Date: June 23, 2024
So yeah I understand how monks and shit will be celibate because they don’t want their bodies “tainted” with other people’s energy. I certainly don’t want my body to be “tainted” either. That’s not the right wording for what I feel it is, but that’s the wording I’ve got currently. It just feels so sacred to me to be able to have access to my body in a way that nobody else can experience. […] I don’t want to share me with others. I’m protective of myself and don’t want others to touch me. Simple as.
I could probably write a more succinct poem about this later, detailing how “holy” I think my body is, but honestly I don’t even care that much right now.
Commentary
Summer was… rough. I wrote a lot about how I felt my body — and broadly, The Flesh — was somehow inherently divine. I connected my sense of self-preservation with a pseudo-secular piety, and I proposed that my asexuality was a facet in all this.
Looking back, though, I see holes in this plot.
For one, my body has already been “tainted”. I already offend evangelical sensibilities by having tattoos and cutting my hair short and consuming a fair amount of cannabis. Secondly, to borrow a phrase from youth group, I am “chewed gum” (although it’s maybe more apt to say I was bitten — I certainly wasn’t properly enjoyed or savored).
I can’t take any of this back, nor can I ruminate on the ways in which I fail to live up to Christian standards for “good” anymore.
Now, after time has passed and tarot has been drawn, I have some responses to these summer sentiments.
response 1: losing my religion
What’s so wrong with seeing myself as natural?
I’ve been futilely pigeonholing myself into seeing the world through the same lens I grew up using — I wanted so desperately to believe in divinity of any kind that I forced the pedestal even upon myself. With age though, as I mused in response to a recent “happy birthday” text, stuff like my birthday feels less special now, but more natural.
“Oddly comforting to know I’m not one of a kind in that regard,” I wrote.
By acknowledging my mortality, I feel part of something real. Because nature is tangible — as are life, death, and all the bits in between. Getting older isn’t divine. It’s just What Happens To Things.
Neutrality is a muscle I claim to regularly tone, but clearly I have yet to undo some remaining programming.
I exercise this muscle when I can, but on certain issues, I rudely lurk in the doorway between what I want to believe and what evidence I have in support of the truth. This is where my propensity and love for nuance inevitably fails me.
response 2: critiquing my words
A lot of what I wrote regarding religiosity that summer holds inklings of truth, but my overall arguments were shaky. Rather than just saying “I need to actively heal more,” I opted to say, “I can magically heal myself without putting in too much work.” Yet, I know that the latter approach cannot create lasting change.
Belief in oneself is crucial, yes, but perhaps more important is the ability to act in accordance with one’s beliefs. (For example, my act of writing publicly is in accordance with my belief that my words deserve to be read.)
Also, what a revealing sentence: “I could probably write a more succinct poem about this later, detailing how ‘holy’ I think my body is, but honestly I don’t even care that much right now.” I’m riddled with contradictions, but not without reason: around 2015, I divorced myself from the institutional schema for what is holy, but since then hadn’t found a worthy substitute.
“Maybe I was it,” I had hoped subconsciously, and perhaps still do.
If I want to re-establish a connection with something I perceive as divine, then I’d better do it in earnest, and not because I’m desperate to fill a spiritual void.
response 3: “I was” and “I am”
There’s something about how I equate “holy” with “indescribable”. But I think this has ended up being a faulty operational framework. My understanding of myself (from this June excerpt) was that I am in some way intrinsically divine. I believed this because I felt simultaneously fragile and untouchable. I felt like I was inherently confusing, unable to be properly understood.
But where this all falls apart is that I am completely describable. I do it to myself. Everything that I do is born from my desire to describe, to understand, to uncover what makes me human and what makes humanity.
When I was a kid, the loftiest pursuit I could conceive of was finding the meaning of life. Now, I just want to find meaning. Make meaning. Nurture meaningfulness. (And, when I feel called, flip up a certain finger to people who scoffingly proclaim, “It’s not that deep.”)
Now I know that life has no particular meaning, except that which you choose to make of it. If I make my own life’s meaning so meta — to be in service of meaning itself — very well. But that is a neutral choice. No more divine than the blankets that warm me at night. No more natural than the breaths that inspire me every day.
Ironically, and genuinely, I must accept I am that I am.