crying in the spring street trader joes

finding w*rk/life balance and/or nirvana

Jul 11, 2022

My body has been floating above my head. Someone I was dating last year told me I had a grounding presence which I found hilarious (& super affirming) because I am the most overthinking overthinker that ever did think (I also have to be the best at everything). I took it as an early sign that my newfound commitment to grounding tools was actually working. My silly little grounding routine is a flexible confection of daily tarot card pulls to strengthen my intuition, workouts (cardio, weights & HIIT), CBT1, Vitamin D, meditation, touching grass, cooking, screentime blocks, letting the ocean dom me aka swimming, olfaction, daily consumption of two 10 mg Adderall, 20 mg fluoxetine (Lexapro) & just like ~checking in with my feelings~.

This week has been especially tough, I definitely cried to Pagan Poetry in the Spring Street Trader Joe’s while buying seltzers & flowers. (I think I might have PMDD? Idk, jury is still out and I’m tired of collecting acronyms so I’ll probably have to revisit that thought at some point). I’m coming off the high of Gemini season, nonstop partying: birthdays, pride & NFT week LOL; and just generally working on loosening my death grip on life. For the first time in months, I felt like I was riding my burnout in a ‘good’ way, like ‘let’s party & build community and be active AND ALIVE because it’s SUMMER and I’m hot & young-ish and this feeling is probably fleeting! Really riding the ‘flow’ of my ebb and flow. I got so tired of my neural system being fried from living in the midst of societal/autonomical collapse & trying to survive off of my idealism, hopes & dreams— I’m still undoing all the internalized societal programming regarding what a successful productive happy life should be.

I love living in 2022 and fully take advantage of telehealth’s flexibility to allow me to get medical care without sitting in a bright blue over-airconditioned basement office but sometimes I forget my appointments & end up face-timing headphoneless with my psychiatrist outside of Kings Plaza while waiting for the Q35 to Riis…which is probably why my psych made me finally come in person. And despite burning sage & making my bed & making sure on days when I don’t go to the gym I take my hot girl walks/swims, my doctor had to prescribe me hydroxyzine2 to stop the recurrent panic attacks I’ve been having since May. I had weaned myself completely off of my anti-depressants & caffeine so to have to take even more pills? Yeah, something needs to change, and a compromise has to be made. I need to create a routine that actually faced head-on the constraints of existing in a system, a crumbling one but a system nonetheless! Time to actually try making money!

I confided in a friend about how I’ve lost my ambition. I don’t feel attached to anything and I’m just feeling it all out. My objectives have changed, it’s no longer make sure you add at least five lines to your CV by October. It's like, I want to cook & plant food & provide a space of healing, comfort, and growth for my future loved ones. I long to have lots of ecstatic transcendent sex with someone I’m deeply in love with. I want to learn how to darn my socks, make perfume for my own personal use, perfect gluten-free pizza crust, and finally pursue fluency in a second language. And I want to party my ass off and not feel bad about it after. I used to judge people for having a lot of these 'goals'.3

W*rk means being unhappy and sacrificing all the joys in life for the mighty dollar. So, I avoided ‘w*rk’ until w*rk became my false everyday joys. And when that became unbearable I decided to get a job.

It took me months of talking it through with literally everyone in my life & doing a shit ton of research to the point of emotional fatigue. The idea alone left me satisfied enough to not have to follow through with the actual labo*r of labo*r. See, the problem is that I have no interest in sacrificing myself for the sake of external factors yet I need the mental freedom that comes with financial consistency; a seemingly impossible feat. And like, I have been working through that in the ‘my family & friends have used money as a way of controlling me via guilt-tripping & love bombing’ obvious way. Like fuck, I’m almost thirty struggling with learned helplessness.

But again, SYSTEMS! I talk all the time about how everything that’s happening presently is the result of a holistic system but I’ve been under-addressing the thing that re-triggered my C-PTSD in the first place; the fucking art world! I don’t care what anyone says I refuse to struggle for ten years plus until some museum deems my suffering for the piety of my ‘non-market-driven art’ valid & starts pushing my work in a way that is actually beneficial to me. I simply do not wish to be exploited by anyone ever again.

So, I’m making money, money that I knew I could make & detach from. My therapist, K, even warned me about the necessity of compartmentalization. As in, remember what my money-making objective is so that I don’t get caught up in the day-to-day, as I tend to do. And then I had an orgasm. I was in the shower like two days after my first shift and the comforting sting from the hot water running down my naked body relaxed me just enough because I intuitively started doing my somatic breathing exercises. I haven’t gotten around to replacing my broken vibrator charger so it took me a second to realize what was happening. I live with roommates in a tiny apartment so I tried to stifle my laugh, heavily & silently breathing while leaning against the wet black & white tile. I continued coming for five minutes (~~god~~ bless uteruses<3).

Money literally makes me come. Jk, honestly (hopefully obviously), it’s not even about the money. I keep trying to pound my spirit back into this realm via every substance and it finally happened, something as banal as w*rk became fulfilling. That’s something I don’t think I ever expected to happen for me.

so ive had a lot of feels about this book in the past but the one thing i will give props to in pleasure activism is that it starts with Audre Lorde’s ‘uses of the erotic’. and i got it before but i feel like now i GET IT. through erotic embodiment - fulfillment on a physical, mental and spiritual level - we are able to work to our capacity — my recovering perfectionist heart is screaming, alas!— the trickiest part of this is that capacity can only be reached unintentionally aka you have to be able to recognize(!!) what fulfills you so that you follow work that ‘becomes a conscious decision a longed-for bed which [i] enter gratefully and from which [i] rise up empowered'.4 <3

While it’s cool to feel empowered by work and all, I’m doing that thing where I forget about all the other parts of me. Like, despite having my first orgasm in over a month I’m still hella in a transitional phase of my life. —Can we talk about that part more? Like, I feel like there’s this thing where we think there’s an endpoint or a magical moment where as soon as we feel satisfied we think everything is resolved. maybe it’s just me— And on the other darker, shadowy side I feel like the desire for chaos because of my trauma is so fucking deep. When I achieved some sense of steadiness I interrupted all of my grounding routines because they had done their j*b so, ‘of course, I’m not dependent on them anymore.’…we need to rethink the concept of post-nut clarity.

Lorde goes on to talk about how eros is born of chaos, ‘personifying creative power and harmony.’ Hopeful.

So here I am today, wanting to go to the beach & not have a thought in my pretty little bleach blonde head; but not really, I’m aiming to go further into myself and dancing with all the erotic desires I’ve been hiding within by focusing on more lucrative/capitalist/traditional(?) pursuits. Why is it still so hard for me to validate that?

PERPETUAL STEW by Sydney Shavers

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