"Netflix & chill" is definitely still a thing, even if you're one of the cool, reasonable people who cancelled their Netflix subscription before that shit started getting really out of control. The problem with Netflix? You can't have sex while watching any of their movies. The quality is fucking dogshit. It's too distracting to be like "wait, what artless gutless empty suit of a Netflix exec green-lit this fucking trash?" and when you start thinking about that kind of stuff, you lose your boner.
Sorry, in the time it took me to write that paragraph, Dave Chappelle was paid another $100 million by Netflix for taping a brand new special about how he hates trans kids.
Let's not worry about any of that for now. Let's instead get horny.
Top Five Best Movies to Have Sex To
I'm just dropping random movies in here, because I actually want to write another blog post, but I was too anxious about writing it by itself, so I'm slipping it into the framework of a Top Five about movies to have sex to. You can fuck to anything. You could fuck to Cool Runnings if you wanted to. Trust me, I've tried... and SUCCEEDED.
What I actually wanted to do was write a blog post about myself (lol, what else is new), but specifically within the framework of "I am going to a therapist tonight for the first time in a very long time and I want to make sure I have a good handle on myself beforehand so that I can use the allotted 50 minutes to get him up to speed on who I am and what I'm about." So this blog post is a dry run, I guess. Who am I? If you were my therapist, what would you need to know?
I'm hoping that by placing all these thoughts within a blog post about Top Five Best Movies to Have Sex To, it can act as a firewall against the possibility that I'll just simply be like "I have a blog post, read this instead of listening to me," which is a lazy shortcut. This will stop me from even mentioning this blog in my session, because if I mention it, then he'll type in the URL, and the first thing he'll see is "Top Five Best Movies to Have Sex To," which would not be an accurate first impression. I am now fully motivated to NOT mention the blog to my therapist in any way.
I did legitimately get horny watching this film, but I was alone, and I have too much respect for Film Club to get distracted by horniness while watching a film!!!
First, I'll have to tell him the basics, because these are important. I am a male, 37 years old. I am definitely white, I am mostly heterosexual, I am mostly cisgender. I grew up in upper-middle class and remain in the upper-middle class. I have a master's degree in my field. I am happily married and I have three young daughters of single-digit ages. We own a home. I have a steady job. I will tell him what the job entails, but I won't type it here. I will say that I previously had deep financial concerns but those concerns have lessened at least 75% over the past six months. I spend a lot of time with my family, and over the past two years I've had added stressors over the fact that I see my family less because of my job. We have a both-parents-working household, and we have strong family supports for childcare.
All of this is relevant to who I am, so I will say it, but none of it feels relevant to the reason I am going to see a therapist. It's important to know, but the therapist could probably get by if I told him none of this and let him just assume whatever he wanted to assume about the basics in my life. I don't think any of this is affecting my mental health in a way that would require a specialist to listen to me talk about it. On the other hand, there's also a good chance that the therapist will be like, nah dude, it's all related, you have to tell me, and here's why. So I'm covering all my bases here.
3. Star Wars: A New Hope
I just had sex while this movie was on a week ago. My takeaway? Not enough Jar Jar Binks.
He'll probably want to know about the drinking, since therapists, man, they love substance abuse. It's honestly such a cut-and-dry subject. It's been studied extensively, everyone knows what works and what doesn't. You tell a therapist that you're in there for substance abuse and they start licking their lips and rubbing their hands together. But I've written enough about this subject on this blog, especially in the past five days, that I feel like going in depth about it again might be a bit of overkill.
It's important to me because it's something that I did and was actually successful at (so far). It's also relevant to the reason I'm talking to a therapist, but in a tangential way. I don't need strategies on how to avoid substances, I think I managed that okay. What I need is strategies on how to deal with the emptiness left in the wake of alcohol's disappearance from my life. I don't think I feel sad or empty because I'm an alcoholic or because I had 10,000 beers in a row and needed to stop. I think I feel sad because I know I had to stop, and I did, and what's left is a whole host of other emotional issues that I never had to address when I was slopping the Hamm's Special Light down my gullet like water.
It's grief, is what it is. Grief over losing a friend. I know this. I'm not a crier at funerals. I accept death, I know it's permanent, I'm not clawing at the casket wishing my loved one were back with me for one more day. But in losing alcohol, I lost something pretty deep, and I think that bottle-sized feeling of emptiness within me metastasizes sometimes as similar-but-not-same emotions, like loneliness, or longing. It feels like I'm continuously searching for something, and I don't know if I am actually missing something or it's just my brain incorrectly assessing the very simple basic grief of sobriety.
2. Love Actually
I can personally attest to this one as well. Just make sure you time it so that you're not fucking when that disgusting British pervert who travels to America is on the screen. I hate that guy.
I can personally attest to this one as well. Just make sure you time it so that you're not fucking when that disgusting British pervert who travels to America is on the screen. I hate that guy.
Something about me that I'll be curious to ask about is the fact that I seem to care a lot what people think about me. I'm really sensitive about it, but I'm also pretty decent at hiding that sensitivity. My entire existence depends on praise or criticism, it feels like sometimes. My mood sinks really low when I'm criticized for something, and I'll feel it in the pit of my stomach for a long time. I feel incredible when someone is nice to me or takes the time to point out something that I did right. I seek approval and that guides a lot of my actions. I fear reprisal and that guides a lot of it too.
In retrospect, I think I grew up in a household that was stingy in its praise but almost total absent in its criticism. This means that I crave praise too much and that I don't have the tools to face criticism appropriately. Moving in together with Pam was an interesting adjustment period because I was facing criticism for legitimate reasons for the first time (at least when it comes to in-the-home shit, I guess), and it took me a while to understand what that meant and how to appropriately address the criticism. I also think that I find myself attracted (not sexually, but like, in a human-connection way) to people who are stingy with the praise. Like maybe if you praise me too much, I get suspicious or something, and I subconsciously start to distance myself. I want praise but in the depths of my soul I usually feel like I don't deserve it anyway.
And I have this problem where I interpret apathy as criticism too. Like I'll worry that if you don't text me back or don't reach out to me or there's any reluctance to hang out or chat or whatever, that this means that you don't like me, or are annoyed by me, or have finally had your fill of me and that's it. Even though that's mostly never true, and it's really just people wrapped up in their own shit, and the idea that it's about ME is incredibly self-centered. There's this thing where I feel like sometimes I care more about people than they care about me. I think it's actually true maybe half the time, and the other half is just my anxieties talking.
Even with the therapist, there's this desire to be a "good patient." Like maybe I'm picturing the therapist hearing all these insights and being like "wow, you've thought about this a lot already!" which would constitute as praise for me, and make me feel good. At the same time, maybe that's not the type of therapist I need. Maybe I'm going to need him to be like "cut the bullshit and just let me tell you something you don't already know."
You can't really go wrong with this film. Basically every scene has one of the following: a hot-ass Hannah Waddingham dressed like a witch; a hot-ass Sarah Jessice Parker dressed like a witch; a hot-ass Sam Richardson dressed like Sam Richardson. A very memorable movie, who could possible forget it?
So if I try to put all these pieces together, it looks like this. I feel sad for unknown reasons. I try to express that sadness but it doesn't come out right, and a Pam-type in my life questions why I would feel that way, or would take offense as to why I would feel that way, what, is my life not good enough, etc. And that makes sense, because I can't express why I'm sad, only that I'm sad, which is confusing and frustrating for all involved. It makes things worse because then I'm given a reason to be sad, like maybe my wife is mad at me because of being sad, and how that sadness makes her life worse, OR maybe this is my assumptions again, how I'm assuming that when people don't feel like dealing with me it must be because they don't like me, which is maybe sometimes true but not always, and especially not with my wife. But even if I acknowledge the truth of all this, then at the end of the night I still feel like shit and I'm not anywhere closer to the answer than I was at the start. I think it has something to do with sobriety, which frustrates me because the whole point of me stopping the drinking was because I wanted to live and I did that and I'm alive but at the cost of feeling sad more often? How is that fair? But then I try to lay the blame at sobriety's feet but that doesn't feel right either. I know I'm missing alcohol but the feelings I have feel so disconnected from alcohol that it honestly just confuses me more. I am immediately suspicious of anyone complimenting me on sobriety because I fear that it's masking some loathing on their part, both in that sobriety is in its essence pious and holier-than-thou and those are repulsive qualities, and also that sobriety means that I am less fun, and that I stripped something away from myself to everyone's detriment. "Congrats on the not drinking" as a way of saying "but I wish you were still drinking." How "congrats" makes me feel good anyway, but it's a hollow goodness. How this is obviously all me being so strung up on what other people think that I'm starting to walk in circles now. I wonder if it's just a chemical imbalance, either something that occurred naturally or occurred because I imbalanced it for so long by tipping the scales with alcohol that a true balance feels completely wrong for me. I wonder too if the fact that I don't always feel this way nullifies the honestly rare times that I do feel this way. Like is it wrong to talk to the therapist for something that happens to me maybe once a month, etc. Or is that just my anxieties worrying about what other people think again, etc. And if it's gotten to the point where I'm sad and then I'm worried about what the therapist is going to say about all this, in what ways he will criticize me and withhold critical praise from me, in response to the deep dark thoughts I've been thinking... well then, yeah, probably time to see a therapist.
I'm not joking, Hannah Waddingham is so fucking hot in this movie, it's insane.
2 comments:
I’m proud of you! For your sobriety, for choosing to see a therapist, for wrestling with tough thoughts and feelings and deciding you want to feel better. You’re looking out for yourself and your loved ones in sorting this stuff out and it’s not an easy thing to do. I’m at a similar place in seeing quite a bit of my behaviors as distractions from feeling the hard shit I haven’t wanted to/been able to face/feel. You can also call them coping mechanisms - drinking, overeating, sex, a steady flow of nonstop relationships - I too have put most of (it not all) my energy there to try and keep down pain and sadness. I think a lot of us operate this way to hide from whatever it is we’re hiding from. But I’m in it now, trying to do what you’re doing, sit with and listen to and work with the sadness, the grief, the loss… it’s really tough but you’re not alone in it. And here’s a wee bit of praise that you’re doing good. By yourself and others. Keep at it.
Hey Kait, this was a really nice comment, and an appreciated one. It IS really nice to know that this isn't some Me Only feeling, that we're all going through our own shit, some of it pretty similar shit. Knowing that makes it easier because, I dunno, it's just nice to feel like other people understand you. Thanks for being there in that way, friend.
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