Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

I’ve been going back through my old post drafts trying to feel inspired to write about something, and I found an early version of the following post, which today’s experience merely served to enforce. What was today’s experience? I got to hang out with the Adorable Girl*. There are many things I like about the Adorable Girl. She’s smart. She’s ridiculously silly. She’s adorable. Most importantly for this post, however, she’s snuggly. When I hang out with her, holding her hand, poking in her in the arm, squishing her, and, in general, all sorts of Publicly Acceptable Physical Contact are easy. In fact, if anything, it’s difficult to keep my hands off her**.

When I started writing this post a few weeks ago, it was because I had had a not terribly startling realization. That realization was that in order for me to sustain romantic interest in someone, they need to be the sort of person who at least occasionally reaches out to touch me.

As I’ve mentioned before, if I like you I’m going to want to touch you and snuggle you and just establish a physical connection with you whenever you’re nearby. This isn’t just with partners, it’s with friends***, but with friends… it’s not that big a deal if it’s not their thing. I can deal with stamping it down. If I’m even going to think about acting on being romantically interested in someone, however, I’ve finally realized that the ability to feel comfortable casually touching and cuddling them is absolutely necessary. Not being able to do that makes me actively unhappy. I feel like I’m constantly required to keep pulling myself back from how I prefer to express my emotions, and it makes me depressed.

When people reach out to me to snuggle me, hold my hand, touch their toe to mine, lean on me, sleep on my leg, or whatever, it makes me happy. It makes me feel cared for, valued, liked, or wanted. It says to me “Hi! You are here! I am here too. We are in the same place, and that’s good.” Most importantly, however, it makes me feel like it’s safe to touch them. I need that in a partner, and I love it in my friends. I know that not everyone uses touch to show their feelings, but I do, and the lack of being reached for by someone who is otherwise really attractive to me can do a good pretty damn good job of killing off my interest because it’s hard for me to be happy around them when I’m always worried I’m imposing.

The oddest thing about all of this is that I live alone and am pretty happy about it****. I have a dog, and we pet each other, but she’s relatively new to my life. I don’t miss touch too badly when I’m by myself. When I’m with people I care about, however, I want to touch them. When I walk with friends, I want to hold their hands. When I’m sitting with someone, I want to establish points of contact- knee, thigh, shoulder. It’s not about sex. It’s not even about attention. It’s just such a lovely concrete way of interacting with the world. Through my skin.

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*I have decided that this shall be her blog identity from now on, since she is Adorable and she is a Girl . You know how I can tell? She has Real Life Boobies, and sometimes she lets me touch them.

**Did I mention that she’s adorable? And has boobies?

***Like the Adorable Girl

****Except when my back itches and there’s no one who can reach to scratch it.

The vast majority of what I write in this blog I write completely uncaring about who might stumble across it (well, I’d be mighty upset if someone gave my mother this blog address, but she’s unlikely to find it on her own, and I think that my identifying information is vague enough that I could maintain plausible deniability.) I’ve only written about one person in this blog in a way that I wouldn’t want them to read, and it’s not that I said anything bad about them. Rather it’s that I’d prefer they didn’t know how attractive I find some of their sexual fantasies when I’m not sure I want to participate in their fulfillment. It could lead to a conversation I am absolutely certain I would not feel comfortable having at this point in our relationship. So… they don’t have the blog address, and I tend to think that they wouldn’t recognize my voice even if they came upon it in the ether.

In general, I write very freely here. I try to only resist those posts that say something unflattering about someone, those that require identifying other people unambiguously, and those that might be considered to be passive aggressive attempts at indirect communication. Furthermore, I don’t assume that anyone I know is going to read things I write or, conversely, that they won’t. It seems the most straightforward, as well as intellectually and emotionally honest, way to proceed.

And yet, despite that perfectly healthy attitude, I was absolutely mortified to learn this afternoon that someone I mentioned in a post earlier this week actually reads this blog*. I think that this is the first time that has happened, although I have, in the past, been horribly embarrassed to meet someone in the flesh who first got to know me here. Not that I would disown anything I’ve written here, but I think it gives people a distinctly skewed impression of who I am as a person. I don’t, after all, spend all of my time talking and thinking about sex.**

I’ve been thinking a lot this week, in particular earlier today while I was reading through my blogroll backlog and then again while e-mailing my surprise reader, about the difference between truth and accuracy. I try to be truthful in my writings here, but truthful is different than fully accurate. A great deal of the difference, in my particular writing style, is due to my tendency to over-focus on minutiae. In other words, I’ll get so caught up in my description of the tree that I’ll fail to notice the structure of the forest. What I write about the tree will be true, but it won’t be the full picture of everything that’s going on - even though it usually feels that way at the time. It will also, at times, be exaggerated for effect, since I am generally trying to communicate rather than simply describe.***

I think I stand by everything I’ve written in this blog, although sometimes I stand by it with implied disclaimers, the most common ones being:

• I like the thought, but that doesn’t mean I actually want to do it.
• It’s my true belief and emotion today, but it might not be tomorrow.
• It’s the amount of truth I’m comfortable sharing with my readers and myself. That doesn’t mean it’s the whole truth.
• I’m not as concerned with photographic accuracy as I am with telling a good story. Although the goal is to tell a good story with a core of emotional truth, that may or may not be best accomplished by simply recounting events.
• Sometimes I like playing with language so much that what I’m writing becomes about that more than about what I intended to say. I am a slut for interesting sentence construction.
• Given a mental pathway I find interesting to explore, I will happily wander down it until I am so far out into the outskirts of the initial idea that what I am writing often loses any relevance to what put me on that journey.****

I think that’s a reasonable description of the framework in which I function, and it was a very useful exercise trying to figure it out. After all, realistically speaking, although I write this blog to be read, it is not fundamentally about the readers. It is about me writing my own way through the world. So while it might be useful for you to understand how and why I write, it’s absolutely essential for me. In particular, as I reread and as I work I have to remember that very rarely is what I see (and therefore what I say) the whole truth, although it’s often the truth and nothing but the truth.

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*I’m pretty much over it now. I babbled at them extensively in e-mail and now the desire to hit my head on my desk has largely passed. I’m still looking longingly at the place in the wall that could benefit from a nice skull shaped dent, but by and large I’m resisting the desire to implement the design change.

**Well… I actually do spend the vast majority of my time talking and thinking about sex, but most of the talking (if not the thinking) is more academic and less practical.

***My affection for allegory doesn’t help there, either. To put that sentence another way, I often care more about crafting a coherent story than sticking to an absolutely accurate retelling of events.

**** Like I did in this here post,

I was hoping to have deliciously naughty things to write about today, but I slipped on the ice and threw my back out this weekend, so I only have delicious things to write about. Tonight I made carbo-porn as comfort food - cinnamon buttermilk biscuits with dark chocolate chips. I bet that, were I feeling up to it, I could bribe people for sexual favors with these things. They’re rather inspiring.

Sometimes I think that the universe doesn’t like it when I plan to play with my intended play date of the weekend. Perhaps it resents the amount of fun we have, because I think that every single time we have tried to schedule some time together something has come up that has made us postpone it for at least a couple of days. Weather, illness, car problems… if I believed in signs I’d run like the wind. However, it always works out eventually and then a good time is had by all. Usually with Impressive Bruises! I do so love my Impressive Bruises. I’m totally a size queen for marks.

I’m such a prideful bottom. Not only do I like marks for how they feel (mmm!), and for the memories they bring me of the scene, I like to show them off to say “I’m not weak! Look at how much I can take!” I’m pretty certain that that feeling is rooted in insecurity. I like the physical experience of pain in a scene, and the endorphin high associated with risk, but I also bottom, to an extent, to overcome fear. Pain, out of context, is scary. If I can prove to myself I can take damage in scene, not to mention enjoy it, it becomes less so. It gives me a way of taking control over the uncontrollable.

The other side of that pride is that when I am at my most insecure, being able to look at my marks makes me feel like I have something that I can give to a top I’m attracted to. I may not be beautiful and tiny*, or terribly sexually accessible, but at least I can take a good beating and enjoy it. For example, the boy I had an inexplicably intense attraction to pretty much ignored me until he heard I had Impressive Marks and asked to see them, at which point I, all of a sudden, at least pinged the edge of his radar (not enough for him to want to play, alas, or to respond to my post party flirtation mail, but at least enough to let me bite his sexy sexy calves later on that evening. Hey, a girl takes what she can get!) Not that I’d bottom the way I do just to feel attractive, but it’s a nice side effect. When I’m down in the dumps, it’s nice to feel like I have something objectively desirable that I can offer someone.

Also, I admit, a bit of it is just that I’m a show off. Surprise, surprise, a professional actor who likes a reason to say “look at me!!!” When I’m not feeling insecure, when I’m feeling sexy, smart, and interesting, and I have marks too… I’m like a two year old who just managed to tie her shoes for the first time and is crowing “Look what I did! Aren’t I just a little bit awesome? Don’t you want to come over here and let me tie yours together too?”

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*I don’t always feel like this, but I do sometimes. Even though these days I’m reasonably happy with my looks, I’m used to thinking of myself as an ugly girl and it’s hard to get out of the habit. My self worth is usually tied into my brain and not my appearance, but I do occasionally slip. On weeks when auditions haven’t been going well, or when I’ve been getting rejected a lot in my personal life, I sometimes think it would be a lot easier if I could just be pretty and normal.