I, at my core, am a deeply embarrassed person. Embarrassed about what, you might ask. All of it!!!! Every last bit! Whatever you are thinking, whatever silly nonsensical possibility arises in your mind’s eye, I find that embarrassing. I am terrified that I will fulfill the vision you have crafted for me. It’s just that anything I do might be held against me, mistakes piled at my feet like kindling for the sacrificial fire. He wanted too much. To be alive and to move and to speak and to think and to want. We saw all his wanting. It was hard to look at, very embarrassing.
In particular, I love dancing and am in equal measures fucking horrified by it. I love putting on a tight ‘n tailored outfit with the waistband of my undies peeking out, getting together with my girls in their tight ‘n tailored outfits and dancing in tiny, pulsing rooms with such abandon like my body might fail me tomorrow. It was my favorite part of turning twenty-one–not the access to alcohol that would ultimately become the point sometime later, but the access to the spaces. The bars and the clubs and the dancefloors where the embarrassing became acceptable or even expected. When the music is good and the neighboring elbows are held within their boundaries, oh god I can’t think of anything more worthy of my body’s time than releasing it instinctually on a sticky dancefloor. In my early twenties when the ennui weighed heavy, unleashing my limbs in a sea of other people unleashing their limbs made me feel light as long as I could bring myself to let go of the fear of looking silly.
But of course, the spaces and the alcohol and the shame are linked inextricably. The spaces lend to casual drinking and the casual drinking leads to a deeper potential for freedom in the body, the melting of inhibitions in the heat of your stomach. Then the drinking and the freedom became synonymous and to stay free required the constant drinking. The reasons I developed a drinking problem are many and I’m still working through them all, but perhaps the biggest was the key that alcohol turned in my body, unlocking fear and releasing it with a throaty gasp and tongue doused in vodka.
Getting sober has improved my life in more ways than I can possibly enumerate but it also locked me into my body again and forced me to face a lot of difficult realities about myself and my internal relationships. Chief among them: I am embarrassed to be alive. I am terrified of having someone see me without the layers upon layers of masks that I wear to make myself presentable to onlookers. When I drank, especially in college, the fears were made quiet and my body became just another tool for entertainment. Embarrassing entertainment, sure, but the liquor placed so many layers of film between me and the things I did turning the fear to nothing more than a distant wailing car alarm. Someone else’s problem.
Without alcohol? I’m an anxious wreck. There’s so much more room inside me for worry and insecurity and the terror that I’ll be ‘found out.’ In getting sober, I lost, almost instantly, the ability to dance. I couldn’t even attempt it. It was layered–bars and clubs became difficult places to exist in with all their reminders of drinking and why I picked it up in the first place. But then there was the very fact that I could not put alcohol inside of me. There’s nothing to push Me down inside of me. I have to be me in all that I am and move through the world with all the fear that entails. I couldn’t fathom letting go enough to move my body around other people to entertain going out again. I didn’t even try. The fear swallowed me, smooth like whiskey.
There’s not much to what got me dancing again. I was restless. I survived a global pandemic. The fear got boring. The world told me to stay down and so I got up. It was a few months back and we went out dancing to celebrate my best friend’s imminent breast reduction, a huge cultural event in the sphere of my social bubble, one that I wouldn’t miss for all the fear in the world. It could have been any combination of things–so many people I adore gathered in one place, that place being a gross dive bar that has always been a confusing comfort, a year of sobriety under my belt securing me in the feeling that I do not want to drink again. I don’t know, but I let myself loose that night.
And wouldn’t you know, I wasn’t embarrassed in the slightest. It still shocks me a bit to recall. I’m always surprising myself. I remember my best friend, this woman who has seen me at my best and my worst in endless cycles over the past ten years of knowing one another, telling me with a gleam in her eye that I looked like myself that night. Hair to my shoulders bouncing in little ringlets, baggy pants riding low on my hips, tight tank top with my arms over my head collapsing and expanding to the beat of a song that fills me up to the brim and pours over in sweat dripping down my sides. I looked like myself and I wore my joints down to aching spikes and nothing scared me.
I’m making a point now to go dancing again, to be a body again. They just had Brat night at local gay haunt Club Cafe, a place in which I have rarely felt safe and often succumbed to my worst attributes and vices. Truly some of the lowest lows of my alcoholism and depression have been spurred on by that place. But I’ve been saying since Charli xcx started rolling this album out that it was going to be the music that got me back to the club and I was right. It’s fun, fearless, honest music. It scorns embarrassment. It asks you to put on the ugliest fucking shade of green and shake your fucking ass. Everything is romantic just as much as it is embarrassing.
It’s a learning curve, like all of life’s little challenges. I tapped into a bit of that shame again trying to dance around other gay men who I want to be or want to fuck or just want to be desired by. It’s the seeing myself through another’s eyes that is so embarrassing, that begs me to criticize myself down to the bone. But why should I view myself through any eyes but my own? These are the eyes that guide me. Closing these eyes and tilting my head back to let the flashing lights drown out the noise, I cede control to my body, a lovely thing that wants nothing more than to move how it pleases to a sick beat.
I am equal parts committed to my sobriety and eradicating my fear. They are at odds with one another and that is nothing more than the lot I’ve drawn in this life. I will always be managing my fear of looking stupid and reaching toward my desire to be a true inhabitant of my own body. Everything I learn seems to come back to this. But what a pleasure it is to always be learning and to take those lessons and throw them all out to swing my hips to songs that make me feel sexy and free.
jw
What I’m Devouring
Between Brat and this Tove Lo EP, I can confidently say club music is sooooo back, baby. The DJ played almost this whole EP on Brat night and it was euphoric. It’s hot and confident and sexy. Dancing to Busy Girl was such release.
My book club just tackled this novel from 1982 this month and I cannot call it anything but an absolute romp. Every last bit of it was so unexpected. It defied genre, it let you think you knew where it was going and then took a sharp turn in the opposite direction, it was great storytelling. And it was just fucking campy. There was so much fun and humor and absurdity. I just watched the 2007 movie adaptation last night and I don’t think it quite lived up to the novel despite being a generally faithful adaptation, but it was still a visual feast.
The Other Stuff
Many of my other creative practices have been falling to the wayside while I deal with some pretty intense burnout. I’m on an intensive, mostly successful screen detox at the moment and I’m hoping it will give me space to get back into making some physical art, exploring some new mediums, and as always to write write write.
I’ve been combing through a lot of my old abandoned projects, half-written novels that are mostly terrible and narratively incoherent, but the ideas still move and excite me so I’m hoping to do something with them soon. More on that much later.
For now, I’m continuing to explore some light, fun, photography with my low quality digital camera.