sharp objects

i've always been too neurotic to properly self-destruct. even when i was best at letting my demons chase me into dark places and dumb decisions, i couldn't help but look where i was walking, at least a little. i never wanted to lose control. and yet something in it has always appealed to me. i feel almost a sting of jealousy when i read about people who have been able to go off the rails, be fully in the deep end, swimming for a little while. as long as they came out whole, or as whole as one can be in adulthood.

i read meet me in the bathroom, about the rock scene in aughties NYC, naturally depicting stories of debaucherous nights - where there is rock and roll, there are sex and drugs. and i just felt like i'd missed out on something i wanted to have been part of. i feel so adjacent to that scene in a number of ways. i like the bands, i lived in the city, but i was too young to be part of it then. missed that window. wouldn't have fit into it even if i were 10 years older, most likely. but it's a powerful case of FOMO it sparked.

just now, i've finished sharp objects, read for book club. and it's a twisted mystery crime thriller, but the main character has spent her adolescence and adult life cutting herself and using sex and alcohol as means to cope and control. i shouldn't find that sort of thing appealing at all. i guess my life has veered just close enough to both of these cases to give me a sort of perverse nostalgia for an alternate timeline in which i ran more wildly from my own mind. maybe i'd have found the catharsis or comfort if i'd just gone a little farther.

rationally, i doubt that. rationally, i'm probably better for the measures i took. there's no safe risk, right? but god i have always - okay, not always, that's disingenuous - too often shied away from risk. to what is probably an unhealthy degree. but people don't really call you out on being careful. can't be too careful is an expression for a reason.

i wonder why this sort of chaos calls to me, though. maybe i feel like i haven't lived enough, or made enough messes. i've played things too safe, done too much of what i'm supposed to, and not enough of what one would want to do, if i wanted to do anything at all. another common theme in therapy, that i seem to have trained myself away from wanting as a means to protect myself from not getting what i want, to stave off disappointment. irrational again, of course. impossible.

i read because i want to figure out how to be more, but sometimes it really highlights how little i've ever been.

good news is at least in reading sharp objects i'm not jealous of the cutting or the unhealthy relationship with alcohol. although i used to cut, and still do honestly miss it sometimes, i'm grateful to not be covered in obvious scars. it makes disclosing that history optional. and i'm not jealous of the borderline alcoholism either; it'd be nice to turn down the volume on my fears and intuitions, but alcohol is just too messy. i do envy some of KW's experiences with AA though. to go through those 12 steps - some more appealing than others - to have someone else help hold you accountable to them, too. i have found myself more than once wishing that there were programs like that for people without having them need to be addicts first. just because i haven't used a consistent substance as a crutch or an escape doesn't mean it wouldn't be helpful for me to do a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. i laughed as i typed that out. fearless, we know, is a failing for me.

what i do find myself bizarrely jealous of is the ability the main character has to just... sleep with people. just fuck. boldly. and again, fearlessly. that'll be a common theme in this whole blog, i'm sure of it. she winds up fucking two people during the course of the story, in the span of a few weeks. she recounts her time as a precocious beautiful teenager wielding a sexuality that probably got out of hand. but still, something in that holds an appeal for me, who kept my sexuality so buttoned up for a decade or more. who spent years wanting to be pure, or the right kind of enigma. desirable but untouched. i'm probably demisexual, with the degree to which i simply cannot truly understand wanting to fuck someone i don't know intimately. but i don't want to be. i want to be able to see a hot man - or just a hot person, really, and go to bed with them. takes more confidence than i have. not just confidence in terms of being able to seduce them, but the confidence to know that i'd want to do that. the confidence inherent to finding a person attractive, to knowing that you'd want to fuck them.

idk, i won't get resolution to any of this any time remotely soon, so all this rambling and reflection is a bit flaccid and impotent, to use some thematically-related words.

the next book i read should be light and wholesome, i think. otherwise reading is going to be a bad influence on me. how hysterically nerdy would that be?