Notes From The Smoking Area

Sometimes when I’m touching myself I worry the people on the other side of my iPhone camera are watching. 

Then I remember I haven’t been touched by another human being in 24 months. 

After a bout of situationshipitis my nervous system took a hard rewire. 

Thrusted from craving the approval of my ex to not wanting another man in my proximity. 

I craved being touch starved. 

The idea of another man being in my bed, breathing my air, cashing in on my charisma sickened me. 

For some months I lost myself to the anger of it. I was doing this purely out of spite. I had passed the point of describing it as simply pissed off.

Rage may have burned but my loins certainly did not. 

I looked several gift horses in the mouth during this period. Watching disgustingly good looking men roll joints on the end of my bed while we both pretend we are there for the ‘company’. 

For about a year it felt like I was spiralling to the bottom of something. A pit maybe. But with the amount of weed I was smoking I think I was within touching distance of befriending a mad hatter and a talking cat. 

Once the rage fuelled psychosis wore off. I proudly declared to everyone that I was officially one year sexless. 

Yupee. Go me. 

Depressingly one of the only habits I’ve managed to kick. 

“I craved being touch starved.” 

I tried to pivot hard into proving I was just doing this for the love of the game, that I was actually quite into abstinence, which by the way is really weird. So again I had to pivot, 

I realised on what was essentially a vanity project was that I just wanted to feel good.

Feel wanted and desired and funny and hot. 

The basics. 

So I did.

I started feeling wanted, feeling desired, feeling funny and feeling hot. 

How?

Honey I took myself for a walk and a joint and I sorted out my shit. 

I had to confront myself. No longer able to use the actions of other men to justify my anxiety. Facing up to the fact I was the only man I would be receiving any kind of validation from.

I had to step up for myself in the ways I was pretty much begging my ex to.

You know, looking out for myself, treating myself with understanding when something would illicit a response deep within me that I didn’t like. I had to go for coffees alone, walks alone, cinema dates alone.

Well reader as your resident town crier I can confirm, the reason I was never able to receive the love I was waiting for from someone else was in no small part down to the fact I was unable to show myself not just love but self contentment.

Being content is one of life’s superpowers.

So I filled my days with things that made me feel good. That made me feel like showing up for myself. Forcing myself out of my comfort zone. Literally going out of my way to procure anxiety, something I had been actively avoiding for the past 4 years. 

So now, two years on there is no game.

Fuck me I can say now I do enjoy my own company. 

But fundamentally I’m no longer chasing to destroy some sort of external validation process.   

I know now I cannot completely exhume myself of societal pressures. I have no right to that. 

But what I can understand is that Rome wasn’t built in a day. As much as desperation can make the nuclear option seem like the only option and trust me I get that, you can ask my ex. 

The healthiest, most proven option is to tackle this shit is taking it 1% at a time. 

So maybe you don’t go from the depths of hell to Nirvana. But maybe today we brush our teeth and text our mum. 

“Being content is one of life’s superpowers.”

We can resist, we can persist and we can boycott.

But fundamentally, what will destroy the patriarchy quicker will be you taking yourself to one side and having a wank and a joint, not sending that paragraph to the man you know will not read it.  

Now I don’t know how or when I will exist as 1/2 of a power couple.

Perhaps I have 2 more years left in me, but sometimes when I tell people about my 2 year abstinence I can hear the soft chant of a room of people cheering

“4 more years, 4 more years!!!” 

As I move past my crushing desire to stick it to the man.

I’m quietly, well it was quietly before I decided to peacock on the internet, holding space for the idea that I could be 1/2 of a power couple. 

But why not, maybe I will find someone, maybe I won’t.

Or maybe it’s finally my turn to get engaged to Harry Styles…