Gay Club Jet Lag

If you’ve been anywhere near twitter these days, you’ve probably noticed Elon’s porn bots proudly touting the new trend- PUSSY IN BIO. In a way, we must admire these digital superheroes, for laying their shit out for everyone to see.

Of course, there is a dark underbelly to this world. The life of the PUSSY IN BIO is not as glamorous as it may seem.

Something with this diva was off. Where is the oomph, the vigor, the joie de vivre we’ve come to expect from the porn sisters? Perhaps like me, her heart yearns for a deeper connection.

I’ve noticed that in the wake of a certain global event that I will not call out by name, our collective understanding of how to create and nurture connections has been severed, and it seems many of us are afraid to admit we are looking for friendship, love, and community. It might even be that we’re ashamed. Because why don’t we have those things already? Is this indicative of some moral failure? Bad vibes?

Or maybe I’m the only one who feels this way and I’m just projecting this on everyone else but the way I feel about everything has never been wrong, so.

Despite my reservations to confess my need for connection in the world, I’ve always been a sensitive person. Growing up in a glass closet in the nasty Down South, however, teaches you to conceal that as much as you can. As a result, I now find it hard to express my feelings. I’d even say I find it hard to identify them to begin with.

“Why aren’t you telling your therapist about this?! We don’t give a fuck! You’re oversharing!” You may be having one of these thoughts. I will respond to them in order.

1. My therapist ghosted me
2. Okay?
3. Welcome to my blog

In relationships, whether they are platonic, romantic, familial, at work, etc. expressing how we feel is pivotal to their success, and yet doing so might seem like we’re jeopardizing them. There’s a classic fear of rejection, and beyond that, I also tend to think that the only way to have a handle on my connections with others is to maintain control. I fear that if I lose control, I will lose the relationship.

To hold onto control, I refrain from sharing my feelings. I simply wait for the other person in the relationship to share, make assumptions regardless of whether they share or not, and rarely come forward with my truth. On paper, this does not sound like the behavior of productive relationships.

I didn’t always used to be this way. There was a time when I was much more vocal about how I felt and what I was thinking, though this usually got me into some sort of mess.

For example, I remember standing up and accusing my eighth-grade music teacher of not giving a crap about my jazz band cohort, which resulted in me having an awkward one-on-one conversation with him. I cried when I heard about the aftermath of the Sharkeisha video, and my teacher in that class had to pull me aside to ask me to chill out. I also remember hysterically crying in the hallway when I was rejected from joining the Broadcast club, as onlookers gawked and giggled at my despair. #BoysWhoCry #NotCoolMsSilver.

I was true to my sensitivity, even though it didn’t always work out in my favor. (If I need to spell it out for you I was bullied. Duh. We can talk about that in another blog post.) I wore my heart on my sleeve, perhaps a little too eagerly.

Nowadays, I avoid confrontation and rarely cry. I am really bad at being vulnerable! These are perhaps not the healthiest habits and trust me when I say, reader, I want to enrich the scope of my human experience by working on them. The idea of being honest with my feelings however, sounds less like I’m putting my heart on my sleeve and more like I’m putting my heart on a stake for birds to come pick at it.

I realize that this is probably a result of bottling up my every thought and feeling for so long, but still, the idea of expressing my inner truth feels gratuitous. I can’t help but worry that if I share how I’m feeling at any given moment, it would play out like Laganja Estranja’s iconic breakdown from Season 6’s Untucked, because this is honestly how I feel all the time. See below.

(If I’m honest, sharing on this blog feels like her infamous stand-up routine. You can find that linked here and at the end.)

I nearly had an episode like the one above yesterday, when I almost cried at work. I made a careless mistake and the security guard in the building yelled at me. I don’t hold it against him, he probably deals with a lot of stupid people who make a lot of stupid mistakes, myself included. I don’t know what came over me, in fact, I even felt proud of myself for thinking about displaying an emotion. I went back and forth wondering- do I give in?

This felt like a trivial reason to cry but I was craving the release. Aside from upholding some level of workplace respect between us, I don’t particularly care about preserving my relationship with this security guard, but not caring about what he thinks of me made it easier to navigate how I was feeling. He yelled at me, and it made me upset. Easy.

When it comes to the people I care about, it’s a lot trickier. I never want to admit when my loved ones have crossed a line or when I have something I need to tell them, positive or negative. On either side of it, whether I want to raise a concern or express my love for them, I fear that I will disrespect an unspoken boundary that I have invented for myself- that nonchalance is the truest state of being. Any behavior out of this norm is erratic, insincere, and a sign of a bad relationship.

Where did this notion come from? Over time, I’ve concluded that overly emotional people are out of touch with reality. To be over-emotional is to blow things out of proportion, to milk a feeling for the sake of feeling. This is what created my rule. If I always aim to be nonchalant and have chill vibes, I never have to worry that I am speaking or acting out of turn.

What I’m slowly coming to realize is the other side of it, that unemotional people are equally out of touch. This is where I say oohhhh, maybe emotional people do have a point. To be unemotional is also to be out of touch with reality because if you never share how you feel and you never ask others how they feel, how the fuck is anyone supposed to know what’s going on?

Besides, I don’t think I’ve ever successfully been calm about anything ever. If anything, I think it’s usually pretty clear that there’s something on my mind that I’m not letting out, whether it has to do with my relationships or otherwise. Like the depressed porn bot from above, something was clearly on her mind, but how could we know for sure if she never tells? She was lucky the user in the replies was perceptive to her issues.

Sometimes I think if another person can’t tell I have something to say or something I want to talk about, then I’m either making the issue up, or they are unworthy of my time- because why weren’t they on the same wavelength? The only way to get on the same wavelength is to talk about it. If something needs to be addressed or there is something I want to share, I can’t wait for others to ask me to offer myself to them.

By not choosing to share myself with others, I am not excelling at my relationships. I am actually flopping. Am I not the only one who does this or am I just an asshole for expecting people to ask? It’s probably a little bit of both. What I am discovering is that writing about it helps clear my head, and while it’s scary to be vulnerable on the internet, I can take some solace in the fact that I am only expecting two people to read this. Shout out to Fernie and Brian.

It’s time for me to be honest about how I feel and what I want without shaming myself for it. As you know reader, I don’t wish to be crass, but as Ariana Grande put it in her hit collaboration with Lil Wayne, She just looking for love, I’m looking for love baby. The only way to find and receive the love I seek is to put it out there.

When I converted to the Church of the Unemotional, I became a hater. I have not been living by the standards of PUSSY IN BIO or HEART ON SLEEVE, but rather HATE IN HEART. In the name of nonchalance and trying to be cool about everything, I have become bitter. The resentment that has materialized from all my unspoken and unshared thoughts has built up into some rather unkind behavior that has subsequently only self-fulfilled the prophecy.

And when the Event That We All Know Happened Happened, the isolation made it worse, reinforcing my beliefs.

With no one to share my feelings with besides myself, it got really annoying really quickly. I figured it must be just as annoying for others to hear about my problems as it was for me to dwell on them. Of course, despite my anxieties that arise when I think of a nasty or embarrassing thought, no one can read my mind. No one will know what is in my head unless I express it.

It’s about to get cheesy bitches… When we started social distancing, I was emotionally distancing. I don’t want to talk about That Period of Time any further, so I will continue to refuse to name her, but you were all there when the things that happened went down and you know What I Am Talking About.

As I said before, I’ve always been a sensitive person. There’s no use in denying that fact anymore. What can I say, I am Latina. When I love, I love hard. Why hide it? So from now on, love wins! I will be honest in all my relationships! Wahoo! Well, easier said than done. Because after all, what is the right way to wear your heart on your sleeve?

And that is a FANTASTIC question.

My journey of chipping away at the walls I’ve put up will take some significant time and effort. It is likely I will miscalculate and over-extend in my sharing, and it is likely I will also pull back out of fear. So keep reading my blog to see how that goes. It is a quest that will surely be full of hilarious failures and emotional pitfalls.

And if you’re like me, expecting the world to explode in the next 6-10 months, you may wonder, well why even bother trying to change? Aren’t we all going to die? And that is ALSO a FANTASTIC QUESTION.

The answer to that is… I don’t know! Why bother? Hm. Well, that just spirals into an entire other rabbit hole of thoughts and feelings that I don’t have time for right now, but you can trust that I will probably write about that soon. Because that is a question I love to ask myself and the universe. Why bother? Good question!

Until then, thanks for making it this far if you did. And if you didn’t, well idgaf because how would I know?

See today’s references listed below.

Thx a mil x