Elize Simon, Sex & Body-Love Coach
My ineffective little human hand reaching across your chest.
Mine and your parents and your friends and all us mere humans with our
puncturable skins whispering to the universe.
please god don’t hurt this.
A clown car of guardian angels fighting for shotgun.
I count you twice
And then twice more
I leave a full blessing for
1: your willingness to let
2: your breath catch and rattle in my
3: hearing ears, and on my
4: unbroken skin, with that
5: bite mark from before
What a gift.
Sometimes instagram is just snack food, but sometimes it is the medicine and the messenger of the universe.
…the question should never be ‘What is the least amount of effort I can give to myself so that I’ll stop being a problem?’ The question is always ‘What do I have the capacity to give? How can I give myself the fullness of what I have to offer?’ I want to give myself the world.
@frankiedoodledandy
Now I’m historically not a great cook. I forget to use salt and pepper, I’ll happily just eat an avocado with Everything But The Bagel seasoning and call it dinner.
But tonight I laid outside and read until I got hungry. And then I looked up what I can make with the half a cabbage in the fridge and I roasted it to sweet perfection. I even made a sauce! With multiple ingredients, that required using an additional pan. And added mustard because I’m worth it.
I treated myself like someone I’m trying to woo like whoa. And let me tell you how loved I feel. The warmth and the sweetness. It felt like a big delicious hug. That was probably the best date I’ve ever been on. It just happened to be with and by me.
What was so hard about ending my last relationship was that my intuition knew it was time to leave before my body understood why. So I had this long period of waffling on whether the decision was right, changing my mind, reaching out to him. I think it was really painful for both of us.
Recently I feel a lot clearer about it.
And one of the things that’s really helped is running across qualities that I get to have in my next relationship.
Playful
Adventurous
Silly
Men with these qualities pop into my day and I’m drawn to them like a thirsty fittonia glimpsing water for the first time in years.
Oh, this too can be for me.
And it can. It feels so good.
I have a story that I’m easy to cancel on. Easy to forget. Easy to pass over. That you “always” cancel on me. That the excuses are real but somehow the manifestation is born of not caring about me.
This, of course, is ridiculous.
Well, only as ridiculous as a feeling can be. It isn’t fact. It isn’t even reasonable. Especially considering how awesome I am.
It isn’t fact. I get to work on remembering that in the moment.
And I get to be gentle with myself when I forget. Because scared, hurt me is important and deserving of love too.
I met a man and had a touch that exists without frame, without reference points, without time before or time after.
The day I arrived I saw him and couldn’t stop noticing him. The way he walked and smiled, hugged people, smiled. Those teeth like perfect pearls, making me smile for absolutely no reason. Like a painting that tickles you every time you see it. Why? Who knows. But I’d rather have the feeling even if I can’t explain it than not have it at all.
It became apparent that he had been seeing me the way I was seeing him. Wanting to speak, wanting to touch, Wanting to uncover the mystery; why can’t I stop noticing you?
Walking alone under an open and unjudgemental sky I told him,
I want to touch you with curiosity. Just run my hands on your skin without shame or fear and see what I find.
That sounds amazing. I’d love to connect with you that way.
After years of thinking the same thought in relationships and situations where it’d not come true my brain was flooded with anticipation. What would it be like to get what I’ve always thought I wanted. Really though.
I tossed and turned imagining luxuriating in the temperature of his chest, grazing my fingertips along his lips, those lips that smile like he’s about to tell me a secret. By the time the time came I was high on my fantasies, vibrating, embarrassed to have passed a whole day with this elevated awareness of self, of color, texture, grinning stupidly about someone I don’t even know.
Reality was different of course. Curiosity means listening, responding not to what you had imagined but to what actually presents itself. What I found more intoxicating than the skin I’d wanted to caress was the muscle beneath it and the intention it held. Like a lionness stalking her prey, he put his hands on my arms and moved me through space, enjoying the way we walked like waltzers, hands full of information, structure, satisfaction.
Enjoying each others willingness to lead and be led, see and be seen.
Before I learned about the mechanics of sex this is what I thought it would feel like in my chest, the tightness and release in my throat, the tingling all over and inside my head, the freedom. He ran his hands down the sides of my torso like a builder looking for warp to address, stopping to notice muscles, ran his hand to the space just below my belly button and collapsed his weight into me, enjoying the roundness and warmth of the intimate no man’s land right above my underwear band. Not sexual, just private, pleasurable in it’s own rarely-noticed right.
Tell me some thinking or feeling words.
This is such a wonderful destination. Just itself.
He held my arms out to my sides floating in space,
Keep them there.
And I did, in the chilly night air, luxuriating in his palms scampering from fingertip, across the soft insides of my elbow, glancing off the lump of my shoulder, skateboarding across my collar bones, and out the other side and back again, breathing and watching his face gleam with joy at my skin.
Not long after that I put my shirt back on and we rejoined the world.
Heading back towards other people with all their eyeballs and opinions I remembered who I was, who he was. This was not the new couple, triumphant, announcing themselves, inviting the tribe to rejoice at their starting a journey as a pair. Just two people who shared a moment in the woods returning, ever so slightly changed, to their own lives. The idea of having to back away before being noticed, to not be seen as some romantic leech clanged around inside my chest.
I’m important to this person! I swear it, you should have seen how he worshiped the shape of my neck just a moment ago!
The knot rising in my throat at the inevitable “she’s not with me” implicit in the return to society. This person is allowed to be important to me, but not in a way I can ever adequately describe, and that makes it feel un-respectable.
The shame trapped me under it like a waterfall, the flow locking me in. Then I got what I’ve always wanted. In a room full of people, an unselfconscious arm around me.
Thank you for not making me feel like something to be ashamed of.
You aren’t something to be ashamed of.
In Judaism you don’t tell anyone you’re pregnant until as late as possible. Don’t brag, don’t count on chickens before they hatch. A flood isn’t out of the question, Nothing is guaranteed in this life.
Don’t smile too loudly. The heavens might hear you and smite you down.
Maybe other people or peoples have that too. That superstitious streak. That abandonment. That cope.
So what do you do when that cope becomes a curse? How do you break yourself of the habit when something comes along so wonderful that it’s cruel to hide it from the world?
Can you adopt a totally different unified theory of everything? Switch from blaming Fates and Bad Air to preaching Germ theory.
I imagine instead of a straight jacket it would be like a light sundress. Casually, tossing over my shoulder “I’m in love with the most beautiful man in the world and I don’t care who knows it.”
Because it feels amazing to say true things. And I am.
This weeks sermon comes to you from having your own personal crisis in the most seemingly hostile of environments. And living. And learning that you can do that and not only be fine, but better than you were before. Absorbing rejection and living anyway, to realize that you can make it through anything. You can experience your worst fears and get confirmation on your cruelest thoughts about yourself and still wake up the next morning.
And if you are lucky then you get to the next morning and look around at the people who were there with you and you get to be grateful for them and love them harder than before. It may have been your worst day but it still wasn’t the worst day you could have had. Because you didn’t have to do it alone. And the people who supported you are not always the ones you expect. Maybe you have a family you never knew about before. People who help you climb by picking your feet up and placing them where they need to go. And people who listen and give zero advice, just hear and reflect back.
These are the things you learn from having the worst day imaginable in the most hostile environment imaginable.
That you are the strongest you imaginable.
Believe them.
Take the yes, don’t accuse them of lying. Gracefully accept the love.
Dude, did you know that men are like, nice? Like really nice. Like hug you while you cry, rub your back, not look even the slightest bit embarrassed that you’re doing this in public. – Nice.
Like looking deep into your soul and saying “You are not something to be ashamed of.” – Nice.
Like “What are you thinking when you stop your hand right above the band of my bikini?” “Just how nice your belly feels against my hand.” – Nice.
My face is so leaky because the inside of my brain is just a photo reel of all this niceness now.
How could I ever have not known this?
I must have known this?
When did I know this?
And why does it feel like such surprising news?
I love men. Some of my best friends are men. Some of my favorite people in the world are men.
So why didn’t I trust them to be this? Or to be this with me?
And how did it come to be that now I do?
No matter. Now that I’ve seen this beautiful new world I’m never going back.
Even if this person disappears, I know what how it feels to kiss someone who thinks I’m fireworks. I’m kissing people who make me feel like a beautiful burning star. That’s mine now.
Female Gazing 