I fell asleep. I woke up.

bedtime, morningtime

* * *

Adam Phillips, interpreting Freud, writes that
"need is where we begin and language is what we acquire."

I have spent the last eight months (but accurately the last two years) being disappointed at my (lack of) revelations of self to self. I also have spent much of my lifetime cultivating questions of want and need and experience and past. Indefatigably. At the expense of intellectual/spiritual/romantic comfort. And yet. Here I was (again?), shaming my own dishonesty and refusal to acknowledge (you, me, etc). 

But today I awoke as if pushed on the sandbar by the undertow. No, I didn't wake like this. I've been struggling with the reality of my need(s). I haven't had the language because I refused to accept myself. How badly I want to be the person I want to be -- I leave behind the person that I am! If I can handle being alone with only my choices and desires and actions at the end of every day and the beginning of every  night, then the masks come off (beautiful though they were occasionally, protective of my precious but not-so-precious flesh).

What are these drives that make my hands move? What is the first sound I want to hear in the morning? Where do I put my hands my cup of tea the pillow behind my back when I'm reading about psychoanalysis and Charles Bernstein at three in the morning? And what do I tell strangers within the first hour of meeting? What do I save for the next day? What won't I tell them at all? What am I not comfortable hiding anymore? What is a requirement of acceptance to share intimate space with me?

I've been chastising my tongue while it waited in the guillotine. Often before the crowd. 

I've been blaming my detachment on language while it stroked my head to make me fall asleep.

All while maintaining an irrational pride in acquiring knowledge (of self).

"Not that the person intent on knowledge was a failed sensualist, but rather a troubled one;
in thrall, as we all are, not simply to her desires but to the conflict around and about her desires.
Pleasure was not addictive, anesthetizing it was."

(Adam Phillips, his exchanged for her by me)

Anesthetizing pleasure was addictive (fuck me, so true!),
all the while hoarding the exploration of my desires until the dust became so thick, I could only recognize them as dust.

I knew myself as Soil(ed).

* * *

"The modern individual is ineluctably, compulsively a biographer and autobiographer,"
writes Phillips in an earlier part of the book.

Here is a photo of me that I did not take or know was being taken.

Portrait as both biographer and autobiographer.

Compulsive yes ineluctable yes.

Need is where I'll begin. Let the language come if it can.

Let if it can.

As I quoted Carl Phillips in a previous post:

Let those plants

that can do so lean away on their stems, toward the sun.