David Davis 42, part 3

Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

It happens, I say. It’s fine. Some men recoil. Some ask if they can touch me, to reassure me, while we wait it out. Some exhibit an endearing confidence they can talk my body out of its panic. There’s one man that can keep fucking me through the tears and hyperventilation; somehow he knows when I can take it and when he needs to stop. Just a moment, I say. Not a big deal.

I don’t know why it happens, though I have my suspicions about certain environments and sensations. No need to reveal them here. But even just being close to someone, in some state of undress, under dimmed lights, is dangerous. I can tell by the way your breathing changes, Jade told me once, as my heart raced under her acrylics.

Since I started sleeping with men again, none have ever been unkind to me when it happens. I used to think this was pure luck. Until recently, when it occurred to me that maybe it only happens when I know I’m safe.

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Worrying is like praying for things you don’t want is a bumperstickerism for the ages, the dreck of embroidered pillows and Kohl’s discount racks, the neurotic’s cruel reminder that fearing your fears is not only unpleasant and ineffectual, but perhaps even self-fulfilling.

From fridge magnets to small talk, the platitude, like the meme, gains its charge from repetition. But in the war of attrition against nuance, the cliche is not an infallible enemy. In fact, we can turn its power back on itself: if worrying and praying are indeed the same mechanism, is it possible that fears and fantasies are more similar than we might think?

I often write here at DAVID about my interest in denaturalizing desire, a thing so overdetermined that most of us can’t even recognize that which we want most in all the world. When I find myself preoccupied with one of my standard anxieties—like knocking out all my teeth, or chopping off my pinky along with the cabbage—I find it helpful to remember that these are fantasies, too, albeit unpleasant ones. In choosing to allow desire to encompass the unpleasant, the negative, and the taboo, I’m not admitting that deep down I actually want to amputate my own finger. Rather, I’m giving myself permission: to worry without struggle, to want what I shouldn’t, to suffer when there is no alternative. To do my best to, as the Bhagavad Gita recommends, meet this transient world with neither grasping nor fear.1 It’s not possible to be ready for it every time it happens. Fighting to do so only makes it more painful.

My journal tells me that a few years ago I wondered, How can I want something so bad that scares me so much? Liz looked up from her book about Lysander the Spartan. That’s everything, she said.

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1

For some reason, I’m reminded of the recent viral video of the man furiously destroying a Walmart display of beer cans because the company that produced them partnered with a trans woman for an ad campaign.