Monday Musing #002

I have been tap tap tapping away at my laptop in the hopes that some full bodied piece would flow out of my fingertips. But so far I have rewritten a piece on intimacy four times and typed a whole bunch of other little paragraphs and thoughts. Which makes sense since the whole idea of musing, is about pondering and thinking and whose thoughts stay on one single thought for long periods of time? Certainly not mine. Anywho. welcome to round two.

——

I have started a little ritual, every Sunday I post a weekly round up of photos on my instagram. It is nothing special and I am not the one who invented a weekly round up. But I have decided that Sundays are the only days I am allowed to post on instagram. For the rest of the week, I can check it on my laptop but the phone is strictly for posting on Sundays and that is all. It is my way of curbing this insane need to scroll on my phone and I have been in this love hate relationship with instagram for the past year as well. I have deleted it off my phone multiple times, I have added a time limit on it. I have done everything I can think of to stop this incessant need to be on the thing. And I am happy to report that sunday posting is the new sweet spot. It is a lovely little ritual of curation and trying to tell a weekly story in photos. I have also stopped editing my photos or forcing my grid to remain aesthetically pleasing. It is my very happy fuck you to the algorithm and I am delighted by it. I don’t care if there are a thousand likes or only one. It is a little thing that I do for me every Sunday and that is it.

——

Sometimes it feels like I go through some kind of writing identity crisis every few weeks. I go back to my old writing hoping that I will be able to replicate it in someway. Not the topics but the sound of it. The texture of my old writing. I think in someway it felt like the Caitlin of yesterday knew how to write better than the me of today does. It feels like I have forgotten how the words form on the page and how I would use them. Which is quite silly considering I am writing a whole piece right now, but I feel like I need to reference myself again and again. Remind myself of how I used words and punctuation. The prose and the sound of them as the fell onto the page. Sometimes I wonder if I should just write however I want. Just post that first draft that spills out of you. Misspellings and bad language included. Or maybe I should write something a little more witty. Like the cheeky narrator of a TV series, kind of fun and sarcastic at the same time. Or maybe I should emulate the rest of these people on substack with their personal essays and think pieces full of wisdom and care and sometimes a little bit of pretension. Maybe I should write like them. Maybe that will help get into headspace of a writer. Maybe then I will be able to write out all of these words that live inside me, every day and with some kind of artistic flare and precision. But I have realised with anything as personal as writing. The harder your try to force yourself to stop sounding like yourself, or sounding like the narrator that comes easily, the wells of creativity dry up. The shrivel and die until you water them with whoever you were meant to be, then they slowly start to unfurl and bloom again. The prose and the words meant just for you.

——

I have been thinking about intimacy lately. About this word and how we have all somehow forgotten the meaning of it. The depth that it carries. I think we have started to throw this word around and use it interchangeably with other words. Words like exposure. We have started to think that the more that we expose ourselves, physically or emotionally to a vast majority of people it somehow equates to us having some form of intimacy with them. I mean sure it does kind of bring down barriers and move away some layers. But I don’t think it brings the nuance to intimacy that we think it does. We use it as a kind of exposure therapy. “If I show them everything all at once then they can decide from the get go if they are going to leave or stay”. There is no more fear of abandonment this way. You can just simply say, “they could not handle all of me” and be done with it. But where is the mystery I say?

Today, our social media accounts read like diaries. Our inner most thoughts out there in the open for someone to pick apart like vultures over some decaying corpse. When we trauma dump on the first date and wonder why they never called us back. When we show chichi’s and titties and say it’s because of women empowerment. What happened to the mystery? To leaving something to the imagination. To having someone be curious about you. Wonder about you. Want to keep getting to know you. Have the privilege of learning about what makes you tick? What movie makes you cry. What your favourite colour is. Why sunflowers remind you of the rain? What happened to showing only ankle. A little bit of a tease of skin. What happened to the eroticism of the mind. Of looking at someone and wondering if the skin of their inner thigh is just as soft as the skin of their wrist and waiting for the day you get to figure that out for yourself?

Maybe it is just me. Maybe I am conservative or a prude or insert some other adjective here. But I think there is so much more sensuality and intimacy that comes with doing the work to figuring someone out. Not just romantically. We like to think of intimacy of something reserved only for partners and lovers. But what about the friend who can read you like a book. Who can take one look at you and know you’ve been having a bad day. Your person, Ala Christina and Meredith in Grey’s Anatomy. The person who gets you. Maybe more than a partner ever will. The one who knows the skeletons in your closet because they helped you put them there. The ones who wait patiently for you to recover even when all they want you to do is just get over the idiot already. What happened to those friendships? The ones you don’t post every day on social media. But the kind of friendships that wait you out until you can articulate your emotions. who sit with you in the dark and pray silently and desperately that you walk towards the light. The ones who hold the mirror up to you and show you what a fool you have been. What about the intimacy there? Maybe you have known this person, 10, 20 years. Or maybe you have known them for 2. But some part of your soul has always known that they were your person. Maybe a part of their soul touched yours one night over casual drinks and nothing was ever the same again.

I think we as a society, as a culture, need to first of all learn some decorum (but that is a thought for another time). And second of all we need to remember that some things are not meant for the eyes of others. They are not meant for the eyes of the world. They are not meant for the eyes of friends and family. They are the things you clutch to your chest and only the safest of people can attend. They are the things that maybe not everyone needs access too. and maybe not everyone should get access to your body, no matter how empowering. Be fun. Show personality. Dress however you want, I am not the fashion police. But if your inner thigh is out there for the world to see, maybe we can reevaluate some things. Maybe somethings are meant to be contended for in the dark and quiet places, not under the floodlights of the rest of the world.

There is a cost to intimacy. One that we have all seemed to have glossed over and forgotten about. We think it is okay to share anything and everything with any one who has a pulse but then we wonder why when we go home at night, we feel like we are in pieces. We were never meant to leave them at the feet of people who were not meant to carry them. It is a lost and dying art. Intimacy. I have learnt and am still learning who can and who cannot carry the weight of me as a person but also who should and should not. There is an intention the comes with intimacy. From both parties. Because intimacy without intentionality is just exposure therapy and I don’t think this world needs any more of that.