Last night, I went to a sex party.

I guess, technically, it was a kink party. But mostly it was sex.

I’d never been to something like that before. And I guess, seeing glimpses of such things in movies, I felt like it should have been… something more than it was. Like it should have been dangerous. Or radical. Or perverse. But mostly, it was just people hanging out, and some of them were having sex. And I didn’t really feel much of anything. Some curiosity, certainly. Detached, intellectual curiosity. And, on some deeper intangible level, longing. Not that I could be doing what they were doing, but that I could feel what they felt, could want what they want. That I could just mold myself into a normal person who felt ok through force of will alone.

I thought about that. And then I saw Tennessee’s football coach got fired today. And I thought about how much Tennessee fans care about winning. And about how winning is something we have such ambiguous control over. How in a game like football, one team always wins and another always loses. And there are a million things you can do to try to make that win happen. But, ultimately, it’s not something you can *make* happen. You put in the work, do your best, and then… hope.

And I thought about all these sexual assault conversations. And, like I usually do, I wondered what happens in the minds of the perpetrators. I wonder if they’re happy. Can’t imagine that they’re happy. Trying to force something to happen that you can’t control. That even if the bodies go through motions, the absence of love, of desire, the trying to insert control where none can be, it has to corrode the soul. Or, at the very least, echo inside an emptiness already there.

I thought about a spoken word piece at the sex party. About a woman talking about a new male partner who couldn’t maintain an erection. How, in her story, she validated the man’s experience, said “feelings are not an on and off switch.” How it was ok with her that what is Supposed to Happen, didn’t happen. How not forcing what wasn’t there was just… ok.

And I thought about a metaphor I’ve been sitting with a lot. Of sea turtles hatching. How the mother lays 100 eggs, and they all hatch at once. Minutes old, they all race to the sea. And they race, because they are not alone. Many are caught, many are eaten. Minutes old, babies in the absolute sense of the word. Without protection, thrown haphazardly into life and racing from the moment they first see sky. How do we make sense of it? Who lives, who dies? Do the ones who live just Want It More? Do they work harder? Are they naturally better, stronger, faster, smarter? Do we blame the ones who don’t? They did not fight hard enough? They, only minutes old, fatally faltered? Do we blame the gulls? The dogs? Who eat the turtles, crack the turtles, seeing in this bright new soon-to-be-broken life a day’s more life of their own?

And I think about how we are those turtles. How we don’t get to choose when or how we’re born. How some of us have warm homes and loving parents; how some of us are thrust into cold and barren beaches, birthed by the very gulls who eat us. How some have wealth and status and some have access to education and some are women born a thousand years ago and some are undocumented immigrants born today and some are happier than the rich and powerful turtles born to gulls who were once turtles born to gulls who were-

And I think how the ambition of humanity, the beauty and the tragedy of this human experiment, is that we were all born on that beach and we are striving towards a world where we want every turtle to live and thrive, every single one, how we want to create a world where we all have what we want and need, and how that world is so different than the only one we’ve had.

On Suicide

A few weeks ago, I went to a meditation group in Seattle. It was pretty similar to other meditations I’ve been to: a period of guided/silent meditation followed by a talk afterward. I felt out of place for a lot of it; in the same way I feel out of place in many yoga spaces or out of place most everywhere since I moved from Tennessee, as if everyone around me is more polished and put together than I’ve ever been or probably ever will be. But it was ok. Most things are ok.

During the talk, the facilitator spoke of 3 basic desires that lead to suffering in the Buddhist tradition; specifically, this week, she spoke of the desire to not exist. She spoke of drinking coffee, to make bad feelings go away. She spoke of freeze responses, of her toddler just deciding to stop moving in protest (when he could neither run nor fight). She spoke of fears of public speaking, of wanting vehemently to disappear to make the bad feelings go away.

To me, it all felt… kind of cute. Like, I guess, maybe those are the connections most people might make to the topic that, in retrospect, makes sense. I, of course, didn’t think of most of those things. I thought of dissociation. Of doing whatever you have to do to contort your mind, your body, your words into however they need to be to get whatever horrors around you to somehow go away. I thought of suicide. Because, of course, what is more in keeping with a desire for nonexistence than the action so many people take to make that actually happen?

The thought seemed, in some ways, unwelcome in this space. I’m not really sure why. I guess, when you’ve thought of suicide as much as I have, when a significant portion of your professional work has been about suicide, it feels normal. And that’s probably not true for most people. But, me being me, I thought about it. It seemed on topic. And I was genuinely curious because I had never really given thought to how Buddhism might regard suicide. So I asked.

To my surprise, the facilitator rolled with the question. She looked at me, and she said “In short, they’d say it wouldn’t change much. They believe the soul exists to complete its task of ending suffering and reaching enlightenment and that when we die we pretty much just pick up where we left off. So, in effect, suicide wouldn’t make much of a difference at all.”

I am not usually a person who is surprised. But, when she said this, I was stunned. For 15 years, suicide has been my “get out of life free card.” It’s my go to when things are bad. It’s my escape, my fantasy. And here this person was, saying that it wouldn’t change anything.

To be honest, I think she’s right.

***

I say this not because I necessarily believe in reincarnation (although, I mean, who knows?). But because it really asked me to look at life not as something I’m trying to figure out if I want “to do but as something I have to figure out how to make the best of. Hamlet asked “to be or not to be?” But the facilitator’s response seemed to ask instead “if we have to be, then what?”

The short answer is “I have no fucking idea.”

The longer answer, though, is that it’s really pushed me to change my approach to life. How do I make the best of things? How do I work through my pain and my past, and actually come out the other side?

What does that even look like?  

I’m not really sure. But that’s my current project. To look at loneliness, to look at boredom, to look at my complicated relationship with other people and work to make them better. Because, ultimately, that’s pretty much all we can do.