notes: scents. & writing.
I’ve just received some very interesting books, including one called I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire (thank you). I’m very curious to read what she has to say. I know if I were to pick my own historical model for marriage, it would be some variant of cicisbeismo, but much less fey.
*
My space still smells faintly of my perfume; my body still smells like him.
He doesn’t really have a smell, and that’s strange because most men do. Even when we’ve rolled and rutted across his bed, we both smell like me, my cunt, my sweat.
So the next morning I shower and he showers, or he showers first, then me, or we both shower, and when we towel off, I use his deodorant. And that’s when I smell like him. He smells like whatever he’s saturated with, and since I smell Ivory soap everywhere, it’s his deodorant that I associate with his body.
It feels perverse to think that I’m now physically aroused by a scent manufactured by Unilever or Procter & Gamble, but I guess that’s how our associations work. I breathe in and it triggers an avalanche of sexual memories.
*
I’ve been writing offline, the old-fashioned way. I wanted to retrain myself to write without filtering out the details so much. Gabriel and I talked about this a bit, how I don’t seem the write the way I used to — I just know that there are topics I avoid now, for various reasons.
Writing offline started as an excavation. I’ve been piecing together old experiences and filling in the gaps, fleshing out the impartial descriptions. Something I didn’t expect was the way I’ve been willing to revisit the negative experiences. I remember a few years ago, maybe two blogs ago, someone wrote and said that they preferred my first blog because “it was much, much darker.” And it’s true – the blog she was referring to was written when I was still starting out, and it was tough then. It was dark. And blogging was new for me. It felt like I didn’t have an audience, though I did, and when you don’t feel like you have an audience, you tend to write as though nobody is looking. (Which is why a client was able to find me and then out me to my madam.)
I don’t know when I started to tune out the negative experiences. In part, I just adapted. The things that were jarring in the beginning weren’t so tough a year or two in, so those things just didn’t seem relevant or worth revisiting. I think it was also a matter of responding to the sense of being visible. When things are tough for me, I don’t usually share those experiences with other people. The darker the experience, the less likely I am to share it. So when my blog started to feel especially public, I felt, and maybe I still feel, like I needed to keep the ugliness to myself.
But writing offline, it comes easily. I have this strong desire to be honest about everything, from every angle, and it’s coming more readily and quickly than I would have expected. Whole memories I thought would be buried under gauze are still very visual and fresh.
The worst was always abstract, like the loneliness of a double life (though that much I did blog about). And on that, the term “double life” doesn’t feel right. I feel like it should be “fractured life,” a life divvied up among false identities and partial truths. It’s true that it starts in double, and that’s when it’s still interesting, even exciting, but it never seems to stay that way.
And for the less abstract subjects, the writing process has been elliptical, like I’m pacing in long, loose loops around difficult memories, carefully avoiding a few pivotal moments that still make me wince when I remember them too clearly. I never really wrote about the day I decided to leave the agency and what happened as a result. I never really wrote about why sex is so valuable to me, and why I’m more comfortable naked than clothed. I haven’t really written about the stalker, either, or what happened last year. Some of these memories are a little tough to think about head-on, but this offline writing has made it easier.
The easiest memories to confront are the clients. There were several times when I was on some travel gig, trapped in some stranger’s plane or hotel room, thinking to myself, I can’t fucking do this. Sometimes I was just burned out, sometimes I was just with someone who was absolutely intolerable. But rather than blog about them at the time, I learned from those experiences and eventually found ways to work around them. Now, though… I want to write about them. Now I have distance.
And I suppose that’s the difference between writing and blogging. When I blog, I tend to skip over whole swaths of experience, maybe because it’s all too in-the-moment or it’s too personal or fresh or raw or just something I’d rather not revisit right away, but writing offline, I feel like I want to cover everything.
On some level, I’m hoping this process will make it easier for me to blog openly again, with more detail, to do what Gabriel suggests and blog as though nobody is looking.
Blogging in that way is difficult, and if you can attain it I can only imagine how wonderful this space of yours will be. It’s already absolutely amazing, really, so actually, I can’t imagine. How can it get any better, any more real or raw?
I’ve become so accustomed to doing everything on a computer and editing editing editing that nothing important ever makes it through. I know I filter too much. If I had to write by hand, with pen to paper, I think more of me would come through. It almost inspires me to do a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise like the good old days.
It’s a shame that you had to abandon your old blogs. I bet there’s a wealth of great writing there that many of us will never have the chance to read.
I used a man’s deodorant once because I forgot to pack my own, kept using it to trap his smell on me, but then once I bought my own stick of the same when I realized it worked better than women’s deodorant, the smell stopped being him. So be careful of that.
Like Wendy, I wish I could go back and read your old blogs…
Yay, one of those posts!
Have you by any chance read or come across a book called Perfume, by Patrick Suskind? The pro/antagonist is a man who has no smell… What you describe above is almost a passage from the book, which is seen through his eyes.
Also, and probably unsurprisingly, being a fan of your writing, I like the term “fractured life”. I feel very close to that.
/D
I’ve been experiencing a lot of that unwillingness to blog about tough or dark stuff that’s going on in my life. I half feel like no one really wants to read it, but I also think I have a desire to put it out of my mind and off paper. Writing makes everything more real and concrete, which is ordinarily what I love about it — writing about experiences reminds me that they weren’t just fantasies or dreams but rather that they happened and exactly how they made me feel. For these same reasons though, I avoid bloging about the tougher stuff.
I’m always an advocate of embracing the dark. Indeed, mine comes and finds me, relentlessly, when I don’t. But I wince a bit when you say someone found you the last time you blogged “as though no one was looking.”
I think your blog is fantastic and stupendous as it is. And I think embracing what you’ve avoided is worthwhile and something you’ll feel great about over time. Confronting those demons is a source of real prided, earned pride, and healthy confidence. I’m just not sure public blogging is the safest space for doing that honey.
gah, i typo’d “pride” the first time : (
I never really appreciated the genuinely cathartic value of writing until I started working with a counselor. I have so many things I have put in a mental box on the shelf that didn’t belong there and writing them down, cataloging them so to speak, has gone a long way to my doing a lot of mental housekeeping. I wish you peace as you engage in that writing.
I love what you do share with us. Seriously, scents are so powerful. It has probably happened to us all that one walks past a scent and is practically teleported back to a moment in time.
“The easiest memories to confront are the clients. There were several times when I was on some travel gig, trapped in some stranger’s plane or hotel room, thinking to myself, I can’t fucking do this. Sometimes I was just burned out, sometimes I was just with someone who was absolutely intolerable. But rather than blog about them at the time, I learned from those experiences and eventually found ways to work around them.”
I’ve really struggled with this and I’m in the process of finding my way around it, as well. The feeling of being trapped and suffocated. But I encouraged their affection in the beginning, i wanted it and thought it was good for business. God, the guilt of leading them down that road then being completely unable to give them more of myself, if only for the weekend. Seducing them and making them fall in love with me … not good for business, not good for anyone involved.
I think there’s a fine line between writing as if no one is reading and holding back just enough to feel that there’s still a part of you that only you know (and perhaps your closest friends) know exists. I deliberately avoid writing about the more mundane aspects of my life because, well, as a sex blogger, they aren’t particularly sexy. I’ve almost stopped writing about intimate moments with men I really care about because I don’t want to share those moments with the world. And why should I? Often I write and save really hot experiences for future books and don’t blog about them at all or in a kind of shorthand that helps me to remember that moment. I love blogging for the way it allows me to connect with my readers and track my journey but question the need to give it all away. I think you give you away more than most. Why not hold back something just for yourself?
I know what you mean about the scent thing!! I start feeling like…shouldn’t there be more “real” substance to the scent rather than chemicals…and most of them that are likely toxic too? Then things get SUPER awkward when some guy with the same deodorant or cologne walks by whom you normally would NEVER think about having sex with, and I smell it and think about sex. After which, I shudder and realize who that scent’s coming from and feel grossed out. hehehe.