Inspired by the fact that A Wildness of the Heart wound up with a segment in a video essay on xenofiction (starting at about 1:01:00, but do watch the rest), I figured I would post all of the included novella Limerent Object here.
16
The presentation went over quite well, I think. There were a few questions after. Jeremy said it sounded good and my boss thanked me in a way that was more than just a pro forma thank you. Some part of me wishes that I had offered something less personal, but the rest of me is just glad it's over and that I don't have to care about it too much going further.
For posterity (and an admittedly uneasy sense that I ought to attach just about anything to do with this current task of journaling to the journal itself), here's what I wound up writing:
Before I set about the task of working toward my current career, I was on the path to becoming a Catholic priest. I made it all the way through my BA in religious studies and a year and a half into my MDiv before figuring out that it just wasn't going to work, and that I would make a terrible priest.
The reasons for this are fairly simple and also not necessarily germane to what I would like to talk about today, which is the process of discernment. Built into the education and administration of running a seminary, even the whole church, is a set of safeguards to help members onto the paths of life that are actually best for them, even if it isn't what they originally thought. This is set down explicitly in the term “discernment", which St. John's University, the seminary that I attended, codified into a system used by the administration.
A cynical way to put it would be a filter to keep the bad priests out, but in reality, it was a way of drawing out a decision that should — or must — take time to commit to. Some decisions are just not meant to be made quickly, whether or not this is because they are bound by time constraints, or simply because they need a lot of thought.
I got started thinking about this in a therapeutic context by a client recently. He was struggling with his decision to pursue the degree program he had chosen at university. Something about it just wasn't clicking for him, as much as he liked the idea of it. During a session, I brought up discernment as a topic that can be extended beyond its ecclesiastical roots and into just about any decision that requires time to play out.
I described the process of making this decision as an ongoing conversation with yourself as we find out what's important to us, what it takes to get where we want to be, and what is within our reach.
I'll note that that last bit is not actually something I said out loud to him. Whether or not he is actually able to pursue his degree to its conclusion is not on me to decide, I don't know one way or the other, but it stood out to me as something that I had experienced.
You all know that I'm a very awkward person. It takes a lot of energy for me to have a conversation with more than one person and to engage with those that I am talking to in an interesting way that doesn't leave one or the other — or both — of us frustrated. Can you picture a priest struggling with something like that? I may have had a mind for theology and all that goes into the bookish side of being a priest, but I don't have it in me at all to do all of the other work, most of it based around social interaction, that goes into the calling.
This is what I mean by discernment. In the context of the church, you take a long time to settle into a path that you will stick to for the rest of your life, whether that's a pastoral role, as a member of an order, or simply as a parishioner, but the same can hold for just about any other long-running decision-making process.
My advisor at St. John's told me that one could think of it like dating. The process of discernment is one of figuring out the relationship between yourself and a potential outcome of that decision before committing to what may be a mistake.
That can even be very literal. My parents dated for about two years before they decided to get married. In the context of their social lives and their families, this was an absurdly long period of time, but something about each other just made them want to be extra, extra sure that they were ready to be together forever. It's not that they were at each other's throats or constantly frustrated with each other, either. They were some of the most in-love people I've ever known. This year would have been their fortieth anniversary, and until the day they died, they were still holding paws and giving each other these little fawning glances.
Where my decision to join the clergy failed, that's an example of a decision that worked out well in the end. Extremely well.
Neither my client nor I know where it is that he will wind up. That is still a decision that is underway. But ever since having that session with him and making the connection between what I had gone through in the past with discernment and the idea of slower decision-making processes, I have made a conscious effort to keep this in mind when working with all of my clients who are struggling with big changes in their lives.
The discussion afterwards was fine. We talked a little bit about other long-term decisions that therapists had run into — things like divorce, changing careers, and so on — as well as some other personal stories. It only lasted a little bit, but since it was time taken out of our normal shared lunch break, no one was eager to stick around, least of all myself.
Again, corporate nonsense.
I shared a bit of this with Kay and she sent me an eye-roll emoji, followed by
6:03 PM Kay> It's bullshit like this that has me glad I'm still in academia. Not that libraries are immune or anything, but they're strange in that you're either a page or assistant like me or you had at least a masters degree.
6:03 PM Dee> I have a masters.
6:06 PM Kay> Well, fair enough. Still, I think libraries have this ivory tower nonsense going on in ways that places like you work don't. Reference librarians stick to their subjects, book binders stay in the bindery, book purchasers buy books, assistive tech people deal with assistive tech, etc etc. There's no real effort to bUiLd a TeAm in the same way as it sounds like is happening with you and every other office drone I know.
6:06 PM Dee> I'd shake my fist at you for calling me an office drone, but you're not wrong.
6:06 PM Kay> I bet you dress in business casual.
I laughed and typed back:
6:07 PM Dee> Of course I do! Have to look professional after all.
6:07 PM Kay> Do you call it “biz cas"? If you do, I will block you immediately.
6:07 PM Dee> I do not, thank goodness. I call it a button up shirt and slacks like a normal person.
6:08 PM Kay> You are absolutely in no way a normal person.
6:08 PM Kay> What did you wind up talking about anyway?
I sent her the essay and then waited for her to read, feeling anxious, as I always seem to when sharing anything related to religion with Kay. She's never been anything but kind-but-disinterested when the topic has come up before.
Finally:
6:12 PM Kay> I mean, it sounds like a fluff presentation.
6:12 PM Dee> It was hardly an academic conference.
6:13 PM Kay> Yeah, but it's not really -about- anything, I guess.
6:14 PM Dee> I guess, yeah. Just a loose compilation of thoughts. I wanted to be the first so I don't have to worry about any presentations for a while.
6:14 PM Kay> Hahaha! So cynical, Dee! Never knew you had it in you.
6:14 PM Kay> Especially given this apparently pretty earnest speech.
6:15 PM Dee> It was earnest! I am cynical! I contain multitudes.
6:15 PM Kay> Now I'm just picturing you as a priest.
6:16 PM Dee> Black cassock and Roman collar? Or all the vestments for mass?
6:16 PM Kay> Oh, the black one. Total hot priest vibes. You just have to wear that and call everyone “my child" or whatever and the girls will be all over you.
Gears crunched to a halt in my mind. I must have sat there, staring at that message, for several minutes, trying to parse out just how much of it might have been serious.
6:21 PM Kay> Sorry, that was probably pretty insensitive…
I rubbed my paws over my snout before replying:
6:25 PM Dee> No no! Just never really thought about “hot priest" being a thing.
6:25 PM Kay> You're just not on the right parts of the internet.
The conversation wound down from there, so now I'm writing up my journal and turning Kay's words over and over in my head. They fit strangely into my image of myself. 'Hot priest'? 'Girls all over me'? There isn't a universe in which either of these things is true. I am no judge of how attractive I am and have never bothered to ask, but the idea of a priest being sexy makes my head ache. They are two completely separate concepts in my mind, a Venn diagram with no overlap.
And having 'girls all over me' just sounds unpleasant no matter how I take it. If I can't deal with more than three or four people in a room at a time, how would I deal with that in some situation that might suggest intimacy? And in the more idiomatic sense, well, I can't even deal with attraction towards just one girl.
17
It is Pentecost Sunday. It's still a Solemnity, but after Holy Week and Lent, it lacks anywhere near to the same level of impact, so although the mass differs from a mass during Ordinary Time, it lacks the social impact of the other holidays.
I always find myself using it as the marker of slipping back into Ordinary Time. It works well for me to treat it as a very deliberate point. It is a relaxing of posture, perhaps. A time to switch from the tense contrition of lent and the jubilation of Eastertide into the, well, ordinary ritual and everyday faith.
Another interesting bit of news is that, as of last night, I appear to be taking the week after next off and heading up to Boise to visit Kay.
Like so much of late, the decision to do so seems to have sprung, fully formed, into my mind. Or perhaps our minds, as, when I mentioned the idea of coming up to visit, Kay responded readily and eagerly. 1 She mentioned that there is a percussion festival being held at UI that she would like to go to, and that she would welcome a concert buddy.
“Besides," she said on PostFast. “It's been ages since I've seen you."
If I were in any other mindset, I think I would have taken this at face value, just as I'm sure I would have taken so many other things from our conversations over the last however long. Then again, if I were in any other mindset, I am not sure I would have suggested a visit.
I'm not, though, and I did, and now I am panicking on Pentecost. Was it some tongue of flame that descended upon me, caused those words to come tumbling out onto the screen, enter key hit far before I'd really allowed myself time to process the request? Was it some inspiration beyond myself, or something within myself? Perhaps my subconscious desires are acting out for me.
But now it's set. I sent in a note to work and, assuming it is approved tomorrow morning, I will send out emails to my clients to inform them of my time away and my phone number to call in case of emergencies — and perhaps work can set up remote sessions if they would like — and then start considering what I will pack for a few days vacation.
I emailed Jeremy, and he replied quite quickly from, I assume, his phone:
Wow! Big step there. I was going to caution you about putting yourself in a situation where you would be pining away all the harder but a. You're a big boy now and can certainly handle that, and b. It might actually do you good to be assertive about the things you want in life. Do you think you will talk to her about your feelings while out there?
J
I haven't yet replied, as I am stuck on what to provide as an answer. The question itself made my stomach tie itself in knots. We, Kay and I, interact so smoothly over text that the thought of saying “Hey, I think I really like you" face to face makes my anxiety spike.
I mean, it also spikes when I think about telling her over PostFast, but certainly not as much.
So I guess I have yet to decide what to do about that, and instead of trying to figure that out right now (or all at once, as I keep telling myself), I'm focusing instead on what we'll do. She says she's found a few good inexpensive restaurants around the area, and, as I suspect that I am more comfortable financially than her, I will perhaps take her to a nicer one, maybe on the night of that concert. She's also promised to cook at least once and says that she's not bad at it.
There's also the percussion festival, which, on the surface sounds fun, if loud. I like drums well enough, though I imagine it won't simply be drum sets on a stage. Maybe we can fit in a hike or something?
Weirdly, though, the thing that I'm most interested in out of all the ideas that have crossed my mind is just sitting in the same room with her. Even if we're just reading or relaxing on our phones or, as always, showing each other videos that we enjoy.
Less than just doing stuff with her, I'm more excited about simply being around her and existing together. That feels like a good 'friend' thing to do.
It also feels like a couples thing to do, but on introspection, I feel like this particular desire may be more bound up in friendship than limerence. It has been a very long time since I have just hung out in person with someone whose company I enjoy.
I have the bus ticket, I have a few room-rental options I am looking at. 2
All I need is to make it until then.
----
1 A fact which I am striving not to think of as a big deal.
2 She made no mention of me staying with her, and even if I trusted myself to do so, she has shown me pictures of her place before, and a studio bedroom with an extra bed would be quite cramped.
18
I will not deny my excitement for this upcoming visit.
Neither, apparently, will my subconscious, for I have had not one but two dreams since our agreeing to visit, and given that it has only been three nights since then, this makes it a majority of my time spent thinking about her.
The first dream was much like the one I wrote about a few weeks back. I was at her senior recital, it was unspeakably beautiful, and then when I tried to help her up onto the stage, I was pushed away by the crowd, unable to call out to her.
In fact, it was so similar to the first dream that I nearly did not write about it here, but the very act of sitting down at the desk to write seems to have dredged up all of the subtle differences.
Yes, the music was breathtaking, but in an almost hypnotic way. The audience wasn't simply listening to it, we were enchanted.
Yes, the applause was uproarious, but it was outsized, for though the audience was perhaps a few dozen people in that intimate auditorium, the sound of the applause was of hundreds, thousands of people.
And yes, the applause was well earned, but more than that, it sounded possessive, as though at the culmination of the concert, the audience wanted nothing more than to claim Kay for their own.
And finally, yes, I did move to help her up onto the stage, but the act was one of desperation, as though that was not simply to help her take a bow, but to rescue her from the grabbing hands that wished to take her.
I didn't just fall away out of weakness, I was actively pushed away, I was an impediment on the audience's way to claiming what was rightfully theirs.
As with any such dream, this all felt astoundingly normal. It was not a nightmare, at the time. It was just a dream in which all of those things — the enchanting music, the audience, the possessiveness — were simply an inherent part of the universe. They were a core truth. They couldn't not have been present.
And yet, two days on, the anxiety of having Kay taken away from me (such as it were) clings to me like scent-block. I can feel it as an oily residue in my fur, between my pads.
The other dream is…I don't know. I have only been up a few minutes, now, and I am still struggling to internalize it. The part of me that is able to interpret is not yet functioning, though I have my coffee already, but the part of me that desires interpretation has been online since I crawled out of bed. I do not know what the dream was, certainly not what it means, but I suppose the least I can do is write it down.
I dreamed that, during the visit, we were sitting down on a couch to watch a movie and that Kay surprised me with a kiss. The dream jumps from there to us in her bed, trying to…it is hazy. We were trying to make love, and it's not that anything was wrong or necessarily preventing us, not in the dream's universe, but my point of view kept rewinding back to the point where we had just lay down together. After a few of these “rewinds", I found myself — not the me who was laying down, but the me who was dreaming, or perhaps observing the dream — getting frustrated with the repetition, and I started to change up my approach. What if I put my paw there this time, instead? What if I kissed first instead of touching? What if I lay on my back? What if I lay her on hers?
It was one of those fruitless dreams of struggling to find the correct way to engage with an idea. It was an erotic dream, but without the catharsis of orgasm.
I don't know. I am just as sure that my feelings for Kay go far, far beyond sex as I am sure that I would not turn down sex, should the topic ever come up.
If I'm honest with myself, given my current struggles over even telling her that I have these feelings for her, I think the idea that I actively pursue sex at any point soon is not just inadvisable but outside the realm of possibility.
I just don't yet know what it means.
19
It's been a few hours, and I have decided that that dream was simply the process of anxiety over the trip combined with a spike in libido. In the other, yes, I could see the layers of meaning going on there, with the ideas of possession and being shut out, but when it comes to what amounted to a sex dream with little in the way of plot or inherent meaning, I don't think there's much one can draw from it.
It all feels a little silly, being anxious and horny. I'm in my 30s, for goodness sake.
20
I have packed all I think I will need. Laptop in case of emergency appointments, books, steno pads, toiletries. I have clothes enough for a week, including my blazer and slacks for when nicer clothing is required. Kay did not specify the dress code for the concerts, but better safe than sorry. Also, perhaps we can head out to a nicer place to eat one night.
Here are at least some of the things I've thought of as ideas for stuff to do, so that I can at least have them written down somewhere:
- Concert — Kay obviously already requested this.
- Movie? I don't know what's out at the moment.
- Nice dinner. Boise has to have a good place we can go.
- Hiking. This will probably depend on whether we can find some way to get to a trail when neither of us drive. The maps shows a small nature reserve that's just on the edge of town. I imagine that will be fairly accessible.
- Bookstore. This may be more for me than her. I do not need any more books, but that will never stop me from browsing.
I think that this will at least give us a good number of options, and we can play the rest by ear. Even if we wind up doing what we do on the regular, just showing each other videos or watching movies together, only co-located rather than over the 'net, I will be happy. I stand by what I wrote before, that just being together, even if that's 'being bored together', is quite enough to look forward to on its own.
It's weird, though. I find myself tiptoeing around these different ideas of what to do while I'm out there, thinking things like, “Is this a thing that just friends do? Is it weird for friends to suggest going to a nicer restaurant?" They are all lies. They are all protective actions. They are all me guarding my soft underbelly to keep from exposing my feelings to Kay. Of course friends go to nice restaurants together. Of course that's a thing that friends do. And even beyond that, trying to hide the fact that I desire more than friendship, at least on some level, is doing neither of us any favors.
I am such a coward. Lord, give me the strength to be honest for once in my life. I know that the petty request of a petty coyote is far outside Your purview. What worth is an intercessionary prayer for something so trivial? I am responsible for my own growth, it's my own failing here.
I never did decide whether or not I would be talking about my feelings with her while I'm out there, and I never did message Jeremy back.
I can tell I am just going to keep fretting around in circles if I focus any more on this. It is so easy to find some way to fractally manage expectations, to forever refine what goes into making a plan, to find ever more layers of meaning in an action, and I will (apparently) do that for hours on end, so I am going to set all of this aside and go for one last walk before bed in an attempt to wear myself out. The bus leaves early tomorrow.