One of my colleagues claimed that psychoanalysis ruined his life. He more or less meant that it made his life absolutely knowable, absolutely logical, that it made him a real-life, modern Cassandra, able to accurately prophesy the future, but only to unbelieving ears. This played out in the fact that he was constantly stuck in the same types of relationships, and no matter how clearly he saw and understood and resented a person and the situation they found themselves in, he’d continue to pursue them, and they would pursue him, even if they knew what was going to happen next.

I told him that it wasn’t worth living with that mindset, that his convictions about the future were making them come true. He told me that I didn’t know how badly he had been hurt. I guess I was one of the ones hurting him, and I knew he was right, so I didn’t argue further, though I felt sure that what I believed was right, too.

I didn’t feel that psychoanalysis had ruined my life until several months later. It was just an inkling of a feeling, not a held belief, but I considered, seriously, before my analyst, the possibility that psychoanalysis had ruined me too. I asked if it had made me incapable of love and romance, and if I was destined, in my post-analytic life, to live as a kind of “wild beast,” incapable of the more passionate, complex, indefinable human feeling that was the stuff of songs. Psychoanalysis had blunted my ability to love, I claimed; it made me truly cruel, cold-hearted, and increasingly promiscuous.

I had just hooked up with a man, gotten to my twenty-first body, and felt that the act had been entirely unnecessary. I felt guilt for having had sex with him. I felt guilt because it had made me late to the session. He lived in Crown Heights, and I was talking to him without looking at the time, then saw it was 8:55, five minutes too long, and arrived at my analyst’s door at 9:35 AM. I explained this first, and then the guilt I felt around the voice of my “ruined” colleague in my head. He had insisted that it was impossible to have sex with me if I didn’t actively want it. Eventually I did get to a point where I could say, “I want to have sex with you,” so we did. But I didn’t want to do it again after that, and he reacted poorly to this aftermath. Since then, I’ve felt a certain guilt around having sex with anyone with whom I don’t really want it.

I was listening to my roommates talk about meditation and vegetarianism; one roommate was relaying to the other the story of how an acquaintance had had a spiritual experience while meditating, and that the conversation had initially been about his reasons for being a vegetarian. It occurred to me that I could have joined in: “Hey, I have a story behind why I started eating meat after being a vegetarian for three years. I was in Japan, and I had sex for the first time with my first male lover. My cunt felt nothing, so I was so sad that I cried rivers and lakes and started eating meat.”

My roommates strike me as rather asexual creatures, they’re very rarely out for a night. They certainly don’t wear dresses or short skirts or red lipstick or tit-length hair. I worry, somewhat often, about how they’d perceive me if they heard me moan in my room, or if they heard the squick-squick-squick of my finger going in and out of my wet cunt when I’m working on the cam site. I even feel inappropriate walking around in my white cotton slip dress, as you can see my nipples and the color of my underwear when I’m in it. We seem to be in an age of asexual liberals and trashy conservatives.

I’m rereading À rebours, which I usually just call “Against Nature,” because though I can produce the french [ʁ], it makes me feel overly exposed. I’m wondering what I’d write if I could send it off to the world as something made “in conversation” with the 19th-century paragon of French decadence. I thought it might be interesting to note, in my version of the novel, that my vegan roommates both use blenders a lot, sometimes to make nut milks, other times to make smoothies. I’ve never witnessed this with my eyes, I only hear it, and it annoys me sometimes. My loud vegan roommates!

My analyst laughed when I spoke about this. I reminded her that I have a stone mill for crushing soaked beans into dosa batter, which I used often when I was a vegetarian. But since I stopped, and moved to the city, where urad dal flour is easy to find, I’ve barely used it. It’s much quieter, it’s got a pleasant rumble, compared to those blade grinders. And I use a hand-cranked burr grinder to grind my coffee beans.

Still, the challenge of explaining myself to others in bed. Let’s stick with that.

I guess he supposed I was easy to bed because I had been speaking to him about my promiscuity. And he liked me, he thought me intelligent, he said he was enjoying my company. I found myself laughing a lot, sort of out of control, after having drank some whiskey like it was water, and I suddenly felt very tipsy. I actually enjoyed this a lot.

He asked if I wanted to get out of the bar and I said yes and he started leading me to his apartment. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to but I thought why the hell not so I went. My first move was to touch his sweater. He commented that I seemed more interested in his sweater than him, before I started touching his hand, which I complimented, though I didn’t really like the characteristic of his hand that I described. Then he moved into kiss me, and I moved in too. He said it was good that I wasn’t shy with my tongue. Some women are, he said. I started to ask him about what he likes. He asked me the same. I said that I have a dominant streak, but am off-put by explicitly masochistic men. He said I was very pretty, “but you know that.” I lied when he asked me if I found him attractive. It didn’t seem like the worst lie ever, because I’m sure a lot of women would find him attractive. He had been telling me about all the women hitting on him at a bar on Valentine’s Day, so I figured he would believe my lie easily.

Then we were on the bed and he asked me if I like being told what to do. I said “yes, actually”—this is true, and not at all in contradiction with my dominant streak—and he asked me to touch his cock. It was soft, it got hard. He commented on the fact that it was uncircumcised. It was kind of thin and round and long, and I started giving him head. Easy to give head when the tip isn’t so thick. He face-fucked me a little and I stopped a few times, when it triggered my gag reflex. I enjoyed giving him head, because it made me feel entirely in control, even if he was thrusting into me.

Ultimately he called himself a “haggard masturbator.” He told me it was a quote from Lolita, during a scene when Humbert Humbert is describing a student. This checked out with the way he fucked me, he could clearly fuck forever and not come. He didn’t cum. I said I was sleepy, and we went to sleep. Two-ish hours later I was still awake and he was, and we started having sex again. Quite reluctantly, on my part, but I was feeling guilty, guilty for taking the dog’s place in his bed; the dog normally sleeps with him, and was looking at me with sad eyes before we had gone to bed. He fucked me really hard while I was on top of him and I eventually came, I was so close to coming that I thought I was on the cusp of faking it, but I actually did come. I liked how I was vocalizing and reacting the whole time, like a competent escort, a seasoned camgirl. He didn’t come, but we stopped, I couldn’t go on. He revealed that his ex-wife is now an escort, though she was previously working fairly well-paid jobs at major magazines.

The aftermath of this hookup actually left a clean aftertaste, I feel scrubbed clean and like laundry, I am thinking of how I liked grinding on top of him, I like my posture of dominance and how it translates into the submission of orgasm. But orgasming isn’t submissive, because I am orgasming for G-d, not for the man who fucks me. G-d is stupid, he doesn’t know anything about anything, he is now “above” us or in a “position of power.” He stupidly watches as the bitch moans for dollars. And I know that my promiscuity is not going to feel good or right with respect to the social fabric of the world, that it will cause me to lie sometimes, and to disappoint. But for G-d, who doesn’t know how to feel or how to relate to the going-ons of humans, it is the right thing to do. I am a particularly pious girl, I said to myself, while biking away.

One of my roommates, L, is an ex-farmer and poet and student at Union Theological Seminary. She is essentially a Buddhist but is training to become a chaplain I guess, she has a French last name and I’m going to guess she has Catholic ancestors.

Once I cried a lot and she gave me a rose tonic she made herself, which was sweet, but I found the aroma of the thing itself a little disgusting. Essential oils are disgusting, they rarely if ever smell as good as synthetic aromatic molecules, and I discovered this when I lived in Ithaca, and decided to become curious about aromas for the first time. I bought a bunch of inexpensive essential oils online, and found them all rather off-putting in their pure forms, even when diffused and diluted. I also learned that a lot of essential oils are poisonous in some way, and can cause a great deal of skin irritation.

My other roommate, C, has an MFA in poetry and teaches and works in food service part-time. She is a white hispanic, probably identifies as queer, and is from Orange County, CA. Sometimes she bakes vegan sweet breads or muffins and they’re often almost devoid of sugar, which I find strange. She also drinks high-quality matcha and Sey coffee, and brings into the bathroom these wonderful candles from Keap, a brand both she and I first encountered at Sey. For some reason when we talk I feel a little impatient, I feel that she’s rambling a little too much, but ultimately the judgments I have, whether positive or negative, around my roommates, come from their kitchen habits and the aromas or tastes I associate with them. I respect some of their practices and feel distaste towards others. I think L uses great vegetable ingredients in the kitchen, and I like her sheepskins, and I like that C brings in excellent candles.

Yesterday I had a sort of convulsive, spiritual orgasm while working. Someone solicited a private show and asked me to grind on a pillow. I don’t normally get off on that sort of external stimulation, but I found it convulsively arousing to watch the frenetic motion of my hips, on the pillow, and then, on my stuffed plesiosaurus.

Envious, misogynistic ideas otherwise waft around me. I watched Belle de Jour, the movie about the pure sweet blonde married Séverine who takes afternoons off to work in a bordello. It’s so satisfying to watch her become more sexually satisfied and wily as the movie goes on. The innocent-looking, refined, bourgeois woman with her little smirk of satisfaction, so promiscuous while her husband doesn’t know. Whatever envy or admiration a spectator might have for her could easily be inverted into the most generic hatred for the innocent, abhorrently perfect blonde who fucks around.

Anyway, J wrote something very hateful, not truly about me per sé, though I’m named as the primary hateful object, but about women in general, about how women are to him, at least when he’s in a hateful mood. I still feel disgusted by it, even if he claims to disavow it. He claims in various pieces on his website that women take their convictions so seriously, that their convictions are so definitive, for them. What are these shared, common convictions, or manners of expressing conviction? Is there so much satisfaction in thinking of women as a distillate? He seems to be the one so stuck on his distilled beliefs, on distilling himself into a vaporous mess of pure belief.

But I guess what I’m thinking is that I do deserve a certain amount of hatred. People are always going to hate what seems powerful and immobile, like our own mothers.

I’m gonna try to do better, be primarily a sex worker, a psychoanalyst, a writer, a reader, a fragrance investigator, have fewer dalliances with human beings in search of romance. I insist that I am not so consistent, not so powerful, and not so knowing.