Everything that gets written on this blog is stream-of-consciousness. I sit down, I start typing, and at some point I stop typing. That’s it. Which is why there are typos, which is why it is sometimes way beyond dull, and which is why these little posts are, at their best, unpolished and kinda rambly and, at their worst, incoherent babble. But so be it.
It’s interesting though, how little thoughts turn into one another, the process of weird association in the brain that leaves us thinking what we are thinking. Today, then, an example of how such strangeness happens, this being the true story of my own brain’s journey along a few meandering pathways.
So I’m sitting the bath, home from work and kinda cold after the 9 block walk from the bus stop. And in the bath there are really four choices – to masturbate, to clean oneself, to relax almost to point of sleep, and to read. Today, given that I had fairly recently indulged the other possibilities, I opted to read, and picked up Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions – the third novel of his I’ve read, and the only one I’ve really much enjoyed. Anyway, there’s a little segment in there about a waitress who meets one of the main characters and is thinking he’d be a good catch, which leads into a meandering little literary pathway on penis size. Yeah, that’s Vonnegut. And I had just finished this section when I was thoroughly warmed and ready to get out of the bath.
Up I climb, leg over the tub, grab my towel, put away the book, and one two three four down the stairs, when I realize that I am thinking about the nature of self-esteem and confidence, and how we develop confidence over the course of our lives. And I realize, too, that in those intervening 90 seconds or so I have taken a funny little brain journey from the weirdness of Vonnegut’s aside on the size and shape of cocks to something entirely different, and I for some reason am mindful of how that whole transition happened.
Many years back, I was involved for some time in a sexual relationship involving my partner and another couple. I remember our initial love-in, and noticing that the other guy involved had absolutely the biggest cock I’d ever seen. Like, really fucking big. Being a man, and being as men are, I had my share of anxiety around this at the beginning, but plunged on ahead regardless. Now, up to this point, I’d never been especially confident sexually. I’d had my partners, and all was well, but I had, from early childhood, real issues with masculinity – with the fact that I was clearly a boy but had a pretty well-developed feminine side, and felt a real discomfort with male sexuality, which I had internalized as always and everywhere predatory. So I was sexually shy with regard to both my own nakedness and my own desire. And now, here I was delving into a whole new kind of sexual relationship and doing so with someone who had a huge cock and a whole lot of experience using it on a whole lot of people. Not the best recipe for a confidence-booster.
What’s funny, though, is that that experience was a profound confidence-booster. In fact, I think it was the most significant moment in my sexual life. Because through that experience, and through several months of that multi-partner love-fest, I had to put myself out there against super-active monster cock, and when I did so I was pleasantly-surprised to learn that girls would still fuck me. Girls who had gone big did indeed go back. From that moment, so much was transformed. I went from intense sexual anxiety to general sexual comfort. I went from a shyness and fear of my own desire to a full-on exploration and celebration of that desire. I went from a denial of any typically masculine desire to its embracing.
I can’t overstate how important that was, how much my entire sense of self-worth was transformed in that moment. And not because I’d been told what a great guy I was. Because, rather, I got scared, I felt woefully inadequate, but I put myself at risk and was rewarded with way more sexual interest, way more sexual play, way more positive sexual feedback. My self-confidence got a major boost, and one that spilled over into many parts of my life and forever changed the way I went out into the world and my interactions with both men and women. No more afraid of being a sissy; no more afraid of being the nice guy who never gets laid; no more anxious about my nakedness; no more denial of my desire; no more feeling inadequate or weak in relation to other guys; no more denial that I’m a boy and I like to fuck girls. Lots.
So, that was the journey of my thoughts from a warm bath to a reflection on self-confidence courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. And got me thinking, then, about those other pivotal moments in the growth of my self-esteem and my becoming a full, willing and active participant in the world.
I won’t bother with the whole story of each, cause that would be ridiculously long, and – besides – after the sex bit nothing else is going to be nearly as interesting. But there are many times I can identify in which a particular engagement with the world directly and substantially impacted my feelings about myself.
1) running for my first union election, terrified of losing, of being scoffed at as wholly too inexperienced, and instead finding the meeting packed with over 200 people to support me, our normal election turnout being about 35;
2) successfully negotiating a grievance settlement that cost the employer tens of thousands of dollars with little of a legal case to rely on;
3) having a child, and going into the world as a protector;
4) having my academic work accepted for publication in an important journal;
5) buying my first home, and knowing that I had managed to make a place entirely my own;
6) applying for and taking on a major promotion and then realizing I was happier without it and walking away from “success” even while afraid I’d look like a failure or a fool or both.
Each of these things – these singular moments – marked a transition from, “I’m afraid, I’m not good enough, I am weak” to “I did this, I achieved something rare and important, I have been recognized as valuable”. And each of those moments stemmed from a success in the world in general. Not kudos from my parents, not encouragement from teachers, not pats on the back from friends. What made these moments matter, for me, was precisely that the recognition was anonymous or generic, about the world in general and not my world in particular.
We talk alot about self-esteem, but one thing I notice is that so much of the talk ends up, entirely contrary to the intent, making self-esteem into this magical power that is somehow innate – something we might damage by criticizing people but that we ultimately expect folks to have regardless of their real lived experience in the world – real lived experience of succeeding at something that we had once feared and chose to face and confront regardless. Self-esteem, then, isn’t something that is there, or we can build by talk-therapy. At least in my experience, it is the emotional result of very concrete moments of affirmation – external affirmation – not for our intrinsic value as humans, but for very specific things in very specific circumstances. It’s not something anyone gave me, consciously, and can’t be reduced to the messaging I received, which was largely positive; rather, it was given to me by people who didn’t mean to, by their reactions when I took steps I was afraid to take and managed not only not to stumble, but to run.
Now, I’m sure any psychologist in the world would raise an eyebrow at this, as I talk out of my ass about things I really don’t know a damn thing about. And, at very least, would connect my ability to take those risks with the positive messaging I so deride as unimportant. Really, though, I’m not claiming any great insight here or pretending to have any idea what I’m talking about. Just noting, rather, that when I reflect on the key confidence builders in my life, the moments that were significant in making me feel like I can take my place in the world, and the way these moments now sit in my memory as a chain of tests that I passed – when I think about all that, it occurs to me that perhaps the best lesson I can teach my own child is that the doing of risky things matters, the willingness to step forward outside of the crowd matters, letting the world judge you a little matters. Because I can see now, when I think back, that it was those positive judgments of a world that didn’t know me from Adam that really counted. It was when I felt I could stand up and face off against complete strangers and large groups that I felt like a grown-up. That’s when I felt confident in real-life terms. That’s when I changed from being a kid who had all kinds of ideas and dreams but felt pretty fragile in the world to being a man who knew not only that he might have something to offer and something to say but he was entirely capable of doing it and saying it.
Ah, well I guess I’m not entirely off base after all. Just did a real quick search on the whole self-esteem thing, and seems the latest research corroborates my experience. After thirty years of tracing self-esteem to messaging from parents and friends in early childhood, folks in the field are now suggesting that those messages – while crucially important to a child’s sense of themselves – have less do with overall confidence in the world than previously thought. In the words of Robert Reasoner, “Attempts by pro-esteem advocates to encourage self-pride in students solely by reason of their uniqueness as human beings will fail if feelings of well-being are not accompanied by well-doing. It is only when students engage in personally meaningful endeavors for which they can be justifiably proud that self-confidence grows, and it is this growing self-assurance that in turn triggers further achievement.”
In other words, ya gotta do things that scare you and come through them the better for it. Take risks. Work hard at it. And go out in the world. Cause that’s where your self is made. And Kurt Vonnegut – your little reflection on cocks is much appreciated. Because in life as in penises, size only doesn’t matter after it really really does.
