It’s a Tuesday. Early afternoon. I’m at the heated yoga studio where I practice vinyasa, especially with Liz. I like their classes. I like their voice. I like the way they put their playlists and asana sequences in conversation with astrology because that’s the way I fucking jam and it’s a good thing too because on this particular Tuesday in mid-late February 2024, it is the beginning of Pisces season, and so all of the shit Liz has been curating for the week is about spring cleaning (since Pisces is the last sign in the zodiac before we start back over again with Aries out the gate) and release and letting go.

At the beginning of class, as we’ve started gently, gingerly, slowly to move, Liz invites us to set an intention for the rest of class, perhaps something we’d like to release. As I lay there on my right side in fetal position, my torso facing the person next to me, the studio door, Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn, steps from the A, C, and G trains—as the world outside goes on and on and miles and countries away there is so much more than what my body can hold—I offer an overarching intention to release, to let go. I silently offer up for my body to let go of whatever it needs. And there’s a brief glimmer hint of thought that tip toes its way across my brain that says something—only the faintest hint of something—about the guy I dated a few years ago, who crossed my boundaries, who began engaging in stalking behavior, who I had to cut out of my life. Something—ever so quietly and barely—says it’s time to release and let go of him too.

But it’s one of those moments where I don’t generate the thought. Something else does. Something I can’t quite explain takes charge to toss the sentiment into the wind, and I happen to be present enough there in fetal position on my right side facing the studio doorway to let it in.

Class proceeds. It’s worth noting that I cry pretty regularly in yoga class. I’m not sure what the line is between regularly and often or sometimes or occasionally, but it’s not abnormal for me to puddle my feelings onto my mat. Sometimes it’s half-pigeon pose, which is where a knee and leg are bent and a body is prostrating over a thigh while the other leg lingers straight behind. Sometimes it’s a random ass standing pose and something inside me cracks open to snap.

I don’t know what pose it is. I don’t take notes—obviously—while in class. And what’s about to happen is so fucking profound that I intentionally refrain from taking notes about it after class, or even in the days thereafter. Like I hold on to it in my morsels and pores until exactly a week later—which is now—while I’m sitting at my favorite coffee shop four blocks from my apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, as The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” begins to blast:

No change, I can change
I can change, I can change
But I’m here in my mold
I am here in my mold

But I’m a million different people
From one day to the next
I can’t change my mold
No, no, no, no, no

But that’s the thing. I had to change. I have to change. I can’t hold on to this fucking shit.

At some point in some pose, I crack open. Wide. And I fucking let go. And I know that it has to do with him. I begin to shake. And weep. But I hold it silently, even as I let myself sob, so that I don’t distract the other people in the class. But I know it’s about him. And really, it’s about me.

What comes to me in the asana—and in other asanas to come, as I’ll continue to cry and release and let this go throughout the rest of class (including in pigeon, holy fuck will I weep then)—is the anger and shame and frustration I carry with and towards and for myself around consent.

Meaning. Yes, he pushed my boundaries. Yes, he violated what I would describe as my emotional boundaries of consent. But I kept coming back to how the consent started with me.

This is a thing I teach in consent education workshops. I walk participants through three levels of consent: self/personal, interpersonal, and communal. Consent is bigger than sex. Consent begins always—first and foremost—with ourselves. Knowing our own volume knob. For everything. Not just sex or intimacy or physical touch. What are our personal needs? Body, mind, spirit, heart, what are the things that we need and desires and want, as well as what we don’t?

And so I created this worksheet I give participants to fill out. There are three sections, as I said before: self, interpersonal, and communal. The personal section asks: What are some ingredients and elements of consent with only yourself involved? And then the next question asks you to consider examples of ways you practice and experience consent with, for, and by yourself.  And then the last question in the “Self” section asks you what are ways you could imagine and/or revise how you practice consent with, for, and by yourself. And that last one’s really asking you to consider the ways you breach or violate consent towards yourself. Sometimes this could be an addiction, or revenge sleep patterns (like when you push yourself to stay awake beyond when you’re tired and ready to sleep), or, in my case, what I’m about to explain with the dude.

Here’s the real, real truth: I wasn’t attracted to him out the gate. And I know that attraction can grow. I’ve dated people I wasn’t attracted to out the gate, but then we hung out more, or then we kissed, or then we started dating and my knees began to fucking melt. I remember a guy with whom the sexual chemistry was so seismic that I could feel the energy pulsing from our bodies inches away, standing on the sidewalk outside a bar in Gowanus, Brooklyn, and it was even more palpable days later when we devoured each other and he made me cum like a faucet on top of his bed, I mean every moment of hooking up with him was delicious and fun (except for how insistent he was on keeping the lights off because of his own insecurities, which bummed me out a bit that he was so afraid of being naked and natural together in the light of the light). Still, I pushed myself to hold on to this adage. This age-old-adage and trope that attraction can grow.

And other people pushed me to lean into that trope too. Friends. Even my therapist (who would apologize later and with whom I would debrief and process and debrief and process this for months and ages hence to come). But mostly myself. Except I have a really fucking good gut.

And I really wasn’t feeling him at first. Ok, that’s not really true. We met on a virtual thing. And he private chatted me and began flirting with me and then we exchanged email addresses and I didn’t really get a good look at him on my screen so when the emails began back and forth immediately after the event ended, I was definitely in crush. Big, loud, gushy crush.

I even felt my loins start pulsating with a spark as I fell asleep that night. Swoony swoon swoon.

But the next morning, he sent me a video he made. My swoon became a wilt.

But he kept emailing. Texting. Courting. Pursuing. It was clear that he had a crush. A big one.

And it felt good. To be wanted. Courted. Pursued. Crushed.

And there was a lot about him emotionally that felt connective. And on paper that felt connective too. There were other moments that didn’t feel right or great, but I ignored those. On I pushed.

And I pushed myself to keep an open mind. An open heart. Live my values. Not be a fucking ass.

But sometimes we can’t help that the body wants what the body wants, and so too the other end.

And yet, I pushed.

And eventually, the pulse came back. And I don’t know if it was the solipsistic egomaniacal thirst for myself being wanted, or actually wanting him, or just wanting the want so badly itself.

But on I pushed.

And so I did when we had our first kiss. And made out on a date. And spent a weekend together naked and in bed. And gave each other orgasms. And were intimate. And I pushed on.

And I only know I pushed my own boundaries most loudly and clearly in retrospect. Because when I look back on it all, it doesn’t make me feel good. And I don’t think it’s about what he did to me after all of the physical intimacy and time together. I don’t think it’s because of the ways he pushed and pushed and pushed past my boundaries with communication again and again.

Because I don’t feel that way about Paul. I wanted Paul. With my whole body and lust.

And even though he too would cross a bunch of boundaries—grab my wrists when I wouldn’t kiss him, string me along on spiraling cyclones of emotional roller coaster hell—my body doesn’t have to reason with itself for pushing beyond that iteration of emotional consent.

I should not have kept hooking up with Paul. I definitely defiled and betrayed my self-worth.

I definitely should have stopped whatever it was we were doing sooner on principal because of how I was being treated. Because I’m better than being a doormat.

But my body wanted all of the things it wanted with Paul, and so I pushed, pushed, and pushed.

But my body didn’t really want the things I put it in a position to experience with this other guy.

And so I pushed in spite of my lack of lust and thirst, rather than because of it.

And so that boundary crossing—that violation of physical consent—begins with and is on me.

That’s what I weep out of my system and release in yoga that Tuesday afternoon with Liz.

I’m not sure if I’m forgiving myself on that dark blue yoga mat in downtown Brooklyn on Schermerhorn Street. I’m not sure what exactly it is. But I’m releasing something. And maybe I’m committing to really fucking listen to my deepest desires and needs. While also interrogating the times I’ve let the bullshit desires—the ones on the ugly surface—take the lead.

Because if I’m being really fucking honest—with myself, with you—I think a thing for which I actually did have hunger and lust and thirst was the being wanted part.

Like if I’m really fucking honest—with myself, with you—I think back to the moment I was on my knees giving him head and if I really look into the brain and spirit and body and heart of that version of myself at that moment all those years ago, I’m getting off mostly on the fact that I feel egomaniacally confident that he is—if I’m doing my job right—getting the best blowjob of his entire life. And knowing I am capable of that, knowing that could be the truth, gets me off.

Which is pretty fucking fucked up since usually it’s the blow job itself that gets me off.

And so here’s the other thing about writing this out. I know I have an audience. So am I telling you—and myself—all of this because I’m egomaniacally trying to complicate my heroism as a heroine and protagonist and am I getting off on knowing that I’m now like performing “honest” for you and telling you all of my ugly human truths knowing that I’ll then get points for being so fucking vulnerable that I share with you my ugly human truths? And therefore am I doing the same fucking thing I did on my knees with him that afternoon in the spring? Knowing that I am showing off my skills? Even though writing feels so fucking revelatory in its release.

Cause I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Audience. Protagonist. Voice. Who the fuck we are speaking to when we write. Because I’ve been devouring fiction at a newfound rate the past few years. And I’m writing it at a newfound rate now too, and I’m on this interrogation kick with first person fiction novels now.

What I most like about writing memoir and first-person narrative nonfiction is that I know exactly to whom I am writing. You. The reader and the gaze and the notion of an audience and my self-awareness as a narrator is all very clear.

But in first person narrative fiction, to whom is the narrator addressing their pontificated thoughts and prose? Sometimes that’s part of the gag. Sometimes it’s a mere plot device.

But otherwise, why has the fictional protagonist decided at this very moment in their life to transcribe their thoughts and to whom are they sending them into the ethers?

I mean, as a reader, I love it. I have devoured thousands of stories this way; hundreds of romance novels alone. But from a philosophical standpoint, what the fuck is actually going on?

Which is why there’s something so naval-gazingly masturbatory and satisfying about being a narrative nonfiction protagonist and narrator.

Yes, I am first and foremost writing this out for myself. Like Jia Tolentino said in Trick Mirror, this is where I work out my shit, here on the page, this is a big part of how I process and think. But after that, I can picture you. Whether you are one or thousands or more of readers.

I lob the ball. Presumably someone will catch.

But in fiction, does the protagonist of first-person narratives have an inkling of this exchange? Or perhaps because there presumably is no ego involved, is their fictionalized first-person prose actually more pure?

I can’t divorce myself of the ego awareness that you exist. I am truly and fully consciously aware that I’m not a tree falling alone in a forest. You’re fucking there. And I love it. I love you.

And.

Is my telling somehow inherently tainted because I can’t get my head out of my ass?

And what does any of this have to do with consent? Or release?

Is knowing I can control the narrative part of the reclamation of consent?

I’d argue yes.

That’s what I gear myself up to do with Paul.

But maybe what I can’t quite shake is how—if that was a thing I did 15 years prior—I fall back into other patterns and push myself to do things I don’t actually really fully truly want to do.

And yes yes yes I know I know I know time isn’t linear. We are imperfect beings. We are in progress learning forever and ever hence and again. But I feel like I knew better in the early 2020s.

And yet.

And ok there’s one more thing about the known audience and self-aware narrator. This guy I’m writing about is a real person. He could read this one day. And what’s my rule? Don’t hurt anyone. Don’t ruin anyone’s life. And so from a harm-reduction standpoint, this could cause him some harm or pain. And so what’s the point of telling all of this? Is it causing me pain to not share it publicly with you? No. I have addressed all of this over and over and over in therapy.

Will it cause the story itself as an entity and work of art harm if I leave it out? Probably not. I think there’s still a very truthful narrative in here even if you don’t know about this part.

But is there a part of me that hopes that maybe talking about all of this might reduce or prevent harm for someone else reading along? Yeah. I do.

Not because I think I’m the messiah on anything, let alone consent, but because I really do believe that while absolutely times five bajillion percent violence and systemic oppression is a structural thing, and absolutely times five bajillion percent we need to build a paradigm shift where we teach people not to harm or rape or stalk or assault or abuse or oppress each other, rather than focus on teaching people how to not get harmed or abused or assaulted or oppressed.

And.

And. And. And.

I do still think in a world like this, we often—regularly?—breach our own boundaries of consent.

Which brings me back to how so much of this story is sitting in reverence for my younger self. How could I at 24, three weeks shy of 25, be so fucking bold as to decenter Paul from my life and have the wild audacity to say no to someone I had once loved, for whom I had always lusted. And then at 38, months shy of 39, pretend I hadn’t learned a goddamn thing in that 14-year gap?

But that’s the thing about time. And the body. And the tricks the world plays when we are so hyper focused on a thing we want. We forget. We relearn. We revisit. Until we fucking know.

Which is why I now want to talk about cocaine.

I developed my infatuation with cocaine as a child from watching the 1987 movie Less Than Zero, which was based on the 1985 novel Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, who also wrote Laws of Attraction and American Psycho, both of which were also made into bonkerstown movies (that I loved, since I have a proclivity towards bonkerstown 1980s/90s films about rich white idiots doing rich white idiotic shit given the rich white idiotic shit from whence I came).

Ok so if this thing came out in 1987, let’s assume it starts airing on HBO circa 1989. And get this, I am able to confirm my assumptive estimation by Googling “less than zero airing on hbo 1990s” to find a January 5, 1989, promo on YouTube for that upcoming weekend whereby a minute and 18 seconds into the clip, the voiceover bro (in like the most fucking 1980s voiceover middle-aged dude voice you can fucking imagine, like younger gens really don’t fucking even know) goes, “What’s it like to be rich, beautiful, and out of control?” over clips from the film. And then Andrew McCarthy’s character Clay Easton says to Jami Gertz’s character Blair, “You don’t look happy.” And she retorts back smiling and shaking her head, “But do I look good?”

The promo continues with dialogue and clips insinuating that Robert Downey Jr.’s character Julian has a cocaine problem (he does), and James Spader as Rip says he just wants his $50K.

Now, you have to understand—if you weren’t alive yet in the late 1980s—that these people were the fucking shit of the fucking shit and while most of them are still around acting, this is already years into their fucking dive onto the scene and “being in everything” heyday as they swim in the mix. They are all already life-deep in so many fucking films (including some together), and before I really get into dissecting what will become my infatuation with trying cocaine even though this film is literally about someone dying from cocaine (sorry, spoiler alert), it’s important to name that I think—and honestly, I’m really realizing this in real time with you as I type at my kitchen table on a Wednesday morning when I’ve averted all the other fucking shit on my to do list today because I’ve been wanting to get this out on paper to process for over a week—I also have a bit of an obsession with looking up to Gen X. I don’t think I realized this before to this degree until right now, but it makes sense because my counselors at camp and all of the musicians who serenaded me through childhood and adolescence and all of the actors and actresses after whom I pinned as an aspiring performer myself were all—for the most part—Gen X. And it would make sense that I’d look up to them instead of my Boomer parents because that’s sort of the way it all works, isn’t it, that we rebel against our actual caretakers, but when I do the fact-checking math (technically McCarthy and Spader are young Boomers but Downey Jr. and Gertz are smack at the beginning of the roll call for what will become the Gen X range), maybe there’s also something about being an elder Millennial born in 1983 and feeling like I don’t totally belong in my own generation and am therefore just the younger sibling to the generation above following them around the house trying to hang out with their friends. But as an oldest child, television and the radio and the movie theaters played a large role in shaping and raising me (along with all of my caretakers, including my parents, and even my Gen X nannies and babysitters, but I feel like their formative impact was on my character, not my cultural thirsts).

And so then imagine me, an impressionable young white Jewish girl in the rich white suburbs trying to figure out who I am and what I like in this relatively rich white predominantly Christian world in which I’m growing up. And listen. Yes there are lots of Jews. Yes my whole family is—at this point—Jewish. Yes I go to Hebrew school and Sunday school and synagogue. Yes I go to Jewish day camp seven and a half miles west across Lake Avenue in Northbrook, Illinois. But I cannot overstate for you how even for a kid in a wealthy family sandwiched in-between a major Chicago sportscaster’s family and one of the wealthiest Jewish families—and families—in Illinois, there is a loud air of how the United States and all of its culture—especially in the 1980s—defaults to a rich white Christian hegemonic expectation of what it means to be alive.

And so this promo clip—which won’t even be an entire 30 seconds long, like by minute 1:48 we are listening to a sultry, sexy voice tell us to “take a behind the scenes look” at the making of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, and I cannot, again, stress enough how big of a deal this is in 1989, years before social media, years before Internet porn, years before cable is widespread—so perfectly poignantly and pervasively highlights the messianic impact this film will have on me.

And so let’s just assume that Less Than Zero airs for a while in 1989, or maybe is syndicated again at some point in 1990, or another year thereafter, but let’s just assume I’m no less than 6 or 7 years old when I am first exposed to this film. And let’s assume that it happens at least a few times. Or maybe the first time isn’t until some later year in the 1990s when I’m in middle school or high school, but let’s just be absolutely certain that TV has free reign on impressionable me.

Because somehow, by the time I am on my gap year in Oxford, England, in 2002, I am very much committed to wanting to finally try cocaine. I am 18 years old, months shy of 19, and I am hungry to shove this white powder shit up my nose. By now, I have had plenty of alcohol. I have never smoked pot or a cigarette—an extremely intentional and defiant choice—and I have yet to try mushrooms, which I’ll digest a few months from then while in Amsterdam, and then again a few more times in college until I one day become entirely straight-edge from both drugs and alcohol the fall semester of my junior year of college in November 2004 when I am 21 years old.

But for now, I am studying abroad in Oxford, England, on my gap year, and my best friend knows I want to try cocaine, and she calls me one night on my Nokia cellphone and tells me that she and her boyfriend have cocaine available for me to try. But I try to explain to her that I have a paper due the next day about for my dictatorships in the 20th Century Europe class about Francisco Franco and the 1930s Spanish Civil War. And she’s like: cocaine will help.

Fair.

She and her boyfriend will pick me up and take me to his dorm room at Oxford University, and I will sit on the floor with my laptop and do lines of cocaine while writing about Franco and the Spanish Civil War, and I will get so hyped on my deep dive foray into authoritarianism and oppression that I will then alternate generating fresh academic prose onto my clunky Dell with orating for both my friend and her boyfriend—who is by now my friend too—chunks of text from my seminal junior year of high school AP English paper about the history of manifest destiny and supremacy in the United States in conversation with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature,” which I entitled—in May 2000—“American Arrogance and the Destruction of Nature,” which I skipped junior prom to write in order to get an A on the paper, which I did.

And now, I am a speed-demon for interrogating everything that is wrong with humanity. And I am so hopped up on my own brilliance that I cannot help but resurrect my 16-year-old self.

That night, I’ll go back to the house where I stay, and call a loved one in the United States who will tell me to fill my sticker-covered Nalgene water bottle with water and drip it down my nose.

I will barely sleep.

I will arrive to class the next morning to meet my tutor eye-to-eye (because that’s how it works at the school I’m attending, it’s tutorial style, so every class is one or two students with a single tutor, educator, professor, etc.), and she will ask me to read my Franco paper out loud, just as I did for my essays on both Hitler and Mussolini, and I will be scared shitless out of my mind that this is going to be a fucking goddamn disaster since I was up all night doing cocaine while alternating between writing this essay and reading excerpts of shit I wrote in high school, but I’ll do great. I’ll finish, and she’ll look at me, and say it was excellent, and give me an A-.

And that’ll be the first time I try cocaine.

The second time will be about 9 or 10 or so months later on New Year Eve’s while on vacation in Mexico. Some teenager slash young adult asks me if I want to go do some lines—literally leans back in his chair at a New Year’s Eve dinner feast and says, “Hey Line, wanna go do some lines?” because this was in the era and age when part of how you build a social capital cred friendship bond is by providing one another with a rundown of your drug and alcohol and sex experience and use, which means he would have known that I would have once before tried cocaine. And so I say yes.

And then I’m in some stranger’s hotel room doing cocaine and talking about Carlos Castañeda and shamanism and the cosmology of the cosmos because that’s also how you make friends at that age in the early years of the new millennium when you’re on vacation.

The third time is two years later. I meet up with an employee—roughly my age—that a relative had come to know from a nearby hotel. We meet up before a Phish show in Miami and he brings me to his friend’s car where we do lines of cocaine off the outside of her black zipper CD case and the dude’s like, please don’t tell your family member, and it’s like, yeah dude absolutely not.

It is New Year’s Eve. Which means Phish will play three musical sets, instead of two. As always, we will have no idea what they’re going to play. As always, each set will be unprecedented and utterly unique. And it’s important to note that I’m sober by the first set.

Really the real takeaway is that after this, after standing there with the lights blaring and blasting and one of my favorite bands raging on their instruments mere hours before 2003 will transition into 2004 as the Miami Palmetto Senior High band and cheerleading squad pop up through the stage to Phish’s cover of Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” before then wailing “Auld Lang Syne,” I’ll realize how absolutely unnecessarily pointless cocaine is, at least for me.

Now, this can bring us down a lengthy Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole around whether or not drugs have a point. I’ll try to sum it up very quickly to get back to the actual point of going on this relentlessly long diatribe about cocaine in the first place. I think about drugs and things that can get us high or potentially take us out of the moment within the framework of “enhancement versus escapism.” Now, it’s not a binary, since nothing is a binary, but I think it’s a duality, and these pieces of the spectrum live in both conversation and sometimes tension with one another.

Here’s how I see it: if you stop a moment to pause and settle into your body and take a deep breath and really witness and receive and consider and honor and understand a thing, is it going to enhance your life—both now and in the long-term at large—or usher you to escape from it?

Now, sometimes escaping is vital. When I watch Love Is Blind on Netflix, that is a very intentional escape because at baseline, I have a lot of ideological and existential and philosophical concerns with reality TV at large, especially shows like Love Is Blind.

And.

I spend my whole goddamn day and life obsessed with dismantling systemic oppression and so even if I’m going to do a thing to shut my body and brain off that one could argue (and one doesn’t even really have to argue that hard or much lol) is itself exacerbating said oppression, I still need to fucking numb the fuck out sometimes. And that’s what Love Is Blind does for me.

But then there’s romance novels. And I read those voraciously. And I’d say those are actually enhancing my life by also allowing me to escape. I read them to cope. They help ease my anxiety. They also help me dream. And gush. And as a writer of fiction, including rom com themes, one could argue they’ve enhanced my life by not only allowing the moments of escape that help keep me stable and calibrated and mentally and emotionally well, but also inform my writing and career.

That’s how I feel about drugs.

At one point, they enhanced my life by opening portals and windows into ideas and dimensions and realms I wasn’t yet able to tap into on my own. Especially mushrooms. I really, really, really liked psychedelic mushrooms. But I don’t think I ever looked to drugs as an escape. Alcohol—yes. For fucking sure. I definitely used to use alcohol as an escape. Although, I don’t feel that I had an alcohol—or drug—problem or addiction, even though I would sometimes very intentionally and sometimes very subconsciously turn to alcohol to catch a fucking break.

But my three-time stint with cocaine quickly leads me to realize that it was just that: a stint.

A scratching of an infatuation itch with the rich white kids from Los Angeles in Less Than Zero. A wanting so badly to understand and know and feel what it was like to be—embody—them.

And on the other side of that costume-wearing experience of snorting white shit up my nose, I realized quickly that I am a hyperactive ambivert (both introvert and extrovert), who when in her heightened state of extroversion needs absolutely nothing else to amplify her natural high.

And by the way—at least for me—coming down is a goddamn nightmare. Did I mention that?

But more importantly, it was so fucking easy to let it go. To say to myself: yeah, we’re done. And walk away, never once having an inkling or desire to try cocaine ever again. Even though it was a thing for which I’d pinned and yearned and put on a pedestal. It was still so easy to let go.

Because again, the actual infatuation with doing cocaine was about being infatuated with fully assimilating into this indoctrinated rich white Christian hegemonic culture that, by the time I was in college, learning to interrogate my own whiteness and class privilege and better understand the internalized antisemitism of defaulting into the narrative around me, I was so ready to begin plucking away at my predisposed addiction to assimilation and ultimately let it go. Yes, I would spend the better parts of my 20s and 30s continuing to peel this onion. But this is where it starts. Now. During this era. Alongside my easy ability to finally try and then easily let go of cocaine.

But not Paul.

Or other men.

The need as a cisgender straight woman to center and center and once again center men.

Even though I know I don’t need a man—or anyone—to complete me or make me whole.

The thirst can be addictive.

The infatuation can be the oxygen and air and wind you snort and sniff and breath up your nose.