to feel deeply

Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” Sister Outsider

When I think of my biggest mistakes, I think most or all of them have had some root in deep fear of myself and the great human capacity for feeling. Other times I have walked head-on into my feelings but still found myself afraid to express them—to let them move through me—because that might mean confronting my life, letting erotic wisdom change the way I live.

Instead, I look to what I’m “supposed” to be doing or what will make someone else comfortable, precisely in order to avoid being accountable to my body, heart, to the Spirit who speaks only in the present moment. My regrets are the times I have tried to be right when I could have been honest, tried to be agreeable when I could have been kind.

Publishing words like this still make me nervous. Doesn’t this talk of feelings and desire sound selfish? Even if it’s not, is it irresponsible to say things like this when they’re so easily used to excuse selfish behavior?

A sentence I had to read several times:

When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.

Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic”

Maybe “using others’ feelings” is consuming their experiences because we are afraid of our own. We are pretending to go with them into a place we are actually unwilling to enter ourselves. In abandoning ourselves, we abandon each other.

I have abandoned many people out of refusal to stay with myself.