by Restin Wells
I suppose I should go into all the racy details, but I'm just a person, not a writer trying for a besting-selling novel. I'm embarrassed, too. I did have sex with him, both at the job and various other places. It was no love affair. We just wanted to have some fun with sex. It was actually the first time I had ever had sexual desire for anyone in real life. The urges came out so strong and unexpected. Most of all, it was the only thing in my life that felt good, instead of terrible, for many years! I felt this was the answer to all my miseries. Not just him, but any man that I could do it with really, instead of make-believe.
Well, I lost the job over this, as you might guess, but soon had another one. I started up with a guy there, too. The first guy got nervous and ask to quit. Nothing lost, I was soon wrapped up in the new guy. I went through several men, going out while Ben was away. I didn't want to hurt him, and knew it would hurt his pride more than anything else. I dreaded his finding out. But I didn't love him, in any mature and romantic way, and never did. I felt guilty because we were married, but that's all. It never seemed that I should be married, anyhow.
Having sex with these young guys my age seemed more normal and natural than anything I had ever done. Although I had participated in sex with Ben since early adolescence, I had never really felt anything. It was an act I went through because he taught me how to, and it was what I was supposed to do for him, because I couldn't say no to a grown-up. Later, I did have some sexual awakening as a teen, but it was somehow separate from him, guarded by some sort of horror barrier deep inside. I kept those feelings away from him. I had no boyfriends in high school, as I was unsociable, tomboyish, and Ben kept me busy with him. I had fantasies of Tarzan, and movie stars, and such, as that seemed fairly normal, judging by what everybody else seemed to do too. So, when this sexual interest suddenly arrived on the scene in my 30's, I had no more real experience with sexual drive than I had with any of the other needs I had denied all my life. It was as if I'd never heard of all the social rules indoctrinated at the school, as if I had never been to church or Bible study. The instinctual urge got hold of me as if I were some kind of primitive warrior-princess in a time-warp. At first, all I could think of was how life was good at last. I had no problems about Dr. T. I could almost thumb my nose at her...but I wasn't supposed to care about her anyway. All that childish idiocy was swept off the table, so to speak, by my body being penetrated by a forceful male pounding against me, proving his prowess and vigor.. a real man who could bring down the wooly mammoth that would sustain us, after he backed out of me. Such was the primal nature of my un-socialized desires.
I was really into the manic thing as never before. I frequently stayed up all night, going to work the next day to see how much more fun I could squeeze out of that. In overdue time, in the back of my mind, the flags began to wave, and the whistles began to blow. Eventually I slowed down enough to look around, and check on what the noise was about inside. It sounded something like this:
"Just what is this you're doing, Restin? Is this something no one else has done before?.. as you seem to assume? Just what do you call this when you see somebody else doing the same thing?"
I guess I'm going into this personal stuff because there's some valuable information there, that is related to being dissociated, or at least divided. I couldn't leave this out if I'm going to try to help anyone with similar issues. First, I don't for a moment believe that it was okay to go that way. I was tempted and gave in to temptation. I won't even try to say that being mentally ill was an excuse. I've always said that people should be morally responsible regardless of how ill they are, or how bad they feel. There are socially acceptable, legal, and moral ways one should change their life, or seek justice. I'm just telling what I did because that's the way it happened and I want to share important things I learned from it. Lucky me, I wasn't physically hurt by this escapade in a time before AIDS..just under the wire. I got tested afterwards, with a sigh of relief. I could have been killed.
More importantly, though, I now comprehend how people can suddenly do the most bizarre things, strangely out of character, where it seems it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the consequences. But it's now clear how an un-socialized, deep split in the character can arise to replace the surface character that tries to be good about the things it knows about. When the split-off part jumps into the scene, it's as if a savage were facing the world without any awareness of the rules that have evolved into the present civilized age. The savage, suddenly awakened, only knows its urgent, raw needs. I'm not saying it to excuse anyone, and not to excuse me. But it shows where work on oneself should have been done, but was repressed instead, and left undone. The passion, the instinctual urge, I tapped in to was a raw mixture of good and not-so-good. Normally, that adjusting between the right and wrong of sexual drive is done in early adolescence when a young person is learning how to relate to the opposite sex, how to express his feelings but not get into too much trouble either. S/he discovers what works, and what doesn't work, in the society outside. But someone who has repressed all his feelings of love, anger, guilt, or grief, since childhood, is not relating them to the sexual urges as he grows. S/he is just trying to be a tough-guy, and that's all. And someone who is repressing even the sexual urges, as well as all emotions, is building himself a volcano.
I wanted the positive flow of energy, the happy feelings, that I so much needed, and had a right to. But with it, came along the unhealthy, selfish, and dangerous, only vaguely recognized. I had repressed so much of my emotional side at such an early age. Only a superficial part of my conscious self got the training in morality and social expectations...just enough to barely get by in my families, school, and community. The main bulk of my mental life was kept in a separate, secret place, a safer place, than the painful real world. I don't understand why or how that works. Science doesn't have the answers for how the brain partitions itself off sometimes, instead of integrating everything. It's sort of like a computer that isn't figuring all the factors in, when it analyzes something, and reports to you inaccurate conclusions.
But this much is known about the mind: The more someone fails to oversee his inner workings as he matures, the more is going on unsupervised, the more distortion there will be about what's true and real in life. Then, under certain promptings, a whole mass of repressed tendencies, sparking with compressed excitement, can surge up and temporarily smother the higher consciousness. Examples of this in our society would be a group of teenagers at a secret hideout, delving into dark arts, putting a curse on someone. Another might be some people at a party that gets rowdier then expected, until someone gets hurt. Another could be a group of "open minded" friends, often on drugs, getting into kinky sex, egging each other on to something like rape, sadism, or murder. Those are the incubators for unexpected "happenings" that get out of hand. More than a few good citizens have awakened the next morning in disbelief that they participated in something horrific. As Bob Seger's song, "Night Moves" whispers, "I woke up last night to the sound of thunder...how far away is that, I wonder?" The ominous dread of remembering what happened, and what the law is going to do about it when they find out, inexorably sinks in. If you're lucky, you didn't actually do anything so bad, but just had a little too much fun, or too many drinks.
I didn't completely lose my wits, as most people don't; but was certainly taken by surprise. While I was riding the crest of the wave, it took a while to look back, and grab my civilized adult self, so she would go along too. Then I could rein my passion back to a screeching halt, for a look at where I was being taken. When my primal desires surfaced, it really seemed as if no one else had done the things I was wanting to do. My new, unique enthrallment, had a right to seek fulfillment, which appeared to make my situation all different. Other people (but I didn't think of other people) may have been doing this for thousands of years. When I did come to my senses, a little, I thought of other people doing it, but they seemed just wicked, stupid, and selfish. Mine was different, I thought, because it fulfilled a great and rightful need. Later, I would realize that everybody thinks that same way, at first. I really had to make myself take a second, and third, look and make myself understand I was only doing what everyone else calls "wrong". I had to admit to the old saying: "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck".
Now, from a much later time, when I hear of people, especially young people, being arrested for something wild, I wonder if they did it from the same division as I did. Perhaps it's only after the heavy foot of the law falls, that they realize that the thrilling, wild thing they did was actually a common criminal act with a common name, and an age-old penalty exacted by the common people, for many generations of civilization. But, then it's too late. The naivety of the split off instinct doesn't count, in the court. It's the outward acts the world sees and judges.
In the sexual realm, I soon realized I had better get the picture fast. Thankfully, this was only a few months after I started into it. I told the guy I was currently screwing, that I wanted to quit; which, lucky for me, was easy come, easy go, for him too. But one evening a few weeks later, I chanced to see him when I was at the Circle K convenience store. I was already in my car, backing out, when he drove up beside me and rolled down the window. He called to me, asking what I was up to lately. I shouted back at him, "nothing", and that I wasn't going out anymore. But he wouldn't take no for an answer. He kept calling to me, asking for a date, cruising along beside me. Furthermore, he wasn't in the nice, big car he first took me out in, which I learned was his ex-wife's, but in a rusty old Vega. I happened to have my 32 pistol laying on the seat beside me, as I often did those days, and I picked it up and waved it at him, yelling at him to leave me alone. I drove home, and he didn't follow. And it wasn't that I had decided not to have sex anymore, it was that I was up to my ears in painful, scary conflict.
Copyright ©
Restin Wells