When(/Why?) Touch Becomes Too Much

Lately, I haven’t been so sure what in my life is mine anymore. Did I decide for myself where I’m at right now?—or did somebody else dictate my course of action this whole time?

It’s a silly, remarkable thing that I have gone as far as I am now, not really knowing the answer to this question. To most of my friends, I have the most free life. I fell off the course of the good Asian kid during college, deciding to ‘be a dancer’. And I did — I went to become this idea of a ‘dancer’.

It was a sort of freedom, but I was mostly conceding to other people’s visions. 

Something happened to me in grad school, though. People began asking me what I wanted, what I wanted to create, and somehow, I had no answer for that. So much of what I had been doing was to serve the vision of being a professional dancer and even when I was choreographing, it was still to serve the market. Like, I was trying to make dances that looked like my favorite dances I had already seen.

Sure, copying is part of the creative process, but I had no semblance of identity as a creator in grad school. My work-in-progress sharings and pieces I made, they were tender and undeniably important and true to me at the moment, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t want to be making anything at all. I did then, and do now, feel like what I make is so infected with what “I should be doing”. 

3 years ago, I began studying a method called Feldenkrais and in one form of the practice, we do hands-on work with our clients. I haven’t graduated from the program yet, so I’ve mostly been working with my friends and practice clients I wasn’t charging. It’s a simple and complex practice that can be quite metaphysical. In it’s most simple form, I’m moving another person to help them learn more about themselves and the way they relate to their bodies. 

I was VERY attracted to this practice. My sense of interiority is very well developed and if there was any way I could gift this awareness to other people in a non-verbal way, I was down to learn. 

But the problem is that within the intimacy of touch (yes, all touch is intimate whether we admit it or not), I simply can’t have access to my interiority and desire. Whenever another person comes into the picture, I am more concerned with what they want than what I want. This habit is exacerbated when that person is a man and/or is non-asian. I’d also go as far to say that with women, femme people, and in particular with Asian women, I am petrified not wanting to ‘take advantage’ or overstep their discomfort. There becomes very little space for my own curiosity, which is an essential part of the exchange. Without my curiosity, there’s no driving force to initiate, there’s no movement at all. It’s timid and unalive.

And so I found that when I was practicing bodywork, particularly with new clients, I would end up feeling taken advantage of. I would have spent about an hour in this “well what would this person like” — guessing around and not getting the verbal feedback I needed to know I was doing okay because this practice is supposed to be non-verbal. So I was spending like an hour in this intimate connection with someone in this echo chamber of “I suck!” and “Is what I’m doing right?” and “Does this even feel good to this person?”. 

This shows up in all the intimate things: making dances, romantic relationships, and sex — all the things that require creativity and presence. Friendship doesn’t always challenge this aspect of me because friendship has a way with bypassing intimacy (though maybe it really shouldn’t). 

It’s just intimacy. It’s those moments when I have to act from the most intimate part of myself… the creator and the artist in me… the spark of desire and want and pleasure. 

What happens to Jason normally when he meets intimacy? He concedes. He becomes small. He freezes and responds accordingly. That’s why being a sub bottom is so enlivening to me—it’s familiar, I feel myself, and I feel useful. What a beautiful, talented thing — to make space for another person’s wants. 

I’ve taken about 6 months off of practicing Feldenkrais hands-on and almost 2 years now from dancing “for” another choreographer. It is very hard adjusting myself to see that there’s another way to be in the world. Perhaps I’ve been so focused on taking the world in that I hadn’t known how to take up space, to be in the world the way I want to.

Practicing a life led by my most intimate curiosities is foreign to me. Not the curiosity that I think I have, not the curiosity that I’ve borrowed from someone else, but one that’s my own?! One that emerges from the pure pleasure of being alive in this world? I hardly have access to that — we as a society are so busy policing each other and trying to control each other. And Asian culture is so collectivist and so concerned with sacrificing oneself to serve the societal unit at large that I think we (or at least I) am so prone to destroying myself in order to please the larger force. At some point, you break.

I broke. Maybe will keep on breaking, hopefully will keep on breaking. I’ll do it alone; I’ll do it with my friends; I’ll do it in front of the world. 

It’s a very lonely journey at the moment. I don’t think it’ll always be that way, but I think because I can only access my most intimate desires by myself, I’ll have to be practicing on my own mostly. I’m really grateful that there a few people I feel safe enough to show more of myself to. I think this part of me—dare I say the top or the space-taker or the dom—is learning to express in a social and interpersonal way. 

But it’s very scary. I get wounded sometimes. 

Last week I revealed this part of me to an old friend while visiting town. I just didn’t get the aftercare that I needed. Yeah, turns out I need aftercare as I step into this part of me. 

I think I’ll go to the beach today. And I have a bath bomb waiting for me too. There’s a friend I need to get coffee with soon. And I just texted another friend for some movie recommendations.

I’m tired of working towards something. I’m tired of judging myself for how much rest I’ve been needing. I never thought learning to take up space would be such a tender, soft, and vulnerable practice, and yet here I am, softening into power.

the bath awaits