At some point, one has to know when it’s time to hang up the towel and quit while one is ahead. After about 10 years of being a loving person trying to navigate a very hostile dating market, I’m sort of emotionally back where I was about 23 years ago. Some of you out there remember the year of celibacy that ended when I met my first husband.
Unlike the last time though, I understand that I am no spring chicken, so my exit from the scene will not be missed.
I leave Fate and Eshu to bring whatever it is they feel I need, but as for my conscious choices, I have decided to opt out. I can admit that part of the decision is peppered with, “You won’t have me to push around anymore.” Since all I have to look forward to from sex is humiliation, even from guys who are, for normal intents and purposes, “nice”, the only way I can see to recover from that is to withdraw in order to rally my inner resources.
I do not know if I will ever stop being celibate, but I know that I will never be used again.
I ask that my friends bear with me through the changes and the crazy that will come out of this. I’ll probably have crappy mood swings, a bit of depression for no good reason. I’ll need to be reminded that feelings are not facts.
The meme I posted yesterday that said that mature people don’t make excuses, they make changes kind of stuck in my mind. I’ve racked my brain for years about how I could make being a sexual and loving person in an anti sexual and rather unloving (at least towards older and African women) society, and have tried everything from trying to be the ice queen that today’s broken man apparently wants, to just being honest about my feelings and femininity. Nothing has worked.
I realized that nothing will work because I am just not valued as a woman. I’m valued as a friend, but as soon as genitalia may come into play, there’s like this switch in people that makes them view me as worthless no matter what I do.
So I’m taking my genitalia out of the equation. It’s time for me to stop lying to myself that the way I’ve been treated is in any way okay, or that somehow I deserved it, and remember a lesson I learned in childhood:
Nature has no mercy for the weak.
It’s not about what I deserve. The Earth and Nature functions as it does to cull the weak. It understands that the best place for someone of any color of species who is not strong or adaptable enough in whatever way necessary, is recycled to create someone who is.
So I am adapting so that I can spend the second half of my life creating a more loving world with stronger people who understand the difference between strength and cruelty, instead of creating misery for myself. I have decided, like anyone else who has decided to stop eating too much sugar or stop buying things they don’t need, to stop feeding the system of irresponsible and unloving sexuality with what remains of my sexual market value, which is dwindling (though not completely gone) anyway.
I am not disposable.
I am not exploitable.
So I am not on the rotating, mechanized menu anymore.
Peace and Ashe.
