Gabrielle #2 – Sex Hell

When sobriety turns daydreaming evil.

Daydreaming is a beautiful word. Makes you think of jasmine and “Moon River.” Audrey Horne swooshing side to side while cool jazz drifts from the jukebox of her imagination. That static semi-smile you only see on people who have recently joined a commune or taken 20mg of Diazepam. Maybe it’s a dying art, on account of time poverty and “phones,” but there’s something kind of perverse about seeing someone daydreaming in public now. Calmly staring out of a fogged-up window on the Thameslink, surrounded by commuters doing their mascara and yelling about “the Edison account” over a bluetooth headset. There’s no telling what’s going on behind the eyes.

I’m thinking about this because I can only describe what's been going on behind mine lately as “sex hell.” I’ll sit down on the bus, blink, and come to having lost 45 minutes picturing the last person I saw on my phone booting my door down in a ski mask. The cashier at my corner shop will inform me I owe £5.79 for a TREK bar and some milk and I’ll tap my card and smile and say “I’m good, thanks” when he asks if I need a carrier bag, meanwhile my brain is running a play of him pulling that bag over my head and dragging me into a storage closet. I’ll stop at a service station and feel the overwhelming urge to do something degrading in the toilets with a labourer I’ve only seen from behind ordering a McDonald’s. 

It’s fair to assume there’s a lot of people knocking about like this. Intrusive thoughts are universal and that’s kind of what these are. I usually get them about other things. Like if I’m driving alone I’ll lock the doors and listen to eurotrance at an ear-splitting volume to override the urge to yank the wheel and go soaring off a flyover. While cooking my brain will chuck me a thought like ‘what if I pushed this knife into my stomach’ and my whole body will flinch with phantom pain. I’ll accidentally lock eyes with a stranger on the street and imagine them doing or saying something aggressive, and beating them to near-death in response, within the split-second it takes for our gaze to break. All the classics. They don’t feel threatening or unwanted, necessarily. Most of the time their origins are too apparent to be distressing. Oh the 5’3” girl who can barely do the bins is walking around the city by herself fantasising about getting into random fights? You don’t say! Puncturing your internal organs is bad, obviously…

It follows that fictional violence – often a legitimate threat subverted – can bring about feelings of excitement or pleasure, so there’s no point feeling weird about that either. These images wash in and out of me like waves. The sex stuff sticks around because it has a firmer foot in reality. I quite literally couldn’t throw a punch to save my life but the erotic sequences are things I’ve done or would do if the opportunity presented itself, so there’s no circuit breaker. A random thought will spiral into a prolonged script that I might return to over and over and over again, rewriting the details and adding things as I go. It’s the psychiatric equivalent to working on a film that will never cease production. This is called “maladaptive daydreaming,” apparently – fantasies so rewarding they take precedence over reality. Makes sense to me. Have you engaged with reality lately? Horrendous. Still, the constant nature of it is a problem. At a certain point it bleeds over the edges and becomes all-consuming. It interrupts my already low ability to function, which is embarrassing. Like sorry I missed my deadline, I was trapped in a reverie of having my back blown out in Welcome Break Membury.

When I got sober in July, I thought the hardest part would be finding something to do on a Friday night. Having a social life, maintaining friendships, not bursting bubbles by declining the afters. As it happens it’s easy to be in a bar as long as you look like you’re drinking and no one gives a shit if you bounce at 11pm, when people start repeating themselves too close to your face, because they’re busy chasing the craic. What I hadn’t anticipated was the bit where I’d have to hang out with me. All the time. Always being present in my own mind, which is like being stuck at a roast of yourself only it never ends and no one is joking. If my interior world was murderous before, it’s like one of Jigsaw’s scenarios now. I can’t even log on without my FYP, the peoples psychoanalyst, forcing me to confront my own feral energy (I’m of the belief that you get the timeline you deserve).

Drinking takes up a lot of time. Way more than you think. When you give it up, your schedule breaks open and unfolds infinite and terrifying before you like the Jupiter scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Your brain scrambles for something to hold on to. It’s not used to all this room, all this thinking. Doesn’t understand why you would choose it deliberately when you were having such a nice time before, being a sack of soup in a second hand leather jacket. It needs to fill the void with something while you adjust to your new life of clarity. Ergo: sex hell.

A brief interlude to appreciate these not unrelated watercolours of guys getting blackout drunk in the early 2000s, by Tim Gardner (via).

It’s often the case that if you have an addictive personality and you manage to kick one habit, the desire for oblivion will try to shift onto something else. People in recovery from heroin start doing ‘a little bit’ of gear, sober alcoholics find themselves 5k down on bet365, gamblers get too into League of Legends. It was not surprising to me, already the type of person to go meet a stranger off an app in the middle of a park at night stone cold sober, that when I stopped drinking my sexual impulses went loco.

It’s difficult, too, to untangle your death drives. I don’t think I’ve been sober long enough to fully separate my actual desires from things I’ve only done drunk. I’m not sure it’s even possible to judge in hindsight whether you slept with someone because you wanted to not exist for a bit, or because you were both there and horny. Do you want to be hogtied in an Ibis because it feels good to turn a fear or a bad experience into something positive, or because you think you deserve it? A little from column A, a little from column B. Probably a secret third thing also. It’s usually not worth over-analysing. Perversions (a word I’m using because ‘kink’ makes me think of £2,000 custom latex and 38-year-old he/they polyamory) are shaped by all sorts of influences. Formative experiences – positive, traumatic and benign, your general interests, “society.” I accidentally read Crash when I was 11 so take from that what you will.

Everyone wants to be choked out and spat on now anyway. Normal innit. None of us have any control over our day-to-day lives so we look for the gratification of surrendering it completely in sex, provided we get to hold the strings to some extent. Benders usually scratch the same itch. Anything that floods your brain with dopamine, disrupts your synapses, temporarily breaks up whatever fight you’re having with yourself. If you put too much stock in one coping mechanism, it stands to reason that the scales will over-correct when you remove it.

Maladaptive daydreaming. What a strangely clinical combination of words. Cellar door for fucking losers. It’s almost a flex to be able to take something so pleasant and turn it into something potentially disastrous, but I will say this: it’s better than sobering up in some random person’s kitchen at 7am and contemplating walking into traffic. It would be nice if for one second I could think about anything other being pumped full of [redacted]. I have shit to do! I feel like a waifu pillow with wasting disease. But it almost never does well to suppress your desires. You can’t feed them under some circumstances either. You simply have to endure.

Allow that dog in you and be vigilant when it gets rabies.