Zk | 05-no-way-2

There is a strangely comforting humiliation to the act of confession, to admitting to the one on the other side of that screen just how long it has been since you engaged with your sins so directly, so honestly. You kneel on that delightfully familiar kneeler, the same you knelt on in high school, the same you knelt on when you got home from your failed venture in Minnesota. You fold your hands, you nearly rest your nose against them, doing your best to smell only your scent and that of the cedar before you, not the priest, not the feline who was in there before you. You admit your deeds and the words roll off your tongue with the aspartame tang of your shortcomings.

For a while, when I was getting my psych degree, I stopped going to confession. I will admit that there was a brief time during those studies that I thought I understood quite a bit more than I actually do. I knew enough to be dangerous. I thought, “Ah yes, if confession is the catharsis of letting go of an internal stressor, I needn’t go to confession, so long as I have that regular release of spiritual energy!”

But while confession certainly involves catharsis, that’s not its sole purpose. I got my catharsis from the class trip to a junk yard where we were given goggles and sledge hammers and let at a stack of cars, from letting a friend talk me into driving up into the mountains so that I could shoot his pistol, even from visiting a batting cage.

But it wasn’t the right catharsis.

I never felt like I was handling my sins when the bat made contact with the ball, and even when the ball hit me instead of the bat, I still had not served penance. I wasn’t shooting my guilt, not blasting away my unworthiness before God. I was just panting and yelping like an idiot in a fenced-in enclosure. I was just tasting cordite or stale oil on the air, not the clean, cool flavor of the act of contrition.

I lacked the post-catharsis cleansing, and so I went back to confession. I lacked the flavor of it.

It is not anything so grand as synaesthesia. I don’t think that voicing my sins actually tastes like an artificial sweetness, one so sweet that it hurts your teeth despite the implicit promise that it not do that. It’s not an actual flavor in my mouth, just this sense so strong that that is how sin must taste spilling from the lips, that is how confession must taste.

Thinking back, this has always been the case for me, at least when talking about anything of such dire import.

I remember the night I decided to leave St John’s. I remember leaving the library and walking to the quad, taking the long way home to put off walking alongside traffic on the road. I remember praying as I looked up to the stars, and then as I sat on the grass, and then I remembered that same tang of confession in my mouth as I said to myself, “I don’t want to be here.”

I tasted that again today, still taste it.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” is when the taste started. “It has been three weeks since my last confession.”

Citrusy-sweet words from a clumsy mouth.

“I have felt desire towards someone…”

Sweet, gritty, leaving the tongue feeling a little too dry.

”…who I am not sure feels the same towards me…”

Salivary glands working overtime.

”…and it is taking a toll on me. I can’t think of anything else.”

And then, with a few words, the taste beginning to lessen, the words of my priest: “Are these thoughts adulterous in nature?”

“No, Father. She is not married.”

“Do they stem from lust?”

I frowned down at my paws. “I don’t think so. It is an overwhelming need to be with her, even just romantically. Like I need her in my life.”

“Like you need to possess her? Keep her? Do you covet her?”

“Perhaps. Certainly to an extent.”

“And what have you done to address these thoughts?”

The crushing weight of my iniquity sliding from the back of my neck to rest on my shoulders. I shrug weakly. “I have been praying for understanding, but Father, I don’t want to rid myself of them. I want to fulfill them. I want to be good to her, I want her to be happy. I just also want to be a part of that.”

“I see.”

“So maybe it is a form of jealousy, or perhaps envy. I’m yearning for something I can’t have.”

“You can’t have that fulfillment?”

“No I just…” I fumbled for words before coming up with, “It just feels like I can’t have that, like it’s out of reach.”

“I see two aspects, here.” The voice was quiet, comforting. “The first is that you are lusting for her — and I say lust because there is more to that word than simply the carnal. It has to do with a desire that is out of control, to the point where it truly claims you. Lust and greed can go hand in hand, and both tie into the second aspect, which is that you are coveting something to the point of distraction. You are spending more time thinking about the little lie you’ve told yourself, that you can’t have her, than you are about the world around you. Does that sound correct, my son?”

“Yes, Father.”

After a moment’s silence, the priest continued. “We all know the commandment that you should love your neighbor as yourself. There is a balance to be struck there, because you still have to love yourself, too. You don’t disappear out of these equations just by virtue of loving your neighbor, you still have to attend to your own needs. If you need that love in your life, then perhaps that is worth seeking out, because not doing so only seems to be causing you pain. Does that make sense?”

It stung to have that laid bare in front of me. I counted three long, slow breaths before I replied. “Yes, Father, that makes sense.”

There was silence on the other side of the screen, and I could hear a quiet cough from outside the confessional. Words failed me, and a pang of worry that I was being unfair with the priest’s time. The tang on my lips was starting to fade, so perhaps I had voiced all I could.

“For these and all my past sins, I ask pardon of God, penance, and absolution from you, Father.”

A soft hum on the other side of the screen, that soft noise the priest always makes when considering penance. And then, “Alright, my son. I would like you to say five Our Fathers for your penance. I also want you think on who it is that you’re envious of, or what you are jealous of. Think about that balance of loving others and loving yourself, and ask yourself who it is that you are hurting in these situations as you pray.”

The weight on my shoulders slid down and off of me. “Thank you, Father.”

That was Wednesday, and coming on Friday evening, now, I still do not know the root of my jealousy. I waffle still.

Sometimes, it feels like envy. It feels like I’m craving something that I cannot have, something that is being kept from me in some form or another. By whom? Who would possibly be keeping me from Kay? Kay herself? God? Myself? I cannot begin to place any sort of blame on any one source.

Other times, however, I recognize that there is nothing keeping me from ‘having’ her, and that perhaps I am simply jealous of something that I do not yet have, but see myself having in the future.

And other times still, both words fail, and I’m left simply with yearning.

I’m left with yearning, and I know that the only one who I am hurting in these situations is me, that to love myself as I would love a neighbor feels always out of reach.

I see a client with obsessive compulsive disorder. She has a tendency to pick at her fur and skin, some troubles with physical affection that make her feel ‘gross’, a fear of driving that leads her to worry that someone has been struck by the car, and a sort of external claustrophobia that leads her to struggle with the idea of closed-in spaces such as cabinets and cupboards, which we suspect stems from some early childhood abuse.

She also struggles with relationship-rightness with her husband. She worries constantly that he might not be, in some way, okay. It’s not that she thinks he might not love her, or that she might not be good for him, but that if there is anything wrong in his life in any way, that she must address it. It goes beyond simply needing to comfort him, and well into the territory of her world falling apart should anything be wrong that she cannot address.¹ It did not matter what that wrongness might be. Often, the wrongness would be unnameable, ineffable, hypothetical.

When I brought this up with Jeremy during one of our sessions a few months ago, speaking specifically to the stress that I felt in masking around someone who existed in such a high state of activation at all times, he asked if I had greater trouble masking around those who experienced strong egodystonic symptoms and feelings than those who experienced strong egosyntonic symptoms.

At the time, I explained it thus. Those egodystonic disorders, the ones that impede upon the patient’s life, brushing their fur the wrong way and leaving them in discomfort or pain, often lead to high-stress situations where I find myself struggling with the task of expressing appropriate emotions, engaging that visible sort of empathy that helps so much with patients and which I feel I must constantly practice. I find myself wanting to disengage in order to protect myself. Avert my eyes. Cross my arms. Close myself off from the stressors before me.

Egosyntonic symptoms, where detrimental feelings, symptoms, or thoughts do not disturb the patient’s sense of identity, are far easier for me to mask around. It feels much more natural for me to try and engage with a patient with visible empathy if my goal is to try and help them understand that a behavior might be damaging to themselves or others. At that point, masking is a tool in my kit.

I suspect that this habit may stem from my early connection with the church. If an individual sins, knows that it is a sin, and struggles with that, it is far more uncomfortable than if an individual sins, does not consider it a sin, and cannot see the spiritual consequences that they might thus face. With the former, I struggle to mask because it is their goal, their work, their job to find their way back to the path, but with the latter, with the one who sins in ignorance, they must be met with empathy, for they know not what they do, etc. etc.

Ah well.

All this to say that I am starting to come to the conclusion that limerence is the egodystonic form of attraction.

I suspect there must be some similarity to addiction here; the overwhelming pungency of limerence is not pleasant. It is a thing that must be maintained, just as a high-functioning addiction must be maintained. One must have that drink at the end of the day. It feels bad to drink it, it feels bad after, it feels bad to need it in order to maintain a functional life.

Similarly, this crush, if that’s all it is anymore, requires of me a constant level of maintenance. I have to feed it fantasies, have to pour energy into it. I have to dream, both at night and during the day. I have to imagine the feeling of our fingers intertwining.

It is a negative part of my life in both its concrete and emotional effects. It feels perilously close to sin.

I think that’s why I sought out confession. What was it the priest had said? Ask yourself who it is that you are hurting in these situations.

I remember the surety of knowledge after that, that the only one I was hurting through these struggles was myself. And now I have better language for that, that this pain is egodystonia. Limerence is something that rankles with my identity, as negative a part of my life as it is. It is a greedy thing, that which has laid claim to a portion of my concept of self, and I object to that claim.

Liking someone isn’t a sin. It cannot be, must not be. But here I am, wallowing in my own pain, and that is where I veer close to sin.

Why must we Catholics wrap our every action up in shame? There must be some root for some bad thing in my life. If I am depressed, it must be for some reason, for something that I have done, yes? If I struggle this much for liking someone, clearly there must be something shameful about that, yes? That sense of dread, that sour, ashen taste in the mouth, that is a sign from God that we have strayed from the path he has set before us, yes?

I’m a therapist. I should not be thinking this way. It’s not just wrong, but it reeks of hypocrisy.

Even as a Christian, there is little enough reason for me to think this way. I have read my Ecclesiastes. I have read my Job. I have buried myself in those words, in Job’s speeches and of those of his friends. I have dug through the arguments on theodicy, I have written my essays, taken my tests on the reasons for bad things happening to good people, how not every terrible experience has its roots in sin. I know these things.

At least, I thought I did.

I don’t know. I’m spinning my wheels, talking in circles. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go from here. To name a feeling may be to understand it, but understanding has gotten me nowhere, has purchased me nothing but a deeper ache in my gut, and now I must feed my desires all over again.

Often times, when I work with a therapist (from either direction), we converse quite freely and with essentially no friction. I do not know whether that’s a thing that therapist-clients engender, necessarily. I’ve had my fair share of clients who were incredibly easy to talk with. Not that they’re likeable, or at least not only because of that, but that our sessions — me and those clients, and me and my therapists — tend to move forward with a sense of purpose.

In my clients’ case, these ones in particular are there for a purpose. To get better, to understand their trauma, to do the work. Not just take a pill² or do the meditation and be cured of depression, but to really understand it, unravel it, and wind it back up into something new, something neater than before.

In my case, I am here to do the job of improving myself and Jeremy is here to do his job of guiding me along that path.

My path of improvement, as I suspect must be the case with many of my colleagues, is to cope better with the process of taking on others emotions. A good therapist has to have empathy, after all, and I do try to be a good therapist. We don’t simply let emotions slide off of us in order to be some impartial observer, we have to feel a little bit of what our clients are feeling as well in order to truly work with them.

So it is that most often, I work through processing the residual trauma of the past two weeks’ clientele with Jeremy. Sometimes we’ll get onto something that goes a bit deeper, digs further into the past, though perhaps less often than he would like.

Lately, though, we’ve been spending more time talking about Kay and, along with that, the friction between us has grown.

I started to feel it in earnest today, and, being the good little therapist that I am, I took a step back and examined my feelings and brought that up with Jeremy: “I feel a little sore that I’m being pushed on this.”

Every time I get all therapist back at him, he smiles, which I think I secretly enjoy. He replied, “Why is that, do you think?”

“I think I worry that this isn’t real work.”

“How would sorting out your emotions not be real work? I think that was one of your stated goals.”

“Maybe it just doesn’t feel like a real problem. It feels like a very intense emotion that I’m not feeling for any particular reason.”

He nodded at that. “You mentioned last time that it feels outside your control.”

“At least more so than any other emotion that I’ve worked on before.” I thought for a bit, then added, “Or maybe ‘outside my control’ isn’t quite right. It feels purposeless, in the same way depression might. I like Kay. I think about her a lot. We were pretty good friends for that year, and still are, but this sudden intense desire doesn’t seem to come from anywhere. It just kind of showed up and now it’s slowly taking over.”

“Did you wind up talking to her about this?”

“Not really, no.”

“How come?”

There was a silence as I sifted through my thoughts. Despite their intensity, they were difficult to pin down, as though too much lens flare obscured the exact source. “I find myself thinking often that I don’t want to say anything to her because I don’t want her to feel pressured to reciprocate.”

“That’s her decision, though, you can’t take that away from her. Has she had a problem setting boundaries before? With you or in general, I mean.”

I laughed. “No, not at all.”

Jeremy grinned, but kept on pushing. “Then is that wholly true?”

“I’m not sure. I just don’t want her to feel obligated to feel the same way about me that I feel about her.”

“Projection, maybe?”

“I’m not convinced it’s that baseless.”

“What is the basis, then? Have you felt pressured into saying yes to someone you didn’t want to say yes to before?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. Perhaps. I know that going into seminary was not originally my idea. I liked it there. I believed. I felt myself faithful enough to wind up on that path. Still, it was my parents’ idea.”

He nodded. “And you felt obligated to go along with the idea?”

“Yes.”

“So perhaps a bit of projection.” He raised a jet paw to forestall my disagreement. “Both things can be true, Dee. It can be projection, and it can also have some truth to it.”

“Alright, I’ll concede to that.”

“Projection in cases like these often stems from a difficulty in being vulnerable.”

I winced.

“I know that being vulnerable isn’t something that comes easy to you. You are an earnest person in general–“

“Sometimes it feels like I have no other choice.”

“–but when it comes to specific situations, you come up against some internal resistance. Have you been able to be vulnerable around Kay before?”

I nodded and recounted our conversation about leaving Saint John’s.

“That sounds like a good bit of forward progress, then. Do you have any other things that you could be vulnerable to her about?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, if there are a few topics around which you have trouble being vulnerable, perhaps you can work up to them. I still think that it should be an end goal for you to talk to her about your feelings, but that doesn’t have to be something that happens right away. You can practice, first.”

And so now I’m thinking: what more do I have to be vulnerable about? I’m a thirty-year-old coyote with an awkward social manner, a strongly-held sense of faith, and an otherwise simple lifestyle. My past is unremarkable. My future holds no surprises.

Am I really so boring? Do I really have so little to worry about? Am I that privileged? An uncomfortable thought. It makes me feel shallow.

And yet Jeremy is right. The friction surrounding this particular vulnerability is too great for me to overcome just yet, and I am still not convinced that this feeling is real enough that opening up is something that is even worth doing.

Instead, I wonder if the right thing to do is just to focus on being a good friend. I do not know if this is something that I can ignore, per se. That isn’t how limerence works. It is an intrusive thought. It is something that bypasses whatever safeguards one might set up to sidle up next to you, press itself close, and whisper wickedly into your ear: “You need them. Doesn’t matter how, doesn’t matter why, but you need them.”

I don’t know if I can ignore it, but perhaps I can use it as fuel. I can use it as a spark to just continue to be a better friend for her. A better listener, a better support, a better Dee all around. Am I not to practice my emotional literacy? Can I not use this as an opportunity? Transmute limerence into personal growth.

We will see.

I feel compelled to state that I do know the reason that I left a path to pastoral. That was something that I talked through with my advisor at St John’s, and something that I had been struggling with for a while. I can point to it and name it as the mechanical reason. What I don’t know, necessarily, is the reason why I left there in the way that I did.

I left my MDiv behind because I do not do well in front of a crowd. Simple as that.

Put me in front of a person, and I can have a conversation with them³. Set me loose in a crowd and I am fine. If you set me down in the middle of the 13th Street Plaza in the middle of the dinner rush or in downtown Boise and watched, I suspect that you would see nothing out of the ordinary.

I don’t say this to brag. Rather the opposite, actually, The recognition that I do okay on the street in the middle of a crowd because, after a certain point, I cease being able to see the people around me as real people and the weight of their presence no longer weighs on me, and just how low a number that needs to be before I cannot keep up with individuals is embarrassing. Three people I can manage. Four is a stretch. Staff meetings are difficult.

Drop me on the altar in front of a congregation and expect me to connect not just with the congregation and its constituent parts but also with God and I get lost before I can get started. If I were able to focus on just one of these things, if I were able to look out over the heads of the parishioners and see only cardboard cutouts of ears and snouts, moving in time with the liturgy, I would likely be able to do that — I gave my fair share of speeches. If I were able to participate wholly in the divine rite and wrap myself in the mystery of tradition, I would be more than happy — I have my fair share of rituals.

But that’s not what mass is. Mass is connecting the congregation to God, and that means being the conduit between the two of them, and that I cannot do.

I recognized this early on, before even applying for St John’s, and set my mind specifically on powering through this deficiency. I was able to learn so much, could I not learn how to provide communal spiritual interaction?

Alas, some things are intrinsic and immutable. I left because I recognized this fact. And so, it turns out, did my teachers.

I bring this up because work⁴ asked us all to provide presentations in our weekly staff meetings, something which the cynic in me explains away as “prove that you’re paying attention and doing your job to higher ups and call it a ‘brown-bag lunch’.”

Fine. Whatever. I can write a little speech. I rather liked the practice of writing speeches and homilies in school, and if the style in which I journal is anything to go by, I still very much do.

I don’t mind the writing, I just mind the thin sheen of bureaucracy that colors everything about dealing with my employer, sometimes.

I have volunteered for the first of these ‘brown-bag lunch presentations’ and am not shy to admit (at least, to myself and Jeremy) that I did so simply to get it out of the way. I have little desire to participate in team-building exercises in the context of an organization that exists solely to facilitate one-on-one interactions in a professional context.

My thoughts on this whole process are clear, so I shall not complain any further.

I have decided, as it is occupying my mind of late⁵, to talk about discernment and the reasons that I am where I am now and not wearing vestments. I already even have the example of my client who is going through his own form of secular discernment.

To that end, I have been toying with the balance of life story to academic content, and have decided to lean perhaps 80% of my presentation on individual stories (both mine and that of a few anonymized clients), and then set that within the framework of psychology.

The core idea of what I want to share, I think, is the importance of taking one’s time to make decisions, as well as to understand the unavoidable malleability of those decisions and long-term plans. The things that decide the outcome of long-term decisions may, after all, be long-term problems. You may, for instance, be a stupendously awkward coyote trying to wedge himself into a position of social grace that requires absolute earnestness and humility.

I have been collecting notes about my own process of discernment, as well as examples of discernment in others to pull together into this speech:

• The client who is struggling with his choice of what he is majoring in at university.
• My parents’ decision to marry (and thus dating as a whole).
• Having my dreams interrupted by a sudden recognition of reality.

I think that this is enough to get across the point of taking a long-term decision-making process into account in a therapeutic context⁶. I don’t have to give an academic lecture or provide any references, of course, just offer some thoughts from what has come up in and before my own practice.

On further consideration, despite my thoughts on the context of this presentation, I think it might actually be fun to write the essay that will underlie my speech. It ought not be all that different from what I am doing here, after all, right? I am providing myself with a forum in which to voice my ideas, explore them to their conclusions, and learn something along the way.

I emailed Jeremy my thoughts on the matter, since he works for the same organization that I do and will doubtless have to give his own brown-bag presentation at some point, and this was his response:

Dee,

Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic idea. I was about to caution you about the difference in tone between a speech and a journal entry, but given what you have shown me so far of your work, I don’t think that that’s necessarily a worry for you. I think I’ve told you “you think in complete sentences” or some variation on that enough times at this point that it has become almost a cliche ☺

One thing that I think I would suggest is that you write this ‘journal essay’ ASAP so that you have enough time to get your thoughts out of the way. You’ve mentioned before how easy it is to get caught up in your own thoughts on something while they evolve in the middle of you trying to share them. Write your presentation, then maybe journal about it some, get all the thoughts out of the way that you can so that you’re not distracting yourself at the front of the room.

Good luck, buddy!

Jeremy

No harm in that, I think. I’ll get those words down and maybe even spend the night before rehearsing them, just to be safe, and then try and make it as fun as possible for myself, and hopefully that will come across to the audience, as well. Might as well try to turn corporate bullshit into something useful for those who have to put up with it.

The presentation went over quite well, I think. There were a few questions after. Jeremy said it sounded good and my boss thanked me in a way that was more than just a pro forma thank you. Some part of me wishes that I had offered something less personal, but the rest of me is just glad it’s over and that I don’t have to care about it too much going further.

For posterity (and an admittedly uneasy sense that I ought to attach just about anything to do with this current task of journaling to the journal itself), here’s what I wound up writing:

Before I set about the task of working toward my current career, I was on the path to becoming a Catholic priest. I made it all the way through my BA in religious studies and a year and a half into my MDiv before figuring out that it just wasn’t going to work, and that I would make a terrible priest.

The reasons for this are fairly simple and also not necessarily germane to what I would like to talk about today, which is the process of discernment. Built into the education and administration of running a seminary, even the whole church, is a set of safeguards to help members onto the paths of life that are actually best for them, even if it isn’t what they originally thought. This is set down explicitly in the term “discernment”, which St. John’s University, the seminary that I attended, codified into a system used by the administration.

A cynical way to put it would be a filter to keep the bad priests out, but in reality, it was a way of drawing out a decision that should — or must — take time to commit to. Some decisions are just not meant to be made quickly, whether or not this is because they are bound by time constraints, or simply because they need a lot of thought.

I got started thinking about this in a therapeutic context by a client recently. He was struggling with his decision to pursue the degree program he had chosen at university. Something about it just wasn’t clicking for him, as much as he liked the idea of it. During a session, I brought up discernment as a topic that can be extended beyond its ecclesiastical roots and into just about any decision that requires time to play out.

I described the process of making this decision as an ongoing conversation with yourself as we find out what’s important to us, what it takes to get where we want to be, and what is within our reach.

I’ll note that that last bit is not actually something I said out loud to him. Whether or not he is actually able to pursue his degree to its conclusion is not on me to decide, I don’t know one way or the other, but it stood out to me as something that I had experienced.

You all know that I’m a very awkward person. It takes a lot of energy for me to have a conversation with more than one person and to engage with those that I am talking to in an interesting way that doesn’t leave one or the other — or both — of us frustrated. Can you picture a priest struggling with something like that? I may have had a mind for theology and all that goes into the bookish side of being a priest, but I don’t have it in me at all to do all of the other work, most of it based around social interaction, that goes into the calling.

This is what I mean by discernment. In the context of the church, you take a long time to settle into a path that you will stick to for the rest of your life, whether that’s a pastoral role, as a member of an order, or simply as a parishioner, but the same can hold for just about any other long-running decision-making process.

My advisor at St. John’s told me that one could think of it like dating. The process of discernment is one of figuring out the relationship between yourself and a potential outcome of that decision before committing to what may be a mistake.

That can even be very literal. My parents dated for about two years before they decided to get married. In the context of their social lives and their families, this was an absurdly long period of time, but something about each other just made them want to be extra, extra sure that they were ready to be together forever. It’s not that they were at each other’s throats or constantly frustrated with each other, either. They were some of the most in-love people I’ve ever known. This year would have been their fortieth anniversary, and until the day they died, they were still holding paws and giving each other these little fawning glances.

Where my decision to join the clergy failed, that’s an example of a decision that worked out well in the end. Extremely well.

Neither my client nor I know where it is that he will wind up. That is still a decision that is underway. But ever since having that session with him and making the connection between what I had gone through in the past with discernment and the idea of slower decision-making processes, I have made a conscious effort to keep this in mind when working with all of my clients who are struggling with big changes in their lives.

The discussion afterwards was fine. We talked a little bit about other long-term decisions that therapists had run into — things like divorce, changing careers, and so on — as well as some other personal stories. It only lasted a little bit, but since it was time taken out of our normal shared lunch break, no one was eager to stick around, least of all myself.

Again, corporate nonsense.

I shared a bit of this with Kay and she sent me an eye-roll emoji, followed by

6:03 PM Kay> It’s bullshit like this that has me glad I’m still in academia. Not that libraries are immune or anything, but they’re strange in that you’re either a page or assistant like me or you had at least a masters degree.

6:03 PM Dee> I have a masters.

6:06 PM Kay> Well, fair enough. Still, I think libraries have this ivory tower nonsense going on in ways that places like you work don’t. Reference librarians stick to their subjects, book binders stay in the bindery, book purchasers buy books, assistive tech people deal with assistive tech, etc etc. There’s no real effort to bUiLd a TeAm in the same way as it sounds like is happening with you and every other office drone I know.

6:06 PM Dee> I’d shake my fist at you for calling me an office drone, but you’re not wrong.

6:06 PM Kay> I bet you dress in business casual.

I laughed and typed back:

6:07 PM Dee> Of course I do! Have to look professional after all.

6:07 PM Kay> Do you call it “biz cas”? If you do, I will block you immediately.

6:07 PM Dee> I do not, thank goodness. I call it a button up shirt and slacks like a normal person.

6:08 PM Kay> You are absolutely in no way a normal person.

6:08 PM Kay> What did you wind up talking about anyway?

I sent her the essay and then waited for her to read, feeling anxious, as I always seem to when sharing anything related to religion with Kay. She’s never been anything but kind-but-disinterested when the topic has come up before.

Finally:

6:12 PM Kay> I mean, it sounds like a fluff presentation.

6:12 PM Dee> It was hardly an academic conference.

6:13 PM Kay> Yeah, but it’s not really -about- anything, I guess.

6:14 PM Dee> I guess, yeah. Just a loose compilation of thoughts. I wanted to be the first so I don’t have to worry about any presentations for a while.

6:14 PM Kay> Hahaha! So cynical, Dee! Never knew you had it in you.

6:14 PM Kay> Especially given this apparently pretty earnest speech.

6:15 PM Dee> It was earnest! I am cynical! I contain multitudes.

6:15 PM Kay> Now I’m just picturing you as a priest.

6:16 PM Dee> Black cassock and Roman collar? Or all the vestments for mass?

6:16 PM Kay> Oh, the black one. Total hot priest vibes. You just have to wear that and call everyone “my child” or whatever and the girls will be all over you.

Gears crunched to a halt in my mind. I must have sat there, staring at that message, for several minutes, trying to parse out just how much of it might have been serious.

6:21 PM Kay> Sorry, that was probably pretty insensitive…

I rubbed my paws over my snout before replying:

6:25 PM Dee> No no! Just never really thought about “hot priest” being a thing.

6:25 PM Kay> You’re just not on the right parts of the internet.

The conversation wound down from there, so now I’m writing up my journal and turning Kay’s words over and over in my head. They fit strangely into my image of myself. ‘Hot priest’? ‘Girls all over me’? There isn’t a universe in which either of these things is true. I am no judge of how attractive I am and have never bothered to ask, but the idea of a priest being sexy makes my head ache. They are two completely separate concepts in my mind, a Venn diagram with no overlap.

And having ‘girls all over me’ just sounds unpleasant no matter how I take it. If I can’t deal with more than three or four people in a room at a time, how would I deal with that in some situation that might suggest intimacy? And in the more idiomatic sense, well, I can’t even deal with attraction towards just one girl.