Welcome to my first monthly write-up

September 2020 – Unseriously Sincere Ideas Write-Up #01

1. COME IN. LET ME TAKE YOUR COAT. PLEASE SIT DOWN. DID YOU BRING YOUR OWN CHAIR LIKE I TOLD YOU TO?

Hola! Cómo estás? Sorry, I’m learning Spanish. More on that another time.

For now, welcome to the first Comfort is for Wimps monthly newsletter! You are one lucky son of a gun (or something more politically correct). If you’re not sure what a newsletter is, it’s pretty much this but with more news and less me.

According to Wikipedia, a newsletter is a regularly distributed publication that is generally about one main topic of interest to its subscribers. But here, with this newsletter, I’ll cover whatever the hell I feel like and you’ll only hear from me if you’re lucky. NOTE: Generally you’ll get lucky on the 16th of every month and I’ll probably feel like talking about uncomfortable stuff. It’s going to get intimate, so wear a mask.

The reason I’ve moved my writing into this email newsletter format is because I’m only ever about ten years behind everyone else. Free marketing on Facebook died about the time we all ripped out our souls and handed them to the capitalists alongside our data and a side of warm bread. So these days when I share a piece of my bloody, sweaty, teary writing on social media, only about ten people see it and my mum’s boyfriend gives it a thumb of encouragement.

But I’d like to write for you. You in particular. Yes, you, dammit. Even if you’re only one of ten subscribers at the moment. Because I’m assuming that due to the fact I have your email address on the list, you must have appreciated my prose somewhere along the line. However, if you only subscribed in hope of more naked yoga pics, well, I guess I like your honesty, so stick around. I might show you a nipple later.

I’d love for you to want me as much as I want you. I want you to read, and importantly, write back to my newsletters so we can privately discuss how revolting or wrong you think I am, in private.

Maybe you have a cool topic that you think is uncomfortable or weird enough for me to explore and write about. Maybe it will even be way too uncomfortable and weird for me and I might just think you’re uncomfortable and weird.

Gosh, so much could happen with this newsletter. It’s like a Goosebumps choose-your-own-adventure and we’re under the covers reading it with a torch together. 

Anyway, without further ado, I present to you, your first three uncomfortable ideas. I mean, your second two are coming now. This was the first one. Just go with it, it’s my first day.

2. GOD WATCHES YOU NAKED, DON’T TRUST HIM

I attended a Catholic school as a kid, meaning I spent a big chunk of my childhood working for God, even though I don’t include it on my resume. 

It was a conflicting experience being a Catholic school kid. Mainly because you’re conditioned to believe that you’re always being watched and as a child you’re liable to fuck up at any time. I struggled with the internal tension of suppressing the grotty and unfiltered human child that I actually was, and showcasing the Catholic glory-child I wanted to be. The human child told me to sneak Tim Tams and tell bum jokes, while the goody two-shoes screamed at me to stop investigating my private parts. God is watching!!!

I was never, ever alone. Not in my bedroom, not in my bathroom, not in my mind. And we all know it’s when you’re alone in your bedroom, bathroom or mind that you’re really able to get into the nitty-gritty dark corners of your existence. These are the places you really figure out who you are and where you put things. I distinctly remember a time I compared my vagina to my Barbie doll’s vagina and then apologised profusely for being such a sin. To both God and my deceased grandmother.

Religion tends to encourage individuals to suppress and apologise for a lot of our trains of thought. In my case, I think I contracted something called “Catholic Guilt”, and I’d like to explore that more next time. The problem with all of this is that the human mind comes up with a lot of this weird and wacky stuff on its own. It’s triggered by unpredictable stimuli. Just like how I couldn’t help but imagine sex with Donald Trump when I saw him with his wife the other day. It just came out of nowhere and it was filthy, dirty, totally out of my control, and left orange spray tan all over my sheets. 

This repression of all my supposed sins is why I eventually got over God. I’m not totally sure he’s over me though. I keep hearing along the grapevine, God loves you. But it’s too late, I’ve moved on. I realised that in order to operate as a healthy, functional human being with an identity of my own, I needed to embrace the nasty little beast within. 

In fact, for any of us to get comfortable and confident within our own skin, it starts with a complete acceptance of these three facts:
 

a) You are not a newborn baby

No one has the clean mental slate of a newborn baby, except newborn babies. This junior-level human, with its tiny pea for a brain, is pure and divine. But don’t be jealous. Fucked-up-ness is coming for them too.

b) You are an animal

Part of the human brain is literally leftover from when we were irrational little reptile jerks. Parts of us are impulsive, aggressive, unhygienic. If you don’t have absurd thoughts and dirty desires then you aren’t actually part of the human species. It’s possible you are just a potato and you are not reading this.

c) A naughty thought is not a naughty action

Let me remind you that there’s a colossal difference in simply having an unsavoury thought and acting on an unsavoury thought. If I had killed a real person every time I thought about it, I would have murdered at least 10 people by now. We are not our thoughts. 

As humans we need complete emotional freedom in order to acknowledge and regulate the weird stuff. When we’re the sole overseers of everything that goes on in our noggins, and we’re not always trying to hide things from our angry God boss, we can properly process and filter it all into healthy outputs. Whereas suppressing thoughts just creates a piñata of shame that needs beating out of you in therapy.

Trust me when I say that accepting funky thoughts about your hot cousin is a much healthier discomfort to deal with than burying who you are deep down in a dumpster of guilt.

3. JOE ROGAN MIGHT BE KIND OF BORING IN BED BUT HE’S HONEST ABOUT IT

It was extremely interesting to recently learn that, despite Joe Rogan being super smart, rich, and funny, with massive macho muscles most would want to be thrown against a wall with, he is, as it might seem, a bit boring in bed. 

While talking to comedian, Nikki Glacer, on one of his recent three-hour chit chats, Joe plain and simply explains that he likes “normal sex”. No kinks. No quirks. No consensual beatings.

He even suggested that choking in bed can be dangerous. Because what if you then want to try rope, then wire, then uh oh, dead I guess.

I assume that all his imagination is used up fantasising about alien conspiracies, all his dirty talk is saved for his stand-up and all aggression is dispersed hunting and MMA fighting. By the time he gets to the bedroom, it’s just dry toast.

I mean, to be fair, this comment was off the back of Nikki talking about how she watches “really fucked up stuff”, like women in gangbangs being told to oink like pigs. So it’s hard to tell if maybe I perceived Joe to be extra boring because Nikki was being extra French toast with glitter and cream. It was just hard to imagine that a Tae Kwon Do State Champion, who grills elk that he’s tracked down and killed himself, gets home to his wife and just wants to missionary with her… Buuuuut then again, Nikki’s explanation of a boot on a woman’s head while being called a slut was on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. And trust me, there’s a spectrum. Something else I shall explore in a newsletter down the road. Who wants to talk about porn?!?

Nikki made a comment about how, after being so transparent with her fetishes in this chat with Joe, she may receive some angry backlash about it (feminists one would assume). But I personally find this sort of conversation very generous to its listeners. In fact, I’d argue that comedians are hugely generous in the way they give unfiltered insight into the depths of their minds.

Accepting and filtering your untamed thoughts is one thing, but to have the guts to spill much less edited versions is pretty far out groovy brave. 

I appreciate comedians take on this brave feat for pure attention, to get the giggles. Let’s be honest, comedy is, by nature, done for attention (another topic for another newsletter – look at that, falling out my earholes). But it is still often very generous in the sense that it allows other people to realise they’re not the only messed up ones with deep insecurities and bad taste in men.

Comedians are over-sharers and their jokes are often hilarious because of the heavily relatable truths in them. Comedians are endearing because they make you feel like they’re completely unashamed of their quirks. And comedians radiate confidence because they realise that making themselves vulnerable, and exposing all the gritty details, leaves less room for anyone else to make assumptions about them.

For example, my brothers can’t tell me I have the head of Golden Retriever because I tell them I have the head of a Golden Retriever first. I don’t know if that’s the strongest example, but I’m happy with it for now. 

Sharing embarrassing thoughts, awkward problems, and simply saying what everyone’s thinking does, and will build confidence. The science behind this is simple. You train your brain to not freak the hell out by repetitively showing it you will not die from people knowing things about you.

Once it’s out there, it’s done. Comedians caught on long ago to the fact that nobody actually bloody cares. Most people are way too wrapped up in their own secret freakshows to care if you like dressing up as a sexy octopus in your bedroom, bathroom or mind. 

So maybe the next step to accepting thoughts about your hot cousin is to actually get out there and tell your hot cousin. But don’t make it weird. And don’t say I said to do it. 

That’s all from me today, over and out chicos.

Signed,
Jess from Comfort is for Wimps

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