Let it be

I was just having an email exchange with someone who has been struggling recently with the level of frustration and horniness he’s dealing with as a result of having been self-locked for a few months.

I, of course, understand those difficulties. While I’m not continuously and distractingly horny like in the old days, I still have periods of intense feelings. Sometimes they last for days but other times they come on in a great crashing wave from seemingly nowhere before receding into the background again.

My advice for guys who are like me and find themselves in places like that is to do what they can to focus not on the what and how but on the why. Being horny and locked up is what and how but the why is because we need to be that way. We need to have our penises taken away and feel the tool of that denial in their place. We need to experience the frustration of inaccessibility and the build up of unsatisfied sexual release. It’s how we’re meant to be. I can’t tell you why. That’s above my pay grade. But it just is.

We can’t stop the horniness from building and, really, we don’t want to. Once we feel it and live with it we know it’s supposed to be there and if it weren’t — if we did what needed to be done to make it go away — we’d mourn its absence. We’d be less happy than we were before. And all we need to do is to feel a hard penis in our hands or an unlocked one in our pants to know that’s the case. It feels wrong. It feels like cheating. Especially in the seconds after orgasm.

The horniness we live with, even when it’s distracting, is not the problem. It’s the point. It’s our natural condition. We can’t fight it. We can’t obsess over it. We need to accept it into ourselves and let it be present. To feel it as an affirmation rather than a distraction. Because when it’s gone, its absence will leave a sucking void inside.

Do not endure. Accept.