July’s full moon is in Capricorn, the dedicated worker bee of the zodiac. Keep your eye on the prize, but let the other eye look back on the road and its adventures thus far. Count your wins! Celebrate them! Cement them in your memory for future motivation!
Take some time to reflect on this half-year’s victories and focus in on how far you’ve already come. Then evaluate where you might need to establish new boundaries and channels for growth heading into the future. Just be sure to build in time for recovery, as much as your mind, body, and soul require. Use this moment of reorganization to reset your sense of freedom.
NEW HOZIER ALBUM FINALLY ON THE HORIZON YOU’RE FUCKING WELCOME!
Hellloooooo lovers. I hope you’re having a very fruitful full moon and casting spells on your enemies via fireworks bought from a questionable warehouse on the side of the road in an unfamiliar zip code. The American Dream!
I’m still out on the road, perfecting the art of repacking an overweight duffel bag in a hostel room full of snoring Brits at 7 in the morning. But I’m also doing fun things, like taking a bottle of wine to the beach in Sicily with the girls working the hostel front desk and snagging the week’s only clear view of Mt. Etna at sunset while White Lotus quotes float through my mind and into every conversation. It’s my most favorite and magical way of living.
They say it’s summertime, after all, and it’s warmer than the scientists would prefer up here in the northern hemisphere. The season of bracing yourself for wind contact upon exiting your apartment building, and then melting into the relief of the warm, buzzy evening that awaits. These are the days of lounging, and relaxing, and touching everything, before the winds change again and trap another layer of poisoned air and mysterious green bugs over your beloved borough.
With that inspiring image in mind, I offer you some thoughts on touching, written from a gîte kitchen in France, the land of romance. You remember touching? The human kind? One of the more major if less famous of our physical senses. M. C. Hammer, skip this discourse.
Alors, allez!
What is the German word for the deep sense of terror that hangs in a thick blanket over that which you desire most in life? Perhaps there is a phrase for this sensation of a Japanese origin? Am I getting a whiff of “anxious avoidant attachment issues” on the nose?
I have recently identified my own bad habit of pursuing the following thought train deep into the recesses of my subconscious: “OOoh look at that, I want that! Wait wait now I’m fucking terrified of how much I want that and how devastated I’ll be if I don’t get it. Okay let’s just avoid it at all costs so we don’t have to worry about ever possibly obtaining it. Awesome plan okay hands in 3, 2, 1, WILDCATS! GETCHA HEAD IN THE GAME!”
Desire, of any kind, always brings its lame-ass friend ‘agony’ to the party. Like physical touch, por ejemplo. A former coworker (a good one!) once touched my arm in passing and quickly apologized, “Oh I’m sorry, I know you don’t like to be touched.” HUH!?
I was *shocked*, but only emotionally because I wasn’t wearing anything made of silk that day. #3 on the list of Most Pleasant Sensations Available for Experience on This Godforsaken Planet is ‘enthusiastic hug from someone you enjoy who also smells good’. What the hell kind of scientific evidence of energetic vibrations was I giving off to be actively repelling one of the main (iconic, even!) forms of human communication? How charged is the static of my atmosphere that I’ve accidentally surrounded myself with a metaphorical electric fence?!
But alas, we do have to hand it to them for picking up on what could only be construed as aggressively-clear social cues. They were kind of right; I am afraid of being touched, even when I’m craving it desperately. My parents weren’t very touchy-feely growing up, and I got super confused when my friends’ dads were, like, voluntarily hugging on their kids. Shoutout to fathers with attachment issues everywhere! Your eldest daughter may have forwarded this to you. She might even send it directly to an email list you’re subscribed to and pay for…
When it comes to the blurry physical affection zones through which pass both friendship and romantic entanglement, I am quite literally shaking in my moon boots. I’m hesitant to touch men, potentially implicating desire, and receiving unwanted advances in return. I’m even more wary of touching women, potentially implicating desire, and perceiving my own fear of unwanted advances reflected in their eyes. The concept of flirting barely skirts the periphery of my conscious imagination because I’m so obsessively worried about infringing on the comfort bubbles of anyone else. I am walking around in a buzzy little forcefield, feeding itself off the energy of my own social anxieties.
The pandemic, weirdly, didn’t help! About a month into NYC’s COVID lockdown, I tried the thing where you cup your face in your own hands with your arms crossed and gently pet your cheeks with your thumbs. It took about three seconds to register in my lizard brain and then I burst into tears. And that’s how I learned the phrase, “touch-starved”!
It wasn’t just the pandemic though, I’d been self-inflicting a state of touch-starvation for years. I may have been living through an historic moment of acute isolation, but I had also reached the apex of what had become a chronic condition.
As children, my only sister and I were locked in constant physical and emotional battle for, uhhh, actually I don’t really know why were fighting, hmm, until I left for college and she faced the reality of living alone with your parents as a teenage girl. Now we get along much better, and I’ve begun to impose ‘hug exposure therapy’ on both of us whenever we’re in the same city. She scrunches her face in anguish every time I remind her that real hugs require two arms, but the only way out is through, and mama may have raised some slightly dysfunctional emotional dynamics, but she ain’t raised no quitters! (This is a southern code phrase for “stubborn as hell”. Use when you want to validate a fervent-yet-unexamined commitment.)
I can recall one particularly vivid hug-centric memory between us, me and my only sibling relation on god’s green earth. I was about 11 years old, and had just survived a car accident that someone else did not. The adults and family friends that had come to collect me promptly deposited my freshly-traumatized self at the front door to my waiting younger sister, who couldn’t have understood much of the situation at such an emotionally-untarnished age. But we could both clearly sense the weight of social expectation.
We hugged on the threshold, miming affection and relief. Mimicking, maybe? Reenacting choices made by the adults around us in the few moments of tragedy we’d witnessed thus far. It wasn’t that we didn’t feel those things, we just didn’t consciously connect them to the act of embrace. I think The Hug was more performative than spontaneous. Like all the grownups were expecting these small children to immediately understand the gravity of surviving an event that took someone else’s life. I think we mostly hugged because we could feel them watching, emotionally guiding us together like Barbie dolls, our little limbs even stiffer. Damn, the marketing for this movie is really getting out of control.
Thankfully childhood experiences aren’t really known to affect us much as adults! Checkmate, therapy industrial complex.
Last week, a French person asked ‘la bise?’ as we met for the first time. La bise is the institutionalized French greeting that requires a kiss from both parties on both cheeks. I felt the firm hand of sudden panic smack me behind the head and said, “oh no, I’m scared of it haha!” in front of a table of French people who had so graciously invited this unfamiliar Amèricaine to their neighborhood barbecue. I am Valley-Girl-“literally” still wincing at the memory. Do you guys think that’s too specific for a meme?
In the immortal words of Nancy Meyers movie titles, something’s gotta give! I cannot go on this way. The soft animal of my body demands evidence of affection and sensory confirmation of perceived emotion! And yeah, I actually have taken several online autism assessment tests, and let’s just say the answer options weren’t specific enough for me to confidently make a qualified selection 😎
I am searching for more instigating and invigorating forms of showing the girlies (gendy nooch) some love. The boygenius tour Tiktoks of Lucy, Phoebe, and Julien loving all over each other on stage are fertile ground for fond displays of friendship that were unavailable in my youth. I’ll be taking my inner child by the hand and showing her how nice it is to love on your people, and how you can always tell the over-familiar buddy of your buddy to fuck off when he gets too comfortable. It’ll be funny I promise. If I do the hands on my cheeks thing one more time I’m going to fucking lose it.
Happy summer honeys, and remember: Hug your friends! Hug me! Don’t fucking kiss me though or I will viscerally react like you poured acid on my cheek. I support the metric system generally but I merely submit to the overwhelming cultural force of la bise by necessity.
Enjoy the full moon darlings, and tell her you actually need a full night’s sleep because some girl on Substack told you so. If you’re still craving some more nonsense from my summer-not-on-break, go ahead (back two weeks), become that one musical movie where Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightley play drums on the roof (the third but not the last unnecessary film reference in this newsletter), Begin Again.
If you liked the vibes on the Hozier masterclass embedded up top, you can find all the songs from previous sends on this playlist, just in case you’re on the hunt for a new form of social media stalking now that Twitter is a limping zombie slobbering for someone else’s brain to eat because Elon’s was empty calories. Boom! Got ‘im!
As Meg Ryan said to her grandmother when she chose bisexually-hot Dimitri over becoming literal royalty while voicing a cartoon Russian princess with an American accent in 20th Century Fox’s 1997 animated classic,
A bientôt!
-Addison (in a French accent)