“Recovering femininity is: don’t let fear of being different keep you from passion to dance by yourself.”
Occasional dreams of erotic subtlety, relaxing as dancing, like floating on air. Surreal or philosophical, knowledge is gained in all phases of interpretation. Raw emotions can be wicked and sensual — but what gives us empathy towards others in pain, is harsh truth, as soothing, lucid thoughts flow into our hearts. Words are inadequate to control art’s meaning as pain is to a body.
What you see as my criticism or an illusion of introspection as what made me feel psycho — it was all very overwhelming. Just how many ways can I say this really? Psychologically, I have only my own experience and basic research to validate a point. I did not have a psychological eval throughout my breast cancer treatment and I chuckle at this more than refer to analysis as a shoulder for my own needs. After breast cancer, I’m a tad bit more psycho than all the slew of doctors, still not one ever urged me to be eval’d whether or not I should have.
If there must be a scientific aspect of in and out of awake mode, nightmares are wrought with mythical creatures and slaying monsters of disease; nonetheless, the Rougarou and daydreams all are pure mumbo-jumbo to me. My slant on psychology.
Learning to have faith in myself took a hold of my whole consciousness while I healed. Transparent dreams and nightmares made me shiver from their violence, my emotions oftentimes so rough… my thoughts later erupted shudders from their intensity locked inside my psyche. I tried to make sense of my swirling thoughts awake and asleep, interpreting both the subversive and the sublime.
Resulting from pain prescriptions, the effects of a mastectomy short-circuited my sleep, my mind deadened by the sledgehammer’s clang. All analysis failed to enlighten me, often just adding to my confusion. Backlash to media or comfort, my reserve fell shattered on the ground. And that said, please do not over-analyze the images nor my dreams, just a lot of letting off steam, not all bound to BC.
I was most fascinated by research. Normally I’m a logical thinker — BUT I had my boob cut off so there was all that ‘mumbo-jumbo’ shit left behind in my head. Self-consciousness or lack of self-esteem has never been a problem since high school, but losing a breast was fucking very difficult to cope with emotionally. Bodily, a woman’s breasts are a part of what makes us a female — it’s the core of our being. Yes, it’s cultural, a woman’s whole self, her identity in life.
Femininity is often perceived as a social construct, which is made up of both socially defined and biologically created factors. This makes sexuality distinct from the definition of the biological female sex as both males and females can exhibit feminine traits. This being just words to describe attributes, but when the whole physiological self is damaged by illness, it all goes way beyond words.
Instilled in our nightmares, we are fascinated with mythical creatures. From nightmares–
The Ancient Greeks believed that nightmares resulted from the presence of a demon named Ephialtes. In Germany they were known as mara, mahr, mare. German Folklorist Franz Felix Adalbert Kuhn records a Westphalian charm or prayer used to ward off mares:
Here I am lying down to sleep;
No night-mare shall plague me
until they have swum through all the waters
that flow upon the earth,
and counted all stars
that appear in the skies; Amen!
In ancient Greek mythology, Lamia was a beautiful queen of Libya who became a child-eating daemon. Lamia is a mistress of the god, Zeus. Her allure is a disguise — she eats the children. Aristophanes claimed her name derived from the Greek word for gullet referring to her habit of devouring children. In the myth, Lamia caused Zeus’ jealous wife, Hera, to kill all of Lamia’s children and transform her into a monster that hunted and devoured the children of others…and the repeated monstrosity transforms her into a monster.
This ‘monster’ that lives in a woman’s nightmare was once thought to harbor destructive and evil tendencies but maybe somehow we rid ourselves of stress simply from ancient myths. Even evil can be sensuous in history. Knowing mythical origins opened my understanding of real nightmares consumed by grief after a mastectomy, as if my subconscious was trying to cleanse my mind of gory crap. Not to be so burdened. Once I rationalized my dreams I could heal …
Erotophobia …
A ghoulish-looking portrait of our fetish of evil (and repulsion) of our darker side. We prefer to believe that myths, not real people are bad. Beneath at least some of the impulse to ‘feed’ our fetishes, our aversion to both writing and reading sexual or erotically explicit stories is Erotophobia, fear of erotic pleasure. This means, borne out of fear of being discovered. Yet, even in our fear, blood and guts and gore excites us. Perhaps we can blame erotophobia on the Victorians — it made us prudes.
Psychological prudishness manifested in taboos as the moral standard, even if that measure is unrealistic, not human nature at all. Yet it’s what society dictates for us no matter what generation. And that’s why I “caution” my breast close up images. By no means am I ashamed of my selfies; they are edited for procedural explanation. I expect there are readers, who gasp at the audacity, such raw shit. Subsequently, I dare they are perhaps such naysayers who criticize unwittingly solely based on the above statements. That’s their deal.
WOMAN IN RECON 