This week I begin sessions with an internationally renowned sex therapist who has agreed to see me at the industry rate, nearly one hundred dollars off his standard fee. We’ll sit in a cozy library on Music Row and explore my sexuality. Yowza.
I spent the summer of 2000 in the desert of central Oregon on what was once a 64,000-acre cattle ranch named Big Muddy. During the 1980s Big Muddy was home to one of the most infamous cults in North American history. Gone now are the secret tunnels, crematoria and bath houses of the Rajneeshpuram. But what remains is one of the most stark and arresting places I’ve ever known.
Big Muddy was purchased by YoungLife a decade ago and converted into what can only be called a paradise. The camp is situated in a giant valley near The Dalles (which you’ll remember from playing the DOS-based Oregon Trails if you were home schooled, like me), at the end of a 15-mile gravel road, and seven years later, thinking about the beauty of it still makes my chest ache.
The final weekend of our session, we were allowed to run amok about the place as we pleased. It was closed to campers and we had free rein of the four-wheeler trails through the canyons, the ropes course, the glass-bottomed lake, the 100,000 square foot sports complex, the endurance course, the bike trails, the CoolCrete pool, the rafting gear, the horses, the fly-fishing gear.
Saving the ropes course for last, we committed to it as a group one Sunday afternoon. I’m sure most of you have been through one before. This particular course was built onto telephone poles that had been shipped in. Which put us anywhere from 30 to 60 feet off the ground. I am mildly afraid of heights. No, really. I can hardly watch movie scenes filmed on balconies or ledges. When my sister and I visited the J. Paul Getty Museum, perched entirely too optimistically in the Hollywood Hills, I clung trembling to the marble of the outside wall, while she raced to the edge of the deck to take in the full view. That Sunday at the ranch, awaiting my turn on the ropes, I was shaking so hard that they couldn’t get me into the harness until two friends held my legs steady. Naturally, I was the last to go through it.
It’s pretty simple, all told. You climb a telephone pole. You crawl across a rope net suspended in the air, you walk horizontally across a swinging pole, etc. At the end, you climb up a second telephone pole, and this is where you’re 60 feet in the air, and you stand up, unassisted, on top of it. There is nothing to hold onto. You’re harnessed in from the bottom, so should you fall, you’re going to actually fall for a little while before the harness catches you. There are no rails. Just you, standing on top of a swaying pole, trying to balance.
Hung slightly above and in front of you is a trapeze bar. Y’know, so you can jump up off the pole, into thin air, grab the bar, swing for a bit, and then be lowered to the ground. For fun. I neared the top of the pole and froze. I couldn’t stand up on it. I felt like I was beginning to have a heart attack. I silently prayed for a heart attack. I wanted to be LifeFlighted out of that wretched canyon and apologized to for being expected to climb the pole in the first place. There were 100 pairs of eyes on me. The guy I’d been smooching had an incredibly sweet, squinty expression on his face. He nodded at me and walked to where I’d land if I didn’t die first on the way down.
I finally made it all the way up there with my eyes closed. And I planned on making it down that way, too. But once I was standing, shakily, on top of it, I opened my eyes for the briefest of seconds and was stunned. It’s not that it made me want to live up there or anything, but holy shit, the view is motherfucking magnificent from the top.
There are any number of several other things I’ve done in spite of being scared shitless: tip toeing across 2400 hundred degree live coals; getting sober after college; flying alone to Prague to study writing; entering into a relationship again with a man who I was dearly hurt by in the past; signing up for and running a half-marathon; walking away from that man a year and half later; giving my grandmother’s eulogy; cutting 15 inches off my hair. Whatev.
And sure, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that there’s a large part of me who is very excited to begin sex therapy. But mainly, I think, who willingly does this?
It’s been my experience and it’s been my observation that for most of us, our sexuality is where we’ve been hurt the deepest, or where the deepest hurts register. I can’t imagine a more vulnerable position than deliberately exploring those spaces we’ve been conditioned to hide, if we acknowledge their existence at all.
Which is why I am wanting very badly to get this whole thing kicked off with the help of my good friend Johnnie Walker.
But the obvious fact remains, if I intend on doing this for a living, it is both fair and necessary and important to have had a little sex therapy of my own before messing around in other people’s lives.
I find it humorous that the things that draw me to sex therapy as a profession are the same things that terrify me as a client.
In the past six months, as I began articulating the desire to explore sex therapy as a career, I’ve been both surprised and humbled by people’s responses. No joke, strangers and loved ones will tell you the damnedest things, when given the chance. I’ve been privy to some of the most spectacular, heartbreaking, funny and endearing revelations, and the thing that people keep asking, over and over, is: Am I normal? Am I going to be ok? It is the dearest thing in the world.
I am, as I have been my entire life, curious. What does a healthy sexuality look like? And what does it mean to cultivate one? And how do we raise sexually healthy and fearless and responsible children? I’m convinced that exploring our sexuality is one of the bravest, wisest and smartest things we can do. For ourselves and for each other. But mostly for ourselves.
But no matter my convictions and certainties, I also remain nearly paralyzed at the prospect of this experience.
I suspect that sex therapy, like ropes courses, like a lot of things in life, requires a substantial amount of work. But I'm banking on this: the view from on top (pun intended), and hoping it's to die for.
