Edit: Huge post rant with a lot of personal information and feelings locked away really deep inside of me. May contain triggers or things that upset you. I felt the need to post since it largely strikes at the root of the demons I've been fighting. You have been warned before you read.
Experiencing urges right now. A lot due to anger and anxiety. Those are two emotions I have a lot of trouble managing. I spend hours on end every single day off glued to a chair or lying in bed literally stretching the skin on my dick as part of my foreskin restoration. I do it for the appearance and the added sensitivity. It takes hundreds, if not thousands of hours out of my life, it's incredibly uncomfortable, and ultimately it sometimes feels like I'm trying to regrow an arm that I lost or something. There's whole communities on the internet dedicated to this issue, and the whole issue is so incredibly divisive that no one ever talks about it. Deep down, I don't think that my parents ever had any intention of hurting me, but I feel immensely angry and incredibly frustrated with cultural mores and it makes me think that things like mass delusion in the medical profession exist. I got absolutely infuriated really deep down today when my father offered to give me a cologne he didn't need. What an unusual trigger, right? I felt absolutely baffled and enraged because I often feel like my parents were completely oblivious to the fact that they cut off a huge piece of my dick when I was born. It makes me really upset sometimes when I think of all the stupid wasted energy and heat that we are pumping into the atmosphere mindlessly chasing our passions and brief interests. I guess my purchasing is a similar way of having created so much entropy. But I can't help but get enraged when I consider how a 20 minute operation that I had as an infant cost me literal years of my life sitting in a chair tied up to a goddamn clamp that's supposed to violently stretch the shaft skin of my dick until I have enough stretch marks and scar tissue to remake the environment that my penis is naturally supposed to be in. I get even more fucking mad when I think about all the vain things that my family and other people purchase - clothes, cars, vacations, fancy dinners out at restaurants, when they are too goddamn stupid to not think twice before they start cutting off pieces of baby's dicks who have no say in the matter! And I get even angrier and more indignant when I read articles from a culture I feel is overly-sensitized to body issues when it couldn't even defend my own goddamn genital integrity. Goddamn, it makes me even angrier at myself when I realize that I get so upset by this that I have become the very thing I so oppose just for saying this. It's a goddamn positive feedback loop of frustration and rage that's been going on inside me for 4 goddamn years! I think I first experienced it by viewing overly eroticized pornography of uncut men, and I started doing research and wondering. To be completely honest, the whole thing makes me angry at everyone except for other circumcised men like myself. It makes me pissed at uncut men because they got to experience what I was denied, and it makes me pissed at women since there is so much understanding nowadays for feminism, when nobody needs to defend women's goddamn genital integrity in our country. I get angry when men complain about their cut/uncut dicks and women express their preferences about them. Would they argue about whether they preferred baby boys with out without their arms?! Some will say it's not the same thing, and to a certain extent, that's true, but a great part of my mind is stuck on the half of it.
Where am I left with all this? I know I'm wrong and not selfless enough for thinking all this, but it's something I need to overcome if I really want to be a free man - unfettered by storms of emotion. I told my parents this whole thing last year and the way I felt about everything and I did it completely wrong, but it was also cathartic, and it's something I'm convinced that no complete resolution can be reached in. Continued dialouge makes me even angrier, so I need to distract myself until the anger subsides. It gets really bad when I start to get angry about it. For practical purposes of living together and me not getting triggered, it's a very good thing I'll be working when my parents are off and vice versa.
For me, when these feelings subside, what remains are the following:
- Hatred for stupid cultural mores that go so far as to overlook people's bodily integrity
- Hatred at myself for being so goddamn sensitive about my own "privileged male pleasure"
- Desensitization - I care less about everything since I just think "to hell with it all" about a society I feel so powerless to change, and where I feel like an asshole for not speaking up more. The truth is that I feel emasculated in a way and I'm too shy to speak up about it, nor do I see many avenues for productive dialogue.
- This weird sense of myself as an object. I questioned myself for awhile as to whether this obsession with my dick made me gay, and I even developed new fetishes for uncut dicks - call it uncut dick envy - because of my being so set on this, but ultimately I'm just not interested in dating men or having a relationship with a man.
- A sense that I would like to make myself great in some way at the expense of others.
I shudder to think how I'd feel if some other injustice came my way - dismemberment of any kind. The whole thing freaks me out.
What am I then? My whole identity (as well as many people's, and you could really say they're inseparable) is wrapped up in my sexuality. I envision where I would like to be, and my only consolation is the idea of restoring my foreskin remnant so that I never have to see the scarred skin on my dick, and I can literally hide my shame under the appearance of a natural penis. I even want it to be bigger than an average dick. I want it to be huge and I want it to make a statement. This idea comforts me. I've also had this growing fantasy of myself as this sort of whore-man - a man who exists only to please women. Male strippers come to mind. If I can just lose my ego in the notion of pleasing women the way that women seem to give themselves over to men's pleasure in pornography, I imagine that I'll experience some kind of ecstasy and release from losing myself by becoming some sort of sexual/athletic superhuman. Or a great artist, where you get so good that nothing matters anymore, and people practically worship you. It's the reason I set these absolutely herculean physical goals for myself. I feel like I remember hearing about that the reason Bruce Jenner (before he became Caitlyn Jenner) became a decathlete was because he needed to accomplish some incredible goal. Was this similar reasoning? Was it to escape from his man's body in some way? I'm not entirely sure. Maybe it was a desire to overcome physical limitations, similar to the way trans- people have their own physical limitations to overcome.
My mom and my sister kicked me out of the living room when they were watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey. I read into little moments like this. It leads to me going ballistic in response to little things, a sign of no emotional intelligence. It makes me even angrier because then I feel physically rejected when I look at my dick and rejected as a person because I just wanted to sit down with them, and absolutely wrong for even getting mad. Then I go to my room and start writing this post because it's my only way of onanistically spilling out my anger and energy into something which will hopefully be productive. Feminism, stupid reality TV that objectifies men (to be fair, it goes both ways), my own virginity and feeling like my girlfriend was babysitting me years ago while I begged for sex, not even understanding that porn and circumcision and vigorous masturbation and my own goddamn selfishness partially ruined opportunities at a healthy sexual relationship, and just generally being a little bit down on my luck, all the while I feel like it gets tied up into this circumcision issue in my brain - it all adds up and it's the perfect pot for me to be relapsing in. To be fair, there are other issues of a similar nature, I'm sure. But it takes all of my emotions and my energy and any love out of me and makes me into this angry, enraged ball full of hate.
But I'm not doing relapsing. I need to confront these demons.
There is the "evil" voice in me that says everything I said above...
But in one part of my mind, there is a logical voice that talks. It says something like this:
"Your parents never meant to hurt you. And the hurt is more than you make it out to be since you are so fixated on it. There are other issues at play here too. Yes, society may allow this issue to go on unabated, but it really doesn't make a major difference in anyone's sexual life, and all issues of the way your penis looks are largely personal preference. If you're really wrapped up in this, a restoration will give you back at least 50% of what you lost, and you can even go further if you like. Maybe someday there will be better restoration methods, too. And don't worry about finding relationships. When you fight this demon and grow mature and can act like it, you'll find the right partner. After that, all of these body image and self image issues will largely subside. Everything else pales in comparison once you find a reason to live, or someone to live with."
I feel like, in one part of my mind, this and all body image issues would be non-issues, and I would focus more on helping other people. That's like the zen that I can't bring myself to live for. Maybe that's the red pill, so to speak.
But I'm weak in this way, and I like so much of what lies on the other road, and I feel like I need to promote myself in some way. It's the reason I exercise for performance, and not recreation, similarly.
In this way, I get my own little secret revenge on the world by proclaiming my own superiority for having suffered through all this. I do it by making myself physically stronger, more attractive, richer, and better in any way. It's kind of the mindset I sort of subconsciously live in right now - well - combined with a more altruistic one, and I think the only reason I do it is so that I can be able to make others feel the pain of rejection that I myself felt through all the things I've spoken about above. Maybe I'll love someone through it all, or reach some kind of selfless enlightenment through whatever hard work I need to do to make myself that important/desirable (though people tend to separate by age, and such a revenge might be hollow and unsatisfying). For me (in this mindset), that's the only reason to keep living. To become great, and reject others who do not work as hard as I do. I get a rush from turning people down in any way, and I (deep down beneath it all) laugh inside when I make them feel good, but I know that my rage and hate are stronger and deeper and more justified than theirs. It's somewhat masochistic. I care less and less about my social acceptance and things I used to be embarrassed about, like my virginity, and I care more about real, measurable statistics, like running pace, penis size, how attractive I am, how much money I have, etc. Maybe it's the reason I have this image of myself as a male stripper or some other type of plaything. I subconsciously ask myself: wouldn't it be amazing revenge to make women feel the way I felt - marginalized - by how they feel around me?
This image always comes back to me of when I was in seventh grade when this really attractive girl in our class sat on my seat when I was working in art class. I was really intent on my project and seated at the edge of my chair and didn't even know she was there. Then a couple of boys in our class came over and followed suit. I don't know why, but this always bothered me and kind of embodied my nerd rage at the world, particularly directed at women, and a self image which rested on my (probably overweighting in some ways, to be fair) events like this made me grow up as a teenager underconfident about friends and thinking that I couldn't meet the standards of girls I was interested in going out with. I'm not trying to play the victim, but I'm just trying to get a better understanding of where all of this frustration comes from, and how I feel about it.
Ultimately, this way of thinking might lead me to some sort of short term rewards, but only if I worked hard enough to make people sexually desirous of me - and I'm only decent looking. Still, I have this hope that I can make myself irresistible in some way. It scares me when I talk like this because it sounds tyrannical, but at the same time, all of this frustration and anger are not often pointed at anyone in particular. I've felt the brunt of it myself, and my parents have felt some of it. And in the long term, it will probably make me utterly miserable. But I feel so strongly about this and the anger and rage has fomented in my head for so long that I think that's all that I'm living for. What am I to do? I still enjoy things like exercise, social interaction, and so on, but I can't help but feel like there is this specter hovering over me, whose reasoning I actually agree with in many ways, that adds this tinge of hate and vengefulness to every encounter. I'm building myself up to ultimately tear myself down as a statement for how angry I am, since I don't feel like I have the voice to express myself, nor do I want to in words. I almost feel like I've grown so hard that I'll become a statue dedicated to anger. I'm practically doing that right now. For much of the day, it makes me very productive too, to be completely honest. I've channeled the vengefulness into enough constructive outlets. Almost all is made constructive now through exercise and self-improvement, except these wounds of hate which occasionally open up, the body image issues, the loss of my sense of purpose at times (and complete, disastrous pivots at others), certain bouts of social awkwardness or feeling like my tongue is tied for all the American Psycho-ish hatred and insufficiency I feel, a sense of loss of productivity in a few areas, and a few other things, but those things have subsided more over the years in some ways as I busy myself.
As I write all of this, I realize that it's horrible in some ways, but I also like much of it and agree with it as an individual. Call it having a huge chip on your shoulder, but I think that just about expresses every single thing that I feel really deeply inside of me. Obviously, I would never mean to hurt anyone, and I hope no one got offended by this post, but realize that this is a complete thought I've consolidated in my head that I merely brush aside every morning when I wake up. It sometimes feel like there's a whole dimension of experience and emotion I suppress just by going about a normal day without thinking about these things.
I guess that the reason I write this, beyond preventing myself from relapsing in rage, is because I want to move on in some way. After I expressed much of this to my father last year very clearly, he asked me "Do you want to move on?" by which he meant, as someone completely on my side in the moment when he asked...What is it that
I want...It's a weird feeling to get completely caught up and lost in your rage, and I think that the rest of my life, as I move on trying to be more constructive from here will tell, I'll answer the question louder through actions.
Words that come to mind for what I want: "acceptance" "revenge" "loving and to be loved" "wisdom" "experience" "stability" "understanding" "constructive behavior"
It all pretty much aligns with those life priorities I outlined a few days ago. And ultimately, I feel like my experience starts to just fade to nothing when I consider how broad and massive the bounds of our lives are. I'll go on and keep working at being more constructive. I'll keep moving at my best guess until I find North on my compass.
Edit: Reading through this whole community's stories - people of all different ages and backgrounds searching constantly to overcome this great weight that holds them down - you all inspire me to be better - to have more firsthand experiences - to try to make myself better and more altruistic - to be more honest and helpful where I can. Thank you so much.
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