Tuesday, Jul. 29, 2003 | 6:58 PM

The occasional release of verbal bile is a good thing, I think. I feel much better today.

I have body issues that I spend most of my life ignoring because when I think about them I am severely freaked out. And watching myself for two hours straight last night absolutely forced me to think about this stuff. I had nightmares all night. Terrible nightmares. I am 26 years old and I have to face this shit once and for all because life is just too god damned short.

My body issues are all so confusing�they are about so many different things and it�s hard to parcel it all out. On the one hand I have the simplistic problems and insecurities everyone has being brought up in a society where each of us is judged by how we look. But then I have completely unrelated issues that have to do with food which go back to my childhood�these are issues that have to do with control and comfort. And then I have issues about sex and acceptance and those have a lot to do with a past relationship and my abortion experiences. It�s all jumbled together and I spend a lot of my time running away from it. I distance myself from my body to a great extent. I try not to think about it�I see it as something separate from myself and I pretend that I look differently than I do. I don�t really take much ownership of my body. I pretend it doesn�t exist. I ignore it.

I wallow in my body�s sensations, yes�but only on a superficial and unconscious level. I�m going to be honest and say that I cannot remember the last time I had a sexual experience with someone that didn�t involve mind altering substances�usually alcohol. And that is because I am terrified, absolutely 100% terrified of intimacy and scared shitless of trusting other people. So I create a buffer zone to make myself more comfortable. In fact, and I didn�t realize this until last night, I am so fucked up about things that happened over the past few years that I cannot imagine having a sexual experience without alcohol involved. And here I have been bragging about what a sexually liberated person I am. Yeah, real fucking liberated aren�t I? Racking up names in a little black book. Convinced that somehow those names would cloak me in confidence, that all those names would make up for the level of devastation I�d been feeling. They haven�t. I guess because my physical response to sex has never been questionable�I get aroused easily and never have a problem orgasming� I haven�t taken a look at what sex means to me emotionally�at least I haven�t in a long time. I want that level of intimacy associated with sex desperately but I�m so afraid of it because of how traumatizing and negative it turned out to be in the past, that in order to attain it I drown the fear and anxiety in a sea of retro cocktails.

Being with Ivy has really helped me in many ways�being accepted and loved because of how I look as opposed to being tolerated despite my appearance, has shifted my perspective somewhat and at the very least has given me the strength and minimal confidence to really start digging at these issues.

I think the more I do things that force me to be in my body (I.e. exercising, theatre, dance) the more I�ll start trusting myself and then if I trust myself, I�ll be able to trust other people. And maybe someday I�ll be able to be sexually involved without the emotional lubrication of a good stiff drink.

I am curious to know what other people�s experiences are with sex and alcohol. Are the two of them tied for you? I�m looking for insight.