The second morning of VibeClipse I woke up in the very late morning to an empty cabin. My girlfriend had graciously let me sleep in, running off to explore the campgrounds with our other cabinmates. I righted myself and looked around the abandoned room. It was too late, I’d lost too much of the day, and the dead silence was uncanny. I felt a spike of Alone.
She loves me though, I can be back with her and her entire Scooby Gang of friends in no time. I reached for my phone to text her the post-rat version of “where u at girl?”. I had already unlocked the screen and opened WhatsApp before I stopped myself. Was I really about to destroy this?
In every retreat I’ve attended, all the way back to my first Burn, I’ve had moments of searing Alone. Periods of relentless alienation that remind you we are fundamentally disconnected from any other thinking being, we can never truly share ourselves, and changing this is actually impossible. It hurts. In the real world, I always run. In these sacred places, though, I am able to sit with it. I am forced to sit with it. (The two can’t be distinguished anyway.)
I finally found the words to capture this Alone when writing of VibeCamp 2.1
In retrospect, such moments are among my peak experiences. The sense of something profound and important happening grows like a deep bruise. A throbbing ache fills my soul. In the heights of this pain I reach out and touch another human. I find something to hold onto within them and reel myself in, one heartbeat at a time. The feeling of solace that comes when I’m finally able to return to the humanity around me is the most intense feeling of Grace I can imagine. The balm over that ragged wound, the soothing knitting that follows, is a religious experience.
It is far better to have felt that intense distress, and then to undergo the recovery afterwards, than to have been happy the whole time instead. The high is so much better than normal happiness, even big happiness, that it’s worth the preceding valley of pain. To the point that I’m now beginning to welcome that feeling2.
I think that I finally understand masochism. Really personally understand it. You can’t get the high without the pain. That makes it attractive in its own right. Never thought I’d get to there via personal alienation, but I guess we all have our quirks. Mine isn’t even that uncommon.
I lace up my shoes and head out to be alone and find solace in common humanity. Two steps outside the door I run into my girlfriend, who was returning to fetch sunblock or panties or something.
Man, sometimes you just can’t win. 😅 It’s OK, I guess I’ll indulge the masochism some other day. I’m not about to abandon my girl when fate so swiftly linked us back together! The message was received, I can interrogate the details later. Right now we have a pirate ship to climb.
The clarity I found there makes me think of these as Barn Moments now
(in the right ritual context)
There are probably multiple causes of, or kinds of, masochism. Yours is like going hungry to make your food taste better. I don't think that explains the kind of masochism most-common in BDSM, which seems to be the masochism of the sub, often with degradation.