golden apple

09 May, 2026

18+ (you better believe it)

Of course you’re gonna die. We’re all gonna die someday, I heard in my sleep, and I gasped and sat up in bed, so sad and so scared, and I cried for what felt like forever. It doesn’t even matter, because every little thing matters. I worry we’re approaching the singularity, and that’s beautiful, but it’s also so cold there, because everyone’s seams overlapping might as well be a void, just white noise and no clear signal anymore. I don’t want everyone, not now, not yet, what if not ever.

I’ve tried to tell myself it doesn’t matter, that we’re all the same in the end, but then I realized no, that cannot be right, it comes from James Dobson, I’d read it in a book, searching for a clue, hoping I could recognize the look of love if I ever found it—his spurious claim that if two people just worked hard enough, if they just worked hard enough, which I’d taken on as my own belief, God damn him.

I’m hooked on a feeling, in every time and every place, even if it’s a different person entirely and we’re surrounded by different architectures and technologies, it’s just the shape of you, the inner geometries, the grand order of halls and vestibules, but also the strange branching tendrils that make the tree of you. Or do I mean the shape of myself? I don’t know what I look like.

I never knew the shape of me until something else passed through it, lighting me up like… like… gallbladder surgery. That stuff the doctor needs to inject to perform gallbladder surgery, the luminescent stuff, contrast dye, finding the locked doors or blocked hallways, a mystery being solved.

How romantic, a surgeon finding a blockage, a calcified stone, how vulnerable, how intimate.

“I’m not really straight, I just need you to resolve my father wounds for me,” I joked to a friend—when we were talking about kink, not overly deeply, just a string of jokes—and she was startled because I really went there, directly there, bypassing the fun part and going straight for the hole in myself. But isn’t that all a kink is? It’s begging you to go there—very rarely literally, because a kink is a fantasy room, a sealed vault with only one person in it, searching around for the source of pain, fear, horror, inflammatory disease.

I don’t have any medical kinks that I’m aware of, but I do have medical trauma. So I was startled to be met with kink in a medical setting, at two very different appointments, which I’d visited in quick succession. Because of the appointments’ proximity to each other, I was already wired up to notice a specific theme.

The nurse was helping me get back into my bra and she said she planned to keep me there, that I should wait a spell, that the doctor would probably want to return to talk to me—because he was very caring, she said, he has a wonderful bedside manner and truly cares about his patients. Wonderful aftercare.

This was news to me; his disposition was not great when he came in, and it’d deteriorated the more I spoke. I very much doubted he wanted to talk to me again or ever, but what I probably said was, “Uhh, I think he might not be back in, I think he’s sick of me.”

This benign statement had further activated her. She started talking cheerfully about how kind and patient he was while she drove him insane, constantly getting his orders wrong, doing everything wrong, “Oh, no, doctor, I’m so sorry—bad!” she said, and as she said this last part, she bent over the table, not fully but slightly, so I’d get the full idea without a full H.R. problem, and playfully spanked herself on the butt.

And I’m sure I stood there with absolute unconcealed amazement, my hand flying to my mouth trying to hide my reaction, which was a swift full-body response, horribly stretching its long-branching arms toward titillation, horror, bafflement, embarrassment, because I’d just received far too much information about the interoffice dynamic, about why this nurse reeeally loves her job, a good look at an inner state of affairs, rather like being flashed at Mardi Gras.

And of course, making a rare exception because I am exceptional, the doctor never returned after all, because he could not bear the sight or sound of me.

I am deeply familiar with a brat kink, because it is an escalating game of “would you still love me if—?” because a chaos goblin with no inner brakes is praying a stern divine hand will come down from on high and lovingly say to stop it right now.

Which is not nice, forcing a fellow adult to be your disciplinarian or, to swap one traditional notion of gender for another, your coddler or your nag. It is not a nice thing to do to someone you love, because you’re shifting responsibility—displacing blame, or risk—onto someone else’s shoulders, so that if one person is nagging, like please pay a bill, perhaps blame is shared with, or entirely transposed onto, the one who didn’t nag hard enough when the electricity shuts off. Or you’re angry at the one who wasn’t punitive enough, and now you’re mad at the one who willingly or even willfully enabled your choices, “why did you let me…?” as if you weren’t the one making your own choices. Because it’s not a person’s job to generate consequences for another adult. At times I’ve even fearfully wondered if there isn’t some sort of karmic status effect, a consequence multiplier, because you never learned how to be your own parent: to feel confident in making your own choices or mistakes, often pausing to carefully rethink them.

And we all do this at some point, we all shield ourselves from the looming fullness of accountability, partnering with the person we hope will one day play our very own bad guy, all of us just like the man who said “well she’s the one who handed me the apple,” as if she’d spat it into his mouth directly¹, had chewed it up for him, which I’m sure he’d love, actually, to receive it all predigested—as if he hadn’t been loitering around the tree looking for the apple himself, as if the fruit had even ever been called an apple at all. Maybe we should've put someone else in charge of naming the world.

But it’s not about the other person, is it, it’s about being reassured that you can be tolerated because, at some point, someone once showed you that all your need, your aching need, is unbearable, an unbearable burden, and all you want in this life is someone who shows you how easy it is, how tolerable it is, to be able to bear the sight and sound of you—but instead you keep finding people to help you lift boxes, or to keep your own hands clean, and once you find the one who can endlessly tolerate you, you just think “jackpot.”

Not very long after the nurse spanked herself in front of me, I’d met with my future gastroenterologist, a first-time consult.

I don’t think it was going well. At that moment I was protesting his suggestion that I go in for a common procedure, even after he’d assured me that he’d be the one performing it, and I was very afraid of going under anesthesia, because of this and that, of waking up mid-procedure, or afraid to have my gallbladder removed, of my then-condition somehow worsening, and I was explaining how—

“I know how to handle anxious patients like you,” he said to me, and my eyes went wide and my mouth clamped shut and twitched.

What… what was this feeling. I’d been caught off my guard. The anxiety was gone, which was strange, and a different internal state had already bloomed, a type of respect—okay, I see, maybe I’ll defer to you this once, my life literally in his hands—that could very quickly tilt into a beloved professor getting fired. Not with me personally, but I’d heard of it happening. (Instead, I’d had a very happy relationship with my own academic adviser, whom I regularly went to lunch with².)

Still taken aback, I finally worked my mouth to speak. “Thank you,” I told him, in a “challenge accepted” way. I very rarely intend to flirt, but I guess when I actually like someone, or at least, if I like something someone has said, I’m accidentally spicy. I’m already responding, involuntarily, unable to play it cool, the exact same nervous system that also makes me a holy terror.

A very specific expression was now crossing the doctor’s face.

“You’re welcome,” he answered in the same tone, a call-and-response, and we held each other’s gazes. I slowly turned my head toward the nurse to see if she were aware of, or reacting to, this absolutely lurid display of a patient/doctor relationship forming, but she was staring down at a clipboard unbothered and utterly uninvolved.

What he’d done, in fact, was manage my internal state, which might be the most important part of doctoring, because it meant he could get me all the way into the room and up onto an operating table, without dragging me in or sedating me first.

And obviously this is all to do with a father wound, too, because institutional medicine is absolutely patriarchal, not in the safe way but in the bad way, in an absent “the workday goes on” way, presenting a constant pressing danger to human bodies. So when a doctor comes in going “father knows best” (and I’ve even just given myself the ick, so please do not mistake this for a thing of mine) and, much more important, if I can actually believe it—because it’s very easy to be taken in by a confidence man, who says everything with so much outward conviction what option do you have but to take them at their word—but when you can actually believe he’s an expert and he won’t let anything happen to you, that inner brat goes, “Oho! Is that how it is. All right, let’s fuck around and see.”

Because feeling safe, truly safe in the presence of a purported authority is such a rare feeling, you can’t help but go “oho!” and blush when it happens. I’ve written before about how authoritarianism—the current state of affairs—is also a kink, because patriarchy has hurt everyone, and adherents are waiting for the arrival, at last, of a father figure who will finally not hurt them, who will not abandon them, with healthy boundaries and a charming sense of humor, who will protect them from the scary stuff and who will tell them a funny bedtime story, “daddy,” the second coming of a figure who never had a first coming.

The operating theater was incredibly cozy. I rolled in and lit up at the very sight of my doctor, who was over there getting all ready, and I said how nice it was to see him again, and I actually meant it, and he warmly said the same, and then the two of us and the nurse were cutting up and laughing.

The anesthesiologist, who comes along with the O.R., looked deeply unimpressed, annoyed, visibly rattled by the complete lack of professional artifice. “DO NOT SPEAK,” he shouted at me, and I looked at the nurse and we both tried not to start laughing again. And that’s the last thing I remember.

I think the real reason this working relationship was working for me—but not working for the anesthesiologist, who’d introduced himself to me with his credentials, in the exact same smooth practiced patter he used with every other patient in the guts mill—is because it’s lateral, not hierarchical. That is, we’re all stuck in our assigned roles³, doctor, nurse, and patient, but it’s collaborative, because my job is to just fucking trust him—to trust a doctor—which is the hardest thing for me, harder than it is for him to scope me and look inside and scrape me out, a specialty he went to school for.

A different doctor memorably screamed at me I AM THE DOCTOR, losing it now, completely unmasked and off her hinges, a child demanding to be put in charge. Once, when tears had sprung to my eyes because I wasn’t being listened to, she’d stared me down with contempt, as if I’d shit on the floor. (I’ve already chronicled how our working relationship ended.)

And I still haven’t even begun to describe love; I’m not even describing coregulation at this point. Maybe you hope someone else will come in and manage you, help manage your distraught internal state, which is enjoyable only right up until you get the feeling that someone is still managing you, micromanaging you, functioning as your handler now, a sort of conservatorship, because now you’re the patient in every setting, very carefully observed and constantly concern-trolled. And how can you even be upset, when you’re the one who, in so many words—unable to trust yourself for two seconds—asked for this?

I’m remembering and practicing my own boundaries now. My co-star is the dog, a husky. Her name is “Missy.” It isn’t short for Melissa but, rather, the way you’d address a small child when trying to get her attention, attempting to seize the reins again. It suddenly occurred to me the other night that this term of endearment is the shortened feminine form of Mister or Master—that is, Missus or Mistress. And the husky does see herself as the one in charge of everyone, even as that profound responsibility makes her visibly nervous, always checking behind her to see if I’ve ghosted on her yet.

I was attempting to accomplish all my tasks before the next houseguest arrives. “The time has come to test the baby gate,” I finally texted my best friend—a short sentence indicating that I was trapped in the dog’s reality yet again, unable to get out.

“Lol,” she said.

The gate wasn’t gonna work. Wrong size, wrong everything. A physical boundary was not going to help me. Now I was messaging my friend with a new update.

“Well she’s successfully eroded my boundaries (opened the door, walked in, jumped into bed) and is now in bed next to me while I sit on the edge sideways typing,” I reported, patting the dog simultaneously. “She’s not just an escape artist, she’s a break-in and take-over artist. She crosses boundaries both ways, and looks so cuuuuuute doing it.” Then: “This is a good education.”

“Put the stool in front of the door again,” my best friend said. Then, “Lol,” then “She’s a turkey.”

“She is SUCH a turkey,” I replied, adding that I would barricade my door, I was just too tired, right then, to take any pains to block her from her constant comings and goings, which had successfully divided my attention into doing nothing productive at all. “I talk to her about boundaries and consent and that she needs to wait for an enthusiastic yes, but it’s like she doesn’t understand me or something,” I joked.

Then, “Oh wait I think she did pick up something from my tone, she just huffed and moved away.” Then, “That should NOT have worked.”

Then I said I was gonna take an allergy pill and get back to work. As I stood up I walked past a bowl of divinatory tiles and, without realizing I was even doing it, reached into the bowl. In my palm were two tiles.

“Huh!” I said aloud. “The Hourglass and the Mosquito.” That second one is having your resources sapped away, one tiny syringe at a time, the needling. I looked at the dog. “Are you beginning to feel a little bit like a mosquito,” I asked her darkly. It’s okay when she wants passive attention, I give a steady supply of it, but then she paws at me and it hurts.

It isn’t a husky’s fault. They need one to two hours of active exercise a day. So they’re always operating like a child, with an energetic surplus they woke up with, begging to have it burned off, and in a partnership with a dog this is like a constantly growing debt for the human participant, and I’m here all alone at the moment, not just in charge of the dog (presumably) but in charge of everything, and there just isn’t enough of me left to do it all.

After the tenth interruption I was finally in the laundry room, surrendering to her whims. I stirred her food dish with a Greenie, a little snack.

“This is it,” I was saying to her gravely, “this is the end. I have met your every possible want or need today. I love you, but you should know that this is not love. What I am giving you is a bribe, because I’ve finally become so intolerant that I will simply give you what you want.”

A flare of grief rose up inside me as I recalled how my mother had bribed and bribed me, and now I sadly thought to myself, that is not love, that is simply giving you what you want, and maybe we surrender and do this when we are on the precipice of no longer being able to tolerate the person, hoping they will take the hint and become self-directed.

And hadn’t I mistaken her capacity for distress tolerance for love after all, because she’d adopted me, rescued me, removed me from a woman who was so dysregulated she could not tolerate me for a single fucking second, the woman who slapped my face—“bad!”—and yanked my hair hard, and nicknamed me fucking brat.

Meanwhile, the woman who’d adopted me could afford to tolerate me, had the budget to tolerate me, because she could keep handing me different things until I went silent. But I was not bored. I was never bored. I wanted both her presence, and for her to play—the only two things that can possibly reassure a dysregulated child—and there was an aching dearth of either.

And I began to see where I’d gone wrong, how this scheme was always going to play out, every morning “are you sick of me yet,” and me asking “are you sick of me yet” right back, willingly entering into a contract, fully aligned, to see how much we could tolerate, or for how long, with the call-and-response are you sick of me itself containing mutual contagion, and naming that an act of love, an act of grace, true romance, the apple of my eye, instead of what it really is, which is a game of chicken.

And I don’t want to hurt anyone—that’s my whole thing, harm OCD, I’m always so scared of hurting anyone—but Jung said “where your fear is, there is your task,” which makes me feel utterly ill, God damn him.