sex on the beach

let’s just saw i’m in my Carrie Bradshaw era. my Carrie/Samantha/Charlotte/Miranda era. semi-single female somewhere in between 20-50 with both a past, present, and future.

full disclosure, i was never a “Sex in the City” girl. i don’t even know when it came out, or why it passed me by. i vaguely remember hearing about it as a cultural phenomenon but i passed it over like i pass over most drinks with vodka.

maybe at a glance it felt superficial.

fast forward a couple decades and it’s now on Netflix and everyone is celebrating the ease with which they could binge their favorite series of all time. i was interested in it from an anthropological perspective (ha! so she says!) so eventually i gave it a whirl.

to give credit where credit is due, it is a fabulous series. the characters are well-developed and even more so as the years go by. the plots are mostly interesting with only minimal amounts of cringe. and yes, it is entertaining.

isn’t that why everyone watches series on Netflix? to give their mind a break and their soul a little comfort?

i watched most of the first couple of seasons at a moderate pace, once in a while, here and there, and then abruptly stopped right when Carrie had cheated on Adrian with Big and Adrian was about to find out.

i was cringing like i do in certain Ben Stiller movies….that feeling of “no, don’t do it!”

from my perspective, according to what i want in life, i would have much rather ended up with Adrian than Big. man with a cabin in the mountains who knows how to build stuff and wants me to marry him and have his baby? yes please.

but the thing is, i’m me, not Carrie.

Carrie has 200 pairs of shoes and freaked out in the countryside. their relationship was a forced match, not a perfect fit. a place where people want it to work more than it’s actually working, and of course you feel that.

that’s why she was cheating, and why they eventually broke up.

i, however, did not want to see that happen, and the beauty of a television series (or a movie) is that you can just stop watching. close the book. let it be.

just like that, Carrie and Adrian were frozen in time. in my mind, even though i knew better, they were still together.

and so they stayed, for another couple of years…

scene change to the relative present and it’s late spring in Cabo. my good friend (who is most definitely a Sex in the City girl) is moving to Miami, and she says that we have to watch the movie together before she leaves.

i didn’t even know there was a movie.

the thing is, before seeing the movie it was apparently mandatory that i see the rest of the series…. all 4+ seasons.

i went home and reinstated my defunct Netflix subscription and was then startled to find that Sex in the City was going to be leaving Netflix in 2 weeks. my friend was leaving in 4.

now the consuming of this series became a serious task. a calculation of hours. what i did in the background of everything — dishes, laundry, siesta — moving in warp speed through the years of individual narratives and shifting relations.

like any good story, the characters are designed so that we see ourselves in them.

in one season i was so very Carrie, there with my words and thought overthinking and occasionally overdrinking. in the next moment i was Charlotte, wanting a baby, wanting a marriage, getting something same same but different. then i was Miranda, overworked and undersexed and suddenly she’s the one who ends up having a baby with the bartender next door she’s convinced she’s not in love with until she is. and then i am Samantha, independent and relation-free, that is of course until she meets a man decades younger who has a different idea of what it means to be together, and then suddenly she’s hooked like a fish that thought it was out to sea.

to say it was an experience to speed-read Sex in the City is an understatement.

it wasn’t just an experience, it changed me.

keep in mind, i say this with a smile, but i don’t say it lightly.

i studied philosophy long enough to have many moments of profound epiphany and equal if not more moments which made me roll my eyes and sigh. i’ve received transmissions from master of thought who have written countless books sharing their wisdom, and have a conversation of equal depth with a man living on the streets.

the qualifier of what i consider to be “philosophical” is precisely the capacity of a thought or phenomenon to change how you see the world.

and yes, that happened watched HBO’s “Sex in the City.”

maybe it was the timing, maybe it was the context. or maybe it really is just that good.

good at showing you all the sides of the coin. all the points of perspective.

because you see, that’s the trick in relation — normally you just get to see things from your point of view. but when you’re watching a characters on a screen, or reading them on the page, in many cases you are given an omniscient worldview, in which you see peoples’ good intentions just as much as you see their shadows.

when you do that in an accelerated and condensed manner, it borders on a surreal amount of information that necessarily condenses into a single point:

give grace and and be generous in your relations, because the tables always turn.

i could spend hours and pages discussing the sweet and sordid details of how life panned out for those NYC ladies, but i find it more interesting to bring what i learned from them back into real life.

on a personal level, it keeps coming back to a sense of humility in the face of relation.

humility as in humbleness, rather than humiliation.

to really take in the fact that we don’t know, we really don’t know, what is going on for the other.

the Other.

now we are getting philosophical.

the Other, or the other-ed. the one made to feel different than the others.

o Other, thou who shalt never be me.

so just to be clear, as we set the philosophical stage, there is the Self, and the Other… and then there is everyone (and everything) else.

perhaps what was so striking about recently watching Sex in the City was the incredible throwback to the 90s, an era when the internet was just opening up, when not everyone had email or a cell phone, when people had to make plans and use land lines with cords and sometimes people got stood up for dinner with no explanation because an emergency happened and there was no way to communicate it.

meanwhile in their mind, someone is being stood up.

someone is not being loved.

someone is playing out a psychological relationship with their past via the present circumstances which are being incorrectly interpreted.

our emotional body is very opportunistic in this way — uses every opportunity to show us our blindspots, even in ways that seem unfair.

nearly all of us project something on someone, for a moment or maybe a lifetime.

this could be the unfulfilled needs or desires of inner children, avoidance or attachment patterns in the ways that we cohabite or communicate, unconscious and unresolved traumas or sometimes overt and conscious violence just to release a profound tension, an accumulation of stress, etc etc.

let’s take, for example, my decision to shut down the series right at the moment that Adrian was going to find out Carrie was cheating.

rather than face reality, i decided to archive and essentially ghost the conversation.

the “conversation,” in this case, is my dialogue with the narrative. but you see, i do the same thing in real life, with real humans and real conversations.

i’m not a big one for blocking people, that i save for extreme situations, but i’m a big fan of archiving — out of sight, out of mind.

honestly, after years of semi-dysfuncional communication with various different partners and a lot of self-reflection, i began to notice how much my emotional relationships affected the rest of my life.

(i doubt i am alone in this)

as a fledgling founder and business owner trying to make a decent living, and ALSO as a person who likes to keep their peace, sometimes i really don’t have the time or energy for the drama.

projection in any which way usually equals drama.

this is because the projecting party is trying to resolve something from the past in a present (and usually completely unrelated) situation.

getting pissed off at someone for not responding sufficiently to a message when in reality you are really pissed off at a different someone who “never responded” in the past means that long story short you’re getting mad at the wrong person.

the present Other isn’t the past Other, even if they are both Other.

you following me here?

usually we have one main Other in our mental dramas, maybe two.

just as someone once said, that every philosopher has one great thought, i have started to believe that we all have one main wound, one thing that we are tasked with healing, again and again, throughout our lifetime.

returning to what i know best, which is myself, i can say candidly that it has not missed my awareness that i quite often get pissed off at people for not responding sufficiently to communication.

here our story could veer off into a few different threads, those being 1. the affects of digital communication and technology on our relations; 2. the general societal trauma caused by Whatsapp; 3. there really are no rules in relation.

i’m going to choose door #3.

(for door #1 check out my book Emotional Permaculture, and for door #2 there is an piece of thought that will come out eventually)

returning to the sense of rule and regulation in relation, i found myself saying to a friend the other day, “i just wish there were rules, and therefore we could choose to play by the rules rather than not.”

this isn’t to say that we will always love the outcome of said rules, but the sense of mutual agreement is the part i find most interesting. perhaps that is really what marital vows come down to… on some level or another, this is what i promise you.

<this> — whatever this is.

recently i had a communication mis-meet with a person (hello Whatsapp trauma).

i could blame the fact that we come from different generations (Gen Z, by and large, seem to maintain a distinctly laissez-faire rule set)…. i could blame impatience…. i could believe that this person doesn’t care and therefore they don’t communicate…. i could also blame myself and my own tendency to actually prefer asynchronous communication, which is to say that most of the time i’d rather you send me a message than give me a call which basically means i will listen to you when i’m ready rather than right now.

i have friends with whom i exchange 10-20 minute voice notes periodically, precisely because we live in different time zones and it’s just easier to share bits of our lives in pieces than it is to get on a call.

then i send a message to my mechanic and he doesn’t respond for hours even though he was at the shop the whole time and most likely would have answered if i just called.

some people hate screens (i’m often one of them).

some people hate typing (i’m not).

some people don’t like translating thought and feeling into words.

some people would rather just stop by unannounced and take their chances…

which is precisely what led to this interesting situation where a communication mis-meet turned into an actual meeting in real life.

he under-communicated, i over-reacted, he blocked me, i blocked him, and then the universe coordinates a surprise rendez-vous on the side of the road the very next day.

it’s like two negatives made a positive.

because the thing is, we both did want to see each other, just in our own way, and the universe in all its infinite wisdom didn’t allow it to happen until we both fully let go.

i would like to think it could have happened a different way, but if i were scripting it, it would have gone by my rules, and ultimately, been my game. this way, i was given a choice — what’s more important to me? my idea of the rules, or what i actually wanted to begin with?

in some way it really is like going back in time to an era in which we were more consistently confronted with our own emotions simply because we had fewer opportunities and spaces in which to project them.

rather than sit with the discomfort of unrequited desire, we externalize the feeling by sending messages about it.

relation is meditation, if we let it be.

or else it’s an escapist vortex where we amplify our insecurities, and of course, everything in between…

© Fotographie by Silverbogen AG

if your relation was a cocktail, would it be like Sex on the Beach?

like i said, i’m usually not a vodka fan, but they say it’s sweet, fruity, and very easy-drinking, and it’s a pretty simple recipe.

• 1½ oz (45 ml) vodka

• ½ oz (15 ml) peach schnapps

• 2 oz (60 ml) cranberry juice

• 2 oz (60 ml) orange juice

i mean really, not bad, right?

there are worse things than sex on the beach.

so let’s see where this goes, my friends.

with non-attachment as my guide and the playa as my destination, maybe i’ll just let the universe write this one for me.

may you be most well this week and always !

rsvp: vidabierta

this piece is lovingly dedicated to my beautiful friend and fellow writer Alexa Ferrer — from Carrie Bradshaw to Joan Didion, may we continue to find our voice and speak our truth with style and grace, chapter by chapter, in these stories of our lives.

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