Oh and plus this whole thing of primal distress kinda fails because how is it that kids have so much damn fun when they are young and naive! My little brother is largely this big ball of fun and delight. It seems to me that the thing that corresponds to resentment the most is the disappearance of naiveté.
Hmm. Yeah, Ok. Points granted.
It was less about the cause of suffering, and more about the recycling of infant feelings into libido.
Why are breasts so attractive?
Surely we have, as both men and women, something of a memory, or at least that infant reflex.
Maybe it’s just not a big deal.
The idea first came to me when I was investigating desire and love while meditating on a bench years ago. I could see this point of softness, a promise of bliss in my centre of vision. Like some sort of rosy womb. A canal. Dare I say a vagina.
It was a promise of bliss.
Maybe it was just a echo of what Richard saw moored in his sinking boat off the Whitsunday islands. A rosy pearl. The goddess turning into the source of all evil.
The centre of being.
Time to get my 5km walk done. Cheers for the chat.
Yeah thanks @Andrew that was fun!
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There is an infinitude available for this body.
“The stone that the builders rejected has become the capstone” old mate, Jesus.
Sorry 1 last thing 
which I think might clarify a little too. I do agree that desire itself is most definitely primal, as in ‘I’ am desire and desire is ‘me’. But it is what society does with that desire that is the problem, as in it launches one into this vortex of schemes and fantasies that promise to fulfil this desire and of course they never do hence the tried and failed!
I was thinking something similar. That I appreciate that I am not fundamentally desirable.
Just imagine being so perfect as to be mutually infatuated to have the highest bliss, only for age, tragic circumstances, or whatnot to take it away.
It’s only because I am not, that I will die, that the search for an actual freedom ever happened.
I can imagine what it would be like to have all those promises fullfilled, only to loose them for whatever reason.
I have lost enough, without having to loose that too.
Being ordinary may just have an ultimate perk.
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There is “cope” in that though. Because what would I sign away for a perfect body, wealth, and ultimate desirability?
I already know I sign away everything for less.
Not for long though. Not right now.
Well the coolest thing about this is that even for the most desirable of them all the fantasies never deliver what they promise, they cannot!
I don’t know if you are familiar with Dan Bilzerian? Who was the ultimate playboy there could ever be x1000. He has been in multiple interviews in the past few years basically detailing how his lifestyle never made him happy.
I had a similar experience working as a naked butler for hen parties, the fantasy never lives up to what it promises. It is the very nature of it being a fantasy that means it can never fulfil, because it is a creation, it is not genuine.
That I find somewhat comforting. It feels like a betrayal though.
Sour grapes for me. It’s out of reach; “It was probably sour anyway”
That was part of the guilty feeling laughing at her last night. Like “you are just coping because you can’t be happy with a woman”.
I don’t know. Somehow I sorta don’t want to think that no one in the human condition ever lived the ultimate promise of it. It’s unprovable from my position. I can’t really know it’s a fact.
The question is rather, if something better is on offer than that promised bliss, right here and now, and I don’t have to look a certain way, or have any money, or even know a fraction of the answers, why not take it?
I mean, if it’s available, why not?
If it’s better, then I don’t need “sour grapes” to justify it. It just better, right?
Besides, they all say something similar. Yet, just about everyone I know is lying about something.
Maybe it’s exactly as promised. Just that this is far superior, and available to all.
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That whole discussion on authority has freed me up a lot. Seeing that it was, at least mostly, a condition from the outside as you say @Kub933
I otherwise had the feeling, “great, another shitty thing I am that I can add to the endless list”
Ok.
4km walked revealed;
it comes down to ceasing to believe that being desirable will “deliver the goods”.
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For me.
Perhaps a perfectly desirable person does get the goods?
Certainly not actual freedom though.
That’s the irksome niggling. A reservation and resentment. What if?
Hmm.
Seeing as I have neither, it’s natural I would doubt the one I am not programmed to believe in.
Lately I noticed that when I see my shadow, I don’t feel the disgust at the narrow shoulders I always hated so much. Something has changed in my feelings towards this body.
A softness.
The motivation to do the best I can to clean myself up, to change into a happier and harmless person, seems to be finding a momentum just thinking about this body.
That is a cool change.
No grand heroics for all and sundry.
Like I saw the other day regarding “saving the world”, I only can expect to understand myself and that is quite enough!!!
I am not fighting feelings now.
Each day they reveal more and more. I reveal more and more to myself.
I am getting a glimmer of what the alternative to desire is; a preference, even willfully sort out, without the desperation.
I would prefer her on this journey with me. A her.
The motivation can’t be for that body in lieu of this body however.
It starts at home.
Perhaps it just takes a caring for this body, to make the commitment to feel good for the term of my life.
Certainly I have put it through enough!
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I have started to like the saying on the AFT,
If one can’t make the commitment to feel good for the rest of your life, just forget about the whole thing!
I felt that it was a somewhat brutal statement, but it’s actually a pretty straightforward thing.
If a person were to refuse to learn basic math, certainly the Nobel prize in mathematics should be forgotten about!
It’s really just common sense.
If a gold medal is my aim, let’s say in Olympic skiing, yet I refuse to move somewhere that has snow, and refuse to buy skis, and never learn the basics of standing up on them…
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I am chuckling at much of who I have been.
I have been feeling good for a few days it seems. Even with all the powerful feelings and confusion, the commitment to feeling good is holding.
Learning that I can psychologically remain in a feel good space, whilst other “deeper” stuff surfaces is really, really, really cool.
The whole observation from @Kub933 that romantic love is a construct, a fantasy is bringing clarity to my thinking.
That thinking is becoming more like a constant realisation.
Things surrounding my ex(s) have clarified a whole lot. There is a light weight acknowledgement of the workings of desire and romantic love.
Richard’s phrase “emotionally accepting, the intellectually unacceptable” is making sense.
It’s this very feeling. Feeling good, despite the mess and drama of the interplay of desire and it’s coping socialisation of “romantic love”.
It’s totally unacceptable that we humans should be suffering because of desire which is mismatched with the facts.
It’s now emotionally acceptable, because of that increasing conviction that I can remain committed to feeling good for the rest of my life.
Why let something such as my own instinctual desire, or another’s desire determine whether I am enjoying life?
I went to the gym today, which is a lovely sunny late winter day, and exercised for the first time since smashing up my shoulder and breaking my collarbone in May. The feeling was so totally different. The appreciation of this body is growing.
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Actually, it’s the first day of Spring.