Animal Behavior

Imagine growing up, hidden away from the harsh reality of the world, on a 75 acre tobacco farm with rolling hills, swampland, Native American remnants, and horses galore. Now imagine spending every day traversing the landscape on your horse, trudging along dutifully, galloping up the grassy slopes, wading into the ripples of the pond, jumping over the fallen trees, so far away from society that you are sheltered from its clutches–free to exist as wildly as you were born to. Now imagine hitting age 18 and being expected to work in the confines of a concrete building, at times never seeing the sun for weeks on end, because it is your “duty” to help others, in a world where almost half of your constituents actively vote against actual freedoms in a desperate grasp on to freedom from accountability. Shit sucks. Finding your place in that world, particularly as a wild creature, is especially difficult. To be expected to exist so unnaturally, subject to the confines of human judgment. In societies based strongly around religions that you don’t respect. In beliefs that you know are naive, or just outright false. Slow to change, and slower to progress. It’s like one of those National Geographic specials when you compare the speed with which the lionesses prowling the Savannah hunt to the rate at which the grass grows. I understand the normalcy of pace is relative, but mine is off the charts.  Add in several near death experiences of my own, an overwhelming heap of childhood trauma, and witnessing several deaths first hand, and you get the healthy knowledge of complex PTSD and along with it, questioning your reality while also trying to balance wanting to help the world with hating the world and all of humanity in it. Factor in the impulsive curiosity of ENTJ’s, an objectively attractive female body, and learning by studying the world around me and you’ve got the lethal combination that results in whatever the fuck I am.  And I’m obviously intense. I know I’m “a lot to handle”. But, I believe it was the meme that said “fuck no I’m not wife material. I’m totalitarian dick material” that really made me feel “appreciated” for the way I am. Like, as alone as I normally am in this world, I’m not ACTUALLY that alone. There are others, equally weird, equally accepting, like me–just not necessarily in my physical environment. Again, download Tik Tok. Its like happiness and body positivity and quirky humor at its best. Which makes sense, seeing as how I lived tucked away on our farm in an incredibly conservative town the majority of my life. Or how my Aunt phrased it “we admire unique children and often criticize them as unique adults”.  But, I guess I hadn’t realized how artistic I am with my life prior to having this extra time in quarantine. Sure, I was a painter and artist, supporting myself through graduate school. But I was a woman of STEM first and foremost. I was a professional. And you couldn’t blend both. Not in the extremity that I am naturally inclined to. But what good is science when it doesn’t captivate the audience? And what good is medicine when the knowledge of the human body is lost?  It wasn’t until the third or fourth trip to Europe that really broadened my horizons in regards to what I thought about Sexuality. Growing up so conservatively, particularly in a military culture, I was taught to be quiet. Seen but not heard. Silent unless spoken to. Emotion, and sexuality, was visceral. A distraction. The only thing that separated us from the animals we raised was our control over that.  But humans are animals. In capitalism, we rush everything in such a way that life becomes a race. We are never calm because destruction is just around the corner–war, economic collapse, terrorism. Our men have been raised through such an incredibly toxic patriarchal society that their connections to their e