Careful

Somewhere in the gender struggle, before my egg cracked, I did some mushrooms to try to sort things out. 

During this trip I floated in the tub at my old apartment like a yolk in a benedict, or a tongue in a mouth. The tub felt endless. I was wearing slutty nurse lingerie, breast forms, and a light pink wig. When my head rose above the water, the hair of the wig fell heavy and wet on my neck and shoulders.

Somewhere in the tub I was trying to figure out if the things I was doing were “good” or not. Mushroom god told me that there’s really only two things: caring, and not caring.

This is beautiful and easy if you think about it interpersonally, like, when interacting with a person, am I giving them kindness? It’s a little trickier when you try to apply it to a solo activity—like staying up all night long wearing women’s clothing and masturbating. In this scenario, the only person I can directly harm is myself, and I’m unlikely to cause physical injury, and how would I quantify any collateral harm anyway?

But mushroom god said there’s care and there’s not care. And now that I’m reflecting, I remember that what felt salient in the moment was that the weight of the breast forms on my chest, the dampness of the hair on my neck, and the sheer cling of the stockings on my legs all felt like caring.