I’m back!
Exactly like a little over two weeks ago, when for a few short days I could celebrate the return of lightheartedness, silliness, but above all of overwhelming happiness, that had always been mine until in 2018 the ground fell away from underneath me and suddenly;
“It” wasn’t mine anymore.
I was gone.
And not in a Buddhist-dissolving-the-ego kind of way, but in an everything-that-made-me-human, kind of way.

The blueprint of who I was had switched to its negative, and positivity became the exception, instead of the core of who I was.

The very short version of the story (leaving out loss and recovery of physical health as well), is that last month I found out what medication I needed (Femme hormones!) and they changed my life around.

Until a week of debilitating and entirely avoidable stress kicked in, and I found myself back on the concrete of misery overnight.
Clawing my way back, and understanding that although the pills were a miracle cure, they did require a price to be paid, to be effective:
I would need to regulate my life.

Every time I would let the events that had caused the stress, to happen again, I would be choosing losing another two weeks of my life.
On top of the 6 years that were already down the drain.

I needed to clean up, clear out, and to stop letting the ugliness of the world in so carelessly. An ugliness that had not bothered me at all, in the previous years, because it had given me an opportunity to crack my mind over it.
To think of a solution.
To get involved.
Or the very least: To lose myself in a roast/ rant about it.

For six years, my baseline emotion had been rage.
Constructive rage, funny rage, rage where people could warm themselves by and feel acknowledged for the unnamed pain they had felt, and I put words to.
It was a world I had never lived in, and I honestly wondered how I had managed to miss it!

There had been something fascinating about waking up in such an ugly place. It was like it gave me permission to unleash the darkest most diabolical Self and presented an intellectual challenge to boot.
Its novelty made reality something I studied with undivided attention, but I loved poking where the loopholes were.

Every year, I understood its dynamics better.
And I learned to wield the knowledge like a sword.

You could even say I had weaponized my rage into a thing of beauty, but all the time I was aware it was far from beautiful.
That the negative can never be a positive, and that although I was happy with how much I could bring to the world (for the first time I felt of use!);
It wasn’t me.

Real me doesn’t live here.
Never has.

I lost real me in 2018, then had her return for a few days which was such a profoundly moving experience… Suddenly I was myself again! And this was also the moment I could see, how NOT myself I had been since 2018.
And the world regained its ethereal beauty, and I regained my lighthearted happiness.

And then the stress kicked in.
My reckless behavior caused what I will call “Happy Suzy” to leave, “Dark Suzy” immediately taking her place again, pushing all the things back in place, cancelling appointments, writing watertight letters and making practical plans.

With the storm under control, today, after 2 weeks of Dark Suzy, is the first day I can feel Happy Suzy again!
And although I see I need Dark Suzy, and can definitely not live without her pragmatic, no bs skills, I also know that Happy Suzy is required as well.

I do not want to lose another day to the ugliness that kills Happy Suzy, and summons armed-to-the-teeth Dark Suzy, taking over my life.
And today, I really do know how to do that;

With male muses, as a representation of what makes Happy Suzy, happy. The thing she will stay for.

Because muses or men in general, are mutually exclusive to Dark Suzy. Dark Suzy does not care for men, unless they are either powerful adversaries or equally powerful allies.
She doesn’t have sex with them, she just bonds with them, conspires with them or she fights them.
She’s a fighter not a lover.

A striking thing about the 6 years I was “her” was that my emotional life flatlined. I have fallen in love twice, and I had a lover as well (whom I had met before that time), but it was like I couldn’t really enjoy it, or them, anymore.
There was a vital part of deep caring and emotional commitment and involvement that just wasn’t there.

Falling in love, living for love, and being inspired by a man, would be my markers of having regained my pre-2018 life.

And then this morning a video on YouTube about muses (The Anatomy of a Muse 19:24) made me recognize that although I speak of lovers, not boyfriends or partners, there was actually an even better word.

That what I am on the lookout for, to give Happy Suzy a new life, are not just men, they are;

muses

The video made me reflect on the men in my life, past and present, that I still consider muses, and how my relationship to them seems so different to what they have with other women.

Or let me rephrase that, because that is not entirely correct, because the way they feel or relate to me, is not necessarily different to how they relate to other women. Any measurable indicator (time spent, commitment given) would even tell you I have been of less importance  to them, with which I am fine.
But the way I relate to them, seems so different to what I have seen other women asking of these men.
None of them have asked them to inspire them.

I know multiple female writers who work under alter-ego, just like me, but even among them I only know one who protects the erotic space she and her lover are having.
One, aware of the invisible pillars holding their house of love.

She makes sure their love stays under the cover of this erotic universe, and is not taken into the relentless brightness of reality.
She is the guardian of an affair that is not necessarily a secret, but that has achieved all the hallmarks of a secret because she protects it.
She is the watcher of the affair’s potency, and makes sure it doesn’t spill its artistic juices.

She, is protecting her muse.

And it’s not even the case that because you write about sex, you will have a muse-artist relationship with your lover.
There are female writers who write about sex, who do not have muses they nourish and protect, and who find purpose in being open and transparant.
But I also know women who do not see themselves as artists, but who instinctively resist their affairs settling down into normal relationships.
Indicating a deep understanding it would kill the very soul of what makes their bond so special.
The end, of the sacred erotic space between them.

So this very first post in my Secret Diary series (a paid-subscriber exclusive for Substack) is where I recognize the presence of these muses of a sign I am in my original, happy healthy mode.
And their absence or having a comradery relationship, or even an antagonistic one, is a sign I am not myself and am in Dark Suzy’s 2018 and up – mode.
Which is not a bad thing (as I said: I do not plan to live without Dark Suzy!) but the muses are the indicator Happy Suzy is here.
And that she is not being crushed or driven out, again.

Which is why I am choosing this Secret Diary series, to revolve around nourishing my feelings, for men I call my muses.
The feelings that had disappeared, not necessarily the men themselves.

The feelings were independent from men being in my life.
Independent from whether they were choosing me, or were taking a different path.
But this does not mean that I was unresponsive to their signals, nor did it mean I did all the work of keeping a bond alive.
They worked, but in different ways.

The muses in my life have always left the erotic space open.
They could return at any given time.

Not all muses though. Some did shut the door. It only takes a glimmer of indicating they don’t want you, but if such a man is a muse, then it is as loud as thunder.

I recognize I have dropped the word Erotic Space here, a few times. I think it’s originally from Esther Perel, the relationship therapist, let me check.

I cannot find her using the term Erotic Space, but I did find this quote:

“Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other.”

― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

To me, my relationships with men I would now call muses, are a mutual cultivation of that eroticism.
It takes just one of us to break the code of eroticism, one of us bringing the world inside, a topic or a third person;
And the Erotic Space we have between us is gone.
The spell is broken.

In my experience, containing that erotic space, the sacredness of it, to not insult it, to not tear it, to not burden it and destroy it, takes a wordless understanding and appreciation from both parties.
You cannot make it a rule that you are going to defend it.
It has to be felt, it has to be instinctive.
And this only happens if both parties, in this case both the muse and the artist, have an aspect, an archetype of who they are, that lives only within that space.

An erotic space, is not where you visit the other;
But where you visit the part of yourself that cannot live anywhere else.

Whether we have been lovers or not, all my muses were men with whom this erotic space existed.
A world between worlds.

And the men I still consider my muses are the ones who left the Erotic Space intact;
And the door open.

These erotic spaces are not there for our affairs to restart, although they could. But they are the space I can visit, to bring me back to who I was.

Erotic Space, is what the Muses left me.
And it is my one true home.

.
Suzanne L. Beenackers
Rock Star Writer

☕️ Buy me a coffee
🌎 Paypal
 🇳🇱Tikkie van de week 

“The Male Muse”
is the first paid-subscribers only post on my Substack account.

My paid Substack subscription will give you the lived Secret Diary experience of my search for a happy ending.
Totally punned.