Today I’m getting an IUD.

It’s my second time, so I know what to expect, but I still dread it. Consensual non-consent with an industrial metal rod. I wish I had a partner to comfort me afterwards. I snap at the thought with impatience: Can’t you bear your own company?

Is celibacy the enlightened choice? People I respect think so, like Liz Gilbert. In some contexts, celibacy looks like an act of great power. To the New Age spiritualism that formed me, it says: I refuse the terms of your question. I won’t even step into this frame. I won’t take on this collective project, of what’s been set into motion from the beginning of history: the social meanings assigned to these particular bodies, and how that structures experience. The constant self-positioning, within an ever-changing contextual-terrain of power, production, and cathexis, whereby authority is claimed on the basis of having a particular kind of body. The ways types of bodies have always structured the distribution of resources and privileges. And how we live in a moment composed of and constrained by all past moments.

What if I just decided not to? Not to involve men in my healing? Not to view separation as a problem to be fixed? Not to express in conversation with these incentive structures? To transcend the constellation of practices that structure access and belonging? And accepted the consequences? Poverty? Isolation? Contempt? Cruelty? Is it even possible to decontextualize myself like this? Am I fundamentally relationally-embedded; can only ever be in conversation, with something?

Do we even have intergenerational studies on IUDs yet? Am I shortening my life span? Why are women allowed to claim a disproportionate share of responsibility for the health impacts of contraception? For reproductive outcomes generally?

Why do we administer this procedure without pain medication? Why is my pain so un-concerning, institutionally? The story of Adam and Eve flashes with a cynical sheen: womankind divinely condemned to suffer in childbirth, as punishment for Eve’s desire to direct her own destiny through knowledge. Eve was not meant to be an agent. So today’s pain is righteous; naturalized by God. A reminder that I was wrong to think that I too have a will to follow, a container to supersede.

I feel defiance enflame within me like beams of light breaking over a ridge; violence in the key of joy. It burns through me, rupturing my insides to ash, then inflating the empty space with potential energy by raging against the walls of my skin until my ribs crack open and my organs disintegrate and I become weightless and float to the top of the highest cosmic mountain and look upon everything without illusion. My fire says: You are real. You are good. You were meant for something. Then I’m washed through with the rightness of it.

From the mountain-top, the gender essentialism is impotent—barely registers as a hope of a possibility of a threat. Nothing can threaten me, so there’s nothing to revolt against.

Up here, I don’t need others in order to know my own magnificence. I don’t even need others for sex. I become desire.

I sink back into the dreamscape, where my guides have already figured it out.

I sleep for hours, unbothered.

There’s nothing to do, nowhere to be, nothing to figure out.

I am whole, and always was.