I’m watching this TV show called Shtisel, about a Haredi family in Jerusalem. Akiva is on the train with his dad flirting with this secular-looking girl who’s just begun the process of “finding god.” He’s so handsome, Akiva, in that lost way, handsome boys get special attention from women and are prone to getting lost in it. I find that adorable. I’m not so attracted to him, but I am entertained.

Shtisel: it means “a little bit of nonsense.” In the beginning, he’s drawing lemurs at the zoo, and flirting with this beautiful woman, twice widowed, who get to see the drawings he’s done of lemurs with payots. Elisheva, she’s the mother of one of his students. She has such a beautiful, slightly creased, slightly dry look. Later she rejects his marriage proposal on the grounds that she doesn’t want to start over again, she doesn’t want to deal with “the furniture, the wedding, the kids.” Right before that, she takes off her wig, and shows him the grey streaks in her hair; of course she’s only more beautiful for it. I loved that forlorn look of hers as she said what she had to say, in her deeper, older woman’s voice.

Anyway, my faculties are weak, I’m not here to write an extended commentary on the show. Selfishly, I have been continually dealing with this realization that I’m far more jaded and forlorn than I expected to be; it’s all befallen me so suddenly. Me, just over the hill of my mid-twenties, entering this stage of life where I’m somewhat divorced from my femininity. I no longer really feel that it’s relevant to be attractive, in my personal life, it’s only a basic infrastructural edifice for paying my rent. I rarely think about adorning myself these days, I don’t think about clothes. I wonder if I’m having trouble doing laundry not so much out of general dysfunction, but because I don’t even like the idea of clothing anymore. I don’t want to touch clothes, think about clothes.

Come to think of it, I seem to be wearing the same two to four articles of clothing over the course of a week. There’s nothing wrong with this uniformity, but I’m indubitably anxious about wearing my depression too obviously, and I don’t want to become tired of the clothes I’ve come to prefer and rely on: a blue linen short-sleeved shirt from Naked and Famous, a green dress made of slightly crinkly seersucker cotton, from Ilana Kohn, white hemp-cotton shorts, and a black hemp tank top, both from Jungmaven. I have little tolerance for clothing which might make me feel somewhat more self-conscious or physically uncomfortable, so I wear what best fits the weather. I’m “conservative.”

So it’s nice to see a man who’s in the process of discovering his own beauty and the beauty of women. He may be wearing the same black and white garments each day, but his payot are so crisply curled that they stand out as much as a septum piercing. His innocent little grin, his pleasure which he cannot hide, all this emerges from the stark backdrop of his uniform clothes. Akiva Shtisel makes me think more than any figure I’ve known of my own grins and pleasures of the past, when I was new to femininity, and surprised that I could have an effect on others as a newborn woman, freshly detransitioned at the age of 25. One becomes so selfless in that state, so receptive to, so curious about the lives of others. But then, Elisheva brings me back to my current, uncomfortable condition, as I become accustomed to my limitations. I’m inward, I’m limited. I feel this great, narcissistic guilt, as if a great deal rested on the wrong I’ve done.

As some of you may have noticed, I am barely camming these days. I stream maybe three days a week and never on the weekends. My main excuse is that I got approved for a one-bedroom apartment on Friday, which meant I spent some time over the last week biking to different apartments and applying for them. In any case, I’m going to live alone starting July 1st, which means I can stream from the kitchen or the bathroom if I wanted to. It makes me nervous; it makes me nervous that I won’t, in fact, take proper advantage of the space as a camming studio, that I won’t make enough money to justify the added burden of rent, and that something will go wrong there otherwise. I like looking at the complaints for the building on HPD Online. This afternoon, I looked up the apartment buildings of nearly everyone I had ever slept with in the city on HPD Online. What can I say, I’m really into buildings and city infrastructure. When I take the train these days, I don’t read or listen to music, I just stare at the subway map. I read the names of the stations, I look at how they’re sequenced and laid out. Infrastructure is very stabilizing, very comforting for me to think about.

Perhaps I will briefly return to life of a princess-student with no obligations outside of studying and training to be a psychoanalyst. I have enough savings to live irresponsibly for a while. My current life is a wish-fulfillment, sitting here and writing. Since I’ve been approved for this apartment, I guess I don’t need to prove my income to anyone for at least a year, hopefully several more. Hopefully I don’t need to prove my income to anyone until I’m a full-time psychoanalyst and have a reputable income. The irony is I’m always going to be self-employed. I wonder what that will be like, I wonder about quarterly taxes.

Also, I keep seeing that man on the train whom I’m attracted to, Jewish Daddy. He never really looks at me. I’ve seen him at least twice as many times as I had when I last wrote about him. But he looked at me a little today, I think, and maybe he finally recognized me as that person on the train whom he sees repeatedly. He’s the only person in the entirety of New York City whom I see repeatedly on the train. Well, this is no longer true, as there’s another Jewish man on the train whom I recognize now. In fact, I’ve realized that the train car I choose is full of men and sometimes women reading the Siddur Ashkenaz, and so I have begun to fantasize about an actual train car dedicated to davening.

My beloved Modern Orthodox Jewish Daddy. I will never see him again after my July 1st move. He took off his baseball cap last time, and bared his head. Then, I found as I was walking up the stairs behind him that a company logo was embroidered on his bag. It’s a ccorporate law firm, in one of the WTC buildings, one I’ve been inside, because I dated a man who worked in that building. I found Jewish Daddy’s profile on their website; he looks so much younger, and more cheerful, in the photo. Not at all like this serious sulking man hunched over his prayers who displays an intense, critical look when he’s looking up. And now that I know his name, I find that he’s married. I realize now that for Orthodox Jewish married men, wearing a wedding ring is not customary.

I noticed another Jewish man moving his mouth along to the morning prayers the other day. He seemed so lazy and relaxed in comparison to Jewish Daddy. He’d look off into the distance as he was reading, and easily allowed his eyes to rest on me several times. After that, I thought, it’s not just my crush who does this on the train, and there are many ways of being, one can read in the intense, hunched-over focused way, but one can also be open to the environment while reading the prayers. I told my analyst that I’m going to learn Hebrew now.

Why am I so drawn to the insular world of the Haredi, why am I drawn to this Modern Orthodox man who looks secular but who went to a Rabbinical college and clearly has no eyes for me? This is stimulating to think about, again it grounds me. I am trying to take it more seriously now. I downloaded the Sefaria app on my phone so now I can read the Siddur too, and other texts from the Torah. Recently I’ve been buying pineapples from a small kosher grocery store near me, and for the first time, I picked up one of their newspapers.

Anyway, things aren’t going so well for Akiva Shtisel. The twice-widowed woman whom he and I were swooning over left the community to move to London. His father discouraged her so vehemently against being with him that she broke up with him, and he basically gave up on the chase. Then, his cousin appeared, and wanted him so bad, and he wanted her, but she lives in Antwerp. All of a sudden, she reappears, and gets engaged to him on the condition that he stop painting. But then he starts painting again, in part because his dad Shulem says paint, just finish the contract with the gallerist, so he does. And Akiva shows her the new painting, and she feels so deeply betrayed, so now they aren’t engaged. She wants him to be a serious Jew, she’s worried after he tells her that he forgot to put on the tefillin while praying the other day. And now that he’s done his job, and gone on TV to do an interview, his dad is furious with him, furious with him for painting and displaying a likeness of his mother where some of her hairs are visible. On TV the interviewer says, doesn’t it look like a Christian image of Mother Mary? Shulem, is furious, says he painted her like a whore in the market, a whore in the market, and Akiva says it wasn’t real life, that it was an image, a fantasy, a memory of a memory, not his mother but also his mother. But “EVERYTHING’S REAL LIFE,” roars Shulem.

Shulem caused me to think about how I agreed with him. I’ve been taught to see the work of art as separate from the plane of reality insofar as social norms apply, but somehow I agree with him. Secular education doesn’t tell te truth. How do I know I agree with him? Through camming. Is it really in any world legitimate to fake something? I asked myself this in the beginning, when I realized that I did not like feeling legitimately turned on during my shows; I did not want to “give myself away” through orgasm. Nevertheless, I was wet, and I let my body go. It was nice to share a real orgasm with someone who enjoys seeing it, but I also didn’t really want to produce the false impression that we had connected in this way; my sexual pleasure, I felt, was quite separate from the viewer’s; my psyche, my fantasy life, is such a private thing, and I never want to give the impression that sexuality is merely instinctual, mechanical, automatic.

And at the same time, this means I do not want to fake orgasms. I think it is fine to fake such a thing sometimes, but for some reason, now, I cannot do it. Nobody really goes on CB in search of a performance; they go in search of a kind of reality. I cannot even feign happiness or excitement, knowing this, and I’ve come to find that I don’t mind losing viewers when I get snappy on stream. I’ve decided that I’m not cut out to be successful in terms of popularity or channel growth, I’m just going to be my meager self, who is not always generous.

I feel a lot of anger, in reality, at those who visit the stream, those who make demands, even if they’ve paid their dues, and those who chat without making demands, even if they entertain me somewhat, because I want to be tipped, too. It’s hard to exist in a state of either frustration or boredom; being tipped a lot and masturbating a lot is boring, and lacking in stimulus is frustrating in its own, more urgent way. I am wasting time sitting here and waiting around, I think.

That is the nature of my anger and frustration. I am losing time, and it’s all real. The time I spend waiting around and feeling frustrated is the same time I spend riding my bike, it is the same time I use to write, it is the same time I use to see patients at my psychoanalytic institute’s clinic, it is the same time I spend in bed to take a nap with a lover. Everyone who has a job probably feels this same anger and frustration towards their work, as it takes from us time that is real.

Does this amount to saying that the construction of fantasies is a waste of time?

Or should we say that this sense of time as real and finite is a kind of fantasy?

Shulem, it might make sense for me to find a different thing to do. Maybe I could take greater and further risks, by finding a way to monetize my writing!

But I’m so resistant to the idea of making and selling objects; perhaps this is what draws me to camming and sex work in general. Sex workers sell services which do not resemble commodities, because sex can never resemble a commodity. You lie to yourself, perhaps with watertight success, if you think all you want a glimpse of an ass viewed from a particular angle. It is probably most accurate to think of the whole camming thing not a sales job or a meat market, but as a kind of expenditure on everyone’s account—an expenditure of my time, an expenditure of your time, an expenditure of my sexual energy, and of yours, an expenditure of your money, an expenditure of my rent, and the psychic waste of guilt and irresponsibility mixed with desire and sadness we all take on here.

Adam allowed me to touch his cock last night. He said he was feeling more relaxed, less sensitive, so I stroked his scrotum and the base of his cock and eventually the tip, which was very wet, and he withdrew my hand from the tip several times. I touched his cock, he touched my hand to push it away.

He is the lover of mine I sometimes talk about on stream, whom I sometimes refer to as my partner, my partner who doesn’t have sex with me. Naturally, this frustrates me, and I wouldn’t hesitate to blame most of my recent delinquency from camming on the difficulties of this relationship, which I have obviously already thought very much about curtailing or putting in suspension.

I don’t often get a chance to talk more about the longer backstory, about who he is: an extremely obsessional man who wishes to return to an academic way of life, in spite of his job which keeps him quite busy. I don’t get to talk about who I was during the first year of the relationship: a capricious and promiscuous girl who insisted in having an open and uncommitted relationship. This ended up hurting him, and feeling not right. Also, it bears mentioning that he’s an extremely physically affectionate person, so the absence of coitus doesn’t necessarily feel like a withdrawal of love. And we used to fuck a lot.

Anyway, it was really beautiful, to feel and look at. Someone unfamiliar with the human body would immediately know that it isn’t usually like this. That thing which I beheld was exceptional, it was a thing that signifies. We would have to invent a word, or a concept, to describe what this “erection” means. It’s not a sickness, it’s not a cancerous growth, it’s not a warning of itchiness or allergy. It’s a temporary way for the body to be, and it doesn’t mean that the organ is experiencing pain, nor does it mean that the organ feels good. The organ is prepared, rather, to do something that it doesn’t normally do, and this thing involves something like “desire.” The organ draws something else to it, the organ in this state signals its involvement with desire, a desire that rests in the brain or the psyche. If desire is fulfilled too quickly by the organ, the whole organism experiences a form of loss associated with a fading or slackening.

So I felt his cock in my hand, and really marvelled at it, in a way I haven’t been able to in so long. Usually the cock just disappears inside of me very quickly, and it becomes this kind of useless tool, useless insofar as it doesn’t give me much to think about, it doesn’t give me much to fantasize about before or afterwards. This time it stood on its own, like some sort of animal.

The cock, I realized then, is continuous with the rest of the expanse of skin that I love to touch and kiss—the nose or the cheeks or the neck or the belly or the chest. But it is different because it is composed of skin which I’m not allowed to touch most of the time. He was, as I said, pushing my hand away whenever it got to be too much. The wonder of the cock lay in part in that delicate pushing away, and in his strained, glassy-eyed expression. I knew that he had submitted to me, but who knows what he felt, as he allowed me to touch this site of greatest risk.

He almost put his cock inside me some time later. I was standing and we were hugging, but his pants were down. I turned around and gripped the edge of the table and bent myself over a bit at the waist; I used my other hand to guide his cock into my cunt, and allowed him to control the rest. It was clearly too much for him, so he withdrew it, but after some seconds of rest I encouraged him to do it again, and was so grateful to at least able to feel the kiss of the tip of his cock contacting the sensitive flesh, a few centimeters of depth he penetrated, these few centimeters are arguably the most sensitive and beautiful centimeters of the vaginal canal, with that pinkish flesh that’s visible only when someone tips me to spread my pussy. Then I turned around so that he could thrust his cock between my thighs, all this an elaborate avoidance of the overwhelming risk or coitus.

I thought briefly of you all as this was all happening. What separate worlds we live in! There is so much you cannot see of me, in spite of my visibility. Sometimes I want you to see things which are absolutely impossible to see.