Chapter 5: Not Having Sex

The art of waiting, sound baths, projections and getting to know yourself

Every week I write about what’s happening in my life: love, work, identity, as I figure out how to be a real person, not just someone chasing the algorithm.

I’m always waiting. For a table, an investor to write a check, to have sex. Even in line at The Frick, when I’ve bought a ticket in advance. The ex-lover I keep rehearsing in my head, the version of myself I imagine could be perfect, the life I think I should be living.

Lately I’m thinking a lot about sex. Not having it. Having it. Who I could have it with. Who I don’t want to have it with. I’m not a casual girl, so I have to fall in love before I can have sex, which makes me wonder if I’ll ever have sex again. Is anyone single in their 30s actually having sex? Or are we all meditating, working on ourselves, pretending we’re too spiritually evolved to miss it and trusting it will eventually just show up?

I notice it the way I notice my bank account, my inbox, the light through my curtainless windows. It’s not just desire, it’s a scoreboard. A measure of being alive. Of having arrived. Of being human enough to count. I once joked on Notes to My Selfie, “Our parents’ dream was to have a home, start a family. My dream is to have a consistent sex life.”

I’m back in the flow of living, if that’s what you can call it. Going to brand events and not making eye contact. Paying taxes. Getting Wi-Fi installed. My friend came over and moved my bed so it faces the right direction for my astrology sign. This semi post-survival, actually living phase is, ironically, the hardest chapter to write because nothing big is happening. Yet.

BODY got into Trader Joe’s, a milestone I can’t bring myself to celebrate. We’re still fundraising, and the alcohol business might never reach profitability. So the milestone, without funding, feels like an open door I can’t yet walk through. Cynthia says, “If you want to know how you’re doing in life, look around and see what’s showing up for you.” Right now? No sex. No man. Money coming in, but not fast enough.

Someone hacked my OnlyFans account, the one I started in the late 2010s to post photos of myself crying. Emotional nudity instead of physical. I thought it would be ironic, memeified internet lore, but I never uploaded anything. Now someone in Hong Kong has logged in. Maybe I found my audience overseas.

Sometimes I feel like I have to move to a new city because these sidewalks know my steps. They know how I glance at the guy on the subway, how I linger too long in front of the pastry counter. The city itself is conspiring against me. It’s too familiar, too lived in, too me, and therefore it doesn’t want to show me to anyone new worth noticing. So I say things like, “Let’s go uptown,” as if someone in a new neighborhood might be standing at Casa Tua waiting for me. Maybe he is. Maybe the universe hid him behind a pile of artisanal bread at Butterfield Market. Maybe he’s in line at The Frick with a ticket he bought in advance, like me, unaware that destiny is hovering somewhere above both our heads.

I guess not having sex is a kind of living in itself. The absence becomes its own texture. I’ve never really had sex, not the kind that makes you disappear and return as someone new. So the waiting isn’t nostalgia, it’s speculation. A slow build toward a moment I can only imagine. The absence forces presence.

I’ve never been great at that, being where I am. But lately, noticing that I’m not having sex has made me more aware of myself than I’ve ever been. I’m starting to see what it means to be with myself without distraction, not waiting to be touched to feel real. When you’re not severely depressed just trying to get through the day, you start to inhabit your body differently. You start noticing every detail, your heartbeat when you walk past someone interesting, the way your skin feels after a shower, the quiet ache of wanting to be known. Maybe this part of life is trying to teach me to stop mistaking stillness for lack, to understand that waiting isn’t empty, it’s a chance to really get to know every edge of me.

That’s what meditation is too, a kind of foreplay with the universe. The slowest intimacy imaginable. When I meditate, I see myself above my body, suspended in darkness. My eyes watch as my body floats in the abyss. My mind asks the universe to guide me, to make me whole, to float me wherever I’m supposed to go. Sometimes I see a fist squeezing my heart, then squeezing too hard until it breaks. The fist used to just hold it, but now it crushes and falls away, the body of a man I once loved attached. My heart, left broken, gets glued together like an antique you can never fix. The kind you keep out anyway because it’s important.

I went to a sound bath this week and cried. The guy leading it wore a matching purple Carhartt set and also co-founded a ping pong club. The past used to be drinking at clubs, now we pay people to teach us how to breathe. The soundwaves rolled over me while I took deep breaths, some like gongs, others like rain, until suddenly a bottle squirted water in my face. Interactive, traumatic, strangely intimate. I cried because I wanted to meditate and all I could think about was the guy who triggered me two weeks ago, the one I used to love who now just exists as a projection of a person I’ve made up in my mind. You know the type, the ones you project a fantasy onto that they can never meet.

Robert Longo says, “Being an artist is a long distance run. Art is the one thing you can get better at as you get older.” I would like to start thinking of my life as art. The waiting, the rehearsal, the projection, the longing, they’re all part of the art of my life.

But somehow, every day feels the same. The repetition, the smallness, it can start to eat at your sense of identity. My identity is built around story and momentum, and when that goes quiet, it feels like something in me is dying. And this space starts to feel like failure when really it’s just the slow burn of becoming, existing without huge lows or highs.

So I guess I’m living in the waiting, not the passive kind, but the kind where my whole soul is stretched between who I was and who I might be. I’ve got two voices in my head right now, well, twenty five, but two are the loudest. One is the old me and the other is the new me. And where I am is in the middle.

Not having sex.

Somehow, functioning.

Jilly