WONDER
I spend a lot of time thinking about innocence and the corruption of innocence, fantasizing about a return to innocence, etcetera. This is a logical fallacy. "Innocence" as a concept is inherently nostalgic. We can only harken back. It only exists once it is lost and we can look back on it with longing.
For me, the loss of innocence had nothing to do with having sex or being seen as sexy. It certainly didn't have to do with feeling sexual desire, which was always unequivocal and pragmatic for me. In fact, I think I lost my capacity for sexual desire at the same moment that I lost my innocence.
It was the moment at which I realized, as a child, that I could kindle in another person a sensation of wonder. When I was 3? 8? I think between those years. I know that it supplanted my sexual desire completely. I fear desire has been torn out roots and all, that there's nothing left to coax back to the surface. It might as well have been my entire genital gear that was torn out, and some other sapling planted there.
It happened with a male neighbor. I recall watching his face transform: his eyes going soft and dopey, his mouth hanging open like a big, wet barn door. It felt great. I knew that, perversely, this had to do with him seeing me as innocent, as incapable of artifice--that I was twisting and beaming and crossing my eyes to make it appear that I was incapable of artifice. And the fact that I could dupe him into seeing me that way made it impossible for me to see him with anything other than contempt.
From that moment on, my every phrase and gesture was inflected with the knowledge that if I did it right, if I enacted innocence and sincerity well enough, I could induce the look of wonder again. Even when I was alone it fucked me over. I was always rehearsing, imagining what it would be like if there were someone there to see me, dancing like a princess all by myself. Instead of living my life as the character who experienced wonder, I was living it to be the character who inspired it, the girl in the slow-motion close-up.
Really it's so horrible that I almost wish wonder didn't exist. If there was no wonder I wouldn't feel like a failure for failing to elicit it. I know ultimately the project is the reconfiguration of my self-concept so that I am the one who feels wonder rather than the one who must provoke it in others. I know what the real question is: how do I set off this psychological shift?