I Am No Longer Addicted to Male Validation and Now I Don’t Know What to Do With My Hands
I’m so scared I’m going to have to get a hobby now or something.
“It’s like a drug I’d been addicted to for years just suddenly stopped working,” I said to a man in a room at the TWA Hotel last July while, in fact, quite high on a drug.
I wasn’t talking about that one, though—that drug was doing just fine. I was talking about the one I was pretty sure I’d been born already cracked out on through no real fault of my own. If you read last week’s dispatch from my college days starring an 18-year-old me desperately trying to numb myself out of my body by offering it up like a sacrifice to anyone who would have me, then you know male validation has always been my drug of choice.
Except, of course, for the part where I don’t really remember choosing it so much as being baptized into it as an infant, born directly into its suffocating embrace like a water birth. I wanted it before I knew what it was and long before I ever got my hands on it. By then it had already seeped through my skin and into my veins, snaked new pathways through my brain. It was the lens through which I viewed myself, the only language I could read myself in, the bar I measured myself against and usually fell short of.
Until one day, suddenly, it wasn’t. At some point when I wasn’t looking, it seemed to have quietly packed its bags and seen itself out.
“And it’s like, it’s obviously great to no longer need the drug,” I monologued in insufferable metaphor to the man in bed with me. “But I do sometimes miss the high.”
This man and I were smack in the middle of what I’d dubbed “No Man Summer”—he being the one and obvious exception. Two months into the detox I’d entered after crashing out in the inevitably bloody demise of a reheated situationship earlier that year, it occurred to me that even the slightest itch for male attention had yet to return. Dating apps had ceased to interest me, as had random DMs from horny men online. Not even a text from my long-term, on-off illicit lover got my heart racing like it used to. It wasn’t just that the drug had stopped working, but that it suddenly held zero appeal. And more than I missed the high itself, I missed wanting it.
Writing in the disemboweled aftermath of heartbreak, I didn’t want to place myself on the operating table to be ripped apart by readers the way I usually did; I wanted to dissect myself in front of them.
This wasn’t so much a problem as it was simply confusing. It just seemed too easy—the mythical “and then I just decided to stop and never touched the stuff again!” narrative of recovery that gets slammed for being dangerously unrealistic. Much as I never chose the addiction, I didn’t remember choosing recovery. I hadn’t found God or gone to therapy or otherwise “done the work.” I felt like I’d accidentally cheated and won a game I didn’t know I was playing.
Like many a recovered addict before me, I suddenly found myself confronted with tons of free time and mental energy I’d previously blown on dating apps and a vague sense of now what? Was I going to have to get a hobby—like people who stop drinking and start running, quit smoking and pick up crochet? Become a boysobriety writer instead of a sex writer?
It was hard to tell exactly when this shift occurred—still is, actually. But I remember the first time I caught a whiff of it.