Let’s talk about sex, baby. I woke up with that in my head, not sex on my mind but that song on a loop let’s talk about sex, baby, let’s talk about you and me. Sex. Yup. It was the absolute centre of my world, the sun around which every decision revolved for most of my life including the early years when I didn’t know that’s what it was called, this thing that ruled me. Those urges were set off in me too young, this involvement in that fire; it was from the start a thing to be weaponised and traded. It was a power that consumed me. I remember being caught masturbating when I was a small child, the housekeeper walked in on me in the playroom, I was watching tv, lying on a huge pillow, the comfort of it followed by the shame. I know investigation is normal but it wasn’t that, already it was a secret and a bond. I loved him, the abuser, and I could give him what he wanted. That’s the bit, the modal of sex as a thing to be used. Not something beautiful to be picked up and put down at will but a trade-off and a fuel, the engine that sent me from one place to another, searching for the sense of completeness he gave me, the attention of him, the sense that in that space I existed. Writing the memoir was the first time I saw the pattern of this. It was double shocking to think I hadn’t seen it at the time or until now. The thirty-thousand-foot view of my actions afforded me the revelation that years of therapy hadn’t. I saw how events connected. And here I am at fifty-two, a lot of work done, much digging deep, much turning up, and hand in hand with that the menopause has happened and my relationship to sex has changed shape. What is it when it’s not a commodity? When it’s not dangerous? It exists now in a place spacious, unrefined, without consequence. It’s no longer hard-edged. I don’t use it to hate anymore. This tender, funny, heightened expression of connection, this playground it’s taken me all my life to reach, perhaps that’s normal too, the time needed to understand the sheer volume of it, the essence and magnitude. As I write this I feel sick, a familiar feeling of reaching into that place where the damage happened. It’s so hard to associate this feeling with the actual because of course that’s not how I remember it; that’s how disassociation works, it literally takes you out of sensation. This is another aspect of the work, to stay present when intimacy happens. What a long road this is. I feel like I have to start again every day.
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And dissociation makes you question every memory.
no more for me Thank You MENopause