The Long Shadow

Me: I still have ‘big scary post’ on my list.

EA: You really need to just write that

Me: I’m basically never going to write that post, am I? Not unless there’s some celibacy prompt on Wicked Wednesday or something that I won’t be able to ignore.

EA: Smirks.

I periodically like to brainstorm blog ideas with Exhibit A and it’s often successful, but this time it came back to bite me on the bum. By the time we’d finished dinner Marie had emailed him to confirm that celibacy was now on the list of future prompts. Stitch up. Possibly. But the fact is this blog is four years old next month and I’ve had ‘big scary post’ on my list of things to write for almost as long. So why have I taken nearly four years to write this and why, when I sat down on Monday evening to write it, did I almost sabotage it by purposely letting myself get upset by something entirely unrelated? How exactly did it come to be called ‘big scary post’ anyway?

If I’m honest I think it’s because I was (am?) ashamed. Ashamed and embarrassed to write about a period of my life where I didn’t have sex for five years. Then, after that drought was broken, went on to only have a handful of flings over the following few years. Nine years where I could, if I thought about it for not too long, probably remember every occasion that I had sex. There is no reason to feel ashamed about this, I had done nothing wrong. Thankfully, there was no distressing reason for it either – no abusive relationship in my past and I wasn’t harbouring an unrequited love or nursing heartbreak. I wasn’t being unnecessarily unkind so that karma got me (sorry, but I totally believe in karma!) and I didn’t have sex on a pedestal. I was just a normal late twenties woman who’d had a couple of infatuations, a small love, a big love and a good amount of fun casual sex during the ‘Camden party days’. That my sex life dried up was entirely circumstantial.

First off, marriage and babies happened. Not for but me but for all the people I used to party with. There is a period during your late twenties and early thirties where you are on a merry-go-round of hen dos, weddings and new baby celebrations. The life that you knew momentarily becomes hijacked by celebrations of other people’s milestones. Of course, this is wonderful, but if you’re not on that path you emerge slightly bewildered that your own life has ‘settled down’ against your will and with you as a solo player. For a while, if you want to stay close to your oldest friends you swap stumbling home at 3am with tales to tell for a bottle of wine on their sofa and interrupted conversation. (Spoiler: the storm passes and before you know it they’ll be up for stumbling home at 3am again and if you’re really lucky you’ll have some new friends in the shape of their children.)

I also chose that time to start working in a sector with a higher than average proportion of women and gay men. My now business partner (who I met at work) was the only man in a department of 30 women. My (gay male) desk mate once looked up at the huge open plan office and said “do you know, we can only see seven men from our desk and they’re all gay.” I wasn’t likely to meet a string of suitors for casual affairs at work!

“What about online dating?” I hear you cry. Mmm. I refer you to the age rings in my trunk and ask you to count the years backwards! Online dating was fledgling back then. I joined Dating Direct and Guardian Soulmates and every so often I half-heartedly went on a dates but those sites largely filled me with doom. The fundamental flaw with them was they assumed that everyone was looking for ‘the one’ and people behaved accordingly. Namely, in a tedious this-is-how-a-first-date-should-be-done way. If that wasn’t your bag there weren’t really any options 15 years ago. I still remember the straw that broke the camel’s back. I spotted a hot bloke on Soulmates and clicked on his profile. “I wake up to Radio 4 and go to sleep to Radio 6”. Really? REALLY? Your opener is going to be that self-conscious? I didn’t hang around to read the rest but I am sure if I had got to sentence three I would have discovered that on a Saturday evening he liked to curl up with a bottle of red wine and a DVD.

Apps for hooking up and sites where you could be more nuanced in your preferences were way in the future. In hindsight, I am sure there were numerous like-minded men who would have been more than happy with the kind of relationship that I now know suits me but those conversations were not happening in the early noughties. At 30 the idea that I would one day use apps to seek out men who were specifically looking for a secondary partner rather than ‘the one’, or couples looking for a regular play partner would have been inconceivable. That tech did not yet exist and my social life had shrunk to nights in with mates and nights out after work with colleagues and I just slipped into a place of acceptance that sex wasn’t part of my life.

So, if I can objectively look at the personal, professional and tech environment that I was operating in and recognise the circumstantial nature of my celibacy, why do I still feel shame about it? And why was it a ‘big scary post’ for so long? I think it was scary because however much I can rationalise why it happened there is still a part of me that sees it as a reflection on me. I am embarrassed that I accepted without much of a fight the loss of something so important and fun. And I worry that all the rational reasons I use to explain why it happened are just hot air. That actually it might be that I just wasn’t hot and that people didn’t fancy me. That thought casts the longest shadow.

There is much about my physical self that I love. I love my height, my legs, my arse, my hair and my face does a very good job of reflecting who I am on the inside. I don’t like my belly or my tits but generally as a whole package I can live with what I’ve got. But I don’t really believe I am hot. And that lack of confidence in my physical appeal bleeds into sexual confidence. I equate being good at sex with being physically appealing and as long as I don’t really believe I am physically appealing I don’t really believe I am good at sex. I should say at this point that I think I suck cock like a boss and I have awesome partners who work hard to reassure me that I am hot and good and that I should just shut the fuck up about all of this, but the voices in our head linger.

So what changed? How did I emerge from a sex-free decade to the life I have now? At 36 I became self-employed. I joined a host of freelance networking groups and bobbed about all over London meeting new people. Overnight I had new circles of friends, all in the mid-thirties to late forties ball park and virtually all of them committed to nurturing just one baby – their business. I had a found a new tribe and they shared my priorities. Within months I was having a fling with a fellow freelancer. Then in early 2012 I was on a contract where idle lunchtime chat with a fellow consultant led to her saying, “You haven’t heard of OKC? Oh my God – it’s amazing! I am having so much sex!” And the rest as they say is history. There I have met many more like-minded people, one of whom led me to this tribe.

The app can get a bad rap and people can be inappropriate but I don’t really see a whole lot of difference between a drunk bloke in the pub pinching my arse and saying my dress would look better on his bedroom floor (hello North Wales circa 1995!) and someone being suggestive in an app. They’re certainly easier to mute in an app than the pub! I think of OKC as being like the flirty parties and pubs of my twenties. I don’t give a fuck what radio station you listen to and I like watching movies on my own. Some flirting and some suggestive chat as a gateway to some drinking and fucking suits me fine. Would I have had the wilderness years that I did had something like OKC existed in 2003? Probably not. Am I bitter that it didn’t exist 15 years ago? Hell yes!

So now I am in the happy place that I am – with one regular partner who I value deeply and other more casual affairs that come in and out of my life according to how my diary is dictated by my business (roll on April when work quietens down for six months and I’ll be looking for this year’s spring/summer flings!) – I have finally written this post. How do I feel? Relieved to be honest. That period of my life sometimes makes me feel a bit of fraud in this community and, like I said, the long shadow affects my self-confidence at times when I feel more vulnerable. But something I have learnt here over the last four years is that almost every time I have worn my heart on my sleeve someone has popped up to echo my sentiments or to express relief that they are not alone. Part of what makes this community strong is how honest people are and how giving they are of their own experiences in supporting others. It’s kind of a relief to look at this secret, take a deep breath and chuck it in the fuck it bucket.

Curtain Time

I was staying at a hotel last night. It was a mid-range chain so I wasn’t really expecting anything special but when I walked into my room the full length curtains and the lighting above them had a drama to them that made the scene feel almost theatrical.

After the Flood (reprise)

Today is day three of my period. I’m not wearing a tampon. I didn’t wear one on day one or two either. In fact, I haven’t worn a tampon for months, maybe even more than a year. These days my periods are so light that I only know they’re here by a very slight colouring of the loo roll. In fact, earlier today, knowing I was going to write this, I giggled when I wiped my hands and the juice from a blood orange left more of a mark on a tissue than an earlier bathroom visit had.

Things used to be very different. I used to plan my work diary to avoid leaving the house on day three of my period. If day three fell at the weekend and I was away I would take my own towels to wrap around me like a nappy in case I ruined a friend’s mattress. Dates, nights out, exercise – all of them would be embargoed if it was day three. Day three was when the floodgates opened. Literally.

Then in summer 2016 a pub conversation with Livvy set in place a chain of events that led me, five months later, to surgery. Nothing serious – just a simple 15 minute procedure to remove what turned out to be “a multitude” of polyps and insert a Mirena Coil to stop them coming back again. Today, I would delight in answering the white trouser question very differently!

Had that conversation not happened would I still be on that frankly horrible monthly rollercoaster, living in fear of public embarrassment? Or would I have eventually taken myself to the doctors of my own volition? I’d like to think the latter, but who knows; I was already putting up with ridiculous levels of inconvenience and had made it my normal. And too many women do this. One of the reasons I’m so glad to see Sub Bee’s new meme, Menstruation Matters is because it provides a place where we can all share our stories and experiences and where we think someone might need a gentle nudge to seek help or just a friendly word, we can help.

So is it all a bed of roses now? Not exactly, but it’s nothing I can’t deal with. Although my monthly bleeding is nothing more than mild spotting now, other things have changed. I rarely (ok – sorry – never!) had period pain but now I get very definite cramping. I’d hesitate it to call it real pain but because I’ve never experienced cramps before I do get a bit cats bottom mouth about them, especially as I cramp but don’t bleed. The most problematic change is emotional. When I was talking to friend around the time of the op and told her I was going for the Mirena Coil she replied: “ah, PMS to FMS!” I pressed her on this. Apparently FMS is fat miserable and spotty. These were the side effects she’d read about when she was researching her own procedure. Fat we’ll come back to. Spotty – I have been annoyingly fortunate on that front all my life. But oh my, miserable? Yes!

I’m not talking ongoing constant malaise but as regular as clockwork a few days before my ghost period arrives I get truly distressed about things. In the old days I’d get all ranty and cross, now I just get really really upset with someone-is-pouring-a-watering-can-down-my-face level of tears. It’s mildly annoying but unlike the hormonal swings of my twenties, when the pill didn’t agree with me, I feel more robust when it comes to coping with these dips. They just happen. It just is. It lasts 24 or 48 hours and then it passes. What I find most fascinating is they’re never irrational tears. When I used to get angry and rant, that was often about stupid pointless things of no consequence or out of my control and afterwards I would feel stupid. Now, I find myself intensely upset about things that I may have been trying to push under the surface for the rest of the month and then – boom! – in the same way a hot flannel will bring a spot to the surface and make it easier to pop, my cycle brings all that emotion up and out. It took a while to cotton onto my new patterns but now I have I am more prepared for them and I examine more closely what that emotional purge is telling me.

And then the fat thing. The official paperwork says fewer than 5% of women experience weight gain, although 5% of the number of women who have one fitted is probably a lot of women. I have put on a fairly significant amount of weight in the two years since the op. But I would be really really disinclined to say that’s coil-related, it’s almost certainly life-style related. Many people talk about ‘eat less, move more’ as a method of losing weight. I generally gleefully subscribe to the ‘eat loads, move loads’ method of making sure my clothes continue to fit! I’m lucky enough to usually enjoy good physical health and I love exercise so this isn’t usually a problem but a stupid accident on a bus last spring left my knee in a sorry state and seen me in and out of X-ray rooms and MRI pods. Of course, I haven’t tempered my eating or drinking to match my reduction in exercise – if anything I’ve done more of both in response to work stress. In short, I’m 99% sure consumption and lack of movement is the cause of my weight gain and that in time normal service will resume. However, if someone was to say to me it is all because of the coil, would I have it removed so my favourite clothes fitted again? No bloody way. Excuse the pun! I never want to find myself hiding in a graveyard washing my legs or cleaning my carpets at 3am again.

So that’s my before and after! If you’re experiencing periods that are disrupting your life, don’t be like me and wait years to get it sorted – book an appointment with your GP right now!

Frost

I was hoping for a beautiful frosty morning so that @19syllables and I could go off for our first photo adventure of 2019 for the F prompt. Alas, it was not to be! So appliance made frost it is…

A frozen dildo really is the most delicious thing. It feels fantastic but the visually stimulated side of me just loves the way it looks straight from the freezer. I also love looking at it when the heat of my cunt has revealed the glass and just a tiny bit of frost remains on the stem.