quizzical pussy

I did not expect the air hunger to come back.

A few years ago when I was first started getting my stupid fucked-up illness I had this weird, deceptive shortness of breath. I knew I was taking air in because I made a point to draw ponderous diaphragm breaths all the way down, pushing my stomach out with each inhalation. Also, I demonstrably wasn’t dying. But it didn’t feel like my breaths were working. It felt like I was suffocating.

This is the kind of thing that seems like it would accompany a panic attack or something, but anxiety was never a factor… except, you know, the what-the-fuck-is-happening-why-am-I-not-breathing-right? thing that kept coming up somewhere in the middle of feeling like I wanted to tear my lungs out to expose them to open air directly. It’s something neurological, and it’s really disturbing. Fortunately I haven’t had to deal with this air hunger in a while. It went away for a few years as my back-stabbing body moved on to focus on other symptoms.

It came back tonight out of nowhere. While I was masturbating, actually. So here are my thoughts on this situation:

1. It kind of ruined my jack-off session and I’m pissed.
2. It is incredibly hard to sleep through these respiratory shenanigans.
3. (a corollary to #2) It is so terribly late that it is in fact early, but not that early.
4. I want to tear my lungs out and expose them to open air. Good idea?
5. I’m worried that this is not going to be an isolated, aberrant setback.
6. I’m so sleepy. And my hands and lips are tingly.
7. I hope this doesn’t happen next time I’m sleeping over at Laramy’s. That could be super annoying for everyone.
8. I had more orgasms in me, dammit.
9. I would like a trade-in body that works, and preferably has a really nice ass.
10. There should be ten things, since I was already up to nine.

I would like to think that emotions can usually be controlled. That’s not to say it’s easy. And maybe we can’t always keep them in check… not like actions, but often we can. Emotions follow thoughts, thoughts acquire speed, lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. Or something like that.

But I also can’t get past the fact that it’s all biology. Hormones and neurotransmitters and shit. It’s kind of humbling how little control we have over these impulses that can blindside us. A chemical imbalance can compel you to injure yourself; a surge of dopamine can make you instantly giddy… or it is giddiness, I’m not even sure. I was a liberal arts major.

Even when we want to think that we have control, a chemical signal can fuck that right up. Sex is a perfect example: Penises wax rampant at awkward times, or you suddenly feel inconveniently bonded to that person you were just using for sex.  The honeymoon phase of a relationship often wears off predictably at the precise moment that the natural swoon stimulants runs dry. And (I love this one) you can take a tiny little pill to trick your body into thinking it’s already got a little zygote passenger on board so you can have crazy monkey sex with reproductive impunity.

I started a new birth control pill last month. I liked my old one just fine, but my insurance dropped it and not getting knocked up is pretty expensive when it’s not subsidized, although it’s nothing compared to getting knocked up.

So I switched to something that was still in my formulary. When I say “new pill”, that’s a little misleading because it’s actually the same one (Ortho Tri Cyclen) I started on when I was 19, until I was put on a lower hormone dose (Ortho Tri Cyclen Lo) a couple years later because the lady at Planned Parenthood said it was better.

I was more nervous than I would’ve been with an untried oral contraceptive, though, because I couldn’t help but remember being miserable for nearly every single day that I was on regular Ortho Tri Cyclen. The only exceptions were the bright patches that coincided with the months when I was off-again with my abusive boyfriend. Oh, also, I was miserable for roughly a year before I started taking any contraceptive pill, which eerily began a few months after we started dating, when I found out he was OMFGcrazy. But despite all this, I asked myself: what if the misery was all down to the hormones making me crazy? What if I’ve vilified him in my memory to rationalize that crazy? What if my female hysterics made him hit me and do other not-so-nice stuff? Or what if the hormones contributed even just a little to the whole accursed business? I didn’t want to go back to any part of that.

I knew these questions weren’t rational (I was irrationally afraid of becoming irrational! Can you stand it!?). The difference is literally 0.01 mg of fake estrogen a day. That might make a subtle difference, but it’s probably not going to make someone’s emotional well-being unravel entirely. But however absurd, I was trepidatious about going back to the higher dose. My Ortho Tri Cyclen Lo had been like a grisgris, a talisman protecting me from the dark, ominous mysteries of female hormones and their mind-bending wiles.

It is profoundly sexist that I was swallowing any form of “estrogen makes you crazy” line. I realize that. I don’t think that estrogen makes people crazy, irrational, or emotionally fragile. I don’t even think that fake estrogen does. I was just a little worried, in the back of my mind. Because of internalized sexism, obviously. And beaten girl syndrome. Thanks, patriarchy.

However, I certainly wasn’t going to let all this stop me from taking an oral contraceptive that I could actually afford, so of course I sucked it up, filled the new  prescription and started taking it. I enlisted Laramy to alert me to any strange, “crazier than usual” behavior. He agreed to tell me the absolute, brutal truth, as long as I wasn’t holding anything sharp at the time.

A month in, no perceptible emotional changes have surfaced. I feel vindicated. I was never hormone crazy. I was just abused, and that probably made me depressed, but that’s a fairly natural and sane reaction. I have noticed some physical changes. I was a bit nauseated for most of the first month, which seems to be abating, and my boobs hurt more than usual before my last period started, but that’s fake-out pregnancy for you.

On another hormone tip, I recently adjusted my thyroid medication and I’ve been masturbating like crazy all week and humping the furniture and shit. Which I guess we should call “back to normal” for me. I love science.

Quizzical Pussy: WTF????

I qualify as quite the limber, bendy girl, but my arthritis (may it kick rocks) makes it impractical to take advantage of my flexibility by experimenting with cirque du soleil sex positions and whatnot. Obviously, this is disappointing for everyone involved.

I can get into some pretty awesome tangles, but all too often one of my joints will start blaring and eventually I can’t be a mighty mighty soldier of love anymore. Orgasms are a great analgesic, but there are limits. There’s always that point of “Oooooh, oooh, ooww owowowow bloody hell, get out of me so I can close my legs!” And at that stage of the game it’s pretty much spoons or nothing.

It’s like this horrible cosmic contortionist cockblock. Holy shit, guys… maybe God really does hate sex!

Laramy Fuquerton and I had just finished having holy. shit. sex. The kind that makes you want to update your facebook status to “just had 14 orgasms! (hi, mom)” right after you collapse and die. It didn’t seem exactly polite to collapse and die on top of Laramy, though, especially since he’d been so unfazed with what I’d done on him moments before when his cock caught my g-spot exactly right. So I swung one leg out of my cowgirl straddle and promptly tipped over, right off the bed, after which we both cracked up. A lot.

It wasn’t a big deal to either of us, and it certainly could’ve happened to anyone, but it’s the kind of thing that happens fairly often to me, and not just in bed. It can happen at any time in my world. Often if I’m standing for a little while unsupported, I’ll lose my balance and start to topple. This is one of the reasons I normally use a cane, along with having joint pain and being a total pimp.

There are times when you really can’t forget that you’re disabled. I focus much harder on the fact that someday I want to be able-bodied again, but right now I have numerous limitations. I got sick several years ago with an illness that often manifests as an invisible disability (there is usually pain, energy loss, and cognitive dysfunction, to name a few), but it’s caused mobility problems as well in my case, so it’s a little more, well, visible. Sure, occasionally on a good day someone will ask me “do you need to use that cane or is it just a fashion statement?”, and it’s nice to know that I can “pass” if I need to, but back when I needed a walker (or even currently when I’m having a not-so-good day) there was no ambiguity: when people looked at me they knew I was messed up somehow.

I’ve been asked if I was born this way or if I’d been injured. I’ve been talked to with very loud voices, the kind obnoxious people use to talk to immigrants, or that you sometimes have to use with the elderly. I’ve been stared at. People in the mall have been completely unwilling to meet my eye. I’ve been genuinely grateful when men and women have opened doors for me, or even just gave me a friendly smile. Because sometimes, when it’s clear that my cane is not just a fashion statement, I have felt absolutely invisible.

Sometimes I’m too exhausted to move, let alone fuck; there have been times when my hips or knees or head have been in so much pain I’ve had to stop in the middle of sex, even if I desperately want to keep going. It’s embarrassing for me to try to explain to a partner that I can’t put in the energy that he (or she) deserves. It sucks to have your libido roaring and a willing lovely ready to go, and your body just punks out. But there’s that other, sneakier part of being disabled and horny that has probably hobbled me far more than any real, physical limit: since I’ve been disabled, I’ve had some trouble feeling like a sexual being. I went through a phase a couple years ago in which I could barely convince myself I was human. I actually saw myself more as this limping, shuddering, twitching chimera of pain, failure, and decrepitude. The looks, the avoidance I saw on people’s faces proved that I wasn’t a real person anymore to them, and my disappointment that I could no longer do the things I expected of myself made me doubt that I was even me anymore.

I’d begun seeing my boyfriend at the time, Edwin Pomble, about a year before I got sick, and he stayed with me while my health degenerated. I was both thankful to him and resentful that I should have to be thankful. Every time someone said to me “you’re so lucky he’s sticking by you through this” or “he’s definitely a keeper: not every guy would stay” I was vaguely irritated. I agreed with these statements– I was lucky, and wouldn’t have expected him to tough it out, but I also disliked the implication that all I could rightly ask as a sick and disabled woman was for someone that wouldn’t leave. No one, not even I, took the time to wonder why it wasn’t reasonable for me to ask for more. It didn’t matter that Edwin and I had dismal intellectual chemistry or that we had incompatible goals in life. He wasn’t dropping broken, disabled me, so it was inconceivable that I could ever leave him.

So when I finally did break up with him I felt tremendous guilt because I knew I had no “right” to do so. It wasn’t my place, as the damaged one, to reject him. And he agreed with my self-loathing logic, saying “I didn’t stay with you through all the bad times just so I could end up cut off from the good times ahead…” …you know, the good times in my speculative able-bodied future. Essentially, he felt that staying with me was like waiting for an investment to pay off, and that the time with the disabled me was more or less a tax write-off.

Single again, I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be dating much until I was well. If I ever got well, that is. It was difficult for me to imagine anyone wanting to build any kind of relationship with me. Sure I could still have sex, since a girl who can’t walk unassisted is about as non-threatening as females come. There will always be, I theorized and hoped, someone out there willing to use you for sex when it’s obvious that even you don’t think you’re worth a call afterward. But for someone to care about me? That seemed fantastical. After all, I’d lured Edwin into my life when I had been perfectly healthy; now I had no bait with which to perform a comparable bait and switch.

But I have the kind of friends who tend to drag you out to into civilization after a break-up. You know, the good kind. And a weird thing happened when I started going out more and meeting more new people. People noticed my cane, but sometimes they also noticed my eyes, my ass, and my sense of humor. They noticed that I’m pretty much always laughing and having fun, and all of this together– including the cane– intrigued some people. Still others didn’t really care about the cane either way. The bottom line was that most people cared far less about the fact that I was disabled than I ever expected.

Socially, I’m much more comfortable with my cane and my poor coordination than I was even just a year ago. What used to mortify me is just a part of my life now: My hair is a vivid shade of crayola, I’m wearing a garnet pendant, kicking off a pair of pumas, popping my prescription meds. My cane is propped beside me, ready for action. And all that’s just what I’m like, for now. It would be nice if some of those details changed, but none of them make me less of a person or even less of a sexual person. My self-image is better than it’s been in a while, and I’m having regular, scorching-hot sex with a guy who cares enough to ask how I’m feeling today and never acts like he’s doing me some huge favor by not treating me like a moped (fun to ride, but don’t let your friends catch you). It still sucks when I’m too sick and tired to go out and I end up missing fun (and that happens a lot), but I know that disability is more of a detail than my identity. It took some time, but I can brazenly look anyone in the eye, and if people have a problem returning my gaze, that’s their issue to cope with.