Interview

Q&A with Comedian Ros Ballinger

Once upon a time (like, somewhere last year, I think), a grumpy, short-arsed and bespectacled blogger Twitter-met a gloriously funny, curly-haired comedian. Thus, a wonderful friendship was born.

Ros Ballinger is a comedian and slam poet, and this August she’ll be taking her show The Idiot’s Guide to Kink to the Edinburgh Fringe. In the show, she talks openly about her own experiences with BDSM as a beginner – spanking etiquette, dirty talk pitfalls, doms to avoid; no subject is off limits. Except PVC. She’s not into that.

I talked to Ros and quizzed her about her beginnings, what drives her, and why you should come and see her show if you’re headed to the Fringe.

How did you get into stand-up comedy?Stand-up was the culmination of a number of years of escalating creativity and loudness alongside it.  I’d been writing for a long time, and as part of my undergrad degree; writing led to sharing work in public, which led to reading it out loud in public, which led to performance poetry (which I still do), which led to trying improv – something I was never adapt at but which gave me the confidence to act like a complete fool on stage and rid myself of any inhibitions I had left.  It’s hard to be self-conscious about much when you’ve pretended to be two inches tall and dangling from someone’s nostril hair.  Through improv, I met stand-up comedians connected to my university, and they encouraged me to try stand-up; the first time I ever workshopped material with them, they laughed – and that was the gateway, the first time I ever thought ‘I can do this, I’m good at this.’  I did my first stand-up set, and it was wonderful, and the rest is history.  

Did you always love performing or was it something that grew on you?When you see pictures of me in my poetry-reading days, I’m sat down, my body language is very shy, I’m physically curled in on myself.  I’ve never been particularly shy but it look a long time to be able to stand in front of people and have to rely on my own intuition to get them on my side without my legs shaking and wanting to throw up – and that’s still the case, sometimes.  The nerves never go away, which is a good thing; they keep you on your nerves, and challenge you.  I can always be better, but I feel much more at ease on stage than I was at the beginning – that moment when they all laugh, and they’re all looking at you, wondering what you’ll do next – it’s very addictive, and very powerful.

Who are your inspirations? I have a particular admiration for female performers who are unapologetically silly, imperfect and filthy – women are placed to a much higher standard in how they present themselves, both privately and on stage, and I aspire to be someone who does not give a shit about looking like a complete idiot despite constantly being under the threat of judgment for being ‘unfeminine’ or ‘unclassy’.  

On the ‘mainstream’ side I’m a big fan of Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, both together and separately, and I love Sarah Millican and Josie Long, and Grace Petrie.  Amongst performers I know personally, I really look up to Jackie Hagan, Cameryn Moore, the ladies of Sh!t Theatre, and fellow filth peddler Jenny May Morgan(/Pamela de Menthe.)

And, of course, Girl on the Net.  If it wasn’t for her and her writing, I don’t think I’d be doing this at all.

How did your show, The Idiot’s Guide to Kink, see the light? I got into stand-up and kink around the same time, so I was developing my style and types of jokes, and exploring a new dimension to my sex life, and they ended up being interlinked in a big way – I was meeting more and more dominant men and building up experiences, and the more general mishaps and inherent silliness in S&M I was encountering, the more I was realizing that not only did it have the capacity to be really hilarious, but that I wasn’t seeing any other comedians cover the subject a great deal.  There was a niche, there, and it was really worth exploring.  The show developed to an hour which has been done in various forms at, amongst other places, the Camden Fringe and Greater Manchester Fringes.    

What’s your favourite part of the show? When the audience is responsive, things get incredibly fun – I love when they react in horror/surprise/fascination to the various sex toys I bring out during the show, and I always love introducing the Doxy into the mix and enlightening the otherwise uninitiated.  My comedy life and sex life seem to intertwine a tad, because the moments I often find most satisfying are when I humiliate myself in front of a mixed crowd, in action or in anecdote.  I must be a masochist. No idea where that came from…

What do you get up to when you’re not talking kink on stage? I do a lot of slam poetry as well, which takes me across the north, and I go and watch a lot of performance both at the professional and the localized level.  I’ve been going to more kink events recently and I’m aiming to go to more munches and get back into the ‘scene’ in Manchester.  Beyond that, I desperately trawl for men on dating apps, eat a lot of pasta, and spend time with my baby niece, whose birth I’ve already co-opted for comedy.  Poor thing.

What has been your favourite/funniest/weirdest on-stage experience so far? There’s been a few – the woman who yelled “PINWHEEL!” in an involuntary, I’ve-just-revealed-my-sex-life way when I held one up during a show (whom I proceeded to take the piss out of for the rest of the show), the other, I imagine, drunk woman who thought it was a toothbrush, the reaction I always get when I inform unsuspecting audience members what you can use ginger for (which prompted my favourite ever heckle from a horrified friend, who simply shouted, “WHY?!”), the gig I had last week where I held up a vibrator to a microphone and accidentally fucked it to death, the performance at Eroticon where I had to tailor the show to an audience of experts and, definitely the weirdest – the time my dad came to see the show.  The show where I wave sex toys around and talk about dirty talk and spanking.  His reaction was to essentially tell me it was hilarious, then never mention it again.  If I can do that, you can do anything.

This is your first time performing at the Fringe – tell us why people should come and watch the show.I feel I have a uniqueness to offer to audiences in what I talk about – although kink is spoken about freely by the sex positive community; by bloggers, toy-makers, sex work advocates, I don’t think it’s been given a decent airing by stand-up comedians, and the feedback I’ve had from audiences is that they enjoy hearing about it on stage, and enjoy engaging with it in a relaxed, non-academic way.  It is a shame it’s such a niche subject in that medium, but I do enjoy being known for that, and having a reputation as being fairly shameless.  People enjoy the show and come out energized and discussing BDSM more in-depth and openly than they might normally have done.  It’s always a lovely atmosphere, and at 10pm each night, what better way to warm up for a night out?

Plus, as mentioned, my dad is coming on the Saturday, so I’ll need a massive audience as a buffer so I don’t accidentally make eye contact with him. 

What does the future hold for you? Where else can people catch you performing in the next couple of months?

My immediate future beyond the Fringe will involve a vast amount of sleeping and adjustment to normal life again – beyond that, I hope to focus on getting back into stand-up not focused around my show, and will be doing my usual circulation of the brilliant regular spoken word nights and poetry slams across Manchester and all of the north.  If you like filth, I’ll also be doing a spot at Cameryn Moore’s brilliant Smut Slam at the Fringe on 9th August, and have just signed up to perform at an event next year which I’m sure many of the kink/sex positive community will know about and be popping along to.  Watch this space…

Continue Reading

Sex

Cool Me Down

Post title inspired by Margaret’s Cool Me Down, which is a Lady Laid Bare approved ABSOLUTE BANGER.
—

There is a grim physicality about summer weather. At least with autumnal cold, we know where we stand. We stock up on knitwear, layer ourselves, strap our boots on for winter walks. We know how to warm up.

After the scorching hot weather we’ve had in the last week, I’m not entirely convinced we remember how to cool the fuck down.

When I talk about grim physicality, what I mean is that summer has a knack for making you hyper-aware of bodies. Not just your own (this will not be a post about body confidence though – bear with me) but pretty much of everyone around you. Your day becomes its own version of the video for Bitter Sweet Symphony – except it does so for everyone else too, so in a way we are all Richard Ashcroft.

Commutes are a sweaty, toasted nightmare. Tubes are sardine cans. Walking through Central London is a never-ending, perspiration-doused game of live action Frogger, even on the sidewalks. Everyone is angry at everyone else for no particular reason. Temperature differences between inside and outside are, to put it mildly, shocking in some places. Sex? Surely, that’s not something you think about in this weather (at least, not in the conventional sense, anyway). You’re already sticky and panting. You’re already extremely aware of every inch of your body, because every inch of your body is aching and glossy with the sheen of perspiration.

Sex? Fucking hell, even walking to the supermarket’s a bit much. Or to the Tube.

The latter of which was what I was doing earlier in the week. I was on my way to work. It was, to put it mildly, a balmy afternoon. The kind where no-one would particularly frown on you cracking the window open to get air into your bedroom.

My street is on a bit of a hill, so when the weather goes bat-arse bananas hot like this, I occasionally stop to readjust myself. I was doing exactly that, near the top of the hill, when I heard a noise from one of the houses.

A deep, lustful, resonating moan.

Followed by more moans, the telltale moans of a woman in the throes of some very sexy time indeed. The house’s window – what I assume was the bedroom one – was open, but the curtains were drawn. I was, briefly, glued to the spot. Was it someone watching porn? Was it someone using the quiet hours of the afternoon to have a wank? Or was it two people, having summertime sex with scant disregard for the fact that one of them was moaning so loud most of that part of the street could hear it?

Not a clue.

Not that I was meant to have a clue – I was just meant to walk by, on my way to the Sardine Tin Express, my body a vessel for hot, hot heat and elbow jabs of strangers.

Still, regardless of all that, it was sort of nice to be hyper-aware of bodies in a different way for just a few moments. A reminder that sex doesn’t stop existing, and doesn’t stop being fun, even in the hot weather. If not for yourself, then for others.

Who knows, maybe sex is a viable way of cooling down. If not physically…

Continue Reading

Depression and Stuff

Neck Deep

It’s hard to write when you’re neck-deep in a depressive episode. Anything, really. Even a shitting shopping list, or a note.

Your brain feels like a constant attack of sharp and noises. Everything about your body feels off, and not in a way that makes much sense. Yesterday, I spent a chunk of my late shift at work with the uncomfortable sense that I had too many teeth. Sometimes I seem to phase out, losing seconds of time by just going too deep into my own head. My surroundings seem to melt around me, until I snap back with a start.

Sharp. Jagged, loud, at once both intimidatingly, vastly huge and so tight and small it almost chokes me. Tears come frequent and terrifyingly hard – accompanied almost always by a weird, sinking feeling in the pit of my belly.

It’s been a month since my last proper post but this depressive episode has been running for a good while longer. I’ve spent a lot of time beating myself up for not *doing anything creative*, like a break from writing or making things suddenly nixed those things from who I am. It doesn’t, though. Laura Jane Williams’s writing, especially her new book Ice Cream For Breakfast, was partially responsible for helping me see that, along with Ruby Tandoh and Leah Pritchard’s amazing zine on mental health.

Right now, I’m learning to preserve my energy, taking small steps and focussing on my day job, and taking care of my basic needs and wants. Day by day, I just see where I get and keep breathing. Forcing myself to write – for whatever non-essential reason my brain conjures up – makes me want to hate writing. I can’t stand the tortured creator myth because it seems so counter-productive to me to put your art at the front at the cost of something of yourself.

So I’m not.

I’m temporarily abandoning ship on writing fiction for submission. And I’m not going to force myself to live any experience for the sake of content on this blog (which is something I’ll tackle on another day, as this deserves a post of its own). It’s my way of taking care of that something of myself I feel like I’ve abandoned.

Continue Reading

Romance

Scene from a Date Night

we’re out on a date in a restaurant nearby. my chair faces the window looking out on the high street, bathed in that evening spring glow.

my mind is flitting. too much work mulch, not enough “focus-on-the-love-of-your-life”. my mind flits and my eyes flit, and then i spot them.

a pair of pigeons. sat on a roof in my direct line of sight. they’re cuddling, it looks like. in that birdy way, their cooing heads occasionally forming a little heart.

i point them out to him and we watch, for a while.

then a third pigeon shows up. sits at a distance, watching.

“They’re shagging, aren’t they? We’re basically watching pigeon sex happening.”

“Yep.”

they’re shagging. in that evening spring glow – a beautiful, tentatively warm day – we are sitting in a restaurant watching two pigeons having sex on a roof.

briefly. before either of us can say anything else, the third pigeon intervenes and an actual fucking soap opera breaks out on that roof. feathers fly. one pigeon is unceremoniously pushed from its perch. it’s over in seconds but it takes us a short while to process what the hell we’ve just been observing.

and then the food comes and we talk and laugh and my brain stops flitting and starts shutting the hell up for a change. it’s nice. so very, very nice to reconnect in this most basic way considering we haven’t really had the chance to do so in the past few weeks.

pigeon-related drama and all.

Continue Reading

Sex and Depression

Blithe and becoming and frequently humming

When I started out blogging, it was partly due to a bit of an obsession with Beautiful Agony. You probably know the site. A multimedia experiment, testing a hypothesis that eroticism in human imagery rests not in naked flesh and sexual illustration, but engagement with the face.

It was, and remains (and will probably always be) a spellbinding erotic website. It was one of the pieces in the puzzle of me, the puzzle I laid out when this blog started, six years ago this week.

I wasn’t celebrating that anniversary though. I’m not sure I like doing that anymore. It pokes open old wounds (and reminds me of lingering ones). Besides, I rather like the idea of just carrying on like always. Re-puzzling that puzzle.

My libido’s still low. But I’ve kind of learned to sit with it. Ask myself questions, give myself room to breathe and rest as a lot of this is tiredness and depression. Room to breathe is what I seem to keep forgetting.

And giving myself room to breathe was how I got to watching some videos Dr. Lindsay Doe’s Sexplanations channel on YouTube the other night. Indulging my never-tiring curiosity is one of the ways I’ve been sitting with myself. Learning. I subscribe to Dr. Doe’s channel but haven’t really taken the time to delve into her videos.  So, when one popped up on my “What To Watch Next [hint: maybe lay off binge-watching The Nekci Menij Show for an hour or so, maybe, possibly]” list, I watched.

It was a video of masturbation tips. And up came the subject of Beautiful Agony.

I’d already kind of been futzing around with bits of porn, willing something to materialize that would help take the stress off from the past week. Hoo, fuckety-boy, it has been a stressful week. But the internet was not being a wonderful thing for porn, alas. Which made Lindsay’s mention of Beautiful Agony all the more timely – sat on the bed, wearing his shirt and nothing else, I clicked the thumbnail for one of the free sample videos.

A woman, on the floor of her flat. Lying back on cushions and a throw, lazily surrendering to pleasure. Outside, you can hear the traffic, the general hubbub of the world continuing. And inside her own four walls, she makes the world pause with her fingers and her pleasure.

And I went right there with her. The first orgasm came quicker than I hoped it would – probably a sign that my body needed that, a lot. But it was good. It was good and it was satisfying and the warmth of my netbook was pleasing on my naked thighs as I watched the woman on my screen come.

The way she bathed in her afterglow, silent and still… it was spellbinding. Ecstasy in the agony, as is BA’s remit.

It was a good orgasm, that first one.

The second one, I had to work for. It was a couple of minutes later, and I was back on Twitter but still needing something. Another climax, another release. So, I took what I needed. Worked for it, felt it building and building in intensity until finally, FINALLY, it blew me the fuck away.

It was that kind of orgasm. The kind that leaves you fuzzy and head-spinny and unable to remember things like words and how pants work. My own beautiful agony. I settled into bed feeling like a toasty, comfortable little cinnamon bun, content because once again I had managed to sit with myself and ask myself questions and give myself room to breathe.

[ PS – in regards to my six year blogiversary. Although I’m not really celebrating in any way, I do want to thank you for reading. Whether from the early days or more recently, thank you, thank you, thank you. Here’s to whatever comes next. Hope you’re there with me.]

Continue Reading

Depression and Stuff

The Burnt

I’m burnt out.

Simple as that. There’s no point in me weighing my words or giving this post a funny little introduction. Because there ain’t nothing funny about this. Those three words can’t, to me, be spun into something they’re not.

It’s important for me to write it down as plainly as this. It’s important in times like this, when health both mental and physical are collaborating to create a giant and painful fog around me, that I write it down like this. It’s like sending myself a semaphore message though the fog – a Norman-from-Bake-Off-esque missive in written form, which I can come back to and read so I can remind myself that this is what’s going on.

It helps. Just like I use Spoon Theory to express how this feels to others, this is how I express myself to… well, ehm… myself. I am burnt out. And it’s okay to sit down and re-evaluate for a second. Take breaths. Relax shoulders. Rest and sit with self in some weird form of peace.

I’m writing this down now because in the last few days especially, I have been angry with myself for not “being more productive”. Full on, red-hot, how-dare-you-you-silly-shit rage. Which in itself is completely anti-productive as it sends you into this weird cycle of apologising to yourself for no reason as you go into overdrive trying to keep up with doing everything this anger is telling you you’re “meant” to be doing but aren’t doing. “Meant” to be doing is the key here – because your brain will start making shit up that really isn’t essential or time sensitive or something and then it’ll start shouting at you because this thing that isn’t of the essence/deadline-sensitive is something you should have already done. Twice.

I’m burnt out. Day job, tiring brain, tiring body, Weird Cycle of Shit I’m Supposedly Meant To Be Doing.

So, yeah.

Continue Reading

Sex

“I Can’t Find It!”

Oh god, I’m such a fucking potato.

Himself and I were on a date at the cinema last night. One that was a bit fraught, considering most of what we’d planned went a bit wrong. Down to the fact that, as we were heading towards the exit afterwards, we were confronted with a massive downpour. Eventually, we made it onto a bus.  It was late. We were tired and cold. So conversation wasn’t exactly flowing. It was more of a “let me cling onto you like a loving limpet” kind of moment.

I mentioned something about making a t-shirt with an inside joke between us on it. Like, I don’t even know why exactly. I just did because when we’re both tired it’s like our brains sync up to hammer on the ULTRA RANDOM button. So, I mentioned this particular inside joke. And I said something along the lines of “but which one would you put on a t-shirt for me?”

He thought it through for a second. Then his face lit up.

“Where is it? I can’t find it! Oh God, IT’S GONE.”

Have you ever, in the heat of a sexy moment, blurted out something so ridiculous it just follows you around perpetually? A something that occasionally gets brought up by your partner and makes you wish you’d never ever spoken, ever in your life? This is what that is for me.

Lemme rewind.

*spoopy, squiggly flashback effect*

This happened about three years ago. I may have written about it then, but fuck it, I’m writing about it again. We were in the midst of some ferociously good foreplay, the kind that makes you lightheaded and giggly and slowly replaces any kind of logical linear thought with the words WOOHOO SECKS YAS GOOD on a loop.

So it was that I went in to give him a blow job. Well, I wanted to. And I was going to. But… weirdly enough, I couldn’t immediately find his cock. Which was quite the achievement considering he was rock hard and also RIGHT FUCKING THERE.

I panicked. I legit panicked because my brain can be a cheeky little shit sometimes. Especially in the heat of a sexy moment. But this was peak me being a shambles. In a thick haze of lust and libido, my brain had successfully convinced me, for a few seconds at least, that my boyfriend’s cock had vanished into thin air.

Three years on, and I still am a bit mortified by it. Just a little. The words, mostly. I actually had to ask him what context this happened in, as I couldn’t for the life of me remember.

Well, I do now. And yeah, after a bit of a duff night, remembering it was a slight bit of a laugh which I needed. An embarrassing one, but a laugh nonetheless.

Continue Reading

Sex

The Couple in the Car

Moments don’t have to take long to imprint themselves on us. Even the smallest flash has the power to stick in your mind for ages. It was like that with the couple in the car. This happened a few weeks ago, but somehow I keep thinking back to it. Maybe it’s because it happened so quickly. Maybe it was one of those moments where my mind filled in the blanks.

Because my mind does like to fill in the blanks. Writer’s thing. It could have been nothing at all. It could have been exactly what I thought it was.

It was early evening. Dark already, the kind of foggy cold dark you get in early autumn. We were walking back from something unspecified and family-related. Birthday thing,  possibly. Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that standing at the top of the road was a car. Which isn’t that remarkable considering it’s a suburban road and there’s cars all around. But there’s a car.

And the window’s foggy.

And for some reason, I spot the foggy window in the corner of my eye. Along with the woman. And the man on her lap. I think they’re kissing before we pass by. Or it might be the mind filling in the blanks. They might be fucking, but it might be the mind filling in the blanks. She may catch my eye and we may exchange a glance.

But it might be… well, you know.

It’s just a tiny moment, which might not have even happened. I may have seen nothing at all. I may have seen everything. It’s been stuck in my head for a few weeks now though. The kind of moment where I keep pondering whether or not I can turn it into something more on the page. The kind of moment when that sort of pondering makes me want to smack myself on the hand because sometimes I need to switch the writer brain off.

Whatever it was, it was a moment.

Or was it?

Continue Reading

Sex, Sex and Depression

Little Stitches – for BOAW16

Written for August McLaughlin‘s Beauty of a Woman BlogFest 2016 – check out the other entries by clicking the button at the end of the post.

—-

It sounds strange, but lately I’ve found myself wishing that I can write my libido back to life. That I can use my skills as an erotica writer, my imagination and my fingers clacking on the keys of my netbook keyboard to write it back into place properly. To reach into my brain and body and jiggle the chemicals around just enough through the power of rewriting it like an edit to a story. Would that it were so simple. Would that libido wasn’t an incredibly complex mess of science, chemicals and circumstances.

Sometimes it feels jarring to me how the lines of my comfort zone have shifted, moulded anew through the lens of depression and fatigue. I try. Oh god. I try to think myself into the mindset for sex, which feels unreal and still goes wrong in the end because my brain has become really brilliant at backtracking, especially from PIV-sex.

I’m trying my best to figure out why that is. And in the meanwhile, I take little steps. Little steps like a few nights ago, when we lay naked on the bed and joked as he lubed me up and played with me, first with his fingers, then with the Doxy. It didn’t lead to much more than an orgasm of sorts, but it was good. I’m also trying to masturbate more, just to remind myself that masturbation is a thing I enjoy and it helps me relax.

When I am in dark places due to my mental illness, I can orgasm as a way to remind myself that there are pleasurable feeling to be had. Not a cure for my depression, not a fix, but a tool that I’ve used as long as I can remember to keep myself going. My ability to find pleasure in the darkness saved me more times than I can count.

Little steps.

Little steps of reconnection.

Recently, I’ve found that my low libido, oddly enough, has also had a negative effect on my ability to write erotica. So now I also find myself wishing I could use my skill as a writer to write my… writing… back into place. To reach into my brain and body and jiggle those self-same chemicals around just enough that the words start flowing more naturally, to stop making them feel like an old car in desperate need of a fix.

If that makes any sense. I wouldn’t blame you if you couldn’t make sense of it, because I sure as shit can’t.

But I can make sense of this: two parts of my life, two very important ones, are ripped at the seams. Not unfixable, but it’s going to take time. These two parts are connected, somehow; parts of the quilt that is my life. And when you’ve got a rip in the fabric of a quilt, you get out your needle and thread/sewing machine and you try your best to join the pieces back together.

The pieces haven’t been lost, though. Libido is there. Erotica writer is there. Neither of these pieces of the quilt will unravel and be lost just because I’m not using these pieces enough. It just takes time. Little steps. Little stitches.

Continue Reading

Sex and Depression

On sex blogging and low libido

A couple of weeks ago, the ever-excellent Dangerous Lilly wrote honestly and openly about something that can seem like a curse when you make your crust (or at least some part of it/or do it for whatever reason you do it) from writing about your sex life. Low libido is something that can feel frightening if you’re a sex blogger – I know this because it’s something that affects my sex life as well.

Lilly mentions being thankful that she’s no longer the “sexy” sort of blogger who writes erotica, takes sexy photos and writes about her sex life. I wanted to write my take on it from the point of view of someone who, technically, is that kind of blogger (in that I write about my sex life and write erotica).

To start with, this hasn’t got anything to do with my antidepressants. It has, for a part , a root in my depression. In the last few months, it’s been a constant unwanted companion. I like to compare it to the feeling of constantly lugging around a backpack: on the worst days, it’s full to the brim and feels much like carrying around a selection of bricks. On the better days, the feeling’s lighter. Less bricks, but they’re still there. The backpack is never empty, but on the better days it doesn’t feel like you’re in constant danger of toppling over.

The root of this upsurge lies in things like residual trauma from what happened with my mother last year, the stress of coming into a new job in a new area and letting my body get used to it, the lack of sleep caused by housemates who like cooking at three in the morning and having loud and (from what I can hear – which is quite a lot) frankly quite dubious sounding phone calls that last all through the night. Not to mention the pressure I put myself under, a pressure which for the last few months mainly centered around my fiction output and the balance of trying to edit two anthologies at the same time.

That last one especially did a number on me. The editing period of the second anthology leaked over into the Christmas period, which is a very high-pressure period in the day job. I spent many of my days off wanting to do nothing more than fajita wrap myself into my duvet and not come out. Of course, this causes discontent with the authors you’ve accepted into the anthology because if you don’t keep them in the loop (which, I am shamefully bad at this) they’ll start to question what the hell is going on. And it made me heavy with a weird kind of guilt. Because I was already pushing myself harder than I’d ever had, and I knew that I needed to take it slower on my days off. But there’s the lingering knowledge that something’s not being done. Something people are needing you to do. And you know that if you drop yourself right in and don’t stop and take a minute to reassess how you’re going about, things will go wrong. But the feeling of letting people down weighed on me so much.

We’ve had sex a couple of times in the last few months. The last time, a few weeks back, I nearly cried with joy at the feeling of him inside me. Sometimes my body and my brain are actually in agreement over how much I want it and need it and want him and need him. Sex and talking about it is such a major part of my life that it leaves me slightly baffled and plenty worried that it’s just not been on my mind much as of late. And when it’s not on my mind and I’m not having it as much, this blog does not get written in. And that same guilt I mentioned above adds a leaden weight to the brick in the backpack.

I am essentially feeling guilty for not having sex, or not thinking about sex in a way that I can write about it on this blog. Which is also not exactly a blessing for my already low libido as it now feels like every time I catch myself thinking I fancy pouncing on my boyfriend, it is immediately followed by the thought that I’m thinking this because I have to for the sake of the blog.

In case you weren’t aware, I fucking love my boyfriend and sex with him gets better and better every time because we keep discovering each other over and over again. The fact that my body and my brain are doing a great big Gallic shrug at the notion of letting me experience my boyfriend like that is as upsetting as the little voice that tries to convince me I don’t actually want to have sex for any other reason than content.

Continue Reading