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.