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.]

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.

A couple of weeks ago, I managed to get a double appointment with the new GP at our surgery. This double appointment came at the recommendation of the GP herself, considering that the first time she saw me I was babbling everything out at once and tearing up something awful. Obviously, I needed a bit more time to explain what I was feeling and, ever so kindly, she made the time.

I’m back on SSRIs, because as I was talking to the GP it became crystal clear to me that I had, essentially, sacrificed my mental health for the sake of an orgasm instead of finding a way to let the two co-exist. And I can’t have just one or the other. I don’t want to have glorious, toe-curling and mindboggling orgasms but then spend the rest of my day drifting into terrifying dark places in my head. In the couple of months in which I wasn’t on SSRIs, I had the most vivid, concentrated and, quite frankly, shocking anxiety attacks of my life. They were tiring as hell, both for myself and ILB.

So, I admitted to the GP that I wanted to be back on SSRIs, but was afraid it might impact my libido again. It’s always going to be a risk, but it was one I was willing to take and work my way around. So, she prescribed me something called sertraline and so far it’s working for me. I’ve had a couple of weird moments – even suicidal ones – but those will pass and I now know that I have a GP who I can talk to and who will take her time to listen to me and my worries.

And I have a loving and understanding boyfriend who means the world to me. And if anything, I am confident that we can work our way around the sex thing. If I’m honest, so far it’s not been on my mind. Sex has been like a foggy kind of thought, overtaken by other things like anthology editing, writing and the day job. I want to make sure it doesn’t stay foggy, but I’m not entirely sure how to do that. It’s like I’m feeling extra self-concious at the moment, not knowing whether I want to give in to loving touches and deep kisses or just crawl under a blanket and hide from the world.

But I’m sure I’ll find a way. I always tend to do.

PS – We did end up having sex on Valentine’s Day – but that brought a whole different set of problems… of the ribbed and dotted kind.