It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
–ee cummings
I was sexually precocious, I think. I suppose all children are, before they get corrected out of it. I don’t remember a time where I didn’t masturbate. There was the infamous episode in which I got caught doing it in nursery school, not that I knew that is what it was. Or what sex was, for that matter. As a small child, I was involved in a lot of sexual play with other neighborhood kids. Older kids, usually. I suppose these days it would be considered abuse. I don’t think it was. I think we were all figuring things out.
I was smart enough to figure out that it wasn’t something that people talked about. I was smart enough to figure out that it was something most people would not approve of. Something I should probably be ashamed of. Was I actually ashamed though? Not deep down. I was ashamed that I *wasn’t* ashamed sometimes.
As I got older, I eventually figured out what sex was. I also figured out that I don’t have entirely middle of the road responses to sexual arousal. For one thing, I was never shy about being seen. I was shy about talking to a boy, but letting one stick his hands up my skirt or unbutton my blouse on the front lawn in the middle of the day? No qualms at all. It’s not that I wanted to be seen, or that the idea of being seen was arousing–it’s just that once I got going, I didn’t care.
Sex was always a big part of who I was, although I really don’t think I realized it until I was much older.
I think as a child and young teenager, my sexuality was a lot healthier than it was after I started sort of letting it be impacted by what was done to me. Once life and love started to inflict the inevitable heartbreak, it became something to hide behind. Sometimes a weapon. Something to keep me from feeling any emotions. A sort of emotional numbing agent. But you can’t just turn off one part of yourself without it impacting everything else. Eventually, I shut down my sexuality as well.
In the last few years, peeling back layers of buried hurt, hate, distrust, I had to start feeling again. Everything.
Talking to one of my friends about how much I had shut down, she said she couldn’t imagine it. That I was the most sexual person she knew. And I was. I am. You have to give up a lot to get to that level of numb.
Not that I did it entirely consciously. I just wanted to be…different. Better. Normal. I didn’t want to feel the things that were painful anymore, but I didn’t know how to go about letting go of them.
I’ve talked about the ways that impacted me. Impacted the people in my life. It was really unfair to them. It was unfair to me. I paid with my body and mind. I paid driving through 300 acres of lonely. I paid being no one for a long time. I paid with 80 extra pounds.
It was perhaps the only thing in my life I have ever been truly consistent about over a period of decades. I am a dilettante about everything else in comparison. Shutting down my true self and reading.
It seems so obviously ill advised in retrospect. It seems like I’d have picked up some pointers in the thousands of books I was reading.
But no.
So what happens when you peel the layers back?
It’s not much fun, really. You still have to deal with all of the shit that you didn’t deal with before. And feel all the stuff you got around over decades. I get why people don’t want to do it, I really do. It’s overwhelming sometimes. A lot of the time. It doesn’t make you a lot of fun to be around. Well, maybe YOU would be fun to be around, but I don’t think I have been a lot of the time.
It was a lot like what happens when you shake up a can of pop and then pull that tab off. Messy. Explosive.
I try to let it settle a little, and pull the tab back slowly. Decompress. There isn’t as much pressure now.
But my emotional regulator is still a little off. I still find myself occasionally sitting in bed crying in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. Or flipping out because I don’t hear from someone for a few days. It is getting better. I’m learning to feel what I feel and deal with it without so many worried messages to people in the middle of the night when everything seems so bleak. I think all of my usual middle of the night messaging victims would agree.
There are still a lot of times when I kick my own ass a little harder than I really need to. Or I’ll what-if myself about something I can’t possibly know instead of waiting to find out or just asking a simple question. It’s better.
I’ll never be perfect, thankfully. No one likes perfect.
I’ll talk to friends or write it out instead of just withdrawing quietly.
So what? This isn’t news. Everybody knows this shit. Most of us work this out in our twenties.
Well, that’s fair enough. I didn’t.
I am really smart in a lot of ways, but I was socially and emotionally delayed. Just not bad enough that it looked like I had a problem to most people. I would have said I knew myself very well, but I didn’t have a clue. You can’t be true to yourself if you don’t even know who the fuck you are!
Hey, I figured it out eventually.
At least, I’m trying to.
Right now, though, there is a sunny spot on the patio with my name on it.
I think there might be a book that wants to be read or something.
That’s my job today.