500

This is glorious week 500 of Sinful Sunday!

I was a fairly regular contributor from 2015 to 2017, with less (and less) frequent posts since then. (Check out all my Sinful Sunday posts over the years here.) I credit that regular participation and the kind feedback of peers as the single biggest factor in healing my body image issues. It’s such a valuable project and I’m glad to see it’s still going strong. Thanks Molly!

Even though I don’t blog much at all these days, I still take photos when opportunities arise. This one is from an airport hotel on my last big trip in the Before Times.

Sinful Sunday: It’s all about the image.

thoughts on gender

I have never felt especially feminine.

As a child, I was told I was a girl because if you have these body parts you’re a girl (versus those body parts that make you a boy), and I did have these parts rather than those so I couldn’t really argue with the logic. When I was 5, my friend and I played at being boys: we knew that boys had penises so we pretended by stuffing wads of toilet paper down the front of our pants, which was entertaining for about 10 seconds and not especially enlightening. I had stuffed animals, little metal cars, Lego, cards, crayons and books. The neighbour gave me a baby doll for Christmas one year and I hated it, but I coveted an Easy Bake Oven (which I didn’t get) and a Barbie (which I did).

When I was 10, the teacher told us we should all thank our mothers on Mothers Day for cooking for us, which I dutifully did. My dad asked whether I’d noticed that he did most of the cooking. Well, of course. I was vaguely resentful that the teacher set me up to be wrong, and wondered why this was supposed to be specifically a mother thing. Yes, my mom has a big career and my dad has a part-time job, so what? My dad also spent more time with me than my mom did.

I never had a pink phase and for a long time I actively avoided it. I lived in jeans. I didn’t like skirts, first because it was too hard to ride a bike in them (and I rode my bike everywhere), and later out of habit. By age 13 or so skirts and dresses made me feel deeply emotionally uncomfortable.

When my breasts first started to develop, I was excruciatingly self-conscious about them. I stopped wearing my favourite t-shirt (wide purple and white stripes) when the shape of my body started to be discernable under it. I noticed girls wearing tight shirts that revealed their form and could not comprehend how they could wear such a thing. I didn’t think they shouldn’t, I just didn’t understand how it was even possible for them emotionally.

By the time I hit my teens, I felt like there was a manual on how to be a girl but I never got my copy. I didn’t understand why girls travelled to the washroom in flocks. I didn’t know the correct response when someone announced, while getting changed for gym, that her calves were so big or that she was fat. I never had many friends in school, and I got along with boys just as well if not better than girls.

I took dance lessons, I took martial arts lessons. I was both graceful and tough. The only rumour that ever circulated about me was that I’d once broken a boy’s arm. I did well in English class, I did well in math class, I did well in all my classes and I didn’t discover until I was in university (or possibly later) that there were some subjects that girls were supposed to be better at or worse at than boys.

I never liked perfume but I experimented with cologne.

The length of my hair has mostly been in the feminine range, though I also went very short for a while. The hairdresser was concerned about going too short because some of her female clients in that situation were afraid of looking butch. Did I look less feminine, less het? Yeah, probably, but that was fine.

I’ve never been grilled about when I was going to get married and make babies. My parents don’t really talk about that kind of stuff, and I’m pretty sure they knew my answers anyway. No one else in my orbit would consider pushing the matter, though Wolf’s mother once asked if I thought about having kids and I recall tearing a strip off her for it (pretty sure I overreacted there).

Wolf and I lived together for many years and when we got legally married it was weird to refer to him as my husband or to think of myself as a wife. When I started blogging, he specifically requested that I refer to him as my partner as he doesn’t feel like a husband, and for that matter I don’t feel like a wife either.

Being part of a group of women that is addressed as “ladies” properly sets my teeth on edge, while being addressed as “sir” in a letter or email also pisses me off because my name is pretty obviously feminine so it’s usually a result of the person being oblivious and/or sticking to outdated habits and assumptions (and it’s only ever men who do this). I’m happy enough to be called “guys” as it’s relatively gender neutral in my corner of the world. Someone commented on a nude photo of me on Jaime’s blog and referred to me as “they” despite very visible breasts in the image; I found this strangely pleasant — not because I use that pronoun (I don’t), but because it demonstrated of the care they took to not assume.

Eventually I learned that male and female isn’t the be-all and end-all of gender, even though that’s what I was taught as a kid. In the last few years I’ve often wondered how my sense of gender maps on to the options and words now in use, but I don’t really have an answer.

I recently read How to Understand Your Gender by Alex Iantaffi and Meg-John Barker, and they describe gender as being biopsychosocial, that is, it is shaped by biological make-up, psychological experiences and social context.

The discomfort about my developing body was not gender dysphoria. As far as I can figure out, my negative feelings about all things feminine came from subconsciously learning that to be female and/or feminine was to be at risk (something that I believe I picked up from my mom due to her own history and trauma, though she never discussed any of this with me directly). I don’t reject the shape of my body or the parts that I have even though some people may react to my body with the incorrect belief that it somehow represents my personality.

My experiences growing up were relatively balanced with a slight emphasis on the feminine, but I never felt overly pushed toward one construct or away from the other. Culture also plays a role but I don’t take a great deal of notice, perhaps because I’ve not found femininity to be especially strictly enforced here (as compared to the US or the UK).

When I think of “masculinity” or “femininity” I always think of them with the quotation marks because each represents a socially determined but utterly arbitrary collection of behaviours, skills, preferences, and interests. Neither category has any connection with biology; none of it is innate.

I suppose I see myself as agender or gender-neutral, but I don’t identify with those terms any more than I do with female or woman. I’m just a person.

make do and mend

Proud of my mending job but it’s not something I can really show off in polite company.

figuring out what foods work for me

I thought I had a good handle on the foods that work for me, but within the last couple of weeks I discovered a big blind spot.

As I mentioned, I’ve had hypoglycemia for a long time and now I have IBS. I’d worked out a way to manage the hypoglycemia — basically eat more frequent meals and prefer protein and fat over carbohydrates. If my blood sugar starts to get too low, I’ve relied on chocolate, candy or soft drinks (fizzy or fruit juice) like a carbohydrate jerry can to bump my sugar up briefly to relieve symptoms and give me some time to get some real food (i.e. containing protein and fat, as well as a moderate amount of carbs) in me.

The IBS is much more complicated as there are five different categories of carbohydrates that may cause a reaction, so if you have IBS, your food sensitivities may well be different from mine even if they cause similar digestive issues.

I’ve been following a FODMAP diet for a year now, though not religiously. In the elimination and reintroduction phase, I discovered I can eat:

lactose — Hooray! I can have ordinary milk, sour cream, cottage cheese (the creamed kind or dry curd), cheese (aged or not). The lactose in yogurt and ice cream is also not a problem, though the sugar is.

mannitol — The only food in this category that matters much to me is mushrooms, but cauliflower, snow peas and celery are also likely OK.

sorbitol — Most often used as a sugar substitute, sorbitol natural occurs in certain foods, like avocado (which I eat in quantity regularly) as well as corn, green bell pepper, broccoli, green beans, and green cabbage.

The problems start when I eat:

fructose — This means that lots of fruits are out, the ‘safe’ fruits are safe only in limited quantities (usually ½ cup), and I have to be careful with sugar in general. The sugar part is something I’m still figuring out.

oligosaccharides (aka oligos) — My number one problem food is wheat, though that’s mostly down to its ubiquity. Other foods in the same category are onions and garlic (which I’m limiting), nuts and legumes (limiting or avoiding depending on the details), and strong black tea (currently avoiding).

This is… a lot.

So what can I eat?

I learned from hypoglycemia to start any meal plan with protein. Meat, poultry and fish are all reliable since they contain no carbohydrates at all. Eggs are good. As noted above, lactose isn’t a problem for me so I can get my fill of any (unsweetened) dairy products, and thus milk and cheese make good snacks. Legumes (pulses), nuts and seeds all contain at least some FODMAPs, so going vegetarian or vegan would be exceedingly difficult; I try to eat these in small doses when I can but I’m not able to rely on them e.g. for snacks like I was doing with peanuts and other nuts. Avocados don’t have a lot of protein but they do have a lot of fat and seem to work for me to centre a meal around.

Next up in my usual analysis is ‘green’, by which I mean veg and fruit of any colour. Tomatoes, cucumbers, coloured bell peppers, carrots, parsnips, lettuce, and spinach are all definitely fine. The sorbitol and mannitol containing foods are also probably fine for me (but not necessarily for other folks with IBS).

Fruit is tricky because of the fructose. I need to limit some fruits and avoid others. There are none that are 100% ‘safe’ for me. I can have ½ cup servings of citrus, most berries, banana, grapes, kiwi, pineapple, cantaloupe, honeydew, rhubarb. And because my other problem foods in other categories all contribute to the irritation, I have to be careful how I combine things.

And then there’s what I usually think of as carbs — starches and sweets. I can have potatoes; rice, rice noodles, rice crackers; corn, corn chips and corn tortillas; quinoa. There are other grains and starches that wouldn’t cause IBS flare-ups (millet, sorghum, teff; plantain, yam) but I’m not huge on starch anyway due to the hypoglycemia so it doesn’t help much. ‘Gluten-free’ might be OK; basically it’s a flag that an item is worth a look, but since my issue with wheat isn’t actually the gluten, GF is hit or miss.

I’d been having IBS reactions recently and not understanding why so I went back to my book (The IBS Elimination Diet and Cookbook by Patsy Catsos), which reminded me that I need to be careful with oatmeal, sugar and nuts, which I wasn’t especially.

As with fruit, I need to limit oatmeal to ½ cup servings (cooked volume). And I also need to limit sweet foods the same way, even if they’re otherwise FODMAP-free: ½ cup max. So, ½ cup of sweetened yogurt or ice cream, and no sweet extras like fruit or chocolate sauce. Sigh. The cornstarch and tapioca puddings that set me off before would probably be safe in ½ cup servings too. Chocolate is OK up to a maximum of 1 ounce (30 g). [Theoretically I can have two such servings per meal/every 4-5 hours, but I’m being more cautious than that until I get a better handle on it.]

I tend to have snacks in later afternoon and before bed — often milk or hot chocolate, peanuts or sometimes almonds, chocolate, sweetened yogurt, fruit and/or ice cream. Of these, only the plain milk is entirely ‘safe’, and I was eating too much of the others, especially in combination.

For beverages, water, milk and green tea are all ‘safe’. I’ve never been big into green tea, despite having lived in Japan and visited a number of times, but I’ve also received a lot of green tea as gifts and I had amassed quite a stash. I probably have at least 6 months’ worth of green tea in the cupboard, and I’m enjoying it. (Weak black tea is just not worth the bother.)

I’ve never eaten a whole lot of carbs due to the hypoglycemia (though always more than permitted on a keto diet), but I do have a bit of a sweet tooth. After a meal I often find that I want something sweet and I’m not sure how much of that is behaviour and how much is more physiological. But I’m trying to focus on more substantial foods so I’m just not hungry so often. That way I can have a little sugar, as a treat.

In some ways my self-control is usually very good or even overdeveloped. But I wonder if sometimes my apparent self-control is less an issue of self-regulation and more habitually ignoring or denying desires. If you don’t desire, you don’t crave. For instance, I’m tremendously frugal, and when that aligns with my environmental concerns I think it’s clearly a virtue (e.g. deciding not to buy an item because contains or is packaged in plastic, or mending clothes rather than pitching them). But I also am in the habit of not going to movies, concerts or the theatre, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’m not interested or I’m just in the habit of denying myself things.

I’m finding the food issue to be a bit of a struggle. I would really like to be able to eat a piece of cake now and then, or a sandwich, or some nice fresh bread, or a chocolate croissant. There aren’t a lot of foods that I really enjoy, so it feels like a loss of pleasure to deny myself these things. But it’s just not worth three days of fatigue and brain fog for a bowl of ice cream with fruit and chocolate sauce. I hope I’m able to find new foods to enjoy rather than just deny myself yummy things out of pure tedious duty.

My current routine goes something like this:

• breakfast: 2 eggs (3 if lunch is a ways away), other savoury leftovers, no more than 1/2 cup fruit, green tea
• lunch: dry curd cottage cheese with sour cream, corn chips, green tea, and a wee bit of chocolate
• afternoon snack: hot chocolate or 1 serving of some other sweet with plain milk
• supper: usually chicken or beef with veg and starch per above — I make Mexican food a lot because of the corn tortillas and corn chips; Indian is also good for the rice (though I can’t have naan *cries*) but my only trick so far is butter chicken; nachos with guacamole and sour cream once a week
• dessert or bedtime snack: 1 serving of a sweet or cheese and corn chips

On the whole, this should serve to calm my hypoglycemia, since excess sugar or starch tends to upset my blood sugar levels. However it undermines my strategy of relying on sweets in case of blood sugar emergency (well, I could — in a pinch I’d take the IBS reaction over a blood sugar crash), so I’m going to look for some glucose tablets to act as my jerry can.

 

Notes on terminology

monosaccharide — a carbohydrate comprising one sugar molecule, such as fructose, glucose, and galactose (aka simple sugar)

disaccharide — a carbohydrate comprising two monosaccharides, such as sucrose (aka table sugar, fructose + glucose), lactose (galactose + glucose)

simple carbohydrates — mono- and disaccharides

oligosaccharide — a carbohydrate comprising three to nine monosaccharides, such as fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS) which are fructose chains and are a type of soluble dietary fibre, and galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) which are galactose chains and are a type of prebiotic, found in legumes/pulses

polysaccharide — a carbohydrate comprising ten or more monosaccharides, such as fructans and inulin, which are also soluble dietary fibres

complex carbohydrates — oligosaccharides and polysaccharides

 

hypoglycemia

At least, I’m going to call it hypoglycemia for convenience. You’ll see why later.

Background

The first time I spontaneously got dizzy I was 12 when I tipped my head sideways to see into my desk. Although I don’t remember circumstances, I do recall having very occasional dizzy spells from that time and into university, at which point they became a little more frequent. I’d usually go home and have a rest, which sometimes helped and sometimes didn’t. Someone suggested it was low blood sugar but it didn’t seem likely because I was sometimes dizzy after a meal.

When I eventually went to the doctor, he diagnosed vertigo, meaning “I spontaneously get dizzy sometimes” and advised me not to move my head around too much. Uh, thanks. He was wrong, but in fairness it took me years of experience and a few other doctors and finally a particularly knowledgeable and helpful school nurse to figure it all out.

A couple of years after this most unhelpful of diagnoses, and after I’d graduated and moved to a different city, I’d been struggling with diet generally. I’d moved away from home with my boyfriend and neither of us were very interested in cooking. I generally ate food cooked from scratch rather than convenience food, so I was having trouble figuring out what the problem was. There had been dizziness, one occasion of an inexplicable sensation of nervousness, feelings of nausea, and no doubt other symptoms I’m forgetting. I went to the doctor, who said it sounded like hypoglycemia, though he didn’t order any tests. Just as well because the test is a glucose tolerance test in which you consume a sickly sweet glucose drink and then have blood tests every half hour for 2, 4 or 6 hours. As a needle-phobic, I was happy to give that a miss. His advice was to eat more meat and drink more milk to increase protein intake, but I found this challenging because I preferred to go more vegetarian and I was off milk at the time. So I attempted to manage my blood sugar through diet, albeit with limited success.

A few years later, when I was teaching English in Japan, I often struggled with low energy, low mood and difficulty focusing. One morning I was having a tough time. I’d made friends with the school nurse and her assistant; both of them had pretty good English but mostly they were nice, and I enjoyed being around them. So feeling unable to focus on work, I retreated to the nurse’s room and as we were chatting I told her I wasn’t feeling all that well, so she asked some questions. The main thing was dizziness and feeling generally blah. What kind of dizziness? This was the first time anyone had asked that question and I wasn’t sure how to explain it. Was it a sensation of going up and down like on an elevator, or was the room spinning horizontally? It was the up-and-down type.

This concerned her because up-and-down signifies high blood sugar, while horizontal spinning is typical of low blood sugar. It was very troubling to her, a nurse whose supervising doctor specialised in diabetes, that I should be having high blood sugar in the morning. Ah, I said. I ate something very sweet for breakfast. But from then on I paid attention to the type of dizziness and it was always pointed to low blood sugar.

I continued to struggle with blood sugar issues in Japan, so when I got back I consulted a nutritionist. Doctors don’t really get any instruction on nutrition, but some nutritionists aren’t much better. When this person encouraged me to eat things like Cheez Whiz and diet soft drinks, I knew I was unlikely to going to get any useful information out of her.

Anyway, since then I’ve just continued to treat it as hypoglycemia and try to figure out what works for me through trial and error.

Reactive hypoglycemia

If you consume sugar and a short while later your blood sugar is actually lower than it was to start with, that’s reactive hypoglycemia. The science is still somewhat unsettled on the precise mechanism, but one theory is that when the sugar is consumed, the body overproduces insulin. Insulin’s function is to lower blood sugar but here it kind of freaks out, and then you crave sugar. If you succumb to that craving, your blood sugar bounces up and down, and generally wreaks havoc.

Because I haven’t had the test, I’m not certain that this applies to me, but my current doctor says they don’t really do the glucose tolerance test for this anymore. And I know from experience that if I were to have a coke or even orange juice without eating some real food at the same time, it would fuck me up, so I probably do have reactive hypoglycemia.

But this isn’t the only issue for me.

Low blood sugar before meals

I also get low blood sugar before a meal, but since this isn’t provoked by consuming sugar, it can’t be reactive hypoglycemia. I suppose it’s just a normal low caused by my body burning off whatever I ate last. In other words (though I hate the term), it includes being ‘hangry’.

There’s another issue at play — I don’t really feel hunger and instead I eventually get low blood sugar symptoms. At first I thought this was an inconvenient coincidence, but now I wonder if I’ve actually learned (or was taught) to ignore hunger and if so this would be part of the cause of my blood sugar woes.

Even so, my low blood sugar symptoms seem to be more sudden and intense than what most people experience.

Symptoms of low blood sugar

Low blood sugar can cause a variety of symptoms. These are the ones I’ve experienced:

• mood: from irritability, through grumpiness and foul temper, to full-on meltdown (crying etc.)
• cognition: brain fog; my natural indecisiveness gets worse to the point of complete inability to make a decision (including, inconveniently, what I want to eat or where); inattentiveness; sensation of nervousness
• dizziness
• stomach: I’ll get a sudden feeling not of hunger but of void, which quickly turns to nausea (though I’ve never thrown up)

How I try to avoid low blood sugar

Avoiding reactive hypoglycemia is pretty straightforward: no sweets outside of mealtime, and especially no sweets as a meal. This includes sweet drinks such as soft drinks or fruit juice.

Avoiding low blood sugar at other times is more complicated because of my largely absent sense of hunger.

In general, I need to eat proportionately less carbs and more protein and fat than other people seem to need. If I eat carbs, I opt for complex carbs (e.g. rolled oats, brown rice, potatoes) instead of refined starches or sugars, but some carb-centric meals are best avoided (e.g. pizza, pasta). (You can get an idea of the effect of a given food on blood sugar by checking its glycemic index, but in general the less processed the better.) I eat meat, and dairy is a big part of my diet (full-fat everything). I eat on a schedule and frequently (breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack, supper, bedtime snack).

All of this becomes more complicated when I’m travelling because I don’t necessarily have access to a fridge, I can’t cook for myself, and I may be stuck with someone else’s schedule (especially on planes!). You can get carbs in any vending machine but protein is much harder to source. New restaurants are mostly a source of worry: will I be able to find something to eat here and will it be served before I have a crash? Do I have the language skills to figure out the menu and advise of my dietary issues? If I’m travelling, I don’t go anywhere without emergency rations.

As a result, travelling (or even going out to a new restaurant, or having a social event that centres food) causes me some low-grade worry. Will I get what I need when I need it? Dipping into my emergency rations around people is awkward because sometimes I sense they think I should share.

How I deal with low blood sugar when it happens

If I sense that my blood sugar is just a bit low and I can’t eat real food immediately, I’ll go for protein and fat (e.g. nuts). If it’s a little lower, then I’ll add something sweet (e.g. nuts plus chocolate, chocolate almonds). If it’s more of an emergency situation and my blood sugar has fully crashed, then I go for something sweet, preferably liquid because the sugar starts being absorbed into the bloodstream directly from the mouth (e.g. soft drink, fruit juice).

If my blood sugar is low enough that I feel I need some sugar right now, then sugar is the first step and real food is the next step. Real food doesn’t work as a first step in an emergency because it takes too long to be digested — I’ll end up having a full on blood sugar crash while I wait for the food to kick in. Not fun.

Conclusion

Blood sugar issues are inconvenient and become more of a hassle the farther away from home I get. I get anxious about it when I travel but I’m more relaxed if I have a travelling companion who understands my issues and can problem solve when I’m not able to. It’s not all negative though: it forces me to eat healthy food on a regular schedule, which is not the worst outcome. Uncontrolled hypoglycemia can encourage development of diabetes, so managing the issue through good diet is long-term self-care.

 

Notes on dizziness

The nature of the dizziness can be diagnostic (too bad my doctors didn’t know that). I’ve experienced the following:

• low blood sugar: feels like the room is spinning, a horizontal feeling
• high blood sugar: feels like you’re on an elevator, a vertical feeling
• benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV): sudden and rather violent dizziness, provoked by changing the position of your head, can be calmed by moving your head back; results from crystals spontaneously forming in the semicircular canals of your ears and then interfering with the messages that the liquid and cilia in the canal send to the brain about position and movement (I’m certain that this is the first dizziness I experienced at age 12, and as of fairly recently it has become chronic)
• extreme tiredness: to me feels like non-directional wobbliness; confusingly, the dizziness can happen even after I’ve slept, if the tiredness was bad enough (in university, I think I had both this and low blood sugar dizziness – the doctor’s mistake was thinking that there was only one kind of dizziness and thus one cause)

Notes on fatigue

In Japan I struggled with fatigue, at any time of day. At the time I assumed that my fatigue was all blood-sugar related, but I underestimated how exhausting it was for me to be surrounded by a different language and culture all day. I should have been eating a different balance of food, more of it, and having more naps. Fatigue is a difficult symptom to work with because a huge number of issues can cause it.

Better Sex through Mindfulness project

Other than the first two or three years after my epiphany, I’ve had low libido my whole life, so when I came across Lori A. Brotto’s Better Sex through Mindfulness: How Women Can Cultivate Desire a little over a year ago, I bought it and promptly started reading. Unfortunately I didn’t get far. The mindfulness it was asking me for felt out of my range.

I had assumed that mindfulness was a thing I’d be good at. I’m observant. I’m introspective. I’m a highly sensitive person. I have good physical awareness for both movement and health issues. So it threw me for a loop when a body awareness exercise felt difficult.

But maybe it shouldn’t have. Now that I give it some thought, there are also ways in which I can be rather disconnected from my body. Relatively recently I developed a tendency to hold my breath under certain circumstances and it took some time (and a trip to the doctor) before I figured out what I was doing. I always have a certain degree of muscle tension, especially in my neck and shoulders. And then there’s the big one: the nighttime jaw-clenching habit that I’ve struggled with for my entire adult life. Oh yeah, that!

There’s also the puzzling fact that I have no memory of my first orgasm even though I’m certain that it was with a boyfriend (pretty sure I know which one), and resulted from him giving me oral sex. I’m also certain that I didn’t dissociate in the moment, but my former sexual shame seems to have cast the memory of it adrift. In reading about dissociation (the current SB4MH prompt), I also brushed up on the related concept of emotional detachment, which is much more familiar to me, especially as demonstrated by my mother who I believe experienced some kind of sexual trauma as a child.

Although I set the Brotto book aside, I started trying to tune in more to certain physical sensations that I seem to habitually ignore.

For instance, I don’t really feel hungry when it’s time to eat, and I now wonder whether my lack of a sense of hunger is somehow learned and is an example of an idiosyncratic disconnect between physical sensation and awareness. It’s a real issue because it leads to issues and symptoms relating to low blood sugar, especially when I’m not able to eat on a schedule like while I’m travelling. This is something where mindfulness might really help.

I’ve also been paying more attention to the times when I feel (spontaneously) turned on. I’ve found that I rarely feel any arousal at all, and if I do, the sensation tends to be very mild and easily ignored. It’s usually only perceptible it in the morning when I wake up, and getting up to go to the bathroom or retrieve my vibe has often been enough to kill it.

In addition to working on this ‘remedial physical awareness’, I also started meditating. In the past I’d never got beyond a bit of dabbling but this time I actively sought out meditation classes as a way of building a foundation for mindfulness. I found a Buddhist class that was conveniently located and had a set of talks aimed at beginners. Perfect! While I haven’t quite gotten into a regular meditation routine, I now feel that I have the foundation I was after.

And with that, I think I’m ready to dive back in to Better Sex through Mindfulness!

As I read Brotto’s book, I’ll be using each chapter as a writing prompt as a way of encouraging myself to slow down, reflect, and engage with it deeply.

Below is the table of contents, which I will link to my posts as I work through it.

Introduction

Chapter 1. Sex in a Multitasking World

Chapter 2. Seeking Sexual Ecstasy – From the Couch to the Brain Drug

Chapter 3. Introducing the Raisin

Chapter 4. Becoming Aware of Your Body

Chapter 5. “Your Attention, Please!”

Chapter 6. How Mindfulness Works

Chapter 7. If You’re Happy and You Know It

Chapter 8. It Takes Two

Chapter 9. Tuning In to Pain

Chapter 10. You Have My Attention – Now What?

Chapter 11. The Next Chapter of the Present Moment

creating a home

Home is a feeling of safety and security. It’s where you can relax and be your whole authentic self. It’s where you feel welcome and a sense of belonging. It’s comfort.

As I remember it, I don’t think I ever felt entirely welcome at home as a kid. It was not an emotionally warm or supportive place. My parents split when I was 10 and they lived close enough to each other that I spent half the week with each. I think my mom was more accepting of me, but the emotional temperature was always chilly; my dad was warmer but critical, and it got worse when he and his girlfriend moved in together — I felt actively unwelcome.

I attended university in my hometown so my first time living away was when my boyfriend and I moved across the country to a big city. It didn’t take long until the relationship became strained (at least to me — I think he thought everything was fine). We had an apartment together in an expensive city and neither of us could afford to move out. I didn’t feel comfortable; I felt trapped.

We moved back. My mom’s house was bursting at the seams. My dad (and his girlfriend) had moved to a smaller house. There was no room but I didn’t want to go back to someplace where I felt unwelcome anyway. My boyfriend’s family took us both in, which was very generous of them, but I never really belonged and the sense of being trapped returned. How can you break up with someone when you’re living with them and their parents? (I did try my dad’s place after all. I lasted three weeks.)

Much time has passed and Wolf and I have made a home together. (It still counts even though he’s living away right now for work.) We are entirely at ease together, entirely accepting, and I now have the warmth and welcome I always craved without knowing what was missing.

Our home is comfortable and cozy, a safe haven where we can close the door and lock the world out. The comfort of one’s own bed, especially when coming home after a trip, is well known. But for me, home is also where my fridge and pantry are, which means that I can eat food that I know won’t cause me health problems whenever I might be hungry and not have to rely on anyone else’s schedule or tastes. It’s also where my yoga mat, ankle weights and other gear are, which means I can do the stretches and exercises that keep my back and hips happy. So it represents my physical comfort as well.

And now that I’ve paid off the mortgage, there’s an extra feeling of accomplishment, contentment and security. Bliss.

 

reflecting and looking forward

“No peeking”, a Sinful Sunday photo from May 2016.

Well, 2019 was a year. Fortunately there was more positive than negative.

IBS-friendly diet and improved energy

In late 2018, I started managing my IBS using a FODMAP-based diet and by January 2019 I could tell that it was having a positive effect, and not only on my digestive symptoms.

The most unexpected — and utterly delightful — effect was that it largely resolved the fatigue that I’d struggled with for over seven years at that point, despite having undergone every relevant test my doctor could think of. As a result, instead of being constantly dragged down and only randomly experiencing the occasional unpredictable ‘on’ day, most days are now good days and if I get blindsided by some surprise fatigue, reverting to a conservative diet and waiting out my digestive process for a maximum of three days almost always resolves the issue.

For an accidental discovery, it’s had a huge effect on my day-to-day life. A few years ago, the combination of fatigue, poor sleep, depression and then antidepressants meant that I never knew for sure if I’d have the energy, cognition or focus to a given thing at a given time. (A few weeks after I tapered off the antidepressants in April 2018, the cognition and focus came back, but fatigue remained.) Eventually I got tired of disappointing myself so I just stopped planning anything and instead would decide on the day whether I was up for doing the thing. Which was me doing my best to cope, but it wasn’t very effective and it had exacerbated my inherent tendency not to make plans or have goals.

I now have the energy to plan and set goals, though I’m not actually very good at either of those things. So I’ll be working on that in all areas of my life, especially food (shopping, prepping, cooking), and sexuality (specifically exploring the factors that may be contribute to my low libido).

meditation

At the beginning of 2019 I started going to a weekly meditation class with a Buddhist group that meets conveniently near my place. I’d been thinking for some time that meditation would probably be good for my buzzy brain. And during my most recent meditation, I became aware that even though my brain is still far from quiet, it’s perceptibly quieter than it was when I started a year ago. It’s nice to feel that sense of progress.

I’m not practicing regularly at the moment but I’m working on making it part of my routine. And I’ll continue going to the classes because I find them helpful and I like the people: folks who are actively working on themselves to to decrease criticism and increase compassion are people I want to be around.

Wolf’s new job

Another significant change was that at the beginning of 2019 Wolf got a good contract job in a nearby city. For a change, we’re now both working at the same time, so things have suddenly gotten much easier financially, although he now has the expense of his own apartment and utilities. I’m in the process of paying out our mortgage early (we’re currently in payout limbo as the request has been made but the bank hasn’t withdrawn the money yet), so there’s a financial freedom on the horizon for us.

It’s not a secure enough job for me to consider upping stakes yet. But we’re making efforts to remain connected despite the distance, and he’s going to look for enjoyable things we can do when I come to visit to help with my project to have more pleasure in my life.

solitude

But with Wolf away, I’m once again alone here. It’s less than ideal but nowhere near as difficult as when he was overseas doing his doctorate: I tend not to get especially lonely; we talk on the phone every day and see each other every few weeks; neither of us are dealing with depression and/or anxiety the way we were before; and I still have support from Jaime.

Some time ago, I discovered that I couldn’t answer the questions “what do I like? what do I want?” in relation to sex. I now see that I struggle to answer these questions at all, for anything. I think this is largely because other people’s needs and wants seem much louder to me than my own. (It’s no coincidence that my epiphany occurred only after Wolf had been away for the better part of two years.)

But there is a mental quietness that comes from being by myself virtually all the time, enhanced by the fact that I keep the house literally quiet most of the time too. That literal and figurative quiet allows me to listen for my inner voice.

I’m going to make the most of my quiet time, keep trying to figure out my answers to those questions, and see what I can do to remain tuned in to my gut even when I’m not alone. I currently subject myself to a certain amount of mental chatter via social media, but I’m considering cutting down in order to be more deliberate with my energy; no decisions made yet on this point.

car theft

Our summer was marred by the theft and subsequent destruction of our car. Someone came in the back door of our house in the early evening and stole a handful of keys that were right there, including the car keys. I experienced a bunch of difficult emotions, chiefly anger, but in the end it didn’t hit me as hard as I (and others) expected. It was too much to process at once (similar to grief in that way) and I was concerned that perhaps I was at risk of burying the emotions rather than processing them. But I’m able to think about it now and while it’s still a bit sensitive, I don’t feel the need to avoid it, so I guess I’m OK.

Despite various anxieties I experienced that made it difficult to buy a new car, I did buy one, and I like it. Rather than getting a colour that would blend in, I got red because it’s my favourite colour, and despite the fact that some people judge drivers of red cars. Rather than getting a standard licence plate I got a personalised plate because it makes me happy to see it. It was an exercise in determining what I like and want, and prioritising my own pleasure.

I still have some anger, sadness and frustration about this episode, but I trust that it will ease over time and that giving it some attention today will help that process. We’ve taken some steps already for increased security and I’ll give some thought to some others, all with the goal of keeping my response reasonable and proportionate and not turning into an angry misanthropist in a walled compound.

looking forward

I’ve spent a lot of time over the holidays planning, which is unlike me. But I think I’m ready for planning and strategizing now in a way that I wasn’t before, thanks partly to the meditation I’ve been doing. (One of my common intrusive thoughts while meditating is my to-do list, so it would be helpful if I gave it its own dedicated time.)

This process of listening to my gut and planning has given me a clearer idea of what I want to do with this blog going forward. Having realised and accepted that I still have unresolved issues around sexuality, I want to work on those and I’m going to try harnessing the power of memes to give me a kick in the pants to get that stuff done 🙂

 

all angles

The silt in my mind has been settling out. I’m feeling more like myself. I’ve been trying to finish things — projects, books, whatever — and not immediately start new things, so eventually I can clear out my backlog of brain clutter. Years’ worth.

I need clarity. I need quiet. When I’m on my own (so much of the time these days) I like silence. It’s not oppressive: it’s utter calm. It’s the only way I seem to be able to hear my inner voice, which is hoarse from almost never speaking.

What’s that you say?

Sinful Sunday: It’s all about the image.

laundry and loneliness

I was doing the dishes, my mind wandering as it often does in the circumstances, and I remembered a little incident from when I was about 13.

I was at my mom’s house (my parents were separated, soon to be divorced) and she said she thought it was time for me to learn how to do my own laundry. I was stricken; I may have cried. She dropped it.

I actually like doing laundry now. So what was that reaction about?

In recent years I’ve realised that I never felt like I had much emotional support from my parents, and they were both emotionally distant, though in different ways. Imagine that a baby’s parents are killed in a car accident leaving a child-free but dutiful aunt and uncle take on the responsibility of raising her. That was my childhood.

The laundry thing wasn’t about laundry; it was about my mom doing something as part of taking care of me and threatening (utterly without malice) to take away one of the few bits of support I had from her. It was about learning to be independent because no one else is going to help.

I guess I don’t often notice feeling lonely because lonely is my normal.