Got another one of those random calls from yet another publishing company today, didn't bother picking up, but I looked them up. That snip clicks out if you need to see the screenshots. 😂
I think at this point I've shared so much stuff for free that I may as well share the rest for free, maybe slap a book together another year (or ten lmao).
Years ago, when I first started blogging publicly as an aspienado, I wrote aspie lovin' (recopied here for mobile viewing), which got way more hits than it should have. I mean way more. Back then, xanga had internal tracking available and I was able to see it. I'm not going to copy/paste it here, but it's a cute story if you want to check it out, how crazy mixed up I get with social interaction in a relationship and why the word 'cupcake' still cracks me up.
A few months later I wrote self stim (recopied here for mobile and later shared on Autisable). I'm not going to recopy that here, either. In the comments section in that middle link in the previous sentence, someone commented that they thought they were the only person in the world to have this problem, and I left a lengthy reply with a history of how I 'came out' about my sexuality with link backs, so if you are one of those weirdo full blown synesthetes on autism spectrum and other complications, hi, me too.
So to quickly recap, I was born a mess and it may have affected my brain a little bit but not so's you'd notice that much on an MRI or cognitive testing, right? Except for empty sella and the headaches I've had all my life, everything problematic I've ever gone through growing up boiled down to either me being 'different' (not a compliment back then), or being a weirdo. On the other end of life now, I have some solid research backing up some of the things that have sexually haunted me my entire life. I can't definitively say what caused what, what exactly are symptoms of which thing, but I've got pretty good ideas how to sort it all out now.
So the big problem behind everything that I rarely talk about is spontaneous orgasms and persistent genital arousal disorder, which is hilarious given that I'm super asexual by nature. This is a very tangled up thing that I tried bringing up in therapy, but the push to have to define myself was so odious that I had to drop it. I'm not against defining and sharing, I'm just not that verbal all the time (thank you, autism spectrum), and when I am, I wind up talking too fast (thank you, euphoric episodes). Throw in another person processing the convo and it's really not long till we're off in crazy land arguing about what I'm really going through.
I started out born with deficits. I am socially deficit (whole cheer section in the back just shouted out at me, we all know I suck), prosopagnosia (face blindness) didn't help with building relationships at all anywhere any time in my life, autism lending to self stim (totally normal for auties as, I argue, a compulsive need for tension relief that isn't perceived as sexual by tiny children), and on top of all that, I have some weirdly brain wired synesthesia. I mix sex up with everything.
You cannot orgasm without a specific brain chemical, and once you orgasm, another brain chemical is released. The whole process usually follows a physically logical sequence of events. You fantasize, you touch someone, you enjoy them, you climax.
Not me.
As a child, all it took was someone angrily yelling and my anxiety would pop like a cork and there I'd be grinding on the floor trying to escape. I could vanish in my mind. I was gone. I didn't know for many years that I was dissociating, and that was the fastest way I was able to cope without melting down and winding up being punished for the extra chaotic noise I'd be adding to theirs. That was a coping mechanism to avoid pain that didn't make any sense to me. I didn't connect cause and consequence for years, so I didn't learn how to deal with the environment around me like I should have.
Let's throw in a monkey wrench. At some point, I must have had a back injury, who knows when or how. I skipped crawling. I dragged myself across the floor with my arms, they called it scooting. I have no idea why I didn't use my knees. When I decided I was ready to walk, I just stood up and walked. This back injury has showed up a number of times throughout my life, and each time I have been unable to walk. This is a consistent story in my life. It happened when I was a preteen, I think, all it took was a high jump off something to paralyze me in screaming pain. A chiropractor relieved the pressure on the nerve and I walked out after being carried in. That happened again three more times as an adult, with extensive physical therapy the last time it happened.
That pinched nerve area can be seen in this article. 👈 I've been through years of complications with that nerve, including such rough lower abdominal pain that I ran in to check for bladder infections sometimes monthly. I always turned out fine. I had severe groin pain off and on throughout my life, feeling like I fell hard in a bike accident or something. I never talked about it because anything involving genitals was so taboo back then, especially in our house, that I would have felt like a sinner just bringing it up.
Between tension in kindergarten and elementary school and that compressed nerve, I almost pathologically aimed for swingset poles on the playground. Just gripping my legs around them and pulling myself up to the top was nirvana in my poor brain, and I'd be so 'gone' that staff would have to come get me and pull me back into class crying in full meltdown. Any time I'm asked about excessive masturbation as a child, I feel so pissy that I can barely talk. That wasn't masturbating. That wasn't sex. That was a very small child with no coping skills desperately needing pain and stress relief. If we remember me talking about being born addicted to darvocet and having to live on donnatal (one of the ingredients is a barbituate) just to hold food down as a baby, it starts to make more sense that my brain was hard wired to overfeel everything as pain.
I'm not sure how I made it through puberty, but I severely lacked cognizance of any kind of sexual attraction all the way up through high school and beyond, which would have been very surprising if anyone knew how ridiculously my life was run by spontaneous orgasms the whole time. I saw it all around me, kids schmoozy and dopey all over each other, and I just sat there hiding continual orgasms out of the blue making it hard to think, although I amazed my gym teacher in high school when I shimmied up a rope right into the rafters one day, and jump pressed 800 pounds another day. I was exremely strong from all that private exercise. I would have died if anyone had ever found out. I wasn't shy, but I was brought up to be mortified over anything untoward, as the prudent might say. I had enough stim practice to outlast a nymphotic slut, and just no one ever knew.
I've brought this up before, but I was in my 20's before I realized I'd never visualized kissing anyone. This didn't stop me getting married, which was surreal. Never get married to escape your parents, that's dumb, and it backfired horribly. I was so inexperienced with sex that I didn't realize for years I'd married a pedophile. That's a scrapbook for the ol' burn pile, right?
I didn't consciously realize until my 30s that I was literally being sexually triggered by weather, colors, smells, architecture... It was highly embarrassing to be flipping through a home magazine in a doctor's waiting room and suddenly freeze into hiding orgasms because I saw a certain rock wall in a picture that was a certain splatter of grays and random patterns. That magazine was so spellbinding I almost brought it home. I kept sneaking peeks back at that page. Seriously? Yes, very seriously.
After I noticed that's all it took, I started keeping track of areas inside and outside of buildings that caught my attention. For some reason, certain colors and patterns in architecture (not all the same) set me off without warning, and it's so pleasurable just being in or near that building looking at the colors and patterns that an hour could slip by and I wouldn't notice. Guess what. There's an article.
What Is Sex Like for Someone with Synesthesia?
Given how long ago that was written, I'm surprised I didn't find it sooner. I guess I never thought to look it up, lol. I'm just disappointed that they confine the question to actual sex and not unrelated stimulus.
So you get a person with a pinched nerve, wonky brain wiring, social deficits, and a life fraught with tension and anxiety, and life is one long frustrating orgasm. 😂 I'm sure there are people out there who would pay good money to have this problem. And now I'm looking back on my life processing all the things I went through and realizing the impact this had on all my relationships...
Most of what I did socially for a long time was mimicry, because I don't seem to have a natural instinct for empathy. I'm clueless, so I sit there listening when people yap on about whatever, and I've been told I'm the best listener. Sadly, I started drinking heavily after I divorced the pedophile and wound up in some really stupid places with not very good people. I was still so unaware of myself socially that I didn't recognize red flags that should have been popping up, so I wound up raped a few times and nearly raped even more times. I got smart enough to see it coming and split the scene, but it took awhile to connect all that poor behavior around me to cause and consequence while I floated over it like bubbles on the tide. Because of this, I've walked through some dangerous places nearly unscathed, oblivious. I can't help but be very thankful looking back that I was so asexual that I never hooked up or bonded with anyone else who would have dragged my life down like my first husband. The only real exception was an affair I pursued more out of loneliness than anything, but the fallout blackened my heart so badly that I called quits on trying to have another boyfriend of any kind.
My second husband came from an arranged meeting and friends/coworkers pushing us to go out, and the deepest thought I had on that was surely they would at least have some sense of what would work out for us, because he was kind of like me, socially distant without much of a clue how to go forward after his own divorce. Not exactly a match made in heaven, but fast firm friends. It's been 30 years now since we first met.
We are not an average couple. At all. We rarely talk about sex, neither one of us can smoothly initiate, we're both kind of klutzy with anything in the aura of romance, and we're both too naturally honest to pretend feelings about anything. He can't lie to save his life, I always know. I think our biggest challenge, besides coming into another marriage each having a premade kid and all the ways we've been affected by extended family, is that we laugh too easily. Especially me. Everything is funny to me, because it's so cartoony. I'm sorry, but sex is hilarious. Everything about it is so dumb, like living memes or something. I cannot to this day get past the word 'frog' if it comes up in my mind for any reason whatsoever during sex without completely destroying the mood with laughing fits. After a few years of that, Scott told me it takes a brave man to continue in spite of a woman laughing in his face the entire time. Just writing that has me stifling giggles, I can't help it. He's right, he's a very brave man with superior focus.
Sooner or later, everyone on the planet experiences a glitch or problem in the 'plumbing', as it were. Some are born wonky, some develop wonky, some age wonky. Then if you have a sex partner of any kind, they may or may not have their own kind of wonky, and then you top it all off with whatever physical and mental/cognitive challenges we have that either twist things up or just flat get in the way of dealing with wonky.
Dysfunctions are part of life, same as heartburn and headaches. It's not a big deal unless you have attached a big deal to it to begin with. If you are using sex to express love and fail to express love any other way, you're going to have a really hard time when things go wonky. If you use sex as your entertainment and don't have any other diversions for pleasure, you're going to have a really hard time when things go wonky. You can do this all day and fill in the blanks
My life should have come with a warning label, since everything I got through is inside out and backward. I can't even imagine having to be married to me. But conversely, same with my husband. He came with his own baggage, as well. We'd both had previous messed up relationships, and we both had deep secrets about our childhoods involving trauma and abuse. It wasn't sexualized abuse for either of us, but it was every bit as traumatizing, so there were parts of us already closed off to sharing long before we met.
Everything we hear about marriage (and you can apply this to any sexual parnership) is about trust and honesty. You can have surface trust and honesty and still have none inside of you. Since a sexual partnership involves such interaction as allowing a person to learn how not to hurt you both physically and emotionally, it's easy to come into that already behind a fortress of safety. Some of us must operate that way because that is how we survived earlier grievances, but that doesn't mean we can't be kind and mindful of each other, even when we can't seem to share what we really need or prefer or like. Anyone who has been through emotional and physical abuses instantly understands what I am saying if they have consciously addressed processing their past. If you haven't dealt with that yet and shrug it off behind a firmly shut door, you cannot understand any of this because you are too closed off. When you are like that, you are using the other person, not sharing yourself. There's a fine line. You can love someone with your whole soul and still be using them because you have a demand that lines are not crossed, and you may not have even consciously addressed those lines. I think more of us are like this than we are willing to admit. Life on this earth kinda sucks and by the time we finally reach a place where we really long for soul-deep love, we are so closed off we cannot figure it out.
That was the kind of wall my husband and I ran into in our 30s, early on in our remarriage with previous kids, family all around inputting their negative opinions, challenges galore, and me dealing with my health issues while fronting that I could keep up. Which I couldn't, so there was a hurt pride thing going along with judgment from negative outsiders and my husband caught between all that. It was natural at that time that he'd fall back into old behavior patterns. Sex was about the only time we could seem to set some of that aside and just touch each other, so bringing up any more problems in that light was tantamount to taboo at that point, because it wouldn't have taken much more to completely break our marriage. That was our last option for managing to stick through the other challenges we were going through, and even though neither one of us could think wisely on it back then, I see now that our kindness of simply not beating each other up too much over sex fails was part of what saved us. The rest was sheer stubbornness, I think. 😄
But for real, first it was me, then it was him, then me again, and the times where sex was easy and good were rare. I had that back injury flaring up here and there on top of arthritic and other pain and some really monumental headache spells, and he developed a weird ongoing erectile dysfunction that could have gone back to injuries as a kid, and when we both overlapped these problems, sex was rough. His doctor told him the best way to treat his problem was to keep having sex, but there was no more information forthcoming from either the doctor or even my husband. We stopped even talking about it, just did it. It was up to me to establish what the lines were for my own pain, which became so excruciating at times that the only way I could orgasm at all (even on my own) was to grit my teeth and own it. Searing nerve pain ripping up your nervous system right at climax is a pretty big challenge, but there was no other way for 2-3 years. I was at a place where that pinched nerve was so bad that I had to drag in to years of chiropractor and then physical therapy just to keep walking, and that entire time I went through complications that felt like an arrow had been shot through the top of my left foot whenever I simply sat down, horrible sciatic flares, bearing down pains around my pelvic floor, groin pain like I'd been spiked, bladder and uterine pain that had no other cause or malady, just lots of pain. Sex was hard because any kind of new pressure in any direction anywhere increased the pain spikes, and then for some reason, orgasm itself was a fresh hell all on its own.
In reality, sex wasn't causing me any actual harm. The logic of sex, actually, was that I needed the extra strength conditioning to deal with that level of pain. That was before much could be found on internet, before we knew how to state our needs simply to doctors (my husband rarely saw doctors anyway, so we were on our own), and before we both made emotional breakthroughs about our pasts. The most logical thing I could think of to get through it was 1- kindness, and 2- patience, both of which I'm not naturally good at. I focused on problem solving, because that is what I was born for in this brain, and I became a sort of director- move this way, try that, slow down, wait a second while I, and sex became a clumsy couples physical therapy session with a very simple goal of either one of us just making it to climax. I wimped out sometimes, couldn't face my own pain, but I made sure he made it. No more laughing over frogs popping in my head. No more distractions. We literally went through undiscussed sexual workouts with each other for at least two years. Over time his erectile dysfunction worked itself out and he's fine, and over time my back grew stronger and healed from the pinched nerve and I'm fine.
That is what life partners DO.
As more time has passed and we've made individual emotional breakthroughs about our pasts, it's easier all the time to hang out and just be friends. As I've gone post menopausal and he's gone more diabetic, we've both become uninterested in sex together, which is actually pretty normal if you look around, but as far as I can tell, we're still fine. I take care of me, I assume he takes care of himself if he needs to, and we don't fret with each other over it. This house is our sanctuary and I like that we respect each other's space.
So now I'm learning about coconut oil and estradiol, because being post menopausal sucks for complications coming with dryness. It's interesting how treating dryness is affecting the arousal disorder, and that in turn is affecting depression and euphoric spells, pretty sure all these are linked through brain chemical processes. Got my little roller coaster going, but I seem to be doing ok with it.
Beyond that, everything in my head now feels like review. I feel like I'm coming up on the 'final', like when you're in college and the end of semester test consumes you. I feel like it's time to go back over everything I've learned and assess how I did with it, and then come to a conclusion about 'my stuff'.
After sticking through a major commitment to a relationship, I can honestly say I'm glad I stuck through it. Aside from feeling like we accomplished our goals getting the kids raised up right, I feel satisfied that I did my human duty learning how to apply what I learned about becoming a more kind person to the one person I committed my life to. That's not an easy thing. We went through years of wanting to call it quits, long spells of barely speaking to one another, things like that, but as water flows under the bridge, time cycled around and we can look back on that now with a few jokes. I can't imagine it having been better to split up, given all the problems we had that we'd have had to face all over again with new partners. I have to say I've been very lucky because I wasn't stuck through all this with someone abusing drugs or alcohol, he never got snotty hateful with me, never struck or pushed me around. We did have a bad day here or there where I'd be told what a drag I was on his life, and I'm not saying that was a good thing, but it was a real wakeup call for me because I really was a jerk sometimes. He didn't need me being a jerk on top of all the stuff we were trying to get through.
For whatever reason the world has become like it is, we have, as a society, been strongly brainwashed into believing that our sex lives are the measure of our happiness, and that we deserve to sex up ourselves any way we wish for fulfillment. I'm here to say that idea of sex is a drug. It's an addiction. I know what sex addiction is, I've lived it. Thanks to my crazy brain, I never turned that into anything selfish, like many people do. There are loads of people out there whose driving force in life is their next sexcapade, in or out of relationships, and some turn that into money making schemes. They model glitzy lifestyles like sex is all that and a bag of chips so they can make money off others, and boy do they get rich. Many of us fall for the glam of it, even if we don't fall into that abyss itself, and bring that home to apply to our own partner judgments and fails, and that isn't fair.
Sex is the most honest doorway in to your soul. If you are honest with yourself, you can see exactly what kind of person you are, could be, choose to be or not be when you use sex to rummage around in your mind and dig up your past. Why? Because sex is the fastest way our trust and honesty can be destroyed. Even if we are never sexually abused as children, the way we are taught to behave sexually can be very mind numbing to how we really feel in our souls later in life. Because I have this weird sense of self in a weird brain, I can see all this clearly. I can see the rubble strewn path others have to pick their way around just to meet me in the middle and talk about these things.
Kindness is logical no matter where you are in your own path. Kindness to yourself, kindness to others. Failure to be kind is our first mistake in any situation.
(Since 'peaceful protests' are messing up our minds, I'm going to insert that kindness also means protecting your loved ones when others will hurt them. It's that simple when we get down to the minute and second of that possible last breath of life, for those of you still freezing up over making decisions like that based on fear of reprisal.)
I bet you guys thought this post was going to be about all my really weird sex stuff, like object fetishes. 😂😂😂
If you were digging the soul stuff, this vid is pretty awesome.
