The Dialog in my Mind

There was a fairly common experience, I think, among those of us who were of a certain age in America during the "women's lib" era -- we spent a lot of time getting comfortable with our own physical selves, and encouraging each other in that. Some wrote books about it, and the rest of us read those books. We got out our hand mirrors and sat down and took a good look at what our "girl" parts were all about. We took back the business of birthing our children, and nursing those children We claimed our rights to control the how and when and what of our own sexuality.

I spent a lot of years with a female body that I knew and understood in very specific and intimate ways; a body whose tides I'd come to understand in the ebbing and flowing. I'd learned the vagaries of that body, and I mostly trusted its responses. For fifty years, that body and I traveled the path together. Then, last winter, I was surgically removed from the vehicle that has carried me for a lifetime as a woman. I was promised, by my doctor, and by a goodly number of other folks as well, that there would be very few negative changes that I'd notice as a result of that surgery. Turns out that promise was vastly overstated. I am left without the woman's body that I've known all my life, and I am finding it very difficult to dwell in the strange shell that I now occupy.

I need to learn a new body, a new physical geography, a new "sensual" language, and I have no clue as to the vocabulary or syntax, and no idea where to begin. I long to be led into some re-acquaintance with my body; some re-awakening of what it might be like to "feel" this body that is mine.

I want, and I feel silly and selfish in this wanting, help in that process. I feel utterly incapable of teaching myself the things I need to know about this. I went and got the G-spot book, on my doctor's advice, and read it from cover to cover. I've been doing all the recommended exercises to strengthen and tone the muscles. I've got that "information" part handled I think. And I sort of believe that I'm healed up inside from the surgery itself. Too, the sex doctor says that I'm "replete." That seems to mean that all of my hormones have been restored to the place where they ought to be -- or close enough.

Still, I'm not getting much out of things sexual these days. Part of that, I imagine is the depression monster. Fix that and probably things would get better. It was beginning to look that way before all hell broke loose there over the weekend. I'm willing, now, to be sort of patient with that process, believing that there is likely some "better living through chemistry" sort of solution to the imbalance that is turning my psyche into a rodeo ride at unpredictable intervals. However, that doesn't speak to the place where I cannot come to rest completely in my own skin.

I feel as if I have come away from my moorings in a very real physical sense -- as if I need to have the orientation points redrawn and re-established. I cannot do it for myself. I have tried. Over and over, in the quiet darkness, I have sought and searched the ways in which my own hands and fingers might bring the sensory awareness back to my hungering flesh, and thirsting mind. It is like trying to tickle myself. Fruitless.

I need the hand and the guidance of the One to whom I have given my whole self, my whole life, my all. I know He would gladly and joyfully do anything (ANYTHING) to bring me back to the fullness of the pleasure we once shared together. I've seen the desperation in His eyes, and heard the frustration in His voice as I struggle in wordless, clueless helplessness -- unable to give Him the map He needs to know how to take me and so us where we so desperately want to go.

There is that imagining, I think, in all of us who enter into this dynamic, that dreams that Masters can fix anything; solve any problem; protect us from every disaster. It is the unspoken bargain that we make when we step into this life -- the hope that we have (hidden away somewhere deep inside) that the power they hold over us, somehow can be brought to bear on the outside world as well. I know that much of my "feeling" about this parallels the kind of response that I think Lenora pointed to in her piece on Grabbing On last month. There really has been a space here where I've been metaphorically almost waiting for Him to grab me and say something like, "OK. That's enough! Here's the path we're going to take to bring you back to your experience of your sexuality..." and then introduce some sort of plan for that to occur. He's the Master after all, isn't He??? I know; I know -- it isn't fair or reasonable, but then, given the way I've been lately, no one should probably have been expecting fair or reasonable from me.

I think that what I want is some sort of process of sensory "reintegration." I think I probably don't just WANT it. I think I NEED it. I need to be stroked. I need to be tickled. I need to be scratched. I need to be pinched. I need to be kept warm. I need to be made cold. I need to hear and not hear. To smell and to taste. To hurt and not hurt. To strain and to rest. I need to come back into my body. Not all of that probably has to be directly sexual. Maybe not even most of it. I feel like it needs to be deliberate and directed and inescapable and intense enough that I somehow cannot avoid, ignore or escape it.

Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not right away. Our schedule in the next bit of time is -- crazy. We've been this long. It will keep.

swan