Learning About My Own Sexuality

Jojo wrote an impassioned plea in a comment about my "realizing" that I'd finally recovered from the mental and emotional and sexual impacts of my hysterectomy almost five years ago:

"Numb and miserable. I know that feeling. How, swan? How did you find the path? What did others try to tell you that you couldn't hear? I am listening because I so need to find the path to sexiness again. I am too young to have lost it but it is so hard to overcome drastic body changes that come as the result of surgery. Teach me!!!"

I don't know what I have to teach here, or how I might go about that teaching.  Still, I remember that same plea echoing in my head for all these years, and I remember the desperate wish that someone could tell me what I so clearly did not know.  I do not feel up to the task, but I also feel that sharing what I've learned is important -- especially if it might help someone else.  What I have, mostly, is a narrative of the subtle shifts in my thinking and my perceptions.  Most of what has evolved for me has crept in slowly.  Very little of this has been fast, or earth shaking, or even entirely noticeable in the event.


The beginning for me was simply time.  It took me a long time to heal and regain physical wellness following my surgery.  Corollary issues including anemia knocked me down, and my recovery was much longer than I anticipated.  Six months after the surgery, I was "healed" from the surgical wounds, but far from well.  I was weak, tired, worn out, and with a real lack of vitality.  Because I didn't anticipate all of that, I was impatient.  I desperately wanted the promised benefits of my surgery, and it did not materialize as promised.  I grieved what had been lost.  I mourned for the woman that I would have been if I hadn't been the woman I was.  I grieved.  I mourned.  I was inconsolable.  I don't think there is any way to speed up that initial process of physical healing, and I believe that each one will grieve as they must.  I have wondered if it would have been different if I'd been forewarned, but I imagine that the individual reactions are so unique and so varied, that there was no way to predict my particular set of responses.  I needed time.  Lots of it, and looking back, I don't think there would have been a single thing that would have made that passage go more quickly.    


Following the immediate recovery phase, I entered into a long, long, long period that was characterized by anger.  I was angry with my surgeon.  I was angry with Tom.  I was angry with every still sexually whole woman in the world.  Mostly, I was angry with my own body.  I felt betrayed by my body.  I hated what had happened to me, and it seemed to me that the root and beginning place of the harms I'd suffered was, in the most immediate sense, my own female anatomy.  My rages burned so brightly, searing all my relationships -- and then turning itself back on me.  In the end, I was the one that I blamed.  It has taken me a very long time to come to some sort of forgiveness and compassion for myself in all of this.  Now, five years later, I am coming to hold myself with some gentleness and softness and kindness -- I do not forgive quickly it would seem.  That forgiveness and compassion, as it turns out, has been critical to my path through the darkness.  


When I thought about my body, after the surgery, the image that I held in my mind, was of a dark, dingy, dirty basement; filled with cobwebs; lit by bare bulbs; broken pipes hanging from brackets...  A dismal and empty space.  I have been certain that my insides were somehow like that mental basement space -- empty, broken, dark, dismal and ugly.  Nevermind that doctors assured me that it was all secure, healed, and quite healthy, I was sure that my female anatomy was a cobwebby mess.  It has taken me years to begin to envision something other than that dark basement.  I've had to clear it out and envision something new and remodel and redecorate (metaphorically, of course).  I've needed to work some sort of mental feng shui transformation on my inner space, and when I began to get that I could choose to "see" something sweeter in my mind, things began to change.


Surgery changed my body in profound ways.  The visible scars were not significant, but the internal changes were enormous.  The hormonal sunset, brought on by the removal of my ovaries, was devastating and utterly irreversible.  I'd never realized how much of the sensation of an orgasm was a function of contractions of the uterine muscles.  Damage to nerves during the removal of my uterus, limited the sensitivity of my vaginal wall.    The vaginal lining began to thin, and my natural lubrication began to dry up.  In the months right after the surgery, I was anxious to be able to resume sexual activity -- and then when I got that medical clearance, nothing happened.  Nothing.  My responses were just gone.  I was still interested in sex; still hungry for sex; still horny as hell -- but I couldn't achieve orgasm.  I'd get all hot and bothered and then my lady parts would just lay there, inert.  


Tom found the very best medical people; found a specialist in women's sexual health -- and He was a fierce advocate with the doctors we saw.  I endured months and months of testing and a complicated scheme of hormone therapies.  Nothing worked.  My migraine headaches got worse than they had ever been before, but my sexual response was just as absent.  


I wanted Him to fix things for me.  I wanted Him to work some sort of magic and restore my sex life.  I was convinced -- utterly certain, that there was some thing He could do; some trick that He ought to know; some sexual alchemy that He would pull out of the hat for me.  When that did not happen, I blamed Him.  Not directly, not openly, not in so many words, but just as surely.  I imagined that what I needed was a "real" lover -- that fabled prince charming who would touch me just so; play with me just right; charm the orgasms right out of my recalcitrant body.  It wasn't that He was unwilling.  I know, with a sure certainty, that Tom would have done anything I wanted sexually.  He was more than willing to do whatever would work to help me find my way back.  If I could have told Him exactly where to touch; exactly how hard and how fast -- then He' d have been delighted to take care of things.  The problem was that I had no idea.  I was lost, with no map to my own body -- and I desperately wanted someone to guide me home to myself.  It turns out that I was that guide ... I just didn't know it in the beginning.  When everything was said and done, I had to be responsible for my own sexual pleasure.  I had to do the exploring.  I had to learn what felt good ... and what didn't.  I had to listen to my own stories and fantasies, and I had to give myself permission to indulge and enjoy the pleasures that only I could stir up in my loins.  I figured out, finally, that all sexual pleasure is good.  I stopped ranking and rating the various sensations and experiences.  I learned to enjoy my enjoyment.  If I managed an orgasm during good old fashioned boy-girl sex with Tom, then that was something to celebrate.  If I worked my way to an orgasm in the dead of the night, using my trusty Wahl vibrator, that was good too.  If, in the middle of a spanking, I can catch on and ride it out to that delicious, lusty, writhing hunger, then good for me.  I've gotten greedy about sex; demanding about sex; serious about sex.  What I took for granted, before my surgery, I now know to be a pure gift, given for some undefined bit of time.  I thought I'd hit my end point, and I was wrong.  I do not intend to waste any of the good times that I may have left to me.


Jojo, I don't know what, if any of that, you can use.  I do know that your story and your challenges are different than mine.  I hope that there may be some bits there that you can use for your own benefit.  All the best ~~


swan