Hindsight

It's probably in bad form to be gone so long and then come back and gripe, but fuck, you know what cut a big swath of suckitude through my life? August. Not that it was all bad, there were lots of lovely moments, but it was really definitely not my best month ever.

Early on in the month, I got an IUD put in and sweet jesus. It was painful but not that painful to get in, so I thought I'd be okay. I knew there might be spotting and extra cramping. D.Jack came with me, and walked me the half block slowly home, then cuddled me on the couch for a bit before he convinced me to go upstairs to bed. I tried to get out of bed about a half hour later to pee, and the pain was so bad it triggered a vagal response (I found out at the doctor's later), which meant that the pain spiked enough to make my body not know whether I wanted to pass out or throw up or both. In confusion, I just pulled the covers up over my eyes and cried for a little bit.

It has triggered some fierce fucking PMS. That seems to go away for only hours at a time. If I'm not super irritable, I'm on the verge of tears at the same time that I'm trying to figure out why the hell I'm sad in the first place.

It's certainly an excellent method of birth control, I'll say that, because it has nearly killed my sex drive. I get it back in fits and starts, but it's not like it was a month ago. It's like it gets shakily to its legs and lets out a thin meow, where before it slinked along with purring confident grace. When I'm having sex, it often takes me a while to ramp up, past or through the sense of disconnection. I have to work to feel uninhibited whereas before it was my baseline.

For some people, this might not be a huge deal. Sex and sexuality don't take up prime real estate in everyone's lives, I know. But they do in mine.

I've worked fucking hard to like my body and enjoy it, you know?, to be connected and present and joyful. I feel like I've lost something. I feel resentful of this foreign thing in my body. I am grieving the way my body used to be; I also grieve that entrance to that blissful place I used to take as normal seems elusive to me now. I miss my old abandon, and worry that I'll never be able to get it back again. I feel like I've betrayed myself, and now I am struggling with a body that feels once more like a stranger's. I am angry with myself for hurting my body like this. I have moments of hating my body again, purely.

Friends have very reasonably asked me if I'm going to get the IUD taken out. But done is done, it feels like. I can never not have betrayed my body like that now. So I'm going to leave it in at least for a while and hope that soon the obvious benefits outweigh the turmoil I'm feeling now, and that eventually, the grief and anger are soothed.