For the last couple of months, when we kissed, the first thought to flash through my mind was: “this is supposed to be fun.” I told myself over and over, like a mantra, willing it to come true. Sometimes it did, more often it didn’t. The actual joy of sex was lost to me, and I worried I’d lost it forever.

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Sometimes I wish I could see the future before I make an important decision. I’d jump at the chance to gaze into a murky crystal ball and find out which relationships would work out, which heartbreaks I could avoid, which projects would be successful. But if I really could see the future, I’d probably have had less fun.

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This blog post – part 2 in a series of… hmm… I’m not sure how many yet – talks about some mental health stuff, including Dark Thoughts and general misery. If that’s likely to disturb you please don’t read on. 

When you’re mad, you’re allowed to say the word ‘mad’ – at least in your own head. You’re allowed to tell yourself: ‘don’t think like that, it’s mad. That’s what got you here in the first place.’ When you’re mad, you’re taught to examine your thoughts carefully – writing them down if necessary – so you can pick over the alien carcass of insanity that your brain has spat out. Pulling the meat (‘I’m worried I can’t have sex’) from the bones that you’re meant to identify and discard (‘If I can’t have sex I may as well die’).

I am being medicated into compliance. 

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This post has everything to do with anxiety and nothing to do with sex. Except, of course, for the fact that both sex and anxiety are woven so tightly into the fabric of my life that they touch on everything I do. Except for that.

A while ago, someone sent me a link to this old article on stress and anxiety, and it made me stressed. But the good kind of stressed: annoyance that prompts me to write a long blog post about something. That kind of stress I like. It’s a refreshing break from the other kind of stress I have, which is a constant low-level hum of worry that I have done or said something howlingly awful, which at some point will be revealed to me via the medium of a friend or colleague telling me to get fucked.

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