Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and My Sexuality
A few weeks ago during a fatigue-clouded weekend of entertaining myself by watching YouTube videos, I stumbled upon a Ted talk — Unlocking the Door to Your Authentic Sexual Wellbeing by Emily Nagaoski. The speaker is a sex educator and researcher and the talk intrigued me enough to want to learn more.
Finally, I got around to reading her book — Come As You Are. After about an hour of reading, I have an epiphany that is so worth sharing.
First things first, a little bit of my sexual background. I am one of those people who have strong sexual brakes as well as accelerators. It made for a very messy and excruciating time in my adulthood when I could no longer pretend to be non-sexual. It took me a decade of failed relationships and heartbreaks accompanied by some life changing sexual experiences to heal and be comfortable with my sexuality. It was a gradual process of making progress, consolidating it and keeping my healed self even though the relationships that healed me fell apart. I often looked back and was able to feel gratitude and be thrilled about my upcoming life and the possibility of sexual adventures, of not being constrained by my very strong sexual brake pedals.
Just before I fell sick, I found myself, for the first time to be relatively emotionally stable and confident, to be able to enjoy being with someone intellectually and sexually and be in the moment. Soon after this, my health situation deteriorated to rock bottom. My job became incredibly stressful and my capability to function day to day dwindling to non-existent.
Anyhow I digress. 8% of my way into the book — Come As You Are, the author speaks about one of the subjects Laurie.
Laurie had a baby and said this of her experience with her body when she didn’t feel her friends got her,
“What I need is to hear that it’s okay to feel sad that my body will never be what it used to be. I put a lot of effort into learning to love that body, and now I’ve got to start all over again learning to love this one.”… “It shouldn’t even be about whether I like my body or not”… “Now it really should be about whether or not it does what I need it to do”
Granted, I haven’t had a child. And yet, I now understand why I lost my sexuality in the last one and a half years. My body stopped working. It no longer does what it needs to do. Every time I make progress and start to think that it is starting to get back in tune, my body falls apart, it just hasn’t been working. My body has become a liability, a spoilt child having a tantrum requiring infinite attention.
I’ve gone back to square one. Of being an asexual person. Because my sickness has left me with a body that does not work. When I saw the ted talk, I wondered why my sexuality is gone, I love myself, I learnt to love myself a few years ago that even though it has been wretched for a while, I still love myself. However, now I am certain of it.
I don’t love my body anymore.
And now that I know, I need to get to work and start to learn to love this defunct piece of human existence. As a wise person once said,
The first step toward change is awareness.
How have your health issues affected your sexuality? Did they affect your relationship with yourself and your body?
