Re-Learning How to Fuck

Let me tell you one thing. Re-learning to fuck is actu­ally quite a bit like rid­ing your bike for the first time in over fif­teen years. Your body remem­bers the motions, but doesn’t quite remem­ber the exe­cu­tion of these motions. It takes time to relearn how to move your legs, how to hold your bal­ance, to redis­cover the fear­less­ness that once pro­pelled you down the steep­est of hills at top speed.

Learn­ing to fuck all over again is a lot like that. My body remem­bers what to do, the mus­cles remem­ber when to clench and move, but it doesn’t quite remem­ber how to actu­ally do them. It’s like relearn­ing every posi­tion as though it was new, relearn­ing where to put your legs and arms, how to arch your hips just so. It’s rather frus­trat­ing, just like relearn­ing to ride a bike was — my mind keeps telling me that I should remem­ber how to do this, but my body isn’t so sure.

Even worse, I’m hav­ing to learn how to come all over again. For me, com­ing was never a big deal. It was some­thing that came as nat­u­rally to me as breath­ing. My body was nat­u­rally respon­sive, always wet and will­ing, so to speak. It’s just so frus­trat­ing to me — I’m doing the exact same thing as I used to, but the results aren’t the same. My responses aren’t the same. It takes three and four times as much work to get me started, and dur­ing the process, things just aren’t the same any­more. I used to come in the dou­ble dig­its with reg­u­lar vagi­nal sex, and anal threw me into over­drive. I don’t lose myself in the sex any­more. It’s too easy to sit out­side of myself like an observer and notice all the things that aren’t right, or that are dif­fer­ent. And my insa­tiable sex­ual beast — the one that used to reach for the Hitachi over and over again for “just one more” until the motor burned out — well she’s gone. At the end of the evening, stay­ing wet, stay­ing aroused, and being frus­trated by my mea­ger results takes its toll on me and I’m ready to throw in the towel. I hate it. I really, really hate it. It’s like liv­ing in a stranger’s body. Some­times I just want to weep, to throw my hands up and cry that this isn’t really me. And in a way, it’s not.

It scares me that med­ica­tion can affect me so strongly. I’ve taken a num­ber of dif­fer­ent med­ica­tions for the bet­ter part of my life — for depres­sion, for acid reflux, to help me stay asleep at night. But I’ve never had any of it affect me so neg­a­tively or so strongly. I’ve accepted that I will likely be on one form of med­ica­tion or another for the rest of my life. I under­stand the risks asso­ci­ated with that, but for some rea­son, I never real­ized that it could take some­thing so inte­gral, so deeply a nat­ural part of me, some­thing that I com­pletely took for granted away from me.

I have less than month left before I’m fin­ished with this med­ica­tion for­ever. I called my doc­tor, told them what was hap­pen­ing and they called in another pre­scrip­tion for me. The funny part is that the two med­ica­tions are almost the same thing — both are birth con­trol, both are Ortho Tri­Cy­clen, but where I used to be on the low dose ver­sion, I switched because, with­out insur­ance or a job, it was a lot more expen­sive than the reg­u­lar dose ver­sion. Such a tiny dif­fer­ence in the amount of med­ica­tion has made all the dif­fer­ence — that lit­tle bit more has turned me into a sex­ual zom­bie, a stranger that I don’t even rec­og­nize any­more. Fin­gers crossed, I’m hop­ing things will change as soon as I’m back on the other dosage. Until then, I’m still on my metaphor­i­cal bicy­cle, try­ing to remem­ber how to ride.