Perhaps if I had been more typical I’d have recognized what I am, a masochist, without the years of anguish and repression. Maybe if I had seen behaviours such as running until I collapsed from dehydration, and playing the piano, violently, until it was out of tune and I was sweaty and exhausted, or tearing at my fingernails and cuticles until they bled and rubbing layers and layers of skin away from the inside of my thighs as self injuring I’d have understood my reality.
I saw those behaviours, the behaviours I now know to be a form of self-injury, as a way to relieve stress and anxiety only, they had no further meaning. Rather I assigned them no further meaning. They had plenty …
I didn’t make the connection, then, between my sexuality and my methods of relieving emotional pain or stress … and I didn’t understand that the repression of my sexuality was the root cause of much of my anxiety. I didn’t know denying a part of myself was impossible to do in a healthy way or that the battle that raged inside of me, the battle between repression and recognition, was one I could not win. It boggles my mind, now, to consider the vast stores of emotional resources I allocated to managing that internal juggernaut …
The thing is, in my case, understanding what I am sooner would not have mattered. Sure, I’d have had a label but it would have made no difference.
I needed Him to help me understand that being a masochist is OK …
That it doesn’t mean I am flawed …
Or that all I have accomplished is in spite of the deficit caused by a deviant sexuality …
No man other than my counterpart could have given me that. No. Other. Man.
I am not ordinary, that I have always known. My needs cannot be satisfied by invented frameworks and rules and a fallacious relationship construct …
It goes far deeper than that for me.
Our therapist once said to Paul, “Would you expect to be able to satisfy Libby if you were a heterosexual man and she were a lesbian?”
That was a light bulb moment for Paul.
For some of us, sexuality is that complicated … and that simple.
again, interesting and thought provoking…