Let’s Talk about Sex
“Now that I have your attention . . .”
I know, it’s a terrible cliche; but it works for a reason. Sex compels our interest in a long list of ways. And when you are diagnosed with a chronic illness, those ways can start to seem larger than life.
It sounds petty to say that our sexuality can become a huge focus of life after diagnosis, but hear me out. I’m not talking about body parts and what they do well or not so well at various times in our lives. I’m talking about the whole enchilada: mind, body, spirit, and relationships. It’s always important to think of ourselves in our human totality, and when we are under a threat to our appreciation of all that we are, it’s absolutely essential to remember we are so much more than a body.
When Worlds Collide
I was well into my 20s before I started to allow for the fact that my best life required letting all of my component parts talk to each other. There is a classic episode of the sit-com Seinfeld in which the show’s most dysfunctional character, George Costanza, starts to panic over his girlfriend wanting to hang out with his main group of friends. “If she comes into contact with this world, you know what happens. Worlds collide. And then they blow up!” As hilarious as this episode is, it resonates because it’s based on something we all understand on some level. It’s called compartmentalization, a psychological defense mechanism used to manage discomfort when things in our lives seem to be in conflict. I never intended to compartmentalize, it was more just how I thought the world worked. My brain was for solving problems. My heart was for feelings. My body was for getting me from here to there, and my genitals were for getting me and a partner from here to, well, there. It seemed pretty basic, and I didn’t see any reason to mix any of these pieces with each other too often. It was all very George Costan-zian.
Getting a diagnosis of Parkinson’s or any other neurological disease is not a happy day. I speak from experience, having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 1998, at the age of 30. But the day of diagnosis can be one that pivots our old ways of thinking about our whole selves toward something better than it’s ever been.
Sideways
In the chronic neurological disease community, the Universe has forced a kind of vulnerability on us that requires pulling our whole selves together. I realize now what a luxury it used to be not to ask my brain to help my body, or my body to rely a little bit more on my heart. I do also see how I allowed myself to be walled off into different pieces that didn’t work very well together. I told myself it was for efficiency and effectiveness, but that’s just a lie. It was to protect myself from feeling like a failure. And if we are honest, sex can amp up that fear of failure in all of us at any time, whether with PD or no PD.
Let’s be real. Things can go sideways in a sexual encounter; the vast array of uncontrollable variables simply make it so. When we are young and/or physically healthy, those variables are more easily attributed to factors outside of ourselves. The dog jumps on the bed. The phone rings and it’s your mother. Water-based gel fell on the floor and now someone has a broken ankle. I mean, I’ve heard those kinds of things can happen.
Maybe before your diagnosis came along, you had moves. Good moves, in-bed moves that are like lifelong friends who show up and get the party started, every time. Perhaps now those friends are slower to arrive and maybe even don’t show up at all. #*&! it.
Right-Side Up
It’s the challenges that come after diagnosis that can be more difficult to laugh off and move on from because they can feel so personal and one-sided. If your partner doesn’t have PD or a chronic physical ailment, it can be easy to feel like the mutuality of intimacy is lop-sided, but this is where relying on your whole self becomes incredibly important. The thing to remember is those old moves (and ways, and times, etc.) were not and are not your only friends. They are not and never were who you are as a whole person. If you’re lucky enough to be with someone you care about and who cares about you, you can figure it out. But you have to let the worlds collide. You have to open up. You have to be willing to say, “Let’s try it.” And when things don’t go as expected or even as hoped, we have to keep the walls down and the worlds connected.
If we live long enough, the truth is this is just going to happen. Fast things get slow. Firm things get floppy. Wet things get dry. It’s a big old-fashioned pain, a five-star buzzkill. But that’s only the final word if we stop talking about it and stop getting creative about what sharing ourselves with another person can mean. After diagnosis, a lot of things can change. One thing that never has to change is our dedication to our total selves, on our own and with people we love. Just think about W.W.G.D. (What Would George Do?), and then don’t do that.
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Photo by lucas Favre on Unsplash
Elizabeth Gaucher earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from West Virginia Wesleyan College with a concentration in Creative Nonfiction. She is the founder of and editor-in-chief for the online literary magazine, Longridge Review. Follow her on Twitter, @ElizGaucher