4d ago
Right so I have been trying to work out how to write this post for approximately three weeks, which tells you everything about how embarrassing I find this whole subject, and yet here I am at 11pm on a Wednesday typing it into my phone because apparently that's where we are now. Act one: something changed. I couldn't have told you exactly when. My husband and I have been married for 31 years and somewhere in the last couple of years intimacy just became... a thing I was quietly dreading rather than a thing I was interested in. Not because of him. Because of me. Because of what was happening to my body without anyone sending me a memo about it. Act two: I said nothing. Obviously. Because how do you even start that conversation? "Darling, I appear to have become a completely different person from the waist down and I'm not sure what to do about it"? I just kept making excuses and feeling quietly awful and also occasionally googling things at midnight in an incognito tab like a teenager. Act three: I finally wrote it down. All of it. On a piece of paper. In very small handwriting. Because I had a GP appointment coming up and I thought, if I don't say it out loud to someone I am going to carry this around forever. The writing it down bit actually helped more than I expected. Made it feel like a real medical thing rather than just me being broken. I haven't had the appointment yet. It's next week. I am absolutely going to bottle it and talk about my blood pressure instead. But maybe not. We'll see 😂 Anyone else taken ages to actually say this stuff out loud? x