I don’t think of myself as a massively determined person. Goals that I think are within my reach, sure, I’ll stick at them, but when I don’t think I have a hope in hell of achieving something, I’d rather just walk away.

I say walk away. In reality, I’m not that calm. Take cross country in PE at school as an example. This is my total idea of hell – not only are you asking me to do something that I’m going to find incredibly difficult, you’re asking me to compete against, and to be watched by, other people. The result in this particular case was usually complete meltdown: I could work myself up into floods of tears and hyperventilation in what I’d now recognise as a panic attack, but at the time even I kind of assumed was just teenage melodrama.

Invisible, or relatively minor (and let’s be *very* clear – I’m in no way suggesting these two things are the same) disability is a difficult beast. People consider you to be able-bodied, so they expect the same of you as they would of able-bodied people. You’re supposed to use the same sports facilities, do the same sports, keep up, essentially. But your body isn’t the same as other people’s.

Say, for instance, that I wanted to take up running, which in actual fact, I quite do. I could just go out and try to learn to run the way most people do, but I’m scared. I can walk, so even I mostly assume that my legs work the same way everyone else’s do: it was only when I saw a physio a few years back and she identified one after another than none of the muscle groups in my left leg really function that I realised the massive strain that I put on the right side of my body as it attempts to compensate for my left.

This isn’t intended as a self-pity post: more just my thoughts on why certain things bother me so much. I love sex – if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this blog, but it is, fundamentally, something that places physical demands on the body, and for that reason, I sometimes hate it, too.

It takes a hell of a lot for me to fuck a guy, and even more for me to fuck him sober (although that’s a whole other post). In the bedroom, I rarely get out of my own head space, which makes it hard for me to come. There’s just so much to worry about: does he think I’m putting enough effort in, that I’m into this enough, that I give head the way he likes it? Which is why, on a bad day, posts like this one and
this one send my anxiety levels off the scale: I’m self-conscious enough about the obvious stuff, I don’t want to think that a guy might be judging my physical prowess outside the bedroom, or that, in addition to how my body works, I also have to be thinking about what I say in the bedroom.

So, as I said, like with cross country, I may be overreacting. But sometimes, like tonight, sex has negative associations, not good ones, because it’s a physical thing, and like all physical things, it’s something I just find too fucking hard to get right.