#I’m learning the hard way that isn’t true. wanna know a fun fact? covid didn’t really… affect me emotionally

[lemonthepotato]

I think I finally know what the worst emotion you can experience is.

A loss of excitement for the future.

I’ve experienced anhedonia before, a lot, actually, and it’s always been a terrible emotion compared to the pain I’ve felt for my life circumstances being ‘bad.’ The problem now is that I’ve felt that tenfold. I’ve always strived above what was normal- for an exciting, perfect life. To think for a moment my dreams are unrealistic, that I shouldn’t strive for them… might save me pain in the long run. It might save me the disappointment, the sorrow, the pain…

But the alternative

Oh, the alternative is so much worse. To not want anything from life. To not see purpose or meaning. To not be excited about anything.

Sure, I know the chances of being famous, having a dozen friends, finding love, living on my own, having excitement and thrill in my life… I know that’s unrealistic. But I can’t let my future be set in stone as not achieving that, as living the way I feared; below average. Even what’s being seen as ‘average’ now. People are lowering their excoriations. What I thought to be an average life, fame aside, is being seen as luxurious or unrealistic nowadays. And for the few seconds I let myself feel that not striving for that would be a wise decision, I immediately spiralled.

“I won’t have that. Even if I did… would it make me happy? Do I even want to be happy, or do I just want the excitement?” The excitement, the pain, all of it I strive for. Heartbreak, drama, sadness- all things that I have dreamed of. Love, friendship- happiness- all things I have dreamed of, because living such a solidary lifestyle for so many years was a numb feeling.

I went off my antidepressants in May. They gave me bad dissociation. The moment I went off them, I felt… real, for the first time. Unfortunately, I thought the anhedonia, the numbness would go away forever- that I would be full of pain, misery and happiness for the rest of my life. But… that was mistaken.

I wonder if my striving to be a less angry person also made me less passionate. I wonder if trying to be a ‘better person’ for ‘myself’ made me less passionate. I wonder. Is it better to be extremely flawed, but passionate? Perhaps.

When things didn’t turn out to be how I thought they would be with college, I saw that as the end of the road. But it can’t be. And though I don’t know how I can turn the tide to make a life I’ve dreamed of, I can’t give up. I truly can’t. Even if it would be the smarter decision… I cannot live a bland, unfulfilling life.

[itsdaggerandsheath]

An Introduction to Sex

               Everyone has an “introduction to sex”. The most of us are not born and raised in households where sex is openly talked or taught about, therefore we must be introduced to it in some way. Usually first by word of mouth from parents, friends on the playground, or maybe a school health class. Typically when it comes to parents and health classes though, you only learn about sex in terms of reproduction and looking at scary pictures of genitalia with STI’s meant to scare you into abstaining. Then, as you get a bit older, you may be introduced to sex as an “activity” through your friends, the Internet, porn, etc. And then, of course, you’re introduced to sex when you start having it, should you choose to. Everyone has different introductions to sex, but I feel the need to document mine because 1.) I feel that it will help explain why I’m so passionate about sex education if I document my experiences with sex from the very beginning and 2.) my “introductions” were hilarious, and since we’re in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to write something with a bit of humor to hopefully make you laugh and provide you with a bit of a distraction from the end of the world.                So. Let’s start from when I was about four years old, when I began to learn about sex for the sake of reproduction. I’m not a parent, but I imagine there are times when parents say something horrible to their young children thinking “they won’t remember this when they’re older,” which is what I’m sure my mother was thinking when she was teaching me about sex when I was little. Unfortunately (for me) she was wrong, and I remember every…weird little detail.              I was a very curious child. I don’t remember why I was so curious with the idea of where babies came from; maybe I saw it as a joke on a TV show or movie or something. But for some reason, I was infatuated with the idea for as long as I can remember (perhaps this was an early sign that I was meant to pursue sex education all along). I was constantly asking my poor mother, “Mommy, where do babies come from?” And by constantly, I mean, probably every day. Even after she explained it to me, I would continue to ask for more details; I continued to ask her as the years went by because her explanation just didn’t make sense to me. Basically, what she told me (and remember, I was four) was that when a mommy and a daddy get married (marriage was always emphasized) and they want to have a baby, the daddy will give the mommy his “daddy juice” (yes, that is actually what she called it) and this “daddy juice” turns into a baby in the mommy’s belly.              It’s going to be very hard to type this all out without cringing.              Since I was four at the time, this answer made sense the first time I heard it. As time went on though, I found myself asking more questions. One time, I saw my cat outside “wrestling” with another cat, and a few weeks later, we had kittens; how had that happened? Why did the boys and men in my life face the toilet when they peed? Where did “daddy juice” come from and how did it get into a mommy’s belly to make a baby?! I demanded answers. (Now my only question is why the hell did my mom refer to semen as “daddy juice”?!)              I can’t remember where my mom got “The Miracle of Life” videotape from. Did we just so happen to have it? Did she rent it from the library or Blockbuster because I’d just kept asking? I’m not sure. All I remember is her handing me a video tape (I’m not that old, I promise) and telling me that if I watched and paid attention, it would give me some answers. By the time she let me watch the tape, I was seven years old and had some mild knowledge on reproductive anatomy; that females had vaginas and periods, and that males had penises and did not have periods, though this was the extent of my knowledge (granted, that’s more than most seven year olds know). However, this was enough for me to understand most of what was going on as I watched the tape.                Most.                Now, there’s pros and cons to me having seen this video tape. A pro is that my mom didn’t try to spin some story about how the stork delivers babies; she allowed me to know the truth. A con though is that my mother wasn’t the one who told me the truth: a video tape was. I can’t remember if I asked my mom any more questions after watching the tape or if any sort of conversation was had with me, but I do remember that she told me not to tell any of my friends about what I’d learned - presumably because she didn’t want me to be “that kid” who goes around and tells all the other kids about sex before their parents told them.                So, of course, I totally was that kid.                I remember being in my back yard playing on the swing set a few days later with a friend of mine at the time, and when I told her that I knew the secret to where babies came from, her eyes widened through her purple glasses and her mouth with several missing teeth fell wide open.               “You do?” She asked, lowering her voice, knowing that what we were discussing was top secret material.                In my second grade vernacular, I explained to her that babies came from “a boy putting his private part in the girl’s private part.”                “Which one?” My friend asked, referring to the fact that, from what we knew at the time, “girls have two holes” (we now know that females have three, but remember, we were seven at the time).                “I think the first one,” I’d said, referring to the vagina, as I didn’t know what a urethra was at the time.                This friend and I then made it our life’s mission to spread this new information to every one of our friends. Partly because it was rebellious and mischievous and fun, but also because I personally felt like it was something that my friends needed to know, because their parents were lying to them about where babies came from. I really was meant to go into sex education from the very beginning.               My mom never found out I’d told all my friends about sex, which was a sweet victory to me at the time. (She also doesn’t know that I have a sex education blog that I share with all of you, which is also quite the victory).                Then we get to how I learned about sex as an “activity” or something that people do “for fun”, which I’ll mostly discuss in Part 2, but I’ll give you a little taste of it here too. I’m gonna circle back to the idea of my mom saying things to me that she figured I probably wouldn’t remember as I got older that sure as shit, I did, and shutter at to this day. One such conversation went a little something like this when I was about eight:              “But how does the penis get into the vagina? Do you have to lay down or sit up, or…?”              My mom shrugged, “You can do it standing up…” She trailed before taking a sip of her coffee.              That’s an image I’ll never get out of my head.              My mom and dad got divorced when I was very young, to the point where I don’t even remember most of it. My mom didn’t date very much before she got married again to my stepdad over a decade after her first marriage had ended, but at the time of the conversation I’m about to document, she’d been in a relationship with a guy who for the sake of privacy, we’ll call Tod. To provide some context, my mom and Tod were pretty serious at the time, to the point where there was talk of moving in together and marriage. I was about nine at the time and suffered from really awful nightmares, so I was sleeping in my mom’s bed with her a lot and Tod never stayed the night (because my mom didn’t want her kids to see a man she wasn’t married to spending the night with her after she’d told us time and time again that married people don’t stay the night together, even though my dad and his girlfriend weren’t married at the time and they lived together, so I don’t understand why she shoved that down our throats so much when we already knew it wasn’t true). However, with the idea of my mom and Tod potentially getting married, my mom was trying to talk to me about sleeping in my own room again.                “You’re not gonna be able to fit into the bed with me if Tod and I get married and he’s sleeping with me,” She’d explained.                I’d shrugged, “I’ll just sleep on the floor.”               “What if we wanna have sex and we can’t because you’re in the room?”               “I thought you said Tod’s sperm didn’t work anymore.”               By this time, I’d learned the word “sperm” and as my mom and Tod had gotten more serious, there came the question of whether or not they’d have any more kids – my mom had me and my sister, and Tod had two children of his own, but would they want any together? My mom explained to me that Tod’s “sperm didn’t work anymore”, which I now assume means he got a vasectomy, and my mom was adamant about not having any more children anyway (this was a couple years before my brother came along; his dad was not Tod, so that’s a story for another time).                “Not sex to have a baby; sex for fun.”                Confused, I asked, “People have sex for fun?”                “Yeah, you didn’t know that?”                I was nine.                I realize I’m portraying my mother like she’s a horrible person, which she isn’t; I love my mother very much, these were just not some of her best moments…               So then, of course, I told all of my friends that grownups sometimes have sex just for fun. I had no idea how it worked, just that it was a thing that happened.               Then, I entered fifth grade, which was the grade that my school began giving us the talk in our health classes about sex. What this entailed was separating the boys and girls, the girls being taught this information by a female teacher and the boys being taught by a male teacher. Some of this information was actually quite useful; we learned about puberty, developing breasts, periods and period products (and how to use them), as well as what little anatomy we needed to know about when it came to sex for the purpose of reproduction. However, there was one fatal flaw.               I was sitting next to a friend of mine – the same friend with the purple glasses who I’d first told about sex when we were seven. Now, we were ten, and learning about a lot of things that we already knew about, which gave us a bit of an advantage, as I’d caught the flaw in the school nurse’s explanation of where babies came from. She did tell us that sperm goes into the vagina, finds an egg in the ovaries, and that the sperm and ovary will eventually form into a baby. However, she didn’t explain where the sperm came from! The fact that sperm comes from a penis and that, in most instances, pregnancy occurs from a penis going into a vagina, was never mentioned.              It was clear that she was intentionally not telling us this, which I immediately knew was wrong.              I was a little asshole at the time, and was this close to raising my hand and asking the school nurse “How does sperm get into the vagina?” even though I already knew the answer, when another girl raised her hand and asked the question instead, and it was obvious that she really didn’t know. My school nurse, her face turning as red as her bright red hair, then very quickly and hurriedly explained to us that sperm comes from a penis and (since we were too young to understand IVF) that pregnancy occurs when a penis goes into a vagina, and sperm leaves the penis and goes into the uterus through the vagina.             I was still an asshole though and dared to raise my hand and ask, “Is it true that people have sex for fun too?” I knew the answer to this question as well, and so did my friend sitting next to me; we just wanted to know what she’d say.            “Uh…y-yes, s-some people do it for fun, yes. There’s even a little piece of plastic you can put on the penis to prevent sperm from getting into the vagina, so you won’t get pregnant.”            This was news to me. That was all my school nurse said about condoms; she never even said the word “condom”. However, this didn’t faze me at the time. Instead, I simply looked at my friend next to me and we snickered together, like the little assholes we were.          As puberty came along, my curiosity about sex only grew. And do you think I got a good education about it in school? Nope. Not a bit. So where did I get my information from? Friends? No, I was the friend that was relaying the information. Porn? Not necessarily…         Fanfiction.         Yes, as much as it pains me to say it, I got a good chunk of my sex education from Fanfiction. And a bit of Tumblr and YouTube as well, but we’ll discuss that a bit more in Part 2…         In the meantime though, what was your introduction to sex like? Was it as ridiculous and cringey as mine? Did your parents tell you the truth about sex, or did they make up some absurd story? Please feel free to tell me your stories in the comments here or on my Instagram page @daggerandsheath                                                         I love you all and stay safe during this difficult time!

-          Dagger and Sheath