This might get a little gross.
I'm having difficulty with gagging.
This is significant to me for several reasons, aside from John's lengthy instructions on how to avoid the gag reflex and give a proper blowjob. Which I can't do anymore either, but that's another issue.
This isn't about sex.
It's about gagging at things that shouldn't get to me.
It's about the grossness factor gag reflex.
It's about how I used to be the last one standing, people puking left and right and monstre, the strong one, tucking her hair behind her ears and cleaning it up, with nary a scrunching of the nose.
It used to be how someone shitting their pants just meant cleaning it off, not stopping twice to decide that human excrement is disturbing enough to lose one's lunch over.
It came out of my body, there shouldn't be anything gross about it. I have an effective dermis for a reason, it keeps the poo from getting back in or making me sick. Poo does not stain, it does not eat through clothing or skin, it doesn't hurt. It's mushy. It's. Just. Poo.
THe same goes for booger, puke, urine, and other undisclosed substances that I rationally know cannot hurt me.
And I hate that we are so easily trained to be afriad of them, that civilization does not mean open-mindedness and education-borne liberty, that it has come to mean irrational fear instead.
In any case, it used to be that I was as tough as my brain told me to be, that all it took was a determined scowl and I could handle anything, from cockroaches crawling across my cheekbone to projectile diarrhea hurtling at freshly clean clothes.
Until recently.
A couple of months ago, I started gagging. In the car, when I miss-sang a note and rather than opening my somethingorother part of the throat, pressed down on my larynx Annie Lennox-style instead.
I'd gag, cough, hack a little, go back to singing. It worried me a bit but I decided that I'm over-reactionary enough as it is without flipping over this.
Then one day I had a particularly beany poo (I told you I was feeling graphic today) and gagged momentarily reaching for the flush-handle thingie.
This bothered me and my slantwise ego somewhat, but I got over it.
Then this morning, hacking with the toilet-brush at the remnants of too many carbs in the lazyman's diet this week (no I will not simply ignore my poo and pretend it didn't just fall out of me), it struck me, I understood the gross, what once would just have been brown flecks heading for the drain, today were rampant, free-floating morsels of gross.
And I gagged.
And then I gagged again.
And then I puked. I puked white banana residue from breakfast, mixing it with something that should never, ever get to me.
In the midst of discovering emotions I never allowed myself to have, I've gone soft, and weak, and more vulnerable than is fair.
There are memories I have that are slowly becoming someone else's past, because I'm not sure I could live through them again.
My strength is waning, and some days it is difficult for me to remember what I am replacing it with.
Everything that made me special...
And yes, all this melodrama is brought to you by one of the most heart-rending performances of Madame Butterfly last night, and my own penchant for being too damned hard on myself.
But.
I just don't like it. Part of me is still holding very tightly to the misconstrued notions of self-worth that I had to give myself as an angry wallflower.
Part of me is very upset that with every new corporate survival technique I learn, I lose a real survival skill.
And I haven't found those answers yet.