Valentine’s and Validation

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive… actually feeling the rapture of being alive.”
~Joseph Campbell

I used to be ashamed of who I was.

My mother wouldn’t let me wear skirts as a pre-schooler, and wouldn’t let me grow my hair long cos it was so thick and tangly, so people ended up thinking I was a boy (yes, the same mom whose reaction to my closet-outage was, ‘Please don’t have a sex change’). She never talked about sex except to demonize it, and the only reason I learned so early on in life about the different anatomical parts of my vagina was because my grandmother taught me- but that’s a whole other blog post.

In short, I was brought up prudishly.

In fact, in one of my grade 8 school projects, I even wrote that ‘the idea of a man putting his penis in me one day sounds icky, I don’t ever want to do that’.

I started masturbating when I was about ten years old. My mom, who was a legitimate massage therapist, had a legitimate therapeutic massage tool. The kind your osteopath or physiotherapist might use on a tight muscle. The kind you can buy at a pharmacy. She used it to massage her shoulders. She lent it to me because I was getting a sore back shoulders, and one day I was lying in my room, and realized it felt kinda nice to move it around elsewhere. More than kinda nice when it was over my crotch. Really, really nice actually.

“For Happy Times And Pleasure”…

I was 13 before I figured out I could do the same kind of thing with my fingers alone. I would tune out, go into a trance-like-meditation staring at a spot on the wall, focussing intensely. There was no fantasy, per se. I just became really aware of my body. Of the totality of my body. That teenage body that was overweight and awkward and couldn’t run and couldn’t catch a ball, for a few moments felt like it could ripple and arch like the most skillful dancer. For a few moments, I felt like I could be beautiful. Like I could be loved. Like- I could love myself.

My mom caught me with the massager once and flipped out at me, telling me it was a terrible thing to do that. I started to feel ashamed. Ashamed that I needed this to feel like I could love myself. I went through phases of extreme depression and self loathing because I thought there was something seriously wrong with me, that I couldn’t feel happy with who I was except when I had that feeling, that aching explosion of energy through my whole being.
But, I did it anyway.

Why? Because it was the only feeling I knew that helped me feel good about who I was. And as I grew older, fantasies started to appear. Fantasies about men, about women, about lots of men, and lots of women.

My private sexual practice helped me to feel like less of a clumsy freak and more like a beautiful, elegant woman.

And it still does, to this day.

It’s so easy to look to sex for validation. We all- regardless of gender- receive the message that- the measure of who we are is in how good we are at having sex. It’s permeated through media, but that isn’t a strictly modern convention. The praise of virility dates back to the dawn of civilisation. That’s why, I think, our modern society doesn’t like to talk about sexual pleasure in public too much- cos what if your sex life wasn’t really that great and that meant that you weren’t really that great a person?

Have you ever had sex with someone just so you could feel good about yourself? I know I have.

But I now refuse to use sex for validation. I refuse to have sex in order to feel sexy. I have sex in order to share and discover, to give and explore.

Sex can be ABSOLUTELY amazing. And ohmyfuckinggod I feel honored to have had some phenomenal sex partners- especially in the last year! Absolutely mind-blowing, universes-collapsing, what-the-hell-was-that amazing moments of seriously sexy times. Some with orgasms, some without, some cascading with sweetness that leaves me in a daze for days.

In fact, I have found that sex with others is more pleasurable and enjoyable the more I learn about how to make love to myself.

And when I say make love to myself, I really mean it.

When I grab my massage machine (hey, dildo vibrators weird me out a bit still), I throw on my sexy-time music, and lie back. I move my body. I enjoy my body. I might even kiss my body. I whisper sweet nothings to myself. All the love I grew up yearning to give away to my ‘One True Love’, I give to myself. It’s a meditation of self-adoration. I let that feeling grow in my heart as the excitement builds in my loins. No longer ashamed, I embrace it, all of it. And when the orgasm comes, I might scream, or yell, or burst into song, or squeal out a line of Shakespeare even. My whole body experiences it, right from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes.

That moment connects me to something more than the ‘Me’ I experience on a day-to-day basis. There’s this ecstatic quality to it: for a few moments, I can touch the divine, I can taste my purpose, I can find meaning to take with me into the rest of my day. I find the joy that makes me feel truly alive, a joy I seek to bring back and share with my lovers.

I moved through my shame by learning how to love myself. I still have work to do on my fears and issues- don’t we all? But I feel fortunate to have gotten this far. In a world where we’ve been made to feel ashamed of our sexuality and self-pleasuring, where we are taught to equate our ability to please others with our measure of worth as a human being, I am incredibly grateful for the discovery that I can make love to myself, that I am in fact, my own favorite lover, and I will never have to worry about breaking up with me.

I adore every single relationship I have the opportunity to explore, relish every kiss, every intimate moment, but I know that in the grander scheme of things, none of those will truly last forever. But that’s okay! I found my soulmate, and she was staring me right in the face every time I looked in the mirror.

My ‘One True Love’ is Me!