Article: I thought something was wrong with me
I thought something was wrong with me
I want to start by saying this:
I’m not the kind of person who does things like this.
Not as a disclaimer — just as context.
Because for a long time, I had a very fixed idea of who I was, and what that person did.
She was practical.
A little reserved.
Not especially curious about her own body.
She didn’t give herself much permission there.
Then one night, a close friend — laughing over a bottle of wine — handed me a small, beautifully packaged box and said,
“You need this more than you think.”
I took it home.
Put it in my bedside drawer.
And didn’t open it.
For eleven days.
The eleven days
For eleven days, I thought about it more than I’d like to admit.
I’d open the drawer for something else, see it sitting there — elegant, quiet, almost deliberately unthreatening —
and close the drawer again.
I wasn’t afraid of it.
Not exactly.
I was afraid of what opening it might say about me.
Which, looking back, is a strange thing to be afraid of.
On the twelfth evening — no occasion, no reason — I opened it.
What I wasn’t expecting
I wasn’t expecting to feel emotional.
But I did.
Not dramatically — just a small, quiet feeling.
The kind you get when something you’ve denied yourself for a long time is suddenly… allowed.
Like your body remembers before you do.
I also wasn’t expecting it to take time.
Somewhere in my mind, I thought it would be efficient —
that it would give me something I hadn’t quite been able to reach on my own, quickly and reliably.
Instead, I spent the first while just getting used to it.
Learning it.
Adjusting.
Letting myself stay present instead of constantly evaluating what was happening —
which, I realized, is something I do even when I’m completely alone.
And then, slowly —
I stopped managing the experience.
And started having it.
What changed
Nothing dramatic.
No sudden transformation.
No clean before-and-after.
What changed was quieter than that.
I began to understand my own responses a little more.
I began to feel — even just slightly — that I had a right to them.
That they didn’t need to be justified or explained.
I was less of a spectator in my own body.
And, for what it’s worth, I became a better partner.
Not because I learned anything new to do,
but because I felt a little closer to what I was actually feeling.
And when you know what you feel,
you can say it.
That matters more than I expected.
To whoever is reading this
If you have something in a drawer you haven’t opened yet,
I’m not going to tell you to open it.
You’ll know when you’re ready.
Readiness — like most good things — arrives on its own time.
But I will say this:
Whatever story you’ve told yourself about who you are,
and what that version of you does or doesn’t do —
that story isn’t fixed.
You’re allowed to be curious.
You’re allowed to take up space in your own body.
I was thirty-one when I learned that.
I wish I’d known sooner.
But I’m glad I know it now.
