But I got to play and cuddle with topaz, making ridiculously silly crude jokes and laughing a lot. We feel back in sync. We had an intense conversation the other night about exercise shame and some recurring insecurities about sex.
Shame is a very rare emotion for me: if you walked in on me masturbating or pooping I'd just ask you to leave and I wouldn't even think about it later. I've had sex in front of lots of strangers without a blush and I'm naked on the internet. There's really only one thing that makes me feel shame and it's exercise. I never used to feel this way, because even though I have never been thin I used to be very fit. I'm not fit right now and showing that to another person makes me feel the most intense shame. It's like I felt confident and fuck-you about my fatness when I was also fit, but now my confidence is fragile and I have no armour to protect me from judgement. I didn't even realize my fitness gave me that armour until it was gone. Now I really want to build my core strength and get my stamina back, but I'm so limited because it's boring to do alone and I feel incapable of doing it with someone else due to the shame. I talked about this with Topaz and told zir that I want zir to encourage me, invite me to join zir, and reassure me that ze doesn't find me gross when I exercise. Ze was happy to offer those things.
The worries about sex came from my intro to sex as "my job to give pleasure" and worrying that if I wasn't doing Topaz' favorite thing in sex every time then I wasn't going to make zir happy. Ze assured me that ze doesn't want the same thing every time and that the variety in our sex is what ze wants. We haven't had much sex in the past few months because of the intense shit in zir life sapping all zir energy, and even though I know logically and intuitively that it's not true, there's still some old damage that says "this must be because you aren't doing the right things /don't want the same things."
