Today was incredibly horribly stressful. First I couldn't fall asleep because I was anxious about the day ahead so I only got 4 hours sleep, then I had to wear a feminine-professional costume for the poster presentation which I felt woefully underprepared for because I just had no idea what to expect, then a final exam immediately afterwards, then stressing out because I felt an urgent need to finish off my take-home final exam and send it off so it would stop hanging over my head- - but I couldn't get the program to work on topaz' computer so I had to go back to school and of course the computer lab I usually use was closed so I had to go to the library where the first computer just didn't work and the second one froze my hands off (it's right under the air vent). I finally got that done and wanted to reward/calm myself so I went to an indie coffeehouse near my school and got a latte which turned out to be SO CRAP I couldn't drink it (and I will drink mediocre lattes because I hate to waste). Then, massive headache partly from not having eaten before 8:30pm after being awake since 7am and partly from no caffeine since I couldn't drink the crap latte! ARGH!  Also that coffeehouse is on my shit list for only hiring young white guys.

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."