August 2009

Last Autumn, I went to the doctor, complaining of sleeplessness and depression. She said, “Let’s take some blood, and check your levels, just to be sure.”

I’m all, “My levels?” But I didn’t really question it. If a pretty doctor lady tells me to pour hot coffee and maple syrup in my bra, I’ll just go ahead and walk around smelling like IHOP for weeks, explaining to skeptics “It’s for my LEVELS.”

It turns out, I have hypothyroidism. Fun, huh? Apparently, “the estimates vary, but approximately 10 million Americans have this common medical condition. In fact, as many as 10% of women may have some degree of thyroid hormone deficiency. Hypothyroidism is more common than you would believe, and millions of people are currently hypothyroid and don’t know it.” Researching it then, I took a look at the list of symptoms and it was like a ton of bricks came crashing down on my head. How long had I been suffering from this? I’d had a large number of those symptoms for years and years and years, and I’d seen many doctors. Why had no one ever thought to test me for this?

I started taking the tiny blue pill that corrects this slight chemical deficiency and suddenly the world seemed a little brighter. It’s hard to tell what changes are due to the medications I’m currently taking and what’s due to the modifications in lifestyle I’ve begun to implement regarding my diet and levels of physical activity, but the point is, I’ve found a combination of things that seem to be working for me.

And the most noticeable change I’ve been through is a radical increase in my libido. Simultaneous with my beginning treatment for this condition, I participated in Nanowrimo. The goal of this challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. This forces you to churn out a little under 1,700 words a day, and that’s not exactly a walk in the park. At one point, trying to boost my word count for the day, I threw in a sex scene. A very graphically detailed sex scene. I thought I would likely delete it by the time I was working on the final draft, or make it more ambiguous. But then suddenly my characters started driving my story and they couldn’t keep their hands off one another. I was writing scene after scene of lavishly intimate fantasies, and the book began to take on a dimension I had never planned. It became a meditation on the nature of humanity, and love, and sex. I wonder now if I would ever have written that particular book if I hadn’t begun medicating my thyroid.

And despite the incredulous reactions I get from various people when I describe my book to them, I still adamantly assert that porno can be good literature. I suppose their doubt is understandable. There is a veritable fuckload of atrocious material out there, stuff that you just know was typed one-handed. Of course, this is true of all pornography, and indeed, all art forms. I suppose the term for works with “high-art aspirations” is erotica, but I say potato-poTAHto. Sex is an incredibly important part of life, and to pretend that any and all graphic depiction of it must be crude and unworthy of serious consideration is ridiculous.

I feel so joyous and blessed that I suddenly see with new eyes. New, horny eyes. To be able to love sex again, in all the forms I can find it, is so wondrous I can hardly keep from gushing.