July 9, 2026
As a warning, this involves discussion of bodily fluids, sex, & usage. It’ll probably be a little gross.
For a while, I lost the ability to feel sexual pleasure (this was before taking MAOIs and seems to be completely random). It was a pretty unnoticeable loss, relatively speaking, but disappointing because I enjoy the other aspects of relationships. Having to perform “duty sex” is unpleasant; I would not like to repeat those acts. If nothing else, working on regaining this ability would let me pursue other desires, though the absence of a common feeling made me uncomfortable for normative reasons. Unfortunately, most current literature on the lack of desire involves acceptance of it, or pleas to not stigmatize it, which is strange; if we were to all lack such emotion, we would cease to exist. I’d like to fix this, not seek acceptance. To go further, being able to experience the full range of emotion has been nice so far (see the MAOI post). Given the dearth of information on solving this, I gave up.
But this lack of feeling was solved entirely by chance (to be generous, this may be one reason why there is not much information). For silly reasons, I took 800mg of a medication I usually take, which happens to be a mild GABA inhibitor. This was similar to being drunk, quite nice, especially since I cannot usually drink. The difference between these states made itself manifest when I wandered over to a restroom, proceeding to have one of the best pees of my life. This feeling is difficult to describe; similar to dipping into a cold pool on a 100° day, a bowl of fresh fruit after a half-marathon, or realizing that feeling such pleasure at a daily bodily function is possible—what was stopping me from feeling it in other places?
I’ve been plagued with incredibly painful digestive issues for the past few years (though mostly resolved at the moment) which comes with a great deal of shame. Incontinence at 25 is not an experience I’d recommend. With this shame came complicated feelings about using the restroom itself. To spare the gory details, my next natural thought was, “What if I allowed myself to feel satisfaction here?” This made much more sense to me than solving my lack—after all, I have to use the restroom multiple times a day & wasn’t dating at that time. Allowing myself to feel this minimum satisfaction making day-to-day life much more pleasant.
Down the line, I started to consider dating again, realizing that this lack was likely preventing me from acting on my desire. In the way I had before, an attempt to allow myself to feel within my body seemed like the best course of action. Publicizing exactly what I did online feels like a touch of oversharing, but regardless, the same process of noticing satisfying feelings in my body was a great help. Following this, finding which actions caused these feelings helped quite a bit, allowing me to act better on my desires.
An issue with this advice is that it is very “just get out of the car”-esque. I’m not sure that this is replicable in any meaningful sense. To zoom out, this change felt similar to the phase change I’d seen in a liquid crystal under a microscope. Focusing on the body is important, but goes beyond that—if this is what meditators are attempting to describe, it would make sense. Otherwise, however, this framing ignores that feelings already existed in my body; it was just that the majority of them involved pain & shame. Feeling is not necessarily a good thing!