My Vagina is a River in Egypt

My vagina and I have a love-hate relationship.

About a year and a half ago, I discovered that I had a rather crappy problem known as Vaginismus. Now not to bore you with all the knitty-gritty details, here's vaginismus (or as those who have it amicably call it, 'vag') in a nutshell:

Vag is pretty much a girly form of ED. Long story short, my vagina is like a high security prison: nothing is let in. It senses outside danger and is all "imma keep this place as closed as shit" and pretty much puts up a sort of wall of defence (almost literally too). The fun thing is that it's partially physical, and partially psychological, which makes it al kinds of fun to try to treat. What's great is that it's fully curable. What's less great is that it takes a really fucking long time to get over it, and if you have the motivation and drive like I do (which is to say, not very much), it could take years to get over it. Yaaaay, complications!

So, that's all great and dandy, Pinky, but why are you telling us this?

Well, boys and girls, I don't actually know why I am. Maybe it's because I don't really keep secrets from people and so there's no point in hiding this from the big bad world of the interwebs and such. Or maybe because I need to organize my thoughts about the subject, and how better to do it than with a bunch of strangers on the world wide web?

I guess what's become problematic is that over the last few months, I've been in a sort of denial state about the whole thing. For one, it's a self-diagnosed problem, so in the back of my mind I can't help but wonder if I've made all this shit up. But this is one of those rare things that seems pretty common to self-diagnose because a lot of doctors don't seem to know what the hell this is, cause it's sort of rare and seen more in psychology classes than medical ones. But I mean, in my defence, my self-diagnosis can't be all wrong. I've mentioned it to doctors who haven't told me that I was wrong. And I have other sorts of fun vaginal problems too! Yaay a package deal of vaginal fail~! Fun for the whole family!

In my denial, my busy schedule, and the fact that I pass out at 9 pm, I've pretty much stopped treating it too. And I don't plan on bringing my treatment kit with me to Japan either. So pretty much whatever small progress I've made up till now will be nullified over the next nine months, which means forget the idea of any sort of relationship while I'm abroad. Guys seem to think of sex as something of utmost importance, and because of my situation, it's honestly at the bottom of my list of what I need in a relationship.

For a long time I've sort of thought of myself as defective because of this. When something you've bought is defective, you bring it back to the store, they replace it for you, and once they get credited for said item, they throw it out in the trash. That's the harsh reality of defective things: they pretty much all get thrown out. And that's pretty much how my last relationship ended too. I find out I have this problem, and a week or so later, I get dumped. I got thrown out into the big garbage known as "let's just be friends." So obviously relationships (and guys and their shallowness) have left a bad taste in my mouth.

I guess this is why I love the manga Chobits so much. I loved it the first time I read it, many, many years ago, before the knowledge of my problem. When I reread it last year for a paper of mine, I fell in love with it all over again. I guess in my own twisted mind, half of the reason I've stopped treating it is because I want to find a Hideki-type guy, who will love me despite whatever imperfections and disabilities I may have. Because if you can't love me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best, right? Because curing myself would make it easy on them, right? But I can't help but thinking this is just another level of some sort of sadomasochistic denial. Clearly I like the idea of not only hurting a potential love interest because of my shortcomings, but I also want to get hurt when they are unable to deal with my problems.

I've become so used to being by myself in my life. I've never had a long-term relationship, and the boyfriends I have had were few and far between. And treating this problem is a constant reminder that there is a problem. I've finally started feeling good about myself again, after months of self-hate and major self-consciousness because of this crappy condition. Is it so wrong of me to just ignore the whole thing and just let fate run its course?