Iron

How I started writing stories and liking boys

Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash

This essay will be less whimsical than usual, beloveds, because I want to explore something particular. No one might care except me, of course, and that’s fine.

1. Starting after the birth of my first son 26 years ago, and especially after the birth of my third son 13 years back, I’ve had walking-dead periods, as someone at The Guardian wrote — frequent and long (six to eight days out of every 24), heavy, and full of blood clots anything from the size of a goldfish to a hamster. Some (many) of these may have been early miscarriages, but the effect’s been the same.

2. Probably related, I’ve been diagnosed with severe anemia — the kind that makes a doctor ask whether I’m under a hematologist’s care, whether I’ve ever had leukemia, etc.

3. In 2013 or so I was prescribed slow-release iron tablets, which I didn’t take more than a month. They make me gain weight and look flushed, whereas back then I was of the T.S. Eliot school of aesthetics — used to wear green powder to make himself look more sickly, Virginia Woolf wrote. So no to the iron.

4. About the time my periods started getting really wretched, I stopped wanting to sleep with guys. This may or may not be related. This lasted about 15 years.

5. In that interval, I had four girlfriends.

6. In November, I went to the emergency room for an unrelated problem and the 12-year-old-looking ER doc thought I had been sent for a blood transfusion. He said, “You don’t feel weak, out of breath, shaky, dizzy … ?” “No, I’m with a dance company; I’m in class or in rehearsal or working out seven to 10 hours a week; I’m definitely not feeble. And my blood numbers are always like this” Him: “Well, your body can adapt for a while, but that kind of thing does cause long-term damage to the heart muscle. Make an appointment with your PCP.” I didn’t make an appointment with my PCP, but I did just start a little trial of OTC iron.

7. I felt immediate changes, in order:

   1. Stopped wanting my most favorite food in the world — ice.

   2. Stopped being so bloody cold all the time.

   3. Became ridiculously fit, like I’d put myself through 100 boot camps in a row, over the course of six weeks. (Mind you, I was already fit. This is beast mode.)

8. So far, so good. But then the weird ones started:

   1. I started having two extra hours of energy at night. From needing 10 hours of sleep I can now do with eight. I started writing all the things.

   2. My face greased up. Acne for miles.

   3. I started noticing boys again. Well, noticing. It’s like a force field. When you’re in it, it’s like a constant communication with the men-people in the vicinity and you can sort of send out a wave of concentration and they’ll turn to look. When you’re not in it, you don’t notice them and they don’t notice you except as fellow humans. I’d lived in that force field for a couple of decades, but over the last 15 years I’d forgotten how it felt. Now I remember. It’s like coming in and out of a depressive episode. When you’re not depressed, you can remember intellectually what it’s like, even remember in detail, but you can’t feel depressed unless you’re depressed, and then you can’t stop feeling it.

   4. I stopped noticing girls. Unfortunately, that included my girlfriend.

9. Now, you see, I’m in a spot where my experience runs counter to the popular — and as I understand it, scientifically supported — wisdom that orientation is inborn, not chosen or malleable. (A friend brought me the term abrosexual, which is useful as a descriptor, I guess, but doesn’t feel like a perfect match.)

10. To remember back to how I felt before I’d have to conjure up poor dear Walter (oh, heck, just jump over here and get to the actual bloody part) and how he felt. Cold, everything pared to the bone. No ability to feel interest in sex even if he wanted to. In fact, that’s why I wrote that one — it was a self that was going away. I wasn’t sure what self would replace it. Now I’m starting to find out.

11. I don’t know what conclusion to draw here. That bodies may be far more malleable than we believe. That taste (ice! boys! ICE!!!), personality, energy, intellectual and physical abilities, may be malleable in scary ways, turning in the channel and flowing back upstream in a matter of weeks.

12. That I don’t know who I am. Maybe I’ll catch a flu and I’ll become a new person tomorrow.

13. What do y’all think? Have y’all had a similar experience? Let me know in the comments!