Blue and Green

I have a blue dress I wear on hot days that elicits compliments from friends and strangers. People walking down the street stop me on the sidewalk to tell me this dress reminds them of the ocean or the sky. The homeless woman who sits cross-legged in front of Walgreens looks up from her paperback, smiles, and calls me sweetie.

These snippets of praise from the general public matter even more to me these days as I struggle to accept my 43-year-old changing body. I was never a beauty. Not even close. Pictures of me as a teenager and twenty-something person show an overweight young woman with acne and jumbo-size glasses, a Dorothy Hamill-inspired haircut in the 1970's and a Cheapcuts-inspired look in the 80's. Those early college photos of Hillary Clinton hit pretty close to home. I was the smart girl, the girl who disdained glamour in favor of academic rigor, the girl who went to the movies to really study the movie, not make out in the back row.

In the last few years I've managed to lose the weight and the acne, and I keep working on the glasses and the hair. In the last few years I've reached a kind of truce with my body, a cease-fire of hostilities, an armistice. I've come to find deep and genuine pleasure making love, sunning on the beach, ambling through forests. I appreciate the twinkle in my eyes, along with the crinkle at the edges of my eyes. I'm fond of the roundedness of my belly and my breasts. I've even befriended my size 10 feet, sturdy and strong, capable of taking me in and out of skyscrapers, sand dunes, and any number of dicey situations.

But recently I've hit a wall I'm not exactly sure how to get over or around. Last summer I was diagnosed with mild dysplasia, a precancerous condition of the cervix caused by the sexually transmitted Human Papillomavirus. The gynecologist informed me that HPV is rampant, an epidemic really, and, because it can be latent for a long time, there's no way to know where, when, or from whom I contracted it. While reeling from the shock of hearing the "precancer" word, I underwent the recommended follow-up medical procedures: colposcopy, biopsy, and a surgical treatment called Loop Electro-Excision Procedure. The LEEP essentially involves a heated wire loop slicing through my anesthetized cervix, removing the small precancerous section, which is then evaluated in a lab to ensure that all precancerous cells have been removed. The virus, though, remains in my body.

And that's the wall. I have a sexually transmitted virus, which may or may not continue to cause precancerous growths in my cervix. Sex is uncertain enough, but throw in the mysterious and ubiquitous HPV along with the beginnings of perimenopause, and what I wind up with is a sexual identity that feels at best topsy-turvy and at worst, well, I guess, fatal. The gynecologist assures me that dysplasia is highly treatable, that with close monitoring and appropriate follow-up, cervical cancer is preventable. Okay. That's the good news.

The bad news is I haven't yet figured out how to live in my skin. Or, to be more precise, how to live in my sexual skin. I am single. I have not had a sexual relationship in more than a year. That "deep and genuine pleasure making love" I mentioned earlier feels more remote to me these days than just a few paragraphs away. I have a lot of fear. Fear of stumbling over awkward explanations with possible new partners. Fear of the possible new partners opting out once they get the full picture. Fear of not even finding possible new partners in the first place.

Lots of people-with or without viruses-have this last fear. Lots of therapy hours and support group sessions get devoted to it. Lots of advice-helpful, ridiculous, and everything in between-gets dispensed in response to it. One therapist said a very comforting, and very simple, thing to me: relationships happen despite viruses. I believe her. But I'm still in the figuring-out stage, the wondering-how-to-live-in-mysexual-skin stage. This stage may take a while. It may be rocky, confusing terrain. And what lies on the other side may turn out to be a very different version of me.

Some examples of topsy-turviness: I am actually contemplating coloring my hair blue and green. I saw an attractive woman at a crafts fair who had hair about my length and natural color. The bottom edges of her hair, though, were parrotcolored: blue and green and yellow. This woman was incredibly sexual. I have no idea whether she has or ever had HPV. All I saw was a woman really living in her sexual skin. When I asked for the name of her salon, she grinned and spelled out the name and location with great gusto.

A more radical example of my topsy-turviness: I fell in love briefly with a nature photographer I met at this same crafts fair. I bought one of her prints-a photo of fog pressing against a green hill along the Sonoma coast of California-and we exchanged some friendly email a few days later. I began fantasizing some kind of intimate relationship with her-a wholly new prospect in my life, given that I have viewed myself as straight all these years. When she told me that she was in a committed 15-year relationship with a writer, I had a hard time sorting out my swirl of feelings and knowing how to behave exactly. My wisest self said to back off, let go of the fantasy, move on. Living in my sexual skin, I'm coming to see, these days involves-no, requires-getting swirled around, disoriented, a little dizzy with possibility.

The parrot-haired woman and the nature photographer, if they were figures in a dream, would embody different facets of my psyche: muse and artist perhaps. If truth be told, I want to be both. And I suppose I can be both, regardless of the status of my cervix. I do not have a 100 percent clean bill of health. I have a very common sexually transmitted disease. The years ahead hold more uncertainties, more changes-some frightening and unwelcome, some surprising and liberating. But I will continue exploring my evolving sexual identity, because it isn't really a wall at all. It is something more fluid, shifting, undulating-something more like fog climbing a green coastal hill.

Copyright Off Our Backs, Inc. May/Jun 2004
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved