After more than a year on HRT, my body does not experience arousal in the way that I suffered for about 30 years there. This change is recent enough, and affects so much wiring, that I really don’t know all the implications. I just know that it comes as such a tremendous relief.

As a physiological response, what I’m getting now feels more wholesome and substantial and meaningful. It feels more real and grounded in my body, less like I’m being attacked, and it better reflects how I actually feel about myself and others, and experience true attraction. There’s less a build-up of pressure than a sort of a loosening of tension. It’s no longer this functional, goal-oriented discomfort, screaming for release. It’s a spark, an awakening of potential. Physiologically, it’s not about the genitals; it’s this glowing warmth and softness all up my torso and my face and my upper arms and legs. This sense of receptiveness. Acceptance, of fascination, anticipation. At higher levels, this shortness of breath, and all-over prickles.

My association with arousal has been this sense of wrongness, of my body working against my interests and my feelings. For my body to respond, there’s always been this dissonance, leading to shame and discomfort and piling ever more disgust on my feelings toward myself. This, it’s… different. I don’t know how to feel. I have all of this baggage to work against, all these expectations, and it’s confusing for me that it doesn’t feel so bad now. Whatever this is, it feels sort of positive, constructive—not lurid in the way I’m used to.

What’s more interesting is the sense of continuity. Each instance, it’s less its own isolated episodic happening with its own short unsatisfying arc, and more dipping back into an ongoing conversation, returning to a prior train of thought, checking back into an emotional space.

This all ties into how the act itself, which I will not labor, is now less about desperately reaching a goal than about appreciating the moment and the ongoing changing mix of feelings and senses. And it’s so much more visceral. Holistic. Decentralized. One literally sees stars.

Like, I do not associate good things with sex, or with arousal. It’s bad, and it’s so delicate to dance around the reasons why it causes me so much grief. But broadly, cautiously, the way my body works now, it makes so much more sense to me. This feels correct. Basically healthy.

What I find interesting about this is how the body workings intersect with my emotional and psychological response. Like, the way I’m wired, I realized I’m expecting my body to behave a certain way, and it never has. And now it kinda does, and this ties into all this other stuff. The way my body now poises all up and down my frame to anticipate and measure and receive and study—it speaks volumes to my expectations of a sexual role. Those dynamics in turn feed into my wiring of how to relate to others and to myself, and my sense of self and identity.

Having estrogen in my system, it causes my body to experience arousal in such a way as to further affirm my gender and justify my core assumptions about how to relate to, feel about people. All these things that I knew on some level were right, yet were a struggle to reconcile.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but—to be wired as an unambiguous bottom, and to experience arousal as navigation of reception and acceptance? It’s congruent. The basic dissonance is gone. The slow perusal does the same with my more detached and abstracted modes of attraction. And yes, to continue the recent conversation, this also to no small extent speaks to the whole deal with attraction to men and long fixation with a particular anatomical feature that I’m just at the point of shrugging and accepting, now that the floodgates are fully demolished.

(All of which, I still feel compelled to underline, lest there be any chance of misunderstanding, remains basically hypothetical of course. See the noodling about internal and external experiences, and how they work when one is aroace. (If… one happens to be Azure, I suppose.))

Anyway, I’m at this confusing juncture here where, ever so cautiously, feeling horny no longer seems like this evil, disgusting thing that makes me wish I could vanish. It’s just… neutral. A thing one can embrace and explore, or not, to what level may feel best in the moment.

I think that’s positive. Probably? It’s weird. It grazes so hard on stuff I’m really not able to deal with still.

But this whole concept of me, it’s… getting more stable. It’s making more consistent sense. Every piece I slot in, it just confirms the placement of the rest.

I still feel like I have to tiptoe around here, but. I think it may be okay. I think we may be good. I just need to settle in. Chill out a little. Get used to the world not ending.