Epilepsy & Sex: Are We Allowed to Laugh?

As I write this sentence, I have absolutely no idea whether or not this is going to be a serious and reflective pityfest or a quippy and ridiculous fluff-piece.

I have had epilepsy since I was eleven years old. And my primary goal since the very first day has been to approach it honestly, openly, and with enough humor that people around me won’t feel the inevitable discomfort of seeing someone with a very socially stigmatized condition. Seizures are weird. They are different. And when people approach weird and different things, they laugh. It’s instinctual. You have to laugh. And I go with it, because when you are caught making fun of someone behind their back (for whatever reason), you hope to God that that person will go along with it and laugh with you. So when someone gets that weird look on their face when I tell them I have seizures, because they are remembering some joke that they heard or told about them, I grant them their wish and tell them a joke of my own.

It was totally fine, and then sex came into the picture.

I’m going to take a detour for a second. College guys think they are sex gods. They do. And for the most part they aren’t. What do they know about great sex? The only practice they’ve had has been on their inexperienced girlfriends in high school or drunk girls that fake orgasms so they can go home and eat tacos and pass out without worrying about farting in their sleep. They are the shitty band in cramped bar that gets a great crowd because it’s dollar beer night and anything is better than last night’s karaoke. But stick them in a stadium and they’ll realize that they no, they are not the next ACDC.

With that said, let’s just get to the point.

When I was 22, I had a seizure during sex.

Okay, so it was foreplay, but we were downtown, so that was enough material for my then-boyfriend to look at himself and consider the fact that maybe his sexual prowess was so overpowering that I was rocketed into a literal fit of pleasure. At the time he was very supportive and comforting, but it was a few days later that his buddy made a drunken comment at a party about him having “magic fingers”.

Of course, I laughed. What could I do? I had programmed myself into making sure that no one would ever feel sorry for me or guilty that they may have said the wrong thing around me.

But god dammit, that was fucked up right?

I never confronted him about it. I never even got on his case for actually telling someone it happened in the first place. But I broke up with him a few months later. I gave several reasons completely unrelated to the incident and the humiliation that had ensued, but I didn’t tell him that that was one of them. I had found my limit. I had found the line between funny and inappropriate. And of course, that line was sex.

Because that is where everyone’s line is.

For the record, I didn’t even come.