Here's the thing: my polycule is honest. And I respect that. So apparently, my performance in bed is lacking. But I challenge everyone to look at what truly matters: my work as a professional. As a woman in her thirties who previously held a high-level job in sustainable candle marketing, took a year off to remember how to breathe, and now can't get any role she applies to, I've got a strong sense of my own lack of worth outside the bedroom.

So whatever, I twitch violently in certain positions. I get where this critique is coming from. But instead of scrutinizing the position of my butt, I would suggest admiring the lack of buttress in the position of my savings account, which is at a truly remarkable angle—just sliding down, down, down until I'm honestly impressed at how low it can go.

So I can never find the spot and am actually just making everyone uncomfortable—fine. You know what's comfortable? Cold emailing the CEO of a two-person nonprofit working to save some species of butterfly, and attaching a mediocre flyer showing a butterfly on the brink of death that I whipped up in a free trial of InDesign to pretend it shows my graphic design skills that I didn't really hone in the Social Media Manager role I wasn't actually promoted to and was in fact expressly told not to step in for while my sustainable candle marketing colleagues were on vacation one week five years ago.

So I'm the only one in the ‘cule who isn't offered more than 30 minutes of sexy time because after that I start to wheeze. Okay! Not sure what I can do about this, but at least I know I also can't get a job offer after spending hours on an interview presentation detailing every possible innovative method through which an association for dementia charity associations could skyrocket their reach and absolutely annihilate all forms of memory loss, after which the interview panel had the guts to smile in my face and say that was so illuminating, they will definitely be in touch, before gaslighting my memory by ghosting me.

So, I realize now that I'm referred to as “Panic Button” because oral triggers my hypochondria and gives me a panic attack every time.

But! What about the fact that every job rejection also gives me a panic attack, leading me to continue not to process my inner emotional structures and instead just apply to more jobs and trigger more panic attacks? Who can top that on a sinking mattress??

So—and this one cuts deeper for me, I'll be honest—another sub-failure in my utter failure to give and receive pleasure is that my communication is poor. This includes, at times, blurting my aunt Marian's name because she was always wearing kerchiefs around her neck and so was obviously my queer awakening, and I do think there's an unnecessarily brutal stigma around incest—anyway. I'm not proud of this one.

I realize that poorly communicating during intercourse makes me look like a conservative. But in the grand scheme of things—big deal, okay? Big whoop! How am I supposed to speak in articulate phrases when I'm wheezing?

I'll tell you what communication is really poor: an interview rejection in which the Creative Vision Lead for a feminist card game company critiqued my lack of response to a question they didn't ask, TO which I sent an aggressively passive aggressive response telling them I am “not trying to be passive aggressive” but I had “extensive notes in my hand for this exact talking point if someone, at any point, had DEIGNED TO TURN THAT CARD OVER.”

So anyway, basically I am barren. My limbs are tired from twitching. My throat is sore from wheezing. My emotional structures are primed for panic. And I'm kissing my aunt Marian–

Missing! Missing my aunt. Missing, missing.

But at least I know this: in addition to completely failing at what could be deeply fulfilling intimacy, I am also losing all hope in my ability to land anything that will help me not work through my elderly years—until I die, probably, from a wheezing-induced heart attack during sex with a new partner because I forgot to mention this issue and they, sadly, would never have anticipated having such a dreadful time.