TETANY

“Do you like that?”

“Mmhmm,” I moaned, because I couldn’t open my mouth to answer. My lips and lower face felt like a tightened fist, numb and frozen. My hands, too, were contorted into tensed claws, fingers curling insistently inward. 

What is wrong with me? I thought. I scraped my hands down his back to hide their stiffness and tried to wrench my face back into any kind of sexy expression, hoping he wasn’t looking at me. Am I gonna pass out? Am I having a seizure? Oh god I must look so weird. I felt paralyzed and suffocated and totally overwhelmed, lying there with his sweaty chest pressing down on mine, making breathy moans behind his ear to hide my panic, panting and pinned down and seized up like a bug turned onto its back. A Childish Gambino song was playing in the background. When is this gonna be over?

It was over soon, as you’re taught to expect the first time you have sex. But what I didn’t expect is that I’d be relieved. It couldn’t have been over soon enough for me—I spent the last minute counting and measuring his breaths, trying to read them like Morse code or the ticking of a bomb, barely holding on until the end. I immediately got up and turned away from him, guarding my claw hands and hiding my tense face, and stumbled to the bathroom. In the dark, I sat on the cold toilet, staring at my hands as I opened and closed my fingers, trying to work out the contortion. I had known that it wouldn’t be good the first time, that it might hurt, but no one had ever warned me that the sudden grip of paralysis would freeze my face and hands.

The next time, it happened again. For longer. Again I was choked by that loss of control over my body, that inability to talk. I tucked my hands underneath the pillow – don’t look at me don’t look at me – and waited. The next morning, I sat in bed and did an anxious Google search: “hands and face seizing up.” Diagnosis: low magnesium, dehydration, carpal tunnel syndrome, kidney disease. Great. Was I allergic to sex or something? Was this going to happen every time I fucked somebody, forever? Was I just too inexperienced and nervous to let my guard down? Was this one of those well-kept secrets of womanhood that I had never heard of?

For a while, I just thought something was wrong with me. It made sense that sex would be difficult for me, that I wouldn’t be able to do it right. I think I had always kind of expected it, and the weird spasms only confirmed my anxieties.

The third time it happened, I was determined to find out the cause. WebMD didn’t know, and neither did Quora. But eventually I stumbled upon a random Reddit page, and a posted question: “Why do my hands seize up during sex?” The answer: tetany. The involuntary tensing and freezing of muscles, caused by hyperventilation.

I think I laughed when I read that; laughed out of relief and ridiculousness. My whole dramatic debilitating issue with sex was that I was breathing too fast? A second commenter added some scientific details. “When you breathe too fast you end up blowing off too much CO2. This makes your blood slightly alkaline, which interferes with calcium channels in your muscles, preventing them from relaxing normally. The simplest way to solve this is to breathe deep and SLOW… or into a paper bag (super sexy paper bag fetish in the making).”

Problem solved, I guess, but the issue had simply been transformed from a physical one to a psychological one. Why was I hyperventilating during sex? A medical journal article from 1938 titled “Hyperventilation Attacks: A Manifestation in Hysteria” found that patients who experienced hyperventilation “have the hysterical personality… They were generally suggestible and emotionally unstable people who easily became apprehensive.” A more recent article, from 2003, characterizes hyperventilation during intercourse as a “psychophysiological mechanism to deepen states of sexual trance.”

So, according to science, I was either a hysterical woman or I was in a sexual trance. Neither option sounded great. But the next time I was lying pinned down in the dark, I thought about my breathing––in, out … in, out––and paid attention. My hands began to tingle and turn numb whenever I self-consciously started panting out moans, breathing not for myself but rather to show my partner that I was enjoying it. Was I enjoying it? I was breathing the way I thought I was supposed to breathe during sex, like it was overwhelming me with pleasure. In reality, it was overwhelming me in a very different way.

Since then, I breathe slower, regardless of the rhythm we’re at—I know I have to watch myself or I’ll seize up again. I close my eyes and fill my lungs with deep, peaceful breaths, and let them out like a sigh, a calm moment in the middle of all the skin. I do it for myself, to make sure I feel okay and can relax, but at the same time, it’s just another way in which I surveil myself during sex. I can’t let go of control by giving in and doing whatever is natural, because every second I have to look sexy, react the way my partner wants, and keep my guard up. Even though I don’t hyperventilate anymore, the self-consciousness isn’t all gone—the need to make sure no one I’m having sex with sees my face seize up—and neither is the feeling that I might somehow be doing it wrong. Like my own respiratory processes could make sex good or bad for anyone besides myself.

The thing is, my breathing could make sex better for my partner—my signals and reactions echoing eroticism for them, giving them confidence that I’m enjoying myself. But for me, hyperventilation is  a physical manifestation of my anxieties and internal conflicts about sex. It’s a side effect of trying to perform my sexiness, my arousal, but the side effect sours and warps into suffocating discomfort. I want to pant and breathe quickly and moan, but I don’t always know if the urge comes from a natural turned-on reaction or from a need to prove my sexual worth. Giving into this urge means accepting a result that ignites my insecurity about the way I look and act and what my partner thinks. 

In a Cosmopolitan article called “All the Advice You Need for First-Time Sex,” the writer’s tip #9 is “Remember to Breathe.” What Cosmo doesn’t mention is how. The article does not tell me how to articulate words that communicate how I’m feeling to my partner(s) as I lie below them in bed rather than turning my ragged gasps for air into Morse code. Cosmo does not mention tetany or any record of other women who contort their faces while they fuck. 

I’m frustrated that I still feel the need to play a role and be a perfect sexy image of a girl during sex. I’m frustrated that it took me so long, that it took Reddit, to find out that my issue was just hyperventilation. I’m frustrated that these experiences are almost universal among my female-identified friends. I’m frustrated because I don’t know how to promote awareness of this issue—besides better sex education, which is obvious but hard to enact, and talking about it more often and honestly.  

So I watch myself, and watch myself, and count my own breaths (slower slower) and measure myself to stay in check. I moan loudly but not too loudly, and I don’t think am I turned on right now? Because as long as I sound turned on, does it matter? If I moan and no one is there to hear it, did I really moan at all? I’m still learning to count breaths and decipher the Morse code—or maybe I’m also learning to let the breaths be what they are: a form of communication, not a code. Still learning to work through the rhythm of honesty between me and my partner, me and myself. 

AUTHOR: Victoria Beale is a sophomore at Brown from the South. She loves to write creative nonfiction, especially about music, cool people, and (you guessed it) love and sex! Outside of writing, she enjoys learning history, cooking (badly), and making very specific Spotify playlists that she will never listen to again.

ARTWORK: Maddie Mahoney