An autobiography of my First Time Masturbating: How I slowly learned about sexuality with a disability.
I have been wanting to write about my first time for a long time. I don’t know if it is special to anyone, but it was special to me. I’ve been working up to the courage to do this for years, so here it goes. For the people looking for a quick pay off, I’m sorry. This is more of an autobiography than anything else, although if you stick around, I do eventually get around to describing my first experience masturbating.
I’m currently thirty four as of this writing. I have a condition known as cerebral palsy. It doesn’t affect my whole body, so I’m lucky in that. The effects are mostly in my legs and right arm. I am also lucky in that I am fairly independent. Nowadays I spend most of my time in a wheelchair, but I am otherwise fairly independent.
The Context
It is difficult to understate the profound effect that having a disability like this can have on one’s sexuality. I was a late bloomer growing up for a few reasons. First, I didn’t really have a great understanding of human anatomy. I didn’t even learn that there were differences between male and female anatomy until I was thirteen. Up until then, the only full human bodies I had seen were those of my dad and brothers. Secondly, especially in my early years, I needed fairly regular supervision for various reasons. This resulted in a situation where I didn’t really have a lot of privacy, and a lot of people my own age stayed away, due to not really wanting to associate with the adults around me. And thirdly, I had an undiagnosed case of Phimosis (a tight foreskin), which wasn’t even really addressed until I turned eleven.
We were raised Catholic-lite, so religion wasn’t a huge aspect of our household, but it did mean that I was strongly discouraged from “playing with myself” when my hands would stray towards my lower body at younger ages. Erections and puberty were explained to me when I was a teenager, but my education stopped short of learning exactly what sex was. “Masturbation” was only mentioned once, during the initial “talk”. There was a class about puberty in the fifth grade, and looking back on it, there were diagrams of the human body. But they didn’t really register. The first time I really understood what sex differentiation was from a diagram of an ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in the sixth grade. The barest of mechanics were mentioned in high school health course my sophomore year, so I learned that reproduction was a matter of inserting tab a into slot b. But what to actually do was kept a mystery for a long time.
All of these factors added up to a situation where I was functionally illiterate about how sex actually worked except the extra bits and pieces I was able to glean from reading our Encyclopedia Britannica, and by looking at our extensive collection of National Geographic magazines.
I grew up alongside the internet, but in a strange twist, I discovered a lot of things in very old school ways. My internet activity was very strictly monitored until fairly late in my teenage years, so I didn’t have access to a lot of sources that could have spelt things out for me as a teen.
The first time I came, I had started getting hard, and I thought I had to pee. Unfortunately, getting to the bathroom takes time for me, and I almost thought I hadn’t made it. When I eventually did get to the bathroom, I was surprised to discover not much fluid, save for a single pearly white drop between my legs.
I was getting erections and wet dreams, but nobody really explained what they were, and I was hesitant to bring it up because I thought I had wet the bed several times. It was also around this time that I started getting harder for longer periods of time.
I don’t think I had a complete picture of human sexuality until I turned twenty. I remember how and why it happened only because it was so comparatively late in my life.
The age of twenty was an interesting time. I had been granted independence a couple of years earlier in many aspects. I didn’t need as much supervision. I had learned to wash and dress myself. I had begun transitioning from mostly using crutches to mostly using a wheelchair, which greatly expanded the distances I could go by myself, and the things I could do without getting tired. One of those things involved being able to browse the library stacks unsupervised and un-chaperoned. It was then that I began reading about psychology and human sexuality.
The First Time
The word masturbation was starting to come up several times in my extended reading, and I began to understand slowly that for guys something was supposed to “happen”. It was at the end of one of these trips to the library that I finally decided to try to find out a bit more about what that was. The book in question had mentioned ejaculation, but most of my experiences up to that point had involved wet dreams. So, the day I waited until I was alone, gathered my courage, and opened Wikipedia.
Finally! Revelation struck. Wikipedia not only explained what masturbation and sex were in very exact detail, they even had live demonstrations. It was like discovering fire for the first time. I even saw what an education looked like for the first time. Armed with this newfound knowledge, I limped to the bathroom, and shut the door, determined to try my newfound knowledge.
By this time, I had cured my Phimosis through time and patience, so unlike my earlier years, attempting to peel back my foreskin wasn’t an unpleasant hellscape of pain. In fact, I kind of liked it. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. I remember a rushing sensation near my bladder as my body built up ejaculate. A growing body of fluid formed at the tip of my penis as I rolled my foreskin back and forth. The pressure built and built towards a crescendo. I knew there was going to be a little bit of a mess, so I pulled off four or five squares of toilet paper and continued the back and forth motion that I had seen in those early videos. Blood was pumping, and the fluid at my tip was building in a large bead that wobbled every time I moved. And then, all of a sudden -- fireworks. It was the first time I had intentionally brought myself to orgasm. I had not expected as much to come out as it did. My first daytime ejaculation soaked through the puny amount of paper I had, and dripped onto the floor. I remember exclaiming, “Holy hell!” as the rush subsided and my body returned to a baseline normal.
I began branching out after that. I learned that I liked the bathtub because it was the easiest thing to clean up after. I discovered Solotouch and a few other websites a few weeks later. And I saw what I later found out was my first pornographic video a few weeks after that. Although, I didn’t start looking at porn regularly until I went off to college and began to actually have proper alone time, along with an internet connection that I knew wasn’t explicitly monitored. Somehow, I was never caught, but there were a few close calls. My college roommate might have seen me one time in front of my computer, but we never discussed it.
Epilogue
Learning about sex and sexuality has been a steady drip of progress, occurring in fits and starts. I’m approaching middle age now, and I still don’t believe I’m done. I’ve never had sex. But I hope to someday.
Sometimes I wish my path had been more conventional, but we have to work with the hands we are dealt. I’ve spent a lot of time being sad I’ve never had a truly lasting romantic relationship, but I have come to terms with it. I’m getting older, but I am slowly learning that there is still time.
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