Where I Go
When I Disappear…?

On ADHD, intimacy, and the quiet tantric instruction that brought me home to my own body.

During intimacy, my mind would go. Not anywhere in particular. Not toward someone else. Just away — somewhere just above my own body, watching from a soft distance.

I felt guilty about it for a long time. Not because I didn’t care. Not because I wasn’t attracted. But because the body of the person I loved was right there, and I couldn’t seem to stay inside the moment with them.

One night, I finally said it out loud.

“I’m here… but I’m not really here.”

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t make it mean something about us. She simply explained, gently, what was actually happening in my brain.

When the nervous system doesn’t feel fully safe or regulated, the brain switches modes. Especially in ADHD brains. This isn’t a choice. It is not a failure of love. It is a nervous system response — older than thought, older than story.

ADHD brains already struggle with sustained attention. Add stimulation, emotion, and vulnerability all at once, and the mind can disconnect even faster. Not from lack of desire. From the very intensity of being so fully met.

“Stop trying to think your way back into the moment.
Anchor yourself in your senses.”

That was what she told me. And then, even more quietly:

“Your brain can’t dissociate if it’s anchored to sensation.”

This, I would later learn, is also the oldest instruction in Tantra. Not the version sold as performance or technique — but the original one. The one that teaches presence not as a discipline of the mind, but as a returning of attention to the body. Again, and again, and again.

The thinking mind cannot think its way into presence. Presence is somatic. It lives in skin, in breath, in the weight of a hand. It is not achieved. It is returned to.

So she taught me to choose touch first.

• Feel pressure. Where is contact happening? How firm, how soft?
• Notice temperature. Warm skin, cool air, the difference between them.
• Stay with physical contact for ten to fifteen seconds. Without analyzing it.
• If touch is not enough, add sound. Breath. Rhythm. A single note in the room.
• Eye contact,keep eye contact no matter how much vulnerable it feels.
• If the mind drifts, do not force it back. Gently — gently — return to sensation.

And the last thing she told me, which changed everything:

“If you zone out, don’t judge it.
Judgment locks dissociation in place.”

Because the moment we make drifting wrong, the amygdala — the body’s alarm — fires. And the further we travel from neutral, the deeper we travel from ourselves. Only soft, neutral awareness brings the nervous system back online.

What I understand now is that drifting was never the problem. The problem was that I had been taught to fight it — to perform presence I did not feel, to push my mind into compliance with a body that was actually trying to keep me safe.

Tantra, in its real form, never asked me to be different. It only asked me to return. As many times as needed. Without drama. Without shame. With the patience of someone tending a flame in wind.

This, I think, is the deepest gift of a somatically-informed erotic life — and the one most needed by those of us whose minds move faster than we want them to:

Drifting is human.
Returning is the practice.

*PS: Feedback from a beautiful soul of a beautiful true story.<3

♥– Ophelia