From my earliest memories, I was never a child who struggled to know what it was I desired. I always knew which color dress, which flavor paleta and which boy I would be running after on the playground. I knew how to move my body, how to fully inhabit and love it. I would bask in the thrill of playing chase, dancing, and wrestling my younger brothers, totally uninhibited, unaware that anything about my body was wrong or in need of correction. I understood the deep pleasure my body gave me access to, and it was a power that delighted and fascinated and blossomed with me into my young teenage years, instilling confidence in myself as a newly erotic being. I knew what I wanted. I knew who I wanted. And I moved and operated with absolute assurance that what felt good was also what felt right. 

But as happens with most young girls, I was worn down by the same internalized messages that disconnect us from our desires and ourselves. You know them. That skirt is too short to wear around your family; that skirt doesn’t show off your nice legs. Isn’t she young to have a boyfriend already? Where is your boyfriend? I quickly learned from my peers, pop culture, the church, and from my mother that enjoying my sexuality meant complying with a set of contradictory rules and values—that the body I inhabited could always be prettier, sexier, less prudish, less slutty, always less of some things and more of others. And still, my inner voice did not go down easy. I can remember sitting in the office of my high school counselor during “college planning” telling him I wanted to be a sex therapist. He glanced nervously around and said he wasn’t sure he could help me with that. And in his flustered reaction, I could sense the same implied message I got so often. Pleasure and desire were not only matters that made folks uncomfortable, but they were also not worthy pursuits or real sources of fulfillment. They had no place as my compass. They were dangerous. They were what would lead me astray.

And so, I tried. I held my nose and did my best to acquire a taste for things as they should be—college degree, desirable mate, career. But suppressing myself was both deadening and anxiety producing. And like too many of us, I soon discovered the rules and points of entry weren’t designed with me—small, brown, femme, millennial—in mind. With the world around us descending into chaos, voices of wisdom are piercing through the wilderness, reminding us that not only are the “shoulds” increasingly less accessible, they are also destroying us. They are product of a racist, sexist, and classist society that deeply fears the erotic. So, slowly but bravely over the past decade, I have attempted to tune back in to my inner voice, rejecting more and more “shoulds” along the way. Behind the bar as a bartender, in my platonic and romantic relationships, as a mother, and though partnering with a variety of experts, I have spent the last ten years studying the human body, sex, and relationships. I’ve cycled in and out of different pursuits— a sexological bodyworker, a boudoir photographer, a doula. An ethical non-monogamy coach, nude model, tantra practitioner and erotica writer. And as I’ve enjoyed the fit of every different hat, expanded my expertise, and tapped back into my own deepest interests, one central thread continues to connect my work. That is, helping others manifest their own desires more confidently. With so much learning along the way, my greatest passion has become helping others escape the limiting paradigm we operate within when designing our relationships and our lives. It does not have to happen overnight, but the first step is allowing ourselves to simply remember.

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