We all have barriers to our own arousal, our own sexuality. Some of this is cultural, societal. Some of this is familial, generational. Some of us choose to stay within the confines in which life has presented us with, happily, safely in our comfort zones. Some of us choose to go deeper into those dark recesses of our souls, to break the molds of what we were in order to become something more.
Somewhere along the way we get disconnected from ourselves. We get lost in the everyday of life and forget to prioritize ourselves, more importantly our pleasure. We let the ideals of others become our path in life, often without even realizing it – until one day we wake up hating ourselves and our lives, wondering how we got here in the first place. I did. I tried to run away from the whore my mom thought I was only to become one as a way to heal my soul.
I hid this part of me for so long, wanting nothing more than to be seen as good in the eyes of others. And I hated myself for it. I would dip my toes into the sea of my own sluttiness, only to back retreat from the face of judgment. It was a back and forth that I had created, a welcoming and then a turning away, the spreading of the legs and the closing of them. I know now that I was simply testing the waters. Now that I have doven in, the temperature feels just about right for me.
There is a lot of shame wrapped up in wanting to be something different from what is expected of you. And we do this throughout various aspects of our lives. We pick up these cultural scripts around sexuality and we act them out. We climbs ladders that have essentially been set up against the wrong house. We accept what is offered without knowing if that’s even what we really want. And we become miserable in the process.
Much of it boils down to permission, of allowing ourselves to take up space in places we’ve never stood before. And that’s fucking scary in and of itself. We compare ourselves to those who seem way ahead of us in life. We criticize our bodies, our self-image, the way we present to the world. We overfocus on the performance part, rather than dare to embrace the cringe that comes when you begin to kill the parts of you that no longer hold sway.
I have been called an attention whore for some of the things that I have said, that I have done. I wear that crown honestly and earnestly. I purposefully put myself into places to be seen. I need to be perceived. I want it. I don’t want you to look away. Do you not like what I’m doing? Do you not like me?
It becomes personal, something I could attribute to a childhood not feeling seen or heard, and that is something that I am still working through. I’m not sure if I will ever be done to be honest. There will always be something after, another feeling to work through, another trauma to resolve, another wall to come up against, another building to tear down within ourselves.
Mad love, Jenna
