My therapist wants me to write a letter to my father, who I’ve been estranged from since February of this year. Since I didn’t do that, she wanted me to write a letter on why I haven’t written him a letter. Classic therapist move!

Girl, anyways.

Growing up, I was a classic Daddy’s Girl. I adored my father.

He was the one in the house who cleaned, who did the laundry, who put the food on the table in high school.

He took me and my sister to the Children’s Museum in Atlanta, to Centennial Olympic Park after a day at Atlanta Legal Aid, to the Atlanta Zoo.

He taught me how to ride public transportation before I could even spell the the word train, and I’d hold his hand as we walked underneath the bridge next to Turner Field to go to the Atlanta Braves games in the summertime.

I would go to those games every summer until I moved to Houston.

An eldest sibling like myself, he frequently went to bat for me when it came to my contentious relationship with his wife / my mother.

We like the same music, the same art, the same restaurants.

When I moved to Houston, he would visit and we’d go get pizza and look at records like I was still 19 and living in Atlanta, only twenty minutes away Little Five Points instead of thousands of miles across the country.

I remember how proud of me he was when I would tell him I made a new friend, or found a new community in Houston.

I would talk to him about witchcraft and politics and the history of the world.

We would passionately debate all sorts of things; surveillance states and abortion rights and all the works.

As his eldest daughter, I took great pride in always being able to keep up with him in a conversation.

We were in some funny competition, my father and I.

Who had the better facts? Who had the stronger sources?

It brought me so much pride to know how proud he was of me in those conversations.

No matter where we disagreed, he would always end the call by saying “you know, you’re so easy to talk to. I love this conversations with you because I always learn something new.”

He is the rare person that has ever said that to me, the rare person who was impressed instead of intimidated by my quick, aggressive mind.

Or so I thought. I know now that this is why we don’t have a relationship. This thing I thought he adored, he now fears.

He knows I am too smart to bullshit.

He was always affirming my intelligence, my cleverness, my wit, my humor.

He understood how scared I was to make new friends after a bad breakup, he spoke power into me when I slowly built my community up, brick by brick.

We would talk about manifesting and talking to our ancestors by the water.

My father was the smartest man I’ll ever know.

He wasn’t a fan of Stevie Nicks but he loved singing Stevie Wonder to me when I was a baby.

He would cook me lunch on weekends because I was always forgetting to eat.

He would give me advice on how to apply to colleges, which ones to apply to.

I remember when I got accepted into the school I’d end up attending and how proud and excited he was.

I remember the sound of his footsteps coming up the stairs of the home I can no longer visit because he had an affair on my mother and then they divorced and sold my childhood home.

I’ll never see that kitchen again, I’ll never watch my father walk through that house. I’ll never hear him call my name from up the stairs, I’ll never smell his cologne through the halls as I get ready to walk to school.

I can’t even call him about my day as a grown up because in January of this year, he asked for a divorce from my mother and then we found out on Facebook that he had been having an affair with a white woman.

One day, he took all of my teenage bedroom furniture and moved it into the apartment he now shares with his mistress.

And today I can’t listen to The Cure without bursting into tears thinking about the smell of his cologne in the morning before school, when I’d be blasting music through headphones to cope with being a moody teenager.

Yesterday, I played Just Like Heaven on repeat and curled up the floor of my kitchen and cried into my Juicy Couture bathrobe for half an hour.

I think about what he’d say about my life today, my friends, my hobbies, my accomplishments, how proud he would be if only we spoke.

I remember the last time we were together, last Christmas, how I wore a pair of heels that made me as tall as him, how he said “I know you look down on me, literally and figuratively,” how confused I was by that statement.

I didn’t know at the time that he had been lying to me and my sister and my mother about where his time and money went; that he was traveling to South Carolina to deceive all of us.

Now, I know what he meant.

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My whole life, I’ve always known I was a bitch.

The first person to ever call me one was my own mother, which should tell you a lot about my personality as a literal child.

And also says a lot about my mother.

I’ve always come off as this super confident, outspoken, larger-than-the-room personality.

Other kids in my Girl Scouts troop would call me a busybody and bossy and it was my first time hearing those words but it wouldn’t be my last.

A bunch of kids were picking on me at school and my mother said it was because of my attitude.

The parents of children would say I complained all the time.

Teachers wrote “headstrong” and “hardheaded” on my reports in the fourth grade.

I had beef with a middle school teacher for rolling my eyes all the time, and I had even more beef with a high school teacher for laughing with my friend while he was giving the class a boring lecture about taking pain medication.

Since college, friends have called me mean, judgmental, intimidating, hard to please, a know-it-all.

I’ve had friends from Georgia to Texas get frustrated with me for being off-putting and standoffish to new people in clubs or bars.

Colleagues at work joke about me being a diva.

And I see so many people constantly talking about “how to be a bitch” and how “being a bitch will save your life” and I couldn’t agree more!

But most of y’all are pretending to be somebody you aren’t.

And because I am indeed a bitch, I’m gonna say a bitchy thing: you’re either born with it or you aren’t.

It’s funny to me that we are now encouraging something that many of us grew up trying to avoid being.

So, let’s really dig into what we were encouraged to be.

Growing up, I wanted to be seen as a nice girl.

Let me clarify: to me, nice is about another person’s comfort around you and how people see you in the world.

Nice is about how other people feel around you.

Kind is about who you are inside. Do you understand the difference?

I wanted people to say “she is a pleasure to be around, she never complains and she’s so sweet”.

But guess what? That’s fucking bullshit.

What does being perceived as nice and agreeable get you?

As a kid, I thought it meant a better relationship with my mother.

I thought it meant more friends at my all-white elementary school.

I thought it meant being treated like the kid I was.

What happened when I tried to be more of what people tell you to be?

Nicer, less intimidating, not so scary?

We all know where this story goes.

And the irony of it is that every person who told me to be nicer, warmer, softer, more agreeable or less difficult…none of them liked me more when I tried to embody their so-called preferences.

If anything, they resented me for becoming less of myself to please them.

And I resented me for the hyper-vigilance and anxiety that begins to permeate a relationship when you center it around somebody’s acceptance of you.

It’s always a lose-lose outcome, trying to shape-shift into the person you think somebody wants you to be.

And in truth, nobody has ever liked me more for being nicer because the ugly truth is I’m not a nice girl.

Trying to be something I am not never works!

People can smell the bullshit attempts to be liked from miles away and the inauthentic nature of people pleasing is a huge turn-off.

More importantly, I end up hating the person I’ve become.

So what does all of this really mean, when it comes to how I navigate the world as a grown-ass woman?

Let’s say my mother loved me the way I wished she had.

What version of myself would that have required?

If I took every person who ever said anything about me and lined them up and tried my hardest to make them all comfortable around me, what would I gain by the end of that?

Who would I be?

I’d rather be me.

So today, I’m abrasive.

I have a polarizing personality that many call “liberating” to be around.

I have strong opinions about my life and even stronger ones about yours. I’m rude when I’m hungry or tired.

I can make people feel free and inspired when I walk in the room.

I like to complain because I think it’s fun to do it with other people and I love saying the word “no” more than the word “yes”.

And I don’t give a fuck about so many of the things women are told to care about:

1. I don’t give a fuck about being nice to people I don’t know. You are a stranger?

2. I don’t give a fuck about watering down my standards so I don’t offend others. If my standards offend you, that’s the POINT.

3. I don’t give a fuck about eating food I don’t want to eat because somebody else made it or paid for it. I don’t care about licking the plate clean even though I hate the food or got full ten minutes ago.

4. I don’t give a fuck about getting a cake that everybody likes for my birthday so everybody can enjoy it. It’s my damn cake!

5. I don’t give a fuck about leaving a function early, alone

6. I don’t give a fuck about being a low-maintenance anything. I literally cannot think of anything more boring and pointless.

7. I don’t give a fuck about making good first impressions.

8. I don’t give a fuck about playing music I know everybody likes in my house

9. I don’t give a fuck about filtering my opinions on your weak ass fuck-buddy/sneaky link/situationship/lover/girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever

10. I don’t give a fuck about being seen as a good, nice, virtuous woman

It’s 2026, and I no longer believe that I’m a good person if everyone is comfortable around me.

Maybe I am mean.

Maybe I am judgmental.

Maybe I am not nice.

Maybe I do complain a lot.

Maybe I am a know-it-all.

Maybe I am hard to please.

Maybe I am rude to strangers that I don’t know.

Maybe I am unpleasant to be around sometimes.

Maybe I am a bitch.

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You see, I’ve done it all.

I’ve had the closeted high school besties-to-lesbian-situationship. I’ve had the long distance non-monogamous relationship.I’ve had the two-year college boyfriend. I’ve even had a relationship with a girl who ended up becoming my months-long stalker.

Yes, I’ve actually had a stalker! With police calls and court appearances and everything! I’m now (thankfully) happy and not dating any one person at the moment.

Actually, I’m in a throuple right now but that’s an article for another day.

The POINT is…I’ve lived a lot of life. I’ve done a lot of research in the field as they say, and gained a lot of experience points that have profoundly shaped the way I view relationships and dating and RED FLAGS.

I’ve ignored so many in my lifetime! So I thought I would make one big list of all the ones I’ve overlooked so you can all learn from my mistakes.

Or at least make your very own unique set of ones that are totally different from mine.

Feel free to add your own to the comments section below, and enjoy!

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1. Gets mad at you for posting sexy pictures on the internet, or deems certain outfits “inappropriate” even though you were posting/wearing them before you got into an exclusive relationship and they never had an issue with it before

2. Makes you delete contacts in your phone or pictures on social media

3. Asks you to stop being friends with certain people, creates a wedge or constant conflict between or about your friends

4. Asks for your phone password, apartment code, or house key (and gets mad when you say no)

5. Justifies being super jealous by saying they have trust issues or are “protective”

6. Gets mad when you don’t text back within a certain time frame

7. Has an anti-nightlife mindset, gives you a curfew

8. Openly admits to being possessive and controlling at times

9. Always accusing you of having flirted with somebody

10. Calls you names or makes blanket negative statements about your character during fights (instead of talking about resolving the issue)

11. Says things like “I hate you” during fights

12. Says things like “if we break up, I’ll never date again” or threatens to hurt themselves during fights

13. Punches walls or has to leave the room or house whenever they get mad

14. Bullies or belittles their younger sibling

15. Intimidates you when they’re angry

16. Insists on PDA even when you say some version of “I don’t like PDA” multiple times

17. Treats you differently around other people

18. Makes empty promises or consistently does not follow through

19. Is the victim in every relationship that has ended

20. Is blocked by all/most of their exes

21. Has a history of cheating/being accused of cheating

22. Is close friends with cheaters

23. Says things like “my ex would say I hit her”

24. Has a history of violent relationships

25. Calls women “bitches” or “females”

26. Uses super crass, derogatory language when talking about past relationships

27. Makes comments about complete strangers’ appearances

28. Doesn’t have any friends who are girls

29. Has low self-esteem, self-deprecating humor

30. Gets too serious too quickly about the relationship

31. Wants things and then historically neglects them (gets a puppy and doesn’t take care of it, spends a ton of money on something that goes nowhere, wants kids but has no plans for how to participate in the child rearing)

32. Lives beyond their means, spends money on things they absolutely cannot afford

33. Is chronically indecisive

34. Gets super emotional or withdrawn or defensive when you give feedback about physical intimacy

35. Doesn’t text or call you when they’re on a trip

36. Doesn’t like to plan things, says “I like to fly by the seat of my pants”

37. Makes travel arrangements for herself and her friends and never asks you to come along

38. Doesn’t get you flowers because “they die anyway”

39. Constantly takes work calls (or texts or emails) throughout your date

40. Is always on their phone during quality time

41. Makes career/life decisions without talking to you about them

42. Has no vision or direction for themselves or your relationship

43. Has no hobbies or friends or life outside of work

44. Never stands up to their friends or family members during conflict, always takes a neutral stance

45. Consistently plays devil’s advocate, is a chronic “see-both-sides” offender (sometimes people are in fact deadass wrong)

46. Seems to always see everyone else’s POV except yours

47. Has no desire to come out to her family

48. Wants to discuss your body count

49. Tries to up-negotiate during physical intimacy

50. Seems super fixated on specific sex acts (i.e., strapping or scissoring)

51. Can’t masturbate without porn

52. Lives at home or doesn’t have their own form of transportation

53. You have no real idea what they do for a living or how they pay bills

54. Asks you “what you bring to the table”

55. Their entire wardrobe is gym clothes

56. Is disinterested or disengaged from general world politics

57. Hates reading, animals, or children

58. Never goes to the doctor, doesn’t have PCP, doesn’t go to the dentist or gyno

59. Complains about a health problem but gets super defensive whenever you suggest going to a medical professional

60. Doesn’t believe in vaccines or wearing a seatbelt

61. Abuses drugs or alcohol

62. Litters

63. Talks down on homeless people

64. Has a spending, debt, or gambling problem

65. Gets into fights when drunk

66. Never drinks water

67. Has dirty nails

68. Has a type that mostly revolves around a specific skin tone or weight

69. Makes comments about how you should change your hair into a completely different style (i.e., “you should shave your head” or “you would look so good if you loc’d your hair”) or frames this ask as a preference (”I really like women with shorter/longer hair”)

70. Does favors for you that you don’t want or puts on such a show of generosity that it makes you uncomfortable

71. Is super into weapons (knives, guns, martial arts, military stuff)

72. Says they are “down for whatever” on dating apps

73. Uses the phrase “I crashed out” all the time

74. Can’t write anything decent without AI assistance or Grammarly

Inspired by a similar newsletter shared by Celia on July 15th, feel free to tally up how many red flags you counted in your own past (or present) encounters!

How did you do?

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• 0-4 points → so nobody is perfect but you definitely might wanna talk to them about whatever applies to your partner. that conversation, and their response, will give you more data on how to proceed.

• 5-9 points → hmm…so respectfully let’s start looking for the themes and patterns in their behavior. basically, this is where you start seeing stop signs on every corner. as in “stop” seeing them.

• 10-14 points → you need to start looking for the ramp off the highway! where are the emergency exits??

• 15+ points → run, run, run. seriously, you need to get the fuck out asap.

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I love having sex. 
I love fucking. 
I love sitting on somebody’s face 
and hearing the squelch of my cheeks smacking against their face. 

I love seeing come in their nostrils 
and teeth marks all over their neck. 

I love watching their eyes water and redden 
and hearing their moans turn into sobs. 

I love talking them through an orgasm, 
flicking their clit until they shoot out delicious nectar 

that drips down the side of the sheets and the mattress. 

I love hearing the sucking sound of fingers knuckle-deep in coochie 

and the soft gentle murmurs of people in love. 

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This article is inspired by Kaothar Kadir:

The Third Thing

Invent a Sexual Perversion

i don’t know about you but I’m feeling freaky. my vacation never ended because i did not want it to end. I’ve been in a place of no death…

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3 months ago · 12 likes · 2 comments · Kaothar Kadir

I think about the backs of erasers all the time. 

Smooth, pink, flat, cool to the touch.

They glint at me from their jar on my desk.

I want to pop them into my mouth like cherries
Swish them around in my mouth, swirl my jaw from side to side
Pucker my lips and make a kissing sound 
While I taste it. 

What happens if I put one in my pussy? 

Could I clench my walls around it
Hold it inside me like a kegel?

How big can I go?
Are we talking mechanical pencil erasers or standardized test helper?

Or maybe I’ll take a handful of tiny pink ones
And shove them inside of me one by one,

Let my essence leak out with every push.

Spread my lips open with one hand 
And watch the strands of my nectar catch like the webs of Arachne.

In my core, a cluster of pink erasers glitter like pearls. 

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I am turning 26 this year and was thinking about what a crazy ass year it’s been.

My parents have gotten divorced, I’m estranged from my father, and I can never step foot in my childhood home again.

My personal life?

It’s never been better.

So, here’s how I stay sane and here are some things I’ve learned.

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Most of the people in your large friend group are really your acquaintances.

Be wary of the large friend groups with eight-plus homies.

Half of them folks don’t know each other outside of one mutual friend in the group and I swear to God if you fall out with somebody you will learn that shit super fast.

Half of those people do not fuck with you if you’re persona non grata that week.

Be careful of who you get close to at your lowest point.

We spend a lot of time praising people who stand by us during hard times, as we should!

But be wary of anyone who seems to be more present and attentive to you when you’re unhappy than when life is going really well.

Sometimes, misery loves company.

And that company can be become particularly co-dependent if you aren’t mindful.

Pick friends you’re equally yoked with.

You don’t wanna be the broke friend in the group or the one who’s unsuccessful.

You also don’t wanna be the friend who constantly picks projects instead of relationships to nurture.

Relationships should be balanced and mutual.

Avoid women who describe female friendships as drama filled, difficult, unsustainable, etc or say “I can’t get along with other women”.

Do I need to explain why women like this are NEVER good friends?

Learn to be selfish.

And pay attention to the people in your life who villainize you for it.

As an older sister…

Have friends in your life that give you the room to delegate.

For example, when it comes to planning, you’re not doing all the planning for trips or making reservations for dinners.

When it comes to transportation, you’re not doing all of the driving or you’re not paying for all the things.

These friends empower you to have an equal relationship with them rather than taking advantage of your default “can-do” attitude.

Not listening to your intuition can get you killed.

Stay woke ! And pay attention to the friends and family members in your life who treat you like you’re being harsh or unreasonable for trusting your gut.

The devil is a lie!

People will lie to you, sell you on something that’s not there to get what they want.

People will study you to plot to have you, simply to abuse or exploit you.

They will watch you for months silently to learn how to mirror your interests or your values to get close you, and it’s all a LIE !

Moving is really hard and really lonely.

So don’t feel bad if you don’t have a friend group or a tribe, especially in your early 20s.

Getting your lick back or “cheating back” is a waste of your energy.

Stooping down to someone else’s level of pettiness or immaturity to prove a point just makes YOU immature.

The time we spend with the people that we love is borrowed.

At some point for one reason or another, the universe will ask for them back. So appreciate them and treat them with value while you have them don’t take the people you love for granted because nothing is forever.

If your friend “supports” you through something…

And then talks shit about it behind your back throws it in your face or villainizes you for having needed that help, drop them!

You will get farther ahead in life…

By learning to listen to your own discernment intuition instead of deferring to other people’s wisdom.

Being unbothered is overrated.

Care!

Care enough to choose better for yourself, care enough to advocate for your own needs.

Care enough to walk away from something that isn’t serving you.

Care enough to call bullshit when it stinks!

Communication is key, but so as comprehension.

If you find yourself repeating yourself and explaining something to a person in different ways and sending long paragraphs of text, I’m gonna hold your hand when I say that that person probably is not interested in really understanding you or taking accountability.

They are benefiting off of your repeated attempts to communicate something while you are getting consistently frustrated and feeling gaslit, and working yourself up at your own expense.

A person who advocates for you lowering your standards or expectations…

Usually stands to benefit from that in someway

The girl who’s always in and out of a toxic relationship?

She will not be a good friend to you.

There are some people in your life…

That you were not even supposed to be in the same room with.

The person who makes little snarky jokes or comments to be “funny” or roast you …

Is being mean and envious and they don’t like you.

There are people you go to the club with.

And there are people you ask to drive you to the airport and they’re usually not the same group of people.

Turning your nose up at high maintenance friends or low maintenance friends doesn’t do anybody any benefit.

Some people don’t care if they don’t hear from a friend for four months or four days and some people do and there’s nothing wrong with any of that.

Find the people that give and receive in the ways that you want to give and receive !

It is okay to fall out with people.

It is okay to lose friends along the way.

How are you responding to that and what are you learning from that experience?

Don’t judge other women for how they take care of themselves when they’re on their period.

If they want to use tampons or not use tampons, don’t be rude about that or turn up your nose like they’re being gross for how they’ve dealt with it.

Don’t shame somebody for taking painkillers or taking PTO or going to the doctor to get a prescription for ibuprofen.

That’s just weird.

Abusive relationships can, and do happen to anyone.

Telling somebody that they must have done something for their abuser to be abusive or act crazy is mind-boggling and ignorant.

That one person you dated in high school or college that you keep thinking about is not your soulmate.

You just have attachment issues.

If you feel like a last resort, a second option, on afterthought in somebody’s life, you probably are.

And you deserve someone who prioritizes you, and that goes for any kind of relationship.

Practice saying no to your family.

Disappoint them.

Early and often.

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It’s a Thursday night in Houston and I’m wearing a pink Herve Lerge bandage dress dupe and a rose quartz necklace layered with pearls.

I Uber to her apartment, girlfriend away for the night with friends and a glass of Pinot Grigio waiting in the kitchen.

They’ve been together for five years and lived in Houston even longer. Tonight is about something new.

She’s nervous; I can tell by the way she opens the door and avoids looking at my ass and boobs for too long.

We hug, smoke a joint, and polish off a glass of wine each before heading out to Zanti’s; a delicious Italian restaurant in a bougie part of town.

What can I say?

I love to impress a girl I’m trying to have sex with.

Except the food is so delicious I forget my goal.

Burrata salad, fried mozzarella balls, tiramisu, mint tea, tequila and vodka cocktails, and googly eyes over candle light.

Dating my friend is an exercise in pacing and timing. Everything about the night requires intentionality and patience.

She is watching me for signs of disinterest, dishonesty, detachment.

My job for the evening is to reassure her without making it obvious that I know she’s hesitant to let her guard down.

And she should be, I respect that.

My friend is not unlike a cat; she bides her time and sits back without drawing obvious attention to her needs.

Though, if you read her body language it’s written all over her.

She observes your ability to read her and attune your behavior to her desire without her having to ask.

So the tiramisu and the shared appetizers and laughter at dinner and the top golf rounds aren’t about sex.

But, they’re about sex.

Our final destination is an unmarked club with a blue door beneath a stairwell.

We wrap our arms around each other at the bar and share a glass of wine before making it to the upper level and sinking into a plush leather couch.

I cannot restrain myself any longer, not interested in holding back my sticky hands.

I want to squeeze the firm, soft flesh that’s been eyeing me all evening.

I want to hold my friend in my lap and try to stick my hands down her tight pants.

Or at least make out a little.

We instead ended up exploring our exhibitionist kinks.

On that leather couch, in front of another couple, I sucked on the full flesh pulling at her blouse, tugging down her black bra to reveal a dark brown nipple that I pulled and sucked into my mouth.

The darkness of the club and the shadows watching us only turned me on more.

Knowing we were being watched and turning on other patrons in the club, inspiring them to reach for their lovers; it had me reaching for the zipper of her pants before long.

I pulled her on top of me so she could straddle my lap and I could get a good angle to slide my hand into her panties and feel her wet core.

Sliding my fingertips around to get a good scoop of her nectar and suck at my fingers is really all I wanted to do that night.

She moaned into my mouth and tongued at me with hers.

Before long, several men were asking us if they could join.

We said no, obviously.

I straddled her to get an even better angle and pulled a wet orgasm out of my girl, her nectar sliding down into the crack of her peaches.

We traded places again and I splayed my legs out around her waist, my dress shoved up to my chest so I could reach down to play with myself while she talked me through it.

She pressed herself on top of me to shield my wet core from interested parties, and to work on a hickey that would stay on my neck until Tuesday of the next week.

And when we left the club, we made sure to text my friend’s girlfriend.

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This article is inspired by a similar newsletter shared by Lady Kay on March 5th:

Lady’s Substack

A List of Smutty/Kinky Things I would Do With My Man

One of my readers requested for an uncensored version of the “YES List” that I posted to TikTok and Instagram…

Read more

6 months ago · 782 likes · 70 comments · Lady Kay

1. Knife Play

There’s nothing more erotic to me than the idea of being dressed up in lingerie and tied up to a Saint Andrew’s Cross and being blindfolded.

Add my wife and a pair of scissors or a knife? I don’t know.

Something about her dragging the edge of a blade across my lingerie and snipping a strap or two, never ever drawing blood but creating a lingering tension that curls in my my stomach stretches on for a session…yeah.

Amplified by the firm knowledge that I am completely safe, that no harm will come to me, that I am in a state of total trust and surrender?

I will ONLY try this with my wife.

2. Medical Play

I love the idea of being strapped down and restrained while somebody hot and sexy snaps on non-latex gloves and rubs my naked body in baby oil before sexily inserting a speculum inside me.

Add in costumes and role-playing and you’ve got a fun scene that’s sure to turn me on for weeks.

I love nothing more than getting to create and re-enact fun and ridiculously inappropriate fantasies like this with my lover.

3. Impact Play

If you’ve never laid in your lover’s lap and had your ass up in the air for half an hour while they rubbed and kissed and sucked and licked and SMACKED your ass…try that shit.

Thinking of my lovers talking me through a spanking session in which they never even TOUCH my core…lord have mercy.

4. Bondage

I love being tied up. I have always had fantasies of being pinned down by the love of my life who proceeds to passionately eat me out for an hour and a half until I’m crying and whimpering.

Where is my wife?

5. Rim jobs

Is this a safe space? I have never eaten ass before. I will probably never do it unless I am married.

It’s something that only appeals to me if I’m literally crazily in love with somebody; just like getting married!

However, I love a woman who noisily and messily shoves her ass into my face and drips down my neck and chest, dampening my shirt and making my nose run while she rides my tongue.

I love how wet everything gets and how easy it is to just slip things in holes…with consent of course.

Let’s just say when I’m in love, I’ll do anything.

6. Facials

I fucking love it when a woman nuts all over my face. There’s really nothing more I can say about this without my account getting flagged on SubStack.

7. Praise

I have praise-kink. It makes my pussy wet to be told how pretty I look or sound, how good I taste and feel, how proud my lover is of my bedroom skills, words of affirmation are my love language!

I love being strapped down while my lover talks me through it and tells me where to look and what to do.

Tell me to stick my tongue out, tell me to hold you close, whisper about how good my pussy sounds.

I want it all!

8. Impact Play

As a part two to spanking, I also love floggers, pads, all of that fun stuff. No whips or canes though.

9. Throat Pies

Reserved only for lovers who’ve exchanged vows of fidelity and STD test results, I love swallowing my lover’s nectar.

I take great proud in choking or gargling in whatever she gives me and begging her to do it multiple times until she shoves me away and yells out our safe word.

10. Sex Toys

I would never even consider being physically intimate with somebody who doesn’t like sex toys.

More people should try having their lover talk them through a vibrator masturbation session.

“Go faster, circle your clit, stroke your core for me, smack it a little, turn it up higher, slow down for me”…does nobody have imagination anymore?

11. Come Shots

Come in my hairline, in my bellybutton, in my mouth, in my ears.

12. Car Sex

I am too damn grown to be fucking in a car, but I love the idea of being eaten in the backseat of a Mercedes.

I love the image of riding my lover’s fingers in her lap in the passenger seat.

I love the idea of sitting on her face after we pulled over on the side of the highway.

When I say I want a lover who gets me outta character, this is what I mean.

13. Face Sitting/Riding

Did I already say I want to sit on somebody’s face? Yeah.

14. Phone/Video Sex

If you shame women for sending nudes or engaging in phone and video sex, you’re a loser lameass wannabe.

Phone and video sex is hot.

Wear gold earrings, red lipstick, lingerie, and a silk robe.

Seduce yourself and then seduce your lover.

There’s nothing hotter than talking each other through an orgasm while the crackling static of the phone amplifies your arousal.

15. Mutual Masturbation

If you can’t tell, I love instruction and co-creation when it comes to orgasms.

I love it when my lover locks eyes with me and plays with herself while she watches me touch myself and tells me what to do.

I love when she tells me to slow down and take my time or slide my fingers inside or up and down.

16. Primal Play

Do we even need words sometimes? I think it’s fun to have a session where you can only communicate using animalistic grunts and moans.

Again, where is my wife?

17. Reading Erotica

There’s nothing hotter than receiving a long-distance audio message from your wife on a work trip, reading a chapter of smut for you to masturbate to.

On the reverse side, I also want to gift my wife with a video of me reading erotica while a vibrator (remote-controlled by my wife) slowly brings me to orgasm.

Who says marriage can’t be fun?

18. Role Play

My lovers and I have played cops and robbers and it was the most fun I had in weeks. And we didn’t even end up having sex!

Being able to shed your regular labels and identities in a long-term relationship and momentarily transform into somebody totally strange is freeing.

Add in the deep-seated familiarity and knowledge about your lover’s body and it becomes erotic.

You’re pinning me to the back of our sofa like I’ve never seen it, but when your hands touch my pussy we both know exactly who the other person is.

19. Sensory Play

I love walking the line of my senses, whether that’s wearing a blindfold or being suspended in a Shibari session or my lover rubbing my body from head to toe with one of those fuzzy gloves with sharp points.

Is anybody else getting really hot?

20. Edging

Edging is the orgasm. I love taking my lover to the edge and talking to them like they’re the sweetest little beanie baby while they beg for release.

It gives me such a thrill.

And being on the receiving end is sure to make me squirt.

21. Movie Theater Sex

I loved doing this in high school and I’ll love doing it with my wife.

If they don’t make you feel young and hot again, what are you doing?

22. Swinging

Is it a hot take that I would be down to fuck another couple with my wife?

I have a specific couple in mind.

Matter of fact, let me find out if they’re available this weekend.

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This is for the women I’ve loved and learned from

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DISCLAIMER

Names and identifying details have been altered or removed to protect the anonymity of involved parties.

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I’ve known too many women in what I perceive to be toxic relationships.

They are brilliant, intelligent, ambitious women. And their circumstances challenge a lot of the assumptions society makes about survivors of abuse.

I knew Emma from another friend group in our same undergraduate class. We had a friendship that would eventually implode, in part due to her boyfriend.

When our relationship had ended, it took six more months before we would sit in front of each other again. To this day, we are not friends.

A month ago, I saw Emma. Drunk, she waxed profusely about how much she had loved our friendship and our bond and how she’d never had a person like me in her life ever. We locked arms and she laughed about how it felt like we were in college again in that club.

After the night was over, I went home and sat at my kitchen table and cried with all my makeup still on.

There’s my friend Danielle.

Years ago, she met a guy who’s her now-husband. We’ll call him Alvin, though honestly I don’t remember his real name anyway.

I remember meeting her boyfriend, a good five years older than all of us. Her friends and his friends had sat down for brunch and we were discussing dating.

I love to be slightly provocative when I meet people for the first time because they will usually immediately tell on themselves.

I loudly announced to the table that I didn’t like guys that were super affectionate on dates, and told a story about a guy I recently saw who kept asking for hugs and kisses on our second (second !!!) date.

I don’t even like it when women do that shit, and I’m gay as hell today. My sexuality is a whole other story though.

Anyway, her at-the-time boyfriend was a complete dick to me in response to my opinion and their relationship made me uneasy for years afterwards.

And I wasn’t Danielle’s only friend to feel this way.

In the last two years, I’ve reached out.

But I don’t know that I’ve genuinely spoken to Danielle since the summer I met her boyfriend.

Then, there’s Caroline. Caroline would tell you this guy is just a friend. We’ll call him Luke.

Caroline is my oldest friend in Houston, the only friend here that I still have after my own abusive relationship in which I had a stalker and had to move apartments and neighborhoods.

There are things about her relationship with Luke that make me concerned, though I obviously can’t prove anything.

So we talk about it without talking about it.

Well, I talk about it. She nods and moves on.

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So, how DO you handle a situation like this today?

You might have seen something wild? Maybe your friend talks about how toxic the guy is or his exes are saying something? Or she just always seems to pick the worst guy in the friend group?

We all have somebody like this in our lives; a friend who keeps ending up with a partner that gives you the fucking creeps.

So I close out, I wanna give y’all some rules that I follow to keep myself in her life as a support system while also protecting myself from a partner that I believe poses a real safety risk:

• I do not randomly visit her apartment, or show up at her place if she’s having a crisis or fighting with her partner.

• I do not allow her partner into my home

• I don’t allow my home to become her “escape location” because I have not explicitly agreed to that role

• I do not share my location, routines, or personal information about myself with her partner

• I don’t get triangulated into relationship fights (“tell him this,” “read these texts,” “whose side are you on?”)

• I don’t accept late-night chaos calls from her unless it’s a genuine emergency

• I don’t let my friend leave things at my place if it increases the chance of her partner showing up at my front door

• I don’t allow screaming matches, breakups, or reconciliations to happen in my space

• I don’t allow myself to become transportation, financial backup, or emotional crisis management by default

• I require honesty if there are safety concerns (restraining orders, stalking, violence, weapons, substance abuse, etc.)

• I keep my own social media/private life separate if her partner is controlling, jealous, or obsessive

• Trust my instincts when I feel uneasy around the dynamic

There are many ways to support friends stuck in a pattern of harm, and ways to keep yourself safe at the same time.

It’s okay to create boundaries for yourself so you can be present in a friendship without abandoning your own sense of danger.

If you or somebody you know is struggling with something like this too, please know that you can get help and support from resources that have helped me too.

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Listen to what people say the first time they say it.

As women, we often drive ourselves crazy trying to interpret “signals” from somebody who explicitly told us they cannot be available for a relationship.

We love to romanticize ambiguity!

My first observation is in the way you describe your interactions as implicit, not explicit.

There’s a lot that’s open to interpretation in lieu of a direct conversation so I’m a bit skeptical of the “energy was unmistakable” narrative.

You’re assuming a lot about Sarah: that she was intentionally flirting with you, that her eyes were communicating things she wasn’t ready to say out loud, that she was actively interested in being in a throuple, that she had feelings for you and that those feelings remain.

Slow your roll, shawty! The one thing Sarah has said is that she doesn’t want a relationship.

Let’s continue.

I’m curious about what you mean by sharing “emotional intimacy”. What do you mean by that? What kind of touches are you exchanging?

You also describe a dynamic in which you are the main facilitator of emotional check-ins and “unspoken dynamics”.

Why is everything unspoken in this relationship? Is everything unspoken in this relationship? I think the one thing that’s been clearly stated came from Sarah directly.

You’re clearly navigating ambiguity but I’m unclear about the source and if Sarah is actually muddying the waters or if you are romanticizing something you want but do not have.

Without more context, my gut tells me that you have feelings for somebody that may like you but does not want to commit to a real relationship and that’s a huge thing to pay attention to.

I can see that your fear in clarifying things with her is being rejected or scaring her, but the truth is that you won’t know how she really feels about you until you ask her.

Not having an open and direct conversation also enables you to continue filling the silence with your own point of view.

You’re aware on some level that this person does not want what you want, but I worry that you’re waiting for that to change.

To really get into that, “I also don’t want to keep walking in circles hoping Sarah will want what I want,” is a statement that tells me you’re intentionally outsourcing clarity.

She’s already told you she doesn’t want a relationship and that means your feelings towards her are yours to be responsible for.

You don’t need to be the one to hold it all together, particularly if one person doesn’t want a relationship with you.

You’re not crazy but you should probably find an outlet for your feelings that isn’t waiting around for somebody to change.

I think clarity may exist already, and perhaps you aren’t willing to accept it yet.

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This newsletter is part of a new series where I find Reddit submissions from lesbians on the internet and share my advice. If you have your own, feel to share them in the comments below!

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OP: I’m going to be honest with you. The bottom line is that if your wife doesn’t want a poly relationship, then you already have a problem. Poly relationships only work when both parties are interested. And even then, it’s a hit or a big fucking miss.

I’m going into this with my own bias; I was in a poly relationship with a partner who made it clear that was non-negotiable and I knew in my gut I didn’t want to date other people.

If you already know your wife does not want to date other people, you’re not really asking about a poly relationship. You’re asking to date other people.

And this is where I think people get confused about what a poly relationship really means in practice.

A poly relationship is where two (or more) people in a romantic/sexual relationship mutually consent to external romantic/sexual relationships or affairs.

Mutual consent, for those who don’t know, is defined by its enthusiasm.

There is no mutual consent in a poly relationship when one partner doesn’t want a poly relationship. And my guess would be that this is true for a lot of “poly” relationships.

Unfortunately, more often that not I think a lot of us find our way to non-monogamy by accident.

We have a partner that wants sex from us but isn’t getting any so they seek it outside the relationship and you agree to it because you want them to be happy.

This is not mutual consent.

Other times, we fall in love with somebody that wants to have multiple partners and you agree to be poly or open because you want to continue the relationship.

My point is that non-monogamy is complicated. So by already knowing where you wife stands, your options are pretty straight-forward.

In the grander scheme of things, I have some other notes to make. You mention “past traumas and preferences” as a sort of possible source of sexually misalignment so I’m curious to understand that more.

I also think that if your partner has unresolved trauma that impacts your sex life, I would prioritize addressing that as a couple first and being honest with each other about how it makes you both feel connected or disconnected from the relationship.

Seeking affection outside of your relationship is a normal reaction to lack of intimacy from your partner, but a poly relationship will likely destabilize a relationship that’s already rocky.

You mention that she has anger issues and you’re very needy. This seems like a problem. Following this up with “all other aspects of our relationship are perfect in fact so no need for couples therapy as we have individual therapy and don’t want to break the marriage” is …. interesting.

In comments on this post, I see you mention that your partner resists couples therapy.

Is that why going would break your marriage? This seems like a huge red flag to me; if your partner knows you have an issue in your marriage but is unwilling to discuss it, that doesn’t leave you with many options.

I think you should also take the issues you’ve outlined a little more seriously. “All other aspects of our relationship are perfect” seems like a rationalization for polyamory instead of a true assessment of your connection to your partner.

My advice?

Go to couples counseling.

This newsletter is part of a new series where I find Reddit submissions from lesbians on the internet and share my advice. If you have your own, feel to share them in the comments below!

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My definition of problematic weed consumption boils down to one question: does it negatively affect your personality and functionality?

You’ve already answered that question about your wife in the first paragraph.

Let me start by saying that I understand where she’s coming from.

I love a good wake-and-bake, followed by a few hits after lunch and a joint after five o’clock.

As a several-years-long stoner and weed enthusiast, I can relate to the defensiveness that pricks up when somebody questions my consumption habits.

I also struggle with PTSD, depression, and anxiety. I understand how easy it is for weed to become a comfort and a companion in a world of unpredictability and expectations.

But the first thing that jumps out to me about this story is the statement “if she doesn’t smoke, she gets very irritable and volatile”. What’s normal for everyone depends on a lot when it comes to weed.

Some of us can smoke a joint a day and perform well at work and socialize with no problem. For others, smoking a joint a day would be considered high-risk behavior.

There seem to be other issues in your relationship though.

One thing that jumps out to me in the fact that your 33 year-old married partner makes $17 an hour as a part-time barista.

I don’t want to pass judgment on folks that make less than myself, but I do wonder why she’s not interested in making more money.

You have a full-time job and are the default provider in your household. This seems super imbalanced and would likely cause tension and conflict if she wasn’t high all the time.

That would be a dealbreaker for me regardless of her relationship with weed.

Context is important here, so I want to ask a few questions.

Outside of how much you each make, do you function as genuine equals in your relationship? Is she in between jobs. Is she in school for a degree or undergoing training for a job program or certification? Does she have professional goals or ambitions?

And here is the bottom line.

I can understand her desire to work as barista until the day she retires (me when I lie) but what jumps out at me consistently in this submission is her lack of concern for how you feel.

You’ve communicated two major issues you feel are draining you. You are paying for mostly everything in your relationship and you feel overburdened. Your partner is unmotivated.

Defensiveness makes a lot of sense here; I would struggle to hear those from somebody I love without wanting to rush to defend myself.

But something else is important here: does your wife demonstrate concern for how you feel at all?

The way you describe your conversations makes it seem like she dismisses and downplays your point of view, or attacks you for feeling some type of way by accusing you of being controlling.

That seems very manipulative. So again, I want to take the conversation away from her weed consumption because that seems like a symptom of a greater issue.

You mention she has mental health issues that you’ve tried to address without success.

If your partner can’t hear that about herself without meeting you with even the bare minimum of interest in your feelings, I think you have a challenging conversation ahead of you.

Finally, and this is the most important thing here. You are tired of your current relationship.

That doesn’t mean you want to end it, but it does mean you’re about to hit your limit on what you can handle if nothing changes; if you haven’t already crossed that point.

That’s data; information that you should take very seriously! A huge part of relationships are about accepting a person for who they are as opposed to who we wish them to be.

You may wish for your partner to be medicated for their mental health issues and not high on weed all the time and your partner may receive that feedback as insensitive and controlling.

In my experience, people can adjust their behavior for a period of time but lifelong emotional crutches are harder to prune out.

Be honest with yourself about what you need from a partner, and allow yourself to be brave enough to attain it.

Let’s establish something right off the bat.

Too many of us have no idea how to really date or vet or picks.

We sorta stumble into red flag after red flag and try and remember the patterns the next time.

When we go on dates, we initially try to resist the urge to help or offer solutions to their problems, or hold space for long conversations about their personal issues.

But, one of the habits we often do as women is offering our time, access, and resources to help somebody that ultimately resents us for our proximity to something they want.

So ask yourself: do you want to date the problem solver or be the problem solver? Pick a struggle!

A roster is helpful because it helps you understand how a person is showing up for you relative to everybody else.

And what’s wrong with that?

Fundamentally, a roster should be structured around a system of archetypes, expectations and needs, with the objective being to vet and select a star player from the line-up at the end of the season.

I think a lot of us are going around curating a list of textuationships and friends with benefits but no real evaluation process or intention to develop a serious relationship with one of your prospects.

There’s also the common “I don’t want the person I’m dating to be dating other people” dilemma.

I’m gonna be honest: I understand it but I think we need to get over ourselves. What’s so wrong about dating multiple people until you become exclusive?

When you know what you want and what you’re looking for, you aren’t worried about silly things like “who else is he/she seeing” because you’re confident in your pick!

You’re clear on your standards and your selection process, and how you evaluate people.

So as I prepare to join the dating pool eventually, I preemptively developed a roster evaluation rubric designed for women to vet the people we date!

Buckle up, this one’s important.

Rules for The Roster

Most importantly, protect your health and your mental wellness. Don’t catch STDs!

Get a diary or a journal and assign everybody a grade.

Who takes you out to the symphony? Who makes your vagina pulse? We want to evaluate the people you’re seeing in a couple of categories. Rank them all against each other!

Investment and effort is the most important at this stage, because this is when they should be trying to impress and court you.

Do they spend money on you, or just time? Are they generous or stingy? Do they plan dates, buy gifts, or cover tabs?

Sex appeal and performance is also crucial, if you’re having (or plan to have) sex with anyone!

Are you daydreaming about them or dodging their calls? Can they find the clit, or are they just confident?

Conversation and vibes are another area to evaluate: do they have a brain and do you actually enjoy talking to them sober?

Then, there’s the risk factor.

Every person you date will have one. Are they toxic, mysterious, or just plain boring? Is this a casual link or a red flag parade?

Finally, you’re gonna want to give the members of your roster a label: keep or cut?

If you’re enjoying them enough, keep them! If they’re scoring low, cut them out.

The Line-Up

My dream roster looks like this:

• A seasonal romance with somebody who respects the spontaneous and chill vibe of our relationship. We need easygoing energy, clear communication about expectations, strong chemistry, and no emotional baggage.

• The Daddy Do-er who can fix things around my apartment or problem solve in my life, drives a truck and smells like cedar, almost never texts back but will show up immediately in a crisis. This is the kind of person who will call you once a day to ask if you ate and then drive up with your favorite food and fix a maintenance issue in your car and then kiss you and leave.

• Somebody wealthy enough to pay my bills double-over (not that we would ever. Take that money and stick into a savings account!) We’re talking mid-40s and up, randomly booking me flights or filling my Cash App, perfect for an ego boost, a dinner date, and consistent gifts. And, why have one when I could have two?

Days Zero through Sixty

In the first two months of casual seeing the folks on your roster, you’re going to give them a grade of one through five in each of the following categories:

• Gift Giving

• Quality of Dates

• Cash-App/Venmo Love

• Overall Effort

• Physical Chemistry

• Interesting to Talk to

• Emotional Maturity

• Humor Banter Game

• Texting Energy

• Consistency/Reliability

• Drama Level

• Situationship Potential

• Relationship Potential

• Respect for Boundaries

• Current Roster Ranking (Keep/Cut)

Days Sixty through Ninety

In the next sixty through ninety days of casually seeing the folks on your roster, you’re going to give them a grade of one through five in each of the following categories:

• Dirty Talk Game

• Orgasm Consistency

• Aftercare/Respect

Mark a weekly date night in your calendar and reserve your date nights for that day exclusively. This will prevent you from giving too much of your time to one person early on.

And, in the time before you become exclusive, your place is totally off limits. Don’t let them know where you live!

Date them ALL, and have zero expectations.

Leave when the love bombing stops.

As you continue to casually date, don’t spend the night yet and give yourself a curfew. Some people do 9 PM, for others it’ll be 2 AM. Whatever works for you, and it’s important that it works.

The biggest mistake we often make is being snuggled up under somebody without having vetted them and letting the dopamine release disable our guard.

Those long phone calls that happen before you meet in real life for the first time will create the same issue - you’ll have this preconceived set of expectations based on a dynamic that was created without face-to-face interaction.

And sometimes that does more harm than good for the relationship!

You should talk on the phone before your first date to make sure they aren’t a total creep or a bad conversationalist, but keep it to 45-60 minutes.

Finally, don’t tolerate shit-talking about exes. That’s literally the worst possible energy that either of you could bring into a new dynamic.

And what happens when you finally decide you’ve found your top pick? It’ll feel so obvious to you that this person is the right match because you vetted them instead of getting caught up in what was around or available.

When should you date again after a horrible breakup?

It’s a question I’ve discussed and debated over and over again.

I’ve had my fair share of relationships - the high school sweetheart, the long-distance girlfriend, the open relationship, the heterosexual relationship, the throuple, the casual hookups.

And I’ve done the breakup phase in pretty much every one way CAN.

I’ve had the hoe phase.

I’ve had the rebound. I’ve had the hot girl summer. I’ve had the relationship-to-relationship ping-pong.

For these reasons, and for others, I’ve been taking a break from serious, long term, monogamous relationships for a while now.

After my last breakup, I went celibate for almost two years and dedicated my free time to creating all sorts of resources for myself as I continue to heal from the trauma that is dating in your twenties; resources I’ll be sharing my thoughts over the next few newsletters.

So, the obvious question for us lover girls: when should you date again after a breakup?

There’s all kinds of advice on this topic like timelines and tactics and I love shit like that.

Tonight though, we’ll be keeping it more high level and focusing on general vibes.

Think of this as a test for yourself. What do you relate to? Where are you in your process of breaking up?

Now, let’s get into this shit.

You are curious

You find yourself interested in meeting new people, making new friends, going to try new restaurants, visit new cities, try unfamiliar and new experiences!

Your focus is on positive indulgence, something that’s only possible when you’ve healed from that horrible phase of constantly looking back into the past and being stuck on what happened or what used to be real.

You are letting go

You’ve had the wherewithal to block and delete your ex from social media, your contacts, text messages, screenshots, pictures, conversations, ALL OF IT.

Months later, you’re realizing you genuinely don’t care or think about it anymore.

No more late night searches on the internet to see what they’re up to!

You are thriving

You are thriving AGAIN.

You’re excelling at work, you’ve found a happy and balanced daily routine that works for you, you’re tapping back into activities and hobbies that took up all of your time before your last relationship.

You are excited

You have an inner fire that’s burning, a hunger for life, an awakening, an appetite for life and new experiences.

You’ve closed that heavy door to the old and you’re ready to usher in the new.

You feel whole

Your night routine feels full.

Your bed no longer feels empty, and that space next to you is comforting instead of haunting.

Your space feels calm and peaceful, abundant on its own.

You no longer feel the need to fill up your time and space!

The past bores you

You’re fundamentally bored of thinking back to your last relationship, playing memories of your ex, break-up, or situationship feels so old!

You used to be stuck on certain things that happened, but now you’re over it, it’s so last season!

You just want to move ON.

Finally, if you’re wondering, I’ll be kicking off singledom with a sexy photoshoot and a psychic reading. And once my exorcism is complete…watch out.

I have a lot to say on the topic of masturbation but lately it feels like such a touchy topic amongst folks.

I wish that as women, we could normalize touching ourselves inside and outside of relationships without having to navigate the sense of inadequacy that so many people seem to feel in these dynamics.

I remember I had a partner before who would call me late at night and chat with me about work before trying to transition the conversation into phone sex.

It didn’t happen super often, but it always made me uncomfortable. She would say things like “we really need this,” or “it’s been a long day, come for me,” as if the whole set up was some sort of mutually beneficial release.

The truth was, I didn’t want to touch myself.

We often fought, this partner and I, and I felt that she used sex as a way to reconnect without having to repair anything.

Consequently, I felt shame for denying her “connection” in the midst of an already-rocky moment, and even more shame for going along with something that I knew I didn’t want, that I knew would perpetuate more harm in the long run.

Before this partner, I had a girlfriend who lived in another state and I came to visit her one spring and after I ate her out she fell asleep with her hand in between my legs trying to get me off.

This would happen several more times in our relationship and it was humiliating every time. I felt awful for being “hard to make come” and when I tried to gently coach my partner on how to co-create an orgasm, she would say she was tired and wanted to sleep.

The sting of shame I felt for being horny was made worse by my partner’s complete indifference and apathy when I brought up how it made me feel when she fell asleep with her fingers on my labia.

That weekend, I went to the bathroom and masturbated twice while she slept in the room next door, and I felt awful each time. It felt wrong, dirty, secret, and not erotic at all.

One time after we had sex, I wanted to keep going so I kept touching myself while she got up to get some water. She never came back, so I got louder until I realized she was probably trying to covertly communicate how uninterested she was in continuing. I stopped, and we never talked about it.

In my relationships with men, every masturbation session always occurred within the shadow of typical “will this vibrator out-perform my penis” fear and was completely unintegrated all together.

I had a friend who would bring a vibrator to her hookup sessions with a guy until he told her that it was ruining his performance. She told me she couldn’t have an orgasm without a vibrator, and I guess that made him feel it was her fault because it “got in the way”.

And this experience happens with women, too. A lot of people, not just men, see a vibrator or masturbation as a competition, not a compliment, to “regular” sex.

As somebody who practiced celibacy for almost two years, masturbation was how I healed from trauma, how I found and expanded connection with myself and my sexuality.

But here’s what I think. The human ego is fragile and people are sensitive about their sex.

They want to be perceived by their partners as the ultimate pussy-eaters, the best in the bedroom, the better-than-your-ex lovers, but too many people see a vibrator as a threat and not an assist to these endeavors.

This has never made sense to me.

If I’m touching myself and I’m getting off and you’re lying in top of me pinning my wrists into the sheets and talking me through it and we’re timing our breaths together and you’re giving me instructions on where and how to touch and we lock eyes the entire time and tongue kiss each other down and create an orgasm together…

How is that not sex?

Isn’t this all a part of co-creation?

Why does the mechanism of the orgasm intimidate people? Are people really saying no to these kinds of experience solely because in this scenario, they don’t “own” the orgasm?

And why is sex so often seen as a performance review instead a collaborative exercise in mutual desire and play?

Too many people just don’t want their partners masturbating. Or they do, but only if they’re out of town or on a work trip or in the shower or if they’re asleep or if they had sex first.

Other times in a relationship, masturbation equals “you suck in bed and I need to get off”, or it’s seen as some watered down version of a “real” orgasm or “real” sex that’s “not necessary” if you’re actively having sex with your partner.

And I think that’s a fucking shame.

For now, I will not be masturbating with or for anyone. I have decided that this particular kind of pleasure belongs to me and me alone. It is mine.

One day, I will have a partner that gets off on me getting off, is turned on by my insatiable need to touch myself, loves watching and talking me through an orgasm.

They’ll instruct me on how to touch myself, where to touch myself, and there’s something so so erotic about this; both of your breaths speeding up as you build an orgasm, how you lock eyes with each other and experience pleasure without having to touch, it’s genuinely so thrilling.

May we all be so fortunate.

It’s another Valentine’s Day. I’m in bed listening to french jazz and sniffing my candles. There’s just something about being single this time of year that I adore.

This week, I bought myself roses and a box of hazelnut chocolates and strawberries. I grabbed a bottle of Merlot and a bottle of Pinot Grigio and picked out an outfit for my dinner reservations tonight.

My dress is a floor length high-low cheetah print strapless gown and I’ll bring my tripod to take as many pictures in as many places as I want to after dinner.

I used to be a serial lover; I’ve had the boyfriend who took me to a nice five-star restaurant downtown. I’ve had the long distance girlfriend fly into town and book us dinner and a couple’s massage.

I’ve had the young high school lover who brings me baked goods during lunch in the cafeteria. I’ve had the flowers sent to my house. I’ve had the trip to Cancun and the picnic on the beach with a sign and fresh fruit.

Now, I’ve been single for two years and I gotta say I do not envy people in relationships on this day. In my experience, you either compare what you did for each other or you compare yourselves against your previous relationships.

It felt expensive and exhausting.

Today, there will be no fights. No resentful comparisons. No swallowing disappointment or unmet expectations. No waking up to somebody who slept on the wrong side of the bed that particular morning.

I spent my morning listening to music, smoking weed, cooking eggs and pancakes and dropping off little love notes to my neighbors. I wrote a letter to my mother which I’ll drop off on the way to dinner.

Last night, I caught up with my long distance best friend, who was heading to the Symphony with her boyfriend and then a beautiful dinner. My closest friends nearer to home are wining and dining each other all weekend.

I’ll admit it. I’m a little jealous. All my homegirls are in loving relationships, amen!

And later today, I’ll talk to my mom and my sister on the phone and tell them I’m trying a new restaurant tonight, Trattoria Sofia. She is sexy and divine, like me.

Tonight after dinner, I have a spa night planned. I’ll run hot water and swirl around bubble bath suds and epsom salts. I’ll slather myself up with potions and lotions and masks and scrubs and eat the rest of the chocolates and polish off too many glasses of red wine.

I’ll watch romcoms or Disney movies or listen to Jill Scott’s new album and text my friends about their weekend.

In everything I do, I get to control the timing, pacing, mood and energy and that is the true luxury of today.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Sometimes I miss my ex.

She was a predator. A psychopath.

And I miss her.

I was chatting with my sister late one night over the holidays, and she was telling me how she saw me as an early teenager.

“I didn’t know why you were suffering but I could see that you were,” she says.

I was thirteen, she was eleven. But even before we knew the word or its meaning, my sister could tell that I was depressed.

Here is the thing about being chronically depressed from a young age: it’s not an average or normal experience. The weight of being unhappy from the fifth grade onward creates this heavy weight and having to carry it is extremely alienating.

I’ve gone through most of my social life with the idea in my head that nobody will ever witness (let alone relate to) the life-long grief that has always seemed to color everything.

There’s a whole bucket of core events that come with being a chronically depressed kid, mandatory therapy sessions in the eighth grade, calls home to my parents from concerned teachers, constant policing from my mother, my father’s disappointment, disagreements over the nature of my friendships.

There’s the matter of being the only Black girl in my class, and (naturally) getting sexually harassed by two of my guy “friends” during class and on the playground.

Another Black girl in the grade below me had seen something and reported it to the teacher, who suspended the kids. Middle school in general was fucking traumatic.

Then, there was the matter of being queer.

I knew I liked girls at thirteen. I had a huge crush on my best friend and I knew this going into the year. I wanted to like everything she liked.

If I wasn’t thinking about her, I was thinking about One Direction. These were the only happy parts of this time in my life.

I wanted to lose weight. I wanted to not exist. I wanted to go home and be happy, which almost never happens when you’re thirteen. I wanted to improve myself into somebody else. I was convinced that my mom hated me with how much we fought, how much I was policed, invalidated, criticized.

I wanted to never go home.

Things didn’t improve when we moved neighborhoods and I went to high school. The one wonderful thing about high school was the friend group I used to be a part of.

There’s so much lore about this group but that’s probably another newsletter.

Then, I’m seventeen. Somehow I survived being in middle school and high school. I’m at the finish line, college is in sight.

My mom and I fought bitterly through it all.

I got a new therapist during my senior year to make sure my head was screwed on straight before I left town for college (it was not) and my mom inserted herself into the one semi-safe space I had to out me to my therapist as queer and tell her she was “worried about” my friendship with my best friend.

Now would be a good time to be transparent: yes, I was having sex with her.

But my mom was worried about entirely the wrong thing. She should have been more worried about me Googling “What happens if you drink a whole thing of mouthwash”.

My sister was shocked to learn twelve years later that I never really tried to off myself, though I feel obligated to give her most of the credit for that.

At twenty-five, my most recent appointment with a psychiatrist let me know that’s technically called suicidal ideation.

I told her I was just trying to find a way out of my life. I didn’t actually ever want to die.

On days where I didn’t want to be home, I would go outside and watch the sky.

I would dream about never speaking to my mother again. I would insist that I would never contact her after I graduated college, that she hated me, that she told me I made her miserable.

I would watch the birds fly and pray about joining them.

It’s when I go home for the holidays that I feel this way again, longing for an escape or exit out of the now.

The ache is ancient, as old as I am. And that is so lonely.

She understood how this felt; when your family is fighting and you walk down the street to go buy pre-rolls from your local smoke shop, blasting SZA.

As I look at my reflection in the shiny apartments, tossing my braids over my shoulder, I think about my ex-girlfriend’s momma could always tell she’d been smoking from the way her hair smelled.

I pat my pockets to make sure I have my Egyptian Musk oil

I remember how much she hated going for the holidays, too, how she would rather stalk them on Facebook.

She would tell me she felt like a dead family member, a ghost watching them celebrate the holidays from the beyond.

She preferred this all to showing up in person. She barely spoke to her mother. They too, fought all throughout high school. She understood why I never wanted to go home. She understood what it was like to constantly fight with your family; to be queer in a Black southern household; what is was like to hate being ten and eleven and twelve and fifteen and seventeen.

She knew why I didn’t like Christmas as a kid, why the thought of spending time at my parent’s house for a week still fills me with dread and anxiety as an adult.

She knew what is was like to hide your grief and trauma and sorrow in plain sight from your parents; to stuff your trauma inside yourself like an overweight suitcase.

To have it explode all over the floor and everybody can see all your shit and looks at you while you try not to scream “I just cannot do this.”

She never flinched, never faltered, never wanted me to ask her if she had the capacity to talk about my childhood, never turned away from my green-eyed trauma monster.

Instead, she exhaled and said to me, “Welcome”.

I didn’t see danger, I saw relief.

I loved her for that.

I could be myself. My darkness no longer had to hide. I didn’t have to pack all that darkness into a tiny fucking suitcase.

She was sociopathic, manipulative, narcissistic; and I felt so seen by her.

I was seen. But I was not safe.

And this need to be seen almost destroyed my life.

This person siphoned energy from my trauma, amplifying mine and reenacting her own. She mined information from my stories, my interests, my past, exploiting her knowledge with finesse and ease.

I know now that I cannot unload all of my trauma into one container.

I resent myself for wanting one anyway.

I am embarrassed by my past, by my decision to date someone who sniffed out my wanting like a bloodhound, overwhelming my nervous system and my life under the guise of support and intimacy.

I have a horrible habit of “trauma-dumping” and totally missing the moment someone starts licking their lips and excitedly rubbing their hands together.

They covertly whip out a notebook and take note of every fucked up thing I’ve experienced or said out loud.

This will later be used as leverage, totally catching me off guard.

Vulnerability is inherently slow. It requires pacing, and your nervous system knows this.

I know this.

I have to remind myself that keeping things to yourself is how you keep yourself guarded, protected, sacred.

I will never allow myself to be anything else ever again.

It is a promise I have made to my soul.

I did not grow up in Black America. I did not have The Black American Childhood.

And, I cannot tell you how tiring it is to navigate my weird ass upbringing and Black identity around Black people who had more traditionally “Black” childhoods. If you grew up around Black people, you aren’t gonna implicitly understand what I’m talking about but I’ll expand on it soon.

There’s an unfair stereotype about Black people who grew up around white people. People like Candace Owens give us a bad rep.

But growing up around white people did not and DOES NOT undermine my Blackness or my legitimacy and my voice as a Black woman.

I will never again allow anyone to tell me otherwise.

No, I don’t hate Black people. No, all of my friends are not white.

But, I didn’t grow up listening to Black American music or watching Black American movies. I grew up around white people, white culture.

My mother felt her children would have better opportunities growing up in proximity to white children, white resources, white communities. And thus, I was the only Black kid my age in my school or neighborhood.

I went to a tiny school with thirty kids to a grade and every single kid was white or light-skinned, shoutout to the two other Asian kids in my class!

I grew up going to a Black hair salon every two weeks and getting my hair done up into little twists that white boys said looked like a mop.

Other white kids would stick their hands into my hair and smell the grease my mom used to moisturize my scalp. They would pull on the ends of my hair to watch it spring back into shape.

As an adult, a friend of mine who grew up around actual Black children was shocked to hear this. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I actually loved having my friends fawn over my hair after an appointment.

Was somebody supposed to tell me this was actually offensive and humiliating? My parents never did.

My Black community was filled with relaxed hair and loud Jamaican accents and Patois and saltfish stinking up the house, loud reggae music blasting through the basement floor.

This was not the culture of my Black American peers.

My family went to a white church my whole life, with the exception of a brief membership with Cascade United Methodist Church, where she married my father and baptized me.

This is because my mother hates Black church music and gospel music. And to be frank, as a kid, I thought all the screaming and carrying on was pretty overwhelming.

My mother hates the Blues. She went to a Patti LaBelle concert and liked her less. She did not play R&B hits or rap music on the way home from work or on the weekends while she was cleaning the house. She never cleaned the house. And, I didn’t watch 106 & Park or MTV after school.

My mother was born in 1965 and was never truly welcomed by Black peers as an immigrant child or adult in this America.

My mother lost the only community of women she knew at fourteen years old, her only example of true sisterhood eroded. She is almost sixty, and never got that back.

I cannot imagine how this hardens a person, carrying a mixture of grief and alienation that weakens the bond between yourself and your people.

But was Black America ever “her people”? This is the thing people do not understand.

As my mother acclimated to America from Jamaica, she was mocked for the way she spoke, for the food she ate, for the way her clothes smelled, for all the ways her mother didn’t know how to raise a young Black teenager in America.

Consequently, the way I spoke growing up was scrutinized and I clung to my little sister in every social setting. I didn’t “talk like a Black person” or a white person.

Other kids came up to us and asked us why we “spoke so proper”. It was clear, even to my super young brain, that I was not like the other Black kids who had grown up around each other.

It was clear to them, too. Nobody was mean then, but there was a clear divide that only increased with age.

My accent came from my mother’s, her Jamaican accent and Patois effortlessly shape-shifting into her best impression of a white woman. I grew up mimicking her as children often do. I understand, you see. It is hard to grow up around white people’s kids.

She did this to survive, and I will never shame her for it. We call this code-switching, but nobody had a word for this when I was a child. Instead, other kids laughed.

My father, a military kid from Arkansas and the son of a sharecropper, went to Vanderbilt. Do you think he could sound like he was from Arkansas at Vanderbilt?

In college, I sat in a conference room while my peers searched “Black Card Test” on YouTube and played it on the projector. They cackled with glee every time I didn’t know a song, missed a movie reference, or was unfamiliar with a Black historical figure.

So no, I haven’t seen Boyz In The Hood. I haven’t seen Love and Basketball. The first time I heard a Young Thug song was when he did a feature with Camilla Cabello’s racist ass. And stop asking me if I’ve ever seen The Color Purple.

I never learned about “the peanut guy”, George Washington Carver? And I still don’t know what Booker T. Washington did.

This is my truth and you won’t shame me for it. I have learning to do, and that’s what the rest of my life is for.

And then there’s the fucking suffering that is growing up around white people who don’t like Black people, who were taught to see my appearance as unattractive, who sexualized me before I had boobs, who only ever liked me when I was funny or “hip” or “sassy”.

There’s a unique pain of recognizing all the comments made from teachers and peers alike that were straight up fucking racist as shit. Never being advocated for or protected by teachers or my parents.

Nobody ever taking my side in a classroom dispute, my own parents never having my back during bad parent-teacher conferences. any mistake or bad feedback was my fault, I was the only Black kid and needed to do better, be faster, network smarter.

I could never just be a kid around white children. If some kids bullied me, it was because of my attitude. If I was stereotyped, I needed to change the way I was being perceived. Like it’s any Black kid’s job to change that.

I was in the fourth grade the first time a group of white girls three years older approached me in the middle of the day to call me names. Stupid, slow, dumb, ugly, annoying, I don’t really remember. What I do remember is confiding in my mother about what to do.

She told me to tell the teacher, which I did. This teacher would later label me as hardheaded, headstrong, and bossy on my report cards. Do you think my mother was happy about this?

A week later, my mother and I were in an argument (yes, we’ve been arguing since I was nine years old) and she told me point-blank that I would have less trouble getting bullied at school if I fixed my attitude.

“See? This is why those girls are mean to you.”

In that moment, I realized my mother was two things: a person who would use the way people hurt me to make a point, and a person who would take somebody else’s side before my own.

In middle school, I came home with a “Most Likely To Sass Out The President” certificate, an inside-slightly-racist-joke between myself and a white boy in my class who was always giving me lip. He had been nominated by our classroom as “Most Likely To Be The President”.

I thought it was funny. It wasn’t.

I came home to my mother who was disgusted and ashamed and embarrassed for me and by me, she said. She was horrified that this was how people knew me, that this was the most notable thing about me that my peers could say.

She was disappointed in me, her Black daughter, for not being known for something else.

I remember being so confused and shocked by her reaction to something I deemed harmless. I was so hurt by her shame, her disgust, her embarrassment.

I didn’t understand why she couldn’t see my peers had given me this label, not myself. As an eighth grader, why was it my responsibility to manage how other people saw me?

I was a child and I should have been protected by my mother, not shamed and ridiculed.

For a lot of reasons now, I don’t have any friends from my childhood. Many of us don’t fit into each other’s worlds as adults. Actually, Instagram would tell you they fit into each other’s just fine, just not mine.

And I don’t fuck with them anyway because some of them were pretty racist ass kids.

When I had sleepovers as a young teenager, my friend’s parents would call me “eloquent” and “well spoken” like they expected hood gutter pre-teen jargon to come falling out of my mouth.

Other white kids would tell me that I “wasn’t like other Black kids”, that they could “understand what I said”.

Even then, I found this so gross.

In high school, my mom told me quite often that I was unlikeable, that I would struggle to make friends if I didn’t fix my personality, that I was rude and abrasive and mean.

In my senior year of high school, I remember hearing my white classmates talk about another Black girl in my grade who’d gotten into every college she applied to. I knew, from being at this school since my freshman year, that these white kids were in the same friend group with this girl.

Her friends made disparaging and racist comments about how she only got into every school because she was Black; other kids complained about not getting into state public schools because “admissions doesn’t want anymore white people”.

This same year, some random white kid named Andrew who I had literally never spoken to, felt comfortable enough to lean down and sniff my silk press before announcing that my hair “smelled like weave”.

Then there’s never being liked by the boys, thinking my hair was ugly and still struggling with it today. people commenting on my mother’s body and how she had the best ass, and so did I!

At thirteen! Wow!

Thanks for pointing out my mom’s fat ass and my big tits. Thank for you for sexualizing my mother and me. Do white people do this with each other, too? Or was it just me?

As an adult, there is a responsibility that I feel I have. I must continue to unpack my own internalized Black-phobia, my own classist views that come from believing being upper-middle class absolves you of being seen as Black in America, that proximity to white institutions is more superior.

There’s my mother’s relationship to Black America as an immigrant, having to critically think about the ideas of Blackness that my own Black parents taught me, understanding how their alienation from Blackness has created a sense of dissociation in my own connection.

Being honest about this is hard because people are so quick to remove any nuance from the idea of being Black if you admit you don’t feel like you belong or struggled to be welcomed.

Being Black is not about what movies you watch or what food you eat or how you wear your hair. It’s not about where you work or where you go to church. It’s not about whether you gate-keep our culture or whether you share it with white people.

It’s about who you are as a person, who you value in your community, who you surround yourself with, who you gravitate towards, who influences you. that stuff can be Black as hell, even if it doesn’t fit the traditional or typical.

And I wish we could have a conversation about this without it turning into a “who’s too Black/who’s not Black enough”. It’s fucking exhausting.

I’ve seen the posts on social media: a Black person complains about feeling unwelcome in their community and thus deems themselves to be friends only with white people.

I don’t think I’m this person, mainly because I have no interested in being friends with or surrounding myself with white people. I don’t feel comfortable around them, I don’t feel welcome in their spaces, and I feel that I’ve paid my dues! I did this in my childhood!

I want to spend the rest of my life absorbing as much of my own culture and interests as possible, not trying to assimilate into somebody else’s.

But this doesn’t mean that I don’t have work to do in unpacking how my upbringing influences my perspectives and values and beliefs and identity today. I do, I have work to do!

And understanding this will be a lifelong endeavor of mine, but I give myself grace. I hope you can too.

So, you want to have sex with somebody who’s got trauma. Big tee, not the little one. I get it, they’ve been working on themselves and they’re probably hot and sexy.

You’re thinking, “I like this person, this is a person I can build intimacy with, I want to eat their coochie”. But there’s a couple things I want to share first.

I decided to be celibate for a year and a half after my last “relationship”. I used to be pretty sexually active, single or in a relationship, and realized I’d never been fully ALONE. It was time to see what life without sex could bring me. I wanted to grow webs between my fingers, and a backbone.

Six months before I was planning to start seriously dating, I ended up drunkenly making out with my good friend’s girlfriend while she licked her lips and watched.

I woke up feeling shocked by my own behavior, but equally curious to understand what about my friend and her girlfriend compelled me to get frisky.

How did I, the guarded celibate-fuck-off-don’t-touch-me-don’t-date-me-traumatized-lesbian, suddenly feel comfortable enough to be so casual and playful with her sexuality?

The following Wednesday, my therapist asked me what I wanted to do next. I told her straight up: I was interested in doing it again, and possibly more.

I wanted to open my sexuality up to my friends, find a safe sandbox to play in as I continued to expand myself.

This was in August. It’s December. I won’t give you the juice details (yet) but let’s just say it’s all going incredibly well.

First, my friends are incredibly flexible. Yes, in the sexual way. But also, psychologically. I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of having been together for five years, but they have an ease with each other that bleeds into the way they engage with me.

This flexibility is important when you are a body that has experienced sexual and emotional trauma.

Start-stop-slow-go-sex is the best kind of sex to have, and it only works with partners that don’t get turned off or made to feel anxious by your triggers.

I need to be able to say “stop, that feels triggering. Can we make out and dryhump a bit more before you touch my vagina again"?”

This shouldn’t be a big deal. It isn’t to me; I understand the difference between a body being violated and being triggered.

A person who lacks this understanding will immediately launch into the “oh my god did I hurt you I’m so sorry I’m so sorry” speech and then you feel horrible and awkward for saying anything.

Or even worse, they become scared to touch you, scared to do anything that could risk you feeling triggered. They feel like they have to walk on eggshells with you, and you feel like you have to manage their guilt and sense of responsibility.

Let me let y’all in on a secret. Sex is triggering if you’ve been assaulted. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just what happens.

Inevitably, your brain will forget that the hands touching you belong to somebody you can trust. Your body will at some point forget that it’s in the present, not the past.

The goal isn’t to never be triggered during sex after trauma. That is literally fucking impossible. The goal is to find a partner that can navigate those triggers with you, creating an environment of co-regulation, not eggshells.

With my friends, I can ask for us to stop, start again, take a beat, take step back, then slowly dial up the heat. It feels like a very natural pacing for my trigger-prone nervous system.

I think this is possible for a lot of reasons, but I will give my friends a tiny bit of grudging praise for their ability to do this as a couple.

They are pretty good at human moments during sex and don’t freak out if I say “hey can you stop touching me for a minute I want to rub my coochie on your thigh some more before we escalate” or if my joints lock up during a scene or if I go totally nonverbal after a really mindblowing orgasm because every cell in my body has been scattered to the winds.

Bodies that have been through trauma deserve this; a space to be ourselves without worrying that we are burdening our partners.

Our bodies are bodies that have sore spots, triggers, don’t-touch-me-there zones we forget about. To tell our partner we feel triggered and not have it be made into a big deal is essential.

Here’s another added layer of complicated. I love having my needs denied during sex.

I also love giving directions, making demands, dictating, I love bossing around, running the show.

It’s important to be having sex with people who understand the difference between me saying something that I-actually-need-you-to-listen-to and “I want you to tease me, dangle this in front of my face until I am drooling and begging”.

I want somebody (somebodies) who can deny me and honor my needs at the same time. Having this in real life is super hot. I love begging and pleading and being reminded that I can use a safe-word if I really want everything to stop.

It’s my partners’ way of signaling that they aren’t overwhelmed by the intensity of ME.

Gentle touch is also really important. I like kink, if that isn’t clear. But I do NOT like being manhandled, I don’t want to be violently slapped or choked, and I will start to cry if you speak to me unkindly during sex.

Foreplay is something that becomes triggering after trauma, for a couple of reasons. One is that it slows down the sex. It forces your nervous system to process what is happening to your body in real time, and for somebody like me that is really fucking hard and scary.

I’m used to dissociating and rushing through sex so I can have my orgasm and not think about all the small moments where something felt triggering.

I need to be able to slowly explore this in a sandbox. I want to be to say “wait stop”, “wait go again,” “ok wait I need something different” and have a partner who sees this as opportunity not inconvenience. I don’t want a partner who freaks out and is afraid to touch me.

I am super grateful for my hot and sexy friends that understand not to go straight for in between my legs or my boobs when we’re getting freaky.

There are so many parts of the body to explore that do not involve those areas, but for me I need to also have sex with somebody who understands slowly touching me is triggering, period.

My worst fear is telling my partner “stop,” and having them sigh or make a face. Or worse, somebody who needs rigid guidance on how to handle my body and my boundaries.

My friends and I have created a little bubble of trust which allows us to figure things out as we go, meaning we don’t have to write everything out in ink before we try something.

We test things out, we develop safe words, we have debriefs, and we give each other the benefit of doubt because we trust each other.

Benefit of the doubt does NOT mean tolerating a boundary crossing because you “know they didn’t mean to hurt you”. It means seeing the best in each other, it means allowing somebody to prove they are worthy of your trust.

You need this when you’re having sex.

I’m starting to feel pretty horny so I’ll close out with this. Sometimes it’s fun to have sex, sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s triggering, sometimes it hurts.

My advice to you all: find yourself a sandbox to play in, and develop a language with your partners so you can learn each other’s bodies, needs, triggers, traumas.

Enjoy eating them out from the front or the back or the side or the top or the bottom.

Roll a joint, have a debrief, and do it all over again.

It’s a rainy, overcast Sunday in Houston and I’m trying not to cry about my old friend, Sarah. I woke up this morning passionate and angry about her.

She is the kind of person who picks every boyfriend from the same line-up of abusive, narcissistic, scrawny biracial brown-paper-bag guys. They all weigh less than either of us.

We’re still somewhat connected because my best friend back home is cool with her (separate topic) but we’ll never be real friends again.

Sarah was beautiful, and I loved her in a way that feels bigger than platonic but not quite romantic or sexual. We became fast friends when we started living together in August of 2019 in our second year of college and for our entire friendship, allegations of us having some sort of secret relationship followed us.

I think it’s because I’m naturally an attentive and protective (possessive?) and passionate person, so when I really like a friend it oozes from every cell in my body when we’re together.

My younger sister and I are incredibly close and slightly co-dependent, so I grew up thinking this kind of stuff was totally normal and not weird. But a lot of people, our boyfriends included, thought we were fucking. Sometimes, I wish we had.

It doesn’t help that I’m also a raging lesbian.

Anyway, things fell apart as they often do. I realized while trying to find old writings about this experience that I may speak about it a lot to people in my life but I never really wrote about it.

I think it’s finally time to discharge all of this energy.

Here’s the thing you need to understand. I was in love with Sarah. Alright? Not in the way that you think, I didn’t want to date her or lust over here. But I wanted her to myself. I will admit that.

Nevertheless, I tried to come from a good place when it came to advising her on her shitty relationships. By this, I mean I constantly told her to dump her boyfriends, to demand better, to run run RUN.

Sometimes I think our friendship felt like a pressure cooker to her.

She was stuck between me and her boyfriend, who was constantly telling her I hated him because I was trying to fuck her.

If I wanted to fuck her, I would have in the year we lived together before he existed. I imagine she felt suffocated.

It’s easy to tell the story like this: I was a loyal, devoted friend and advocate who got burned by somebody that couldn’t handle being seen in an abusive, self-destructive relationship.

We lived together and I saw and heard things nobody else in her life had witnessed. I was the person who was constantly reminding her of every bad thing or fight she had with her boyfriend.

I would bring up times she would knock on my bedroom door in tears or nights she begged me not to let her get back together with her boyfriend. I was holding her accountable to her own boundaries and she couldn’t handle it so she ran.

That’s the story I like to tell. And all of is true, but not complete.

Years later, I was in my own abusive relationship. I remember reaching out to her right at the time where I was being stalked post-final-break-up. I knew she would understand how terrified and confused I was.

I also wanted to let her know something: I finally understood why she ran head-first away from our friendship.

Here’s what happened. God, it’s a long fucking story.

Sarah started dating this guy around the pandemic. I don’t know exactly when they started talking because she never mentioned him all summer but he was there the very first night we spent together in our brand new apartment off Marietta Street in West Midtown, Atlanta.

I remember being slightly thrown; we had spent all summer texting about our various problems at home being quarantined and all, and she had never brought this guy up. Then he drives up from bum-fuck Georgia to spend the night? Apparently they had been talking all summer, yet I had never heard of him.

I tried to squash my uneasiness by reminding myself we had a whole year together - I could let this go. But for me, uneasiness and apprehension are hard to shake. Like a shadow cast over sidewalks, you can’t help but notice the discoloration. The shades of gray, the cracks.

They would date for the rest of the year.

Now, let’s fast-forward to March, 2021. Sarah’s birthday. I spent the whole night watching her friends vomit in the guest room of a rented Airbnb while Sarah and her friends partied in the living room.

And I was happy to do it; working my hardest to earn my sainthood.

I wanted Sarah to see how loyal I was, how devoted I was willing to be. I wanted her to know that she was loved, that she was supported, that she had people in her life willing to rally around her. I wanted her to stop picking bad boyfriends. I wanted her to see me.

Back at our apartment in the early hours of the morning, over bong hits she told me how much she appreciated me.

“Whatever you need me to do, I’m there. I’m always gonna help you out, I’ll always support you.”

Sarah ended up having to drive me to the hospital 45 minutes later. I had been having chest pain all day and in the haze of weed and sleep deprivation, my chest tightened with tension and anxiety.

I tried to call an Uber or Lyft but there weren’t any around. I asked her to drive me, hands and arms shaking with fatigue and stress.

She took the car of her friend who was staying the night at our place - I don’t know why because she had her own. Maybe she had left it at the Airbnb? I really don’t know.

But she ended up driving me in her friend’s car. Hours later, we’re in the ER and I burst into tears. I felt scared, embarrassed, tired, and weary.

People kept coming into my room and poking me with needles and I was cold. I knew Sarah had to meet up with her parents later in the morning and I felt awful for getting in the way of her rest.

We ended up back at my apartment after the doctors told me I had a bad case of heartburn.

After this, Sarah and I didn’t speak for three days. I spent those three days bracing myself to apologize for stressing and inconveniencing her but her bedroom door remained shut and she was never home.

On the third day, she was in the kitchen as I left my room to grab a snack.

“Hey, I wanted to talk to you. So, I knew you were fine when we went to the hospital. Like, I knew you were gonna be fine, and I’ve been annoyed because I was so exhausted that day and I had to see my parents and when I did, I burst into tears and told them what happened and they said I shouldn’t have taken you to the hospital.”

“If you were really having a heart problem, we should’ve called an ambulance. Plus, we took my friend’s car and I was still drunk. I felt pretty drunk the whole drive and I felt like I couldn’t say no to you when you asked for a ride even though I knew you were fine. But it was a new car and she just got in a car accident a few months ago so she was pretty pissed. And so are her parents.”

I was so ashamed and immediately apologized. In that moment, I felt tiny. So small. I slunk bank into my bedroom and fought back tears.

In therapy later that week, my therapist told me straight-up: I had nothing to be sorry about. I still don’t know if I believe this.

In the weeks after this, Sarah kept her distance. She told my best friend that the hospital incident made her feel a ton of anxiety and she had to get out of our apartment.

She told my then-boyfriend that I took her food out of the fridge so that it would go bad.

Side note: I did actually one time move a frozen Tupperware of food into the fridge to make room for something else and we had talked about it and she told me not to do it again and I never did.

I feel like telling people a version of the story that villainizes an honest and genuine miscommunication is a fucked up thing to do.

Anyway, about two weeks passed before we spoke again. She knocked on my door and told me she was leaving because she couldn’t stand the energy in our apartment anymore. She would help me look for a roommate so I didn’t have to live with a stranger. Two weeks later, she was gone.

Knocks on the door 

Mine is closed these days 
We don’t speak, not anymore. 
The apartment is quiet 
Walks in the room 
Eyes lowered 
It’s dark, quiet 
An early spring evening 
I was about to take a bubble bath. 

Your shoulders speak for you 
Hunched, curled in 
Rounded 
Like your edges 
“So, I’m moving out.”
We don’t talk about the boyfriend 

In the background, 
I hear rushing water 
Roaring, gurgling 
Something inside this house crashes, splinters 
We make eye contact 

Silence 
We hold 
After you leave, I stay 
Cross-legged on the ground.

After this, I found out from the roommate she replaced herself with that she’d been asking around to sublease her apartment for weeks; long before she told me she was moving out.

She had lied about when she had decided to start looking, she had lied about letting me choose my roommate, she had lied about helping me look for a replacement.

A day after Sarah told me she was leaving, I was walking to our apartment and saw her turning the corner and literally sprinted in the other direction.

I saw her walking around the hall looking for me so I left the building and then had my sister come take me to our parents’ house back in Decatur where I stayed until Sarah moved out.

Months later, I reached out to Sarah so we could clear the air. I knew she would never do it; reach out to me, that is.

When we sat down, it was painfully awkward and painfully familiar.

Her side of the story was this: she was in a whirl of abuse after she moved out and couldn’t reach out to me because she was trying to survive.

I was sorry to hear this, but not shocked. She blamed the escalation on herself and said she was foolish to not see it coming; I tried to remind her that he had likely been isolating for that very thing and she was not responsible for his behavior.

He had been stalking her, breaking into the parking garage at her new apartment to leave notes for her on her car, threatening to call the cops on her for having weed, hitting her, yanking her clothes off to punish her for wearing revealing outfits. I was horrified and heartbroken.

I couldn’t imagine what she had survived that she wasn’t talking about and could easily forgive her for not reaching out first.

She denied moving out because “a man told you to” but I’ll never be convinced that was her idea. Maybe that’s my own thing to work through: denial. I always tell myself it wasn’t me she was moving away from, it was herself.

But maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe she WAS running away from me; from what I reminded her of; from what I wanted her to do.

I told her most of my POV, of what I’d gone through and she apologized for essentially ruining our friendship.

I never brought up the lies, the stories she had told me and other people, and she never accounted for them.

This story is a difficult one to tell. I have to accept that Sarah probably felt suffocated by our friendship and the pressure to reciprocate my level of loyalty and devotion.

It was something she simply did not have the capacity for. I think she always knew this, and knew that one day I would realize this. And she was right; I did.

And, the flavor of abuse that she experienced in our apartment, which only worsened after after she left it, only created more and more heat. The more dependent they became on each other, the more I tried to pull her away from him and the more they bonded and the worse everything got.

I told her later in the midst of dealing with my own stalker-abuser-ex-partner that I forgave her for it all; that I could not have possibly had a friend like me by my side during my own abusive relationship.

I mean this sincerely; it is simply too fucking hard.

A quiet attentiveness 
An awareness 
An acknowledgement 
We sit 

Two women in an 
Empty apartment 
We look at one another 
With eyes, that can see 

I lean against the doorframe 
Watch you, watching me 
Your wild hair 
Sexy thick thighs 
Beautiful smile 

We do not speak, rarely engage 
We are not alive anymore 
Love eroded, weathered 
Quiet admiration 
Silent loyalty 
A fierce possessiveness 
Protective passion 

Our hands will never again meet 

But I still see 
You.