I’ve spent a lot of time returning to self. After years of loving and being loved in ways that weren’t truly aligned with my being I knew I had to learn how to simply to do it for me. To hold myself. To understand myself. To learn how to cater to my own needs and show up for me in a way that never left me needing it from anyone else.

The process of becoming was pivotal. Every person needs to spend copious amounts of time becoming comfortable with the silence. Being able to reach inwards for relief and find shelter in your own body. However, I’ve come to understand that we do not truly know how far we’ve come or even get to experience who we really are until we let ourselves simply do it all again. And do it differently.

I’ve learnt more about myself & how much I’ve grown in the last 6 months than I did in the year prior. I’ve been outside to say the least, but not just in the ‘enjoying summer’ sense but in the living sense. I’ve approached my friendships with a refreshed intentionality. Throwing myself into conversation, asking them things I’ve never asked before, being genuinely curious about the people in my life. I’ve returned to my career the way I originally intended not just in search for financial stability. Chasing the desire to create, to see colour again and to capture it as beautifully as I can.

I’ve also fallen in love again, more fearlessly than I ever thought I was capable of. In a way that I can literally touch. I never thought loving like this was possible. I never thought being loved like this was possible. Feeling at ease. Feeling sure without fear of the unknown. In fact, welcoming experiencing the unknown as long as you get to do it with them. Feeling peaceful and yet so excited to wake up everyday and get back to being in love.

I’ve also built a new way of living, showing up for my health and my body regardless. Watching what I eat without policing it. Enjoying things without being excessive. I’ve actually been practicing all the things I’ve learnt.

But this new place I’ve built has come with genuinely being confronted with everything that hurt before and forcing my nervous system to experience the same things in a new way in order to rewire itself. Forced to silence my anxieties in real time because this time is different, I’m safe. I can exhale. Forced to push myself into acting differently in the face of uncertainty. Asking questions when I would have previously been silent. Saying no when I would have previously shrugged or agreed. Relaxing when I would have previously tensed and shut down.

Our bodies can only know healing when you present it with the same scenarios but produce different outcomes. This process is what actually allows you to develop the the new behavioural traits you’ve desired. You can talk about it as much as you like, journal endlessly, ruminate and dig within for however long feels necessary. But practice?That’s where the change is.

I could have sworn prior to meeting my love that I had healed from so many things. That my anxious attachment style was now secure because I’d read about what that meant and spoken about it in therapy. But it wasn’t until I actually had to show up securely attached that I could actually become it. Knowing that silence doesn’t equal abandonment is great in theory, but you can only truly start to believe that when you’re finally able to release the thoughts of panic when you haven’t received a response as quickly as you expected.

Granted, this is only possible because I’m with someone who has created a new framework through which I can receive love. I have a mountain of evidence to refute the things that previously would lead to anxiety. But the process of actually being able to refer to the evidence of the love my partner has displayed over and over again is a different story entirely.

A process I’ve only been able to become accustomed to because I’ve opened myself up again to the situation that would allow me to learn.

Furthermore, there were so many things about my previous relationship that I didn’t realise were even hurting me in the first place. It’s only through showing up for myself and also allowing a new experience of love to show up for me that I’ve been able to identify things I previously thought were okay as deeply problematic. It’s very hard to identify issues when there was genuine care in a dynamic; when no one means any harm. But just because things were done out of love doesn’t make them okay. And it went both ways. Being anxiously attached to someone tends to be because you love them, but it isn’t okay to grip onto someone simply out of fear of losing them. And that grip is suffocating, it doesn’t allow either of you to live authentically.

I wasn’t able to identify so many of these things until I took a risk and put myself out there again. These are realisations that come to me in real time through my current experiences of living and loving. A lot of people are stuck ‘healing’ in isolation simply out of fear. Working on yourself in solitude can easily snowball into comfort & growth doesn’t happen in comfort.

This doesn’t just apply to relationships both platonic and otherwise but to our ambitions as well. You have to be willing to make a mistake, create badly, lose money and be rejected in order to grow in whatever craft you desire. None of this can happen in isolation.

I say all this to say, look up. Try again. Love again. Risk something again. Until you allow yourself to live through experiences that challenge the person you claim to have left behind, you can’t actually leave them behind.

I then came across this TikTok (https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRakXm3S/) by a creator hilariously coming to the realisation that a man has never made her climax. As funny as her delivery and the comments are, it made me realise just how much of an issue this is for women. Don’t get me wrong a lot of it is a skill issue with men. But the truth is, men would be better at sex if they were told just how bad they are at it. The reason why they’re not being told? Shame.

I’m choosing to focus my thought process specifically on black British women aged 21-40. Although I believe women from all backgrounds are victims of the sexual shame affliction and every human has the ability to experience this; there is something specific about the lack of access a lot of black women have to their own bodies that is the direct antithesis to pleasure.

We were raised by a generation who largely treated sex as a tool for reproduction, pleasure only being mentioned at a developmental stage in relation to boys & men. I’m sure most of the women, girls & non-binary people that fall into this cohort do not recall ever being spoken to about sex in terms of their own pleasure. If anything our sex education both from school and our guardians focused on how uncomfortable sex could be for women and was heavily laced with coded “you’re probably going to be raped at some point because of how uncontrollable the pleasure men get out of this is,” language. Emphasis on potentially bleeding the first time instead of discussing how discomfort shouldn’t be more than brief if arousal is present. It was mechanical. Penetration focused. And only delved into anatomy in order to explain the menstrual cycle & reproduction.

Nothing about the design and shape of the vulva, vagina & the head bitch in charge; the clitoris. We were never educated on how the female anatomy is littered with pleasure points like a dot to dot puzzle, capable of so many different types of orgasms. If anything sex is designed to be far more pleasurable for the female anatomy in a more complex way. And yet?

Then there’s religion. If there are two things that go together, it’s religion and shame. Not just sexual shame either. Most black women living in the UK will identify with being raised around religion; fear faith-based living is engrained in African & Caribbean culture. Living with the constant guilt that comes with being told that, ‘hell is always just a sneeze away,’ leaves most of us walking through life on eggshells. Most will probably have experienced some level of orthodoxy or strictness when being taught how to practice. Abrahamic faiths, which have shaped majority of socially accepted ideas surrounding sex, have been used as tools for instilling sexual fear into women specifically and is the cornerstone of the patriarchal society we live in today.

Speaking biblically, sex and women only existed in a few contexts:

• Prostitution: Although framed as if said prostitute was one as a result of their own ‘godless’ decision making, we know that most women at that time had to surrender to being routinely raped in order to feed and clothe themselves and their children. Or to simply be allowed to live without being the property of a man. For a majority of women in biblical times, should this have been a ‘choice’, it was one made in order to survive.

• Virgins: The act of not ever having had sex at all because a man hadn’t claimed you as his property yet. Not because these girls were children. Or because it was a choice. But because literal value was ascribed to this status. This has everything to do with pedophilia & purity culture which is at the core of male sexual behaviour as well as the concept of ownership as a whole. A man taking a virgin as his wife was the ultimate display of possession and therefore the ultimate sign of virtue for said woman. Being possessed was in fact a status symbol. Virginity is directly tethered to the literal monetary value discussed between men during the transaction that was marriage.

• Motherhood: Now she belongs to the child. The product of the sexual act that didn’t consider her is now embarking on the most self-less and thankless journey one can. A journey that has no end but instead morphs into an identity. Again the woman, the body, the autonomy no longer exists. From conception, to pregnancy to child rearing. Everything about a woman’s body simply lives in service.

• Sin: Sex and sexuality outside of the above contexts was therefore classed as sinful. Lust defined as one of the devils most powerful tools of manipulation. Desire positioned as a temptress with the ability to take your soul to the hottest corner of hell should you indulge. God forbid the mention of queerness and the spectrum of sexuality in itself. Although no original translation of biblical text is actually homophobic, generations after ensured that was woven into the belief systems in order to further control the masses. This one here has done the biggest number on us all. Queer and straight alike. Sex and desire being viewed as inherently wrong whilst being woven into the very fabric of our biology only makes for a cocktail of constant shame. Don’t get me wrong, a lack of sexual discipline is incredibly destructive and is one of the biggest symptoms of patriarchy that men in particular suffer from badly. However most of this concept is spoken of in the feminine (as if women and children weren’t & aren’t main victims of this violence) and although original translations intend for a lot of it to speak to violent and harmful sexual behaviour (rape, pedophilia etc.), as patriarchy unfolded translations sought to cover the entire topic with the sinful blanket.

This is the framework through which most of us view sex and sexuality. Messages that are in no way conducive to exploration. By the time most of us start acknowledging sexual desires and feelings within our own body, shame is already the default. The first tingle between your legs, the first time you kiss someone and genuinely like it, the first time you see something sexual on tv and your instinct isn’t to cover your eyes or pretend you’re not watching because the intrigue and rush you feel in your muscles is winning. Shame. We rush to shelf it. We move as quickly as possible towards shaking off whatever that was because the idea that it just isn’t allowed is the most accessible one to us.

Most of us start exploring in secret as teenagers. Waiting until parents are asleep to load up a scene from a movie that made us feel something we can’t quite put our finger on. Discovering porn and feeling completely mortified by how much you like what you’re seeing or even worse, how much you don’t like what you’re seeing, precipitating feelings of fear and dread as a result of how unethical most porn can be. Figuring out that if you touch there for a certain amount of time something electric happens and wanting so badly to understand why. But the shame doesn’t disappear. If anything it amplifies. The post-nut clarity hits and you’re left with all the harmful messaging floating in your head and condemning the feelings you allowed in. This is even further emphasised for queer women because thinking about sex without a man present is the ultimate forbidden fruit. Queerness is a whole separate article where this is concerned.

Even as most of us have embarked on the journey of deconstructing our faith, embracing our sexuality etc, unfortunately shame lives in the body and it’s only through active submission to our desires during sex itself can we learn to shed it. For me, a masc lesbian, it’s looked like relinquishing a little more control than i’m used to and accepting that I actually like to. This has been new to me because a lot of the pleasure I get is from pleasuring my partner. I’m a true eater, pleasuring a woman is genuinely one of my favourite things to do. Everything about it has the ability to get me there. Each shaky breath, laboured moan, every ‘right there’, the ‘oh shit, don’t stop’. That is the true source of my own road to climax. However, having mostly been with women (until now) who at the time weren’t clear on what they wanted, or for whatever reason weren’t able to reach true sexual freedom with me, I’ve never been faced with the reality of someone else feeling the same. Someone else being an eater and wanting to see and hear me in that position of pleasure. It got so easy for me to assume I just didn’t need that much reciprocity because of how much I enjoy providing the pleasure and how infrequently I was offered otherwise.

However the first time I was hit with a ‘lay down’ recently, I was shocked by how much arousal shot through my entire body. It took me by surprise so much that I found myself freezing, checking if she was sure, repeatedly needing reassurance that she was enjoying herself even though it was clear she was. After our first encounter I had to sit with myself and ask what that was. Was I ashamed of laying there, legs on her shoulders having my shit rocked? Was I just not used to being with someone who was present in their own body enough to know what they wanted? Or was I just not used to being the thing they wanted in that way at all? The more I thought about it the more I realised it was the novelty. After almost a decade of being sexually active, shame free sex was new to me. It was new to me to have a woman want to eat me out for their own pleasure and not be fearful about what that meant about them. I didn’t feel like I personally carried a lot of shame but as long as someone in the room was, it didn’t matter, it transferred.

The reason I identified this so quickly is because I’m not shy about sex with myself, the person I’m having sex with and my friends. We get into it. We talk about it extensively. How we feel about the sex we’re currently having or not having. What we’d like to improve and advising each other about how to speak to partners about it. And I realised for a lot of us women this is still the missing part of the puzzle, especially straight women. We’re not talking about it enough. We can talk about so many other things in so much detail but when it comes to sex, so many of us cower.

Sex is yours. Your pleasure is yours. It’s your right to be around someone you’re attracted to and be aroused. It’s your right to seek consent from them in order to act on the arousal. Your body tells you exactly where you want it. Are you listening? Are you communicating what you hear to your partner? Straight women, this is your shit too. Talk to that man. Sex doesn’t belong to him. The dance requires both of you. If he’s done and you’re not; then no one is done. Wake him up and ask for what you want. Give him a review. If he changed pace at the wrong time, did something you loved or didn’t love; speak up. As much as men are far better positioned to take control of their own pleasure and ignore yours, you can’t expect him to be a mind reader. ‘Faking it’ is shame in action. It’s the manifestation of being too embarrassed to admit that you’re not satisfied because then you’d have to admit what would satisfy you. That you want more. Ask for it.

Lastly, nervous-system regulation. Of course the main body of getting rid of shame is the deconstruction of the harmful messages you’ve internalised. Whether you solely view sex as a way to appease a man, a means to reproduction, a sign of your virtue or something sinful, letting that go is ultimately the first step. But after that you need to know how to remain in your body even when your mind wants to take you into a place of shame. You can’t relax where you don’t feel safe and that includes your own skin. This starts with the self care basics; eating well, exercising, getting adequate sleep and drinking enough water. Regulating your physical biology is pivotal to overall nervous-system regulating.

As clothes come off, scars get revealed, the reality of how you feel in your own skin sets in; you’re hit with just how much you want the pleasure that’s coming and that can become slyly embarrassing all of a sudden. At this point it all comes down to how your nervous system experiences moments of intensity. It’s in this space you need to learn how to breathe, close your eyes and sink into your own skin. Be present with the sensation each touch you give and receive leaves with you. Learn how to meditate your way into a state of complete submission.

This is all a practice. Starting with deconstruction, meditation, breath work. The best sex, the sex every woman deserves to be having, begins with allowing yourself access to your desires without criticising them. It starts with allowing the random thoughts, flashbacks or fantasies to turn you on without policing its appropriateness. It starts with learning to stay in your skin when something (shame) starts bringing you out of the moment leading to tension as you feel the pleasure build. Stay with yourself. Listen to pleasure. Let it win.

Yes there’s a balance to be had. Community requires inconvenience. Love requires compromise. You have to be willing to serve the collective and do so at the expense of your own comfort sometimes. However, there’s a difference between putting self to the side in order to feed a community that feeds you and disregarding a need or desire out of fear that expressing said needs or desires will result in the loss of a connection.

Sometimes you catch yourself exchanging self for scraps. Giving someone your time for longer than you know you should. Agreeing to another task when you can feel the cost of burnout staring at you. For flickers of attention or just to feel wanted or useful even if it’s brief.

I literally just caught myself about to continue entertaining a situation I knew I wasn’t feeling. This was inconsequential, we had just started speaking. Incredibly beautiful and as a woman who loves beautiful women l, I sometimes allow that to mean a lot more than it should. I wasn’t stimulated by the conversation & I could see the misalignment clear as day on our approaches to dating. Im very clear on what I want in this area of my life now and I could tell this wasn’t it and yet it took me a beat too long to state that and move on. Why? As to not hurt someone’s feelings? But what about yours Paula?

Catching myself in the act made me wonder how many times I’ve abandoned myself to remain in connection. To remain feeling wanted. It also made me curious about the ease with which I caught it this time. What’s so different about me now that I can sense quickly when I’m making a decision that abandons my true desires and needs?

I took this to therapy and the more I thought about it the more I realised that it’s because I’ve stopped abandoning myself. For the last year of my life, every promise I’ve made to myself I’ve kept. Anything I wanted to achieve I did. The things I’ve genuinely wanted to prioritise have been. The ways I’ve wanted to take care of myself I have. The goals I set out for myself have been achieved or are in the process of being achieved. If there was something I wanted that I just couldn’t afford, I’ve written them down and I will make them happen when the time is right. I facilitate every need. I move mountains for my desires. I’m willing to sweat for the fruit I desire.

I’ve lived in complete service of myself and my needs for such a long time now that putting myself in situations that abandon them in search for connection doesn’t hit the same anymore. I don’t care about keeping any connections because I’m connected to myself. I don’t care about who wants to abandon me because I’m not following their script because I’m not abandoning myself. No matter what, I’ll be here for me.

I know how to pick myself up when I’m sad. I know how to lean on my community. I know how to speak up for myself. I know how to communicate my needs and I know how to give people the chance to respect or disrespect them. And then I know how to enforce a boundary after the fact.

Being the constant in your own life fosters an environment that doesn’t allow you to tolerate anything less from anyone else. That’s not to say everyone who isn’t treating me the way I need or desire is a bad person or intentionally trying to be hurtful. Not every situation is even that deep. Like the one I mentioned above, no one was wrong or right about anything. But it’s easier to know when something is no longer serving you when you’re so dedicated to being in service to yourself.

You can’t fear abandonment when you know there will always be someone who will never leave you. And that person should be you.

School was kind of easy because of an insanely high iQ (which life would reveal to me as autism in my 20’s) but then the social aspects of the things I listed above came into play which then made school not so easy. Kids were really fucking mean.

Then there was the plus size of it all, which if I’m honest I never really cared about but was devastatingly conscious that literally everyone else did. So being in my body then became another thing that wasn’t easy.

I got a 2:1 Masters of Pharmacy. Not easy. I started a creative career while doing said Masters. Not easy.

With all this I thought I truly knew what it meant to endure. Until the year that was 2025 occurred that forced me into the real understand of what it meant to actually endure. In order to have endured something. It has to have changed you.

All the many not easy things I’d done in my life up until now were experienced yes, but I never let the pain register. I smoked. I drank. I slept so much. I avoided confrontation. I barely spoke up for myself. I tried not to take up space. The kids were mean, so I started pretending I wasn’t smart in hopes I would just disappear.

But all the numbing behaviours, that I believed was endurance, they didn’t really help. I had to keep doing them to get even shorter bursts of relief each time from what had become crippling depression. So at the height of the pandemic, stuck inside a cage of my own anger, I reached out to a therapist.

By the end of 2020, I started antidepressants. The maladaptive behaviours didn’t stop though. If anything they got worse. I barely remember 2021-2022. I mean I know none of us do, but I really don’t. I look at pictures and videos and it’s like having an out of body experience.

Wading through the sheer grief of some of the things I’d experienced as a child was sickening. I’m too Nigerian to start giving details but like I said, growing up wasn’t easy. I was crippled by the realisation of bad some of the things Paula, the child, had to experience. I grew angrier. More volatile. Confrontational. I felt like therapy had started to make everything worse because I literally wanted to die all the time.

But then a day came, in 2023. A day where I got up, cement in chest, anger still coursing through my veins, awake.

I knew exactly what I was feeling. The pain had a named. I realised I’d lived with it the whole time. It sat dormant, beneath the substances and the self neglect, biding its time for the day I would finally give it the attention it required. The day I realised that holding it in and pretending it wasn’t there was simply putting it in charge. Having you locked in a cage inside your own life avoiding.

December 2023 I signed up for an online coach at 145kg, because I realised it didn’t matter if people had a problem with the fact that I was fat; what mattered is that I didn’t care about myself. I didn’t really care about how I was perceived because I couldn’t see myself. I look back on me at that weight and I feel pity. I’ve always been gorgeous, society can’t convince me otherwise. But I looked exhausted. Unwell sometimes. I remember how I felt. The joint pain. The discomfort.

I also fell in love. Deeply. A love that held a mirror up to so much I was unwilling to see prior. A love that made me believe in a future for myself. A love that fuelled me with the desire to be better. To be more. A love that allowed me to welcome 0-16 year old Paula back into my life and talk to her. A love that made me sure of how much love I still had to give. A love that strengthened me for its ending.

By December 2024 I’d lost 20kg. It was slow. Painful. A reckoning of all behaviours that contributed to my lack of health consciousness. Therapy had become so much more gruelling but I faced the challenge. I welcomed the breakdowns. The questioning belief systems. The pain of rejection. I clocked in without fear. But I couldn’t let go of the numbing when it got too much. I would reach for a bottle. A blunt. Anything when I felt it start to show signs of truly changing me.

By December 2025, I’d lost another 20kg & that love. Unexpectedly. To me anyways. But by then the lesson of endurance was clear. The only way over, is through. You sit with it. You let it break you. You do everything it demands of you. You let it force you to take up space. You let it make it clear what you can or can’t tolerate. And whether or not you were the person you were tolerating shit from. I finally let myself welcome sobriety. The loss led me into full submission of the path I knew was calling me. Submission to the truth that being alive isn’t equivalent to living. And to live, you must feel. Fully. Not every feeling will be kind but it will teach you something regardless.

The price of becoming is the death of a version of you that is too afraid to feel.