I didn’t feel like writing this morning. I’ve been up for a couple of hours, just circling the urge. Maybe it’s because I started feeling better yesterday, and I’m afraid that revisiting the memory will take me back to numbness.
Still, I tried. I revisited the memory to see if any tears would come. Nothing. But something’s shifting. I can feel it. Not in the form of tears, but in how so many other memories are resurfacing. Pieces I never understood before are suddenly making sense.
One that came up was from the time of a terrorist attack in Mumbai. The blast happened at a train station near my house. I was scared, alone, and couldn’t sleep. I remember lying in my aunt’s bed after she had moved out after living with us for a while after her divorce. That night, trying to soothe myself, I touched myself. I don’t know if it’s connected, but it came up now. Maybe because during the memory retraction process, I pictured her sitting on that same bed, even though she wasn’t there in the actual event that took place. My mind’s been stitching together things I hadn’t thought about in years.
More moments like that are surfacing. I remember a therapist once asked me how I perceive sex. I didn’t have a clear answer. I just knew it never felt pure. Never good. It always felt like something I had to hide. Something I wasn’t supposed to enjoy.
In college, it shifted a bit. I acted out more when I was drunk — not from freedom, but from rebellion. I even got a tramp stamp after I saw a girl getting too close to someone I had just started seeing. It wasn’t about betrayal. It was about control. It was about doing something because I wanted to and I could.
The pattern became clear: I could only get close to men when I wasn’t sober. When I was numb. When it didn’t feel real.
I once had a dream around the time I started therapy again. In the dream, there was a safe in my old college room. The safe was rumbling, vibrating. I was terrified to open it, sure that a ghost would jump out. I never had a safe in college. But I know what the dream was telling me now. That locked-up part of me was ready to shake open.
A lot of anger toward my mom has started to rise. I’m mad at her for letting this happen. But I also know, somewhere deep down, that she couldn’t have stopped it. These things don’t announce themselves. And the people who hurt you are rarely strangers. Still, I hope she did something when she found out — maybe during the divorce proceedings with my aunt. I hope she made him pay somehow. I don’t know.
I’ve been called so many things in my life — slut, loose, promiscuous — and none of it was ever true. I had only slept with one person until I was thirty. Yes, I got drunk. Yes, I made choices that may have looked messy from the outside. But I was trying to survive.
I’ve been blamed for leading men on and not following through. But all I’ve ever wanted was something simple. Something beautiful.
Even the fantasies, the kinks, the desires — they weren’t coming from freedom. They came from hurt. I never acted on most of them. They didn’t feel like me. They felt like something dirty. Something I’d regret. My mind might crave it, but my body never really wanted it. I remember one night when I got really drunk at a conference. When we got intimate, I physically couldn’t open up. I wasn’t safe. Not emotionally. Not physically. My body said no.
I’ve been remembering that too.
Yesterday, at a café, Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On started playing. And something in me softened. I remembered seeing it in a movie once — a scene where two people are making love, tenderly, truly in love. It made me realize that’s what I want my sex song to be. Not like Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon — the one I used to think defined me. That song was all heat, chaos, and craving. This one is warmth, permission, connection. I don’t want desire fueled by rebellion anymore. I want something slow, sacred, and safe. I want softness, the kind that doesn’t have to scream to be heard.
Today’s Truth:
Some healing doesn’t come in tears.
It comes in understanding why you’ve lived the way you have.
And deciding you’re allowed to live differently now.
fortuitouspurpose 