My pussy and I have made an executive decision to take a leave of absence.

“Sex has become my superpower. It's like sex is where I’m finding my worth. That's the one thing I know, I can make you keep coming back.” — Amanda’s Tale: Heaux Tales by Jazmine Sullivan

While I have grown to enjoy my own company, my awareness has heightened, and so has my responsibility. The stories and memories I once buried have come to the surface to set me free. Nah, I will say..this level of adulting has me wanting to be put back in the womb sometimes, but let’s get into it, shall we?

One spring in Detroit, my oldest sister Angela and I were doing karaoke in the car, playing Betty Wright’s Tonight is The Night. Girrrrl….Betty knows she cut up on that track! At the beginning of her live performance, she asks the crowd to think back to their very first time. I looked at my sister and asked, “You remember?” She goes, “Oh yea bitch I remember.” We sat silently for a minute and looked at each other, bursting out laughing, in sync, shouting, “AGHH, IT WAS TERRIBLE!!!” Here we come from two entirely different generations, yet we both related to how unfulfilled our first time was.

My introduction to consensual sex gave that I had zero education and something I went through with because my boyfriend wanted us to do it. My ass still had milk behind my ears, but I called myself, proving my love and commitment. I was in the 8th grade, and he was in the 9th. I remember lying there confused. It was his first time too, so the blind was leading the blind chile. It didn’t last long, and I remember thinking so that’s it? His oldest sister barged into his room, asked if we “did it,” and high-fived me with a silly ass grin on her face. Holy Spirit, please excuse my language, but in retrospect, this bitch was a junior in high school, who I considered “grown” really high-fived me. Lol

After that it still never felt like anything; it became something to do when we were together, and my 14 year-old brain understood it as an expectation when someone liked me. That same boy I lost my virginity to cheated on me twice. The second time, the girl found me on MySpace and told me every detail about them making out at the movie theater. We became “friends” through bonding over how much we hated him, but that’s a whole notha’ story that would fit perfectly in a Black fiction novel, titled PLAYED BY A WANNA BE PLAYA. He finally stopped messaging me back in 2016, talkin' bout he sorry for the past. Boy,gone on!!!

I’m sure I’ve told this story before in a previous post but stay with me. After or maybe in between my last year in middle school, I was writing letters to the girl who lived in my aunt's neighborhood. This was my second encounter with liking a girl since elementary school, and both girls were only kind to me when we were alone. Outside of us hunching and kissing in private, they were pretty mean girls in public, and I allowed it. In a twisted way, I liked their meanness and how the tables were reversed in the closet. My God, I needed to be in therapy back then — Bless my lil baby.

Very early in life, I realized I was good at making others feel good. I accepted that pleasing others pleased me, and the rest has been history. By the time I was in high school, I learned how stupid and easy boys were. Before the word thots was in our vocabulary, boys were the real thirsty thots to me, AKA hoes. They thought with their wee wee’s and only wanted one thing from girls. I hung around in Mo City, “where the girls sat pretty” who vetted the boys they saw with promising futures, the athletes, rappers, or those who came from money. I saw them use what boys wanted to get what they wanted, even if that was being their gal for the season or night. I was the odd one in the group. I didn’t like any of the boys I entertained foreal. I liked their attention, but I didn’t like them. Boys felt like toys I picked up when I was bored. I was more interested in the girls boys attracted.

High key I lived the Black version of Gossip Girls and Euphoria in the early 2000’s. We were some grown-ass kids, either motherless, fatherless, being raised by grandparents, or parents who didn’t have time for their children. Sex, drugs, gossip, drama, and alcohol was a normal part of my high school experience. When I was drinking all of the time, sex became something that also accompanied people, including myself, being hurt. My boyfriend in high school cheated on me, and I started sleeping with the girl he cheated on me with, who later, as she rightfully deserved, wanted more than I could offer her. I didn’t know how to respond to anyone seemingly having genuine feelings towards me. High school was also during the height of grief and resentment towards my mama. I know our relationship impacted my relationship with myself and other people, especially with girls. I saw relationships as transactions and a means for survival, nothing more, nothing less.

I discovered how to please myself by sneaking to watch Zane’s Sex Chronicles. I never had sex for me per se. I found my pleasure in what and who I was doing — that was enough for me. It was also a distraction from the real life things I was dealing with internally. The mess couldn’t have gotten any hotter, foreal.

My first orgasm with another person wasn’t until college. Then I met someone who showed me intimacy, why to pay attention to sunflowers, how to give myself permission to dance, and the true meaning of friendship, unconditional love, and my ability to feel and create. I’ll unpack this poem in detail if I ever write a memoir before I go on to glory. It was so unfamiliar that it was difficult to trust it, and the thought of getting used to it made me uncomfortable. It’s taken countless bad decisions and reruns of self-sabotage for me to arrive at the conclusion that I haven’t believed that I deserve the very thing I’ve desired since I was a child — love. I have anxiously blocked myself from myself by constantly reaching outside of my own body and boundaries.

Many light years, relationships, situationships, and entanglements later, I extend all the grace and forgiveness to my past selves, me today, and the adults and guardians who did the best they could. In practice, I’m teaching myself how to love myself, be gentle with myself, and instill a moral code and standard for my existence. And it’s alright that I am thirty-one, and life looks nothing like I thought it would many dreams ago.

But I am aware of a few things..So, cheers to my devotion for the woman within me I have yet to meet and love softly.

1. Forgiving myself and moving on from the past is possible.

2. Fuck a body count.

3. Shame is an enemy in sheep’s clothing.

4. I am worthy of patience and understanding.

5. My pussy will forever be a rose with a special Asé and the power to manifest and transform anything. She is precious and worthy of preservation.

6. I am full of love. I am a body of water, not a cup.

7. I deserve to commit to myself.

8. The work I do for myself is never in vain. The work is Fa’ sho working.

9. It’s okay to admit to feeling lost. Surrendering to not knowing what the fuck is going on is the way to freedom and the way home.

10. I can heal and not need fixing. Cause nothing is wrong with me.

11. My mama and daddy are with me. Their spirit keeps me laughing and believing in every sweet thing and miracle that IS for me.

12. I can begin again and again and again in pursuit of myself.

13. “Love requires you to know yourself as intimately as you know someone else.”

14. I’m willing.

    ---

    *** P.S. My homegirl Kiah said this is me when I share my thoughts. LMAO THE ACCURACY THOUGH. I’m currently in the bathtub and feeling real proud. Ain’t God good?