Content Warning: This content references sexual assault.
**
This month I decided to be intentionally celibate. 

I am choosing to be celibate to learn intimacy on my terms, to take back what was stolen and rewrite my history. In therapy I am learning how to set healthy boundaries with others and with myself. I am learning that I chase sex for intimacy. I chase intimacy to cure the assault, to comfort thirteen-year-old me. Sex was escape. Sex was shelter. Sex was a block. It’s not wrong to crave relationship. We are human—it’s what we do. But I want to choose the relationship with my body, with my healing, with myself first. 

One night in the not-too-distant past, I was frustrated over another guy. I was in tears and in heartache—another rejection, another moment of feeling like I am not good enough, like I am too much. My friend Alice texted me, “Duck that fool! you’re an EXCELLENT human being & deserve the BEST. Nothing less!” So, I cried my tears and felt my feelings.

Then I looked at a photo of myself and saw the colors of my brilliance, the outline of my beauty. There is a story I am writing, and there is no room in that story for those who do not want me. Friends, do not beg for anyone to love you. A tree does not beg, and still, it offers the sweetest fruit to those willing to reach for it.

Today I am believing those words for the first time. Today I am reaching for myself. I am not too much. One day I will hold hands with someone who understands that. Until then, I will give myself this magic, this love I call my own. I am sharing this with you to hold myself accountable. To say it out loud and to walk into this new chapter unwrapping the wounds. Something magical happens when we declare ourselves, when we tell the trauma it is no longer welcome, when we arrive.

Dear Thirteen-year-old Tonya,

I am doing the work for us.
I am doing the work for us. 
I am doing the work for us. 

For my birthday, my Virgo sister, Rotana, gifted me Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown. I read the first page of the introduction and started to cry. So much of dealing with my lupus feels like I will never know pleasure—like touching my body is a bad thing because it is diseased, or because I have suffered for so long that suffering is all I will experience.

But I can change that narrative. I can kiss my shoulders and run my fingers across silk and laugh until my belly aches. I can want ultimate joy for myself, for others. I can seek radical healing and it will be mine. Sometimes I am so damn tired of my doubts or being stressed or caring about being judged. I want to escape the hurt that keeps me stuck.

I am tired of looking over my shoulder and second-guessing every good thing. I want to be wild, bursting with ideas, silly and loose with my heart. I want to show up for myself—like truly show up in all my quirky, intelligent, messy, stubborn, quiet, booming, sensual curiousness.

I want to wear what I want, unafraid of how my catheter peeks out. I want to scream when I feel like it, dance oddly if I need to, stare into the unknown above and dream. I want to peel oranges in the morning and paint my growing nails a shade of wine. I want to have opinions of my own. I want to tell people how I feel, have crushes, and care less about shaving. I want to love every part of my body, releasing myself from expectation.

I just want to be honest. Pleasure activism is born of honesty, and that can be scary. So, I want to get to the scary parts of myself. Why do I hide? Why do I care about the likes? Who I am when I love myself? Who am I when I love another? How is my heart?

These are all loose thoughts connected to that photo of myself. I put on three gold chains, three gold rings and a dress I could see my body in. I just wanna see my body. I am learning how to see myself, how to experience pleasure. For too long I carried shame—I gave it a home. But it’s time to evict my guilt. Healing is ready to move in.

Friends, hold your body a little closer today. You deserve to be held the right way. 

And as always: I love you. I see you. I am so proud of you.