I am struggling in this year of 2025. I feel helpless and I feel overwhelmed. As a sober alcoholic, it’s key to learn to focus on what you can control and ignore the rest because you can’t do anything about that. So, what I can control is my outlets. And this is an outlet that I’m choosing because I can write and I need creative expression.

I am a millennial, cisgendered, pansexual, white, American woman (leaning a bit on the non-binary side), married to a cisgendered, white, American man. I grew up in Southern California in a fairly Christian household, in a low to middle class financial situation. My mom and dad divorced when I was a year old, and she remarried when I was five, so those years where my mother was single with three children were pretty impoverished (though fun), and once the house turned into a double income partnership, we were always comfortable, but never rich or well-off. We managed.

I state all of this to set a baseline for my generalizations. I am writing as a creative outlet, but I am not a researcher, data scientist, or a speaker of all of those who identify as women. But, I can confidently assert that my experiences, though filled with potentially unique details, will ring relatable to those who share similar attributes to myself. And this is because most of us here in the US fall under the intense weight of patriarchy and capitalism.

I have lived (in my opinion) an interesting life. Not because I am a world traveler or have accomplished anything earth-shattering; but because I have learned about myself and society through my sexual endeavors. I have spent years processing my history in order to recover from trauma, to release relationship baggage, to stay sober, to help others understand their emotions, to make complex decisions, and to generally find happiness.

In this processing, I have taken away the power these experiences have held over me and I have even started to take my power back from them. This comes in various flavors, including finding humor in heavy topics, providing embarrassing details about what I’ve done, and to say some things that maybe others cannot yet.

As a woman in Christian America, I have been conditioned to be submissive, polite, virginal, and grateful for anything I have without asking for more. Because of who I am and how I grew up, I have struggled for a long time with sex and what it means as a woman in this country. I battle with feelings of guilt, shame, disgust, freedom, joy, confidence, disappointment, anger, frustration, power, worth with every sexual partner or even the memory of a sexual experience. But it’s not so simple to just feel different. Everything that you have learned you must unlearn; and that is a difficult thing to do when it’s unlearning things that have been forced onto you before you were even capable of questioning them.

And maybe you’re feeling the same way (maybe you don’t know it even). So, I want to talk about it to help myself continually unlearn these characteristics and perhaps encourage others to do the same. I am not here to judge people’s life choices, but I am opposed to society and culture dictating what we are supposed to do simply because we are gendered specifically. Just like with most of women’s rights, it’s not about changing it so everyone does it the opposite way, but so we all have a choice to go whichever way we want.

The simplest and most effective conversation to start (in my opinion) is about sex. It’s still unacceptable for women to be sexual beings and for us to feel like we have any power in that regard.

Because of my upbringing, I went into sex without any help. My teachers were movies, TV shows, friends my age, random comments here and there from my siblings. I never felt comfortable asking questions and I also was too embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know something, so I just went into it, assuming whoever I was with knew enough to get things going.

And so I became the byproduct of my sexual partnerships, taking from them skills, expectations, insecurities, hurt, confusion. I thrived in abusive relationships and ran away from intimacies because I had no foundation of what is “right” or “normal” or “healthy”; and those initial experiences of mine took advantage of my naivety and my understanding of a woman’s role.

But I am grateful to know this about myself and about sexual dynamics in general because it has helped me create the person that I actually want to be. So I want to share that with you.

I don’t really know who’s reading this and what any of you will take away from it, but I certainly hope that I can do the following:

• Make you chuckle at least once

• Relate to you and some experience you’ve had

• Teach you something you didn’t know about women’s sexuality

• Empower you to talk about your sexuality and experiences

Get ready for whatever this is. Some writings will be reflective stories, some haphazard poems, some light and funny anecdotes, and some really fucking heavy offloading. So, read what you want and leave the rest.