This is what I look like:

last year sometime, film

I make a lot of mistakes.

I compartmentalize some of my most challenging traits/ambitions because I underestimate
why my friends are my friends, my lovers my lovers, my family my family.

Done with that.

Having never spent a day of my life on birth control, I've struggled with skin that wasn't smooth and untextured. Now, as I've grown into my late thirties, I've developed sunspots on the sides of my cheeks that connect to my neck; as they've coalesced into brown patches, I pleasantly refer to them as fields of freckles. Once a month (often more) someone well-meaning offers me a solution to 'fix' my skin. I entertained it occasionally and can't promise that I won't in the future. But most days, I embrace these discolorations and shapes, refuse to deflect its attention with make-up, wear my hair off my neck in daylight. Lots of people aren't able to assimilate as their best features what they are consistently told are their worst; if I can, I must. And I can.

But this isn't about my vanity, though I use it as an example of a place in which I have welcomed, adopted, my 'flaws.'

How ridiculous that I would consider anything about the way I look a flaw!
Who said? Who says what's a flaw, what's an imperfection? For that matter, who says what's a perfection?

* * *

I want to do this in every aspect of my life. Own what makes me a complex human being.

I want to not ask anyone to hold things for me, especially things that are triggering for them.

I have not always been loyal in my relationships, but I have been steadfast. I give love as if it were all I have to give.
Because sometimes it's all I have to give.

And I'm not just talking about romantic relationships. I have given up on friendships when they became too difficult, when they asked me to give them some vulnerability in myself that I was refusing. I have hidden aspects of my life from my closest friends after I decided what they would feel before they had a chance to feel it. I have objectified them, not given them a chance to love me back, refused to be valued for irrational reasons.

Done with that.

* * *

Did you know I was a sex worker? Just to say it here, plainly, for you and you and you and you to read:
I have done sex work.
I didn't hate it. I wouldn't have done it if it didn't pay so well, but I also often enjoyed it.

It's not right for me anymore, and I look forward to fully letting go of the baggage it forced onto my shoulders,

necessarily unecessarily.

I look forward to writing about it.
A lot of people I know are aware of this fact about me, and we have conversations about it that are fascinating,
spiritual at times in their complexity.

If we have a cup of coffee one day, and you have something you want to ask, fuck yes ask me.
I don't feel this is a story that anyone needs to keep in the dark, accompanied by a Victrola of shame.

Shame doesn't belong to anyone. I've found that the more I hang onto qualities like shame and guilt,

the more boundaries I build around myself like a barbed-wire mote.

These are not qualities of defense/protection -- they are aggressive.
Under the guise of intense fear, they attack everyone who comes near me,
particularly those who near me in order to hold me tightly and let me listen to the beat of their heart.

So if you've been holding that for me -- be done with that too.

* * *

Read that again:

If you've been holding that for me --

if you've been holding ANYTHING for me because you thought I needed it to feel safe --

be done with that.

* * *

Dirt on my face, I put it there. I buried my head in the mud because I was scared someone might see me.
But you see me.

Now, I can see you too.

This smile on my face?
It's gratitude! It's magical love!

It's a belief in the tenderness of my own strength and of yours too.