Sharing my thoughts always felt like an injurious act. It didn't matter that I was electing to do so, that I often sought opportunities to think aloud with an audience. The second my voice was heard or my words made it to the ether, I felt achy and fatigued, ribs tender and colored in plum wine and indigo configurations. My breath would labor, the way it does naturally when you exit a warm room into the freezing winds of winter. Both mind and body could sense a shift.
Share.
Found in its etymology is the reason, the purpose of the wounds I can’t seem to patch quick enough, constantly stumbling for ways to bandage what needs no repair. The Proto-Indo-European root sker meaning “to cut” imparts wisdom we all could use. The notion is simple: the gift of sharing is severance. The requirement that we bid farewell to being the sole proprietor of this thing, whatever it is— a shitty joke, a smile, a novel, a rant or genius idea. It’s the bite off your slice of pizza that you didn’t taste, and maybe that’s what’s most challenging for me, that sharing at its core, is an offering preceding loss. And there are larger conversations here about grief and mourning, what aspects of life we ascribe impermanence to willingly versus the ones we cling to for dear life (no pun intended) but that’s not what I find most troubling. No, for me, it’s the reality that the loss is rarely acknowledged but rather eclipsed by the presentation (and critiques) of what was shared.
Often when we engage with each other’s thoughts, theories, ideas and art, we forget before they were ours, they were yours or mine. Places known and visited only by one. And once we share those things, it’s like geotagging those places for the masses to find and inspect, dig through for treasures you may have missed. In the process of severing my exclusivity to these words (cutting off a limb), I’m also opening up a dialogue about what these words and me offering them could mean (bleeding, publicly). It’s all about vulnerability really. And being vulnerable isn’t particularly my strong suit but more importantly it’s the content of my vulnerability that scares me.
Sex is my life, in so many ways, for so many reasons. It sounds cheesy, cliché, poached even but true nonetheless. I knew from around 6 or 7 that sex would be one of the most important things in my life, both in the abstract and the material, which isn’t something you can articulate with a 2nd grade education—go figure. In a world that felt vast for many yet exceedingly small for me, sex became a window, a looking glass with edges that never ended. Something so polarizing and prone to extremist belief being projected on it, became the node through which I could understand the world.
As I aged, I started teaching sex education. I was a sex worker. I wrote for zines and online publications and sought knowledge about all that was sex because that was my world and as I expanded how I expressed my expertise and passion about sex as both an activity and sociopolitical machine, people flocked towards me. They had opinions about my opinions, questioned my motives when I disagreed with their worldview, used me as a vector for all of their paternalism and misogynoir and whorephobia. That doesn’t bother me often, you can’t be out here with thin skin, but what it did do was rupture all these poorly closed wounds. Showed me all the times I severed a thought and felt slighted by the response. How often I hadn’t allowed myself to sit in the loss of my intellectual labor. Reminded me that I have cried at responses people made towards me, about me based off of their interpretation of my beliefs. It’s fucked, really.
And I’m not special in experiencing this. We see it all the time, especially those of us whose work deals almost exclusively with the parts society deems as ails—there’s a fine line to walk. One that asks you to err on the side of criticism always, even at the expense of folx (including yourself) just trying to survive however you can. There’s no right way and the knowledge of that leaves me as tender as the wounds of sharing do. It’s not that I’m damned if I do or don’t, but rather I’m damned when I do, because I do. There’s no easy existence for folx like me but I’m constantly reminded I chose the harder one by being vocal, by wanting to state what I think my and other people’s existence could and have meant. There are days, weeks even I long for silence and like a child fantasize that I know little of the world aside from the pleasures it provides me. To put it in a tweet…
Ignorance is a bliss I fought hard to avoid possessing. Which lends us the present dilemma.
I have a full vault, just drafts upon drafts sitting between various platforms that I’m afraid to share. Always worried thoughts found excellent today will be deemed extreme tomorrow. Books are compiled and read and annotated and discussed in the mirror, rather than in public. I bookmark and revisit the work of people I deem too successful to call peers and wonder when they stopped handing out the magic necessary to make a career of it all. I call my mom and lament at the potential I feel is actively squandered by Capitalism and Cisheteropatriarchy and a culture obsessed with possession and domination. I post videos with mostly lukewarm opinions and reread the hate comments on them. I scroll and scroll and scroll mindfully, so aware that this time could be spent more efficiently but paralyzed in an activity that ask so little of me in a world that ask for it all. I cry when my body allows me to, expressed grief drying me out like salt on a slug. I lose, before the cut has even been made, hoping no one notices they’ve only been presented with gristle while I've stored the meat for myself.
I’m liable to get lost in labyrinths I created but perhaps this is the string that walks me out safely. If I bring you all in there, the walls can only swell for a few minutes before it collapses under our weight. I need to share these things because if I don’t, I’m not sharing at all. The offerings of sanitized pieces, of ‘almost what I’m getting at’ essays, of the politician-skirt-around does me nothing, and tells you little about what I’m so passionately observing and/or arguing for. I’m proud of the places I’ve landed in spite of the circumstances that preceded them and that pride should be expressed through honesty. For every comment asking how I came to know so much or what informed my politic and ethics are stories, scars on my body you can only see up close, and history that is sure to be unearthed one day and the longer I fear having to explain these things, to share all of a story, the longer I remain in inertia.
There are irrefutable truths about my life, ones that are not agreeable and I’m just figuring out they don’t have to be. That my past can be arbitrary and arduous simultaneously and I’m allowed to express that. Often times, I didn’t get the answers or come to the conclusions I did by reading books and pondering on theory, but rather existing as a marginalized individual, willing to do damn near anything to make ends or friends or lovers. Bringing authenticity to the idea of doing what you can when you can, which left me in unsavory places, doing disagreeable things that I have a hard time regretting.
Which is all a loquacious way of saying: In order for me to share at all, I have to share it all. And the it in question rarely sits well on the binary scale of morality we’re all taught to ascribe to, hence my years of self censorship and sanitization. I don’t suffer from writers block, the words are there as they’ve always been. I suffer from some adjacent affliction, one that ask so much of me and so little of you, the reader. They ask that I remain forthcoming in the face of adversity, that I pretend to be neutral to the potential of hundreds, if not thousands of people making character judgements of me based off of my occupation(s), opinions of them and checkered history. That I remain smiling as my teeth chip on your sanctimoniousness— the kind you think you don’t possess until you don its claws to swipe at me.
If you can’t already tell, this concern zaps a lot of the joy out of not just writing, but of memory. It’s not easy to cradle what others would rather kick. Either way, I’m up for the challenge. Have willed myself to exercise compassion and empathy and kindness inward prior to the potential maiming.
This post—ramble if we’re being more precise—is your fair dues warning. I have a lot to talk about, have sat on too much material in the past year or so that deserves to be seen and heard, critiqued and pondered on, to be shared. I’m going to talk about sex and history and society as I always have, with the addition that I expand on why I discuss it the way I do. I’m discussing poverty in poverty. Sex work as a sex worker. Infidelity and scandal as a Mistress (both of the BDSM variety and run-of-the-mill “other woman” variety) because that’s where my life has taken me, it’s where my politic and ethics and fundamental belief in the capacity for a better world met me. And I’d really love for you all to stick around and explore this vaulted past and cautiously hopeful future, with me.
The next piece is coming out in a week or so. It’s about being a Mistress (you can guess which kind— you’re running 50/50 odds) and I hope to see you there.
Talk Soon,
Nia Òla