I started my journey into the Erotic path after trying everything, in my mind, and crashing pretty hard. The path that had been laid out for me led me to a dead end and I was mad, lost and scrambling.
But first let’s start with the good part, am I right? A year after college I had moved to Spain and fell in love with a Spaniard. I mean how great does that sound! And not just any Spaniard. He spoke four languages, had just gotten back from living in Paris, he was tall, dark and handsome. If I didn’t think I had it all figured it out, I sure would make you believe I did.
We met at a tapas bar. God that sentence. I saw him from across the room and something happened in my body. An electric wave went from my body to his and in that moment he caught my gaze, and I was done and undone. I was certain he could get any woman in this bar and like a warrior determined to win a prize, I made him my conquest.
Hey, this is not a story about a man and a woman falling in love. Because fast forward 4 years and I am planning my escape from prison. Barbed wire shut windows, 4 stories up, my apartment in San Francisco in the heart of the Tenderloin had become my prison. I know what you’re thinking, for real prison? That’s a little dramatic. Yeah, it is, but that’s also how it felt.
It was October 20th 2015 and I found myself suffocating in my own home. I literally felt like the walls were closing in on me and I could not breathe. There was a moment a few weeks prior, I was standing in the kitchen cooking dinner for my husband and I. It was like a flash came across my vision, all the moments of not telling him the truth. Moments I had hunger for other men and flirted behind his back, different choices I wanted to make. I realized that I had set my life up to look good, and on the inside it felt far from that.
In that moment, I saw two paths. The first was to tell him everything I hadn’t said up until that point. Come clean. Be honest. Let it all unravel and allow the truth to come to light. The second was to leave. Without hesitating because I couldn’t at the time bare being honest (thank you pride) I felt myself falling into the second option. There were a few weeks of trying to figure out if I could stay without telling the truth but the more I avoided it the more I felt like an inflated balloon, about to burst. Right as I was about to pop, I told him I was leaving hoping. I shoved all my anger and doubt into him, making him the problem. As if the rug was pulled out from both of us, the walls of the prison started to cave in. It wasn’t an elegant walking out, or a feeling of “freedom” like I had imagined. That Beyonce meme where she opens the doors and water floods out all around her as she descends the stairs like a slow motion queen in her bright yellow dress. In fact, the only flood I experienced was with the surge of emotions that went along with all the things I didn’t say with each step I took. It washed me over and knocked me out.
An entire life that I had built, came crashing down. It was like everything that I thought was solid crumbled to dust. I had been walking down this certain path, with this certain person and the more I envisioned it, the more it felt like someone else’s life I was living. I had the job title picked out, the husband, we were on our way to the house and kids. And with each step I felt myself shrinking. The smaller and more constricted my life became. Having to sell and cut off parts of myself. They say that the modern woman is more free than before, that we have more rights and more equality, but I felt like I was in a Victorian-aged corset being tied tighter and tighter to keep in all my inappropriate thoughts, feelings and desires.
Is this what life is supposed to feel like? I would write in my journal. God, I feel like something is missing. More clothes? Maybe being skinnier? Dinners with friends? Making more money? Having babies? Traveling to beautiful countries? Ok, if traveling didn’t fulfill this hunger, there must be something wrong with me. I tried everything except turning towards my life and myself. The depths of feelings and desires that I had that I would never express.
My uncle once told me that he wished he could die and come back as me. That’s how good my life looked. If you could see my instagram account at that time, you would likely think that, too. I mean I wasn’t celebrity status, yet, but I was to my family and those around me. And that’s all I thought I needed. I sat on a throne in my mind, and finally people were beginning to see it, too. But even those words of affirmation were starting to lose their power. I couldn’t build a life on other people’s approval, could I? I mean I love my uncle, but I was going to need much higher status approval if it was going to get me anywhere.
So there I was, standing in the prison that I had built. I never would have admitted it at the time. Because I felt like all of it was happening to me. I wanted to blame my parents for modeling something untrue. I wanted to blame the world for telling me I would get something from this path. I wanted to blame my husband for being unable to provide me with happiness and fulfillment.
I cannot tie this bodice any tighter. I will explode, or die. As if something had taken over in me, I found myself calling a Lyft and shoving as many things as I could into a suitcase while he was at work. I didn’t even know where I was going. At that time, Lyft was still new to the scene (it was San Francisco afterall) so you didn’t have to give a destination. I fit as much as I could into my suitcase and I walked towards the door. I knew in that moment, if I walked through that door, through that threshold, I would never go back. And it wasn’t just to that apartment, or that husband. It was an entire life that I had built on top of who I was underneath. I think it was only a week or two later that I heard from the start up I was working for that they were closing down the San Francisco chapter, changing directions and I would no longer have a job. Any final piece of the rug that had not been ripped out from under me when I walked out of that apartment, left in the moment when I received that news.
Anything that kept my feet on the earth had been removed. No home, no husband, no job. Now this is where the path that I had been walking down would have told me would be the worst possible place to find myself. And yet, upon arriving to this location, I found myself feeling complete and utter relief. The feeling that I thought I would get from climbing the ladder of some very hot start up company, or parading my hot foreign husband all around the world posting glamorous photos on instagram, came in this very moment where I let go, where I had nothing. I won’t lie and tell you I wasn’t terrified. But the relief of unraveling this incongruent life outweighed the terror.
It felt like though I had been alive in this body on this earth for 27 years, these were the first steps I had ever taken.
