ORIGINS: A Discovery of Women
A brief personal history of female worship from a previously straight woman.
ORIGINS: A Discovery of Women
A brief history of female worship from a previously straight woman.
If there was a prize for being disconnected from your body, I would probably win gold. I know that this isn’t a particularly unique experience. Most of us millennials are burnt out, chronically ill, and overwhelmed. From devoting ourselves to constant tragedies across the world to the daily poisons that wreck our bodies, we don’t seem to have much space for living. For growing flowers, long baths, and basking in sunshine. For pleasuring ourselves, for yearning, and for desire. For slow mornings, afternoons, and nights. For short days in the winter and long ones in the summer. And certainly not for long, sensual sex and intimacy with ourselves and our partners.
For so long sex and intimacy was a burnt sunset with a flash of rare hope. After dying again and again in battle, my rugged hope would stand, bloodied and dirty and with gritted teeth, and I would force myself to try again. I gripped my future tightly, desperately clinging to the idea that this one could work. This one would be right. I just have to try, again and again and again. I took the spoils from my lovers bodies and adorned myself with them, trinkets of self-indulgent personal development I showed to my next potential, hoping they would see a rich dowry worth tying themselves to until the end of time. Every date was an amusement or a bore or a chore or a “maybe… I guess we’ll see.” Sex felt like a challenge I believed I was designed to overcome.
Until her. Intimacy with her feels like rich, nourished earth. Like breathing. It feels sensual and luxurious and, most of all, slow. Her body exudes lushness, freshness, and aliveness. She wakes up and stretches next to me, her eyes bright and her hands soft and sure. I touch her like I touch flowers, with a novice urgency that begs for gentleness. I find much of myself lingering on her constantly, from my eyes to my lips to my skin. Parts of myself I never knew existed reach for her, shouting desires I’m not sure how to satisfy. I feel like rain that’s finally found soft earth after years of pavement.
Discovering her feels like discovering life at 30.
I grew up in a progressive family. The most my mom ever said about being gay was that she wanted us to be happy, and that our partners could be anyone, but that she wouldn’t choose a harder life for us if given the option. I fought for LGB people and was an outspoken advocate for their rights. I was around it in my small, tangible life as well as my larger virtual life. But my puberty coincided with the uncertainty of social media, with the fear of knowing too much about myself and that my privacy would become exposed to the world. So I kept myself sheltered, even from myself, with the hope that if I didn’t know about myself no one else would, and then nothing could be used against me. Suddenly, just like sex, self-knowledge and embodiment became dangerous.
I had plenty of gay and questioning friends growing up. Almost all of them were out and proud and coating themselves in the messiness of discovery and exploration. Meanwhile, I was boarded up against the storm with a protective layer of fiction novels. I delayed any sort of romantic endeavor, convincing myself that I was “not like the other girls” because I had self-control. I was delaying the mess until I could handle it as an older, wiser, adult. When I could ask the (now invited) guests of discovery and change and chaos to take off their shoes before entering the house. I imagined that they would volunteer to wash their dishes after the meal and wipe down the counters. I’d dry their clean dishes with a fluffy, white, absorbent kitchen down and place them neatly in the cupboard. We’d be partners on the ship instead of drowning in the ocean while they laughed from the shore. I was disconnected enough to think puberty wasn’t actually that bad as I was going through it (it was.)
While my peers were kissing and drinking and socializing and building community, I was defending my terror of the world with peer-reviewed articles and thoroughly checked sources. I knew that romantic and sexual endeavors were dangerous as the default. Only the rare exceptions were safe. Emotional vulnerability left one open to manipulation, and sexual promiscuity left one open to pregnancy and STIs. One mistake could be permanent. One mistake could ruin everything my parents had built for me.
I kept my focus on school and college and becoming a well-rounded individual. I was interested in lots of things, from theatre to swim team to writing to physics. I got along with teachers, some of whom detected my reclusive attitude and some who didn’t, and I got along with parents. I became jealous of the girls in my class because at least they had something more, although deep down I knew that the something they had was nothing I wanted. I was too afraid to know myself well enough to figure out what it was I wanted. I was fiercely independent and wore that like armor against cruelty. My moral compass pointed towards righteousness and judgment.
While I accepted male success, I developed these big, huge, massive feelings towards women I admired. They tended to be relaxed women who broke the rules. Who didn’t care what others thought, who had the opposite energy of everything I’d ever known. Who wore men’s clothes and (sometimes) cut their hair and celebrated the embodied women I hoped to become. They wore beanies, went snowboarding, and refused to live in fear. They were chill like the unheated showers I would take by the beach, warmed enough by the sun to be refreshing and cool against my sunburnt skin.
Unlike the men I admired, I interpreted these feelings towards women as envy, and in my darkest moments as jealousy. I thought that I desperately wanted to be these girls. I wanted to live life like them, I wanted to feel the things they felt. I wanted to bask in their glow and take it inside myself so I could make others feel that way. I wanted to sit casually in my life like they lounged on the field or the slope, laughing at the sky and laughing with God. And, when my defenses failed and I realized I wanted them to be attracted to me, I called myself selfish and insecure and an attention whore.
Meanwhile, I rejected my body and my womanhood entirely. I refused to touch myself without shame or hurry, without an end goal. I saw my pleasure as a need that needed to be filled, like a protein bar when you neglected to pack your lunch. I assaulted her with porn and vibrators, drowning out her cries for peace and gentleness with aggression and force. I put chains around my womb to protect myself from pregnancy, taking hormonal birth control to shut down everything in the hope of preventing a dying mistake (I still made my partners use condoms.) I stabbed my womb with a copper knife for the same reason, and for three years she sobbed to me with swollen eyes, pain pulsing from her, unable to heal. My cycles never regulated, my ovarian cysts became chronic, and my periods were long and apathetic. I stuffed my voluptuous breasts into clothing and bras and swimsuits that cut into her and made her cry out for freedom. My body was withering as I rejected her one by one, all her defenses just another enemy tactic I had to overcome. My anxiety, desperate to protect me from pain, became my enemy. My depression, desperate to protect me from loneliness, became my enemy. My womanhood, my source, my power, my sacred self, was being strangled in control and fear.
I had my first kiss at 19 and didn’t have my next until I was 21. I knew I had to find the “right” partner to be intimate with to be safe, but I had no idea what to look for or how to choose a safe partner. Adults always said to “be smart” and “make sure it’s right” without ever telling me how to know. I forced myself to lose my virginity at age 23 with my best guy friend. He had no hope of supporting me emotionally through it (I was convinced I could emotionally support myself,) but I was desperate to get over the hump of my first time, devaluing it to take the pressure off. Then I gave myself to one-night stands, casual hookups, and friends-with-benefits. Everything felt blocked, like the universe was repeatedly putting me in the time-out corner, exhausted with my constant attempts to repeat the same patterns with the hope of different results. The universe got so consistent with this behavior that it became somewhat obvious that it was sending me a message (even transferring the last guy I liked to Japan the day after our first in-person date.)
This neglect of my womanhood bled into every area of my life. I was living in a situation that left me chronically sick. I stopped hanging out with my friends, focused on sleep, cooking, and other bare minimums of survival. My job had lost its fulfillment. My internal disbelief in my power, my influence, and my ability to be useful to society was seeping away with the fragile confidence I’d built. My life’s foundation was being ripped away, leaving me with misery and illness and an apathetic disquiet that settled into my bones.
And yet…
When I looked at women I didn’t see fear. I saw hope. My gorgeous friends, the women I looked up to. I found writers, poets, painters, artists, scientists. I found powerful women embodying their womanhood from a place of honor and joyful sacrifice. They wore it like thorns poking through their skin, their flower reaching up to the heavens, as though the world was designed just for them. They blossomed in front of me, both in person and online. I witnessed women guiding, mentoring, and leading other women as they led themselves, the unknown a welcome respite from the stifling world of consistency and careful mediocrity in our wounded world. I began following Fiona McCoss, Luci Lampe, and Delani of Submission to Source. I learned to worship my body from the ground up, starting with nourishing myself with whole foods (prioritizing steak, raw milk, raw honey, and fruit) and building in grounding and sunlight.
I discovered the divine gifts of womanhood that have been neglected. I began to read about womanhood, not only in the painful cries of Emily Bronte but in the soft worship of Tolkien. I began to feel my womanhood come to life. Years off of birth control and months without my IUD began to clear the deadened wasteland of my yoni. The poison was being sucked away, and I was determined to do it with my own lungs, teeth, and lips. I prayed for the day I could add fertilizer and seeds and begin rotating life, never taking too much from one area. But I gritted my teeth and focused on the next step. Saltwater leaked from the earth, the ocean welcoming it back from my fields, fresh rainwater nourishing my garden from the clear skies above.
I began to find worship in the fear, the pain, and the unknown. The muchness when she looked into my eyes the first time we spoke. In the acknowledgment of the discomfort she made me feel, and the soft acceptance and curiosity towards my avoidance of her for months afterward. In the sharp sting of jealousy when she would talk to others flirtatiously, which finally didn’t feel like something stolen but like something desired. In the visions of her laying next to me, of bringing her pleasure, of worshiping her. In the shame coursing through my body when we spoke about the boys I was dating. In the high I experienced when I surprised her, with her laugh and her shining eyes. In the wildness of sharing with her who I could be if I’d only let myself want.
I found myself in awe of her womanhood and the legacies held there. How she tied together timelines and legacies, pulling circles from straight lines and flooding the world with warmth. Pulling the universe forward and backward like the moon, pulling the tides inside me until I could handle the shifting sands. I trace my fingers across the curves of her body and feel the curve of the earth. I touch her core and I feel the soft, rich soil from which everything grows. I soften against her chest and feel life flooding into me. I look into her eyes and feel the wisdom of millions of women before us resting there. It feels as though she’s pulling everything out in front of me, displaying it, as though to say, gently, that I’ve had all the knowledge all along, built into my cells and my soul. I’ve had everything I’ve needed this entire time.
I didn’t realize that to worship and love and please a woman was to do the same to yourself. It’s difficult to look at another woman and see her brilliance and completeness, to begin to fall in love with her, and then to deny your worthiness on principle.
While I’ve been struck by the shock of understanding myself more, I’m still shaking from the aftermath. There is an existing deep well of knowledge about myself, and I’ve barely dipped in a toe. I’m just beginning to understand how scary life is for me, and beginning to soften into safety and peace.
It feels like to fall in love with women is to fall in love with yourself, your maker, and your sacred connection to the universe. Going forward, I shall do my best to chronicle my efforts to humble myself before all of these three. I hope you find value in these stories.
With honesty and humility,
Your Sapphic