pleasure & grief: the possibility of returning to my body for myself
I never characterized myself as a crier during sex, and yet the first time I ever cried during sex was with my ex-partner. I uncontrollably sobbed into their chest. And to my amazement, they held me and affirmed my tears.
Was it because I was hurt, remembering the past, overwhelmingly happy, or simply my body communicating that safety had arrived? It could have been all of those logical reasons, as our bodies communicate not only to the other person, but they connect us to the moments we share with memory.
However, we’re not staying here. To continue the journey, I cried so much in my previous relationship during sexual intimacy that I began to resent the act of pleasure itself. It felt like it took away from my experience, no longer “hot and sexy,” instead crossing a threshold into which unresolved sensual wounds arose to the surface.
I thought: this isn’t an attractive experience.
I questioned the root of my tears because intimacy became a sacred confession that only my flesh and I could understand, yet I couldn’t communicate this visceral overflow my body contained within myself. I wanted to understand a language from which I felt deeply disconnected to, but desperately wanted to receive. For I was greeted with a new relational reality with my body that I’d not dared to unearth.
Like many, I grew up within Black Evangelical Church culture, steeped in purity culture, wrapped in people-pleasing, and masked as “loving thy neighbor as thyself.” Pleasure was never neutral; it was something to manage, contain, or survive around. Pleasure was a luxury—a world I would one day opt into once I surrendered myself to marriage.
My disconnection from my sensuality became evidence that my worldly flesh had taken over my mind, that my desires and proclivities were pulling me further away from the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
As I search within the tears, I realize now that I was searching for a safe place to land—not only within my ex-partner, but within the deepest desires of my own knowing—the erotic of my essence.
The possibility of my body holding the permission to be completely free once felt distant, but somehow still present. Almost as if sweet freedom were waiting for me at the tip of my tongue, ready to be uttered and heard. And my body lingered in the sweetness of the journey, even as I craved the destination of finally, we made it.
How many of us—Black queer femmes— trace that deep, embodied knowing, yet feel as though the access point is just behind a pane of clear glass?
I ran from not only the tears, but also from what they might tell me about how I truly felt about my body. My disappointment wrapped itself around the realization that I hadn’t thought much about my body as a place for me, and only me.
Instead, I had sought my body as a divine site where others could comment, desire it, and decide what kind of relationship they wanted with me. So the tears ran down my face and they continue to. Because my body recognizes all the chipping away. All the belittling. All the ways I co-signed my own diminishment in pursuit of being witnessed by romantic interest, trying to etch a price of worth onto my body.
Now, I want to embrace the tears that come with intimacy and, hell, maybe I am a crier in this season of my life. I whisper, “I deserve it all,” sweet affirmations I courageously store away for safekeeping.
My body actively processes, softens, and begins to believe that there is a place for me to softly land within my longings—within the wrappings of not only sexual desire, but sensual and cosmic elasticity.
The tears, then, are my truth. A sacred witnessing that places me, my wants, and my pleasure at the center. The tears seal it with a kiss.
Intimacy without tears once felt more erotic. Intimacy with tears felt more healing. But when I allow both aspects of what intimacy invites—the erotic and the sacred portal—I witness what becomes possible in my body: to be seen, fully and whole by me and if it’s with another person, that’s a plus.
I imagine intimacy with another body restoring my witnessing of my own capacity to receive my full sensual nature.
We have been taught to fear the flesh—cast as demonic, untrustworthy, radically rogue in its pursuit of “self-ish” desires, often renamed the ego. I was taught to fear my body. Now, at this point in my life, I invite a powerful, sovereign, sentient being—one that carries her own ecosystem, designed to keep herself alive. And her pursuit of pleasure is a thirst that wishes to be quenched.
My body—our bodies—know how to survive without instruction. They hold a psycho-emotional intelligence, registering how situations, events, and experiences impact us long before language arrives. We often hear the echo of “the body keeps the score,” a phrase that attempts to encapsulate the sensual knowledge the body holds: its capacity to protect us, orient us, and keep us alive.
And yet, the physical intelligence of the body is so often watered down into something far more clinical, something that fails to honor the essential truth of our physiological nature: we are sensual beings.
In “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, Audre Lorde writes, “the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
The fear of the body is heightened to serve many agendas—labor, the usage of bodies that are not mine or ours, but pursued to be commodified in the name of white supremacy and patriarchal values that strip us of intuitive expression and rewire us for profit. But for the sake of exploring the erotic, intimacy, and pleasure, something becomes clear: when desire cannot be tamed or contained, you live differently. And the question becomes—who benefits when you can no longer be kept inside a container?
So, I weep. Constantly.
As I am still learning the language of my own body, I am tasked with finding the cues that usher me into moments of such radical honesty and pleasure. The tears I ran from for so long now meet me with a simple greeting: hello.
I want to enthusiastically reply, hello there.
Maybe next time, I will.
If I seek the wisdom of experience, then I have to make room for grief, too. And as much as my mind tries to water grief down to a mere unattractive experience, I think grief wants to be known. It wants to be witnessed.
There is grief in the messiness, the undesirability, and the raw reality of knowing how long it took me to arrive at a period of remembrance—and now, learning how to practice being a witness to my body.
To be inspired by it—is to recognize that my body, in its pursuit, is searching to be known. I want to know what makes me ache, what makes me laugh out loud without control, what makes me smile without any thought, what makes me consider surrendering as the only option, and what makes me utter the words in a safe haven because it is the only thing that matters.
And I can hold the capacity for joy, and receive loudly.
I have the capacity to receive my sensuality—to taste, touch, smell, hear, and see. My body is a portal, we can encounter through a reciprocal relationship of listening and action.
The concept of receiving, within a religious landscape that has trained us to see our intuitive knowledge as antithetical to our best interest, angers me, pains me deeply. For our best interest is wrapped up in the intelligence of the body.
The distrust in my body—our bodies—and its ability to show up for us in pleasure and grief means a home is ready to be created. A home already exists, and if we’re brave enough, we can visit the parts of ourselves we once relinquished for others’ approval or to give others a say. And maybe it becomes a simple, “I want to keep having a say” in what and who has access to something is already mine.
xoxo