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In 2020, when the world went silent in the worst possible way, I began looking for something new to help me feel something—anything— other than the anxiety I felt during the Covid-19 pandemic. I wanted to escape, even if just for a moment. We were months in and relatively settled into our new way of living, but I wasn’t feeling very alive. I felt some guilt about this because shouldn’t I just be grateful to have my life since so many others had lost theirs? I continued to throw myself into all the safe, joyful things I could possibly do. I biked, improved my Italian, curated playlists for every possible mood I had, gave Audible way too much of my money, and yet, I still wasn’t fulfilled. Finally, I decided to give romance novels a try. Little did I know that I would be led into the world of writing romantic stories (many with Thai hot spice levels). And somewhere inside those stories, I was writing characters who wanted things freely and without apology.

You see, there is something that happens when you write about pleasure and desire. It becomes hard to ignore the aliveness that stirs inside of you. You have to inhabit it to know what your characters hunger for, what they would risk, and what they would grieve if they couldn’t have it. And at some point, I stopped being able to pretend that the wanting belonged only to them. Little did I know, my characters were teaching me something important. They were showing me the outline of a life I hadn’t even allowed myself to imagine.

I remember sitting with that realization for a while, just thinking about the same question that seemed stuck in my mind. Could I have something similar, even if it's just a little bit? It sounds like a small question, but it wasn’t. For a lot of us, especially women, learning to ask what we want, not what we’re supposed to want, is its own kind of work. It’s actually its own kind of courage.

That question is what led me here.

What I needed, I eventually realized, wasn’t more information about desire or pleasure. I needed a language for it, which I found at the Somatica® Institute, where I embarked on a transformative journey into intimacy work. I wasn’t drawn there by a clinical interest in human sexuality. I was drawn there because I needed to connect with my body — and I needed words to help me express and communicate what I discovered. Somatica® helped me build a vocabulary for desire, embodiment, and the space between what we feel and what we’ve been taught to feel. That experience changed everything about how I understood myself and, eventually, how I understood the work I wanted to do.

I have a feeling you know a little something about that kind of hunger. Maybe you’re in a great relationship, but somewhere along the way, you stopped feeling like yourself inside it. Maybe you’re like me, where you’ve been so focused on being what everyone else needs that you’ve lost the thread back to yourself. Or maybe you’re just beginning to ask the question I asked in 2020, and you’re not sure what the answer might reveal about you.

If you've made it this far, I think you already know this space is for you. I'll be writing about desire, story, and self-authorship — the kind of work that gets messy and doesn't have a clean ending but always has somewhere worth going.