I was born with the expectation that I would be small.
Whatever you’re thinking, think smaller than that.
Think: tiny. Think: invisible.
Think: the woman in the background of the scene serving the tea to our main characters. No, the woman you don’t even see who already placed the tea on the table for them to drink. Extra #35 in the movie. No name. No lines. No role in the plot, not really.
We movie-goers don’t remember a thing about her. We never saw her. She barely saw herself. She was just a vessel to deliver the tea.
**
Part of the problem was the usual: all the ways women are taught to be small in a society made for and run by men. All the ways young women especially are meant to be seen and not heard—and really not even seen.
My boobs were too big. My body too sexual. My voice too loud. My needs too present. I was too bossy. Too giggly. Too argumentative.
Cover yourself. Don’t talk so much. Stop being so bossy.
But even more than patriarchy, the problem was that I was raised evangelical. And the message was always more of Jesus, less of me.
The goal: to replace yourself entirely with the church-sanctioned version of Jesus (patriarchy Jesus, capitalism Jesus). To be, as it were, body-snatched by the holy spirit.
Hallelujah, hosanna, shout to the lord. More of you, lord. Less of me.
Less.
Less.
Less of me.
And here’s the real tragedy: I was good at it. Marvelous. Proficient. At subjecting myself to what I believed was the will of god.
(Which just so happened to match up neatly with the will of capitalism –funny how that works—and the will of patriarchy and the will of pretty much any other system of power.)
I was good at making myself smaller. I was good at taking up my cross. A phrase straight out of the Bible which meant: suffer. Take up the heaviest burden ever handed to a human. Give up everything, including your life.
And so I did. I made myself small and invisible and sick. If someone was ill, I volunteered to sit with them all night. I did free labor for the church. For the youth groups. For any person who had a need.
I learned the world was full of needs. But never mine.
**
I still remember a phone call with my father where I agonized over what to do because my roommate was moving out and the woman who wanted to move in made me deeply uncomfortable. She had stories of men she’d dated showing up and throwing bricks through her windows. She had a very young grandchild who’d stay over multiple nights per week—and likely cry and wake us both.
I was afraid of the men she’d bring home. I was afraid of the lack of sleep a child in the house represented during a time when I had the most demanding job of my life and I was (very secretly) having some of my earliest suicidal thoughts. But I also knew that what I wanted or needed wasn’t supposed to matter.
Because What Would Jesus Do? He’d take her in even if it put him in danger. Even if it killed him.
Take up your cross.
More of Jesus. Less of me.
My father—ever disappointed—told me I didn’t even sound like his daughter. His daughter knew better than to want anything for herself. Even a good night’s sleep. Even if her bedroom window was on the ground floor, perfect brick-breaking height.
**
It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I did the revolutionary thing.
I had already left the church by then. I’d already untangled (some of) the purity culture. I had my first kiss at twenty or twenty-one (I no longer recall). I moved to New York, then Colorado. I used words like goddamn and fuck and every time they were a relief.
But I had not untangled the compulsion to serve—hadn’t found where my natural impulse to help people had gotten tangled up with the toxic idea that I was nothing and others were everything and I should help until I had nothing left.
I was so incapable of saying no that I simply froze up when a man pushed a make-out session into sex without asking. Once, then twice. I was so incapable of no that I kept finding myself in danger, letting people into my life who took and took and took some more and left me thinking that it would be nice to be dead because I wouldn’t be so exhausted anymore.
And then, in my mid-twenties, depressed and suicidal and desperate, I did a revolutionary thing that probably didn’t look revolutionary from the outside.
I let my lease expire, and I packed a bag, and I left.
I left the people who needed me. I left the demands. I left all the ways I’d gotten tangled up in other people’s needs while stomping on my own. I boarded a plane on a one-way ticket to Europe.
I did it to save myself.
And save myself, I did.
**
The reasons it saved me are complicated. The first is this: I let the distance do the thing I couldn’t do for myself—say no.
No, I can’t come to every single event everyone ever asks me to attend. No, I cannot work those extra long hours. No, I don’t want to kiss you. No, I can’t be your entire emotional support universe.
My distance made it impossible to ask as much from me. And in the space where other people’s needs had been, I found answers to the questions of what I wanted, who I was.
**
What I discovered on the road was this: me.
Pandora without anyone else’s demands on her time, her emotions, her life.
I discovered she was luminous.
I discovered she was powerful.
I discovered that I loved her.
It was something I’d been working on in therapy for years. Self-love. It never made sense. It never clicked. I could bend my will so easily to love others, but I never could find my way to it for myself.
Until a bright, hot day on a beachfront vacation when I walked into the bathroom and glimpsed myself in the mirror—and I didn’t realize it was me. I just saw a girl that I loved, and my heart leapt with it. As if I’d seen my best friend walk through the door. My crush. My lover. My life.
That’s the truth beneath the truth: I had.
Somewhere in all that space no longer occupied by everyone else’s needs, I had become my own best friend, my lover, the human I’d fight for tooth and nail and heart and soul.
**
Another decade passed, with so many steps toward self-love, self-actualization. In my late thirties, I started joking that I was my own wife. And indeed, I had become that too. I cared for myself so fully, so tenderly. I protected my sleep and my peace and my joy and my rage. I made art. I gave myself space and time to expand into. I sang myself love songs and took myself on romantic getaways and danced with myself when I reached a milestone.
I learned to say no—and learned that I loved saying it. I learned to take up space—and learned that I loved demanding it.
I stopped hiding my power, my body, my mind, my boundaries, my needs, my demands.
**
And then, a few years ago, I met a kinky human.
Our relationship started platonic and built oh-so-slowly—a sweet and safe and languid journey toward new forms of closeness. He made art for me and painted art on me. He read books I recommended and took notes. He told me he loved me, but more than that: he showed me. He loved me in the ways I’d learned to love myself—with admiration and wonder at this powerful, sexy, luminous person I had become. With gratitude for the fighter she is. With active, intentional, consistent care.
Powerful women were his kink. And I had finally embraced my power.
We transitioned slowly from platonic to sexual—but not in the ways of the vanilla world. Elements of tease, denial, and orgasm control came long before what most people would call sex. My feet were pampered, worshipped. Pet play built from nearly day one.
And worship—the underpinning of it all was worship. The centering of my pleasure and power and self.
Once he told me that he felt like he’d never had sex before this. He’d never explored. He’d never gone so far off the expected script of romantic and sexual relationships. His world had been smaller.
I didn’t say it, but my heart’s response was this:
I felt I’d never been loved before.
I didn’t know someone could love me in the fierce and sacred way I loved myself.
Everything else had been a shadow. An imposter.
**
Nearly two years into that long, slow romance, I shared another truth:
In this journey I’d been taking with myself—of taking up space and finding my voice and being big, not small, never again small—I wanted him to come with me. Not just to equality, a place where we would neatly meet each other’s needs. But to swing the pendulum in a direction I’d never swung it: to be loved more than I loved. To be given more than I gave.
To be worshipped.
I wanted him to do the thing he’d already been naturally doing. But I wanted more.
I had been born to worship, and all I wanted now was to be worshipped. I was not Extra #35. I was the goddess at the center of the universe.
The light in his eyes told me that this was his truth too.
**
Now I am the goddess at the center of more than one universe. Every day, I step deeper into my power, I welcome others deeper into their submission, their rest, their truth.
I started this journey thinking kink was interesting. Kink was fun. Kink was centering. But I did not realize until I was in the middle of it just how healing it can be. How it can take you into the most vulnerable parts of yourself, the deepest truths, the place where you can embrace your self.
Whatever that self looks like.
Be she a goddess. A tease. A domme.
Or a submissive, worshipper, or something else altogether.
Whoever yours is, I hope your journey takes you ever-closer to them.