The Beneaths.

Through life experiences, we understand what our soul most longs for and desires.

If I look at the experiences that I have accumulated in my life, I would say that holistically until recent moments, I have manifested a life of imprisonment. —> I experienced my mother’s self-entrapment, the imprisonment of my own mind, the imprisonment of my desires, the imprisonment of my vulnerabilities, and the echo of imprisonment I enforced on myself out of habit passed down to me. [NOW PLEASE READ THAT LAST SENTENCE AGAIN BEFORE PROCEEDING. THANK YOU.] —> I carried with me my own laws of guilt and shame that “properly” kept me imprisoned from pursuing my desires. Not only did I keep myself tied up and straight laced when I was born to be f e r a l; I kept myself imprisoned from dancing in a strip club when I -yearned- to be a stripper since I was around 8 years old. I knew that the spirit I saw in the character of the dancing Esmeralda [The Hunchback of Notre Damn] defending outcasts under a corrupted regime lie unexpressed within my young vessel. —Even though I didn’t understand the deep-seeded contradiction the world has for an empowered woman; loving her yet simultaneously wishing for her demise— possibly because others love to hate a woman out of line until she dies.

While many might see my father as a negative catalyst for who I am, I prefer the perspective that my father perhaps subconsciously and intuitively knew who I would become and unknowingly nurtured it in the only way he was humanly capable of doing, being unprepared to be a father and running to a combination of religion and distrust of authority. While he played tug-of-war within himself, he simultaneously played psychological tug-of-war with me. He shamed the examples of empowered women that got anywhere close to me but allowed me to glimpse and view films in which empowered women were erotic creatures. I dreamed of wielding a whip like Cat Woman and stripping like the beautiful dancers I took in while walking by our living room TV. I committed to memory a scene of a steamy shower scene where a woman was washing herself erotically. Furious, my father [who definitely was the only one who had added the film to our Netflix Queue] demanded to know which of us added the film as he slammed the pause button. But it was too late, somewhere in the future, I was already choosing to film myself doing the same thing for my OnlyFans. In church, I wasn’t allowed to be erotic in any sense unless it was in subservience to a man. Otherwise, I deserved guilt, shame, or even death, as I was told very clearly not only by the males around me, but in the book we read: Jezebel was violently murdered. Eve was shamed. Esther could have been killed for speaking up but was spared by her husband, the King of Persia.

Yet was in church that I learned that dancing is the language of liberation.

“But Miriam led her sisters in dancing after being liberated from enslavement in Egypt [Exodus 15:20-21].”

I used this exact Bible verse to verbally combat our Baptist preacher who would not permit dancing at our church, because it led to sex…so did drums, he would tell me in response, which is why you would not find any drums on our worship stage. It was the same worship stage two of my best friends [both were secretly struggling to sort through their sexuality] worshiped “God” in song, all the while being praised for being “good Christians.” Sometimes, I really believe that my father chose the most Authoritarian church, so I would -have- no choice but to rebel and be who I am today.

So, perhaps…I manifested a father who knew intuitively what I was meant to become and nurtured me in the way an Aquarian would most need; which is perhaps why he is a 6’2” stubborn and unnecessary authority figure blocking human expression and freedom. Perhaps that’s why he was so careless in the sexual icons I was exposed to, yet so harsh in his control of my femininity and female expression, and then also so purposeful in the range of musical exploration he gave me access to, so I could enjoy and feel confident to flow and dance to all genres of music. Again, perhaps my father knew that I would become an empowered woman that embraced sex work. Maybe that’s the soulful reason why I was not permitted to watch Pretty Woman [a film that depicts a woman who is saved from the roughness of sex work by a John] as a teenager, but was encouraged at the same age to watch a film about an alien/Female hybrid, bred to be docile and controllable, escaping as scientists attempt to kill her before she breeds with human males [Species].

… maybe…

Truly, I’ve always been the seed that blossomed into the juicy fruit of the Woman I am today —> A healing witch who made rudimentary elixirs for my mother from juniper seeds intuitively, not consciously knowing juniper is holistically beneficial for protection, renewal, and resilience. Also not consciously knowing that while I was experiencing my mother’s domestic abuse, I was being programmed to magnetize the same romantic connections that I was accustomed to experiencing. My family fought, my father played psychological games, he was abusive in many ways, my mother ran away repeatedly throughout my childhood, and I can recall many days where we would ride around in our family car with my siblings trying to find her again. I experienced a lot of broken dishes and household items where my mother’s imprisoned emotions leaked into our eye sight. All of this was reflected in my own imprisonment that I imprinted.

Even while my father told me bluntly that God would rather an abused woman be killed by her husband rather than divorcing her abusive husband, my father also made sure I saw the Hunchback of Notre Damn during a time that I that loved Beauty & the Beast. And as I watched Esmeralda fight religious leaders with her magic and eroticism, I heard my own highest self dance in liberation and whisper, “Thank you for showing Her!” Thus, I prefer to live my life considering my father as a co-creator of my conscious reality. His shadows planted seeds in my subconscious to blossom into some beautiful blooms. Maybe there was soulful purpose to me feeling unsafe to express my innate erotic essence in a home where I experienced assault while simultaneously enjoying pornography that featured similar themes? [see Consent Workshops].

…and maybe…

I was within all this time of accumulating these experiences that also subconsciously allowed me to dream up a world with more open-hearted and trusting relationships; where intimacy is sacred to a union; the family is part of a village; and we have a priority to include and show compassion and empathy for all others.

…and through the tug-of-war games,

through weed & whimsy,

this is the Woman I watered into today…