I used to be hypersexual and histrionic as a result of childhood trauma. It started around 13 and slowly burnt out around 25. I used to get exclusively cast as prostitutes and sexy side characters in plays and musicals, and my friends and I thought it was funny to oversexualize each other, grope each other unexpectedly, and pretend to come onto one another. And whenever I made someone uncomfortable with my hypersexuality, I’d scoff at them, call them prudish, mildly shame them for not succumbing to what was obviously just a joke. But it wasn’t really a joke, you know? It’s not that i wanted to have sex with every person I playfully objectified; it’s that I was channeling my own anxieties about what had happened to me through hypersexual dominance. I became the predator to dissolve my position as prey (unintegrated animus). If i could (subconsciously) normalize sex in all aspects of my life, the trauma could be absolved and ultimately never confronted. And any refusal to participate was treated as a threat to that very fragile contract. In my early 20’s, the consequences of my hypersexuality became real. Sex was no longer a social dance. It was now like a drug I could use to dissociate from reality; a performance that stripped me of myself and allowed me to adopt another persona, one who was reckless, unfeeling, and nonchalant. The casualness of sex meant no one would stick around long enough to inspect where I was going during the act because they didn’t know me to begin with. I could float away in my drunken haze and forget myself and my lover and everything that has ever happened. Until I met my husband. Falling in love is like being a rare insect discovered for the first time. You can go your whole life in hiding, and then someone sees you, observes you, feels what it’s like when you’re fully there and when you’ve disappeared. We’re all capable of simultaneously being in a room and falling away to other realms. When you’re in love, that person can see you drifting. They can feel your spirit ascending. Love—at least our love—grounds you and protects you from your drug of choice, sometimes a substance, sometimes an act. By the latter half of my 20’s it was clear my addiction was leading nowhere good. If i loved this man and wanted to be with him, I had to stop using his body as an escape from reality as I had with so many before. Sex could still be erotic. I could still experience ecstasy. But the orgasm had to come from a state of presence, something the body only permits when you are vulnerable with a person you deeply trust. I had to reconfigure my relationship to sex and the body and confront the backrooms of my mind to the point where I no longer felt the need to project my sexuality onto others in order to feel safe. Sex became sacred again, so much so that even pretending to feel sexual desire towards another feels immoral. Not because sex is immoral, but because it is so precious.