Lidia-Anain

May

14

sickness and stillness

Hello Beautiful One,

I have a confession…

This was supposed to be a great year yet it has been mostly anything but that. With a lump in my throat as I type, a lot of not knowing on my mind and tears flowing as rapidly as the anger that is racing through my veins my heart is screaming for everything to be okay. Life should be okay. No! Life should be great. Life should be great once you’ve beat the monster that chased you repeatedly. Life shouldn’t deliver another blow. But it has. This too I shall overcome or so I desperately hope.

For the last few months while working on my next project I’ve struggled with fatigue and abdominal pain. In last couple of months, I’ve been going through the long process of getting a diagnosis and treatment for whatever is causing these physical pains and fatigue that stole the first quarter of 2013 from me. During those months a lot of people noticed that I’ve been extremely and unusually silent, sheltered and what has seemed as stagnant. As the pain got more intense I feared the worst. As the pain got more intense I became as silent, sheltered and ~~stagnant~~ still as possible so, that I could go within to prepare for the worst as I hoped for the best. I’ve slept more in the last few months than ever before in my life. When people started to question my silence, me sheltering myself away from others and my lack of progress with my work, at first I felt like maybe I had wasted a lot of time.

Emotionally healthy people know that no matter what you do with your time, Time will always be a thief.

As an emotionally healthy person I allowed myself to sleep, to be silent, to shelter myself with only the most caring family and friends and allowed myself to be still.

Stillness is not stagnation.

Stillness is healthy. Stillness is full of purpose. Stillness allows you to feel fully. Stillness is the calm before the storm, the battle, the growth, the triumph and the calm before the worst. It is in stillness that I’ve sat for the last few months. It was this stillness that showed me my emotional growth and health. I can finally see that regardless of what comes after this stillness I am more ready than ever to fight for a great life. It is because I sat in stillness with my fears and all of my emotions, that I can certainly say that no matter what comes after a diagnosis my spirit has already overcome. I have already beat the worst.

Life should have been so great once I beat the depression monster. It should have been but it hasn’t been. But because I did beat depression I know that I don’t have to put a smile on my face and pretend that I am okay. I don’t have to give give give to my friends and family. I don’t have to hide behind a facade as I am falling apart inside.

Because I did beat depression…

I can ask for help from my family and friends.

I can eloquently explain to my mother what kind of relationship I want and need from her.

I can be afraid of the not knowing without spiraling out of control into despair.

I can believe that the best is yet to come even if it means going through an extraordinary hell.

I can allow myself to sleep when I am extremely tired; even if it means putting all my work and dreams on pause.

I can say no! And it feels so damn good to say that word!

But most of all I can be as silent, as sheltered and as still as I need be.

And I can speak, be open and thrive as I am ready…

I am ready to face whatever this mass in my cervix is.

I am ready because if I beat depression, what can I not beat?

Swimming with Hope in an ocean of tears,

Lidia-Anain signature

Nov

23

killing the sadness: why mother had to go

This year has been the year in which I finally killed all the sadness inside of me and replaced it with peace and confidence. It has been an amazing year in which I can’t say that I have accomplished all the great things I set out to finish but the healing that has happened for me in 2012 has surpassed any goal I could of dreamed.

I never dreamed that I would feel whole, at peace, perfectly sure of myself in my own skin or truly happy with everything that I have and confident that I could create more happiness.

Feeling fulfilled is not something that I had known that I was capable of because I thought I had to live with depression forever. On top of my depression, I thought I had to figure out how to save my mother and help her create happiness because the dysfunctional upbringing she provided me was all about shaming me for wanting to create my own world of happiness and success. No matter how far I went I never truly dared to go too far from mother or her ways.

The most dysfunctional relationship in my life has always been the one I have with my mother.

But I should really say had because, I have cut my mother out of my life.

Sitting over dinner with a friend that I think I could so easily grow to love for everything he is I declared for the first time before another human being that I had cut my mother off.

And his response was, “LIDIA-ANAIN!”

Nov

07

my stressful life is tranquil

diary / prose & fiction / sex love joy archives

my heart is at peace

my world is full of stress

yes, a lot of things are out of my control

but for the most part my life is tranquil

stress doesn’t stress me out anymore

life isn’t out of control because I finally know

that the more I own what I can change

that the more I act on what I can do

that the more I let go and just live

the more tranquil living that stressful life is

if only I had known sooner how to step into my feminine power

if only I had known sooner how lovely simplicity is

if only I had known sooner how to set boundaries and expectations

but it doesn’t matter how long it took me to get here

I made it

made it to this time in my life when I finally know how to love and respect myself

life is definitely stressful but it is self-love and self-respect that keep my heart at peace

yes, a lot of things are out of my control

but for the most part my stressful life is tranquil

Lidia-Anain signature

Oct

22

playful parenting

diary / motherhood / sex love joy archives

One of the things that I am most grateful for about my ForteFemme experience is that I was reminded to be more playful about my parenting.

It was as we sat in a semicircle telling one another about the kinds of play that were approved and unapproved by our parents that I thought that I could definitely be more playful with my children.

It was in that semicircle that I almost cried because of the amount of heartache that having to be the one that disciplines the children most of the time causes me.

The thought scared me because although I do have so much fun with my sons and they bring me so much joy… I hardly ever am fully in playful mode. There always seems to be this burden on my shoulders of having to be in control. Guess that I’ve never felt permission to really let go of the responsibility of parenthood and join them in play without being in control. You can even see the difference between how they totally jump into playing with dad versus how they play with me. Mom plays but always at a further distance than dad. How he gets to be one of the kids sometimes but not me has always hurt. I am the guardian, the responsible parent, the one that usually has to be Debbie Downer and set limits on how wild and carefree the play gets.

Goal 1: Figure out how to challenge myself as a parent so that I could step out of my box as the “responsible parent” and be the “fun parent” more often.

It wasn’t strange at all, thinking about how my parenting would shape my own children’s sexualities while sitting in a room full of women that were discussing how their childhood play related to their adult sexual play. It wasn’t strange at all because almost everything that I do, think or think about doing usually stirs a thought or two about how it will help or hinder my children. Once you’re a parent you’re always a parent. So, it was in that room full of women discussing their kinks that I decided that I needed to allow my children more modes of approved play.

And when I thought about it, long and hard, I realized that I had always wished my mother hadn’t been so strict with me and that when she did play with me it had been more on my terms than hers.

That’s when I thought for a minute that maybe even as a child I might have been greedy and self-centered but instantly that thought went to…

Goal 2: Make childhood more about the needs and wants of my children and less about me.

I am the parent that has always said that children teach us how to parent them yet I had not always followed my own advice. Controlling Lidia-Anain has too often wanted for her children what she didn’t have for herself as a child and forgotten that her children are not her even if they are her own.

And there it is… the web that’s so tangled that I can’t seem to get myself out of it. My childhood shaped me and the way I parent, the way I parent shapes them and the way they will parent…

So instead of worrying about how to get myself out of this tangled web of wanting to give them everything I never had, keeping them in a perfect straight line towards happiness and success as adults and being the parent they need and want, I’ve decided that maybe being playful is just what we need more of.

I can let go some…

run around the park chasing the son that loves playing tag

create art with the son that loves painting, sculpting and all things visual art

have conversations with the make-believe friends that my other son has

I can master playful parenting as soon as I learn that it isn’t a goal to be mastered but a part of parenting to be enjoyed!

Lidia-Anain signature

Sep

18

the sweet spot…

diary / introspection / sex love joy archives

Big heavy tears flowed down my face and no sound came out of my mouth but I could feel the cry at the core of my soul.

In a room of about twenty strangers, several colleagues and two very important people that I have looked up to for some time, it seemed like the wrong time for my emotions to completely escape my body. Crying silently and uncontrollably was not what I thought I would be doing in the moment that I realized that there was a sweet spot in the field of human sexuality that was meant just for me. It was so surreal that when I found myself in that moment all I could do was let go and cry and listen and accept the permission that these two experts were giving me to… just be myself and do things how they work for me.

As that day went on, I thought that maybe blogging regularly was not for me, that maybe writing erotica would take a backseat and that definitely I should keep the personal out of my writing as much as possible but then the truth of that moment revealed itself to me. I am able to reach those of you that I do because I lack the ability to hide my vulnerability and to me keeping my emotional journey private seems like lying to my readers.

So, here I am asking you to hopefully continue to love me as a woman, as a writer and as everything that I am as I grow and add new things to my journey. As I am finally able to say I no longer suffer from depression, I am now a happy purpose driven woman and I am ready to take my life and writing to new levels.

I have decided to reveal my in-the-very-near-future plans.

What’s next for me…

In no particular order…

I am putting together a best of Sex Love Joy book together that will be available for free download.
I am publishing all the erotic stories that I haven’t ever put on the site plus previously published stories as an e-book available for sale.
I am going back to school full time.
I am letting go and going to stop homeschooling my sons. Very soon.
I will be doing a SARs training this year.
I will be helping more with SFSI.
I will be doing something extremely special with the domain bornsexual.com but what I don’t know yet.
I will be finishing a non-fiction book that I will publish next Fall.

I did come through the other side of completely falling apart and now only the best in me is left to cultivate the woman that I am meant to be… for myself, for my children, for my partners, for my friends and for my readers.

Sunday, September 16, 2012 at 9:24 am PST was when I finally realized that I’ve always known my path, my vision was always clear but I didn’t know until that moment that all I needed was permission to act on it. My heart is extremely heavy in a great way in this moment as I type this because I realize that the date is almost exactly sixteen years since I tattooed Sex Love Joy on my skin, since I lost the daughter I always wanted and since my life began falling apart. Yes, it took me sixteen years to get out from the cloud of loss of self, sixteen years of falling apart, sixteen years of doubt to finally get to that sweet spot.

But after all the pain…

I stand here with a clear vision of what good sex love joy looks like and what is my place within the field of human sexuality and also the permission to fight with every breath it takes to claim my place and produce the work that will matter.

Thank you for being part of my journey. Thank you for reading about all the tough moments and I hope that you’ll continue to read the next chapters in my life.

I appreciate you! Dearly.

Lidia-Anain signature

Sep

07

books i am lusting

diary / sex love joy archives

It is a fact that I read a lot. I really do have a lust for reading and consuming books. It is also a fact that my favorite season for retreating into books for escape, healing, learning, and all things revitalization is Fall. My Amazon wishlist of books is currently filled with over five hundred books that have been asking to come home to me. Yes, they beg me daily as I look through the wishlist seeing which one’s cry is the loudest and new releases usually don’t cry loud enough. But this year there are so many great books coming out in September that I am feeling torn. Books that are coming out in September have made their way to the very top of my list; cannot wait to get my hands on these new releases and I haven’t even gotten through my new August read.

I am private about my collection of books but because these because all seem like great reads, I’ve decided to share my Fall reading list with you. It might sound silly but it makes me feel extremely vulnerable to share this list publicly.

I present to you…

Fifteen Books I am Lusting!

List is in the order that I will be reading them.

The Erotic

Written by: Lou Andreas-Salomé

Book Description

Lou Andreas-Salomé may seem to be a figure remote from us, one belonging to a pre-1914 Europe, but in many ways, she is our contemporary. She travelled in a highly romantic world as socialite, sociologist, and author. She was part of Georg Simmel’s salon, the most exclusive in Berlin, frequented by elusive poet Stefan Georg, dramatist Paul Ernst, social theorist and polymath Max Weber, and Georg Lukács, among others.

Salomé’s unique contribution to the erotic was that she argued sexual difference ran deeper than economics, and equality—the politics of Marx and the ideals of the French Revolution. For Salomé, to think about women and their erotic nature, you must start with their biological and psychological difference, not their economic situation.

Salomé was an outstanding theorist. Her books on Nietzsche and on Rilke are major studies. The field of psychoanalysis would not have developed in the way it did without Lou Andreas-Salomé. We cannot understand Freud’s “rationalism” or his anti-religious sensibility without Salomé’s writings. This new English translation is an essential text of psychoanalysis, one that shaped the very conception of the field.

Why I want to read it…

Lou Andreas-Salomé is a woman that I consider an icon and that I highly admire because of her intelligence. She was a brave woman that lived and loved as she pleased in a time when this wasn’t acceptable for women to do. While many admire Anaïs Nin, I choose to admire the woman that Anaïs admired and I think she wished she could have been.

If you love Anaïs Nin then you should become familiar with Lou Andreas-Salomé due to one simple fact: All-things-Lou Andreas-Salomé > All-things-Anaïs Nin

Playing Well with Others: Your Field Guide to Discovering, Exploring and Navigating the Kink, Leather and BDSM Communities

Written by: Lee Harrington and Mollena Williams

Book Description

Whether you’re a trembling novice or a jaded expert, there’s always something new to be discovered in the endlessly changing, complex and titillating world of kink. While there are plenty of other books out there that explain how to give a spanking or tie a half-hitch, Playing Well With Others is the first book that explains kink *culture* — the munches, parties, leather bars, conferences, workshops, fetish nights, exploratoriums and all the other gatherings of kinksters that turn BDSM and leather from a bedroom predilection to a lifestyle and a community. You’ll learn to: * Examine your own motivations, needs, wants and desires * Ease your way into established communities * Understand etiquette in different adventurous sex communities * Familiarize yourself with the many types of events available to you * Care for your relationships as you explore new territory * Negotiate for play and aftercare * Go back to the “world at large” without ruffling feathers * …and, of course, answer the all-important question: What do you wear?! The team of Harrington and Williams offers 30-plus years of experience in diverse kink communities: top, bottom and switch; gay, bi and straight; female, male and trans; white and POC. Both former titleholders and international educators, they are an unbeatable pair of “sexual sherpas” with an inimitable voice and a great deal of wisdom. Playing Well With Others is an unprecedented and essential guidebook for anyone who wants to explore or understand the “community” aspect of the kink lifestyle.

Why I want to read it…

I’ve heard Mollena Williams tell a couple of stories at Bawdy Storytelling and she blew me away with her storytelling. As a sex educator I like to stay up on what is written about sexuality by other sex educators, especially if it is a topic that I am digging deeper into in my personal life as well.

Aug

28

thoughts on suicide

diary / introspection / sex love joy archives

Earlier this month I ended my longest relationship when I finally parted ways with Depression.

Breakups aren’t easy, especially when you are breaking up with the you that helps you hurt yourself. Breaking up with depression requires hitting a wall of sadness that is the realization that you’ve always been enough and do deserve more. Letting go of depression for those that have always had romantic thoughts of suicide requires believing in the you that knows that there is a best you could ever dream of being already with you. A you that knows that suicide is never an option. Ever.

Finding that for me I’ve had to face a lot of sadness as I’m making an effort to understand that joy comes & goes.

Breaking up with depression caused me to have a full blown breakdown. As several dreams were coming true and new possibilities presented themselves instead of celebrating I panicked and wondered if deserved them and whether or not I was enough woman to follow through and live what I had dreamed. Instead of celebrating, I often found myself breaking down in tears as I prepared to leave my house to step into the bigger role that life now had for me. In those moments of panic and tears, I had to look forward and tell myself that I could do what was now expected of me and that I did deserve these things. It was in these moments that I realized that I might have been hiding behind my depression before.

Hiding behind depression? There was a time when irrational thoughts and emotions paralyzed me, causing me to quit on everything that I really wanted. Completely quitting life often felt so right that I believed that I belonged to a certain troubled group of people for which suicide is the only option. For this troubled group it wasn’t a question of whether they would commit suicide or not but a question of when they would. It just seemed better to figure out when was the perfect time to quit on myself than to feel my emotions or fully listen to my own negative thoughts. Sounds insane doesn’t it?

All the same negative thoughts and feelings of despair that had plagued me since forever were with me as my dreams came true. Sadness still filled my soul no matter what was going right or wrong, but this time around instead of backing down, quitting or not following through I allowed myself to fully experience my emotions and sit with the negative thoughts. I would not be the shadow version of me that wasn’t strong enough to live through the self-hate.

My moods do not control my life anymore, even when I am fully in my feelings I am in control of my actions.

I wasn’t hiding behind depression. What I was doing was not allowing myself to sit in my feelings or listen to the awful thoughts that I had. When depression set in I would retreat into the darkness and not work through my emotions or thoughts. I had to redefine what self-love was for myself because sometime ago somewhere someone had convinced me that if I really loved myself I would not allow myself to have negative thoughts. They were wrong! At the age of thirty-five, I learned that the fastest way towards happiness sometimes is through the sadness. Making it through the negative thoughts and terrible feelings is how I reach joy.

It is in my greatest moments that I am often fighting sadness the most. It is in my saddest moments that I reaffirm my commitment to living. These things are true for me now yet I know that for many there often seems to be no better option than suicide.

As I decided, that even though I would always have moments of depression I wouldn’t allow myself to suffer from it anymore, people I love started to tell me about friends that recently “suddenly and unexpectedly” had committed suicide.

Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Committed. Suicide.

It might seem sudden or unexpected to the people on the outside but to many of the people that follow through with suicide it was a long time coming.

Some of these people were the same people that when they expressed their feelings of sadness or irrational thoughts of unworthiness their friends responded with, “You can’t be depressed. You have a great life.”

You cannot see the internal struggle that those that are part of the group that believe suicide will be their tragic ending.

You cannot see anyone’s inner struggle but you can be vocal about how you work through your negative emotions and irrational thoughts to more friends so they can see that everyone experiences these things.

My emotional truths…

Never imagined the emotional strength it takes to step into the big stilettos that I always dreamed life would have for me someday.
Having much needed breakdowns are a part of realizing that I’ve always been enough and that I do deserve to live the life I’ve dreamed.
Breaking up with depression has me in an extreme cloud of sadness as I walk away from it. I don’t need/want to hide behind depression anymore.
I definitely have a blessed life filled with a lot of happiness but I will always have to battle depression and mental illness.

Share your emotional truths with those you love!

Lidia-Anain signature

Jun

20

my sexual liberation: an erotic quasi reality

diary / sex love joy archives

I couldn’t sleep at all last night so instead I started writing an erotic story. This story is very much a fantasy but also journals my personal experiences and sexual liberation that was made easier because of the writings of Betty Dodson, Carol Queen, Dossie Easton, Susie Bright, Violet Blue and Tristan Taormino (in order of appearance).

The story starts like this…

I spent hours tossing and turning in bed next to my husband who was snoring. It was one of those late spring East Bay nights that was ideal for sleeping with the windows open. An ever so slight cool breeze awakened my skin, as I was struggling to grab hold of fleeting sultry thoughts to use as fodder for the masturbation happening underneath our sheets. Frustrated I stopped. Settling into the heaviness of my inability to bring myself to orgasm I finally drifted off to sleep.

Jun

12

fourteen years of marriage

diary / love & relationships / sex love joy archives

On June 12, 1998 at around 10:30pm my love and I got married at the Chapel of the Bells in South Lake Tahoe, California, after only 45 days of knowing one another. We had only kissed once and had never had sex before we said our marriage vows. Our marriage began as our way of moving off base so we could hold on to what we could feel was growing between us. Our marriage was something we treated lightly during the first few months; we were friends playing house.

By October 31, 1998 it had become extremely clear that there was something powerfully healing that bonded us on top of the easy friendship that filled our lives with laughter and our sexual attraction. As time passed, circumstances beyond our control and many of the choices we made together and as individuals tested our marriage; we passed test after test. Passing these many tests over the last fourteen years has etched different dates in our memory that mean to us just as much as our wedding anniversary and October 31, 1998.

A lot of people look at the love we now share, a love that is stronger now than ever before, a love that is filled with hope, a love that is vibrant and shiny and easy and comfortable and everything that many people want and these people say…

You’re so lucky!

Well, we are lucky that at the young age of 21 we against all strange odds were paired up to clean dorms together for a week. We are lucky that we both agreed to do the craziest dumbest smart thing in the world by marrying one another just 45 days later. We are lucky that the Celestial Planning Committee made it so that we were together on October 31, 1998 so that we could realize that an easy friendship and laughter meant more to us than anything else at that time (and it still does). We are lucky in many regards but luck has never been what has kept us together.

May

03

“caught” in the act – a masturbation story

diary / orgasm & pleasure / sex & sexuality / sex love joy archives

I don’t remember the exact day that I started exploring my sexuality through masturbation as a child but I do remember the first time I was “caught” in the act. This is the story of how at the age of six I learned what adults thought about masturbation. But before I tell you exactly how that happened I think I should tell you more about my masturbation history.

At the age of four or five, I had discovered that humping my teddy bears, pillows and even my fist not only made my little girl bits feel good but after doing it long enough a calm feeling of relief and peace would soothe me unlike anything else. This was an activity that I would do on rare occasions and always in private (in bed before falling asleep); this changed when I became a latchkey kid.

My parents both worked full time and although they had daycare for my baby brother they couldn’t afford to pay our neighbor that watched him to also watch me after school. At the age of five I was alone at home for several hours each afternoon with nothing but a television with very bad antenna reception to keep me entertained. I quickly found myself with a lot of time to explore my body between the time that the afternoon sitcoms went off and when my parents got back with my little brother. Masturbation became an almost everyday afternoon activity for little Lidia.

Apr

25

the sexual memory i tried forgetting: victim?! survivor?! neither!?

diary / sex & sexuality / sex love joy archives

This post is part three of a story that began here.

This story is about how a guy I did not know had sex with me without my permission and I didn’t say anything.

In this post you’ll get to read about how I felt and approached sex after.

***

victim?! survivor?! neither!?

A little over sixteen years ago, I had an experience that I carried with me for a very long time before I finally processed it.

I had taken a shower after he raped me but as my tears ran down my body cleaning my body better than soap and water ever could, my mind decided to put the experience into that secret place so that I could forget and move on. After that shower, I never thought about what happened, I never considered myself a victim, I much less would have thought of myself as a survivor. I didn’t want to think about it; I wanted to get back to being the sexual woman that had never had a bad sexual experience not even in her worst relationship.

It wasn’t until a little over a year ago, when someone commented on a piece I wrote about choking and rough sex that I realized how my mind had chosen to process this experience that from what I knew most women would react differently to. When the person left the comment she said that as someone that was a survivor of sexual abuse that she didn’t understand how women could enjoy rough sex my response to her comment reactivated the memory of this experience.

Mar

23

the sexual memory i tried forgetting: non-consensual sex

diary / sex & sexuality / sex love joy archives

This post is part two of a story that began here.

This story is about how a guy I did not know had sex with me without my permission and I didn’t say anything.

In this post you’ll get to read about how I woke up from a drunken stupor to find an unknown man having non-consensual sex with me, what I did about it and what happened immediately after.

All names except my own have been changed.

***

non-consensual sex

I had gone to sleep with my head resting on a friend’s shoulder and I had woken up on a strange couch with an even stranger man with his penis inside of me. Of course a man that doesn’t care enough to wake up the woman he wants to have sex with to ask if she wants it too wouldn’t take the time to pull panties off. It had been a combination of panties rubbing on my inner labia and pain in my vagina that had woken me up.

At first I thought I was having an awful nightmare and I tried to tell myself to wake up. I did wake up more but the nightmare wasn’t going away. There he still was on top of me, inside of me and thrusting away. I pulled up as much as I could to look around him and I saw that there were three other men and some woman I didn’t know not too far from us on another couch. I could hear the T.V. they were watching. I could also hear Jasmine’s voice, giggles and moans in the distance.

At first when I woke up I thought about fighting him but it was after I saw other people in the room (especially other men) that I decided to not fight. I had no idea where I was, who these people were and no idea what they would do to me if I fought this man.

Everything in my body wanted to fight. Everything in my body told me to fight so I could get free, run out the door and call for help. Everything in my body told me to scratch his face, dig my nails into his eyes then begin punching with all the strength I could muster. Everything said fight but in the back of my mind as quickly as the screams to fight had started I heard a voice telling me to just be still.

14

Swimming with Hope in an ocean of tears,

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18

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Fifteen Books I am Lusting!

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