reclaim your pleasure

Most of the women I work with look successful from the outside and feel half-numb on the inside. I know that gap from the inside, because I lived in it for a decade.

On paper, I had everything I was supposed to want — the degrees, the six-figure career in higher education, the promotions, the accolades. Underneath it, I was exhausted and disconnected, pouring into everyone but myself.

For a long time, I told myself that was just what success cost and that the tiredness and the numbness were the price of doing well. So I kept performing, kept achieving, and kept quietly drifting further from my own body. I didn’t even have the words for what was missing. Until one night, it found me.

I was lying there after really good sex, and my own thought stopped me cold: why does he know my body better than I do? And why don’t I ask for what I really want in all areas of my life?  Then I realized that I had performed achievement flawlessly for years and never once claimed my own pleasure, my own body, or my own right to feel fully alive. That was the moment I started changing my life.

So I started making bold requests and going after my desires — but not all at once. It started small, with tiny, terrifying asks. Signing up for a 30-day yoga training. Taking a four-month sabbatical. Requesting FMLA to protect my mental health. Leaving work early, every day, to put myself first. Each one felt enormous, because I’d spent a career putting my own wants last — and every time I honored one, the next got a little less scary.

Until the biggest one. When I finally got honest with myself, my husband and I didn’t just leave the career — we left the country. We moved to Playa del Carmen and gave ourselves the two things I’d never allowed myself: time, and space to feel. Our move was even featured in We Quit America by Dr. Yanique Redwood and Ronnie Galvin — a book about Black people choosing to build freer, fuller lives beyond the borders of a country that was wearing us down; my five-page chapter begins on page 204.

Today my mornings start slow, and I spend my days teaching women what took me two decades to learn — that pleasure isn’t the reward you earn once the work is done. It’s the medicine. And it’s a skill you can build back — one honored desire at a time.