It was raining all day – cold, grey, unpleasant rain and the day was just as bleak as the weather. I went to a bookshop to look for a gift for a child’s birthday and instead bought a book for myself. It felt like the right moment. It felt like long time coming.

I am following interconnected threads: the realisation that although I have left evangelical movement long time ago, I have never managed to shed off the evangelical lens. I keep approaching such fundamental themes as spirituality, body, sex, relationships from that narrow and binary point of view. For example, I have never read the Bible without considering it to be God’s word. I have always seen my body and my sexuality through the lens of the purity culture. Even worse, I see my body and my sexuality through the double lens of purity culture and body shaming. My friends and I were in our late twenties when we started breaking free from evangelicalism and experimenting with dating, relationships and sex. Yet, now I realize that we weren’t really free: even in our own eyes, we were not just experimenting, we were sinning.

In my late twenties, I was extremely inexperienced, even dim in everything that concerned sex, sexuality, sexual orientation and relationships. What’s worse, I couldn’t share this fact with anybody or seek guidance, because I was ashamed of my own naïveté – I was a decade too late. I realize now that all my early (in terms of experience, not age) sexual experiences were non-consensual and violated my boundaries. I have never had a chance to experience, explore, to ask myself what I like or to even admit the existence of my sensual side. I have definitely never had a chance to connect my sensuality to the other parts of my personality: my fierce intellect, my insatiable desire to learn, my love of hard work, my ambitions. It was last year during the Spring Café at the Edge of the World that the disconnect became impossible to ignore: I was stimulated intellectually, but when we were asked to engage in any kind of bodily experience I froze in fear. Dancing, grimacing, wearing accessories, putting on lipstick – everything felt terrifying. It is through unraveling the threads of possible religious and sexual trauma that I came to this point: I need to be able to face and understand the past and through this I need to create a possibility of a liberated future for myself.

I need therapy. Somatic therapy seems like a good choice, although I don’t fully understand what it means.

I need to shift the narrative about desire, sex, sensuality and purpose to the point when it’s no longer dominated by shame and puritanism.

I want to try something: for the next several weeks, at least, I will be asking myself: what brings me joy, what brings me pleasure and what I desire.

I will remember that just because things are the way they are now, they don’t have to stay this way. Other ways are possible.