Celibacy
An Orientation, Safety, and Learning Myself
Hi, Hello, Friends! 🤓
2026 is almost here… Wild.
I took a nice pause on publishing and have really just been enjoying and living my beautiful life.
I’ve come to love a pause and the silence in the pause. The irony with that is not lost on me.
So let’s jump right in!
There are large memory gaps in my childhood.
There are also memories I cannot go to at all because they are too deeply unsafe.
And there are others that, even with that being true, I know still need help being reprocessed because of the trauma that rippled outward.
Before I started psychotherapy at the beginning of this year, I would sometimes have moments where suppressed memories surfaced. But I couldn’t actually go into them. Instead, I would collapse into flooded emotions, often with outward physical reactions.
I would have full nervous system episodes.
Flooded clusters of reactions.
Complete nervous system shutdown.
A sentence returned to me recently:
“We support you, of course, but we also want to be honest and make sure you know that this will probably mean you’ll have a harder life in some ways.”
That is what my parents told me when I openly shared that I was attracted to girls.
From there, I started journaling about where else shame showed up in my family system around the orientation of being “gay.”
Four more distinct memories surfaced.
On my biological father’s side of the family, I grew up visiting his mom (my Granny) and my two great uncles. During one visit, I was in the kitchen listening to Melissa Etheridge, belting every word and loving it. My Granny and my two great uncles asked me what I thought about her, and I went on a long rant about how much I loved her music.
Then they asked what I thought about her being a lesbian.
At the time, I didn’t really know what that meant or what I was supposed to think about it. It didn’t stir anything negative, so I flippantly said I didn’t care one bit. Because I didn’t. And I couldn’t understand why the question mattered.
Years later, as an older teenager, I was finally told that only one of those two great uncles was my Granny’s brother. The other was his husband.
My brother and I are twelve years apart.
I can’t remember exactly who told me explicitly that my brother was gay.
I believe it was my older sister.
But just like my other family system, my parents intentionally hid that my brother was gay until I was much older.
And looking back… of course it was obvious in both situations.
The last memory that surfaced in my journaling was about the church my parents attended while growing up, where they also served in leadership. You could, technically, “be gay,” but you couldn’t serve in leadership or in certain capacities.
I learned early that belonging came with conditions, and that love required careful management of what parts of yourself were allowed to show.
In a family system where being yourself isn’t safe in order to be loved, you become what is safe.
It has taken my whole life to realize how much that pattern extended into my body.
I was also taught, without fully realizing how deeply tethered I was to it, that sex came with marriage as the next step attached to it. That intimacy created obligation.
That desire meant responsibility. That once you crossed certain lines, you were supposed to keep going forward, whether your body wanted to or not.
A lot of that came from religion.
A lot of it came from trauma.
A lot of it came from learning very early that safety was conditional and love required adaptation.
I’m still learning that I didn’t know how to separate attraction from obligation.
I didn’t know how to separate desire from survival.
I didn’t know how to pause long enough to hear myself.
I’ve been celibate for most of this year. It started because of complications from surgeries related to cervical cancer, which coincided with my separation from my husband. Eventually, the reality set in that our separation wasn’t ending. Regardless of what I wanted. Regardless of the promises that weren’t kept.
I had to accept reality.
Then, I was medically cleared to have sex again if I wanted.
Suddenly, I didn’t want to.
I wasn’t choosing celibacy to be pure.
I wasn’t choosing celibacy to wait for my husband.
I chose it because my nervous system needed space.
I needed my body to stop bracing.
I needed to understand why urgency had always felt like chemistry.
Celibacy allowed me to be safe and slow down and orient myself enough so I could land on my two feet and begin to step into myself authentically.
What became clear in that quiet genuinely surprised me.
What surprised me wasn’t that I’m queer. I’ve known for a long time that I’m not “straight”.
What surprised me was how clearly my orientation began to point once safety within me came first.
When I let myself slow down enough to actually listen, it became obvious that my attraction to women has always been there. It just lived in the background. Joked about. Softened. Kept hypothetical. Put somewhere in the future so it didn’t disrupt the present.
With women, my body feels calmer. I feel less pressure to perform or prove anything. Connection feels mutual rather than earned. I don’t feel like I have to contort myself into something palatable enough to be wanted.
That difference matters greatly to me.
I’m orienting toward women not because I’m trying to reject men, but because this is where my body feels grounded. This is where attraction feels warm instead of activating. This is where desire doesn’t require urgency to justify itself.
Queerness, and that identity or label if you will, feels wholly and completely me. It feels as though it takes all that I am and says, this is warm, this is true.
This wasn’t a sudden realization.
It wasn’t a performance.
It wasn’t something new.
It was something unnamed in me finally allowed to exist without being managed.
I grew up, during my most impressionable years, in a world where queerness could maybe be acknowledged, but not embodied. Where it could be tolerated, but not safely chosen. Where it could exist quietly, as long as it didn’t lead, disrupt, or ask too much.
So I learned to keep it theoretical.
I learned to joke about it.
I learned to place it somewhere in the future or soften it into abstraction.
I learned that bisexuality was tolerated.
I also learned that if I had sex with someone, I was supposed to marry them — or at least move toward that outcome. That staying still was failure. That choosing myself was selfish.
Celibacy interrupted that script.
I began to see how much of my past attraction was shaped by safety-seeking and how much was shaped by expectation. I saw how often I confused being chosen with being grounded. I noticed how rarely I had asked what felt whole instead of what felt familiar.
When I imagine dating men again, or sleeping with men again, my body reacts.
There’s a familiar tightening. A bracing. A sense that I need to prepare myself to be chosen, to manage someone else’s expectations, to stay regulated and perfect enough to be desirable.
Celibacy interrupted the pattern long enough for me to see it clearly.
I’m not closing a door forever. I’m listening to what my nervous system is saying right now. And right now, it’s telling me that attraction rooted in safety feels different than attraction rooted in survival.
I’m not rushing to define this.
I’m not trying to arrive anywhere.
I’m orienting out loud where I’ve always been.
I’m letting my body and my beliefs be in the same room.
I’m letting attraction exist without turning it into obligation.
I’m letting truth feel warm instead of defended.
I am fully and authentically me.
I am not my past.
I am the story.
I choose to keep writing.
💌 Thank you for meeting me here, friends!
A la Luna, 🌙
Lauren 🪻🍀
🌻 Hi, Hello, Friends 🤓
I have been working on a creative little project over at [freckledlore.com]
She is a work-in-progress just like I am. I hope to meet you there. 🤓