Sex, Shame, and Storytelling: How Erotica Changed My Life

If you told me a few years ago that I'd write a book filled with steamy scenes and intimate longing, I probably would have laughed nervously. My bookshelf was packed with psychological thrillers, memoirs, and self-help books. You know, the kind that makes you question your sanity or try to fix your inner child.

Erotica wasn’t even on my radar. It felt... not for me. Anything overtly sexy felt off-limits, foreign, or uncomfortable. Like watching a sex scene with your parents uncomfortable. And no one wants to feel like that.

I didn’t grow up in an environment where sex was talked about openly, let alone celebrated. Combine that with the trauma I carried, and the idea of reading erotica felt almost shameful. Like something I wasn’t allowed to touch, let alone write.

As a survivor of sexual assault, sex was never just sex. It’s been a complicated relationship that included dark shadows and echoes. It was tangled with fear, confusion, and pain. It became something I didn’t know how to hold anymore.

I’ve hated it.

I’ve craved it.

I’ve used it to feel seen and wanted. (Something that is still a trigger to this day, and I am working through.)

I’ve avoided it to feel safe.

I’ve felt like it was something that could either take more pieces of me away or maybe, just maybe, start to heal some of the ones already broken. Imagine standing at the edge of a mountain. One part of you aching to fly, the other terrified to fall. That’s what sex became for me. A battlefield of want and withdrawal.

I was confused. Torn between feeling like I didn’t deserve good sex, or any sex at all, and believing that if I gave it away freely, it wouldn’t matter as much when I was just giving it to strangers. It was more about survival than anything else.

And that’s why writing erotica became something I never expected: a form of reclamation.

WRITING AN EROTICA BOOK TO RECLAIM MY POWER

Then came Fran Bushe’s book My Broken Vagina, and suddenly, I saw myself on the page. I didn’t understand everything that she wrote about because we didn’t have the same experiences, but Fran encouraged women to write their own erotica. Not for the world, but for themselves. Just to see what it felt like to name your desires out loud.

So I tried it.

I wrote not just sex, but longing, tension, and truth. I wrote characters who leaned in and asked for more because I wasn’t that woman, and I so desperately wanted to be. I wrote about healing through intimacy. And for the first time, I didn’t feel broken. I felt honest and hopeful that I could have the strength that my characters did.

Erotica, for me, isn’t just about steamy scenes. It’s about letting a woman like me take up space in a world that often tries to silence her. It is about the woman knowing what she wants and not being afraid to ask for it, AND having a lover give it to her because he wants to and enjoys it.

When a woman knows what she wants, and she gets it, not through coercion but mutual passion, it’s a taking back of power. It’s choosing instead of being chosen.

It’s about showing a body that has known trauma that it can also know pleasure.

It’s about creating a character who is messy, real, healing, and still worthy of love and lust.

I didn’t just write sex scenes. I wrote emotional truth into physical intimacy. I let my characters navigate the same struggles I did: shame, fear, desire, numbness, longing, resistance, surrender.

THE EMOTIONAL TRUTH BEHIND THE SCENES OF MY EROTICA BOOKS

My characters wrestled with the same ghosts I did. Flashbacks, shame, and insecurity. But they also let themselves feel. That was the hardest part: not censoring the want or the need that they were feeling.

They were layered and real. Survivors. Lovers. People with scars and desires. People who were terrified of being touched but longed to be held.

I hid my truth inside their stories. And in doing so, I found freedom.

Here’s the truth no one talks about enough…

Erotica can be empowering because it lets us name what we want. Not what we were told to want. Not what someone else demanded. But what we want, in our bodies, our hearts, our fantasies.

It lets us explore desire without shame, reclaim our sensuality on our own terms, and write new stories about pleasure that don’t begin with pain.

EROTICA AS EMPOWERMENT FOR SURVIVORS

Instead of stories where sex equals pain, I wrote ones where sex equals healing. Where consent is sexy. Where communication is foreplay.

Shame thrives in silence. Erotica gave me a megaphone. Wanting doesn’t make you broken. It makes you alive. And that’s a feeling worth fighting for.

It can help survivors see themselves in a light that isn't dimmed by trauma.

It can be a way of saying, "I am still whole. I am still worthy. I get to feel good again."

I didn’t expect erotica to heal me, but somehow, it did.

It gave me the courage to feel again.

To love again.

To trust myself with my own body again.

WHY MORE WOMEN SHOULD WRITE EROTICA

Forget publishing. Forget perfection. Just try writing a scene that turns you on. You might learn something powerful about yourself.

Writing erotica helped me return to my body, not as a danger zone, but as home. We’ve been told to be modest, quiet, and small. Erotica lets us be wild, loud, and unapologetically turned on. Check out my current erotica book, Bound By Desire.

For years, I thought that sex was something that women needed to stay quiet about. That the desires I had were wrong. Instead, every word I wrote was like stitching a piece of myself back together. Because feeling pleasure again, after trauma, isn’t just sexy. It’s sacred.

Writing erotica stories became a love letter to myself. Not only that, but it became a love letter to my husband. 

If you’ve ever felt shame around desire or feared your own story was too broken for passion, let me tell you: you’re not too much, and you’re not too far gone.

Sometimes the sexiest stories are the ones where we come back to ourselves.