If you have not yet read my piece in Issue 7 of SISU Magazine “Lawful Bodies” titled Sex Is An Adventure, do so now. I’ll wait.

Although the article itself is interesting, I feel that the story leading up to the article, and what has come from it, is even more intriguing. Since, tomorrow, I will be interviewed by the Sex Outside Podcast, it seems like a good time to reflect on the journey to this very exciting milestone.

Last February, I found myself in the most uncomfortable conversation of my life. Not the worse, or the most heartbreaking, but simply uncomfortable. I felt more shame in that office and the hours and days following than I have in any other point of my life. Yes, I made some mistakes. Also, I am forever affected by those hours and days.

I am choosing to be vague here. I want to share some emotions I was experiencing to see if any of you have felt the same way at some point. Most powerfully, I felt judgement. I felt that my education around sexuality and my openness in talking about the topic, using scientific terms, was perceived as me being immoral. Honestly, I cannot even pull out all the emotions and words from this, even when I am trying to.

My initial reaction was to bottle it all up. “Okay, Natasha, no more talking about sex. Zip it up. Hide it away. Right then and there I felt the urge to change who I was. To pretend that I did not like educating others and having open conversations so we can all have a more enjoyable and safer sex life. I wanted to reverse the years of education, and the following years of advocacy.

I was embarrassed. Ashamed. I felt everyone looked at me different. I felt I had lost my friends, my colleagues, my community. I felt alone. Lost. Scared. Uncomfortable. And I realized I made other people feel uncomfortable and that was even worse. My goals, my intentions, my passion is the opposite. I strive to make everyone more comfortable with the topic, usually just through leading by example. That day, I learned that is not always a good method. No matter if it worked well in the past.

After a few days of hiding out, crying, questioning, I came to some new feelings. Feelings on an entirely different perspective. Rather than hide away, keep it all inside, forget about who I am, I realized I could do the opposite. All I needed was to find the right platform and the right audience.

There are people out there that want to be invited into open conversations around sex. There are people out there that want to ask questions. There are people out there that want to learn, and share, and grow. There are people who are curious, confused, alone. And, there are magazines, and podcasts, that want to help get those stories out to those people.

When my pitch for SISU Magazine was accepted, it confirmed that my hypothesis was 100% correct. While writing the article I found it a bit comical that, due to Covid taking away some other opportunities, my first print published article was going to be about sex. However, the more I reflected on this, the more I realized this was far more inline with my career trajectory since college than writing about adventure and grief.

I was a sexpert, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, writing for the fantastic Sex Info Online, not only creating articles from scratch, but also answering questions from people around the world. These were my first writing pieces that ever were consumed by an audience. Moreover, I majored in Sociology, specializing in Human Sexuality and Gender. When I first moved to Lake Tahoe and joined Tahoe Toastmasters, my best speech performance was about sex education.

In the end, my article morphed from being more focused on some of the ludicrousness of sex education, based off that speech I performed multiple times, to being more similar to all my other pieces. I used adventure to navigate through something challenging. Just like I have with grief and other mental health struggles, I used the outdoors as a metaphor to make sex feel less scary and more approachable.

Now 10 months since I pitched the article, and five since it was published, I’ve had pitches accepted by Powder Magazine, Tahoe Quarterly, and more, and, I’ve been invited to be interviewed on two different podcasts specifically because of that article.

Tomorrow, is my second interview, and the one I am most excited and nervous about. Why? Because talking about sex is challenging, even for me. But, like any adventurer, I love a good challenge.