I have been embarking of my own journey of liberation, using the erotic (as Audre Lorde defines it) as a measure of aliveness. Introduced to Lorde's essay, "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" in 2024. I listened to it and read it while on sabbatical in the Maldives. I was a woman at ease, surrounded by the beauty and seduction of the Indian Ocean.
I immediately understood that essay was for me, Lorde was pointing to not just an idea, but a measure, the erotic as a measure and standard of aliveness. And from that time on, I've been in pursuit of the erotic. I wanted to feel it's power deep within my body and to have the knowing Lorde spoke about.
Fast forward to exactly two years later. Two years into this embodied experimental journey of aliveness, of my pursuit of the erotic, I feel transformed, open, and tender.
Underneath the tenderness, is in part, grief.
Lorde wrote:
“In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept the powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”
And this is where the source of the grief lives. Because my work, my realization of the erotic has been embodied, experimental. Meaning, I haven't just been reading about it, I've been living it, reaching for it, putting Lorde's words into practice. And lo and behold, I've had amazing experiences, some felt surreal even. Experiences that arrived from me choosing my erotic desires, leaning into play and pleasure.
I have been collecting lived evidence. I have been moving through France more freely, putting down armor, experiencing my body differently, receiving, buying flowers for my room, allowing beauty and sensuality to matter, and noticing what happens when people encounter you without trying to reduce me. All these things have made me feel so alive.
And my mind now has new evidence of what is possible and available to me. It has counter-evidence that the things I've experienced that have not been for my greatest good is not all there is.
And this is where the grief crept in.
But corrective experience has a cruel little underside: the better experience reveals that the poorer experience was not the only thing possible. Receiving demonstrates how much labor I normally carry. Generous treatment exposes previous ungenerosity. Ease reveals the accumulated cost of strain. Being met well provokes anger about all the times I was expected to accept being met badly....horribly actually.
I also grieve how I contorted myself not to accept bad treatment but to endure it, to avoid it, to create workarounds. I grieve all the baggage I carried that was never mine. And I'm angry at the people who created these conditions around me. I've also had to witness the anger at myself for allowing these things and for not moving/leaving certain places, people and situations sooner.
All the counter-evidence I have now, that could only come from experiencing not just intellectualizing created a huge wave of revelation and emotion.
Using Lorde’s erotic is powerful because it means that I am not defining healing merely as reduced suffering. I am using aliveness as the measure. The question becomes more than “Can I function without pain?” It becomes:
“How much vitality, beauty, pleasure, depth, and rightness can my life hold?”
That is a different question and holds so much more than just harm reduction.
The anger, the grief, the pain had been so intense at one point that I wanted to quit the experiment. It has been so revealing, exposing what was already there but under the surface. Audre didn't warn about this part or maybe she did but just skipped over the detail!
“But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.”
Perhaps, what I've experienced is part of the fear she mentioned. The fear of recognizing what happened was not inevitable, it was the circumstance of environment, of systems, of people. But there was more and better outside of the experiences I encountered. And because I'd normalized such things, my positionality was to fight, to endure not to choose other, not explore possibilities. I mean, I understand to do that now of course. But oh, how I wished I knew this at 15 or at 25.
And I also fear, I've reached the point of no return. How can you know what it is like to feel so deeply alive, so deeply erotic and turn away from it? How can I expect anything less going forward. It would be painful to live a life that isn't deeply and fully in touch with the erotic. And of course, Lorde knew this. She wrote:
“For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.”
In the place of tenderness and grief and anger, I remember the song "Seja gentil (com você)" (be gentle with yourself). I did not know what I did not know. I've always done the best I could with what I had available. And while I may have come to the embodiment of the erotic a little later, at least I am here.
“But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.”
― Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power