My confession: I learned to desire myself every night

There are things a woman only dares to write when she’s sure nobody is going to make a face at the name. That’s why I changed mine. Call me Mariana, I’m a little over twenty, and I live alone in a small apartment in the city, the kind where you can hear the neighbor opening the fridge. This isn’t a story I made up. It’s a confession, and my hand trembles a little as I type it.

For a long time, I found it hard to look at myself in the mirror. I’m not what magazines call pretty: I’m short, I have a softer body than I’d like, and every morning I felt that the face staring back at me looked more tired than the day before. Anxiety, lack of discipline, sleepless nights... all of it piled up on my skin. I looked at myself and all I could see was how little I had loved myself.

What I’m going to tell you is how, without looking for it, I started turning that story around. And it began, strangely enough, with a package that arrived at my door wrapped in anonymous cardboard.

***

I bought it in an insomnia-fueled dawn, hidden behind the phone screen, my heart pounding as if I were doing something forbidden. A vibrator. Not one of the classic ones, but one with suction for the clitoris, the kind that promises in tiny letters what you don’t dare ask for out loud. It took me three days to press the buy button. Another four for it to arrive. And when I had it in my hand, I left it in the nightstand drawer for a whole week, glancing at it sideways like someone living with a secret.

The first night I dared, I turned off all the lights. I was embarrassed even with myself. I lay down, switched it on at the lowest setting, and the soft buzz seemed scandalous in the silence of the apartment.

I wasn’t expecting much. I suppose I expected the usual: something warm, quick, a chore to release tension before sleep.

I was completely wrong.

As soon as I placed it there, my whole body went on alert. It wasn’t the rough friction of my fingers rushing in other times; it was a rhythmic, patient suction that seemed to read what I needed before I knew it myself. I let out my breath slowly. My hips lifted without my realizing it. And for the first time in a long while, I stopped thinking about how I looked and started thinking about how I felt.

I closed my eyes. The sheet clung to my damp back. I turned it up a level. Then another. The tension gathered in a precise, hot point that throbbed harder and harder, until a sound slipped out of my throat that I didn’t even recognize as mine.

This is me. This body I criticized so much is capable of this.

When I came, I arched over the mattress and had to yank the toy away at once: my clit was so sensitive that the slightest touch was too much. I stayed there trembling, my breathing ragged, laughing to myself in the dark. Not from shame. From relief. From a kind of tenderness toward myself I hadn’t felt in years.

***

From that night on, something changed. Not magically, not overnight. I still had gray days, I still fought with the mirror. But I discovered I had my own territory, one where nobody judged me, where my body wasn’t a problem to be solved but a source of pleasure that belonged to me and nobody else.

I started giving myself time. Taking long showers beforehand, putting on a lingerie set I had kept with the tag still on since a birthday, bought for a version of me who believed she didn’t deserve to wear it. One night I put it on. Just for me. I looked at myself in the wardrobe mirror with the light low, and for once I didn’t search for flaws. I saw wide hips, a neckline, a mouth slightly open. I liked myself. I really liked myself.

I tried the second toy a week later, another suction toy I ordered with less guilt than the first. I learned to combine them, to alternate the rhythm, to make myself wait. I discovered that pleasure is built with patience too, that postponing it makes it more intense. That I could take myself to the edge and stop, and come back, and stop again, until orgasm reached me like a wave that wouldn’t even let me breathe.

And I also discovered that in those moments my head filled with images I didn’t dare confess in daylight.

***

The one that came back the most was a woman. I’ll call her Lucía, though that isn’t her real name either.

I met her at the café where I sometimes stop to read. She works the midday shift, has an easy laugh and hands I found myself staring at longer than I should have the first time she handed me the little cup. Nothing happened between us. Just counter chatter, a couple of jokes, the brush of fingers when she gave me my change. But something about her stayed inside me.

I had never been with a girl. The idea always gave me a mix of curiosity and fear, like standing at the edge of a pool not knowing if the water is cold. But in the dark, with the buzz between my legs, the fear disappeared and only curiosity remained, lit up and without brakes.

I imagined her walking into my apartment without me having to explain anything. I imagined her hands, the ones I had looked at so much, slowly tracing me over the lingerie I now actually dared to wear. I imagined her telling me in my ear what I never believed anyone would think about me.

—Don’t cover yourself —she said in my head, moving away the hand I instinctively wanted to use to hide myself—. I want to see all of you.

And in the fantasy I obeyed her. I let her look at me. I let her mouth move down my neck, over the neckline, let her fingers find the path I already knew by heart. Only this time they weren’t mine or a toy’s: they were hers, warm, curious, learning me.

The toy did its part while my imagination did the rest. I pictured her kneeling between my legs, taking her time, looking up at me with those eyes that undid me at the café. I pictured the heat of her tongue replacing the device’s suction, the weight of her body on mine, the way she would say my name.

One day. Maybe one day I’ll gather the courage and ask her if she wants coffee away from the counter.

That night I finished thinking about her and screamed into the pillow so the neighbor wouldn’t hear me. Then I lay on my back for a long while, with the lingerie still half on, smiling up at the dark ceiling.

***

I know this isn’t some grand passion story like the ones you read out there. There’s no lover showing up at three in the morning, no clandestine meeting in a hotel. There’s a woman alone in a small apartment, slowly learning not to be afraid of herself. But for me it’s the biggest confession I have to make, because for years I didn’t even believe I deserved my own desire.

I miss having someone, I won’t lie. I miss the weight of another body, a mouth that isn’t mine against my skin. Sometimes the fear of responsibility, of complicating my life, of opening myself up to someone who might leave later, wins, and I stay where I am, safe among my sheets and my toys. But it’s no longer the same confinement as before. Now it’s a choice, not a sentence.

Something I understood in these months of discovering myself: nobody is going to love you for you until you dare to love yourself first. And loving yourself, I found, is this too. It’s giving yourself pleasure without guilt. It’s putting on lingerie for yourself. It’s accepting that the body you have is the only one you’re going to inhabit, and that it deserves to be touched with desire, not resignation.

I still have a long way to go. There are still mornings when the mirror wins the fight. But now I have nights that are only mine, where I learned to desire myself, and nobody can take that away from me.

The next time I pass by the café, maybe I’ll dare. Maybe I’ll ask Lucía if one afternoon she’d like to sit on this side of the counter. And if she says yes, I won’t arrive trembling with insecurity anymore. I’ll arrive finally knowing what I’m worth between the sheets.

Thank you for reading me. For listening, even in silence, to this confession I never dared say out loud.