The Diary I Wrote When I Stopped Being Afraid of Myself

Dear diary:

I’ve decided to do it. I don’t know why I’m writing this as if it were a solemn declaration, but here goes: I’m going to explore anal sex. Not out of prurience, or not only that. I’ve gone three months without writing a decent line, my therapist insists that I need to «reclaim my body through courage,» and my last partner said that my body was emotionally tense. They’re both somewhat right.

My name is Renata, I’m thirty-seven years old, and until this week I had never looked that part of myself straight in the face. I bought a beginner’s kit with a ridiculous name, three toys of increasing sizes, a dragon-fruit-scented lubricant, and a pamphlet signed by someone called «Anita Puerta,» which I don’t know if it’s a pseudonym or a threat.

I’m nervous. Also a little excited.

***

Day 3. Today I tried self-exploration. I put on soft music, lit a sandalwood candle, sat in front of the mirror, and looked at myself with an attention I’d never devoted to anything before. I thought: «Hello. We’ve never talked. I suppose we’re going to get intimate.»

I breathed. I worked up my nerve. I got on all fours on the rug, my ass pointed at the mirror, and spread my cheeks with both hands. There it was, that little puckered eye I’d ignored for thirty-seven years. Pink, wrinkled, shy. I put lubricant on my middle finger and ran it over the surface, drawing slow circles around the hole. My first reaction was a strange, almost electric tickle. I pushed in barely half a centimeter and froze as if I were defusing a bomb. My sphincter clenched shut like a Swiss safe. Zero pleasure, lots of internal dialogue.

I persisted. I lubricated myself again, this time with more, until my finger gleamed as if it had been dipped in oil, and tried again, breathing through my mouth as I pushed, just as Bea had explained. I felt the ring give a millimeter, then another, until the fingertip sank all the way in. A brief burn, a twinge, and then a strange warmth. I stayed still, my finger buried in my own ass, looking at myself in the mirror with a mixture of astonishment and absurdity. I moved my finger, barely, in a small circle, and something woke up, a dull throb between my legs I hadn’t expected. My nipples swelled. My pussy grew wet without permission. But I learned something: fear lived there, lying in wait, and I’d spent years pretending it didn’t exist. And beneath the fear, very deep beneath it, there was something else that had also been waiting.

***

Day 5. I tried the smallest toy, the friendly one, the one that asks to be invited in rather than invading. I christened it Theodore, with complete seriousness. I coated it in so much lubricant it was dripping, lay on my side, drew one knee to my chest, and pressed it against the little eye. I pushed slowly. The tip slipped in with a small «pop» that pulled a gasp from me. I felt the body of the toy making its way inside, inch by inch, stretching me internally in a new way. I breathed. I relaxed. And when the base touched my buttocks, a hot shiver ran through my legs. I sat down to write with Theodore inside me, and every time I moved in the chair the toy pressed against something deep that made me squeeze my pen. Everything was going well.

Until the doorbell rang.

It was the deliveryman, carrying an enormous box and wearing a Sunday smile. With Theodore installed, I tried to walk like a normal person and only managed to move as if I were measuring every tile.

—Are you all right, miss? —he asked.

—Yes. I’m… very upright —I replied.

—Do you need help with the package?

I sweated in high definition. I signed the delivery slip, closed the door, and discovered that Theodore had settled deep inside like someone renting a vacation apartment and deciding to stay. Panic. I called Bea, my sexologist friend.

—Breathe. Relax. And cough —she told me, holding back her laughter.

I coughed with the dignity of a supporting actor. And there was the outside world again. I gave Theodore a discreet funeral, with plenty of disinfectant and very little solemnity.

***

Day 7. I went to therapy with tears in my eyes.

—I don’t know if this is for me.

—Anal sex, or the process of discovering yourself through it? —he asked.

—Both.

—What do you feel when you explore?

—As if my body were a foreign satellite and I didn’t have the manual.

He told me something I still repeat: sometimes you have to cross the narrow passage to reach the open sea. I asked if that was from Freud or an explorer, and he confessed he’d read it on the box of a product that had been sold to him by mistake. I paid for the session anyway. For the honesty.

***

Day 10. I went out with Adrián, the love of my life, the man I’d never dared tell anything to. We had dinner, laughed, drank wine, and looked at each other for too long between one sentence and the next. When we got home, the kisses came before the words, our clothes fell without negotiation, and, in a burst of drunken courage, I whispered in his ear:

—Would you mind if… we tried back there?

Adrián pulled back a little, not frightened but curious, wearing that half smile that had kept me awake for years.

—Are you sure? —he asked, resting his forehead against mine.

—I even have a protocol. And plenty of lubricant.

He laughed softly, then kissed my neck, the hollow of my collarbone, the space between my breasts, and went down with his mouth open until he reached my pubis. He opened my legs with his hands, unhurried, and buried his tongue in my already-soaked pussy. He sucked, licked, played with my clitoris until I began arching my back against the bed, clutching his hair with both hands. When I was about to come, he stopped, looked at me with gleaming lips, and whispered:

—Turn over. Slowly.

I lay face down, a pillow beneath my hips to raise my ass. I felt his hands spread my cheeks, and then his tongue, warm and firm, tracing me from my pussy to the other hole. I nearly screamed. No one had ever kissed me there in my entire life. He licked me slowly, drawing circles around the little eye, pressing the tip against the tense ring until it began to yield on its own. I bit the pillow, covered in gooseflesh, feeling exposed and adored at the same time.

Then came the lubricant, lots of it, running between my buttocks and down the insides of my thighs. Adrián inserted one finger, just one at first, patiently moving it inside me in small circles. Then two. And he waited. He waited for me to push back, seeking him, so he would know I was ready.

—Tell me when —he murmured behind me.

I felt the tip of his cock resting against the little eye, thick, hot, gleaming with lubricant. He pushed just slightly. The first centimeter pulled a long moan from me, caught between burning and surprise. He stayed still. He pushed again, a little farther. He waited again. And so, inch by inch, feeling him make his way inside me, my hands clutching his hips and his breath warm against my ear, until I felt his pelvis against my buttocks and knew I was completely full of him.

—Fuck, Renata —he whispered, and that dirty word spoken by him squeezed my pussy as if he’d touched me.

He began to move very slowly, pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in, each thrust more confident, more his. I lowered one hand and touched my clitoris, rubbing in circles, while he fucked my ass with a slowness that was driving me crazy. The pleasure was double, contradictory, savage: a deep filling from behind and a wet throbbing in front seeking each other inside me. He began moving faster, his breathing ragged, and I pushed back to meet every thrust.

—Keep going like that —I begged in a broken voice—. Don’t stop, please, don’t stop.

When I came, it was with a convulsion that rose from my feet. My pussy contracted around my own fingers and my ass clenched around his cock, and I felt him tremble, grip me, and come inside with a long, hoarse moan, spilling hot and deep within me. We stayed like that for a few seconds, joined together, panting, our skin stuck together with sweat.

I don’t know whether it was the euphoria or the vertigo, but for the first time I felt that my body wasn’t an obstacle to get around. It was a place I could inhabit. I cried a little afterward, not from pain but from a strange, new pride. Adrián hugged me from behind, silently, still inside me, and I understood that true intimacy begins exactly where shame ends.

***

Day 12. I wrote fourteen pages in one sitting, without correcting, without thinking. The block had broken from the most unsuspected side. The protagonist of my novel is a woman who dares to look at what she avoided for years, and every word came out with a freedom I hadn’t known in myself. My editor read it and said it was «unsettling and profoundly honest.» My mother said she wasn’t going to read it. My therapist applauded me. Three different reactions, and yet all three were right.

***

Day 16. Last night, alone, with ambient music and no guilt, I managed to take the whole thing. I took out the medium-sized toy, the one that had been waiting for me for weeks, and prepared myself as if I were getting ready for a date with myself. I lay on my back, raised my legs, spread my buttocks, and lubricated myself calmly, feeling the cold gel make my little eye clench reflexively. I pressed it against myself, pushed, breathed. This time my body didn’t close. This time it opened.

I sank it all the way in, little by little, and when the base touched my skin I stayed still, feeling it inside me, breathing around it. I began moving it, pulling it out to the tip and pushing it back in, while with my other hand I rubbed my clitoris in tight circles. The combination was devastating. A pleasure rising along two different paths and joining somewhere in my belly, pushing me upward. My nipples grew hard as stones. My breathing became one continuous moan. And when I came, I came screaming into my own pillow, my ass clenched around the toy and my pussy dripping between my fingers.

The pleasure wasn’t only physical. It was like telling my own body: «You are not forbidden territory. You are a continent to explore, even from the other side.»

I remembered that when I was twelve, I heard a cousin say that this part of the body was «the ugliest thing we have.» And I understood how long I’d spent covering it up, denying it, apologizing to it for existing. Last night I looked at it straight on and didn’t look away. There were no witnesses, only my breathing and the faint click of a box closing, as if to say: mission accomplished. I slept uncovered, without crossing my legs or my emotions.

***

Day 19. Today I almost put everything away in a box: the toys, the lubricant, the pamphlets with their suspiciously happy smiles, this notebook with its dog-eared corners. Not because of a bad experience or a trauma. Simply because I was tired.

Tired of searching for poetry in discomfort. Tired of forcing a laugh when all I wanted was for someone to hug me without my having to explain anything. I sat on the sofa, felt a slight ache, and said softly, almost without meaning to: «That’s enough.»

I made myself some tea and drank it slowly. I wondered whether all this was a whim, an elegant way of avoiding the blank page, or an extremely complicated way of saying yes to myself from another angle. I thought about closing the diary forever. But then I opened the page. And I wrote this. Maybe I wasn’t giving it up completely. Maybe I just needed a truce between the joke and the muscle. Today I don’t want to explore anything. Today I only want to stay still, breathe, and give my body permission not to be brave.

***

Day 20. I don’t know what happened to me yesterday. Well, yes, I do: I had a tiny emotional drama with a sad piano soundtrack and thought my period of discovery had reached a solemn epilogue. A dignified retreat.

And then a package arrived with no return address. Inside was an absurd and beautiful toy, with glitter built in and a phrase engraved on the base: «Magic enters where you least expect it.» An anonymous note said: «Come back. You still have a lot left to tell.» I recognized Bea’s handwriting, of course, but I played along.

I laughed with that idiotic laugh that only appears when you’re emotionally stable or slightly deranged. And I thought: who am I to ignore such an invitation? I showered, prepared my little altar of candle and ridiculous playlist, and started again. I slipped the glitter toy into my ass with a new boldness, without ceremony, laughing at myself as I stroked my pussy with the other hand. It wasn’t glorious or spiritual or profound. It was simply fun. I came twice in a row, one right after the other, glitter sliding through the lubricant and a choked-back laugh in my throat. And I felt better. Not enlightened, but lighter.

Because sometimes reconnecting with yourself doesn’t come with fireworks. Sometimes it comes with an object that glows in the dark and the certainty that humor is also a way of healing.

***

Day 96. My mother called me today. I’d sent her a copy of the novel without any warning.

—Renata, I read it.

—And?

—I did it secretly, with a glass of wine. I think it awakened things in me that had been asleep.

—Do you want to talk about it?

—No.

—Do you want a hug?

—No. You know what I want? Tell me where you bought that kit. Discreetly. And don’t tell Aunt Remedios.

I hung up and stared at the phone, laughing to myself. It turns out courage is contagious, even at seventy.

***

Day 365. Exactly one year has passed since that first trembling attempt, with my dignity dancing a tango of regrets. The novel was published, read, scandalized whoever needed scandalizing, and comforted those who hadn’t expected comfort. Some female readers wrote to tell me that they, too, had stopped apologizing to their bodies.

Tonight I’m alone in a hotel room, with a glass of good wine and a lit candle. The toy that started it all rests in its box, watching me like an old friend who has seen everything. I don’t need to use it tonight. Because the journey, in the end, was always inward. And because my entire body is finally mine.

I don’t know whether this year opened a door for me or closed a few wounds. Maybe both things at once. Maybe that is exactly what living is.