"I want to write a book"

Part I, Chapter 1: Facing Fears

From my book, Unsolicited Advice: the Canceled Memoir of a Consent Educator

Book starts here.

Previous.

January 19, 2021 Wednesday 7:45am – Inauguration Day

            I opened the Kae Tempest book [On Connection] and looked at their table of contents and was inspired to write a memoir. Just from their structure. I started writing it. It will be part philosophy and part memoir because I will use personal stories to teach.

On March 17^th, 2020, I found myself moving back in with my parents. This was not where I had imagined myself to be at 30. A year prior, my life had seemed to be trending upward when I’d joined a burgeoning new field in the TV and film industry, intimacy coordination. I’d first learned about this field when a friend asked if I wanted to write a romantic comedy about someone whose job was to choreograph sex scenes. I said, “Yes” and “Is that a real job?” It was. We began researching the lives of intimacy coordinators who, yes, choreograph sex scenes, but also do so much more. Around the same time, I got a job as a casting assistant on The Affair. The show hired an intimacy coordinator, and so I got to meet one of the professionals I’d been learning about. She agreed to let me interview her so that I could get more background info for our script. During our conversation, as she was describing her work, I felt as if someone had gone into my brain, taken all the things I had been interested in and studying up to that point, and made a job out of it. I asked her if she was training people. The next thing I knew, she was training me to do the job. The freelance intimacy coordination work I picked up as a result brought me my first year ever making six figures, which was a massive improvement to my mental health and wellbeing.

It was as though I had been living in black and white and could suddenly see in color. A veil had been lifted, one that had been placed between me and myself by systems of oppression.

Photo by Summer Wagner

Then Covid hit. Productions shut down, work dried up, and now I was spending an inordinate amount of time in the window seat of my childhood bedroom surrounded by my sister’s Harry Potter books. I thought often of Tony Kushner’s play about the AIDS epidemic, Angels in America, when the titular character says, “Before the boiling of blood and the searing of skin comes the Secret Catastrophe: Before Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable. (Coughs) YOU HAVE DRIVEN HIM AWAY! YOU MUST STOP MOVING!”

Being a paid subscriber supports getting anti-carceral consent education as far and wide as possible. The full subscription is $9/month. If you’d like to follow along but need a lower price, use these: 25% off, 50% off

~ if this discount is still inaccessible, Venmo what you’re able to pay for the book to @sharetheload with the abbreviation “UA" and your email address in the memo and I will give you a comp subscription for 1 year ~

Recommending this newsletter in your recommendations list is the best way to help spread the word! xx

Live Classes • Recorded Classes • Workbooks • Consulting • Merch! • Share the Load Podcast • You’re Doing It Wrong Podcast

There’s a 10% off discount code to classes below the paywall…