Consent + Grief

Introduction cont'd: What to expect

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

Book starts here.

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Grief on the Boundaries and Consent Journey with Brooks starts 10/22

Because journaling is a huge part of my life and has greatly shaped the work that I do, I’ve chosen to use my journal entries as a framework for this book. They begin with the day I decided to write a book on January 19^th, 2021 and end with receiving an email from an editor at a publishing house I will call Lighthouse Press¹ on September 21^st, 2022, asking if I’d be interested in writing a book. I’ll explore the memories that contextualize those journal entries and what I’ve learned from them about myself and about consent.

Journaling has been a way to give myself a narrative and a record. I have journals from as far back as when I was ten years old. Being able to look back on how I was feeling, what was on my mind, and what I was learning about myself has allowed me to see that the same themes and ideas have always been present. I recently found an essay that I’d written in college about Merleau-Ponty’s “Cezanne’s Doubt”—the same philosophical piece that I instinctively turned to more than a decade later when writing this introduction. In college, I’d interpreted Merleau-Ponty’s argument much as I do now: that “the given self and the constructed self are one in the same, so trying to distinguish the two is not only pointless, but impossible.”   

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