On taboo and performance (and why it is so hard to name our dreams in public)

The terror and liberation of self-revelation

21 July 2026

Starting my own business has been one of the most confronting experiences of my life. Not the hardest, but the most confronting. I have had to meet many of my demons, over and over again.

Of everything this process has asked of me, the hardest part has been allowing myself to become visible. My work is driven by a desire to shape something beautiful in the world, to give life to a dream. Doing so requires me to let that dream become visible. And that is terrifying.

We are infinitely skilled at keeping our deepest, rawest truths in the dark, visiting them quietly when no one is looking, sharing them occasionally with the people in our lives we trust the most. But shaping a business is an entirely public act. And in order to do it true justice, it is necessary to be honest about what you are creating.

My life, both professional and personal, has brought me squarely into the realm of the body. I have spent years living inside questions of taboo and shame. The dark spaces we are taught to ignore. And in this time I have become animated by a deep desire to liberate our bodies from the burden of shame, to release taboo, and to reintegrate the sensual into all aspects of life.

Over the years I have become intimately acquainted with my own anxieties and fears. I have moved through various therapeutic spaces, and immersed myself in the practice of tantra. I have learned to articulate my wants and needs, surface my desires, and release the layers of shame that shroud my impulses.

In my personal world I feel freer than I ever have. But there is nothing like the nakedness involved in sharing yourself with a room full of silent strangers. And standing here, as a devoutly non-social media soul, naming my dream has taken me to the edge of my comfort and capacity.

My first iteration of my work was tepid, informed by a false notion of safety. I left my message implicit, danced around the words, the purpose, and in so doing diluted my passion. It took me a month to understand why my words were stuck in my mouth. And finally I understood that there was one word I was refusing to say. Sexuality. Sexuality lived at the heart of my work, yet I was unwilling to name it.

I began to pay attention. I noticed that whenever I tried to occupy my place in the public forum, I experienced one of the most primal trauma responses: I froze. Every time I tried to open my mouth, the weight of history landed on me in one deafening thud. A woman writing about eroticism, about transformation, about power. My head filled with all the ways my words could be distorted and used against me and my body recoiled from the imagined judgement.

Then one soft day I woke up next to the sea, the air gentle but fresh, the morning light yellow-orange and calling. As the sun filled the sky I felt the full truth of the Anaïs Nin quote, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”. I was struck by the question - at what price do I hide my truth? And, perhaps more importantly, at what point does a partial truth become a lie?

We are quick to mistake the deadening force of inertia for safety. We have been taught that to survive we must not disrupt. And while there is often much truth in that, it also commits a violence to the soul. When you are hiding you are crouched, frozen. And inside a universe in perpetual motion, to live like this is a distortion. A denial of self, of possibility, of life.

As these realisations unfolded, my resistance began to yield to something deeper, more primal - the desire to live in my truth. No matter the cost. Because I could see that the cost of living in silence was a far more violent, far more normal punishment.

So I took one brave step and decided to honour my desires. To commit. To allow sexuality to feature in my writing, to speak of eroticism, and to call myself a tantra practitioner. This field has transformed my world, and sits at the heart of the dream I am trying to make matter. To name it is to give it life.

When we boil it all down to essence, it becomes simple. Some of our dreams fit within what is allowed, others do not. But neither are more or less valid. The edges of the world only move because we dance at them. And god knows the edges of our world need to move. So I have decided to dance.

The dream that I hold happens to challenge convention. But I have come to understand this as a gift. I believe we are capable of forms of intimacy and aliveness we have barely begun to imagine. And every time I have spoken my dream of erotic and embodied living I have been met. People from all walks of life have shared their hearts with me, their relationship challenges, their desire for loving touch, their fear of speaking the truth.

I have been shown over and over that the thing that moves me sits at the soft point of the world. As we risk losing ourselves a little more each day, this path back into intimacy matters deeply. So I will honour every person who risked themselves to affirm our humanity, and teach myself the courage to hold my dream. I will keep speaking my desires out loud, breathing life into their bones, and pray that one day they are strong enough to take flight.

Here is my gesture to taboo, and my offering to hope.