Shame Wasn’t Invited, But It Showed Up Loud Anyway
You didn’t wake up one day and decide your body was a problem. That sh*t was planted. Watered. Fertilized with shame. And handed to you like a family heirloom wrapped in calorie-counting apps, racist beauty campaigns, and a dozen unsolicited opinions about your thighs.
This post?
It’s not about “learning to love yourself.”
It’s about learning to question the entire damn system that taught you not to.
Because here’s the real scandal:
The shame you carry? You inherited it.
From the culture. From the colonizers. From that one youth pastor who made eye contact while saying the word “lust” and ruined church forever.
And now? It’s time to evict that shame from your nervous system and take your pleasure off mute.
Not with a self-help mantra—but with full-bodied rebellion, dirty jokes, science, and absolutely zero apologies.
Ready? Let’s go burn the script they gave us.
Racism, Fatphobia & Ableism Walk Into a Bar… And Ruin the Party
If shame had a reality show, it would absolutely be called America’s Next Top Internalized Oppression. And the contestants? Every body it deemed “too different to be desirable.”
Here’s how it usually goes:
You’re born into a body. A body with color, curves, quirks, needs. And before you even know how to spell “puberty,” the world starts critiquing your design like you’re a rejected runway sketch on Project Runway.
The beauty norms we’re handed aren’t neutral. They are colonized, sanitized, and weaponized against anyone who dares to exist outside the default setting: white, thin, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical, quiet, and willing to make themselves smaller to be more digestible.
Racialized beauty standards didn’t just promote whiteness—they erased everyone else. You weren’t just “not the standard.” You were “exotic,” “intense,” “aggressive,” or “distracting.” And somehow your hair, skin, or features became professional liabilities. Like your face needed a LinkedIn-approved filter to be taken seriously.
Fatphobia jumped in with its best diet tips and moral superiority complex. It didn’t just say fat was bad—it said fat meant lazy, sloppy, and unworthy of love. It taught us that hunger is a weakness, appetite is shameful, and taking up space should come with an apology. And if you dared to feel sexy in a larger body? You were either fetishized or erased. There was no in-between.
Ableism brought its own flavor of erasure by acting like disabled bodies were either tragic or invisible. If you didn’t move, fuck, or communicate in a way that matched the rom-com blueprint, your desirability got questioned—or deleted entirely. Because apparently, only people with perfectly symmetrical staircases and non-disabled hands deserve slow-motion sex scenes.
And neurotypical norms? They handed out gold stars for scripted flirting and linear arousal patterns, then told the rest of us we were broken. If your body doesn’t respond on cue, if your desire takes the scenic route, or if your idea of intimacy includes stimming, silence, or sensory prep—they’ll call it dysfunction. But it’s just diversity.
These systems don’t just judge you from the outside. They climb into your nervous system. They turn desire into doubt. They turn presence into performance. And they do it so early, and so often, that by the time you hit adulthood, you’re already fluent in self-surveillance.
And babe? That’s not empowerment. That’s indoctrination. Disguised as advice.
It’s exhausting. It’s dehumanizing. And honestly—worst of all—it’s boring as hell.
A world where only one kind of body is allowed to feel sexy?
Uninspired. Try again.
And if you want a real-time example of this system in action? I spent a ridiculous amount of time searching Unsplash for an image of a big Black body to represent this post. You know what I found? White women. Thin women. Ambiguous yoga poses and disembodied hands holding lattes. No matter what I typed—“plus-size Black woman,” “fat Black body,” “Black joy”—I got filtered, flattened, and fed back the same narrow aesthetic that’s been dominating media for decades.
It’s almost like the algorithm is just another arm of the beauty myth machine, choking out visibility one search result at a time.
Shame Isn’t Just a Vibe—It’s a Neural Hijacker
Alright, science nerds and overthinkers—gather ‘round. This one's for your trauma brain and your Google search history titled “why do I dissociate when things get hot?”
When you grow up in a world that constantly critiques your body—your weight, your skin, your neurotype, your mobility, your sensuality—your brain doesn’t just log that as “rude” and move on. No, no. Your nervous system takes notes like it’s prepping for the final exam on how to survive patriarchy and internalized oppression.
Eventually, it starts to do something very specific: it rewires. It begins associating pleasure with risk. With danger. With exposure. Because every time you expressed something too loud, too hungry, too queer, too big, too soft—you got feedback. And not the kind that helps you grow. The kind that makes your body flinch without even knowing why.
So what happens next? Sensory disconnection.
Not because you don’t want to feel, but because your body was smart enough to protect you from feeling something that once got you hurt.
You might find yourself going completely blank in the middle of a sexual experience—not because you’re not into it, but because your system quietly hit the “safety override” button. You might be thinking about how your thighs look from that angle instead of, you know, actually feeling anything. You might be going through the motions like you’re auditioning for “Most Convincing Moaner in a Supporting Role,” because being present is too vulnerable.
And it’s not just in sex. It shows up when you avoid mirrors. When you skip meals because you “weren’t good today.” When you say no to joy because you feel like you haven’t earned it.
This isn’t dysfunction. It’s a survival strategy.
Your body adapted to shame. It learned to shut down the circuits that made you feel alive, because aliveness got confused with punishment.
But here’s the good news: the same brain that learned to fear pleasure? Can learn to trust it again. Slowly. Tenderly. On your terms.
And yes, babe—you’re allowed to feel safe and turned on. At the same time.
Wild concept. Let's normalize it.
Rebellion Looks Like Eating Dessert First
Healing doesn’t always look like journaling under a weighted blanket or listening to a meditation app whisper “you are enough.” (Although no shade if that’s your jam.) Sometimes, healing looks like licking chocolate frosting off your finger with absolutely no guilt. Sometimes, it looks like putting your phone down during sex because you’re too busy feeling something real.
Because real rebellion? It’s not about perfection. It’s about presence.
You want to heal? Start by choosing play over performance.
Embodiment doesn’t require a retreat in Bali or a $300 crystal egg. It can be as simple—and as radical—as wearing that outfit you were “saving” for a thinner version of yourself. You know the one. The one that makes you feel like a walking disco ball, even if your brain still occasionally whispers, “Cover that up.” Wear it anyway. Let them stare.
It’s in the way you move when you're not performing for anyone—when the music hits and you let your hips lead. Even if it’s just in your kitchen. Even if the dog is judging you. Especially if someone’s watching and you’re into it.
It’s in the unapologetic act of taking the last bite of dessert, not because you “earned it,” but because you wanted it. And maybe—just maybe—you moan a little when you eat it. With eye contact.
Every one of these moments is a love note to your nervous system. Every time you stay in your body instead of floating above it in a cloud of self-conscious critique, you're rewriting the script. You're creating new neural pathways that say, “This is mine. This is safe. This is mine.”
You're literally changing your brain. With joy. With curiosity. With whipped cream and dirty dancing and that little sound you make when you stretch in the morning and finally remember you have a body.
You don’t have to earn pleasure. You just have to notice it.
And babe? That noticing? That’s the revolution.
Wanna Keep Going? Your Reclamation is Waiting.
If you read this far, then yeah—you’re already doing the work. The unlearning. The slow rebellion. The glorious reclamation of a body that was never the damn problem to begin with.
And if something in you is like, “Okay but… what next?”
You’re gonna want to check out The Ember Vault.
It’s where we stash all the good stuff—courses, reflection tools, pleasure practices, and resources designed to help you peel shame off your body like a bad sunburn and get curious (or chaotic) about what actually feels good.
No perfection. No gold stars. Just space to be human and horny and healing all at once.
Because you’re not too much. You’re not broken.
You’re just living in a world that has no idea what to do with someone who feels alive.
