Sex and photography

I haven’t had sex in two and a half years.

30 months.

30 months makes for some goddamn good Parmesan cheese.

What else gets better in 30 months?

Wine?

Not just any type of wine. I assume most reds become richer and deeper with time, while whites—especially bubbly wines—lose some of their tangy, fizzy liveliness (I assume).

Am I really comparing myself to cheese and/or wine?!?!

Gosh, that’s kind of pathetic—but bear with me. I need to believe that by giving this celibacy shit a chance… I’ll get “better”… somehow.

I used to love sex. I loved to receive, I loved to give. I loved that tension—that pressure building like a crescendo in music—waiting for that last set of drum rolls to mark the climb to the mountaintop, where you can scream at the top of your lungs knowing that only the sky is higher than how high you are. If only for a moment.

If my words are too dry for you to grasp how sex used to make me feel, just listen to Edvard Grieg’s _In the Hall of the Mountain King_.

In case you’re curious:

I was talking with a friend about this and she looked at me, quite puzzled, and said, “But, honey, you have 10 fingers!”

“Oh, I know I do. And I love them—just like I love my BOO(s) (FYI: BOO = battery-operated object)—but it’s not the same. Masturbation means I have all the control. Having sex (for me) means I’m willingly giving part of that control to someone else.”

FYI: One of my childhood traumas I carry with me is abandonment. One of the ways it manifests in my life is a desperate desire for control. If I control everyone (including myself) and everything around me, I won’t get abandoned again.

Control is something I taught myself back when I was too little to know better.

At the core of my heart, there is this wild being who knows she doesn’t need to control.

And you know when I allow her to come out?

Yes, you’ve got that right.

But there’s another place in my life where I discovered I loved having no control: photography.

I’ve never understood why I was so good at documentary photography—to the point that, because it came so freaking easily to me, I used to berate myself for it.

The fact that I placed myself in an environment where I had very little control allowed me to freely receive—and give—with every photo I made.

I imagine this is a very unconventional way to describe my behind-the-scenes process. But the truth is: I feel it in my body when a good photo is about to happen. I hold my breath, I tense a little, and I start yelling (in my head—always ONLY in my head): “To the right, yes, stay there, now jump!”

And sometimes the people I’m photographing will do more or less what I’m mentally asking them to do, and I get my shot of dopamine. And sometimes they won’t—and that only builds more tension, and makes me work harder in the search for that great photo.

And that’s why, after a Day In The Life session, I hardly have any energy left to drive myself home (or back to the hotel I’m staying at), take a long cold shower, and collapse into a dreamless sleep.

I haven’t gotten my dopamine from sex in 30 months. But I still got it from photography.

Even if my burnout forced me to stop doing family photography, that wild, free part of me—the part that’s above any trauma I like to blame my stillness on—urged me to take on the jobs that brought that spike of oxytocin that keeps me bound to my love: photography.

Quite recently, someone asked me, “What do you do?” and for the first time in the last 10 years, I proudly said, “I’m a photographer.”

And you know why, in the past, I was unhappy calling myself that? Because doing something that came so naturally—something that pleased the wild one inside me with so much intensity—felt like a sin. It made me feel like I was cheating on my partner. And I was not the cheating type.

Other stuff was at play too, but I think I’ve been vulnerable enough for one post. I’ll keep the rest for later, if you please.

In two and a half years—30 months—I haven’t made sex with anyone. But I have done long-distance hiking and long-distance traveling, in solitude. I’ve done deep diving within myself with my therapist and my coach. And last but not least, I’ve done quite a lot of ugly crying and belly-aching laughing with my girlfriends.

All this so I can find myself.

Better, all this to know myself.

So I can rewrite my story.

So I can say: “I am who I am, and that’s enough.”

Am I able to say who I am in all my facets? No, not yet. And probably -hopefully- I’ll spend the rest of my life searching and discovering new parts of me.

But for now: I am a photographer. And a pretty damn good one, if I may. And that’s enough (for now).

If I am to put these journeys on paper—raw words, real photos—

would you want to walk them with me?

Because I’m building it.

Slowly.

For real.

And my newsletter is where the first pieces will land.