What's Actually Yours vs. What You Were Taught: Untangling Beliefs About Your Sexuality

Is there a part of your desire or sexuality you've never fully let yourself claim, not because it isn't real, but because claiming it felt like too much?

Your sexuality didn't form in a vacuum. It was shaped by your culture, your family, your history, what you've survived, and what you've been told you are, sometimes by people who never asked you what was true.

A Question Underneath Most Other Questions

Most conversations about intimacy focus on what you want, how to communicate it, how to feel more confident. Underneath all of that sits a quieter, older question: how much of what you believe about your own sexuality is actually yours?

Many of us are living from inherited expectations without realizing it. Beliefs about desirability, sexuality, and what a woman is "supposed" to be often arrive so early, and from so many directions, that they start to feel like personal truths instead of messages we absorbed.

The Split Many Black Women Carry

For a lot of Black women, this shows up as a particular kind of split: being hypersexualized and desexualized, sometimes both at once, and being defined before ever getting the chance to define yourself.

It can look like a kind of internal division, being physically present in an intimate moment while also tracking how you're being perceived. Editing yourself mid-experience. Performing a version of desire shaped more by expectation than by real connection to yourself.

These patterns didn't come from nowhere. They developed as ways to stay safe in a world that has often projected onto Black women's bodies and sexuality without asking permission first. Reclaiming what's actually yours is usually gradual, not a single moment of clarity.

There's a particular kind of exhaustion in knowing how to be wanted before you ever learned how to feel wanted. Most of us never had language for that exhaustion. We just carried it.

Separating Assigned From Chosen

One useful way to start: draw a line down a page. On one side, write messages you've received about your body, your desirability, your sexuality, your role in relationships, what a woman should be. On the other side, write what actually feels true now, what you've learned through real experience, what aligns with your values.

This isn't about rejecting everything you inherited. Some of it may still fit. The work is figuring out what belongs to you and what doesn't, which is different from assuming everything you were taught is wrong.

This Isn't About Arriving at the Right Answer

This isn't about arriving at a tidy conclusion. It's about creating enough space to notice what feels true to you now, and staying curious as that answer continues to shift.

Untangling this isn't quick work. But it's real work, and it's yours to do, on your own timeline.

If this brought something into focus, Identity & Sexuality the Inherited or Chosen workshop offers a guided version of this exercise in a supported group setting, and Pleasure Practice goes deeper into the stories you've inherited about your own desire.