“I don’t miss innocence. I miss privacy — the kind that lets desire grow before it gets named.”
I was never nostalgic for innocence. That word always felt borrowed, something people pressed onto me retroactively, like a label for a version of myself they wanted to believe in. What I miss is quieter, less flattering, harder to mourn without sounding ungrateful. I miss privacy. Not secrecy. Not shame. Privacy. The right to exist before being interpreted.
Growing up in a village, everyone knew where I was. Which path I took home. Whose kitchen I was sitting in. My body was never a mystery. And yet my inner life was untouched. No one rushed to narrate me. No one tried to explain my wanting before I felt it myself. I wasn’t interesting enough to be decoded. I moved through the world unarchived.
Back then, being seen didn’t mean being read.
That changed slowly. Not with one dramatic moment, not with a single violation I could point to. It happened through small permissions. A comment I didn’t correct. A story told about me that I let stand. A look that lingered too long that I pretended not to notice. Each moment felt harmless. Together, they rewrote the terms.
The internet didn’t invent exposure — it accelerated it. Suddenly it wasn’t just skin that was visible, but thoughts. Longings. Half-formed selves shared before they had the chance to grow edges. I learned quickly how to be legible. I didn’t learn nearly as fast how to be protected.
There’s a difference between secrecy and privacy that took me years to understand. Secrets shrink when you hide them. Privacy breathes. Privacy gives things time to become true before they’re shared. I didn’t lose innocence. I lost time.
Looking back now, I can see how this lack of privacy shaped my sexual life more than I wanted to admit. The clarity didn’t arrive with regret that screams. It arrived quietly, like something finally lining up inside me. I regret that I didn’t start with girls sooner. Not because sex with boys was violent or wrong — I’m not rewriting the past into a cautionary tale — but because it was misaligned in ways I couldn’t name yet.
With boys, sex often happened to me more than with me. My body responded. It knew how. But my emotional center stayed oddly offline. I mistook responsiveness for resonance. Availability for freedom.
Some of those experiences were fine. Some were even good. But good for them, not for me. Pleasure moved through my body without anchoring anywhere inside. There was no echo. No aftertaste that felt like mine. If it was good, it was good in theory, or good from the outside. It didn’t stay.
What I called curiosity was sometimes a detour. What I called openness was often convenience. Being desired felt easier than being met. Performance felt safer than presence. I didn’t yet know how to ask for the kind of intimacy that would have slowed everything down.
The regret isn’t moral. I don’t disown that version of myself. I’m not ashamed of her. I just don’t romanticize her anymore. The loss wasn’t sex. It was privacy. I made myself visible before I knew how to stay oriented toward my own desire.
With girls, everything asked something different of me. Desire didn’t rush me forward — it pulled me inward. It wanted slowness. Attention. Mutual orientation. Not parallel bodies performing proximity, but two people actually facing each other. Presence instead of efficiency.
That clarity didn’t come earlier because too many people were already listening. It’s hard to hear yourself when your wanting has an audience. It’s hard to know what you want when it’s already being named for you.
I know now that I can’t become unknowable again. That door closed without ceremony. But I can be selective. I can decide what earns daylight and what deserves lamplight. I can let some truths remain unnamed without calling it dishonesty.
I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to disappear.
I just want my inner rooms to have doors again — and to be the one who decides when they open.