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12 Days of Girly Juice 2021: 3 Fave Encounters

Kate Sloan

Strap in, folks… We’re talking about some of the best sex I had all year!

Like I did last year, I’ve asked my partner mb to contribute some thoughts on each of the scenes/sessions I picked, so you’ll get both of our perspectives in here. Enjoy this glorious horny overshare of a post!

 

An ex-cellent roleplay

mb and I had been watching the Netflix show Sex/Life a lot, and it inspired a scene. If you haven’t seen it, the show is about a woman who starts to feel restless in her life as a suburban wife and mother, and finds herself longing for the spontaneity and sexual excitement she experienced with her super-hot (but avoidantly attached and emotionally immature) ex-boyfriend. It’s full of hot sex scenes, largely because the actors playing the woman and her ex were dating and presumably fucking IRL while it was being filmed. 🔥

This show reactivated a long-standing fantasy of mine about fucking an ex again. It’s not that there are specific exes of mine I’d like to fuck again (well, not very many of them, anyway!), but more the overall idea of reuniting with someone who knows your body and your mind inside and out. Traditionally I’ve been the type of person who would sometimes (naughtily) stay in bad relationships too long because the sex was so good; that isn’t the most emotionally healthy practice, obviously, so roleplaying a sex-with-an-ex scenario is a better way of exorcizing those feelings, IMO.

mb suggested I lie down with a blindfold on, and then left the room and came back in again, to heighten the sense that this was indeed a different person. They whispered filthy things to me like “God, I’ve missed this cunt” and “I bet I still remember exactly how to make you come.” This was such a fun example of a simple roleplay that somehow turns fairly “normal” sex into something turbo-charged with hotness.

mb says: I’ve had a few experiences fucking actual exes, but predictably none were as hot or good as this roleplay scene. Getting to flirt, corrupt, and cajole you into “letting” me fuck you one more time hit on a lot of our mutual kinks and let us dirty talk in new ways. Since I was very much in character (and in top space), I don’t remember much of anything I said, but I do remember how your moans were different – more excited and surprised, and how much it seemed like you wanted to impress me once I started fucking you. A+++. Would fuck you as an ex again, but let’s not actually break up in order to do it, because we clearly don’t have to.

 

Languorous cunnilingus from 500 miles away

There is nothing quite like oral sex from someone who knows your body… but oral via phone sex comes close for me.

I know, that sounds absurd. How can one replicate the unique and nuanced sensations of oral by oneself?! But I’m never really “by myself” during phone sex. I have my partner’s voice and words, painting a picture and telling me what to do. And I have lube, and toys, and drugs, and other accoutrements that help me create an atmosphere of sexy relaxation and a sensation that approaches “real” oral sex and sometimes even surpasses it.

Sometime in May, while my partner was locked up in chastity, they spent a good 30-40 minutes describing giving me head in extreme detail, while I replicated each movement they described on my own body with lubed fingers and then a vibe. We do this often, but not usually for that length of time, or with that purity of focus. Given the prevalence of people ignoring or downplaying clitoral pleasure in the world, it feels healing and uplifting to have entire sex sessions sometimes that focus solely on my clit and all its magnificent nerve endings, whether a partner is touching them or I’m doing it myself.

mb says: When you and I have sex of any kind (IRL or on the phone), going down on you is nearly always on the menu. But this session and others like it are different because of how singular my focus is on that one act, elevating it from quotidian cunnilingus to true cunt worship. Being locked in a chastity cage certainly helps, but so does closing my eyes and focusing on the sensations, scents, and tastes I crave after missing you for weeks or months of being apart. I’ll mix detailed descriptions of my tongue and finger work with explicit instructions about you should touch those spots with your own hands and toys to best mimic my technique. While it can be initially hard to get into the headspace of going down on you and talking at the same time, once it clicks into place, it’s one of my favorite ways to fuck you through the phone. Why even add penetration when I can focus on licking, sucking, kissing, and stroking your eager clit for as long as it takes to feel you come in my mouth? *chef’s kiss*

 

I mean does my spouse look hot in a suit or WHAT

Ready and waiting

I was about 20 years old when I first had the sexual fantasy of “getting myself ready” for a partner before they arrived home, so they could fuck me immediately upon their arrival, using my warmed-up body for their pleasure. My partner at the time was pretty vanilla, and loved giving oral sex, so he told me that to do this would be to skip some of his favorite parts of sex. While this was an understandable perspective, I still found that fantasy hot to contemplate from time to time.

My partner now is decidedly not vanilla (obvi!), but because they also love giving oral (as evidenced above), they recently found a way to enact this fantasy of mine without skipping cunnilingus. On an evening when they’d been out of the house all day attending to work stuff, they texted me, “At 9:30, put on lingerie, get into bed, turn the lights down, put on sexy music and a blindfold, and think about my mouth while you lie on my bed. Touch yourself however and wherever feels right and fantasize about what I’m gonna do to you.” They added that I should do a couple hits of weed to amp up my sensitivity, and put an Njoy Pure Plug in. Of course, I was eager to comply.

After setting up the space as instructed, I put my blindfold on, grabbed the Zalo Kyro wand, and started moving it lightly around my vulva, avoiding my clit so it would be at its most sensitive for my partner to enjoy. They were audibly delighted to see me laid out like that when we arrived, and I got to feel like a good little submissive for doing everything that’d been asked of me. What a win-win!

mb says: It had been a long time since I’d had to stay out late for a business dinner, and I’d forgotten how horny that makes me: silky suits, fancy food, being away from my sub all day. We hadn’t fucked in few nights, and I knew I wanted to use you as soon as I got home before you got too tired, but I wasn’t sure exactly how late that would be. So I did what any good dominant would do: started the foreplay while I was at dinner from my phone, so you’d be ready for me when I got there. Walking into my room with the lights already low, my good girl high, plugged, and writhing against a vibe on my bed, and sexy music on the stereo was the perfect start to a perfect scene. I undressed as soon as I got in and remember how quickly you were ready for a dildo in your cunt after I started sucking your clit. You came hard and fast on the toy, and so did I once I slipped my cock into your cunt and used you like I had been planning for hours.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2021: 6 Journal Entries

Kate Sloan

Content note: There’s some depressing stuff in here about climate change, fascism, etc.

 

February 7th

A Spiritual Practice for Quarantine

wake up, take your meds
stretch & pee & check your phone
stretch & sigh, ignore your phone
brew some coffee, clear some cobwebs
set some goals & test your brain
watch the news, turn off the news
feel grateful you’re not on the news

don some ruby lipstick no one will see
take butt selfies in bed
suck cock every lazy morning
scribble notes to future selves
let haters tire themselves out
slither into slim-cut sweatpants
comb your hair for no one
read a book for pleasure
drink a boozy revelation
squint your eyes until you see
a pale unfocused vision
of the You you want to be

 

April 19th

Life all feels so absurd when you’re living through a global pandemic and a fresh wave of fascism and the end of the world due to climate change. I really don’t know how we are supposed to deal with it. There’s not even a frame of reference, a touchpoint in human history we can point to and learn from where we idiot’ed ourselves out of being able to even inhabit this planet anymore. It’s all new and a lot of it is bad.

I think one of the only things you can do to cope with all this is to do what the existentialists did and accept the liberating but terrifying meaninglessness of it all. I can’t affect humanity’s problems on a scale that would be effective, so I may as well feel pleasure and create joy where possible. I don’t mean it’s okay to be selfishly hedonistic all the time. I mean that we’d go nuts if we never allowed ourselves to be selfishly hedonistic. We’d be squandering the best parts of the very world and civilization our anxieties are trying to save.

 

May 29th

Lately I keep looking at real estate listings of 2- and 3-bedroom houses and condos in Toronto and New York and dreaming of what it would be like to furnish and decorate my own office in my own home. There would be lots of framed photos and art. An altar featuring citrine, blue topaz, and perfumed incense. Big white bookshelves displaying books, old journals, striking sex toys, and a rainbow of vintage typewriters. A smallish piano and my ukuleles and guitar. A luxuriant daybed for lounging and naps. A big plush armchair for reading in. Stacks of empty notebooks waiting to be filled with thoughts and ideas. Organized drawers containing my entire sex toy collection. A sex toy charging station à la Piph. Sophisticated coasters for having drinks at my desk. An array of fine pens and pencils. Tons of natural light, plus several lamps for atmosphere. Ahh, bliss.

 

June 9th

I bought a secondhand digital piano yesterday. Been wanting to get back into songwriting. It has been about 3 years since I’ve written a song. It’s just so weird because in high school I wrote multiple songs per month. It no longer feels like a skill I can access. I try playing and singing improvisationally but everything sounds terrible and doesn’t flow out of me the way it used to.

I think if I asked younger-me for advice on this, she would advise me to spend more time just idly messing around on my instrument(s); inspiration can’t show up if you’re not there to greet it. But I can’t shake the feeling that I was connected to some divine source of musical ingenuity and I no longer have a stable connection to wherever that came from.

I guess part of the reason for this is that my life now is fairly settled and content – I am married to the love of my life and our relationship is stable and healthy, so the main sources of interpersonal angst and sadness I used to pull songwriting inspiration from are just absent. I guess this means I have to carve out new ways of being a songwriter, ways that don’t rely on romantic drama. Writing from fictional characters’ perspectives is often helpful for this, I’ve found.

 

July 7th

Things to remember when I hate myself and feel like a failure:

  1. I will have had 2 books published by the time I turn 30.
  2. I am happily married to the love of my life, who is perfect for me on every dimension I can imagine.
  3. I live comfortably on the money I make as a self-employed person/freelancer in the sex media field. Dreamy.
  4. My work means a lot to people and they tell me so nearly every day.
  5. I am working through my traumas and flaws with a therapist, and I’m making good progress.
  6. I have a cozy home that I love and have put a lot of effort into making it feel as comfortable as possible.
  7. I achieve an amazing amount every single week for someone living with an invisible disability/chronic illness.
  8. I have made a lot of art that I think is good, and I will make a lot more.
  9. There is always more to learn, to see, to experience.
  10. Every single thing in life could change in an instant so the only thing to do is appreciate it when you have it.

 

July 26th

I’m emotional tonight, for a couple reasons. Firstly, today 11 copies of my first book showed up in the mail, and I got to hold it, and read it, and sniff it, and take selfies with it… I am truly so fucking proud of myself, and the pride feels unusually tangible to me today. It’s a really good book and I think people are going to like it.

The second emotional thing that happened is I went for drinks with T___, who I met several years ago because they were friends with L___ when I was dating him – and they told me that basically they never really liked him that much. They felt he was “a sad man who sucked” and didn’t treat his partners very well. (Uh, can confirm.)

My mind is honestly kinda blown. All this time I had believed what L___ said, which was that the two of them were very good friends, maybe even best friends – and I had felt that L___ must have some essential goodness or coolness because T___ thought he was cool, but in reality all this time they’ve seen him the same way I saw him on my most self-righteous and self-possessed days: as a sad, selfish, confused and confusing dude who wasn’t a very good boyfriend at all.

He was a person who frequently represented himself as perpetually right and good, as if his way of doing relationships was the best way or the only good way, and as if I was in the wrong for ever taking issue with anything he did. He was an extraordinarily bad boyfriend to me but framed himself as a generous and tolerant caretaker and protector.

Our relationship was this fraught mirage, always seeming like it had the potential to be so good and healthy and satisfying but never actually allowing that reality to materialize. He paid lip service daily to the kind of boyfriend he wanted to be, and wasn’t. He was a complete and total fuckboy, who would’ve been appalled to hear himself referred to as such. The only reason I stayed with him after he seriously hurt my feelings was that I believed deeply that he was desirable and special and “a catch” and that I was incredibly lucky to be with someone like him. That’s all it was. I mean, yeah, NRE makes idiots of us all, but I really think most of my poor decision-making in that relationship was directly related to me 1) assuming his inherent worth because he was a man who expressed an interest in me, and 2) thinking so poorly of myself that I couldn’t see how valuable and desirable I myself was. I didn’t know I deserved better, or that I was allowed to expect better, but I did and I was.

12 Days of Girly Juice 2021: 7 Bangin’ Selfies

Kate Sloan

It’s time for the most self-indulgent instalment of this series: the one where I show you my fave selfies of the year and tell you about why they were meaningful to me! Let’s jump in…

Content note: There will be nudity in this post! You’ve been warned!

 

January 9

I’ve had such a hard time staying in touch with my femmeness during the pandemic. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve waded more deeply into fancy loungewear than I ever had before, I’ve bought myself cute slippers and robes and chemises, I’ve attempted to make “hanging out at home day after day” into something glamorous and aesthetically pleasing… but that stuff can only go so far when you’re depressed about not being able to go out, see people, and do things in the world.

On this night, my partner and I got dressed up to sit at home on the couch watching a livestream of Bawdy Storytelling. A friend of mine was telling a story that night and we wanted to be there to support him (virtually, from afar). Bawdy offers a thing in their virtual shows where you can pay extra to be an “exhibitionist” or a “voyeur,” meaning that your camera can be on during the show so other people can see your look, and/or that you can see other audience members (who’ve consented to it) throughout the show. It’s a really fun way of motivating audience members to dress how they would if they were going to an actual Bawdy show – and to make the flirty personal connections that often at least partially motivate such aesthetic choices.

It felt good to put on lipstick and lashes and a sparkly dress, even if it was “only” to watch an online show. I’m glad to have had opportunities this year to occasionally cosplay like we’re in the Before Times.

 

February 14

Valentine’s Day selfies often end up making their way into this post, because I love to dress cute for Valentine’s Day. It’s one of the few days of the year when I can really “get away with” wearing pink, red, and a whole lotta hearts!

mb and I usually go out for a fancy romantic dinner on this day, but we decided to do a COVID-friendly version of that this year and ordered delivery from the steakhouse BLT Prime. We sat down at their little dining room table in our pink finery and ate an excellent meal, and it was almost like being at an actual restaurant.

There are always ways to celebrate special occasions even if your options are limited, and I found that dressing up was a major way I celebrated holidays and accomplishments this year. Even in an era where my most frequent and robust socialization happens via Twitter and Discord, there are still times worth dressing up for – and eating a steak with my sweetie in celebration of our love was one of those times.

Side note: Check out that grin. They really do make me this happy. 🥰

 

April 26

When mb received the sex doll they were supposed to review for my site, we couldn’t stop laughing about how tiny she was. Like, yeah, we knew she wasn’t full-sized, but I don’t think either of us really fully understood just how small she would be until we took her out of her box.

I immediately had a very specific vision for the photo I wanted to take to go along with the review. It needed to convey what we had realized in that moment of opening her up: that she was hilariously, almost disturbingly petite.

But also, having done a fair bit of writing on sex dolls and sex robots and the like, I’m kinda fascinated by the “uncanny valley” and the differences between human sexiness and slick technologically-engineered sexiness. I wanted this photo to convey that tension as well: my tattooed and cellulite-dimpled thighs next to her tiny flat-planed ones, my gravity-affected boobs and her perfectly round ones, my skeptical expression and her total lack of human expressiveness. It’s an odd photo and I like it more every time I look at it.

 

April 30

Upon returning home to Toronto in April after a 7-month stay in New York, I had to go on a long and (for my chronically ill body) arduous journey. I had to take a cab to the airport, go through security, get on the plane, fly, get off the plane, pick up my suitcase, drag it onto a link train, ride the train to my quarantine hotel, check into the hotel, stay there for 3 days, and then trek to my parents’ house to complete the remainder of my quarantine. It was pretty exhausting.

I took this photo, sleep-deprived and mildly manic with anxiety, on the link train between the airport and my hotel, by which point I’d been traveling for something like 7 hours. I was surprised to get a car to myself on the train, and wanted to let mb know I was doing okay but barely had the energy or brainspace to formulate a coherent message. So instead, I lifted up my shirt, snapped a surreptitious public nude, and sent that.

The wildness in my eyes makes me laugh, because I was really on a different planet mentally at that moment than I am in normal everyday life. I was just So Over It, and you can tell. This isn’t really a sexy nude. It isn’t really a funny one either. It’s just… weird. But I like that about it.

 

May 16

Both of my vaccine shots happened somewhat suddenly and unexpectedly – I’d hear about a pop-up vaccination clinic way up in North York or way out in Scarborough, do a little scoping online to see if it was for real, and then hop on the subway or in an Uber and get my ass there ASAP. It was quite a rush, like the public-health equivalent of managing to score tickets to your fave band’s big arena show just moments before it sells out.

Upon arriving back home after my first shot, I was glowing with happiness from having been able to get this thing I’d been (like most other people at that time) desperately and impatiently hoping and wishing for. So I decided to take a nude, of course.

This photo is such a 2020/2021 mood. I love that about it. In no other years so far in my lifetime would it make sense, let alone be hot, to take a lewd selfie with a band-aid slapped onto your arm like a sexy accessory. And yet, this is probably one of the most sensual photos I took all year, if just because of what it portends. After all, wouldn’t you rather kiss someone who’s got their shot than someone who hasn’t yet?

 

August 26

Another sexy one! Damn, there are a lot of those this year.

I had a bunch of ideas for photos I wanted to take when copies of my book first arrived on my doorstep. I wanted to line them up in flat-lays with whips and chains, hold them between my legs like a naughty secret, surround myself with them like I was drowning in my own words. But also, I wanted to put one on my ass.

Something I like about this photo is that I would have no idea how to interpret it if you showed it to me-from-10-years-ago. I wouldn’t immediately clock this ass as my own, because I didn’t have those distinctive tattoos back then, and I certainly wouldn’t know how to parse the sight of my own name on a beautiful book like this.

In many ways, this is a photo of the version of me I’ve manifested into existence over the years, the me who I’ve fought to become. A good girl, an inked-up queer femme, a freelance writer lounging half-nude at home, a published author who doesn’t have to care if people online have seen her butt or not. It’s essentially a self-portrait of some of my favorite things about myself and my life.

Plus it’s made a great promo shot for the book. I mean, if you saw this on a billboard or something, wouldn’t you be curious?!

 

October 24

Because we’re romantics, mb and I celebrated the one-year anniversary of them proposing to me by returning to the place where it happened, the High Line park.

We walked the entire length of the park twice, first one way and then the other, stopping in various spots where we’d had romantic moments on previous visits: places where we kissed, where we held hands, where we laughed at odd things we’d overheard other people saying.

But the most meaningful spot in the whole High Line for us is the picturesque lookout where mb got on one knee and asked me to marry them. They’d chosen it specifically, over any other place in the park, because it was so beautiful. So we returned there and took a selfie to document the moment, and our joy.

I love them so much and I’m still so glad I said yes to them that evening in the park, late in 2020. I think our smiles say it all.

Cybersex in Roleplaying Games Made Me Who I Am

Kate Sloan

Content notes: This essay discusses some of my early experiences with cybersex. I was underage at the time (probably 12-14 in most cases). All of this was consensual on my part (personally, if not legally), but if underage sexuality squicks you out, that’s understandable and please feel free to skip this one! There are also mentions of master/slave language.

 

Cybersex in online roleplaying games made me feel like an adult for one of the first times in my life. In some ways, no other online sexual experiences I’ve had since then have quite scratched the same itch.

I was always a sexually precocious kid, scribbling anatomically uninformed erotica in my journals and googling for lists of masturbation techniques to marvel over. Porn didn’t particularly interest me – there were few safe porn sites at the time that would neither load a virus onto our shared family computer nor crash it with pop-up ads blaring autoplay moans – but I loved to read about sex. That’s still largely how my sexuality works to this day: although I’ve gained an appreciation for some types of porn, in many cases I’d rather read someone’s detailed cunnilingus guide or a well-crafted erotic fanfiction story than ogle cumshots and gangbangs.

Massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) were some of my first online social spaces, after early forays into ICQ chatrooms and TeenOpenDiary blogging. My two favorite games in this genre were Furcadia, a highly user-customizable world where everyone was an anthropomorphized animal and you had to learn a basic coding language to craft your own private rooms, and Runescape, a vast medieval fantasy world involving quests, guilds, mining, and magic. It was in these two strange universes that I began to understand the massive implications the internet had for people like me, people who were shy and reserved in the “real world” but came alive online, making friends and having adventures.

I was surely too young to be having cybersex, legally speaking. That’s the detail of this story that makes me cringe to type out. Sometimes I told other users my real age – and many of them were, or at least were pretending to be, teens as well – but sometimes I didn’t. Young people’s burgeoning sexuality is a highly controversial and fraught topic I’m probably not qualified to make any definitive statements about. But I can tell you that in my case, everything I pursued in these mediums was something I had consented to and was not traumatized by, and any time anyone made me feel at all uncomfortable, I had no qualms about closing the window or teleporting to a different corner of the virtual world I was navigating.

In Furcadia, as I mentioned, you could create your own areas – called “dreams” – by coding them yourself and then uploading them to a communal space, where others could visit them if they so chose. I have always been profoundly nerdy and was immediately interested in this aspect of the game, for the huge amount of freedom it provided. It wasn’t long before I started building myself elaborate mansions with big, ornate bedrooms, complete with doors that locked at the flip of a lever due to my careful coding. It delighted me to build secret entrances, hidden teleportation pads, dim dank dungeons no one would know about unless I showed them.

There was an 18+ area in Furcadia, where, of course, I spent a good deal of time long before turning 18. Within that area was a place called The Slave Auction. (I must note here that the language of slavery is no longer something I’m comfy playing with, in kink or otherwise, due to, y’know, centuries of systemic white supremacy and horrific violence against enslaved Black people. I’m white so that language isn’t mine to reclaim or subvert.) In that area, you could line up to be “auctioned off” to a buyer in the crowd. No money was exchanged, actual or virtual; this was all fantasy. I find it telling that this was probably the communal space where I spent the most time in my years as a Furcadia user, despite believing until about a decade later that I was vanilla and had no kinks. (Oh, precious baby Kate, there is so much you didn’t know.)

When someone “bought” me, typically I would take them back to my “dream,” lead them to the ostentatious bedroom I’d hand-coded for the occasion, and commence having cybersex.

Much like sexting today, different people had different ways of approaching cybersex. I would always click on potential partners to see the bio they’d written for themselves, and if it was a long paragraph full of big words and impeccably-employed punctuation, I knew I’d get the type of cyber-fuck I liked best: articulate, loquacious, and seductive. When I had them in my virtual bed, we’d start describing – in walls of text that took so long to type, you could be waiting 3-5 minutes between missives – removing each other’s clothes, kissing, touching, and whatever came next. My replies were probably fairly generic and naïve. I was much more interested in what the other person typed.

It’s telling, too, that I tended to guide the conversation toward cunnilingus. Being a person who’d learned to masturbate via only clitoral stimulation, and had rarely – if ever – done anything else, I found descriptions of penetrative sex boring and hard to relate to. Instead I would prompt my pixelated paramour to craft strings of sentences about going down on me, and would reply with paragraph-length descriptions of my own moaning and writhing. A pillow princess in the extreme.

There were people who, upon noticing these limitations of my lust, would vanish to another realm, leaving me alone in my abandoned dream. That is fair enough. But there were also people who would stick around the whole time, giving me what I obviously wanted, and those people shaped my sexuality in ways they’ll never know. These were some of the first instances of me ever formulating a clear sexual desire and asking someone else (albeit indirectly) to fulfill it. The skills I took away from these interactions (including typing fast one-handed) would serve me for many years to come.

While some therapists and friends of mine, in the years since, have sometimes (very reasonably) expressed concern upon hearing about these youthful dalliances, for me, cybersex was never a site of victimization or violation. I know many people have had a different experience. I’m lucky enough to be able to credit those late nights of furtive typing with making me into the sexually fulfilled, adventurous, and communicative person I am today.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.

Rest is Crucial, Sacred, & Sexy

Kate Sloan

I recently quit my part-time social media job after 4 years of working there. I’ve long called this gig my “dayjob” because it did the thing for me that dayjobs do for creative types: it gave me a steady, reliable income that tethered me to the working world and afforded me the time, money, and brainspace to do my passion projects on the side. But in recent months, my “dayjob” had begun to bring in only about 7% of my total income, while taking up about a quarter of my working hours – and with book deadlines and health issues weighing heavily on me, I decided it was time to move on.

This was a challenging decision for me, in no small part because I have loved working at that company and with the people there, albeit remotely, these past 4 years. I had other resistances to leaving, though, and spent a whole hour discussing them with my therapist recently. I worried that my other projects would dry up, leaving me regretful to have quit – although there’s no evidence that will happen. I worried that without time-sensitive morning tasks to complete each weekday, I’d let my depression get the better of me, lazing about in bed into the afternoon. I worried that firm daily deadlines were the glue holding my life together, and that without them, I’d lack the conviction and self-direction to manage my time effectively.

But as my therapist reminded me, this is internalized ableism, internalized capitalism. The discourse around “laziness” is too often aimed at people whose systemic struggles and marginalizations are framed as personal failures. The freelancer community’s obsession with “hustling” is borne of capitalistic imperatives. A person’s “hustle,” or lack thereof, says nothing about their inherent value as a human being. Not all people have the same abilities; we can’t all hustle as hard as we think we “should.”

It feels shameful to admit that one of the reasons I quit my job was so I could rest more. I feel like I already rest a great deal, certainly more than my friends who work long hours at cafés or retail stores. But this mindset comes from holding myself to able-bodied standards despite being increasingly, invisibly disabled. My chronic pain and chronic fatigue are worse and more frequent than they’ve ever been. I often need a 3-hour nap just to get through the day, or to “catch up on sleep” into the luxuriant afternoon hours on weekends. The simple fact of living in a pain-wracked body is uniquely exhausting. I can’t pretend that away.

I have to banish culture-borne ideas of “laziness” in order to plan a schedule that actually works for my body and my brain. Now that I’ll soon be fully self-employed, with most of my deadlines being self-imposed or flexible, I can rearrange my schedule as needed to fit with my lifestyle and desires – something I’ve longed for my entire adult life. I’ve been fantasizing about “Weekend Wednesdays” and impromptu staycations and “the 4-hour work week.” It feels blissful, in the truest possible sense of that word, to envision the freedom my self-employment will now afford. And I know it is an enormous privilege, one that comes from my position in society as an educated white person as well as my many years of hard work to establish this lifestyle for myself. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s wrong somehow to rest as much as I do, or as much as I want to. That I “should” work more, to “earn” the happiness I get from having a career that genuinely delights me.

My therapist told me, “You’re working as much as you comfortably can, and you’re earning enough money to live on. That’s all that matters here.” I felt my body relax when she said this. It’s so wild that capitalism instills in us, from birth, the belief that our work, our productivity, and our output are what define our value as human beings. Even sworn anti-capitalists sometimes still struggle to unlearn this. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that “jobs” and “careers,” as they are defined in modern times, did not always exist and do not need to exist. If human didn’t need to work in order to survive, what would we do instead? Would we make art, socialize, have sex, eat, drink, sleep, think? Would we feel fulfilled then? Would we feel we had done “enough” at the end of each day?

It’s impossible to say. But I’m working on accepting that my rest time is every bit as valid and important as my work time. When my achy, sleepy body demands a 1 p.m. nap, I need not admonish it or deny it. When my inner child pipes up to say that Wednesdays should be days off for playing in the sunshine, I can and should listen. When all I want, at a bone-deep level, is to stay in bed all day playing Pokémon games and listening to comedy podcasts, that’s likely a signal I should heed. This feels sinful and embarrassing to even type out. But that’s because it’s a new belief system for me, one that butts up against bullshit I’ve been inundated with my whole life.

We need rest to survive. That’s especially true for disabled folks. I feel no sensuality and sexiness in my body when my nose is constantly pressed to the grindstone. I get precious little joy from life when my every waking minute is mired in work and worry. I have no time or energy left over for the fun things, or even the necessary things, when work swallows me whole.

Rest is crucial. Not all of us have the ability, or the privilege, to honor that fact and live it out fully. But don’t let anyone tell you it’s not. You deserve the rest you need – and the rest you want.