For a long time, I felt drawn to other men to compensate for childhood development that trauma interrupted. It wasn’t really about men. It was about reaching for qualities I didn’t feel inside myself. Men are beautiful, but sexual union with them was never a substitute for being me.

Coming home to my body is foundational to my life. When I can sense myself from the inside, I show up more whole in relationships, my physical health improves, and my work thrives.

These days, even the idea of sexualizing men in my mind feels disgusting. Not because same-sex intimacy is disgusting, but because for me, sexualizing men means leaving my body. That’s also why I call myself straight. During years of dating men and publicly calling myself gay, I had to abandon my body to feel sexual pleasure, even with the kind, handsome men I loved.

I was repeating the same survival strategy I used during two years of sexual assaults as a child. With women, intimacy landed me inside my body. And now, after years of healing, I live in my body more consistently. I don’t need a woman to “bring me home.”

When I dissociate, my body pays. I get weak. Physically, literally. I learned to exit early, and I can feel the cost in real time: my core collapses, my energy drops, my strength drains.

For years, I thought manhood was something granted, earned, verified by other men and women, like a stamp on a passport. But what I’m learning is quieter:

Maleness isn’t a performance. It’s an element. It lives in tissue and bone.

Manhood is what happens when that element is allowed to grow up inside me, when the boy who had to leave his body is invited back. When the spine stops bracing. When the pelvis stops disappearing. When the jaw unclenches and the throat learns it can speak.