I went to a strip club last night.

I went to a strip club last night. I went to a motherfucking strip club. I. Me. This girl who not that long ago used to cringe and hide her face any time anyone made an even slightly dirty joke out loud. This girl who maybe just 2 months ago could barely muster up the energy to have sex with her Fiance about once a week.  This girl who couldn't even say the word "penis" out loud with a straight face. This girl. Me. I.  I went to a fully nude, fully insane, fully amazing strip club.

And it was spectacular. It was fantastic. I had the most mindblowing time, and got to meet and flirt and smell some of the most amazing women. In the car ride home, I think I yelled out something like "Holy shit, there's no question about it. I'm totally a raging bisexual back here." I can't remember everything. There was no alcohol involved, but the night was such a blur of color and flesh and elevated heartrates that I'm sure it will be weeks from now and I'll still recall new details that will thrill and excite me. I can't tell you all the stories. But I owe this experience to two very very dear friends who took Fiance and me there as a most fantastic and inspired engagement gift... I still have no fucking words, but they both got a lot of hugs and snuggles and I wish I could do something, anything to really truly thank them in some way that does justice to how that experience transformed me.

And... and... going to the club wasn't the only mind-blowing thing that I did yesterday. I sort of changed three times yesterday... ("A day of three changes?") Sort of bolstered by the anticipation of going to the club, and also sort of bolstered by the unabashed desire just to try it and see how it felt, I shaved everything... and I mean everything. With a razor. Fiance was there, helping me. Supervising. Helping me touch up places I couldn't see or reach. Telling me I was a good girl when I needed to sink slightly into subspace in order to really fully trust that the blade wasn't going to cut me.  It was a fantastic and amazing experience, and afterwards I felt changed for the first of the three times.

I looked at myself in the mirror after shaving and just said "Who the fuck am I?" with this massive grin. I think I even yelled something like "holy shit, I have a pussy!" while looking at the color and texture of skin that I'd never actually really seen before. And in this really deep belly sort of way, I felt this glow... this unabashed glow that I can only attribute to actually discovering that I like myself.

And then the second of three changes happened. A lightswitch in my brain flipped from off to on, and despite the fact that for my entire life, I swore I'd never ever let anyone ever do this to me (not even a future life partner after being married for a million years), I decided I wanted to take naked pictures of myself. Naked pictures. Of myself. Explicit ones. Very explicit ones. I. Me. This girl who used to hate her body so much that the thought of ever there existing any kind of even half-nude or sexualized picture of her used to send her into a massive anxiety and panic attack just thinking about it.  But for some reason, yesterday, I wanted to. I needed to. So I did. :D Fiance helped with angles and poses and also helped with making sure my phone didn't auto-upload any of these images to the cloud.  We must have taken a dozen or so... some with rope (purple of course!), some without. Some up close, some zoomed out. None showed my face, and none were very good, but they were mine. My naked pictures. I'd never felt so fucking powerful before that moment as I did right then, zooming in and out looking at my own god damned cunt in high definition.

I don't have good words to process any of this. I don't think I've had nearly enough sleep to process any of this.

After we got home from the strip club last night, I had to just pause looking in the mirror at one point and just be *baffled*.  Somewhere in the club, somewhere between learning how to tip properly at the stage and learning what it's like to have this gorgeous tattooed woman who just made you feel so much teasing you in a private dance so intense that it ends in involuntary tears and many laughter-filled hugs (I am not making this up. While I wasn't sobbing or anything, I can honestly say I cried a bit in the arms of a stripper!) I changed for the the third time in a day.

When we got home, I found myself having one of those incredibly surreal moments where you look at yourself in the mirror and you see someone totally different from who you were the last time you stood there. Like the night before and after losing your virginity... I remember pretty distinctly looking in the mirror before sneaking off to meet my friend (yes, I lost my v-card to a friend rather than a boyfriend. I'm actually pretty damn proud of this.) and thinking to myself something like "the next time I am standing here, looking at myself in this bathroom mirror, I'm going to be a changed person."  I don't mean this to say that losing my virginity was some kind of mythic, epic thing. (It wasn't. It was actually pretty disappointing and frustrating, but that's another story.) But even so, I marked that moment with this mirrored eye-contact with myself and just marveled at how I was about to do something sort of huge and different and personal and in that romantic-narcissistic headspace all 16 year olds live in, I felt and believed that after that point, I'd be changed forever.

And last night after coming home, I had one of those exact moments but sort of in reverse. I looked in the mirror and saw myself as a changed person. Wholly changed. "Who the fuck am I?" I said with an uncontrollably huge smile. Just a few weeks ago, I'd never have even fathomed that I'd be doing and thinking and being in the ways I have been lately.

And I'm so fucking pleased with myself over all of it. Every single thing.  I had the most spectacular time last night. I wore high heels all night and didn't die (although I'm sore as fuck this morning... but that COULD have been from the wild sex after coming home... not sure if I can blame the heels). I fell in love over and over and over again with the women on stage, chatting with us, doing acrobatics and dives and flinging their underwear at my friend next to me.  I got to watch as a stripper in full Harley Quinn cosplay and character grabbed my Fiance by the tie and dragged him off to be molested (I think when he came back, he said something about how he'd never ever been so hot for a woman threatening to murder him before.)

I'm still more than just a little bit stunned by it all. I can't expect to process this all in one post. I am sure I'll be thinking about this for weeks... I know that for days and days to come, I'm going to be thinking non-stop about the stripper who treated me oh so well and gave me the most spectacular hugs, celebrating with me the fact that it was my first time there by being so incredibly warm and generous with her smiles and body and laughter.  She told me afterwards how thrilled she'd felt to dance for me because of how enthusiastic and genuinely into it I was. We hugged and she said I was her "favorite" to dance for, and even if she says that or something like that to all her clients, she made me feel it. She made me feel like she understood me, my nervousness and enthusiasm and the happy dizzy feeling she was making me feel on a level that I had no hope of really understanding for myself just then, or maybe even ever...

I really don't know how I'm going to return to my "normal life" after this. It's 9:35 am on a random Sunday in October and I have two very large stacks of papers to grade and lessons to write, and dishes to do, and laundry to fold, but all I want to do is just continue to bask in this afterglow... write some smutty fiction, and put my black high heels on again and walk around in them for just a little while more.