Our birth control stories

JoséI am sitting on the cracked, faux black leather couch in a white beam of LED light. Underneath the sparkling sheath of my green-blue dress is my matching tangerine orange underwear set. José is crouched on his knees on the floor in front of me.I notice the way he sees me. His drunken eyes double-take as I open my legs. I look down over the lip of my dress and back up into his brown eyes, teasing. I want to control him. It's like I've made up a game with my own body. I will spruce up these used goods. Put the fruit back on the shelf at the supermarket, nice and ripe again.I touch myself over my underwear as I look up at him. I am putting on a show for him. I quite like it. I feel powerful, in control. I notice the grey hairs in the scruff of his beard as he sips his beer. He leans in closer, tasting me with his nose.When we are f*****g in his room, the breath is forced out of my lungs by the weight of his body and his protruding belly. He has cute brown moles on his face, deep brown eyes, and a wicked smile. Eight years older than me. He comes quickly. I feel dainty, young, fresh.José drives me home at 3 in the morning. In his car, I hug my knees, my orange underwear back on but readjusted and slightly twisted. He winks at me, and I pause for a moment. I wonder. We can both look at my body, but perhaps we see very different things. How does he see me? As some kind of walking beauty? Humanly imperfect yet highly f******e?Come back for more

TL;DR Better out than in. Be bold. Tell people you love them while you still can. No regrets.

Dear Wonderful Readers,This morning, I woke up grumpy and exhausted, scrolling depressively for thirty minutes, debating whether to even get up. My self-criticism has been flaring up again, making life almost unlivable.“Come to this self-portrait event at Soho House!” my friend coaxed me via WhatsApp.I frowned. Most of me wanted to stay at home, hiding. But after a short self-compassion practice to stop me destroying myself from self-hatred, I got up. I got a latte. I went for a walk. I decided to go to the self-portrait event. Because why the hell not?Get a weekly, shamelessly sexy musing

Abstract (TL;DR) ⏰After 64 attempts and zero orgasms, I finally understood why 81.6% of women can't reach orgasm from intercourse alone. Here, I uncover the reasons why. I was in a one-year relationship. We were in our teens, and although we had lots of fun penetrative sex in different places, neither of us understood the importance of the female's pleasure in a heterosexual relationship. I cite a research paper where I self-identify as part of the 81.6% of females who cannot orgasm from intercourse alone. Then I share which of the researcher's suggested techniques for helping women orgasm also work for me. These include not feeling rushed, having a partner who knows what I like, and anal stimulation.Subscribe for regular spice

Dear Wonderful Readers,The following vignette is what we call a “raw write.” I wrote it in 40 minutes in my writing class called UnMute, led by my incredible writing teacher, ANN RANDOLPH. I've been attending Ann's classes for the last three and a half years, and working with her has been a huge part of my creative journey. She'll be starting up UnMute again in the fall for any of you who have a lot of stories bubbling away inside of you but are unsure of where to start. I highly recommend her class.Today's prompt was the poem “What The Living Do” by Marie Howe, and I took the question: “Write about something broken in your home—something small and stupid. Let the description grow. What bigger thing does it mirror or hold? What grief or yearning lives inside that broken faucet, that squeaky hinge?”Also, I've got an exciting and quick Misseducated update. Starting this week, I will be experimenting with posting my work on Tuesdays. I've tended to publish too late on Friday evening, and I hope that publishing earlier in the week will give me more opportunities to share my work on social while it's still fresh. Still, I am eternally grateful to all my regular Friday readers, and I will keep you in the loop as to how it goes! You can expect posts from me on Tuesday from now on.I hope you enjoy this piece and have a great weekend.Love,Tash

Dear wonderful readers,Today, we have the ultimate treat for you all! This week, two shameless sex writers on Substack sat down to share our personal experiences of what it's really like to publish the details of our intimate lives on the internet.Share the steam with a spicy-minded friend

What you see on social media can stand in your way of being shamelessly sexy. Here's what to do about it.Short Answer ⏰Comparing yourself to others on social media creates a shame spiral that traps you in four ways: expectation, comparison, striving, and validation. To counteract this, change your media diet (follow fewer accounts that make you feel terrible, and more accounts that make you feel good), reflect on what exactly you are jealous of in a post so you can take action to make it happen, and consider taking a social media break altogether.Longer Answer

On a warm afternoon in May 2011, I was walking down Tottenham Court Road in London. I had passed through the wide, open grassy squares of Bloomsbury and Holborn, filled with corporate people enjoying the late spring sun. Now, I was surrounded by the streets of fried chicken joints and tourist souvenir shops packed with people as I headed to catch a double-decker bus home.At 16 years old, navigating London was nothing new to me. I had been taking the bus home from school since I was about 12. Still, this afternoon was slightly different. I was feeling curious, inspired, and contemplative. My school had just taken us out on a Maths conference field day. As I passed cars, lorries, and buses stuck in traffic, my mind zoomed, imagining all the possibilities of what I might study at university and beyond.I was mid-bustle when I saw a sign propped up on the pavement. It read, “Free Personality Tests.”A short woman approached me from the shop.“Hello!” she called out, “Would you like to take a personality test?”Much like the men selling Paddington Bears, Union Jacks, and keyrings, she seemed to be selling her wares. I almost didn't turn around because I had already passed the shop. Yet I distinctly remember thinking, as I stood a couple of steps ahead of her, that maybe I should be more open-minded! A personality test sounded intriguing. My school activities were over for the day. I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. I thought to myself: why not?“Sure, I'll take a personality test,” I said to her, turning around.“Amazing. Follow me,” she said, “There's plenty for you to discover.”I went with her into the narrow shop front. The space was quite small and bright, with a kind of beige old office feel to it. The hardwood wall had some kind of giant inscription written on it, and the floor was a faux marble with light brown-green speckles. There was a staircase with a glass, silver-handled railing. She took me down a short corridor, passed rows of books and pamphlets on shelves, into a small back room with low-walled cubicles.She showed me to the cubicle where I was going to take my personality test, and I sat down on a scratchy, cushioned office chair with a round back. There were a couple of other people in there, flipping through pages of questions on small packets of white A4 paper that had been stapled together. I would have heard the scratching of their pencils on the pages, but there was a buzz of background noise and chatter throughout the place. She soon handed me a packet of questions. I wrote my name and my date of birth at the top of the page and got to work.I didn't feel particularly scared there; I was just curious. I was still at the age where I believed that most people were well-intentioned in the world, and I would just be able to leave any place, including this stuffy office room if I felt like it. If anything, my friends and I were the ones actively breaking the law, getting ourselves into less-than-ideal situations, and running away from the police. We'd pay homeless men to buy alcohol for us from the local newsagents. We'd bribe the guy at the corner shop to sell us cheap Egyptian cigarettes. Even if one of us was caught smoking a splif (a rolled mixture of weed and tobacco) in the park, we usually found a way to speak posh with our private school accents and talk the constable out of calling our parents.I kept a steady pace through the questions, quite like the multiple-choice verbal reasoning tests I'd had to take for my entrance exams into secondary school. It had probably 30 pages of questions.Did I get angry sometimes? How often did I feel misunderstood? Did random coincidences happen sometimes that I couldn't explain? Did I ever talk about someone, and then they'd appear later that same day? Did I ever feel very excited but also very bored? Yes. No. Very often. Often. Sometimes. Rarely. Never. Strongly Agree. Agree. Neutral. Disagree. Strongly Disagree.Gosh, that questionnaire was long. After at least about 20 minutes, I really hoped the personality test would be over soon. I was desperate to get the results. Was I a particularly angry person, with unacceptable levels of rage, getting angrier more than most? I thought about leaving the stuffy office, but now I had put so much into the first 25 pages of this thing that my time was such a sunk cost. Couldn't someone just tell me what type of personality I had?When I finally finished the questionnaire, the woman instructed me,“Now, you're going to watch this video where you can learn about the different personality types as we assess your results. You'll know soon.”Thank god, I thought to myself. This better be good.She led me down the staircase with the glass railing into another smaller, slightly darker, stuffy office room. She sat me down in a similar low cubicle. There were a couple of other people in there, including a mother with her young boy, who was playing on the floor.The woman handed me a round, cheap headset with a small black muffler at each earlobe, quite like the ones we got on planes at the time. The monitor was an ugly grey color. She put the DVD into the desktop computer and started the video.I remember the video starting with bright yellow, gold, and orange sunsets and a man and a woman in hiking gear sitting there with their heads in their hands or running in slow motion up a hill.“Do you get angry sometimes? Do you often feel misunderstood by the people around you, even your closest friends and family? Do random coincidences happen sometimes that you can't explain? All this depends on your personality, and we're here to give you the tools so that you can navigate your life and thrive. Our guides are here to assist you.”I sat on my hands, praying that the whole questionnaire had been worth it. This was just starting to get good. About five minutes in, mid-video, the woman quickly came up to my cubicle and pressed stop on the video. She seemed huffed and bothered slightly.“I'm sorry,” she said, “We can't help you. We hope you have a great day—”I interjected,“But I just spent 20 minutes filling out that questionnaire. You can't tell me anything?”“No. Sorry.”Without much of an explanation, she hurried me upstairs. I noticed that most of the people upstairs had gone, possibly to a meeting or to watch videos with their guides and get the answers to their personality tests. She hurried me outside and shut the door behind me. Their white shopfront now looked sleepy and vacant.I stood there for a moment, grumbling to myself, before I continued down Tottenham Court Road to the bus stop. What they had promised sounded kind of amazing, but it had all ended up being a waste of time when I could have been outside, enjoying the late spring afternoon. I regretted going in there only to have my expectations crushed. Why hadn't she been able to give me any answers?Well, it's now 14 years later, and the hilarious thing is that the place still exists. I had entered the “Dianetics & Scientology Life Improvement Centre,” an active “non-profit” organization with a whopping 4.4 stars on Google Maps and 291 reviews, offering “courses and counseling to help you improve your life and reach your full potential.” Just wow.I now know, thanks to this news article, that the questionnaire I took was probably their 200-question “Oxford Capacity Analysis.” The article says, “The Scientology “personality test” is described by various Internet sources as a Scientology recruitment tool used worldwide on Scientology websites, in Scientology churches, and in public settings such as fairs and festivals. It also has been criticized by psychologists as not a bonafide personality test...Young people under age 18 are asked to have a parent or guardian sign the questionnaire.”So, there you have it. Years later, I finally know why I was instructed to leave: I was underaged and alone. In that woman's mind, once she saw my date of birth, I quickly morphed from a fresh, juicy recruit into a potential legal nightmare.I wish I could tell you that I saw it coming or that in the moment, alarm bells went off in my head, and I walked out disgusted, vowing never to return to any cult-like place. But that is far from what happened. Sure, I left that place feeling puzzled and disappointed. Yet, it was only with the benefit of hindsight that I see now how lucky I was to be a minor at the time, without one of my parents nearby to sign my waiver.The truth is that even if I considered myself smart or well-educated at the time, I only narrowly avoided joining one of the largest and most notorious cults in the world because of an even greater factor: the rule of law. Part of being shameless is accepting in a light-hearted way that even if we think we've got it all together, we can still make mistakes. We can still be wrong, very wrong. Especially as young people, sometimes we need an external force like the law to save us from ourselves. When we acknowledge our mistakes shamelessly and do not pretend that we are above other people, having this perspective on life is surprisingly freeing. We've fully come to terms with our foibles and failures, and there's not much in the way of other people that can tarnish us if we hold ourselves in high esteem. We might make a mistake, but that does not mean we are a mistake. Indeed, sometimes, making a mistake may riddle us with deep shame and embarrassment, and that's something we can work through. Then, we have other mistakes that may simply become a funny story that we can share 14 years later.Have you ever been duped? Did you ever almost join a cult? Tell us about your experience in the comments!Join us on our mission to help the world be shamelessly sexy!Love,Tash

Introduction

Introduction

Warning: This piece discusses my menstrual cycle in depth. If that doesn't interest you, please do something else with your time. I won't be offended. Thanks!“Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.” — Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.Dear Wonderful Readers,I am not a scientific expert when it comes to a complex topic like the menstrual cycle. But as a writer who is curious about the world, since I got my first period 19 years ago, I've gathered a lot of data on one menstrual cycle in particular: my own. Today, I'm going to share with you one aspect of my menstrual cycle that I hope you will find reassuring, cool, and downright witchy. It gives me the kind of all-knowing power that I definitely would have been burned at the stake for 400 years ago.The Phenomena of Phenomenal ThinkingEvery month, after I finish my period, I get a few days of incredible clarity on basically every aspect of my life. I also feel incredibly energized. I'm currently in that phase. Just yesterday, I found myself biking extra fast on my way to my co-working space and improvising on the piano like an absolute boss.I first noticed this experience a couple of years ago. I've since started tracking it in my period-tracking app, Clue, which is an awesome company that I also happen to work for (I don't make money from telling you this because Clue doesn't have an affiliate program). In Clue, I've made a special tag for this experience. I call it my “Post-Period Strategic Clarity.”How does my “Post-Period Strategy Clarity” manifest in my life? Well, this week, I pitched five new clients before midday on Wednesday. I'd also been feeling a bit lost in my career, but when I went to a concert on Tuesday, I could picture my future self, sitting on that same stage, selling out an audience of 3,500 people as I talked about my writing tools and techniques and sharing them with the world. In the last couple of days, as I go to bed, I find myself reaching for a piece of paper and a pen to jot down strings of incredible ideas on who I should be reaching out to, how I should be asking for help, and where I should be focusing my energy because I know where I'm going. It's like unrolling a blueprint created by my brain and knowing all my next moves. I even redownloaded Hinge and started messaging people.There's evidence that I'm not making this up. Here's what hormonal health expert Alissa Vetti says about the menstrual cycle and the follicular phase:“So first, you have the follicular phase. Fascinating phase. And neuro-chemically these hormonal ratios change your brain chemistry. So, you are a different person week-over-week within a month…In that follicular phase where the eggs are coming up to maturity, one is going to make it to the fallopian tube, very exciting time. Neuro-chemically speaking, you have the most access to creative energy than that you will have the entire month. Effortlessly. This is a perfect time to begin new projects: mastermind plan, dream big, all of that.”My next question is: why does my body do this? Well, here is my totally non-scientific answer. I'm 30 years old, and these days I'm feeling super intense baby fever and what can only be described as extreme horniness every time I ovulate, which occurs in the days right after the follicular phase. So, right after my period ends, once my body has rid itself of the last cycle, it's gearing up again for ovulation. And so, I get a surge of energy. And this energy makes sense because, for survival, it would probably be a good idea for me to gather a lot of resources (i.e., pitch a s**t ton of clients to make sure I have plenty of enough income) and find a mate (i.e., download a dating app and start going out and flirting with whoever is hanging around). Maybe I need to nest a bit (i.e., decide which relationships and things in my house are working for me and discard some that aren't). So, yes, I'm living my modern life equivalent. But from a biological perspective, I can see how this corresponds to what's going on in my cycle. My brain might be speaking in emails, client pitches, and party invitations. But my body is making sure that I create the most awesome, successful, and habitable environment for myself, attract a great mate, and get some optimal offspring going. Pretty cool! And yes, I literally am ready to run a half-marathon this weekend before a party with some of the coolest musicians and hot, bright young things in Mexico City.Before you start rolling your eyes and thinking, “Well, isn't this girl's life just pretty and perfect!” let me remind you what happened just before my Post-Period Strategy Clarity: I had my period. All the greatness that follows my period during this phase happens despite my recent mood swings, extreme irritability, propensity to cry for no reason, and depression during my PMS for at least another week before. Plus, the depressing point is that this clarity doesn't last forever. As I've written about before, after a couple of days, I know all the insanity of ovulation will start happening again, and I'll be back to not having a clue what I am doing with my life. See how Mother Nature's a b***h? And how what goes up must come down?Three years ago, I was on this same cycle, just as I will be until I hit menopause, I expect. In May 2022, I wrote,“Right before I get my period or even the first or second day, I feel incredibly alone, timid, and shy. I feel self-conscious and hyper-acutely aware of all my mistakes in conversations. But the strangest thing happens at the end of my period, like now. I feel incredibly energized, and my thoughts become completely clear. It usually comes to me like a flash of inspiration on one night of the month. I can see crystal clear who I am trying to become, what I need to do to push myself that month, what I'm truly feeling about things, and what needs to change. I can see that now.”For those of you who want the extra details, you should know that this all happens despite the fact that I've had a Hormonal IUD for the last 8 years. I recently got mine replaced after it expired because my periods have been historically insanely painful, and I don't plan on having a period again if I can avoid it. These 8 years, I haven't had cramping and bleeding on my period, but I still get those mood swings! So, I still get my Post-Period Strategic Clarity. At least in my experience with Hormonal IUDs, everybody wins.In summary, if you have a menstrual cycle and you're not currently using an app to track any of your symptoms, maybe try it out for a while and see if you find it helpful. There are plenty of apps on the market besides Clue. Obviously, I'm not a pacha mama earthy spiritual lady telling you to live off the grid and never put another medication in your body ever again. But looking at the science, it makes sense to try to master matching our lives with the energetic flow of our menstrual cycles, especially when it serves us as baddies living our best lives. Alissa Vetti called this “[leveraging] your body as a power tool.” And that's what I plan to continue to do.Here's to harnessing the cyclical nature of being a female for my own benefit! Moahaha!

I scheduled a meeting with my boss one cold mid-March morning in New York City. Since saving up almost $40,000, I had started to taste freedom in my morning coffee. My courage came out of nowhere. I was about to do something crazy. I was on the edge, flirting with the real world. That morning, I did the dead. I quit my full-time job.Three years have passed since that fateful morning, and this week, I hosted a party to celebrate that. As I sipped white wine with my friends, I realized that despite what the crunch of capitalism would want you to believe, I'm still here. I've survived for three years without a full-time job; I also moved to Mexico City and published a teen romance novel in the process. And in some ways, I'm thriving.This article is for anyone in the corporate world who is curious about what I've learned in the chaos of building my new career as a writer, freelancing, and fun, which I'm calling my “post-employment” era. Here, I've distilled for you the five most important professional lessons that I've never shared anywhere else, as well as the most impactful things in other categories of my life.Top Five Lessons for Post-Employment Professional Thriving

Introduction

Hello Wonderful Readers,What I'm about to share with you is completely real.I wrote a love letter to another writer. We met through friends in Mexico City. Over dinner, he told us he had written a short story about sex, and about him. I told him I wanted to read it. I gave him my email address. At the club later that night, after he had emailed me the story, he stood over me and talked loudly over the music into my ear,“Will you send me something back?” he asked me. “What do you want to read?” I said, “I publish my work all the time.” I was trying to make myself sound very prolific and very accomplished.He paused for a moment. Then he said,“Send me something you haven't sent to anyone else before.” His words gave me chills, and you'll understand why below.The next day, I went home, read his story, and whipped up this piece, “Toothpicks,” in about an hour. I had no intention of sharing it, but then my friend insisted on it.Well, here it is.I hope you like it!Love,Tash

IntroductionMy mission is to help the world be shamelessly sexy. To me, that means not feeling ashamed about who you are or the type of sex you want to have. It means going after the things that you want in bed and in life. Being shamelessly sexy looks different for everyone. It's something you need to define for yourself on your own terms. Also, no one can ever be perfectly shamelessly sexy. That's because shame is a normal human emotion that will continue to crop up in life. But being perfect is not the point, people! Not feeling shame is not the point, either. This is about self-discovery. It's about living your own life that is pleasurable and “totally rad,” as the surfer dudes say. It's about feeling aligned with yourself and courageous enough to pursue what you want.I may be more shamelessly sexy now, but I wasn't always this way. I grew up in London, where I was trained at all-girls private schools to be a prim and proper young lady. The red shoes of my school uniform were always perfectly polished. As I failed to color inside the lines in my lessons, I developed a dangerous curiosity.One day, I secretly came across what one might call a “spicy book” or “smut” in my school library. Heavens! When I read it, I felt excited. It was a beacon, an acknowledgment from the adult world:“There are other horny teenagers just like you out there. In fact, being a horny teenager is normal. All those boring adults? Well, they were once one, too.”That day, my perspective on sexuality changed. That smut book opened my mind to the possibility that sex and lovemaking are some of the most beautiful things in the world, even if nobody overtly champions them. I still believe that it's one of life's greatest joys to love another person fully, honestly, and vulnerably. And yet, this is totally hidden in our culture, which makes us feel guilty for simply enjoying ourselves. To this day, that doesn't make sense to me. I've come to wonder whether there is a screw missing in my brain or if it's that I simply transcended the confines of the world I grew up in all those years ago when I read that smut book in the library. Now, I try to help others do the same: to love ourselves and our partners openly in our own unique, beautiful, and messy ways.This piece is for heterosexual-leaning females because that's my experience. Men experience shame differently, and I'll address that in another piece. So, let's dive into how we can get you there!Defining Shame About SexIn my article, “How To Be Shameless,” I shared Brené Brown's definition of shame: “Shame is an epidemic in our culture” that is “highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders." She shares that "[f]or women, shame is: do it all, do it perfectly, and never let them see you sweat.”Here's an example of this in my friend Emily's day-to-day life. Emily is fresh out of a relationship, and she wants to feel good about her body. Last week, we identified where her ideas about her body and her sexuality are coming from.* Feminine conservatism from her mother: Emily's mother is Catholic. For her whole life, Emily's mother wanted her to cover her shoulders and wear longer, feminine dresses, especially when they went to her grandmother's house for Sunday brunch.* Bikini bodies from Instagram: Emily saw a beautiful woman wearing a bikini on Instagram, so she ordered one. It has a G-string bottom that Emily is a bit nervous about trying, but since she lives by the beach, she wants to give it a go.* Pressure from her ex: When Emily was 18, she dated a guy who was 23, and he was more sexually experienced than her. He made her feel guilty that she had never had a threesome and that she didn't want to watch porn with him. In his eyes, she was never sexually experienced enough.* Social Comparison: With her last boyfriend, Emily noticed when they passed other girls on the beach who were prettier than her. Those girls were tanned and wore the G-string bikinis like it was nobody's business. Emily knew that comparison was the thief of joy, but she still wondered if her boyfriend wanted to be with someone prettier.Emily's experiences mirror exactly how Brené Brown described shame in women: “unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we are supposed to be.” Still, Emily's situation confused me. If her sexuality and her feelings about her own body weren't these messages from others, then what were they? This was something far deeper than her mother's conservatism or her ex pressuring her to have sex. Perhaps this was something internal. Perhaps this was something to do with her “self,” and that required an energetic, internal transformation. We agreed that it sounded woo-woo, but her feelings about her sexuality and her body are a form of energy that she embodies.Being Shameless SexyEmily and I agreed that being shamelessly sexy comes down to three fundamental things: knowing what you want, believing you deserve what you want, and asking for it. There's a lot to say here, so I'll address the tips for each of them separately.Know What You Want“If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.” (Terry Tempest Williams).I could probably write a whole book with tips on how to help you figure out what you want in your sex life. I don't claim to be a witch or a genius, so I'll share what's helped me so far.* Work On Your Shame.As I explored previously, facing your shame can help you change your perspective and let go of the past. So, pull up a shameful memory or two from your past that involves your body or having sex. Try not to pick something too overwhelming to begin with. You might need to repeat this exercise multiple times if you have various memories bringing you shame about sex in your past. For this exercise, I picked Valentine's Day with my high school boyfriend when I was 17 when my younger sister walked in on us trying to have a romantic bath together, and my dad found out and gave me the awkward sex talk. It was terrible.Hold your experience in your mind's eye. Remember as many details as you can about the situation. Notice what you feel. Do you feel any physical sensations in your body, your chest, or your throat? Where are you holding the shame in your body? Now, turn toward your younger self with compassion. Acknowledge the pain of the experience. Find a loving gesture you can give yourself for comfort. For this experience, I held my hand and told myself,“Taking a bath is a rather wonderful thing to do with someone. That experience was cruel. You didn't deserve that.”If you don't want to hold your hand, you could also hug yourself, squeeze your arm, or put your hand on your heart. Think of what a loving parent or a kind adult would say to your younger self now. What does your younger self need to hear? It could be something like,“Experiencing shame is part of life. You're not alone. You made a mistake. That doesn't mean you are a mistake. I forgive you.”The more you can give yourself love and acceptance, the less shame you'll eventually feel about that experience. It is totally okay if you cry or feel a big wash of emotion. That's a good sign that you're processing pain and grief.You can listen to my Misseducated interview with Dr. Kristin Neff, the world's leading expert on self-compassion, here: “How to Be Kind to Yourself, and Why It Matters.”* Keep a sex diary or journal.Writing helps to make what we know subconsciously about ourselves conscious. For three years, I've written about my sex life on my blog, Misseducated. Exploring my experiences in pieces like “Why I Never Swallow Cum” has had an incredible benefit that I didn't expect: it has helped me figure out what I like in bed. Writing about your sex life can help you figure out what you want to explore and where your limitations are. You can also learn the exact techniques that make you orgasm and how you like to receive pleasure (for me, the secret tip is always a little bit of butt stuff).So, I encourage you to start keeping a separate journal where you can explore sexual experiences from your past and what you liked and didn't like about them. Start with a prompt like “Losing My Virginity,” “My First Kiss,” or “The Best Sex I Ever Had,” and go from there. Try to bring in all the senses: what you saw, what you heard, what you touched, what you smelt, what you tasted, and what you felt. A candlelit dinner? Grinding at the club? It's all part of your arousal and your sexuality. It can be as simple as a private note on your phone, which you can then giggle to yourself about secretly.Subscribe to the Misseducated Calendar to learn more about when I host Sex Writing Workshops in the future.* Separate the voices of others from your own.“We have lived quite enough for others: let us live at least this tail-end of life for ourselves.” (Page 271, Michel de Montaigne)As you distinguish your voice in your sex diary, it's important to keep the voices of other people separate. For example, you can make a quick list of self-critical words or phrases that often come up for you. Now, try to figure out where you learned each voice and to whom it belongs. Are these your mother's words? Or did Mrs. Screech from 2nd Grade plug those into your brain?Imagine your brain. Clear a dedicated little space at the back of it, which is solely reserved for your thoughts and feelings about your life. This is where you are going to store your unique thoughts. As the old French philosopher Montaigne says,“We should aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude, and asylum.” (Page 270, Michel de Montaigne)* Define success in your sex life.What are your aspirations when it comes to your sex life? Would you like to orgasm or squirt with your partner at least twice every time you sleep together? Is it dancing bachata? Or is it throwing away your razor and just living like you want to, hairy armpits and all? Take some time to define success on your own terms. This exercise is about self-acceptance, not about judging yourself in any way or stressing yourself out. It's supposed to be fun!For me, success in my sex life does not involve jet-setting around the world to attend giant orgies every weekend (though it might look like that for you). It's probably just having a loving relationship where I can enjoy plenty of butt stuff, and we can be open enough for an optional third person who we can play with together, and I can have lots of earth-shattering orgasms, of course.* De-stigmatize your body and other people's.Going to clothing-optional events has brought me a lot of acceptance and love for my body. As I've shared, while it's normal to feel nervous at first, I find being naked around other people very freeing. Attending an event like The Naked Bike Ride in Philadelphia has shown me that when you get a whole bunch of naked bodies together for a brief moment, the intensity of our insecurities and self-consciousness totally melts away.The prospect of going to these events might terrify you. But just remember that our obsession with our bodies being perfect or looking a certain way is a social construct that we need to unlearn if we want to feel truly shameless about who we are. I hope you can find ways to explore de-stigmatizing your body for yourself, whether that be going to the sauna, skinny-dipping in a river, or going to a nudist beach.* Follow your curiosity.Sexuality is a journey of exploration, constant evolution, and discovery. As I've shared previously, “God” is not going to part the clouds and bestow upon you your one true perfect sexual experience. What you're curious about exploring may well just start as a whisper, which you're going to need to listen for closely.Imagine that sexuality is like a pair of shoes that you're trying on in a shop. Does this activity or idea feel very “you”? Could you see yourself wearing those sparkly heels on the right occasion? Like Emily wearing a G-string bikini on the beach, try something new when you're not sure if you'll like them or not, and see how it feels. There's power in courage, which, as Maya Angelou reminds us, is the most important of all the virtues.* Talk to yourself.Talking to yourself is usually considered weird. But I highly encourage you to sit down and do it to figure out what you're comfortable with and what you're not. As Pauline said wisely in our interview about open relationships,“Sexuality is an emotion…It depends on where you are in your mind…You always have to sit down with your thoughts and kind of like ask yourself this question: am I okay right now? Do I feel safe?”Knowing your limits is a beautiful thing. For example, I consider myself a sexually open person, but almost four years ago, I experienced what can only be described as a doozy of a sexual assault. I still don't feel comfortable with men I don't know touching me, and I am so thankful to know that about myself.If you feel like you're crossing the line for any reason, remember what Pauline shared,“I'm able to stop at any time. Like that's also something that is like really important…You can stop at any time and say goodbye. Like, I'm done. And it's okay. It doesn't mean you're a loser. It doesn't mean anything. It just means that right here, right now, you just don't want it. And it's okay.”* Make up your own rules.Despite being a huge people pleaser for most of my life, I made up a rule that I would only allow a guy to stay over at my house once he was my boyfriend. I decided this because I noticed how disrupted my sleep gets when a guy stays over, and it often ruins my next day. Admittedly, I don't always stick to my own rules when I'm hooking up with a dude who is particularly hot and cool (I'm allowed to make exceptions to my own rules, lol.) But the point is that I've taken time beforehand to identify my needs and figure out what is important to me.Get some space and peace of mind. And while you're alone, off on a solo adventure or single, go ahead and put your own rules in place. These could be rules about your sleep, your safety, and where you want things inserted into your body. Write these down in your sex journal, also. It's easier to decide what you want when there is no one else in the picture because biology is a stronger force than anything else in the world, and having a hot guy in your life is incredibly distracting. And, of course, once you make a rule for yourself, don't be pansy like me. The first step is to recognize that you deserve to have needs and boundaries. The second step is actually to enforce them.* Explore the underworld.This is about getting a handle on what's possible in terms of your sexuality. While porn is acting and often misleading, if you're open to it, I encourage you to watch some. You can watch some female-friendly porn here and here. Watching porn is a good way to see what's possible, and who knows, you might find it arousing.I thought that everyone was like me and had watched porn in secret, but it turns out I have female friends who have never watched porn, who are virgins, and who have never had an orgasm. Everyone is on their own journey, and that's a beautiful thing. I encourage you to meet yourself where you are right now and go from there. Also, try taking the BDSM test. It might help you figure out what type of sex you like to have. If some questions come up that you have no idea about, read the definitions and see if that's something you might want to explore.“When you're in a relationship, it shouldn't be the end of exploring your sexuality.” – Pauline, Open Relationships 101* Explore your body, guilt-free.Planned Parenthood quoted research published in 1994, which said, “half of the adult women and men who masturbate feel guilty about it.” Quotes like this depress me because, as far as I am concerned, guilt is a totally useless emotion. Meanwhile, “the medical community considers masturbation to be a natural and harmless expression of sexuality for both men and women” (Masturbation Guide, WebMD).Every time you feel guilty about touching yourself, buying a new toy, or feeling hot as f**k, just remember that there are literally 5,000 worse things you could be in the world than being a masturbater. You could be a murderer. You could be intentionally stomping on all the flowers in your neighbor's garden. Masturbation is harmless, pleasurable, and fun. So, take time for it like you take time for a friend who wants to get coffee and talk about her most recent breakup. Seriously, give yourself an hour at least and see what you can do. And also, put what you discover in your sex journal.* Question everything.Something is only “normal” because some people in our society decided it was. So, take all the assumptions you have about yourself, your life, who you can be, and what you can do, and turn them upside down. As Pauline expresses beautifully:“I deconstruct a lot by myself, about like patriarchy, about like me as a woman, like sexuality…And a lot of stuff, you're like, “But why the f**k am I doing this?”… Why are we even like, I don't know, blowing candles for a birthday? Like a lot of questions. And yeah, you know, why? "Yeah, it's normal.” I'm like, “No, it's not. Like how the f**k we ended up doing this?”Why the f**k do we blow our candles on a birthday cake, indeed?Believe You Deserve What You WantThis next step is about self-esteem. It's about standing up for your needs, saying f**k yes to people or f**k no to people, and not feeling guilty either way.* Be selfishWikipedia defines selfishness as “being concerned excessively or exclusively for oneself or one's own advantage, pleasure, or welfare, regardless of others.” I find this definition so funny! Because being socialized as a woman, it's clear to me that women are often branded as being selfish for having any concern for ourselves at all. The example comes to mind of my mother calling me selfish because, at age 28, I refused to share a bed with my brother, who is 6'5” tall (195cm), on the family holiday. In the world I grew up in, I wasn't really allowed to have needs, let alone express them.It's a crime in our society for a woman to put herself first. Yet, this is the moment when we decide to stop being doormats, even if we risk being branded as “difficult” in the process. I wholeheartedly encourage you to start being selfish.* Believe your pleasure matters.In the bedroom, this means taking up space and time to make sure you get the pleasure you deserve. As someone who has written a lot about the orgasm gap and experienced it firsthand, I know that we are simply not there yet. According to the International Academy of Sex Research in 2017, quoted in the Guardian,“95% of heterosexual men said they usually or always orgasmed when sexually intimate, followed by 89% of gay men, 88% of bisexual men, 86% of lesbian women, 66% of bisexual women, and 65% of straight women.”I've explained how the world would be a very different place if straight females were orgasming 65% of the time. I estimated I had orgasmed with 8% of my partners and maybe 25% of all the times I have had sex. To be shamelessly sexy, we have to believe that our pleasure is just as important as our partner's pleasure. We're talking about getting equal pleasure for equal measure.* Remember that nothing is wrong with you.With shame being blasted at you from all directions, it's easy to believe that it's your fault for being alive in the body that you're in. I fundamentally disagree with this. Books like “Invisible Women” teach us that the reason why nothing ever seems right for us is because the world was not designed with us in mind. Literally, the people who designed airbags in cars, sidewalks, and even medications didn't bother to test them on female bodies, and this has real-world consequences. If you've ever had weird side effects from medication, just remember that women were all but left out of medical research until 1993. This costs female lives.It's not that there is something with you. It's that there is something wrong with the world. Nothing is wrong with you. You are simply a woman, and because of that, you will never be typical or be the default.* Prioritize your relationship with yourself.The harsh truth is that our relationship with ourselves is the only constant relationship we will have in until we die. Everyone else will come and go—friends, partners, parents, lovers, siblings, and children, even. Your relationship with yourself is the only one that truly sticks.So, for God's sake, put yourself first. What you think about yourself matters much more than what other people think of you. And don't be like the guy from The Onion article titled, “Man Waiting Until Parents Die Before Doing A Single Thing That Makes Him Happy.”* Your experiences are valid. Your feelings are real.I used to have very low self-esteem until I started going to a 12-step Program called ACA. Over time, I learned from the program to ground myself on the basis of my experience rather than constantly defining myself by the actions of other people. One example of this new thinking came at the end of my most recent fling. Here's how I can choose to react:My old self says: “He doesn't want a relationship with me. I'm not worthy of being his girlfriend.”My new self says: “I want to be in a relationship with someone who wants to be in a relationship with me.”It's the same experience, but I now have a totally different perspective on it, one that is rooted in self-respect and dignity. So, remember that your feelings are valid. Your experiences are real. And be sure to define yourself in terms of your own needs and dignity, not from the broken actions of other people.* Define your body on your terms, also.When I was 15, I went to get bras fitted with my mother. I had armpit hair at that point and didn't bother using a razor (at least, I've been consistent with that to this day). When I noticed that she saw my armpit hair, I said something like,“Will doesn't mind.”Will was my boyfriend at the time. As a young person, I felt the need to justify the existence of my armpit hair to my mother. If my mother wasn't defining me, I had to justify my body in the context of another person, my boyfriend, and a male person, nonetheless. I had no idea that I was allowed to keep my body the way I wanted to, armpit hair and all.If you find yourself stressing out about external standards, just remember that it's not up to other people to define who you are. Only you can and should define that. And if other people aren't comfortable with that, that's their deal.* Take up space. Take up time.Some of my female friends find it impossible to go to a café, buy themselves a treat, and sit down to read a book on their own. What if someone else wanted to use that table? They've asked me, perplexed. Existing on their terms in a public space is a struggle. Whether it's having an orgasm with a partner or buying a cookie from a café, because of culture or history, many of us have internalized that whatever this is, it is not for people like us.But have you ever sat in a vast canyon, totally alone? Have you ever climbed to the top of a small hill in the desert in New Mexico, with 360 panoramic views, and cried and felt held by the vastness of the desert all around you? Well, I have. And I can tell you that that's plenty of room for you there, in the desert and in the world. It might take a quick adventure into nature. But just remember that the sky and the earth can hold all of you and so much more, just as they've held your ancestors since the beginning of time. As Maya Angelou says, “Take up the battle. Take it up. This is your life. This is your world.”So, please sit down at the table for as long as you like and eat the cookie.Ask for What You WantIt's time to express yourself, your desires, and your needs to the people you're having sex with. Otherwise, all this hard work you've done internally won't actually go anywhere. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. And it's time to squeak!* Safety, first.It's very important that you trust the person you are going to ask these things for. Before I pegged my boyfriend, we had already been dating for a couple of months. The act of an ask itself can be a very vulnerable moment, so make sure you're with a compassionate partner who respects your body and who will honor your needs and desires. If your partner sucks at listening or makes you feel judged or inadequate in any way, they might not be the right person to explore your sexuality with.* Muster up your courage.“Courage is more important than confidence. Taking that first step in doing anything is the real key to begin to manifest the possibility of that thing happening” — Debbie Millman, The Tim Ferriss Show.The art of asking takes courage. You're also opening up to the possibility of being rejected by the other person. But you can't say the wrong thing to the right person. It's better to rip off the band-aid than spend your whole life wondering whether or not to say something, second-guessing, and tiptoeing. You deserve an answer.* Over-communicate with your partner.Each time will be different because, as a human, you are evolving. Be sure to check in regularly to see whether your partner is still comfortable with this or if you want to try something new. Here's how Pauline communicates with her partner:“We look at each other in the eyes a lot. Like, okay, what do you think? We communicate a lot through the night. We send like text messages…But each time we were doing it, we kind of like sit before and we're like, “Okay, what's your mind in today? What do you want to do? What do you want to explore? How do you feel? Where's your head at today?”* Pick the right people. Curate the right spaces.I'll share more another time, but I went to some sex parties in New York where I didn't feel comfortable at all. I wouldn't go back there again, but I would consider going to a play party if I was with the right people. It really depends on the context, who the people are, and if this feels like the kind of place you want to be in.“You should pick whatever you like and create your own community and yourself and like whoever bonds with you and agrees with you, and that's cool.” – Pauline* Leave if you need to.If your partner does not want to explore the same things as you, you may need to find someone else who you are more compatible with and who celebrates you exploring your sexuality. Refuse to settle. As Pauline shared,“I think like you have to find your own way, which is nice because I think, as a girl, I have never been taught that you can find your own way in your sexuality. It was more like you'll have what you got. And then, if you're not happy, that's what it is.”ConclusionIf you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading my guide to being shamelessly sexy. I hope you loved it, that you found something here that made you smile, or maybe it inspired you to explore something new. Please feel free to reach out to me with what you discovered, as I would love to hear from you, and share this article with a like-minded friend if you think it could help them.There's one final phrase that I want you to keep in mind:“You can do it on your terms. It's your sexuality in the end. So, do yourself on your terms.” – Pauline.Amen.

Intro Hello Wonderful Readers,Sometimes, it's the chance encounters that can lead to the most fruitful stories. And that's exactly what happened when I met Pauline about a month ago. As you know, our mission at Misseducated is to help the world be shamelessly sexy, and as far as I'm concerned, very few people embody that quite as much as Pauline. I was going to publish another article this week, but I just had to share her story with you all. It's too good!Here we discuss her open relationship, her views on sexuality, and her overall attitude towards being a woman and life. And I am telling you, you do not want to miss the second half of this conversation especially. If you like this show, please consider subscribing, leaving us a review or a rating wherever you get your podcasts to help us reach more people. With that, I bring you Pauline and our discussion, “Open Relationships 101.”Love, Tash

Hello Wonderful Readers,Last week, I interviewed Camilla Sievers, founder of Qi Health. Qi is a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) company that creates personalized blends of natural herbs to solve various problems in women's health.Camilla was inspired to create her company from her journey using TCM to relieve her persistent period cramps and other symptoms. Now, her team has built a seamless digital experience to help people access one of the oldest medical systems in the world.I hope you enjoy our conversation! Feel free to reach out to Camilla on Instagram or LinkedIn to share your healing stories.Check out her interview in Entrepreneur!I hope you have a shamelessly sexy weekend

IntroductionSo, you're curious about having a one-night stand. I'm glad you're here! I've had a few in my time; some very successful, some less so. Whether this will be your first one or you're a regular wondering how to make casual sex work better for you, I've compiled everything I know to write this ultimate guide to having the best one-night stands ever.The main difference in preparation depends on the sexes of the partners involved and whether it's going to take place at your house or theirs. Because I'm a cis-gendered female who mostly has sex with men, this article is geared towards heterosexual couples. But I hope that no matter the genitals of you or your partner, you'll find something helpful here. Let's dig in!Before: How To Prepare for a One-Night Stand* Find someone you're attracted to: If you're not attracted to this person, don't even bother going through with the rest of everything else. This night is about you having fun, not pleasing other people.* Set clear expectations with yourself: Decide what you want to get out of this night and if you have any clear boundaries. Do you want to have penetrative sex (penis in an orifice, either vagina or butt) with them? Where is this one-night stand going to take place? Do you want to stay over, or are you going to take your ass home in an Uber at 4 am?* Prioritize your needs first: I'm adding this here because I'm terrible at doing this. As soon as I find a guy who I want to have sex with, I lose all sense of my needs and life priorities. So, be realistic for a moment: Do you have anything you need to get done the day after your one-night stand? The point is to make sure you're caring for your general well-being and not just dropping everything for a random dude you will never see again.* Plan your sleep: There's evidence that women need more sleep than men. How well do you sleep in someone else's bed or having someone in your bed? Can you survive on three hours, or would you be better off with eight? Even if you don't know exactly because this is your first one-night stand, just take a guess, and then you'll learn whether you were right or wrong after the experience.* Set clear expectations with your partner: Communicate with them if you can. Plan where you are going to do this. If it's at your house, is your partner allowed to sleep over? Do you need them out of the house by 10 am so you can go to your yoga class?* Be honest with yourself about your true intentions: If you have feelings for this person and would like to have anything more than a one-hit wonder with them, stop right there. Having sex with them is not going to fix anything. Be sure to do the feelings check-in I've included below.* Plan your alcohol and drug intake: You don't want to be too drunk or high for your one-night stand. Know your limits. A couple of drinks is probably fine if you've eaten, but you do not want to be completely blackout. Bad things can happen, and you need to have your wits about you so you can get the hell out of there at a moment's notice. Plus, sex when you're super wasted is not very enjoyable.* Plan to meet somewhere where you feel comfortable: Don't schlep yourself across the city to a place you don't know. Make this person come to you, like to your favorite lively local bar, or go to a party together where you know a couple of people.* Consider using a highly effective form of birth control: I'm talking about an implant or an IUD, i.e., a coil. Whatever sex you have is going to be a lot more enjoyable when you're not worried about getting pregnant. I have the Hormonal IUD, which I love because it is super effective for preventing pregnancy for up to eight years, and it stops my painful periods, which is a faff that I don't want to have to deal with. If you're already using the pill for your “acne” or some other form of birth control, good for you!If the one-night stand will take place at your house, here are some other tips you might want to consider:* a) Prepare your sex toys & condoms: I'll get more into this later, but you'll want any vibrator, lube, butt plug, and fun stuff on hand. Be sure to have multiple condoms, at least three.* b) Wash your bedsheets, if possible: There's nothing like banging in a clean bed.* c) Have clean towels on hand: Some men I've had sex with will literally sweat through multiple layers of sheets. It's insane, and yes, your bedroom will be destroyed.* d) Have a bit of alcohol in your house: You may or may not want to keep a bottle of wine or beer on hand at home. I don't like to drink that much, but you and your partner might want to.* e) Tidy your house: This is totally optional, but this helps me have less anxiety, at least.If the one-night stand will take place at their house, this might help:* a) Pack the essentials: This might be hard depending on the size of your purse or bag, but see if you can bring your toothbrush, deodorant, a contact lens case (essential if you wear contacts like me), and maybe even a change of shirt for the morning after. You're not bringing your toiletries bag, just the bare basics so that you don't lose your mind.* b) Subtly bring a toy and condoms with you: You could bring a small bullet vibrator in your bag or invest in a Vesper necklace, which is a beautiful piece of jewelry that also doubles as a vibrator. Yay, secret pleasure! And also, stuff a couple of condoms in your bag.Before you proceed, do a feelings check-in.What if I have feelings for my one-night-stand partner?Be honest about whether you have feelings for this person before you have sex with them. I may sound old-fashioned, but my honest advice is: do not have a one-night stand with someone if you have feelings for them. You will just end up having your heart broken. Having casual, easy sex with someone is not going to make someone fall in love with you. In fact, the sex of the one-night stand is basically over in a minute, and that is the end. It's a quickie one-and-done.What if I'm not sure if my one-night-stand partner has feelings for me or not, or I'm not sure what their intentions are?Just be wary of men you actually like or might want to have a relationship with. If you're not sure about your partner's intentions and you might want something more serious with them, my advice is to wait to have sex. You can still fool around with them but try to keep your clothes on.I've had a couple of experiences where I found myself in bed with a guy I liked, and I wasn't sure about his intentions with me. In this case, I like to refuse to have sex with them and see how it plays out. When we part ways, we either never speak again, or we continue our relationship and get to know each other better. By then, we're beyond a one-night stand and have a slightly longer, more meaningful relationship.This is only for partners you might have feelings for or want something more serious with. If you don't want that, and you just think they're hot and want to have some quick casual sex, keep reading!What if I don't have feelings for my one-night stand partner?That's awesome! This is probably the ideal scenario. When you're both using each other to have a damn good time, no one has to feel bad about it. I've heard many women say that they feel guilty or get attached when they have sex with someone. This isn't always the case for me. I tend to get attached to someone I have sex with when I have feelings for them. But if I just think they're hot, and this experience truly is not going anywhere, then f**k it! I'm just in it for the sex, and I won't be messaging them the next day, and that's that.During: What should you keep in mind during a one-night stand?* Use protection when you have penetrative sex: You're going to need protection against pregnancy and STDs. Just remember that nature is a b***h, and people can often carry STDs without having any symptoms. These STDs can cause life-long complications for women, like infertility from Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (PID) if left untreated. The challenge with one-night stands is that if you don't use protection, the situation can quickly escalate. No matter how much fun you thought you had that night, when you're taking Plan B or dealing with HPV forever, it's going to f*****g suck.* Trust your earlier intuition. I've had men promise me all kinds of things when they're trying to have sex with me. “I love you!” (They don't). “I'll love you forever.” (They won't). “That was the best b******b I've ever had.” (Well, maybe that one's true). Regardless, this is why you need to have it clear in your mind before you have your one-night stand what you are willing to do and what you want to get out of it. The wrong kinds of partners will say anything to get you to have sex with them. Have your wits about you and ignore the b******t and excessive sweet talk.* Prioritize your pleasure: It is very important that you, as a female, also experience sexual pleasure and orgasm, if you so choose, during this one-night stand. The statistics around female pleasure for first-time hookup sex are pretty dire. As Dr. Laurie Mintz shares in her fantastic book, “Becoming Cliterate,” “55 percent of men versus 4 percent of women said they usually reach orgasm during first-time hookup sex!” Boo. We can do better than that! Basically, the most important thing to remember is that having sexual intercourse (putting the penis in the vagina) is NOT the most reliable route to orgasm for most females. Sexual intercourse is basically for the male orgasm only. Also, men want to please women. So, how can you have pleasurable sex? “Almost 45 percent of women said their most reliable route to orgasm was intercourse coupled with clitoral stimulation.” I've written a whole article about female orgasms. Here are the most important points for your one night stand:* Mimic the way you pleasure yourself when you're with a partner: That's why I recommend having your toys on hand at your house or bringing your Vesper necklace to your partner's house. Basically, get your partner to assist you using the masturbation techniques that already work for you and that you know you like.* Get the guy to pleasure you in ways that you like but find difficult, if not impossible, to do to yourself: As I mentioned in the article, a tiny amount of butt stuff from my male partner, coupled with clitoral stimulation from my hand or a toy, does the trick very easily for me.* Take your time: You've got all freaking night. What's the rush? If you're a guy reading this article, make it clear to your female partner that her enjoying herself is important to you and that you'll be patient.* Remember that oral sex and “foreplay” is the female's main course: “Quoting Ian Kerner, author of the how-to oral sex manual for men She Comes First, “Most men consider cunnilingus an aspect of foreplay, an appetizer to be served before the main meal of genital intercourse.” However, it's crucial to understand that this “appetizer” is actually the main course for many women—it's the way they orgasm!” (Read “Becoming Cliterate” and “She Comes First”).* Go all out: This is my favorite tip! You've found someone with whom you can safely explore sexual stuff, and then you'll never see again, so seize the moment! Why not experiment, explore, and try stuff you've always wanted to try? Take a bath. Try a new position. Try chocolate or food in bed. Of course, ask your partner what they're comfortable with trying (I always shamelessly ask for a bit of butt stuff, obviously.) And if you're having a good time, or you think they're hot, say so! My best one-night stand was when a guy in Newcastle told me how much he loved my bush, and he ate me out for ages. It was so hot!* Make sure you pee after sex: You might already know this, but don't forget. It's great for helping avoid UTIs, etc.* Get your beauty sleep: You deserve to be a functioning human the next day. It's time to get some rest. If you know that you'll totally struggle to sleep, feel free to call yourself or them an Uber.The Morning After: What should you do after a one-night stand?* Prioritize your health and vitals: While one-night stands can be fun, they can be very depleting in terms of your basic needs. After you're all done, take time to shower, eat, get some sleep, and rest yourself back to health. Consider drinking a Gatorade or Electrolit to get hydrated. If you're feeling super depressed, try to do some light exercise, like going for a walk, and just know that this feeling will pass. Being hungover and sleep-deprived is a recipe for feeling like s**t!* Only have brunch with your partner if you want to: You can keep hanging out, getting coffee or food, or let him cook you breakfast, but just remember that you don't owe this person anything. Don't feel any pressure to keep hanging out with them. Only keep them around if you want to.* Clean your house: Depending on how much of a witch you are, you might want to wash your bedsheets, open all the windows to air things out, and sage-cleanse your house

Hello Wonderful Readers,I hope you had a lovely holiday. Despite having Covid and then the flu and watching the neighborhood my mother grew up in being razed by a wildfire, I am keeping my promise to you. I'm here to tell you the story of how Todor and I met. Before I do that, I have one very exciting announcement.Upcoming Topic on Misseducated Podcast: Open RelationshipsNext week, I will be interviewing an anonymous girl about the successful open relationship she's been in with her partner for the last four years. They do all kinds of fun things together, like go to play parties. While open relationships are common, I know very few couples that have done it successfully. She's graciously agreed to be interviewed by me for the Misseducated podcast. So, if you have a question for her, please feel free to comment below if you are a paid subscriber, or you can respond to this email or text me. My interview with her should be great, but whatever questions you send me will make it even better.Thank you so much!I hope you enjoy the romance to come

Hello Wonderful Readers,Yesterday, a poet asked me,“Do you ever tell lies?”He had locks of brown hair, a strong jawline, and wicked eyes that smiled. I caught his gaze for a second, but then I quickly looked away. I focused on his somewhat dorky, checkered shirt. My shoulders hung heavy with guilt as I listened to the catchy notes of Lou Reed that played over us from an old vinyl turntable.I was three hours into my first date with this poet at Hule, a trendy, bustling bar in Mexico City. The night air was scented with a thin layer of cigarette smoke and air pollution. We had gotten along rather well, laughing a lot, until that moment. Could he sense that I was hiding something?“I h-had to lie the other day,” I admitted, stumbling over my words, “But I believe lying is really bad. And I never do it.” I took a large sip of my IPA. I let the sharpness of the alcohol zap my throat.“Why did you lie?” he pressed me. It was the next most obvious question. Urgh, I was terrible at this, I thought to myself.“Well,” I started, and then I immediately regretted everything as it came out of my mouth, “I had to go to the doctor to get…um…my IUD replaced. I didn't meet the requirements, but I only had one day to get it done in England for free. So, I had to go to this clinic and give them a fake name and a fake address. Anyway, I got it done.”I bit my tongue. Didn't meet the requirements? Oh, please.The truth was that I had scheduled that appointment in London two months in advance, and when I finally went to the doctor, she had asked me, “Have you had any unprotected sex in the last three weeks?” And I answered honestly, “Yes,” because I'm a clueless fool. And then she stared deep into my soul and said, with pity in her voice, “You should probably take some emergency contraception because you could be pregnant.” This was a ridiculous thing for her to say because I still had my old IUD inside of me, and I apparently study and care about women's health, and I thought I knew about these things. And that even if my IUD had expired a month ago, it wouldn't just stop working overnight. But I couldn't be sure without reading all the medical fine print from the IUD companies on the internet and deciphering a bunch of Reddit forums that night. And now, after eight years of not having to worry about pregnancy, this nurse was dishing out to me all the shame that I'd thought I was smart enough and wise enough to avoid and made me feel like I was being totally reckless for having what had been a beautiful, deep connection with a very sexy man.The truth was that I then had to tell Todor*, this very sexy man that I was sleeping with and whose dangerous sperm was potentially still swimming inside of me, that I might be pregnant after I had let him cum inside of me as many times as he wanted to because that was what I had wanted also. Needless to say, discussing my potential pregnancy with him was kind of a vibe killer because he said to me, “I don't want to have a kid.” I didn't have the guts to tell him, “I want to have a kid, but maybe not today, but maybe if we were actually boyfriend and girlfriend, I would have wanted to have one with you, but we live in different countries on different continents, and I am honestly so depressed being here in London, and I would never come back here, at least never again during the winter, if I could avoid it, but I'm too scared to tell you that.” And that after fulfilling my weird impregnation fantasies, while I had quite enjoyed my times with him, actually facing the reality of potentially conceiving a child together didn't feel quite as cool or fun or sexy as those times had been.The truth was that I had then had to leave that clinic without my new IUD and wait for another couple of days for all of Todor's dangerous sperm floating around in my inner caves to die before I rushed myself to another clinic on my last day in London. There, I gave the doctor, who was really quite a kind woman who did not deserve to be lied to, a fake date of birth and a fake address, which was definitely super illegal. And then I lied to her that I hadn't had unprotected sex in the last three weeks so that I could do what was right for my own body because I really did need that Hormonal IUD to help with my periods and also give me a solid form of birth control for the next eight years. I was privileged enough to live in a country that offers socialized medicine, but that has a lagging enough technological system that didn't check between clinics, and I could take full advantage of it for my own benefit.The truth was that once she had finally inserted my new IUD, which was physically painful but that didn't scratch the surface of this evident emotional turmoil, she suggested to me that I probably would want to take it out before the eight years were up, meaning that she expected me to want to have a child by the time I was 37, all that being contingent on finding a partner and us wanting to start a family together, which would not be an easy decision, and that person was tragically but undeniably not going to be Todor. I was turning 30, and I wasn't a teenage girl anymore. The eggs in my ovaries were not going to live forever.The truth was that this made me feel very sad. Remembering all of that, I really had no business being on a first date with this funny and charming Poet Man anyway because it had barely been a week since I had left Todor behind in London, the city I grew up in and used to call home but frankly hated visiting, wondering all the while why modern love had to be so f*****g hard but also knowing that I would never be happy living in London again. I had gone through so much in the last three years to build a beautiful life for myself in Mexico, and I wasn't about to throw all that away for nothing.The truth was that I had spent most of that week before the date randomly sobbing whenever I got a brief moment to myself, especially whenever I sat down to play “Mad Rush” by Philip Glass on the piano in Soho House, where Todor and I had celebrated his birthday and my first author birthday together a mere month ago. And I had finally felt loved by someone else for a brief moment in time after years of dating a******s or perfectly lovely men with whom I had no future, and now the one person that I had quite liked and I believed had quite liked me back couldn't be together, and that made me so, so sad. And that in my first week back in Mexico City, I had intentionally returned with my other friends to the places where I had memories with Todor so that I could paint over every scent of him that kept creeping up in my body, whether that be at my favorite pizza place or a random spot on the street near my house. And I had initiated 60 days of no contact with him also, or until further notice, so I could rip out the roots of whatever love for him I had that was growing inside of me and lob that tree off at the lowest point of the trunk possible.The truth was that I still had the card that Todor had given me. I had stashed it with the book that he had bought for me in the closet in my house because I didn't want to get rid of them yet. Still, I also didn't want to come home and see them and think about them and think about him every day, and I knew that he would understand that. However, the fact that I knew they were still in my closet and that I am thinking about them even now made it even more clear to me that I still wasn't over him. I might have to get rid of his gifts if I ever wanted to be, but we had ended on good terms, so there was really no reason to be quite so drastic in my actions to remove him from my life anyway.The truth was that, as funny as this Poet Man was, he was never going to know any of this, and as I had no intention of going home with him, I would keep it that way. Because, practically speaking, while many of us dating in our late twenties and early thirties are not virgins, the last thing you want someone to bring up on a first date is a past lover. It's rude. It's disrespectful, and frankly, I was not about to give this Poet Man the barefaced dissatisfaction of knowing that I was not over Todor at all. Instead, I let him speak.“I mean, it makes sense if you got done what you needed to get done,” he said vaguely, but in a way that I knew he was trying to be kind.“I guess,” I said, “What about you? When was the last time you lied?”The Poet Man continued with the conversation. I let his words drift in through one of my ears and out the other.Do you want to know the full truth? Next week on Misseducated, I'll be back with the honest story of how Todor and I met and what we got up to when he was in Mexico. Wink wink.Until then, I hope you have a lovely weekend.Much love,Tash

Hello Wonderful Readers,I felt a lot of resistance writing this piece. I'm very tired right now. Most of you reading this are not in high school, and any of my younger cousins or friends who might be are probably just scrolling on TikTok. You can see how my inner critic is already working against me! That's why it's important to me to challenge myself. I'm determined to write and publish this piece for you anyway.I'm stealing the idea of this list from Austin Kleon, who stole it from Debbie Millman. I listened to his story about it on Millman's podcast this week. Here, I've cobbled together the first six things I wish I had known when I was graduating from high school. That year was 2013, and a lot has changed since then. Instagram existed at the time, but it wasn't widely used. This was years before TikTok, when the first major sex scandal about Jimmy Savile came out, and Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter, had just murdered his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.I was finishing up my A-Levels at my incredibly fancy and academically rigorous “secondary school,” Westminster School in London. I had gotten rejected from all the top universities I applied to and was on my way to taking a gap year. I had no idea what I was doing with my life (spoiler, I still have no idea what I am doing now). So, without further ado, this is what I wish I had known at that time.1. The mean girls don't matter in this cruel world

IntroductionHello Wonderful Readers*,A very contentious topic came up in a conversation with my female friends this week. I discussed with them how I'm single and looking for a partner in bed and in life. But how old is too old? And how young is too young?When I decided to write about this topic, a cultural icon immediately came to mind: founder and innovator Cindy Gallop. She's currently 64, and she has shared her sexual preferences and experiences with dating apps publicly:“I date younger men for sex. I want lots of stamina and very short recovery periods. I don't get those with men my own age...I was completely honest about everything, including my age…I got an avalanche of responses, which was very good for the ego. 75% of those responses were from younger men.”Her perspective got me thinking. How common are big age differences in heterosexual relationships? Is Cindy Gallop a lone wolf (or a lone “cougar”) in today's world? And are relationships with big age gaps less likely to work out?I dug into the science to answer these questions. While I've found some fascinating things, I will say that to get a complete picture, I could have looked at more data from studies on dating apps and whether these findings hold for LGBTQIA couples because these statistics focused solely on heterosexual couples. The reach of my work here is limited, and there's always room for improvement.So, let's dig in!The State of Age AffairsThere's a clear trend in heterosexual marriages in the United States: now, more than ever before, husbands and wives are likely to be the same age. According to Pew, the average age difference in the United States was 4.9 years in 1880, 2.4 years in 2000, and 2.2 years in 2022.In the data below published in 2008, you can see that for marriages in England and Wales (a proxy for “Western” cultures), there is a bell-shaped distribution of the average age differences between couples. Most married couples in recent history have had a husband who is slightly older than the wife. But this is a difference of less than 5 years, and it has been declining since 1963. Indeed, 51% of opposite-sex marriages today have spouses who are two years apart in age or less, which is up from 46% in 2000 (Pew).Are Relationships with Larger Age Gaps Less Successful?To answer this question, I looked at large-scale studies on divorce rates by age difference. Of course, divorce rates are not the perfect measurement of relationship success. A couple can fight every day and stay married, which is probably worse than a couple that divorces civilly and stays friends. As Divorce Therapist Oona Metz has shared, “What the new research shows is that conflict is bad for kids.” Ideally, I could have looked at relationship conflict and age differences between couples, but as far as I'm aware, no such data exists.It turns out that the age difference of a couple is NOT a major predictor of whether the relationship will end in divorce. The bottom line, according to this 2008 study from the National Office of Statistics, is that, at least for now,“propensity to divorce is not strongly associated with marital age difference at an aggregate level, although further research would be required to control for mortality and any other factors that may affect the risk of divorce.”Other studies have suggested that in order to interpret these findings fully, researchers would need to disaggregate the data based on whether one of the partners was married before and who initiated the divorce. It's well known that about two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women, so these divorce statistics may well be skewed toward women's preferences.Unfortunately, as I dug into this data, I found a lot of crappy news outlets that totally blew findings from certain studies out of proportion and came to conclusions that were misleading or just plain wrong. One poorly researched article on a website called MarketWatch concludes, “The bigger the age gap, the shorter the marriage.” This is not true. The second source they cited has since redacted an inaccurate chart where they tried to show the increased likelihood of the marriage ending based on the age difference. I smell b******t! Still, I had to get out my magnifying glass and relearn how to read coefficients from my Statistics classes at Wharton just to determine that this was indeed a shitstorm of statistical insignificance.As far as we know today, an age difference does not significantly impact the success of a relationship. However, there are a couple more interesting insights below the surface.Extra Interesting Tidbits: Things To ConsiderMale Preferences For Younger Females and Vice VersaA study conducted by Professor David Buss at UT Austin investigated sex differences in mate preferences in 37 cultures with 10,047 participants. Its findings might partially explain why men are slightly older on average in married couples than women. Their key result was:“Females were found to value cues to resource acquisition in potential mates more highly than males. Characteristics signaling reproductive capacity were valued more by males than by females.”Basically, females take more than just physical appearance into account when selecting a mate, as they might want a partner who signals resource acquisition for their potential offspring. Additionally, males might prioritize physical appearance and have a preference for younger females because of “a biological adaptation resulting from the greater potential fertility of younger women” (Office for National Statistics), especially if they want to produce offspring and have a family.However, this is a generalization and certainly not a rule. There is also a variety of other social trends happening. For example, women's increased access to education throughout the world has coincided with an increase in the age of marriage. Plus, while women might have preferred older men for their access to financial stability and resources, the gender pay gap is decreasing with more of us females entering and staying in the workforce, so this is becoming less socially relevant. Indeed, among unmarried adults, single women without children now have, on average, as much wealth as single men (Pew).Until Death Do Us Part: Widowhood & Living AloneThe only reason to be concerned about a large age gap with your partner is whoever is much older is obviously more likely to die sooner, leaving the other person widowed and most likely living alone.According to Pew, as the share of husbands who are older than their wives has fallen, widowhood for women ages 65 and older has fallen to 30% today, down from 45% in 2000. Given this spousal age gap and the fact that women tend to live longer than men globally, about 20% of women over 60 live in a solo household, compared to about 10% of men (Pew).Is Everyone Coming to Cougartown?There's been a lot of talk about “cougars” in the news, or “age-hypogamy,” where the female is older than the male in a heterosexual relationship. A study released in 2003 by the UK's Office for National Statistics concluded that the proportion of women in England and Wales marrying younger men rose from 15% to 26% between 1963 and 1998. Still, these forms of relationships are rare, even though they are slightly on the rise. By a different definition, “recent US census data has shown an increase in age-hypogamous relationships from 6.4% in 2000 to 7.7% in 2012.” (Wikipedia).Despite the sensational news, cougars appear to be happier than other females who are in relationships! There is some evidence that “woman-older partners were the most satisfied with and committed to their relationships, relative to woman-younger and similarly aged partners, consistent with socio-cultural predictions” (Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2008). And for all my older, single female readers, there's evidence that age doesn't matter to male partners as much as beauty. Yes, unfortunately, you're still being held to the standard of the male gaze, but being doesn't matter as much as being good-looking. Is that a plus? I'll leave that for you to decide.Second Marriages & MenDigging through the research, I did find that when a husband is marrying for the second time, his wife is often much younger:“Some 20% of men who are newly remarried have a wife who is at least 10 years their junior, and another 18% married a woman who is 6-9 years younger. By comparison, just 5% of newlywed men in their first marriage have a spouse who is 10 years younger, and 10% married a woman who is 6-9 years younger.” (Pew)The “Socially-Acceptable” Cop Out: “Half your age, plus seven.”I came across this concept during my research. While it will have no impact on whether or not your relationship with someone of a different age will work out, this will help you determine whether or not that age difference is “socially acceptable.” To determine the youngest person who you're allowed to date, simply use “half your age plus seven.”So if I'm 29, the youngest person I could foreseeably date without being seen as a complete weirdo is roughly 22 years old. However, studies have shown that this rule applies much more appropriately to the age range that men can date, as opposed to women, which I think checks out. Because unless he is really amazing, dating a 22-year-old guy for me right now would feel very weird indeed.  My Statistically Insignificant StoriesIn addition to the more useful statistics of having a partner who is alive and the potential of being happy as an older cougar, here are my not-so-scientific summaries of my experiences dating younger and older men.Dating Younger MenLargest Age Difference: 3 years younger than me.In the last two years, I have dated four guys who were three years younger than me. I enjoy dating younger men, and it didn't feel like too significant an age difference. Most of them had gotten a decent start in their careers. They were flexible in terms of their life direction, and they felt more malleable to date.Within this, I noticed some patterns. The younger men I slept with had great bodies and even better stamina, à la Cindy Gallop. They were also more likely to want to go out clubbing, drink heavily, and party party party until the wee hours of the morning (or as they say in Mexico, “la madrugada,” one of my favorite Spanish words). I'm not a total grandma, so sometimes I would go out with them, but I generally prefer not to go too hard or drink too much, lest I want to do anything the day after.Dating Older MenLargest Age Difference: 14 years older than me.In the last year or two, I've dated two men who were at least 12 years older than me (aged 42 and 44, I think). Neither of them stuck around for long. The first one was The Photographer, and while age was not a factor in terms of my attraction to him, he was a workaholic who had no intention of ever having a family. He explicitly told me he didn't want anything serious, and when people tell me who they are, I try to believe them.The other 44-year-old guy was recent. We met at a very fancy bar in Mexico City. He was short but very well-dressed, and his daddy vibes were hot enough to get me to have dinner with him. The problem with him was that he had two children with two different women. While money wasn't an issue for him (he worked in hotels and real estate), no matter how much money you have, there are only so many competing baby mamas and children scattered around the city that I want to contend with.Much unlike the younger men I dated, both of these men seemed more stuck in their ways, with more rigid schedules and lifestyles that I would have to box myself into. Both also either had dead or very old parents, and that was also a turnoff for me, as I'd like my children to be able to meet their grandparents if possible, and I don't want to start a relationship with one foot already in the grave.ConclusionDoes age difference matter in relationships? The answer seems to be no. The only potential downside of dating someone much older is the possibility of being widowed at a younger age and then living alone. But I already live alone anyway, so to me, this wouldn't make a difference.Whether you're attracted to people of all ages is a different question. As is somewhat reflected in the statistics, my range of dating men who are older than me is much wider than men who are younger than me. Yet I can imagine that if I'm single, aged 50+, I will want to jump on the cougar bandwagon and get a taste of that potentially more satisfying and committed relationship with a younger man. Whoopee!Ultimately, I believe that if you both like each other, then none of the other “socially acceptable” bullcrap really matters, and you shouldn't care what other people think. Don't try to follow a baseless rule like the “half your age plus seven” method because it won't make a difference to the success of your relationship anyway. Also, try not to judge other people. Love is love, and as long as no one is committing statutory rape, there's literally nothing wrong with dating someone with a wild age difference, as far as I'm concerned. And given the other social trends that women are becoming more financially independent, getting better educated, and acquiring more resources of our own, it seems perfectly fit and well that we might want to date men who are younger than us for the same reasons of attractiveness and youth that older men have traditionally sought out in us for ages.Final ThoughtSo, my wonderful readers, what do you think? Would you date someone 15 years younger than you or 15 years older than you? Can you be brave and admit you wanted to date someone who was outside the bounds of a “socially acceptable” age difference?Paid subscribers can battle it out in the comments.Love to you all, and enjoy the rest of your weekend,Tash

Dear Wonderful Readers,I am sitting in the airport, grumpy with myself. I'm in Terminal 2 at Heathrow in London. For such a massive space, this place is oddly quiet. There's only the shuffling of footsteps and the thumping wheels of carry-on suitcases.When I go to the airport, I often feel inspired because, in the most physical sense, I am going somewhere. But I don't feel inspired today. Twelve hours into my travels, I'm incredibly jet-lagged, and I'm also stuck in a funk. I'm about to turn 30, and yes, I'm lamenting about my “writing career,” or my lack of it. A sluggish sense of dread has been hanging over me for weeks. It's the lack of momentum. I quit my full-time job almost three years ago to become an author and a writer, and things have been going okay. Recently, I even drafted my second book. But nothing sensational is happening.Perhaps I'm more worried about this than usual because I'm about to visit my family. My mother has very high expectations of me. She'll never admit it, but she wants me to be very rich and very famous. As famous and rich as possible. Not only am I neither of those things, but I am also far less rich than I would have been if I had just stayed in my boring tech job, even if I would have remained deeply, paralyzingly unhappy in the process.I remember how uplifted I used to feel when I was in this exact airport. I remember flying back to university in America and listening to the podcast How I Built This with Guy Raz, specifically the Airbnb episode. That story gave me a sense of possibility—that external pull, that demand; that someday, I could be “successful” also.So, I connect to Heathrow's WiFi with a fake name and a fake email address. I whack on the episode. I've still got three hours to kill before my flight to Derry (which will later be canceled). The podcast episode begins to play. The inflections of Guy Raz's familiar, measured voice captivate me. I am caught up in the catchy music and the suspenseful sentences. Joe Gebbia, one of the co-founders of Airbnb, speaks to me through the void,“It was not a smashing success at all…It was completely demoralizing. Like, 2008 was the worst year of my life…Because you've put so much into this thing, like, there was nothing else going on in my life except this. And to put it in front of very credible investors, the guys who had picked the Googles and PayPals and YouTubes of the world, and for them to look you square in the eyes and go, “Well, this is weird, I'm not investing in this.”This episode was recorded in 2017, about seven years ago. We now know how the story plays out, as Airbnb recently celebrated reaching 2 billion lifetime guests. Yet as I relisten to his words, the podcast episode strikes a new chord with me.I gaze drearily into the high ceiling above me, which is framed by purple and gold fairy lights and the odd wreath. I am reminded that in Airbnb's story, really smart investors and even their close family members and friends didn't see the company's potential. Not even the founders themselves understood what Airbnb was or what it was going to become at points in their own journey. I chewed on some Haribo sweets from WHSmith as an insight sank in:Even really smart people are wrong about stuff all the time.I sat up a little straighter in my hard, plastic seat, which I had found impossible to sleep on. Maybe I've been wrong these three years about how success can even happen for me. Maybe I've been approaching my life too rigidly, with too much structure. Recently, microdosing on magic mushrooms has helped me see that my solidified weekly work patterns are holding me back. My problem is that, from all the fancy schooling I've had, I was told that I'm a smart person, which has made me believe that I make smart decisions. But if I think I'm smart, well, that means that I could be just as wrong as the investors who turned down Airbnb. And I'm not just wrong about predictions of the future. I could be wrong about anything because the truth is that I have no idea what aspect of my work, if any, will lead to my success or why. I don't know what part of my work will resonate most with people. In fact, many of the pieces I write that I think are going to resonate with the most people actually don't. There is no way for me to know.  I watched this clip of an interview with Adam Grant that describes exactly this. He says,  “…the more brilliant you are, the worse you are at recognizing your own limitations.”Describing myself as brilliant is a stretch; arrogant is more like it. But what is the antidote to my arrogance? Inc magazine contributor Jessica Stillman paraphrases Grant:“What's the antidote to this kind of overconfidence that's so common among smart people? A stiff dose of humility.”Hah! Humility. Well, now that I think about it, I do have a favorite wrong prediction in mind about commercial success for you that demonstrates this. And the story of it goes like this…About ten years ago, my sister and I were home for the holidays, and she brought her friend from Cambridge University over for tea. Joscelin, her friend, was this thin, nerdy guy. He told me that he was studying music and starting to play some gigs in London. Curious, I asked him if he could share some of his music with us. I don't remember much about what he played, but all I remember is that it was ultra-modern, disjointed, and weird. As I listened to it (or tried to), I thought to myself,“This guy is not going anywhere. He should go back to studying music academically because he's never going to make it.”But then, fast-forward about a decade. A couple of months ago, I was scrolling through Instagram. I was watching an Instagram Reel of Vanity Fair when they interviewed Margot Robbie and Florence Pugh, and then…“Joscelin? What the f**k!” I said aloud to no one.Except that his name is not Joscelin anymore. His stage name is Jerskin Fendrix, and he was in the Vanity Fair video because he composed the music score for Poor Things, starring Emma Stone. So, the guy who I thought would remain a totally unsuccessful musician forever (sorry, Joscelin) has now been nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score.The moral of this story is that I have no f*****g clue about how the world works, especially when it comes to commercial success. As I continue to listen to how the potential investors in Airbnb failed miserably, sitting in the middle of this airport, I realize something: I must embrace the fact that I can be totally wrong. I must embrace the fact that I don't have all the answers, and many of the answers that I think I have are totally wrong.  This message from “the universe” has been coming to me in more than one form. Just last week, I was walking down the street when I passed a tiny piece of paper on the pavement. I knew from its shape that it was from a fortune cookie. Not my fortune, but one that, apparently, I was meant to stumble upon. It said,“Ideas you think are absurd will lead to your success.”I took this photo of it (above). You see, no matter how smart we think we are and how great the decisions we believe we are making are, we need to leave a giant space open in our minds and our hearts. A giant space where we accept that, much like the very smart investors who turned down Airbnb, we may simply be wrong. We may even be wrong about most things. And this is a good thing if we believe it. Once you're aware of your own limitations, you can start to entertain ideas that you think will not work out. Because the truth is that neither you nor anyone else in the world knows if they will or not. Only time will tell.  So, what have you been wrong about? And what could you be wrong about right now? Leave a note in the comments.Lots of love, and enjoy your weekend!Tash

IntroductionHello Wonderful Readers,One year ago, I became an author. As I tucked into a giant half-baked cookie pan and vanilla ice cream to celebrate (thank you to the charming man who ordered it for me), I reflected on my failures and learnings this last year. Today, I want to share those with you.This year, my attitude towards living a creative life has changed completely. Since I started believing that self-improvement is a farce, I quickly put aside all my excuses to “merely do the work” (Seth Godin), and I found myself with a complete first draft of my second novel. This perspective will take a little longer to explain than a 2,200-character Instagram caption, but I believe that you deserve something comprehensive on this topic. So, I hope that what I have learned is helpful for you, for brand-new baby creatives and aspiring authors alike.Here goes nothing.* You must keep going. After I held my first book baby in my hands, I expected to feel happy. Instead, I felt depressed for a long time afterward. I had spent 14 years, about half my life, as “an aspiring author.” Now that I was simply “an author,” that identity shift completely overwhelmed me. I felt like I was facing the death of all my former selves who had made my book happen. In fact, years ago, I had accepted the very real possibility that I might never publish my book at all. Now, I was bewildered. Did I have it in me to sit down at my desk again? What else did I possibly have to say?After you accomplish anything major in life or go through any major change, things will take time to reorient themselves to a new normal. You will have to become a new person with new goals. How do you do that? My writing teacher, Ann Randolph, shared a story from Steven Pressfield, which I'll paraphrase poorly:Steven Pressfield spent ages working on a draft of a book. When he submitted it to his editor, he expected to sit on his hands. But as soon as the editor received it, they said to him, “Great. Now go start the next one.”Put simply, you must keep going. Sometimes, it's the only thing you can do. Once you're past the craziness of the launch, the screening, or the wedding, the next steps of life remain. Starting another project might feel cruel at first, but please don't sit around.After I floated for a couple of months, slowly, I got my butt in the chair, and I started writing again.* Be very attuned to which projects you want to do. “You have this natural want. That want is the thing that moves evolution. Like a plant, it's like, "Oh, there's sun. I want to move in that direction." It's the thing that allows us to know that's our evolutionary path…And they kind of show where the growth is occurring or wants to occur." – Joe Hudson on Lenny's Podcast.I had an idea for a second novel about three years ago. I wrote a small bit of it in 2022, but then I stopped. I was worried. Do people even read novels anymore? I should be writing SEO-optimized articles, I thought to myself, if I really wanted to be a successful writer. This preoccupation with what I “should” be doing left me stagnated, flailing, and ultimately stuck.Then, at some point a couple of months ago, I basically decided: f**k it. I didn't care whether or not anyone would read my second book. I wanted to write that story for myself! And write that book, I would. Once I made that decision, everything changed. Suddenly, I felt inspired by the world around me again. As I wrote my second book, new ideas for other projects and pieces came to me constantly. Energetically and creatively, it was like night and day.I can't overstate the importance of this: as much as you can, when you have an idea for a project that you really want to do, do it. Run towards it and embrace it. Get started. Somewhere. Anywhere. The energy that you get from doing the one project you really want to do will solve everything.If you find yourself thinking, "I should do XYZ project or activity," stop for a second. Notice how it feels in your body. Do you feel heavy? Do you feel guilty? Do you feel stuck? Now, imagine doing something you want to do. Do you feel lighter? Do you feel curious? Do you feel excited? Try to do things you want to do more often.* Make up a deadline. Create a friendly routine.“Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time.” – Rick Rubin, “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.”I had a very unproductive summer. But then, in September, I went to a writing workshop with the London Writers' Salon to mark the start of the “100-Days Challenge.” This workshop was an initiation. There were 100 days left in the year. F**k! I thought to myself. 2024 was almost over, and I had little to nothing to show for it. It felt like it was now or never.I sat down and started writing 3,000 words per day on my second novel. Surprisingly, I could hit my word count in 2-3 hours. Once I was in flow, I noticed that I felt energized; I found joy in writing the scenes and figuring out the plot points. Perhaps, like the birth of a second child, the book just slid right out of me. I finished the first draft just last week, about a month into the 100-Days Challenge.My original deadline for the first draft of the novel had been September 1st. That came and went. Then, I started working towards the 100-Days Challenge, and I blew it out of the water. In general, I hate being told what to do. But once I found a simple structure that I could stick to every day and tick off once I'd completed it, it was ironically freeing.So, to get your project done, set yourself a deadline. Yes, it will be totally arbitrary. If you pass that deadline for whatever reason, that's okay, just set another one. Once you've chosen that goal, try to work backward and set up a daily practice, so you make a bit of progress each day. As Rick Rubin says,“Find the sustainable rituals that best support your work. If you set a routine that is oppressive, you'll likely find excuses to not show up. It's in the interest of your art to create an easily achievable schedule to start with. If you commit to working for half a day, something good can happen that generates momentum."* Compete with yourself.“…the only person you're ever competing against is yourself. The rest is out of your control.” – Rick Rubin, quoting John Wooden in “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”To write my second book, I set myself a target of 3,000 words per day. Why 3,000 words per day? Because on my semi-productive days over the summer, I could comfortably write about 2,200 words per day. So, 3,000 was a tiny bit of a stretch for me. Could I write that much? The challenge seemed exciting but achievable. Plus, I had a funny feeling that once I sat down to tackle a scene, reaching a 3,000-word goal would be easy. I was right. Within a couple of weeks, I finished the first draft of my second book, about a year after I published my first.Once you start competing with yourself, you will enter a completely different league. That momentum will be insatiable. The psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson encourages us to ask ourselves: "Am I performing better than I did in the past? Am I learning? Am I getting better?" "Am I smarter than I was a week ago, a month ago, a year ago because I've been taking the time to learn?"So, if you challenge yourself to a duel, you'll soon be surprised at just how far you have come.* ⁠Enjoyment is everything.I love my mother, but she has a particularly draconian perspective on life. When she was working on her PhD thesis, I encouraged her to celebrate after she finished each chapter. Instead, she insisted that she could only celebrate once the whole thing was finished. Did she celebrate when she finally defended the thing? Nope. Not hardly at all.I believe that hard work matters, but I also believe that enjoying what you do and celebrating wins along the way are equally important. Enjoying your work is a good thing because it increases your chances of success. When you're happy, you're more likely to stay motivated, and you'll actually get better work done.In the few years that I've been building my writing career, I have wanted to fire myself as my marketer many times. But half of being bad at marketing means that I've also had to accept where I am on my journey. Accepting myself and finding ways to enjoy marketing my content has given me more stamina. If I'm too mean to myself, my self-criticism just weighs me down and stops me in my tracks. But when I can find a way to enjoy editing TikToks using iMovie on my computer because it's fun, then I get more TikToks edited and published out there in the world.In fact, Joe Hudson shares on Lenny's Podcast that enjoyment is about internal work, not external work. He suggests that we should ask ourselves:“How can I enjoy this 10% more right now? So, it's not about changing anything in the external world…Trying is not what creates more enjoyment. It's usually letting go of trying that creates more enjoyment.”So, pick any task that you hate doing, any meeting with your team that you find completely pointless, or any assignment you've been dreading and ask yourself: How can I enjoy this 10% more?* You will have to learn the simplest things last.“I have had to learn the simplest things / last. Which made for difficulties” – “Maximus, to himself" by Charles OlsenI did not reach my goal of selling 10,000 copies of my book in the first year. I tried Amazon ads and did not waste that much money, but I also got no sales. I am currently running the A/B test on potential book covers that I should have run almost a year ago. Thank God for print-on-demand! Lol. Hopefully, by the time you're reading this, I'll have a better cover for my book that fits my genre.The reality of building a creative career is that even more than 2 years in, I still have so much to learn and so much I am yet to master. I perpetually exist in this liminal state of half-baked imperfections. But then I remember the wisdom from the poem, “Maximus, to himself,”“We are all late / in a slow time.”“We grow up many / And the single / is not easily / known.”Growth doesn't happen overnight. You may feel like the same person you were when you woke up yesterday. But when you look back in a year or two, you will be amazed by how much you have changed! So please, don't kick yourself because you spent a year learning something that now takes you only an hour to complete. You are doing something right. It is better to learn late than never to have learned at all.* You must decide to go pro.“All you have to do [to turn pro] is change your mind.” – Steven Pressfield, “Turning Pro”A couple of months ago, I was somewhere between posting on TikTok, writing, and balancing client work when a sobering idea crept into my mind:If I want to be a professional writer, I need to write a lot more than I am currently writing.Anyone can write 50,000 words, 100,000 words, or even one book. But two books? Or even three books? If I wanted to accomplish that, I would need to reach a whole other level of dedication. It was a switch, a simple decision.Luckily, this realization coincided with the 100-Days Challenge. It was the same familiar world of writing characters, scenes, and plots, but it still felt like the land of the unknown. In my mind, the publication of my first book had been a lofty fluke. Yes, I now know how to self-publish a book. But here I was, crossing the chasm into second-book territory.In “Turning Pro,” Steven Pressfield describes this inflection point. He says,“The difference between an amateur and a professional is in their habits…A professional has professional habits…We plan our activities in order to accomplish an aim…This changes our days completely. It changes what time we get up and it changes what time we go to bed …When we were amateurs, our life was about drama, about denial, and about distraction…But we are not amateurs anymore. We are different, and everyone in our lives sees it.”Deciding to turn pro is second book energy, second film energy, and second creative costume project energy. One day, you're going to have to sit down and cross that chasm. And it's not something you just do once. As Pressfield says, turning pro is like “kicking a drug habit or stopping drinking. It's a decision, a decision to which we must re-commit every day.”* Combat your excuses one by one.“Friends sometimes ask, “Do you get lonely sitting by yourself all day?” At first, it seemed off to hear myself answer No. Then I realized I was not alone; I was in the book; I was with the characters. I was with my Self.” – Steven Pressfield, “The War of Art”This year, I spent many months flailing between projects and fluffing around. My narrative for my life went like this,I live alone. I write alone. I work alone. I'm single. It's too much alone time. I can't write unless I get a roommate or a cat.Right? Wrong! I was parroting a couple of the classic excuses that Rick Rubin mentions,“Thoughts and habits that are not conducive to work:”* “Thinking you can only do your best work in certain conditions.”* “Believing a certain mood or state is necessary to do your best work.”* Thinking anything that's out of your control is in your way.”But when I sat down to write for the 100-Days Challenge, something magical happened. I was so focused on the words and the story that I didn't feel alone anymore. I realized that while I'm writing, my mind is super stimulated. I'm so in flow that my need for other people doesn't seem as intense. I soon combined this with a daily gratitude practice recommended by Joe Hudson. For 7.5 minutes a day, I talk to myself out loud about all the things I'm grateful for, and I feel the gratitude in my body. I started to say out loud to myself:I am so lucky to have a small, beautiful, one-bedroom apartment that I love, where I can sit in my house all day and write if I want to.So, it's up to you to embrace your current living configuration. You can get a lot done the way your life is set out right now, trust me. Things could always be worse. You could have less help. You could be older and less capable for all kinds of reasons. So, focus more on what you do have. Define yourself as someone who has rather than someone who has not. And you'll be amazed at all the reasons you can come up with to create rather than all the excuses as to why you can't.Conclusion: Focus on the next step of your natural evolution.  “Start close in, don't take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in” – David Whyte, “Start Close In”Writing my second book has taught me many things. But the most important thing I have learned is that believing we have to improve ourselves is heavy and draws us into a scarcity mindset. When I beat myself up for not doing what I "should" be doing, like posting on social media to share my work more, it reinforces the idea that I am lacking in my current state and that I have to gain or achieve something external in order to be acceptable, lovable and worthy. This way of seeing ourselves in the world is painful and fundamentally wrong. Instead, when we focus on what we want to do and move towards that, we move into the abundance of our existing energy, our skills, and the way we want to flow in the world. In the episode of Lenny's podcast, Joe Hudson shared the analogy of an oak tree. He says,“At what time in the journey of an oak tree is it perfect? When it's an acorn? When it's a sprout? When it's 20 years old, 40 years old, 150 years old? Two hundred years old, depending on the oak tree? Like, “Now, I'm perfect.” The idea is ridiculous. So it's a similar thing for us. So, the idea that I need to improve myself really disturbs the natural process that's at hand, which is that we evolve. We, as human beings, evolve.And if it's like, oh, I'm evolving, and I can enjoy it. And I'm acting from my authenticity. Then that has a lot of alacrity. That moves quick. If it's I need to improve, there's something wrong with me. I need to improve; I should do it. That all goes really f*****g slow. Right. Because there's a lot of emotional stagnation in that."So, I hope that you can take the next step, identify the next project you want to work on, and go for it. Not because getting that thing will make you richer or more successful and, therefore, more lovable. But because moving towards what you want is the natural next step in your evolution.Good luck! That's about it for now! I hope this resonated with you. I'll be back with more exciting updates soon, as I am working on a third book! Lol.Love,Tash

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Hello Wonderful Readers,Late last Thursday evening, I felt terrible. As I walked with my two friends through the dark, tree-lined streets of Mexico City to a cocktail bar, a giant, hollow pit was growing inside me. Not because I was hungry. I had just eaten two slices of my favorite pizza in the whole world: the Picante Pep from Hanks. But not even that salami, basil, and sweet, spicy honey could comfort me. Arturo, my new love interest, had promised to meet up at Casa Franca. And I still hadn't heard from him.My phone lay message-less in my purse. I ground my teeth in this godawful purgatory. My heart had sunk somewhere between my knees and my feet. Part of my disappointment and hurt was oozing with my anxiety into a mixture as toxic as nuclear waste in my mind.Maybe I won't meet with him for jazz music and dancing like we planned? Arturo isn't interested in me, is he? Why can't I date a nice guy like him without scaring him away? What's wrong with me?I felt like a fool for dressing up, looking hotter than I had looked in weeks. I wore a crimped red dress and dark purple turtleneck top, black tights, and big, clompy black boots. My dark, purply red lipstick matched my dress, which was the same length as my black blazer with gold buttons. Whatever, I huffed to myself. None of this mattered if I wasn't going to see Arturo.But what do they say? When God closes a door, he opens a window. Well, don't even start me on the concept of God being a male. At least Ariana Grande was right about something.My friends and I arrived at the cocktail bar, Salón Palomilla. I kept trying to focus on what they were saying, but I still felt too distracted. It was hard to divert the course of my thoughts when the destination of Arturo was seared into my brain. We walked down the mirrored corridor, passed gold bottles of expensive alcohol, and climbed the back stairs to the rooftop.Our surroundings transformed. Serpent-green walls were interrupted by low-lit, quirky paintings of women's bodies, something between Picasso and Miro. The starry sky stretched overhead like we were in the top capsule of a spaceship filled with Mexico City's hottest and coolest bright young things. Just arriving there, I felt slightly elevated. Do I sound entitled for feeling self-important when I walk into a room of exclusivity, pomp, and snobbery? Probably. I gazed at couples whispering to each other and groups of friends sitting on velvet couches around black onyx coffee tables. They talked and checked us out as we passed. But much like the stars in the night sky overhead and the bubbles in some clientele's cocktails, I too, felt like I had risen.On the way to our table, I suddenly caught sight of someone strangely familiar. He was sitting in a high-backed armchair with a female friend at his side. I believe they were friends because they seemed utterly uninterested in each other, at least compared to the other couples in the room who were sitting much closer together and seemed more enraptured in each other's physical and personal business. But as you know, I have been very wrong about this in the past.I only caught sight of this man for a split second. I couldn't be sure. Was it him, though? If it was who I thought it was, well, then it was Guillermo García Garrido, one of the hottest and most successful internet chefs of my generation. His initials should not be confused with GGG, a tagline some men use on dating apps to proclaim themselves as “good, giving and game” (good in bed, willing to give equally to their partner and game for anything). Perhaps Guillermo, if that's who he was, was GGG. A conversation about Guillermo's supposed sex life, for me, would be a whole other situation.Now, I'm not one for cooking shows. I don't give a s**t about cooking recipes at home, and I have never used my oven in the two years I've lived in this apartment. But the truth is that Guillermo could feed me s**t-stew, and I'd eat it. The man is like a small walking god. He had a beautiful, rounded nose and luscious locks of brown hair. And when I say luscious, I mean a little long in places, but the kind that he would curl down in front of his face when he made his cooking videos. I don't remember how I had come across him on the internet. But this beautiful man, born in Chicago to Mexican parents, had achieved something that I thought was impossible. Guillermo is so attractive that for a brief moment in time, he convinced me that vegan food is sexy. Known as “That Vegan Guy” (this is not his real handle, of course, I have anonymized him), since he moved to Manhattan, his career had exploded, and he'd soared to more than 400,000 followers on Instagram.  Of course, once I stumbled across his work, I began to salivate over the vegan things he was cooking. Well, not for the food. I was there for the videos of him being hot and cute, biting into a deep, juicy mushroom burger, and rolling his eyes back in his head because he was enjoying his own food so much. The pleasure of it all, just watching him chop, stir, and devour, was enough to keep me on my toes as I looked into his equally dashing dark brown eyes through my screen. What else can I say about him, except that he was so hot? And just like any fangirl on the internet, I quickly developed a crush on him the size of Mount Everest. I formed a strange, para-social relationship with him, wanting to touch and lick this man who was touching and licking so many delicious things in his videos. Well, that's the weirdness of the internet for you.Yet, in 2021, I soon became very disinterested in his vegan cooking. And so, in an act of stupidity or genius (I'm not sure which), I decided to troll him on Twitter. Now, I know I'm being a complete hypocrite here because I believe trolling is bad and it's not a nice thing to do in general. What I did was wrong, I admit it. But at the time, it was the pandemic, and I didn't give enough of a f**k about anything. And I honestly didn't think he would reply. So, here is the interaction that we had on Twitter:If you can't speak Spanish I flit from trying to sound cool to the immediately desperate reaction of:“Seriously, tell me when you don't have a girlfriend. Maybe we'll meet someday. Who knows.”And who knows, indeed? Had I just finally met That Vegan Guy in real life? Had I prophesized this meeting three years earlier? Or was I just fangirling and salivating over nothing and no one?My friends and I indulged in rounds of cocktails and passion-fruit kombucha with a salt rim, which I quite liked. Despite the chance of seeing Guillermo, I still felt down about Arturo, and I turned to my friends for consolation. But when I mentioned to them who he might be, of course, we erupted in giggles and quickly came up with a new challenge:I had to determine whether this man was indeed Guillermo García Garrido, and then I had to do whatever was in my power to talk to him.Rather than being normal and mature adults, my friends quickly dared me to walk back to the entrance to try to catch his eye. I got up and dawdled back to where I had seen him, pretending to look at the art. But based on where this guy's chair was sitting and facing, it was impossible to look properly. He also now seemed even less interested in talking to his female friend, and he was on his phone, which meant it was even harder to look directly at his face. I returned to the table with my friends, unsuccessful.But then, about 20 minutes later, this Guillermo-lookalike got up from his chair and walked beside us to the bar at the back of the room. He disappeared behind some curtains into a cornered-off section. I whispered to my friends,“Okay. What should I do?”“Go for it!” my female friend said, “I mean, you miss all the shots you don't take.” She winked at me with undeniable excitement and cheekiness. So I took a deep breath and stood up. Yes, I thought to myself. I had nothing to lose again.I tried to walk as normally and coolly as I could. Soon, I disappeared behind the curtains. I found him there next to the bar.“Excuse me,” I said in my most confident and British English, “Are you Guillermo, That Vegan Guy?”Guillermo gazed at me, and as if he was posing for a TV camera, he twirled the lock of luscious brown hair dangling over his forehead.“I am,” he said. Was that a smirk? A smile? Was Guillermo García Garrido flirting with me?“Oh, great,” I said, again trying to play it the coolest of cool. Guillermo's beauty was a little more understated in person. Still, I liked his rolled-up corduroy trousers. “I don't know if you remember me. I trolled you on Twitter once. I'm Tash—”“Tash Doherty,” he said.I almost choked on my tongue. I was clueless as to what to do, so I kept talking, pretending not to hear but also very, very aware that this walking human male god knew who I was. (If you think I'm an egotist for writing this story, you are completely right. I checked after and somehow we follow each other's personal Instagram accounts. Lol.)“Yes, that's me. I'm sorry I said that about you. Quite the back-handed compliment. Ha. Ha. Well, what are you doing in Mexico City?” I asked him. I was grateful to be wearing my blazer so that he couldn't see the probably enormous sweat patches forming at my armpits.“I'm checking some places out and visiting my family in Queretaro. What are you doing here?”“I live here. I used to live in New York, but now I live here.” I bombarded him with nervous repetitions to try to save myself.“Oh, cool,” he said.“How long are you in town for?” I asked. And before he had the chance to answer, I added, “I'd be happy to show you around if you need. Here. Let's exchange numbers.”“For sure—”I thrust my phone into his hands and beckoned for his. I was surprised that he had an older, smaller model of the iPhone. I guess I had incorrectly judged him as someone who might have all the latest gadgets. But Guillermo was either down-to-earth, uninterested in the high-flying lifestyle, or he was so successful in his TV and food film career that he never shot videos for himself on his own phone, and only had others do it for him.Putting my number in this man's phone, I could tell that he was very important indeed. Just from the red icons on his home screen alone, I saw that he had like 560 missed calls, 810 messages that he hadn't read, and some ungodly numbers of Instagram and TikTok notifications. I now had low expectations that this man would ever message me (spoiler alert, he eventually did, which I may tell you about another time). Yet with a couple more pleasantries and a quick goodbye, I headed back to my table with Guillermo García Garrido's phone number in my phone and a one-in-a-lifetime story for my friends.As I told them what had happened, I noticed that my feelings of low self-worth from Arturo's radio silence had evaporated. When Guillermo left the bar some 15 minutes later, I even gave him a quick wave as he stood at the top of the staircase. How did he signal back to me? He nodded at me, the most incredible, smooth, subtly sexy nod I had ever received in my life. A smirk, a thin lift of his eyebrows, and a small swoosh of his hair all in one. It was scorching hot enough to make my insides melt on the spot.So, what is the moral of this twist of fate, of the universe lending me a step up and a reason to remember for a moment that, yes, I truly am hot as f**k? It's one of the five cliched principles I live my life by:You never know.This is an angle of optimism. Things can accidentally work out far better than you could have ever imagined. My experience with Guillermo García Garrido at Salón Palomilla is proof of that, and let me tell you: there's nothing quite like exchanging numbers and flirting with one of the objectively hottest guys on this planet as a way to forget about a pleasant but inattentive man.Of course, you know from last week's post that Arturo did eventually message me, and we did eventually dance to jazz music at Casa Franca. But I can tell you that I was a lot more fun to be around once Guillermo had given me the ego stroke of a lifetime.As promised, I'll have even more details of where that came from for you next week, because I ran into one of my exes from On Dating Mexican Men at Casa Franca. Stay tuned, as I'll be back with the gory, juicy details of that encounter next week.Much love to you, wherever you are out there in the ether.Love,Tash

Hello Wonderful Readers,I'm struggling to write to you right now. I was on a bender until 3 am this morning, and last night was filled with so many juicy details that it will take me at least a couple of weeks to tell you all about it.Of course, a new guy has entered my life, and I'm nervous to write about him because he reads my work and is supportive of me. As you know, in the recent months of writing Misseducated, I've been burned by my own work much more than I hoped, and it has hurt. Yet, somehow, I have to believe that my work matters enough to keep going. And that leads me to the first part of this story I've got for you here. It's the part of last night that sticks out to me the most.Last night, I woke up from a power nap at about 8:30 pm. I had plans to meet up with Arturo (yes, the new man) at a Jazz Club later in the evening. He's kind of a night owl, so I was thrilled when I woke up bursting with energy. I was ready to take on whatever the night had in store.All you need to know about Arturo is that he's 35, divorced, and from Los Bosques, an upper-class suburb of Mexico City. He also lives in Polanco and works at Google Mexico City office in Las Lomas. We met on Raya and have had a couple of dates together which have gone quite well. So well that, last night, he invited me to meet him at the Jazz Club, Casa Franca, in Roma Norte after he finished a late dinner with his coworkers.Yesterday, we had been texting in Spanish:Arturo, 5:57 pm: See you at Casa Franca? I'll let you know when to get there.Tash, 6:01 pm: Sounds good. See you there and enjoy your dinner!As 9 pm rolled around, I was flailing around my apartment, desperate to make myself look as hot as humanly possible. I know I'm not supposed to get myself glammed up for a night out solely for the pursuit of a man (thank you, Cindy Gallop), but just like any bad feminist, I was embracing the fact that rules exist to be broken. Luckily, I had lined up drinks with a female friend to keep myself distracted from Arturo until the moment we were to meet.I messaged him on the way to the cocktail bar to meet my female friend,Tash, 9:48 pm: Hey, Arturo! What time should I meet you at Casa Franca?And then I emotionally sat on my hands. And I waited.My female friend and I ran into some other friends at the cocktail bar. Then we went out for pizza. Then we went to yet another bar. While I was sitting there, I admit I was being a terrible friend. I was only half-paying-attention to what they were all saying. It's early October. It's cuffing season. I am wrestling with myself inside because I know that I need to lock a man down (only metaphorically, of course) before the winter sets in. However shall I make it through these upcoming cold months alone? However shall I procreate and create a plethora of healthy, rosy-cheeked children? My body is barking at me. In this economy? Not even my logical business-school-educated brain can argue with my urge to get knocked the f**k up. This is biology at its best; at its strongest.I checked my phone at 11:26 pm. Not a word from Arturo. Not a peep. It had been a whole hour and a half. As I sipped on my passion-fruit-laced kombucha with a salt rim, I wondered: Was Arturo going to message me back? He had seemed nice until now. Maybe he got too drunk at dinner? Maybe he'd picked up another hotter girl at Casa Franca already? Maybe he didn't want me to come after all?You know, I've been single for a while. And that's because, well, I don't know. There's got to be something wrong with me. I shouldn't have sent him that very forward message asking him when he'd be at Casa Franca. I'm too needy and desperate, and men can smell it.I started to get upset. I turned to my friends for consolation.“Treat him like a candidate for a job interview,” one of my friends advised me. “If you were interviewing a candidate for a job, and they showed up super later or didn't show up at all, would you stand for that? No! You'd never hire them.”We laughed it off, and something else very exciting happened that I will tell you about next week. But as time went on, I got more and more anxious. Clearly, Arturo didn't want to see me. Why couldn't he have just told the truth in the first place instead of pretending? I couldn't bring myself to check my phone again, just to be trodden down further that Arturo hadn't messaged me. I would bring all of this up with my therapist in our next session. If this guy wasn't going to meet my needs, well, then I was ready to give up on us getting to know each other. To numb the pain of it all, I got another round of drinks with my friends.It was 12:09 am before I checked my phone again.Arturo, 11:46 pm: We've been here a while. Are you coming to Casa Franca?My hands shook as I read the message. I accidentally dropped my phone smack on the table. The ice in our cocktail glasses wobbled. Arturo had messaged me. And I had been so busy wallowing in my story of him not being interested, or of him finding someone better than me, or not caring about me, that I hadn't done the damn simple task of checking in with him on my phone.As soon as I saw his message, I rejoiced with my friends. Arturo wasn't a complete a*****e after all. And maybe, well, I had been being a bit dramatic. I would leave my deep-seated worries about my self-worth for another time because he had requested my presence.I hurried my friends through the end of their conversation. We quickly got the bill. They walked me over to Casa Franca, and after a couple of trips through the various rooms (which I will also tell you about another time because I ran into one of my exes from On Dating Mexican Men), I finally found Arturo and his coworkers.It was sometime past 12:30 am when we finally hugged each other hello. Then Arturo turned to me, and he said,“I'm so glad you came. I was beginning to think it was too late. I was worried you had already gone to sleep and weren't going to make it. It's so good to see you. I'm so glad you came.”His words took me aback. They struck a chord. I puzzled to myself in that moment, again distracted as we caught up with each other about how our day had been.After all the anxiety and the trips through the realms of self-worth that I had dipped into in my own mind, here was this perfectly nice, if not also imperfect, guy standing in front of me. Somewhere along the way, between the hundreds of hours of Instagram reels I had consumed and the narratives about the opposite sex that I had bombarded myself with, I forgot that on the other end of the phone was also another living human person. And that if I wanted to get to know this person, I would have to meet them where they were. Maybe that meant compromising. Maybe that meant being patient. But without a doubt, it meant that I needed to ground myself in my reality and not fall into old, unhealthy stories of how I was treated in the past. It meant not having silly, made-up expectations of a man or any human and how they should show up for me in any given situation.And yet, in my experience of entrenched loneliness and questioning my own worthiness of connection, I had accidentally left him hanging. And I had even transferred that instability and potential for disconnection onto him. My limited story of myself had almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wading through the trash of my information diet and obsessing over my own emotions and ability to connect with others had left me isolated. To the point where I could hardly afford a tiny inch in the corner of my brain to consider the experience of another person, much less a person seeking a deeper connection with me. We had almost passed each other like ships in the night.It reminds me of a fascinating TED Talk I watched a couple of years ago with psychologist Dr. Guy Winch. In the story, Winch shares that he always calls his twin brother on their birthday. That is, until one year, when his birthday rolled around, his twin brother didn't call. During his talk, Winch says,“That night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life.”That night, he makes up all kinds of stories about how he doesn't matter to his brother anymore and how they've grown apart irreparably. The next day, Winch wakes up and realizes that he had accidentally kicked the phone off the hook the night before. When he realizes this, he puts it back on the ringer, and his brother calls him immediately. His brother had been calling and calling him the whole time, panicking for over a day.“It was the longest and saddest night of his life as well.”Disconnection. That's what our questioning of our self-worth and loneliness can bring us to. Meeting Arturo at the Jazz Club made it clear to me just how much our own perceptions of lovability and our narratives of ourselves create or deny connection in our lives. In ignoring my phone and trapping myself in my narrative of loneliness of not receiving a message from him, I accidentally recreated that experience for Arturo and left him hanging on the other end of his phone, on the verge of disconnection and loneliness also.You know, the tech bros in San Francisco promised us that new apps and AI would make our lives easier. But the longer I have a smartphone, the more I'm convinced that by making things easier, these apps can also make our lives more complex. Now, instead of having a face-to-face conversation, there are two phones, data plans, and wifi signals between us. While, in some ways, that makes it easier for us to communicate, it has also made it easier for us to get lost in our own biased narratives about our lives and how unlovable we might think we are at times. These narratives and perceptions are what shape our reality.I apologized to Arturo. We danced at Casa Franca and had quite a dramatic night for other reasons, which I will tell you about in a couple of weeks. I learned that technology has made communication easier in our lives. But it has made miscommunication easier in our lives also.Much love to you out there, wherever you are in the ether.Stay tuned as I'll be back with a spicier story of who I met at the cocktail bar with my friends next week!Love,Tash

Hello everyone!This week I'm sharing an interview with Dr. Tarra Bates-Duford about how to help someone in an abusive relationship. Below you'll find a summary of our key talking points, and then the full transcript of our discussion so you can read along.I hope you find this informative, and that it comes in handy one day. Please share the episode and article with anyone you think it would help. Love, Tash

Dear Wonderful Readers,I was looking forward to updating you with the next part of my story. Until s**t went down on the internet. (See recent weeks here and here).Given that this s**t went down in the last 48 hours, I haven't had the chance to process things properly yet. However, I was still determined to write something for you today. Luckily, I also have one exciting update for you that I hope will be a strong metaphorical band-aid over this situation for us all.Without meaning to, this week, my life turned into a very dramatic and scary telenovela. Perhaps I was asking for it by writing about my love life in Mexico with no filter and very thin guises of anonymity for the other characters. But to be honest, the Instagram harassment and the casual threat to my personal safety have put a downer on the whole situation. I had to confirm that these people don't know where I live. Guess what that did to my nervous system and my latent PTSD? Not good things! Lol. Don't worry, I know who they are and why they're mad. But it's a bummer because the story was just getting juicy!Many of you have contacted me to say how much you loved my stories these last couple of weeks, and for that, I am truly grateful and inspired to keep going. However, when the haters mount up, the amount of b******t I am experiencing starts to tally and counteract the good. If this newsletter paid me a s**t ton of money, which I hope it will one day, then maybe I wouldn't care. But right now, as a labor of love, it starts to hurt when people keep lobbing daggers at me through the screen with expert precision.  I will be the first to admit that I am not perfect. My flaws include having far too much curiosity for my own good, a propensity to meddle in other people's business, and publishing whatever I want without giving much thought to who is reading it. Yet the closer my stories reflect my personal life, the stranger these situations become. Do I go on a date with a weirdo so I can write something off-piste about it? Do I pursue people and experiences to sensationalize them with spice later?This week was a hard lesson. I learned that I should not do things just for the story itself, especially if that would put me in danger. What happens when the characters confront me in real life? It's a mindfuck. I have to develop a thicker skin while treading more carefully. As my woo-woo friends have suggested, this may be what the current full-moon-eclipse is trying to teach me (Still, don't ask me about astrology; I know nothing about it.).But ultimately, I do love writing for you all. Especially in recent weeks, I have absolutely loved these little serialized chapters. You get to read a bit more of the same story each week, and the momentum is exciting because I have a clear sense of what I'll reveal next. That keeps me on my toes with all of you. I want to keep that cadence going, but as you can tell, I've had quite a rough week. So hopefully, next week we can start again with a new series of mischief I've been up to.However, not all hope is lost. Here are some things that have been bringing me back to life:* Reaching out to all my closest friends in Mexico. Thank you all for being an incredible source of emotional support and helping me through with your witty and sometimes ridiculous reflections.* Getting drunk with said friends, catching up on all the gossip we've missed and laughing a lot to help take my mind off things.* Hugging myself. It's the best way I've found to give myself compassion thanks to Dr. Kristin Neff.* Channeling the strength of my ancestors. Do you know how f*****g tough you have to be to survive the Irish winters? Before electricity and central heating? Part of my family has lived in Donegal for probably thousands of years. Those people, the women especially, are tough as nails. Their strength is part of me.* Cleansing everything. I exorcised all the bad energy in my house by opening all the windows and burning copal, and then sage, which I originally got from the Taos pueblo in New Mexico. I feel witchy and lighter.  Lastly, before I share the exciting update, I want to comment on how we treat women in our world. It is disappointing to me that some people like to blame women for men's bad behavior. What about holding the men accountable for their actions? What about some self-reflection? Using a woman as a scapegoat, blaming her for everything and calling her a liar is old news, and it's childish.I used to blame women for things or think that they were just being inconvenient and difficult when they spoke their minds. That was until the Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar cases convinced me otherwise. It was shocking to me that while many young women in each case were assaulted by the same person, a big reason why they didn't come forward is because they thought no one would believe them. However, false reporting for rape, for example, is estimated to be between 2-8% of accusations. That means we should believe other women about 92-98% of the time. So, let's bend the moral arch of the universe a tiny bit. Let's start believing other women, rather than blaming them. How about that?Anyway, that's more than enough of that. The good news is that my head is bloody but unbowed, probably because a quarter of my blood comes from generations of stalwart Irish women. Now we can move onto something much more interesting:The Exciting Update: Launching “Ask Tash

My conversation with Jorge, the hot waiter, unfolds in Spanglish over WhatsApp. Of course, I leave healthy delays between messages, so I don't come across as too keen.Jorge: “Hi Tash. It's Jorge. How are you?”Tash: “Good morning. Do you work at Pujol?”Jorge: “Yes, haha.”Tash: “Lol. Where are you from? How old are you?”Jorge: “I'm 33 and I'm from Veracruz.”Tash: “I'm from London, and I'm 29.”Jorge: “Cool. I have to start my shift, but let's chat soon! Do you have Instagram?”We exchange Instagram handles. I tell him I'm traveling for the next few weeks, and he tells me to get in touch once I'm back. I'm lying around the house in LA on my family holiday one afternoon when I finally look at his Instagram profile. It's private. But his profile picture tells me all I need to know.I use my thumb and forefinger to zoom in closer on the tiny circle. There he is in the picture, smiling and stubbled, clad in full hiking gear. And then, undoubtedly, unavoidably, inconveniently, there is a girl in hiking gear standing next to him. Does he have his arm around her? Well, with their hiking poles, it's hard to tell. It takes him a day or two to follow me back before I can finally see what I'm dealing with.Most of Jorge's Instagram pictures are of him and his colleagues brandishing extravagant pieces of fish or perfectly plated food alongside chefs and knives. I imagine that to work at a high-end place like Pujol, you have to be a fiend for good food, and your job is your identity. Are there lots of pictures of the girl? No. But when I do find a picture of her from way-back when, there's her Instagram handle, and her profile is public.I discover that she is also Mexican and also from Veracruz. There are plenty of pictures of them together, dining out to exquisite meals and hiking trails along Popocatepetl and El Nevado de Toluca. And yes, there is a ring on her finger. I begin to read into things, dig into things, and project my limited and nervous thoughts all over things.Here's a lovely couple from Veracruz who moved to Mexico City together. This man is clearly obsessed with his work. His fiancé loves him dearly and cherishes the dinners he takes her to because he knows all the best restaurants in the city. But she wishes he wasn't so dedicated to his work so they could spend more time together and start to build a family.I think back to the dinner with my family at Pujol. Did Jorge have a ring on his finger? I am pretty sure he didn't. Otherwise, I never would have left him my number in the first place.I pause. You see, in Mexican culture, the way I'm communicating with Jorge is not very appropriate. It's not done for a married man to have many single female friends or to be friends with his wife's friends, for example, and vice versa. So, I can't help but wonder. If Jorge is engaged or married, why is he talking to me?Summer this year has brought some of my most strange and confusing interactions with men. It is probably a complete coincidence, but soon after I got my Mexican residency in July, weird things started happening to me.The first was when I met Lorenzo, a videographer from Los Bosques, a fancy suburb of Mexico City, at an art event. We talked for about three weeks before he took me out for a dinner date at a cantina. The dinner went well, except he took a very long time in the bathroom, so his food got cold. He also told me stories about how he often came home to find his uncle sleeping with other women and prostitutes while he was still married to his aunt. That should have been a red flag. Still, I'm a sucker for men who pay for dinner.The morning after, I woke up with 6 missed calls from Lorenzo. At first, I excused it, thinking he had butt-dialed me, and we kept talking. Later, when I checked Instagram, I found that I had 13 missed video and audio calls from a girl called Luisa. She also shared a picture of her with him, in which he looked very guilty indeed, and she wrote,Luisa: “Did you go to this cantina with Lorenzo? Tell me! I am with him.”I then texted Lorenzo to ask who Luisa was. Lorenzo never responded again. As my old Economics teacher, Mr. Simpson used to say: “Extraordinary scenes!”Tash: “Haha, your poor phone.”Lorenzo: “Hi! How are you? How was your flight?”Tash: “All good, thanks. I got to San Cristobal de Las Casas already. Did you want to talk last night, or was it your phone's mistake? Also, who is Luisa?”

✨ I've missed writing for you! I think you'll like this story… ✨I will give my number to the hot waiter at this restaurant. But this dinner is not my typical Wednesday night, and it's far from over.The light in the restaurant is deep and gold. Low beams radiate out over the main dining area. Impeccably dressed people sit on wood-framed chairs and silently drag their spoons across plates of mole. My dark rouge lipstick stains the thin curve of my wine glass as I take a sip. After I put the glass down, I can't help but run my hands over the hazelnut table, sturdy yet tantalizing. Five other glasses of various shapes, sizes, and colors sit there, waiting for me to work through them. I am sharing the wine pairing with my father. I had an early shot of tequila and a cocktail. I have the sneaking suspicion that I am a little too loose.I am wearing all black. I wanted to look thin and be comfortable but also look hot. A short cashmere turtleneck dress and a blazer with gold buttons. High-laced boots. The top part of my hair is in a thin braid. I decorated myself with the trimmings of gold necklaces and rings, my fancy jewelry which I never wear in Mexico. But I am wearing them tonight and pulling out all the punches, because we are dining at Pujol, one of the fanciest and most expensive restaurants in the whole of Mexico City.I called, emailed, and confirmed our reservation over a month ago. Along with my father, my mother and aunt are also here to celebrate my aunt's retirement. Everything has gone perfectly on their trip. The sexagenarians (i.e., the people in their sixties, my family members, lol) are ecstatic, yet I'm dwindling with the exhaustion of a five-day chaperone. All I have to do is make it through this dinner. It's the peak of their trip. It's the height of indulgence. And it's the perfect second off.Yet, from the moment I walked into Pujol, what can I say? I was already on the prowl. My period finished last week, which means I am about to ovulate if I'm not ovulating already. As I sip my wine again, I shake my head silently to myself in knowing shame. I am drowning in the intensity of my baby fever. As we trundle over fond memories of summer holidays, I had to admit it to myself. I was not just hungry for the most delicious, exquisite meal in the city. I was hungry for the aftertaste of man. (Or woman).I didn't mean to get drunk. What happened was that my father wanted to order the wine pairing, but my mother insisted he can't drink that much, or he will snore, and she won't be able to sleep. My father passes me every half glass of wine he's not allowed to finish. Across the pristine plates, well into the 6th course, my wine glasses look like the traffic jam we briefly got stuck in in the Uber on the way here. I sloppily joke with my aunt and my mother,“K-Keep your eye out for any single men between the ages of 25 and 40.”I guess my father pretends not to hear. My father places another thin glass of wine in my queue. The rain is pounding on the roof. I glance through the low, wide window at the lush, jungle-like garden beyond. The air is a balanced temperature. The trickling music, the elotes, and the lamb barbacoa melt together in front of me. I sit up straight. I try to keep it together.I'm not sure when he first comes to my attention. I notice him holding a tray and standing by the wall, almost hidden in the shadowed corner of the room. He has black hair tucked behind his ears and crafted stubble on his chin. In the shadows, it is hard to tell if his hair is salt-and-pepper. But it is gelled, definitely.The next moment, he is standing over me. He has brought me a gift. It is another plate of carefully manicured vegetables, this time with lush pink tuna, the catch of the day. The light salt of the fish. The creamy, spicy, lemony kick of yet another green sauce.Well, that is his job, isn't it? To explain the dishes. To serve us the food. Is it just my imagination, or is he serving me first? His hands are thin. His skin is tan, and his fingers are rounded and rough. He leans over me. Our shoulders are almost touching. I feel a short shiver at the base of my back. I prop up my chin, resting on my hand, pretending to be elegant and oblivious.I've written about this before, but I can tell whether I want to have sex with a guy from the shape of his hands alone. And let me tell you: this waiter's hands are incredibly f******e. There's no hair around the knuckles, but they look strong. He has the kind of hands that might lock me in the bathroom with him, I imagine. That might pour a 40-ingredient, 10-year-old warm, dark chocolate mole across the pale skin of my naked chest under the light of a single bulb. Before he pulls my hair back and f***s me, getting it everywhere. The ghost of my feigned innocence might lift out of my body. Because beneath all the pleasantries of the dinner table, I am a bad girl, and I know what I want.I look up from my plate and remember I am in the strange company of my family. I chuckle in silent shame as I narrow in on my goal. I want his attention. I want to chat him up. I'm not sure what is so hot about this. Yes, he is attractive in his long, tucked-in black shirt. But there is also something forbidden about it. Forbidden, because this is his place of work. Forbidden, because I am still presenting as a young girl, surrounded by the pomp of some of the wealthiest people in the world. Yet none of the tax loopholes or client contracts or ETF investment portfolios matter now. I still need sex. I still want sex. And I want to have sex with him.For me, the power dynamic sharpens the chemistry. It is his job to serve me. Not that I believe I deserve to be served. But this is the game we are playing. The societal game. I walk near him on the way to the bathroom (to freshen myself up and make sure I don't look terrible). He is taller than me. We speak in Spanish as he shows me the way. Always on hand. Always there to please. Once I am alone, I gaze into the bathroom mirror. I confirm that my makeup is still on my face. My eyes are dark. My lips are still red. I think to myself,“You're hot, too. You've got this.”When he serves the next meat course of wild boar, I tell him,“Conseguí mi residencia en Hidalgo.” (I got my Mexican residency in Hidalgo.)We have a 20-second conversation about the unique wild boar dishes of various Mexican states before he quickly excuses himself. He resumes his position, holding the tray beside the wall and standing in the shadows. I glance at him repeatedly when I can.As my family shares the last bites of the special cake they prepared for my aunt's retirement, I say to her,“Here's a phrase you might like. Chingatelo. As you know, chingar means to f**k. So if I tell you, chingatelo, it means f*****g finish the last bit on the plate.”The hot waiter happens to be hovering at that moment. He seems to giggle a bit.“You're teaching them the slang,” he says to me, and I smile at him. Of course, I didn't have the guts to tell him I learned that phrase from my barista ex-noviocitio (lover), another man of incredible talent and taste.The hot waiter serves me. He serves me again. And I watch as he leans over me and wipes away the tiny crumbs and drops of alcohol that I had spilled on the table in front of me. Of course, he wipes my area of the table first. I notice the thickness of his fingers. Is he enjoying this also? Does it excite him? I sit up straighter and look away as he loyally makes his way around the table, wiping the spaces in front of my aunt, my mother, and my father.As we finish up dessert, and he returns to the corner of the room, I catch the intensity of his gaze. Was that a slight grin? My heart quickens, chest pounding. I bite my lip. I know what I need to do. I reach into my tiny leather purse. I pull out a small white square of paper and a pen. I take the square of paper out a bit too early because my aunt and my parents need to keep talking about how marvelous their trip has been. And what a wonderful time they had. And I sit there like a fool with a blank square of paper in front of me.“I'll order the Uber,” my father offers kindly. They stand up to leave at last.“One minute,” I say. I snag the pen and paper and head to the bathroom again. I stand at the round mirror beside the flickering Jasmin candle and the box of perfectly rolled-up hand towels. My hair is quite blonde in this light. Blonde enough. My makeup is still on my face. I'm not quite 30 years old. I still have some collagen, or so I hope. In the dim light of the sink, I scratch my pen across the tiny page. I write,Tash. +52 55 7435 8932.I fold the paper. I'm not sure how I am going to do this. I hesitate. Is this appropriate? Hitting on a man in his place of work? He's not consenting to this. Am I just objectifying him, using him as my mental plaything? I am, aren't I? Still, I've never been to Pujol before. I have no intention of ever coming back. This is my only chance.I leave the bathroom. My family is nowhere to be seen, already outside. My eyes scan the room. He's not at our table. I follow the light flow of people who are leaving and the waiters, who are standing by.Now he is standing right in front of me. He has just finished serving another table when he turns around.“Es para ti,” I say (It's for you), handing him the folded white paper.“Gracias,” he says again. His dark eyes are smiling.I skip out of the restaurant, giddy like a child, far too terrified to look back. I wiggle on the sidewalk as I wait with my family for the Uber. I have left my number with a couple of people before. But this time it feels daring.We get caught in the rain and traffic on the way home. I go for a wet, late-night walk with my aunt while chewing on the time. There was no wedding ring on his finger. But I begin to wonder. Maybe, like some of the more secretive Mexican men who have taken me to dinner, he has a secret girlfriend lurking in the shadows?I try to brush off those thoughts.I get home.I am brushing my teeth when my phone buzzes.It is a WhatsApp message from a number I haven't saved.“Hola Tash. It's Jorge. Como estas?”

Hello there, This week, you felt liberated. You twirled to cumbia music barefoot in the sodden muddied grass at the backdoor DJ set in San Cristobal de Las Casas. You looked up at the deep pink bougainvillea against the construction site that surrounded the garden. You saw the water tank on the roof of the building next door and the clouded night sky, and you said to yourself,“I don't have to answer to anyone. Moving to Mexico was the best decision I ever made. I am free. I am still young.”You returned to the city and called up all your girlfriends and invited them to go dancing. It is just passed your half birthday. You are inching closer to turning 30. You are still young, you try to tell yourself, so you must drink four different types of alcohol and dance in a club with a bunch of 24-year-old men on a Thursday night until 2 am to prove that you still have it in you. With each passing second, you'll never be as young again as you are right now. Perhaps it doesn't matter how old you are, you consider, as you notice your knee pain is acting up again on the dancefloor. The beats pound through your body. Perhaps all life is youth, or so says some cliched phrase.Last month, when walking around in Polanco, you stopped in Santa Clara. You drank chocolate milk, fresh from the refrigerator, at 5 pm in the afternoon. You are convinced this is the height of adulting.You can't deny it. Spilling your feelings about a man you had been in love with for a year has left you weightless. The heaviness of well-kept secrets and feelings is no longer wearing you down. There are familiar male faces resurfacing with new messages to you on your phone. Did they know? It's like the universe has shifted energetically and their spirits noticed the tiny space you've cleared for yourself. They immediately lurched in and grabbed an inch for each of themselves.You discover a dirty pair of your polka-dotted socks buried in the pillows of your couch. You left them there, as you tend to do when you come home and take off your shoes after work. No one was around to tell you to pick them up because they ruined the clean aesthetic of your typical home. Instead, your dirty socks had faded into the distance of your daily passings, until now. It always bothers you to find dirty items of clothing you forget to send to the wash. It is always something. You are never perfect.PromptShare with us:What was a recent moment of liberation for you? What makes you feel liberated? What makes you feel young?Do you like dancing? If so, when was the last time you danced and had fun? When is the next time you will dance? Mark a date, time, and place in your calendar for dancing, if you dare.Tell us about a treat you like to eat, when you should be saving room for dinner. What are your guilty pleasures?Is there a person in your life that makes you feel lighter and freer? Tell us about them.Are there certain activities you only do in the privacy of your own home that you never tell anyone about?Paid subscribers are invited to overshare in the comments

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A few weeks ago, I had a fantastic conversation with Dr. Amy Divaraniya, CEO of Oova, a hormonal health testing company. We talked all about how very few women have regular 28-day cycles (only 13%, and maybe even closer to 5% according to Oova's latest data!) and what that means for those who are trying to conceive or who are hitting perimenopause.⁠⁠I love a good #femtech story where a woman brings a product to market to solve her own health issue. Congratulations to Dr. Amy for raising a whopping $ 10.3 million for their Series A. That's big money in femtech! ⁠Here's to taking our health into our hands, and I hope you enjoy the story! Listeners of Misseducated get 10% off Oova. Go to https://oova.life/misseducated and apply the promo code MISSOOVA10 when you checkout.Episode Transcript I apologize in advance for typos or misattribution of words. We'll gladly make any corrective updates that you identify. [Intro] [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] They say that if you have PCOS or irregular cycles, our data may not be reliable for you. And I was like, well, that's great because we know that 87 percent of women don't have a 28-day cycle. So, who are you trying to solve this problem for?[Tash Doherty] Hello everyone. And welcome back to Misseducated with me, your host, Tash Doherty. And today my guest is Dr. Amy Diverania, the founder and CEO of Oova. A personalized at-home test to help females understand their unique hormone profile. There's been a lot of talk of hormonal health in Femtech over the last couple of years, and Oova is leading the way in measuring LH, estrogen, and progesterone, three key hormones in the menstrual cycle.In 2023, Dr. Amy and her team raised a whopping $ 10.3 million Series A, which is big money in Femtech, so we're super excited to dive into all things hormonal health. So, Dr. Amy, welcome to Miseducated. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you today. You got your PhD from the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai in Genetics and Genomic Sciences.So what inspired you to get your PhD, and what did you discover in your thesis and your research?  [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Before I did my Ph.D., I was actually working in the industry as a data scientist, and I've been really fortunate in my career to be surrounded by folks who are smarter than me and amazing mentors. I've never really disliked a boss; they've always pushed me.To be better and move forward. My director actually took me out to lunch one day and was like, Amy, he was so mad. Right. It's really weird to see your manager mad. And it's not directed towards you, but he's like, I want to give you a promotion, but I can't because you either need a PhD or ten years of experience.And at that point, I only had five years. So he was like, leave here. Go get your Ph.D., and then wherever you go, I'm coming, and I was like, all right, fine. Like, I'll invest in myself. Like, don't invest the time here invested in you and go and get your Ph.D., so I did, and I was really particular about where I wanted to go.Who I wanted to work with. I was kind of a groupie of my 2 Ph.D. advisors, who were at the time also leaders in the genomic space, very visionary, and I was always that person in the audience listening to the same talk over and over again, just inspired beyond belief. I wanted them to be my mentors, and they both accepted me.I got into the school. They agreed on my Ph.D. dissertation topic. We kind of hit the ground running from there. And believe it or not, my director that had advised me to do this actually came in as an investor in the company, too. So he did follow me, which is really exciting. But my Ph.D. work had nothing to do with what we're doing today.It was really looking at genetic networks and figuring out why women or not women, why people were developing certain diseases in the inflammatory. Like, why were you getting lupus over cardiovascular disease when they're so related? What's that trigger that says you're going to get this disease versus another?And we were able to actually model out various genetic networks by looking at different tissues and health records to validate everything, which is really cool. I had beautiful pictures throughout my dissertation. [Tash Doherty] Wow. So, you planned to go back to your industry job when you finished your PhD? [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Well, yes and no, I wanted to go back to work. I wasn't really in this, like, I need to start my own company mentality at all, but I didn't really want to go back to big pharma because I felt like. Those companies are so big, and you have all these great ideas; you often get lost, and it takes so long for innovation to come to real life. At that point, it's not even innovative anymore.My plan was either to go into a biotech or startup and my PhD advisors were really well connected there. So they were like, what kind of company do you want to go into? And at that point, I was going through infertility myself. And I was experiencing the gaps in women's health and not understanding what my body was doing.And so what I unintentionally did was pitch Oova. I basically said, do you know any company that is monitoring hormones, helping women navigate various phases of life, and doing it in a nonblood form? And they both looked at me and were like, no, you need to build that. And I was like, okay, sure.They're like, I have an investor coming tomorrow, get a pitch deck together, and I'll put you in front of them. I was like, all right, fine. I happily walked back to my desk, Google, like a good student. What is a pitch deck? And I put together an 87-page deck to put in front of this investor. [Tash Doherty] 87-pages. That's quite extensive.I mean, I had just written a dissertation that was hundreds of pages long. So, 87 pages felt like nothing. He was very kind and tore that deck apart with so much grace and was like, you only need these seven slides, Amy. And I was like, Oh, okay. And that's really where it started. Wow. Well, I love the idea of having so many mentors that you can learn from, and he will just give you the honest truth.Like nobody needs that many pages. This is Silicon Valley. Like people do not have time to sit through hours and hours of research. So that's really amazing.[Tash Doherty] And so when you talk about your own experience with infertility, because you were trying to conceive like with your partner and was it like a question of like, Do you know anything about, you know, your unexplained infertility? Was it when you were cycling, or did you have PCOS or some other kind of like other condition that was affecting whether or not you could conceive? [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Yeah. So, I've always had irregular cycles since my first period. It's always been a regular, and I've kind of tried everything like I was misdiagnosed with PCOS for multiple years.I was put on the hormone birth control, all of that to find out finally with like a sane OB that, okay, having an irregular period is just normal for you. So I kind of accepted that, and I let it go, but when it was time to start trying to conceive, I was doing everything right. I was using my fertility tracking apps.I was peeing on sticks. I was tracking every symptom like I was a data scientist by training. So like, give me data, and I will find that golden nugget. But there was no pattern to be found in this data. All I was learning was that I'm irregular, and it's so frustrating because my train ride to work every day was literally dissecting all my data.That's what I would do. Like, no one can sit on the seat. I have my stuff spread out. Like, this is my time to really dig in, and I couldn't find anything. The most frustrating part was when you were looking at the fine print of all these products. They say that if you have P. C. O. S. or irregular cycles, our data may not be reliable for you.And I was like, well, that's great because we know that 87 percent of women don't have a 28-day cycle. So, who are you trying to solve this problem for? And that's really where the light bulb started coming up. I don't know if I'm ovulating or not. I can't not be ovulating in the 18 months it took me to conceive.I have to be ovulating much more frequently than I am. And I just didn't have those answers. The breaking point for me was more so sitting on my bathroom floor. After getting another pregnancy test, it was four in the morning. I was bawling and crying, and I had my dad's magnifying glass in my hand, trying to find a double line on a pregnancy test, and I couldn't find it.And I was like, my Ph.D. work is so innovative, and I'm doing such crazy things, yet I'm sitting here with a 60-year-old magnifying glass, trying to figure out if I'm pregnant or not. It just didn't feel like real life. And there was such a broken piece of the puzzle that I wanted to fix. These are the kinds of stories that I love to feature on this podcast because it's amazing how we now have so many women in STEM, so many women, OBs, you know, women doing PhDs.There are nice, fancy things that we're all studying and researching. And yet, there's our lived experience of going to the doctor and trying to understand their own bodies. And we're so behind still on that. [Tash Doherty] I always get really excited and inspired when I'm like, okay, here's a person who is like STEM, literate, educated, and like enfranchised basically.Like when you have a Ph.D., or you're assigned as like, you can do all these things and study these things. So that's really great that, you know, unfortunately, you have to take one for the team and put your own body on the line for the greater good. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] You bring up a really good point. Yes, there are a lot of women in STEM and making moves here, but it wasn't until I started this company that I actually felt like the only woman in a room.And I don't know if I was just oblivious to it, or I don't know what it was. Still, I didn't feel like I was actually treated like a woman until I started this company in an environment like a group setting; I felt like I was always treated like a person. And now I'm feeling like, oh my God, like I, everyone is looking at me like I am the only woman in a room because I am defending a woman's health issue for a woman's health company being run by women.[Tash Doherty] Yeah, it's crazy. I've had, um, Anna Lee as well from Lioness on the podcast, and she talks about like pitching sex toys to all male investor panels in Silicon Valley, and I'm like, oh wow, really respect for that girl. Yeah, to be a fly in the wall, right? Wow, and so did you end up discovering, you know, through your data and all your research, like, were you ovulating, or also it randomly, like, through your cycle?[Dr. Amy Divaraniya] So, no, I was ovulating every cycle, but the issue for me was that my luteinizing hormone search was just on the lower end. So when you look at these over-the-counter tests that are available, they're all threshold-based. So my LH just wasn't reaching their threshold. So, I was getting false negatives every month.So, literally, I was missing my window because the test wasn't reading it. [Tash Doherty] That's crazy. Yeah. I've also interviewed Dr. Amy from Proov, and I would love to get into a little bit of Proov as well because it's kind of a similar market. Still, parts of Oova's applications, but yeah, she was just talking again about how, like, even with COVID vaccines, it's like, they were only testing it on female bodies that were, like, not cycling.This is, again, of course, you're going to have outside effects on people who are cycling, which is the vast majority of people. Still, it's just like a really, a really difficult thing where I think, obviously, because so much of this medical history is like very patriarchal and like driven by men, it's like the added level of cycles is just too complicated, or women were assumed to be like too unintelligent, or we didn't have enough education to be able to figure out our cycles on our own.So it's kind of just this, You know, clusterfuck medical issues. And I think that's why it's really starting to unravel now. And we have a chance of getting really great gains in this generation of women and beyond, which is awesome. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Yeah, no, you bring up a great point. There are definitely those two aspects that you highlighted that women just aren't accepted to be able to handle this data and understand what's going on. But then you go to the other end of the spectrum, right? When your cycle stops. In science, there are very few things that you can say affect 100 percent of a population. Menopause is one. If a woman is to live to a certain age, 100 percent of those women will go through menopause. Yet we know nothing about it.It is a mystery. I don't understand that. Like, why do we not understand this transition that is inevitable and are able to guide women through that? I understand everyone's different and everyone's going to have different symptoms, but the fact that no one has, there's no holy grail. Like, if I experienced this, it could be X, Y, or Z. There's none of that. And after generations of women going through this. We still don't have any sort of answers there. I think it's completely a disservice to women. Totally. I think perimenopause is a huge area that we need a lot more advancements in.[Tash Doherty] And I think that's a great segue actually to some of the product questions that I was going to ask you about, and maybe we could give an example of a perimenopause user with Oova so far. So I think it's like digital urine tests; if I'm right, it's like the same test over and over again. So yeah, tell us a bit about the product and like how a woman who's experiencing perimenopause might want to use it.[Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Sure. So I'll explain the product a little bit so people understand what it looks like. I can show it to you, but, um, I can describe it for your listeners. It's a urine-based test, so every kit comes with 30 strips. There are 15 strips to measure luteinizing hormone and progesterone and 15 that measure estrogen.Each one of our cartridges has a QR code on it, so we know exactly what tests are measuring. You don't need to worry about, like, am I using LH or estrogen? Am I misrepresenting it? We work, we take care of all of it. But you basically provide a urine sample, and then you scan it with your phone. Very similar to how you would do a mobile deposit, right?You're not entering data in. We get the data directly from the test strip, and then we interpret it all for you and let you know exactly what your hormone levels are every day that you use a test. Now, for perimenopause, we expect you to use it for 15 consecutive days. So we can really understand what your hormone profile looks like.Oova's forte is not on a single time point measurement. We really value looking at the trend of your hormone over time. Because we're not robots. We don't stay stagnant. We have fluctuation. And you need to understand what that fluctuation is for every woman to really guide her. So what we're looking for on the perimenopause side is 1; how are the symptoms that you're experiencing relating to the hormone levels that you're having?Is there a hormonal imbalance there? Can we help navigate you by giving you lifestyle recommendations to alleviate those symptoms or not? And really, are you in perimenopause or not? We have so many women who are using our perimenopause kit right now, thinking they are. But when you look at the data, they're still cycling.It's just Irregular. And yeah, you could say that's a sign for perimenopause, but does that mean I've been in perimenopause for 20 years? No, it's just my norm. Right? So we're really trying to help navigate women through this transition because the biggest issue is that it's so unknown. And we just don't know what's going on.[Tash Doherty] Yeah. So they're basically maybe experiencing some symptoms, but then they're still cycling, but basically the, I don't know, the hormones are winding down or they're irregular. And so, yeah, that's just helping them to measure that. And so is that also something that you really focus on is not having a threshold for these different types of hormones, just saying like, this is your level.That doesn't mean you're over and above or below whatever; this is personalized to you as a kind of hormone package, in a way. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] That's exactly it. So, we don't have a threshold on our test at all. You're getting an actual level of all your hormones every day. We really focus on understanding every woman's unique hormone baseline.So I get this question all the time. I understand these are my levels, but what's normal? And my answer is always, well, whatever is normal for you, like that 20-day cycle, which is not normal. We're not striving for that anymore. We're not 19, 18, 20, trying to get pregnant anymore. If that was great from the previous generation for us, now we're in our late 20s and early 30s, trying to get pregnant, and we're not following a 28-day cycle.For the most part. So, how do we really embrace your uniqueness and understand what's happening in your body? So our answer is always like, it may be normal for you. Let's look at your historical data. And then we help women educate themselves on what their body is actually saying. Yeah, and I think that's just so powerful, like, because there's so much, as you've talked about in your experience, like even my experience getting birth control, whatever, and like having painful periods, there's so much shame that is built into like, what is the normal female body doing?[Tash Doherty] And I just love that, you know, with personalized products like yours, you can just understand and be kind of proud and be like, yeah, I'm irregular and like, this is what happens to me. And like, this is how I deal with it. Or, you know, and then have more personalized, you know, recommendations around like health or nutrition or whatever it is.Cause you guys have quite a holistic look at the fertility windows and things there. Um, yeah, so that's pretty, pretty crazy. Less shame, less guilt for being a female. Yeah, absolutely. And what I love as well about the product is that, like, you can just tell from the, from how it's made that, like, you don't even have to input any data.You just scan the QR code. Like, that's kind of cool. I don't know if you can go into the details, but I like how that actually works. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Yeah, sure. I'll be honest with you. We had the QR code way before COVID. So when we were thinking about the product learning curve, I was like, people are going to not know how to use the QR code. Well, thank you. COVID everything. Everyone knows what these things are now, and it's not a learning curve anymore, but we basically print a QR code on every cartridge. And we know it's embedded with a lot of data. It's not just there for. Positioning. It actually has data in it that we use internally to help interpret your results.The test strip that's inside of that cartridge, it's designed to quantitatively measure your hormones. So, the intensities of the lines actually vary based on how much hormone is present in your sample. But I don't want a woman interpreting that by eye. So when she scans her test strip, not only do we understand what hormones she's testing, plus all of the backend information that we need.But we're able to use our AI and image processing to really fine tune and get to two levels, two decimal places of accuracy in our hormone levels on a daily basis. So there's a lot of going on in that test strip. It's not just meant for you to visually interpret it. Wow. Yeah, that's kind of exactly what we need, though, is that there's the variations of levels, obviously the different types of hormones, but yeah, just having that level of accuracy is super important.[Tash Doherty] And I mean, I'm also. I've studied a lot of statistics around birth control and stuff. And it's just like, if you're using something over a long period of time, it's like, we just want to remove human error and also make the user experience easier. That's super awesome. And maybe you can then tell us a little bit about the other daily action plan or like tips and recommendations that you include in the app experience. So, for nutritional, emotional, and physical health. Like what does that look like when you're in Oova? [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Yeah. When you're going through any of these transitions, whether it's trying to get pregnant or going through debating if you're in perimenopause or not, you're already stressed out, right? Like there's some level of stress that is pushing you to buy this product to get some answers. So we're not trying to layer on more work for you or add more to your checklist of things to do every day. But what we are trying to do is, as we're seeing your hormone patterns and understanding what's going on with your body, there are some lifestyle changes that you can implement to reduce some of the discomfort that you're experiencing. So we will try to give it to you in bite-sized pieces. For example, let's look at PCOS, which is a very common and one of the most common diagnoses that we have in our platform. If you notice that you are showing signs of PCOS because your hormones look a little unbalanced.We're going to start implementing physical activity that is very lightweight. So giving you tips like, let's go for a 10-minute walk after a meal today, right? Or let's stand after eating our meal today for 5 minutes before we become sedentary because you want your insulin to be working; you need it to be like digesting your food properly.So we start giving you these little habits. That will actually have a long-term impact rather than, say, you need to exercise after every meal. That's not going to happen. So we're really just trying to embrace healthy living and long-term healthy living. Right. [Tash Doherty] And do you see any other use cases for Oova, apart from trying to conceive and perimenopause in the future? We can go more into the future unless it can translate in the conversation to more like the business model stuff as well. So, yeah, what are you thinking for more use cases? [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] So women aren't just like baby-making machines, right? Like our bodies are designed to have babies. Yes, but we go through so many transitions from our first period to the last, and it's all driven by hormones. So yes, Oova started with fertility. Yes, we moved into perimenopause, but we're really trying to scale across all the different sectors of a woman's life.Using the hormones that we have plus additional ones that we're thinking of adding as well. My goal as a company is to ensure that we're providing women and people in general just all the information they need so they can navigate every transition with information and not Google articles. Right. I want to be able to empower a woman to advocate for her own health and have that two-way conversation with her doctor, which kind of moves into our business model, but that's kind of the long-term plan of Oova, helping women navigate through every phase of life. [Tash Doherty] Totally. And we want more data, and we need more data in order to do that. So yeah, part of your business model, in addition to the kits and stuff that you have, is a membership. So, I didn't look too much into this, but I would love to know what the membership consists of. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Yeah. So it's kind of funny. What we ended up doing was we just had our one-time order and a subscription model for the longest time. And we always offered these free consults with our team. If you ever have any questions, feel free to reach out. It was always a console with either our support team or me, but it was a face-to-face Zoom call. Um, and the questions that we got were pretty similar. Can you just talk me through my data?Like, I understand everything that's happened, but I just need someone to verbalize it for me. So I was like, this is we're onto something because people are using this. Let's embed that into the product because it is so useful and it's such a distinguishing aspect of what we can offer. Since we have actual data, not just a bunch of yeses and nays or smiley faces like we have actual numbers to talk about.So, with our membership model, what we did was we embedded these consultations that are available to all of our members monthly. We also have events that are. Secure for our members to be able to talk to clinicians in our network about their own data. It's a really safe forum. So, of course, we're always HIPAA compliant, but oftentimes, you don't want to go to your regular doctor to ask certain questions.So, we offer these events where a patient can log in with one of our providers, and the provider can view their data once a patient gives them access and answer any specific questions they want. We also have office hours with these clinicians. So, if they want to talk to them one-on-one, don't feel comfortable in a group setting.That's always available too. It's so clear that women are hungry for this information, and they're just not able to get it elsewhere. So if we're able to provide that trusted circle for them, it's an honor to be able to do that. [Tash Doherty] Totally. And super cool. And so through your experience, like building the product, like scaling, um, exploring all these different use cases, uh, what are some interesting features or insights that surprised you as you were going through the process?[Dr. Amy Divaraniya]  Are you talking about building or just like after the product kind of got out there?[Tash Doherty] Um, let's do building and then one example of, like, an insight from users as well. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Okay, so building, I think, it was an assumption for me. So, like, my husband always makes fun of me when I'm like, I think we want to add this feature in here like, how do you know people want this?I'm like, well, I want it. And I'm assuming 10 other women want it. So I'm going to go with it. And so far, it's been right. So, one thing that I had a hunch about was. People are going to want to compare their data to normal, whatever is normal. So, we added this feature in our report where you can overlay a typical 28-day cycle on top of your own.But then all the messaging that's associated with that is that it's okay. You're different from this, but this is why, and it's okay, right? So, really trying to embrace the fact that you're not normal. You're normal for you. And I was floored by how many women appreciated that because they felt like they were spiraling and not knowing what was wrong.Yeah, and there's so many, like, undiagnosed people, even yourself, being misdiagnosed, and it's just like, without any understanding. I mean, the baselines are helpful. Um, but I think it's also the fact that we're not treating women, especially in the ways that you provide people with recommendations and stuff for their health.[Tash Doherty] It's like, you're not treating them as, you know, different or like, You're just saying this is, you're actually personalizing the experience more. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya]  Yeah, but it is a fine balance. [Tash Doherty] And then what was something that surprised you about either the data or something else that was interesting?[Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Well, I'll share two things. So one is we're so heavy on the data side and being sure that we're clear on research and backing all of our claims with doing the studies that we need to, um, there was a study that came out a couple of years ago saying that only 13 percent of women have a 28-day cycle. And I was like, let's, let's test that out.How many women on our platform actually have a 28-day cycle? We found it was 5%. [Tash Doherty] Oh my gosh. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] And yet, everything is designed for a 28-day cycle. [Tash Doherty] Yeah. Well, it's also probably because, like, my grandmother, she's, like, 86, but she took part in the first nurses' health study, which was, again, only tested on, like, white women who were nurses in the 50s and 60s.So, you know, whatever data set they were working with is probably, like, 100 years old, and was only testing, like, women in Indiana who were white Christian churchgoers or something under the age of 30, like. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Yeah. So it's, it was amazing as we published that last year, and that's gotten a lot of traction, but then the, so I'm like, glad that we're starting to like myth bust some of the assumptions that we have about women's health and we're doing it with data.But the 2nd thing that really surprised me, I know women want this information. I didn't know how badly. So when we launched our perimenopause product or our 3 hormone tests, I should say, in December of last year, we obviously had projections. We were prepared for whatever we wanted. We sold out of 15 weeks of inventory in 2 weeks.[Tash Doherty] Oh, my God. That's crazy. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya]  And I was just like, what do we do now? Like this is a great problem, but it's not like it just really opened up my eyes to how badly women want this. Yeah. And we're solving a true need here. Yeah. I'm excited. There are other players that are really starting to navigate this.[Tash Doherty] I've had a lot of other friends on here as well. Kristina from Kegg Tech is one of my best friends, um, in the fertility tracking space, and the same thing. It's like HSA approved suddenly, you know, all the stocks are gone, and you've got to order. But they have physical devices. So it's like, you have to have a six-month delay or something. And it's incredibly difficult. So, yeah, it's, uh, I'm, I'm glad it's like people, it's more accessible and yeah, better ramp up production because now that we, as Cindy Gallop also says, there's a lot of money that you can make from like believing women. So, as soon as you make a product that people are willing to use, it's incredible in that sense. And so, in June of 2023, you raised 10. 3 million to Series A. Congratulations. That is huge. So, what was your fundraising journey like? [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] It was very interesting. Like I told you earlier, I've never felt like the only woman in a room. The first time, I felt that wasn't always fundraising, not specifically in this round, but just in general. I mean, the world is very different today than it was a year ago than it was a year before that. So it was a very unique experience of fundraising like the markets are crashing and whatnot. But what I had done.I'm a big believer because I'm a first-time founder. Let's caveat everything with that. So I don't have a network of investors to tap into, Hey, guys, I have this new effort. Believe in me, put money in. Like, I don't have that. So, um, what I've always been really adamant about is.Build a relationship with these people before you ask for money because. You never know. And what people are innately always willing to do is offer help and advice. If you're open to it. So I've always done that. So, when I closed my seed round, I actually started talking to Series A investors right away. The next day, I didn't even give myself a moment to celebrate that I closed my seed.[Tash Doherty] I feel like you at least have a moment to celebrate, like just an inch. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] It was just, it was more of a breath of fresh air. It's like, all right, now what's next? Right. Um, but in that year and a half between our seed or whatever the time limit amount was, I spent so much time speaking with Series A investors and building relationships. So when it came time for our A. We were preempted, and then people jumped on very quickly, so it still took us time to close. But I had already built that trust with a lot of investors where we were able to bring in some amazing funds, and I'm just really proud of what we were able to build. Such a like, truncated amount of time.[Tash Doherty] Yeah, that's huge. And also, it seems like you're quite well connected because you're, like, living in New York, right? [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] The company's based in New York. I live in Connecticut, which is about 30 minutes north of New York City. But I think it's not so much about where you are physically. It's more so about being open to feedback, questions, and help. Because I've always been able to accept that. And I'm always hungry for it. And I feel like you can only grow when you surround yourself with folks that are smarter than you and more established and know things that you just haven't experienced before. Um, and I think that's really attractive to some of these people that just genuinely want to help founders. [Tash Doherty] Yeah, totally. That's actually something that I wrote down in my own journals recently. I'm doing all my own social media and platform building as an author as well. I had watched a talk about self publishing like over a year ago and then forgot about it. I didn't implement any action items from the talk. And then obviously the woman, I watched it again last week, and then she's like, yeah, you gotta go with like Ingram Spark. And I had gone with a different self-publishing platform, so I was like, oh man, if I had just actually taken these people's advice, you know, and again, it's a tricky balance because you wanna, you know, you have your own view of the product, right?Like you have the features that you wanna build that you think, uh, the user's gonna need. But then, when it comes to stuff that you have no idea about, or I'm seeing myself when I don't know something. That's exactly what I need: just take the best advice that I can and then keep going with my own vision and my own thing that I'm working on.Yeah, it's definitely an art, right? Like the advice is always out there. [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] And the thing that I've also learned is that people have so many ideas. It's all about the execution. So when you take a piece of advice, it is an idea. Now you have to go and execute on it, which is the hard part. So, if you do your diligence on all the ideas and advice that you're getting, you'll have a solid path forward.But if you're closed off to that great resource, you're only going to be moving forward with what you think is best. And that may not be necessarily the most important choice. [Tash Doherty] Right, exactly that. And also, I'm somebody who's struggled to ask for help for various reasons, you know, depending on your upbringing and how you've managed to survive as a woman in the world thus far. I mean, being a trailblazer and doing your own thing as much as possible. It's like sometimes you're trained not to ask for help. So that's a good skill we can all implement in 2024. Yes, let's finish with a couple of more personal questions as we're wrapping up today. Um, if you were going to do a PhD again today, what would you do it in?[Dr. Amy Divaraniya] I would probably do something in education but tailor it a little bit. Um, if I could start another company, it would be focused on redefining what sexual wellness means when you're learning about sex and sex ed. Like I want to redefine that entire program across the world. We should not be teaching girls that their period is something to be ashamed of.They need to understand what the biology of this is and why you're having a period. It is not true that if you have sex, you're going to get pregnant. That is absolutely not the case. And I'm living proof of that. What we do need to understand is why you have a cycle, that there are certain days that you can get pregnant, and what that means.Yes. Like you, you can make the argument that when the kid's minds aren't developed yet, they won't understand those nuances. That is feeding into that entire scope of women not needing or being able to handle data about their bodies. It's just not true. I gave my nine-month-old a phone, an iPhone. He grabbed my phone.He knew how to swipe. Yeah. Like, they know way more and are much more capable of handling information and knowledge than we give everyone credit for. And I'd want to redo what the entire program looks like. [Tash Doherty] Yeah, and I think an aspect of that is that, like, you know, it's kind of like when you're in that awkward puberty phase where you're like, am I going to sit at the adult's table or the kid's table at Thanksgiving?Um, but the reality is that we treat young girls, you know, like children; they're already fertile and have been cycling since I was like 11 when I got my period. So, I probably should feel equipped, empowered, and enfranchised with the data that I can understand about my body.So yeah, it's a very, it's a very strange, again I think that's like a patriarchal thing where it's like the infantilization of women, um, because that's what, you know, in our society people have historically found attractive. So changing that sounds like a great thing to do. And what are some other areas of research or women's health questions that you think people who are interested in STEM should be answering or trying to answer?[Dr. Amy Divaraniya] I would hope that anyone that's addressing any women's health issue is looking at objective data. I think a lot of the, like, conclusions that have been made or assumptions that have been made about women's health are based off of subjective things. Like, if you look at period tracking apps, it's all subjective data.We're one of the first actually to bring objectivity to those symptoms. I mean, I have years of data and all these apps, but if I look at it, there really aren't many patterns there that I can draw conclusions from. Now, when I look at my three years of data, that's powerful. Cause I'm seeing what the hormone trends were.I'm seeing the days that I was super stressed and that my cycle was completely off. And there are explanations that I can draw from looking at actual objective data. So, there are so many areas that are exciting right now. Like, I think menopause is having its moment finally, like, man, I guess women have started going through menopause, right?It's finally having its moment. There are companies that are looking at the microbiome, the vaginal microbiome. I think that's fantastic too. Like, let's understand what cervical mucus is and really get to the bottom of why you're having that and other issues there; Priyanka Jain (at Evvy) is wonderful. Like, I love the way that they're approaching the vaginal microbiome, they're really normalizing this as a body part, and it's not something to be ashamed of, like. There's a purpose to having a vagina, and we shouldn't be shy about that. Um, so I'm really excited about some of the innovation that's happening and the way the conversation is shifting.[Tash Doherty] Yes, exactly. And if you had any career advice for women interested in STEM and startups today, what would you tell them? [Dr. Amy Divaraniya] The number one thing that has helped me get to where I am today is always asking questions. And I think when you do a Ph.D., you're kind of trained to ask questions, but I was doing it before I even did a Ph.D. because the more questions that you ask, the more doors that are open.So if I'm talking to an investor about something, and I know this person isn't going to invest in us. We're not in there like round size or whatever, but they're going to know at least five other people that would be good fits for me. And that's how you build your network. And that's how you grow because you're going to have five more conversations that have so many more legs.And I've always been open to that across every aspect of my life. And it's never hurt me. It's only kind of paying it forward in a way by always having a network to tap into. [Tash Doherty] Well, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Great advice all around. And, uh, speaking of these kinds of questions, what do you wish that I had asked you, or what should I have asked you in this interview?[Dr. Amy Divaraniya] You asked really good questions. But I think the one thing would be, what is a big gap that I'm seeing in this space? Right now. Yeah. I think we asked what areas we could; it was exciting, but we didn't really see what the big oversight was. I think there are a lot of players in the fem tech or women's health side, but people enrolled, like going off to the same investors, we're all like trying to show growth and things like that.But I would hope that, especially when you're a female founder, that's like the companies that are really in the space, like all the female-founded ones, you know how you would want to get marketed to. And what information you would need to make, like, to be convinced to make this purchase. I would hope that companies just stay true to that and not do false advertising or bend the truth. Like, let's be honest and clear with our potential customers about what we're actually putting out there because I think we're just creating more noise and hurting our community so much by playing the marketing game. This should not be a marketing game. It should be providing value to a community that is desperately in need of it.[Tash Doherty]  Yeah, totally. I mean, that's if they can get their ads published at all, you know, with the Facebook and Instagram ads, you know, like the banana penis can go on the subway in New York. But, uh, and then, I think her name is Alex, but anyway, yeah, the Dame had this huge thing about that as well.Amazing and fascinating. Such a bummer because then you can't, even even if you raise a million dollars, it's like, well, if you can't advertise like you don't get any of that growth,[Dr. Amy Divaraniya] But we're still held to the same metrics that men are, right? [Tash Doherty]  So anyway, Dr. Amy, this has been an incredible conversation. I am so grateful that you could come and chat with us today, and yeah, best of luck with Oova and all of the great things in store for 2024.[Dr. Amy Divaraniya] Thank you so much. It's wonderful to speak with you. [Outro] [Tash Doherty] Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Miseducated. If you'd like a special discount on Oova, I'm super excited to be able to share this promo code with you. You can go to Oova dot life slash miseducated, which is It's O O V A dot L I F E slash M I S S E D U C A T E D. And the discount code is, all caps, MissOova10, which is M I S S O O V A 1 0. Lots of love, everyone. Stay safe out there, and I hope that you'll join us for another episode of Miseducated again soon.Bye! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit misseducated.substack.com/subscribe

How To Not Lose Yourself In A Relationship - By Tash Doherty“Look into his angeleyes, one look and you're hypnotized.” – ABBAIntroductionI've been doing the “dating” thing recently, and a subtle but terrifying thing keeps happening. When I'm seeing a guy I like, I start reorienting my life around him in tiny ways. I leave my late evenings open in case he wants to message me. I only make tentative plans with my friends because he might ask me out. Soon, I find myself sleeping over at his house in the middle of the week, leaving sleep-deprived and with a poor performance at work the next day. This seems harmless at first, but soon it snowballs. Within a couple of weeks, I've become a clingy, needy mess, a shell of my former independent self. And unsurprisingly, the relationship doesn't work out because of this.Strangely, when I have just myself to contend with, one could say that I'm a “responsible adult” (big words). I exercise regularly. I live in a cute, clean apartment where I feel safe. I put food on my table. But things have changed since I've decided I want to have children and am now looking for a more serious, long-term partner. Once I start dating someone, my entire life routine goes out the window.It's a painful and annoying trap to fall into again and again. So, in this piece, I explore what this is and share everything I've learned on how to avoid it. I hope that by reading this you can somehow sidestep this shitstorm altogether.Why does this happen?On one extreme, I sound lonely and desperate for this guy to fall in love with me. This is partly cultural. In our culture, we are obsessed with love, fairytales, and happily-ever-after. This leaves women totally screwed. Even though I'm a feminist, I was raised on a diet of Disney princess movies like Snow White and Cinderella. At some level, I've probably internalized the toxic narrative that I've been bombarded with since my childhood: men rescue women.On the other extreme, we have modern feminist ideals where women are throwing the idea of babies out with the bathwater. It's projected that 1 in 4 young women today wish to remain childless, and almost 40% of young single people are not interested in dating. This is great for them because, as Cindy Gallop says:  “The moment you decide you don't want to be in love, that just takes a whole layer of crap out of your life.”Life for single, childless people is simpler and easier, and they're probably happier for it. But some of us want to have kids someday. Some of us are dating to find the father of our future offspring. We can bang on the drum of being an independent career woman all day. That is, until our life goals suddenly suggest a man's presence might be helpful. So we let the guy sleep over at our house, even if we have a lot of important s**t to do the next day, because we want him to like us. Ultimately, it's like Cindy Gallop said,“[As women, we] are taught to undervalue ourselves from the moment we are born.”How can we get out of this? How can we learn to value ourselves, our routines, and our lives? Not just as some feminist theory, but in practice? Here is my non-exhaustive list of tips.Please comment or reach out to me if you have additional ideas.Tips* Remember that it's your hormones. This guy does not have a magic dick.Besides culture, biology is not helping us either. The physical desire I regularly feel to want to get pregnant is intense. Especially around the time of my period, I can feel myself trying to finagle ways to keep this man around for at least another week or two before I ovulate. I'm not even kidding.The solution here is to remember that any one guy, whoever he is, does not have a magic dick. If you can pause for a moment and hold onto your horses, you'll remember that you are still young and fertile enough, and you probably live in a major metropolitan city where you could go on dates every night if you wanted to. You can meet someone else. This is not your only chance ever to f**k. This man is probably not exceptional. Your hormones are fashioning this fake mirage to get you to attach to him.Here's what my grandmother had to say about this:“It's part of a woman's base of understanding that you have this romantic streak. Because that's what gets you pregnant, and it keeps the race going.”So, before you deprive yourself of a good night's sleep for an average dude, remember that this is Mother Nature trying to f**k with you. She's trying to get you to reproduce. You can take a deep breath and pat yourself on the back before you cancel your entire day tomorrow. This man is not in love with you. This is just a spark set alight by your hormones. Hormones that have been designed to hook you, just like they've hooked every single one of your ancestors over the last billion years.You must resist Mother Nature at all costs or perish.* Do A Reality CheckIt can be fun to fantasize about our partners and our future lives together. But as we're drawn out of our reality, eventually it will hurt a lot when we come back to Earth. As my grandmother said:“It's part of our nature to have this fantasy. You assume that the other party is going along with it, but they aren't.”For my entire relationship with Luís, I fantasized about him whisking me away to his family's second home in Valle de Bravo (the Mexican equivalent of the Hamptons). Instead, he smoked too much weed and couldn't plan more than lunch one day in advance. Another boyfriend I had spoke multiple languages and taught kids how to code. It took me months to realize he was not the future Amal Clooney on international peace-keeping missions. Instead, he was a software engineer with no idea what he wanted to do with his life.So, let's run a reality check on the person you are dating right now. Next time you have a moment away from your partner, ask yourself:* Am I excited about dating this person as they are right now?* What are they doing with their life right now? This is who they are.* Am I happy with how they treat me and are they meeting my needs right now? (very important question)This is hard. It means paying attention to the red flags. If this person has red flags, like a substance abuse issue of any kind, it means that no matter how you might feel about them, they're probably not a healthy person for you to be with. Whoever this person is right now, that is who you are dating, not some idealized version of them.* Stick To Your Routine“You have a life. You have other priorities, some of which come before him.” – Sherry ArgovWhen I'm dating a guy, being with him feels more fun and exciting than anything I do alone. But in her book, “Why Men Love B*****s”, Sherry Argov warns us not to get swept up in this. Her book is a relationship guide for women who are “too nice”, where “b*****s” is more about her humorous tone than about men liking women who are cruel or mean.Here is her advice for when you're starting a relationship:* “Don't stop eating, sleeping, or exercising.”* “If he wants to spend more time with you than you can comfortably do, invite him to join you in one of your activities.”* “Force yourself to keep the routine you had before you met him. Once you lose your rhythm, you lose your psychological equilibrium, and you become needy.”As much as possible, we must try to remember who we were before we met our partners.  So, take a look at your calendar when you were last single. Do you have music, dance, or craft lessons scheduled in there? Do you have a favorite exercise class or friend activity that you do every week? Do you like to spend quality time with your dog, or at museums? These are the things that you like. They make you happy.Even when we are in a relationship, we must keep doing these things.  * Have Some Self-Respect“The nice girl treats her interests as “little things” or secondary. The b***h doesn't treat her interests as minor or little things. They are her things.” – Sherry Argov“People value you at the value you are seen to put in yourself.” – Cindy GallopThis is a tough pill for me to swallow. In my single life, I do whatever I want and have my own life that I'm excited about. And yet, when I'm dating, I have found myself shimmying across the city late at night in an Uber because a guy invited me over late to his house after he finished band practice with his friends. The guy did make time to see me…sometimes. But I was way more likely than him to drop everything and see him when, in hindsight, it was inconvenient for me. This is all because I thought I had to be a sacrificial lamb in order to make our relationship work.When we value ourselves more highly, people will value us that way, too. We're only as valuable to our companies as the salary or financial worth that we've negotiated for ourselves. We're only as respectable as what we say no to. Writing this piece is making it even more clear to me that female pleasure and the orgasm gap in heterosexual relationships is not the only aspect of our lives where we are subordinating ourselves in service of male contentment. We must learn to value our interests, priorities, and what we like in many aspects of our lives. And we should value them just as much, if not more, than the guy we are dating and what he likes.Instead, being a doormat makes us unhappy and does not make men like us or respect us more. If anything, when we're better at standing up for ourselves and prioritizing our health and sanity, the guy will respect us more for it. As Argov says,“Suppose a woman says to a guy she can't go on a date with him that night because of her weekly pottery class. He scratches his head and thinks, “She'd rather go to a pottery class than be with me?” It not only attracts him; it blows his mind.”Realizing this, I feel frustrated because I've been throwing myself under the bus and cancelling all my plans in each relationship for all this time. My only solace is that if the problem starts and ends with me, it's pretty clear who needs to change.* Set Boundaries, Even If It Feels Foreign And You Don't Want To“Power is the control you have over yourself.” – Sherry ArgovWhen it comes to seeing a guy, I can get very impulsive. “Love” feels fantastic. Why would I let “real life” get in the way when I'm forming an intense connection with someone so quickly? F**k it, I think to myself. Who cares about work? Being a responsible adult is boring! I want excitement, adventure, and fun.But when I talk about this with my therapist, she has another theory: I'm letting the feelings in my body take over without thinking logically about what I need. In my head, I know the importance of a decent night's sleep. But when my heart is all wrapped up in the attention I'm getting from my partner in the moment, I immediately neglect every other need I have. Sounds fucked up? That's because it is.To avoid this happening to you, when you're having some alone time and thinking clearly,  list all the things that you need in any given day. Then, follow that list as a set of your boundaries, and try to enforce them (even if you do not want to!) when you are with your partner.For example, on any given day, I need:* Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep* Three meals of relatively healthy food with no white bread* A shower with warm water and a clean towel in the morning* Time to work, meet with friends and follow my weekly scheduleIf you're like me and you struggle to know what you need, ask your close friends about it. They probably have some of your answers. Are you really into cleanliness, so you need your special shampoo and soap? Are you vegan, so you need to go to a restaurant with appropriate options? I recently ended things with Luís because he'd never message me in the evenings when I wanted to check in at the end of the day. Did I need him to message me? Kind of. It would have helped me to feel that he was interested in me and willing to put effort into our relationship.* Stay At The Center Of Your Own OrbitIn my last relationship, I spent many weekday nights hanging by my phone in desperate purgatory, waiting for this guy to text me. Then, I'd complain about it to my therapist later about how abandoned I felt by him.This week, after a month of torture, I had a breakthrough about this when I was journaling. This is what I discovered:“Just because you meet a guy, you are still you. That's what you need to realize. It's not that these men are abandoning you. It is that you are abandoning yourself. So keep a hold on who you are. If you need sex, have sex. If you need physical touch, have physical touch. But do not change the orbit of your world to fit this other person. Your world is amazing. The world you are building for yourself is amazing. If the man is the Earth, well, then you are the Sun.”Now I'm seeing that the work I need to do in a relationship starts way before the point where I feel abandoned by this guy. I need to go back to those tiny, seemingly insignificant ways that I am giving up myself and my time at the beginning of the relationship and stick to my priorities in my everyday life. This is how I will stop the cycle of abandoning myself.Conclusion: Keep Learning From Your Mistakes“Don't look too deep into those angeleyes” – ABBAFor complex reasons that could take up many Ph.D. theses, as women, we may be subordinating ourselves in unhealthy ways when we get into relationships with men. So, if you can put even one of the tips I've mentioned here into practice, that's something you can be proud of.Finally, remember to be kind to yourself. You are learning. If you skip work calls because you had a late one with your lover last night, forgive yourself. Be compassionate towards yourself because it can be excruciating to learn these things while you're dating someone and then the relationship doesn't work out for whatever reason.Because we have so few examples in our culture about what a healthy heterosexual partnership looks like, and because our hormones are so freaking persuasive, this is going to be hard. We're bound to keep making mistakes. But there is one thing we can try to do. As one of my favorite business leaders, Christina Wodtke puts it:"Make new mistakes."  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit misseducated.substack.com/subscribe

In this piece, I explore 10 Forms of Love, inspired by a conversation I had with my therapist. “You've got this very narrow definition of love,” my therapist told me yesterday over the antics of my latest disastrous relationship. “What about your friend who you went on a walk with this week? What about your sponsor, who always calls you back? These people are giving you their time. Time is our most precious resource because you can never get your time back. You shouldn't take them for granted.”

I have indeed hosted a naked party. So, here's what I've learned about how to host a fantastic naked party...* Spread the word to like-minded people.* Lead by example, i.e., Be naked. * Curate a safe yet exciting experience.Warm, Comfortable SpaceTechnology & PrivacyNo Hard AlcoholActivities & Ambiance* Consider a theme or designated phases of the evening.* Try to reach a critical mass of nudity, with female bodies first* Have a vetted guest list.Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit misseducated.substack.com/subscribe

Hello everyone, I'm super excited to share my interview with Dr. Kristin Neff, self-compassion expert, author, researcher, professor and TedX Speaker. Check out her website and workshops at the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion: https://self-compassion.org/Link to Dr. Neff's TedX Talk (one of my personal favorites!)Link to her latest book, Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power And ThriveStay up to date with her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neffselfcompassion/I hope you find a self-compassion technique or practice that works for you! :) Lots of love,Tash

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit misseducated.substack.comHey friend,Have you ever returned to a place, only to be flooded with memories from when you were there before? Maybe it was a small, forested park where you went on a date with a previous partner, at a time in your life when you were deeply in love with each other. Maybe it was a candlelit bar where you went drinking with friends you no longer keep in touch with. Yet returning there, after time has passed, feels both visceral and nostalgic. That's the position I found myself in a couple weeks ago. I wrote this piece about my experience and performed it at the Spring Salon of my writing class, Notes on Your Notes, taught by Joshua and Adam. They are great writing teachers who have built a wonderful community. Paid subscribers will get to listen to the story. So, tell us: when did you go back somewhere, only to be flooded with memories? Who had you been there with? And where were you in life the time you went back? What was that like?Lots of Love,Tash

I'm over the moon to share today's episode of Misseducated with you: Female Orgasms 101, with Dr. Laurie Mintz, where we dive in deep all about female pleasure, the orgasm gap and how women can have more orgasms. Here are a couple show notes:* Contact Dr. Laurie on her website: https://www.drlauriemintz.com/about-laurie-mintz* Buy her best-selling book, Becoming Cliterate: https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Cliterate-Orgasm-Equality-Matters/dp/0062484389* Her articles on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/stress-and-sex* Find her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drlauriemintz/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit misseducated.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I read aloud my article, "How To Achieve Orgasm Equality". This piece discusses sex in depth. I advise my family to not read it. Continue at your peril.I have had sex with about 40 men in my life so far. Sadly, only a few of them could make me orgasm; I remember all three of them fondly. A couple of others allowed me the time and space for my vibrator. When I realized how rare these men were, far greater questions hit me. Did I pick the wrong guy 37 times? Or put simply: is there something terribly wrong with me?It turns out that I am not alone. My experience is so common there's a statistic in social science dedicated to it: the orgasm gap. We'll dive into: what the orgasm gap is, and how big it is, the clitoris, redefining what we mean by "vagina" and "sex", vibrators, anal, and all kinds of other tips. Enjoy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit misseducated.substack.com/subscribe

Warning: sexual violence and death are mentioned.This week, on Wednesday March 8th 2023, it was International Women's Day. Almost two years to the day since the most traumatic event of my life.Misseducated is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I left my house at about 3pm to attend the women's marches in Mexico City. I was wearing purple, following the dress code my friend had told me about. As I left my apartment, I grabbed a 500 pesos note from my drawer. I knew instinctively what I had to do.As I walked to the march, crowds of women also wearing purple and holding signs gradually gathered around me. My throat started to swell up. I hadn't expected to get emotional already. The chanting, the energy, the spirits of all the women overwhelmed me.“¡Señor, señora, no sea indiferente, se matan las mujeres en la cara de la gente!"(“Sir, Madam, don't be indifferent, they are killing women in the face of the people!”)If you didn't know already, I am one of the millions of women who has experienced sexual violence in Mexico. At the marches that day, I thought about it a lot. I thought about how much I had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder these last two years. I thought about all the women who had never made it out alive, who had never been found, and who might have been saved if they had had 500 pesos on them at the time. And how many of their abusers were living free out there in the world, like my abuser was. I also thought about how unbelievable it is that I now call Mexico my home. This country is so beautiful, so vibrant and magical. But there is no justice. When unspeakably awful things happen here, there are no consequences for the perpetrators. In addition to not committing crimes in the first place, that is what needs to change.By the time I met my friends at the Angel of Independence statue, I was crying already. I was embarrassed about being so emotional in front of them and was grateful that they held space for me. I had a good old sob, right there in front of the crowds of people. But I felt determined to make it count.I shared my plan with Itzel, my amazing photographer friend, and her friend Renata, who I had just met. We walked around the statue, dipping through the crowds to find the right angle in the sun. I took out my 500 pesos note. I held it up to the Angel of Independence. Another girl gave us some flowers. That's the story behind these pictures. Two years ago, I made it out of there. I live to tell the tale today. I am free. He didn't get me. But I was only saved because I had money. My story is that 500 pesos, about $25USD, was the difference between me being raped or not raped. Killed or not killed. This privilege is not lost on me. It's the harsh, damning reality of the world we live in. I think of all the missing women in Mexico, and the family members I saw that day who were marching for them. What would it have taken for them to be saved? How many of them would still be alive right now if they had had $25USD in cash?The crowds were singing and the air was vibrant and fun. There were beautiful signs of painted uteruses with the ovaries putting up two middle fingers.“¡El que no brinque es macho!”(“Whoever doesn't jump is a macho!”)After that chant, the entire crowd would start jumping each time. There were “callaberas” (horse riders) on horseback from Veracruz. There were Otomi women, the oldest indigenous group in Mexico who also predate the Aztecs, in their colorful, traditional dress.But as we headed down Reforma, to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, I couldn't help but notice the few men in the crowd. They were often holding crosses or signs with names on them, “Jimena”, “Diana” or “mi prima” (my cousin). They wore t-shirts with a woman's photo on them. Each one a named face of the roughly 25,000 desaparecidas (missing women) in Mexico. Families and friends travelled in groups, often wearing similar clothes, like beacons of their loved one's voices in physical form. This was a stark contrast from the flyers stamped across the graffitied fronts of buildings, with pictures of men's faces and their names, tagging them as “violador” (rapist), “golpeador” (beater) or “abusor psicológico” (psychological abuser).We passed one woman holding up a sign which read,“Escribeme el nombre de tu acosador / violador / feminicida”“Write the name of your stalker, rapist, femicide”People were queuing up to write names all over her body with thick, black markers. This was another emotional moment for me. I knew I wanted to write something. But the truth is, I don't know the name of my abuser and I never will. I used Google translate on my phone. I was shaking as I wrote on her arm, “Anónimo” (Anonymous). Itzel captured this really incredible picture. I felt the weight of my privilege as I was writing. I thought about all the women in Mexico who had experienced violence at the hands of someone whose name they would never know, like me. I thought about the women who had died at the hands of anonymous abusers. That moment was incredibly heavy. But it made me think about how I could be using my privilege more to help other people. I felt like I was carrying the weight of duty on my shoulders.At sunset, we passed about a hundred female police officers, silently standing in a long row. Some had flowers stuffed in the pockets of their black armored suits. Others stood expressionlessly as the thousands of women marched in front of them. When we arrived in Centro, the downtown area, I saw some stores had been smashed. The air was more tense and seemed angrier there. But none of the damage done to the storefronts could compare to the gravity of what the women were fighting for. To the absolute unspeakable immensity of how many people had been murdered, how many innocent lives had been lost or ruined forever by violence and grief.By this point, we had entered the Zocalo, the main square and the center of government. The crowd was booming. Itzel, Renata and I felt exhausted. We were ready to go home. The last sign I took a picture of was:“Existo porque resisto”(“I exist because I resist.”)I thought about how I still existed because I had resisted in the moment on that hilltop in Oaxaca two years ago. I felt incredibly grateful for that, for standing up for myself so that I could have a chance of being whole again, like I feel now.As we got in a taxi to head back to my apartment, I remembered a sign I had seen earlier that day.“Por que? Algo tan simple cómo volver a casa es un privilegio.”(“Why? Something as simple as coming home is a privilege.”)p.s. A photo of Itzel being a badass photographer: Misseducated is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit misseducated.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit misseducated.substack.comAlessia said she wasn't looking for anything serious. She said she just wanted to be friends.How could that be? I dared to entertain the question. When I had held her in my arms only a week before. When she had curled up into my chest, as I ran my fingers along her back searchingly. When I had gone out on a whim and decided to secede myself to being the man in our relationship. When I had admitted to myself in a state of weakness, or perhaps, in a state of emboldened vulnerability that I wanted to take care of her. That I wanted to make her happy. Make her smile.

Hello! I usually only write about my romantic life for my paid subscribers. Today, I'm offering a story for everyone, to give you a taste of what's behind the paywall. All my stories are true, as I remember them, but I have changed some details to protect people's privacy; as my writing teacher, Ann Randolph, tells me, “A story told twice is fiction”. So, consider subscribing to read more stories with all the juicy details. I'm also going to enable to chat feature in Substack so you can tell me about the times you've looked for a lover also…I lay on my couch last night. It was a Thursday, and my mood was sour. It had been a long week, almost a month since my breakup. I frowned in the low light of the early evening. I felt apathetic, yet restless. I wanted to dip into the distraction of my phone. It was like I was becoming a crotchety old lady. Like the one in London who used to shout down at us from her balcony when I was a kid, when we filled the bird bath with twigs and stones.I grumbled to myself. Why was my bed so empty? When was the last time someone had given me a hug? Images of couples walking down my street holding hands, or stealing a kiss, surfaced in my mind. I could have smelt the sickening sweetness rolling off their shoulders. How come they? Why not me? When will I?I hugged my navy blue couch cushion tighter. I nestled my nose against the warm skin of my own shoulder, imagining that it was someone's chest. Open. Warm. And that he was cradling me in his arms.I had spent most of that week hopping between galleries at Zonamaco, or Art Week in Mexico City. I had descended upon the stained-glass, art-deco facades of trendy, candlelit bars in Juarez and Roma Norte and Condesa. I had tried to admire some of the art, at least. But these events had been far more about the people than the paintings or the portraits; the city's hottest Bright Young Things were there, only a century after Evelyn Waugh.I had tried to flirt with a guy in a crisp, lime-green suit, wearing thick rectangular sunglasses indoors. I had tried to chat to a bearded man in all black, a turtleneck and a long, leather coat. Like he had been picked up from some underground rave in Bushwick and plonked into the middle of this cavernous room of bizarre, contorted statues and screens for the NFTs. I had tried to get the attention of a man with dark ginger hair, wearing a mosaic of necklaces and embroidered shirts. He had smelled like incense, and said he ran a boutique mushroom chocolate business. But as we had exchanged phone numbers, and I had glanced hopefully up into the warmth of his green eyes, I knew he would never silently shut the door of my apartment behind us. He would never lie down on my couch. He would never assume the exact position where I was at that moment, with my navy blue couch cushion and my own shoulder there, trying to comfort myself.As I rolled over and considered taking a nap, suddenly my phone screen flashed through the darkness. My friend had texted me. An invitation to a piano bar nearby. Suddenly I felt the deep silence of my apartment. The stillness was haunting me. I texted my friend to tell her I would be there. I waited to see if she would text back. As I lingered for a moment, I decided I couldn't sit in the emptiness anymore. I wanted something. I wanted somebody. I wanted someone to fill the silence.I got up off my couch. I did my makeup. I put on a tight, long, pleather brown dress with a white turtleneck underneath. I locked my front door and left the darkness of my apartment behind me. I ate duck tacos at a restaurant on my own, unable to fully appreciate the delicious plum sauce.As I paid the bill, my phone screen lit up again. My friend had cancelled on me. I would go to the piano bar alone. I walked down the street there alone also. At a crosswalk, I caught a glimpse of a man, one of the well-dressed bearded ones with nice cheekbones. But a car pulled up, and he got into it, and we drifted apart, like two suns spreading away in the vastness of an expanding universe.  I turned the corner and reached the piano bar. Just then, I saw a couple smoking cigarettes outside. I don't quite know how to tell you this. Maybe there's no other way to say it. But she stood out to me. She had short brown hair, and styled bangs. She was wearing a strapless, black top. Her cleavage was deep, and so were her curves. A tall man with glasses and long, blonde hair stood next to her. I remember she was smiling. I remember she was smiling at me.“Are you guys going to the piano bar too?” I found myself saying.“Wait, what?” she replied. She was American, undoubtedly. And then, as if we had known each other for ages, she said, “We're drinking with friends in the wine place downstairs. You can come sit down with us if you want.”“I don't want to interrupt,” I said, looking at the tall man then back to her again, “How do you guys know each other?”“We met on the internet,” she said.“The apps?”“Yeah.”“Cool,” I said, probing further. The tall man said nothing.Her name was Alessia, she told me, though she wasn't Italian. She was from D.C., but technically the Maryland part. She was half-American, half-Ecuadorian. And she was an artist. And she had a dog. I looked at the dark purple stone pendant hanging around her neck.“I've been wanting to get a giant lizard tattoo on my arm for like 10 years,” she told me, “I finally booked my session on Valentine's Day. I'm going to do it!”“That's awesome,” I said, noticing another long, rectangular tattoo with an inscription on her arm. I thought back to my ex, and the tattoos he had on his arm. And how much I loved them. And how colourful they were. And I thought about how edgy, and how sexy, she was going to look with her new tattoo.“I like your dress. And your haircut. You won't be single for long,” she said to me.I smirked, but I felt myself stiffening. I folded my arms. My insides squirmed. On Feeld, the mother of all quirky dating apps, I had put my sexuality as “heteroflexible”. Was that what this was about? Was this a moment of pure fun? Or a moment of shame and weakness? I suddenly resented Alessia for telling me all about the cool art parties she was hosting. I felt like we had clicked, and now I wanted to unclick from her. And ignore whatever had happened. And continue on to find some swanky man with glasses in a suit at the bar. But I couldn't bring myself to do it.A couple days earlier, I had texted my gay friend.“My great-grandmother's brother was gay,” I messaged him, “Do they know if sexuality is genetic?”“I think they discovered a ‘gay gene',” he messaged back, “But it was debunked. Anyway, I think it's socially constructed. Like no one can even grapple with just how thoroughly they've been taught to be straight.”His words now felt like a tap at my shoulder. And then a slightly bigger slap round the head. Alessia brought us inside, and we went through the motions. We had a glass of wine with her friends. We got the check. Her friends left, and we went up to the piano bar afterwards, the tall man following quietly behind us. But all the while, my thoughts and my feelings were nagging me. I had barely had any encounters with women. Yet in those few cases, I found myself mystified. I was so nervous even though I was trying to play it cool. I had been to pride parades. I remembered when the White House lit up with rainbow flags the day that gay marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court. I had plenty of friends that were gay.  “…no one can even grapple with just how thoroughly they've been taught to be straight…”We sat down in the corner behind the piano at the back of the bar. I wanted to sit next to her, but instead I sat next to her date (apparently I wasn't crashing whatever they were doing). I made small talk with him. It turned out he was cycling from Alaska to Argentina, or something as insane and adventurous as that.Alessia leant over him, towards me. She handed me her shot of mezcal. She wanted me to share it with her, she said. Was her hand lingering there a little longer, so I might hold it? I felt myself sinking down into my chair. I tried to laugh and sing along with the songs. Hey Jude. Love by Nat King Cole. Like a Virgin. I looked away from her, then I looked back at her, then I looked away again. I felt stupid. Like a tween going to their first bop. How do you flirt with a woman? And what if she wasn't into women? She thought I was cool enough already. Maybe if I let on, she wouldn't think I was cool anymore.I know what men do. I know what kind of men I like. I know how I like to be with men. But with a woman? What? I found myself, all of a sudden, wanting to be the man in the relationship. Wanting to take her out for dinner. Wanting to figure out what her love language was. Wanting to make her happy. She was an artist. She seemed cool. She seemed hip. Where was the line between a really good, deep female friendship, and something that crossed into other territory?In the blur of the singing and the clunking rhythm on the piano, I saw Alessia's phone lying face down on the table, between the shot glasses of mezcal. Some kind of black and white figures were painted on the case. I picked it up. I looked at it more closely. They were drawings of women. With simple, thick-lined curves of their bodies, and jagged black triangles of pubic hair under their armpits and between their legs. On a phone case. I mean, I consider myself a feminist, but ,naked women? I didn't have any of those tacked up on my walls.I raised an eyebrow as I glanced at her. Alessia caught my eye. She grinned, winking at me. I felt my tongue tie itself in my mouth. Was that a sign? Did she…was she…flirting with me? At least, I thought, I would give it a try. I had to.I hadn't considered the possibility that she might like me back. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit misseducated.substack.com/subscribe

Hello everyone and welcome back to Misseducated, with me, your host, Tash Doherty. This week we're diving into the subject of unexplained infertility with Dr. Amy Beckley, the founder and CEO of Proov. In this episode she shares with us how her experience of having 7 miscarriages fueled her to create the leading products in at-home fertility and hormonal testing kits.We talk about how she bootstrapped the company and brought these sorely-needed femtech products to market from an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, of all things. We'll also touch on how an over-the-counter medication with a $10 co pay could save you from having to do a $40,000 round of IVF if you're trying to conceive, and also the surprising impact that the reversal of Roe v. Wade has had data centers and the security around women's health data. So please, enjoy! 

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit misseducated.substack.com“Excuse me, Madam,” the porter said to me, “Tennis shoes are not allowed in the Breakfast Room.”My cheeks flashed red hot. I looked down in horror at my painted Converses. They were a black mark against the opulent, rouge-velvet carpet. My beating heart was almost audible over the tinkling piano music and the gentle clanking of fine China tea plates coming from inside. I sensed Will hovering over my shoulder. I tried to soften the blow,“Not even to just look around—”“Certainly not,” the porter replied, “We'll be happy to seat you on another visit, should you be capable of adhering to the dress code.”

I interviewed Zuzana (Cahojova) Brixová, the Director of Gender Equality for Slovakia, just over a year ago. I feel so lucky to have come across her story; it is one of incredible strength and perseverance. Here, Zuzana tells us about her experience of domestic violence, and how she overcame an abusive marriage to find her freedom and her voice as a lawyer. She now drives key policies in her country to protect women and children from violence.As a practicing Catholic, Zuzana also shares her fascinating opinions on how false interpretations of religion can place more value on protecting something (sanctity, virginity or marriage) rather than someone. Her inspiring story is one of true transformation. I hope you enjoy it! p.s. For survivors of trauma and abuse, I want to reiterate that overcoming a terrible situation and forging a new, safer life for yourself is more than enough. Post-traumatic growth is mostly a myth, and surviving trauma itself is enough. You are enough.Read more about Zuzana's background here. Get full access to Misseducated at misseducated.substack.com/subscribe

Enjoy this reading of my latest piece, "How to Adjust to the Real World After College". Thank you to my friend Alara Gebes for requesting the article, and Deniz Kecik and Alan Jinich for their feedback. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit misseducated.substack.com

After a sturdy career in consulting and healthcare, Anu Sharma knew she wanted to make a difference. She just wasn't sure what kind of difference she wanted to make. Yet when she gave birth to her daughter three years ago, nothing could have prepared her for a near-death experience. Anu used her in-depth health knowledge to take herself back to the ER post-partum, effectively saving her own life. In this episode, Tash Doherty interviews Anu about her career and the physical danger she experienced in giving birth. We'll also explore how that experience inspired Anu to start Millie, a new healthcare startup dedicated to reimagining patient care for birthing people everywhere. Millie offers digital services, and has recently opened their first clinic in Berkeley, California. Misseducated is super excited to be able to support Anu, her team and Millie's work. Find out more about Millie: https://www.millieclinic.com/ Insta: @millie_clinic Discover Misseducated: Insta: @thisismisseducated https://misseducated.substack.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/misseducated/support

"If I were a man, I would..." This was a prompt given to me by my writing teacher, Ann Randolph. It sparked one of my most-read pieces on my blog, and helped me discover my narrative voice. Enjoy! Read along at tashdoherty.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/misseducated/support