The Complexity of Being a Sensual Woman with a Mind Like a Blade

Issue Nine: The most human truths live in contradictions.

I feel things intensely—joy, grief, desire, despair—and I am not afraid of depth. I write poems that taste like longing. I love with my whole being. I dance until time dissolves. And I’ve never once regretted it.

But I learnt early in my career—especially as a twenty-something woman in a professional space—that intensity has a place, and it isn’t here. That to be taken seriously, you must silence the parts of yourself that sing. That sensuality, especially, does not belong.

So I led with my intellect. I pursued two academic degrees. I contributed to peer-reviewed research. I became a national board member early in my sexology career. I crafted my image to reflect rigour, not tenderness.

I learnt to wear competence like armour. It won me respect—but it cost me resonance. My body grew quieter, my joy more contained. And I didn’t realise what I was losing until I almost forgot how alive I was meant to feel. 

But what I didn’t realise then—and what I now know in my bones—is this:

My sensuality was never a liability. It was literacy.

What Sensuality Actually Is

Sensuality is not about sex.

It is about being in touch with your senses—and allowing yourself to derive pleasure from them. 

Pleasure is not an extra. It is the nervous system’s proof of safety.

It’s the way the late afternoon light spills across your skin and you notice.

It’s the curve of a ripe fig. The silk of a sentence. 

It’s the shiver when music meets memory.

Sensuality is embodied aliveness.

But we’ve been taught to exile it—especially if we want to be taken seriously. Especially in professional, clinical, or intellectual spaces. Sensuality gets mistaken for seduction, distraction, indulgence. Something frivolous. Something unsafe.

And so we hide it.

We compartmentalise.

We code-switch.

We turn down the volume on our full expression—until we no longer remember what it feels to FEEL alive.

What They Don’t Tell You About Complexity

I have made altars

out of the very things

they told me to hide.

My tenderness.

My desire.

My ability to hold paradox without needing to resolve it.

I am someone who can teach neuroscience by day, and dance Flamenco under the stars by night.

Who can hold space for a client’s shame without flinching, and then write a poem so raw it trembles.

Who can speak to a room full of lawyers about trauma and power, and then whisper metaphors into a lover’s mouth like honey.

This is not a contradiction.

This is a composition.

The sharpness of my mind does not cancel the softness of my spirit.

They belong together. They speak to one another. They strengthen one another.

 It Starts With Women—But It Doesn’t End There

We talk a lot about how women are expected to choose:

Be smart or be beautiful. Be nurturing or be respected. Be sensual or be taken seriously.

But this pressure to split off parts of ourselves isn’t just a women’s issue.

It is a human one.

All of us, in some way, have been taught to curate our truth to be more palatable. To be less “much.” To perform one side of ourselves and quiet the rest.

But the most human truths live in contradictions.

In the spaces between opposites.

In the both/and.

And wholeness—true, radical, embodied wholeness—comes not from choosing a side,

but from living the entire symphony.

So here I am :

A woman with a mind like a blade

and a body that carries the pulse of music.

A professional who reads neuroscience papers

and writes odes to breath and skin.

A person who has felt their way into a life that honours all of it.

Not despite the complexity.

Because of it.

This isn’t just about me. 

It’s about all of us reclaiming the symphony of who we are. 

Let them wonder how you do both. 

Then do more.

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