Okay. Reality check. You spend your whole life thinking you understand something—like sex—because you’ve experienced it. You have a checklist: did it, felt nice, whatever. Then you get a front-row seat to what it’s supposed to sound like. Real, raw, unfiltered pleasure. Not the polite, quiet kind. The kind that shakes the walls.

And you realize your checklist was a joke. You’ve been drinking skim milk your whole life thinking it was cream.

My ex (yeah, ex, finally did it) never made me scream. I never knew my body could even want to scream. I thought those sounds were performative. A choice. Now I know they’re involuntary. A biological surrender.

It’s humiliating and exhilarating all at once. To discover a capacity for feeling you never knew you had. To realize the problem wasn’t your libido; it was the caliber of the cock you were settling for.

Now my own voice is a stranger to me. And I’m obsessed with getting acquainted.