Thresholds
on sex, birth, loss, and silence
TLDR; this is a very long post about where I’m at right now and where I’ve been.
This is about how we’re shaped during our most vulnerable moments.
Sex is a threshold. Birth is a threshold. Loss is a threshold. Transformation is a threshold.
I’ve crossed all of them. Some more than once. I want to talk about what’s on the other side. Sex, birth, and loss are the three most powerful imprinting events in a human life. We treat all three with silence, distortion, performance. I’m attempting to break the silence.
Sex
I crossed the virginity threshold at 13. I wish I could tell you that was my first introduction to the taboo but being subjected to child sexual abuse at a very young age is a story for another time.
The small town I grew up in exposed me to a boy who was the product of a teenage pregnancy. His grandparents raised him and gave him everything he needed to flourish, including unbridled access to the internet. He learned early on about Asa Akira so I did, too. My teenage years were heavily inspired by all the Spiegler Girls of Asa’s generation (no wonder it was only a matter of time before I became a Spiegler Girl myself).
By 18, I left the small town where everyone knew everyone’s business. My friends’ parents and grandparents graduated from the same high school we attended. There wasn’t much space left for growth and if I had to attend community college (my parents wouldn’t cosign on student loans), I rationalized I’d rather attend in California.
Looking back, it’s easy to see that the seemingly easy jobs (barista, waitress, receptionist) were impossible for me to land because I was meant to end up in the adult industry. I had plenty of work experience in production management but not enough technical experience to make it a full time gig. At 19 years old, I was thrust into a decision: go back to Washington, where I was ready to die, or walk onto a porn set from Craigslist.
Why not? I wanted to die anyway.
So I walked through that door. I was so good at pretending to be someone else. I had the time of my life. I used substances to avoid the nagging feeling in the back of my mind. How do I maintain a real relationship when I perform for money? It was hard attempting intimacy off camera when I’d go to work and sometimes the intimacy on set was even stronger than the intimacy at home. The threshold doesn’t announce itself when you’re crossing it. You only feel it after when you try to go back and realize the door closed behind you.
One day I checked and realized I’d crossed 100 million views on PornHub. I’m not ashamed of my past but I have no idea where I go after that. I can’t just delete my fanbase. I can’t just erase ten years of my life. This is the timeline: incredibly competent high school student to depressed to hyper sexual to community college student to college dropout working in production management to Spiegler Girl to pandemic to hiding my identity so my then BF would accept me to being unable to accept myself and then somehow… not knowing how tf to move forward? I could seemingly be anything I want but I never know where to start. It’s like I’m standing at the edge of a rock, terrified to jump, even though the rock is barely 3 feet high. And there’s soft sand underneath.
Last week a social media strategist asked me what I want to do. Her job is to help me craft my brand (and also help me promote my OnlyFans). “What are you good at?” “What are your hobbies?” “What do you want to make content about?”
I got frustrated. I told her I’m not a content creator. I never was a content creator. The “content” was me showing up to set and filming the deed. And I built a following on that. When it comes to actually creating something outside of that persona, I don’t even know where to begin. And here I am, asking myself, do I even want to do OnlyFans?! Like damn I guess I want and need the money for the sake of survival (more on my early 20s financial decisions later) but wow keeping up with a persona that is so far from who I am now is EXHAUSTING.
Sex was my threshold into visibility and into being seen. Once I was comfortable in the bedroom, I became popular at school. Once I was comfortable on set, all those people from my hometown knew what I was up to and indeed I lost the option of anonymity. The performance of sex rewired how I understand intimacy, power, and the female body. I don’t regret any of it. But it hurts when I see girls unapologetically being themselves online and I feel tethered to a version of myself that I don’t even know anymore.
And then I remember, if I’d never become Kendra Spade, I probably wouldn’t even have the courage to post this now.
My best friend died when I was 21.
Before she passed, we recorded a conversation in the car about how she wanted to raise her kids but actually how she wanted me to raise them, via IVF, if something happened to her. She talked about how her parents always told her they loved her, randomly, even when things were hard. She emphasized not being a helicopter mom. She really wanted her kids to know that there’s not one right way to live and everybody gets to the place they need to be through totally different paths.
I have the recording and from time to time, I listen to us discussing these things and I yearn for the camaraderie and understanding that we had between us. I wish I could tell her how things are going for me now. And selfishly I wish she could tell me I’ll be ok.
Grief is the fire that burns the false self. The fake version of yourself you’ve been building is just a big stack of wood, ready for flames. People resist being seen because being seen makes them feel vulnerable and vulnerability reminds us of pain. That’s what grief really is. The hope. That they’d finally be the one to stay, to hear you, to protect you from the ghosts inside your chest.
Loss taught me that thresholds don’t always look like choices. Sometimes they just happen to you and the only decision left is whether you’ll stay on this side and make your time here worthwhile or spend the rest of your life trying to somehow crawl back through.
I’ve really come to find that my body is keeping score through all of this.
Your brain translates fear into stress hormones that flood the blood and change your behavior and your perception. Positive thinking produces positive chemistry. Negative thinking is equally powerful but works in the opposite direction.
I was diagnosed with OCD around 15. I’ve had ADHD my whole life. My brain processes way too much information and sometimes my attention is completely taken from me for days. My mom would get mad and not talk to me for hours. I got used to filling that silence by thinking over the same things over and over and over again.
That’s how the loops started. Your subconscious mind isn’t creative but instead it’s habitual and pushes the button and plays the behavior. Whatever you learned, whatever you experienced becomes a program and then it runs on repeat.
My nervous system learned that silence means danger. That visibility means danger. That love means danger. And every threshold I’ve crossed reinforced the pattern: the things that transform you are also the things that can destroy you.
I’ve been avoiding the question of whether I’m playing small because I’m scared I’ll fail or if I’m playing small because I’m terrified of what happens when I succeed.
I’m scared of being seen. I’m scared of validation. Not because I don’t want it lol obviously I love being validated. I love when someone tells me I look nice or that a big event couldn’t have happened without me. But there’s something about owning what you’re good at that makes the mind fear the responsibility that comes with recognition. Once you’re validated, you’re responsible. You can no longer hide in potential and suddenly you have to exist in execution.
We are all responsible for healing our own nervous systems so it’s important to acknowledge the scar tissue on those triggers. The scar tissue is real. The healing is also real. Both things can be true because you can’t uncross a threshold. I just have to learn to stop flinching at the light on the other side.
The body keeps the score 👏
❤️❤️❤️