Welcome to Untethered, a new column by me, a person who has basically never been single in their whole adult life. Herein, I’m publicly committing to, above all else, dating myself and building community around me not based on the relationship escalator — for the indefinite future. I’m curious about what that looks like, genuinely, and hope you’ll explore that with me!

I committed to stepping off the relationship escalator, but I didn’t commit to being celibate, okay? I faced facts and said to myself, look, I’m not going to go through my mid-thirties without having sex just because I’ve gone and had a breakup. That’s absurd. Or, it’s absurd when I think about what I value. It can be a valid choice, but it’s not one I’m making.

Putting yourself out into the world can lead to getting hurt. Most of the time, when we’re talking about “getting hurt” while dating and hooking up, we’re talking about emotional wounds (or, like, very serious threats — the kind that make you send the address you’re going to in a text to a trusted friend). But in the pursuit of what I’ll term abject sluttiness, I’ve been running into scrapes and cuts, drama and ego-bruising, unresolved trauma, exhaustion, and a UTI…to name a few things.

My right leg now has a light scar from scraping myself on the ruins of an old stone hearth while making out with someone on a hike. Since then, I’ve developed a love of antimicrobial spray, which also comes in handy when someone pulls my still-healing nose piercing. After a particularly liberating fingering on a crusty rooftop while I was also on my period, I developed a UTI. I know I know, this is not a surprise at all considering the convergence of factors here, but I still woke up and sobbed because it hurt so much. And it did mean a depressing march on foot to go pick up antibiotics and those handy little pills that turn all your fluids orange and numb the pain. I rewarded myself with a matcha latte and sent a photo of me drinking it while holding up a peace sign to the person I’d had sex with to tell them I had gotten a UTI from the interaction, as you do.

I lost my wallet after queer country night drama — or after, rather, someone tried to make a threesome happen by letting their other partner inadvertently crash our date. The other partner had no idea and said she felt bad, but overall, when I marched out of that apartment at 3 a.m. to catch a Lyft home, I lit up one of my going out cigarettes (we don’t officially smoke anymore) and explained that I did not appreciate not being thought of. Instead of sleeping over, I was now catching a Lyft home in the early hours of the morning. Over the next day or so, I turned my therapist begging me to stick up for myself over and over in my mind until I tapped out the kind of text message people make fun of, long and blue and multi-paragraph, and sent it. I received a sincere apology and the opening to a conversation about making the situation right. Something inside of me clicked back into place then, like a tiny dislocated joint. I didn’t have to put up with feeling mistreated. I could just say something about it, and the worst that would happen would be that I’d end the fling. But also, someone might just respond with sincerity and things would be fine.

Last conversation I had with my therapist, we talked about my boundaries while dating, and he did the thing we all wish therapists would do — he told me I was getting an A+ in therapy. Bless. I had just made a joke about how a lot of people online will talk about wanting to get a good grade in therapy, to win therapy, but his response was so sincere. “You’re actually trying. Good job. Keep going.” While I’ve been cautioned about (and am avoiding) some kind of jumping into an ever-escalating monogamous relationship, dating and dating poly or intentionally single people has allowed me to look to myself as the authority on how my days are spend, on what my boundaries look like, and what I’m willing to put up with, where I bend, where I hold myself firm. As a chronic people pleaser, this is obscenely difficult because at once, I want to throw myself out of the window and leave a perfect shadow standing where I was, someone intensely likable. And on the other hand, I sometimes find myself meeting unexpected calls for emotional intimacy — but especially emotional labor — with repulsion that makes me want to defenestrate the entire connection with the other person, to boot it, to burn it all down and become a hermit solely so no one will ask me to hold their hand through something hard, which is, also, unsustainable. I’m still working on that balance.

The other night, when I was faced with a frustrating situation that left me splashing around in a pool of rejection and irritability, I pulled out my phone to find someone to vent to, texted my sister briefly, and then just went up to bed and watched a movie, grumping alone by myself in an effort to self-soothe. I woke up feeling perfectly moored, steady, like the fact that I’d trusted myself so deeply to handle these feelings on my own had brought me back to shore overnight.

While visiting the LGBTQ clinic for periodic STD tests and answering the questions they ask in a very bisexual manner, a doctor came in to talk to me about PrEP. I now take a chalky white pill every morning. PrEP: It’s not just for cis gay men, it can be for slutty nonbinary dudes, too. During my PrEP checkup, they also asked me if I wanted a MonkeyPox shot. As someone who was planning to go to a party in a gay bathhouse that night, I was like, you know what, stick it in. I’d also always wanted to get the smallpox vaccine, and apparently this is related, so it was fun for my nerd brain to receive, even if it left a bruise lasting for weeks. When I take my PrEP with breakfast every morning, or look over my calendar and see my every-three-months clinic checkup coming up, it stirs up a lot. Over coffee, I feel, at once, medicalized, a part of a population where we’re trying to control things like MonkeyPox, and also, so, so myself.

And then there’s the healing nature of having a bunch of people think you’re hot. This cannot be underestimated! It’s been glorious, and it gets easier every time to tell someone you think they’re hot or cute or pretty or whatever they are. It’s good to know that years and years ago when my ex husband screamed “You look like a boy!” and I screamed back at him “You fuck boys!” that his assessment of me would actually be a bonus in others’ eyes. There is a lot that treating yourself with kindness can do, but there is also learning to accept kindness from people who have good intentions and all the sweetness that comes with it.

Lastly, I keep dating people who regularly take shrooms and who share them with me. While I can’t say that body doubling and working on creative projects together while micro-dosing or seeing a psychological horror movie while tripping are the stereotypical kind of deep, spiritual experience one might seek on shrooms, these periodic forays into psychedelics have served as a kind of medicine, too. When you have to face reality getting a little wobbly, where you have to trust fall with another person while colors grow bright.

There’s a theory around healing trauma where you have to heal at the site of the wound. If a lot of my wounds have come from relationships in the past, then those can only be healed by relating to other people. If my wounds come from a sense of rejection, then I have to face the potential for that rejection. And, apparently, get a little injured by ruins and needles and everyone’s various piercings, too.

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