It used to be easier to be beautiful

I’m watching a YouTube short about mannequins in Venezuela. They feature exaggerated breasts and inflated butts, and apparently clothes sales have gone up since they were introduced.

Sandra Trujillo, the owner of the mannequin factory, notes that girls as young as 15 are asking for boob jobs for their birthdays. “It used to be easier to be beautiful,” she says with sad resignation in her voice. “Society is very demanding.”

It’s my birthday next week, and as often happens when I pass into another year, I’ve been reflecting on “then” and now. Not only how things used to be but how – and who – I used to be.

If you saw my last couple of posts, you’ll know that I did a live reading of an erotic story that I’d co-written with Orlando Silver (“A Boy at My Feet”). If you follow Orlando too, you’ll know that “Orlando”, as a pen name and writer of extraordinary truths, has just retired from public life.

The conversation we had to introduce the story – and the reading itself – felt meaningful on a level I didn’t fully realise at the time, but now makes a lot of sense.

Orlando said, “I can’t write what’s not fucking bleeding out of me...”

What an incredible gift it is to offer words that come from such a raw and vulnerable place. And maybe it’s no surprise that that level of authenticity can only be sustained for so long.

I wonder if it used to be easier to write this way – before ‘content creation’ and AI mining, and before being in the public realm meant exposing yourself globally and forever.

I’ve written about intimacy and eroticism for over two decades. I needed to. My yearnings formed a pressure in my heart, my head, and my cunt. And this pressure needed to be released (or subsumed) somehow.

I picture blood-letting ceremonies with leeches – maybe they could have sucked the truth from me.

I had questions and curiosities. I had a hunger for more.

I wrote those words at a time when my hide felt thick. My heart felt strong. And my desires felt so close to the surface that the smallest scratch would make me bleed profusely.

That was then.

And now…

My skin is wrinkling and thinning with age. My heart has become more discerning and erratic. And my once-clamorous desires are subtle whispers – audible only to me and those I choose to intimately share them with.

“It used to be easier…”

It’s so easy to romanticise the past.

The better days.

The easier days.

I’ve been straddling worlds for some time.

One foot in ‘then’ – with my commitment to share my “living experiment of desire” – and one foot in ‘now’.

Except the ground under my feet ‘now’ keeps shifting.

I really am in the edgelands.

An unknown territory, neither one thing nor another, not yet ‘before’ and ‘after’ but somewhere in the middle of the story.

I’ve been struggling in this place.

But then the oddest thing happened:

I caught a glimmer of a new landscape, and I felt anticipatory grief for the day when I emerge from the edgeland. Perhaps the unknown has become my new normal?

“It used to be easier to be beautiful.”

I’ve never been conventionally beautiful.

I’ve never been conventionally anything.

And there’s always been a freedom in that for me.

I wonder if the edgelands are a place of freedom too?

This blog used to be called “Desire Lines 2.0” in reference to my more-than-a-memoir, Desire Lines. It was under this banner that I wanted to keep sharing my “living experiment of desire in queer midlife.”

You can find my most popular Desire Lines 2.0 Substack posts here (the sweet spice of desire), here (what if it’s just a phase?), and here (queer or straight, we all have this in common).

You can find my erotic stories in books and scattered across the internet here (Down By the River), here (in Monsterf#ck), and here (my novel, Coming Close).

You can find my more-than-a-memoir Desire Lines here.

And you can read my chapter – Masturbation Saved My Life – in the anthology, Sex Meets Life, here.

Increasingly, my curiosities are leading me to a different kind of experiment.

Now my driving question is: what lives in the edgelands?

What does each person’s unique landscape look and feel like?

Are there pathways or way markers leading through the edgelands, or are we without a map?

And how can we support ourselves during these times of transition and unknowns, and be self-compassionate during the process?

Which is why I’m relaunching this Substack as “Letters from the Edgelands”.

I hope you’ll stick around.

I’ll also understand if you decide this new enquiry is not for you and choose to unsubscribe.

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