Lust Is Just Immature Vocabulary
I thought I had to choose between moral failure and aliveness.
Years ago, I met a man at a conference.
The chemistry was instantaneous… one of those connections you feel before a single word lands.
We were sharp with each other: ideas flying, wit matched, energy clean and dangerous.
At the time, I was deep in corporate success: well paid, well respected, securely tethered by golden handcuffs… and completely numb.
When he appeared, the air changed. My body woke up—and the guilt arrived just as fast.
Every conversation left me both charged and ashamed.
We lived thousands of miles apart [different cities, different lives], so it wasn’t like anything could happen.
We only saw each other at annual conferences, and our calls were about business, ideas, and life. Nothing inappropriate.
Yet every time his name flashed on my phone, I felt the same rush of heat and the same punch of guilt.
I told myself I shouldn’t answer… but I always did.
Not because I wanted to cross a line, but because something in me needed the aliveness that lived in his voice.
And still, every time we hung up, I felt like I’d betrayed my husband in ways I couldn’t explain, not physically, not verbally, but energetically, like I was leaking some sacred fidelity I didn’t know how to protect.
At the time, I couldn’t see that it wasn’t about him at all. It was about me trying to remember what it felt like to be lucid.
I knew I was someone who wouldn’t violate marriage vows. That part of me was solid.
But my immature understanding of lust vibration convinced me that even feeling it was betrayal.
I couldn’t yet separate sexual temptation from erotic aliveness.
So I did what made sense with the tools I had… I slowly stepped back, got busy with life, and cut the connection, not because I didn’t care, but because I couldn’t yet read the language my body was speaking.
It would take years to realize what was actually happening.
Fantasy is surface code
An erotic fantasy is rarely about the literal act.
It’s your psyche speaking in images because words would dull the signal.
The scene [the power play, the chase, the surrender] is the packaging.
The content is a need your body hasn’t had permission to name.
Back then, my mind didn’t have the language for it. I thought the arousal meant I’d crossed some invisible moral line. I didn’t understand that erotic charge can exist without agenda… that it’s not always an invitation to act, but a reminder that I’m still alive.
If I’d known that then, I might not have run from it. But at the time, the only way I knew to protect what mattered was to retreat.
In truth, fantasy is how the body speaks when language fails.
That conference flirtation was the surface code.
Underneath it, my body was saying, I’m starving for aliveness.
The charge wasn’t a threat to my marriage; it was a threat to my numbness.
I’d been managing performance for so long that my nervous system had forgotten what vitality felt like.
That spark was my system trying to reboot.
The message underneath
Stay with the feeling instead of judging the storyline.
Ask what the fantasy is trying to restore:
Control fantasies often hide a need for safety.
Submission fantasies often hide a need for rest.
Exhibition fantasies often hide a need to be seen without performance.
The body uses sex as a language because it’s the only dialect that carries enough charge or tension to still get our attention.
When I looked back later, I noticed there was no daydream about a relationship or escape.
No “happily ever after.”
Just a highly charged urge to merge; pure, electric recognition.
That’s the tell.
When attraction shows up that cleanly, it’s rarely about the other person.
He wasn’t the fantasy; he was the mirror.
He reflected a part of me I’d exiled: the woman who wanted to feel without earning it, who wanted to come alive without burning everything down.
The alchemy
When you let the charge move through you without acting it out, the fantasy burns down to its element.
You start to feel what it’s actually asking for.
Maybe it’s freedom.
Maybe it’s tenderness.
Maybe it’s recognition.
Once you know, you can meet that need directly, through conversation, creativity, touch, or solitude, without losing the spark.
Years later, when we reconnected, that’s exactly what happened.
Same chemistry.
Same voltage.
But this time, I could hold it.
I didn’t need to suppress or express it, instead… I could let it live.
The energy that once felt dangerous became fuel for truth-telling, writing, and connection.
That’s what alchemy feels like: energy changing state.
What once looked like temptation becomes usable voltage.
I finally understood that erotic arousal and sexual arousal aren’t the same thing.
One seeks contact; the other seeks consciousness.
Why hiding doesn’t work
Repression doesn’t erase desire; it just forces it underground where it festers.
What you run from runs you.
What you can look at becomes energy you can use.
Owning fantasy doesn’t make you reckless; it makes you responsible.
I learned that the hard way.
Corporate life had trained me to trade feeling for function.
So when that first flash of desire hit, I did what all “good” women do: I locked it down.
I called it inappropriate, filed it away, and got back to work.
But the body doesn’t follow HR policy.
It keeps sending the same signal until you decode it.
That’s why burnout, boredom, and impulsive choices show up. They’re the body’s rebellion against repression.
Erotic intelligence
The goal isn’t to perform the fantasy.
It’s to understand the signal behind it and decide consciously what to do with it.
That’s erotic intelligence: the capacity to hold the charge between desire and obstacle without collapsing into shame or compulsion.
The real work wasn’t about fidelity; it was about literacy.
Fantasy wasn’t proof that I was broken. It was proof that I was ready to wake up.
Now I can meet that current anywhere [in conversation, creation, or intimacy] and know what it is: life reminding me I’m still alive.
That’s erotic intelligence IRL: the ability to hold tension without needing resolution, to let desire teach instead of consume.
Looking back, that man didn’t threaten my marriage or my career; he threatened the illusion that success required self-erasure.
The fantasy that once scared me awake wasn’t about him.
It was about me… about remembering that my body still knows the language of aliveness, even when my mind forgets the words.
Back then, I didn’t understand that what I was calling guilt was really the discomfort of expansion; the body’s confusion when it starts to feel again.
I thought tension meant something was wrong.
I thought I had to choose between desire and integrity, between aliveness and morality.
What I couldn’t see was that the tension itself was the portal.
It was never a sign to retreat… it was the pressure required to alchemize numbness into vitality.
This was just one example of how emotional illiteracy plays out in everyday life: we misdiagnose our awakenings as mistakes and call our invitations into aliveness “temptation.”
But the very friction we try to escape is the source of the power we’ve been starving for.
Why We Need to Talk About This
This is why we need to be having these conversations openly, intelligently, without shame.
Not to glamorize temptation, but to humanize it.
Because when we suppress the body’s natural language of aliveness, it doesn’t vanish; it mutates.
Without context or conversation, women end up crossing lines they never meant to, mistaking lust for liberation.
They blow up careers, marriages, and identities not because they’re reckless, but because they were starving for sensation in a life that had gone flat.
That’s one way to feel alive, yes, but rarely the way they saw it playing out.
We need to normalize talking about this voltage: how it moves, how it speaks, and how to hold it, so that aliveness doesn’t have to come wrapped in destruction.
Desire isn’t the problem.
The problem is in thinking it’s wrong or that you’re the only one experiencing it.
Final Note
So don’t hide your fantasies.
They aren’t proof of what’s wrong with you.
They’re proof that your body still believes in possibility.
What you name, you can navigate.
What you repress will run you.
Let’s talk about it honestly, without filters, and without judgment, so aliveness can return to its rightful place: inside the body of a woman who knows how to hold it.
If this conversation stirred something in you and you’re ready to explore the charge, decode the message, and talk about what no one else will… come inside The Wet Club.
In the Voyeur Lounge room of the club, we’re having these conversations in real time: women unpacking fantasy, desire, and power in a space that’s raw, reverent, and unfiltered.
🔥 🔥 🔥 loooved inhaling your writing!!