This Project
What I'm working on here
This is an experiment, and a long time coming. If you're here and considering supporting its development, allow me to tell you a little about what I'm thinking.
As a sex and relationship coach, I've been answering questions—and correcting assumptions—about what it is I actually do for years. In name I've been a coach; in practice it's so much more. Most of my clients experience our work together as therapy, and the long-term arc of those relationships bears that out. Sex is usually a topic at some point but sometimes not at all, even though it's in my title. Even my clients struggle to describe what it is I do exactly. Just as the title is hard to explain, it's also too small to write from. So this is a place to write freely about what I want people to know about sex and relating.
It's also a place for more than that. This is where I write as my full self. Be that as a practitioner-scholar preoccupied with justice and intimacy, our social dysfunctions as much as our intimate ones. As a writer of creative non-fiction (my favorite genre). As a memoirist. Each braids with the others. My personal stories aren't just stories—well, sometimes they might be. They're also material from the personal research project I call my life: experiences from which I draw meaning about the bigger themes.
The project begins with three registers.
Manifesto. The frameworks and thinking that will always be free.
Manual. The practical offering—experiments and reflections distilled from over a decade of private practice. Let's try them and see what supports where we need it, what shifts where we want it. This tier may also include weekly practices and reflections. You're invited to chime in on this one: tell me what you want to know more about, what you want to try, what you need in whatever you're navigating at the moment.
Emotions move, and can move swiftly if we let them—emotions are meant to be in motion.
What are you feeling right now? Name three emotions or sensations. Just say them to yourself, that's it. That's the practice.
Memoir. This is going to be the most personal and therefore the most exposing and therefore what costs me the most to write and share. I also think it's going to be good—good and meaningful writing that will be enjoyable, if challenging at times, to read. This is my hope for it. I have a lot of this waiting in the wings and I can't wait to start giving it beautiful shapes.
I learned this about grief: that it comes in waves. That it will have its way with me regardless of whether or not it is convenient or appropriate. At first the waves came often and fierce, knocking the wind out of me—making it hard to breathe, hard to get out of bed. As time passed, the waves rolled in more gently, and came less often. Time makes a difference. And even after time, grief can come out of nowhere and hit like a tsunami.
Here's the shape of things. For starters.
Manifesto, always free.
Manifesto + Manual or Memoir, first paid tier.
Manifesto + Manual + Memoir, full tier.
The invitation: become a founding member for $7/month and help me build this. That price stays with you as long as you stay, and it includes one future paid tier as soon as I publish to it.
— Elena