Squarespace has been a blessing and it makes it easier to make my content more engaging… but they don’t like content that is too “spicy” in nature, so I’ll be using euphemisms here.

One day, I was feeling… spicy.

Roughly two years ago, I was in the bathtub and feeling spicier than usual.

I decided to take some photos and post them to some of the subreddits I had been lurking around on for a while.

This decision changed everything.

It changed my life.

It changed my direction.

And, it changed my personality.

Slowly.

At first, I had all these ideas about how I was “supposed” to act and who I was supposed to be on here. I played dumb. I conducted myself like a bimbo because I thought all girls who post spicy pictures of themselves online were supposed to be bimbos.

And then I talked to someone who encouraged me to not do that. “You’re not stupid, so don’t act stupid,” he said.

Could I… could I… be smart and get freaky with men on the internet at the same time??

Wouldn’t they run for the hills? Don’t you always hear about how men only want dumb girls and brains are either irrelevant or a turnoff? Either that or they’d try to tell me that there are no smart women. Or that women are never as smart as men. I feel like I’ve heard men say such things before.

It couldn’t possibly go well… could it?

But, I thought I’d try it out.

I started to act more like myself.

I ventured bit by bit to have the courage to be more honest.

It was a long process.

After I stopped playing dumb, I continued to act like I was okay with things I didn’t like. 

Degradation. Name-calling. Insults.

I didn’t like it, but again, I thought I was supposed to like it, so I pretended.

But, slowly, my internal pattern recognition was changing.

All the chatter I’d heard my entire life about how intelligent women are off-putting was giving way to positive reception.

It turns out that when you cast your net as wide as “the internet,” you wind up finding your people… the people who don’t mind if you’re smart. Some of them even like it.

In fact, this net was cast so wide, that I started to assume that no matter who I was, truly, there would be somebody who was into that.

Next lesson: “The Birth of Lilly.”