Sexual wellness isn’t just about pleasure or technique, it’s about safety, confidence, consent and knowing yourself well enough to honour what you want. For many of us, those lessons arrive far too late. I grew up warned endlessly about pregnancy, but never taught how to protect my boundaries or trust my intuition. That gap shaped my early experiences in painful ways, and it took years of unlearning guilt and relearning self-worth to rebuild a healthy relationship with intimacy. This is what that journey has looked like and how it’s still unfolding.
Let’s start at a lowpoint. Me too came too late for me. When I was a teenager, everyone told me how to protect myself against unwanted pregnancy. But when I was a teenager, no one told me how to protect myself against sexual harrassment. No one taught me about consent. The “girls magazine” that I read at the time spent more time debating which positions were giving most pleasure to a man than teaching me how to voice my needs. So when I started out being sexually active, there was a guy that apparently also hadn’t been taught these things. He pushed and gaslight me, trying to make me sleep with him. He did things to me that I didn’t want and that deeply affected my confidence and hindered my sexual wellness ever since, because I felt guilty about it for quite a while.
Why time is important
A big thing Chyrpe has taught me so far, is that I need to spend more time thinking about what it is that I actually want. So far, all the guys I met on Chypre were highly consent oriented. They asked me what I was looking for, what I wanted to do or try, but also asked about my boundaries. I told some of them about my troubled past with men and apart from being bazzled by the inappropriate behaviour of other men, they were understanding and patient with it.
They didn’t rush me. They didn’t treat my hesitation as a problem to solve, but as something to explore together. And that changed everything. I realised how much of my early sex life had been shaped by fear, fear of disappointing someone, fear of being “difficult”, fear of saying no. With these new experiences, I finally had space to feel something different: curiosity, not obligation.
Steps to take
Improving your sexual wellness isn’t only about finding the right partners. It’s about learning the language of your own body, what makes it hum, what makes it tense, what makes it go quiet. It’s about noticing when you’re doing something because you genuinely want to, versus because you feel expected to.
I started saying no to things that didn’t feel right. I also slowly learned to say yes to things that did, on my own timeline. I journaled after encounters, not to grade them, but to understand them: What did I enjoy? What felt uncomfortable? What surprised me?
Self-doubt and guilt needs to stop
Somewhere along the way, the shame started melting. I stopped blaming myself for choices I made when I didn’t yet have the tools. I stopped pretending that if I was “not so naive” I wouldn’t have been hurt. Instead, I gave that younger version of myself compassion. She did the best she could with the scraps of guidance she had.
The more I practiced speaking honestly, online, offline, in bed, out of bed, the more aligned everything felt. Confidence wasn’t suddenly handed to me, it is still growing slowly. And funnily enough, pleasure became easier not because I tried harder, but because I finally felt safe enough to relax into wanting.
That’s the heart of sexual wellness for me now: not the tricks, not the toys, not the technique, but safety, consent, curiosity and choosing myself first, every single time.
