Christin is intelligent, funny, witty,
kind, compassionate, very giving (she would literally give you the clothes off
of her back), stunning, strong and very candid. Since I have met her she has ALWAYS been self-less, motivated,
encouraging, and supportive of all who enter into her life.
As you will soon discover, as a result of
various situations that occurred to her over the years, Christin has had to
deal with some very serious issues and it has impacted her self-worth and
self-esteem. Even though the trials that she has had to endure have affected
the way that she esteems herself, she still is one of the sincerest,
most charming, most genuine people that I have ever encountered, and nothing
that has happened to her can take that away from her.
She seriously is like a breath of fresh air
and I’m so glad honored to call her my friend.
When she decided that she wanted to share
her story with you all, I was very humbled and grateful that she would openly
reveal it in hopes that it in turns impacts someone else’s life.
So here’s Christin’s story in her own
words:
Monologue
Monday: Christin
First of all, thanks and admiration to my
friend who runs this site. I think that the way the media , our culture and our
peers (as influenced by the media/culture) portray sex is pretty skewed from
its reality, and not all people (myself included) have trusted adults in their
lives to have open discussions about sex and all that it implies.
Having a site such as this one then is
entirely valuable, and I’m so proud of my friend for the time and effort that
she puts into answering all of your questions and finding interesting and caring people to tell
you their experiences.
Secondly, there’s the key phrase above: ‘their’
experience.
When you read these monologues, you get a
privileged insight into the mistakes and triumphs of others. In writing my
story, I can’t offer you a manual of what to do or what not to do. I can only
tell you what I did. Hopefully something that I say resonates with you or you
find applicable to your own life. Either way, I guess I’d just like to give
someone the opportunity to learn from my experience so as to avoid the pain and consequences that I have faced in my life.
I grew up as a conservative, evangelical
Christian, and my role models were the people at my church who never even held
hands until their wedding night. I was intent upon waiting for marriage to
share this great intimacy with one person and one person only. I wanted to
remain pure for my God and have an innocence about myself that my future
husband would admire.
One of my favorite sermons from my youth pastor discussed how
pre-marital sex was essentially adultery perpetrated against our future spouse,
and I took that lesson to heart. I would absolutely not engage outside of the
confines of a marital bed.
Then, things changed. For reasons that
are tangentially irrelevant to the subject of this post, I ceased to claim
Christ as my Savior. I had always been told that it was my duty to wait for
marriage because I was God's child and that's what he wanted for me. No one
ever told me that I, as a human being, have an inherent value to myself that
entitles me to wait for all the best that sex has to offer. So, since my moral
standing against pre-marital sex had been purely religious, I floated in an
uncomfortable moral abyss of confusion and curiosity about all the things that
had formerly been entirely off-limits to me. And that’s where trial and error –
A LOT of error – entered my life.
When I was 21, I made one of the worst
decisions of my life. I ended a night of excessive drinking with friends and
had to take the last Metro home, by myself, at 3am. During that trip, I was
targeted by a male who recognized my state of incoherence. He took advantage of
me. And that’s how I lost my virginity.
That night created a disjointed
relationship between sex and intimacy for me. Sex became just another thing to
do and lost any sort of specialness that it should – and certainly does – have.
I’m struggling to close that gap, but for an assortment of reasons, it’s
proving extremely difficult.
For someone like me, who struggles with body
image issues and low self-esteem, the desire/lust that comes from physical
interactions can be easily confused as genuine affection or simply personal
affirmation. As such, I have given myself to more men in the past 2 years than
I care to be true, several of whom were just for one night.
Of the people with whom I’ve shared that
part of myself, only one of them genuinely mattered to me. I was – and still am
– in love with him. It pains me to think how I’ve so degraded him and what I
shared with him by allowing others to have that same part of me.
When I look back, I remember the moment
when he apologized to me for having been with other girls (at that time, I had
only been with that one man on that fateful night). I remember the look in his
eyes, how it bothered him that what we were to do was inherently less special
because of how willingly he’d done it in the past.
And, now, I will have that same
responsibility of apologizing through my broken heart to someone in the future.
I will need to apologize for how I held myself in such low regard that I sought
affirmation of my personal worth through the body of someone else. How I’ve so
disassociated sex from emotion so as to degrade both myself and the act of sex
itself. With every person with whom I share that intimate act, I’ve lessened
the specialness that sex will have with the last person who ever has that part
of me.
Some really interesting points you have written. Aided me a lot, just what I was looking for : D.
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