I was about 9 when I masturbated for the first time. Standing bare bodied and curious, experimenting with the faucet in the downstairs bathroom of my childhood home. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just knew that it “tickled.” Pounding on the door one day, my mother pulled me out of the bathroom to have the dreaded talk and I was all the more confused. Except I felt my child body overflow with an inextricable and nearly innate feeling of humiliation.

It’s funny how quickly that feeling can settle in. And all the more so how stubbornly it lingers. Even writing about it now in my mid-20s leaves me red in the face and flinching. 

I know getting caught by your parents is far from a unique experience, but there’s something about what it means for a girl. Conditioned from childhood to view our bodies as a communal object, we meticulously tuck away its impurities like an art. Clean body and clean mind. For the first year that I started menstruating two weeks before my 10th birthday, it was this sense of social responsibility that made me hide from my family that I thought I was struck with a terminal illness (but we’ll save that story for another time).

March’s themes, Taboos, calls us to step into our shame and to do it boldly. It’s an invitation to acknowledge that the darkness of our guilt, desires, discomforts, and pleasures are just as much a part of us as the light and adulterated self we present. In the words of Jason Lee in Vanilla Sky: "just remember, the sweet is never as sweet without the sour."

Welcome to Taboos. No reservations. No apologies.