Content warning: abuse, death.

Today is the first day of fall, my favorite season. Name one thing about it, and I’ll almost certainly light up with joy – apple and pumpkin picking, watching leaves change and flutter to my feet, Scorpio season, the feeling of being held when I put on my favorite sweater, anticipation of the winter holidays right around the corner – it’s all magic to me.

However, for the past four years, my fall seasons have been fraught with distressing memories and emotional pain. In fall 2012, my abuser died.

The weeks and months following his death were excruciating. I can remember that time only in flashes and bursts, like a broken movie reel in front of my face: The funeral. The procession to the cemetery. Placing my hand on the casket before it lowered into the ground. His friends and family, telling me he still asked about me even just one week before he died, that I was the first person they thought to call, even though our relationship had ended over a year ago. Pictures, letters, gifts from our four-year relationship, returned to me and left to sit in my home. Suffering.

Throughout those weeks and months, I could feel something massive bubbling to the surface. I knew our relationship was very unhealthy, but I never had the tools to actually call it abuse until he died, after learning more about consent, feminism, and autonomy in my first year of college. I didn’t know what to say to these people, his family and friends who loved him, who told me repeatedly he still cared about me. I wanted to shout something, anything: “You don’t know the truth,” “don’t believe what he told you,” and even “he was a bad man” all sat at the bottom of my throat, desperately needing to jump out. But we’re not allowed to speak ill of the dead, so I was silent, and stayed silent until I could no longer handle the pain anymore.

Right now, I feel like my body is filled with heavy rocks. Instead of flesh, blood, and guts, I am made up of stones and boulders, rendering me unmovable with their collective weight, each rock a reminder of the sexual trauma and emotional scars I carry with me wherever I go. Each fall brings a different sharp edge, a heavier feeling of fullness, but the rocks never go away. As a survivor and a depressed person, they live with me.

Those rocks are why I write about sex.

I write about sex because talking about pleasure is revolutionary. I also write about sex because my own sexual autonomy was taken away from me, and I am working to boldly and unapologetically reclaim it every day.

Each fall since my abuser’s death brings up something new for me. One fall, it was that the relationship was abusive. Another, I discovered it was very difficult for me to have sex at all, or even masturbate, in the weeks surrounding the anniversary of my abuser’s death. This fall, I’ve been thinking about how my blog has been absolutely crucial in my continual healing process, especially healing from my sexual trauma.

Until I started using sex toys, all of the sex I had and the way I viewed myself and my pleasure were through the lens of what my abuser did to my body and what he told me about my body. Even though I had sex with other people in the time between his death and when I started using toys, I never masturbated, I didn’t feel connected to my body, and I certainly did not have a grasp on what pleasure meant for me as an individual.

When I bought my first sex toys, that started to change. I felt in control of my pleasure for the first time; finally able to begin my journey towards reclaiming my own sexual narrative and my own autonomy. I had my first orgasm and felt more powerful than ever before. I felt good about my body for the first time in years. I felt desirable because I desired myself. It was revolutionary.

I don’t know what this fall will bring, but I do know this: sex toys help me heal, and writing about sex and having a supportive community of bloggers by my side help soothe the weight of those rocks tumbling around inside me. The stones never disappear, and they may grow heavier still, but I am still here. I am here, and I am healing.

If you are a survivor, you are not alone. Please know that you are loved and supported. You matter because you are here in this world, and you matter to me.