I love to keep things fun and sexy on this blog, but this story that I’m about to share with you is a bit vulnerable however this blog is called Underneath Your Lingerie. I’ve titled that for deep spiritual reasons but also I’ve named the blog that because sometimes as women we have to look a little deeper underneath our lace and that’s what happened to me two weeks ago.
See for the past 5 years I’ve been on a journey that I didn’t sign up for. My goal was to break a certain generational pattern. I had wanted to find a safe place to heal from life. As a trainer I had down every rep within myself that I had ever known and I knew that I had to go find a new one because the rep that I needed wasn’t in me. So I packed everything that I owned into my Toyota camry. I’m insanely close with my family and leaving them was the hardest thing I had ever done, especially after we had just lost our angel. And I traveled across the country, looking for a safe place to “Come home to my wings.” As I shared with a girlfriend one time, “All this time I’ve been searching for a safe place to come home to my wings and I can’t find one.” Which is pretty ironic when you think about it, here I am a woman who wrote a book called Your Sparkle Is Inside of You where I interviewed women who found a way to live life again, found a way to find their inner sparkle, and while I interviewed them they were wearing wings, angel wings that I had recreated in the image of the Angels in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.
“You see the words Victoria’s Secret. I have made you victorious. Victorious secrets are inside of you and the victory has been won.”
“You fight for victory, not from it.”
This is a quote that a girlfriend (who I’ve now lost) shared with me.
This blog originally wasn’t going to be called Underneath Your Lingerie, at the time I was working at Victoria’s Secret and I turned to one of my Angels at the store that I worked with (this was at the time that I had just started using the metaphor of as women our bodies being lingerie). I was talking about our customers with her and I remember that I said to her, “You know as women we often think it’s our lingerie (i.e. our bodies) but really it’s what’s underneath it.” At the time I was referencing the reason why women especially are treated the way that we as women are for our bodies.
Well 2 weeks ago the metaphor Underneath Your Lingerie took a different approach. I needed a safe place, a safe house that was all women to live in. For the past couple of years I had been through something so physically and spiritually degrading and violating at person who I don’t want to call him a man…demon is more like it. A demon who enjoyed doing things to me out of desperation. To this day I can’t believe that I’m alive, I thought I was going to die. I had a list of women’s only domestic violence shelters that another women who also felt that I was in danger had helped me find. Another woman who was aware of what was happening had been in a similar situation and she had encouraged me to create as much content for my Only Fans so that way I would have some form of income and she also recommend searching around for domestic violence shelters and moving far away from where I was.
My brother helped me get out of the house. My mom prayed for me, and those of you with mothers, mother figures, or grandma’s know that there is nothing like a mothers prayer. As soon as I got into the Lyft I started sobbing uncontrollably. It’s only been a few months but I still cry, it’s like the trauma and the impossibility of what I’ve been through on a spiritual physical level just wrecks me. The sad thing is that I was too scared to call the shelters. The reviews of them scared me – a few of them mentioned murders, strange men that walked the hallways in a women’s shelter, and review after review was about how hard it was to get into them. Also I knew that my story was so impossible that no one would believe it. That’s why now when it comes to a life experience I often turn it into a metaphor or an analogy and preserve it in the “Body of a Goddess” section of this blog.
I came up with the term the Body of a Goddess because I believe that inside every woman is the body of a goddess – untouched by anything that has ever happened to them, and that includes inside of my own body – although sometimes, especially in these moments that I’m sharing about with you I don’t feel in touch with her. Another reason why I use the term the Body of a Goddess because circling back to my experience working at Victoria’s Secret. It was never about the lingerie that a woman puts on. It was about the body that she feels like she’s wearing as she slips it off. Most women are ashamed about their bodies. However if women were able to slip off their lingerie and feel like they were wearing the body of goddess instead of a body that they feel self conscious, insecure, and embarrassed about it would change everything.
No wonder we don’t feel confident about our design. Look at how we’ve been treated. As Tyra Banks represented for me as she walked down the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show runway, the secret to wearing lingerie is all how you own it.
I logged into an ancient Facebook account that I had way back in college (I’ve deleted most of my social media, seems healthier) and found a girl who had just graduated and along with her roommate who also shared the room with her, was subletting her room for the summer. The room was in a college house with multiple girls. I was a little worried but one of my mindset and high spiritual performance coaches had counseled me that after being around such a heavy masculine force it would be helpful to be around feminine energy. I knew she was right, I had been attending free yoga classes down the street and just from being around the women in the yoga class I was almost sick from the feminine energy, it was almost a dizzy feeling that I couldn’t describe. I should have asked more questions around this because once I moved in the waves of feminine energy were so powerful that I could barely walk. I couldn’t go back to my coach for more directions. And on top of my shock traumatized body (and my ongoing personal things), it was a lot and it took a few weeks to get things somewhat balanced. The problem was that I only had 7 weeks.
I started, still faint from my chronic health sickness of my body to struggle to continue to bring in income through camming and my Only Fans while also looking for places to live.
It felt like I was under some kind of attack, 4 of my youtube channels were deleted by YouTube (a couple of my videos had 200,000, 300,000 views) and it had been the main driver to my Only Angels. My subscribers dropped from 51 to 22. My marketing technique although risque it’s more like Playboy so it’s not what every man really wants. My only source of income that I really had was camming and my sickness completely drained my funds. While in this I was looking for places to live, which was emotionally very hard for me. And place after place kept on falling through. Mind you and this might seem like a small thing, and it’s not that I’m wasn’t grateful for the space because I was and it saved my life. It was next to Trader Joes which has life’s greatest treasure – Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups for only 99 cents, it’s everything. It was a large gorgeous room.
But in the kitchen it was really dirty and a few days after moving in I saw it.
The biggest roach in my life.
Which is saying something because I thought Texas roaches were big. This was like an alien roach. Fast forward just a short time and the entire house was crawling with them. One of the girls was cooking on the stove and a roach fell into her food. It was beyond what I could take and nothing – we tried every bug spray in the world, we tried foggers nothing worked.
So this is just to explain that at the time my mental state was shaky at best. And in my shaky mental state I choose a bad place to live. Housing is hard to find, especially now. Because of the stigma that sex work has I can’t share with others what I do for work, which adds to the stress and it’s not safe because if someone does find out what you do in private, even though it doesn’t hurt anyone they will or at least can use this new information to hurt you.
I had to be out by Friday. So on that Monday I agreed to live with a woman who I could tell was a fellow angel but there were a few red flags. I buried them down, tried to ignore these flags. I looked up homeless shelters in the area but the reviews were very similar to the other ones before and in my health condition I still spend a lot of time in bedridden in bed. Now I just want to share here that I never believe in looking like what you are going through. It’s a concept that I learned from Niecy Nash. In her days of hosting the show Clean House she would always wear a flower in her hair, and even today she dresses to the nines and I remember once reading the caption on one of her fabulous IG posts and she said that she believes in never looking like what you are going through. She said that at the of her life, when she’s in heaven if the devil looks in and is excited to see the women who dragged through the mud she wants him to be surprised because she’ll be standing there laughing, filled with joy, and not looking like a thing she’s gone through. So ever since then I’ve worn things like flowers in my hair sometimes even tiaras just because of this philosophy. Whether it’s a beautiful dress (which of the few clothes that I’ve kept I’ve kept them) or wing eyeliner everything that I put on represents another aspect of who I am.
Ok back to my story, and it’s taking me a long time to share it because of all the shame I feel. I want to just hug myself. I know that posts like this aren’t a way to heal – it’s not professional, but in a way it is. I learned a lot about that house and women. See a few years ago at one of the Victoria’s Secrets that I worked at there were a lot of 20 something year olds and they attacked me. And I never understood why. I had attempted to pour into them. And it wasn’t everyone, there’s even a couple of diamonds that still this day I talk too. However at the time it really hurt.
There’s something that I’ve always found so inspirational about women in their 20’s. Well women and men and other regardless of how that person may identify. In your 20’s, fresh out of college or still in college you have this fight and over time it leaves you.
So for me it was very inspirational and a kind reminder that the scared beaten up broken feeling like a woman wasn’t who I always had been, I had once been that 20 something year old with dreams too. And this isn’t to sound like a victim, it’s to give an inside look at my heart, being real, being a human being. As it says in a quote that of my girlfriends once shared with me, “Telling my heart to beat again.” When I interviewed her for the book Your Sparkle Is Inside of You (the book where some of the same girls that hurt me are in) she shared with me that I was heart surgeon was doing brain surgery and after the surgery – while they were still on the operating table, the surgeon had done everything that he could but the patients heart still wasn’t beating. And so the surgeon leaned close to the patient who was still under anesthesia and whispered to him.
“Okay I’ve done everything that I could. Tell your heart to beat again.”
And you know what? The patient’s heart started beating again!
Sometimes we have to bring our lingerie back to life on our body. As this video shows here. It’s a bra that I had seen over and over at Victoria’s Secret and thought it was so ugly. At the outlet store all the bras come to us in a box and we sell most of them at the same price. The old tags are still on them though and I never understood why the original price of the bra was so high. I was in shock when I saw what i saw in the video below, I even limed a video for one of my girlfriends who I used to work with at the store (the one below) and I sent a video to my old store manager and assistant store manager of the bra (at V.S. we’re a a V.S. family for life regardless from where we are from) and my store manager (whose also in the Sparkle book as well) told me, “You know I was just thinking that about the bralette the other day. It wasn’t until I actually put it on the mannequin that it looked beautiful. Sometimes you just don’t know what a piece of lingerie really is until you breath life into it.”
The same Victoria’s Secret store when I left, they sent me a pair of Angel wings! Literally my life feels like it’s right out of a story sometimes! And in that house with the different girls and the one male roommate (who their girls told me he’s their Ken, our wireless password was BarbieBitch) so ultimately it was the right house for me to live in. And I did encounter a healing being with other women.
I also met the ugly side of other women too.
On my last day of living there, just 2 weeks ago I was just too worried about the next place that I was going to move into. I spoke with my best friend, I spoke with a couple of family members – my mom and my brother and shared my concerns and they all told me that it sounded really dangerous and I was about to get myself into a bad spot which could be hard to get out of – there were just too many factors, and since an abusive ex was also involved I was worried. I had just escaped an abusive situation. So I decided to book an AirBnB for the weekend. The airbnb was my entire security deposit. And super beyond thanks for my brothers and mom for giving me the money to cover what I lost so I could find a new spot. When someones going through trauma or had been through a lot of trauma it can get to a point where their unable to function and do normal things. I couldn’t physically carry my things and didn’t have a set place to move them too. My bags had already been packed and moved out of the house (to go to the other spot). One of the girls at the house had been volunteered to drive me over to the other spot, later she became rather forceful with it (which I learned she couldn’t actually drive the car so glad I didn’t get in). And then when I went to book my airbnb do you know what happened? She intentionally pulled the modem so I couldn’t use the internet. I was treated so bad.
All my things, which I had already downsized from my trip there and in the 7 weeks I had lived there, a couple times a week I would downsize and throw more things away. But it was still too much for me to carry on my own. And so I lost most of my stuff. Now in saying that I also kept a ton of things too, to the point that when I did find a place to live it took me hours to unpack (mind you I would unpack one bag and then rest an hour because all my body feels so empty). But at that moment I didn’t know I was going to find a place to live and it was going to be for the weekend.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. Especially financially. I didn’t know where the blessings were going to come from and I’m so thankful that they did.
But as I threw away my things, unpacking my luggage and throwing thing after thing away I went into meditation mode. One of the girls was sweet she came up to me in shock and said she was so sorry. But the other two girls…they stood there and made snide comments, you know how girls can get, it was dig after dig – silly things like “Wow your throwing away a lot” “Where are you going to go again” “What time is your airbnb, when is it going to be ready.” (that was a popular question) “How are you going to get there, taking a lyft” Innocent questions but their eyes they way the would rush away and you could literally feel yourself being talking about. I think they were enjoying or really wanted to see me break. I didn’t though, losing my brother was more painful then this. I couldn’t look them in the eyes though and I could see them glowing at how they enjoyed it. Underneath my lingerie I didn’t feel like I was wearing the body of a goddess. Underneath my lingerie I felt like I was wearing a body that was scared and didn’t know what to do.
I even gave one of them this gorgeous African painting of a woman who looked just like Oshun. The painting was going to have to go to the trash. I even threw away a leopard print rug (which I majorly regret – those things are expensive). But I didn’t know where I was going to live, I was using my house money, yes I ended up borrowing money from others but this was a lot.
It was kind of funny because once everyone had cleared out and it was just the cleaners who had been hired to clean the house and I, they accidently had thrown away my food so I went to trader joes and bought more food (my airbnb wasn’t ready) and had sotpped at McDonalds for some water, fries (que the carbs) and even the manager at McDonald’s tried to throw me out, I guess they have a lot of homeless people there so I bought more food, I was oging to anyone that way I could stay there longer. It was just a long, long day. When I returned back to sit outside the house the cleaners were still finishing up, the head cleaner who was a male was nicer than the girls who had laughed at me throwing away my things. He actually was worried, “Is someone coming for you?” He asked, and he said it with so much concern.
I had book my airbnb at the last minute and so it wasn’t ready until later so I waited a bit before ordering my lyft and heading over.
The next day I was at the ocean. I hadn’t even realized at the time that I had booked an airbnb by an ocean! The host and I had problems, but it just goes to show that spiritual world really is real. I’ve realized when I’m tired the wrong type of men and women show up, they can almost sense my auric or energy field. However I walked over that barrier too, still trying to find inner grace.
The day after that I was moving into a new place.
Still not sure how I got here. Or if it will crash. I think I’m just scared and there’s still so many unknowns that I don’t know if I’ll ever write about or if I’ll forever hold in close to my heart.
Thank you for reading this bit of healing for me.
Underneath my lingerie.
This is what I went through.
Yes Underneath our lingerie stands for this glowy essence that makes us our women.
But underneath our lingerie we get to choose within this glowly essence to be ashamed. To hang our heads. To accept our abuse. Or to become the woman in Maya Angelou’s poem ” And Still I Rise.”
Underneath our lingerie is all the things that we can’t see, from galaxies, to diamonds. But also underneath our lingerie are things that we can see…like our grace, honor, and dignity. And those are parts of our lingerie that even when we feel like it – never fall off.
