Author’s Note: This piece gathers threads from years of writing about sexuality, travel, relationship, and personal integration. If you’re trying to understand the direction of my writing, this is a good place to start.
Where Things Actually Ended
When I began this blogging journey, I wrote about my travels, some philosophy and a lot from erotic hunger—from the charge of sexual desire and the way sex seemed to illuminate questions about relationship aliveness, connection, intimacy and truth. That part of me hasn’t disappeared, even as my writing has turned more toward deeper reflection about my life and identity. What changed over time was that the erotic stopped being one of the main pathways into relationship and instead became part of it. Desire began to include learning how to speak and listen better, having patience, repairing misunderstandings, and doing the subtle work of staying present with another person over time. My questions around sexuality and “the erotic” didn’t disappear—they became part of something more relational, something more about living life undivided. The sexual models the erotic but doesn’t exhaust it, as one of my teachers used to say.
This expansion happened across continents and chapters of my life. Sabbatical travels through Nepal, India, Cambodia, Colombia, Thailand and many other places eventually stripped away familiar identities—professor, son, warrior—and left me face-to-face with simpler truths. We are born into love, slowly conditioned into fear, and spend much of our lives finding our way back to love again. Love is an action we do, not just something we feel. In the markets and cafes around the world, I realized I no longer had to perform or impress anyone. I was just another person moving through the world. I could finally be myself, and the different parts of my life finally began to intertwine more easily together.
But for a lot of those years I wasn’t living or writing freely. Part of me and my writing was always being held back. I kept an online alias and two separate websites. Underneath my desire and relationships was a force I didn’t fully see back then: shame. Shame ran the show. It dictated how I lived my relationships and how I expressed my sexuality. It told me that the “Professor” could not coexist with the “Sex Worker,” and that the “Black Sheep” from an abusive family had no place to quietly exist.
For twenty-five years in the classroom, I taught culinary arts not just as a skill, but as a doorway for students to discover creativity and personal growth, while hiding the erotic explorer, the shadow worker, and the one carrying family wounds of silence, control, and manipulation. Academic culture demanded curriculum and delivery be highly polished. Family dynamics demanded loyalty without naming the disfunction. Looking back, I realize I lived somewhat like a fugitive, constantly scanning the borders to make sure no part of me leaked into the others or crossed into the wrong place. I still feel frustration toward the systems – the college, academic hierarchy and family – that required I wear those masks. I spent years performing in a high-stakes life theater, and I carry real grief for the energy I wasted believing I had no choice if I wanted to survive.
That grief sharpened in April 2024 with my father’s unexpected passing, an end of an era mixed with relief, confusion, and a complete rearrangement of my inner world. During the previous years, America continued to feel no longer like home. Leaving didn’t feel like escape so much as the next step in integrating my life. Thailand’s “sabai sabai” way of living captures my attempt to move towards ease and contentment. At the same time, I live amid the paradox of “saving face,” where difficult truths simmer beneath social harmony. My family rupture continues to echo in different ways. Old patterns of withdrawal, abandonment, choosing certainty over curiosity, and loyalty without truth telling – all reminding me how a divided life keeps repeating itself until it can finally get named.
The Rigidity of the Mask
Writing from a life no longer split between my erotic self, my professional self, and my history now feels a bit disorienting. Partly because I never experienced this kind of freedom, this degree of integration, clearly enough to know which identity I was meant to stand in. In my writing, I’m trying to describe what becomes visible once I stop dividing myself into separate roles and stop trying to keep different parts of my life apart. The ground I am walking on feels less certain right now, but it also feels more genuine and honest.
This internal integration isn’t just changing how I understand myself, it’s also changing what I can see in my relationships. As I stopped working so hard to keep different parts of myself separate, I started noticing something I had missed before. The conversations that ended my relationships didn’t happen at the end. They happened earlier, over time, when things accumulated and became unsayable.
I remember moments when people shared vulnerabilities with me, and instead of allowing myself to empathize and be fully affected, I retreated into safer responses based on experience or perceived knowledge. The same pattern appeared in family silences, in travel companions’ indirectness, and in Asian cultural cues where saving face often conceals direct truth. The rift didn’t form because of conflict, but because we stopped being curious and started assuming our perspectives were right.
I remember sitting with someone I cared about, talking about a disagreement that had been circling us for weeks. It wasn’t dramatic. No raised voices, no cruelty – just a familiar loop we couldn’t seem to get out of. I tried to explain how I experienced the situation, not to convince them, but to be understood. They listened, then explained why they saw it differently. That part was normal.
And here’s where things went wrong. There was no curiosity from either of us, no open-ended or follow-up questions, no sense that either of our perspectives had affected the other even slightly. It felt like my words were processed and then set aside, not because they didn’t matter, but because their position was already fixed. And if I’m honest, I know there were moments in other relationships where I did the same thing. I was too interested in being right and protecting myself. Hiding behind one of my identity “masks” instead of allowing myself to be unsettled by what someone else was trying to tell me.
When Intensity Did the Talking
For years, I explained the endings in my life – relational, professional, mentored, even familial – as incompatibility. We had different needs, opposing values, different stages of growth, different paths in the world. Those explanations seemed reasonable and generous. They allowed everyone to leave without being blamed as the problem.
But those explanations missed something harder to admit. Many of those relationships ended because, at a certain point, neither of us knew how to stay curious once we believed we were right. We became more committed to our positions than to understanding each other. Once that certainty set in, the relationship narrowed. Conversations lost their openness. We weren’t trying to understand anymore; we were defending positions.
Looking back, I can see how often the excitement of attraction, emotional intensity and the relief of feeling deeply understood carried me past an important moment. I stopped asking curious questions and started assuming I already knew what was happening. That excitement made decisions feel obvious and gave me a reason to move forward. I moved ahead without paying much attention to what I was actually building or what kind of future possibilities I wanted to create.
More than once, sexual chemistry itself became the focal point of the relationship. Everything else felt secondary because the erotic connection was so strong. And when that intensity naturally faded, we were left facing realities we had never really talked about – differences in values, personal needs, and how we handled conflict. Once the chemistry carrying us wore off, there wasn’t enough underneath to keep us moving forward together.
I believed that in the beginning if the chemistry and connection felt intense, the relationship itself must be right. That belief wasn’t naïve. It came from real experiences of connection, intimacy and aliveness. But it left me less attentive to what happened once the erotic charge diminished, and the real work of relationship began. What once felt like the driving force eventually revealed its limits. Attraction can open doors to intimacy and connection, but without sustained curiosity and a willingness to be affected by another person, we remain essentially unchanged by each other.
I can see now how easily erotic charge can coexist with emotional inflexibility. In fact, the two can reinforce each other. Strong attraction creates closeness and intensity so quickly that deeper differences often get overlooked or postponed. Good sex can happen there. What it doesn’t reliably produce is longevity. At the time, I thought openness meant expression, by speaking honestly, naming desire, being direct. What I didn’t yet understand was that openness also requires allowing yourself to be shaped by what you hear from the other person.
What I Now Think Sustains Intimacy
What I am paying more attention to now isn’t why intimacy breaks down or when the erotic intensity stops carrying a relationship. It’s what’s actually required once desire alone isn’t enough. Intimacy depends less on mutual feelings and physical attraction and more on whether two people are willing to keep turning toward each other when things become uncomfortable, unresolved, or disappointing – especially when it would be easier to choose certainty and leave.
I’ve felt this from the inside for a long time, and it’s been the hardest part to practice. There’s a subtle moment when we stop asking questions because we think we know what the other person means, intends, or is reacting to. That confidence can feel grounded and mature, but it can also become a form of withdrawal from the relationship. Over the years – in men’s circles, in relationships, and in adapting to Asian cultural settings – I’ve seen the cost of that withdrawal. Isolation grows when we stop allowing ourselves to be affected by one another.
What keeps intimacy alive now feels simpler than it once did. It comes down to whether I’m willing to stay engaged and empathetic when emotions get tense or things feel awkward or unresolved. I’ve learned how easily harmony can be maintained at the expense of truth telling – especially in saving face cultures, where politeness often takes priority over honesty. But avoiding discomfort doesn’t protect connection, it slowly erodes it. Intimacy deepens when we’re willing to feel each other’s perspectives and let the conversations remain unsettled long enough for something real to shift.
This is where the repair actually happens: listening deeply without rushing to fulfil a selfish need to defend or deflect, asking follow-up questions that show we’re listening and still open, and taking responsibility for our own feelings instead of assuming we already know what’s happening. In men’s circles, I’ve watched men counter isolative tendencies by speaking honestly about what they’re feeling, turning loneliness into a shared experience. The same holds true in partnership. Curiosity isn’t passive – it’s an active responsibility to choose to stay, listen, remain present, repair ruptures, and to allow our perspectives to change through what we hear from the other.
In the beginning, excitement and desire may ignite the relational spark, and vulnerability may open the door to connection. But what keeps the flame steady is this ongoing practice: allowing ourselves to be affected, paying attention to one another, and learning how to stay connected over time. Intimacy lasts when we treat relationship as an ongoing practice, weaving relational patience into the fabric of love. It’s the expansion of the erotic into the more challenging work of staying present with each other. This kind of staying runs against much of what we’re taught – to replace, to leave when things get hard—but I can see now how costly that impulse has been.
Cid-ānanda-ghana: Undivided
I’m aware that this way of speaking about intimacy is easy to misread and doesn’t translate across cultural lines. To some, it can sound like I’m retreating from traditional relationship values, a loss of my own self-respect, or a collection of ideas used to glorify my maturity. To others, it can sound like hesitation – an unwillingness to speak my truth, an over-cautiousness about naming sex and erotic life publicly, or a lack of commitment to my own desires and beliefs. Neither of these explanations feel particularly accurate.
What I’m trying to describe is a movement into living an undivided life, something I’ve been working toward for years. I’m finally at a place where I have nothing to prove to anyone and no secrets left to manage. This has meant integrating parts of myself that were long kept separate: the professor’s mind, the sex worker’s body, the group facilitator, and the black sheep of the family.
It also means weaving together the experiences that reshaped me – years of international travel that stripped away fixed ideas of cultural identity, my father’s passing that rearranged my family life, years of teaching that asked me to carry responsibility for students’ growth, even as I learned that no one can be taught until they’re willing to learn, and many years of erotic inquiry that forced me to confront my own limits around intimacy, vulnerability, and honesty. I’m trying to hold all of this as one coherent expression, if that’s even possible.
Where I’ve landed is simpler to describe than it is to live as an ongoing life practice.
Desire and chemistry can open the door to connection. What sustains intimacy once staying becomes the harder choice is a shared willingness to remain curious about each other—especially when things get uncomfortable.
Life will deliver what it will, regardless of how we plan or what we hope for. Much is outside our control. The only real choice we have is whether we meet what arrives as resistance or something we’re willing to learn from – even when it’s not what we wanted.
Maybe this is what enlightenment actually looks like: a steady relationship with uncertainty and unpredictability. Living life without guarantees. Remaining open when the ground feels shaky and we want to run. Staying curious about the mess is what keeps despair and rigidity from taking over.
I don’t feel finished. But I do feel more undivided. The ground is less certain than it once was, and I have finally stopped hiding and performing.
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