The Freedom to Stay

I’ve been celibate for almost a year.

Voluntarily.

I say that because there’s a difference between the absence of intimacy and the decision not to pursue it. This hasn’t been about a lack of opportunity, nor have I suddenly discovered some moral superiority in abstaining from sex. I’ve lived enough life to know that desire doesn’t disappear simply because you decide to approach it differently.

If anything, I’ve become more aware of it.

I’ve had people express attraction to me physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Some appreciate the way I look. Others are drawn to the way I think, the things I write, or the conversations we have. I’m grateful for the compliments, but there’s also something exhausting about being desired when you’re trying to understand what kind of connection you actually need.

And I want to be careful here. I don’t believe people are necessarily reducing me to an object when they express attraction. People are emotional beings. We’re curious, complicated, physical, and often drawn toward qualities we don’t fully understand ourselves.

I’ve experienced attraction in much the same way.

I’m bi. I have no interest in concealing it to make anyone more comfortable. I’ve explored my sexuality, had many experiences, and shared intimacy with different people throughout my life. Men flirt with me, and I indulge. The Greeks gave desire a god: Eros. I’ve never been ashamed to entertain him, but I refuse to let him rule me.

But there’s another dimension to my attraction that I understand quite clearly.

I’m strongly attracted to men, but my attraction to women has always been greater. There’s something about women that moves through me in ways I struggle to explain. It’s physical, certainly, but it goes far beyond that. I see beauty, life, tenderness, intelligence, and the possibility of a love that extends into the ordinary years of growing older together.

When I imagine spending the rest of my life with someone, it’s a woman I see.

I can appreciate a man’s beauty, enjoy the flirtation, and experience genuine attraction without imagining myself falling in love with him. Romantic love, as I’ve come to understand it within myself, has always drawn me toward women. That’s where I see my future. Not just in the excitement of desire, but in the intimacy of choosing one woman and continuing to choose her.

Perhaps that sounds contradictory to some people. It doesn’t confuse me.

I don’t need a scale to explain every dimension of my sexuality, nor do I need to distribute my attraction equally to prove that it’s real. I know what I feel. I know what I desire. And I know the difference between someone who awakens attraction and someone with whom I can imagine building an entire life.

I don’t regret having a history.

Nor do I believe that a meaningful future requires me to condemn my past.

But I’m changing.

And I’ve begun asking myself whether the freedom to pursue intimacy whenever it’s available is the same as the freedom to choose what genuinely nourishes me.

Because I no longer want to be intimate with someone simply because the opportunity exists.

I want to share my body, my mind, my affection, my curiosity, and my passion with one woman. A woman who understands that desire doesn’t end when the physical encounter is over. Someone interested in the ordinary human being beneath the intensity of attraction.

I want conversations that continue when neither of us has anything impressive to say.

I want to be loved when I’m tired.

I want to know someone beyond the version of themselves they present to the world, and I want to offer that same honesty in return.

There’s something frightening about that kind of intimacy. It’s easier, in some ways, to be desired by many people than to allow one person to truly know you.

Attention can be temporary. Being known requires a different kind of courage.

And I’m beginning to wonder how much of my past pursuit of desire was really about connection, and how much was about movement. Another encounter. Another distraction. Another opportunity to avoid sitting alone with questions I wasn’t prepared to answer.

I don’t think every intimate experience needs to carry some profound spiritual meaning. Sometimes desire is simply desire. It’s physical, pleasurable, instinctive, and entirely human.

But I also don’t want to spend my life treating it as something disconnected from the rest of me.

The body remembers things the mind would rather explain away.

I’ve been thinking about that as I grow older. About how the body carries illness, pleasure, exhaustion, memory, and longing. How it can be strong one moment and vulnerable the next. How easily we can begin treating it as a machine that needs to perform rather than a living part of ourselves deserving attention and care.

There’s a peculiar contradiction in wanting to transcend the limitations of the body while also wanting to experience everything it makes possible.

Touch. Movement. Sensation. Affection. The comfort of another person’s presence.

I don’t want to escape being human. I want to understand it.

Jung’s exploration of the shadow has made me think about desire differently. The parts of ourselves we hide aren’t necessarily evil or shameful. Sometimes they’re simply the things we’ve never learned to understand without judgment.

I have no interest in declaring war on my own sexuality.

The goal isn’t to eliminate desire. It’s to stop allowing desire to make decisions that belong to the whole person.

There’s an important difference between restraint and repression. Repression asks me to deny what I feel. Restraint allows me to acknowledge it and still decide what I want to do.

That distinction has become important to me.

The Tao Te Ching offers another way of approaching this. I’ve been drawn to its refusal to equate power with force. The more tightly we try to control everything, the more we risk losing our relationship with the natural movement of life.

I’m learning that I don’t have to chase every feeling. I don’t have to force connection, manufacture certainty, or turn every attraction into an experience.

Some things can exist without needing to possess them.

And some forms of longing deserve to be understood before they’re satisfied.

I’ve also been thinking about Venus.

A planet that appears in our skies as both morning star and evening star. The same celestial body, observed at different moments, carrying different names. In Roman mythology, a goddess associated with beauty, love, fertility, and desire.

It’s fascinating how human beings have looked toward the heavens and given form to the things we experience within ourselves.

Our longing. Our attraction. Our fascination with beauty. Our desire to create life, meaning, and connection.

But beauty isn’t always something to possess. And desire doesn’t have to end in conquest.

There’s a difference between admiring something and believing it exists for our consumption.

I’m becoming more interested in that difference.

In the feminine as something beyond an object of attraction. In the maternal symbols that appear throughout ancient mythology. In the ways people have imagined creation, nourishment, fertility, and the sacred long before the religious traditions many of us inherited took their present forms.

The Great Mother, for me, is becoming a question worth exploring rather than a doctrine to accept.

What have human beings been trying to understand through these symbols? What does creation mean beyond reproduction? What happens when we stop treating the body as an obstacle to spirituality and begin examining how deeply the two experiences are connected?

These questions have become part of my changing relationship with Christianity.

I’m moving away from some of the certainties I once inherited. That doesn’t require me to dismiss everything those traditions gave me, or deny the meaningful experiences I’ve had within them. But I want to investigate spirituality without being instructed in advance where the investigation must end.

I don’t need another set of walls.

I want space to question the nature of the divine, the origins of religious symbols, and the human longing for something beyond ourselves.

I want to understand why we have spent so much of our history reaching toward the heavens while struggling to accept the humanity standing directly in front of us.

Perhaps some of my questions about spirituality are really questions about intimacy.

How do we connect without controlling? How do we love without possessing? How do we maintain individuality while allowing someone else into the most vulnerable parts of our lives?

And how do we recognize what we want without allowing our wants to become another form of captivity?

Turning forty has brought these questions closer to the surface.

People sometimes talk about this age as though freedom suddenly arrives with experience. But age alone doesn’t make anyone free. I’ve known people much older than me who remain prisoners of habits they refuse to question.

Freedom requires participation.

It requires the uncomfortable work of recognizing when your own behavior no longer reflects the person you’re trying to become.

I used to think freedom meant having the ability to leave anything behind.

A relationship. A place. An expectation. A version of myself that no longer felt comfortable.

Now I’m discovering another possibility.

Maybe freedom is having the ability to remain without feeling trapped.

To experience attraction without surrendering judgment. To acknowledge anger without becoming cruel. To feel anxiety without allowing it to dismantle everything I’ve worked to create.

To love another person without disappearing into them.

To be alone without interpreting solitude as rejection.

And to share myself without giving away the parts of me I need to remain whole.

I don’t know when I’ll become intimate with someone again. I’m not keeping a calendar of deprivation or waiting for some imaginary moment of spiritual perfection.

I’m simply no longer in a hurry.

There are things I want more than another temporary encounter.

I want peace that doesn’t depend on isolation. Strength that doesn’t require emotional distance. A love that makes room for two complete human beings rather than asking either one to become smaller.

I want to experience desire without using it to escape myself.

And maybe that’s where self-preservation begins.

Not in rejecting the body. Not in fearing intimacy. Not in retreating from the world.

But in learning that I can welcome love, beauty, pleasure, and uncertainty into my life without abandoning the man I’ve worked so hard to become.

I spent years believing freedom was somewhere beyond the next departure.

Now I’m beginning to find it in the decision to remain.

Here, in this changing body.

Here, in this unfinished life.

Here, as Rashad.