WELCOME TO THE “IN THEIR OWN SKIN” SERIES.

One of the biggest honors of my job as a boudoir photographer is hearing the stories clients share with me. While these stories are not mine to share on a public platform, I hold them close in my heart. They bring me inspiration, strength, and light in a way that only true humanity and vulnerability can.

I created the “In Their Own Skin” series to share some of these stories with you. The “In Their Own Skin” participants graciously consented to share their stories (told in their own words) alongside their boudoir pictures. My sincere hope is that these stories and pictures will bring you moments of strength, uplift your soul, and encourage you to keep moving forward, especially as we navigate these challenging times.

I’m excited to introduce you to “E,” the final participant in the “In Their Own Skin” series. “E” talks about her connection with her body and how it’s changed over the years. She also shares powerful thoughts on how unlearning the patriarchy and leaning into her own queerness are informing her view of her body’s purpose and abilities. Here are her words.

“I’m ‘E,’ I use she/her pronouns, I’m 29, and I’m from Minnesota. For work, I’m a sex educator. Talking about bodies is a lot of my work, and it’s also something I care very deeply about.”

“I felt a really strong connection to my body.”

“I was very lucky in the sense that I really felt a really strong connection with my body as a kid. My body was a thing that let me climb trees really fast and run around and get in the mud. My body was this tool that allowed me to do all these things that I love to do. I also grew up being a dancer, and that’s something that I begged my parents to let me do from the time I was three years old. They were like, ‘Let's find a studio that’s not about performance and competition and things like that,’ so they found one when I was six and I started dancing. My mom says that even when I was really young, dancing was my way of being in the world – and so I think I felt a strong connection to my body for a really long time.

“In high school, I started to be feel like my body was this separate thing from me. My body changed as I went through puberty, and all of a sudden I had breasts and none of my friends did, and at a larger size than other people too. All of a sudden I was being told that a lot of my worth was in my body.

“I got diagnosed with ADHD two years ago. Looking back at my whole high school career, I never felt like my brain was ‘enough’ in comparison to all my friends, and so I think I really latched onto, ‘Okay, well I can have this power in my body.’ Through college, and even up until a couple years ago, I felt like I had to perform with my body.”

“My body is an integral part of me.”

“I think the last couple years have been about unlearning all of that, and unlearning that when it comes to queerness. I think that’s been a part of reclaiming my body – that it’s not for the consumption of cisgender men specifically, but that my body is an integral part of me and that we’re all one part rather than this separated thing. That’s where I’m at now: I am really trying to view my body as a whole.

“During the last year specifically, I’ve been really intentional about not putting myself around any commentary on dieting or exercise. I started to put up a lot more boundaries around that stuff, where I’m not okay with casual comments about ‘deserving food’ or things like that.”

“The more I use my body, the more I’m able to hear it.”

“The more I’ve been listening to my body over the last year, I feel like I’m getting a more organic sense of what my body needs. I can tell what the line is when I’m hiking or something – I can tell the line between, ‘It’s harder to breathe at this higher elevation but this is fun, I feel strong, and my body is enjoying this!,” versus “I’m pushing myself too much, I need to take a break.’

“I’m a very curious person. When I’m really in my element and feeling the most myself and the most grounded, I feel very playful. I think that connects to my body, too. I love doing outdoors stuff because there’s something new every time and it’s so exciting. There’s such an opportunity to be curious and my body allows me to be able to facilitate that.

“The more I use my body, the more I’m able to hear it. That kind of connection between pleasure and play is really strong. So I think that’s a part of my personality that I really love, and the more I’ve been able to listen to my body, the more energy that that space has.”

“As my conception of myself and my body feels more together, my conception of other people and their bodies feels more together, too.”

“There’s also this interplay between me having this stronger connection to my body, and me coming into my queerness, and I’m still figuring it out!

“I think this is very liberating but also very scary: if we’ve been told that our power is in our body and how we look and how we perform in that body – and if we stop performing and stop making it palatable for the patriarchy, it takes out this jenga block from the bottom.

“I think part of that journey for me is recognizing other people’s bodies too, kind of taking the patriarchal glasses off of my own view too. As my conception of myself and my body feels more together, my conception of other people and their bodies feels more together, too.

“The more I interact with people who are really shrugging off the patriarchy, and the more I do that within my own body too, the more I see my body as this part of me rather than something to be sexualized. The more that I grow into my queerness, the more my body becomes something that is an expression of myself rather than a thing to be consumed.

“I think we’ve been taught for a long time that ‘sexy’ looks a very specific way. And the more I do this work as a sex educator, the more I see how sexy is not an aesthetic, it’s a verb! It’s something you can feel, rather than something that you perform.

“It’s really powerful. If sensuality is something that’s innate within me, then that means that it doesn’t matter what I look like, or what I do – it becomes something that’s accessible to everyone, and is much more innate.”

“E,” I am so grateful that we worked together! You have such a beautiful, powerful way with words, and it was incredibly moving to hear about how your view of your body has changed throughout your lifetime. I deeply appreciate you sharing your time and insights with me – thank you so much for being a part of this series!