I’m not making any new revelations by saying that college is a tough time for women. It’s a tough time for body image, a tough time for self-discovery, and a tough time for sexual discovery, too. There is so much beauty in the hardships that can come with this territory. Experiences that trigger growth are the most beneficial part of college. I’m here to argue that we should view all of our experiences as growth, and leave the guilt in 2021.
You may or may not agree, but for me, guilt is the worst possible emotion. Emotion? Sensation? Hellish punishment? I’m not quite sure how to define guilt, aside from comparing it to its twin sister- regret. Here’s the thing- these two terrible feelings have one thing in common. They’re devices of self-hatred. I’m not saying you can control the way you feel about certain things, but guilt and regret are self-inflicted. The bad news? That makes these feelings even harder to push away.
Think about those memes you’ve seen about the feeling you get when you’re lying in bed and remember something embarrassing you did 10 years ago. We all suffer from this- it’s part of the universal human experience. When it comes to sex, sometimes the same thing happens.
Because we’ve been culturally conditioned to know that we’re not the ones in control, feeling regret over a hookup is… way too easy. Whether you feel like the decision was pressured or you really wanted it at the time, we can all relate to wishing that we hadn’t given a piece of ourselves to someone who was undeserving.
But that’s what sex positivity is, right? It’s your power to stop assigning pressure to your choices. You (and ONLY you) can decide how much sex means to you. Whether it’s sacred to you or means nothing, is completely in your control. Of course, the cultural stigmas ingrained in us as women have prevented us from feeling like casual sex is ok. They’ve also prevented us from feeling like sex is sacred. Labels come to mind and you start to feel even worse.
So, while the toxic powers of regret and guilt feel completely out of our control (re: that meme we all know too well), it’s important to take control where you can. You can control the meaning that you assign to your choices. You can’t control someone ghosting you, but you can control the way it makes you view yourself. Before you start regretting anything you’ve done, try to remember that we’re not put in this world to bury ourselves in guilt. We’re not put here to put ourselves down. And we’re definitely not here to let people other than ourselves impact our self-worth. Period.