Girl on the Net

Sorry to be blunt, but I don’t need advice on my feelings. I don’t want to be rude or cruel here – I fully understand the desire to give advice, if you think you can be helpful. And I recognise that your desire to help comes from a lovely place. Occasionally I will make very specific requests for advice or input, but the vast majority of the time, I do not write my sex blog in order to gather advice from strangers.

I write this blog for three reasons:

1. I enjoy telling stories

2. The site makes money that allows me to cover (some of) my bills

3. I am a desperate validation slut and I like hearing people tell me I wrote something that resonated with them

Fundamentally, I write to make you feel stuff. Horny stuff, happy stuff, loved-up stuff, sad stuff, angry stuff, funny stuff, whatever. I pull my heart out through my cunt and smear it all over the internet in the desperate hope that strangers might tell me I’m good… and then buy sex toys.

Yes, I know it’s weird. I try really hard not to be frustrated if you give me advice on how I feel, because I’ve done all this work to try and get you to relate to me, so when you relate to me and see me in pain, I understand that it’s tempting to offer me a solution to that. But I am imploring you to understand, please, that my pain is part and parcel of my life, so it has earned its place on the blog as much as any other emotion. You can no more ‘cure’ me of sadness than you can prevent me from getting horny or falling in love. And I’d like you to refrain from trying, if you can please.

Pain is part of the story

I don’t want to imply that depression and misery is what makes good art (it is not), but I do need to stress that misery is an inevitable component of life. I care about painting a picture of my life that’s broadly honest, even if you never see the whole messy canvas, so sometimes my writing will touch on things that are causing me pain.

I do not write those posts as a cry for help. I write them for the same reason I write everything else:

• I like telling stories
• I need to make money
• I get validation from writing things that resonate with people

Sometimes the things that resonate are the sad posts: the emotions that others have felt themselves, in the wake of a break-up or during dark times. If you try to ‘solve’ my problems when I write these, you disincentivise me from talking about my pain because I think ‘ah fuck this one’s gonna just attract lots of well-meaning randoms giving advice’. The implication, when you’re offering me tips on how to deal with my sadness, is that I should fix the problem and stop talking about it.

But firstly: I’m already working on fixing the problem. In fact, because there’s always a delay in publishing posts, I’ll be much further down the line that you know when you read what I’ve written.

Secondly: I don’t want to stop talking about it. Even when I’m down, I still like telling stories, getting validation and making money! And while misery isn’t vital to making good art, I think to do what I do well requires showing more emotional breadth than just flashes of the good stuff. I can’t tell you everything, but I do want to paint a fuller picture than just ‘I fucked this guy and it was hot.’ I have no interest in writing a sex blog that just consists of brag-type porn posts about this one time I stole a man’s soul because I sucked his dick so good. If I don’t temper those with the pieces about what a miserable fuck-up I am then… what’s the point? I would feel like the sex blogging equivalent of those TikTok influencers who hire fake private jets to boast about being richer, better people than all of you.

THAT WOULD SUCK!

I don’t want to look like – and I have never wanted to imply that I am – someone who trips gleefully through life just sucking dick and grinning and loving and being loved. Because that is not real! Not a single one of us lives a life like that! It is impossible!

Unsolicited advice will never be as helpful as advice I have asked for

The above was quite emotional, but here’s the practical point: I am actually pretty good at asking people for help when I need it. I have some truly wonderful friends, I am not scared of seeking therapy, and I follow a bunch of incredible sex and relationship experts on social media. I read, every day, new articles about communication and emotion and connection and recovering-from-trauma or whatever it might be. I am neither scared to seek help nor incapable of doing so.

I tell you what I do find challenging, though: being told what to do. It makes me itch. I have dealt with plenty of controlling people in my life, and that has given me a frustrated, spikily independent streak. So if you offer advice unsolicited then you are actually just adding to my sadness, because I will be irritated by the fact that someone who doesn’t know me has given me instruction on something as personal as how I should live and love.

I know where to seek help if I want it. Sometimes I don’t want it, and would prefer to work this particular thing out on my own – feeling independent and powerful is something that I find actively healing. Sometimes I want help and have identified exactly what I need but not told you, because that isn’t a relevant part of the story I’m trying to tell in a short blog.

Often, ‘writing posts about my pain’ is actually one of the solutions I’m using to try and process my emotions.

What should you do instead of giving advice?

I know you mean well, I promise I know this. I am genuinely, truly and completely not trying to tell you off. So maybe your well-meaning kindness could be spent on one of the things that would help me instead:

• Share your own stories (publicly – use the comments with an anonymous name and fake email if you like). Often I’m trying to show other people who feel similarly that they’re not alone – you can be a really helpful part of that by sharing whatever might resonate from your own life. Please don’t do this privately, though: it’s one thing to publicly broadcast a story so anyone can pick it up and chat about it if they want to, quite another to send your pain directly to a stranger – it hands them a responsibility to which they may not necessarily consent.
• Say something nice about my writing, if you want me to keep doing it.
• Unfollow me if this doesn’t sound like your cup of tea. I mean this very sincerely. Sometimes people praise me for being ‘brave’ about what I share, but I don’t think it’s especially brave, to be honest. Brave is fighting for other people’s rights when you know there’s a personal risk to yourself. ‘Brave’ is speaking out against injustice in the face of fascism and genocide. ‘Brave’ is living your authentic self in a world that tells you not to. ‘Brave’ is not a horny attention slut sharing a few stories about her love, sex and heartbreak. As I say above, I like telling stories, I use this blog to make money, and I enjoy validation. In order to keep doing what I do, I have to work on the assumption that no one is being forced to read it. So if you don’t like reading about the sad stuff and it makes you uncomfortable, just click away! It’s fine. I know this style of writing, and these emotions, are not for everyone. I would never ever expect them to be.

If you’ve got through all that and not found something that works for you then please, I beg, do the one thing that will help me more than anything else above. More than any advice or solution you could offer – practical, tangible help:

Share the post.

Even if it’s sad.

Next time you find yourself typing out a reply, comment or private message with advice on my feelings, consider instead if it would take you less time and effort to just hit ‘share’. I promise you that’s the best possible thing for me in the long run. If it resonated with you, or you liked the writing, or you thought it might help others… please share the post.