The Lives We Didn’t Get to Live

Sometimes, after a session, a client’s words linger like perfume. Not the erotic ones, but the tender ones. The unexpected ones.

Yesterday, a man lay on my table and spoke of a life half-lived. Of desires denied. Of choices made not from freedom, but from necessity. He told me about his grown children, his long marriage, his aching body. And then he said something simple and piercing:

“If being gay had been possible back then, maybe my life would have been different.”

He wasn’t bitter—just wistful. His words were tinged with that particular kind of nostalgia that doesn’t seek pity, only witness.

And I heard it. I felt it. Because I, too, carry the echo of a life I didn’t get to live.

I sometimes wonder what would have unfolded if I had been born into a truly supportive family—one where tenderness wasn’t rationed, where love didn’t come with fear, where desire wasn’t a source of danger or shame. What paths might I have walked if I’d been encouraged instead of silenced? If I had felt safe instead of scrutinized?

I can’t know. None of us can.

But here’s what I do know:

That absence shaped me. That longing sharpened my vision. It taught me how to read the microexpressions of pain. It attuned my hands to what is unspoken. It made me someone who can sit with others as they unearth their buried aliveness, not flinch, not rush, not turn away.

And maybe this is what sacred intimacy really is—

Not just touch or pleasure or release,

but the weaving of two unlived lives into a moment that is lived.

Fully.

Consciously.

Without shame.

When a client looks at me with hunger in his eyes and calls me beautiful, I understand that it’s not just about me. It’s about being able to feel again. To want again. To be met without apology.

And as I mirror that back to him, something in me heals, too.

The boy I once was—the one who didn’t know love could feel like this—gets a little closer to believing it.