Reclaiming Desire, Power & Purpose in Midlife

12 min read

How I got here

In my thirties and forties, on the surface, I was a confident, successful, Manhattan professional with a fulfilling career, a loving husband, and two beautiful daughters. But behind closed doors, my marriage had been unraveling since I became a mom. The passion I’d shared with my husband—once wild, reckless, and sworn for a lifetime—was gone. For me, sex had slipped from its exalted place and fallen to the bottom of a long list of things that needed tending. My husband’s sex drive, meanwhile, went undiminished by the trials of work and parenthood. His desire for me came to feel rapacious—never predatory, but greedy like addiction is greedy.

Addiction had a permanent place at our family table. Though my husband had been clean and sober for years before we met, his history of drug and alcohol dependency was part of who he was. Which became part of who we were. My hypervigilance—careful monitoring of moods, quiet scans for signs of slipping—amounted to trust built on sand. Then, in 2015, more than a decade into our marriage, he relapsed. For the next four years, my husband would try to right himself, cycling through rehabs, ashrams, and 12-step meetings.

I slogged through those years, depleted and sexless. Whatever erotic vitality I once had was burned up in the white-hot heat of my anger and shame. So when my husband landed in an emergency room from a pill overdose in 2019, I made up my mind: he was not coming back. Not to our home. Not to our marriage. Once released from the hospital, he left for another recovery center, then flew to California to stay with his parents.

For nine months, separated on opposite coasts, I let myself imagine what my new life might look like without him. I was ready to start over. Primed for a rebirth.

But the pandemic had its own plans. New York City public schools closed indefinitely, quarantine was announced, and the walls of our 1,000-square-foot apartment quickly started to close in.

“Come to California,” my husband said over the phone, his voice urgent. “You’ve got to get out of there. New York in lockdown will be a nightmare.” It didn’t take him long to convince me. Leaving the city seemed like what any parent would do on the brink of Armageddon.

I spent the six-hour flight to San Francisco fretting about the sleeping arrangements at my in-law’s house. How is this going to work? I can’t share a bed with this man. Maybe this is a mistake. As the San Francisco skyline appeared on the horizon, my inner monologue turned existential. Is this pandemic part of some strange fate pulling our family back together? Or have I trapped myself again?

California Healing

As it turned out, California held the keys to my freedom. Sonoma County is a place where you hear words like energy, chakra, and heart-space thrown around by baristas, schoolteachers, and even electricians. In the beginning, it was hard for me to take all the new agey-ness seriously—like when the woman at the garden store told me to harvest my herbs at dawn, “when their souls are most awake.” But healers’ services were on offer everywhere I turned, and boy did I need some healing. I was worn down in ways I was only beginning to understand.

Living with my husband again, I saw that his commitment to AA and recovery wasn’t just serious—it had become his way of life. This, too, was new. But instead of bringing clarity, it only brought new questions to the surface. He wanted to repair our marriage, but what did I want? I had no idea. I was trapped in a restless limbo—oh, and perimenopause had arrived, just to kick a girl when she was already down.

I had never been one to throw money away on myself—my Yankee practicality insisted there was always something, someone, or somewhere more important to spend it on than me. But panic and pain had a way of rewriting rules. With a surplus of unspent lockdown cash and a desperation I could no longer ignore, I was finally ready to place a bet on myself.

I began with treatments that were at least a little familiar to me—acupuncture, shiatsu massage, and sound baths. The more I said yes to self-care, the easier yes became, and soon I was trying stranger things like rolfing, myofascial release, and something called “the ghost points treatment,” among others. Some experiences were transformative, most were interesting, a few were absurd. But each, in its way, reinforced my deeper commitment to my health and well-being.

Fresh out of quarantine, I met a woman at a dinner party who told me she’d recently taken a trip. “A vacation?” I asked, surprised to hear the travel industry was making a comeback so soon.

“Not that kind of trip,” she laughed.

I’d never been much of a drug user but leaned in as my dinner companion recounted a life-changing experience with psychedelic-assisted therapy. When she said, “I developed a sort of tender affection for myself”—that’s what really got me. I’d spent years in talk therapy trying to reason things through, but tenderness was not the outcome. Maybe a little self-compassion was just what I needed to wake up, wise up, and show up—for myself, for my family, for the work of becoming whole.

Duly inspired, I did what I always do when faced with something vast and unfamiliar: research. First, I devoured Michael Pollan’s 2018 book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Next, I reached out to friends, then friends-of-friends, following the trail underground until I found what I was looking for: my first guide.

Over the next few years, I’d work with a series of trained and vetted professionals, experimenting with a wide variety of substances. Some of my guides operated legally within clinical settings, and others worked underground. All of them catalyzed outsized growth in me where decades of conventional psychotherapy had left me feeling stuck. What irony: while drugs had nearly killed my husband and destroyed our family, they might just have saved me.

But the biggest shift was yet to come. Over time, once my nervous system downshifted and the fight-or-flight vigilance I’d experienced for much of my married life quieted, a different current took hold. My body began to thrum with a pulse of desire, stirring after a long dormancy. This wasn’t the single-lady rebirth I’d envisioned back in New York. It was something else entirely—something deeper, more electric, and wholly unexpected.

Again, I went looking for a guide—someone to help me understand what was going on with my body. Someone female. I began in the most obvious way, using the only search term I knew—sex therapist—but with a little more digging, I uncovered an entire world of practitioners I hadn’t even known to look for. There were Somatic Sex Practitioners, Sexological Body Workers, Sacred Intimates, Intimacy Coaches, Sexual Surrogates and Tantrikas. You might call them sex workers because they exchange sexual services for money, but they are, in fact, energy workers. They deal not in orgasms, per se, but in sexual energy, or “life force energy.” What I discovered was a network of wise women that brought to mind The Ladies of the Canyon—not the Laurel Canyon ladies Joni Mitchell sang about, but women wrapped in songs and gypsy shawls nonetheless. With their help, I found inner transformation and my way back to my marriage—back to my desire for a man I’d long since given up on. It’s a different marriage to the same man.

* * *

We’ve been told that self-care is an indulgence. That self-help doesn’t dismantle systems. But the truth is, a thriving woman strengthens everything she touches. I believe the personal has never been more political. It was Joseph Campbell who said The Hero’s Journey isn’t about transformation for its own sake—it’s about returning with something to give. Reawakening our vitality fuels our engagement with the world. When a woman’s life force is drained by trauma, pain, or stagnation, we all lose. Less life force for her means less for her family, her community, and, in a time of cascading crises, the world itself. The world doesn’t need more women merely surviving. It needs women fully alive, resourced, and resourcing others.

Sexual energy is a tool. Drugs, when used responsibly and respectfully, are technologies. Viewed through a conventional Western lens, some of the practices I’ll share in the weeks and months ahead may seem strange—deviant even. They certainly did to me at first. But this newsletter, and the community I hope will form around it, will show the world otherwise. Together, we’ll demystify and normalize unconventional modalities that help women break free from stagnation and step into a fuller expression of ourselves.

For more about this mission, visit my About page.

Stay with me. This is just the beginning.

I love you.

Juliette