S3 Episode 1: "2023 Letter to My Listener" | A Reintroduction & Forecast

Meg begins Season 3 of Erotic Renaissance, with a letter to you. She reviews the history that led her to begin the Erotic Renaissance, and thanks her listeners for journeying alongside her. She then reviews our topics of focus for the year before signing off.

Introduction Plays:
Sex Isn't Intimacy. Sex is pleasurable and becomes more pleasurable when you have intimacy. Not sold? Let's rethink love, relationships, and sex. Let me seduce you. You are listening to the Linguist of Love. Welcome to the Erotic Renaissance.

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You can join Meg on linguistoflove.com where she hosts a community aimed on personal development, restructuring relationships to be more authentic and built on communication, transparency, and empathy, and exploring sensuality and eroticism in safe ways that push your boundaries to allow you to create the space you deserve to live the life that will bring you more joy, peace, and love.
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Transcript

Dear Lovely Listener,

Welcome to 2023 – the Year of the Sun!  I am crafting this letter with all the magic I can conjure while drafting on New Year’s Eve and revising on our first day in 2023. If you follow me on Instagram, you will have already seen our Card for the Year – The Sun. What a beautiful symbol to carry us through this coming year. It is full of blessings, positivity, and joy. However, to fully take pleasure in the beautiful year we are stepping into this month, I want to take us through a brief collective history of the past few years that began with The Plague of 2020 in a method to reintroduce myself to those who have been listening since day one or for those who start right now.

The Year of 2020 was like lightning striking a dry forest and causing a fire – many of us running towards whatever felt  safest at the time. I was teaching high school after finding that teaching college courses still left me with instability. As the plague led us to transform the way we worked and lived in our quickly changing world, I began teaching digitally. Years of classes aimed at how to treat the scholar before me in a physical classroom were thrown out, so I adapted. As we all did. Some of us were left without the security of a job, and many others began working at home – forcing us to reconsider the lives that were interrupted in our work/life balance, or…lack of.

As I adapted to the change in Education, I began teaching a scholar –many in fact – who were like younger me. I had found in my youth that the classroom was welcomed as an escape from what I was scared of facing at home. School had been my safe haven where I could expect normalcy when my life was plagued with the unexpected. As a teacher, my most important job is to make my classroom safe for my scholars to learn, just as so many teachers had done for me. However, with 2020 bringing something we were not prepared for,  I could no longer accomplish creating a safe space to learn alone. My classroom was at a kitchen table where my scholar got in trouble for not finishing their dinner or for the C they brought home in Algebra. My classroom was in their room as their sibling and every possession posed as a distraction. 

Many of you were doing this too. Some of you were the parents that struggled to parent these scholars, some of you were in virtual college courses or meetings struggling to stay awake, and many of you began spotting parts of your personal lives that you no longer loved. – Perhaps it was a partner or a job that only seemed to take  from you,  leaving you running on empty. Some of us faced poverty or homelessness in light of mass lay offs, or because you left a toxic relationship and were without a place to call “home.” Some of us freed our shadows while others were forced to keep the cage locked. Yet – despite the obvious lack of normalcy, that was exactly what was expected of us all. 

We then cautiously walked into 2021.  This was the year of the Quiet Fear, a fear of an impending pandemic surge, fear of what we couldn’t expect, and fear that if you stayed in the job or in the relationship just a little longer that something wouldn’t ever change. Thus, many of us lived with the quiet fears; I hypothesize that this fearful silence  is because …saying things out loud let’s you hear the truth in the statement, and sometimes hearing the truth is the scariest aspect of change. What if I say it and it feels true? Further – what if it feels true and then I realize I need to do something different for things to change?  Some of us decided to say, “This is unjust;” “I am unhappy here;” “I want to move on.” And others needed longer to face the fears.

It was at this time that I took a leap of faith on the business I was quietly building with a friend while I was teaching. Working for the school system, I realized I was being asked to compromise what is most important to me daily – my values and feeling connected to a mission. The change I was hoping to make through teaching high school was defeated every day as the school system continued to make decisions that prioritized finances over the emotional well-being of my scholars – where years of research pointed to the priority of one’s emotional well-being in a learning structure. I not only wanted to leave – I had to leave or I would emotionally and psychologically harm myself by abandoning the only reason that led me to a classroom in the first place. As I and my scholars were  pulled back into the classroom in spring 2021, I was handed masks, a water-filled spray bottle with some drops of Dawn liquid dish soap, and some new strip cords as my administrators asked me to make it safe.

 I couldn’t bear the reality of convincing  myself into believing that the school system would create room for justice on this pressing deadline when they had withdrawn all promised funding to support emotional awareness after a global pandemic had changed all of our lives, and I was told that their reasoning was that they “...didn’t believe it was important anymore” (Teaching Union Source).  So I made a choice and I leapt to follow what my heart called to me on nights I spent alone  in distant and hopeful dreams. 

While I don’t know what quiet fears nipped at your ankles in 2021, I named mine injustice and hopelessness in honor of the injustice I was asked to daily enforce for a corrupt school system and hopelessness at their disinterest to change. With my side business starting to gain momentum, I saw the opportunity to grow this venture which was connected more fully to a mission that felt like home to my heart; the last half of 2021 found me building the website and writing curriculum for sex and kink based events; writing, recording, and editing podcast episodes; and feeling that I was finally on a path to help progress and change the world in a way that was emotionally fulfilling. And I noticed many of you also leapt from the now foreseeable instability of a job where you were a number or cog in a wheel for someone else’s dreams, trying to learn from the chaos of 2020.

Through the last half of 2021, I worked very hard on my business. I dedicated every moment to writing and developing the theoretical framework behind the kink classes I was preparing to teach and the safety protocols for play-based events.  I was so happy, despite living on the tightrope of poverty; I had done this my whole life, coming from a family that had very little, so I was not scared of scraping by while I created something beautiful and meaningful to me. 

And although I felt positively about my life in the last few months of 2021, I started to feel like a fog was constantly blanketing my sky – a series of unknowns that were slowly revealed as clouds momentarily parted. While I still had no evidence but signs that something was “off,” I ushered in 2022 by working on some of my own projects and dancing with Luna - my sweet pup - around my pole at home. It was mid-January of 2022 that I would see the evidence that my business partner had chosen to orchestrate and sign paperwork without my knowledge or consent to remove me as co-CEO and place me as secretary – leaving her the only CEO of Hush-Hush Inc. I had been operating as co-CEO for four months, unaware that she had wanted to take the company away from me and unaware that she had done so a month before our final play party. In order to inspire guests, I had written my story, “Amor in the Afterlife.” Poetic as a symbol of the death I didn’t know was consuming what I had worked on for months. 

Upon seeing the evidence, I was…relieved to know what had actually happened while I slaved away for a company I no longer owned, and mournful for the loss of something I loved very much and had poured my soul into after leaving my career for it. However I didn’t have the time to mourn, I had to rebuild. This is why I named this past year of 2022 as the “Year of Rebuilding.”

Thus, I began my own Erotic Renaissance, and I invited you to join me, which is where the start of this beautiful project truly began. In the face of injustice and a painful death, I wanted to create a beautiful rebirth for myself – and others, like you. A true phoenix Woman in my soul, I only know how to be reborn from ashes. So I want to thank you for being on this Erotic Renaissance alongside me, whether you listened on day 1 in February of 2022; hopped on while I blazed through my first Erotic Travel Tour this past summer as I created Erotic Art that I am so proud of, breathed through our Shadow Work Series, holding my hand; or are in some moment in the future just now tuning in. Thank you for listening and sharing this podcast, which  is now listened to across the world – with a quickly growing audience especially in Europe! Wherever you listen from, thank you for being here with me and giving yourself the opportunity to love you a little more. This year, I forecast a lot more Sunshine, bringing in blessings you have been anticipating. 

I learned that my favorite way to experience the true beauty of a sunrise is meeting it up in the clouds. So, this 2023, I will be centering on the theme of Travel, and I do hope you will join me in the skies for this Erotic Renaissance Adventure. If you would would like to add to your listening experience this year, you can find my always free Reflection Prompts and Tarot Card Lays through my website LINGUISTOFLOVE.COM ; I encourage you (as always) to reflect, write, create, or converse on my prompts alongside listening to my Erotic Renaissance that is birthed from my own reflection, writing, creations, and conversations on the themes found there. My goal is to bring unity and community to those who might feel “homeless.” Someone once told me that Home is wherever you are, and I have certainly found that to be true this year, so you can find me dancing through Las Vegas, Maine, New York, and in my home base of San Diego should you like to connect with someone in this Beautiful and Wide,Wide World. I am also planning to touch foot in Spain.

I introduce you to a New Year, filled with Sunshine and lots and lots of room for your Sensual Shadows to play. You can expect this season to move us towards exploring the themes of consent and kink – one of the aspects of sex that is hidden in the shadows of society the most. As a teacher by training, a Sensual Domme in my practice, a Dancer in my Artistry, a Siren in my Soul,  a Writer in my heart, and a Sensuous Witchy Woman Always, 

I am Meg De la Torre, Your Linguist of Love, Let me Seduce You.