The first time I tried to date after experiencing trauma, I was terrified, far more terrified than I was when I went on my first date at 19 years old. I feel everything in my body: the good, the bad, the uncertainty. Was I ready to be seen again? To be touched? To want?

It had been years since the word dating meant anything to me. The word itself tasted like poison and felt like fear. As a survivor, even casual flirtation has felt like standing on the edge of a cliff. As a queer survivor, that cliff feels like Mount Everest layered with paradox: I’ve learned what I need, want, deserve, and I am seeking is softness in a world that often eroticizes my pain, community in spaces that claim to be safe but rarely know how to enshrine that.

For a long time, I thought I had to simply “heal” and that the healing would necessitate rejecting my own desire. I told myself the most “empowered” thing I could do was focus on work — to build my career, to pour everything into helping other survivors. I founded my organization The Gold Star Society — a survivor-led community organization dedicated to safety, healing, and economic justice for women, queer, nonbinary, and BIPOC survivors — so people like me could feel safe, seen, and supported again.

I thought I had to choose between being a survivor and being sensual. As I have been actively healing, I’ve learned it doesn’t require cutting off the parts of me that still ache for touch. It means learning how to listen to my body and learning my body’s different languages, slowly translating it back into something tender for myself and then something I am able to give to others.

My Body Remembers Everything

When someone’s fingers brush against mine, even in passing, my body reacts before my brain does. There’s a flinch, a pause, a quiet scanning of the moment for danger. I have never forgotten a single touch.

Trauma has rewired my sense of time,  trapping me in moments that no longer exist. Dating after trauma means constantly negotiating between past and present. I can love someone deeply and still feel my pulse race when they reach for me too quickly. I can crave touch and still freeze when it arrives, and those are all things I have had to learn to navigate and embrace.

I used to think that made me broken. But the truth is, it makes me honest. My body is simply telling the truth: Safety takes time to relearn, and desire, like healing, is a process, not a state.

Queer Love, Complicated Love

Dating as a queer survivor adds layers most people don’t talk about. The language we use to describe harm — “gender-based violence,” “domestic violence,” “sexual assault” — wasn’t built for us. These terms were created to fit a heteronormative mold: man as abuser, woman as victim. But what happens when the person who harms you shares your pronouns, your politics, your community space?

In queer culture, we talk a lot about radical love, chosen family, accountability. But we rarely talk about what it means to experience harm within that same radical ecosystem, how queerness doesn’t make us immune to replicating power, control, or silence. When I was harmed by another queer person, the hardest part wasn’t the betrayal; it was the erasure. The way people whispered, “that’s not really assault,” or “but she’s queer, she wouldn’t do that.” Literally no one believed me and kept insisting it couldn’t happen because we’re queer.

Relearning intimacy meant reclaiming not just my sensuality but my truth. It meant refusing to let queerness be used as a shield for harm, while also refusing to let harm steal queerness from me.

There’s a myth that queer love is automatically safer, gentler, more evolved. While this can be  true, it is not always a given. Queer survivors have to fight to even name what happened — and then to rebuild the possibility of touch without fear and without support.

Dating With Soft Armor

Since I have finally started dating again, I made a rule for myself: honesty over performance. If I need to pause mid-kiss, I will and I do. If I need to check in before being touched, I will and I do. Having conversations around this as early as possible has been crucial. The first person who didn’t flinch when I said “I’m a survivor, and sometimes my body shuts down when it remembers” taught me something about what safety can look like — not absence of fear, but presence of care, patience, support, and understanding.

Softness has become my armor, but not in a bad way. In the most authentically human way possible.

Sometimes that softness looks like swiping on a dating app and saying upfront “I move slow”, unafraid of the rejections since they aren’t personal. Sometimes it’s telling a partner “I need the lights on” or “can we breathe together first?” It’s using safewords that aren’t about kink but about grounding and consent. It’s letting myself have boundaries that evolve by the hour and not being ashamed of them.

In queer spaces, sensuality is often framed as liberation, as reclaiming the body from shame, as proof that we’ve survived. Which is beautiful. But for me, sensuality after trauma isn’t about performing confidence or the pressure to be confident in myself right away. It’s about presence. It’s about learning how to inhabit my body again, not just in the moments that are pleasurable, but in the moments that are uncertain, even in the moments that sometimes hurt.

I’m still figuring it all out. I’m still learning how to tell lovers what I need without apologizing for it. I’m still unlearning the reflex to shrink when someone calls me beautiful, as it’s hard for me to take compliments. I’m still practicing how to trust a body that once betrayed me by surviving and extending grace to myself.

The Politics of Pleasure

There’s something deeply political about being a sensual survivor — especially as a queer, Afro-Boricua, Neurodivergent, Indigenous Nonbinary individual. We live in a world that commodifies both our pain and our pleasure, manipulatively  separating them completely or making them into just one thing. Our trauma gets turned into hashtags, our bodies into symbols of resilience, with no in between. But the private, messy, ongoing work of learning to feel safe inside our own skin? That rarely fits the narrative.

Every time I choose to date again, to flirt, to feel desire without shame, it’s an act of resistance. Pleasure is protest. Slowness is rebellion. Safety is revolution. This is what I have been embracing.

When I design survivor tech, I’m not just thinking about crises. I’m thinking about pleasure as safety. About what it means for survivors to have agency over desire, over boundaries, over joy. Looking at us as whole humans who deserve to not just survive, but thrive.

I want survivors to have access to tools that honor not just their pain, but their curiosity — the right to want again, without fear that wanting will lead to harm. We are all humans.

Love as a Slow Rebellion

Sometimes people ask me if I’m “ready” for love again, as if healing has a finish line. It does not. The truth is, readiness is fluid, and I learned that right away on this journey. Some days, I can’t stand to be touched — like, at all. Other days, I crave closeness so much it hurts.

What I’ve learned is that love — the kind that’s real, the kind that’s worth staying for — doesn’t rush you. It moves at the pace of mutual consent, respect, and understanding. It honors silence as much as sound; grace and patience go hand and hand. It asks, gently, “What do you need to feel safe?” and actually listens when you answer.

Queer love taught me safety isn’t sterile — it can still be wild, electric, messy, full of heat and contradiction. The goal isn’t to erase fear but to learn how to dance with it. To know that you can tremble and still reach out and have all the human experiences we’re meant to have.

To touch after trauma is not to forget what happened — it’s to remember who you are beyond it and embrace that.

Relearning Desire

There’s a moment, every once in a while, when someone touches me and I don’t flinch. It’s rare, but it does happen. It’s quiet, almost unremarkable — a hand resting on my thigh, a kiss at the corner of my mouth — but in that moment, I feel something I hadn’t felt in years: possibility.

Not because I’m “healed,” but because I’m here. I’m present. I’m choosing softness again, even when it is scary.

For us survivors, desire isn’t just about pleasure. It’s about return — returning to the body, to the world, to the possibility of being loved not in spite of what happened, but because we are still capable of loving and giving and trusting again.

Dating after trauma isn’t linear. It’s not pretty. But it’s real. And in a world that taught me survival was the ceiling, I’m finally learning that tenderness can be the floor, the place where I start again.

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