My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How I Learned Pleasure Without Guilt at 38 — My Story
By Nina, 38 — Santa Fe, NM
Learning pleasure without guilt was never something I expected to do at thirty-eight. I thought by now I would have figured out what I wanted, what I liked, how to ask for it. But the truth is, I had spent most of my adult life tiptoeing around my own body like it was someone else’s apartment — careful not to touch anything, careful not to take up too much space.
I am an artist. I work with clay. My hands are in contact with texture and temperature and pressure all day long, shaping things into being. But when it came to my own skin, my own quiet hours, I went numb. Not because I did not feel anything — because I felt too much, and then immediately felt guilty for feeling it.
Where the Guilt Came From
It is hard to explain where pleasure guilt starts. For me, it was not one big moment. It was a thousand small ones. A mother who never closed the bathroom door but flinched when anyone mentioned desire. A college boyfriend who told me I was “too much” when I initiated. A culture that handed me a hundred skin-care routines and not a single honest conversation about what it means to enjoy being in your own body.
By my early thirties, I had built a life I was proud of — my own studio, a small gallery that showed my work twice a year, a circle of friends who talked openly about everything from grief to money. But not this. Never this. The idea that I might set aside time to feel good — not productive, not generous, not useful, just good — felt dangerous. Like the moment I admitted I wanted it, someone would appear to tell me I did not deserve it.
So I kept my evenings utilitarian. Dinner, cleanup, stretching for my back, sleep. Repeat. I dated occasionally, and the encounters were fine in the way that lukewarm coffee is fine — it does the job, but you are not really tasting anything.
The Night I Stopped Apologizing to Myself
It was a Wednesday in February. Santa Fe in winter is dry and golden during the day, but by seven o’clock the sky turns this impossible shade of violet and the air smells like pinon smoke. I had come home from a long day glazing a new series — my hands were sore and my shoulders ached from hunching over the kiln. I ran a bath. Nothing unusual.
But something was different that night. I had been reading an essay a friend sent me — a writer in her forties describing the first time she bought something for herself that was purely about sensation, not function. She wrote about how she had stood in her kitchen holding the box like it was contraband, and how that feeling — the furtiveness, the secrecy — was the actual problem. Not the object. Not the desire. The shame around the desire.
I sat in the bath and thought about that for a long time. I thought about how I could spend forty-five minutes choosing the right glaze for a bowl — testing it on my wrist, holding it up to the light, making sure the texture was exactly what I wanted — and nobody would call that indulgent. It was craft. It was care. But the same attentiveness directed toward my own body? That was somehow suspect.
That night, I made a decision that felt enormous and also absurdly small. I decided to stop apologizing to myself for wanting to feel good.
What I Learned About My Body at 38
The following weekend, I ordered something I had been looking at for months. A HiMoment device. I had read reviews from other women — some in relationships, some not — and what struck me was not the product descriptions but the language people used. Words like “understanding” and “patience” and “discovering.” One woman wrote that it helped her figure out what she actually liked so she could communicate it clearly. That stuck with me, because I realized I had never done that work. I had been guessing at my own preferences for two decades.
When the package arrived, I did exactly what that essayist described. I stood in my kitchen holding it like contraband. And then I laughed at myself, because I was thirty-eight years old, I lived alone, and there was literally no one to judge me except the cat.
The first time I used it, I cried. Not from any physical sensation — from relief. From the sheer strangeness of giving myself permission. I had spent so many years treating my body as a vehicle for getting things done — carrying clay, standing at the wheel, hauling canvases — that I had forgotten it was also a place to live. A place that could feel ease and warmth and slowness without a reason, without a product to show for it.
Over the next few weeks, I started what I can only describe as a conversation with myself. I learned that I like warmth. That I carry tension in places I never noticed. That the space between my hip bones holds a kind of tightness that only releases when I breathe into it intentionally. That I had been rushing through everything — not just intimacy, but showers, meals, even the way I put lotion on my hands — as if pleasure was a thing to get through rather than a thing to be in.
I started slowing down in other areas too. I ate dinner at the table instead of standing at the counter. I started stretching in the morning with music on, not a podcast. I bought sheets that felt good against my skin instead of whatever was on sale. These sound like small things. They were enormous.
How Letting Go of Guilt Changed Everything
Three months after that Wednesday bath, I started seeing someone. David. He is a carpenter who builds furniture from reclaimed wood, and the first time he touched the small of my back while we were walking through the railyard market, I did not flinch. That was new.
What was also new: I knew what I wanted. Not in some grand, cinematic way — I was not suddenly a different person. But I had spent enough time listening to myself that when he asked what I liked, I had an actual answer. Not “I don’t know” or “whatever you want” or a shrug dressed up as easygoingness. A real answer. He told me later that my clarity made him feel safe, which surprised me because I had always assumed that wanting things made you demanding.
We took it slow. Some nights we just lay on the couch with our legs tangled together, not talking, not performing closeness but actually being close. Some nights were more than that. And both were fine. I learned that from myself first — that a Tuesday night with a warm bath and unhurried solitude was not a consolation prize. It was the main event. And bringing that understanding into a relationship did not diminish it. It grounded it.
I think about the years I lost to guilt — not with regret exactly, but with a kind of tender bewilderment. All that time I spent believing that wanting to feel good was selfish, or excessive, or a sign that something was wrong with me. When really, the only thing wrong was the story I had been told about what I deserved.
What Pleasure Without Guilt Actually Feels Like
People ask me sometimes — friends who are circling the same realization — what it feels like on the other side. I never know how to answer that in a way that does not sound like a greeting card. So I will say this instead.
Last month, I was in my studio late, working on a new piece. It was one of those rare sessions where everything flows — the clay was cooperating, the shape was emerging exactly as I had imagined it. And when I was done, I sat on my stool with wet hands and thought: this is the same feeling. The clay, the bath, the slow mornings, the nights with David, the nights alone. It is all the same muscle. Attention. Presence. Permission to be in the moment without racing toward the next one.
I am thirty-eight. I am learning things about myself that I probably should have learned at twenty-five, or nineteen, or thirteen. But I am learning them now, and that is what matters. There is no deadline for knowing your own body. There is no age limit on discovering that you are allowed to feel good — fully, slowly, without apology.
Tonight I will go home and light the candle that smells like cedar. I will put on a record — probably Joni Mitchell, probably Blue. I will take my time. And I will not feel guilty about any of it.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: At 32, I Finally Learned How to Date Myself and How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
