Church Girl to Porn Star: Dawn's Life Beyond Shame

By Dawn

There was a time in my life when I couldn't say the word porn out loud.

Not because I was shy. Because it triggered something deep in me. The word itself felt dangerous, dirty, off limits. If you had told me a few years ago that I would end up as one of the fastest growing creators on OnlyFans, that I would film my own pleasure and share it with the world and love doing it, I would not have believed you. I couldn't have even imagined it. That version of me didn't have access to that possibility yet.

So when Andrew and I titled this episode Church Girl to Porn Star, we weren't being provocative for the sake of it. That's my actual story. Both ends of it are true, and the distance between them is the whole point.

This is about shame. What it costs you to carry it, what it does to the people you love, and what becomes possible when you finally set it down.

Where the shame started

I came up in the church. For a long time that was the foundation of my entire life. The Bible was my rock. It was my safety, my familiar, the thing my nervous system organized itself around. And inside that world, there were very clear rules about what sexuality was allowed to be, who I was allowed to be, and what parts of myself were acceptable to feel.

I absorbed all of it. Not as ideas I chose, but as programming I never questioned. That's how programming works. You don't examine it because you don't even see it. It just feels like reality, especially when it's being programmed at a very young and impressionable age. You forget your earliest childhood consciously, but you remember everything that you learned then at the deepest and most fundamental levels. 

Andrew and I actually met while I was still going to church, and he came along and gave it a real try with me. Over time, together, we started noticing things that didn't add up. Contradictions we couldn't unsee. And eventually we left, together.

I remember the moment I set it all down. In my head I said something like, God, I don't know what's real here. I believe there is a God, and I don't understand it, so I'm going to set you over there. And I'm going to trust that life is going to show me the truth.

I had no idea what that meant. It felt like the biggest leap of faith I had ever taken, because I was letting go of the very thing that had held me my whole life. But it opened a door. Because once I was willing to question that, I had to be willing to question everything. What are morals, really? Why do I believe what I believe? And what is all of this fear and control and tension wrapped up in my body around sex and sexuality?

That's where the real excavation started.

The thing about suppression

Andrew has a way of explaining this that changed how I understand myself. It's this.

The amount of energy it takes to keep a part of yourself suppressed has to be at least as big as the thing you're keeping down. Because whichever force is more powerful wins. So if you're spending enormous effort holding something in, that effort is evidence. It's proof of how big the thing underneath actually is.

We don't suppress the meaningless parts of ourselves. We don't guard, suppress, and hide the parts of ourselves that are unimportant. We reserve all of that protective force for the things that matter most. So the more fear and shame you're carrying around a part of yourself, the more that fear and shame is actually pointing at something powerful you've locked away.

For me, the suppression was massive. Which meant what was underneath it was massive too. I just couldn't see that yet, because I was using all my energy to keep it crushed down.

This is also why people slip and do things they regret when they drink. The alcohol softens their inhibition just enough, and the bigness of what they've been holding down wins for a moment and comes out. But it comes out sideways, because there's still all that pressure on it. When you actually let go of the shame instead of just numbing it, what comes out doesn't come out sideways. It comes out clean. It comes out as you.

What shame does to a relationship

Here's what I didn't understand for a long time. Shame isn't just something that hurts you on the inside. It's not a private problem. It reaches into your relationship and does damage there too.

When I hold shame about a part of myself, I will always project it onto other people. I did this to Andrew for years. I judged sex. I judged sexuality. I judged his sexuality, and I tried to control it, because I couldn't accept my own. That's the first layer of damage. The shame I carried came out as judgment aimed at him.

But there's a second layer, and it's the one that took me longer to see.

When I lock a part of myself away because I'm not comfortable with it, I'm not only projecting that discomfort onto my partner. I'm also making a part of me completely unavailable to him. There is a piece of me he cannot love, cannot see, cannot experience, because I've hidden it. And if he has parts of himself shut off too, then there's a piece of him I can't reach either.

That's the double whammy. You cut off pieces of yourself from each other, and then you take the pain of that suppression out on each other. Two forms of damage running at the same time, and most couples never realize it's happening.

Early in our relationship I was fairly sexual, at least compared to how shut down I would later become. But it came out mostly with Andrew, and I explained it away as infatuation, new relationship energy, the stuff everyone says fades. Then we got married and it did fade, and Andrew eventually reached a point of wondering why I didn't want him anymore. He wouldn't fully speak up for what he wanted, because we were tangled in codependent patterns back then. And underneath all of it, we were both carrying our own shame, blaming each other for a sex life that neither of us was actually free enough to create.

Andrew had his own version of this. He had real desire for a fuller sexual life, but he had his own beliefs about his sexuality that kept part of him shoved in a corner. And he blamed me for it. He told himself that if only I were more open, more available, then everything in him could finally show up. And that was never true. It was never going to work that way. His freedom was never waiting on me.

The moment that cracked it open for him was when he realized that if he were me, he wouldn't want to have sex with him either. He was trying to negotiate a feeling out of me. You cannot negotiate desire out of another person. It doesn't work. Desire shows up when the shame that's blocking it gets out of the way, and not one second before.

Why we started making adult content

People assume the OnlyFans was a calculated business decision. A money grab by a couple of influencers. It really wasn't.

It started, like almost everything we do, with me following what felt right. Not knowing why. Not needing to know why. I've held one thing steady through this entire journey, which is the pursuit of freedom of spirit, without ever pretending I knew in advance what that would look like. I let my triggers show me where I was still carrying shame, and then I moved toward those places instead of away from them.

Somewhere around the beginning of last year, I noticed there was a lot of excitement in me around exhibitionism. And it made me deeply uncomfortable. So we did what we've learned to do. We played with it in fantasy first. We let ourselves tap into the excitement without any pressure to act on it. And we watched it grow.

Then it reached a point where there was real energy there, and we had to ask the honest question. Does this belong in fantasy, where we get to enjoy the charge of it? Or is there something real here that wants to be lived? For us, the answer was that it needed to be real. And thank God we listened, because of what it has done for me since.

When I first started, I didn't love the way my body looked. I didn't feel fully comfortable stepping in front of the camera. I did it anyway, because I was chasing freedom more than I was chasing comfort. Almost a year later, I feel like a whole new woman. My confidence in who I am is off the charts. And that confidence comes with a deep humility, because it's not arrogance. It's just that I finally know who I am.

I also had to face a fear I didn't expect, which was all of the desire coming at me. Men wanting me. And I learned that I don't have to be afraid of that. It doesn't mean I suddenly want them instead of Andrew. It means desire is moving in the world, and it gets to move. It's theirs. I don't have to control it, manipulate it, or reject it. Let them have their desire. When I stopped trying to manage it and just let it flow, more of everything came in. That's what abundance actually is. It's what happens when you stop clamping down.

The contradictions people can't handle

There's a line from Ayn Rand that Andrew loves. There are no contradictions. When something seems like it doesn't make sense, don't assume the other person is the problem. Check your premises. If something isn't lining up for you, it's because you believe something that won't let you see why it actually does line up.

People run into this with us constantly, and honestly it's kind of fun to watch.

The one that breaks the most brains is the spirituality and the sexuality together. If your only frame for spirituality is religion, or the soft love and light crowd, then you can't understand how deep spiritual presence and raw sexuality could possibly live in the same two people. But they don't just coexist for us. They're the same thing.

Fucking is spiritual. I'll say it plainly. The spiritual journey was never about escaping the human experience. It's about fully immersing yourself in it. This physical world is the one place we get to meet our conditioning, face our pain, work through the reasons we carry shame, and step from the dark into the light. Fully living the human journey means dealing with all of it. And on the other side of that work, connecting with the pleasures of this life, good food, good wine, good sex, being fully alive in your own body, becomes part of the spiritual path rather than a detour from it.

People love to try to put us in boxes. They need some way to classify the thing they're seeing. But it so often doesn't work, because we aren't that easy to define. Spiritual but does porn. Kinky but clearly deeply in love. Degradation kink and reverence in the same relationship. Married 15 years but still can't keep our hands off each other. Every one of those combinations short circuits someone's mental filing system. And that's not our problem to solve. It's information for them, if they're willing to look at it.

The judgment is always a mirror

Here's what I've come to know for certain. The things people judge in others are the things they judge in themselves.

I get comments. Most are supportive, and honestly a lot of them are beautiful. Men and women who tell us they admire what we have, who can see the love and devotion underneath everything, who say they want to experience something like it in their own lives someday. That means the world to me.

And then there are the others. The men who tell me I shouldn't be doing this because I'm married, to which I sometimes point out that they're the ones looking and watching and enjoying. The people who tell me to get off my knees, which is fascinating, because Catholics kneel in church every single week and nobody loses their mind over that. The negativity is such a small percentage, and none of it touches me, because there's nothing inside me for it to land on anymore. I actually have fun with it. If you want a good laugh, go read the replies I leave on comments over on my Instagram.

I don't take any of it personally, because it was never about me. When someone feels the need to label me, other me, and push me away, they're showing me something they've locked away in themselves. If watching me take off my clothes and enjoy my body makes you uncomfortable, the useful question isn't "why does she do that?" It's "why does it make me so uncomfortable?" 

That question is the doorway. If you're willing to actually walk through it and look at what you've judged and buried in yourself, you'll probably find something you don't want to admit. Andrew and I have both used the same word for those moments when we've found them in ourselves. Humiliating. That gut punch of realizing this was me the whole time. This was always about me.

But on the other side of that discomfort is a better life, for you and for the person who loves you. Because when you let go of what you've been judging in yourself, your partner suddenly gets access to a part of you they could never reach before.

The permission trap

It's easy to believe that once you feel accepted, then you'll finally be able to be yourself. Once your best friend approves, once your partner opens the door, once the world says it's okay, then you can let yourself out. And it's a trap, because no one else can actually give you permission to be yourself.

Andrew showed me this in the most generous way possible. Early on, he offered me total acceptance of my sexuality. He told me I could bring anything to him. Any story from my past, any desire, anything I might want or even want to want, and it would be welcomed without judgment. He cleared a runway for me, paved it smooth and perfect, and told me I could land anything there.

And here's the thing. Just because someone builds you a perfect runway does not mean you can land the plane. He could give me the permission. He could not make me able to receive it. Because the reason I couldn't bring those parts of myself forward was never that I lacked his permission. It was that I didn't trust myself. I didn't accept myself. I still believed those parts of me were bad, which meant I still believed I was bad.

This is why you can strategize communication until you're exhausted and nothing changes. You can learn every technique for talking to your partner about what you want. But until you do the inside work on why you can't speak in the first place, no amount of permission from the outside will move the needle.

Whatever you're looking for your partner to give you, acceptance, permission, approval, you are actually looking for yourself to give yourself. You are the only one who will ever meet that need. So instead of waiting for your partner to make it okay for you to want what you want, the real work is asking why won't I just let myself want it. Why won't I let myself say it out loud.

Give yourself the thing you keep looking for from everyone else. You're the only one who can.

Living openly versus performing openness

There's a difference between living openly because this is genuinely who we are, and performing openness to shove something in people's faces. We're not doing this to provoke anyone. We're not living out loud as a strategy. We do it because it's exciting and alive and real for us, and because letting go of the reasons we carried shame made this version of our life possible.

And letting go is the right way to say it. Not healing shame, exactly. Letting go of the reasons the shame was there. Everything I've gained came through subtraction, not addition. Surrender, not effort. I didn't build a new confident self. I set down everything that was in the way of the self that was always there.

Not everyone who releases their shame is going to end up doing porn. Most won't, and that's the whole point. This was never a template. The point isn't to do what we do. The point is to accept what's inside you, whatever that turns out to be, and to actually live your one life instead of a suppressed version of it.

But there's something that feels genuinely purposeful to me about letting people see one example of what's possible. Because I am living proof. The woman writing this exists because I was willing to question everything, face what I found, and let go of who I thought I was supposed to be. Andrew has watched a real spirit come out of a very thick shell. Church girl to porn star, both ways, all the way to the extremes. And if my story does anything for you, I hope it's this. It shows you what letting go can actually make possible.

You get one time around in this life. You deserve to feel free in it.

Listen to the full conversation

This post covers the heart of what Andrew and I talked about, but the episode itself has all the texture, the laughter, and the back and forth that make it what it is. If you'd rather hear it in our own voices, this is Episode 139 of the Infinite Devotion podcast.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

You can find more writing like this on the blog, come say hi on Instagram, and if you want to see the side of me this whole post is about, that's at dawnofdesire.net.

In devotion, Dawn