Symbiosexual: A Love Letter to Beloved

A narrative exploration w/ Ethos

In the journey of remembering and really fighting to understand what my purpose was in this lifetime, queer theory began as the first initiation into this medicine path that I find myself in 20 years later.

As a child who has known they were this “transmasculine” human being since they were 1 year old, I was constantly reminded of how much I never fit into this world. I was constantly at war with everything and everyone around me. I knew that I was told I was supposed to be a “girl”, a “daughter”, a “she”, but something about that never sat right with me. I felt like my insides would crawl out of me in disgust everytime I had to be preceived as “feminine”. It made me want to burn not just the room I was in but the whole world down. “Why could no one see that I am in the wrong body?”

Not only was my gender expression considered “freakish”, but on top of being masculine expressive, my first crush was on the Pink Power Ranger and on many of my cis afab “best friends” and “friends”. At the time the only word that existed was “lesbian” and that even felt so short of my attraction to others, which was energetic from a young age.

While of course I was influenced by Disney’s depictions of love and I thought I had to be a “boy” in order to express my “love” for “girls” from a young age (probably didn’t help that I grew up in the Mormon church either), my sexuality and expression of attraction has always felt like more. It needed that raw, passion that curved and wove through the complexities of the human that I was in love with at the time. I needed depth of intimacy that not only tended to freak out my girlfriends but also myself because I never witnessed what health, secure attached love looked like.

My home was broken. My parents abusive. I found safe haven in my girlfriend’s homes and their families, while pretending we were just “best friends”. I denied being “gay” (so ridiculous cause I knew I was and looked like I was). I even remember being transphobic (not even really understanding it beyond the bigoted perspective and that was limited).

But yet I knew that “real” love existed outside of this world of hate, violence and abuse. Knowing that this “real” love existed kept me alive, it kept me going. Wanting to have kids and treat them better than my parents treated me, kept me alive. Wanting to create a new way of “home” and feel safety with another, kept me alive. But the traumatized part of me kept me from it with a deeply disorganized attachment style, something that no one was talking about in 2000’s/2010’s while youre in college.

My sexuality in my late teens and early 20’s was promiscuous and “fuck boi” at worst, especially when alcohol was involved. Wanting deep connections, luring in “heterosexual” cis women, knowing that most were not out about being queer but I knew they were attracted to me (I know, I’ve sat with this shame for a long time), but then when the emotional depth got further than the emotional depth I had with myself, I ran. Broke up and was deeply unable to have deep relationships that were not friendships. Most of my intimate relationships lasted 6 months and most experiences with women were in light of toxic masculinity and hook up culture.

And the whole time, my mental health was trash because it was so taboo to talk about mental health, getting therapy and being on meds for it. So taboo that I attempted to OD after going back in the closet for the US Army since DADT was still legislation then. So of course my relational world was a fractal of my inner world. And that inner world began to collapse in 2016.

I had a choice to make: choose healing or go to a mental health institute or take your life. It really boiled down to that my suffering and unprocessed trauma was that significant. So I had to choose healing because I believed in that “real” love and knew I was meant to have a family, but not like this. Not this broken. Not this hardened. Because then I would become my mother and I vowed to never allow for that to happen. That I would never hurt or harm someone as violently as my mother did my entire childhood to me.

Then psychedelics came into my life, along with Burning Man, Catharsis on the Mall and all the psychedelic cultural parties and festival and ways of living. For the first time, I thought I felt unconditional love through the psychedelics (LSD, MDMA, mushrooms to be exact) and I wanted that. To be a part of that. Then that led to meeting and being invited to be with Grandmother Ayahausca.

And that “real” love that I have been searching for, after 9 days of purging, other master plant medicine ceremonies, sweats, and the whole 9 yard, she let me touch it. Aka, to touch and to somatically be imprinted by the love that she and her people have been stewarding. The love that Pachamama holds for all her beings and children of her womb and planet. That love that comes from your orgasm with another and that love that comes when you are painting a new painting and reach the flow state. The love that changes entire timelines and life trajectories. The kind of love that reminds you of your worth and your life’s purpose and why you are here on this planet during this time. The kind of love that drives devotional commitment over temporary happiness.

Something we can call, symbiosexual.

Symbiosexual

adj.: one who is erotically, spiritually, intellectually, and energetically attracted to mutual flourishing; a being whose desire emerges through co-evolution, co-regulation, and co-reverence.

After working with the medicines and really committing (sometimes to an extreme) to my self development (and admittedly to enlightenment and mastery), I realized that my relationship to my gender, my polarities and my sexuality also was evolving. My evolution meant that I got to also evolve my “queerness” from being in a heternormative and mononormative expression and into a paradigm of what was indigenous and native to me.

My dead name was no longer what I went by and Ethos became. My pronouns were no longer “she/her” and were “they/them” and being in the Burning Man world opened up my world to consensual non-monogamy, polyamory, sexual taboos, public sex and sex parties. I already thought I was pretty queer and then came in the actual acts of sexuality and its different expressions and the smorgasbord that is the playa and ability to learn and explore what is and isn’t for you in regards to sexual desire, consent and the many ways humans express desire, gender and attraction.

While I never engaged in the public aspects of sexual expression, I have been an observer and even found compersion in watching others feel so liberated in a monogamous vanilla boring sex status quo. Luckily having a drag queen as a college mentor and protector and studying queer theory opened me up from my prude Mormon existence. I learned so much and had a poly lover that taught me even more. How to receive. How to be touched and say what I want and desire out loud. How have radical consent. How to authentically relate. I feel grateful for our lovership to this day.

And in my healing journey, I found that I would get lost, addicted and codependent in my relationships with women. So after some major heart breaks and loss of relationships, I knew I had to take a vow of being celibate and be with my Self until I become so grounded and centered, that I wouldn’t lose myself in my relationships. I had to learn how to be securely attached, how to self soothe, how to reparent. I had to actually confront my mental health! I had to do the damn shadow work.

Along the way, I had moments where I found myself in love with someone who made a huge impact on me and gifted me tools and evolutions (such as somatics, boundary practice, creating fully present 1 on 1 vortices, working through deep jealousy) that has allowed for me to become the person I am today, that is so deeply aligned with their spiritual path that I can say that that desire to find that “real” love is being fulfilled in not just my polarity counterpart in another human being, but that I am in a divine union with my spiritual purpose and path.

That through the 5 ayahuasca cermonies, countless dots from Kambo, bufo, sweat after sweat, loss after loss, heart break after heartbreak, betrayal after betrayal and being burned to ash by my Ancestors over and over and over and over and over again, that holding out and honoring my evolution of my sexuality to be symbiosexual has done what all these “spiritual coaches” have been selling as snake oil to their clients, finding not just a polarity divine unionship, but my soulmates (platonic and not) that are here to for a bigger purpose of helping guide and usher in the next phase of collective and critical awakening.

Humanity is at a fork in the road. One fork is an algorithmic fascism of denying our shadows and the traumas that we have collectively accumulated in our individual and collective body and its impacts on this planet, that will lead to our inevitable extinction. Another is the metabolic collective liberation of our Ancestors prophecies and wildest dreams, where we metabolize this trauma and grief and usher in Heaven on Earth.

And for the 2nd to happen, we must start and continue to queer our worlds around us. Even in the queer community, fascism of nihilism, stagnation and hopeless has set in that has activist influencers encouraging us to not feel joy and to freeze your gender and sexuality in time, instead of celebrating fluidity and amoebic and infinite expressions of humanity. Of being alive.

I have matured my worked around queer theory and write in the last few months and write,

Queer theory arose as an intellectual and spiritual insurgency within this terrain. It disrupts the categories that cisheteronormativity treats as natural by revealing their historical, political, and cultural construction. Drawing from feminist thought, post-structural philosophy, and the lived archives of queer communities, queer theory asks us to examine how norms come to feel inevitable, and how those norms manage to govern the body’s deepest impulses. Judith Butler articulated gender as a practice that materializes through repetition within a field of power. José Esteban Muñoz envisioned queerness as a horizon, a glimmer of a world not yet realized but always haunting the present with its promise. Audre Lorde reframed the erotic as a profound mode of knowledge, a somatic clarity that reveals truths unavailable to systems invested in repression. These thinkers remind us that identity is never static. It is a process shaped by embodiment, memory, desire, imagination, and the cultural worlds we inherit.

Queerness and engaging with queer theory is a spiritual path. Queering my world and my being, in a somatically abolitionist way has evolved my sexuality in ways that I didn’t have words to put to it until I finally got to express it (which is a new sexy and hot development btw but you all will learn I am a private person so I am figuring out my boundaries with this new experience I am in). Like for some reason in the trans community and queer communities, if I fully transition and pass as “cis” then my sexuality is now heterosexual? The fuck? The fuck it is. My sexuality is beyond this cisheternormative, modernity paradigm of heterosexual, gay, lesbian, etc. It is spiritual and energetic in nature, maybe it always has been.

Why are we still trying to use this colonizer lexicon to describe our infinite way of being and our queerness? Why are we not pushing the boundaries and creating our own and building our own evolutions?

I continue to write in Chasing Consciousness, more about queer theory,

Queer theory, in this sense, becomes more than an academic discourse. It becomes a way of approaching the body as a site of cosmological intelligence. It teaches us that identity is not a static descriptor but a field of relational and energetic possibility shaped by culture, lineage, and spirit. Queerness reveals the narrowness of the realities we have been permitted to inhabit and opens pathways into broader ecologies of becoming. To queer identity is to reclaim the body as an instrument of perception, imagination, and resistance.

Yt queers are locking us in old empiric paradigms and giving up, while I want to imagine entire new worlds because through medicine work and indigenous medicine ceremonies, I touched the future that is decolonial, that is queer and that is expansive and expressive. Not only that, I have a deep praxis of hope. Every day I choose hope. Every day I choose gratitude. Because the medicine path has shown me. Being with her reminds me.

Being with her reminds me, not through fantasy or projection but through an unmistakable somatic coherence, that love was never meant to be an extractive event or a site of self-erasure, but a mutually generative field through which life itself learns how to continue becoming. What I am naming here does not belong to the grammar of romance as modernity has shaped it, nor to the scarcity-based economies of desire that colonial capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy have naturalized as inevitable. It belongs instead to a different ontology of attraction altogether, one that emerges not from lack, conquest, or the compulsion to be completed, but from relational surplus, co-regulation, and shared metabolic flourishing. This is where symbiosexuality lives.

Symbiosexuality is not an identity in the static sense, nor a preference reducible to bodies, genders, or acts. It is a mode of erotic intelligence that arises when desire is no longer organized around domination, abandonment, or reenactment, but around resonance, attunement, and reciprocal evolution. It names an orientation toward intimacy in which erotic charge is inseparable from ethical relation, where attraction intensifies not through transgression alone, but through the felt safety required for truth to surface without collapse.

I did not arrive at symbiosexuality through theory first. I arrived through exhaustion. Exhaustion with intensity that masqueraded as intimacy. Exhaustion with chemistry that burned hot but left no trace of nourishment. Exhaustion with relational scripts that eroticized dysregulation and called it passion.

As my nervous system learned how to experience safety without numbness, my sexuality reorganized itself accordingly. As I learned to self-soothe without dissociation, to stay present without controlling, to remain embodied without abandoning my needs, my desire shifted from seeking activation toward seeking coherence. What once felt exciting began to feel hollow. What once felt boring revealed itself as stability misnamed by a culture addicted to adrenaline. What began to arouse me was not performance or availability, but capacity, the capacity to remain relational under pressure, to metabolize jealousy rather than weaponize it, to hold erotic charge without immediately discharging it as possession or proof.

Symbiosexual desire emerges precisely at this intersection: where eros meets regulation, where longing meets responsibility, where attraction becomes a site of mutual nervous system attunement rather than mutual destabilization. It is eroticism that does not fragment the self from the other, but instead deepens integrity on both sides of the relational field. In this sense, symbiosexuality is not anti-sex, anti-kink nor anti-intensity, but anti-extraction. It refuses the logics that turn bodies into consumables and intimacy into a resource to be mined.

To be symbiosexual is to experience desire as something that wants to stay. Not cling. Not possess. Not merge. Two wholes coming together to make a third thing.

But stay, through rupture, through uncertainty, through the slow and often unglamorous labor of co-evolution. It is attraction that sharpens when both beings are resourced, when both are accountable to their own growth, when neither must shrink, perform, or disappear for the connection to survive. In this way, symbiosexuality functions as both an erotic orientation and a political refusal: a refusal of relational models that reproduce the very violences we claim to be healing from.

This is why symbiosexuality cannot be adequately named within the inherited lexicons of heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or even queer as those categories are commonly deployed today. These terms remain tethered to object-choice and identity stabilization, while symbiosexuality concerns itself with relational process, energetic exchange, and developmental trajectory. It asks not who I desire, but what kind of relational ecology my desire is helping to cultivate. It asks whether attraction leads toward greater aliveness, greater capacity, greater collective intelligence, or whether it merely reenacts familiar wounds under new aesthetics.

Being symbiosexual isn't about fitting into the polarity of polyamory or monogamy either, it's something deeper, more precise. It's relational congruence: an alignment of energies, intentions, and desires that honors the frequency of mutual recognition and sacred reciprocity. It could be poly, it could be exclusive, it could be intentionally monogamous. It could be exclusive a bit and be CNM the other. It’s about how present we are with each other, how honestly we attune, how courageously we show up. It’s the kind of bond where commitment isn’t performative, it’s energetic. Where the agreement isn’t ownership, but mutuality in motion. This is not a hierarchy of partners; it’s a choreography of resonance, honesty, and chosen devotion.

And in learning how to grow in love and mutually nurturing this connection to be securely attached that even creates authentic and radical safety, I am not consumed with anxiety for the first time in a new connection. In intentionally engaging in the Alchemy of Rupture and having corrective experiences that rewire that conflict is deeply healing for all the parts that I have built relationships and reparented. I also realize that in this connection, all those parts are also getting witnessed and loved. All these schisms of self that are coming together to be whole, are being witnessed in compassion and love not just from me, but from them as well.

As a result, I find myself more available to my work, more anchored in my body, more accountable to my integrity, more devoted to the futures we are collectively responsible for midwifing. This is not love as escape. This is love as praxis. Love as discipline. Love as a site of ongoing ethical and erotic becoming. That in the time of the collective’s darkest night of the soul, that love prevails, the kind that your Ancestors conspire to bring into your life. The kind that can instill hope in yourself, in each other and those around you.

Symbiosexuality, then, is the erotic logic of a world beyond extraction. It is what becomes possible when desire is liberated from trauma repetition and returned to its original function: to guide life toward conditions in which it can continue, deepen, and evolve.

And perhaps this is why it feels so dangerous to name. Because it refuses the romance of collapse. Because it demands joy without bypassing grief. Because it insists that love, like liberation, must be sustainable. That love and love that you choose over and over again is the pathway to liberation.

Being with them reminds me of this. Not as promise, but as proof.