Emily Torres

Jul 5, 2024 | thegoodtrade.com | Emily Torres

My basic sex education did not cover that in school. Instead, sex ed meant memorizing lists of sexually transmitted diseases in classrooms full of snickering high schoolers. I sat on old wooden bleachers while guest speakers told my peers and me that premarital sex would make us “chewed up pieces of gum” or “pieces of tape that were used so much they no longer stick.”We were told nobody would want us if we weren’t a virgin, especially us young women.

Jul 2, 2024 | thegoodtrade.com | Emily Torres

My first diary was a beige, floral-covered hardback with a small gold lock on it. It had come with a matching address book that looked like something you might find next to a rotary phone in an elderly aunt’s house. Still, it was mine, and the flimsy lock made me feel like my words were powerful, they were worth protecting. It was that journal that housed my diary entry from September 11th, 2001, with all the failure to understand that an 11-year-old kid could muster.

Jun 21, 2024 | thegoodtrade.com | Emily Torres

My first experience with poetry was sugary-sweet and dripping in rhyme. Dr. Seuss’s melodic stories captured my youthful attention, and I loved listening to how the words bounced off the page to form music of their own. When I began writing poetry as a preteen, I invested my allowance in a rhyming dictionary. I rhymed the words “love” and “above” more often than I’d care to admit (with an occasional “dove” in there, too — WHY).

Jun 18, 2024 | thegoodtrade.com | Emily Torres

My adult friends and I can talk—and have talked—about nearly everything. But when it comes to sex, we revert to our prepubescent selves, giggling at every anatomical term. Or, we make jokes about it to mask our discomfort. Call it immature, or call it the product of a sex education that taught us little to nothing about the mechanics of sex. I like to think it’s the latter. “Is it finally time to have ‘the talk’ with my friends?”But lately, I’ve been wondering: Should I bring it up more often?

Jun 18, 2024 | thegoodtrade.com | Emily Torres

I’ve spent hours agonizing over my “true self,” and years yearning to find my “sense of purpose.” For so long, I documented my questions in my most trusted companions: simple college-lined spiral-bound notebooks; my journals. As I grew more inquisitive, I began to read through my old entries—and there, in the midst of my distractions and tangents, I found what I had been looking for.