A LETTER FROM OLESIYA

MEET OLESIYA

Although technically, you’re also meeting Alyssa.

My name is Alyssa.

Olesiya is the name I write under.

For a long time, I thought they were two different women.

Alyssa was the ordinary one.

Mother. Daughter. Woman buying groceries. Woman making breakfast. Woman capable of being loving, frightened, selfish, generous, ridiculous, contradictory, and occasionally spectacularly certain about things she would later discover she had absolutely no business being certain about.

Olesiya was different.

She was the woman who wrote.

The woman who followed ideas into uncomfortable places.

The woman who could say things Alyssa wasn’t entirely sure she wanted permanently attached to her name.

It was a convenient arrangement.

Possibly too convenient.

Because eventually I had to consider the possibility that there had only ever been one woman.

Me.

I HAVE LIVED SEVERAL LIVES IN ONE.

My life has not followed a particularly convincing narrative arc.

I have been a businesswoman.

I have worked in the adult industry.

I have known material abundance and watched much of what once made life look secure disappear.

I have volunteered.

Studied.

Become a mother.

I have lived inside spiritual traditions deeply enough that they stopped being interesting ideas and became the architecture of ordinary life.

I became a Bhakti nun.

Later came Christianity.

Marriage.

Divorce.

BDSM.

Tantra.

Psychology.

Conscious relating.

Writing.

And eventually, Goddess Philosophy.

There have been periods when God occupied the centre of my life.

There have also been periods when a cookies-and-cream donut from a service-station refrigerator seemed unusually significant.

I no longer assume the first experience was necessarily more sacred than the second.

Life has been inconveniently resistant to becoming a neat story about how I once knew nothing and now know things.

I learn.

I change.

I become convinced.

I reconsider.

I occasionally discover something beautiful and immediately make the very human mistake of trying to turn it into a universal law.

Then life tends to intervene.

Usually by Tuesday.

I DIDN’T SET OUT TO CREATE A PHILOSOPHY.

There was no grand plan.

No notebook containing:

Step One: Have complicated life.

Step Two: Develop philosophy.

Step Three: Capitalise alarming number of nouns.

I was trying to understand my own experiences.

Why could something feel liberating in one context and diminishing in another?

Why could surrender feel beautiful once and unbearable somewhere else?

Why could the same person be powerful and vulnerable?

Why did ideas I once believed completely eventually stop making sense?

Why did love sometimes expand a life and sometimes quietly consume one?

I kept following the questions.

One question became another.

Then another.

Eventually there were manuscripts everywhere and apparently we had ourselves a philosophy.

Things escalated.

I’M NOT PARTICULARLY INTERESTED IN BEING YOUR GURU.

This does present something of a branding problem.

I created something called Goddess Philosophy.

I write under the name Olesiya.

There are Thrones involved.

I understand how this looks.

But I have remarkably little interest in becoming an unquestionable authority on somebody else’s life.

I don't want you to agree with me because I wrote a book.

I don't want disagreement explained away as evidence that you simply aren't sufficiently evolved to understand me.

And I definitely don't want to become so invested in being right that I lose the ability to notice when I'm wrong.

I expect some of what I believe today will embarrass Future Me.

She is welcome to her opinions.

I hope she has better information.

WHY OLESIYA?

Olesiya began as a place I could put parts of myself that felt too large, too strange, too exposed, or too difficult to reconcile with ordinary life.

She could write.

Question.

Explore.

Take up intellectual space.

Alyssa could remain safely elsewhere.

Over time, that division became less useful.

The woman writing philosophy and the woman making breakfast are not competing for the title of Real Me.

Neither is the woman who once lived as a nun.

Or the woman who has worked in the sex industry.

Or the mother.

Or the sceptic.

Or the believer.

Or the woman eating a service-station donut in her car.

None of them needs to defeat the others.

They are chapters.

I still write as Olesiya because that is the name under which this body of work came alive.

But Alyssa isn't hiding behind her.

She's the one typing.

THERE ARE PARTS OF MY STORY I WON’T TELL YOU.

Not everything meaningful needs to become content.

There are experiences I keep private.

There are stories involving other people that do not belong entirely to me.

There are things I may understand differently ten years from now.

And there are parts of my history I refuse to turn into evidence that every adult choice I later made was inevitable.

Context matters.

So does responsibility.

Privacy matters too.

I can tell you my story without believing you are entitled to every page of it.

Some things are allowed to remain mine.

AND NOW, APPARENTLY, THE INTERNET.

This is the part I am still getting used to.

I like writing.

Writing gives you the wonderful opportunity to say something deeply personal and then close the laptop and pretend nobody is going to read it.

The internet has somewhat undermined this arrangement.

Being seen makes me uncomfortable.

Being recognised makes me more uncomfortable.

The idea of a large audience does not fill me with excitement.

It mostly makes me wonder whether hiding behind a very large houseplant remains a viable communications strategy.

And yet, here I am.

Not because I conquered the fear.

I just stopped requiring the fear to disappear before I did anything.

HELLO, FRIEND.

If you hear me speak online, you may hear me say this.

Hello, friend.

There is a reason.

I don't particularly want to speak to an audience.

An audience sounds enormous.

An audience has opinions.

An audience may contain thousands of people before breakfast, which frankly seems excessive.

But I can speak to one person.

So that's who I imagine.

Not followers.

Not an audience.

You.

One human being encountering another human being through the profoundly normal medium of a glowing rectangle.

Hello, friend.

THINGS I STILL DON’T KNOW.

A great deal.

I don't know which of my current beliefs Future Me will find embarrassing.

I don't know how much of love is choice and how much is accident.

I don't know whether some experiences we call spiritual will eventually have explanations we haven't discovered yet.

I don't know whether two people can ever know one another as completely as they imagine.

I don't know what Goddess Philosophy will look like in twenty years.

I don't know whether writing publicly will eventually make being seen feel normal.

And I still don't understand why anyone voluntarily chooses orange furnishings.

Some questions may simply remain beyond us.

I'm comfortable with that.

I am much less interested these days in having a complete worldview.

I'd rather remain capable of being surprised.

SO, THAT’S ME.

Writer.

Mother.

Former nun.

Former adult industry worker.

Businesswoman.

Believer.

Sceptic.

Woman behind Goddess Philosophy.

Woman behind Olesiya.

Woman behind the laptop.

Still learning.

Still changing.

Still occasionally far too certain.

And still very interested in what happens next.