11/17/2025
✨ Blog Draft: “Branded (and Blessed)”
by Dr. Tina Plays…
We use the word branding to describe ownership — cattle burned with a mark so everyone knows who they “belong” to.
But humans get branded too.
I was branded first by my father.
Then by my spouse.
The two men who, according to the myths of our culture, were supposed to protect me.
To keep me safe.
To guard my survival.
But life has a way of teaching truth through contradiction.
No one is coming to save us.
And also — we are never alone.
Safety is not a person.
Safety is a relationship with ourselves, with our body, with our breath, with the Earth, and with the unseen.
And this brings me to the branding most people never talk about:
My virus.
My herpes.
The tiny particle that lives in my nervous system.
Whispering. Signaling. Teaching. Revealing.
We think of viruses as invaders — enemies — shameful secrets.
But that is a misunderstanding of the human body itself.
We are not singular beings.
We are ecosystems.
We are part human cells, and part microbiome — bacteria, fungi, viruses, ancient mitochondria who once were other and now are us.
Without the bacteria in our gut, we don’t digest food.
Without the mitochondria that once invaded our ancestor cells, we don’t make energy.
Without the microbes that live on our skin, we lose our immunity.
The microbiome is not contamination.
It is communion.
So why do we treat some microbes with reverence
and others with shame?
Why is strep welcomed as “just a childhood illness,”
while herpes becomes a lifelong mark of unworthiness?
Why do we test women for HPV and blame them for cervical cancer
while almost never testing the men who transmit it?
Why do we worship antibiotics, birth control, and vaccines
while dismissing the intuition, the cycles, the signals, the body’s ancient knowledge?
I used to believe my virus was a curse.
A mark.
A scarlet letter.
Something that happened to me.
But now I understand:
It was a teacher.
It told me I was not safe in my marriage.
It told me my boundaries were crossed long before my skin was.
It told me my body was screaming what my mind refused to hear:
You cannot abandon yourself and still survive.
And so I woke up.
I began to remember who I am:
A healer.
An intuitive.
A woman of fire and water and animal knowing.
A creature of sunlight, s*xuality, creation, and joy.
S*x is powerful energy.
It creates life.
It creates art.
It creates intimacy and innovation and meaning.
And like all sacred things—it requires reverence.
Not shame.
Not punishment.
Not exile.
Herpes — like HPV, CMV, EBV, HIV — does not make someone unworthy.
It makes them human.
It makes them part of the world’s oldest conversation between cells and consciousness.
In a s*x-positive world, we still carry the medieval fear that viruses make someone “dirty.”
Yet every day we exchange bacteria through touch, breath, saliva — and those bacteria shape our minds, our moods, our immunity, our future health more profoundly than herpes ever could.
The real intimacy is invisible.
It’s microbial.
Energetic.
Emotional.
Spiritual.
We become the people we spend time with — not just psychologically, but biologically.
We merge.
We mirror.
We co-evolve.
So the question is no longer:
“Who is clean?”
But rather:
Who honors their body?
Who honors your body?
Who tells the truth?
Who treats s*x as sacred?
Who can meet you in intimacy with presence, breath, and reverence instead of performance, conquest, or shame?
My virus taught me to choose differently.
It taught me sovereignty.
It taught me discernment.
It taught me self-love.
It branded me not as broken, but as awake.
And now, I carry it as a reminder:
I belong to myself.
And that is the real liberation.
