So I was 18 and I had just moved out of living with my fiancé. He and I had dated for about 2 years at that point and we were mostly engaged because his Christian relatives were against us shacking up. He wouldn’t let me experiment with shaving my cunt and he didn’t want to do anything kinky and he was 1,000% against hitting me. So I wasn’t particularly sexually satisfied in this relationship. I could time to the minute exactly what three positions he liked to go through for sex–there was no variation. Also almost zero orgasms for me. I woke up one morning and told him that if we get married we will absolutely be divorced by the time I turn 40 so we shouldn’t get married. I moved out about two weeks later.

I was renting a room from an elderly lady who rented out the room because she wanted companionship. The previous tenant was a girl my age in college who was from another country and she had no friends. I was working theatre and out every night whether I had a show or not. During the daytime when I had time to burn I started hanging out on www.match.com. It was there in a stupid truth or dare game that someone asked me what my deepest fantasy was; of course it involved being whipped till I bleed then having someone fuck me nearly unconscious while I am bleeding all over the place.

So of course this dude sends me a private message and asks me if I have ever heard of bdsm. Nope, I hadn’t. He told me to go buy the book SM101. I called every fucking book store in a 30 mile radius before one helpful employee said, “Uhhh I think you should call Leather Masters. I think they are the only place you are going to find that.” So I managed to find Leather Masters and I drove over there. I walked into that store with my eyes as wide as dinner plates and my mouth open in complete horror. I remember shivering and feeling terrified. As I was slowly walking around the store I saw a cabinet with some weird metal things in it. The employee asked if I needed help. I asked him what those metal things were.

They were fucking sounds. He had a great time explaining how to use them. I bought the book and ran out of that store about as fast as I could.

I read the book in one night, masturbating furiously. Not that the book is that exciting but more the growing awareness that there almost certainly were people who would be thrilled to beat me until I bleed and then fuck me while I cry and say no. THAT WAS THE BEST NIGHT EVER. I kept talking to the guy from match.com. He told me to go up to the Power Exchange in San Francisco. I asked why and what would happen there and he told me to go find out.

I brought my fucking sister because I was so scared. In retrospect that is hilarious and rather gross given my weird family history. If you don’t know: PE, as the locals refer to it, was a public sex space that had a dungeon in the basement and various other fun tools/equipment for sex. Folks from the scene were very welcome and encouraged in the time when I was going but I understand in the last few years it has gone hard in the swinger direction. If you didn’t have fetish/super sexy clothes on you had to wear a towel. So my sister is there going, “WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF CRAZY PLACE DID YOU BRING ME. WHY AM I HERE?!?!?!?!?! MY HUSBAND* IS GOING TO KILL ME.”

I told the guy from match.com that I wasn’t sure I was up for that. He said that maybe we should take it slow and I should drive down to his house and we could do a scene in private before I dealt with the public stuff. So I did. I drove six hours to get to his house. Because I had read SM101 of course I had a safe call and I called a friend as soon as I arrived at his house and I read off his address, car license plate number, and his drivers license number before I walked into the house. In retrospect I am proud of myself.

We went in and I figured out that he was a lot older than I thought he was, or at least he looked a lot older? Something. He was at least 30 years my senior and possibly more than 40 years. He wanted to start by giving me a bath and shaving my cunt. I went along with it with reservations.

By the time he finished that and was drying me off and trying to get me to the bed I flipped out. “Uhhhhh I gotta go.” I got dressed in lightening speed. It was very late at night so I called an old friend who lived about an hour north of him. I asked if I could crash at her house for the night. She was very confused because she was not my safe call and she had no idea why I’d be in SoCal at that point. When I told her she screamed at me for about two hours about how lucky I was that I wasn’t dead. I drove home the next day.

Then I went to Hot Topic and bought slutty goth clothes and I went back to PE the next weekend by myself. I ended up fucking one of the employees in the laundry room. Linc was his name. Dad (@Slydexia) yelled at me to come inside the cage because he and his friend needed bottoms. I did not enter the cage for him. Instead I played with this incredibly beautiful woman. She flogged the shit out of me and told me to come kiss her as a thank you the next day at Dore Alley. I absolutely did as she directed and had my mind completely blown by the sight of thousands of hot leathermen hurting each other, pissing on each other, fucking each other on the street in San Francisco. How in the fuck was this real life?

The week after that I went to the Santa Cruz munch and met two highly creepy weirdos. Ok, that wasn’t going to work out. (I knew more about them later. My radar was 100% fucking right.) Then I went to the Palo Alto munch that Wednesday. I was invited to a party the next Saturday. I met my Owner and most of the people who would become my Leather family in the course of that first month I was in the scene.

I grew up in that Leather family. It’s not that we always had good times and there were no difficulties. I have worked through more problems with those people than any of my vanilla friends. When one of us fuck up the others are happy to point it out. It has allowed me, no required me to get my shit together in so many different ways.

I don’t want love that is uncritical and unconditional. I am not an infant. I want people to have standards that I must meet. I want people to require that I treat them well enough. I learned it through watching other people do the same.

I feel like my life is very much the result of luck. If I had not met those people when I did there is the very real possibility I wouldn’t be alive. They modeled sobriety. They modeled making calculated risks. They modeled researching risks. They modeled how to set boundaries and hold people to them. They showed me how to be a healthy person.

Well, at least healthier than I had ever known. It’s all relative–right?

• Turns out he wasn’t her husband because the marriage ceremony they had while he was in prison wasn’t legal. He never bothered to divorce his first wife.