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Foibles

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I feel deeply grateful for the reminder that everyone can do their very best and still fail to communicate clearly. Everyone can mean super well and only have love in their hearts and still sometimes folks feel wounded. Relationships form over a long time and over many different exposures to one another. If you deeply desire community with people who have strong personalities and who act decisively and firmly then there will be times when there will be misunderstandings.

Bumps in the road are not cement walls.

Community is formed through apologies and forgiveness and trying again. If this exact one specific thing doesn’t work out then you keep going. If you care enough to push for it there will be more opportunities.

Tonight I walked up to the top of my road because I had a lot of big feelings in my body and breathing really deeply as I huffed my way up that big hill was good for my body. Some folks, including me, believe that we store grief in our lungs so doing things to force yourself to breathe very deeply when you are working through deep feelings allows you to let the feelings go. When I got to the top I looked out over the city and the firth and I reminded myself that we picked this city out of all the cities in the world. We decided that this was where we are going to put down roots and build community and find a place for ourselves.

Hell, I’ve already planted 15 trees. I’m staying here till I die. I am going to eat that produce, damnit.

I am in this for the long haul. I am not always an easy person and sometimes I fail to figure out how to communicate clearly in the timing that would be best. The good part is that I don’t do a lot of holding grudges. When I can see very clearly that everyone is doing their absolute best in a given moment there is no anger to hold on to. Even if there is disappointment, that will fade.

As I say in my house over and over every day: you learn a lot more from mistakes than you do from getting something right the first time. What did you learn from this mistake? How can you build on this learning moving forward? As long as you are still alive you haven’t run out of chances yet.

I am grateful when I learn how I have failed to communicate clearly. There are lessons to be had in that; every day is a school day.

Food culture

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It is funny to me the ways in which my autistic challenges around food land differently in different spaces. This has been an intense and complicated roller coaster since I was a tiny child. This is relevant to kink mostly in as much as almost all of my earliest strong positive exposure to conscious sharing of food among adults was in kink settings.

I stopped going to church when I was in middle school. Most of my foster placements didn’t take me out into the community because I was an explosive, very difficult child. My mother, during the rare periods that I lived with her, never participated in anything in any community that I can remember. She was isolated and lonely and poor so her life with me involved a lot of stories about how good things had been when she was married. Back then she had friends and community and there were potlucks and all the kids on the blocks wanted her to make their birthday cakes because hers were the best.

She bought me shitty grocery store cakes that made me vomit. But hey, that just happened because I was ungrateful. I couldn’t possibly be having a physical reaction that was entirely out of my control, no I was just being rude to her with my constant ingratitude.

All of my feelings about food are wrapped up in all of my feelings about my mother and the kink community is a very interesting place to be dealing with different personality dynamics around food. For the whole rest of my life I am going to be grateful that I learned food sharing with the people I did it with. I know about the subtle quirks and preferences of almost every person I have ever prepared food for. For all of the years I was super active in the scene before I had kids (when my palate changed like whoa) I was on a pretty restricted diet. The list of things I would eat was much easier to contend with than even trying to list all of the things I wouldn’t eat.

People always made sure there was stuff for me. Even if they weren’t planning to eat it because it didn’t look very appetising to them, devoid of flavour as it was. I have very distinct memories of approaching a food set up with great trepidation and having someone wrap their arms around me and guide me over to exactly what had been made for me. I cried so many times. That right there made me feel more loved than any sexual experience I have ever had. Those people (because gender was not a factor–folks were all over the spectrum) made it very clear to me: *”I see you. I understand you. I’ve got you.”

The recreation events weren’t like that. My other hobbies didn’t do that. The parenting people did a different sort of dance around accommodating all needs because holy shit do homeschoolers have a whole dance around food needs. That shit is Tetris on a level that made me have to develop whole new neural pathways. That was so hard.

In the kink community it wasn’t hard. I had to learn how to talk about my body in order to be a safe person to play with. It was not ok that I had learned to dissociate all the time and I spent most of every single day feeling bad all the time. I had no ability to imagine a time when I did not feel on the verge of death. The sheer vigour of youth was pushing me still but I was very near the cliff where that wasn’t going to help me anymore.

My community members made me feel safe. That was not a feeling I had known in my life up to that point. Now that I am an adult I can describe my IBS troubles with great eloquence and fancy-pants words like “HPA axis disorder”. For a few decades all I could say was that everything burned. Of course people didn’t take this seriously, obviously I was just melodramatic. A whiner. I sat in the bathroom all day because I was lazy, obviously.

It couldn’t possibly be that I was sitting in the bathroom on the toilet rocking and crying because it burned so fucking badly All.The. Time. When all of your hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and your adrenal system develop in your brain from infancy through all of your childhood in settings that are violent physically, sexually, completely unstable in every metric you can imagine then a body is going to have a completely fucked up digestion system. It’s kinda like how I can watch someone pop up to have to run to the toilet every 45 minutes and go, “Ahh, early childhood sexual assault? Yeah.”

You want to know how I can talk about this easily and without shame? Because of the kink community.

I suspect that this happening in the groups with all ages are part of the reason that I never became particularly drawn to TNG groups. I guess I definitely already understand it isn’t universal. I stayed with the people who were 20, 30, 40, 50 years older than me because my experience of those kinky friends were that they genuinely wanted me to be around in the long run and that means I needed to take it seriously that things were done to me and I had to figure out how to fix what was broken. It didn’t matter that it was hard and that it would take a long time, they would be there. And the thing is–it’s not like this was one person who was all shiny and magical. It wasn’t. This built over years and it carried me through more than a decade of my life as the only support network I had.

Noah has done the vast majority of the heavy lifting on expanding my palate. He asked me if I would like to learn to like more food and I said yes. I will flat out admit that a lot of it has been the privilege of being able to spend a lot of discretionary money on food. He has spent 16 years taking me to fascinating restaurants and traveling the world to find out what food really tastes like in other places. I am a lucky fucking bitch and I know it. Now I know how to put things in my mouth without risking a panic attack because a texture is unfamiliar and my body cannot process that this thing is safe. It took years and a very gradual expansion of trust. This was the stage with learning how to make my mouth believe that food wasn’t trying to kill me.

Noah paid for the nutritionists who worked with me over time to slowly acclimatize my body to absorbing nutrients from food instead of flushing it out as fast as possible with as much acid as possible. It took years. People who have been with me for many years probably remember my elimination diet challenges. I still have the Poop Book notebook. Wasn’t that a fun adventure. This was the stage where I learned how to digest food. I struggle with feeling like it is deeply pathetic that I had to spend my late 20’s/most of my 30’s learning how to digest food but such is my fucking life.

The process of digesting didn’t stop with how to stop having agonizing pain that left me writhing on the floor trying not to scream from the pain of having large bulky items move slowly through my scar tissue laced intestine. It was a god damn nightmare. Do you know who emotionally supported me through that? The friends I made in the kink community. Especially the people who were older than me and who wanted me to be alive in this body for a very long time. They knew that the sooner I went through this the more years I’d have with actual quality of life.

It isn’t that things were perfect or that there were no problems in the community. Despite how much of my heart I left behind I had to go. So the good of being in California didn’t outweigh the bad.

I think about these things and I want to write them here because my experiences of food culture were such a big part of what made the bdsm community different from other hobbies I had. That is how bdsm/Leather crossed from being “those people you hang out with sometimes” to being my family. They wanted to know me. Nosey fuckers, I love it. We have to care about how our bodies are doing or we can’t keep doing this. This is a high intensity fucking sport, yo.

So that’s why I ask you so so so many questions about food. That’s why I want to hear all your stories about food. That’s why I want to find out what kind of food culture existed in your life growing up. That’s why I want to know what you prefer to drink and how do you feel about spice? It’s why I am so intense about figuring out how I can get as many servings of vegetables in front of you that you find palatable because I am in this for the long game. I’m only 41, I might know you for 30 or more years past this. I want you to still be alive and feeling good and having fun. So I want to know how I can make you feel like your needs are seen. Like it is important that you attain the best health you can in this life so your body can carry you to all sorts of wonderful debauched adventures.

I want to see you out fucking 3 hot people when you are your 70’s. Oh my god. There was this particular woman in the San Francisco community when I arrived. I was young enough that while we had a few very passing conversations she really didn’t have patience for my bullshit. I would watch her saunter around parties in her black mini-skirt and her black lace bra and her sensible kitten heels with two dudes who were in their 30’s on a leash behind her. The dudes were ripped as fuck. She had the most salacious, glorious smile I have ever seen. When I was 18 I decided I wanted to be her someday.

I’d like you to be there too. So, what kind of vegetables can I serve you today? Food is medicine. Food is magic. Food is what gives us the nutrients to build the cells and the tiny invisible to the eye specks that form the entity that is you. Food matters. Food is part of community.

I would like to be in a community with you. I don’t want you to be a commodity or a notch on a bed post. I want your whole being. I know it is a little weird. I never claimed to be normal.

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch

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I keep getting comments from complete strangers, which is still slightly surprising to me. I write about myself and I had extensive and varied trauma as a young person. It comes up as I try to figure out how to handle situations in my life as an adult. I function best, as a person who is autistic and has PTSD, by writing out the things that I am having big feelings about rather than trying to talk about these things in real time. My side of the conversation is too big. I like to play in ways that will upset sensitive people. I encourage you to take care of yourself and not read my writing.

Lately we have been having to have the kinds of serious talks that fucked up people need to have before they go wading into the murky morass. Things like: it is ok to harm me if you are doing it on one axis at a time and it isn’t ok to stack traumas because I can’t process my way out of that fast enough to be appropriate with the kids.

My life is still incredibly structured around my ability to be level through my day to day life. I’m homeschooling my kids and I have over a decade to go before I’m done and that requires a high level of emotional regulation from me. (Not debating this choice here.) But this is the rock around which my life is built.

I have a lot of experience with complex trauma. Lucky me? I am a bit of a tight ass and I define trauma in my personal life as circumstances in which my survival has been in question and ongoing issues where my brain is not capable of telling a situation apart from things that might kill me. Being uncomfortable or stressed out is not a trauma in my personal nomenclature. Brains can be difficult. If something was a threat to your survival at a formative time in your life and it continues happening past the point where it can threaten your survival sometimes your brain struggles to turn off the “Oh shit I am going to die” part.

This is relevant because my father liked to tell me that I exist to get men off. I am the product of rape. Like, those fucked up incest stories? That was literally my childhood. He would tell me, from when I was a toddler, that if I am not pleasing there is no point in him continuing to let me be alive. That means that for the rest of my whole life sex is wrapped up in Do I deserve to be alive? Am I going to fail at getting this man off and then he is going to kill me? Or should I kill myself out of shame. That part was a lot less clear.

Noah is getting older. There are biological factors at play that influence when he can come a lot more than I can be the force that decides his orgasm. But if you tell me that I’m not getting you off that I’m just not quite good enough combined with putting your hand on my neck*? That is a singular layer of trauma for me that I can process and internalise and enjoy the mind-fuckery. I know Noah is actually very happy to be married to me and orgasm or not he is absolutely thrilled to fuck me for the rest of his life. He has demonstrated the absolute commitment he has to me not dying–I can deal with that.

But I cannot cope with that if I am already overwhelmingly upset or feeling suicidal for other reasons. This is part of why I cannot play like this if I am not writing. I have to tell you where my brain is so you can make decisions about what is safe.

This is why I don’t play with safewords. It’s not because I’m so bad ass. It’s not because I think someone should read my mind. It’s because either my play is so light that “Hm that’s kinda pinching” is the same as “red” or because I am doing play so intense that “red” isn’t a word I am going to come up with under pressure. I just won’t. My brain isn’t going to go there. I will be unable to use that as a word to help myself.

In the fourth month of our marriage he raped me. I don’t mean we did a rape scene I mean I was hysterically sobbing because I had spent the day talking to CPS about what my sister was doing to her kids and that was an extremely upsetting situation. I was not fucking ok and I felt like I was about to break into a thousand pieces. I have been raped quite a few times in my life. Every other time my brain has coped by freezing. That day with Noah I was completely unhinged and I fought him. I fought him until we were both bleeding. I lost. That had reverberations for years. I was scared of him and I flinched when he tried to touch me. That was before we had children. There was no reason in the world why I should have stayed.

Except I am pretty sure I could not be married to someone if they will not hurt me like that. I am pretty sure I could not maintain interest in a singular person who was not willing to do that to me.

So yeah, we are talking about the role of rape in our life going forward. I am someone who has spent decades teetering on the edge of committing suicide. It is kinda a family tradition: maternal grandmother, father, brother. It’s just there as an option, always.

I am 8 years younger than my father was when he quit. But hey, nobody is going to send me to prison for raping them as a child so I guess I don’t have his good reason to wuss out.

Anyway. When it comes to raping me that’s a topic of some delicacy. We have talked about the fact that what he wants is not a rape scene on a pre-negotiated day… where is the trauma in that? We are discussing ways to upset me/pick a shitty day that isn’t too shitty. As a recent example of oh-god-no: if he had decided to rape me on the day I got the news about Andrew dying I would not have been ok. I would not bounce back from that in a way that would be acceptable for the parameters of my life. The absolute best case scenario is I would get out of bed 10 or so months later and be maybe ok with trying to avoid dying.

So strategy is important.

But like, I’ve started running again. I haven’t paid the fee yet but right now I’m thinking my self-masochistic act of physical pain for my birthday this year is running another marathon. If he were, say, to wait until I am tired and focused and all I want to be thinking about is the race to absolutely insist and piss me off and hurt me so that I have to feel that while I’m running?

Oh yeah I could still behave how I am supposed to behave in my day to day life. That is a reminder that my body isn’t mine. I have accepted that I like having times when my inconsiderate asshole of a husband lets me feel pain and additional physical burden outside of my usual standard chronic pain because I’m a lucky whore.

I know that there are a lot of feminists who would be extremely unhappy about the fact that I need my marriage to involve explicit sexual violence as the trade for my comfy rich bitch life. I would say that I am a lady of leisure if I ever stopped working. The working won’t stop because it is ingrained into my bones that you work until you die and that rest is for other people. But mixed in with that is constant gratitude that I get to choose my work and I get to choose the scale of my projects with almost no limitations.

Hi newish people. I grew up in really deep poverty. I didn’t have a “permanent address” until I got married. I moved every few months–more than 50 times before I was 18 and then 9 more times in the 7 years of being an adult before I got married. I went through more than a dozen different foster homes and when I was with my mom things were often bad enough that I stole food in order to eat. I mostly crawled out of that poverty thanks to a dog bite settlement. It’s why I am fervently in favour of universal basic income. My lawyer set me up so that the settlement could pay for college. Without it I would not have gone; there was no chance.

So marrying a trust fund baby has been weird. It wasn’t a big trustfund by such standards but he was able to buy a house in his mid 20’s in California in an intense housing market. He was able to go to a good school without loans and he has had a really blessed career in tech.

I get to do what I want. I get to focus on what I want. He lets me control a lot of pieces of our life and I get to decide how money is spent and how it is saved and invested. It blows my tiny little mind that I do the things I do on a daily basis. I was not fucking trained for this shit. I feel wildly out of my depth. I feel incompetent in the extreme even as according to all metrics that can be validated by outside professional sources I am doing extremely well. It feels like a farce. It feels like the house of cards will collapse at any minute.

Now that’s kinda a loophole you can drive a truck through. Because that’s not existentialist trauma. Fucking with me around those insecurities? Oh yeah, that’ll be fine.

Fucking me when I’m sick and I feel terrible and I am not going to enjoy any bit of it at all? I mean… not like cancer sick–don’t be ridiculous. (I’ve already had cancer twice so it’s a reasonable part of the conversation.) But a bad cold? The flu? Oh sure. Mock the fuck out of me. Great time to shove my face in a pillow so you don’t catch anything.

I have heard from other people with PMDD that they too have times of the month, every month, when they don’t have any interest in sex and it is very repellant. For the past almost decade and a half of having small children it’s been very questionable fucking with me when I’m on the low end of that cycle. I’m less stable if you do and the level of stable I have needed has been pretty difficult for me. I am not naturally a stable person. I have no useful training in stability.

Things are changing. I don’t have super little kids anymore. I have support in the day for me to duck in and out for a few minutes so I can take breaks and have time alone in my brain–I have literally never had this like it is now before we moved to Scotland. The way our life is set up now feels like an utter fucking miracle. This is beyond my wildest dreams.

Noah is nervous that this is a short uptick and it won’t continue. That’s a reasonable worry. The little kids part of our life has been hard on both of us. It has been hard to trust that there is a far side that will be fun. (If you do not feel in your bones that you must have children or your life will be incomplete don’t fucking do it. This shit is exhausting and frustrating and steals all your fucking time.)

The thing is: I have been in the bdsm community looking for people to do mean things to me from as soon as it was legal. I was desperately masturbating thinking about it and hurting myself before that. I think that being at a low ebb while I am going through the intensity of early parenting is reasonable. I’m just been fucking surviving. I don’t think that having kids is going to turn me vanilla in the long run of my life. I like it when people are crying way too much. I don’t care if it is me or someone else–if we are fucking someone should be crying. And bleeding at the same time is even better.

I miss you D. I will love you forever and I wish you only happiness.

Just like the growing tightness in my legs feels like carving off a layer of shell I don’t need anymore–a return to who I have been. My legs feel like I have been running. My legs feel like I have been bouncing up and down like I am dancing. I miss dancing so much. I used to dance 5 nights a week doing a wide variety of styles–most of which were extremely energetic. I’d go running at lunchtime.

I want that back. I tried to start running not long after we moved but I think it was too close to the more recent cancer and the house repair has been really demanding. I’m just to the point where it feels like I can.

I feel like that with sex. I feel like that with needing Noah to hurt me. I think there were reasons I could never walk away from the scene. I think there are reasons I started making friends before I was even playing again. I am a shark and I like swimming near other scary creatures.

Also: fucking terrified of the ocean. I am completely convinced I am going to be eaten in the ocean. It is not rational. FUCK MY OLDER SIBLINGS.

Anyway. I think I have followed this train of thought far enough. mwah

  • = Don’t even come for me about breath play. I didn’t say he choked me. He can’t choke me. I have had a significant number of brain injuries and I am at high risk for stroke. He is deeply invested in keeping me for a long time and that means I can’t be choked anymore. I miss it.

Just keep swimming

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Last night Noah was being a sensitive new age guy and he checked in if the current level of increase in meanness/friction on my cunt is a problem. He said he knows it is a lot compared to what had been happening and he just wants to make sure I’m ok.

I said, “Well I did tell you I’d be ok with you fucking me pretty much whenever and I’m still mostly initiating all of our sex. So mostly I’m thinking that you aren’t fucking me enough…. loser.” (We are having sex pretty much every day lately.)

He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Well! Ok then!” Then he ripped his pajamas off real fast and started poking at my clothes. So I undressed and we, like the fully mature people we are, proceeded to spend about 40 minutes rolling back and forth naked telling stupid jokes and not getting around to having sex.

Finally I said, “This is my downfall. I am too funny. You can’t bear the seriousness of fucking someone as funny as me–it might ruin the mood.”

Really it just felt like we were young again and we had all the time in the world to just enjoy being naked together and of course eventually we will get around to sex.. it’s inevitable. Also inevitable: when we did it was of course very fucked up roleplay about how to manipulate a child into not having the right vocabulary for even reporting sexual abuse. After all, he is just having me pray every night and giving me a relaxing massage.

I met Noah when he was 26, we spent his 27th birthday together. I was 22 when we met. On one hand I felt so very worldly when we met but now I look back on it and I giggle. What does it mean to be worldly anyway? I was in such a rush to gain “experience” as if that would somehow make my life better. In some ways it was a good thing.

I have friends who settled down permanently with the first or second person they ever dated or had sex with. Most of them have told me that they have mixed feelings about the fact that they have little or no sexual experience outside of this primary relationship. They feel like they don’t know as much about what they do or don’t like.

I’m sure there are people who are completely content with their one lifetime partner, but those folks don’t talk to me about it.

I have never had a moment of pause where I have thought “Oh no if only I had more experience with other people.” Sometimes I miss the hunt because I was good at it and it was fun, but that’s not the same thing. Really I’m not even sure if I would hunt the same way going forward in any case. My life is so different and the Jenga tower is somewhat precarious. I don’t have much time to give anyone and the community in Scotland is so small that hunting with my normal voraciousness would very quickly create a challenging situation. Even if you are being honest and up front, not as many people are happy to be part of a truly extensive network as you think.

It’s a rare person who appreciates the sort of woman who can cheerfully pick up 8 new partners in a weekend. Daddy James you are always and forever the best first date of my whole life. I love you so much.

When you are fucking a lot of people you find out very intimately about peoples’ prejudices. I firmly believe that anyone gets to dislike whatever they want. Depending on how you say that people often assume that you end up on the side of disliking something they are on and they freely explain in great detail.

I asked about whether the older people I know remember a time when things were less judgmental because I saw a comment on a buddy’s post from someone I don’t know (who is ironically, younger than me) who said that they are old enough to remember a time when people in the community didn’t judge and they accepted everyone.

People judge whores. People judge women who use the word whore for themself in complicated ways. I remain grateful for the sex workers in my life who were close friends when I was working through some of my really intense trauma who told me that whatever associations other people have with that word are not my problem. My experiences are mine and no one can take them away from me or say that I am not allowed to experience the world as I am. It’s really weird that my biological father gave me that gift. Apparently whore is a title that a man is allowed to gift to a small child and she can keep it absolutely forever no matter what anyone else thinks.

I think about the judgment that people pass because despite the press releases that the bdsm community likes to put out about how people in the bdsm community tend to have slightly higher than average EQ and they are not significantly more traumatized than the normal population…

I am a traumatized motherfucker. Much of what drives me to seek out predatory and vicious partners is not some abstract “I was born this way”; I was shaped by a monster. When I was young and in the scene I would occasionally hear outlandish stories about how the younger you were when you started being inculcated into “slave life” the better you will be for the rest of your life. There was a woman who claimed her family sold her into a bdsm slave family at 14. This was treated like a hot/good thing?

Yet in reality if the core of your sexuality is formed around extreme trauma and abuse and, frankly, brainwashing you make people fucking uncomfortable. The average person (even in the scene) you want to go play with and fuck is not able to handle even being too aware of the extent of extreme abuse that people like me live through. Because yeah I do want you to act that out with me. Yeah. I do want you to be that fucking evil.

My biological father held a gun to my head while raping me. If Noah wanted to do that we would have to do the scene on top of a Princess and the Pea pile of towels to catch the river of squirting I would do.

Because to be clear if you do to me what I like having done to me… you are going to have to sit real hard with the idea of whether or not you are a bad person. You are going to have to be ok doing fucked up shit to someone who has a documented police record of having incredibly fucked up shit done to them. You have to face it head on. You have to embrace it and really own it and be ok with the fact that other people are absolutely going to judge the fuck out of you if they find out what you do.

I am trickling out stories, yo. I know I have a new audience and I know that is pressure. I know that the Scottish people will get to know what I put out there in writing far faster than they will get to know me in person because I don’t leave the house that often. Nobody sees me week after week at a munch to get used to me slowly over time. I am going to be very much on the fringe for a long time, perhaps forever. Will I ever play publicly here? I don’t know.

I don’t particularly enjoy playing in the safe zone that I used to specifically inhabit in public play spaces. Well, I enjoyed it a lot more in the past but I don’t think I could get back to that headspace. I want to play for me now, not for advertising for the maximum number of potential partners. And I am fucked up.

I watch the age players defend that it isn’t about sex. Oh. Well sometimes it is. And sometimes it is about specifically degrading a little and making it very bad for them.

I watch pet play folks get upset about people bringing up bestiality. Oh. Well… I don’t think I could cross the line with an actual animal for all kinds of very good reasons but the stories are fucking hot. Roleplaying it? Fuck yeah. The more humiliating and disgusting the better.

Rand went down a list of things that most people would reject and it was a challenge for me to find a true hard limit on any of it. Much of it I want to be verbal/roleplay–there are no actual children involved in my sex life and there hasn’t been since I was the child and there never will be again.

I remember saying, “No children, no animals, no dead people other than that let’s talk.” But really if you want to roleplay any of those scenarios… ok.

I don’t find bodies off putting. I don’t find bodily functions to be deal breakers. I don’t have many limits or reasons I will tell someone to stop something in the abstract. There are days when I can’t do a certain thing for a transient reason and there are tons of obstacles to my having space and safety for most of them but that’s not the same thing.

When people get very upset about wanting to get rid of all predators in the scene I can’t help but wonder… but do you really want to? If you do then who are people like me going to play with?

Neither Noah nor I would be as good at crossing social more lines and being degrading and violent and vile as we are if we had never gone too far.

I always say that you learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing things right. I have made a lot of mistakes. A tremendous number of mistakes. I am sure that there are at least a couple of people who think of me and feel really bad sometimes. I know Noah has at least one woman who saw him in her nightmares. She came to me to process it because that is exactly the sort of thing that someone would do, right? I told her that I would support her in any way I could. She was entitled to say or do anything she needed to do to communicate to Noah how badly he fucked up. If she wanted him to pay for her therapy that would be completely legitimate. She wrote some very intense letters. I read them with Noah because he needed to understand fully how he fucked up. I am still friends with her and she says things are much better now. She’s happy.

You learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing it right. I know how badly I can hurt someone. Noah knows how badly he can hurt someone. Hell, he knows how badly he can hurt me. He fucked up really badly in the first six months of being married by the choice of when to rape me. It caused an extra layer of trauma that had to be unpacked.

Do you know how hard it makes me come when he hurts me and tells me that he is so glad that he gets to rape me decade after decade? It is literally completely fucked up. This is vanilla-land “You should run, not walk away from this man.”

Instead I am no longer allowed to say “Jesus Christ” because the only God I am allowed to worship is Noah so it has to be his name I say.

“The difference is consent” except when there is no consent and sometimes that is far better.

“We evaluate the risks to make safe choices” except when we totally fucking don’t and we flail and we hurt people and we traumatize them and then we put our finger on that trauma and push down a little harder because the bruise was starting to fade and we can’t have that.

I don’t do safe things. I do things that any reasonable therapist would tell me is a bad fucking idea and I am totally risking cracking my psyche wide open. Yes. The best orgasms live there.

Bdsm is not therapy. Bdsm is a place where fucked up people can do very fucked up things. I treat the bdsm community like the sea and I am a shark looking for a bigger shark. When I encountered stingrays and eels and angler fish I wished them well and kept looking until I found someone who could appreciate the kind of fucked up I am. Someone with just enough training in mental health to be able to properly enjoy fucking with someone who is as damaged as I am. I found a megalodon; just think of all the nice people I am keeping safe by keeping him off the market.

Noah didn’t pick someone who compulsively cannot say no to sex even when I really should because of physical damage by accident. He is a fucked up person. I mean that in the very best of ways. He is brilliant and he can hold many contradictory truths in his mind at the same time. He deeply respects me and he wants me to be a big person in the world taking up space. He is the reason I have most of the self confidence I have to just go do whatever I want. I used to doubt myself so much. I don’t have time anymore. He also wants to hurt me emotionally in ways I won’t shake off. He wants to specifically drill down on damage created by my father.

I can’t wait until he can go back to cutting on me.

In many ways it is much better for everyone that Noah put the choke chain on me. Scotland is a small sea and we are very big sharks.

Gathering for honoring Andrew Conway

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I would like to meet up with people in San Francisco on Saturday in the late afternoon/evening to collectively grieve and share stories about Andrew Conway. I am not sure where to meet as there is a 96% chance of rain so outside is unlikely to work (unless someone can think of a place outside with good cover?)
Does anyone know of a place that would be good to meet?

I would definitely prefer that it be a sober event as that was such an integral part of Andrew’s life at the end.

The last few years have been filled with so much loss and isolation and fear. I would really appreciate having an opportunity to connect and share our mutual love and respect for someone who was a tremendous force of life. Andrew lived more fiercely and broadly than most other people manage. He touched (not like that) many lives. It would be wonderful to get to see each other’s faces (with masks) and celebrate that we were all blessed to know him. Even when he was a twerp.

I have a public Facebook post as well. I will try to post updates here if I get more comments over there. Please feel free to share it with anyone who might want to see it. I would really appreciate suggestions for where to meet up.

Paula has said she might drop in but she is not sure she is ready to process this with a big group. She gave me her blessing to ask folks to meet up this week even though she may not be up for being present.

Bring all of your Andrew stories. I originally was thinking Golden Gate Park so folks could juggle and crack whips but of course this has to be the weekend San Francisco gets weather.

Share widely! Giving away porn (San Francisco, maybe Scotland)

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Hey folks, it might be easier to share a post.

A very dear member of the San Francisco community has passed away. I was asked to take care of dispersing books and toys. I am working on a Google Sheet with a list of the books.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vDqzyDpkkNp8jLGcTpRL-hi3ztTLKSRxesC-kyAK18M/edit?usp=sharing

I got started yesterday but I am far from done. Yesterday I processed books as fast as I could and snapped photographs of spines of more. I have added what I could get from the photographs this morning. I will be going back today to fill in the information I couldn’t get from the pictures. I will take more pictures and try to get all of the book data entered by Thursday night.

I will try to make time to meet up with people on Friday, Saturday, and early Sunday. I fly out on Sunday evening. Any books that haven’t been picked up in San Francisco or claimed by Scots for me to bring home will be taken to Half Price Books early on Sunday.

Act fast! I will not be able to deliver books all over the place. We will have to meet in/near San Francisco as I am racing the clock and I don’t have much time for driving all over.

The ties that bind

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This “community” we have as perverts is wide and shallow and yet so deep. The friends we make here are the witnesses to our lives. We see each other through loves and losses. We feed each other and we laugh. We show up for births and parties and holidays and deaths.

If you hang around very long you start seeing the old timers from your youth retiring or moving into care homes or hospitals and eventually they just go back through the process of becoming part of everything again. The spark that animated the very specific soul flickers then goes out.

I watch folks fuss at the problem of how to make swimming in this shark infested sea safe. I don’t think safety exists here.

I think there is transcendence and beauty and honor and horror here. I am here for it. I am here for as much of it as I can get.

I make friends with younger folks while knowing that I am writing the story of what they will remember when my own flame flickers out.

For now I just hurry so I can bloody my fingers rubbing the skin of one of my favorite sharks before he sinks forever. His wisdom will stay in the world. His love and generosity have already kept countless other souls from giving up. He kept me from giving up. He made sure I could eat and get to work and school. He gave me so much.

This blood in the water is really the least he deserves.

I will keep swimming. I will remember what he taught me. I will pass on anything I can. Sharks aren’t hoarders, they take what they need to live and they pass on the rest.

But I must keep swimming. I am a shark and swimming is how we stay alive.

Scraping the bottom of the spoon drawer

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Well fuck everything. The last two ish weeks have been absolutely horrid. I mean, there’s all the things (*wave arms in the direction of the whole world*) and then my body is being a real nightmare. My PMDD symptoms this month have been utterly unreal. My pain levels have been sky high. My mood is in the toilet. (Or rather in the scalpel drawer–not that I did anything. But I thought about it. Hell I don’t even own a scalpel at this point.)

And then when I did start my period my mood got worse and the pain got worse and I passed some clumps that were the size of golf balls and that’s just not fucking ok.

I’m watching two very different communities go through growing pains. I’m learning a lot about myself as I watch them process. I’m thinking about Sobonfu. I will never find a community; I have to make it. What are my values?

I’m more than a little bit of a dick. So my line can’t be that people can’t be dicks. I can be a bully so that can’t be the line either. Ah shit.

I try so hard to lift people up but right this minute all I can see are my failures.

“Only cowards ghost.”

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Someone said that recently in a conversation I was part of. They weren’t trying to talk to me or about me. But I was in the conversation and it was a generalized statement that applied to me so I took issue. Then they told me that I was taking things out of context and I was just triggered.

Ghosting.

I got involved with a dude when I was 19. He was 19 years older than me. We were lovers and play partners and friends until I was 33. During that time period anytime I wanted to set a boundary he didn’t like (marrying someone other than him, wanting to have kids with someone other than him, all kinds of shit) he would tell me why my reasons weren’t valid. He was adamantly pro relationship anarchy poly and he didn’t think I should be artificially limiting our relationship. I argued for a long time. After a while I think I had a lot of sunk cost fallacy in the relationship and I didn’t want to give up on him. Also he liked to say that anytime someone did him dirty they were discriminating against him for being autistic.

Then in a short period of time we had several interactions. First he told me that I needed to “make my children be submissive to him” because he is an adult and they are children so they need to know that they have to obey him. I told him he clearly understands nothing about child psychology and no I am definitely not doing that. Then the Elliot Rodger shooting happened. He said that he totally understood why any autistic man would do that if he were denied sex. (By the way he had spent the previous several years buying guns and going shooting a lot.) Then we had a weird conversation and I said, “Do I need to specifically say that my children are never ever potential sexual partners for you? Do you understand that?” (I mean, he held them within a week of them being born. He was an “uncle”.) He smirked at me and said “We’ll see what they say when they are 18.”

I cut him off. I blocked him on all social media. I blocked him on my phone. I blocked him on email. He was dead to me from that moment further and no I don’t feel like he fucking deserved an explanation.

At a different time, years before that, I went on one date with a dude. He totally ghosted me after that date. I shrugged and went on with my life. A couple of years later he ended up engaged to one of my close friends. During the engagement period before the wedding he took me aside at an event. He told me that he ghosted me because he had just gotten out of a bad relationship and I had a few personality traits like his ex (to be fair, I knew the woman and we do have a lot of surface traits in common) and he was afraid I was going to be crazy and fuck over his life too. So he ran. He said that the way I conducted myself in social situations after that (I gave him space and didn’t try to corner him and demand an explanation) made him realize that he was wrong about me and he was sorry he had treated me that way. We hugged and wished each other all the best and I’ve been sending him and his spouse Christmas cards for over 10 years now. When we see each other we are perfectly cordial.

People ghost for a lot of reasons. I don’t think that any blanket statement can be made for those reasons. If you find yourself in a situation where person after person after person is ghosting you… maybe do some self reflection on your own behavior. I am welcome in the homes of 95% of my ex’s. The vast majority of my ex’s are people that I would welcome into my home for a holiday if they were in a rough spot and needed to be loved that year.

I’m totally comfortable with the fact that I have needed to ghost people. It was a need and I don’t feel bad. It took a lot of years of working on my self respect before I recognized that I don’t owe every fucking guy endless explanations just because he wants them. I owe myself integrity.

I could list all of the reasons it is utterly laughable to say that I am a coward. But frankly, that’s a waste of my time.

I think it is entitled and toxic to demand that everyone explain their feelings and boundaries to you on your time table. And I no longer have time to play games with toxic people.

Goodness, monsters, and shame

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I know that other people view monsters in a solely negative light but I’ve never been good at doing that. Monsters are always creatures with a different point of view. A friend pointed out that perhaps “alien” might be an easier word to use, but I feel like alien and monster are interchangeable. A monster is a creature who is different from you who seems scary. Many monsters don’t hurt anyone at all… but they are scary anyway.

I can’t begin to count how many people have told me that I am scary.

I am amused to read that it is a common thing for autistic people to feel like they “come from a different planet” which fits more in with the word alien than the word monster. (I mention this because I have been diagnosed as autistic not because I am trying to talk about “those people”. I’m reflecting on the similar language used by folks who have the same diagnosis as me.) Only I’ve seen every Aliens movie and I can tell you with authority that those things are monsters.

Are they evil? I don’t think so. They are creatures who are trying to survive and we look like food. That’s not more evil than the bacon I had in my soup tonight.

Before you tell me I should be vegan let me tell you that many health professionals have told me that I absolutely need meat for optimal health given my constellations of issues. Veganism may work great for lots of folks… but not everyone.

Anyway.

So I’ve reached a point in the evolution of my brain where I just can’t see monsters as inherently evil. I see them as creatures with too much strength and too much ability to hurt other creatures without necessarily intending to.

Intent doesn’t matter.

I wrote yesterday that I haven’t done a major boundary violation in many years. By that I mean that I haven’t had someone say “Don’t do x to me” and then I do it. I have broken rules. I have broken agreements about what I might go do with other people. I have hurt people by accidentally doing something that would have been a boundary if we had negotiated. (I’m a clumsy bastard and I absolutely do things unintentionally sometimes.)

If intent doesn’t matter, how do I justify calling some things mistakes and other things violations?

We are all hypocritical bastards.

What I mean is that when I was young I had a few times when someone told me “Don’t do x” and I went and did x as fast as possible. I stopped doing that. It helps me sleep better at night.

But I struggle with whether I ever have the right to decide that my “softer” fuck ups are mistakes instead of monstrous violations that are evidence that I should be shunned from society for the good of people.

I look around the bdsm community and I see a lot of people who have been perceived as dangerous/bad/evil/worthy of shunning. Many of these people are monsters.

Are they worse than me? Are they better than me? What metrics are being used to judge? Why are we being judged–what’s the end goal?

The only part that matters to me in the long run is whether I find a self that is worthy to be a model for my children.

I really don’t give a shit if you like or approve of me. And yet you are my community and I love and value you so much. Many of you have contributed words of wisdom to my inside voice that I replay on a regular basis. So many of you have taught me that just because I’m a monster that doesn’t mean I have to damage people on accident. I can learn to have my damage be inflicted rarely and only with great purpose.

This community is a lot of where I learned to value the darkest and hardest parts of myself. It’s ok that I want to cut people open and lick their blood. There are folks who think that is hotter than the sun. It’s ok that I want to hit people and make them cry. There are folks who have something deep inside them made whole by such a process.

It’s not wrong to be a monster.

But can a monster be good? Do I have to be good to teach my children to do good? Do I want to teach them that they must be good?

Oh bdsm community. Do we want our teachers to be a certain level of good? What is that level? What level of goodness is demanded/expected/required of “community leaders” or educators or presenters?

We talk a lot about consent here. But how much information must be given in advance to qualify as informed consent and how much responsibility do we all bear for our fuck ups?

It’s kind of funny that in the long run of my life, the bdsm fuck ups where someone blatantly hurt me or violated my consent are not the things that weigh me down. (I say this from the hubris of having my biggest injury as a bottom be a broken bone. Broken bones heal.) I worry more about when I damaged someone else. Being a victim is not as big of a driving force to change my behavior as knowing that I have used my strength to do someone else damage.

How do we learn to be powerful and strong and monstrous and good enough?

I know I shouldn’t let the word good be taken away by assholes who want to define it as passive… but this shit is complicated.

Would it really be so bad to be a monster if one can do it without shame and without hurting people extra? Hurting people sometimes is life. But maybe just hold back on the extra?

How much hurting people is tolerable? How much is abuse?

I don’t think you have the answers either. I’m thinking that I’m still at the stage where asking the question is all I can do. The answers will come long after I need them. Like all the most important parts of life.

Monsters and good people.

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I had my first therapy session in a while. I haven’t been driving for health reasons and this session was via technology. Yay technology.

Most of the session centered around something having to do with my kids but it has to do with my identity in this community too. One of my children is struggling to deal with shame. Ah shame, my old nemesis.

My therapist told me that until I view myself as a good person who makes mistakes instead of as a monster who sometimes does the right thing… I can’t help my kid.

Given the stuff I’ve been reading on fetlife lately about redemption and making up for mistakes and when are you allowed back into the fold and to do which behaviors… this all feels connected in my head.

I’ve done wrong and I’ve hurt people in my life. I have done everything in my power to make amends. I’ve tried to help my victims and I’ve tried to help the victims of other people. I’ve tried to not hurt more people, with varying degrees of success. I haven’t had a big flagrant boundary violation in well over a decade, approaching two decades. I did learn from my mistakes.

But at what point do the mistakes of the past no longer define you? How many fuck ups are necessary to make you a monster forever?

What kind of fuck ups can be waved away as “just a mistake”?

I don’t know.

The right point of entry

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I think it is funny how strong everyone’s opinion is about when is the “right time” to enter the bdsm community. Yet another One Twue Way.

To me this is just like a conversation I have with my kids all the time. They tell me they “can’t” do something and I interrupt and say “yet” every time. Maybe you can’t do that yet, but it doesn’t mean you will never do it. Set the stage in your brain for the idea that maybe things will change.

Maybe you entered the scene at the Exact Right Time… for you.

Maybe that is good enough. It doesn’t have to be the universal right time for life. Maybe there isn’t a universal right time.

I’ve heard arguments for why it is better to wait until you are older and more mature. In my head I think “Ahhh because it is better for 30-something, 40-something, 50-something year old people to make the same stupid mistakes I made at 19? Ok. Sure. Whatever.”

Because when you get into the scene… it doesn’t matter how old you are… folks make some mistakes. The size of mistake varies… and the age of the person is not a big factor in that. I’ve seen older people make some really foolish mistakes because they were new and trying their best and they didn’t understand.

I don’t tell them it is because they are old and foolish the way people tell me that my mistakes were because I was young and foolish. But whatever.

I arrived in the scene before I was 19. I’ve had… rather a lot of 30-something year old women go off on me extensively about how I should have waited until my 30’s to enter the scene.

Err, can you please stop projecting your life path onto other people? I am in my 30’s now and I frankly have other things to do with my time than hang out in the bdsm community the way I did in college. I’m busy. I don’t have spare time. I have a lot of responsibility and not a lot of support and there is no way I could have made that life story work out the way it has worked for other people. That doesn’t mean I think it is wrong for people to be on the life curve they are on…

But I’m grateful I spent my college years in the scene learning about boundaries instead of spending them interacting with other college kids who didn’t know shit and who had very little to teach me.

Some of us are maximizing the lessons we can get out of life and that means we want to accelerate the rate at which we learn some lessons.

I will have more spare time in about 10 years. So much for the window of my 30’s.

I’m glad for the people who feel they spent their 20’s maturing and they are “ready” for more when they are in their 30’s or later and they view bdsm as an upgrade. Sure, whatever works for you.

I’m glad for the people who show up at 18 because they need to learn the lessons they are here to learn. The bdsm community has a lot to teach if you get lucky and find the right people. Fantastically who the “right people” are varies tremendously so not everyone is competing for the attention of the same two people. Yay everyone wins.

What I learned in the bdsm community made me a better teacher, a better neighbor, and a better parent. If I had not learned these skills in my late teens or early 20’s I would not be as good of a person as I am now.

I’m glad I said fuck off to all the people who told me to leave the scene and not benefit from these lessons. I would not be where I am and I like the progress I’ve made.

I’m not saying you should have been in the scene at 18 or you are lesser somehow. That’s bullshit. You were on your path and that’s ok. Just stop acting like your path is better, m’kay?

Things shift so much.

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I don’t come on this website very often because I don’t feel like I am “kinky enough” anymore. I have changed a lot over the almost 20 years since I found the bdsm community. Some of the shifts have just been in myself and some of them have been about my relationship changing.

At some point over the last 20 years I recognized that a lot of what drove me to actively ask for the specific kinds of play I wanted was… really a problem. The need I had to be treated as a worthless whore… that came very directly from being told by my father from toddlerhood that… that’s all I was. I guess I spent my 20’s still trying to be a good girl for my father.

It’s funny how I associate being abused in public with being kinky. The fact that I’ve been under M/s contract for a while and we do a lot of Daddy/daughter play during sex… in private… for some reason that feels a lot less kinky to me now. I have some strong programming that “being part of the public scene” is what makes you kinky.

For some reason “enjoying being hit” isn’t enough in my head?

I don’t come to parties in large part because I go to bed at 8pm every night. Driving hurts my body in ways that make it hard to socialize or enjoy being hit. I have kids and no child care.

So that means I’m not kinky any more, right?

But I miss you all. I think about you. I think about the lessons I have learned. The funny thing is… I don’t think I would be a very good parent if I hadn’t had the experiences I had in the bdsm community. I owe y’all an eternal debt of gratitude for helping to shape the person I am.

I know that there are people out there who believe it is bad for 18/19/20 year olds to get into the community… those folks believe you shouldn’t try this hobby till your 30’s or so because you will “mature”. I really disagree with that point of view. I think that people need what they need when they need it and there isn’t a timeline. I needed the structure of the bdsm community when I was 18. I needed to start hearing adult women talk about consent.

I needed to go find the glorious, beautiful sex workers who told me that I had the right to say no to anything I didn’t want to do. I will never finish repaying my debt to those women for what they taught me about my boundaries.

I try to take the lessons you beautiful people taught me and bring them to the children in my life, not just my own children. I don’t talk about it in terms of sex or bdsm. I talk to them about consent. I talk to them about negotiating for what feels ok for them in a game. I talk about how boundaries allow people to be kind and loving to you.

I learned all this from you. Thank you. I needed you so very much. I am so glad you were there for me when I needed you.

Suicidality x-post

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This is a big hot button for me. I’ve been suicidal for most of my life. Given that the rapes started before I was 2 and I was cutting by 7 that isn’t surprising.

I have been somewhere “around” the bdsm community for going on 16 years. I go away and do other things sometimes but then I come back and my friends are still here.

Sometimes I see people I respect post things about how suicidal people don’t belong in play spaces. That’s why I used to not tell people about my problems very much. Because if I told people how dysregulated and distressed I was… I would be told to leave.

I would be told that I am too broken to deserve connection.

So mostly I lied for a long time. I didn’t tell people how much I hated myself. I didn’t tell people that often going to a dungeon or picking up random sex was what I did as harm reduction instead of killing myself.

It really isn’t the worst coping method.

I say all this from the strange security of not feeling suicidal. I’m 34. My life has finally progressed to the point where I feel more joy than pain.

I got here partially because a whole lot of weird people took me in even though I was a flailing, obnoxious, difficult child. Thank you.

Thank you for tolerating me through my mental illness, boundary issues, and attempts to grow up. I’m at a point where I now believe it is possible that I will finish growing up someday even though I’m not there yet.

I feel hope.

I no longer ask for beatings because I want to get through tonight. I ask for beatings because the week or two afterwards are so awesome. I want the chemical journey not the momentary distraction.

That feels significant.