They don’t all call themselves gurus, some use teacher, Owner, shaman, tantrika, daka, coach, guide, and memorably one just went by Dragon. That is outside the not-short list of Daddies I have acquired through my time as an adult. They were all men who were absolutely convinced that they knew what I should do to be happier/healthier/sluttier/less slutty/more attractive/more intelligent/less emotional/less crazy… in short what they all had in common was viewing me as a piece of clay that could be molded into their ideal woman.

If I’m at all honest I totally fucking have a type and it definitely extends to people who like having a massive reality distortion bubble around them that intrudes into other people’s sense of self so they could direct the people.

For the purpose of this writing I am going to assume that the controlling person is primarily male, mostly because I have yet to have an enby try to establish this sort of dynamic with me (not saying they never do at all) and very few women try to influence me in the same manner. I have a number of women I look to for advice and guidance and they are all people with extremely strong opinions (FUCKING HAWT 😍) who will tell me what they think then drop the topic and move on. I will listen or not and that isn’t their problem.

The men come back to check if I am obeying. They chastise me. They tell me “you have to ____”. They tell me that if I keep doing x that I will never (whatever they want me to do). They threaten dire outcomes if I don’t fall in line with their direction.

Before you try to go all “Oh look, just another feminist bitch hating on men” I need to point out that I married one of these dudes and many are still in my extended harem (the people I am deeply emotionally attached to who I have fucked or played with in the past), and I even talked to one about how to write this post. Clearly I don’t just hate all these men. I signed on for sucking one of their cocks for the rest of my days. He has no problem at all with my harem of much loved and adored friends. My husband knows that he has a biological family he may not adore but who would show up to rescue him with money and resources if something went sideways in his life. I have my harem, my triad of best friends, and the loose ties I have extending through communities in cities in many countries. He does not begrudge me the only safety net I have in this life. Mommy boards say that I have a lot of emotional affairs. I’m ok with that description.

So when I talk about the feelings I have about my relationships with men who share this personality trait it is not a purely negative topic. When I say that I would not be who I am without these men I’m really not kidding. I’ve done a lot of hypnosis, NLP, conditioning training, improvement plans, slave contracts, affirmation work, and even a fair bit of strait up corporal punishment when I failed to do as I was ordered.

Every time someone gushes about how confident I am about myself I mentally see that meme of an autistic woman accepting her Oscar for how well she masks.

I have a great deal of self doubt, well less than I used to. I have a great deal of suspicion about my own motives and why I am taking the actions that I am taking. I believe that the self I have constructed amongst my friends, mainly through the writing I have done for decades (it all went private when I moved to the UK but once I have citizenship locked down, finger guns I’m sure it will revive) is a binding contract. Old friends tell me that when they are doing things in their life they stop and consciously think about the delineated way I think through why to act the way I want to act when they are evaluating what they need to do in a situation. I feel kind of stunned when they say this. Then I laugh because immediately after they almost 100% feel the need to follow up with “I know what you would do and it would be ____ (sometimes they are right in that guess and sometimes not) but I am just using the PROCESS and I have different values so what I decided was ____.” There is usually this little bit of a funny energy about this exchange that is now emerging with my kids as they get older.

I do the teacher shit fucking hard too. I’m not just dissing on people who like to influence other people.

When you model how to think through a problem without giving a strong “the right answer will always be ‘x'” people can generalise from that into many cases you never considered initially and often there seems to be this little almost foot stamping response of, “Just because you are right about one part of this process that doesn’t make you right about everything! So THERE!“

I think this is pretty subconscious for folks most of the time but when I see it over and over and over and over it gets a little hard to keep the smirk off my face. After this many years of parenting, I am getting particularly obnoxious about keeping a serious, slightly concerned face and leaning in a little to say, “So you are saying I win?”

I’ve now said this to a few friends in situ and they are people who have known me long enough to throw their heads back howling in laughter. Just like last night my coach said at the end of the conversation “So you are telling me that after this conversation you feel a lot more comfortable about the fact that you are clear in your purpose and you don’t think there is underlying inappropriate feelings driving your actions? Now you figured out what you are going to do going forward? So what you are really saying is, I win?“

But do you know what I am honest with myself about? An awful lot of these men are uhm not people I can wholeheartedly endorse as upstanding gentlemen. Many of them have pushed far too hard and have raped women who did not use a firm enough “no”. I have supported communities in enacting blacklists that blocked these men from attending. I have spoken to the men in question and told them point blank that I was going to reach out to people in the community they just moved to and I am going to tell those people about your history. They usually sigh very deeply and nod. They know that it is not worth a single minute of their time to try and talk me out of it.

Someone recently mentioned the concept of being in an accountability circle with someone. I spent a little bit of time on DuckDuckGo and thought about that concept more specifically. Ok, that’s my husband and my triad and harem and my sisters and mothers in leather. Those are the people who keep me on the path I want to be on. They tell me when I’m an asshole. They tell me when I fucked up. They help me figure out how to fuck up less. Harm Reduction is the goal. They see me clearly in all of my layers of machinations and mixed feelings and need to learn what “healthy” responses are and they are really good at asking me the right questions.

Over and over I say that the purpose of working with a therapist is so that you can have access to someone who will ask you the questions you need to think about in order to figure out the answer. Therapists aren’t magicians and they aren’t priests: they don’t have all the answers. You have the answers for you and I have the answers for me.

I rode out most of the first couple years of the pandemic not talking much with most of my harem, my triad mostly went silent, and most of my sisters and mothers in leather were far too overwhelmed to have much ability to interact regularly. I did make more tentative connections with new people here in Scotland but frankly it is still early days. Bailey taught me that friends come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime and you don’t know who is who until the end.

Over the past year there has been a slow wave building in my life, the ocean is just starting to send the tide in. The people who are still in my life and who reach out daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or just when they happen to see something that makes them think of me remind me of just how far the road has been. I have not sat still with just a couple of people, needing them to fill all of my needs. I have been privileged to be a comet in a great many lives.

It’s not that I still know everyone I have slept or played with. Many threads have frayed.

Do you know who stayed? The fucking gurus.

But not even all of them. I have kicked a few out of the harem. People who consistently showed me that they did not understand the agreement between us about which parts of my life and selfhood were up for attack.

I mean, I did marry the grand motherfucking prize winner of the game “What is wrong with Krissy.” I’m not opposed to being attacked on a great many fronts. These people I am speaking about get to stay because they have been able to shift their understanding of me over time with great nuance. They understand that the opening gambit of our relationship was not to be indicative of how we would get along forever. They can usually understand that they have crossed a line just by seeing me narrow my eyes.

I might be into providing service, I may be an absolute workaholic if I am given a project that will please someone in that group of people, I might be fully willing to be an owned possession who has limits about what they are allowed to do in big parts of my life, I might fucking live for the opportunity worship people and grovel as I appreciate the opportunity to please them…

That is always within a strong framework of you have to learn my idiosyncratic, difficult to track, highly specific to my life boundaries and not encroach on them. There are limits. I will comment when you have crossed them. I will retreat from you rapidly if you respond inappropriately. There are lots of kinds of inappropriate.

The only real appropriate response is, “I just said something that was not good. May I ask how that went wrong?” I train my people like I train my plants. To be clear I do not expect the appropriate response from anyone early in a relationship. Casual acquaintances and folks I know randomly/socially are absolutely going to 100% of the time have an inappropriate response. That’s totally fine. I get that. I am not mad. But whatever inappropriate response results in some level of gentle correction. I evaluate how gentle to be on a case by case basis.

If you laugh at my correction you are now out of the running for ever making it past “yeah I know that guy”. And you know what? I’m not mad about that. Really, it’s ok. I may feel lonely in a lot of ways because I have a lot of touch hunger for the specific people who have the right to touch my body because we are deep enough and close enough in our relationship. The people who have survived hundreds or thousands of little course corrections after inappropriate responses.

When I get word of them having fucked up in their community I figure out what went wrong and I proceed to talk to them about where and how that went off the rails. I am not gentle or kind but I am forgiving. I am just as fucked up as they are and they forgive me too.

I have gotten much better with practice about understanding when and how someone can be my prey.

I am pretty wordy about figuring it out though. Typing is my native language and I have been sitting on everything I’ve thought over the last few years. Necessary time to hibernate and slow down. You have to close some doors in order to open other doors.

When someone tells me that they are desperately holding on to a person in their life because they feel like they are afraid of the pain of the loss I can’t help but think of all the times when creating an empty space in my life lead to me being able to create a different connection that nurtured me deeply but wouldn’t ultimately be as all consuming. Sometimes the person I thought completely lost turns out to be a comet who can show up for chats every few years. Every time I have that happen I say a blessing for Past Me having the wisdom to smile brightly and wish my friend joy as they severed the tie to run off and grow somewhere else.

It’s funny how much this all feels more and more like a cross between gardening metaphors. Oy. That’s yet another detour.

The point, and the reason I haven’t hurried off the dang computer yet is that I know that if I am writing a contract in my head around my behavior and what I should be doing to continue the arc I have been on for quite some time I might have to say pieces of that out loud again. I can’t get to backstory yet but I will. This stretch of writing is a long time coming and most everyone has even told me it is fine if I just use their names. A few asked for pseudonyms and I go with that.

They are each of them a whole fabulous thread of interactions and course corrections and fucking opportunities for growth. Other people don’t need to care about any of this at all. I write it down simply because that is how I learn what I need to learn. I ask myself the question and then I write until I figure out the answer. I’ve made many of my closest friends through writing. We have arguments and debates and always come again and again to the same end result: we each have our own different right answer and it won’t be the same. This is part of how they taught me to think and I miss it deeply.

I miss letting them in.

Finding space for that writing is hard with running and gardening. There’s this whole web to weave. I don’t know how much of it will end up here, probably just most of the slutty or kinky stuff. But I have to start writing again. I am getting off course. As I was told several times yesterday: I am always at my finest when I am saying what I am thinking so that I don’t get cocky or shitty because I would have to admit that too.

I think fuck ups should be very publicly discussed and analysed. I’m not just saying “boundary crossings” or assaults or anything extreme. I find out who is going to end up closer in or farther out on the extended web with every time I talk about them doing something I don’t like.

I’m not talking about a big deal. I’m talking about noticing “Hey, x thing sucks and it isn’t cool”. There is a lot to be learned when people react to that. A whole lot of people will pick up their football and go home and will speak about me with scathing words. Cool. I’m used to that.

But the people who stay all wiggle into the right place for them. It takes time. Seasonal changes sometimes make waves in that group of folks who are around for reasons that might not be so needed anymore. And some of them fade out except for the occasional fond smile or grimace depending on why they faded out.

But the ones who stay. Well, chef’s kiss they are my kind of predators and I am very happy to recognise that my loving them means that I am choosing to do whatever is in my power to help them only go after prey instead of finding victims. I hope not in a codependent way? I really don’t have time for that much involvement with fucking anyone’s life outside of people I live with. Good grief.

I can only ask questions and hope they are the right ones. I can only tell them where they are fucking up and how. I can ask them to consider why they want to do a thing. I absofuckinglutely will do something to deplatform them as much as possible. Fine. Learn how to be a member of a community who is known as someone to keep an eye on. You don’t get to be the leader. You know how you are wanting to go do x, y, and z? How about if instead of you doing that you look around at who could be doing that even better than you can but they need some kind of support to make that happen. Don’t take the stage.

Cause with these specific predators we have agreements between us. I will call you what you are. You will never in your whole life have to worry if I am just sucking up to you. I will tell you what I think without reservation or softening my tone in any way. You get to find out what the inside of my brain instinctively produces in response to you doing that. And we will talk about this until you motherfucking understand how and why you done wrong and how you are fucking going to make amends.

Maybe not in that same city because you fucked up so bad you have to leave. (Ironic that I say that here. To the best of my knowledge I did not leave the bay area because I fucked up and was driven out of any communities. If anyone disagrees with my assessment feel free to comment below.) So maybe my level of intervention is going to be a bit messy and ridiculous. But I know what you are. I know what you have done. And you can have a redemption arc–that’s great. It will require you not doing the same ol’ same ol’. You have to choose to change. You have to figure out what your answers are. Where is the enlightened self interest in your need to change? What should you change to get what you are currently fucking yourself out of in your impulsive dipshit move?

The people who stay are messy and complicated and I hold no illusions about them. As a deeply flawed person I want to be seen and accepted for the totality of myself. And that has involved a lot of agreements about what had to change.

How in the fuck would someone new just know all that bullshit? For fucks sake. That’s ridiculous and unfair.

I know.

I can never really write it all down but it moves the conversation along by so much when I at least try.

So yeah. I suppose this is my personal ad. This is how I have always hunted. My prey is different for so many reasons but if you are patient with me I will be as explicit as I can. You don’t have to come for the whole ride. You are welcome to come in and out whenever you need.

Cause I’m a wordy bitch.