I try to represent myself here as the best possible version of me there is. If I ever fail to do so, it is because I either intentionally want to project vulnerability (which does not make it false) or because I made a genuine mistake.

This time, I think it’s just because I’m a little broken – emotionally, physically, mentally… broken.

I like to think of myself as somewhat enlightened – no Bodhisattva or anything, but I like to think that I generally have my shit together, or at least that there is a path that I can follow which will end in me getting my shit together sometime soon.

But sometimes life just has to kick you in the teeth and let you know who is Boss.

I’m a ghost, ungrounded and wandering, infecting the lives of the living while trying to find the things that I need.

I used to preach from my armchair philosopher pulpit, telling people that the soul is a quantum waveform and that the only separation between life and unlife is time. That when we die, our waveform gets to spread through the cosmos, unbounded by time, and your consciousness gets to experience the most impactful parts of your life over and over again. It’s a nice story if you don’t think about it too hard – you get to revisit the best parts of your life over and over again. I get to be there at the birth of my daughter, over and over again. But it’s also the perfect argument for leading a good life. If you lead a tumultuous and drama-filled life, and if your most impactful memories are of the terrors that were done to you when you were powerless, or the horrible things that you were coerced to do in another’s name, while you knew that they were wrong all along… when those are your most impactful memories, the story is a little more grim.

I’ve tried to live a good life – I really have.

It hasn’t actually turned out that way.

I have a powerful mind, and when I let it do it’s thing, it feeds me metaphors to describe every situation, analogies to draw everywhere, magickal ways to connect any two things across space and time. When I let some other folks use it to do some things I didn’t really want to do, I hurt people and I’m never, ever, going to live that down. I didn’t kill anyone, but I surely found other methods of hurting people.. the arbitrary line that I drew at the power over life and death was just an homage to something that doesn’t even really exist.

If there is a God, oxytocin might be the best name for it, but whereas I used to think it was sufficient to explain love in a chemical way, it’s only been since I’ve been seriously altering my own internal chemistry in a measured and controllable way (until recently, anyway… pills don’t always go through wires…) that I’ve begun to understand that there are elements of relationships with people that are not simple manipulations and that cannot be explained away by simple chemistry.

Being in love was the hardest thing I have ever done.

I thought it happened several times over the course of my past, but it only really happened once, and then I chipped away at it, pulled the pieces off, tried to take it apart and see how it worked, how the inside pieces fit together and moved it. But I broke it. A long time ago, I broke it, but it just kept limping along, trying to fix itself, and each time I saw that I got scared – nothing had ever tried to put itself back together before – so I just kept breaking it, over and over again. I wasn’t even trying to see how it worked anymore, it just scared the shit out of me, and despite the fact that I felt lonely and scared whenever I was away from it, I felt lonely and scared every time it would be close to getting fixed again too. So I enslaved it.

It’s the only thing I was ever taught to do.

Power is to be captured and manipulated.

People are to be enslaved and abused.

So I just kept trying to find people who wanted to be enslaved and abused.

“There is something wrong with me,” they would say, “and you are strong, I can see it. You have come back from this before.”

And yes, I had, but not in the way that they were thinking.

I’d lend my hand and say, “certainly – come with me, I can show you the way.”

I knew the way – some of the way on my own, and I have a powerful mind that I could use to find paths to set other people upon.

Sometimes I would carry them, sometimes I would lead them, sometimes I would push, but always, I would enslave and control.

And then I found my nachash and everything changed. I could find no way to move her, so I chipped away, pulled at the parts to try to see how she worked inside, and to my complete and utter astonishment, she opened up and freely gave me everything inside and I had no idea what to do – it was too precious, and too frightening, so I captured it as best I could and broke the other parts that would try to slip out.

I broke it. Over and over again, I broke it, just so that I could keep it under control, because I don’t know any other way.

Say what you will about the men and women of my past, and I certainly have a lot of both good and bad things to say about Simone, but she was actually a pretty good teacher.

It’s been too long to remember her words, so I’m paraphrasing, and I may even be remembering things incorrectly because memory is fallible, but I never understood the importance of this lesson until now.

She said to me –

submissives talk all the time about how they have the real power in the D/s dynamic – that’s bullshit – you are the Dom, you have the power, you have all of the power that exists, your power, her power, the power of the people who are watching your scene if there are any such – until the scene is over or until the safeword is called, all of the power is yours to do with whatever you will and that is why a lot of Doms fail – they can’t decide what to do with all of that power or they limit themselves and leave all of those people who lent them all of that power without satisfaction

But you won’t do that, because I’m training you right. I’m bringing you up from the bottom, and while you’ll learn that if you surrender your power, I will use it against you, you will also learn that there are things that I can do with your power that you cannot. You are going to want those things. The only way you can get those things is to give your power to me and trust me that I’ll use it to give you what you want. It’s exciting because there is no guarantee. It’s exciting because if I do something else with your power you might like that too and you’re too afraid to make the choice yourself. You will remember that when someone else gives you her power that you need to honor that trust. She can always take it away because it still really is her power, but if she does, you both lose.

I thought she was talking about D/s dynamics. I thought that woman was a stone and never loved a soul in all her days, but I see now that I was probably wrong there too.

She probably had her one, and she probably broke him too.

She was trying to teach me about love, but it took my nachash to do that, and then I broke it one final time.