I’ve been waiting a while for the other shoe to drop.
I didn’t really realize this until recently. I was initially just stunned, then I was overwhelmed with support coming in from places where I didn’t expect to find it, but I think I’ve known that the exodus of ‘friends’ would begin eventually, and it started about two weeks ago, it would seem.
It hurts.
I know it shouldn’t, and even when my ex and I were still together, I knew that the circle of people to whom she introduced me were only interested in my participation because I was there with her. I wish that were not the case, because I genuinely like them. I genuinely like her. It was not a horrible break-up, as such things go. Of course she was hurt. I was hurt. But our reasons for ending things were sound, even if we don’t agree on what they are. Her reason was sound to her, and mine was sound to me. In the end, we were no longer on the same path, and I wish her the best of luck in getting what it is that she really wants, and that I was unwilling to give her.
So far, it’s not obvious what the future will hold as far as my relationships with those people go. I’d like to remain friends. I’d like to continue to see them places and even do things with them, but that might be hard, since I think it might be awhile before my ex-partner and I can be at the same places/events/venues without it being awkward. And I really wish it didn’t have to be that way.
But I’m reconnecting with old friends that I haven’t seen in years, and it feels good.
My ex has a very dynamic personality. She is naturally the center of her circle, and while I was a part of that it was intoxicating, I’ll admit. I felt like I was eventually able to stand as a part of the group on my own merits, but it seems that perhaps some individuals were interested only in my presence for the perks that I could provide, and I don’t need that sort of influence in my life anymore anyway.
So now I build a new circle, with me at the center. I am rebuilding the core that was once there and that I left to founder, and I am adding new people who share my ideals and motives.
As a Dominant, I belong in the center anyway, and this was something that I could not see clearly, but that I think was something that held me back in several of my past relationships.
No more.
I want to be clear that I do not blame my ex for my behavior in allowing my old friendships to founder – I accept full responsibility for that. And many of the relationships that I let die then, I have no interest in rekindling now, but there are a few people that I can still count on and who would have had my back at any point along the way. They are the people that I’m bringing back.
In most of these friendships, I was the hub before, and I withdrew for a bit, becoming someone that I don’t really recognize.. Dominant in private only, and while I liked to consider myself stoic and perhaps even aloof, I was really just quiet and brooding or even perhaps, unsure of myself and hiding. And that’s not me…
I’m doing well in the aftermath, I must admit. I am working on a new relationship with someone that I find I care about deeply. She is opening up new parts of me as well as pulling things out of me that I thought were long dead and buried.
I’m not so silly as to be completely blind to the possibility that this new relationship is blinding me with NRE and that there may be transference of feelings that are common in ‘rebound’ relationships, but I’ve walked that path before and this feels different.
I’ve been happy all along, and I think that makes all of the difference.
The breakup was hard, yes. And I didn’t really see it coming, that’s true, but I can look at it and say, objectively, that it was the right thing and I don’t regret it. I can feel it’s loss and not be overwhelmed, because I know that she is better off and so am I.
And now I have a new girlfriend, and she’s magnificent.
I’m still Rant, but I’m changing – back to who I used to be – back to who I want to be.
Since I posted the ‘Stasis‘ entry, I’ve been receiving an even greater number of emails than usual.
Many of these were queries as to my emotional state – and I appreciate the concern that I’ve been given. Some were a little more pointed…
Since my latest entry (Expectations…) the number of requests to meet in person and offers for play, both online distance play and in-person local-to-me play have increased dramatically.
I’m grateful for the attention, but I would like to set the record straight on a few notes.
Firstly – though my former primary partner and I ended things, I was not monogamous with her at the time of our split, and I am still not ‘single’ in the traditional sense. I’ve been free to pursue other relationships for some time, but I am actually not seeking that right now. Now is a time for reflection and taking things slowly.
I posted that I was going to, over the course of the next year, rekindle relationships that I had left to wither, that I was going to forge new ones, and that I would work to strengthen the ones that I already have. That remains a true statement, but it seems to have been interpreted by some to mean that I am immediately seeking that, and I am not.
I do not have a specific time frame for this, and I am currently working to simplify things until such a time as I feel that I am emotionally ready for more. I do not know how long that might be.
It will be some time before I am ready to take on anyone new, or even to seriously rekindle relationships that have faltered. I am always happy to hear from people from my past, or to provide guidance to people that I have not had contact with before, but I currently require a certain amount of distance for those relationships.
I have one partner with whom I am spending my time right now, and while I work on myself (which is a never-ending process,) together we are beginning the process of working on her and finding the path to what it is that she wants and how that fits in with my desires.
Working with a new submissive requires a significant amount of attention, patience, and time.
I have made the mistake in the past of engaging with other partners while attempting to mentor a new submissive, but it has not worked out as well as it should have, and this is not a mistake that I wish to repeat.
So, while I remain available for advice as always, I am not looking to take on any new trainees, long distance D/s relationships, or even to begin playing with any new partners right now.
I still firmly believe that access to more information, more styles of D/s, and more personalities is a good thing for anyone who is interested in this lifestyle, and to the degree that I have always been available to my readers for such things, I still am.
I just need some more time before I start anything new with anyone, from either my past or future, and I hope that does not offend anyone or turn anyone away from asking me for advice or an opinion.
You readers are the reason that I keep writing here, so please don’t stop the emails or comments (I do have anonymous comments disabled, so if you are afraid of outing yourself as kinky, email is still your best choice) but understand that it may be some time before I agree to more than passing emails back and forth.
I would make the above a statement rather than a query, but this has been a year for change.
In two days, I’ll be 40 years old.
Given that the average life expectancy for men in this country is currently 72 years, and that I have both a family history of heart disease and a medical history of serious injury, including cranial fractures and multiple concussions, my own life expectancy is likely to be less than that, unless medicine advances to the point where those elements change, which is possible, possibly even likely, but it’s not something that I would bet money upon.
So – taking these things into consideration, it’s reasonable to assume that I’ve lived more than half of my life by this point.
This is the sort of thing that makes one look back over his life and wonder what might have happened differently.
This year has brought change, as every year does, but the end result is not unlike the beginning.
I end the year in much the same state that I began it, having picked up experiences, but tangible change still sits in the wings, waiting for something – I know not what.
Early in the year, I stumbled upon a young and brash new submissive who desperately wanted to push her way into the BDSM world, and I took her under my wing, trying to mold her, to prepare her for the experiences that she would encounter, to introduce her gradually to a world that she ended up jumping into with both feet and outgrowing my influence in short order. I like to believe that my guidance made her transition easier than it might have been; I suppose only time will tell on that count. But the world is a different place than it was when I was brought in to it, and her experiences at this point in many ways outstrip my own.
At nearly the same time, I shared a spark with Autumn from servingmaster.com and we melded minds on subjects far and wide. She started me on the path that this blog has taken, committing my memories and experiences to an ever widening audience, which I suppose is a tangible change for the good, but in the face of what else happened, and then un-happened, this blog seems insignificant. She and I remain friends and in contact, and I hope that she will remain my friend, supporter, and confidant for years to come, but our relationship has cooled and we both have busy lives. The spark that ignited between us sits in the ether like the Mithras and is unlikely to ever completely die, but with no new fuel, its flame burns cold.
I reconnected with the woman who I expected to spend the rest of my life with and over the course of this year we had months of glorious joy, many adventures both big and small, and plans for things both near and far, but ultimately that ended not so very long ago. Our lives were on different paths for longer than I realized, and when push came to shove, I got out of the way. This is still fresh and new, and we don’t exactly share the same views of what went wrong and why it couldn’t be fixed, but that is normal in breakups, I think. I sincerely hope that she finds everything that she wants from life, but ultimately, I was not the one to give it to her.
I have made other friends, touched other lives, had other romantic and play partners over the course of the year, not all of which ended the way I would have liked, some of which remain, and others still exist as smoldering embers sewn into the landscape, waiting to be stoked back to life. There is one relationship here in particular whose ending I grieve still, but the circumstances of the time left me no other choice, or so I believed, in any case.
I enveloped myself in a new circle of friends, most of whom I severed contact with when my partner and I split. Since they have known her for far longer than I, and are counted among her support structure, I may never interact with them again in any meaningful way, and that makes me sad, but is understood to be a part of life and love.
I am in roughly the same shape, physically, emotionally, and psychologically as I was when this year began.
The majority of my friends are not kinky, not in the scene, and don’t know about this blog or the aspects of my life that it illustrates.
This is not because I am ashamed, but because they have no curiosity about this part of my life. They live in the vanilla world and find the concepts of nonmonogamy and risk aware consensual kink to be unfathomable, perhaps even disturbing. They are generally tolerant people – I do not generally get along well with those who are not – but they limit their own experiences and exposure by choice, and it is not my desire to force them from that.
My own social support system has contracted.
But I am not alone.
I am never alone.
I am, however, reduced from what I was at the high points of this year.
And I am not convinced that this is a bad thing.
The grief that I feel in each of these cases comes from expectations met and then dashed.
If there is a pervasive theme to this blog, and indeed to the way that I live my life now in a post-nearly-fatal-car-accident world, it is that. I am happier and more successful when I can live my life without expectations.
When I was a teenager, I looked to the future. The year 2000 was looming. I would be 25 when the odometer of life rolled over. That seemed like such a distant thing, and yet so close. I was going to be successful by then. I was going to be married, own my own home, be on the path towards greater things. Expectations levied upon me by others for the most part, but that I took to be my own. Expectations that were unrealistic and different from my actual desires, though I had no idea at the time what those might be.
I achieved all of those things. By the time I was 21, I had nearly all of those things. I was married. I owned my own home. I was accepted into medical school, and I was on track for meeting, even exceeding, all of those expectations.
And I was miserable.
I was quite possibly the unhappiest I had ever been in my life up to that point. I had everything that I was expected to have. I had achieved most of it ahead of schedule. I was always an overachiever, but none of it ever made me happy.
I ended things there.
I started over.
I went deep into the rabbit hole and learned a few things about myself.
I pulled myself back out and put myself back on what turned out to be a very similar path once more. For a time I was high on life, I was living what I thought I wanted to be, I was meeting the expectations of others and I was a part of the functional cogwheel of society, producing, living in the suburbs, parenting, and trading my time for a paycheck.
And I was miserable.
I was even more miserable than before.
I was not the one to end that relationship, but it followed a similar trajectory. I dove into the rabbit hole again, learned some more things about myself, and crawled out. I wandered in the deep woods for awhile, but eventually I found a path, and I started walking it.
This time, the path was less trodden, it was thin in places, and it diverged from the main road in many ways, but it was still a path that others had taken, the expectations levied upon me were still not entirely my own.
This time, the choice to end things was largely my own once again.
I had a partner.
Our dynamic should have preserved my priority. It should have let me cut the path, and had I been strong enough, it probably would have. But I am still a product of this society, and I could not, would not, rigidly enforce my will, so the path diverged from where I wanted to go when I chose to allow the choice of direction to follow expectations not my own.
I take responsibility for those actions, but they were not my Will.
In order to remain true to my Will, I had to make the choice to be partnerless again. To do otherwise would have required crushing the will of my partner, and that is something that I have always been unwilling to do.
I fight to hold the ideal of non attachment. I fight to hold to the object of no expectations, but these are not tenable long term options. If you walk where there is no path, you must cut it yourself, and that means that you will not find anyone else there to walk it with you.
But that is what I am trying to do now.
I don’t know if I will succeed.
I don’t know if I can succeed.
I know that my path will intersect others from time to time, so I’ll never be entirely alone, but I am learning that I need time alone, more than I thought I ever did before. I need to cut my own path, and while others might follow along behind me, the decisions about where to cut and what directions to move in have to be mine alone.
I have relationships with people still. People that I care about deeply, but I watch, and I cheer success, support setbacks, offer my own experiences, but I don’t follow.
I can’t know what lies ahead of me because no one has ever walked there before. There are no guides to this trail because there is no trail to guide me upon.
I may be signing up for a very solitary existence in the long term, but that does not frighten me as it once did.
I may attract followers to walk the path that I cut, but I do not expect them.
I have less than half a life to complete at this point, and while I have made mistakes in the past, and I am guaranteed to make more in the future, I have faith in my ability to get through them.
I grow more open and honest with myself and those around me as I continue my journey. I don’t say ‘as I walk this path’ any longer, because I’ve gone off the path. I go where my Will points me, and I see nothing but obstacles in the way. The smooth path is gone from my sight, and there will be trials, but I believe that I am strong enough to face them.
I will rekindle some relationships that were left to wither.
I will start some relationships that I have not made yet.
I will support relationships that are currently in place, but I will not hold on.
I will live my life without attachment or expectation, to the degree with which I am able, and I will not get down on myself for building attachments or having expectations when I do. For while they always seem to lead to pain, sometimes the pain is worth it.
I will make goals and walk towards them, but if they vanish, I will keep walking, keep cutting the path myself.
I need time alone, but I need people in my life too. I have my children. I have my family. I have those few friends who would take a bullet for me, just as I would for them, but those are always fewer in number than one might think, and levying expectations upon others is something that I specifically intend not to do.
I crave companions, but I do not require them.
I am perfectly capable of cutting this path alone and letting it close behind me if needs be.
If my wisdom is something that you seek, then you know where to find me.
You are welcome to walk this path with me, but make no mistake, this path is mine.
I am evolving.
I am grieving.
I am meeting the rise of the sun with alacrity and hope. For that is what this time of the year is really about, and I was born at just the moment of Rebirth for the world.
And though grief comes from loss and loss comes from dashed expectations and I will continue to strive against holding those, I acknowledge that life goes on, and so shall I.
I am Rant.
New beginnings are in the wings, and they terrify and electrify me.
I promised you that December would bring the end of NaNoWriMo and that I would assail you multitudes of new posts, topics ranging wide and that these would assume a more normal cadence once more.
However, life has a way of interrupting our plans, does it not?
I’m living in stasis at the moment, caught between possibilities and unable to move – analysis paralysis is the term most often applied to the same situation in a business setting, I believe.
The situation at hand requires emotional intelligence to resolve, and whenever I bring it to mind, my emotions retreat entirely, leaving me unable to process things.
And so I wait.
I am purposely omitting details, but rest assured that my health is superb, I continue my physical recovery, perhaps even at a quicker pace than before as this event, or impending event, I’m not quite sure which, has nearly sapped my appetite completely and I’m losing weight as I choose to not eat.
But I have the weight to lose – I’m still over my ideal weight as a result of my car accident which is now more than three years past.
My doctor has been after me to lose weight for some time, he thinks it might help with my pain, so he will probably be pleased when next I see him, though I will probably omit for him the reasons as well.
My emotional health is on hold. I make no progress forward or back, as I am stuck.
Before I begin, I’m going to be knocking an important post down by posting this, so if you have not yet, please go read : Practicing What You Preach
Thank you.
*********
Relationships are hard.
Nonmonogamy is hard.
This seems to be a recurring theme in my life right now. If you click the links over there to the left where I list ‘Blogs I Read’ you’ll find that the front page posts for two of them deal with variations on this theme.
I am in a nonmonogamous relationship because I do believe that no one person can fill all of the needs of another. I believe that it is impossible to be everything to someone for the long haul. In the beginning parts of a relationship, when NRE is strong, you can easily overlook the things that are missing in the light of all of the fantastic that is currently going.
That is a pretty easy concept to embrace when the point is academic, or possibly even when it is you selfishly seeking a need that you aren’t getting met currently, but it’s a bit more of a struggle when you have to realize that it is you who is unable to meet that need in your partner.
I’m in love with my partner.
Nine months ago, I could not say those words, much less write them in a publicly accessible place where anyone from teh interwebs(misspelling intentional) could read them.
It’s true though. I love her.
And I can’t be everything that she needs.
And intellectually I’m okay with that.
I want her to have other friends, other confidants, other lovers, other play partners. I want her to be healthy and happy and the best her that she can be.
I try to help focus her where I can, and while I don’t always succeed, I think on balance I do a decent job. But she has needs that I cannot satisfy.
Semantics sorted, we’re left with a modicum of understanding about what this ‘love’ thing is, at least in Rant’s mind.
So – for possibly the first time in Rant’s life, he finds himself in love.
Please forgive that brief and annoying use of the third person to describe myself, but those concepts are so foreign to how I perceived the world a scant few months ago that I find it difficult to express in any other way, but here’s the defining statement for you: I believe that I have found the love of my life.
The emphasis is new, but appropriate.
But it’s been a few months since then and things are coming into short relief right now.
And I do mean right now.
As I write this, she’s out on a date with a guy that I haven’t met, but from everything that I can tell, he’s a great guy. I’ll meet him someday soon, and I’m sure that when I do, we’ll be fast friends. My partner has a type, and we’re both slightly different specimens of that type, so either we’ll be great friends or bitter enemies, and I have every incentive to make sure that it comes out the former rather than the latter. She likes him; she may even love him someday, and I’m intellectually okay with that.
But then there’s the feels.
My partner is my babygirl. Our dynamic is not one of diapers and age-play in that vein, but she has a naturally bubbly personality and she is happiest when she is channelling her inner child, her little, to use the appropriate nomenclature of the BDSM world. And I am happiest when I am being Protector and nurturing, so we naturally fall into one of the classic Daddy/babygirl archetypes – of which there are several.
However, when I am in Daddy headspace, I cannot hurt my little. I simply cannot bring myself to do it. My body stops. My mind spirals away into cuckoo land. My dick goes limp, my limbs get heavy, and I simply can’t lift my twitchy palm.
I love my partner and I have a hard enough time hurting her when I am not in Daddy headspace, but when I’m there, I just can’t do it. And when she is little, I go into Daddy headspace automatically.
I am not a Sadist, and I never get pleasure from inflicting pain, but sometimes I like to be a Fluffy Service Top(™) and provide pain for those that require it, and when I do, I can be brutal. I can slap you so hard that you think you left a tooth or an eyeball behind. I can leave bruises on you that will last for weeks. I can grind your shoulder into the carpet until it bleeds and seeps for days. These are not things that I need to do, but they are things that she needs to feel, and I cannot provide them.
And it’s not that I don’t care for the women for whom I am able to provide this service – sometimes I care for them quite deeply, else I’d not put myself into FST mode – but I’m not in Daddy headspace then and I’m not in love.
When I was 15 years old, I confronted my first existential crisis. It was not my only one, and it is unlikely to be my last, but as far as crises go, it was pretty profound.
This wasn’t a depressive event, and though I did undergo moments of melancholy when I was a teenager, and this particular event caused me to re-examine almost every aspect of my life, I would not learn what the word depression really meant for another two decades.
You see, I was always a bit more mature and thoughtful than I should have been as a kid and still as a teenager. I was raised in a Roman Catholic family and we went to Church every Sunday. I went to CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) classes twice a week after school all through elementary school. In Junior High School I was part of the Church’s Youth Group. I was a leader there. I was a ‘perfect’ child. I never received anything less than an ‘A’ in my classes, I was respectful to my elders, I always practiced my piano, I was in team sports (soccer and baseball until Junior High, then I switched to track in the spring, and in High school I added wrestling for the winter,) I was in student government, I was involved in student service groups, I was a Lieutenant Governor in Key Club, I was Editor-in-Chief of the High School newspaper, I was even lead in the school play…
Much of that was actually after the event that I am about to describe, but it’s still descriptive of how I led my life at that time. I was larger than life. I had everything going for me that a person could hope to have at that point in my life. I got my first paying job at the age of 12 (though it wasn’t strictly legal.. I was doing contract technical writing for Broderbund software with a false SSN and an assumed name… people were so much more trusting back then) and by the time I was 16, I’d saved enough money to buy a car, and I did. When I was 16 I got a part time job writing software and I was suddenly cash flow positive in a very big way. I could pay for my gas and car insurance and still have enough left over to be a stupid teenager.
But I wasn’t.
I was an ‘old soul,’ according to my mom.
I identified strongly with the persona of Yama, the Vedic god of Death. He was old before he was young, and so was I. The fact that I even knew who Yama was at the age of 15, growing up in a rural community and a Catholic family in the pre-Internet era is something of an anomaly itself, in retrospect, but that’s not the the thrust of what I’m after here. It would, however, come to color the events that caused me to change so drastically from the Christian Beaver Cleaver overachiever that I was and become something new and different.
When I was eight or nine, I made friends with a boy who was in my CCD classes. We went to Vacation Bible School together in the summer. It was only a day camp, but it was the first camp I’d ever been to, and the only one that I would attend until I finally went away for my one year of sleep away camp when I was a teenager, but that was after the Transformation.
This boy, who I will refer to as Charlie, though that was not really his name, was not my best friend, as I understood such things to be at that time, but he was a good friend. We would play with Transformer and Gobots together. He even had some of the cool Gundam toys, straight from Japan, that you couldn’t get in the States. I’m still not sure how he got them, but he would always let me play with the one that I liked best, so I didn’t really care.
Charlie was a year older than me, and at that age, that’s a big deal. He still liked to play with me and I thought that was cool. Charlie and I would have playdates (a word which means something very different to me now…) and we would meet before camp and before school, and even though he was a little strange and the other boys didn’t like him, he was my friend.
Charlie’s dad was gay, and I didn’t know what that meant, but it did mean that Charlie’s mom and dad no longer lived together and that Charlie’s dad wasn’t allowed to go to our Church. My parents told me that he was a bad man and that he did things that people are not supposed to do, and that is why God hated him and he wasn’t allowed in our Church. I thought that was wrong, because Charlie’s dad was very nice to me and he got the best toys for Charlie and I never saw him be mean to anyone or even say anything unkind, despite the fact that people were very unkind to him while he was not looking. I had always been told that kind of behavior was wrong, but for some reason, whatever it was that Charlie’s dad had done made it okay to be mean to him.
For a couple years this would go on, and I eventually came to understand what it meant to be gay and what the Church’s stance on this was and I was torn.
I was a true believer.
I believed that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary and lived and preached and suffered and died on the Cross for our Sins and that was the only way that any of us would ever make it into Heaven.
Over time I lost touch with Charlie. The year of difference in our ages meant that he left our elementary school and moved on to Junior High before I did, and that year apart, coupled with my own struggles as I approached puberty (which I hit earlier than all of my peers) caused us to drift apart. I was becoming more aloof and socially ostracized as a result of my undiagnosed Aspergers Syndrome, but I was still every bit as much of an overachiever. I was still involved in Church Youth Group, and my Faith was becoming stronger and broader. I would stand toe-to-toe with my Atheist friends and debate them on the logic of Faith. I felt like I would win these arguments, but in retrospect I see the same fallacies in my arguments that I came to disdain.
I made my own path, and it was one of Righteous Indignation and I wore the Cloak of Faith and Righteousness in every act in which I engaged. I was a Paladin and I was going to march right up to the Gates of Hell and take the fight to Lucifer himself.
I still saw Charlie from time to time. He and his sister, who was of an age with and friends with my own younger sister, were friends, and he was in the Church Youth Group, though with split custody and his father’s excommunication (and yes, his father was excommunicated for being gay and having the audacity to donate money to the Church) he was not there every week. He and I were no longer close friends, but I never forgot that he was my friend, even if his father was doomed to spend Eternity in Hell for the things he chose to do (note that I no longer believe that he had a choice in the matter – this is reflective of my ignorance at the time – I was only a child, after all.)
I kept on my merry, ignorant path, and could see no reason why I would not remain so as long as I lived.
When I was 13, the Pastor for our Parish, Father Thomas, would retire. In his place, we were assigned Monsignor Heinz, an extremely intolerant and very powerful (within the Church) man who was tasked with ‘turning our backwater Church around.’
I had no idea that there was any trouble, but apparently our Parish had some of the lowest per-capita tithing of any Church in the Diocese. And not only that, but there were apparently some thinly disguised ‘disreputable elements’ in our Parish.
Monsignor Heinz would have none of that.
He conducted interviews with each family individually. He demanded to see tax returns. He set tithes of at least 20% for each family, and when people would complain that they could not afford such exorbitant tithes, he would send Parish accountants to help them file their taxes and make sure that the Church got it’s pound of flesh.
The secondary purpose of these family interviews was to root out the undesirable elements from the Parish.
My own family was found lacking. My father had not been tithing appropriately, and I was ashamed for this. But at least we were found to be morally sound (which I don’t really understand either, but that’s not the subject of this piece.)
Charlie’s family, however, was not. Charlie’s father was excommunicated, and Charlie himself was found to have gay tendencies and was told not to return to the Church.
This did not compute with me.
Charlie was not gay. (He was, and he is, but at the time, I could not comprehend this.) The Church made a mistake.
I didn’t have the normal social constraints that people around me did, so I confronted Monsignor Heinz about this. Charlie must not be expelled from the Church. Excommunicated or not, this would almost certainly mean that Charlie was being sent to Hell, all because Monsignor Heinz had a feeling about him, a feeling which I was certain was incorrect.
Charlie was a good person.
Charlie was my friend.
By this time I’d read The Bible cover to cover at least twice. This is a very unusual thing for a Catholic to do. Monsignor Heinz quoted Scripture at me, and I quoted contradicting Scripture right back at him. Eventually he started quoting things at me that I had not read.
Where was he getting this information? I had to know, so I shifted my arguments and started asking some very pointed questions. Suddenly, my curiosity and conviction were not the Scourge of the Devil, but they were a Path to the Light. Monsignor Heinz was convinced that I was Destined for the Seminary and would be a Beacon for the Faithful. He told me of the Apocrypha and for a short time my ire was deflected.
Ultimately, however, I could not Rationalize how someone as kind and good and pure as Charlie had to be sacrificed and sent to Hell, and someone like myself, who had begun to have some seriously impious urges concerning girls could be a Paragon of the Light.
I could not bring the two things together in my mind, and I realized that I was the Heretic. Charlie was good, the Church was hiding Secrets from people, and I was being driven to think and feel and act in ways that were un-Godly.
The strain of trying to keep these things consistent in my head eventually broke my Faith.
If Charlie deserved Hell, then surely I deserved something much worse than that. I hated myself. I thought to myself: I will someday die, and when I do, what will my legacy be? I have accomplished nothing. I have lived in the shadow of others, reading the writings of men dead for centuries, and blindly accepting what they said, claiming their ideas as my own and extolling the virtues I was handed, with no free thought of my own. I was not a stupid kid – I did get straight A’s and that included A’s in classes like AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Physics… I knew the power of the Scientific Method, and I’d been turning a blind eye to it in the name of Faith for years. I was afraid to go against the Church because then I, too, would be Destined for Hell. My Faith was broken, and without that, without the love of Jesus, I would perish in a lake of fire, and yet…
And yet… without a testable hypothesis, and without a fair trial, how could I say for certain that any of these things were true. I had Occam’s Razor, and it cut the fabric right out of my Faith, and yet, I was not yet ready to accept the path of Atheism.
This made me easy prey for Jubal McReady and his gang, but that is a story for another day…
When I was 15, I lost my Faith in God and Jesus and the Trinity. I lost my path to Heaven. I Despaired over the fact that when I die, I’m gone. I will simply cease to exist. At first, this notion was terrifying to me. It caused me to lose sleep. I spent days where I could think of nothing else but the fact that the Universe is cruel and careless.
But today… today, this same thought brings me peace.
When I am gone, I will not have to bear any of this any longer. I will not have to try to be Zen. I will not have to try to live without expectation. Nor will I be a prisoner in some theme-park paradise or for better or worse, some Infernal realm of the Underworld. I will just be done. My work will be complete, and History will judge me as it does. I couldn’t care less. I won’t be here to see it.
This was something of a story and perhaps a bit of an admission.
Nearly everyone is a hypocrite, if you look close enough, or pay enough attention, but I have one issue on which I am a planet-sized hypocrite of the worst kind.
Forgiveness.
I preach forgiveness.
I literally proselytize the virtues of forgiveness. I attempt to convert the unwashed masses to my own personal religion of sorts. I tell anyone who will listen that the path to happiness can be found by forgiving others and letting go of your own expectations. I tell people that you can walk the path to happiness by doing your best and then allowing whatever happens to happen without prejudice or expectation. And as an example of this, I tend to point to myself.
I have all sorts of stresses in my life. I’m a single parent, I have constant physical pain, I have a career that can be demanding at times, I live in one of the most expensive places to live in the world, and I have relationships with other people, so I am constantly affected by the things that affect them. Compounded, it would be rather easy to allow these stresses to overwhelm me. Each individual thing is something easy enough to cope with, but all together, the weight of this burden could crush me. No one would fault me for wanting to wallow in it, and from time to time I have.
But that is not my hypocrisy.
I point at myself and I say, “I am happier now than I have been at any other time in my life, because I stay in the now and I don’t worry too much about tomorrow. I plan, I am prepared to deal with eventualities, foreseeable and unforeseen, not because I worry about them, but because I have the basics covered and I believe in my own ability to deal with things as they occur.”
I give myself as an example to others, saying things like, “let go of your expectations and be present in the now and you will be happier for it.”
And yet… forgiveness…
I’ve mostly forgiven or forgotten things that affect me in life. I’ve forgiven Simone for tossing me out. I’ve forgiven my ex-wife for leaving me for another man. Although I won’t ever forget it, I have forgiven the people that molested me as a teenager. I have even forgiven my ex-wife’s boyfriend, the guy that she left me for and is still dating, though I did want to ask him for a very long time, “did you know that she was married when you fucked her?” So… I guess there is a kernel of bitterness there still, but I’ve had a conversation with the man and I didn’t jump down his throat for it, so I think I can safely say that I’m mostly past all of that now.
But my father… him I have not forgiven. I have not forgotten that he took advantage of me when I was most vulnerable, that he stole from me when I could least afford it, or that he has simply never been there for me except when it served his own narcissistic purposes. That is my hypocrisy and that is the burden that I can never seem to unload. And I would really like to…
Most of the time he won’t even admit that he has done anything wrong. I don’t mean just as it pertains to my life, but in other aspects of his life as well. He has done criminal things to his friends, he has manufactured issues in order to avoid other problems. He lies, he cheats, and he steals. And yet, he lives in total denial of it all, and perhaps that is the most galling thing. If he would apologize to me, I would forgive him, but I should be able to forgive him without the apology, because I know it will never come.
I know, without a doubt, that the times that I get struck down, the times that I lose sight of my goals and get stuck in problems that I can’t let go, most of those things would disappear or at least be drastically diminished if I could let go of this one last thing… I know that I would be happier and I would be more capable of dealing with the setbacks and holding to my non-attachment practices, if I could just let go of this one. last. thing.
And yet…
And yet, I haven’t been able to do that yet.
I deal with my father when it is required of me. I am civil to him, if a bit cold. I make sure that my daughters know him and are involved in his life. His birthday was this month, and I had them call him to wish him a Happy Birthday, nevermind the fact that he doesn’t do the same. Without me reminding him about their birthdays, he would forget them completely, and he has, more often than not. I got used to him forgetting mine, but the way he drifts into and out of my children’s lives bothers me. It shouldn’t. I should accept that is how he is, and I should just be grateful for the things that he does remember, but this bitterness will not budge.
And so, I am a hypocrite.
Perhaps someday I shall not be, but for now, I still can’t completely let go.
I am Rant, and maybe someday I will be everything I want to be, but for now, I do the best I can.
Five hundred words. That is my daily writing goal.
I used to be a rather prolific writer. I enjoy writing, and it is a skill that definitely diminishes over time if left unused, so the fact that my life became chaotic and I pushed aside my daily goal to keep writing is something that bothers me.
So, much like I would do for a submissive in my care, I’ve set myself a task to write at least five hundred words a day. It’s really not that much, but it does require that I actually sit down, empty my mind, and put something on the page. That first step can be oh-so-difficult some days.
I’ve been in and out and at the periphery of the kink scene for a very long time. One of the things that I have always thought to be true, though my understanding of what it means has changed with time, is that in order to be Master to someone else, you must first be Master of yourself.
That is a tall order, but how can I task a submissive with the things that I think will improve her life if I do not even have my own in order? This has recently been a struggle of mine. I’ve had some personal setbacks, and while I do always manage to correct them and find my true path again, I have spent a few days in the weeds, during which time I find that I am all but incapable of being the Dominant that I am needed to be, both for myself, and for my partner.
I don’t think I’ve spent more than three contiguous days in a state where I was not fully Master of myself, but these occurrences have happened with enough frequency lately that it is nearly half of the time for the last several weeks, and that is purely not acceptable.
Sure, I am human, and I am entitled, just as everyone else is, to have off days or to not always be in control of things, but as Master, I have a duty not only to myself, but to my submissive as well. When my submissive partner is having trouble, a firm hand is usually what she needs to get back on course. When I am in my right mind, I see this, and I act upon it, but when I am the one who needs the firm hand, and it has to come from within me, there I run into trouble.
So – I need something that will persist across that line, where I no longer feel in control and when I feel like I have to have direction put in front of me.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me before, but the answer was always in front of me all along. Writing forces me to sit quiet with my thoughts for a time, and commit them to paper. When I am feeling most chaotic, I cannot do this of my own accord, unless I feel like I have a persistent demand that requires it of me. And so….
I’ve tasked myself.
I will write 500 words a day, every day, whether they be in my blog here, as a post on fetlife, or in continuation of one of the several novels that I have started and not finished.
I am now at 565 words, and this piece has achieved my goal for today, and I will force myself to write something tomorrow, even if I don’t feel like it, because my Master ordered me to do so.
Today I’m having what I describe as ‘an aggressive day.’
I’m getting over a cold and I am still slightly sick, so I think that’s probably got something to do with it, but I can’t be certain. If I were feeling more contemplative, I’d remark on how it’s interesting that so much can happen in my body that affects my mind for which I have no control, but today I just want to choke someone. Not necessarily in a bad way, and not necessarily in a sexual way either, I just want to put my hands on someone’s throat and squeeze until I feel better.
I used to think that this was evidence of the fact that I’m a monster.
Now, I’m certain that it is… *grin* – but I’m no longer concerned that being a monster is a bad thing. Letting the monster loose is half of the reason I am involved in this lifestyle. For too many years I pushed him down and kept him penned in.. it made me a very unhappy person to be denying a part of myself in such a way.
Aggression and passivity are often placed at separate sides of the same spectrum, but I know things to be infinitely more complex than that.
Is this aggressiveness of mine a factor in my choosing the Dominant lifestyle? Absolutely, but it’s not sufficient, and I would once more caution any aspiring submissives in my audience that aggression is not a necessary or sufficient criterion for being a Dominant.
When I was a much younger man, these things would happen more frequently. I suspect that it is something that is correlated with the levels of free testosterone that I have in my system, and there are several studies in recent years that would seem to indicate that testosterone levels in men begin to decline at age 35 and rapidly decrease over time. But then again, I have also ingested a great deal more caffeine today than I am accustomed to, so that may be a factor as well. Regardless of physiological reasons for it, sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t.. today, I’m having fun with it.
It’s a powerful feeling.
I walked to the store today to get a salad for lunch, and I was feeling aggressive, so I was projecting asshole with a chip on my shoulder as I walked. People get out of my way; it’s amusing to watch. I don’t have to say a thing and groups part so that I can split them. I walked into a crosswalk and a van actually backed up to get out of my way. Perhaps he was merely being polite or it might have just been my bright orange shirt, but I like to think that even he was affected by my body language and decided that the prudent course of action for him was to get out of my way.
As a Dominant, there is little that is quite as satisfying as having someone bend to my Will without even having to speak.
I feel like I can think faster, like I can cause the world to bend to me rather than me reacting to the world around me. It’s a trick of perception, of course.. the universe doesn’t care about me in the least, but for those moments of delusion, it’s fun.
I am reminded of a client that I used to have.. she would not have described herself as a submissive, or even as kinky, but she really liked it when I would be aggressive with her, physically, emotionally, and mentally. She was a small woman, and she loved the fact that I’m a physically intimidating man at times. I’m only six feet tall, so I’m not the biggest man in the world, but she was only five feet tall herself, and she might have weighed 90 lbs. She didn’t like the implements of BDSM. She was scared to death of floggers and whips, she did not enjoy being bound with ropes or restraints, but she loved it when I would pick her up and toss her around. She actually liked to be thrown at the wall… we would spend the majority of our session with her charging me and I’d grapple her, choke her, hold her down, or pick her up bodily and toss her away from me, where she would hit the wall or the bed or couch and then get up and charge me again. It was probably one of the more physically demanding things I would be called upon to do.
It was not clear to me, and probably not to her as well, which confuses me a bit, that it was always play. At times it was light-hearted and fun. She’d giggle as she charged me, and squeal when I would catch her and lift her over my head and toss her away. But sometimes it would get rough. She’d bite, hard, and I’d backhand her to get her teeth off of me, hard. She’d have bruises at the end, and I would have bite marks that lasted for days.
She’s scream at me and tell me that I was weak and that I had a small cock and that she was going to kick my ass. Humiliation is really not my bag, her telling me these things did nothing at all for me, but they sure got her fired up. I’d respond by telling her to give it her best shot and that I was going to fuck her until she bled. She’d run at me and I’d grab her by the throat and push her down or even lift her up in the classic comic-book move where the evil warlord is holding the protagonist up by the neck with one hand. It was only because she was so small that I could do this at all and not for very long at that. She would kick at me and flail at my arm with hers, and she could have broken my grip and got free at any point – it’s actually nearly impossible to hold a person in that position, but she didn’t want to.. she wanted to be held that way, it was a fantasy for her.
I’d grab her throat until she started to turn blue and then I’d respond with a quiet voice, “See, little girl? You’re helpless and now I’m going to hold you down and fuck you until you break.” And then I would hold her down and fuck her, with her saying, “Hurt me. Harder. Please hurt me..” over and over again before she came.
It was some of the kinkiest sex I’ve ever had, and yet, she would still maintain that she wasn’t the least bit kinky at all. People are strange.
Today I would have given her a proper session, but I wasn’t always able to on command. I used to get down on myself for this fact, and sometimes I still do. I haven’t done anything nearly so intense with my current partner, and I know she wants me to, I just have to be in the right frame of mind and be feeling physically capable, which is something I have struggled with since my car accident.
But days like this are encouraging, and the pain today is not too strong, so I look forward to the next time schedules and moods intersect, and though my partner isn’t expecting it, I’m pretty sure that she’ll approve when it occurs.
Even if she doesn’t, it is my Will, and I am the big D in our relationship, so it will eventually happen.
Breaking things is sometimes fun, and fixing things is sometimes too.
I was the last car in a line of cars trying to merge from one freeway to another when a guy in Ford Econoline E350 work van was driving along, texting on his cell phone and not paying attention to where he was going.
I was at a dead stop.
He was going 55 miles per hour (that was the CHP estimate, he was probably going faster…) and not looking in front of him.
I saw him coming at me in the rear view mirror.
I saw the back window buckle first. It sort of got pushed up from the bottom and then it popped.
It’s kind of amazing how your perception of time changes in a moment like that…
I felt the shards of glass hit the back of my neck at about the same time I was aware of being pushed into the car in front of me and then the back of my seat collapsed, fell back, and was pushed up again by the hybrid system battery pack being forced through the seat behind me and pushing the car seat (empty – thank whatever gods there may be) into the back of my seat.
Then I became aware of the noise.
Somehow, the van careened off of the back corner of my vehicle and struck or was struck by a car in the lane to the left of me. It was that car that t-boned me on the driver’s door.
I was flung forward against my seat belt at an angle and then bounced back to hit the post between the front and back seat with my head.
I don’t remember anything after that for what I’m told was about 35 minutes.
I regained consciousness with paramedics asking me if I could move my arms and legs and whether or not my neck and back hurt.
“Yes,” was my answer to all of the above.
I was proud of my succinctness, and amused but the whole situation.
The next thing I remember is one firefighter talking to another,
“Be careful there, this thing has side airbags.”
“It does?”
“Yeah, I don’t know why they didn’t go off, but you don’t want it breaking your arm if it decides to go off now.”
They decided the only course of action available to them was to cut the doors off and take out the post between the front and back seat.
I didn’t much care, I was just sort of floating there in space and time, aware of most of what was happening, but not really involved.
They tore the car apart, cut the seat belt off of me, cut my shirt off as well (it was wedged in something, I think..) and secured me to a board to carry to the ambulance.
The ride in the ambulance to the trauma center was interesting, but not really worth relating. You imagine it being a smooth ride at high speed, but it was really mostly stop and very little go.
I had no idea how badly I was injured. I am lucky to be alive. I am grateful, every day, that my kids were not in the car with me at the time. I had recurring nightmares about that for over a year. I still occasionally do.
I have constant pain from my injuries. I have not had a day completely free of pain since then, but most of the time it’s pretty manageable.
I broke my collarbone, cracked one of the vertebrae in my neck, broke three ribs, cracked my skull, got knocked unconscious for about half an hour, and suffered tremendous intra-muscular scarring as a result of tensing up right before the impact.
The bones have all healed by now, the soft-tissue and psychological damage remains though.
My car was totaled. I was out of work for four months. When I finally did go back, I had to take a different job that was closer to home because I couldn’t handle the commute. I wasn’t able to pick my kids up for a year.
I’m a different person now.
I have some physical tics. My back feels like it’s always tense, and that my spine needs to pop. This causes me to lurch my shoulders and twist my back and neck several times an hour, and much of the time I’m not even aware that I’m doing it.
I get grumpy a lot. I snap at people for things that don’t merit it sometimes. Constant pain, even if it’s low-grade and manageable, wears on you like nothing I’ve experienced before.
I was addicted to opiates.
I kicked them, but I’ll always be dependent on over the counter drugs, TENS treatments, physical therapy, or something else in that vein.
I exist in a constant state of conscious suppression of my pain and the emotions that fall in its wake.
Usually, I can ignore it. I can push past it. I can act and appear as if it’s not bothering me, but it’s always there.
Patience is one of my super-powers, and without it, I’m certain that I’d be an angry and useless person. I manage to live mostly in grace and love, and I am grateful for whatever it is within me that makes that possible.
I am stronger than I ever believed I could be, and I’m getting stronger every day.
Today isn’t a good day. I have a lot of pain, and I’ve retreated into my own mind more than I normally have to, but I am still here, and I’m going to be here tomorrow.
There are people who love me.
There is one who is Devoted to me, and she made me dinner and sits here beside me, wanting to take my pain for me, and though I’m not a Sadist, sometimes I wish I could lend it to her for awhile.
I am fortunate. I am strong. I am alive. I am Adored.