Hello party people. It’s been awhile since I actually ranted about something, so here’s a tirade for you to ponder on your Earth Day.
There is a phrase that has become so ubiquitous in the BDSM culture that it is literally written on t-shirts and mugs that you can buy from dropshippers worldwide – but it is just plain wrong and it sticks in my craw every time I read it or hear someone say it.
The phrase?
“My submission is a gift…”
This is usually followed by other such sundry tripe as, “… and any man who can’t understand that doesn’t deserve it,” or “… and if it is not respected, I will take it back.”
This is wrong.
It’s a terrible metaphor and we really need to stop using it. Submission is merely half of a power exchange negotiation. It represents something different for every power dynamic, and every couple or group. Submission, like almost everything else that we deal with in this thing that we do represents a spectrum of possibilities.
Submission is not a gift. A gift is something that you give to someone with no expectations. If you are submitting to someone with no expectations, you are doing it very, very wrong.
A gift is something that you give to someone knowing that you will never get it back. A gift is something that you give to someone because you are following a social convention, or because they are someone you care about and gifts are one of their love languages, or because you, yourself, enjoy giving things to people.
Only the worst gifts come with strings attached, and while every gift given creates some sort of socially bonded obligation on the part of the recipient – it is always acceptable at some level for the recipient of a gift to do absolutely nothing with it, or even to re-gift it to someone else. If someone were to offer me their submission and I did nothing with it – I would be doing us both a massive disservice, and if someone were to submit to me, only to have me pass that bond onto someone else, that would be a serious violation of trust (unless this is something that you negotiated prior.)
To make matters even worse, the vast majority of the people that I see using this phrase seem to think that they are somehow maintaining some level of control by trying to use this metaphor, which is completely untrue. Everything gets wrapped up in these bullshit harlequin romance novel terms and ceases to have any real meaning anymore. These sorts of modes of thinking force us to treat submission like it is a binary condition – either you are submissive or Dominant and that’s that.
It is certainly possible for a particular power dynamic to be so black and white, but that has to be negotiated to be that way. It is also just as possible for a power dynamic to be more fluid, for areas of submission to be valid under only certain conditions, or only up to certain levels of comfort, respectful of hard and soft limits.
In fact, in my not-so-very-humble opinion, binary D/s is boring and uninspired. Even if someone wants to consider themselves my property, I am not going to treat them like a slave under most conditions of normal everyday life. Not only is it exhausting, but it’s not fun.
So, if my submission is not a gift, then what is it?
It’s a negotiation. How many times do I have to say that here? In the BDSM world, everything is a negotiation.
Let me say that just one more time.
In the BDSM world, everything is a negotiation.
There is power to be shared on both sides of a power exchange negotiation, and if you have not negotiated away a particular power of yours, it remains yours.
I seriously urge anyone who is entering into a D/s relationship to think long and hard about what they want to give up and what they expect to receive as part of that power dynamic and to not only have an earnest discussion about what those things all mean for you personally, but to even write them down and codify them in a contract. This will help to prevent misunderstandings and many of the not-so-fun aspects of D/s relationship dynamics can be avoided.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of love over the course of my life. Everyone seems to experience the expression of love in a slightly different way, and apart from being a place to rant about my discomfort with the state of the world, exploring the topics of love and limerence was part of my motivation for starting this site.
English is a very descriptive language.. it actually has more words than any other language, by a large margin, but I think that we sometimes miss with the focus for where we put those words, and that has some pretty dramatic implications for the way that the minds of native English speakers work as compared to everyone else in the world…
I tend to steal the Greek words when I talk about love – they had at least seven different forms. Of course, because Latin is very dependent on Greek and English is very dependent on Latin, these words are often the roots of the words that we use in English anyway:
eros: this is the Greek word for ‘romantic love’ – but also lust – and as such is the most overused of these words. Eros was specifically a word about sex though – it was, after all, the name of the Greek god of fertility. It was actually a frightening concept for them because it involves a sense of a ‘loss of control’ – which is commonly seen in art from and inspired by the period, including the very famous story of Cupid and Psyche wherein Cupid himself becomes overwhelmed by eros and tragedy ensues. Using modern English words, the Greek concept of eros was probably far closer to limerence than love or even lust.
philia: this is what we might call ‘brotherly love’ – but it meant a great deal more to the Greeks – this is the word I use to refer to my chosen family. To the Greeks, this was far preferable to eros. This is the love that leads one to make sacrifices for others. This is the love felt between soldiers on the same line – the kind of bond that remains in place no matter what barriers of space and time lie between the people for whom this bond exists, but the Greeks understood that even philia did not necessarily mean that both people in such a bond would be equally bonded. I may be willing to sacrifice almost anything for you, but that does not necessarily mean that you would for me — that does not negate my own feelings of philia towards you.
storge: this is a special form of love that parents have for their children. It’s akin to the above, but recognized to be a special case because there are ways in which you modify your own expectations and behavior for your children that you are unlikely to do for anyone else, even your romantic love(s). This is really the only form of love that the Greeks thought had to be shared between both parties – because it was of an instinctual nature, beyond the view of the self.
ludus: this is what we might call ‘affection’ – it’s the love that children have for each other, or the physical aspects of love that are not carnal in nature – hugs, dancing, playing. In our Western society, we tend to reserve expressions of this only for people with whom there are taboos involved that prevent sexual expression, which kind of perverts and cheapens it, if you ask me.
pragma: this is what I might call ‘patient love’ – it’s the love that you build over a long time with someone, that allows you to overlook small character flaws or acute events of an unpleasant nature and still keep a pristine mental image of the person that you care for. This is ‘mature love’ – or what we expect most romantic relationships to settle into once eros has taken leave and you have a chance to return to your senses.
agape: this is also a pretty commonly stolen word, often misused because we don’t think like the Greeks did… this is ‘hippie love’ – or ‘love for everyone’ and sometimes referred to as ‘brotherly love’ as well, but in the “society is full of my brothers” sort of way, rather than, “I would die for that man,” sort of way. This is really meant to be more like the Theravada concept of metta. I fear greatly the expunging of agape from the minds of people, but that does seem to be the way the world is moving – division is the rule of the day, not love.
philautia: self-love… to be held in direct opposition to narcissism – this is the concept that all expressions of love for anyone are really just manifestations of your mind recognizing in other people things which you value in yourself – if there is nothing that you value in yourself, you cannot love anyone at all.
And all of this information is useful, but kind of secondary to the point that I’m trying to make, which is that when I say, “I love you” to someone – I may mean that I feel any or all of the above things in differing measures, and the phrase may not mean the same thing to everyone to whom I speak it – just as it doesn’t always mean the same thing when I hear it from different people.
For some people, love is a jealous thing – it is possessive… if I say “I love you” to someone, and I mean in a romantic sort of way, society tells me that I’m not supposed to say that to anyone else – but that doesn’t stop me from feeling it, and because I’m polyamorous, it doesn’t stop me from acting on it either, but that may not address the feelings of the person involved with me, and sometimes that can cause friction.
I don’t have a silver bullet here – jealousy is a very normal thing to feel, and there is no way to magically stop it if that is what you feel, but surprisingly I’ve also found that the converse of jealousy is often almost as important to some people’s feelings of love. I have had partners who, while telling me of their interactions with other people, have wanted me to feel jealous and when I do not exhibit that kind of reaction, they begin to doubt the truth behind my statements of love. If I am not jealous of them being with someone else, how can I really love them? And yet, I do.
Love is one of those dangerous and chaotic things that makes our lives in this universe worth living, and yet it is also the one thing that has consistently laid me low when a relationship ends. I don’t think I will ever completely understand its power or be able to control it, and perhaps that is why it is so compelling for everyone and the subject of so many works of art and media.
Hopefully by communicating about it, by understanding that there are different facets to it and how those things are each individual spectra of emotion, we can find a way to live beside it.
There is a reason why every pantheon of gods contains at least one, if not several, deities who are personifications of this powerful force in our lives. Love is every bit as powerful as the sea or the wind or fire, perhaps even the Sun itself, and I consider myself fortunate to be its acolyte.
This is not a post about kink – sorry… my soapbox, I get to talk about the things I want to.
Today I’m going to talk about what it’s like to be Damien.
Damien is one of my alters. If you don’t know what that means, educate yourself here or some of what I say next may not seem to make much sense. But that’s okay, it probably won’t make much sense after you learn anyway.
Damien is one of the main three personalities that I express most often, along with Rant (that’s me), and Apollo.
Damien is a bit of a handful… He is very much in tune with my Dominant side, but he takes the things that I do and kicks everything up to 11. He has no shame. He has no fear. He rarely forms attachments. He believes himself to be good at everything. Somehow he does this without attaching his ego though. If you insult him, he’ll just laugh it off and then try to buy you a beer. He is arrogant and charming at the same time. It’s really kind of strange.
Whereas I am very patient, compassionate, forgiving, and I do not judge people; Damien judges everyone and everything, he is not very patient, and he has been known to hold a grudge. He is, however, generally kind and he will moderate his behavior when he knows that it would not meet with my approval… sometimes, anyway.
We are both Hedonists, but while I enjoy wine, women, and song, he enjoys everything and everyone if the context is right. He is very, very everything that he chooses to be, and he gives absolutely zero time and attention to the things that he does not care about.
This incompatibility in our values can sometimes be difficult to deal with, especially when he acts out in a manner that would be inconsistent with what people have come to expect from me (Rant).
I often find that I have to apologize for things that I don’t remember because Damien took something too far or stuck his face in someplace where he wasn’t necessarily welcome.
However, being able to be Damien under the right circumstances is kind of a super power, and I wish I had more control over it. He tends to come out on Wednesday nights, or if I’m super stressed out or otherwise emotionally overwhelmed, especially if I’ve been drinking – and it seems to matter very little how much I drink, even just a nip from my flask can bring him out if he’s lurking.
He thinks that I am entirely too emotional and he has no problem telling everyone that. In the beforetimes, he would try to pack as much activity as he possibly could into every time that he was at the fore. He is well known for dragging people from one party destination to another, to another, and then finishing up with breakfast at 4am in a diner someplace, preferably one that sells pie.
Damien claims to have access to my memories, and sometimes I can remember his, but I do not understand how this works and while he claims he does, I don’t really believe him. However, I can remember being Damien sometimes, and it’s a very different way to experience life.
I’ll almost certainly follow this up with another entry on what it’s like to be Apollo, but that is a more extreme shift. Apollo actually experiences the world differently than I do, which is kind of hard to explain, but … that is also not this post.
Damien does not see the world particularly differently from the way I do, but he tends to ignore things a lot more than I do. He is interested in the things he is interested in and nothing else matters. This means that our behaviors are different in subtle and not-so-subtle ways…
Back in the beforetimes, if I had to navigate through a crowd, I would take a path that winds around people and other obstacles in my way, trying not to bump into people and letting the speed of the crowd slow my progress in order to avoid those sorts of unintended contact with people. Damien – he walks a straight line and if you don’t get out of the way in time, he might run into you, but he’ll then stop and apologize and be very charming about it and probably get your phone number…
In the beforetimes, when I would go to a grocery store, I might take a cart and go up and down each and every aisle, looking to see if I find anything new and interesting that I might like and then take my stuff up to the front and largely wordlessly put my goods on the conveyor belt, help bagging them, thank the checker, pay and then leave. Damien – he walks straight to the thing(s) he wants, grabs it, and then goes and flirts with people in line or with the checker while waiting for someone else to bag his stuff on the way out.
He just sort of expects that everyone wants to please him all of the time, and he is correct more often than he has any right to be.
One time Damien was at a nightclub and as they were closing and kicking everyone out, my girl went to the bathroom, leaving me standing there alone in the club, waiting for her and the bouncer told me to get out of the building. Damien told him that we were waiting for my girl and that we would leave when she got out. The bouncer decided that this was not sufficient and that we needed to leave immediately, so he got into my face a little bit. Damien just laughed at him and said, “What do you think you are going to do?” and the bouncer just walked away without saying anything else.
Being Damien feels powerful, most of the time.
I don’t really suffer from social anxiety all that much, but I think every person is affected by it from time to time – except Damien. He walks into a room and expects to be the most intelligent, best looking, most captivating person there, and kind of just refuses to acknowledge any reality that may be different from that.
As you can imagine, this does not always rub everyone the right way, however, he is so charming that most of the time he gets away with all of it. He leans heavily on Apollo’s assessments of people and when he is interested in something, he pays very close attention to everything about it or them. At the end of a single conversation with Damien, he can make people feel like he knows them better than anyone ever has before. He can create instant connections with almost anyone if he wants to, and often he wants to, though his EQ is not quite as high as mine and sometimes I have to clean up his messes.
I really wish I had the ability to turn those sorts of abilities on and off at will. It really does feel like a super power sometimes, and if I could control it, I wonder what doors it might open for me. I doubt that it would change my life entirely, and Damien is far too polarizing as a personality to be able to be Damien all the time, but I do wonder what it might be like if I could be Damien whenever I wanted to be, especially if I could always remember the things he does along the way.
Being me is not easy, but Damien makes lots of parts of it fun in ways that I might never even think about. He is in many ways like the brother I never had. The pandemic has had him visit less regularly and for shorter periods of time, and I actually sometimes miss him, as odd as that may sound.
Continuing in my series of audible blog posts, here is me reading one of my oldest, and probably most fundamental (about me) posts of the blog.
I hope that you enjoy.
The original post can be found here, and the text that I read is reproduced below.
You may have some questions about how it’s possible that I, admittedly a Dom, possibly a control freak, could possibly live without attachment. It seems antithetical to the very mantle which I’ve just taken up, does it not? I mean, the essence of Domination is control, and my own personal road to happiness was rocky and uncertain until I embraced that mindset for myself again and accepted my Dominant nature. How could those two things possibly coexist in the same person?
Perhaps they are not as incompatible as they might at first seem…
Ever since I first read Leaves of Grass in high school, this has been a favorite passage of mine, from Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Even as a teenager, I understood and related to those words as part of the complex structure that makes up me and I have used them as a balm over the years to quiet my worried mind.
My personal journey to get to where I am in life now has been interesting, but I am finally and quite possibly for the first time in my life, happy.
I’ve studied many religions, practiced several, sought wisdom in self-help books and the writings of others. I have been through individual therapy, group therapy, couples’ therapy, and psychiatric assistance. I have used drugs, both natural and synthetic, prescribed for me or found through illicit channels. I have done yoga, exercise, meditation, hypnosis, and attempted to express myself in art. I have retreated into virtual worlds and even made my own. I have worked as a video game programmer, for a private investigator, and even as a sex worker. I have cleaved to my family and ostracized myself from them. I have told the fortunes of others and cast rods to divine my own future. I have been married, twice. I have had several intimate relationships and lots and lots of sex. I have driven fast cars and ridden running horses. I have tried almost everything that anyone has ever suggested to me as a way to become enlightened, to lift my dark spirit and to try to find happiness. It does not surprise me at all, today, that none of those things worked for me.
I am a Dominant. I am an atheist. I am a pacifist. I am a father and a guide and a feminist. I am worthy of being loved and I love myself. I am calm.
Throughout all of those experiences that I detail above I fought my inner self. I denied my feelings and persecuted myself, borrowing the Catholic guilt that I was raised with to hold my own desires at bay… I told myself that the me who desired to Dominate was wrong. That each person is his own individual and it was wrong for me to want to have that authority over another. I found myself submitting to others, not in the BDSM sense, but in a very real-world sense, all of the time. I did not have the confidence to stand up for my feelings because they were wrong. I hated myself for those horrible thoughts that I had about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be.
How did I resolve that with letting go?
I stepped away from myself and looked at the dynamic.
I let go of my self hatred. I let go of the assumed societal restrictions on permitted thoughts and desires and I accepted myself and my ‘dark’ side. I have no desire to hurt anyone, quite the opposite, actually. I have no desire to injure anyone, I have no desire to inflict unwanted pain, but there is also the pain that reminds you that you are alive and the pain the brings with it the intense emotional release that I got when I submitted to Simone. There is such a thing as an embrace of pain that frees you from other pains.
I was molested as a young man. It was no one in my family, and indeed, they still don’t know that it occurred and if this ever gets linked back to me and placed in front of them a great many uncomfortable discussions will likely result, but it happened and it turned me into a brooding, angry, anti-social young man for a long time. Simone’s compassionate brutality helped me to face my demons and reclaim for me the things that were taken from me. Some of them, anyway.
I Dominate those that give themselves to me willingly. I will not accept submission from someone who is incapable of understanding what they are doing and I will not attempt to hold anyone who does not wish to be with me any longer or even those who can no longer benefit from doing so, whether they choose to see it or not.
This is a very scary thing.
Strong is the impulse to hold on, to claim a lover as mine and mine alone, but I know that I cannot be all things to all people, and no one person can be all things to me. To truly open my heart, I must accept that now, in this time, at this place, this person is trusting me with herself and the joy that brings me is incomprehensible. The joy that I feel when given that trust and that submission cannot be measured, and there is nothing wrong with me for feeling that way, just as there is nothing wrong with her for wanting to give herself to me in such a way. These are maladaptive behaviors, perhaps. They may be remnants of a primitive psychology, or they may simply be facets of a larger gem, I don’t know, but I want to know, and I will never give up exploring, and yet for now, right now, accepting is good enough.
Yes, I get off on having a pretty girl sit at my feet and lean on my leg and look up at me through long eyelashes with doe eyes and say, “yes, Sir.” If I believed in any gods, I would invoke them now to prove the conviction behind my thought. Once I thought that this made me a monster. Once I thought that this meant that there is something wrong with me, but there is not.
I am a kind Master, and a brutal lover, and a king of my own domain, and the confidence that I have to be these things, and to love myself for them comes from letting go of everything, even those lovers and that domain itself, because wherever I am, it is with me, and whoever they be, I am loved. And I am happy.
After people get beyond the novelty of talking with a former sex worker and I answer all of the questions that I did in my last post, the thing I most often get asked about is how it is possible for me to create connections with people right away.
In the context of the work that I did for Mistress Simone, this was trivial. I already had a certain amount of native talent in the area. I was fit, good looking, well spoken, and I have a fucking amazing voice. The people that I saw were already primed and seeking a connection – all I had to do was not fuck it up. Of course, I still sometimes did – and not being an idiot, I try to learn from my mistakes and do better the next time, or at the very least, make new mistakes.
All of those first-date like meetings served to teach me rather well in how to create a connection and how to maintain someone’s interest once I do. As a result, I’ve created the neural pathways to instinctively know how to attract and maintain the attention of almost anyone.
I don’t necessarily mean a romantic or sexual connection here – and it would be impossible for me to create such a connection with anyone, since there are at least a large number of people out there who would not find me attractive – at least, not right away. But even when you are not taking sex into consideration, it is often very useful to be able to establish a connection right away, even if it is shallow. This is a core skill for salesmen, or personnel managers, or product marketers, or just about anyone, actually.
People are already hard-wired to look for connections. Humans are social animals – without a clan, we die – and when an opportunity arises to meet a new person, you make a snap judgment – whether you want to admit it or not – about how you feel about that person. Is this a person that I want to fuck? Is this a person that I want to talk to? Does this person make me feel threatened, or does this person make me feel safe? I can almost guarantee that all of those questions are going through your mind about every new person you meet, every time you meet someone new. You may not be cognizant of them all at the moment you meet, and the answers to those questions can (and do) change – often quite quickly – but every person answers all of those questions, and dozens others besides, about every person they meet, within moments of meeting them.
The good news is that most people are actually pretty decent people, and that most people really do want a positive outcome to meeting anyone. That does not mean that everyone wants to fuck you, but it probably means that more of them do than you realize.
The worst part of this post is coming right now: there is a trick to it.
It’s not something that I started doing intentionally, but eventually I noticed the effect, and I can occasionally be something of a social scientist brat – so I performed experiments. I talked to my friends in new ways, I talked to their friends and watched their reactions intently, and I interacted with total strangers.
It’s actually much harder to do this in the context of a normal social club/bar/party setting than it is as a contracted sex worker, but the stakes are also a lot less and I really didn’t care about being rejected – I was inoculated to rejection when I was a younger, more instantly visually appealing man. Which is to say – I’ve been rejected a lot…
But I said there is a trick, and it would be really mean of me to mention it and not tell you, wouldn’t it? So here it is: if you want to create immediate connection with someone, no matter their gender, age, or motivation, the answer is always the same…
Make eye contact and smile.
Seriously. That’s all that’s needed. Most of the time, you get a smile back and then you can move to the next step, but often you will get a shy look away or a terrified turn of the head or even see them get up and run away. Don’t worry – you’ll get another chance, but there’s also the chance that they just don’t like what they see and you should give up.
If they look away but eventually look back towards you, you can try it again one more time – but more than that and you are being creepy and need to stop. Otherwise you’ll ruin my reputation. More often than not though, if you don’t stare at them and try to will them into talking to you, they will be intrigued by the non-threatening smile and return their attention to you and give you a better chance – but it’s a bold thing to hold someone’s gaze who isn’t expecting it, and it intimidates a lot of people at first.
The next step – and the crucial one, I’ve found – is to ask them for a favor. It has to be something trivial that they can complete without needing any skill in a short period of time, and it cannot be in any way sexualized. Anything creepy here is going to just push them away and tickle their ‘not okay’ vibes. Besides – you’re not in this for the sex anyway, because if you were, you’d be smart enough to realize that the best way to accomplish that is to just pay for it.
This will require you to actually think a bit, perhaps, but as a good example, imagine that you saw an attractive, clean-cut, non-threatening looking man smile at you and give you some time to react, then he gets close enough to ask a question and says, “Would you mind holding my drink for me for a moment? I’ve just noticed that my boot is unlaced and I’d like to fix it.” Then he hands you his drink.
Most of you are thinking, “well, now I roofie him and when he’s good and lit, get him to take me back to his place where I fuck his brains out and then roll him for any cash he might be carrying on my way out – hoping never to see him again.”
No.. wait.. That’s not what I want – and that’s only happened once…
But you do see the point, right? You’ve created a connection, immediately. You’ve engaged their compassion as well as curiosity and maybe lust.
But isn’t this all terribly manipulative and premeditated and awful, Rant? How is this different from any of that pick-up artist crap that you are always shitting all over? Aren’t you just using psychological tricks to manipulate people?
Well – maybe. But name any interaction that you have with anyone, ever, where there is not some form of manipulation taking place. The whole point of communications is usually that there is something that I want (even if it’s pretty mundane) and I want you to help me with it in some way. And more to the point – you do have to start somewhere, and while I could just stand next to someone until I hear something that I can talk about and then try to jump into the conversation… that is a really weak place to start, putting yourself in the submissive position before you even begin to communicate – verbally, at least.
By asking for a trivial task to be accomplished, you’re giving your conversant the power to say ‘no’ and walk away, or to pick up the gauntlet and do something trivial in the interest of more conversation. And conversation is the goal here, so you have to follow up after this and actually have something interesting to talk about. There must have been some reason you wanted to talk to this person. Maybe you overheard them talking about something you are interested in, or maybe you just really like the way they make that dress look and you want to fuck their brains out. Talk about it – whatever it is – or let it go and forget about it entirely.
Interesting – or perhaps the opposite, actually – is that this works equally well with people who are sexually attracted to me as those who are not. In either case, I’ve engaged their curiosity and given them a focus, and then all I have to do is hold it.
Of course – you must also be charming and debonair and have impeccable sartorial choices if you want to maintain this contact, and that becomes a much more involved process and there are no tricks for that – either you will establish a real connection, or you won’t – but that is entirely up to you. The vast majority of the work involved in making a new connection is in those first moments of uncertainty, and by looking for a smile and asking for a favor, you can short circuit a lot of that.
I have made a number of difficult admissions through this site. This is probably the most terrifying thing I’ve ever contemplated posting to a public site and it has nothing to do with BDSM but everything to do with me.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I have been through psychotherapy and have been on prescriptions for psychoactive drugs at various times in my past – over the course of writing this blog, even. However, I have not been completely open about one of the more challenging aspects of my atypical neurology, and in order to be consistent with my mission, I have to be unflinchingly transparent and vulnerable, so here I am…
For those of you who don’t know what that is, you can follow the link above or just accept that it is the current accepted terminology for what used to be called multiple personality disorder. There is literally more than one person living in my body – though the degrees to which they make themselves known can vary tremendously.
The ways in which it can manifest are legion, and I have been in deep denial about my own condition for years, which created more than a few problems for me. I was able to conceal it from almost everyone, even from myself – perhaps most especially from myself, by being paranoid and attempting to control every aspect of every moment of every day of my life. I spent huge amounts of mental and even physical energy in just monitoring myself for consistency and trying to portray an unbroken narrative for myself and everyone who interacts with me.
It was exhausting.
I developed habits though… I repeat myself a lot, both in written and verbal communications. Most people completely fail to notice, but those who do tend to think that I am merely emphasizing the things that I want to say for effect – and often that is the case, at least in part, but sometimes I’m also doing it so that I can make sure that I will remember… I meditate – and when I forget to do that, or when life gets in the way too often and I don’t make the time – I suffer for it. I use drugs to force my mind into the state I want it to be in sometimes as well. Nootropics and psychoactive chemicals are my friends and allies.
The memory gaps are the worst thing.
I can be working, sitting at my desk, writing code and being in the zone, and then I will lose track of time and space and my consciousness will return and I will find myself in a completely different part of the office or in the kitchen or even in my car, completely unaware of hours of time that have passed where I have had conversations with coworkers, accomplished work goals, even eaten meals or used the bathroom. That happens with some frequency, and I’ve just grown accustomed to it. I have learned to ask leading questions and prompt people to fill in missing information for me in conversations all of the time, because when I’m at work, about a third of the time it isn’t really me there.
Sometimes when I go out to my favorite weekly event – Bondage a Go Go – I will end up finding myself at home in bed and not remember how I got there. Sometimes there are people with me throughout this entire process – my former partner would frequently accompany me to and from BaGG and spend the night with me, and often I would not remember things from some point after our arrival until the next day. Often pieces will come back to me, but sometimes they won’t – until my personality shifts again, and then all of the corresponding memories come flooding back in again, only to be lost anew when I shift again.
My personality shards – my alters – to use the common parlance, each have different motives and desires and personalities and while I am fortunate enough that these are almost always in concert with each other, sometimes they are not. Sometimes they even conflict with each other… and as you can probably imagine, this makes dealing with me difficult sometimes. I can seem like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at times, I’m sure.
Recently, this has all been very different though – and not in a very flattering way.
When I was suppressing the expression of personality shifts, I would minimize the impact, even when they happened. I would go on with life as if I was always the one at the controls and while I had gaps in my memory of things, I could usually fill them in pretty effectively and by denying the gaps existed, I was presenting myself and everyone around me with an unbroken narrative.
And that is how we experience the world, I’m realizing… I mean, I’ve always known this, but it is not something that I usually spend much time thinking about. We experience everything as a continuous story, beginning when we are born and ending when we die. This is the normal, expected, and understood way in which people live their lives – when you’re trying to explain anything to someone else, one of the most effective ways to do that is to relate it with a story.
With the exception of our daily sleep periods, humans experience their entire world as an unbroken narrative.
Except — I don’t. There are breaks in the narrative for me – every day. When I was not monitoring myself as much, and when I denied my interior pieces, I failed to notice this, but the narrative of my life is not unbroken – and there are pieces missing for me all of the time.
I had no idea how much this was affecting me.
To be experiencing so much missing time and to be openly accepting the transitions was causing my mind to fragment even more. Personality characteristics that are dominant with one alter were beginning to bifurcate more tenaciously and rapidly, leaving my dominant self, the one who I most often consider to be me, with the least agency that I can remember ever having.
The parts were growing at the expense of what remained of me.
For some reason that I can’t explain – maybe it’s self-selection bias, maybe it’s something else – the BDSM community seems to be home to many more people with DID than would match population statistics. I know several people in my local scene who also have DID and one of the more fascinating things to me is how the disorder manifests differently in different people.
Most of my friends and acquaintances who have the disorder have the ability to conduct conversations between their alters within their own mind. The only way that I have ever been able to have an actual conversation with a different part of myself was very recently when I was staring at myself in the mirror and having a conversation with myself.
My alter – who is known as Damien, though he doesn’t refer to himself that way except to note his presence to those in the know – would talk through my mouth at me as I stared at the mirror, and he would respond to things that I thought back at him – so anyone watching the conversation would only hear Damien’s voice, and I imagine it would have been really fucking freaky to watch.
Damien told me about the world as he sees it, a little bit about what he wants, and a lot more about how he wanted my former partner to succeed, and plans for how she can probably do that. He told me about his disappointment in me. He told me that he does not understand why I let myself get hurt, and he offered to take over for me. Permanently.
I almost let him.
It is something that I still think about. Since having that weird conversation with myself a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been unstable. I have a very hard time concentrating on anything at all. I can tell that he feels much more stable, more in control, more complete than he used to be.
A completely different alter – one who lives in a very different world than I do, and who believes in things like magic and supernatural connections between things – led Damien and I through a ritual that was intended to close some of the gaps in my memory and help him to cope with the fact that his carefully laid plans were falling apart and give him some broader context in which to operate.
As far as I can tell – from his perspective – it was a complete success. I feel slightly more grounded than I did, and it did return a small portion of the personal agency that I feel was eroding, but he is resplendent. He has been staying out of the light because I did not accept his offer to take over control for me, but his fear and doubt are gone, and mine still remain – and may be even greater, and while I don’t actually know if his offer is still valid, it tempts me even now.
But it is a terrifying thing. It feels like a lesser form of suicide. If I do this – who will I really be? I know that I won’t disappear entirely, Damien doesn’t when he is no longer in control – and he continues to learn and grow.
I am nearly certain that this is something that I have already done once before – not to let Damien take over for me, but for me to take over for the one who could no longer handle living.
I may very well be the result of a first suicide of this type, and the original progenitor me is still locked inside me somewhere, but he never comes out anymore – would that be my fate if I were to surrender to the more Dominant part of me?
Who knows? Perhaps it is all delusion anyway.
I’m still too afraid to try – still too afraid to know.
It kind of started out as a joke. The statement was completely true and made without any sort of deception or guile, but it seemed so outrageous that even though I was the one saying it, I had a hard time believing it.
I was on a date, and my date and I didn’t know each other very well as normally happens in the early stages of dating, so she asked me, “What is your passion?”
Such a broad question…
Normally this sort of question kind of puts my mind into overload as I try to think about all of the different possible answers and I get kind of paralyzed, but on this particular occasion the answer came quickly and almost without thought.
“I make it my sacred mission in life to make it acceptable for every person to be who they really are at their core.”
I usually actually try to go further than that and help everyone to be the best version of themselves that they can be, but that requires a great deal of work on their part, whereas the above statement only really requires that I be interested, nonjudgmental, supportive, patient, and caring – and I’m really quite good at those things, most of the time.
I’ve tried to refine this a bit, especially in the case of the people that I actually have close relationships with, because with those people I can take a more active hand in helping them to realize the things that are holding them back and realizing how they can be the best versions of themselves that they can be.
Of course, none of this is worth anything without me also doing work on myself and learning along the way as well, and I do my best to do that, every day.
One of my former mentees likes to tell people that I am responsible for her being kinky – or, she did, until I started to correct her each time she said it, with something like this, “No, little one, I didn’t make you who you are, I just accepted you and made it okay for you to be who you were all along.”
My goal in life for myself is to be as authentically me as I can manage. I try to let go of the guilt and shame that I’ve been gifted with by family and religion and society and I try to listen to the internal voices within me, understand their needs, and so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone to do so, satisfy them.
My sacred mission in life is to help you do exactly the same.
Those of you who know me personally or who have been following along since before I began to recall my origins story may remember a bit of the relationship that Simone and I ultimately ended up having. She did not exploit me in the same way that the members of the Lodge did, but she did exploit me nonetheless, and in a much more direct way. The difference, of course, is that I consented to this treatment.
To this day, I do not know if Simone ever really cared for me or not. She made gestures to indicate that she did at times, and she was incredibly cold and distant at other times, but it didn’t really matter in the beginning, because I was completely smitten.
The first week or so that I was Mistress Simone’s property was a panoply of new experiences for me, the details of which are burned into my mind, but that I really can not recall here without shifting my perception to the point of discomfort. However, I can paint the broad strokes…
Over the course of several days, Mistress Simone set me up in an apartment, destroyed most of my old clothing and took me shopping to replace them with more suitable things, introduced me to several of her business associates, most of my companion chattel, and even a couple of prospective clients, though I did not know that was who they were at the time.
She introduced me to protocol, proper ways to show submission, posture, bearing, and many of the tools of the trade. I did not know it at the time, but she was being careful not to mark me. She taught me both the Top and bottom sides of each interaction, which I thought was completely normal at the time, but have come to understand is completely unique. It was a whirlwind introduction to the things that would later be expected of me.
She spoke to me a great deal about sex. She was very interested to hear about my sexual experiences with the Lodge, and I could tell that she was turned on by the ritualistic nature of things and the incorporation of sex as part of that. I often had a difficult time accurately reading Simone, but I was absolutely certain of her interest in this. She asked a great deal about my perceptions of various sexual activities, and whether or not I enjoyed doing those things with women or men. I answered her honestly, though in many cases, I did not really understand the questions that I was answering.
She hit me and made me beg and stepped on me and let me perform cunnilingus on her, but she always stopped me before her orgasm. I didn’t understand why then, and I’m not entirely sure that I do now. Whereas I was completely baffled then, I am pretty sure that I understand now. It was a power play. It was to show me how in control she was, and how – even as I learned what she liked and what she didn’t, becoming much more adept at the act – she maintained that control.
She would often command me to jack off for her, but she warned me that I was to ask her for permission to cum, and that if I were to ejaculate without permission that there would be severe consequences. I always asked her for permission to cum, but she never gave it (until much later). I made the mistake once of stopping after asking if I could cum and being told no – but I only made that mistake once. I never did ejaculate without permission, but I did occasionally become sore.
She spent several hours with me each day. I felt extremely special. I could tell that the others were jealous of the attention that I would get, but I would occasionally overhear things like, “he’s just new, the shininess will wear off soon,” or “wait until he pulls his first job and falls flat on his face,” but those things just raised my competitive spirit and furthered my isolationist tendencies – Simone became my entire world.
The psychology of her pitch was impeccable. She knew that she had me wrapped around her little finger. I felt like a million bucks, even when I was prostrate on the floor naked for her, licking the bottom (yes, the part that contacts the ground…) of her shoes. She put me in fancy clothes and a fancy apartment and was introducing me to important people. It really didn’t matter to me that much that I was getting no actual sex from this – I felt important again, special, unique. And once I felt all of those things, and I’d been divorced from contact with everyone else in my life, and I was completely and utterly dependent upon her, she told me what she really wanted me to do.
She wanted me to be a prostitute.
I’m not an idiot, and I had picked up along the way that this was what was actually going on behind the scenes, though there were also legitimate photography gigs and convention postings that were happening as well, but I already knew that the core of her business was in the sex trade, and the women that I had seen her dining with when I first encountered her were clients of hers more than friends – and she knew many such women. She even conducted events specifically targeted at this demographic – sex toy events, wine and cheese events, anything that would get the abandoned wives of Beverly Hills together… Her male clients required significantly less maintenance or cost of customer acquisition, but they were also significantly less reliable. Female clients were almost always return clients… these were the people to whom I was intended to appeal.
Forewarned of this eventuality, and fully enamored of my new life, I did not hesitate to agree, though in retrospect, I realize that I really did not have much of a choice. Simone rewarded me with what was at that time the most intense sexual experience of my life. She was Dominant with me in a way that appealed to me then, but that would result in very different reactions from me now, but she fucked the shit out of me, and while she ordered me to do things to her, she also just used me in ways that still make me pause… and then when she was done, she told me to disappear and clean myself up because I would be seeing my first client in just a few hours.
I was simultaneously excited and about as anxious as I have ever been.
I have neglected, so far, to mention that at the same time that much of this was going on, I was in the process of developing an actual, mostly healthy relationship with a young lady with whom I was attending high school.Let’s call her Susan, just to keep things simple, but that was not her actual name, of course.
She was wonderful.In all likelihood, she still is wonderful.In other circumstances, it might have been a relationship that could have lasted.Our original plans were that it should, of course. We met when she moved across the country with her family at age 15 and started to attend my high school.She was one of two girls in the school who could keep up with me intellectually, and while she came from a Southern Baptist background, she was in a similar anti-Christian mood at the time and while I kept most of my involvement with the Lodge away from her, I felt like we were aligned in all of the ways that mattered to me at the time.Of course, my conception of what was important then was very different than it is today.
Living in a largely apathetic household and having a great deal of autonomy, I was free to pursue my relationship with Susan in any time that I was not already involved in some other activity (and there were a lot of those in those days.)We grew close quickly, and it soon became a focus for more and more of my attention.
She felt like she did not fit well in high school, so she graduated a year early and started college while I was still a high school senior.I almost followed her.Im retrospect, I am glad that I didn’t, but it might have removed me from the influence of the Lodge sooner, so it’s hard to know how things might have changed.But I stayed in high school and had an awesome senior year – with a few dark places, some of which I ended up seeking out, and some of which found me.
This next part gives me squicky feels too… Susan’s parents had money. They probably had more assets than I will ever acquire, and growing up on a horse ranch, I never wanted for space and things to keep my mind occupied, but I really had no idea how big the difference between ‘comfortable’ and ‘wealthy’ was until then.I hate to admit this now, and at the time I was wholly incapable of even seeing it, but I used them for their ability to influence people and make things easier through the application of money pressure.I did love Susan.I still love Susan, if I’m being honest, but I also used her and her family, and I do wonder if I would have been as interested in Susan if not for the fringe benefits of a relationship with her… not because any part of my feelings were disingenuous, but because I was not a very well-formed human just yet.
I console myself with the knowledge that every human manipulates others, consciously or unconsciously, to get the things that we need or desire.I was not consciously manipulating Susan, but I can see in retrospect that I did end up manipulating her quite a bit.
I was not quite so self-aware then, and I was a much more selfish person in general.
Susan and I had a plan.She started school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and I planned to attend UC Santa Barbara (which is only about an hour away by car).We were both engineering undergrads, but our plans for grad school were divergent.She planned to pursue a JD (and ended up getting an MBA at the same time for good measure) and go into patent law or become inside corporate counsel for a technology company.I planned to go to medical school and pursue a career in biomechanics or biomedical engineering.While we were not actually modeling our lives after the Huxtables, it was a comparison that was often made.
But that is where things fell apart…
I used Susan and college as ways to help me get away from the Lodge and my family.Susan and I married at a ridiculously young age and at that point I just completely stopped attending any of my own family’s holidays or events and just started exclusively going to hers.I did not realize that I was actively rejecting my own family or that I was isolating myself so effectively.
Gradually, over time, my relationship with Susan started to fail.The most pronounced area in which this was problematic was over religion.Most couples fight over money, but we didn’t have that problem, so we found other things to be in conflict over.Susan went back to her Southern Baptist roots and even went so far as to be born again and baptized yet another time – in the swimming pool in our backyard, no less.She became more and more involved with her church, and that made me more and more uncomfortable.I started to spend more and more time away from home.School kept me busy, and even though I didn’t need the money, I started taking on side jobs to have an income stream of my own, even though her parents gave us everything that we could possibly need.
Our relationship finally broke.I can remember the incident that predicated it with crystal clarity.It was a summer evening, and the summer sun hung low in the sky, the LA area smog making for a gorgeous panoply of red, orange, purple, and pink hues in the sky.I arrived home in the early evening – and found Susan already at home, sitting on the sofa in the formal living room and crying.It looked as if she had been crying for some time, so I did what I do in situations where I find someone that I care about crying – I tried to console her.
My actions made her cry even harder and I was genuinely confused, but I just stayed where I was, arms around her, silently being in the moment with her and eventually her sobbing abated and she looked at me with big, blue eyes, bloodshot and teary, snot uncontrollably rolling out of her face, and she said to me, “I will miss you.”
I didn’t really understand what she was talking about, so in my customarily eloquent fashion, I said, “Huh?”
“I will miss you when you’re gone.”
“Am I going somewhere?”
“I mean when you die.”
“Well, yes, I would imagine so… but I don’t plan to do that any time soon.”
“No, I don’t mean that.I mean I am sad because when I die, I will go to Heaven, but you won’t be there.”
“Well, shit…”
I was flabbergasted.Dumbfounded. And I sat there, dumbfounded, for some time.
Eventually this turned into a conversation about what it means to be ‘equally yoked under God’ and what happens to the souls of the unbelievers when we die.
I had already come to a very painful decision though – as soon as she said “…I am sad because when I die, I will go to Heaven, but you won’t be there” I could feel the decision being made.It was less of a conscious thing and more of a necessity.
It took getting through the rest of that conversation while I muddled around in the innards of my own mind for a bit – with much less facility than I have now – and was finally able to give voice to the decision that I had already made.
“I want a divorce.”
It felt like gutting myself to say those words.It was an agony unlike any that I had previously experienced, and it made me question the whole notion.If separating was going to be so painful, then maybe it shouldn’t happen?Maybe I was missing something?But no.I was just being affected by emotions in a context that I had no previous experience in… and it was truly awful.
I feel pain when every relationship ends, whether I am the one to initiate the break-up or not.I don’t think that is unusual at all, but having been the one to first say the words, I felt like I was in some way beholden to them.It makes so little sense that it is difficult to express in words, but I felt that I somehow owed the concept of divorce my attention.
We both did a great deal more crying that night, but she never fought me on it.She never tried to talk me out of it, never asked me to stay, never tried to win me back, all of which I expected, but was relieved to not have to deal with.We were separated the next day and our divorce was final as quickly as the courts could process it.
We maintained the same residence in name until our house sold, and then we split the proceeds evenly, however, I stopped living there almost immediately.I had no real money of my own and, being a full time student, I had very few ways to earn enough to actually live on.It was already well past the FAFSA deadline, so there was no way I could apply for additional loan money without paying usurious levels of interest, so I ended up couch surfing for a few weeks while I tried to figure out what was going on in my life.
For the first time I took a look at the trajectory of my life and I said, “how did I get here?”
I was on the path that everyone wishes they could be on – I had good grades, a handful of bachelor’s degrees and I was accepted to the Geffen School of Medicine – and had I stayed on that path, I would probably be a very different person today, but it was not a path that I set out on because I wanted to be a doctor or even because I wanted to work on human-computer interfaces (which was the only thing that really kept me interested anyway – I have no real interest in medicine.)I was on that path because it was the path that Susan’s parents wanted me to be on.I was on that path because it was the ‘logical’ thing to do given my intelligence and ability to assimilate information.I was there because it was expected of me.So I resolved to quit that too.
I still bounce back and forth between relief and regret with respect to that decision.Most of the time I’m content with things and I can be comfortable with my choice, but there are definitely times that I look at my bank balance and how expensive things around me are and I regret not making the choice to pursue a more traditionally lucrative career path, and there are definitely times when I look back with great relief on a decision that kept me from becoming a prisoner to a rather narrowly defined career path that I am nearly certain that I would find unfulfilling or challenging in all of the wrong ways.The challenges that I face now are more constructive, and I never have to tell anyone that their loved one is going to die.
Regardless of the motivations or causes behind the next chapter of my life, this was a seminal event.It put me in the vicinity of UCLA on the couches of friends for as long as they could stand me while I tried to salvage the pieces of my life and find a new path forward.
I didn’t drop out of school right away, but I did find a shitty job working as a server at The Cheesecake Factory in Brentwood, and that would prove to be a very important decision for reasons that will become apparent next time.
I am going to stop making promises about how far I will get with this story in each installment – since I quite obviously have more to say on some of these topics as I commit them to the page than I initially thought. So – from now on, I’ll just keep adding parts of my story to the journey as it unfolds.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the fact that this post took me awhile to get up because of the effects that writing it had on me. I began by writing about the change of power dynamics in the Lodge, and how that affected me both then and now, but as part of writing that, I began to relate in some detail one of the rituals that I was always the center of attention for, and as I was writing it, I started to re-experience the feelings that I had, and I had to stop. I have cut most of that, but I’ve left what I can, for now.
One could be excused for thinking that the feelings that bothered me so much were feelings of victimization or exploitation, but that’s not what really bothered me. I felt megalomaniacal, with delusions of grandeur. I’ve been having some small amount of difficulty in keeping these feelings from bleeding over into my day-to-day life. , but I think I’ve managed to normalize things at this point. I am somewhere in the middle of where I want to be: warm and open, honest and bold – and where I was: cold and closed, aloof and narcissistic. I’m not as open and warm as I was just a few weeks ago, but neither am I as aloof and unconcerned as I was twenty years ago.
But to get back to the story…
My interactions with Joe’s extended family and a few others from the neighboring communities started to have a profound effect on my view of myself as a man over the next couple of years. I will refer to this extended group of followers from now on as the Lodge (since that was how we referred to ourselves).
My interactions with the Lodge began to take on more and more ritually significant roles, and either by fate or happenstance, this coincided with my own realizations concerning my atypical neurology and how I interacted with the world. This would prove to have a profound effect on who I became and the decisions that I would make for the next decade.
However, in order to understand how this happened, it is first necessary to explain something about the central concept at the core of our beliefs – the Thelemic concept of True Will.
I could probably write a book on that subject alone, but to provide just a small bit of context so that this makes sense, I will relate the two meanings that the concept of True Will carries.
Firstly, the meaning given to the outer order and the world at large – and the only official definition – is basically this: every person has a ‘best path’ – or True Will – for them to live in this life, and as long as you stay on that path, you will be happy and things will be easy for you. All of the things that are stressing you out now are things that are happening because you are not aligned with your True Will. This concept goes a bit further and early induction rituals involve contacting your own personal Holy Guardian Angel to help reveal your True Will, but basically you are told that there are different voices within that speak to you about what you should do, representing different facets of a cognitive being that connects us all, and you need to be able to filter out the voices that do not belong to you and that once you do that, everything will be perfect for you.
Secondarily, there was the meaning given to the inner circle. This may have been unique to our Lodge and my future interactions with members of the more official Ordo Templi Orientis would indicate that they do not generally acknowledge any other interpretation of True Will. Whether this facet was a perversion unique to Frater Jubal (for he did claim to have secrets) or a more widespread ‘inner doctrine’ I do not know, but the gist of this facet of True Will is this: as long as you are aligned with your True Will, you can do no wrong.
That is a very simple statement to encompass a much broader range of things, but that was the justification for every evil thing done by Joe or myself or any other member of the inner circle of the Lodge. If I am acting on my Will, what I am doing is absolutely – even Divinely – right.
Tying destiny and will together like this is insidious.
And then Joe did something that I’m certain every other Thelemite would balk at – he told me that I had the power to read others’ True Will.
According to everything that I had read, this should not be possible. One’s own True Will should only be revealed through a few specific rituals or ordeals. But Joe called me an Ascendant Being and told everyone that I had the ability to read their True Will, putting me in the position of being the Lodge fortune teller, for the most part.
In retrospect, I see it as a cunning move on his part. He thought he could control me, and he saw the opportunity to use a smart, observant kid to gain even more control over his flock.
I actually have no idea if this was his true motive or not, but it certainly makes a great deal of sense. By not claiming the power for himself, Joe was being falsely humble, and by telling the members of the Lodge that I had the ability to read their True Will, and then ‘guiding’ me to do so in such a way as to get everyone to do what he wanted them to, Joe was able to elevate himself – and me – from teacher/priest to demigod. Suddenly, if you had too much difficulty with the initiation rites (which was a very common problem for new acolytes), you had another option – you could just ask me.
This made me indispensable, and Joe continued to groom me to ascend to leadership positions within the Lodge.
This break from previous teachings actually caused a few people to leave, but those who remained were even more loyal and bound to us.
Ultimately though, this would prove to be the linchpin that gave way and allowed me to escape the Lodge.
As I grew older and more confident in my abilities (and while there was always a part of me that knew that something wasn’t quite right, I was, for the most part, a believer at this point) I began to disagree with Joe.
I can still vividly remember the argument that he and I had after I had read someone’s Will and gave a different pronouncement than Joe had pre-suggested to me that I should tell her.
It was a direct challenge to his authority, and he began as you might expect, by distancing himself from me and pronouncing that I had strayed from the path, appealing to the Lodge to oust me, for the most part.
It worked too – but only because I let it, and realizing that has been one of the biggest events of my life.
He made certain that our argument was very public, and while Joe was a very smart man, he was outclassed in this fight. He said that I had lost my way and that I would need to do penance to find my way again. This was not the first time that he suggested that I would need to do penance, but it is the first time that I disagreed. I took Joe’s own words that he had previously lavished upon me when I was a more timid, more compliant acolyte. I stopped speaking to Joe, even though he was the one in front of me – I started speaking to be heard – and I said that as an Ascendant Being, my mastery of Will was complete, and that as an avatar of the Lightbringer, I was the only being capable of discerning the Truth, and that, indeed, Joe had lost his way.
The last part is almost certainly actually true, but I no longer cared. I was about to leave for college and I was beginning to see things for what they truly were – a dangerous cult built around some stolen ideas and a charismatic personality. I was happy to let that argument be the last interaction that we had before I moved hundreds of miles away.
It wasn’t until much later that I would begin to understand the actual value of the things that I was taught and to use the gifts that Joe had helped me to hone in reading people as a way to gain personal power, and even later than that before I realized that to be such a creature would be to lose myself completely.
When I was 18, I graduated from high school as Salutatorian and left behind my small rural home town. I would spend a few days back in my parent’s home during that first year away, but after that, I would limit the amount of time that I spent in the area, even to the point of seeking poorly thought-out plans to ensure that I wouldn’t have to return.
One of those would result in an early and inappropriate marriage – and the other would result in sex work and my first introduction to BDSM.