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.
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.
Lately writing has been hard… in fact, accomplishing much of anything at all has been a great deal more difficult lately than it would normally be thanks to the status of the world around us, and I know that I am not alone in feeling this way.
But I also know that I want to share more than I have been able to, so I’m going to do something a little different for me. I’m going to record an old post in audio and let you hear what I sound like.
Here is me reading my own piece, Kneel for me. I’ve reproduced the text below as well, so that you can follow along as I read if you like.
I hope you enjoy.
— Rant
Kneel for me.
Meet my gaze and hold it. Do not look away.
I know it is not easy. Nothing worthwhile is.
Cry for me. Not because you are sad, not because you have lost, not because you are missing someone dear, but because I am asking you to.
Open your heart for me. Pour the blood of your emotion on the floor at my feet and let me sink into its depth.
Sing your song of sorrow until it fills my soul and covers the rough parts, smooths out the edges, fills the gaps of my emotional canvas.
Cry for me. Not because you need to, but because I need for you to.
Lift your heart and mind and soul to the sky and let my love surround you. This is a place of safety and security, you are in my Protection and nothing in the world can harm you right now.
Rage for me. Not because you need to purge the poisonous vapors of mistrust and envy from your mind, but because I feed on your ire.
Scream for me. Not because your voice needs to escape your throat. Not because you have broken through the wall of your pain and anger and the primal need for screaming catharsis is pulling apart the walls of your soul, but because I want you to.
And then do all of these things again for the reasons I told you not to before.
I will hold your heart close and keep it safe while you channel the dark things away and I will eat them for you.
And then, when you are ready, I will return your heart to you, clean, shiny, and new.
And any time you need to, I will be here, and you can…
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.
If you know me personally, this is probably not a new piece of writing to you. I posted this first to my fetlife profile rather than here, about a year ago, but I re-read it myself recently and thought that perhaps it should be cross-posted here as well.
It is short, and while I intended it to be akin to free-verse poetry, it’s really just a short monologue… but I kind of like it.
I hope you do too.
Kneel for me.
Meet my gaze and hold it. Do not look away.
I know it is not easy. Nothing worthwhile is.
Cry for me. Not because you are sad, not because you have lost, not because you are missing someone dear, but because I am asking you to.
Open your heart for me. Pour the blood of your emotion on the floor at my feet and let me sink into its depth.
Sing your song of sorrow until it fills my soul and covers the rough parts, smooths out the edges, fills the gaps of my emotional canvas.
Cry for me. Not because you need to, but because I need for you to.
Lift your heart and mind and soul to the sky and let my love surround you. This is a place of safety and security, you are in my Protection and nothing in the world can harm you right now.
Rage for me. Not because you need to purge the poisonous vapors of mistrust and envy from your mind, but because I feed on your ire.
Scream for me. Not because your voice needs to escape your throat. Not because you have broken through the wall of your pain and anger and the primal need for screaming catharsis is pulling apart the walls of your soul, but because I want you to.
And then do all of these things again for the reasons I told you not to before.
I will hold your heart close and keep it safe while you channel the dark things away and I will eat them for you.
And then, when you are ready, I will return your heart to you, clean, shiny, and new.
And any time you need to, I will be here, and you can…
This is the second part in a three part series. When I am training a new submissive, I rely on three of the five senses to keep her where I want her. My first piece on Touch was just previous to this and you may or may not wish to read that before continuing with this.
Voice: a (slightly) more subtle approach to the same.
Since I started off talking about senses, I suppose it makes more sense to say that I really mean ‘sound’ when I say ‘voice’ here – but since I don’t use a training whistle, clicker, or anything like that, sound almost always means my voice. There are some Dominants who do use clickers or whistles or the like, so some of those same concepts probably apply here, but since that is outside of the scope of my experience, this is the only mention I will make of them.
I have three distinct voices that I use with submissives and trainees:
Normal voice: This is just the voice that I use under normal circumstances – both vanilla and kinky. I’m told that I have a very soothing voice and that it carries, so I rarely have reason to modify this in normal circumstances. In normal voice, it is important to pay attention to what I am saying as well as how I am saying it. This is the voice that I will use to tell you that you are a good girl, but also the voice that I will use when I lean in close beside you and tell you that I’m going to use you until I’m exhausted. It carries the most variability of intonation and generally the most information, but there is subtlety here that can sometimes be missed, so it is not ideal for situations where more control is required.
Command voice: This is the voice that I use when I want you to do what I am telling you. It does not mean that I’m angry with you, but that is how it is most often interpreted at first… I drop my voice by about an octave and a half, so not only is the tone different, but the pitch is as well. It’s an obvious difference and it follows a convention held by much of society – even in different cultures, I’ve found. I’ve been told by vanilla friends that this is my ‘serious’ voice or even my “don’t fuck with me” voice. The timbre won’t change, but I often vary the volume with which I speak in this voice. It carries very far and I don’t always want to broadcast my intentions. In this voice it is much more important to pay attention to the content of what I am telling you rather than look for subtlety of meaning.
Crisis voice: This is the voice that I use when I need to be paid attention to right now – usually for reasons of safety. The tone is similar to my command voice, but it’s about half an octave higher, so it’s similar in pitch to my normal voice, just a bit deeper and definitely much, much louder, just under a yell. This is the voice that I will use when you are near to harming yourself, or someone or something else is about to impede upon your physical space, things like that. This is my, “watch out!” voice. If I want, I can put a lot of power behind this. In this voice, there is never any implied subtlety at all – the only important thing is the information that I need you understand and likely act upon right now.
Of course, I can also whisper and use other vocal intonations, but generally those are embellishments on one of the above – things that I can use to subtly change the meaning of the words that I am using, or to impart a particular idea. I can whisper in Command voice, for example, and sometimes I’m just an asshole and I’ll lower my vocal volume of my Normal voice in an effort to cause someone (not always my sub/trainee) to move closer to me or to pay closer attention to what I’m saying.
Even without me explaining these things, trainees under my care usually come to understand them pretty quickly. I use facial expression, body language, and sometimes just plain brute force to reinforce the things that I say with my voice and establish a pattern pretty quickly. It’s difficult to train anyone to do anything without explaining what it is that you want done, and voice is generally the way that I accomplish that – at least in person – and while long distance D/s is something that I have some experience with and am learning much more about as I do it every day, the spoken word has power even in situations like this. Written text in an email or text message can be extremely descriptive and more detailed than most people can maintain patience for in person, in voice, but the voice, facial expressions, and body language that you can experience in person is a lot more powerful – even more powerful in person than over media like Skype.
More often than not, the things that I will do with my voice are explained by the content of what I am saying when I say it. For instance, if I say, “bunny, go sit on that chair and hold it for me,” what I mean is literally that I want her to go sit in the chair I indicated and wait for me – it’s not rocket science. However, sometimes I will use commands that are not obvious, but that actually require training.
I stole this wholesale from Stranger in a Strange Land – one of my favorite books of all time – but on occasion I’ll just blurt out, “Front!” and I expect my submissive to immediately walk to me, stand in front of me, facing me, place her hands on her lower abdomen with the palms facing her, one over the other, look me in eye briefly and say, “yes, Sir?” and then lower her eyes. This is not exactly what happens in the book. In the book, the character who says this is not a Dom – at least not in the overt sense, and not in the typical sense either. He has three women who serve as his assistants, keeping his books, taking dictation, cooking his meals, etc. – all of the things that one would normally expect of a service submissive, but not any of the physical or sexual aspects of that service. It’s entirely possible that this novel helped to contribute to my ideals of what a submissive should be like – for me – but I first read it at such a young age and it provided the backdrop to a different phase of my life. The character in the book, Jubal Harshaw, expects one of his three assistants – on a rotating schedule – to run to him with a notebook and a pen and ready to take notes or instructions when he calls Front. My requirements are somewhat different and tuned to my own needs, but the call is still similar.
When I say, “present” I expect my submissive to stand in front of me, legs shoulder width apart, hands with fingers interlaced together behind her head, elbows up, head up straight, and chest out. As with any other command, I expect some sort of verbal acknowledgement as well – a, “yes, Sir” is sufficient.
When I say, “kneel” I expect my submissive to present herself before me as above, and then to drop the her knees in front of me, put her legs and knees together, sit on her feet, put her hands behind her back, palms out, and then after meeting my eyes and acknowledging my command, look at her own navel. For competition, I’ll have her make a diamond figure with her hands, thumbs out and touching, forefingers touching, and to do all of that silently, but in more common usage, I’m not normally going to walk around behind her to inspect that anyway.
When I say, “expose” I expect my submissive to be in the kneeling position above or work her way into it through the “present” and “kneel” poses, but to spread her legs out so that her calves are at shoulder-width and straight back behind her, toes pointed back away from her, and then to lock her fingers together and put them behind her head as with the “present” position above. I expect her to hold her head high and meet my gaze or that of anyone else who happens to be watching nearby. For competition, this is modified again so that the knees are further apart and the calves need not be so far apart behind her – toes still pointed but without overlapping the feet.
When I say, “move to position,” I expect my submissive to be in kneeling position or to move to it by moving through ‘present’ and ‘kneel’ and then to change the placement of her hands so that her hands are open, palms covering the front of her knees. Unless she has very long arms, this will result in her leaning slightly forward. I want her to crane her neck a bit to look up at me, acknowledge my command with a “yes, Sir” or similar, and then to drop her eyes and stare at her own navel, awaiting further command. I used to call this “position one” but found that numbering positions was a bit more difficult to remember than naming them, so this is merely ‘position’ now.
When I say, “hands and knees” I expect my submissive to drop to her knees, lean forward, keep her legs at hip-width directly beneath her, calves straight back, and toes pointed back behind her. I expect her to place her hands flat on the surface in front of her, whether that is the floor, bed, couch, whatever. I expect her to hold her fingers together with the exception of her thumbs, which I want out at a 90 degree angle. Her fingers should point directly in front of her and her thumbs should point at each other. I expect her to look up, craning her neck if needed, acknowledge my command, and then drop her head so that her chin rests on her chest and she’s looking back between her own legs.
In private, these are often all that I will say – there is no need to further qualify who I am talking to or about, but in public spaces or even in private places where there are other people about, I will usually modify the above to include a name, but sometimes I expect to be understood anyway.
As an example: in a public dungeon, I might say, “bunny, kneel” and I’ll expect bunny to come over and kneel in front of me, but “Front!” is a special command and I always expect my submissive or submissives – if I’m carrying more than one – to respond, lining up side-by-side in front of me if needed.
There are other commands that I sometimes use as well, as well as some other positions that are specifically for competition, and these are probably what earned me the reputation of being a ‘High Protocol’ Dom, but I’m not convinced that is factual. I have also become even more lax with protocol as I’ve aged. I’m a lot more tolerant of ambiguity than I once was, and I’ve worked with submissives in the recent past without using any of these commands – positions are not as important to me as they once were, and in most situations I will just explicitly say what I want, making a need to memorize commands like the above unnecessary.
There is definitely something to be said for having someone instantly react to simple or single word commands though. It is certainly one of my favorite things, especially when chained together with other more explicit commands.
For instance, ‘kneel’ is often followed by something quite like, “Look at me. Now reach up and undo my belt…” which, as you can probably imagine, is not where things are meant to end, but often an over-eager submissive in this position will take it as license to do more. Without an additional command, I would expect her to acknowledge my command with a “yes, Sir,” do as I’ve said – undoing my belt – but to then return her hands behind her back and await further instruction.
Sometimes I will chain these with other indicators as well. For instance, “hands and knees – on the bed,” is often a command I might give, in Command voice, to let her know that things are serious and that she needs to respond with vigor. It lets her know that I want her in the ‘hands and knees’ position, but that I want her on the bed, not necessarily where she is now, which is likely to be standing on the floor.
It is really not possible to over-communicate, so I’ll often add modifiers like these even when they’re not necessary. I am not the kind of Dominant to often try to trap my submissive with a command that she cannot easily fulfill – I like to enable success – but I have done so in the past and will likely do so again from time to time in the future. It is a playful way to push her into a place where she knows that punishment is likely to come, but there is a big difference between playful punishment and correction. Perhaps that should be the topic of a new post sometime soon, but I still have one more to go in this series before it’s complete.
Next week I will talk about the final means of control – glances. This is the ultimate level of control in a D/s setting in my opinion. I like my submissives to learn to anticipate and provide for my needs, but that is not the same thing as control. I also like my submissives to be autonomous and have their own opinions and ideas, so I have no desire to completely stifle that, but the ability to produce an action or change a behavior with nothing more than a pointed look is the pinnacle of D/s communication and control – in my not-so-very-humble opinion.
I hope this was informative, helpful, and perhaps even a bit titillating. Come back next week for the final piece in this trilogy and then I’ll give you a story of my own experiences in learning these things at the hand of my brutal and affectionate – if not compassionate – Domme Simone when I was but a young pup myself.
I am in a relationship. It is a complicated relationship, it is definitely not easy, as no relationships are, but this one is worth fighting for, where I have failed to fight for others in the past.
In the past, I’ve always felt justified in blaming the failure of my relationships on external factors or upon the other person, and yet, I’m almost always the one to call an end to things. Not always, but generally, I’ve been the one to give up.
When my first wife, Sabrina, found religion and started to use it as a weapon against me, I could take it no longer and ended the first real relationship of my life – quickly, mercilessly, and without much regret, but regret and pain are not quite the same thing, and that experience surely did hurt.
I went through a series of short term and nontraditional relationships after that, and in most cases, I was the one to give up when things looked the least bit like they were going to crack, but eventually I was tossed out by Simone and experienced my first case of being the dumped party. It hurt; it scarred me, and every relationship that I have had since then has had to bear the baggage that came with this event. Every time a relationship came close to ending, I feared the upending of my entire life – being thrown out onto the street has a way of refocusing you though…
Despite being somewhat jaded at this point, I decided to once again try to settle in and live life according to the societal norms. I found a new wife, Madison, and we had children together, and no matter how bad things got, I fought to stay in that relationship for the sake of my children. That relationship ended for reasons that were not my choosing.
Then I did the series of short term and nontraditional relationships again – with the same sorts of results for the most part.
The truth is that in all of those cases, there was always a fear that the other person would abandon me, and in most cases that is what actually happened.
In some cases, I pushed things to that conclusion. Consciously and unconsciously, I worked against my own relationships to break them, so that I didn’t have to be hurt when the inevitable abandonment would occur. I could spin it around and say that it was my choice to leave, and in most cases, that is how it would appear to anyone who was not deep within my mind.
In some cases, it really was the other person’s fault. Kendra, for example, was simply batshit crazy, and after spending tens of thousands of dollars to try to get her help and get her life back on track, I simply could no longer afford to keep it up and I told her so.
But my current relationship is different, and very much worth saving.
This is the first time that my partner refused to hear me when I said that it was over.
She has been the first person to see through my bullshit and my baggage and my fear and anxiety and dread and to hold on to the part of me that really does not want her to go.
She is my lighthouse.
She is the blue canary in the outlet by the light switch who watches over me.
She is the one who I want by my side for the rest of my life. Whatever form that takes, she is the one that I always want to come home to, the one that I want to always protect, the one that I want to always have my back.
But in order to do that, I have to clear out this garbage from my past.
I am confronting things about myself that I buried long ago and never wanted to revisit, but those are parts of me and if I do not acknowledge them, they crawl out on their own anyway.
This is a long, painful, and extremely difficult thing for me to do.
I have nightmares almost daily. Even when I am awake and focused on something entirely different, sometimes when I close my eyes, the images that I see on the inside of my eyelids are of inexplicable and horrifying things. I often lie awake at night in the dark and I can feel the demons trying to infect me again, but I have strength, because she is there, sleeping by my side.
I am fighting against myself. I am fighting against the walls that I placed in my own psyche for very good reason, but those walls have to come down and the elements behind them have to be dealt with. I need to re-incorporate those things into my being again. Until I do that, I won’t be whole, and she deserves so much more than a partial boyfriend.
I will kick my own ass so that she can have more of me than anyone ever has. She deserves it, and I want to give it to her.
But when I started this post, I was only meaning to speak in part about my girl and how much she means to me and how much I want to fight for her, because while she may be the most important thing in my life to fight for right now there are going to be many, many, many things that I will have to fight for in the years to come.
I had briefly considered pulling the white male card and just coasting through, hoping that nothing bad happens and nothing touches me, and I am just fucking spoiled to have that option in the first place and I’m a bit disappointed in myself for ever even half-seriously considering it.
I had considered leaving the country. The incoming administration has no love for people like me and the things I represent, but that would be cowardly as well.
I am extremely fortunate. I am not powerless in this world. I do not have much power, but whatever I have I am going to dedicate to fighting for the things in which I believe.
I am donating money now. I will donate time when I am able. I am going to speak of things in my bully pulpit here for as long as I can.
People are people, and until and unless we can recognize that, we may deserve the environmental catastrophe that is coming for us…
But we can, and should, fight against all of those things until they overwhelm us.
My ancestors long fought against impossible odds, and they usually lost, but they won enough that I stand here today, and they kept enough of their values and culture that it is immediately recognizable the world over.
I stand on the shoulders of giants and I stare down the petty and selfish.