Tag Archives: empathy

On the nature of Love

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.

Being Damien

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.

 

The Zen Dom – as read by Rant

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.

I am Rant.

SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic – Stay Safe, Stay Inside, Stay Alive

I have been quiet for a while now.  There have been some things going on…

I was actually really sick for awhile recently.  I don’t know if it was covid-19 or not, but at this point it does not really matter.  I am nearly 100% better and I have been completely sequestered for the past two weeks, with the intention of remaining so for as long as is necessary, probably all of April at the least.

My other underlying health problems put me in a high risk category, so I’m just going to pretend that everyone else has it and I do not, and that I don’t want to get it.  As you can imagine, that creates a pretty tense world for me, but I’m managing well.  I’m inside, I’m safe, and my life is awesome.

I have wonderful partners and friends from all over the world who check in on me and skype with me and bring me groceries when I need them and leave them on my porch so that I don’t have to be within 6 feet of them.  I am extremely fortunate.  Not everyone else is likely to be.

This is a really awful virus.  It is exactly the wrong blend of transmissible while being deadly, but after a long and silent incubation period.  I think a lot more people have it than realize it, and that is not even counting the thousands of people who have been tested and don’t yet have results or the thousands more who have not been able to get a test.  I myself am one of those.

This virus knows no borders.  It does not care about race or creed or sexual orientation or gender identity.  And it’s going to be around for a long time yet.

It is truly fucking terrifying, and almost no one can suffer through terror like this alone, even though we are all alone right now.

I have not been to my office in a month now, and I’ve only left my house about half a dozen times since then, and not at all in the past two weeks.  It’s starting to wear on me.

I have a wonderful support network, and even though I am a stodgy old stubborn fool at times, I am taking their help when it is offered, and I am staying safe, inside, and alive.

If you have been thinking that this virus cannot infect you for whatever reason, you are wrong.

This is a tense time for all of us, but we will get through this and be back to doing kinky things in public with our community around us eventually.

For now though, Stay Safe, Stay Inside, and Stay Alive.

I know the isolation is hard.  I am a self-professed introvert of the highest order, but even I am beginning to fray at the edges for lack of human contact sometimes.

Reach out to those you can when you need support – we are all in this together.  And if you don’t have anyone to reach out to – reach out to me… I’ll happily respond to your emails and form submissions.

 

— Rant

The invasive and insidious nature of hate

I recently posted about myself again, and it continues a pattern that has been reinforced since I first started writing here.

My posts to this blog seem to generate interest in a few different forms.

Sometimes, people find what I write about interesting or informative and they either want to ask a question or have a comment and will comment on the post directly here on the blog.  Most of the time this happens when I am writing either informative or erotic pieces.

But sometimes, people find what I write about emotionally impactful, and I get email directly.

Often – more often than not, thankfully – these are positive things.  I get messages from people all of the time telling me that I have made a positive impact on their life because I shared something difficult or I exposed something that they could relate to in a way that made their own experiences easier to understand or more acceptable somehow.  I’ve been told that I have been directly or indirectly responsible for saving peoples’ lives. That alone is some heavy stuff, but it’s good – I can feel good about the fact that I am helping people, and I can feel good about the example that I try to set for how I live my life.

But sometimes… people find what I write about emotionally challenging in some less positive ways.

I also get a lot of hate mail.  Not as much as I used to, actually, but I recently gave these people more ammunition to use in an attempt to hurt me with my diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder and some of the other things that I have recently said and done as part of my life in the BDSM scene – and some of the things that I’m getting emails about are related to things that I have not even revealed on this blog – which ratchets up the fear a notch or three.

This means that I am getting hate mail to my blog from someone who knows me personally.

Even when it’s only an email, or its just someone filling in my Contact Me form, it is difficult to see messages where people tell me to kill myself.

It is difficult to read that someone thinks I have so little value as a person that I would be doing the world a favor by removing myself from it.

It is scary as fuck to read that someone knows the city I live in and would take any opportunity they had to beat the shit out of me or that they might show up at my house and set it on fire.

It hurts to read that someone that I have personally interacted with believes that my way of life is so repugnant that I should subject myself to terrible, painful, torturous ways of killing myself, and that the lives of everyone that I love would be improved by removing the stain of my existence from their lives.

Recently, I’ve made calling cards.  I’ve been trying to more closely engage with my community and to put myself out there a bit more for the good that I may be able to do as well as to increase my own exposure and possibly increase my reach.  It’s never been a strong goal of mine to create a personal brand or chase fame on the internet, but the good things that I hear urge me to try to at least reach a bit further – until I hit the barriers that I am coming up against again now.

This becomes important because those calling cards are the first time that I have linked this blog to my fetlife profile (where there are pictures of my face) and my phone number – and only recently have I started to receive text messages and phone calls from people who are spewing hate as well.

Honestly, it makes me want to run away.  It makes me want to pull up shop here, stop writing altogether and even to withdraw from my community.  It makes me afraid to go outside sometimes. It makes me afraid to have my kids stay with me at my own house.  And while I can rationalize away the fear and despair, I can never really get rid of them completely, and it weighs on me, heavily.

I have nightmares almost every night.  These are the result of trauma from my youth more often than not – memories that I have suppressed trying to percolate back up into consciousness – so I know that these are not necessarily only because of this newly increased volume of hate that I am receiving each day, but I would be incredibly foolish if I didn’t consider that it is having an effect.

I don’t know who is making these threats and sending me so much hate – and while I could probably find out, I am terrified to learn the answers to those questions, terrified to learn that someone I love harbors such deep seated loathing for me and feels like they can only express it pseudo-anonymously and with such bile.

I do not always succeed in putting forth the best version of me, but I do try very hard, and I try very hard to be open to criticism and discussion about how I act and the ways in which I may have made you feel.  And if you know me personally and I have somehow offended you, I would very much appreciate the chance to rationally discuss the things that have hurt you, but if you are just a hateful stalker who wants only to cause me harm, I can tell you that you have succeeded.

The hate that I feel seeps into my soul and makes everything seem bleak.  It gets into everything that I think and everything that I do and it makes it almost impossible to concentrate or accomplish anything of substance.  I try to counter it with love, and to an extent I succeed, but the fear never seems to completely disappear. I try to ignore it and focus on the other things that make my life the amazing thing that it is.  I have amazing people in my life who love me and support me, and even those who no longer wish to be a part of my life, or those who I care about but cannot make fit into this chaos claim to love and want to support me, if but from a further distance – and I feel the same way about them.  Much of the time I succeed, but sometimes the hate seeps back in like an oily stain that you can never quite remove from your favorite jeans.

I am Rant, and I am not going nowhere, but you have made me afraid.  Bully for you.

 

The many faces of Rant

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…

I have Dissociative Identity Disorder.

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.

And so – I remain Rant.   For now.

 

My sacred mission in life

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.

 

My Personal Journey : Part 8

Mistress Simone was confusing – at times she seemed entirely without compassion.  I do not know the full details of her operation, and in retrospect, that is a very good thing, but I did catch glimpses from time to time – especially when she left town on one occasion after I’d been in place for a few months and I took it upon myself to look after what I could – in an ill-fated attempt to impress her.  I do know that the weight of keeping things running smoothly got to her from time to time, and I do know that anxiety was one of her demons as well.

But sometimes, she was incredibly caring and empathetic.  She seemed to always know what was going to happen before it did.  She not only seemed to know the specific details of what would occur, but she seemed to always know how I would feel too.  There was brief period of time where I entertained the notion that she could actually see into the future, but that wasn’t it at all, she was just a master of understanding the human condition, of reading the desires of people and finding ways to fulfill them.  It was as skill that she attempted to impart on me – and one that I would like to think that I have become adept at myself.

On this particular occasion – I didn’t even know that I needed support, but Simone did, and she was there for me.  

I had just met with my first client, Mary, (the details of which you can read about here, if you wish) and it had gone amazingly well.  Subsequent meetings with other clients, and even with Mary herself, did not always go so well. I was very fortunate to have had the first time experience that I did – something which I suspect Simone had specifically engineered, but I do not know for certain, and as I said, Mistress Simone was often confusing.

I was confused to see Mistress Simone when she showed up at my door after I’d run around tidying and getting clean after Mary had left.  I was certain that I’d done something wrong to earn her visit, but she had something else in mind.

She walked into my apartment, looking stunning as always, and not knowing what else to do, I dropped to my knees in front of her.  She looked at me, but walked past me to go sit at on the edge of my bed and placed her hands to her sides at the edge and regarded me.

“Rant. You did nothing wrong. Stand up and come over here with me…”

I stood up and walked over to the base of the steps below where my bed was.  Even sitting as she was, her head was level with mine as I stood below. Not knowing what else to do, I stood there at parade rest and regarded her.  She was dressed more casually than I was used to seeing her, in a lengthy flowing skirt and a loose-fitting top. Normally, her clothing was tight, fitted perfectly, or she was wearing little more than underwear, but now she looked … ordinary.  It was unsettling.

“How did it go?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer.  I felt like it had gone very well, but was considerably less sure of that after being visited by Mistress Simone.  I began to go over events in my mind, disassembling them and looking for all of the points of failure along the way.  I was about to answer with a list of perceived faults, when Simone interrupted me.

“No, don’t answer now…  It’s okay.  Come, kneel at my feet, toy.”

I did as she asked, stepping up onto the platform where my bed rested, and knelt to the right side of her.  She scooted over a bit to the right and centered herself around me, and then spread her legs and motioned for me to come closer, so I knee-walked until I was kneeling between her legs, and then she patted the inside of her thigh and I somehow knew that she wanted me to rest my head there, so I knelt lower, and then rested my head on her thigh as she began to pet my hair.

Mistress Simone’s skirt was split up the sides, which is something that I didn’t really notice until she sat and spread her legs, allowing her bare thighs to protrude from the sides, one of which my face was now pressed against as I tried to look up into her face and she pet my hair, which invariably caused my face to turn towards her body – and her pussy – instead.  At first, I kept trying to crane my head up to look into her face as I lay there, my whole body tense with the weird angles required to accomplish such a thing. Once I started to say something, to ask my Mistress questions about what she wanted from me, what I should be doing, because to just be kneeling there, leaning against my bed and her thigh, having her pet my hair, was making me anxious.  I felt like I had done something to displease her, I thought that I should be doing something differently…

Opening my mouth to speak the questions that were flooding my mind, I changed my posture slightly, and it became clear that despite her silence, Mistress Simone was watching me intently, because the moment that my mouth began to open, she shifted her hand from petting me, to wrap around my jaw and gently push my mouth back closed.  When she moved her hand away for a moment, I began to open my mouth yet again, and she repeated the same action, with the same levels of both deliberation and tenderness. Once again, she moved her hand away, and when I did not try to open my mouth again, she resumed petting my hair. I still had no idea what to do, and my anxiety was making me restless.  I shifted in my position on my knees, and when I moved, Mistress Simone’s hand would stop.

After several minutes of this – what seemed like an inordinately long period of time – I eventually reasoned that she wanted me to just relax and be there, kneeling loosely, head on her thigh, with her petting my hair.  Eventually, I did just that, letting go of the tension, relaxing into my lean against the bed and her thigh, allowing myself to feel the comfort present in her strokes of my hair.

My breathing slowed, I could feel my body temperature dropping, and the anxiety that I had been holding on to – all afternoon at least, perhaps all day – finally began to flow out of me.  I felt grounded for the first time in a long time, peaceful in a way that I had only experienced a few times in my life before, and those were all what one could only properly describe as ‘religious’ experiences.  It may be the closest I ever really came to feeling in subspace myself, and perhaps it actually was, but it was fleeting, and replaced by the most unexpected of things for me at that time.

I began to cry.

I don’t mean that I sat silently as tears streamed down my face as I am oft wont to do today, nor that I was overcome by emotion to the degree that I commonly see in people when they try to hide their tears from me.  This was crying of a primordial sort. A part of me broke in that moment, and I sobbed.  Eventually, it became impossible to stay as I was, the sobs causing me to curl into a ball at Mistress Simone’s feet, uncomfortably straddling the top step up to my bed and the floor in front of it.  

I don’t know for how long I cried, and I don’t know for how long Mistress Simone petted my hair and wouldn’t let me speak before I began to cry, but I was on the floor crying for what felt like a very long time.  I could not control my body, and I must have looked a fright with tears and snot when I finally did look up again to note that Mistress Simone was no longer sitting on my bed. I pushed myself up to look around and noticed Mistress Simone in the kitchen area, working on something as I glanced over to the clock to see that about an hour and a half had passed since she arrived at my door – significantly longer than I was expecting to find, even though it had felt like a long time to me.  In retrospect, I wonder if I didn’t fall asleep for a short time somewhere in between beginning to cry and looking to see Simone no longer above me.

I completed pushing myself up into a sitting position on the stairs where I could see well into the kitchen and my senses began to return to me.  I cleaned the snot and tears from my face as best I could with my hands and the ends of my shirt and focused my attention the smell, sound, and sights from my kitchen.

Mistress Simone was in my kitchen, cooking.  It was something that I never expected to see, and something that I would never see again.  She looked over at me and smiled – which was also something that I did not often see from her.

“It’s funny how the smell of breakfast food always seems to bring the attention of the exhausted and the forlorn,” she said in my general direction as she was plating the eggs that she had just been cooking and putting the mixing bowl and pan in the sink for me to clean later.

She pushed the plate across the island towards me and indicated it with her hand as she said, “Rant.  Eat.  Please. You need the calories and comfort.”

I wordlessly rose to walk over to the place she indicated, pulling a bar stool over to sit on as I did so.  I settled onto the chair and looked over at her, unsure of what I should be feeling, of whether or not I was doing the right things, worried that my emotional outburst was going to put me on the outs with her, thinking about three hundred different things all at once.

“Stop,” she said, reading the anguish on my face. “Just stop, Rant.   You have done well today. You have done extremely well.  I am pleased with you today, and I am certain that this will become easier for you with time.”

I instantly felt relief.  I was still emotionally raw, and I still did not really understand what it was that I was feeling or why I was crying the way that I was, but I did at least know, in that moment, that I had not displeased her or somehow screwed up, and that was enough.  The relief must have been obvious in my posture, face, and voice as I looked up again at Mistress Simone and asked her, “How did you know?”

“I wasn’t sure what to expect, honestly.  Every person is a little bit different. What you just went through was an intense experience to cap more than a week of increasingly intense experiences, and it would be surprising if you didn’t show any weakness anywhere along the way.”

That word.  Weakness.  It took the wind right out of my sails again, and it was probably evident in my posture because it was immediately rebuked in compassionate, but certain terms, “Rant. Stop.  You must not let every minor nit turn into a major upheaval. I gave you your kudos, and I will continue to do so for now, but while this episode was understandable and will be excused, you must not let yourself get carried so far away again, do you understand?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Now eat your eggs.  I’m not much of a cook, and I can count the number of times I’ve cooked for a man – my husband included – on the fingers of one hand still, but you have performed very well and I am very proud of you and you deserve something special.”

“Thank you, Mistress,” I said with ecstasy as I began to dig in to my eggs.  It was only then that I recognized that there was no other plate; that Mistress Simone had cooked for me in my own kitchen, and only for me.  It was not that she intended to eat and was allowing me to have the surplus of her portion, she was doing this as a service to me, and it felt strange and wonderful all at once.  

The eggs were not particularly good – simply scrambled with some salt and pepper, but the method in which they were delivered ensured that they were among the very best that I had ever had.

“These are delicious, Mistress,” I said, with complete honesty.

“I do expect flattery and devotion, pet, but I will not tolerate dishonesty – you are not being dishonest with me, are you, toy?”  she asked me, with just a hint of a smirk.

“Oh, no!  I swear, Mistress!  I don’t even like eggs, and these are amazing!”

“You don’t like eggs, and yet, these are amazing?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“It’s a good thing that you’re adorable, Rant, because sometimes the shit that comes out of your mouth is just completely unbelievable.”

“Mistress?”

“Nevermind.  It is not important.  I am pleased that you are enjoying them, and more pleased that you are eating them.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Please be sure to drink lots of water,” she said as she grabbed a glass and filled it from the tap to place in front of me, “and do not get used to this sort of treatment.  I expected you to have an emotional reaction, and you did. I expected you to do well with Mary, and by her accounts, you did – though we will talk later about what you should and should not reveal to my clients.  I expected you to be just as you are, and I was not disappointed.” She said the last with an air of finality to it that left me feeling a little off-balance.

“Thank you, Mistress,” was all I finally managed to get out, after what was probably too long a period of time to be comfortable for either of us.

At this, Mistress Simone gathered herself up, stood taller – though I had not noticed that she was not keeping her normal, extremely rigid posture until just this point – and looked me square in the eyes with the largely unemotional gaze to which I became accustomed.

“I will leave the dishes for you to do, Rant.  I am glad that I was able to give you this time after your client today, but this is not likely to be something that can happen again.  You will need to be able to be resilient and care for yourself moving forward. Do you understand, Rant?”

“Yes, Mistress.”

“Good,” she said as she walked to the door, grasping the handle and looking back at me before opening the door.  “You really did do well today, toy. Keep this up, and I foresee a long and fruitful partnership.”

“Thank you, Mistress,” I beamed at her as she opened the door and disappeared behind it.

I sat there, on the barstool, in front of an empty plate and an empty water glass for quite some time, examining the thoughts and feelings and visuals that played themselves over and over again in my mind, wondering at the sort of partnership that Mistress Simone was speaking of, and wondering at my own emotions and whether or not I could continue to do this.  But ultimately, I decided that I could – I could do anything – for her.

I still don’t really know what possessed me to do so, but I pulled all the bedding off of my bed and slept in it on the floor that night.  I remember waking early in the morning hours, having forgotten to close the blinds the night before and with the glare of morning coming in.  I remember feeling like I was completely alone in the world, with no one beside me apart from Simone – but in that moment, that felt right, comfortable, even good.

My schedule was clear for that day, but that would be the last day that I had to myself for a very long time afterwards.

 

I am easy to love, but I am challenging to be in love with.

These are the confessions of a powerful polyamorous slut.

I am happy. I am in complete control of my life and I cannot foresee anything that might change that. I feel competent to deal with anything that life can throw at me.

I have grown and changed every year of my life, and I have been proud of the man I am for some time now, but I still discover new things about myself and sometimes those things are significant.

Struck by this realization as I was, it slipped into place so easily that I recognize this as something that I have known for some time but masked from my own perception.

I am easy to love, but I am very challenging to be in love with.

I am open and caring and honest and innocent and eager and overwhelming and arrogant and selfish and demanding and safe and nurturing and horny and wicked and brutal and oh-so-fucking-smart, and I do not hold back on any of these things.

When I am in love with you, the world ceases to exist when you are in my presence. You become the focus of all of the attention I can bring to bear.

I will be open and caring and honest and innocent and eager and overwhelming and arrogant and selfish and demanding and safe and nurturing and horny and wicked and brutal to you.

I am happy, and if you were in love with me, you would be too.

But I am an unrepentant slut.

I am easy to love, because I love so very easily, and honestly, and completely.

And when you are in love with me, this will be challenging.

I will make you feel special, because you are special.

I will make you feel happy, because it is difficult to be unhappy around someone who is so very happy themselves. Misery loves company, but it hates competition.

I will make the things that you despise about yourself okay and I will make the things that you love about yourself super-powers.

I will focus all of my unbridled enthusiasm right at you and I’ll use it to mold you into what I desire.

I will convince you that you are the most important person in my universe, all the while telling you about how I feel the very same way about someone else in my past, present, or future.

Time itself will take on special properties when I am around.

And then I will leave.

Not forever. Not even for more than is necessary, but it will still be difficult.  I will return, because this wasn’t an ending – there are no endings in my life anymore – but the distances of space and time will be painful.

You will remember that all of those things that I made you feel – I am making someone else feel some of the times that you are not around.

And it will all feel like a lie.

But nothing was false. Nothing was untrue. Everything that you felt was real, and continues to be real in my mind – forever.

I am easy to love because I love you already.

I am challenging to be in love with because I love openly, fearlessly, and it will not always be directed at you.

But I will never stop loving you – I never have.

 

 

Interlude: Kneel for me

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…

…kneel for me.