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…
I first posted about this subject four years ago, in the first month that I started this blog. If you are interested in that post, you can find it easily here.
However, like any normal human, I do still get attached to things, people, and relationships, and when those things are removed from me or change in some fundamental way, I can get hurt and react in very human ways.
My life recently has been tumultuous.
I am not quite up to detailing everything here for the world to see, but suffice it to say, I have been missing from here and most of the rest of the aspects of life in general for some time as I have been processing my grief and doing some very difficult introspection.
Each time in the past couple of months that I have come here with the notion of writing something new, I have read my previous post and spiraled away into my own mind with unkind thoughts about myself and I manage to put nothing to the page.
The relationship that I boasted about being so strong has come to an end (for reasons unrelated to the content of my last post) and created this massive inertia around making even the smallest of steps back into the life that I was recently so happy to call mine.
But I still have good friends, and several of them have counseled me that I need to write something – almost anything will do – and so here I am, overcoming inertia.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, and while it may not be much of one, this is such a step.
I am still here and still on the path.
I recognize much of this scenery though and I can’t help but worry that I’m wandering in circles sometimes, but I’ve come to the conclusion that even wandering in circles is better than not moving at all.
Anyone who knows me personally and has interacted with me in the past several months knows that I have a (relatively) new submissive whom I adore. She is Devoted to me, and I am pledged to her, and I have no intention of changing any of that.
She and I have an open relationship and we are honest with each other about everything that goes on – and more importantly – about how those things make us feel. We work together to ensure that we have a proper understanding of both the factual and emotional issues that surround anything that may come up – because emotions and facts don’t always correlate well until you take some time to understand how they interact with each other around the particular issue at hand.
And that was a lot of words to say: she trusts me and I trust her – and the reasons for that are brutal and open honesty coupled with a lot of patience.
I hide nothing from her. I don’t always tell her everything, because sometimes I don’t think to do so, and sometimes too much information can be hurtful, but I always answer all of her questions and I patiently allow her to feel what she feels and then reinforce the fact that I love her, I cherish her trust, and I am still committed to her. It isn’t easy, but it is extremely valuable.
I have not always had relationships that ended well. Heck, I’ve not always had relationships that proceeded well. However, I am nearly always patient and polite. No one manages to always be these things, but I do my best, and I usually succeed.
Yesterday my submissive received some very strange text messages from a woman (or someone claiming to be a woman) who she has never met, but that was put into contact with her some time ago. This woman resurfaced and started making claims about me – that she ‘catfished me on her behalf’ and claims that I derided her on fetlife and threatened her when she refused to have a skype sex session with me and tried to warn my submissive that I bad-talked my submissive behind her back and that I was a dangerous man.
Now – I am a dangerous man, but not for the reasons that she accuses me.
Anyone who knows me and has tried to get me to agree to a video chat session knows how laughable this is. I am extremely reluctant to have a video call, and I almost never engage in any sort of sex over the wire. I don’t enjoy it, and it triggers a few unpleasant memories for me. If I’m doing it, it’s because I love you very much and I want you to be happy – it’s never something that I would pressure someone into, and I use words like ‘always’ and ‘never’ extremely sparingly. I don’t even like talking on the phone. So – on its face this was an amusingly ridiculous accusation, but even the most ridiculous accusations can destroy relationships when there is not trust there to begin with.
I’ve been in relationships where that trust was not solid. I’ve been in relationships where accusations of infidelity – and actual infidelity – destroyed the relationship, and the reason that happened was because trust was either never fully established, or worn away. I am certainly not trying to portray myself as always being in the right in these situations – I don’t know that there is always a right to be had – but I do know that I have never acted in the manner for which I was accused.
I honestly have no idea who this person is or what his motives might be. It’s extremely unlikely that it is one of my exes trying to get at me through her. It’s equally unlikely that it’s her ex trying to get at her, but the motive of anyone else in this matter just doesn’t seem to add up…
The fact that we can’t find a sensible motive is an any area of consternation to be sure, but sometimes people just like to cause drama, and maybe that’s all this is.
I’ve been in relationships that would be threatened by such a thing, but I am ecstatically happy to not be in one of those now.
My relationship is as solid as ever, and may even be stronger now for having faced this sort of challenge and walked away unscathed, and we have accomplished this thanks to the intrinsic power and value of honesty, compassion, empathy, and trust.
I’m currently working on a triptych of posts – dealing with the various forms and methods of control that I employ as a Dominant, and I hope that it will be worth waiting for, as it is taking me some time to write to my standards, but in the meantime I have something else to say.
This is the core of my own personal belief system and a telling window into my own soul, if such things exist.
I don’t experience emotions in the same way that people who are born with them do. I don’t mean to imply that I was born without the ability to emote at all – of course not – I would have been institutionalized long before now if that were the case, but I was born neurologically different. I had Asperger’s syndrome, or something very much like it. Throughout my childhood, I was always the odd one out. While my ‘friends’ would play around me, I was often content to sit by myself, still playing, but the only interactions that interested me were the ones in my own head, or the things in front of me which I could control. I put together a lot of models and puzzles as a child…
I say I had Aspergers, because I no longer believe that I meet the diagnostic criteria for that particular syndrome, and the only reason I can imagine for that is that I rebuilt myself and made it less of a part of me.
Much later in life, when I felt that the Roman Catholic Church that I was raised to revere had failed me, I sought answers in other places. I found some, and I missed others, but I learned in the process.
When it became apparent to me that my life would remain one as a social outcast if I did not conform, I made a choice. I would not only conform, but I would exceed the norm. This has often been the choice I would make when I had the time, energy, and resources to do so. As a young man, I had those things in spades.
I watched people interact. I emulated their behaviors. I taught myself to be human. And somewhere along the way, I broke myself, several times. I was not prepared to deal with the weight of the emotions that crushed me when I took them upon myself. I was not prepared to deal with the staggering uncertainty that comes in the wake of allowing that information to percolate up from within me. I was not even aware that I possessed such things – I could see them in other people, and I could behave as they do, but it wasn’t until I rebuilt myself around that model that I became a real boy and could hurt so deeply – and I do hurt deeply – all the fucking time. Not in the sense that I am in constant pain – for while that may be true, it is of a physical nature and I hold my soul separate from that infection.. I am happy and hurting at the same time.
I came to learn that emotions are beautiful things. Each one has its place and time. Each is important information that one ignores at great personal risk. Happiness and love are certainly my favorites and I am blessed to have much of both lately, but pain and sorrow are also useful things.
I found the practice of Zen along the way, and I have employed it to deflect, avoid, and trap emotions from time to time. Zen became my method of self-defense against the mental assailants that I could not overpower and so it became my Aikido of the soul… But the greatest gift that Zen gave me was the realization that I don’t matter.
My readers will dispute that fact, and while I concede the point that my continued existence provides financial, emotional, and spiritual support to a lot of people – more than I ever realized – it is also true that none of you matter.
Please do not be offended by this. The universe is a very large place and we are but motes floating in the stream of time. None of us matter.
This is an empowering concept. It allows me to carry the understanding that the universe is so much greater than I am, and that there is so much in life that is unfathomable to a mere man like me. I do not need to understand it all and I am unable to do so.
It is my atheist way of understanding the Will of God.
Future generations of humans will be impacted by the things I do, but the net affect will be small. I can control things to an extent.. I can try to be good, and I can try to make sure that the microscopic things that are a part of my world take the best turns that they can, but my missteps will not derail the universe. Nothing is so horrible that it can never be forgotten.
A billion years from now, our descendants will appear nothing like us – they may not even be organic creatures, but they will carry forward in their own microscopic and easily forgotten way… until the universe itself cools and falls apart.
This is not fatalism – it is hope.
My past mistakes have already been forgotten by most. The horrible things that haunt my dreams will be completely forgotten when I am gone, to trouble my descendants no more. The horrible things that were done to me are already being erased by the love and compassion that surrounds me. I have forgiven, and I will forget – or I will die and whatever dreams may come from that will not be plagued by the evils of my past, but will be enlightened by the hope of my present and future selves.
I am still physically broken, and I cannot focus the power of my mind to solving hard problems yet, but I am mending and my soul is mending as well.
This was pretty self serving today, but I will follow up soon with things both erotic and instructional. Thank you for your patience as I heal.
I’m still healing. Physically, emotionally, psychologically… I’m not quite yet where I need to be. Maybe I never shall be.
But right now, my life does not suck.
The energy in my life has taken a complete turn. Where there was uncertainty, anxiety, mistrust, and pain now I have tolerance, Devotion, affection, and love.
My life is full of music and love.
Trust is at the core of my ability to be happy.
Fear has been driving my life for longer than I’d like to admit.
I made things worse by finding more and more sources of fear to add to the mix and when I didn’t have enough, I invented things to fear.
My proclivity is strongly to turtle when things hurt me. I pull in, armor up, and tell the world to fuck off while I rally the troops for a sortie.
Love is so much more powerful than fear though.
I have amazing friends. In some cases these are friends that have been hanging back in the shadows, waiting to serve me when I needed them – my own personal Batman corps. In some cases these are new friends, people I’ve just met, but still want to help me heal. In some cases, they’re friendships that have been with me all along, but now take on new significance and import.
The problem with love is that it requires trust. When I open myself up to love, I’m opening the very heart of me, and the pain that I felt in the past weeks is more intense than anything I’ve gone through before, and I’ve gone through some seriously fucked up shit.
The very idea of making myself vulnerable like that, so soon, so wholly, is terrifying. But it is also exactly what I need.
So I have begun again to love freely, trust freely, and have no expectations.
I am setting myself up to be crushed again, but now I know that I have my friends who will always be there to help me get back up again.
I am giving my trust and love to everyone right now, and it’s scary as hell, but so unbelievably rewarding that I literally do not have the words.
This past week I was at Bondage a Go Go and we all found out together that Chris Cornell had passed away. It was a powerful moment for a lot of people. I stood outside waiting for my car and saw a young woman crying but didn’t put two and two together just yet. I asked her why she was upset and she evaded, saying that it was not a good reason to be standing on the street and crying, but I told her that I knew exactly what she was feeling and asked if I could give her a hug. She agreed and so I did. She wept and I held her for only a fleeting moment. My car had arrived and I looked down on her and said, “my car is here, are you going to be okay?” She looked me directly in the eyes and said, “I will be now, thank you. Go.” So I did.
It was an anonymous moment with a stranger in the streets of San Francisco, but it was powerful. It was a moment where fear and pain turned into hope and love.
I don’t even know her name.
In the past, this soon after a tragedy like I’ve recently undergone, I would turtle. I’d close up and close out the world and drink in the sweet poison of misery. I’d sell out and join the world of the hopeless and haunted. But I am fortunate and that is not my path this time.
In October of 2011, I was in a terrible car accident that almost killed me. I was at a dead stop on the highway and a driver in a work van was not paying attention and struck me at full speed – probably close to 75 miles per hour.
I was physically broken by that accident. Emergency responders had to cut the door off of my car to get me out. I was concussed, suffered a minor skull fracture, a fractured clavicle, three fractured ribs, an avulsion fracture of my cervical spine, and countless soft tissue injuries, the scar tissue from which still causes me pain today, almost every day.
I can still count the number of pain-free days that I have had since October 2011 on two hands.
But I don’t have to be pain free to function, and I’ve developed a staggering tolerance for pain.
Recently I was in a conflict where I broke my jaw (hence the photo in my entry from earlier this month) and I walked around with a broken jaw for more than a week before I realized that it was broken. Sure, it hurt, but nothing more than I go through almost every day.
Physical pain and I have been traveling companions for a long time now.
I am only now beginning to realize that emotional pain and I have been traveling companions for most of my life.
Just in the past two years, I’ve been working hard to peel back the layers of my mind and access the deep hurt that has been buried there. I have developed emotional scars as well, and where I have learned to tune out the physical pain and walk on in the past 5 years since my car accident, I had also developed ways to tune out the emotional pain, I just didn’t realize it.
This is where things start to cycle back on themselves, and I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s helping me to function again, so I’m just going to live with it for now and examine the consequences later.
I can’t take my anxiety medication right now because of my closed jaw. The capsules cannot be broken and there is no liquid variant available, so my psychiatrist gave me a different liquid medication instead. It doesn’t really work for me, so I’ve just stopped taking the meds altogether.
This is dangerous, I know.
This is probably not the right way to go about things, I know.
But those wonderful drugs that opened my viewpoint to allow me to experience more of the emotional spectrum and to be more emotionally available to my partner.. they appear to be a crutch, and it’s possible that my already developed and natural coping mechanisms – while not ideal, perhaps – may actually be more effective in letting me live a somewhat normal life than the drugs have been.
I took them, and I went to counseling, all in an effort to save my relationship and fight for the one that I love. But my counselor betrayed me and my girlfriend left me and now I’m physically broken again, emotionally vulnerable, and heartbroken in a way that I have never been before. I rarely leave the house, and there are days when I do not speak to anyone. Not one word.
But you know what – despite that.. despite the depressing canvas that I’m creating upon, despite the lack of medications, the lack of contact, the isolation from my family, the lack of any available friends, the severing of the best and worst relationship that I have ever had… despite all of this – I’m getting better.
I’m hardening again, and that may ultimately not be a good thing, but the funny thing is that I’m finding that the further I hold the world at bay, the easier it is to deal with.
I’ve cocooned the pain away, and it becomes easier and easier to deal with every day.
I was fighting hard for something that was probably hurting me more than helping.
The fight is over for now, and I have to find a new way to move forward in the world. Oddly enough, pushing away the pain has led me to be more present and patient. Or maybe it’s the lack of drugs that has restored my patient nature… either way, the fight is over, and I’m finding new ways to deal with the pain.
I am strong like the Oak. Pretending to be a willow does not suit me.
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.
Firstly, before I begin this post, I need to apologize – dear readers.
I promised that I’d be more frequent with the updates, and then life got in the way again. Even while I was not able to keep up on the blog posts, I have always been responsive to email requests from my readers, until this past week. I’ve received a few emails that I was not able to respond to for almost a week, and for that I apologize. I think I’ve responded to all of those that require a response, but if you sent me something that I failed to give an adequate response to, please re-send, I think I might have lost one or two in the process.
I should also apologize for the content of this post – it’s in keeping with blogs in general, but not precisely with the tenor of this blog in particular. This is a personal piece that has almost nothing to do with my role as Dom…
As I write this, I’m sitting in an outdoor covered patio on a beach on the Mediterranean. It’s overcast, but warm, and while it rained a bit earlier this morning, it doesn’t seem to be threatening rain now.
You’d think that this would make me happy, but really, I’m rather discontent. I’m far away from the one that I love, in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, and in the company of people that seem to not like me. It’s the sort of thing that makes one angry and pensive – at least when that someone is me.
I miss my girl.
Lately, we’ve both been stressed to the max and it’s boiled over a few times into conflict, but even when things were their worst, this remains the most solid relationship that I’ve ever had – while I still have doubts about myself, and I still wonder how I had the good fortune to find her, I no longer have any doubts about us, and that is really about the only thing that is keeping me sane today.
Anger is just below the surface, and it’s undirected and undirectable (yes, I know that isn’t a word, but you know exactly what I mean by it, so leave off) and it’s become a terrible distraction. If my girl were here, I could do something about it, but then again, if my girl were here, I would likely not have to…
I’ve spoken about my ‘Aggressive Days‘ before, and this would seem to be quite similar, but whereas I didn’t quite grasp all of the nuance involved in bringing me to this point when I first wrote that entry, I’ve had a bit of a personal revelation since then. I thought at that time that part of the reason that I was unable to really let myself loose and open up my Primal side was because that wasn’t really part of who I am anymore, or maybe that I was growing too old and the chemistry of my body was different enough that I didn’t feel the same things as intensely as I did, but that’s not actually true. I think I was just with the wrong girl. Things have taken a much better turn now… but I want to talk about the past a bit, to where these things began – I think.
When I was a teen boy, not quite a man, but thanks to an early puberty, looking every bit the part, I sort of … broke.
When I picked up the pieces that were left, I was not the same person – or rather, I was not just the same person, there was something else, something new, something that broke off from the main part of what I consider to be me.
The Monster.
One of my favorite novel series is called the Sandman Slim series, written by Richard Kadrey. Incidentally, Mr. Kadrey is a San Francisco resident, respected fetish photographer, and at least peripherally connected to the same scene to which I am a part, but we’ve never crossed paths that I am aware. If by some chance Mr. Kadrey or one of his acquaintances happens to be a reader of this blog, I’d very much like to buy him a beer and have a conversation. I don’t completely relate to every aspect of his antihero protagonist Stark, but I do identify with him to an extent, and one thing that I certainly do understand is the problematic way that broken people (to apply the term loosely) like Stark, and to a lesser extent, myself, deal with other people and the world at large. There are certainly times when I think that I belong in Hell myself, and there was a time when I was convinced that I should be, or that at the very least I should be isolated from society, so as to not cause any harm to those that I actually care for.
This is not because I like to be alone. Sure – I need alone time, and I think everyone does, but nothing has gone so far to reinforce the point that I need people too as sitting here, surrounded by people that are in most ways alien to me. They speak a language that sounds like nothing I can understand. They live and move and wander around me as if I am not even here. I sit here, surrounded by people, more alone than I have been in a long time. I was at a grocery store yesterday to buy some basics, and I completed the entire trip, including purchasing a few sundries, without speaking a single word to anyone.
And so… here I sit. Pensive. Angry. Lonely. Longing.
And there is a part of me that is raging. I don’t understand the things around me, and while I can still read the body language and emotional cues of the people I see, I cannot understand them, and that is making me tense.
I don’t do so well when I feel this way.
I grew up in fear. I let myself be led astray by a man that I respected and he abused me in the worst way that he possibly could have. I didn’t have any control over my own destiny, and when I managed to pull myself out of that particular situation, I got myself trapped in another. I think that these things worked together to make me who I am today, and contributed to my need to control everything – including myself. Which is why the need to channel the scared young man inside of me into physical and emotional actions. It’s why I want to control every aspect of my life, and it’s why I want to exert control over others.
But my heart is still strong and I’m still a chivalrous man.
I’m beginning to accept and even embrace this side of me. It’s always been something that scared me in the past. It was a thing that scared others too. Simone once told me that she was only in her life ever afraid of two men, her father and me, but she never told me why. I think I know though. I’ve always kept the monster caged, and I do again today, but he’s come out a couple of times recently, and I’ve not lost control.
There are two ways you can control a situation, and each has its place. You can seize control. You can force your will upon someone, and if you have enough power, you can get them to do what you want. Or you can accept the burden of the situation. You can allow yourself to be pulled in, and then with a strong will, you can guide the way to the resolution you desire. This is not a manipulation, this is a sublimation. You can give up control in order to get what you want… what you need. These are the two sides of the D/s coin. And they both need to be employed to make for a complete life.
In my present situation, I could attempt to seize control. I could expend my personal power in a number of different ways and force those around me to act how I want them to. It might even work, contextually. I could hire an interpreter or guide. I could only go places where I know that there are people that speak English. I could only acknowledge the things here that are familiar. But I choose not to. I am immersing myself in the world here and now, and it’s quieting the monster. I am experiencing new things and expanding my horizons, become bigger, better, stronger, more… but I do not think that I could do that by forcing the world to meet me where I am.
It has taken me a terribly long time, and perhaps in some ways my growth in this area was stunted, but I’m learning that extremes have their place, and it’s not sufficient to ride the middle line all the time.
I can let the monster loose when I need him, or when I want him, and I can still be the man I want to be. I can let him take control when I want to, but I am always still there, watching, making sure that nothing untoward happens.
This is how I can love my girl, even as I choke her until she passes out, or slap her across the face as I fuck her.
Fuck, I miss her.
I’ll be back with her in a week.
I can hardly wait, but I know I am strong enough to manage it.
It has been a very long time since I’ve posted here. I’m sure many of you thought I had abandoned the blog, and effectively I had, but that was never my intent.
I’ve been very busy lately with work and life issues, working on a side project of my own, and playing video games to distract myself, and while I’ve written the starts of several posts at this point, I never managed to press ‘Publish’ because I was discontent with the results.
I’m not gone, and I am beginning a process of refocusing my life and how I live it.
I’ve been complacent in too many areas of my life lately. I’ve been making progress on some things, but for most, I’ve let them slide and just allowed myself to live with things as they are. I resolve to stop that (again) and to take a more active role in my own destiny.
Funny, isn’t it? The big, bad Dom-type was drifting. Isn’t that supposed to be the last thing that a D-type would do?
Each person’s Dominance is unique, and each is a journey. My own journey has taken many turns over the course of the past couple of years – most of which I did not anticipate.
This is a source of tremendous anxiety for me.
I do not fetishize control, but Control is the thing that lets me be a Dom in this world. Control is the thing that reinforces my power, that gives life to my Will. Control is the thing that allows me to tame the chaos of my mind and live a successful life.
But it’s fucking boring.
I’m a dichotomy and I contradict myself all the damned time. I have a consistent set of values and desires, but there are things in my mind that get in the way when I try to enact them sometimes.
Lately, my life has been largely out of my control, and that has been a source of tremendous anxiety for me – but also joy. While control allows me to accurately (for the most part) predict how the events of my life will unfold, it also completely removes the ability for anything to surprise me, and it can be exhausting to try to force things to fit when that is a state to which they do not naturally gravitate.
I’ve had literally weeks where I was almost paralyzed with fear concerning a couple of lawsuits in which I have been involved over the past several years. But I’ve also recently had moments where I was comfortable enough to completely let go and allow the Primal in me to come out – something that has not happened in a decade or more.
Just last night, I attended a kink event with my girlfriend and I made a horrible misjudgment. I think it’s fair to say that I know her better than anyone else, but I erred, and not in a small way.
There are those of you out there who read this and already think that I’m too soft to be a ‘True Dom’ – and this is going to reinforce those beliefs.
I fucked up.
I take responsibility for my lack of preparation, my lack of empathy, and my disturbingly effective emotional distancing coping techniques.
I entered into a highly emotional situation without the ability to access my own emotions or to empathize with my girlfriend, and I made a huge miscalculation.
And that is precisely the correct word to use here, for my actions were calculated and predicated on years of experience that I have and she does not. I embarrassed her in a public setting in front of people that she very much cares for how they view her by treating her as if she should have known things that I never showed her.
And so, the evening fell apart, and when things were at their bleakest, I did too. Spectacularly, and in a way that has not happened for more than decade.
I relived moments that I wish I could forget. I went to the place in my mind where control is fiction and I didn’t possess control even over my own body. I went so deep that I actually caused myself to vomit – no mean feat when I’d not eaten anything all day.
But there is catharsis in surrender – as any s-type can tell you – and as I once lived myself.
When I broke, she came to help me.
I cannot possibly overstate the significance of that to me.
The big, bad, Dom-type was quite literally a blubbering idiot in the corner, and his protective and nurturing and beautiful girlfriend and submissive-in-training took control for a moment and gave me the strength to allow my mind to find the coping mechanisms that evolved in me over the years and Control came back. Briefly, and without form, but it came back.
I wrote once before on this blog that I thought I had finally found the love of my life, but it turned out to be untrue.
I have been reluctant to make the same sorts of claims with this relationship, largely because I did not see it coming the last time, and I didn’t want to jinx this time, but after weathering the battle and experiences of last night, I think it’s safe to say that this is the most stable and mature and balanced relationship that I’ve ever had.
We struggle with D/s.
This is my fault, not hers. She wants it, and I have a very hard time presenting things to her because I do not want to insult her by treating her like she knows nothing, but in so doing, I do her a massive disservice. How can one learn if no one is willing to teach? Sure, books exist, resources are available on the ever-mighty Internet, and there are even classes that you can take, but ultimately, at the end of the day, our D/s is between us, and it’s not every Dom in the world that she needs to cater to, just me. And there is no manual for me on the Internet – the closest you’ll find is this blog, or the defunct one I wrote years and years ago – so how I can I expect her to know what to do if I don’t show her?
This is a journey. I don’t want the same type of D/s that I’ve had in the past, but I haven’t yet formulated what it is that I do want, and until I do that, we’re going to flounder.
So, this is where I cast off the worries of the lawsuits that have since been settled (and very recently – I literally just signed papers to settle one case on Thursday) and I recommit myself to my life, my love, my joy, my friends, my family, and my community.
More posts will be forthcoming.
I threw out the 500 words a day goal when my life became overwhelming a couple of months ago, but I’m reinstating it now.
If I have time to play video games, I have time to write.
NaNoWriMo will be taking a back seat to the other parts of my life this year, but my circle of friends is widening, and my relationship with the woman who I intend to keep for the rest of my life is only beginning to really solidify – despite months of growing and a nearly complete merging of our lives.
I love my girl. I hurt her, and I cast myself into Hell for doing so.
Punishment is always a part of D/s relationships, but last night we both punished ourselves to an extent that I could never replicate. The worst punishments always come from within, don’t they?
Rant is a name that I took when I started this, and it’s not a bad one. It’s short, easy to say and remember, and accurately reflects the mindset that I was in when I began this particular journey, but it doesn’t quite fit any more.
This is not a rant. This is not a lesson. This is a confession and commitment.
I shall return. One small step at a time, I shall return.
There are multiple reasons for this. One is the abysmal relationship that I have with my own father, but the magnitude of that in determining my overall feelings about the day pale in comparison to the other thing that always sticks in my craw on this day…
My girlfriend is away for the weekend, which is probably a good thing on balance, but at first it was a bit of blow for me. We recently had a pretty big fight. The worst of it is that the fight was almost entirely my fault. If you’ve been following along, you know that my job situation is a bit tense right now – not that I’m in any danger of losing my job, mind you, just that my boss is unbearable and is doing everything in her power to make my work life miserable. This is one of those times that I’m happy that I work to live rather than the other way around.. anyway.. I’ve been dealing with a great deal of stress lately. My girlfriend and I just took a Caribbean cruise, so I was able to unplug for a full week and experience some things that were new to me as well as bringing new experiences to her (which is one of my biggest kinks…) so I was in a pretty good place, until we got back. Then work started to invade upon my consciousness in both waking and sleeping hours. I was having more and more difficulty in putting the work things behind me when I went home, and that’s where things exploded.
I’m not going to go into the details, but suffice it to say that every relationship requires work, and my girlfriend and I have learned a few places where we need to communicate better, and we’re now stronger for the experience. Oddly enough, the problem areas for us are not related to anything else in this post, nor to the reasons why Father’s Day is a hard day for me.
So let’s get to the real story then, shall we?
My marriage ended on Father’s Day.
That’s not exactly the whole truth, and there were lots of things that were going wrong as early as a year prior, but it was Father’s Day, five years ago, when my marriage finally ended for truth.
This is one of the reasons why monogamy makes me so squeamish. I would have let her have her weekend with her paramour and probably even much more if she had been willing to open up our marriage, but when we’d talked about that as an option she was always against it. I’m still, to this day, unsure why.
Ultimately, I’m not unhappy with the result, because I would not be where I am today without those experiences, but a repeat of the same thing terrifies me to my bones.
My ex-wife was away on a business trip which she had extended for several days – including over the weekend, which was not entirely necessary for business purposes, but there was someone that she wanted to spend time with on the East coast where her trip was taking her.
I had confronted her about her extramarital relationship about a month prior. I’m something of a computer security expert and I had gathered evidence of her affair and the man with whom she was cheating on me. I knew that her trip was going to be taking her to his part of the country, and I knew that they would be spending time together.
Before she left, I had a conversation with her. I told her that I wanted to stay in the marriage, that I still loved her, that I wanted to preserve our family, and that I would be willing to open the marriage so that she could explore this relationship if that was her choice. She assured me that she was merely ‘going through a phase’ and that she had not, and would not, actually cheat on me with this other man.
She asked me if she could still go on her trip. To this day, I’m still not sure why she was asking me for permission.
She told me that she needed to go for work, but that she would not see this man if I told her not to.
So I told her not to.
Then she backpedaled and said that she had to see him because part of her job function depended upon it.
I told her to do what she needed to do.
She assured me that she would not meet him outside of work environs, that she would not pursue the attraction that she felt, and that she would remain faithful.
She didn’t.
Electronic surveillance is wonderful, and it can give you all sorts of soul-crushing information if you’re not careful with it, but it can never give you the full picture.
The details of how I came about the information that I received are not important, but suffice it to say, my reach, especially in those days, was vast.
On Father’s Day, with the father of her two daughters (that would be me) at home, taking care of them in her absence, she spent the entire day entertaining him. She took him to her hotel room that night after dinner, and being very careful to not have intercourse, she did just about every other sex act possible with him.
The worst came immediately following that.
Her guilt got the better part of her, and at 2am local time, just after she has swallowed his semen and he left her room to go to his own home, she called me on the phone to tell me how much she loved me and missed me and the kids.
She woke me to assuage her conscience.
She had betrayed me before that in her heart, but this was the first act that went against her promise and it was the first for which she felt guilty enough to make the choice to leave me.
Tomorrow is Father’s Day.
I’m home, alone with my daughters, and tomorrow we’re going to have pancakes for breakfast because that is the tradition that I started with them after their mom and I separated.
It began a year after the events that I just related, and it’s always been this way, just them and me.
I don’t want that to always be the case, and I know that it won’t be, but perhaps it’s good that it is for one more year.
There is a dark nostalgia in remembering the low points.
There is a deep desire to wallow in the pain and misery, but that is no longer who I am, and while I can appreciate these feelings, I am no longer overwhelmed by them.
Life is all about love and learning and growing and I hope I never stop any of those things.