QUESTION NO. 2: WHO ARE YOU?
Easier to say what I am not than who I am. Easier to say my body is on
fire. Easier to say the woman who prepares to emerge struggles with big
ideas of morality and feminism that stand guard at the door of my sexuality
like two three hundred pound ex-con bouncers who have no sense of humor and
who will grant me admission to this very exclusive club only if I am
properly dressed and have the right attitude. Otherwise, I can just go
home.
Who am I? I am not a prude. I no longer make judgments about others’
sexuality or my own. My body is essentially a blank page though you can see
layer upon layer of erasure marks.
I am not lesbian and though women’s bodies command my eye more frequently
than do men’s it is a man I want beside me for dreamtime and day-to-day
intimacies.
I am not… No. I am on fire. That’s for sure. What ever I’m doing it’s
very hot, so hot it feels cool. Dig those guys who walk hot coals. Yeow.
I am a hunka hunka burnin’ love. Elvis and me get down. Know?
I come in a small package but am in reality ten feet tall. When I am kind
or extend myself, I am a hero because kindness and connection are previously
unknown in my behavioral lexicon. I am not the self-contained unit I used
to be and it took a kind of heroism to get here from where I was. It takes
a kind of heroism to allow one’s self to feel rather than numb out.
What is it I do that’s so hot? I give myself over to a man is what I do. A
man who understands what I need and is not afraid to give it is what. To
admit the need is one thing. To act on it another, though for years I have
taken sips from this apparently bitter cup but now take a full drought, at
least as much as the man thinks advisable. He decides when and how much.
And what is this liqueur? Why, it is the liqueur of discipline: tough,
unrelenting, focusing, and a kind of nightmare.
It’s difficult to say what I do but I shall say it: I submit. I give it
up. I open myself very wide. But my nature is not yet able to accommodate
self-motivated automatic opening. I must be opened manually.
Mistress said something important last time we were together. She said as I
writhed and cried in the cuffs because hands and feet cold and tingly numb I
’d been bound almost long enough, “It is a very, very good thing to be
splayed and vulnerable like this.” She made me cry with the paddle, cane
and crop. She makes me feel without thinking first. She manually opens my
legs and in doing so takes away the volition I’d never forgiven myself for
exercising when as a girl I joined my abusers in their sex games, eager and
hoping each time for release.
I don’t know which came first, my need for pain and sex or the sex and pain.
In the end, knowing doesn’t really matter for knowing the answer will not
exacerbate the need. I only know that if I do not acknowledge and act on
this need that something beautiful inside will die.
I fear losing myself but perhaps it is a self worth losing. Something tells
me loss is not possible because in point of fact I may discover a self more
real than I ever imagined.
We are just beginning our odyssey of discipline this man, this dominant man
and me. I hold any emotion I might feel toward him in strict check, but the
more time I spend with him the more I learn to trust his judgment,
intelligence, knowledge, care, and wishes for my well-being. He takes it
slow. Sometimes excruciatingly slow.
Each time we meet we go longer and more deeply into the pain, farther into
the dangerous psychological territory of bondage. Each time we meet I know
the extrapolation will progress, and the shape of the algorithm makes me
terrified and wet. Each time he gives and I take more. He tells me he is a
hard player. I have no context within which to judge whether this is true
but I believe him. He wants this experiment to succeed and is not married
to expectation of outcome. I can’t fathom what the outcome might be either.
The possibilities are innumerable.
How can the immolation of the body be a good thing? So long as its effects
seem long-term positive I shall continue to explore. The effects? The
endorphin rush is an intoxicant that stays with me for days afterward. In
the throes of this rush nothing is impossible. I am open in body and
spirit. I walk taller and allow my natural womanly grace its expression
rather than hold my body tense with control. I don’t get nervous around
emotional subjects and talk too much like I usually do. There is a core of
centered peacefulness that replaces anxiety, loneliness, and fear.
So far it is only the discipline we explore. We have not yet studied
service. Service terrifies me more than the welts and red, black and blue
marks that stay with me as long as a week. Like Eleanor Roosevelt said,
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you
really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think
you cannot do." And so I shall.
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