Catharsis at Paradise

A story told in images:

Communion

Flight

Healing

Brother’s keeper

This past Thanksgiving, I made it a priority to spend more quality time with my younger brother.  We had a pretty confusing sibling relationship when we were both much younger, and I really want to build a better connection with him.  He is a good, kind person, and in a lot of ways I always felt he was a lot better person than I was (which I resented when I was younger).  And while I think he is doing really well, he lives solely with my mother right now, and I can’t help but want to provide another outlet for him, especially with regards to certain topics.

One of the goals of my trip home for the holiday was to create the opportunity to talk about sex with him.  This opportunity was actually facilitated by my mother, who worried about not being able to talk to her son so frankly.  She approached me and asked if I would be willing to send him some resources or talk with him, and I quickly agreed.  I could not be happier that she felt comfortable asking me to talk to my brother about sex!

I bought him S.E.X., by Heather Corinna, and we spent a little time just skimming through the book together.  I also showed him the It Gets Better Project and talked to him a little about bullying.  My strongest memories of high school are of being miserable and having suicidal ideation, and while I don’t know at all if my brother feels similarly, he doesn’t seem particularly enthusiastic about school, and he’s getting a lot of pressure, both from teachers and from my mother, to perform better academically.  I know this created a lot of stress and tension for me.

It has been a difficult balancing act, not wanting to project onto him my own history and my feelings about my mother, while at the same time wanting him to know that the world is a much bigger place than the small rural town he’s in.  He knows some of this already, having traveled quite a bit now and having spent a summer taking classes at a university in a major city.  And God knows he’s probably already been influenced by me through all the mischief I got into, which my mother has undoubtedly vented about to him (much as she used to vent about my father to me).

The other topic my mother stressed that I needed to address with my brother was the SATs.  She has continuously prodded me to help my brother better prepare for the SATs, to give him tips, help him with practice problems, and encourage him to study the many prep books she’s bought.

And I was loathe to do any of this, waiting until the night before I left to grudgingly take a look at a book with him.  I felt badly about being so reluctant, but that reluctance was not because I was lazy or didn’t want my brother to do well.  I have a very strong opinion of the standardized testing, and while I’ve done SAT tutoring, I absolutely hate the test and think it’s an unfortunate standard to have in our education system.  All that said, I did pretty well on the test myself, and I actually tend to do well on tests like this.  But I also tried to make the point to my mother that I never even studied before I took the test the first time, and that was only the end of my sophomore year.  My brother is currently a sophomore.  I personally think he has plenty of time to prepare.

So when we sat down together with the 2-inch thick prep book, I instead spent the entire time explaining how to study the test itself – its format, the way points are tallied, how to guess and eliminate choices.  I told him he has plenty of time to study the actual content of the test.

And when my mother asked how our study session went, I assured her that he would be fine.  She seemed unconvinced and still worried about him.  The conversation we had around this has left me feeling frustrated ever since.  She explained all the ways my brother wasn’t prepared for college, from his lack of awards from competitions to his lack of leadership roles in any organizations.  She lamented about him not being competitive or aggressive enough in seeking these things out.

And then she told me I needed to help him.  She related a story of a friend’s daughter, who was very self-motivated and got into MIT without needing outside help.  But her younger brother was the complete opposite, with his parents assigning him private tutors and consultants to prep him for college, and still he wasn’t accepted to MIT.  His sister intervened, using her legacy status and asking the admissions office what he needed to get in.  They told her, and he was able to get in.

So, my mother concluded, it behooved me to help my brother reach his goals, because he simply wasn’t like me, self-motivated and a self-starter.  I’m not quite sure where my mother got this opinion of me, because I don’t remember ever being called that before.  Regardless, I left for San Francisco the next day, feeling guilty for not being more supportive (what a horrible sister am I?) while simultaneously still believing that he is the only person who can decide how to form his life, and that I should not be so involved as to direct the path he should take.

I always downplay my own educational background to my brother, where my mother likes to ask him if he wants to get into my alma mater.  I tell him it doesn’t matter, there are so many great schools – and great programs – and that he shouldn’t focus on the Ivy brand name.  My mother used to tell me I’d never get into anything better than the local state university when I got a less than stellar grade.

So there is this constant back and forth, with my brother unfortunately caught in the middle.  I’m not sure what step to take – if I should take any at all.  We don’t speak often when I’m in San Francisco – partially my own aversion to phone calls, partially because he almost never has his cellphone on him anyway.  I do think I should be more intentional in being a part of his life; I’m just not sure what role I should play.

Of course, while I am sorting all this out in my head (and agonizing over it in conversations with Max), my brother’s life continues to play out.  He’s already grown up so quickly without me there a lot of the time.  I feel an almost maternal guilt for not being around more.

Education Revolution

Education has been on my mind a lot lately. Specifically, the state of most education systems in the world.  A pretty hefty subject, but it seems to have continually cropped up within my social networking sphere the past couple months.

I ran across two of William Deresiewicz’s essays, one titled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” and the second, “What are You Going to Do with That?”  Both gave me a lot to think about, in terms of my own educational history, the paths I’ve chosen to take along the way, as well as the outward factors that influenced those decisions.

The two essays reminded me of another I’d read years ago when I was seeing M, who was very education-focused, as he was the co-owner of an ESL school.  I learned a lot through M, and he pointed me to the essayist, VC, and entrepreneur Paul Graham.  The essay I remember is the one entitled “How to Do What You Love.”

At the same time that I was discovering these articles, I also came across the wonderful RSA Animate series.  I saw the video on changing Education Paradigms:

 

And immediately went in search of more information on Sir Ken Robinson.  That was how I came across his two TEDTalks on radically changing the education system:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

 

And finally, another TEDTalk, this time by Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs:

Random thoughts:

I agree, quite emphatically, with all of them.  I have only my personal history and observations to draw on, but I believe the education system is irreparably flawed and in need of radical change.  While I was trained and cultivated throughout my childhood precisely to succeed in the linear model of the current system, it was rarely a satisfying experience except when I took those classes that completely deviated from the norm.

From William Deresiewicz’s essays I find a lot that strikes a chord in me, along with a bit of residual bitterness and dissatisfaction with my college experience.  But it is equally true that I’m grateful for opportunity to go to college without incurring nearly the level of debt that many of my peers faced after graduation (before disowning me for the second time, my mother almost completely covered my academic fees).

Although it was an unpleasant experience at the time, I now see that event – being disowned and the withdrawal of financial support – as probably the most useful in helping me break free of my mother’s influence over my future and my decisions.  I saw clearly her overwhelming desire to simultaneously see me as an adult and keep me continually semi-dependent on her, in the often distorted way that parents define and express their love.

I was also able to feel less guilty about breaking off the path she’d so carefully cultivated for me ever since I was born.  I have since made a lot of pretty crazy decisions, like driving across the country without knowing where I’d end up.  I’ve made my share of mistakes, of course, but in the long run I’ve been incalculably happier than I think I ever would have been with the options that were laid out for me by familial precedence.  I am constantly amazed that things seem to be working out, and this is, I believe, because of the narrow model of success I’d been taught.

Now, whenever I see my family, my mother often remarks that I will likely be the one with the lowest degree in our household.  I never have a response to that, but I sincerely cannot believe that the pursuit of an advanced degree is the right choice for me right now.  Still, it’s hard to take her sometimes scathing comments, even though I understand her motivation is to shame me into “making more of myself.”

I came to another realization while reading and listening to all of these thoughts: I have, since entering college, felt a kind of self-loathing and sense of being a fake or fraud for enrolling at such a prestigious school.  Although my primary interests lay in the arts, especially in graphic arts and design, and despite the fact that I endeavored to take an art class almost every term, I never put much weight on the talents I had in visual media; it wasn’t a real or useful life skill.  Yet I also never felt compelled to pursue more lucrative options.  I defaulted to biology, because at least I was also interested in ecology, and because Jane Goodall had been my childhood idol.  It was also a safe choice that my family could accept – biology could mean a path to a medical field.  But I never felt truly immersed in the material except during labs or outdoor excursions.

It’s only now, two years out of the academic sphere, that I can finally admit to myself how much more I’m actually interested in things that fall under the often-stigmatized heading of “skilled labor” – things like woodworking, metalcraft, and leathercraft.

There are also other views to take on the people I’ve linked to and what they have to say; a look at the comments sections of Mr. Deresiewicz’s articles is telling of the scorn people feel for an academic scholar criticizing the system that helped shape his career.  And I could argue that most of the people I knew personally fell outside the kind of privileged students he describes.  But I also have to admit to having a circle of friends who were more the exception than the rule at our school.

Regardless, I can personally attest to being the recipient of all the stereotypical comments one hears made to smart people who don’t pursue the well-trodden path: I’m not applying myself, I’m wasting my talents, my degree, and my future, I could succeed if only I were more motivated, I’m making a huge mistake.

I believed all of that, and I was weighed down by the belief that I was being intentionally self-destructive and the belief that I was a failure not only to my family and friends but also to my own intrinsic potential.

 

Reading these essays and watching the TEDTalks, as well as hearing stories every now and then about others who’ve also taken unconventional paths and were successful – using a much broader rubric for defining success – continues to encourage me and help me believe that I am, in fact, capable of a successful, happy life, even if the path in front of me is only vaguely defined and involves a lot of bushwhacking.

 

It gets better

In response to the recent suicides related to anti-gay bullying, Dan Savage set up the It Gets Better project on Youtube a few weeks back.  The idea is for those who have gone through bullying and homophobia themselves to reach out to LGBTQ youth by submitting their own videos.  I heard about IGB early on, both through Savage’s podcast and various social media outlets.

The response has been generally supportive, though there have also been dissenting, questioning voices as well.  And then counter-responses to those.

There probably isn’t much that I could say that hasn’t already been said by hundreds of others.  Word of the project has spread virally.  It has sparked waves of conversation and lots of news bytes, has both inspired and angered thousands of people.  It’s moved viewers to donate to suicide hotlines and to reach out to others, while making others realize how much more needs to be done.

To that end, I already see IGB creating change and opening discourse on the topics of suicide and bullying.  On a personal level, it’s incredible for me to see these videos of people talking so openly and intimately about suicide attempts and sharing explicit stories of bullying.  As with so much else in our culture, suicide is so taboo and stigmatized a subject that it’s often difficult to talk this openly about it.

And without the language and shame-free environment to discuss these issues, it makes it that much harder to get help, open up to another, and recognize that you’re not alone.

It’s also true, what the dissenting voices say: it’s not enough, this standalone project, it doesn’t get to the root of the issue, and everyone will be affected differently from watching the videos.  But to have the conversation at all, to insist on having this conversation, is what I think makes this a truly worthwhile cause.

Other resources:

• The Trevor Project – 24-hour hotline for LGBTQ youth (866-488-7386)
• GLSEN – the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network
• Kristin Brooks Hope Center – Suicide awareness and hotline (800-784-2433)
• Youth Resource – Website created by and for LGBTQ youth

This thing called poly

This is really hard to write, and it’s a little raw at the edges, but if I’ve learned anything these past few months, it’s that getting this out in some form is always preferable to keeping it in.

I realize that I do not have the best background for understanding polyamory, and my past relationships did nothing to improve that understanding.  But perhaps unraveling some of that baggage will give me a better foothold for parsing out why I continue to have the issues I have with all of this.

What immediately comes to mind is my first relationship with Tim.  After discovering the existence of his fiancée through her finding out about me and writing to me, I then found a letter she had written to Tim on his computer.  It was heartbreaking, and the realization that I had caused that level of anguish to another person – unwittingly, due to my naivete – was, and still is, hard for me.  I saw myself, the outsider, as an intrusion, wreaking havoc on this existing relationship, and loathed both being the outsider and the effect I had had on an innocent party.  I despised myself for it, while simultaneously despising her for the anguish her existence now caused me.

Of course, the main force of all my anger was directed at Tim; for (among many things) his manipulation of my trust, and also for tingeing the discovery and budding growth of my kinky side with lies and deceit.  It still angers me how strongly my subsequent relationships have been affected by this experience.  I truly believed I would never wear another’s collar again, nor would I submit to another and call them Sir.

But the hardest realization for me to come to terms with, which subsequently branded a new fear in me, was that my connection with him, our relationship, had always been that tenuous by its very nature, had always been necessarily secondary and easy to dismiss to preserve his primary relationship.

Whatever initial impression I might have had regarding poly was colored very strongly by this.  I read others’ blogs and forums discussing poly, and while a part of me was curious, intrigued, another part of me shook my head in disgust.  All I saw was poly being used as an excuse to manipulate multiple people at once.  In poly, I saw the effects of hurt and pain magnified with each additional person involved, each additional line that connected one person to another.  Drama seemed inevitable, and drama was the last thing I wanted to endure.

Now, it is four years since I left Tim, and I find myself suddenly with the opportunity to change that view very drastically.  Since becoming involved in the Boston rope scene and then moving to San Francisco, I have seen examples of stable poly relationships, though I admit the majority of them still look like a train wreck more often than not.  I saw people cycling through new partners and culling out other partners as quickly as clothing, I saw statuses change so often it was hard to remember who was with who, and I saw all of those connections as superficial at best.

I recognize that this works for some people, that they and their partners handle it well, and that they have a different emotional capacity for it.  I also recognize that I am not one of those people.  So, while I was being exposed to positive, working examples of poly families and getting to know and become friends with many of those people, I still didn’t believe I was “one of them,” so to speak.

Then, I met Max.  What started as an experimental, short-term service relationship with a start and end date has become something much, much more significant, and I am still reeling a bit from the transition.  Although it’s now over a year that I’ve been in this evolving relationship with him, it still feels very new and raw – undoubtedly due both to the physical distance and our individual time constraints and schedules.

I am so deep in this new, foreign territory that I can’t even identify the horizon – the smooth, clear line of balance to aim for.  It used to be easier, during those first few visits, when the bulk of our time together was only with each other: focused, intense, and deliberate.  It was also easier because I saw myself in the very specific role of play partner and service submissive.

I should have realized, by Shibaricon, that those roles were no longer accurate.  I should have known it when I dropped almost all other commitments there to spend more time with Max.  When it was all I could do to force myself to go to the workshops I had planned on attending, rather than the ones he wanted to attend and the ones he was teaching.

Even despite all of our prior time together, the promise of more to come in the future, and the intensity of our connection, I really didn’t anticipate falling. So. Hard. In love.

Writing that was more difficult than revisiting my relationship with Tim.  There is a lot of fear in that statement.  Whenever I find myself resenting our distance or the time I don’t get to have with Max, I am afraid.  I’m frightened by how much I want him, and by how much he fulfills a part of me that I have been deeply craving.  The service, the rope, the sex, the D/s – they all fit so well with my own kinky makeup.  It’s the closest I’ve come to finding someone who complements my kinks this way.

At first, the fear was rooted in the possibility of loss – of finding such a close match only to have it end, a short-lived play partner relationship with some nice memories and nothing more.  Though honestly, those memories would still be very nice, and I cannot imagine leaving this relationship on anything but amicable terms. I cannot envision a future where I’d think back on my time with Max with anything but fondness and love.

No, the fear has evolved into something quite a bit more complex and poly-related.  I’m not even sure how to explain it clearly, but the main idea is this: it seems only fair for me to have my shit together and figured out before embarking on this kind of journey into non-monogamy – fair, that is, for Max and his other partners.  And yet, every time I find myself in the same space with Max and another partner, I automatically relegate myself to that post of outsider, never sure of where, exactly, I belong, and always, always hesitant to step on toes and disturb established patterns and habits.

Perhaps it is as simple as having been raised in the binary culture of heterosexual couples that makes this so difficult.  In dissecting all of this with Max, I’ve come to see the number three as a highly destabilizing factor.  “Three” seems to require so much more effort, vigilance, external and internal awareness, and communication, and creates such a divided focus, as to overwhelm the poly beginner.  Not to mention that my only prior experience with this has been as the nonconsensual third of a main couple’s relationship.  That experience has amplified being with Max and one of his partners into the fear and belief that my very presence in their space is an unwelcome intrusion.  And so, in those situations, I withdraw, step back, and build distance between myself and Max.

This is an all-internal issue.  All of Max’s partners, all of his extended poly family that I’ve met, have been nothing but warm and welcoming towards me, and I could not ask for a better role model for learning to navigate the poly world.  I also have the added benefit of genuinely liking his partners, making it simultaneously easy to want to see them happy as well as more difficult to request time to spend with Max alone.  I want to spend all of the time I can with Max, while simultaneously wanting him to spend time with his partners.  I see the joy in his eyes and in theirs when together, and I want them to have as much of that joy in their lives as possible.  And I want Max: all of him, 100% of his time, focus, and energy.  I want him with the same ferocity and intensity that he expresses in his desire to own me.

I am greedy for his time, and I am able to rationalize some of that greed because of our distance.  The reason is two-fold; being 800 miles apart makes me cherish any time we are in the same vicinity all the more, and makes me want to guard that time jealously.  It also prolongs the timeline of the different stages of our relationship, so that it was only at Shibaricon (our sixth encounter, but nine months in real time) that I found myself becoming fully immersed in the “new relationship energy” that made me want to clear my schedule for Max.  But when it is not just the two of us, alone, I am afraid of the destructive nature all of that greed and desire also holds, of the baser emotions they elicit – when it is not joy I feel at seeing Max with his partners, but jealousy and resentment.

Add in the inherently unequal nature of our relationship and the fact that Max is my only partner, and the equation becomes exponentially more complicated.

What it comes down to is figuring out whether or not I can do this, and do it well; whether it is fair to be going through this learning process and developing these skills – with all of its bumps and bruises and missteps – with Max and his family, knowing that it will inevitably cause waves; and whether or not I will have the self-awareness to understand if I am holding on to something I cannot sustain or manage, and holding on to the detriment of everyone involved.  And to be able to let go, if that’s the case.

At this moment, despite my tendency to catastrophize things in my head, I don’t believe it will come to that.  My motivation for doing all of this digging around in my head, after all, is so that I can figure out how to make poly work for me and thus continue being a part of Max’s family.  And if part of that means revealing more of my vulnerabilities and imperfections than I am comfortable with, and risking more honesty and communication rather than less, I will do that.

Lessons from Paradise

I finally landed back in San Francisco late last night, and I have an obscene amount of work I need to catch up on.  I am exhausted from the roller-coaster ride the last week has been, and there’s a lot there that I need to reflect on.  So, in lieu of any kind of organized thought, a list of some things I took away from this trip:

• Even relaxing, week-long conventions are still conventions and crazy to schedule
• Asking for clarity is almost always better than trying to guess at intentions
• Life will throw wrenches into any planned schedule
• Needs cannot be neglected for very long without personal consequences, and being submissive does not mean forgetting about my own needs
• “Do you need anything right now?” is an open invitation that I should take up more often
• Being at an outdoor kinky event means submitting to the weather and the passage of natural light
• Building a relationship with thought and intention has been a new, satisfying, scary, and intense process
• Poly is hard
• Coming into an established poly family is like taking the graduate level course without having read the primer
• Building expectations in my head without making them known to the people I’m building them around is a sure recipe for miscommunication and unnecessary hurt feelings
• Waiting for what I want to fall in my lap is unproductive and leads to festering emotions
• Relationship lessons are hard, painful, and emotional, but they are important lessons nonetheless
• It’s all worth it. When the dust clears, I feel love and power and connection unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and how can it be wrong to want that?
• Because it’s worth it, it will take work and thought and communication and personal responsibility
• Communication, communication, communication

90% of Paradise was immensely fun, and I am glad for that experience.  And while the remainder of my visit was difficult and created some personal turmoil, it was all important to experience as well.

More to come, perhaps, when I’ve more time and thought to devote here, but for now, I know at least the future is hopeful and bright as far as my relationship with Max is concerned, and that is all I need right now.

“there are always statues to talk to”

As with every other time I’ve been with Max (short of Shibaricon), I’ve written and sent him a journal of reflections and chronology summarizing our time together.  This one was particularly difficult to write, and it took me a week of struggling with words and with memories to be able to form something coherent and, more importantly, honest.

I stumbled, that week.  Perhaps, with a little more distance and time, I will see the stumble for the small thing it was, and not amplify it into a monstrous calamity in my head, as is my wont.  Either way, it was a good lesson in knowing when to ask for help.  Because as much as I tried to fight off my chameleon myself, I couldn’t win the battle alone.  As it was, it took lots of talking, listening, and fighting with my uncertainties to bring my defenses down and let Max in again.

Every time I do this, he settles deeper into my life and becomes that much stronger of a presence in my world.

As always, writing these journals leaves me very reflective and withdrawn, too focused on memories and introspections to notice much else.  As I worked towards finishing the final leg of Max’s trip yesterday, I took a break to visit the Legion of Honor Museum.  It seemed an appropriate venue in which to handle the flood of thoughts swamping my head.  While walking through galleries of paintings and sculptures, I reflected on the past year.  I have not mentioned it here before, but last weekend marked a year since I stepped foot into the Center for Sex Positive Culture, met Max, and then proceeded to have a 15-minute suspension scene with him later that evening.

As Max noted while here, I looked a little alarmed every time he mentioned our anniversary to friends we were with.  To be fair, neither of us planned his trip to coincide with the date, nor had I even realized what the date meant – me, the one who’s fanatical about recording things in correct chronological order.  And, because my mind had centered on Folsom as the one-year mark, I completely overlooked the date that we’d met.

Max commented on the funny way these disparities happen, especially with non-monogamy.  Just how do you commemorate the forming of a relationship without the social normative markers of marriage or even, in our case, a first date?  After that 15-minute scene, the next time I saw Max was to be in service to him throughout Folsom weekend, two months later.  There was no gradual progression of coffee dates to dinner dates to play dates for us, so it is a bit harder to pinpoint one moment in time, or one event, as the start of a relationship counter.

And yet, we have somehow arrived at the one year mark after getting together for weekend to weeklong service dates almost every month since Folsom.  New Year’s Eve, a visit in March, SEAF, Shibaricon, and now, Max’s visit with me, in my own home in San Francisco.  It certainly gives me a lot to look back on, as well as a lot to look forward to.

Going through the museum also took me back to my trip to Seattle for the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival.  The festival’s occupied a lot of my head space lately too, as I try to form a coherent article around my experiences there.  I remembered the amazing pieces of artwork I saw and the mesmerizing performances that electrified the exhibit hall.  Wandering through the Legion of Honor, I realized just how starved for art I’d become.  My mind switched to the work around me.  I was enamoured with the classical sculptures and head busts on display, and I marveled at their Rodin collection.  The classic Renaissance paintings and Victorian furniture, I spent less time looking at.  But regardless, it was revitalizing to be surrounded by artwork, alone and insulated by my own thoughts.

At the museum store, I spotted numerous books I’d love to read: Undressed: Why we draw, Love, Sex, & Tragedy: How the ancient world shapes our lives, and The Buried Book.  I also spied a book with a painting of a nude woman entwined around a swan on its cover, which I didn’t pick up but reminded me of the Greek mythology that most captivated me when I was younger: the story of Leda and the swan.  I have always been enraptured by both the story and the paintings it inspired, especially Michelangelo’s rendition.

Sex. Art. Eroticism.  My own arts background helped build a foundation for my sexual identity and gave me a vast amount of appreciation for the human figure, as well as respect for the power of the erotic allure.  I looked at some paintings and wondered at their power to captivate, and the emotions in the eyes of some of the sculptures made me want to weep.  How can art be so powerful?  So evocative? So piercing?

It was an inspiring visit.  I should make the Legion of Honor a monthly visit, and I look forward to slowly making my way through all of the museums in this city.

(notes: all photos were taken by me, and I confess, I took closer note of the media than the artist’s name in some cases. Also, this post’s title is a line from Tanya Davis‘ poem, “How to Be Alone.”  I still can’t stop playing that video…)

“How to be Alone”

And it’s finding treasures like this that keep me going back to social media sites.  Found via my Twitter stream, and specifically via @chelseagsummers: “How to be Alone,” poem by Tanya Davis, video directed by Andrea Dorfman:

a few good men

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now.  It’s been brewing in my head for over a month: this idea of extricating all the threads of contact and intimacy I have attached to the current men in my life and seeing what I can do to make some sense of them.  There seems to be a distinct lack of any one definitive term to encompass where I stand in each man’s life, or where they stand in mine.  Not to mention that the list of characters continues to grow as I meet and get to know more and more people.

Dov.  A chance meeting at a gay bar with Dov propelled me back into rope bondage, which has now become something of an obsession (is that an understatement?).  Between getting involved with the budding Boston rope scene and my first experience demo-bottoming in rope with Dov, I was quickly being plunged into the public kink community, something still quite strange and new and intimidating for me.  Along with many others who had been initiated into the public scene with the help of Dov, I came to see him as mentor and “scene uncle.”  We’ve played fairly intensely and intimately, and a lot of my own rope quirks and techniques are derived from what he’s taught me.

He is initiator, catalyst, friend, mentor, a sympathetic ear, confidant, and my first play partner.  We’ve had intimate conversations on sexuality and fears as well as geeky exchanges on website design and cameras.  However, now that I’m on the opposite coast, I’m not sure how things will progress.  Though we have dabbled in some power exchange play, I am hesitant to enter into anything like that over such a long distance.  I also still am uncertain about how I feel with polyamory as a personal lifestyle choice.  I’m not yet convinced that it’s for me.

Max.  What began as an electronic introduction via Dov to get me into a play party at the CSPC has evolved into something quite a bit more complex.  I suspect that will only continue, as I plan to stay with Max for the week of the New Year.  I imagine there will be a world of difference between this and Folsom week, which I spent under service to him.  This time around, I will be staying with him and interacting much more with his other partners.  He will be much more distracted, time will be more condensed and filled, and I will have more of an agenda of my own, in terms of visiting other friends while I’m there.

In reflecting upon how coincidental our crossed paths were, I am still bemused at how I ever became more than a friend of a friend who got tied up once by Max while on my summer roadtrip.  That is exactly where I thought it would end – at midnight when my friends came to pick me up from the play party and we went on our way to Olympic National Park.  Yet we somehow continued to keep in touch, and Max helped facilitate more introductions to kinksters down the Pacific Northwest coastline as well as kinky Burners to connect with during that excursion.

I was grateful for his support, yet still I would never have anticipated that it might lead to my agreeing to serve Max for a weekend – or that our original four-day plan would become eight days long.  I learned much about myself in those eight days.  Many aspects of submission and service were given more clarity once I was submerged in those roles – much more completely than anything else I’ve ever experienced.  At the same time, I have recognized similar issues as with Dov – uncertain that I can be fulfilled in this role over a long distance and with someone who is polyamorous.

T.  It’s still incredibly amusing and astonishing to me that I should be involved with people who’ve been friends of friends that I was put in contact with while on my roadtrip.  After my stay in Seattle, Max sent me T’s info as a point of contact for the kinky community in the South Bay.  I met up with T, he took me to a munch, and I stayed for a couple nights before heading down to L.A to drop my friend off at the airport.  Then, when I was ready to drive back up to San Francisco, I contacted T again to stay the night before going the rest of the way into the city.

And since then I’ve stayed with T numerous times, often attending an event at Edges and spending the night at his place.  And in the few months I’ve interacted with him, our play has grown exponentially more intense.  I thoroughly enjoy being pushed and challenged beyond my boundaries with him, and through that we seem to have built an unexpected level of intimacy together.  My scenes with him are the most frequent and the ones I am rather fond of reminiscing upon, given that every one challenges my perception of how much pain, or restraint, or humiliation, or service, I can submit to.

But again, the same issues apply.  T already has a long-term partner, and although he is in an open relationship, I feel like I need to hold back and not get too attached.

J.  Then there is J.  I don’t speak much of J, and we haven’t kept in touch as frequently lately, but he is an important force and influence on my life nonetheless.  Our relationship has been strictly electronic-based.  We have never met in person, though he has threatened to arrange our meeting several times, and each time seems increasingly more likely.  What started out as a friendship based around his interest in my bottoming for his partner has developed into an interesting something that’s more-than-friends, and we’ve exchanged secrets, stories, and as much of a power dynamic as is possible over e-mail and chat.

My first ex indirectly made our connection possible, and I am grateful and glad that we have stayed in touch beyond him.  J was my first confidant when I began doubting my ex’s honesty and integrity, and he kept me sane when those doubts proved far too true.  Throughout that period we grew closer, partly because I felt that no one else would understand the level of devastation I felt from my breakup given the D/s dynamic.  It seems silly now to think that, embedded as I now am in the kink community.

Of everyone I’ve listed so far, it is J who has seen me at my absolute most vulnerable.  He has witnessed those days where I felt drained beyond all capacity to get back up, where it took every ounce of available energy to maintain a facade of normalcy for family and friends while my insides slowly shredded away and I really felt like an empty shell.  Only in him have I confided how I truly felt.  Even now, I have not reached that level of trust with any other person.

—

All of these men fulfill a large segment of my needs that hadn’t been met before – newly explored and excavated needs that have awoken in me and that I have acknowledged are an important aspect of my life and the relationships I seek.  And yet I find other needs unable to be met – either physically, or emotionally, or availability-wise, or whatever else it is that isn’t satisfied at this level.

And it’s not about the sex, either.  Despite the heights that my libido will sometimes attain, that’s not what I mean when I say physical needs.  I’m looking for physical closeness, physical intimacy outside of intercourse, a warm body for times of comfort.

I’m not complaining, though.  Really.  In gaining more clarity in defining my needs, I’m also more willing to wait for the right combination of factors to fit into my life.  In the meantime, I try and remember that I am young, that there is a full lifetime of experiences still waiting for me to explore, and that I will continue to cultivate those experiences at my own pace, neither with an absurd level of caution nor the reckless abandon with which I first began.  I’m also enjoying dipping my toes into a potential new role as educator, as service or play top, and as a source of safe rope play for those new to bondage or bdsm.

And that is quite an exciting prospect for me.

Sometimes, you just have to laugh

Oh, emotional crapola abounds.

I’ve had a mood swing roller coaster the past couple of days, from ecstatic giddiness crashing into low-grade depression within hours.  The low was most noticeable after a couple deplorable and uninspiring clothes-shopping trips, in which I despaired upon ever having an inkling of fashion sense.

Similarly, I’ve ping-ponged back and forth between going into work in the morning feeling like I am a wasted piece of flesh who will never amount to anything for working in food service to never having felt happier than when I stepped foot into a place where, for once in my life, I can truly be myself.

Oh, believe me, I fully appreciate the melodramatic senselessness of it all.  As ever, I blame it on my upbringing.  Living with parents whose personalities are as contrasting as black and white was sure to screw me up somehow, right?  (I hear it’s also trendy with my generation to place all blame on our parentals for everything wrong with how we turned out.  We are the Entitled and Victimized Generation, it seems.)  When I’m not taking after my father and having all the emotional and social capabilities of a lump of coal, I wax my mother’s flavor of melodramatic and feel the world collapsing around me.

And within this big Freudian, Oedipean psychoanalytical metaphor of a life that I’ve contrived for myself, my personal sense of self gets a bit muddled and fuzzy.

And then there are nights like tonight, when I am antsy and disgruntled and want to get in an intense, emotionally riled, buzzed discussion on the state of affairs; expound upon the latest in ridiculous, head-shaking-worthy antics of some fanatical zealot group; extrapolate on ideological tangents as a mere academic curiosity and exercise with a lack of any tangible consequence.  Where can I fire off with self-righteous anger while cradling my Bailey’s on the rocks?  Where is my dimly lit, wood-paneled hole in the wall for meeting with fellow conspirators and shooting our mouths off about how much better we’d do things, given the chance?

How is it possible to feel so tiny and still so concretely present at the same time?  I am so confused, so out of place.  Once again I feel pale and passionless among so many hundreds of people who change the world with the bright flare that is their life.

Stepping back and taking it all in, there is not much else I can do except laugh at myself for these inconsequential ravings.  Pay no mind, please, I don’t even know what I’m rambling about anymore.

—

The other thing weighing on my mind these past few days lies in a not-so-optimistic reflection of my forays into casual play thus far.  I will not yet claim to experiencing actual polyamory, because I draw a distinct line between having a stable relationship with one or more partners and having multiple casual play or sexual partners.  Nothing wrong with either, necessarily – just distinguishing the definitions for myself.

And, in all fairness, I have had immense fun dabbling in various types and intensities of play.  I’ve had formal ritualistic roles, more playful flirting roles, and much more in the grey areas between.  And it’s been an incredible and educational series of experiences so far, to be sure.  Now, however, I have realized how little I’ve participated in my local community (besides, I suppose, working at the new epicenter for kink activity and community in SoMa).  Since I unpacked my sparse belongings into my new home on August 11th, I’ve set foot inside the Citadel three times.  In fact, I am hesitant to explore that space at all, and I think some of that reluctance can be relegated to some choice flesh-related terms: ‘meat market’ and ‘fresh meat’ being the main two.

I’d like to change that, however.  Despite my lack of social grace, I’m determined to make some headway to become more of an active participant at the Citadel.  After all, while I am having fun with the play relationships I have now, I cannot survive, emotionally, on that alone to any kind of satisfaction.  I’m looking, in short, for more regular human company (my cilantro plants don’t count, despite their enthusiastic blooming).  Not necessarily for play, just for company.  I’m reluctant even to voice this desire here, because I am afraid even a whiff of whisper of “single” and “looking” and I’ll have an influx of Fetlife messages asking for me to be someone or some couple’s slave for life.

Or, more succinctly, I’ll just get messages like I used to on Alt.com: “Kneel, bitch, and beg me for the honor to be my slave!”

So if you were to come up to me at any Citadel event, in all likelihood I will decline any and all offers to play or socialize or “meet up later” with a deer-in-headlights look on my face denoting my horror at having to interact with another human being.

Case in point?  Two days prior, I made a short trip to Trader Joe’s to pick up groceries, and lined up at the cash register of one cashier whose eyes I’d caught while scanning the aisles for the shortest wait.  He was a cute redhead with what I think is an Irish accent (I’m useless at guessing accents).  As I pulled out my wallet, we exchanged the usual cashier-customer pleasantries.  Then he looked up, made eye contact, and asked, “What brings you out here on such a fine afternoon?”

I might as well have been faced with either of the Boondock brothers.  As in, wow you’re hot, but why are you pointing a gun at me?

Except in this case it was, are you actually talking to me?  I blinked in surprise and managed to croak out a paltry, “Um, I needed food!  Ha…ha.”

I locked my lips shut after that and just concentrated on not bolting out the door.  I grabbed my change, started to power-walk away, when he calls out asking if I want my receipt.  I turned, grabbed it out of his hand and really did bolt for the door.

Yes, I am that awkward.

So, in closing: do I know how to laugh at myself?  Are you kidding?  I need no other source of entertainment.  I spent my teenage years doing what teenagers do best: taking myself way too seriously.  The only reason I’ve survived this long and retained my sanity is by learning to laugh at myself, and at life in general.