We went to bed and had a nice long negotiation, meaning that we spent a lot of time talking as we fucked. It was so hot that I woke Noah up in the middle of the night and uhm insisted that he fuck me again. Like Now.
I don’t know what rules I’m going to be capable of following. Which means I can’t set many rules on him.
This is scarier than shit.
I want.
I spend a lot of time worrying that what I want isn’t fair. Not to Noah, not to the people I am propositioning, not to my kids, maybe even not to me.
What is “fair”?
Noah is having some feelings about how much time I’m spending thinking about the folks I’m chasing. That is logical and reasonable. I haven’t spent much time with anyone yet. It’s mostly in my head and some IMing and letters and emails. It’s almost entirely emotional energy at this point. But he notices.
I feel like it isn’t fair that I forcefully reject the label of polyamorous because I just can’t take on being responsible for someone’s needs that way. This article reminds me that I don’t have much to offer.
The thing is… I actually do talk to my prey quite a bit. I think there is a big difference between one-offs I pick up at parties (where I usually will not even write down my email address or phone number or name: if you can remember my name to google me you can find me) and the people I…
am attached to.
Because this is love. I don’t want to call it polyamory because I have issues of my own. But this is love.
Why do I love my submissive? Because he is smart, funny, he’s a great father. I have barely met one of his children one time many many years ago in a waving from the car sort of thing (I think but I might be remembering wrong) so I’m judging from his self-descriptions.
But I know how much time he spends. I know what activities he engages in. I know how he encourages his kids to try and fail and get up again. I respect him.
Even though I disagree with some of the decisions that his personal beliefs lead him to make… I actually have respect for the fact that he has his faith and he is going to god damn act it out. It matters to him and I really respect that. I respect it when people take their faith (whatever that is) seriously.
My faith is it takes all kinds. And if we are going to all make it that will take money and help.
I love the way he has taken care of his slave. He has one of the longest term M/s relationships I know. They are so loving and considerate and caring. Being around them always makes me feel just a little bit happier that such people are in the world. I respect that they model how to talk to one another and be loving while having boundaries.
I even really respect the fact that even with ownership between them they get to do what they each need to do for their lives.
Because we are all different. We are all complicated. We all have such different needs. They show me one way of working out those different needs. They don’t switch together because that’s a complicated thing in a dynamic. But other people are different.
I can understand to some degree. I can’t switch with Noah. Sometimes that is hard. Sometimes I think it simplifies things and improves my life. I appreciate that Noah doesn’t have a strong need for me to turn on dominance with him when I’m totally not in the mood. That was hard with my Owner. He’s a very switchy person. He wanted to have ultimate control of what kind of stimulation he was getting when, but sometimes he wanted to be dominated on demand and that was serious work for me.
I have a deep, burning inner sadist but this dominance thing is different. No matter what my submissive is saying. He doesn’t know. Picture me sticking my tongue out but this is a smiley free zone.
Today I took youngest child to the penultimate ballet class of the series and I used the hour to exercise. I ran for 40 minutes then I did a bunch of crunches/push ups/planks/leg lifts/etc until I needed to get the kidlet.
I have an increasingly weird opinion of my body. Why can’t I get stronger and stay fat this isn’t fair. I do drop weight pretty fast when I start heavily exercising. I feel this awful feeling of “See. If you only cared about your looks you could be thin” and I want to scream back WATCH ME BUY 15 GALLONS OF ICE CREAM AND EAT IT ALL THIS WEEK MOTHERFUCKER I’LL SHOW YOU ‘CARES ABOUT LOOKS!”
Ahem. But I’m not sure that is actually good for my health. So I don’t know what I’m doing.
I want to be better able to ride Noah (or anyone else). So I want to get better at running. Because right now I want to do that. I’ve been having a lot of fun on top lately with Noah even though that is historically not much my thing.
Really lots has been changing about my sexual interests over the last few years. On one hand Noah is so ideal because he is up for trying anything with the merest suggestion. On the other hand I’ve kind of exhausted the things he really wants to try.
Even though people are constantly surprised that I’m not the top in the relationship… no… I like being a sexual follower. I like doing what you want to do err, but let’s be clear that is if you are in the mood to do what I like doing. Cause I’m a selfish shithead. I like being told what to do and how to do it. Even if what you like isn’t perfectly my favorite I really like that you want to tell me to do it.
So I’m in an interesting place with my submissive. He thinks I’ve been so dominant with him and I think I’ve been an incredibly perceptive service top. I say the things to you I wish someone was saying to me.
Sigh
I’m actually looking forward to Noah watching me top in a few weeks. He’s never seen me top Sarah. He’s never seen me seriously beat on anyone. I feel like… after ten years he gets to meet a whole new me.
This is terrifying and exciting at the same time.
I hope it doesn’t change how he sees me too much.
I need to review some anatomy lessons. Especially the bone structure of the face.
God I’m mean.
No marks anyone can see when you go to work. I’ll be good.
I may draw these lines with a bright red marker to remind me. And cross out the no-no areas on the body with bright red. Because I’m still learning new boundaries and it’s important I don’t fuck this up.
The amount of trust that is being placed in me, quite frankly, scares the shit out of me. Why would anyone put their physical safety in my hands like this? Why would anyone give me permission to do this much damage to their body?
Shit, why am I just about begging the Professor on my knees to be just as rough or worse with me?
Because I’m a masochist.
Because I’m a sadist.
Because I have wonderful, complimentary friends who can help take me to heights of ecstasy completely impossible in vanilla sex. I know. I’ve tried and tried and tried.
I want someone completely and totally pedantic to crawl inside my head and whisper pretty much whatever he wants because I have faith that he sees me better than I see myself and I think he will say things I should hear.
I hope my submissive trusts me for fairly similar reasons.
I know Sarah trusts me for that reason. Lots of history proving that I will tell you what you really need to get programmed into your inside voice as I cause your body to absolutely flood with chemicals so that these lessons can be beaten as deeply into your unconscious existence as possible.
You are good. You are worthy. You are strong. You are beautiful. You are so very necessary. You are wonderful. I see you. I am so happy you are here. Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for loving me. I love you. I love you. I love you.
The script varies and has different components but that’s kind of the basis of what I like to beat into people.
I don’t hit people because I want them to feel small or bad or wicked. I hit people because it is fucking hot and you are so fucking nice for letting me do this. Extra bonus points if it gets you off. I’m completely satisfied with you just enjoying it.
For me, and for some other perverts I know, bdsm is sex of the mind and the body but not necessarily of the genitals. It can involve the genitals but it doesn’t have to. It’s about the chemical experience of strong sensations in your body. It’s about the power dynamic of doing that to someone or letting someone do that to you. Submitting your body to someone else’s desires is hotter than the sun.
I mean, I think. But I’m highly sexually submissive. I just don’t do that without serious negotiation. I think those kinds of roles are things that must be highly explicitly stated. I think the expectations must be verbally agreed on or (preferably) written down so that can be reviewed as necessary.
Power exchange means permission to have expectations about how you will be treated. Without some serious verbal negotiation (or written for an ongoing relationship) it is inappropriate to get into a situation where you have serious expectations of how you will be treated.
Folks just don’t actually generally sign on for that. Not when it comes to pain play and power imbalanced relationships. Not anymore. Once upon a time such things were normal and expected but things have changed.
Now it’s abuse. If someone tries to control you or hurt you without extensively asking your permission they are an abuser and you need help.
Things change.
We have to adapt. Even if our wiring doesn’t want to. Even if we would be much more successful predators if we were more up front about our hunting.
Side note. There are many women in this world I’d like to meet and talk to. How does it feel to live in your world and have this many partners? I’m kinda a freak in my world.
I’m not sure they want to talk to me. Maybe I’ll find out some day.
You never know what might happen. Life is long.
It is weird how with every passing year I feel like I have more and more I want to do before I die. I feel so much more urgency to be busy and active and accomplish things. Shit. I might live to be as old as 80. That’s a lot of fucking time to fill. I’d better make lists. Or I’m going to be old and be pissed I wasted so much time.
Sometimes I’m quite angry with myself for how I spent my childhood. Then I try to find compassion. If I had been out trying to exercise by myself as I moved around as a child the horror stories I experienced would have been much more frequent.
It’s ok that I hid. I had good reasons. I need to stop hating myself for everything I had to do to get through hell.
It’s over. I can change now. I can do something different.
I feel guilty, Noah. I feel like I’m letting you down. I also feel like I’ve been dragging and dragging and dragging for a long time. I think you are filling my bucket with everything you have going spare.
I need a deluge from somewhere. So I have a nice safe deity lined up who will fuck me senseless and maybe eventually get around to hurting me; a nice safe Professor who will beat the shit out of me and (we’ll see); Sarah who wants me to gleefully beat on her while telling stupid jokes; and a nice submissive who wants me to make him bleed and bleed.
That’s a deluge if ever I’ve produced one. That’s a lot of energetic stuff going on.
I’ve never managed a line up that felt this intense this… instantly… before. April is going to be god damn intense.
Oh yeah, and I’ll be playing with Noah and our normal sex life will continue. Cause that’s not going to change.
I have a very hard time feeling like this is ok. But whether it is ok or not I am going to do it. Because Noah is the only person who could stop me (other than my proposed partners losing interest) and he’s… ok with it.
Maybe that’s over stating. He’s nervous right now.
I get it. I’m being a selfish bitch.
I feel like I am about to god damn explode out of this little box that my life is allowed to be. This is not all of who I am. I am big. I am so many things. I am so many people. I want so many experiences at so many intensity levels. I want all of it. I want all of you.
I’m a little surprised I managed to damn this for four years. That’s my longest stretch of monogamy in my life.
Watch the riverbanks flood. Just wait. Soon there will be so much green.
Speaking of which: I’m very happy with how the tile mosaics are coming along. As long as these people I already dislike manage to install this well… I will live in a gorgeous house. I’m a lot more talented than I thought, which is kind of funny.
I can make beautiful things. No, not perfect. No I don’t make pictures that look like photographs. But I help people feel feelings.
That’s all I’m trying to do.
Different people encourage me to look at myself in different ways. Yes, they may call me filthy names, but they also concretely say, “Let’s look at x, y, and z and talk about it objectively.”
Because the filthy names are at uhm, my request. It’s ok. It gets me off.
So the whore thing is so complicated. On one hand I want to stop having this negative thing in my head where I keep coming back to this awful place of feeling bad about who I am. On the other hand if someone is hurting me and fucking me and whispers that I’m a whore and I should come…
I will. Over. And over. And over.
I kinda don’t want to give that up just cause it isn’t pc? It is super hot.
But I want it to stop being part of my negative tape when I am having a bad day. I want to stop randomly feeling bad about myself and calling myself a whore because of it. That’s dumb.
I want to change that.
But eliminating the word whore from my life entirely isn’t it.
That would be easier. Avoiding this powder keg would be easier. But then I wouldn’t get to orgasm like that and I’m not that pc.
I was asked what doors I’m knocking on. I think that being as transparent as a piece of glass will save a whole lot of trouble down the line about misunderstood motives or impulses. Realistically, I figure out my motivations when I write them down and hope that I don’t piss people off too much in the process.
My submissive wants me to write more about him. He also thinks I don’t need to respect his privacy quite so much. Good to know. I went knocking on his door first. He has been in my life for about fifteen years. Primarily he has been my friend and not my submissive. He says I have spent more time dominating him than I think. I think he should wait six months and reevaluate that opinion.
Why him? Why now? I don’t know. Because for the past few years I have had a terrible need to get out kinetic energy in fierce ways and I have never in my life play with someone who swayed into my need to hit with such intensity?
He wants to make me feel better and if hitting him will do that, please oh please. It helps that he is one of the most intense masochists I’ve ever known. We are going to run into my limits as a sadist before we run into his limits as a masochist.
That’s a kind of freedom I don’t know how to describe for me. I spend my whole life being too much. Being too scary and intense and bad. I’m not for him.
He asked what to call me. Well I ain’t a fucking goddess or queen. Get that straight the fuck out of your head. Ugh. And I’m not a domme. I can’t stand that.
What am I?
I’m Krissy. But I want to control the shit out of a very small part of your soul. What does that mean? I don’t know yet. I’m going to get more… invasive over time. My encroachments will be very slow. They will come in inches and millimeters until you notice that I’ve covered a tremendous amount of ground and holy shit how did I get there.
I want to boil you alive.
I want to find out what it means to do that.
Given what he’s writing I’m not sure I am going to be able to be as intense as his fantasies. We’ll see.
Wait, Princess? You want to call me Princess? Ok that’s kind of hilarious. I’ll consider it.
Why do I want this with him so badly right now? Part of it is the fact that he has patiently waited, while indicating interest in the most subtle and non-forceful of ways for over a decade. He’s not a stalker. He’s not entitled. He’s not pushy. He just… lets me know he’s interested. I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel like I need to be prepared to defend myself. I feel safe and I feel like it is safe to be parts of myself I otherwise have to keep under lock and key. I feel like it is a rare and wonderful thing that I have the talents I have, that I can make people happy the way I can.
Why not any other submissive, ever? Because. Because clearly, he doesn’t need me to take over to fix his problems. His life is fine. He’s doing great. Because he has done a really high amount of Emotional Labor with no promise of ever getting anything back. He gives because he wants to. Because he thinks I deserve it.
Noah does a lot for me. I don’t want to sound ungrateful. It’s a very different kind of care and labor and consideration. Noah will not suffer for me to take away some of my suffering. That’s not our dynamic and I’m happy about that. That’s not what I want with Noah.
Why do I need this relationship to be stone? That is weighing on my soul. I feel really mixed about wanting to play with him and deny him sex. I know he likes having sex with me. We’ve been on/off lovers for a long time.
I just need it. I need to have something really intense and really important… without my cunt. I know I’ve been doing that with friendships over the last few years, but they’ve all been at arms length. They’ve all been carefully chaperoned and supervised and controlled. I need to control myself in this way when I’m engaged in play. I need to. I need to feel that sadism not part of being fucked partially because being fucked is such a different experience.
The second door I went knocking on was one of my Daddy’s. He’s like way Top 5 so if I have a hunting license he’s going to be on the list forever. Unfortunately for me, fortunately for him, his love life is going very well and he doesn’t have much time for me. Maybe someday I’ll be driving by at the right time and I’ll get to bang him but… the chances are slim. I’m happy to just have permission again. He has been in my life for twelve years. Why do I come back to him? Because when I am in his presence he makes sure that he lets me know that he knows me and that he loves me in all my complexity. He was the first person to teach me to eat English muffins and blueberry jam. I have quite a soft spot for him. He was the first man I was ever involved with who cooked for me regularly.
I don’t have permission to write about the third yet. I will ask.
Number four is a sweet french vanilla deity I hunted on okcupid. I strung him along right before I turned off my profile four years ago. He became a friend later. I am… very interested in what I missed. I am interested in large part because he was super enthusiastic about an intense negotiation and lead up and then…. he was nice when I backed out. He never demonstrated even an ounce of entitlement. He’s been sweet and mellow ever since. He pops up to initiate conversations with me more than the vast majority of people I know. He continues to seek me out just because he wants to talk to me.
He’s in between relationships so he seems to find it entertaining to show me what I missed. And he did buy that picnic basket just for seducing me and then we never got around to it. So he’s about four years old. (Uhhh… wait… that sounds wrong.)
I think that is going to be a lot of fun. I haven’t had a new-to-me partner with lots of lead up in a very long time. This is going to be… interesting. Fun. Exciting! I feel like this is appealing for a variety of reasons. For one: new people are always exciting to me. Repeats are good too, but new people have a special spice. For another: he feels safe. I’m not sure I’d be willing to go to the house of a random one-off right now. It feels risky in a way I can’t do right now. But this deity seems fine. He’s been to my house. He isn’t a stranger. He isn’t random.
He isn’t yet in my count but I feel like I know him enough that I have a very good understanding of how this will play out.
Why do I call him French vanilla? Because he’s kinky but not in the way I think of from my Middle Guard training experiences. He’s closer to Noah. There is a difference between people who like having kinky sex when they happen to be in a relationship and people who will go to bdsm and/or sex parties every weekend and munches throughout the week because they just need to be around perverts.
It’s not a bad difference, but there is a big difference.
I… can’t write about number three yet. That’s a story.
Otherwise I plan to go do as much bdsm play with old friends as I can manage at the few parties I get to go to for a while. Noah says I can play freely at parties (with barriers). In my experience of the bdsm community like 99% of my bdsm play will be non-sexual. Noah and I intend to hit up the occasional swingers party which will be no-lead-up-casual-sex.
Uhm. Yeah. That’s my itinerary.
I feel a little…. weird… about the fact that this is in fact kinda reserved for me. God damn. I’m not interested in lining anyone else up because I get a date a month. Why so many? Why so fast? Because there are all these parts of me that are screaming and screaming and screaming for attention and I can’t even look at them in my normal life.
Number three is a story.
I find that people (who want kinky sex at all) tend to fall into two generic camps. People for whom bdsm/etc is foreplay and they are there to get laid. Then the people for whom genital stimulation may be almost entirely optional. They are there for the emotional power trip.
I “grew up” with people who were not genitally focused. I learned a lot of things that way. I learned a lot of associations and behaviors. I am a genitally focused person. I like doing bdsm without sex but if I’m going to pick either bdsm or sex 9/10 times I’ll pick sex. (Which is part of why Noah is so dreamy. He likes kink stuff, but mostly we just fuck like rabbits.)
So French vanilla is anything but an insult. It’s a way of helping myself evaluate what I’m in for. A lot of why I like having promiscuous sex is because I like making other people feel good. I like getting them off. I like having them feel satisfied. French vanilla sex is kinda my sweet spot but I have needs outside that range too. I am closer to a weekend warrior than a Lifestyler.
I choose that.
I have been a Lifestyler. I didn’t get fucked enough and that was a serious problem.
But I feel like I have bdsm needs that aren’t getting met in this new era of raining dick. (Thank you Noah. I am grateful.) I’m not sure what that means. I’m not sure how to do this. I’m not sure what I actually need.
It’s not that Noah and I never do bdsm play. It’s not that I dislike how he plays. It is that there are differences in our styles and preferences and experience levels.Not insurmountable problems. But problems that are hard to solve given the limitations in our lives.
Just for now. I think this will get easier with time.
Despite other flattering offers being floated up to my door in bottles… I think this is going to be a full roster for this year. I don’t know that the deity will be an ongoing thing. I have no idea what Number Three wants yet, not really. I don’t know what I want either. I think it will be ongoing with my submissive. I want to really delve into this.
I think that doing these things is part of loving myself. Even though that is complicated. I’m not one thing or another. I’m not a gentle person. I’m not a harsh person. I’m a little bit of everything, all rolled into one. (Thanks Meredith Brooks.)
I’m scared of wanting these things. I’m scared of wanting these people. I’ve wanted them for a long time. It’s not like any of this desire is new. I’ve just been actively sitting on it for years… mostly to prove that I can.
See. I can pick Noah. I can be Loyal. But it’s…. hard.
I’m not that loyal of a person. Or rather, I’m loyal in ways that might be nonstandard. There are gals who start dating a military guy at 15 (like I did) and stay with him forever. I replaced him within a few months. If I don’t like how I’m being treated… I move on. Bye now.
Every.Single.One of these doors I’m knocking on are guys (why are they always guys? Cause they are easier to approach?) who have demonstrated over literal years that I am worth emotional labor from them. Even though most women complain bitterly that they can never get a guy to perform emotional labor for them. God I feel like an asshole. How did I get so lucky?! Noah says it is because I am finicky and demanding and that draws the kind of people who like to jump through hoops. He says that emotional labor is one of those massively unfair feast or famine things. Either folks find ways to gets tons of it from the people around them or they get almost none.
I get a lot.
The doors I’m knocking on aren’t doors I closed because I didn’t like them or didn’t want them (or maybe I didn’t at the time). The doors I am knocking on are doors where I have experienced intense emotional support without having to earn it. I just… got it. Because they wanted to give it to me.
Why do I always turn that into wanting to have sex with people? I don’t. But sometimes I do. Particularly with men who overlap with my sexual interests oh so neatly. I don’t have women or non-binary people throwing themselves at me in the same way.
Shooting fish in a barrel is way easier than taking a shotgun out on a boat and hoping you hit something. I’m a lazy predator. I like knowing I’m going to succeed. So I ask super bluntly, really early, and only keep around the people who seem like they really deserve it and have an appropriately high level of interest. If you aren’t that into me I need to move on.
It’s not like I have a shortage of people I know. These are people who showed up to do emotional labor, while indicating that I’m hot, and taking no really well.
How could I not fall in love with them?
I don’t know.
I’ll be straight that the French vanilla deity is the one I’m the least in love with. But I still like him a whole awful lot. He’s funny, serious but not in an obnoxious way, so smart, patient, aware…
He’s also the newest. Things do tend to age and mature for me. My submissive has been in my life for the longest. Then Noah. Then Daddy. Then Number Three. Then the French Vanilla deity at a mere four years.
I sure do like to put people through the ringer.
Why are they still interested at all? I really don’t know. I don’t.
I hope it is partially because they show up to perform emotional labor when they feel they have it to give and I am not needy, demanding, or obnoxious about invading their lives? I’m ok with being a ball of need alone in a room. I don’t have to demand that someone fix me, not now. I still like talking to people though.
Despite super intensively interesting awesome offers floating into my inbox…
This is a way full roster. Holy crap Krissy. Uhm. If you’ve been following long enough you know it isn’t that extreme. Picture me slapping my face down into my hands now.
These are all people who have indicated a high degree of agreement with my beliefs around how much my children should know.
I’ve spent a lot of the last few years trying to get my emotional/attention needs met from female friends in platonic relationships. Guess what, this isn’t doing what I want it to do. Most of them aren’t real available. They don’t have much drive to perform a lot of emotional labor for me and as a result… I have mostly stopped calling them. I’m an asshole but it is hard to be the one who calls more than 90% of the time. At some point I will just stop. And Pam is about to leave the state for a few years.
I think I needed to slam this door open so hard because what support network I was building wasn’t working at all and I need to go back to something that has had more success or I can’t keep giving to the kids the way I am. My drawer of spoons is empty. You know what… that’s not true. I actually have a few spoons in my drawer right now. I feel like I have finally started reversing the flow.
I’m sleeping better. I have more energy to be productive when I do work. I’m resting better when I’m supposed to rest. My digestion is still… settling while I do this cleanse nonsense. I’m almost done though and I told the nutritionist I need a break.
I haven’t been seeing chiropractors or acupuncturists in a bit because I’m freaking out about money. It’ll even out…. soon I hope. I skipped my massage this week because I threw up an hour before my appointment.
And yet I still feel so much better than I did. I feel like I have stuff to do. I feel like I’m excited to go to sleep because that will give me energy to wake up and do the things I want to do.
I feel better than I have in many years of sitting in the park all day. Somehow… I didn’t get many emotional needs met that way.
And yeah, hunting is part of this. I like the me I am with Noah. I like all the gifts he has given me in terms of emotional labor, attention, and approval. But he has like, a job and an own self to pay attention to, and kids, and books he writes and… stuff.
Whoo hoo! Number Three woke up and gave me approval to talk about him. Hot.
Ok. I’m now glad this took me long enough. We did take a break to go to breakfast.
Number Three shall henceforth be known as the Professor. He is another person I met on okcupid, but I met him during that freakishly short period of time I lived alone in San Jose. Puppy had just dumped me. I was teaching. I was freaking out because I left my Owner because I wanted to find someone to marry and have kids with and the hunt wasn’t going very well. The Professor wasn’t the Professor then. He was exactly my age and still in college. He was interested in me.
He came over and helped me grade papers. We kissed once and I couldn’t handle kissing a cigarette smoker and I said no.
That was eleven years ago. In that time he has become my friend. (He also quit smoking.) He has had his own life story in that time. Relationships that taught him lessons, painful and otherwise. On this list of doors I’m knocking on he is by far the closest to being a Lifestyler. He has spent most of the last ten years hanging out in the community getting very good at a lot of physical skills. I haven’t seen him play in a while, but the way he talks about himself has changed. More humble and more self assured at the same time.
He is also one of the most pedantic motherfuckers I have ever had the privilege to know.
If you know me you know that sentence is dripping with admiration and affection.
Noah is a pedantic motherfucker. The Professor can give him a run for his money. They mostly don’t overlap in areas of obsessive study and this is better for the whole universe.
I clearly have an intellect fetish thinking about the folks I’m chasing hard.
If you can’t teach me something, why am I here? I have things I need to learn and right now I’m in a very selfish stage. The only people I’m teaching are my kids because they take all that I have to give in that department and then some.
The Professor will take me on a journey. As much as I love that Noah’s bdsm is seriously dominated by his desire to fuck me, the Professor isn’t quite so dick obsessed. (I love you Noah, I’m not complaining.) This will be a long scene. The kind I used to do a few times a week. The kind that take you on a journey of emotional development and leave you wrung out like a dishrag on the floor, spent.
I want it. I want to be hit and hit and hit and hit and hit.
Want to know something funny? I don’t know for sure if he will kiss me. I don’t know if he will have any interest in fucking me. I… I am not 100% sure where my preferences lie. I’m not chasing him because I feel like I haveto haveto haveto get access to his dick. I’m chasing him because I think he has the precision and control to fuck with my mind. Perhaps he will also want to fuck with my cunt and I’m not opposed to that. But it is less the goal. I will be ok with following that journey where it needs to go. I think there is a part of me that thinks I can’t get too interested in sex with him because I want him to decide at the end of the scene and I want to be ok either way. If I get my hopes up and he doesn’t want to fuck me I will feel rejected and bad and really not ok. If I decide I don’t want to fuck him and he does want to fuck me I will probably not want to say no and that’s complicated.
For the record, I’m totally leaning towards wanting to fuck him and I’m trying not to get too focused. I have now seen a picture of his cock (I love my friends) and I’m pretty confident that wouldn’t be scary. Fantastic. Yes. Try not to have expectations. I may not even get to see his cock in person. Just accept. Because that is seriously what I’m looking for that night.
So I’m out here chasing a stone relationship, one where I don’t know if I will get laid or not, one where I was told probably not, and one where sex is a more sure thing at least once but I don’t know if it will continue.
So I’m thinking with my cunt and I’m not.
Noah, thank you for your permission.
Want to know why this is worthwhile for Noah? Today is the 13th of the month and we’ve already hit quota (10 times/month). February was quota and a half. Our sex life explodes when I feel like I have more options.
The kids have been telling me that I’m being more patient and fun. They are noticing an improvement to such a degree that they are spontaneously commenting on it.
I’m not sure I’m doing anything bad here. But I’m scared. I’m scared I will hurt everyone. I’m scared that I’m so selfish I don’t deserve all of this wonderful. I should let more of the decent men go find other women. (Hey–every single one of these dudes is seeing multiple women. I’m not monopolizing anyone but Noah. And he’s hunting.)
Why did I flip from NO to yes?
I’m not feeling honorable.
I want this. I want this. I want this.
I’ve been a kinky motherfucker all of my life. I officially entered the bdsm community at 18, but I was doing kinky stuff before then. I’ve been giving oral sex for 31 years. I’ve been having PIV (penis in vagina intercourse) by choice for 22 years. This summer marks 16 years of my life in the bdsm community. In two more years I will have been in the bdsm community (to some degree or another) for half of my life. I feel very confident saying that being a pervert is part of my identity. Part of my identity I’m thoroughly comfortable with.
But things shift over time. The kind of pervert I am changes. The kinds of things I like has drifted considerably, especially since having kids.
In all these 16 years I have resolutely shied away from pursuing any kind of ongoing interaction where I was to be Dominant. That’s been a line for me. I like being toppy. I’m sadistic as fuck. But I’m not a Dominant. Nope, that’s not me.
I’m a serious control freak and I manage a lot of that by being the submissive/bottom/slave because then I’m the one who does the vast majority of the work and it goes how I prefer. I date lazy tops. Perfect.
But my life has changed a lot. I feel like I have changed.
There are a lot of people and situations in my life where I could railroad people and control the shit out of them. I’m home schooling my kids. I could micromanage the fuck out of them. I could require them to be submissive to me. Legally I have the right. Yesterday I read this post that reminded me of why I really don’t want my children to be submissive to me in any way.
I don’t know about you, but I fall into being a bully real easy. I have to be careful not to control people inappropriately. I have big opinions and big feelings and people who aren’t rock solid in themselves like being influenced. I could be a serious problem for a lot of people.
I try so hard to not be that. I keep my boundaries fiercely. I don’t boss people beyond very specific, small, limited places where I ask for consent. “Hey we want to organize this event, can I boss people around to get things done quickly?” At this stage of my life 9/10 times when I ask that people gratefully say, “Oh please do.” I’m good at figuring out a plan. I’m good at bossing people.
But I’m scared of it. I avoid it. I don’t seek it out in an ongoing way. I do not want a job where I have that kind of control over people. I am not stable enough. I am not kind enough. I make such bad assumptions.
I act without thinking and I hurt people when I do too much of that.
It isn’t safe nor appropriate for me to be too bossy with any of my friends or family members.
But lately I want to boss. I want to control. I want to have influence in an ongoing control-tastic way.
I got this email from my friend. The one I topped the other night. The one I’ve been thinking about a lot for a while now. The one who likes the really super intense play that I like.
I’m thinking about him way more than is good for my overall balance of life. Holy shit. What do I want from him?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So much. So little. Such specificity. I don’t want to try to meet all his needs. I want to negotiate a very small slice of his soul and control the ever loving shit out of that. As I hurt him really badly.
Anyone who tells me they really want to see me come up from biting them with blood dripping down from my mouth?
Shit. We need to get tested.
Cause I can’t draw blood until we have both been recently tested. I have kids. I have to care. I have too many friends who have contracted Hep C.
Cause if you have been dreaming for years about having me hurt you like that and I have been dreaming for years about hurting you like that and my husband doesn’t mind and your partner thinks it is hotter than the sun?
Uhm…
Why not?
I have worked very hard to cram all of the “me” that is a pervert into a very small box that I keep in the closet. I take it down for very rare special occasions when my kids are far away and kept safe with someone I trust completely.
I know that many people in the community are ok with somewhat fuzzy boundaries with their children. I am not comfortable with that. I need boundaries between them and my sex life constructed with steel beams and concrete reinforcement. This is a no-information/no-fly zone kiddos. Nope.
No, I won’t swing in the house with the kids.
Just no.
Not because I’m judging you. Because I’m trying to deal with the body and brain I have. I’m trying to deal with the highly traumatized DNA sequence I passed down.
Why does sex with Noah behind a closed door feel fine as long as we are quiet? Because I’m really thrilled that my kids think that sex is a natural part of growing up and finding a partner. I’m ok with modeling that.
I can’t model promiscuity. Not given my background.
You know what? My kids have flat told me they don’t want me to date. They know that we have friends who date outside their marriage. They don’t care about what other families do. They told me flat out that they don’t want to give up more time with me.
They are little for such a short time. I’ve already been a pervert for so long. I have already been a slut for so long. Those things will still be there when my children no longer want me like this. I have one shot in this lifetime to nail the kind of parenting relationship I want to have and that means giving my children far more than I want to give. It means giving up things I want really badly for a while.
Life is always about choices.
Noah could tolerate a lot more promiscuity and boundary pushing and dysfunction. But then I’d be teaching it to my kids.
No.
It isn’t that I think that modeling dating is inherently wrong. I truly don’t. Other people have very different lives.
I think I don’t know how to model long term stable relationships. I like picking up strangers and fucking them once or twice and moving on.
I don’t want to model what I like.
Even if I don’t want to stop liking it. I just don’t want to like it in front of them.
This feels so complicated. I don’t like being in the closet. I don’t like feeling like a liar. I don’t like feeling like I am being anything other than 100% brutally honest.
You know what? I am with my kids. I still have boundaries. They sometimes ask probing questions about my history or my experiences and I will either say something matter of fact like, “Yes I dated lots of people before I got married because I wanted to figure out what things were important to me” or “That’s something private that I will not discuss with you during your childhood. You need to grow up without having that information in your brain. You can find it out later.”
So I’m not… lying… but I only answer selectively.
Part of how I have kept these divisions is “I did a lot of stuff in the past I’m not doing now and I have no shame about any of it” and “Right now I’m doing the mom thing.”
But the “mom thing” isn’t all of who I am. Even the (incredibly hot) sex I have with Noah feels like part of the mom thing and…
It isn’t all of who I am.
I’ve gone through a lot of evolution of perception of self. Especially with regards to the word whore. (Small disclaimer in case anyone is new: I’m not talking about sex work. I’m talking about personal associations from formative abuse. Specifically I have to figure out how to get my brain to work around shit my father did. It’s complicated. I’m not knocking anyone or any careers.)
I’m going to need some way to refer to this person I’m playing with. I will need a code name. I’m not ready to make one up yet so this is awkward. I have blanket permission to write about him, but he values his privacy.
For a long time I genuinely saw myself as a kind of sacred whore. I had sex with a lot of people, many of whom… weren’t getting a lot of other play. I feel like there is a lot of emotional healing that comes through sexual intimacy and you can absolutely experience that with strangers. There is a validation and affirmation that doesn’t exist in other kinds of connections in my experience. But it only happens with a highly, highly experienced partner who knows how to read intricate body signals and ask the right questions.
I’m really good at it. I’m told. By an exceptionally long list of people. So I have to believe it is true.
This person I’m playing with likes a lot of degradation with his submission. He wants to be called a whore and I get that. There isn’t a lot I find hotter during sex than having someone grind into me and call me a whore… so I get it. Better if I’m being hurt while they are calling me a whore and fucking me. I’ll usually come right there.
I’m having big feelings about degrading him. He asked me a lot of specific, leading questions leading to his desire to be degraded. Oh my.
I want control so badly right now. I want to be able to boss someone around a lot. I want to really play with someone’s mind. I want to headfuck someone until I can tell them that down is up and up is down.
I know how.
I’ve taken lots of classes. I’ve practiced with lots of people who are considered experts. I trained for this.
But I’ve never actually gone and done it. I’ve always been terrified of this. I don’t have the right. I was a Wiccan too early in life. What you put out there comes back to you times three. Be very careful what you wish for and make happen in your life.
I want to crawl into someone’s head and change parts of how he feels about himself. Not in bad ways. I don’t want to hurt him. I want to… tweak him. Because it’s hot. Because controlling people is so fucking hot.
I don’t want to hurt his life. I don’t want to interrupt his relationship with his partner or his kids or his job or his other play partners or…
I just want this. This piece of control. That I can’t explain yet. I don’t know what it is I want so god damn badly right now.
Thinking about the fact that he has to wait for a letter in response to his email because I feel like making him wait …. I’m going to masturbate quite a few times today. This is hotter than fuck.
(Yes I have appropriate boundaries around it. Don’t worry, I can come quick. I only need like three minutes of privacy.)
The email he wrote me is earth shatteringly hot and I can’t quite quantify why. The depth of longing. The number of years this longing has been sustained for.
I met him when I was 19. He likes to say that I had him from, “And who the hell are you?” Apparently that was the first thing I said to him and he was done.
You know…
I feel like this is a bad rom com justification for intense longing wearing people down.
In this moment I all of a sudden understand one of my friends much better. She has a marriage in which they do not discuss politics because they are on opposite sides of the fence. This man and I… have very differing views. We are going to need a hard and fast rule that if one of us notices that we want to have an argument because it is veering near politics we will need a Shiny Change Of Topic. Because…. I know his views. I know his views about a lot of things don’t align with mine for very complicated and diverse reasons.
He isn’t someone I could have married and had kids with for a laundry list of reasons. Guess what? That role in my life is filled and I’m fucking thrilled with how it is going.
But there is this stuff that I really fucking like to do that I can’t do with my husband because holy shit is he not interested.
Noah’s ok with some biting and scratching because it indicates enthusiasm and he likes that. But he is not a masochist and he has decided limits and he gets mad if they are crossed. It isn’t hot.
He has offered, over the years, to do some bottoming if I feel like I just absolutely have to do it and I just… can’t hit him. Not like that. He doesn’t like it. I topped him once because he wanted to feel what it was like to go through a hook pull and he needed help from endorphins and it sucked for him.
I can’t ever do that to him again.
But I really really really like hurting people and it is much easier to control that impulse on a regular basis if I have occasional times when I get to feel like, “Yes, This Is The Right Time And Space”. It is easier to understand what boundaries feel like when you get to have lots of them in different places at different times for different reasons.
I’m horrified by the idea of putting mild pornography in front of an unknown vanilla audience. But I will take all my clothes off in a room full of strangers, crook my finger at a person I don’t know and proceed to fuck right there. I will go to Folsom Street Faire and tie up any person who wants to get tied up because I know I am safe and competent and I won’t hurt them and they will get to have a sensual experience.
Boundaries, motherfucker.
Some time ago one of my children was being friendly with a random other child while we were waiting in line somewhere. The kids were going to have to just stand there for an hour or more. After a few minutes of Eldest Child trying the mother looked at me and said, “Your children have no boundaries, do they?”
Whoa.
What a global statement. We are friendly in a way that is highly unusual outside of California. We are enculturated to being part of a place that treats everyone warmly and like we could be best friends and we just don’t know it yet.
This is where we have always lived. This is how we know how to be. It isn’t that we have no boundaries. I’m wary about going into peoples houses. The kids have a lot of boundaries around going into secured spaces with people they don’t know. They are only allowed to be taken in the cars of very specific people and we have passwords around that.
No boundaries, holy fuck.
We like to pass the time in line by being friendly. Some of those random chats have turned into beautiful friendships. You know what? On the road trip we stopped in Michigan to visit with a man I met in a grocery store. Because he was wearing a pervy t-shirt and I needed to ask him to join the Mountain View Perverts Society. (We weren’t a real thing, but there was a shocking density of pervert households in a small area; we knew each other.) At worst it usually means standing in line is less tedious.
No boundaries. Jeeez.
You know what? My husband neither wanted nor asked for sexual fidelity when he married me. Nor did I.
I said I would be faithful to our relationship. That doesn’t mean anything about who I fuck or beat. If I am faithful to what Noah wants from me… You know what? I’m better able to be present with Noah if I have other needs met by other people. It means I spend less time being frustrated with him that he completely fails to be a queer masochist. I mean, what the ever loving fuck did I do wrong in this life to end up married to a hetero top?
But you have to take the hand you are dealt. He wanted me. He wanted to do the kids and home schooling thing. He has been up for everything I want to do in life. He isn’t someone who has as much strong direction as me. He’s thrilled to have someone with a stronger rudder around.
But I can’t control him. I don’t boss him. And I can’t hit him.
I have someone I like, someone I love even, walking into my life and telling me that they want me to hurt them as much and as deeply and as harshly as I want to because they think I deserve to have that release in this lifetime.
Holy fucking shit. God that’s hot.
What do I mean when I say I don’t want to date? Because clearly that means something to me. I think it means: if my children have already known you as the kind of person who comes to one big party a year and maybe one dinner a year… that’s probably where it is going to stay. I don’t take much time away from my kids. I need a lot of alone time and that dominates the time I take away from my kids. If I start seeing someone else on my own time frequently… it would cut into how present I can be with my kids and that’s not ok. But I want to see him so much.
And I’m making him wait for letters before we negotiate more. Oh, he’s probably reading this. But that’s different, you know? There are a lot of things I’m not saying here. A lot of things that are going to be private negotiations and may not ever be written about because I’m not 100% sure I want my kids to be able to find that in the archive.
I want to do some pretty fucking evil things.
And he really wants to let me.
Why is that so bad?
I don’t know.
I’m having a hard time talking myself out of it. I don’t want to talk myself out of it. I want to ………
Oh god.
Yes, when we played last weekend it was not anywhere near what we’ve talked about so far. Yes it was sexier. Yes it was more gentle. I was trying to not squick the vanillas, ok?!
Boundaries, motherfucker.
God. This scene is going to be so hot I should sell tickets.
Hey, maybe it would be a way to get enough money to pay to rent a play space during a time when my babysitter is actually free… Ha.
No pictures though. He has privacy concerns.
Yes. I want to take you. Yes. I want to take you.
God the sex is complicated. I think…
I think that is going to have to be part of what makes this so fucking hot. I think my pussy won’t be involved. I’ve never had a stone relationship before. I have never before in my whole slutty life been interested in having a stone relationship. I don’t know what the fuck this means.
It isn’t that I think I won’t have sex with people other than Noah. He kinda holy-crap enjoyed the swinger thing and… yeah I can do that.
It isn’t “what I want” in the same way. But it is close enough and fun enough and sure.
I want to use you and use you and use you and fuck with your head and build you up and help you feel a whole lot more cocky about how wonderful you are with everything you have to offer. I just want this tiny piece of it. But I’ll talk a lot about how much I enjoy all the other parts of you. I want you to be whole.
I want you to be a whole you. I think I can feed part of you.
I think you have already given me something.
I’m sleeping a lot better.
I told the woo Dr I need a month off from these supplements. I need to figure out how my body is doing after what we have been doing.
A lot of my pain issues are improving. I can feel that most of my current ache is because of current unfamiliar strenuous labor. My hands are getting wrecked. I really ought not be typing.
But I can’t say all of these things to Noah. And I need him to know that I’m thinking them. Because I need to be as absolutely transparent with Noah as I can be and in most of our lives… we just can’t talk about this stuff.
I don’t want to “date” in the next ten years. I want my kids and Noah to take up pretty much all of my time. I need that safety. I need it. I don’t know how much time I can carve away from that in order to come out with the relationship I want to have with my kids.
Don’t worry, I’m going to launch these puppies. Then I’ll have more, ahem free time. But a lot of that will go to Noah as his reward for supporting me and providing for me so well for so long.
I don’t know what is left.
I kinda want to find out.
I feel so alive.
I went to a party last night. The kind of party where you aren’t supposed to talk about what you do. But how much do I respect those boundaries? Only by the skin of my teeth. Which has no skin. So I totally don’t get that expression.
It was hot. I had a lot of fun. It was interesting to manage my feelings and expectations. Noah had more uhm contacts than me (this was intentional) and we both left feeling like we had a really positive experience.
I do have explicit permission to write about one of my partners. He has given me blanket permission to write about him. But that’s complicated. You see, a lot of folks I know… also know him. I’m having big feelings. They come in waves and layers and they impact many different aspects of my life.
Who am I? What do I want? Am I good or am I a monster? Can’t I be both? Is it ok?
I’m not sure I want to stop being a monster. What I want to do is go bite him right on top of the bruise he has from me biting him last night. That’s what I want to do.
He said that for that night it was a 9 but in the future I can treat it like a 7 because he really wants to let me do what I want to do.
So. Hot. Explosively. Hot.
Well I had my first fuck since Muse. Not with my friend I am hurting. Why not?
Why not?
Why not?
Why do I need that to be a boundary? I’m still thinking about it. It’s complicated. It has to do with a sense of obligation, about boundaries, about my own limits around energetic output, and of course it’s about the fact that when I’m being super slutty… I wanna bottom.
Even though it is explosively orgasmic to fuck your throat, it is hard for me to turn around and say, “Ok now I want you to fuck me like this and like that and do it this way and harder and…”
When I’m fucking I want to drop like a rock.
That was part of the trouble with breaking the rule in Portland. I wanted to break so many rules. I wanted to cheat. Because he likes flipping people.
That’s where I get in trouble. My friend, who lets me hurt him so exquisitely, has absolutely no drive or desire or impulse to flip me. Not an ounce. None. I’ve looked in that well. I’ve dug out the bottom praying for brackish sips of toppy energy.
I love you so much. I want to drop when I fuck.
I feel bad for wanting that and I don’t want to feel bad for that.
I can do enough feedback to tell a stranger how to avoid land mines and encourage them to hit the tempo I want. That’s easy. I can’t tell a submissive how to fake being forceful enough to fuck me. I know folks who can. My hat is off to you. Sounds fucking hot. I can’t do it.
That was the thing with my Owner. He liked to submit to me. But when he was done he wanted to flip the table hard and have me go down.
I like that.
If I don’t feel a strong challenge, if I don’t feel like someone kind of wants to crawl inside me to eat my neck from the inside… meh. I’ll go find someone else to fuck. Don’t worry. There are more out there. Dick is the most plentiful thing on earth. As Feminista Jones recently pointed out, dick is more plentiful than drinking water.
And if what I want is someone who will fuck me like an animal then go away and not talk to me anymore?
I’m in a god damn buyers market.
This is part of why negotiating boundaries with Noah is so hard. I’m so touchy. I’m so sensitive. I need so much attention and energy and maintenance. We aren’t going to be polyamorous any year soon if ever. I have no desire to share that big of a piece of him.
But how does it work to fuck your friends? How does it work to keep people at a distance? I don’t know.
My kids are my secondaries. That sounds creepy. I don’t think we have an emotionally incestuous relationship. I think we have a lot of boundaries around what it means to be support for one another. I don’t think I am overly enmeshed or overly dependent on them. But I am really seriously teaching them how to take care of themselves. And I’m doing that by figuring it out (kinda) in front of them.
I believe with all my heart and soul that much of this journey needs to be off-screen for them. Sure, I write about it publicly and some day they may discover just how skanky their mom was/is…
I can live with that.
I believe I am allowing them to grow up in a world where sexuality is normal, healthy, private, and personal. People do it in a lot of different ways for a lot of reasons and there is no one way that is right or wrong. We have friends of quite diverse family arrangements. And I’m matter of fact and shame free about all of it. I explain why things I tried failed because of defects in my personality. It isn’t that those ways of existing are wrong.
I just can’t do them.
I don’t know why sex can be biting someone and slapping him and fucking his throat with my strap on and that’s enough. We didn’t even kiss.
But sometimes that is a complete sexual experience that needs to be respected within the boundaries that apply to it. Sex isn’t what you think it is. Sex is a lot of things.
I kissed his body. I kissed his neck. I licked him. Do you know the most contact I had with his cock? When he was wearing pants I kneeled on his crotch and jerked him off with my knees. I was still fully dressed.
Sex can be a lot of things.
Sex can be a lot of things it can’t be with Noah. That’s feeling interesting to me right now. And then the pick up sex.
Gosh. Feeeeeeeeeeeeelings. Where do these all fit in my heart, in my loins, in my life?
I asked permission for the pick up sex. Absolutely no cheating happened. This was all highly negotiated and safe and what not. Lots of condoms and covered oral sex. Ok we didn’t use gloves for fingering.
I swear to goodness driving across the country with my kids was more dangerous than fucking this dude.
Why didn’t I hunt for a woman?
Complicated.
Because there are more feelings involved. Squishy feelings. Feelings I have a harder time keeping at arms length. Because I want to fall in love with you. Because I miss women so much. Because I would want to… not have the boundaries I’m supposed to have. Because I do want to come over and bring my kids and all of us can cuddle because surely that’s not a problem, right?
A long time ago I went home with a couple after a wild drug fueled orgy. I shit you not. In the morning the three of us were lying in bed naked doing more drugs. In walked their eight year old kid.
No one blinked. This was just normal.
I left very soon after. I didn’t really keep dating them. I couldn’t do that.
My kids know I smoke pot. My kids know I have had sex. My kids see my casually naked because I genuinely see nudity as not a big deal.
My kids don’t walk in on me smoking pot with my lovers in the nude. Nope, nope, nope.
Do I think I’m better than them? No. Not really. Because you can go down a list of this for that wrong for right and… I’m not. I’m not better than anyone. I don’t have stones to throw. But I have decisions to make about where my boundaries need to be.
Isn’t judging kind of a necessary thing in life? It doesn’t have to mean someone else is in the wrong. But you have to judge anyway. You have to judge if something is right for you.
I asked very careful permission before I engaged in any sm play because this was not a bdsm party. I asked the host, I found a semi-private room. I asked the other people playing in the room for permission before I got started. When other people wanted to join us in the room I asked them if they were comfortable before things got going.
I want it to be ok for me to be in my place in the weird ass world and I want it to be ok that sometimes other people need to be protected from my baser urges. My baser urges are pretty wicked and I know that. Whoa.
I kept it light. I knew I was at a vanilla party. I’m told I only got up to a 3/4 for the hitting. The biting I got more fierce because that doesn’t scare people who are watching. Uhm, not as much?
No punching. No kicking. No serious choking.
I kept it kinda sensual mean.
aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh. I’m going to beat off like a fiend for weeks thinking about this. I need to go to a real bdsm party with him so I can fuck him up. I feel like I’m fiending like a junkie. I like this feeling.
This used to be my life. Ok, I didn’t top that much. Enough. I topped as often as other people could talk me into it. Because people who really crave being hit can tell what I have hiding beneath my smile.
How am I going to keep boundaries around this?
I’ve already loved you for way more than ten years. I’ve known you for more than fifteen years. If this changes, what will that mean? How much of me is going to go to a relationship that has been… super low key for a long time?
That’s the rub. That’s where the negotiating comes in.
Last night I was teasing him and I was teasing me. I know what we both really want and I couldn’t give it to him there. It wouldn’t have been appropriate.
See: I can be taught.
He told me, “Many years ago I decided that even if I didn’t know what you wanted from me, I want to give you everything I have.”
Danger. Danger. Danger. Soooooooooooooooooo much temptation there. That could be so much fun. So much intoxication. So much excitement.
Crap.
It’s magical. It’s appealing.
I have at least ten more years before I will consider seriously dating. Realistically I’m not sure our marriage would survive a serious outside relationship for one of us. We are enmeshed mother fuckers.
But I don’t mind when he goes and does x with someone else.
Cause it isn’t cheating. I walked into the room. I saw what was happening. I saw who it was happening with. I grinned. I walked out.
I like watching other people but I honestly don’t like watching Noah have sex with a stranger. I like watching him fuck my friends because then I can tell them both what to do and be a bossy shithead. That’s kinda inappropriate when he’s banging someone I don’t know. Boundaries, bitch.
And the very best part is when we got home he wasn’t ready to get a hard on so he put on a strap on and fucked me till he was ready to get hard again. Because I wasn’t done yet and if you aren’t hard that’s fine, we have equipment for that. I’m not done yet. And then we woke up and had frantic sex again in the middle of the early morning.
Because we feel cocky, snotty, insatiable, and completely and totally lucky that we get to come home and fuck each other.
I think it is hilarious that my shrink is shocked by how much sex we have considering how long we have been married. “Krissy, you know that people just don’t do that, right?” Meh. I know people who do. Maybe you don’ t know the right people.
It’s all about where you stand.
Noah likes to make fun of me. If I can find people who are more extreme at something I will loudly and prolifically say that I’m not that good at ________. Doesn’t matter what the topic is.
If there are fifty people alive who are better than me, clearly I’m not that good.
Uhhhh, right?
Depends on your scale. I’ve never ever tried to be a specialist. I’m a generalist. So what the fuck does that mean?
I don’t know yet.
Let’s find out.
I was feeling kind of angsty. So I used an 18 year old coping method and I went and found a chat room. I sure like talking to people. That lead to a series of weird feelings.
I can’t get into specifics for Reasons because I was hanging out in a mental health support chat room. Folks care about their privacy a bit more than average.
I talked to a person who had an experience with abuse masquerading as bdsm. We had a long conversation. This person had no idea that such things happen to other people because this person was never part of “the scene”. I think I blew that persons mind a bit. I was casual and up front with all kinds of general attitudes and problems the community has. I feel guilty that I may have dove into the deep end of their trauma just casually answering the questions I was asked. They didn’t feel that heavy or intense to me because bdsm wasn’t traumatic to me. The community wasn’t traumatic to me. So I feel pretty guilty that I might have hurt this person by my indifference to the intensity that they experienced. I shared links to articles written by folks in the scene about the kinds of problems this person experienced. Mind blown. “This happens to other people?!?!?!” Yes. There aren’t that many truly singular human experiences. Most experiences happen to many people and you just have to ask around until you find your tribe.
That was actually a neat conversation for me. I’m very into talking about community dynamics. But it was so personal for them…
But more than that… I felt like I was bragging. When I’m asked, “How do you know so much about this topic?” “Uhm… I’ve been to a lot of national bdsm conferences. I’ve taught bondage and suspension classes. Go to a kinky book store, read the names of the authors… those are my friends.” And uhm, many of them have played with me. I feel like I must be lying or exaggerating but it is just plain true. I used to go around the country tying people up and being tied up for fun.
Then the topic morphed because the people in chat morphed. Chat rooms are like that. We talked a lot about travel and different climate zones and how food migration works and…
I have a lot of stories. When I get into a chat room and people are just casually going through lots of little references to get to know one another… I have a lot of stories. I think I sound more interesting than I am if you just listen to the things I’ve done.
I think I sound like a liar. I talk casually about travel all over my country and the world. I talk about good and bad things as casually as if they had equal impact on me and people react very oddly to that. I’ll go from telling a story about a principal being on first name basis with me in 5th grade to talking about being beaten daily by a different principal and neither mention feels “important” to me in the way it seems to hit other people. “Your principal hit you!” Uhm, it was Texas. They did that as of the 1990’s and I’m pretty sure they still do it now. It’s not a big deal.
That “it’s not a big deal” is part of why I feel weird. I moved so many times that I seem to have picked up pieces of a lot of different life stories and then I shoved them all together in a way that sounds… frankly impossible to casual listeners.
I have been called a liar to my face many times, that’s why I think I sound like a liar. I couldn’t possibly have done all the things I say I’ve done.
Dude, I really don’t exaggerate for effect much. I don’t have to.
Yes, I really was a teacher. Yes I really was a stage manager too. I’ve had people challenge that I could have done all the things I did. Uhm… I went to college. I did theatre in college. Being a stage manager is not exactly rocket science…. they let teenagers do it. Depending on how liberal you are with the definition of “teach” I have worked in an educational capacity with kids from 1st grade to community college. (I was a substitute for a while. That’s a hard fucking job.) In the community college I was the youngest person in my classroom. My students loved me. I can encourage you through writing a much more… assertive view than you even knew you had.
Yesterday I felt waves of shame, like I should stop bragging. I was just participating in a conversation. But that feels like shoving things in peoples faces. Other people participate in conversations by mostly listening. I should do more of that. Obviously me talking is a problem.
Why?
I don’t know.
I didn’t dominate the conversation. I wasn’t the only one talking. I wasn’t the only one with stories. But I was talking with up to five or six people and I dropped the most stories. I suspect this is related to typing speed in addition to other people being shocked that I just kept going. Nope, I’ve got lots more stories than these. I’ve barely shown you the tip of the ice berg.
What do you mean you are done?
Oh. I’ll shut up now. Uhm… I guess people are going to talk about tv characters now because they are out of personal stories.
Right. Uhm. Yeah. I’ll uhhh shut up.
I really like talking about myself. I really like hearing other people talk about themselves. Why do other people want to spend so much time talking about celebrities? It is very confusing to me. I only vaguely know the names of the people they are talking about from magazine covers in the grocery store. I’d rather chew my arm off than research these people so I can join in the conversation.
Uhm, I’ll go clean my house now. Thanks.
I flat refuse to spend time researching so I can join in slut-shaming other women. Fuck. That. Noise.
I think women get to fuck as many people as they want and it is none of your god damn slut-shaming business. Go straight to hell.
In my defense… I did not say that in the chat room. I did get quiet.
WHY DO PEOPLE GET SO UPSET THAT A WOMAN THEY DON’T KNOW IS HAVING SEX WITH A MAN THEY DON’T KNOW!!!!!!
I feel pretty upset by how much of this I’ve seen in the last day. That woman you are describing as a whore has fucked way fewer people than me. What do you want to say to me now? Nothing because I’m different? Fuck you with a chain saw.
Oh, you judge her because she was “stupid” enough to let her boyfriend take naked pictures of her? THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF SUCH PICTURES OF ME. FAR MORE EXPLICIT PICTURES. Fuck you very much.
I feel pretty pissy about this topic. Thus the shouting.
The only reason I’m “different” is because I’m not doing it today. If I was still behaving that way you wouldn’t think I was different. I am making different choices now for specific reasons related to managing my trauma. Not because I am a morally superior person who has conquered my base urges. Fuck you with a 2″x4″.
Even when I get ranty like this… I feel weird shame like I’m bragging. I’m just talking about my life but it feels like I’m exaggerating to make a point.. I’m not. These are just my thoughts and experiences. Ok, plus a few vague general threats at non-specific people. Not real threats. I don’t plan to shove anything forcibly into anyones orifices without permission ever in this life. But I’m colorful in how I bleed off stress.
This article right here is part of why I defend sex work so vigorously. It has a place in society. Women who have sex with lots of people have a place in society no matter why they are having that sex. Sex is one of the most primal urges we have and I don’t see how suppressing it does folks good. Let’s look at the history of abuse perpetrated by the Catholic church in the name of suppressing sexual desire. Not good juju.
I will not join in on dog piling on someone to tell them they are bad for making a choice you don’t agree with. That is not my job here on this planet. I really don’t want to tell people how bad they are.
I want them to feel like they are ok. And feel like there are probably other people like them and they are ok too.
I want people to feel ok with existing. I want people to believe that a community exists for them even if it is hard to find.
To me, the sum of my stories is a search for a place in community. I have tried a lot of things looking for community. Some tricks worked and some tricks failed spectacularly. I talk about both sides equally as freely. If other people can learn from my failures that makes them even more valuable.
I learn from other peoples failures. Part of the reason I haven’t really been in a relationship with intense domestic violence is because I watched it happen to other people and I made different choices.
The first time a boyfriend slapped me I exploded like a hurricane and ended the relationship. I am not going to fucking let anyone get away with slapping me and saying it doesn’t count as “really hitting”.
I have a very strong ability to set the reality of my life. I don’t let other people define what happens to me. My words. My opinions. My life. Fuck Right Off.
Why haven’t I had an abusive boyfriend? Because I only date people who force me to beg for my beatings. Or I walk. If I hint a little that a beating might be nice and you start hitting me… I leave. That’s not a safe situation. I often talk about deserving things I don’t really deserve or want. A partner who took such musings as hints to hit me… would not be safe.
I pick partners who make me beg for my beatings. I have to give explicit directions about where and how I want to be hit or they just don’t hit me. I really like the boundaries I’ve developed.
BDSM is not abuse. The difference between bdsm and abuse is educated consent on the part of the bottom. I have a real problem with experienced dominants manipulating inexperienced submissives. I think uneducated consent is basically invalid.
But I have strong opinions. When I play with newbies I give them a fucking lecture a mile long before I touch them. I want educated consent.
I learned by giving a blowjob to a little boy in kindergarden. Later he told everyone I raped him. From where I was standing…. he hadn’t said no. From where he was standing…. he hadn’t said yes.
I have a hard time forgiving myself for a mistake I made when I was five. I don’t get to make those kinds of mistakes ever again. Period.
Barely a topic switch… whether I am ever promiscuous again may actually revolve around how my kids turn out. If they are happy, healthy people who don’t give a shit… I might do it. If they would be horrified if they found out… I’m probably done.
I can’t hide who and what I am. I choose a relationship with my children over other aspects of myself. Even though I’d love to convert half the women in my future nursing home to lesbianism. That would be hawt. At least bisexuality if they didn’t want to swear off men. Personally I like people at all points along the gender spectrum. Yay people! Yay bodies!
When I first came into the bdsm community/public sex community I met this lovely woman. She was in her late 60’s when I arrived. I think she was 69 when I was 18. So that’s 15 years ago. I am pretty sure she’s still active. I saw her not that long ago. She is my hero.
I want to be playing with hot young 40 year olds when I’m in my 80’s. I’ll play with old people too… but that would be really fun. I think it is gross that the old men want teenage girls. I’ve done my virgin initiations. They weren’t the most interesting sex I’ve had. I’ll take grown ups, thanks.
The breeding period requires particular behavior sets from me. I chose it willingly with my eyes wide open. The boundaries do not yet chafe.
I get cranky about incidentals in my life. I get frustrated by details of my life. Overall I am so very happy that I’m doing what I’m doing. I like where I am. I’m learning how to be appropriate. I’m doing so in an environment that is actually safe for me. I will always have a version of appropriate that doesn’t match up with other peoples perfectly.
Like last night I apparently educated a local middle schooler about the basics of sex ed. Whoops. Hadn’t really set out to do that. But she asked direct questions. I’m not going to give evasive or shameful answers. Her friend freaked out and tried to shut me up. “SHE DOESN’T KNOW THESE THINGS YET!!!”
Yeah. And that’s dangerous. She needs to know these things so she can keep her body safe.
Someone with fully developed breasts and an hour glass figure needs to know the basic technical non-salacious names for sex. And if someone stands there and asks me direct questions… I’m going to answer them in plain language.
Awkward.
So yeah. Last night I was taught why my friend said, “Your kids are not sheltered.” No, but they are protected. I believe ignorance is dangerous. This is a big, scary fucking world. There are ways to minimize your risks.
I’m not blaming victims. I’m talking about how some women can walk through life making seemingly dangerous choices and they never get assaulted once. There are ways to minimize your risks. There are tricks to keeping yourself safe. I’ve talked to a lot of women about how they manage their lives.
I want to protect my kids. I believe that knowledge is power. They have all the age appropriate books on sex that exist. They know that sex makes babies. They can look at an anatomy drawing and show you where the vulva, labia, clitoris, prostate, anus, urethra, or penis is. Technically, Shanna has memorized more of the specific names than I have. I always have to reread the book to see what a lot of the accessory names are. I know fallopian tubes, but there are some tubes in guys that I don’t remember. She does. But I’m not the one who spends a lot of time talking about wanting to be a doctor.
They also know that sex is something adults do for fun but it isn’t for kids because it can hurt kid bodies.
Why did this come up? Because there are sexual references everywhere and Shanna asks what they mean. I am not graphic, but I say, “Well grown ups like thinking and talking about sex. So that’s a reference to sex. You’ll understand it after puberty.”
I talk about sex as if it is a normal, natural part of life. I talk about choosing when to have children based on being able to take care of a family. I talk about having “kissed boys and girls other than your dad before him because I wanted to make sure I knew I found the right person”. I’m not graphic.
I don’t want to be “out” with my kids the way some of my friends are out with their kids. My kids won’t see deviant-from-normal behavior during their childhood. Regardless of what I do during baby-sitting time.
And a lot of it comes back to feeling weird for talking about this stuff. Am I bragging? No. I’m trying to work out the logistics of my life. I’m trying to get a clear picture on who and what I am. I am trying to prove to myself, Yup. Still here.
I’m in the breeding period. Most members of my species end up here on accident and they kind of chafe at the boundaries as a result. Their freedom was curtailed not by choice. I want this so much.
I want to know what a childhood is like when the parents are not having sex in front of nor with their children. I want to know what a childhood is like when there isn’t constant drug and alcohol induced partying going on. I use pot, but it isn’t a party drug for me. It is something I do in isolation or I take a pill. I’ve only smoked around a handful of people (the wonderful folks who come over for dinner) and it doesn’t happen until after the kids are asleep. My kids are not growing up in a party house.
Only they are. It’s kind of weird. I’m finding out what “vanilla” parties are like and they are pretty fun.
Not long ago my neighbors re-did their house. They were tired of “looking like a preschool”. But… you have young children. Ok, the materials should age up, but why in the world do you think that your house shouldn’t look like kids live there?
Stop judging, Krissy.
I like that kids like coming here. They feel comfortable. I like that I can invite a whole bunch of people over and it works out really well. Everyone leaves raving about how they’ve had a wonderful time.
I’m going to go have fun with my family now.
I haven’t been hitting quota. (For non-long-term readers: we try to have sex ten times a month. I joke about it being my quota.) I just… can’t have more vanilla bunny sex than I’m having.
I didn’t go to Folsom yesterday mostly because I didn’t think I would have the self control to follow my boundaries. I want a pick up scene so bad. And I could have gotten lots of play. Lots. Being “good” isn’t feeling fun.
I want to do a take down scene with someone who would be equally gleeful about losing as they would be about winning. That isn’t a dynamic I can have with Noah. He doesn’t want to lose and he… is clear when it happens.
I don’t know how this will resolve. I’m not a heterosexual monogamous person. I still think that poly would be the end of my marriage. I would not put up with more of how things have gone. But I feel so antsy and restless and dissatisfied.
I’m not feeling that good about bdsm where I’m the only person who can get hit. Noah has managed to fully and completely convince me that it isn’t ok to hit him. It means that no, it isn’t fun to do a scene where I fight back. You get angry when you are hit. It isn’t a game. You can’t play with it.
I’ve been hitting the punching bag and I’m not sure it is helping. I want to beat the crap out of someone so badly. In my defense, I want it to be someone who has fully consented and is having fun. I want to play with a friend. Not necessarily a specific individual friend–but someone I have positive feelings about. I don’t hit people out of anger, exactly. Excessive energy.
Only I’ve agreed not to hit anyone, basically ever again. Sometimes it feels like dying. It feels like having to kill parts of me. If memory serves correctly (it’s a funny thing) it hasn’t even been two years since I beat on my Leather sister. Not that long. Why does this feel like it has been lifetimes of suppression?
I’m a sadistic masochist trapped in a life where it isn’t ok to cause anyone pain and it isn’t ok to model that it is acceptable to hurt me. “Trapped” is a terrible word. But it sure as shit sounds accurate today. I carefully created this trap for myself–I’m not blaming a single person other than me. I wanted this. Now I’m finding out what it means to get what you want.
A long time ago a friend asked the dude I was dating at the time, “So, what does it feel like to get what you always wanted?” He said, “Exhausting.”
We didn’t date that long. Turns out I wasn’t actually everything he always wanted.
I feel like a big meanie face for not being all gung-ho on the kinds of sex Noah wants. I used to work my way through all 31 flavors on a regular basis. Now I get one or two flavors and that’s it. Forever. It isn’t that I have started hating vanilla (I even got a spiffy new vanilla cookbook from a generous friend for my birthday) I just… man I miss variety.
I miss having the kind of sex that causes people to get upset when they watch it because the violence is so intense. I like going to public sex spaces and freaking people out with how violent sex can be. You have to work pretty hard to alarm such a jaded audience and the challenge really spurs me to great heights. “This is bdsm not your local vanilla cuddle party.”
When I got involved in bdsm people were told that if you were overwhelmed by what you were watching it was your responsibility to walk away and go handle your shit. While I was actively playing I watched that get stomped on hard. Eventually people were only supposed to do non-offensive stuff in public.
Folsom is a great place to squick the tourists. I want to alarm people. I really do. I am an exhibitionist. It is partially about the effect on the crowd.
I want to suspend someone and slowly cut them in between all the rope marks till they are dripping on a tarp. Just to watch it. I really do. I haven’t done that much blood play but right now I think I would be hard pressed to not lick up all the blood. I’m feeling quite savage and violent.
And I sit at home. Today there is baby sitting and I will work. I should arrange to get books from the library. I should paint. I should write letters.
Whoo.
I’ll watch more god damned West Wing because that is a lot of how I numb out at this point.
Don’t do anything you will regret in the future. Just be “good”.
I don’t regret what I’ve done. Not the people I’ve tied up. Not the people I’ve hit–ok, I regret some of the fist fights in grade school. I don’t regret being a pervert. I found people who were happy to go on the ride with me and I don’t think we did anything wrong. I just don’t want to teach my kids.
That is what it comes down to. I don’t want to teach my kids to be perverts. I don’t want them to look at me from a distance and know the kinds of things I used to do on the weekend.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this one play partner I had. She was willing to let me do some… horrifying? fun? intense? things. I wonder what she has been doing lately. I really shouldn’t call and ask.
Avoidance is a PTSD symptom. But is this avoidance a problem or a good thing?
When I talk to other mothers I frequently hear that one or more of their children strongly prefers daddy. Often to the point where mom is refused–sometimes with venom. I listen to these stories and think, “Huh. How did that happen?”
My kids have had individual minutes where they want their dad more than me. They are thrilled when they get to spend a day with him. But they want me there. Always me. Mommy mommy mommy. We are the all-mommy-all-the-time channel. Sometimes I feel a weird mixture of pride and pain. Am I fucking my kids up? Am I too naked in my desperation for their love so they can’t feel safe stating a preference for their father? Do I not allow him enough time with them? And yet there is a part of me that feels so very relieved that at least for a few years of my life I get to find out what it feels like to be cherished and adored. I am the favorite. I am Noah’s favorite. I am Shanna’s favorite. I am Calli’s favorite. And my heart explodes with joy.
I adamantly refuse to pick a favorite. I say Noah is my favorite boy and I can’t pick a favorite girl because they are each wonderful in different ways and I couldn’t do without either of them. I need the whole set. NEED NEED the whole set. All of them. I don’t have a single favorite.
I need to be part of this team. I need to have a group where I actually feel wanted and included and like I am important. I need this so much.
Sometimes I feel a little sad that maybe my kids know that I need them and I am going to damage them because that is too much pressure.
I counter my fierce need with telling them that they have to live their own lives and have adventures without me–just come back and tell me stories. I will probably always be the most appreciative audience you ever have.
You really and truly know how I feel about you. I don’t hold back. I tell you how I really feel. When I have a problem with my children’s behavior I am very specific “I love you but right now I’m really upset that you are doing _____. I don’t think it is a good idea because ______.” Sometimes the because is “I am on my last nerve and I’m about to start screaming and not be able to stop–seriously you need to stop making that noise.”
I tell my kids a lot that dealing with people is weird. Everyone has a long list of little ways they need to be accommodated and depending on how good of support they have from people in their life, they may not even know they are getting the accommodation. They might have no idea that they are really weird and the way they want to be treated is downright odd. The people who know them are used to it and don’t question it so for them it is normal.
I can be hard to live with. I have a lot of rules. I have a lot of preferences and nit picky crap I care about way too much. The best I can say is I’m sorry, but at least I can tell you the details about what I want instead of just exploding with inarticulate rage. I’ve lived with that and it sucks.
More than 70% of parents think it is ok to spank. I think that if I have to hit my kids I have failed to teach them. Hitting is a mark of *my* failure–not theirs. First I failed to teach in the first place. Then I went on to fail in modeling how to fix mistakes. When you hit your child you teach them that the right thing to happen when they make a mistake is the person they love most in the world should hurt them.
Nope. Not in my house. No matter how nutty they drive me. I worry about the screaming though. I haven’t been documenting it lately because I haven’t been typing. My arms hurt quite a bit. The screaming hasn’t been daily or even weekly. Not super nasty, either. But I’ve threatened too much in the last few weeks.
I don’t want to be that kind of person. I think it is chicken shit to do it and then apologize and act like that makes it all ok. It doesn’t.
I’m kind of glad that I get to go through a famine period of not spending money. Staying home sounds like a smart idea. We need to get used to each other again. We’ve been spending a lot of time out in the world bouncing off other people and their boundaries. It makes it harder for the kids and I to really see one another. We are all constantly changing. If we stop staring we miss important stuff.
I always thought I would change less quickly once I became an adult. Not so much.
I go through periods of screaming when I’ve been running (metaphorically) too hard and too long and I have no more patience left. I’m not being proactive enough about limiting my activities. I have such a hard time telling people no. If someone wants a relationship with me the answer is yes. But I don’t actually have time.
This is why we aren’t poly. I don’t have any energy going spare. Sure, I have needs like crazy. I don’t have any energy to give. And every outside relationship requires energy. I would have to steal it away from other parts of my life: Noah, the kids, writing, gardening, etc.
I don’t want to waste all of the energy of my life pursuing people to fuck. I’ve done that. Lots of it. I’ve fucked orders of magnitude more people than most ever do in a lifetime. Meh. It was alright. It was fun while I was doing it. I don’t regret it. I can foresee futures where such behavior could be appealing again. But right now it would be theft and it would be destructive to the three relationships I care the most about.
It is pragmatic and self-serving. But man any time I go somewhere alone I manage to find a likely target. Hunting is so innate. And I know which smiles are likely to be followed up on. It took being told no a few hundred times to learn which smile means, “Ask.” I’m feeling antsy. I miss feeling exciting.
I feel like a work horse and I miss being a race horse. I used to pull chariots; sometimes literally while doing pony play.
I get random flashes of memories of things I’ve done sometimes. Like when I’m out running I will notice that I’m moving through my *ahem* paces. I usually laugh at myself and try to consciously get back to more of a “running” gate. I’m not entering any pony competitions any year soon here. Doesn’t matter if my trot is fine.
Sometimes it feels very weird to look at this vanilla, monogamous life and think “What in the hell made me think I want this?!”
I’m having trouble sleeping. I’ve had a lot of time to think and I haven’t been typing lately. Lots of thoughts churning.
I do want this, though. I want this so much that I stop every day to specifically be grateful for what I have. I have Noah and Shanna and Calli. And they all love me. I get to be their favorite, at least for now. I understand that someday Shanna and Calli will go find somebody to snuggle who is uhm more snuggly with them than I am. (I have boundaries around snuggling with them. Whoo boy.) I get this precious time.
The home school tea party for today was cancelled due to low attendance. I’m not up for putting together a big party for three kids who aren’t mine. We will try again on another date/time to see if we can make it actually work. I will figure something out for the Friday Funhouse tonight. It’ll work out..
The girls are watching Harry Potter 2. I won’t let them watch 3 yet. Honestly I don’t think I will let them watch more movies in the series until they have read the books. Incentive. I sorta wonder sometime when Shanna will decide to read. I try not to harp on it but she probably notices that I have feelings. She’s like that. She notices me.
Today on the bike ride she yelled at me not to hover. So I rode on side streets and added loops to give her time to do each block before I watched her carefully check both ways before crossing the street. I didn’t stand near her though. She wanted space and she was being careful.
This growing apart business is hard. But learning how to do this is what we are doing right now. Gotta just do it.
I have so much anxiety right now that I am shaking and not sleeping. I got less than five hours tonight and I am so full of adrenaline there is no chance I will sleep again.
I deleted everything off my fetlife profile. Most of my experience there involves me having an unusual opinion and then a bunch of people jump on me and talk about how icki I am. I participate in casual sex conversations. Apparently women like me, who will have sex with strangers (err, at least I used to) are disgusting, stupid, and we are obviously not worth keeping around. We have no self-esteem and we denigrate the women around us just by existing.
I get less shit for my promiscuity from Christians than I do from “perverts”. At least the Christians act like, “Well duh you like sex.” The perverts talk about how there is something wrong with me for not wanting a deep emotional connection with everyone I fuck.
Does anyone else see this as odd?
I don’t think that is why I am up though. I feel horrible guilt for canceling on the mural. I’m really not functional enough. I have a job. I’m supposed to be homeschooling my kids. I haven’t paid much attention to them recently. I mean, I pay attention to them… but not to the degree I *should* as a home schooling parent. Right now I expect them to just entertain themselves all day while I do work. I’ve been doing this for months. This isn’t a long-term solution.
I feel like I am trying to do so many things that I’m not getting anything done.
And I feel left out because I don’t have the spoons to go do the fun social things my friends do. I really can’t handle it on a lot of levels. I will probably never work Dickens Fair again because I don’t want to run into my rapists.
I’m not sure why I feel so isolated, unimportant, and worthless right now. I have wanted to cut for a few days. It has been really hard to not do it. I haven’t which is supposed to be all that counts. But I want to. I trace designs on my flesh with a non-threatening finger.
I miss people but I am so tired and worn out that I really can’t handle being around anyone. I feel brittle, tired, and snappish. I’m not saying it is anyone else’s fault. It just is.
I hate when I do this. I want to be around people so much it physically hurts. But I know I can’t behave well enough to pull it off. If I spend time around people when I feel like this then I do stuff I know I shouldn’t do and I lose relationships.
Better to hide until I am less of a cunt.
I hate when I get into this place of feeling desperately lonely while seeing people. I am overscheduled with people I have to “behave” very carefully around.
I feel guilty because the easiest things to cancel on are things for the kids. I can skip their friends more easily than I can skip my long list of chores.
I feel lonely and mean at the same time. This isn’t a good combination. I feel angry in a way that is hard to pretend isn’t there. I’m not even sure what I’m angry about. I just feel really angry. So angry that I could probably punch dozens of holes in a wall without noticing the knuckle damage.
I’m sitting very still and not doing anything terrible.
I wonder how long this will go on this time. I hate this feeling. Tonight I could beat my head on concrete for a long time.
I think a lot about impulses. I think a lot about compulsive behavior. I think a lot about choices and emotions.
I don’t seem to be able to control my emotions. I am controlling my behavior by being quiet and still. But that is of limited duration. I’m sure I will come up with more work to do.
Noah is writing another book. And going back and forth on what he wants to do after some work issues. I have feelings about both set of circumstances but it is what it is. I don’t think that is why I’m freaking out. I may be feeling some increased anxiety because job stuff is kind of uncertain but he always lands on his feet. And I have almost five months of income in cash in the bank. We will be ok. (Which blows my mind considering how much money he makes.)
I know I’m worried about money in the “I feel existential angst for being a terrible person and spending money on anything other than rent, rice and beans” sort of way. I’m not actually worried.
I opened an IRA in my name and fully funded it for the year. (The limit is only $5500.00… so not that extreme.) I’m going to start having this as an auto-deposit thing.
No one will help when I am old. I will have what Noah and I have managed to save. I should take that more seriously and pay myself first. Making sure I don’t end up homeless when I’m old should be a serious priority. I’ve already been homeless. I don’t really want to be ever again.
I feel scared and dirty and bad.
I feel like I can’t do anything right. I can’t do anything worth doing. I can’t…
I don’t even know. I have been feeling a weird balance between feeling happy and feeling scared that it is all going away soon.
I am really upset with myself for saying yes to the mural and then saying no. That feels like a really horrible thing to do. I am bad. I should have said no from the beginning or I am stuck with having said yes.
It’s kind of like how I never thought I had the right to say ‘no’ to sex once I had a meal with someone.
Buy me a grilled cheese sandwich and a milkshake and that gets you a blowjob. I don’t even have the self-esteem to be high priced.
Which makes things complicated with Noah. A friend told me I should consider paying myself as a housewife.
I don’t deserve to be paid. These days I’m not even a good whore. I haven’t had sex ten times in the past two months and some put together let alone hitting quota each month.
I feel tired and sad and I hurt. I keep moving in and out of feeling sick. I’ve had terrible nausea for days. My throat hurts, well not my throat. My neck. The corded muscles that are kind of on the sides of the front.
Just over 2,000 words and I will hit 30,000 words on the book. I’m honestly running out of things I would want to say to twelve year olds. I’m also feeling like, “No one will let their kids read this thing anyway. Why am I wasting my time?”
I feel so bad that I needed this book terribly when I was twelve years old and I’m not sure it will be of any worth to anyone else. I don’t think other people need the same lessons I need. Not everyone is a worthless whore.
I feel so broken and disgusting. People like me shouldn’t be allowed to spread their disgusting point of view.
I’m not quite to suicidal but if this continues I will get there. That is where this is heading. I can more or less see the pattern.
Being suicidal is just a thought process. It is how a brain deals with feeling over loaded and unable to function through pain. Suicidal isn’t a “feeling”. I’m feeling sad and lonely and unimportant and expendable. Those are feelings. Suicidal isn’t a feeling. It’s a thought process. It is how my brain has learned to handle feeling all these feelings.
I don’t want to kill myself. I have these kids to raise. I really like them. I’m not at a dangerous spot.
I’m just struggling with how my brain works.
I need to not schedule anything until after the end of the year. Hell, it’s the holiday season. Maybe I’m just going bananas in that typical end of year SAD hell that so many people live with. Maybe I’m just missing my mom. I really miss my mom. Every year that goes by hurts more.
Why didn’t my mommy love me?
I can see my kids through my pain. I can make their needs more important than mine. My mother couldn’t do the same thing. She couldn’t do anything more than survive. She had no spoons left to give to helping me.
I have no spoons left to help other people right now. Do I have any right to throw stones?
I watched some really heavy TED talks today yesterday. Specifically Indian women talking about rape. Stories about three year old children raped until their intestine fall out of their bodies.
Ok, I don’t win the oppression olympics.
The woman who told that story was gang raped by eight men and used that as a reason to devote her entire life to helping victims of trafficking.
I am not that cool. I haven’t used my personal tragedies to help other people in a large and measurable way. I am small, selfish, and not very useful.
I wanted children too much. I think that engaging in that kind of work means you give up on a family of your own. You can’t take care of your own kids and devote your life to helping people. In the process you neglect your own kids.
I don’t want to neglect my kids.
I know a number of people who have devoted their lives to helping professions. I know therapists and emergency responders and… lots of professions. Lots of people. I know a lot of people.
I don’t feel like I deserve to know the good people I know. I am not as good as them. Sure, I taught high school for three years. It wasn’t even three years. It was 2.5 years because of my copious vomiting all day long. Because I was too incompetent to do anything while I gestated.
I hope that this round of self-pity doesn’t last long. I’m really tired of this shit.
After canceling on painting I have a couple of days where I can stay home. I am just about to the point where I don’t have house chores left. I need to clean off the tops of the bookshelves in the living room and shift things so the plumbing can be fixed on Thursday. I am thinking about asking Noah and Uncle C to help me Wednesday night.
My back hurts all the time. I have periodic spasms where I lie on the floor and breathe until I can move around again.
I’m just not being nice to my body. I’m acting like working a manual labor job is necessary for basic survival and that’s just not true at this stage of my life. It is self-hating.
I don’t know how to feel less pain. I add stress until I crack. I’m not good at doing anything else. This isn’t a healthy balance.
No painting this month or next. The paint will get put away. Maybe in the spring. Maybe in the summer.
Maybe more West Wing. Hiding from life sounds great.
I am on my second night of not sleeping because I am angry about the PTSD forum. Third night? I can’t even remember. This is why I backed away from facebook. Maybe my therapist is right and I shouldn’t be on this website either.
I have a chip on my shoulder the size of Wyoming when it comes to people nastily lecturing me about my behavior. You do not have the ability to foretell the future. Shut the fuck up.
But it’s all my fault if someone chooses to yell at me about how stupid I am… right? I chose to talk in public about something I did. I did not write a 20 page dissertation justifying my decision thus I am just being self-hating. If a man ever says anything sexual to a woman and she continues talking to him it will be all her fault if he later beats her and rapes her. So I’m fucking stupid for talking to this guy and asking for a boundary. Like, duh.
That sounds like a crazy person with PTSD trying to make me act even crazier than I do. Please forgive for being dismissive and nasty after you have derided me multiple times. At least I’m not doing it where she can see and I have not yet typed any of the swirling nasty names for her running about in my head.
I did go back to the thread this morning. *hang head in shame* I said that in the future I would like her to know that I am not interested in her opinion and please never comment on anything I write again. I believe her crystal ball to be out of service and I wish she would quit sharing the hysteria it is stuck on with me.
You notice how I almost never comment on other peoples writing? I probably comment on substantially less than 1% of what I read. I understand that my hysterical opinion is not usually welcome.
P, I do notice that it is a big deal that you are able to get to our house. I just think that at this point you continue to do so because you are being nice to my kids. I’m grateful that you are willing to be nice to my kids. They love and adore you and think you are smart and funny and capable. I want them to look up to women like you. I *do* understand that it is hard. I *do* appreciate it.
I just don’t know how to be unoffensive. And I don’t particularly want to offend you. So I don’t know what to say now.
I spend so much time worrying about how to not offend people. What can I possibly say or do to not offend and piss people off. I seem to piss people off by existing and breathing. (I’m not trying to dismiss the valid complaints of people who get upset with me. Sometimes I do know why people don’t like me any more. Sometimes it is very confusing though.)
I know I am a selfish asshole. I don’t know a different way of staying alive. I am not capable of living for unselfish reasons. All of my forbearance is gone. The closest I have to that left is taking care of my kids and having kids was the single most selfish thing I have ever done. So I’m not sure I can do the unselfish thing. I don’t think I would want to try. Near as I can tell the reason to live unselfishly is because your invisible sky friend told you to. Have fun with that.
I am up to twenty hours on the mural. I am somewhere between 40%-50% done. My neighbor bitched that there weren’t any people on it. My comment was I JUST FINISHED THE BACKGROUND COLORS GIVE ME A BLOODY BREAK. But he also very helpfully went and fetched a flashlight as I worked at dusk yesterday so I screeched that in a more or less pleasant way. Or at least he just laughed at me.
Yesterday he was trying to get a rise out of me (that’s basically all he does) and he was asking me if I knew anything about racing cars. After stating that I don’t watch Nascar it was kind of awesome to be able to say that I went to track school for racing Porsche’s so please don’t lecture me about how racing works. (To be clear I never actually *drove* on a track. My Owner got into that part after I left with the girl after me. Oh well. I still did the track school with him.)
So today, after the cheerful argument about racing cars yesterday, he showed up and asked me a bunch of questions. He said as he was walking up, “So now that I now I have a resident expert….”
I of course made it clear that I don’t consider myself an expert at much of anything. I am at best a dilettante. But we had a lengthy conversation and yeah I can answer a lot of questions.
Yesterday I was blessed with two (ok really four throughout the day–two adults) people coming over. One just stopped long enough to show off her HOLY SHIT DRAMATIC hair cut (she looks great) and the other friend walked around our neighborhood and looked at the fence and shared ice cream with us. The ice cream sharer brought little girls so my kids thought the day was a win.
Every day during dinner we try to go around the table sharing our favorite part of the day. My kids always say that seeing their friends is their favorite part of a day. They are really grateful when they get to see the kids they know. I am too. It is nice to still know people.
I feel really weird about trying to provide my kids steady access to people. I want them to have actual long-term relationships. I didn’t during childhood. I rarely knew people for any consistent period of time.
At this point Jenny is the person who has known me the longest and best. Everyone else comes post-bdsm period.
I went to a party recently and watched two beautiful women top a third beautiful woman. I have known the two tops for more than a third of my life.
A woman I used to date is moving back to the area. I’m having feelings about this. I’m having really intense feelings around the idea that I will never have sex with her again. It is really bothering me. I want to fuck her so bad my hands shake.
When I met my friend at the coffee shop to talk about the boundary incursion one of the things we talked about was inappropriate sexual acting out on the part of parents. That has dramatically played into his and his wife’s emotional issues–their parents not being appropriate.
I don’t think that promiscuity is always wrong. I don’t think that polyamory is wrong. I just think that I am not going to be able to model healthy versions of these. I think that *I* would be incredibly unhealthy. I am obsessive. I tend to forget everyone else in the world when I am thinking about a new (or returning after a long absence) sex partner. I think my children fucking deserve twenty years of my attention.
But good golly Miss Molly I want to fuck her. I want to. I want to. I want to. And I get the distinct impression she would really like me to. Mostly she is stone because she doesn’t trust people. (For the non-queers in the reading audience “stone” means that she does sexual things to people but she doesn’t tend to allow people to touch her genitals.) Given my long history of fucking her six ways from Sunday I’m pretty sure I would still be an exception–I always was.
I think it is that ability to side step peoples normal boundaries that drives a lot of my sex. I solicit people to actively reconsider their boundaries for me. I push them. I ask them to change the rules for me. It’s that whole selfish asshole thing.
I am having a hard time with the idea that I will never again validate someones sexuality and identity. I want to make her feel like she is beautiful and desirous and yet there isn’t a long list of people wanting to date her so she doesn’t believe me. If I’m not there to apply ego stroking… there is no ego stroking. So maybe she is only those things to me. And now I don’t want her either.
It is all very tied up in knots of shame and wanting people to feel loved and important. A lot of the reason I have always picked the partners I have picked is because I go hunting for people who are used to being told “no” and then I undo some of that damage. “Ok, maybe you aren’t a good fit with everyone but let me show you HOW AWESOME it can be to find someone compatible. You aren’t wrong or broken–you just need to find people who mesh.”
And perverts really have a hard time finding people to validate them. I’m just sayin’.
On my last trip to the dispensary I only bought edibles (not any of the sugar enhanced kinds–the variety is breath-taking these days). So I’m trying to eek them out for more than a month. So I’m under dosing for the first potion of time. Given that it is coinciding with doing EMDR again I sort of expected to hit a suicidal ideation period again. I haven’t. That is good. *happy dance* Any month without living in a multi-plex of suicidal horror is a good month. Happiness is about low expectations.
Last night putting the kids to bed was one of those magical experiences. I lay down with them for a few minutes when I got back from painting. I like hearing what they want to say as they empty their heads in preparation for sleep.
“I share my things with my family because I love my family. I share with my mama. I share with my big sister. I share with my daddy. My mommy shares with me. My big sister shares with me. My daddy shares with me. My family loves me!”
Is sharing of stuff how love is decided? I don’t know.
“I am happy! Sometimes I am sad. Sometimes I am mad. Right now I am happy!”
Yes, my beloved, feelings happen. I’m glad you are happy right now. I am too. I almost always feel happy when I get to snuggle between my two favorite girls in the whole wide world. I feel so deeply grateful that I get to have many hours a day every single day of cuddling my children. That is filling my decades old touch deficit.
I get that because Noah wants me to have it. Because I want it. He’s ok with me being selfish. I am very lucky. Not everyone wants what I have (which is more than ok–it’s kind of necessary). I feel lucky.
Ok, now I’m feeling less angry about the hysterical woman on the ptsd forum. I’m sure in her head everything is stuck on hysterical. I have totally had that feeling. I just choose to not take on someone else’s hysteria. I have enough of my own.
I think I can look at patterns and determine what will happen. I get the feeling that you absolutely MUST listen to your own impulses on this topic. Ignoring nigling feelings of worry is part of my problem. It is part of how I have ended up sexually assaulted so many times. I don’t know when to run. I absolutely get why people would want to lecture me “for my own good”.
I just honestly don’t want to hear it. You don’t know much about me. You don’t care to find out. How in the fuck do you presume to know what is good for me?
Yesterday I felt sad and drained by the suicidal ideation slowed down. In the afternoon I talked to one of my favorite men in the world. He helps me gain perspective on life. We talked about shame and pain and being a problem vs. having a problem. We talked about what it means to be trying to change. We talked about how very hard it is to change.
This friend has dealt with a lot of suicide. Three people in the last two years. Now his dad is talking suicide in the “threatening” sort of way. My friend called the police. He told his father that either his father start a) going to therapy, b) seeing a psychiatrist to discuss medication, and c) find some sort of peer support group that my friend will have his father declared incompetent and he will sue for guardianship. That’s kind of intense to hear from my friend.
I asked him how he feels about me talking about my suicidal ideation. He said, “Do you see a therapist?” Yes. “Do you see a doctor for medication?” Yes. “Do you have peer support?” Well… the support group didn’t work out but I have very close friends some of whom I speak to daily and I can call them in any crisis. “Then you ARE DOING what you are supposed to be doing. You are allowed to talk about how it is going.”
He pointed out that I’m not threatening to do it. I’m saying that I want to but know I can’t. I absolutely never fucking ever say, “If you (whoever) do/do not do ___________ then I will kill myself.”
That’s not the point. I don’t think that any one else needs to change what they are doing. I feel like a chicken shit for whining about being in pain. Isn’t every one in pain? Well, why do we act like everyone must suffer all the time? Why?
I don’t suffer all the time. I am in some kind of pain basically every minute of every day but I don’t think about it. I try to ignore it. That isn’t the focus of my life. I’m also breathing air and pumping blood and blinking my eyes and producing saliva. So what?
I don’t always have the standing-in-the-center-of-a-bunch-of-movie-screens feeling in my head. That just isn’t here today. Today it is pretty quiet upstairs. I wouldn’t say I feel “relaxed” but I have more or less decided that given how much I was screamed at today I’m not jumping through hoops to entertain my kids so I don’t have a lot to worry about.
I don’t have a big terrible anniversary looming. Not till October. I have Calli’s birthday and my birthday to get through before then.
Last night my therapist and I talked about my compulsive sexuality. She hasn’t had a lot of details outside of what is in the book. I’ve only been seeing her since October 2012. She has only known me as monogamously married. Hell, she thought we started monogamy at the beginning of the marriage. Snort.
No, actually not following the guy home from the grocery store is brand spanking new. For basically the first twenty-five years of my life I would have. I said yes all the time because saying no frequently resulted in my being raped and that process is pretty terrible so if a guy hints that he wants to have sex it is just a better idea in every way to say yes. Saying no is just flat dangerous.
I only want to be beaten when I ask nicely and say please. In any and all other circumstances I’m not ok with it.
My big girl came in to put her head on my chest while I type. Not a great angle for my arm. But gosh this is good for my heart.
I want to see what they are like as adults. I want to find out if they are going to be slutty or very monogamous. I don’t want to tell them to do either. I want to find out what they want for themselves.
My therapist asked me why I stopped being promiscuous. I told her I didn’t want to model it for my children. I don’t want to teach my kids that they should spend their entire lives hunting for sex. They can learn that lesson from someone else, not me. That’s not my role.
It is really fascinating listening to other people talk about their marriages and sex lives. I feel so grateful that I found someone who is extremely sexually compatible with me. I feel like that alignment isn’t actually common. This is why I test-drove so many people. Ha.
I should get dressed and water the yards and finish sanding the fence. Then I can bring some pencils over and start sketching. I bet I could get a lot of the layout done today and tomorrow if I tried hard. Then I would have next week while Shanna is in day camp to paint. I’ll have to think about how to entertain Calli. I’m not thrilled with the idea of just bringing the iPad but I might. She will have a hard time keeping herself busy without Shanna for three days. Stuff to ponder.
I was lying in bed the other night, crying–of course. I was thinking about how my entire life has involved crying myself to sleep while rehearsing all of the memories other people tell me to forget. Other people want me to pretend that my life never happened. They want me to swallow all of the poison down deep inside of me so that it is buried in the darkness of my belly. There they are safe from the poison. It only hurts me and that is not their problem.
I wonder if that is why my abdomen hurts. It is all the secrets I am not allowed to tell because they are too shameful. I eat them. I swallow the poison as fast as I can but it isn’t fast enough. I don’t do it completely enough. I am not able to do it while smiling and making other people feel good about themselves.
I am a failure.
I am supposed to take all of the suffering away from other people. It is not their responsibility to hurt. I should hurt.
But then I stop and think, “What a self absorbed stupid bitch.”
I haven’t spent more time crying about my friends miscarriages than they have. Who in the hell am I to think I am taking pain away from any one else? I don’t take anyones pain away. I wallow in my own.
I sit and wallow in shit and misery. Because I am too stupid to understand that I am in the pig pen. All I have to do is get up and climb over the fence and take a shower–right?
But this is the only home I’ve ever known.
My friend told me (and my therapist said she was so happy he told me this) I am changing my brain when I parent the way I do. I am creating the possibility of a different future for myself and my children. I am changing the pattern of my family.
My parents both had really bad childhoods. My mother cleaned up after her mother’s suicide attempts after school. My father had a violent, abusive alcoholic in the house. My mother was the youngest child and her older siblings were contemptuous and vicious to her. My father raped his sister.
What the hell happened to my grandparents that they would produce children who would act in such a way? One grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute. One was the descendent of Mayflower Pilgrims. (My sister claims she saw records as a kid before my parents divorced.) One grandfather was a second generation immigrant born on a Mennonite colony. One grandfather was a Catholic printer from LA. His family had been in the printing business and in the military as long as anyone could remember.
For my children three our of four of their grandparents are mentally ill though I doubt my mother in law would like me saying so. My children have a great grandparent, grandparent, and uncle who have all committed suicide. They don’t need a parent too.
If I manage to have a happy sixtieth birthday that will be absolutely miraculous by the standards of my family.
And Noah would be really nice to me for all of the years in between. It’s nice to think about.
If one is going to have a quota for how much sex one has then one should occasionally examine how such a system is working. In my opinion.
The kids were gone for almost 48 hours so we spent more time than usual talking about sex. I feel really grateful that despite how hard I hunted in the bdsm community I ended up with someone basically outside that world. Don’t get me wrong–Noah likes kinky sex. He likes hitting someone who is ok with it. He likes being mean when he has permission. I have yet to know anyone within the community who is actually as good at reigning it in as Noah is. Noah is not driven by his desires. They are small and subtle accents on his overall sexuality. Hurting someone isn’t the point of sex for him.
It is weird when I think about my ex. My Owner. I wasn’t a real person to him. He didn’t know much about me and he actively shushed me because he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to talk about his life much. He worked 60-80 hours a week. He wanted a slave to take care of details he didn’t like bothering about. He didn’t want to know me. He didn’t even particularly like having sex with me. We didn’t have much sex–he did it because I wanted to and mostly he wasn’t interested in meeting my needs. He liked tying me up and hurting me while fully dressed then he would masturbate. I was more or less live action porn.
Noah doesn’t treat me like that. Noah is quite clear that I am more interesting to him than any other human being has ever been. He likes talking to me. He likes knowing what I am thinking. He appreciates it when I tell him what is going on. He likes having sex with me. He would do it all day every day if we had time and no friction burns.
It’s different. Dealing with them is so different. Everything I learned for my Owner is irrelevant in the course of the rest of my life. I feel like I have gone through life trying on personalities. Who am I allowed to be around this person? What do they want to know about me? Mostly very little.
I started dating Noah for the first time when I was still living with Tom. They overlapped for months. Hell, Noah came over and slept with Tom and I. (I slept with Noah and his girlfriend too.)
I met Noah in February of 2004. I broke up with my Owner in August and moved out the first weekend in October. That first weekend I had my first date with my Daddy J.
Daddy J liked to bring people home with us. Between when I left Tom and when I married Noah in September of 2006 I slept with more than eighty people. Most of them were because Daddy J would bring people over to me and say, “She has an empty hole. You should fill it.”
I didn’t date him very long. I couldn’t handle it. That was so much worse than Tom not wanting to fuck me at all. I felt so very worthless as a person. All he wanted from me was access to my cunt and my ass and my mouth. He could avoid getting to know me by ensuring my mouth was never empty long enough to talk.
Noah feels so very nice to me. Noah was enthusiastic and ok about the idea of me sleeping with other people but he never pushed for it or watched or controlled it. He was ok with me doing that if I wanted to but it wasn’t about him.
I don’t want to any more. I feel so used up and abandoned. I feel like the vast majority of people who have fucked me have ended up not being very nice to me. They certainly don’t feel any kind of bond.
If I’m at all honest I think part of the reason I am going to be thrilled when Noah migrates away from his current company is he works with a lover. One who wasn’t just once. One who was almost a one night stand until I ran into him a few years later and all of a sudden he was so impressed with my sense of boundaries that he wanted to have an occasional thing on the side more often because I was good at not invading his life. I knew I was only supposed to show up for sex then leave and be silent. He wanted more of that.
I am so tired of people wanting access to my genitals while feeling like the right way to handle my mouth is to duct tape it shut.
I lived for four years with someone who thought it was great fun to put plastic bags over my head and then wrap my neck with duct tape. He liked watching me cry through the plastic. No, he didn’t want to know what I thought or felt. Eventually when I started freaking out he would poke his fingers through the plastic over my mouth. Usually followed immediately by kissing me so that I couldn’t actually breathe. It was hotter that way.
So now I’m married to this guy who seems practically angelically nice in comparison. He doesn’t pimp me. He doesn’t degrade me. He wants to know about me.
And I’ve got this quota. I kind of tried to explain it on MDC and failed. It isn’t at his initiation. Noah is a simple creature. I can look at his life and judge how much stress he is under. Sex has a specific trade value. It reduces his stress level by x%. If I want him to keep functioning then I have to help him with the stress balance in his life. I know how much sex makes him able to work how hard. I’ve been watching him for six years. Compared to everyone else I have tried to learn he is dead easy.
But that means I’m having sex because it is stress relief for Noah. Not because I want it per se. Post kids sex is just weird. I’m not getting off like I used to. It’s not that I can’t at all (this weekend was awesome we went to a sex party and had lame awkward sex [because I felt uncomfortable] and came home and had ridiculously hot sex and I got off multiple times. That doesn’t happen much anymore. Woo!) it’s that it works differently.
I’m not who I was. Not at all. I am struggling with how much change is permitted in a partner. If he married me because he thought it was hot to be with someone very promiscuous then we have problems. I can’t be that person forever. It is too hard on me.
I don’t think promiscuity is a problem per se I feel that I don’t have enough of a support system in my life for me to pour out my physical energy on something that does nothing for me. I don’t get energy back. It makes it harder to go do my life. I have too much to get done. I have nothing more to give in that department.
So sex doesn’t (usually) feel very sexy any more. It’s stress relief for Noah. That’s what I’m there for. It’s uhm, well… he is quite nice to me. I like that. I really appreciate that in order to feel like he has “the right” he spends a lot of time gently touching my body. I have never really experienced anything like this before. He is so nice to me. I feel like I don’t belong here. He should be giving this treatment to someone who deserves it. I’m the stupid whore. Why is he wasting time being nice to me? I don’t matter.
So things are muddy lately.
When you come out as a survivor of early childhood sexual assault (and ohman INCEST) and especially when you have major adult promiscuity people always want to talk to you about celibacy. Maybe you should try it. The prevalence of this response is annoying. I can’t possibly “work on my issues” unless I stop having compulsory sex.
Ah. I see. All this work I’ve done “doesn’t count” because I haven’t done it how you think I should do it. Right. Tell me again why I should care about your system? Oh, yes. You read an “Expert” so now I have to listen to you. You don’t even know for sure that your “Expert” would react to me how you are reacting so how about if I turn and walk away now.
The day-to-day life I lead now bears absolutely no resemblance to anything I have ever lived before. It is hard to believe that one life can encompass so much change. And I am going to change more. I am going to learn more. I will get better at a lot of things that I currently suck at.
I don’t think that celibacy is going to be part of it. I care too much about that stress relief function. I need to have Noah continue to feel invested in me. He bonds through sex. Oh baby does he bond through sex. And sex is much better when I tell him what I am thinking about. I’m not used to that. I’m used to people wanting to hear a narrative I make up. Usually what I’m “thinking about” is a story deliberately suited to that person–it has very little to do with me.
Noah is different.
It is weird to try to parse out the differences between my compulsive sexuality and my feelings of obligation and trying to earn someone liking me. Noah really likes me. To the point where when the kids are gone he follows me around with large fawn eyes because he is so happy that he can relax into adoring me without the risk of anyone screaming suddenly near our heads. The screaming totally harshes our mellow. Six years. He still follows me around because he wants to listen to what I’m babbling while I walk around doing random things.
I can’t express how overwhelming this is. Why does he care? It feels so good. Part of it is the sex. He wants me to feel loved and wanted all the time, not just when we are having sex, and we have a lot of sex so he feels pretty required to be demonstrative all the time. So I don’t feel bad about him only validating me during sex.
He brings me flowers. Yes, I’m going to keep a quota so this man stays happy. I think that taking sex away from him would be like kicking a puppy. It makes him so very happy. He’s not demanding. He phrases it as, “As always I would be entirely interested in sex. It is totally ok if you would like to just snuggle. I just wanted you to know.” When I say no, he still rubs my back. He still talks to me. He still strokes my hair and soothes me to sleep. There is no punishment. No revoking of love. No lessening of attention. He still likes me.
The only time Noah yells at me is when we are on opposite sides of the house and we just can’t stop talking to each other. We are a loud house. We like talking to one another and we like getting up and doing stuff. So we just raise our voices to carry on the conversation over greater distance. No big deal.
I feel so loved in this house. It is very hard that feeling loved is so alienating. I wish it wasn’t. I don’t always know how to engage.
I told Noah that the quota is a reminder to me that I have to hit the stress relief button a certain number of times every month if I want him at full capacity. I know that when stress is lower in our lives I can dip down a bit if I feel like it (and I do some months) and I know when I have to up the quota. I watch his life. Deliverables at work. The kids hitting a challenging milestone. His additional projects. I watch what he is eating. I adjust his diet as much as I can given that he eats at work.
He is able to be calm and happy and patient with me and the kids if I hit the stress relief button enough times. If I don’t then he gets tired and run down and kind of sad. He doesn’t get angry. He just moves slower. He looks wasted. He looks like he is literally running out of gas. Just add sex. It’s like a miracle drug. I’m going to keep doing that.
It is a pragmatic choice. I don’t feel exploited. I find it kind of happily fitting. I am unusually well suited by my life circumstances to benefit from having a partner who has this much of a connection between sex and well being. And it’s vanilla missionary sex and he’s gentle and nice and it’s really just not a big deal to do a lot of taking one for the team. Honestly it’s sweet. It doesn’t rock my world, but it makes me feel good about myself.
I feel like I have changed the deal on Noah to such a degree that consideration on my part is a good idea. Once upon a time in our marriage we had a set up where I could revoke all sex and that would be something he could live with–he was allowed to fuck other people if he needed to. He can’t do that any more.
It seems to me that marriage has to be good for both parties. I don’t feel used or exploited by Noah. If anything I feel overwhelmed by shame because he married down in pretty much every way. I don’t feel competent enough or smart enough or worthwhile enough for him. BUT I CAN HAVE SEX. I’m not going to strongly consider celibacy any decade soon here.
I feel bad about being this way. I feel like it would probably be a good idea for me to have some kind of idea of my body as a closed system I don’t owe anyone access to. But I don’t anticipate actually feeling that way until or unless Noah was out of the picture. I got married. That changes things. I’m no longer a closed system. I am part of a unit. I’m married.
Whether it is philosophically a good idea to feel like a closed unit or not it is specifically unuseful in my current life. It would be destructive. It would be harmful to my marriage to try hard to close off from him. I don’t want to. I like him. I don’t want to hurt him. I am not being harmed in any way and I like being part of this unit. This is the most positive experience of my life. I don’t see the benefit in trying to close off.
He isn’t harming me and he wants to know how I am doing and he adjusts his behavior based on my requests and he isn’t demanding and he isn’t pushy. I am not going to punish him just so I can have a philosophical conversion at this point in life. It wouldn’t make my life better.
I’m not worried about being forced. When I say, “not tonight” he backs off completely. I know that if I tell him that his needs aren’t important and I am not going to meet them he will put his head down and accept that as natural and right. I don’t need to be another big source of that in life for him. I married him because I wanted to be part of a family where we help one another be bigger and better than we can be while standing alone. I really want the mutual exchange of support. It allows me to do things I simply can’t do alone. I want to be part of a unit. That means consideration. A quota isn’t romantic or sweet but it reminds me that he has needs. He matters. Meeting his needs is a good idea if I want him to be able to continue to meet my needs.
That’s probably enough defensiveness for one day.
I am asked what I am afraid of. I went to a party last night. I have known those people a long time. Shunning. That’s what I’m afraid of. I sat at the party and I listened to people I didn’t know bicker. I listened to the relationship dynamics. The things they were saying and the frustrations they appeared to be expressing. I listened to the passive aggressive shit.
I didn’t stay in the group after Tom and I broke up because I didn’t want to watch what happened when he started hunting and I didn’t want to hunt in front of him. I know less than half of the people who are there now. Now I don’t have to worry about the crowd knowing my whole history. I didn’t want to parade men through the group. I would have been ashamed of myself. I am ok with people having a theoretical knowledge that I am a slut but I don’t parade my business.
I don’t want to be a parent in an open relationship because I don’t want to parade my business and I don’t want to keep dirty secrets. The only way I see to do that is to create an unchanging set of roles that they primarily interact with. It is a choice to be that kind of person for my kids. Not because I think all polyamorous people are bad–that truly isn’t it.
I’m not polyamorous. I’m a slut. I pick up random people on the internet for sex. I have done a lot of it. I have hit three digits of sex partners but I don’t know for sure. I lost my list in a hard drive crash. I used to keep an excel document with check marks for what sexual activities I did with whom. I did that in case I needed to look people up and say, “I tested positive.” I thought it was the ethical thing to do. I did actually go back and contact everyone when I tested positive for herpes. Even the one night stands I otherwise would never fucking have talked to again. It was hella awkward. I explained that I used to get cold sores as a kid, so I have probably had it all my life. I thought I was getting tested for it when I said, “Test me for everything” but actually they don’t do the herpes test as a standard thing. Whoops.
Sometimes people say that they won’t sleep with someone who has had more than x number of partners. I have had guys tell me that completely out of the blue so they can explain why they won’t fuck me even though I am hot. Cause obviously I was hot for them, right? The fact that I was not remotely sexually attractive to them was irrelevant.
I had a different point when I started writing. Shunning. Moving as often I did as a child is a constant slow motion enaction of shunning scenes. There were large scale specific instances that stick in my mind. When I was in eighth grade we lived with Seventh Day Adventists. Living with Uncle Bob sucked because he was a verbally abusive asshole. The only people who would take my mom and I in were the religious folk. They were kind as long as you did what they wanted.
I went to church with them. I went a lot. I got very involved. I started following Joey like a puppy and he was very involved in the church life. I went with him everywhere. I tagged along on trips up the the SDA college in Northern California, I found out about the boarding high school in Mountain View. I had fantasies of going before the church elders and telling them about my life and asking for scholarships. Please, please save me. Joey and I did a lot of door to door missionary work. I helped in the production of a series of classes on spiritual matters. I read my fucking Bible. I could quote it chapter and verse.
I had this friend at school, Yvette. She was involved in a different church. She invited me to come with her to a lock-in. That’s where they lock a bunch of kids in a gym all night long. It was a lot of fun. We played games and sang songs and told stories. It was one of the best nights of my childhood.
I came to one of the leaders of the youth group for the SDA church. I asked if we could look into doing something like this at our church. She recoiled from me in horror. She said that she did not condone filth. She told me that I would be better served somewhere else.
If I couldn’t go with Joey to the Seventh Day Adventist church then I didn’t have a way to get to a church at all. I couldn’t get off the mountain.
To punish myself for being unlovable by God I would enact the most horrible things I could think of. Mostly this entailed reenacting scenes from Bertrice Small books. I would dress up in the closest things I could find to corsets. I would wear really tight tights in layers until they caused me a lot of back pain. Then I would put on layers and layers and layers of gauzy skirts. I was very into the peasant skirt thing. I would put on many layers of shirts and dresses. When I was done I would put on a very tight belt. I walked around in the house. I would pretend to encounter strange men.
I would then pretend to be raped over and over. I used a wide variety of different items to penetrate my vagina starting with pencils. Sometimes I would experiment and see how many pencils would fit. I fucked myself with the legs of a Barbie. It kind of skeeves me out to see my kids play with Barbies. (Obviously not the same dolls.)
I would call myself names for hours. I would chant that I was a worthless whore and no one would ever love me. Even God didn’t want me. I was dirty and bad and I wanted bad things to happen to me. I deserved to be hurt. I was disgusting.
Then I started calling the radio dj. He was twenty-five. We went out on several dates. I was twelve. We didn’t have sex but he did ask me for a blow job. I gave it to him. I knew I was supposed to. I tried to be enthusiastic but it was really unpleasant. I tried to smile. I tried to not vomit in his car.
Not long after that my mother and I no longer were as friendly when the neighbors tried to tell us what to do and how to do it. We moved to the old house in the canyon for a while. I couldn’t stand living with my cousin’s girlfriend and her kids. I wasn’t nice to them and they weren’t nice to me. I think there is plenty of blame to go around for that situation sucking. Then Auntie and Uncle Bob bought the new house up in Redwood Estates and my mom and I joined them. It was like a palace. It was huge compared to the old house.
I spent a lot of time angry at God. I felt very directly shunned by God. I wasn’t. I was shunned by a tight-ass ignorant woman. A mean spirited harpy. Unfortunately God wears many faces. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t speak for God. No one wanted to help me. Police officers told me not to talk about what happened to me after being sexually assaulted. I was isolated and hunted.
I don’t think the dj sexually assaulted me. I think he exploited my low self esteem, but that’s not the same thing. He didn’t force or cajole. He didn’t pressure me. I wanted to. I was enthusiastic. I asked him out on a date. I think he should have been a good enough person to understand that it was pretty bad for me to be doing what I was doing.
My mom didn’t mind me dating the dj. I broke it off. I felt disgusting and dirty when he gave me an opal necklace for Christmas. I knew it was a cheap shitty necklace. It was a gift worthy of my status. I was that bad of a whore.
Which isn’t fair. It was probably what he could afford. He didn’t know me. We didn’t have a real relationship.
But … yeah.
I don’t want to teach my kids to be the kind of promiscuous I am. It hurts me. I am to a point where I am capable of doing nonmonogamy in an ethical and reasonably safe way because I have made a lot of mistakes and I have been hurt in a wide variety of ways.
I have learned lessons that not everyone needs to learn. My kids don’t need to grow up and be like me. It is not important that my legacy be carried on in such a way. But maybe it is still important for my experiences to be talked about. That isn’t the same thing.
My kids aren’t having a life like I had but other kids are.
I really should try to sleep. I was going to try to go to the Renaissance Faire with the kids. Hahahahaha. We’ll see.
I don’t know how other people find self-worth. For me part of it involves being liked by people I admire. People I feel are particularly good at _________.
So I have this friend. I met her when I was fifteen. I met her because I was sneaking out of the house to go to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I started chasing a guy, well–several, named Scott. Scott was kind of available. He didn’t technically have a girlfriend or anything. We dated a bit but nothing serious–you see he was hung up on this other chick, P. I was so jealous I couldn’t see straight. I hated her on sight. Who is this slutty bitch?
Because you see, she had a boyfriend who went to a different university (all these people were five years older than me) and she was STILL STRINGING SCOTT ALONG. Obviously she was bad. I helped him out. I have never liked those girl games of promising and denying. I make up for those chicks. I feel like those girls are hurting the poor boys who have needs because I am a deeply damaged individual.
She was prettier than me. She was older than me (which was a big god damn selling point when I was fifteen). She had great breasts. She was really shapely. Dear god she had a nice body. I had some lurid thoughts about telling Scott, “Well why don’t all of us just…” but I didn’t. I was good.
Time went by. Scott didn’t last long in my life. Guys in that slot (ha) rarely last longer than three months. I ditch them quickly.
Years later I turned eighteen. I ran into the girl at one of the theatres in San Jose. I showed up to do low-level volunteer work at a theatre with a friend and she happened to be the stage manager. The show was Hair. That was such a lovely frisky time of life. Lots of hinting at sex but not much doing it. I was dating Steve.
(I have to give you a name. You seem to like Pam. That’s an acceptable pseudonym-right? I still think you are being ridiculous. You are one of like 3.7 million people with your name.)
So Pam was around. I was spending a lot of time with Kristine. (God bless her for spelling our name right.) I uhhh broke up with Steve because I wanted to sleep with a different Steve. I wanted to sleep with that other new Steve because Pam was stringing him along and I am a compulsive whore. So I dumped my boyfriend. I’m awesome. At least I didn’t cheat on him. That’s always been my line.
I started getting to know Pam though. As things that summer shook out in my life (found the bdsm community, drifted away from theatre) for some reason Pam kept calling me.
And calling.
And calling.
She would come pick me up and we would hang out. I felt… baffled. Why did she want to seek out my company? People don’t really do that very often. I am not pursued. I am avoided. I am abandoned by people I pour many years of hard work and energy into. I don’t get pursued much. It’s a heady experience.
So I spent a lot of time talking to Pam, because she wanted to talk to me.
It’s been a lot of years. She went off and worked on a cruise ship for five years. Then lived in Australia for a few years. Then Taiwan. Now she’s on the east coast having just graduated from an ivy league fancy-pants graduate school. (I’m proud of you for finishing your conclusion. Get started on the last paper.)
She used to traipse around the world being gone for years at a time doing very interesting things. She’s had a fun life. She always makes time and space for me. She calls me. She calls me faithfully though irregularly. Before I had kids I dropped whatever I was doing to answer calls from her. I once answered the phone while teaching because it is that important to me to answer the phone when she calls.
I do it out of respect. This person has spent a lot of money on international phone calls to me over the more than decade of our friendship because she wants to hear my voice. Because she just loves me. Because she wants me to tell her what I am doing and thinking and talking about. She is interested in me and she respects me.
And she is someone I have a lot of respect for. She doesn’t have all that high of an opinion of herself, which I hear is normal. I’ve seen her do things that I want to do but I’m too afraid. She has had the courage to chase a lot of dreams I can’t handle living. I feel like she is my gypsy self. She actually broke free.
And way back in the day when I was dating Tom she wanted to ahem find out more about the ladies so I helped her out with that. Really we’ve had kind of an interestingly sex-related friendship the whole time.
I support her in being parts of herself that the other people in her life wouldn’t respect. She’s kind of slutty, bless her heart. Not a lot. Nothing compared to me, of course. But she hasn’t settled down with one person and she’s kind of nomadic and not inclined towards monogamy.
Before Noah and I got married I was dating this guy I’ll call Spot. I met Spot at BaGG and he was kind of my “club boyfriend” during the time when I did a lot of clubbing. Given that once he had to drive me home because my drink was spiked I feel I was right in believing I needed a protector in that space. Spot overlapped with the early part of my engagement to Noah.
Pam came back to California for one of her periodic visits during that time period complaining long and loud about how she hadn’t been able to get laid in a long time. Given my compulsive bent I said, “Well, which guy do you want to borrow?” She said both. She’s like that. So I called up both boys and told them to come over for a foursome.
I didn’t want to completely run the fuck and that was the problem. For the first bit I assigned Noah to Pam and told Spot I was starting with him. I did announce this out loud. Spot decided it was more interesting to kind of glom onto Pam while she and Noah were playing and ignore me.
Can you guess how this went? Noah realized kind of late into the evening that I was sitting there trying not to cry. He tried to save. Once Pam realized I was upset she tried to save. Spot… well… I didn’t date him much longer and I don’t really talk to him much any more. He did give me the awesome kitty hat for my birthday though. He’s not a bad guy just… not perceptive.
And when Pam was in town while I was pregnant and not interested in sex I had her come over and fuck Noah so that he would be in a better mood. That was very mixed for me emotionally. I’m not sorry I did it–I got the results I wanted. But the cost was high. I don’t like sharing. I’ve decided I’m not going to anymore and both Noah and Pam are very supportive and awesome about it. They were never “dating” they are both just slutty like me. “I like sex. You are here. Ok!” But they are affectionate friends. Only they don’t really talk to one another unless they are both here to see me.
This must be what a V feels like. I don’t mind that they talk and are friendly with one another as long as they are both here to be paying attention to me. I can share that much. I’m generous and all.
I’m not explaining this right. I’m not explaining why she is important. Pam has had a life that is about as different from mine as a life can be in most of the big, obvious ways. And for some reason she latched on to me and fell in love with me and she has created a long term intense relationship for us that freely mutates with my mood swings. If I tell her to do things she says sure. If I tell her to stop doing things she says sure.
When I told her about the smoking she had this interesting reaction. She said, “Hmmmm. If you were anyone else I would start on a long lecture about how irresponsible you are. But you are you. How about if instead I say: I know that you reach conclusions after a lot of careful research, study, and thought. Why don’t you tell me what lead you to decide that was the best option because I know that it must be the best option out there. Or you wouldn’t be doing it.”
I cried. Part of what this relationship gives me is this ongoing feeling of someone feeling that I am important and worth seeking out. Part of what I get is the modeling of what being respected looks like. Not very many people respect me the way Pam does. Not very many people turn to me and say, “Hey I assume you are an authority on this subject. Will you please teach me part of what you know?”
I feel really silly but it feels good to have this person who is nothing like me so she doesn’t understand me at all but that just leads her to ask questions. She wants to understand me–I’m just different from everything she has ever known. She has to ask a lot of questions. I feel like she cares enough to actually want to know me. People don’t ask me very many questions. People don’t want to bother me. So for the majority of my adulthood I have sat alone in rooms not talking to anyone. Except when I’m lucky enough to have Pam call. I prioritize taking those calls over talking to people who show up one off to hang out at my house. I’ve been kind of an asshole about it a couple of times. Pam is very important to me. I drop everything for those calls.
Although having kids has changed this dynamic a lot. Often my phone is on vibrate or silent and I don’t hear it ring. We have a lot more misses now and that is hard for me. I no longer have the space to give our relationship complete seniority at a moments notice like I used to and it is very frustrating for me.
Pam makes me feel like a main character. She wants to hear my stories. She wants me to talk. She wants to know about me. She likes to cuddle me. She’d love more sex’n but is very supportive of that being off the table and thinks it is good that I’m taking care of myself. She wants me to think I am important.
I am fairly honest with myself. She is never going to live near me. She is never going to be anything but occasional phone calls and maybe a visit a year. But she puts a really lot of effort into writing me long emails (I just expect her to read my blog–I don’t have time for all that much long email writing on top of the blathering I do here and I’m a brat and I want it posted.) and she calls. She puts a lot of energy into making me feel important to her. Into reminding me that she thinks about me a lot. When she needs advice she comes to me. When her sister needs advice she tells her sister to come to me. When her friends need advice she relays stuff to/from me.
She has told me that I am her ideal parent. I set the bar for what “doing it right” looks like for her. She makes me cry.
We have occasional long stretches where I get mad at her for some reason or another. Sometimes with semi-cause (things were tense for a good six months after the thing with Spot) but mostly it’s just me having trouble dealing with the ways in which we are very different. I’m not good at that. But she is. And she talks to me actively about compromise and being respectful of one another. And she lives up to her end of it over and over and over and over and over. It’s pretty easy to trust her. She wears her intentions on her face. She is one of the most blessedly honest people I know.
The weird thing is, I’m pretty sure that isn’t the experience that other people in the world have of her. She does a lot of things that are very rebellious by her standards and she spends a lot of time being wracked with guilt for one thing or another.
One of the things Pam gives me is a constant reason to think, “How can someone so obviously tremendous in merit doubt their worth?” When I get an uncomfortable niggle of self-awareness from that thought I immediately stomp on it with great leather boots, of course.
Pam gives me the feeling that if I believe I am important I can go out and be that in the world. Maybe not to absolutely everyone–no one is. Not even everyone likes Santa Claus and if anyone was going to get universal popularity it is that motherfucker. Not me.
But I can be to a few people. And if I can make one life better isn’t that enough? Isn’t that something? Do I really have to be trying to amass a harem? I don’t want or need to be a guru. I want to be respected, not worshiped. I don’t need to be blindly followed. I don’t want or need people to be like me. I really like that there are people who say, “I want to know about _____ and I know you know a lot about it–can we talk?” It makes me feel like my existing in the world is useful. I do have things to give.
Pam is insatiably curious. If I look at my closest cadre of friends that is probably one of the strongest traits for all of my friends. They want to understand. I think you need to be such a person in order to bear my company for long. I’m what is termed “high needs” in young kids. It’s why Shanna’s questions and thirst for more more more from me doesn’t phase me. I feel the same way a lot of the time. Less now than when I was younger, I’m tired.
Pam I love you for so many reasons. Because your extreme perfectionism gives me a little light on how my own perfectionism is pretty twisted. You are good enough. You are smart enough. You are going to get a good job because you are a god damn amazing speaker and you get people. I think you will do well. You are like a cat. You always land on your feet. No, you don’t make a million dollars. No you didn’t become a famous model. You were thirty and not willing to starve yourself–you knew that wasn’t an option going in. You did fine. I wouldn’t have done as well. Sometimes I kind of hate you in an I love you and you are so awesome it feels painful to stand next to sometimes kind of way. It’s complex.
Pam is challenging to me to spend time with or talk to. I have to really think and process and be on in order to handle her. I’m fucking weird to her so I have to explain a lot of things that feel really tangential to me and it gets kind of hard to stay on a track. That feels frustrating. It feels like she is arguing but she is just pressing for enough information to keep following. I’m glad she has the chutzpuh to interrupt me and ask for clarification–don’t get me wrong. I want her to understand, but it’s been an adventure figuring out tone of voice stuff between us. We have different cultures. Very. Different. Cultures.
I have learned a lot and been challenged in a great many ways over the years as I have been exposed to her culture. She is very happy to introduce me to her other friends and she doesn’t give a shit if I make them feel uncomfortable as long as my subject matter is G rated. As a parent I feel a lot more comfortable with such limitations and impose the shit out of it on everyone around me so that has grown more comfortable. I feel like being a parent has finally given me a bridge into being willing to figure out respectable behavior. Pam is an invaluable resource.
No relationship between mothers and daughters is perfect. Pam tells me about her relationship and the relationships she sees and she teaches me a lot. I don’t really have any other access to such information. When I am in tricky situations with the kids I sometimes think about how Pam would handle something. What do I see her immediately do with my kids? I don’t see many people really walk up to my kids and treat them like people to have relationships with–Pam did from the first minute she met them. They were already people to her in her mind because she asks me about them all the time. She wants to know what they do all day. She wants to know the slightly condensed version of the Collected Works. And she comes back for updates quite frequently so things don’t even have to be condensed all that much. It’s really nice.
I can say, “I’ve been thinking about ____” and she responds with (I can hear her brain whirr) “Wait that is the person who did _______ and ______ and _____, right?” She can cross reference my whole experience with people because she has paid a lot of attention and gotten a lot of details about people over the years.
It’s really nice having this friend who is 100% outside my life so I can tell her what I really think about absolutely everyone I know. I don’t have to worry about polite courtesy. I can be honest. I cherish it.
I’m Pam’s beck and call girl. She doesn’t want a lot of my time and I feel so good about being wanted and appreciated that I’m going to respond as consistently and quickly as I can for the foreseeable future like I have for thirteen years. I like being wanted. Not many people want me.
How can you not understand how important you are?
I’m thinking quite hard about about the different kinds of bdsm play I have engaged in. It seems somehow important. Who did I play with and how? Was heavier play a sign of greater trust or greater stupidity? I’m not sure.
It feels weird to talk about being a masochist. Mostly it hasn’t been part of my life since having kids so I haven’t thought about it much in years. Except that I’m starting to feel that itch. Part of why I picked Noah as a partner is the way he reacts to that itch. I like the way his reactions make me feel. When I want him to hurt me he gets excited. Visibly excited. Nearly trembling with excitement. I like that I can make him feel that way just by saying yes. Ok, I usually say a lot more than that. I’m kind of a talker.
I don’t think I would be able to come up with an accurate list of “everyone I have played with”. I think of different event spaces as my way of trying to come up with memories and it isn’t a fool-proof system. It’s easy for me to forget. I remember some more than others.
The night before Dore Alley in 2000. I hadn’t “met” anyone from the scene yet. I hadn’t been to a munch yet. An old guy from match.com sent me to the Power Exchange. He gave me an address and told me to go. He didn’t explain what I would find. Technically he sent me two weeks before Dore Alley. I was a towel girl with my sister. I was afraid to go alone. She was freaked out. I came back the next week by myself. A gorgeous trans woman picked me out of the crowd and beat me. It was my first flogging. I don’t really like being flogged. But it was intense. It was my first experience. I’m grateful. I had to top it off by finding one of the PE employees and expressing my interest bluntly. He pulled me into the laundry room and fucked me there. He wasn’t supposed to have sex during his shift. Oh well.
It wasn’t my favorite scene ever, but it was my first. It broke the ice. It taught me that there were indeed people who wanted to hit me. It wasn’t my imagination. If I found one person I could find more. The next day I went to Dore Alley and spent time with two lovely queer men I knew through campaigning for Californians for Same Sex Marriage. They took delighted half naked pictures of me at the street fair. I had just pierced my nipples. They wanted to see. Sure, why not?
It isn’t enough for me that I have done these things. That in the privacy of my own mind I can think back on these events. I like talking about them. I don’t like being the only one who knows. When I feel like these stories are only in my head I feel like I should be actively trying to hide them. If people know this about me they won’t respect me any more. They won’t like me.
When I was eighteen I ran to the sex communities as fast as I could. I had sex with just about everyone who was willing to say “yes”. It was awesome. There is power in being a young woman who is willing to say yes. It’s a power I have watched slowly slip through my fingers as the years go by. I appeal to different people now. I don’t know how to approach them. And now it doesn’t matter. I will never go hunting again.
I learned hunting as a skill. I learned how to smell for people who would be interested in me. It’s not just that I break the Embargo left and right it is that the kind of sex I want is not standard issue. And for the love of shiny green apples I wish we could dispel this myth that men want to have a lot of sex and women don’t. It’s horse shit. Some men want a lot of sex. Some women want a lot of sex. And vice versa. Move on. I have ended up with a shockingly high number of partners who were completely uninterested in trying to keep up with my libido. I’m really tired of this myth that men want tons of sex and women turn it down.
When I am thinking about my compulsions fairly clearly I can direct them. I know how to ask for kinds of pain (spankings, canings) that really aren’t going to damage me long term–they don’t carry the inherent risk that cutting has. Cutting myself with a scalpel is far more potentially dangerous. People do slip and cause too much bleeding. Hit the wrong blood line and you are in trouble. I’ve looked into that a bit and I avoid those areas but that isn’t the point.
Somehow using spanking as a means of controlling my paralyzing anxiety seems nearly benign. I asked Noah for a spanking this morning. I don’t feel the strong urge to start the day by smoking pot. My stomach isn’t churning. It relieves a lot of that ache. Forcing myself to go through and experience negative/painful feelings causes a relief from the miasma of crazy that rules my life. I can feel a lot more control over how much I hurt when I decide the causes of pain. When my pain comes from the fact that I’m just plain crazy–it’s been a rough life–I can’t do a lot about that. I feel helpless and scared and trapped. When I am being hurt by a partner as a conscious decision it takes up the same space as my normal crazy and my normal crazy kind of has to back off into a corner and take up less space.
It’s going to be interesting to describe my relationship with Tom. I used him. He didn’t want to understand what I was doing but I had a pretty clear picture of what I was doing. He didn’t want details. I filled my life with externally supplied pain because that allowed me to be much closer to functioning. It couldn’t do all the work. I’m still me.
I would like to move through the world without fear. That sounds trite. I would like to move through the world without feeling heart-pounding-terror that people will hate me. Soon more people will come who hate me. They will hurt me. I am different. I am bad. People like me end up in jail. When will I go there? What will I have done? I don’t know. I feel like I haven’t done anything that bad. That doesn’t always seem to matter.
If I lived in the wrong time and place I would absolutely be locked up for being a sexual deviant. That’s scary. It is weird knowing that I exist at this intersection of privilege and experience. I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t know what experiences I have yet to come.
I’ll tell you though, I look at Noah and I’m a lot less scared. He is my bulwark. I feel guilty when I think about my history of partnership because I was desperately searching for someone who was not close to their family. I can’t be all that close to someone who has a close relationship with their parents. Steve’s parents hated me and openly attacked me at Christmas dinner. Tom’s parents didn’t like me but weren’t loud or rude about it. Puppy’s parents and siblings openly ridiculed me and laughed.
Noah’s mom hated me when I met her. The first time I met his parents his mom sneered at me that she wanted to have a private conversation with her son and pulled Noah off for a three hour tirade about how awful I was. Noah’s response to this was to stop coming home for holidays. He has only gone back to Texas for his brother’s wedding. He only did that because I pushed him to do it.
I don’t understand why people hate me so much. I know it must be my fault if it happens so often. If the only consistent force in your relationships is you then you must bring the problems, right? Why do so many people feel the urge to berate and belittle me? Why do so many parents feel like they have to tell me how disgusting and bad I am? Steve’s parents told me I was going to ruin his life. That was part of why I ran. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t take on the position of whipping girl in a new family. I couldn’t once again be the person whose fault every bad thing was. I just couldn’t.
Noah picked me. Noah didn’t like his family much to start with and he was quite ok with the idea that his path would diverge from theirs. He says their dislike of me isn’t my fault or my problem and I don’t have to deal with it. I feel so guilty about being the reason he doesn’t see his family. To be fair he saw them aout as little as he could get away with before we were together. But now that tolerance has dropped to once every five years. His family has met Shanna once. They haven’t met Calli.
I can’t be in the closet. I can’t keep my mouth shut about who and what I am, about the things I have done. I just can’t. I can’t act like I am ashamed. Silence is consent to the larger social order. I don’t agree with it. I break the rules. I do it loudly and consciously.
For years I have known someone who refers to herself as a sexual outlaw. She did a lot of actual sex work: stripping, phone sex, escorting, being a prodom. I don’t do things for money. I do them because I want to. It’s confusing. I don’t do these things because I need to earn money and I don’t mind doing them. I do them because I can’t not do them. I need them. I want them.
I like stripping. I’ve done it in clubs a few times. I always let the people who are on shift have the money. I like having sex with lots of people. I like cybersex and phone sex. I’ve done them with a myriad of people over the years most of whom I can’t really remember.
What does it mean to be a sexual outlaw? I think I have avoided money partially because I don’t want to deal with the potential legal ramifications. It’s one more thin line I don’t have to skate. My income has been small and traceable my entire life. Well, until marrying Noah. Now “my” income isn’t small. It’s still highly traceable.
I have slept with a number of very inexperienced boys/men. I have done the whole, “I’ll teach you how to do this” thing. It’s quite fun to take very well endowed boys condom shopping. When they discover that there is a variety of sizes and brands to try so that maybe condoms won’t hurt anymore… they light up like a roman candle. You just gave them a present beyond measure.
Sex is a skill like any other. I found out a lot about the variation possible. It was fun. How can I talk about it without sounding like I am still hunting for it?
I’ve been thinking about my Top Five. Why they are there. How I feel about them. How I feel about the fact that there are four men walking around in the world I will have a difficult but not impossible time saying no to. They are the ones who have earned privileges over many years. They are the ones who understand the compulsive hypersexual part of me. They are all compulsively hypersexual as well. That is a lot of why I bonded with them so fiercely. Not very many men understand the degree to which sex has shaped my life. Very few men have enough sex to understand it. Very few men run across women who are willing to have the kind and quantity of sex I have had.
The internet is not providing me the data I want. Stupid internet. All I can find is that most extremely promiscuous women max out around twenty lifetime partners. That makes me giggle. I love how websites say: “Then you find out your 23 year old girlfriend has slept with 17 men and you feel kind of repulsed.” Ha. By 23 I hit triple digits. I’m repulsive. Awesome.
Why does this make me repulsive? I don’t understand. It’s a taboo. I rigorously get STD testing. When I was being rampantly slutty I got tested every three months and I used condoms religiously and I even used dental dams a few times. I never got good at them, but during the really risk-taking stage I tried to figure it out.
I feel defensive and sad. No one is actively judging me this minute (I can believe this because it is early in the morning and normal people are sleeping) so I don’t need to feel these feelings. Sometimes life just works that way.
I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on normal. I’m a freak and I’m going to raise little freaks. I’m sorry for that only I’m not. My demographic doesn’t need to fade out of existence. We aren’t bad. We are just weird. On the internet when people bandy about numbers I have seen the figure 1 in 17 men are rapists. I usually see that put right next to the figure that 1 in 6 women/girls will be sexually assaulted.
I told Noah that I would be fairly ashamed to tell people how we are moving forward. According to my personal religion that means I am committing a sin. It’s mixed. Mostly I would say we are getting along very well. I’m not starting fights or insulting him or picking on him. Noah is his usual polite and adoring self. It’s like nothing happened except we have massively increased how much sex we are having and how degrading our sex is.
We have spent a lot of time talking about how compulsive I am about sex. About how that works in my head. We have spent a lot of time talking about how impulsive Noah is about sex. So far we seem to be at the point where we are both acknowledging that we qualify as “sex addicts” by any reasonable definition but maybe if we stick with each other we won’t cause too big of problems?
Apparently the task of the week is to see how much sex we have to have before Noah can’t handle any more. So far we have managed three times a day every day. Then I fall asleep. I feel mixed about this. He knows I feel mixed about this. Hell, I’m writing about feeling mixed about this–everyone will know. It’s hard talking about the actual needs that casual sex meets for me. I can meet some pretty fucked up needs without telling anyone what I am doing. I never have to tell my partners what my internal dialogue is. I don’t have a very high opinion of myself and my voracious need for sex.
I don’t have a very high opinion of the fact that my preference is for most of the sex I have to be quasi-consensual. Noah is well aware that a large percentage, possibly “most”, of our sex involves me not being in the mood at all. It doesn’t really matter if I am interested in sex. I am interested in being a good whore. That means I will do what I am supposed to do. I feel manifestly uncomfortable admitting that. A large percentage of the sex I have I only have because I feel like I am required to do so. That is what someone like me is good for. That is what I am supposed to do. And I’m really good at it. And I fucking live for the post-sex adulation. People I fuck tend to be willing to tell me at great length how good I am at sex. I try very hard to make sure I work far harder at sex than most women. I really really want the approval I get after sex.
I feel like something is broken in me. That I chase this so hard. Noah and I have been talking a lot lately. I don’t think I am going to sleep with other people any more. Regardless of what Noah ends up doing for the rest of his life, I need to stop buying affection with sex. I need to stop begging my friends to like me by proving that I am better at sex than anyone they’ve ever slept with. It’s not really a strategy that is working for me.
I like to pick other sex addicts and go have multiple hours of sex with them. Most of the time they are so shocked by finding a woman who is also as motivated by sex that they are willing to tell me pretty much anything I want. It’s broken. I have a partner at home who is willing to do the Jekyll/Hyde thing with me. He will degrade me and talk about me being a whore during sex. He will tell me that if I am so motivated by cock I am required to show up at 5am every day and wake him up with my mouth. And he’s pretty nice to me the rest of the time.
I feel worried by the duality of our relationship. Most of the time in most ways he really is an amazing partner. He is a good, stable provider. He is kind. He is great with our children. I have been able to push him towards mutually agreed upon improvements in behavior over the years. He’s very willing to accommodate me in just about every part of life. He bends over backwards for me in nearly every way. He will even call me names and hurt me tremendously during sex if I tell him I want him to.
There is this mythos in my head that slaves and masochists should experience no internal conflict over what they do. I have massive internal conflict. I am still upset that Noah lied to me. And my response is to tell him more and more complex stories that I am terribly ashamed of. Things that hurt me very much. And I ask him to use them against me. I want him to agree that I am just a dirty whore. There isn’t much else that someone like me is good for. But I want him to gift wrap it in a package where I don’t have to be at risk going forward.
For me to keep having the kind of casual sex that I like is for me to risk my life. It really won’t be much longer before I go back for hunting for rough, dangerous sex. Sure I’m being all loud and snotty this round of hunting because I want vanilla sex right now. That would fade. I would go back to wanting people to do dangerous things to me. I’ve already had a broken bone in the pursuit of good sex, what else will happen?
It is a lot safer to stick with Noah. He will be able to hurt me as much or more than anyone else. He doesn’t flinch from doing so. Noah has not yet inflicted as much pain on me as a small handful of other people, but he has every intention of doing so. I get the impression that some day he will be the one I have done my most intense play with. That kind of terrifies me. Because he has a high bar to reach. I have already done things that were a really bad idea. I’m sure I will do more.
If I do this instead of cutting or sleeping around or drugs or whatever other self-harming behavior I can dream up… is that better? I don’t know. I don’t know how this life thing is supposed to work. I hear I am just supposed to magically decide that I shouldn’t be harmed any more, not by anyone. Not by me, and not by random guys, and not by my husband. But I need this. I am so used to feeling shit on. I require it so much.
Noah has been nice and patient for a long time. We haven’t done intense or painful or degrading sex in a long time. He’s been more respectful than that. So I got bored and went out and slept with other people. And the thing is, it’s not enough that he does these things to me. I need people to know that these things are part of my life. I need for people to know that I am this person. I can’t have this done in secret. I can’t keep secrets.
It would be a sin if I did these things and kept them private and secret. I believe that. That is something that I have to hold on to in life. Something is only a sin if I am ashamed to talk about it. If I am talking about this now, does that mean I am released from the power of it being a sin? I don’t know. I worry about needing what I need. It’s mixed.
I can point in a straight line from events in my early childhood to what I do now. Come March, other people will be able to do so as well. Noah already can. And he stomps all over me with that knowledge. Only in ways I find hot, of course. Is that the difference? Is that the line between what we do and some amorphous “abuse”? If I tell Noah to stop doing something on a given day he does. Except by prior arrangement. Except that I know that I just don’t bother to say no when I’m not in the mood. I figure out how to let it happen. I figure out how to permit him the access he wants whether I want it or not. I don’t generally bother to communicate whether I am in the mood or not. If he tells me to do something, I do it.
It’s interesting when people talk to me about how self-assured I am. How self-possessed. How willing to stand up for myself. Ha. Only sometimes. Only in some ways. If a sexual partner is telling me to do things I frankly don’t want to do I have limited ability to communicate my wants. It depends on how I am doing emotionally and it depends on how much I am invested in the partner. I have casual sex because I can have boundaries with strangers. I have repeat sex with long-term friends because I have beaten them down in non-sexual settings and they don’t push real hard out of fear of a backlash that will never come. I don’t have boundaries with my long-term partners. I barely communicate anything about my limits beyond telling them what buttons will get them the biggest reaction today. “Today is ____ anniversary so why don’t you hurt me by doing _________.”
It’s not a sin if I talk about it. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a sin. I have decided this for my own personal pantheon of beliefs.
These needs all predate Noah. They are not because of him. Most of them are not really about him at all. These are things that were broken in me as a child. But he frankly enjoys many of the ways I am broken. He feels no shame whatsoever in enjoying what I became as the direct result of years of sexual assault. Well, maybe he feels a little shame. But not much. Not enough to prevent him from trying to behave in ways that will keep me from getting bored in the future. Not enough to lessen his enjoyment of what this deep feeling of shame causes me to do during sex. His favorite part lately seems to be that I’m really ok with him fucking my throat until he causes me to vomit. I have a fairly reactive gag reflex. I consider vomiting to be just part of serious blow jobs. I don’t think that is normal. It never feels like it is really a good time to say, “Could you back off on the deep throating?” I don’t get to set terms like that. I get to accept.
In about ten minutes I have to get up and close the computer. I will walk across the house and I will do what I was told to do. Do I want to? Enh. Not really. My throat and cunt are sore. I could use about a week off from sex to recover at this point. But I draw comfort from the fact that I have confessed so I go forth without sin. I will smile. I will encourage him. I will beg him for more, in fact. It doesn’t really matter that I’m sore. That’s beside the point. I don’t think I should go have sex with other people any more. I don’t think that is a good decision for me. He says he is going to be monogamous as well. No, let me be clear. He will be as monogamous as I am.
I fell compelled by my shame. I told him he would be allowed to sleep with whomever he wanted, forever. I promised him that. At no point did I tell him I would like it or feel happy about it. I feel like I did a bait and switch. I feel like I owe him for all the sex he will never get to have because he was stupid enough to marry someone as insecure and selfish and possessive as me. I feel guilty that I seem to have tricked him into monogamy. In turn I fell compelled to say, “Ok fine, I guess I can’t be monogamous either–go have fun.”
I sincerely believe I should stop having sex with other people. I should not act on feeling compelled to earn love and affection with sex outside my marriage. It’s bad enough that I do it with Noah. I don’t actually think I should go out and find a harem of men who will cheerfully call me a whore during sex. I don’t need that. I do enough of that all by myself.
I feel so broken. I seem to have absolutely internalized that anyone who fucks this many people is kind of disgusting. And all I want to do is increase the number so I can increase just how many people will think I am disgusting.
But Noah doesn’t care. He doesn’t care at all what I’ve done or what I might do in the future. He wants me. He takes great pride in me. He loves me and adores me. He bends over backwards from me in pretty much every part of life. Except when he’s being impulsive. Oops. His friend told him, “The problem with your situation is it’s hard to know when you are cheating.” Maybe if the rules are clearer then it will be easier to figure out what to do?
I feel like I have taken something away from him. He was poly when I met him. How dare I take that away. I seem to be the epitome of what Dan Savage and Mistress Matisse warn about. That evil double crosser who promises poly and can’t hack it. I’m sorry I am so broken. I really am. I wish that I could encourage Noah to do anything he wants with anyone he wants. Hell, I do encourage him. But it hurts me when he does it. I’m sorry that is true. I really am.
Do you know what not forgiving means? It means dying alone and angry no matter who is in the room. I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want to die afraid. I don’t want to be angry that after all this misery all I get is death. I don’t want that. I want to die knowing that I have honest to fucking god made the world a better place. I helped other people be happier, better, stronger, wiser. I want to die smiling. I want to know that I did exactly what I was supposed to do and I helped as many people as I could. I want to feel peace. Some day I want to know peace.
As long as I am angry like this there is no room. I have nothing to give. Being angry takes up so much of me. I don’t want this. I don’t want this to be my life. I don’t know the path and I am so afraid.
Every marriage involves different compromises. Different accommodation of irritations. Different forgiveness. Because the human condition is that we bump each other funny sometimes. Thank you to all the women who wrote me to tell me that you are angry at Noah too. It actually made me feel better. I felt like the anger wasn’t just mine. And that’s complicated too. Life is long and life is hard. Noah really fucked up. But he has never done anything to break my trust like this before. He has carefully in pre-negotiated ways pushed me right up to the edge of my limits and off a cliff. But that’s not the same thing as breaking trust. He has never broken trust before.
That does have to count for something. He knew he was being a raging dick. He didn’t mean to do what he did. I have never seen him cry before. He says it hasn’t happened since junior high. He probably already feels bad enough. Beating him down isn’t a way to have a happy marriage. It really isn’t.
I will never again bear a child. That is a decision I have made for myself. I want to spend my life with the only person I will ever really completely join my body to. I want to. And he’s going to fuck up some times. And I am going to get very very angry with him. But I keep my promises. I promised him a lifetime.
What does forgiveness even mean? It means telling him how I feel about sex with other people and watching him cringe. It means filling in the dots for him on some of my broken. It means telling him that I don’t want to have sex with other people any more. Even though taking that hit on my identity is going to be massive for me. I am going to feel compulsive. I am going to want it. And I think I shouldn’t do it any more. It’s not actually a good decision for me any more. Given who I am I don’t think it will actually be a healthy thing for me to do with other people ever again. I think this broken is too deep.
It’s time to try something else.
The song right now is Tonight I Wanna Cry. I wish he had used a real word, but whatever. It’s kind of funny because I’m not crying. This is the first time in a week I haven’t been.
I’m thinking hard about what marriage means to me. You see, I’m at a weird tipping point in my marriage. A point of leverage. Most people don’t get to the point where they have lived with their spouse longer than anyone else ever in their lives until about twenty years in. I’ve been married for five years. I have lived with Noah longer than I ever lived consecutively with either of my parents. It really doesn’t matter if it is not fair that I hold Noah to a higher standard of truth telling than other people use in their marriage. I do. And that’s the fucking deal. You take it or…
Ok, now I’m crying. I will get to the point where I am not angry all the time. This is a stage. I know that. But I will never stop needing that level of trust. Noah is already the only mirror my life has. I won’t leave Noah. It really doesn’t matter if he breaks my trust over and over. I will never be willing to walk away from another person. I will be mean and nasty and vicious sometimes and try to drive them away because I am angry. But I can never leave again. I don’t have that in me.
Yesterday I talked to the friend who was born across the street. She asked me if I could bear living with it because her mom couldn’t. I remember how that happened. I visited during that period. It was bad. I remember what happened to her family. I know what has happened to her mom. Noah will never leave me and I will never leave Noah. I’m afraid we may hurt each other very badly though.
Given that everyone in this house agrees to the basic premise that our kids deserve to grow up safe and happy we will make sure they do. I’m really scared. As much as people mock me fucking constantly for being angry, oh my fucking god you have no idea. You have no fucking idea what I sit on. I am direct and I am female. Stop fucking commenting on my anger. If a man said the same thing you wouldn’t fucking say, “Don’t hold back, tell me how you really feel.” Well, Noah might. And he does it on purpose to be a fucking asshole. (He does not say it to me.)
I have to choose to not be angry. I have to choose to bite my tongue and not escalate. I have to choose to not make nasty comments. When he goes out with people I have to not snap, “And you had better fucking come home this time.” He knows already. He knows I am on edge. He’s not going to push that again, maybe ever. What will he push instead?
I apparently get to hold him hostage for the rest of our lives. His level of nonmonogamy will mirror mine. I guess that’s a good way of seeing how effective of a whore I am. How long can I hold out? How long until I have to admit that he is right and he should be allowed to do whatever he wants whenever he wants because I want to do the same. I don’t know. It’s not worth the fucking drama.
I have to decide how to tell this story. What story is this? I’ve already been monogamous for most of the marriage. I guess I’m supposed to be one of those stories about how open marriages don’t work. Swinging? When I know that everything I do is giving Noah a free pass to go do it with someone else. Wow. All of a sudden it really makes me feel sick to my stomach. It’s not about him having the sex with someone else, although I do try hard to not picture it. Noah wants to egg me on to do things with other people so that he can do it. I don’t want to be used that way. I don’t want to feel pressured to have sex with other people because I know I have to in order to give Noah “permission” to go do something I’m not thrilled about anyway. I am really unhappy about being part of the Embargo Noah, I’m not fucking doing this arrangement.
No. I am not going to be a gate keeper. You can’t blame me for the rest of your life for what you do and do not get to do.
I feel like what I am going to do is learn to shut my mouth. I’ll perfect my come on. I’ll do what Noah wants me to do and I’ll sleep with other people. I will learn to tell the story perfectly so that I don’t talk about the fact that it always hurts. It always leaves me uncomfortable for days. Even the fairly nice stuff with lots of lube. I don’t fit other people. It always rubs wrong. It’s feeling increasingly apparent with each person I sleep with. I have intense feelings about that. I feel intense compulsion to figure it out because Noah wants me to. Noah wants me to be slutty. He wanted that kind of wife. He really did. He went out and picked the woman with the highest body count he could find who wasn’t already married. I guess I didn’t tell him up front how much of that sex was quasi-consensual childhood experiences did I? It kind of changes the picture.
It’s going to be interesting when people see the blanks filled in on my promiscuity. I wear it like a bragging badge. I am such a whore. Everything is complicated. I don’t feel bad about the sex I had recently. I don’t feel like it makes me a bad person. I didn’t break the sanctity of my marriage, blah blah blah. But it was remarkable to me just how weird it felt to me to be so uncomfortable during and after sex. I had forgotten that part. That used to be such an understood part of sex for me. Oh yeah. It always hurts. It doesn’t with Noah. And it’s not that he has the smallest penis I have ever had sex with. (Uhm, err should I insert a disclaimer?) Smaller penises often hurt more than him.
We fit. I don’t know why. It’s one of the most intense parts of our marriage for me. He is the first sexual partner I’ve ever had where I am not uncomfortable and/or in pain during and after. I mean, he can but it takes effort on his part. Sex is such a huge part of me and my life. I am so intensely conflicted about it. I finally have a partner who doesn’t hurt me every single time we have sex. I don’t want to leave this. I don’t want to give up on sex for the rest of my life. That’s what my mother did.
I wouldn’t really do the single and dating thing while raising my kids. I would stay home and cry that I fucked up my ability to watch their whole lives. Being a mom is a way of finding out what it would have been like to have a mother who was continuously with me throughout my childhood. Yes, I’m doing it in a much more high intensity way than most of my friends who are mothers. You don’t have similar wounds to heal. I need this consistency. I need to have a stable period in my life of twenty years. At least once. I need it. I have to choose this. If I left I would never have a stable period to finish growing up in. I would never get to have that safety.
Tom gave me the first period of safety. But he wasn’t willing to let me finish growing up. Noah will let me grow up. He will let me change. He will encourage me whole-heartedly.
But he doesn’t want just me. And I am very compulsive about sex for a long list of reasons. I don’t have a good excuse, and I’m not sure I need one given that I’ve been honest and up front and negotiated to be allowed to do the things I wanted to do for a very long time. So did he. He doesn’t need an excuse either. He just wants it. New-shiny-sex is pretty hot.
But it always hurts. There is always a down side for me. Not to mention that I feel intensely conflicted about being out of the house and not present with my kids. It’s not like I do night-time parenting any way. Noah does, except when he’s out.
It is hard to not be angry all day every day. I’m not. I’m a little snippy. I’m generally very polite with my children. But small irritations are escalating too fast for me these days. I get so mad so easily. I’m not doing anything other than making terrible facial expressions and having a shitty tone of voice, I hear. I don’t want my kids to remember this. I don’t want to be this person. I really don’t know what the road forward looks like. I’m so scared.
We went from having a weekend of lots of planned sluttery to only having sex together. This is rather hilarious, I think. But Noah was approached on okcupid. He’s making a date.
I love masturbating right after sex. I’m sore and overly sensitive so it kind of hurts and it takes me a long time to have an orgasm. I have to really make up a story in my head. I’m just starting to do this again. I haven’t done this in years. I don’t masturbate when my kids are in bed with me. I like to follow the stories that come up. Often they involve sex with one or more of my friends. It usually involves me getting to meet some need in their life.
Having sex with your friends is shitting where you eat. It’s hard because having your needs met feels really good and it’s easy to get upset when you know people in your life can make you feel that good but they choose to schedule their time elsewhere. That’s a hard thing emotionally. It’s a lot of the reason that I am gun shy about polyamory. I have my priorities set where they are set and no I am not fucking adjusting them for someone else.
I don’t think I have ever hunted the way I am hunting now. I have never gotten to set the terms before. It’s really hot. It’s really hot to have people be willing to seduce me by email before we ever show up in person. I have a great correspondance going right now. The problem is that people get to the date and then have performance anxiety. I don’t have performance anxiety. I’m that good at sex. As good as I say and better. Because if you write me a script in advance I will make sure it is a script I can play and then I will play it to the hilt. It’s really fun.
People who know me have a hard time engaging with this part of me. They already have so many experiences that have made them gun shy. I should make people gun shy on a day to day basis. I’m kind of twitchy. You don’t know how my moods will flow, it’s true. Pushing an agenda on me is normally a questionable idea.
Except when it isn’t. And I don’t know how to figure out the boundaries around this with people I know. But I am learning how to do it with strangers and it’s really hot. One hiccup is that I was asked if choking is really a hard limit. Uhh, yeah. It is. No hands around my neck at all. I don’t care that you like to assert your dominance that way. Find another way. Hey, I’m a nice girl. How about if I tell you that I have been thinking a lot about face slapping? You’ll believe me because I’ve been so clear about my boundaries in every other place. Start slow, of course. I’m sensitive. But if that is interesting to you… I would feel put in my place. Just sayin’.
It’s hard to do these exchanges with people I know. I don’t trust very many people to that level. It’s hard to use your friends as one night stands. They feel bad. Friends feel used and abandoned. It’s important to not spike that oxytocin too high with people who already are more emotionally connected than I am. That’s shitting on people I like. Because they get hurt. I don’t like doing that.
I am really thrilled about how many dates are happening. I’m having fun. I’m thrilled that Noah’s response to me hunting is to start talking about going to the gym because now he has to compete. He totally doesn’t. But I like it when he is in better shape. Our sex life improves. And given where it is… oh my.
I think it is funny that I hunt so hard for sex with other people when I know that Noah will be a better lover. Every time. It’s kind of like how Noah won’t eat McDonald’s, so I go without him. I have these tastes for things that are bad for me. My vices. I like McDonald’s, ramen, and dates with new-to-me-men. I’m going to get to the point where those are it. (I eat McDonald’s like once a month. Just sayin’. Happy Meal joy.)
Noah tried to wake me up for sex on Friday night and I bit his head off. Thursday I didn’t sleep much so I was cranky. I made it up to him by waking him up on Saturday morning. And we went to a party and played together on Saturday and had hot sex. And we came home and had hot sex. And Sunday afternoon Sarah took the kids out and he tied me up and did wonderful things to me and we had hot sex. And Sunday before passing out we couldn’t stop pawing at one another… so we had hot sex again.
Sometimes just being near him makes me shake with wanting him. I have felt this voracious need for sex basically all of my life. For the first time it’s not only ok it is preferable. Because Noah actually likes me and appreciates me. I worry about how other people will perceive me for being this kind of person. I worry and feel stupid for worrying. Of course people judge me. So what?
I am not at risk of being hurt. It would be very hard for anyone to hurt me just because they disapprove of my behavior. My kids are far more sheltered than average. They have a fierce sense of body autonomy and you can’t get that if you are abused. They shine with good health and love. I don’t have a job that is at risk. Noah tells me he doesn’t care what I write. He’ll take the hit. Because I’m worth it. I am financially secure enough that I will never have to play a public game again in my life.
Still I feel this fear. If I feel this afraid, what is it like for people who have something to lose? I have hubris on my side. I can limit my hunting pool ridiculously. I seem to be only hunting among people who have college degrees, often PhDs. Not because I care but because those are the ones with the cajones to message me. They are the only people who are willing to put up with a long list of nitpicky requests and demands from me before they meet me. People who will write a sex script with me before meeting me and allow me to call a large percentage of the shots. Am I actually doing risk management this way or am I lying to myself?
Communicating clearly that I am a sure thing gives me this sensation of butterflies in my stomach. That moment of revelation, when I have to say I am interested in sex feels incredible. Because I am interested in sex. Not with anyone. With people who can talk to me and help me make a script and help me figure out why I am there.
That’s what I’m doing with the pre-writing. I’m giving myself a chance to create the back story on why the kind of girl he is fantasizing about would show up for the experience he is about to have. Everyone wants a different why. I’m very curious about why people think they should have sex. It’s different from the why they have for love. The why people have about sex tells me so much about their life.
Most people think they should have sex because they are in love. It’s kind of a weird thing, to me. Why do I think I should have sex? Because it feels good. Because I like carefully balancing how much of my life is devoted to things that feel good to me. The specific kind of feel-good I get from sex with new people is apparently worth a lot of effort and angst to me. I’m trying to get to the point where I can attenuate the effort and get rid of the angst. I’m not for everyone. The kind of people who are in the right place to do exactly what I want… that’s serendipity. I need to be honest about the emotional cost.
I need to stop being messy with my emotions in my house. Sarah has nightmares and I make them worse. I’m not yelling or screaming. But I am huffy. I do visibly shake with anger. To someone who grew up in a violent household I look like I am on the verge of hitting. I need better control. And that means I need to back off on hunting. It’s taking a lot of my brain cycles and that makes me short tempered elsewhere.
I need to figure out how much energy I actually have left once I am meeting my obligations at home. Right now I don’t feel like I understand that balance very well. This is where I don’t have a map. I guess I do though. I painted it on my wall. I’m going into the cave. Sometimes. Or I’m wandering off to have an island retreat.
Have I mentioned that due to plumbing mishaps I have a white wall in my house? The possibilities are endless. I still haven’t painted the garage door. All of these things take energy. Energy I am currently holding in reserve because later today I am going to go shut down the Port of Oakland with a few friends. I’m bringing my kids. And after the Port Shutdown I will be dropped off for a date.
There is only so much of me to go around. I only have so much energy to give. It’s really awesome; I have to be pragmatic. What do I want to have in my life? What are my actual, actionable priorities? What am I doing with my time and energy and how is it balancing throughout my life? I have to think about these things.
I am sad things went the way they did with muse, but I can’t say I’m surprised. I shouldn’t have tried for a month. I know better. I know I don’t have that kind of energy for a relationship. I should have left it at the first date. If my one night stand hunting culminated in a night of bath house sex where I don’t have to talk to the person after that… that would have been great. I was stupid. I tried to get the short-term boyfriend experience.
Know yourself. Know your limits. Noah has different limits. Hell, near as I can tell everyone has different limits than me. That’s ok. It’s tricky trying to figure out where I get to have rock hard limits around what I can and can’t request from people.
I’m interested in one night stands. If you aren’t, that’s fine. We aren’t a match. Move along. Don’t get mad at me and I’ll try not to rant about you. I’ll make that promise to all the future boys. I’ll try not to rant. Which is to say that I will rant but try to be balanced. You did good things too. We just aren’t a match. No shame in that.
That’s why. That’s why I’m hunting. Because I am continuing the behavior I have done my entire life but not I am trying to do it without shame. I want to find a way to balance this part of me that feels bad because other people do not value it with the knowledge that it does bring good to my life. It gives me the energy to go conquer the world.
I’m probably not going to schedule a one night stand attempt in January. I need a rest from that energy drain. It’s time to re-evaluate the energy I’m giving to my sex life. I promised Shanna that I would make her a play house in January. I can’t be tired from staying up all night for sex and do that. It’s going to be awesome. Just wait. But it will take creativity. It has to fit into Wonderland.
How can I talk about parenting and being a slut in one post? Because I’m both. That has to be ok. I’m not actually doing anything shameful. I have an unusual hobby that most people don’t share. Like people in this valley should fucking judge. You are all a bunch of weirdos. What the fuck is this geocaching shit?
I think that if you look at history you will find a lot more people who pursued sex voraciously than people who beat some video game. Who is the freak? Ahem.