From Hell

Saturday, 16.05

Shh! I'm hiding!

I've found a small space to tuck myself away from the horror and I think I'm safe for the moment, but no one make a sound!

Oh the horror, the horror.

I am in great danger, and it's not just physical danger - my very soul is at risk if I don't protect myself. I just have to survive for two days and I'll be OK, but two days can seem such an eternity.

Hmm, perhaps I should explain. I'm down doing the Christmas visit to my family! For two days I cannot escape, I must just survive.

OK, there is just a tiny possibility that I may be being overdramatic about this, but seriously it's genuinely a bit of a trial having my adult self thrown back into the relationships, attitudes and environment where a very confused adolescent had to sort out who he was and untangle how he felt about his kink twenty something years ago.

So, I can be adult and reflect on the issues of identity and experience, or I can drop any pretence of rationality and just go on a big stream of consciousness rant in a barbed and bitchy way. Which way do you think this is going?

I'm only going to get to grab ten minutes at a time to write this, so let's see what comes out over an increasingly cloying afternoon in which I am likely to drink whatever is available. If I'm particularly unwise, I'll then post it unedited at the end of the night. Should I apologise now?

They're coming! Signing off!

Saturday - 17.23

Th calm before the storm. Full Christmas meal being prepared, most of family yet to turn up. Hiding for a few minutes and have discovered iPod headphones. Picked some appropriate music for feeling like a rebellious teenager - the sisters of mercy.

So, why do I find this so difficult. I have a broadly supportive, loving family background and yes, I'm fully aware how many people have had to survive far worse. In truth most of my childhood was fine. It diverged from this steadily as I began to evolve my sense of self and finally had to realise that I didn't fit. From a very conventional, evangelically Christian family it gets difficult to discover that either you are going to have to spend your life crushing your real self or break away.

Saturday - late

I've described some of this before, though not here. Kami once asked me what I got out of playing dark scenes. One of the three strands of that answer was a big part of why I became really uncomfortable with the family culture and aesthetic. I'll need to censor that previous answer but let's cut and paste it and censor as needed:

"Well a big part of the answer comes in a hunger for experience and intensity, a dark aesthetic sense which has been with me in differing degrees since my childhood. Some people get by with normal lives and experience, and are quite content. I'm not. I want and need more.

There is a restless need for experience that makes my biggest challenge in day to day life just surviving the bland banality that surrounds us. That cloying web of tedium, social normality and duty that seems completely fulfilling for most but leaves me spiralling into ennui.

This doesn't just fuel my kink side. It's why I have done a lot of the things in my life... Extremes of sensation and emotion have always fascinated me and it's in large part why kink first fascinated me and why I jumped at my first chance to experience it. Arguably a little extreme for 16, I neither hesitated nor regretted anything.

This restless, dark aesthetic is very tied up my kink. It's why negative emotions are interesting to explore, why breathlessly intense kink will always score over vanilla (unless it's really good vanilla, though that then seems to make it automatically kinky in the eyes of most of the world!). Interestingly, I can actually pinpoint the life experience that really brought this aesthetic to the fore, though as I was only eight at the time I think it's safe to say that the sexuality got attached to it later!

This strand is a big part of me, a big part of my kink, though not the dominant part in really heavy scenes, at least not when I'm topping. Remembering the first time, that was interesting because it was the first occasion that I met someone who I knew, instinctively, very early on, shared a similar darkness to my own. Something that a religious upbringing had left me feeling very negative about. "

So, welcome to the bland banality, mixed with the ghosts of years of self doubt and the fear I was some sort of evil corruptor. Phantoms that I still carry around in faint form, to whisper their doubts at moments where I am at my lowest. They are loud tonight, and sleep may be some time in coming.

It's curious how we all learn to adapt, grow and survive but many of us carry scars. Old ghosts of doubt and pain. And all this despite basically loving my life.

Oh well, tomorrow I escape and this will feel like a bad dream. I think I will post this, though I'm not sure. If I do so it will be because this may in future be read by people who hit the same confusion and identify with it with a wry smile. And it may be read by people who are in the middle of that confusion, who I hope would recognise some aspects of my distaste and see that most of my life passes untroubled by this.