What makes me what I am...

I want to say this first… I AM NOT WRITING THIS TO FOSTER SYMPATHY. I have come to terms with my childhood decades ago. What happened… happened. It should not have happened. Any abuse of a child is pure evil… BUT I HAVE WALKED OUT OF THAT VALLEY OF EVIL AND I KNOW I AM NOT EVIL. Don’t waste any of your energy or time on regret, or hate, or sympathy… I know I don’t.

Perhaps that is why I usually do not often speak of my childhood to others, the tendency of people to focus on my trauma rather than my recovery.

But anyway…

In a group someone posed the question of how/when did you find your perversion/kink?

And my mind began to spin… and spin… and spin… Images of being so small… just a little tiny girl and holding such terrible knowledge and secrets carefully hidden in my heart. I think that is the most corrosive thing about being a victim… being taught to keep secrets… secrets that fester inside you…

There was not a time I can remember when I was not sexual. Not a time when I was not very aware of my body’s potential for pleasure. And not a time when that knowledge did not terrify me, deliciously diabolically terrify me. Because, there was not a time when that sexuality was not steeped in terror and violence.

I remember being very, very small, wearing a little ruffled dress and seeing a man, just a man, a stranger on the street, and wondering if he did it too? If he fucked too; and I felt that shuddering delicious rush of dread. I must have been three or four. And fucking was nonconsensual… forced… dangerous… violent… the concept of consent was beyond me. (interestingly… my abuse never involved penetration… but I knew… oh yes, I knew…)

And not only was sexuality fraught with violence… violence was fraught with sexuality. Just being frightened was erotic… panic could make me come. And I was orgasmic… fantasizing, terrible complex fantasies about chains, whips, rape, humiliation, dehumanization long before I even had words for the acts. I was given a Barbie doll… poor, poor thing… I fashioned chains for her, forced her to do so many terrible things. I caged her; beat her, fed her horrible things; shit, dirt, poison. I forced endless, sundry, foreign objects into every imaginary orifice. I dismembered her. I fed her to the dog.

Long after I was no longer under the influence my abusers, I carried that within me, a dreadful fascination with violence. Every sexual fantasy involved abduction, rape, and abuse. I fantasized about things that I did not even have names for.

I remember that once I read an article in a Time Magazine about a crime. I think I might have been ten. In the article it was stated that the woman was raped multiple times. I was very puzzled. I had somehow thought that rape meant the act of tearing off someone’s clothing. I had this odd vision of the men tearing off her clothing and then her getting dressed again and then tearing the clothes off again. I remember asking my mother about this. She explained to me that rape meant forced sexual intercourse. The concept sort of rocked me. I knew about sexual intercourse. I knew about fucking. I just did not know you could do it consensually. You mean people fucked willingly???? That totally did not seem possible.

And I knew I had to keep all this secret… deepest darkest secret. No one could ever know. Even after I admitted my abuse, even after I went through years of therapy, I still did not tell anyone about the truth of my existence, that I had carried that love of violence inside me. The fear that if I let that monster out I could easily do terrible evil things. That each time I laid down and let someone fuck me, I was not there with them, I was deep inside my head, lost in my guilty world of horror. And afterward I would turn away from them, feeling dirty and evil.

I think I was maybe twenty something when I decided these fantasies were bad for me, unhealthy, and that I must stop. I decided that I was perpetuating my victimization. I decided I was not a monster, and that I was not going to think like one. It wasn’t easy to stop thinking about violence. But I did it. And I also stopped thinking about sex. I rejected violence and sex at the same time. I just turned it all off. I was in control of myself. And I was so angry. I stopped going to therapy, deciding that I was cured. I mean I was in control, finally.

My first husband could not deal with the frigidity and the anger, strayed and found greener pastures.

My second husband had a sense about him… he never asked… he always told. He was critical and demanding. Sex with him had no sense of me “letting”… he took. He was gentle, generous, attentive, creative… but underneath was this sense of being taken. It was fucking awesome. It woke up a lot of my old monsters, but I was getting old enough to know that I was not really a suppressed serial killer. I knew now that I really wasn’t going to somehow lose control and go on some kind of rampage. And fucking him was mind blowing. I loosened up a little, let the fantasies roll, took some time to try and figure out who I was in these fantasies… Was I the victim or the perpetrator in these complex stories? It was never really clear.

The marriage was chaotic, he was controlling in all aspects of our relationship. I was a strong outspoken feminist. We fought, separated, reunited, divorced and reconciled. I was strong. He was stronger. He seemed to thrive on my resistance but eventually I just stopped fighting. Menopause nearly killed it because I lost the need and literally the ability to have sex. But momentum and perhaps a certain lack of motivation kept us together. I gave up fighting, but I just was passive and avoidant. We coasted along for I don’t know how many years like that.

But finally menopause got over… and suddenly my libido snapped back on again, with a vengeance. I got a laptop computer for a birthday present and I started to write down my fantasies. My dark, dirty, forbidden fantasies… and I started jumping the old man’s bones at every opportunity. A friend mentioned an online erotica site where people can post their stories. I started reading other people’s stuff. And I had another AHAH moment. Holy fuck… There are other people who thought like me. And then I read stories about people who did these things (well, a lot of these things) that I have been thinking about WILLINGLY????

OH MY FUCKING GOD!!! I found out about BDSM… about consent… about SSC BDSM… and then I read more… and found out about Masters and something clicked… hell, I had been in a power exchange relationship for years. Yes, it wasn’t by the book. But with my husband it had always been his way, his way or fight and I was tired of fighting.

I started to talk with him about this, talking with him about wanting to be controlled, owned, bound and hurt. He looked at me like I was crazy. Protesting that I could never do it and I would wail, “I want to try. I need this.”

And I began a cleverly designed campaign. If you build it, they will come. I began “playing” submissive, imagining that he had “ordered” me to do this. Working my ass off as a service slave, telling him that I was his… that there was nothing that I would not do for him. For the longest time he refused to believe it was true, to play along. But slowly… oh so slowly… he found that he had a taste for having a girl at his feet, the sound of a scream and a body undulating in pain. Slowly he began trusting that I will not hate him if he hurts me.

It has had its ups and downs. Sometimes I despaired that it would ever really happen at all and we would take a break. But we would step back and try again. And in less than two years I am happy to say I have a Master. Not the Master of my dreams and fantasies, because he is who he is. And I have realized that it is my task to accept my role, to meet his expectations and stop worrying so much about my own.

Our M/s relationship does not look at all like anyone else's. It never will. But for the first time in my life I feel like I am in love. And he loves it when I say promptly, at a sharp nudge or a look, “Yes, Master, is there anything I can do for you?” He will kick my chair for no reason beyond wanting to hear those words.


Once someone asked me if I wished it had not happened and I stepped back and looked at my whole life. I am strong. I am smart. I am beautiful... perhaps more so because of the pain I have had to overcome. I know I would not wish it on anyone else, but like a shattered crystal vase lovingly reassembled with patience and glue, I cannot help but decide that I am all the more beautiful for the way the light catches in the cracks and stronger for the glue that holds me together.