Out of Place

Depression is trying to grab hold of me again today, so I’m fighting it… with all the energy that hasn’t already been sucked into depression. So… mostly I’m sitting here resisting curling up in front of the TV. Hooah!

I had a pretty busy week for a summer week when I’m not working, and I think that was good for me in some ways, but it also meant I did a lot less writing than I wanted to, and that I am dragging hard today, so, you know, trying to slither out of writing today, too. So I’m fighting that urge, too.

As I was sitting here, I realized that… in almost all “advice columns” to writers, “read in the genre you write” is near the top of the list (usually right under “write daily”). The problem is… I’m not totally sure what genre I WANT to write. I read mostly fantasy at this point in my life, and gritty murder stories (Kellerman), which I know I don’t want to write. I think I’d someday like to write fantasy, but I’m intimidated by the amazingness of the authors I read and don’t even try. So I’m left with kink. The problem is, anymore, I read very very little kink. Partly because… it’s hard to find any that isn’t so poorly written that I spend the whole time choking down the writing and can’t even enjoy the story… Partly because the few people whose writing I REALLY love, I’ve read about a hundred times, and I also have found a kind of rabbit hole in it where I escape into these stories and I wind up in severe depression because… in a weird way… it’s kind of like reading about people cutting. I get this sense of addiction craving and I want to go back to that world… the world of the characters… and the problem with that is. Most of those characters are really fucked up! Fucked up like I used to be.

I used to work in a bar. I had… casual encounters with men. I did kink for money (not sex, but for me I don’t know if it made a difference). I was emotionally dysfunctional, I was dissociated most of the time and when I wasn’t I cut myself to manage. I drank. I’m probably lucky that I somehow never started with drugs or I probably would have gone down that hole as well. I remember that entire phase of my life as one, long, miserable darkness. I think now about choices I made and I’m horrified. I, as the person I am now, could NEVER do the things that the person I was then did… My anxiety alone wouldn’t let me. But somehow I did them, then. I think the dissociation was helpful.

But reading kink stories often feels like going back to that world… It feels good to be in my current life. Even though I have a lot of problems, it feels clean, it feels comfortable (most of the time), it feels… right… I don’t WANT to be back in that dark time when I did those things that I did and acted that way. But, there’s still a part of me that craves it. And I imagine it might be like that for people with addiction, too. Even once you’re “cleaned up” and have a good life, that old crowd, those old habits, that old self still holds the potential to tantalize and tempt. And I don’t even know why. I don’t know what it was about that life that I would be missing from my current life. But reading those stories can somehow wake up that craving for self-destruction that I can’t even understand.

So, what do I do? I can read more mainstream kink stories. They exist (not Fifty Shades of Gray, actual REAL kink erotica). But I’m not really interested in erotica. I’ve never been interested in erotica or even romance stories. Hell I don’t even enjoy “chick flicks” (though I find the label and stereotype of women annoying).

Additionally, I find that… mainstream kink (is that an oxymoron?) disturbs me. It makes me feel “othered.” I was recently looking through some D/s blogs for journal prompts about submission (trying to find some inspiration… found it… but not how I expected!). I found a Tumblr full of gifs and images of men and women engaging in spanking and BDSM – bondage, nipple slips, sex, etc. It was… erotica. So the women were all thin and beautiful and if not naked, dressed in lingerie. The men were rough and sometimes violent. And it wasn’t that I felt I was seeing something non-consensual, it was a way that kink manifests. It’s the Fifty Shades manifestation (if the author of Fifty Shades knew anything about safety in kink whatsoever, seriously, if people actually did the things she wrote, they would dislocate joints, ffs.) So it wasn’t like I was thinking, Oh my God, I found a den of men abusing women! I was clear that this was consensual play (or actors, of course, engaging in what people do consensually).

But it wasn’t MY play. None of it. My life. My relationship. My play. My style. None of it was reflected anywhere in that Tumblr. Some of it was sexy, (but scary, because fuck no!) but none of it was me. And as I continued to look through it, I felt more and more sad and alienated and I suddenly realized that I was becoming irrational (go me for recognizing it!) I began to think maybe Sir would prefer if I could handle THIS kind of kink and he only does it the way he does because I’m too delicate to handle THAT. And I started thinking about things in our play that I’ve overcome and been able to do (moments of engaging in something that a year ago had be a FUCK NO! level of activity) and how I’d felt so proud and accomplished and satisfied by those moments, but then seeing these images, I felt like an amateur, a toddler proud of getting a “big kid bike” with training wheels instead of a tricycle, while the adults are out doing adult sex.

I felt bad about myself and my submission… from looking at a freaking porn Tumblr. And I tried to tell myself, you know, it’s porn. It’s supposed to be unrealistic. But then, I know people who DO have sex that way (in real life, not in porn). So I told myself, it doesn’t matter what other people do, everyone is different. I thought about a friend who thinks that I’m so hardcore because she perceives her play as so much less intense than mine. I told myself it’s all ridiculous. It’s not about comparison. Why am I trying to shit on something that makes me happy? What purpose could that possibly serve?

And yet, I do it. And I think part of that is just me. And part of that is… representation.

Who I am. My type of play. How I live with Sir… I don’t see that when I look around, even in the “media” of my identity which is already niche. It’s hard to live without representation. It’s hard to maintain my self without a reflection. (Tangential thought – maybe that’s why vampires are always such assholes!)

And it’s hard to write, and create the media, without the models to read.

Sir says that is a good reason for me to turn my little vignettes about life into a book. I will create my own representation.

But right now that just feels so depressingly difficult. 🙁

*Five minutes later…*

And I just saw this quote on another blog (which I may have to start following!)

“Whatever you’re interested in comes naturally to you so it’s natural. And if something’s natural then any shame or disgust is a product of other people’s opinions, which are shaped by culture, time, place, religion, etc.” – The Pageist

Whaaaat?? Thanks blogger person for saying exactly the right thing at some point in the past, onto the internet, to make me feel slightly better (irrationality and depression are stubborn-ass bastards) about my life.

I guess that means I have to keep working on the being my own representation thing…

Sigh.

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