This isn’t a nice, pretty, cheerful post. Some of you may find the material disturbing. This one is entirely for me. One of the bloggers I read regularly has alluded to his inner beast. Reading his words transported me back to a time and place in my life that was very difficult. I had neither the knowledge or desire to rein in my inner beast. What follows is my train of thought regarding that time in my life.
I was dangerous, although it remains a matter of some debate whether it was the poor male on the receiving end of the whip or my soul that was in more danger. I don’t think I was entirely sane then either. In fact, looking back at that period of my life, I know I was suffering from a very deep-seated clinical depression, a walking, talking zombie. I remember having fleeting thoughts of suicide, but I never really fully felt the urge to destroy myself, only the urge to destroy others. Zero tolerance was the order of the day. In retrospect, it was having the son that saved me, since that provided enough of a break in the spiral, and gave me a reason to be responsible. I clung to that responsibility for a long time, used it as both sword and shield. I remember I would get up, get dressed, go about the days business solely because I was responsible for my son, no other reason. I certainly had no desire to be a functioning member of society, nor did I particularly care what depths my life sunk to. I did have that all-consuming responsibility though, so I held a job, paid the bills, made sure the child had food and clothing and proper care. In the course of doing so, I ended up with the same. Amazing how that works.
My major memories of my life between my freshman year of college and the birth of my son revolve almost entirely around my discovery of and exploration of BDSM. I found BDSM through a Usenet newsgroup, and various other BBS sites. This was before the advent of the ubiquitous chatroom or Yahoo or AIM or other instant messaging services. This was back when you had to know at least a little bit of Unix to do pretty much anything more involved than word processing. I got hooked up with a Dominant that was reasonably local, and spent some time being the world’s worst submissive. I think the proper descriptor is probably “nightmare.” I was young and dumb and everything I ran across in my explorations led me to believe that BDSM consisted only of Male Dom/femsub or gay couples or sleazy Pro-Dommes that were no different than prostitutes, except for the whole leather and latex clothing bit. In any case, the man I hooked up with was a bit sadistic, not really very dominant, and kind of creepy, but that’s what was available. He certainly didn’t help my already-huge trust issues, and in fact put me in the position several times to trigger intense bad reactions, in addition to disregarding my safeword when I was in physical danger. Needless to say, our relationship ended the day I took the cane away from him and hit him with it. Unfortunately, that was also the day that the beast that had been prowling in the dark recesses of my mind snapped the barriers holding it back and came leaping and snarling to the fore.
I started to drink heavily, and on a couple of occasions tried smoking pot, which fortunately just bored me to tears and never became a habit. The booze did though. The booze regulated my day and kept that inner beast from fully coming awake on those occasions that I had to interact with others. Looking back, I know that I was heavily self-medicating, and doing so in more ways than with alcohol. I was very willing and eager to try whatever sort of sex was mentioned or available, generally while blasted out of my mind. It truly is a miracle that I somehow managed to avoid disease and/or death, considering some of the situations I put myself in. This period of my life included my explorations with other women, swinging, multiple-partner sex, public sex, videos and photographs, pretty much anything you can think of, I was there and gave it a try. In the process, I became colder and colder… the beast ruled more and more of my life. The more stimulus, the more self-medication that happened, the more it took to make me feel alive. I continued my explorations of BDSM, but that had been relegated to the back burner, as I increasingly found myself irritated more often than not at each successive foray into that world. I was still attempting to be a submissive, but just didn’t fit. That all changed late one snowy Friday night at a club called First Ave in Minneapolis. I was out drinking and carousing with a bunch of friends, and had gotten groped while trying to make my way through the crowd. I snapped, and before I knew it, I was surging with rage, and the guy who had grabbed my ass was pinned to the wall with my hand wrapped around his throat and my knee firmly embedded in his crotch. I don’t remember much else aside from the wild exhilaration I felt, and my friends dragging me out of the club.
The months following that were a frenzy of exploration for me. I quit drinking almost entirely, and for the most part, stopped my sexual exploration as well. I spent lots of time learning everything I could about how to inflict pain, and searching out men who were willing to be test subjects. Probably the only sane thing I did was to decide that I would honor safewords, regardless of the circumstances, or how out of control I felt. That was something that was paramount in my thinking, because front and center in my mind was the image of my face staring back at me in the mirror the morning after my safeword had been ignored. It wasn’t pretty. I had no finesse in those days. I wanted, craved, needed the psychological rush that comes from power exchange, but had no idea how to go about muzzling the beast long enough to get it. The beast would get a taste of the pain I was inflicting, and rage out of control, needing more, creating more. I can’t even recall the number of canes I broke, or how many times I had to bite back a howl of pain because I had to stop for a safeword. I wasn’t content or even momentarily sated unless I drew blood, lots of it, and I was so exhausted and sore I could barely lift my arms. I don’t remember ever feeling a connection to any of the men I beat—they were simply living, breathing targets for my aggression. Needless to say, it got harder and harder to find someone willing to endure what I needed to give, and if it weren’t for a truly hard core masochist I knew, I probably would have self-destructed. That man was my delicate tie to sanity and the right side of the law for a long time.
My family, especially my father, realized I was skating close to the edge, and made the long trek to pull me away from my life, a move that I fought tooth and nail. In the end, I only went with them because my father physically pinned me to a wall and held me there until I stopped snarling long enough to hear him say that he knew about the beast, and that if I didn’t choke it back and learn to tame it, it would kill me. That was quite a shock to me, especially since I’d never spoken to anyone about what was going on in the deep dark recesses of my mind.
I was dangerous, although it remains a matter of some debate whether it was the poor male on the receiving end of the whip or my soul that was in more danger. I don’t think I was entirely sane then either. In fact, looking back at that period of my life, I know I was suffering from a very deep-seated clinical depression, a walking, talking zombie. I remember having fleeting thoughts of suicide, but I never really fully felt the urge to destroy myself, only the urge to destroy others. Zero tolerance was the order of the day. In retrospect, it was having the son that saved me, since that provided enough of a break in the spiral, and gave me a reason to be responsible. I clung to that responsibility for a long time, used it as both sword and shield. I remember I would get up, get dressed, go about the days business solely because I was responsible for my son, no other reason. I certainly had no desire to be a functioning member of society, nor did I particularly care what depths my life sunk to. I did have that all-consuming responsibility though, so I held a job, paid the bills, made sure the child had food and clothing and proper care. In the course of doing so, I ended up with the same. Amazing how that works.
My major memories of my life between my freshman year of college and the birth of my son revolve almost entirely around my discovery of and exploration of BDSM. I found BDSM through a Usenet newsgroup, and various other BBS sites. This was before the advent of the ubiquitous chatroom or Yahoo or AIM or other instant messaging services. This was back when you had to know at least a little bit of Unix to do pretty much anything more involved than word processing. I got hooked up with a Dominant that was reasonably local, and spent some time being the world’s worst submissive. I think the proper descriptor is probably “nightmare.” I was young and dumb and everything I ran across in my explorations led me to believe that BDSM consisted only of Male Dom/femsub or gay couples or sleazy Pro-Dommes that were no different than prostitutes, except for the whole leather and latex clothing bit. In any case, the man I hooked up with was a bit sadistic, not really very dominant, and kind of creepy, but that’s what was available. He certainly didn’t help my already-huge trust issues, and in fact put me in the position several times to trigger intense bad reactions, in addition to disregarding my safeword when I was in physical danger. Needless to say, our relationship ended the day I took the cane away from him and hit him with it. Unfortunately, that was also the day that the beast that had been prowling in the dark recesses of my mind snapped the barriers holding it back and came leaping and snarling to the fore.
I started to drink heavily, and on a couple of occasions tried smoking pot, which fortunately just bored me to tears and never became a habit. The booze did though. The booze regulated my day and kept that inner beast from fully coming awake on those occasions that I had to interact with others. Looking back, I know that I was heavily self-medicating, and doing so in more ways than with alcohol. I was very willing and eager to try whatever sort of sex was mentioned or available, generally while blasted out of my mind. It truly is a miracle that I somehow managed to avoid disease and/or death, considering some of the situations I put myself in. This period of my life included my explorations with other women, swinging, multiple-partner sex, public sex, videos and photographs, pretty much anything you can think of, I was there and gave it a try. In the process, I became colder and colder… the beast ruled more and more of my life. The more stimulus, the more self-medication that happened, the more it took to make me feel alive. I continued my explorations of BDSM, but that had been relegated to the back burner, as I increasingly found myself irritated more often than not at each successive foray into that world. I was still attempting to be a submissive, but just didn’t fit. That all changed late one snowy Friday night at a club called First Ave in Minneapolis. I was out drinking and carousing with a bunch of friends, and had gotten groped while trying to make my way through the crowd. I snapped, and before I knew it, I was surging with rage, and the guy who had grabbed my ass was pinned to the wall with my hand wrapped around his throat and my knee firmly embedded in his crotch. I don’t remember much else aside from the wild exhilaration I felt, and my friends dragging me out of the club.
The months following that were a frenzy of exploration for me. I quit drinking almost entirely, and for the most part, stopped my sexual exploration as well. I spent lots of time learning everything I could about how to inflict pain, and searching out men who were willing to be test subjects. Probably the only sane thing I did was to decide that I would honor safewords, regardless of the circumstances, or how out of control I felt. That was something that was paramount in my thinking, because front and center in my mind was the image of my face staring back at me in the mirror the morning after my safeword had been ignored. It wasn’t pretty. I had no finesse in those days. I wanted, craved, needed the psychological rush that comes from power exchange, but had no idea how to go about muzzling the beast long enough to get it. The beast would get a taste of the pain I was inflicting, and rage out of control, needing more, creating more. I can’t even recall the number of canes I broke, or how many times I had to bite back a howl of pain because I had to stop for a safeword. I wasn’t content or even momentarily sated unless I drew blood, lots of it, and I was so exhausted and sore I could barely lift my arms. I don’t remember ever feeling a connection to any of the men I beat—they were simply living, breathing targets for my aggression. Needless to say, it got harder and harder to find someone willing to endure what I needed to give, and if it weren’t for a truly hard core masochist I knew, I probably would have self-destructed. That man was my delicate tie to sanity and the right side of the law for a long time.
My family, especially my father, realized I was skating close to the edge, and made the long trek to pull me away from my life, a move that I fought tooth and nail. In the end, I only went with them because my father physically pinned me to a wall and held me there until I stopped snarling long enough to hear him say that he knew about the beast, and that if I didn’t choke it back and learn to tame it, it would kill me. That was quite a shock to me, especially since I’d never spoken to anyone about what was going on in the deep dark recesses of my mind.
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