A friend once mentioned to me that not-choosing was a valid option; he put it in the sense of waiting for clarity. The idea has always sat close to me through my life…
With that notion, I have been sitting silently with something since last September. I have mentioned it to various individuals as the conversation arose, but not posted anything about it, nor mentioned the deeper ramifications…
Last fall, at summer camp, I was flogged. Well, I was flogged by a certain individual, which more than one man has told me is a flogging with a capital ‘F’. It was quite possibly the single most intense experience I have had in my thirteen years involved with the leather community. I think of it often, fondly. I am fully happy to have share that with him and to have been there with him.
Since then, I have had a few opportunities to be flogged, and my answer has been ‘No, thanks.” Or a more resounding “No!”
See…? I think I am done with it. That session answered a lot of questions for me. Perhaps it has offered more insight into who I am than most other moments in my life. In a more abstracted sense, I am still processing it.
Once more, I say to the world: I am not a pain pig.
This time around, it is not a question or suspicion or anything of a guess.
I am right and accurate when I say that certain things do not hurt me as they do others, and certain things do. I do not enjoy the latter. Early in my life, I walked through the world with a lot of pain. Things such a flogging offered a break from all of that by giving so much intensity so that I could forget about what I carried through the day. That said, the years following chemo were intense for numerous reasons, but steadily over the past few years I have learned to move through the world with very little pain in my body.
I suspect that this change has influenced my shift from activities such as flogging.
In the process, my body has come alive in its response to such tiny little stimuli. Any of you that have witnessed my response to tactile stimuli understand what I mean in this. This is wonderful stuff to me, but also it makes more intense things quite difficult.
I can sit in an active play space and close my eyes and listen to the beatings and sounds of the space… in the right moment, my body will start to response to the experience. Sometimes, so intensely so that I feel like I am being hit…
There are reasons for the timing of all this: IML is this weekend, the event that I will no longer attend as long as I make yearbooks… but, also, I received my invitation to this year’s summer camp earlier in the week, so my urge to reflect is rather high…
The frustration I see in this new understanding of myself is this: once more, I am put outside of the normal range of experience. The most common BDSM practice is flogging. It seems to me that moving upward from there is single tails. I still choose to walk my own path, I am just frustrated to again find myself isolated from the norm even among those I consider to be a better fit to me than the general populace…
I am happy to note that of the men I have met that see the unique response of my body to light touch, many of them delight in knowing me and sharing that experience with me… but the mainstream of the leather community doesn’t get it; the subtlety of it all is lost on them…
Such is the way for me, I suppose…
gryphon's hole 