I grew up in polite chaos. There were no brawls in the living room, but I was mediating arguments between adults before I entered high school. My basic needs were met, but there was little room to honor my own emotions in a highly emotional household where a series of untimely losses, glamorized addiction, and unacknowledged mental illness had quietly crippled everyone. None of us were familiar enough with survival mode to recognize that we were drowning in it.
When the first person I dated and slept with broke up with me shortly after taking my virginity, I was inconsolable. I couldn’t get out of bed for days. I couldn’t eat. It took time to understand why my response was so disproportionate to the relationship.
It was never really about him. He wasn’t my person. It was about trusting and being left - believing I was safe enough to give myself to someone and discovering I had been wrong. I felt like a little idiot who’d made the wrong call.
Over the next month, he came to his senses and did his best to win me back. Giant teddy bears waiting in my car in the morning. Flowers and chocolate at my door. Many, many letters.
Eventually, I gave in.
But it was never the same, and some months later, I couldn’t do it anymore. My body had frozen him out. I was willing to try again; my nervous system was not. The decision had, in some primitive way, already been made for me: This dumb dumb will not abandon us a second time. I haven’t been broken up with since. But by then, this sense of abandonment had found a deep home in me, which has made everything that followed more complicated.
Over time, my environment taught me with remarkable clarity what I did not want to become: Emotionally selfish. Reactive. Quick to anger or offense. In denial. Theatrical. Unaware. Immature. I didn’t want to become numb, disconnected, neglectful, or cruel. I wasn’t malicious; I took no pleasure in hurting other people. I didn’t want to lose my mind in the heat of an argument and say things I didn’t mean simply because I was angry or frightened or passionate. I didn’t want to dance around the truth or hide in vague statements. I wanted to be me. Soft and strong. Trusting and caring.
I’d always possessed some instinct toward inner peace, something I associated with my grandfather, who had died by the time I was old enough to understand most of this. I knew I wanted to cultivate it despite my circumstances.
More than anything, I wanted to be okay.
I did a terrible job of that for a long time. I was still stuck in the aforementioned survival mode, and once I was finally out of it, the last thing I wanted to do was “the work.” Survival had bled me dry. The prospect of diving right back into my past with a new healing lens was daunting.
And then I got sick enough that tending to my nervous system was no longer a matter of self-improvement. It was imperative. Reconnecting with that inner peace began to feel like the difference between healing and living a half-life forever.
It’s taken years, but I am not the same person I was. I’ve earned my security, my peace. I have either nurtured it from seed or grown it from nothing. It was hard, and it remains hard. It is tested constantly. I have insecurities. I get angry, sometimes extremely angry. I find myself deep in states of self-protection. Numbness. Shutdown. Sometimes I want to scream. I want to pitch fits and set fires and dance on graves. But these states no longer stick. More importantly, they do not dictate my actions.
By no means am I where I would like to be. I’ve made hard choices to survive and harder ones to remain true to myself. I’ve found myself in situations for which there was no “right” answer, response, approach, and done my best.
But one of the things I’m most proud of is that I live as me. Not my childhood, not my losses, not my parents, not my illness. I know how I feel; I do not question my feelings or back down from them. I’m brave. I take care of the people I love, and I’m very good at it when they let me.
I still crave safety. Abandonment remains a deep wound. But I am capable of holding compassion and expectation at the same time, and of honoring both. I’m steady. It is the most difficult and most worthwhile thing I have ever done.
D/s asks for an unheard of amount of vulnerability and trust. Without those things, it is hollow. What’s an exchange of power without meaning?
I think one of the reasons submission is so fulfilling to me is that it allows me access to my truest nature. To be completely myself. Soft, trusting, vulnerable. Honest in desire and connection. Brave.
It’s not lost on me that I can access that part of myself now because I fought so hard to make her feel safe enough to exist.
