Your Dickhead Brain & You: A Practical Guide to Living with Mental Illness Part 1: Not Dying
This is part two of a five part series I’m doing all about the stuff I’ve learnt over the last 10ish years of various shades of depression and anxiety. Some of it has been taught to me in therapy, some of it I worked out by myself, some of it I read online or was told by other mentally ill people. Originally I was going to post it over a week but hahaha commitments.
This is all stuff that I do on a regular basis, to help me. It might not work as well for you. Do not be afraid to discard unhelpful bits, or modify them to make them work better for you, or use them as a springboard for researching other things that are more relevant to you. This is not exhaustive or prescriptive.
You can find part one here.
Not Dying
In the past, poor mental health has wiped out my ability to feed myself, shower, and have anything even vaguely resembling a sleep pattern. Unsurprisingly, I then ended up with very poor physical health to complement the poor mental health, and that just made everything worse. Over time, I figured out a few techniques to help reduce that.
Eat: My problems have always been around undereating and I’ve written this from experience with those problems. If your problems manifest in overeating, then this section may not help you; searching for “help overeating” might be more useful for you.
Your body needs calories to survive. Eat. Decide how often – if three times a day is too difficult, try twice or once a day. And then actually eat that often a day, even if you're not hungry. Mental illness fucks with your appetite; if you decided to eat lunch and dinner everyday, do that, even if you're not hungry. Even if it's not very much. Better to eat something than nothing.
Keep a stock of ready meals and/or instant noodles and/or cereal and/or toast and/or whatever convenience food feels doable to make for yourself even when you're deadly low on energy.
Vegetables are great and eating a balanced diet is ideal, but mental illness can give you weird food cravings, and eating an unhealthy meal is way better than not eating at all. If all you can stomach eating for three days is cheesecake, do it.
Keep cleanish: if you can't shower as much as you used to or want to, a damp cloth (or baby wipes) on your pits & bits + dry shampoo can be a godsend, and allow you to feel spruced up enough to leave the house when showers are just not doable. Order some off Amazon and keep them in stock.
Try and change at least your underwear/bottoms every day or every couple of days, especially if you have a vagina. Thrush is not fun.
If you can't brush your teeth, aim to gargle mouthwash.
I have long hair, and my go to “looks like it's messy on purpose” hairstyle (don't even have to brush it) is to pull my hair back in a ponytail, twist the hair tie so it makes an extra loop, and pull my hair half through the loop from the base of the ponytail. Might be worth trying, or finding your own equivalent.
You're ill. Don't be too surprised if you can't be perfectly coiffed. Make compromises.
Sleep: obviously the ideal is to keep a regular sleep schedule where you get up and go to bed at the same time each day but also lol. I will say, value your sleep – don't cut time out of your sleep time to work or read or whatever.
If you can't sleep, don't worry too much. Simply resting – lying in bed with your eyes closed, perhaps listening to some music or a podcast – can be rejuvenating as well. But if you find yourself lying down and becoming increasingly anxious and agitated, don't stay there. Get up. Do something else for an hour or so. Try again later. You won't fall asleep if you're becoming more frantic.
To help get to sleep, visualisation can be a helpful tactic, in large part to prevent rumination. Imagine a calm scenario, for example walking along a beautiful beach, sitting in a woodland glade, floating down a gentle river. Focus on and think about all the little details. Don't let your dickhead brain get a word in edgeways. It doesn't really matter what you visualise so long as it's calm and you can focus on it – I like to visualise myself floating through the void of space. Another option is to mentally rehearse something from your everyday life; I sometimes visualise how different knots are tied. You could also do dance choreography, martial arts patterns, musical compositions, chemical equations, anything you want. Finally, if none of this works for you, you can find sleep hypnosis tracks on YouTube which a lot of people find helpful
Doctors recommend practising good sleep hygiene. This includes using your bed (ideally bedroom) exclusively for sleep (and sex), not eating in it, not studying, not writing long guides to mental illness, none of that. Sleep hygiene also includes not napping, turning off all screens for an hour before bed, getting up/going to bed at the same time each day, and having a strict bedtime routine so that your body knows that it's time to go to sleep 10 minutes after you (for example) brush your teeth. I'm not very good at sleep hygiene personally; you may want to look it up elsewhere.
Keep a daily to do list of important but difficult things: sometimes the number of things you feel you should be doing to look after yourself and keep your life in order feels overwhelming. Picking the most important things and writing them down somewhere you can easily look at them everyday can help keep your head in order and prioritise. Pick the things that you struggle to do but really feel if you don't manage to do them. But it's important you don't use this list as a tool to beat yourself up with. Some days you won't manage all of it, and that's okay. It's a list of things that are important but difficult. Try and be kind to yourself when you can't finish it.
The list should not be immutable. If you're consistently finishing the whole list, consider adding something else helpful; if there's something on it you're not doing for days and days at a time, think about dropping it.
It does not have to be a long or complicated list. In one of the bad patches, my list has been “eat lunch, eat dinner, take medication, change underwear”. On bad days I wouldn't eat dinner or change my underwear. On good days, I might brush my teeth. Now, my list has 9 items including “exercise”, “do housework”, “shower”, and “study Italian”, all things that would have been completely impossible for me to do even regularly in those bad times. I don't have reminders to eat or change my clothes any more because I don't need them; before my list was mainly focused on making sure I didn't get physically ill, now it's focused more on maintaining my mental health by doing things that make me feel productive and meaningful. That's what I needed then, and this is what I need now. Â
On a more general organisational note, you can use this list to help remind you to to do things from a more general to do list. I keep my general to do list in a separate place and add one thing from it to my daily to do each day.
Exercise: short section here because though exercise is good for your body and your mind, exercising while mentally ill is not possible for a great many people. But if you can, try to do some. Not necessarily a lot. It's unlikely you're going to be able to do daily hour long workouts, but remember: 5 minutes is better than none. So is 1 minute. So is 30 seconds. So is 10 seconds. Even if it's a single press up, a solitary star jump, one yoga pose, walking up and down stairs, whatever it is it is infinitely better than nothing. That's just maths.
Try to remove barriers to exercise. Don't think to yourself that you must work out in dedicated clothes. Burpee in your jeans. Plank in your pyjamas. Squat naked. Definitely don't say to yourself that you have to leave the house to go to the gym if you want to exercise – stretch in front of the TV. Do crunches in bed. Not even crunches – just toss and turn in bed for a bit, because any movement is better than none. (On that note, both “exercise in bed” and “yoga in bed” have many results on Google.) Make it as easy as possible for you to get in that 10 seconds.
A reminder...
All of this is hard when you're ill. Maybe you wanted to do it all but couldn't. You did some of it. You read it. You thought about it. Whatever you did, it was better than nothing. Value it.
Your Dickhead Brain & You Part 1: Intro and Self-Talk
Your Dickhead Brain & You: A Practical Guide to Living with Mental Illness Part 1: Intro and Self-Talk
I have already written most of this down; however it's spread out over two dozen different chat threads. After spending quite a lot of time talking to people individually about what I've learnt about looking after my mental health, I thought I'd throw it out into the void for anyone else who might find it useful.
This is all stuff I've learnt over the last 10ish years of various shades of depression and anxiety. Some of it has been taught to me in therapy, some of it I worked out by myself, some of it I read online or was told by other mentally ill people. I have a lot to say on this topic, and to stop this guide becoming entirely unwieldy I'm going to split it into five sections:
Self-talk – all the things you say to yourself inside your brain
Not dying – keeping yourself fed, vaguely hygienic, and similar
Going outside?! - leaving the house to do things
Coping mechanisms – things to help with the not dying and the going outside
Medication and therapy –  I'm not qualified to say too much on this, but I do have a few thoughts
...Aiming to post Monday – Friday this week, assuming energy levels allow. At the weekend I'll probably post one giant post with the whole thing in it for ease of reference.
This is all stuff that I do on a regular basis, to help me. It might not work as well for you. Do not be afraid to discard unhelpful bits, or modify them to make them work better for you, or use them as a springboard for researching other things that are more relevant to you. This is not exhaustive or prescriptive.
Self-Talk
Most people have an internal monologue going on inside them all the time. For mentally ill people, this monologue can be viciously destructive, but there are a few things you can try and do to make it slightly less bitchy.
Use I feel statements: don't say things like “I am stupid, I am lazy, I am pathetic”. Your dickhead brain is saying those things, but that doesn't mean they're true. Instead, say “I feel stupid, I feel lazy, I feel pathetic”. Just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's real. On that note...
Don't tell yourself you're bad for having feelings: thought patterns like “I shouldn't be so anxious, this shouldn't be so difficult, thousands of people do it everyday without all this fuss etc etc etc” are common. But listen to me: it's okay. You are allowed to have feelings. You are not bad, wrong, or broken for feeling a particular way. Some things will be harder for you than for other people and that has no bearing on your worth as a person. This can be hard to remember in the moment, which is why it's good to...
Have pre-prepared affirmations to help break negative thought patterns: when you're caught up worrying about something it can be hard to break free from it. Sometimes it goes round and round in your head, repetitively and endlessly – psychologists call this rumination. When you're caught up ruminating it can be hard to think about anything else, which is why it's important to pre-empt your dickhead brain and develop affirmations ahead of time. Here I am using the term “affirmation” to mean a phrase or sentence (or possibly image, piece of music, whatever works) that you can use to counter negative thoughts. For example, when I feel bad about my body, I say to myself “my body has no bearing on my worth as a human being” and I repeat it over and over again inside my head.
It can feel very hollow and false, you might really struggle to believe it, but the point of an affirmation in this context is not necessarily for you to believe it, but to take control of your thoughts again and to stop automatically ruminating on negative self-talk. If you google affirmations, you will find pages and pages of relentlessly positive affirmations such as “I radiate beauty, charm, and grace”. If that works for you, awesome, but for a lot of people that's simply too lofty a goal. Trying to use an affirmation like that can be counter-productive because it feels so far from the truth that rumination takes over again. Pick something that you can personally relate to. In  the example above, “my body is beautiful” would not have worked for me because it feels too far away. “My body has no bearing on my worth” feels more doable.
Ideally, affirmations directly counter whatever your dickhead brain is saying so that you can try and  train yourself to think in a less negative way. If you can't do that, use something unrelated to yourself – a favourite memory, something fun you're planning, anything that allows you to break the rumination cycle and guide your thoughts down a less destructive path.
Value what you've done: so what if “all” you did today was get out of bed and brush your teeth. You could've not brushed your teeth! Whatever you've done, value it, no matter how tiny. Even if you just opened your eyes and stared at the ceiling. Any movement is better than none. Try not to focus on all the things you didn't do – no one's to do list is ever empty.
Some time ago I read this excellent post on Girly Juice, Kate Sloan's excellent sex blog, fantasising about what Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn 99 would enjoy in bed. Then I forwarded it to half the kinky people I know, because kinksters love Rosa.
In this post it very briefly mentions that Rosa is imagined as “stone” in bed. I had never heard this phrase before and it was quite hard to google, but the various definitions I encountered seemed to coalesce around the idea that someone who is “stone” doesn't want their genitals touched in a sexual way. It appears to be most commonly used in lesbian communities in the butch/femme framework, and more specifically in the context of stone butches, in a way which is related to female masculinity and the gender dysphoria that some butch people experience.
I'm not butch, I definitely think of myself as femme, but I am often stone - and I'm not sure I like it all that much. When I have sex with people with vaginas, I am normally entirely the giving partner – going down, fingering, strapping on, until they come shudderingly around my fingers or sitting on top of my silicone dick. Often they will ask what I want back, if there's anything they can do for me, and I sort of awkwardly dodge the question or say I'm not in the mood that day. The same applies for when I'm a Dominant partner in kink. They might get beaten, facefucked, held down by the throat and ordered to make themselves come to earn the privilege of air – but while they might come with all the horny desperation of someone who feels that their life is dependent on their orgasm, often I won't even take my underwear off.
So I often behave in a way that could be described as “stone” - but I don't think I want to. Orgasms are fun and I want more of them. And it aggravates me somewhat that in so many of the D/s dynamics I'm involved in, my submissive partner comes more than I do. I feel that if I'm in control I should be having as many orgasms as I want, not to mention that normally my sub expresses a desire to pleasure me and make me come frequently and deeply. I want to come more. My partners want me to come more. Why aren't I coming more!
One of the primary ones is my Complicated Feelings about penetration. It is so much easier and so much more fun for me to come when I have something inside me. I love being penetrated. But I find it really hard to dissociate this from submission. In so many portrayals of D/s (the vast majority?), the person being penetrated is the submissive partner and the person doing the penetration is dominant. I don't agree with this as a philosophy and I don't think that being penetrated is inherently a submissive act, but it's a trope that subsumes me so completely that I find it hard to break away from. And in general I do not want to feel submissive. Thinking about it doesn't turn me on, it just ticks me off.
The other major Thing is anxiety about my orgasm. To come, I need to be touching myself, with my fingers, and nothing interfering with that. I can't have anything touching my fingers while I rub my clit, it throws off my stroke (if we're in missionary, your body needs to be at any angle that means you don't touch my hand in your forward stroke). Sometimes it can take a while of self-stimulation to come; sometimes I can touch for myself for ten minutes before accepting that it's not going to happen that day. I worry a lot about partners feeling inadequate or frustrated because they can't make me come by themselves, or getting bored while I lie back and wank off for extended periods of time, or irritated when I can't come. And I often struggle to find the words to express this.
More minor, but still very present, is anxiety about my pubic hair, the amount of which varies depending on how exhausted/busy/mentally ill I am, and whether I smell or taste bad. This is heightened because I very much dislike, to a degree that borders on phobia, using other people's showers, even when I've driven an hour to get to their house in summer and my butt is all sweaty.
Those last two are easier to deal with. I can tell myself that if someone doesn't want to put their face in my vulva than they probably won't, and say things like “hey it was a long drive so I apologise if I'm a bit sweaty” in the hopes of making it easier for people to say if they'd really rather not touch my genitals (and if I really really need to I can use an unfamiliar shower, I just...would very much rather not). And while it's hard for to communicate about what I need to come, I'm getting better at it through practice. Fucking more people helps – asking what other people need to come and seeing the incredible variety of answers make it easier for me to see my orgasm as less bizarrely specifically.
The hardest part is penetration. But again, I am learning. Simply by identifying and naming my desire to be penetrated it gets easier. It allows me to say that I want to be penetrated and to talk to my partner about the best way of doing that – whether it means with their fingers, with them strapping on, or with a specialised harness to attach a favoured dildo to their face. This last is especially good in a D/s dynamic.
As of now, I am often stone. But I think I know how to change that.
I don't want to hurt you, but I will. I don't know where your boundaries are. I can't intuit them. I want to, I want to so badly, but it's written in an alphabet I don't know. I can't remember. I can't work it out.
If you want me to know something, write it down. I don't remember what you said. I don't process sound well. I process speech worst of all. Especially when I'm scared (I'm always scared).
I'm going to break the rules. I'm going to upset you. I'm going to hurt you. I don't know when or how, but I can be pretty sure it's going to happen. I apologise in advance. I'll try not to – where I've hurt other people in a similar way, I'll check to make sure I don't do it again. I rarely make the same mistake twice; shame that there's an infinite number of ways to be wrong. I will try and remember where your preferences lie. But I will struggle.
People don't come with warning signs or instruction manuals. It would help if they did. It would help if I did. It would help if I thought about things more. It would help if I wrote more things down. It would help if I weren't so stupid and so broken. A lot of people have called me intelligent, but no A grade can erase the stains of whatever I have, whatever I am – the opposite of empathy. Not knowing. Not apathetic – but not knowing. Not being able to know, in that way that you know and your friends know and your family know and your partners know and so many people other than me know. Not knowing because of the deficiency in me that casts other people's inner lives as vague, guessed at shadows.
What's it like to know? To feel someone else's feelings? To know how your actions will affect them? What's it like to not know that at some point, everyone close to you will have their hearts ripped out by your clumsy, adolescent fumbling, gangly and too tall, in the shape of an adult but still too young to fuck?
For when it happens – I apologise. I hope you recover.
Diary entry – 09/01/17 – The house always wins
This is a story about an intense, awkward, and somewhat not to plan, but ultimately successful – I think – playdate with Fell. Although play is always somewhat of a blur in my memory, it is as honest as I can make it and I've tried not to leave anything out – as such, it's pretty damn long, four and a half pages. When I reread to proofread, it took me about 10 minutes.
In this, I use “it” pronouns for Fell. Doing so fits with our D/s dynamic, but I don't know if I'll keep this up in future posts. It depends on how I feel after publishing and ruminating, and if using object pronouns leads to linguistic confusion with actual inanimate objects. For now, Fell is not a he but an it.
Onto the story.
I had not been able to see it for almost three weeks due to a combination of the holidays keeping us both busy, and us both being horribly ill with the worst cold/flu thing I think I've ever had in my life. We went to the same play party – play parties are a hotbed of disease, although typically of the rhino/adenovirus variety rather than the venereal variety – and were both laid up for a couple of weeks. I was so excited, I'd really missed playing with it and I'd also been getting a bit stressed about the Bruise of Theseus project faltering (in a similar vein to the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, we've been working to keep it permanently marked by me in some way – there are some pictures of this endeavour here at my very very NSFW kink diary).
By the time we met up again, it had almost completely healed from my administrations at the play party, with only a few faint cane marks left. This was unacceptable and so the first order of business was to remark it.
I had got it a small, cheap Christmas present: a set of 6 colour coded egg timers ranging from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Happily, Fell has monochromatic vision, so when I asked it to pick a timer to play with – putting the 30 seconds one aside, that's not long enough – it hesitated. It didn't know what it was picking, and whatever it picked, we were going to do no safe words impact play for the appropriate time.
It ended up picking the 1 minute one, which was the shortest time possible. Lucky thing. Next time I hope it picks the 10 minute one – it's a bit of a Russian roulette type deal, the timers jump straight from 5 minutes to 10 minutes which is a big leap. I'd like to see it get “shot”. But in the minute I had to fuck with it I still managed to get a lot of good cane marks in, and had it go from standing against the wall to sobbing and crying on the ground. It doesn't often cry, so this was a rare treat for me.
Then it was time to move onto the centrepiece of the session.
We had negotiated an interrogation scene. Before I showed up, it had generated a code using a random number generator and hidden this code somewhere in its flat. We had agreed that we would have an hour of playtime, and if it surrendered the location of the code within that time, it would receive a pre-agreed penalty: its ass held open with a speculum and Tabasco poured in, no safeword. If it managed to hold off for the whole hour, it wins – game over. No penalty.
I got into role with some knee high boots and my favourite black dress, laid out my tools, and set the timer on my phone.
Because this was an interrogation scene, I wanted to get away from traditional kink props and use more household objects for a gritty, less polished feel. My first act was to string a few cable ties together and use them to bind its feet and wrists together; then to say to it “now is your chance to tell me the code and escape what's about to happen to you”. It refused, so I wrapped packing tape round its face to gag it, punched it swiftly in the testicles and then the gut, and picked up a pair of pliers.
It had curled up, protecting itself. I persisted, wrestling with it and going for its nipples. It was hard because it kept moving, I was really struggling to aim, but in the end I got flesh and grabbed. I could see it screaming behind its gag and then, all of a sudden, it broke the cable ties on its ankles and kicked me clean off the bed and onto the floor. I was shaken for a second or two but got up and came back. It had warned me beforehand that if it struck at me it was probably reaching its limits, so rather than going straight back to play I put my finger in its clenched fist and told it to squeeze my finger if it wanted to safeword.
It flattened its palm. Keep going.
I went straight back with the pliers and the nipples, and this time it tapped out, the gag slipping from its face. Enough. Stop.
I cut the packing tape and cable ties off it with safety shears, made sure it had water, gave it lots of cuddles and strokes, and we talked about what had happened. I had been unaware that nipples are a hot point for it; I knew that genitals are (which is why I'd only punched it there once), but nipples was new to me. It pointed out that I could have worked this out seeing as it picked waterboarding over nipple clamps the first time we played, but I had attributed that to wanting instant relief rather than to nipples themselves being particularly awful. It apologised for kicking out at me but I told it I didn't mind at all – which is true. It didn't hurt and I don't mind being challenged in play.
In the tussle, without trying to, I had managed to tear off some of the skin near its nipple. It might scar and honestly I feel awful about it. Scars are one of its limits, and though it doesn't seem to be especially fussed, I feel pretty shit about breaching its limits even if they were by accident. I overreached myself as a top  and I'm not happy about it. This is not responsible topping and not only did I fall short of the standards I set for myself, but I let Fell down. Fell and I play heavy which I love, but I need to step up my game if I want to keep doing it. If you're not careful, heavy play can swerve into being straight up unsafe. I definitely know which side of the line I want to be on.
Enough self-flagellation. Back to the story.
After it safeworded and we had some aftercare time, Fell and I discussed if we wanted to restart the scene. We agreed to do so, but with no nipple play of any type and not to use those pliers again – I asked about using them on other body parts but it thought they were too sharp to be used safely and I was inclined to agree.
I restarted the timer and this time I had it with its hands cuffed together, on its front on the bed, again with the packing tape gag, spent some time smothering it, and went at it with the cane. But, again, it tapped out after a minute or so. What had happened this time was that I had gone for its buttocks with the cane, it had instinctively moved its hands to block, and its fingers had got in the way of the cane. Pretty painful.
Once again, I released it, and we sat and talked. I think we were both getting quite frustrated by this point, but still wanted to make the scene – which had been much discussed and anticipated – work. We agreed some more parameters: no impact that it could block (it can't stop itself blocking).
It was getting late, so this time round, I only set the timer for 30 minutes. If it could endure these 30 minutes, it would avoid the pre-agreed penalty. And this time, as I'm sure you will be glad to hear, the scene went precisely to plan.
I had it on its back on the bed with its wrists cuffed to its thighs with some specialised restraints. This position keeps it open, exposed, and easy to torture. I had a plan.
The first thing I did was blindfold it and tape up its mouth for the third time (it refused my offer to release the code's location and avoid the rest of the scene). Then, I put electrostim pads on its inner thighs and selected a programme that started off almost imperceptibly before gradually climbing to an almost unbearable peak of pain. I took the opportunity to punch it in the gut again, and amused myself by smothering it with my hand, cutting off its air until it started to thrash and I had to let it breathe again.
I got up to investigate its toys and decide what to do next. I considered using a knife to screw with its head, but with the amount it was struggling I was concerned I'd accidentally cut it. I settled on a butt plug, but before inserting it, I checked the time. Five minutes in. “You're doing well – we're already ten minutes in,” I told it. Lying in scenes is a soft limit, but it had agreed it was okay for this particular scene.
Once it had the plug in I removed the blindfold and sat quietly for a few minutes, legs crossed on the bed with my chin resting on my palm. I watched it go through a few cycles of the electricity, from a moment of relative calm up to an apex where it thrashed and cried out beneath the gag and tried to rip the pads from its thighs with its bound hands. I reminded it that smaller contact area means more pain, having the pads half off is worse than having them fully on, and stuck them back on. Then punched it again, for good measure, and resumed my observations. I wanted it to know that it was trapped. I wanted it to know that I had no reason to release it. I wanted it to know that it was going to lose.
Later, it described that moment as feeling as if it were under a microscope – exposed and vulnerable. Ideal.
I got up to get a glove and checked the time. Ten minutes. “We're ten minutes in.” I watched its eyes widen and its face contort as it tried to work out what had just happened. “I don't know what you're so confused about,” I told it. Messing with its perception of time was a key part of my plan for it.
My plan was to add more and more sensations until it was completely overwhelmed and desperate to get out. It had already had time to be exhausted by the electrics, so the next part of the plan was to remove the plug and insert a finger. Then another. I saw it struggling beneath its gag as the electricity climbed once more, and reminded it that I had three more fingers to use.
I had one hand free. I used it to punch it again, and to smother it. I encouraged it to tell me the location of the code and it shook its head no. I put my hand back over its face, denying it air, and then when it started to struggle gave it a single second of air before cutting it off again. I pulled back long enough to ask it if it was willing to talk, and it shook its head no.
Time for another finger. Finally – caught in the unhappy cycle of electricity, with three fingers inside it, and the threat of a punch or its air being removed – it gave in and told me both the code and its location.
I left the electricity running while I verified the code it had told me out loud with the code in the envelope, and stopped the clock. There were four minutes remaining.
Since then I have enjoyed occasionally messaging it to remind it that there were four minutes left on the clock, that it almost won, that if it had just held on for a little longer it would have avoided the penalty.
I removed the electricity and it got a slight breather as I removed my glove and retrieved the Tabasco bottle. To receive the penalty I got it to flip over, still with the thigh to wrist cuffs on, so its face was buried in the bed and its ass was in the air. I inserted the speculum but quite quickly realised it was a crappy speculum that was pinching too much, and discarded it to one side. Instead, I put a new glove on my hand and dripped Tabasco onto my index finger before sliding the finger into it.
“Nope. We're done. Take it out.”
Fell is always begging and pleading with me to stop whatever I'm doing, but in a garbled way which I can safely interpret as part of the play – no is not a safeword, after all. But it has another, clearer voice which it uses to communicate when it really is actually fucking done, when it's not part of play, when it genuinely wants things to stop and it's not fun anymore. This was that voice.
But we had agreed no safewords, and so I ignored it.
It didn't take long for it to dawn that I was not going to stop, that this was what we had negotiated and I intended to see it through to its conclusion. Fell started sobbing; it was losing hope.
I took pity on it, and let it suck my finger clean in exchange for an end to the scene. Now, I wish I'd let it go on for longer – I was really enjoying its complete and utter defeat.
Then it was time for aftercare, for hugs and telling it what a good boy it had been, for a bath and for curling into me saying how much it hurt. Weirdly, I needed aftercare as well – normally I can get up and walk away unscathed no matter what I've done to someone, but this time I got spacey and slightly teary and it was really strange. I never ever drop so I didn't really know what to do; at first I tried vaguely rambling, then I tried tidying up the scene – taking control of my environment is helpful sometimes. Fell hugged me but I wasn't into it. I wanted to be in a small enclosed space but I couldn't fit under the bed, so I tried to make a duvet cocoon but it was too close, it didn't work. Eventually I lay on my front on the bed and asked Fell to lie on top of me, which it duly did. That worked. I find pressure very grounding. I took some deep breaths, calmed down, and was ready to go home.
This has taken me so long to write, but I feel much better for it. The scene has been twisting in me since we did it, the pure joy I felt at winning and at being able to apply the penalty, the frustration when we kept having to stop the scene, the confusion when I dropped, the guilt at breaching Fell's limits. I know that most of that isn't very sexy, but I think it's important to write the sex I have honestly, including negotiation, barriers, aftercare, safewords, and how we cope when things go wrong.
Mostly I feel lucky that I've met someone I can play like this with.
As we move into the New Year, it’s time to look at some statistics on my sex life.
Last time I did sex stats was in 2012. I would have been 19 at the time and looking back, I’m actually quite embarrassed by them, in particular the data on ethnicity, a lot of which I acquired by vaguely guessing at people's ethnic background from their skin colour. Why did I think that was interesting or worthwhile to keep? Gross. Also, equating gender and genitals. Eww.
Happily, I have moved on as a person. I’m 23 now and I do things differently. Something that hasn’t changed, however, is that I haven’t defined “having sex” by whose genitals have gone where. I still think of sex as being a sustained, intimate (as in, physically close) exchange of sexual pleasure. Generally, it involves people who’ve put their penis in my vagina, people whose vaginas I’ve spent time with my fingers inside, and people I’ve had intense and long kinky scenes with. There are, however, exceptions. It should also be noted that I haven’t counted pro-Domme clients because it just doesn’t feel like sex to me; I’m not getting the sensation back that they’re getting from me. It’s missing the “exchange” part.
Right, let’s go. I’ll follow the format I established in 2012, but edit it as needed. This time, there will be no charts, because quite frankly I can’t be bothered.
Total
My total number of sexual partners (at time of writing) is 90.
I first had sex when I was 15 and I am now 23, so this makes an average of 11 (rounding down from 11.25) sexual partners a year. However, the vast majority of those were between 2011 and 2016.
Last time I did these stats, I’d had 23 sexual partners; there’s been an increase of 391%.
Gender Genital Breakdown
Gender is too complicated to express in simple stats, especially as some of the people I’ve played with have fluctuating gender identities. Genitals are easier, although not as simple as you might think.
I’ve expressed this as “penis”, “vagina”, and “other”. As a broad guideline, if someone’s genitals are several inches long, ejaculate semen, and are used for penetration, I’ve classified them as “penis”. Most of these people are men, but not all. If someone’s genitals take the form of an internal canal that can be penetrated, I’ve classified it as “vagina”. Most of these people are women, but not all. If there’s a mixture of these traits, I’ve classified it as “other”. Almost all of these people are trans, but (can you see where this is going), not all. Generally, trans people who’ve taken hormones but not had bottom surgery are in this category.
Penis: 62, or 69% of my partners
Vagina: 23, or 25.5% of my partners
Other: 5, or 5.5% of my partners
I’m sure at some point someone I’m sleeping with will have surgery or similar that changes their genitals. We will cross that statistical bridge when we get to it.
I’m pretty sure that all the women I’d slept with when I was 19 had vaginas and all the men had penises. That means that the breakdown then was 78% penis, 17% vagina, 4% other. Penis is in decline in my own personal sexual stock market, apparently. This is unsurprising as I am much less interested in having sex with cis men these days and so am much more likely to play with people with vaginas or other genital configurations. I’m also a lot braver at asking people if they’d like to play with me; in my experience, people with penises are much more likely to ask me to play, whereas I rarely get to play with people with any other genitals unless I ask them.
Age
When I was 19 I looked at the actual age people were when I played with them. Now, because I have a few people I’ve been playing with a while, I’m using the age people were when I first played with them. That’s why the range appears to have gone down slightly. I’ll do those stats now, but I’ll also look at the age difference between me and my partners shortly.
Please note this whole section takes the total as 88 because two people wouldn’t tell me their age.
Range: 17 to 65
Mean: 28
Mode: 25 (10 of the people I’ve slept with, or 11%, have been 25)
Median: 25 again
Little has changed in the last 4 years, apparently. I am now older, of course, which indicates that the people I’m sleeping with are generally less likely to be older than me. I have found over the last few years that I’ve developed a much stronger preference for people round about my own age. In particular, I’ve mainly – not entirely – gone off cis men aged roughly 40+. Elder queers, I still love you, hit me up.
Age difference
A new section! Much more useful now some of my sexual relationships span many years.
Range: - 2 to 47
Mean: 7.8
Mode: 2 (unsurprisingly, 10 of the people I’ve slept with, or 11%, have been two years older than me)
Median: 5
This means that the youngest person I’ve slept with is currently 21, and the oldest currently 70. The median being higher than the mode demonstrates that the data skews older, explaining the relatively high mean – according to the mean my average sexual partner is currently 31.
Ethnicity
No.
D/s Dynamics
This is based on the role I took.
Vanilla: 34, or 38%
Submissive: 24, or 27%
Dominant: 21, or 23%
Switching: 9, or 10%
These actually really surprise me. Nearly all of my sex life has some element of kink, and in nearly all of the kink I do, I am the dominant partner. So I’m proper surprised to see that for the largest proportion of my partners there has been no D/s dynamic, and that the most common D/s dynamic was for me to be submissive. Scrolling through the raw data, I can see that most of my new partners over the last couple of years I have been dominant to, but I guess that a lot of necessarily vanilla one night stands (much harder to do proper kink when there’s no time to negotiate in) and a lot of subbing when I was younger are still influencing the data. Maybe in another four years it’ll look different.
Four years ago I had a timeline of how many people I’d been fucking when by month (!), but obviously I could not even slightly keep up with that. Maybe in the future I’ll do an estimated one by years. Also, I looked at who I’d fucked more than once. But now, I feel that data should be more complicated - a huge difference between people I had sex with once or twice over the course of a few months and people I’ve been seeing on and off for years. I haven’t got data of that complexity to hand, and I don’t want to generate it just now. Maybe next time I do this particular exercise in navel gazing.
My typical sexual partner
From the mode, my typical sexual partner is a 25 year old person with a penis (probably a cis man), who I have vanilla sex with.
Statistically, I, a 23 year old cis woman, am most likely to have vanilla sex with a 25 year old cis man. I like to think of my sex life as relatively exciting, but on average? Apparently, it’s very normal.
Socialising is hard. So hard. Especially socialising one to one. In a group it's easier; in a group I can take some time to fade into the background and not talk to anyone for a little while, but one to one I can't escape. I have to be constantly on and it's really hard. It takes a lot of energy for my autistic brain to socialise. I love it, but it's exhausting, and not being able to take breaks makes it much harder.
The technique I've developed to deal with this is to watch television or films with another person. It's socially acceptable, mutually enjoyable, and it means that if I want to stop talking for a bit I can. It's got even better now I've discovered the joy of subtitles – we can talk to each other when we want to without constantly pausing, and when we don't want to talk there aren't any awkward silences because the TV people are doing TV things. (Also subtitles are the absolute bomb.)
But lately I met this incredibly lovely ridiculously beautiful girl who I'm totally into (she's so great! And she's into me! Literally anyone would be lucky to date this person and for some reason she's picked me) and that doesn't work for her. If she's watching something, she needs to be totally immersed. That's fair, but it doesn't work with my social crutch. It's really scary. I feel a little bit like I did several years ago when I was just learning how to have a social life and every single time I had any kind of social interaction with anyone it was this whole anxiety-strewn deal.
I'm trying to figure out new ways to be one to one with someone without constantly dying from anxiety. I've spoken to her about this and because she is just so lovely she's more than willing to work through it with me, which helps somewhat but doesn't stop my anxiety brain freaking out. What if she gets annoyed by my weird body language! What if she thinks my anxiety is because of something she's done wrong rather than my horrible horrible mental health! What if whatever I suggest doesn't interest her but she's too polite to say so! What if I screw up!
Something that's come up is playing boardgames together; I know she's into this, she plays a lot with one of her other partners. I like this idea because I like boardgames and if you google it there's a lot of good options for two players out there, but it does have the potential to get quite expensive quite quickly. A cheaper alternative would be to get a deck of standard playing cards and look up good two player card games. Books of lateral thinking puzzles and such may work well too – she took one round to mine once and we had fun playing with it. But...I'm so scared! What if she doesn't like any of these? What if she thinks they're super rubbish and it makes her think worse of me? What if, somehow, they make me look bad? What if I screw up?
I am aware that all of this stuff is super crazy and if I just talk to her we'll work it out. And I do intend to talk to her (or possibly wimp out and send her this blog post). But this is terrifying. It took a lot of hard work for me to figure out how to interact with people in a minimally stressful way and though I'm a lot better at, you know, life these days (I've done a lot of therapy and I'm quite heavily medicated) having to figure out a new way is still daunting. This girl is so amazing that I'm willing to do it, but...what if I screw up?
I think a lot of people assume I'm an introvert becase I need a lot of time at home by myself, resting. Sometimes when I'm out with people I take breaks where I don't talk to anyone and stare at my phone for 15 minutes or so. I don't like taking the train or walking with other people, it pushes all my anxiety buttons. I really like the type of low key socialising where you share space but don't directly interact. I hate crowded rooms and loud music. All those “illustrations that show what it's like in an introvert's head” things apply to me.
But I'm not. I LOVE people. I love being around people, I love talking to people, I'm really interested in other people's lives (read: I'm nosy), I like hosting parties, if I don't see anyone for a few days I get really antsy and grumpy and my family want to murder me.
The introvert/extrovert/ambivert (as far as I an tell an ambivert is a well-rounded person rather than a caricature) thing the internet seems to be obsessed with is ridiculous, but it's so pervasive that I find myself caught up in it anyway. The main thing I've got from it is thinking about how deeply being autistic, being disabled affects me. A lot of the time I behave in really stereotypical introverted ways because I have no other option. Even though I want to go out on the town every night, I can't – being outside of my own home is too terrifying and exhausting. I get lonely and bored but I have to stay in because I don't have the executive function that day to safely navigate myself outside of the house.
I've ended up countering this by hosting a lot of my own events, mainly film nights and variants on “come round and eat a lot of food with me” type things. These are much better for me because I have a lot more control over them; in particular, I can control the environment and make sure it isn't too loud and there aren't any flashing lights or whatever. I don't have to travel so I don't have to deal with that, and I can generally avoid inviting people who stress me out. I've managed to balance my extroverted nature with the introversion that disability forces on me, and generally, I feel like I'm doing pretty well.
I don't like it when people think I'm introverted. Constant companionship is so important to my overall well-being that it just feels like a lie. I do understand why people assume it, but it's not true – I'm extroverted, just disabled.
Diary entry – 18/11/16 – “So, maybe we should play...”
I originally wasn't going to write about this because I wasn't sure if I wanted my blog to go kinky in the disturbing way - rather than the giggly spanking way - so early in my new flurry of posting, but seeing as I basically already typed all this out so a different partner could enjoy hearing about/masturbating to it, I may as well edit it and post it.
I met this guy, Fell, through Mimieux, who has known him for a great many years. Mimieux and I happened to be going to an event near where he lived; she was going to say hi to him and I came along.
When I met him I got very strong sub flirting vibes. Sub flirting is different to regular flirting. Regular flirting is “do you want me to get you anything from the bar?” “can I have a pint of cider? I'll pay you back” “my treat, don't worry”; sub flirting is “can I get you anything?” “I want a cider” “okay” [immediately stands up]. A sub trying to flirt at you may end up sitting on the floor near your feet more than is statististically likely, offering to carry your bag, and otherwise making your life easier. I was into it – I often am, I like sub flirting – and Dom flirted back (i.e. I was a mild to moderate bitch to him). Mimeux had told me he wears a chastity device on her command, so when I hugged him goodbye I said in his ear "maybe some time you can show me your cock cage".
Then I waited for him to get in touch on social media, which of course he did.
I chatted with him via Facebook for a bit and we discussed our various interests and I let him contort himself trying to impress me, e.g., showing me pictures of him sucking cock and saying “as you can see I'm pretty good at taking it down my throat”, because I guess just saying “I really want to impress you please Dom me I desperately need a beating” would have been too easy. It turned out that we had some mutual interests, so I checked with Mimieux that she was okay with me playing with him and then went to meet him at his place.
I came in, he took my coat, I told him to take my shoes off for me. Once he'd put them away and came back I told him off for standing and commanded him to get back on his knees.
I told him to go into his bedroom, strip, kneel down, and then I spent a good 10 - 20 minutes going through all his sex/kink toys and evaluating/asking questions about them because that's the type of nerd I am. Turns out he had a couple of things that Harley made back when Harley was still making impact play toys which was exciitng.
Once I was done doing that, my first properly sexual instruction was for him to insert a butt plug. Then I bent him over the bed and flogged/caned/generally injured him. It was great. I haven't had the opportunity to properly beat someone up for a while and he made lots of unhappy noises and twitched and it was overall a lot of fun. Afterwards, I told him to kneel down on the floor with a Jennings gag on and a dog bowl in front of him so it caught all of the drool from the gag and aggressively facefucked him with my Feeldoe so he drooled more and gagged and suffered.
And then I wandered off to send Harley a message about how Fell has some of his toys and just let him drool into the bowl for a bit. I wanted a lot of liquid. I may also have been trying and failing to make my Feeldoe cooperate with my harness which was exceptionally irritating, but sometimes sex logistics just don't work out.
Then I put him back on the bed, exposed him with some thigh to wrist restraints, blindfolded him, finally took out the plug, and fucked him handheld with first one of his own dildos and then the Feeldoe. I grabbed the cane from before, traced it over his body, asked him to guess what the implement was. He didn't know. I gave him a few strokes with it but he still couldn't guess, which gave me an excellent opportunity to mock him and beat him more.
Still restrained, I directed him off the bed and onto the floor where he stayed kneeling. I retrieved the bowl and put it in front of him, then reinserted the bulb of the Feeldoe and facefucked him aggressively with the shaft, reminding him that it had just been in his ass. More gagging, drooling, and choking.
The scene was nearly over. To end, I picked up the bowl, which had a solid inch of his spit - and I think some bile from the facefucking - in it.
First I just lifted it to his face and told him to lick some of it up.
Then I told him to tilt his head back, shut his eyes, open his mouth, and poured the contents of the bowl over his face.
Later he said “it was so so awful, it was cold as well, it was just...digusting”.
That was the end of the scene. I got him to thank me, kiss my feet, and let him go get cleaned up.
We took a break; he poured me a glass of wine and I put Brooklyn 99 on while he sat on the floor and held my glass for me. The bottle was nearly done, so he opened another one for me and I said “do the swirly thing so you can reuse the glass” - and he said “no it's okay I don't mind doing chores for you, you can have a second glass” which I thought was super cute.  and I asked for his wifi password.
And he was like “tell me a fact first” and I said “no I'm not playing this ridiculous game tell me by the end of this episode or I'll beat it out of you”. He did tell me the password on a technicality (apparently “am I going to tell you the wifi password?” “yes you are” counts as a fact), but then kind of awkwardly told me that he kind of wanted to see what would have happened if I'd beaten it out of him.
So then we negotiated three minutes of no safeword, unrestricted impact play.
He started off standing up with his hands on the wall and ended up sobbing on the floor. At first I tried to hold him still against the wall, but he just kept on flinching away, so in the end I let him sprawl helplessly on the floor and caned him there.
Three minutes is a long time when I'm actively trying to inflict intense pain on you.
When the alarm on my phone went off after the three minutes I spent quite a lot of time cradling his head and kissing his hair and telling him he was a good boy and I was very proud of him. I think he needed it.
We sat up long enough to do aftercare and then went to sleep.
One of the things we had discussed over social media was waterboarding – he'd showed me some pictures of a previous waterboading scene he'd been involved in and it had piqued my interest. In the morning, we had a chat about this – the relevant risks of waterboarding (I had already done some of my own research), how to minimise them (you want to get as little water in the nose and mouth as possible), his reaction to waterboarding (immediate panic, struggling, and safewording), and how to get around them (i.e. we would need to intermittently suspend safewords throughout the scene).
To prevent him fighting back too hard, I handcuffed his hands behind his back; and to give me a negotiating tool, I put some clover clamps on his nipples. Marched him through to the bathroom and put him in the bath where I told him that I was going to waterboard him, he was going to hate it, and I was going to love it. He was shaking a little. He was very afraid.
At first I just pulled on the clamps, ran a pinwheel over him, slapped him round the face. You know, warm up. Then I told him I was suspending safewords for 45 seconds, put the cloth over his face, and turned the shower on. But I didn't spray the water onto his face that time. I just sprayed it around his face and onto his body and watched him gasp and shake in fear.
The alarm on my phone went off and he was, I think, relieved/scared.
Because he knew it wasn't nearly over.
Next time round I suspended safewords for 60 seconds and waterboarded him for real. He struggled and fought to get away but between the handcuffs and me holding his head down by his hair he couldn't get away. Once it was over he was sobbing and gasping and pleading for no more, but I wasn't going to listen to that – safewords were applicable again and he wasn't using his.
The nipple clamps were still on at this point. I tugged them and flicked his nipples and watched him being in pain.
Then I gave him a choice.
I told him that I would either leave the clamps on for a further 10 - 20 minutes, but no more water; or he could take the water and I'd take the clamps off now.
He really struggled to make that decision. He didn't make the choice until I told him that if he didn't decide soon, he'd just get both.
Eventually he said he'd take the water please get rid of the clamps.
So of course, that's what he got. I took the clamps off and he got another 60 seconds of waterboarding. Again - struggling, fighting back, sobbing, gasping.
Afterwards I instructed him to thank me for waterboarding him and to thank me for respecting his choice - because I didn't have to listen to it. I could do what I wanted. I also took the opportunity to remind him that I'd never said that this meant no more clamps or no more water; I could bring either back at any time.
Then I facefucked him with the Feeldoe, handheld. He tried to pull back but I just kept going, grabbing his hair and repeatedly pulling his head forward onto the dildo until he gagged and threw up bile.
“Oh no, looks like you need to be hosed off!" I said, and waterboarded him again.
Finally, I took 45 seconds with the cloth over his face but no real waterboarding, just teasing with the shower as at the start of the scene. But apparently it was nearly as bad because of how sodden the cloth was.
That was the end. I took the handcuffs off and got him a glass of water, let him take a shower while I sat and kept an eye on him. When he got out I wrapped him up in a towel and gave him lots of snuggles and affirmation. He'd done well.
It was actually time to get going by that point so he dropped me off at the station and I went off to the Natural History Museum with some friends.
He keeps sending me pictures of his bruises. He wants my attention and I am mocking him for it. I hope to play with him again soon.
Diary entry - 18/11/16 - Using AAC & the utility of disabled identity
As long as I can remember, every so often I'll get this thing where...I don't know how to describe this, but I sort of forget how to talk. It's normally when I'm feeling socially anxious or I'm concerned about whatever I want to say being rejected or inappropriate. I'll have what I want to say in my head very clearly, but when I want it to come out of my mouth...nothing happens. Sometimes I can get myself out of it by taking a deep breath and just DOING IT but it's very hard and can take a long time.
In an attempt to illustrate this, the first few times I did therapy I had this forget to talk experience, so I just sat there and looked at my therapist for a whole hour. It took me a good couple of months to be able to say the words that were pressing so desperately on the inside of my head.
In a related phenomenon, when I'm having a meltdown, I can't ask for help because if I try to speak I will start crying hysterically and can't get a coherent word out. In an attempt to combat this, I recently downloaded an app called Emergency Chat (Google Play, iTunes) that provides a simple text client to allow you to communicate with people when you can't speak. You type, give your phone to whoever so they can type back, etc. I downloaded it and put it on my phone for the next time I meltdown in public, but I ended up using it for the first time in a different context entirely.
It's not a long story – I was with a guy called Fell I was hooking up with (more on that next post) and I wanted to propose getting out of bed, having a glass of wine, and watching some Netflix, but I was worried about this for various long ridiculous reasons which I won't go into because it'd be 2000 words of iane nonsenical rambling. And I got that “I know what I want to say but it's dying before it gets to my vocal chords” type feeling, so I ended up typing a message using Emergency Chat and passing it to Fell. He spoke, I typed, and it only took a few minutes before I remembered how to talk. It was pretty great.
I'm going to end this fairly short and uneventful anecdote by mentioning briefly that consideirng myself disabled was what allowed me to access this technology. AAC (Alternative and Augmentative Communication for those not in the know) is a technology designed for disabled people and before I identified as disabled I would have consistently skipped over it because I'm not disabled! But now I think of myself as disabled, and a whole world of adaptations has become open to me.
Of course, these adaptations are available for anyone to use disabled or otherwise. My prior and current attitudes to this gives me Feelings both about the stigmatisation of disability in our culture (which makes it harder for everyone whatever their degree of disability to access acccommodation) and about how some people pussy foot around the word disabled as if it's a dirty word; someone once told me after I called myself disabled that she doesn't like the term, and I was like “well I do and I feel like that's more important”. These two things are obviously very closely linked.
I might write about this more one day, but I mainly wanted to mark the beginning of what I hope is a slightly less stressful, AAC-using part of my life.
Imagine if everyone was walking on their hands except you. Everyone around you. It’s remarkable to you, how they can all dance around on their hands so happily, do 8 hour days at work on their hands, go to the shops on their hands, just…do it, all day, every day, without thinking about it. Other people get out of bed and flip right onto their hands, but it takes you a good half an hour to get up onto your hands, and after a short while you fall over anyway and have to walk on your feet.
Imagine if everything was designed for people walking on their hands, and as a person walking on their feet you struggled to interact with the world on a daily basis. No one wants to hire you if you can’t walk on your hands. People don’t want to be your friend because they find it weird that your head is so much higher than theirs. People just assume you could walk on your hands if you tried a little harder, and that your inability to is an act of defiance or laziness.
Not only that, but whenever you say “I can’t walk on my hands” everyone else says “yes you can! It’s easy! Look! Maybe if you tried a different diet, or some yoga, or a different sleep schedule, or vitamin supplements, or acupuncture, or meditation, you would be able to walk on your hands”. So you try that, but you still can’t walk on your hands. And everyone acts like it’s your fault for not being able to walk on your hands, even though you desperately want to be able to, just for a few metres. You must not have wanted it enough. Your priorities weren’t right. They have this friend who has no arms and managed to figure out how to walk on their shoulders – surely that inspires you to greatness?
You’ve tried all the things those well-meaning people suggested and you’re running out of ideas, so you ask for help. That means filling in 20 page forms all about the most personal details of your life, so that maybe if you’re lucky you get to tell a complete stranger all those personal details all over again, and then that stranger decides whether or not your inability to walk on your hands is severe enough to be granted help. Except half the time, the help you’re offered needs you to walk on your hands to get there. Your medication makes you ill.
And you STILL can’t walk on your hands. And everyone STILL thinks it’s your fault. And you’re STILL navigating a world in which everyone thinks you’re a freak because you can’t walk on your hands.
That’s the best way I can describe how I experience being neuroatypical and disabled.
This is amazing and needs to be made into a comic or something. I mean, I can visualize this. And it’s explained in THE best way. Do you mind if I use your awesome example to explain sometime?
Imagine if everyone was walking on their hands except you. Everyone around you. It’s remarkable to you, how they can all dance around on their hands so happily, do 8 hour days at work on their hands, go to the shops on their hands, just…do it, all day, every day, without thinking about it. Other people get out of bed and flip right onto their hands, but it takes you a good half an hour to get up onto your hands, and after a short while you fall over anyway and have to walk on your feet.
Imagine if everything was designed for people walking on their hands, and as a person walking on their feet you struggled to interact with the world on a daily basis. No one wants to hire you if you can’t walk on your hands. People don’t want to be your friend because they find it weird that your head is so much higher than theirs. People just assume you could walk on your hands if you tried a little harder, and that your inability to is an act of defiance or laziness.
Not only that, but whenever you say "I can't walk on my hands" everyone else says "yes you can! It's easy! Look! Maybe if you tried a different diet, or some yoga, or a different sleep schedule, or vitamin supplements, or acupuncture, or meditation, you would be able to walk on your hands". So you try that, but you still can't walk on your hands. And everyone acts like it’s your fault for not being able to walk on your hands, even though you desperately want to be able to, just for a few metres. You must not have wanted it enough. Your priorities weren’t right. They have this friend who has no arms and managed to figure out how to walk on their shoulders – surely that inspires you to greatness?
You’ve tried all the things those well-meaning people suggested and you’re running out of ideas, so you ask for help. That means filling in 20 page forms all about the most personal details of your life, so that maybe if you're lucky you get to tell a complete stranger all those personal details all over again, and then that stranger decides whether or not your inability to walk on your hands is severe enough to be granted help. Except half the time, the help you’re offered needs you to walk on your hands to get there. Your medication makes you ill.
And you STILL can't walk on your hands. And everyone STILL thinks it's your fault. And you're STILL navigating a world in which everyone thinks you're a freak because you can't walk on your hands.
That’s the best way I can describe how I experience being neuroatypical and disabled.
I am deeply materialistic, and I don’t think anyone’s noticed
I am an extremely materialistic person, in that many/most of my immediate goals revolve around wanting to own more material things, and many of my long term goals revolve around the same. People don’t seem to realise this, because the things I want a lot of are mainly sex toys and pets, rather than designer clothes, make up, shoes, handbags.
I’m currently running a theory that because the things I’m interested in aren’t stereotypically feminine pursuits, it flies under people’s radar, because the concept of materialism exists primarily to shame women for enjoying things. I investigated this using the time honoured method of Googling Stuff; and here is what I found. I’m just looking at the first page of text results, and the first screen of image results seeing as the image results load endlessly.
Search: Materialism
Images: mainly quotes and cartoons, with a single picture of a man; suggested searches, “photography”, “philosophy”, “art”, etc
Text: dictionary definitions
Search: Materialistic
Images: mainly quotes and cartoons, with a few pictures of women; suggested searches, “materialism”, “women”
Text: dictionary definitions
Search: Materialistic girl
Images: Madonna
Text: Madonna (I may have not thought this one through properly)
Search: Materialistic boy
Images: several pictures of men, a picture of a young girl, a quote warning men off dating materialistic women, a quote about how men are materialistic about women because they’re focused on looks, magazine covers
Text: a blog entitled Materialistic Boy, results from Google Books, an article entitled “100 Year Old Christmas List From A 7 Year Old Boy Shows How Materialistic Our Society Has Become” (with that capitalisation)
Search: Materialistic woman
Images: entirely pictures of women holding shoes, money, jewellery, etc, except for a picture of a male/female couple with their backs to each other and some text on how brands can profit by marketing to women
Text: articles entitled “how to avoid materialistic women”, “why men date but don’t marry materialistic ladies”, “signs of a materialistic woman”, “women’s materialism is a cause of divorce”; forum threads called “why are women so materialistic”, “why are (most) women so materialistic”, etc
Perhaps it’s seen as normal for men to seek wealth or power (in financial/material terms), while women accumulating wealth is a deviance from their gender role?
I am deeply materialistic, and I don’t think anyone’s noticed
I am an extremely materialistic person, in that many/most of my immediate goals revolve around wanting to own more material things, and many of my long term goals revolve around the same. People don’t seem to realise this, because the things I want a lot of are mainly sex toys and pets, rather than designer clothes, make up, shoes, handbags.
I’m currently running a theory that because the things I’m interested in aren’t stereotypically feminine pursuits, it flies under people’s radar, because the concept of materialism exists primarily to shame women for enjoying things. I investigated this using the time honoured method of Googling Stuff; and here is what I found. I’m just looking at the first page of text results, and the first screen of image results seeing as the image results load endlessly.
Search: Materialism
Images: mainly quotes and cartoons, with a single picture of a man; suggested searches, “photography”, “philosophy”, “art”, etc
Text: dictionary definitions
Search: Materialistic
Images: mainly quotes and cartoons, with a few pictures of women; suggested searches, “materialism”, “women”
Text: dictionary definitions
Search: Materialistic girl
Images: Madonna
Text: Madonna (I may have not thought this one through properly)
Search: Materialistic boy
Images: several pictures of men, a picture of a young girl, a quote warning men off dating materialistic women, a quote about how men are materialistic about women because they’re focused on looks, magazine covers
Text: a blog entitled Materialistic Boy, results from Google Books, an article entitled “100 Year Old Christmas List From A 7 Year Old Boy Shows How Materialistic Our Society Has Become” (with that capitalisation)
Search: Materialistic woman
Images: entirely pictures of women holding shoes, money, jewellery, etc, except for a picture of a male/female couple with their backs to each other and some text on how brands can profit by marketing to women
Text: articles entitled “how to avoid materialistic women”, “why men date but don’t marry materialistic ladies”, “signs of a materialistic woman”, “women’s materialism is a cause of divorce”; forum threads called “why are women so materialistic”, “why are (most) women so materialistic”, etc
 Search: Materialistic man
Images: approximately half men holding dollar bills, a couple of quotes (primarily of people saying that they aren’t interested in the material things a man might give them), a picture of a woman
Text: several of the same articles from the materialistic woman search, forum threads titled “dating materialistic men” and “materialistic men” (OP: why are so many men so materialistic???), “Am I been too materialistic by giving up on a financially unstable man?”, “Are guys materialistic?”, “Are women more materialistic than men?”, “Love of money may mess up your marriage”
Not exactly scientific, but of interest (to me, at least) anyway. The internet appears to be full of women worrying about being materialistic and men talking about how to avoid materialistic women. Confirmed: women are shamed for liking stuff.
I’m assuming that this is men wanting to avoid women who have no investment in a romantic/sexual relationship beyond the man buying things for the woman. But that’s not what the articles appear to be, on face value, about – they’re not entitled “how to avoid sugar babies” or “how to avoid gold diggers” or “how to avoid women who only want your money”, but “how to avoid materialistic women”, as in, a woman who likes stuff. A woman who wants to own things. But this hypothetical woman could be earning her own money, you know? The concept of a woman who wants to own things is seen as inherently undesirable without reference as to how she intends to acquire those things.
There’s probably a more sophisticated analysis to be done here revolving around the relative economic power of men and women and how that manifests itself within interpersonal relationships, but for now it’s enough to conclude that female materialism (as in, women wanting to own stuff) is shamed.
Now onto talking about myself, which is of course my favourite activity, and my materialism.
I subscribe to the idea that if it’s not beautiful or useful, I don’t want it. I tend to define “useful” as “a thing that I actually use”, although how often it must be used to be useful depends on what it is; if it’s a kitchen gadget I want to be using it at least a few times a month, if it’s a screwdriver it’s fine to only use it when I’m fixing up the house, which may happen less than once a year. But I have a very wide definition of what’s beautiful. Here are some of the things that I consider beautiful and get joy out of simply owning, along with how many I think would max out even me:
Pets - I will have as many of these as I can fit in my house and sensibly maintain;
Plants and terraria - same as pets;
Sex toys - if I had a whole chest of drawers of sex toys and they didn’t fit I think I’d have to stop;
Books - two big bookcases is probably enough…or maybe three;
CDs - so long as they fit in my CD shelf, it’s fine;
Art books - I’m okay with having a fourth bookcase for these;
Hula hoops - these don’t take up much space so I can have, like, 50 of them, right?;
Art for the walls - it must actually fit on the walls though;
Cushions shaped like animals - so long as people can fit on the sofas alongside the cushions;
Of course beautiful furniture, clothes, jewellery, shoes, make up; colourful socks; plates and glasses with attractive prints. But I’d want to actually use these on a regular basis. I don’t mind spending three times as as much on a plate with a picture of an octopus on it as a regular plain white plate though. That is the type of materialistic bitch I am.
See? 100% materialistic. Look at all of these material things that I want. If you’re going to shame women for liking designer shoes and handbags then fucking shame me too - my interests are not somehow morally superior to theirs.
I had a dream the other day in which I walked past an ex-lover, who was shocked and silenced because I was taking his friend to court for sexually assaulting me. And as I walked past him, in the dream, I said “don’t look so shocked motherfucker, I could have you in jail if I wanted to”.
I wonder if I should. It was a very cut and dried case of sexual assault. We were experimenting with anal sex and I said “that’s enough, my ass needs a break now”. And then he fingered me in my butt. And I said “no, stop, I said that’s enough for now”. And he put his finger in my butt again. And I said “no, I mean it, no more things in my ass”. And he put his finger in my butt again.
So I stood up, put my clothes on, stormed out of the room. Threw him out of my house. Hooped angrily to “All Men Are Pigs” by the Studio Killers. He came crawling back the next day to apologise. I sort of wanted to forgive him. But I couldn’t. It was never the same. I didn’t feel safe around him. When I saw him at social events, even if I wanted to hang out with him, I just…couldn’t. This thing that had happened lay between us. I could not look at him without remembering that he had ignored me saying no. He was drunk at the time, but it doesn’t matter to me – if you can’t drink and respect consent, don’t fucking drink. Or if you do drink, don’t drink and get naked around other people.
I was angry. So very angry. I loved fucking him. He lived just down the road from me, a 10, 15 minute walk. I’d been fucking him for months. He’d been the closest thing I had to a boyfriend in that area. I’d been sad, he’d come over to cuddle me and watch dumb films with me. I’d been hosting a social event, I’d asked him to come round early so I had a social crutch. I’d cried on him. Why did he have to do that. Why did he have to ignore my boundaries and my consent. Why did he have to hurt me. Why did he have to ruin one of the very few relationships in Nottingham that I felt secure and comfortable in, and…for what? A few minutes of touching my asshole? Was that really fucking worth it?
Of course it wasn’t.
I left it at the time. But now, knowing more, knowing what this boy has done in the past…if I’d known, I wouldn’t have been fucking him. And if I’d known, maybe I would have taken it further. It was a very cut and dried “I don’t want this”, and he still did it. And I even have a witness – it was a threesome. I probably still could, but…no. I do not have the energy for this.
I am still angry. I am still hurt. I just fundamentally do not understand why this happened. Obviously there was no logic to it. Did he really, on some deeper level, see me as a toy to play with rather than a fully fledged person with, you know, bodily autonomy? The whole time I was talking to him, was he really just seeing me as a set of orifices to insert bits of his anatomy into rather than a person with the right to decide what happens to me?
“Why haven’t you renounced feminism when so many feminists are terrible people?”
Someone asked me this lately. And, you know, I don’t actually say “I’m a feminist” anymore (in large part because I can’t say that without people screaming at me, but also because I feel that making politics into part of your identity isn’t a good idea in general), but I will say “I agree with a lot of feminist principles”. And, yes, there are many feminists I disagree with, even some very important and well-known feminists (best example being Germaine Greer), but that doesn’t change the fact that feminism has been a very positive influence on my life.
Here is a list of things that feminism and feminist ideologies have done for me:
- Improved my body image and made me more comfortable within myself: feminist rhetoric telling me that I don’t have to be sexually attractive to be worthwhile and that if I don’t want to shave my body hair I don’t have to, have definitely improved my quality of life. The hair thing is the most succinct to talk about: I used to spend oodles of time, energy, and money trying to remove my body hair, and now I…don’t. It was a constant, daily concern. Now, if I fancy shaving, I do, and if I don’t, I don’t. It is fantastic. (Similar things can be said about my clothing and body, but I don’t want to talk about this one thing for too long.)
- Helped me stop people sexually assaulting me: feminism has told me, repeatedly, that my body is my own and I can make my own rules about it. It’s taught me that people respecting my consent is not a privilege, it is a right, and that I shouldn’t worry about offending or upsetting people when defending my bodily autonomy. It is feminist blogs and websites that have given me the confidence to unapologetically set my own boundaries, and I believe that has stopped people from pushing it even further with me.
- Accurately describe it when sexually assaulted or harassed: feminism has enabled me to say the words “he sexually assaulted me” (sexual assault here defined as non-consensual sexual touching). It has given me the language to say “what happened to me is wrong”, to not try and blame myself for my hurt, try and work out what I did wrong, to hate myself because I was groped or hit on by my employer or whatever – feminism has taught me that rather than going “this horrible thing happened, it made me unhappy, what did I do wrong, maybe I should apologise or give them a second chance”, I can just say to myself “I was sexually assaulted/harassed, it wasn’t my fault, I can simply avoid that person and move on”.
- Made me better at sex: feminist ideas around consent and communication have, I firmly believe, made me a better sexual partner. Actively seeking consent forces me to communicate better with my partners. In fact, multiple different people have told me that playing with me has been a positive experience in large part because I make such an effort to communicate.
- Meant that I have more sex: when I was 18-almost-19 I sought out the fetish scene, where I made a lot of friends and had a lot of sex. I mean…a lot. Feminism told me that doing so did not make bad or dirty. Feminism told me that if I want to go to fetish clubs and have orgies, then I can, and it has no repercussions on my moral character.
- Enabled polyamory: feminism allowed me to consider relationship models other than monogamy as viable, and to seek one that worked for me. Feminism encouraged me to think about what I actually want, rather than what mainstream society expects of me.
- Allowed me to model and to do sex work: feminism told me that I am not a bad person if I am a sex worker or get naked on camera for money. Feminism told me that my body and my life are my own, and that I can do what I want with them. The world at large informed me that sex workers are crackheads who end up dead; feminism told me that sex work is simply work.
- Made me a less transphobic and racist person: feminism (specifically intersectional feminism) taught me to listen to and value viewpoints other than my own, to take it seriously when people say “that hurt/this is important to me”. I understand my friends, many of whom are trans and/or of colour, better now. I can be a better friend to them.
How am I meant to say that I don’t agree with feminism after all of that? Or that I’m not interested in feminism? Or that I don’t believe in feminism? Or whatever I’m meant to say in order to “renounce feminism”.
Even if none of that happened, the fact is that I am more often than not in agreement with people, organisations, and articles that self-identify as feminist, and/or advocate viewpoints that are similar to what I consider to be the core feminist principle of “gender roles are bad for everyone, but especially women”. And, you know, I don’t agree with all left wing politics or politicians, but I am much more likely to agree with left wing than right wing politicians; and as such I describe myself as left wing. This is true despite massacres perpetuated by Maoist extremists. I apply similar logic to describing myself as feminist.
My politics are feminist. I agree with feminism. You know what – I am a feminist. I just am. And next time someone says “but so many feminists are terrible why do you still use the label”, I’m just going to link them here.
I don’t think of myself as THAT disabled. I think of myself as disabled, but not as badly as some people are. I can still go to the toilet by myself. I don’t need a live in carer. You can leave me alone for several days in a row and I won’t be at imminent risk of injury or death.
But recently I had to do a form to keep getting my disability benefits and it asked me so many questions about every aspect of my life, and it hurt to see written down, in black and white, just how much I struggle every single day.
Do you ever struggle to wash yourself? Yes.
Do you ever struggle to eat or prepare a meal? Yes.
Do you ever struggle to leave the house? Yes.
Do you ever struggle to communicate with other people, for example by phone? Yes.
