Painful Personal Growth

For me, S&M and sex have been thought of as separate and I like them that way. Sex is fun, funny and, at times, can be used to strengthen a relationship if done correctly. What I enjoy about BDSM is the intensity of the experience and sex would cheapen it in a way I'm just not interested in at this moment. I know the two can be linked but I've yet to figure out a way to do it that make the two work together well. That being said, I'm still very new at this and imagine with more experiences, I will probably find a way.

 I have spent a lot of time thinking about why I am the way I am and why I enjoy pain. The oversimplification of an answer has always been "I'm wired wrong" as an explanation of why I enjoy the sensation of pain, an experience most people spend their lives avoiding. A better, longer and more complex answer has come to me through the process of developing my other hobby, distance running. At the end of a run, I feel the same way as I do after a good beating. After an event, I feel as though all of the periphery of my life has been stripped away. I'm not worried about the perceived problems in my life, questioning past decision or concerned about how people may be judging me. I don't think about my many insecurities or anything beyond the here and now. All of the daily shit just melts away and I get a few brief moments to truly live in the moment and see the core of who I am. It's the endurance of both activities that allow me to get a few fleeting moments of peace to feel strong, see the person I really am and who I want to become.

Reflecting on these moments and what I had to do to achieve them give me strength in my everyday life to face the self doubt and anxiety left over from my mental health struggles. Many people view me as a confident person, which in reality, I am not. I am so afraid of failure everyday. One of my favorite quotes on the the subject is from Game of Thrones. "'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?' 'That is the only time a man can be brave'". I'm not confident, just brave enough to face new fears everyday and try not to let the fear of failure keep me from trying to get what I want and need to be happy. Remembering the moments of clarity and feelings of strength help me live my daily life and allow me to escape it when I need to.

Physical pain is one of several types of pain; there is also emotional and psychological (or what others might call spiritual) pain. To me, physical pain seems the most acute while also being the most superficial. It can be enough to distract you from anything else at the moment it is occurring but also quickly fades after an event is over. Emotional pain isn't as acute as physical pain but it lasts longer. It can linger and corrupt other life experiences but it can be thought through and reasoned away. Psychological pain is the most severe because it has the ability to effect who you are and create doubt about how you think of yourself.

I have spent a lot of time thinking and working through both emotional and psychological pain in the last 3 years due to the emergence of clinical depression. It runs in my family and my twin sister, my father and I have all suffered greatly. Both my sister and I have dealt with it through therapy and antidepressants, which I still take on a daily basis. My father is a recovering alcoholic and I believe drinking was his way of coping. I was a daily drug user for roughly 3 years before I got everything under control. I smoked pot everyday because it allowed me to distance myself from the dark feelings that were so overwhelming at the time and gave me a change to think about what was going on without the fear and doubt and sadness that had consumed my life. I pride myself on a high pain tolerance but it got to the point that even with the recreational drug use and regular counseling, that I didn't think I could take anymore. Life doesn't have a safe word and I was looking for a way to make it stop. I didn't want to die but I didn't think I could endure living anymore so I began thinking of death, first abstractly, then planning an effective, easy and clean way to end my own life. My main consideration was making sure once I was gone, any remaining affairs I might have would be easy to take care of for my family and that no one would have to clean up a big, gory mess. I felt so completely worthless and didn't want my death to be an inconvenience.

Even now that things are better, I am not the same person I was before my experience with mental illness. I have learned so much about myself, who I am and how much I am loved but I still don't think the insight I've gained is worth what depression took from me. I was young and I used to feel invincible. The fact that the first real setback in life I experienced was so severe has radically altered my view of myself and what is possible for my life. I worry about and doubt everything and live with a constant low level fear of judgement from others and failure. I work to be brave but even putting these words down has been a real challenge. I worry that if people know this much about me and how weak I really am that they won't think of me as the same person as the character I play everyday which is the person I'm trying to become. I've tried to ignore the remaining psychological damage for so long but it continues to eat away at the very core of a person until a way is found to remove it and a person is ready and willing to let it go. I think I'm ready to stop playing a character in my life and just be myself but it's not something I can do alone and I will certainly need a push from time to time.

I'm very attracted to the idea of complete submission within a BDSM relationship. I think it will give me a chance to shut down my thoughts for a while and focus on doing what is expected while gaining peace through a feeling of powerlessness, instead of trying to fight is back and fearing it like I do in my real life. It would be a safe way to lose control with someone I trust; a chance to take off any figurative armor I carry around and just be. Even now, knowing I've been kinky for years, I still feel shame about my interests and was humiliated when exposed. Embracing the lack of power and learning to accept, own and even enjoy the shame and humiliation I feel about my interests in a safe environment makes the idea if submission very appealing. I hope that being able to let go of the psychological pain I've been dealing with for years will help me become a better version of myself, even though personal growth is often very painful.