I am broken. This does not mean I am irredeemable, or irreconcilable, though sometimes I feel that way. My demons are shadowy and looming, lurking in the dark corners of my mind, of which there are many. There are alleyways among my synapses populated by the specters of my past, each less inviting than the last.

I am broken. The theme park of my mind is a torrent of wave pools and roller coasters devised by a sadistic voyeur. Vendors rise from the narrow lanes peddling memories of failure and desperation fueled by the warped excuse for love I was taught to endure. Every endlessly embarrassing moment catalogued and photographed, glossed and glamoured for sale that they might never be relinquished fully to the past.

I am broken. I learned to receive love as if it were a treat, as if my existence were defined by my usefulness to another, as if there were no purpose to me beyond business transactions in a twisted market. I do not know how to receive love, or how to love myself. I only know how to hope I can sell myself.

I am broken. I am like a wounded animal, wary of human touch lest I be forced to sell myself yet again, to choke down my disgust at each piece of myself and find my path to surviving another day in hopes of redemption. Hope is an opiate, and I find myself in short supply.

I am broken. There is no solace to be found in the desert of my mindscape. There will be no comfort here. I must press on in the night.

I am broken. And I am likely to remain so for quite some time.

This is a little different. I know it’s been a while since I’ve written. I’ve been struggling with topics, with putting together posts that felt coherent enough to be worth putting out. I’m not sure prose is where I’m strongest right now. I’m not sure it’s the part of my brain that is or needs to be trying to push through the writers’ block right now. So I’m gonna try something different. Maybe this’ll be once, maybe this’ll be more. But it’s…a writing. A poem maybe? Sort of, anyway. At any rate, here it is. Maybe there will be more soon. I really can’t say:

The shards keep raining.

Falling from…your eyes? Not always.

Sometimes just holding behind them. Sometimes deeper.

Always there, always slipping down.

I keep trying to catch them. Keep trying to hold them.

Keep trying.

I see if I can put them back, but this doesn’t work that way.

I want to make it better. But there’s no “better”, not in the way we always mean.

And I am shards and pieces too. I forget that.

I diminish it. I diminish. I deflect and I make my pieces small enough to look like a whole.

Catching them isn’t the point. They can’t be. They’re pieces, they’re shards, they’re gone and they don’t come back. Because they can’t. 

We are broken. You are shattered. I cannot stop it. I should not.

It is not my place. It is not in my power.

I cannot save you. That is not what I am for.

I cannot save me. That is not what I am for.

We can just find the shards of us that fit and try to make it through.

Together maybe. Sometimes anyway. When the shards that fit are the ones we need.

The shards keep changing.

In many ways, we glorify scars in our society. They’re cool, they’re unique, when they’re on a guy they’re attractive to women supposedly. Well, the right kind of scar, anyway. And you have to have a good story for it. How you were doing something daring, or heroic, or something that makes you a rebel. Personally, I really don’t have many scars on me. I have surgery scars from the chest surgery I had when I was 12. Like many folks around my age, I have some faint markers where a pencil fight went wrong and there’s a little bit of graphite in my skin. Not exactly tales of great renown. But we always focus on physical scars. There’s so much more beneath the surface, stuff we don’t talk about, that we’re taught are taboo and shameful. We carry these things with us, markers of our painful history, unseen and often untreated for years. We bury them, try to cover them over, try to pretend they aren’t there or convince ourselves we weren’t affected like that, sometimes so long we forget. These are the scars I’m going to talk about today. So, let’s talk about the mental scars of trauma.

Reality is a fickle thing, from a mental perspective. Our minds are capable of creating such intricate filters that we can believe something that we mostly made up, or disbelieve something right in front of our eyes, solely because of what our brains are processing. So much of what we get from the world attaches to expectations and patterns we think we’ve seen. These extra things we attach, often completely unconsciously, change things. It’s like mirrors in a Funhouse (a name I use loosely), reflecting back to us what’s there, but in a way that is changed by the surface and shape of the mirror. Mental scars warp our ability to process in a similar way. And the shape of them decides the ways in which reality appears to us afterward.

It’s hard, in many cases, to determine when it’s happening. Sometimes, it’s hard to even understand that the way in which you relate to a word or phrase is wildly different from the people around you. This happened to me very recently. A little while ago, I came across a post in which the author described feeling like a partner is “home” to them. A sense of comfort and ease, of being able to just settle in around them, feeling safe and able to relax. I shared this with T and C, because I really liked it and felt it was something that is so often lost in the way we as a general society talk about relationships. That has come up in a few conversations over the last few weeks for various reasons. Just last night, it came up again. I had a rough mental day yesterday, and spent some time isolating in my bedroom and just letting it run its course, but later in the day T came in to check on me and stayed with me for a bit. For most of the day, I’d been in a pretty strong dissociative state, and I was able to pass it off as tiredness from difficulty sleeping and a physical toll from healing from a couple new piercings I’ve gotten over the past couple weeks. This changed after a few minutes of T holding me in bed.

I sobbed. The kind that wrack your body and double you over. They kept coming. Eventually they ebbed, giving me time to breathe a little bit and recover. T and I talked, mostly her since I was all kinds of raw. She asked me what was wrong, what was going on that caused that reaction, and I didn’t really know. I told her about the insecurities that were running through my mind that are always lurking, about relationships and why anyone would stay with me, and about needing to provide some kind of value to think my partners have any reason to want me around. That’s when she talked about feeling like home, and how I felt like home for her. It was the first time I’d been the subject of it. The first time *I’d* been the one being told they feel like home. And here’s where I realized one of those mental scars was playing tricks on me.

T talked about feeling safe with me, and in our relationship. As she described it, talking about what she felt, a growing sense comprised of both some level of horror and of comprehension took hold in me. I don’t know what “safe” feels like in that sense. I don’t think I know *how* to feel it. I’ve spent my life guarded, creating connections with people and lifting them up, but leaving myself in a place where I could extract myself when it was time, when they could rely on other, less broken people, because I wasn’t ever the important one, it was about putting others in a better place and letting them flourish, then moving on again, repeating the cycle. I’ve known I do this for a while, and a whole lot of things have come up as “why”s. But this one, this idea of “safe”, hit a different note.

I have made vague allusions to this in the past, but long story short? My father was abusive. In some ways physically, in a *lot* of ways mentally and emotionally. My family, who I looked to as a means of trying to make sense of any of it, were all suffering in their own ways, and often fell back to that idea that you *have* to stay with family, all the apologetics that could be found to say it wasn’t that bad, and I should recognize he *loves* me and he’s *trying* to find ways to show it and all those things that normalized the abuse. This went on for close to 30 years in some form or another. One of my parents, someone who was supposed to teach me what love is and how it feels, turned me into something for his own ends and amusement. The other people who were supposed to love me found ways to defend him, to convince me I had to forgive and let him stay in my life, probably to some extent as measures of their own defenses against guilt and the sense that they’d have to confront things if I started the ball rolling. I never learned how to feel safe in the idea of love. I never learned how to believe someone cares for me beyond what I can do for them tangibly. This has been reinforced in some ways by other relationships in my life, but this is undeniably the catalyst.

My struggles around my gender identity and, eventually, coming out built on this. In many of my close relationships, it affected how I was able to relate to people. In some, it was a crisis point, something I inflicted on the other person that they couldn’t bear, and it had to end. In others, it was an inconvenience, a complication that made their lives harder, so I would do everything I could to diminish myself and diminish the impact my transition had. I became apologetic for being who I was to people close to me. I don’t think I even recognized this for years, until very recently. It was just another thing that I made up for, another way in which I wanted to “prove” that I was worth being around for a while, in spite of being trans.

All of this came pouring out last night. I could finally recognize the landscape of the mental scar I have been left with. I could finally put a name to it, finally understand what made it *so hard* to believe I was worth having as a partner, after so much time trying to fight to get there through all kinds of other paths, *knowing* my partners have told me outright that they want to be with me, that they chose me. Knowing that it caused them stress and no small amount of frustration that I struggled to allow them that, practically asserting I knew better and denying them that agency.

I was lied to for years about what love is. I was shown something and told it was love so that someone could get what they wanted, satisfy their own desires, or punish me if I didn’t live up to that. My place in that love was never safe. I could never trust it. And I learned to see love as that thing. I learned to believe it could and would be rescinded in an instant. I’d have to earn it back, demonstrating I knew my place. That wound never quite healed right. My perception never fully shifted. Love has existed in a shade of that form in my mind ever since. I know that now, which is an important step, and I can begin working on it. But it will take work, and determination, and time. I have to begin the process of healing from that scar.

This is just one of my mental scars. There are others, some I know and almost definitely some I don’t. There are many forms these scars can take, many ways they can impact a life. They can be very deep, and hard to see, and they can be extremely hard to correct for once you find them. We all have them, something, somewhere, in some part of our mind. Talking about them is important, normalizing their existence is vital. Healing is a hard, and sometimes violent, process, but it is so incredibly necessary. However, it is impossible to heal a wound or a scar you can never seek treatment for. I have shown mine. Find someone you trust, or a good therapist, and show them yours. Start healing. And show others that they can too.

Talking about metacognitive subjects is always interesting to me. By nature, anything in that vein is tricky and full of pitfalls, as the entire point of the subject matter is that we are using a tool to analyze itself. It’s one of the few instances where we just don’t really have another option. So, we make concessions, and we try anyway, because an imperfect understanding of something like the nature of thought is better than nothing at all(disclaimer: this isn’t, strictly speaking, *always* true). This brings me to my topic for today. Much of my life has been a long, meandering, complicated journey through my own mind, in ways that seemed to make sense at the time. But sometimes, that journey involved realizing that things which formed the structure I walked on in earlier moments were faults, rationalizations that couldn’t exist any longer. And really, that’s the basis of what I want to talk about today. So, let’s talk about how my brain works.

I was the kind of kid that became probably a little too trusting. I accepted boundaries I was given, likely in part because things like my gender identity left me feeling like I didn’t understand something that everyone else did, and generally held on to the structure of rules pretty tightly. Rules made sense, they laid out how I could define what I was supposed to do or not do in a given environment. Whether or not they were rational or good rules, as I might define them now, they were an anchor point that kept me from floating in undefined space, my own personal nightmare. As an aside, writing these few sentences is actually making me realize something about something I place value in now that I haven’t processed before. It’s always nice when a topic reinforces itself as I’m writing about it. Anyway, this developed into something of a coping mechanism, one that I would use for a long, long time without accompanying it with the necessary questioning nature to see what was going on around me in a lot of circumstances. I was an incredibly curious child(and am still so as an adult), so there’s a cognitive dissonance to this that highlights how deeply this mechanism permeated my existence. This wouldn’t even *begin* to break down until I left the environment I grew up in. Bits and pieces began to fall in college, and slowly I began to be able to question rules and systems of adherence around me, but it would be over a decade before I could earnestly look at how badly it has impacted my life.

There were stops along the way that saw me begin to parse that all those paths that had been constructed around me, walled off and carefully curated, which had been peddled under the guise of safety and security were, in fact, nothing of the sort. The first was when I finally could take a step back and question the entire system of religion I had been brought up in, and recognize how so much of that system was built on social and political agenda. The next, and arguably the first real major hole in the wall, was dealing with gender identity and transitioning. There’s one in particular I want to talk about which, while it’s taken a while to fully manifest exactly *what* needed to be uncovered, undeniably has broken open some of the deepest roots of this kind of mental shackling.

Something I haven’t talked about, or at least not much, to date on this blog is the topic of abuse. It’s a broad one, and there’s a lot to unpack around it as a large-scale topic, but in particular here I’m referring to the abuse I’ve experienced. I always felt like I really didn’t experience abuse as a kid, sure my dad was kind of a jerk and he lost his temper sometimes, but that was just life, and it wasn’t like I was being beaten or sexually abused regularly. My dad and I always had a strained relationship, I was the nerdy, science-y kid and he was always more into politics and sports. He got a kick out of making fun of me for things, and he always thought my interest in things like video games was stupid. I just always thought this was how things were, this was how families went, and you just deal with family. That’s what everyone else in my family told me. He’s my dad, and he’s annoying sometimes, but you have to make exceptions because *family*. This only got worse after my transition. He’d deadname and misgender me, make comments about how it was reasonable that some people would be uncomfortable around me, and how it made sense that some people wouldn’t want me in the women’s room. But again, everyone around me told me you can’t just give up on *family*. 5 years. I let this go on for 5 years. On top of everything else that had happened before my gender identity even played into how things went, I put up with him treating me as subhuman for 5 years. Finally, he stepped way too far over the line, and between T encouraging me to consider my own mental health and my personal realizations that the rest of my family was just perpetuating their own coping mechanisms, I cut him off. I don’t talk to him. I orchestrate visits to my family so that I know he won’t be around. He is no longer part of my life. I made that decision at the age of 30.

I am now 31, a few months out from 32. I’ve talked previously about my relationships, and how pivotal they’ve been in opening my eyes to a lot of things. In accepting that I was abused. And in accepting that I have triggers around some things as a result. What I talked about in the last paragraph isn’t the whole story, there are other things that went on when I was younger that I rationalized away, that I just brushed off as punishment, or as playing that went wrong. There was my dad’s temper, and how he’d fly off the handle at things. And there’s the more recent impacts, which built on the already-present physical dysphoria and consequently have taken me a long time to unravel, where every time he’d misgender or deadname me, what I heard was that no one would ever see me for who I am, that there’s no way anyone could be attracted to this thing I’d become, this shell that I so desperately wanted people to accept and respect. It told me he only ever saw the old me. And if that’s what he saw, how could anyone else not see it?

I have traversed so many different paths in my mental and emotional journey through life, across so many different fractures in my mental landscape. And in the end, many of those paths relied on fallacies and dissonant assumptions that I so desperately clung to so that I wouldn’t fall. Those things became walls which stopped me from functioning further along. But the tricky thing is, I can’t honestly say that I didn’t need them *at the time* for what I was going through. With hindsight, it would have been better if I had been able to function in an environment where I didn’t need those crutches. That isn’t an option I get to have. There’s no actual use in examining it from a question of what could have been. What *is* useful, though arguably much harder, is admitting and accepting that, while I walked those paths and at the time it held me up, I need to break them down now. My mind, my mental self, is fractured. I used to cling to those things as what got me over and past those fractures. It’s not true anymore, if it ever was. Those things are, if not the cause, then at least catalysts in the fractures, deepening and widening the gaps in my ability to function as long as I try to keep them in place and don’t start dealing with them.

The process isn’t easy. It isn’t fun. And the hard parts aren’t always confined to myself. My partners have had to deal with aspects of it which have caused serious strife. I have hurt them, sometimes repeatedly, trying to work through things and having imperfect understanding and either insecurities or remaining defense mechanisms cause me to lash out, to believe they didn’t want me, or to think I simply am not worth the difficulty of being with me. I am unbelievably grateful they have stayed with me, and helped carry me through some of the worst of these things. They understand, even when I struggle with believing it’s worth it, that these things aren’t who I really am, and that becoming who I can be requires going through them, no more going around them. And while I struggle with applying it to myself, in moments of clarity I can understand it, because I do the same for them. We all struggle with issues like these. They take different form for everyone, but they are there. And I know I would tear apart the universe for my partners. It’s just a matter of believing they would do that for me. And I’m working on that.

We all come from somewhere, and there’s nowhere that’s perfect. To get through those things, we all develop means of coping and defending ourselves. But that is not the end. Those things do not exist in isolation, and recognizing them for what they are is vital. It isn’t easy, and sometimes it takes a while, and potentially hurting someone you love, to recognize just how badly something needs to be excised. Questioning all of those things is hard. It is messy. It is also cathartic, and revelatory, and provides so much extra understanding of just *why* we act in certain ways. I do want to pause and highlight one important aspect of this. As I’ve mentioned a few times, sometimes these sorts of things will end up causing harm to others around you. You have to admit and acknowledge those things. Approach the person who was hurt, take ownership of what happened, and apologize for it. Make sure you focus on acknowledging the hurt they suffered. Do not use it to self-flagellate. Use it to mend, and to show that you care about the hurt you caused. And then focus that energy into moving forward and breaking the cycle of those mechanisms. Sometimes it will mean rebuilding that relationship, sometimes it will mean letting them, and yourself, move on. But most importantly, *move forward*.

Mental health is a vast, complex, deeply nuanced thing to talk about. It’s important. It is stigmatized and taboo, but fighting those things and making it more normal to have and deal with problems is so critical. And it’s good to provide space to allow others to talk about it, that is an incredibly compassionate and humanitarian thing to do. Empathy and acceptance provide the basis for healing. Remember to allow that for yourself as well. And let others help you too. No one can do this alone. No one can carry all their burdens and stay healthy entirely of their own accord. We aren’t built that way. So, forgive yourself, and let yourself breathe.

There’s far more to talk about in regards to my development around mental health. I may or may not share some things, as there’s a lot of deeply personal aspects there which I haven’t decided if I’m comfortable revealing in something this openly accessible. If I never write about any of these things again, however, this post is the most important. Healing starts with acknowledging the wound.

Content warning: This post is going to involve discussion of a mass shooting, PTSD resulting from it, topics around death, and triggers. Please be mindful of this while reading.

Every day is a sequence of events, whether large or small, that make up how we spend our time and what we’re doing. Some of these are mundane, forgettable, so boring we don’t even think about doing them, like going to the bathroom or grabbing a drink from the refrigerator. Some are notable, maybe important in context, but ultimately nothing special, like work meetings, or a project deadline. Others still are unique and memorable, things you think back to sometimes, like a concert, or getting something new you really wanted. None of those are what I want to talk about today. In fact, today’s topic is going to center specifically around one event in my life, one earthshattering day that I will not, in fact cannot, ever forget, even if I want to. It is one I don’t talk about terribly often, and one that has haunted me for nearly a decade and a half now, along with many others who experienced it right alongside me. So, lets talk about April 16, 2007. The Virginia Tech Massacre.

I entered Virginia Tech as a freshman in August 2006. I was excited to go to this new place, to be away from parents and go to football games and explore college life. There were, of course, many adjustments, figuring out dealing with classes and homework entirely on my own, new dynamics to how my social life played out, all those things that a new college student has to deal with. This continued for the next several months just like that, occasional trips home for holiday breaks notwithstanding. One morning, my alarm went off, and I felt absolutely awful. My head was pounding, my nose was stuffed up, I was nauseous, I just felt like crap. So I decided I would skip my class that morning and rest more. This would turn out to be one of the most critically important decisions of my life, quite possibly.

I woke up again a little later to my roommate and my Resident Advisor talking. The very first thing I heard after gaining consciousness was “so, wait, someone’s dead?”. This is the kind of thing that catches your attention and snaps you awake. My roommate went to turn on the TV in our room and find a news channel. At this point it was about mid-morning, and they were reporting on the woman who was shot in her dorm room. They said the shooter had not yet been caught, which was worrisome, but it sounded like a crime of passion and not a large-scale concern. I did have a friend in the hall where the shooting occurred, which was a little scary. At the time it seemed like it was mainly a precaution that everyone was remaining indoors and we would just wait it out until the police secured the campus otherwise. Then everything changed.

The reports started coming in about Norris Hall. The gunman had entered and shots could be heard. People were fleeing from all corners of the building. We had no clue how many, or who, or what was going on. We only knew someone was on campus, shooting, and that we had no idea why. It was impossible to use a cell phone. I couldn’t tell my family I was ok. It was dangerous to use social media, since we knew nothing about who was doing this or why, so posting anything that might give away a location could very well be issuing a calling card. This went on for hours. We locked ourselves in our room. We closed the blinds as best we could. We kept the noise from the TV down, but we didn’t want to turn it off in case something extremely important came up. It was our lifeline. And then we waited.

Hours later, it was over. They had found the gunman, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, in Norris Hall. Stories began to emerge, stories of teachers, or students, who stood in the way and let others escape. Stories of the gunman entering a classroom and opening fire. Too many stories of people who didn’t make it out. He killed 32 people that day, as well as himself. On the college campus where I lived and spent my time, in the halls where I walked and went to class, in the dorm where my friend lived. I found out a little later that day for sure that she was not the victim in that hall, thankfully. I had friends who lost people they were close to. And the sanctity and safety we had all believed we had was gone.

All of this, undoubtedly, is horrific. But it doesn’t explain why that decision to sleep in and rest that morning was so critically important. The answer to that question is this: the class I skipped that morning was in that hall. Thankfully, it was not one of the rooms where he went. But what if I had gone, especially feeling like I did? What if I had needed to excuse myself and use the restroom? What small sequence of seemingly unimportant events could have ended everything right there in that building for me? Of course, ultimately, it didn’t, because I did end up sleeping in. But it haunts me. How something so seemingly simple and innocuous could have ended everything over 12 years before I am writing this post.

Everything about the event is haunting. That piece augments it in my mind, thinking of the things that could have been, and amplifies the visceral gut reaction when it occupies my thoughts. I don’t handle death well, especially up close. I haven’t since that day. I can’t do funerals. Processing death takes time for me. I have PTSD around it. News stories about shootings give me flashbacks, put me right back in that room, flinching any time it sounded like there might be movement in the courtyard outside my window. It is paralyzing. That summer I missed my grandmother’s funeral, because I couldn’t stomach the idea of being in that kind of environment. I haven’t been to a single one for anyone since that day. Hearing about them makes me tense up. It probably also contributes to my need to be constantly aware of my surroundings. I have seen firsthand that you can’t ever know where it’s coming from. It can happen anywhere, at any time.

I do fight these thoughts in some ways. It’s not easy. But it also doesn’t happen everywhere all the time, so it can’t rule me like that. It does make it hard, hearing about shootings or acts of violence with the regularity we do, to engage with current events sometimes. I almost never watch the news. I have a mental aversion to it. Not every incident sets off a major reaction, but there’s an uneasiness even with the smallest things. Big, notable events trigger me in an instant. Even memorials, like the recent anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shootings, send me back. It is painful. It is damaging. And getting through it is hard. I hate every second of it. I hate what it does to me. I hate that a friend can pass away and I won’t even be able to bring myself to show up at their funeral because of the ways in which this has broken me.

What I do not want to do in this post is get into any kind of discussion about gun politics or anything like that. There are times and places for that, and people better equipped to do so than I am. Here, in this post, I am spilling out this thing I have held onto for so long, that I do not talk about openly most of the time, that I tell people about to explain why I might be struggling on a given day but do everything I can to gloss over and move away from. Regardless of any greater discussion, this is about me, the pain I have, and the scars it has left me with that I struggle to deal with. I don’t think it will ever go away. It has been 12 years and I can still vividly remember details of *that entire week*. It robs me of my ability to breathe. I start trembling. My heartrate spikes. I can feel it happening while I’m writing this. But I have to get it out. For once, just one time, I have to let it all pour out onto this page.

This event is a permanent scar on the face of my life, on the landscape of my mind. There was the 19 years before April 16th, and there is all the time after. I don’t think I will ever be able to process that in a way that allows it to make sense to me, but it is my reality. And it is devastating. I have found ways to move on with a lot of pieces of my life. I have found other purposes, found connections with people, and managed to not allow it to completely rule and engulf everything about me. But it is my constant companion. It is the cold sliver in the back of my mind every time I see a news story about an act of mass violence. It is the needle in my heart every time someone starts talking about a gunman. And that’s the reality I live with.

I don’t have any real grand point with this post. I don’t have any answers, I don’t have any life lessons. This is me, spilling out catharsis in a way I have never been able to do before. I think this is probably the only medium in which I can. I couldn’t possibly sit in the same room with someone and say all this. I don’t think I could say it out loud in a room where I was alone. I wouldn’t get through it all. This time, this is just my story. The incomplete, untidy real life story of someone who was there for something awful. That’s all this is. Take it as you will.

As a whole, we tend find categories and labels easy to grasp and comprehend. Sorting things into their spot allows us to feel like we have a better handle on any given topic or situation. We tend to rely on these as a matter of instinct, these classifications guiding our expectations and understanding of the world around us. However, like much of the rest of human experience, the reality is messier than we like to easily process. This is especially true regarding the topic I’d like to approach today. It is imprecise, imperfect, and dependent on our capacity to understand what we’re looking at. So, lets talk about shifts in identity.

The concept of shifting identity is, I think, something of a misnomer. Our ability to engage with our own identities is complicated by our journeys of understanding. This can include understanding of ourselves, of the ways our personal intricacies interact with social norms and expectations, and of how to relate to human experience on the whole. All of these things evolve throughout our lives, or at least they should. The process of questioning your own perceptions of the way things are invariably leads to new perspectives and observations, new ideas, new possibilities. This is not to say every endeavor of introspection and self-discovery results in evolutions or changes in the way you understand or present your identity. It is absolutely possible to come away from such a process having reaffirmed convictions and solidified aspects that were already in place. Indeed, this is just as valuable an outcome. Further, by nature of engaging in the process, it’s likely you’ve engaged with questions that were on your mind, or that you’d been afraid to approach, and whatever the answers, there is personal value in dealing with those over avoiding them.

However, I’d like to look more closely at the other possibility here. Something that has been a massive factor in my life over the past several months is dealing with what felt like shifts in my identity. This can be extremely difficult to approach and understand. In particular, for someone like me who is, out of necessity, intensely familiar with large-scale discourse over topics like sexuality and gender identity, finding a way to navigate the realities of evolving understandings of my identity within the framework of having to fight for recognition of that identity as valid and real is tricky. The “born this way” point of discussion is a common and loud point in pushing back against those who would assert non-cishet identities are morally, ethically, or religiously bad or invalid. It is a rallying cry, because it is a relatively easy concept. If someone is born like this, then it’s just who they are, and how could someone else possibly tell them they are wrong. The reality, as usual, is more complicated than this. There is truth in the fact that, from most any angle, variation in the way humans exist makes way more sense than a very small number of rigidly defined categories, and that this is true from birth. There is also truth, however, in the fact that human development and the human brain are both incredibly complex and variable. There are so many different moving parts that no two people will come out of a situation exactly the same. Even if there are common themes that play out, they will not exhibit exactly the same characteristics. Understanding how this affects the concept of identity, I think, requires looking a level deeper than that outward expression.

To bring all this into the realm of how an individual handles their own identity, I believe there are three important layers to understand, as well as understanding how they interact. The three layers are identity, understanding of identity, and expression. The identity itself is pretty straightforward, it is how you identify. It makes up who you are. Understanding that identity is a little more complicated, as that understanding is often influenced by circumstances of childhood, surrounding culture, social expectations, personal perceptions of those around you, and personal perceptions of yourself. Expression is the aspect we’ve examined most to this point, the way you present yourself to the world and what everyone around you sees. As far as how these interact, the answer to that is where the key to all this lies. Expression is, arguably, the most distinct, as it involves a fair amount of conscious decisions about what we show others. However, between our ability to hide things from ourselves and taint our own perceptions of what actually shows to other people, it get ties up in that understanding. The other two are heavily intertwined and tied into each other, so much so that it can be almost impossible to tell them apart.

I believe the discussion as to whether identity, especially in the realm of things like sexuality and gender, is immutable is inherently flawed because of this. This aspect means that variation in times when people approach or address an identity that might vary from what is presented as the majority identity should be expected. Different journeys in life will present people with different priorities and different opportunities for exposure and consideration. Furthermore, it means that those who begin to develop the skills to engage in that form of questioning and begin to break from feelings of being required to adhere to a particular identity are more likely to have their presentation of that identity evolve and continue to shift as they gain deeper understanding of what it means to them. As you might expect by this point, this has played out in my life in many ways. My understanding of my sexuality has gone through numerous shifts and recalibrations as I have dealt with other aspects o myself I needed to change, or areas of trauma I hadn’t yet engaged with. This happened a few months ago with my gender identity, which I will likely talk about in-depth in a separate post at some point. That evolution in understanding around gender has taken almost 4 months and involved interactions with numerous other aspects of myself coming to the forefront, and a number of traumas surfacing that I had buried. It has involved recognizing and internalizing that I have been a victim of abuse. Those things have not shaped my gender identity, but they have impacted my ability to understand what it is. At this point, I identify as Agender, but oddly enough, I am actually more comfortable with gendered references like “woman” than I have ever been up until this point. I am still working through why that is, but I do feel fairly confident that at least in part it is a result of being more confident in my gender identity and how it relates to the world. This may have always been my identity. I don’t feel as though I can assert whether or not that’s true, because my understanding of it is undeniably flawed. What I can say is that this is currently the most comfortable I have ever been in myself, and it is the best I have ever understood myself and how I exist in the world.

This kind of evolution is too uncommon. We rarely talk about it, let alone discuss how to engage in it. Conflating it with identity itself leads to difficulty with concepts like experimentation with sexuality and gender presentation, when these things should be encouraged as a means of exploring our understandings of who we are. Being free to do so is cathartic, it is uplifting, and it is freeing. It can be difficult and occasionally cause strife with those who don’t want to accept those who are different, but coming out the other side of it is almost universally a positive, improving the lives of anyone who undertakes the journey. Question yourself. Be open to new answers. Don’t be afraid to live them out. This is the kind of progress that reverberates throughout your life and lifts you up in areas you didn’t even expect.

This kind of vulnerability has often been difficult for me, exposing this kind of deep nuance to who I am and how I understand myself. These processes are scary, and they are deeply personal, but I have come to believe that sharing them is not only valuable to share any knowledge I might have gained, but also to keep moving myself forward and make me more comfortable putting myself out there. I hope that these sorts of explorations do make a difference to those that read these posts, and I hope that maybe I bring something new, or some different approach, that helps some readers understand the world around them better. But in addition to all that, I gain so much just from putting all these things out and feeling like I’ve taken the time to put something together. This is just another step in all these evolutions, and I look forward to continuing to bring these posts to the table.

I’m going to use this post to zoom out my usual focus. My posts until now have touched on particular threads in my life, ways that I have changed around certain themes. Important ones to be sure, but pieces of the whole. Now, I want to explore the commonalities in those changes and how they happened and continue to happen. This will also encompass, to some extent, the strategies and approaches I have developed for analyzing my feelings and thoughts on important topics, and how I sift out what has been instilled through various levels of social programming. So, let’s talk about self-evolution.

I have always been a very thoughtful and introspective person. As a child, I tended toward being quiet, observant, analytical, and perceptive. I wanted to understand things, to know how things worked, and to be aware of the things around me. This was a drastic difference from both my dad and my brother, who tended toward being boisterous, loud, and emotionally-driven. They were very outgoing, fairly quick to judgment, quick with a joke, and more comfortable talking than allowing silence to pervade. This dichotomy caused some difficulty for me growing up, but that is a topic for another post. More on-topic, it highlighted something that made me stand out. People around me didn’t seem to take the same kind of time to see the actions of those around them, see patterns of interaction, see effects and cascades and try to learn what was likely to happen in a given sequence of events. I seemed to have the capacity to hold on to details and pieces of information that others didn’t, either because they didn’t care or couldn’t. My interests and fascinations were typically intense, things I’d be driven to understand deeply and know as much about as I could find. All of this stemmed from my need to know things, to know *what*, to know *why*, to know *how*. This is arguably what has driven me toward science and technology throughout my life as well. And as I’ve grown older and continued to develop as a person, these traits have expanded, and I have ultimately directed them at just about every possible piece of myself.

Those base aspects of me, things that manifested since my childhood, have formed the core of all of my personal evolution. Much of this was counter to things I was taught as a kid, and especially considering that I felt like I didn’t seem to understand the world in the same way as everyone around me, I spent a very long time believing that it was because I was missing some kind of crucial element, and that I should adopt and adhere to what I was being told was the right way to exist. This caused a number of internal crises, especially in light of my struggles around my gender identity, before I was able to reach a crucial breakthrough; Having people I saw as authority figures tell me something was inalienably true *did not mean it was unquestionably so*. Some of the rudimentary framework for this happened around examining what I had been indoctrinated with growing up in the specific religious environment I was in as a child. I want to take a moment and say that this is not intended as a broad condemnation of faith, your faith is your own and I cannot claim to have some objective proof to lord over you or invalidate your beliefs in that realm, and only take issue when faith is used to justify infringing on others’ ability to live their lives in happiness. Now, back to my examination of the religious doctrine I was fed as a child. It took getting away before I was able to admit and explore my discomfort with it. This was the beginning of my process of challenging and questioning social norms and programming. I deconstructed everything around it and found very little of what I considered real substance. It felt that there was a core assumption in all the teachings I’d been put through that the particular church I was in had the right, or at very least strongly backed, interpretations of any given topic. Even the callbacks to the Bible didn’t really support many of their assertions without a lot of assumptive context and inference. And when I allowed myself to look beyond the surface, many of the people were extremely performative, bearing out nothing of substance from their beliefs but rather using the venue to instill good feelings and self-satisfaction that they were a “good” person, as opposed to those *others*. So I stopped engaging with it. I changed my habits because those habits did not provide meaningful advancement in the lives of anyone I could see.

A few years later, my gender identity would refuse to be subsumed anymore. This, unequivocally, ended up being the largest catalyst for me to build the processes by which I would understand how to excise the grafts of instilled beliefs from peer pressure and societal collective assertion from the body of my actual beliefs, feelings, and needs. I needed to confront something that has long been asserted as a fact. The vast majority of the culture all around me said it could not be true, that the problem was something going on in my mind, and that changing to align with who my internal self asserted I truly was would be the mistake. This is something that gets imparted constantly in large and small ways, and to most, it’s not something there’s much *need* to question on that sort of level. So, at the start, I had no real concept of how to approach it and figure out what “who I really was” meant, or how it would impact my life. There was an immense process of trial and error, one I can’t really say has ever truly ended but has certainly evolved, by which I began tentatively approaching the idea of “trying on” different pieces of what I thought might be me. Some of the ways that manifested are things I likely would be horrified by now, things that played on stereotypes or misguided attempts at things I thought I was supposed to want, but at the same time I don’t necessarily regret them, in the sense that I think there’s a necessary level of that in establishing how to navigate things like that. The more important part is that, in addition to learning things I didn’t enjoy, I was able to analyze some of those more potentially concerning ones and understand how the deeper assumptions or beliefs may have been suspect or unhealthy, and begin learning how to recognize those things. This was an intense process, and a very pitched battle, with some steps forward leading to diversions in the path which caused other aspects to backslide. Over the course of a few years, I was able to start taking these lessons and weave the threads by which they formed a process I could comfortably recognize and understand.

After a little while, the process of examining and questioning my relation to and understanding of my gender identity became a regular exercise. This was instigated by my belief, after the major initial process of coming out and adapting, that these changes and evolutions should not be taken as static. We are complex beings, and that complexity lends to continued changes in our perspectives, our methods of understanding, and our relation to our own needs. Consequently, it is entirely possible that my understanding of my needs around my gender identity, and my relation to the ways that influenced my presentation and the way I move through the world, may be incomplete, or may simply evolve as the circumstances around me shift and change, perhaps opening certain opportunities or making some options less undesirable than they were in other environs. As such, I have, for several years, made a habit of revisiting my understanding of my gender and how it plays out in my life, avoiding taking it for granted so I can maintain the confidence and happiness it provides when I am in tune with it.

That framework, that process, has become the basis by which I develop understanding of who I am and what I need. There have been other factors which influence my ability to access and approach those needs, many as a result of trauma from all the ways in which my struggle with gender caused mental distress for years, and many as a result of abuse I have only just begun to acknowledge, process, and deal with. There’s emotional entanglement and instinct responses around some of those things that complicate the process and can derail it at times. The core basis shines through, however, giving me some method, some grounding principles, by which to explore these things, many of which are unfamiliar, and in some cases uncomfortable or scary to approach. I won’t claim that I can tackle all of them on my own. I can’t. I don’t believe anyone is fully capable of perfectly managing every aspect of their mental health on their own. But it’s given me the capacity to understand change, and not be frightened by it.

When I first approached the idea that there might be something other than monogamy out there, this framework made it much easier to process. I was able to acknowledge that there was, invariably, an interweaved body of understandings and beliefs originating from more than just myself which formed my starting point. I was then able to begin from a position of questioning why I thought monogamy was the “right” choice, what about it made me uncomfortable, what would change if I was no longer monogamous, and what would those changes alleviate for me. Actually moving through those steps took some time, as each one required consideration and evaluation, but they form a sequence by which I could break things down, and if I reached a point where something was stumping me, or I couldn’t determine how it fit into the question I was on, I could put it to the side and examine the next question and see if that gave me more insight into what was causing me to struggle. Having this process in place already made it much easier for me to approach the subject in a more collected manner, and I was able to begin grasping what I felt and what I wanted to move toward and try.

Throughout all the myriad changes, shifts, and evolutions I’ve experienced in my life, this process has become vital to me, to how I process what is happening and figure out what I actually want. It’s not always perfect, and it can fall victim to my neuroses and insecurities at times, but I am who I am today, and have many of my wants and needs fulfilled, as a direct result of figuring all this out and being able to rely on it to carry me through the hard questions. With many of the things I have uncovered about myself recently, there’s a lot of therapy ahead for me to deal with things and learn new strategies for moving forward, and I’m sure that will help me augment and improve this process even further. There’s a quote from the last episode of Matt Smith’s tenure as Doctor Who, just as he’s about to regenerate, which I think expresses a very important truth. It goes as follows:

We all change, when you think about it. We are all different people all through our lives and that’s okay, that’s good, you’ve got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be. I will not forget one line of this, not one day, I swear. I will always remember when The Doctor was me…

Matt Smith, The Time of the Doctor

We are all different people, all through our lives…you’ve got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people you used to be. That is the core of this process, this continuing saga of evolution and change as my understanding of myself, and the world around me, and the people I know and love, continues to grow and fill out and shift. Learn from who you were, the things you used to do that you don’t anymore, the world as you thought it was and the world as you think it is now. And never, ever stop questioning it. Trust yourself, but also trust that you will change. Move with it, don’t fight it, and find what joy those changes offer you. That’s what drives me, and what carries me along as my life progresses. And to be perfectly honest, I’m actually really looking forward to seeing who else pops up along the way, as long as they remember when they were me.

I’ve had bits and pieces of this one swirling around in my head for a long time, trying to work out some avenues of approach. Relationship structure is a very broad topic, and there’s a number of things I can delve into around it, and around how I do it myself. I’m going to jump in here, start to parse through the topic and provide some insight into how it plays out in my life, but I expect this will end up being a topic I revisit again and again to examine in different ways. So, let’s talk about non-monogamy.

First off, the title of this post is what it is basically because making the monopoly reference is funny to me. I am, unequivocally, polyamorous. Ethical non-monogamy as a concept has become an important piece of my life, and polyam is the way it plays out. My journey to get here has been meandering, so I think giving some of the history of my relationship style may help when I talk about where I am now, both on a level of my personal ideal and the practical logistics of current circumstances.

I was, pretty much by default, monogamous up until a couple of years ago. I really hadn’t ever approached the option, I accepted the type of relationship systems I had been guided to throughout growing up without much question, and I just assumed the way I experienced it was the way a lot of others experienced it. What I mean by this is that there were several aspects of monogamy that presented me with severe anxiety. Knowing that effectively I would either do things my partner wanted that I didn’t or they wouldn’t be able to do them at all, or do them with someone they were as close to and wanted to share with, was a major source of self-doubt, anxiety, and stress. A very mild example of this: T really likes a lot of horror movies. She likes going to see them in theaters, and she has attachments to some horror series. On the whole, I *hate* horror movies. I hate the specific type of tension, I hate jump scares as a whole, I just don’t enjoy the genre. This meant that, if she wanted to go to a horror movie and share that with a partner, it meant sharing it with me. Either I would have to do something I very deeply didn’t want to, or she wouldn’t get that opportunity. This particular example could be fulfilled by friendships(as defined by mainstream monogamous culture), but I believe it’s relatively easy to relate to enjoying something different from someone you’re close to, and see how it can be a relief to be able to spread those needs around with people who do enjoy it. This concept was one of the biggest reasons the idea ever even came up in the first place.

I do want to highlight that both T and I have uncovered a lot more about things which led us down this path we did not initially understand, at least not very well. For me, I was used to challenging the concepts of social norms by this point, as I’d already transitioned socially and dealt with the spectre of how adherence to those norms was Vital to Society™. What I started to realize was that I didn’t really separate relationships on a hard line of “platonic” and “romantic” like had been presented to me all my life. While those categories certainly tried to assert themselves with the social programming, I regularly had feelings for other people that just ebbed and flowed and existed. I never saw anything wrong with that. Once I started wrapping my head around that, it was pretty easy to take some steps further and understand that I didn’t love T any less just because I ended up feeling something for someone else. And the only reason I didn’t talk about it was societal expectations.

Thankfully, T and I have pretty much never had anything that was a taboo topic. We’ve never really seen the point. Some things get more gravity than others, but we still talk about anything that either of us think about and want to figure out. So I knew, even though my concepts and thoughts weren’t fully formed at the time, I could talk to her about it and we’d sort of work some things out. One night, I was cooking dinner, I asked her to come talk with me while I did, and while we were talking, at one point I just looked over and said “so, like, what if I kissed other girls sometimes?”. Yes, this is pretty par for the course with our style of communication. I started relating some of the feelings that I really never saw eye to eye with the way physical touch and intimacy was ranked in our society, and I liked the thought of being able to express how much I care about friends that way. It was a bit of a stumbling, meandering first entry, but T was always open and agreed pretty readily, saying she was totally fine with it. As those feelings evolved, we continued talking a lot, and figuring out thing as we went. It took T a little longer to fully process the concept of breaking with monogamy more generally, as she hadn’t experienced that process of challenging cultural norms on that level(not yet anyway), whereas I had the tools in place already. But the further we stepped into this world, and the more we understood about ourselves and our capacity to love, and also how to continue engaging each other as well as other relationships, our perspectives have vastly shifted and evolved from what they were back then. T’s particular journey is not mine to tell, but this aspect of it is so heavily intertwined with mine that I couldn’t omit it.

So, ultimately, we went through a progression of steps around the concept of polyam which continued to provide insights into how we each felt about things. This started with casual encounters with friends who were open and willing, to starting to interact with dating apps, and meeting people. A couple of years ago, from the time of this post, we both started feeling like we could engage with the deeper idea of polyam and start to process what relationship structures looked like, and the impact of them on each of us compared to other partners we might develop and so on. We both reached a point where, on the one hand, neither of us liked the idea of any kind of veto power or the kind of hierarchy that established one partner as a fundamentally more important person than the other. On the other hand, we’re married. We are financially intertwined, we have legal connection, things like power of attorney default to each other. We don’t have any children, but there’s a significant amount of interconnection there which does make our relationship more logistically significant than it would be possible for us to have elsewhere, since a person can only be in one legal marriage. This effectively just settled in as a practical exception to the philosophical rule. The financial benefits of remaining married are too significant. The difficulties of sorting things out if we were to dissolve it wouldn’t provide all that much benefit beyond some level of ideological purity. And realistically, at least in terms of where we’ve gotten to right now, the parameters of our relationship wouldn’t really be any different. We’ve both gotten to the point where we have been and are shifting to even referring to each other as partners most of the time, instead of wife, because we’re both more comfortable in that term being able to encompass all of our relationships rather than giving any appearance of hierarchy.

This is where I’m going to diverge once again into focusing on specifically my story, and how I relate to polyam. While there are, I’m pretty sure, differences in the specifics of how T and I related to polyam and exactly what we each want out of it, my actual motivation in focusing in on talking about myself is that her story is hers, and this story is mine. For a number of reasons, my views on polyam and what I want out of it have…taken sharper form over the last several months. I knew for a long while that I enjoyed and frankly needed polyam in my life to feel like I had a relationship structure that fulfilled my needs. What I didn’t fully recognize at the time was that there were a lot more possible details that I hadn’t really examined.

Back in November, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I first met C. They have been involved in polyam overall throughout their life for a much longer timeframe than I have, so they had a lot of exposure and experience that I had yet to encounter. This meant they engaged with concepts I either only had a surface understanding of, or hadn’t really heard of before. We don’t often make a point of discussing polyam specifically, in the sense it’s not really the sort of thing where one of us would enter a conversation saying “and now we will talk about how to do relationships”, it’s the sort of thing where in the course of discussing things, other partners will come up, or other relationship dynamics will end up playing a role in how schedules work, or something along those lines, and we might end up spending a few minutes just talking about whatever that particular detail is and how it works. A major catalyst for this was that, a little while after we started dating, C had some major breakthroughs on important things in other aspects of their life which allowed them time to refocus on relationships and what they wanted out of them. Through their exploration of that, I was exposed to concepts and possibilities I hadn’t really considered before. This gave me my own avenues of exploration, my own pieces to evaluate and analyze.

Arguably the most impactful of these pieces was my relation to having my own space. Given T and I are married, we’ve, by default, shared a living space up to and including a bed for the last few years. I hadn’t really ever considered this dynamic and the way it plays into my feelings and things I feel I need. Exploring this has been very complex, and has involved a lot of disentangling expectations and feelings of what I owe to partners from what I would like in my *ideal* situation. The ultimate end of this is that I highly value having my own space. I want to be able to have somewhere I can go when I need to recharge, or time to think, or simply some quiet time, and know that, within reasonable expectation, that establishment of boundaries delineating my space is inviolate. Anyone else entering is doing so under my consent, and mine alone, and me asserting a need for a little time to myself does not deprive them of a space that is also theirs. This also fulfills a need I have where I would like to have space that I know will be mine without any need for discussion when it comes to having a partner over. Now, like I said, part of what I was aiming to do with all this consideration and these exercises was to look at it from the perspective of my *ideal*, not just necessarily what I thought was logistically possible in the nearish future. So I explored this idea of my own space a little further. I worked on sorting out just what I meant by “space”, what kind of scope I was talking about and considering in this instance. It really opened my eyes to some important aspects of myself.

I am a pretty introverted person. I tend to be fairly happy staying in and reading, or watching tv, or playing video games, or something of that sort. I rarely have much of a need to go out of my own accord. More often than not, it’s more important to me *who* I am going to something with than *what* I am going to. Because of these traits, I also place a high priority on carving out my alone time. It doesn’t always need to be a lot of it, but I absolutely need to set time aside for myself, for some level of introspection, or just reading or doing something individual, or even something like writing these posts. This is augmented by some sensory input issues I have, in that prolonged or intense exposure to most any kind of stimuli usually drains me very quickly, if it doesn’t just flat out cause me to shut down and enter a sort of survival state. Time on my own, in a space that is either quiet or has noises and sights of my choosing, helps maintain the equilibrium in my brain to work through scenarios that overstimulate me. Because of all these needs, having a space to call my own is *very* important to me. In terms of my absolute ideal, this would likely mean something I can consider my own entire living space. Somewhere I can set the boundary when I need to and have my own room to move around and shake loose tensions and things like that, and at other times bring partners into, to occupy my space with me and share time together. It may not even be somewhere I claim as my living space *all* the time. I like spending nights with partners, I like having time where we just kinda go and do whatever until it feels like we’re ready for our attentions to turn to other things in our life for a little bit, and for that to be ok. It’d be great if all my partners were close enough that we could see each other regularly (same city/metro area, discounting LA because that’s not a metro area that’s its own reality) and just kinda weave time around however many relationships end up being my equilibrium point. Right now, for example, I have bandwidth. The attention and time I have available outstrips that of my current partners, due to a myriad of circumstances, and it would not be a bad thing for me to have other avenues to weave into that dynamic in my life. Being able to do that within my own guidelines, and knowing and relying on my own space, is pretty much my pinnacle relationship style. There’s mitigating factors around accomplishing that, as I acclimate to living in a city proper for the first time(as an introvert that is a *massive* adjustment), and continue to find my bearings as things like distance have adjusted dynamics of my relationships, and also process all these other things that have become apparent as part of who I am over the last several months. But I believe I’ll find my niche in that.

Now, I mentioned earlier in this post that I would also talk about practical logistics and how they impact the way I process that ideal. There’s a couple of things that I can speak to, at least as far as how things are right now. For one, if I were to ever actually end up in my own space like that outright, it’s going to be a little while. There’s a high chance that most/any future plans are going to center right here, around San Francisco. This is not exactly a low-cost area. It’d be quite ambitious to work out the financial logistics on their own. But there’s also relationship dynamics to consider. My ideal effectively spells out how I’d approach the entire concept of relationships if I were starting fresh *right now*. I’m not. I have a marriage that has a history. We’ve been together for years at this point. I cannot unilaterally make that decision, not if I wish to be a good partner. Because my nesting partner has needs too, and I agreed, both on our wedding day and continuing through to today and moving forward, that those needs would intertwine with mine and be important to me. So regardless of whether or not she’s on board with it, it would take a lot of time and discussion and planning before I was comfortable allowing that to be an option. And there are compromises that can be made. Once we’re in the right place, I am putting a priority on our next place having enough space for everyone in our household to have their own room. We can share other aspects of living spaces, and share rooms whenever we feel, but it’s a means of having *some* space carved out as mine to assert my needs over. Somewhere I can go and have as mine, or take partners and know that it is *my* space we are occupying and does not interfere with anyone else, nor will anyone else have to interfere with my space with another partner.

There’s one last piece here that I want to address that can come up. It may be apparent, or it may not, that I have only referenced the term “partners” in this post, aside from 3 very specific examples that were particular to the time periods I was portraying. There’s a reason for this. I have been asked this question, in fact, in the past. What is the difference between a partner and a friend? The answer, quite honestly, is not much. At least as far as how I approach relationships. Intensity varies relationship to relationship, for sure, but that’s true no matter what. I have people who would fall closer to the mainstream definition of “partner” who I’ve never slept with. I have “friends” who I have. The level of emotional, psychological, and physical intimacy I exchange is, with little exception, pretty much irrelevant to those considerations, and all about my connection to the specific person. That’s really the essence of it. I utilize those terms socially because it does make it a little easier to navigate conversations on a more general scale when I use them to indicate the level of time and effort I devote to a given relationship, for lack of a better description, but it’s pretty much just a practical concession and nothing more. This has become all the more true as I’ve been sorting through things like my sex-aversion and changes that occurred around that disappearing. With a lot of those hang-ups gone, I just want to spend time with and enjoy whoever I click with, and in whatever way we click. If we sleep together great, if we fall asleep watching something we’re both super into, also great. And that’s the way I prefer it.

I had originally been thinking about making a separate post about the friends or partners thing, but I don’t know that I feel the need at this point. I may revisit it, we’ll see. But this post has laid out a large swath of how I’ve come to relate to and function within the concept of relationship structures. This is a complex topic, with lots of moving parts that evolve both along the lines of how my understanding of my own needs evolves, and how my relation to my partners’ needs evolves, and the intersections I find in those things. I have no doubt that some aspect of this will show up again. For now, this is who I am, and this is how I do polyam.

Content warning here: this post will delve into topics around consensual pain and sadomasochism. It will very likely touch on many different forms of masochism, and may deal with some things that get quite close to self-harm topics. Please be mindful as you read.

My last post about Submission delved into a fundamental piece of my relation to Kink and what I need out of it. Note that I said “a” fundamental piece. This is because there’s more than one. Today, I’m going to delve into another. This one is going to require examination of things on a much more tactile level, and then connecting that to the mental and emotional effects, rather than the other way around. It is far more sensory than cerebral. And it will get a little bit messy. Let’s talk about Pain.

Pain and masochism are very common topics people think about when Kink comes up. I want to stress that this doesn’t mean *any* pain, but specific circumstances and situations. Now, that idea of the sub restrained and being whipped, or spanked, or flogged by the Dom is something of a common stereotype. What these stereotypes often miss is what, exactly, motivates these scenes, not to mention all the other ways this particular interaction can manifest. In a Kink sense, sadism and masochism are, when practiced properly, entirely consensual and mutually beneficial. This may seem odd, how could one person inflicting pain on another be anything other than torture? The answer is that we are all wired differently. The whipping, or the spanking, or the flogging are not punishment, at least not in the traditional sense. They are not a case of the sadist inflicting their desires on an unwilling victim. There is a release, a surrender, in masochism that breaks down barriers and allows the masochist to stop holding up defenses. I won’t speak much to the sadism side, as that is not really my role. I bite sometimes, but it’s not really a consistent aspect of what drives me in Kink spaces. I am, however, heavily masochistic. So let’s dive into some of those things, and why I desire them.

The simplest topic to explore here is impact play. I’ve been engaging in this one the longest, so I know it the best. This is usually something I do after being restrained, as it’s helpful for me to be able to have something to get resistance from, something to struggle against, as an additional tactile sense. There’s typically several different toys that my Dom will cycle between during a session. Bare hands, crops, paddles(never wooden, due to a trauma response I can’t do wooden paddles), floggers, and tawses all make regular appearances. My favorites are universally floggers. In all cases, when one of these hits my skin, it contributes to shifting my focus from whatever whirlwind of thoughts have been flying through my head for an uncountable amount of time, and into the sensation, into the nerves firing, into the moment where my body is telling me something is happening *right now*. Floggers in particular push on that process, the multiple impacts occupying my brain more fully with each hit, the capacity to string together several hits in a row meaning my senses of control and of maintaining constant detailed awareness rescind, allowing my mind to give up that need to have those and become a recipient of reality rather than an insistent observer of it.

I started out probably about 3 years ago believing I was not into pain, that it was something I avoided at all costs. Through exploration with T, this began eroding, and evolving. I discovered the sparks, the beginnings, of the things I have described to this point. And for a while it hit an equilibrium point where we were pretty stable in what toys we used and where on the masochism scale I was. This was not to be, as it turned out, the summit, but merely a plateau in the climb. From here, we’re going to start delving into some heavier levels of masochism.

Among most any kind of impact toy, there’s a wide variety to what you can get. Different materials will deliver differing levels of intensity, differing levels of pain or focus thereof. We’ve usually used soft rubber, or leather for our toys. Even within that, however, there’s a lot of room for differences. Relatively recently, say within the last 6 or 7 months, we have finally sprung for more toys, both higher quality and also more variants. We have some soft leather floggers, but also a pair of harder leather, with the ends knotted into balls. There is one of the softer ones that is a fairly run of the mill flogger, but the other has a higher-than-usual strand count. These differences bring wildly varied sensation. The higher strand count increases the overall impact of the flogger, so it feels like a more solid impact spread across the entire toy. The pair with the knotted leather on the end…well, it feels like seven or eight pellet crashing into you, all at once. The sensation radiates from each one, creating tremors and intersecting shocks. There’s one more, however, that I haven’t talked about. We have one made out of metal. This one get’s used sparingly, and we are still exploring the best ways to maneuver around it, because there is definitely some very real possibility for damage with it. But nonetheless, I love the sensation of it. It’s a bite, each strand unyielding as it makes contact with my skin. That sensation shoots out from each point of impact, webbing through nerves and creating flashes that blot out anything else happening. The residual sting throbs along those pathways, providing a lingering reminder for some time that I have asked for and willingly submitted to this exquisite torment, and that I can withstand it and just be. The ways in which this allows my mind to relinquish the illusion of control and the uncertainties and apprehensions that come with that are indescribable and invaluable.

While impact play is by far where I have the most experience, it is not the only way masochism manifests for me. There are a few other avenues which I either have only done sparingly, or which I have not yet started to explore. These are arguably the darkest, for lack of a better term, of my desires. So, if you are reading past this point, strap in.

One of the topics in Kink that I heavily identify with is referred to as Primal play. This usually revolves around pretty animalistic concepts, the idea of a hunter and prey, sometimes also things like growling, hissing, things along those lines. For me, while there is an aspect that plays into my identification as a dragon, the core of it is that idea of being prey, of feeling hunted. As far as the physical interactions, this includes things like biting and scratching to fairly extreme levels. On occasion, when I am in a certain headspace and my masochism is in a certain place, this includes going so far as to make me bleed. I *want* my Dom to make me bleed, to dig into me until my skin breaks and I can feel it. There’s this raw need in it, this intense desire to feel that animalistic, unbridled aggression from my Dom as they tear at my body. To submit to that aggression, and sublimate my mind to it. I am no longer my own, to my very core.

It is hard to fully translate that sense, that feeling, into words, given just how basic the instinct is, how deeply it resides away from fully rational thought. I’ve only gotten to that point a few times, and it takes a lot of care and conscientious work after the fact to ensure everything is safe and wounds are properly dressed and disinfected. But the sense of it, the way it stimulates that deep part of my mind, is worth every second, and every burning moment of the cleaning. There’s still one more way yet, however, in which my masochism manifests, at least mentally. I have not yet actually explored this one in reality yet.

Knife play is a tricky subject. It is something of a scary idea, allowing someone to use a knife and make cuts in your skin. This is something we try very hard to avoid in the vast majority of our lives. So, what could *possibly* motivate someone to do so willingly, fully conscious, as a means of masochism and submission? That is a question I have been exploring within myself for a few months now. And really there’s a few answers. For one, it takes that idea of release through sensation to an extreme. Feeling the blade separate your skin is a moment you cannot ignore, your mind cannot hold to other concerns. You are present, and that is all you are. For another, It takes some of that sense around Primal play, and it brings it into sharper, more cerebral focus. Relinquishing the coherence of my body into my Dom’s hands, trusting them that they will both carry me through the experience and simultaneously provide this sensation, this release, this literal bloodletting that allows the darkest parts of me to flow out…that takes everything I get out of masochism and submission and drives it as far down the rabbit hole as it can go. I don’t need to hold anything in, I don’t need to pretend, I am ceding everything I have to give and letting the sensation carry out with it my darkest demons.

All levels of masochism require intense trust, pre-existing communication, and an understanding from both the sadist and the masochist of what they are doing and the things they are engaging in. It is vital to trust the person opposite you, either to be conscious of how much they are inflicting upon you, or to be able to tell you when they can go no further. When these aspects are in place, however, and I align with a sadist, with a Dom, I become open. I become free. *That* is why Pain is so important to me. It is a euphoria masked as an ailment. It is a vessel for release and reshaping. And it will forever be an integral part of my life.

I’m going to dive into Kink for the first time with this post. This will be a very vulnerable, revealing topic. I am likely to wander through this, meandering from point to point, exploring the twist and the flow of my thoughts as I work to lay out how this interacts with my life. It is a topic that I have intertwined with, to various degrees and on various levels, for the better part of my life. This post alone may not touch on *all* the details of this journey, as it is a long and broad tale with a lot of intersection, but I want to do my best to focus in on it here. So, let’s talk about one of the most pivotal topics in my life, and my evolution to who I am today and who I am becoming. Submission.

Submission is a topic that invariably carries with it a host of orbiting connotations. Among the broader mainstream culture, on a shallow level, it becomes associated with passive or unassertive behavior permeating one’s life. There’s a lot of complexity to this topic, as it’s entirely possible that some of that can hold true for some people. The more important discussion, and one that I think most kink-familiar folks at least will understand to some extent, is that this is not remotely a universal constant.

Anyone who knows me in a professional capacity would balk at this assertion. I am known to push, to be the one stepping out and accomplishing, to pick up tasks and projects and drag them forward. I am ambitious, and I am not quiet. Challenge me, and you better have something backing up your challenge. And I proactively work to bring others up with me to improve my surroundings.

In relationships, the bar shifts. I am a pretty introverted person. I enjoy my alone time, I rarely need all that much in the way of going out. This does end up detrimental at times, as I fall into the pattern and fail to make sure I *do* make an effort to do some of those things and fulfill what social needs I do have. This also means I tend to a limited set of deeper relationships, because too many people in my social circle can overwhelm me. On an individual interpersonal level, I tend to primarily care about getting time with someone, usually in a relaxed environment, and talking. Because the specifics of going out and doing things tends to be less important to me, I only tend to put forth something to do if I *really* care about the event. This even carries into smaller things, like getting food. Usually I’m just happy to have a meal and fulfill that requirement, and I want whoever I’m with to enjoy themselves, so I don’t really tend to strong opinions, and consequently usually don’t take charge of making a choice. It can actually end up causing strife, with partners feeling like they’re always responsible for the choice because I tend to leave that choice to them. I do, however, heavily assert my need for communication, and also take on a guiding role when my partners are dealing with difficult topics or struggling mentally or emotionally. I am a caretaker. I have a need to show my partners I care and to help them through struggles. I’ll likely touch more on relationships and things I’m both exploring and working on within myself regarding them in another post, so I’ll leave this here for now. Suffice to say, it’s a little easier to see that lack of assertiveness here.

Now it’s time to talk about this from a BDSM/Kink perspective. I am, undeniably and unequivocally, a submissive. I have tried switching. I have tried being Dominant. There’s a lot to explore in those topics and the journey I took, especially pre-transition, that I will talk about at a later time. But for right now, the important takeaway is that those are not a part of who I am. Submission brings me to a place of letting go. It allows me to relinquish that control I exhibit so readily in other areas of my life, and to erase the millions of things coursing through my mind that relate to that control. I am an extreme masochist, and heavily into bondage, and this usually gets associated with more sensory-level desires, which does not tell the whole story. Most particularly, I want to state right now that BDSM and sex are completely separate topics in my mind. There’s correlations, and aspects that play into BDSM for me can also be things that turn me on, but they are not the same. Willingly ceding that control means I am free. I can let myself feel. Not only do I not *have* to be the one focusing on what’s coming next or on making sure something is getting done, I *can’t* do that. I can put myself in someone else’s hands, and let them move and guide me to their will. This takes an *immense* amount of trust, but it is attainable, and at this point in my life I am confident in saying it is a necessity to my wellbeing.

Subspace is a hell of a drug. For those unfamiliar, “subspace” refers to a mental state a submissive enters wherein they are fully in tune with their submission, and have given over to it. It can manifest in slightly different ways for everyone. For me, there are a few key signifiers. First and foremost, I am wholly in the moment. There is nothing else in my conscious mind, nothing pushing in from the edges trying to steal my focus or keep track of what’s happening outside of my immediate situation. In everyday life, I am observant and situationally aware, generally speaking, on an almost unhealthy level. I keep track of what’s happening around me and usually am ready to respond to possibilities I see. Subspace is where that shuts off. My Dom/me is in control. It is in their hands. I exist, and that is all that is needed. They will handle the rest. In the case of scenes based around impact or pain play, subspace also includes a shift in my sensory perceptions I am receiving. While there is always a component of the pain that hits on things I enjoy, when I enter subspace, it becomes euphoric. Each impact, or scratch, or bite feels like a rush of endorphins that washes over my body and releases everything I hold onto so tightly. It carries an immense catharsis, bleeding tension from me and blotting out all the indecisions and uncertainties I wrestle with. In some sessions this leads to something I so rarely do. I end up crying, unfettered, wracking sobs from emotions held so long I can’t necessarily tell you their genesis. In that space, they can finally manifest and be released. Other times, as far as outside observers are concerned, I become almost catatonic, completely lost in each momentary sensation and so deeply immersed into that baser level of consciousness that I either don’t or, in some cases, can’t respond. This is an area where that immense trust with my Dominants manifests. It is possible for me to sink into that to the point where I am not consciously aware of things like just how much is being done to my body. It is up to my Dominant to ascertain in those moments if I am capable of indicating to them enough that I am still in a place to continue, or if I have sunk so deeply that they need to pull me back out and ensure that nothing goes too far. This is a process, and an open conversation, I have continually with my Dominants across sessions like this. I have been doing this so long with one of my Dominants that even if my responses is only a slight nod of my head, she understands me well enough to determine if it means I am still good to continue, or if my response, even if it looks positive without any other context, indicates I am too far gone to be a good judge of that.

I also engage in another form of Submission, one that is often not well understood, and also which has begun to play an unerringly important role in my life. This is the concept of a 24/7 D/s dynamic. What this means, practically, is that my Dominants and I have talked about and established a set of rules which I have agreed to follow on a daily basis. I want to emphasize this isn’t going to be the same thing you may have seen in 50 Shades of Grey or depictions like that. The rules that we have in place generally involve helping me with things I struggle with, or laying out things we both want to do and setting it in stone. The rules act as a touchstone, an anchoring point that make those things easier to accomplish, or express, or explore. Additionally, this kind of submission plays a massive role in combatting my uncertainty in relationships, in my self-doubt that I am worthy of my partners, that they want to be with me, that they *enjoy* being with me and doing the things we do. And it *encourages* communication between us. If I am left to my own devices, I will certainly end up talking about many things with my partners, but I will also end up with topics or thoughts that imposter syndrome or some level of self-loathing tell me I can’t waste their time with, or will push them away, or will show them I’m farther off the rails than they realized and they couldn’t possibly deal with me like that. If it’s a rule that I have to work on being open, and I have to talk to my Dominants about things I am struggling with, two things happen in my brain. First, on a level that is really just tricking myself into moving past those blocks, it gives me something to point to and say “no, I *have* to do this, it is written right here in this rule” and use that to springboard myself into it. Second, considering the rules are something my Dominant and I established and agreed to *together*, it tells me, in no uncertain terms, that they want to hear those things and be involved in my struggles, and that they *need* me to do that for them to feel connected to me. This short-circuits so many of my defense mechanisms and self-isolation. And the more I do it, the better I get at it.

I have come to a realization in my life that I do not believe I could have a healthy, vibrant relationship with someone that doesn’t involve Kink. If there is anything beyond platonic interactions with someone, I need it. It is integral to the way I process and relate to someone, and quite frankly that includes on a sexual level. I don’t know at this point that I need 24/7 dynamics with someone as an absolute. I’d assert I’m pretty confident I could have a more casual partner that involved Kink but not 24/7. I *do* know that in the relationships where I have the most intense connections, 24/7 has opened a world of connection that has fundamentally redefined how open and honest I can be, and how willingly I can engage with my partners. There’s a heavy intersection in this area with the way my interactions with polyamory/ethical non-monogamy have evolved and the way I even process the concept of relationships, which I will dive into in a post that likely is coming sooner or later. For now, suffice to say Submission has defined itself as a key part of my identity and my relationships.

This is a topic that never really stops evolving. My experience of it now is changed drastically from my experience of it 6 months ago, and is just about unrecognizable from a year ago. I can all but guarantee there will be more explorations of this, of things that evolve in the future, of how I got to where I am now, and other aspects of Kink as a whole. It’ll be a fun ride, however long it lasts.