

02 January, 2008

Gnothi Seauton

I don't like to write about problems publically, especially when I'm dealing with them; there's this fundamental awkwardness to that sort of exposure that feels almost like a betrayal of good faith in actually solving things.

Which means when I want to write about some things I get stuck.

So instead I write on something not entirely unrelated.

I've done a lot of thinking about my kink stuff. Starting reasonably young, sorting out what turned me on, what I responded to emotionally, with fantasies, with finding snippets of things here and there, with just trying to piece together and track down the internal narrative that was sex to me.

I eventually got old enough to be vaguely familiar with the trappings of BDSM, which mostly came off as a lot of SM leavened with B, which was less than ideally useful for someone into BDS. (Tangent: on the way somewhere recently I saw a car with the license plate 'DSNOW'. I really hope my original parsing of it isn't accurate to the intended meaning.) Which meant I never felt particularly interested in the whole 'scene' thing, as it didn't seem to be offering me anything that scratched that impulse in me.

I toyed with bits and pieces of the stuff that did work for me and the relationships I had, and explored rather a lot more with a partner who exposed me to rather more of the breadth of potential of human sexuality than I had been able to imagine before. (Which has mostly made me fairly mellow about lots of it, as far as I can tell.) I learned what I could and couldn't handle, refined some comprehension of my interests, and generally sorted a lot of things out.

I realised that the relationship I'd had that didn't have some level of d/s overtones was the one that was abusive, which was an interestingly illuminating thing. I chased down my understandings of power into other parts of my life, such as my hatred of running things (preferring to be the heavy for a competent leader) and my refusal to let an incompetent leader stand. I (for a project related to my religious studies) wound up making a playlist of music that evoked the concept 'Sex' for me, and, after it was done, realised that every single one of them had a clear power dynamic twining through it.

Some of my working through how my head works around kink was trying to disentangle causes that fed into bad experiences (like how my tendency to freeze up when assimilating data is the flipside of subspace) and some of it is related to intense introspectiveness and some of it was just 'That worked, how do I get more of that?' And some of it is painfully, intensely personal, like the stuff that hooks directly into my earliest sex fantasies, some of it is just stuff to know and use appropriately, and some of it is hilariously particular (like which bit of use-of-restraint turns me on the most). All of this stuff is stuff I've chewed on, often directly when figuring out how it fits together with kink (though I occasionally come up with something new, like today's realisation that my comfort and trust levels in relationships ping to my comprehension of my partner's motivations and psychology probably derives from mentally managing my mother).

I've got libraries of this stuff filed in my head under a complicated duodecimal filing system that only the brain gnomes understand, but it's all there, neatly shelved. Occasionally generating footnotes, annotations, the odd new volume accreting out of wisps of knowledge rolled about like a katamari.

Connecting this up with anyone else, finding a shared language ... is hard.


Anonymous said...

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend way back in college. I was analyzing the dynamics of my relationship with my-then boyfriend---putting them into my personal context. She said that "overanalyzing a romance will distroy it, trying to understand it will only make what works more difficult and what doesn't work worse." (Pretty close to exact quotes.)

I disagreed, very strongly, and I still do. I /have/ to understand things, and I have to be able to put them into some sort of context. It's the only way I can feel safe, and the only way I can process my world. It took me ages to realize that.

One of our differences is that my analyzing process (when it's working) feels almost identical to my subspace. It's me becoming comfortable with who I am, and with my reactions. How strange and wonderful.

Dw3t-Hthr said...

One of my recent comments in various discussions has been that my comfort and trust in a relationship depends heavily on my understanding and being able to anticipate and work with my partner's reactions.

Anything else is, yes, utterly unsafe.