I have never been someone who lives with regret. It isn’t that I am incapable of bad decisions, or even recognising them as such. I take so many. I also agonise over things, thinking of how I might have done better, said better, acted better, or even what-ifs. You would be forgiven for thinking these are the hallmarks of a regretter. And maybe, for small things, it is unavoidable.
But I don’t seem to regret much of anything. Even as a teen, I was conscious of wishing to live my life as best as I possibly could. I didn’t want to be an old man thinking of the things I hadn’t done. Now that I will never be an old man, that bit has taken care of itself. And since a hallmark of being a woman has been living out my life.
Some of this came from my father. Watching him. Listening to him. One of the only times that I lived with him was in the twilight of my High School years. 18 months. Not welcome, but given the choices, the best of bad options. He was very fond of reminiscing, and lamented so many of the things that he hadn’t done.
Perhaps it was the natural rebellion of a teen, or just me seeing something I already knew I didn’t want to become, but I can remember conscious thought of not wanting to live in a way that I regretted anything.
Part of that has to do with decision making. To take the best possible decision, best course of action, based on everything you know at the time. We all make judgement errors, but if we are also consciously, effortfully making decisions because we have mustered and balanced what we know, then we are doing our best.
But I am also shy. Painfully shy. And this is preposterous to people who meet me. At least most. I had a lovely “date” the other day and she said, “shy? You certainly don’t seem it.” But I am. I just hide it well. Why? Because I learned at a very early age that when you are shy people fill the room for you, and this can suck.
I do not consider myself trans. And by trans I mean transgender. That might seem outrageous. It is outrageous. I don’t even believe myself when I say that being transgender isn’t the most, or at least one of, the most, important core, foundational threads of my being. But it isn’t. There is something deeper. And it has many flavours.
The first is a fear of being misunderstood. Why on earth I would care about this is a mystery to me. But there are few things which make my ears burn in sorrow, anger, anxiety, shame, frustration than to be misunderstood.
There is a very strong feeling amongst trans people, but I dare say amongst people of colour, people of non-mainstream sexuality, perhaps anything that falls outside of the hetero-normative bubble the world wishes everyone fit into. Don’t throw rocks if you live in a glass house. As a child of diplomats, the culture of being on “stage”, of having to be careful of what you say lest it be misconstrued, or worse, that you be pigeonholed (bad enough on its own, but egads, what if it is the wrong pigeonhole?!), was a recipe for anxiety. But I want to throw rocks.
And I did. Boy did I. I was a terror in the neighbourhood growing up. When we moved in, my siblings and I threw rocks from our side of the street down and across the street onto the porches of the people who lived opposite us. It was our first home post our parent’s divorce. Were we playing something out or were we just bad people?
I went on to be a real terror. One of my siblings was a sweetheart, a gentle soul, but who was fond of drugs and ended up in trouble at school. He did well in the end…Ivy League education, successful career. Another sibling was a goody two shoes, president of their class year after year, great student who didn’t get into good schools, who had the most bizarre and peripatetic career but has been so successful that they have earned a title for life from their good works. And me? Crap student, bad boy, in trouble and suspended for drugs (I didn’t inhale!), problem child, emotional train-wreck, passionate about everything at least for a little while, suicidal on occasion, and so effing confused. Ivy league education, post-grad at an even better school, a wild career that saw me become a listed-company CEO at the age of 32.
A glimpse inside my professional life.
“You have 90 days to fix things at this company, or it’ll be you that I fire,” said my then boss/client. For 60 days, I tried to work with the guys that were in charge, coaching, guiding. The needle wasn’t moving. “I wasn’t kidding,” my boss/client reminded me.
“I’d like to make some changes to the team,” I said.
“Like what?”
“I’d like to fire all of them except for M. (the CFO I had installed some months earlier).”
“You have my blessing on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You sit in the chair,” he meant become CEO. I did. Two weeks later I had removed the entire top team. In the space of three days I flew across the US and personally let each one of them go. This was not a knee-jerk decision. It was one that I had had time to think about for a long time, to prepare for. And the people that I promoted into a new structure were people I had been watching, coaching, grooming, for a year.
The weekend after finishing this process I gathered my new team at a fabulous resort and got down to business in a board room…what is it with nice resorts and board rooms? Is it so we can all bring spouses and they not mind that we are locked up? Mine didn’t come. Neither did any of theirs.
“Well,” I said, “now we don’t have any excuses. It’s your company now.”
“Yours too,” one said.
“I’ll get fired sooner or later. I always do. It comes with the territory.” What can you say to that? The purpose of this gathering was to set the direction for the company, a rhythm of meetings, expectations for our working relationship…and to energise them about the future. Bookworthy actually. Just not this book.
It isn’t the story either. The story is no regrets. Bold action is often the action we regret least. Governed as it is by our guts and tempered by a clear and well-thought-through plan. For my part, what I regret least is the dignified way in which I fired a group of people who had given their lives to the company. I took the time. I listened to them. I helped them understand, which was mainly helping them find their feet. I listened to one of them cry like a baby as he felt his life had lost its purpose. He still sends me birthday cards and Christmas cards.
In other words, the admonition ‘don’t throw rocks’ is not to come from a place of being a “yes’m” (the kind who keeps their head down so that they don’t get picked out) but is instead to come from a place of decency.
I spend a lot of energy trying to be nice to people. As a people pleaser I often find myself examining this for clues as to whether it comes from a potential toxic source in me, the doormat archetype. But mostly it comes from a place of touching people with tenderness. To do this awakens something in them, and often the result is that both people get more from one another as a result.
Recently I was back in touch with a woman I once loved and who once loved me. She has had a tough run of things, a string of toxic men in her life, a topic which has stirred me since I first dated and before. I could feel her need. As a newly affectionate person, a tool that has become far more powerful and accessible as I have accepted my own womanhood, I was also very aware of how thirsty she was for it.
I left her in my home for adventures abroad and she left my keys under the mat. In her goodbye and thanks she shared that on the last night she had crawled into my bed and worn my sleepwear, admitting that she wanted to feel me around her. Part of this is a boundary violation, I think. Isn’t it? We are no longer intimate, and anyway, she broke my heart once. She also became one of many woman who leave my home with items of clothing, but at least she told me.
I guess this is one of the advantages of having a trans (or cross-dressing) partner. I remember seeing an ex, one whom I should have never let go, and noticing that she was wearing my favourite leather jacket and thinking ‘how the hell did you get that,” but on the day I just said, “you look great in that,” and she smirked and smiled and said “thanks.” I felt guilty for leaving her (I didn’t mean it, but life took me to another country and I didn’t think I could/should ask her to join me).
Sometimes talking to strangers surfaces things that we don’t seem to get at with people we know. I stayed at an AirBnB recently and the hostess was very gregarious. She told me I was really, really beautiful. She had me there.
She was also very curious. About sex, sexuality, gender, when did I know, why did I wait so long, etc.
“I was afraid,” I said. Is that not a recipe for regret? And yet, do I regret? No. I don’t. I had a full life as a man. I achieved remarkable things. But most importantly, and despite having acute gender dysphoria, managed to have a very long and loving marriage and produced the greatest gift of all, my children. And this leads me to the original spark for this post.
Love.
There is no greater feeling than feeling that something greater than us exists, that something greater than us motivates. That is what love feels like to me. It is an annihilation of the self. The dedication of the self to something other than the self.
Is that a universal feeling?
Why do I ask? Because that is also what submission feels like to me. It is what I have found in submission. It is what draws me to submission. The bounds of D/s are like an express train to a place where everything is bigger than the self.
I think of the people I have been drawn to in the world of D/s. Professionals. Some have affected me on a deep emotional level and others not at all. Or very little. I have learned so much in the process. About giving. About receiving. About wanting. About letting go.
We are taught that we are enough. I have not lived my life that way. If anything, I have been too much. I don’t know whether I can help it or not. I don’t like how self-labelling becomes an excuse, and how prone we are to put ourselves in boxes…or even that I like the shorthand that comes with it. As a person who has lived with ADD and a diagnosis in childhood, the diagnosis of which was a form of abuse, the resulting treatment another form of abuse, and a perfect example of violating consent, I still struggle with accepting the diagnosis in whole and in its parts. But I recognise that being “too much” is a part of ADD. That having an intensity of passion, while it lasts, is common to ADD. That being hypersensitive, not in the sense of being touchy, but in being very able to feel and tune in to others, is part of it. That being situationally unaware is a jarring corollary to hypersensitivity, invoked in the main to turn down the noise, or life would be just too much.
When I am going to see a provider, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I want to feel. My Queen just naturally taps into this, and always asks me unprompted what is going in my mind, my life, and so on, to help her tune in with this. I would say that there are two people I am “regular” with, though I suspect that how I am regular with them is highly irregular. How many clients see an FSSW to not have sex? How many sub/slaves see a domme and just go out for drinks?
I crave normality. Not in the sense of normal/not normal. But in the sense of that which is quotidian. But I think that this is dangerous. I remember with Ex-Mistress thinking that I would much rather have just been a friend than a client. But as another domme who is a friend said, “I’m not looking for friends, I’ve got enough already.” This is important because when we want things that aren’t on offer, we lose everything. And it isn’t the loss that matters, what matters is the action of the self in that mix.
Recipe for regret? And that is what I am getting at. In my case no. Regret would be the wrong feeling. There is enough self-regulation, self-control, for me to say that I am always my best me—even on the bad days. I work hard enough on understanding my emotions, my needs, my desires, and my place in the world that I can consciously say that I try, always try. Being decent and good has its own reward.
Why no regret then? Because I was being me. I was always being me. And that means being true. To the self. And whilst we may want something for ourselves, or heavens, from someone else, but that is only relevant insofar as it comes from our truth. We must expect that everyone always acts from their truth too. Even if we don’t like it. Regret is pointless. Self-reflection is not. Doggedly sticking to a course of action can be an act of self-harm, especially when we know it might lead to getting fired.
Every time I get fired, be that from a relationship or from a job I know it is coming. It never has anything to do with performance. It has to do with being the wrong-shaped peg for the wrong-shaped slot.
The AirBnB hostess had asked me about why I had waited so long. It isn’t the answer, but I have no regrets in part because of my children. I can say that my man-life was as rich as it could be given the constraints around being a man for a trans woman. And I could tell myself that, and it would keep me warm. But I might always wonder. Niggling doubt.
The presence and existence of my children, however, forever dispel those doubts. I love my children so much that my heart aches. And this is something which is beyond rational. I feel it just as I feel love, just as I feel submission, just as I feel the presence of God. We are confronted with things that are larger than we are. This is one of them.
We do not have a purpose in life. We are not put on here as part of some giant chess game. And yet, I cannot help but feel we have destiny. We have agency and destiny. Mastering both is what it takes to live fully.
It is better to try and fail than not try. It is better to live and fail than to regret. And it is best of all to love, to be hurt by love, and to just be open to more and more of it.
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