My mommy is the Divine Feminine.  Why wouldn’t I want to grow up to be just like her?

I feel my love of women in every cell of my body.  In the dark spaces between cells, in my dark matter.  In my own black holes. In the electrical impulses that tell me about how I feel and direct all conscious and unconscious action.  If I ever disappear in a puff of smoke all that will be left is a warm fuzzy feeling of the profound depth of this love.

This feeling has been the North Star, the Southern Cross, of my earthbound life.  Nothing has ever mattered to me more, both in small and big ways.  This love has ruled my life with reckless abandon, with passion, with the bittersweet nectar of the past and the tender hope for tomorrow, but above all, what it feels like to be alive, the now.

One of the most joyful parts of my life as it unfolds is the growing presence of now.  It is taking over.  ‘Now’ has all of the emotions.  Now is female.  Now is about feeling my way into my own body, my own life, and experiencing love as it lives all around me.

We can aspire to be certain ways and to do or have certain things, but I don’t know how much they matter anymore.  I still swear.  I still love my children.  I’m still broke.  I still don’t know what is going to happen in the future.  But the universe has a wicked sense of humour, and I am laughing along with it.  And this helps me not in a conscious way…it just is.

I wrote about how my wife broke into my home and helped herself to whatever she felt like taking and threw my clothes into the garden.  Sweetheart.  Life is a cliché when it comes like that.  I don’t need to punish her or contemplate revenge.  I know that what is right for her will come to pass, it probably has, for to inhabit a body capable of such things must be penance enough.

My own sexuality is distant from me.  The things I used to need, the urges that might have ruled me, seem very far away. I experience them very differently now.  Sexual desire, longing, is just as strong as ever, perhaps stronger, but what has taken over is a desire to connect with a fellow human.  Can we just drift into love with whomever?

I went out last night to the Opera with a male family member, a perfect gentleman, but one who has been estranged for reasons not relevant.  It has been beautiful to reconnect with him.  And last night was a date.  Of sorts.  Not really.  But it felt like one.  To him; to me.  It felt beautiful to be taken out and shown off.  And it may seem weird to you that I might want to be eye candy, but it felt extraordinarily good.  I turned heads all night long, could see people taking my picture, everyone was looking. 

A ballerina giraffe decked out to the nines in a slinky, backless navy dress, slit all the way up my leg, towering in her heels just owns the room…what she does with it is her business.  I ate it up. 

I was also cold…As usual.  I always get cold.  But the kind words and even kinder eyes of strangers kept me warm.  The heat generated from turning heads warmed the entire hall.

I had gotten my hair done exactly as I had always dreamed of doing earlier…had my nails done, and had my makeup done.  This was a big deal for me.  We take these opportunities to be seen as a woman in all our power with total seriousness.  And kudos to a man with BDE who can pull off a date with me (Big you-know-what Energy).  And for making me feel seen, stood up for, and demonstrating the hot ticket I was on his arm.  It was fabulous.

The next day I walked into a shop and a man said, “you were at the opera last night weren’t you?”

“What, you recognise me?”

“Miss, there wasn’t a person in that place who didn’t notice you. You owned it.”

“Aww, that’s so sweet, thank you. I guess I scrub up nice,” I said looking down at my modest outfit.

“You’d own it no matter what you wore.”

“Stop, that’s too much.”

I love the female gaze.  It almost always begins with curiosity.  Only rarely with judgement.  Very, very rarely.  After the curiosity she might approach and talk to me.  Or she checks me out.  Or she smiles.  Two kinds of smile.  ‘Cool’, solidarity.  Or, ‘you’re hot, I want to kiss you.’  I’m not always sure which is which.  Bad girl.

I’ve been chatting with a new dominant woman.  A pro.  But my motive in reaching out to her is different than what I normally feel under such circumstances.  I am speaking to her for coaching.  I was drawn to her because if there is anyone I have ever come across that I would like to emulate when I grow up, it is her. 

She is over-educated.  Gorgeous.  Very intentional.  She sees kink as a healing practice, and one of her core offerings is feminist re-education of the male brain.  I am very drawn to her because I want to be her.  She is helping me define my “brand”, the kind of dominatrix I am to become.  And I see this as important work, something which my therapist and my Sex Witch coach are supporting.  So too are many of my teachers in practical skills.  And future colleagues.  The pro-domme community thus far has been generally welcoming.

I always had this fear about having been a client, being an ongoing client, that this would interfere with people taking me seriously, of seeing me in a dominant guise.  But I realise that as much as I used to want it, I don’t want to be collared by someone.  I don’t want to walk in public or bare my soul in front of others as a submissive ever again.

I say that, and yet, I still take the whip.  But taking the whip has changed for me.  I see self-described pain sluts wriggle and cry out, or struggle under the loving caress of the lash.  I have a long way to go, but when my Queen told me, “wow, you didn’t even flinch,” after dismantling me with a bull whip, I felt a comfortable certainty in the human relationship.  Taking it for her created an emotional bond.

Finding out the kind of dominatrix I would make is also about discovering myself as a woman.  There is a dawning realisation for me that even though I inhabited a male body, lived outwardly as a man, the nature of sexual desire that I have always had has been comfortable to me as a kind of sexuality that I would describe as female.

And our sexuality lies at the root of how we date people.  I have always wanted to attract people.  To seduce them.  I have always wanted to draw them in and make them pounce on me.  That has not changed.  And now that I have changed sex, it is stark and clear to me.

I want to cultivate my own feminine sexual energy, to find its full power in self-expression, to learn how to wield it, and to do so.

The thing is, what I admire is the dominatrix.  The self-possession.  The strength.  I could have never imagined that this is how I wished to embody myself, but it makes perfect sense.  An early domme who was struggling with her own identity once told me that lesbians often experience attraction as wanting to be the person they are attracted to.  That has always been true for me.  I have always felt that kind of “lesbian” attraction.  And now I can be it.

I was out with a male sibling at a farmer’s market.  He made reference to a woman there who he found to be gorgeous and wanted me to go and see her with him.  I was wearing my new favourite t-shirt…a tight white form-fitting ribbed white cotton tank top with the words, “nobody knows I’m a DYKE” emblazoned across the chest.  It is very boob-enhancing.  As we approached the farm stand where the woman in question was standing she looked up and into my eyes as if she knew I was coming. She locked eyes with mine.  She drew me to her, and my brother stood slack-jawed in disbelief. For 30’ she owned me until I stood before her and felt shy. I flashed a smile and said ‘hi’.  She said ‘hi’. I didn’t even want bread. It was utterly hot. I bought bread anyway.

“Holy fuck, what just happened?” my brother asked.

“I just bought bread.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“She likes girls,” I said.  This became a topic with my entire family over lunch.  But it is a microcosm of life.

Later, when we were cutting into the delicious loaf my mother said, “there’s a phone number on a piece of paper in the bag; is it important?”

“I’ll take it,” my brother said. I intercepted it. You have to be on your toes with family.

I will become a dominatrix not for commercial success, which may never come, but because it is who I am, who I wish to be.  In spiritual circles we sometimes speak of what it means to become alchemized.  I have never really understood this expression.

Now I do.  My destiny lies along this path.  Come what may.  And the part that counts?  Knowing that what I will find there is what I already am.