Love, submission, and are these my demons?

You’re not reading this.  I’m not writing this.  I’m not here.  I’ve grown up.  Moved on.  I don’t need this anymore.

Years ago, when I first began blogging, I wrote because I couldn’t help it.  My survival instinct was coming out in many ways, writing was one of them.  Some of you have been here since the very first post.

In those days, I was living in a perpetual state of overwhelm.  I had just come off a very rewarding and fulfilling professional experience.  Which ended up abruptly.  I had two years of “gardening leave”, a British colloquialism which says “you can’t do anything.”  Boy did I do.

Holding back the transgender tide in me that had been flowing since childhood suddenly became an impossibility.  It had been coming out through the cracks of my own self-suppression for the previous two years, finding expression in small ways through my clothes, my relationship to my body, to body hair.  Small signals.

These were all changes that could be conducted and lived in private.  Though I loved my wife dearly, we had not been intimate for years, and had stopped sharing a bedroom roughly 15 years earlier.  So my lack of body hair anywhere would have gone unnoticed, as did much.

I became certain that I would not make it, and hired a posse of therapists to keep myself from jumping off the balcony of my luxury Miami Beach Condo.  I stopped going onto the balcony, and turned to exercise as a way to control my raging animal spirits.  Running and working out at least once, but sometimes twice a day.  And writing.

I had never been “kinky” before, even though I knew that I was quite thus.  By kinky I simply mean, had never expressed it.  The closest I came was a date in my 20’s with a woan I knew from business school and we both wore vinyl trousers to a nightclub, mine were black, hers were white, and we both thought we were pretty edgy.

I probably wrote at how grossed out I was by the experience, how overwhelmed I was by predatory male energy which was rampant in the UK Club scene in those days.  I felt shame for having taken someone I liked and knew in a professional and vanilla context to something which spoke of what felt dark inside of me.

Shame, lot’s of shame. 

In the midst of all of this, and my collapsing sense of what was real and not, I discovered Tumblr.  In those days it was a free-for-all of wild and unrestrained sexual energy, and I fell down the rabbit hole.  Random strangers started pinging me, and my body responded in ways that were stronger than anything I had ever felt as a series of catfish dommes extracted cash, gifts, and compromising selfies from me.

Then one of them came along and sounded different.  She took her time.  Didn’t ask for money for weeks, despite being online with me in what felt close to 24/7.  I wondered at times if she were multiple people, in a call centre, but her consistency was real.  And for the first time, I entered a bounded D/s relationship.

It did become financial, but I also received a bounteous service.  And after 18 months and having pierced the veil of her fake identity three times, she finally showed herself to me.  I won’t say that we became friends, but insofar as such a dynamic could allow for such a thing, we crossed a threshold of the unheard of.  I met her, her brother, her children, her whole family—all on video.  Seeing her in the patio of her home in Lagos, understanding their modest means, and thinking about how we had talked about books, and how she had so masterfully taken over my life, I could only feel admiration.

What happened next was documented extensively on this blog: I saw a dominatrix in person for the first time, began intense somatic therapy and talk therapy.  Came out, had a sex change, got divorced, and went from not just being submissive but to being a dominatrix.  Somehow, becoming a woman, or simply allowing my gender expression to find freedom, I was able to let go of so much shame.

The shame of submission, however, was harder to release.  I had no desire to find submission shameful, and it bothered me on many levels that society judged submission in a negative way.  After all, that which in me was submissive, led directly on a very short path to my professional success.

When I first say the dominatrix for the first time, we talked about what I was there for.  I asked her to help.  To shape me into a kind of person that she could love, to be the kind of submissive that was worthy of love.  It had taken me a long time to find her, to find someone who felt capable and stylistically apt enough for this to be realistic.  And she leaned into it with gusto.

For a while it was beautiful in ways that I had never felt before, and I found strength to be and do in ways that were liberating and new to me.  There was no burden on her, or expectation, or even discussion, but the consequence of our time together was that I stayed alive and found the strength to assert my identity as a trans and non-binary person, and to do it without flinching.

We went off the rails which was disheartening, but a domme I met to talk about it ended up becoming my domme.  I still see her.  Even if only rarely.

As all of this was happening, particularly once I had transitioned, I no longer felt submissive.  I became a dominatrix, becoming what I had admired, mainly in its transformational life-giving sense.

But the submissive energy lingered.  I remember seeing a very well-known domme and protégé of my domme, and announced to her, “I’m not really submissive anymore,” to which she retorted, “well, you’re here aren’t you.”

But as I was stepping away from submission generally, or rather it felt simply as if it were falling away, my sessions with my domme grew more intense.  What I realised is that I might not be submissive, but with certain people, it just comes out.

I don’t really know what I am reacting to, but I feel it in my body.  I was at a cocktail party once, and a young dominatrix was there.  Indeed, it was a cocktail party of dominatrixes, and me.  I was there “incognito” in a submissive sense, and randomly, I met three people that night who have become friends within the industry.

But one of them dommed me all night in a very subtle way, in a way that no-one else could see.  And it resonated, and felt quite strange and good at the same time.  I never sessioned with her, or asked, and in truth, that isn’t something I look for anymore.  If I have those feelings, they generally reside with one person.

This is changing subtly now in ways that I don’t understand and which are beyond the scope of this post.

And now, finally, I can get to the point.  Love comes out of me as submission.  When I truly love someone, I self-annihilate.  It is unhealthy, even though it feels delicious and noble.  I can point to concrete ways in which it has damaged me.  My ex-wife’s rage at “losing me”, even though our divorce was her choice, is centred on her loss of this kind of connection, not on my transition.  She wouldn’t recognise it, and is a nasty TERF, but I don’t believe she gives two figs about this.  She mislabels her loss and may never figure that out.

And so I go about my life becoming a better and better dominatrix, making deeper friendships in this world, and finding profound and deep joy in the freedom of expression that comes with it.

The pain that comes with being part of a group which is reviled by society, mischaracterised, marginalised, endangered is real and at times overwhelming.  But it is nothing compared to the joy I feel in my body and in my connections with women, with my sisters, particularly those who are Sex Workers.

I wonder if I had been in a loving marriage with a partner who saw me and accepted me rather than suppressed and judged me, if I would have had the strength to continue living my lie as a man.  When I look at pictures of myself and see the success, confidence and beauty of my former male safe, I also see the sadness and the shadow of death.  These are all gone, all of them.  

I no longer have success of any kind in the vanilla world.  I do not think it is possible or accessible any longer, despite my qualifications.  I am to live in the shadows.  We speak of our life purpose, and perhaps for many of us, the only purpose we have is not a destination, some great work, but a process, the simple act of living.

My friendships with women make every ounce of pain I feel worth the sacrifice.  More than.  To be able to just be.  To cry, to love, to lust, to simply be.  That is what women do for women, sisters do for sisters.

A few days ago, one of my colleagues asked for someone who was a fellow provider who had experience with a particular kind of corporal punishment.  The brief was not to do, but to receive.  She had a client who wanted to dominate a dominatrix.  There is nothing in my life that would suggest that this is something I would do that I switch, but I volunteered and noted that it was because she would be there.

I love the certainty of someone who says they are not at all submissive or at all masochistic and you can feel the solidity and purity of the statement.  It didn’t proceed, but the point is different.  In the moment of expressing my willingness to do this I realised that I really am a submissive.  A slave.  Cos-playing her way through life as a dominatrix.

It feels quite a bit like a moment of shedding.  I do not know what will emerge.  I have had sex with men over the past few months, both in work and play, and have found that it does nothing for me.  I am good at it, and they wouldn’t know that I was just doing it, going through the motions, because I can act too.  I thought for a while that maybe I could be bi, but it just isn’t so.

Stepping into my womanhood has allowed me to see and feel and to receive a kaleidoscope of love from and to and with other women that has only deepened my intense and profound love for women.  Wallowing in womanhood, mine and theirs.  Bliss.

And my dominance comes out in play with other women, and so too, perhaps hesitantly, does my submission.  We talk about the vulnerability of love, our love, and our vulnerability.  But we don’t talk about the vulnerability of submission.

When I see my domme this plays out real time.  Even if I don’t see her often, her effect on me is profound and immediate: when we shift from being social to in the D/s bubble, I will sob for her on command.  I should simply say, “sob for me,” but she opens the door.  And even though I don’t love her in a conventional sense, because the container precludes that and also makes the expression of these feelings possible, I realise that submission is what opens the floodgates, and that is the same feeling that love is.  To fall in love is therefore to feel submissive towards.

It perplexes me when strangers write to me already intensely submissive in language.  They are fetishists, reacting to pictures of me or my words.  I know many of my colleagues can’t stand this kind of “submission”.  I don’t mind because it can be transformed into something healthy and beautiful but does require training and work.

Does any of this make sense?

I was not born submissive.  I learned it.  There is a straight line from being sexualised by my mother to feeling that sex and sexuality were dangerous, and that to express adult sexual energy is predatory.  I’m not saying this is true, it is only my truth.  Hence a lifetime of being a “little” even if it something I never express anymore, not even really on my own.

Submission is my way of granting permission.  I am attracted to you, so I feel submissive to you, so I am begging you to come and pull me out of myself, because I can’t do it on my own.  And that feeling, right there, is what makes me sob with the dominatrix, what makes me go see escorts, and what makes me love.

Because I can’t do it on my own.  Can anyone?