There are no do-overs in life

The march of time is relentless.  We all know that.  If we live true to ourselves, perhaps we never need do-overs, because we always gave it a go.

Philosophically, I have always lived this way.  And yet, as I look back, and am honest with myself, there is the truth which lives behind the truth: what we tell ourselves is often not true.

I see someone for a whipping every so often.  I have been seeing her for six years.  The whippings only came later.  She has told me that she prefers the kissing part over the whippings, “this is what I like to do,” she said to me as I lay beneath her, skin still alive from the brutal range of play that she had chosen for me that day. Her lips are a warm sea spreading out above me, like the night sky and to be kissed by her is to feel the horizon disappear altogether.

We speak and catch up, and then I come to her, crossing the room in reverence and cannot but fail to cry as I do. Her ministrations of me lean towards her natural delight in sadism. They have included a flogger made of metal chain, which is to date the most terrible instrument I have felt.  I am not a masochist.  But I would beg her to beat me even if she were not planning to do it.  Who knows why.

People describe floggers, the conventional kind, as the most “gentle” of impact toys.  I get that.  Only my body responds very differently to the dull thud of the flogger than it does to the sting of the whip. I find them much harder to take, as if they rattle my insides and all these parts of me which are balanced and stacked on shelves are dislodged and crashing down. 

The first person to really, really whip me told me that I could take a beating and that I should lean into that.  She was not my domme, but a protege of hers.  When I shared what we had done with my domme, she was surprised by the session content. It planted a seed, one that seems to have borne fruit—that I would suffer for her.

And that is it.  The idea of suffering for someone.  A measure of love.

I go to a domme to be reminded that I am capable of love.  That I am willing to suffer for love.  My peculiar relationship to women and love was forged in the crucible of abuse, when my mother violated the most basic link between mother and child and abused me sexually as a baby.

It is far too late in life to question whether I can construct a healthy path out of it, into a form of “normal” loving.  I cannot.  I married abuse.  The form it took was different than what I had experienced with my mother, but abuse is still the same.

The dominatrix, in accepting my suffering, is giving me a way out of the narrative of helplessness.  It was hard to see that.  But it is through my tears at her hands that I discover my agency.  I can always stop.  I can walk away.  No child can walk away from their mother.  Ever.  At least not completely.

I sometimes wonder why I love women so much.  It is women who have hurt me the most.  The hurt that men do to me has never been sharp but has been one of social consequence.  Life in patriarchy is systemic abuse.  But because it is systemic it doesn’t feel like personal betrayal.

The flogger does something to my body that makes me cry from a deep place.  I can take much less of it when delivered with force than I can of the bull whip.  I find that those who have whipped me stop things before I cry ‘yellow’ or ‘red’ because I can’t see or feel that I am bleeding.  I have yet to find a need for a safe word when being beaten.

The talent of the dominatrix lies in her ability to feel.  To sense what is coming.  To read the body.  To possess empathy at superhuman levels.  She always knows what is coming before I do.  She knows that I will cry and collapse before I can even sense it, and begins to unshackle me.  I don’t know how it transpires.

And why do I cry?  Not from the pain.  It is from the life that I didn’t live, the love that I didn’t lean in to, declare, experience, all because I was afraid.  Afraid of leaning into whoever I fancied along the way, because she might have interpreted me as a “typical man”, a predator, someone she could not trust, that I had ulterior motives.  I cry not for what I lost, but for what I never tasted, simply because I was afraid.

Now that I am not a man, not perceived as one, I see and feel without clutter.

Life has this bittersweet feeling to me.  It is beautiful and hurtful in equal measure.