On Fear

Things are not always as they seem.  There is fear, but I am not scared.  There are tears, but I am not upset.  There is pain, but I am not hurt.  So much of what you see here, dear readers, is a small sliver of the experience.  Think of this place as a singular moment in which you get to peek through the crack in the door.  Your eyes may deceive you.

Take fear: I have described many times my experiences with fear, too many to link to here.  One of my earliest memories is running away from a parent who was about to physically discipline me.  In that moment, as I ran up the steps of the house and locked the bedroom door behind me, I felt a pure rush of adrenaline.  It was something overwhelming, something I had never experienced before.  The feeling recurred in my dreams over the years, usually in a scenario when I was being chased.  I could feel that enticing and terrifying rush in my sleep and I held onto it like it was a precious treasure of an experience.    

When we are together, he recreates that feeling.  He pushes me to a point where I feel like I am in jeopardy, either physically or emotionally.  He brings me to that point of terror and I let him.  I let him.  I trust Him to do that because I know that I am safe in his hands.  He pulls me in opposite directions - between fear and safety, pain and pleasure - and I feel the extreme emotions at each end.  That is the essence of the experience.  That is a delicious feeling and one that I would be hard-pressed to describe to anyone who has not been involved in such an experience.  

The experience of fear feels very real but is buffeted by the ultimately safe nature of the entire framework.  It ends, but I often write from within that experience because it is so world-bending that I cannot keep it inside me.  But I do not live in fear of Him.  I am never really afraid, after all.  I am just experiencing fear in a safe way.  I love him and trust him more because we have the ability to experience that together.    

Same with crying: By now, he knows me well enough to see that I have trouble letting my anxieties and emotions out in a constructive way.  I do not have a place to release those anxieties in my life.  I am too busy placating my family members and pleasing my bosses.  I cannot unleash an emotional torrent on them and I do not know what to do with these feelings.  I suppose I could take up kickboxing, but that's not my cup of tea.

Instead, he helps me exorcise those demons in a constructive way.  He may bring me down with verbal humiliation or push me past where I think I can go.  He is very skilled and knows just how to lead me.  The goal is to allow me to release these emotions, to sob with the grief that I feel and to cry out like I have been longing to all week.  He absorbs everything as he holds me.  Again, there are the emotional extremes, the humiliation and the comfort all in one place.  I am not really upset by the experience, after all.  It is safe for me and it is a wonderfully freeing experience.  Sort of like primal scream therapy for kinky people ;-)

In both situations, if you happened to peek through the crack in the door at the moment when he is holding me down and I am flailing with a look of terror in my eyes, or when I am crying and racked with sobs, you would naturally think "My god, what is that man doing to that woman?"  But your eyes deceive you.  I have been deceived in the very same way.  I have spent days wondering if I should be afraid of him or why he made me cry so, only to talk it over with him and realize that the emotional whiplash of the experience was the purpose, not the fear or the crying.  I get wrapped up in my myopic perspective sometimes and miss the point.  While I am working that out and until I come to a place of understanding, I come here to write.    

That's my excuse.  Yours is that you don't always get to see everything that goes on inside this relationship.  That is understandable.  I don't give you a running account of my whole life that would provide the context for much of what I do.  But it is not my job to provide you with a comfortable experience every time and it is not my job to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside every time.  Many of you do feel comfortable and warm and fuzzy, judging from a great majority of the comments.  For everyone else, I don't really owe you an explanation as I do not expect you to constantly explain yourselves to me, although I'd like to provide a little understanding from my end.  

And that is the point of blogging after all.  To open up my world to you so I feel less alone, and maybe open yours up to an experience that you have only dreamed about.  Or to educate you about different perspectives or to educate me about my own limitations.  I feel a profound amount of love and peace in my relationship and in my submission, and if you can grab on to even a tiny piece of that, then we will have connected in a meaningful way.  All you have to do is open your heart and see that I have been here, pouring mine out all along.