Throughout my life, I have often been the one people come to when tragedy strikes. When loss upon loss presses heavy on their souls.
And a common thread in those conversations is this:
The people around them cannot tolerate the discomfort of their sadness, their rage, their grief.
They want to solve it. They want to banish it. They want optimism and positivity and movement away from the sad, hard thing.
And what I can do in that moment is sit with those hard things. Defend those hard emotions. Welcome them because hard emotions aren’t evil things trying to destroy us. They are part of us. They are signals. They tell us this mattered.
You grieve because you love.
You hurt because you hoped.
You’re angry because something is wrong.
You are in pain because you are alive.
Discomfort is not my enemy. Pain is welcome in my space. And because of these truths, I can witness those things without trying to usher them away, sweep them under a rug, pretend they never happened.
This is a mirror into how I see the uncomfortable parts of BDSM—the intentional pain, humiliation, and degradation. The requests to make someone cry.
They are sometimes a request for permission to feel those taboo feelings.
Especially for men, who are raised to think of so many feelings as an indictment of their masculinity. As if being human wasn’t man enough. As if pretending not to feel pain was some kind of courage.
Part of my role as a domme is to hold space for the hard feelings. To let them exist and grow and excite and relieve.
This space lets you face the questions society is uncomfortable with. What happens if I am humiliated? What happens if I am crushed? Where are the limits between tolerating discomfort and finding a boundary?
And this is part of why the vanilla world cannot understand. Because as long as they are running from the so-called negative feelings, they cannot know the depth of those feelings. The way that they can be tangled up with pleasure and relief. The way that you hold them and find yourself more whole. The way that they shape not only your sexual desires but also—if you are going deep enough—the way you show up in the world overall.