Saving the zombies - "I Can Choose Not To Play"

It is hard for me to recognise that it has only been 36 hours since my emotional breakdown while reading "Playing on the Edge". It feels like a lifetime, because where I was before that moment feels so distant and inaccessible, almost as if that me is dead now. And because so much happened in the emotional and mental turmoil since.

There have been a lot of tears in that period, and a shedload of introspection and questioning and looking for a way to frame my kink in a way that doesn't freak me out.

In this I have, rather unfairly by some measures, inadvertently cast Staci Newmahr as some kind of guru or guide (unfairly, since her job is definitely not to be a psychologist or counsellor or to hold anyone's hand through this stuff). My excuse is that the ideas and basis for which I might build a new understanding are still very new to me and derived from her writing, so wrapping my brain around them is hard in this internal project. As I poured my heart out yesterday morning and the night before, I knew that Newmahr would eventually read my words, although that wasn't really registering in the chaos. And of course, that sort of reaction produces its own reaction, so a conversation started.

Working my way through ideas by writing them to someone has helped before, and seems to have helped so far (and is why I am taking the time to write again this morning, because who knows, it may shake something more loose). Last night, something began to dawn on me as I wrote back to Newmahr:

I have just stumbled upon one thing, though - I hadn't spotted it before, but when I linked to the earlier post and how BDSM differs from traditional marriage, there was that "permanent/temporary" line. I remembered just now that that was a boundary in edgeplay that you identified, on which edgework took place.

One way of framing the issue for myself is around a similar kind of permanent/temporary boundary, and the feeling that the "permanent" socially-constructed need for a monster to survive for the edgework to work, takes away my control of the monster (if the monster always has to be there, then I don't control it, and therefore can't engage with it in edgework). But if I can choose when to be the monster, or negotiate it, then I can recover more-or-less exactly the position I was in before this crisis. I'm still working my way through this idea, and what (if anything) it has to do with relations between D/s, SM and other types of play and relationship. If choosing when to play is placing an order and a "temporary" element onto things - creating form out of formlessness - then that creates a "safe space" in that I can choose not to play. But then, it seems possible to identify an "edgework" site within D/s, which can blur and challenges that concept of the temporary. This also makes sense to me in terms of how I was framing my D/s involvement before I started reading your book.

Further ideas, challenges, and problems occurred to me while I lay in bed heading towards sleep that made this seem less of a magic bullet to cure my woes, although I think the ideas, with some more work, offer me the best hope.

The first thought was simply that choosing not to play is not that easy for a top. It is easier in the negotiation stage, either to say, "I don't want to play at all" or "I won't play in that way this time", but even then, there are socially-constructed ideas about who wants it more, where (especially) men who say "no" risk being interpreted as saying "you are undesirable".

Once play has begun, the topping equivalent of a safeword is much harder to define or utilise. Inasmuch as all topping involves a "service top" element of "giving the bottom what she asks for", it is easy to feel like a failure if, for physical or emotional reasons, a top is unable to match the expectations and demands of a bottom, regardless of whether "service top" is a part of the understood dynamic of the play session. It can also lead to some pretty scary stuff of its own.

One of the nastiest things I ever did in a scene was this: SNS and I were having a "wrestling" match and, for me, it was either "I win or you surrender". She didn't want to surrender, and I am not a good wrestler! At some point, I just snapped and had enough. I muttered, "Okay then!" and walked away - in SNS's words, I "suddenly became all moody".

The need or choice to "just walk away", therefore, comes at an emotional cost that at the very least needs to be managed a lot better than I did in that instance!

There's the famous joke or cartoon: one person holding a cat-o-nine-tails, the other kneeling. Masochist: "Whip me!" Sadist: "Nope!"

The alternative is to carry on (to avoid feeling like a failure, or just carried along by the emotion of the scene) and be pushed into doing something you didn't feel comfortable with. There have been times when that has happened too, when I have ended up as a top doing things I did not want to or did not feel ready for, because I felt it was expected and because in the emotional moment I did not see that I needed to stop. That tends to have a very negative effect after play has finished, and a real sense of "I wish I had not gone there." I have read accounts of both types of situation from others as well so I know this is not just me.

Not to mention, of course, that for the purposes of re-connecting my sadism and my sexuality to my body, it is quite hard to find the thought of saying "no, not today!" arousing enough to make a physical connection (even if that's just with my right hand...!)

One of the interesting and powerful concepts that Newmahr develops in her book is the concept of collaborative edgework, or "collaborating the edge", in which both participants at once create the edge for the other, and explore their own edge (which is created or defined by the other). I think this "I can choose not to play" approach seems to break that collaborative interpretation of SM as edgework, because it depends on the top (me) saying effectively, "I do not want to be your edge and help you explore it." It becomes an either/or situation, "my edge or your edge but not both". It is possible that this breaking of the collaboration is what leads to the emotional difficulties of "choosing not to play" (where not stopping is a problem because instead it's "we will work on your edge instead of mine).

While these objections surfaced as I tried to work through how the idea of regaining power through saying, "I can choose not play", one reflection occurred that may mend it.

I have been allowing the monster to be real again.

Hush, little baby, don't say a word
And never mind that noise you heard:
It's just the beasts under your bed,
In your closet, in your head!

Exit light
Enter night
Take my hand
Off to Never-Never Land

- Metallica, "Enter Sandman"

It's very tricky for me to remember that the monster is not real. That my sadism is not, in fact, a monster and does not make me a monster. That monster is a myth, created not by me but by stories told to me. The shadows in the dark are not cast by monsters but by perfectly ordinary and safe things. Yes, it is dark, and scary, in here (my brain!) but there are no actual monsters. The shadows cast by my sadism are big and scary things, but they are not monsters, and they are not shadows of a monster either.

The beast in my head exists because I spent a large proportion of my life (the time from realising I was a sadist, to realising that there was a way for that not to be a bad thing) believing in it. The best way to control it is to stop believing in it, and at my best and most comfortable with myself, that was exactly what I had managed to achieve. But my edgework has, a lot of the time, involved the type of work necessary to prove to myself again and again that the "monster" is not a monster - which means, of course, that a lot of the time it comes from a place of believing it might be.

So when I saw the monster or beast arise again in Newmahr's conception of women's edgework in SM, it shook me very deeply (as recorded in those earlier posts).

But, remembering that the beast is not real and in my head, but a shadow and a story told by society can put it outside of me. In Newmahr's formulation, I am not, in fact, the monster from my point of view. Paradoxically, my partner is my monster, just as I am hers. The monster does not exist in my head, the thing that freaked me out was the image of that monster seen in her interpretation of me. Because for both of us, the monster is largely a phantasm created by society out of our fears and lived experiences, it appears only in the other and not in the self.

Because we each appear as the other's monster - the other's edge - the collaborative edgework reappears.

At this point, you might ask what this has to do with "choose not to play". But of course, I am not always strong enough to not-believe in the monster, as evidenced quite effectively by the fact that it just took the whiff of it from Newmahr's book to send me into a deep and hideous pit of emotional turmoil! Recovering that "temporary" aspect that I mentioned in originally formulating the "choose not to play" is still important, and realising that the monster is only a shadow on one's partner is key to that. The fear that the monster is real for my partner all the time, and I am just a foil (a "straw-monster" if you will) to enable her to beat it symbolically is also produced by the same shadows and stories that we have both been told. Yes, a few monsters do exist, but the thing that is real here is only the fear of those monsters.

And, as I have written before, quoting and paraphrasing from Terry Jones' "Erik The Viking" book, fear is not my enemy. Fear is an old friend, an ally, familiar from many years' acquaintance. Fear can teach and guide me and keep me safe, and push me to better things. I am not afraid of fear.

If it sounds as though I have managed to find my magic bullet with this reasoning, then you are reading too much into this by far. It takes time to rebuild emotionally after the sort of devastation I felt two nights ago. I need at the very least to sit with these thoughts and let them seep through my soul. I need time to forget that the monster felt real, and to let the realisation that it is just a shadow and a story become more real to me than the monster was. I need time to rebuild a sense of order so that there can be a place to call an edge. I need to see if I can reconnect this sense of "I'm okay" to my body! (At least there's porn that can help - hentai tentacle monsters ahoy!)

Thinking in terms of the concept of edgework, there's an analogy to describe where I have been the past couple of nights. The example from masculine, solo, edgework that Newmahr uses most often is that of rock-climbing. If my exploration of "where does this come from?" has been a journey of emotional, solo, edgework for me, then in the same example, the metaphor is this:

I fell off the cliff, reaching a little too far. I did not, after all, die, but was injured. You can well imagine a person immediately after that saying, "I will never climb again." But of course, you want to climb again, it is just believing either one's body or one's experience to be too damaged to allow it. Then you realise that "Okay, I read the situation wrongly, I tied the wrong type of knot, I should have gone for a different handhold, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with how I do rock-climbing, or with the rock. And, after all, I didn't actually die." But you still have to spend ages in the hospital waiting for the broken bones to heal, and then you have to get fit again, revise and renew your skills and training, and get over the emotional hump of feeling okay on the rock face again. I'm at the "healing" phase now, getting my mental/emotional body back into working order, and working on overcoming the "hump" to feel okay on the rock face.