The Art of Suffering
I learned in life to swallow my reactions to bad stuff, and smile.
So many of us do. I am genuinely happy at the moment, but there are days when two or three things remain that make me wish I could switch off and not feel anything. But no one knows. I dress them up with grace, humour, or kindness, to show an interest in someone else.
Mask. Hide.
I’m ridiculously private, despite all I write. I love the anonymity of writing online. Few read it, I’d run for the hills if I became popular. But the people that do hold a cherished place in my mind because while attention freaks me out, acceptance, understanding and connection help me unfurl just a tiny bit.
Attention.
Don’t look at me. Don’t compliment me, Don’t make observations about me. Let me be a ghost, a shadow. I won’t ask for anything because then I am inviting ’you’ to look at me. I’m learning, even at 52, slowly. Many compliments are gifts, and should be accepted as such (for me).
As a masochist, primarily physically so far, I can lose myself a little bit in physical pain. I can write about it, the thrill of the anticipation, how the moment of white hot bliss makes me rise and swell and burst from my own reservations because it’s OK to hurt like that. It’s OK to suffer like that. It’s OK to look at the bruises and feel pride, revel in the scars, marks and residual pain.
ESM is my new world. I don’t even like calling it emotional masochism because I don’t want to admit to emotions. Not the big ones. I battle with myself. I am wrong. I must not feel. And if I do I just bury it deep. I must push down anger and transfer it to a physical energy. No self protecting indignation; that’s to be wrapped in graciousness and a murmur of deflection of the most. I can not allow myself to rise to goading, belittling, negging... all of my responses will, at the most, be contained in a barely raised eyebrow and impassivity. Lessons so hard learned that the only way I know how to manage these things if they arise, is to shut off. Clam up. Or laugh. Humour as a defence. That old chestnut.
I can defend another with passion and fierceness, undiluted. I can’t easily write with honesty about shame, humiliation and the squirming, agonising self consciousness that all but paralyses me. Everything in me is telling me to stop writing. I can’t even quote a thing that has been said to me that has triggered the confusion, the delicious agony of the conflict that flushes me hot, cold, a shiver of defensive anger inside, the turmoil, the prey caught in headlights, the twist in the pit of my stomach as words sting at the same time arousal emerges, dark, aching, primal, feral, wanting to fuck hard to obliterate the confusion and mess inside.
I can say how his physical presence makes me quiver and tremble. His tone, his look. I can easily grasp and celebrate the wanton creature that purrs and revels in physical acts. But the memory of a comment, an observation, ‘you are X, Y and Z’ holds a horrified fascination.
The compulsion to explore why my body is on fire, whilst wrestling with the desire, almost but not quite screaming, to say stop. I want to run where physical masochism makes me want to stay. I am being as brave as I can be when I read a message that drips shame onto my skin and renders me uncertain.
I am hot and flustered now just writing about it. And so very turned on. I crave a beating to pour those feelings into. I want the white hot agony of a strike to centre the cringing agony of feeling these things. It’s a different energy, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Not so easy to make an artsy fartsy erotic image about. It would I suppose be in my eyes, the set of my jaw, the drawing away from people to guard myself before I put on my mask. Smiling, funny, polite-- the reserve. The safe.
Whilst aching to be fucked, used and abused, all the pretty words are stripped away because I feel exposed.
And once again, baby wants to do a bad, bad thing.
About the Author: AQuietSub, having started as a sub and evolved into a hedonist, an emotional and physical masochist, primal, feral and curious, A dark world beckoned, and once entered it was impossible to leave.
