Maybe Not as Tough as I Must Look

There's a fine line between participation and mockery. -- Scott Adams, Dilbert

It is interesting. I have been writing about my life and our lives here in cyber space for a good long while now. Those who have been reading from the beginning, have weathered ups and downs and ups and downs of all kinds with me and with us. There have been joys and sorrows, fear and silliness, celebrations and crises -- all poured out here in a flood of words that, when I look back at them all are pretty staggering.

I know that what I write here is only a very narrow view. It is what I choose to write; what I feel I CAN write. Sometimes I choose not to share details or events for a wide variety of reasons. I can go "quiet" here because I am busy, or tired, or stressed, or baffled, or uncertain, or angry, or bored, or confused, or ... I also tend to protect the privacy of our family -- more so than I do my own. I'll expose myself without too much fuss, but I'm far more cautious and careful about hanging the other folks that live around here out for everybody to peer at. Then, too, there are the days when, try as I might, I just cannot make sense of whatever there is -- and so I just let things sit, or I make starts at writing that then languish in the draft mode until they just die of old age and neglect. However the words appear here, I am determined that they will be as truthful as I can make them be... I'd rather not write anything at all than fill up the screen with fluff and fiction.

I think though, that all those words give people the impression that they "know" me; that knowing the things that can be garnered from reading here, they can make a fair assessment about the person I am. I think people assume that I am tougher and braver than I really am sometimes. I think people read all that "masochistic" stuff, and somehow just figure that I must be a real "stoic" when it comes to the emotional side of things. It feels to me that people assume that the sexual/erotic BDSM practice that forms the core of my relationship translates into a kind of brashness and nonchalance about the places where that takes me.

I can understand how those kinds of impressions form. People who read this blog know more about me than the people I work with; more about me than my neighbors; more about me than any of my siblings...

I get very few overtly "negative" comments, and there is seldom anything that openly attacks me or us. Most of our readership is unbelievably kind, supportive, and "faithful." So, when the assumptions that get made about how I "must" be show up, it is almost always subtle. It is the presumption that the fact that I am a "masochist" means that my heart is not tender. It is the presumption that my status as "slave" means that I do not have feelings or fears or struggles.

I think it is hard to reconcile the contradictions -- the clear-eyed, determined, deliberate, sure, and intentional choices and decisions that brought me into this life and this place seem to belie the softness, the fearfulness, the tenderness that are also realities. The openess of this day in and day out chronicle of my path and our lives gives strangers entree, and makes them feel as if they know me. It just must be that I am prone to "look tougher" here sometimes than I really am

swan