My Response to swan's Love Letter

I too love you and always will. My continual refrain to you "Mine Always and All Ways," has meant to me that we are one unendingly, just as I am with Teresa, and that the three of us are bonded throughout all time. I more than believe this. I know it as a fact, as firmly as I know gravity bonds my feet to the earth or that (unfortunately) each night is followed by yet another day for me to realize the reality that I am no longer a man.

I love your mind...your intellect, your spirituality, your courage in living each day as you do and in having me and us. I love your voice, and how you weave a spell of love, safety, encouragement, discipline, faith, values, information, and science into tremendous growth for your students. I wonder at how common it is for your students to demonstrate that you are, for them, one of those special teachers who remake their lives, and who they will always remember, and feel grateful, to have had in their life. I am so proud of your career as an educator. I love how you have made my advocacy yours (when advocacy I still had). I love the way you see the world. I love SM with you. I love sex with you. I love your cooking. I love your undying dedication to me and staying with me, serving me, protecting me, advocating with me, sleeping next to me, in a chair if that is all that is available to you, while I am hospitalized. I love your political beliefs and passion which is so congruent with my own. I love your writing. I love, I love, I love, I love, I love you.

It is great to remember the history we have had. I could not agree more that we share star-crossed paths. I do believe absolutely that you, t and I were destined to be who we are together. I too cannot imagine life without either of you.

My issue is I cannot imagine continuing to live. This morning I awakened to the 37th consecutive day living as I do not choose to, as I never have chosen to live, traumatized by memories of being subjected to treatment that would not be allowed for a dog in a pound, the gravest public humiliation and degradation, and knowing fully well that that will likely be only a small and brief taste of what lies ahead for me.

I am, as I sit here, continuing to wear an electronic monitoring device on my ankle which has me continually monitored so that were I to drink I could be immediately incarcerated. That monitor has so aggravated my diabetic neuropathy that my right foot has gone numb. They moved it a week ago then to my left ankle. Now my left foot is numb too. It is likely that in something like the U. S. version of sharia law I will be required to have both my feet amputated if I have to continue wearing this thing, for allegations of domestic violence and inducing panic my attorney tells me are without legal merit. Being tethered via electronics to the state so that they may come and imprison you for doing nothing is not a life I intend to live. I am told by my probation officer that his probation office's statistics indicate that, on average, anyone who has a TAD (i. e., the electronic monitoring device on my ankle) placed on him from their office, has it on for two and a half years at the discretion of the court. Of course, that is an average. Some wear them for shorter times and others for five years or even more.

You write how you loved my strength, courage, tenacity, optimism, ability
to see solutions to problems others did not, my willingness to take on any issue, etc. Yes, that was like who I used to be although you have certainly, in your love and devotion to me, enhanced my attributes in your mind, and I love you for doing that.

That man died October 28, in the Wal Mart parking lot, and naked and freezing in solitary confinement November 1, and standing freezing and shivering in court dressed just beyond naked, hogtied in wrist and ankle shackles, November 1 and again November 4. He died yesterday as I waited to go back to court at noon today, fully expecting I might be put back in jail, or at least be mandated to continue to be monitored, and forced into unwanted treatment, that I will have to pretend to value to not be reincarcerated, only to get a call at the end of the afternoon telling me that now they will not hear my case again until December 30. I died again when I woke up this morning to visions of all of this replaying again in my head and facing yet another day I'd much prefer not to suffer through. I have no feelings but pain and despair.

Our great love was predicated on our D/s. It was based on the belief that you were acquiescent to my vision, my will, my desire, my pleasure, etc. It was what you expressed desperate need for as you came to me. You specifically wanted that with me. It was the deepest honor you paid to me that anyone could pay another. It began to end this past year as increasingly you insisted that your need for me to stop drinking took precedence over my wishes and happiness. In that I was having (then unexplainable) increasing problems with alcohol related extreme intoxication, black outs, etc. (we had not yet put together the effects of the changes to my body's reactions to alcohol due to my gastric bypass surgery)and out of concern for you and t, I began working collaboratively to change my drinking....even abstaining entirely and working through research and planning to change my behavior to try to maintain my drinking at a very limited level. I even went so far as to switch with you disciplinarily (a huge trauma for us both) to try to achieve that accommodation of your needs superimposed on mine ( a very odd emanation of a M/s relationship.....but none the less ours.)

We were progressing on then with my successfully drinking within moderate limits until we reached October 28. That was the day my life stopped and shattered, and has never returned to being worth living since. You called 9-1-1 that day and reported me for an off-handed comment I made. It resulted in a massively disproportionate police response which was harassing, dangerous, hurtful and only barely missed my being jailed and our car confiscated.......FOR NOTHING! You repeatedly tell me that you had no idea that when you call 9-1-1 you get a police response. You continuously ask me to forgive you. You have been forgiven time and time again. Forgiving you does not end the wound I have. I am not well. I am broken. This was the genesis of this hurt. It had nothing to do with drinking.

You knew fully well that I have a life-long fear of and hate for the police, You knew that I have a great phobia of being taken away by the police. You know that I am continuously armed fearing that I might need to defend myself from the government's paid thugs (which is what police are) from taking me away unjustly. Knowing that, you initiated that occurring to me.

You were amazed and horrified that that experience, I have phobically feared throughout my life having occurred, I became devastated, felt betrayed, enraged, acted out violently against you, and self-injuriously, imagining all sorts of terrible things that might then further be done to me, and yes I drank. I violated my own plan to drink moderately. I was terribly out of control. I was violent. I was abusive particularly to you. You were terrorized. You were horrified. You grabbed t who was away for the weekend with her Mom before she returned and took refuge in a motel, and eventually after outrageously crazy phone calls from me in a drunken psychotic state claiming I had horribly intentionally hurt myself, called 9-1-1 again resulting in my eventual incarceration in inhumane conditions ( a unique approach to responding to someone in a suicidal psychiatric emergency.........it doesn't enhance one's desire to live).

You have then responded that your responsibility is that, I have been terribly ill for years and you should have "forced" me to get help. This is another interesting juxtaposition of a M/s relationship. You believe that the problem in this scenario is mostly my alcohol consumption, and my inability to grasp this is some sort of alcoholism disease model denial, reaction formation, and/or some additional defense mechanisms clouding my reasoning.

There is an analogy about a man who encounters a man crawling about all fours in the grass under a street light. He approaches the man and asks him why he is doing this, concerned he might be ill or need help. He tells him he is looking for his lost wedding ring. So he offers to help him find it and asks him where he was when he dropped the ring and when he lost it? The man who was searching responds, that he lost it ten years ago a mile up the road, but he is looking here, now because the light is better.

The reasoning that man used to decide on his search location is like the logic that the primary problem in our situation October 28 through November 1 was my drinking.

I am not drinking now nor have I for 37 days. I cannot honestly say I have quit drinking in that were I to drink, I would be immediately jailed. For me to say I have quit drinking at this point would be like a person who has always ridden a bicycle with training wheels saying he has learned to balance and ride a bicycle. Until the training wheels are removed he really has no idea. In that I am not free to drink, while I can say I am not drinking, I cannot honestly claim to have quit.

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We have many conflicts that evolved between you and I in this process. One of the greatest is that you and I both insist that we want our relationship to be an
on-going D/s relationship, presumably a restoration of the M/s we have aspired to for the past eight and a half years. Yet, you have come to define M/s as your determining major aspects of how I live my life, and how we live our lives, and I believe that M/s, even D/s, requires me being in the leadership role...a despotic role....in my case, I hope, a benevolently despotic role, but despotic none the less.

You have (and it being you I am not in the slightest bit surprised:) done some tremendous thinking and writing about our current status as a family, and what it is we need to accomplish to move forward.......to survive.

You talk about our claiming our responsibility. I claim my out of control drinking. I accept that my drinking is unsafe. I am of course not drinking now in that the consequences related to it are, of course, unacceptable. Anyone would have to be truly insane to drink under these circumstances. I agree to not drink for a year from November 1, should I get out from under the court's preventing me from drinking. I do not pledge to live through that period. I am not at all sure that I think that life on those terms is worth living. I think continuously of ending this nonsense. At this point my cowardice in the face of death is keeping me facing the horror that is my realization of my life at the beginning of each new day.

I am not drinking now. I didn't drink for 9 months surrounding t's and my gastric bypass surgeries. I didn't drink for over a month the end of August and all of September. That accounts for over 11 of the last 19 months. Yet all of these issues have burgeoned during this period of time. So is the evil of alcohol so pervasive that it is effecting us even when it is not present? If so, I might as well drink should I ever have freedom to again. It appears that simply because it exists in the world, it will make our lives impossible anyway.

Yes, I love you so passionately that I will not live my life without you. Too, I loved my life before. I have no desire to live my life as it is. It is most likely that I will have further restrictions imposed on me by the courts. I cannot imagine myself accepting life on the terms of lenghty probation and/or electronic monitoring. I will not accept further imprisonment. I don't want to continue to live as I am, simply out of fear of dying and inability to overcome a well developed survival instinct. This may be survival, but it is not life....

Tom