I spent a summer in an other-this-worldly valley, a place full of pepper trees and stucco walls where everyone only looked forward. Even now, the gorgeous glory of it defies my imagination: how did we create this place where we prayed and studied and danced and chanted and painted and wrote and fucked and drank such beautiful things? How did we do so much growing together and leave it all behind?
It was 2014, and my Owner and I were not together at the time. I had broken up with Him in late April that first year because I needed us both to be more honest people, and though we kept in periodic touch during the next few months—I can remember hiding in the shade, the smell of pomegranates, frenetic music in the background, His face flickering on my computer screen—I was very much immersed in where I was. I needed to be. I was doing healing from the kind of brokenness that can be healed from, and it worked. I came back different; our relationship came together different. We were discussing collaring by October. I felt spiritually healed. Spiritually whole.
I am—or was?—so drawn to spaces like this. Built community, authenticity, healing. That’s what I thought it was. A healing-and-growing space. I wonder now what I would have experienced there two summers later, when I was realizing that something in my body was wrong and was not going away.
Since becoming ill and later on accepting my disability, I’ve grown tired—like many others who are ill or disabled in physical or mental ways—of fixes being pushed on me.
“Go outside, get some sun and some exercise—that’s all you need for depression.”
“You should try yoga. It totally cured my low back pain.”
“CBD is a miracle drug and eliminated all my aunt’s inflammation.”
“Cut out gluten; your fatigue will disappear entirely.”
These are harmful statements, though most of us do recognize they’re well-meant. They’re harmful for the same reason that I no longer feel home in these alternative spaces that claim to be about healing. It’s because the mission is never, “Yoga asana could be helpful to your mobility if you’re up to it, and meditation works for some people as a pain relief technique.” It’s never, “Do you want to hear about how diet changes helped the way I experienced that symptom?” It’s never just an “if” or “could be,” and it’s always an “entire cure,” an “all you need.”
And that’s the harm. Sick/healthy. Broken/fixed. Even in our metaphors, our language: we discuss organizations losing donors as being crippled, or good investment accounts as being healthy. Bad actors in a group are cancerous. Crime infects a city. Sick is bad, healthy is good, and if you only ate right… prayed more… didn’t get a vaccine… you could be good too. I’d argue that even the anti-Pharma movement (while totally legitimate in many ways) often revolves around people wanting to get *off* of drugs that are making them feel better because they want their bodies/minds to be able to do something on their own. The implication is that the goal isn’t feeling better, really—it’s not being sick at all.
Now that I feel I truly need it, I’ve frequently sought for anywhere and anything that could mimic what I felt that summer. I search for people with the right energy who want to connect and express themselves authentically through whatever means feel right at the time. I have entered and left spaces of ecstatic dance, Reiki, narrative medicine, prayer. And when I go, I always end feeling abandoned and empty, and healthy people pat themselves on the back. When I look back now on my pepper trees, sometimes that is what I feel, too. Because these magical created spaces are often time/space/people-dependent, and when they’re over, there’s no framework for those who didn’t heal. Who won’t heal. Who need something else.
I’ve been thinking about what I want from my body lately. Do I want my disabling pain to go away? Do I want my joints and tissues to work as they should? Do I want my mind to regulate my emotions as it is meant to? Yes, of course. Maybe. I’m not sure. It isn’t the first thing I think of. It took me a long time to get there, but that’s the truth: this isn’t getting better, so it doesn’t occur to me to want that. “Healing” isn’t an option. But maybe feeling better sometimes is.
The reason that many of our alt “healing” practices only appeal to healthy people is because of the sick/healthy dichotomy. These practices, popularized here in shopping centers and pay-your-way courses, weren’t built in that Western ideal. Most come out of Indigenous, Eastern and Middle Eastern, and non-Abrahamic religious groups, and they are from minds that thought differently. These practices weren’t meant to achieve a goal and stop. They weren’t meant to fix. They were meant to lift part of the burden. To give it to the community to share. To help where we could help and give back where we would give back. To care for people, as people, where they’re at.
Which brings me to what I find so caring about degradation. To why I feel better after He tells me that nobody could ever want me, how romantic I find his knife held almost at my eye as He fucks me, how good it is when I say “no” and He mocks me and laughs. To what some find to be toxic, non-understandable, kink-norm-bannable parts of our relationship. To what I don’t think I’d be getting by without.
I’m not getting better. Not with the information we (on the personal and collective level) have right now. So my world has moved to how to feel slightly better as often as possible. Oftentimes, that means figuring out how to mitigate the things that hurt that can be changed. I want to be clear: I don’t advocate BDSM-as-therapy. But I do believe in BDSM as care. And that’s what He does when He takes over. He cares for me by lifting those burdens.
I look in the mirror, and I see a body that looks “normal” and that doesn’t reflect the way it moves through the world every day. I see a body that feels ways I don’t consent to, that beats me down and keeps it all invisible to the outside world. “Disgusting thing,” He says, pulling my eyelid up so I am forced to stare at my face distorting in reaction to what He does to me. He makes me feel seen as I am. He shows me that my body can lose, too.
I feel hopeless and alone after days of bad pain and so many hours in bed. I feel disconnected, and down on myself, and like He deserves someone who actually acts like a 20-something and who wants to fuck four times a day. He puts one knee on either side of my face, braces Himself on the wall, and fucks my entire throat until I’m gagging. I choke, I feel bile come up, I am forced to swallow it back, I meter my air, I cry. I stay put until He’s satisfied. “My hole,” He says, and His totally selfish objectification shows me that if He wants to make use of me, He can and will.
I am desperately angry at my fogged-up head and my aching everything, the way things have gone for me and all the opportunities I don’t even know I no longer have. I am sad, crying, again, again. He looks me in the eyes and slaps me. I focus so as to not flinch. He slaps harder. And the other side. Again. Again. Again. There’s no thought. There’s no space for it. There’s no room for feeling anything else. There’s red skin, and heat, and my eyes–unable to do anything but lock back onto His.
I like to believe the people in the valley that summer would have cared for me and lifted me with them had I gone as I am now, but I don’t know for sure. But even if they had—it would have ended. We all went home. We didn’t stay in touch, most of us. We spread back out across the earth. And the meditation retreats end. And the yoga teachers leave for better pay. And the prayer leaders impose their own morals. And the people who wanted to show you they hold healing energy in their palms grow frustrated, or move on to where they can feel successful.
But caring for people—doing what we can to alleviate as much as we can, which is sometimes distraction and sometimes commiseration and sometimes holding space for or even causing authenticity and catharsis—is not a class or a fix or a space. It’s a relationship, or a network of relationships. And sometimes it looks like what we can’t understand.
You see relationships of high-risk physical or emotional play and maybe that looks like breaking someone to you. But when you think outside of what is broken/fixed and sick/well, you start to see what is being taken away. What is being given instead. What care must be happening.
And it may not be healing. But it’s where my “feeling better” lies.