“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”
There are days I wish I wasn’t a masochist. Sure, sometimes He hits so hard it gets around those wires crossed in my brain which can make it feel like pleasure, and sure, I know how to process pain. But the secret is that many days, I use that knowledge to actively choose not to. I choose to suffer instead.
I want to. I want it so often. Want to be made to scream things that go against my worldviews until I’m not sure what I believe, want to sob thinking of what former selves would say about me now, want to fear coming around the corner, want to sit alone crying without aftercare, want to have nightmares, want to yell out my terror that my bones will break. I crave it. It gives me clarity. I don’t know how to live without it.
I don’t pretend it’s normal. Those wires are crossed for me just as the others are.
On Friday, Owner and I are going to play at a costume party as Tyler Durden and Marla Singer. I’m looking forward to it more than I do many scenes, because I know whips, and I know methodical impact, but to be kicked, punched… sure, I have been, but not continually. Not without anything in between. Not until breaking. I’ve never been beaten up. I don’t want to not have that experience anymore.
How could I want something like that? Why suffer? Why actually hurt? Actually feel sorrow? Actually feel pain?
It’s service, for some. Knowing what their partner wants and subjecting themselves to it is a sign of their desire and willingness to give. It’s also power exchange. That’s where I’m at, at least in part. Anyone can hurt me in a way that makes me feel good; that’s natural for me. To bring me to suffering you must be a force which can truly control me.
But that’s not it. That’s not what I mean when I say clarity, a word which has recently become part of my ever-growing vahavta-specific vocabulary.
Why suffer? How could I want this?
To suffer is to know existence, to see what I call God. It is self-actualization. It is a spiritual experience. Suffering is recognizing that I am human, that there is a full range of human experience out there to feel. These emotions which control me so intensely on a daily basis — they aren’t the peak of it. There is always deeper. Darker. There are places I haven’t gone yet in this world. If the suffering can bring me lower than my own depression, if it outweighs what my own mind can do, there is something more powerful. *He* is more powerful. My demons go quiet.
To suffer is to be brought low. Suffering shows me the violence internal to the mundane of this life. It lets me master it. Survive. I cannot feel anything about surviving something I just enjoy. I cannot grow stronger from it — but when I am brought back up from destruction, I know more about myself than I did before. The boundaries of sensation and sentiment expand, and like a gas, my spirit grows to fill them. In the after, there is no limit to my limits.
But in those most poignant moments—those right between collapsing in gratitude that it is all over and coming back to myself—there is nothing in my mind. There is nothing I need. It is quiet, impossibly calm waters, seamless with my breath the way the sky and ocean were one night when I stepped outside on the pier and everything was black, black, suspended in that second. It is clear, this mind, this heart, this thing that I am, absent of the befores-and-afters, the analogies and constant associations. It is lower, it is higher, it is suffering, it is coming back anew.
“May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.”
This stems from an ongoing discussion I’m in with people who have stated they don’t understand and have absolutely no desire to watch scenes that involve people subjecting themselves to real pain. I mean absolutely no disrespect to the people sharing their views in that discussion and am appreciative of your giving me a reason to think about a thing that has seemed obvious to me. I also do not intend in any way, shape, or form to imply that enjoying or not enjoying suffering is the better or stronger or more enlightened way to do things — this is simply how I experience it.