The Masochistic Princess and the Pea

As a masochist, I’m a long ways off from the Princess and the Pea. My skin needs a lot more than a teeny vegetable to make an impact. I’m a horrible marker. If you thrash me with a knobkerrie all weekend, I’ll wake up on Monday morning looking as though I was bitten by an ant.

A lazy ant.

On a Sunday.

After it already put all its energy into its morning gym routine.

I always used to wake up the day after a play date thrilled at the bruises I might see in the mirror.

Usually my mirror would just point at me, laugh, and tell me to try harder next time.

I suffer from a condition I call masochist’s pride. Junkie pride says, “The harder your drugs, the cooler you are.” Masochist’s pride says, “The more pain you can tolerate, the more value you have.” I really do try. I swear it, but I’ve only been thrashed hard enough to get impressive marks once in my entire life. That’s when I learned that tears really can spring into your eyes long before you have the time to cry.

The next day, I looked in the mirror and saw black. Now, this was the sort of thing you could post on Fetlife, but I never did. I never checked my marks in the mirror again, either. I realised that the extremes I was willing to go to for kink were far milder than the extremes I was willing to go to for the marks, so I swore never to play for bruises again.

The top in question never hit me that hard again, either. The bruises terrified him. He felt guilty for weeks, and after that, he decided he might have liked pain, but not that much pain. I think he lost a little trust in me that night because my limits were a little stretchier than he would have liked.

Fetlife has a noxious subculture that exists by the injuries in our albums. How many of us have tucked away our safe words unused just so we could post the images later? I’m guessing quite a few of us, and that focus isn’t bringing much wholesomeness to our kink lives. It pushes us beyond our own limits and tempts us to ignore our body’s (crucial) signals–the very ones that keep us in one piece.

I’ve moved my masochist’s pride into the back of the closet with the cobwebs and insects. Somewhere in there is a gym-going ant who likes biting people on Sundays. I’ve moved that little dude to the front because unimpressive marks are just fine by me. Thanks, li’l guy.