Some people think the kink scene is evil. Some people think it’s sacred. I think it’s both.

The first time I found kink, I felt more and more like the world’s only freak.

I was sick.
Just sick.
It was lonely. It was confusing.

The problem was BDSM felt like home. I knew I’d changed, but I thought that was a bad thing. It had to be.

I spent a month hunting the internet trying to figure out what kind of sickness I had, and that’s when I found Fetlife.

Within months, I noticed for the first time that I no longer felt ashamed and alone. It had snuck up on me so slowly that I'd barely noticed it. Fetlife became the place that taught me not to be ashamed—a place that took away my loneliness. A place that normalised me. A place for escaping judgement.

My first D/s relationship was like years of therapy. This is what love does: it enriches the soil. As with most subs, though, the next one flayed my spirit alive. Coercion, I could tolerate. Broken limits, I could tolerate. Having my trust violated by a complete absence of empathy ruined me for years.

I try my best to arrive in my relationships with my big girl panties on, my socks pulled all the way up, and my hems neatly sewn. Okay, so maybe not that thing about the hems. Or the socks, but definitely that first thing. I’m a grown up, and I prefer not to get involved in a serious dynamic with tangled insides and tears. Had I said “yes” to the first D-type who propositioned me, I’d have left that relationship in tatters, so I stayed single until I had healed. When the connection is over, the collar severed, how do you return to independence?

If kink hadn’t mattered as much as it did, I might have written BDSM off like so many other subs do. It did matter, though. It was threaded through my very psyche like so much yarn. The kink scene will take from you, but it will always, always give, so the next time I played, it was with a D-type who had unquestionable ethics. He coached me back into the scene one tiny slice of patience at a time. I’m still in awe of his generosity.

Dickens wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times […] it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light.” That’s it. That’s us. The kink scene holds so many horrors, and so much light. We are everything all at once.

My next D/s relationship was the best of times, the season of light. He was broken. I was scarred, but we loved one another, and we gave as much as we could. The grief is gone, but his stamp on me remains.

Some people think the kink scene is evil. Some people think it’s sacred. I think it’s both. There are no guarantees. Sometimes, you find beauty, and sometimes blood. We are sick. We are healthy. We are everything in-between. Sometimes you just have to learn how to find the best of times and how to avoid the worst. D/s is made up of rough edges. It’s the steaming hot core of human nature, but there’s never a bad place for love.