I'm Okay, You're Okay
Added 2023-12-08 05:54:17 +0000 UTCI rarely trust my perceptions of people. My instincts with assholes have usually been en pointe, so if I’d spent my life trusting myself, my history would be steeped in rainbows and Chanel Number 5 instead of blood and broken glass.
I’m relatively well informed. I can spot predators from 50 paces, and yet I walk headlong into pain and trauma all the time. The same thought has gone through my head time and time again: “I knew they were destructive when I first set eyes on them.”
I tend to think I’m the only person who has this much distrust in myself but, by my own perceptions </irony> most of you are a lot like me.
Give me a second to take a detour...
... When you’re pitching a feature for a magazine, you look for what are known as ‘pain points’ in the most popular articles in that publication—the problems their features solve and the emotions they appeal to. That’s how you figure out what their readership is like...
If I do that exercise on Fetlife, I find that most popular posts offer one thing: acceptance. Their pain point is insecurity. It’s odd that we, in all our rebellious glory, would be so hung up on finding people to tell us we’re okay. Aren’t kinksters supposed to be so well-acquainted with our uniqueness that we don’t care what anyone else thinks? Apparently not.
Self-acceptance keeps subs safe. If we felt secure enough to use safe words without hesitation and choose the precise dynamics we wanted, we’d experience far less harm. If we were more comfortable in our own skins, we’d be far more likely to use safe calls and reference checks instead of letting guilt and embarrassment rule the day.
I’m not Wonder Woman. I’m Average Woman, but if I’m not Versace-perfect I come down on myself pretty hard. As much as my ego wants you to like the shiny, sparkly parts of who I am, my soul needs friends who love the whole of me instead.
And you know what? They do. They always love me through the hard stuff. That’s how I’m learning that the real me is worth loving, and that’s a beautiful thing.
