After much encouragement from those in the Leather lifestyle, I’ve started this site to share musings. Those who have entered the hectic richness available to us when we shed our colonization and embrace our true selves, I hope they find a bit of a home here.

Let’s start at the beginning. My parents…mother was a flower child of the sixties and seventies, the youngest of four siblings. She is cautious, almost to a fault, which seems to have manifested itself in my sixteen year old six-foot-tall son. I imagine her childhood as full of tall trees, laying in the grass to watch the clouds pass, watching her wilder siblings dabble in drugs and fast living. Dad is a dreamer, a forever Peter Pan, raised amongst airplanes and fast cars, loud engines, a taste for adventure. In raising my sister and I though they seemed to bring out the best of themselves. Except for one thing. We were shackled from birth with the restrictions of a very devout religion.

Before we came along my parents married at the ages of 18 (mom) and 21 (dad). They were well along in their Bible studies with Jehovah’s Witnesses, and embraced the teachings. Their parents weren’t Witnesses, which is striking as Mom and Dad had to push back (I’m sure) to enable their independence. Being a JW is so counter to the typical Christian religions that run rampant in the US. No holidays, no birthdays, no “careers”, certainly college is a NOPE. Anything that could distract or divert from the teachings was forbidden. Cutting off friends and family that didn’t embrace the “Truth”, as it was/is called, is essential. All your spare time, if you had any, was for preaching the “Good News” to “all the nations, and then the end would come”. “Meetings” on Tuesdays, Thursdays, “going out in service” on Saturdays knocking doors, another meeting on Sunday. In your free time from those priorities you were of course going to need to work and care for yourself and family by way of jobs that were just enough to keep them afloat until Armageddon. That’s all that mattered. Striving for more was a conceit, unnecessary to survival, and frowned upon.

I embraced what I was raised to do. Embraced the teachings, prayed to Jehovah, asked him to keep me humble and happy with the lot that was given to me.

But oh how I dreamed.

I blame Dead Poet’s Society, which was released when I was nine. It was rated R, which meant I couldn’t see it until it was on TV or VHS, so that my parents could fastforward and control my exposure. But OH how I longed to be Mr. Keating. To let my mind gallop and kick up its heels, oh how delicious it was, I grabbed hold of poetry and never let go. Finally my mind wasn’t bound down 24/7, I learned there were other glorious ways of thinking, expressing myself, that there was an entire world inside of us all, one that I tried very hard to keep content in its little box with no sunshine or fresh air.

Reading helped with this confinement. By the age of ten or so I’d devoured everything in the children’s section of the local library. I’d checked out everything I could from it, as well as from the library at school. There of course were titles I wasn’t allowed to read, but by the time I was thirteen I’d moved on from my dad’s sci-fi novels to the classics on the bookshelves at home. I’m not sure if anyone but me really read them, but thank goodness they were there. Of course my parents encouraged my reading (within the limits of the religion), they loved seeing me with my nose stuck in a book in the backyard. In the eighties and nineties my days were spent at school, prepping for “meetings” by studying the JW publications, going door-to-door, but oh in the free glimpses how I lost myself. My little sis and I weren’t allowed to sit about the house when we were out of school or found rare free time, we were herded outdoors to wander. And me, with always a stick or two and some books tucked into the waistband of my shorts.

When I was about ten I encountered the adult’s section of the library and devoured as many classics as I could get my hands on. Years before some well-meaning inhabitant of the small cow town donated their relative’s old books to the library, and here I found the Marquis de Sade. They were classics, they were “safe”, and I read them in hiding, because I knew for sure that my parents would not approve. I read them through again when I was done, for here were shockingly detailed acts of depravity my little boxed-up brain could have never conceived of, and I couldn’t get enough. The playfulness, the tease of the characters…the horrible cruelty that curled my toes…these were my little secrets that thrilled me to my core, and I’d spend my days reenacting them on my sister’s dolls. I’d string them up in trees and poke them with sticks, I’d build little pretend fires and just wish I could get away with lighting them. In one moment I was the dowager of a vast estate who did as she wished with her servants, and in the next I was a wild filly jumping over piles of bracken with a wild-haired woman on my back. She terrified me as she lashed me with her whips, and I served her even better for it.

I married at nineteen, proud that I’d waited longer than my mother had. Married a young man four months younger than I, who had infiltrated our JW congregation with the sole purpose of finding community and seducing me. He did nothing about the religion after we married, we didn’t go door-to-door together once. These things are unheard of in the JW community, for “faith without works is dead”. When I got the before-the-marriage talks from my parents and others in the congregation I remember being told that oral sex, should we decide to engage in it, was just between us and god. That we should never tell the elders in the congregation about it. Most certainly this set the tone for our sex. It was normal, boring, vanilla, yet playful. We each suppressed the kinks we could feel pushing under the surface of our skin. After four months he decided he didn’t like to touch me, hold my hand, hug, cuddle, talk deeply about any and everything. He had what he wanted, he had sex and a female body to do with as he pleased. And he wasn’t pleased with intimacy.

I cheated. And used the guilt of it to stay where I was in a marriage where I was undeniably neglected and unhappy. I stayed in the marriage, I stayed in the cult, I didn’t deserve anything more.

There is ever so much more to the eleven year story of our marriage, but I don’t like to overwhelm. Suffice to say, most of the years within that union under the umbrella of the cult I was suicidal. I self-harmed to get the endorphins of pain, to see my skin weep red, to watch it heal. I became an alcoholic to help me sleep and quiet my mind. I was an alcoholic for seventeen years but have been sober now for four-and-a-half going on forever. I wouldn’t change it.

I left the cult and the marriage at the same time when I was thirty-one. Cutting my safety lines of community, family, I had no career and way to support myself, I drifted trying to find my way.

Within a year or so of being alone I met a lovely older gentleman on OKStupid who talked me into dinner. He asked my shaking nervous mind why the hell I didn’t dip my toes into the BDSM lifestyle, as the little quizzes online certainly pointed in that direction. I told him “I can’t. I simply can’t. Because if I do, I know there will be no undoing it, no going back. And what if the perfect person for me doesn’t want anything to do with it? What if I meet them and we can’t make things work because I need this so completely?” He smirked at me, and asked, “What if you meet the perfect partner who needs the same?”

Soon after I found myself face down on his bed, as naked as I could tolerate with my still-fledgling kinky mind, being struck with a rubber dragon’s tail, and I disappeared. I faded into the red stripes, the licks so devastatingly essential to my guilty mind, hating when he ended it and wanting more. I fell in love with the marks and bruising that came after, with the decadent washing of endorphins and dopamine over my confused nervous system. I thrilled when he asked me to kneel before him, took my chin, angled my eyes to his, and called me a good girl.

I hadn’t been a good girl for over a decade. I was horrible and dirty and used without eye contact or touch. I was belittled and neglected, made to retreat into the box again and again, only feeling freedom when outdoors away from all other humans. I’d have to stuff myself away again to go to the cult meetings three days a week, to try to teach others about the patriarchal systems that kept me in line, to reject my needs over and over again because they didn’t match those of my community.

I’d wandered alone for an unbearable amount of time, as I was shaped to be codependent to a religion that cared nothing about me, and to the man who slept in the same bed.

But here I was a good girl. Here on my knees with my naked skin uncovered I was seen and loved and wanted. In every way I hadn’t been for over a decade.