The opposite of being broken

The discussions about being broken on the blogs that I read made me think about my relationship with Mistress, and the one I was in before. Because I can relate to the posts that's about wanting to be broken, but also to the more somber ones. In a way, I'd like to say that I've tried both.

In the first relationship (it wasn't really my first per se, but my first power exchange dynamic, and I was young, only 22) I did feel this urge, this need, to be broken, to be stripped bare and have all my defenses violently stripped away. We played hard, much harder than I'm really comfortable thinking about when I think back at it. I thought that if he hurt me bad enough, we would find something, there at the bottom, as if there was some sort of treasure or secret buried inside me, that would be driven into the open with enough pain, enough humiliation, enough tears.

There wasn't, of course. There was transcendence, though, a feeling of losing myself, of being one with him, and with everything. A feeling of everything being perfect and just right. And it's really cool when that happens, and it is worth striving for. To a point.

But I can get that feeling in other ways, in for me better ways. For one, I get it sometimes in the most mundane situationes. When rocking my baby to sleep. When resting at Mistress' arm. A feeling of piece and contentment and wholeness that is not exactly the same, but has the same quality, has the same feeling of perfectness and being out of myself. So that's one thing.

I also get it sometimes while participating in a LARP, when the experience of being another, of acting out another persons feelings and thoughts and actions, and being creative and suddenly having everything click into place in perfect harmony, gives that same feeling of transcending. Again, not exactly the same, but the same sort of expericence.

And I get it when Mistress plays with me, most usually when she beats me and I float away in bliss. I lose myself, I can't talk or move, nor do I want to, and I feel... away. In a good way.

And the downside of the things me and the ex did was that it hurt. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that it harmed. I mean, he beat me. And in the end it turned out that it didn't matter that I was turned on by that, that I had signed up for it, that I in many cases initatied it or begged for it. Or rather, of course it mattered, it would have been a ton worse if it hadn't been consensual, of course. But even so, it still impacted me.

Physically, for one thing, which actually is a problem because I lost some of my sensation in my ass, and that bugs me, and I got a latex allergy... That's mostly to laugh at, but it contributed to me having an allergy attack to walnuts last summer, which scared the hell out of me, made me spend the night at the ER, and makes me never allowed to eat walnuts again. The thing is, it's not that big things but they're there. They happened. What he and I did during a couple of years for kicks have given me lifelong consequenses I have to deal with, which makes me wish we would have slowed down a bit and taken it a little more easy. 

But most profoundly it impacted my mind. At the end the consensual part of the deal was no longer there either. There was no part of me left that could say no to him, until I was ready to leave him. But there was many many months before that, and especially at the end, were what he did was not in any way good for me.

I realise I'm being vague. I think I want to be vague. It was a painful time, I'm ashamed of many things, and I still feel loathe to say anything that will make him out in a bad light. I think that everytime I think of that time, I get back in that mindset of constant bad conscience and feelings of inadequacy.

What I do know is that when we broke up and I moved in with Mistress, I knew I didn't want to be hurt like that again. My inner painslut had gone into hiding, or maybe packed up and left.

We do S/M-play too, and I have no idea were we rank on any kind of severity scale. But I do know that I'm never broken. I always feel more alive, more energized, more like me, afterwards than I did before. With him, I was broken. I needed time to recover afterwards, because he put me in a state were I couldn't function. Mistress doesn't, and for me, I think that is much, much healthier.

Of course, I like me a good cuddle afterwards and I might not be at the peak of academic performance the second she pulls her cock out of me and allows me to get out of bed. But I'm still me and what she does, everything she does, makes me better and stronger and healthier and more of me, and that, I think, is the opposite of breaking. For us, that's the right path.

(Would I go down another path with her if she wanted to? Would I let her beat me and use me and break me like he did, if she wanted to? Yes. I would. Because I'm wired like that. I don't have those kind of shields up, for good and for bad. But since she doesn't do that, for the time being, I don't have to worry about that right now.)