Seven Days of Kink, Part 1: Origin Story

Welcome to the Seven Days of Kink series here on Ready for Polyamory. As you'll have noticed if you've been around here a while, my identity as a kinkster and member of my local community is important to me and started pretty concurrently to my polyamorous journey beginning; and I teach a lot of kink classes as well as polyam ones -- so I decided to draw back the curtain on this corner of life for a few days. I'm posting seven days of journaling prompts on my Instagram if you want to join me in thinking about these topics, and sharing my responses to the prompts on the blog.

Today for Day 1, the question is "What's your origin story?" How did you come to kink? What are your inspirations and where did this story start for you?

Like many people, I explored the things I liked and wanted in books and stories - and power exchange is everywhere in fiction. My fantasy life was largely composed of power exchange, alternating praise and degradation, and a mild sense of danger - before I had any actual experience to base my likes and dislikes on, or any experience with the practicality of kink & fetish scenes. I was 14 when the film Secretary came out and I definitely watched it a bunch and had a sense no one got exactly that but that one might want that.

It was much more of a shock than it should have been when I met kinky people in real life and figured out some of this didn't just have to be a function of fiction and my imagination. I was a "jump in with both feet" sort of person, in some ways to my detriment - but I learned a LOT about what I like and don't like very rapidly (some of which I'm re-evaluating now, 15+ years later, because people change over time) and found a comfortable identity as a submissive and bottom. Learning things like what kind of impact I like, that the feeling of wax gives me the ick, that praise and degradation alternating work EXACTLY as well on me as I thought they would, but that the kind of each matter a lot, and discovering entire worlds of activity I hadn't considered (as well as the skills to negotiate about them) were pretty much exactly the kink baby steps you might imagine. I took them as inelegantly and giraffe-like as you might assume from my general high level of enthusiasm and low level of regard for social norms.

When I first found kink I did exactly as much socializing as it took to make headway in the local scene and kept a fair amount of distance from it when not taking classes or going to events - it was intimidating that so many of these people were older than me, it felt like they all knew exactly what they wanted and what they were doing, and I felt way over my head and out of my element. I know the advice the me of today would give me then, but I want to acknowledge that discomfort and uncertainty.

-----

Join me for Negotiation for Edgeplay (Bottoming 201!) for Wicked Grounds on September 19 at 6pm Pacific (9 Eastern), tickets here, or for Boundary Enforcement and Expression on September 24.

Kink welcome but not required, I'm running a relationship retreat for dyads and triads from November 10-12. Learn more here.