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thinking."

* * *

I've been practicing BDSM for a while, now, and it has been amazing. I've had a lot of
very intense sexual experiences and I feel incredibly confident about my sexuality. I feel
very far away from my younger self, who realized that she was into BDSM and
completely freaked out. However, I used to keep a very detailed (albeit sporadic)
personal journal, and this allows me to look into the head of 20-year-old Clarisse. Here's
something I wrote only a couple of weeks after I met Richard, my first serious BDSM
partner:

On the surface I have a hard time understanding why this has shocked me so much -- the
fact that I wanted him to hurt me, the fact that even as I was facing down my demons and
crying and incoherent I wanted him to keep biting me, scratching me, bruising me, and
God, it was bad, but even now I wish it had been far worse... on some level I want to
have been physically scarred. He stopped finally because I started saying "no," and
couldn't formulate a coherent answer through my tears when he asked me if I was
serious. But, of course, although I was serious, I also didn't want him to stop. Of course.
Of course I wanted him to hear me saying no and keep going, to be protesting and
overridden. And the reason I couldn't formulate a coherent answer wasn't even that I
didn't know the answer was, "Yes, keep going." It was that I knew the answer was yes,
and when I faced it I started crying so hard I couldn't speak, and he... sensitively, I
guess... decided it was time to stop.

How cliche I am. (God, I'm sounding like some naive ingenue from a random de Sade
play or something, just discovering my sexuality or whatever.) How self-conscious. And
how humiliated and ashamed. Of all the things I think I expected from myself for this, if it
ever came true that this was what I wanted -- I never really actually expected to be
ashamed.

What I think is especially interesting about those paragraphs is that I felt a certain
recognition for my BDSM identity, I felt a certain inevitability about learning what I
needed. It made sense to me. "Of course," I wrote, over and over. And at the same time I
acknowledged that I had considered BDSM before -- but that I hadn't really known what
that meant, and I'd had no idea how I would feel if I found it. I knew what I was thinking,
I knew what I had been thinking, and yet at the same time I didn't know. I had no idea. I
was completely confused.

I'm not so confused anymore. These days.... There are a lot of things I don't know, but
there are an awful lot of things I do know, too. I have gotten pretty good at knowing what
I want, even when it's hard to figure it out. And I have a very good sense of my
boundaries.

But I also keep trying to figure out how to expand them. This isn't just true with BDSM.
Arguably, my urge to go to Africa and put myself through extreme culture shock was
similar to the urge I feel to expand my head with BDSM. Some of the things I want to do
with my life and my body and my self seem almost opaque; totally irrational; a little
scary -- even to me. I love experiencing and analyzing emotions; experiencing and

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