A Reluctant Mourning

Saying Goodbye (For Now) To Myself as an Insatiable Bottom

I’ve always been drawn to “top energy” in a palpable way.

We can blame it on being a Capricorn but all my life, I’ve always had an innate sense of who was running the show, and they were who I wanted to know. 

Strength (in all its forms), confident-competence, capable looking hands… any permutation of an “I got this” vibe melts me straight to my knees.

I did my best to vet, proceed with caution, learn from things when they didn’t go the way I wanted them to— but I am also a wanton strumpet so mostly, the hunger gets fed when it rears its head.

This particular hunger— frequently written off as “bottom frenzy”— a sort of insatiable chasing of whatever dragon bottoming manifests, and it’s often associated with folks new to SM. In my experience though, that particular hunger didn’t fade with experience.

It’s always ready to overtake my cautious nature and shout out “GIMME MORE!”

But today, we mourn the loss of that frenzied, ravenous, bottom. 

I am in no way saying I don’t still hunger in this particular way. 

Quite the opposite, I am famished. Starved and salivating, yearning for an unattainable satiation. 

I want to feel the vibrations of rope being pulled tight against itself as they reverberate through my body.

I want that moment during the buckling of restraints where they are pulled just this side of too tight as the hardware is fastened and then settles into the perfect fit once I’m strapped in.

I want that bubbly evaporating feeling in my brain that happens as I greedily absorb slaps, stings, thuds, and thwacks.

I want to know that sensation like the finding of a gear in a stick shift when cruising/being cruised and we find ourselves on the same page, seeking the same flavor of deviance. The nod, the wink, the shy growing smile as I realize our puzzle pieces of desire fit together just right. 

The hunger is alive and well, I’m just not sure that I can pursue it with the same abandon that I used to. 

I am not the same person I was the last time I surrendered myself to someone’s sadism.

The specific knowledge that the person you are trusting to hurt you can also *hurt* you really puts a different lens on things.

Obviously I have been hurt before in many and varied ways. I’m a human after all and to trust, to be vulnerable, to say yes in any way is to open ourselves up to hurt. This time is nothing different.

I’m also not so lacking in perspective to believe that one instance of “things not working out” is going to change the trajectory of my life forever, or that I’ll never experience desire in the same way— it’s just that’s the phase of “I had a gnarly d/s breakup” that I’m in right now.

In the meantime, I’m scratching the itch from the other side. For a long time, I was solidly bottom/sub identified. I could and did top when I needed/wanted to, but I always knew that top persona wasn’t actually me but rather just drag that I was pretty good at getting into.

Lately though, what was once drag has become a solid piece of my identity and it never ceases to amaze me how differently the two sides of the same coin (sado/masochism) hit in my body.

Topping is incredible— it transports me to a different state of mind where I feel I could do literally anything. The power is absolutely intoxicating.

But that switch where I become a bottomless pit of just wanting more, more MORE doesn’t get flipped like it does when I bottom. The need to keep a hand on the wheel, the fact that I’m steering the ship prevents the total surrender that bottoming provides. And I love that feeling. 

So even as I learn to live in these newer pieces of myself and have a lot of fun with them, I know I’m not done being a bottom. 

I look forward to the day when I’m feeling resilient enough, when I feel trusting enough, or just when someone’s particular brand of personal dominance ignites the hunger so strongly that I have to say yes. 

So maybe mourning is the wrong term. Like all of us who have had to put pieces of ourselves away on the shelf while the world around us takes a new shape, my frenzied bottom is very likely just on a sabbatical, waiting for her next opportunity. 

Waiting for someone’s quiet confidence, waiting for strong forearms, waiting for the knowing smile from a top who knows what I need and knows that they’ve got it.

I hope they come along soon, I’m hungry.

-d