The modern conservative panic is fueled by juvenile tantrums, of people clinging to hierarchies until their fingernails are bloody because they're too contemptuous towards undesirables and offal acquiring even a shred of humanity and dignity.

But it's inevitable, and the clock will not turn back.

Telling your girlfriend "hey IDK if a tree might have fallen on the roads, so I'm gonna bring a chainsaw in case I need to cut through" is a turn on it seems

Where I've landed is that the things we enjoy, the things that please us, get us off and make us happy, are always worth exploring and understanding, and that the ritual of doing so will show us the wounds we have left to heal.

Once we do so, the play we do get with others is much more fulfilling.

All these things require some courage and skill in self-analysis and self-soothing. Allowing myself to want things, allowing myself to desire things selfishly, allowing myself to see things like sensory deprivation and heavy bondage as autistic stims, letting go of shame. All of it was worth doing

Again, I realized that expecting my partners to meet these needs for me was going to get in the way of our goal of sustainable play. I so started letting myself just explore and do self-bondage and learn about my desire outside of pleasing others. This was good info for expressing my needs later.

In particular I had a lot of stress and anxiety around time management, being a hostess and being useful. Realizing how power exchange really soothed those things let me realize just how much I was hurting and struggling, and so I built more unstructured rest time into my life.

So I just looked at my play in a vacuum and recognized that play is deeply soothing from a physical stimulation standpoint, it helps me release the emotional and executive function burdens i carry, and it let's me rest an overstimulated mind. A lot of it was unmet autistic and ADHD needs

Second, I figured out that, outside of service and pleasing others, I do have play that I desire for my own sake. I spent a lot of time insisting on trying to invent reasons these desires pleased others but this just left me and my partners often confused and myself resentful. They cant read minds.

So I had to learn how to soothe those parts of me myself, reassert my capacity to feel safe in those relationships even when it wasn't possible to play for external reasons. I had to learn to be okay if nobody was playing with me. This was hard but worth it, and evened me out.

I found that when I was not regularly playing, parts of me perceived that as a failing, as rejection, as a sign that my relationships are in trouble. When I played, those parts were soothed. It made a bad pattern where I was needing to play in order to stave off my trauma.

Thats cuz ur pretty cool

I found a lot of mileage grappling with what dry spells *mean* and my reaction to that

I also grappled with how king soothes my soul in ways I was unwilling to give myself

The pull leveled out when I unpacked those things. I had to define my desire outside the bounds of someone else's first

Pretty much. Its about observing how your thoughts move. Its hard to explain.