I Get It Now...

This is how I feel about myself these days

It is still odd to me, this being a stranger in a strange place, a stranger to myself, and stranger to the me that now sits upon the shelf.
I wonder sometimes how the woman I work with does it, how she feels alive without the constant fix that used to be her life, the daily trauma and adrenaline, the pain of humanity, the consistent danger of being one step from the edge of death...

I crave it...That feeling which comes only with heart-wrenching agony, the unavoidable truth of reality, the ecstasy of relief when you are challenged in each and every belief, the passion in pain...

As a kid, I never understood. Never understood why my father chose a life that was, to put it bluntly, so fucking hard. Why he reveled in the struggle, the misfits, the underground, the snow and its bitter fucking cold, the lost boys, the broken toys, the unforgiving deserts and the people to poor to put food on the table.
Even a few years ago, I didn't understand his abhorrence for the easy monotony of suburbia, the 2.5 children inside their white picket fences. Why he was addicted to the new mind, the thrill of finding inspiration in the most unimaginable of places. Why he ran so fast and so far from the illusions so many people dream of living.

They showed him that he was alive. That his life was not a lie. The people, the deserts, the snakes, the trees, the mountains and wide open spaces, the struggle and the fight, the blood sweat and tears in which he spent his years...They reminded him to be alive.

I get it now. He was afraid of being dead which is very different than being afraid of dying.

I think that is one of the things that often draws people to ttwd. People spend their lives like money that can go back into the bank. They go to school, get married, go to work, kiss each other goodbye, eat dinner, and repeat the same story for years.
Then one day they wake up, and they wonder if they have truly lived. They wonder what it's like to be reminded of being alive. And they find it in D/s, in M/s, in power exchange, in the ultimate trade. They find it in the exquisite pain, the whips and the chains. They find it when the sensation of being, of really living, pours down in their tears like rain.

I wonder why I no longer seem to seek this, no longer reach for that peak where the air is thin and the edge so close, no longer wish to hand it all over if even just for the moment.

This industry we work in, it takes everything you have. It demands everything in your mind, commands all of your time. It requires you to pour your heart out into the hours, and hand your soul over to the daily toils. Everyone in this industry works too many hours, too many days of the week, does too many jobs, and gets up on Saturday to start all over again. We're all running on empty.
Perhaps we break new ground one inch at a time, perhaps each day we push a little harder against the line, perhaps one day it will be an accomplishment etched forever in time. Perhaps one day it will be a tale of living worth telling.

This was his dream, and most days I feel like it is eating me. I give it everything I have, so maybe that is why I hold back what he always had of me--everything that I have, everything that I am, every thought and every dream of what I could be...It's all taken up. And the pieces of what is left, the little pieces of me, I hold them close to my chest because every day I give all that I am to the ethereal promise of what we could create.

Maybe I resent that I give my all over and over again to a dream that was never mine but upon which our lives now depend. And it's my quiet little subconscious fuck you to keep what I have left of me away from him.
Maybe my fear of not really living simply can no longer compete with my fear of having nothing left that is me...
By the same token though, that part of me exists for him, and it cannot exist and flourish in a self-created void...