2 AM and I’m still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer inside of me,
Threatening the life it belongs to
And I feel like I’m naked in front of the crowd
Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
And I know that you’ll use them, however you want to
Not precisely true, as I’m not “still awake” but have been awoken from a restless sleep, and it’s not the words in my head I am trying to escape but the itching of my body-the damn poison ivy, while mostly subdued, always picks the early morning hours to drive me crazy. So here I am at my keyboard trying to avoid scratching the painful spots and hoping that the meds the doc gave me will kick in soon so I can get back to bed and the comfort of A’s sleep-warm body.
I’m working on a blogpost in another window that I had sent to W earlier this evening. It is a pictorial and, unlike most of the other pictures I post here, has a couple really good face shots. I wanted to know if he thought exposing myself that way was a bad idea. He said, in part, “In most of your pieces, your words reveal far more about you than any photos ever could…”
And I think about being exposed, and what it means.
The other day, W posted a new set of photos over on Bondage Demons of a scene we did in which I am completely naked, in a modified spreadeagled pose. There is a beauty and a simplicity to the pictures that even I can’t deny, as much as I flinch when I see myself – gasp – naked like that. I do that hunch-shouldered, looking-at-them-sideways thing when I see them…but I can’t quite look away, and I even like some of them. I have even put some of them in a file to be uploaded to my FetLife profile (though I haven’t had the nerve yet to post them), a much more public space, and a space in which I feel, at times, much more vulnerable even than here. It’s an odd juxtaposition, though not completely incomprehensible. I meet real, live people from there, I know real live people there, people I have known for years, and as such I keep pieces of myself private, separated and safe (or so I like to believe, so it feels.) Limiting crossover from there to this blog is one of those ways that I do that.
The truth of the matter is that it is not truly separate, and I do not even really try to keep these online spaces apart that hard…my “firewall” is in not posting this blog publicly there, but I do share it willingly with certain people, both from FL and in real life, and frankly, with very little effort one could link from my profile to W’s (ripping away the quaint nod to his anonymity by the colloquial use of initials), and from there go to his bondage site, and from there, link back here. I don’t think most people would take the time or effort – why bother? – but it could be done.
And so that begs the question: Do I really care? What if I was exposed that way? What if (or should I say when) someone recognizes me from my photos – or my words? And now of course I am not talking about people that I am open with about my life, but those few that I haven’t shared it with: workmates. My family. The rest of the world, all my friends, know me and who I am and what I do. Maybe not in as much detail, maybe not the raw depth of what I at times share here, but they do know. My children know about poly – since my divorce I have made it a priority to educate them on alternatives to the one-man/one-woman model, and to open their minds to the possibilities of alternative lifestyle choices by making my choices a non-issue. It simply is another way to live, loving multiply. But of course they don’t know about kink. And that is the part that I would feel uncomfortable revealing, especially in as much detail as I do here.
Then again…it is a part of human existence, of my existence. I like to think I and my relationships (and my job?) would survive such exposure.
But here now, we are talking two different sorts of exposure, aren’t we. Photographic vs emotional, pictures of me versus snapshots of the things that live in my head. Strangely enough, it is the photos that give me pause. The emotional exposure is cathartic, it is what keeps me sane, it is in part my kink, as I may have said here before. Photographs, being photographed, as I talked about in this post, are an edge for me. Writing, spilling my guts, analyzing myself and my life and the world around me, is just what I do, and I don’t think I could stop doing if I tried.
W and I talked about photographs (and the potential for being “found” on the internet via an article he read in Wired Magazine, but that isn’t where I am going just now) earlier today, which may have spawned some of these musings. In regards to photographs, it was about the fact that a new potential playpartner, that I am going to meet on my travels this week, is a photographer, and brought up taking some pictures of me while I am there. Confession time: that was one of the reasons I contacted him in the first place. I love the photos he has on his profile, both the beauty of his ropework and the beauty of his photos. And here’s the “exposure” of myself in all this, the emotional component: I’d love to see myself as beautiful that way. But…I do not see myself so, or as potentially so. I am not photogenic in that easy-to-please way that so many women are, I don’t “pose” as W said, and feel acutely self-conscious even with the notion of doing so. So it’s a thing.
On the other hand, going there, meeting him, a stranger in a strange city, for the express purpose of possibly playing with him, is a “thing.” Exposure of an entirely new type; a different edge.
Okay, feels like the itch in my skin has abated–and apparently the itch I had in my mind (without realizing it was there) has also. I’m back to bed.
