This past weekend I attended a munch with the Hypnotist. It is a munch for folks interested in hypnokink, which I am, but that I have avoided attending with him until this last one because, hell, I don’t know. I’m shy, and awkward, and anxious about having to make small talk. I mostly said yes because it was at an ice cream shop. How could I say no? Okay, okay, kidding. (Sort of.)
Really I’ve never been too keen on munches before. I’d rather go to a play party where I don’t have to do so much talk talk: hang with people a little bit, get my kink on, and then curl up in a happy glow – not having to talk much – and then leave, is the way I usually roll. But K is (as I may have mentioned before) pretty damn social, and enjoys munches, and talking to people…and I want to be a part of his world. I can still be awkward, shy, me, and enjoy being in an atmosphere he enjoys, right?
So there I was, at the munch, and it turned out that I was enjoying myself. Of course there were only 3 other people there, and one was someone K had invited because it was someone we’d both known a long time but hadn’t seen, and the other two I knew, at least peripherally, so it wasn’t scary. And the topic of the munch is one I am really keen on, so it was fun, and I was engaged, and I was glad I had gone.
The topic of my name – Jade, my chosen name, as opposed to my given name (I know, ya’ll are shocked I wasn’t actually named Jade at birth) – came up. The Hypnotist calls me Jade almost exclusively, for his own reasons, whether we are in kink space or not. W used to call me Jade also, and for about 20 years everyone I knew in the scene called me Jade, in and out of kink space. It got so that when Adam or someone else called me by my given name – especially in kink space – I wouldn’t hear it as referring to me. I assumed it was someone else they were talking to. W used to laugh about that. But something I said at the munch about being referred to as Jade or by my given name has stuck with me as an essential truth, and I have been pondering what it means.
“When W died, everyone rallied around me,” I said. “That was in real life, apart from kink, and my real name, my given name, was suddenly how everyone knew me. And then, when I started seeing V, he didn’t want to know me as Jade. I don’t think he approved of anything about ‘Jade,’ and refused to use the name.” And I realized, as I said it, how much that had hurt me.
To be fair, I think he also wanted to help distance me from the tragedy of W’s death, but in retrospect, I also think he wanted to divorce me from who I had been, in some ways. This isn’t that uncommon in a D/s relationship, actually – oftentimes the D-type wishes to mold the s-type into what their vision is, and you often find an s-type being named something else. It can be sweet, like the Canadian referring to me as “beauty,” or it can literally be a taking away of that person’t former identity, as I have seen in some M/s relationships. That notion is kind of hot to me, to be honest – that whole idea, becoming what the D-type wants, being made anew in the image they choose. It’s hot and sexy and on some level my kink is deeply rooted in that desire (a point to ponder later.) But as I’m talking about it this past weekend, I realized that’s not what it felt like from V. He wasn’t giving me something new to celebrate me being his, he just had issues with me being Jade. With pictures and the blog and the way I played. With me: me as Jade.
The Hypnotist has given me back a lot of things that I had lost: enjoyment in music, pleasure in writing here, things to write about (~grin~), the Scavenger Hunt, the license to be silly, my name. And not just my name, but being Jade again.
Jade dresses cute and sometimes sexy, even at work. She wears bracelets and rings and her hair is frequently a mane of messy curls. She wears heels even when they might be inappropriate and enjoys being teased by the men in her life – even when one of them is her boss. She needs – and enjoys – having two men to manage her, as when she frantically texts Ad when she’s forgotten her bowling ball at home because she had too many other things to think about to get ready to go to work, then to K’s, then to bowling that night, then overnight at K’s and then back to work Thursday – and he says he’ll bring it, no problem. She loves the way her and K’s and Adam’s lives are meshing, and not because she is driving it, but because the two of them are choosing it as well. She wants an integrated life, and that is the life that is happening. She is a writer and a dreamer and a blogger and is sometimes sassy and has an open, loving heart. She’s adventurous and an idealist and impractical and shy and loves fiercely and makes mistakes but wants to do better all the time.
I love being Jade again.
