I’ve been mulling this phrase over in my head a lot lately for a variety of reasons. Comparison is indeed the thief of joy. It makes us over think our own lives. Second guess the decisions we’ve made or didn’t make. It can throw us off of our mood because now we are deflated. And yet, knowing that doesn’t stop us from making the comparisons. Or at least it hasn’t stopped me. When I found kink, I didn’t realize how overwhelmingly white it was initially. I lucked into a site called Dark Connections where the kinky people looked like me. There were Doms/subs, Masters and slaves, rope bunnies and kinksters and I was in heaven. It wasn’t until we migrated over to FetLife that I realized how much melanin was lacking in most kink spaces. A different stream of comparison would manifest there but I’ll get to that in a second. I was definitely kind of blissed out because I was in a little pod of kinky people that understood the skin I was in. However, I wasn’t as experienced as any of them, couldn’t stay in rope as long as a few of them, definitely wasn’t as thin as some of them and as much as I liked me I didn’t seem effortlessly gorgeous as many of the s-types. So I compared a lot. I read everything I could to get better. When possible, I traveled to where they were engaging because I wanted to be in that energy. In some ways that settled my comparison of some things because in person I wasn’t an outlier the same way I was online–in my head, but in others I was still feeling out of my depth. There were pockets of community there that I could not replicate at home. They could hang out on the weekends, stay late after events that I wasn’t even invited to attend, love on each other in between these big gatherings. And I’m not sure if I was jealous or just lonely but the comparisons never left my space.
Moving out of the protection the largely Black kink community I spread my baby submissive wings in was a different shock to the system. Now there were even more thin lithe bodies around with long flowing hair and bruises. So many bruises. I remember telling my first partner, my Master Emperor (nickname for the unfamiliar) that I had not bruised after a session. He took that as an affront and made sure to rectify it the next time we met up. The amount of abuse my lower torso had to absorb to start a bruise was likely well past my baby submissive threshold. But as someone who can orgasm from a good spanking and who is also likely to go nonverbal during that process I didn’t have the ability to ask him to stop on any level. Plus who wants to disappoint their Master? Definitely not me. He wanted bruises and I was going to give them to him. And I did where he expected and where he did not. The cuffs that had been on my ankles and wrists slowly left darkened rings around both for a week. I wore long sleeves in July so that I didn’t have to entertain why I had what looked like signs of abuse on my otherwise healthy arms. The bruise on my ass slowly widened and darkened until I had a large purple circle on the vast majority of the surface area. I took photos on a very early digital camera and sent them over. He was thrilled. Had we not been interrupted by the “trapeze artist” I have no idea what my body would have looked like later but I remember thinking but look how happy he is that my body showed the signs of his work on me like the nice white bodies do. Thanking the heavens that God protects babies and fools because I wouldn’t have stopped him. I was too enamored and too caught up in being just like the other good slaves/submissives who wore their scars for their Sirs proudly.
I have to remind myself of that now when my feed is flooded with bruises, scars, blood and scratches. I’m a girl that loves Sadists but I’m not a girl that’s ever going to routinely show that love on my flesh. It used to make me feel so inadequate that I couldn’t give them my scars. Not visually and not easily when they might happen. It played in my brain that my lack of easily gained body trophies was just another strike against my offer of submission. My skin was too dark, I was too quiet, too unknown, not worth engaging with when so many other people could provide what I could not without much effort. And maybe that’s true. I honestly don’t know if I’m too much or not enough of anything. I stopped asking. I may make some bad guesstimates from time to time but lack of confirmation gives me some freedom lol. So I’m back where I started. Comparison is the thief of joy. What I want is conflictual. Part of me wants to be the kind of girl that is easily and readily desired by kind of men that I easily and readily desire. The bigger part of me knows that would mean not being who I have become and in all my dark skin gray haired glory that sounds unreasonable. Maybe I’ll find someone that appreciates all of that eventually. Maybe I won’t. Regardless, I have to remind myself that despite what I cannot give there are a myriad of things I can offer without hesitation to the right person. I won’t be sporting easily obtained wounds to my flesh but I can, and have been, the absolute best toy for the person who won’t leave me on the shelf when they get distracted. My joy has to not be so easily manipulated. I’m working on that.