P.S. — If this piece was helpful, yet you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your journey — I’m happy to guide you privately. In person and remote options available. Please DM me and let’s connect.

Thank you for watching, , you are deeply appreciated.

Learn more about me and what I do.

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A container that was created long before you began to sort out your desires, read the books, joined the online community. One that you stand in now as you read this, because this is what your algorithm served up for you, and what you chose to click on.

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Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion described a container as any structure capable of receiving unbearable experience and returning it in a form that can be tolerated and thought about. He was describing the mother-infant relationship. The word has traveled a long way from there, and it turns out to fit almost anywhere you put it.

Whether you prefer calling it Hobbes’ Leviathan, Rousseau’s social contract, Winnicott’s holding environment, Aristotle’s use of polis, or the negotiated structure a Dominant builds around a scene, the concept scales. It scales down as readily as it scales up.

A nation is a container. So is a community. So is one person’s hand closed around another person’s wrist or how you spend your Sunday afternoon.

When a container is working, you barely notice it. The world just works. When it isn’t, you feel it everywhere. In your sleep patterns, your tolerance for stress, the extent to which you connect and thrive.

A container is not a guarantee that things will go wrong anyway. There is a continuous stream of pressure to contend with regardless of scale. It should be the structural condition that makes functioning possible. The buffer between crisis and stability.

The predictability. The reliability.

I’ve been circling this for a while: the way small ways environments behave like nervous systems under sustained pressure, narrowing, bracing, reaching for certainty when complexity gets too expensive to hold. The little things that rocks us on a day-to-day level, in the systems we live within, in our relationships, and within ourselves.

What I want to examine now is the container itself: what happens when it’s asked to hold at three different scales at once.

The community. The dynamic. The person, alone.

“Community” is doing a lot of work in a piece like this, and I want to be honest about how much it’s papering over.

There isn’t one BDSM or kink container here. There are several, loosely federated, sometimes barely on speaking terms. The leather lineage this piece leans on for history, protocol-based, historically gay male, organized around titles and bars and decades of earned rank, is one thread.

The much larger, newer, mostly online kink world that grew up around FetLife, Discord servers, and apps like Feeld is another, with almost none of the first thread’s institutional memory and a different relationship to risk entirely.

The professional domme and pro-switch world runs on its own economic logic and its own legal exposure. Rope and shibari communities have their own technical lineage, closer in spirit to a craft guild than to either of the above. Munch culture, the local, in-person, coffee-shop-and-backroom scene, is its own thing again, and looks different in Atlanta than it does in Seattle.

These groups don’t share governance. They don’t always share norms. They aren’t always fond of each other. When I say “the community’s container” from here on, I mean something closer to a loose federation of containers, unevenly built and unevenly maintained. That unevenness is part of what makes this world fuzzy to the newcomer.

It’s like the Wild West out here. Yet, imagine a world where the path forward was legible. Nagivatable. Where you have the tools to thrive.

Those of us with years of experience try to create this. We write, mentor, moderate groups, and coach. We develop frameworks, guidelines, and sometimes over-correct.

Because we care. Think about what a functional container makes possible. You can make a decision and trust that good outcomes are likely. You can disagree without losing face, perhaps even finding common ground. You can afford to be wrong without catastrophic outcomes.

You can imagine a future. One where you find that sense of belonging, exploration, and expression you have always wanted. One that is fun, and interesting, and engaging. One where you feel seen, known, and heard while you uplift others. Where there is grace for change, evolution, as well as stability.

What American kink and leather communities are living inside right now is a container under a specific kind of strain. One that we may not be aware of yet influence our sense of trust in the system that holds us, fuzzy as it is.

In January 2025, International Mr Leather removed Durk Dehner, cofounder of the Tom of Finland Foundation, from its judging panel after photographs surfaced of him wearing a swastika pin and a leather cap bearing the Nazi eagle. He resigned the foundation’s presidency days later.

Pup Diego Onyx, Mr Bullet Leather 2024, who surfaced the photos publicly, also described additional allegations that Dehner had made racist remarks toward Black and Latino community members at a leather event the previous February. If those allegations are accurate, they appear to have circulated informally for months before anyone with institutional standing addressed them publicly.

Two of the community’s most storied institutions, the organization that names the sport’s most visible titleholder and the foundation built around its most iconic artist, were pushed into a response by someone junior to them. That isn’t a story about one man’s regalia. It’s a story about what institutions do with information they already have, and specifically about the leather lineage’s institutions. The ones with titles and judging panels and decades of accumulated authority to protect.

Five months later, in May 2025, a different thread of the same loose federation ran into a different kind of pressure. The TAKE IT DOWN Act became the first major federal law to address AI-generated harm directly, criminalizing nonconsensual intimate imagery, deepfakes included, and requiring platforms to build takedown infrastructure within a year.

Almost no one in the kink community would argue against the underlying purpose. NCII and deepfake risk lands with particular weight here, since so much of the community’s documentation already exists as private images shared inside circles of trust, images that do outsized damage if that trust breaks.

But the same month, Senator Mike Lee introduced the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, an attempt to rewrite what counts as obscene at the federal level. It has almost no chance of passing. That isn’t the point.

The point is that both bills moved through Congress in the same window, one protecting a community that rarely gets protected and one threatening to redefine what that community is legally permitted to depict, and neither process meaningfully included the people whose lives would be shaped by the outcome.

None of this is a single dramatic rupture. Yet, things that happen in one fraction of our community affects the rest of us.

Consider an issue a little closer to home for most of us.

FetLife has spent years designing its structure around a payment-processing industry that functions as an unelected morality board, flagging and de-platforming based on what Visa and Mastercard will underwrite rather than what’s actually legal or consensual. The generation that built the community’s protocols is aging out of leadership faster than that knowledge is transferring.

A newer generation, raised on kink as aesthetic more than kink as practice, is inheriting infrastructure it didn’t build. None of this makes headlines the way a deadly virus that devastates a community does. It’s harder to organize against something you can’t point directly to.

Artificial intelligence is arriving into that same slow pressure the way it’s arriving into everything else, faster than institutions can respond to it, harder to see the shape of until the shape is already set.

Algorithms increasingly deciding who can find you, who you can trust, and what happens to an image of you once it leaves your hands, are the same technology now being asked, by law, to also protect you.

A nervous system under chronic stress is not well positioned to metabolize that kind of contradiction. It produces the same thing it always produces under sustained pressure: anxiety, tribalism, a search for certainty.

The kink community is not exempt from that physiology. No-one is.

Most people, inside kink communities or out of them, have never lived inside a genuinely stable container. Which means it’s easy to miss what one actually looks like when you’re standing in it. Inside a room in which you feel safe. In the arms of someone you trust. In time well-spent alone doing nothing in particular.

There are examples, drawn mostly from one thread of this federation, the leather lineage, because it happens to be the thread with the longest recorded history.

Old Guard leather culture is one of them. It began with servicemen returning from the Second World War who missed the structure of military life and rebuilt something like it in civilian form. Strict codes. Earned rank. A novice working his way up through years of demonstrated trust before anyone called him anything but novice.

It was rigid. It was also, by design, boring in exactly the way a functioning container is supposed to be boring. Protocol existed so that trust didn’t have to be reinvented from scratch every time two strangers found each other in a bar. The container held not because everyone inside it was virtuous, but because the structure made certain failures harder to commit.

What came after was more deliberate still. The Eulenspiegel Society, founded in New York in 1971, was the country’s first BDSM organization. The Society of Janus followed in San Francisco in 1974, founded by Cynthia Slater and Larry Olsen after an ad in the Berkeley Barb drew people together to talk about it. Neither happened because anyone was granted permission. They happened because people who distrusted the available options built their own structure instead, one meeting, one newsletter, one negotiated disagreement at a time.

Then the container was tested in the worst way it could be. The AIDS epidemic hit gay leather bars and clubs with a severity that gutted entire membership rolls. The institutions that already existed, the protocols, the earned trust between people who’d spent years learning to rely on each other, became the infrastructure for something nobody had built it for: hospice care, fundraising, food, the physical labor of showing up when the government wouldn’t.

The container held, not because the state protected anyone inside it, since it explicitly did not, but because the structure had already been built strongly enough to bend into a shape nobody had designed it for and still not break.

What strikes me about all of these examples is how unsexy the actual stability is. No mythology. No electrifying leader. Protocol, institutional memory, the accumulated weight of people who kept showing up.

Stability, it turns out, is profoundly boring. And that boredom is a gift most people never get to unwrap.

This is where I have to be honest with you.

I don’t know if it holds now the way it held then.

And I’m not sure “it” is a single enough thing for that question to have one answer. The leather lineage, with its titles and its institutional memory, is not under the same pressure as the FetLife-and-Discord generation, which is not under the same pressure as a professional domme watching payment processors decide her livelihood, which is not under the same pressure as someone whose only contact with any of this is a munch in a town with one venue willing to host it.

Asking whether “the community’s container” holds is a little like asking whether “the economy” is doing well. Averaged across five different structures, the answer might be technically true and still useless to any specific person trying to live inside one of them.

The conditions that produced Old Guard structure, the founding generation of TES and Janus, and the capacity that let that structure absorb the AIDS crisis without shattering, were specific. An external threat clear enough that internal disagreement became a luxury nobody could afford. Institutional infrastructure that already existed before the crisis arrived, not built during it. Decades of accumulated trust that made rapid mobilization possible instead of merely hoped for.

The community doesn’t have that same clarity right now. It has slow legal erosion instead of a single unambiguous threat. Contested judgment calls instead of a crisis everyone agrees is a crisis. A payment-processing industry quietly making content decisions no one voted on. A founding generation transferring less institutional memory than it assumes it is, to a newer generation that came up through platforms and aesthetics rather than Houses and mentorship, and doesn’t always know what it’s missing until it’s needed and isn’t there.

What I notice in myself, and in the people closest to me, is a growing uncertainty about whether the community’s container can hold the way it once did, within a timeframe that matters for the people living inside it right now. Not eventually. Now.

And if that’s true, it raises a different question entirely.

The nervous system doesn’t naturally distinguish between the community’s container and the one two people build between themselves in a single negotiated hour. It has to be taught the difference, and even then it doesn’t always believe it.

This is where the container stops being a metaphor borrowed from psychoanalysis and becomes something the community built in independent fractions.

Negotiation is Bion’s container in practice, a structure agreed to in advance for holding what’s about to happen. A safeword is the exit that makes the risk of entering tolerable in the first place. Aftercare is the literal return to a form that can be thought about again, which is close to Bion’s own definition, word for word, whether or not the person doing it has ever read a page of object relations theory.

You can live inside a chronically stressed community and still build something reliable at the scale of two people. Not by pretending the larger precarity isn’t real. Not by treating a dynamic as an escape hatch from everything outside it. But by choosing, deliberately, people who negotiate honestly over one who is merely exciting. By building the unsexy parts, the human space holding things, the check-in the next day, the willingness to say a limit has moved and mean it.

In little ways, that do not necessarily present themselves the way a dramatic scene does. Because we, as a community of careful, feeling people, need one another.

And yet.

None of this requires a partner. The capacity has to exist in the person before it can be negotiated with anyone else. Someone who has never been in a dynamic and doesn’t intend to be still needs the same interior architecture: the ability to tolerate discomfort without collapsing into it, to know a limit before someone else tests it, to bring yourself back down when nobody’s hand is there to do it for you.

Bion was describing something a mother does for an infant who cannot yet do it for himself. Growing up, in this framework, is largely the transfer of that function from someone else’s hands into your own.

The dynamic, when it’s good, is practice. The self that results is both the beginning and the outcome.

Some of the people who built the institutions this piece has been describing knew this longer because the official container was never fully theirs to begin with. That knowledge is worth something regardless of who’s holding it now.

The hardest version of this is holding both realities at once. Because there is a container, even if it’s too big for us to wrap our mind around while we scroll through Fet or sit in our discussion groups.

To be lucid about what’s happening to the community’s container without letting that lucidity curdle into paralysis. To resist the urge to lone-wolf it, never testing your fantasy version of this against an unsexy reality that holds you accountable. To grieve what’s precarious without deciding nothing is worth building because it might not last.

To build locally and personally without pretending the larger container doesn’t matter. To stay engaged with the scene even when it’s exhausting, because disengagement is its own kind of surrender, masked as self-protection.

To build a stable interior, a reliable, honest, well-practiced self, while remaining genuinely present to the instability outside it whether that be the community at large or inside your dynamic.

This is not the same as being fine it all. It’s not equanimity as detachment. It’s closer to learning to stand upright in a hurricane. You feel the wind. You know which direction it’s coming from. You’re not knocked over. This is true no matter which side of the slash you find yourself on any given day of your life.

That kind of stability doesn’t come from resolve alone. It comes from practice, from the accumulated weight of showing up honestly in small ways over a long period of time, the same practice the founding generation of this community was doing decades before anyone found Fetlife at all.

I want to name a tension here, because I think it matters. Personal stability can be a foundation for staying engaged with the community’s harder work, or it can be a substitute for it. The person who builds an honest dynamic, tends their own regulation, and develops real competence can do that as grounding for the longer work of collective repair. Or they can do it as a quiet way of opting out, keeping their own house in order while the shared one goes on degrading.

The difference isn’t always visible from the outside. It isn’t always visible from the inside either.

I’m not arguing for withdrawal. I’m arguing for the kind of groundedness that makes staying engaged possible, instead of the kind of engagement that burns people out and sends them into cynicism.

A dysregulated person can’t build a regulated community. But a regulated person who’s stopped caring about the community isn’t the answer either.

The honest gap in this piece is that I’ve described what a stable container looks like, admitted the specific conditions that produced it once might not be available now, and argued for personal groundedness without fully answering what collective repair looks like while the legal and attentional ground keeps shifting under it. That gap is intentional. It’s the question I want to take seriously rather than resolve too quickly.

The community has been here before, in different forms, though “community” has meant something different each time. Vice squad raids on leather bars in the decades before Stonewall. The feminist sex wars of the 1980s, which split parts of the movement over exactly these same questions about representation, risk, and who gets to decide what’s dangerous.

Samois, the country’s first lesbian BDSM organization, grew out of a women’s discussion group meeting inside the Society of Janus in the late 1970s and disbanded in 1983 amid its own internal conflict, having spent much of its existence publicly rebuked, and sometimes picketed, by an anti-pornography feminist group that considered its members traitors to the women’s movement. The fracture wasn’t new even then.

The shutdown of Backpage and Craigslist personals in 2018, after which every platform built for this world has been quietly designing around the same chokepoints ever since. Each of these parallels is real. Each carries genuine explanatory power.

But something keeps nagging at me.

We have been here before, and yet this time may be different. The tools available for both control and resistance are different. A handful of payment processors now function as a de facto morality board for an entire category of legal adult expression. Artificial intelligence can manufacture the exact kind of image the community has spent fifty years trying to keep out of the wrong hands, without needing a real photograph to start from. That is genuinely new.

I’m not sure the answer is as large as the question. I’m starting to think it might be smaller. More private. Closer to home than any of us expected. This is why I continue to think about how I move through space, how I regulate myself within systems under historical strain, and how I think about how to treat others as they move through the path as those who came before us once did.

Love and containment,

Ava

P.S. — If this piece was helpful, yet you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your journey — I’m happy to guide you privately. In person and remote options available. Please DM me and let’s connect.

Thank you for reading, , you are deeply appreciated.

Learn more about me and what I do.

The thing that I want to show you most is that power exchange, kink, and BDSM can look the way you want it. Built from two people who bring their own history, their own energy, and their own permission, into any given relationship.

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I found a space in the basement of a coffee house in downtown Denver. Below street level, with a speakeasy feel. For months I had been building the House in my head before I scheduled any events, and this was the night it stopped being an idea. Three events in one evening. A dark romance book club, Ava’s Eros Writing Group, and a munch, all hosted by my House, the House of Three Rivers, formed out of this very Substack. Small, but ambitious enough that my hands were cold while I set out chairs.

I run events for a living. Over two hundred a year, high end and complicated, built for people who run companies and countries and expect every detail to be perfect. This should have been easy by comparison. It wasn’t, because this one was mine. A lifetime of spaces, and every version of myself who has ever stood in one, finally standing together in the same room. The writer, the smut lover, the community builder. The slave. The sadomasochist. The domme. All parts of myself pulled together in one place. Soul-led. All in.

We waited for people to arrive the way you wait before anything that matters. Talking quietly. My Master’s voice low and even. His hand steady at my back. He always knows how I am feeling before I say anything. He watched my fingers, watched my eyes go to the door and back to the table and back to the door, checking what I had already checked twice. Then back to him. His face calm. Amused, almost. Like he already knew how the night would go and was waiting for me to catch up. He’s been doing this for years.

The first people came in, and he was the one who met them. Warm, easy, telling them where to sit and what to expect, setting the tone before I had to say a word. I watched strangers walk in tight and settle in loose, already smiling. Then I greeted the next ones the same way, without him ever telling me he was showing me anything. More came. Then more.

All night he worked the edges. A look toward someone standing alone by the wall. A quiet nod toward a newcomer who hadn’t found their footing yet. I’d close the gap without knowing exactly why, until I was already there, and every time, he was right.

Once, low enough that only I could hear it: I am so proud of you. You did it. You are doing it. Good job, Ava Chanel. I felt that in my knees and in my chest, radiating through me.

Someone asked me, near the end, where all of this came from. Where I found it in myself to build a space like this. I didn’t think about the answer before I gave it.

“My Master inspires me.”

He was the one who encouraged me to publish my writing here. To build something new. To bring people together. To lead one of the only female-led Houses in the country. To start my coaching career. Who helped me overcome the fear and shame of my past. To be a mentor for others and share what took me decades to accumulate.

While some Dominants need you to be smaller so they can feel larger, he does the opposite. He expands me, reaping the benefits of experiencing me fully expressed.

I watched her eyes widen. She was new, still working out what these words meant outside of books. The person who had just spent three hours holding sixty strangers steady was someone’s personal property. She hadn’t built a category for that yet. Most people haven’t.

Here’s the confusion, and I understand it: submissive gets treated like a personality. Soft, quiet, someone who needs the decisions made for her, someone who is that way in every room she walks into.

That’s not what this is. I’m not submissive by disposition. I run events for a living, over two hundred a year, meetings, strategic planning, community organizing, and ran three of them that night alone. That is on top of running my personal life, which can be quite complicated. We will leave it at that.

What I am is his slave. And slave is a role, submissive is a role, not a trait. It only exists in relation to him. There is no “real submissive.” It does not exist, and if you hear that or any form of it, you hear idealization. Fantasy or projection. Not reality in any form. Take him out of the equation and there’s not that much submissive left to go looking for in me.

My submission is a response mechanism. To the quality and brand of leadership first and foremost. I am more likely to laugh in your face than fall to my knees before you. There are very few who are worship ready. Yet, that is possible.

This is why dark romance is a thing. Why BookTok is off the charts (if you know, you know). The confidence. The knowledge. The all encompassing, fuck yes. I want you and only you. Forever, Mine. Period fucking period and I’ll burn the world down to prove it.

Lots of relationship styles exist out there. I’ve been in polycules. I’ve been in D/s polycules. I’ve been in “relationship anarchy” (sorry that’s just dating) and whatever else you want to put a name on it. Mostly, I become the primary partner is all relationships. In all situations.

I lead. It’s what I do. I organize. I structure. I’m good at it.

Alluring, yes. Communal living and alternative relationships have a ton of upsides and I do not deny that. I’ve been searching for community my entire life. There are outcomes for everyone involved which takes a satisfying amount of team building and scope.

I need that.

And yet.

In some rare instances, not connected to my work life, or my private life, or my personal life, there is a continuance of energy that creates the largest energy convergence I have ever felt. The thing dives me, whether I want it to or not, to go into the deepest primal parts of myself. That gives me the deepest struggle, and the deepest satisfaction.

When there is a person who steps inside my orbit who has the potential to meet me, my ears perk up. My body reacts. Not a, oooh this may be interesting but a full body literal knee jerk reaction.

To the floor. Now. Dropping like a rag doll.

Because you can’t help it.

Because it’s right.

This takes time. It’s an evolution, regardless of any stories you’ve heard. It takes overcoming conflict. Disappointment. Wants. Fear. Needs. Anger. Communication differences. The histories and traumas all this bring into the space between you.

The people who hold that role with one specific person are often the strongest, most self-aware people I know, not despite or because of all the things in their lives, but right alongside it.

This is something I come across all the time in my coaching practice. The need to explain, compartmentalize, and fraction our lives.

This is the biggest problem we face. The separation of ourselves from ourselves. And there is a bigger problem behind it. The problem behind the problem.

The shame.

And the fear of being known.

We are too complex to be seen, right ?

That is not true.

Yet, it takes only a select few to hold it. We can hold it for ourselves. Yet, we constantly search outward for that seeing, knowing, holding.

And they fail us. Most every single time.

That hurts. It’s isolating.

I could have built the House without him. I want to be exact about that. Needing him wasn’t necessary. Wanting him there was because I needed both. And that’s the part people miss when they hear “power exchange” and picture a transfer, one person’s power moving into another’s column until someone is left with less.

That isn’t how polarity works. He didn’t take my charge to add to his. He held his end, fixed, so that mine had something to work with. It meant more because I didn’t have to ask him to be there.

He showed up. He always does. Not because he has to. Because the fuck yes is there. Because even if it were to end tomorrow, I would be supporting his next thing. Forever. No matter what.

That was my charge.

I had my own charge. Yet, his was the extra change that made this night different. Not better necessarily to everyone else in the room, though I expected it did.

For me, it was electricity.

He has seen me in my worst moments, and I still get the hard growl of your fucking mine admittedly sometimes after I burn toast in the morning or am exhausted after the end of a very long day. After colds, and life traumas, and personal failings.

It was powerful because it was a choice he made. Inside power I already had. And lost, and regained, and may loose again.

That is just fucking life. We can do our best, and still, no matter what happens, we let go of what is not ours to hold and watch with pride as the other thrives.

The current only exists because neither of us collapse into the other’s position. And it only exists if we do not cling in the most Buddhist sense of the world. The source of all suffering on earth is clinging.

It is an exchange.

You can call it love, but without devotion, to their total well-being, what you are experiencing is attachment. And that is one sided. That is different.

And that is one of the most painful experiences of any relationship. Of knowing that they will not only be okay, but thrive without you.

This goes against every dark romance version we have. Or traditional version.

Yet, it is honest. And it is what allowed me to build a space for others that night.

He is the one who cared for me, and let me go.

Granted, he is better at this than I am. That’s why he’s the one in charge, makes the decisions, and holds it that way when I get squirly.

And I often do. That is another writing altogether.

If the rest of my life did not bleed into our dynamic from time to time, I would deserve an award.

Yet, he doesn’t take anything from me. Not when I run a night like that one, or any other. He doesn’t need to. He gives, and I receive. Sometimes he takes, and still, I receive that.

He built the conditions for me. For our relationship, our dynamic. The container that holds us and everything in it. He taught himself to read me before I know I am nervous, built on skills he learned long before he ever met me. Based on his own life experiences, his own pain, which I will never know. Not really…

And yet.

He is proud of me when I’m strong, when I’m space-holding, when sixty people leave a basement in Denver lighter than they walked in. Who came back the next time and the next. None of this threatens the thing between us. It is the energy between us, working exactly as it is meant to. And I appreciate every single thing he has been through to lead me here.

To this place. To this now.

It is also a higher place to come from, and descend to, when I find my place on my knees before him.

And, that is sexy as hell.

I blushed right now writing this.

Yet, descent is not really the right word. It is me drifting back gracefully to where I belong with him, in relationship with him.

He leads men. I lead men and women. He leads me.

I love that.

Somewhere underneath all of it, every space I walk into, whatever I am doing and whoever I am leading, he is still leading me, and I am still surrendering to our container. To him.

Two fixed points, holding their ground on either end. That is polarity.

That is true power. Devotion.

Power generated in the space between two poles that refuse to invert upon themselves. Which keep coming back to their natural state when they do.

It’s the current running under everything I do.

That we do.

It’s where my creativity comes from, where my best ideas come from, the reason I can stand in a basement in Denver and pull sixty strangers into something steady. I can do this alone. And yet, when you give yourself the permission to enter this space, the results ground deeper into your soul.

And, if something were to happen tomorrow and all that is taken away, that same devotion would still be there. For whatever reason that you cannot control. Or maybe you could and you made a terrible mistake, you gather yourself up, and you learn from it. And you carry that love with you, knowing you were never once in control of anything.

And everyone around you feels it. A positive force. A freeing thing. And the world rises.

Love and polarity,

Ava

P.S. — If this piece was helpful, and yet you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your BDSM journey, I’m happy to guide you privately. In person and remote options available. Please DM me and let’s connect.

Learn more about me and what I do.

Subscribe now

Whether you have lazy Sunday morning sex when the kids are still asleep, anonymous dating app hookups, or have the heart blown wide open fucking of your soul’s fully expressed desires, you have designed your erotic life through a series choices.

Today, I am going to discuss how to go deeper. To obtain what you truly desire in a more conscious present, strategic manner.

There is sex. There are scenes. Then, there are scenes. Call it scenes 2.0 or elevated BDSM. Or just call it better planning and deeper imagination with the willingness to go deeper than you have ever gone before.

I’ll give you two examples. In this piece we will explore one way of doing things. Come with me into a typical scene that you would encounter in most BDSM spaces or at home. Feel this experience as I have. Imagine yourself there.

And.. hear from the impact top, the Dominant who brought me into that space. In his own words. From his own experience. I invited him give his perspective. Thank you for that, you know who you are.

In part two, I am going to take you deeper and father than most people, even experienced practitioners with years in the lifestyle, have ever considered or even thought possible.

Both are valid, legitimate, and so much fun. This goes beyond Tuesday afternoon kinky sex for most people and dives into what BDSM can be like with a little imagination and the willingness to step into the deep end of the pool.

Take my hand, , and take a breath as we enter the first Back Room of our desire together now.

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Allow me to go deeper with you. To show you how my brain works, and why my chosen fields have always been so closely tied to my erotic inner life.

I’ve always been obsessed with the flow of power. My undergraduate degree was in peace and international studies, filed under the history department, which in practice meant four years of studying war.

How people hurt each other, or not, and why, across every century, culture, and class.

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My graduate degree was in public administration, which sounds like a study of bureaucracy and isn’t. I was studying the oldest relationship in politics, the one between a citizen and the polis.

The Greeks didn’t separate citizenship from participation. Athens didn’t have subjects. It had people who were, by definition, part of the thing that governed them, and a specific word, idiotes, for anyone who opted out of public life and kept to their own private concerns instead.

That’s where our word idiot comes from.

Governance, underneath the modern paperwork, is still that same question. Are you inside the thing that has power over you, or outside it, opted out?

I didn’t land in either field by accident.

Power is the thing my soul turned toward first. A surge that flowed through my erotic life, even when I was very young. It energizes me. Pulses through me, so much so I can taste it.

Most people think they know what power is. The Governor. The decision-maker.

It’s the one giving orders, not taking them. The hand that can hurt you and won’t, for now. Fear more efficient than love because fear is more reliable. More immediate and precise.

That belief has a four-hundred-year history. For a long time it was correct, in the sense that it was what serious people argued: that power belongs to whoever can hold it alone, by force, over everyone else.

It just isn’t where the argument ended.

My argument starts with Thomas Hobbes, in 1651. Power, he wrote in Leviathan, possibly the sexiest word ever, is a man’s “present means, to obtain some future apparent good.”

Neither good nor evil. Just a tool, aimed at whatever you wanted next. But a tool needs enforcement to mean anything, and Hobbes knew it: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”

A hundred years earlier, Machiavelli made the tool political. In The Prince, he conceded that a ruler should ideally be both loved and feared.

Then he added the line everyone remembers and nearly no one quotes correctly: when you cannot have both, “it is much safer to be feared than loved.”

This was a fallback, offered as strategy.

His argument has a built-in condition: love and fear together is the ideal, fear alone is only what he tells rulers to reach for when they can’t manage both. Tactical advice for a worse-case scenario, not a claim about what power actually is.

Nietzsche pushed the same instinct somewhere stranger. Will to power, for him, wasn’t really about one person ruling another. It was closer to a claim about every living thing, including the private contest a person has with their own limits. He measured a will’s strength by “how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.”

That’s a different register than Machiavelli’s fallback. Less about ruling a people and more about what a person does with what tries to break them. But it planted an idea political theorists after him couldn’t quite shake: power might not be about domination at all, only about what you do with resistance, wherever you find it.

By 1922, Max Weber had turned this will into sociology. Power, for Weber, was the probability of getting to “carry out his own will despite resistance.”

Still a competition, still one person’s will against another’s, but now it needed an entire social structure to function at all, not just a strong hand.

That’s the last stop for the domination model before the argument turns against itself.

Hannah Arendt broke it in 1969. Power, she wrote, isn’t something anyone holds alone. It’s “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.”

It exists only as long as people keep acting together, and the moment they stop, it’s gone, no matter how many weapons are involved.

“Violence can destroy power,” she wrote. “It is utterly incapable of creating it.”

James Baldwin made the same break moral. Power “can have no morality in itself,” he wrote, but it is entirely dependent on the human energy, the wills and desires, of the people behind it.

He wasn’t interested in power as an abstraction. He was interested in who it was used on, and what that use cost the person using it.

“When power translates itself into tyranny,” he wrote, “it means that the principles on which that power depended... are bankrupt.” Power was not separate from the people exercising it, and it answers for what they desired.

Then bell hooks closed the loop on Machiavelli directly, four hundred years later. She doesn’t offer his line back as strategy. She names it as a gender wound.

Patriarchy, she wrote, teaches men that “it is better to be feared than to be loved.” I’d call that wisdom built specifically to keep them from noticing it’s a scar.

Fear might get obedience. It has never once gotten intimacy, and hooks spent a career arguing that men particularly lose more than they gain in that trade.

The most recent stop isn’t only philosophy. It is empirical.

Dacher Keltner spent decades studying how people rise and fall in power. “We rise in power due to what is best about human nature,” he found. “We fall from power due to what is worst.”

What sinks people is the opposite, the entitlement and impulsivity that having power itself tends to produce.

Four hundred years after Hobbes called power a neutral tool, research says the people who keep it longest are the ones who did not treat it as one.

This is my argument. Realist political science still runs largely on Hobbes and Machiavelli today, and serious people still defend it.

So the domination model isn’t wrong because it’s unkind. It’s wrong because everyone who took it seriously enough to test it, philosophically or empirically, kept finding the same out.

Power held alone, by force, against resistance, doesn’t last. Power practiced with someone, deliberately, consensually, does.

Force produces compliance, not cooperation, so it has to be re-enforced by threat every single time or it evaporates. That is what Arendt meant when she said violence can destroy power but never create it.

Agreement doesn’t need re-enforcing, because the other person keeps choosing it on their own, over and over again, which is why Keltner’s data has it outlasting dominance instead of collapsing the moment a threat lets up.

Arendt was writing about crowds and revolutions, not bedrooms, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the shape of what she described, that power that only exists because more than one person keeps choosing to act together, is the same shape underneath conscious power exchange.

Nietzsche measured a will’s strength by how it turned resistance to its advantage. He wasn’t wrong. He just assumed you’d be doing it alone.

Power not as Machiavelli’s fallback. Something closer to Arendt’s model, scaled down to two people who agreed in advance to act in concert instead of alone.

I think that is one of the most powerfully beautiful human things we can do.

Love and power,

Ava

P.S. — If this piece was helpful, and you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your BDSM journey, I’m happy to guide you privately. In person and remote options available. Please DM me and let’s connect.

Learn more about me and what I do.

It starts with a base desire. To connect. To be known. Seen. To find your person. Your people. To build community. To become who you’ve fantasized about being. Who you know you are deep inside.

Maybe you’ve already stepped into that world, whatever world that is for you. Your profile is out there… and you’re getting the opposite of what you hoped for.

That’s disappointing. It is also fixable.

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Whether the responses you’re getting are overwhelming or nonexistent, I bet there are things you can do to engage more meaningfully. For those looking for quality over quantity, this is for you.

How you present yourself online matters. Most people online are performing a version of themselves. The ones who aren’t are the ones worth finding.

So how do you find them?

The word authenticity gets used until it means nothing. We’ve built an entire production around the ideal of it, which lets us skip the actual work of getting there.

For years, standard online advice treated authenticity as nice-to-have. Fake it if you need to. Curate hard. Algorithms don’t care about souls, so why should you.

Research says otherwise, and it’s not close.

A 2020 study in Nature Communications analyzed language and behavior across ten thousand Facebook users, comparing each person’s actual personality to their online presentation. People whose online self tracked closest to their real self reported meaningfully higher life satisfaction. Researchers then ran a longitudinal experiment to check direction, and found authentic posting came first, mood lift came after. A cause, established through pre-registration and a within-person design, not just a correlation explained away by happy people posting honestly.

We can usually tell the difference in an instant. But I want to be precise about what that study measured, because I’m about to extend it further than the data goes.

The research shows personality-consistent posting improves mood. It doesn’t measure what happens when your hidden self gets discovered by the wrong person. The test I’m about to describe is my own extension of the Nature Communications finding. I think the mechanism tracks.

Most advice about online hygiene treats exposure as a reputational problem. Don’t get caught. Keep the kink self and the professional self, maybe even the personal self, your friends and family, far enough apart that neither implicates the other.

I think that distance itself is the problem.

Here’s my test. If your professional life, your family, or your partner’s closest friend found the version of you that lives elsewhere, in a kink community, in an essay under a different name, in a photo meant only for a small trusted circle, what happens internally.

A shrug and a smile means you’ve done the work of living with integrity. A cold drop in your stomach means you haven’t integrated that part of yourself yet, and no account setting closes the gap between who you are and who you present to the world.

Which one did you feel, ?

Many of you message me privately asking some version of the same question. Am I okay to feel this way. How do I give myself permission to explore the deeper parts of me and not lose everything.

Some of you are at real risk if you’re found out, and I want to be careful. My own career is kink precarious. I was trained, formally, that if you wouldn’t want a piece of correspondence on the front page of a newspaper, you don’t send it. I’ve been blackmailed, and I lived through it. That I survived it doesn’t mean everyone would. I’m not telling you to match my exposure.

I can say come at me because of where I sit. A career in leadership like mine survives this kind of honesty. Mine has. And I will be okay if one day it does not.

A teacher’s does not survive it the same way. An officer’s may not. Some of you are one photo away from losing a livelihood other people depend on, or worse. What I’m telling you is that courage is contagious, and my brand of authenticity might be useful to you even from a much safer distance than mine.

To do that, I had to pull all the different parts of myself together, and live from the same space. Pull from the same energy.

Every single day.

Here’s the part nobody puts in the wellness column version of this argument.

Integration doesn’t just make you feel more whole. It makes you harder to scam, harder to manipulate, and a lot less interesting to people hiding bad intentions, whether that’s your school board, your in-laws, or your boss.

The internet lets people rehearse a version of themselves they’d never risk showing anyone who knows them. Someone who’d never behave a certain way in front of their own community will type it into a thread without hesitation, because the platform removes the immediate cost of being seen doing it.

That disinhibition is where the scammers, the fantasists, and the plain creeps all live, including the person you met online that you’ve quietly started projecting every desire onto. Their tell is almost always the same one you’d catch in a badly written kink profile, if you were skilled enough to see it.

Sloppy. Inconsistent.

A claimed identity that doesn’t hold together under thirty seconds of scrutiny.

When someone’s opening warmth doesn’t match their next paragraph’s presumption, when a claimed amount of experience doesn’t match a profile that can’t manage a real name or a real photo, I don’t read that as mixed signals. I read it as data. Something is off, whether or not the person intends harm, and integration lets you clock the mismatch before you spend any of your time finding out which.

This is also, not incidentally, why this flavor of nonsense rarely reaches me. It is not luck. The way in which I’ve written myself into public view doesn’t read as easy pickings.

You could take content from any one of my platforms and put it on the front page of a newspaper, and I’d be delighted you found my work, genuinely curious what you were doing in my neck of the woods, and what you thought of it.

Try outing someone who’s already grinning back at you.

Integration isn’t only an inner peace project. It’s a filter. People whose own presentation is scattered, evasive, or performing something they can’t back up tend to self-select out before they reach you, because a coherent profile signals someone who will notice incoherence in return.

My profile reads as: this is who I am, this is what I do, and I see you. Because this is my life. I hurt no one. I break no rule, no guideline, no standard that disqualifies me from doing what I do best, in family, in career, in any work meeting.

My eros isn’t rare. It’s common enough that most of what stops people isn’t desire, it’s fear of being identified and called out for who they really are.

People with bad intentions don’t like being seen. Their persona can’t hold up to scrutiny, so they move to an easier target.

Don’t be an easy target.

There’s a structural version of this worth sitting with. Researchers studying why people increasingly use LinkedIn for dating found that professional stakes function as a built-in honesty mechanism. Colleagues, clients, and a searchable work history are watching one version of you, which makes running a wildly different second version there difficult to sustain. It’s built in. The platform does the enforcement so the individual doesn’t have to.

FetLife and Substack don’t build that in. No one’s employer runs a standing check on your kink profile the way a LinkedIn connection runs one on your work history. But exposure still happens in online kink spaces, through a screenshot, a mutual connection, a coincidence, and when it does, it lands without warning instead of being priced in from the start.

Whatever protection LinkedIn gets automatically, we have to build on purpose. We don’t get to skip it just because no one is checking today. As recognition technology gets sharper, it stops being a question of if.

It’s when.

This doesn’t reduce to smarter content strategy, a better bio, a sharper photo, a smarter privacy setting. Those help, and they are not you doing the deeper work of living a life you are proud of.

Underneath all of those sits one question: is there a version of you that would collapse if seen by the wrong person, and what would it take to become someone who wouldn’t.

That’s where real soul hygiene begins. Everything else polishes your profile. It doesn’t touch the person behind it.

I’ve learned this the hard way. Partitioning yourself doesn’t work as a long-term strategy. There will always be people who project onto you. The work is knowing where your own boundaries are, knowing who you actually are, knowing what lets you sleep at night.

That’s where you come in. What kind of presence do you want to build? Who’s guiding you through it?

Together, we can make the internet less of a dumpster fire and more of a place for the deeper connection we are looking for.

Love and power,

Ava

P.S. Some of what you just read is not only essay. It is also the work I do with people directly, one at a time. If that is you, start here.

Learn more about me and connect for a free consultation.

I am starting something new.

Every piece I publish here is a room you can walk into. It’s ours. Public, considered, written to hold up under scrutiny from anyone who finds it.

But not everything I know belongs in that room. The specific stories from my own life I haven’t yet told, the ones that make the philosophy and theories behind my work tangible. Felt.

And the practical part, the concrete ways to apply what I’m writing about to your life right now.

That lives in the Back Room now.

Paid subscribers get the second half of select essays there, where the argument turns into practice and I share with you my lived experience, not just what I’ve concluded from it.

I am calling it The Back Room and here is my invitation into the part of me, of what I’ve learned actually works, that I don’t open to everyone.

20% of the proceeds fund the vital public education and community events that my House, one of the only female led BDSM Houses in the country, hosts.

Think of it like the speakeasy into my soul. Come in. It’s nice here in the darkness.

Read more

I was mid-sentence in an argument with a dominant I was seeing that did not need to happen when I felt the old move rise up in me like a record player falling into a familiar groove.

Resistance.

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He asked for clarification. We had laid the foundation for a healthy D/s dynamic. Not perfect, none are. But solid. I would argue above and beyond what most relationships establish ever.

Yet, I gave him silence. The flat withdrawing of my voice, of my openness, so he would have to notice, would have to ask.

Would have to work for it.

I had frozen. And, it was a test. I needed to tap the edges of what we were forming to see if the structure I hoped was there actually held, without asking the hard questions directly.

This was unfair. To both of us. So where was the resistance coming from?

I have done this many times and called it self-protection. An escape route so that if this was not what I had envisioned in my idealized 24/7 power dynamic, I did not have to feel diminished or rejected.

What if I found out he was not really willing or able to hold our dynamic?

To hold me. To hold us. The container we were building with every yes Sir and kneel for me.

And I had been yes Sir-ing it up and yes Daddy-ing straight from my pussy the entire time, make no mistake. I wanted this. I was a fuck yes from the start.

Yet, when things got real, when I actually had to put my adulting pants on and give him a straight answer, I struggled.

He did not chase it. He calmly said, name what you need, out loud, right now. We are not doing this.

I did not want to. I wanted to be found. I wanted him to read me without my having to explain everything, to produce the exact repair without my having to hand him the instructions. Because if I have to ask for it directly then some part of me has to admit I want it, and wanting it plainly, in front of someone I deeply wanted, is the single most exposed I have ever been in front of another person.

It does not matter what the specific thing is. The real fear underneath it is simple: what if he sees this much of me and does not like it.

In my vanilla relationships, it was easier. A part of you can always stay hidden. Armored. Your hands can, often must, stay white-knuckled on the wheel, because if you take them off for one second you go over the edge into the ravine.

If you do not do it yourself, no one will. Precision is efficiency in a world that values production over substance. That is not only acceptable in the vanilla world. It is encouraged.

Be a strong independent woman. A boss bitch. Never be dependent on a man for anything. That is how you take care of your children. Your life. Your finances. To not be taken advantage of.

Never be vulnerable. Never give in. If you do, whatever happens as a result will be your fault. And there will be blame. Usually from those you care about the most. Your family. Your church. Your friends.

You knew better, after all.

Yet, what I desired was a 24/7 power exchange dynamic. I wanted more. What I did not expect was that this required more of me.

Much more.

To go against the grain of the entirety of my social programming.

In my romanticized fantasy, he simply took what he wanted and I was held captive to his obsessive, singular, never-ending desire.

I am convinced after talking to thousands of women and men that this is a deep seated part of our erotic structure.

Especially women. Men feel it, too.

Yet, through our fear, we have morphed sexual safety and security into an erotic kink.

That says a lot about our culture and generational trauma.

Perhaps that says addresses the state of being human.

And yet, this is real life. Right now.

We desire an actual power exchange relationship with another human being that requires more, including a better understanding of ourself, our desires, and our limits.

I had asked for it. I did not sign up, in my head, for the unsexy work. The honest risk versus reward assessment. The above-and-beyond determination. And worse, the willingness to let go.

To let go of control, even when you think you are so close to the thing you have always wanted. Even when the temptation is to manipulate the situation just enough that the outcome you desire arrives faster. To control his response just enough to get what you want in the moment.

Especially then.

This is agony. It is also thrilling.

Both true at once, and neither cancels the other out. It’s the tension of opposites that submissives live for. To live in our wanting state, to thrive in it. It keeps our senses heightened and our eros swirling.

We draw energy from it which lights up every other part of our life.

It sparks my creativity. Makes me a better leader, friend, and community holder.

If you are reading this, you have felt that pull too. To feel, in exquisite detail, your soul blown wide open. To loosen your grip and feel the natural riptide of your erotic being wash you away somewhere it is welcome, and secure, and loved, and whole.

So I said it. I pulled myself together and I said it. Out loud. To another human being with his own trauma, his own boundaries, his own agenda, his own sources of joy.

I need more than this. I want more and I want it defined. I want to feel chosen and cherished and loved. Not despite my faults. Including them. I want to tell you this and be able to take my hands off the wheel and watch you drive and know I will be safe doing it.

It came out of my mouth like a confession because it was one. I clasped my hand over my mouth and looked at him wide-eyed, bracing for the disapproval.

As a disclaimer, I wish it had come out even half as eloquently as that.

It did not.

It was messier. And nonetheless true.

That was the essence of it, though. Dominants are not word gardeners. And they are not your word gardeners. They have their own feelings to work out, just as you do.

I learned this the hard way.

I wish I could tell you what I received in return was something like of course, come here, lie still, I have got you in all your imperfection, here is some ice cream, now let me fuck you into oblivion.

That is not what happened.

And I own my part of that.

If I had known then what I know now, I would have done things differently. You don’t know what you don’t know. And I did not know how to get from the idealized version of what I desired to what was right there in front of me had I been skilled or experienced enough to bridge that gap.

However, there was one mind-shift, one reframing of the whole dynamic, that changed everything.

I am going to hand you that insight right now.

When most people think about dominance and submission, they picture the romanticized version. The cute brats on TikTok and Instagram. The shadowy man who arrives and carries you away from all your life’s stress and strain.

If you are looking for something real, something more intimate, we have to go deeper than what popular media and culture has sold us on relationships.

Any relationship.

Deeper than D/s

To understand your submissive desires, we must first familiarize ourselves with polarity.

As a person who does not identify as a submissive, this was the thing that erased all my shame and unlocked my erotic energy.

Polarity is the current running beneath all relationships. In BDSM dynamics, the D/s aspect is the reinforcement: the kneeling, the protocol, the collar.

Polarity is the electricity the structure exists to hold.

You can have all the BDSM choreography and none of the current.

That is the fairweather dominant with all the vocabulary yet collapses and withdrawals under the weight of their submissive’s emotions.

The submissive unable to trust in her dominate to make basic choices then criticizes them for not leading correctly.

Here is the whole idea: Charge comes from difference, not sameness.

One person holds direction. Who makes the final decisions. Who builds the container of their lives and the conditions within it. Unwavering, structured, solid.

The other holds flow. Radiant, alive, unguarded, receptive. The one who moves inside the structure instead of building it. The one in service to it. Who gives openly.

Think of it in terms or organizational psychology, if that helps. For any institution to run smoothly, there must be those who create and maintain company culture, HR to resolve conflict, a Board of Directors to lead long-term strategy. That is the Dominant’s role. Likewise, there must be those who receive instruction and carry out this vision. Who follow and support senior leadership because they are invested in the success of the organization as a whole.

When a couple in balanced polarity are supported in their roles, the organization thrives and everyone profits.

Conflict arises when one or both partners slide, or are forced, into inverse polarity.

Two people both gripping the wheel generates friction. A wreck. Two people gone soft does not generate that spark of electricity either. That is two people lost in the same fog with no map and no one driving.

The charge is the voltage between one pole and the other, and it cannot exist without that precise exchange of energy.

Polarity is not a role you can play. It does not arrive because you lit a candle and said yes, Sir out loud one time.

It is the orientation your nervous system defaults to when the atmosphere of the relationship is right. When the container is solid and your nervous system is at ease.

It is a process. A long, often uncomfortable one. Layers and layers of conditioning and narratives must be stripped off. Once you peel back one, another is revealed.

Yet, the more you strip away the stories we tell ourselves and remove our personal and societal blocks, we can begin to discover what our soul wants from us.

I surrendered to the process and let it play out.

In return, I gained trust in my partner and a sense of freedom in myself.

I lost absolutely nothing.

D/s ascetics are the easy part

Here is what we were sold: A hand in your hair. The relief of not deciding, for once. Of letting go and becoming undone. The hand on your throat. The collar and the contract.

The sexy parts.

It is real. Oh yes, that is all very real.

It is maybe ten percent of the job.

The other ninety percent looks like this.

Doing the thing you agreed to when you do not feel like it, and being honest that you do not feel like it, instead of doing it badly on purpose so he has to notice your resistance and manage your feelings for you.

Telling him the truth about a want before it curdles into a grievance.

Taking correction without dissolving into I am worthless or hardening into you are wrong to ask this of me.

Staying in your body when what your body wants is to leave the room, the conversation, the relationship, and calling that abandonment self-protection when it is often just old narratives posing as a boundary.

There is a whole industry selling you the ten percent and calling it submission. The collard sub who has never once let a man see her actually lose an argument. The girl on Fet whose submission is more extreme, more degraded, more devoted, as if suffering creatively is the same thing as surrendering honestly. From BookTok to podcasts, and yes, here on substack, what is advertised as sexy is only just the start.

Do I love it? Yes, I do.

Yet, real life submission asks you to be an adult who chooses to yield, over and over, out loud. Not this cute version. Not while you are running to the bank or getting groceries. Not a woman performing yielding while quietly running the relationship from underneath it through moods, tests, and silences.

A woman who knows herself first. Who can use her words. And then, ride the ride instead of continuously attempting to control it.

And look, it is hard.

So we make excuses. Bypasses. And it undercuts what we really want on a soul level.

The real power lie

Somewhere a well-meaning friend, a substack writer, a podcast, told you the line that is supposed to make all of this comfortable:

“Submissives are actually the ones in control.”

The reasoning often given is that without submission there can be no dominance. That they are the ones that hold all the power.

This completely undercuts the point of consensual power exchange. It is right there in the name. Power that is exchanged from one party to the other.

On purpose. Consciously.

Sure. I hold the safeword. That is not a secret and it is not a plot twist, it is the entire architecture of consent, and without consent, is not a dynamic, it is abuse. But do not confuse the exit sign with the point of D/s. I did not walk in wanting to use it.

I wanted a dominate capable enough that my urge to control the dynamic gathers dust.

Telling a submissive she is really the one in charge is not a compliment, it is a bribe. It is forcing a submissive into an unwanted power state. If this is a woman, it is forcing her into her masuline. Into her inverse polarity where she specifically did not consent to by willfully entering a D/s dynamic.

It is the opposite of what they were signing up for.

It is the thing people say to a submissive the second they admit they desire to kneel, so the culture does not have to sit with what they actually asked for. It hands them a crown to hold onto so they do not feel small for wanting to feel small.

Wishing to live in your natural polarity is not something anyone needs permission or excuses for. It is a perfectly healthy thing to want to do.

Normal, even.

I do not need a crown or a permission slip to submit. I already have power. It is sitting right there in my own name, my own income, and my own self awareness. What I do not want is the power in my D/s relationship.

What I am doing when I kneel is not smuggling that power back in through a side door and calling it submission. I am spending it. On purpose. Handing it over is the entire transaction.

Insisting I secretly still hold it is not flattery, it is a refusal to let the transaction be real, and it cheapens both what he receives and what it cost me to give it.

I am a sadomasochist. When I take on submissives, I am acutely aware of the ways in which power originates, the manner in which it flows, and why. There is no productive reason to inform a person offering their submission to me, other than coercion, that they are really the ones that are in control.

I am.

And I full on take responsibility and accountability for it.

Likewise, if I told my Dominate I was the one who really held the power in our relationship, he would likely have a heart attack laughing, then ask me if I was feeling okay, given that I intensionally entered in our specific dynamic after discussing in vivid detail our deepest needs and desires, then tested it at scale.

Ridiculous.

The entire point, the whole erotic charge of it, is that we have power to give away and choose to, time and time again, to a person we trust to use it with care. To feed it back into our relationship creating the best version of each other, of us, possible.

This line is a myth. A basic misunderstanding of consensual power dynamics at large and of submissive desire specifically.

The closer truth is there is no submission without dominance.

That makes people uncomfortable. There is a history there.

The conquering of nations. Of entire peoples.

Of me.

Sit with that.

Yet, that is the formula for successful long-term, 24/7 power exchange relationships.

Free from shame. Free from stigma.

Free to use your power as you see fit.

Use your power wisely.

A word for brats

Brat play, negotiated and named as play, is genuinely great. A taste for resistance both people enjoy is not the problem here. It is the premise of every smut book ever.

It goes like this:

“I must have you.”

“No, no, no.”

“You are mine.”

“Make me, you beast!”

“My pleasure, princess.”

“Oh, no! Oh, yeeees! Okay I’m yours forever.”

The end.

This is fine if you are comfortable never advancing past submissive kindergarten. It’s a fun place to be. Until it’s not.

Allow me to explain.

You are a problem, and not a complex one. You are also not a submissive in any sense of the word. Not really.

The problem is the version of I’m such a brat that has calcified into a permanent identity, one you can wear to every relationship, post to every feed, and never once have to hand over anything that costs you.

Calling yourself a brat can be the socially acceptable way of announcing I intend to resist you at every real turn and I will call it play so you can never accuse me of actually failing to submit, because I never agreed to in the first place.

That is not an orientation. That is a stalling tactic with better marketing than most stalling tactics get.

Here is the tell. Ask a brat what she is actually afraid of. Most of the time she does not have an answer, because she has never gotten close enough to find out. Resistance is not covering a truth. For her, the resistance is the whole operation, and she has built an entire persona to keep from discovering what is underneath it.

I am not scolding anyone for having a personality, and I am not asking you to stop being funny or sharp or a handful in the ways that make you fun to be around. I am telling you that brat without one real dropped moment somewhere underneath it is not a kink. It is a hiding place for trauma with a cute name.

Do you want to be cute? Really?

I bet you want more.

This is manipulation, sloppy bullying, and dishonest. You do not need to push someone to find their edge. To be overpowered. To be given the mental permission you needed to submit when you could have simply taken an honest look at yourself, acquired the emotional intelligence required to obtain what you want consensually, and worked through that with someone instead of at someone.

In other words, you simply could use your big girl words and asked for what you want.

Here is what that looks like in my world:

“I would like to experience a CNC scene.”

“Fantastic. Let’s have a conversation on what that looks like for us.”

Done. You’ll be chased down in the woods by that masked man before you know it.

First though, you must build the honest foundation in which trust like this is built. That is the part that takes time. There may be some feelings to work through on both sides. That is fine.

And that is what intimacy looks like in practice.

Dominants are less likely to engage in this type of varsity level play if they do not trust you. There is risk involved on their part, and brats are infamously untrustworthy. In fact, it’s their whole stick.

Bypassing this step has undesirable consequences that leave you hollow at best. Do you really want to be a lifetime victim?

Gross.

Try putting it down for one night, actually meaning it, saying the true thing instead of the clever deflection, and see what happens. You might hate it. You may not get immediate results.

You might also find out it gets you something the persona never could.

If you don’t know where to start, DM me.

Sub 101

Dominance gets defined by what a man does when it is hard. Fair. Submission has the same test, and we like to skip it.

A woman who can drop only during a scene she has had a week to prepare for, when she is not tired, when no-one is asking anything difficult of her, has not tested her submission under pressure. She has learned to enjoy a mood that arrives under ideal conditions, but it is not the discipline the word promises. Not in deeper, long-term power exchange dynamics.

The discipline is this.

Can you soften when you are angry at him and still tell him you are angry, in words, without withdrawing your softness as punishment?

Can you take his direction on a day you privately think your way was better, and raise that afterward like a partner instead of swallowing it and logging it as evidence for a future indictment?

Can you let him see you when you are not at your best? Actually unglamorous, ugly sobbing, unreasonable, wrong, and stay in the room for the repair instead of fleeing to the version of yourself that has it all together, because that version does not need anyone and therefore never has to risk this?

Submission that only shows up when it is convenient is not submission. It is a a scene in every definition of the word. I know because I have done it, and it fools dominants (especially men) faster than almost anything else, because it looks so much like the real thing from the outside that even I sometimes could not tell.

The fix is to be honest. To yourself and to your potential partners, about who you are, what you desire, and where you are on your journey. And then, let the pieces fall where they may.

Because this is your life. This is being in service to yourself. And you are okay in doing so. You can let go no matter what happens.

Submissives live in their heads. And their hearts. People who do not identity as submissives who do submit live further.

That feels like a void. That is a cliff. I can help you with that, too.

The Accountability Nobody Warns You About

Honestly is what he was asking of me that night when he asked me to use my words. Not perfect language. Just true language.

These sentences stopped me cold the first time a partner said them to me: You are allowed to need things. You are not allowed to make me guess them and then resent me for failing a test I did not know I was taking.

Some submissives build an entire identity around being someone whose needs were legible only to a dominant perceptive enough to earn them without being told. It feels like a standard.

It is actually a trap, one that let you stay safely undefended while looking devoted, because a need that is never spoken can never be refused.

A need that is never spoken can also never be met.

Submission, surrender, requires you to risk the refusal. To say, I need reassurance right now and hear him say not right now, I am driving, and survive it without deciding this proves he was never the one.

To ask for a specific kind of touch, a specific word, a specific structure to your week, and own that you asked for it by softening to it instead of giving him more work to do by shrugging it off when you get busy or distracted.

The point is to make your dominant’s life easier, not an endless list of tasks and reprimands you later resent.

Wanting out loud is healthy. It is also, I will be honest, the thing that still makes my hands shake a little, every single time.

It also makes my core ache and my pupils dilate.

The real test, the one that makes all of this work, is that once you’ve advocated for yourself, your desires, your boundaries, your truth…

Then, you have to let go and let your dominant drive.

You simply must. There is no way around it.

There is no hack. No trick.

Trusting that you will be okay, no matter how this plays out, is not just about giving up control.

This is what love and devotion is really all about. And where it begins.

Here is what that looks like.

Hands Off the Wheel

I told him I wanted to take my hands off the wheel and watch him drive. That sentence is easy to say once, in the high of a real confession. It is a different matter to actually do it two weeks later, when he orders food you hate.

Say the truth first. That part is not optional and it is not romantic to skip. Tell him who you are. Do you know? If not, you should. What are your desires, your triggers, what your history brings into this. Tell him where the lines are. Tell him what scares you before you hand him anything.

By doing this act of enormous bravery, you are giving them something invaluable to build something off of.

You.

They know you now well enough to know how to lead you. Your preferences, your dietary restrictions, your pleasure points, your deepest desires.

Because you have allowed them to know you.

Because you know yourself.

Surrender built on a truth you were too afraid to say out loud is not surrender, it is a false premise with a due date. And you both pay for it in the opportunity loss of divine connection.

Once it is said, the job changes completely. You put your hands in your lap. You do not grab the wheel back the moment he takes a turn you would not have taken. You do not just mention the better way to do it. You do not narrate his mistakes in real time like a backseat driver with a safeword.

You watch him get it wrong sometimes, and you say nothing, and you let his learning be his to notice and correct, because that is what trusting someone completely, maybe for the first time in your life, and probably in theirs, actually looks like from the inside. It looks like a silence you did not earn easily and have to keep choosing.

For you. And also for them.

This has almost nothing to do with a scene. This is Tuesday at six, when he picks a restaurant you would not have picked, or handles a call with your mother in a way you would have handled differently, and you stay soft, and you do not build a file for later.

You gave him the wheel. Taking it back every time he does not use it exactly the way you would have is not oversight on your part. It is the actual content of whether the trust you claimed you wanted to give him was ever real.

Staying is the hard part. Harder than the offering. Anyone can hand over a wheel once, in a good mood, feeling generous. Fewer of us can leave our hands off it the third time he takes an route we hate, the tenth time, the fiftieth, and mean it, and not privately keep score, and stay that way.

A caveat: If you are afraid for your safety, if this feels like isolation, wrong in any way, talk to someone. Consensual power exchange is not abuse. Not ever. I will be honest, in BDSM is it hard to tell the difference sometimes. Have resources on the ready before you get into a situation that you find it difficult to get out of. This is where surrounding yourself by trusted community elders, kink knowledgable therapists, and kink coaches are invaluable. Even when you do your due diligence, your projected desires can be so powerful that you willingly look over the red flags that, in hindsight, were everywhere. Plus, you simply do not know, what you do not know.

The Harder Version

There is a version of submission that looks like disappearing. No opinions left. No preferences. A woman so thoroughly folded into a man’s direction that she has nothing of her own left to negotiate with, and people call this the deepest submission there is.

I do not believe that. A woman with nothing left to hold has not surrendered anything. She has evacuated the premises. What is left for him to lead is not a person, it is an absence wearing her name, and there is no trust transaction happening in an empty room.

This is less sexy than many new to submission imagine. A women surrendered without agency is nearly as un-fun to play with as a brat. Both are uninspired and while this may lead to short term satisfaction, end in long-term emptiness.

The harder submission is the one where I keep my opinions, my work, my friendships, my own unfinished healing, my occasional bad mood that has nothing to do with him, the community I have surrounded myself with… and I still choose, on purpose, again and again, to hand him the wheel in the specific places we have agreed the wheel is his, and then keep my hands off it.

I get to sit back and watch his leadership grow stronger with every, you’ve got this, I trust you. He continually surprises me with what he does with his power once he is handed creative control.

It is breathtaking. My knees get weak just thinking about it.

Do it and watch him glow. To bask in their power while you breathe a full breath is nothing short of spectacular, I promise you.

That is a transaction between two whole people. It costs me something real every time because I have something real to lose. The resistance version creates tension without the satisfaction of watching them build something amazing for you. For both of you. The disappearing version costs you your soul.

Do the work. Show up honest instead of managed. Say the true sentence before it becomes a test. Let yourself be seen in the ugly parts, not just the sexy parts. Take correction without collapsing or bricking the door. Give up the wheel and actually stay out of reach of it.

That is the sub ass shit that’s real, and it is also the only version I have ever seen actually last.

Love and surrender,

Ava

This is the other half of Everyone Wants to Be a Dom Until You Have to Do Some Dom Ass Sh*t.

P.S. — If this piece was helpful, yet you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your journey — I’m happy to guide you privately. In person and remote options available.

Thank you for reading, . I would love to hear from you. DM me and let’s connect.

Learn more about me and what I do.

Why I Started a House

I did a thing.

A thing I have been wanting to do for a long time. A thing I have felt in my body. In my heart. From my neck, and my back, down the length of my legs, and everywhere in between. In my very soul. Drilling down inside of me. Something I have craved in my own life for decades.

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A real need.

An ancient calling.

A risen thing.

This thing that I know will make a real difference. For real people.

People like me.

People like you, .

And now, I would like to share this thing with you.

I started a House.

Here is what that means and why it matters.

What is a House?

Let’s say you have always quietly been curious about power exchange relationships. You’ve read some spicy books and something deep within you lights up. You’ve had an experience you have not been able to forget and want more. Something startling that shook you to your core. Desires you have put on a shelf to justify your neat, normal life.

And yet you feel alone. Incomplete.

So you decide to take this journey of your soul’s ache to the next level.

You’ve taken some classes. Read some books. Gone to community events. Maybe a munch. Perhaps a club or two.

But have you heard of a House?

If you haven’t spent time in this world, the word probably conjures a secret dark place, a bunch of slaves serving leather-clad Masters, hidden dungeons, a cult-like following.

That’s not quite right.

It’s not entirely wrong either.

A House, in the lifestyle sense, is a chosen family built around Dominance and submission, kink, and conscious power exchange. It has a founder, someone who has done this work long enough to have something worthwhile to build something solid around.

It has members who commit the way you’d commit to any real community. It has structure: protocol, ritual, education, gatherings, a way of holding each other accountable.

Most people outside this world have never heard the word used this way. Most people inside it have only heard it whispered, like a speakeasy.

That’s not by accident. Houses go back generations, built by people who had no other space to be with others who shared their interests.

Here’s the history, worth knowing before I tell you why I built one anyway.

A short history of Houses

The most cited origin traces to gay servicemen coming home from World War II. Missing military camaraderie, they built fraternal groups instead, motorcycle clubs at first, bound by rules and codes of conduct rather than blood.

By the 1970s, the more organized style of leather had developed into a complex culture of hierarchy and comradery. Guy Baldwin, the psychotherapist and former International Mr. Leather whose 1991 essay on the Old Guard is still the most quoted piece ever written on the subject, described stumbling into Denver’s gay leather underground as a young man and finding what he called a surrogate family there.

Women weren’t invited into that world, so they built their own. Leather and Lace formed in Los Angeles as a women’s BDSM support and social group, adapting the same protocol-driven structure into a scene built for women rather than around them.

Worth saying plainly: even leather historians argue about how unified any of this ever was. The Old Guard has been mythologized, and the record behind it is hard to pin down, split from the start between a more disciplined, protocol-driven faction and a rowdier, informal one.

Leather families were never standardized. One leather elder puts it this way:

There is no blueprint for how to form one, and different founders call the same structure a tribe, a household, or a House, whichever fits. Succession has always been personal rather than institutional, an elder mentoring the juniors who earn their way in, grooming them to eventually lead.

Separately, and just as old, an educational tradition emerged with nothing to do with any single lineage. Cynthia Slater founded the Society of Janus in San Francisco in 1974 because the existing clubs were professionally oriented and offered little community for women like her. That’s the real ancestor of open education in this lifestyle, not any one House’s secrecy.

So the honest claim isn’t that Houses have always been closed. It’s that two traditions, private lineage and public education, have mostly run on separate tracks for fifty years.

This House is where I’m fusing them.

To be modeled

Houses built around a single lineage were built to protect one leader, one small circle. They stayed small and quiet because that was the only way that kind of House could survive.

I don’t want this House to survive by staying invisible.

I want it built well enough to be copied.

That doesn’t mean starting from nothing. Decades of people in this lifestyle built real knowledge, real protocols, real culture worth keeping: education passed down with care, ritual that actually means something. Mentorship that isn’t transactional. I’m building on top of that, not around it.

What I’m leaving behind is whatever calcified along the way, rules kept because they’re old rather than because they’re right, status mistaken for trustworthiness or worthiness, structure never revisited once it’s set.

So the House is modeled instead of kept in one person’s head.

Transferable.

Scalable.

It’s designed so a founding member could eventually take everything they’ve learned here and start their own House on this same design, with my support behind them. Something replicable because it’s real enough to survive being handed to someone else, not because it’s been diluted into something anyone can run.

That’s the opposite of secret. A House built to be a model other Houses can learn from, for a community actively looking for something newer and deeper than most of us stumbled upon in this lifestyle.

If we stumbled upon it at all.

Here is what makes mine different.

The House of Three Rivers: Power. Eros. Soul.

My House was born from this Substack.

And, I am a woman.

We called it the House of Three Rivers because power, eros, and soul are the currents that run through me, through all of us, each one feeding the others. They are my ethos, my North Star, the source of my desire, inspiration, and creativity.

Three rivers from a single source, meeting where the water runs deep. That’s the argument this Substack has made since its first post.

This House is built to prove it in practice, not just in writing.

Power is power you choose, name, and keep testing, not power assumed once and left unexamined.

Eros is desire given a real container: taught, practiced, played. A way of moving through the world on your own erotic terms, instead of leaving desire locked away in private.

Soul means you already know what yours is asking of you, and you’ve stopped living any version of your life that ignores it.

This is the tenet the entire House is built around.

Though it is women led, I prioritize the natural polarization that forms, in whatever way that flows through us.

Two doors, one elevated

I’ve built this House around inclusion as a value.

Still, there are two ways to experience what we offer.

Our public events are open to everyone, the newcomer who’s never set foot in a scene and the person who’s been in this lifestyle for twenty years.

They are where you find us first, designed with real intention, borrowed openly from the discipline in The Art of the Gathering by Priya Parker: a shape, a purpose, a reason to return. Not a room where people stand around with drinks making the same small talk they’d make anywhere else.

A room built for actual conversation, human connection, real meaning-making.

Membership is a different door, and it goes deeper.

Members are vetted for a specific reason: House members are mentors, leaders who’ve earned real standing in this community, elders, people who’ve built real accumulated knowledge in their particular corner of this field, whether that’s protocol, negotiation, a specific kind of play, or simply decades of lived experience worth passing on.

They are people I know and that I respect.

They serve the public and the House both.

Teaching classes, sharing their craft, leading workshops, hosting events, monitoring play parties, serving the House internally.

Each plays a part in building and advancing the community as a whole.

They learn from one another and show up for each other when it’s needed. What every member shares isn’t just a skill set. It’s an investment, a working interest in this House’s success and in the health of the wider community it sits inside.

For members, this is a place to go past the conversations most of us cut our teeth on: the real edges of what’s possible once negotiation, consent, and aftercare already live in your body, advanced dynamics, deeper shadow work, the kind of exploration and growth that lifts everyone around you because you have done the work yourself and in community with those who hold you through it.

Belonging lives in both rooms.

Depth of responsibility does not.

We show up

Here’s the test I hold this House to.

If a member is moving across town, or across the country, I want a group of people showing up with a truck and pizza before they’ve even finished asking.

If someone is grieving, I want people at their door, not just in their inbox. If someone is celebrating, an engagement, a promotion, surviving something hard, I want a room full of people who know them well enough to ritualize that with them.

We grieve together.

We celebrate together.

We take the masks off, the professional one, the polite one, the one you wear so the rest of the world doesn’t ask questions, and we become more of who we actually are.

A risen thing, after all. Ancient, and entirely new.

A thing we do in togetherness. Just like the hard work of those who came before us. Who sacrificed to give us the space we have today. To build upon. To experience true freedom, meaning-making, and honest, loyal community.

That’s the debt. Building this House is how I’m paying it forward instead of just carrying it.

Love and belonging,

Ava

P.S. — If this piece was helpful, yet you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your BDSM journey — I’m happy to guide you privately. In person and remote options available. DM me and let’s connect.

Learn more about me and what I do.

I had been awake since five. By the time I reached his door I had been the one in charge for fourteen hours. The one who led. Who anticipated, planned, and stressed. I had run my own life all day the way I did every single day, with both hands on the wheel and my jaw locked in place.

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He had made a container and he wanted me inside it now. Soft, dropped, present. In my feminine, receptive and attuned to him. A particular order to things. I wanted to be inside it too. That was the part that still undoes me. The wanting was there. The wanting is always there.

What was not there yet was the off switch.

It takes time to set down a life you have been carrying since dawn. For years. All your life. More time than a person who has never carried it understands. The vigilance does not end at a doorway. It follows you in.

I stood in his careful space, still half in command of a day that was technically over, reaching for presence through a fog of to-do lists slowly dissolving, and still not arriving fast enough.

He read the lag as a verdict on him. The unspoken message that I had walked into the space he made and disrespected it. That my distraction was disregard. That a real submissive would have dropped already. Spoken to him in the right register. Showed him the right deference.

He was wrong about what he was looking at. He was looking at exhaustion and calling it defiance. Too much. Not enough.

If you want to lead a woman who lives like this, and most of us do, sit in what I just described. Fourteen hours at the wheel. The off switch that will not flip on your schedule. I mean, would yours switch on mine? Even if you wanted it to? Even if you had asked for precisely that.

Fuck. No.

Because most dominants never have to flip that switch at all. Women do. It takes real effort. It burns our energy, even if the process is something we desire.

That is what you are reading when you read her lag, and I will explain here what it costs her to offer her submission to you. This applies to all submissives to a degree, yet this piece addresses a specific programming that women experience throughout their lives.

The words people reach for when they think of power dynamics is hot. Sexy. Thrilling. Taboo. That happens. Yet, both dominants and submissives should consider what they are actually signing up for. This is the deeper more complicated aspect of D/s dynamics.

The switch has a cost

The desire to surrender to a man who could hold the container was already in me. It predates him. It predates every dynamic I have been in. It lives in my feminine nature unapologetically. The most elemental part of me allowed to be in relationship with masculine energy.

What is situational is the expression of that desire. I run most of my own life because no one else is there to do it but me, and then I am asked to lay that life down on cue and trust the patience and care will be there to help me cross over.

Orientation is not the problem. I want to be there. There is nothing I want more than a secure place to land and do what I do best given the opportunity. The logistics are an issue. I am in charge of my own life right up until the moment I kneel, and I cannot hand that title to anyone unstable, demanding, flighty, or needy.

I simply cannot. I will not. And I would never ask that of out of a person submitting to me.

Surrender requires trust. The dominant’s learning curve and mine are mirror images. The instinct to lead lives in him already, and he must learn how to do this in practice rather than in concept. The instinct to yield lives in me already, and I have to fight a relentless life that does not let me set it down. Ever.

Same nature in both of us. Different friction. We both are carrying a lifetime of conditions that keep us in inverse polarity. Of stories that tell us we are bad or weak for embracing what makes us the fully expressed version of what we could be, if we were allowed to do so.

In this particular case, he punished mine as a character flaw, something to tolerate until it was not convenient, while treating his own as a work in progress.

The drop is harder for submissive who arrive home at the end of the day still warm from burning her motor all day. From operating from their masculine and drifting further away from her source of power, erotic energy, and her soul. It costs her more. That cost is not evidence that her surrender is fake. It is evidence that it is expensive.

Before She Can Let Go

Her hesitation is older than any dynamic. Control is not a preference I picked up. It is the thing I adapted to survive. Somewhere along the way, I learned that trusting people is scary. Not only am I responsible for my own challenging life, but in relationship, surrendering control, even for a moment, can be terrifying.

How many men have you met and think to yourself, yes that guy has it all together. I would trust him to lead me. I would honestly be surprised if anyone you know could say that they even know a person who could say that. Yet, they exist. And there are many men working on unwinding from the same inverted polarity they have been conditioned with as well.

For most of my life, I have not seen healthy, conscious masculinity modeled clearly. Media has not shown men in a positive light for decades. There are not many role models or mentors out there.

As a society we have an internalized view that men are incapable of leading, and if they are they must be dangerous. And women must be strong and independent. If they are not, they are complacent to the patriarchy.

That is simply, utterly, not true.

No wonder D/s dynamics are thought of as taboo and most people have never heard the word polarity.

The polarity part is foundational while D/s ascetics reinforce the natural charge between partners. The two combined, is power exchange. And power exchange is not only the stuff for our secret erotica books. It is the recipe for the intensity, trust, and presence you have been searching for in every relationship you have ever had.

Here is what we miss.

Leading is a decision. An action. A man can choose it and begin the same afternoon. It takes more time to unwind from his social programing and feel what it is like, maybe for the first time, to be trusted.

Surrender is not a decision and cannot be willed. It is a state of being. A gift to both parties because it requires the slow process of the masculine finding itself and the feminine feeling safe inside of it.

The feminine is receptive. Yet, we have never been taught how to accept a compliment without fidgeting let alone trust another person to lead our emotional and sexual being. It is a release, a practice, and no one releases on command, any more than an upset person calms down because tells them to.

So when you tell a submissive, especially a woman, to let go, you are not asking for a mood. You are asking the part of them that has kept them alive, to survive, to stand down on command, in the dark, on the word of someone who has not yet proven the universe and everything in it will not implode around them.

Of course it feels like falling. It is falling. The only thing that makes it possible is evidence, gathered slowly, that this time someone is actually there when nearly all historical evidence suggests otherwise. Letting go is not a switch she flips for you. It is a thing her body agrees to once it has watched you long enough to believe you. No collar or contract or rules or rituals do that for you. They are tools, not the mechanism.

You cannot surrender where it is not safe, and safe is not a promise he makes. It is a thing he builds, with effort, over time. The work starts with him and starts before me. He does his own healing first. No woman should be handed this as a second job. As he is able, he builds the container. The structure of your relationship, your life, your sense of safety, trust, and empowerment.

Then the part that is crucial and gets skipped most: he holds her, unwaveringly, while she learns, by degrees, that the holding is real.

She will not make this easy. She will test it. She will push to see if he flinches, pick the fight she did not mean, grab for the reins out of a reflex older than he is. This is not bratting. While some of that is conscious, most of it is not. This is her tapping her foot on the bridge to see if it will hold or give way and fall into a ravine under the slightest pressure. A man who reads resistance as rejection, rather than as the exact thing he signed on to hold, fails here every time.

There is where the ability to hold nuance and grace come in. He needs to know he can make mistakes. That the submissive is on his team. That you are doing this work in parallel and together. Where fear and uncertainty meet honest communication and patience. The result is a relationship with deeper roots because they have been stressed, and nurtured, and continually come out the other side.

That, my friends, is hot. My body opens up just talking about it.

When Rupture happens

Every dynamic gets tested. Money tightens. A child gets sick. An illness or struggle. Work turns vicious. The carefully built container meets actual life, and actual life does not negotiate.

Here is where the two roles split.

The submissive, under pressure, armors up. She has to. Old familiar survival instinct kicks into gear. The surrender she was offering needs a solid foundation, and when the floor shakes, her first instinct is to reach for those reins again. She returns to the masculine out of necessity, resentfully, exactly as she has had to her entire life. Her softness goes back inside where it is safe and waits.

This is grief for her. She is being pulled out of the one place she wanted to stay. Especially when the shit hits the fan and she needs help the most. A submissive in inverse polarity and in crisis is doubly impacted. The trust and security she needed is instantly replaced by ingrained conditioning like groves in a record player.

I will not pretend her armor is always clean. Sometimes it hardens past necessity into a wall. She stops asking and starts issuing terms. She tests him with ultimatums she half hopes he fails which reinforces the narrative. She seals herself off so completely there is no opening left to lead her through, then reads his confusion as proof he was never up to it. No one can lead a woman who has bricked the door. That rupture belongs to both of them.

I have built that wall myself and called it self-respect. It was not. It is avoidance at best and abandonment at worst.

This walling-off is where most vanilla relationships quietly settle, two adults armored against each other, warring their polarity, and calling the distance peace.

Choosing power exchange on purpose is the refusal of that drift. We enter it to do the opposite, to stay open where the reflex is to seal up. To work with our feminine and masculine nature, not swim up current as if our lives depend on it.

And it many cases it did. There have been very real consequences for turning away from our social programming. Ostracism from our communities. Religious groups. Our families. Even death.

The fear is real. And, we have the brave choice not to live this way anymore.

There is a real difference between a man who cannot reach a woman who has sealed herself off out off and a man who leaves or withdraws the moment leading starts to cost him. The first is a rupture two people made. The second is one person quitting and calling it discernment.

His withdrawal did not prove the wanting was counterfeit. It proved he had not done the work: reflected upon his intent, his desires, had his house in order, explored his bandwidth. Desire can be real and yet the man not yet able to hold it. That is the more common story, and the sadder one.

He was not ready, and he took her surrender anyway.

The dominant who stays present faces the choice. He claimed the role. Leading through the hard thing is the specific thing he undertook when she offered her surrender and he accepted it. The moment things get hard is the moment that promise comes due. This is where leadership stops being fantasy and becomes the job.

So, he steps toward her. He takes more from her onto himself. He becomes the steadiness she cannot manufacture for herself right then. He builds the conditions for her surrender around the often complicated circumstances of her lived experience.

Her taking back command of her own life when she has to breaks nothing she promised. His withdrawal breaks the one thing he did when he identified himself as a Dom.

The difference is the opportunity cost of building something new.

Something strong and steady and real.

Most of the men I have watched do the other thing. They withdraw leadership at the moment it matters most. They go quiet. They get busy. They reframe their leaving as her failure and dress it up as boundaries or render it a test of her identity. She discovers, suddenly, that his foot had been near the door the whole time.

Ask the submissives I know and the story barely shifts from one telling to the next.

Dom 101

Pema Chödrön writes about staying. Staying in the middle of intensity consciously instead of fleeing it. To be accountable when you mismanage it. That is discipline. It is also, stripped of the titles, the whole of dominance.

A man who can lead only when nothing is wrong has not learned to lead. He has learned to pose. Good-weather dominance is an aesthetic. It is candles and protocol and the right voice, and it disappears the instant things stop being easy. It was never authority. It was set dressing for a fantasy of authority, and that fantasy required the world to behave. It dissolves under the slightest scrutiny like all falsities do.

Dominance is defined by what it does under pressure. The capacity to lead a person through a hard thing. And life can be hard.

The fairweather dominant is not the same creature as the beginner. The man who says he is learning has done nothing wrong. And there is a lot to learn. The fairweather dominant took her surrender on a claim he could not back, and found out, in the one moment that mattered, that he had been playing a part.

You cannot surrender to a part. To an ideal of dominance. The woman who was asked to trust him will not do it in the absence of consistency. Once a submissive has watched a man crumble at the first real difficulty, the offer she was making, her control, her service, her softness, her actual life laid in his hands, gets withdrawn, and it does not come back cheap.

He spent her trust on his own comfort. On the easy thing. The thing he claimed to desire most, her surrender, her submission, he made permanently more expensive in the act of fleeing it.

Going all in erotically means the ownership language is backed by conduct. If he calls me His, he behaves like it on the day I am unbearable, not only on the night I am irresistible. The you are mine and you will address me as Sir that survives daylight is the only one worth saying.

The rest is dirty talk with no collateral.

Imagine, kneeling while being kept at arms-length. To airy dominance. To a flighty man. It is wishy washy at best.

And submissives can see right through it. Feel it in our bodies and in our soul.

Nothing makes my pussy dry up faster.

This is why I call no man Sir, unless they are my Sir. And you should not ask her of that unless you are willing to show the fuck up. All day. Everyday. Period fucking period.

By accepting her submission, and calling yourself a Dom, you are assuming that level of responsibility. Holding another person’s psyche in your hands. Hands that make mistakes. That are constantly learning. That desire and want and keep building something real.

If that makes you roll your eyes, you are not a Dom, my friend. You are a fantasy version of yourself playing with people lives, and you should go back to BDSM kindergarten because that is where you belong.

The Harder Surrender

Surrendering control or offering dominance can be fine inside the limited frame of a scene, a designated space where you play roles and then go back to your ‘real life.’

What I am talking about asks for more of yourself. It is the long game. Radical honesty inside a committed and loving relationship that honors both partners working as a unit.

So be clear about what kind of relationship you truly desire. To be honest about your intent, you must first know it of yourself. If you do not, your dominance is lazy, sloppy at best and abusive at worst.

This is not a scene you enter and leave. It is a committed life built over years, where the healing runs on two tracks at once. Each of us carries our own work, the part no partner can do for us. There is a healing that only happens inside the holding of one another, that you cannot reach alone no matter how whole you arrive. Wanting that is not dependence. It is what intimacy is for.

Seen. Known. Accountable.

Celebrated.

There is a tempting idea that the only real submission is total. Do what you are told. Be a good girl. Submit on command. Dissolve the separate life until there is nothing left to manage and surrender becomes the only available state.

I understand the romance of it. I have felt the pull of it.

A surrender that is only possible because there was nothing competing for it has not proven much. The woman who yields because she has no life of her own to hold has demonstrated her circumstances. The woman who yields while still living her life, who sets the armor down on purpose and picks it back up when she has to and sets it down again, is doing the harder thing. Hers is surrender against resistance. The total-dependence version can quietly counterfeit devotion, and dependence and devotion are easy to confuse from the inside.

So when I ask whether a woman who keeps her own life is fully submitting to anything, I have my answer. She is submitting to more, against more, for less guarantee. That is the costly version, not the cheap one.

The Honest Place to Start

If you are new to this, none of the contempt is for you.

The men I am hard on are not the ones who do not know yet. They are the ones who pretended they did. Not knowing is the honest place everyone begins. A man who says I want to learn to hold this, and I am not sure how to yet is already more trustworthy than the one with all the vocabulary and the protocol and nothing underneath. The skill is learnable. The willingness to stay is the whole of it, and the rest gets built from there.

And if you are a woman at the edge of this with no idea how to start, you do not have to arrive already good at submission. No one does. You are not failing because you cannot drop on command. Go slow. Watch what he does with a small trust before you hand him a larger one. Resist the urge to hand over everything immediately. Surrender is built in increments, on evidence. A man worth yielding to understands that building is the point, and he will not rush you through it to get to the part that is convenient for him or that strokes his ego.

A man who takes a woman’s surrender as a costume and sets it down when it asks something of him does real damage. She handed him the most undefended part of herself on the belief that he would stay in relation with her, and he taught her that belief was a mistake. She pays for that lesson long after he is gone, reinforced and ready to go for the next relationship. And the cycle continues.

If you are not willing to be held to that, do not ask to hold anyone. That does not make for good dominance or healthy manhood. In fact, it makes you a predator, a tourist, and a lier.

Women have a phrase for it: a basic bitch.

Yuck.

A man who is present. Intensional. With an infinite curiosity and his house in working order, is groan worthy, knee-droppingly sexy. You are not just attractive, you are inevitable. I will unapologetically trip all over myself to reciprocate any measure of pleasure to that brand of dominance.

Be inevitable.

More than hot

Here is what almost no one is told when they whisper about power exchange dynamics.

You think you are signing up for hot. The heat is real. Bone stripping, mind-blowingly real.

And, it is a tiny fraction of it.

The eye rollingly hot sex and electric thrill of a scene is the expression of the underlying work, and it asks as much and more of the one who kneels as the one who leads.

The couples who make it are not the ones who wanted it most. They are the two who kept choosing the work after they found out it was work.

I am not waiting to be carried. I have carried myself a long way and I keep doing it. What I want is rarer than rescue. I want to ride beside a man steady enough that I could close my eyes for a stretch and trust him, and relax, and watch him with admiration as he lives his fully expressed erotic, personal, and professional life, while I do mine.

Two whole people who both show up for one another. Every single time.

That is so much more powerful, erotic, and soul fulfilling than just hot, and it is one version worth the work.

Love and surrender,

Ava

This is the second part of: Everyone want to be a sub until they have to do some subby ass shit

P.S. — If that recognition felt familiar and you want somewhere to take it besides the page, I work with a small number of people directly.

Learn more about me and connect for a free consultation.

From women: it has always been my fantasy to live the way you do. They mean various things by it. To be fully, erotically themselves. To experience surrender. To stop carrying their desire like contraband. To do the thing they only read about. To give themselves permission to want and set their fear aside.

From men: how do I express my desires without the fear and shame, or the one that has been landing the most. I thought I was a Dom until I read your writing, and now I realize I have work to do and a lot to learn. Or, I wish to submit yet I don’t know where to begin.

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Everyone starts somewhere. Arriving honestly about where you are is its own kind of awakening.

All of it comes from the same place. The gap between fantasy and real life. And of not knowing how to cross it without being vulnerable. Without fear of exposure. Of making mistakes.

That is going to happen anytime you try something new. You are going to be vulnerable in a way and to a depth that you never have before. That is the point. You are going to be exposed in a way you never thought possible. Your fears will surface and you will make mistakes.

This is unavoidable, and it is the work. This is soul work at some of it’s deepest intensity.

And, this is why you are here, . Am I right?

My intent is to share things I wish someone had told me earlier. Back then the lifestyle world was a much different place. Communities were harder to find and reliable information less accessible.

Today we have commonly regarded frameworks around consent, self empowerment, and connection opportunities like never before in human history. And yet, we still find ourselves lone wolfing it, attempting to wade through a sea of conflicting information and opinions. It is nearly too much to navigate alone.

This is also the start of something I want to build with you, and I will come back to that at the end.

So treat this as a doorway. Your basic 101 level entry point based upon what I’ve learned from decades in this lifestyle, mistakes included.

What this is: Grounded in power, eros, soul

First, let’s lay out what I am actually talking about so you know whether you are in the right place. I deal in the conscious eros and power that already lives in you. In your soul. An ache that runs in the background even when you attempt to set it on the self of your daily life.

Mine does not switch off in the morning, or when the workweek starts, or when I am between partners. My everyday life runs through that desire. It is my power source, my inspiration, the energy that fuels my creativity.

And, I had to learn to plug into that source, piece by piece, over time and experience.

I have a feeling you are here because there is a part of you that has been searching for a way to express your deepest desires. You have been searching for something real your entire life.

It may have began secretly, in your thoughts and late night fantasies. Now, something feels as though if you don’t give it the air it needs to breathe, to thrive, something will shake loose.

Eros is how I perceive and move through the world, without apology. I live inside it. I have always been this. It is my power. My soul fully expressed. What changed is that I made the study of it a practice.

I lay this out in I Am a Sadomasochist and how it makes me a better leader, friend, and lover.

That is my version. Yours does not have to look anything like it. Hold that while you read on. There is no right way to explore what this looks like for you.

There are, however, some best practices that will help you find your starting place.

Make room first

You cannot pour anything into a full cup, and you cannot learn to build a power dynamic on top of a messy life. Or learn new things. Or build the type of life you want.

You are about to go on a journey that may very well crack you wide open.

Make space for it. This asks more presence, intention, responsibility, and self-reflection than most people have ever spent on anything. You are not picking up a hobby. You are going to take on responsibility for another human being at some point, their body and their psyche, and they for yours.

If you arrive scattered, conflict-avoidant, unable to say a hard thing kindly, you will make messes that take years to clean. Many of them you can avoid simply by coming in level-headed and clear.

So before you go looking for a partner or a scene, look at your life. Your communication methods. Your follow-through. Your capacity to repair when you hurt someone.

I know this from experience. You will never get what you want unless you start with yourself first.

There are a couple of things you can do now that will support everything else.

Get your life in order. If you are drinking, stop. Clear your head and opt in on presence. There is no place for drinking in BDSM, especially not in play where risk is involved. The community is generally an alcohol free space as it is and drinking tends to be looked down upon. It is the opposite of the type of life (hence ‘lifestyle’) you are seeking in any scenario.

Stop looking at porn and opt in for real life. Watching people who are paid to act like they are turned on is not what actual play looks like for most people. I’m not coming down on sex work. I was a sex worker. I know what this looks like on the inside. What I am advocating for is for you to clear space in your life for the real deal. You will need that mental space for all the things you are about to learn that is actually helpful to achieve the outcomes you desire.

Get your finances, your relationships, your house clean and clear of clutter. Make your bed. I am quite serious. Get your oil changed, have good sleep hygiene, have good hygiene in general, go to the gym, make nutrition a priority, start a meditation practice, and go to therapy. I am not saying this to be harsh. You came here for sexy kink talk and you get eye roll worthy advice.

Yet, this is you being an adult, who is about to take on the adultest of things in a way you cannot possibly imagine right now. Do what it takes to be comfortable and proud of your mental, emotional, and physical state. Your life will still not be perfect, and you will feel that much more spacious, free, healthy, and confident.

That is irresistibly sexy as fuck.

Those are the real prerequisites. Anyone can buy a flogger. You, however, are already positioning yourself to be the in the top percentage of people who move through this space with power, confidence, and grace.

Nothing is hotter than that.

Find your oldest desire

Before you can ask for anything, you have to know what you actually want, and most people have simply never been asked. That’s a shame. This is also something completely in your control and one of the most valuable things you can ever do for yourself.

Start with the question underneath the question.

Our first questions usually go something like this: How can I bring heat back to my marriage? I read something in a book and it lit something up and I want to feel that in real life. I would like the feeling of surrender but how do I trust anyone to let go?

Are you kinky? Are you drawn to BDSM? Seeking a D/s dynamic? Do you know the difference? Not many people actually do.

This is where most people begin to feel overwhelmed. Those things will come and evolve over time.

Set those aside for now.

Go deeper than that. Search for your base desires. The ones that were there before you could articulate them aloud, the ones that have outlasted every relationship and every phase.

Build outward from those.

There are a few places you can start. Journaling is one of the best way to discover your base desires. Instead of allowing your fantasies to run wild then tucking them safely away after climax, spend some time with them. Write them down.

What exactly is it that keeps you coming back to it? What part do you like? What part scares you? How does this feel in your body?

Give yourself permission. To celebrate your shadows. Spend valuable, intensional time exploring your base desires. Discover why this excites you as if you are the most fascinating person on the planet.

The Self Contract is the long version of this work. I use this in my coaching sessions and intensives. DM me to learn more.

The work is inward

Here is the part nobody puts in the fantasy version.

The play parties and the hot sex are only the surface of this. Underneath is your deepest psyche expressing itself. If you skip the reflection and go straight for sensation, you will miss the full range of experience and may eventually do real damage, to yourself, or someone who trusted you. Or, you may just miss vital information that would have made your kink life that much more pleasurable and sustainable.

This is powerful material. The most experienced among us still get tripped up, myself included. Much of what I know came from past mistakes, or from the wide category of things I could have done with more care, presence, and intentionality.

So treat your own interior as a primary text. Why this. Why now. What does it touch in you. What old wound is hoping to get reworked through it, because something usually is.

You do not have to have the answers before you start. You just have to be willing to keep asking.

Learn before you leap

Now the practical part, because curiosity without information is how people get hurt.

Read first. No, not Haunting Adeline, however I do have quite the mask collection, thank you for that H.D. Carlton and especially you, Leigh Rivers.

These are the classic starting place texts. Not because they are the only ones, but because each one taught me something I needed before I knew I needed it. Read them in any order. Read the one that scares you a little first.

The New Topping Book and The New Bottoming Book Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy

Two books, two side of the slash. Pick the side you lean toward and start there, then read the other one anyway, because you will want to know what it feels like from the seat you do not usually sit in. These taught me that the work is emotional before it is physical. Identity, safety, where you find your people, and what to do after the scene ends. Start here if you start nowhere else.

The Ultimate Guide to Kink edited by Tristan Taormino

Every chapter is a different voice, a different educator, a different way of doing the thing. That is the gift of it. You come in looking for the one correct way to do this and you leave understanding there isn’t one. For a person who is afraid of getting it wrong, this book is for you.

SM 101 Jay Wiseman

The reference on the shelf, not the book by the bed. It is older and it reads like it. Some of the specifics have aged. But this is where you go to learn how not to actually hurt someone in the ways you did not mean to, and that knowledge is fundamental.

Playing Well with Others Lee Harrington and Mollena Williams

This is the one most lists forget and the one I think matters most for what we are building. It is not about technique. It is about the room. How to walk into an event, how to read a scene you are watching, how to find your people and vet the ones who find you. If you are nervous about belonging somewhere like this, read this before you come stand in it.

The Ethical Slut Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy

More about non-monogamy than kink, so know that going in. I include it anyway, because almost everything that goes wrong in this lifestyle goes wrong in the conversation, not the scene. Jealousy, honesty, the things we do not say. This is the toolkit for the part that actually breaks people.

The Deep Psychology of BDSM and Kink Dr. Douglas Thomas

This one is for later, after the floor is under you. Thomas is a Jungian therapist, and the book reads kink as soul-work. Suffering, the underworld, ecstasy, death, all the things the rest of the world wants us to be ashamed of, and he puts them where they belong, inside the reach of a meaningful life. The premise is that everything belongs. That nothing you want is outside of yourself. If you have ever needed someone to tell you that your desire is not a sickness but a door, this is the book that says it in the language of the soul. Dense. Worth it. Read it when you are ready to stop apologizing.

A note. This canon is old. These writers have been at it for decades, and the books endure because nothing has replaced them, not because nothing has been written since. What they cover less well is the way we understand consent now, the role of trauma, the way race and queerness move through these spaces. Treat these as the foundation. We build the rest together.

I will add three more because I think they are important. All have a community built around them. Podcasts. Substacks, coaching, workshops, newsletters, and more.

Man UNcivilized Traver Boehm

If you are a man reading this, start here. This book tells you what almost no one told you growing up: that the pain you have never said out loud about living as a man is valid, that you are not broken, and that you are not alone in it. This is a completely new paradigm for reclaiming yourself, head, heart, and dick with none of it amputated to fit what the world called acceptable. It asks you to be more grounded and it promises that the people closest to you get safer as you do. A man who has met his own darkness is gentler with everyone else’s. That is the work this lifestyle asks of you. You can support his moment by attending his workshops and intensives, becoming a paid subscriber to his amazing substack, or taking him up on one on one coaching sessions.

Savage Lovecast Dan Savage

Savage has been answering strangers’ sex and relationship questions for decades, and the value is in the volume: you hear thousands of people work through the exact things you are too embarrassed to ask, and you slowly absorb that almost nothing you want is as strange as you feared. This is where a lot of our shared language comes from. GGG. The price of admission. The campsite rule. Monogamish. Even pegging is Dan’s. Frameworks you will hear people use without knowing where they started. I’m a magnum sub and you should be, too.

Infinite Devotion Dawn & Andrew

For the long game. The one some of you are really asking about, even if you have not said it out loud yet: building a conscious, loving, full-time power exchange. The deep work. This is the most thoughtful resource I have found on mechanics and philosophy of true Dominance and submission. The actual daily architecture of two people living inside a dynamic and tending it like a marriage, because that is what it is. They talk about the parts no one romanticizes. Listen here when you are past wondering whether you want this and have started wondering how people make it last. Join their community and go deep on becoming the conscious, present Dom or submissive your soul knows you are.

Find your people

There are two things you can do to find your people, and they do different jobs. Take as many educational classes as you can find and go to events.

Classes first. Most communities run them, and if you are rural, they are abundant online. A 101 class gives you the fundamentals and the shared language, and it does something else that matters more. It pulls you out of your fantasy headspace and into the real one. You arrive grounded instead of floating in the version of this you have been rehearsing alone. That changes how you show up everywhere after.

Then, find your people. Go to more classes. Go to all the events you can find and talk to people. Hear different perspectives. Everything from kinky bingo to play parties.

Try a munch. A munch is community, not education. People meeting for coffee or a meal, clothes on, no play, just conversation and faces. Do not arrive expecting it to teach you the basics. You will have those already. Come for the people. Some of them become yours.

I host a dark romance book club, an erotic writers group, community gatherings, workshops and more through my House. Learn more about The House of Three Rivers and what makes my House different than other BDSM clubs or social groups.

FetLife is where most munches and events get organized, so make a profile and start reading. Think of it as Facebook for the kink and BDSM world rather than a dating app (which it is not).

A note on Fetlife profiles: Most profiles are horrendous and do nothing to tell the world who you are and what you are about. There are ways to design yours to ward off unwanted attention, connect with real people, and build the community you are looking for. If you would like help with yours, reach out to me through Fet (avachanel) or DM me.

Vet everyone, always

This is the section that protects you, so read it twice.

New people, especially new submissives, get circled. The eager and the unvetted are easy marks, and the community has a name for the way newcomers get rushed. Slow down. Meet in public first. Take your time.

Ask for references. Regularly. Anyone experienced, with a good heart and a clean reputation, will be glad to give them. This is a thing that people who are savvy in the community do all the time. Treat reluctance as information. You are allowed to ask questions. You are allowed to walk away at any point, before, during, after. That right does not expire. If you would like a template and advice, DM me. I can help.

Before any scene, negotiate. What is on the table, what is off, hard limits, health, history, what each of you needs. Agree on a safeword system and honor it without exception. I use the stoplight method (green, yellow, red). You will hear about frameworks for all of this, SSC, RACK, PRICK. The acronyms matter less than the habit underneath them, which is that consent here is active, specific, and ongoing, and the responsibility for it is yours.

The comedown is real

What happens after the scene is part of the scene.

There is a chemical aftermath. The intensity floods your system and then it leaves, and the drop can arrive hours or days later as a low you did not see coming. It happens to tops and bottoms both. Aftercare is how you tend it. Water, warmth, contact, words, whatever you each need to land. Care does not end when the play does.

The emotional risk is one most beginners never brace for. They prepare for bruises and get blindsided by what comes up from underneath. Old grief. Attachments that form fast because intensity is a shortcut to the nervous system. This can crack you open. That is part of why checking in with each other is vital, and part of why a kink-aware therapist is one of the best investments you can make.

There is no one way to live this

Hear this clearly, because shame loves a hierarchy.

You can live this in the bedroom and nowhere else. You can live it in scenes, deliberately, and return to ordinary life between them. You can live it the way I do, as an orientation that does not clock out. None of these is the advanced version. None is the watered-down one. The only failure is doing it unconsciously, or doing it to perform a level of intensity you do not actually want.

I write from the always-on version because it is mine and it is what I know in my body. Take what serves you and leave the rest. I do not need you to live like me. I need you to stop living like a stranger to yourself.

If you have read this far, you are already past the hardest gate, the one made of resource scarcity. So come find me. Message me. I mean that. We are building the kind of community where questions are the whole point, because the deepest harm in this world rarely comes from rope or impact. It comes from isolation. Isolation breeds disproportion to real life. Your desires need to be tested against reality, in the open, among people who have walked it.

There is no excuse left. Only the next honest step.

Love and power,

Ava

P.S. — If this piece was helpful, yet you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your BDSM journey — I’m happy to guide you privately. In person and remote options available. Please DM me and let’s connect.

Learn more about me and what I do.

I asked a very dear person to give me a writing prompt and it was this: how the Lord of the Rings changed the way I express myself sexually. That’s a challenge, right?! If you have watched the movies or read the books, which I have multiple times going back to the Silmarillion, you know there is little that’s sexual about Tolkien’s work. But my inner dork was delighted with the challenge and I believe I can make a good argument that the events of Middle Earth have everything to do with the basis of this Substack: power. eros. soul. and my own sexuality.

Prepare yourself for probably my least read post ever. And it made me endlessly happy to write it nonetheless. It’s my Substack and I’m driving here. Strap yourself in.

J.R.R. Tolkien went into the trenches in 1916. He came out of the Somme with trench fever and a knowledge of power most people are lucky enough never to acquire. He was a signals officer. He watched the militant machine do its work on the bodies of men he had grown up with. By the end of the war nearly all of his closest friends were dead. The little society they had built as schoolboys, four of them who believed they would say something true to the world, was gutted. Two of them killed within months of each other. One in the same battle Tolkien walked out of.

He had already watched a different machine eat the green world of his boyhood. The mill, the smoke, the sprawl of industrial Birmingham swallowing the fields. The war was that same force turned on everyday human beings. Power that remakes the world by force and calls the wreckage progress.

People have always wanted to read the war into his books as code. When The Lord of the Rings appeared, readers were certain the Ring was the atom bomb and Mordor was the Reich. Tolkien refused that reading. He disliked allegory. He preferred what he called applicability, which leaves the meaning with the reader instead of smuggling a message inside the story.

I keep returning to that refusal, because it is the same one I make about my own life. The tidy explanation. The code that makes desire or darkness respectable by tracing it to a root cause. He saw the trenches, so he wrote about a dark lord. It is too clean. While it invites you to lean in, it is not the whole story.

The war did not hand Tolkien a message to encode. It handed him a knowledge of power, and he spent the rest of his life building a world capable enough to contain it. That is the thing I want to dive deeper into now with you. Let your history loving mythology nerd soul soar for just a moment.

Lúthien’s Descent

She is the part of the mythology Tolkien loved most. He had her name carved on the headstone he would share with his wife. Lúthien on Edith’s side. Beren on his.

Lúthien is an elf, the daughter of King Thingol. Think of him as Thranduil a thousand times over. Just as hot, and married to a literal original angel. Lúthien falls in love with a mortal man. He first sees her dancing in the woods at evening, is struck dumb, and calls her by the name of the nightingale. To win him back from death and worse, she does the thing no one expects of a beautiful princess in a story.

She goes down into the dark.

She walks into the fortress of the first dark lord, Morgoth, the one before Sauron, and she does not raise a sword against him. She sings. She sings him into sleep, cuts a jewel of captured light, one of the stolen Silmarils, out of his iron crown, and carries it back up and out of the depths of the source of evil that could, and may yet, choke the soul out of the world.

A woman walks into the absolute dark, faces the thing everyone else runs from, and returns carrying the light.

I have spent a long time on the meaning of that. We are taught that the dark is where women are lost. The fairy tales I read as a child were mostly warnings dressed as bedtime stories. Stay on the path. Do not go into the wood. Lúthien is the older story underneath those. The one where the woman goes into the wood on purpose, because what she needs is in there and nowhere else.

Her surrender is the most active choice in the whole legend. She is not handed the dark. She walks into it. Later she chooses to become mortal, to lay down an immortal life to stay with the one she loves. The deathless one chooses death, and that choice is how you know the love was soul grippingly real.

Sound familiar? This is also the story of Arwen and Aragorn. So fun! My dark dork soul is so happy with itself right now.

Also, I know that descent in my own body. I have gone into places most people spend their lives avoiding, on purpose, sometimes with a guide, and come back changed. Going down was not the loss of my power. It is where I have found the most of it and handed it over anyway. The source of what gives me strength when all seems lost.

For years I read my own want to kneel, to submit to a power greater than my own, as proof I had lost something. Lúthien undid that. When I go down now, on purpose, with someone I trust to hold the dark with me, the going down is where I find my power, the same way she found the light in the one place no one else would go.

The Failure of Will

Tolkien invented a word for what he believed stories were for. Eucatastrophe. The good catastrophe. The sudden turn near the end, when all hope is gone and grace arrives anyway, unearned, from outside.

Watch what he does with it at the most important moment in the entire book. Frodo carries the Ring across a continent, through fucking everything, to the one place it can be unmade. He stands over the fire.

And he fails.

He cannot chuck that burden into the darkness in which it was forged. He claims the Ring for himself and puts it on.

The hero, at the threshold, does not have the will.

The quest succeeds anyway, because of the loyalty of a pure friend and a mercy Frodo showed years and miles earlier, when he spared a wretched creature he had every reason to kill. Gandalf had told him it would matter. The pity that stays your hand, the refusal to deal out death when you cannot see how the story ends, decides more for you than any blade can or will. That mercy walks back into the story at the last second and finishes what willpower could not. Grace, set in motion long before by an act of pity, completes the thing the hero cannot complete himself.

Tolkien was explicit about this in his letters. Frodo failed. The salvation came through pity and providence. Strength had nothing to do with it. He called it the truest thing he ever wrote.

I think it is the truest thing anyone has written about surrender. You cannot will your way into letting go. The whole point of letting go is that your will is the thing you are setting down.

I have been to the place where the self gives out. I know it well. It is the same drop I chase in surrender, and it has never once come because I willed it.

It does not arrive because you were strong enough to reach it. It arrives when you stop holding the doorframe and feel your knees hit the floor. Because in that condition, that’s the only place they belong. What waits on the other side is not yours to earn or control. It is given, or it is not. The only preparation is the mercy you practiced long before, the trust you built when no one was watching.

The Marring

Here is the idea I cannot stop thinking about, and what most readers don’t reach. I slightly envy you for that. Come with me down the dark hole where I live. It’s slightly messier than Bilbo’s hole yet the food is just as good.

The first dark lord, Morgoth, did something Sauron did not. Sauron poured his power into a single ring, which is why the ring could be destroyed and Sauron with it.

Morgoth poured himself into everything. Into the dirt, the stone, the substance of the world as it was created. Tolkien’s son gave his father’s late writings the title Morgoth’s Ring to make the point.

Really, and hold onto your seat for this, the whole world is the dark lord’s ring.

His power is dispersed through all matter, which means the world is marred at the level of its material. You cannot cut the evil out.

It is in the fabric of being.

That is a far more honest cosmology than good against evil in clean lines, and it is the one Tolkien reached after a lifetime of sitting with all of this. The darkness is not a country you can invade and defeat. It is woven into the thing itself.

Into the world. Into you. Into me.

I lived the cheaper version of this for years and paid for it. The belief that the dark parts of me were a problem to be solved, excised, healed past, left on a shelf. The marred material was always desire. The wanting that never matched the woman I was performing. I believed that if I built a clean enough life it would not show.

It does not work that way.

What you refuse to integrate does not leave. It runs its machinery from somewhere you cannot see, and it bills you for the privilege with glee.

The work was never to defeat my darkness. The work was to take down the partition between the parts I would show and the parts I would bury, and to stop pretending the substance of me could be sorted that way at all. There is no version of the world without the marring. There is no version of me, or of you, that isn’t woven with the darkness.

We are intrinsically bound.

There is only the choice to know what you are made of and to work with the whole of it. To own your desire. To be the divine sexual being you are.

The Machine and the Green Things

Now war comes back into focus.

Sauron is barely a body by the end. An eye and a will. Pure domination with nothing left over. Nothing to spare.

The Ring he made does the same thing to anyone who carries it. It promises power and it eats the self of whoever holds it, hollows them, stretches them thin, turns a person into a mechanism of destruction bound to the source. The machine logic Tolkien hated in the world is the logic the Ring runs on. Power as control, control as the only value, the wielder consumed by the wielding.

Against that he set the green things. The natural world that was being threatened and lost to progress and efficiency.

The Ents, ancient tree beings that walk, who go to war on the wizard whose mind has given way to Sauron’s will, in Treebeard’s verdict, to metal and wheels.

The Shire, which is only a place where people grow things and leave each other in peace.

Galadriel, offered the Ring, lets herself picture it for a moment, a queen lovely and terrible as the dawn whom everyone would worship and dread, then refuses, choosing to dwindle and stay herself rather than become the thing she fights. The thing she has fought for so very long, when the easy thing must have seemed so enticing.

She had been there from the start, after all.

How exhausting.

And the woodland king. Thranduil holds a kind of power I recognize and trust more than Sauron’s. He does not reach. He reclines. He keeps his crown of red leaves and his unbothered face, and the room comes to him. Power that withholds, that never performs itself. It rearranges itself around you.

That kind of power is the most erotic thing I know. The one that does not chase. The one you feel in a room before a single word is spoken, the kind that makes you do the crossing. I will admit, with the single raised eyebrow it deserves, that of every figure in this mythology the one I would cross the floor for is the glittering, faintly disdainful king who cannot be troubled for most things and will go to war over a necklace, the way Thingol did over the Nauglamír. I wrote a whole fan fiction piece about him when I was learning to write, set in the same window as The Hunt for Gollum. I shit you not.

The contrast is the entire argument. There is the power that dominates, that organizes everything around control, that cannot allow surrender because surrender would mean it was not total. And there is the power that can hold opposites. That can lead and yield. That stays in relationship with the thing it has power over instead of at war with it.

The first kind is a machine, and the machine always comes for the one operating it. Or for the ones who pay the cost of maintaining it.

The second kind is the only kind worth having, in a war, in a country, in a bedroom. It asks that both people stay human inside it.

The World He Built and I Live Within

Tolkien came home from the war and watched the same machine that had killed his friends go on savaging the green world of his childhood.

There is a place in his story where the dead lie just beneath the water. The Dead Marshes, where the travelers cross a drowned battlefield and the faces of men and elves and orcs float up at them, lit by their own cold candles. They fell in an old war against Sauron, and the bog grew over their graves. Among them, if you chase the genealogies the way I do at one in the morning, is Thranduil’s father, who charged in ahead of the signal at the Battle of Dagorlad and never came back. Tolkien said the Dead Marshes owed something to Northern France after the Somme, the ground his own friends went under while the fever sent him home. So the faces in the water are two wars at once. The fallen of Middle Earth and the boys he grew up with.

He did not answer any of it with a tract against war or industry. He built a world instead. One large enough and vivid enough to hold all of it at once and become a legacy. The descent and the grace it cannot earn. The marring no one can cut out of our reality, our world, or our souls. The machine that hollows its wielder, and the living thing that refuses to be hollowed.

That is what the trenches taught him about power. It is close to what my own darkness taught me, blessedly without having to go to actual war.

The kind of power that only knows how to dominate is already a machine.

The kind worth wanting can go down into the dark and come back. It can hold the marred material, the darkness woven into our worlds, and the light in the same hand. It can lead and it can kneel.

It stays human the entire time, which is the hardest thing in the world to do, and the only thing that has ever been worth doing.

So how did a story with almost no sex in it change the way I express myself sexually?

It did not.

The wanting was always there, formed early, long before I had any of these words for it. What the story gave me was a way to hold it. A descent I could choose instead of dread. A surrender I stopped trying to earn. A darkness I quit apologizing for. A picture of the power I would kneel to, the kind strong enough to kneel back. The appetite did not change. The fluency did. And fluency changes everything about how you express a thing.

He carved her name on his wife’s grave.

Lúthien.

The one who went into the dark and came back carrying the light.

I keep going back in for the same reason. For the Shire. For Frodo.

And also, for Morgoth. For Sauron. And for everyone in between. Because that’s the spectrum of power in our world and in my erotic soul.

Love and One Ring To Rule Them All,

Ava

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I have written about the price of hiding before. The exhaustion of wearing competence as armor in The Armor We Wear. The glass of wine at the end of the day and the body that does not fully unclench in The Crucible of Being Female. The fragmentation of carrying a different self into every room and calling the collection a life in The Last Honest Question. And most honestly, the cost of numbing in The Last Partition.

Those costs are real. They are also the ones we reach for when we think about this at all. Fatigue. Frustration. A life that runs on autopilot without ever catching fire.

This is about a cost most people never think about. It often does not show up as outright suffering. It shows up as subtraction so slow you barely notice. And what it subtracts is the two things you can least afford to lose.

Your power. And your soul.

You pay a toll for the hidden life, in both currencies, whether or not you notice the meter running.

It is not only about hiding from the world. It is about hiding from yourself. In private. With no-one watching. When the wanting gets shelved so completely that you forget you ever felt it at all.

This is not a personal failing. We are taught to bury it, from every direction, early. Our culture hands us the shovel and calls it maturity. Act a certain way. Think a certain way. Be civilized. If you do not, there are consequences.

Sometimes there are and sometimes there are not. Our threat response biologically cannot tell the difference. So we suppress. We hide ourselves from ourselves and others.

The Faculties Go First

Desire is not only appetite. It is a way of perceiving and walking through the world.

I made this case in I am a Sadomasochist. The competence I mean is specific. Tracking power. Adjusting so effortlessly it feels like grace. Reading a room before anyone has spoken. Hearing the want underneath what a person is saying. Knowing where real authority lays, regardless of title. Staying calm and exact in a charged situation that scatters everyone else. Sensing early who is safe and who is not. Your instincts can be trusted. You know who you are and what you stand for. If you have not felt this, I can tell you, it feels like a living entity within you. A guide. These are the faculties that make a person formidable, and they are erotic in origin. They run on the same current as desire.

Starve the current and they fade together. You do not only lose the pleasure that makes life stunningly beautiful. You lose your sense of perception. The person who stops letting themselves want also stops catching what they used to perceive instantly. The shift in the room. The thing underneath the thing being said. The space in-between. Your sense of self.

You cannot deaden the faculty in one part of your life and keep it sharp in another. It is one instrument. Desire is a mechanism. It goes dull everywhere, or it stays sharp everywhere. There is no partition. You are either locked in, all in, or you are the pastel version of your technicolor life.

That is the first installment of the toll. It is paid in power.

What You Cannot Name

There is protection in knowing what you want and the firm ability to act upon it.

I have written that self-knowledge is your first line of defense in The Self Contract. The people who have not specifically named their non-negotiables, who never consider what their history brings to the table, who cannot name their deepest wants, are the ones who surrender them under pressure. The reverse is the half I left unsaid.

A person who will not define what they want, cannot defend a boundary they refuse to admit they have. They have nothing to measure an offer against, so they are available to whatever arrives with enough certainty behind it. This self silence feels like safety, self-defense, or exposure.

It is the opposite. It leaves you undefended before anyone who has done the work you would not do onto yourself. That work is not always the positive kind and there more people out there with less than kind intensions that we care to admit. The easiest person to manipulate is the one who has never honestly asked what they actually want, let alone what they do not or why.

As part sadist, I can spot you a mile away. Smell you. You smell like fear and uncertainty. You wear your insecurities and indecision like a neon sign in your hesitant part answers and that adorable shrug of an innocent grin. I’m clocking everything you think and do to a degree you cannot begin to imagine. The cadence of your voice, your shallow breathing, the frequency and in which manner you respond, your daily routine, your patterns, the things you care about and those you gloss over. This is instinctual without me having to lift a mental finger. By leaving yourself open, you are like lunch for people like me.

I am not only aware, but in relation with my components so I can work with it instead of it working me. Not everyone has taken careful measures to understand, or care, what their desire has the potential to cost themselves or others. It is worth taking the time to take stock, and have a healthy respect for, all the different parts of what makes you, uniquely and beautifully you.

Again, the cost is power. The power to choose rather than be chosen for. For a person’s experience to outweigh your own and use it as manipulation. You do not want that, I promise you.

Desire Does Not Wait Quietly

Desire denied, even in private, does not shrink or go away. It grows in the dark, where nothing corrects it, and it loses its sense of proportion.

Proportion is the thing I want to be exact about. A desire that never meets reality cannot tell large from small, or urgent from idle, because nothing ever tests it. In a real encounter you learn that the fantasy you were certain would undo you is survivable, and that something you dismissed turns out to be enormously satisfying.

Reality teaches scale. Starved of it, every want stays pitched at the same fantasy volume, and fantasy does not know how to want a little. So when it finally breaks loose, it does not arrive as a preference you can manage. It arrives as a flood, because flood is the only setting it was ever allowed.

The flood does not always just affect us. For many men it turns outward, and it has a name we flinch away from. Traver Boehm writes that every man carries two predators, one he has to conquer and one he has to befriend, and that the man who faces neither stays at the mercy of both in The Two Predators Every Man Carries. Unexamined desire and aggression does not stay put. They either burn his own life down or detonate onto the people closest to him. Often women. Sometimes girls.

This is where men reach for the comfortable lie. Epstein was a monster, and monsters are a separate species. He is not me. That distance is the whole problem. The predator is not a foreign thing that infects bad men from outside. It is the same energy every man carries, left unexamined and unconquered. Epstein is what that predator looks like at full extension, fed for decades by money and silence and rooms full of powerful people who found it easier to look away than to name what they were standing next to. The difference between that man and a decent one is not species. It is whether the work was done. Refusing to do it, and calling the refusal innocence, is how the predator keeps feeding on our souls.

I watched the unfaced version for years from the stage, in men who arrived starving for something they could not say aloud and could only express as entitlement. Traver writes that same figure from the inside. The antidote he names is soul. The willingness to turn toward what you carry and conquer the half of it that would hurt someone, before the predator that lives in every man, does.

In women the same flood usually turns the other way. Inward. She becomes the first casualty of her own suppression. Women like to believe they can be the flood’s casualty and never its agent. That is its own evasion. The harm a woman does with unexamined desire is quieter and better disguised, which is exactly how it goes unnamed.

It takes more than one form. Sometimes it is control wearing the mask of care, eros rerouted into dominion over a family, the devourer who runs and slowly ruins everyone’s life and calls it love. Sometimes it is worse. The woman who, rather than face her own power, fuses herself to a man’s and trades other women to keep her place beside it. Ghislaine Maxwell is what that shadow looks like at full extension.

The Measure

Audre Lorde named the deepest layer of this decades ago. She understood the erotic as a form of knowledge, and as a measure.

The measure is your internal reference for what fully alive feels like. Once you have felt it, you can sense the gap in everything that runs at half. The job that is fine. The conversation that is pleasant. The relationship that is reasonable. You feel, in your body, where the aliveness should be and where there is void. Lose the measure and the gap closes over. The half-version stops registering as a half. You call functional good, and you mean it, because you have nothing left to hold it against.

I have had the measure. I have stood in the full tension of it. And I have lost it, more than once. Sometimes because a partner could no longer hold what it asked of him. Sometimes because I set it down myself, for one reasonable-sounding reason after another.

What I learned both times is that Lorde was right. Adequate stops being enough. The everyday stops satisfying you. An unsatisfied life, the kind where you have settled or simply not yet found your match, becomes its own slow discouragement. You start to resent the people who could not hold you, even when it was no fault of theirs or they were simply holding onto to their own comfort measure. That resentment is not noble. It is just true. It is part of the bill.

The Toll on the Other Side

There is a cost almost no one mentions, because nearly no one reaches it.

When you have gone all the way through, when you have actually lived at the height of erotic expression, you lose easy relatability with most of the people around you. Ordinary conversation gets harder to have. You look at people who have never gone there with some of the same curious distance they occasionally turn on you. You become more like a guide. An initiator. And with that comes responsibility.

If you are in community, or public about any of it, you become something like an elder. A passageway for people still looking for the door. That is an honor. It is also a weight. You grow more deliberate about who you partner with, because your choices now carry consequences for other people and not only for you.

I try, with intention, to remember how long my own road was and how much care it took to walk it, so I can extend that same care to the people just beginning theirs. If more of us did a little more of that, the world might be a gentler place to want things in.

What You Pay With

Here is the part to take with you.

There is no toll-free road. Suppress your desire, shelve it, give it up, hide it from the person who shares your bed, and you pay in the two currencies that matter most. Your power, the faculties that made you sharp and effective and hard to fool. And your soul, the part of you that still knows the difference between a whole life and a convincing performance of one.

Go all the way through to the other side and you pay too. In belonging. In ease. In the simple comfort of being like everyone else around you.

You do not get to skip the toll. You only get to choose which one you hand over. I have paid both. Knowing exactly what each one costs, I would choose the second again and again. Every single time.

Love and full expression,

Ava

P.S. — Some of what you just read is not only essay. It is also the work I do with people directly, one at a time. If that is you, , start here.

Learn more about me and connect for a free consultation.

That is not a metaphor. It is the most accurate thing I know how to say about the interior life I have spent decades learning to inhabit rather than manage.

Most people treat their darkness as a problem. Something to be healed, transcended, medicated, or performed past. The wellness industry has built an entire economy around that premise. The shadow as wound. The darkness as deficit.

Carl Jung understood something differently. He argued that the shadow, the parts of ourselves we have disowned, suppressed, or never allowed into the light, is not the enemy of the whole person. It is the necessary complement to it. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The goal is not to eliminate the shadow but to know it. To be in relationship with it. To stop pretending it is not there.

I have found this to be exactly right.

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Your Shadow

Jung’s shadow is not evil. It is not pathology. It is everything the conscious self has decided is unacceptable, inconvenient, or too dangerous to acknowledge. The desire that does not fit the version of yourself you present to the world. The rage that has nowhere to go. The grief that was never permitted. The aliveness that got partitioned away because it was incompatible with being taken seriously.

The shadow does not disappear when we refuse to look at it. It goes underground. It drives from the back seat. It makes decisions we do not remember making. It costs us things we did not know we were spending.

When the shadow is denied long enough, Jung called what happens next projection. We begin to see in other people the qualities we cannot acknowledge in ourselves. The things that trigger us most powerfully in others are often the clearest map of what we have refused to examine in ourselves.

The alternative is integration. The often uncomfortable work of bringing what has been kept in the dark into conscious relationship with the rest of who you are.

That work is what I mean by the long journey inward.

What It Feels Like From the Inside

The darkness is alive. It has its own intelligence, its own agenda, its own way of making itself known.

When I am listening to it, it informs and nourishes me. It allows me to direct and redirect my life with a precision that no external framework has produced. It is bone strippingly real. Demanding, because it knows I will listen. And I know from real experience what happens when I do not.

It starts as a nudge. A restlessness at the edges of things. If I ignore it, it moves into my body. My back and neck first. Then my hips and groin and down my legs. When it is serious it arrives in my chest and stomach. It disrupts my functions. All the yoga in the world does not touch it. It is a fatigue that is genuinely debilitating. A skin crawling that no amount of numbing makes better and that numbing makes it acutely worse immediately.

The body keeps contact with the soul whether the mind agrees to or not.

Jung understood this too. He wrote extensively about the body as the carrier of the unconscious. The symptoms that have no medical explanation. The dreams that arrive with the force of something that will not be ignored. The psyche insisting on its own reality through whatever channel remains open.

The Long Dark and Grief

Francis Weller, psychotherapist and author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, writes about what he calls the five gates of grief. Everything we love we will lose. The places that have not known love. The sorrows of the world. What we expected and did not receive. Ancestral grief carried in the body.

Weller argues that we are living in what he calls the long dark. A collective estrangement from grief, from ritual, from the communal containers that once held human pain and made it bearable.

What struck me most in his work was the understanding that grief is not only personal. It is not only the processing of individual wound. It is the acknowledgment of everything that has been lost, everything that was never given, everything that the world itself is carrying.

This connects directly to what Jung called individuation. The lifelong process of becoming more fully and precisely yourself. Not the self the world asked you to be. The self that was always there underneath the accommodation and the performance and the careful management of what you allowed into your one life.

Individuation is not comfortable. It requires encounter with the shadow, the grief for what was lost or never received, the willingness to carry the full weight of your own complexity without setting any of it down prematurely.

Weller says some things are too painful to set down alone. We need community. Ritual. A container that holds us in the process without requiring us to perform resolution before we have found it.

The Jesuit Practice

My undergraduate education was at a Jesuit institution. The Jesuits have a contemplative practice called the examen. At the end of each experience you step outside your experience and examine it. To honor it. To turn it over and look at it from various angles. To notice its texture, its taste, its feel. To ask what was alive in it and what was absent.

The practice teaches a different quality of attention. The willingness to look directly at experience rather than through it.

I did not understand then what I was being taught. I understand it now as the foundation of everything that followed. The therapy. The grief work. The writing. The relationship with my own darkness that has become the most reliable thing I know.

The examen and the Jungian practice of active imagination, the deliberate engagement with the contents of the unconscious, are different methods arriving at the same place. The honest encounter with what is actually there rather than what is comfortable to acknowledge.

My Darkness

Much of my darkness lives in the erotic. In desire and power and the places where those two forces meet.

That is not coincidence. It is the predictable result of being a woman who came of age in environments where female desire was simultaneously commodified and shamed.

What I found when I stopped managing it and started listening to it was not damage.

It was vitality. Opportunity. Range.

Jung wrote that in the shadow lies the gold. The unlived life. The energy that has been suppressed rather than directed. Aliveness that lives in places most people desperately spend their lives avoiding.

Weller writes that what we do not grieve we carry. What I would add is that what we do not examine we are driven by. The darkness that is never brought into the room does not disappear. It drives from the back seat.

When I brought my darkness into the room deliberately and learned to be in relationship with it rather than managing it, something fundamental changed.

It stopped driving.

It became a thought partner instead.

What This Work Requires and What It Produces

It requires a dedicated practice of deep listening. Radical honesty. The willingness to invite in rather than push away. To grieve what belongs to grief without a predetermined timeline or a tidy conclusion.

Jung was clear that this work cannot be rushed and cannot be performed. The shadow does not yield to cleverness or willpower. It yields to honest encounter. To the willingness to sit with what is uncomfortable long enough to hear what it is actually saying.

It costs relatability with people who have not done this work. There are plenty of people invested in the surface version of this conversation, the one that produces insight without requiring the actual encounter with what lives underneath. The kind that talks about shadow work without going there. That is understandable. The actual encounter asks something most people are not willing to give.

What it asks is complete, sustained, undefended presence with your own interior life.

What it produces is the capacity to bring yourself more fully into any room with any person and choose rather than be persuaded. To stop carrying hate for what was done to you or what you participated in that cost you something real. To channel what the darkness contains into something that feeds rather than corrodes.

Jung called this the transcendent function. The capacity to hold the tension between opposites long enough for something new to emerge. The intellectual and the erotic. The public and the private. Dominance and surrender. Leadership and vulnerability. These are the texture of a life that has been genuinely examined.

Writing is its own form of the examen. The turning over of experience. The honest accounting of what was there before the interpretation of it. I write because it is the most reliable method I have found for staying in honest relationship with my own interior life.

It also requires real community. The kind that holds you accountable and stays present when you are in the middle of something genuinely hard. Weller is right that some things cannot be set down alone. The container that holds the process is not optional. It is the condition that makes the process possible.

The Invitation

The Jesuit examen and Jungian individuation and Francis Weller’s grief work are three doors into the same room. What matters is not the method but your conscious devotion.

Devotion to turn toward rather than away. To grieve what belongs to grief. To bring the darkness deliberately rather than waiting for it to arrive uninvited in ways that cost you more than inviting it in would have.

Darkness is not the enemy of the good life. It is the soil the good life grows from.

Jung wrote that the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. He was right. That it is terrifying. He was also right that it is the work.

The long journey inward is not a detour from your life, .

It is the life.

Love and darkness,

Ava

P.S. — If this piece was helpful, yet you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your journey — I’m happy to guide you privately. In person and remote options available. Please DM me and let’s connect.

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Consider this question.

What if the very thing that made you successful is the same thing keeping you from feeling alive?

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“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin

How We Got Here

You know the feeling. The alarm goes off and before your eyes are fully open, the list is already running. The obligations assembling themselves in the dark. You are already managing before you are even awake.

For generations, people have worn armor. Some of it was handed down. Some we forged ourselves under pressure, in rooms that did not leave much space for anything else. We learned to earn our place, carry the weight, keep our carefully constructed structure from collapsing. We became the steady one. The capable one. The one who handles it.

And it worked. The armor carried us through decades of proving, building, enduring. Through systems that excluded us, families that depended on us, circumstances that left no margin for softness. But somewhere along the way it became so familiar we didn’t realize it was heavy. We began to mistake protection for our sense of self.

For women, this has a specific cultural history. Compliance was once the only currency available for so long. When doors finally opened, we walked through them carrying that same vigilance, only dressed in competence.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild named the invisible second shift that followed. The labor that begins after the workday ends. The emotional management. The domestic orchestration. The culture said you can have it all, and really meant you must do it all. We filled our schedules, answered the email, soothed the child, held the marriage together, and called it a full life.

The armor updated itself. We called it progress.

For men, the inheritance looks different but the mechanism is identical. Stoicism handed down as virtue. The emotional interior treated as irrelevant at best, dangerous at worst. An epidemic of unexpressed purpose and unacknowledged pain in men. The way an entire generation learned to sever the connection between strength and feeling and call that severance maturity. The result, for many, is a man who is capable on the surface and genuinely unknown to himself underneath it.

So, we pour another glass, work another hour, stay another year in something that is not working, and call it strength. What we are actually doing is staying numb and mistaking the numbness for peace.

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” — Anne Lamott

It’s Exausting

The cost of armor is subtle precisely because it is so constant.

It hides in exhaustion. The kind where you wake up already tired, where rest feels like one more thing you have to do correctly. It surfaces in the quiet resentment of doing everything right and still feeling unseen. Of being competent, dependable, present. And somehow still hollow underneath it all. In keeping ourselves to ourselves in relationship with others. Of deflecting. Of caving. Of compromising because either we don’t believe we deserve better or that we need something now instead of later.

You feel it all. Chronic suppressed rage that has no acceptable outlet. Sexuality that’s performed rather than inhabited. Intelligence that’s deployed in service of others’ visions rather than their own. A persistent sense of being a tourist in your own life.

The weight of armor is guilt that arrives the moment you stop moving. The piercing anxiety of stillness. The way doing nothing feels intolerable. In the reflexive deflection when someone offers you something real. A compliment, genuine care, a moment of being truly seen. Your first instinct is to minimize it, send it back. Or, to overcompensate.

Antonio Damasio, one of the foremost researchers on emotion and consciousness, has shown that the mind uses its own workings to hide the body from itself. We screen out the interior signals. The tension in the jaw, the held breath, the creeping dread that makes your skin crawl. Because attending to them would interrupt the stage we created for our lives.

Over time we lose access, not just to what we are feeling, to the fact that we are feeling at all. Armor does not disappear because we are disciplined enough to manage it. It goes somewhere. Into tissue. Into patterns of relating, numbing, disassociation. Into the widening gap between who we are and how we are defaulting to protect ourselves. In our backs. Our necks. We ache.

We become fluent in functioning but illiterate in being. Capable of caring for everyone else but genuinely uncertain how to receive care ourselves. Able to hustle all day and unable to tell anyone what we actually need when we get home.

Underneath all that competence is a hunger that performance cannot satisfy. A starvation for something simpler and far harder to admit.

To be known.

bell hooks wrote that the first act of love is attention. Armor refuses attention, toward ourselves before anyone else. That refusal is where the cost compounds, year after year, until the life we are living feels like a well-managed approximation of the one buried inside us.

“Most of your healing will be about unlearning the patterns of self-protection that once kept you safe.” — Vironika Wilde

The Unraveling

The unraveling begins with an honest question.

What do I truly desire? Not what I have trained myself to want. Not what earns approval or keeps the structure intact. Not what you told yourself was not for people like you. What does the interior, unperformed, unhurried part of me reach for when nothing is required and no one is watching?

What am I carrying that was not mine to begin with?

I have asked myself these questions inside a career that looked like success from the outside and felt like a sustained performance from within. As a parent, watching myself transmit the same reflexive self-sufficiency I inherited from society, wondering whether that was the legacy I wanted to pass forward. In moments when genuine connection was available and I held back anyway. Not because the person across from me was unworthy, but because I had not yet learned how to fully arrive without one hand still on the door or parts of myself I was unwilling to share.

Seneca knew that the stories we tell ourselves are often more consuming than the thing itself. Much of what armor guards us from has already happened. Or will never happen. Or would cost us far less than the protection itself.

This is the work of honest examination. Not hating what the armor gave us. It had a valid purpose. A defense mechanism built by the width of human existence.

But, have we looked at it clearly? Ask whether it still belongs in a life meant for living, or whether we are carrying it out of habit because setting it down would require us to find out who we are without it and if we are ready to be truly seen.

Because, what if we unshed and the person across from us rejects us for it? That, to many of us, is unimaginable. So why try at all?

When you sit with that question, where do you feel it in your body? Does your chest contract or expand? Does your stomach turn? The answer lives in the slow exhale. In the space between the breath and the truth you have been circling.

“When we protect ourselves so we won’t feel pain, that protection becomes like armor that imprisons the softness of the heart.” — Pema Chödrön

This Is Soul Work

Acknowledging your armor is not weakness. It is presence.

Peter Levine’s work on somatic experience makes clear that the body does not release its holdings through understanding alone. You can read every book, attend every workshop, comprehend something completely, and the nervous system will continue to brace against it. Real integration is slower and more physical than we expect.

The first time many people allow themselves to be witnessed feels wrong. Your body tenses. The urge to fidget is overwhelming. Your heart races. Your mind keeps scanning for what needs managing. The tears come.

That is a body that learned its job too well.

Donald Winnicott observed that the false self does not dissolve under pressure. It dissolves under safety. You cannot force your way out of armor. You can only build the conditions that make it unnecessary. Which means finding the communities and relationships where you are allowed to arrive as you actually are. Where depth is valued over performance. Where the examined life is not a liability but the whole point.

Soul work, as I mean it, is not mystical. It is the slow paced, honest archeology of who you are beneath the roles you perform and the credentials you carry. Unsexy. Quiet. Layered. More demanding than anything I’ve ever done. And more worthwhile than the totality of everything I’ve done to evade it.

My guess is, you are too alive for the life they’re living and have been taught to treat that aliveness as the problem. It’s not. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

“The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.” — Caroline Myss

What It Feels Like To Let Go

When I stopped managing how I was perceived in every room, something became available that had not been there before. Something specific and physical.

The constant background scanning quiets. Is this okay. Am I okay. What does this person need from me. What do I need to manage. What do I need to hide. It settles into a frequency you don’t just tolerate but inhabit.

The capacity to be genuinely moved by a conversation without immediately converting the feeling into how to best use whatever insight you acquired. To sit across from someone and be all the way with them. You stop monitoring the interaction from a slight remove, composing the next thing to say while they are still speaking, or holding some part of yourself in reserve in case it turns out not to be safe.

There is more energy available. Not because I was doing less, indeed I had time to do more if I wanted to, but because I stopped spending so much of it on maintenance. On the performance of being fine. On the management of how I am perceived.

Living in your actual shape, after years of contorting into a more acceptable one, registers in your body first. You notice it in small moments. Laughing with your entire body without wondering who you offended. The warming in your chest from sharing something meaningful without running it through the filter first. The butterflies from wanting something openly without immediately twisting the wanting into shame.

This is what integration offers. Strength that no longer has to legitimize itself. Leadership that does not require self-erasure. Relationships with genuine room for rest and reciprocity. A quality of presence that other people can actually feel. Because you are actually there. It radiates from your entire body.

And something more important. When you stop needing the armor to define you, you get to find out what does. What you actually care about. What kind of person you are when your performance is no longer running in the background. What becomes possible in a relationship, a conversation, a life, when you finally show up without the protection you no longer need.

The question I opened with is worth returning to.

What if the very thing that made you successful is the same thing keeping you from feeling alive?

For most people who sit with that honestly, the answer is yes. And also: it was necessary. And, if you look closely enough: it is no longer the only option.

What remains when the armor falls away is the person who was always underneath it. The one whose real shape was being kept safe, kept hidden, kept from even themselves.

That person has been waiting. Patient in the way that only truth can be patient.

Love and letting go,

Ava

P.S. — If this piece was helpful, yet you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your journey — I’m happy to guide you privately, . In person and remote options available. Please DM me and let’s connect.

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You are not in crisis. Everything on the surface is intact. The career, the relationships, the competence demonstrated in every room you enter. You have delivered. You keep on delivering.

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And yet, there is a question you have been circling for years. An ache. An emptiness. A sense that the version of yourself you present to the world is accurate but incomplete. That somewhere in the building of this life you made choices you may not have fully examined. Inherited ambition you mistook for your own. You put desires that mattered on a shelf in favor of things that were expected of you.

The question underneath all of it is simple and most people spend their entire lives avoiding it.

What do I actually want.

Not what you should want. Not what fits the life you already built. Not what would make sense to the people around you. What do you actually, specifically, genuinely want from this one life of yours, ?

This Question Is Hard

It is hard because looking directly at it requires a willingness to find out something true about yourself that you may then have to act on.

Anyone who has built a marriage, a family, a career, a reputation, knows that asking honestly what they want carries real risk. The answer might not fit the structure you spent years constructing. It might require disappointing people. Restructuring something. Admitting that a significant portion of life has been organized around what was expected rather than what was true.

So the question gets managed instead of answered. The acceptable answers come easily. More balance. More rest. More connection. More quality time. Those fit the version of yourself you have been maintaining.

The real answer is usually more specific and less convenient than that.

The Question Is Worth Asking

I have done this work. In practice, over years, at real cost.

When I asked myself what I truly desire, the answer was not immediately clear. So I did a series of exercises, went to therapy, noticed with care what I did not want, then brought it all together.

I can see that path with clarity now that I’m on the other side of it. I see the mistakes I made, the paths I took that were the long way around, and the mistakes that undermined my best intensions. When you step back and look at the entirety of my life, that picture looks much different than it did to me while inside of it.

I have lived an unconventional life. I began my journey as an erotic dancer who later earned an Ivy League master’s degree. From Bourbon Street bartender to world class hotels and restaurants to consulting for billionaires. From hospitality to educator to leading an executive office institution. From managing a traditional family to kink communities and D/s relationships. As an avid reader to substack writer and everything in between.

That’s a lot of conflicting parts warring for attention in one human. Without a solid container, there are a lot ways to buckle under my own complexity. I say that as someone who made real mistakes that have cost me devastatingly real things.

Then, I landed on it. The last honest question. Not just want do I really want or what do I truly desire.

What does my soul want from me?

I asked the question. And then, I listened. Hard.

What my soul wanted from me was integration.

To pull all the unique parts of myself into one room and let them finally talk to each other. To live in the same space, in the same person. To create a solid container for myself.

Not for others. For me. Not perfect by far. But not separate.

That was the foundation I needed.

My deepest desire is that my sex worker side need not be hidden away by the academic side. That the deeply erotic side of me was not diminished by the leadership side of me. They are to exist in equanimity. Harmoniously balanced. Intrinsically bound and led by my higher being.

That numbing any part of me out would be numbing my very soul. My soul needs me to be together and present.

Integration did not happen because I was brave or exceptional. It happened because I was willing to ask the honest question and stay with the answer long enough to act on it repeatedly over time. To stumble and get back up and begin again.

That required examining what I actually wanted. Needed. To disregard what most people would say is easier. It required sacrifices I did not anticipate. It required being willing to make major changes. Seven years of academic devotion. Career pivots where it felt like steeping off a cliff into a void of the unknown. Exposure of my past and rejection from those I cared about. Relationship failures that tested my faith in humanity. You name it. This journey is not easy.

Yet, I did it. I still do it.

I listened with deep curiosity and devotion to what my soul wants of me. Often instead of advice from those I care deeply about. With the discomfort of becoming someone different from the person I had been preforming. The one hiding parts of herself at her own cost to make others comfortable or market a false narrative. The one who wanted more but was too afraid to ask for it.

What I found on the other side of that examination was clarity. The relief of a life that is genuinely mine rather than a well-managed approximation of one. Or worse, one that is driven by fear and shame.

What the examination requires is the willingness to sit with an honest question long enough to hear an honest answer. To befriend your darkness and learn to listen to your shadow. To tend to your broken parts. To resist the acceptable version and fight for the true one. To treat your own interior life as a legitimate subject of serious inquiry rather than something to be managed around the edges of everything else.

This is something that we were not taught to do. It is not a natural skill.

It is a practice.

Clarity In Knowing

When you ask honestly what you want and stay with the answer, specific things become clear that were not clear before.

Maybe you want to live more expansively than you have been allowing yourself to. To stop performing modesty about the life you have actually built.

Maybe the structure of your most important relationship needs to be renegotiated to fit who you both actually are rather than who you were when you began.

Maybe there is something you have wanted for years that you have been treating as unreasonable when it is simply inconvenient for the version of yourself you have been presenting.

Maybe the traditional path feels foreign because it was genuinely never yours and you have known that for a long time.

These shelved desires are the architecture of a life. Your life. And they are available to anyone willing to do the examination honestly.

Your version will look nothing like mine. The tools are the same. The answers are entirely yours.

Where to Begin

I wrote a piece recently about one practical framework for beginning this kind of examination. It asks specific questions and gives you a structure for sitting with the answers over time rather than reaching for the first comfortable response.

If something in this piece found you, that is where to go next. What I really aspire to is forming a community that is brave enough to walk this path with me. This kind of soul work is not meant to be done alone. If that is you, DM me. Let’s start the conversation.

This is hard. The kind of hard that rewards sustained honesty over time.

The question is worth asking. What do you really want? You only have this one life, after all.

You already know that. That is why you are still reading.

Love and power,

Ava

P.S. — If this piece was helpful, yet you know you would benefit from more personalized support at any point on your journey — I’m happy to guide you privately. In person and remote options available. Please DM me and let’s connect.

Learn more about me and what I do.

Very likely, no one ever showed them how. The cultural script handled the big decisions. School, career, relationships, family. The script is not malicious. It is simply not personal. It was never designed around you specifically. Around what you actually love. What brings you joy. What protects you from the script we in inherited and have never really questioned. Around what makes your particular life feel worth living rather than worth managing.

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The self contract is a structured practice for doing that examination honestly. It is not a wish list. It is not a personality test. It is not a therapeutic exercise. And it’s only a starting place.

This is a document you build for yourself, in dedicated time, with genuine honesty, that maps what is actually true about you. What you want. What you value. What your history has taught you. What you will not accept. What you are building toward.

It is useful for anyone entering a significant relationship or life transition. For anyone who senses that the life they are living is not quite fully theirs. For anyone who has been answering the acceptable version of important questions rather than the honest one. The real one.

One honest note before you begin. This document is a tool for self-examination, not a substitute for professional support. If you are navigating significant trauma, mental health challenges, or a crisis, please work with a qualified therapist or counselor alongside this practice. Knowing yourself clearly and getting appropriate support are not competing activities. They reinforce each other.

Paid subscribers get the second half of select essays there, where the argument turns into practice and I share with you my lived experience, not just what I’ve concluded from it.

I am calling it The Back Room and here is my invitation into the part of me, of what I’ve learned actually works, that I don’t open to everyone.

20% of the proceeds fund the vital public education and community events that my House, one of the only female led BDSM Houses in the country, hosts.

Think of it like the speakeasy into my soul. Come in. It’s nice here in the darkness.

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Numbing.

It could be endless scrolling, porn, drugs, or alcohol. It doesn’t matter. You know it when it happens by how it makes you feel. By the opportunity cost. By the space you create between the life you want and the one you have.

The way in which you spend your time is an investment that creates predictable and tangible outcomes. The act of dissociating from your life prevents you from living it fully.

For me, it was alcohol.

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A glass of wine, or three, at the end of the day. The exhale of it. The signal to my nervous system that the performing was over, the managing was done, the part of the day that required me to be fully on had finally closed.

I grew up watching my father do the same thing. He came home from work and he had a drink. That was simply what adults did to mark the end of one thing and the beginning of another. There was nothing dramatic about it. No bottom. No crisis. Just a habit so normalized it never occurred to me to question it.

Then I spent years working in environments where drinking was not only acceptable but functional. Encouraged. Bars, nightclubs, the hospitality industry. You sell drinks. You bond over drinks. You close out a brutal shift with drinks. The culture is soaked in it.

I was an erotic dancer in the late nineties. I don’t have to tell you there were hard drugs involved. We bounced between New Orleans, Las Vegas, and LA without a care in the world. Well, I probably had many. I just don’t remember any offhand.

We were young and had little fear of consequences. My whole life revolved around aggregate risk. After all, rolling my ass off dancing in the packed Las Vegas strip streets seemed like the perfect way to ring in the new millennium.

Forgetfulness

When I went back to school I stopped. There was no room for it. The scholarships required grades, the grades required presence, and presence required that I show up to my own life without the nightly buffer between me and it.

I felt better almost immediately. More myself. Mornings were for healthy rituals. I poured my entire self into my work without distraction. I didn’t date. Everything I touched had more of me in it.

And then I forgot.

The way you forget things that feel obvious once you are no longer inside them. I drifted back into it slowly post graduation, still glowing with the high of such a huge achievement.

Social drinking. Bonding with a new partner over shared glasses. The habit that had always been there waiting. The culture that welcomed me back without asking a single question.

Then a breakup and wine became a private ritual. I told myself it kept me sane. Softened the edges of grief and pain. It didn’t help me deal with any of it. It just pushed it further away. And there were some real things there to deal with.

As my life became more mundane, it changed shape. Perhaps a connection to my younger self. Partly me feeling like an adult who made adult choices. Those were both narratives I told myself.

I told myself I had earned it. That the life I was building was examined and whole while I quietly maintained the one room I had not opened. I kept this to myself and it was harder than I thought to let it go.

What I was actually doing, underneath all of it, was carving out a moment that felt like mine. A few hours where nothing was required of me.

Where I could check out and call it reward even when it made me tired the next day.

Call it normalcy when a better alternative was reaching out to a friend.

Call it the thing grownups do at the end of a hard day even as I watched the effect on my father compound over time.

A force quit. To tune out the world just for a few hours. And there is plenty that makes us want to tune out. Those things are real, heavy, and continuous.

For me, it was all and none of those things.

It was the last partition I had not yet examined.

Locked Doors

Here is the part I did not write about for a long time because naming it required sitting with how much it cost.

It made me into a liar.

The person who preaches presence and practices partition. Who writes about the examined life and maintains one carefully unexamined corner of it. Who builds a public framework around presence, depth, and sitting with your darkness while privately keeping one part safely locked away. It was mine, after all.

Until it wasn’t.

The work I had done was undermined by the one thing I had not been willing to put on the table. And there was real work. Years of it. The therapy, the community, the rituals, and the deliberate return of every part of myself into the same room.

And it came out sideways. The way all unexamined things do eventually. In the exquisitely painful way that costs you exactly the thing you wanted most, yet were too afraid to name directly.

I lost something important. Something I had done real work to feel worthy of. The things I wanted to build. The connection and sense of self worth I had earned. A knowing of wholeness. Trust in myself. Trust I needed from others.

That loss was not bad luck. It was accurate. It was the consequence of the last partition finally making itself known in the most clarifying way available.

And because I hadn’t fully examined that one part of me, there were other things I hid. Things I really wanted but was too afraid to explore or ask for. It never really felt safe to do so because I hadn’t asked the harder questions. The ones with answers I likely didn’t want to hear even if I had been fully present. Not present enough to ask if we were on the same page. If we had the same ambition, desires, or shared goals.

I was afraid. So I kept part of myself to myself. This is why fear is the number one silent killer of relationships. It simply does not work. Not if you want the full, terrifyingly real experience of being fully seen with your shadows standing right next to you, hands resting protectively on your shoulders like a claim.

My shadows have always been the closest friends I have ever had. Yet, given a chance, your darkness will start driving the moment you look the other way. It is smarter than you. Vastly so. Ancient. Merciless.

And it loves to be seen.

It does not matter what your numbing of choice is. I could be hours lost staring at screens. Time lost in a relationship that makes you smaller than you are. A career that does not fit your being’s cry for purpose. Being cruel when you could have been kind.

The harder ones to name are the ones that wear the costume of self-improvement. The meditation practice used to bypass feeling rather than examine it. The therapy that has become a comfortable place to talk about growth without doing it. The spiritual framework deployed to float above difficult material rather than sit inside it. The wellness routine that looks like presence from the outside and functions as avoidance from within.

These are the most seductive forms of numbing because they come with the approval of everyone around you and the quiet satisfaction of believing you are doing the work while the last partition in you stays firmly closed.

Your heart knows it. If you do not address it, it will make you sick. Physically. Mentally. And in your very soul.

Our souls are too precious for that.

Erosion

Keeping it quiet does not work. A silent erosion of the soul is still erosion. It creates shame where none was needed and adds struggle to a life that did not require it.

Does it matter that the thing that steals from you is culturally acceptable? That a lot of people do it, even just once in a while?

No.

It does not.

Does the work you did before matter? The life you built? The trust you earned? The grit it took to get you to a place that may not be perfect but is yours?

Yes. And knowing that will not catch you when you trip and fall on your face.

Your shadow is always running in the background. Mine will be there throughout the entirety of my life.

It is part of me. And a part of me I am quite fond of actually. My darkness has led me to some stunningly beautiful places. Sacred places. It can work through you in some really pleasurable ways. But that is for another piece.

Our darkness does not go away because you have looked at it directly. Your relationship with it changes shape. Your dance with it, however skilled you are, is just that. A dance. A healthy fear of it, a respect for it, is wise.

Darkness is the closest thing I know to divinity. Best not to poke at it, minimize it, or lock it away. It does not love that.

My advice? Act as if the whole world can see everything you do all the time. That matters. When you partition yourself from others you lose legitimacy. Without legitimacy you have no power. Only performance.

Will it be uncomfortable? Deeply so.

People crave privacy for a reason and unbridled truth requires others face their own shadows. You cannot control how others react. That is an external reality. The difference is knowing you did your best, that you were in the room, that you stayed in the room.

It is knowing exactly how you want to show up in the world. For others. For yourself.

There is no use throwing around words like presence or mindfulness or integration unless you are actually clear in your body, mind, and soul. That will only be the beginning of your long journey inward. Step one. Call it a spring cleaning of your soul.

Words mean nothing as decoration. They mean everything as practice. And practice means all of it. Not just the parts that are comfortable to examine. All of it.

A really smart person I know says to live a soul led life you have to go all in. Otherwise you always have one foot out the door. And keeping one foot out the door is enough to cost you everything you truly desire.

What most people do not realize is that everything you do of value requires your undivided presence. Presence requires knowing yourself. Not compartmentalizing, fragmenting, or hiding parts of yourself away at your convenience.

You cannot hide from your soul. You cannot hide from your darkness.

Stillness

Real rest does not require numbing.

It requires an honest accounting of how you spend your time. Every moment is an investment.

For me, it looks like writing. Like reading. Lots of reading. Like being in nature. Building community and valuing the ones I already have. Like the silence that comes from a nervous system that is not being pulled in opposing directions. A way of being that is not spending precious energy protecting itself from ghosts. Genuine stillness rather than the performed stillness of someone who has taken the edge off their own experience.

I have built a life dense with things I actually want to do and there is genuinely no room in it for checking out. Am I saying that I don’t want to from time to time? Sure, I do. How could you not with your feet planted in this world? Yet, there are other ways to elevate that human desire for maladaptive stabilization.

I am particular about how I spend my time and who I spend it with. I do not own a television. I write instead of scroll. I am careful about what I allow into my mind, be that opinions, ideas, or beliefs. I question everything to a degree that would annoy even Socrates.

That is not virtue or discipline. It is the honest reckoning of someone who understands what presence costs and knows what its absence costs more.

When I am fully present, I glow. And I know it. I am plugged into a life-giving source. Vivid. Fascinating. Real. I can hold nuance, connect dots, and stay grounded when things get real.

The relationships I truly desire, the ones built on genuine trust and complete visibility, require that I show up as someone who can actually be known. I can weather rejection, stick to my vision and values, and sit in honest relation with my fear, communicating them properly.

You cannot navigate complex dynamics that matter at that level with a compromised nervous system. You cannot offer real surrender or real authority from behind a buffer. The stakes are too high and the intimacy too real.

This is true everywhere. In every room. In every relationship. In every piece of work that asks something real from you. And every piece does. It should.

The examined life is not a concept. It is a daily practice of showing up time and time again. Of finding out what is actually there when you stop managing the shape of your own experience. To sit with your darkness and allow it to breathe with you.

What is there, it turns out, is enough.

More than enough.

The Last Partition

Every piece of work I have done on myself over the years was real. None of it was wasted. The deliberate integration of every part of my history into a single coherent life was necessary and beyond meaningful.

It was just incomplete.

The last partition is always the one you have been calling something else. Rest. Reward. Normalcy. Freedom. The thing grownups do. The force quit. The moment that is just yours.

Those things are defensible. They are also thieves.

You know it when your kid tries to take your phone out of your hands so you will play with them and you snap or push them away. You know it from the way your skin crawls with anxiety when you are high. You know it when you have not slept well in ages.

You know it well before others can see it. On a long enough timeline, they will. And it will affect them in ways you cannot begin to imagine. But it does not have to be that way for you or for them.

When I finally put my last partition on the table the same way I had put everything else on the table, something completed itself.

The quiet of a life that is finally, wholly, without exception, mine. One in which I know what I truly desire. What I really want. In which I can finally rest. Reset. Tend to my soul. I am like a soul gardener. It is, the best.

I can finally be truly present.

The difference is magnetic. It changes everything and the people around you can feel it. I bet you can remember a person who when they turned to you it felt like the sun itself was shining directly on you. For you. Only you, in that heartbeat of a moment in time.

It feels like power folded in divine awareness. The room rearranges itself around them. Bends itself to them. They radiate steadiness and grace. They do not need permission. They are permission.

It is the difference between someone sitting next to you scrolling through their phone and someone turned directly to you, the entire weight of them settling upon you, their presence wrapping around you as they listen, really hear you, with their full intent and care.

It is the difference between being afraid of being seen and being the one who calmly watches people adjust their bodies when you ask the fourth follow up question to an offhanded comment because you are genuinely interested in coxing out the layers of their consciousness.

That is intimacy. Intensity. Inevitability. A fully alive life.

There is no checking out. Not when what you truly desire is a fully lived life filled with passion and joy. There can be no secrets. No hidden shame. The ones who want to be there for you cannot hold what they do not know.

I know that now in every part of myself.

That is what it cost to learn it.

Love and power,

Ava

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