This time of the year when you are reminded once again very acutely how far from ordinary your life is

So it came again. This time of the year, when you meet with your colleagues and their partners for a Christmas dinner and you realize that you are never going to achieve their level of normalcy (which you usually don’t aspire to, but being so acutely aware of your distance from it makes you slightly uncomfortable and feeling out if place).

This time when people ask you to summarize your year and tell them what the highlights were and all you can think of is how your dominant made you believe that he is a psychopath and you feared for your life or how you were hypnotized into a rag doll and fucked mercilessly while being half-conscious and helpless. Or how you were tortured and humiliated in rope in front of forty people and how afterwards everyone was telling you that it is was beautiful.

It is this time of the year when the frequency of biting your tongue, awkward silences and coming up with the worst possible lies is at its year-high.

Will there ever be a time when I can stop hiding my personality from the world?

Both kink and polyamory have grown to shape a big part of who I am. It happened organically and it has changed me on many levels. I really love how I've developed in the past two years and I would love to be able to share it with others. Unfortunately, sometimes it is not the best idea.

In general, people talk about relationships frequently, which makes hiding polyamory quite complicated. Because if I want to talk about my relationships, I either have to lie or I need to explain myself. Becoming polyamorous changed the way that I look at relationships and love in general. It made me both more connected and more self-sufficient at the same time. It made me question the status quo in many other aspects of life, also outside of romantic relationships. On the one hand, I would like to share it with other people, because I feel like otherwise, I am not myself with them. I am putting on a facade that is socially accepted, but it is not who I am. I am also not able to talk about all the important people in my life without lying who they are to me. But on the other hand, I know that my choices are not standard and if I share them, I will have to go through a process of explaining them as well. And not everyone that I interact with is worth going through it. Also, not everyone that I share it with will approve of it. I might turn some people against me. In terms of friendships, it is perfectly fine for me to lose people in my life if they can’t accept my choices. But when it comes to career or family, things get more complicated.

As for kink, one could say that not talking about it shouldn't be such a problem, as people usually don't share with others what they do in their bedrooms. That’s true, they don’t, but kink and D/s are way more than just sex for me. It's a way of life. It's a certain attitude and it permeates all aspects of my life. Accepting the fact that I am submissive, learning about my reactions to dominant people and playing with people, in general, taught me so much that I feel like I am putting on a very thick mask when I decide not to share those experiences. The play that I do requires constant self-analysis and work on myself, which often leads to enlightening discoveries. When I am around vanilla people, I need to police myself a lot not to share certain thoughts and insights, because I don’t want to be asked where I got them from. I need to shut off a big part of my life, lie about my free time activities and where I’ve met many of my friends and partners.

The alternative is even more complicated though because kink is so misunderstood in the society that sharing about it can potentially be dangerous, even leading to losing my career or the people that I love.
For me being open and true to myself is one of the most important values. But by being honest about kink and polyamory, I put myself in the spotlight. I give myself a label. Because once I share it, it is going to be one of the main things that people will remember me from. And they are going to ask me about it and I will have to explain it to them in the best way possible because it might be the only insight that they get into polyamory or kink and I don’t want to create a wrong image. The sheer fact that I’ve made many non-standard choices in my life creates a dilemma where I either have to be dishonest or serve as an example and an advocate of the choices that I’ve made. And sometimes I feel like I just want to live my life.

Will there ever be a time when I can proudly talk about how I express myself creatively?

I am a data scientist and I have an analytical mind, but I’ve always loved art. And I’ve been looking for ways to express myself artistically since I remember. I’ve tried playing the piano, singing, cooking, dancing and writing. Without greater success. Argentine tango was giving me some sort of satisfaction, but it was far from fulfilment.

Last year I finally found an activity that does make me feel like I am really creating some sort of art. It is rope bondage. And maybe writing about kink a little bit, but I don’t feel good enough in it to really be proud of it. In any case, I would love to be able to talk about these subjects. I used to feel kind of inferior towards people who I thought were creative, because I felt like they have something that I don’t. But at the same time, I’ve always found them fascinating and I was looking for their company. Thanks to rope and kink I feel like I also have something to say in terms of creativity and I would love to be able to share it with people whom I admire. Unfortunately, it is not always a good idea.

Last week during a Christmas dinner I’ve been talking to the husband of my manager (whom I find extremely interesting, very intelligent and well educated with a successful career in business, who happens to also be a recognized photographer with a number of exhibitions in galleries and so on). Before dinner we visited a photography exhibition and we had a talk about it afterwards. Then he asked me if I do anything to express myself artistically. That was a difficult moment for me. I really value his opinion and I wanted to impress him. I was so tempted to tell him that I am a Japanese rope bondage model and that I love it. That I feel like rope exposes some aspects of myself that are really at the core of who I am. That I think that I can really touch people with what I do. And that I really am starting to feel like I have something to say in it. That I understand what it means to create. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because then I would have to explain to him what it is and where it comes from. And I would probably have to admit that I am kinky.
For me, rope is so much more than kink. It really allows me to express myself in ways that I didn’t know were possible. It is a beautiful art that I find utterly fascinating. Practising it is a big part of my life and I love to talk about it. Unfortunately, the only people that I can freely talk about it with are kinky people. With all the other people I need to remember that sharing about it equals coming out. And there are some people with whom coming out might be a really big deal and not in a good way.

Is staying in hiding really a good idea if I want something to change?

I keep asking myself this question. If I and fellow kinksters and polyamorous people keep staying in hiding, will anything ever change? Will public opinion about what we do ever change, if we don’t share about what we do? I hate the fact that I need to hide a big part of myself in most of my everyday interactions. That I always need to weigh my options carefully before I decide whether I can be completely transparent with someone. I hate putting on masks.

I feel like if I want something to change and if I want people to understand polyamory and kink, I should talk about it. By keeping it in hiding, I keep behaving like there is something wrong with what I am doing. And I definitely don’t think there is.

But… Sharing about it is an act of courage that is hard sometimes. People often feel threatened when they hear about other people being different than them. They don’t like them. And we are dependent on other people in our lives. We live in a society. We work for other people. We manage and are managed by other people. And if we want to be successful in a society, we need to make other people feel comfortable around us. We need them to like and respect us. And if we seem too different, they won’t.

So I am still doubting whether I want to be open about my choices or not. On the one hand, I feel like I should, not only because it makes me uncomfortable to pretend someone that I am not, but more because I feel like being open is the right thing to do if I want anything to change in the way that society views kink and polyamory. On the other hand, though, I don’t want to risk being pushed to the margins of the society and losing a chance for a successful life, because I’ve been too honest with the wrong people. Honesty makes you vulnerable and your vulnerability might be abused by some.

I am not sure if I am ready to pick up this fight. I am not sure if my position is strong enough to hold the weight of judgement that will come with coming out. I try to be honest about it with the people whom I trust, but I feel like that it is not enough. It’s easy, to be honest with people who you know will support and understand you. Or at least will try to understand. But I feel like I am not ready to be fully transparent yet. Especially not about kink. I feel like I am not ready to make most of my social interactions about defending my choices.

So I guess that I will have to still suffer through that period of lying and wearing thick masks to pretend that I am just like everybody else. It is saddening that it feels like I need to shield other people from who I am. It is saddening that I feel like I am not strong enough to be fully open about who I am. I hope that one day I will. I feel like I owe it to myself. But this time has not come yet.