With the Wind

To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler

You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it

If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life

If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.

Go through a sensory checklist.

SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights

SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.

TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?

TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?

SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?

INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.

Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.

This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.

People often ask me about my unmasking journey and express surprise to hear that such a big part of it has been 1) accepting I must avoid light/the sun and 2) wearing clothes I can stand.

I’ll play it jokey and say it like “well it took me far too long to realize that my former wardrobe made me want to jump off a bridge.” Or “turns out my old underwear was anti-autistic.” Or “for whatever reason when it’s too bright, I can’t think.”

That’s right! Because you don’t know how autistic people are.

You know, people never bullied me for being autistic. Because neither me nor they had the terminology. Nah, they punished me for being weird. And what made me weird to their eyes? I spoke weird and often stumbled, and I spoke like a grownup anyway, and I wouldn’t shut up about Ancient Greece. I moved weird too, because I was (am) really clumsy, and I didn’t have any friends. I was boring and didn’t catch jokes (made at my expense) and I didn’t look them in the eye, and so on and on.

So today I'm going to wrap it around your thigh. We'll use the longer prongs for this, so there will always be contact no matter how much we walk about. The longer prongs will hurt more, of course. Metal does not forgive and those points will dig in and serve as a constant reminder of what's between your legs.

From there, it's a perfect correction tool for a forgetful or bratty sub.

Speak without being spoken to? Zap. Close your legs? Zap. Meet my eyes? Zap zap zap.

The first thing to note is that...

This is going to Hurt.

That fact cannot be shied away from. Pain, even for masochists, hurts. There is a tolerance to how much someone can take, and ways to engage with that tolerance. You will need to learn how each masochist takes pain, and potentially even teach them how to manage and endure it.

So you've got a paddle and a tied up piece of masochistic meat, or perhaps you're using your hand and it's bent over your knee, or perhaps it's cuffed to a cross and you've got a whip, or perhaps you've got a knife or needles or... well by now I've laboured the point enough.

How do you get the most out of your meat?

Start slow. Hit them slowly and rhythmically, building up in intensity every few hits, and when they tense too much or start struggling to breathe or can't stop themselves from making too much noise, slow down again.

Your aim is to warm up the meat so that it can get used to the pain, and once it's used to the pain you can intensify it. Climb up, drop down, and climb back up again. Vary the strike location, but remember that locations you haven't hit as much will need warming up too. The more skilfully it's done, the more you'll get to hit it.

On the subject of their breathing, tension, and noises, you'll want to pay attention to these as you hit them. As you hit them, their breathing will try to get sharp and shallow. Their muscles will try to contract to harden against the impact, and they'll make noises as reactions to your hits. Encourage them to keep their breathing steady and calm, and they'll take the hits better. Encourage them to relax so that the impact dissipates into their flesh instead of getting caught in their tension and you can hit them harder while hurting them less. Listen for moans of pleasure if they're so inclined, and encourage them to verbalise their pain, intentionally responding to pain verbally will help them endure it. Let them calm themselves between your hits, and they'll feel like they can take it and let you push them harder.

Watch how they react, but be aware that you may need to soothe or goad them. Try different things: Hold your off-hand on their shoulder so that they can brace against you. Praise them for each hit you've delivered. Tell them they can take more for you. Tease them. Rub them while they catch their breath and tell them how happy you are with them for taking it. Be verbal, but don't expect responses unless they enjoy responding. Pay attention to what helps them calm.

Once you've got the hang of these things, you can begin to play with them and challenge them: forbid them from making noise. Blindfold them so that they can't prepare for the pain. Make them watch you hit them so that they can't help but tense up in response, and play with false swings to mess with their minds. You can be cruel, because you know how it works. You know which moving parts can be shifted, and which must stay still.

Consider also what your masochist wants from being hit: some do not want to be overwhelmed, they want to be guided and hit into a meditative place where they can dissolve into the pain: intense but never too much, and then you can hit them until they're bloody and raw. Others want their pain to push right up to the edge of too much and stay there until they break. They want to cry and scream, and your challenge is to see how cathartic you can make it: break them too quickly and they might not find it satisfying, and neither will you.

Now I have to punish you before we start again.

Let's see if you can count to 24

Hurt me with purpose.

Fuck me with meaning.

When I heard the word "eustress" I didn't care for it, because it felt more meaningful than the word itself could hold. I explored that concept, over the next couple years, kept having experiences that returned me to it. Eustress: moderate or normal psychological stress, interpreted as being beneficial. How silly. There was a something in that word, but the word was an inappropriate enclosure for the something.

I made my own doctor's appointment and went to it. This was the hardest thing I did that year. It was a new kind of hard. I had always thought I would feel the sickening tightness of forcing, the nausea of silencing my body and my feelings to comply with orders from another person. That was the essence of my medical experiences throughout life: coercion, lack of autonomy, shame, being demeaned and belittled. The trauma resisted being treated as an irrational fear to be pushed down and ignored, so I accepted it. I released the werewolf gnawing on my guts and let the wolf-part of me decide how medical professionals would be allowed to speak to me and to touch my body. I wrote down these boundaries, brought them to the appointment, and walked like an apex predator. And it worked. That fall, I got my flu shot for the first time in my adult life. No crash of adrenaline, no trapped, agonizing panic.

A new kind of hard: not the hard of a dog in a cruel experiment being shocked with electricity no matter what it does, more like the hard of a sled dog running as fast as it can, a bloodhound latching onto a scent, a herding dog weaving and dodging to maneuver the sheep into their pen.

That's how I feel when I'm out, somewhere I probably shouldn't be, exploring some woods or a neglected hay field, searching for plants. You can discover anything in the places no one looks: little pockets of biodiversity, rare species, ecosystems thriving under the mercy of being forgotten. I feel...focused. Locked in. Perfectly stimulated by my environment. I'm good at what I'm doing: good at navigating thickets and clambering over rocks, wading through weeds and mud and weaving through brambles, observant, sharp-eyed, and I know what I'm looking at, where almost nobody else does. Swamp milkweed. Smooth carrionflower. Lyre-leaf sage. Alsike clover. Knowing them all by name is like a sixth sense, a power to move through a higher dimension. A world invisible to others becomes known to you.

Sometimes I feel this way when I'm writing, or rereading my own writing. Damn, I'm good. Sometimes I feel this way when cutting kudzu or invasive bamboo in the forest at work, tying them into a bundle and using my strength and stamina to drag them back to the nature center where they can be made useful in crafts and projects. Sometimes I feel this way when walking, covering ground between A to B, cooled by the breeze through my comfy linen pants. I'm a machine, a persistence predator, an animal doing what it evolved to do. Solving a chemistry problem and realizing I understand it. Pulling off a tough platforming section in a video game. That intoxicating feeling of strength and efficacy.

The counterpart of eustress is distress, the usual association of the word "stress." That's why eustress is hard to wrap your head around, because you imagine the feeling of being overwhelmed and powerless and try to come up with a version of that that's good and enriching (you can't). Insight arrived after that doctor's appointment, when I experienced the crucial ingredient of feeling powerful, not powerless. Then I thought of other times when I felt powerful, when I felt challenged but also engaged, stimulated, maybe even exhilarated.

Another word for this feeling might be mastery. It is good for us, I think. Not just to experience mastery, but to be exposed to it. Watching Simone Biles perform gymnastics makes my brain light up with pleasure, recognizing that I am witnessing pure excellence. Music, art, athletics, films, dance. Wow! That's excellent. Wow! Such mastery of the craft! Wow! So much practice and training! It is amazing how many things a human being could potentially become excellent at.

It's the same when watching a creature behave as it evolved to do, showing excellence within its niche. A tree swallow looping and diving, bumble bees pollinating flowers, a deer leaping gracefully. Wow! Millions of years of evolution, a creature thriving and excelling. I felt this when seeing a soft-shell turtle next to the road sprint into the creek and dive beneath the water as I approached. I didn't know a turtle could move that fast. Wow! What a weird-looking creature- but it's excellent at being the thing that it is.

Humans are adaptable, incredibly so. We can choose the thing that we are. We can be a lot of things. And we can be excellent at them. And no matter what it is, whether swimming or rock climbing or singing or dancing or worm charming (it's a real thing, look it up), there can be that glowing hum of pleasure at being good at it. Or watching others be good at it. That feeling can be a form of guidance. Okay, you're good at it...how does it feel to be good at it?

Are you challenging yourself enough? Are you pushing yourself hard enough? Maybe that's not the right question. Maybe instead it's: Does it feel good to be good at it? When you're doing less than your potential and not growing, the activity would probably cease to be stimulating. Eustress has two opposites: distress and boredom.

Of course it's bad for mental health when things are not effortful enough. That's why zoo animals need enrichment, and even pets can benefit from puzzle toys and ways to "earn" their food and treats. If things are effortless, then you don't experience effort leading to results, and that is a lot like being powerless. Whereas if you have the opportunity to expend effort and focus towards a result, getting the result makes you feel empowered.

Maybe this is one of the purposes of play: to psychologically recover from coerced effort, fruitless effort, or lack of opportunity for effort and reward, by rehearsing scenarios where a creature can feel effective and masterful doing something. From that perspective, play is a way of getting your healthy dose of eustress.

you could say that