#extremes

I am fire and storm.

I cannot tamper down what I am,

Nor do I want to.

Come near me and be consumed.

Let your heart be taken to the edges of every feeling,

Free fall into the abyss and lose all sanity,

I am all you fear and long for,

There is only before and never an after.

And I can promise you, you will die but you will also live like you never have before or ever will.

Sometimes I think my bipolar, my alcoholism, and my kink all live in the same room. Different doors, same walls. The craving doesn’t change—just what I use to feed it.

When I was drinking, it was always about escape and obliteration. That burning want to shut off the noise in my head, to drown the ache under something stronger. Bipolar feels similar, just stripped of the bottle—either I’m flying so high I can’t touch ground, or I’m sinking so low I can’t breathe. Both sides are still hunger. Both sides still want more.

And then there’s kink. Which sometimes feels like the same craving, but in a language my body understands better than my brain. When I give myself over to pain, or denial, or someone else’s control, it quiets me. It makes me feel held inside the chaos instead of lost to it.

That’s what makes me wonder if they’re all threads of the same thing: the part of me wired for extremes. The part that can’t settle for lukewarm. The part that feels safer in the intensity of a bruise or a command than in the flatness of moderation.

I don’t think kink is my illness. And I don’t think it’s my addiction either. But I can’t pretend it isn’t tangled up in them. Maybe kink is the only one that gives the hunger a container. A way to pour it out without drowning.