Time to Get Real

Most New Year’s resolutions are laughable; forgotten and ignored before the Superbowl is played. But my primary resolution of 2010 has not only endured but has reaped real results. Quite simply, I resolved to lead a more reality-based life.

Let me give you a specific example. I had been grossly overweight for some time. Some of the weight slowly accumulated in the many years I worked in sales and marketing and traveled constantly. For a six year period I managed our company’s business in Canada and lived in various Intercontinental Hotels, mostly in Toronto, for 10-15 days per month, with all the attendant room service breakfasts and client entertaining that includes. Then, in 2007, after a brief brush with cancer, I had a total thyroidectomy – including the four lymph nodes in my neck. It’s quite sobering to have body parts removed and not be replaced with anything! (Anyone interested in knowing more about this episode can email me, and if I know you, I will be happy to give you the link to my “medical blog”). But while the operation, recovery and subsequent cancer treatments all went in stride, I had a very hard time adjusting to my new regime of daily doses of T4 thyroid hormones – necessary to replace the hormones normally created by the thyroid gland. As a result, my whole metabolic system went haywire -- it took a full 18 months for the correct T4 dosage to be found and for my body to fully adjust to it. I blew up like a balloon in those 18 months. Really scary. When the dust finally settled, I made several half-hearted and thoroughly unsuccessful attempts at losing weight, all the while fantasizing about being thinner. Well, my new credo in 2010 is to recognize the reality of a given problem and then do something real – with intent – to effectuate change. As a result, I have lost over 50 pounds this year and am still losing at a rate of about 6-8 pounds a month as I slowly settle into my ideal weight. As I reflect on this success, I’m still stunned at how easy it was to do. All it required was a real recognition of the problem and the intent (and correct methodology) to do something about it.

I have applied this same reality-based thinking to all of my personal relationships as well. Many of you know that I have enjoyed a very complicated and rewarding personal friendship with a well-known NYC ProDomme. I began seeing her for monthly sessions several years ago, and after a couple of years of increasingly intense and enjoyable sessions, she asked me to meet her at a downtown bar for a drink The occasion was her impending trip to Europe and my impending trip to the operating table. Starting with this sweet good luck clink, our relationship slowly transformed from a strictly professional provider/client acquaintance to…well, something else. What that something else was could never be properly defined. She had no interest in collaring me (which I would have readily accepted) but yet held me in higher esteem than a regular client and was willing to spend considerable amounts of personal time with me. She frequently joked that I was so unique that I was in my own category. And while I craved a closer relationship with her, I understood why that was not the case and considered myself very, very lucky and proud to have the wonderful friendship that we did have. Over time this friendship took many dips and turns and last year sometime, without warning or announcement, I was seemingly put into the proverbial ice box. I really thought I had done something wrong, and my timid inquiries were rebuffed as inappropriate requests for personal information, which they weren’t; I was just trying to figure out where I stood. Well, I’m a little slow sometimes, and at long last it finally dawned on me that where I stood was nowhere, that the closeness she once shared with me was absent and was replaced with...nothing. I had to take a hard look at this. The reality was that I was pretending to be collared by her. And for a while I think we both enjoyed this pretending: she got the occasional benefits of having an additional collared subject without ever having to do the deed and without dealing with any of the messy shit that normally come with the territory. But as time passed, sadly, there was less and less of that, and I became acutely aware that my diminished status with her was making me unhappy. The cold truth of the situation is that I am no longer an important person in her life, and that is something I just had to come to grips with. So after much discussion, some of it heated, we recently agreed - as she put it so well - that neither of us was being the kind of friend that the other person wants or needs right now. That about sums it up. For her, I‘m quite certain she has not wasted even 5 minutes of thought on it, but for me it was a difficult and painful process. Ultimately, it was all about accepting reality and behaving accordingly. I am sad beyond words at what has happened, and in fact my shrink is worried that I have cavalierly thrown away something precious and important, but for better or worse, my personal development required moving off the dime, and I saw no other way that movement was going to occur. But this is my head speaking; I have a ball-gag on my heart at the moment…

I would be remiss if I did not reflect for a moment on that wonderful friendship we once had. At play, she tapped into a vein that very few Dommes ever found, and once she found it she was able to go back to it at will almost every time we got together in session. Nobody else in my long experience has been capable of such a thing. I’ve been playing for over 30 years. The thought that I may never have anything like this again – a real possibility - is truly terrifying. But the fact is, I have not sessioned in over 6 months precisely because I felt too vulnerable to play with her anymore. Sometimes it’s tough to keep it all compartmentalized when your heart is always in your hand…. Finally, I’ll also miss the amazing level of communications we maintained over the years. Being two writers, our best mode was always the written form, and some of our email exchanges are truly classic; the most intense disagreement giving way to new learning and understanding. I will miss that, too. More than I can express.