Somber Reflections
Compartmentalizing my identity was tearing me apart.
Vibe Song:
What has been on my mind is a conversation I had with someone I knew in the kink community. I mentioned that I stepped away from the community, and they said that they were thinking about taking a break themselves. And what struck me was their reasoning.
The reason they gave for wanting to take a break is that how kink was becoming part of their identity. They wanted to focus on aspects of themself that wasn’t related to kink and sex. There’s a bit more to what they said, but these were the parts that stuck out to me.
I felt like I was coming from the other side of the problem. I was okay with kink being my identity and my struggle was fitting other parts of myself in the kink community. I felt like I wasn’t able to show up as an indigenous person in the community, and frankly I didn’t know what it would look like. And I was actively working on this before I stepped away. I started going to POC munches and becoming familiar there.
I struggled a lot because it feels like race and kink don’t mix in the way that it should. As a white presenting indigenous person, I don’t get hit with the typical racial issues. I get hit with racial erasure. I’m seen as white, so therefore I am white. I have to be active in my indigenous voice to seen as such. But that makes for awkward introductions because there isn’t a social standard for it like there is around gender identity.
It took me awhile to come to terms with the idea that I’m a white presenting mixed race person. A fact that was kind of embarrassing once I remembered that Métis is french for “mixed blood.” Literally a word for a mixed race person. It became easier once I started caring less about what others thought about me in that regard. I know that I’m indigenous, I have a tribal card, and I have regular connections with my tribe to back it up.
So it was a struggle for a long time to feel like I was a Kinky person and an Indigenous person, but not at the same time. When the person from the community I was talking to mentioned kink being a part of their identity instead of just an interest, it put into focus what my issue was. I am an indigenous person that is kind of kinky. And I was trying to be a kinky person that is kind of indigenous. I wasn’t letting kink just be an interest because it was the community I was most connected to. When I should have been putting more effort into connecting with my indigenous community.
I experienced compersion while in the kink community, and I experience joy while in the indigenous community. For one, I was never really “popular” in the kink community. I was familiar within the community, at least by org leaders and a good portion of the community. But I didn’t really play that often, mostly because I’m relatively shy and not great at initiating conversations with new people. So I watched others play and experienced their joy vicariously.
However, in the indigenous community, it’s pretty different. I regularly experience joy at any event because there is a sense of pride I feel when I’m within community. It’s like regardless of the bad shit happening the world, we can still gather and celebrate our collective existence. It’s a coming together to love and co-exist together. And it wasn’t until recently that I’ve been putting in more effort in being active in my indigeneity.
Unless it was my tribe’s powwow, I wouldn’t mention that I was indigenous because I was afraid of being questioned. It’s almost like I needed to show my tribal card just to prove to everyone that I am, in fact, indigenous. But thankfully that hasn’t been in my experience. Though I do get questions about my tribe and it’s history and I’m always more than happy to teach and share my knowledge.
I think it’s interesting that as I write this I get the sense that kink for me was always an inward expression, whereas, my indigeneity has been an outward expression. I think kink being an inward expression has to do with the shame I have around sex and my sexual desires. And the way I was approaching kink wasn’t healing that shame. I think it just made it okay and I began centering myself around it.
I clearly wasn’t healing the shame because of the way I view my “sexual” self. I view that side of me as this morbidly disgusting being that I introduce people to, in a kind of “So this is me, are you okay with this?” way. Like I’m anticipating the other person to run away screaming and I wouldn’t blame them. But when someone accepted the disgusting being then it gave me a false sense of “freedom.”
So connecting with people became getting the acceptance of the disgusting self. And I think that played a big part in my boundary pushing incident. The false sense of freedom lead me to test a boundary that was previously stated. There are some contextual reasons why I thought testing the boundary was okay at the time, but I don’t think it matters because I should have done several other things instead. A basic checkin, “Hey, I know you said this was boundary before, but have things changed?” would have been 1,000% better, but alas I did not do that.
I realized after that incident because I had been centering this sexual shame, instead of processing it, I need to step away from the community. I wasn’t safe to play with. Yeah, I learned a lot in processing what I had done, but until I actually start dealing with this sexual shame I shouldn’t be in the community. I need to put the brakes on and slow things down and be intentional about what I’m doing.
In a way, I feel thankful that things played out the way it did. I’m glad I got the wake up call because the trajectory that my life is on now feels more rewarding. Like I’m actually dealing with shit rather than rationalizing/intellectualizing my shit. So having that conversation with the person I knew from the kink community helped me reframe a lot of what I had been struggling to process.