I listen to a lot of podcasts, which I know I've referenced before; and in particular, I've recently started listening to Lore, which is a podcast about folklore - about vampires and werewolves, about H. H. Holmes, about a haunted railroad tunnel in western Massachusetts. The host made the above quote in episode 7, and it struck me as a very meaningful comment.
The house I grew up in was a split-level and my bedroom was all the way at the end on the upper level. By the time I was in junior high and high school I'd end up being awake for a couple of hours after my parents, and going to bed involved travelling from the basement up through the kitchen and then the full length of the house back in the other direction, turning off lights behind me as I went; and when I was 10 or 12 I was afraid of the dark. I'd end up sprinting from the kitchen to my room with the yawning black mouth of the downstairs hallway behind me. Even then I knew how absurd it was; I had walked that hallway a dozen times that day and thousands of times in the past and knew it was both empty and perfectly safe... But I was still afraid. And as Lore said, I wasn't afraid of the dark - of the trees - but of the monster that would leap out of it and grab me. Of the thing the dark was hiding.
I like to think that this is true in BDSM as well. Honestly? Most of the things people are scared of about kink aren’t really scary - it’s what they’re masking that you’re afraid of. Maybe to some people it’s making too fine a point of it, but I’m not afraid of admitting I’m a dominant, or a sadist, or a demi-sexual, or that I’m poly; they’re just the trees in the forest. I’m afraid of what they might bring when I’ve admitted them. The reality of it is that everything you fear is what the people you’re admitting it to bring back to the situation.
It’s such an irrational fear in most ways, but no less real. There’s real danger in certain situations - hostile people who have power over you in some way, be it professional or personal. You are still best off, in these cases, looking for the true fears - for the things behind the trees. Only then can you really address them properly.
