I like to be hurt, both physically and emotionally. I’m a masochist, so a lot of my sexual needs are tied into pain. But do I like pain? Well, mostly I have a love/hate relationship with it.

There are times when I really struggle to accept it, to accept the pain that I need. I also struggle with being able to say no to pain that is not the pain I need but is, instead, just …well, painful.

I know, right? That sounds like a total oxymoron. How can I get off on pain but not like pain? How can I say some pain is okay but not other types of pain?

It is a lot simpler than it seems. I do not know one single person who really looks forward to a root canal or a major surgery, no matter how much they like pain. I also do not know anyone who can handle being verbally or mentally abused in a situation that has nothing to do with a scene (and even upon occasion in those that do have things to do with scenes).

As a kid I got bullied a lot. I was the second child in a family of five children and money was always scarce. We moved a lot and changed schools sometimes twice a year. I was afraid to make, and then lose, friends, so I made my friends up. I spent most of my time daydreaming and reading because, frankly, I grew up in a home where food was sometimes scarce and entertainment that cost money was a luxury we could not afford, so there was little else I could do for fun.

What that resulted in was me being ganged up on by bullies who sensed I was vulnerable. I had all the usual things happen: Hair pulling, shoving, name calling, my clothes poked fun of, and of course nobody would stick up for me because to do so would be to fall prey to the same mistreatment. I remember every name they ever called me, everything from fat to stupid to ugly. To this day, those words are triggers that will cut me clear to the bone and guarantee me a bad scene.

I struggled mightily with being masochistic. For a long time, I thought there was no way I could like being hit and verbally humiliated. I thought that to enjoy that meant that part of me really had liked that bullying that was dished out to me as a kid. I thought I was continuing my victimization, poking away at the rotted remains of my childhood like an abscessed tooth. I found myself questioning if I was simply keeping those old wounds good and tender, and if so—what the fuck was wrong with me?

I would lie awake at nights, calling myself names and enjoying it. I deliberately sought out people who were able to toss names like whore or cunt at me and played with them. During the scene, I felt incredibly hot, after I would be a mess.

It just never seemed to make sense to me. I would recall the time I was ringed by a group of kids on the playground and shoved from one to the other being called weirdo and freak. It didn’t stop until one of them pushed me down, and then another kicked me. Then it became a mass of piled on bodies and me on the bottom. I had to walk home bleeding and crying, and with my right arm dislocated. I would think about that pain and the feeling I had when they were calling me names, and my utter fear when it escalated. Then I would remember all too clearly my mom’s face when I finally got home, and how angry she was the next morning when she stood in the principal’s office and demanded that he either take care of the problem or she would. If I liked being shoved and called names and beaten up, did that mean my mom had failed to protect me to the point that I had become not just used to the pain but craved it?

I kept stumbling back against the blocks, tripping over the guilt, and losing whatever confidence I gained within myself to those things every time I did a scene with someone, no matter how awesome they were before, during or after.

One day I found myself staring at a picture of myself taken when I was eleven. I had gone through an awkward growth spurt that left me taller than the other girls in my class and with C cup breasts. In the picture, I was huddled over, my knees were bent, and my hands clenched in front of my chest. The picture said it all. I was ashamed, closed off, and desperate to be smaller than I was.

But why? Why be small? Why be ashamed? At the time it had made sense, being different had always made me a target. But I wasn’t eleven anymore, and having large breasts and being tall, well that was hardly a liability. I was still ashamed though, and closed off. And for what?

Being bullied had gifted me with an interior landscape dotted with landmines. But my masochism was not caused by being bullied; that was inherent to my nature. The mines were caused by bullies and could sometimes be triggered by certain things, and since I had never dealt with the actual issues of being bullied, I had no way to understand how to navigate the minefields, much less how to disarm the bombs.

Once I could see how to disarm them, I sat myself down and replayed as much of my childhood as I could stand. Doing that made me realize that the difference was not even so simple as consent; the real difference was in me not feeling fear at the words. Bullies made me afraid, even when I was at home and safe, because I knew they would be there in the schoolyard or in the neighborhood and my face the very next day. Fear was what had kept me feeling ashamed and guilty, fear of betraying those who had reached out to help me when the bullying became actual physical abuse, fear of losing my hard won strength, fear that I had enjoyed something that was wrong.

But they were the ones who were wrong, not me. I had not deserved the treatment they dished out, and I had not asked for it, nor consented to it. My cries of stop were ignored until the day those kids who had ringed me on the playground nearly broke my arm; the fact that four kids could attack one lone kid shocked the principal and the teachers into action. Finally. There was no red, no yellow, no I need a moment to collect myself. I just took it and internalized it all.

Seeing how to disarm a bomb and doing so are two very different things. Just seeing that I was not replaying my childhood with every scene wasn’t enough to ‘fix’ me. That took a lot of work. It took a lot of understanding that there will always be things that I need that scare the total shit out of me.

It took a very long time for me to grasp the concept that being called a whore or a cunt makes my nipples hard, but being called a fucking slut by the guy who first cuts me off in traffic and then curses me out can make me feel small, and afraid, and as far from hot as it gets.

Yes, pain is pain is pain. Except, you know, when it isn’t. I love pain, and need it sexually, and even emotionally, when I consent to it. But II’ll be damned if I need it in my day to day interactions with other humans.