This is something I wrote a few years ago for a project that never came to life. I would like to publish it here because I like what I wrote, but I have definitely evolved from that point and if I were to write it today, the text would probably be different. And slightly less dramatic :)
Why do I like to be tied? The most appropriate answer would be, it just feels right. The very first time, my partners’ hand pulled a line across my shoulders, I just knew the feeling. There was love and recognition and desire to obey… obey whatever it is that rope is asking me to do.
My rope bottom type is the one that is looking for depth rather than novelty. I hardly tie with other people besides my partner. I’m never bored to feel the “same” Gote on me again and again. It is always different anyway…
I’m not submissive, I’m not a masochist, I’m not being paid to be tied as porn professionals, i didn’t have a rope fetish as I started (I have definitely developed one over time), I don’t have “stories” or fantasies about being in ropes and living out a particular interpretation of what that could mean.
But it feels right to submit in ropes. To go on my knees in seiza and obey the will of my partner. It feels right to take the pain I don’t like and accept being made to do what I don’t wish for. I learned to embrace this controversy and I think of it as some ritualistic space where I get to live out the parts of myself that normally don’t see the daylight and don’t even visit my fantasy world…, the parts that I don’t fully understand myself.
In ropes, I seek to Surrender. It is erotic to me, to be desired, to be taken. I enjoy being “made” a beautiful thing for the pleasure of my rigger. I want to become a clay and I want to be touched, moved, split open, taken, rejected, objectified, worshipped, penetrated… Ultimately, I seek to surrender to the core of my being, to the point of dissolving my mental resistance and becoming nothing but a pulsating body, like one of the plant, of the flower. On the way there, it might call out different emotions in me, sometimes it is hot as fuck, and sometimes, it calls out a layer of deep sadness. I like arriving where it is nothing, just quietness, just being.
I do not always manage. There is also fear hiding, resistance, hardness, stubbornness, non-acceptance…
We do Seme-nawa – challenging ropes, those that have power to move something in me, to melt me, to transform me into something else. I don’t seek pain, I seek Challenge. A challenge that brings me to my limits, to my resistance, my fears, and my choices. When I’m up there and have no way to move, no way to breathe properly, and my fear is so haptic – I can touch it – the only choice is left to surrender to what is happening. This intensity brings me back to myself, reminding me that the truth is what I feel, not what I think I should feel. This intensity I rarely experience in “normal” life and this is one of the gifts that rope gives me. It is cleansing and softening…
I think one part of this “cleansing” is about having a space for Drama, having a space to discharge emotions, especially dark destructive emotions, that I get to accumulate throughout the day… Anger, hate, self-hate, fear, anxiety…? We are not supposed to show such feelings in social situations, we are almost denied to have them, but they are there. It is a blessing to have a space to live them out through crying, sweating, shaking – there is a feeling of relief and lightness that often comes afterward.
I used to make Drama as a child to protect myself, to prove myself. I think it’s more loving and self-sustaining to find an outlet for living out the drama in a sexual play, rather than accumulating this energy until it bursts out violently.
In ropes, I learned a great deal of Acceptance: acknowledging what is really there, not what I want it to be. Acceptance is not a passive state. Acceptance is a serene state of trusting myself to something bigger than I am, trusting myself to life, to others, to vulnerability, to future… not resisting it, not controlling it.
We are taught we can control life, control relationships, control others. We can’t. But this illusion brings us a great amount of pain. We imagine the future, we make plans about the future, we attach ourselves to this desired future and we feel like a failure when not reaching it. That used to be my muscular posture toward the world, I exercised it for years… Until we started with Seme-nawa, until I was being tied in the way that melted me to little pieces, kept me safe, and brought me back, and I learned to accept and to trust.
“Seme-nawa is relational, not mechanical”
Alexander Ma
And again, it’s a blessing, to have a partner who understands. And dares to take the rope in the hand. We don’t switch our roles in rope and we enjoy living out our polarity in the most radical way – willingly giving up and taking over power… “Seme-nawa is relational, not mechanical”, my partner said once. The space where I can be helpless, where I entrust myself to another (non-perfect) human being, this space we grew organically over time with shared experience. There is mutual trust and love and compassion and appreciation of the complexity of human nature and the ways humans relate to each other. Otherwise what my partner is doing to me, would be – madness…