Kink isn’t the most interesting thing about me.
Which is slightly awkward, considering how much of my life has revolved around it.
For a long time, kink was one of the first things people learned about me.
Sometimes before they even learned my real name.
Don’t get me wrong.
I love kink.
I’ve built friendships through it.
Communities through it.
A career through it.
I’ve learned things about myself through kink that I might never have discovered any other way.
It’s given me confidence.
Connection.
It’s also given me stories that would make the most normal dinner parties deeply uncomfortable.
Not that I’d know.
I’d never say this stuff at a dinner party.
I wouldn’t be at the dinner party in the first place.
But the older I get, the more I realise kink was never really the interesting bit.
That interesting bit was always the people.
I’ve always been nosey.
Curious sounds better.
Let’s be honest.
The thing I’ve learned over the years is that most people are far less weird than they think they are.
Or far weirder.
There’s rarely much middle ground.
Spend enough years talking to people about their deepest fantasies and you start to notice something.
We’ve just wrapped them in different packaging.
Sometimes that packaging is rope.
Sometimes it’s latex.
Sometimes it’s a fantast with so many oddly specific details that it sounds less like a desire and more like a niche ‘Really?’ nobody asked for.
Underneath it all, though, people are usually looking for the same things.
Connection.
Acceptance.
Understanding.
A place where they can stop pretending for five minutes.
Kink just happens to be one of the places where people are more likely to tell the truth.
Or at least get a little closer to it.
I’ve met people from every imaginable background.
Teachers.
Tradespeople.
Professionals.
Parents.
People you’d never look at twice in the supermarket.
People carrying entire worlds around inside of them without anybody else knowing.
Some of the most reserved people I’ve ever met have turned out to have the richest inner lives.
Some of the loudest have been quietly terrified of being seen.
You learn very quickly that appearances are a terrible guide to what’s really going on inside someones head.
Honestly?
That’s always fascinated me far more than whether someone likes latex or rope.
The older I get, the less interested I am in categories.
Domme
Sub
Swtich
Alternative
Vanilla
Normal
Kinky
Most people are far too complicated to fit neatly into any of them.
Which is probably why I’ve spent so much of my life talking to strangers,
What scares them.
What excites them.
What keeps them awake at night.
What they’d do if they weren’t worried about being judged.
Kink has introduced me to thousands of people over the years.
But the thing I’ve come away with isn’t a deeper understanding of kink.
Its a deeper understanding of humans.
Humans are infinitely stranger than any fetish I’ve ever come across.