thinking.” te OK oe I've been practicing BDSM for a while, now, and it has been amazing. I've had a lot of very intense sexual experiences and I feel incredibly confident about my sexuality. I feel very far away from my younger self, who realized that she was into BDSM and completely freaked out. However, I used to keep a very detailed (albeit sporadic) personal journal, and this allows me to look into the head of 20-year-old Clarisse. Here's something I wrote only a couple of weeks after I met Richard, my first serious BDSM partner: On the surface I have a hard time understanding why this has shocked me so much -- the fact that I wanted him to hurt me, the fact that even as I was facing down my demons and crying and incoherent I wanted him to keep biting me, scratching me, bruising me, and God, it was bad, but even now I wish it had been far worse... on some level I want to have been physically scarred. He stopped finally because I started saying "no," and couldn't formulate a coherent answer through my tears when he asked me if I was serious. But, of course, although I was serious, I also didn't want him to stop. Of course. Of course I wanted him to hear me saying no and keep going, to be protesting and overridden. And the reason I couldn't formulate a coherent answer wasn't even that I didn't know the answer was, "Yes, keep going." It was that I knew the answer was yes, and when I faced it I started crying so hard I couldn't speak, and he... sensitively, I guess... decided it was time to stop. How cliche I am. (God, I'm sounding like some naive ingenue from a random de Sade play or something, just discovering my sexuality or whatever.) How self-conscious. And how humiliated and ashamed. Of all the things I think I expected from myself for this, if it ever came true that this was what I wanted -- I never really actually expected to be ashamed. What I think is especially interesting about those paragraphs is that I felt a certain recognition for my BDSM identity,