HISTORICAL DIARY ENTRY, FEBRUARY 2008:

Perhaps it should have been more obvious to me. I mean how does one get to her late 20s and so seemingly self-aware, and yet be so ignorant of her own true desires?

Looking back, it began with entrapped princesses, for whom I was not fearful for but rather jealous of. Rapunzel in the castle with her long golden hair, Princess Leia bound as slavegirl in her brass lingerie in Star Wars… In literature and film I would read and watch over and again scenes of capture and physical entrapment. The Story of O, the rape scene in Belle de Jour, the red skirt and bondage scene of Catherine Breillat’s “Romance”.

But it was when I had a fleeting affair with a well-educated and engaging man, that I got it. Or rather – it got me.

The intoxicating rush of the adrenaline, endorphin and hormone cocktail, brought upon by being spanked and taken. Taken – physically and emotionally, with words of wisdom and slavedom whispered into the ear, as my hair was brushed away. The painful, peaceful and pleasurable abandon, in which inhibitions drift away in absolute submission to the will and desire of another. The body bound, as the spirit floats, hovering above in bliss.

The tendency which had absorbed me since being a little girl was so obvious and yet had gone unrecongised for most of my life.

And now I dare look in the mirror, and see that want, and the wanton, peering back in my eyes.

It is a challenge, this pursuit, for one who is sensitive and intelligent. To step into this new arena – so fraught with risks, to the self, to social expectations of what a woman should be. I have long known it is easier to live in a place of honesty with oneself, than one of repression and lies.

In the new games, one draws closer to danger, and a confronting sense of the corporeal and mortal. But in doing so I find myself bound more tightly to the natural pairing of opposites – to the safety, spirit and to the immortal self.

I feel it, that stirring, of the sublime and divine. A new view of the world, and a mirror on the self. And so it begins…