Borderline Successful: I’m Baby

Sun sign: Cancer

Moon sign: Leo

Sky: Fire and Brimstone

Meds: Taken

Mini Soundtrack, obviously:

Right now, I remember.

I like being a sexual being. I like being in my body. I like connecting to my breath and letting my shoulders drop. I like opening up for, I mean to, someone. Opening up to someone. Yes.

I am extremely proud to say I remember the sex I have now.

In this era of myself, I know people’s names. I know where I am. I know when I’m not feeling it. I know I can tap out when I need to. I’m direct about my sexuality and my history, and I don’t mince words about what I want when asked. I love that about myself.

Remembering sex is proof of presence. It means I was there. It means my body didn’t have to leave the room to survive being touched. It means consent is not just something I said once at the beginning, but something I stayed with. Something I kept choosing, moment to moment.

I used to need a role to survive sex. I didn’t know what to call it until much later, until I found it hiding in poetry scribbled in notebooks lost to time. Each role gave me a way to receive attention, good or bad, without having to admit how terrified I was of attention, good or bad.

I could take on a character and receive care, pretend I was in control, endure pain and rough handling, manipulate the room, lean into power exchanges, and eventually find my way back into my own body.

I’m in control of my body and my needs now. If I choose to submit to a partner, it’s an exchange. It’s a sign of respect, and it’s also a measure of how safe I feel.

I don’t want a 24/7 kink dynamic again. I might not even want a Dom. I think I’m more interested in verse4verse dynamics with people who don’t see submission as breaking me down so I can be beneath them, but as a position I choose, in a moment, inside a scene, so I can relinquish control for a while.

I am allowing them to top me. I am allowing myself to be topped.

Someone steady enough for me to put my head on their shoulder, someone who makes me feel like I can lower mine, gets me to the headspace of joy, comfort, and real softness where I can even consider being submissive.

I’m a brat. I top the room. I barge in hot and loud. And the person who sees through the bravado and asks me what I actually need in that moment, that’s who I want to be on my knees for.

“baby”

My early experience with kink and BDSM was, high key, a toxic enmeshment with someone I wanted to fix me so badly that my boundaries went blurry, then disappeared. It became a near full-time Daddy Dom/little dynamic.

I was 20 or 21. He was 27 or 28. He was Daddy. Not just in bed, not just in a scene, not just as a bit we could put down when we were done. He was Daddy driving me to work. He was Daddy in the supermarket. He was Daddy at the movies.

He was soft with me, and he liked the caregiver role. Sometimes that meant helping me in the shower. Several times, after a day out and before sex, he had me stand under the warm water while he carefully washed my body with a cloth. Sometimes it meant feeding me with a spoon. Sometimes it meant coming home with Peppa Pig-themed things he saw at the store because he thought of me.

Years later, I remembered the shower thing out loud and said, “That was a lot,” and someone nodded and said it sounded unhealthy. When I let myself remember that time, I know it was unhealthy. I feel like it happened to another girl, like I saw it once in a film and thought, “Poor thing.”

I wanted to be held so completely, swallowed whole by someone who kept me safe, that I didn’t notice when being held became being managed, maybe even raised.

When it was happening, no one pointed it out. No one saw the whole shape of it, or if they did, they did not name it to me. He was not controlling, exactly. But he was in control.

That distinction matters. He didn’t have to lock every door to become the person who decided where the exits were. He was, first and foremost, my Dom and my caregiver, even when I could fully care for myself.

I was a baby in a very literal way.

And yes, I was also in college. I was going to class. I had a good job (where we met), and he courted me all slacks and ties. I was getting things done like a proper young lady. From the outside, my life looked functional enough.

But at the end of the day, I was his.

“cadaver”

After being treated like something fragile enough to manage, I swung hard in the other direction. If softness made me easy to hold, then numbness made me harder to reach.

I’d been such a baby-doll, sweetie-pie, doe-eyed sub in that relationship that, for a while after, I couldn’t be soft or submissive with anyone during sex. I went from having sex with a partner who treated me like a sickly Victorian child to only wanting disconnected, impersonal, often brutal fucking.

I used to imagine myself as a cadaver: the body in the room instead of the person in it. The people laying into me were grave diggers. I was dead inside when they fucked me, and I would drift out of my body, across the room, watching myself go limp, surrendering to whatever was wanted from me.

It was self-harm I consented to and asked for, but it was still self-harm. Sometimes it toed the line of assault. I’d rather not consider myself a victim of that, but it did happen.

Have you ever dissociated during sex? Sometimes they notice and slow down, but they usually don’t stop. A few went harder when they saw my eyes glaze over.

I went back and forth between lucid thoughts and being unable to safe word, if there even was a safe word, and they would shove my head into the pillow.

One was a chef who had his knife kit laid out in his room; he had been sharpening it before I arrived. I watched the knife kit as he held me down by my neck. I still remember the knife kit better than his face.

“brat”

Brat was the role I leaned into when I wanted to feel in control of the game of cat and mouse that became my only understanding of sex and courtship, if I can even call it that. If baby was too vulnerable and cadaver was too absent, brat gave me attitude, sharpness, and a way to come back into the room with my teeth showing.

Bratty behavior let me be cute without being helpless. Brattiness let me test the room. Brat let me say no with a grin before I had to say it with my whole chest.

I enjoy being defiant with tops because when else do I get to be haughty and uncouth, huh? Let a girl have a fit for five minutes. Use your deep voice so I can tease you about it. Put me in my place as I giggle and you steam, and the people around us in line at this coffee shop want us dead.

I like being minxy, slick, and silky. One might even say seductive. Contest it if you must, but I am, dare I say, a fine piece of ass. I’m adorable and your biggest problem, and you love it. The horror.

Brattiness is a bit, and the bit is fun. If someone needs me compliant before they can be kind, I need to know that early. If someone can play with my defiance and call my bluff, I can soften. If someone can hold the reins in the moment without needing to conquer me as a person, I can surrender.

“siren”

If baby was helpless, cadaver was absent, and brat gave me a chest puffed up with hot air, becoming the siren in the room was me trying to get the wheel back without the surrender. It was my attempt at topping, I suppose.

It’s not hard to make people want me, but it is something I’ve tried to get better about. I could become whatever you wanted and make you want me so badly I was impossible to keep. They died mad about it.

I can make everyone I fuck fall a little in love with me with the right mix of push and pull and heavy breathing. At my most raw, black-hole-toxic self, I can be any girl you hoped to find beneath you… on top of you… across the bar staring at you too directly like a challenge.

That sounds conceited, but it’s not pride. It’s a manipulative and sort of evil thing to bend into the shape of someone’s presumed soulmate. I tried very, very hard to become exactly who I thought they would fall in love with, and I paid close enough attention to get very good at guessing.

I made them love me, or at least fall into a lust they later woke up from, shook off, and fled for higher ground. I yanked them by the ear. And the ones that didn’t crash and fall to their knees, I just never saw again.

I demanded love for a long time. Then I forgot how to ask for it altogether. Then I denied it to myself. Then I denied it from others.

I did a bit (quite a bit, actually) of work on all of that, and I’m less frantic. Less alarmed. Less reactive. But also less toxic? Maybe? I like to think so, but it’s hard to take the temperature when you’re the fire.

But now, I’m so scared of becoming someone who overwhelms people and calls it love that I’ve become the inverse and forgotten how to be vulnerable at all. It takes ages with most people.

I can get away with smirking, snarking, and being a bit spoiled around the right people, even if only for a little while. The ones who see me as the yippy little dog I am.

People intimidated by me have probably never seen me in a safe space. They have never seen me at ease, sword sheathed.

“bunny”

Lately, I’ve been exploring rope bondage, specifically shibari, and what surprised me is how calming it feels. Not because it erases my need for agency. The opposite, actually.

Rope is the first role that does not ask me to vanish.

Rope lets me be the focus without becoming the performance.

Rope gives agency a shape. It gives the scene a structure clear enough that I can release control without disappearing from myself. I am literally in someone else’s care until I use my safe word, and there is an expectation of a safe word. That clarity helps me stay in my body.

That matters because I no longer regularly dissociate during sex, which is huge. Grounded and lucid are still the goal. I like remembering the sex I have. I like remembering if something happened that I didn’t like. I like being aware of my own boundaries while still calm enough to enjoy what’s happening.

I am used to performing during sex. I know how to chase climax like it is my job, like my partner’s ego needs proof that I am having a good time. Rope interrupts that. It forces me to sit still. To notice the difference between pressure and pain. To say “ow” when I’m uncomfortable. To say “thank you” when I’m blissing out.

I’m not trying to win the scene. I’m not trying to be impressive. I’m practicing presence, staying in the moment and letting the emotion swell.

Receiving care after from someone who understands sub drop gave language to the sobbing after sex that used to happen on subway platforms and park benches. Oh, there was a word for that. Great. Horrible. Useful.

This is to say: I very much identify as a rope bunny. Put me in knots, respectfully.

Right now, I sit still

For a long time, being wanted meant making myself easier to hold: smaller, simpler, bendable beyond my capacity and desire. I learned roles that let me keep people close without letting them know me.

Being baby let me be cared for, but only if I disappeared into need. Being a cadaver let me endure by leaving the room and standing just outside myself. Brattiness let me resist before I could be hurt. Being a siren let me feel powerful, as long as I kept performing desire as proof I deserved praise.

That’s why rope feels different. Not because it proves I’m fixed, and not because restraint is automatically healing. It feels different because the terms are named, the edges are clear, and the care has a structure I can understand even when I’m still lost inside myself.

Rope Bunny is a role too, obviously. I’m not above a bit. But this one asks me to stay. It asks me to notice my body instead of abandoning it. To receive care without shrinking into a child. To surrender without becoming an object. To be wanted without becoming whatever someone else can most easily consume.

I don’t need to prove I’m healed by never needing care. I need care that meets me as an adult. I need surrender with edges, softness with language, touch I can remember, and desire that doesn’t ask me to audition for it.

The difference now is not that I never want to be held. Obviously I want to be held. Put me in knots, respectfully.

The difference is that I want to stay in my body while it happens.

Lastly… I’m baby, but not like that anymore.

Thanks for reading.

Atila Martin

Blog: https://atilacore.pckt.blog/

Bluesky: @atilacore