When I do something new or different, my brain attempts to stabilize by associating it with a feeling or task I already understand. That’s probably why when a stranger was binding my legs to a bamboo pole while I lay face down in a dark room, all I could think about was the intense feeling I get at mile 23 of a marathon.
The endorphin release feels surprisingly similar. It feels like the part of my brain that copes with pain seems to send out little sparks releasing the instinct to clench up. My animal body lets go of the survival mechanism; suddenly everything is hazy and loose.
I first experienced this while in labor with my daughter. I was in my living room howling my way through the transition stage when a series of little brain bursts left my body feeling completely unoccupied. Later I speculated that feeling out of control in my body tapped into the trauma of a previous sexual assault, and I disassociated.
But long after, when I ran my first ultramarathon, I realized that wasn’t true. My body copes with pain by turning my brain off, and as someone who is in a constant state of overthinking, this is a miraculous feeling. I am not someone who ever feels totally “in the moment.” I can recognize when something is a moment, but my brain will keep telling me: “Appreciate this moment!”
I remember holding my newborn in my arms and thinking, “Later, I will want to be back here.” The first time I said “I love you” to my boyfriend, I thought, “Photograph the way his chin is shaking” as he spoke the words back to me.
Is it like this for everyone? Has social media made us think too much about making content from moments rather than being in them?
In my experience, pain negates the need to control moments. It allows me to just exist in them. It took me natural childbirth and four ultramarathons to realize that. It’s also why I started exploring B.D.S.M. and trying to ascertain where the line was between masochist and adrenaline junkie.
When Peter sent me a message a few weeks after I joined FetLife (a social media site where people connect about fetishes), I had no idea what half the terms in his profile meant. He was a sadist and a rigger, someone who gets sexual gratification from tying women up with rope. The pictures of his “bottoms” (people he had tied or flogged as a “top,” or sadist) were frankly alarming.
I didn’t think that was the kind of pain I was after. I appreciated the mindlessness of being at my physical limit, but I wasn’t sure I was a true masochist.
I thought about it for days before replying. “It looks like you’re very good at what you do,” I wrote, “but I think that kind of pain is a little out of my depth.”
“Perhaps being new,” he replied, “you don’t realize that you get to set the parameters for any interactions we have.”
I was intrigued.
I read somewhere that people’s kinks are a desire to control what they fear. For instance, a woman afraid of being sexually assaulted might arrange a scenario known as “consensual nonconsent,” where a partner overpowers her physically, but she is in control the entire time, having meticulously set the scene, including a “safe word” that will end the act. This kind of playacting can provide a remarkable sense of power and control.
Peter and I agreed to meet later in the week at a neutral Chicago location. I vacillated about wanting to go through with it. I had vetted him as much as I was able to through his profile, but I was too new to know anyone in the community who could vouch for him. He looked popular judging by the engagement on his profile, and physically overpowering — tall and muscular.
We ordered tea and vegan doughnuts at a trendy little cafe in a neighborhood halfway between us. I can’t remember a single word we spoke, just the intermittent buzzing of alerts on his phone, the image of his hands cupped around his mug, and an art piece of a burning woman on the wall. I was attracted to him and that was enough.
Outside, I got in my car, turned on my location sharing, texted my boyfriend (“all good, location on, going with him”) and followed Peter’s car back to his place.
When he opened the door, I was hit with the fact that I hadn’t kissed my children goodbye. They were happily engrossed in something when I left, and I had taken advantage of that to slip out quietly. When I tried to pull their faces to mind, I instead saw their little heads happily bent over a pile of toys.
How do I explain what happened next as a woman, a mother no less, without inviting judgment? We had negotiated everything in advance: our safe word, how I wanted to feel from the encounter. I had even colored a diagram of a body in red and green to indicate where he was allowed to touch me. The experience was designed to feel safe, clinical. But I caught myself wondering: Who would hear me if I screamed?
He led me to a room and asked me to stand under a large metal frame. He walked around me as much to make me uncomfortable as to gauge my body. Then he undressed me.
In the arid valley of predictability, the chaos of taboo can feel so lush. It was dangerous, what we were doing. Besides the intentional infliction of pain, there could be accidents. I noted a pair of emergency scissors hanging from the beam in case he needed to remove the rope in a hurry.
The fear and anticipation of pain rendered each moment down to a single snapshot so that my memory of being tied is fractional. He rotated my shoulders in their socket and pulled my arms behind me. The effect made it difficult for me to fully inhale; I could feel a pull toward panic with each breath. Sensing this, he stood in front of me and coaxed my torso to the floor. As he tied my legs together, he began to make connecting links to a bamboo pole to lift my legs higher than my head and increase the pressure.
I had imagined the rope would feel like an uncomfortably tight hug, but I was wrong. The pain was searing in blood vessels impossibly constricted. As an athlete, I was familiar with distancing myself from the immediacy of pain to analyze whether it was an alert of future trouble or a sign that trouble had arrived. I felt myself begin to slip away from my body and the endorphin crash came over me like a hot blanket, releasing the temptation to control what was happening.
He got down on the floor next to me and put his face in front of mine. Our eye contact was startling until I realized he was matching my breath, which made everything feel looser all at once. It was the sensation of falling in love, of running for 22 hours straight, of reaching down to catch the new person you made. It was the feeling of being alive but blissfully disconnected from life. We lay on the floor nose to nose until the growing numbness in my fingertips sent warnings up my circulatory system.
As he turned me over and began to loosen the rope, I thought about what I would pick up for dinner. I had seen a sign in the window of a grocery store on the way that said, “Fried Chicken, 2 sides, 14.99,” and I couldn’t decide if that was a good deal. It was hard to be in control again, and I wanted someone else to do the work of planning meals and managing a budget.
As he released the bind, blood rushed from my core to my extremities and my whole body exhaled.
There’s a difference between relief and release. When I was in high school, and the guidance counselor would pull me out of class for therapy, I explained this to her — the interruption was a release but not a relief. Sometimes the release comes with a feeling of dread. Sometimes the relief comes from being constrained.
Later I would drive home in a fog and forget the chicken. I would bathe my children and kiss my boyfriend good night and lie in the dark, feeling bound but not confined.