I have shared this on another site, but figured I'd share it here as well.
It took me a long time, but for the first time in my life, I am proud of my disabled identity.
In 2020, I was diagnosed with an incurable and lifelong disability. I had known that something was wrong for many years, but as with a majority of disabilities people can’t see, I was left undiagnosed and in pain for eleven years before I finally got a diagnosis.
I am in pain every day of my life. On a self-described “no pain” day, I am still in pain, just ever so slightly; like my body has finally taken a breath for the first time in a long time, but there’s a tiny hitch in the breath that will never go away.
I often play as a heavy masochist.
When I went to the hospital dressed in nothing but my hospital gown, I imagined it was a beautiful sheer outfit at the kink club as I swanned around the corridors.
When I stepped up to the operating table I could feel myself in a medical play area, just about to do needle play for the first time, and the anaesthetists and I were doing negotiation before a scene.
When I wake up and the cannula comes out and they have stopped administering needles and the beeping has ceased and I get to go home wrapped in a blanket, I imagine myself admiring the fresh bruises from a scene while wrapped up in the same blanket and the embrace of my play partner.
People often ask me how disabled people can play as heavy masochists, and I tell them that there is nothing more beautiful and validating to me than being in control of the pain that is administered onto my body. BDSM, and pain in particular, has enabled me to love my body in a way that was not possible before I started playing.
My body often feels like a medical experiment, like something to be kept alive at all costs, but what I have realised in the last few years of intense medical procedures is that there is a difference between being alive and living. To be able feel pain that I chose to be administered on my body, given consensually and lovingly, is one of the most empowering things that I have ever felt.
I have learned that I have a preference for play where my partner is hurting me with their hands. I love rough body play, I love painful rope play where the rope and their hands are pressing into my skin; I love it when my play partners are cruel to me and they use their hands to show it.
Touch is so important to me in play, because when your life is hospitals and doctors offices and the type of uncomfortable, clinical naked that no one likes and no one touches your sick body, the validation I feel with beautiful marks from your hands all over my body is like nothing else.
Pain as catharsis, pain as healing, pain as becoming, pain as empowerment.
Masochism is the most beautiful way to own and cherish my disabled body that I love more than anything, and I am so very grateful for the wonderful people who I get to share this part of me with.