► UpFromTheAshes wrote:
My profile here is still pretty thin, and it took me a while to put up my first profile pic. I don't have the BDSM checklist even.
Why? Oh....there are a variety of reasons.
Reason 1 is that I have a stalker, so I try to avoid photos and things that could make me easy to identify. I had a phone run-in with him a few years ago, but I know he keeps an eye out online, and shady kink and sex websites are definitely places he might hang out. As a newbie, I didn't want to go advertising myself here (even though on Fet I do have a picture with my face in it, which needs to be taken down, and hasn't been yet because I haven't actually used Fet in many years), in case it turned out that I'd made a poor choice in where I seek community.
Another reason is that even though I've been around kink for more than a decade, I know very little about my own kinky interests, and even what I do know about what I'm into I often have a hard time articulating it. May sound weird..... I'm autistic -- many of us have a hard time understanding and expressing thoughts and feelings, especially very personal ones -- and I'm also gray-sexual, possibly actually asexual so I haven't explored very much or with very many different people.
Yet another reason is because I'm very shy and can be sensitive to rejection. What if people are mean to me just because I do cutting as part of my kink? I know that it's not a very openly accepted one, nor very talked about, but it's a big deal for me. I wanted to get a feel for the community before I started putting myself out there. I wanted to make sure I felt safe(-ish) being open and vulnerable.
So....I started out with reading, a little bit of talking in the forums and commenting on blogs. A little bit of my own blogging, dipping my toes in the water. It was probably at least a couple of months before I had a profile photo.
@UpFromTheAshes
*I don't have the BDSM checklist even*
Doing a test in which there are probably 100 different versions of, is not a prerequisite .