Open Letter to a Fetlife Noob

A few years ago, I headed into New York City. There were lights and screens and crowds and horns. Everyone was rushing somewhere, and the longer I stayed, the more exhausted I became. Some places are home, and some places are so different from home that they make you miss your own city. New York was the latter. It thrilled me, but it exhausted me.

Your first play party might be a culture shock, too. There will be baby girls walking around in jute. There will be milfs tied to rafters and men led on leashes. There will be wax and fire and rope and whips, and you'll feel like the most outlandish alien who ever was.

You won't quite feel that you belong.
You'll ask if this is really for you.
You'll wonder if we're all mad.
You'll wonder if you're mad, too.

The answer to those last two questions is "yes". We're all mad here just as the Cheshire Cat once said. All the best people are. Give it some time, though, because those milfs and baby girls will become your new best friends. You’ll share your secrets for the first time in your life, and each one will make the vanilla world will feel a little more alien.

Maybe you don't quite belong there anymore.
Maybe you'll wonder if vanilla people are all mad.
Maybe they are.
Maybe sexual liberation is healthier and more human than the secrets you used to hide in your underwear drawer.

One day you’ll realise you were starving all along. You just didn’t realise it, and now that you can access as much kink as you can stomach, you’ll go on a binge worthy of its own smut channel. You'll try every toy on the wall and attend every event. You'll fall in love with kink harder than you fell for your first love. This is the honeymoon phase. All honeymoons end.

Consent violations will happen. Maybe they’ll even happen to you.
Event leaders will quit. Hosts will have arguments, and fuckbois will be ousted. Didn't you realise we're all mad here? Well, some kinds of madness are sicker than others. The kink community will suddenly feel like hostile territory and, in many ways, it is.

Maybe you'll try to fix it. Maybe you'll abandon it. Maybe you'll learn to live with our endless crises because you've made a new family, and now you can't be happy any other way.

One day, you'll hit a new snag: Are you sure you're a top? Hell, are you sure you're straight and monogamous? Polyamory has a way of sneaking up on you in the kink scene. Expose yourself to a foreign lifestyle long enough and it will stop feeling quite so foreign, and so you'll kiss boys and girls and everyone all at once. You'll delete all your kinks, make new ones, and then go all the way back to the start.

Sometimes you'll wonder if you're vanilla after all. Actually, no. You're kinkier than a duck penis.

In time, you’ll figure out who you are and which kinks belong.

Years will pass. You'll find a million kinks and a thousand sexual identities. You'll arrange events and find a sense of belonging everywhere you go because when you don't need to keep so many secrets, everywhere is home.

One day you'll realise that sexuality isn't an identity, but a lifelong adventure. Like New York, sometimes it's magic. Sometimes it's hell. Sometimes, you've just got to stop asking so many questions and enjoy the view.