The Defining Experience of My Adult Life (Real Life Feelings, No Smut.)

 December is such a hard, hard month for me, and mostly I keep it to myself.  I suffer more because if it, but I haven't had too many people in my life with whom I truly felt comfortable being honest about how I feel.  Things that I say that from my point of view are little cries for help seldom translate that way in other ears.  I have always longed for someone who would notice that I was hurting and needed a shoulder to cry on without me having to ask (which feels like weakness) but I have never felt comfortable getting close enough to anyone for them to develop that kind of awareness of me.

So I write.  For the impersonal, faceless strangers of the internet, who checked out this blog for the smut and maybe stuck around when it turned into something more personal.  I write because expressing how I feel really does help, and I post because, recklessly, I get as much out of no one responding as I do from anyone responding, just in a different way.  A lot of the way that I feel right now is due to me being very, very tired after a long work week.  A lot of the way that I feel right now is due to me being very, very tired of isolation but not being totally certain of how to change that.  The second wouldn't bother me so much if not for the first.  And I foolishly read something from when I first started learning about hypnosis that has reminded me of how positive and optimistic I was at that time, before I learned just how easy it was going to be for me to get hurt "playing" with trance.

So.  December.  The month in which my Grandfathers died.  The month in which I fell in love with my husband.  The month in which I first knew in my bones that I was going to be alone forever.  The month when I lost a baby, not realizing that I would never get a chance to have one again.  I have been fired from jobs, given last chances, and humiliated personally, all in December.  I have had the best moments of my life, found new communities, and fully experienced erotic hypnosis for the first time in December.  The up-and-down of it all makes it worse, somehow.  But every year I march on through, because January is always so much better.  But this year is a little different.

January 1st, 2015 will be the 10 year anniversary of my husband's death from a nasty and rare form of brain cancer.  As we were lousy at being married we had been separated for several years by then, but we were still best friends.  December 23rd, 2014 will be the 10th anniversary of the last day I saw him alive, when my Mom and I made the 300 mile trek to where he was being cared for to give him Christmas presents and check in with him.  I didn't know how close he was to death at that time.  I wish I could say that if I had known I would have found a way to stay there and be with him, but the truth is I was terrified every time I saw or spoke with him that that time would be the one in which I finally broke and ran away.  I lived in a different city and had work and a thousand good reasons for why I couldn't drop everything and take care of him, but the strongest of all was that I was too scared to do it.  I have never gotten over feeling guilty about it.  I have never stopped hating myself for being that weak.  Most of the year I remember that I did the best that I could and that I shouldn't judge myself in this way, but in December, especially this December, I can't hold those feelings back.  And it will all be over in two weeks and I can go back to being someone who doesn't really talk about her past.  I can go back to being someone who, when she does talk about it, does so in an almost flippant way so that no one will know just how much I still feel it.

People have often asked me what it is I like most about being hypnotized.  What I like most is this:  when I am deeply entranced my sense and understanding of the past and the future is eradicated, and I am just existing now.  I can't be hurt by what has come before in the now.  I have no fear of what may come later in the now.  I just am.  And I am trusting someone else to have the power to control the now, which leaves me free to completely let go of everything and just exist.  That is why me trancing myself, while entertaining and useful, is ultimately just me passing time until a hypnotist comes along.  I don't want to be in charge of it.  I want to give myself to it.  And it's why, when someone abuses my trust, I am so very very upset.

I went back and read the logs from some of my earliest text-trance experiences.  Back when I was shiny and new and optimistic and had no reason to think that finding someone I could trust would be difficult.  I had had a few negative experiences, but not heart-breaking emotional ones.  The person who would become the heart-breaker was just getting to know me and those are the logs that I read.  I don't remember half of what I am reading ever happening, I don't know if it's because of how long it's been or if I never remembered them.  And what I discovered is that everything he did to me in the end were things that he had already done to a previous subject.  He basically told me the story of how he got in too deep and cut her loose, and I never saw that it was a warning to me of what might happen.  I never thought it would happen to me, and when it did it took me over a year to really recover from it.  Over a year to trust new people enough to give them a chance at messing with my mind.  I am slow to recover from emotional things.

So a double whammy today of reminiscence and nostalgia.  Wanting to talk about it but having no one to talk to has at least resulted in a blog post, so that's something.  For next time, I promise I will write some actual smut to make it up to you all.

Extraordinary Things

I have had an extraordinary day (that has stretched into an exraordinary night) and like many extraordinary things is proving very difficult to write about.  Exraordinary things have been happening to me daily ever since I discovered hypnosis; I am constantly surprised by the next thing that comes along.  Just like I can always go deeper so can I always find new territories to explore.

So, an update on the life of Noelle.  I am no longer seeking out new trance partners.  (This doesn't mean that I won't trance with someone new, but it does mean that if you chat me up with the sole intention of trying to entrance me that you will be sadly disappointed.)  I have found two wonderful friends with whom I can play with total trust and respect and that is sufficient.  They are very similar in some ways, but also dramatically different in others.  It keeps it interesting for me, interacting with these two points of view.  Keeps me on my toes, as it were.

The novelty of being a science project has worn off, especially as I've discovered something that I am not good at at all.  Turns out I'm lousy at being blank--that complete mindless state that some people seem to achieve without effort.  I want to be able to experience it quite a lot;  someone saying "freeze" and me being frozen and mindlessly unaware of the passage of time before someone says "unfreeze."  I'm having a lot trouble with the 'mindlessly unaware' aspect.  We're working on it and I know that someday we'll manage it, but until then I am being childishly impatient and not a little bit demanding of myself.

I've rediscovered some things about myself that I should have already known from my 'real' life but hadn't really expected to deal with in my hypnotic life.  Stupidity annoys me, as does neediness and unfounded arrogance.  (And by 'annoys' I really mean 'angers'.)  I seem to attract men with the mentality of little boys who are looking for a Mom, or arrogant jerks who think they are god's gift to any woman with a Skype account.  Strangely enough, in a community that practices an art to which listening is integral I have encountered very few people who actually bother to listen.  Maybe it's because so many people rely on scripts posted online and read blindly by someone with no connection to the original hypnotist.  It's a mystery to me.

But as I said, extraordinary experiences.

Having all my senses heightened to unbelievable levels and then orgasming like something supernatural.

Being taken so deeply into trance that all I remember is the sensation of water and some pretty lights.

And feeling a connection so strongly with someone that I would have sworn he was in the room with me, so close that I should have been able to just...reach...out...

Asking myself again how it is that I have this mighty rapport with two people whom I've never met?  (When I crack that mystery I'll have the keys to the universe.)

It's already tomorrow, so I suppose I'll have to look forward to today for any answers.  Or more likely, more questions.


p.s.
*licks from the base of your skull to the bottom of your spine*

I'm Not Sure Why I'm Here

There's nothing quite like going to bed sad and slightly turned on for ruining sleep.  And I did try to sleep, I really did, I was asleep, I'm almost positive.

Until I wasn't anymore.

Times like right now are when I actually feel my age.  All the achy places that I know 20 years from now will be the problem places where I might need surgery bother me a little more.  (I swear my skin looks just a little more wrinkled too right now, but I don't care as much about that.)  All the oddities of behavior that are uniquely mine, the little tics that I won't want to control or won't be able to control later are just a little stronger right now.  The only reason it bothers me is I can see in my mind's eye what kind of an eccentric old woman I shall be, and it's perilously close to the kind of scary crone that small children avoid and older children dare each other to hurl stones at.

Bah.  How ironic is is that in order to have a really satisfying experience with trance I need to feel like I can completely trust someone yet there is such a giant lack of people whom I feel I can completely trust elsewhere in my life?  The point where the two lives meet has proven problematic (thank you so much Joss Whedon for introducing that word into my life.)  Times like this I can't quite remember why I thought it was such a good idea to throw myself out into the world in the first place.

But I'm sure I'll feel better in the morning.