Before We Begin...
Fact or fiction? A note to start with.
I should probably explain myself.
Actually, no.
I should probably explain why I’m not going to explain myself.
This isn’t really a diary about becoming a dominatrix.
Well... it is.
But not in the way you’re probably imagining.
This is a diary about power.
About pleasure.
About submission.
About dominance.
About money.
About motherhood.
About trauma.
About health.
About wellbeing.
About death.
About class.
About war.
About sex.
About squeezing the juice out of life before it’s too late.
About why a perfectly respectable, midlife, middle-class (admittedly massively broke) single-mother, career-pivoting student nurse with three children, a wardrobe full of Boden knitwear, and a WhatsApp full of school-gates messages…. has become convinced that training as a dominatrix might be one of the most profound, healthy and wonderfully exciting things she’ll ever do in this life.
People often ask whether this diary is based on truth.
The answer is... I’ll let you guess.
For the legal record though…
Names and characters are almost entirely made of mashed-up twinkles in my mind’s eye.
Businesses, places, and events are all very likely products of my wildly over-active inventiveness.
Locations and real-world details are blurred.
Scenes have probably considerably improved with retelling.
I’ll leave you to decide which bits belong in memory and which belong in imagination.
Because that’s rather the point.
I’m not interested in shock or harm.
I’m interested in the underlying truth in everything.
And one truth keeps following me around.
Power games based on submission and domination are everywhere.
They’re in marriages.
Hospital wards.
Politics.
Boardrooms.
Bedrooms.
School gates.
Family WhatsApp groups.
Bank accounts.
Governments.
Religions.
Dating apps.
Even supermarket queues.
We spend our lives negotiating dominance and submission.
Who speaks.
Who apologises.
Who takes up space.
Who earns.
Who serves.
Who asks permission.
Who assumes they don’t need to.
For most of my life, I believed I was making free choices.
I’m beginning to wonder whether I was simply very well trained.
This diary is my attempt to find out.
Not by reading another psychology book.
Not by doing another self-help course.
Not by sitting on another meditation cushion (although I do love a bit of transcendental meditation).
But by cracking my whip, stepping into a leather corset and six-inch Jimmy Choos and pondering the question from the opposite direction.
What happens when the woman who has spent a lifetime unconsciously submitting (and being blown around inside patriarchy like a feather) decides to learn how to dominate?
I genuinely don’t know.
That’s why I’m writing this.
One final thing.
Please don’t mistake this for a diary about sex.
Although there will no doubt be much of it…
Sex is simply the doorway.
Power is the room we’re walking into.
#andsoitis
