I blog at Male Submission Art, host Kink On Tap, and support KinkForAll as much as I can, among more things.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm censored in some places. Make of that what you will. Follow me on Twitter.
Posts tagged: sigh
Tomorrow night, there’s a party at Mission Control (a venue I’ve written about before) called Threshold “Relaunch”. I hadn’t been planning to attend until a friend asked me to be their PAL—a prerequisite for attendance. In the obscenely small Scene that is the San Francisco/Bay Area sex-positive community, foreknowledge of a kind of social steric hindrance—friction between myself and other people that would make it uncomfortable for myself and the people in question to be at the same party as one another—prompted me to email a host ahead of time before agreeing to be my friend’s PAL.
This was their response:
I’m not comfortable with your attendance due to statements on your blog that indicate you will violate the confidentiality of the party guests.
You have also made it explicitly clear that you do not attend parties to play but to work. I do not consider you safe for my attendees.
In summary, it’s not a matter of stepping on toes. It’s a matter of making sure my attendees do not wind up on your blog just for being there.
I asked for clarifications, but I think I already know the answer. I’m not exactly subtle about my agenda to be a gadfly. I suppose it was only a matter of time before this happened.
I can absorb being actively excluded from things; that’s not new for me. Being told I will knowingly violate confidentiality, however, is language that falsely ascribes a certain intentional malice to me that particularly stings.
Among other things, this means I won’t be able to tally the imagery at Mission Control as I had said I’d do. At least, not yet. If you are attending, I’d be grateful if you did it in my stead. I’d also understand—viscerally—why you wouldn’t want to.
This blog is my job. If it moves you, please help me keep doing this Work by sharing some of your food, shelter, or money. Thank you!
Originally published as a Facebook status update, but worth putting here for my own use.
I hereby reject the label “workaholic.” I am not a workaholic. I am simply someone for whom personal satisfaction is more easily achieved by “working” than by being social. Most social situations I find myself in are not fulfilling. They are at best painful reminders of an inability to create social encounters in which I feel nourished. As a result, I avoid them and privilege “work” tasks. This is not an illness in myself, and I refuse to feel broken any longer for working so hard. End of line.
There’s a certain level of social attrition to be aware of, here. I hope people who find themselves in the parts of my life I no longer wish to prioritize understand the difference I see between choosing not to interact with them for my own sake rather than as an intentional slight. While I still wish to be sensitive and empathetic to others, I will also try to not “care” so much about favoring some tasks or people over others, else the entire exercise of attempting to achieve my own social satisfaction is moot in the first place.
Possible other titles for this post: “More reasons why I will be called an asshole in the future,” “A trial-and-error conclusion in social self-awareness that may be totally incorrect,” “When loneliness is preferable to socialness.”