Mary and Daphne #99

I am not a little girl.

I got good grades in high school. I played sports and was good at some of them. I had friends. I got good grades in college. I had friends there, too. I had girlfriends. I walked all by my lonesome into the kink scene where people like me have great big targets on our backs for every creep and user and abuser out there.

I started a career. I worked for ten years. I was good at it. I took a lot of shit, and I was still good at it.

My whole life, people have made assumptions about me. “Daphne’s different.” “Daphne hasn’t hit her growth spurt yet.” “Daphne’s sheltered.” “Daphne’s special.” “Daphne has some growing up to do.”

So I didn’t start dating until college. “Daphne’s just a late bloomer.” I wasn’t out until senior year of high school, and how easy it is for people to forget that fifteen years ago things were a lot different when you came out. A lot of people still don’t understand how hard it is to do it now, and it’s still really hard!

So I didn’t like sex at first. “Daphne’s not ready.” Or “Daphne’s not really a lesbian – it’s just a phase.” Or “She’s just confused.” Or “She’s a prude.”

I just didn’t know what I wanted. And when I did know, I didn’t know how to ask for it. I don’t care if you’re gay, straight, both or neither, there’s only one mainstream narrative about sex, and it goes, no one can be happy without sex, there’s only a few ways to enjoy sex, and if you don’t enjoy those then you have some pathological dysfunction. And it’s fucking bullshit, and no one will say so and the people who will say so aren’t allowed a platform by self-appointed gatekeepers, and they’re the real dysfunctionals.

And when I did take my first steps into the kink scene and went to munches, I won’t even type the worst stuff people said to me and about me. The printable stuff? “You’re not really gay. You just need the right ----.” “I want to ---- you so much.” That’s what people said to me! Then there’s what people wouldn’t say to me but that got back to me. “She just needs a good ----.” “I can break her.”

No. You. Fucking. Can’t. No one can!

Or how about this one: “She’s too young to know better.” Like I could be manipulated by older, more experienced predators, bossed around and told what to do and gaslighted, and not all predators are men, by the way. Plenty of women in the scene trying to do that shit to me. “She’s too young to know better.”

I. Was. NOT.

I was not, and was not about to be the answer to anyone’s fetish or anyone’s victim or anyone’s mark, and I wasn’t.

I found my people. I didn’t go back home after college. I stayed in a city where I only knew a few people, and I made my little circle of friends. People who cared about me. People who mostly understood me. And a few of them took me under their wing and made it easier and safer for me to be a part of a community. With people who thought of me as “the kid” of the group who needed looking after at first and finally with people who saw me as fully capable and worth their time as a member of the group and not a newbie or hanger-on.

But still, no matter what, to everyone outside my circle, to everyone who didn’t know me or didn’t even want to try to know me, I was what I appeared to be at first sight: young twenties, five-foot-two, tomboyish, redhead. As far as the world was concerned, I was a book with no pages, and all the cover said was, “Still just a kid.” “Accident waiting to happen.” “Bait.” “Plaything.”

I. Am. Not. A. PLAYTHING!

Not for men, not for women, not for anyone, and especially not for wannabe dominants who think a sub is a whore they don’t have to pay.

And everywhere else, it was the same story in a different setting. It didn’t matter how much I accomplished. It didn’t matter how good I was at my job. Someone else got the credit. I got the blame. Someone else got the laurels. I got a pat on the head. I did the work, and then I got to sit in the back of the room and take notes while the grownups did business and took credit for my talent and effort and blamed me when things didn’t go their way because I couldn’t fight back without losing my job until they managed to gaslight everyone around me into believing the bullshit narrative: “Daphne – does an okay job and has nowhere else to go.” Like I was some kind of charity case. They even convinced me a little.

“Not ready.”

“Still getting her feet under her” at twenty-one means you’re learning and have potential. At twenty-nine, it means you’ll never learn more than you already have.

The positives were backhanded slaps to the face. “Spirited.” “Spunky.” “High-energy.” “Peppy.”

It was never “Talented.” “Smart.” “Clever.” “Leader.”

“Always in a good mood.” No, I wasn’t.

I. AM. NOT. A. MANIC. PIXIE. DREAM. GIRL.

I don’t exist to help the main character resolve their deepest life conflicts and grow as a person. I am my own main character.

“Don’t take Daphne seriously,” is how it all translated. “She’s not a principle. She’s just an extra.” A cog. A stock character there to move everyone else’s plot forward.

And when it was just us, when it was just me and my friends, I was tired. I was so tired of always being on my guard and always trying twice as hard for half the credit and always having to bury myself under this mask of some whole other person just to try to get people to see me and not the stock character version of me. The manic pixie dream girl wants nothing more than to kick the main character in the crotch and set something on fire on her way back to dealing with her own shit.

I had a lot of bad dates and a lot of good dates that didn’t go anywhere. A few relationships that weren’t right. Was rarely anybody’s fault; they just weren’t right. Play partners who gave me some of what I needed, and I gave them some of what they needed in exchange, but that’s all it was, a friendly transaction.

I don’t think there’s any harder part of life than those first years after the fun of dating is gone but you still haven’t found your person yet. And I never had much fun dating. The people I met outside the kink scene never understood what I needed even when they were willing to try, and the people inside the kink scene, the ones who weren’t out for themselves entirely, were mostly too immature to realize they weren’t ready yet to see past their own needs they’d been holding in forever. It’s not their fault. It’s a lot to carry and a long time to carry it. I understand because I carried it for a long time, too. I learned to recognize desperation.

I wasn’t miserable. I wasn’t unhappy every minute of every day. But I had a hard few years. Yes, I was young, but that little place inside that people spend those years filling with partying? I tried that. I liked it. But it didn’t fill anything. Maybe for most people that stops working at 27 or 28, and that’s when they need more out of life. It stopped working for me at … I don’t think it ever worked for me.

Where was my person? Where was the person who wanted to get to know me? I just wanted to be me, and I wanted to be nothing like the person I had to be everywhere else. I wanted to be taken care of for once in my adult life. Not by someone who thought I needed to be but by someone who just wanted to because it made them happy to do it. Where was the person who wanted me, with all my baggage, to be the co-starring character in the story of their life?

Little girls are not the starring character in anyone’s story. They’re a stock character. Or they’re a play partner. Or they’re the kid of the friend group. Or maybe they’re a good friend, but they’re a side player. They’re not part of the main story.

Mary. Mary is my person. Mary is my wife. Mary is the other half of my identity. Because it’s not a phase, and I’m not a kid. Mary. The very first person who ever understood what it meant to be my domme, that it means she’s responsible to me as much I am to her. The very first person to stare at me like a treasure to protect and not an object to possess. The very first person who, when she saw, I just wanted to get behind closed doors with and not be who and what I was to everyone else. To be with and not carry the weight of every ounce of bullshit across my own threshold.

Because she didn’t see a chore or a responsibility or a wounded person. She saw me, and she wanted to see more. She saw more, and she wanted to see everything. She saw everything, and she wanted me to be the co-star in her life.

And now I’m her wife. I’m not a kid anymore. I haven’t been a kid in a long time. I never was the little girl so many people took me for.

A lot of people thought I wasn’t ready for the world. I even thought so too sometimes. But the world wasn’t ready for me. I kept myself safe. I paid the rent. I built my circle. Me! Because I am the hero of my own story. I’ll always be the hero of my own story, and now Mary is my co-star. Co-star. Not actress and supporting actress. Co-star.

Little girls are stock characters. Mommies are stock characters. I am not a stock character, and neither is Mary. I don’t want her to be my mommy. I want her to be my wife, like I’m her wife. She can call herself lots of things, but she is not my mommy. She can be my dominant and my top and even my owner and even my big, but I don’t like her calling herself mommy because that makes me the little girl, and I’m not.

I had to fight so many fights to not be seen like a kid. I don’t want to be a little girl. I don’t want her to be my mommy. And I told her that. I told her I don’t like her calling herself that. And I don’t know why she did it anyway, more than once. I didn’t like it the other times either.

She’s not my mommy. We’re partners. We’re co-stars. She’s my wife, and I’m her wife. She’s my Mary, and I’m her Daphne. I don’t want anything to ever, ever change that.