There are a number of epiphanies one can have under the harsh fluorescents of a Wendy’s drive through at 2AM. You can mull over the solidarity you share with the other cars wrapped round the block. You can invent a new sign language for the drunk. You can even calculate the exact perfect ratio of sauce packets to fries from a profit vs customer satisfaction rating for the aforementioned company. But, seeing as I was driving home from a party with Vento – it was rope we discussed.
I awoke next morning to the open notes app on my phone, and a single thought written under an old grocery list –
Leeks
Flour
Sliced almonds
..bread
Bottoming – no recipe for perfection, only mindset
There’s something that happened to me on my rope journey – on the path from manic pixie super-maso, to the precocious switch. Or when I spent a few months convinced I would never bottom again, and then met someone who made me melt back into being tied. Or even my current vanilla phase, which I regard as exceptionally kinky. But right around the time I started to become confident in my tying abilities (far too early) I realized something, I had become a backseat driver. And it was sucking all of the enjoyment out of being tied.
We have a name for this phenomenon in the scene, “topping from the bottom.” Which has rightfully fallen out of favor as we have become more bottom centric and consent aware in general. I definitely don’t like the way this phrase has been used to shame people for speaking up when there is an issue, but I’ve noticed more and more both in myself and others that maybe we were missing something by throwing this baby out with the bathwater.
So here is how I see it happen – in the hallways of conventions, or debated hotly over dinner, or explained in excruciating detail in books or video tutorials: The **one perfect detail** that changes the game. In their quest to treat nagging injuries or push past plateaus in their ability to process pain, bottoms start hunting around for perfect recipes. They share tips on how to “lock the shoulders” or how to dress the wraps in the exact right way, and rigger/bottom teams develop an almost superstitious ritual around how they tie certain patterns.
I certainly did, and it became a self reinforcing habit. The less I bottomed, the less confident I was in my bottoming skills, and the more superstitious I became about how I wanted to be tied. I remember clearly calling a scene a few years ago because my top didn’t dress a line that literally wasn’t weight bearing at all. But, because I had it in my head that this line *needed* to be dressed at X point in the sequence, the fact that he didn’t do that got me totally psyched out. I wasn’t actually being a good, communicative partner, I was just trying to control the scene.
Looking back I realize it was a defense mechanism for a larger problem – I had lost the will the suffer. But on a recent evening with someone who has known me through a shocking amount of this rope journey, I finally was able to agree that I had gotten my bottoming mojo back. We negotiated as we always do now in the simple code of old friends.
“What if we do that thing from the 4 riggers video?”
“I’ll tell you if anything’s too much.”
And then a TK with the wrong arm put back first, and the nagging voice in my head to ask for an adjustment. But I didn’t, I made the choice instead to see where things would go. And after sinking into it, I found there was no need for an adjustment after all. The tie itself was hard and painful. I thought several times about tapping out, or at least urging him to move faster, give me some relief, but instead I just sat with the pain. I wanted the intensity more, and I knew that I could trust him to bring me through this ordeal without injury, or any unkind motivation. It’s that special dance between the sadist and masochist – a synergy that doesn’t quite make sense unless you’re in it.
There’s this concept I first learned about in the context of extreme sports: type 2 fun. It’s the suck when you’re muscles are screaming at you to let go of the rock wall and take a break, or when you’re cursing yourself for being up before the sun in the freezing cold for some uphill skiing. The kind of thing that isn’t enjoyable while you’re doing it, but looking back you have this deeper sense of satisfaction. “That was a good day,” you will say after its over. I used to be a real type 2 fun kind of person. That was the shit I lived for. But over the course of a relationship that went bad and lingered far too long, a few catastrophic injuries, and many more insults to my confidence and self-trust that I wont get into, I had lost my stomach for it.
And during the long middle years of the pandemic I found a way to get back. That’s what Montana did for me. Mostly, type two’s the only kind of fun you can find there. And the isolation and tension of the lockdowns put some recklessness back in me. I would go on to make it a habit to just toss a granola bar in a daypack, take the half full waterbottle off the floor of the car, not tell anyone where I was headed, and throw myself into the woods. Before long you’re out of the reach of the cell phone towers, and you’re just out there. I mean, really, out there. You have to trust yourself, that when you walk 8 miles in you can walk 8 miles out again. And that no matter what you’re faced with, you can handle it.
I learned to trust myself again- that my body could take the abuse, and that my mind could take the exposure. Sometimes that came from pushing right to the edge of safety and having to run through exhaustion just to keep warm cause I got caught in some bad weather. Sometimes it meant having the wisdom to turn back early when something didn’t feel right in my gut. But for whatever reason I just kept going back out to test myself, and each success reinforced that this was something I could do. I don’t think I can in good conscience prescribe unplanned and under-geared excursions into the deep wilderness as some mental-toughness cure all for the bottom in need of inspiration, but I do think that doing hard things is an incredible gift you can give to yourself.
Maybe the hard thing is leaving a shit job, or running a marathon. Maybe you’re reckless like me and want to go fight your demons in the bush, or maybe you just need to do a trial class at a martial arts gym. Maybe in fact your hard thing is being tied. All I can say is that seeing rope through this lens has helped me. So here’s to type 2 fun, and no secret recipe that takes the seme out of semenawa. There’s just the thought, as I hung on the worlds suckiest thigh line on display for a crowd of vulgar watchers “I hate this, but I can take this.” And the feeling looking back of “damn, that was a good tie.”
And as with most epic scenes there are no pictures. But since I suspect most of you readers are actually just here for the pictures, I’ll share some of this memory of type 2 fun with this very dear friend of mine SimplyDiane – back in the place where it all began for our rope fam.
It was one of those nights with too many people watching, so I started with a blindfold and face rope – trying to bring her attention inwards and make a moment just for us in the crowd.
With so much possible distraction, its nice to keep the rope basic. I tried to just move deliberately and stay present through some basic transitons.
We ended with something a little silly. Ok, I guess rope can also be type 1 fun 🙂
Thanks to Diane for her beautiful bottoming as always!
boshai 