A Lokean Devotional Vignette
“I have never seen a case of Mountain Dew that isn’t caffeinated. If it says Mountain Dew, it’s got caffeine in it.”
“I’ve never seen you not caffeinated.”
“You aren’t likely to.” I sass back.
“Oh really?”
“Oh fuck. No… It’s my only vice left!”
Loki’s face reveals he’s already been planning this.
i hear a raven’s
voice echoing
croaking
and cannot see him
but know he’s playing with me
divine mimicry
From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 26
Content Warning: BDSM and coercive power dynamics, psychological manipulation, grandiosity, dissociation, references to childhood abuse, and spiritual themes.
It was very disturbing to watch the Raven fall into submissive territory. I perked up to take her place… naturally. Demons demon.
I started misbehaving for our Dom in small, ridiculous ways, chipping at his very thin-shelled exterior. I thought to myself, if he is who he says he is, great! He’ll love the self-reflection and awareness. If not… okay, then it’s working.
I have this twisted pride. No one has anything on my father. I didn’t want him to be worse. I needed my father to maintain that position because worse is unimaginable to me, and fuck anyone trying to knock that fantastic pedestal my father built for himself and placed me beneath.
He’d called me good, and I really took it personally. Oh, now I have to learn to what? Behave saintly? No thank you. We have parts for that.
I lazed around flicking my tail at him and shining my claws. I happen to love madness. A little bit.
His was truly unrepentant. He’d crafted a whole spaceship around himself that zipped around and through us with noxious fumes, and I fell into grace after a while, aware he wasn’t really allowing me to demon. He was just taking my spot inside my system that I had rightfully earned by knocking the Raven a peg down.
I found the Gods and began to pray. In particular to the Goddesses, because my experiences with men weren’t so good.
-Lilith
From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 25
Content Warning: Trauma, dissociation/DID, coercive control, trauma bonds, psychological manipulation, abusive power-exchange dynamics, and references to mental health destabilization.
Leaving therapy sucked so much for me. I’d been using it to run away from my system, as it turns out. It was my safety net, me and my psychologist “against” my system. It was never going to work like that, but I couldn’t have that awareness until we left therapy.
In retrospect, it really was time to leave. We were making our choices and being responsible for them. We were functioning well for us. We were living the life we wanted to live.
But fuck if there wasn’t that ex Dom there reminding us we can be out of our mind if not vigilant.
I threw down and joined my system in all the reindeer games. What else was there to do? They had the majority, and system law says the majority gives no fucks about my sensibilities, logic, and care to live a respectable life.
I’m not at all spiritual, and what transpires next is both my deepest shame and my freedom to create exactly a shit pile of shit if I want to.
I let myself fall for that jackwagon. It’s so disappointing to me and so “not me.” I mean, I actually started to see the beauty in the intentional triggers he was pulling off on us and what I could learn from them.
My own curious nature got out of hand. I no longer had therapy to throw myself into, so I threw myself into… whatever it can be called. An incredibly abusive, toxic D/s? He called it biology, but that was dumb. That places me as an animal, a pig if you will, and I never consented to being a pig.
I can also be controlling in that I figured if I threw myself in, I could somehow gain back some kind of control in the situation, even if it was gradual over time.
I found the situation and circumstance hilarious. I went mad, full-steam-ahead mad.
Every good mutiny deserves a part like me, and I showed up to play my role.
-Raven
A Lokean Devotional Vignette
“It hurts too much, Loki.”
“Because you feel like it’s all yours to fix.” His words trickle down my mind.
“Your body, your back and shoulders, are bearing more than is yours to bear.”
“I don’t know how not to.” Anger singes my admittance.
He continues lighting matches in me.
“Not only is it not all yours to bear, but you were trained, conditioned, to carry it all until you believed it was your responsibility to.”
“But why?!”
“Well, you are the one bearing it. You tell me.” His face inches from my own.
“Because they just didn’t want to. They made me responsible so that I would for them.”
“Yes,” he says nonchalantly, as if he’s had this conversation often in other shapes and forms.
“How do I stop being responsible for it all?”
“Be a little less responsible for others and a little more responsible for yourself first, and see what that feels like.”
“Become like them?”
“No. Your version of responsible is so extreme-ended that if you were to be a little less responsible, it would balance out as regular.”
I break into laughter.
He smiles.
the trees rustled and whispered
let it go
let it go even though you don’t know
let it go
From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 24
Content Warning: Childhood trauma, dissociation/DID, survival responses, clinical mental health language, coercive power dynamics, and references to perceived threat of death.
He didn’t like that we were in therapy. I didn’t like it either. Raven said that was the condition we’d laid out for entering into a power exchange relationship with him. We had to remain in therapy.
He framed it as therapy will change us, and he loves us exactly how we are. I agreed.
I hated that I had to learn a whole new language meant for scientists to dissect my brain and signal to one another what they’d found. I still hate it. It’s a lonely language that doesn’t account for the lived experiences and the gravity of chronically labeling ourselves victims and survivors and making that the identity for a person who already has enough identity. Just my take.
I am grateful for the time we had in therapy. I am grateful for the knowledge it gave us to stabilize and process. Those skills are non-negotiable. I’m just saying, I hate the language and how clinical it is. I understand that it is a boundary, a legal language. That’s also why it’s so lonely and feels dehumanizing, like we’re the issue being herded and marginalized or isolated from others. There’s a whole fucking language developed to word that experience that doesn’t account for my heart. My humanity. My sincerity. My devotion.
I’m not heavily spiritual, still I like this logic: if the Gods allowed it, then they also prepared a way out of it. That’s made sense to me.
I also don’t need the “DID is a brilliant survival mechanism” trope. Anyone faced with dying, which is what our brain told us was happening every time we split into a new alt. person, would be mentally and physically propelled toward whatever means of survival was available to them. There isn’t a choice in it. There isn’t time to decide whether it’s brilliant or healthy or anything else. There’s just what happens because life’s whole goal is to stay alive. It’s like when our blood clots to save us. It just does, and that’s a miracle, but it’s not an identity or a purpose.
Then, after surviving, there are the results we learn to live with. The danger in making those results an identity comes when fixing the self becomes the purpose, and surviving becomes the thing we’re best at. That leaves a little too much wiggle room to start liking survival as a thing to do, in my opinion.
I like being alternative. It suits me.
Our brain survived itself. I’ll never be ungrateful for that. I’ll never be angry about it or look that gift in the face and say fuck off. I’m here, all of me is here, because a way was available to me to survive impossible situations and circumstances as a vulnerable, dependent child.
It inspires some kind of faith in me. I haven’t wanted words for it yet, really, because just sitting in that miracle is all I’ve needed to feel my gratitude and devotion.
I ranted. Fuck it. That’s all I have for my part.
I canceled therapy with our psychologist, and it just so happened that she was retiring at the same time. We could both agree our system was taking responsibility for our life and could manage it. There is no doubt in my mind the Gods were there the whole time.
-Stevie
From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 23
Content warning: BDSM and coercive power dynamics, dissociation, trauma reenactment, psychological manipulation, and references to childhood trauma.
“It wasn’t all bad.”
My father told me that in the middle of my mental health crisis. He was referring to my childhood years. “It wasn’t all bad” would follow me into this second uniting with my ex Dom.
I told myself, it’s not all bad. Which became, the good outweighs the bad. The benefits outweigh my fears and doubts.
He told me he didn’t know all that was going on when we met. He didn’t know I wasn’t sleeping or eating or that I’d had a mental breakdown. And I wanted to believe him so badly because the alternative was that I was talking to someone extremely calculated and someone dangerous to me and my system.
I wanted a good story, and I got exactly that. Just… it wasn’t the story I meant or set out to create and live.
I wanted the BDSM dynamic, the devotion, the intensive care, and even love, potentially. I wanted what I never had. The allowance to be myself and… not abused for it. Not exploited for it.
I needed it to have been a misunderstanding because the alternative was that this person I’d trusted with my mind and body, my sacral energy, was another reenactment of a time when I was truly vulnerable and at the mercy of others.
It feels extremely humiliating and painful to realize I’ve reenacted something from my past. The deep shame is unbearable. I could logically recognize that I was reenacting something and still not be able to see what was happening while my brain was overwhelmed. I was misfiring, overcompensating, burning out, and going numb. They were all warnings I couldn’t see because dissociation was my blind spot.
Then add to that the chemical fire of a BDSM dynamic and my brain is mud, ripe for conditioning.
I started to notice he’d say things while I was in subspace, tranced, sometimes heavily dissociated, flooded with happy chemicals, endorphins and things. He’d tell me he owns me, not just as his submissive, but all of me, soul included. He would tell me it’s his destiny to own me. He’d tell me afterward he was just following the flow of the moment and encourage me to do the same.
Over time, I looked for how this was mirroring my past. My father had a hypnotic way of speaking to me. A confusing and deliberate tone, spacing of words, and intense stare. He’d only talk to me like this alone in his bedroom.
Instead of reacting in terror that my ex Dom was mimicking this with me, I felt grateful for the clear processing of a past puzzle piece and fell into further devotion to him.
I gave him the credit for the work I did with my selves because he led me into that space where I could look, notice, and see. Where the truth could break free from the stubborn dissociative walls and, for a moment, I could piece it together and be free.
I gave him way too much credit.
-Raven & Rogue
“Are you okay?” Loki asks intently.
“Yes. No. Yes and no. Maybe.”
His face splits in a grin that’s contagious.
“Better than okay?” he nudges.
I feel it out.
“Hmm, yes, it appears that you are better…
than okay.”
“Absolute flirt!” I burn crimson, and he relishes every bit.
in the rain
hair soaked
and flattened
against my face
flame and water
steams my heart
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