Bluebeard

Most of us literary gals know the story of Bluebeard. Yet I am assuming most of my audience here are men. So, I will share it with you. I originally came across this story in childhood and then again in Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés when I was 19.

It is based on other older stories however, the version I will summarize for you today is the version written in 1697 by Charles Perrault. This story isn't a fairytale (in fact most of the "fairytales of our dreams" were actually warnings in the beginning... read that again).

The story goes...

Wealthy Bluebeard wishes to marry and has been eyeing the two beautiful daughters of his neighbour, who is a widow. The daughters were repulsed by his ugly beard and didn't want to marry. So, using the other thing he had... he invited the ladies of the house to come to stay at his estate.

The youngest daughter is seduced by this wealth and agrees to marry Bluebeard. They rush into marriage and only a few days after the wedding Bluebeard tells her he has to leave on a long trip, far away for work.

He leaves her behind with the keys to every part of the house, the keys to all the safes and tells her to use anything and do anything that she likes. She was overjoyed. However, he also tells her, "There is a key you can't use, the smallest key there. It is to a tiny closet and it is the only forbidden place in the house. If you open it expect me to be angry."

The curiosity of course killed the cat, the young maiden went to the room and unlocked the door that she wasn't supposed to open, and what she found was a room full of blood and the corpses of all of his previous wives. Shocked, she dropped the key into a puddle of blood and she quickly cleaned it off and left the room, locking it again behind her.

Despite saying he was going away for a long trip, of course he came back that evening and found blood on the one key that he told her not to use. He confronts her about it and she tries to deny why there is blood there. But both of them know that he knows that she opened the door. He is enraged and tells her that it's time for her to join his other wives.

She, being smart, asks him if she could have a little bit to say her wishes and prepare for her death. He agrees. So, she runs to her room and to the balcony and calls for her sisters to tell her if they see anyone coming. Eventually, her brothers storm the castle and kill Bluebeard just before he is about to behead her.

Not much of a "fairytale" is it? This story is very very important and I will explain to you now why I started this piece with that story.

I was a submissive for 8 years AFTER reading this story, meaning that I already knew the lesson prior to learning it through experience. You can know a lot and understand it too, but you never truly have any idea until you live it. To develop a true relationship with yourself and your will, you have to take a trip in the dark. People get trapped in this darkness. This story is a warning to young women, but I think everyone has their own initiation with naivety. All at different times. I myself? I've had too many run-ins with deaths of various forms of my naivety.

So being naive of course, I figured I was done learning the lessons, I had reached adulthood and already had been through so much! So, after one prudish partner, I dived headfirst into the deep end of BDSM.

I loved it and hated it for many years, facing a Bluebeard after Bluebeard but with much less money. I started off being a heavy masochist, determined to prove I could take any pain the world threw at me, so I forced that pain. Looking back I think, "Why the world hurts enough, seriously why?" But I know my excuses, I used it as an outlet or at least that's what I said.

Anyways, I digress, I didn't truly learn this lesson until I was almost 26. Seven years later, few too many predators. Too much of me was prey and I'm not ashamed to say I grew wildly tired of it.

The last Dom I ever had and will EVER have told me in our honeymoon phase how amazed he was to find a sub who just liked being a sub, rather than someone using BDSM to cover or attempt to heal from something. I smiled, knowing full well that was a misled observation. I am self-destructive and that's what I used it for. So used to being low, I needed a way to keep myself there, because how dare trailer trash like me succeed. We could go deep into an analysis of that, but you'd be reading a book. I'll teach in chapters and we will wait for that one.

If you haven't realized by now I am talking about a turning point and a major struggle for all of us. A turning point into maturity. This is a turning point that hurts drastically and for me it started with my first broken heart a few years prior to this. The point I am talking about now was the official coming to terms with an officially dead innocence. Too many of us don't come out of this place of being beheaded by others or by ourselves. While I have very alive archetypes for this story, my archetypes' minds are theirs. I guarantee they still choose not to be aware of their own despair.

When I met my last Dom, I was amazed by his charity and thoughtful writing. Yes, of course, the bookworm would fall hard for the tricks of a well-wrote polyamorous man, her parents' age. He was kind, I was broken-hearted and desiring to be involved in the city's BDSM scape again. It had been some time.

After a while, I started noticing the gaps in his game. He said it wasn't all about sex but when I went away to continue college he was "suffering". Someone who had a wife, and another girlfriend, but because his sub was away he was suffering. This threw me into a whirlwind and not being able to make sense of it, my sex drive simply fell away to depression. I'm naturally a people pleaser and will ruin my life to build pedestals for others. So, even when we were together, I wanted closeness, he wanted to add bodies to a closet with a small key.

I wasn't enough to fill the cup which is something I had grown far too used to. Not being enough for others. This was a story I grew up with and had practiced with, it got old.

I realized I was far done. I was so far gone, I was burned and broken and furious. I realized this wasn't going to be a productive place for me to grow and I left him. He never asked why and told me he didn't care when I offered him a learning moment. At that moment that I was leaving and he was smirking it finally clicked to me. I liked sex, yes, but I will not tolerate liars. I understand where his mind is though, he would venture to disagree I'm sure. But it was and is no longer my duty to try to benefit or guide those who want to stay lost.

"The problem posed in the tale of Bluebeard is that rather than empowering the light of the young feminine forces of the psyche, he is instead filled with hatred and desires to kill the lights of the psyche. It is not hard to imagine that in such a malignant formation there is trapped one who once wished for surpassing light and fell from grace because of it. We can understand why thereafter the exiled one maintains a heartless pursuit of the light in others. We can imagine that it hopes if it could gather enough souls to itself, it could make a blaze of light that would finally rescind its darkness and repair its loneliness."

Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinolka Estés

It was at that moment, that the monsters in the game of love weren't invisible anymore.

Not only were the monsters not shrouded in darkness anymore, but I also had to fight not to become one. Rather I chose a merger with my Demi-devil. I could have become Bluebeard right then. I wanted to eat men for breakfast. If it weren't for my brothers in life, the physical ones and the ones in my psyche, I would have cut men's eyes out for the rest of my life.

You can't have a true union in the hatred of your own opposite.

To combine... needs two forces.

I am challenged daily by idiots who think they are gentlemen attempting to touch where I stand and me attempting not to devour their souls and feed them to my own demons.

I'm still learning from this last connection to BDSM. Sometimes I wish I was still blind. There truly is bliss in ignorance. I'm sure if you are reading this from a place of understanding, you will recognize that it's hard to "play nice" and "make friends" with people who are actually ghosts.

My innocence to the types of greed changed, and my ideas about others, this began my wake-up to more than just the gaps in sex and love. But in my own spirituality too, it was six months after this I was introduced to tantra and the left-hand paths of spirituality. To the feminine power, something I am only naturally tuned to but know truly nothing about. It's a lot to wake up to and it's hard not to fall back asleep. I'm glad I have stories like this one to act as a reminder for when I get caught up and forget what others and I am capable of.

I think BDSM is a creative outlet, it can be a lot of fun. It is nice to play pretend that you aren't in charge anymore and it's good to explore things sexually. I just wish more people were aware of themselves first. I'm blessed and cursed by the fact that I always learn more about things the hard way.

This was how I learned to say no.