390: What if you found the antidote in the venom? [Rebroadcast Ep284]

Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening. Add free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Hi listeners. Today we bring you the second episode of our annual three week winter rebroadcast series. We'll return with all new episodes starting January 13th. Today's rebroadcast episode, What If You Found the Antedote in the Venom. Originally aired as episode 284 on June 27th, 2023. I just remember having this moment of my therapist asking me, where do you think the fear started from? What's your first memory of feeling scared and overwhelmed? And I just remember starting my sentence. I think it was when I was, and I just remember the room closing in on me. Like my peripheral vision just went completely black. From Wondery, I'm Whit Missildine. Before listening to this is actually happening. Episode 284 What If You Found the Antedote in the Venom. Whether you're exploring your fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has stories that will introduce you to your most fascinating self. Step into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic series. Know how true the latest blockbuster movie stayed to the sci-fi story it was based on, or find unexpected reveals through an exclusive true crime podcast. However you listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. Select any audiobook every month plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at £5.99. Audible, be fascinated, be fascinating. Both of my parents grew up in the Middle East. They were both married prior. My mum would have had three kids and my dad would have had seven kids. My dad would have been the eldest of eight. He would have always been the person who everyone relied on. He pretty much reared the majority of the younger kids in his family along with cousins. My mum's upbringing would have been quite similar in that she came from a family of seven and she would have been one of the middle kids. Unfortunately because my mum finds it really hard to talk about her past without sharing dishonest stories. It's really hard for me to know what her upbringing is like. I can piece together bits of information based on what my aunts have told me. My mum would have explained that her upbringing was, you know, she lived in this grand house and she would have had nannies to mind her and cooks in the house and a chauffeur and I know that none of that is true. So the thing that is kind of upsetting is to know that my mum potentially went through something very difficult in her upbringing and not necessarily know what the source of that is. Both of my parents grew up Muslim and my family would be quite traditional. I wouldn't necessarily say extremely religious. I would say that they were brought up in a way to present themselves and to adhere to certain cultural guidelines and anyone who stepped out of those cultural guidelines was frowned upon. There isn't necessarily anything against divorce in my culture but when my dad separated I know for a fact that my family were quite unhappy with the separation and when he met my mum and she wasn't from the same country as he was they went out of their way to make her joining the family to be quite difficult. I know my mum had to endure a lot of grief from my aunts and they would have made her feel quite unwelcome. Because of the conflict between her and my aunts my mum would have actually not allowed us to engage with my dad's side of the family and she had frequent falling outs with her side of the family so it left us quite isolated for quite a while and we kind of created our own culture in our household. While my parents were married they conceived immediately they had my brother within their first year of marriage then I came along and it was just the two of us growing up. They had such a volatile marriage and the volatility was clearly one-ended. My dad was more placid and I never heard my dad raise his voice whereas my mum, their would be screaming matches from her towards my dad very frequently. My earliest recollection of being around my parents is pretty much them fighting and that would have been the way I understood marriage to be at a very young age. In primary school mornings were very difficult for me because I found it really difficult to finish my breakfast. That was the thing that really aggravated my mum in the morning and I didn't understand why. She would sit me in the kitchen and she would just stand in front of me and watch me drink or eat and if I didn't do it at a pace that she was happy with she would immediately start screaming at me and I didn't know what I could do to make myself eat or drink faster I just couldn't do it and that's when the cane came out. I remember she beat me so hard that this cane broke on my back. It was right before I was getting dressed for school and I was at that age where she needed to help me get dressed. So she put on my primary school dress and I remember arriving into the school and feeling wet on my back. I didn't know what it was, I thought maybe in the car I sat on something so I went to the bathroom before class started. I just went to the mirror and turned around and I remember I was with one of my school friends at that time and I just saw blood on my uniform so I took the dress down over my shoulders. I looked at the mirror again and I just saw a red line that was bleeding going across from my shoulder to my mid back and I just looked at my friend and I just said oh my mum broke a cane on my back this morning. The only thing I thought of at that point was how nervous I was to go home and have my mum realise that I had bloodied the uniform. I didn't understand why she felt the need to act in the way that she had with us because we weren't misbehaving. I know for a fact I wasn't a bad kid. I always felt that she was observing us and that if we made any mistake that we would have some repercussions for our actions but yet no matter what way I acted, what way I tried to avoid conflict with her it always happened. I would always compare what she did and how she reacted to everyone else around me. This went to school and they were happy in the morning and they were looking forward to starting their day, they were looking forward to going home and seeing their parents and I would have compared it to how I felt which is completely petrified at going home. And I would have always started my morning trying to compose myself and try to forget whatever traumatic thing happened that morning. And then I'd come back home and I would just look at my mum and I'd just keep asking myself why is she subjecting us to this? But I would have always tried to understand her thoughts, feelings, her triggers because I always thought that once I understand what upsets her then I can change myself to become less antagonising towards her. When I was a bit older my mum was socialising with friends of hers and her friend had a girl that was my age and we were playing together. Me and my mum go home and it's just the two of us and we get into the elevator for our apartment complex and she immediately starts beating me in the elevator. At that point I didn't know what I did wrong, I thought I was on very good behaviour and she said it's all because of you that we have to go out with them again. At that point I just came to the realisation that sometimes my mum just lashes out at us to take out whatever annoyances that she had in her life and no matter what I did my actions don't necessarily change her reactions. My role in the family has always been peacekeeping. When I became older I felt like that responsibility just amplified. Whenever my mum went into her episodes of rage and anger I felt very stressed because I felt like I had to find a solution, I had to calm things down. I would feel genuinely responsible for the drama that was happening. I wouldn't be able to sleep, I'd be put off my food again, I wouldn't be able to focus in school. Even though my dad was there and even though my dad was amazing he was always the voice of reason but he wasn't physically present enough to view all the things that she did. I think my dad had his own issues with my mum so if he came home and everything was fine and dandy and there was no screaming even if I told him that this morning X, Y and Z happened he was pretty much saying look we're at peace now so let's not aggravate your mum. So he was also scared of her, we were all scared of her. So it felt like there was no solution. When I was 13 my dad would have gotten us our own computers so it made it very comfy to spend an endless amount of time in my room alone and I would have been exposed to a lot of things that I didn't understand at the time. My first exposure to understanding that I had sexual feelings was trying to search first things that I was thinking of. What a naked male looked like and naked female. A lot of my earlier experiences of being turned on by things would have been talking to people online and kind of getting into role play and being able to express my curiosity and having that received in a positive way. I never luckily had an association of shame with my sexuality because I just thought I'm not having sex before marriage so this is fine. And even though I never talked about it to anyone in my day to day life I thought sure everyone has a computer, everyone's having these conversations, this is completely the norm even though I would have been talking about how fun it would be to be tied up. When I first started masturbating it would have been around that age as well and I always kept that part of me learning about myself completely private. I think part of me knew that potentially someone would tell me that this is wrong or bad or inappropriate. I would always kind of delete my history and make sure no one touched my laptop. I would never discuss it with friends or anything like that. But immediately I normalised that I never had any kind of shame associated with it. When we hit our teenage years that's when I noticed things changed. My brother was old enough to start rebelling against my mum so when he was 13, 14 that's when he started getting a bit more confrontational. I remember those years were very stressful for me because when he started being able to stand up to my mum it caused even more conflict in the household and that's when I really felt like I was alone. But as a consequence of his conflict we became in touch with my dad's side of the family again. I started visiting my aunts and uncles and got to know my cousins more but when I joined my country's culture in my teen years I had my aunts telling me that I should act a certain way and I should behave a certain way and I should prioritise knowing how to run a household because these are the things that my culture valued. Because I had such an isolated upbringing it kind of helped me dissociate from cultural pressure internally. I was very good at knowing how to present myself in a way that fits in the culture but internally I felt like I just carried on the way that I had been carrying on which is being able to think about things independently of people that surround me. My final year of high school I was studying quite hard throughout school. It was my way of kind of avoiding conflict at home and staying isolated. I was going to do quite well in my final exams and I asked my dad what he wanted me to do with my career and my life and he knew me well enough to know where my interests lied and he suggested that I go into medicine and that I study abroad. That kind of took me by surprise because my whole family has not a single woman that has studied abroad. There's nothing in the religion that says that I can't do this but everything about the culture says I can't do this. At that point I knew that I wanted to do medicine in Europe. I got accepted. I was nervous. I was very excited. I had this overwhelming feeling of relief that I could potentially have time away from my mom and just kind of formulate an understanding of normalcy and what that could mean. Because of the scholarship program there was a lot of people from my country who were studying abroad like myself. I still felt like I had eyes on me so I still had to act in that manner that I got very good at acting back home as the person who was very good at adhering to cultural norms. But then I always had something happening alongside that was completely different and completely private. I'm Leon Nefok, best known as the host and co-creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco and Think Twice, Michael Jackson. I'm here to tell you about my show Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions and vicious onstage fights. But before the Jerry Springer show became a symbol of cultural decline its namesake was a popular Midwestern politician and a serious minded idealist with lofty ambitions. Through dozens of intimate and revealing interviews with those who knew Springer best I examined Springer's lifelong struggle to reconcile his TV persona with his political dreams and aspirations. And one of the best podcasts of the year by the New Yorker and Rolling Stone, Final Thoughts, Jerry Springer is a story about choices, how we make them, how we justify them to ourselves and how we transcend them or doubt. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or binge the whole series ad free right now on Audible. Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app. I'm Razer Jeffery and in the new season of The Spy Who we tell the story of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. He was the scientist spy who stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands and used them to give Pakistan a bomb. But he didn't stop there. He became a black market atomic salesman, a fix it man for rogue states seeking nuclear weapons including Iran, Libya and North Korea. And that left the CIA and MI6 in a race against time to put him out of business. All the world's most wayward regimes get hold of the world's most destructive weapons. Follow The Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. Early at Ad Free on Audible. So in my first year I remember meeting someone but he attended a different course than I did and had different circle friends and wasn't Middle Eastern that kept him at a comfortable distance from ruining my cultural image. He was my first kiss and he was the first person I had sex with. He knew that he was my first time and he was very very respectful of taking it slow and letting me take the lead, which I really appreciate. But I remember the first time we had sex I found the whole experience completely underwhelming. I kept thinking how this thing that we have formed such a taboo on in my culture, you know like you're going to lose your virginity when you get married and it's such a precious thing. And when I actually experienced it I had a moment where I thought is that it? Is that what we have talked up so much? Is that what we make people look forward to after marriage? It was such a epiphany of me realizing that it was just two bodies connecting and the meaning you put behind it is what you make it. After that I wanted to explore a bit more. I remember having him over at my apartment and I would have grabbed the belt from a fluffy house robe that I had. I would have sat him down in a chair and tied up his hands very poorly and I thought this was the most exciting thing ever. He was naked and I was standing there in my underwear and I realized that he wasn't aroused by the situation at all. And I was really confused because I didn't know what part wasn't arousing for him because I thought up to that point this was way more exciting than us actually having sex. I immediately untied him and we just had you know normal vanilla sex. I didn't really have a word for what I wanted out of the situation. I kept thinking about that interaction over and over again and I just realized that our sexuality is varied and at that point the relationship was fizzling so we broke up. Second year of college I realized I needed to explore what I thought was happening with my sexuality. I didn't want to talk to people online forever. I wanted to go see things for myself. The first event I attended I was nervous but I wasn't scared. I was curious. I was wearing just underwear with fishnet tights and a lace eye mask. I remember going in and seeing this wide room with different people dressed in whatever way their heart desired. There were people dressed in full latex cat suits, dressed as different pets. There were people in lingerie. It was just a completely different eye widening experience to just see people so comfortable in their skin. I would have just observed what was happening around, observed people playing with each other, tying each other up, doing a bit of impact play which is using tools like floggers or whips, spanking and I just thought the whole thing was absolutely magical. I did get a chance to have a little scene myself with he was then an acquaintance but turned boyfriend later. He tied me up and did a little bit of bare hand spanking and I was so overwhelmed even though in hindsight it was such a little thing. So me and my boyfriend became very close. We went to events together but we weren't limited in playing with each other. He had specified that his role was a switch which means that he had interests in being submissive and also dominant and I'd say I knew very quickly that I had no interest in submissive roles. When I started exploring my domeside he had interests in heavy bondage, impact play so that was something I had to learn and the type of bondage he liked was the type that he knew he couldn't get out of. To get confident enough to tie someone up or restrain someone in a manner where he knew that they couldn't get out and watching someone bigger and stronger than you, not being able to move unless you want them to was definitely something I enjoyed learning. He had interests in CBT for example which is cock and ball torture. Usually with CBT people get to decide the type of pain that they enjoy which is something I also learned with experience. Another thing was pegging which is using a strap on your partner. So initially I genuinely had no idea what I was doing but because I was exploring with my boyfriend it felt very safe to make mistakes and not necessarily have things go according to plan. So I was able to gain confidence in different aspects of doming like bondage, like inflicting pain and plan a scene with my boyfriend and have it play out exactly the way I had planned it with my partner. Whenever I played with someone who wanted me to dominate them I would spend a lot of time getting to know how their mind worked and what really turned them on, what way they like to be touched, what way they like to be spoken to. That's when I realized that I could use my empathy which is something that I found to be quite a burden to my favor. When you're playing with domination or submission there's a huge safety element. Everyone has to have an open discussion about their limits, their comfort zone, their safe words and I think I found all that extremely comforting especially if you enjoy pain or if you enjoy degradation. They can be quite stressful even if you're doing it as something that turns you on. So another thing that comes into play is aftercare. Just walking away from someone who just experienced that can make them feel unwanted or undesired which means that when a scene ends you need to address the person in front of you's needs in regards to bringing them back to reality. I don't necessarily like the more sensual maternal side of doming. I find the more twisted scenes to be way more enjoyable. If someone enjoys pain or enjoys being spoken to in a degrading manner those are the kind of scenes that appeal to me more and I think it's because even though I'm hurting them and like saying very mean things to them I know that I can make them feel that when they come out of that headspace they feel safe and cared for. So me and my boyfriend had a total of a five year relationship and I would have kept him a complete secret and I lived with my boyfriend and no one knew I lived with him. People thought I lived alone. I still was very much adhering to my cultural facade still wanting to not stand out and wanting to kind of hide under the radar. It came to a point where for the five years I had one life which is my college life, my family life and in hospital placement coming to contact with patients and kind of really growing as a clinician and finding my identity as a clinician and then a completely separate life which was my BDSM life and all the friends I had from the scene. I was really thriving in a dom role and my submissive was really enjoying sinking into his submissive interests. Those two parts of my lives would have stayed completely separate. During the day I would go to the hospital I was allocated to. I would be part of the medical team, I would be looking after patients with the doctors and I would be the best version of what I wanted to be as a doctor and then I'd come home and here's my submissive dressed in a latex cat suit and a latex hood on his knees waiting for me. I would be a complete switch from my daytime demeanor to my dom persona which was very much harsh and cruel. I was very cruel, very mean, extremely inconsiderate and that's the total opposite of what I'm like in the daytime. When I was in work I was fully nurturing and kind, always there for colleagues, always there for patients and I'd always really enjoy doing the meanest things on weekdays because it was such a nice stress reliever to be able to come home and ask my submissive to lick my work shoes clean before I take them off or worship my feet after a long day and once he's done with that I loved putting him in a latex body bag that I could leave him in while I was doing something else like having a shower or getting changed and whenever I was ready to play with him the body bag we had had zippers that gave me access to the areas I needed so it would be really nice to tease him and watch him squirm and it was such an effective outlet for both of us and he worked very hard as well. It was extremely satisfying. I found that what makes me a good doctor in my opinion is what makes me a good dom. There's a lot of overlap and my empathy came into play. It's all about wanting to be better for the person in front of me and wanting to understand where they're coming from and wanting to know where their pain and their hurt is. So the two personas are still 100% true to my identity and who I am because I find that when you're in a dom role externally it might look like it's very cruel and mean but everything that's expressed in that manner you know that that person needs that from you. That person requires me to take power from them unapologetically and if it's done in a manner that's more hesitant they feel more unsafe in their submissive role. In a messed up way in my head I find being a dom to be extremely nurturing but I feel like I'm almost looking after this person. I provide a safety for them to be the way that they want to be and know that they're looked after. In my final year of med school I didn't know where I was going to be in a year's time. There was only a fixed amount of positions in the country for working as an intern and because I wasn't European I wasn't going to rank priority by any means. My boyfriend suggested that we can change my visa status by marrying him which could help me move up the ranking and initially I thought that was the most ridiculous idea I haven't even told my family about him yet but he kept talking to me about it and persuading me to reconsider. So eventually I was persuaded to go ahead with this. We ended up getting married in 4th med. Fun enough his parents were our witnesses that's how supportive they were of our relationship and I was really grateful for them. After final med I managed to successfully place in the country and get a slot to do my internship. I was really relieved broke the news to my mom and dad. My dad was delighted for me but my mom didn't take the news well at all. She found that I was abandoning her is the word that she used. She kept saying that she was lonely and that I already spent enough years abroad that I should come back home and be with her and that I should look after her. It was a big trigger for me to hear that from her because I just was angry at her for standing in my way. That conflict probably lasted for 6 months. She was ringing me screaming all the time she would send me really hateful voice notes. I remember reaching a point where I was so furious with her after spending so many years trying to be a peacekeeper and trying to make sure that she was happy in whatever way I could provide. I reached a point where I just hated her and I remember ringing my brother just crying after hearing some awful voice notes that she sent me just telling him how much I wish she was dead. I genuinely felt like my life and everyone's life would be better off without her. I had no sympathy for her whatsoever. I was just tired of her taking over my life. In fourth year we cover psychiatry as one of our modules. When we got into the personality disorders the second we got to borderline I actually started reading about this personality disorder that includes emotional volatility, frequent dissociation from friends and family during conflict, removing people from your personal life, huge fluctuations and emotions, feeling victimized frequently. I just kept thinking of how every single thing I read aligned with the way that my mother was. I spent my whole life trying to understand and explain my mom and the actual relief I had of being able to understand that this is what she's going through and this is the condition she's suffering with. I finally had an answer. My mom and I reached a breaking point where I called her and I said that I couldn't take what was happening to our relationship. I was crying. I was very sad. I told her I don't know why you're hurting me because all I want for you is to be happy but you don't want the same thing for me. I don't know what else I can do for you because I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm working so hard. I thought that you'd be proud of me for everything that I've achieved but you're sitting here and you're telling me that I'm the worst daughter ever and that I'm a disappointment to you and I don't understand why. She actually was trying to calm me down. I actually couldn't catch my breath because I was in actual hysterics. I wasn't able to speak more than two words without sobbing. And then she said, look, just take a deep breath and go wash your face and we'll chat later. We'll chat later. I was hung up. And the next time we talked she just said, look, I know you were very upset and I know that you care about me and you know I care about you and we'll see what we can do to help our relationship. I think she realized that she was genuinely going to lose me. She views everyone as an enemy or someone against her and I genuinely wasn't trying to be against her in any way and I think that was the moment she realized that. I'm still in shock that that conversation went the way that it did and it actually changed our relationship completely till this day. At this point in time when all of this was unfolding with my mom, I had started working and the reality of working in healthcare hit me like a ton of bricks. We're incredibly under supported and we're incredibly overworked. I was coming home at 10 p.m. after starting my day at 7.30. We weren't being paid our hours that we worked. It was a really, really steep learning curve. Everything that I was doing in college, being able to balance study and exploring my sexuality and having fun with my partner and doing all this stuff, that completely changed. I didn't have time to feed myself properly and look after myself better yet, you know, organize scenes and play time with my partner because I was coming home exhausted. At that point, my partner and I didn't see each other as much and when we did, I almost viewed him as a burden because I wasn't able to look after myself so I felt like I was at a deficit with him. By the time I thought I was getting grips on work-life balance, COVID hit and it just went haywire all over again. I really struggled at that point to find myself and find enjoyment in life but I and every healthcare worker still had to show up to their jobs. I was seeing people die more frequently than I ever have and I had to come home and not have an outlet in any way so my mental health really deteriorated at that point. The funny thing is when I was at work, it felt like everything was perfect. I never felt like I underperformed. I never felt like I wasn't there 100% but it was the second I left that building that I just felt like I was drowning. Our relationship was falling apart right in front of me. I didn't realize it was happening. We never fought. We were always there for each other but I was emotionally detaching myself. One day I just started crying and said I can't do this anymore. You're not there. Even though we're together I feel alone. I was actually relieved that he broke up with me because I wouldn't have been able to say the words myself but I really did feel a lot of guilt towards how I handled the end of that relationship. Even though we're still very friendly with each other, that guilt lasted for a solid two years after. I remember going for a walk with one of my work friends and I remember just telling her that I was feeling very overwhelmed with life and no matter what I did I just couldn't relieve that feeling. It just felt like I was a full glass and I didn't know how to empty that glass. This friend of mine just said look I actually went to therapy a year prior in this place and she sent me the link to the location that she went to and she said that she got a lot of benefit out of it. For my first session I almost felt like a fraud sitting there thinking maybe I'm fine but after the first 20 minutes of the session I was in tears. It took that span of time just for me to actually realize that I wasn't okay. I felt I had to live a certain way and act a certain way not for myself but for other people pretty much exclusively always people of my culture and my family. Despite the fact that I still lived in a way that was my own the double life was making me very unhappy because I wanted my family to accept me and love me the way that I was even if they disagreed with certain things that I did in my life and I think that conclusion I found to be quite intense because I've been doing it that way for 28 years. The reason I always felt scared and terrified I realized that that's my way of coping with any kind of stressful experience. Stress in my childhood would have always been associated with fear so inevitably for the future everything I experienced that was stressful would always go hand in hand with fear and terror. I just remember having this moment of my therapist asking me where do you think the fear started from? What's your first memory of feeling scared and overwhelmed? And I just remember starting my sentence I think it was when I was and I just remember the room closing in on me like my peripheral vision just went completely black and I couldn't finish my sentence I just immediately started solving. The realization that something as normal as stress I can't even experience in a normal manner because every time I experienced stress it was like I was experiencing stress as a child rather than experiencing stress as an adult who felt in control to me at that point stress was something that felt completely out of control for me. I think that was the the best thing I gained from therapy at that point just realizing how to separate and understand the different types of stress that I'm experiencing and kind of detaching it from my childhood gave me a lot of power that I didn't think I had. I never really discussed my my BDSM life with my therapists because I thought it was something that I'd like to keep quite personal to me but it really allowed me to dive deep into why I enjoy what I enjoy and why I feel so comfortable in that role and it just made me realize that I spent a lot of my childhood having things not in my control and not having any power over how I was going to feel and how I was going to be treated whether I felt safe or unsafe or happy or unhappy was completely in someone else's hands it was in my it was in my mom's hands. When I reflect on my sexuality I realize that I found myself leaning towards situations where I had power and control over the circumstance. There's nothing I found as comforting and as thrilling as being in control because I provided a safety for myself. If there was any kind of pain or suffering that was going to happen it would happen within my control and when I wanted it to happen it was not inflicted on me. I lean more towards scenes that affect the psychology rather than just physical activities but with that comes a lot of responsibility because you need to understand that when you're inflicting that amount of not just physical pain but also kind of psychological pain you have to know how to bring someone back and I think that's the one thing I never had in my childhood I never had my mom come back and apologize and tell me everything was going to be okay and a bit of accountability for her actions. It never happened it was pretty much purely just the abuse with nothing back so when I started learning about doming as much as I had to provide a dom role that was very harsh I was also able to provide an aftercare role which was very loving and caring. I find the whole experience to be healing for me being able to talk about our scenes after and discuss them and say what our favorite parts were and what parts we would do different and what parts potentially felt uncomfortable. I really loved that I really loved the closeness that you felt. I get to take something from my experience in my childhood and find strength and find power from that. I went about prioritizing my career at that point and I put my BDSM interest to the side and I remember meeting up with a few colleagues from work in a house party. There was this one guy who I never saw before and I remember we just briefly chatted I thought he was really cute. We had our first date a couple of days later he was very nervous and I thought it was very endearing and I'll never forget our second date. We went to a restaurant and after 10 minutes of sitting down I said listen I just have to tell you something very important about me as a person. I proceeded to tell him about my history in the BDSM scene and that this is something that I've done for the last few years of my life and pretty much said take it or leave it and I just remember him just staring at me like not wanting to react in a way that was negative and he just said okay and I can't wait to get to know a bit more about your experience and see what happens between us. Since then we actually ended up exploring an array of things together which was such a fun experience but I learned a lot about what it means to have just a connection with someone. I think a lot of the emphasis I had in my last relationship was learning about the BDSM scene and being able to do things right and in a certain manner. I really value that connection that me and my partner currently have which extends beyond what my understanding of my sexuality was at the time. He taught me something new. We grew together. We got through COVID together. When I introduced him to my family it was with the intention of them knowing that this person was in my life and we were going to get married because at that point we were engaged. They didn't say anything other than we're happy if you're happy. I would have never thought that this moment would happen. They came to Ireland and they met his family and they loved his family and they got on perfectly. It was such a surreal experience to be sitting in front of my fiance and my parents and just have them talk in a manner that was very loving and very inviting. That also includes my mum. At the moment it's surprising to say but she talks to me every day and she finds me to be someone safe for her and she always calls me if she's under pressure or feels like she's about to do something that might be harmful for the family. You know, she's not perfect. She's still trying her best to not be as volatile. I can see the effort in her end. At least she knows that I'm there to be an ally for her and not an enemy. I remember after leaving dinner with his parents the first thing my dad said to me was, do you think I did well? Do you think they liked me? And I thought that was the most heartwarming thing he could have said because at that point I knew that all he wanted was for me to be happy and for them to do what they can for my happiness. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Whit Misteldine. Today's episode was co-produced by me, Andrew Waits, and Aviva Litkowitz, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The opening music features the song Sleep Paralysis by Scott Velazquez. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook or follow us on Instagram at Actually Happening. On the show's website, thisisactuallyhappening.com, you can find out more about the podcast, contact us with any questions, submit your own story, or visit the store, where you can find This Is Actually Happening designs on stickers, t-shirts, wall art, hoodies, and more. That's ThisIsActuallyHappening.com. And finally, if you'd like to become an ongoing supporter of what we do, go to patreon.com.com. Even $2 to $5 a month goes a long way to support our vision. Thank you for listening. Wonderful. Follow This Is Actually Happening on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of This Is Actually Happening ad free by joining Audible.