Everything, Here
There is a phrase that has been following me around:
Everything, always.
I had just watched Obsession, the Netflix adaptation of Josephine Hart’s novel Damage. The phrase “Everything, always” is there in the 2023 limited series, but almost in passing. It didn’t land with anything like the force it had when I first encountered it in Hart’s novel.
Perhaps that is why the phrase came back to me afterward and left me slightly unsettled.
It was unsettling because I understand its attraction.
There is something intoxicating about wanting without qualification. Not merely wanting more, but wanting the barriers removed. Wanting a thing completely.
At this stage of my life, I find myself reconsidering the erotic dimensions of who I am with an intensity I hadn’t anticipated. Perhaps that is one of the wider horizons age can gift you: knowing yourself better, discovering what matters, and still realizing how much remains unexplored.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in my attraction to Dominance and submission. I am a switch, comfortable on either side of that exchange, and perhaps that makes me particularly sensitive to its strange reciprocity — to what it means both to surrender control and to be entrusted with someone else’s surrender.
In thinking about this particular phrase, though, it is the Dominant side of that exchange that fascinates — and unsettles — me.
The authority of a Dominant is not inherent. It exists because another person has chosen to grant it. That is precisely what makes it powerful.
What moves me most is not obedience itself, but surrender as an act of trust.
Someone knowing herself well enough, trusting herself enough, and trusting me enough to place herself in my hands for a chosen moment.
To uncover herself.
To open herself.
To say:
You may know me in this moment, however you want me.
You may explore my body, fully.
I trust you.
There is something almost unbearably erotic in that.
Because what is being offered is not simply access to a body. It is permission to be curious without apology. Permission for hunger to be sated. Permission to discover what might happen when another person chooses not to retreat from that curiosity, but welcomes it.
Nothing coerced.
Nothing taken.
Nothing presumed.
But everything she genuinely wishes to give, given freely.
For someone with my particular wiring, the siren song is obvious.
Everything.
And that is where the beauty acquires a shadow.
Because someone else’s surrender can become intoxicating enough to enslave the person receiving it.
Not because I necessarily want her to surrender more.
Not because today’s boundary must become tomorrow’s conquest.
That isn’t the danger I recognize in myself.
The danger is that the sensation itself might become so sublime that I no longer want to leave it.
The Dominant appears to be the one in control. They are the one entrusted with seeming authority, permitted to explore, allowed for a chosen moment to inhabit the extraordinary freedom of another person’s willing surrender.
But there is a kind of disappearance in that experience too.
The outside world recedes.
Ordinary concerns lose their gravity.
There is only this person, this trust, this astonishing permission to be completely present inside desire — to bathe in the pleasure of having someone so fully, so physically present, so utterly open to me.
And perhaps that is precisely why it can become dangerous.
Not because I need the next surrender to be more extreme.
Because I begin wanting this one not to end.
I want to remain inside the feeling.
I want the world to keep receding.
I want this state of erotic absorption — this exquisite suspension of everything beyond it — not merely now, but again tomorrow, and the day after that.
I want —
Everything, always.
And always is where the danger lies.
It is no longer simply that she has given me everything within the moment.
It is that the moment itself should never have to end.
That I might begin arranging the rest of my life around returning to it.
Protecting it.
Maintaining it.
Finding my way back into it whenever ordinary life inevitably reasserts itself.
At first, perhaps, nothing would look like ruin.
A little more money.
A little more time.
A little less sleep.
An obligation shifted.
A judgment softened because it interferes with getting back there.
One perfectly persuasive exception.
Then another.
Not in pursuit of greater extremity.
In pursuit of remaining there.
That is the darker paradox of Dominance for me.
She may surrender herself completely within the erotic space, yet I am the one at risk of surrendering the boundaries of my life in order to remain inside what her surrender makes me feel.
The catastrophe does not begin because I ask her for too much.
It begins when I become willing to give up too much of myself so that the feeling never has to end.
That is where Damage stops feeling merely melodramatic.
Its terror is not simply overwhelming desire, nor some form of transgressive sexual intimacy. It is desire becoming so complete, so self-sufficient, that ordinary existence begins to feel like exile.
The erotic becomes so absorbing that everything outside it starts losing its equal claim to reality.
Family.
Obligation.
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Judgment.
Promises.
Stability.
The ordinary structures of a life begin to feel not valuable in themselves, but like interruptions between returns to the sublime.
I understand the seduction of that.
That is what makes it frightening.
Because I don’t particularly want a carefully moderated erotic life.
I want intensity.
I want hunger.
I want surrender.
I want trust extravagant enough to frighten me a little.
I want those moments when the rest of the world really does disappear.
The answer cannot be to prevent that disappearance.
It has to be remembering that I must eventually allow the world to return.
Not:
Everything, always.
But:
Everything, here.
Here, inside the moment we have deliberately created.
Here, inside the boundaries that make surrender possible.
Here, she may give everything she genuinely wants to give.
Here, I may receive it completely.
Here, the ordinary world may fall away.
But here has an edge.
And here is not merely a boundary around her surrender.
It is a boundary around my hunger.
If I am responsible for respecting the limits of the person surrendering to me, I must also be responsible for recognizing my own.
Perhaps that is one of the less obvious disciplines of Dominance.
Not merely exercising control within the erotic space.
Maintaining control of myself outside it.
Knowing when hunger is enlarging my life and when my life has begun reorganizing itself around feeding the hunger.
Knowing how to surrender completely to an experience without surrendering my life to the need to remain inside it.
There is a Nine Inch Nails song, The Perfect Drug, with a refrain that has fascinated me — and resonated with me — for years:
You are the perfect drug.
I understand that feeling too.
Perhaps that is what this kind of surrender can become for me: a drug.
The extraordinary physical presence of another person. The trust. The openness. The sensation of being permitted, for a time, to disappear completely into that desire, into her.
But I find myself wanting to revise what perfect must mean.
Its perfection must include the ability to come back from it.
A perfect drug cannot be one whose pleasure eventually demands the destruction of everything that makes the pleasure possible.
It cannot require me to sacrifice the stability of my life simply to remain inside the feeling.
Perhaps the perfect drug is the one potent enough to make the world disappear for a while — and still allows me to return safely.
To take in the experience completely.
To be changed by it.
To want it again.
But not to require always.
That may be the difference between intoxication and addiction.
And perhaps between erotic abandon and ruin.
Within the frame, I do not have to be moderate.
I can be ravenous.
Curious.
Possessive in the grammar of the game.
I can allow the rest of the world to become temporarily distant.
Then the moment ends.
The possessive grammar ends.
The authority dissolves.
She remains herself.
And I return to myself.
Not because the experience mattered less than it seemed to in the moment.
Precisely because it mattered enough that I refuse to make it responsible for sustaining my entire life.
Perhaps that is what I am trying to learn.
Not safety from desire.
Not moderation for its own sake.
Something harder.
To permit abandon without permitting self-destruction.
To let an encounter be total without allowing desire to become totalizing.
Everything, here.
Because here acknowledges what always cannot.
There is an outside.
And the life waiting there does not diminish the intensity of what happens within the erotic space.
It is what allows me to enter that space without being consumed by it.
Perhaps erotic maturity is not learning how to want less.
Perhaps it is learning how to want everything —
and still know where always must end.
