Back in the closet

I spent the day of the royal wedding with the only gay men whom I knew would not be watching the wedding.
Well, that’s not true.
I have many gay friends and I can’t see any of them being remotely interested. Maybe it’s an Anglo-Saxon thing because I don’t know any Dutch gays interested in royalty. Except for a few royalty reporters.
Interested in sex? All of them.
Madonna? Fifty percent.
Musicals? A few.
I even know one who is a soccer fan. He kept that from me for years. I was baffled when his boyfriend accidentally let that slip.
And then you think you know someone!!

But I never detected an interest in royalty in any of them. And four out of five don’t care for weddings either. And neither do I.
I ve been declining wedding invitations for years. I would make an exception if it was direct family, or closest friend. Only for the ones I love most.

I always feel like Maleficent when it comes to weddings. Maleficent is the uninvited evil fairy from Sleeping Beauty. Except of course I don’t want to be invited either.

Now that I’m a mistress, it makes even more sense because mistresses and weddings are not a logical combination. Maybe one day, if we totally own our sexuality, mistresses will be able to rejoice in weddings:
“Yay! More married men!”

But not attending weddings has more to do with the fact that I simply don’t like parties, and I don’t like being reduced to an audience either.
Unless it’s to attend something that I find truly inspiring. For example going to a museum or taking a guided historical walk, then I can be audience. Even a concert with a support act would already be beyond my attention span. I would give it fifteen minutes tops, between handing in my ticket and needing the main show to start.
But I don’t care for weddings either, if I can watch Harry and Meghan from the quiet seclusion of my own home. So I didn’t watch.
And neither did my gay friends.
I spent the Saturday with them, and was asked about a certain person. If I thought he was gay or not. And I admitted that I had always assumed he was gay, but that it was getting harder to believe since he was now forty plus and married with children.

And this was a guy who could get anybody, any age, any gender, any sexual orientation, to make an exception for him (if necessary). He was absolutely gorgeous.
Which was one of the reasons I assumed he was gay.

Straight men are usually not that easy on the eyes, and they do not score that high on people skills either. One of the reasons male players barely have any competition, is because most other men are so uncomfortable talking to women.
This is local; Could be different somewhere else!
But in The Netherlands, if a man easily connects with people in general but that includes women; He’s either a player or he’s gay.
I still thought this one was gay.
“I have the impression he’s never coming out of the closet. He’s hiding even deeper.”
My friends and me all agree someone can stay in the closet for as long he or she wants. I wasn’t always like that but it’s one thing being a mistress taught me: to realize that when your sexuality meets opposition, you have every right to deny it, lie about it, or refrain from it. You have the right to setup a whole second life and marry whoever you choose, and to stay in the closet forever.
If that’s what you want.

At times I suspect the only reason I’m even in this relationship with a married man, is because I believed it was temporary. I wouldn’t even have recognized myself in that word “Mistress”. I believed it was temporary and that he would choose for me.
You can compare it to experimenting with someone from the same gender.
It’s stage one.
It’s an important step, but it’s only experimenting. You’re not making any decisions.

To go from stage one to realizing you’re full blown liking it and never want to go back, can still take years. And maybe you will never allow for that level of accepting who you are. Regardless of how lighthearted you jumped into the experimental stage.

So my friends and me don’t out people. And I m ashamed to say that I once did press a friend, and took it personal I felt he wasn’t honest. I would apologize if I ever saw him again.
But I do still fantasize and wonder: Would he? Is he?
And so do my friends.

So we were wondering about this man presumably hiding deep into the closet of being gay, and things started to shift inside of me as well. My previous post, which cost me two days and one heart attack to write, was still fresh in my memory. I knew being so open about being a mistress, and actually advocating it to those who have similar preferences for secrecy, excitement, and unavailable men (wake up call! you will never be satisfied with something else!), was coming at a price;
ANXIETY.

Like being gay, a mistress can never be sure if she will not be molested or killed over it. I have so many “friends” who say they would kill their husbands if they found out.
I know better.
They’d kill me.
So that’s what I mean when I say I no longer out gay men. But that it probably took me until I was a mistress to really feel that choice. To understand why it’s sometimes practically impossible to honor who you are and speak up for what you believe in.
But the conversation, combined with my recent anxiety attacks, had stirred something in me; I wanted out.
Not out of the relationship – I never considered that a serious option.
I wanted to stop drawing attention to myself.
No writing, no books, no message.
No Twitter, no Facebook, no career.
I would just go back to being a yoga teacher and keep my thoughts to myself and my gay friends. Maybe I wouldn’t get killed, if I stopped speaking about my sexual preference. Maybe “they” would leave me alone, if I was “only” a yoga teacher..

And the pieces started to move, and the day went by and I didn’t write for this daily blog, and slowly my thoughts started to make sense.
One of the key insights into my own preferences was my need for secrecy. That I had lost a huge part of joy with my long-term boyfriend, when we made our relationship public after six months.
There was the initial excitement over being able to share it.
And then – poof! – it was gone.
Initially I thought it was because after a while you’re not in love anymore. But that wasn’t it, because I’ve been in love for over three years with my lover. I get more butterflies every time.
My fleeting interest with my long-term boyfriend was simply caused by our “coming out”.

I was way more excited about us when we were still a secret.
And had lost something valuable, coming out of the closet.

If I would stop talking and writing about being a mistress, I could go back to having the perks of secrecy and stop having these anxiety attacks… It’s so difficult to say no to that.
It comes down to existential questions like:
Why I am here on earth?
How important is it for me to get this message out there?
Unfortunately: Very.
I don’t think there is a single area where I have a bigger contribution to make than here. Stopping now would feel like Marie Curie butting out of research before she discovered radioactivity.

I just Googled her.
What I didn’t know was that she too was a mistress when she was in her forties. Her husband had died and she had a lover who was a scientist too. He was married. At the time it wasn’t out of the ordinary for successful men to have a mistress, but she needed to stay in the background. The fact that she was famous and foreign, made her not eligible to be measured according to loose French standards. When the news broke she was scandalized and even had to go into hiding.

So although my work is far less important than Marie Curie’s, I do know this is it.
To stop writing would be a short term relief.
But I feel so strongly, that this is The Message. That some people, women, men, need this. To be a secret lover.
And some men or women need to have a second lover.
That’s how they’re wired.

You don’t accidentally end up loving two people.
If you love two people, there was a vacancy. It’s like those animals who have two penises: they’re built differently.

I don’t want to get too much on the field of people who have two partners: one legit, and one secret. Because I think that’s not my story to tell. But yes, they too are not heard. They probably don’t even understand themselves. They might even think they fucked it up.
It’s so sad. It’s ALL so sad.

If I think even further, about all those betrayed partners: They think it’s about them. That the relationship wasn’t good enough. That they shouldn’t have said such and such. Shouldn’t have been so difficult, or something.
Or that their partner should have left if they “wanted it so badly!”.
And so on.

The unnecessary sadness and suffering this taboo is causing, might be the most important reason why I don’t want to go back into the closet.
Not the closet of my sexuality.
I will persist, just like Marie Curie persisted.
And I hope it doesn’t cost me, but it did cost her. She died of an ailment caused by radioactive exposure. She paid with her life but her invention has been saving lives for over a hundred years.

But there is something else. Something I think I unconsciously let go off a long time ago. As if I already knew that standing up as a mistress, inevitably meant that I longed for more privacy in other areas.
I will no longer be writing diaries or erotica;
which has been my most important work since 2006.

I made this choice unconsciously. I can see that now, looking back on my last projects.
Their content already shows me drawing back:
Reboot, started in August 2017, was about rebooting my body, but also contained a lot of sex.
The Hero’s Journey, started at Christmas, was only about yoga. Or about Not Practicing Yoga. The accountability of the blog had the opposite effect on me. I practically had four yoga-free months.
The Daily Hustle, started a month ago, was more about the daily grind, the yoga studio, and writing.
The only place where I m digging deeper into my soul than ever, are these posts, The Grateful Mistress Series.

In an effort to bring some of the passionate diary writing back, which I still had in my book Big diaries and erotica I made countless note to selfs:
“Write erotica again!”
The last story was December 2016, which had been the published in Big.
But there will be no more erotic stories.
No more diaries.
No more speaking about yoga.
I know I ve shared all in the past, but I feel I need to draw back into the closet. That I have been drawing back for years.
Just that I failed to notice it.

I kept thinking my life was like an onion: That I could just keep peeling back layers. But when I saw the big picture, I realized that is a very dangerous way to think about self-revelation.
Ultimately, the onion will be gone.

It reminded me of a story about a sex worker. I think I saw it in a movie. She didn’t want to be touched in her armpits. Having a place on her body where she wasn’t touched gave her a sense of control, in a profession that required her to give up boundaries.
With The Grateful Mistress Series, I am already peeling layers, turning myself inside out.
But in order to keep being able to do that, I have to move all unrelated aspects of my life, or parts I am no longer willing to share, back into the closet.
Like an armpit; they may not be a particularly interesting part of me.
But as long as no one can touch me there?
I can share myself here.
Fully.

<3LSH
An Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living