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I find myself haunted by Woolf at the riverbank, by Plath in her fume-shadowed flat—haunted not only by their deaths, but by how they wrote pain before it drowned them. Pain, for them, was not silent. It became structure, shape, beauty. Maybe that’s what I do, too. I don’t step into water or ovens, but pain is a doorway I open, again and again. Woolf wrote waves. Plath wrote glass. I write blood, blade, scar. All of us, separated by centuries, fed our pain into sentences because that’s the only way we knew how to live with it.

Psychiatry calls me names—borderline, bipolar, obsessive—accompanied by prescriptions, plans, and the constant shadow of incapacity. None of it speaks to this secret truth: I am a masochist. For me, pain has always been more than a symptom. It is a language, a ritual, a way of saying: “I am still here.” It is how I inhabit my body when the world becomes sharp, when my thoughts sharpen even more.

There is risk in saying this aloud. Masochism is misunderstood; it is pathologized, made dirty or dangerous or pitiful. But it shapes me, this hunger for pain. It is dangerous, yes, and also deeply intimate. My first pain was never chosen—it arrived as a bruise, as a boundary crossed, as a childhood I never owned. Later, as a teenager, I bent pain to my will. Self-harm became an anchor, not an enemy. A controlled hurt steadied me when depression unmoored everything else. “Don’t romanticize it,” they said in the wards, where sharp things became contraband and I became a problem to be solved. Nobody wanted to hear that pain was the thin strand keeping me from slipping away for good. They saw harm; I saw survival.

Law and medicine have always tried to confiscate agency from pain. I remember reading R v Brown, that British judgment about men and chosen pain—how the court refused to believe that harm could be consensual, could be loved. Psychiatry echoes this: pain is always a pathology, always evidence of illness, never a form of care. The message is clear in both systems: pain cannot belong to you. But mine does. My masochism muddies up their binaries; it refuses to fit. My pain is not always a wound—it is sometimes a home.

Of course, trauma lingers in its roots. But masochism, for me, is also about desire. There is something erotic in surrendering; in letting someone I trust mark me, leave evidence of presence on my skin. Pain becomes a kind of writing that no language can translate. A bruise says: You were seen. You were touched. You were real to someone else.

This is not a story that reads easily outside my skin. How can pain be both balm and blade? How can harm be healing? For me, pain sharpens the world—renders me alive and present, turns my unruly mind into something grounded. It isn’t just self-destruction; sometimes it is self-preservation.

And yet, I cannot ignore the scars. I wear them, visible and not. They shape how I am read—by shrinks, by family, by lovers. Sometimes I resent what I need. Sometimes I wish pain were not the thing that tethered me to living. But every time I have tried to let it go, the world blurred and the chaos crept closer.

The clinical gaze can only see “non-suicidal self-injury.” It tries to correct me, fix me, pity or fear me. The popular gaze reduces it to kink, to spectacle, to joke. Neither understands what I know to be true: masochism can be creative, soft, sustaining. It can coexist with theory and tenderness and a politics that refuses neatness. It is not simply disorder, not simply deviance. It is a refusal of comfort as currency, of pain as banishment. It says pain can teach, can tether, can sometimes be chosen.

I do not want to sanctify it. My masochism endangers me; it scares people; it isolates. It is not all poetry and orgasm. But it is not only rot either. Like lithium—another double-edged tool—it is both leash and lifeline. The difference is, lithium was forced on me; pain I claimed for myself.

Maybe that is why I return to it—not because it is “healthy,” but because it is mine. My pain, my scars, my rituals. To name my masochism is to invoke agency—to resist easy stories and institutional silences. Survival is not always pretty; sometimes it is broken and raw and persistent. Sometimes, surviving means making peace with hungers that no one else honors.

I do not glorify pain. I live with it. I live because of it. This is not a clean ending, not a plea for rescue. It is a reckoning: my masochism is not a disorder to stamp out, but a truth I must hold—bruised, earnest, alive.

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