Phil Dunphy, Modern Family
I consider myself scrupulously honest. I don’t tell lies – I simply stay silent. I’m not good with the small niceties of polite conversation unless I really mean them. Basically, I’m not going to tell you your hair looks great, that dress makes your boobs look good, or I like your nail polish unless I really think so. I’m good at keeping my thoughts to myself. Read a few posts, and you may find that hard to believe, lol.
When I write, it’s what I really feel and believe in that moment. Yes, things change as do hearts and minds but from the moment the words go from my brain to my fingertips to the screen, it’s the God’s honest truth.
I detest liars, cheats, and thieves – most especially when they’re affecting me or anyone I care about.
And yet, my life is filled with lies of omission.
You don’t know my real name. Does it matter that “Kayla Lords” is a bastardization of my real name and that I feel most myself when I’m working and writing under that name? I don’t know.
My closest family and friends have no clue about half (okay, one quarter, maybe one third) of my professional life. My mother keeps telling me I should write books. (Cue ironic laughter here.) My family wonders how we manage to make ends meet just on the little they know about. I have to assume they must think I get paid a lot to write. (Cue hysterical laughter here.)
Hell, my friends in the local kink community know me as Kayla. Only a small few know the vanilla side of my public life or my real name.
Now, to be clear, I know why I have a pseudonym. I know exactly why I guard the two halves of my life from the other. But sometimes living a double life becomes overwhelming.
I want to share my writing with my vanilla world. But I don’t want them crawling through the rest of my kinky life.
I want friends who know both sides of me. But I haven’t figured out how to make that work yet. It’s a little bit like looking for a kinky date in a vanilla world. When exactly is the right time to tell someone you put your boobs and every kinky proclivity on the internet for anyone who cares to look?
Y’all might find this hard to believe, but I’m actually an intensely private person. Some of the women I would consider my absolute best friends on the planet have no clue about much of my life. That sounds crazy, I know, but friendship (the true, good, long-lasting kind) have more to do with compatible vibes, energy, and personalities than shared interests – at least to me.
Am I walking around morose or freaking out as I battle this feeling of duality? No, not really. But I do wonder if I’m as honest as I think and say I am. Wouldn’t a truly honest person come clean to you, her kinky fuckery readers, about the rest of my writing? Especially since I’m intensely proud of it and some of it comes from things I’ve learned as a sex blogger? Wouldn’t a really honest person say, “Hey Mom, stop worrying about me. I write smut and kinky shit for a living, and people are actually starting to pay me for it!”?
The part of me that believes in total honesty says the answer is yes. The part of me (thankfully the overwhelming majority of me) that believes in privacy and not scaring the hell out of my own mother says it doesn’t matter.
This side that you get to see is an honest part of me. The side I show the vanilla world is equally honest.
Would you believe the kinky side is fearless compared to my vanilla life? In my vanilla world, I’m a hippie, tree-hugging liberal who believes in philosophies that send most conservatives into apoplectic spasms – complete with mouth-frothing, eye-rolling, and foot stamping – and my social media feeds are filled with conservative friends. And yet, I share very little of that side. In the kink world, I’ll tell you I’m pro-sex, pro-sex worker, pro-kinky-weird-shit as long as you’ve got consent – and I’ll go toe to toe with any asshole who tells me I’m wrong. Not so much on the vanilla side of life. Weird but true. (For the record, though, I don’t pretend to believe differently than I do.)
I don’t have any answers. I’m gonna keep on, keepin’ on because I can’t figure out the safest way to join the two halves of my life. At this point, if I out myself, I out other people, especially a certain Daddy/John Brownstone. That doesn’t seem fair to me, either.
And frankly, I like my anonymity. If I knew people from my vanilla world were reading this, would I continue to be my own kind of fearless? I don’t know.
But I swear there are times when I wish I could share a vanilla-world link with y’all, and say, “Look at what I did! Isn’t this cool?” I wish I could show my vanilla world a link from Kinkly or Fetish or Submissive Guide and let them know kink might seem weird, but it’s good and positive and healthy.
I wish I could be one whole person instead of one woman with two lives.
Oh, this is so timely, Kayla! I’ve been pondering such things for quite some time, but more so in the last 6 months or so. I feel similarly about friends…connecting on a spiritual plane means more to me than shared interests, but it would be lovely to just be with those people and not feel like you have to filter too much? I’ve made friends I can be myself with and not filter and half or part of me, but they also live miles and miles away. But there is one friend with whom I’m meeting shortly, actually, and she is an among woman who knows about my halves. She’s even read some of my blog….and she loves and accepts me for me. That feels really wonderful.
The family thing, especially with my mom, that does weigh on me too. I’ve shared philosophical things about the way we live and about my journey, but that’s about it. They know I blog but have no idea about its content. But mummy has asked to read my writing, she’s encouraged and admired it (non erotic or kinky, of course), and I’m left feeling pigeon holed. I WANT to share with her the things I’m proud of writing, things that come from a place of happiness and growth and just, me. So um left feeling as if I can’t share or that I needs friends create a separate blog and then it feels compartmentalized!
Let’s not forget about M’s job and my girls whom need protecting.
Anyway….I can relate in so many ways. While I’m whole in ways I’ve never been, there are halves which collide at times, but cannot be whole, and I feel like a fraud, disengenuine. And I don’t love that at all.
Kay, you summed it up better than I did. Whole and still in pieces, and yes, it does leave you feeling like a fraud. ((HUGS)) I hate that anyone else feels like this, but it’s nice to not be alone, either.
* mom has asked (I don’t call her mummy, lol)
*or that I need to create a separate blog
Damn fingers. That’s what happens before the coffee kicks in!
Hey Kayla,
I went the other way and opened my blog up to my family…pretty much from the beginning. To an extent the effects seem symmetrical…you’ve been writing away and my stuff has slowed down. I can’t attribute my slow down exclusively to my family, but the mainstream does like most of us flowing in more or less the same direction.
A few weeks ago I watched an old talk by Erica Jong. She’s funny and wild and kinda delightfully all over the place. At one point when she’s discussing writing she exclaims “Fuck your family!”…”They don’t want you to succeed, they want you to conform to their expectations.” Here’s the link:
https://youtu.be/DHegRT8sWUM
Cheers,
RR
I’ve run a few blogs that my family knew about and eventually, things slowed down because it felt like I let them in too far – and that was on topics that had nothing to do with sex or lifestyle or anything. Even my current vanilla blog doesn’t mention sex (although my published vanilla writing does) and my mom told me she prefers it that way. Uh….yeah, she’s so not ready to see this one.
I’ll have to watch this video. 🙂
I know exactly what you mean.
Whilst I’m never going to write books, I enjoy writing kinky blog posts. I absolutely love identifying myself as Kinky (and I doubt there are many who would say I’m not … if they knew). I’d dearly love to be out and proud, to have some of my closest friend read my blog without judging me for it. Some of the stuff I’ve written I’m genuinely proud of. But the world is a judgmental place, especially when it comes to sex. And it’s not to great a leap of immagination to see people turning their backs on me were they ever to find out what goes on in my head, or what I enjoy when no one else is around. The irony of course, whilst we kinksters never speak out in public, we will probably never know just how not alone we really are, and how many of our friends an family are just as perverted as we are.
I have thought about that, often. How many other people are in my life feeling similarly? Hiding their proclivities and desires and lifestyle for fear of retaliation or rejection? And if we were more open about it, how many people could we touch or just allow them not to feel so all alone? I wish I was braver than I am because that sounds like a good reason to stop hiding.
I think we all feel that way at some point. We just have to mesh the two halves and move forward that way. Hell, our asses have a deep crevasse separating our two sides…so does our brain for that matter, between the lobes. So a double life? It’s just part of who we are, I guess. (I’m rationalizing, I know.)
I AM a cheater. My wife knows nothing about my secret life, my M, or that some of my vanilla friends are ones I met first as kinksters. It does help a TON to have that connection, in addition to the ones here online, so that you can sit and have lunch and giggle at some of the antics, share stories about your Dom’s and generally have the same freedom we do online, only face to face.
Somedays it’s harder than others, to be sure.
nilla
(((HUGS))) It’s that connection that I crave. And I rationalize in my own way, too. I have to find some small place on this planet where I’m whole (SSir’s company excluded, of course, lol).
Sigh… The duality is sometimes too much for me and I disappear for periods of time. Then I have to write, then I do, then I feel horribly exposed, and I run for cover. Thanks for writing this.
It’s funny…feeling exposed is part of why I like it. But I guess I want to be exposed on my own terms. If I was truly willing to be completely open, I wouldn’t hide anything – I might not advertise it, but I wouldn’t pretend it doesn’t exist, either. Being that open is scary, though. I don’t blame you for running for cover when it gets to be too much.
I’ve had the streams between my two worlds cross once and it was not pretty. People aren’t accepting and I find I prefer the halves separate.
Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t know what the reaction would be, I can only imagine it, and because I can imagine it, I can believe it might be good – or it might not. Maybe one episode of having people freak out would remove the yearning…sadly.
I have lived my whole life putting different facets of my life in different boxes. I’ve merged the people from those different areas a couple of times to mixed results. Because of that I prefer to keep my bedroom proclivities to my partner and I. I’ve recently realized I need to get divorced because he’s never going to be dominant enough for me. Ironically at almost the same time I’ve found the Dom of my heart. Talk about having different areas of your life. I am actively living a double life right now and it’s extremely painful. I have to keep reminding myself that in time it will work out and there are reasons why I’m doing things the way I’m doing them that are rational and best for everyone else. Hopefully sometime within the next year I’ll be able to go through everything and become a more whole person and go back to being an honest person. Although I don’t know if I’ll ever truly get rid of all of the boxes. My Dom told me recently that he was told that I was very vanilla when we first met, which just made me laugh hysterically. It surprised me as the person who said it to him should really have known better, I guess not. When she finds out we’re together that’ll end up being a very interesting conversation. I’m finding that as long as I know who I am and the most important person in my life truly knows who I am then all the rest don’t really matter. I know that at the end of next year I’ll be a more authentic person than who I was even six months ago, and that’s more important to me than fully revealing all to everyone.
I definitely understand what you mean about only needing one person who truly knows you. I think I would be harder to lead the double life if I didn’t have John Brownstone who knows more about me than I do (or at least it seems that way).
I think part of my thinking on honesty and the double life thing is evolving and maturing. When I was younger (and frankly, not much younger than I am now), honesty was a black and white kind of thing. You told the truth and if you didn’t, you were a liar. But there are things people don’t *need* to know. And no, my family doesn’t need to know about my sex life or my kinky proclivities. I just wish I could share the whole author thing without revealing the rest, lol.
I struggle with this too. I really want to “write legitimately” for all the world to see… and I do have 2 other blogs that are the real me. But for some reason, I don’t have the same passion for writing them as I do my “secret” blog. I just don’t know who in the world really is themselves 24/7. We all have sides we keep to ourselves or even hide. It’s a rare boon to have even one person who knows the complete you, and even then it’s a little scary and very vulnerable. The biggest fear I need to get over now is publishing my novels… which are more than read to go… I hate the fact that because they involve kink, and what some in my other world would find abusive or distasteful (or insane), I can’t shout to the whole world, “I’ve written a novel series!!!” But “publishing” even under a pseudonym will feel like an outing of sorts too. You’re not alone!
I have the same problems with my vanilla blog. I do it because it’s a good marketing tool for myself as a writer, and I need a venue for when I begin writing novels in the vanilla world. But it’s just not the same.
For me, I know that I’ve changed, matured, grown, and become a better woman in the past few years – and a LOT of that has to do with my D/s life with SSir. When my family comments on the woman I’ve become, I wish I could point to this space and share it with them. But I also don’t want all the crap that comes with not keeping this space separate from the vanilla world. Ugh. Such a conundrum. Well, not really because I’m not outing myself anytime soon. Not yet, anyway. I don’t know. Maybe. UGH!
Anyway, parting thought: publish the damn book! 🙂