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I’m writing again.

This time, I want your help. If you have a tale that would fit with the type of experiences I am describing below, please let me know – I want to interview you for possible inclusion in the book. No one gets named who does not want to be.

There is no instruction, here. Only scars.

This is not wisdom from an expert, or sage advice from someone who knows something special.

This is an accounting of mistakes, some of them funny, some of them terrible… a collection of blind alleys and dead ends. Most are mine, some are shared by others, but they all have something in common – we were all striving to get somewhere, to learn something – something that was important to us. Something which promised to define us, if we could only reach it. Something sacred.

Dominants are not encouraged to share our errors- not with those under us, and certainly not with each other. So, all too often we fumble along blindly, afraid of looking weak or foolish to our peers or partners, trying to embody the myth of infallibility like toddlers shuffling around in Daddy’s huge shoes.

Once we have made a move and we manage to make it work, often we will cling to it, wading out no further than the shallows we know, one trick ponies, soon to grow as tiresome as rabbits from hats, in danger of becoming cliché. Many Tops seem to live in terror of the looming possibility of failure, especially where our peers and partners are concerned. Mistakes are bad enough- but mistakes where someone might see? Oh, no. No, no, no. We often spend more time worrying and being afraid than we do acting, paralyzed by the daunting prospect and looming threat of embarrassment as if we are all at our first school dance, milling around the gym.

This is the fumbling towards the sacred, the road of excess that leads, one hopes, to the palace of wisdom. This book is about the various ways I have screwed up, made a fool of myself, and hurt people who deserved better.

This is about what I was lucky enough to learn from those times, those accidents, those people. These are my scars.

Without them, I would be nothing.