Prologue
I couldn’t tell you when I realised I wasn’t a normal. I can’t place a day or month upon the epiphany, or even a year, though I only have eighteen to sift through. I couldn’t tell you when I discovered the name of what I was, or learned what it all meant. All I know is it has fundamentally shaped my life: everything from my relationships to my job to my choice of university. It’s stamped on every surface I have ever touched, on every person, on every word thieved from my mind. I stain the world around me, and yet the world does not see.
You might have heard of me, I tread the blurred colours at the edge of the spectrum belonging to the public eye, but you do not know me. I am many things, but I am not whole without this. This is me being as whole as society is willing to let me be.
You may call me Ana. That’s not my real name of course, but I am only prepared to be found by those who follow the breadcrumb trail. In some ways, in real, pragmatic, boring ways, I am her doppelganger, but I am no Anastasia Steele. I am no work of fiction; I am a real person living a life of contradictions I have sought to reconcile since the day-I-cannot-place that I realised I was like this. Yet recently the spectrum has turned greyand the public eye is focusing on an alternative lifestyle of which I am a part. It is in this climate that I have decided to tell my story – my real story – in all its charming, disturbing, uncomfortable, thrilling wholeness, in the hopes that one day, I will not have to write from the safety of the masque ball.
Since the advent of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon a great many books on this subject have emerged, and if you seek titillation I can only recommend the aforementioned story as I have read none of the others, and never intend to. I write truth; truth for the truth-seekers, and the confused.
You must understand that I need to be like this, I came to it eagerly, sanely, safely and consensually; I ask you to read on only if you can accept this, even when the evidence would point otherwise. Read curiously, read omnivorously, but read objectively, and you will know me whole.
And so I welcome you, reader, to my whirling masque of power, violence, sex, blood and darkness – to submission.
