I’ve been sitting here for hours with a piece of wood somewhere in my heel. I can’t see it anymore, but I can feel it. I’ve been digging (slowly) into the skin to expose it. If I can get close enough, then I can pull the wood out. But I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m using a hypodermic needle I happened to have in my med kit.

It’s throbbing. I can’t walk on my foot, and I have to bend my knee in a way that it doesn’t want to be bent to even get a good look at it. I have this vision that they’re just gonna cut into it easily at the urgent care, and I’ll be out in 30 minutes—it makes me pissed that I couldn’t do that myself. The masochist in me is like, it’s fine, we can live with it then.

Yes, I need urgent care

I got the splinter yesterday after a great day on the Yellowstone River. I had my paddleboard and all the rocks I collected (tons of rocks). I put everything in its nice backpack and started walking home from the river. My feet were still sandy from the shore. So when I finally got there, I wanted to wash off my feet before going inside. I couldn’t find a hose, so I dipped my feet in the creek next to my Grandma’s house. I got back on the deck, happy, and before I knew it, something popped inside my foot. It almost caused me to trip.

I thought, oh THAT’S something. Not really knowing what happened. I got inside, took a look at my foot, and could already see the chip lodged into the callused part of my heel. Blood coming down my foot. I’ve always been heavy on the heels.

I paced back and forth, with one foot now walking only on my tippy toes. The masochist in me is truly hilarious because it’s like, well, we don’t know how to get it out, and we can’t see it, so we’ll just live with it. It wasn’t until my Grandma came back home that I got some help to try and get it out. I spent the next 6 hours trying to do what I could with what I had. Taking breaks to moan about how much I hate this in between soaking the foot to soften the skin.

Digging in your own skin

It reminds me of the other ways we, people on the spiritual path, dig around in our own skin. Ah, how can we keep uncovering this thing that if we can get to it, then we’ll be who we want to be! I have a love-hate relationship with shadow work because people get obsessed with it without any aim or end in sight. And, instead of using shadow work to move into more light, they get stuck, digging into the wound over and over again, thinking something is going to change.

Shadow work is the process of uncovering, exploring, and integrating the unconscious parts of ourselves. The parts that we’ve disowned, rejected, or repressed. These are often traits, memories, desires, or wounds that we push out of awareness because they feel unacceptable, shameful, or dangerous to the ego.

We do shadow work so that the hurt part doesn’t act out when we don’t want it to. When we don’t integrate parts of our shadow, we can project it onto others, sabotage ourselves, or react in ways that feel disproportionate to the thing happening. Doing this kind of work is about finding more choice.

Shadow work is NOT about digging around in the wound until you find the wood chip that you’ve probably fragmented into pieces and is starting to create an infection. That’s insanity. That’s an obsession. If you keep going while you’re obviously bleeding and you obviously need help, that’s fucking insane.

It’s hard to show someone, and it was hard to show me when I was doing this, that I’m actually just stuck in the same painful pattern that is the shadow. That is the self-indulgence in pain. That is the same story of something is wrong with me.

That actually, I don’t need to dig around in the wound. I just need to live my life in aim to the light, and have the courage and the strength to address the things that arise, as I do that.

BDSM was my open wound

This exact thing is one of the reasons why I’ve stepped away from the BDSM and Kink community. At one point, this felt like a place to accept all parts of myself and could be with others who understood things I couldn’t connect with most people in the world on. But frivolous, surface-level intimacy, peak experiences without long-term relationship, never fully knowing what new partner your partner is going to engage with and then come back around to you with, is unhealthy, and at best, was still me getting high.

I don’t believe you need to know if you like to get beaten on a cross to know that your dad didn’t love you enough. I don’t need to go through chasing a totally unavailable guy that I can fuck, but I can’t love (because he’s married), and who does not honor my heart and my becoming—and will stop being around the minute he can’t get to your pussy.

I find most of the BDSM and Kink community to be indulging in hedonistic desires that subjugate the best parts of their humanity. That’s being a fucking child. If you act on every little desire you have, that’s a kid who throws a block at his sister’s head because it feels fun. That’s wanting a cookie for breakfast. That’s not growth, sorry. That’s replaying the same shit you’ve been doing since you were a teen, now just covered in lace and leather.

I can feel the defense people have around this, too. You loving sex is not the issue. You accepting all parts of your sexuality is not the issue. I am a sexual being. I love sex and I love exploration, and at the end of the day, I simply want to love and be loved, and I stand in the universal truth of that. The heart is connected to the sex. When we deny that, when we split our sex from our heart, we are doing ourselves and the world a disservice. BDSM and Kink just become the digging around in the wound.

When we deny that that’s actually what we want, either because we can’t see it or because we can’t accept that we’re actually soft as butter, we’ll keep going to the dungeon to get our sick little thrill of connection with the guy everyone wants, and who makes you feel special for the whole 25 minutes you have his attention.

I see a world where it can be supportive of hot, expansive sex that supports the integration of shadow WITHIN a sacred partnership, but where it’s just acting on desire without aim, disconnecting the heart from the sex, or repeating a pattern that you have had before, it’s bleeding out with the splinter unmoved.

Always happy to be wrong about this.

On my way to urgent care,
Valerie