[#F4Thought] Privacy Through the Keyhole

I find that the prompt of privacy also encompasses several other recent prompts that I’ve been too busy to write for.

When all is said and done I am a very private person.  Is that a natural trait, or is it a learned behaviour.  I don’t think I was a private person until the age of eight.  Until then I had those friends where you lived out of each other’s pockets.  Where it didn’t matter whose house you were in, or where you went to spend time together building dens in the woods and fields.

That was taken away from me and the new environment was harsh for a child used to being completely open.  I never again made a close friend as a child.  Instead I learned to withdraw inside my own head and establish a rigid emotional detachment as a means of protection. 

That’s not to say that I didn’t interact with other children.  School and social activities such as being in the scouts meant that there was plenty of interaction.  I’d have been just as happy without it.  It was the lesser of two evils (that always makes me think of Master and Commander 🤦‍♀️) to appear moderately normal.

Whilst it took a few years to fully create that impenetrable curtain of privacy it did teach me certain survival skills.  Without the emotional attachment to need to belong to a specific peer group I was able to be part of any peer group – well, not the female groups, obviously.  I could flit between the group that were cast on the scrap heap – the ‘bad lads’.  The sport group of the rugby team so doted on by the school and the academic group.  Never in the inner circle of any group though oddly considered as an acceptable conduit between any of them.  I came to call this being a social chameleon and I’ve since found quite a few people who recognise this in their own social behaviour.

Nothing was more precious than being able to go home and shut the door.  Did privacy and solitude reinforce each other ?  They probably did.  Privacy meant being able to enter the world I wanted.  A world of solitude where I could devour books without interruption and later learning to program on micro-computers – that short time between them being cheap enough to experiment with and learn what they actually did, and the emergence of the ready game market.

Being the chameleon has stood me in good stead for certain aspects adult life.  I’ve mixed with every group from CxO’s to aristocracy, to street walkers, to cleaners and security guards and much in between.  Hey, I even learned to mix with Americans 😛  And the one thing in common with all those interactions is that none of them see beyond the public facade, the private me has remained hidden.  

From the moment I could shut my own front door there has always been an element of melody in play, even long before I knew she was really there.  That fetish for high heels starting the chain leading to full dressing, hammered home the intense need for privacy.  No one can be allowed to find out this side of me.  So, no one is allowed through that front door.

It’s a boundary as tight as the North Korean border.  No visas granted.  Nothing gets past it except for the sneaky buggers doing the landlord’s inspection.  

For so long that need for privacy was conflated with hiding embarrassing and shameful aspects of who I am.  

During that time we have seen the advent of the Internet.  The possibilities of online relationships to break through those barriers, like some sort of wormhole tunneling through the barrier, were priceless.  It was possible to let someone in and to lift one or two veils of secrecy and privacy, all in the knowledge that you’d never have to actually meet them and let them inside your physical space.

I’m still intensely private and yet I’ve found ways to let people in behind the opaque exterior.  Whilst I’ve not opened that physical front door for them, my former mistress and my current domme both managed to strip away every veil and see dark depths to my soul and psyche that I never realised were there.  This blog is a place where so much slips through the privacy barrier and I find that by and large I don’t care.  

So much of what would otherwise be private gets shared here, some people know rather a lot that I could never have previously thought to expose.

Even the work environment is a strange amalgam.  No one comments or asks and yet melody is staring them in the face.  Over the years I’ve gone to great lengths to leave her behind that front door because it was a completely private facet that the male persona dare not expose.  Each time I now go out that door it’s melody who steps out and she bothers less and less about the exposure.  Sometimes she has to be reminded that privacy is still an essential survival attribute.

That level of ingrained privacy is not something that can ever be fully discarded.  Yet I thank the people in real life that have persevered to break it down.  I’m also thankful for the people reading this, you make it possible for me to pretend I’m a normal social animal.

By the time I started working I had some advantages in that I was comfortable operating in any social setting, which is great for career advancement.  Yet, so wrapped up in personal and emotional privacy that it’s hard to say that anyone transcended the boundary between acquaintance and friend for a very long time.I