Heartbreak and Phone Sex, Part II

Inception Guy has been my best customer. I just realized he deleted his user account. I think I know why. My heart is full of ache, and hope.

This is gonna be a long post - it took me days to write it - so I'm going to use the jump break for the first time. Click the "Read More" to see the whole long convoluted story, with all my convoluted feelings.


Calls have always been complicated with Inception Guy. I nicknamed him that because it feels like we crawl around in each others' psyches, switching characters and roles, edging each other emotionally as well as physically, searching for the next level of intensity.

For example, I'm 95% okay with being overweight, as I wrote about here. But sure, 5% of me worries, wonders, guilts, and shames about my weight. That's normal (and maybe even healthy), and I deal with it when it comes up. But I can crawl into that 5% and let it be my whole world, let all that worry, wondering, guilt, and shame just come right on up and have their field day, and sometimes, with Inception Guy, I do just that.

We started off with me humiliating him, at his request, and he kept pushing me further to push him harder. Then on the second call, we humiliated me, but it felt like a joint venture instead of abuse, and I was fascinated by the dynamic. It isn't therapeutic, but it is cathartic.

I believe that any two people who are willing to engage emotionally have the ability to create a unique space together. Person X has a lust landscape with 50 things in it. I have a lust landscape with 50 things in it. Our 15 things that overlap become our playground, with unique features, unique possibilities, and a unique feel. I love creating and exploring those playgrounds.

Inception Guy and I built a playground that was raw, a little brutal, and mutually torturous. And yet, somehow, also fun, and caring, in a really unorthodox way.

I kinda feel like a phone sex badass for being able to hang in there and do something so specialized and demanding. And really, it's hard to overestimate how deeply I enjoy feeling like a badass. My mysterious unexplained neurological vertigo (described a little more fully here) sometimes makes me feel weak, and I fucking hate feeling weak. I love feeling like I can take on the world and be strong.

So that's what we do well: we fuck with each others' minds. It makes him feel powerful, it makes me feel strong.

Unfortunately, there are downsides to our calls. Serious ones.

His downside: He has said he's struggled with addiction to phone sex. I told him that I hoped that one day he would delete his account and never look back, and I meant it. I want the best for the people who call me, even if their best would be never to call me again. Although I know his addiction is not my responsibility, I still hope that everyone who calls me is only using their fun leisure money as a safe, fun hobby, and it was hard to know that wasn't the case for him.

My downside: Our calls have been long sometimes, like 90 minutes or more. My vertigo is progressive, so when I don't take breaks, especially if I'm emotionally intense, I can sometimes get exponentially dizzier as the call goes on.

Last week, Inception Guy and I had a perfect storm for my vertigo: I hadn't gotten enough sleep, he and I had a long call, NiteFlirt had a glitch that kept cutting us off, and during one of the cutoffs, I realized that (a) I was dizzier than I should have allowed myself to get and (b) I had a wedding shower that evening. It's a bad combination, starting off a social engagement already dizzy, because it will just get worse. I had pushed myself too hard, left no room for the unexpected, and then the unexpected had popped up, and I was a little overwhelmed.

He called later, after the shower. I was tired, and dizzy, and I couldn't catch my snap enough to explain the situation to him. I should have told him. I should have explained my dizziness, but that would have meant admitting I was weak, facing my real limitations with him, the hard ones, the ones I really hate to admit. This wasn't safe 5% territory, this was real-live 100% exposed nerve - I'm not as badass as I want to be, and I needed to call it quits. And I hate that. So I declined to play with him, with no explanation.

I regretted the decision immediately. I should have explained. It wasn't his fault I cut him off, but I can see how he might think it was his fault - unfortunately, we had wandered into new territory just before the afternoon's cutoff, and I had been brusque about it, because I was tired and dizzy, but not because of the topic.

So I sent him some free minutes and told him I wanted to talk, "out of character". I was going to tell him that I needed to limit our calls to 60 minutes at a time. That we could play just as hard, but not as long. That I'd found my limits by going beyond them, and now I needed to take a step back. No harm, no foul, now I know, and we're all good. It's too tempting to keep pushing myself, and obviously, I could push myself to the place where I didn't have reserves left for emergencies, and that needs to change. I rehearsed what I was going to tell him a dozen times... and my breath caught in my throat with every call for days. How was I going to get through it and remain professional, reasonable, calm?

Then I checked my customer lists, and realized he had deleted his account. I felt like Ben Affleck in "Good Will Hunting" when Matt Damon didn't show up at the door one day - happy for him, yet a little sad at having been left behind.

Then started a fierce inner dialogue about what to do next. He read my blog before. Is it just more mindfuckery to write about this on the blog? But the blog is the place where I dump my emotions about this part of my life, where I process how I'm feeling, and if I don't write about it, it will just keep bumping around inside me, causing low levels of chaos. The whole point here is self-protection, his and mine, so I shouldn't sacrifice my emotional process for his potential benefit, should I?

I recognize that it is selfish of me to publish this post. And yet, also, I hope that he reads this and understands that he didn't do anything wrong to me. I hope he has good memories of us playing. I hope he knows that 5% of me will miss our raw, honest playground, but that 95% of me wants life's best for him, even if it means he never calls again. And I hope I hope I hope I hope that this blog post doesn't suck him back in to a place that hurts him.

Heartbreak, phone sex, and mind fuckery. I named him well, didn't I?