I think the addiction stuff, because I was already sort of outed in my family as a sexual person: as a sexually-adventurous and sexually-conflicted person and sexually-driven person. They already knew that about me. They knew that about me when I was eleven. My parents very consciously tried to provide an environment that would protect me from becoming a drug addict.
Melissa FebosMy father was raised by a violent alcoholic. There was alcoholism in my mother's family. I'm half-adopted, and my birth father was a drug addict and alcoholic. So, I think they very consciously made decisions and parented me in a way that was aimed to help save me from that. So, I knew it would be particularly painful and it was, especially for my father.
Melissa FebosChildren's stories force logic upon the gruesome facts of our lives. They mirror our troubles and submit them to a chain of causality.
Melissa FebosI think that more so, my wonderful skill of dissociation came in very handy. I care very much what other people think. I'm a total pleaser. I want everyone to like me all the time. I feel like people who don't feel that way on some level are lying, but particularly female memoirists. We want to be seen and we want to be forgiven. So that occurred to me very early on.
Melissa FebosBecause of the irresistible nature of our own Imagos, I think the replication of it in music is a siren song - we love those tormented songs, and we listen to them over and over and over the way that we smash ourselves into our lovers, or the same kind of lover, over and over. That drive is tireless, until it is resolved. And we can "enjoy" it safely through music, which is a simulacrum we have power over.
Melissa FebosEarly in my career as a domme, I both admired and feared becoming one of those career dommes. I saw, in myself, and in some other women in that industry, the way that sex work could eclipse the other parts of your personality, the way that I started to feel as if I wasn't qualified to do anything else. I had always known that I wanted to be a writer, and I stopped writing for a time while I was domming; the experience subsumed my other interests, and it scared me. Now, however, I have nothing but admiration for them.
Melissa FebosI was in the fantasy. I was selling myself on the fantasy as I was doing it. It never occurred to me. I did take notes, but just because I am a writer. I've been a writer since I was five. You don't have any sort of outlandish, shocking, extraordinary, horrifying experience without writing it down, because I know and knew that you forget things. No matter how outrageous and amazing and extraordinary and seemingly unforgettable an experience is, it's kind of like a dream. It will erode inevitably, for me.
Melissa Febos