JUMP IN: Community is What Will Make Your Life Good

I've been listening to this song a lot this year, because a) it's awesome, and b) I love the theme: jump in. Here are these three sexy, vibrant women, the Pointer sisters, saying I'm here, you can have all this goodness - but you have to close the gap. If you want my kisses in the night, then JUMP.

So I'm saying: JUMP IN to a face-to-face kink community. Take a risk to make your fantasies come true.

Walk into that munch. Drive to that kink con. Buy that plane ticket. Jump.

Why face to face?

• Kink takes trust. It's easier to start trusting people face to face.
• You get automatic points for being brave. And you get to hang out with other brave people.
• You're more likely to be talking with the person, rather than your fantasy of who they are. And vice versa.
• You'll be living in the *place* where you are, and that's great.

When you see the same group of people regularly, amazing things happen. It doesn't even have to be kink. (But that's a good one, for the complete acceptance and ferocious growth and exploration.)

Jump doesn't mean you can't prepare. If it's the Boston scene, read this (all of it). Read essays on Fetlife and other kink related sites like pervocracy and kinkopedia. Work on your social skills. But then, pretty soon, jump.

You might have to move closer to a big city.

Is there something weird you crave, that you've never been able to say out loud? By the end of your first month you'll have said it to more people you would have ever imagined. Not only will you realize it's not that weird, by two months you'll wish you were into *more* weird things. By six months, you will be.

Don't worry about pairing up for your first long while. Just soak it all in, enjoy, and get to know people. Their connections are just mindbogglingly complicated. But there's a place for you.

The scene is not safe. Many of my friends have been harmed, and there's no real way to protect yourself. All I can say is that the ones that I know loved it so much that they found their way back, even after getting hurt.

And I am so grateful that I jumped. So grateful for the preposterous things that happened to me over the course of a year and a half in Boston, the sexual and the nonsexual memories, mostly thanks to a couple dozen people I met who often hung out on the top floor of a house in Somerville. (not to mention the people I met hanging out at a terrible Italian restaurant)

Fuck Netflix and HBO. Fuck having a great apartment, or even looking for a great boyfriend/girlfriend/master/sub. Community is what will make your life good. That's what you should put your strength into.

Community is what builds amazing things: knowledge, events, innovation. And stories, jokes, memories, people you care about desperately. Being the best, and usually only, way to meet people for whatever you have in mind is practically a side bonus. And there will be conflict, and awkwardness, and sadness: you know, all the things that happen when you care. The stuff that makes for a life with stories worth telling.

Join community or make it. (Yes, *you* can create community). Do your best to add to it and help it be better. The first one you try might not be where you end up.

But it all starts with that leap, where you walk into a room and say hello.

Jump, jump, jump. Take me out Pointer Sisters!