Back Among the Strays (All-Right)… (2-1)

Consent (The Ticket)

This piece is about kink identity and D/s language—being “not standard,” staying visible without turning yourself into a slogan, and what it costs to keep deleting parts of your real wiring just to feel safe.

If culture shift, shame, erasure, or “I should just be quiet and be normal” has been sitting on your chest lately, read this only if it feels grounding—not draining.

If it starts to feel heavy instead of seen, it’s okay to skim it, save it, or walk away halfway through if your body starts tightening up more than it opens.

— Zan

Scene (The Ride)

I’m coming out.

From the dark.

Just to tell you I’m back.

And if you’re still here, so are you.

Not out of a closet.

Out of the quiet.

Out of that stretch where I chose to cancel myself and stop narrating my kink-forged brain in public for a while.

Not exclusively because I went out for chocolate milk and got a little lost along the way.

I was watching the culture shift as well.

Watching the way “different” went from being a marketing trend to something people treat as a “threat” again.

Neither version is particularly appealing. :/

Watching which voices get amplified, which get muted, which get blocked, and which get shredded by whomever is the latest voice of the people.

Depending on circumstances, “coming out” or saying you’re not the “status quo” can result in a lot of different outcomes — some good and some not so good.

Look, you don’t owe the world your insides on a platter. Silence can be survival.

But pretending it doesn’t matter at all? That’s a different kind of death.

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said as loudly:

For better or worse, these kinds of announcements barely register unless someone is:

  • fucking you
  • related to you
  • paying you
  • or trying to sell you something

Outside of that? Your identity is mostly background noise — something to be filed away, or used to fuel narratives that usually work against you in the long run.

For us, it can be tectonic.

For others, it’s “oh” and a half-attention thumbs-up — if you’re lucky.

Since the last time I was publicly on display, the air’s gotten colder in more ways than one.

Some people cherry-pick the loudest, weirdest example of “not normal” and pretend that’s the whole group — easier to sneer at a caricature than deal with an actual person, I guess.

Others are so terrified of being erased — rightfully so — they turn their label into a bullhorn until no one remembers there’s a person under it.

And then there are the ones who don’t live in either of those extremes.

You just want to go to work, get paid, enjoy your own hobbies, love who you love, and not have every damn thing turned into an identity crisis when, frankly, there are much more important fires to put out.

You’re not out here hunting enemies.

You just don’t want every conversation, every pastime, even your own flesh and blood hijacked into a lecture about identities and beliefs that aren’t yours — or that come pre-tilted with someone else’s narrative baked in.

The problem was never people just trying to get through their day; it was the way labels got turned into brands and shorthand, and whole crowds ended up judged by whatever the loudest cartoon in the room was doing.

Some of us live right between those extremes.

Too much of something most people pretend doesn’t exist to pass as “normal” on sight,

but too tired to turn our existence into a nonstop political content feed.

You just want to:

  • be read correctly by the people who matter
  • be ignored by the people who don’t
  • and be allowed to live the way you actually are

That’s not politics. That’s breathing.

That’s who I’m speaking to.

Not as your spokesperson, but as another person who doesn’t come factory-standard.

This isn’t an announcement. It’s a signal flare.

Here’s the thing I can’t pretend isn’t true:

When you keep your real wiring offstage too long, everything starts to feel like you’re quietly deleting yourself.

You can speak in a language that never mentions kink, power, or the way a body responds to me when I say good girl or good boy in just the right tone.

Something in you starts thrashing around anyway.

If you’ve read this far, you might know that feeling.

Maybe it’s about how you want to belong to someone.

Maybe it’s about gender, or submission, or the fact that “vanilla life partner” has never once felt like a true answer to you.

Maybe it’s just about who gets to fuck you.

Whatever it is, you’ve heard some version of:

“No one cares. Keep it to yourself. It doesn’t matter.”

But it does matter — to us.

And if it matters to you, it’s real.

So this is me, slamming on the keyboard again to say:

  • You’re not broken for being wired differently.
  • You’re not selfish for wanting to be seen as you actually are.
  • You’re not a villain because what actually turns you on doesn’t match the default settings.

You don’t owe anyone a clean label.

You don’t owe the world a fully developed character backstory.

You don’t owe the internet a neat little tag for its filing cabinet.

You owe yourself the truth.

Full stop.

If your truth happens to be:

  • a little queerer than you let people assume
  • a lot kinkier than your friends could handle hearing
  • or just quietly, stubbornly not what people expect when they look at you

I assure you, you are OK.

I’m not here to sign you up for anything or argue about definitions — maybe just my Patreon, and even that’s your choice.

I’m here to step back into the public area and say:

If you feel wrong almost everywhere else, but something in you feels a sense of ease reading this?

You’re not alone. And I’m back — out here with the other strays.

If you’ve felt like a stray everywhere else, you don’t have to become anybody’s mascot to belong. You can just exist. 

Fully. Quietly. On purpose.

Yes, it can be said:

I came back to the public kink town hall before GTA 6.

Priorities.

Companion track: “All-Right (Oh, Yeah)” – Local H

Aftercare (The Comedown)

If this one put a hand on your throat in that familiar way — not fear, just recognition — let the volume drop at your pace. This wasn’t a call to declare anything or pick a label; it was a door cracked open long enough for you to remember you didn’t imagine yourself.

If you’ve kept the real wiring offstage to stay employable, lovable, tolerable — that isn’t weakness. It’s strategy. And if reading this made something in you unclench, you don’t owe yourself a shame spiral to “correct” it.

You also don’t owe anyone a performance. The ones who want a caricature will find one anyway, and the ones who live on purity tests will move the goalposts no matter how carefully you behave.

So take what’s yours from this and leave the rest. Keep your truth close, keep your agency closer, and choose where you speak from safety — not shame.

Whatever you do next, do it on purpose.

Cycle II – Coming of Age (The Hidden Life) · 01 (v1.00)

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