Times Like These… (1-26)

Content note: Talks about intense dynamics that don’t last, heartbreak, walking away, and using failed connections as experience and growth.

Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like a choice at all.

It feels like this:

You blink.

You meet someone.

You internally say “yes” faster than your brain can catch up to your body.

And just like that, you’re not standing on the edge anymore —

you’re already underwater, calling it a dynamic.

There’s a version of this story where that makes you “reckless.”

There’s another version where it makes you “stupid.”

I don’t believe either.

I think it just makes you alive:

  • You wanted something real.
  • You saw enough to believe it could be real.
  • You stepped in with both feet.

That’s not failing yourself.

That’s the only way anything ever actually happens.

What you can’t see at the beginning:

  • how long the high will last,
  • what the other person is capable of when things get quiet,
  • how your needs will shift once the fantasy becomes routine.

Sometimes you find out:

  • they liked the title more than the weight of the role,
  • they loved the idea of “Master” or “submissive” more than the person in front of them,
  • they could talk about expectations but not live inside them.

Sometimes you look back and realize you spent more time waiting for them to become who they said they were than actually being in the dynamic you thought you agreed to.

That doesn’t mean you failed.

It means you learned what not to call home for yourself.

I have jumped fast before.

Given the benefit of the doubt.

Opened the door wider than was wise.

Let a newly formed dynamic take up space that used to belong to writing, to the House, to what I wanted to create.

For a while, it looked like that was where the story ended.

Like this was the last Cycle.

Like everything I’d built here was just… something I used to do, before I “moved on.”

Time had other plans.

The ending wasn’t the ending.

It was just the part where I found out:

  • I hadn’t broken my own standards,
  • I hadn’t betrayed my ethics,
  • I hadn’t failed the other person by honestly giving them all I could give from my self in that role.

We were simply:

  • right for who we each were in that moment,
  • wrong for what we thought we could hold together.

That’s not nothing.

That’s experience.

Here’s what time does, if you let it:

It shows you the difference between:

  • “I was wrong to want that,”

and

  • “I was right to want, and now I know more about who and what I’m actually built for.”

It shows you:

  • how you handle disappointment,
  • how you handle your own hunger,
  • how you handle the quiet after a loud “yes” turns into a smaller goodbye.

You don’t walk out of that unchanged.

You walk out more round:

  • more fluent in your own limits,
  • more certain about what you won’t shrink for,
  • more willing to wait for something that actually matches the shape of you.

If a dynamic didn’t become a forever story, it doesn’t mean it was a waste.

It means:

  • you got to see what you are not — from both sides,
  • so you can stand more firmly in what you are,
  • and be clearer, next time, about what “all in” actually looks like.

Freedom is still having the choice.

Power is still making the decision.

Consequences are still what happens when people live honestly, even if they grow in different directions afterward.

Times like these don’t define the whole life.

They just prove one very important thing:

You are capable of saying yes,  

capable of walking away,  

and still capable of wanting more than what almost worked.

That’s not the end.

That’s the part where the next song starts to fade in.

Let’s see how far I’ll go.

Companion track: “Times Like These” – Addison Rae

Between Cycles – RD-26 

Cycle I – Coming on Strong (The Hidden Voice) · 26 (v1.01)

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