Times Like These… (1-26) – Commentary

Times Like These is the quiet epilogue to Cycle I.

It’s not the big villain monologue, not a manifesto, not a recruitment speech.

It’s me putting something simple on the table:

“I went all in. It didn’t become what I thought.
I still don’t regret wanting.”

When “yes” happens faster than thought

The opening beat is the whole nervous system of the piece:

“You blink.
You meet someone.
You internally say ‘yes’ faster than your brain can catch up to your body.”

That’s the moment most kink discourse loves to shame:

  • “You moved too fast.”
  • “You should’ve vetted more.”
  • “You should’ve waited six months / a year / a lifetime.”

What I’m doing here is refusing to rewrite that moment as a sin.

The post calls it what it actually is:

  • aliveness
  • the willingness to risk
  • the refusal to live only in fantasy

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

That isn’t naïve.
That’s how anything real ever starts.

You can’t consent to a dynamic in theory forever. At some point, there’s a first “yes” that feels like jumping before you can see the bottom.

This piece blesses that jump, even knowing how the landing went.

Titles, roles, and the slow reveal

The middle section is the slow, painful part:

“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.”

That’s not unique to one dynamic.

That’s a pattern in kink:

  • people fall in love with roles,
  • people fall in love with aesthetic,
  • people fall in love with their own reflection in someone’s devotion.

It can take weeks, months, sometimes years for that to show itself clearly.

The line that stings:

“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’s the heartbreak.

Not just losing a person, but losing the future version you were subconsciously building around their promises.

This post doesn’t erase that hurt.

It just refuses to label it as failure.

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

That’s the reframing:

  • not “I shouldn’t have jumped,”
  • but “I now know more about what doesn’t fit the shape of me.”

Letting a dynamic eclipse the House

There’s a quieter confession buried in here:

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

That’s me admitting:

  • I gave priority to a connection over the work,
  • let my own project dim for a while,
  • let the House go quiet to see if this person was part of the future.

From the outside, it looked like:

  • the end of the public writing,
  • a clean fade-out,
  • story over.

Inside, it was a real attempt:

  • to live another “life” in the thing I’d been dissecting on the page,
  • to give a real, new dynamic the same force I’d been pouring into theory and structure,
  • to see if this was the chapter where “Master” stopped being an archetype and started being my day-to-day again.

“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.’”

That’s how it feels when a big “yes” doesn’t last:
like everything before it was a prelude to something that didn’t stick.

Time had other plans.

What time actually revealed

The turning point of the piece is this:

“The ending wasn’t the ending.”

Time didn’t retroactively make the dynamic “fake” or the feelings “wrong.”
It revealed something else:

“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.”

That’s important.

It means:

  • the experiment didn’t become abuse,
  • the intensity didn’t become manipulation,
  • the disappointment didn’t turn either of us into villains.

It was:

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

That doesn’t make it meaningless.

That makes it experience.

Not the “I’d do everything differently” kind.
The “I’d still want, but I’d name it cleaner next time” kind.

Roundness instead of ruin

The post leans hard into 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.’”

That’s the big grown-up distinction.

Because the easy move after a painful dynamic is:

  • “I should never trust again.”
  • “I was stupid for wanting.”
  • “I should have stayed on the sidelines.”

This piece refuses that.

Instead it suggests:

  • What if the wanting was correct?
  • What if the target just wasn’t a fit?
  • What if the lesson isn’t “don’t want,” but “want more precisely”?

“You don’t walk out of that unchanged.
You walk out more round…”

Round as in:

  • more layered,
  • less brittle,
  • more fluent in your own limits and needs.

The post is not glorifying pain.

It’s acknowledging that some kinds of pain, survived with integrity, leave you better shaped, not broken.

Freedom, power, consequences – revisited

The closing deliberately loops back to earlier Cycle I language:

“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.”

That’s Post 25 energy folded into a softer context.

It doesn’t soften the reality that choices have impact.

It just refuses to treat every “didn’t work out” as a catastrophe.

“Times like these don’t define the whole life.”

They don’t erase you.

They don’t mark you as “the person who chose wrong.”

They just become:

  • one track in a longer playlist,
  • one chapter in a longer story.

The real proof of life is in the last lines:

“You are capable of saying yes,
capable of walking away,
and still capable of wanting more than what almost worked.”

That “still capable” is the muscle you get to keep.

And then:

“Let’s see how far I’ll go.”

Not as a moral, not as a “lesson learned” speech.

Just a shrug at the sky and a willingness to keep moving.

On the companion track: “Times Like These” – Addison Rae

Choosing “Times Like These” here does something deliberately off-center:

  • It’s newer, poppier, softer than most of the Cycle I tracks.
  • It carries that “I’m a little bruised but I’m still trying” energy.
  • It sounds like late-night scrolling, soft glow, quiet replay of what just happened.

It’s not epic, not tragic.

It’s:

  • “That happened.
  • I felt it.
  • I’m still here.”

Paired with this piece, it frames the whole thing as:

not a tragedy,
not a triumph,
just a real, human chapter between Cycles —

the kind of song you loop when you’re not done wanting, even if you’re a little tired of hurting.

Cycle I – Coming on Strong · 26 · Commentary (v1.00)

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