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I have been on the path of healing for quite some time, and I have forward progress and I have backward progress, which is one of those frustratingly simple truths that feels almost insulting to write down because of course healing is not linear, of course it does not behave like a progress bar in a video game where every action adds experience points and every level-up stays permanently unlocked, but it is still surprisingly hard to remember that when the thing you thought you had processed suddenly comes back and hits you with the emotional force of “oh, I guess we are still here.”

That is the part I keep struggling with: the gap between knowing I have changed and feeling like I have changed. Because if I am reminded of the trauma on the wrong day, or by the wrong joke, or by the wrong cluster of implications that my brain connects before I even get the chance to consciously approve the connection, it can feel like all of that progress disappears. It is a little like seeing a friend every day and not noticing how their face has changed, how their posture has shifted, how their style has evolved, because the transformation happened too slowly to be witnessed as transformation. Then someone else sees them after a year and says, “Wow, you look different,” and suddenly all the invisible increments become visible at once. I am the person seeing myself every day. I do not always get the luxury of distance from my own growth.

So I guess that is why I am writing this paper.

Ok. Big breath.

I have said some of this before, so stop me if it sounds familiar. Just kidding, you cannot stop me from writing.

This paper is, in a very literal sense, a continuation of Never Have I Ever: Kinks and Anti Group Tendencies, though I do not want it to simply repeat either of those papers or absorb their arguments wholesale into this one, because those papers already had their own jobs to do. Never Have I Ever: Kinks was about autonomy, consent, asexuality, kink as a field of study rather than participation, and the strange fact that a pornographic sci-fi text adventure could become one of the safest spaces I had ever found for exploring sexuality precisely because it let me control the terms of engagement. Not because it was mild (oh my gosh, no), but because it was navigable. It had exits. It had save files. It had choices. It had a way for me to encounter the human landscape of kink without being dragged into it by another person’s expectations.

Anti-Group Tendencies, meanwhile, widened the lens into something more explicitly psychological. That paper gave language to a pattern I had lived with for most of my life: my near-reflexive resistance to group pressure, my habit of standing just outside the circle, my need to preserve autonomy even when the thing being asked of me seems, from the outside, completely harmless. It was the paper where I could say, with more clarity than I had before, that my resistance is not just stubbornness or contrarianism or being a stick in the mud (though, sure, sometimes it probably looks exactly like that). It is a survival strategy. It is a shield. It is also, at its best, a creative principle, because refusing to be absorbed by the group has often forced me to build meaning, identity, and connection in ways that are more intentional than inherited.

This paper sits between those two works and the thing I kept circling around without fully entering. It is about the wound that makes some of that autonomy feel so urgent. It is about why certain sexually charged group situations affect me in a way that goes far beyond preference, far beyond “not my thing,” and into the realm of panic, freezing, mental derailment, and that horrible feeling of my body reacting before my ethics or intellect have had time to calmly explain that other people’s consensual lives are not threats to me. It is about why Trials in Tainted Space helped me heal, and also why it did not magically fix everything. It is about how I can write thousands and thousands of words about relationship anarchy, fictional kink mechanics, consent systems, queerplatonic interpretation, and the narrative architecture of erotic games, but still feel my whole body recoil when the subject gets too close to certain real-life configurations.

This was supposed to be a happy update, in the way I imagined it when I first thought about writing it. Something like: wow, look, I did some healing. Look how far I came from panic and avoidance into careful engagement and reflection. Look how a game, of all things, gave me a controlled environment where I could learn without being harmed. And that is still true. I do not want to steal that truth from myself just because the rest of the truth is harder to write.

But the only way to explain why the healing matters is to explain what it was healing around, and that is where the paper becomes difficult. Because there is no clean way to say, “I learned something beautiful,” without also saying, “and the reason it was beautiful is because the alternative had been terrifying.”

So this paper is not just a victory lap. It is not trauma for shock value either. It is an attempt to make the whole story visible: the fear, the exposure, the intellectual processing, the anger, the boundaries, the regressions, the growth, the parts that still do not feel healed, and the parts that genuinely are. It is me trying to write from inside the mess without making the reader live in the mess without a map.