Ok, in an attempt to not put out approx. a billion pages of unreadable stuff, I think I’m gonna break the purely clinical “what happened with the haircutting” as its own writing. And then a separate one like, debriefing some thoughts about it? And then another separate one just about S (the bully for this scene). So here’s the just the facts maam of it all.

The night after I put that last writing up, S and I had a conversation where we nailed down the finer points and details about what was happening, It’s the kind of thing where I think we could have done the scene without it, and communicated most of what was important with significant glances, with the way that we said certain things. In debriefing after with her, we both kinda came to the realization that we’ve, without really ever having a conversation specifically about it, have created a pretty intense, mostly 24/7 dynamic. I’ve got a whole other paragraph about that somewhere else in this about that (EDITORS NOTE, I’m actually making it its own writing), but for right now, the important takeaway is we’ve gotten pretty good about building the plane of consent in midair, but it felt very good to actually hammer out the few specific feelings we both had about this. It of course devolved into a mutual admiration fest, for the friendship we’ve built with each other, and for what we were asking each other to do and what we were offering of ourselves. She remarked that there was a battle weariness to the whole conversation; that the horrors to come had somehow united us even though we were going to be on opposite sides of them when the day came, and I felt that too. It’s important for me to keep holding that as big as this was for me, it was big for her too, and as much as I was making myself a victim, she was making herself a monster in the eyes of the basement. We both had a lot to lose.

On Friday at 1pm, I went to the hair salon I’ve always wanted to go to but never tried. The stylist asked me a bunch of questions I wasn’t ready for, because I was trying not to get attached to the gorgeous hair he was going to give me but he wanted to make sure he did a good job. I’d slept like absolute shit the last two nights (more to come on this, lol) and my nerves were already pretty shot, but he poured me a glass of wine and then spent five hours bleaching and dying and styling my hair. I kept trying to view it from a detached, disinterested angle, but I couldn’t help falling in love with it, it looked amazing at the salon and when I got home I put on nicer clothes and makeup and my whole fucking chest hurt with how good it looked. It was utterly devastating.

That night, King (long time treasured partner) and I went out to the 19 to see and be seen among the queers, and I don’t know if I’ve ever looked prettier. Someone correctly clocked my tripp skirt as a skirt and not pants, which hardly ever happens. Simply the magic of the hair, I thought to myself. We stayed out latish, drinking and laughing and smoking with Z, the amazing friend who designed the tshirts that S had made (there’s a good chance you’re reading this because of a QR code on one of those shirts, if so, HI!!!!).

He had put Friday in his calendar as “good hair activity with Felicity” months ago when he heard the plan, because he’s an amazing individual. At the end of the night, I made our excuses, and joked that it was time for bed because “I’ve got degendering due tomorrow”. He laughed with me and hugged me, tightly.

Another night of terrible sleep later, I woke up, spend the morning with King, and got ready for the photo shoot that S had booked to immortalize my beauty before she took it away. I picked out four outfits I really loved but would be able to accept losing and threw a poll on fetlife so people could pick which I wore to the party. I showered and washed my hair! The day after getting it dyed! So freeing! And then I did my makeup and King and I went to the photoshoot. King’s ankle had been giving him shit all last night and that morning, and I told him he didn’t need to come along but he was willing to power through and I’m endlessly glad he did.

The photoshoot was a blur. My hands were shaking when I tried to drink water. We saved the best outfits for the end, and I’m glad we did because it took me so long to lock in and feel comfy. I’ve always flinched away from having my picture taken, and transition has helped soften that but the gut instinct of “never let yourself be caught on camera” is still present and was absolutely beating my ass that day. The photographer was phenomenal, and did an amazing job helping King feel welcome, and we ended up with some truly amazing shots you’re going to see posted here over the next few days. We wrapped up around 5, and King and I headed home. I killed an hour and change in a daze, and then touched up my look and we headed to the party.

The outfit everyone voted on was a black and white “sailor” dress. It was the first dress I ever wore to a kink party. I believe I wore it to the very first MFC party, emboldened by the idea of an explicitly trans-inclusive group. It fit a little differently than I remembered, but it felt right. A bookend, or the end of a chapter, of sorts.

At the party, G (another of my lovely bullies) had a fun game. As punishment for failing my orgasm control tasks for the month, she was letting people disable parts of my body until I brought myself back to her to ‘fix’ them. The sensory play she gave me, and the silly, lighthearted game and rules were such a delightful way to occupy my (simultaneously racing yet blank) mind while waiting for 10:30 and the timer S had set up months ago to signal it was time to destroy me. She checked in a few times throughout the evening, and after the final check in she showed off the amazing shirts that she’d gotten made in like, days (unbelievable?). There was no turning back. I got my hair pulled into like, 12 little bands so that as it was being shaved off it would be collected for people who wanted locks of it to keep.

It was five minutes to. S announced to the room it was happening, and led me downstairs. Normally, the attention whore in me would revel in watching the seats fill in, flirt and smile at all my people, make jokes about what was going to happen. This time I just took my seat in the middle of the room under the hard points, and looked at the floor.

S waited off to the side until the alarm went off. She led people in a final countdown. She began kicking me. She threatened me with a knife. Piece by piece, thread by thread, she began to slice and peel me out of my dress, out of my fishnets and mesh gloves. The knife was sharp and unforgiving against my skin. She joked about which direction was the ‘right way’ to slice the mesh sleeves (referencing the slitting my wrists I might be doing at the end of all this), held the knife to my throat and joked about how putting me down might be merciful. I didn’t bleed, but I got nicked. She did an incredible job walking the line between terrifying and safe. She used the knife to slice just a few inches from the tip of my hair, and pushed it into my mouth. She leaned in as if to kiss me. As soon as she could see that I actually believed a kiss was coming, as soon as I started to move towards it, she slapped my face, hard.

We used kneepads so I could kneel longer (my knees are shot due to a series of dislocations and I can’t really handle prolonged kneeling without something like that). She showed me the clippers, made me beg to put a guard on them so I’d have some left. She showed me the smallest guard and switched to a bigger one when I wasn’t looking. She used the knife to cut more bits off the ends, scary rough hacking cuts, but so far nothing irreparable, doing an incredible job of somehow slowly escalating the consequences of the fairly binary “hair is either ruined or not”. She used the knife to carve the very front of my widow’s peak completely off. She cut off one of the silly little curls I’d scrunched to the sides of my temples, and handed it to a shared partner. She dragged a full length mirror in front of me, kept forcing me to look at myself even as I repeatedly tried to turn away, to not watch. She turned the clippers on, and took a huge chunk off.

I was cringing, begging, yelping. After she’d worked on the hair with the knife, I made one final plea. She had fucked it up, there was hair all over the floor, we could stop now. I think it was after she’d taken the widows peak out that it felt like I’d crossed a point of no return. I was holding it together until then, and I made the mistake of looking out into the audience. I saw someone crying into their hands, unwilling to watch me. That started me crying.

At some point, she grabbed a bundle of the pre-sectioned hair strands and started hitting me with them. It hurt. It was insulting. It was a reminder, a blunt metaphor. It made me cry.

I think over the course of the scene I cried every different way I knew how. It started centered in my throat, but moved to settle in my chest, my stomach. I felt nauseous, with worry, with sadness. Towards the end of the cutting, when there was just one clump of long hair left, she kicked me up from hands and knees into more of a sitting position, staring into the mirror.

“I want you to feel it on your shoulders one last time. And I want you to feel it tucked behind your ear one last time.”

I don’t think anything I’ve done in kink has matched that moment, those words, the final cut that followed, for sheer pain and despair. I howled. I felt empty, I felt so stupid for agreeing to this. I was as abjectly miserable in a way I haven’t felt since I crashed a car as a stupid teenager.

She invited people to kick me if they wanted. People came up and they did kick me, but some of them did worse. They tried to reassure me, told me I still looked hot. I flinched away, the comfort hurt worse than any kicking. They offered kisses, and I felt bad about the snot and tears and loose hair that were in the way. A beautiful bald transfemme leaned down to whisper “learn… to love… hats” as she kicked me, a moment that almost made me ruin all the weeping with belly laughter. One of the funniest punchlines of the evening, delivered out of nowhere, her timing utterly impeccable.

After I’d been soundly kicked, S checked in. When we were planning the night, as I was worried about it not hitting enough, my backup contingency to make sure I felt properly worthless was maybe crossing the threshold and trying out bottoming for watersports for the first-ish time. I told her we’d probably need to play it by ear; if I was shattered I wouldn’t be up for it, but if there was some cheeky spark of rebellion still left in me, that would probably be enough to stomp it out. And so she leaned down, and in a voice for just us, asked if I needed anyone to piss on me, or if I was done. I looked up through a haze, and managed in a small voice to tell her I was probably done. I don’t remember what she told the group, but she managed to convey that the scene was finished, and there was applause. It felt so loud. It felt like being buffeted, it felt like such a reminder of how perceived I was. Normally during a big flashy scene I play to the crowd, to the camera. This was somehow the most inward scene I’ve done with S, probably ever, despite the amount of eyes on us. So much of this was just for us, for me, for her.

A side note on S. I don’t know if I can think of a scene I’ve seen where one person was demonstrating perfect competency in so many different kinds of topping. She was balancing knife play, rough body play, clothing destruction, emotional sadism, crowd engagement, and giving a functionally pretty cute buzz cut without dropping a single one of those plates, executing each to such a high degree. There was a detached observer part of me that could not get over how perfect each slap felt, exactly and precisely as hard as was safe and sustainable. It was a masterclass. It was a humbling tornado to be in the eye of.

And then it was time to go upstairs. I asked S if I could shower the hairs off, and she didn’t even do the usual teasing me about if she’s going to let me clean off. I think people offered a hand up, or kept a respectful distance, but I can’t recall exactly. My memory of the back half of the night is hazy. I do know that when I told my body it was time to stand, it flat out didn’t respond. I had to take a much more intentional approach with a lot more focus to get any of my limbs to respond. I shambled upstairs and had one of the ‘normalest’ showers I’ve ever had at S’s house, no frosting to scrape out of ears or anything. I was still itchy for the rest of the night. Usually one shower gets all the itchy hairs off post haircut, but most haircuts you’re in a chair and they give you a cape, whereas in this one I was nude and was being like, kicked into piles of hair or having it dropped over me to rub in what was happening, so I suppose it makes sense that it was a multi shower job.

I made my way back downstairs and had a little aftercare in the bedroom with S and a few other friends and lovers, but when I do big group scenes like this I try to be mindful that the big group I played for kinda needs their own aftercare, they need to see me walking and talking, they need to say bye and get a hug, and I wanted to be around everyone’s energy. I spend the rest of the night on the couch, hydrating and eating snacks I wasn’t really focusing on, watching people try on shirts and telling them about the website (HI AGAIN) I’m going to put all the writing and pictures on. I hugged everyone, especially S. Eventually I packed myself into a car. King helped me navigate a Taco Bell pickup, even though it was 4/20 eve. We ate our tacos, smoked a little. I went to bed (another shitty night of sleep). The next morning the sun rose. I went to my dad’s house for Easter. Pumping gas on the way back I could see stars swimming at the edge of my vision. I tried to take an hour long nap. I went to an amazing punk show in someone’s basement, discovered a few new incredible bands. I swung by S’s house after, and spent a few hours debriefing and hugging and getting into heated debates about how good the cafeteria at my college had been.

I don’t think I emerged from the fight or flight panic sleep deprived brain fog I was in until Wednesday. I went on a manic cleaning spree, my place was a disaster. I took a shower and felt invigorated. I had the windows open. I was listening to bizarre techno. I was going to be ok.