I hate being arrested. I go through it because it is an “occupational hazard”, a risk you have to take if you want to change anything. What I hate is the police forcing me to give up my freedoms, of being so dominant and it is not my choice.

It takes about a week after being arrested, but there is an inevitable need to surrender myself totally to someone else. It does not matter how much they use me as long they make me work for their attention. I want to give in to them, to surrender to them of my own free will. This is me giving up my freedoms, my choice to find my pleasures in this way.

I love it when they chain me up and punish me. Sometimes when I am sitting in a cell I think of what thing have been done to me when I have surrendered to a lover and I know the police have nothing on me. They do no know how often I have been tied up and wiped until every inch of my skin glows from the pain; they do not know how I have been pinned down and fucked at my partner's whim. Above all, they do not know the security of being in the arms of someone so completely in control of me, of being with someone I want to serve so completely. No copper is ever going to get that from me, and that gives me strength to resist.

They will not break me. Yet I need to know that they will not break me, that I will not be broken in the future, and so each time I return to the absolute surrender. I feel lucky that I have had partners who are willing to indulge these desires.

There are times though when it is not enough to make my own choice to submit. I have too much anger and then I need to let that go if I am to stay sane and to be able to look at another piece of filth in the eye. In those moments to have a slave is the only thing that will do for me. It is then I am at my harshest, most dominant. My play is rough and my demands absolute. I want to push the boundaries of pain and obedience in my slave.

To me this is not perversion or a contradiction of my anarchist principles but about keeping me sane and dealing with the traumas of being active in a fucked-up world. This is not to say that I don't enjoy all these things for their own sake – I assure you that I definitely do, but I have worked them in to my life as a political activist as well. It is a nice convergence. No masters but the ones I choose...

- mhicscian