a 30yearold hyderabadbased kinkster si shares their experience of navigating bondage and boundaries at a gathering that helped unleash their authentic selfi came into myself under fire as a nonbinary trans person with a complex mental health history growing up under the pressures of a society that functions like a game whose score determines your worth as a person all the experience i have of truly being myself has been a process of synthesis a creative endeavour to surface the parts of myself that nobody around me understands or respects and to find the explanations that let these parts exist and be heard by the people around me i try in my spare moments and stolen afternoons to understand who i am and then i describe them to my people i ask can this be loved and im really asking can i be lovedthe morning before kinkcon i was coming off a daylong anxiety attack i changed my sheets so that i would have something pleasant to come back to in case it all went to hell i packed whatever clean clothes i had into a bag i dressed in the clothing that made me feel best and damn whoever saw and whatever they thought and i locked my house and departedon the other side i found my peoplei found conversations about gender about mental health and illness and neurodiversity about society and love in all its forms about queerness and feminism and polyamory and kink thoughtful engagement with trauma joy in play secret fascinations disclosed carefully and then less carefully as we all slowly understood that here and now and with these people all of this was okay flirtation lived experience constant checking in is this okay are you okay and so much kindnessdoes this all seem disjointed its hard to explain after the fact just how much happened in three days the bedrock of it all was very simple really trust and consent everyone there seemed to have intuitively understood that the people opposite them were to be treated with respect over a very short period we all learned that each others needs were all different and we worked to meet our own needs and those of the people around us and then we used the rest of the space for our wantsthat first morning i sat down at a table next to someone who looked friendly and whose hair was an interesting unusual colour the third thing out of my mouth was im so incredibly nervous right now and they asked can i pet your hair would that helpcan i explain how transgressive this act of kindness was do you who are reading this intuitively understand do you know or can you imagine what its like to be seen this way without the layer of mediating assumptions for someone to look at you and imagine correctly what you might need what would helpi didnt know if it would help i knew