Unbelievably thought-provoking read and the whole time I was just waiting for you to mention cannibalism. You explored sacrificial love in such an intimate way, I'm just awestruck by the connections you've made and how you've tied it all together... wow wow wow
"To sin is to act on impulse, to give in to the darker, more primal aspects of human nature."
This is one of the most beautiful essays I've ever read. The way you craft your sentences and explain the meanings is so careful and delicate, giving a clear insight into the philosophy of surrendering without making it difficult. This will go down as one of my favorites as well. I truly, truly love this theme. Thank you so much for sharing your piece 🩷
Beautifully written. I always thought the way I loved was too consuming and in tern something bad. I have never understood the way I loved. I thought that there was something very wrong with me. You have now given me a new perspective. Thank you. You have no idea how much this has impacted my thoughts.
I literally love this so much. As someone who's been in an all-consuming relationship that has changed the trajectory of my life, reading this was like seeing the things ive been feeling and the reflections ive been having materialize into words in ways I would not have been able to imagine myself. Thank you so much for this <3.
such a phenomenal piece, every part resonant and profoundly articulated and i am grateful to have gotten to read it. thank you for writing and sharing and putting all that you did into it, my god. i feel nearly speechless 🙏🙏🙏🙏❤️🔥🫀❤️🔥
you're so welcome <3 the whole topic, or topics, of pain and surrender are huge loves for me and been major focuses of the past few years of my life. im realizing now my intensity for it really came out there haha but yeah i do mean every word <3
I feel the same! Once it gets you it gets you. I always thought I'd have a focus on political science and anthropology and sociological things of that concept but one therapy session and I was trapped here. For me personally it ties all the way to abnormal psych and morality and the philosophy of determinism especially. (Also some experiences with 'natural digestible fungi' *cough* shrooms *cough*) the introspection made me realize that pain and surrender are inevitable but how you take it can make it so incredibly beautiful. Glad I could provide you with something that resonates.
haha (the *cough cough* 😂 yes plant medicines and working with them !!) i do not think i have heard the word determinism (or not in a bit) so thank you for that too! and i totally get starting in the direction you did and then moving to that, i feel like i've been all over the place with my focus and intertwining them all, especially when i finally started my journey with shibari after already experiencing chronic pain it was like .. oh damn, deep dive Now. ugh. (good "ugh" haha) yeah. so much there. so awesome
Is a good read and loved the analogy with the open body but I think is a very toxic take on love. Can there be love without losing your sense of self? Can there be healthy boundaries and individuality?
A very thoughtful and thought provoking article. I am looking forward to specific instances and challenges we face as well as how to weigh our options.
This is truly phenomenal. Touching so many of the ideas and topics I have been experiencing for the first time and trying to make sense of. Thank you thank you for this and your excellent writing and examples diving into these concepts. Such an incredible article.
For a good reason! Thank you for your engagement, but I must respectfully disagree with the premise that the absence of references to violence against women, patriarchy, and coercive control in this context is irresponsible. That expectation presumes that every discourse involving desire, surrender, or power must default to a trauma-centered, gender-political framework. While I acknowledge the value and necessity of those conversations in broader academic and social justice contexts, my research deliberately moves toward a different ontological and phenomenological inquiry—one that asks what is left of human desire when we stop making fear and control its only grammar.
The central concern of my work is not the pathology of violence, but the erotic potential of voluntary, even ecstatic, relinquishment. I am investigating the intimacy of surrender—not as a symptom of oppression, but as a choice that defies instrumental rationality, disrupts normative power dynamics, and reveals a subtler interiority where agency is not always synonymous with dominance or resistance. In this realm, surrender is not something done to a person, but something done within them—an active, even sacred, engagement with vulnerability, intensity, and the unknown.
By focusing on what is embraceable in so-called “dark” desires, I’m asking whether there is room in our moral vocabulary for complex experiences that are neither purely liberatory nor purely destructive. To collapse all non-normative expressions of eroticism into violence is to reinforce the very puritanical binaries that deny people full access to the multiplicity of their own emotional and psychological realities.
This is not a rejection of power dynamics—it’s an attempt to trace how those dynamics function when they are neither weaponized nor condemned, but metabolized into aesthetic, spiritual, or interpersonal arrangements of meaning. I am particularly interested in what happens when desire is decoupled from utility, when the body becomes not a battleground of ideologies but a site of confession, permission, and transformation.
My research doesn’t deny structural inequality. It asks: what is desire beyond structural analysis? What is longing when it is stripped of politics—not because politics are unimportant, but because there must be intellectual space for subjectivity that is not always in reaction to trauma or gendered harm? This is about choosing complexity over moral reflex.
In truth, there is a deep irony in the criticism. The urge to categorize surrender solely as danger or victimhood is itself a kind of epistemic violence—it denies the interior freedom of those who find catharsis, transcendence, or clarity in the very spaces society has deemed unsafe, unspeakable, or shameful. That denial risks flattening lived experience into advocacy, and scholarship into surveillance.
My project is not irresponsible. It is daringly responsible to the parts of the psyche we are told to suppress. It is an act of philosophical hospitality toward the inadmissible, the erotic, the morally ambiguous—and in doing so, it joins a long lineage of thinkers who have sought to understand human behavior not as it should be, but as it is.
Surrender, obedience, and worship can ironically be so elevating. The metaphorical knife stabbing so healing. Sitting in that dichotomy is intoxicating. My heart sang in resonance as I read your piece. Thank you 🙏
This was a really thoughtful, and somewhat disturbing, reflection on why love feels like so much risk-taking, like so much surrender, like so much exposure. I appreciated the comparison to surgery, to incision sites, to organs being rearranged. It helps me understand the weight and beauty of it - and inspires me to love more deeply.
So being that sin is subjective based on whatever religious lens you’re viewing things from, how do you associate that with innate objectively natural human desire and behavior? While I do understand the sentiment here I’m not sure I totally see that perspective.
Unbelievably thought-provoking read and the whole time I was just waiting for you to mention cannibalism. You explored sacrificial love in such an intimate way, I'm just awestruck by the connections you've made and how you've tied it all together... wow wow wow
"To sin is to act on impulse, to give in to the darker, more primal aspects of human nature."
This is one of the most beautiful essays I've ever read. The way you craft your sentences and explain the meanings is so careful and delicate, giving a clear insight into the philosophy of surrendering without making it difficult. This will go down as one of my favorites as well. I truly, truly love this theme. Thank you so much for sharing your piece 🩷
Beautifully written. I always thought the way I loved was too consuming and in tern something bad. I have never understood the way I loved. I thought that there was something very wrong with me. You have now given me a new perspective. Thank you. You have no idea how much this has impacted my thoughts.
I literally love this so much. As someone who's been in an all-consuming relationship that has changed the trajectory of my life, reading this was like seeing the things ive been feeling and the reflections ive been having materialize into words in ways I would not have been able to imagine myself. Thank you so much for this <3.
Happy to have provided 🌸
so beautiful!!!
such a phenomenal piece, every part resonant and profoundly articulated and i am grateful to have gotten to read it. thank you for writing and sharing and putting all that you did into it, my god. i feel nearly speechless 🙏🙏🙏🙏❤️🔥🫀❤️🔥
Oh this is very kind! Thank you 💕
you're so welcome <3 the whole topic, or topics, of pain and surrender are huge loves for me and been major focuses of the past few years of my life. im realizing now my intensity for it really came out there haha but yeah i do mean every word <3
I feel the same! Once it gets you it gets you. I always thought I'd have a focus on political science and anthropology and sociological things of that concept but one therapy session and I was trapped here. For me personally it ties all the way to abnormal psych and morality and the philosophy of determinism especially. (Also some experiences with 'natural digestible fungi' *cough* shrooms *cough*) the introspection made me realize that pain and surrender are inevitable but how you take it can make it so incredibly beautiful. Glad I could provide you with something that resonates.
haha (the *cough cough* 😂 yes plant medicines and working with them !!) i do not think i have heard the word determinism (or not in a bit) so thank you for that too! and i totally get starting in the direction you did and then moving to that, i feel like i've been all over the place with my focus and intertwining them all, especially when i finally started my journey with shibari after already experiencing chronic pain it was like .. oh damn, deep dive Now. ugh. (good "ugh" haha) yeah. so much there. so awesome
It takes time! I hope all that you want to know and understand comes to you 💕
🥺🥺 thank you !! that means so much to me 🥲🥹 💞🫶❤️🔥🫀❤️🔥🫶💞
Is a good read and loved the analogy with the open body but I think is a very toxic take on love. Can there be love without losing your sense of self? Can there be healthy boundaries and individuality?
This title alone is inspiring omg
A very thoughtful and thought provoking article. I am looking forward to specific instances and challenges we face as well as how to weigh our options.
How deeply and wonderfully thoughtful you are, Fallon. This felt especially pertinent to me as I have also been thinking about love lately. Sharing with you my thoughts in the hopes that they resonate even just a little: https://idontknowwhoneedstohearthis.substack.com/p/why-do-i-feel-like-im-only-whole
I really liked the way you interpreted surgery and talked about the intimacy of it all
This is truly phenomenal. Touching so many of the ideas and topics I have been experiencing for the first time and trying to make sense of. Thank you thank you for this and your excellent writing and examples diving into these concepts. Such an incredible article.
The absence of any mention of violence against women and girls, gendered power dynamics, patriarchy and coercive control here feels irresponsible.
For a good reason! Thank you for your engagement, but I must respectfully disagree with the premise that the absence of references to violence against women, patriarchy, and coercive control in this context is irresponsible. That expectation presumes that every discourse involving desire, surrender, or power must default to a trauma-centered, gender-political framework. While I acknowledge the value and necessity of those conversations in broader academic and social justice contexts, my research deliberately moves toward a different ontological and phenomenological inquiry—one that asks what is left of human desire when we stop making fear and control its only grammar.
The central concern of my work is not the pathology of violence, but the erotic potential of voluntary, even ecstatic, relinquishment. I am investigating the intimacy of surrender—not as a symptom of oppression, but as a choice that defies instrumental rationality, disrupts normative power dynamics, and reveals a subtler interiority where agency is not always synonymous with dominance or resistance. In this realm, surrender is not something done to a person, but something done within them—an active, even sacred, engagement with vulnerability, intensity, and the unknown.
By focusing on what is embraceable in so-called “dark” desires, I’m asking whether there is room in our moral vocabulary for complex experiences that are neither purely liberatory nor purely destructive. To collapse all non-normative expressions of eroticism into violence is to reinforce the very puritanical binaries that deny people full access to the multiplicity of their own emotional and psychological realities.
This is not a rejection of power dynamics—it’s an attempt to trace how those dynamics function when they are neither weaponized nor condemned, but metabolized into aesthetic, spiritual, or interpersonal arrangements of meaning. I am particularly interested in what happens when desire is decoupled from utility, when the body becomes not a battleground of ideologies but a site of confession, permission, and transformation.
My research doesn’t deny structural inequality. It asks: what is desire beyond structural analysis? What is longing when it is stripped of politics—not because politics are unimportant, but because there must be intellectual space for subjectivity that is not always in reaction to trauma or gendered harm? This is about choosing complexity over moral reflex.
In truth, there is a deep irony in the criticism. The urge to categorize surrender solely as danger or victimhood is itself a kind of epistemic violence—it denies the interior freedom of those who find catharsis, transcendence, or clarity in the very spaces society has deemed unsafe, unspeakable, or shameful. That denial risks flattening lived experience into advocacy, and scholarship into surveillance.
My project is not irresponsible. It is daringly responsible to the parts of the psyche we are told to suppress. It is an act of philosophical hospitality toward the inadmissible, the erotic, the morally ambiguous—and in doing so, it joins a long lineage of thinkers who have sought to understand human behavior not as it should be, but as it is.
Surrender, obedience, and worship can ironically be so elevating. The metaphorical knife stabbing so healing. Sitting in that dichotomy is intoxicating. My heart sang in resonance as I read your piece. Thank you 🙏
This was a really thoughtful, and somewhat disturbing, reflection on why love feels like so much risk-taking, like so much surrender, like so much exposure. I appreciated the comparison to surgery, to incision sites, to organs being rearranged. It helps me understand the weight and beauty of it - and inspires me to love more deeply.
So being that sin is subjective based on whatever religious lens you’re viewing things from, how do you associate that with innate objectively natural human desire and behavior? While I do understand the sentiment here I’m not sure I totally see that perspective.