"Don't worry baby, it's less-lethal!"

Tommy stungunned me!

It actually wasn't the worst. On the ol' 0-10 pain scale, maybe a 5? Worse than a handslap, but not as bad as something that, y'know, hurts. I give the sound and sight perfect 10s for horribleness though. Hearing that *CRACKSNAP* and seeing GODDAMN LIGHTNING is way worse than the actual shock.

I wish I could say "yep, I just manned up and did it," but the truth is that right after declaring I wanted to do it, I came down with a pretty bad case of the cowards and had to be kinda coaxed into it. Fortunately Tommy is inhumanely patient and trustworthy in these matters and if you want the perfect man to hold your hand and run 300,000 volts through your ass, you couldn't do much better. (Why you would want this is a question I have never satisfactorily answered, but at this point I'm fairly comfortable with just accepting that I do.)

I'm really glad I did it. Even though the act itself was kind of pointless, the fact that I went back and faced something I feared, something I had regretted not doing, means a lot to me. I faced something I was terrified of and found that it's--not painless--but not an unfathomable pain. That's an important thing to learn symbolically and something I'm still working on. It's the difference between "if I fail, it's the worst thing ever" and "if I fail, it's bad, but the consequences are finite and I'll still be alive at the end."

Sometimes submitting can teach you how not to be life's bitch.