Tessa Fields us un-retired!
Semi-Retired is a multi-part series that focuses on Hypnodommes that are no longer as active as they once were. This series does not explore the reasons for their absence, but does explore the marks they left on me, and maybe you too.
Semi-Retired Part 3: Pun About Tessa Fields’ Last Name
Where did Tessa Fields go?
Full disclosure, we’re friends in real life but we haven’t had a chance to talk for a while… as in a long while, so I don’t know exactly, and also, it’s not my place to speak for her even if I did know.
That said, sometimes if you don’t know exactly what you want, it’s easier not to make a public decision even if you’ve made half of a private one.
I’m not sharing any secret insider information about her here or anywhere in this post. In this portion, this is just more a refection of my own personal experiences when it’s come to quitting jobs, breakups, and leaving groups I’ve been a part of.
Part of it’s a question of how you leave, or if you’re really leaving, and what kinds of doors could you be shutting/bridges could you be burring based on that choice, you don’t want to accidentally fuck something up if you don’t have to right?
With Tessa Fields, I want to offer up a question to you the reader, and that is:
Who Knows?
Who knows if she’s happy having an awesome catalogue of her work available to share with everyone?
When I met Len Wein (RIP), creator of Wolverine, and I asked him about what it was like to see people bringing him copies of his books, and seeing his creations still thriving, he told me that part of being a writer was hoping you can make something good enough in your early years to support you through your later ones.
So who knows, maybe that’s Tessa Fields.
Who knows if the emotional labor of being a popular and successful Hypno Domme wore her down, or if the rest of her life AND that labor got to a point where the responsibilities outweighed the rewards?
It’s not an easy job, and you don’t really know how hard it is until you see it first hand, and who knows, maybe something as fulfilling and less demanding came up.
And that’s saying nothing about maybe just being tired of hearing guys talking about how hard you made them cum.
And who knows, life is demanding, and people are entitled to their privacy. Maybe she had something come up in her personal life that pulled her away from this (she was open about her father’s passing, and that;s a life changing thing right there), or made the kind of constant labor that goes into being successful here untenable?
Finally, who knows, maybe she’s just on a prolonged vacation? Maybe it wasn’t intentional, maybe it was? Who knows? Maybe she’ll be back tomorrow, maybe all her sites will be taken down in a year, who knows?
I don’t know, believe me, I don’t know.
But I do know this, there are things we’re entitled to in this world of Femdom Erotic Hypnosis and things we’re not, and this is true in any relationship.
I don’t know if Tessa ghosted everyone, but I know that regardless of what other people do, we’re responsible for our own choices and conduct (unless, you know, we’re under hypnotic control…), and we can choose to respect the privacy and hard choices people make regardless of if they’ve made the same choices we would have, or acted on those choices the way we would had we been the ones making them.
When people leave, they leave.
Sometimes, like Lady Lita, they come back. Sometimes, like Nikki Fatale, they stay gone. But regardless of that, as the ones who stay in this world, we owe them the respect and dignity to honor the privacy they are entitled to as people.
This isn’t to say that we’re not entitled to feeling hurt or fucked over, or even just curious depending on what are relationships are to these people. It’s as I said above, we’re all entitled to certain things, and that includes having our own feelings respected.
For us, as fans, and subs, and as people who can have an immense emotional stake in these relationships it can be difficult.
It can be anything from feeling abandoned, or even like we were broken up with without an explanation, or even in the opposite direction, all the way to just being bummed out that someone whose work you love isn’t doing it anymore.
That’s the life and emotional range of a submissive fetishist too, because just like Dommes can run on a scale from Personality to Product so too can our interests.
And while Tessa Fields was never a Cult of Personality, she did live sessions, she had regulars, and she had personal relationships with her subjects, relationships that are/were naturally enhanced by two things:
The intimacy and influence of hypnosis.
The emotional catharsis of engaging with your fetish.
You don’t need to be running an Empire to have people become deeply invested in you with those two elements in play.
But, that also sounds like I’m downplaying something else that matters here:
The relationships we forge are real.
I’ve written maybe too extensively about the complexities of what those relationships are on their own terms, and what their parameters are, and I’ve made mistakes about them too, but they are nonetheless real on both sides, even if the sides can be skewed.
So, now that that’s all out there, I want to talk about my relationship with Tessa Fields:
I discovered her work in early 2011, maybe 7 months after embracing my fetish, and randomly, during an Inraptured chats around the same time, we got to know each other. We became friends and I became a super fan pretty quickly.
Tessa, I believe, may be the best technical hypnotist to ever work in this fetish. To be clear, I think everyone has their strengths, so don’t think I’m saying she’s purely better than everyone else. I don’t think something as subjective as our scene can really have an objective “best”, but I think that her fundamentals, her understanding and scholarship of hypnosis as they were applied to making erotic hypnosis were uniquely impressive on a technical and creative level.
Regardless of all that, my super fandom ran its course the more we became friends.
But, that doesn’t mean I didn’t keep following her work, and listening to it, or staying in touch with her on and off. For a while, she was the only person I was listening to, so it’s easy to understand where my takes on her abilities come from, and while she’s not the first person I’ve publicly and earnestly praised in my blog, I can only assume it’s kind of weird to have me banging the drum so hard for someone when I normally offer up a more mediated take on everything.
This hasn’t been a very upbeat article so far, so let me fix that with a couple of cool live session Tessa Fields stories that I can sum up in about one sentence each.
The first one:
She gave me my first prolonged blackout where I legit had no idea how long I was under or what I said while under, but I know I said something because I thought I fell asleep and she asked me if I talked in my sleep when I told her that; I don’t talk in my sleep.
The other one is:
We were chatting on the phone one day, just being buddies, and as I was playing video games, listening to her talk, I had to put the controller down and close my eyes, because she’d decided to just work me over and put me under conversationally.
These were important moments to me because as I’ve said so many times, I wasn’t a good subject at the time that those things happened. And that brings me to one of those moments where I try and sneak something universal into a personal story; it doesn’t matter how good a hypnotist is, some people are difficult subjects because of who they are.
Yes, everyone can be hypnotized but some people have to learn how to be, and they have to practice it too. That was the case for me, and before Tessa, the light to mid level depth trances I’d experienced with Nikki’s, and Lita’s, and Marquessa/Krystal’s work etc. that I thought was deep trance was put into perspective, showing me I didn’t really know what real depth was.
But as I get to wrapping this piece up, I realize unlike the other entries, I didn’t talk about any of her files.
She has a lot of great stuff, and I would recommend, off the top of my head, Tales from the Couch if you want to get naughty, and the Tessa Teaches Trance series if you want to get into technical hypnosis.
So, where can you find her?
Tessa’s site is still up here and while I haven’t checked, I assume her store is still open.