If you mean the BDSM world, I used to be quite the diva - I trained people to dance in ballet boots and arm-binders; I put on staggering productions, I was making quite a name for myself.

Then the girls I was living and performing with broke up with me and alleged abuse, and (because I was deeply in love and had attached my ego-validation processes to their opinion of me to an unhealthy degree) I wholly internalized that narrative.

That was, in fact, the exact moment of the beginning of my collapse.

The seeds were planted a lot earlier, of course - I spent most of my childhood in rather nastily abusive situations, and developed an unhealthy obsession with status and power and dominance - but I'm fairly certain the actual structural collapse occured in mid-2006, when all the support structures that I had built to compensate for those earlier flaws got ripped away.