Return

After too long away, I'm finally stepping back into the local scene.

I find myself remembering, viscerally, how much I felt at home in the scene.  When I sort of took a break from it it wasn't a voluntary thing; my health went bad and my mother died and I just did not have the time to think about kink.  But now my life is stabilizing again, and I find myself able to get back into it - and it's all rushing back like a flood.

Last night I finally got out to an event that's been running for a year and I hadn't gotten to yet.  It's run by some beautiful people I'm already somewhat familiar with, and when I got there I was greeted so warmly by so many people.  Eyes widened and smiles broke out, and "I haven't seen you in too long!" was a common phrase.

Never have I felt so at home.

I love kink.  I love Leather.  And I love the kink and Leather communities.  I love that even though I've been gone for quite some time (almost two years I think?) I was welcomed back in so quickly and so easily.  It was a familial reunion.  So many beautiful people with their beautiful hearts, embracing themselves and each other.  So much love for ourselves and our people.

I'm waxing a little poetic, I know, but that's honestly because it's a poetic thing.  To feel at home is something all humans strive for; we all want to belong, we all want to be beloved.  To feel that is always an extremely powerful thing.

It's good to be back.

Show Yourself to Me, Xan West's New Anthology

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Getting Back Into the Swing of Things

Not long after when serina and I broke up in 2013, I experienced a relapse with my chronic illness.

Those two things combined in a way that meant I wasn't able to get out to kink events much any more (something that was extremely difficult to handle as I'd been a regular on the scene since I came out at 18), and also that I was feeling very heart-sore about D/s relationships.

Boy and I began our relationship back in 2007 as vanilla lovers, and that means that for us, that is always beneath the D/s.  It's always an interesting balancing act, and not something I'd ever particularly want to try balancing again with future relationships I imagine (but who knows what the future will bring), but it does certainly have its benefits.

One of those benefits was that during this time, I didn't need him to be my boy.  I needed him to be my partner.

Oh, we were still D/s.  Neither of us are very good at vanilla relationships.  D/s is natural for us.  But a lot of the extra bits - the protocols, the play, etc - got stripped away for a while.

Then life kept doing that thing life does, and I went through a few crises.  Then we thought it was settling, and as we settled into our new apartment back in the city, I mentioned to him several times that I was feeling the drive come back, and that I imagined more kinky fuckery was in our future.

Then... shit hit the fan with my mother, and serina got back in touch around the same time, and everything was just stressful and exhausting.  And I was doing my best.  I was.  I am.  But I'm not superhuman.

But now, now things genuinely seem to be settling again.  There is space again.  And that means I can start thinking about the fun frills and ruffles of kink, rather than just feeling like my relationships are all just holding steady until I can breathe again.

I'm still not 100% again yet, but I feel like there at least the breathing room to get there.  I am feeling the stir of the enjoyment of D/s and kink, rather than it simply being a default structure for my relationships.

In a way I feel like I am starting all over again.  And that's actually a rather nice feeling - no one knows the joys and thrills of kink and D/s like fresh new people do, and if I can recapture some of that feeling, I am certain the coming times will be enriching and enjoyable.

Everything is HAPPENING SO MUCH.

Long time no blog, once again.  Only this time, I do have things to talk about, because fucking hell my life kind of exploded.

My mother died.  It's been... incredibly difficult.  I was very close with my mother, I loved her very much.  Her death was entirely unexpected; it happened very suddenly.  She went from completely fine to dead in less than two weeks.  On the bright side, I did manage to get up to the country to see her for the last five days of her life, and I am endlessly glad of that.

More relevant to this blog, serina got back in touch with me, and, well, we are back together.

It was serendipitous.  I had made a post on my personal tumblr blog that I was missing her and that even though it had been so long since we broke up, I was still sad about it, and I still missed her, and a part of me was still hoping we'd get back together one day, even though I knew intellectually that wasn't going to happen.

Well joke's on my brain, I suppose.  Because she decided to a little bit of making herself sad by looking at her ex's online presence, and she saw that post.  She then sent me an email saying she felt the same way.

So, long story short, we are trying again.  I am far too tired from.. well, everything, to go into massive amounts of detail here.  Perhaps I will another time.

For now, we are starting fresh.  We are taking things slowly, because I am still dealing with my mother's death and don't have an endless supply of energy.

I am optimistic about the future.  I am also very, very tired, heh.

Long Time No Blog

Hello blog, sorry for the long time spent away.

Honestly, there's been a couple of reasons for the lack of blogging.

The first is that I've simply not had the time to focus on kink.  My health has been dreadful, and we've been through a lot of stress - we've moved house back into the city, one of our cats got extremely ill, and generic life stress abounded.  So kink has been on the backburner.

The other reason is that, honestly, I'm still a little heartbroken over serina.  It's been well over a year now since we parted ways, but I'm a very ... I'm not sure what the word is, exactly.  Intense maybe?  Attached?  Person.  I am slow to fall in love, however once I am there I'm pretty sure there's no way out for me - I'm still in love with everyone I've loved, regardless of how our relationships went or ended.

And it is hard, as I said - losing not just a relationship, but a relationship that you had a future planned for... it's very hard to lose that future as well.

And so I've been heartbroken and not in the right emotional space to consider new relationships, and barely having enough drive in me to maintain the one I have with my boy.

We are fine, boy and I - we are going through a bit of a normal slowing down that we're working through.  We've been together eight years now, so we've become incredibly familiar, and the relationship does take extra work this far in to make sure no one is getting bored or resentful.

I am, however, finally starting to perk up in terms of my health and my situation.  Hopefully I will be able to get back involved with the community again in the coming weeks - I've missed it a lot, but I did need my time away I think.  Although I've never really felt "away" from the community really, I feel like I keep it in my  heart even if I'm not out going to things.

Still a long way off new D/s relationships I think, but that's comforting in a way, because there's no reason to add seeking stress to my rejoining of the local community.  It will be nice to try and slide back into things, it's been far too long.

Hooks!

So as you can probably guess from the silence on this blog, things have continued being not very exciting for me.  That's going to change in a few months; we've grown jack of the suburbs and we're going to downsize and move back into the city.  It'll be good for both of us for a lot of reasons, one of which being we'll be able to get back out to community events more often again.

But that's not what I'm here to write about today.

A couple of days ago I did a hook pull!

I did a quick google to try and find an easy page to link you to if you're not familiar with it, but I'm coming up pretty dry so I'll say this:  on sunday, I had 6g hooks shoved through my back flesh that I then pulled against, for fun.  Want to see a picture?

I'm not a masochist.  I didn't do it for the pain rush or anything like that.  I mostly did it "because I can", because it's something extraordinary, because I like having extraordinary experiences.

What went on in my head during it is mine and mine alone so I won't be going into that here.  But it was a very interesting experience and nothing like I expected.  I also came out of it thinking I might do it again, which surprised me - I thought I'd come out of it with a kind of "well it's off the bucket list now I'm never doing it again" attitude, but actually, I think I might.

Taking the sticky dressing off a very hair back the next day was infinitely more painful than anything involving the hooks, by the way.  :p

Sometimes You Just Gotta Do the Nilla Thing

Haven't posted here recently for the simple reason I haven't had much to post about.  My health took a nose dive and I've been unable to focus on anything more more complicated than making it through the day and trying to get my life reorganized enough for me to adjust to my new, lower levels of functioning.

That last part's been going pretty well by the way - I have a computer set up over my bed now, so that the bed rest I need isn't terribly boring; but it also has the excellent side effect of making my health when I'm out of bed much improved as well.  So things are actually going pretty well.

So, haven't had much time or energy for BDSM.  Lifestyle things have continued as they were without too much focus on perfection; basically boy and I have been puttering along, both being fairly lenient with each other so we have more energy to focus on just being there for each other.  From an outside perspective I'm pretty sure we'd pass as a vanilla couple very easily at the moment, heh.

It's something not many people think about I suppose - what D/s looks like in the long term, yes, but also what it looks like when other things have to come first.  And times like these is when it becomes clear why people put so much stress on D/s relationships being firstly about the relationship.

Sometimes life circumstances mean you spend less time having kinky sex and more time cuddling and watching tv.  Sometimes you need to take a break from pushing each other to be the best you can and just focus on loving each other.  It doesn't make the relationship any less a D/s relationship.  It just means that life is hectic, humans are vast, and sometimes you need to take a time out to relax.

Having said that, I do miss the kinky shit.  I'm hopeful that I can get back to it asap, considering the slow improvement to my health.

I also miss having a family unit.  Adjusting from a three person family back to a couple is hard.  The hardest part is over - the mourning, the sadness, the healing.  But now... well.  There was a hole inside me before Serina came into my life, and now that she is gone from it again, the hole is reopening.

I am hopeful that we will find someone to join us eventually.  Just gotta stay positive and keep looking.

Little Update

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?

I've been puttering along.  We had a big blood-family xmas here, then there was a death in boy's family so we had to travel for that, and there's been lots of smaller stresses popping up day to day.  The last couple of months has been a bit busy.

I don't really have much to report, life has just been going on.  I'm still mourning the loss of serina, though it's now low levels of mourning just in the back of my mind which is a good improvement.

Things have been quiet for us on the BDSM and D/s front.  We've been "falling into vanilla land" a bit, to quote a friend of mine, but at the moment it feels okay for that.

Hopefully I will have something interesting to post about sometime soon - the good kind of interesting, though, do you hear me universe?

Mourning Pieces

It's been two months since my last post about serina and I parting ways, and I've been spending most of that time mourning, as I'm sure you understand.

It's been hard because there's three parts to my grief - the first is the obvious, my partner and I have split up, and I am sad about that.  Not just for the relationship that was, but also for the future that will now never be.  When you have planned many years together and it gets cut short, you need to take the time to mourn for that future as well.

The second part is mourning the loss of a family member.  She was a part of our lives and our household, and we were finding the rhythm to improve our lives by utilizing the strengths of each of us.  The house feels so much bigger and emptier.  My social calendar no longer contains as many important dates and events.  We have to reconfigure household chores.  Household holidays and celebrations (like upcoming christmas) are one person less joyful.

And the third part is the mourning the loss of a slave in training.  I have mentioned briefly before that submissives are not the only ones who crave D/s relationships and feel less than complete without them.  I've been having D/s relationships for just over ten years now, and there has always been a hole inside me where I am waiting for the right slave/property to come fill it in.  It's a hole that can only be filled by a slave, not a boy, not a princess, not a pet.  Only a slave, though the labels of course don't matter as much as the dynamic.  I don't know what the labels of our dynamic might be, I only know that there is a hole in my heart where I am waiting for someone.

That hole had slowly begun to close with serina.  We were approaching the type of relationship that I have been looking for all these years.  I was able to focus better, I was a better person, because I was beginning to lack the decade old ache inside my chest.

But now, of course, it's opening up again.  And I am by no means ready to start a new relationship right now, which makes the pain all the more noticeable, because I can do nothing about it right now.  All I can do is mourn for what was and try to move on to a place where I am ready for the new to come in.

The collar is still on my desk.  Soon I will be taking it on a trip to the countryside and burying it somewhere there.  I am determined to get it done before the new year, I want to start 2014 having cast off this relationship for good.  Because new years is important to me, it's my most personally important holiday.  I need to cast off the last physical remainder of what was so that I can move forward in the new year.

And one day, I will find the right person for that hole in my chest, as well as many other wonderful relationships I will have, I am sure.  But for now, I heal.

Parting Ways

Ah, I've put off making this post for a couple of days, but now it's the last thing that needs doing before it's all "done" in my mind, so here it is.

Pet--well, serina--and I parted ways a couple of days ago.

As break ups go, it was a good one.  No one did anything wrong and there's no blame to be assigned.  Put simply, she realized that slavery is not the right thing for her right now.  So, we dissolved our contract.

Because a lot of people use my blog as a learning tool, here is how it happened and how we did so with grace:

Once she asked for release and I agreed, we made a time to sort through the details (the release happened when we were apart, via email).  The next day she came to my house so we could do so.

Clothes that I bought for her using her money, I bagged up and gave to her.  Some of the clothes I bought her using my money, I kept.  I don't know if I will ever have another sub who is the right gender and size to wear them, but I am fond of them and I wanted to keep them as an option.

I removed her, or she removed herself, from apps that we used for household management.  So she was removed from the gps tracking app I have, she was removed from the to do list app we use, and we deleted each other's calendars from our accounts.

We discussed social networks briefly - I told her that I had no intention of removing her from my social networks but that if I change my mind on that in the coming weeks not to take it too personally.

Her boots, that I bought for her as her first earned leather, she kept.  That might sound natural but I feel it's worth mentioning anyway.  Regardless of where she goes in life she earned those, they are hers.

Finally, she returned the key to my house, and the collar I had her wear.

And that was it.  Boy drove her home.

I am, to put it mildly, sad about it.  It came out of nowhere to me, as far as I knew we were doing very well.  But... well, it takes two to make a relationship and only one to break it.

The collar is sitting on the desk in front of me as I type this.  I am not yet sure what I will do with it.  At the moment I think that in a couple of weeks or so, once I have felt the worst of the grief, I may bury it.  If I don't do that, then I may just put it in a box in storage.  I don't know yet.

So, it's just the two of us again, me and boy.  He's upset about it too.  We were a little family and now we have lost one.