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.

Missing Cultural History

Ever since I first came into this life, there has been this hole inside me where my cultural history should be.

I am very young by Leather standards.  Very, very young.   I am 28 years old.  I burst out onto the public kink scene the moment I turned 18, and so I've been around for a decade now, which means something in generic kink circles; but in Leather, it's not much.  I am a baby.

I'm okay with that.  We're all young and new in the beginning.  I'm hardly concerned about that.

But this hole, this hole has been in me from the beginning.  And I've spent the last--well, longer than ten years, I think I first started researching this life when I was 14.  So I've spent the last 14 years, literally half my life, trying to learn about my cultural history.  Trying to learn where people like me came from, what life was like for them, what the world looked like for people like me.

I collect lifestyle books.  I collect queer history books.  Unfortunately I'm not as rich as I'd like, so my collection is still quite small, only about one shelf of books.  But I still collect them, it's my lifetime passion.  I read them passionately, because every word makes me feel a little more connected to those who came before me.

Just before my most recent health crash, I sent a few messages to some of my personal elders, asking if sometime I could come have a cuppa and talk with them about their lives.  Reading books is all well and good but it doesn't have the warmth and the earth of personal experiences.

I want to know my cultural history.  I want to hear it.  I want to hear what worked and what went wrong.  I want to hear the heartbreak, I want to hear the ecstasy.  I want to feel connected to the past, specifically the past of Australian Leather people.  I want to save the history and the knowledge from disappearing from my generation, and those who come after me.

Yesterday I was reminded how important this is to me.  The hole in my heart got a little smaller, and it hurt in that itchy way that healing wounds do.

As I hope my health continues to slowly improve, I need to try and get to those discussions.  It's not just that I want to learn, want to know - I need to.  I need that connection to my past, I need it like I need the air I breathe.

Still not much to update, but I missed you, blog.

Still rather ill.  Not a lot has changed since my last entry - although my health does seem to be slowly on its way up, which is good.  Now I just have to not go overboard and wreck it again, heh.

I can't remember if I blogged about this, but pet has another relationship at the moment.  I allow her to have any vanilla sexual relationships that she wants, and while this started out that way... heh.  Pet is one of those people who falls into relationships and honestly I was not particularly surprised when it happened.

She has had her boi for a few months or so now, they are exploring a power exchange dynamic where pet is the dominant.  I'll refer to her boi here on my blog simply as q, hopefully that won't be too confusing.

Q is very new to D/s and BDSM, as far as I know this is the first time they have dabbled in it at all.  Pet has learned a lot from me about how to slowly introducing things in relationships so that seems to be coming along well.  They recently had their three month negotiation that I sat in on, so things are going well there.

It's an interesting thing, the chain of command.  Because while I have no issue with my subs having their own subs, there are practical aspects to consider.  I am high maintenance at the best of times, and at the end of the day if I'm your dominant, I come first.  Simple as that.  Any relationship that might interfere with that is not welcome.

Which isn't to say I'm draconian about it.  I don't mind what my subs get up to when they're not directly interacting with me or following orders, as long as it is something of which I would approve.  Every breath and action my subs take is somewhat of a reflection of me, and that means they need to be living up to my standards as much as possible.  Unfortunately for them my standards get more draconian the more years they are involved with me, heh.  :)

It's not difficult to have a submissive who has a submissive, but having a slave who has a submissive may well be so.  I am however not particularly worried, everyone has been very clear about the chain of command and where everyone falls, and that takes about 6000% of the difficulty out of the situation.

Things are very early days and we will see how things go.  Q has shown an interest in becoming part of the family unit as time goes on, which is a very positive sign for the future of their and pet's relationship.

I'm sorry if this post is a little disjointed or strange, I'm still quite ill and brainfoggy and so I'm not as articulate as I might normally be.  I hope you're all doing well, readers.  :)

Nothing sexy to report.

My health has continued its downswing and everything is boring at the moment.  So no matter how hard I want to write a blog post, I can neither think of anything to say nor can I just talk about life because the only interesting thing that's happened recently that isn't terrible is that we got a kitten.

(We called him Tribble.)

Withholding

First of all, thank you so much for your comments on my last entry.  This is a trying time and your comments were greatly appreciated, thank you.  ♥

~~~

D/s relationships quickly break down if the submissive withholds their feelings or thoughts.

Something I have experienced many times with both boy and pet is that they will stop letting everything out to me, and that's a problem.  I can only make the best decisions with the information I'm given, and if I'm not given complete information I am not making complete decisions.

One of the hardest things you will have to learn as a submissive, no doubt, is that you cannot keep things from your Dominant.  You can't not tell them your thoughts or feelings.  You can't hold yourself back from being affectionate or devoted.  You can't give anything less than 100% of yourself when it's required of you.

Frequently, the Dominant is not giving back an equal share of thoughts, feelings or actions.  That's okay.  These are, by design, unequal relationships.  If you want an equal give and take relationship, then D/s and especially M/s is not the relationship models you should be looking at.

That's not to say Doms should keep things from their subs.  Not at all.  Dominants have their duties too, but they are different from the submissives.

This last couple of months have been awful for me, and pet especially but boy a little too have fallen into this thing where they "don't want to bother me" with things.

No.  Silly submissives, that's not how this works.

Tell me everything.  Give me everything.  What I choose to do with it is up to me, even if it's nothing.  But they, as my submissives, do not get to decide what is best for me.

I've been keeping much to myself and have told them that I am checking up on them less right now because I need to focus on other things.  They, however, are not on holiday, they are still expected to be my submissives and continue giving me access to their power and authority.  Unfair?  Perhaps so.  But as I said, this isn't a relationship model for people who want fair and equal relationships.

I'm back!

Oh boy, this last month has been a Thing.

I don't really want to talk about it, heh.  Suffice to say, stuff has been a headache at best and it's still not finished being a headache.

This last month or so has been awful for me, personally.  Aside from moving house, I've had to do a long term sleep study for a specialist (which has been awful), I lost a friendship, my health has been awful, money has been beyond tight, and to top it all off, my father died.

During that time, BDSM has taken a back seat, unsurprisingly.

What is interesting to me is watching the ways in which boy and pet deal with me being more or less out of commission.

Boy has made me very proud this last month.  He has gotten up and taken over things that needed attention that I wasn't able to deal with, he has taken good care of me, he has been an exceptional example of what a Leatherboy can be in times of stress.

Pet on the other hand, well.  I don't think she even realizes she's doing it, but it's clear to me that without a firm hand on her at all times she begins to lose the headspace.  I haven't done much about it yet because, as you may have guessed from my description of this last month, it has been a very low priority thing, and it's not that she's been a problem.

It's not that she's become rebellious or anything that severe.  But she has become less devoted, she has been less focussed, she has been less communicative.  Not to a degree that it's a problem, not by any means.  But it's something I've noticed.

I feel like this is actually a pretty good example of the difference between a boy/girl and a slave, actually.  When the Dominant is out of commission, how do they react?  Do they step up to look after things, or do they flounder?  Obviously it's not a one size fits all thing, but it is something that I think is very common.

Anyway, as I said, I don't have much to report.  Things are still very stressful here but will hopefully settle over the coming couple of weeks.  I hope you're doing better than I am, dear readers.

Moving House

Well embarrassingly enough for me, no one asked any questions in March.  Fortunately for me, this means I have more time to put towards packing.

Yes, we're moving house.  To a much larger and much cheaper house.

Where finally I will be able to have a dungeon.  :D

See you after the move, blog!