Here We Go Again

Wellp, serina broke up with me.  Again.

It's not a bad breakup.  It's a really good one actually; we're remaining friends and there's no hard feelings (well, beyond a little smarting I'm having today, but that's normal).  I am sad about it, of course I am.  But her reasons were sound, even if somewhat hilarious in a hurtful way.

I'm not want to blab details all over the internet but the short version is that I am not really the type of dom she thinks she needs.  She needs someone domineering and harsh and chaotic, and I'm not that.  I'm polite and gentle and stable.  She also feels she needs more experience with other types and people to figure out better what she needs.

All very sensible.  And I really, really do wish her the best.

Still sucks though.

I think that's all I'm going to write about it.  I have a bit more wound-licking to do and I just... I don't know.  There's not much else to say about it.  Break ups are not enjoyable, even the good ones.

Reconnecting

The past two years have been tough.  I've written about them here somewhat.  What I haven't written about is some personal struggles I've been going through in regards to trust and intimacy and sex.  I haven't written about them because they're too personal, and I'm not about to start writing about them in detail now, either, so sorry about that.  But they need brief mention for context.

I've written about trying to get back into the swing of things.  And I am, slowly.  Too slowly.  I don't feel I am ... I'm not sure the right phrasing.  Living up to my potential is a bit too serious for what I mean, but something along those lines.  It's not so much that I'm not trying hard enough, more just that... maybe I'm not giving it the priority it requires.

Okay, so maybe I'm not trying hard enough.

Or, no.  Maybe I'm just not trying the right tactics.

I've been very... serious with it all.  I've been working hard at it.  And maybe I need to work a little less and enjoy a bit more.

I've been putting so much energy into trying to do things seriously and take things seriously and work hard and try hard and... it's exhausting.  And I think I lost sight of the fun of it all, somewhere along the way.

I realized this as I saw a hashtag on tumblr.  #52weeksofkink

It's basically a tag that some kinksters are using to discuss a different kink on their blogs each week.  But when I first saw it, in my mind I saw: "52 weeks of doing some small fun kinky thing each week".

And I felt such desire.

What if I took the pressure off a bit and simmered things down?  What if instead of everything I do being Meaningful and Another Huge Step in Working Things Out, I just... had some fun, too?

I haven't spoken to boy about this yet but I'm going to bring it up with him perhaps tonight.  What if we wrote a list of little kink activities, and did one each week?  Each week something different.  No big commitments, not even to a full scene perhaps.  Just something little.  Each week.  One tiny thing, one little step towards reconnecting with myself and with kink and with pleasure.

That feels a little like hope.

Limited

I really hate being limited.

I am disabled, chronically ill.  I'm on the more severe side of it.  I spend most of my time on bedrest.  My computer is set up over the bed so that I don't lose my mind with boredom.

In general life terms, this doesn't bother me particularly much.  I keep myself occupied with projects and entertainment.

In kink, sex and relationship terms however.  Hoo boy.  It pisses me off.

It's not just as simple as "I'm not well enough to play as much as I'd like".  I mean, obviously that's a thing, too.  But at the moment I find myself with a new and frustratingly annoying issue.

I feel like I have no space to explore, right now.

I feel like whatever energy or time or health I might have, I need to aim it directly at the two partners I already have.  My effort is such a precious resource that I feel like if I even think about spending it outside of my current relationships, then I am failing them.

But my drive is coming back and with that I find I want to explore, I want to play, I want to have fun.  I saw a cute boy on fetlife the other day looking for a Daddy to cuddle with, and I thought, hmm, that sounds really nice.  But I didn't message him, because I felt wrong about it.  If I have the energy to think about hugging on the couch watching netflix, shouldn't I be doing that with a partner I already have?  But then I feel oddly restricted, like I don't have the feedom to do what I like, which is hardly the sort of feeling one wants to have in D/s poly relationships, hah.

It is worth noting, by the way, that neither of my partners have implied any of this.  This is 100% in my own damn head.

But as irrational as it sounds, it's also not really 100% wrong, either.  Relationships require attention to thrive.  If my attention is limited, I need to channel it efficiently.

I'm not really sure what the answer is, here.  I suppose it requires some more thought, and probably some discussion with my partners.

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.