With a little help from my friends...

Just a quick post to say a massive thank you to all the friends who've held my hand through the last year and a bit and offered tea, cuddles and a shoulder to cry on when I've needed it, which has been quite a lot. I haven't blogged much for quite a while because frankly life has been mostly less than sparkly and too many 'feeling sad today' posts are very dull and very self indulgent. It's not to say there haven't been good things - Lowewood, the reformatory and house party, my Central American adventure, the Lakes with uni friends - they've just got a bit lost in the mire of feeling sad and lost.

It's funny how things sometimes all go wrong at once to create a sequence that seems bent on keeping you down. Eighteen months ago I was blissfully happy - I'd just started an exciting new job, met a wonderful new boy, had fabulous friends and all seemed well with the world. What I didn't know (maybe I'd have done things differently if I had) was the boss of the new job would continually sexually harass and bully me for the entirety of my time there leaving me emotional and unconfident. That I'd get glandular fever but be working too hard to rest properly, making me tired and ill for the next year. That the boy interest would move far, far away, that we'd survive the long separation (with lots of tears) but that the damage it did wouldn't be something we couldn't fix. That when I finally got the guts to leave the job the ex-boss would stalk me and turn up at my house, making me scared to be alone. That my Dad would get sick, a lot. I could have predicted various minor annoyances like anaemia, a moth infestation, frauds on my bank accounts. I couldn't predict that the boy and I would plan to go to Australia, envisage a life together and then split up weeks before I was due to leave leaving me to go alone. That all of this would make me teary, tired and blaming and hating myself for not being able to handle it.

So yeah, it's been a weird and emotional time of coping with one problem before moving onto the next. I honestly don't think I'd have retained any of my sanity were it not for lovely friends who fed me tea or wine, listened to me sobbing incoherently or debating the same things in circles and dragged me out of the house when I just wanted to hide. I've not been very myself or very much fun and owe a huge debt to those who have helped hold me together - friends are the superglue of life. I'm not going to name people but you know who you are - so thank you. It really is true that you do get along 'with a little help from your friends'.

For better or worse 2011 will be a year of change - I'm moving to Australia, far away from everyone I care about. It's scary leaving people behind, knowing that they'll move on and I won't be part of things but true friends will always be friends and always have time for each other. It's especially scary going all on my own without the boy by my side - but that's out of my control. I'm hoping it will be a chance to draw a line under the sadness of recent months, recollect myself and re balance a little. One of my vanilla friends commented that she was glad I'd decided to go because it was the most 'me' decision I'd made in a while and she worried that I'd seemed a shadow of my normal self recently - that all the tears and worrying were out of character. Hopefully she's right and it will give me a chance to sort myself out so that when I come back I'll be a bit easier to be around, more fun and less sad. Hopefully there will be more fun kinky posts on this blog detailing my adventures down under too.

To all those who've looked after me - thank you so much - I have really appreciated it and hope you all know that (even if I haven't enunciated it very well through floods of tears). True friends are forever and I love you all so much.

R xx

Less than 'me'

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about headspace and bdsm and how it can make me feel. One thing I’ve realised is that although I love playing in the space where I’m riding the pain, there’s lots of banter and I’m quite ‘high’ sometimes I want something different. I want to be less than ‘me’. It’s odd but when I’m playing like that, not really feeling it when it hurts, minimising my reactions, giving the top a lot of lip that’s closest to whom I am in vanilla life.

I was bought up to give as good as I got – mentally and physically. Not to mention spending a significant part of my formative years in a martial arts dojo where ‘sucking it up’ was the done thing – if someone hit you and it hurt hit them back, if you fell badly or missed a block and got hurt make a joke and accept that it was your fault. Tears were certainly not acceptable, grimaces during training sure to attract extra attention from a fairly sadistic instructor. Retrospectively it’s no coincidence that I loved it and flourished from a scared looking chubby girl to fight full contact, instruct and take no shit from the inner city lads who thought they’d try it on because I was a girl. Fast track a few years to university and I was boxing with the boys before swapping to rowing and ultimately captaining the squad. The learned behaviour not to hurt, not to let anyone see me cry and to focus on succeeding in competition have served me well in many respects. They complicate things somewhat as a submissive.

When I first came onto the scene I wanted to resist, to be taken advantage of, gave tops a lot of lip and mostly played in quite a ‘high’ headspace. I think that came from needing time to become comfortable with the idea of giving someone else control, and also from playing more with people I’d just met and wanting to keep the barriers up. I still enjoy playing like that – it tends to leave me on an endorphin high, which is awesome.

Sometimes I want to go deeper into myself though and let myself be less than ‘me’. I want to open myself up fully to what’s happening and let myself feel things fully. To be vulnerable in a way I can’t in a life that demands me to constantly stand my ground with work and things. If something hurts I want to let myself whimper, I want to feel scared, to wriggle, to fuss a bit. It fuels a feeling of being slightly pathetic, which is humiliating in itself – the little voice in your head berating you for being such a weak, pathetic girl and making such a voice. The inner confusion that comes from acting in a way that makes me less than what I normally am, delving beneath all the conditioning. Doing as I’m told, being a ‘good girl’, being small and broken.

It’s interesting how in the two different headspaces I process pain differently. When I’m ‘high’ you won’t get much of a reaction for a while but when I do it’s because I’ve begun to have had enough and am really feeling it. When I’m less than me I fuss a lot more quickly because I’m not riding the pain, I’m sinking into it but ultimately I can take as much if not more; there just may be tears before bedtime.

What I find very interesting is I tend to drop into one headspace or the other depending on what’s going on – who I’m playing with, how I’m feeling, what the environment’s like but that it’s very rare I move between them once I start playing. Because in my feistier headspace I don’t want to yield an inch and in my ‘good girl’ headspace I don’t want to fight the Dom – it just feels like the wrong thing to do. I have had one or two very powerful scenes that have taken me from one place to the other but it’s not a common thing.

When I first started going deeper into myself I think it confused people a bit – a couple of playmates commented that I was so well behaved that it was difficult to find reasons to hurt me. I guess that’s the thing – there doesn’t need to be a reason when you’re in that space – you’re a sub and they’re a Dom and they don’t need a reason. Try that with me in a feistier mood and I’ll be proclaiming how unfair it is (whilst still loving it). It’s a funny old world.

Wanting to play like that can be unsettling – to be hurting, scared and confused but it also has a form of freedom just to let go. To be less than the expectations you and others set-upon yourself. To submit and trust in someone else, to stop fighting.