Ready or not?

I've been somewhat silent for the last couple of months because there really is only so much you can say about feeling hurt and lost. Intentions to throw myself into the munches and clubs of Melbourne weren't quite followed through as I realised I needed to establish a normal life first (though I did meet a couple of lovely friends). Not to mention having spent five of the last six weeks abroad with varying levels of internet access. I did see the cutest lion cubs though, which kind of makes up for it!

If I'm honest it's been more than being busy - I've not felt ready to head out into the big wide world and meet new people to play with. Too big a part of me has been feeling hurt, rejected, mistrustful and wondering why on earth anyone would want to play with me anyway. I've also been feeling sort of desexed.

Bizarrely after an awful experience in China a few days ago (robbed at knifepoint) being home has made me feel so much better. It's not like I have loads of close friends here but it's lovely seeing new friends, being in my own flat, eating normal food - lots of little things like that. While I've been away I've been having a bit of a flirtation on fetlife, despite stating that I was only really looking for friends. We had a lovely coffee and he gets me rather well and I'm wondering whether I'm ready to dip my toes with somebody new, or whether it's not a good idea when I'm often still tearful from the break-up.

It is strange how real danger can somehow make you feel more alive though, my energy levels are higher than they've been for a while, despite the jetlag. I actually feel like traipsing along to a club, cooking properly, trying out for a girls soccer team. I actually feel up for the prospect of taking a risk and playing with someone new but am a little wary of opening Pandora's box. He did have a lovely way of tugging my hair though...

Little Victories

This week has been a really hard week. For no real reason I've been exhausted, struggling to get out of bed in the morning and wanting nothing more than to collapse by the time 5 o'clock rolls around. Work has been incredibly stressful with a lot of uncertainty around whether or not I was heading off to Africa for weeks only resolved a few days before I fly. The novelty of being in a new country and a new flat has worn off and left me missing friends at home, the familiar grime of my London commute and staples like Marmite, Look Magazine and proper Cadburys chocolate. Then yesterday to make things worse my auntie went into hospital with a stroke and the guilt of not being there for my family has been pretty unbearable.

Therefore it's been a week for small victories. Making myself go rowing and play mixed netball with strangers when all I really wanted to do was go home and eat ice cream. Taking getting into the office on time and putting in nine or ten hours as a victory in itself. Accepting 'cleaning the flat' as an activity and that actually it's alright for the shiny floors and surfaces to be the achievement of the day. Picking myself up, prettifying myself and heading out to meet lovely new friends for dinner and cabaret because staying at home wouldn't make it any better. Feeling incredibly lucky to have met lovely people who have been so supportive - thank you Star and Eternity. Trying to take the pressure off myself a little and to accept that I can't make everything work overnight and don't have to.

Anyway, it is a new week tomorrow and rather an exciting one. I'm off to Tanzania and then Kenya for work. I've not been feeling great about it because I'm still settling in here and in honesty would rather go to Eternity's birthday do and get stuck into rowing and netball. However I'm determined to make the most of it and have plans to head to Zanzibar next weekend - somewhere that has haunted my dreams for years (since a gap year visit was aborted after a mountain biking accident). With any luck I'll also find some adventures in Nairobi!

Not to mention I'm going to have lots of flying time - so I promise to have written some new fiction by next week as I've been procrastinating for far, far too long. I would say if I don't you can spank me but I'm on totally the wrong continent - so there!

More like me

Yesterday marked my first month in Australia - it certainly hasn't been plain sailing but there has been a lot of good. Am happily settled into my new flat, have met some lovely friends, joined a bookclub and work is keeping me very busy. It's really hard being so far away from family and friends, to miss exciting social events, giggling over a glass of wine or just being able to have a bit of a gossip.

But all things considered it's going pretty well. I miss the boy and still feel very sad and broken in that respect but in other ways I feel more like me than I have in a while. It's quite nice remembering that I can meet people and sort out a life for myself on my own and that actually it will all be ok. I'll miss people a lot and my heart will take a while to mend but in the meantime I'll be fine, or even better than fine.

All By Myself

I really am all by myself. My first two weeks down under have been something of a whirlwind - not many people succeed in needing emergency dental within 48 hours of arriving in a country! One wisdom tooth lighter (I never was very wise!) I've realised a few things about myself...

- I'm actually quite good at looking after myself. Within 10 days of arriving I'd found and signed the lease on a new flat, handled the dental crises, set up a mobile and bank account, joined the equivalent of Tescos Clubcard and had my first week at work. My parents friends think I'm 'scarily capable' and I've managed to hit the ground at work not so much a running as a flat out sprinting.

- Sometimes things beyond my control will throw a serious spanner in the works. I hadn't really envisaged antibiotics, minor surgery, reinfection and more antibiotics and then getting ill during my first fortnight. Needing time off work is making me feel incredibly awkward but not as awkward as feeling so wobbly that I really couldn't be confident that was I was doing was actually correct. They will get over it I'm sure but is quite embarrassing that I was off for the extraction, off again when it got infected and am now sick. HR are being lovely (apparently I looked like death warmed up) but get the feeling my boss is somewhat less impressed.

- I'm fine at meeting new people, even if it does scare me and I haven't *had* to do it for a while (as in if I don't I really will have no friends). I've been out to the pub with friends of a friend, to a gig with a girl from work and her friends, seen family friends for dinner, hit the ageplay munch and met kinky girls for drinks. I still feel horribly lonely but I'm going to make friends in the end.

- Other people think I'm competent even if I'm not so sure. Work is throwing an awful lot at me and that includes an awful lot of travel over the next three months. I'm less sure if that's a good thing as it means I can't really join any sports clubs or music groups as I can't commit. I've joined a book group though and once I'm over this bug am going to look into going climbing.

- The break-up may have been for best in many ways. It was however very traumatic and it's only now that I'm realising how various negative aspects have really affected my self-esteem over the last year. I have to put myself back together and realise that I'm an ok person and worth bothering with because right now I'm quite broken. This is going to take time and I don't have to push myself too hard too quickly.

- I need to put some walls back up because I've let too many people inside my head in a spate of trust and it hasn't done me any favours and left me hurt and confused. Better just to rely on myself for a little while as then when it goes wrong and I'm sad I'm the only one to blame.

Which feeds a bit into the realisation that I'm all by myself for now. No partner and no friends in a new place preparing for a few months of nomadism. Hopefully it'll give me the space I need to mend a little bit, to decide who to trust my emotions to in the future, to get over the shit of the last eighteen months. As a teenager I always wanted to be a traveller, so we'll see how I fare with 4 continents in 3 months. I guess it means I won't be putting roots down here just yet, so will continue to view the UK as home and a bit of a grounding point - it's where everyone I care about is anyway.

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.

Back to College

I go back to college on Thursday to study for a qualification I don't really want. Exams, assessments, homework, long Thursday evenings and Saturdays of studying something I don't *really* care about to be something I don't really want to be. Going back wasn't the easiest decision but however much I stamp my feet about it I *am* working in finance for now for very good reasons. And if I am working in finance and my employers will pay for it then it would be extremely foolish not to take the last few exams to earn my chartered status. It is one of those 'right' decisions that you don't like very much but sort of have to accept.

Thing is, I dropped out of the exams two years ago somewhat dramatically by basically failing a paper on purpose. The same paper that I'm starting this week. The rational part of me knows I just need to get on with it but the other part of me is already griping. I finally sat down to do my pre-course work and realised that I can't actually access it on this computer. I have four online tests to do by Thursday and haven't even started. The worst thing is deep down I just don't care - it's like being a student again and finishing printing an assignment due at 4pm at 3.59 and sprinting to hand it in. The stupid thing is I'm not a student, I'm a grown-up and that part of me recognises that I need to do it for my career, that my employer won't be happy if I fail but some deeper part is still rebelling against it.

I'm trying to decide if I should get someone to 'mentor' me over it and thrash me in a way I won't like if I get behind or if that's a bad idea. I've never reacted very well to 'real life' discipline, my best friend frequently jokes that I have 'a problem with authority' and it's probably true. Somewhere along the line I got bored of playing by the rules and being the perfect student, bored of life's constrictions and started to see how much I could get away with. Maybe it's gone too far and I should ask someone to help me stay on track for this course. Because in all honesty if I don't pass it won't be because I couldn't, it'll be because I didn't.