Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

I went to the party I talked about in my last post, and it was lovely and wonderful and fun and then it was a mess.

The mess was not the party’s fault. Not really. By and large it was a wonderful space filled with a group of people I adore doing fun things and having a great time. I did have some issues, but they were the same issues I always have and reflect more on my tendency to be a bit judgmental about sexual behavior* than on any fault of the party itself.

The problem was with me. I am an introvert even when at my most emotionally healthy, and I am so far from a state of optimum emotional health at the moment that it would take two full days of travel to get there on the Concord. I frequently get stuck in these maddening spirals of thought that swirl around so quickly that there is no way to escape, and when I am tired, depressed, or otherwise off, people quite literally get on my nerves. They make me angry and twitchy and upset simply by being physically near me. I can deal happily with small groups of friends in contained spaces, but if I am even the slightest bit off, which I have been most of the time as of late, surrounding me with flocks soon makes me overwhelmed. If I don’t have something I need to be doing, I simply can not cope.

So on the last night of the party, I fled. I made a valiant attempt to bring up my mood, get dressed in a sexy outfit, and go have fun, and lasted all of five minutes before needing to run away to my hotel room for a good cry. It was there that my MDP found me an hour or so later.

We’d had plans to play, and so he’d come down to find out if I thought I would be more in the mood to play right then or later (in which case he would go play with one of his other partners first.) “Not at all” was not an option (and that combination of considerate and still in charge is a truly delicious and delightful thing.) I left the ball in his court, but apparently was closer to the edge than I thought, because he touched me and I promptly burst into tears.

The most frustrating thing about depression, for me, is the disproportionate emotional responses to minor or nonexistent stimuli. It’s enormously aggravating to be that overwhelmed and upset when absolutely nothing in the world is tangibly wrong, except for being perhaps a little short on sleep. I explained that, or did as best as I could while blubbering, and then he decided it would be better to play right then (or as “right then” as you can manage when you need to inform several people about your scheduling plans) and flopped me into sub space by the simple expedient of telling me to take off my clothes and get ready to please him.

It got me out of my head. It shut off all the doubts and made me present. It, in fact, locked me into the present, which is something I have a lot of difficulty doing for myself. I took off my clothing and was suddenly ready and excited to be used. That is the joy of subspace.

So much of the sex that my MDP and I have takes place inside my mind. So much of what I enjoy is not just what we do, but the way I process it and think about it. It makes for odd, and useful, contradictions like the fact that thinking about him using me when I don’t want him to use me is such a turn on that I instantly want him to use me. I am excited by the very fact that he uses me because he wants to, which is of course why I have negotiated a relationship where someone can use me regardless of my interest at any given time. (I could, of course, always safeword out, but knowing that and believing it means I usually don’t want to or need to. Plus, he’s wonderfully considerate of my feelings, more so than he needs to be, which makes me believe that should he choose not to be because he really, really wants something of me, I would be even more inclined to give in than usual.) It makes me beg him to hurt me as much as he wants, to hurt me more than I like, because it makes me so hot to give more than I actively desire. It makes me fantasize about him doing the things I am most afraid of, and get off on those things, because of that very fear. I can lie in bed next to him, not even touching him, getting more and more worked up by thinking about all the horrible things he could do to me, that I would let him do to me, which I hate or fear… and end up wanting him to do the things I don’t want more and more with every passing moment.

We are conditioning me to give him, and my mental perception of him, rather profound control over my arousal and orgasm. I say we are conditioning, because it is an effort that I actively embrace and further. In fact, I realized the other day that I was asking him to do certain things** while we were playing because I wanted to more closely link sexual excitement to pain. I have fantasized about being able to orgasm from painful stimuli since I first read porn that talked about it over a decade ago, and apparently I was subconsciously trying to get myself there. I told him about it, when I figured out what I was doing in the middle of a scene, and I think he was amused (aroused? amused? such similar words…. let’s just say he didn’t object.)

But really, so much of sexual response is mental and as such can be conditioned. That’s a fun toy, but it also provides a useful conceptual window into other forms of mood alteration. My MDP can knock me into subspace pretty reliably with his actions, but it’s because I’ve - consciously and unconsciously- trained myself to go there. It’s in many ways a form of self hypnosis - learning to get off in the way my mental and physical proclivities drive me to. Why shouldn’t I be able to do that to stave off the worst ravages of depression? I’ve been wondering about practical applications - not of submission but of the mental processes that let me submit - a lot lately.

At the end of our scene that night, alone together in the hotel room, my MDP asked me if I thought I could stay in head space for the rest of the night while he was back at the party, holding onto it until he returned. He was trying to give me a way to function and enjoy myself while alone as well as help keep me from returning to my previously messed up state. I wasn’t sure if I could maintain the head space by myself for an extended period, but the knowledge he was coming back in a few hours made it seem vaguely plausible - so he told me to try and gave me instructions for what was, and wasn’t, acceptable behavior during the time he was gone.

When he left, I basically half napped/half writhed around in head space for a few hours until he returned. He stopped in a few times to check on me, slap me around a bit (Gods, but that was hot), and pick up things he needed, and it worked. I didn’t descend back into the Pits of Despair and what could have been a miserable evening turned into one that was quite intensely wonderful instead.

I really need to figure out is how to apply that trick to myself. It’s been made abundantly clear that I can usually fight my way back to emotional functioning if something or someone needs me to do so, I just have to learn how to manage it on my own volition. It will help, I think, that I have become more and more conscious of when my thoughts are being made irrational by brain chemicals. I just need to determine how to move from recognition to being able, and willing, to do something about it. I shouldn’t need the glorious self-hypnosis of subspace, although it is certainly a tool I can use - even alone in the privacy of my own mind.
–
_{*Not judgmental in the way of “judging their character” but judgmental in the way of “things that make me unwilling to sleep with them no matter how much I might want to.”}

_{Although I must admit I have occaisionally failed to live up to my own standards, it makes me really queasy to see people have sex, even safer sex, with multiple new partners - particularly new partners who they have just met - over the course of a few hours or days. I am frequently envious of the opportunities that they throw freely themselves into that I feel are outside my comfortable level of risk taking, but at the same time I have trouble believing that they’ve all had good talks about testing and safe sex and levels of ongoing risk with each casual partner and are making informed decisions about their sex lives. Given my work-related somewhat privileged place as a Holder of Personal Information In This Area, I also often wonder if I know things that they don’t, and wondering that… makes me uncomfortable. I would never break anyone’s privacy about it, but it makes me uncomfortable.}

_{Unfortunately, another thing that this weekend made me quite clear on is the extent to which I am already unhappy with the size of my sexual network, and I have come to terms with the fact that I’m not terribly inclined to make it any bigger through my own direct actions unless I find someone who has the potential to be a primary partner, or at least a significant, ongoing relationship. I may change my mind, but… for right now my level of risk is high enough and I’d prefer to avoid taking on a new sexual partner who has lots of partners already (or a tendency to pick them up on the fly,) which pretty much eliminates the possibility of “casual” sex. Oddly enough, I’m feeling totally fine with the person who may be coming in once removed, but that’s largely because sie seems a uniquely sensible sort about all the issues involved.}

**_{Like begging him to hurt me when he tells me I can orgasm so that, as often as possible, I don’t come with him except when I’m either in pain or doing something that makes me feel even further under his control.}