Secret Confessions of a Smart Girl

“I am kinky. You are perverted. They are deviant.”
“Mmm… you can conjugate me any time… wait… does that make this a conjugate visit?”
*thwack*

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.}

I tend to be extraordinarily leery of using BDSM as therapy. That having be said, however, there are times I find it to be extremely therapeutic.

For various reasons, including a parade of weasels, I have been considering bailing on a play event at which I will see (among many other adored people) my MDP. This morning he told me to find a way to make it possible for me to come to the event and… it helped. Having him tell me to find a way to make it work shut up the weasels long enough for me to reframe my problems in a way that I -could- make it
work.

I’m good at being a high-functioning depressive for work.

I’m terrible at doing it for life.

Still, it seems as though having given my mind permission to put his desires above mine in scene space, and in fact finding great comfort and joy in doing so, has also given him the quite useful ability to tame my social anxiety (and related) weasels. I can’t quite do it for me, but it does seem I can do it for him.

I find this both fascinating and somewhat disturbing, because, while I’m amazed at how well it works, it makes me very uncomfortable using someone else for emotional caretaking. I like being that person, but I can’t quite grasp, emotionally, that someone might like being that for me. It’s awfully nice though, that he seems to. (I can’t quite bring myself to write that as “he does.”)

We were discussing this in a related context the other week and he said to me “I don’t know, in this case, where to draw the line between respecting your worries and just Being The Dom and having you do what I want.” So we talked about it, figured out which worries were legitimate concerns and which were acceptable for him to D/s me through, and moved on from there.

That sort of respect and conversation is why I can let him push my limits and take me to the places I am not always comfortable wanting to go - because I am confident both that he won’t try to take me anywhere I don’t really want to go and that he will listen to my worries and address them constructively (by stopping or altering or whatever. For that matter, I suspect the fact that he knows I will tell him if something he wants is a problem also allows him a great deal of comfort in just assuming he can take) It enables me to love letting him use me without regard for what I want or like at any given moment, because I am completely confident that he has complete respect for what I need.

This sort of submission is really nice. It’s oddly comforting, even in the moments where it’s terrifying. It’s also incredibly hot to know he can take what he wants when he wants it (within what we consider reason) and I suppose the proof of my submissive orientation, at least in this relationship, is the fact that him wanting something almost always makes me instantly want it too - even if moments before sex, pain, or service was the last thing on my mind.

It’s quite weird, as an extremely introverted and often exceedingly selfish person, to find so much pleasure and joy in having someone who wants things from me and in being able to just give to them.

I guess that, if push comes to shove, when you can get me out of my own head I really like to care.

Sexual arousal is, for me, often mostly in my mind.

The right touch isn’t nearly as important as having my brain engaged in the activity at hand (at tongue? at whip?)

It’s one of the reasons why I usually masturbate to erotica. It’s not so much the sensations that get me off as the neurochemical alchemy of desire.

I often laugh to imagine the standard porn trope - “show me how you masturbate” - applied to me… since it would primarily involve pulling out one of my most reliable books.

That’s not always as true when it comes to having sex with other people. Pleasure there is often more about connection and sensation than pure neurochemical bliss. Still, there is occasionally an exception.

One of the reasons I so enjoy submitting to my MDP is that it so often takes my brain to its happy place. In my head, things become not just about what is happening, but what could happen, and I end up excruciatingly turned on just imagining the possibilities.

I have to say, though, that sometimes it’s nice to know that the swirling mass of deviant ideas and wicked plans is not entirely in my head*.

The other day, he whispered me to an orgasm.

If you paid me, I couldn’t tell you what he said.

All I know is I was lying on top of him and he was speaking in my ear, and all of a sudden I said “You’ve pretty much just talked me to an orgasm.”

Then he grabbed my ass hard enough to really hurt, told me to come, and I did.

It was ludicrously, insanely, and intensely hot.

Gosh, but it’s incredibly perversely** fun to be involved with someone who has such a highly congruent and complementary fantasy life.

–
_{*Not that I even remotely thought it was, but Holy Crap Objective Proof, Batman!}

_**Literally

It was the middle of the work day for him, but I work at home and make my own schedule. Lately I’ve noticed that I tend to spend more time online during regular business hours so that we can chat, and so that I can spend time shmooping with my girlfriend in another window. It’s not the most productive part of my day, but it’s a nice connection when the people you care about live several hours away.

I had just stated my intention to walk away from the computer to engage in some “focused daydreaming” to improve my mood. I was feeling tired, cranky, and a bit out of sorts, and I wasn’t certain if it was a euphemism for napping, masturbating, or cleaning out my closet. Fortunately he had his own ideas.

The phrase, “I think it would be appropriate for you to” is not usually followed by “find something just a bit larger than is entirely comfortable inside you, fuck yourself with it, and come for me.”

That time it was. Apparently, we are redefining the term “appropriate.” Not that I could find it in me to object. To blush behind my screen, yes. To be slightly horrified that he was telling me to do that from work, yes. To become instantly, enormously turned on - to deny it would be to lie.

So I went browsing through the sex toy drawer. I had actually done a big clean out around 6 months ago, and gotten rid of most of the toys that I considered to be too large for comfort, but I thought I still had one or two of them left. My favorite of the two I found - the vibrator I use when I want the sensation of being filled to be just on the right side of pain, when I want to fantasize that it’s “too big, too much” - wasn’t suitable for fucking, but it turned out that I had a toy of a similar width that was. A little short, perhaps, but wide enough that it would be difficult to push in, and shaped so that I could fuck myself with it and stay on the boundary of discomfort without falling over the edge.

My instructions were to fuck myself and come, that was all, and so I decided to take them literally. I would be allowed no other stimulation - no pain, no vibrator on my clit - my orgasm had to be from the sensations of the toy alone. It was my only allowable source for pleasure or pain.

I took off my clothes, put a condom on the toy, and heard his voice in my head as I slowly worked it into my cunt. As I thought, it was a little too wide for easy insertion. I had to push it in slowly, and firmly, and it still was a bit large to slide easily along my inner walls. I wanted to touch myself further, but I forced myself to follow the instructions I had been given and just slowly fuck myself with the toy - pushing it in far enough to hurt, and then twisting the head so that it would press against different places inside of me. I imagined that it was him fucking me, because in a way it was, and pictured him above me as I pushed the toy deep against my cervix so that it would make me ache while it finally made me come.

Then I came back to the computer to tell him what I’d done. It seemed, somehow, like it would be appropriate.

I have, of late, been particularly fixated on control.

Things are going almost disturbingly well in my main D/s relationship, and I find it somewhat frightening how turned on I get by my partner doing things that speak to me of control.

It’s one of those things that it goes against the grain for me to speak of longingly. I had the same problem this weekend, when I was in bed with my partners trying to describe a particular rape fantasy. It feels wrong to want these things, even though I know that by wanting them I am not endorsing their existence in the universe at large… or even in my own personal bailiwick.

I am a bit of a control freak. I have a visceral need to be self contained that I sometimes have a great deal of difficulty giving up. Thus I find it disturbing how comfortable I am, and how much I like, giving up control to my MDP* - not to mention how much I want to do it.

I have a conceptual difficulty with begging someone to do things that make me feel like I am under their control. I am therefore usually extraordinarily pleased when my MDP does them spontaneously, and I am now going to speak rapturously of something that happened that is so weird to speak rapturously of I’m not entirely certain how to do it.

He kept playing with my mouth. Not in the “sexy finger sucking” way, but in the exploratory way in which you would evaluate a horse - a creature for sale. His fingers pushed against my teeth, my soft palate, my tongue, and it was freakishly erotic - not the activity itself but the fact that he could.

It is mystifying to me how much I liked it. It made me feel some strange combination of (literally) objectified and safe. It felt like how you’d idly play with a toy, a possession, that you like to use, rather than like how you’d treat a person, and it slightly horrifies me that that’s something that so profoundly turned me on.

These days, with him, I’m kinking on all sorts of things I don’t particularly like, or that intellectually bother me. In part, this is because the fact that I don’t like them makes me feel particularly blissfully submissive when they happen, and in part it is because the kinds of things I tend to not objectively like are those that also speak to me most viscerally of control.

The most obvious example of this is that I don’t like breath play. It scares me and it isn’t particularly inherently erotic, but I find myself wanting him to hold his hand over my nose and mouth and cut off my air just because he can. Just because it makes me feel instantly under his control. This is something I usually won’t even consider negotiating with people, and with him I long for it? How bizarre.

It’s so strange to me, where this relationship is - what this relationship is- and the odd things about it that I value and cherish. There’s so much about it that makes me really happy, and very little of it is what I normally would expect. It would make sense to me if what I was jonesing for was more of the incredible sex, but the fact that the craving is for more, and deeper, submission is somewhat more confusing. I don’t dislike it. It just requires some more work to understand**.

_{*MDP = Main Dominant Partner. He who is colloquially known as The Boyfriend, although that doesn’t quite feel right as anything other than convenient shorthand. It’s not wrong, it’s just not as semantically apt as calling The Girlfriend The Girlfriend - a descriptor that speaks more accurately to the fundamental nature of the relationship.}

_{**Interestingly, it doesn’t reflect a desire for more submission in my other relationships. If anything, the more intense the submission gets with my MDP, the less I tend to want that particular type of submissive headspace with other play partners. It’s almost embarrassingly kinky-shmoopy to say it out loud, but that’s his headspace, and I don’t particularly want to give it to anyone else.}

Not so long ago, my main dominant partner told me to do something that, had you asked me in advance, I would have said was:

1. a hard limit
2. massively squicky
3. not hot in the least

In the moment, however, I did it without question, because he said to, and it blew my mind.

I feel like I should find this problematic, but I don’t. Even though the act in question is still rather squicky in retrospect, I’m not actually bothered by the fact that I did it. In fact, I find it rather insanely hot that, in the moment, I just did what he told me too, and I’m reasonably certain that had it been something that was going to bother me upon sober reflection I wouldn’t have… but I’m only reasonably certain.

This, then, is where my intellectual and emotional responses to submission take a divergent course.

• There is a voice inside my head that  keeps telling me that I should be disturbed by the fact that I not only can give up enough of my control to someone else that I will do things I find instinctively objectionable without even thinking about them  but that I enjoy doing so.
• There is a separate, and much louder, voice that is thrilled to have found a situation in which, and a person to whom,  it feels so safe to thoroughly give up the control that I normally grasp so tightly in my tension filled hands.

Time out of mind is one of the things I most value about submission. It is not something I find easily, and once I get past the difficulty of letting go of thought, giving up control, freeing myself from the usually overpowering constants of analysis and worry, it can be exhilarating, quiet, peaceful, erotic, terrifying, comforting…. or all of the above. To unquestionably do this thing was, in some ways, a proof to me of how much I had given - how much I had let go. That was a good portion of the reason why I found it so hot.

With the partner in question, I’ve noticed that I  tend to say “yes” these days  before the question is even asked, and it is sincere. This largely feels safe because I honestly do not expect him to ask anything I’m truly unwilling to give. Realistically speaking, however, that instinctive and preemptive “yes” actually worries me more than the acting without thinking, because I know that there is every possibility that he could ask for something I am not willing to agree to… and I would hate to renege on my word.

I suppose that’s where I have to, and do, trust in the balance - that he knows me well enough to not try and take me places to which I can not in good conscience travel, and that if he does I will be able to say “no.” This is a trust that has to go both ways, because if I did not choose these things willingly; if I came out of an activity feeling I had been coerced; if I did not like them so very, very much; or if I was unwilling or unable to stop a scene that was going badly wrong, I could, as he is so fond of joking, press charges. The risk for him is low as long as I can, and do, say “no” when I need to, but some of the pleasure for, I believe, both of us, is in the expectation of acquiescence. The alternative would be giving up the simple joy I take in giving him the ability to take me, and I like the feeling that he has blanket permission (within the boundaries of previously expressed limits) to take anything he wants… even though I know intellectually that it isn’t true.

That idea of blanket permission  is a fantasy that I get to live in by giving more than is easy and more than is comfortable and sometimes by giving more than the things I would choose. I think it would be naive to believe that it is a fantasy in which my partner can fully share, since even though our desires in these areas are quite well aligned I know he must have to moderate the things he asks for and the things he takes… if by nothing else than in their timing.

I often think that it must be a very frightening thing to be an ethical dominant sadist, to enjoy controlling and hurting people while worrying about doing physical or emotional harm. To, in particular, enjoy controlling and hurting people who you care about, who you don’t want to damage or drive away. To sometimes actively choose to do what you want regardless of whether or not it’s something your partner would choose for themselves or even like*. To constantly have to worry about consent.

It’s easier, I think, from the bottom - where I can take a perverse sort of pleasure in choosing not to safeword and letting him beat me until I bleed…  even as I am sincerely begging him to stop.  Where I can be constantly surprised by how much I enjoy it when he doesn’t… because it is a visceral reminder that much of how I find pleasure in submission is in giving someone else what they want rather than in getting to live out a particular fantasy, experience, or dream.

–
_{*And even writing that, I doubt that my feelings on these matters are ever not a consideration. They may not be the driving one, but I suspect they are usually at least subconsciously weighed - thus the ethical part of the formulation.}

–

EDIT: Because it came up in a discussion of this post on another site, I should say that the !squick  in question had NEVER been discussed as a limit.  In the middle of a scene is not when you renegotiate boundaries, and if that had been what was going on I would have been livid.