When Onyx and I began getting deeper in our D/s dynamic I had no idea the emotional impact it would have on me. I thought about it in some ways, I figured there would be impact on all areas of my life, but I had no idea the scope it would take. In some ways I feel like I’m experiencing NRE (New Relationship Energy) all over again. Surely there was a boost of NRE in March of last year when I returned back from Juneau, and now, after all of the changes our relationship has gone through since February when we took the Delving Into Power workshop, there’s a surge of something if not that.

It’s the little things that are so impactful to me, the rituals that we have intentionally set into our lives to keep our dynamic going. I really love them, but they also frighten me. The more I am of service to him and the more I am submissive to him the more I want to do those things. My collar has been brought up a few times lately by people that I just met, perhaps simply indicating that I’m around more D/s-oriented people, but it is often startling to me to be seen in that light. I still have some internalized domism in me, I think, that needs sorting out.

I don’t equate submission with weakness, at least not on a conscious level, but there is a fuckofalot of vulnerability when it comes to getting in this deep, and I only see myself getting deeper. I don’t believe vulnerability is weakness either, but it is unfamiliar territory. I’m so used to being closed off and walled up that this newfound vulnerability and presence is quite startling, even if it is what I’ve also been craving for so long. I want to be vulnerable, to be present and transparent, to not feel I need to hide or be shamed for my desires or any part of me. For the most part I’ve got that down, but every once in a while something gets triggered and I shut myself off.

I’ve been working pretty ceaselessly to clear myself of triggering patterns, of stories that aren’t mine and don’t serve me, of the reasons behind the urge to shut off or lash out, but it’s not something that I can achieve once and never have to worry about again. It is something I have to do constantly. Sometimes it is simply easier to let the old destructive habit take over for a while. It requires less work and I can let myself go into the spiral of guilt or sadness, then getting more frustrated at myself for allowing myself to get into the spiral but not allowing myself to see the way out of it.

Still, though, I work, I soldier on to clear myself of what I can, hoping to live as fully in every moment as I possibly can. That’s enough for now.

The more I put my trust in Onyx the more I find myself emotionally attached to him. I am also painfully aware that my survival depends on him, since he is very much my Sugar Daddy at the moment⁰¹. He doesn’t seem to mind, but it is worrisome to me, especially as I become more attached to him in other ways as well. I am scared to become more reliant on him, yet that is part of weaving a life together with someone else.

We refer to each other as life-partners, and maybe six years isn’t enough time to make that declaration, but I can definitely see us together for a long time. It is quite wonderful, but also quite frightening.

I love the closeness we are cultivating, the vulnerability I feel is just as amazing as it is frightening. I love the spirituality that we are bringing in to our dynamic as well, and perhaps that is at least one way I can help offset the fright, but that might be a whole other post. I think I still have a bit of processing and exploring to do to find just how I fit with submission and service, although I also recognize that sometimes finding something like that out isn’t necessary. Perhaps what I really need is to just let all the analyzing and processing go and just be in the moment.

1. I am making some money, but definitely not paying my fair share [↩]

A lot has happened in the three months since this semester started, both personally and professionally, and in some ways I can’t believe it is over already. I wasn’t prepared for the speed with which these three months have gone by, but it has all been wonderful. There were some topics that I wanted to write about but just didn’t get the chance, like Public Humiliation, Skin Stapling, Corsets, more on our Rope escapades, and joining my fellow student bloggers crafting homemade floggers, but I just didn’t have the time.

I re-read my application post and my introduction post in preparation for writing this, my final post on the Kink Academy Student Blog, then looked over all my posts this semester. My intention when applying was to use the videos I would be watching and the techniques I would be learning to get closer with my partner, Onyx, as well as to learn skills that I could use both with him and others. [...]

Read the rest on the Kink Academy Student Blog!

Read all of my Student Blog Posts here

Once upon a time Onyx and I were running late for a queer play party. We were making our way out of the elevator of our building on the ground floor when I saw something slip from under his jacket and slide neatly through the thin crack between the elevator and the main floor. It was one of our toys: the wicked, short, thin, red acrylic cane. While it was not my favorite cane its sister cane—a thicker and longer red acrylic cane—had also recently been taken from us as well, it was stepped on and snapped during a passionate moment. I was quite sad since this brought our total cane count down to simply two.

It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if we only had two paddles or crops or straps, in fact we only have two or less of each of those, but canes are a different story. I love canes. As you probably figured already from the title of this post, canes are my favorite toy to play with, both as a Top and a Bottom.

I have written about canes before for Kink Academy, so if you’ve been following my posts you have already read about my love of canes once, but it bears repeating again. Why? There are more wonderful caning videos to talk about now, of course! [...]

Read the rest on the Kink Academy Student Blog!

Read all of my Student Blog Posts here

While I have gained skills or many new activities through numerous Kink Academy videos, such as bootblacking, rope bondage, and fire play, I have found that watching videos on activities that I already engage in is also extremely valuable. Instead of exposing me to a new way of looking at the entirety of something, like other videos have, usually watching videos of an activity or skill I already participate in or possess exposes me to a different perspective or slightly different techniques than I have used before.

I can’t remember exactly when Onyx and I started playing with face slapping, but we’ve been engaging in it a lot more in the last year or so than in the previous five years of our relationship. I think part of that has to do with the higher level of trust and intimacy we’ve experienced in this last year compared to all the others. I know we’d played with it casually before that, but it has become a pretty significant part of our play. Face slapping is one of the few activities that both turns me on and gets me into a submissive frame of mind practically instantaneously. It is quite powerful. [...]

Read the rest on the Kink Academy Student Blog!

Read all of my Student Blog Posts here

I still have my first pair of knee-high leather boots. They were Fluevog Angel Boots, though I didn’t know what Fluevog was at the time, I was sixteen. Although the soles are now virtually nonexistent and the toes are scuffed beyond recognition I still have them, because they are a part of my past, a part of my life for so long. I still remember going to birthday dinner at my favorite chinese place in my hometown the same evening I got them and being so excited to have them snug around my calves.

I’ve been a lover of leather boots ever since. I’ve been thinking recently that leather boots may go so far as to being a fetish of mine, and not just in a talismanic sense. The feel of leather surrounding my flesh is intoxicating, and taking my Owner’s boots off for him or the idea of his boot pressed against my body fills me with pleasure. I discovered Lee Harrington‘s video Sole/Soul: The Art of Leather (a free video that anyone can watch, btw, even if you’re not a member) a while ago and even before watching it I had the desire to learn bootblacking, but it inspired me to start seriously looking into it. [...]

Read the rest on the Kink Academy Student Blog!

Read all of my Student Blog Posts here

I’ve always had kind of mixed feelings when it comes to service. I wrote about service once before for Kink Academy where I talked a lot about intention and some background in my relationship with my partner of six years, Onyx. If you haven’t read that one I encourage you to do so.

This week, however, I’m writing about new service-oriented videos that just came out, specifically those by Mollena Williams. I’m not the only one who has written about her, no doubt because the videos are awesome and Mollena is an amazing teacher. I have only seen her speak once in person, at a conference a few years ago, but I have been following her on Twitter for far longer than that, so I was really excited when I saw her first Kink Academy video pop up in my feed reader. [...]

Read the rest on the Kink Academy Student Blog!

Read all of my Student Blog Posts here

On Friday I was lucky enough to get to both wield and have my ass reddened by our newest toy addition: a super short and faily thick acrylic cane that Onyx and I picked up while we were in Portland last month. Aside from the love I would regularly have for a purple acrylic cane part of the reason I suggested to Onyx that we buy it was because I had recently watched the Stingy vs. Thuddy video.

I’ve loved canes for as long as I’ve loved impact play, especially the thicker ones. The thing I hear most about canes is this misguided notion that canes are all extremely painful, but in reality they can elicit a wide range of sensations. While I knew most of the information in the Stingy vs. Thuddy video it had never been laid out for me that same way, so it was extremely useful, and it’s information I’ve relayed to friends since watching. I started rating the canes we have: thuddy, thuddy with a stingy finish, and stingy with a thuddy finish (I love making kink toys sound similar to a fine wine and it works so well!). We used to have a wicked stingy thin one too, but one day it snapped at the handle while in mid-use! Somehow I didn’t mind.

I really like thud. That’s not to say I don’t like sting, because I do, but I generally can take a lot more thuddy than I can stingy. Really, though, I like it all. In fact, if that is not my motto I don’t know what is. When presented with multiple options I generally have a difficult time choosing because I want all of them. Go ahead and call me greedy, I don’t mind. [...]

Read the rest on the Kink Academy Student Blog!

Read all of my Student Blog Posts here

This is a word that carries a lot of weight with me. Just how much weight I wasn’t completely aware of (consciously) until last night. As I have mentioned before Onyx and I have begun to create lists of tasks for me each night that I am to get done while he is at work. These are all sorts of things such as housework, spiritual work, making a living work, relationship work, or whatever else. They are to keep me on track and so I have a tangible thing to look at when I’m feeling like I haven’t gotten anything done that night and say “no, see, you have finished things!”

I’m not entirely sure why but the last few days I’ve been slacking a bit. I have not completed things by the time I have to go to bed and last night I forgot to send him my nightly text at 3am until nearly 3:45. This was not good, of course, and I knew that but sleep was necessary. The night before we had been talking on gtalk and he mentioned he was disappointed about me having to go to bed before everything was done but that it was acceptable because of circumstances that had happened. Following closely, last night he said he was disappointed in me for missing my nightly text.

I started bawling. Him saying that felt like punishment enough for what I had done because I felt so poorly about it. I knew it was a disproportionate reaction and I could actually examine my emotional reaction as it was happening, which was nice and is something I’ve been working on. Neither of us would have guessed I would have reacted so strongly to such a small thing, but I did. I was somewhat shocked, actually, and thus commenced my analyzation of why that term has such power over me.

When I was growing up I was rarely punished for bad behavior. My mother is big on developmental and child psychology and my father would just get withdrawn and upset but rarely directly punish me. I can only think of one instance where I was even sent to my room, so mostly my “punishment” was guilt or being told they were disappointed in my behavior. Naturally this created a trigger in me. I strove to never disappoint them (or never let them know about what they would be disappointed about). Disappointment was the worst thing I could do to someone.

That’s not to say I don’t and haven’t disappointed people. There are plenty of things I have done that I feel bad about, but for the most part those are small things, there is nothing in my life that I regret.

I attribute the weight of his words last night to be partially because of the new power dynamic that we have been building between us and partially because of hearing it two days in a row. I was already feeling down from the day before and I was already beating myself up about not doing what I was supposed to and he said that. For the record, I keep saying “he said that” but I’m not placing blame on him for my reaction or anything, neither of us could have predicted that is what would happen. Vaguely I remember recognizing disappointment from others as a source of pain for me, but it hadn’t come up in so long I just had no idea I would react so strongly.

I also have a tendency to subconsciously punish myself. I was feeling extremely down after that happened and although I got myself to feeling a little better through the hours before Onyx came home when he came home I closed myself off and didn’t allow myself to find the comfort in him that I might have been able to if I wasn’t, essentially, punishing myself. There was no time when I thought “I’m going to do this” but that is what happened. I was sad and closed off and I had done the same thing the night before as well, though to a smaller extent.

Onyx and I had a talk about this earlier today so he knows about what the word triggers in me and we discussed possible options for punishment that he could inflict that would not be as damaging or affect me for so long. Of course, if I do something or don’t do something that carries a lot of weight with it he also knows that he can use that word to hit home the true weight of the situation to me. Ultimately, this is another tool for him to use in our dynamic.

It wasn’t long ago that Onyx put a collar around my neck for the second time, but at the time there was little that came along with it that wasn’t already in our relationship. The last year has been the best we’ve ever had together, and after nearly six years together that’s saying something. Hopefully, though our effort at sustaining and nourishing our relationship, that trend will continue. After the first time he collared me and I moved in with him there was a time when we attempted to implement some service and protocol in our lives. It didn’t work.

There was lots of baggage we both were battling back then, issues and assumptions we both were making due to past experiences either with other people or with each other. I desperately wanted some structure. I wanted clearly defined rules and protocols. I wanted all the things I’d heard what M/S is, the things I had read about in books and erotica. I wanted to be controlled by him in every way. When we tried to put those into practice, however, I rebelled. I didn’t trust him. I couldn’t submit in those conditions. He couldn’t control me and I wouldn’t let him.

Fast forward four years or so. The last year we’ve been at our peak as far as our intentional non-egalitarian relationship, which I often refer to as Owner/Brat for lack of a better term. I am owned by him, I am his, but I am not always submissive or obedient. I have the leeway to be a brat, to struggle, things we both really enjoy (though usually I’m only a brat in certain contexts). I had been consciously neglecting the other aspects, however, at least partially because they didn’t work before.

Enter Delving Into Power, a weekend intensive by Lee Harrington (who has some wonderful clips here on the Kink Academy) that Onyx and I attended the first weekend of February. Going through that weekend my Service Submissive self was tapped into and I realized there were aspects I was missing and that Onyx and I were finally in the right place to address service and protocol in our relationship so naturally I began scouring the service and protocol category of Kink Academy to see what other tools I could find.

Read the rest on the Kink Academy Student Blog!

Read all of my Student Blog Posts here

Two weekends ago Onyx and I attended a Delving Into Power Intensive with Lee Harrington, an intimate⁰¹ three-day workshop focusing on power exchange within relationships to “create the non-egalitarian relationship of your dreams!” Going into it I felt rather content with our relationship as it was with the knowledge that there was, of course, room for improvement and was startled at what was brought up in me. I introduced our relationship to the group as an Owner/Brat dynamic, which is close to the truth. I’ve been thinking of replacing Cunt with Brat in the normal way I describe my role with Onyx, but that’s another post.

A lot of the information presented included things I had thought about before that Onyx had not or things that Onyx had thought about that I had not or things that we had talked about in our previous relationship with each other⁰² that we hadn’t explicitly talked about in this one⁰³. It was especially refreshing to be around other kinky people, something that has been missing in our lives for the most part as we’ve been focusing more on the occult community here rather than the kinky one⁰⁴. We were both able to get some perspective on our own desires and feelings by being in such a group.

There was so much wonderful information I won’t even go into it, mostly I want to talk about some of my reactions and the changes in our relationship since then. I love to be a brat and part of that love is to elicit a firm hand in dealing with me, basically forcing Onyx to reign me in (consensually!⁰⁵), but something that came up over the weekend was my equally strong desire to submit and be of service. The latter is not something we have been exploring in our new relationship as much as the playful force that bratting brings in at least in part because of our failure to implement it in the old one. We had such difficulty with trying to view service in a particular way and trying to include that in our M/s relationship but now that we’ve in an O/b relationship⁰⁶ for nearly a year and we’ve gotten comfortable with that the service and submission aspects need some focus.

We had a long talk on Saturday during a break between class and dinner/play party time that was most wonderful. We both expressed some things that had been building up within us and were able to come to some conclusions as to what we each wanted to include in our relationship. I was having trouble that day because I was feeling like I didn’t fit in for various reasons⁰⁷ and because I felt like I was failing Onyx⁰⁸ partially due to lack of explicit instructions. Onyx doesn’t like giving out explicit instructions but I need them, something we have had lots of trouble with before.

There was a lot more we talked about, including the spiritual path we are currently on and our own issues that we have each been dealing with. We expressly communicated about the things we each need and want and ways for us to begin getting that. It was refreshing and amazing, exactly what had needed to happen, and took us one step further in our relationship. Realizing my service desires that I had been squelching with him for so long was freeing. I had doubts then about our ability to actually implement some things that we were wanting due to our past experiences, but those doubts are nearly gone now.

We haven’t had the time to talk too in-depth about our power dynamic since the weekend long workshop because of work and then going to another workshop this past weekend that was not kink-focused⁰⁹, but we have been able to begin some practices that have not only worked to shape the new dynamic that is forming between us.

The primary practice we’ve been putting into action is a daily checklist so I am accountable for the work I do. I’ve previously complained about feeling like I never get anything done or I don’t get enough done even when I do get things done. I’m still working on figuring out this self-employment stuff. I’ve also been a little lax at my cleaning duties. This daily checklist allows me to feel accomplished when I do get things done and for me to be sure I am doing something for Onyx every night as well, plus I have a fetish for lists¹⁰.

I’m excited to feel like we’re moving forward into uncharted (by us) territory. We have new ideas and a great many things we want to include in our relationship as it goes forward. There will be plenty of road blocks ahead but I feel like we will be able to encounter and move through them all. Along with the workshop this past weekend, which helped me release some things I have been needing to for quite some time¹¹ and I believe the same thing happened for Onyx as well. It has been a transformational couple of weeks.

There has been a general shift in our dynamic because of the communication, interaction, and introspection we were able to do both individually and with each other. I feel so much more connected and in tune than we were before, and this last year we’ve been so much more connected and in tune than we were before that! It seems like we’re just getting better and better, which is truly amazing.

1. there were 16 of us total I believe [↩]
2. the years before the triad [↩]
3. since I returned from Alaska last March-yes I consider the post-triad relationship to be a separate one [↩]
4. eventually my hope is to be part of a kinky queer occultist tribe, which is starting to happen [↩]
5. or, lately it has been consensual [↩]
6. I am not defining the differences here at the moment, but I am sure I will be talking about them soon in another post! [↩]
7. all in my head [↩]
8. or I was being set up to fail [↩]
9. which I will also be writing about [↩]
10. both making and crossing things off of [↩]
11. you will just have to wait for the other post for more on that [↩]