Kinktober Journal

Part 1 of this wrap-up covered my background when it comes to relationships and sexuality, the reasons for engaging in Kinktober and what I hoped to get out of it, and why I decided to proceed with what was essentially a solo switch dynamic, with a distinct focus on my dominant and submissive sides in their own right.

In this part of my Kinktober wrap-up, I’m going to focus on the psychological considerations for this dynamic and how I dealt with those. In the third part, I will focus on the dynamic itself and the lessons learned on both sides. And in the fourth and final part, I will focus on how those lessons affect me as a whole, what I learnt about the process from more of an oversight position, and where I see myself taking this going forward.

So, first of all: How do you divide yourself in order to be in a solo switch power exchange dynamic? Is it a good idea?

Mental Health & Being Whole

As I said in part 1, “I can’t really understand or get a handle on what my dominant or submissive sides look like if they’re always just kind of averaging each other out… I knew I had traits and interests that lent themselves to a dominant side, just as I had traits and interests that lent themselves to a submissive side, and I wanted to understand them in their own right.”

I recovered from a decade and a half of depression and general anxiety when I was 30 and from that point on, I knew that being whole and having that peace of mind were absolutely non-negotiable when it came to protecting my mental health. Before that, I had felt divided against myself, one part of me feeling like I should be doing better and being critical and perfectionistic, and the other part of me feeling like I just wanted to hide from the world and do my own thing without being noticed or having to be held accountable for anything. I was miserable. Once this divide healed, it changed my relationship to myself as one where all the noise was dialled down and I felt more at peace with myself, kinder to myself and just had a lot more energy freed up for doing stuff instead of worrying so much.

I will say that having peace of mind does not mean never facing challenges or being in uncomfortable situations but it does mean having some resilience in place, being able to recognise what is damaging and to accept that sometimes there is pain to soothe, tears to cry, a relationship to fix, amends to be made, discomfort to be endured – all the things that life can throw at us – and still be compassionate to oneself, understanding that maybe our best at that time is to simply be a mess and do the emotional physio needed one day or one hour or one minute at a time. Sometimes we just need to remember to breathe.

I went through some of the hardest times of my life three years after I recovered from depression and general anxiety and I was bereaved and distraught and hurt and confused, but through it all, I was still whole and I knew that it was one hell of a storm that would eventually pass. All I needed to focus on was getting through one step at a time, addressing the immediate needs with whatever energy I had, asking for help when I needed it.

It’s been six years since getting through all that and I know that it was because being whole, being kind to myself were absolutely fundamental to my wellbeing. They still are.

So, you can imagine that when I come to contemplate deliberately realising two separate roles within myself, there might be some reservations, and you would be right.

Reservations

Having spent so long getting to a good place in terms of my mental health, the main reservations I had when it came to deliberately interacting with myself as two personas were that it would create cognitive dissonance, that it would strain that hold I have over myself as a whole person and reintroduce conflict or make me divided again, feeling like I’m being pulled in different directions, becoming more indecisive and unsure of myself as to how to proceed.

I gave this a lot of thought and I felt that while the concerns were reasonable, there were certain things in my favour.

Firstly, I’m a fairly analytical person and pretty adept at compartmentalising parts of myself anyway. We all play different roles in life, whether kink or vanilla. We have family, friends, jobs, hobbies, relationships, public duties, legal statuses, community commitments, all sorts. We are slightly different versions of ourselves in all of these areas of life. I felt like I already had a solid grasp on all those parts of my life and how to navigate between them, or whether to navigate them between them at all in some cases. (I won’t mix personal and professional relationships, for example. My ex and I are best friends and work for the same large company, but I won’t consider jobs in the same part of the company as he’s in because I don’t want that complication and conflict of interests. Some people might be OK with that, but it’s not something I want.)

Secondly, I feel that if those foundational tenets of being whole and being compassionate to myself had kept me going through three of the worst years of my life, then they have been well and truly tested, and the fact that they have continued to guide me for the six years since, I think it’s safe to say they’re well integrated and a core part of me now. If at any time, I started to feel like this experiment was causing psychological effects that were having a detrimental impact on my mental health, I would stop immediately.

And finally, I recognised that regardless of my being the only participant in this experiment, it still had to go through SSC or RACK or similar. Was this safe, sane and consensual? Was it risk-aware? The answers were yes. I understood the psychological risks, I knew what I could do to mitigate those risks, and I had not so much a safe word to watch out for as an ongoing overseer role in this dynamic monitoring for signs of pushing myself too far. The reflections in this blog were not just to provide titillating descriptions of my erotic exploits but to keep check on the whole experiment from all angles and process everything that was going on psychologically to ensure that I was happy with everything that I was doing, that I was looking after my psychological wellbeing all the way through, and that any issues were recorded and addressed before continuing.

Satisfied that I had done my due diligence, I decided to go ahead. And the next part will go into how that actually worked in practice.

I have had two relationships in my life – one short-term, only lasting a few months when I started uni, and one long-term, lasting over 12 years.

When it ended mutually and amicably, it took a good two to three years before I could even contemplate getting into another relationship, and then when I did give dating a try briefly, I realised something that had happened for me in those intervening years. I was really happy not being in a relationship. I enjoyed my own company, felt like I had more balance and freedom to explore who I was, and just generally felt like I was looking for something that wasn’t missing.

Relationship with Sexuality

One of the most difficult challenges in the past seven years solo is knowing that my relationship with sex was very complicated and messy, and that even if you ignored the hang-ups I had developed, and focused on the positives, the fact was that while I enjoyed sex, it always took a lot of energy and made me feel like it affected my ability to do all the many other things I wanted to do. As a result, I just minimised its part in my life, keeping to some minimal masturbation and otherwise remaining celibate and focusing my attentions on everything else I wanted to do.

It reached a point probably a couple of years ago, where I would be watching some series with particularly attractive characters, and this question kept getting louder in my head:

Was I downplaying sexuality in my life because I had low libido (which I’d had for years before) and/or genuinely felt that I wanted it to play a lesser part in favour of other activities, or was I downplaying sexuality in my life because I knew it would be uncomfortable, messy and disruptive and didn’t want to have to deal with that?

Given all the stirrings in response to various sexy vampires and pirates and angels and demons and whatever else on screen, it was starting to become apparent that my libido was perhaps more in line with how much I chose to focus on sexuality. If sexuality was something I saw as messy and complicated and made me feel underconfident, then my libido dropped in line with that. If sexuality was something I was responding to positively, with arousal and confidence, and an increase in sexual fantasies, then my libido went up in line with that.

Over the past couple of years, this feeling just kept creeping up on me that my libido wasn’t fixed at low; that I do have a generally positive attitude to sexuality, even if I can be indifferent to it and it not affect my overall happiness in life; and that I was starting to feel ready to explore my sexuality again.

I still had no desire to be in a relationship, but I did want to feel like I could overcome these hang-ups and explore what a happy, healthy relationship with sexuality might look like for me, and I felt that it was important that if I did ever change my mind about being in a relationship with someone else in future, it would be preferable if I worked all this out for myself first, rather than bringing all this past baggage along for the ride.

Kinktober

I don’t recall now exactly what prompted it but at the start of October, I decided I would take the BDSM test and get a feel for exactly what kind of kink I was into. I knew some stuff I liked, but I had never been in a BDSM relationship or power dynamic or explored anything beyond what I had figured out in my late teens, twenty years ago.

I wanted to explore further and eventually found this website, where people were talking about Kinktober. That’s when I decided I would use this month as a means of exploring my sexuality, and that meant exploring kink as a key part of that.

Dynamic

I knew I was very clearly a switch because almost all elements of kink for me are like yin and yang. I want to know it from both top and bottom perspectives, from both dom and sub perspectives (if that applies). I want to understand what it feels like from different angles, not be fixed on one particular side of the slash or be fixed in one particular role. That isn’t to say I don’t have preferences, because I really do, but that’s exactly what I needed to figure out. Who am I? What do I like and dislike? What do I want? What do I need? What are my limits?

Now, I am a person who feels fundamentally dichotomous all the time. I don’t feel like two people or that I have two identities, but when it comes to politics, culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, I typically have my feet on two different sides of a fence or straddling a spectrum. I’m also a person who likes balance and tries to weigh up different sides, so my decision-making process is often one that results in some kind of more mediatory position. Mediator is one of my frequent roles in everyday life.

But when it comes to understanding different parts of me individually, mediation and balance aren’t always particularly helpful. I can’t really understand or get a handle on what my dominant or submissive sides look like if they’re always just kind of averaging each other out, resulting in this more reasonable output you can expect from me as a whole.

I knew I had traits and interests that lent themselves to a dominant side, just as I had traits and interests that lent themselves to a submissive side, and I wanted to understand them in their own right. So, I set up a power dynamic between me in two roles, with the aim to explore who I am when I’m dominant and who I am when I’m submissive, and at the end of the month, reflect on how the interplay between those two sides has developed and what new insights I gleaned from the process.

Lessons Learnt

The fact that I now feel so much more in touch with my sexuality in a positive way, I think, tells me that this was absolutely a worthwhile endeavour, and there is so much more I want to write about that, but I will go into that in the next part.

Sir has now forgiven me for my disrespect two nights ago 🥹 I was punished severely with denial of rewards that will take me weeks to get back, forced orgasms while writing pages upon pages, forbidding me from touching him or seeing him while I remain in prostration being edged by him repeatedly.

I have completed all of my punishments now and the moment I was free, I lavished his boots with devotion, apologising for my disrespect and thanking him for his forgiveness. I will not forget our bedtime ritual again, for fear of incurring my Master's wrath once more 😥

He is being so warm and kind to me now, wrapping me up in a blanket and holding me tight after spending half an hour tormenting my pussy with a vibrator, and all is good again 🤗 Now we're curled up watching Buffy together 🧛🏻‍♂️

It's coming up to that time of year again: National Novel Writing Month! (For more info: https://nanowrimo.org/)

In November, participants aim to write 50,000 words of a first draft of a novel in 30 days, which is 1,667 words per day. And if you're a NaNo Rebel, you don't have to write a novel - you can write short stories, poetry, a screenplay, memoirs, or non-fiction.

I've completed NaNoWriMo a couple of times before and I'm intending to participate this year, although considering it's less than two days away, it's definitely going to be pantsing or plantsing mode, rather than planning mode. I'm generally a plantser so I tend to like a rough outline and then work the details by the seat of my pants. So, while I don't yet have an outline, I do have an idea and I may be able to work that into something more structured ready to start on Wednesday.

So, here's the idea: Kinky Novel Writing Month! Or KiNoWriMo for short.

I have written over 25,000 words in my blog posts for Kinktober, with detailed descriptions of scenes; in-role reflections of both Dom and sub sides; explorations of various BDSM roles; affirmations for aftercare; analysis of the psychological motivations behind, and psychological impact of, my experiences with BDSM; and thoughts on the evolving dynamic I have created with myself for solo play.

I started my recent journey with BDSM on 3rd October, so it will be almost a whole month by the time NaNo starts and I honestly feel like I have so much more to process here, so much more I could write and develop. And I think that answered very quickly the question of what I should do for NaNo this year.

What I'm intending to do is to take the experiences I've had during Kinktober and distil them into a semi-fictional narrative framework, so that I can dig into them deeper, expand on them and take them in new directions within a fictional setting. I think that will really help get the creative juices flowing and probably give me some ideas for continuing my kink journey as well.

Dynamic

As far as my contract goes, which ends at the end of this month, that will be extended for a further month but at lower intensity. I've given my solo dynamic further consideration, which I'm going to go into in a separate post, but I think that where currently I have tasks to do in order to get rewards and my Dom side has a lot of work to do coming up with ideas, structuring everything, responding to my sub side actions, issuing punishments and so on, that will be more simplified for November, to allow me to focus mostly on writing and to relieve my Dom side of a lot of the work that has taken up so much time this month. Not that it's work that isn't enjoyable, but it takes a lot of energy and I will need it to write. That's the Doylian explanation. The Watsonian explanation is that my sub side is on a writing retreat and my Dom side will be keeping in regular touch and visiting on weekends, but otherwise, a lot of the daily routine is dedicated to writing.

If anyone else does NaNoWriMo, I would love to hear about your plans.

I thoroughly enjoyed edging my little slut while she was in prostration last night, unable to see me or speak to me. Her moans of pleasure and anguish certainly made me more willing to forgive her lapse of judgement in protocol, but she has two more days to complete all of my punishments before I will let her back into my good graces.

Regardless of her punishments though, today is our designated session day.

I want her to give me a bare pussy to write on... and torment by ignoring in favour of her ass and mouth 😈 

And if she even so much as fucking thinks about bratting, she's going to be writing those pages I assigned her with a butt plug inside her, and a vibrator on low speed just touching her pussy. She can't stand the light pressure and tickling sensation, so that will drive her crazy in seconds!

There's a very good chance she will be crying and begging me to forgive her before the weekend is through, which should definitely serve as a powerful reminder in future that our bedtime ritual is sacrosanct and not to be dismissed as a trivial inconvenience.

One day on and she's certainly mollified... but she recovers quickly, which is why I'm taking my sweet time to punish her. The longer her punishment is drawn out, the greater the likelihood I will learn the truth.

If her devotion is true, she will endure and end up in tears at having disappointed me. If not, she will brat in frustration at me for having been mean or unreasonable, and I will tame her by showing her just how mean and unreasonable a bastard I can be.

I relish either outcome 😏 

I spent the last hour attempting to remain in prostration, as my Master instructed, as punishment for not having performed my bedtime boot worship ritual last night. I thought Sir was going to remain distant, punishing me by ignoring me.

Instead, he made sure of the opposite. He left me struggling to remain in the position he desired for a long time, and then came over and pushed my face into the floor, forced my legs further apart and knelt between them.

"Let's see you ignore me now."

He teased one of my nipples with one hand while keeping my head firmly against the floor with the other. Then he stopped caressing my nipple and slid his hand between my legs, very slowly massaging my clit.

Just as I was about to come, he stopped, leaving me throbbing and pulsating, trying to lean back into his hand to get him to pleasure me again.

Which he did. Edging me over and over again until my full hour was up before finally allowing me to come.

It was bitter-sweet release lying there forbidden from looking at or touching my Master in any way, and I will be forbidden for two more nights.

I love how cruelly he dominates my attention and I can't wait to lavish him with my devotion once I am allowed to return to my usual ritual.

😔🤐

Hell hath no fury like a Dom scorned 🔥

For the most part, I'm very fair and generous to my sub. She has many rewards quite easily available to her for keeping up good habits and completing tasks and she has been enjoying having the opportunity to earn these pleasures from me. I have a range of small punishments I use to discipline her or to satisfy my sadistic pleasure in dominating her, and she accepts those with a combination of arousal and trepidation.

I don't set many protocols or rituals, but the two I have set are there for a reason.

One is of lesser importance but serves to keep me informed of any extra punishments or rewards she gets by chance from completing tasks. (Some of the reward messages are "spiked" with a punishment message instead 😈) This is due at 00:45, so she has plenty of time to report before going to sleep.

The other is a bedtime boot worship ritual where she demonstrates her loyalty, devotion and obedience to me. It takes time and serves to deepen our bond and commitment. She seeks to offer her devotion as a submissive, and I seek to earn her devotion through domination.

Last night, she was late with her report because she spent over three hours on the phone. But most importantly, she was extremely cursory in performing her ritual, which is to say, she literally paid lip service to it.

She has a standard punishment allocated for non-completion of her daily report, but the punishments for failing to show me respect by dismissing her bedtime ritual will devastate her.

Her bedtime ritual is modified for tonight and denied for the next two nights. Tonight, she is not allowed to touch, kiss or lick my boots but must instead prostrate herself for 1 hour in sensory deprivation. She will write lines saying "I will not disrespect my Master". And she will have her vibrator confiscated.

On top of this punishment, I chose to be more sadistic than she has ever seen me before. I robbed her of 2000 points (she had 50 to start with) and some of her rewards, and I assigned two further punishments that were not earnt but that I want her to endure anyway: facefucking with a dildo to train her gag reflex, and 9 pages of writing.

She apologised for disrespecting me and I told her to demonstrate this by accepting my punishments in silence 🤐

It will take her a month just to get her points back to 0 and start getting treats again.

I doubt she will dismiss me again so readily in future.

This week was primarily focused on exploring sadomasochism, but having finished with that to the extent that I feel is useful for now, I've decided to move on to the final part of my Kinktober explorations, which is to reflect on the various lessons learnt so far and contemplate what kind of dominant I am, what kind of submissive I am, how switching works for me, what kind of dynamic I would prefer, and so on. I really want to feel after this month of exploration that I have a better idea of what BDSM really means to me, how I fit in it and what role in my life I want it to play going forward.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I find Evie Lupine's channel extremely helpful and she speaks in a way that just resonates with me, so I'm going to be looking at what control and service mean to me when it comes to power exchange, based on the insights I get from her video.

Control and service may often go together, but it isn't always the case. High levels of control and/or service may be desired in fantasy but be less attractive in reality, and as with anything else in a D/s relationship, there needs to be discussion to ensure needs are being met.

While some people may want to focus on serving their partner and be given very precise instructions on all the details, facing punishment for any imperfections (high service, high control), others may find that this is too much like micro-management and while they want to serve their partner, they would prefer to feel trusted to carry out the task with due consideration of the details themselves (high service, low control). The former may be told exactly what meal to prepare and how to cook it and how to set the table, with measurements for how far the plate should be from the edge of the table and so on. The latter may be told to prepare dinner but be left to decide what to prepare based on things like what the Dom likes or what's in the fridge and so on.

Control, being the level of authority the Dom has over the submissive, may be about service, as in the example above, but it doesn't have to be. A Dom with total control over their sub may decide how much money is in their bank account and how it's spent, or whether to sell the house and move country and completely change their lifestyle. This might be perfectly fine with some subs (low service, high control). Others may feel that them being very careful with spending while their Dom is very carefree creates a conflict that isn't desirable. The sub may be constantly stressed when the Dom decides to fritter away their life savings and spend frivolously, and they may not agree to relinquish so much control in that dynamic (low service, low control).

Thinking about my own situation, I would say that trust to do something properly myself is very important. I don't like being micro-managed at all, but more specifically, I don't like my service being micro-managed. As I said in another post, service to me means duty, while devotion is out of love. Things I choose to do to please another person are not things I want to do out of duty, but out of love, which means I want you to trust that I know you and then you will be reassured of that when I can demonstrate it. If you control my service, then you don't trust me and it makes me feel denied of an opportunity to show my level of care in the relationship.

In other areas, higher levels of control are not necessarily a bad thing, but it would depend on the domain. I wouldn't want high control in areas that are life-changing, like just upping sticks and moving to another country. I wouldn't want high control in areas that are more personally challenging, like losing weight or studying a course. If anything, I would say that the only areas I really am OK with high control are those where I don't really enjoy the task or where the task is arbitrary, basically as an act of sadism. It forces me to endure something that's either boring but important and improves my environment, or it forces me to endure something completely pointless precisely to get me to focus on endurance itself, as well as domination, which feeds my challenge and devotion focused masochism respectively.

In summary, I would say I want low service with medium/low control, depending on context. However, if we were to make the distinction that was made when discussing sadomasochism, and one I raised here as well, then what I really want is high devotion with medium/low control. I want to demonstrate love, not duty. And I want to be trusted to know how to do that unless my Dom just wants to fuck with me because he can. In those cases, because he knows I don't really like high control, deliberately being more controlling is in itself an act of sadism, to dominate with the express purpose of getting a reaction out of me. And my response as a masochist is either to brat so he will increase his levels of sadism and the resulting feeling of domination when I do eventually submit, or to submit immediately. And when I do submit, it will be to rise to his challenge as an act of devotion.

I think I'm going to go with devotional submissive as my submission type for now, as distinct from service-focused submissive. Don't know if that's a term but the vibe is completely different to service, as far as I'm concerned, and labels work for me, not the other way round.

Glad that dom drop was quicker to get past than sub drop, but I think it was mostly because it was more affecting my mood than playing havoc physically. Once I got it straight in my head, especially digging deeper into my motives for sadism and masochism, then it was all good again.

I felt it was really helpful both for my sub side to remind my Dom side that all was equally agreed to with full awareness of what was happening and there was no harm caused, and to honour the instructions given out of respect and support rather than back out of it, which would have made my Dom side feel less secure in having had the authority to give those instructions in the first place. I want my Dom side to thrive and learn and grow, and I want my sub side to do the same. They work together or not at all.

It helps for me to have a split dynamic like this to get different insights into myself. I'm learning how to dominate better and I'm learning how to submit better. A lot of the time before, the two would regularly cancel each other out, or end up being the average of the two rather than the best of both worlds independently.