introducing myself, again

Every so often I feel I need to re-introduce myself to readers. New followers jump into my blog mid-stream, not knowing the context of who I am and the life I am in.

I hope this helps.

My Nature

My real name is Shae Madigan, and yes, I’m of Irish descent and have the stereotypical red hair and freckles. I’m in my mid-thirties (getting a little hard to admit to that these days). I identify as bisexual and submissive, which requires a lot of unpacking to understand — the submissive part, not the bisexual part.

You see, I believe submissiveness is not a personality trait but a sexual orientation. It is part of my sexuality and compels what and whom I am attracted to.

As a result have chosen a life of Dominant/submissive (D/s) slavery. This is a lifestyle in which people agree to be in an alternative relationship with each other, in which one controls completely and the other submits completely, often to extremes.

I have lived in full-time D/s slavery for more than six years.

Currently I am owned by a woman, Amanda, whom I live with and serve 24/7. I’ve been her slave for three years now.

My Blog

I am a writer by training, education, and vocation. A college grad, I have a degree in literature, which doesn’t mean much, and a focus in creative writing, which means little more.

I document my slave life in this blog. I started this blog some four years ago (two years into my first slavery) and have posted nearly a thousand entries. (Navigating to many of those early posts is a challenge — so sorry, and I’m working on that…)

I like to think that I somewhat effectively communicate not just what is done to me as a slave, but the experience of it, and the psychological and emotional journey of living the slave life.

I should mention that some of my entries are quite explicit. Be duly warned: I write frankly about my sexual life and sexual themes.

My Journey

It took me most of my twenties to discover my submissiveness and the degree of my submissive need. I had grown up in a conservative religious home and church, which repressed me in various ways from knowing and accepting myself. That’s a frequent theme of this blog.

Before giving myself to the slave life, in my twenties I worked in real estate. It was an ill fit for me, but I managed to start my own agency and got a taste of the business world. (As it’s happened, many of the dominant people in my life are executives in business.)

Through my real estate work, I met a man named Michael who became (well, two years later) the first man to own me. I don’t mean “own” in the romantic sense, but literally, as his submissive and slave.

After my years serving him, I became the property of Mistress Amanda and her (then) partner Kevin.

Later, Amanda and Kevin split and Mistress and I moved to the Denver area, where we live now.

Mistress Amanda now shares me with another dominant man, Master McKenna.

This has been the sequence of my slave life for the past six years.

My Sex

There are different kinds of D/s slaves — service slaves, kitchen slaves, professional slaves, display slaves, sex slaves, and many others. In most D/s slavery a submissive serves in an assortment of all of the above. Some D/s slaveries are not sexual at all. Some specialize in one or another “slave type.”

In my case, I have been designated and made into a sex slave. Which doesn’t mean I’m so good at it, just that I am used that way.

Being a sex slave is a life of sexual objectification. In this life, that reality isn’t offensive, just the common way of being seen and talked about in the lifestyle. I live in it and accept it.

My Body

Not that it matters: I am five-seven, 135 pounds. Pale skin, freckles, as I’ve said, with long, over-my-shoulders red hair. I have by some accounts “really good breasts” (sizable, natural, and roundish), too-narrow hips, and a slightly flattish rear end. I am shaved just about everywhere that hurts, and I have been given pierced nipples but no tattoos.

So now you know what gets objectified.

My Personality

As a writer, I love words. I like playing with words. I enjoy being clever and humorous with words.

My dominant owners generally enjoy my humorous word-play, but sometimes it leads me to slips of sarcasm and servings of Irish sass. My mouth gets me in trouble (oh, in so many ways!).

I am curious about people and the world, enjoy the arts, and am interested in a lot of subjects. (I know that sounds like a yearbook entry.)

I generally have an upbeat, positive demeanor — although recently have dealt with some depression (see below). I am usually a happy girl in my life of slavery, although the life is often difficult (again, see below).

I also have moments of smoldering temper, not attractive in a woman who’s supposed to be submissive. However, it does give my owners opportunity to discipline me. Also, I have an inquisitive mind, ideas, opinions, and am prone to express them, sometimes brashly. My dominants usually allow me room for that, often giving me just enough leash to hang myself.

My Family

My father died when he was too young and I was just twenty-two. His death devastated me. But it also released me, in a way, to find myself.

Over the past year, my mother has had some health issues affecting her mental capacity. I have spent quite a bit of time with her in Pennsylvania. My mistress, Amanda, continues our lifestyle long-distance, and has visited PA frequently over the past months. Likewise, I have returned to Colorado at times.

This is my current situation, and it has been difficult. I have struggled with depression.

But there is some hope — an arrangement for my mother’s care. This possibility is playing out as I write this.

My Reality

The slave life is difficult. Many sensibly wonder why a woman like me would choose this.

I know what I am deep down — submissive and needing dominance. Being in the life is deeply satisfying at that primal level, yet deeply hard. Mostly because I know very few people understand it.

This blog is my attempt to be understood.

six short insights into my submissive life: 6

6.
My blog is my confessional.
It sometimes embarrasses me to report my life as I do.
And yet I do.

I had a friend in college who was in theater. She shared with me a recurring dream she has about being on stage and forgetting what play she was performing. In front of this dream audience, she stumbled through a scene and suffered public humiliation. It was only a dream, but she felt deeply the humiliation during her sleep — and was relieved to awake from it.

My blog feels like that sometimes. It’s a public presentation of what I am to a readership that’s virtual (though very real). I don’t consider it a “performance” or “acting,” like my friend, for it is my actual life as it happens, reported. But it too is embarrassing in a public way and feels like I’m on a stage, perhaps in the way that actors experience in performance dreams.

Writing my blog is sometimes like that, sometimes cringingly humiliating as I relive those experiences a second time. But blogging helps me process my humiliations, and it actually helps that you as readers are part of that process. You compel me to make sense of my disgrace.

When I started my blog years ago, I had few readers and it was mostly an extension of my private journal. As time went on, I was blessed with more of you following my blog, and my naked life was shared more broadly. But even then, there has been some comforting distance in the virtual nature of the space.

But now, more and more people I know in real life, face to face, are reading my blog as well: some of Amanda’s clients, our neighbors, my college cohort friends, people associated with Master McKenna, now Blake and his friends, and so on. I’m now aware that what I write in my blog some evening reveals and exposes me to those I might have coffee with the next morning, or meet for lunch at a diner, or encounter in one of Amanda’s Zoom meetings. It’s kind of a cringing humiliation to know someone who sees me in person has just read about the sex that someone had with me yesterday.

I am living my life out loud, which sounds good but also means I have no private space. Often I feel like like I’m standing on a stage in blushing shame.

But then again, I bought into it: this is “slave life according to Mistress Amanda.”

In my fiction, I frequently explore themes of penance and confession, usually about sex as related to sin. I don’t believe sex is sin, but I believe many of us feel that it is. One story I wrote, “Penance”(which you can find here, or under my fiction menu), imagines the BDSM punishment of a woman, Leigh Ann, as her personal ritual of penance and confession.

For Leigh Ann, the process is relentlessly circular: her confession is actually a kind of permission to do the very things she confesses. She pays people to humiliate and whip her. Doing so frees her to be the promiscuous woman she is.

Perhaps it is likewise for me, in different circumstances. I’m aware my blog is a form of my own confession to others — “this is who I am and here is what I have done.” I admit to the things I do in front of you as online readers. I share my “illicit” experiences in this with you, a theater of people, known and unknown. I publicly describe the scandal of my submissive and sexual life.

My blog is my confessional — it embarrasses me, but it also is somehow necessary for me to write.

Maybe in this, as my confession, you all give me permission to do the things I do.

the (short) history of my blog

This may not interest everyone, so I’ll keep it short. I’ve been asked when and how I started writing this blog.

My first owner/master was a man named Michael. I had been with him as his live-in slave for a year and a half when he first suggested that I write about my slavery and post it online. This was in 2018.

He knew that writing was important to me in a very personal way, so he didn’t want to formally order me to start a blog. He made it a suggestion, optional, and for a number of months I kept it on a back burner.

He brought it up again casually a few more times that year. He said he thought it would give me experience writing in another form. He also felt it would be good for me as a way of self-processing my slave life. Both seemed likely true to me and made sense.

Another reason emerged sometime later: Master Michael felt a blog would give me the awareness of being public about my slave life. I think he knew that the exercise of public exposure was an important development of me as a slave.

In the early fall of 2018, I began to pen some blog posts, though never actually posting them. It was just experimental practice. In fact, I didn’t yet have a blog space online. I wasn’t happy with my early efforts, but I was intrigued by the “short-form essay” type of writing it was.

Right off the bat I had to come to grips with transparency and explicitness. A blog needs to be honest and true, with some depth of feeling and experience. Otherwise, it’s simply a series of Instagram or Facebook posts portraying myself in a made-up social image. Moreover, my life was one of sexual submission, and so my blog would need to represent those experiences in words.

Writing about yourself sexually is something I might go into in another post. It’s a learned set of unique writing skills. You are to report the “event” that happens objectively, of course, yet you have to also convey what happens inside you subjectively. The focus is external and internal at the same time. And it isn’t just about sexual sensations, but how you think about what you feel during sex. And in the process, you have to find ways of showing yourself sexually as perceived by others if they were there with you. The “camera” has to see you, your body, and your sex, which is at times uncomfortable to reveal.

All this was a challenge for me, but I created a “policy” of sorts that has served me well through the full history of my blog — I had to put blinders on, disregard who would be reading my blog, and simply write my experiences fully, explicitly and honestly.

I figured out some of that and began my blog in January 2019.

When Mistress A bought me, she assured me she wanted me to continue my blog and would carry over the same thinking about it that Master Michael had. Which has been true. She has been encouraging and hands-off.

Of course, Mistress Amanda’s vision for me is a far more public slavery than Master Michael had for me. With him, I was mostly private but slightly public. With her, it’s all about being public, being open with everyone, and being shared. My blog has helped in her execution of my slavery publicly.

When I started my blog, I was well aware that hardly anyone would actually read it. Only a few people in the universe would stumble upon my writings. The point was not the numbers of followers, but simply that it would be “public,” and I would have the experience, in a limited and random way, of being known as the sex slave I am (which would be good for me). And it worked that way at the beginning.

My blog is still not attracting tons of readers, but it’s grown well beyond dozens into hundreds. And so, my daily life in sexual submission is now quite public. What has been an unexpected outcome of that is that in being so public, my followers affect me personally and sexually as a submissive woman. Readers, encountering me intimately, become part of my life experience. And this plays into Mistress Amanda’s intentions for me so very well.

At the beginning, it was never thought my blog writing would be read by people who knew me.

But now, many of my followers are people in my immediate physical world as well: our neighbors, my college cohort, lifestyle friends and acquaintances locally, and even now some of Amanda’s work clients.

This creates some challenges, though not so much in terms of my transparency and openness in writing explicitly about myself, for I continue, for the most part, to put those blinders on and write away. But now, in this new age of my being shared, I am going to be faced with the question of writing about someone who is known by others who read my blog.

So, we’re trying to figure this out. It will mean more diligence in securing permissions, more maintenance of anonymity, and perhaps choosing not to write about certain experiences at all. I am conflicted about some of this, as I want to continue my blog practice of sharing everything honestly. If I can’t be utterly transparent, I wonder if I can continue writing the blog.

We’ll see.

But I hearken back to the beginning: I am grateful to Master Michael for his initial urgings toward blog-writing. It has been a wonderful experience for me, expanding and maturing both my writing as well as my life in slavery.

boring

I am trying not to blog frequent updates on my daily life. Hard to believe that being a sex slave is boring sometimes. But it’s boring sometimes. Also, I don’t assume that I am so inherently fascinating that everyone is dying to read about my ordinary life routines.

Yet, here’s a boring update on my life.

This has been a full week of work for me and Amanda. She has dressed me whimsically, as she likes to do, and sometimes has undressed me in pieces and parts, as she likes to do. But that’s all been for her visual pleasure, and it hasn’t been played out in front of others.

We really have worked hard all week.

Things are opening up a bit in Colorado, and there may be a chance for us to get outside to a park or even a store this weekend. I’m looking forward to that. Maybe a hike along the ridge, or a drive into the mountains.

Nothing new to report. No news back from Mr. Drake.

Like I say, life is boring. But that’s not a bad thing sometimes.

method and madness in writing

I’ve been encouraged to write more about writing.

I resist doing so, because I think that attracts just a certain reader and might not be of interest to most. Also, I don’t like being in the role of teacher. I think there’s so much more I have yet to learn myself.

I expect my reluctance also has to do with my submissive nature and lifestyle — I’m not sure I have the right to teach.

Even so, I have written about writing before, and here’s a little something now.

As blog writers, we incline to write about the most recent thing — for me, my adventure in ballet boots yesterday, or what Mistress did to me on the kitchen island last night, or a thought I had about my slavery while standing submissively with the coffee tray an hour ago.

Blog writing leads us into the tyranny of the recent. As a result, we tend to write at the surface. We become reporters of our own news. We cover the who, what, when, why, where, but sometimes fail to unfold the deeper things that happen inside us.

Nothing wrong with this sometimes. I do this too, quite a lot and maybe too much — I often just report what’s going on in my life. Again, it’s something of the expected recipe for blog writing.

But better writing takes time to cook. Getting to the deeper things requires reflection, not only about what happened, but about what was felt and experienced. It requires not just the word that comes immediately to mind, but the better word that expresses so much more. And it requires time to pull random events together toward some coalition of meaning.

It requires time to simmer.

While I write posts about the “recent,” I rarely post them immediately. I find that stepping away from a piece for a day or even just an afternoon makes a huge difference in the quality and depth of what I write.

Something that works for me is to have a number of writing pieces in development at the same time.

I usually am writing five or six different blog pieces at once. Each is a separate experience or thought in my D/s slave lifestyle; each one is intended to be posted when done — eventually. Those five or six may take days to finish, although in the cycle of things, one gets finished almost every day, and I post that. This allows me to post frequently enough, but also gives my pieces time to simmer.

Meanwhile I’ll start another idea and keep it open with the others, adding to each as I have new insights. I constantly replenish the “pool” of five or six open projects.

One thing this approach does is to eliminate writer’s block. Almost every piece you write poses a problem or two, a writer’s block moment. If I were writing just one at a time, I would get stuck on something and have to wait until I got some epiphany or figured out a solution. By having multiple posts open at a time, I can move to the ones I have solution for.

This is true for my fiction writing as well. Right now I have about seven fiction pieces — short stories and one novel — started and at different stages of development.

I think it’s a good system, and it’s worked well for me. So if I have advice for someone (teacher voice), I’d say write a number of things at once.

One of the hardest things to do in writing is becoming your own editor. You have to be willing to set aside parts that are your favorite children, who simply don’t play very well.

But the biggest “editing,” I find, is the up-front question, “Why would anyone care about this?”

Often the answer is, “No one would.”

And then you shouldn’t write about it.

One of the age-old adages in writing — every writing book says this — is that there is writing by planning (method) and also writing by intuition (madness). Sometimes the terminology is “plotter” (one who lays everything out before writing) versus “pantser” (one who writes intuitively by the seat of their pants — or skirt, in my case).

Some writers are more one than the other, and most of us do both. Neither way is necessarily better.

I think much of the time I start a piece as a “pantser,” writing intuitively, allowing my “madness” to go wild, letting my thoughts go where they will.

Then I turn myself into a “plotter,” looking for some “method” — structure or progression — within the “madness” words I’ve put on the page. This is sort of like developing a “plot” within a non-fiction piece. Even in non-fiction, there are the same elements you find in fiction — conflict and rising actions and obstacles and climax and resolution. What you’re writing is what really happened, an actual experience, but the way you tell it is often through fiction technique.

Of course, not everything you write works this way. And each writer has his or her own approach.

And that’s perfectly OK.

My two cents….