the goodbye girl

These last couple weeks, my mind as been awash in anticipations and goodbyes. I think ahead with aroused trepidation for what awaits me in Colorado even as I feel the poignancy of my last moments here.

I said my goodbyes to Morgan’s Woods, and now will be saying farewell to the house, my family home from years past.

I have reassured Lucille that I am thrilled she owns the house now, and I’m helping each day to make it her own. This arrangement frees me to return to my submissive life, where I’m meant to be.

But, while I’ll come back to visit, it will no longer be my home — or even Mother’s house.

In a week and half, I’ll say this goodbye and shed tears.

It’s ironic: with all the house stuff going on and my preparations to leave, I have no time to write, yet these anticipations and goodbyes give me more to write about than any time this past year.

I find a smidgeon of time around midnight to write, after a long day of running around and moving boxes and sofas and beds. I sacrifice sleep for my journal and blog writing, but it’s a necessary swap — musings and thoughts that have whirled around my mind all day have to get out, get tucked into the bed of my writing, before I myself can find sleep.

I know that writing these things is another way for me to say goodbye.

This goodbye girl will also say farewell to this culture, the culture of her upbringing many years ago.

My year living here has been difficult in that regard, as I have bumped into the memory of my left-behind life, like randomly running into an ex-lover at the supermarket who wants to “reconnect.” I’ve had to live in this world once again, sit in its church, literally.

Yet, as often as I have written out my angst about this, my sojourn here has helped me understand myself in a better way. Before this year, I saw myself as once at a crossroads: my life then and now as as equal diverging paths. I chose the road less traveled. Now, after my year in exile here, I understand this religious culture of my childhood was never equal, never an attractive path to begin with. It’s kind of a dead end to a promised land.

To be clear, these are good people, well-intended, and beautifully ordinary. On Sunday, when I go to church with Mom for the last time, I will say goodbye to some of them who have befriended me. But they are not the kind of “friends” who know me, or would ever want to if they knew what I am.

Another irony, though: part of what makes me appealing in the D/s world, I well know, is the very influence of this moralistic culture upon my slave life and being. Without this cultural background, my submissive humiliations would not be humiliating, and my sexual depravity would not be depraved. It is the moral audience I imagine myself in front of that makes my degradations so deliciously shaming for my dominants to witness.

So, yes, I will say goodbye to this culture and feel relief not to live in it 24/7 any longer. But the conscience of it will always still live in me in some small part, contributing to the submissive I am.

sundry notions

In two weeks, I’ll be heading back to Colorado to be immersed in active slave life again. I’m excited.

In the meantime, I am surprisingly busy here in PA, every day helping Lucille move in and preparing for my move out. She has asked to rearrange furniture in the downstairs rooms, and I’ve given my blessing as well as my labor to help make it happen.

I have no resistance to Lucille making the house her own, and it sorely needs refreshing, for Mother’s sake too. One of Lucille’s great ideas is to re-purpose a south-facing sitting room into a greenhouse room. She and Mother will grow flowers and herbs in the winter months.

I find it amazing how much personal “stuff” I have accumulated in my ten months here. Amanda has decided not to try to move everything to Colorado, but to box it and leave it in the garage here.

And I’ll keep a closetful of clothes upstairs. The house is now Lucille’s, but I will always have a bedroom in the house with Mother.

I have a wardrobe here, a full wardrobe at home with Amanda in Colorado, and another wardrobe in the mansion with Master McKenna. It paints an image of my life, my homes.

Funny that I have so many clothes, and yet, as a woman kept, I’m so often forbidden to wear them.

For the past year in PA I’ve struggled mightily to find the writing energy to blog in a time when there’s not much happening in my D/s life to blog about. The irony is that in my final month here, my creative juices have started flowing again, and I have plenteous ideas springing up.

When I return home on the 23rd, it will be almost exactly one year since I first arrived here to care for my mother. My first “Postcards from the Edge” blog post from Pennsylvania was March 30 last year. There were twelve in that series, and then I realized I was going to be here so long that the series of articles would have to become a novel, and I abandoned it.

Many of the major events in my life happened in a February or March. My mother’s struggles were first diagnosed March last year. My father died in February, fourteen years ago. I entered the lifestyle of slavery full time under Master Michael in March six years ago. And I was acquired by Amanda (and Kevin) in February, 2019.

I’m not sure what to make of these February/March anniversaries. Maybe just that to be returning home this month, March, seems like perfect timing.

a train of thought in the abyss

The fact is I am a woman indeed owned by two people, a man and a woman, yet in this moment without either of them to direct me daily. Such is the circumstance of my life, soon to be resolved. I whine about this and yet realize my privilege: many submissives do not have a dominant; many dominants do not have a submissive. I am lucky, just temporarily on hold.

I guess the surprise for me is how much I have been conditioned into being actively dominated, and in the vacuum without it, how adrift and wanting I really am. This has been apparent to me at times for most of my sojourn here, but I think it is more pronounced in this particular moment of being done here (PA) but not yet present there (CO).

A I have written before, this is not about sexual deprivation — the absence of sex with others and the denial of sex with myself. I can live apart from sex itself for long periods, much as I love it and get glassy-eyed without it.

This is really more about submissive deprivation of the active kind, the in-person kind. I am adrift and wanting because I need to touch and taste and feel myself dominated in real time. In times like these, I realize I can never go back to vanilla life. I am bound not by leashes or chains or cages but by my own submissive nature.

Yet part of my submissive deprivation is being without the experience of being used sexually. To parse a subtle distinction, what I mean is the difference between the physical pleasure of sex, which I can get by (barely) without, and the submissive pleasure of being used for sex by others, which is my primary craving and, apparantely, essential need.

The hypothetical might be if I were provided to a dominant man for his use, but he never actually touched me. Instead, say, he tied me naked to a bed and stroked himself until he came in dollops all over my breasts. In such a case, I would not have had physical sex but would have been used sexually.

And I’m saying that would itself be deeply satisfying to me submissively even though it would not have pleasured me sexually.

What does that say about me?

Much of my blog writing is talking myself into what I already am. I wrote recently about how I became a sex slave. While I accept the label these days, I think I still have had the question if this is what I’ve been made into or what I really am deep down.

Maybe my current state of mind reflects that this is what I really am deep down. Seems I need the imposition of sex upon me.

I know part of my lingering resistance to the label “sex slave” is a fear of it being thought to be sexual addiction. And maybe this is what I’m trying to get at in this post.

I really can live without the physical experience of sex. What I crave so hard is the submissive experience of being used for sex. Again, it’s a subtle distinction, but maybe the essence in my identity as sex slave.

charmed, I’m sure

Last night, Mistress Amanda said she intends to use my nipple rings as hangers of charms like a charm bracelet. She proposes two charms, left and right, one reading “Property of Mistress Amanda” and the other “Property of Master McKenna.”

She further proposes a slew of various charms signifying different things, perhaps for when people have me in different ways — but that’s another discussion.

She’s also fond of tiny little bells.

I immediately think of what this would look like under a tee top or thin blouse — a lot of little critters crawling around my breasts — and how I should camouflage them in public.

I expect this will be one of her surprises when I return to CO.

She’s certainly a creative one.

anticipation

Not surprisingly, now that I have a timetable for my return to Colorado, my mind has flown ahead into imagining my life there once again. My body remains here, of course, preparing for the moves — Lucille moving in and my moving out — but that’s physical labor, and I can happily live in a mental subspace while doing it.

Mistress Amanda’s declaration that she will be immersing me in a stricter submissive life is what prompts these thoughts. I have no idea what she intends but am eager for it. After such a long absence from the life, I am thirsty for discipline. I’m in a subspace of longing that only submissives know, the special kind of desire to be used, and used extremely.

On the phone last night, she said, “Be careful what you wish for.” I purred, whispering, “Yes, Mistress.” Already, we are there in that space, anticipating the unique chemistry of domme and sub, each of us fulfilling the other’s unconscionable need, like jigsaw puzzle pieces with gaping holes, and prongs to slip into them.

I probably shouldn’t anticipate what my new requirements and disciplines will be, but I can’t help myself. My desire is to feel again, to be slapped and whipped out of this vanilla numbness, the mush of same. I want her to make me cry, to bring tears to my eyes, to cause my welted breasts to kiss the delta of her most private flesh.

In that, I will find my joy again.

you can go home again…

Good news.

The arrangement with Lucille for care of my mother has been finalized, and I will finally be returning to Colorado on March 23. This will be permanent now: while I’ll still come back to visit Mother, I won’t be living here full-time.

I will soon be immersed once again in my slave life in Colorado. Excited, to say the least.

Amanda says that it will indeed be a full immersion: she has plans for a neighborhood welcome home party, and teasingly says I will be on display. She’ll keep me for herself the first week, then Master McKenna will have me for about five days. After that, she tells me, I’ll be “spending time with some of the neighbors.”

She has forewarned me that she intends to be more intensely dominant with me. Our relationship has always cycled between girlfriend-ish-ness and femme-dom/slave, so I don’t think this will be permanent, but I expect to walk into a somewhat more formal and harsher treatment. I have to remember that during this sojourn for me in Pennsylvania, Amanda has “gone without” too, and I imagine her dominance needs an infusion just as my submission does.

Yes, Mistress.

stranger in a strange land

Early in January, I joined the “logistics team” at my mother’s church. This is a group of volunteers who set up tables and chairs and temporary platforms and stages for various church functions. Doing this provides me a way of connecting to people, a sociality which I have sorely lacked out here in Pennsylvania. As a result, I have made a few casual friendships. It’s also been good physical exercise.

These people do not know of my lifestyle back in Colorado nor are they aware of what I am as a submissive — or even what that means. In other vanilla situations, I have sometimes been required by Amanda to present myself to someone quite openly as what I am, mostly for the sake of my own humiliation. In this case, Amanda has felt that my mother’s connection to the church and friends there should not be violated. So nothing has been said to these people about what I truly am.

Yet, they must think me odd. My slave requirements for clothing have not changed. I wear skirts, never jeans, and I know some of these church people find that strange for the kind of physical work this team does. Perhaps they see my attire as quaintly prim, conservative, and cutely old-fashioned — but they surely also notice that I do not wear a bra, which must seem a terribly libertine thing to do. I strive (and am permitted) to layer my tops and use sweaters to, well, mitigate movement and, well, to tame the pointedness of certain things. But still they are aware, and I imagine this is a combination of oddities that confuses them. They have no idea, of course, that under my skirt I am not wearing panties.

I’ve written about this often, that in my slave life among lifestyle people, my proscription against a bra and panties is for the purpose of making me self-aware of my sexual availability and providing pleasure to others around me, those who know what’s not underneath and savor the thought. But here in vanilla-land, it mostly just makes me aware I am so very different from everyone else, starting with my most private parts, uncovered yet unseen.

I believe they must be aware of something ineffable in me, life experience they do not know and cannot imagine. They pick up from me the wafting aroma of a certain wildness. They sense I have been in places “out there” and have touched the feral edge of the secular world. They can tell I’ve tasted immoderation, the opposite of what they live for and live in. They are curious because I have the scent of scandal — and yet I’m the woman in the midi-skirt and oversized sweater setting up chairs in the recreation hall.

They are good people, warm to me, gracious, even though I don’t belong. This is a strange land for me. I am a stranger among casual friends who need to be shielded from my truth. Indeed, the clothes I wear protect them from my nakedness underneath, from knowing what I truly am and from seeing my deep and wonderful disgrace.

begging God

After a cold spell, it warmed here yesterday, and I was able to get away for a couple hours to Morgan’s Woods. Still too chill to go completely topless, I wore my belted pea coat, splaying the lapels open so my naked breasts could kiss the air.

It’s ironic, perhaps, that I seek the physical wilderness when I’m in an emotional wilderness, but there’s something in it that seems right. It’s a spiritual alignment of a kind.

It makes a walk in the woods a good time to beg God.

“Please take this cup from me” is my mantra, my beg for release from my current wildernesses. I’m aware it mangles the Bible, for it’s actually what Jesus the Son begs God the Father in Luke 22, and last I checked, I am no Jesus, and my distress pales in comparison to taking on the sins of the world.

But it’s a good line, feels true, and I use it.

“It really is,” I say aloud to the Something Out There, “about being what I am without being allowed to be what I am.” I was made a certain kind of woman, a submissive, who has been cultivated to be and do in service of others, conditioned to please and to pleasure, trained in certain abilities. But now I’ve been extracted from that life, deprived of using the skills I have in the art of being used. (As I say these things, I realize this starts to sound like a joke about actor Liam Neeson’s roles and his “very special set of skills,” but it’s pretty much true for me too, albeit mine more in the “love not war” tradition.)

I know there are many in far worse circumstances. I know others despair over far more than I do. I know there are many who have long wished for a dominant to serve or a submissive to obey them. But just because there are many others flailing about in the seas surrounding the sinking Titanic doesn’t assuage my despair about my current doom.

Then again, I have been blessed in so many ways. I’ve had six years of live-in slaveries to four tough-but-benevolent dominants. I’ve been on a leash all this time, but given longer leash at times, when needed. This sojourn in Pennsylvania is a very long leash indeed.

Yet my past blessing doesn’t diminish my current begging. This wrinkle in time has cast me into an ill-fitting part, as if I’m an actress on a stage in a play I’ve never read. The curtain opens, and I’m without words. I don’t know my lines.

I wish to be elsewhere.

Begging God has the same problems as begging my dominants, one of which is that it’s bargaining without a chip. To Amanda and Master McKenna, I cannot offer something in exchange for my beg — they already own me. It means nothing for me to say, “Here, take my breasts, enter my soul through your pleasure of them…” They already own them and possess me.

Likewise, here, topless in the woods with God, the equation “If you take this cup from me, then I’ll do this for you,” just doesn’t work. There’s no this to give. I’ve got nothing.

And yet I try — as if divesting all my clothes and standing barefoot on a bed of thorns is my begging plea: “I’ve got nothing, but maybe something could change anyway?”

Another problem with the begging thing is that it starts to sound like childish whining. My dominants want a woman in her thirties not a girl in her teens. Begging, almost by definition, is persistent, repeated — and therefore annoying. It’s not a good look or a good sound.

My dominants prefer to see me as a woman without whine or pout, quietly enduring her deprivations, silently living through them. In fact, my dominants delight in my wanting, quietly endured but for an occasional glance of exasperation, a slow rolling of my eyes, and a phrase of clever sarcasm. They know my wanting swells my desire, which they can use for their pleasure. They love seeing me grow pregnant with it.

My begging in the trees subsides, my whine fades, my words are used up. I say it once, but not over and over. For a time, my begging gets all sucked up and sucked into myself.

In a clearing, the sun is warmer, and I untie my pea coat, letting it fall open for the rays to coat my breasts, which now wobble as I stroll. I figure God doesn’t mind — he created them — and I continue to meander through Morgan’s Woods, intermingling the sacred and the profane with my words and body.

For now, my begging, silent and internalized, has become a kind of confession:

This is me.
This is not the life I was made for.
And I’ve got nothing else.

Instead of “amen” at the end, I whisper another word:

Please.

I know why I come here and do this odd thing without clothes among the trees. It’s the closest I can get to the trifecta of my pleasure, the intersection of my parts.

In these moments, my sexuality, submissiveness, and spirituality somehow come together in a kind of communion.

In these moments, with the leaves stroking my flesh like fingernails and the gusts of cool rushing between my thighs like men, I feel my sex in submission to nature as a spiritual wonder.

In these brief moments, I leave my fragmented life behind and feel whole.

It makes a walk in the woods a good time to beg God.

conditioning

When I was in Colorado last time, I was asked, “Do you feel you have been conditioned to be what you are and do what you do?” The word “conditioned” threw me off. In the moment, I answered, “Yes, sort of,” but it was a kind of gibberish reply, and I regretted it later.

I’ve been thinking about that question a lot more. Perhaps the question has resurfaced with me because my submissiveness is mostly unused here in Pennsylvania, and I so deeply feel the absence of active domination. It’s obvious: I am indeed conditioned to need the slave life.

But the answer to the question is more complicated than it seems.

I am wary these days of people assuming a lifestyle or orientation that they don’t like or approve of is a result of conditioning. Or education. Or grooming. I won’t get into that beehive, but with that in mind I now want to amend my Colorado answer.

The question was, “Do you feel you have been conditioned to be what you are and do what you do?”

I would now answer that those are two different things — what I am and what I do. I was never “conditioned” to be what I am. I was always submissive, and in some ways I was the last to know. No one encouraged me to be submissive, and in fact one dominant man in the lifestyle told me not to get into it.

I think the intent of the question assumes coercion or a kind of brainwashing. No one could (should) ever choose that, so you must have been talked into a bad lifestyle. So it goes.

On the other hand, given that my orientation is submissive and I am rather extremely wired this way and that this is what I am by no one’s coercion or even by my own set of “bad” choices, there’s the other part of the question regarding what I do. And that’s what I meant in my original answer to the woman’s question.

The general model of lifestyle D/s is one of training. It’s intentionally an alternative relationship: the submissive gives herself to a dominant and consents to be trained into his preferences. This training, formal and casual in the daily life of D/s, is indeed a kind of conditioning. I am submissive naturally, by birth, I have chosen the D/s life by my own free will, but once in it, I have been trained, conditioned, shaped to be the kind of woman and submissive my dominants prefer.

I walk and sit and stand a certain way, as I’ve been trained. I am submissively proper in social situations, as my owners have shaped me. I kneel and bend over and spread myself open just as my dominants have conditioned me to.

However, it’s not conditioning to make me submissive, but conditioning to make me a better submissive. It’s not shaping me to be but shaping me in how I do what I do.

I do agree that my conditioning in the “how of doing” is something that deepens my submissiveness. Does it make me more submissive? Maybe. I know some men and women who would say so. I certainly submit to more, endure more, and crave to be used more.

I admit it feels like a drug in a way, such that when I am dominated constantly, living in 24/7, I want more and more of it. And such that when I am outside of the life, as I am in Pennsylvania, I feel withdrawal and the absence of it.

This is complicated more by the fact that I am kept as a sexual submissive. My submission and sex have become intertwined. And I am “conditioned” for both of them to be used of me together. And conditioned perhaps to crave both together.

So, it gets complicated.

Some would still say that I have been conditioned to crave an insatiable life of submission and sex. That my moral compass has been hijacked.

I think of it differently. I used to live a life of quiet repression. I now live a life of freedom to be what I am.

Kind of ironic.

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.