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.

swimming through the muck

My therapist Jillian says I’m in a mild depression. She’s been on Zoom with me twice a week, talking me through this. I’m OK, and there’s some hope at the end of the tunnel, but it’s continued to be a down time. I talk with Amanda every night. I’m really doing OK, but it’s like swimming through something thick and cloudy.

I won’t belabor the details, for I don’t think my state of mind is of that much interest. I’ll just say that it’s curious my current ennui has happened not inside my life of humiliation and abasement but outside of that in the vanilla world. Apparently I was meant to live in subjection and submission. That I can handle emotionally. Go figure.

No, I haven’t posted much this week, but I have been writing. I’m specifically working on the much-belated Q and A post that I promised some many moons ago. So sorry I never got to that. But I captured from you all so many great questions. Coming back to them now. Responding to them in blog words is actually helpful to my heart. I’ll post something soon, likely in several parts… BTW, I still welcome questions you’d like me to speak on: shaemadigan@comcast.net

The good news hope is some further movement on the agreement with Lucille. To be clear, the delay has had nothing to do with her. She is eager and exited to do this. It’s a win-win for her and us. The process just takes a long while, having to be vetted by various authorities, financial and legal, and papers wind up sitting on desks for days before getting attended to. But now, we may be within a two weeks of something final.

More on that to come, but from me now a cautious “Yay!”

poly and sharing

Our list conversations took place here in Pennsylvania between Christmas and New Year’s, mostly in the living room of my mother’s house. We tried to replicate our common positions in Amanda’s house — each of us sitting on either end of a large couch, our backs against each side rest, facing each other, toes almost touching. However, mother’s couch is from another era before comfort was invented, so we moved around the room into other seatings at different times. On occasion, our discussion extended into trips to the grocery store or drugstore. Most of the time, a mug or thermos of coffee was in hand.

One of my list items — “becoming more poly-oriented” — seemed to align with one of Amanda’s — “the sharing of Shae” — so we talked about them together.

I admitted to Amanda I really didn’t know what I meant about wanting to be more poly-oriented. It is an aspiration toward something nebulous.

Let me come at this in a roundabout way: bear with me…

At a certain point in life, you are what you are, and it really doesn’t matter how or why. For an obvious example, I am submissive, profoundly so. It used to be I wrote passionately how I was made this way, born into this “condition,” and that it wasn’t a result of or reaction against how I was raised as a girl. I still maintain my submissiveness is nature not nurture, but the argument now is not so important to me. I am what I am, and how I got here doesn’t so much matter.

This applies to me in another way. Whether by nature or nurture, I am still “morally oriented” toward the idea of monogamy.

I know, this seems ridiculous, considering my submissive lifestyle and how I am used. But that’s sort of the point: as a slave, I do what I am commanded to do, even unto multiple sexual relationships. I obey orders to be joined to multiple others in sexual ways.

But in all that, I still feel the moral conditioning deep down to need to justify what I do. I write often about this, how I feel promiscuous and shamed because of my slave life, yet I crave doing it. Maybe to justify my moral shame, I strive for meaning in the relationships that people have with me — even when they use me in non-relational ways. I “attach” to people who dominate me, perhaps thinking by doing so I legitimize the “unholy” relationship. I seek to make my services to another, even a random person, to be the best I can provide, possibly convincing myself that quality is somehow a virtue in a life that is not virtuous. And most of all, I find myself coming to love the dominants who debase me — my loving of them in their act of doing me maybe again a moral justification for what I do.

I know that some people — dominants, followers — try to argue me away from such a moral conditioning. (This is even as they find my wrestling with my shame to be especially compelling for them to watch.) But my response here is like the other: this is how I am. My moral compunctions are not my beliefs any more, not my rational thinking. They are not a philosophy I need to be talked out of. They are just somehow imprinted in me, whether by nature or nurture, and I cannot do or be anything other. I have become resigned that this is something I will always wrestle with.

Again, in this way too, I am what I am, and how I got here doesn’t so much matter.

It was about two years ago that I began to learn about polyamory. This changed my moral landscape somewhat. I found a kind of noble sensibility in the idea that we are capable of loving far more than monogamy allows.

I realize that my life of D/s slavery is not a prototypical example of polyamory. My multiple dominants and sharings are not true examples of poly-groups or polycules. My slave life is not actual polyamory, and I’m not publicly justifying what I do by claiming that.

But for me internally, if I think of myself as woman capable of “being love” to multiple people, I find something of my purpose. I don’t deny that I am wanton at heart, a trait which is released and given permission by my slave life. But I still have a desire to make, say, my depravity meaningful, to bring my loving, even so one-sided and unrequited, into the lives of people who use and consume me.

Well, it’s something like that. And something of what I’m getting at in my list item: “Become more “poly-oriented.” As I am used promiscuously, it helps me to think in terms of my being polyamorous — having a greater capacity to love.

This was some of the discussion with Amanda.

Her list item, “the sharing of Shae,” sort of connects to my “poly thinking.” And both of our list items had the neighborhood in mind.

This has been tricky for me to write about, as many of our neighbors now read this blog. But during my Pennsylvania absence, Amanda has been in discussion with everyone around the block about certain things when/if I get back. So, conversations have been had, and Amanda’s woo has been in high and effective use. I’ll get into that at some point in a future post. But the point here is that Amanda has created a potential playground within the neighborhood in which I might be shared in various ways.

From the first moment Amanda acquired me years ago she has talked about sharing me, and I have written many times about her intentions. Her item “the sharing of Shae” has been on her list for years, but always thwarted by circumstance (our move, her work, COVID, Pennsylvania). The difference now is that she might actually be able to make it possible this year.

The sharing of me is Amanda’s highest pleasure. And that in itself is an added motivator for me to give myself to it even beyond my submissive need. By being gifted by Amanda to others, I am gifting her.

But in all this from time to time, my original “moral orientation” kicks in. In traditional, monogamous terms, this seems so, well, patently wrong. Becoming the neighborhood slut is a scarlet-letter social shame — or that’s how I have internalized it. I have lived my slave life in conflicted sensibility — feeling guilty for being so broadly sexual yet justified in that I am dominantly made to be promiscuous.

Now, however, this new “poly thinking” seems to provide me another way of understanding myself. I have a capacity for being love to multiple people, and isn’t that a good thing? It doesn’t seem so wrong, then, to become pleasure to multiple others.

Or so I am telling myself…

So, “thinking poly” sort of helps lead me into a readiness for being shared. I say that, although I don’t quite know how one gets ready for something like this. And of course, I am still in PA, and my path back to Colorado is unclear.

But this was the gist of one of our list conversations.

Kevin-bonding

Amanda and I have had a couple of conversations about Kevin. This has been prompted by one of the items on my “do and be” list in which I expressed my desire to be with him again. Our lists aren’t supposed to be wishful thinking, and Kevin is precisely that for me, so I expected Amanda to say so. But she didn’t.

What ultimately ended things with Kevin more than a year ago was his involvement with a woman friend, a relationship that became quite serious. I wrote about them here and also here.

For newer followers, I should probably explain that several years ago Amanda and Kevin jointly owned me as their slave; later I was gifted to Kevin as an escort of sorts. Kevin was never “mine” in a romantic sense and I was happy for him to have found a romantic someone other. (OK, yes, I was a little jealous.)

My understanding is that they got engaged to be married, then sometime last year broke it off, yet still are seeing each other. I don’t know what that means or what their current status is.

My inclusion of Kevin on my list has nothing to do with his status or that relationship with his woman friend. I didn’t intend my list entry to be “practical” or actionable. Or maybe I did, kinda, sorta. But I don’t consider him available to me, and it’s not like that for me anyway— that is, to be angling for him. Not my place to even think that way. Besides, I’m a sub-slave with her hands and other parts full (if I were not the one unavailable in Pennsylvania). I told Amanda I didn’t expect something to be done, but just needed to acknowledge on my list that I think of Kevin often and I miss him in a D/s kind of way.

Well, Amanda and I talked about Kevin. And, in the process our conversation became about something more.

I have never been able to express adequately how I become bonded to dominant men. This bond is not a romantic emotion, nor is it purely a sexual desire. The best I can express it is as an emotional yearning and a poignant body-memory that makes me long for how I was once done by a man who possessed me.

I do not believe that dominant men feel the same bonding with me, and I don’t expect they should. I really don’t consider myself to be a dom’s “significant other” — I know I really am not. A dom possibly has other submissives and certainly has other non-sub women whom he might romantically attach to. So my bonding, my emotional yearning for a man’s particular dominance of me, is one-way, not reciprocated. I accept that what I feel for any of my doms is one-sided and appropriately unrequited. A slave yearns and a dom uses — it’s as it should be, and I have no complaints about that.

But what no one tells you is that you still are bonded to him and feel this bonding long after it’s over. You carry this longing in your body as if he impregnated you with it and left town.

I think the gist of it is that when you’ve been taken by a dominant man, used by him, and made to serve him beyond your personal dignity, something happens inside you, a kind of emotional alchemy. Being defiled by a man is a profoundly intimate experience, more and other than sex with him. It’s his uncovering of your worst possibilities. It’s his disrobing the shames you will commit for him because of your deep submissive need. It’s his awareness of not only the extremes you have done but also the further disgraces you will do because you’re submissively insatiable.

His knowing you this way changes you. Bonds you to him. Later, in absentia, you find yourself craving the man who has transformed you into the slut you are.

In the sequence of my slaveries, I became bonded to my first owner, Michael, then to Kevin, and now to Master McKenna. They each have watched my desperate submissiveness, led me into degradation, and observed me undressing my dignity before them. They each have enjoyed my struggle for respectability in the midst of my depravity.

You see, any deep D/s experience goes beyond leashes and collars and somehow touches your soul. We think of carnality — the sins of the flesh — on the opposite end of a straight line from the spiritual purity of godliness. Polar opposites. But I have come to think that they actually follow along the line of a circle and ultimately the two ends meet.

This is perhaps the uniqueness of my bond with Kevin. He had a physicality to him that quietly became a spirituality. He had a way of reducing me to carnal, throbbing flesh while making it touch the spiritual in me.

Kevin’s dominant style with me always had a visceral physicality. A former construction worker, he maintained a kind of body strength even in his executive roles. It wasn’t just brute strength but also the know-how of leveraging weights and balancing loads and moving masses of supplies from one place to another. Kevin could lift me easily and deftly splat me down onto a padded bondage horse. I was all wobbly breasts and fleshy thighs but may as well have been a load of lumber. He wouldn’t lay me gently down but drop me, knowing precisely the load that was me, how far I would fall without injury, how my breasts would thud into the leather and my naked thighs smack onto the pads. This manhandling of me was one of his unique signatures and took my breath away, literally and figuratively.

But it’s more of course, and on to my point — my experience with Kevin was also spiritual. I wrote about times with him in his garage as he tinkered with his truck. He’d have me half naked on a stool in the garage with him. He wouldn’t speak, there was silence, and I was just a quiet sexual presence in his space. I knew he loved his truck more than me; he used us both. His tinkering with his Ford was a kind of worship of its craftsmanship, and I found a similar spirituality in being the object of his sexual dominance.

Kevin, of course, trained me to provide him blowjobs on demand, impromptu, and I was used by him at home and in his truck constantly over a period of months. He made me into a cock-slut, one of those “worst possibilities” about yourself that you’d never know unless a man made you. Most often, my blowjob of him was in the morning early, before he went to work. For him, I was regular, like his morning shave, and just as mundane, which I loved. For me, this became a moment of quiet devotion, as spiritual as meditation, perhaps deepened and enhanced because I could not speak — my mouth was so occupied.

And then, of course, there was the special experience of bound sex with him. Kevin would tie me bent over the leather horse, face and breasts flatted down. His ties were tight — my arms, legs, torso belted snug to the horse. My legs straddled the round of the horse at the end, and my ass extended just past the edge, making my pussy and anus open and available to him. He used both, entering and exiting me at will.

Bound sex is a unique experience with any dominant, as it makes you incapable of anything except to be used. I am there, of course, out of my own consent, but once in it, nothing is really consensual. There are safe words and signals, but I don’t use them even though at times I wonder if I want to. Part of the extraordinary experience of bound sex is this ambiguity, just as a man is entering you with himself.

Kevin was quiet in these times, and words were distracting to him. He sometimes ballgagged me for that reason, taking away one of my attributes. His business was to use my body, apart from meaning and sensibility. He liked that, over time, my ballgag would generate much saliva from my mouth, which would pool thickly around my face pressed against the leather of the horse. It was a further reduction of me to the functions of my body. I became pure flesh, used.

In bondage sex, everything you feel is magnified, doubled or tripled because you cannot do anything other, choose anything other, feel anything other. Kevin would push his fat cock into me, and it would be violating and glorious at the same time. His firm restraints so tightly binding me, tamped down the spasms of my orgasm, not repressing it but extending my shudders longer, making my ecstasy a novel instead of a short story.

With Kevin, at a point, the intensities of the flesh become a spiritual nirvana. The circle of flesh and soul completes. After, he’d leave me there used and dripping, in solemn repose, like a penitent remaining long after the mass has ended.

Amanda and I talked about all this, about Kevin being this way for me, about the nature of my bonding to him. It wasn’t a new conversation for us — she knows how he has imprinted me like with a tattoo — yet in the discussion new things came out.

I don’t think she knew my bonding to him had persisted so strongly more than a year later. I don’t think she understood before this how everyone I am shared with submissively has this potential of bonding me to them. (This got into our “do and be” list items regarding polyamory and her future sharing of me… but more on that in other posts.) The take-home point was that I am affected by everyone I am used by to any significant extent. A year later, I am still so bonded to them.

Regarding Kevin, there is not much Amanda can do. I told her again I didn’t expect her to. It has to be his call, his desire, to pull me back into him. And even then there are logistics. Even were I to be in Colorado, he lives some five hours away from us. Amanda might be willing now to share me with him once again, but that takes a lot of time out of my schedule. Meanwhile, Amanda is wishing to do more with the “neighborhood at hand.”

And so, anything more with Kevin isn’t likely. Which makes me sad.

In D/s, we sometimes make the mistake of seeing leashes and collars and all the rest as the actual thing. In fact, they are mere symbols of the inner reality. I am bound to someone internally by need and conditioning and the event of being taken, and my collar symbolizes it.

Kevin has bound me to him, an internal collar that he’s locked shut. And he’s walked away with the key.

I will always wear him.

new skill

Thank you, all, for understanding and grace. Again, I got on this side of 2023 and ran into a wall of discouragement. I’m still feeling down, but working through it…

Master McKenna has given me a task of sorts, an exercise he wishes me to practice regularly here in PA for his future use of me in CO. I am to make myself nude but for a pair of high heels, to squat against a wall with my thighs spread open, and to clasp my hands together behind my neck.

I have been doing this. After my morning shower, in my bedroom I assume this position, maintaining it during my usual devotional/meditational time. I know Master McKenna means it for the carnal display of my flesh, but I don’t think it matters if somehow I find a kind of spiritual peace in it as well.

He’s interested in three things: economy of movement getting into the position, maintaining form while in it, and stamina for an increasing amount of time staying in it.

When I started, I could barely stay in the position for a few minutes; now I’m close to ten. The trick is in using the wall as much as possible to support you. I think my form in the position is fairly good. But I have no grace getting into the position — that process isn’t pretty. Will have to work on that.

He says he has a display table to put me on for doing this.

I asked him if he came up with this just as a solace for me right now because I’m depressed, something for me to do submissively, sort of.

He said no, that it’s really something he wants me to develop. Been considering it for some time. “Think of it as a new skill,” he said.

I said maybe I could mention it next time I’m in a job interview.

blues

So, yes, I get down sometimes. This week it hit me all of a sudden — Amanda flew back to CO as planned, and I was left alone with my mother once again. This, with Mom, is going into another year now.

This has left me with a particular observation: it’s ironic that in my submissive life I do not get depressed from being dominated and demeaned. In submission, I am put in chains, whipped, and spanked. I am called names like “slut” and “cunt” and made to accept them as my identity. I am kept at a lower level of personal status and servitude. And I am reduced to my sex, used for sex, and seen by others for what that makes me. Yet in all of that, I do not become depressed.

Because it is what I am meant to be and do. It is my deepest reality and orientation, the woman I am, submissive and docile. It is the life I need to be in.

My current malaise is not from being in D/s life but from not being in it.

I go through times like this on occasion, and I know this too will pass. I am on Zoom sessions with my therapist, Jillian, who’s great for me because she understands my lifestyle. Though it appears it will take a long while, I expect some solution for mother’s care to get decided, maybe by spring. There are things to hope for, and I am not desperately depressed.

But it’s a time for the blues. And I’m feelin’ it. Just sayin’.

about those lists

As usual, I’ve started something I’m having trouble completing.

Writing about our year-end lists is harder for me to do than I imagined. Mostly this has to do with the simple fact that most of the items on the lists depend on my being there, in Colorado, for extended periods of time — all dependent upon my mother’s situation and this possible pending arrangement for her care.

I just don’t know about that yet, if it will work out or what it will look like, and in the meantime, I have trouble writing about things that might not ever happen.

Admittedly, in the moment I’m in a deep funk. But I’m deciding not to write about the lists as I had promised. I just can’t do it right now.

Though I reserve the right to change my mind.

the lists

Usually at the turn of a year, Amanda and I exchange lists of our personal intentions for the future. These aren’t intended to be the usual New Year’s resolutions (dieting, working out more), though some have an aspect of self-improvement. They also aren’t bucket list items — things we want to do before we die.

These are our personal intentions reflecting our desires for “being and doing” over the next twelve months. Amanda and I prepare our lists separately, then talk through them together. Ultimately, what matters is not so much the lists themselves but the deeper conversations that emerge from them.

Shae’s List

Work out a good arrangement for Mother’s care.
Execute Master McKenna’s plans for retreat and school.
Renew something with Kevin.
Counsel/tutor Maria, however she wishes to go.
Become more “poly-oriented” (re neighbors).
Find my inner “copacetic” in regard to Blake.
Pursue a regular outside interest/hobby, apart from D/s.

In fact, I had several more items that had to do with my mother, but in the final version have collected them all into number one. Amanda and I started our discussions with the mutual understanding that much will depend on such an arrangement with Lucille — if not, much of my time will still be here in PA, and all bets are off.

Amanda’s List

New startup company.
Pennsylvania office.
The sharing of Shae.
Someone to bring into our couple.
Gazebo.

Over the next two or three posts, I’ll try to share the frank conversations and intimate thoughts Amanda and I discussed on each of our list items.

we went shopping

There is a limit to how much “Christmas niceness” Amanda can bear, it seems. To be fair, she genuinely enjoys my mom and is happy being with us during the season of good cheer. She is less taken with the religious aspects of Christmas that I still hold on to, but she appreciates they are important to mom and me and respects them as family traditions. But at the end of several days of joy to the world, it seems Amanda needs to push it all away as if it were too many Christmas cookies.

Today Amanda announced she and I were going shopping for the day. She dressed me in nothing but my winter wool coat and high heels. And a collar, of course. I spent the day in public places while naked underneath.

It’s been a while since she’s done this to/with me. As you may recall, she used to take me hiking in the Colorado mountains, rendering me in various degrees of undress. She has conducted public park adventures with me topless, and had me work in her downtown office (when she had one) for an afternoon as I was perkily bare-breasted. But COVID hit and somehow limited her options for public display of me. (I never understood that — it seems during COVID when no one was walking the parks would be the perfect time to walk me half-nude on a leash.) And then my Pennsylvania events took me away from her for a time.

In any case, she is here now and felt she needed to undermine my peaceful holiday with a day of ever-possible sexual embarrassment.

The coat I wear is of a soft wool that doesn’t unduly scratch my bare skin underneath. It’s in cream white, short in length, coming down to a couple inches above my knees. This would be stylish atop a pair of tight jeans or even dressy with a skirt hem peeking out from below, but without either I look like a big snowball with legs.

It’s a wrap coat, and though it has buttons, Amanda doesn’t use them, instead cinching the coat tight around my waist with the tie. It has a deep V front that makes me self-conscious. I tend to try to tug the lapels closed, and Amanda says “Stop doing that.” I obey and say nothing — it’s an old dialogue, well-worn: “People will see my boobs”; “That’s the point”; “There are children”; “They’re used to them”; “There are men”; “Yes.” We don’t have to repeat my litany of self-consciousness — we well remember how this conversation goes.

Actually, the people group whose judgments I am most sensitive to I never mention: other women who wonder why a whore in white is shopping in the mall on a Tuesday morning.

This is one of those days when “nothing happened” but anything could have, which is the real story.

One of her long-considered plans for me has been to have me approach a strange man in a mall and offer him a blow job. In fact, Amanda has had me prepare “practice scenarios” for this, mostly introductions and dialogues that convince a stranger I am an ordinary woman out shopping who wants this sort of adventure. The trick, I find, is in the segue from talking about the weather to proposing a brazen sexual act. If it weren’t so serious a possibility, it would be the fount of much humor: “Speaking of sunny skies, I could brighten your day considerably…”

I have never practiced these on a human of the male persuasion, although Amanda has had her fun hearing them. She likes arguing with me the hypothetical of whether I am more of a slut if I give a man a blowjob for free or if I ask for money.

All of this is brain-play, her mental dominance of me, erotically playful but short of a more intense mind-fuck. Still, all this goes through my mind as I walk the mall in my wool coat. I see men alone, think about their lives and wives, and wonder if Amanda’s greatest rush here would be in using me or in allowing them to use me.

The mall is packed, filled with families, and I look like a walking snow globe — all reasons this will not happen today.

Even so, I know Amanda loves being here with me in the possibility of such a scene, knowing I am thinking about it and imagining ways in which it might go down.

So to speak.

Early in the shopping day, Amanda finds a corner off a service hallway, and pushes me against the wall. She opens my coat and palms my breasts. I worry that a mall worker will walk by, but I stand docile and receptive. Amanda reaches into her handbag and pulls out a Ziploc containing something. Inside are two weights on chains. She hooks each one onto each of my nipple rings. They don’t hurt, but I feel their weight, and they make my nipples extend and droop. She closes my coat, and we continue shopping.

Later, Amanda has me try on dresses in Macy’s, not to buy me one but to get me out of my coat in the dressing room. There’s a moment when she knocks on the door of the cubicle, and I open it, thinking she’s the only one in the entryway. But there’s a woman standing behind her, likewise waiting on a friend or sister in another cubicle. It’s, of course, a place for women in underwear, but I am not wearing any, and this woman gets in a full stare, slightly surprised by my flesh and, no doubt, the weights dangling from my nipples.

Early afternoon, Amanda steers me to the rest room, the one in Macy’s which is less popular, it seems. There, she takes my coat and I walk into the stall naked. It is then I realize that Amanda could walk out of the rest room, my coat in hand — indeed walk out of the mall entirely. She doesn’t, but later admits she thought about it.

We do some real shopping as well, shoes for Amanda and a sweater for me, residual Christmas gifts from each of us to each of us. We have coffee at a Starbucks and a soft pretzel at Auntie Anne’s. We sit at the fountain in the center of the mall and talk about what life might be like this next year. It’s all rather normal and fun and lovely.

In the car about to go home, Amanda opens my coat and arranges it to show my flesh and mounds and weighted nipples. She drives home via the Interstate, looking for a driver of a big rig she can pull up alongside, showing me off. She finds not one but two, the second tooting his foghorn to my utter embarrassment. I look away but do not turn away, allowing them their looks.

Amanda is the yin-yang of naughty and nice, and in the surfeit of Christmas sweetness, she finds her balance by offering me to the wolves.

But by the end of things, nothing actually happened. All day, she kept me in her control, in sexual tension in public, which is her deep pleasure. But there were no events and nothing actually happened.

At night, before sleep, I write in my journal: “We went shopping.”