Tag: Writing

rules of writing (about neighbors)

This is not my main post for today, and it may seem an odd interjection amid all that’s going on, but I feel I need to talk this out on the heels of my post yesterday about the neighbors.

So, there’s been some discussion with Amanda about how I handle blogging about others in the neighborhood. How I write about others has long been a sensitive matter in my writing conscience, and now will become more so in my more-intimate future with these people around our block.

I have always seen my life as an open book, or, if you will, “open blog post,” and when I started writing online, I vowed to be transparent and explicit in my accounts of my experiences, submissive and sexual. I wouldn’t consider that virtuous of me — I have needed to write these intimate things to make sense of myself, to process my own life for myself. So in this space I have offered myself up intimately to readers, uncensored.

Further, my owners have never restrained me in this — they’ve encouraged me to blog and have given me a green light to express anything and everything I wish to. As it happens, they find interest in reading my posts to discover more of how I feel and respond in slave situations.

But when I started to become shared with others, it became a bit of a question how to report out on my experiences with them and theirs with me. I have navigated this a bit gingerly, but it’s worked out well enough, I think. It helps that I am usually not negative or critical of others — it’s not really the point of my blogs to “review others.” That’s not part of who I am. If anything, in my blog writing, I am more critical of myself.

A more intricate problem has emerged as more people in our social circles are reading my blog. They will now be reading about each other and be discovering my intimacies with people they know down the block.

I think I was first aware of this issue several years ago when Amanda threw an office party at our house. Her employees already knew about Amanda’s lifestyle (she’s open and up front about that) and they had met me and known I was “a woman kept by her” in some sort of “different lifestyle.” People often don’t have the language for what I am.

At this party I had interactions with every one of them. Later on in my blog, I was reporting out on the party, various conversations, and my feelings of others’ impressions of me as a slave. I realized then that they all, back at the office, might be reading my blog and discovering much about each other as each related to me and my submission.

So what should I have done? Not write about the party? Edit my post to exclude specifics? Both of those options violate my prime directive, if you will, for writing my blog.

For better or worse, I chose to write fully and transparently.

But now there will be neighbors intimately involved with me. How do I handle writing about them so personally? I need to be free to write my life, but do they want their private moments with me to be shared?

I should make it clear that I change people’s names when I write about them. A few exceptions: my real name is Shae, and my mistress’s real name is Amanda. Yet, changing names of neighbors protects their privacy with people outside our housing group but not from those within. Neighbors know who the other neighbors are that I’m reporting about.

What to do?

Obviously, this is a unique set of circumstances for me and for them. Who does this — and then writes publicly about it? There are no precedents we know of.

Amanda has suggested to everyone that this is an experiment, and with some mature grace and forgiveness when needed, “let’s all give it a try.” There are “things we’ll have to figure out,” she’s said. And, she’s proposed a set of guidelines for my writing about these experiences.

Amanda has made the executive decision that I must remain free to write about neighbor experiences transparently just as I normally write about her and Master McKenna and everyone else.

Amanda has talked with the neighbors individually, assuring them that it is not my style to “review them.” Also, she’s said to them that I will not air what I hear them say about other neighbors or things about family. Amanda doesn’t want my blog to become a gossip column. (Frankly, I filter that stuff out anyway, so this is no new imposition.)

Amanda is so good at woo. She’s said to the neighborhood that I have written publicly about her for years, and that’s been a good, not negative, experience. And she’s made the point that the neighbors have been reading my blog all along, and so “you all know how Shae is responsible and respectful with her words.” (I was deeply pleased that my writing became a positive icon in the discussion.)

At the same time, Amanda made it clear to the neighbors that I will be at times explicit. Other neighbors will read about them that way. If they don’t want that to happen, then they need to back out of their sharing experience with me.

So far, no one has.

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.

four problem words

To many readers this may a boring blog. (That’s an opening line one is told never to start with).

You see, this is essentially a word study. I get excited by word meanings, connotations, nuances, word imagery — but I know most people aren’t into words as I am.

Perhaps it helps that this relates to the lifestyle of D/s, practices of BDSM, and my own sexuality. In any case, bear with me. I’ll try to keep this short, but I wish to say a few words about words that cause me pause.

Normal.

The dictionary definitions of normal take us into two different directions, and that’s the problem when using it in the context of the D/s lifestyle.

One definition contains the idea of “common” or “usual.” It’s normal (common) for it to be hot in summer. It’s normal (usual) for a person to feel anxious during a thunderstorm. Normal is what happens most of the time. Normal is what most people are and do commonly — what usually is the case. This definition derives from statistics, bell-curves and such, and, of course, normal has a lot of defined uses in the sciences. Normal in this sense is a statistical truth.

The other definitional direction of normal is the idea of natural, healthy, whole, or sane. The problem in this is more easily seen in its opposite, the antonym abnormal. We laughed at the classic line in Young Frankenstein, where Igor (Marty Feldman) produced a jar with a preserved brain. After the operation, Dr. Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) asks Igor, “Whose brain did I put in?” Igor says, “Abby someone.” The doctor presses, “Abby who?” And Igor replies, “Abby Normal.”

In talking about D/s, abnormal is the problem with normal.

As a submissive, I accept that, according to statistics, I am not normal. Most people are not predominantly dom or sub, not significantly wired as such. I am different from the majority. Yet I do not accept its opposite definition for me — that I am Abby Normal — deficient as a woman, twisted because I’m a submissive, abnormal.

The word is true in its one sense, untrue in its other. But in writing it’s hard for me to get away from the word normal. I still use it of myself. I guess I make a distinction between “not normal” and “abnormal.”

Some observe that “no one is normal,” meaning that everyone has a difference or two from the norm, that in the vast panoply of human life, there is great variety. True, but that’s not the point. Normal does not mean everyone needs to be identical. It means that, in particular areas, one thing is common and another thing is less common. In the category of dominance and submission, the largest group of the population is not into D/s (normal), and a much smaller group within the population is into D/s (not normal). That’s just true.

Again, I accept myself in this particular measurement to be “not normal.” Some try to correct me away from that, feeling that I am engaging in negative self-thinking. They’re just trying to make me feel better. Thank you. But when I say that I am “not normal,” I am not putting myself down.

I just mean I am, perhaps, rare. 😉

Lifestyle.

For a long while, I avoided this word, but ultimately had to give in to it. Now I use it all the time.

One problem I have with lifestyle is that it carries an elitist tone, a sense of lah-dee-dah with a tinge of posh. Maybe from my girlhood I was influenced by the TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” In my use of the word, I certainly don’t mean Amanda and I are richer or better than everyone else. We aren’t.

But another problem is that my D/s life with Amanda isn’t exactly a lifestyle. Though it is. That seeming contradiction is a nuance at the crux of my word troubles.

My submissiveness, which I consider to be “inborn sexual orientation,” is not a “lifestyle.” It is what I have been made to be. While my submissiveness has led me into certain D/s relationships and the life that accompanies them, it is not, properly speaking, a lifestyle but rather a trait or characteristic. Nor is my life lived with and under Amanda a lifestyle. It’s a relationship.

I feel the same about poly arrangements — multiple-partner relationships fulfilling various wants, needs, and loves. The mainstream world tends to look at that and label it a “lifestyle,” while those poly partners in it think it’s all simply about relationships.

The etymology problem is this: it’s like calling “marriage” a lifestyle. It is, kinda, but not really.

However, relationships do lead us to live in certain ways. As Amanda’s D/s slave, I wear a collar 100 percent of the time. Per her order, I serve her coffee in the morning on a tray, and upon her order wear not enough clothes, and on occasion am bound to the wall in the entryway. All of these practices are part of our way of life, our style of living.

So, what lifestyle expresses, effectively, is simply the idea “We have chosen to live this way.” And the term “our D/s lifestyle” quickly identities the group of like-minded people who “live this way.”

So, lifestyle is a word I cannot get away from in writing. It’s just necessary, it seems.

Slave.

I have become sensitive to the social implications of the word slave. It certainly can be understood as having a racial context; it also can be seen in the context of sex-trafficking. Of course, in my use of the term, I don’t intend either of these associations. God forbid. And I never wish to offend people or be insensitive to serious social concerns.

Yet, in the D/s lifestyle, there is need to identify the extent of my life in service to another, the extreme of it as I live it. I am a submissive, but more — my submission is not occasional or casual, but much more extreme — I am property owned, kept 24/7 as someone’s slave. I live at the lower level. I say that not as a brag, that my submission is better because it is to this extreme. If anything, people look down on me for allowing myself to be made a slave. Yet, my being a slave is simply true — it’s what I literally am to Amanda and Master McKenna, and how I see and accept myself.

So, slave is another word I cannot avoid in my writing.

But as a partial remedy to those social associations, I more often now say “D/s slavery” or “lifestyle slavery.” I’m not consistent in that as yet, but I try.

Vanilla.

In writing about my D/s slavery, it’s necessary to refer to non-dominants and non-submissives — the mainstream world. You just have to.

The term vanilla, of course, has a general usage even in that mainstream world to refer to that which is conventional or traditional: “I considered the blueprint for the new building to be vanilla, too safe in design.” “Without its best player, the team executed a too-predictable vanilla offense.”

Of course, this same meaning has been adopted by the BDSM world, mostly to delineate it’s lifestyle from the mainstream: “The guests were vanilla, witnessing the act of bondage for the first time.”

The problem I have with vanilla is that its proper definitions of conventional and traditional can also have the connotation of bland and boring. It can sound disparaging. When I use vanilla, I don’t mean to put down those who are not of my D/s persuasion. I just wish to refer to them as being different from me. Vanilla is the “other crowd.”

So, I use the term. Have to.

Here in Pennsylvania, I live in the mainstream world and interact with non-D/s people most of my time. And I find them well-meaning, caring, and lovely, even though they and I are so very different in what we believe. They are vanilla, yes, and I am different from them, yes, but we are all human. Yes.

Recently in my writing I have come to use normal as a synonym for vanilla: “The vanilla world of normals.” I mean it without judgment but just as a distinction. They are normals and I am not.

So, we’ve made a full circle in our word study.

We’re back to normal. 😉

I think the guiding light in all of this etymology is to aim for usage that is descriptively true and fair and honoring of people.

We don’t need to tear down people that aren’t us.

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.

blogging in the void

I think it must be obvious to people I have fewer lifestyle experiences to write about these days — my being “slave, interrupted” and all — and so there’s rather little new to post.

As a substitute, I have told (too many times now) about my topless reveries in Morgan’s Woods and have fabricated this roman à clef about the semi-fictional Master Z. I’ve also created new menus for some of my old posts and refurbished an older post.

Admittedly, these are the motions of a blogger treading water.

I’ll be going back to Colorado on September 11, which will no doubt return much opportunity for my reporting fresh experiences. And our longer-term hope is for me to be able to do more trips back there. Still, I will be living primarily here in Pennsylvania, caring for mother. As Amanda and I have discussed our future, we have penciled in 2023 for us as a tale of two cities.

Which means I will continue to need to wrestle with the challenge of blogging in the void.

So, one thing I’ve decided to do is start a series of posts about my early years entering the D/s lifestyle, specifically about my relationship to a man named Michael, who eventually, tumultuously, became my first owner and master.

As I’ve noted before, I had been with Michael as his slave for two years before I started blogging. This WordPress blog started just a few months before things ended with Michael, when I fell into the dominance of Amanda and Kevin. Yet I have journaled throughout my life, including all my years with Michael and those first years of my slavery, so there is a resource to help me remember and piece together those experiences.

I don’t know if this will work, but I feel now like trying it. I may start it then abort it. It may be that I post one of these retrospectives infrequently, maybe one every other week. I don’t know.

One challenge has been that there are some things about my Michael years that are tenderly painful. But there’s been enough time now that I think I can explore those times once again without emotional trauma. That isn’t, by the way, any critique of Michael himself. He was and is a wonderful man.

I think another challenge in blogging this will be to recapture my early naiveté about the slave life back then. I have been trained and conditioned and enslaved so much, it’s hard to put myself back in those shoes of innocence.

We’ll see how this goes…

punishment: program note

Just a quick update:

I’ve received such great comments and emails on my previous blog about punishment in D/s, and later this week I will summarize them and compose a follow-up blog post. It’s turning into a great discussion.

I also intend to respond personally to each of the comments and emails I’ve received, but that will take a little time. Bear with me.

And there’s more time to add your two cents. I welcome further input. Please contribute.

Your inputs remind me of how many different D/s arrangements are out there, how differently we each pursue a life of submission and dominance. I am learning from your commentary, ever impressed by the variety of relationships we are exploring. It’s a beautiful thing.

Also, I invite you to continue exploring the menus on my site. I am changing these every week now, and will be adding another menu today or tomorrow.

I’m also adding new blog listing to existing menus. I’ll try to find a way of marking these, perhaps with an asterisk, to show they are newly added.

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.

The Party (Fiction)

Note: This is flash fiction, which is generally defined as a really short, short story. One rule of thumb is that it is to be about 500 words in length, although some allow more words. This comes in at 500. I find flash fiction is a good exercise in economical writing. It forces you not only to eliminate any unnecessary words, but find other words that do more “work.” It’s not the only kind of writing you want to do, of course, but it’s a good discipline. Here I’m trying to adapt erotica into this flash fiction format.

He warned if I toppled any glass I would be given lashes in front of the crowd.

The problem with the waist tray was that my breasts, which would be made bare for the event, jutted into the space above the tray. This was fine for stemless wine and cocktail barware, which sat comfortably under, but made tall champagne flutes and highball glasses precarious. My breasts swayed slightly when I walked, tending to jostle any glasses that tall.

“I can’t help it,” I apologized, “they just move.”

Master Jack grunted but would hardly complain, for he valued my assets. Indeed, the whole point of the waist tray was to frame my tits above the tray for all to see.

He put me in a black miniskirt and strappy heels and my titanium collar with a Yale lock in front. He shackled my wrists behind my back and filled my mouth with a ballgag.

The tray belted around my waist, with chains holding up its front corners. The question was whether to attach the chain ends to the piercings in my nipples or the O-ring of my slave collar. Master tried to attach the tray to my nipples, and it worked sort of, but my nipples elongated like springs when the tray was filled with drinks, making everything unstable.

The O-ring it was.

People arrived around seven, some thirty of them, men and women, strangers offering leering smiles when they saw me.

Master announced at the beginning — “My slave cannot serve drinks in tall glasses… for her tits are too big.” Everyone looked at me and I was obvious and people laughed.

All evening I walked around in a random pattern from bartender to party guests, my breasts jiggling, framed between the chains.

Later I became weary from being in my heels all evening. My shoe caught on the edge of the Oriental rug. It was a minor stumble, nothing really, but two empty glasses toppled over on my tray.

Immediately Master Jack led me to the wall. He beckoned the crowd to watch. He made me bend over at my waist and grab my ankles. He lifted my skirt from behind, revealing my cheeks. I felt the air, circulated by the overhead fans, waft over my shaved pussy.

He announced my stumble, that there were to be two strokes. He handed a whip to one of the guests. “Have at her,” he said, and everyone laughed.

I heard the whip being raised. It whistled through the air, landing flat against my flesh.

I screamed, trembling.

“Harder!” someone said.

The second stroke landed. I yelled again, gasping from the slice.

People clapped, laughing.

I felt blood trickle from the stripes I’d been given.

Master straightened me, facing the guests. My tears made my mascara run. He left the back hem of my skirt tucked into my waistband: my welts were visible to everyone.

I continued serving drinks on my tray.

Someone asked Master Jack, “Where do I get one of her?”

word studies

I wrestle sometimes with the way particular words are used, especially in the context of D/s understanding. Occasionally I like to post something about my musings on the meaning of these words. I realize many people are not so interested, but I hope followers can indulge my interest here…

Lifestyle

I use this word all the time, but only because I have to.

“Lifestyle” sometimes carries the sense of a wealthy, lavish existence. In certain uses it connotes artistic choices of decor and style. It’s also an overused advertising word. In all of these cases, “lifestyle” suggests superficiality.

Also, the word “lifestyle” implies a casual, maybe trendy choice — “we like being outdoors and have an active lifestyle” or “we’ve decided to adopt an eco-friendly lifestyle.”

Of course, D/s lifestyle is not superficial nor casual nor trendy. It’s a serious and hard choice to live in a different relational structure, a demanding (often) 24/7 commitment, and a radical departure from normal life.

And more to the point — D/s is a relationship not a lifestyle. In the vanilla world, newlyweds don’t say, “We decided to live a married lifestyle.” Marriage is to be an intimate relationship of the highest order, and “lifestyle” cheapens it.

Yet “lifestyle” says a bunch of stuff very succinctly. It is by definition “a mode of living,” and for the most part that’s how I use it. D/s is a different mode of living from other vanilla modes of living.

I can’t get away from using “lifestyle,” but I still wrestle with it every time.

Shame

In therapy, it is now commonly thought that “shame” is about one perceiving oneself as unworthy. This has been spearheaded by the work of Brene Brown, which has influenced my sessions with my therapist — who has in turn influenced me.

In that pantheon of “bad feeling” definitions, guilt is when you are literally responsible (“I shot the sheriff”). Shame is when you see yourself as faulty (“I am deficient; I am bad”). Humiliation is the experience of being seen or viewed by others as you are being disgraced. Embarrassment is a fleeting, often accidental, experience of being exposed — as when your bikini strap breaks at the beach. (I hate it when that happens!)

A further helpful distinction is that humiliation is more about the situation you’re in and shame is more about who you are.

Therapists’ counsel is to avoid self-shaming language and negative thinking. I agree with that, and for a long time in my blog-writing I avoided using the word “shame.”

However, I have started to use it again, and here’s why.

Outside of the counseling context, “shame” is also an emotion of deep intensity. In my slave experiences, “embarrassment” is rarely appropriate because my situations are not fleeting or accidental and the emotion the word suggests is too mild. I go often to the word “humiliation,” which is more apt. But at times there’s another level beyond humiliation, and it feels like it needs another gear. It’s then I need the word “shame.”

(As an aside, I think that in the D/s world, there are simply not enough words for these experiences. “Humiliation” carries much of the load, but is overkill in some cases, and insufficient in others. There are words like “abasement” and “ignominy,” which I use sometimes but are more archaic and less known. It is said that in certain Scandinavian native languages there are more than 300 words referring to “snow.” I don’t need 300 but it would be nice to have at least five words for “humiliation.”)

There’s another point to be made: in D/s, a slave is both highly valued and deeply disgraced at the same time. I agree that a slave should never feel unworthy; to the contrary, she is seen as being extraordinary in the life of D/s. But what she is — a woman kept, a woman used — is also a status of disgrace, and it’s appropriate for her to wear that as “shame.”

An example: I think of my experiences being made topless in the house around our handyman, Blake. My reaction to that goes deeper than just the sense of his visually feasting on my breasts. That much is humiliation. But in those situations he knows I am bared to him because I am an adult woman who is owned and kept as a slave. He knows my breasts are naked for him because of what I am. In this case, “shame” is the word that more fully expresses it.

“Shame” is a necessary word sometimes.

Normals

There are two words/phrases I’ve recently coined, and this is one.

In my usage, “normals” is a stand-in for “vanilla people,” those who lead non-D/s lives — ordinary people doing normal things.

Some have commented that by using the word “normals” in my writing I am suggesting that being a submissive is “abnormal.” No, that’s not my belief nor my intent. “Normals” is simply a statistical reality. More people are not submissive than those who are, and they are the norm.

Likewise, only two percent of the world population are redheads like me. The norm is for people to have black or brown hair — they are the “normals” because that’s what’s statistically most common. It doesn’t mean that as a redhead I am defective.

(However, what are the stats about a woman like me being both a redhead and a submissive? That makes me unusual for sure, though Mistress A would quickly say, “Don’t get too full of yourself, Shae. It doesn’t mean you’re special.” OK, then.)

Deep Submissive

The other phrase I’ve coined recently is “deep submissive.” I use this as a noun, describing one who is extremely submissive by nature. I am a deep submissive. (Duh.)

This is a term of degree and type. There are submissives of all kinds. I sometimes use the phrases “curious submissive,” “casual submissive,” and “role-play submissive.” A “deep submissive” refers to those of us who have an intensely strong need to live submissively.

For a deep submissive, the D/s life is not a casual or experimental thing. It is an immersive existence. The deep submissive is wired differently in how she experiences life and in the kinds of relationships she needs. For the deep submissive, submissiveness is part of her sexual orientation. For her, being dominated is not just a wish but a desperation, not just a desire but a need.

“Deep submissive” is one who seeks to live deeply embedded in a life of being dominated.

That’s all, folks.

a potpourri of randomness

I really don’t assume people are so fascinated with my life that they care about Shae trivia, but sometimes there are just odds and ends I feel like collecting into a post. So here — a potpourri of randomness.

It’s been rainy here on and off this week, and it seems it will be so again today (Sunday) and tomorrow. I often like rainy days, and here in Colorado we don’t get enough of them, but after a year of COVID isolation, this is a bit frustrating.

Otherwise it’s a swell Memorial Day weekend.

Mistress A, perhaps because we are destined to a day indoors, has me collared and heeled and naked, just because she can. Recently she’s taken to having me wear a waist chain, and today she has attached to it a jingle bell, positioned just above my bared pussy.

Such I am as I write this.

One bright spot: Amanda bought me a new collar. She ordered this weeks before I went to Kevin’s, and it arrived Tuesday.

It’s made of stiff leather with a large metal buckle in back, and a massive O-ring hanging in front. It is red, deep red. The collar is wide, some two-and-a-half inches of stiff leather sheathing my neck, and while it’s not a posture collar, yet I feel its constriction when I look down.

Bold and loud and obvious, this collar draws attention and clearly states that I am a submissive slave.

As if that wasn’t perfectly obvious already.

I’m wearing this collar right now as I write, and I feel it each time I long down at my keyboard.

I’ve been writing a lot lately, and my juices (to be clear, my creative juices) have been flowing through both my fiction and my blog writing. It’s been good.

I use a program called Scrivener, and it allows me to keep my ideas in separate folders in front of me in a left-hand pane, and I can flip to them instantly. I use MS Word for other things, office stuff, of course, but I find Scrivener so much better suited to creative writing with different pieces and parts.

Anyway, the point of this is to say I keep a number of blog ideas active at the same time, currently more than a dozen. It works for me to go from one to another until I land somewhere with the creative insight on that piece to continue what I wrote before and perhaps finish it.

It’s a writing tip I’ve offered before — don’t fixate on just one writing thing, but keep several going at once. That way if you get blocked on one, your writing might open up on another.

The caution, though, is that too many open projects can become distracting. I sometimes find myself flitting from one to another so often and quickly I get boggled and don’t get any real writing done at all.

So, seems that Kevin called Amanda the other day. He normally phones her in between my visits to discuss his schedule for me the next time, but this call was earlier than usual, and made me wonder about things.

She won’t tell me about the substance of it, which is fine — I don’t have the right to know., and sometimes she wants me to be reminded that I don’t have that right. But of course, I immediately fret over if Kevin has some problem with me.

I go back to her later and ask, “With Kevin. Was I OK?”

If she were less benevolent, she wouldn’t say anything, letting me stew in my self-doubt. But she doesn’t want me to agonize over something like that — she plays with my mind in other ways.

“You’re fine, Shae,” she says, “It’s nothing like that.”

OK, then. Still, I’m curious.

Upcoming slave and writing agenda:

It seems Amanda is waiting to hear from another neighbor as to whether they will be able to join us for afternoon tea on Thursday. I’ll write something about that, of course.

I will be resuming my time with Master McKenna next Saturday.

My personal writing project now is to focus on this whole thing with Master McKenna, and try to capture is personality and style. It’ll probably be a number of parts, posts.

Mistress A seems to be keeping me today in high protocol. She has me speaking to her as “Mistress.” And she has me dressed this way — or undressed, as is the case.

I think this is in response to my earlier Marisa Tomei impression in My Cousin Vinny, my being likewise petulant and demanding but in my case involving demands for spanking and caging. I told her I was sorry for that — not for telling her those things but for my tone of demanding them. Thankfully she didn’t feel it rose to the level of being punishable, but I was on the edge.

My writing is interrupted by her calling me to refill her coffee. She is, thankfully, not working, rather reading a novel in the living room. She needs rest and time not working. I think she is calling me because she wants me to serve her and because she wants a hot cup of coffee, but also because she wants to hear my jingle bell as I come trotting to attend to her.

Also, also, because she wants to see the slit of my pussy.

This last time, I delivered her a fresh coffee, and she had me stand there while she read her book. After a short time, she reached over and fondled my pussy, her thumb creasing my slit between my pussy lips.

She went back to reading.

I said, “You know, you could continue doing that.”

She laughed and said, “I’m done with you. You can go now.”

“Thank you, Mistress.”

So I am back writing again. Ready to wrap this up…