A quick (and insanely sentimental) post, because I’m worn out from a long day of shooting, but today is an important day!
Ten years ago today, I found myself upturned across a lap for the first time, receiving my first ever spanking. I was eighteen years old, and I’d been craving that moment for as long as I could remember. I’d been thinking about spanking since I was old enough to think real thoughts, and as I had grown older, it had become an obsession.
In my early teen years, I felt so much self loathing because of my kink. I truly believed that there was something wrong with me, and that I would never be able to be truly happy because I needed something that I didn’t believe was available to me.
Of course I had seen spanking sites and forums, although I’d never been brave enough to post there. So I knew that there was some sort of community, with events and meetups. But I was afraid to even say the word aloud, let alone to go to a place where this was happening right before my eyes. In order to get what I wanted so badly, I would have to admit to myself, and then to another person, what exactly that was. And that thought terrified me.
Of course, I also had to turn 18, too. That was another setback.
My life has always been full of duality. I have “mixed luck.” I’ve had dark and awful things happen to me, but I’ve also had times where something perfect just fell into place and changed my life forever.
Meeting my first top in a totally vanilla setting and finding out, by accident, that he also had a similar kink to me was one of those things. If I had been required to take initiative towards finding a spanking partner, I don’t know when I would have built up the courage to do so.
This isn’t the anniversary of my entry into the scene, though. For the first five years, I played privately and only with SF, my first Top. The other leap was too big for me to make yet. I started really slowly, but I eventually became brave enough to keep expanding my comfort zone. But if it wasn’t for this day ten years ago, when I finally made my fantasy a reality, if I hadn’t made that first step, none of this could have happened.
I know it’s hard to believe that I used to be so shy back then, but it’s true. My ability to put myself “out there” the way that I do comes from a lack of shame about who I am and what I am into. I used to believe that my kink was a failing on my part, a disorder, something to be ashamed of. Now, I feel none of that. Spanking is the thing which has given me the most happiness in my life, and which has opened up the most wonderful opportunities for me.
Being able to be myself in this regard has helped me to accept other parts of me and to be myself completely without a need to hold anything back. In a way, this is the anniversary of the first step in me finding my real identity, learning where I fit in and all in all, being okay.
I remember how nervous I felt once the possibility of getting my first spanking became real, too. There was a whole other rush of emotions. What if it wasn’t anything like what I had fantasized? What if I didn’t like it at all in real life? I sometimes thought that I’d be able to do this once and cross it off my bucket list and that I’d never need it again. I felt halfway worried that this wouldn’t be the case and halfway worried that it would. I think I was starting to realize that this was just part of who I am, maybe, based on that fear.
I sometimes wish I could talk to the girl I used to be before I found my way into this Spankingland. I’d tell her that everything was going to be okay. There’s nothing to worry about. There’s a whole kinky world out there, and it’s chock full of people who will love and support you. Through sharing your kink, you’ll get to meet people from different walks of live that you never would have connected with. Sure, there are going to be jerks and people who will truly hurt you out there, but you’re going to meet amazing people. You’ll make the best friends you’ve ever had.
Through this, you’re going to meet a man who loves you, cares for you and values you in ways that you never thought possible.
You’re going to travel all over the place and get to explore parts of the world previously only available to you in books. You’ve never even been on an airplane before, and you haven’t seen much of the world. But one day, you’re going to feel at home in more places than you can count.
Everywhere you go, you’ll know someone. Because you’re not the only one who feels like this. There are tons of people who share your thoughts, your fantasies, your fears. The things that made you feel so weird won’t seem so strange anymore one day. You’ll sit in a hotel suite with a group of friends one day and joke about the movies that you used to watch over and over again, waiting for a thirty second spanking scene, or the way your dictionary opened to “SP” page on it’s own due to frequent viewing.
And, despite the fact that the world you’re about to dive into isn’t perfect, it’s really good. And you’re going to be happy. You wrote a list of things you wanted from life in your tattered black leather diary. In the next ten years, you’ll get almost all of them, and this is a huge step towards a lot of the things you want.
You’re going to live the dreams you didn’t dare to dream, because you’ve learned to dream small, to destroy your desires and to settle for what you get.
This moment is a rubicon. It’s true, there’s no going back from here. But this isn’t something to be afraid of. It’s something to celebrate.
Yes, it’s going to hurt. And yes, you’re going to love it. And no, you’re never going to want to stop.
You don’t like yourself much, but one day you will. There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of.
Most importantly, you’re okay.
So, this Kink of the Week post is blatantly late. I don’t know if it will even get posted up on the KOTW page, as it’s technically Tuesday of the new week now, but I wanted to write about this topic anyway, so I think it’ll be a worthwhile post even if it “doesn’t count” in the end.
This week’s topic is “real” (as opposed to “play”) punishment. Discipline and punishment are things which I’ve always been open about as existing in my life. They’re a huge portion of what I get out of TTWD, yet I’ve only written about disciplinary scenes a handful of times over the course of the past two years. Usually, I’ve included the story when what I did wrong can be retold in a way which is comical, like this post from a long time ago or my recent “Target Incident.” This is because I find actual punishment to be very private, personal and intimate. I used to feel very uncomfortable sharing this aspect of my life with the general public. Now, I feel a lot more comfortable with it, although I sometimes don’t want to talk about the things that I’ve done to require the punishment. So this shall be my first post ever which is explicitly about this.
Spanking first entered my consciousness at an incredibly early age. I remember no inciting incident, simply a burning obsession to know more about it and a feeling of secrecy and shame about my ever developing “interest.” All of the thoughts I had and the fantasies that I made up were about disciplinary spankings, as was the entirety of the media that I encountered that had spanking in it, although that was extremely sparse. In my mind, spanking was a very, very serious thing. It was a severe punishment, the ultimate sanction, the consequence of the worst behavior. As I became a teenager, I craved guidance, structure and discipline in my life, longing for the feeling of being loved and taken care of that I imagined would accompany those things. Spanking as part of sexual activity didn’t occur to me at that time. Spanking as something fun and enjoyable seemed like a weird and alien idea. This contributed to my early confusion about my desires. I characterized this activity as something entirely unenjoyable, but desired nothing more than to experience it for myself.
When I turned eighteen and I *did* get my first spanking, it was for demonstrative and introductory purposes. After that, my relationship with SF (my first Top) was entirely disciplinary. It allowed for a lot of space, which is to say that he never policed me. I simply came to him and self-reported about the things which I had done which were against the standards which we had mutually agreed upon and he punished me for them. The relationship was very sterile and austere, with an understanding of affection and caring between us which was rarely expressed. We were kind of an odd pair, me and SF because he’s Forever The Most Serious Man Ever (SF stands for ‘Serious Face”) and I’m patently ridiculous, but he had a pretty decent amount of patience for my antics and I enjoyed his stern nature. It was really, at the time, everything that I wanted because it was everything that I had ever imagined that a spanking relationship could be. I did my best to be good. I sometimes was not, and when that happened, I was soundly corrected.
For the first five years (I think) that I was getting spanked, it was only by SF. After he went back to England and, a little later, I moved to Los Angeles for the first time, I started to venture into the scene there. When I did, I had trouble with my identity and I struggled to identify what I actually wanted. At first, I attempted to find someone to replace SF, which I found tremendously disappointing. Everyone wanted something different from spanking. Some people wanted dominance. Some people wanted sexuality. Some people wanted to embrace and explore the younger, more vulnerable side of me. Some people wanted to do complicated roleplay. Some people just liked smacking a girl’s bottom without any reason for it. It was during this time that I realized that needing to be punished and needing to be spanked weren’t the same thing. Both were real and valid needs, but spanking could be a variety of other things. With my play-partner, J, I explored playing “just for fun” and did my first forays into roleplay. I explored arbitrary and enjoyable spankings with a variety of friends that I met in the local scene, many of whom weren’t spankos, and therefore had a vastly different attitude towards playing than that which I was used to. Eventually, I met Malignus and began to question whether or not I was actually interested in submission. I determined that I was and began the process of exploring that with him.
While punishment was a fairly significant part of my first D/s dynamic, I’m not going to go into the details of how it worked between Malignus and I. At the time that I started blogging, Malignus and I discussed what parts of our relationship he was comfortable with me posting about and we decided that the details of my punishments were too personal to be written about, although I sometimes asked if it was alright for me to post about a particular scene (like the post I linked to earlier) and he always agreed. Although our relationship has ended, I am going to continue to honor this agreement because I feel that it would be disrespectful and “the wrong thing to do” not to. It’s not like there was anything secretive or mysterious about this aspect of our relationship that others shouldn’t know about. That’s just what we decided at the time, so I’m sticking to it. Punishment certainly wasn’t the center of our relationship, though, and I’d say that it was probably the least common reason for me to be spanked, as the most frequent spankings were arbitrary, goal-based or D/s centric, reaffirmative scenes. This was a huge change from where I’d started out, but it was a positive difference, as I had expanded my options for what a spanking could mean.
Fast forward to the present time: I’m extremely comfortable with my role as a submissive, and as I continue to grow in the my spanko identity, I’ve branched out to embrace forms of play, atmospheres and additional kinks that I would have never thought I’d love so much when I was first starting out in my exploration. In my relationship with Paul, punishment is both something that we play with for mutual enjoyment and something that can be as serious as can be. Playing with lighthearted punishments for silly things by no means dilutes the actual act, and it’s just as important to me now as it was when it was just a daydream.
Sometimes, punishments happen immediately after the punishable behavior takes place (like in the “Target” story). Other times this isn’t possible, and I’m punished later that evening (usually right before bed) if that’s an option. If not, the offense and the requisite discipline are entered into a notebook entitled “Alex’s Behavioral Record” and the punishment is meted out at a later date. The “book method” of dealing with things was the only way that punishment was delivered when we were in a long distance relationship: things got recorded and then, when we saw each other, those things were addressed. I really, really like the fact that things don’t get forgotten just because “too much” time has passed since the original behavior. It’s obviously more effective for me to be punished as quickly thereafter as possible, but the inevitability of knowing that at some point, no matter what, I’m going to get corrected for the things that I do that I shouldn’t gives me a marvelous sense of security.
Basically all of my punishments are corporal, ranging from OTK spankings to a series of hard smacks on the insides of my thighs to strappings and canings. Since all these activities are also part of our “for fun” play, the only differences are atmosphere, tone and mood. Being punished makes me feel very vulnerable, and Paul takes a very stern approach towards punishing me (which I like very much). Often times just the scolding brings me to tears, and when I’m in that headspace, there’s very little pleasant about the spanking that follows. I say “very little” instead of “nothing” because being punished makes me feel particularly loved and taken care of, and I do enjoy that feeling, even as it’s happening. Being disciplined almost always makes me cry, and afterwards the seriousness of the actual punishment quickly melts away and I climb onto Paul’s lap, sometimes continuing to cry for a bit as he tenderly comforts me and assures me that I’m a good girl again. Everything is right in the world during those moments, and I couldn’t feel safer.
As much as I enjoy “for fun” “play” punishment, and as ultimately positive and edifying as the experience of being discipline is for me, at the end of the day, I want to be a good girl. I want Paul to be proud of me, and I do my best to avoid getting into real trouble. It’s intricate, the way that something which is so enjoyable in a different setting can be made truly punitive, but it’s not a novel idea, nor is it a particularly rare phenomenon.
I hope that this is at least somewhat articulate: I’ve just recovered from having been ill, and I’m struggling to get caught up, so I wasn’t able to really draft this the way I usually do for posts that are this wordy, and I was getting really tired by the time I was finishing it. I’ll be posting more about other aspects of this topic in the future, so stay tuned. ♥
I haven’t written anything all month long.
This is one of my longer hiatuses. I have gotten a few concerned emails, asking if I’m alright, or if I’ve retired from blogging or something. I’m just fine, and I’ve certainly not gone away for good. I haven’t *meant* to go away at all. It’s just been difficult to update recently, due to a combination of circumstances.
The changes in my life sort of began in earnest several months ago when Malignus and I ended our romantic, and then later, our D/s relationship. At the time, I didn’t feel that I could write about it without being dramatic or excessively emotional, so I simply didn’t. It wasn’t a secret, obviously, but I didn’t feel that it was appropriate to sit down and write a big post about how we’d split up. The process was obviously not easy, but it was ultimately the right thing to do.
Additionally, and un-relatedly, YS and I have recently decided to end our D/s dynamic. We’ve grown and changed as people, and our dynamic was no longer serving the same purpose that it originally did. The dynamic had become punctilious, and more of a formality than anything else as we both developed in different directions.
SF is currently taking a hiatus from the scene because a horrible personal tragedy befell him recently, and it’s taking a long time for him to recover from it (quite understandably). I know he’ll eventually be back, and he knows I’ll be there when he is! PTL and I have a horrible combination of impossibly busy schedules (hers much more extreme than mine!) and therefore have little time for bossing interactions these days. That was mostly just “for fun” anyway.
In the meantime, this means that my flowchart has become pretty straight-forward:
Current Bossiness Flowchart |
As opposed to this, 9 months ago:
This didn’t happen by design. It’s just been a year of changes. Nothing’s quite as sure as change. There’s lots of room for off-chart bossing in my life, of course, and there’s a good handful of people that I choose to listen to when they tell me to do something.
There’s another very big change that’s happening in my life: I’m in the process of moving from Sioux Falls back to Los Angeles. It was time for that, and it just makes sense right now. Last week, Epipelagic came to visit and she helped me to pack ALL MY STUFF into boxes and space bags. Space bags are one of the greatest things of all time, by the way. Watching all the air get vacuumed out of the bags is extremely gratifying. Once everything was packaged, Epipelagic did most of the organization of my car. It nearly defies the laws of physics. She turned my car into a bag of holding. She’s a wonderful friend, by the way, and I’m so glad that I’ll be living near her again. I value our friendship so much, and I can’t wait to see how it grows and develops in the coming years.
Leaving Sioux Falls was hard. It’s never easy to leave a place where you lived, even if I was never truly suited for life in a small, Midwestern city like that. I’ll miss everyone that I got close to there very much. I realize that I didn’t have a very drawn out or formal goodbye process as I left. I can’t really say why that is– it just felt like leaving quietly was the most comfortable thing for me to do. The other day, I drove from Sioux Falls to Denver, where I had a few shoots before continuing on my way. Driving away from the place that had been my home for the past two years was difficult. I was dazzled by the beauty of the landscape as I passed into the part of the state that wasn’t so flat. The sun was shining through the clouds, and it would start to rain, but the rain never lasted long.
I’m in Denver for a few more days and then I’m going to Texas to see Mila, WYO and LLB, do more shooting and sessions and probably swim in the pool in my underwear some more, because that’s how I do. After that, Mila and I are going to drive from Dallas to Vegas, stopping in New Mexico to visit Heather Green for a bit, and in Phoenix and or Tucson for shoots on the way. Vegas, of course, will be Shadowlane, the superlative spanko gathering place! We’ll be heading to Los Angeles from there, where Mila will visit for a few days and then I’ll begin my new life there. It’s tremendously, amazingly exciting. I can’t wait. I love everything about the life that I’m going to have.
So, that’s the state of things right now. I’m ultimately in a very good place, and my life is only going to get better and better.
I remember my first spanking with a combination of perfect clarity and the fairy tale gloss that comes with having remembered something over and over again for many years: in my case, six of them.
S_F and I had talked at length about what my first spanking would be like. We’d been friends for almost a year at that point, and I knew and trusted him, and in the time that we’d been openly talking about spanking I’d gained a lot of confidence. I could say the word without getting sick in my stomach ; ). We did not, however, set up a date and time for when we’d be having my first scene. It just so happened that on that August afternoon that we were alone in the house, I was feeling well (I’d had some health problems left over from my more difficult years and was often a bit sick back then) and we were both in positive, relaxed moods. S_F determined that it was as good a time as any to give me my spanking.
From the time that I first discovered that S_F and his wife were into spanking, and learned that consensual adult spanking was a real thing, the desperation of feeling that I had an unfulfillable desire was replaced with excitement, but a new concern rose in my mind: what if I didn’t actually like being spanked? What if it was only the idea that excited me? What if the real thing didn’t live up to that which I had so long imagined?
This was at the front of my mind at the onset of my first spanking. I felt like my entire life had, in one way or another, building to this moment. What if I hated it? It had the potential to ruin all those years of fantasy. There was only one way to find out.
S_F lead me upstairs to his study and sat down in the middle of the brown sofa there. I came in slowly and uncertainly, gently closing the door behind me. He beckoned me over to him, and I found it difficult to get my muscles to respond. My heart was beating faster than I knew was possible and I felt a little dizzy. I realized that I had been holding my breath, and I closed my eyes for a second, forcing myself to focus and move forward.
“What is going to happen now, Alex?” he asked me, once I was standing in front of him. His voice was full of confidence and affection, and his tone wrapped me in comfort. I gathered my courage to answer the question.
“You’re going to spank me,” I finally muttered. I played with the hem of my skirt nervously, wanting to get the apprehension that had been building for so long finally over.
“Why?” he asked. I furrowed my brow. I wasn’t sure what the right answer was to that.
“Uh…because I want you to?” I said, trying to make a statement but falling back into a question. S_F nodded.
“Precisely. Are you ready to go over my lap now?” he asked. I was very ready, and I muttered that I was. “Please do so, then.”
Just lying down in position filled me with an immediate joy that I had never known. It was as if the instant that I was in place over his lap, I knew that I was in the right place. Despite the extreme nervousness that I was feeling, I grinned uncontrollably.
S_F flipped my skirt up, and he placed his hand on my plain, white underwear. I lay there for a moment, breathing deeply, trying to relax as combating forces of fear, anticipation and excitement fought in my chest. Then, he began to spank me.
He started firmly, but in a way that was not overwhelming or frightening. As I relaxed, accepting the reality of the situation, the fact that this was real and not a dream or a story I was making up, I realized that the sensation was actually a bit pleasant, and my fears of hating spankings began to leave. After a few moments, he increased the force behind each swat and it began to truly hurt. It didn’t hurt in the way that other things in my life before that day had hurt: other pain, even very extreme injuries that I had suffered, had seemed to pass through me, its acknowledgment entirely under my control. For the first time, I felt present in my body while something hurt, and there was nowhere else that I wanted to be. S_F checked in with me frequently, and I told him that I was doing well each time. After each confirmation of wellbeing, he increased his force and/or speed, making the spanking continue to grow in intensity. As the pain grew, so did my emotional comfort. I felt the strongest feeling of relief that I had ever known. This is finally real, I thought happily. Tears started to flow down my face. A few seconds later and I was sobbing. S_F rubbed my back gently with his left hand and told me that I was a good girl. He told me that he was glad that I was able to let go, and he encouraged me to cry as much as I felt was necessary. I cried and sobbed. It was the beginning of the release of fifteen years (as I remember thinking about spanking from the time I was three) of tension, stress, fear, self-loathing and shame. In a way, six years later, I’m still struggling to fully rid myself of these things, so it was not an immediate change, but the first de-corking of the bottle was a fabulous feeling.
I remember very little else about the actual spanking: mainly, it’s the good feelings, the safety, the self acceptance and the happiness that come to me when I review the memory again. After the spanking ended, I cuddled against him for a long time as I finished crying. It wasn’t a whimpy spanking at all, and I was incredibly bruised afterwards. I wish I had taken a photo, but at the time, the idea that I would ever want to share this experience with someone who wasn’t there at the time was the furthest thing from my mind. I didn’t care about other people. I didn’t care about anything else. I was safe, I was sore and I was tired. I went to sleep after hugs time was over and I slept better than I had ever before.Thus my adventure in Spankingland began.
My last post in the series of entries outlining my history as a spanko ended with me being about twelve years old and entering into my first dating relationship. While my thoughts about myself as a spanko were still dark and bleak, I was feeling slightly better about the world in general due to my new found emotional closeness with my first girlfriend. The rest of my twelfth year was fairly positive in other areas: I came to know myself in ways I had never before, and I began to see how it would be possible for me to have a place in the world.
Unfortunately, that is where the positivity stops for some time. I am not going to write much about the years when I was thirteen through sixteen. Suffice to say, I had some serious life issues that took my mind off my desire to be spanked. My focus was on simply getting through the day alive. That’s not to say that my spanking desires entirely disappeared: only at the very lowest point of my life, when I was about sixteen, did I reach a point where I simply did not care about anything superfluous to my survival, and spanking fell into that category. Still, when my situation improved a few months later, the daydreams and fantasies returned as if they had never left.
When I was seventeen, I first saw Serious_Face in the public library. He was, it turns out, twenty eight at the time, but he just seemed “kinda old” to me. He was working on some sort of research and had a lot of his personal books and papers spread out all over a table in the History section. I was originally fascinated by his stuff: his books were mainly older and leather bound. He had fancy pens and elegant folders for his papers. He had an air of class surrounding him that I’d never before observed. I did what any person would do when such an interesting person entered his or her world: I started stalking him mercilessly.
I realized fairly quickly that he was of English origin, which made him even more interesting to me, especially because of my long time obsession with Boy. I went to the library far more often and found myself sitting at a table adjacent to his, but getting very little reading done. He generally wore a long sleeved, button up shirt with a tie, and before he began to write, he would unbutton the cuff on his right hand and neatly roll the sleeve up, presumably to prevent ink from getting on his shirt. It sent serious shivers through my body and left me more interested in daydreaming than reading.
After two or three months of this (seriously!) I got up the courage to start talking to him. I asked him some mundane, academic questions and he answered them, then went off on long-winded historical lectures. He liked to talk and I liked to listen to him: we became fast friends. By the end of the next month, I was hanging out with him and his wife outside of the library. Eventually, I started to go over to their house pretty regularly.
Serious_Face’s house fascinated me. I lacked a lot of social skills when I was young, and I spent a lot of time just standing around staring at his stuff. I stood in front of his shelves reading book titles, and I smelled all the spices in his pantry. One day, when he was downstairs and I was looking at books in his study, I took my exploration a little too far and began to open the drawers in his desk. Tucked away behind a bunch of mundane papers and things was a heavy, leather strap. I turned beet red and slammed the drawer shut, feeling for a moment like I might pass out. Clearly, it had to be for something else. There was no way that it was for… that thing. I found myself too nervous to even think the word “spanking.”
Originally, I intended to never mention it again. I was clearly reading something into it that wasn’t there. That was all there was to it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, though: it was like suddenly discovering an artifact in someone’s home that suggested that magic might be real. Over time, I noticed little thing: the way that he looked at his wife when she was annoying him and the way that she shied under his gaze, the way that she occasionally sat down very carefully, the thick, ebony hairbrush on her dresser, even a small blister on the palm of his right hand. It took me months of quiet observation, but I finally decided to bring it up.
It was, hands down, the most awkward conversation of my life. I was sweating and shaking with fear and embarrassment. In order to do this, I not only had to approach something extremely personal head-on, but I had to say the word “spanking” aloud: something I had only done a handful of times in my entire life. Still, my desire to know if maybe there was a way for me to have that which I had always wanted was stronger than my fear and lack of self confidence. I was able to get through the conversation, and I found out that yes, he and his wife were into spanking. We talked about DD and accountability, about the physical side of how things were done, in his experience, and about the fact that there were other people in the world into spanking besides me, him and his wife. Then, making myself more emotionally vulnerable than I’d ever been in my life, I asked him to spank me.
He said no. At the time, it was the worst possible thing I could have heard. Now, I greatly appreciate it: I was only seventeen. He told me he would not engage with a minor that way. Thus began the waiting game. During this time, I started to use the internet to look at spanking sites a little bit, although I didn’t ever delve too deeply into that. I was so overwhelmed with excitement that one chapter of a spanking story could hold my attention for a week. The world of my fantasies was real. I was simultaneously overjoyed and petrified. I never made an account on any website. I never went on a message board. I never posted a story that I wrote. I lurked, feeling certain that even if S_F eventually did spank me, I’d never want to take my “kink” (as I had just started to think of it) any further than that. As I waited, my life changed more: I went away to college that January, where I grew and learned and matured even more. With the idea of DD in my mind, I found myself craving structure and discipline, but I tried my best to give it to myself. I set my standards high and put all my effort into their achievement.
On the day of my eighteenth birthday, I saw S_F and asked him if now that I was of age, he’d be willing to spank me. Being a cruel and awful man, he told me that he wanted to wait until he had more free time and we were both in the right “headspace” for it. So I kept waiting. It took another month and two days.
I looked a bit different when I was 18, huh? |
[To be continued]