A Sense of Protection

In my previous post, I described the end of my relationship with Ms. M. Originally, when I first heard that she had removed me from her friends list, but regretted it, I thought about how I might handle or even bring about a reconciliation. I thought about those parts of our conflict for which I was responsible, and I thought about her responsibility as well. I wondered what exactly I wanted by way of a resolution. Resumption of our prior friendship? A more tentative, probationary friendship where we rebuilt our trust?

I shared this episode with my Mistress. As I laid it out in chat, my intention was to ask Her to allow me to deal with it. On some level, I feel like I should clean up my own messes, and I don't want to burden Her with them.

But this is not what occurred.

For even while I was laying out the sequence of events to Her, She was already contacting Ms. M. via IM. By the time I got around to saying I would like to handle it myself, it was already more or less handled. This outcome surprised me, but it shouldn't have.

First, because I am a sub, if anyone has a conflict with me, they should take it up with my Mistress (this is BDSM 101). In fact, to not take it up with my Mistress is an insult to Her as well as me.

Second, when I get into trouble, it is my Mistress' job to deal with it, not mine. In a way, She is my advocate, because my behavior reflects on Her. She has every right to discipline me, as She deems appropriate, in private (or even in public). However, any conflict I have with another person immediately becomes Her conflict.

Of course, this also means that once a situation is resolved to Her satisfaction, She also tells me how to handle it. In this case, She has asked me to desist all communication with Ms. M., even if she approaches me, on the grounds that she seems to cause me more pain than anything else. At first I was a bit surprised by this turn of events. But I admit I find comfort in the protection and am quite willing to accept it as-is.

A Friendship Burns

Today I write about how a friend of mine virtually murdered me. Perhaps that is too strong a phrase, though I am now, thanks to the technology of Second Life, assuredly dead to her. How exactly our friendship came to this, I cannot say. Though she once praised me for my intelligence, her twists and turns as my friend confounded me. Her final twist into ex-friend confounds me more. Now I cannot say when she was, and when she was not, my friend. I recall the day she became my friend (it is described in my very first ever blog entry), and I thanked her the day I was collared, but I cannot say on which day she became ex-friend to me, for it was not a mutual decision.

I learned recently that she deleted my friendship card, which irrevocably puts us out of touch with one another. Isolated in a sea of sims, if she is more than 10 meters from me, she is now invisible to me, and I her. To one friend, she said that I had hurt her and that she deleted me in a fit of anger, an act which she now regrets. To another, she said she was merely clearing out her inventory. Which to believe? I'm not sure which is worse, actually. Am I such a bitch that she can no longer bear me even as an acquaintance? Or am I so inconsequential to her that I am relegated to inventory rubbish?

In my heart, I feel that I should be neither of these. For if I hurt her, it was surely accidental, part of a constellation of conflicting signals of which I was but one participant. And if I represent folder clutter, then it is in spite of showing her my vulnerability, my deepest fears, and (yes!) my most forbidden desires. Let me declare then before all, that I am hurt. And I remain confounded, for there is no resolution to our tale; it just ends. Here.

Resubmission

Lately, my blog entries have focused on fear. My fear. My fear of overstepping my boundaries. My fear of losing my Mistress' favor, that She might rather be with her talented and glamorous friends, instead of tagalong me. My fear of abandonment and neglect. I talked about these fears somewhat obliquely on this blog, perhaps not really acknowledging even to myself how stressed I actually was.

The other night, my Mistress and I had a very nice chat about these blog entries, and eventually we managed to get to the real basis of my concerns: my insecurities about whether She is tiring of me and my tendency to try to read between the lines.

I will confess an example. A few nights earlier I had logged on, and after 10 minutes of pleasant conversation, She had asked whether I might like to go hang out with another friend of hers, C. (C. is very nice, and I like her, so this was a very reasonable suggestion.) But as we teleported, I actually wondered if maybe She had found me boring and wanted to go hang out with Her friend because She found C. more interesting. I know--and I knew then!--that this thought was unreasonable and uncharitable. But I had it anyway, and it ate at me the entire time we were with C. My Mistress' coincidental preoccupation with something in RL made her slower to reply than usual, which seemed only to confirm my anxieties.

Back to our conversation the other night. My Mistress pointed out the following to me: by definition of our relationship, I put myself in Her hands. If She has a problem with me (finds me irritating or boring), She will tell me. In fact, as my Mistress, it is Her job to do so and She has implicitly (now explicitly, thanks to my carrying on) agreed to do it. Therefore, if She isn't correcting my behavior, She doesn't have a problem with it. Likewise, on those occasions when I actually behave, she rewards me with a hug or a stroke of the hair.

Moreover, the fact that I was obsessing about these insecurities is itself a manifestation of mistrust (and in a way, insubordinance) on my part! If I trust that She will take care of me and correct me when appropriate, then I never need to be insecure. I agree that this is logically true.

Still, it is a habit for me to fret about whether my friends find me tiresome, and I cannot separate my Mistress from my friends! This is something I will have to work on.

Punishing Silence

The other night I was at Perilous Pleasures chatting with some members of that community, and a question came up regarding punishment. Punishing a masochist is a tricky matter, since tying someone up and or spanking her (or him) may arouse pleasure. How do you punish a submissive?

I thought about this a moment, and I realized immediately what I would consider the worst form of punishment: denial of attention. I can bear just about anything, except silence. I said so to the group, and all the subs agreed, as did community leader and experienced Dom, David Valentino.

I guess underlying the submissive nature is a craving for attention.

Slipping Across the Thin Line

If you like me, it is "because of" or "in spite of" the fact that I am articulate, honest, and sassy. Most of the time, people like me because of, not in spite of. But sometimes, I slip across the line. Two different episodes in the past week have me thinking about this, though both are quite different. One is largely trivial, and the other is more serious.

The trivial incident occurred when I was spending a nice evening with my Mistress, and She invited a friend of Hers, T, over for a visit. Uncomfortable with Her friend, but wanting to be friendly, I got a little silly. At some point along the way, I apparently crossed the line from silly to a little annoying or possibly offensive, and my Mistress gave me a gentle, but firm rebuke. Needless to say, I stopped. In fact, I more than stopped. After my sincere apology, I lapsed into complete silence, not because I thought that's what my Mistress wanted, and not because I was sulking; I was flustered, and it stopped me dead in my tracks.

Trying to recover, and also trying to figure out exactly what I did, I read and reread the chat history (which of course only increased my silence). I never quite figured out what exactly I said, which makes me wonder if I intended something in a totally innocuous way, and She heard it in a different way. But because I never quite figured out what it was, it has made me unusually cautious in my use of humor around Her--something I don't think She actually wants.

The second "episode" really isn't an episode, but rather a type of episode. Every now and then, my Mistress talks to me about more serious things, such as her relationships (rl and sl), Her real feelings about something or someone, some conflict or dilemma She is facing, etc. Now, this is delicate, because a true friend is honest and sometimes has to say something their friend does not necessarily want to hear. If I am superficially roleplaying as a sub, of course it is doubtful I should say such things. But I say them anyway, because my Mistress is a friend first, and a Domme second.

This is clear enough in my head, but in practice, it can become a little fuzzy. Last night, my Mistress was feeling tired and sick, and I felt that She should probably go to bed and catch up on Her rest. I guess I got a little enthusiastic in this particular recommendation, and I suddenly found myself involuntarily on my knees before Her, facing Her rhetorical question, "Who is in charge here?"

Now, a number of factors should be clarified here. First, I interpreted Her reaction (putting me on my knees, asking this question) as playful. I don't believe She was offended or that She really felt I was being insubordinate. Second, you should know, dear reader, that the advice I was giving clearly went against my own self-interest, since I had hoped to spend the whole evening with Her! My motives could not have been more selfless. Third, lest you infer from my writing here that being forced to my knees is somehow a bad thing, I beg you to consider your author. For I must confess that it was thrilling and greatly rewarding for Her to assert Her control over me in this way. (And I'm pretty sure She knows that.)

But I also backed off of encouraging Her to go to bed. She did, anyway, which suggests that I had made my point before I wound up on my knees. Regardless, I definitely would have shut up after that point, at least with regard to Her going to bed.

The bottom line is that I will continue to treat my Mistress first as a friend and second as a Domme, and I will accept whatever consequences this policy has. I trust that She will communicate with me when I step across that thin line, and I only hope that I have the strength and maturity to deal with it well when She does correct me.

Worlds of Pain: Thoughts on Virtual Jealousy

A recent conversation with my Mistress began with Her saying, "There's something you should know about, and I wanted you to hear it from me first." Now, this is not a promising beginning to a conversation, and I won't deny sweating a little during the moments during which my Mistress typed the next sentence and dropped the bomb: "I developed a new [Second Life commercial object], and for the vendor image for it, I took a picture that featured me and [Her male business partner] S."

That was it, the bomb that wasn't a bomb. My Mistress appeared in a commercial picture to be used in a vendor with another avatar and was concerned for my feelings. I appreciate Her sensitivity to my feelings--still more evidence of what a great Mistress I have. And yet, Her concern aside, I felt not even a twinge of jealousy. The only thing close to a negative feeling I felt was a bit of envy: I wanted to be in the picture too! But I certainly didn't feel threatened, neglected, or cheated on.

That this concern--She did something (posing in the picture) that She felt was appropriate, but then worried that I might be hurt, when in fact it didn't bother me at all--was even raised was possible because there are no established standards of fidelity, and so on in virtual spaces. If my RL boyfriend appeared in a romantic-looking picture for commercial purposes, there are a lot of ways we might handle that, but no one would think I was nuts if I had some discomfort with that. But what sort of fidelity is owed to me by my virtual Mistress (and vice-versa)?

My Mistress was concerned, because a friend of Hers had complained that her in-world partner appeared in a romantic pose with another avatar. For Her friend, this picture was a violation of the fidelity of their relationship. For me, the picture in question was my Mistress marketing a creative product of Hers. For her friend, real life romantic issues were tangled with the in-world romantic issues. My Mistress and I have a strictly virtual relationship; She is happily married in real life, while I am very happily boyfriended in real life.

So far so good. But then I started asking myself "what if" questions. After some reflection (and I did need to think about it), I decided I probably would have some issues if my Mistress were to take another submissive (this is strictly hypothetical; I don't expect Her ever to do so, as long as I am Hers). At first, I thought that in this hypothetical scenario, perhaps I could just ask Her to talk to me about why She wanted to do this and what its value was for Her. Then, I would try to understand it from Her perspective and deal with it that way. Well, that would be very generous of me, but I have serious doubts that I could really pull it off. So I guess there is a line. But posing in pictures for commerce is way, way on this side of it.