Ten

So this blog will be ten years old tomorrow...One whole fucking decade.

A lot happens over the course of ten years. Hell, a lot happens over the course of one. I took a long hiatus from this place. And coming back...Well, it's stirred up a lot in my head. And it's been kinda lovely cuz, some of you are still here and that warms my heart to no end.

A decade of my story is here. Not all of it, and certainly very little of the last few years. But it is still my story, my history, my life.
I have been talking to one of my aunts. I never had any close family, but still, she's my family. And she remembers family history that no other living person knows. My youngest has expressed an interest in learning his family history, so I started talking to her about it and really acknowledging some interesting things about history and being alive.
Stories die when no one remembers them. Some day, everything we know and experienced will vanish unless someone else learns our story. Histories, lifetimes, people, their stories, the events during their lifetimes, these things only truly die when no one knows them and can pass them on, and no one listens or recalls the tales of those who do.
And these individual moments of failure, success, pain, joy, love, hate...All these little individual moments put together as a whole make up the world as we know and experience it.

We are all merely a drop in the ocean, but without all those little drops, there is no ocean.

This blog is ten years old. I turned 37 last week. Time flies, but it doesn't have to pass us by. We add to our story and those of people we interact with each and every day. Life is beautiful. It's fucking painful, and ugly, and glorious, and amazing. Our story is what we make it, how we choose to allow others to shape it, the memories and moments we share with others.

In the end, perhaps it matters not how long we are alive, but that we truly live in the time we are given. And if we are really lucky, we will touch even just one person enough for them to listen to our story. And remember.

Given the theme this post kind of took on its own, I would just like to mention Cat, of Be pleasing always. Her dom, HerLiege, recently posted that most of her blog was going to be deleted by tumbler.That brings me great sadness. Because, while Cat had already passed away when I found her blog years ago, her story meant something to me, it impacted my ideals and views, helped to shape so many of my ideas of submission. I can still call up that feeling in my heart that reading her words inspired, and the introspection  and growth it evoked. Her story and who she was will always be beautiful to me. And because she shared her story, I will remember her. Always.

Your Own Reality

Stupid Question

Ok, so I may have forgotten how to use Blogger, or I may just not know how to use my phone (a valid option as I spent weeks wondering why my alarm wasn't making sound in the morning until it was pointed out to me that said alarm was set on silent).
Anyways...Any ideas as to why I can't respond to comments from my phone? I can write posts and do the things, but if I want to comment I can't comment as myself. It just gives me an option to comment anonymously or with some other profile made over a year ago which quite frankly I don't even remember creating but obviously did.

Belonging

One of the things I loved about Blogland was the feeling of belonging it gave me. Coming back after having built this blog, and my entire life really, around Alpha, I feel a bit like I don't belong. This blog was very much OUR story. And now...Now it's mine. And in a place that is so much based upon belonging TO someone...It feels a bit odd. But I am who I am. And it is what it is.

I watched a movie the other day, and the main character was having a conversation in which she said, "I'm much more stable when I write, I haven't written much lately." and the other character replies with, "How are you doing with that?" to which she responds with, "Not well, not well at all."
That resonated deeply with me. B has asked me to write on more than one occasion in the last couple years, because she knows it's good for me, knows I need it. But so often...So often, the words haven't been there. too much pain, too much bitterness, too much confusion, too little drive to stare at the blinking cursor and make it move. And above all perhaps, when it comes to here, too much fear that he would read it and lash out.

I don't know where I belong. But I do know that I am still me. I still need this thing we call D/s, I still need the physical pain he trained out of me in favor of control over all those years. I still crave control, yet have developed a deep and abiding angst around any efforts to do so. I know that I'm a monster, and I'm working with that lol.

I have learned how to take care of myself because it was that or die. And for a while, not gonna lie, I just wanted to die. I got these kids though...so I didn't.

I took care of him and the kids for years with these:

It's a rough life, and not ideal for a mother; living in the hills away from your children, only seeing them when you come home to dump piles of money on the table, and hear a week later that the rent it was intended to pay was already spent. But I was good at it. And I built a reputation on my hands and my name. My hands were good and I made my name gold. Because I could be trusted and I always landed top chair. And I belonged. With the crazies, the misfits, the storms, the underground castoffs...
Then...I couldn't do it any more. Too unstable, too dangerous, too tired of living in a tent, too tired of not seeing my kids, too tired of all the bullshit, the backstabbing, being taken advantage of, the cold and the rain. Too fucking old to be living on the hill telling people to get their fucking drugs off my table and working 18 hours a day. Too damn good at what I did to accept the wages they began offering.

So I learned something new. It's hard to start over and suck at something new. But I have learned that it is also brave, and can be well worth it. so I traded in those scissors for these:

I can't threaten to stab the people who piss me off anymore, but I do provide health insurance for my kids, I sleep inside in the same bed every night, I can support myself in a very stable manner, and I work with one crew who has my back, not because they need me, but because I have shown them who I am and we have each others backs. And I still kinda suck at it, but I do belong.

It has been a lifelong fault of mine, this desire to belong. And I have fought against it so much...But I have learned that a refusal to base my life on that desire always lands me in the places where I truly do belong.

I do belong to someone...This girl. This girl he wanted me to want because he wanted her. This girl he left me for who would have left him in a heartbeat if I had asked her to, this girl who loves me like he once did...This girl who broke my heart and put me back together when he told me over and over to just die. In a way, she's getting shorted. But she has my back.
The sub in me can't give her what she knows me to be at my core right now. What she really needs in a relationship. Yet...In a way she's also getting the best of me, because I hold my shit down. I pay the bills, and I work my ass off.

I guess...I guess I belong wherever I choose to be. And maybe that's just one of the things we learn about life along the way, that we belong where we choose. I choose to be here again. And so, as odd and strange as it is, as much as it may challenge all that I believed and pick at not-so-old wounds, I still belong here. Because I am what I am. And I built this space, and I still hold to many of the core beliefs I have expressed here.

Storm

So I changed my name here..I called myself lil, because he called me littleone. And I am no longer his littleone. Indeed, rarely can I bring myself to indulge in the much needed luxury of being little...But that is beside the point. I can no longer be lil.
So...
I became storm. Because because I am the storm. And the storm survives.

Life is amazing, and painful, and beautiful and awing, and shocking, and it will beat you down and eat you up...

Yet...Without the storm there is no harvest.

The quote that's been sitting unattended on the side of this blog for years now? I tattooed it on my wrists. And I find it no less true today than when I posted it here. One must sow to reap, and one must, in some way, labor for the reward.

 The storm...The storm makes us what we are. Plants that do not weather the wind and rain and harsh conditions are weak. They cannot survive...

It's Been A Long Fucking While...

So...It's been a while since I posted here. Took me a hot minute to login...Then the first thing I did was read his last post here...And I seriously considered deleting it. Cuz...Everything he hates me for, I did because he told me to, because what he said was such a public and erroneous low blow that it was difficult to start back here with reading that of all things...But I decided to leave it. At least for now. This blog has been meandering, but if nothing else, I have striven to make it an honest reflection of my life. And all things considered, those are some of the nicer things he has said to me over the last few years...
So...I dunno if anyone who used to read here is still around, but I think maybe I'm back. It's hard to come back here, with everything I built this blog on and believed in my core and lived...And now him and I barely speak.
And the part of me I struggled so hard to build this blog on...I don't know how to be her anymore. Because before my true end with him, I never loved anyone he told me not to, I never pursued anything he didn't tell me to, and I never in a million years imagined that someone I had turned myself so completely over to could endeavor so much to destroy me, to destroy my mother, would threaten my life and the lives of everyone i loved...

This blog was a reflection of my life for a very long time; however, I have learned that a reflection of ones life is not always a complete reflection of themselves, but more a reflection of who they are on their path at the time.
I am nothing if not a survivor. And I am still here. I am still me. Perhaps a different version with many core things which will never change.

This blog is nearing a birthday shortly after mine. I haven't checked, but tentatively, I'ma say its gonna be 12 years old. It's my story. And a story does not end when it takes twists and turns. When we lose everything we ever knew and became things we never knew we could to survive. It doesn't end when we tuck away parts of ourselves to survive and vanish into the mists for a bit. A story only ends when there is no one left to tell it, and not one left to hear it.

I remade myself. And yea, I'm still a bit of a fucking mess, and there's aspects of me that I want to unlock and explore more again, I just dunno quite how to yet.
I'll always be who I am at my core. And maybe I'll never understand how he so completely abandoned me and told me to go with others, while hating me for following that instruction, how he of all people could rain what he has on me and no longer care, how some random little girl could mean so much more than me. But it is what it is. And yea, I still care, because...If I didn't, wouldn't that be an egregious insult to all that we were? One day I'll be ok with him choosing a girl he knew for a week over me. One day I'll forgive myself for the fucked up shit I did and its impact on my kids.

Today is perhaps not that day. But that's ok. Because I survived. My kids are ok. And I have a girl that maybe hates me sometimes, but she truly loves me, and she truly loves my boys. And God knows, I do love her.
 I'm trying to learn how to give and surrender in the ways that I loved so much with this new knowledge I have...That the person you submit your being to may someday despise you to the core of your being. And I don't yet know how. But I do know how to survive. And I'm still here.

Grey

So...It's been a hot minute since I posted here huh. I don't know how to be be here. I was always me in this forum. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less. Yet now...I have this thing...This fear that anything I say here will be thrown at me in the most painful of ways by the one whom this blog so much revolved around...So I don't write. Cuz yea, it hurts. More than I can put into words...

I used to believe that life was black and white. I prefer to see the world in terms of black and white. It's simple. Right, wrong; love, hate; black and white. But he taught me that there is grey. I fucking hate grey. And fuck 50 shades of grey for acting like grey is cool, but I digress, as usual...
My life is grey. and I fucking hate that. I want to live in black and white, or color so intense the eye can barely see it and the mind struggles to comprehend it...

But he taught me that anything can be grey...Grey is that place where your lifetime love meets that which hates you with all it's heart and soul but also loves you...Grey is that place where you want nothing more than escape, yet at the same time...Maybe you don't...Grey is an eternal fucking limbo where everything you believed collides with everything that is and none of it makes sense. Grey is wanting to run away and slit your wrists but being in love with a past which is no longer reality. Grey is, "his limits are mine" until you realize that you never actually knew his limits...Grey is needing submission to the core of your being and questioning what you are every day of your life because you drew the line somewhere... Grey is when you have sweated in sheets and screamed someones name for nearly twenty years while they lovingly whispered in you ear what a whore you were, only to someday hear them scream at you that you are merely a worthless whore whom they wish would die.

Grey is being in love with a memory that hates you but is still in love with you and won't let you go.

And yea, I'm in love with a sadist who once broke my heart. But I feel like I can't write that here...Cuz the various shades of grey will appear to rub salt in the open wounds of what was, was is, and what will be. 

So until the next time...If you used to read and you're curious about where we landed, this sums it up pretty damn well. Except for the she don't give a shit bit. Cuz I always give a shit. And that's one of the reasons I despise grey.