Overcoming Lazy

If I had to choose one trait of mine that stands most in the way of becoming the boy I want to be, it would be my laziness. When I'm given the option, I naturally tend to slack off, to watch TV, or go online, or play games, anything other than the tasks I am meant to do.

And this isn't a new realisation, either. Daddy has spent a lot of time and effort trying to train me, to make me a good, conscientious boy who gets his chores done, but no matter what he tries, nothing seems to stick. Worse, while I am well aware that I need a harsh taskmaster to keep me in line, pushing me out of my lazing activities makes me grumpy and unhappy, so the taskmaster role is a thankless task around me. Even if I tell my taskmaster that this is what I need, I balk at being told what to do. And this is a problem for my Daddy, who, like many Daddies, is a kind soul at heart. He has no problem being harsh to his charges, but he's not a cruel man, and gets nothing out of being harsh if the charge gets nothing out of it. In short, he'll be the kind of taskmaster we like.

And this is a problem with me. Because the taskmaster I want is the taskmaster I dislike.

And Daddy doesn't really get this. He's not used to dealing with someone who actively fights their own development, like me. It's not that I want to fight, but the behaviours I want to discard are so ingrained that I fight them purely out of habit. I dislike anything that's not familiar, it feels like a threat, which you can understand makes me my own worst enemy when it comes to self-improvement, even when I know that it's necessary. To Daddy, it seems like I'm telling him one thing and then acting completely contrary, which to be honest is completely accurate. It's just that I am genuinely acting contrary - I am acting out against the things that I know are good for me, purely because the things that are good for me are not things I do by default.

This week me and Daddy looked at the issue again, because this situation is just completely out of Daddy's ken. Daddy takes self-improvement in his stride, because when he identifies an issue, he can devote himself to rectifying the issue, as opposed to me who's always having to fight the desire for familiarity. To him, word and action match, and when they don't match, it's usually because the word is inaccurate. So, he works to my actions, which is great for my comfort levels, but terrible for my self-development. I had to describe it to him as "I want to want to do things - I aspire to be the kind of sub who does things without prompting, but I block myself every time".

So, once I'd gotten that out, we came upon a possible way of making sure we both get what we need. Daddy will work at being harsh with me, by reminding me at each step that this is what I want. In short, to try and break the comfortable familiarity by directly appealing to my aspirations. And in return, I will make sure that Daddy is always reminded by me that I'm grateful for Daddy taking this thankless task, and thanking him for it whenever I can.

I really hope this works.

Things noone thinks to tell you about tattoos...

Just a quick one for this week.

So, the last week or so I've been recovering from my tattoo, which means that I haven't been able to lie on my back. It's not been painful,  but the stuff I'm using to promote healing (called bepanthen), is a really greasy,  sticky substance (by design), so sticking my back on things is a terrible idea.

Which means that I can't lie on my bed on my back.

Which means it is really awkward to jerk off.

I haven't beem this horny since the first couple of weeks into the Year of Chastity. It's amazing how touch-happy you start getting when you can't get off...

Up from Scratch

Almost exactly a year ago, me and Daddy made a committment, that the leathers that I had bought and had been bought for me before I'd come onto this leather journey would be taken away from me, so that I could have the chance to earn them properly. So that instead of forever fretting as to whether I was right to wear my leathers when Daddy wore his, I decided that he would get to make that decision.

Yesterday, just before I got my tattoo done, Daddy called me into his room, and sat me down. He told me that over the past year, I had been improving greatly as a Leather boy, and that he was so pleased with my progression, that he felt that I had earned the leathers that he had been keeping from me. So, he took my leather pants, my harness, and my belts, laid them in front of me, and with as little ceremony as that, told me that my leathers were once again mine to do as I wished.

I don't think I can convey how proud I was of myself at that moment. It came as a complete surprise, and suddenly it gave my tattoo another meaning, well separate of anything that I would have imbued in it. Because now, this tattoo also marks the day that I made my Daddy proud, the day I had improved enough to prove myself to him.

I don't claim this is the end of the journey, just a milestone within it. I have so much more to improve on, an I plan to improve as much as I can for him. I will push myself, strive to be the best boy that I can be. Now everytime I get a glimpse of my tattoo, I will have it in my mind that memory, that feeling of pride.

Marked

So, yesterday I finally bit the bullet and got myself tattooed. I've had plans to do it for the last 5 years, but until now I've never had the courage to go ahead and do it. However, since I'm on leave for another half-week, I decided to bite the bullet and get it done.

I had planned to get it done as part of a coming of age ceremony, but of course I could never figure out what the rest of the ceremony would be, or even how I'd know that I'd reached the time where I'd earned a coming of age. Eventually I came to the shocking conclusion that as a boy I probably didn't need a coming of age ceremony, but more about that another time, I think.

The design itself is a two-dimensional  orthogonal tesseract,  an image that I've often used for meditation. It's meaning is a kind of personal one, related to the meditation. To me, it represents complexity in simplicity,  as all the squares and cubes resolve themselves the more you look into the image.

I was more than a little afraid going in - this was my first tattoo,  and my imagination went wild with thoughts of how painful it was going to be. But the pain was tolerable, and I was able to push right through it, and I think the results speak for themselves.

A very special day, all up!

Boy Improvement

I recently posted about how I'm trying to treat my submission as a challenge,  to engage my competitiveness to become a better Boy. I'm starting to take small steps in that direction, and one step that's seemed pressing recently is my attention span.

In a lot of ways it's been a major obstacle to me being better, not least of which because of how often I "drop" orders. For a lot of people, the problem isn't so pressing, because if they haven't paid attention to orders, it's easy to tell. But because of my job as a call centre worker, and because of my family and romantic history,  I've become extremely good at making acknowledgement cues, even if my brain hasn't actually processed the request. Worse, it's nearly automatic - I often don't realised I'm doing it until someone (often Daddy) knocks me out of whatever thought process I was on.

It's been incredibly frustrating for Daddy, and I'll freely admit I haven't been doing a lot of work on fixing the problem on my end. So, this morning, I decided to work on improving my mental workspace,  and I found a website called Lumosity. It's a website that engages you with games that practice specific mental skills - including attention and global perception,  two skills that I really need to improve more on.

I know this isn't a cure all - there's still plenty to be done with working to stay in the present, which is a big component of my lack of attention. But, improving my mental skills can only help, I think.

New Pain

A few weeks ago, me and Daddy had a big long talk about our BDSM relationship.

Calm down readers, it's not quite as bad as all that.

Put simply, we've come to the realisation that our BDSM life has seriously stagnated - we rarely play, and in a lot of ways we were almost avoiding play, because of a number of issues, one of which being my legendary inability to communicate. Because, and here's the thing that's been dogging us for a while, Daddy just has no idea what I want out of BDSM, and if I had to be honest, I'm not sure I really did for a long time either.

But I've been talking with my psych, who had the audacity to point out to me my insane competitive streak. It's really one of the few healthy ways in which I channel my competitve streak. And it occured to me that while the joy of sensation has been fun, it's not something that helped my grow as a Sub, a Boy, or a Person. Part of the reason I'm in this relationship with Daddy is to improve myself, to be better than I am.

But for the most part, Daddy has been reluctant to challenge me - we've known each other for a long time, and the fact is, I tend to get grumpy at challenge. It's hard, he points out, to keep pushing me when he doesn't see anything out of it. So, all we do is a bit of electrical play, some occaisional other sensation play, and that's it. Nothing that Daddy really gets off on, and nothing that really pushes me.

During our heart-to-heart I finally connected these things all together. The reason I'm not connecting to BDSM is purely because I haven't been treating it as a challenge. I've been treating it as a diverson, which hasn't been good for Daddy. And I realised an easy way to fix that was to just change my mindset about it.

And so, yesterday, Daddy bought himself a new cane, and my masochistic streak came out in full force. I started seriously poking at him and the cane, and bought myself a caning. Daddy started slowly, we played around, and at the same time, I got to tell him how mean he was for doing things like drawing the cane away for a second or two and not coming down hard afterwards. He told me to relax, but relaxing just made everything hurt more, so there was a "nope nope nope!" moment for me. And, best of all, he challenged me to take 5 hard canings. And I took them. They hurt like hell, and I was swearing by the last one, but by god I did it.

I gotta be honest, it's the first time in a while that I felt like I'd really connected with Daddy. Well besides the pride at getting through all of it, I could feel that Daddy was pleased with the play as well. We were actually playing with each other, rather than Daddy doing things to me and me just enjoying them. And it's a feeling I really, really enoyed, even if the play was short.

I really hope that this is the beginning of something good. Taking it all felt good, feeling the welts after felt good. I think I'm turning into an honest-to-god masochist, and even better, It's helping me connect better to Daddy. And all it took was me realising there was a challenge here that I hadn't taken on.

You're getting... Relaxed!

Me and Daddy have been talking about doing hypnosis for a while, and last night me and Daddy actually tried a little starter to see how I reacted to it. It wasn't very long, just a short induction and some simple relaxation, but it's more than we've done in quite some time.

And I think I'm really going to like it. While I'm not sure that I really got fully down to trance state, I really liked being in the suggestible, can't-do-anything state. I felt really nice afterwards!

It's really fascinating to me, thinking about hypnosis. While the fantasy screams all mind control, the honeIst reality is that the power of hypnosis is purely internal - I'm the only person who defines what I can be hypnotised to do. It's almost a distillation of BDSM - I'm the one who gives my power to Daddy, Daddy doesn't exert his power over me. It's given willingly, and sometimes irrevocably, but in the end, the power is always mine, regardless of who possesses it. Hypnosis is exactly the same - in the end, the only person who has a hold on my behaviour is me - it's just that Daddy is holding the reins, telling me where I'm going.

I'm looking very forward to the next step, myself!

Bad Feeling Checklist

Daddy has asked me for this week to write down a checklist for me to refer to if I'm feeling low.

• Have I eaten?
• Have I eaten enough healthy food?
• Have I had enough water?
• Have I missed my dose recently?
• Have I had enough sleep?
• Have I had too much sleep?
• Have I exercised recently?
• Have I had cuddle time?
• Have I read anything about sexual assault recently?
• Has my schedule been out of whack for several days in a row?
• Have I socialised with people recently?
• Have I had a bad last call at work?
• Have I been criticised by someone?

Talking about Hypnosis

For this week's blog, I figured I'd share some specific fantasies about hypnosis, for Daddy to get some ideas.

Giving Orders Teeth. I've always loved the idea of certain key words forcing a specific behaviour. Me and Daddy currently use "Would you kindly" as a way of telling me "This is a direct order, do this now". What if I didn't have a choice? Where no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop if he put "would you kindly" in front of a request.

Or maybe have a keyword that will immediately stop me at whatever I'm doing and pay complete attention to Daddy - no ifs or buts. Or maybe a keyword that will turn me into a real Lee-Pet. The sorts of things that forces the meaning of phrases.

Suggestibility Sensation Play. One of the really fascinating things to come out of me and Daddy going to Lee Harrington's workshop a few years ago was the idea of guided meditation being a kind of hypnosis. It got me wondering about the idea of using hypnosis as a way of making someone feel a sensation without the tool being needed. Being able to, with just a word, turn your finger into a wax candle, an ice-cube, silk, a TENS pad, etc. Making me feel things with nothing more than words.

Changing Perceptions. I've heard a few examples of hypnosis practitioners using hypnosis to change a person's very perception of reality. A fun one I've heard of is a dom who hypnotised their sub into perceiving every voice they heard as their dom's voice, but there's a lot of fun possibilities. Making everything taste like Nutella, perceiving every face as wearing a moustache, stopping me from seeing the colour blue... A lot of really evil, but really fun possibilities exist. I'd certainly find something like that pretty damn fun to try!

Just a few fantasy ideas I have for fun with hypnosis.

First Top

Yesterday I had my first topping session with Sis. I decided that I wanted to do a wax play scene, with a little ice play as well, and Daddy agreed, and asked if it was alright if he co-topped.

I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed with the scene. I'm glad that I had Daddy to help teach me things, because I am seriously out of practice with topping. Hell, I think I'm out of practice in general, to be perfectly honest. I didn't have more than a general plan going into the scene, and it turns out that I'm not as great at thinking on the fly as I used to, so I ended up just repeating moves to extend the scene. At a few points, I was just mirroring Daddy, because I didn't really have anything else in my mind to do. Worse, Apparently I'd not remembered a few important limits, which could have derailed the entire scene.

But on the plus side, it seems that Sis definitely enjoyed the scene, she was quite happy to have some messy, way fun, so I was quite happy at that outcome at least. As first scenes go, at least the bottom was happy and got what she wanted out of it, so in that sense it was a very successful scene.

In the spirit of trying to discard my perfectionism, I am merely going to say that yesterday's sessions showed simply that I'm at the beginning of my training as a Top. I think I've learned some very important things, not least of which is that I need to plan scenes in much more detail if I'm planning to go for long scenes. Also, I need to work a lot more on concentrating on my partner's limits - there's no excuse for forgetting about limits, they should be foremost in a Top's mind.

Documenting The House

Since I set up the wiki, me and Daddy have continued to talk about our plans for it.

Now that we have Sis, the way the world sees us, and the way we see ourselves has begun to shift. We've now become more of a Leather House than the couple we used to. We're starting to look at now documenting our lives, so that new members can learn about our house.

A lot of the old Leather Houses used to have House Manuals, books that would document the way the house works. They'd write down all the rituals of the house, the hierarchy, everything the house was would be in that book. These days, of course, we've improved our technology. We have our own house network, including a perfectly functional server.

So, we've started to turn our little Wiki into  true House Manual. It's small now, because our House hasn't really had a great deal of rules and rituals. I wonder how much that will change now that we have a place to put them? I guess time will tell...

Like a Boss

I officially started off the next stage of my development as a Leather Boy last weekend.

I've been talking about forming a formal topping relationship with Sis, and this weekend me and Sis actually sat down, after she and Daddy had finished their negotiations, to negotiate how our relationship was going to work, with Daddy along side us to help us and to add his input.

It's actually been quite some time since I've been through a full negotiation, so I was really glad that Daddy was there to guide everything. When me and Sis first talked about a possible Sirship, we were a little vague since I hadn't really had much thought put into it, but I was much better prepared this time around. I made it clear that I wanted this relationship to sort of be a Dom internship - That I would start learning the skills of being a Dominant under the Tutelage of Daddy, and Sis would be my bottom during this tutelage. In return, Sis stated that she wanted to have the opportunity to have a more touchy relationship with me, since this is something that she's not getting a lot of with Daddy.

While Daddy and Sis's renegotiation didn't take that much time at all, Our negotiation took a lot longer, and that's probably because it was really a three-way negotiation - Sis is Daddy's pet, so anything we negotiated really had to go through him as well. But in the end, I'm really happy with the way it all shook out - I get to start taking a real and genuine step towards being a more skilled Leather boy, I get to be closer to my Daddy since he's now effectively taking me on as protégée, and I get to have a closer relationship with Sis.

Oh, and we decided on titles for each other. I'm Boss, Sis is Girl. So I'm in a new relationship LIKE A BOSS.

As serious as negotiation get, you can't take this stuff too seriously.

Geekiest Service Ever

It occured to me that Daddy's most common complaint of me is how I forget so much stuff. That his orders, or stuff he prefers, just doesn't seem to stick. My brain decides "You know, I should write all this down, make a book so I can remember everything"

My inner geek decides "Or, you could make a wiki for the house, and put everything on there." My inner geek won out, and our media box is now also running a house wiki over our network. I was setting this up while Daddy and Sis were doing their renegotiations (which I will talk about tomorrow), and Daddy suddenly pipes up "Is that a wiki for the house? That's a great idea".

Geekiest. Service. Ever.

Enemy of the Good

One of my biggest challenges has been about overcoming fear. My life in a lot of ways is ruled by fears of one sort or another.

With the New Year, me and Daddy took a trip to Torquay beach, and as often happens at beaches, the two of us ended up reflecting on the previous year, and began thinking about where we want the new year to take us.

It's always a conversation that's full of challenges, mostly because of my nearly legendary ability to avoid thinking about the future, but today I change up with a resolution that I think I can work with.

In short, I want to be braver this year.

I want to stop being afraid of failure. I wasn't to stop being afraid of other people. I want to stop being afraid of everything I don't know about. And I know that bravery is as much about overcoming fear as not feeling fear, but dammit,  I would like to stop at least some of the fear, as it's not exactly a fun sensation.

Or maybe that's not the resolution that I should be aiming for. Because it's not like I haven't already made some fantastic strides. Last weekend I but the bullet and got many scrotum pierced, twice! That's bravery! I'm getting better and better at being open,  I'm taking on challenges I'd never considered a couple of years ago.

So why so I feel so afraid? I think it's because I keep seeing all the stuff I can't do. I see where fear stops me, and forget that I don't have to be brave all the time.

Perhaps my resolution should be about breaking my perfectionism streak, and learn for real that perfect is the enemy out the good