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.