Sweet Lassitude

I like to think I don't need external validation, and it's important to Me to believe that. But this week I got a spot achievement award from My boss, and two days later, for the same effort, the senior business person involved sent Me an enthusiastically appreciative email which was copied to My boss, our VP, our company's CEO, and someone so high up in our company's parent company stratosphere for My vertical that I only faintly know who they are.

What I noticed after the shock wore off and the Woo-HOOO!  moments passed, was how very like orgasm it felt. Obviously there's an endorphin pleasure rush but what felt orgasmic  was the sensation of sweet lassitude. The wow-I-need-a-cigarette-whilst-reclining-in-bed feeling. I didn't realize how much tension I was carrying around due to the annual review process until it unexpectedly released and I felt all safe and floaty and noodley.

I've been doing a specialized kind of yoga for injury recovery, and it has been fascinating. I'm just finishing taking the same class for the third time and I will keep repeating it until the instructor feels we understand My injury well enough for Me to be ok at the next level. That may take a while, for both of us. It has been fascinating to notice as I develop new awareness in My body. In one exercise we work with the four corners of the felt: inner heel, outer heel, inner ball of the foot, outer ball of the foot. Now, activate both inners. Now activate both outers. Now activate the inner heel and outer ball, then the outer heel and inner ball.

The first two class series, when we got to this part, I had absolutely no idea how to do what was being asked in the inner + outer combo. And then suddenly, quite amazingly, last week when I did it in the third series, I somehow understood, had a sense in My body of how to do it. Similarly, I suddenly have an idea now of how to control My big toe independent of My other toes. And when re-learning how to bend over, I suddenly this third time have more sense of how to be in My lower body, be in My feet, to use My lower body to straighten up in a way that does not engage My back at all.

It's so bizarre. 

It has all *been there* the whole time in My body, but I couldn't find it. I wonder what else there could be, awaiting discovery. Maybe some really great hot sexy stuff!

I bought that plaque that reads Less House More Home. And I feel that suddenly this blog has been a slow meditation working My way first, from My apartment into My house, but then further, without realizing it, from My real estate home into My ultimate home, into My body. In a weird way, moving more fully into My house has helped Me move more fully into My body.

I told j recently that I want to be more sexually selfish next time we are together. I put him on notice that things will be a bit different. Reading the books Come As You Are and also The Body Keeps the Score have helped Me understand some things about what I need to locate an erotic headspace and to recognize that it can be easy for Me to snap out of it. Most of My life it was just a thing that happened to Me, a mood or whim. I felt sexy or I didn't. I was horny or I wasn't. Now I have the concept that I might simultaneously have one foot on the gas and one on the brake... and if I can just release the brake, ZOOM!   Also now I have the idea that there may be eroticism in My body, maybe I just don't realize it is there.

I have new tools in the last year, tools that can make this a matter of choice and agency rather than a fleeting in-the-mood. It is time to start using them. Yet I find Myself somehow reluctant. boy t is always eager and willing to serve in this way, yet I do not use him. j is always up for anything, and arguably is emotionally safer since I have known him longer, yet I do not use him in this way either.  Why?  Maybe I don't want to have to be so high agency about it. Maybe I'm really attached to the fantasy of what Erica Jong in Fear of Flying called the zipless fuck. Maybe on some level I don't want take responsibility for My sexuality.  Maybe it has something to do with fear or being vulnerable enough to be disappointed or exposed to conflict. It's something I will be pondering a lot as I make the 130 mile round trip, weekly drive to physical therapy.

I found a nice gay PT who has mad skills but being gay, I feel saying that one of the things I *really* want to get out of PT is being able to do a several pick up flogging scenes in an evening at the dungeon. I need to talk about and work on My wrists and back and flogging body mechanics. I have wanted to bring all of Me to a PT not just the vanilla bits and I finally found that person. I brought in My floggers so he could assess them and Me. When I mentioned that I'm starting to notice certain intimate sensations, he knew about pelvic fascia issues that could be involved in My injury. I noticed recently that to support good back alignment, I tend to clench the underside of My ass and half engage the Pussy. Now that I'm aware, I play with releasing those muscles and find releasing them causes a totally different set of muscles to be recruited, with inferior results. That's not easy to say, even for Me, and I'm pretty candid.  If I'm going to bring up the observation that sitting with proper back alignment creates a moderate tearing sensation around My asshole, it's somehow just easier to say that to a smiling gay man who gives off bottom vibes. Perhaps that is horrible of Me somehow, but I have to do what I need to do to heal, and that means choosing care providers I can feel comfortable with... not just the easy vanilla parts but the wow, here's-all-the-cards parts of Me. I have had several forms of pelvic trauma and I know I have been not fully honest with Myself about how they might be affecting Me. It was hard to be that honest when I was at a loss for how I might fix it. But now that I have a good care provider, it's all-in honesty time.

Maybe if I get in the habit of being that vulnerable and honest with the PT about what I feel in My body, leading to other resources and answers, maybe I will get braver with other people. I would like that.

Less House, More Home

I haven't been writing. I haven't felt the impulse. What I mostly have been feeling is overwhelmed, and that has been true to varying degrees since the election. But it's not just politics, it's also the house and life generally.  The house did appraise for almost 45% more than the purchase price 3 1/2 years ago. At first I was ecstatic just to be out from under the PMI. A few weeks later I began to toy with the possibilities. Perhaps I should take out a home equity line of credit? That lead to questioning whether perhaps I should sell it, just take the money and run. Pay off all my debts, get out from under the mortgage, quit my job or at least take a sabbatical, and travel around the country and parts of the world catching up on all the vacation trips I have not taken in 25 years, living off the little nest egg that I wouldn't need to spend on renovations. It was very seductive, it was also very freeing, and it was part of a very long long long process, a multi-decade process, of coming to terms with some major life decisions that I made before I could legally drink. 

In time, my previous real estate agent came to the house, looking much spiffier these days, driving a very nice SUV, and after three hours of time for which he will not be receiving any compensation at all in the near future, he managed very gently to tell me the hard truth: nobody is going to want to buy your shitty little house for the appraised value. This blew my fantasy of chucking it all and taking a gap year completely out of the water, and I was more than a little crushed. 

On top of it all, I was sick all of January which caused Me to dro out of My choir for a concert cycle; gone away for a week with family; went to Winter fire; and in the middle of all that started physical therapy, continued taking a therapeutic yoga class, and also had some drama at work.  At some point in all that, I bought two little wooden plaques. One says: All Who Wander Are Not Lost.  The other says: Less House, More Home.

It has felt like everything I want to be solid is rolling under my feet, and I have felt more than a little at sea. It's not bad but it's disorienting.

It's not that I have nothing to talk or write about. It's that I don't know what to say. I haven't yet figured out how to make sense of what is going on around Me. It's one thing to write in a diary, and the blog is sort of a diary but it has an audience and it's also broadly open to the public, and that makes Me less willing to blow air out the top of My hat when I don't know what I'm actually trying to say. I'm also very sensitive at the moment to the possibility that things I say in writing -- those which are really much better suited to verbal conversations face-to-face. -- can be a little dangerous. Writing makes everything more real. Writing is a less forgiving than talk. Something slightly mis-stated in writing has a permanence to it which makes fixing the mis-statement extremely difficult. It risks an un-bridgeable rupture, and I don't feel comfortable with that at all.

The good news is that spring is almost here, it's time to spring ahead this weekend. The annual process of My clock winding down and winding back up is nearly complete, and for that I am thankful. The cherry blossoms are coming. I have new focus now for which projects the house needs, I understand their priority. I have amusingly learned that most of what I care about in the house is unimportant to most buyers, and conversely, almost perfectly inversely, what is important to most buyers has been totally unimportant to Me. It's time to create a convergence between those two groups of projects. From this point forward I improve the house for resale value, not for My own preferences. I understand the difference between what affect sales price and what affects appraisal value. I have clarity, and though it was uncomfortable to get, clarity is good, very little happens without clarity.  Now My goal is to get the house ready, as soon as feasible, so that I could sell it if I chose to, so that if I ever did decide abruptly to sell, I would be prepared. It would give Me peace of mind to know I am ready, like the Israelites ready to jump up and go when the moment comes. This has the interesting side effect of giving Me permission to live in a finished and beautiful, camera ready house. I think it's interesting that I've been willing to live in a renovation for 3 1/2 years. I wonder if maybe on some level perhaps I didn't believe I deserved to have it be perfect, just for Me. Now it's clear it must be perfect to sell some day, so it may as well be perfect before that, I may as well get to enjoy it Myself. It's an interesting scrambling of priorities. 

Growing up My parents tried to renovate our house at one point. They ran out of money and got stuck and the result was that I lived in a gutted house most of My childhood. I particularly remember that we did not have a furnace exactly, we had a hole where there used to be a stairwell but it was just a hole covered by a piece of 4x8 plywood. And in the hole was something very like a jet engine. It must've been some sort of a propane or kerosene furnace, laid on its side like a cruise missile. And in the depths of the Midwestern winters when the house got too cold, we would pull the 4x8 piece of plywood up and turn on the jet engine for about 10 minutes, to heat the house to the point of being unbearably hot, and then turn it off and let the house cool for four or six hours until it was so cold that it once again seemed like a good idea to tolerate 10 minutes of noise and kerosene fumes to be warm again. 

Reading back… That sounds just awful. It's surprising to read that that was My home in childhood, that that was the way we lived for several years. But it was. We also went a long stretch without a bathroom in the house. For a long time the only bathing option we had was out in the barn and often we had to move a sick calf out of the shower in order to be able to take our once weekly shower. Lord, I must have stunk. It was a lot more like living in Little House on the Prairie than one might expect for the 1970s. 

I have understood for a long time that this house renovation is on some level completion of a task that is not Mine, it is on some level finishing the renovation My parents could not finish. It's a wound I inherited that I carry somewhere inside, and in the way of such things I have created an external version of the wound for Myself so that I can heal it. My parents are helping Me with My house, and so by extension, finishing My renovation will bring them a little bit of extra closure for their past. It is perhaps for this reason more than all others, that My father has been here for the last five days helping, sanding and finishing the staircase, chipping out tiles from the utility room, replacing the damaged subfloor and putting it all back together. It is emblematic of My father that this is a tremendous act of love, yet for the most part he does it with a level of grumpiness that makes it feel like an imposition, a gift given begrudgingly. I have to work hard at remembering that it is love in action, and remembering to feed back to him demonstrations of love that he can receive. Amusingly for a FemDom, this means that for the last five days I have been getting up 2 to 3 hours earlier than I prefer, brewing fresh coffee for my man so he can start the work, baking cinnamon rolls for my man, washing and folding my man's dirty clothes, making sure my man is fed and feels adequately appreciated. And I worked 48 hours at My white collar day job. It was a slightly bizarre juxtaposition. And I am exhausted.

After dad flew home tonight, the bizarre culminated with Me peeing in My own backyard because I cannot get up the wet staircase to the single bathroom right now. So I said screw it, and went out under the tree. If I could have found a nice boy to lay down there first, I would happily have peed on him as well. It would have done Me a world of good.