A Little Background

It's no secret that I'm a professional editor.  I started out specializing in editing technical, academic and scientific literature with some general editing (papers written by college students, magazine articles, etc.) to fill in  here and there.  This is pretty dry work consisting of fact checking, grammar correction, tweaking formatting, chasing down those ever-elusive typographical errors and even doing some indexing.  I learned a great deal from the material I was editing but, honestly, there were times I was so bored out of my mind I wanted to scream, throw the computer out the window or both.  I still do this work but, about two years ago, my life took a rather interesting turn.  A friend asked me to look over the manuscript for a book she was writing, and my job hasn't been the same since.  I moved from dry, mostly technical editing to working with independent, self-published authors in the wonderful, amazing, a-little-bit-crazy, whole-lot-hot, world of Romance Fiction, editing contemporary and historical General Romance, Erotica and Erotic Romance, with a healthy serving of the wide ranging kink subgenre to keep things spicy and very interesting.

My job is no longer boring, and I find ice water and fans to be helpful tools to keep close at hand.

And, yes, I'm a pervy kinkster, who lives the D/s life, loves the B, is very curious about the SM and would like to explore the M/s dynamic all under the BDSM umbrella. 

In the vanilla world I'm very happily married for the last 20 years to a wonderful man who is the Love of My Life and Center of My World.  About ten years ago, I finally came out to him that I had a very kinky twist to my personality, had been this way almost from the day I first became sexually aware, and could no longer live in the closet.  Was there any chance he'd be interested in trying a little Rocky Road with our Vanilla?  He was.  We did.  And it's been a complicated, amazing, eye-opening, sometimes disappointing, frustrating, nerve-wracking, fun, silly, incredible journey ever since. 

The first three years or so were characterized by the "two steps forward, one step back" philosophy.  Sometimes it was more "two steps forward, three or more steps back".  Our professional lives mandated that we had to keep this part of our lives very, very much on the down-low.  Consequently, we were the personification of the less blind (me) leading the completely blind (DH). 

In 2005, our lives were turned every which way by several devastating events that occurred one on top of the other over the next three years.  If statistics are to be believed, our marriage should have failed miserably from any one of these circumstances, never mind the others that piled on one after the other.  The truly miraculous thing about all of this was that our marriage not only survived, it flourished.  While living through what finally ended up being nearly six years of hell we became more deeply committed to each other and fell more and more in love every single day.  Even so, I suffered two episodes of major depression so severe that I literally ceased to function outside of my job.  I've only just begun to rejoin life and the world of the living in the last two years.  Those two episodes of depression and the years of therapy it took to heal caused me to take a long hard look at every facet of my life.  I decided it was time for a major overhaul.

While in therapy I began to realize that I had been living a life that was governed more by what I thought society expected and keeping up appearances than being true to myself and acknowledging who and what I am.  This realization brought about some good, very positive changes in my life and in my relationship with my husband.  It also created problems, some of which stemmed from trying to live a D/s life without training, practical guidance and/or a support system.  The blind were leading the blind resulting in tripping over carpets, furniture and each other.   

It wasn't pretty.

It was complicated – and that's putting it mildly.  

I am a submissive leading a very dominant professional life that was spilling over into and definitely messing with my personal life.  Husband (aka Sir Sayanov) is a Dominant in his professional life, knowing deep down inside he is a Dominant in his personal life, but societal expectations were in conflict with instinct resulting in a confusing, totally messed up situation for both of us.  In our personal lives, as the more experienced partner in the D/s dynamic, I was trying to guide and teach him how to embrace the Dominant side of his personality.  As a result, I began to feel as though I was Topping from the bottom.  It wasn't working.  We knew it wasn't working, couldn't understand why, couldn't fix it, and I became confused, frustrated, insecure, angry, sad, and a hundred other crazy emotions.  The whole thing just felt wrong, very, very wrong.  Sir blamed himself.  I blamed myself.  Communication broke down because we weren't speaking the same language.  While we both knew it wasn't working, we knew that the D/s dynamic could work if we could just figure it out.  The situation was not getting better; it was getting out of control and we knew we needed help. Something somewhere was going to break and it finally did.

I knew I was craving something, wasn't sure exactly what it was, but I was driven to try and find answers.  I confided in a very trusted friend who helped steer me in the right direction.  This led to mentoring with a BDSM Master and His slave, which resulted in our decision to fully embrace the D/s dynamic in our personal lives, culminating in my husband becoming the Dom He was always meant to be and, about a year and a half ago, collaring me as His sub. 

Distilling it down makes it all sound incredibly simple; it was anything but simple.  No one waved a magic wand and instantly solved the problems.  There were a million things going on in our lives.  Sir's career was evolving and I had completely revamped mine from the ground up.  We adopted the mantra "one foot in front of the other, one day at a time".  We embraced the changes in our personal and professional lives, and the pieces finally began to fall into place.  It wasn't long, though, before we realized something still wasn't quite right.  Our professional lives were going along just fine, but our personal lives were not.  We were sure we were on the right track, but something just wasn't working.  So, what was wrong and how could we fix it?

Next:  Anticipation, face time, lots of fun...and then disappointment.