I have a confession. My favourite reading matter is this very blog.

But I swear, it’s not just because I am so vain! It’s also because my memory is a sieve. It’s so bad that once when I was asked for a personal motto, I immediately ad-libbed, “Question Everything. Don’t Lose the Answers.”

It’s particularly bad with kink, because it’s so partitioned off from the rest of real life. I’ve had so many questions for so many years, and it’s only recently that I’ve discovered the books and friends who have helped me work through possible answers. (Thanks, guys!)

So I made a cheat sheet for what I’ve learnt here this year. Ahem!

Abject Submission

• Should I have let my kink dive down that rabbit hole last year?
• The truth shall set me free!
• I don’t want mercy. Only the gift. And I want to be the giver.
• I think [a protocol is] really a promise that you know what you want. That I can please you.
• This is my problem with equality: we don’t have it.

What Makes Us Tick?

• When you’re at your most sadistic we are at our most intimately connected, we live in each other’s minds.
• Vanilla sex scenes leave me cold, no matter how much destiny and feeling and pressed pink flesh are crammed in.
• So yes, it is about self-annihilation. So is Buddhist meditation, or Christian prayer, or Sufi mysticism.
• I want ten different things before breakfast, and I want you to deny me some of them!
• Control, not service. The journey, not the destination.

Safety and Ethics

• There is no shame in weakness and fear. Or in power and privilege – if you learn where the whip lands.
• But horror is not a valid moral compass, any more than a squick is a valid moral judgment.
• I’m starting to think that nice and ethical have a lot to do with each other. Not nice is a warning sign of worse.
• Consent is choice. Choice is always limited.

Reality Check

• We are like rock climbers and skydivers – the sky is big, the ground is hard, and a life of more is precious.
• … sadism that comes from a place of anger and revenge, instead of affection and power.
• Black belts and black hankies pretty much agree on where to draw the line.
• That is what sociopaths need, from the horse’s mouth. Consequences.

How to Do It

• CollarMe.com feels just like teaching preschool again.
• If I want anyone to value my consent, I have to own the responsibility for looking out for number one.
• What do you think I should do about your behaviour?
• You get my vanilla reaction to pain and danger, which resembles nothing so much as sardonic sports commentator trying very hard for saintly patience.
• I think it also helps to remember that it’s not our job to enjoy what is happening. Our mission is simply to experience it.
• Don’t make the dom work to figure out what you really mean.

I Did It

• Of course, my ardent desire to fall through the floor did not pass unnoticed.
• Searing pain, panic and protection. Oh God, I want more.

Buried Treasure

• Beware! Here be spoilers!
• You want to grovel, you want to be cared for, you want to be done to.
• I think I only stopped feeling that way when I realised that in real life, I don’t need every boundary of ethics and taste to be trespassed.
• So – whimpering, trembling and a frightened child tone, yes. Dull eyes, no – screeching brakes.
• Because in order to cry, you have to know that … you do not deserve this pain. And I didn’t know.
• My ethics are processed through the heart. I question my squicks, I unfold my squees.
• Your focus in exchange for my everything else.
• Just love and desire and submission. That is the alchemy which transforms innocence into bacchanalia intact.

My Favourite Quotes

• “I never forget that I’m playing with a person.”
• “This was completely Jekyll and Hyde territory, and nobody had ever really said how incredible it was to let Hyde out.”
• “Maybe it’s safer to be a bottom.”
• “Our first responsibility is to learn to make such judgements for ourselves before we presume to judge anyone else.”
• “Consent alone is not enough.”
• “You want to be a CONCUBINE?”
• “I feel like a MUGGLE.”

What a year. I’m looking forward to more.

See you in 2015!