A Year's Time

Today is the one year anniversary of my blog! I have been scrolling back through the posts and pages and the changes I have been through in this year are really amazing.  I started the blog around the same time I signed up for FetLife.  I had a handful of friends there and so many questions.  A year ago I was ready to start to explore but I was absolutely terrified about it. I have worked through issues of shame and guilt and fear, not that those feelings don't come back (more often than I would like), but I like to think I am learning to navigate them better.

In the last year, Damascus and I have opened up our relationship. We have opened up our minds and hearts to some wonderful people. We have made dozens of new friends and have shared intimate details together. We have shared our bodies with a few of them, both together and on our own. I have fallen in and out of love and learned about the range of emotion and relationships that I am capable of having.  I have ended relationships and have have been broken up with.  I have learned to introspect and try to make sense of the jumble in my head and heart and to do my best to communicate it. I have challenged my sexuality, thought about it in relationship to men and women, and focused on what really gets me off. I have pushed myself to learn about pain and sensation and what it means to my sexual self.  And through those experiences, I have learned that it is an exchange of power that I have been seeking.

In the last year I went from being very modest with my body and clothing to feeling comfortable walking around in front of people in stages of undress.  I have been naked in a room full of people. I have been beyond naked: undressed and submissive in front of others, which is even more vulnerable than nude in a crowded room. I went from being too shy to have pictures taken and showing images of myself to regularly posting and sending erotic and exposing pictures to others. I went from being terrified of going to a play party for the first time to regularly attending and playing at such events, and we have hosted several of our own. I went from feeling completely alone in this lifestyle, afraid to speak up and reveal myself, to having a hundred and a half new friends on FetLife.

I still have lots of questions, but they are new. So many things have become clearer to me in the last year.  I know that writing and blogging has helped.  I think I may start sharing more of my writings on FetLife.  My blog site seems very public, in some ways, because it is out in the open on the web.  But it is a bit of a well kept secret that I think only a few people who are close to me read.  Posting to Fet, with all my new friends potentially reading, is much more vulnerable, because it is not just the world wide web, it's the people in my community that I am exposing myself to. I am ready to start living this journey out loud, sharing it more, and talking with more people about it, receiving questions and getting help with finding the answers to the questions I have. It's time.