Life and Pain

I’ve been struggling super hard. I feel like a failure all the time at everything.

Sir has me on a new plan, as he and SB are at work, and I’m off for the summer. We’re using an app called Ike, rather than a traditional to-do list. It has, basically, urgent items, important items, “fit it in if you can” items and “back burner” items.

Each evening he goes over it with me and we set my goals for the next day.

Every day, “write” is on the “important” list. I’ve just about gotten ready to give up and put it on the back burner list. Or just delete it altogether.

I’m only absolutely accountable for the urgent items.

Today, those were to clean up the dining room (he also has routines written for me so I can do complex tasks like cleaning a single room or brushing my teeth), to go to trauma therapy on time, to do my morning routine (eat, exercise, shower, dress, take meds), and to refill my med containers for the week.

At 1:30 this afternoon, I had done… a third of my morning routine and played games on my phone for 5 hours.

Sir came home from work early.

There was yelling and gnashing of teeth.

There were swats with the wooden spoon.

There was a deadline, “In your car, ready to go to trauma therapy, – showered, dressed, fed – at 3 P.M.

I played more games.

At 2:40 P.M. there was a panicked dash for the shower.

I was in my car at… 3:02.

Sir was nonplussed by my amazing feat of getting completely ready in 22 minutes.

Sir had promised punishment for every minute I was late. Two swats for each minute.

So… I went to therapy already sore and facing four more swats when I got home.

During therapy I have to do a grounding exercise… first notice my feet pressing against the floor, then notice my butt and thighs against the couch.

Already done! Every inch of my butt and thighs is making me aware of the pressure of the couch (and the texture of the material of my panties, and every seam in the seat of my jeans). I’m ready to graduate from trauma therapy!

I came home and sat in my car in the garage. I didn’t want to go upstairs. Didn’t want four more swats. Didn’t want to finish the chores I avoided all morning.

I played games on my phone. For thirty minutes. Sir came downstairs and told me to find a stopping place and get upstairs. “Five minutes. Move.”

Fifteen minutes later, SB came down to plead with me on my body’s behalf. “Just get it over with, you’re just making it worse.”

Thirty minutes later compulsively punching at cartoon images of farm equipment could no longer hold at bay the howling storm of anxiety building in the pit of my stomach.

Thirty-five minutes after deadline (plus two minutes after 3:00), I slunk upstairs.

I told myself that Sir would wait until bedtime. That I had to worry about cleaning first, that I could put off the worry about punishment for hours, yet.

I stepped into the living room. Sir was on the couch with SB. Sir glanced at me, then pointedly turned his gaze to the wall clock.

I didn’t bother to look. I knew. It was bad. Almost an hour. At bedtime there would be a painful reckoning.

Sir pushed himself up from the couch. “All right. Upstairs.”

I gaped at him. I tried to think of what chore I had on my list that required me to be upstairs. I tried to guage by his face how annoyed Sir was. Then I made the tragic mistake of glancing at SB. While I had managed to push my fear off to an abstract and suitably distant time from the present, SB wore his fear for me on his face. His eyes darted between me and Sir as I lingered near the top of the stairs, as if to keep an escape route open.

SB’s fear was a fast-acting contagion that spread a tingling cold over my face, down my chest, burrowing into my belly.

I began to bounce on the balls of my feet, my fingers twitched, ready to speak as soon as I found the right words.

Sir paused at the foot of the stairs to the bedtoom. He glanced back at me. He glanced at his watch. “What you’ve earned so far will be a five. Every minute after this that you do not obey, the number and the intensity increase by two.”

I sucked in a gasping breath. A five…out of ten. Most punishments are given at a four. The hardest I’ve ever taken from Sir he called a seven. It had hurt to walk for two days afterward.

Somehow my feet, in an act of desperate survival, begin to carry me towards the stairs. Sir motions me up ahead of him, and though I know it isn’t his style, I brace for an assault from behind.

I step into the bedroom and my breath catches again. A pillow is positioned at the edge of the bed. Usually I’m expected to hold my position with my hands on the bed. I have to control, myself, the desperate wriggling as my body instinctively tries to escape the pain. This will be… easier.

I am already shuddering as I turn to Sir, pleading mercy. His mouth is a hard line. He doesn’t meet my eyes, only gestures to the pillow. “Pants down.”

A terrible, cold fear creeped into my chest. A sense of futility. Of helplessness. Of loneliness. A feeling that Sir had gone away, far out of reach. That even my most genuine, authentic pleas for mercy, for care, for love… would go unanswered.

This bleak sadess spread out from my heart, creeping into every last hidden reserve of strength, of stoicism, of composure.

I lowered myself over the pillow, and already I was close to tears.

The earlier swats meant these now fell on already tender skin and the sharp, bright, stinging drove everything else from my thoughts.

I don’t know how many there were. My memories are like snapshots, single moments of searing pain, moments of squeaking, choked misery, a moment of attention to the color of the curtains. A moment of gasping for air, suddenly realizing I’d been holding my breath.

A moment of confusing silence when I realized the sound had stopped but my body lagged in registering the cessation of new pain.

Then the bed shifted under me, Sir’s leg a warm press against my side. My breath continued to come in shuddering sobs, but Sir’s soft words were clear above it. The final ten. To my thighs. I almost bolted off the bed at these words, but he pressed me down. I mewled pleas and promises. I tried to catch his hand in mine.

He let me. His hand was warm and he gave mine a gentle squeeze. The bed shifted again as he stood. He leaned close over me and pressed a kiss to my temple. He whispered softly to me and my tears broke free, “Tuck your hand, keep it out of the way,” as still trapped in his, he pulled my captured hand to the small of my back.

The dog was upset by the final strokes. His worried whines and the click of his nails interwove with with the smacks of the spoon and my smothered shrieks. All efforts to choke down my pain dissolved as the wood cracked again and again against my thighs.

I buried my face in the bed. I tried to count down, see the end of this suffering, but I couldn’t maintain even a count of ten. My entire universe became the crack of the wood, the terrible pain, my screams, my saliva soaking the thick cotton of the bedspread pushing itself into my mouth, and my repeated, panicked, desperate cries, “Please! Please! Ow! Sir! Please!”

There was a time… long ago, with another person, another relationship, another punishment, when I was deeply ashamed that I broke my silence, that I uttered a single, “please.”

Now they spilled from me, the last, unextinguishable threads of hope, of trust, of faith…even through the pain, that Sir cares, that he listens, that he loves me. In Sir’s hands, in Sir’s arms, shame cannot survive, and I surrendered, shrieking, sobbing, pleading, unashamed.

I sniffled and gulped and gasped lungsful of air for long minutes after the last swat landed and I heard the spoon clatter to rest on the bedstand. Sir’s weight again beside me, his hand now soothingly rubbing my back, my freed arm wrapped around his waist, clinging in desperate connection, finally I fully cried. I cried deep sobbing tears. Tears of grief, of pain, of soul-deep sadness. I cried until my head ached, my cheeks itched, and my face ached from the pressure.

I cried until I remembered how truly miserable it is to deeply cry.

When my breath had finally returned to a normal rhythm, interupted only occassionally by hitching gasps, Sir leaned close again.

“You have chores to do.”

For an hour and a half, I cleaned the dining room. It shouldn’t have taken that long, but I was moving slow.

I hurt. I hurt so much that for the first hour my hands were trembling so much, I stuggled to put my pills in their containers.

It hurt to move. It hurt to stand. It hurt to walk, to bend, to sit. It hurt a low, burning, stinging, ache, flaring brighter each time I shifted, each time a movement dragged the hem of my underwear across my skin. Each time my skin pulled or stretched or caught contact with the roughness of my jeans. Every time I forgot and bumped against something, or managed to wrap the cord of the vacuum cleaner behind my hips.

And I hurt inside. I hurt at the size of my task, at the overwhelming sight of it, at the thought of it, at the seeming endlessness of it.

Sir helped me focus. He pointed out each small task, one at a time, watched and waited while I did it. Threatened SB when he tried to stealthily put away some of the clutter.

After an hour, Sir let me take a break. I was shaking hard, and on the verge of tears.

I went to the bathroom after washing my hands, checked my bottom in the mirror. It was still hot and red, an hour out. It was a serious spanking. I twisted to see from another angle and gasped slightly.

I caught SB’s attention and we went into the kitchen. I tugged my jeans down to reveal my thigh, and the crimson red mark, still livid an hour after the spanking.

Marks aren’t unavoidable. Hard spankings often leave a stippling of small bruises. But it us exceedingly rare that Sir will leave definite marks on my skin from a punishment.

SB looked at it, and his expression of empathy broke me again. I cried softly while SB got Sir.

Sir’s mouth twitched in an expression I couldn’t determine… regret or disappointment. I cried harder and tried to apologize, though I’m not sure for what, but I was shaking too hard to say anything intelligible.

It seems stupid, in the light of rationality. A mark isn’t anything dangerous. It is like the thunder that arrives after the lightning has already struck. But like thunder, the mark is more frightening than the actual experience that created it. I flinched away from Sir’s reach to comfort me and asked SB, repeatedly, irrationally, “Is it bad? Is it really bad? How bad is it?”

Sir quietly stepped back and kept his distance as SB took a picture so I could see more clearly (the picture isn’t as clear as reality, but he might have done that on purpose…) SB sat on the couch with me, cuddled me, showed me how I could add silly faces and doodles to the image, and, strangely, it soothed me. I added drawings to the picture, a kind of retelling of the story. It was silly, and it helped me process, normalize, integrate my feelings about the physical reminder of my mistakes and correction.

Sir occupied himself elsewhere, and later I felt bad for excluding him, for not even thinking of him for those minutes with SB on the couch.

When I felt able, I went back to my task. Sir made himself unibtrusively available and I turned to him as I was nearing finished, hoping he would let me off without dusting and vacuuming, without carrying the recycling downstairs, without carrying the small pilevof bedroom items upstairs…

Sir simply said, “You’re getting close. Three jobs left.” He turned away but his body was lines of unhappiness. I fought the rising sense of anxiety, of overwhelm. I choked back the voice that said, “It’s too much! I’ll never finish! I can’t do this.”

Slowly, painfully, I finished the rest.

Now we are snuggled together on the couch. Sir included this time. I asked him, shyly, deep in my submission, if he would hold me. He looked at me for a moment and something softened. He’s been holding me for an hour. SB has his head on Sir’s shoulder. They both read along as I wrote this on my phone (and both helped me catch the typos!)

I still hurt.

It’s an itching burn mostly now, brightening to a sting when my clothes rub. Occasionally, a frazzled nerve fires a jolt of searing pain that steals my breath for a moment, but it is happening less frequently than the last hour, and even less than the one before that.

My muscles are starting to ache. My thighs. My shoulders. My obliques. Warning of the deep soreness I’ll wake up with tomorrow. Fatigue from the incredible tension of struggling to keep still, and then of simply struggling, writhing, twisting under Sir’s restraining hand. Pain no one ever talks about so I always thought I was alone until SB said once thatvit happens to him, too.

It will itch, too. Something else no one ever talks about. It will itch like fuck. Probably for days, as my cells work on healing.

Depression has been a stranglehold choking me for weeks now. It has stolen my feelings, my care… I don’t sleep, eat, even shower some days unless Sir forces me to. I try to interact with people and feel myself fading away.

Tonight will help. Maybe for a day or two. Then it will get worse. But Sir will be here. SB will be here. It will end. But like a spanking, I will probably lose sight of the end. I will become too distracted by the pain to do anything but endure it, mewlimg, crying, biting a blanket, begging for a way out, an end, a reprieve. But none will come.

It will feel endless. It will feel helpless. It will feel hopeless.

It will end, and like a spanking, my body and brain will be slow to realize it is over. But then, eventually, I will hear the clatter of the spoon on the side table. I will lick my wounds and seek comfort, realizing, finally, that I can feel it.

And for a while, it will hold. I will be better, feel better, stay on track.

Until I don’t. And it will all start again.

• Warning
• Potentially upsetting imagery ahead.
• It’s the photo of my leg that SB took.
• It shows redness and a slight redder mark.
• There is no blood.
• There is no bruising.
• There is no harm to animals (unless you count me.
• Of the people I know who follow my blog, identities range from vanilla to “if there’s not blood, we aren’t having fun, yet.” Please consider your comfort level.
• No, I’m not showing my ass. I’m pretty sure that would violate the Geneva convention.
• If you absolutely must jerk off to this picture/this post, please don’t tell me about it. I will think less of your humanity. Even if spanking is what gets your motor running, being a decent human being with empathy means you should be able to exert your higher brain functions and recognize this as an emotional, non-sexual post.
• If you can’t do that, at least keep it to yourself.
• If you’re still having a hard time with this idea, let me simplify it – telling total strangers about your masturbatory habits isn’t sexy. Don’t do it.
• Sigh. My faith in all of humanity can be shaken by so few of its representatives.
• Is this list long enough to give people enough room time to click away?
• Welp, let’s hope so, because I have ADHD and my ass fucking hurts, so my interest in being a good person and protecting people from my content just ran out.