Living the Life We've Imagined

He has, for years, signed off with that tag line... "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined."


It is easier to say than it is to do, as it turns out.



The life we imagined some six or seven years ago was not at all what life itself chose to hand us in the event. The hurdles have been higher and closer together than we ever dreamed they might be, and while we are sturdy and resilient people, there comes a time when things wear on you and the imagining starts to get harder and harder.


I have been particularly guilty of looking backward with longing more than I've looked forward with "imagination." That has ended up keeping us in a continual loop of bitterness and frustration that really has kept us from living the life we might have imagined IF we'd imagined any life at all in the forward sense.


There are some tricky places to the relational power dynamic that He and I engage in. Our particular orientations are closely aligned, but not exactly so. He is an inveterate spanko and sadist with a very Dominant (controlling) personality. However, He is not primarily driven by control urges -- He controls as He needs to in order to satisfy His desire to spank. I am inherently a control freak who is driven by the need for a strong Dominant force to allow me a safe place into which I can relinquish power. The masochism that forms a deep and dark core of my sensual and sexual nature, is a reflection of the drive to have the control taken from my hands. I don't respond, in the first sense, to the pain -- rather to the loss of control that the pain brings/implies.


We have struggled in the last months; struggled to find a shared path, a shared vision, a shared understanding; a shared imagining for our lives together. We have struggled to even communicate what it was that was out of sync between us, and the knowledge that we were missing that mark with each other has only served to ratchet up the level of fear and frustration on both sides.


He has done everything He has done with the very best of good intentions; fearful for my health and well-being (emotional and physical), He has lightened up and pulled back and relaxed in a hundred different ways -- accommodated until the framework that might once have conveyed certainty and security to my very core, has been stripped to almost nothing. Not that there is any blame -- I've fought and spit and hissed like the wounded animal I've been; all claws and fangs and scraggly-looking fur... The fun and playful companion that He thought He was getting back six years ago has turned into a worry and a drag.

I've tried, in a couple dozen completely ineffective ways to convey to Him just how lost and cut lose I've felt, and how desperately I've needed to have more, not less, of His guidance and input -- but terror is not a particularly eloquent state from which to begin a conversation. Worse, as I've sensed His drawing away, I've fallen into my own natural control mode, snatching the control from His hands anytime and anywhere He will let me. Each and everytime that happens, and I "win" the power battle, I become more frightened, and less sure of the foundation upon which I've built my life.


And so things spin further and further out of control.


Saturday was bad. Really bad.


We'd had a very long, difficult week, and we were both looking forward to a chance to reconnect and play and spend some time together as Master and slave, as lovers, as partners. But we hadn't talked, and we weren't nearly on the same page, and all the agendas were spinning in the air around us, and the stories that I've been telling myself were all playing loudly in my head... None of that makes for an easy session, and things went south really fast. By the time it was over with, I'd busted up the relationship, piled the pieces into a heap, poured gasoline over the whole mess, and set it on fire.


Luckily, we are two damned stubborn people. He is even more stubborn than me, mercifully. There is no "quit" in the man, and He really does believe in living that imagined life. Saturday was a long day of working through the conflagration I'd made, sorting through the ash and rubble, and finding our way back home again. By Sunday morning, somehow, He seemed to have come to some sort of decision point.


Whatever foolishness I'd flung at Him on Saturday, He'd chosen the path of "Master." Come the light of morning on Sunday, He began to reclaim the ground that has been slowly ceded to my moods and rages and fears in the last months. He moved to break through the barriers that I've been so busily erecting -- to take possession of my mind and my heart and my body, so that as we played together in the early hours of the beginning of the week, I felt myself coming back to the place I'd fled from in panic over the last few months -- relaxing into His control.


I think, believe, that our path will be different from here. He has declared that there will be more of His control over my life in the coming days, weeks, months -- that He knows what is and needs to be for Him and me and us, and that is the way it will be, and I believe Him.

That may sound trite, pedestrian, simplistic. It is perhaps all of that. It feels entirely right. He has already begun to define the lines and outlines of how things will be for us as we move forward. Things will be different. There are things that I have pulled to me, declaring that I would "do this" or "not do that." He has obliterated that control grab. I WILL do what He decides I will do.


We will, together, imagine our lives anew. We will begin to live the life we can imagine together. If He were different; if I were different, that might all seem grim and dark and dismal, but we are the people we are -- for the first time in a very long time, things seem hopeful and good.


swan