A Bad Day
April 7th, 2011
I’m having a bad day. Work was fine, the cat didn’t attack me, the weather was gorgeous, no one got hurt or is deathly ill in my immediate life(though, for my good friends who do have that in their lives, I’m incredibly sorry and wish I could be there for them more than I currently am). I didn’t break the car or lose my phone or have drama explode. Nothing changed today. But I’m having a bad day.
It happens time to time. My body fights me. My immune system attacks (mostly) my joints. I have pain and swelling in various bits and pieces depending on the day, week, month, year. I used to take a lot of drugs. A couple years ago, about the time I started this blog, I was getting worse and my doc upped my injections. I snapped, I was tired of the drugs. Tired of the chemicals, tired of getting worse. I changed my diet. Massively. It didn’t cure me, like I hoped it would. But it controls it about as well as the drugs did.
Or at least that’s what I tell myself. I blame the flares on not sticking as strictly to the diet as I should. On not eating raw enough. On not eating alkaline enough. But then I also have two books with opposing opinions on what is and what is not alkalizing. On stress. On empathetic pain, sometimes. I take a naproxen every now and then. If I have a really bad flare, I take a couple prednisone. Rationalizing that one or two pills a week is better than four a day and two shots a week.
I haven’t been to my rheumatologist in a over a year at this point due to money and insurance concerns and the fact I’ve stopped taking the drugs. I’ve still got spare pain killers left from the refills I did a year and a half ago. Probably, they say they should be thrown out by now, but that’s not the point.
I’m having a bad day. My wrist hurts, my elbow is buggered, my ankle’s achey, and my shoulders are cranky. None of it’s debilitating, but it was all worse this morning before I took a naproxen. I knelt tonight, made it to 28 minutes before I got up, and was in tears a short while later. Not tears of physical pain. Physical pain hardly ever makes me cry by itself.
I’m a masochist. A pain slut. I enjoy pain, I get off on it. No, Midori would say, I get off on intense sensation. No one enjoys stubbing their toe accidentally. It’s the pain I can’t control that made today bad. It’s the frustration that got me up from kneeling before 30 minutes because I wanted to stop the pain I could stop, because I couldn’t stop the other pains. And honestly, some days, that’s what keeps me there the whole 30 minutes, because I’ve chosen to be there.
It’s why I’m a masochist. I enjoy control, I get off on power exchange. I get off on giving someone else the power to cause me pain. I get off on allowing myself to feel pain because I choose it. I get off on the adrenaline and the endorphins, too. But on a bad day, I want to get off by choosing pain instead of pain choosing me.
Mental vs. Physical Drop
November 4th, 2010
Today I want to talk about drop.
About a year ago, I posted about Altered States and said that Pain Space “is the one that leads to drop most often.” A month or so later, after a post specifically about Sub Drop I commented that “I rarely have sub drop anymore over purely the physical parts of scenes, which used to happen after any Really Intense scene. Now it really does take a negative emotional trigger for me to drop.”
Earlier this week, I was talking to Lover (yes, he keeps that name for now, I’ll post about labels again soon) about drop from mental scenes as opposed to physical scenes. He was baffled that a relatively painless evening could cause faster and more massive drop than a very physically taxing scene. At first, I thought maybe it had to do with being a girl, I blame girly hormones for a lot of things. But then I thought maybe it was a disconnect in understanding between people who really enjoy pain and people who don’t. Let me explore my thoughts out loud.
My first year in the local community, I would have drop after big physical scenes, either just from the chemical drop after the high endorphins of the scene, or from a negative comment about how harsh the scene was, or just from being so worn out by the physically taxing nature of the scene. I did not do a lot of mental play during that first exploration, certainly not to the extent of some of the play I’ve done this year. I also was not a self-described pain slut in the beginning. I knew I liked some very specific types of pain(intense sensation), but have since discovered that while there are some types of implements I am not fond of, I will put up with them for the experience of the pain(intense sensation). Since I have come to grips with my enjoyment of pain, I have far less drop from physical scenes. If someone comments negatively on it, I am better able to laugh it off and explain how much I enjoyed it.
It is the mental side of things that I now find causes harder drop. Mental scars and bruises are a lot harder to see and are more intense than physical ones. I’m remembering a scene that I don’t think I have posted about before. There was crying from the pain during part of it, but the harder crying was caused by words. That is the case more often than not this past year. Yes, pain can trigger tears, but words and mental control strike deeper chords. While you can see the bruises and marks on the skin, sometimes you don’t know what all happened in your mind. A day later, a stray word, or a random thought, could bubble to the surface and bam, that’s it, you’re dropping from something that you did not consciously process at the time. The mind is a far trickier landscape than the body.
I think I strayed off my two theories quite a bit, let me see if I can bring it back around. On blaming it on being a girl – I’m not sure that holds any water at all. I think I had it at an angle of being more vulnerable mentally than the men I play with, but I think that is quite possibly a false basis for the claim. On being about enjoying pain versus not enjoying pain – I think this holds a bit more truth. Pain is easier for me to process now that I am more accepting of my enjoyment of it. It was not always that way, so I can understand how, for people not at ease with pain, why it would be harder to process and thus be a potential for more drop than more mental play they might be more at ease with.
What are your thoughts? What causes more drop for you? How do you deal with it?