I have been enjoying responding to the Submissive Journal Prompts the last few weeks. Here’s another round and before you read, I hope that you’ll respond to these also in the comments or in your own blog. Its fun to learn more about fellow bloggers and my readers. *smiles*

• If you are masochist, how do you process pain? Are you the silent type? Screamer? Crier? Is this what is expected of you? How does your partner prefer you to process pain?

It depends on the kind of pain it is. There is a certain level of pain that is just unbearable to me. It is the type that goes straight into the center of my body, effecting huge bundles of nerves and seeming to radiate to other areas that aren’t even being touched by what’s happening. When something hurts like that and is so bad that the nerves go crazy and start making my muscles twitch uncontrollably, then I dissociate and I can’t stop it. Its the kind of pain that makes me feel assaulted. Any other sort of pain, I respond completely the opposite. I sink into it. I become one with it and breathe with it. I wriggle with it and let it wash over me. I am generally silent about pain unless it causes an orgasm or it starts to generate alot of discomfort. I know that’s an odd word to use, but when it becomes uncomfortable to tolerate, then i start making sounds. I start flinching. I start using words when its getting really hard to tolerate. Ow! and the like. But I stay with it. I don’t run away mentally or emotionally. When its getting toward the type that I feel assaulted by, I start trying to get away instinctively, but also holding myself still. Its an odd little wriggle. A struggle inside myself that I respond to variously. Sometimes, I need to stop then. Other times if we stop, I’m going to feel frustrated, even if I said I wanted to stop. I am not sure how to tell when that is and I’m not sure why that is. I just know it happens.

No one I’ve shared pain games with has ever told me they expected a certain thing from me about tolerating pain except that I communicate and that if I need to then I should use the safe word. Usually, I want to be pushed until I want to use the safe word pretty badly….and there are times that I want to be pushed until the safe word is on the tip of my tongue and I am trembling to say it and not say it. But no one has ever said they wanted to hold me there specifically, nor have they said that’s what they wanted out of me each time we played pain games.

• What does it mean to you to be “someone’s”?

There have been two men who wanted to ‘claim’ me and ‘keep’ me in my life, but they didn’t stick around to actually do that. There was never anything formalized between them. With my husband, there’s been no formal claiming me as a submissive. As a wife? yes. And that feels like being home to me. None of these relationships were total power exchanges, so I don’t know what it feels like to be a slave or owned or any of that. Only what it feels like to be loved and devoted.

• “If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day.” – Alex Noble

I don’t think I have anything to add to this one.

• How would you define your service? Devotional, positional, transactional service?

It is all three. I try to be a presence of unconditional love in my life and especially to those I love as a submissive. I try to discern what it is they want and to respond to that out of love and not resentment or fear or resistance. I just try to give them what they need…even if it hurts to do it.

I haven’t decided what the word positional means to me in relationship to D/s, so I’m not sure how to answer this part of the question. If I’m to answer something, I have to know what it means to me first.

Submission is not a transaction to me, but it is an offering without condition.

• Do you ever find it difficult to embrace your nature in today’s society? How do you balance it out?

I do not find it difficult to embrace my submissive nature in my society. I have trouble embracing other aspects of my nature which both relate to and are irrelevant to submissiveness. And that’s another story.

And the mood for a jiggle finally came over me…Ha! I made a punny. *grins*