Limited by Fear #WickedWednesday

I know when you come here, to this little kinky corner of the world, and you think about “limits,” you’re thinking kinky limits.

Of course I have limits. I’m not into scat, golden showers, blood play, knives, or any of what I would consider “extreme” (extreme being personal – one person’s extreme could be another person’s vanilla). But John Brownstone and I also have very compatible limits – his hard limits are the same as my own, so with him, I can say I have “no limits” and he knows this means within the confines of what we both want.

But I’m not actually talking about those kinds of limits. Not today.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about fear. Fear in my vanilla life. Fear in the kinky world. Fear on a personal level. Fear as a parent. Fear as a professional. So much fear. We all experience it, on some level.

Fear holds us back from telling our partner we want to get kinky with them.

Fear keeps us in toxic relationships that only make us feel bad about ourselves.

Fear tells us we have to keep working that shitty job for the next 20 years or we’ll end up homeless and in a cardboard box.

Fear says we can’t do that because we suck or we shouldn’t do this because someone won’t approve.

Fear sucks ass, y’all.

It limits us. Holds us back. Keeps us stagnant.

My limits are expanding as I begin to tell fear to fuck off. I don’t always get it right. I make mistakes, and sometimes, fear gets the better of me, paralyzing me at times.

Someone wants me to write something new? I’m going to procrastinate for a few days as the fear of failure winds its way through my blood stream. I’ll lash out, get sick, or simply lose all motivation. Until I realize that fear is being a sneaky bastard, swallow it down, and get on with the work.

I have something to say about kink and D/s. Fear will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, no one cares, someone with more experience is going to call me out as a poser or a fake. Until I realize that I’m simply speaking my truth and encouraging others to find their own truth – then I tell fear to kiss my ass.

John Brownstone wants me to go somewhere, meet someone new, try something I’ve never done before. Before we can move forward, I’ll have a mini-freak-out where I convince myself I’m the most awkward person alive, hate all my clothes, and wish I could lose 30 pounds in 10 minutes. I wish I could say I push fear back, but in those moments, it’s done for me, as he takes me by the hand and pulls me into whatever situation I dread or gives me a big push and “makes” me do it. And he does it all with The Dom Look with a dash of Dom Voice mixed in.

Those are just my common fears.

Everyone has fears, but when we let our fear of what we think will be, the unknown, uncertainty, our assertion that someone else would be better, someone else should do it, we simply can’t – that’s when we impose the most limits.

When we push the fear down, step forward, and do what we think we can’t, that’s when we conquer fear – and when we learn we have less limits than we realized.

So many of the things we think we can’t do or shouldn’t do aren’t based in reality. It comes from fear of the unknown, fear of the new, fear of making a mistake, fear of getting it wrong, fear of being laughed at, fear of rejection, fear, fear, fear. Fear limits us.

When we reject fear – feeling it but not allowing it to stop us – we expand our limits, we grow in ways we never thought possible, and we realize we’re capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for.

Whether you fear telling him you want to be his submissive or you fear smacking her ass too hard or you simply fear walking away from someone you know isn’t good for you, dig down deep, find a little grain of courage, and move forward anyway. You may get it wrong but you’ll learn that there was very little to be afraid of, and it’ll get easier the second time around.

Welcome to Wicked Wednesday. This week’s prompt was “Off Limits” and the things that I consider “off limits” on a lot of levels are based on fear, so I let my mind wander. I think about fear all the time. I’m on the lookout for it so I can avoid it or move past it. There are so many things I want to do in life. I refuse to let fear be the reason I hold back.