Your Protocol Isn’t My Protocol, but Your Protocol is Okay

Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing D/s “right.”

For the record, after consent, communication, and safety/risk-awareness, there is no “right.” But that doesn’t mean I don’t still have an idealized version of my own D/s relationship living in my head. The one that looks more like what John Brownstone and I started when we were still long distance. The power exchange of rules and tasks, rituals and routines. The one we had when I worked part-time as a freelancer and had more time than I knew what to do with. (With no appreciation of what I had.)

These days, from the outside looking in (and hell, from the inside looking in) our D/s is much more flexible. Not, I think, because that’s what he wants. But definitely, because it’s what our lives currently demand.

How can I work up to 12 hours a day, build multiple businesses and (in my best Brain voice) try to take over the kinky world — and still keep up my submissive schedule of old? I can’t.

How can I give John Brownstone my raw, powerful opinions on what we ought to do next and where our business ventures ought to go in a submissive way? I can’t. Maybe you can, but I’m not built that way.

The idealized version living in my imagination doesn’t even match the real version of back-then. It’s the hazy memory and wishful thinking version. It’s what inevitably happens when you look back across multiple years and see it as a simpler time. (Though in the moment I was doing what I do now — the best I can with all the stressors of living life, looking back to even simpler times. Which is the lie of this thinking. It always looks better in the distance than it did at the moment. And it makes you think you’re missing something so you don’t enjoy what you have now.)

I try to be careful of missing “what was” because I know it’s actually “what I wanted it to be/what I still remember of it” which isn’t the same.

But at the same time, I also know I resist any and all efforts to bring back routines and rituals, no matter how much I say I want that life back.

Strict protocols don’t empower me like they once did or fill me with submissive mojo. They stifle. They make me feel crowded and harried in an over-crowded life that I desperately want to slow down. And at the same time, desperately want to speed up to get to the “finish line” of whatever goal I’m striving for at any given moment.

Except that I haven’t run out of goals in over 40 years, and I don’t see it happening anytime soon. So will there ever be room for new protocols in our power exchange? Will I ever feel anything but stressed by the idea of one more thing to remember, to do, to think about?

It’s about priorities. It’s about flexibility and balance.

John Brownstone is always, every single day, my Daddy Dom. He’s the one I turn to for counsel. In our relationship, he’s the ultimate Decider™. That makes us 24/7 without a single major protocol in sight. Without adding new routines and rituals, new things to do and remember, the pressure to be submissive in a very specific way.

I know it, believe it, feel it down to my bones. After I give unvarnished, fiery opinions, say what’s on my mind however I feel it (in a respectful tone, of course), I sit back and let him choose the path forward. I yield, willingly, happily, becoming a softer version of myself for him. Knowing I could live another life where I choose, I decide, I control it all. But I don’t want that life. I want this one.

Even without the idea of rules and tasks, routines and rituals that feel (in my head) like the “right” kind of D/s life.

I saw this prompt come through from Kink of the Week (click the lips for more) and didn’t think I was going to write anything although it’s completely my thing. And then I read Molly Moore’s post, and I was inspired to say the real (but slightly scary) things I think about my own power exchange protocols.