Miss Tara and I have had a couple of very good conversations in the last 24 hours. A few results of that:

1. For the next week I am to blog every night between 9:30 and 10:00. I’m to leave SecondLife so it’s not distracting me.
2. Miss has been quite worried about punishing me when I mess up for fear of compromising our friendship. We established from the very beginning that our friendship supersedes anything else.
3. I’ve been using my wife’s condition and her need for care as a crutch to get out of doing things I don’t want to do. I don’t think I’d really recognised just how much I was until Miss pointed it out to me.
4. I need to feel Miss Tara’s control in my gut again. The best way to do that right now is for her to establish specific expectations and if I don’t fulfill them to smack me down hard in ways I don’t like.
5. A realisation I had, that I haven’t really shared with Miss yet: When we’re talking on the phone, it feels less like Miss and her boy, and more like two friends. On the one hand, that’s good and appropriate at times, on the other, I think it’s been making it more difficult for me to consistently relate to her as my owner in addition to my friend.

This last one was a bit of a surprise to me, well, a number of them have been surprising to me. In the case of how we relate over the phone, I actively spoke to my Miss rather than to my friend this afternoon and it made a noticeable difference.

The good news is that we’ve recognized a problem and we’re dealing with it. Miss checked in hard with me about whether or not her imposing punishment would compromise our friendship, and whether I truly want/need her to clamp down on me. It won’t, and I do. I can feel a difference already. Not a huge “Everything is solved, life is perfect again” difference, but a small one: I could easily have stayed in SL while I was composing this. Miss would have no real way of knowing whether I logged or not… except I did. There was a temptation to just say “You know, having it in the background and not switching while I’m blogging is close enough…” except it’s not what my Miss told me to do. She told me to log from SL when I’m blogging this week and here’s a case where I’ve done exactly what she told me to, exactly the way she told me to. No excuses, no weaseling, just proper and complete obedience.

Feels good.

Related posts:

1. Being a little kitty cat
2. Time to start writing about my new adventure
3. At some point you've got to let it go, Enigma
4. Ponderings while waiting for a test run to complete…
5. Some thoughts on submission and communication