2024-10-04 - Safeworded Session with Tim

Posted on October 05, 2024
Word Count: 1012

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I safeworded last night. We don’t have a classic safeword but it’s really what happened. And it’s entirely con’s fault.

Tim had things that needed to get done – emails that had to go out, mostly. I had cleared my schedule as best I could with no expectation of doing con work that evening beyond maybe answering questions on discord. Rather than skip the play session all together, he decided to have me suffer for him while he worked. Which both worked and very much didn’t.

I was tied to the bed, bent over the end of it, more or less ready for whatever he wanted to do. First he applied clothespins and that was awful but easy enough. He would tell me how much he enjoyed listening to me. Then he applied the pads from the TENS unit.

I fucking hate that thing.

I mean. I hate it in a hot way. But I still hate it. I hate the feeling. The electricity feels like little needles and even though it’s very low intensity and objectively is a lot less pain than I take from other things, I still hate it so much. So it’s always hot when he decides to break that out. Very much a “yay, but also, fuck” kind of feeling because that’s how it goes with a suffering kink. That fucking thing certainly makes me suffer.

And he hooked me up and let it run.

I don’t actually remember how many times he came back to me to play with me or adjust things. I just know overall I was dealing with it for what seemed like a really long time. At first it was a pretty standard play session. However I didn’t realize that I was subtly and slowly spiraling. In a normal play session Tim will talk me through everything. Sometimes I’ll have to ask him to talk more to keep me anchored to him, but he basically talks me through all our sessions. He’ll tell me what he’s planning, or how much he enjoys what he’s doing, and he’s talking to me more or less the whole time. It matters a lot to me to hear that sort of thing. It allows me to stay in the moment and not get lost in my own head.

Well apparently when he’s answering emails, he’s not paying quite enough attention to satisfy that need for me, at least not with something that I have real trouble with like the electricity feeling. He did take breaks and provide attention, so it wasn’t just tie me up and leave me there. But I still managed to get lost somewhere along the way.

It actually all happened very fast for me. The spiraling was so subtle, possibly because of the periodic attention he’d been giving me, that seemingly out of nowhere I “heard” the following things in my head:
“This is absolutely miserable.”
“Yeah that’s kind of the point.”
“I’m fine. I’m okay. I’m fine.”
“No, this is miserable.”
and I realized I was actually in trouble. “I’m fine” is 50/50 whether I’m in a bad spot; sometimes it’s just a gentle reminder to myself that no, this is actually okay, and sometimes it’s me trying to fight myself. This time I was trying to convince myself and myself was not buying it. I felt very, very alone in that moment. It was a pain I genuinely hated, and it felt very much like I was suffering alone even though I objectively knew that Tim was right there.
Within a moment of realizing I was in trouble, having spiraled without noticing, I snapped my fingers.

There was a moment where nothing seemed to happen. Maybe 3 or 4 seconds but it felt like forever. Had he heard? Do I need to do it again?

And then he was moving. And then he was there. It’s all very fuzzy. I think he turned off the TENS first before doing anything else. I mostly just remember him almost laying on top of me in a hug. I kind of remember him asking me something and my reply was “words” because I really had none I could get out just yet. I was too deep.

I remember feeling moisture on my eyes. I hadn’t started actually crying yet, but the tears were close enough to have started just a little. I had actually taken this to the wire, without meaning to. I was close to breaking down and hadn’t even known it.

It took a while for the fuzziness to fade enough that I could put the words together to explain what had happened. We cuddled for a long time and talked a lot before playing more. I think he’d offered to end the session there and spend the rest of the night cuddling, but I was still up for more, just not… that. And so we did. It was a pretty light session after that, but a lot of fun and we were both pretty happy overall.

We talked through what did and didn’t work regarding him working on emails while I suffered for him. We’re both pretty sure something like that can work in concept, but the suffering he chose was too much for how little he was actually paying attention to me. We will likely try it again at some point with some modifications.

I told him later as I was mulling things over, that I had absolutely zero worry about alerting him. I was not worried he was going to be disappointed or mad, and I wasn’t disappointed in myself for not being able to “take it” or whatever. I went to the wire and as soon as I realized something was wrong I did what I needed to do to let him know without any hesitation.

I know some people get worried that stopping things might disappoint or upset their partner but it does say something about how much confidence I have in him and our dynamic that the thought never even occurred to me.