Troubled Times

Times Of Trouble

Lately, Master and I have been having some troubles; like all people do, you just can't be together, and with such intensity, without having conflicts. Yeah, in theory, He is Master, i am slave; He is always right; may sound nice, but...the fact is, both Master and I are people. Sometimes, it can be kind of easy to lose track of that fact. That means we each have our own thoughts, opinions, feelings, and moods. Also, since we are not able to be together physically all the time, in fact hardly ever, there are frustrations that can build. Its real difficult to make a long-distance relationship work. It can be done, but its not for everybody, and it sure isn't easy.

None of us is perfect, whether we are Dominant or submissive. That means, that if you form a serious, intense relationship of any length of time, there are going to be problems. The difference in the couples who make it and those who don't is the willingness, on both parts, to take the time, effort, and trouble to work them out. Master and I love each other very much, and that makes us want to work out problems as they arise. There are so many times, we'll be arguing about something on IRC, and I have the urge to just logoff, forget about it, not go through the stress. But, and I am very proud of this, I have never done that. I have always stayed online, hanging in there until the problem gets resolved. Recently, we were having an argument on IRC, and Master and I were both very angry, and I was also very hurt and upset. Then, what was to me the unthinkable, happened. My Master's computer froze up, and he was "booted" off IRC. This has happened to both of us before, so I just stayed there and waited for him to return. I waited.....waited....and waited. He didn't come back. As it turns out, he told me the next day in an e-mail; he decided he didn't want to come back because he felt I would just complain more. I cannot begin to express how deeply I was hurt by that. It still hurts a lot to think about it. We'd made the agreement before to work out things, and he had broken it. I did not react well at all. As hard as I tried to be just angry and pissed off; it wouldn't work. All I could feel was hurt and betrayal. His doing that, refusing to return and try and straighten things out, hurt me in a way that he never, ever could physically. All that kept ringing through my head were his words to me "I will never break your spirit, if it comes to that, we will part." Well, he had done what he HAD to know would do just that; it broke my spirit more thoroughly than any physical pain or humiliation ever possibly could. My reaction, out of my pain and betrayal, was to remove my IRC "collar", the initials [SK] from my IRC nick. In fact, for two days, I changed my IRC nick completely. Instead of kaicie[SK], I was "rainspirit." This was just a name personal to me, sort of a security blanket of sorts. I could not stand using kaicie, in any form, because kaicie was our symbolic name that we had created for me. I tried to go back on irc as kaicie[SK], but, until I heard from him, I just could not handle it; it hurt way too much.

I have to add, that, once we were back together talking about things; Master also said that I had "stressed him out" too; I do not doubt this is true; I wrote him some very angry and hurtful e-mails. I can't imagine, though, that he would have expected any different reaction. He knows that I have a lot of problems with insecurity, which, until this episode, I had been making real progress toward working out. I was beginning to feel completely loved, and secure in his love. This one act took all of that away from me. Even though we have now worked things out, I still feel a pain deep in my heart that he would do this to me. Yes, I do feel as though he broke my spirit in doing that. But, I also learned, that maybe that's not the worst thing that could happen, as we had both thought. Yes, I was, and am, broken in spirit. But his willingness to finally face up to our problems and to work them out, is going a long way toward repairing that. Its going to take some time, and I know that we are both going to have to work very hard to rebuild our trust and security with each other. The thing is, though, our love is strong, and we both want to make this work. We're going to get past this, I know we will. I guess we'll even end up stronger for it, although right now its still pretty recent, and I'm having a little trouble believing that much good could come out of so much pain.

I do still love him, and I know that he loves me. I do not doubt his love, I never did, I just am going to have to work on building up the security that I had begun to develop. Fortunately for me, he understands that I feel this way, and he is willing to help me to build this up again. I did ask him to promise never to do that to me again, because I know that if it did happen again, there's a real chance that I could not handle it, and it will probably be the end of "us" if that ever does happen. Then again, we did work through it this time, so I suppose only time will tell. We both just have to follow what is in our hearts.