Dysfunction

I know that she doesn't think anything bad about me for being sick. I know she doesn't love me less, or gets angry at me for that. She doesn't consciously ask me to do stuff that will make me sick, she doesn't want to break me, and if she do want me to hurt or give me a hard time, she will tell me it's on purpose.

But we tend to misread each other when I feel her wishes or demands overreach my capabilities.

How does other people do this? Vanilla people? Or other people in power exchange? How come this isn't a recurring problem for everyone else? Because it doesn't seem to be. Just for us.

One reason for this is of course my overwhelming sense of shame, and general lack of connection between experience and actions. Me being hungry doesn't mean I'm going to eat. If I'm sleepy it doesn't necessarily leads me towards a bed, and shivering from cold haven't got a very strong correlation to me putting on more clothes. I think there's something missing for me, honestly. I'm not saying it's all my fault or that there's something wrong with me, but I do have ADHD, and this is one of the things it leads to.

There's a disconnect. What I feel in my body doesn't show up in my behaviour in the same way it does for other people. Part of it is a trained respons I think; since I grew up undiagnosed and misunderstood, I was constantly expected to perform above my ability and was ignored or ridiculed when I showed signs of exhaustion or fatigue because of this. My feelings and experiences weren't acknowledged or mirrored by the people around me, because they were not expected. So there's that, and that explains a good deal of the shame and defensiveness I feel when I can't do what Mistress wants me to without suffering.

But there's also a more biological side of it I think, that's more about how my nervous system functions. It's like there's something wrong with the flow of information. I can on the one hand be aware of that say I have great pains somewhere in the body, or that I'm very hungry or something. But it's as if that information doesn't permeat the system. It doesn't reach all the places it should. And because of that, it doesn't influence my behaviour or show up in my demeanor. I don't stop to remove the pebble from my shoe, nor do I limp or make faces. But then suddenly something shakes loss and all the sensations arrive at once and in a moment I'm screaming with pain. There's no middle ground, no warnings. Not for me, and therefore not for anyone else either. 

In regards to Mistress I do try to tell her everything I know and everything I can tell. But that doesn't cover everything there is to know, unfortunately, and sometimes the disconnect between what I tell her in words and what my face and actions tell her muddy the water. I might tell her "I'm really tired" or "I really should have eaten a while ago, I need to get a snack" and for me, that means "red alert red alert, the "check enginge"-lamp is lit". It doesn't come across like that, though, and I'm not even aware of it. I've given her the information. I'm ashamed of my weakness, I have no real connection to what I'm feeling and experiencing, and I don't realise that what I tell her doesn't really translate to the actual state of things.

And then I get pain cramps from hunger or start crying from exhaustion because she didn't decide to put me to bed or feed me, and I didn't try to tell her again or ask for what I needed or express my needs in any other ways. I had already told her. She knew. If she wanted to make a decision about it, she would have.

And I'm not even a martyr here, I'm not playing it up for pity-points or being passive-agressive. This is for real the way I function (or dysfunction). There's some pieces missing, I think. And this, I also think, is the reason she freaked out on me when I answered her question about how I really felt about things. Because just as I have had bad experiences from telling her or other people how I feel if it's not good, she's had bad experiences from asking me those kind of questions. It's not the first time there's a nasty revelation behind my humming and hawwing, it usually means there's something wrong and she's missed it. And right then and right there, I think she just couldn't take that.

She didn't read the angst in my voice as fear or shame. She heard it as an accusation. When I was distraught and panicking, for her that meant that not only shouldn't she go to the meeting, she couldnt' because if she did she was a bad bad person, and she already was a bad bad person just for suggesting it. I didn't get that, of course, because it wasn't even on my radar, but I get it now.