ellysnapps

[ellysnapps]

Happy Birthday. :)

[ellysnapps]

Would you like to spend your birthday with me? I was thinking I'd order chinese or whatever you're in the mood for, and I'd like to give you something very special. It's ok if you can't or dont want to, but if you say yes, I'll send an uber to you Thursday around noon and it will be all about you that day. :)

[ellysnapps]

What do you think about going to the Dewey Center voluntarily?

[ellysnapps]

what are you dressing up as for halloween??

Myself

[ellysnapps]

Would you be willing to let go of Michael for me? Even if we have to start over and learn each other. Are you willing to take that chance with me?

Ok

[ellysnapps]

[ellysnapps]

[ellysnapps]

What are some of the simple pleasures of life you really enjoy? Do you make time for these things in your day to day life?

I enjoy being happy even if i dont know why

I enjoy the two feet i stand on and a head on my shoulders

Warmth

Comfort

Idk if i answered properly

I try

[ellysnapps]

When I see you next, can you wrap your arms around me and hold me tight? It makes me so happy.

[ellysnapps]

What's in your head?

[ellysnapps]

In your head they're still fighting...

[ellysnapps]

Polyamory & Monogamy Are Not Mutually Exclusive.

There are a lot of varying reasons why people work so hard to deny the fact that they are addicted to love. Why people pretend like they are immune to love. But those reasons all come down to an attempt at avoiding rejection, destruction and pain. In denying our feelings we are trying to avoid being hurt or hurting others. And usually in trying to deny them, we end up there anyway.

Because we are all addicted to love. 

Love is the point, the reason, the driving force behind everything we do. We fight it because we’re afraid of the fall out if it isn’t returned, or goes away or isn’t able to be fully realized in the way that we wish it could. Because unrequited, unrealized and mismatched love, hurts.

For most of my life I have felt disconnected and like I wasn’t enough, I was loved, but it never felt like I was loved for who I actually am. It’s left me susceptible to manipulation. It’s left me untrusting of potential partners and friends. It still affects my belief in Daddy. I crave validation, and yet I also don’t believe it. So much so that I’ve denied parts of my identity because I thought it was just a need for validation. 

I’ve been dancing around polyamory for a while. Apparently all my life. When I look back on my relationships and how I felt within them, I’ve always felt guilty for being greedy, for being able to see the potential in others even when I was with someone. I figured it was because I hadn’t found the right person. Only then, I did. I found Daddy, and I still had crushes even after, but I figured it wasn’t a big deal because it wasn’t real. It was the newness, or just appreciation that my brain got crossed as attraction. I was happy with Daddy, so of course I wasn’t really able to fall for anyone else. It had to be something other than real feelings, cause it’s wrong to fall for someone after you’ve committed to someone else, right?

Only I have realized I have such an immense capacity for love. And Daddy is the one who made me see that. The first thing he did after he broke into my heart was steal my image of myself. He took a cracked, broken, fragmented scribble and replaced it with a complex, empowered, beautiful painting, and every day I saw a little more of myself in it. Every day I believe in myself a little more. And every day that I see my own beauty, another part of my heart is unlocked… My heart is a Mary Poppins bag, ya’ll. I just didn’t know it.

So, I am polyamorous… AND I am still monogamous. Just like being married to a man doesn’t make me hetero, being in a monogamous marriage doesn’t make me monoamorous. Polyamorous simply means the ability to fall for multiple people, not the follow through. There are single poly folks, poly folks who play but are committed to one person, and people like me who are monogamous and manage their polyamory for the love of their primary/only partner. Although the most common representations of poly/mono pairings is the mono partner accepting the poly person’s multiple relationships, it is also an option for the poly person to honor their mono partner.

Polyamory isn’t a choice, but how it manifests is. And how it manifests for me is that I chose a man who is not polyamorous, and I love him deeply. I need him more than I need anything or anyone else. So I choose him over everyone. I love him the most.  But I can still love other people too. And I’m still attracted to other people too.

It is easy to fall when people are so beautiful, sexy, strong, resilient, honest, caring, nerdy, dominant, kind, funny, clever, and sweet. There are some people you just connect with. I have a couple of really good friends who gave me practice at shifting attraction to friendship. I keep most people at arms length to ensure things don’t get complicated. I thought I had it all under control. Until I was caught by surprise. Surprise by the swiftness with which connection can happen sometimes. How a day of conversation is enough to know that you like someone. A lot. Maybe even to fall a bit and get shook because when kindred connection and chemistry intersect, you catch some feels. The kind of warm feelings you get from a crackling fire, cozy but electric at the same time.

When I feel that fire for Daddy, (because I still do, every day), it means our connection is growing, our love is getting stronger, and/or we are about to have some really kinky, yummy sex.  Those feelings are great, and the follow through belongs to him, because I belong to him.

I am polyamorous in a monogamous relationship. So those kinds of warm feelings are a warning when it is anybody else. They send a message from my gut to my brain that Daddy would be hurt by this, that it isn’t in the spirit of our commitment. The more real the feelings, the more swift the reaction.

The warmth actually goes from my belly outwards and makes me feel uncomfortably hot. My body playing the part of the robot screaming “Danger, Will Robinson” in the form of a panic attack.

I belong to Daddy, and feeling like that is threatened in any way, makes me shut down and run to him. 

He always helps bring me back to center, even when the conversation itself hurts and makes him feel like he is not good enough. He doesn’t begrudge me emotional connection. Monogamy in the face of temptation is hard anyway, but especially when the partners have different love styles. But we work through it. He knows that he is not just good enough, but the best. It doesn’t mean the feelings I have for the other person aren’t real, or that I don’t care for them. It means that because I care for them, I pull back. Because polyamory and monogamy are not mutually exclusive for me.

So I take space to process. To write. To fantasize. To explore the what if’s in a safe way. I use writing to figure out ways to honor my feelings, work through them. I try to shift the feelings into something that does feel right, that doesn’t hurt anyone, or lead anyone on, and I hope that the connection I’ve felt can morph into something that works for everyone involved. Something that can still be meaningful if you can be clear about what it is allowed to be and stay within the boundaries.

I know now that I can fall for more than one person. That I can love more than one person. That sometimes even when I don’t know someone, my soul apparently recognizes them as someone I could care for. I also know that I will always choose not to pursue it beyond what is appropriate to my primary love. Daddy is my home and my soulmate and my everything, and I’ll always make the choices I need to honor my marriage and the commitment I have made.

And ultimately, faithfulness is easy. Because It’s about my actions, not my feelings. Just like folks choose to support their poly partner, I choose to support my mono partner. And I choose to support myself and the people I catch feels for to. Faithfulness means a devotion to everyone’s well-being. It means honesty, and communication, and loyalty and integrity. It means love. The feeling, but even more, love the action.

And I have an infinite capacity for love, in feeling AND in action.

[ellysnapps]

I Wanna See You Be Brave:

A Call to Action When We Face Rejection

The end of a relationship is a loss. Loss of the relationship, loss of the person/people, and loss of parts of ourselves and who we were in that relationship. That loss is painful. The pain looks different depending on the person, on whether it was a romantic relationship, friendship, dynamic, or family relationship. It generally hurts for all those involved in some capacity- but particularly for the person who is hurt because the relationship ended against their wishes. That is even more compounded when you add BDSM, because ownership in that way is a whole new level of validation, commitment and rejection.

Regardless, the most common reaction to loss, the way we react, is grief.

When I have been rejected by people I cared for, and relationships have ended, there has always been a period of grief. Moving through that grief happened at different rates, and frequently I was trapped moving between the first two stages of grief. Those stages are the hardest to find perspective in because we are afraid to face reality and are unable to look beyond our hurt to our own role.

@reflectedtruthsblog wrote a very vulnerable post about the stages of grief as she processes being released. She has shared a lot on her page processing the pain, the rejection, and the impact of her dynamic ending. She has also rolemodeled what it looks like to consider all sides of a relationship ending. What it looks like to have grace and care for your former partner, and to consider your own contributions to the end. To reflect and consider your perspective and how it might be influenced by that pain and grief. To be brave in the face of fear and pain.

Before Daddy, I didn’t have a lot of successful relationships. Part of that is not my fault, but part of it is. Daddy told me at the beginning of our relationship that sometimes I can be emotionally manipulative without realizing it. It wasn’t something I had ever seen in myself before. I began reflecting on my past relationships and realized that my own insecurities led me to do anything and everything to get praise, attention and affection. In my anger, I didn’t own a lot of what I should have, I  and my response to rejection was always about the other person using or playing me, or not having the guts to end things. It was less painful if it wasn’t my fault at all.

But it was.

I always contributed in some way to the end. I didn’t see the way I tried to emotionally manipulate people into staying with me, picking me and how inevitably that helped a relationship end badly. Validation is addicting, and a lot of times I would do just about anything to get it. I chase it. I miss it. I hurt without it. It took me a long time to realize that I was causing a lot of my own pain from rejection because of how skewed I was in viewing it. Because I refused to listen and see the ways my behavior contributed to it. Because I was gaslighting myself and the pain of realizing how I’ve engaged with someone when I’m in the denial/anger stages is impossible.

This was the case all over again when I found submission, and couldn’t see my own responsibility in how I behaved. When I blamed sub-frenzy for my actions and how they caused issues in my marriage. Sub-frenzy did impact it, but it didn’t mean that I wasn’t responsible for the pain that they caused. Then I discovered I was poly. Then I finally realized that I’d been burying my bi/pan sexuality.

I chronically want more than I have, and I am consistently learning what my responsibility is in navigating the complicated relationships that can pop up within our community.

I cultivate really deep friendships, some with other dominants that I am attracted to. I have lost/modified those relationships because the connection became an issue or because they found someone else who better suited their needs. Sometimes we struggle through and find a new way of being in each other’s lives, and sometimes they decide they can’t, or don’t want me in their lives. Sometimes that is against what I want. Sometimes they try, and I’m just in too much pain to move forward. In the past, that is where blame would come in for me. That is where I wouldn’t own It is easier to blame the person than to own that circumstances in dynamics with multiple people involved are complicated, and that my addiction to validation and desire to be the primary importance in people’s live (even if they aren’t in mine) can be problematic. But I’m not in that space anymore because of my self-reflection.

For me, Daddy’s statement made me notice patterns. Thinking about the commonalities in my past relationships, about how I was seeking validation by any means necessary, about how things never ended amicably and I always blamed the other person, and wasn’t able to move on from the anger stage of grief for a long time. They became not just someone who hurt me, but someone who would hurt others. Sometimes who was bad. But relationships mostly are not about villains and victims, and I am much happier now that I can see my own contributions and not feel like things are happening TO me.

I am not a victim, even though once upon a time I always felt like I was being victimized by men. Sometimes I was and that made me see unable to see when I wasn't. A lot of the time, my relationships didn’t end without my input. My input came in my behavior and actions that contributed to the ending.

@submissive-seeking taught me something really important about being submissive that is easy to forget when you’re giving up your power. Power Exchange doesn’t mean I don’t have a responsibility. We as submissives can be just as destructive dominants can be, (and switches too) and we have a responsibility to consider our own actions and how they contribute to our relationships, including their ends. Navigating BDSM relationships, platonic or not, is difficult. And it is imperative that ALL of us examine our own contributions and how our lenses might be skewed by grief.

Submissives are by nature brave in giving up our power and trusting that we will be cared for. But when relationships end after that kind of exchange, it can make us feel like we trusted the wrong person, shouldn’t trust anyone again, want to avoid pain and hurt. Humans will do a lot to avoid pain, and masochists know pain is useful, healing, forward moving. Pain and hurt is part of relationships, and growing through that, learning from our own contributions to it, is part of moving forward in a healthy way.  

To me, facing hurt and pain and our own role is the pinnacle of bravery. Facing inwards is difficult AF. It depletes energy, it makes me cry, it makes me feel guilty, it makes me angry, it makes me want to stop.

But, in the end it is so worth it. It is so worth the bravery of examining ourselves instead of solely blaming others. What would future relationships look like if upon the ending of a current relationships everyone went inward rather than outward and focused on the their contributions, rather than blame?

For me it looks like the healthiest, strongest, best relationships I’ve ever had. It looks like less hurt, and more trust. It looks like being able to grow from the feedback I receive because I’m open to it. It looks like cultivating my bravery muscle and being able to do it over, and over again.

If you’ve gotten here, I have a challenge for you… think about the times you felt rejected within relationships. Think about how you acted before, during and after the rejection. Focus inward instead of outward. Be vulnerable with yourself, be honest with yourself, and think of at least 3 learnings that have nothing to do with the other person.

Some quick ways to tell if you’re focusing inward or outward:

You don’t believe you had any responsibility in the failure of multiple relationships (and it wasn’t abusive in nature).

Because you’ve gotten hurt, you decide every person you could get into a relationship with will hurt you.

When you get hurt you start to apply what you feel to other people who were never part of that relationship.

You can do this. It will hurt, but it will be so beneficial to yourself, your partners and your future relationships. It has for me. I continue to focus inward as I navigate my relationships. Sometimes it is easier than others, and sometimes it takes me a long time to get there, but ultimately my growth has benefitted from it.

[ellysnapps]

Do i dare ask a question or say something to you where i make you wonder who i am. I have always had something for you since i met you. Do you have a boyfriend? If you do hes a lucky man

I suppose it doesnt matter who you are

[ellysnapps]

A mysterious girl appears in front of a sunset with a “forget-me-not” flower dress and then whispers: “This world is enemy of those who live of love”… 

[ellysnapps]

Im trying to be better

[ellysnapps]

I showed you Shakey graves and we went to holy hill. HIIIIIII I miss chillin

Hiiii!!!!! I dont know how many times ive played roll the bones, i love everything about it.