Last May I did something heretofore unthinkable as a type-A perfectionist, sacreligious even. Late one night, in the high desert of New Mexico, I unceremoniously… didn’t track the things I’d done right that day. I was on a writer’s retreat and had wanted to keep my phone turned off to focus on the programming and the work I’d brought with me, but the desire to not track came from somewhere more mystical than this practicality.
Up until that point, habit tracking had been a cornerstone of my expression of my 24/7 dynamic with Mr. Dune. Early in our dynamic, we both really responded to the Secretary (2002) Walk In The Park method of submissive training. If you’re unfamiliar, Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal) becomes Mr. Grey (James Spader)’s secretary and a Dom/sub dynamic develops between them. At one point, he tells her to take a walk. As she does, she narrates:
I took a shortcut through Hawkins Park, and it was as if I'd never taken a walk by myself before. And when I thought about it, I realized I probably never had taken a walk alone. But because he had given me the permission to do this, because he insisted on it, I felt held by him as I walked alone. I felt he was with me. At the same time, I was feeling something was growing in Mr. Grey. An intimate tendril creeping from one of his darker areas, nursed on the feeling that he had discovered something about me.
The walk in the park is still one of the best representations of D/s I’ve ever seen — it beautifully captures the sense of duty you feel as a submissive to care for yourself as an offering to another person. A lot of us submissives come to this practice having had our desire to care for others exploited in some way. When D/s comes along and offers a paradigm where caring for ourselves is caring for others, it feels like receiving the keys to the universe. We glow with the possibility of being able to finally turn our attention toward ourselves without guilt.
For the first three years of our dynamic, we implemented this method by having me track my habits on an honor system — I went to yoga three times a week, drank enough water, meditated when I could, and generally took care of myself. Then during the pandemic we discovered a D/s habit tracking app called Obedience (get 10% off premium using my link!). I still love this app even if I’m not currently using it — it allows partners to create economies of rewards and punishments for daily (or weekly or monthly) activities. Subs can save up points and buy rewards. It’s basically like a kinky virtual Chuck E Cheese. It allowed us to set up an ecosystem where I could measurably see how much I was doing, but the double-edged sword was it made it hard to capture the nuanced reasons I couldn’t always do it all every day.
My step away from habit tracking had nothing to do with the tracking methods or even the habits themselves, though. It came when I read the book Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee. Headlee makes a case that our modern lives don’t need more productivity, but less. She argues passionately for leisure time, something so many of us are uncomfortable with as we fill out bullet journals with goals and track every moment of our days with habit tracking apps.
I felt exceptionally called out by her research-backed critique of over-work and manufactured busyness. I was entranced by the concept of just knowing I had done my self care tasks without habit tracking them. We’d even had a discussion in the Ask A Sub Discord around that time about how subs were inclined to hoard their points on the app and never spend them on rewards. What was that about? Wasn’t this system meant to get us more acknowledgment? Instead it had (FOR ME) shifted my kink focus onto “doing” rather than just being.
Every time I’ve ever been interviewed about kink and my 24/7 dynamic the interviewer asks something along the lines of “how does it work?” I have always taken this question to mean “what do you do that sets this relationship apart from a ‘normal’ one?” And with time this question becomes harder and harder to answer. “What makes your relationship kinky?” Idk man, it just is!! Ugh!!
But the more I think about it, the more I think I have a deeper reason for resisting this version of things. The “doing” model of kink actually doesn’t serve me in a lot of ways. I’m dealing with an exciting grab bag of mental illnesses (bipolar 2, anxiety, PMDD, etc) and sometimes I can’t express my kinkiness by showing up and doing the same things I did the day before. Sometimes libido ebbs. Sometimes life is life-ing too hard for us to consistently show up for protocols. But oddly enough, these are the moments where the kink foundation of our dynamic is the strongest, in that kink has taught us how to hold and respect each other as separate equals with our own struggles and concerns. It has given us the language of limits and boundaries to navigate conflict. And it has given us a way to feel loved that is bespoke to our individuality. It’s the air we breathe. It’s who we are.
I think subs are people who are exceptionally driven by performance, and performing their kink correctly. And the paradox of kink over time in a longer-term relationship can be that it challenges you to ease up on that a bit. These days, the most delicious moments of our dynamic are those spur of the moment commands, when He notices I need a moment and tells me to get in the bath, or give myself an orgasm, or sit down and write when I’ve been avoiding it. These are those moments of being really seen as you’re sent on a walk in the park. And if the orgasm tree falls in the forest and no one is around to habit-track it? All the better. I’m learning how to live in that bone-deep knowledge that I’m enough — kinky and otherwise. Which is what this is all about, I think.
I deeply resonated with the walk scene in Secretary and think of it so often!
You write beautifully about the delicacy of submission.