Playing to Expectations

Tomorrow night Amabile and Piacere are hosting a formal D/s dinner at their home with a theme of "Contemporary Leather." The two of them have been doing some serious work lately on structuring their D/s relationship and incorporating levels of protocol. This dinner is a way of helping to learn about that and share their own discoveries. Or at least, that's how I see it. I know they intend for it to be just a fun night. There's also going to be a bdsm demonstration and a play party afterwards.

Eilen and I are playing the role of the slaves for the formal part of the night. It's interesting how the two of us ended up in that part - me, the experienced submissive who has not had a chance to explore protocol much and her, a person new to bdsm who thinks she enjoys the submissive role but has really only tipped her toe into the waters.

We've been having fun the last couple of days working out what we'll wear, ideas on how to do our hair..lol. Being girls, basically! But we both are worried about the expectations of the slave role and how we'll fare in it.

We have a list of formal protocols neither of us have done before. Neither of us are terribly graceful or elegant creatures and that is expected. We'll be serving drinks before dinner and serving the three course meal as well. I've never even used a serving tray!

While chatting to someone about my nervousness for the upcoming night, I stumbled upon a very difficult emotional trap. I've been consistently telling people I'm worried that I'll "fuck up." Well, it seems it goes even deeper than that. It's been a realisation that I set myself up to disappoint. I expect myself to fail. I don't think it is only related to this specific event. This is something new I've never done and I know logically there is no pressure to be "perfect" and they would not have asked me if they thought I'd do a miserable job of it. But doing some deeper thinking, I see this trail of thinking whenever I try something new or when others expect something of me. I feel inside that there is no way I could succeed. Ok - that is an overexaggeration, bigtime. I'm not that bad anymore but there was a time when I didn't believe I could succeed at anything. I am stronger than that now. But I still somehow set the bar well beyond my reach, expecting perfection from myself while at the same time knowing for certain that I will disappoint in some way. How does that work??

Anyway. I'm heading over to Amabile and Piacere's place tonight. We'll be playing with rope, oragnising and getting things set up for Saturday evening. All day Saturday is set to preparation for the event. Eilen and I still don't know exactly what we're wearing! lol...always the most important part, isn't it?? *smirks*