Spankoanxiety

I'm a pretty confident girl, right?

Back-tracking through the stories I've told on this blog, I've been photographed topless in Manhattan in the winter, done my first spanking video as a model, traveled to San Francisco to attend the Folsom Street Fair, shot with several other spanking production companies, gotten hot wax poured on me, a needle shoved into my body and cups full of suction on my back and moved across the country.

My image appears in various states of undress and bruisedness quite a few places on the internet. I'm perfectly acceptable showing a lot of sides of myself in photographic form.

Publicly, I'm as okay with being this girl:

As I am being this girl:

Or even sometimes this girl: 

So it gets hard for me to admit that sometimes, talking about things terrifies me. Sometimes I get a lot of anxiety. Well, you might say, that's normal. Everyone gets anxious from time to time. You're in a new place, at a new job, making new friends... of course you're going to get nervous about these things. 

The sad (for me) part is, those aren't the things that are making me anxious. Spanking is.

It isn't that I've gone away from spanking, or lost interest, or any of those strange things that supposedly happen to people from time to time. I've always had this feeling, ever since I was a little girl and I began thinking about spanking. The butterflies in my stomach. The shakiness in my hands when I think about it. The flush on my face when I say the word. The dumb, monotone voice that comes out of my mouth when I try to bring the topic of spanking up when it wasn't already, even when among people I trust the most. 

The anxiety reaches its peak when I'm in a situation where I might get spanked, and it increases in intensity as it becomes more and more obvious that a spanking is imminent. Generally speaking, though, the anxiety goes away simply by exiting the situation or, more enjoyably, by getting the spanking and having the release that's associated with it. The spanking hurts and more often than not makes me cry, and I get rid of all the anxiety which built up as I was anticipating it. 

This is the main reason that listening to someone else get a spanking makes me anxious (and why I tend to do dishes or bathe when someone else is getting a spanking so that I don't hear it): because the spanking is real and I have to face the reality of the fact that I'm a spanko, that this thing which sounds scary is the thing that I like and that this is all real. These are all things that I generally try to celebrate, but even with my happiness, just create a nervous, sick feeling in me. When it's someone else getting the spanking and not me, I don't get the release that goes along with it, and the stress just stays in my body. 

Despite the fact that I'm a spanking model, I can't really watch spanking videos. They make me too nervous and uncomfortable. Having it real and happening in front of me without any connection to me makes me feel scared and pathetic. When I've watched my own videos to try to learn what I'm doing well, or when I've watched videos to learn about the companies that I want to shoot with, I often end up peeking at the screen through my hands, like a little kid watching a horror movie. I almost always end up turning the sound down extremely low. 

Why don't I ever talk about this? Because I'm embarrassed by how embarrassed I am about spanking. Generally speaking, it's easier to just take a deep breath and talk about it than to admit that I have these insecurities. Besides, what kind of spanking model can't even say the word "spanking" when sitting alone in a house where all the residents are spankos who scene together, and spanking is so much a part of our daily life that the wooden spoons in the kitchen are marked with "Cooking only- no spanking!" What kind of person spends six years getting spanked with hairbrushes, yet when asking her roommate to borrow one refers to it as "the thing you use to brush hair" out of discomfort saying the word? I'm supposed to be a pro at asking for spankings, yet when I try to these days, my voice either cracks or gets all monotone and my eyes get big and probably very sad or desperate looking. Somedays, I sit around thinking about getting spanked for over an hour without mustering the courage to bring it up. Sometimes, I honestly believe that if I hadn't run into SF in the library and then creeped his stuff and discovered his spanko tendencies, that I would have died unspanked because I'd never get up the courage to find a partner, which seems pretty likely when you realize that I spent FIVE YEARS perving spanking sites before I made my first contribution to one.

Still, I've usually corrected my spankoanxiety with a simple trick: getting spanked. A good, hard spanking (and yes, I'm blushing as I type this) reminds me of all the things that I get out of a spanking, makes me feel safe and gives me a sense of belonging and gives me a channel for the stress that being a spanko causes me. There are other things that help, too: getting validation from the spanking community that I'm an accepted part of it and that they're all okay and therefore I'm okay has always helped. Being on fetlife, blogging and modeling have boosted my spankoconfidence immensely. 

But right now, I've been so anxious about spanking that I have a hard time getting through a blog post about it, which is just dumb. I'm not being judged by anyone, I'm having awesome spanking adventures and my life is wonderful. Like all things, the anxiety will come and go, I'm sure, until I figure out how to correct it entirely. In the mean time, I'll just be squaring my shoulders and being very glad that my readers can't see me blushing as I type this stuff. :D

Does anyone else have this problem? How do you deal with it? Do share. I could use tips :P