I wrote over 125 blog posts this year. It’ll be 137+ if you count this 12 Days of Girly Juice series. That’s 2.63 blog posts a week, for the whole year. Uhhh. I wasn’t joking when I said that sometimes my hypomania makes me more productive than is actually good for me…
Choosing my favorite 11 blog posts of the year was a tough task, but these are the ones I enjoyed working on the most and have loved looking back on since. They’re also, in many cases, some of the posts my readers seemed to resonate most with. Yay!
“Slow Burn“ was the first post I ever wrote about my Sir, back when he was just my crush, occasionally my Sir or my daddy, but not yet my boyfriend or my partner or my love. It featured – weirdly, and incomprehensibly to anyone who is not us – a photo of the room we were in when we kissed for the first time. It’s a “romantic screed” about wanting to fuck someone, but not being able to yet, and the ways that repeated recollection and rumination can re-write a memory into a legend. I sent this piece to Matt before publishing it, to make sure he was comfortable with it; he devoured it and replied immediately, “Wow wow wow, wow that’s good. I consent to all of it. A lot.” Later that night, on the phone, he asked if he could read it out loud to me, thus beginning what would become one of our most treasured traditions. Suffice it to say that this post holds an important place in my heart.
I wrote “Do You Want It Too?“ in the very early days of my relationship with Matt, when we were still negotiating, experimenting, and working out the kinks (so to speak) in our new D/s dynamic. I was amazed by how asking for something you want, sex-wise or kink-wise, can be incredibly vulnerable and scary, but tends to pay off if you’re doing it with a kind, open-hearted person. I wrote about some of the manifestations of that in our early courtship: cocktails, honorifics, iron pills, sadomasochism, makeup, and more. Our New Relationship Energy was amplified by the constant rediscovery that he, indeed, wanted what I wanted.
Next, predictably, we fell in love, and that’s what “How Did You Know You Were In Love?“ is about. I became obsessed with this question from the moment Matt texted me from a London hotel room to let me know he’d been Googling “love” and reading its Wikipedia page to try to figure out if it fit what he was feeling (what a nerd). We talked about how both of us had been in love a few times before but it was hard to know if that word also applied to our present feelings, simply because it all happened so quickly, so intensely, from a distance of 500 miles. But through much self-reflection – including writing this post – I eventually realized that yep, I was very much in love.
Matt’s fave thing I’ve written about him is “Little Girl Blue,” so I couldn’t leave it out. It was directly inspired by the first gift he ever bought me: a copy of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Our relationship was haunted by the color blue, especially in its early days – a blue app, a blue button-down shirt, a blue book, a blue collar, blue cells in a spreadsheet, two gorgeous blue eyes. This is a post about how everything can seem beautiful and meaningful when you’re mired in new love – everything is heightened, from feelings to words to, yes, colors.
“8 Strategies For Taking More (Consensual) Pain“ was definitely my favorite how-to post I wrote all year. It highlights some of the cognitive, linguistic, and logistical methods I use to increase my masochistic limits in kink scenes. I hope folks found it useful!
I’ve long been captivated by the idea of revisiting emotionally significant locations from your past to imbue them with new meaning, and that’s what “This is the Place“ is about. I wrote about romantic interludes in playgrounds, parkettes, and parking garages – and what happened when I returned to those locales at less tumultuous times.
While I had previously written about our first date, I think “A Second Date in a Golden Room“ is my favorite thing I’ve written about a specific date with my Sir. It was definitely the most nervewracking date of my life, because of the amount of build-up that preceded it and hopes I had charged it with. I interwove the story of the date with excerpts from our actual texts that day, seeking to recreate the adrenaline high that seized me and wouldn’t let go. Peppermint tea and peppery pasta, a black velvet dress and a blue wool suit, a warm hand in mine and warm lips almost kissing me – these are some of my sense memories from one of my most exciting nights on this earth.
Matt and I collaborated on a lot of posts this year – most notably our Intimate Intercourse series of interviews – but I think my fave collab we worked on was “Cocks & Cocktails: Drink Pairings for Sex Toys.” I threw a bunch of sex toy names at him and then made frantic notes while he extemporized on which drinks best suited those toys. Synthesizing the brilliant thoughts of someone I love is always a fun challenge, and I love the way one of my interests and one of his came together to make this post.
Let’s get sappy… “10 Thoughts on a Long-Term Relationship Out of Left Field“ was my love letter to the whole idea of established, settled love, something I hadn’t really experienced for years. It wasn’t always my decision to end relationships so soon after beginning them, but nonetheless it still felt like my fault: the result of a personal failing, an embarrassing inability to sustain anyone’s interest. So, needless to say, I had a lot of Feelings about finally finding someone I wanted to stay with for a while, who wanted (and wants) to stay with me for a while too.
One of the most fun (yet most complicated) posts I worked on all year was “A Month’s Worth of Phone Sex,” which is exactly what it sounds like. I made scattered notes after every phone-sex sesh we had all month – which, as it turned out, totaled 19 times in 30 days – and then tried to write about them, though, as I’ve learned over and over in my years of being a sex writer, it’s very tricky to write about sexual encounters in a way that adequately translates the magic of them to someone reading from the outside. I did my best, though!
Finally: “When Your Partner Comes Out As Your Partner“ was definitely one of my most emotional and meaningful posts all year long. Reading it still makes me cry. Whoops.
What are your fave things you’ve read or written this year?