Annie B: Not a novice any more

I went to a caning workshop at my friendly neighborhood play space this evening, and I realized, with some startlement, about halfway through the lecture portion of the presentation that I already knew almost everything that the presenter was talking about. It was lovely to see her enthusiasm for her topic, and some of the toys she passed around were exciting or wicked or both (a cane made out of a real rose stem, thorns and all? Ow!). But I didn't need to keep the handout, because it didn't tell me much that I didn't already know, other than that one can make canes out of a great many natural materials, such as apple tree shoots or forsythia branches. Or bull horn, which is what I think she said the big scary solid thing was. Or a foot-long, inch-wide cylinder of solid rubber, if you can even call that a cane and not just an implement of ow.

My very first toy that got any consistent use was a cane, or at least a stick that I called a cane for lack of a less generic description. One of the very first demos I ever saw at a kinky con was a caning demo that left bleeding welts on the thighs and ass of the very happy demo bottom. I think I've gone to at least one caning demo at every kinky con I've attended since. At this point I can rattle off a great deal of theory about cane care, and about playing safely with said toys, and how the rules can be gently bent if you both know exactly what you're doing. And so, on the one hand, I agreed with the smartass top who joked that you can cane any part of the body, because in theory you can indeed do so, if you put no force behind the strike and don't use an innately painful object as your cane (cf. the thorny rose stem). On the other hand, I wanted to grab him by his ill-fitting (and ugly, IMbiasedO) fetish wear and smack him upside the head for hijacking the presentation for even a short discussion of why it is, no seriously it is, you smartass, a bad idea to cane someone's hands using force. (I happened to be sitting right behind the smartass top in question, and I was momentarily tempted to smack him on the head or neck with the little cane that I was holding and see what he thought of his own statement. Of course, I did not. But I was tempted.)

All that being said, I know I have a great deal more in the way of technique to learn. But I'm not new to this any more, and I've reached a point where I'm refining certain skills, rather than newly acquiring them. And that, somehow, still surprises me. I feel about the same as I did when I went to my second year of Witchcamp, or my second year of home-grown co-created rituals. "I'm still relatively new to this -- but I'm not a 'baby witch' any more."

I think it's all too easy to lose sight of the vast middle ground between "novice" and "expert." There's a long way between me and the famous names in either witchery or kink, but if I had been doing what those folks have been doing for as long as they've been doing it, and had been doing it as well as they have been, I'd be pretty damn good at what I was doing, too. And, at this point I'm still under 30. I hope to have a very long time in which to become that good.

And yet, despite the experience I do have, I sometimes compare myself with the leading lights of the witchy or kinky worlds and think, "Gosh, I'm nowhere close to being that good. Therefore, I must not be good at this at all." This is clearly false; I wouldn't even need to ask my dear partner for confirmation of that any more. But it's as if that middle ground temporarily vanishes, and since I'm not an expert, therefore I must be a novice.

And so I leave you with this piece of unsolicited advice, dear reader: Do what I say, not what I do. Embrace the middle ground, for it is truly a vast place, and there is much good company therein.

Bonus paragraph: I would love to make a direct connection between the above statement and the Iron Pentacle, because I feel like these things go together in some obvious way. However, it's late, so I will leave that as an exercise for anyone who feels like taking it on.