1. Practice describing what is going on in your body, early and often. I used the McGill Pain Scale to learn to do this better (for both fun and not-fun pain)! Whether or not you use traditional safewords, there will come a time when you’ll have to say what you’re feeling — whether after calling red, or in-scene. There may even come times where your tops ask you to describe what you’re feeling even if you have *no* desire to stop (and as number 1.5, I’d suggest you explicitly ask that they do this every so often!)
2. Practice describing what is going on in your body, early and often. But I don’t just mean the words… I mean the lack of shame and filter. If you have any fear around saying that you’re about to have explosive diarrhea when you’re not playing, you certainly aren’t going to be willing to in the charged dynamic and fear of CNC.
3. And find other ways of making partners aware of your state, especially if you’re the type to want to do something like CNC as a “surprise” scene or in a longer-term relationship where sex and play might not have full negotiation every time. With some illnesses/disabilities, this may not be a thing you can do anymore, period. But getting in the habit of emailing daily check-ins as to specific symptoms, having a piece of clothing that indicates go/no-go, etc. can be helpful tools.
4. Keep your partner(s) informed about your medical visits and team. My partner knows my different doctors’ comfort levels with kink, and all those appointments go on a shared calendar, and He can use that for His planning in a lot of ways.
5. …and keep your medical team informed about kink before they need to be, unless you’re in a position where your symptoms are totally stable for you and you are unlikely to have anything new pop up. I tell every doctor I have about my sex life on the first visit. I have stopped seeing doctors after that first visit before based on reactions. Better that than for there to be an issue later on.
6. Practice gentleness with yourself. The hard part for me hasn’t actually been the during or even the after. It’s the last minute cancellations. I’ve had to retrain myself into believing I have time, something which I had previously trained myself *out* of. A “seize today; tomorrow isn’t promised” mentality just doesn’t go so much with disability and chronic illness, even though it also inspires it in many of us. The first few times… hell, the first few *years* I had to cancel playdates last-minute that I had gotten excited for, I made myself feel like absolute shit about it. That helps no one.
7. If it’s something that works for you, see if emotional types of play (even just fearplay mindfucks) are a good route. See if there are physical types of play you aren’t already doing. When I can’t do rough body play because everything keeps dislocating, needles can happen with me being still. When I can’t do that, I can still be hypnotized into thinking something much more physical is happening… more than I had any idea until very recently. But that’s me. Kink doesn’t look just one way, and getting out of a rut we’d fallen into as to how our kink played out really opened up so much more than I had any idea it would and has been nothing but positive.
8. And finally — labbing isn’t just for rope! Any kind of toy or play can be done as a “lab” to figure out what someone’s base-line reaction is. and because different tops use different tools differently, I think it’s important to do this with each play partner. We will go through new toys and what a “1” would feel like, what a “5” would feel like, and working up from there until i’m like NAH. I can handle my partner giving His “10” on some things, but not every thing, and He doesn’t have any way of knowing that I’ll react that way with a new toy (even if we’ve played with other versions of that same toy). With chronic conditions that change state, if there are states that aren’t “I’m feeling great!” but also don’t = “we can never ever play if I’m like this,” it can be worth it to name those states and lab things out there when you’re feeling them, too. If I’m not at my best and we want to play, I can say I’m at something we know like “my bones are crunchy” (or just do a small lab earlier that day) to help my partner gauge how I’m experiencing things. Now, the charged environment of a scene does change how things can feel and how people respond, so this is not a catch-all. But it is still helpful for Him to know my baselines so that deviations from said baseline can be judged accordingly.
And I guess I’ll end reiterating 6 again. Be gentle with yourself. Disability and illness are spectrums and our places on them change. What doesn’t work right now might tomorrow. What you don’t know about yet could be your favorite thing in the future.
And don’t forget to hydrate.
If you want to join in on the conversation in the comments, this post can be found on Fetlife here!