Hello readers! We’re here today to bring you the first in a new series: Bloganuary! It’s a challenge to blog every day in January with a prompt from WordPress. Even though we didn’t find out until the very end of the day on the 1st, we decided to give it a shot! The prompts don’t come out until almost the day of, so we have to write every day for it to work. (And hey, this will help inch us closer to our 1,000,000 words goal!)

So here is the first installment. Day 1:

What advice would you give to your teenage self?

Jayden:

I’ve answered this on the blog, I think, but I’m not sure it’s the same anymore.

As a teenager, I had a singular focus: get a job, get married, have kids. It was all I cared about. I was ready to jump in with both feet. In fact, I think I was 14 the first time I had a pregnancy scare and I was more excited than scared. (Joke’s on me. I needed medical intervention to get pregnant when I eventually did get married and was actually ready to have kids.)

As an adult looking back, I think I rushed into all of that. The job I got right out of college was great, and it served me well for more than a decade. The relationship I was in also served me well for more than a decade. But getting married at 23 was too young. I didn’t grow as an adult the way I should have because I was in that relationship for literally my entire adult life. It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I was able to clearly see how things had gone so wrong.

As it turns out, it worked out in the end for me, and I am very happy with my life. But if I could give my teenage self advice, it would be not to rush into things. Take your time and learn about yourself.

Richard:

Fuck Bruce Demarco (name changed to protect the not particularly innocent.) I’m pretty sure I told this story before, but whatever. Bruce and I worked together at camp when I was in my late teens and he was in his early twenties. He was a tall, lanky, nerdy guy, with curly, dirty blond hair just the right length to grab on to. We worked together a lot, and hung out a fair amount on our time off. He was a pretty quiet, serious guy, but I think he was more open and relaxed around me than most of the rest of the staff, and I got him to actually have some fun every once in a while.

I was pretty afraid of coming out at the time, and I tend to lean on my subby side more when I’m with older guys, so my “flirting” tended to consist of light teasing and making sure he got dinner if he had to work a watch over meals. It got me absolutely nowhere. A few years later, we were talking on AIM or Skype or wherever because there were 3000 messenger platforms back then, and I found out he was bi, kinky (really into puppy play), and submissive.

Had I actually hit on him the way I would’ve with most people, I probably would’ve had a fun little pet. Oh well, I have a lovely slave wife now.