i cannot overstate how motivating it is to have a beautiful muscular woman yelling encouragement at you for an hour, like seriously... ^^'

also the social aspect of it is really motivating for me. i am very extroverted in that being with other people energises me. if i was trying to do exercise at home or by myself at a gym or something then i'd lose motivation for that immediately. the structure of being in a group where we're all working on the same thing makes it really easy to connect with each other and the mutual encouragement from that is invaluable.

if you meant physical strength though then i could honestly be doing way more, like 2-3 times as often. going from being very sedentary (and post-hospitalisation), i got huge early gains. at the start, one pole class would leave me really achey for days, but for months now i'll just walk them off like they're nothing. part of why i'm so excited about being promoted is i'll be being pushed even harder and might start getting all that lovely soreness again.

in many ways my life is a fucking mess currently. i live somewhere incredibly isolated, and that combined with disability eating up so much of my time means i don't really feel like i'm living all that much - i'm merely "alive" at the moment. if i wasn't taking every opportunity i've got to be going outside and spending time with people then i would be at home spiralling.

so pole isn't something i'm putting in effort to keep up with; pole is one of the handful of things i get to do each week that are keeping me alive.

ooh fun question !!

firstly i shall point you to this: https://nymphostimtoy.neocities.org/tag/submissive-narrator :)

if i wanted to be reductive (or at least terse) then i'd say i'm a sub-leaning switch and bottom that sometimes fantasises about wielding a strap.

generally, i find that i lean much more subby in more sexual contexts, and become much less sexual when in a dominant headspace. when i'm a sub, i wanna get fucked. tie me up, objectify me, use me. sex is something i want to be subjected to. ideally, i want my orgasms to be forced out of me. i want to be overwhelmed.

when i'm feeling more dominant though, it feels completely different. i can be a big sadist and get these delightful tingles when someone is visibly afraid of me. i struggle to do whole scenes cause i run out of steam quickly, so i function best just existing in a context where i can enjoy having a certain aura and reinforce it with brief but intense outbursts.

i generally won't try and do anything sexual though, because what tends to happen is the moment the sub starts doing anything to pleasure me, my brain turns off and all my dominant energy evaporates, which is very fun to play with in explicitly switchy scenarios, but is otherwise more just an inconvenience.

the ideal for me though is when i manage to get comfortably into a kind of "domme in the streets; sub in the sheets" headspace. i love to feel powerful and dangerous and uncontrollable in a very succubus kinda way, hoping that it'll rile someone up enough that they just have to take me and i get the deep satisfaction of making them snap while they get the satisfaction of watching me absolutely crumple underneath them.

i was in the middle of a cheeky menty b when this one showed up so i decided to sit on it for a bit lol

there's not really one thing that keeps me going. i think it's the variety in the combination of all the different things in my life to look forward to that keeps me going

like i've got creative outlets in my music, my bass playing, writing smut, the little doodles i do in my journal each evening.
then i've got social outlets like my online friends, the weekly and monthly meetups i go to locally, the friend i watch telly with once a week, looking forward to the times i get to spend with my boyfriend, my annual summer trips.
then there's all the other things, like the joy of doing pole dancing and watching my progress in that, or the music project i tutor on a few times a year that i've been doing since i was a kid.
also just, the world is really beautiful actually? one thing i love so much about summer is just how astonishingly beautiful everything is. bright blue skies, flowers, trees, all bathed in so much light. all the birdsong too. it's hard to see it when you sit inside all day though.

when i'm not doing well, it's so easy to just kind of forget all this stuff exists. i've found that the more i can fill my life with things to look forward to and the more i can push myself to keep engaging with them (just not when i really definitely need to stop for a bit), the more restorative they can be. if i have a pole class in the evening but i'm feeling miserable and i'm not sure if i wanna go, then i'll go anyway and i might need to mask for the first few minutes, but by the time i leave i'm beaming again.

i'm honestly very proud of where i've been able to get my life to. in spite of serious health problems and living in the middle of nowhere, i've managed to carve out enough joy in my life and enough things to look forward to that i can know that even when i'm doing really badly (like i was 3 weeks ago when this question was asked), that it will be temporary, that things will come around, and i'll always make it out.

also like, most of the horrible bastards around today will die in my lifetime and i wanna fucking party about it. no way i'm missing that.