The following is shared by permission of the FetLife author Karuna16
Heh heh, they won’t tell you this stuff in the glory-be-to-submission fetlife threads and your Dom won’t either. Not through an evil plot to deceive, just because your Dom is too busy figuring out the stuff no one told them about domination.
I am in a hetro 24/7 d/s dynamic, we don’t live together and we’re not publicly out to people know, for context
Which is exciting and comforting and intimate, yay. But I went to the ballet last week, my mother hustled me out of the door before I could pick up my phone. The curtain went down and I realized that for the first time in two months, not only could Sir not reach me, I couldn’t explain why. For four hours, I had no sub duties at all. Eerie.
Lest you think my Dom is an attention hungry tyrant, he is not, I do have space and time away. But our dynamic rules ok, no matter what is going on. Because it is how we relate, we can’t pause or switch it off. Have you ever dog-sat for a neighbours pet, or had an annoying house guest who wouldn’t leave? Remember how it feels for your time to no longer just be your own? It’s that feeling.
You are a sub when you are tired. You are sub when you want to slip into bed without having to get up, unplug a charging phone, text your Master and say goodnight. You are a sub when you feel uncommunicative, premenstrual, anxious or angry. I have tried to isolate from my Dom, mostly because I try to keep my crazy in a small corner where he cannot see it. But the closeness of 24/7 is about being constantly ready to be there for your Sir, or to explain and arrange time away. The very nature of which can be something that requires getting used to.
Hopefully you chose each other because you are compatible. But there are things I do with a flourish because I think they are a big gesture of my undying lurve that Sir doesn’t get the significance of or that don’t excite him. I have ideas about serving him in ways that he doesn’t need serving, ways that make him feel uncomfortable, ways that are just irrelevant.
It constantly amazes me what please him in terms of what I do. There are things I don’t think of at all, they are such second nature or so much a part of what I assume submission to be, that he values greatly. He puts his arms around me and thanks for something I did last week that I consider to be small. It is also worth mentioning, submission shifts with your life circumstances. How I serve Sir when his health wanes differs from when he is well. How I serve him when we are apart is not how I serve when we are together. Some days he likes to sit on the sofa, ring the servant bell and edge me, some days he wants to cuddle and be a ‘normal’ with me.
I see many people doing what I do when I am not careful, make my submission a model of how I would want to be submitted to, instead of sitting at their Masters feet and asking what submission should be like in their relationship.
I am insane and I have the ward notes to prove it, they don’t call me mcstabby for nothing (though also not because I have a violent history, it bears mentioning). I am the queen of emotional oddness. However what I didn’t realize was that submission would not be a Disney princess song.
I cry at weird times. I cry during sex. I get offended at stupid stuff. We can fight for hours, like multiple phone calls, hours long fights where I run out of words. There are moments where I feel inadequate, foolish, greedy, misinformed. It’s not just worrying about my sex face (Thank you Sir for lying and telling me it is cute) it is feeling the depths of my need. Turns out I am a big bag of neuroses and submission is a game where we pull them out of the bag one by one, like a horrible sorting hat of fucked upness.
Vanilla relationships are often built around the cult of ‘I’m really fine’ and not digging this stuff up, until it poisons the well and you break up. Submission forces us to look at it. And if I hate looking at my weaknesses, imagine what it is like to do it while the man I love gets stuck in looking at my weaknesses too.
He has bad days. There is zero I can do about that. My vast array of slutty lingeries and ability to take it up the bum most anytime often doesn’t make his life drastically better when he is feeling low. He tells me that I make his life better and he loves me and having me there, but there are things that happen to us both that submission will not cure. For me, my submission revolves around the premise that there is always somewhere else to go, sexually or emotionally. Sometimes, there isn’t, everything sucks and nothing I can do will change that.
How submission taps into the streak of rage in me, I don’t know. It’s not rage at Sir, though I have felt the discomfort of that too. Sir becomes a weird symbol. He is totally different from those who have inspired my rage. But his presence and what we do hits those buttons, all the anger comes up. By deferring and humiliating myself to him, I get back in touch with all the injustice and the people who really did take from me selfishly. This is a mysterious process to me, how his kind and gentle (even when he has pinned me to floor) actions can take me to a place of past brutality and bring me home again. Because once the buttons are pushed, I feel it, I manifest it and we have to talk about it. We play it out. I cry under his hands. He witnesses the stories.
I have no choice about this rage. It will not be packed away neatly. I will feel it on days when I could really do without it.
It’s not. Your stretch marks will be on show. Bedsheets will be changed. Maybe outfits you feel kinda silly in will be procured. I sometimes buy stockings that give me that sausage thigh thing. There probably will be cock to face slapping drooling, prepare to see your worst pornographic ‘eeew’ moments to become first person experience.
I got a friction burn from his carpet on my face this weekend. A big pink friction burn on my temple, the day before I met his brothers young family. Sniveling, wretched orgasms of snot are not pretty. I had to blow my nose halfway through a blowjob this week, true story. Any and all make up you lovingly apply will be smeared off. I am a natural redhead, so counting the bruises I acquire at a weekend at Sir’s is a hobby, we don’t do anything hardcore but I bruise like a peach.
It’s impossible to be on pretty patrol when your life is not your own. He will want to play when you have crap hair, acne, have put weight on etc and faking a headache is a lot less of a option as a sub.
However much I want to crawl to Sir and worship him (and I do because I am his slut) there is a little part of me that marvels at that. I once walked out of a male dominated workplace and said I wasn’t coming back in unless the male superior apologized for making fun of me on speakerphone for being a lady tech support person. I right hooked a guy in a nightclub for not taking his hands off me when I clearly asked him to. I have read the female eunuch and I know it is ridiculous. But I have always championed women (and men) is the kind of stealthy institutionalized misogyny we have in our culture. I believe in equal pay, equal rights, merit, respect etc.
The world tells me that to show any weakness as a woman is to be lumped in with the dolly birds and bimbos. I can love a man and be with him but any sign of submission is a sign I am sick in the head. It’s a sign of some kind of emotional damage. The horrible flipside of this is that the story goes that men cannot be trusted, they are horrible opportunistic sex beasts. Misogyny hates men as much as it hates us women.
So next time I am washing up while he orders me to keep still while he finger fucks me, I tell myself that this is liberation. Feminism and submission can be part of the same philosophy.
It is a rare woman that can say she has never been a victim of sexual assault or coercion. Most women I know have a story (even she doesn’t name it for what I would term it as) where someone took something sexually that she wasn’t cool with. Many more women live on the end of verbal and emotional abuse and manipulation which they have no name for and aren’t supported in leaving. Submission is scary because it surrendering to something loaded with bad memories.
Sir loves me. He thinks I am cute and beautiful and I feel totally cherished. But humiliation is how we play. It is never nasty. But the words aren’t always neutral. He has walked over a minefield of a past he doesn’t know the extent of to figure out what we kink for and what makes me flashback. I have had to use safewords, process body memories, talk to him and ask for reassurance.
If hearing the man you play with tell you that you are a dirty, greedy anal hungry little bitch for his convenience is a totally neutral bit of dirty talk, I salute you. If letting someone restrain you or manipulate your breathing has never caused you one iota of concern for your wellbeing, well I envy you - and think you are nuts. When playing with pain, pain is scary.
I serve him because we enjoy it. The means is the end. I don’t serve him with an agenda. He doesn’t love me any more or less for my submission, which is good because that means he loves me just as much when I can’t do it. He loves me, not me in the role of sub. But I can’t earn anything from him but finding new creative ways to debase myself. There is no scorecard.
There is a culture, particularly for us girls, that we are socialized to think that the polite way to get what we want is to give everyone else what they want. If we are sweet and good and quiet, we will be rewarded. This is anathema to healthy submission, in my opinion. I hear many Doms struggling to put this into words, but Doms know when a sub is doing something to get to something else and most I have heard talk about it, loathe this.
I have loved some great men, I have had some peak experiences. I won’t do those dudes an injustice by playing that down. But there is nothing on earth like what I have with Sir, it blows me out of the water how new it is for me. It is unlike any other love. I rant about like I a lovesick school girl because I have two months of experience of what we have, that is only about sixty days worth of proficiency. I’m a total n00b. It’s exhilarating.
So I don’t want to fuck it up. What if he leaves? How is it going to feel if it ends, how would a 24/7 d/s relationship break up feel? The vulnerability I feel in surrendering to something so unique and precious is terrifying. A man walks this earth who has a little piece of the most private me that no one else has ever seen. The power he has is incredible, now I think about it. Everyday I show up and let him rule and all along I am thinking ‘please, don’t leave me.’ And if I tell you I have been dumped just twice in fifteen years of short term relationships, you can see how much being left scares the bejesus out of me.
So those are the things no one told me about submission. And maybe they are just my part of the submission journey. Who knows. But I felt like we need to air out our own experiences that speak to something else than lying spreadeagled on bed with killers heels on while our breasts get tortured. Because that is all very nice, but it’s not what causes 3am angst.
SOURCE: deleted