Today I am a Slave

I’ve had a Master before LH and a man who considered me for a time, and those relationships gave me the opportunity to grow and explore what I thought I understood about submission. They also led me to realize the things I didn’t want. It became apparent to me that I needed more than a weekend dominant, and I yearned to serve beyond the bedroom. More than anything I craved a dominant who would push me to be a better slave and partner while at the same time pushing my boundaries of submission in a healthy way. I longed for a symbiotic relationship, one that was mutually beneficial in real life ways that would help us both. As much as I wanted to build my sex slave fantasy, I also wanted it to reach into my reality.

Honestly, I didn’t know how that would manifest in my life exactly. The reality of voluntary kinky slavery is that I’m giving up my rights to another. It’s a constant submission that extends further than a scene, further than a day… it could become my entire life if I wished it. On the surface, I understood that in a logical way. I’m an intelligent, willful woman. I read the rules of our game, and I had my safety nets in place. At any time I could use my safeword or I could tear up my contract and give back my ring. Nothing bound me but my word and my love for LH.

In many ways, the past few months have felt like a whirlwind romance with a swift engagement and marriage. LH and I seemed to occupy a wacky romantic comedy; two people that met, fell madly in love and hijinks ensued. Our whirlwind, though, was preceded by a lengthy interview process. LH and I played games and learned about one another, swiftly establishing an emotional intimacy that made me feel secure as much as it left me exposed. Our dates were traditional in some ways as we traded life stories over steak nachos, and different in that they often ended in bondage and bruises. As spring gave way to summer, we were well into establishing our roles as Master and slave, and I was riding the high of new relationship energy. I was euphoric and deeply in love.

LH told me when we signed our contract that I would soon learn if I liked his brand of slavery. By that time he was helping me towards my diet and fitness goals by cooking healthy meals with me and making us exercise daily. I joked with my mama that he had become my life coach, and in many regards, that’s exactly what LH was doing. He spurred me to devote solid writing time towards my professional goals and gave me the motivation (a caning) to get my shit done during the week.

When June arrived, LH was living with me most of the time and my typical work day at home was conducted in the nude if my daughter wasn’t home. Rules were in place. I had no right to privacy, for example, which meant that I was forbidden to shut a door, and I had to ask permission to use the bathroom. I fed LH at meals and sat at his feet if we watched television. When my little girl was with me, the rules relaxed of course. But when she left to vacation with my ex, I was suddenly left with a long stretch of continual slavery. We were alone, and I existed to serve LH and to submit to whatever he desired in the moment. The intensive training had become a slavery bootcamp of sorts. LH was helping me meet my goals, and at the same time, he ensured that I felt objectified; I was a thing that existed purely for his pleasure. I felt appreciated and loved and cared for. I also felt used and dominated, and sometimes, exhausted by the constant dance along the edge of being a “normal” partner and a sex slave. I was living beyond the fantasy full time, and it brought to light a serious issue.

It was easy for me to fall into a pattern of being a victim. I had been a victim for a large portion of my life when I was married which was enforced by my family’s message of “put your head down, shut your mouth and endure.” That sounds like the perfect mantra for a slave, doesn’t it? To some extent it did serve me. In the middle of a caning, for example. But it hurt both LH and me when I fell into my old pattern, when I reverted to the silence of a person who was too beleaguered to use her voice to say she was upset, or exhausted, or at the end of her rope.

It didn’t serve me Wednesday night as I knelt in the dark to give a blowjob, tears trickling down my face. LH had asked me over and over again if I was ok, and I had replied with a simple yes then went back to a resentful silence. I submitted, doing what was asked while inside I despaired that I wouldn’t be able to continue being his slave. I couldn’t submit constantly with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. I was tired to death, and all I wanted to do was curl up beside him and sleep. Why didn’t I tell LH this? Because I figured that my limbs were still attached, and my heart still beat in my chest. In my illogical thinking, none of that was reason enough to call RED. RED was for uncontrollable bleeding or heart attacks. Besides, I didn’t want to inconvenience my lover. I was a slave after all.

In the cold light of day, LH made me talk about it. My words came out in bits and pieces, and before long I was crying again. I told him I could be better, promising to be more considerate and understanding. But that wasn’t what LH wanted. He wanted my honesty, and he needed me to talk about where I was emotionally even if it brought our play to a screeching halt. In order for him to take us to the darker parts of our fantasies, he needed to trust me that I was being honest about how I felt. My victim pattern was hobbling our relationship and undermining the trust between us, and it caused both of us to take a hard look at what we were trying to create with this M/s relationship.

The most challenging part of this wasn’t vocalizing my feelings, it was believing that I was absolutely worth the inconvenience of stopping a scene or the disappointment of plans changing. The worst part of my victim pattern was the belief that the things my abuser said about me were true. It kept me silent for so many years–this small voice in my head that told me he was right. I was too ugly, too fat, too flighty to be considered an equal. LH wasn’t that man, but that feeling of not being worthwhile persisted. But I didn’t realize it until I was on the verge of saying that I couldn’t continue being a slave.

I have more to process, but I feel a hundred times lighter now that I can see why I remained silent in the darkness. Instead of the silent victim, I now feel angry. Angry at how I was treated in my marriage and in my family. I want to rage and cry, but mostly I want to hit the pavement and run until my head is clear and I no longer feel like kneeing my ex-husband in the balls. Good thing LH and I have a half-marathon to train for. LH and I have agreed on a series of words that I can use as shorthand to communicate where I am during a scene or during the day. He told me that I didn’t have to have an articulate or concise answer for him, I just needed to continue communicating even if it was to say that I needed space and time to process.

LH has often given me the push I needed to get past my fears to try something new, to move past my shyness and natural reticence. But most important to me is the bond that we have forged, a bond that surpasses the labels of Master/slave. We are connected emotionally and energetically in ways that I never thought possible. He’s a part of me–a force of nature in his own right. He is mine as much as I am his. I will stare again and again into the darkness of my soul, into the abyss, because this connection is worth it. We are absolutely worth it.

**One more thought

The first draft of this post was different. Nikki returned it to me with her edits, the big message being that I left out the hard parts of slavery. Let’s face it, if it were easy-peasy-breezy all the cool kids would be doing it. Her edits corresponded with my crisis and the blow job, so I included it in my post. (LH calls it the “resentful blowjob” while I have dubbed it “the blowjob of despair.”) When I wrote this I was still processing that night, and I wrote this post as if I were peeling back my skin to examine the nerves that had been exposed. I spilled my guts, and I realized later that it wasn’t comfortable for anyone concerned.

What I’ve realized since writing this is that my pattern of victimization and my consent to be a slave are two different things, apples to oranges if you will. There is overlap in that now I know that aspects of my service to LH will trigger those victim feelings. However, it wasn’t LH or our dynamic or our total power exchange that made me feel victimized. It was ME. It was my self-esteem challenges, my past toxic relationship patterns that I still enact (dammit!), my family’s history of abuse… All these things are bound up in me, and I was telling myself that I wasn’t allowed to protest. I was in the process of convincing myself that I had no power to speak up for myself, and that made me think that maybe I didn’t have the inner resources to be a slave.

LH and I have many words that I can use in a scene or in our daily interactions that will communicate how I’m feeling. My slavery and his domination of me aren’t stopping me. In fact, the architecture of our relationship gives me ample room to articulate exactly how I’m feeling. What I’m striving to improve is my feeling of being worthy of speaking up, an issue that began long before I discovered BDSM or found my amazing LH. What I’m working on is something a lot of us, regardless of sexuality and orientation, struggle with–respecting and honoring ourselves despite flaws and failures and knowing that we’re absolutely worth loving. There’s no overnight fix for this, but I’m grateful for that terrible moment with LH that shed a beacon of light onto the shadows of this issue.

Last night LH and I had another lengthy discussion about this post and our subsequent feelings and revelations. I voluntarily articulated that I wanted to be his slave, and that I wanted to continue building and refining the total power exchange between us. We celebrated with rope, clover clamps and forced orgasms. Then we snuggled in bed and had the quarterly review of our contract.  I don’t really believe in happy endings, but I’m very happy about the work-in-progress us.