Maybe It Depends on How You Look at It

In her comment to my last post,  morningstar said...

i will follow this (what shall I call it???) journey??? i don't know what to call it swan.. but i will be interested to see how it goes....
i have been trying to be submissive without a "leader" so to speak.... some days it is just damn frustrating.... 
i wish you luck  

I'm not at all sure if she meant that to say that I am "trying to be a slave without a Master," or if she was really only speaking to her own current situation.  I know I tend to do that in comments on a regular basis -- read someone's words about their life and their experience, and then speak to whatever that brings up for me about my own life and circumstances. 

 I know that the implication that I am somehow trying to do the submissive/slave side of the power dynamic without the accompanying Dominant/Master side caught me off guard.  I never wrote those words, and I'm surprised to find what I did say interpreted in that fashion.  So let me try to clarify --

What I discovered, Saturday morning, sitting in my therapist's office, was a truth about myself.  More accurately, I suppose, it was rediscovered... because I have known it for years.  I am, if it can be possible, happiest and most fulfilled when I live from the place of "slave" within my most intimate relationship.  It is what I wanted through nearly three decades of marriage, and it is what I chose when I came here to be with Tom some 9-1/2 years ago.  It is what I choose for myself today -- and for as long as I live.  For myself.

 The changes we've come through have rocked us to our foundations.  We've been lucky to survive.  We are, I hope, through the worst of it, but we are still in the early days of clearing the debris and laying the foundations for "new stuff" in our lives.  It is hard work -- exhausting both physically and emotionally.  We haven't yet come to a place where things are easy or simple or familiar.  Every move and every task and every undertaking seems daunting and oppressively complicated and difficult.  Every single success; every triumph; comes about because we've managed to successfully navigate the delicate business of working at it together with whatever tools, skills, and talents we can bring to the effort. 

I am not faced with trying to be "slave" in some vacuum where there is no dominant counterpart.  He is the One that I serve, and the only One that I want to serve.  He is learning His way into our new reality, even as I am, but He is still "Master" to me -- always and all ways.  That is far more about who and what I am than it is about Him.  I belong to Him; bound in heart and mind and body by threads that span our two lives with a strength that is more than steel.  The fact that, as I became fearful and hurt and angry and resentful, I pulled myself away from those anchor points does not change the truth of their existence.  It is only evidence of my own willful foolishness and blind panic.  

I needed to flail around in that place until I realized where I'd gone wrong.  I needed to correct my own course.  I needed to come back to my home and my center.  That has been my work and my healing in these months -- to come to understand that, and then to accept that it was within my power to choose to do it.  He couldn't "lead" me to this.  I would have battled with Him and fought Him -- just as a drowning swimmer may fight her rescuer.  Far better, I imagine, that He let me work through this on my own, and find my own way back to "us."  

I know that there is a common belief, in the lifestyle community, that it is the Dominant partner who leads, and the submissive partner who follows that lead.  That may, in fact, be precisely the model that prevails in many of our relationships most of the time, but I have come to believe that it isn't always so.  If the goal is to build strong and healthy relationships that endure and work for the partners, then the power flows between them in natural and organic ways, and the leadership can pass back and forth depending on what the circumstances demand.  Just as climbers might share the lead in ascending to the summit, so we move in and out of "leadership" roles in our relationship.  I have skills and knowledge and wisdom to share, and sometimes it makes sense for me to be the one to take the lead.  That doesn't mean I am less slave or that He is less "Master."  It only means that each of us offers the best we have to this life we are creating together.  

So, I will be "slave" as best I can.  I will work on the things that still bedevil me in that context -- my fears, and my tendency to extrapolate from bits of nothingness, and my quick leaps to judgement, and my jealousies, and my insecurities.  I will do the best to serve Him, to anticipate what He might need and want from me, to be where He needs me to be, and to cultivate the graceful, respectful, kind, and loving attitudes toward loving Him that were once my habit.  He'll give me whatever guidance and direction seem appropriate and necessary from His perspective, I'm sure.  We'll grow together into this -- even as we have over the years that have gone before.  I doubt that we will avoid all the frustrations and battles and pitfalls that may be lurking along the path.  I hope we manage to bypass some of them.  

Bad things could happen, but I am not looking for them.  Good things might happen just as easily, and I want that for us.  So that's where I'm going to put my energies.  I want more joy, more pleasure, more intimacy, more love, more sex, more S/M play, more laughter, more adventures, and more friendships.  I am the slave.  I may not be able to make all of that happen by myself, but I can bust my tail to do my share.

swan