How I came to be a slave and what it means to me

I was not born a slave.  I cannot even say that life has made me one.  No.  I have made myself one.  Two strong threads have been braided together into a very strong rope that binds, one positive, and one negative, and it is these which make me slave.

Positive thread

The desire to serve, to express love through service is both innocent and heart felt.  At its best, it represents the absence of ego.  Giving to one we love without expectation of return, without strings attached.

This kind of love flourishes when we know we are loved back, appreciated, handled with care.  Love must be two-way lest it wither or turn into an unhealthy obsession.  The landscape on which I generally play out this kind of love is a training ground for the real thing…for as my bestie once remarked, “you are seeking the impossible by falling in love with a professional dominatrix.”  I stand by my reply, “it’s always worth a shot.”

But therein lies the piece of grit which either creates the pearl or is rejected altogether, is spat out.  For when love grows unevenly, it does not sit easily with the giver or the receiver, no matter the degree to which it is known consciously.  An imbalance is felt.  Always.

To receive love when it is not offered back is perhaps flattering but may also be something else—a kind of judgement, a feeling which feeds arrogance and contempt.  Those are strong words, and they may be diluted in reality with many other things—the health of the pro-client relationship depends on this dilution—can I receive this love and get enough back to compensate me for creating a container for it, for holding it.  Because love that is received which is not reciprocated is a burden.  Love is weightier than the atmosphere itself.  It is heavy like a black hole, suffocating, crippling, stronger than steel, but only when receiving it and not feeling it for the giver too.

I am reminded of the x-ray blanket given to us in the dentist’s chair, which is this enormous weight which crushes us.  “Hey, its for your own good,” and the x-ray is as invisible as love is.

The weighted blanket, on the other hand, is elective, and as such can be wedded to bliss…”I am ready to receive.  So, I shall crawl under this blanket and feel ‘love’.”  Such is self-love.

Am I making sense?

Somewhere along the line I found that expressing love was the most fulfilling aspect of my life.  Manifesting this love seems to come out in service.  This can be small, nice things, done for someone who you are getting to know.  It can also be enormous things.  Showing off, even.  Being a peacock in service—showing the lengths you are willing to go to in order to serve someone.

I was once accused of being a narcissist for doing just that, which is as absurd as a peanut butter and bacon sandwich (one of my mother’s favourites).  Laying gifts at someone’s feet can be wasteful if the gifts are not appreciated.  It is possible that one gives to get.  The Christian tradition speaks the truth of this—that it is wrong to give with motive…and I suspect that all religions offer similar wisdom.  At the same time, questioning the motive of the giver is also spoken of.  The gift horse must be ridden not resented.

Negative thread

On the face of it, many might scoff at the idea that some people are slaves.  Voluntary slaves.  I do not refer to the horrific situations of true modern slavery, at its heart, lacking consent, inherently evil.  No, I speak of voluntary slavery.  That someone should choose to surrender themselves to someone else.

What have discovered is that surrender is not passive.  It is not a one-off, it is a constant living over of crossing the threshold.  In a healthy master-slave dynamic, both parties enter a state of constantly re-crossing the threshold without ritual, need for elaborate protocol, events, dynamics.  When it is out of equilibrium, we act out, on either side of the slash.  This is human, and is to be expected, but must also be dealt with to return things to a flow state.  I cannot speak to the dominant side of this world, as I find that less and less do I even begin to understand it.

But as a slave, as a submissive, as someone who is fulfilled by being able to love and serve someone, I have learned that there is no superiority/inferiority in the dynamic.  I don’t submit because you are better than me.  I submit because I love you.  Or, at the beginning of a dynamic, I submit because I am prepared to love you, to learn to love you, and to allow the train to move forward on the assumption that all the cars are attached, and my little submissive self is busy creating and dreaming all the way back in the caboose, gradually working her way forward to the front of the train, to participate in the drive and direction of the dynamic.  Maybe the metaphor is worn, but there is truth to it.  

That process of exploration, of being open to submitting to someone as one feels the tender shoots of love break through the ground into the right growing conditions, are fuelled in part by lust…and that can be spiritual, sexual, erotic, trantric…so many things.  We do it for the connection.

The responsibility of both parties lies in owning the self.  It may seem ironic, but if the slave does not own the self, then the risk of everything going pear shaped is high, with mainly grave risk for our feelings, sense of self.  Self-care is the essence of aftercare.  Of preparation.  The temple of the Goddess we enter has to be about our own power.  Submission from a place of strength is electrifying.  To know that one is rippling with electricity and to calm and soothe it and to lay it at the feet of a dominant, one who will get off on that, feel it rippling through them, energizing them, fulfilling them, reinforcing all that is good in them, triggering the ‘yes, baby, I feel you, am proud of you, am grateful for you’.  That is good.

I am in the throes of genuine love, and she knows about my submissive side, that I am a slave, and she has teased me gently, seductively, about it.  That means she is open to it.  And at a dinner with friends one night, where I cooked and served, without a hint of kink, just my feelings of care and tenderness in evidence, one of my friends asked me after, “are you her slave?” of the other woman.  And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what bliss’.

But what does that mean to me.  First, it means personal responsibility.  I have to own myself, my energy, my success, my power, and to cultivate it to the greatest extent possible.  For as a submissive, my achievements are a reflection of her dominance.  The more that I can achieve in life, the more I can give, the more deeply I can submit, and the more value that such submission potentially brings.

The internet is littered with the postings of men who send one-liners to gorgeous dominant women about how they wish to bow down to the Goddess, often couched in crude or clumsy sexual innuendo, and I can imagine that even the most venal pro-Domme would be utterly turned off by that.  

I am desperately scared of the lifestyle dynamic because of the high risk that it entails.  To submit to someone IRL is much more emotionally vulnerable.  Scary.  Dangerous.  I am wondering about how to submit to both a pro-Domme and a woman in my vanilla life at the same time.  First, if the latter is in the scene, I do not wish to push to her anything.  But what I do wish for is to gently explore what submission might mean as a means of informing a healthy relationship.  Submission in this sense has to be about her.  To support her emotionally, physically, spiritually, lovingly…to listen to her, to take care of her, to be always there for her, utterly present for her needs, to tend to her.  Ritual and service may be a part of that, they may not.  More importantly, retaining a strong sense of self, is critical.  I cannot sublimate myself if I wish to be successful in service.  To say, ‘yes Mistress’ when you don’t want to can only work up to a point before it becomes destructive.

She will and may know where it comes from.  She will and may know how to feed it.  The danger lies in either party coming to depend on it.  The slave has equal responsibility to own and communicate about how the two people in a dynamic cultivate their gifts and strengths.  Sexual play is so much fun on top, and will thrive best when everything else is in place.

As I consider the two relationships that I have had in life that are explicitly within the D/s context, both with professionals, there is a common thread from me, but the two Dommes I have come to know are as different as black and white, but both are exceptionally gifted humans, deeply cherished by me, phenomenally talented, exciting, wonderful, creative people.  That I came unstuck with one shall remain a source of wistful nostalgia for me, and the lessons from that have perhaps taught me more than the good parts.  The common thread is and was one of friendship.  It takes time to become friends with someone, it takes even more time when there is the barrier of a pro-client relationship.  But I can’t engage in intimacy of any kind, without the feelings of friendship being central to that.

One of my therapists, my main one, said to me once as I was trying to process my unravelling dynamic with ex-Mistress, “I can be your friend or I can be your therapist, not both,” and she was right.  I chose therapist, and in the end, she has become a friend, not in a conventional sense, but is very much is present in session with me in that sense, and has been increasingly open with me about her own life in ways that have improved our therapeutic relationship.  This has happened with my favourite therapist too, who has much more explicitly embraced me into her life, having introduced me to friends, and her social circle, all the while our therapeutic relationship has become much more professional and fundamental.  The demarcation of what is what has become central to its success.  Boundaries.

I don’t know why it is so important to me to become friends with the people in my life, not in an intrusive intimate sense, but in a sense of ease and flow.  Honesty.  I hate it when I can’t trust someone, and reticence, false information, white lies, even if justified, eat away at that central core.  When two people have common interests, it is natural that they might get lost in joy in those topics.  And to feel free to do so is the starting point of friendship.  And friendship, in a sense, is emotional intimacy.  Being there for someone.

I can also understand that this is a dangerous place for a provider to go.  Especially since most clients have an agenda.  And I cannot honestly say that I am free of agenda.  It would be impossible.  But I can be open about it, and am genuine in my desire to be emotionally available to someone.  But how gross to think, ‘ooh, this person is imposing their emotional availability on me’.  To need to be needed.  That is kind of offensive and is the shadow side of me.  The ugly step-child, the thing which I am wrestling into submission.

What else is ugly?  Wanting someone else to take responsibility, to own my problems, to own me, to take them away altogether.  It would be so easy to not do the work, to not confront my own ugliness, all because the container that a dominant partner imposes.  That becomes immediately imbalanced.  It cannot be her problem.  And yet, I think that letting go into submission, is exactly this if not done with maturity.  And as a little, someone who thrives on the mommy-baby energy, the danger of falling into dependence is very real, very present.  Growing up is really, really hard.

Just an aside on being trans and dosing up on oestrogen.  Doing this work, figuring this out, finding that it is possible to flow, has become easier.  It has been easier to find that my own needs do not require the thrusting fulfilment of my own needs.  Oestrogen has brought me closer to my spiritual self, has brought me closer to enlightenment, has brought me closer to a purity of heart.  I had the intent before, only I was afraid to, or incapable of, confronting my ugliness.  Now I feel much better equipped…and ironically, this also means being much clearer to myself and others about what I want, expect, but also bring.

What else is negative?

My rejection of masculinity is not a positive force in my life.  But it has been there since I was a child.  Even on the playground.  I wanted to be around girls.  My closest friends in nursery school, pre-school, elementary school were always girls.  And the presence of another male was always felt by me as the interloper, someone who interfered with the energy of interaction with the girls I was with.  My disrupted natural state of respect and affection for male energy was broken not long after birth as the child of an abusive father, a man prone to outbursts of physical and verbal rage, and who may just have been a narcissist, and is certainly someone even in death who is utterly unable to see his hand in any emotional chaos around him.

Thank goodness I have some male friends who I respect and admire, even if they have flaws which stem from the shadow things I hated in my father.  My ability to accept them and not be tortured by those attributes has grown as they have shown me unstinting support and love in my transition, not being weird about it, not being afraid to be seen with me, of being staunch friends.  I never thought this would be the case…thought I would only find support with women, but my friendships with both men and women whom were close have deepened as a result of this.

One of my closest male friends who is also a colleague said, “we love you.  We already loved you.  And now that we see all of you, there is that much more to love.”  Gosh.  How I cried when he said that.  And being able to cry in front of him, and not feel judged, but just accepted, has opened a chink in my wall against men, and that is growing.  I am still very wary of men, but this is a big step forward.

And Star Child has helped me too.  When she spoke of being flattered by male desire, even when it was misplaced, I found that liberating.  I have always hated how vulgar men can be as they speak of women, and I mean when their guard is down, in the proverbial “locker room”.  And how putting the moves on a woman is so very self-serving.  To hear Star Child describe this as a “healthy” expression of male desire, that she is flattered by male attention even if it is misplaced, was enlightening.  As she said, “for a man to want me, there is nothing untruthful or nasty about that.  I might not like him, might not be attracted to him, but I can appreciate that it comes from a good place in him.”  She was not saying that unwanted advances were not at times inappropriate, and that a ‘no’ was always a ‘no’, but she was saying that a man to desire a woman in this way is a natural expression of his essence.

And I always thought it was just wrong.  Self-serving.  I can remember so many conversations as a teen with male friends who were just being “understanding” or just doing something for whomever they were sweet on so as to get into her knickers.  It bothered me.  Star Child didn’t care.  She felt it was coming from a natural and flattering place.  And she contrasted this with how women hurt each other.  That female cruelty is in contrast to male vulnerability.  Men need approval.  Women need affirmation.

What do you think?  Can such statements even be made?