The Need to Suffer

I was looking at my profile on Fetlife and thinking of things slave Caroline and others said during the MsC and I realized something about myself. I have a need to suffer for those I serve.

When I started my journey more than a decade ago, I was afraid of the pain. I remember the first time a flogger fell upon my shoulders and how emotion welled out of the depths of my soul. I was terrified. I was thrilled. I was aching to let go. I was desperate to maintain control. I fell into the arms that were opened to me as I stepped off the cross and I cried and shook and smiled and laughed.

Through the years, things changed. I became involved with heavier and heavier sadists. Suffering for their pleasure became an important part of my service. My willingness to stand before them, stripped bare in so many ways, was part and parcel of the ruthless obedience I gave to those I served. I never lost the nugget of fear that lay in my gut each time one of them nodded to the cross and pulled out those things that would bring me pain while giving them pleasure. I never learned to fly as a bottom. The things these men did to me hurt...there's no way to romanticize it. That shit hurts and I had no way of escaping into “subspace.” Instead, I stood, I held on, and I suffered.

But there is value to me in that kind of suffering. That kind of surrender speaks to the depths of my service. It is a way to openly strip away my control and to stand in utter vulnerability before the one I serve. In accepting the physical pain of allowing their inner beast to run free, I can suffer in a way that allows me to recover. There are other ways those I have served have made me suffer and some of those ways are far more difficult to recover from. I'm not saying I'm looking for the easy path, but that physical suffering is something I can do for the one I serve that will not leave me so damaged that the owner will have trouble bringing me back to useful service.

I have never been in an authority-based relationship that did not include some level of S&M play until recently. I don't know for certain how I feel about this. I know there are times when it feels as though there is some piece of my inner self that is set to the side and packed out of sight. Other times my rational brain says, “What are you missing? You don't like the pain.”

What I am missing, I believe, is that place of complete vulnerability. What else do we do in any relationship that puts us in a place of such deep and complete vulnerability? What other action or interaction can strip us as completely bare of our control as standing before someone, knowing they will hurt us in ways we may not like? I cannot think of anything, any situation or interaction, that can so fully demonstrate the depth of surrender I want to give to those I serve as suffering for their pleasure.


And so I have circled back to my beginning...I have a need to suffer for those I serve.