A Look Back

A Look Back

February 7, 1998

It happens to many people at some point...the questioning and self-doubt...the concern about whether you really are submissive/Dominant/switch. I has happened..is happening..to me. Like so many others in recent years, I came to understand there was a word for what I felt, submission, late in my life. I was already married, already seeing what I thought would be the pattern of the rest of my life. I wasn’t unhappy....just unsettled.

Then I got a computer and from that point, the story is a familiar one. I started out prowling the 40something channels on AOL and searching out men online who could “take” me...”control” me. It was all cyber and it wasn’t working. Then I met someone who say in me what I didn’t yet see myself. LonelyDom, now ShadowLrd convinced me to try a different kind of channel...a BDSM channel called #Dungeon. Cymbals crashed, lights exploded. Finally, I knew who and what I was! I was home!

Well, as we all know, life just isn’t that simple and there are no easy answers. As I became more involved in BDSM and D/s in real life as well as online, I was more and more exposed to others in the lifestyle too. Again, though, I find myself unsettled. I hear and read so much about pain (I don’t like it), subspace (i’ve never been there), TPE (I could never live that way) and slavery (I am no one’s slave!).

What’s wrong with me? Could it be that I am not really submissive? Have I been confusing lust and submission? Why do I push and test, try so hard to manipulate if it is myself who desires to be pushed, tested and controlled? Perhaps these questions will never be answered. Neverthelss, I feel a need to try. This is a first attempt...a look back.

As a child I had a fantasy. I don’t know where it came from...books, movies, etc. No matter...wherever it came from, it became a part of me. In my fantasy, I was a slave girl. No, not a Gorean type of slave. I was maybe 10 years old so this was at least some 10 years before the publication of those books. (You thought he invented the idea? Sorry...nope) I wore a silk scarf around my head, alternating as veil and long hair, my own being rather short. I wore one of my mother’s sheets wrapped around me as a gown, making sure it was easy to remove. And sometimes, I wore the scarf around my body, my “slave silks”.

In my fantasy game, I was always “bought” by a “Master” who would keep my in line with a cane...one of those bamboo things you won at a carnival back in the “olden” days. The cane would slap me, push or pull me, or lift up a section of my “gown”. I was “ordered” to dance or serve in some way or another. Often, I was “sold” to another “Master”. The game always ended the same way, though. It ended when I was “taken” which took the form of masturbating with something of the appropriate shape and size.

Was this just the childish game of young girl just discovering her own sexuality? Perhaps so. Except I never outgrew this game. It stayed with me long into adulthood. Well into my 40s it was still the vehicle for masturbation. What does that mean? Was this my submission “yearning to be free”? What’s wrong with me?