Do You Want to Die Happy?

I’d rather die right.

That really does debar me from 24/7 M/s except perhaps as an experiment.

Is there a way for me to say that knowing whatever truths I can - sadly all too few - is important to me without sounding self-preening or banal? It isn’t as if I have customers asking for titles like Self-Delusion for Dummies.

My own sense of the individual psychology of BDSM is that most of it begins when we are so young we can never reach back to the roots. But our later childhood and early youth shape how we will be able to express - in my case - the desire for surrender.

For a long time I had no problem with the authority adults had over me. Little Richard was a frightfully dutiful boy. By and by my eyes opened to the shallowness of most of mankind, including my parents and teachers. Often I was being instructed to act and believe ways that didn’t match any truth that I could see.

Becoming who I could be meant escaping their authority. Not that I ever became your typical high school rebel, bonded with a peer group of similarly disaffiliated people or attached myself to simple slogans like “question authority.” All that seemed other forms of falsity.

My parents saw little of this. I no more talked to them about these things than I would try to describe a rainbow to a blind man. And for a long time my habitually respectful nature left my exterior responses unchanging.

It was a bit rougher with my teachers. They would ask questions and with a bland ignorance that probably looked like insane gall to them I’d give them honest replies. But courteously. So they sent the weird little misanthrope to the school counselors. The latter I blandly informed of their inadequacy in coping with me (the quiet egomania of my adolescence startles me in retrospect). Eventually they all just left the school weirdo alone.

I came to feel that one of the goals of my life was to do my best to be free of any restraint of my speech, opinions or behavior. Normal enough, though I probably brought an unusual level of self-consciousness to it as if it were a special project.

Of course reality has required concessions. We’re all tangled in a social and economic web. You learn to bite your tongue and lyingly nod your head. Happily a bland expression is taken by so many as agreement.

I’m not getting any D/s content in this am I? Men like me stumble and fall in their need to offer all the homage they can. And their fear it is not enough.

As my life has worked out I’ve been, not quite master of my fate but achieved more control than most people ever have.

While normally very polite sometimes my plain speaking has enraged people. I’d swear it is easier to anger people by speaking an opinion clearly and quietly than telling them to go to Hell.

And there may have never been a lover that I haven’t wounded at least once with my tongue. Affairs of the heart do require verbal compromises: kind silences, blunted wordings.

My life hasn’t left me really fit for the casting off of the will, humble acceptance that a few of you have achieved. There are a few of you I marvel as some do in the presence of ascetics. There are times when self-abnegation is no shame but a gift. Certainly those when it leaves people fulfilled and true to themselves.

I envy you without jealousy. Delight in reading of your play. Respect you for the reverence you offer your lover.

For me I suspect that on some level there may always be negotiation within myself in expressing submission and coping with everything else that goes on in my mind. To both die happy - if only in the sense of la petite morte - and being “right.”

How many dominant persons would be willing or even interested in coping with a man so encumbered with this sort of complexity?

Related: Paradox of Obedience and Paradox of Submission