u/luverlucy

A sad vent/rambling: I am no longer a sub, or that’s what it feels like. All of the tasks and things I do don’t feel like submissive acts but acts to hold on to something that I use to tether myself to some semblance that is D/s, a part of myself I miss but can’t seem to identify with. If I stopped doing the things that are “submissive”, the little tethers that hold what feels like the illusion of D/s together, I don’t feel like there would be a fight, or a conversation, the last scraps of a formal D/s identity would just kind of fade away. I don’t know what would wake them, or wake us, or what level of necromancy would pull me upwards. I’ve become trapped in the grief of numerous things, or at least it feels like grieving when I think of my submissive self. And, it feels like grief trying to wade through my PhD, my career. It’s like I’m grieving the idea of who I am and what it takes, or maybe it’s grieving the perception of myself, I don’t know. Maybe this part isn’t grief, maybe it’s just realizing how sad day to day life is, how I don’t know how to find meaning in my work anymore, or how to find meaning in what I do every day or how I act or even how to enjoy a modicum of life. Maybe it’s just the existential dread of forever marching forward, or the fact that I feel as though I’ve lost my spark, my whimsy, the goofy part of myself that made day to day life interesting.
I’ve become just another person, just another woman, quietly fading into existence. Maybe it’s because I’ve become just another woman who has lost the ability to have her own identity altogether, or another woman who is so exhausted she doesn’t even find joy in sex, who doesn’t understand the point of physical intimacy, especially if it doesn’t make me feel like the light in the darkness anymore. Maybe that’s the grief I’m feeling. I’m having an identity crisis on multiple fronts, but maybe it’s because I’ve lost what feels like my magic, the stuff that always made me “light up a room” or “cackle the loudest”. It feels like it’s been fading, and maybe that’s just age, but I’ve always prided myself on my whimsy, on my knack to keep my head up, to find the good or at least the little glimmer. I know part of it is stress, the stress of everything, the stress that everyone is feeling in our modern beep-boop world to some degree. But, it’s not just about stress, it’s also about my inner perception, and the connections that feel strained with others in my life. But, maybe the grief is too large right now.
My grief has made me misunderstand what connection means to me, what it fulfills in my inner mind. I am the crone, but I’m not any wiser, I’m half way to Boba Yaga, but I have lost all semblance of what it means to follow my own instincts, if any of them are inherently mine to begin with. I feel like “just another” trapped in a sea of physical nothingness where I both feel like I am and am perceived as nothing, or at least nothing special. If we are all special, no one is special, right? It feels like grief to be nothing, even though others find it eyeopening, or freeing. It’s the argument that if nothing means anything, you can do whatever you want and create your own meaning? I sometimes find that thought freeing, but I mostly find it annoying. What’s the point in finding meaning if there just isn’t any, or what’s the point of making your life built around joy or fun or whatever adjective? The goal is to live a life free of pain, to have overall a fulfilled life, to give to others, but why?! Why do anything? We are just eternally lonely and trapped inside our selves without anyone ever actually understanding us. I guess maybe this is the “death” cycle before a rebirth? It’s a transitional point, sure, but how long do transitions have to be.
Can you transition if you feel devoid of certain truths or evolutionary underpinnings? Our meager attempts to touch others with work that somehow lives past us, something that is so liminal it never fully closes the loneliness bounds? I feel like I’ve been transitioning between things; thoughts, feelings, physical and academic spaces, for years. But, the more I delve into my inner self, the more I evolve and transition through or try to figure out this identity crisis, the more I lose certain parts of my identity, or at minimum— the more I gnaw at the pieces of myself that have been patched together. And, how can I gnaw on the remnants if some are only thin tethers? I don’t know how vast the abyss is, I don’t know the cavern that sits between the puzzle of myself I’m building and where the pieces sit that I can pull from. Is the pile of pieces reachable again? The tethers just thin enough to spot? Maybe that’s part of this grief. The continual loss of self as growing, the little puzzle pieces that seem to float too far, the things of our identity that are no longer at arms length. I know that some of that is healthy, there are certain pieces that aren’t meant to go together, that aren’t healthy for us to keep. But, what about all the other pieces we just don’t have time to find, the ones that cross the cavern and jump from the table to under the couch, findable but you have to know where to look and you have to have time to look! The continual adding of pieces as you grow feels like it would be enough to fill those lost gaps, but it doesn’t.
All the pieces I feel like I’ve placed on my puzzle aren’t as vibrant, or aren’t quite in the right place. The whimsy is gone and I don’t know where to find it, or maybe it’s as simple as not looking in the right location. But, why look, why pathetically get onto the ground and search for the little scraps that might fill the void when the void doesn’t have meaning? I am trying to remember, if not mentally, but physically, what the tethers attach to, what the pieces are, what my actions can be, even if with nominal meaning.
The futility between intellectually believing against and physically demanding to have an existence that mirrors something close to meaning or is as close to what I can currently muster of a fulfilled life feels absurd, yet here I am, kneeling, scrounging, submitting to the search.

Positive affirmation/bimbo hypno?