It’s amazing how much time I spend peeling potatoes, I message my mom, because her first message of the day, always around the time she settles in at home after work and the time I am beginning to prepare dinner, again has found me peeling potatoes, perhaps the third time in a bit over a week “peeling potatoes” has been my answer to “whatcha doing”.
I don’t mind the cooking of (and certainly not the eating of) the potatoes. They’re easy enough to wash and peel and cut and then turn into garlic mashed potatoes or roasted potatoes infused with chicken stock, hearty sides.
I like cooking, and baking, and doing things like that in the kitchen. It hits something in the service slave in me that would rather peel potatoes than use a powdered mashed potato mix, rather cut in butter than buy biscuit dough in a tube, rather set a table than eat on the couch (if I were allowed to sit on the couch).
It takes up a lot of my time and energy: there’s the cooking itself, the increased cleanup after (compared to delivery or something frozen), the meal planning, list making, couponing, shopping, the organization to even get to the part where I’m peeling potatoes.
And much as it’s true that it can be time consuming and energy draining, and the rule about a healthy homemade dinner on the table at six every night (and associated rules) is beyond my control…
I do not consider it to be a particularly submissive act of service.
Technically, it is.
I consider it a service, yes. And I believe that for some, it would be a submissive act of service. But I don’t think it is for me.
I started with the fact that I enjoy cooking and baking and doing things in the kitchen. If all of those rules went away tomorrow, I would still enjoy those things, and unless banned from doing so for some reason, would continue to do them to some extent.
Because of that, I don’t view it as particularly submissive.
I have often seen basically the question, “Is it more submissive to enjoy everything you’re ordered to do, or to dislike those tasks but do them anyway?” I heavily believe in the latter.
The first sounds very nice in theory. If you were so submissive, surely you’d just be thrilled to receive an order, and love acting on it. On the one hand, well, yes. If there is no part of you that finds satisfaction in doing something simply because your M-type wishes it, even if every other part of you hates that task deeply, I think many M/s dynamics might turn bad for you quickly. On the other hand, in a 24/7 [Part 1] [Part 2] dynamic where you cannot say no, I think assuming every part of you will be thrilled at every order is likely unrealistic; there are going to be times you are exhausted or ill or in an emotional place.
I don’t like to dismiss things as simply unrealistic, though, and I have seen many posts on M/s write off as unrealistic what for me are daily realities, so let me address it beyond that.
My other issue with it is this: if you love to do something, is doing it an act of submission, or is it simply doing it? Are you truly submitting to the order, or following it because you have no motive not to, and enjoy doing the task anyway? If you’re told to do something you would do anyway, is it submission, or a convenient line up of intentions?
What about the things you don’t love to do? Things you might even hate. Or perhaps even like or simply don’t mind in general, but you’re tired or stressed or under the weather?
When ordered to do those things, what motivates you? You no longer have the “well I was going to do that anyway” or the “well it’s no trouble” or the “well I enjoy doing it” as motives also present.
At that point, the only motive is submission, and thus, those are the things I view as truly submissive. Exactly what those things are will change on a person to person basis.
Recently I was discussing love languages (the ways we show love, and the ways we want it shown to us) and brought up the concept of novelty.
If you have a friend who is super touchy, always hugging hello and goodbye and generally cuddly, but who rarely says “I love you” or “I’m proud of you” or compliments you, what means more when they do it? If you have another friend who keeps two feet of distance at almost all times, but says “I love you” and compliments you on three things every time you see them, what means more when they do it?
The answers are likely different for each of those people. It is the deviation from their personal norm that is noteworthy and meaningful, not the act itself. A hug from a physically distant friend means a lot, and a hug from a friend who hugs you three times a day might not feel like that anymore unless it has been absent.
I apply the same concept to services and submission. My cooking isn’t particularly submissive because I would do it anyhow. Someone else’s cooking might be extremely submissive because they hate being in the kitchen.
I saw a joke about Shakespeare, something like, “If he writes her one sonnet, he loves her. If he writes her three hundred sonnets, he loves sonnets.”
You get the idea.
I do think the act of doing something you don’t want to do is only particularly submissive if done without protest or complaint or caviling. Otherwise, it is probably just grudgingly tolerating being told what to do.
Such arguments can be a symptom of the “have to” (versus “get to”) mindset.
If you want to submit, the task presented is how you get to do it. You might also have to do it, but if you treat it as a “have to”, you might not get to. Sometimes listening to complaints is not worth delegating a task. Consider how you would feel if you didn’t get to do the task. From a submissive mindset, that will be worse than the feeling of having to do the task. It can be a motivating thought experiment and change how you feel about it and how you present those feelings rather quickly.
If your motivation is that you get to follow an order, be pleasing, be useful, submit, do as you’re told—I think that is much more important as an indicator of submission than if you enjoy the task for the task itself.
Service Slave Secrets 