conflicted compliance

I have this rule that for the better part of a year I hated. It was among the first given to me from my former Sir and upon receiving it I had a strong immediate reaction. It's not just that I didn't like what was being asked of me...I felt that it undermined my femininity and obeying it ran contrary to my personal feelings of what is appropriate in societal terms. I understand that my Sir had his reasons for the rule and he did share them with me when I asked him about them. Learning his reasons didn't make it any easier for me to accept his will but I resolved to do my best to accept and remain obedient in light of my personal feelings. It was my first real struggle in my submission, one I still haven’t resolved completely.

Ma'am made a lot of changes after Sir S left us and it had been my hope that this rule would be amended or eliminated. It wasn't. I'm fairly sure that Ma'am's reasons for keeping it in place are not the same as Sir S's but I've never asked her about it. It is her will and that should be enough for me to find acceptance and obedience. And yet it has not been enough to erase my personal struggle or the internal rebellion that seemed to continually flare. My obedience of this rule has always been more grudging and less complaisant and, although I didn't realize it, it came with a high personal cost.

Not long ago, as I began to gain a deeper understanding of obedience, I started to realize the price I was paying. My inability to accept Ma'am's will with an appropriate attitude, to be able to lay aside my conflicting personal feelings on the matter, and the resulting internal rebellion I nurtured had undermined my confidence in service and built a portion of my self esteem into a fragile house of cards. I had made personal decisions that I would have preferred not to in order to avoid what I felt were the worst implications of my rule until one of these decisions proved a major miscalculation – the outcome was something significantly less than I’d hoped for and the self esteem I hadn’t realized was so fragile came crashing down around me.

It was only after the cards fell and I spent a terrible week trying in vain to rebuild that I realized my own culpability. Until this point, it was easy to blame the rule I hated for whittling down my sense of femininity and self esteem. But it was even easier to overlook the fact that I never once divulged my personal feelings or my struggle and rebellion to my Ma’am. I knew that in order to move forward I needed to find a way to come to terms with my rule. I needed to find the silver lining - something to hold onto that would give me some measure of peace with my obedience. Once found, I would be able to obey with a more appropriate manner and attitude and would eliminate some of my struggle. But first I needed to know why I’d never found a way to speak up about how following this rule made me feel.

The reason was easy enough to identify when I finally went looking for it – following this rule made me feel something else that I’d never quite consciously realized. It made me feel Ma’am’s control - something I’d craved and felt predominantly uncertain of. There was nowhere else in our D/s relationship, nothing else that Ma’am asked or expected of me, that made me feel her control as keenly as I did when facing this terrible rule on a daily basis. I realized that even when that control chafed, it put me in touch with and helped to deepen my sense of submission. There it was – the silver lining.

Almost a year after it was first given to me, I was able to find a much needed measure of peace with Rule 3. I still don’t like the rule but my struggle and feelings of rebellion have greatly diminished since I’ve identified a positive aspect to its existence. I’ve been able to change my attitude from grudging obedience into a more complaisant obedience that is more respectful of my Ma’am and her will - which has shown me glimmers of the contentment and joy that obedience can bring. Someday, I hope to be able to say that my struggle is gone entirely...right now, though, I am content with what I have overcome, what I have learned, and how I have improved the manner of my obedience for my Ma’am.

the loophole

Last week I discovered that in following my rules it is possible to follow the letter of the law and yet not the spirit of it. The possibility that I could be technically in compliance and but not actually compliant had never occurred to me before. It's gotten me to thinking and, just maybe, understanding a thing or two about my service a little better.

I have inspection on Tuesday evenings and so on Monday, as I do every week, I made a quick check of my manicure. My nails looked fine to me and I decided that there was no need to touch them up or re-do them. But Tuesday morning, in better light, I realized that they looked a little worse for wear. They weren't going to pass inspection and I've had one warning about them before. I wasn't exactly eager to learn Ma'am's reaction to a repeat offense during inspection.

When it came time for lunch, I ran out to the drug store and purchased nail polish remover and a bottle of quick dry polish. An hour really isn't enough time for a proper manicure but I needed to make due. Off went the old polish and on went the new. I used the fan in my car to help dry them but when I looked them over again I discovered in horror that the polish had dried streaky. My nails looked terrible and there was no time to start again.

Enter a quandary.

My nails were polished – which is exactly what my rule states. And yet it didn't make sense that just having them polished was all that there was to the rule. It would seem that the spirit of the rule, the reason behind it, is that Ma'am wants my nails to look pretty for her. And a bad manicure is definitely not pretty. So, yes, I was technically in compliance to the wording of my rule but probably not in compliance to its true meaning.

What to do? If I was right, and I was pretty sure that I was, I was most certainly in error and had something to confess when I got home. But I wasn't quite sure what...was I assuming too much? Is it even possible to be both in and out of compliance at the same time? Have I been missing a key part of understanding what it means to be obedient all of this time or was I being too philosophical?

The difficult and uncomfortable decision: should I leave my nails as they were (which was obedient and technically compliant) or remove the new polish and leave my nails bare (which was prettier and compliant to the spirit of my rule)? Which would be the lesser of two evils – which would Ma'am be more pleased with?

I considered my options for the rest of the afternoon. I would have to commit to a decision and see it through but I didn't like either choice. Any way you added it up the equation included something that Ma'am wouldn't like. Trying to determine the level of her displeasure and repercussion served no purpose. It wouldn't change the fact that my manicure wasn't what it should be, wasn't what Ma'am wanted.

There were a couple of other options... I could exploit the loophole if it came down to it. I could argue that my rule doesn't specify anything about them being nicely polished. I could fein ignorance - pretend I hadn't noticed how bad they looked and wait for her to point it out. If the light was the same as it had been the evening before it was entirely possible that Ma'am might not notice how bad they looked. These options just didn't feel right to me – they're dishonest and designed to try to get me out of trouble.

In the end, I decided to leave my nails as they were and come clean about the state I considered them to be in. There was, after all, a chance that my assumption about the meaning of my rule was incorrect and, even if it wasn't, bare nails seemed dangerously close to willful disobedience. I would discuss with Ma'am what full compliance of this rule meant and be prepared for whatever discipline she saw fit without invoking a loophole defense. It was the only decision I could make and it was the right one.

In the future, to better serve and please my Ma'am, I think I need to be less literal and take a fuller, more dimensional approach in my thinking. I must look past the surface and understand not only what is stated but also what is meant. I don't believe it's enough to simply follow the stated rules – to be fully obedient I must also understand the meaning and spirit of what she asks of me and take direction not only from what is indicated but also by what is meant.

introspection and mentorship

It's no secret – I'm a fairly introspective girl. I'm not sure if it's natural progression – that I've reached a point where I'm not constantly mulling over every facet of what I'm doing wrong or that submission has changed my focus to be less inward – but lately I've noticed a more broad-based bend to my ponderings. It seems that more often than not these days when I have the time to write I'm mulling over more general topics or concepts related to service and submission, filling pages in trying to answer questions that inevitably spawn other questions or trying to figure out how I feel about something and not really getting anywhere.

Most of what I've learned so far has been the result of my own inner examinations. It's been a difficult path on occasion and there have been so many times that I've felt adrift, as if I'm stumbling around in the dark as I try to figure out how to be and how to behave. I've had my “a-ha” moments and epiphanies but many of these revelations have been hard won and left me feeling stupid for not sooner grasping something that later seems so obvious or basic a tenet.

I've begun to wonder if maybe I would benefit from a mentor. I have mixed thoughts about mentoring – my Ma'am's experience with it proved to be more of an example of how not to mentor someone and left her largely feeling frustrated and exasperated. I'm also not sure how my having a mentor would mesh with or affect my current service situation. Or, even, how to go about finding a suitable mentor...

I'd love to hear from those who've had some experience with mentorship...anyone have any thoughts on the topic?