Subversed

I make decisions all day long, and I am good at it. The people I work with would never guess the rest of it.

What I want most, at the end of the day, is for somebody else to decide.

Someone in our Discord asked this a couple of weeks ago, in almost exactly those words: “Is anyone else a sub in the bedroom but a confident, cocky, dominant person socially?”

I answered before I had finished reading it: “Me, me, me, me.”

So did others.

She told a story in that thread about how everyone who meets her assumes she is the Dominant one. Her partner is the quieter of the two until he is comfortable, so when people look at them they imagine it goes the other way around, that she is the Dominant in that relationship. At a party, someone asked her straight out if she was a Dom, and she yelled NO across the room, and then had to explain herself to everyone who turned around.

Here is my theory on what I think happens in these situations.

The people I know who want to hand over control are almost always the people carrying the most of it. The manager, the one who organizes the whole family, the friend everybody calls when something has gone wrong, the person who has never once in their life been able to say “I don’t know, you pick.”

When I am with Rob and he takes control in the bedroom, my head can finally go quiet. That is the closest I can get to describing it. All day there is this low hum of deciding and weighing and planning and holding the thing together, and when I put it down, the hum stops.

That rest is real. It is most of what I am there for.

I think we get read wrong because people hear submissive and picture a personality. Someone soft spoken. Someone without strong opinions. Then they meet a sub who runs a department and they cannot make sense of it.

Neither one is an act.

There is a demand hidden in all of this, and it lands on the person taking it. If I give you the decisions and then have to keep checking on you, I have not put anything down. I am just managing you as well as everything else. The rest only works when the person holding it holds it properly, and that is a real job, not a favor.

Which leaves an obvious question hanging. What about the people who have nobody to hand it to?

The solo folks using SubTasks are doing something I find extraordinary. They build the structure anyway, and then they hand the control over to that structure.

One person wrote that they do all of this on their own, no Dom, and that most of their tasks are self improving ones, to do things that are good for them in the long run. Then they said: “since I struggle with low self esteem, this is my way of taking some sort of control.” And I just love that quote!

I think that is the same move I have been describing this whole time. You decide once, on a day when you are thinking clearly and can see yourself kindly, and then you put the deciding somewhere outside your own head, where the mean voice cannot reach it. Later, that version of you does not get a vote. Later you just have to do the task.

Someone else said the solo version was exciting, but that a partner who set the terms would be amazing. And that is true as well, wanting a person is not a failure of self sufficiency, and solo is not a smaller version of that. But the structure is doing real work in the meantime, and that work counts.

And in our Discord, someone new asked whether everyone there had a Dominant. The first person to answer said no, they did not have one. Then they pointed out that there are plenty of people on the server who will help you set your own thing up.

No Dom of their own, and still the first one to help somebody else build theirs.

Of course, none of what I am saying constitutes a new rule and it is not a personality test. Plenty of subs are not running anything out in the world, never have been, and what they get from a dynamic is every bit as real and none of my business to explain. This is one pattern. It happens to be mine, and it turned out to be a lot of yours.

The reason I wanted to write about this is that it is hard to say it out loud without it sounding like a confession. It is not admitting you are not coping, it is the opposite of that. It’s knowing exactly how much you carry, and knowing you need somewhere to set it down. It is how competence survives these crazy adult lives.

So tell me which one you are. The one who carries control all week and puts it down on Fridays. The one who never wanted to carry it in the first place. The one who built the whole structure alone and hands control over to it. Or something I haven’t thought of at all.

Hit reply, or find us on Reddit, Discord, FetLife or social. With your permission we would love to run some of these in a future issue, because those are the stories worth sharing here.

Meghan

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Subversed is the newsletter from SubTasks  ·  subtasksapp.com

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