Grief and Submission

Submitting doesn’t come naturally to me. Offering affection and care to partners has always come from a desire of wanting to make the right decisions for them. To ease them from the weight of feeling unsupported through tasks. To create sensations for them that support their need to release anxiety, let go of control, and feel their body trust someone. I like being that person. Being trusted enough to free someone means the world to me.

But Doms have limited thresholds too.When my cat passed away unexpectedly, I found mine. I couldn’t channel grief into my play the way I could release anxiety by negotiating boundaries with my partners. My anxiety craves control, it wants to hold and instruct and protect.

But my grief? It makes my hands and feet go cold. My arms go limp, my mind grows quiet and disconnected. I lose the ability to stay present and take charge for myself, so how could I possibly take charge for someone else?

In grief, I felt my first ever desire to kneel.To have someone else cup my face for a change and tell me I was going to be okay. For someone else to look after my limbs, open up my shoulders, make the blood reach my fingertips and let my mind go blank. I needed someone to play that role for me.

I needed the instruction, the structure, the guidance. I needed the adrenaline and pain from the blood rushing through my body again, followed by the peace and calm of feeling my mind and body connect with each other again.

There was only one thing that could take me there– Shibari. I had performed it for someone before and watched how it made them feel, and this time I needed someone to do it for me. I asked a friend with experience in Shibari to step in and be my rigger for a session and they agreed.

I told them what I was sitting with, what I wanted to process and feel and we managed each other’s expectations for the session. With my hands behind my back, I sat with my full body weight on my calves and feet. This was already a change from the inactive, slumped and hunched over posture I usually had when I was low. My feet felt warm for the first time in a week.

My rigger took their time and walked around me, as if to assess what shape I would look best in. The first knot went around my wrists and pinned my arms to my lower back. I felt my breathing sharpen in anticipation of what was to come next and felt the voices in my head slowly simmer down as my rigger covered me in more rope.

With every knot, I felt my mind’s awareness shift from the weight of my thoughts to the sensation of rope. I wasn’t in pain, but the gentle bite of rope into my flesh was enough for me to become more and more present in my body. Where domination or partnered sex would have demanded that I stay present and read my sub's state of mind, submission allowed my body to grow passive, limp and heavy-- exactly the way grief made me feel.

My rigger built me a tight and firm chest harness. The parts I could see were beautiful and it felt like I was allowed to cocoon into myself. Cocooning was just what I had craved desperately through all this grief, but could never give myself when I was continuously expected to be a pet parent, a partner, a friend or colleague.

Where was the space to crumble?

The luxury of pressing pause and taking an actual break?

My rigger used the rope to keep my hands open behind my back and the frustration of not being able to ball up my fists kept me from thinking about anything but what my rigger was about to do to me next.

As the harness became more intricate and came closer to its final form, I felt my rigger come closer and closer to me too. There was lesser rope for them to maintain distance from me with, and now, they were just as bound to this scene as I was. They held my neck as they made the final knot. I felt them graze my fingers and I squeezed their hands back. They told me I looked beautiful, kissed my shoulder, kept me from leaning or slouching in any direction and sat directly behind me to help me stay upright.

We stayed this way in complete silence for a few minutes. Their breath began to match my own. Their hands ran down the knots against my body and I felt my weight shift away from my legs as I leaned on them completely.

But that quiet calm was not to last forever. The second half of this state of submission was harder. My blood circulation felt off, some parts of my body were experiencing many more sensations than other parts were, and my breathing changed as my state of submission slowly changed to a flight response.

I wanted to be out of the rope, but I needed to trust that my rigger would untie me in time. I told them how I was feeling and they began to undo the knots. With each undone loop, the desire to escape grew stronger. A weird fatigue kicked in even though all I had done was sit still. When the ropes were completely off, I felt the blood rushing through my entire body and felt my lungs slowly expand and return to a sense of normalcy too.

It wasn't just a desire to be free, it was my body asking to be active and in control again. My rigger stayed close and gently soothed me as I came out of this heightened state of sensation. As I felt the noise of my thoughts slowly resurface, new memories of my grief began to pop up. But I didn’t feel weak, overwhelmed or broken this time. I just… felt. I was present, I was able to hold my pain again, and it felt easier to return to my errands as I thought about the love I had lost.

Maybe submitting isn’t about an inherent state of mind. Maybe we all deserve moments of total control where we are entrusted with making big decisions for ourselves and for others with compassion, and moments where we can let go and believe that someone else will make the right choices for us too.