Just Tell Me What the Fuck To Do

For an average of fifteen hours a day, five or more days a week, I make decisions. Some are small, a minor adjustment here, a slight schedule change there. Some are not so small--lots of prioritizing and readjusting to reality, lots of money, time, and people.

Decisions create a ripple affect that rolls through upwards of forty people. A decision made in another department three months ago impacts me tomorrow. A decision made by me impacts revenue streams a month from now.
People come to me with a hundred tiny questions a day, and a few really big issues.

Decisions. Choices. Making the call. Over and over again. Day in and day out. Long days. Long weeks. Hours that fly by too fast. Just trying to keep the ship floating, keep the people rowing in tandem, decide when to lower the sails, who most needs the limited amount of life jackets on any given day.

Decisions. Choices. All day. Every day.

Sometimes I want to crawl out of my own skin. The skin I wear so well, the skin that is but is not...Mine. His. Me. Us.

I am. The queen bee. The regulatory interpreter. The manager of a single department with her fingers in every other department.

Sometimes I just need to be told what the fuck to do.

Not at work. Because I largely do it my way, which led to an unpleasant conversation with my boss regarding the chain of command the other day where I walked out pretty pissed off. But if you want me to make all these decisions day in and day out every day, I refuse to have them all dissected, questioned, and challenged.
I don't always make the right call. Doing so is a statistical impossibility. But I make them, and my ratio of success is fairly high.

Decisions. Choices. All day. Every day.

Sometimes I want to crawl out of my own skin. The skin I wear so well, the skin that is but is not...Mine. His. Me. Us.

He likes it, having the queen bee bow down, fall to her knees at his feet, beg to be free.

When I'm with him I just want to be told what the fuck to do. Regardless of whether or not I have the least amount of desire to do it.

He asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner the other night. I looked at him and said, "Just tell me what the fuck to do". And he did. We went out to dinner.

The world, our world, it's a heavy heavy globe.

For him, peace comes in those moments when his control is total and absolute.
For me, peace comes in those moments without freedom, without choice, when I have no control or voice.

Mythical Creatures

There's a lot of talking in my department. It's a pretty monotonous job with what is likely to be a fairly high turnover rate, so if conversation makes it more bearable and they're doing what needs to get done, more power to them and their inappropriate conversations.

The majority of people seem to think that D/s relationships begin and end at kink. In some seedy room In some other city. With people who just like to play. Real people who live it are a myth like unicorns or Pandora (I'm actually pretty sure that she's not a myth and follows me around opening up her stupid box weekly, but that's a different story).

I just laugh and keep on working. Okay, most of the time. Occasionally something that shouldn't just forces its way out of my mouth, but after all, living D/s is a myth like unicorns or Pandora, so nobody pays it any mind.

The truth is, most people see D/s through the filter of 50 Shades of unrealistic. And that's okay. But it's still a bit funny to me--the crew thinks I'm the queen bee. They see that the majority of people, the ones who have been around long enough to know how things work, step fairly carefully when it comes to me. I'm picky, and I'm a big fan of "do it my way or get the fuck out". They see that, in my department, Alpha defers to me. I do ask his opinions, but if I disagree, things get done my way.

As was pointed out to me the other day by another manager, I am "The big dogs wife". One might think that comes with lots of perks, but it does not. If anything, it has come with a hell of a lot of "she's just in that position because of who she's married to". Yea...Ironically, nobody wants my job. Can't imagine why not!

But I'm getting distracted, as usual...

The truth is, it can be amazingly difficult to see beyond our own constructs of what we perceive reality to be and who we think the people around us really are.

To Be a Real Rabbit

I didn't like The Velveteen Rabbit much as a kid. I thought it was sad. But it's an interesting concept--the idea that love makes you real.

I work. He works. We work together, but are never really together. The "us" we created is something we miss. Who we used to be as individuals has faded into what we have become, and we miss them too.

Self lies in the shadows
a well read book, tattered around the edges
long since touched with broken hands
a tale etched into our bones
memorized by our souls
a small burning fire in the storm of cold
worn pages waiting patiently
long since read
but written permanently into our minds
like ink on the skin
a story
a memory
a feeling
a being
real.

We tend to live within the constructs we create, whatever version of reality we choose to believe or find ourselves living. This is considerably more difficult when there is pain. Cold. Love. Blood. Death. Birth. Because some things are beyond the box, beyond the construct, beyond the containment that we so carefully immerse ourselves in on a daily basis.

Maybe we make magic real.
Maybe magic makes us real.
Maybe love and pain and death and birth and cold are magic.
Maybe belief makes magic real.
Maybe, like the silly little velveteen rabbit, the belief that love makes us real is our true magic.

I have realized that I have no interest in a life without the magic of us.
In a life where the excess of mental anguish comes without the magic of real pain.
In a life where no one dares to be different or let others see that they bleed.

We lay together late at night
after he has sated his need
taken his fill
clawed at my soul
torn into my body like a starving wolf without a pack
after all is forgotten except for pain, blood falling slowly in the rain of tears, no longer ruled by fears, and what was far becomes once again near.
When once again all that we know to be true is us
in love and surrender to the tender brutality of his control.

Life isn't about bleeding, it's about what we bleed for.
It's not about the freezing cold in your bones, it's about taking one more step into the snow and surrendering to the storm.
It's about love that makes us real
pain that makes us feel
about dying after truly living.

Maybe it was his belief that the boy's love made him real which made that silly little velveteen rabbit real. Maybe it really was the boy's love which made him real.
In the end, does it actually matter? After all, that silly tattered little velveteen rabbit was real in his own story.

I Am Who I Am...

One of my bosses is really pissing me off. I almost quit. But then Alpha asked me to stay. And those stupid glorious kids with all their dreams of changing the world and pioneering something great keep working their asses off.
So I stay.
The thing is...The boss wants me to be something I'm not. He's trying to fit me into one of the boxes he has been able to apply to everyone else he has ever dealt with.
But I don't. I'm not. And I'm far too tired for any new forms of evolution beyond trying desperately not to fall off the very steep learning curve.

In marketing and business, there's always a hook. People have currency--money, success, fame, etc. I don't care about those things. And having a hook in everyone is very important to him. So he tries different approaches with me, and each one is successively worse than the one before. It went from ego stroking (also not good currency for me) to the power play of reminding me of my place in the food chain and putting me squarely in it. Followed with some irritating ego stroking. It was not well received.

I have never made and claims about being driven, about being a business woman, about being successful, about wanting to pioneer new pathways in any industry.
I said, yes--I'm good at this. Yes you need someone to do it. Sure, I'll do it to the best of my ability, but I'm trying to figure this shit out as I go.

I am who I am. Regardless of what you make or who you think you own, who you know or what successes you have had.
I have more respect for the people I run than I do for the random millionaire or politician who trots through--he's sure as hell not working until 10:00 at night with me, and some of these kids will crawl through the trenches with me until they can't even see straight. Because respect is earned.

I have changed a lot over the course of the last year. But I will not compromise who I am for money or recognition, or other people.
I don't quit because Alpha asks me to stay. Because I can't abandon my crew. Because I help to ensure that those kids have a job to come back to every day. Because Alpha asks me to stay.

But I would rather be fired than become, or pretend to become, something I am not. Because I am who I am, and in the end? That is all any of us really gets to say that we have.

Really? I just want to go home and sleep for a hundred years. Home home, not this house we live in home. Home where the stars whisper in your ears and the moon caresses your skin. Where the trees know your name and none of the people are ever trying to be the same.

It has taken me a ridiculously long time to define my currency.
My currency is love and loyalty. They cannot be bought or sold, they cannot be quantified by numbers on a spreadsheet, or defined only by measurable output.
It is there when Alpha asks me to give this thing one more genuine shot. It is there with the girl who puts her head down, never complaining, and works with me until long after the sun goes down. It is in the kid running out the door after a ten hour shift on his way to his second job. It is there when my crew tells me I should go home and get some sleep--not because they want to go home early, but because they know that after their ten hours in a day, I'm already in fourteen.

Why Are You Mine?

It was an inopportune moment for a quiz. Well, for me anyways--he seemed to think that the timing was quite appropriate.
I hate answering questions in the middle of sex. I mean, I'm no good at it during a whipping or other such event, but it doesn't kick me out of my head-space the same as it does during sex.

Why are you mine?

It was a valid question. It is a valid question.

I flailed. If it was a graded test I would have bombed it with flying colors.

The truth, the obvious reason, was there floating on the edges, so close that I couldn't see it.

Because I need to be.

Of course, this becomes 21 questions terribly fast and "Why are you mine?" would morph into "Why do you need to be mine?"

Because of who you are, because of who I am, because of who we are. Because of what we need to be.

That' a slippery slope--each and every one of those answers could easily lead to another question.

Once upon a time, the answer might have been because I didn't know how to be anything else. I have recently learned how to be something else, and I'm not loving it.
That woman who sets a crew down in front of a whiteboard and walks them through compliant logging, that woman who spends hours on inventory, who people seem to think has answers, who spends hours of overtime every week trying to get out the door and back home (I'm an employers dream for salaried employees. Not so great for me).
I have learned to be the woman who runs around plugging the holes of need and compliance in a desperate attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of a multi-million dollar business, on a salary that, while good, is laughable given the position. And I watch him do the same.

I have learned how to be something else.
I know how to be something else. I am still unsure of what that something is, but it is there and it is all-consuming, leaves no room for breathing, no space for simply being.

Simply put, the answer to, "Why are you mine?" is that being his is what makes me happy. The one thing in this world that makes me complete.

To Be Great...

I want to be great again.
With him. I want us to be great.

I no longer care about being great at what we do--after more than a month of 60 plus hour weeks with no end in sight, I'll settle for mere survival.

We're okay. But when you know what it is to be truly mind-blowingly great, "okay" is a poor substitute.

I am not who I was. If you asked our employees, all of them would say they think I sleep at work. Some might even claim that I never existed outside of that place--that I was created in those rooms, and am as much a part of the facility as the walls themselves.

Maybe I am, but I was not. And I want to be great again.

People are the pulse of any facility, and you can feel them as they go about their daily duties.
Survival.
I am part of the heartbeat which keeps the pulse going, part of the brain which coordinates all of the moving parts, molecules of blood in the veins through which the pulse is felt. Every day, the goal is survival.

Perhaps one day that crazy organism will be great. Perhaps it will not.

Yet still...

With him. I want us to be great. Him and I.

Toast and the Bathroom

With my face pressed into the bathroom floor I was reminded of the importance of my abandoned beliefs in housekeeping. The defense I offered myself that I had worked 60 hours this week just didn't seem to satisfy me like it should have, as I attempted to contemplate the layers of dust on the baseboards and the hair dye I had obviously missed on the bottom of the sink, accompanied clearly by an unforgivably wide streak of toothpaste.
It was going to be the mother of all orgasms. Right there on the floor of our decidedly dirty bathroom. Until a child wandered up to the bedroom door asking for toast.
Toast.
I may have sunk my teeth into Alpha's shoulder and muttered something about wanting to be one of those species that eat their young.
Maybe.
But it was still good. And hot. And kind of gross because really, I do need to clean the bathroom. But maybe that was part of the appeal and it fed the part of me that thrives on humiliation. Just a little bit.