It's hard being a woman. Much of the work world is still a man's world. Through the years we learn how to find our way through this world, at least we do if we want to succeed. Lessons I have learned while working include:
- Pull your weight - respect is earned.
- Say what you need to say - nobody wants your passive aggressive bullshit.
- Don't be like that woman who screws around with a guy in the office (both married to other people of course) and gets caught snogging in the stairwell or fucking in a car in the parking lot.
- Don't tolerate harassment, but understand that sometimes a compliment is just a compliment, or maybe an awkward guy trying to start a conversation.
- Don't beat yourself up over your mistakes, just own them, fix what you can, and move on - men don't hang on to that shit so why should we?
- It's great that mental health issues are more accepted now, but be honest with yourself - if you need a mental health day every other week, it doesn't matter if you have approved leave, you're not getting promoted because the powers that be will think you're unreliable even if your issues have nothing to do with work.
- Oh god, period time! In a woman's world of work you'd get to take a day off every month, but it's not that way. Though many women would prefer to stay in bed, pop a muscle relaxer, curl up around your heating pad and pray for the grim reaper to end your miserable goddamn existence so your suffering will stop, you can't do that. You get up, drag your most bloat friendly pair of work pants out of the closet and stock your purse with tampons. Then instead of the muscle relaxer you down a handful of ibuprofen with a swig of diet soda to hopefully take the edge off, and then eat some toast on the way in to work to try to stave off the stomach ache you're gonna have later from too much ibuprofen. And you hope that no one fucks with you at work because you have all the charm and patience of a rabid pterodactyl, and if anyone pisses you off you'll glare at them with a beady dinosaur eye before you snap their head off with your razor sharp beak, and then you have to hide a body.
Women learn all these things, and hopefully it serves us well. Day after day, year after year we push through and these lessons and others are like rocks in an invisible backpack weighing us down. We eventually get used to the weight. We may even thrive and forget that the pack is still there until we find D/s and realize why it feels so good to submit. We get to take off that pack and set it down!!
I love submitting to my Master, E. It's such a relief to let go of all the crap, all the lessons learned about coping in a man's world and just let him be the man. I love being just a woman with him. I can be silly, I can be sexy, I can be girly, I can be sweet and helpful - I can be all the things that I can't be in the professional world. And I'm appreciated for those things.
While it takes a good Dom to make a woman comfortable enough to submit, it is a privilege for a woman to find that one, and be able to set her burden down.
