Submission is about a relationship. It's a precious gift that one gives to another. It's little things, like freely choosing to allow a Top (in whatever form that takes) to have the final say in little things in life. It's obeying, even when doing so would cause you discomfort and maybe even pain, because you trust them to make the right decision for you. It is about *KNOWING* that your place is at their side, at their feet, at the end of the leash, or wherever the two of you negotiate, and feeling at home there.
Service is a state of mind that involves gifts for others in the form of acts. It's about taking care of someone, even if it's for money. It's about keeping a smile on your face and helping someone even if they are a royal jerk to you. It's the little things, like listening to what they *REALLY* want, through their actions and body language as well as their words. It's about going that extra mile to make sure the person you are helping is happy.
There can be a lot of overlap. Often, in the D/s scene, you hear of "service-oriented submissives," bottoms who get an emotional charge out of providing service as part of submission. For those who live 24/7, there is *DEFINITELY* overlap.
A perfect example is my current job, working part time overnights at a gas station. I have been there a month and find that it already feels like it's grating on my soul. It commits one of the few mortal sins in my book: I'm both bored and busy at the same time. It's 8 hours of almost solitude and repetitious drudgery, where both thieves and police are a constant worry. Every time someone comes through my line wanting alcohol or tobacco, I squirm like a worm on a hook, wondering if I somehow missed some important little detail on an ID of someone who I shouldn't sell it to. That nervous energy lasts for a few minutes, furtively looking out the window for flashing lights that don't come. (They don't come because, according to my boss and coworkers, if I did sell to the wrong person and was caught, the officer would already be there in line, watching me from undercover.) I also hate dealing with money. I barely like dealing with my own, much less someone else's, and I have about a hundred or so people who are expecting me to give them precise change. One person asked snidely if I was new because I may have rang something up wrong and it cost literally a few cents more than usual. Another came in with $166 in lottery winnings. Split among 7 tickets. That got entered into the system in 2 different ways. And I'm not supposed to have that much money in my drawer. I could easily quit. Just walk off in the morning and not come back. Hell, it's a gas station. It's almost expected at some point.
If I hate it so much, it's part time anyway, and my roommates would help me out if I left, why haven't I quit yet? The answer is submission to my Goddess, pure and simple. I have given her my submission, and she wills that I work, even if it's a crappy-ass job like this. If they pushed me too far, yes, she might approve my telling them where to stuff it. Gods know she's heard enough bitching from me already about it. She knows how much I hate it and has been gently pushing me to push through the exhaustion and loneliness (cause I don't get to see her and my roommates often because of almost literally opposite schedules) to find other work, but until then, she tells me to stay there, and because I love and obey her, I stay.
That's very interesting. You talk about "keeping a smile on your face and helping someone even if they are a royal jerk to you. " David Foster Wallace wrote about it a lot, particularly in his essays:
ReplyDelete>"... the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry; and no place in my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I am on the Nadir: maitre d's, Chief Stewards, Hotel Managers' minions, Cruise Director -- their PS's all come on like switches at my approach. But also back at land at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, on and on. You know this smile: the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia with incomplete zygomatic involvement, the smile that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who's sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald'ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?
>Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?
>And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who has ever bought a pack of gum at a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker's scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman's character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess."
From a footnote(of course) in the titular essay of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."
Because of his privileged position in the essay and in life, he talks about it from the position of a recipient of the smile, although due to the way our consumer culture works, everyone ends up the recipient of it.
I love how you contrast that with genuine submission, where you do what you don't necessarily want to do because you've given your obedience to someone you love and trust.