I know that the life of a slave is not an easy life in reality. Yet I will admit something which might seem a little strange but which I believe is true of most slaves. This is something I’ve learned while writing books. We always make our heroes confront various problems. The general rule, if we wish to write a good story, is that when the going gets tough, it must get tougher. It is funny, but exactly the same is true of a slave. Life sometimes seems without meaning, chaotic and absurd to the point of cruelty. I often feel I have really no other way to give it any meaning beyond this thing, which makes life even more difficult, if someone sees it as an external observer. But it does not really become more difficult, not in a fundamental way, except for practical matters. At least now I know what I am dealing with. And now it has meaning. I think that it all has to do with control. This is the greatest control I can have over my life. The self-destructive life of a slave without a Master is an attempt on her part to regain a form of control. To invent a conceptual framework. It is as if she were saying, look, I cannot do much, but at least I can hurt me really well.
Take for example the problem I have with my menses. I become very irritable just before I get my period. I do not suffer much, but I suffer enough so as to “lose” it (that is the story of my life in a nutshell). And how did Master deal with it? Instead of saying, “poor girl, lie down, have a rest and I will take care of you and everything will be fine”, which would have made matters worse, because I would have bitten his hand in ingratitude, he set a new rule that would make the situation harder for me and would make me hurt more. But now this difficulty would not be uncontrollable. It would not be a pain imposed by nature, over which I had no control. It had been imposed by Master and I would have followed it voluntarily. This immediately put the matter under my control. And it is a great relief. It is something I can handle. Still, an external observer would have thought of it as cruelty.