Romanticising Suffering

Todays Psych session was oddly relevant today, to my BDSM stuff.

We were talking about my Daddy's breakup, and while I thought I'd have some serious conflicts about it, it turns out that my emotions are actually nice and straightforward - I'm sad that my Daddy is sad, and I'm sad that I likely won't be seeing a person I liked very often from this point. But that's about it, really - I have no real conflicts about the whole kibosh.

But it brought up a more interesting question - why I thought there would be more complex emotions involved. He pointed out to me an odd phenomenon which comes up a lot in my mind - the fact that I almost strive for suffering, like it's a good thing.

Now, don't get me wrong - to suffer at the hands of your dominant is not necessarily a bad thing. But I have this view in my head that I must suffer - that I always take the hard road, always do things by the least efficient method, that I don't feel I've accomplished anything if I didn't suffer through it. Really, I've put this romantic spin on suffering, and I think part of that is that the suffering that I've been through in life has lead me to the person I am now, with all it's kindness, compassion, and willingness to listen.

But the fact is, I don't need suffering to learn things. I don't need to suffer through everyday life to learn things in life, I can just, you know, learn stuff by looking around. There's no need to complicate things by pushing myself to inflict pain and woe upon me just because it builds character.