It’s a classic trope: a superhero emerges. Bit by the radioactive spider. Arrived from another planet. Awakened one day with previously-unknown powers.
And the hero, knowing the world won’t understand, hides. They mask. They create alteregoes. They relocate. They keep secrets—even from those they love.
They do this to stay safe from the villains. And they do this to stay safe from the world.
Because the world doesn’t understand. Because change is scary. Difference is scary. And they no longer fit.
So they mask. They hide.
And of course: they long to be seen.
It’s a core tension of every hero story. Feeling that they need to hide; wishing someone could see. See them in their entirety. Their totality. Their power and their weakness and their truth.
It’s an apt metaphor for the world I see so many submissive men living in. One where they realize their truth, their power, their special gift is service. Care. A desire not to subjegate or overpower or control, but to rest, to care, to sacrifice.
But in a world that doesn’t understand—that actively punishes you for taking off the mask—an alter-ego is created. A mask. A performance of dominance because the world is so rigid and stupidly narrow in what it expects from men.
And behind that alter-ego, under the mask, in the secret, tender, pulse-jumping places: longing.
To be seen.
To be yourself.
And—importantly in the case of submission—to be valued for who you really are.
To have someone look at you with a glint in their eye and say oh, you. I see you, with your superpower. Your submission. Your care.
My partner has told me often that when he was young, he felt ashamed of those parts of himself. The parts that didn’t want to chase and subjegate and push women. Instead, he wanted to admire and serve and worship.
With his consent, I’ll tell you some of his secrets:
He was ashamed that he didn’t want what all the men around him kept telling him to want.
He felt so strange, so off.
And he was afraid he would always be alone.
That’s the core of it, isn’t it? The fear that when you reveal the secret thing, it means danger, shame, isolation.
But here’s the truth, kitten: in the years we’ve been together, as he sinks deeper into his truth, into my knowledge of it, he keeps expressing one thing–
Relief.
Relief that he is who he is. Relief that he didn’t listen to the men trying to prod him to be someone he wasn’t. Relief that who he is is fucking beautiful and now seen.
Because the truth is that care is a superpower. Admiration for women in a world that keeps telling you not to have it is a superpower. Service is superpower. Submission is superpower.
And it doesn’t actually matter if the whole world understands.
It matters that you do.
That I do.
And the braver you are in showing that part of yourself when you find someone you can trust with your secret, it will matter that they do.