Fragments: Fear
Last night I was thinking about the fact that fear has been a theme throughout my life. It kept me in a state of inertia during my teen years when I was still living at home; I was being harmed but trying to take any sort of action was too risky because if the outcome wasn’t perfectly in my favor then I would be in trouble; I’d be harmed further. The same thing was repeated in my marriage (though ultimately I broke the pattern, in that case; yay for personal growth!). It’s also what stopped me from ever taking the step over the line and actually going into sex work. There are other examples. Is it what stops me from calling my health issues what they are?
Tonight, on the way home from Manuel’s, I was thinking again about all the considerations about whether depression should be called a disability. (I even have a hard time calling it a mental illness – hey, I grew up in the same society as everyone else, and we’ve all internalized the stigma to an extent.) I was having the usual back and forth in my head. I wondered what other people think of people who have mental health issues and identify as disabled. I wondered what my closest friends really think about my struggle with depression and my questions about whether or not it is a disability. I wondered how much it really matters what it’s called and why I’m so preoccupied with that question lately. I wondered if Rusty feels burdened or irritated or manipulated or limited or frustrated or exasperated or thinks I blow shit out of proportion or thinks I make shit up or thinks I do things just to get attention or rolls his eyes at all my ponderings on identity. But maybe that’s just because I roll my eyes at myself, a little (or a lot) and maybe I should stop that. I wondered how much of this comes from internalizing of the societal stigmas and how much is me being a responsible person who thinks of others instead of being too self-absorbed.
I wondered what it would be like if I could wipe the slate clean and not have all that baggage and all those wonderings.
Do other people think about this stuff, in the way I do? I often think about how we can never really know if the way we experience the world is “the norm” or if it’s an exception. We can never really know what it feels like to be someone else. But because I’m fascinated with people and interactions, and because it comes perhaps too easily to me to think of how I would feel/act if I were in a certain situation that someone else is in, I always wonder.
We hear a lot of messages in the media and pop culture about being an over-medicated society; people talk about kids getting ADHD diagnoses and roll their eyes because that’s just a scapegoat, that’s not a real condition; we get angry at people who can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps and shake things off. I admit I feel that way sometimes, when I hear about someone filing for disability, and then their disability turns out to be… PTSD. Anxiety. Depression. ADD. Etc. C’mon if I can force myself through the day certainly other people can too! Plus Americans love to focus on individualism (which, let me be clear, I do not think is a bad thing at all) – why should I subsidize someone else just because they have depression, right? Not on the tax payer’s dime, etc.; all the Libertarian/Republican talking points. And even as I push back and say, that’s spoken as someone who has never dealt with mental illness, sometimes those thoughts go through my head too.
Just hit publish
[I started writing this several hours ago, so now the "Rusty in a meeting" part doesn't make sense. But he was in a meeting when I started it!]
While Rusty is at a meeting and I’m waiting for him at the office after hours since we carpooled to work, I should take this opportunity to blog. And there’s so much I could blog about.
Diva’s post about acceptance, sexuality, and gender identity. I don’t disagree w/ the premise. But a few parts of it felt like little barbs, because I’ve had the “acceptance” line used against me to punish me for not staying with my ex after I found out she was trans. You know: “If you REALLY loved her, you’d stay with her!” Love is about the person not the gender, etc. But what none of them seemed to understand is finding out she was trans was about more than the gender. SO much more. That was part of it, of course, and not a miniscule one; but people reduce it to that and draw this line in the sand when they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Often it came from other trans people, probably projecting their feelings of resentment toward their own exes onto me, and at the same time using pronouns I was not ready to hear. Guess what: sometimes it’s not about you. And that’s why I created the SOTS Forum web site, to talk about these things that nobody else seems to get, to have a place where we didn’t have to constantly explain ourselves and do damage control. And this morning, I was cleaning up a few things on the site, and everything felt painful. I know I’ve neglected that site for a long time, and the message board has been broken for over a year and I recreated it as a half-assed Google group… but it feels too draining to try to maintain it, a lot of the time. I don’t think it’s healthy for me. But then I feel guilty because I feel like I’m leaving other SOs hanging out to dry – people who need the support like I needed it when there was nothing there for me (and so I created the group). The good news, though, is that in the years since 2003 a few other support forums/sites have sprung up. I haven’t really taken a look at them to see what they’re like, though; but at least I know they’re there. Then I start wondering about my responsibilities to myself vs. my responsibilities to others, and what the balance is. My dad used to say I should write a book about my experience, and there isn’t a book out there like it; and indeed I’ve referred to it as the book that scares me. That book would be filling an empty space and maybe helping to make some people feel a little less alone, less like bad people for not loving their trans partner unconditionally (not that that’s really what the situation is, but I’m saying, that’s what people spin it as). But for now, at least, I don’t think writing that book would be healthy for me. And yet I feel so strongly empathic to all the suffering people out there who have nowhere to turn.
I could write about going through a depressive spate – but lately I feel hyper-aware of writing about anything like that, even though I really want to. My mom reads my blog, Twitter, etc., even though we don’t openly talk about it (which is probably fucked up in its own right but I need to focus on one thing at a time), and I’m not going to try to stop her, because it’s the internet and we’re both adults. But I do think she has some responsibility, too, to realize that we’re BOTH adults, and if I need her help or support on something, I’ll tell her. Sometimes we’ll talk on the phone and she’ll preface something with, “I know this might make you mad but…” and inevitably it’s about something she read on my blog, and she’s saying she’s worried. Which I didn’t mind terribly the first few times, but it’s getting to a point where it’s starting to feel less like concern and more like, take care of my need to think you never have ups and downs in your life by silencing yourself on the not-so-great parts. Even though those are the parts I most desperately need to write about.
Then there’s this fucking post which makes my brain want to slide out of my ear – but if I write about that at all, I think I’ll do it in a separate post.
I’ve had this post by Daisy saved in an untitled draft for two months, and the thoughts about blogging and what it means to me and how it feels have been hanging around, mostly unwritten, since that time, too (actually more like three months now). That last round of bullshit in late February changed something for me. I actually have mentioned this briefly before. But speaking of being hyper-aware, I’m now hyper-aware of writing about ANY part of my life because someone might pounce on it and attack me for my “privilege,” (never mind I spend half my time calling out ACTUAL privilege), twist my words to fit their own agenda, use me as a convenient punching bag, etc. All that kind of stuff had been in the back of my mind for years – it comes w/ the territory of being a woman blogger, particularly a feminist blogger – but somehow that last crap made it feel even more stark. I’m trying to push it down and push it away and just press on like I always have before, but it feels way harder this time. I was reading back through some of my archives recently, looking at some of the bullshit I was handed by commenters before I either banned them or they got bored and stopped coming around, and to look at it objectively I wonder how I stood it. And how can people be so awful that they think it’s okay to talk to another human being that way? But then, that’s MALE PRIVILEGE for you.
I’m getting off track here. I want to write more about class and my experiences, but I feel like there’s no good way to do it without someone using me as an example for something. I hate the feeling of being analyzed and picked apart under a microscope by people who don’t know the half of it. You don’t know my life. So who the fuck do you think you are?
I think maybe part of it, for some people (the ones I’m at least willing to give the benefit of the doubt – a list which, admittedly, is getting shorter), is that they have a hard time understanding differences in blogs. This is a similar thing to what I mentioned when Toby interviewed me, and I’ve experienced it plenty from that direction too – where people who use social media for business/marketing purposes simply can’t conceive of the fact that there are bloggers out there who have different goals, non-business-focused goals, and that those goals are just as valid as theirs. Likewise, people who use blogging primarily for activism/advocacy can have a hard time differentiating the personal and the political. Yes, sometimes they mesh, and yes, sometimes I write posts of that nature. But my blog has never had one “theme” for me to feel boxed into (I started blogging before there was much of a concept of themed blogs) and sometimes my posts are just PERSONAL. As in, there is nothing here to debate or question. This is my truth. It is not a political statement aside from the fact that I think any woman speaking her truth is an act of personal revolution. But when I talk about my experiences with class growing up, I’m not talking about CLASS in the big-picture, societal, analytical way. I’m sharing something with you, the readers, and if you get something out of it, that’s awesome. I do hope that sometimes my personal posts will help someone out there feel less alone, or whatever. But if you don’t get anything out of it, or you want to project all over it? Just leave it alone, because it’s not that kind of post. Some things are not up for debate.
This is the same kind of thing I mean when I said, for example, reproductive justice is not an “issue” to “debate.” This is MY LIFE. You don’t get to “debate” about it, and fuck you for thinking of it as a dehumanized issue; THAT is one of the hallmarks of privilege.
But back to blogging and how I feel about it… Basically there’s a lot of goddamn drama in the feminist blogosphere and I’m sick of it. I barely read any feminist blogs anymore because I don’t have the energy for all the bullshit. We talked about this a little at Sex 2.0 during the Naked on the Internet panel… Dacia said something like, “I think we’ve all been in the position of getting righteous in a comment thread on Feministing and then saying, ‘Oh, fuck this!‘”
But I will always call myself a feminist. I know that the drama and bullshit is with the feminist blogosphere (and really just part of it – a loud part, but not the whole), not feminism itself. I am continually baffled by people who conflate the two, and I really don’t have much patience for it.
I don’t have a lot of patience in general (except when I do – but that’s another tangent) and I’m fucking DONE trying to explain privilege, feminism, class, etc. I should also be done w/ trying to appease people who are going to complain about what I say no matter what I say. But I just hate that w/ some topics there doesn’t seem to be a good way to write about it that doesn’t make me sound like someone whose views I disagree w/ equally.
I know what I really need to do is what I’m constantly telling myself: write like no one is reading. That is what blogging is about, for me. But it’s not always easy. And of course I always keep in mind issues of where my life intersects w/ other people’s lives, and that even though there are things I might want to talk about, they might not want their life made public in that same way. But that’s a whole other can of worms and not what I’m rambling about here. That can of worms, I actually feel pretty equipped to deal with and I can happily discuss the ins and outs of it all day long!
I guess in a way this very post is indicative of me trying to take back my own blog… half of it doesn’t make sense, I’m talking in circles, making sense to no one but myself, and it’s fucking LONG. Yay!
I had a few other things on my “could write about” list but they’ve flown out of my head at the moment. So I suppose I’ll do what I thought I’d be doing a few hours ago: just hit publish!
7-year retrospective
I should have posted this last Thursday, on the date of my actual 7th blog birthday, but this is close enough! Here’s a retrospective of where I was…
Seven years ago: About to graduate from college w/ my BA in linguistics. Married, living in a pretty cool townhouse in Athens (bigger than my mom’s house in square footage!) with an approx. 2 ft. x 8 ft. “yard” out back, where I’d planted some shrubs and flowers and made the place look generally nicer than the exterior of most college students’ dwellings. Total Mac geek obsessed w/ old obscure hardware.
Six years ago: About to wrap up the intense, life-changing, really wonderful experience that was the MIT Program (which includes giving a presentation at UPS headquarters in Atlanta), and graduate w/ a degree that people don’t understand: “Yes, the degree is actually called MIT. No, it’s not an MS in IT. It’s a Master of Internet Technology. That’s a real, separate degree.” And speaking of life-changing experiences, living for four months w/ the secret that my husband is trans – and wondering what the hell I’m going to do, while trying to hold things together on the surface for the benefit of people in my everyday interactions (only Jenny and Niki knew at this point). Applying for a job at a technology non-profit in Dallas, Texas.
Five years ago: Newly transplanted to Atlanta after seven months in Texas. I would hesitate to say going there was a mistake, because I learned a lot and I don’t think I would be the same otherwise. (Insert cheesy platitude about every experience shaping who you are… blah blah.) Ultimately it was a positive, because I learned what I didn’t want, and it made the things I did want come into much sharper focus. Working at The Job (also known occasionally herein as PHS, and in a few scant places, by its real name). Still married legally but separated in most senses of the word, though she was staying w/ me after moving from Athens until she found her own apartment in May. A therapist I was seeing at the time gave me crap about us sharing the same bed and “how that looks,” and I promptly fired her (the therapist). Blog archives for April 2004 are lost to the ether due to a hard drive failure. :P
Four years ago: Been in Atlanta and working at The Job for a little over a year. Hanging out w/ Brent, Ryan, and Sam at Houlihan’s several nights a week after work, then walking home in the almost-dusk light. Recently met some local bloggers IRL; I’m starting to make connections in this town. Officially divorced now, for seven months. This place feels like home (and I selfishly wish Jenny and Niki would move here). Reconnected w/ Dacia and Dipika thanks to blogging. Occasionally fucking a not-so-closeted Republican, but getting increasingly fed up w/ the situation; got my eye on a local political blogger who, by casual appearances, you might not think is my “type.” Trying to hatch a plan to get in his pants.
Three years ago: Rusty and I have been an item for almost a year (the plan worked!). Moved out of my first Atlanta apartment a month prior, even though I didn’t really want to; but they wouldn’t budge on raising the rent, and anyway, it had been taken over by a new, shitty management company. Moved to the Ice House Lofts, into an apartment at the other end of the hall from Rusty. :) We call it our halfway house to living together. Working at Large Media Organization, after departing The Job in October ‘05. My dad had a stroke a month earlier and things are kind of rough in that area. Official launch of Georgia Podcast Network is imminent.
Two years ago: Surprise – back at The Job! This time as a contractor, and it’s all for the best. Coming back was one of the best “career-related” decisions I’ve made, and I told my boss this time I’m never leaving. Total site redesign and launch of new platform complete, and I raked up major overtime bucks with which I dug myself slightly out of debt (finally paid off that car I bought seven years earlier!). Rusty and I have moved in together in an ill-fated apartment. PodCamp Atlanta has come and gone and I’m exhausted and swear I’ll never organize another conference – and yet, I dream up the idea of Sex 2.0 and decide to try to make it really happen. In honor of my 5th blog birthday I’ve moved my blog off my homegrown PHP/MySQL system and onto WordPress. Due to peer pressure and the inevitability of “anything I hate on, I will be a fanatic about in 6 months to a year,” I’ve started using Twitter. I graduate from level 3 pole dancing and get my purple garter.
One year ago: Sex 2.0 really happened OMFG!! And it was a huge success w/ a full week of post-orgasmic bliss! But this time, I’m standing firm on my promise to myself to never organize another conference. What else? Back to being a permanent full-time employee at The Job. Performed in the second PoleLaTeaz student showcase. Rusty and I are living together back in Decatur and have recently brought Puff and Stuff to live with us. We meet with a super cool financial planner and lay out a plan for getting out of debt, saving money, and eventually buying a house together.
There’s more – much more. There’s no way I can accurately condense seven years into a “highlight reel” of a post. But, I felt like I should put something up, just to reflect on how things change over the course of [x] number of years, and how keeping a record of your life – whether a blog, a personal journal, or any other medium – is, I believe, extremely valuable.
Maybe later I’ll go back and edit this post w/ hyperlinks to relevant posts about key events!
Update: Post has been updated w/ a million links!
Items not to blog(?)
Here are some things I’ve been nervous to blog about because I’m afraid people will get pissed off, and I don’t want to deal with it. So what am I doing? Blogging them with self-awareness and defenses up!
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1. Whenever Rusty and I get married (no specific date set; it’s an “eventually” thing) we’re not going to have rings. We don’t need a material token to signify the depth of our relationship. I actually surprised myself with how strongly I feel about this.
Why I’m afraid people will get pissed if I blog this: They’ll think I’m judging them for their choice to have wedding rings.
Fact: The first time I got married, I had a ring. Two rings, actually – an engagement ring and a wedding ring. I still have them both, somewhere. The wedding ring is pretty cool – it has a Celtic pattern on it. The engagement ring had a tiny, barely visible diamond – all we could afford at the time. At some point the diamond randomly popped off of the ring while I was on the bus. I saved the diamond but never had it put back in the ring. Now I feel bad about having a diamond ring in the first place because I know about “blood diamonds” (thanks to Ren).
Also, I changed my name the first time I got married but won’t this time – and neither time did the decision have anything to do with traditional notions of marriage, gender, other crap. I have my reasons and, duh, other people have theirs. A statement of what works for me is not a judgment on others.
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2. I really, really do not like dogs.
Why I’m afraid people will get pissed if I blog this: Some people like dogs. Some people like dogs a lot.
Fact: This really is not one I should worry about. Geez. I don’t like dogs. If somebody’s going to get seriously pissed at me about that, do I really want to have anything to do with them?
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3. Different people have different purposes/goals in blogging. Not everyone blogs to try to affect change, influence the political process, break news stories, etc. Changing people’s minds about issues can be a nice side effect but it might not be the primary purpose.
Why I’m afraid people will get pissed if I blog this: Because (as usual) I won’t find exactly the right words for what I want to say. I’ll end up contradicting myself, too, because I’ll want to play devil’s advocate to my own positions – which I think is good, but can make for pretty disjointed reading/understanding.
Fact: My blog’s primary purpose has always been for me. But also, I don’t think that a blog’s purpose being for the blogger, and that blog having a larger impact, are mutually exclusive options.
Another fact: That sentence was a grammatical mess!
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I should know by now to just blog and not worry about it. :P
Update: I thought of another one!
4. Sometimes I worry that I’m becoming dependent on Ambien to sleep at night.
Why I’m afraid people will get pissed if I blog this: I’m afraid people will come out of the woodwork to lecture me about the evils of artificial medicine and Big Pharma. And I just really do not want to deal with that self-congratulatory superiority.
Fact: My doctor said Ambien is not addictive and is actually one of the safest medications. I should stop worrying and be thankful it’s helping me.
Review: Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Yesterday Rusty and I went to see the new Kevin Smith movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I usually don’t write movie reviews but I wanted to post some of my thoughts about this one. So here is the requisite VERY LARGE SPOILER ALERT.
SPOILER WARNING!!! IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THIS MOVIE, AND PLAN TO, AND CARE ABOUT SPOILERS – DON’T READ ON!
For extra safety I’m also putting it “after the jump” for those of you reading the actual blog instead of the RSS feed.
(more…)
Protected: Transitions
“Write the book that scares you”
At WAM!, in the book proposals session, Courtney E. Martin said, “Write the book that scares you. Write the book that you needed to read.” When I heard that, my heart leapt to my throat. Her words have been resonating in my head ever since.
My comments at the time, in my liveblog, were:
Eeeek… that’s why I started the SOTS Forum site… but of course, I recently shut it down (though I plan to restart it as a Google group; a lot of that was because I broke it and couldn’t figure out how to fix it). But also, it just started feeling too detrimental to be hanging out in that place that I had passed. Maybe that sounds selfish… but that is how I felt.
Maybe one day I will feel like writing that book. I don’t know.
One of the other panelists in that session (don’t remember who, and apparently I didn’t liveblog it) said she firmly believed that everyone in the session has a great book in them. I don’t doubt that I do. It’s the getting it out part that’s terrifying. And not just because of this part (another quote from my liveblog), though that’s certainly part of it – and a passable excuse, if nothing else:
A lot of people talk a lot about writing a book, but actually doing it is a huge sacrifice of a lot of other activities. You have to spend a lot of time just sitting in a chair, writing.
And, last relevant liveblog quote for now:
Courtney: “The book that’s inside of you may be the book you don’t want to write.” It may be the thing that feels too painful, or pisses you off, or is too real or too personal.
She wrote a book about body image. She says she never wanted to write it, because dealing w/ body image issues had been so painful for her.
I can relate… more than a few people have said I should write a book about significant others of transgender people. And I don’t disagree… I mean, I *could* write a good book about it, and from a perspective that hasn’t been done thus far. But I just don’t know if I want to. That stuff, even though I’m “over it” in some ways, in other ways I just want to leave in the past and not think about.
Okay, now I think I’ve sufficiently set this thing up.
As mentioned above, I started the SOTS Forum site in December 2003, and ran the support forum there until earlier this year. Part of the reason for shutting down the forum was that I did something stupid one night while mucking around with FTP, shell access, and god knows what else, and basically deleted the entire database (or at least the message board front-end interface; I still don’t really know). But partly, just like the line about sitting in a chair and writing, that was a convenient excuse. Don’t get me wrong – it’s very true, I don’t have the time, necessary technical prowess in this particular area, nor the disposable income to pay someone what they would deserve in order to fix my fuck-up. But I’ll be honest: I had been thinking of shutting down the board for a while.
I didn’t really want to shut it down, wholesale. I wanted to pass it onto someone else who would take over as admin, webmistress, etc. Except nobody was stepping up. And I had been distancing myself from the board for a long time: posting only occasionally, and mainly just taking care of behind-the-scenes issues like combating spam. The reason – and even though I know, logically, it’s not “selfish,” it still feels that way and I feel guilty – was, to use a phrase previously used by a cisgendered* partner of a FTM in California who was a lifesaver of support for me in the first few days following my discovery: “It was getting too detrimental to wallow in other people’s pain.”
I was glad the board was there – hell, I created it specifically because of the glaring lack of support resources for SOs at the time when I needed it – but every time a new member would join and describe her (it was, 99% of the time, her) pain and agony, it was like I was reliving all of that misery, yet again.
I created the board because nothing like it existed. I created it to be the support forum I needed. And now, should I “write the book that [I] needed to read”?
Let’s face it, that book still does not exist. First of all, there are only a handful of books out there by SOs of trans people at all (some are mentioned here, and even with that list, I was reaching); and the ones that do exist are mainly of the “my partner transitioned but I stayed with them and it was tough and here’s how we did it” variety.
Which is great, and those books serve a purpose, and speak to the people who need it. But what I always got from those books’ existence, and more significantly the lack of books by the partners who didn’t stay?
Well, it was the same thing I got from the online support forums “for transsexuals and their partners” (the “and their partners” glommed on as a superficially-inclusive afterthought):
“If you really loved her**, you’d stay with her.”
In so many words, and not. I got it both ways.
And, too:
“Think about how she must be feeling! It’s so much worse for her!”
This is when I truly learned the importance of safe spaces.
The board – especially the “SOs only” area, visible only to those to whom I granted access – was sacrosanct. There was no accusatory language, no projecting, no trying to turn someone’s life falling apart into a teachable moment. There was no judgment. If you decided not to stay with your transitioning partner, it wasn’t because you didn’t love them enough, or you were transphobic (that was the accusation that always galled me the most), or you weren’t willing to stick it out through hard times (Religious Right anti-divorce rhetoric, anyone?) – it was because you were doing what was right for you. What a concept.
I wish the board existed, now, in book form. I want the details spelled out – the process of going through the five stages of grief (because in many ways, it is like mourning a death), trying to keep up external appearances while your world crumbles from the inside, the self-doubt and self-loathing and self-hatred and second-guessing and all the rest of it. I want the affirmation spelled out in all caps, underlined, italicized, bold:
You are not a bad person for not staying in a relationship with your trans partner!!!
I want that book to exist. I know the ability to write it is in me. Part of me wants to, but part of me feels resentful that someone else hasn’t already done it.
And, anyway: I think I’m still too scared.
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* We never used that term on the board; I guess because no one knew it?
** A big no-no: using female pronouns when I’M NOT READY TO HEAR THEM. Hello, my life crisis is NOT political; do NOT make it about YOU.
What it’s like
Straight privilege… this is it.
Very moving post up at Shakesville, written by Portly Dyke:
I doubt that most straight, cisgendered people think about, or notice, how frequently they touch their partner in public in ways that are not necessarily “sexual” (in addition to kissing, cuddling, and the odd bum-squeeze) — ie. holding hands, walking with an arm around the waist, smoothing the other’s hair back out of their eyes — nor do I think that most straight, cisgendered people are probably aware of the fact that when I touch my partner in public, it’s nearly always a considered act.
I don’t obsess about this — as in — it doesn’t eat up my days and nights — and I’m probably about as “out” as a queer can be in this country — but every single time I take my partner’s hand on the street, or toss my arm over her shoulder or around her waist, hug her goodbye or hello, I do a little, tiny “security sweep”.
I notice who is around, and where I am, and what the energy feels like — before I touch her in public. It’s a tiny amount of attention, most often, but it’s there.
I just noticed recently that in an unknown situation that seems “sort of” safe, (like walking in a crowded mall) I’m more likely to curl her arm through mine than to hold her hand — which may seem counter-intuitive, since arm-in-arm actually affords much closer body contact — but after I thought about this, I realized that walking “arm-in-arm” is something that I see straight girl-friends do more often than holding hands (after they’re 12, anyway). In considering this choice, I also realized that in many situations, I’m happy to give any possible bigots in an uncertain setting the option of assuming that we’re just a couple of straight girls.
Which sorta sucks.
I recognize this as the internalized homophobia that it is, but I can’t deny that it’s present in me. The fact is, that I stop, look, and listen before I demonstrate physical affection toward my beloved in nearly every public setting that is not clearly “queer safe”.
A must-read.
(Yes, I’m aware I’m speaking in sentence fragments today.)
Telling my story
I finally got around to watching last week’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy – the one with the MtF patient who’s getting SRS. And as I said in an email to Jenny and Niki, I feel, just… weird.
I couldn’t think of a more specific word, because I’m having a hard time describing this feeling even to myself.
Basically, the show brought up a lot of feelings that I haven’t experienced in a (relatively) long time. I was kind of expecting that it would effect me in some way, but… well, you never really know how something will “trigger” you, as they say, right?
I mean… okay, first of all, yes, I’m glad to see a mainstream TV show portraying a transgendered character as something other than a freak or a mockery. That is very, very good. But the side camera shots of the wife, looking confused and in pain… well, let’s just say I indentified all too much. And I felt like they didn’t give enough time to her side of it. -Not that I should expect them to. It’s a fucking primetime soap opera, not an indepth exploration of actual people’s lives. It’s just… I don’t know, I guess I get defensive about this stuff. And at the end, where she’s all, “I came back because Donna is my husband and my best friend, despite all the pain” – well, I felt angry at that point. As if it’s so noble to stick around despite all the pain and betrayal. Look, it may work for some people, but I hate the way those of us who choose to take care of ourselves rather than live the rest of our lives as a martyr get painted as if we don’t care or we’re heartless or selfish. Which by the way – YES, I AM selfish! I take care of myself! What is wrong with that?? If I can’t take care of myself how the hell can I be a true partner to anyone else??
I guess I just didn’t expect to have all these feelings drudged up tonight… not to this extent anyway. Now I have this ball of emotion in my stomach and I don’t know what to do with it. This is why I don’t visit the support forum I started for partners of TG folks very much anymore. Sometimes I feel guilty for not commenting more, but the community has grown to a point where it’s pretty much self-sustaining. Sometimes I feel like I should step in more than I do, as the administrator, but it’s just… I can’t take the daily involvment in other people’s pain. I can’t watch, daily, as new people come in, wives who’ve just found out about their husband being TG and have been pushed aboard that lovely emotional rollercoaster I was pushed onto almost 4 years ago. (Hard to believe it’s been that long.)
Recently one of my closest friends asked me why I didn’t blog about all of this back when it was happening. I just… couldn’t. I didn’t even tell my parents about it until almost a year later. I didn’t tell anyone (except my therapist, Jenny, and Niki). I kept it all inside me, even though I knew that wasn’t good. But how do you talk about this?? Oh and I talked to people online too, and that was a huge help… and I started my support forum… but still. No, I did not blog about it. I don’t know what I would’ve said. I don’t know how I could’ve written about it and not self-censored. Not to mention the fact that I’m sure I would’ve been guilt-tripped about it by my ex for “outing” him (now her), which I get, I mean, yes, it’s her life too, and I blog under my real name, but still… argh.
I did write some in my now-sorely-neglected paper journal. Those first few nights, I basically stayed locked in the bedroom, unable to eat or sleep, just scrawling in my journal and bawling. That journal is packed away in a box in the closet now, and I haven’t looked at it since. Honestly I’m afraid to. And this all makes me realize, that I don’t think I’m ready to tell my story yet. See, a while ago my dad had suggested that I write a book about my experience. And I think it’s a great idea – for one thing, there aren’t any books out there written by the partner of a TG person. (The only ones that I know of that come close are written by wives of crossdressers – not the same thing.) And certainly not a partner who didn’t do “the noble thing” and stay in the relationship. I think one day I will write this book; I think it’s important. But not yet. I need more time.
I just hope that when the time comes when I do decide to write it, that I remember everything! Already I can tell that I have blocked some of it out. I guess I’ll have to crack open the journal. But even that won’t tell the whole story. Oh, but I definitely remember that night, New Year’s Eve, when it all hit me in the face like a sack of bricks and my world fell apart. I literally felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me. And I called Niki and bawled on the phone to her. I had no idea how my life could go on.
But like I was saying, I think that I need more time and more space before I write a book, tell my story. I need to make sure I have the right distance and perspective. I want to be able to tell the whole story, you know? And I want to stress to partners that it’s okay not to stay. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t mean you’re insensitive or “selfish” (in a bad way) or that you’re transphobic or that you don’t love the person or all the other bullshit that gets said about us. It’s okay to take care of yourself – and you have a right to be angry. Yes, yes, I get it, the TG person has to be true to themselves, but you know what, do the “selfish” thing and for one minute, let this not be about THEM. It’s about you. And you were betrayed. And personally, I couldn’t live with that for the rest of my life.
Anyway. Just rambling, venting. I don’t blame you if you didn’t read this whole thing! I feel weird tonight – but it’s been good to have a night to myself where I just take it easy. 12-hour work days start on Monday, for about 2 weeks. Argh. And tomorrow I need to get some freelance work done, I guess. No rest for the weary…
And, one other thing: clearly, this has been an exercise in pushing my boundaries of self-censorship. Because I don’t like self-censoring.
Just some rambling thoughts about trust and sharing
I saw this line at Random Bird’s place. It is fucking beautiful in its simplicity and to-the-pointness.
If I love you, I will love you more for everything you were before me.
YES.
And I read that, and I thought, “Whoa. That is what I’ve been struggling to convey for I don’t know how long now. And look, she’s gone and done it perfectly with one simple sentence.” I am awed.
I’ve read it a thousand times: the accepted-by-default platitudes about, “Don’t talk about previous relationships, and BY GOD whatever you do, ESPECIALLY don’t talk about previous sex!! If you do, reality as we know it may come crashing down in a ball of fire and jealousy!! And there is NOTHING WORSE than jealousy!!”
You can find it everywhere, this perception. Yes, from the goddamn mainstream pop-culture media, but also from people with good intentions. Like zuzu at Feministe. And I wrote about that post back when it first went up, but fell short of accurately getting across what I meant. Oh, and I mentioned this whole concept here, too; and that turned into a bit of a blow-up at another blog.
To reiterate my point wrt zuzu’s post, in particular: I completely agree that specific numbers are meaningless (not to mention heteronormative and male-centered) and should never be a determining factor in a relationship, used against a person as a judgment about his/her character, etc. But I’m not talking about “the numbers game” here. I’m talking about the way that any discussion of past experiences – and not just sex, even, but anything that involves a former partner; and especially any admission of love for that person – are popularly deemed “off-limits.”
And I’m left there thinking, “Wellllll… wait. No. That’s not how I feel.”
And then, of course, back when I first started to identify that the way I felt didn’t match the popular portrayal: “What’s wrong with me?”
Cue hours upon hours of introspection! ‘Cause that’s how I roll. So then I came to, “Well, that’s bullshit. It’s all socially constructed! It’s caused by people’s discomfort with sexuality and it perpetuates that discomfort! Oh and not to mention, people’s undealt-with emotional baggage about fear of abandonment and whatever else.” -You know, or something close to that, in my 17-year-old mind.
I got negative reinforcement from other people, though, when I tried to reach out and put my feelings to the test. Questions were met with, basically: “What’s wrong with you?” I internalized a lot of that, and to a certain extent some of it’s still there, and I’m still struggling to shake it. Which is why I can get a bit defensive about it, even now.
I still feel like I can’t articulate this properly. Really, Random Bird’s entire post sums it up better, by way of illustration rather than trying to write a whole philosophical thing.
So this is how I feel, period. And I won’t pretend otherwise. (Fortunately, in my awesome relationship now, I know I don’t have to.)
On a larger scale, not just related to sex: I think another part of it is, I recognize that every experience a person has had contributes to who they are today. And if I love the person they are today… fill in the blanks.
Oh, and also? I hate secrets. I always have. And even moreso since the debacle of the Ending Of My Marriage (which, if you know about that, you’ll understand). To my mind, to love someone is to share things with them that you might be hesitant to share with others.1 It’s a function of trust.
1 And no this doesn’t mean having no privacy, or no space of one’s own. That’s something completely different, and not cool.