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The strangeness of memory

  • Posted on June 29, 2012 at 11:27 pm

What was it I said?

Yesterday does not exist, tomorrow does not exist. There is only now.
For yesterday is just our interpretations and tomorrow is just our imaginings.

Something like that. And we all know that memories are not photographic, but filtered by meaning, so that we remember in a way tempered by significance and emotion, and that false memories can be evoked. This is why memories can sometimes be echoes: memories of memories. Do I really remember lying alone in a pram? The braiding around the hood? Or do I remember recalling this, albeit at a very early age? And it is why memories can still hurt for a lifetime. We remember the pain with the memory, and never reinterpret it. Maybe the real purpose of memory is not to have a nice mental photo album or video diary, but to retain significance as an advantage for survival. So a bird can return to its nest after migration, and an eel or a salmon its spawning ground, or a penguin find its partner after a season at sea. If so, memory is complex, involving not just the obvious cues such as visual and olfactory, but other things, such as the subtle patterns of magnetic fields. The bee’s waggle dance that directs its fellows to nectar is not exactly a satnav, but much more subtle. Indeed there are possible clues of awareness of quantum fields (read here if you want to know the mathematical trail).

So what we store, how and where, when we create memories is very interesting indeed, and anything but a simple recording of events.

Memory and time

One of the strange effects I have felt in recent months is my own memories of self, but whether it demonstrates the reliability of memory or its unreliability, I’m really not sure. Someone came up to me this week, said a very bright ‘hello!’ and shook my hand, and launched into conversation. Which was fine, except they hadn’t see me as a woman before, hadn’t been told, and showed no flicker of strangeness, despite not having seen each other for a few years. OK, I am recognisable, to the extent that I got away with a new passport photo without needing a new witness to it. The eyes, nose, mouth alignments are, of course exactly as they were. No, I wasn’t disappointed not to be complimented on my new look (and certainly not to get the usual ‘goodness, you are brave!’). Really it reminded me of my own memories of self.

Just a few months ago I was still presenting a male persona at least half of the time, and I wrote about the odd experience one day, looking at myself in the usual trousers and shirt, and thinking: ‘why am I wearing someone else’s clothes?’ That was a point at which cross-dressing meant wearing male clothes. Now, it seems my memories, like a sponge, are soaking back my feminine awareness and resolution, such that it is actually hard to recall what it felt like to ‘be a man’. It is as if I have always been this, so I expect my memories to be the memories of a woman. Certainly there is no memory of it being very different, only that the struggle has gone from those memories. Everything that felt wrong, now has meaning and a place to be. Everything that I remember of me now comes from me, not from the façade I lived behind. The little ways I was ‘different’, the inner intentions I always had, as well as the yearnings and sense of displacement or not belonging, have become rooted in my female self where they always belonged, and it is the male persona that is becoming detached. My past is becoming my past, not to change it, but to own it properly, as if it never really belonged to ‘him’ – who no longer has a purpose, served well in the circumstances, but now has long retired, remaining only in memory as a fact.

Significance

I rather like this rediscovery of self. It explains so much and takes away the crisis of becoming something new in front of everyone I know. It also means that I don’t disown my past, I don’t feel guilty, and there is no severance of self. Of course this isn’t how everyone else sees it. For the caterpillar lovers, this butterfly is strange indeed, and will be a curiosity for a while to come. It is new, previously unknown. And so they don’t know that it was me all along, beneath the male façade, that this was who was living, loving, giving, working, playing the music and painting the days. And which is why my deepest grief is that, having put matters right, having arrived at this understanding, this realisation of where I have always been coming from – I am met with lack of recognition, and all my access codes are denied, sometimes in the places that matter most.

All my memories are mine (ever bought a new computer and transferred all your creative writing, and felt the sense of relief at it all being there?). I really was there! But I was there, and now I know who I was all along. That is something I guess you can never quite know in the same way, and so to some, I am different and ‘he’ was another person. But I have the easier explanation, in which no-one dies. When Copernicus asserted that the Earth went around the Sun, he simply made the explanation, the mathematics, very easy. You can do the maths based on geocentricity, but it’s awfully complex stuff! I’m glad to leave the complexity behind, but I recognise Copernicus had a hard time of it too.

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Tapestry

  • Posted on June 19, 2012 at 10:03 am

For something we see so little of, the tapestry is a rich source of imagery and metaphor. Once the rich man’s insulating wallpaper, now we tend to see them in dark rooms, faded or disintegrating, protected from the light, their rich colours gone. And yet ‘all part of life’s rich tapestry’ and ideas of crimson threads through the picture remind us that life is a painstaking picture full of many juxtapositions, characters, journeys.

It’s there in the continuity of the stitches, the first use of the pixel or picture element, long predating pointillism too. I hope I have a long canvas left still to be stitched, but what I am seeing so far is a lot of completed journey, a band of work in progress, and a need for a lot more thread. Crimson or otherwise. In graphic design we talk of ‘graduated tints’ where one colour blends into another seamlessly, and I love the way Dru Marland uses natural skies at dawn or dusk as such backgrounds to her illustrations. You have to stand back from old tapestries a bit to see it, but they did their best with the treads they had.

My tapestry has such a graduated tint in its background. We could stereotype it from blue to pink I guess, but that only helps explain what I mean rather than being the colours I would choose. But I see it as a dawn sky rather than a dusk, as light arriving rather than fading, and the continuous whole has a dawning meaning too, a realisation of how the picture is.

Tapestries of course were very expensive, and therefore they got reused, sometimes in parts if the whole was damaged. So you can come across captured scenes in smaller, rebordered tapestries, that are just a glimpse of the whole picture, and which can be very misleading! I imagine the rescued parts made a pleasing picture, and sometimes it might have been a way of losing the bit that was never liked, or keeping the bit that was special.

To some people, it appears I have two tapestries. One that was cut short and a new one started, using ideas of the first, but so different it is a piece on its own. Some people never saw the beginning part in all its freshness, and it is a dim and incomprehensible picture. So the question as always is: wherein lies the continuity? New friends would be very surprised to have the early work interpreted, but I know they wouldn’t ask it to be cut away. I don’t disown it either – it is my story (his story if you want the pun). Some so liked the old, before the dawning light that they would rather cut it off and keep it, as a story ended. And as I stitch away, pixel by pixel, some watch with fascination as the picture emerges, while others ‘rather liked his early work – shame about the new, I really wouldn’t have that on my wall!’

But my tapestry, incomplete as it is, has a beauty of its own, as a unique journey, maybe as my insulation against the winds of life, here in this blog as an illustration for others to see and appreciate (or otherwise). And it is one complete whole. The figure in the top left corner, the character in each vignette (woops! an anachronism for tapestry!) is me. If you cut away the bit you liked you are making a statement about tapestries and how they may be used or reused, but you are also destroying my picture, making my integrity impossible to see or hold.

I like Carol King and have listened to her since my teens. I remember the words of her classic ‘Tapestry’ very well (in full here) including:

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the everchanging view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

I’m not saying it’s my story, I just like it! And for those who click to the lyrics, or rememebr – I have not turned into a toad.

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First Fathers’ Day

  • Posted on June 17, 2012 at 7:58 am
This poem celebrates those who find a way to be both trans* and a parent. It is based on something I heard last year, which was lovely. This year is my first such day, and I hope one day I might read it as my own.

I couldn’t find a card
so I drew this flower instead
and wondered if we should
switch to Mothers’ Day.

No. You’re Dad, this is yours and
I never knew your breasts.
Which I still can’t understand
but I do like your dress.

Shall we go out then?
It’s your day, not any day
and I still love you and nothing
changes me from daughter.

Let’s just remember I’m your girl.
Let’s play Daughter’s Day to celebrate
the one who fathered, nurtured, cared
and loved me into who I am.

That’s what we are.
What we always shall be.
Here, I bought you this necklace.
It’s very pretty, don’t you think?

2012 © Andie Davidson

See also:

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Quite ordinary really

  • Posted on June 7, 2012 at 7:01 am

Being normal is such a strange thing. We all think we’re normal until someone defines it in a way that leaves us ever so slightly outside, and we’re tempted to shift a bit to nudge ourselves in. And then life throws something at you that makes you so very not normal in the way most others describe, and all that goes out the window. It’s a bit like severe stress reactions; people behave in very strange ways out of self preservation, fear, trauma, and yet all they are doing is reacting very normally to very abnormal situations. Or one day you finally wake up to the fact that the gender everyone else has given you all your life isn’t right, and you start living differently. So many people think it just isn’t normal, because they have known you as something else for a long time.

And then they sit down with you, share a coffee and talk about all the things you always have talked about, and they realise that you are still the same. You’ve adjusted your appearance, made some changes and planned a few more. A few weeks ago they would have been talking to a man (apparently) and now they’re talking to a woman, who is offering the same responses, thoughtfulness and kindnesses, and, well – it’s still you, and you are so comfortable and natural, even more peaceful and happy in yourself. You have become normal. A bit unusual in making this kind of change perhaps, but normal.

It’s this ordinariness that strikes many trans* people too. We don’t choose our clothes for any reason other than that they feel the most appropriate. We don’t set about a very protracted and in places very painful and uncomfortable, expensive and difficult journey for fun. We do it because it makes us ordinary and normal in the way that feels most right. There’s a lot to learn of course, and this takes us places we have never been before. It shoves us up against some things we may rather not know about. We rub shoulders with people who have quite different issues and get confused with fetishists and thought of as practitioners of weird and strange sexual practices. Some think we are to be feared and present a threat to children – or just normality. And all we feel as we find ourselves, is ordinary.

To begin with, coming out and telling people this extraordinary thing, that we are going to live the rest of our lives differently gendered from before, is very challenging. Whether workplaces, social environments, close family or wherever, most people haven’t a clue what it’s all about, so there are adjustments we want to steer and get right. And that certainly makes life complicated. Some will never accept ‘our story’ and we have to accept that. We lose people and we gain people, some lose jobs, homes and everything. And if we survive that, and our personal emotional response to the challenges, we chase the surf over the reef and find ourselves in a wonderful lagoon. The storms are past and we survey our rigging and assess the damage.

But it is calm, because we are in the only place we can be safe and at rest. Some of the crew may have jumped ship, but now it’s time for the carpenters to fix things, the cooks to get breakfast, the navigator to get the maps out, and you, the captain to take charge. It is ordinary. It is normal. There are losses, but the ship is where it is meant to be.

I have had people remark to me how natural I am like this (and long before I finally let go fully, too). I have had trans* people ask why they feel so ordinary going to work, doing a job, living an ordinary life, after all the trauma of gender change. I guess it is because the old ideas of normality were only other people’s guesses anyway, and breaking them simply showed how false they really were. Why did it all have to be such a big deal? Well, some people just wanted us the way we were and don’t want us the way we are now. We have maybe upset too many applecarts – or they were into our apples and now we’re offering pears. I can’t help that, but it is very galling when your fruit is good but it’s just the wrong shape. But in the end all we were after was being ordinary and normal in an unusual way.

It isn’t easy of course; we get very hurt in the process. We learn things most people never have to think about, and I suppose we feel a bit ‘special’ or unique – not that anyone would choose this path given the choice of the easier, unquestioning, understanding of gender.

My closest family is very normal, and like with any trauma, their responses are all normal. One shows complete, silent denial and rejection; one is familiar and accepting; another understands it completely and simply doesn’t want it. All entirely normal, all very ordinary in a tale told a million times in the lives of trans* people like me.

I wrote of courage earlier, and how I disowned the idea when people ’admired my courage’ in coming out. Now I realise the courage isn’t in the change or the exposure, it’s in the ordinariness. It is in the daily rejection in your own home, it is in suddenly becoming the inappropriate lover after ten thousand days of being the appropriate lover. It is in learning where not to touch, in learning not to be kissed, in learning to be out there alone once more. It is in knowing you are the cause of so much grief and cannot do a thing about it, except to carry on being your same loving, kind self, and simply accept it. Grief too is a very ordinary thing.

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We cry, we dance

  • Posted on May 28, 2012 at 8:10 am

In the land where all is pink and blue
the purple has no face.
We cry, we dance, we love like you
but cannot find our place.

There are countless stories, wherever the gender variant gather to share, of lost families, lost friends, lost lives. Such is the detritus of being trans*. It isn’t that we do strange things, nor that we love differently, though I do increasingly gain the impression that there are insights on life and love unique to the gender-blessed. We see things in a way others cannot, but that insight sets us apart in a world where we cannot expect to share it. In my last post Miscarriage of justice, I wrote about the inability of any of us to convey any self-knowledge to any other. We can show evidence, we can be persuasive, we can argue, but in the end no-one can know what we know. The truth is: ‘know-man is an island’. Others can be persuaded, the evidence may hold true for another who copies that knowledge for themselves. But is is cloned, not shared. And so we may lose our most loved, our closest, as well as old friends.

Among the stories and tragedies, stands Janus. He’s the Roman god, depicted with two faces, looking forward and back. He is the god of beginnings and transitions. For all trans* people there is this gateway, where Janus stands, between a past and a future, seeing both ways, marking the transition into realisation of ourselves, but as a portent of change that places us apart. We too become ambiguous. Are we two people? Are we two-faced? Are we deceivers (past or present)? Are we a different person, standing on new ground, requiring reassessment for love, for friendship, for acceptability? Or are we still the same person as when remembered in a different gender presentation? Janus is a lonely, if commanding, figure. And like Janus, people look into our faces confused, and back away.

Some trans* people insist that we are not the same, once settled into our gender of comfort. That we have left something (or all) behind. We speak differently to be more appropriate, we walk differently for the same reason, we make adjustments simply to fit in and be comfortable, and make others more comfortable. Are we adopting a different persona? Are we someone else? Are we acting a role? Whatever it is, we are not just differently presented, we are not the same person.

The alternative view is that we are very much the same person. If we (male to female trans*) used to fix cars and write computer code for a living, that’s what we do now. Hormones might reduce muscle mass over time, but we still be the one to pick up six chairs from the stack, not drag two across the floor. I really respect trans* people who are not in denial of their gender history, but are living with it, drawing strength from all that they are, comfortable with who they are. But is is more than that. We are more than our memories, though they are all still there. We are still parents, lovers, partners, we still love, we still get up in the morning with the same aspirations.

I love you because …

But of course you are on the outside, and what you see is what I do, not what I am, and I look different. Very different. But I do not love with my outside, I love with my inside, that same place where my unique truth lies, where you cannot go. That’s where my love has always come from. But this lack of access means that for all of us, perhaps a large proportion of our love is what another reflects back at us. I love you because … you make me feel complete. I love you because … being a man makes me feel more of a woman. I love you because … I can cook and you can fix things. I love you because … when people see or think of us together we are normal. I love you because … you complete my image of what life should look like. I love you because … you play a role that anyone who is just a friend cannot.

I love you because of what you make me.

And if you change, I too am changed. The reflection in the still pool is disturbed, the image gone. But I am still here. And yes, I really was there at every moment of love, at every life event, at every trivial point and in every crisis. We can both recall the same shared memories of times of wealth, of times of real constraint (maybe we were never poor), we can both remember what it was to enjoy bounding health, but to care in hospital or sick at home. I called the ambulance, you booked Pilates, I watched you prepare for and run a marathon, you called the doctor when I screamed in agony in the night. Like you, I knew better and worse. Every shared mountain top, every quiet stream, each moment of birth, each stirring of shared joy, each carefully chosen and share acquisition, each precious gift. Like you I was happy and I was scared, doubting and elated. Each loving touch with the same hand, from the same heart. Am I really so different, now the pool is disturbed, the image gone?

Coming to understand ourselves is something we all do, and for trans* people it is just a bigger-than-average thing to do. We drop a great stone in the pool, the ripples spread and spread, and we are gone from your eyes. The real question is not whether we were there, but why we were loved when we were there, and how we can become so easily un-loved.

We cry, we dance

The other two familiar faces are the theatre masks: one comedy the other tragedy. But Janus is usually depicted impassive. He watches, he doesn’t judge. He isn’t comparing past and present for good and bad, not to separate the two. And yet if there was a trans* Janus, I wonder how he would depict simultaneous grief and joy. Maybe not like the masks, but both, on both faces.

I suspect few trans* people suffer no real losses of family and friends. Struggles of many years when given up bring peace, and often we become gentler, or more assured, more genuine in ourselves; but this was never asked for and the loved image has gone, the attachment lost.

As trans* people, I wonder whether how we love changes. I wonder if we can access a deeper understanding of love – I don’t mean romantic or sexy, I mean getting under the externals, seeing others as they are, welcoming others into more personal spaces? I don’t mean we are superior or better at love, just that we really do lose our sense of gender rigidity, of the link between sex and gender, and the acceptability of either as a precondition of love. Or at least for a time. Some of us move on and merge into a new disambiguated life, invisible and apparently as gender binary as the majority. But if we do access something deeper in love, beyond gender and presentation, it can also be a lonely place, a solitary knowledge told only in pictures and allusions.

In this space of self we cry. Many of us cry in the space of months, more than others do in a lifetime. And it is the grief, not just of a lost relationship, but of entering a place where relationships and love have become very hard to find, because we are different. We are the purples in the land of pink and blue, unrecognisable and reflecting all the wrong things for others. We don’t make the pink feel more pink, nor the blue more blue. And we don’t want purple to be the reason for being wanted either. We have lost our complementarity that makes others feel more like themselves. And so we cry.

In this space of self we dance. Whether we dance with our hands, or dance all around the house, many of us dance more freely than most (at least when no-one is watching), because it comes from inside. We can dance with an inner music, or respond to the call of the music, unchoreographed. Because there is such deep joy in self-realisation, in losing resistance to who we are and can now be, in becoming an undivided person, in finding ourselves feeling utterly normal, very ordinary, instead of torn apart inside and never belonging in our assigned gender. Oh yes; we can dance.

And we love like you too. It’s just that being loved has become so much harder, and those we love may not love us any more.

In the land where all is pink and blue
the purple has no face.
We cry, we dance, we love like you
but cannot find our place.

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