You are currently browsing all posts tagged with 'loss'.

Missing persons

  • Posted on April 29, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Maybe we were all surprised at the sudden re-emergence of the Madeleine McCann story. Not because she’s forgotten, but because it seemed no-one knew what else to do. Then 192 missed leads were identified, a photo of how she would look today, and then a clear statement from the Portuguese police that there was no reason to reopen the case.

The case. Madeleine is a case now.

This morning I listened to another mother whose son, then aged 15, disappeared from a railway platform on his way home from school over 30 years ago. It reminded me of another programme on missing persons a week earlier, outlining all the problems of not being able to deal with a death and grieve properly. Even the slightest, tiniest hope, causes agonies over and again, because there is no closure. How could anyone give up on a loved one just because of the passing of time? Death, even a reason or possible explanation, is better than living with the eternal possibility of restoration.

These are not files. These are not cases. These are people, and there are maybe a quarter of a million people go missing each year. 99 per cent are resolved within a year, which means every year over 2,000 remain missing, with an unsurprising bulge in the data in late-teens people, and another around mid-life. (Source: Missing Persons Bureau)

But it was the link between this kind of non-bereavement and the many stories that keep coming up among trans people (and LGB too) that struck me today. Real people who finally own up to themselves, their innnate birth identity and a lifetime of disorientation, and achieve what I describe as authentication, only to be rejected by those closest to them. Terrible stories of parents disowning children, partners disowning the other, and yes, described as bereavement in both directions.

I had a weekend of considering bereavement and missing persons.

For I too am a bereaver by losing my old male identity. Yes, I have ‘killed off’ the persona formerly presented as me. I didn’t exactly ask permission, because in the end it could not be negotiated. It wasn’t like an argument over who has the car, or whether to watch football or domestic makeovers, or whether I like a coat that you don’t. It was about my fundamental authenticity. At one level it is all about change (and therefore loss) whilst at another level there is no change at all. Inside, as so many of us always say, there is ‘me’, full of all the same capacities, emotions, intentions and aspirations – and love.

And so there is a missing person. Put me in a file, call me a case, let me be un-dead, and I shall still be pleading from inside that thin dark space: ‘I am here!’.

And who put me there really? I did. Why?

I’m in that missing persons file because it’s the only place where I am truly me, where I can clothe my inner with respectability. And as much as I call, write or strive to make contact, the only thing that is wanted back is the inauthentic outer that was taken away. Yes, some missing persons have a reason to disappear, and can find no other way out. Find me as I really am, by all means, but don’t live in expectation of the old persona’s return.

I want to be found. Not the old outer persona – if that is what is wanted, then it isn’t me you want at all. You want something that I am not, more than the someone that I am. And the someone isn’t a missing person at all.

No-one chooses to place themselves in a position of becoming bereaved either. But I have done that too. It hasn’t happened to me, it is a direct consequence of finding out the truth about myself and acting on it. My mental picture is that of a dedicated worker who has been a model employee and a real contributor, helpful and achieving all through a long career. Then HR turns up with your original, yellowed, 30-year old application form and says: ‘You never had the required degree did you? I’m afraid you aren’t qualified for this job so I’m terminating your employment. Clear your desk and go.’ Yes: I am saying that HR has a choice – policy or value, whereas you can never go back a lifetime and get the qualification you never had. Was the career performance no qualification at all?

I am not bitter. After all I have found myself, and there can’t be a much bigger goal in life than that. But I am disappointed about that qualification which would entitle me to continued partnership. And these are just words after all, that I will hear back to me and must let go.

 

My happy note in the midst of this was finally releasing the agony and achieving my first public concert looking more glamorous than I have ever before as a trumpet player. I can’t express how deep that ran in me, even if I can’t share it quite as I would like.

Write lightly,
yours truly,
dear diary.

(Who remembers where that comes from? Ideal for a blog. And it comes from Threshhold of a Dream. How appropriate.)

Continue reading Missing persons »

Care to leave a comment? »

Identity

  • Posted on April 4, 2012 at 5:49 pm

Identity is another word that is perhaps as hard to define as gender. I remember when ‘identify with’ was a new phrase that caused some difficulty with grammarians and any of us who couldn’t quite understand it because we never thought we’d ever done it.

Fascinating though, because identity isn’t something we spend a lot of time thinking about. I am who I am (isn’t that Yahweh’s response to Moses?). I think, therefore I am: Descartes. How could I be anything or anyone else?? I have found myself telling people recently that rather trite thing: ‘just be yourself; no-one else can do it as well as you can!’ But it is true – isn’t it?

After yesterday’s blog about the self(ish) half-life, I have been thinking more about identity. My desperately synthesizing brain hoovers up things I hear or see, and among today’s flotsam are a deed poll form on my desk saying who I am, my LinkedIn world where puzzlement reigns over the ex-colleague who doesn’t look quite the same but does all the same things, and my Facebook page which isn’t my face any more inviting people to transition to my other page. It’s also an unformed poem that will arrive one day that says ‘I᾿m still here’.

If you wear glasses you will know that feeling of the first time you could see again properly, and then got so used to them you found yourself looking for them when they were already on your nose! And yet everyone else said: ‘there’s something different about you …’ and couldn’t quite place it. The view from the inside was the same, but clearer. The appearance from the outside may have seemed quite strange. Fancy dress parties can give you very uncomfortable feelings too, and your sweet darling child in a grotesque hallowe’en mask can be very disturbing. Change your gender presentation, and all that you are is subsumed by what your identity does to someone else’s identity.

I have to admit this took me by surprise: that my identity, with which I had struggled for so long on the inside, but which I felt only found understanding rather than change, had actually shaped other people’s identities too. Perhaps that is my truth: was I was so good at being a man because I was shaped by all those identities around me? Like stress-balls packed tightly in a box, the memory of shape is only revealed when taken out. I came out and found my shape – but those I was packed in with most tightly then also found their true shape, and it didn’t always fit with mine any more! Had I really shaped their identity and stopped them being true to self? I say that about me, so perhaps I should not be surprised after all.

I feel different living now as I do, but I don’t feel that I am different. The ‘what’ of my presentation and declared identity is no more to me in some ways that the glasses I first put on to make me normal again. I am still here, looking out, and the ‘who’ is completely unchanged, except for the joy of restoration to a single identity instead of one that was increasingly split. The same eyes, the same hands, the same terrible jokes but the same gentle humour; the same concerns, attitudes and fears; the same loves, the same aspirations to live a good life, the same courage to do what’s right. The same needs. Nothing I ever did that felt best in life was because I was a man. The suit might have been impressive, the feelings of not belonging in male-dominated meetings was not. And yes, let’s be personal, sex for me is a pooling of resources, an equal sharing, never a male dominance, never done because of my apparent gender, never because of the body I was given.

And yet for all that, gender is such a powerful thing when identified, that other than for my own sense of identity, I have to the external world lost my identity and gained another that is completely different, and that needs to be assessed all over again for validity, for preference, for befriending or for unfriending. The deed poll says it, LinkedIn says it, Facebook says it, even my family says it. It must be true; there, my passes no longer work, and hang around my neck useless and irreplaceable. The pictures, the names, the codes of acceptance, the permissions to enter: all these externals, in the end are regarded as my identity, not the me that I am inside that has simply come home and finally belongs only to find some people have, well, just gone home too. But my door is always open, because it always has been. It’s part of my identity to be like that.

The poem in the adjacent post to this (Losing my touch) was a vision I had of returning to an old familiar place and finding it shut down and deserted behind a chain-link fence. You’ll get the gist, but I just thought as a poem it worked quite well too.

Continue reading Identity »

Care to leave a comment? »

Losing my touch (I counted on you)

  • Posted on April 4, 2012 at 1:39 pm

the memory of hands
where fingers go
and the gates are barred

a place remembered
past fingers curled
in a mesh of wire diamonds

the space beyond silence where
fingers once danced
with jewels and laughter

if only my hands could call
receiver fingers ringing
all down the hot line to you

only sun on my hands warmer
my fingers number
because the wire is cold

if I let go, step back and
fingers become digits
I shall never count again.

 
2012 © Andie Davidson

Continue reading Losing my touch (I counted on you) »

3 comments on Losing my touch (I counted on you) »