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Conversations

  • Posted on July 6, 2014 at 9:51 am

Cat

This week I had a conversation with a cat. I had gone to deliver a birthday card to be delivered by my former wife to my daughter who lives I know not where. I don’t even know if the envelope will be opened. Who else would send a card in an envelope written in purple with just her name? Will her partner suggest she opens it? Just to see? My guess is that they never mention me to each other. I wonder what the conversation would be if they did? There was no message, only love and happy birthday.

Anyway, I stepped out of my car to meet my old cat, a ginger tom, one of two, which I do miss. I tickled his ears as I always did, squeaked as I always did, talked to him and told him how I missed him. He was appreciative and did all the right things. I must have given him a full five minutes before ringing the bell. I handed the card, she took it. No smile or welcome, just an uncertain holding of the front door, shooing the cat out as he tried to go in. She explained, after repeated attempts to set the cat on his way in any other direction but this, that this was a spitting-image neighbour cat, not ‘mine’.

There was no real conversation; our last evening out had been ‘difficult’. I left, feeling like the cat. He looked the same and was rejected for not being the right one. I don’t look the same, and was rejected even though I was the right one.

Friend

I spent a delightful morning with a friend from Bristol. After friending on Facebook largely because I already had met her daughters, this father (yes, that’s right), a professional surgeon, was coming over to Brighton and we agreed to meet. What made the conversation lively was in part due to my book of poetry Realisations, which she found thoughtful, evocative, even helpful. But more than that, here was someone happy to live as I at first had, in a dual role, male and female. This I found fascinating, because I remember those days, when I too asked permission to be female in certain spaces, because I didn’t want to cause offence or alienate, whilst inside I was screaming to be allowed out. My friend does it very well, and will never follow the same route as I have. Her daughter joined us for lunch, and we had a lovely time together: one bisexual, one transgender dual-role parent and one transitioned transsexual friend of both. None of us had any difficulty with this, and no shortage of conversation.

And this father, this respected professional, had told me of their being outed by The Sun newspaper. A deliberate attempt to sensationalise being transgender in order to invite rejection and ridicule.

Support group

There is an invaluable drop-in support group in Brighton for gender-questioning people of all ages, called the Clare Project. Once a month I have the option of joining them for an evening meal out in Brighton. Thankfully there are plenty of places in Brighton that do not mind a very motley crew of maybe 30 gender-questioning and transitioned people. And we are diverse. This week, as ‘my last’, I made the effort to go along, even though I make no effort these days to inhabit trans spaces. I bumped into someone I only knew on Facebook, recognised them easily (early days) and was not recognised because they had felt accosted by just a woman in the street. But the evening was a chance to meet my favourite trans man, there was someone who went my way at the same hospital just a I was coming out, and a friend who joined the group soon after me. There were others who are moving nicely along, as well as a few cis folk friends and partners, and some non-transitioners. I did say diverse …

We don’t just talk about gender things; we have real lives. But we do have things in common, such as broken families, loss of affection, triumphs and loneliness, battles with ignorant people, even difficulties finding an income or a friendly place to live. I was just high on the excitement of impending closure, full of energy.

My trans man friend said how much he simply missed cuddles. Me too. We hugged.

Work

I was passed over for a job opportunity that I wanted, and that I could quite easily have done. I felt a judgement against me was unfair. I checked it out with colleagues in sporadic conversations, and they felt the same. I wondered whether my first year in this first job as a woman had tainted my record, and reflected on how the past two years have changed me. I had walked in just weeks after transitioning from ever expressing as male again, into a new corporate environment led by and full of men. To consult and advise. I got a contract, then a job. As a trans woman (everyone was told). In a wig and silicone boobs. I got on with it, survived inhabiting an entirely male office, found my feet (albeit with a slightly belligerent side to assert my non-maleness), and went through months when I cried all the way to work as my life fell apart, rejected by family and ultimately beginning a single life away from all I held dear. Including the cats.

I had this conversation with my current manager, who is now to be replaced as my manager by the person who got the job I wanted. I am one layer further down the organisation, just as I am craving to rise again! I related how I know what it is like to be a woman at work. But also a man among men, with those expectations. An advantage? Certainly eye-opening from both sides. And I reflected with her how the two years had treated me, and how newly-empowered I now feel. When I return to work and complete my healing, I shall have left behind all requests for permission and proofs for the existence of me as a woman. This will be a real difference, and the future is wide open to me. I have grasped responsibility for my own life, found my own authenticity, and I shall never give it away again.

This kind of conversation has an honesty I could never previously have expressed at work.

The world

It has also been an interesting week of online conversation. Brynn Tannehill wrote in the Huffington Post this week about the very thing I have blogged, regarding family treatment of transitioning parents, partners, children, and how the sheer distaste is boosted by public othering of transgender people. This is transphobia: unlike many other phobias it is fear. Fear that there is something horribly odd about us, corrupting and changing anyone who comes close. Yes, I too am ‘icky’ when it comes to imagining affection and intimacy with me. You might have fucked someone for decades, lovingly, passionately. But now as trans? Yuk!

Then Julie Bindel launched her new book, with a chapter on sexuality being a choice. A good time to launch this, being Pride season. But aside from her complete misunderstanding of gender dysphoria (if she believe it exists at all) here she has she muddled what may be her own bisexuality, with being simply lesbian or gay. It is interesting to know what the causality of any sexuality or gender identity is, but it must never be used to define people in or out of existence. There is to be a debate/discussion featuring Julie Bindel, Qazi Rahman, Stella Duffy, Patrick Strudwick and Kira Cochrane, which I am sure will be fascinating, but I don’t seriously think we know very much. Who knows whether the cause of being lesbian by nature is the same as that of being gay? Or whether there is any link at all between gender and sexuality, or whether the origins are of a completely different kind.

What I do know is that Paul McHugh, writing in the Wall Street Journal, and who still asserts that people like me are suffering a psychological disorder and delusion, is wrong. I can tell you whether gender confirmation surgery (or genital reconstruction, or whatever) is a final cure, in just two weeks time. Right now, I already have no doubt.

If anyone said, ‘you can have all the love and affection in the world again, if only you keep your bits’ I would say no. Some of my conversations have been bad, most good. But it is my conversation that really counts, not anyone else’s opinion. And my conversation decides who I might meet, work with, love, even (I can hope) fuck, without it being icky.

These are just a week’s conversations, but at least people are talking, and little by little, some understanding is growing.

A colleague (yes, you!) expressed the hope that I would keep writing after my surgery. Yes, of course. There are too many conversations to ignore, and anyway, I was born like this: a writer.

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Light at the end

  • Posted on June 14, 2014 at 2:21 pm
Are you just realising that you are transgendered? It may be a joy for some. For most of us it is unstoppable and scary. What are you going to do, at the point where it seems unmanageable, and potentially starting on a long journey with a lot of change. I never said it was easy, but here’s a view from the other end of the tunnel.

October 2010, and a man in smart-casual clothes and close-cropped grey, receding hair is sorting through the sale rack in a quality store. He’s forgotten about being surreptitious, and given up thinking about how this seems. He is buying his first skirt and feels he just isn’t going to stop himself any more. In the back of his mind, he knows something is changing forever. A recess of sadness is a shadow on the relief he feels, because there is no way he is going to be able to explain this. At this point he doesn’t even know that he is transgender, that there is a diagnosis for this, that it is normal for people born like him. That there are thousands of people within a few miles radius of this store, who were born the same.

He will go home and hide his purchases and wait for a coming weekend when family will be away. His daughter and wife are having a girls’ weekend in London. He is defined out of his own family. And he will be a girl for the weekend. There is no fantasy or fetish attached to this, and in the end he will confess. That he bought a skirt and jumper, spent a couple of days wearing them. That he simply felt perfect. And will realise with joy and horror that ‘he’ is not appropriate. The realisation will come tumbling in, and very quickly ‘transgender’ will enter his vocabulary. He will gradually begin talking about being both genders, dual gendered, two-spirit, a normal trans person, and soon, very soon, acknowledge that he is she, take on a female name, use it online, acquire a separate email address, and turn the page.

The acknowledgements page faces the contents page, and the chapter titles are frightening. She is seeing unfamiliar headings and can no longer close the book. Months will become years, in which she will write every week about this journey. It will be Andie’s Place. This will be the hardest journey in her 55-year life, traumatic and filled with grief, anxiety, the need for constant justification and she will lose completely the life and family she has loved and depended on.

 

It is now June 2014, one month away from the end of the procurement of change. She will grow and leave the journey behind, having learned so much more about life, about love, about being different. There is nothing more to ask for, or persuade others about. No-one to stand in her way of personal identity and fulfilment. No reason to stand out, or defend. No special service, no professionals as gatekeepers to her life. She will awake from anaesthesia, euphoric. Several weeks of pain and then a few months with discomfort will simply have to be borne, but with a now-familiar gratitude for closure.

The feeling she has is, yes, relief. The realisation of being transgendered – and then that transition is a lengthy process, not an event – has become clearer, as being a journey with an end. Her history will include all her life events: a slightly incongruous mix of experiences, expectations, conditioning, confusion, fatherhood and womanhood, constraint and freedom, that is rich, unusual, but integrated.

Her conversation will change perceptibly, because the one pursuit that has driven her life for so long will be achieved. Her poetry has already changed, its voice being still reflective, but outwards. Her dance has changed, having developed out of nothing. Her movements have noticeably lost their defensive, protective and escaping shapes, and now she skates, swims and flies, extended fully in the space.

Her employment is still good, but she is realising that stepping back and down, as a comfort and space within which to find herself, is a frustration to her leadership instincts. Working as a woman has been interesting, from encounters where men don’t expect her to have an answer, let alone a correct one, to those where she is simply not quite equal – or conversely where being transsexual is a good enough reason to expect differently from her than an ‘ordinary’ woman.

Life has come not exactly full circle, because whilst back in the real and ordinary world, ‘real and ordinary’ have been redefined. It has been a spiral, thankfully upwards.

With the end in sight, her message to anyone feeling they are at the beginning of this story, is that whilst the journey feels unavoidable, dark, destructive even, it is not a blind alley. The tunnel may at times be water-filled, but you can hold your breath long enough. It may be dark with no light at the end visible, but it is only a bend. There is only one person in this particular tunnel, because all are diferent. And that person is you. It may seem lonely, because no-one else can walk, crawl or swim this way with you. There may be blockages to worm around, or currents in the water that throw you about. But there is no reason to die in here, or to despair and give up simply because it is dark and unknown. People may be unkind, even cruel. Many will never understand. But they are not what matters. You entered this place not knowing what it would be like. The entrance seemed big enough to engulf you. As you leave, and you will, the way out will seem small, because you will have grown. It will be quiet, leafy, green and bright, undisturbed by thrashing limbs and protests. No-one fights to get out, because the air and light and freshness is simply welcoming and wonderful.

She still remembers him, and why he is no more. Not dead, transformed, made real. He received love for being him, but it was at enormous cost. Now she is only known for being real. Love may still seem a world away, but the world is loving in all those spaces that mean most. Being appreciated for music, for writing and for dancing is a wonderful confirmation of her personhood. Above all, among women, she finally and fully belongs.

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Show, not tell

  • Posted on April 18, 2014 at 8:56 am

It’s Easter. Two years ago I dug around the story, and was reminded today by a Facebook image doing the rounds saying that Easter comes from the goddess Ishtar. I knew this to be wrong, because I’d dug around Eostre instead. The poem is here, if you already need a digression!

At the time I felt the poem may be a little obscure, because most people were still just starting to realise that my transition was something real, and my objective in writing poetry was to lead not push. I could write prose, which is why I started this blog, but some people don’t like to be told, because they come head to head with their idea against mine, and that’s uncomfortable. Poetry that just ‘says it’ can be boring. A picture of a witch is just a picture, take it or leave it. But that familiar optical illusion that can switch mentally from being a drawing of an old woman in furs, to a witch’s head, is fascinating.

Sometimes we just can’t take being told

This week I took my poem Unspoken to a workshop, and resisted the temptation to say what it was about. I had dared to read it on local radio last year, but revisiting it, I still felt I needed reassurance and feedback. It still means something real and deep to me, it is still relevant, but it is all ‘show not tell’, and it is precisely about those things you can’t say because they could undo everything in an instant.

This reminded me very much of the whole business of coming out, of learning and speaking my truth. It felt subversive (something I like about poetry, but which felt uncomfortable to live out). I am not alone in the way I behaved, and I suspect this is a feature of many trans* people’s lives when they are working out how to tell the world that things need to change.

So this blog is for people coming out, for their friends and families. You can’t just be told, you need to realise a few things first to prepare you for understanding. For anyone to transition may be to find peace and authenticity, but it is one of the hardest things to do, because you know it won’t be understood.

And this is why we start wearing bits of the ‘wrong’ clothing, jewellery or make-up, begin to soften in our ways, and why things appear in our wardrobes that ‘shouldn’t be there’. For people transitioning female to male, that may be a lot less obvious, rather ‘why don’t you like doing that any more?’ It may not be the best way to do this! But what many of us are trying to do is introduce new ideas about ourselves, new ways of seeing us, new understandings of being the same person looking different, feeling better. You might just se this as weird or even disturbing. It may not be what you want. But what we are trying to show is that we have to change, we want you to notice, and we need you to ask, so we can be open without thrusting it on you. This conversation can lead to shared understanding and travelling forward together, or it may lead to separation and loss. We don’t intend to hurt anyone by coming out. After all, we are only being true to ourselves.

To you it probably seems like deception. We are writing poetry in our lives, and you want the classic story with a happy ending.

Deception was an unfortunate keynote in the divorce petition against me. It was felt necessary, it wasn’t a grudge. But it was there; it was the remembered thing. Shoes were in the wardrobe, and that meant I was going out. Without permission. How embarrassing. My gender dysphoria was an unacceptable behaviour. (Popular link to my page on behaviour, here.) But I remember wanting desperately to be discovered from hints so that a legitimate enquiry could be made, for me to explain. There were things left sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately, stuck in a drawer, trapped in wardrobe doors. Nail varnish left on, beads worn with my old clothes, new mannerisms, books and leaflets on trans* issues; all sorts.

My ‘Unspoken’ poem obviously spoke, because my fellow poets in Brighton picked up on the emotions, the situation and the meaning of the poem quite easily. I still feel embarrassed about my hints before coming out. So I wrote another poem:

Show not tell

Was I really learning the art,
poet in the making, risk averse?

A skirt caught in closet doors,
an obvious symbol without reason.

Without rhyme, hoping to scan as
pent… something, I am… bic

in hand, but blocked, right as
blocked, wrong to be spoken.

So the coloured skirt, in draft
as a chill wind stirring flowers

invisible but spoken, my self
trying to show, not tell.

Once again, this is a poem where the sounds of the words and how they join, really matter. Find the words that carry two meanings. It’s just another way of saying that when we communicate in a way that invites enquiry, it can be because we have something to say that we can’t just speak out on. We need your wanting to understand.

So if your spouse, or sibling, or child, or parent or friend is acting strangely, and you know something isn’t right any more, ask what they are trying to show you so that you can see, not so that an explanation and justification can be given and things go ‘back to normal’.

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Gender dysphoria is not a behaviour

  • Posted on March 22, 2014 at 8:07 am

I got drawn this week into another of those dialogues about the legitimacy of the transgendered identity. The comparison as so often was between being gay/lesbian (i.e. sexuality) and gender dysphoria, where the former finds agreement between body and mind (identity), but a disagrement with social tradition or culture, and the latter finds a disagreement between body and mind (identity) as well as with culture and society. It’s tough, because if you are trans*, the chances are you also have a sexuality that is questioned by society, including the gay/lesbian part of it.

It’s like being trans* gets you shut out of almost every kind of accepted normality, where anyone except yourself can decide what your legitimate identity is allowed to be. As if society is afraid of your behaviour, perhaps thinking you are unpredictable or potentially predatory. Sometimes I have been treated as intrusive simply for being; there can be a lot of exclusion for being trans*. The worst kind is trans erasure, where certain groups define us out of existence, saying in effect that what we are is only in our minds.

Believe me, there is nothing about being transsexual that is behavioural. In fact, being transsexual need not involve you doing anything at all. It is only about being. Part of the problem is that the trans-spectrum people who are most visible are either the most flamboyant (deliberate) or the most physically disadvantaged (unfortunate). I don’t get noticed anymore, but knowing what I am gets me associated with stereotypical ideas of what I do (or salacious imaginings of what I might do).

There are people who knew me before transition, and who, two years later, still find it hard to stop thinking of me as I used to present. Everything is still a reference to how I used to be to them, which leaves me with the distinct feeling that they can only regard this as a chosen lifestyle. In other words, that this is behavioural, and therefore subject to judgement as to its rationale or authenticity.

What does it take?

I wrote a poem last year about an innocent prisoner being discharged, based on the feelings of what it must be like to be the only person in the courtroom who actually knows the truth. No-one else does, though they have the power to imprison or release. If you know you are innocent, should you be grateful for acquittal by people who were not there, who have made judgements based on external and partial evidence?

Sometimes being transsexual feels like that: others get together to make judgements on the validity of your claim to authenticity, whereas only you can actually know this. Even trans* people make judgements about each other on ‘degrees of transness’, perhaps as self-protection for their own sense of identity, or out of insecurity.

The closest you can get to another is by communicating through some intermediary language, verbal or not, that you hope is shared. In the end you are isolated and insulated, and love is a reflexive verb.

This is where you come to understand, if you haven’t before, just how completely lonely the human spirit really is. No other can climb inside yourself and share your experience. You can become aware of resonance with another, but you know that when they choose to go away from you, they take nothing and leave nothing but thoughts. The closest you can get to another is by communicating through some intermediary language, verbal or not, that you hope is shared. In the end you are isolated and insulated, and love is a reflexive verb.

Oh no, not the trans lobby again!

If there is one thing that those who like to discuss trans legitimacy don’t like, it is the ‘trans lobby’ – people who stand up and object every time to this discussion. How improper! These discussants feel they have more right to say whether transgendered people are real, than transgendered people themselves. Well, I guess if you think we aren’t real, then we have no right. But why are we not real? Because our discussants have only one traditional concept of gender? And if there is one sure way to create a trans lobby, it must surely be to declare that a trans woman is ‘really’ a man, or a trans woman is ‘really’ a woman. Or indeed, that neither are either.

I find it interesting to try to understand where our eager or insistent discussants place those with intersex conditions. Bodies can be very ambiguous, and more than we like to believe, are. Genital/reproductive abnormalities may be as high at 1 in 100, and real ambiguity as high as 1 in 2,000. What, without question, defines a woman or a man, since our discussants seem so clear? It certainly isn’t a complete and clear possession of all the sexual markers, whether organs or chromosomes. XY, with androgen insensitivity, for example?

With such crass disregard for the reality of human physiology, chromosomal, reproductive or sexual, it is hardly surprising that there seems to be a trans lobby that jumps to defence. So I was very cautious about entering this week’s conversation, lest I too be labelled a lobbyist.

Society creates disorders

Part of the discussion we trans folk are presented with, is: what if society were so accepting of transgendered identities that we would not even consider surgical reparation or correction? It is a fair question, because any parent of an intersex baby will want to know what to do. Intervene, in order to avoid the dreadful uncertainty of growing up without definition? Or risk surgically defining the baby in a way that proves to be wrong? Maybe we, as a society, can get over this one by being simply honest about physiological birth differences. But what about transsexuals? Is this just a different case of intersex? Can I imagine a society that is accepting enough for me to say I really have no need of intervention, hormonal or surgical? For some of us, I really do believe that dysphoria has no other origin than our innate sense of being. For others, not – but for me, I know the sense of not being ‘right’ has not been planted by nurture or social interaction. Who would go through the social trauma and physical struggles, if there were an alternative? Is it just that society is so unkind to us, and so unaccepting?

Here is a parallel that I keep coming back to: what if society were so accepting of, say, a deformed limb that could, through surgery, be straightened?

The same social argument would apply: ‘surely there is no real need for corrective surgery or treatment; there’s nothing wrong with a limp or the inability to run.’ Well, it’s fine for the one without the deformity, but highly presumptive that the other might not genuinely prefer to be able to run.

Much of the time, our discussants on our legitimacy are gay or lesbian, who have seen a revolution in the UK over acceptability of their sexuality as innate. Look what they went through in the past, and look how society is now! Surely we can just calm down and be different, like they are? And here is the difference between LGB and TQI: we don’t want to be different. We feel our normality is there, in the gender we feel ourselves to be. Most of us don’t want some halfway house, some different, either hated or exalted status. We know we can’t alter the way we were born, but we can do our best to put things right and leave it behind. LGB people don’t do that; they live it. LGB people need each other for intimate relationships. Transsexual people do not. If we have any togetherness, it is only because we’re better at understanding each other.

So I don’t believe that I have a cultural disorder. Something congenital and off the normal distribution mean, yes, but more than a matter of social convention. My ‘condition’ hasn’t been created any more than the case of the deformed limb. So when I read non-trans people questioning my validity, I find it somewhat arrogant. It isn’t for anyone else to decide another’s legitimate identity. Perhaps there is an enormous clue in people born with intersex conditions. No observer can say what their gender is, only they themselves. They may naturally feel strongly that they have a binary identity, or indeed none. We all have this. You can lose all your physiological markers through illness, disease, accident, surgery, and still you would know what your felt gender is. That’s what it feels like for me.

Gender is indeed intriguing and fascinating, and I know what gender I am not. But to imagine that my identity is up for debate without knowing this from the inside, is a tad presumptive. And remember, always, especially if you are gay or lesbian: sexuality is not like gender.

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So far away

  • Posted on March 8, 2014 at 8:38 am

This week I was revisited by a feeling of being alone. After several vibrant long days at work, with some small sense of achievement, coming home to a silent flat for a whole evening alone hasn’t felt like fun. Nor was it sufficient stimulus for the opportunity of doing the dusting! I did some writing, which was good. In fact two poems, one, Voice, I put up here pending revision and better crafting, the other left me in a quandry.

Lyricists have long been in danger of writing love songs to people they’ve subsequently cheated on, poets are often asked if it’s autobiographical, and novelists where such ideas could have come from other than within. So it is with this other poem I wrote. I actually like it, because it’s neat with use of words and ambiguity, a touch flirtatious, but heartfelt too. And though it doesn’t speak of love, it is a love poem. And it speaks about when love is unspeakable. Perhaps there is nothing as bittersweet as unrequited love, especially when it isn’t just intoxication or infatuation.

As I approach the two-year point since the final vestiges of living-as-male were shed, everything seems so far away. By now it is unreachable. I have memories, and I dare to touch them again, though I’m still not sure whether they are people frozen as statues as in Narnia, or moving images like photographs in Harry Potter. Both are an evil magic in some ways. But more to the point, nothing has filled the space. And I don’t really know what the space is any more. What does ‘a committed relationship’ mean now? I don’t want the claustrophobia of me or a partner not being able to do their own thing because everything has to be done together, but I do want to know that there is someone who always puts my interests ahead of others, simply because they always care, and because I know they have a love that won’t change from day to day. I want affection; I want to be wanted; I want to be cuddled. More: I want to give the same without it being blocked because of what I am.

How do you say this?

I dipped a toe in the online dating pond, not as far as paying, only as profiling. In response to ‘woman seeking woman, Brighton, within 60 miles’ and lots of good things about me, I have had a stream of people who might be interested (overlapping profiles) – from Scotland, Lancashire, Northern Ireland and it may as well be Timbuctoo! OK, unless I pay, there won’t be real matches, but they’re not exactly encouraging me to sign up and pay. And anyway, I actually don’t want this kind of relationship-finding displacing a best friendship I already have. Nor do I want to lose a friendship by saying anything I shouldn’t say.

As yet I have not experienced anyone showing the slightest ‘interest’ in me. Just as my wife would tell me ‘I just don’t know how to relate to you (as a woman)’, I don’t think people do know. I’m safe as a friend, but I’m not in the category of possibles, because, well, what am I? That was my last relationships blog, so I won’t go there again, but it does fit this feeling of ‘so far away’. Anyone I think may be a possible ever-closer friend/partner knows exactly where to stop and defend territory (or any inclination to make me an exception). As soon as I am not one thing or I am another, I know we are destined to be ‘just friends’. And that is how I fear it will always be, however I feel.

This isn’t a grouse, but I keep thinking about this Midas Touch – not that I turn anything into gold and add value, but that what I am is a danger to anyone who gets too close: I would change them. Know me, and you instantly become one of those people who knows a transsexual person. Touch me and you instantly become someone who touches … Kiss me and you instantly become someone of ‘other’ sexuality. Love me? I can be your friend while you go dating.

I don’t know how to bridge the gap, so if you have any really good ideas, please let me know. Anyone I talk to about this is terribly kind in their words. Of course I’ll find someone, I mean, haven’t I a lot going for me? Musician? Artist? Writer? Dancer? Thinker? Philosopher? Terrible jokes, but somehow still fun? Highly intelligent and witty? Committing, loyal, kind and deeply loving?

Sadly, none of these things count if, when you imagine being intimate, what I am makes you feel less than what you want to feel you are. You’re ‘not wired’ for people like me? Being wired differently myself, I can never understand that either.

Ideas on a postcard please.

And just because I really like it for touching a really tender spot, here is ‘So far away’ by Carole King.

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