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

Plus ça change

  • Posted on January 12, 2014 at 9:23 am

A young man is standing at night on the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. The scent of orange blossoms hangs in the warm Easter air. A growing warmth is also drawing him to a young woman who seems to like him. Over breakfast of pitta bread with strawberry jam, grape juice and Turkish coffee she likes his eyes, his sense of integrity, his humour and sense of where he is going.

A middle-aged woman is remembering her graduation year, the daring to go to Israel to see the archaeology and history just weeks before finals while everyone else was sweating their revision. She is remembering the morning muezzin after an evening of romantic feelings, and how her eyes had been so attractive to someone else.

A young man is descending a Peak District hill on a hot summer day. He has been struggling with something and walking is therapeutic. His rucksack contains the day’s essentials to protect him against change in weather and he is churning over thoughts as poetic lines and songs in his head. His boots strike the gritstone rocks as he negotiates the bracken hillside. The map in his pack is also in his head as he heads for the road that leads to toasted teacakes. This has all been familiar territory for some time.

A middle-aged woman in stout boots, jeans, rucksack and warm jumper has just left the crag-climbers behind as she follows the track through bracken and down to a grassy path and a familiar church. You can always follow the steeples as you come off the moor; this she learned when quite young, and first came to the Peak District by bus. A very old map is in her rucksack, the folds now open tears, but it is a reminder and a prompt if she fancies a new track or diversion. She’s come further than she had imagined to be here now. The valley will welcome her with a cosy tea shop, where she will distil some thoughts in her poetry notebook.

It is a daring moment for the father of two, as he begins work on a new house together. His plumbing skills will be called for, and some re-wiring, and he doesn’t yet realise, but the tiling job will turn into his first plastering job, and he will do it well to make a perfect little family bathroom. Before he leaves he will have renovated the kitchen, rebuilt doorways, installed full-length sliding wardrobe doors and interior and redecorated throughout. He will be cared for through back surgery, and he will also be found out for what he really is.

A 57-year old woman is detaching the soil pipe from a lavatory pan and clearing the bathroom in her flat for some renovation. By the time she finishes, the room will be quite different, with neatly boxed pipes and tiled surfaces, new flooring and attractive lilac walls. Here she will take her showers in a morning, and hot baths to candles and music at weekends. Other jobs will get sorted over time. About to be divorced, she is getting used to living alone and doing everything for herself. Soon she will be getting an appointment for surgery, and is wondering what it will be like, dealing with pain and recovery, alone.

A middle-aged man is lying on a gurney, a line in his arm and a pain in his back. If he is to walk normally again, parts of his body will be removed, the place closed, and he will recover. If the surgeon does his job well, the pain will be gone and he will stand on his toes again. His pain has evoked sympathy, support and loving care, and he has learnt a lot about pain, the mind, sense of value to others, and vulnerability. He has been scared, disturbed by a body that isn’t right, and prepared himself for this moment. Later, his eyes open in a disoriented state. It is over. Any pain is different. It will diminish in coming days, and life will return to normal.

A later-middle-aged woman is lying on a gurney, a line in her arm, and a yearning in her heart. Soon her eyes will close, and if the surgeon does his job well, her pain will be gone and she will dream of returning to dance, but in clothes that fit properly, and without having to disguise anything. She knows plenty of people who have come this way before her, and is reassured. But she will not be returning home to the love and care of a family. She has learned a lot about truth and authenticity, and about the conditionality of love. In a few hours, her eyes will open in a disoriented state of euphoria, and she will experience considerable pain before she begins to heal. But for the first time, she will feel really, fully, whole.

She may also lie there in the coming days and catch the scent of orange blossom in a shower gel or bar of soap. She may imagine the smell of strong coffee or ask for strawberry jam. Visitors may see a new light in her eyes, or recognise a strong integrity and a sense of arrival in someone who knows where they’re going. Her humour will break through as usual, unchanged. There may be a mixture of tears, from pain, from joy, and from the memory of a romance that started in Jerusalem and lasted over 30 years, and that depended entirely on that young man who woke with the muezzin. And that was conditional on her not being here, now, like this.

This is the story of a single person, in short episodes. Anyone really knowing this person may well say ‘plus ça change’. There may seem to be external changes, and indeed there are. But there is no pretence, and a lifetime of being one and the same person has finally come together. Very little can be considered ‘lost’ about this person. Her life has changed, and inside the difference is incomprehensibly better. But you will always know who she is.

But I don’t actually want this story to be about me. I want it to be a perspective for people starting out in the realisation that they have gender dysphoria, and for anyone who knows, loves and cares for them. I want also to show how being transsexual is a perfectly normal difference to be born with, and that avoiding the awareness and the issues is cruel and unnecessary. If this was the familiar story, rather than the sensational documentary about ‘sex swaps’, then we might all have grown up with acceptance. I have had to learn to be open and confident. To begin with it was daunting and I felt very vulnerable. That was after a lifetime of fear of being found out as something bad. I already knew it was bad to be thinking about my gender as different, and the parallels above illustrate how wrong and unnecessary the split life has been. I am not a different person, and if I have changed in some ways, it is only for the better. But most of me by far is the same, including the eyes.

This week I was asked if I was one of those men who likes to dance in a skirt. The misunderstanding was mine. As it transpired, the only reason I was asked was my name (more commonly sounding like a man’s name) and because in the dance I do, there is a background principle that allows wearing clothes that broaden your shared experience of being simply human rather than gendered. It was perfectly reasonable to guess, but it was not because of how I look. This, I didn’t mind, and it afforded to opportunity to explain openly what it means to be transsexual to someone who genuinely wanted to understand. I hope I shall always be prepared to sit down like this and explain. If I, and people like me don’t, the world will be full of men in the story above, who are too afraid to be who they really are (the woman in all the episodes above), and families and colleagues uncertain about being associated with us, and journalists who think that we are freaks and perverts and bad for society.

Plus ça change? I think so, despite my journey over the last few years. We all change over the course of our lives, and mine may seem like greater changes, but never ever think of people like me as becoming anything other than who we really are. Some things change when someone ‘transitions’, but many more do not.

Continue reading Plus ça change »

Care to leave a comment? »

Straight talking

  • Posted on December 15, 2013 at 9:43 am

A week ago I was privileged to share time with a few friends to talk plainly about the more physical aspects of transition. I am still gobsmacked by the complete absence of clinical advice, guidance and care in this process. Google is our best friend, as indeed is YouTube. That also is scary, because in some countries and places Google is censored and YouTube belongs to Google, and the content we need is all about sex, genitals, gender expression and so on. Some things we really do need to see, and viewing late-onset pubescent breasts and a post-operative vulva is not just a curiosity but a necessity for us. It can all feel a precarious position to be in.

Care and share

Care itself is variable. I would hate to slate the NHS, because it is a doorway (and for me the only one) to full surgical treatment. But I also know that post-operative infection rates are higher than they should be, and that many people return for subsequent corrective surgeries because things weren’t right first time. This isn’t a criticism of the surgeons, more of aftercare, and the protocol differs between Charing Cross and private hospitals.

And still no word of an appointment to see the surgical team, only an answerphone call that wasn’t returned …

And so it was, 21 months after my transition that my breasts were seen by somebody else for the first time. No, nothing more than seen, but I wanted to know that my progress was normal, acceptable and OK. I learned what I needed to through comparison, and had some advice on good bras to buy for that bit of enhancement. Without embarrassment we talked about the surgical outcomes and about how a neo-vagina performs and compares. It is important. Surgeons won’t tell you that any more than the referring psychiatrists understand what it means to be trans.

And inevitably we talked about relationships: that is, family, friends and potential lovers, and how we find ourselves in a place, supported only by each other, with no support for the others to understand that we are a natural occurrence.

So it is all a mix of joy and frustration and slogging through doing our best, always hoping to be loved at less than arm’s length.

Straight talking

There has been another side to speaking this week. An earlier conversation revealed (or confirmed) that I am perhaps not exempt from sexist gossip or opinion in the more manual regions of my workplace. Why should I expect it? Other women experience the same, I just have another handle they can pull. Last night I walked in to play for a band I haven’t been with for maybe two years. Of course for some it was a double-take, others didn’t recognise me. But we are all friends, and great kindness and welcome was shown rather than curiosity or distance. But the male-dominated workplace can be different. Vocabulary, social place and expectation are all very different, and I have no pretensions about being the ‘odd’ person upstairs, the woman ‘who used to be a’, and maybe the T-word.

I don’t see them much and they don’t see me (it’s an upstairs-downstairs world). On Thursday I had to give a presentation about a project I initiated that will, hopefully, really benefit the whole company. It was to the whole company. Downstairs comes upstairs to hear from the MD the latest state of play in our fortunes and about major projects. I teetered on the brink of business suit style, looked at myself in trousers and jacket, and said no. I don’t need to bow to male privilege and presentation, nor to distract by being too pretty, so it was the smart skirt, blouse and scarf.

So why did I even think about it? The MD and another director weren’t smartly dressed, why should I even think about it? I guess it was in the back of my mind that I was going to be completely exposed in front of people who may talk about me but who don’t see me or work directly with me. I didn’t want to be compared with what a transsexual is supposed to look like. I wanted to leave an impression of complete normality.

The presentation went well, there’s a lot of hard work to do, and I fully expect that I was talked about rather than my project, and the place of my project might, by some, have been treated with less commitment than had I been a senior male manager. How can I not be treated differently?

A new colleague (very nice gay male) has seen a great deal more of the outside world in his first few weeks than I have seen in 18 months. I worry a little that I have been over-protected, or that I may be a slight embarrassment. I know that up until now, new colleagues have been told about me, to protect me from curiosity and misunderstanding. Very nice, but I don’t actually want this any more.

Honesty

All this boils down to straight talking and honesty. Let’s accept that transsexual people are not an object of curiosity, our issues are not about sex, and as people we are not somehow complex and troubled, except by the differing levels of acceptability by others. Here is something very simple and very accurate:

If I have a problem, it is only because you have a problem with me, and that problem is in you, not in me.

I believe that if I was treated as less anomalous, my clinical needs would be treated with the same seriousness as an achilles tendon, or an ear infection. Someone would look at my ankle or into my ear, would enquire about the outcomes of physiotherapy or the effect of my antibiotics, would be concerned with prompt treatment. These things would be spoken of between others with sympathy and concern, they could simply ask me how I am, how things are going, even with direct reference to the bits concerned. Maybe being trans is regarded like mental illness, unspeakable? Perhaps, with the added complication of some thinking their way under your clothes too.

But I think all I am trying to say is that the whole business of gender transition is only as bad as it is because as a society we have yet to talk about it as a naturally-occurring human condition that has nothing to do with ethics or morals or personality or anything other than the way we were born. We are not objects of curiosity, we are not dangerous or subversive, and we can speak for ourselves. But it is entirely reasonable to talk, dispassionately and with understanding, so that our lives can be better integrated.

Continue reading Straight talking »

Care to leave a comment? »

Truth and reconciliation

  • Posted on December 7, 2013 at 10:26 pm

The whole world learned this week of the death of Nelson Mandela. I’ve heard and read a lot of opinion, recollection, reflection and analysis over the last few days, some seeking balance about a man who refused to renounce violence. But no-one can refute or deny that here was a man who changed the world. It wasn’t just his incomparable role in dismantling apartheid, nor his fortitude through 27 years in prison, rather it was his ability to seek reconciliation rather than revenge, and working together rather than division. He became the paradigm for truth and reconciliation, to be used as a model elsewhere and into the future.

Beyond politics, beyond nations, there is a principle in truth and reconciliation that was unique at the time, but which speaks in many situations now.

I tried writing a letter. I rewrote it. I asked myself how much I was writing for myself, and how much for the recipient. My expression of care and concern: was it because I wanted to be heard, or because there was something that did need to be said? Was it my place to speak? Or even be concerned? Was it more my seeking to be understood, or genuinely to help the other, where understanding might be helpful?

It was quite a quandary, and in the end the letter went into the recycling. I wasn’t sure about the motive, and in the end it became a much reflected-upon telephone conversation. It was, I felt, much-needed communication with my almost-ex wife who, I felt, has not really worked much out in a deep way about my transition. I shall never know what it is like to be faced with having an unexpectedly transsexual spouse. She will never know what it’s like to face up to being transsexual. Between us we have very deep questionings about the nature of love and the role of the body in showing and sharing love. Some find it easy, some impossible, some in-between. I guess that’s us.

Truth

I guess we both know the truth as we see it. I feel utterly rejected and betrayed because the worst I did was understand the way I was born and adjust to it. The best I did was to love in the same way as always and hope to continue. But what was forced upon me was the deepest and most honest assessment of my identity, my self, my expression of life itself, and I fell into place, looking and sounding somewhat different from the husband-as-was. I shed fear and self-hatred but gained the agony of losing the love of my life.

She was never rejected, nor her love, but must have felt my rejection of the male role that defined her role, quite keenly. It’s not really for me to say on her behalf. I do know that my female presence felt competitive rather than complementary, and must have challenged her sexuality. But she was not obliged to dig as deep, as I was, into her furthest recesses, and I expect has surfed the loss in order to keep going. Don’t we all do that much of the time? Yes, it’s easy to over-analyse, but it’s also a lot easier to cope with things by skating lightly on thin ice, hoping to get to the other side.

We each have truths to face full-on, if we are to remain balanced people. Mine is to recognise that even the most in-loveness and commitment does not signify unconditinal love. I have to accept that the reality of human love truly can be entirely contingent and dependent on being what’s needed. Yes, I was to a sufficient degree wanted for my body more than my loving, for my means more than my self.

It’s a truth, and it’s hard for me to chew on.

Her truth is that if indeed I was born female with male body bits, as per my complete clinical diagnosis, then she was married for over 30 years to a woman. That neither of us knew this possibility is immaterial. The truth is that I have not become a woman, I am just a woman who is finally aligning her way of life and body to what she is.

It’s a truth, and it’s hard for her to chew on.

Isn’t truth a difficult thing sometimes? It won’t go away by not thinking about it, or by making excuses for prior beliefs, and the best thing you can do with it is to speak to it, voice it and embrace it. We have to change to fit the truth, because it won’t change to fit us.

So why am I blogging this? Isn’t it just a tad unfair to be the one who always writes, and about pretty personal stuff? These dialogues are very one-sided when I write them out, and maybe I am inventing what my wife is really thinking, presumptuously and unfairly. I don’t know, because she hasn’t expressed these things as I have. All I can do is try my best to imagine what it must be like (see also, from earlier days: Who does she think she is?).

And that worries me on her behalf, and I know that she will be no more alone as a spouse/partner of a transsexual person, than I was as an emerging transsexual person myself. For every one of us who is married, there is a spouse coming to terms. As transsexual people, we get to know each other, go for diagnosis and resolution. They have little or no real support or help, no reason to meet, and have less to invest than we do. They can walk away and rationalise it as they wish. We can’t, and that makes it different.

And yet we reach a truth that makes sense. We are leaving fear, self-hate and denial, and finding self-love and acceptance. They may never do that, and rather find themselves feeling diminished, self-doubting and fearful, or in denial.

That’s why I write – to observe and present these difficulties as issues to properly resolve rather than avoid.

Reconciliation

I have sent over-long texts, emails and letters. I have been overwhelming in my self-explanation and insistence that I, myself, me, am still here. That what is in my head and my heart, my soul – is unchanged. More openly understood and expressed maybe, but not different. Don’t I deserve to be loved for myself?

I try to be honest about my motivations, but yes, I have often written just hoping for a touch of that old love, affection and partnership. Wrong fishing line, wrong hook, wrong bait. Truth must precede reconciliation.

So what is reconciliation? It means no more nor less than bringing together again. I don’t expect anything more than friendship, but it does imply acceptance of truth and being able to step beyond old understandings and beliefs into a shared space.

And divorce? Isn’t that about irreconcilable differences? Or is that also about unwillingness to face truths? Our grounds, for pragmatic reasons of a gender recognition certificate, had to be those awful declarations about my unreasonable behaviour in wearing women’s shoes (among other things) and being seen in public!

No, somewhere beyond all that crap, I hope that there may still be the kind of friendship that only 30 and more years of shared memories and parenting can give. But we shall not get there unless the truths are faced. My plea therefore, is that attention be given to spouses, partners and relations to properly understand that having a transsexual partner does not change you, and that recognition of the underlying nature of another human being does not change their intentions towards you. At present there is absolutely nothing available. If you are diagnosed with a debilitating disease, there is support available for carers. It is respectable to be related to someone who suffers. Not so if that someone is transsexual. It reflects on you, makes you feel you must be something you don’t like or respond to (OMG – don’t even suggest that I may be bisexual, let alone lesbian!!). It is not obviously OK to tell your friends and family that your beloved is trans. (See my early poem: Not like a bone.) But it is almost exclusively the response from friends, that leaving a trans partner is the only reasonable thing to do. How can you explain? No pressure there, then!

For me, reconciliation requires the wholehearted recognition that I have always been a woman, unknowingly having the wrong outward appearance. It is also a wholehearted recognition that human love is not what we idealise, but is (perhaps most commonly) contingent on outward forms and meeting expectations.

The Mandela motif

To the last, Nelson Mandela was kindly, warm, smiling, human, both ordinary and somehow supreme. He achieved world-betterment through both truth and reconciliation.

Dear partners, wives and husbands of transsexual people everywhere: your truths may be unpalatable and force changes in the way you see yourselves and the world, but they are truths. They alone stand between you and reconciliation. You don’t have to want that, of course. But they also stand between you and peace with yourself. Whether you stay in partnership or not, there is no point in not being reconciled with yourself, and no future in not resolving your truths, between you and yourself.

Sometimes the world is just not the way you have been used to seeing it. Sometimes it is not black and white.

Continue reading Truth and reconciliation »

Care to leave a comment? »

Please take all your belongings with you

  • Posted on November 9, 2013 at 8:35 am

… when leaving the train. It’s an everyday announcement. I’m not sure if it means don’t leave a bomb please, or please save us the lost property, but you hear it so many times it doesn’t remind you to do anything. Just mind the gap. That really does matter!

This is my first blog from my new home, and it’s taken me lot of adjusting to come to recognise that I am permanently here (as in, I am going to be here quite a long time). No, I shan’t be moving again next year or the year after, and whatever I dislike or that feels awkward or less than I really want, this is it. Water-leaks into my cupboards are my leaks. Truffle-coloured walls are for me to sort out, and there just isn’t much of this place to alter to my individuality. (But the olive-green wall was the first to go, painted three times on the day before I moved in!)

I’ve been having dance workshops in someone’s home, in a room as big as the floorplan of my flat. And yet this bedroom is really lovely, and I’m glad it’s as big as my lounge. I shall get used to restricted space and limitations, and probably swap the car for something rather smaller that will find the under-sized parking spaces possible.

I used to live in a more spacious semi-detached house, with a large garden. I have always lived in a semi, always with a garden, often with fruit and veg growing, sometimes a pond. I have a larger car because it’s been useful for larger pieces of wood, garden provisions, and taking things away, for transporting my son to university and back, and for family holidays.

And now, I have none of these things. That dream, for what it was worth, and for all its enjoyments, is over.

Spare room

So why is it that the most difficult space has been my second bedroom? In reality it is my office/working space, and potentially it was to be where a guest could stay, as in my last rented flat. But this time, it has acquired history from my family house. I rescued some OK-ish white metal shelving for storage, and added my belongings that I’d taken with me.

I guess I didn’t want to fall down the gap, so as I left, I checked around that I had everything. Bench vice (the bench went), angle grinder (for loan: I have nothing to grind), router (for woodworking, not the Internet), and tools for everything (some of which really have been useful already). I don’t want to call in any handyman to do what I know how to do myself. A girl can be self-sufficient when she’s learned what to do.

And yet, after a morning assembling the shelving, and an afternoon of putting everything away in them as neatly as a first shot could permit, I was left looking at a wall that was dominating domestic space in what has to be said is an unusual way. It isn’t how most spare bedrooms look. My dad had one, but then he had five bedrooms to play with and no shed. I like having my practical means of survival. These are my skills and abilities, encapsulated. Yes, this is a part of me; these are my belongings, and whilst I do know other women equally capable, it does leave me wondering whether some of these are belongings I should leave behind, and whether for anyone else, they are a marker of not being a ‘real’ woman. Does this room detract from my femininity? I have already thought of screening the shelves with floral or pink/purple curtains, but the truth is, the futon won’t fold out for a guest because of the shelves and the rest of my stuff that won’t quite fit in. Portfolios of years of art classes, pictures with too few walls to go on, boots without cupboards, regular office equipment and stationery …

I have left the train, and I am stationary. Some things have moved off without me already. What are my belongings? Is there lost property? Should I ditch some of this in order to become a more regular female traveller? It isn’t materialism so much as attachment to the means of doing things, that I feel torn by.

Birthday

Today is also my birthday. It is only the second time in my life that there has been no-one special to have thought or asked: ‘what would you like for your birthday?’ But a card from a friend arrived in time, a pretty card from my mum, and a very pink ‘Sister’ card (bless you: you have no idea what a wonderful feeling that gives me). I shall never again receive a blokey card, featuring some sport I have never played, boats I have never wanted to be sick on, diy debacles, or drunken lounging. Why did I ever get any of those? And yet some of the things on my ‘second bedroom’ shelves would have appeared on them – and I don’t want a card with a girl wearing a tool belt.

It is many years ago that I was in a short poetry interlude, writing from a hurting heart, and several times about wanting to be wanted for who I am, not for what I can do. It felt as if my place in life was to be able, not simply to be. And here I am, being more me than ever, yet still hanging onto belongings that define what I can do.

And if I could swap my room full of these belongings for a person who wanted me simply for who I am, I would leap out of bed now and throw it all away in an instant. It isn’t about belongings. It’s about belonging.

The whole theme of my script with the many psychiatrists it took to decide that the problem is my body, not my mind – was that of not belonging in the gender assigned me at birth. Not belonging with male peers from the word go, on a boys’ table, in a boys’ playground, in a boys’ school, as a teen boy, among young men, in a male team and environment.

As I woman, I belong at last, in the right place. But perhaps with too many belongings, and no-one special to belong with.

Continue reading Please take all your belongings with you »

Care to leave a comment? »

Touching, isn’t it?

  • Posted on October 28, 2013 at 1:03 pm

It’s a cultural thing – who touches whom, when, how and why. I have relaxed into being a whole lot more touchy-feely recently. As a woman, in England, I feel OK touching someone’s arm in conversation, greeting or saying goodbye with a hug. I was never allowed to do that as a man, lest it be misinterpreted, even by me. OK, sometimes I did, but not as a regular thing. When a man touches a woman’s arm or leg, it’s either a presumption, an advance, or it’s effeminate. Hugs before always had that constraint: not too warm, not too close, not too long. Air-kissing only.

It’s as if physical contact is largely reserved for sexual intimacy. Singular hugs are remembered: the last hug with my wife, the last hug with my daughter, a special hug one Christmas with someone I felt deeply for. The kiss that could have led to a mistaken journey. A French kiss that was so needed, but never again repeated. I’ve often written about my yearning for intimacy, for the next ‘real’ kiss that means more than friends, the hand in a place no-one else has touched for a very long time.

And yet now I am learning something quite new through the dance and the people I meet there. Human touch, understood differently, is nurturing, healing, and increases self-awareness and wholeness. In a small group this week, we explored self-awareness in the body to its six extents: fingertips, toes, head and tail. Yes, you know, those little bones at the end of your spine that are free to wiggle. This week involved touching the tail.

Isn’t it funny, the way we ignore parts of ourselves in Western society? Men have breasts, just undeveloped and unspoken about. But they are there and sensate. We have navels that have inner connections and psychological significance, and the most we do is pierce them. Women’s breasts are sexualised, yet they are so much more than erogenous zones. Men don’t communicate that they hold their penises many times a day, and the conversational barrier between men and women, even between women and women about vaginas, leaves everyone communicating poorly. We have a sense of at least some taboo about things we all deal with throughout every day of our lives, not in the one per cent or less time spent in sexual activity. There are things we value and enjoy, and yet pretend they don’t exist or aren’t really part of our enjoyed lives.

I am learning how much is lost in the separation of sensory and sensual experience from communal life, and its exclusive adoption into single-partner expression. No, I haven’t gone all swingy and free-love – far from it. I am just touching other people, and they are touching me, and we are understanding its importance. We are communicating a shared awareness in a way I never found possible before. There are always caveats in our dance, that if the other isn’t comfortable with a touch, it is avoided. We don’t get to really intimate erogenous zones, because that would raise ambiguities, but we still talk about it and respect each other. Many other animals regularly touch, hug, groom each other, and it is bonding. We as Western humans have lost a lot to supposed correctness, fear of taking advantage, and loss of trust.

You can’t tickle yourself. And you can’t hug yourself. A duvet and a cuddly toy may be comforting, but it is not a hug. An orgasm may be a beautiful experience, but it’s all the touching, skin contact and caressing that creates an awareness of mutual trust and love. And I have found that there is another non-sexual layer of physical contact between people that is simply shared awareness of who and what we are, without which we are only partly aware. So I am really liking my new community of people who touch and hug, who make contact in dance, who will pull and push legs and arms, wiggle a tail bone, and who will invigorate, or stroke, and remind me of my extension in all directions as a living being.

Could I have found this before? It’s a difficult question. I know I would have felt the same in myself, but I know it wouldn’t have fitted with life as I knew it. And now, I know that this is exploration I always wanted but never found, not even in my marriage.

Continue reading Touching, isn’t it? »

Care to leave a comment? »