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Patterns

  • Posted on July 27, 2013 at 7:45 am

I swear my printer says ‘rhubarb, rhubarb’
as it swings its head and spits politely on the page,
writes my words with rainbows.

It’s why I know you across a crowded bar
and have said hello to strangers by mistake
to colour with apologies in red.

It’s why there are trees on my winter glass
and Virgin Marys sanctify burnt toast
for the blessed mistaken in brown.

And clouds are far countries where peace
reigns despite the castles melting into hills,
or that chimeras rear their fleeced heads.

The rain drips random from roof to sill
lulls my sleep, while a strict tap tortures me
in Chinese: tacked and tock-sick to the second.

And clocks with pendulums synchronise
when left in a room alone, like nuns whose
months listen to each other, ignore the moon.

It’s why molecules love each other or repel
in blind recognition of affinity for how
everything falls together, or falls apart.

Make patterns and everything fits. Life
tessellates, minds made whole; vacuums
are shapeless; we hate them to death.

So we invent patterns as comforts, patchwork
hexagons mimicking bees to leave no space
and fill them with sweet nothings.

Comb our recognitions and reassurances,
find the illusions and pretence. Fillers for those
things we need to learn and now shall not.

Computers work so hard at what we do
without thinking; pattern recognition makes
automation easy as the mistaken friend.

Then Mary says ‘rhubarb’ across a crowded bar,
writing trees on the window and tapping your name.
Your pendulum swings to hers and you’re safe.

 

2011 © Andie Davidson

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I am seeing something very different in love

  • Posted on July 2, 2013 at 8:55 pm

It’s different because it’s from a different place.

It’s a different place, because this is where I am from when I am not just being here.

Everything has a beginning. Everything has an end. In between all is change.

But that doesn’t mean anything is destroyed, or loses its identity.

I wonder. I wonder what our souls would say to each other today, if they could speak without our voices and ears. I wonder how confused our souls are, how bemused, when all they have, to join with others, is voices and ears.

I have no belief in a god. I feel no need. I did once, and my belief in a god who was loving, if corrective, made me hate myself. I believed I was a good person, liked by almost everyone I came into contact with. I also believed that something in me was wicked, sinful and wrong. I believed that if anyone else knew this about me, I would become unloved, untouchable, even hated.

I have a very different philosophy of life now. I am connected through love and life with all other living things. I belong in a wider, larger place than just this body-life, and it will be to there that I shall be reabsorbed again when this journey ends. I belong and I am safe; and so long as I know my place here and have acceptance, I am happy to stay and be involved. At my deepest, darkest point last year, I came to believe that I was unloved, untouchable, even hated. That meant there was no longer any reason to stay here, and I was very prepared to take a shortcut home.

I wonder what our souls would say to each other today?

I tried desperately for ages, in some kind of belief in thought transference, telepathy, rerouting my heart through spirit friends or guardians, hoping angels may be messengers–to say that love is love and souls are souls and connection is the meaning in life. I failed. I still believe deeply that I am part of something greater, something whole. And yet I feel that love has completely failed me. I have become untouchable.

It seems a long time ago, but I used to live in the belief that I was a man. I did as best as I could to do and be what that meant. I was acceptable empathic: people told me that in my 20s. I had a strong feminine side. People saw that. I was different, but I was one of the ‘nice men’. I was the man who understood the wives who had husbands who didn’t understand them. I was a lover because I believed in love. I was not god’s gift, I have no god. I was nothing special in terms of the big exotic Lover. But I knew how to give, and keep giving, when it came to making another feel special, valuable, wanted, loved. I don’t say outstanding, I don’t say perfect. I just say that inside of me there has always been an ability to connect, be devoted and committed, and express love. Not just desire, not lust, not wanting to possess, just to give and to share, beyond romance, but not excluding it. It doesn’t set me apart, but it does mean I still believe I have a lot to give and to share with another, with a lover, with a partner..

Today I laughed and laughed. Lying face down on tender breasts, having my back massaged, my therapist said how unusual I had always been. No, not for my gender, but because I was so conventional! I did ‘man’ well. I did as I was told, too much as expected, perhaps. I hid the self-hate even better. I was afraid I would not be loved. I was afraid I would become untouchable. And here I was laughing at the absurdity of it all. And realising that the only caring touch I now receive is this, at the hands of my massage therapist.

I understand completely that on the outside I have changed almost beyond recognition. In some ways I hope I have; I too see photographs of myself looking very like a man. I look at those images of myself, with the hatred locked and secret inside, and recall how my family, and my wife, loved me. At a human level they were loving the man; the father, husband, lover. But were they loving me? I can’t answer that anymore, because they don’t now.

I wonder what our souls would say today if they could speak without our voices and ears.

So I really do appreciate that the bits that were loved were in many ways the pretended bits. But the parts of me that loved in return were soul bits. I am not saying anything superior about myself, I just know that for me it was different. These parts of me, were those that lay inside all the time. Inside that ‘man’ was me, self-hated, not understood, but making me the different kind of man. There are men who are like I learned to be, who are not like me at all, who are kind, gentle, loving and don’t watch football with passion, or feel that women are there just for them. I know. But I was different, and if I was liked or loved for those nicer, understanding aspects, it was because I was never really a man at all. I just learned to behave more like one.

If your soul knew mine, it would understand that a woman had in fact loved a woman.

Spiritually, I feel I know myself and my place better than in the days when what I am, was a sinful secret. Those were the days when my eyes were blinkered by beliefs, or rather by dogma or doctrine about how we all ‘should’ be. And those beliefs, even when the religion faded away, stuck fast. Now, I need no religion and no god to love, to be kind, to work for better equality, fairness and to understand the acid of greed. I never was unlovable, untouchable and wicked for being a woman with a male habitation. But I was loved and touchable for hiding it and for hating myself enough to keep it secret.

But I also know that through the experience of wrestling with gender, I can no longer see as most people do. I can no longer wear the spectacles of the gender binary. I can see every day how the majority of men presume priority and superiority, and aren’t even aware of it. I can see male stupidity and emotional immaturity a mile off. I can see women taken in by sexual attraction above personal trustworthiness and real caring. I can see protective bitching. I can see how people judge each other for playing the roles they were taught. I can no longer see why two people who love each other should not find some physical expression of that love, whatever their gender or sexuality. I simply cannot see as most people do any more. I am not alone; this is no special gift as such, but I can never wear the same blinkers again.

I wonder, if our souls could speak to each other, what they would say about love, about bodies, about touching, and whether they would agree with our minds about what can and cannot feel, or be, good.

I can see better than ever that, for all the wonderful feelings of romance and being in love, truly loving another person is actually something quite different. I believe we are more than these bodies, and our feelings about loveableness and touchableness are badly skewed. If another’s body ‘isn’t right’ we turn away from touch. Disfigurement? Disability? Ageing? Impotence? Mental health? There are lots of reasons for disowning previously-loved people who no longer match our reasons for originally loving them. We reject their touch like infection. We fear being tainted by association. We fear losing the opportunity for something better, more like the original.

Don’t we all do it? Don’t we do it when dementia strikes? Don’t we do it when someone is struggling with life? Don’t we do it when we walk on by, past the homeless person we can’t possibly help, who doesn’t want to be helped, just wants to eat? Don’t we do it when someone is attacked, verbally or physically, in case being involved hurts us, in case we have to share in another’s hurts? And don’t we do it with the transsexual partner who finally finds their authenticity? Does expression of love need the same attraction as in the mating game? Can nothing new be learned? Is this really a different kind of love?

I wonder what our souls would say, if one said, ‘oh my goodness; I have the wrong body for this soul’. Would the other say, ‘oh yuk. I can’t commune with you any more, I thought you were a man soul.’

Somehow, because of where I believe I fit in the broader span of existence, I think real love comes from somewhere else than the recognition of bodies. I know as well as anyone that sexual attraction happens through eyes, and pheromones. But frankly unattractive people do love each other, people do endure together through disfigurement, illness, impotence and age. People of all kinds find ways to touch and to express love to each other, and overcome disappointments, changes and challenges.

I don’t know whether it is my spiritual appreciations, or through the struggles and changes I had (and still have), to go through in being transsexual in a world of preconceptions, but I just don’t see the barriers that bodies make between people who want to share love.

***

And this is what I wish I could communicate. I cannot, because to say it would invite the reply that I just don’t accept the impact of my diagnosis.

So here I am. It’s too late, and I know I see differently. My soul does not meet with you, and cannot simply say ‘I love you’ any more. I am not loved enough to be touched; it gives you the wrong kinds of feelings to touch me now. It has become unlovely and wrong. I wonder if we shall meet as souls in some other place, touch once more, and agree finally what love is? I do hope so.

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Authenticity and the empty bed

  • Posted on June 21, 2013 at 11:29 pm

Sometimes I just ache for loving contact and touch. I knew it every day for over thirty years, and gave the same freely and with real affection and love. This has been a real cliff edge, and as much as I accept that my marriage is over, I am haunted.

This week my black dog has been prowling, asking for walkies, claws clicking on the floor, and looking at me with doleful eyes. My black dog arrived the first night I descended into the awful realisation that I had shed my pretence of being male where I was loved and desired, into a place where I was sufficiently female to be unlovable but insufficiently female to be desired. That place, where I might never know love and intimacy ever again was my greatest nightmare. It was then my black dog chased me to the brink and I seriously considered that all meaningful life had come to an end.

Dramatic, isn’t it? Of course not. It isn’t any different from a million other lonely women who either don’t want a man or can’t find anyone attracted, or can’t communicate their feelings lest it break a friendship. So I don’t count myself exceptional, and among fellow transsexual women, this is de rigeur.

‘Count your blessings!’, I am told. I even tell myself. And yes, my life is richer now than ever in many ways. But I don’t need to be told this, as I have explained in previous blogs, and tell over and over, the explosion of reality for me that transcends everything else, is my sense of authenticity.

Yes. I am real. I feel whole and normal and complete (well, almost – give me another year!)

And ready. Ready to love and be loved and feel wonderful, and share life and wholeness with another. Wow! It’s amazing! But I am standing alone on an empty stage and the play is elsewhere, the lights are out, and I am not in it. I have a feeling that if only I can find the right stage I may just be mistaken for an extra, so long as my lines are convincing. But I have the feeling that my script just isn’t the right one any more.

You see, this is my script and I don’t want someone else’s.

Probably the worst underlying thing about being born transsexual is that only another transsexual really gets it. I am reminded by the way accepting friends act and speak, that their acceptance is simply that – and they still don’t fully get it. It’s in the handshake you get when the woman next to you gets an air-kiss. It’s the explanation of how you never had to grow up with the vulnerability of being a girl. It’s the male banter as if you aren’t present as a woman, that you will ‘understand’ because you ‘used to be a man’. It’s the comment: ‘I shall always think of you how you used to be’.

My history will haunt me for ever. I am neither ashamed nor embarrassed by it, but it just isn’t normal is it? I was reminded robustly by a friend that I don’t exactly present as your average lesbian. Real lesbians grew up as women facing male presumptions and female vulnerabilities and judgements. I, on the other hand, was fully socialised as a man and took all the privileges – so don’t expect any sympathy there (mate). You can never be a real lesbian with that kind of background. It seems even wearing a skirt and being feminine is in itself surrender to male dominance and betrayal of some lesbian fundamental. And yet I really don’t (at least as yet) feel that I could let the average man into my personal space. I think it’s partly because I’ve seen male attitudes, the male psyche (which I don’t feel I ever truly shared), and behaviours from the inside, being expected to do the same, and experiencing men in the absence of women.

‘Why don’t you find another trans person? They will understand you much better!’ As if being trans defines your personality, your philosophy, your tastes and abilities, and makes you all of a kind. Ginger hair? Go join the gingers! Does that sound any more or less reasonable? It’s as if people feel safer if I don’t get too close. My authenticity is, in this way, questioned or denied. Real people, this way; less real people: over there please.

So despite my complete sense of authenticity, the world is full of well-meaning people who insist on labels that simply are inadequate. *Sigh*. It seems we’re back with the ‘what’ being more important than the ‘who’. Nothing pronounces this more than dating sites. Blokes browse my profile (no money exchanged yet so there are no exchanges) despite ‘F seeking F’ – and women either explain their lesbian past or ‘only seek friendship, nothing more’.

I’m a person! I’m screaming inside. Where can I find another person for whom our pasts and our unlearned selves are far less important than who we are now? I only want to love and be loved!

OK, you’ve had enough of the apparent angst. So have I. But what is so wrong with yearning for love? Having the capacity to love, care and commit, and finding that your labels don’t qualify you for being wanted and trusted is truly awful.

Because authenticity seems to count for less.
Because what you are makes people defensive, lest you change them by being too close.
Because in the end I had to choose between authenticity and the love of my life.

And that, dear readers, is the case of authenticity and the empty bed.

It all leaves me wondering if I would have really got to grips with and faced authenticity (and how many people do) were it not for this. Most of us have an idea by the time we are adult, of how life goes. We adjust expectations to reality all the time, but we lose bits of ourselves all along the way. Life is like that, this is how it is, never a bed of roses, you have to compromise, count your blessings, please others, keep your head down, it isn’t the end of the world, there are many people worse off than you.

And yet this real-I-sation for me, this truly knowing with awe and wonder, that I am meant to be like this, is a wholly different awareness than I have ever had. And it isn’t just about my gender, it’s about my sense of self. And it means that I will never allow my authenticity to be compromised ever again. Is that why I don’t know the script any more?

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Is there a ‘me’ in ‘chimera’?

  • Posted on May 26, 2013 at 10:27 am

One of the more fascinating debates to have in the pub is when people start to ‘enquire beyond’. What is beyond the universe? What is beyond the end of time? What is beyond this life? It’s reassuring to know that there isn’t some monster at the end of the universe, or that time is not simply recycled in some Groundhog Day nightmare, or that hell isn’t just a coercive historical invention of a ruling priesthood. Whenever a conversation starts to ‘go beyond’, even if it is just an inability to understand a different human culture, or to think scientifically about something where there is insufficient knowledge, I recall Descartes’ Discourse on Method.

It was tough going, on my philosophy course at university, to plough through, especially since God had to be an integral part of all Descartes’ functions of reason, but I do recall some important features. One is that everything lesser comes from something greater, and that we can’t always infer the rock from the chipped-off stone. Also, that you can’t invent and describe a chimera (a made-up creature) that isn’t made of bits with which you are already familiar.

We had a rather old inherited children’s book with split pages, where you could mix half a lion with half a giraffe, for example, to make a liraffe. And pictures of dragons and monsters, or even aliens, are always recognisable in their parts. There is a head, or sometimes the body contains the head parts (Monsters Inc). An eye or eyes, a mouth and teeth (usually, not many monsters simply suck, and we tend to think of them as frightening and aggressive, so they need teeth), limbs to get about, with joints, gripping-parts with fingers, suckers or claws, and maybe a tail for balance or as a weapon. But however hard you try, it will be slimy, furry, leathery, scaly, or something derived from an experience of a living creature, or manufactured robot you know. You can only describe and imagine from what you already know – and for sure, we don’t know everything. (Anyone who knows me well, knows that I can be very adamantly wrong!) If you were to meet a quite different being, manifesting in an entirely novel way, you would have no words to convey the experience. Everything would be analogy or simile – in other words, solely in terms of your current available shared experience. In fact, you would have difficulty having the experience if it really was beyond the universe we know so partially.

Belonging and experience

Now think of your own life, its changes, roles, relations, and the creature that you are. Here is short chain of what I am so far:

unborn kick; baby; Andrew; son; brother; minor; pubescent child; Andy; adolescent; boyfriend; student; lover; man; husband; father; companion; woman; sister; daughter

I said ‘I am’ because either I am momentary (i.e. only actually exist in this moment) or I am everything from all moments because that is known and recalled. I could add the decorations, of writer, artist, musician, etc., but you get the point. These aspects are all me. Yes, I include the male stuff, because the body part of me was identifiably that, but because I am woman, that is as real and as true as anything else. I lived and performed as a man mistakenly for far too long, but nevertheless I did, just as surely as I kicked before I was born. You can’t infer the whole from the part, and you can also recognise everything that has ever described me.

Is there a ‘me’ in ‘chimera’? We can all see that, and we are all part of someone else’s construct..

Is there a chimera in me? No. Because I am not all things at once. Only a few things are retained together, but it isn’t monstrous to be daughter, sister, woman, father, even lover, all at once.

This is my philosophy of self, that I own it all, understand it better than I once did, and will again more in the future. But it is also my philosophy of person: that for everyone who knew me before I took possession of my womanhood, all of it was me, and that the person you know now is the same as the person then. Those who sit next to me in bands where I play, or in the office (does anyone there read this?!) know that my sense of humour is fast and innate and of a particular kind. Those who have told me I have lovely eyes have not done so because of my gender presentation. My voice has changed a bit, the way I speak and walk certainly have, I let my hair grow, but my memories are contiguous and detailed. My DNA runs in my children. My feet are the same size, even if women call a size 9 a size 8, but I dance on them now. So if anyone thinks I am a different person is simply saying that their mental chimera of me doesn’t look like this anymore.

A different person?

We do say, colloquially, ‘they’re a different person’ when someone is traumatised, or reacts to drugs, and in some way their personality changes. Sometimes a person becomes ‘lost’ through dementia, or grief, or by withdrawing, and we know that inside, this person is just unexpressed. Sometimes we mean someone has become released, or content or happy in a way they never were. But they aren’t really ‘a different person’, only expressing themselves differently. Sometimes we like it and relate to it, sometimes it is less easy to do so. But all of these changes belong to the person, and the difficulties belong to the observer, friend, or family member.

Me? Yes, I’ve changed. I’m happier, freer, I am reconciled with my real gender, I feel a lot younger and I wear eye shadow and a skirt. I don’t think that I have become less of a friend (though some have been tested during my transition) or unlikeable. I am as annoying in some ways as I always was, and I shall have to continue working on that. But the same person gets up in the morning and sleeps at night, and feels lonely and hungry.

When you say you love someone, what do you mean? What do you love? When a person changes in the way I have, what did or do you love? I hope I may find someone who loves me like this (but that is me ‘thinking beyond’) who may not have loved me when I was living as a man. But that is about attraction, not about loving the person. It’s about feeling safe to open up and be vulnerable with me, in accordance with what is ‘right’ or that fits expectations. Maybe someone will be intimate with me again, only because I am a woman. But just as those who have left me because of this could not accept that whole chain above as ‘me’, so another will have to face the fact that ‘I’ am that whole chain too. This is me, the one person. Be careful what you love.

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A difficult friend to have

  • Posted on May 24, 2013 at 11:36 pm

Just as I turned my corner and things felt like they really had settled down, I realised that I was spending more time than ever alone. It’s not a complaint, and it’s not just me. Single people just don’t get invited anywhere. It’s assumed you must be busy, or want more than just a coffee and chat, while all the time you’re sitting alone, or just getting on with stuff and wishing you simply had someone talk to you, and do ordinary, everyday things with.

But I’ve had to realise that I’ve been a pretty demanding (or just demanding, never mind the pretty) friend to have over the last year. Losing everything you hold dear and love is hard, so keeping it under when you’re with a friend is the last thing you want to do. That’s what friends are for isn’t it? We take it in turns to have hard times and to support. And sometimes we have hard times at the same time, and don’t offer the listening we should for each other. Looking back, as my life fell apart around me and I grew into more than I could have dreamed of, I was on an emotional rollercoaster. It’s just that those stomach-churning drops seemed to take longer than any steady climbs. A male history had left me with few friends, all girl friends, and all of them were going through difficult times too. And I know that I was talking too much and too intensely and too long and about me. So I screwed up really; and now I feel I’ve just worn them out. I suspect none read my blog!

I do hope I’ve learned about myself through this; I certainly feel very different now, and I hope friendships will grow back in coming months, now that I feel more ordinary than ever. I’m over the grief and mostly over the rejection, but I have to admit still to a bitter feeling about losing the love of the person I shared everything with so well, for so many years – and through no fault of my own. That will soften with time until one day I just won’t care anymore, but the matter-of-factness I’m getting about divorce is not quite how I feel about it. But now is no longer the time to speak of that, or share it with friends. I think they’ve had enough of the me, me, me.

As always, my week has gathered some coherent thoughts from different directions. This week, with so much parliamentary discussion over equal marriage, and a not-altogether satisfactory outcome for transsexual partners, there have been a lot of aggrieved people feeling cheated. Once again we can’t just let it go. Being transsexual is still a real tag-on-the-end of society. Why should time be spent considering so few people? And that’s how we come to feel about ourselves: hard done by, hard done to, neglected, separated, dispensable. Who will defend us, if we don’t defend ourselves? Can’t we just accept our lot and get on with it? Why do we push our presence, and our equality and rights on other people? What do you want? Special treatment?

At the heart of these feelings, and I guess why I wore friendships thin, is fear. Fear that we can never again be fully integrated in society. Who will want or desire us now? Some are lucky, most are not, and we know that. Deep down we know we are not the same when it comes to getting too close to another. And so we assert ourselves and remind others that life is hard at times, being trans. We want others to realise that we are just normal as people, even if our bodies betray that we are different.

Many, if not most, of us will have come to the impossible dilemma of choosing between self-authenticity, and relationships of trust and love. Someone this week described being trans as being given ‘a shit hand’ in life, and someone else on Facebook disagreed, and yes, we all know it’s what you make of it. I even wrote of it as a gift a couple of months ago. But whatever it is, it’s tough. It’s heartbreak, it’s emotional trauma, it’s grief, it’s sheer hard work; it’s about being obvious, about making mistakes, it’s about standing out and being different, and knowing you’ll be different forever. It’s about uncertainty and having to convince professional clinicians over period of years that it’s ‘real’, while you get it all wrong and gradually start to get it right. It’s about vulnerability and fragility. And fear of further loss. Every coming out is a potential disaster, and every time it isn’t, it’s a relief.

It does wonderful things to you, and nothing compares with the authenticity you can achieve. But it’s hard, and often leaves us quite on our own. And we take that to our friends. During transition, life is focussed on ourselves; we have been described as making Narcissus seem an empathic extrovert. We swamp friends in our fear and insecurity, because that’s what it’s like inside. And when we succeed, and develop, again we’re full of it and want to tell everyone, hardly believing we could have managed it. No; you can’t just get on in life when you begin transition. And your friends are on the receiving end.

I think, as well, that I had 32 years of someone I completely trusted, in whom I could confide, share troubles and joys, and know that I would always be loved – and that was suddenly withdrawn, leaving me with no replacement. I am still learning to have those conversations with myself, because I have no-one else. It’s less comforting, but it’s better than silence. And sometimes I do feel terribly alone.

None of this is unique to me. We can be very difficult friends, and all I can say to anyone who I’ve affected during my transition, is that I appreciate your fortitude, and understand you taking a breather. But I still need you, in a less demanding way I hope, and want to offer something back. So please don’t stay away and distant; I can be a good friend too.

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