Let’s talk more about gender as it affects how I act in society. In my post yesterday, I wrote about how the label ‘agender’ seems to freak out some people even more than being trans. It surprises me, even though it shouldn’t. Anyone who wants out of the societal norms is looked upon with suspicion.
You would think I would have learned after the negative reac9tions I received to being bi and to not wanting children, but I’m a slow learner. Plus, each big issue only happened every five years or so, so it wasn’t as if I had constant reminders of how out of the norm I was on the big issues.
By the time I reached thirty, I knew better than to talk my mad shit in casual company. As I accrued more and more weirdo traits (not wanting to get married, not wanting to be in a longterm monogamous relationship (being ENM), and not wanting to live with anyone, for example), I kept it to myself. Oh, let’s not forget Taiji weapons and now Bagua. I’m specifying weapons because Taiji in and of itself isn’t that strange. Well, at least the Westernized vision of it. It’s pretty funny, though, that the one movement that is always featured in any movie/TV show which Taiji in it is my least-favorite movement.
It’s called Cloud Hands (more like Moving hands like clouds, but Cloud Hands is the shortened verison), and it pretty easy to do it in a basic fashion. In other words, you can look like a master fairly quickly with this one miracle posture, er….
Of course, if you want to do it well, it takes longer to truly master. That’s a given, and not really the point of this post.
One of the reason I don’t talk about certain things is because I know that I have it easier than other people do. At the same time, being ignored/invisible/denied existence is a special kind of hell on its own. And I do have to deal with bullshit even if it’s not life-and-death bullshit.
So now the newest thing is being agender. If I was thirty years younger, I probably would have reluctantly embraced nonbinary. It’s not really me, though. It’s still a gender, which is not what I want. I am not interested in gender, much as I am not interested in religion. When I was thinking about religion and my (non) relationship to it, I really didn’t like atheist for several reasons. One, I did not have that kind of confidence that there was nothing bigger out there. I mean, to me, it was more ridiculous to believe the Big Bang Theory came out of nowhere. You mean to tell me there was absolutely nothing and then BAM! We get the earth? (Yes, I know there are more steps in there, but no matter what steps exist, it’s still unbelievable to me that it came out of nothing.)
Anyway. I called myself agnostic for some time. Meaning that I wasn’t sure about what was out there. That’s still true. I’m not arrogant enough to think I know for certain if there is a god or not. What I realized, though, a few years ago was that I didn’t care. The topic of religion wasn’t something I wanted to think about any longer. What it boiled down to for me was that there’s rpobably something bigger than us out there–but I don’t care that there is. I don’t care what it is. I don’t want to spend any more brain cells tihnking about it.
When I died (twice!), my mother asked me what I remembered from being in a coma. I said nothing. (It’s a fucking coma. It’s kinda baked into the word that there is no memory of said event.) She desperately wanted there to be something from my coma that confirmed there was a god.
After she and my father returned to Taiwan, she sent me a video of an American doctor being interviewed by a Taiwanese woman. The doctor had something terrible and was in a coma for several months (I think?) He was expected to die. When he came out of his coma (and he seemed back to ‘normal’ in the interview), he said that while he was in the coma, he was visited by an angel. She was an attractive white woman with brown hair*. She smiled at him and told him that he was so welcome here.
My mom wanted me to tell her that something like that happened to me. Nope. I was in a coma for nearly a week, and I do not remember a single second of it. From the time I passed out in my front hallway to the second I bolted upright in the hospital, I was completely unconscious. My mother showed me my levels much later, and they were ‘yeah, there’s no coming back from that’ levels of unconscious.
I did not see god, an angel, or anything to indicate that there was an afterlife. It’s funny because in that interview, the doctor said that he talked to other people who had near death experiences (NDE) and they all had the same experience as he did. Oh, he was an atheist before his medical experience. He said he did not know of a single person who had a NDE who didn’t beileve in god afterwards.
*Raises hand and waves it vigorously*
Hello. That would be me. I died. Twice. And my coming back was called a miracle by everyone on my medical team. I was almost a rockstar in the hospital. People knew who I was and that I had cheated death. It was a strange feeling, not completely unwelcome. I mean, there are worse things to be known for, I guess.
My point is that I chose the term areligious because I just didn’t care what kind of god was out there/if any. It difdn’t have any effect on me because I could not make god make sense to me.
Same with gender. I thought about it so much, it made my head hurt. I could not figure out what gender really was and why I should care about it. Believe me, I have thought about it a lot, and I end up in the same place I did when I thought about religien.
More tomorrow.
*Oh, I will get to that in a minute. Believe you me. No wait. Let’s do this right now. Come the fuck on. An angel who happened to look like a pretty American brunette? Let’s be real. It was probably a nurse whom he mistook for an angel.