Still talking about being a weirdo is a very straitlaced world. Here is the post from yesterday. Sometimes, I get jaded when I hear other people talk about things they consider ‘weird’ because it often falls into what I consider to be mildly diffreent. Or even if it’s more out there, it’s not super out there.
It’s hard to explain, really, but as someone who is on the fringe of everything, I don’t assume that anything about my life is normal. Not my hobbies; not my beliefs; not my traits/identities. One fairly tame example is when I worked at the county as an administrative assistant. I was on the floor with all the executives of the different departments. That meant that there were people from very disparate departments on one floor. There was a researcher who was roughly my age and also a woman (as I identified as at the time). We would casually chat about this and that, and it was fine. I only saw her once a week or so, so it was certainly not a steady thing.
Somehow, we found out that we were both bisexual. She was with a male partner in what she thought might be an abusive relationship. That was an interesting discussion to have, but it’s not the reason I brought her up. Once, we were talking about sex. Yes, wildly inappropriate for the workplace, but not surprising with that particular workplace. Somehow, the question of attraction came up. I said that I would walk down the street, see someone hot, and think about how they would be in bed.
My colleague looked at me as if Itold her I was streaking on the streets on the regular. Or as if I had said that I was punching people in the face randomly and for no good reason. I asked her what was wrong and she said that women don’t think like that. My brain screeched to a halt because she was telling me, self-identified as a woman at the time, that something I had just said was something that ‘women’ didn’t do/think. She was completely serious and did not see how fucked up what she was saying was.
Side note: This is human nature, by the way. We think/believe things beyond all ratinal belief. If something threatens our sense of self and what we believe, we will go to ridiculous lengths to explain it away. That’s why it’s so hard to get someone out of acult, for example. Or why conspiracy theorists are impossible to reason with. They will simply dismiss anything that doesn’t fit into their preconceived notions/ideas/beliefs. Again, we all do this–it’s just to what extent any given person will do it.
I looked at her and told her I, a woman, was telling her to her face that this was something I did. She said that she had talked about this with all her female friends (ten! Ten women! All the women!) about this very thing, and all of them said they could not imagine doing that. Therefore! No! Women! Would! Ever! Do! That!
I dropped it after ten minutes or so, but it stuck with me as how ignorant, fearful, and stubborn people can be. I was literally telling her that this was something I did, and she refused to believe it because in her mind, real women didn’t do that.
Side note: I hate people trying to dictate what a ‘real’ ____ would/would not do, no matter if that person is nominally on my side or not. When I was in college and a budding feminist, I liked to wear mini-skirts. I had killer legs and saw no reason not to show them off. I was a psych major so I was around that department quite a bit. One of the secretaries in the department was a fierce feminist herself. Once, she questioned me sharply about my mini-skirts asking how a feminist like me could wear one. I looked at her bright red lipstick, hard, and said, “I left the patriarchy because I did not want them telling me what to do. I’ll be damned if I let anyone else do it to me, either.” I also pointed out that automatically doing the opposite of what the patriarchy dictated women should do was being just as tied to the patriarchy as following their dicta slavishly. The point was that in order to be free from the patriarchy, one had to make their own decision after thinking through the issues carefully.
Also, sometimes, I like showing off my legs. And now that I have an actual ass and not just flat back there, I would not mind showing that off as well. Plus, my boobs. I don’t mind them being on display, either. Or rather, I have no reason to hide them or tamp them down.
Ahem.
That’s when I first started thinking about gender other than as related to sexism. It remained seared in my brain from how ridiculous it was and it planted a seed that maybe I wasn’t a woman?
I want to be clear that I don’t have body dysphoria. I have never felt bad in my body or that I should be in a different one. Well, that’s not completely true. I have hated my body for most of my life, but that’s because of fatphobia not because I didn’t like my body itself or felt it was the wrong gender. Even when I wished I were a boy when I was little, it was because of sexism–not because of the shape of my body.
This issue is interwoven with sexuality and race, but it’s not easy to tease out what is which is what. It’s like a ball of tangled thread. You can’t easily just pull one out. Throw in religion, politics, and sensitivities/disabilities/etc, and it’s just a hot messy soup of me.
I really need to get back to writing. Writing has always been there for me. It’s been my comfort and my home. I have been able to write posts since my medical crisis, but not fiction. I feel as if I’ve lost a limb, and I don’t know how to deal with it. The times I’ve tried to write, it’s just been, well, shit. And I have stopped because of how shitty it is. I have been able to deal with most of the changes that came with my medical crisis, but this difficulty writing is not one of them.
In the past, I could just sit down and write. It wasn’t pure gold as I wrote, obviously, but I could at least see the genesis of something beautiful. Now, it’s pure shit. And, yes, I know that shit is necessary for life to grow, but metaphorically, it’s not worknig for me. I guess it just depends on how much I want it. And if I truly believe it’s still there–my ability to write a story, I mean. I’m not sure I do; that’s what scaring me.