Knowledge is power. It’s a facile statement that is not a trope, but it’s also true. I know not everyone feels that way, but I find comfort in information. The thing I regret from when I was younger was that I did not know that what I thought was wrong me wasn’t. I mean, it was wrong in the sense than it was different than the norm, but it wasn’t wrong as in I wasn’t broken. I certainly felt that way, but that was because others treated me as if I were broken.
One of the only real arguments K and I have had was about how mental health is more out in the open these days. We weren’t arguing about that–we both think that’s a good thing. She was just frustrated because she felt that it sometimes got in the way of getting shit done. On the daily, I mean. She said when we were kids, we dealt with it. That hit me the wrong way because some of us did not deal with it very well. I was passively suicidal for most of my life, and I hated being alive. I knew I was depressed and that I had anxiety, but not to what extent. And if I had any inkling taht I was neurodivergent, that would have made such a difference.
I spent my childhood/teen years being told that I was too sensitive, too much, just too too. I was too everything, and I needed to make myself smaller. This was in part because I was perceived as a woman, and my only value as a woman was to serve the men around me. And to have babies, but that was also in a way at the behest of the man who owned me. Er, married me. I can’t tell you how many times my mother pushed me to have children. She used all the tactics in her arsenal–guilt, manipulation, and persistence.
I don’t know how I resisted, but I did. this was the one thing I knew about myself to be true–I would have made a terrible mother. More to the point, I did not want children. At all. In fact, I was the opposite of wanting children–I did not want them with all my heart. I would have done anything to avoid having them, and it would have made my life a living hell to be pregnant/have children.
It’s not something I talked about much because it was such a taboo. It would have been a relief to be able to say it loud and proud, but even I knew better than that. Well, I did after I got a few very negative reactions to saying I did not want children.
By the way, I’m sad that this is still the case. Naively, when I was in my twenties, I thought things would be better for the next generation, but I’ve heard it hasn’t changed much. Young women are still pressured to have children, and the rise of trad wives is very depressing. Yeah, I’m just going to say it–it’s fucking sexist. And, no, I don’t think most women really want it. I’ve seen a few videos from trad wives who either snapped or had their husbands cheat on them. I have to admit that my internal response is, “What the fuck did you expect?”, but it’s so out of my experience.
I never wanted to get married, but I felt I had to. It was another thing my mother pushed on me since I was a little girl. And I would have really loved to have known that I didn’t have to get married and have children.
I’m just saying that my life would have been so much better if I hadn’t been indoctrinated since a very young age that my only worth as an AFAB person was in squeezing out spawns for the benefit of my future husband. This edict did so much damage to me, and it took me decades to make my peace with it.
Once again, had there been one person in my childhood who took me aside to let me know that I didn’t have to get married and/or have children, it would have made such a difference to little me. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt quite so broken and like a failure of a woman.
Truth time.
Part of the reason I walked away from the label ‘woman’ was because of the trauma I faced from being nagged about not having children. Incessantly. Constantly. For fifteen years. from my 26th birthday until I turned 40, my mother pushed me to have children every time we talked. She brought it up no matter how much I protested and told her I was not having children. Nowadays, I would have just uh-huhed her to death and not really have paid much attention, but back then, it was a brutal battle every time. I came away from it exhausted and depressed. Why couldn’t she just listen to me and what I wanted to do with my life?
She actually said to me out loud that what I wanted as a woman did not matter. It was my duty to have children as a woman. You can see why that might turn me off being a woman. If having children was my duty as a woman, well, then the obvious answer was that I was not a woman. That’s not how I consciously thought of it, of course, but that was the first step down the road of eschewing gender for myself.
I don’t know if it’s because of my neurodivergence, but I just do not understand gender. By the way, there is a significantly higher percentage of trans people who have autism than in the gen pop. Scientists don’t know why, exactly, but I was struck by that fact.
Here’s my totally unscientific hypothesis as to why this is true. And I’m just applying it to myself, really. As someone who is neurodivergent, I already view things differently. Societal norms are not normal to me. I’ve learned to adapt for the most part beacuse I’ve had societal norms beaten into me, but that does not make them natural to me. Left to my own devices, I would be a much different person, I think.
Because I’m used to thinking of things in a different way, it’s not a stretch to think that I might think of gender differently as well. I am heartily confused by the very idea of gender roles, let alone try to actually emboy them. I’ll be crude. There are very few things that I need my pussy to do, and I can do those things without one as well.
I find it wild what people say certain genders can and/or can’t do. I will write more about it tomorrow.