Staring into the Face of Truth

“A story is as good a way to organize your thoughts as anything else,” she points out, poised in the shadows in the doorway. I quickly conclude that she is playing the part of my conscience. That, or devil’s advocate. Either way, she’s me. I cannot say she does not really exist without implying the same of myself. She is in my mind, and of my mind, so I do not look at her. She cannot be seen, not in the flesh anyway, but it’s not like I have to look at her to see her. “It’s been a long time since you’ve done this, though,” she observes, watching me carefully. I can tell there’s something on her mind. I can feel it. Technically, it’s on my mind, but I have long since learned that her thoughts are her own when she chooses to assert herself. It’s a bit like being in two places at the same time, a way to step outside my normal perspective and look at what I’ve become.

“That’s because it takes more effort than thinking, even if it is no more contrived than any other thing written; it isn’t really a story,” I respond. I do not have to add that this manner of confronting myself is one of the reasons my stories never get finished; she knows that as well as I do.

“It helps when you need someone to talk to, though,” she argues, crossing the room to sprawl on the couch next to my desk. There are times when I wish that I could have visual hallucinations; it would be nice to really see her when she goes to the trouble to try and fit herself into the world. Instead, I can only see her in the way I see what I am reading about in books, from everywhere and nowhere. Of course, with her, there is no book, no words; she is self-rendered thought. “It gives me chance to be myself, too.”

“You mean, get some distance from being like this,” I amend somewhat bitterly, in reference to all the unpleasant facts of my reality. Normally, I do not have the patience to write like this. Once I discovered I could split my attention two or three ways, it did not take long to become good enough at it that I would just talk to myself when I needed someone to talk to. I can confront any part of myself that way, even the parts that are smarter and wiser than I can normally be. I have come to believe that this is what angels and demons are, projections of ourselves, impressions of others and the personification of our hopes, beliefs, fears and doubts. It’s what I think of as five-dimensional thinking. “So, what do I need to talk about?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you posted yesterday. Okay, that’s still weird; it’s as much my post as it was yours,” she sighs and scoots closer to the opposite arm of the couch, tucking her feet under herself. “I know what it has to sound like to anyone who reads it, and if people have trouble understanding and accepting a transgendered person, well…” She cannot finish the thought, because I already know what she is going to say.

“People have a hard time understanding and accepting anyone different from themselves. It took me too long to realize that there is nothing I can do to make anyone understand or accept me. People have to take it upon themselves to understand anything, and it is impossible to truly accept what is not understood. I am inclined to think that an inability to accept something is in fact proof that you do not truly understand it,” I find myself declaring. I had been unable to understand what was expected of me as a child, and so the role imposed on me was unacceptable. When I learned enough to understand what made me a boy, I also understood that I never had a choice, and that was unacceptable. When I worked it out enough to realize I also had no power to change what I was, that too was unacceptable. This lead me to ask some devastating questions. What is the point of being able to choose if you are not given a choice — especially about something that virtually defines you? What is the point of living if you are given a life you did not want? “I am not the only one to suspect that there has to be more to life than this, or that there is more to us, for that matter,” I tell her, in response to her unstated concern for what was at the heart of that post.

She tilts her head and shrugs in agreement, picking at imaginary lint on her skirt. “I know, but I did not stop at that, did I?” I can feel her studying me. I can’t really meet her eyes, but I can imagine myself looking over at her, seeing thoughts written on her face.

“I know, some of this is impossible to put into words, but yeah, the post was really about believing in myself and the impulse to act on that belief,” I admit, picking up on the thoughts this little game was bringing to the surface with a small sigh. “Although, there really is nothing hard about changing the world. The world changes with or without our help. What is hard is getting the results you intended. I might have gone out on a ledge by saying what I wanted to do, or why I wanted to do it. If there was a problem with what I posted, it was not being able to say how it could be done.”

She pulls her knees up to her chest and hugs them. I know what she’s thinking, because I am thinking the same thing. I have not been able to invest the time and effort needed to figure that out. “The hard part is not figuring out how it can be done. There’s plenty of scope for the imagination there,” she insists, prompting me to think of thousands of stories I’ve read, and hundreds I’ve tried to write, where suitable means were presented.

“No, the trick is establishing that there are means and methods available, and pushing ourselves beyond our current understanding. It is kind of hard to work on that if it is not your job, though,” I laugh, bitterly. Of course, there is no job like this. That has been the other reason I have been totally lost in this world. That sobers me up. “Honestly, even the little I’ve managed to find time to think about would take a lot of writing, and I don’t need another ‘job’ I don’t get paid to do!”

“And yet you sit up all night writing a blog like this?” she teases.

“Until I figure out what to do, what will make a difference, I don’t really have anything better to do,” I point out tiredly. As usual, I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the things that are on my mind. Writing is too slow and time consuming a way to deal with such thoughts. She looks at me, knowingly, and I shrug. “Things have to be done in their own way. If this were a story, I could skip over all the deep thinking. Even in a simple blog post, I could just focus on making a point. You intended to ask me how this is going to work. You really want to know how much more of this you have to endure.” I close my eyes and lean back in my chair. I know what it would take to set her free, and that I have to find it in myself. The problem is, as long as I am not her, I can’t really be me. I roll my head to the right and look at her. She cannot be seen, but she does not let that stop her. An obvious truth, always staring me in the face.

Impulse

Who am I? Why am I here? What is the point of my existence? These are questions we all ask at some point in our lives, and we can go our entire lives without knowing the answer. I suspect that a lot of people try to avoid thinking about it, not knowing how to begin answering, and I wonder how long a person can go without asking them. There are an endless number of situations and circumstances that can force us to confront these questions, and other soul searching questions like them. For me, the question can come up as a result of gender issues, but I’ve had it come up in many other circumstances. The answers, whatever they are, test the limits of my understanding, because in many ways I am the awareness brought into focus by both the sum and the gestalt of my understanding. In the scope of my understanding, I am aware that I am not driven by a desire to be female. I am driven by an impulse that is at once too simple and too complex for words, because words will never serve to express that impulse. Because I found myself in a body that I was not able to express myself properly in, it was only natural for me to become obsessed with finding a better way to express myself. I put a lot of thought and effort into figuring out the best way to embody myself in human terms, and because I was thinking in human terms, my self image is based on understanding the compromises that allowed me to be as true to myself as possible. Of course, human limitations are based on the limitations of reality, which are the perceived limits of existence — or rather the limits of perception. The plain, simple and painful truth is that I am driven to do something that can not be done within those limits — as we understand them.

I am a person who would have to change the world in order to show myself in it. It is who I am, it is why I am here, and the end — the point — is to have a beginning. It took a long time to understand that I was not limited by what anyone else knew or understood about reality; I can only be limited by my own understanding. At the same time, I realized that people understand a great deal more than they know, and that the truth is pretty much always hidden in plain sight. As I began to see and understand more, I felt the temptation to try to share what I discovered and help enlighten others. I got side tracked trying to figure out how to describe and explain what I perceived, losing sight of my original purpose. I do not need anyone to tell me that what I intended to do was “impossible” and I got tied up in wanting to be able to explain how to do the impossible before I went off and actually did what I intended. I just ended up spending a lot of time thinking about how impossible it was to do what I needed to do. I should have obeyed my original instinct, which was to try to do the impossible without attracting any attention to what I had done, but I did not know how to do that without hurting people I loved. I was also bothered by the implications of what I intended, and the peculiar insight that motivated me to act. I intended to transform my body, but that was simply how I intended to use the power I perceived in myself, how I would truly show myself. I am not actually interested in trying to change the world, but I find myself in a position where it is necessary in order to be true to myself. But, as Morpheus reminded Neo, “there is a difference between knowing the path and walking it.”

I know it sounds insane, and I’m not inclined to convince anyone that it is not. This is mostly a case of me thinking aloud and not much caring who hears. I have spent decades trying to figure out what it would take to accomplish this task, and discovering where I am obstructed by a lack of knowledge, or experience, or resources. I’ve shared bits of speculation in past journals and blogs, but I can never really capture my thoughts in words. Writing allows me to slow my thoughts down and get some of them out where I can focus on specific ideas. I needed to get to the root of what was really bothering me, and even if it sounds crazy, I am more comfortable with what I have said in this post than I have been with any of the posts about being transgendered or needing to transition. Those other posts have forced me to revisit the things that have torn me apart, but in the hope of being understood and accepted I tried to stay within the bounds of what seemed socially acceptable. The problem is that transition falls bitterly short of accomplishing what I really need to do. I have paid a huge price to give myself time to think this through, and for the second time in my life been tempted by the practical alternative and found the cost in terms of personal compromise to be too high. It was never an option, because I always believed in myself, even when that belief was undermined by all the doubt in the world. If I cannot act on that belief, is there really any point to living?

It Takes a Village to Break a Child

I do not often get comments on my blog; if I exclude the pingbacks, spam and my own replies, I’ve received twenty-two comments from ten different individuals since I started the eye of paradox two years ago. Four of those people have identified themselves as transgendered, and like every transgendered person I’ve known, it has affected their lives as bad or worse than mine and I do not have to explain myself to them to be understood. For a long time, I’ve understood that this condition is difficult or even impossible for people who have not experienced it to comprehend. In order to live with normal people, the “cisgendered” if I use the term that’s come into use to describe those who identify with their birth sex, I’ve had to go to incredible lengths to comprehend and empathize with them. I’ve tried many, many times to find a way to describe what it feels like to live with this condition, hoping to make it easier for my family and friends to understand me. As I mentioned, I do not always like what comes out when I write on this topic, because it is a very intensely emotional issue and intensely emotional writing just encourages people to accuse me of being mellow-dramatic. I honestly expect most people to be driven away by the things I have written. Growing up, it did not take me long to learn how incredibly unsympathetic most people are about this issue. I was never asked to explain myself. With the exception of my adopted mother, who confronted me when I was six to ask if I wanted to be a girl, no one ever asked me why I acted like a girl. By the time she asked, I knew better than to admit it, since every other time someone noticed I was just slapped, spanked, or jerked around while being criticized for acting like a girl and being commanded to stop. That does not mean I was not asking myself why I acted like a girl. Even though the question was often on my mind, the only answer that ever rang true was the one that the facts denied.

Because I was being held to a standard of behavior I truly did not understand and which did not come naturally to me, I had no choice but to conceal my pain and confusion in order to conform to that standard. As I’ve said before, it had been made clear to me that my “disobedience” was justification for punishment, rejection and abandonment, so it did not take long before I was conditioned to assume that anyone who enforced the male standard of behavior could not be trusted. I could not ask anyone why it hurt so much to not be a girl or why nothing about being a boy made me happy. I could never understand why compliments and praises highlighting my qualities or accomplishments as a boy left me feeling hurt, hollow and unhappy. I did at least feel relief and gratitude for the fact that it made people happy with me, and at the time I thought that was what happiness was. I was not always caught on the double-edged sword of gender conflict. No one can be, because one thing that Sophia Marsden pointed out is true; life is full of things that can be appreciated no matter who or what you are. In fact, I pretty much lived for those things, using them to distract myself, and in my preoccupation I pretty much forgot myself and acted like a girl — perhaps a tomboy, I should say, since I managed to get away with it more often than not. If there is a bright side to my childhood, it was that I found ways to be as much like a boy or a girl as I wanted to, as long as no adults were observing me. Unfortunately, I was never comfortable with my genitalia, or the fact that the sensitive organ served as a constant reminder of why I was not a girl. It pissed me off that I was never allowed to let my hair grow, and I hated the clothes I was forced to wear.

The simple fact is, there was always something bringing the gender conflict to the fore. No matter how hard I tried to be obedient, practical and realistic, the notion of myself as a boy never took hold. I was always caught off guard by the realization that I was male, and even when I was trying my hardest to keep that fact in mind, I would look at the girls around me with admiration and envy, forever underscored with an ache of loss. I did not really wonder why, because I knew why I felt this way, and knew it was forbidden, so I simply did not allow myself to think of it most of the time. I just locked myself away and died a little more each day. In a sense, when I got my hands on an anatomy book and finally found out why I was not a girl, I understood what was expected of me. I still did not know why I felt like a girl, and I still do not know. I do not know why I feel like I am lying whenever I act like a man. It is a feeling that makes me feel so sick, I cannot even get past the stupid “male or female” check-box on a job application. I mean, if you look at me and assume I’m just another guy, then, well, whatever, I cannot blame you for what you see, but if you ask me, I no longer know what to say. I am no longer a child to be threatened with abandonment, I am no longer willing to give anyone the power to reject me. I am more than willing to do any job asked of me, but I am no longer able to ask for a job, and if I care even an ounce for my own well-being, I cannot say anyone can pay me enough to endure what I have to do to myself in order to work. I got into temping and contracting because, for the most part, I am never in a position to ask for work, I am asked for; unfortunately, even that is drying up, and once my savings run out, I’ll be stuck homeless in Alaska with winter around the corner. The scary thing is, that doesn’t frighten me. I’m long past the point where I can be motivated by fear. Or, I am more afraid of compromising myself ever again.

I do not want to die, and I do not want to quit, but I do not trust anyone, I know I do not fit in, and even though there are people who understand and care, I know they have to take care of themselves first. I have made little appeals for anonymous help because I know I need it, and since I do not really expect anything to come of it, I really feel no guilt for asking. When you hurt enough, you scream. It’s human nature. Walking by and pretending not to hear the screaming is too. I really have no idea what I would have done if anyone had stopped and asked what was wrong. I would really be at a loss if someone thought they could help and offered. If someone wanted to throw money at me, no strings attached, I’d take advantage of it; it would be stupid not to and even if I’ve lost the will to go on living like this, I’m still too stubborn to die. I go through these spells of crying for help unable to decide for myself if they’re the remnants of my morbid sense of humor, a way to make it clear that I can manage a cry for help without killing myself, or simply an example of believing in people even if I am no longer able to trust anyone. In the end, the reason I write is not in the hope of salvation, but in the hope of understanding the answers to questions I do not even know how to ask. The people who shaped my childhood did not understand me, and their actions hurt me because they were carried out by kind and caring people I depended on. I could not tell you who is responsible for breaking my spirit, or failing to simply ask “why does this boy think he’s a girl?” My father stepped out of the picture when I was three, my mother’s parents convinced her to put me up for adoption when I was four, I was passed around between extended family members and foster care like a hot potato. Someone, perhaps more than one, saw my natural personality as a problem and whatever they did, the damage was done by the time I found myself in a safe and stable environment. I guess that just means that sometimes it takes a village to break a child.

Point Penetrating Points Overlapping

A number of my posts, particularly the ones dealing with transgender issues in my life, have been written on a long, dark night of the soul. It can be difficult to come back and read what I’ve posted and resist the urge to delete what I’ve written, because of how dark they are. I have moments when I think, if ever a family member happened to read them, some of what I’ve written could really hurt them. That was never the intention, and yet, there is a ring of truth to the posts I am not able to deny. It is an unfortunate fact that I’ve been hurt a great deal by people who never meant me harm because of things neither I nor they had any control over. It is not their fault that efforts to encourage my growth and development as a son or brother caused me so much pain; they were simply responding to what they perceived me to be. Our current society is the end product of thousands of generations of people struggling through life trying to make sense out of it. If that resulted in the division of human traits into masculine and feminine, and if the cultivation of gender roles led to a society that could not understand that there was a difference between the things that make people who they are and the things that make them what they are, it is not possible to assign fault or blame to any specific group, let alone a given person. As much as it would have made a difference in my life to have been raised among people who were more perceptive, or in a society that was more accepting of individual differences, I would still have grown up with the more difficult problem of being a girl in a boy’s body.

I can look back now and say it would have been better if I had been more assertive, but like most people I did not come into the world with all the answers and because I understood the reality of my situation, I tried to adjust to it. It took a long time to prove to myself that I was right from the beginning to think of myself as a girl. I had to destroy myself trying to be a boy and a man to understand that the only way I could survive as a person was by being true to myself. That was hard, and it is still hard, because there is nothing I hate more than the idea of being a woman trapped in a man’s body. How can I possibly be true to myself when I am betrayed by my own flesh? What future is there for a living contradiction like this? So, even when I am tempted to regret allowing myself to be forced into a role I cannot endure, I can understand how I could try to hard to be what everyone else expected me to be. I tried to be the person everyone thought me to be in the hope that, if I could not hope to live for myself, I could at least live for the people I cared about — the people who cared for me. I had no idea it would cost me so much, or that in the end I would be driven into isolation and have to face the simple, horrible truth of my existence. I lived a lie, and that is why I do not feel deserving of the love my family and friends have had for me. I hate the person I tried to be, and in that irrational way of such emotions, I hate everyone who ever loved that person. I’ve never been the type to hold on to negative emotions; I know that they arise in response to things I perceive to be wrong, cruel and unfair. I could never point a finger of blame, because I keep analyzing the problem until I understand it and what I did, or did not do, to bring it about.

I am a girl in a male body because I found myself and believed in myself, and it ended up hurting me because I allowed the circumstances I was in to overwhelm me. I knew the truth and allowed myself to doubt it. That doubt was all the leverage needed to turn my life into hell. I tried to deny the truth and struggled to believe the lie I created to survive in the world of doubt I had embraced. Why? Do the facts really matter if they contradict the truth? Is reality worth holding onto if you have to dispose of yourself in the process? I could never silence these questions, and part of me struggled to hold onto the one truth I had. I know there have been times when I wondered why this was happening to me, and there are answers I could give myself, but in a lot of ways it was not the question that mattered. If I tried to look at my life as a story, then everything that happens is just part of the plot, and if I think of myself as the protagonist of the story, then it’s all a puzzle I have to figure out. Even if I just call it a life, then the challenge of every experience is to find meaning in what is happening to me. When I open my eyes and consider what is happening with everyone all over the world, then it begins to look like a proving ground, and the purpose of everything that happens in life is to find out what it takes to destroy us. When I think about it, though, I feel like I’ve survived too many things that should have destroyed me, often in ways I would have preferred not to have survived. Even worse, it often seems that it has been because of my weaknesses, not my strengths, that I have been able to survive. I mean, if a person can really die of a broken heart, I could have died a thousand times a day.

The hardest thing to endure is the idea that this is a world without magic and miracles, a world where it is not possible to transform this body of mine in a way that would make it mine. I cling to my sanity in the face of a reality in which the very thing that supports my existence is the thing that denies me the ability to truly live. I’ve always known that there are others who have experienced a conflict between who they are and what they appear to be. I also know that appearances matter no matter what anyone says to the contrary. It is not necessary to be gender dysphoric to feel betrayed by one’s body. It is enough to simply look different. In many ways, it is easier to accept what other people look like than to accept our own appearance. I always had a hard time with the fact that I appeared perfectly normal to other people but felt horribly deformed, with parts of me literally turned inside out. I feel the distortion of my body image by my physical senses as a constant dislocation and disorientation, like I have two bodies, a male body overlapping a female body — which is a lot like wearing over-sized boots all over. That should go a long way towards explaining my instinctive understanding of four-dimensional space, as well as my intuitions about the nature of the mind, soul and spirit. Even as a child, I found it easy to comprehend magic and miracles in terms of multi-dimensional functions, though even now it’s difficult to describe what is clear in my mind using words. Of course, what I think of and associate with the terms “magic” and “miracle” are a bit different from what I find in most literature. For a while, I thought it might be more appropriate to use the term “psychic” or “psionic” instead, but even those terms are met with suspicion and skepticism these days, and I can understand why.

I recall pointing out somewhere that magic is the ability to change reality in spite of what you believe, while a miracle is a change in reality based on belief, and that both are expressions of psychic potential. These were clarifications I made to distinguish the concepts for my own use, both in fiction and in philosophy. As far as I am concerned, there should be no stigma attached to these words, or any mystery or occult terms passed down into the English language, even if scientists and skeptics do like to view them with contempt. Concepts are necessary to communicate ideas, and even if there is no scientific basis for their use, they provide a rich vocabulary for expressing ideas that are otherwise hard to articulate. It’s an approach I’ve been using all along, in previous posts. It was inevitable what I would reach a point where I would feel the need to comment on my use of such terms, just as it is inevitable for a child born in the wrong body to wish for metamorphosis. If all I had done was wish for change, I would have lost it a long time ago. The part of growing up and outgrowing fairy tales and children’s fantasy would have left me hopeless. So, I had to put more effort into searching for a way to change, which meant doing my own research into miracles, magic and medicine. Since I did not have money to throw into it, I was pretty much limited to what could be found in libraries and book stores or what could be learned from other people. It is not hard to find people with strong beliefs about magic or religion, and medical practices are pretty well documented; it did not take long to conclude that what I was looking for was beyond the reach of medicine, and what most people who believed in magic or divine intervention would consider possible.

I should say, anyone who believes in God would say He has the power to transform a body, but since He is our Creator we are meant to be the way He made us. To believe otherwise is perceived as a sign of demonic or satanic influence. I have had this kind of theology used against me, and it falls apart with just a little analysis. We could not be vulnerable to demonic or satanic influence upon our identities unless we had the capacity to redefine ourselves, and we would only have the capacity to redefine ourselves if we were meant to assert our own identities. God might determine where we start out in life, but I don’t think we would be able to live without free will; if it’s all God’s will, then there’s really no one here but God playing with meat puppets. If we are free to make our own choices, who we are is a reflection of those choices, even if we cannot act on them. The problem most of us face in life is not having the opportunities to make the choices we really want to. One of the ways you find out who you are is by understanding the path you choose to take, and why. In any case, the world we live in only makes sense if we have true free will; there is clearly nothing limiting the choices people have except the consequences of those we act on. By chance or design, we are free to do anything we take it upon ourselves to do, and it’s up to us to figure out what the right thing to do is and to do the right thing because it is what we choose to do. In the end, we become better people by choosing to be our best, without the need for threats or coercion.

For all I know, the point of my life was to come to this understanding, to live a lie long enough to want nothing more than to be true to myself and find a way to be true to others, to understand how vital it is to be true even if the truth is out of reach. Perhaps that is something that can only be understood when you need something you cannot have, when you aspire for something that cannot be obtained with words, or actions. The thing I have sought my entire life is the power to change myself, not because I want power for its own sake, but because I need that power to become the person I want to be, the best person I can be. I can be honest and say I am not happy to be the best I can be; it’s not enough to make the most out of what I’ve been given. I want to be the best I can dream of being, and I wish I could achieve that on my own, without compromise. I’m not sure if that is possible in this world. I believe in the possibility, but what I believe only affects what I can accept as possible. In all probability, I will die for that belief because I don’t want to live in a world where it will not come true. Until then, however, I will keep thinking about what it would take to change the world just enough to make myself truly part of it.