Is This It?

I was on my way home on Wednesday, September 23, 2009, with my dinner in hand, and I swear I just wanted to sit down and eat but I knew the bus would show up the minute I did. I had intended to eat in the restaurant, but for some reason the counter person handed me my meal in a bag to go. Since my usual table was occupied, I sighed and left; the entire day had been off like that. I should have known the universe had it in for me.

When the bus arrived, I was the second to board and the first person stopped and pushed past me to get off again. That was when I noticed one of the passengers was beating the crap out of another. The bus driver had gotten up to try and do something about it, but that just drew the psycho’s attention to himself. I had stepped off the bus and was looking for somewhere to set down my bag of food and my drink, because I’m not the kind of person who can stand around and watch something like this. None of the people standing around at the stop would do me the favor of holding onto my meal, so I shifted everything into one hand so I could reach in and pull the mad man off the bus driver.

I had no desire to get involved in this; I don’t get into fights. Still, I tried to get the guy’s attention, pulling him back and saying, “That’s enough. You need to step back and think about what you’re doing,” while he stared at me in disbelief and asked me if I wanted to die. “You’re attacking the bus driver,” I pointed out, adding, “Think about it!” At that point, I let him go and stepped back to give him a chance to come to his senses. I can see in his eyes how pissed he is at me for “disrespecting” him, and yet there I was treating him like a sane, mature, intelligent human being, giving him the chance to resume acting like one. Instead, he turns back to the bus driver and is joined by a young woman who has come forward to attack the bus driver too.

When the guy tries the grab the girl and pull her off the bus, I step back and hope this means that he, at least, has sobered up a bit. She keeps screaming, cursing and kicking the bus driver, while people around me cry out for someone to call 911. When the couple finally does step off the bus, the driver shuts the door on them at the suggestion of the other passengers. I was trying to back away from them, but I was caught between them and the crowd at the bus stop. When the girl, who had tried to stick her foot in the door and got it stuck, pulled free, the couple bumped into me as I tried to get out of the way. The man turned around and grabbed me, shouting over and over in my face, “WTF! Do you want to die?”

I show him the drink and bag of food still in my hand, telling him calmly, “No. The only thing I want to do here is get home so I can eat my dinner.” He gives me this look of contempt and grabs the drink, crushing the plastic cup and trying to spill the contents on me with little success. Once the cup is empty, I let it go and try to step back with a disappointed shake of my head. After screaming something about disrespect, he hawks up a mouthful of spit. I looked him straight in the eye and, still in a level voice, say, “Don’t. That’s assault, and I will defend myself.” I know the adrenaline had hit my system minutes ago, but all I felt was disappointment and resignation.

He spit on me, and I took one moment to let my disappointment show on my face, and since he still held me close, with one hand gripping my coat, I pounded him in the face. I think it was the first punch I have ever thrown, and I was amazed that I felt no pain even though I could feel and hear flesh and bone compact and crunch under the blow. He did not let go, so I hit him again, still looking at him with cold disappointment and resignation. By the third punch, he was trying to jerk me off balance and his return blows began to land on the left side of my face. I had seen him go from person to person lashing out like a wild animal, and I wondered right then, Do I want to kill this guy? Will anything less stop him?

I was still amazed that I felt no anger, I was not seeing red after taking a few good punches. Not interested, I realized. I started to put him into an arm bind and headlock, and the girl suddenly jumped in, throwing punches, pulling on my hair and clothes, kicking and screaming, and I looked right at her and said, “No. I don’t want to hurt you,” as I pulled back the punch I threw instinctively in response to her attack. She kept attacking, though, so I caught her up in my other arm, for a moment keeping both of them bent over and bound up in my arms. Their struggles threw us into the side of the bus, and one of them went for my leg, throwing me over and then things really got out of hand. The next few moments were a flurry of her tearing at my hair and jerking my head around and him raining my face with punches.

This is what it is to get beaten. I thought it would be more painful, but it was mostly a series of shocks and a lot of disorientation. I could not make sense out of things, which meant I was no longer able to fight. You need trained reflexes to fight when you can’t rely on your senses. So, I curled up, protecting my head and face and gave them my back. In a way, it was an enlightening moment. I was beaten senseless, and yet I had the clarity of thought to note that while I lost the fight, I had won in the sense that I accomplished my objective of helping to protect the passenger and driver they had been attacking. I was a bit disappointed that I had not been able to defend myself, but the only thing I was really upset over was the destruction of my dinner. I was still hungry, and I really regretted that.

I finally have proof that physical pain just does not compare to the psychic pain I live with daily. The only thing that really bothered me was the twinge in my knee, which was twisted when they attacked that leg to bring me down. The broken nose bled like a faucet, and has been tender since; I suspect that it straightened my nose from when I broke it as a kid. The real problems have been the fact that I don’t have medical insurance; I could not let them take me to the emergency room and run up a massive ambulance and medical bill. I had to take a couple days off work, which I really can’t afford. I might just have enough to pay rent and bills, but that will leave me with nothing to live off of for the next month–even assuming I don’t lose my job for being out injured without a doctor’s note.

I have been taking care of myself, giving my knee time to recover. I could not walk on it Thursday or Friday, but Saturday Evening I was able to walk to the nearest mini-mart for some Advil and ice cream. I was not able to focus on school work for a couple of days; I spent a while laid up in bed and even when I was able to get around my apartment, my knee made it impossible to sit at my desk for long. In a way, I feel like my worst fear has come true, that I would get hurt and not be able to support myself while I am alone up here in Alaska. I was able to get some help from my apartment manager and one of the girls in my support group to get some food stocked up so I don’t starve, and if I am able to walk by Monday, I might still have a job. The problem is, I don’t know that I will have an income beyond this weekend, and that’s stressing me out more than the attack itself.

I have never been able to be myself, so I tried to just be the best person I could be, and yet when I truly do my best, I always seem to end up the worse for it. It really makes me wonder if there’s any point…

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.

Hidden in Plain Sight

On April 27, 2008 at 12:36 am, I began a post — this post, actually — but got no further than the title. I don’t know if that was because that title summed up my feelings so well that there was no point to writing any further about what was on my mind. Yesterday, those words came back to me at the conclusion of A Glimpse into the Eye of Paradox. I’ve always thought of the truth as something that is hidden in plain sight, and approached it as something that we take so much for granted we really don’t know what to do with it. One might as well say that the truth that can be put into words is not the truth. Communication is more a matter of interpretation, and there is no singularity to interpretation. The truth is out there, and every time we encounter it, we are seeing it from a limited point of view. When we come across it again from a different point of view, we still recognize it as the truth but it not only appears different, we ourselves understand it in a different context.

As I said yesterday, I consider myself to be hidden in plain sight. There are days when it is not hard to think of myself as a very high functioning autistic, because the person I really am has almost no connection to the real world; I rely on an artificial mental construct to interact with people around me. The better that construct is, the more disassociated I actually am. As much as I hate the effect this has on me, and as much as I view it as evidence of my acquired distrust of people, I can see it as simply a more extreme form of social persona that is created by each person to deal with other people. We do not expect to be accepted for who we really are, and so we lie to gain acceptance. Little white lies, for the most part, and no one really thinks much about it. Of course, they hurt us, and this manner of hurting ourselves gives rise to shame and guilt over the lying and the possession of undesirable traits. So, maybe we all try to hide in plain sight.

By that, I mean, we try to conform. I obscured myself that way. The problem with conformity is that you have to believe in the existence of a norm. In that vein, I once looked at social gender constructs and human nature and concluded that each of us must be heir to all of human potential, so it was perfectly normal for a man to have many feminine traits that had to be denied in order to become a man. Because of social gender constructs, it was a natural if unfortunate consequence that men who possessed a number of so-called feminine traits would end up with dangerous inferiority complexes, both to conform to the social ideal of masculinity and to condemn in each other what they were insecure about in themselves. The problem with this assumption was that it implied that we have to choose but we do not have a real choice. In nature, any option that is not fatal is viable. In honesty, society would probably benefit most from men who possessed more “feminine” characteristics, and the men would probably be happier and healthier as well.

I conformed to the expectations of people around me because it was clear to me what would happen if I did not. When I really thought about it, it became obvious to me that the thing that messed society up so much was the perception of social ideals that ultimately favored one tiny group of self-justified elites. But, if that’s not who you are, you can never be happy trying to conform to that false ideal. I’ve seen a lot of people try to take advantage of these social constructs to pursue power, whether in the form of money, fame, or politics, but this is no path to happiness or enlightenment. This just reinforces the system that abuses the people under its influence. A warped social system is as responsible for creating and perpetuating the illusion of poverty as it is the illusion of prosperity. If you cannot fit in and thrive while being true to yourself, you can never gain anything from taking part. I learned that the hard way. I played the part I was expected to, only to have the life sucked out of me. If I had been paid in proportion to the personal cost of my sacrifices, I’d have billions by now.

Instead, I’ve got a hole more than deep enough to bury myself in. I have been shocked awake, as if by some near death experience, and I can no longer deny the truth of myself no matter how much of a misfit it makes me. I have to be true to myself, even if that means I have no hope of stable employment, even if it means I cannot function in the environment that would provide stable employment. I should be honest, I don’t want any job that I would have to lie to get or play a role to hold on to. I know that will only push me off the deep end. I am beginning to think that there is no place for me in the world of deep thinking, though it’s probably where I belong. I have always known that people have to figure out the important truths for themselves. It never hurts to write about them, to give people food for thought; once in a while, what you can write down is enough to lead someone else to their own epiphanies, and I’ve had enough of my own to map out a few promising paths. I would love to keep on exploring the frontiers of consciousness, but I just don’t have the right backing. I am not catching anyone’s interest.

I usually do not worry about the fate of humanity. I know that the truth is there for anyone who wants to see it; I know that people often see what they want to see, or use what they see to justify what they think, but as long as people are still curious and confront the paradox of death seriously, they can get past the usual mistakes and still get to the point. I was originally more interested in finding my own miracles and being able to point out precisely how they worked in the event I was able to solve my own problem using them. I have to pursue transformation because failing to would mean living a meaningless life and dying a meaningless death. That realization is part of what undermined my attempts to write fiction simply to support myself. I would much rather live the kind of story that comes to me than simply write it. I would rather be working actively toward my own salvation. I would rather be fighting for my soul. I would rather face the moment of my death with a smile and an understanding of what that step in the dance of life really was, and if necessary, be able to step around it.

I am not afraid of the prospect of oblivion, but I do find existence worth holding on to, even if I have to change it to make it work right. It’s a good idea and one that needs a lot of improvement, and while I may not be well equipped for that, I still want to work on it. I might have once tried to save the world, but it takes all of us to o that, so I am going to focus on ideas that might help people save themselves. I once said, “if you want to make the world a better place, you need to make better people” but I’ve revised that second part to, “you need people who want to make themselves better” and since you can’t force people to be better, you have to give them what they need to improve on their own. Society does not serve that purpose, but people can work inside of society to benefit more people. I was kind of hoping there would be people with resources and no ideas on the lookout for someone like me — I’m doing this one way or the other, with support or without, but… yeah, support would be nice — but I can see how hard it is now to believe in a single voice lost in the roar of the surf.

Thanks to the Internet, I simply have one more way to be hidden in plain sight. It’s not quite as bad as being the needle in a haystack, and at the same time it’s as bad as not being the only needle in the haystack. I really do not have much care for money, I have never been much motivated to make it since its not really the solution to the problems that really matter to me. I could use money to transition, to travel and do research, set up a better studio and information system, but most of the money I’ve made in life has been only good for paying for rent, food and bills. Most of the people I’ve known on a personal level have been in the same position. I have taken whatever work I could get to keep up with the bills. The problem is, I passed the point where I don’t care anymore. I want to keep working on some of the questions I am forever asking, and I want to share my observations still, but I am no longer afraid of homelessness and death, not enough to make the personal sacrifices I’ve made in the past for the privilege of starvation wages. If nobody sees me, if nobody hears me, if nobody really cares, that’s fine. If you didn’t notice I was here, I understand.

I have tried to ask for help. I’ve tried to catch people’s attention, and I’ve tried to put something worthy of interest out there for you. I have a lot more, but I am running out of time. I have to say that now, while there’s still a chance. I have to ask strangers for help like this because I am too inward bound to know how to get attention from the right people, people who can get what I am saying, who can see where I am going and who feel that it is as important as I do. The truth is hidden in plain sight, and so we overlook it every day. I think it’s past time we stopped and looked into it. I think it’s essential for us to survive and grow. I think that anyone who has confronted the prospect of oblivion should know better than to ignore the implications that are all around us. I think it is time we took our imagination and intuition as seriously as our reason. I think it is time we took our wishful thinking and stripped away the whimsy, and made a serious study of doing the impossible. Lots of people have dreams, but my dream has always been to achieve realization. The only way to do that is to be able to go beyond our normal thinking, and that is the stumbling block most people fall over. I can hardly get through the day without tripping over myself, but give me any other stumbling block and I can fly right over it.

A True Identity is Nothing to Fear

The response I received to my last post, Conundrum, prompted me to check out the recent posts of the people who commented or posted blogs in the transgender category yesterday. As a result, I became aware of the outcry against the appointment of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, Dr. Ray Blanchard, and J. Michael Bailey, by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), to the work group responsible for revising the entry for Gender Identity Disorder (GID) in the Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders. The first blog I read on the subject, posted by Gender Outlaw, struck a very personal chord with me. In addition to being transgendered, I was put up for adoption when I was four and spent a year in foster care while the state attempted to contact my biological father so that he might claim his custody rights. It was during my time in foster care that I was terrorized out of identifying myself as a girl and learned to keep my true identity a secret. It took time to learn how to restrain my natural impulses and act like a boy, and the threat of abandonment and rejection was used to reinforce “correct” behavior. By the time I was adopted, this conditioning had scarred me for life, rendering me incapable of trusting anyone with my true thoughts and feelings. When my new family noticed my feminine traits and confronted me with questions about my behavior, or offered even a mild rebuke for “acting like a girl” I was consumed with that fear of rejection and lied to deflect any suspicions.

To this day, I can not remember where I gained the fear of being institutionalized and subjected to shock or aversion therapy. It could have been something someone said to me, or around me. I do not recall, but having suffered an accidental electrocution when I was five I knew what it would do to me, and that fear ensured that my distrust extended to medical professionals in particular. I tried to understand why no one accepted me. Between the ages of five and six I learned the physical facts, and by the time I was seven I knew what a sex change was and how society viewed transsexuals. It confirmed my belief that, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, the thoughts and feelings that made me who I am marked me as abnormal and insane. To protect myself, I could never allow my true thoughts and feelings come to light — no matter how painful it was. The promise of abuse, the threat of violence and possibly even death was certain. I did not want to live like this. I wanted to be a boy, to be sane and normal and wanted in the world.

I did everything I could to accept the reality, carefully controlling my thoughts and feelings, training myself to think and act like a boy, even though I was often clueless about how. I observed and studied boys intently, trying to understand why they did the things they did so that my own actions would seem appropriate. I learned how to be friends with boys and stopped being friends with girls. I became lonely and miserable, my confidence tattered and thin because I could never trust my own instincts. Nothing I did could alter or prevent my true thoughts and feelings from asserting themselves, however. The plain and simple fact that I was not a girl caused instant agony, whenever it crossed my mind. I could understand girls without trying; often better than they understood themselves because my intuition flowed into an analytical mind that questioned everything that others took for granted.

I knew I was supposed to be female, but I did not have the right body and no means of changing it, though I pursued every possibility in secret to the point of absolute frustration and disappointment. I have not given up. I never gave up on finding a way to get the body that goes with my soul, but I struggle and fail to obtain the resources needed. The pose that I maintain, even now that I have overcome my fears enough to assert myself, costs too much. It takes so much out of me. I pay a price for every thought, word, or gesture committed to disguise the emotional tempest that has built up inside of me.

I do not like to answer people when they ask me how I am doing or how I feel. I have to lie, because there is no way to tell the truth. There is no way to describe how I feel, but I would not ask my worst enemy, the most abominable thing in existence, to feel this; how could I ever ask a stranger? How could I put that on a loved one? One moment of this pain is too much to bear. Sadly, when it is there every moment, you learn to. It can not destroy you because it can not exist without you. It is you. It is me.

…

I followed the posts to a petition against the appointment of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, Dr. Ray Blanchard, and J. Michael Bailey. I started this post to include the comments I left along with my signature, not realizing that cracking open that door would let so much out. Now I can see that my comment expresses the conclusions I reached on the repression of identity.

The use of any method to impose a state or frame of mind upon an individual to subvert or subdue that individual’s free willed expression of identity is nothing less than assault with a deadly weapon. No external agent or agency should be permitted to impose a belief, theory or system of thought upon any individual against that individual’s will. Voluntary self examination or constructive therapy should be sufficient to ensure that an individual with ambiguous feelings or confusion is able to resolve any uncertainty that could have negative consequences if an individual were to act in haste.

No one has the right to tell a person who he or she is. A body might house the mind, but it is the mind that makes a body into a person. It is a person’s privilege and natural obligation to assume and assert his or her own identity in accordance with his or her best understanding of him or her self; no one else has sufficient access an individual’s psyche. Social pressure of this nature is threatening enough to the formation of identity and causes significant trauma by itself; as a medical practice it would be an abomination.

Conundrum

Today I find myself puzzling over the weird fact of my existence. The Internet created an opportunity to show a side of myself that I had long kept hidden. I am transgendered; in spite of being born and raised male the core of my identity is female. It is not a convenient or desirable situation, and it puts me in constant conflict between who I am and what I am. It would be simpler to let myself be defined by my body but the simple fact is that I am defined by my mind, or to be more accurate, my mind is what defines me. It is the nature of my thoughts and feelings that define me as a person, and it is by examining and understanding my thoughts and feelings that I find myself forced to admit I am a girl in spite of being a boy. It could mean that my brain structure and chemistry is feminine, or it could mean that the character of a soul is stronger than the imprint of a body. There is no way to know. What I do know is that being male, thinking, acting and being perceived as a man, does not make me one; it does not change who I am. It only means that few people are ever likely to see me for who I am.

That is the real curse, the real tragedy of being transgendered. Short of changing the way people perceive me, by changing my physical appearance, there is little chance I will ever be accepted for who I am. Actually, short of a miraculous and literal metamorphosis, there is no chance. What I am stands in the way. What I am distorts me no matter how I appear. I am not a woman. Looking like a woman, dressing like a woman, taking hormones and getting surgery to make my anatomy more like a woman’s, will not make me a woman. A change from transgendered to transsexual is a lateral move. I’ve been tempted, because it would allow me to be much closer to my natural self, but I’ve always known that the physical facts would still prevent people from seeing me for who I am.

But, who am I? That is the question it always comes back to. That is the question that stops me in my tracks every time I meet someone, or interview for a job. I am a lifetime full of facts that obscure the truth. I am a consciousness trapped in a reality that denies me my own reality. My body is nothing more than the earth in which my awareness is rooted. To conform to the flesh, I have to deny my own identity and assume the one that circumstance has provided. To survive, I have to conform to the flesh, and the pain it causes leaves me with no doubt as to the existence of the soul. The only thing in reality that can explain the cause and nature of this pain is the fact of my own reality, the fact that I, myself, am real. This pain, though it has repeatedly broken me and driven me to the brink of suicide, is one thing that assures me I am true.

I know who I am. In spite of having nothing to support me, nothing to confirm my identity, nothing in this world to base it upon but the understanding of what makes me true to myself, I know the truth. I have always known it, even when I tried to deny it for the sake of others who expected or demanded that I conform to their perceptions of me. I am different from most people only in knowing exactly the cost of the circumstances of my birth. In philosophy and religion, it is common to hear that we choose our place in reality, but if you examine it more carefully the choice is not one based on getting what we want out of life, it is based on getting what we need to perfect ourselves; it is a test, a trial by fire. I assumed that my test was about self-sacrifice and accepting reality. Acting on this belief, I nearly destroyed myself.

It is obvious when you think about it. It does not matter what you are if you lose sight of who you are. If you take the person out of the picture, it ceases to have a frame of reference, a perspective that gives it significance and meaning. All of my life I have listened to people asking “what is the point of all this?” and as soon as I realized that without us all of this has no point, I understood. We are the point of all of this. We give this focus. The problem has always been that we have never really understood our purpose. We do not understand what it means to be the point of existence. In today’s world, “existential” is practically a dirty word. No one wants to be existential. We have turned our backs on the spiritual, the ephemeral, the insubstantial, intangible and invisible, and in the process turned our backs on ourselves. This is the path to destruction.

All of the pain and suffering in the world is a product of us walking down this path. If we fail to see the point in our own existence, we cannot truly see the point in anyone’s existence. In a pointless existence, we are driven only by the impulses to avoid pain and seek pleasure and either way we are rendered too numb to think. Without thought we are blind and indifferent to the consequences of our actions, the pain and suffering we cause. Instead of thinking, we rationalize. Instead of solving problems that we have created, we justify them and in the process we create injustice. We end up pitting ourselves against each other, struggling for power to rise above the conflict, creating institutions that marginalize and alienate us further. Each step on this path of destruction strips away a layer of our souls and makes it easier for us to destroy each other.

As a misfit, I have always been painfully sensitive to the suffering of others, and the world’s suffering eclipses the imagination. The mere apprehension of it is overwhelming. Everyone is aware of it on some level and I am sure it is the weight of that apprehension that discourages so many, leaving them wondering if there is any point to existence, unable to understand how a meaningful universe could be so cruel and indifferent. I usually wonder why I am so desperate to find a place for myself in it. All I know is, this world is the one dream we all share and I am tired of dreaming alone.

The Impact of Social Stratification

We’re all human. None of us have a say in what circumstances we are born. Pretty much any other characteristic by which people can be defined produces some form of social stratification. Thinking about it boggles the mind. I’ve grown up with the ideas of caste and class, and tried to understand how anyone can willingly accept being “put in their place” by the people around them. In the end, I think it all comes down to the perception of power, the ways in which circumstances can be used to dominate society.

It is fair to say that society, like reality itself, is created and sustained by our participation. Society is an unspoken contract, and one that is sort of worked out on the fly and passed down in its present, imperfect form through each generation. We pride ourselves on the progress we have made, but honestly it seems that whatever progress we have made has been in spite of ourselves. But, how can we address it critically and sensibly?

It is so easy to point the finger of blame, or to rationalize human behavior, but I’m still asking myself, “Why does anyone put up with this?” There are certain things, things we have created, that make us desperately unequal. Consider the tendency of formal organizations to create authority, or formal systems to create wealth, or formal status or merit to create prestige.

These are useful things, but they need to be paired with responsibility, integrity, and humility. Look at the way that groups are formed on the basis of common identity or purpose, but create trends of positive and negative discrimination, and the guidelines for institutionalizing them as caste or class. Think of the many ways that individuals who have gained a privileged place in society have acted to protect their privilege by limiting opportunities, controlling resources, creating surplus labor forced to compete for reduced wages.

The fact is that any system or organization can be leveraged to create power, in one of many forms. Money is economic power. Prestige is social power. Authority is political power. This is power we all have, but depending on where we are in the system, that power is either channeled away from us, or right into our hands, and it happens because we allow it to happen. The problem is that social stratification dramatically shifts the balance and flow of power. The more concentrated the power structure becomes, the more severe the inequalities of society.

The ultimate danger is not revolution, however. The more extreme the imbalance is, the more coercive the power structure becomes, the more controlling it becomes. The real danger is not that people will fight the system. The real danger is that they will simply abandon it. They will try to escape their miserable lives through drugs and debauchery, they will turn to crime and simply take what they require, or they will quietly, desperately, take their own lives.

Paying the Price

As true as it is that some people are incapable of valuing things they have not paid the price for, the fact is that free money is never free. There is terrible cost for being on the public dole, that is immediately evident when you walk into a welfare community. Being on public assistance or living on a reservation, the cost of that free income or housing is having to live in poverty. It provides just enough to survive but not enough to advance. While many assistance programs include job training and placement programs, the jobs one can qualify for rarely provide better incomes.

Taken in the context of the way people on state or federal assistance are forced to jump through hoops just to get food, clothing, housing or basic medical services, it is hard to imagine a more discouraging or disheartening life style. People who are subjected to this tend to have little appreciation for the system that provides for them (the rest of society for the most part) because the system has no appreciation for them. Part of this comes from having someone else decide which of their needs deserve to be met, or what sort of help they deserve to get.

To simply exist in the world requires more time and resources than an individual can provide for themselves. It simply is not possible to advance if you can not start out on an even footing with the rest of the world, and people in poverty rarely do. The best most impoverished families can do is to work twice as hard as everyone else for half as much in the hope of giving their children the opportunities they never had. No one can choose what family, race, community, culture or nation to be born into, or the advantages and disadvantages that they have as an accident of birth.

It’s human nature to say that “no child shall be left behind” but in reality some children get born with one hell of a head start. Just knowing you got dealt a bad hand in life is enough to make you pretty unhappy, but when you also realize that the deck was stacked against you that unhappiness can become something much uglier. Poverty is the direct consequence of the creation and accumulation of wealth. Poverty is symptom of a disease that infects civilization, and until civilization can overcome this disease it will continue to be sick and just a bit deranged.

It is natural to assume that the disease is greed, but let’s be honest, its only human to want more than we need. The problem is that some people are ruthless enough to simply take whatever they want; a certain pair of continents come to mind as examples. I would also like to point out that, while there are semantic differences between “criminals” and “rebels” the defining characteristic of any society’s ne’er-do-wells is that they are usually people who, feeling that they are not properly represented or established in society, do not respect the establishments of society.

It is not necessary to be in poverty to be a criminal, or a terrorist, or what have you, but being in poverty puts you a lot closer to the fringe of society where you have more to gain by bucking the system than you do by participating in it. As long as there are people out there who have better prospects working against society, there will be people content to exploit or disrupt it. The parasitic element of our society is created by our own institutions, in the way they are organized, the way the operate, and the way they perpetuate imbalances in the status quo.

To see who is at fault, you simply look at who benefits from the status quo the most consistently. Crime and welfare have been accepted by those people as an acceptable operational reality of industry, economics and politics. The first question everyone needs to ask is, “who has the right to determine privilege?” Privilege is certainly not distributed based on who does the most work, or even who does the most important work. In both cases, the poor do. To understand how important the working poor are, try to imagine what would happen to civilization if they all stopped doing their jobs!

Granted, there are some very specialized fields that have great value, and the individuals who perform those functions are handsomely rewarded, but it does not always follow that a highly valued worker does the most important work. Any job can become “worthless” if enough people are skilled at doing it — that’s simple “supply and demand” and it applies to general labor or brain surgery. Teachers, who perform an essential social function, are valued proportionately to the perceived value or significance of the students they instruct.

Yes, other factors like tenure and experience apply, but a gifted grade-school teacher is easily overlooked in favor of a competent tenured professor at an elite university. Which brings up the second question everyone needs to ask, “who has the right to determine the value of my contribution to society?” The answer to both of the questions raised should be “Me.” Any other answer ought to show you what’s wrong with the system. Beyond the most basic necessities, “chasing the dollar” is a very unfulfilling way to spend life.

With so much emphasis on making money, particularly in business, it becomes too easy to lose sight of why we are working in the first place. Most people accept the argument that money is superior to barter, but both systems of exchange are dependent upon assigning a fair value to the production of goods and services. The value of the dollar fluctuates, and over the past hundred years has plummeted through inflation, but the cost of an hour’s work is still an hour spent working. The true value is in what is accomplished, and how hard it is to accomplish — and only the person doing the work knows that!

The day people stopped setting the value of their own work was the day that people lost their independence and freedom. When there is always someone else deciding the value of your work and your worth in the community, what assurance is there that the decision will be fair? Living is the only privilege we truly have, and we have the responsibility of making our own contribution to the world valuable. Anything that distorts or denies that is part of the problem. If you want more in life, you have to be more, you have to do more; you can’t just keep doing the same thing you have been doing all along.

You are going to have to do something you don’t want to do — because if you wanted to do it, you would have already tried. But, you can never know if you’ll like doing something until you try, and in some cases until you succeed. This is all common sense stuff, but it’s amazing how easy it is for people to avoid even thinking these simple thoughts when they need to, or taking it to heart. And really, all the good advice in the world is worthless if a person is not listening, and it can’t be used unless a person can take it upon themselves to use it.

Life really does not have a purpose if you don’t live your life on purpose. People really do a lot better in the world when they act like they have a good reason for being here. Blissful ignorance of the world is a handicap, however pleasant it might seem. An open mind should always be guarded by open eyes.

Take a Moment to Reflect

Even with the best intentions no one has the right to impose a system of thought or action on anyone against their will. Ironically, that is exactly what has happened to all of us as we were born into this world. It is in some ways no different than being born into slavery, in the sense that we come into the world having no say in the system that will govern our lives, and we spend our most vulnerable years being programmed to become obedient citizens and uphold the status quo.

As children we learn that the double-standard is pretty much the rule in virtually all situations, and while there seem to be thousands of problems in the world, the one thing all problems have in common is apathy and indifference. The older generation has already been through the school of hard knocks and become bitter, skeptical, intolerant, or what have you — the end result being that most people have given up on trying to make the world a better place and turned their attention to finding a better place in the world. While most people are busy pushing and shoving each other aside trying to “get their share” no one is taking responsibility for the world we share.

Now, I understand that self interest is important for people’s well-being, but our selfishness as a species has become blinding. It isn’t enough that we’re consuming the world’s renewable resources faster than the world can cope with, or that we’re depleting the world’s limited resources as fast as we can dig them up, but we also pile up mountains of debt for our children to conduct wars with nations we’ve given up trying to be friends with. People need to wake up and realize that no one is going to fix the world for them.

The people who have seized control of our world are abusing the authority they’ve been given, ignoring the responsibilities we’ve entrusted them with. I’m not just talking about our presidents and prime ministers, here; I am talking about the people who are given authority in all walks of life that are exploiting the system for their own benefit. I’m even talking about the customers who abuse the courtesy of employees to get special attention or service. Every single abuse of the public trust is passed on to another human being, and while people are complaining about how they are being mistreated, each person who uses their misfortune as an excuse to abuse the public trust is helping to destroy the world we live in.

Not all at once, not today, but almost every day, somewhere, for someone, it manifests as robbery, assault, rape, murder. That is how it works. The end of the world comes one person at a time. Every time a person dies, the world loses something irreplaceable.

There have always been those who believe that the world would be a better place without some people in it, and there have always been people willing to kill anyone who gets in their way. We have all been one of those people, at some point in our lives, for some part of our lives. The worst possible human being exists within all of us, as does the best. We can choose to understand this, and we can choose what sort of human being we will allow ourselves to be. We can choose to be weak, we can choose to be insignificant, or we can choose to be powerful and extraordinary.

Those choices are ours, and we make them by doing what those choices call for. But, no one is going to make the right choice if no one cares. The only thing that people need, really, is something that most people have — or can get access to — and the only thing they need to do is stop taking it for granted. It’s called a mirror. Take a good look, because that is who is going to change the world — or not — and that is who you have to fight to succeed.

The Best Way to Fit In? Don’t Stand Out

Grouping is an activity that comes instinctively and automatically to people. It is part of a filtering process that allows us to make sense of our universe. Anything can serve as criteria for grouping, but because this is a perceptual-interpretive process; differences and similarities in physical characteristics are the most prevalent. As we learn and grow, we also associate ideas and experiences with the items in our cognitive inventory. We give values to people, places and things based on personal experience, inherited attitudes and beliefs, and assumptions. Part of our ability to form instant impressions and make immediate judgments is based upon preconception — ideas we have formed previously.

Stereotyping is the result of reaching conclusions based on limited observation or information — often inaccurate or unreliable information. The thing that really differentiates the act of grouping people from the act of stereotyping is thinking. When grouping, you are engaged in a thinking process, perceiving and interpreting raw information, but when stereotyping you are simply calling up some predigested conclusion to save the time, effort and attention required to make an accurate and appropriate judgment. It is called “jumping to conclusions” and it is something we do so much that we rarely even notice it. What this means for social relations is disastrous. By assuming that we “know” what we are confronting when we encounter another human being, we actually fail to perceive that individual as a person. We not only take him or her for granted, we automatically dismiss them as being worthy of greater consideration.

The tendency to concentrate into isolated ethnic groups is a natural instinct for most people. It stems from the desire for a common identity or a desire to belong, and apparently the easiest way for a person to fit in is to not stand out. It is an almost universal aversion to being different. It is the differences between us that become the focus of conflict, as immature as it is. The ability to single a person out of a group gives the group power or justifies decisions that would otherwise be unjustifiable. There are no human traits that are immune to discrimination.

Height, weight, color, sex, intelligence, class, nationality, regionality, whatever it is that makes an individual unique can be used to shut them out of the group. Racial discrimination gets a lot of attention, but what about gender-identity discrimination? When a person who has female psychology and male anatomy acts normal (that is, dressing and acting feminine) and gets raped and or murdered, that is an example of extreme prejudice and discrimination.

The fact is, being different is enough to get a person killed. The reality is, civilization is founded on an impulse that encourages intolerance and breeds fear of individuality.

Each new generation is raised in an environment defined by lingering prejudice and emerging enlightenment, responding to the lingering injustices in positive and negative ways that inform the next generation’s prejudices. The victims are not just disadvantaged minorities isolated from “mainstream society” in ghettoes, or resentfully integrated into “suburbia.” Most of the people in the world struggle with poverty and discrimination because poverty and discrimination tend to be self-sustaining and mutually reinforcing. The thing most people overlook is the fact that the rich are a minority isolated from mainstream society — including the majority of individuals of their own race or ethnicity.

While this may sound like a discriminatory statement, minorities continue to struggle with the System mostly because it is not their System. The government and industry of the United States was created by a specific group with the specific purpose of supporting and promoting their own group. It is a privileged system and while it’s laid out on paper as ideals and laws, it is made real by people who do discriminate and are prejudiced — sometimes negatively, against people of other races or ethnic origins, but primarily positively toward their own race and ethnic group. It is perfectly reasonable to point out this selfishness on the part of the elite, and it is not entirely enviable, but it is human. A better system can only be created by people who hold less exclusive views of people.

Being at Odds with Life

I never imagined that I had a monopoly on being at odds with life. It is simply a state of being with which I am much too familiar. I have spent most of my life struggling with things that most people take for granted, stumbling and falling in places where most people stride with confidence and conviction. Strangely, I can dance through other places where most people crawl along blindly in fear and confusion or turn and run from in terror. I am not like everyone else, and I can not just be like everyone else and do what everyone else does. In order to live like other people, I have to learn the role and act the part — but the performance I put on never ends and by going through the motions I end up not having a life of my own.

There are people who are paid millions of dollars to use the skills I use simply to survive. My life has been a job that no one hired me for and no one pays me to do. I do this simply because I was born in a body that disguises my true nature. I do this because it is the only way I can do anything, be anything, have anything at all. There is one interesting benefit; I am in constant turmoil because of a conflict between who I am and what I appear to be. I know I have a soul, because my mind is not strong enough to exist at such complete odds with my body. In spite of every effort and encouragement to conform to my physical reality, I continue to exist as a girl in my own mind.

My mind has fallen apart and reset to this female identity too many times for me to question who I really am. Trying to be a man destroys me. There is a limit to how long I can play the part before it kills me. It is like holding my breath under water. I have to surface one in a while to breathe or risk drowning. Unfortunately, I have to keep taking that risk because the people around me can only acknowledge the person I appear to be; only the physical part of me is accepted as being real or legitimate. Oh, I can talk myself blue about who I really am, but most people will continue to perceive me as a mentally defective man — or worse, a sexually defective man.

I could get a sex change — pardon me, I mean, I could elect to undergo gender reassignment surgery — in which case I would no longer be considered a man. I might even, with lots of work, pass for a woman. But I would not be female. I can not even begin to explain the problems I’ve had with the very idea of surgical intervention, but it was being forced to confront it as the only real option available for correcting things that drove me to the brink of suicide. That is a very odd place to end up as the result of wanting a real life. For now, the fact that I literally can not afford it, and for health reasons should not risk it, is all that keeps me from pursuing in desperation to get out of living as a man.

I am actually afraid of what would happen if I could afford to go through with it. Not because I would regret doing it. I’ve spent so much of my life hiding who I really am, I am not sure if I would know how to just be myself. The other concerns, real and terrifying as they are, just don’t compare to the fact that I would end up alone and uncertain of myself. The hardest part of what I have survived is the one part that will be emphasized most if I were to do the right thing for myself. I know that I would get past that point, and survive if the process itself doesn’t kill me — a risk I was always willing to take. In the end, the final curse is that no matter what I do, I have no idea how I am supposed to fit in anywhere. If I have no place in this world, either way, why do I put myself through all of this misery?