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greenstormToday my counselor taught me a technique to hold myself within what she called my window of tolerance-- that is the place where the nervous system is in neither fight, flight, nor collapse. There are a ton of techniques out there to keep us in this place, the place where we can think and play and have compassion and love and engage. I haven't been living in that place.
There are a ton of techniques out there to keep us in this place. Deep belly breathing or even just concentrating on breathing is supposed to do it. Keeping the mind out of rumination is supposed to do it. Etc. None of the techniques I've ever been given has worked for me. I don't even co-regulate well; that is sometime in the last two decades I lost the ability to be calmed and soothed by someone holding me, most of the time.
Today's technique works. And I've discovered that when I'm outside that window of tolerance I can act or react pretty normally but. I can't access my grief in that space.
And so here I am, and I can come back to my body for little bits, and be propelled into this huge grief. Like everything human it's multipart and interwoven with the world. I came up here to escape the world, to be in life partnership with a place. Now I'm considering ending that life partnership, replacing that partner: that is surely a grief so huge I can't begin to think of it yet.
But also: I've never felt entirely part of the world of people and that's why I came away. And one piece of that feeling separate has definitely been the way my world has done gender. There's this concept that a trans person is born in the wrong body, that they feel their body doesn't match their gender, and they can fix it by making their body into the other gender. That's a binary model, a world where there are two genders and both body and social perception are aligned into an expression of one of two genders.
I'm not binary-gendered. I'm pretty good with my body, it doesn't trigger me to feel my gender is wrong. I am not good with the social perception of me, and I cannot fix folks having the wrong social perception of me by changing my body or my presentation. I can't fix folks because they only have these two binary ideas in their heads, man or woman, and I don't fit that. Androgyny doesn't make anything better for me: folks still, when perceiving me, are settling me into a girl or boy category, or are moving back and forth between those categories.
This isn't a privilege thing or a sex thing. I reject a male binary role as much as a female, which is to say: some pieces of me are in alignment with both roles but anyone like me has to have practice taking what bits we have in common from other folks' representation because we can't experience archetypes or stories without that. And I could care less the gender of folks I want to fuck except to be careful where different things are threatening for folks with different experiences.
This isn't a pronoun thing. You know when people talk about cars, or the planet, or a boat, and they call it "he" or "she"? I would be so happy to accept pronouns on those grounds where it's accepted that its a convenience for the viewer, that it's compensation for the limitations of the viewer in experiencing a thing a little outside their realm, that it's anthropomorphized.
So yeah, if everyone called me "it" I'd be more comfortable, but. What I want is so far outside my society's comfort zone. What I want is a social category that my society doesn't have. I can't transition into a space that doesn't exist.
There's grief there and a very particular type of loneliness that I remember from being thirteen and looking out my window at the moon and knowing that no human would see me and understand who I was. Now, there's more to it than gender but gender is definitely part of the package.
So is Threshold, this home of mine, this piece of ground and how I feel about it. That connection-- you know, I really like people, and I love them, but this feeling towards the land is much bigger and more all-encompassing of my soul.
It helps to write the grief out, and so I have done. I wish myself a more peaceful evening, and peace also to you.
There are a ton of techniques out there to keep us in this place. Deep belly breathing or even just concentrating on breathing is supposed to do it. Keeping the mind out of rumination is supposed to do it. Etc. None of the techniques I've ever been given has worked for me. I don't even co-regulate well; that is sometime in the last two decades I lost the ability to be calmed and soothed by someone holding me, most of the time.
Today's technique works. And I've discovered that when I'm outside that window of tolerance I can act or react pretty normally but. I can't access my grief in that space.
And so here I am, and I can come back to my body for little bits, and be propelled into this huge grief. Like everything human it's multipart and interwoven with the world. I came up here to escape the world, to be in life partnership with a place. Now I'm considering ending that life partnership, replacing that partner: that is surely a grief so huge I can't begin to think of it yet.
But also: I've never felt entirely part of the world of people and that's why I came away. And one piece of that feeling separate has definitely been the way my world has done gender. There's this concept that a trans person is born in the wrong body, that they feel their body doesn't match their gender, and they can fix it by making their body into the other gender. That's a binary model, a world where there are two genders and both body and social perception are aligned into an expression of one of two genders.
I'm not binary-gendered. I'm pretty good with my body, it doesn't trigger me to feel my gender is wrong. I am not good with the social perception of me, and I cannot fix folks having the wrong social perception of me by changing my body or my presentation. I can't fix folks because they only have these two binary ideas in their heads, man or woman, and I don't fit that. Androgyny doesn't make anything better for me: folks still, when perceiving me, are settling me into a girl or boy category, or are moving back and forth between those categories.
This isn't a privilege thing or a sex thing. I reject a male binary role as much as a female, which is to say: some pieces of me are in alignment with both roles but anyone like me has to have practice taking what bits we have in common from other folks' representation because we can't experience archetypes or stories without that. And I could care less the gender of folks I want to fuck except to be careful where different things are threatening for folks with different experiences.
This isn't a pronoun thing. You know when people talk about cars, or the planet, or a boat, and they call it "he" or "she"? I would be so happy to accept pronouns on those grounds where it's accepted that its a convenience for the viewer, that it's compensation for the limitations of the viewer in experiencing a thing a little outside their realm, that it's anthropomorphized.
So yeah, if everyone called me "it" I'd be more comfortable, but. What I want is so far outside my society's comfort zone. What I want is a social category that my society doesn't have. I can't transition into a space that doesn't exist.
There's grief there and a very particular type of loneliness that I remember from being thirteen and looking out my window at the moon and knowing that no human would see me and understand who I was. Now, there's more to it than gender but gender is definitely part of the package.
So is Threshold, this home of mine, this piece of ground and how I feel about it. That connection-- you know, I really like people, and I love them, but this feeling towards the land is much bigger and more all-encompassing of my soul.
It helps to write the grief out, and so I have done. I wish myself a more peaceful evening, and peace also to you.
