I’m in a bad place, sinking in an ocean of shit, in a sea of stigma that comes from the everyday drag on people who visibly cross the gender boundary in this heterosexist culture.
I went through all the shit posts, or at least many of them. Heavy Shit, Binary Shit, Complicated Shit and Lonely Shit only exist as titles, all real and all true kinds of shit that I swim in.
I even reached out for help from some kind people who want to help transpeople in distress before they go over the edge. I didn’t get help, though. As TBB has said, if I end up going, well, it’s not like I haven’t done the work in spades. Hard to help someone who has already tried to help themselves for decades and knows the edge intimately.
Being trans in normal reality, well, it is swimming in shit. That’s because normativity is about stigma. A reply to the doctor who was at the screening on Thursday
In my experience, when you open transgender issues up to a general audience, things always get scattered.
And sadly, unless you deliberately stop them, they almost always end up in the toilet too, that tiny stage where the fears that keep us terrified by gender difference always play out. “But what if there are no rigid gender boundaries to protect people? Won’t we all be victims?”
You and I both know that predators don’t need social change to protect them, that they will act badly whatever the rules. But transpeople are vulnerable and do need that change.
Evil or sickness is always going to do what it must. But to predicate our society on stopping that evil or sickness by creating thin boundaries is to cast those who need to be beyond those boundaries into evil or sickness. Do we really want to create more evil or sickness in the world? Maybe, just maybe, if we live in a culture where we don’t have to compartmentalize and deny our own nature, there will be less twisting of people into predators.
But that’s the way of stigma, the way of the ego: any fear will do to demand compliance and protection, even the canard of “men in the women’s room.”
In the mundane world, trans is wearing, grinding, a case of how much armour can you carry, how much fear can you fend off. That is true.
I was really struggling, really wanting a way out of that struggle, the struggle I have been in for so long, the struggle that keeps me small and hidden in the world.
And then, I saw the answer, clearly.
I’m either fucking amazing or I’m fucking dead.
I either transcend the mundane or I drown in it.
I either lift myself above or I get sucked below.
I either go above the world’s expectations and fears or I am killed by them.
http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2013/09/12/dont-confuse-lady-gaga-with-stefani-germanotta/
Don’t confuse Lady Gaga with Stefani Germanotta
Lady Gaga is a warrior, the pop star tells Elle magazine in its October issue. But Stefani Germanotta? That’s a different story.
“Wait a minute,” you’re probably thinking. “I thought Stefani Germanotta is Lady Gaga?”
Yes and no.
As Gaga explains, “I am – Stefani is – a perpetually tortured artist. That’s why I changed my name,” she tells Elle. “I can’t be her in public. She would be a mess!”
The Mother Monster, on the other hand, is cool and calm under pressure – so unfazed she doesn’t even realize when it’s there.
“What are you talking about, pressure?” Gaga asks. “I’m great under pressure. I’m a warrior. I’m Rocky, round 12.”
She can probably credit that toughness for helping her survive in the industry, seeing that for every fan she’s attracted, there’s someone else who’s a critic.
“Everyone is so cynical,” Gaga says of the detractors. “I can’t purely love my fans, or share an honest story about my past, without someone asking me if I really, truly struggled. Do you know how much dirt I ate? Do you know the men I had to crawl through, the people that disrespected my body, my mind, my heart?”
Gaga gets it. If she is just a mundane person, just who society tells her she is, she can’t do what she needs to do to save herself. And she can’t do the magic that helps others lift themselves, either.
I’m either fucking amazing or I’m fucking dead.
That does seem like a terrifying and isolating call. In the past weeks, I have had people close to me explain to me that reality is reality, and people don’t transcend it. Instead, people just slog at it, balancing the grind with as much dreaming as they can get away with.
This, though, is the universal lesson of the leap.
A bit of advice
Given to a young Native American
At the time of his initiation:
As you go the way of life,
You will see a great chasm.
Jump.
It is not as wide as you think.
Joseph Campbell
All growth is a leap in the dark,
a spontaneous unpremeditated act
without benefit of experience.
Henry Miller
We must walk consciously
only part way toward our goal,
and then leap in the dark
to our success.
Henry David Thoreau
When in doubt, make a fool of yourself.
There is a microscopically thin line between
being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on Earth.
So what the hell, leap!
Cynthia Heimel
Half the failures of this world arise
from pulling in one’s horse as he is leaping.
Augustus Hare
The most dangerous thing in the world
is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps.
David Lloyd George
Unless we lift ourselves out of the mundane, we will never be all we can be.
Unless we leap from here to possibility, we will never feel our connection with the universe.
Oh, God, I am so scared. But am I brave enough to live boldly rather than die, slowly or quickly? Do I learn more from being fucking amazing or being fucking dead?
The essence of normativity is the essence of death, trading our energy for the comforts of compliance. We shrink ourselves to try to feel connection, forgetting that separation from the universe is impossible.
Transgender is about pure transformation, or it is about nothing at all, as somebody once said.
I’m either fucking amazing or I’m fucking dead.
I either transcend the mundane or I drown in it.
I either lift myself above or I get sucked below.
The hardest thing about trans is doing it alone.
The worst part of having success is
to try finding someone who is happy for you.
Bette Midler
The shit exists and will always exist.
The only way to not lose yourself in shit is to rise above it, even as people around you try to express their shit, their fears, by throwing shit, by throwing fear at you.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions.
Small people always do that,
but the really great make you feel that you, too,
can become great.
Mark Twain
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson, A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles
I’m either fucking amazing or I’m fucking dead.
I either transcend the mundane or I drown in it.
I either lift myself above or I get sucked below.
And yes, that prospect is utterly terrifying to me.
Callan 