One thing I learned very early in life was to never, ever trust my gut.
My gut, well, it was too weird. It knew I was a girl, it knew when things were wrong, it just knew too damn much stuff that the world explained was wrong. Trust me, I have a long list of things I have screwed up stored in my head. A very long list.
I learned to filter everything though my head. Manipulative and controlling, well, I learned to do that. Of course the primary thing I needed to control wasn’t others, it was myself: my own strange desires, my own x-ray vision, my own connecting brain, my own shaman spirit, my own transgender heart. Maybe that’s why I never used drugs — I was so scared of how I was straight, that the tought of me released was terrifying.
Over the last decades I have learned to let go and let God. “What am I supposed to learn from this?” The nurse may have screwed up and knocked my father out of the clinical trial three months ago, but today we learn that his PSA is down by an order of magnitude, from 70 to 0.7, and he is no longer eligible — he is in remission. Should I have been upset, trying to create my own visions, or just let it go to get this result?
I don’t know. I do know that you do have to be active in your life, but that you have to be committed to process and not to outcomes. The challenge is, though, and I have known this for years, is that it’s hard to hold hope without holding expectations, but holding expectations fights against trusting process.
It’s not just me trusting my gut, though. It’s others affirming my good gut, because the block that stops me from trusting my own heart is that others will find it offputting, distasteful, weird, perverted, sick and abject. I don’t really have the energy left to face everyone down, including friends who like me but who hold a bit of fear about my intensity, my intelligence, my social skills and my power.
I have spent my life doubting, remembering and making connections between ideas and affects, and I am good at that. Trusting, believing and leaping in the wider world, well, that’s not so easy. I can’t go back to manipulating, but forward to trusting, well, that demands trust.
I have been on two “trust walks” in my life.
The first when I was in an encounter group in 1969 where businessmen and students came together, “Generation Bridge,” filmed for a local TV special in Boston. I reminded my partner that I was a good 8 or 10 inches taller than she was, but sure enough as soon as I was blindfolded and she was leading me though the woods, I was smacked between the eyes with a big, honking branch that left a big bump.
The second was a few years ago when my sister insisted I take the secret initiation course at Kripalu, lead by a lesbian who tried to recreate Girl Scount camp, where, I presume she had her first sexual awakenings. They knew I was trouble, and when she read “The Monster At The End Of This Book, starring Loveable Furry Old Grover,” I knew I was lost — I had that book almost 20 years before with my Grover puppet and knew it.
On this Trust Walk, I had a syndesmotic screw in my ankle, fusing it after a bad sprain, and was fitted with a Bledsoe splint boot and crutches. I knew the people at Kripalu didn’t care — a leader had me walk up the stairs with my stuff rather than use the elevator. But the poor Japanse woman who led me around took me onto a muddy slope and I was quickly on the ground, my orthotics full of mud. She wanted to help clean, but there was only the mens room.
A helper say me and tried to be cute “Mother Nature is a bitch!” she chirped.
“Really?” I replied. “I thought it was trust that is a bitch.”
It’s very hard to trust people to manage what they don’t understand, to assist in what is out of their experience — height, handicap, transgender, vision, whatever.
So, if I don’t trust that they will be helpful unless I am controlling & manipulative and I refuse to be that, and if I don’t trust my own gut, in whom or what do I trust?
Is ther anything to trust other than sleep?
Callan 