A correspondent wanted to know who I am.
I replied:
You want to know about me?
I’ll tell you my big secret: I listen to other people.
I listen and find commonalities, and then try to find ways to speak the truths that appear woven throughout our narratives.
It doesn’t sound like a big thing, but the saddest thing about transpeople is just an expansion of the saddest thing about most people in this world: they work to rationalize their own choices by separation rather than understanding their choices in a wider context by connecting.
In other words, they don’t really listen, rather they just search for ideas, beliefs and truths that they know they agree with or know they disagree with, looking for notions that support the separations they hold which defend their own choices. They don’t want challenge to see more clearly, they want the comfort of having their own assumptions and rationalizations affirmed.
When people are in a defensive mode, they don’t want you to hear the truth contained in their words, rather they want you to hear what they mean to say, the face they paint on themselves to face the world. After all, for most people who lie or dissemble, the person they want to fool the most is themselves. It’s usually much more comforting to break mirrors that reflect us in unpleasant ways rather than to face that revelation and work to get more whole, more integral, more actualized, more healthy.
I listen, even when it challenged or challenges me, and I try to find what connects us. That’s why I am the “grad course,” because newbies who still want to find a way to separate, isolate, compartmentlize or deny their messy humanity find me either challenging or crazy, saying things that they can’t believe apply to their life.
I listen and I understand, and sometimes, when asked, I share a bit of this boiled down wisdom, knowing that it may well just be dismissed as another asshole heard from.
But that’s what I do. And what I have done for about a decade and a half, now.
Callan 