Power Vulnerable

People need you to be Callan,
because Callan is comfortable with herself
in a way you forcing yourself to be a guy can never be.
That lets you be a good mirror
who helps people see themselves, and grow.

It was a good week for TBB.  She let go of holding onto an investment, let go of twisting herself into knots to make it work, and surprise, now people want to help her make it work.

Since she was loose and free, she got good reactions from people — the closeted transperson who confided in her, the transperson facing change who wanted to talk, everyone.

One guy asked her to dance, and then after they danced, a bit in his own swing, wanted to arm wrestle.  TBB took him three falls out of three — bam, bam, bam. 

“How big was your penis, when you had a penis?” he asked her.

“Average size,” she replied.  “But it’s somewhere in Utah now.”

Another transsexual at the same table blanched at this talk.  “If anyone asked me that, I’d be out of here,” she said.

A gal at the table of this working class bar noticed this. 

“Take the stick out of your ass!” she told TBB’s friend.   TBB had to stifile a laugh, knowing that I often say that the ultimate tranny surgery is pulling the stick out of your own ass.

People notice that TBB is comfortable in her own skin, and that makes them comfortable around her, something that many transsexual women who have transitioned long before her haven’t quite noticed.

There are so few big, potent grown up trannies out there that if we don’t take care of each other, who will?  But as long as we can’t engage our own pain, can’t see how others also have touched the same pain, can’t see how it connects us, we will continue to act out our pain against others close to us, others who reflect the pain in ourselves whith which we have not yet come to terms.

Our defenses block our vulnerability, and we keep that stick buried deep.

I need to know that my power comes from trusting, releasing, being open.  That’s why I called TBB this morning, telling her that while I knew the drill, it was hard to trust when it came from me.

She told me the stories I told to you, and then she ecouraged me to loosen up and get out there.

People need you to be Callan,
because Callan is comfortable with herself
in a way you forcing yourself to be a guy can never be.
That lets you be a good mirror
who helps people see themselves, and grow.

I teared up, and she was touched that I trusted her.  But I have trusted her since we got up on stage together in 1994, knowing we had each other’s backs.

People need me to be Callan.   Even if they don’t know it.  They need me to trust my heart, to come from my spirit, to be open and loving, not in denial and serving at a low level.

After all, TBB said it, and she has a beautiful connection to God, so it must be true.

 People need me to be Callan

Yes. Please.

I asked by an old friend to leave her list, because she found it offensive that I was writing under a nom de plume.  Today, she finds masks improper, even though her history is in theater & magic.  She picks at my note, line by line, dragging it though all those filters installed in her head so as to offer her judgement, sure in her intellectual sniffing.

I suspect it’s because she does not want to look behind the mask she wears, the earnest and judgemental mask of self-righteous spirituality.  She wonders why she isn’t having fun, why no one finds her fun to be with, but she can identify it as a problem with others, rather than a problem with the expression of her own pinched & dessicated pain.

She doesn’t really want to hear what I have to say, which is “Yes.”  Yes, be playful.  Yes, trust your desire.  Yes, take the stick out of your ass.  Yes, laugh with God.  Yes, you have to dance. Yes, you have to allow yourself to be as exceptional as you are.  Yes, you have the divine in your heart.

TBB, when I tell a particularly cutting truth, laughs with pain & delight.  This gal, well, she puckers, rejecting the truth and the teller in one fell swoop.  We live in a  finite world, and that means every statement contains both truth and falsity.  We have to decide which is more important, looking for the big picture connective truth and focusing on that, or picking for the bits that can be denied as false and throwing any truth out with the bathwater.

It’s not a surprising behavior.  Lots of the world do it, deciding that protecting the status quo is more important than enlightenment.  It’s just when someone who claims to be comittted to enlightment does it that it smells kind of rank.   I get her need to hold tight, I just don’t think it’s serving her anymore, but if we as humans don’t hold onto defenses that no longer serve us, what do we do?

The one big, big stanky thing about trans-support groups is their unwillingness to affirm the positive.   It is, instead, fears that get affirmed.  We see someone doing what would scare us, and we feel the need to denigate those choices in them as we deny those choices in our life.   Rather than affirming choices we would never make for ourselves, and asking people to affirm the choices we make that they would never make for ourselves, we act as monitors, defending the right way to be trans in the world, the way we have chosen.

As I look to being out in the world for a while, walking past neighbors and into places where the presence of a tranny can bring fear, laughter and derision, I know that my own intention feels thin.  I know that I need affirmation, feedback, encouragement and empowerment.

But where, oh where, can I find this kind of affirmation?   I know lots of people who agree that it is important, but when their fears get hackled, well, they freeze up, pull back, decide to ask for responsibility and not to offer compassion.

I need to hear yes.  Please, I need to hear yes, Callan, you have to go out and be big, to be visible, to try and risk and try again. 

And, from long experience, I know I have little hope of hearing it now.

Facing Myself

The thread I hold on to is service to others.  I deny myself, but help them.

And now, when my parents are on the road between Fayetteville NC and Savannah GA, there isn’t much I can do for them.  That doesn’tmean there won’t be to do for them tonight — last night, I had to try and understand what my mother’s camera was doing when it had words on the screen (it was asking her to set the time and date).

I know they will call and I know that their son has to be here to take care of them.  I can’t really immerse in my own stuff, losing that servant.

But I also know that if I am going to survive I have to face myself.  And the first step of that is literal.  I haven’t shaved since last March.  Oh, I buzzed the length off in June when it got hot, but didn’t shave.  Now, long and white, children identified me as Santa in stores this Christmas.

All that time, all that hiding, and it has to go.  Pity.

But the true pity, I fear, is what I find under there, the blemishes and bumps, the longer nose, the worse teeth, the thinning lips, the age and decay of a year in a life of denial.

And then, beyond that, I remember how hard it is to cover all that again, to box it up when you have to show your mask to the world, the hidden face they find comfortable.

Today, I have to face myself.  My neck tenses and aches, my head hums, and my infections flare.

But it is Saturday night, the ritual night before Sunday morning, a night I have always opened, and then stayed in.

Time to face myself, after a year.

Ouch.