Day: March 25, 2007

Li’l Bit

When your brain & your heart deal in connections, the kind of balance that many try to suggest, compartmentalization, just seems to be impossible.

To me, behaviours are always in context.   It’s certainly possible to do scut work or perform a role, but only if it fits into some larger context.

TBB understands this about me.  “You are a big picture kind of gal,” she tells me.  It’s my blessing and my bane, making big things comprehensible and small things overwhelming.

I know what people think I should do, and that’s take care of my own life, at least a li’l bit.

What is the big picture for me right now?  How do my needs fit in?

I am engaged in the same struggle I have been in all my life: a test of will.

A test of will requires two key components.  The first is an admirable goal, and in my cares that is taking care of my parents.   The second component, as G. Gordon Liddy will be happy to tell you, is punishment, denial and sacrifice, all endured with grace and discipline.  Hold your hand over that candle, and no Dr. Flameo, either.

I just took a two hour walk to buy strawberries and a paper, and deliberately didn’t put on my MP3 player to listen to Kurlansky’s book about Cod.  Will.

TBB gets this on some level, understanding that I have to have a focus, a context, even if that context requires too much denial.

How do I find the permission to love, to move past will?  I don’t know.  But I do know that it’s almost impossible doing it just a li’l bit

Permission To Love

If there is one thing society needs to control to keep people following shared goals, it is who and what we love.

TBB and I were chatting about love last night.   What we did for love, and what we did to deny love, and how people around us did the same thing.

The first thing both of us learned is that what we loved — the things other women loved — were things we had to learn to deny ourselves.   TBB has moved on with those desires, but me, well, they still have to be denied.

Beyond that, we learned that people who loved us first had to consider what they learned they were supposed to love, the socially approved loves trained into them.   We found that struggle hard with out partners, getting over their own expectations, and both agree that unless a partner has come to grips with their own bisexuality, they aren’t worth the effort.

I suspect that permission to love — to desire — is the same thing as permission to hope.  When you can want something enough to believe you might get it, you have hope of change.   One big challenge of learning to live without the expectations which block possibility and cause sorrow, is balancing openness and desire.   It’s one thing to live with detachment, but to want to make something come into being in this world, you have to be attached to that vision, have to want it enough to struggle for it.

After all, isn’t this what gay pride is all about, a defiant gesture that they have permission to love who they love, and don’t have to stay within the boundaries laid on them?  Of course, once they get into the gay or lesbian culture, they have other social boundaries laid on them, other expectations that need to be followed to be seen as attractive in the culture, but that is another discussion.

In my case, instead of loving what I love, I love what I can love, and that is my parents, who generously offer me sustinance in exchange for doing.   I am grateful for that perimission to love, even as the sense of denial of permission to be & to love, leaves me without hope.

Still, the years of suppressing my love, believing it will be seen as the love of someone tainted & pathological — as Michael Savage called an unknown tranny this week — and of believing that others will find it hard to love me because they don’t have permission to love someone who just is me, well, that’s hard.   It may not be true, but it certainly informs my experience, and shapes me into the human doing that I hate having to act, doing what others want to be in their story.

I want to love it, I want to love them, and I want to be loved.  But I believe that permission is denied, and that means hope is absent.

And that is that.