My sister claims that she threatened to call the authorities and lie to them about me being dangerous to my parents as a failed form of “emotional manipulation” to get me to do what was good for me.
I have been thinking about that — yes, I have very low levels of “latent inhibition” and don’t slough well — and I don’t find that claim credible. I can’t imagine how she believed that threat would get me to be compliant.
No, I think that her real goal was emotional expression. She wanted to express to me how much she was hurting, how much my parents were hurting. She wanted to get through to me about how much they hated to see me suffer, how that was creating emotional suffering for them.
In other words, she was acting out her emotions onto me under the guise of doing the right thing.
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The terrible thing for the little girl is not just that everyone sees her as an ogre, but that she sees with absolute clarity. Your perceptions are so clear, and so strong, in a way, and the awful thing is they just bring more pain, because the little girl just wants to be seen and loved and taken care of. While I had your message up and I was listening to the mp3, Gmail had one of its ads alongside–beautiful bedding for beautiful little girls — and I kept thinking how different your life might have been if you could have had some of that as a child. Or now.
Your sister, like so many other people in the world, uses her lack of clarity to indulge herself in self-righteousness and claiming victimhood. You don’t allow yourself that luxury. It’s a terible burden, and it feels like your skin being torn off, but maybe in some deep way there’s a salvation.
I just noticed that my friend has a copy of my Tarot deck above the computer, so I cut it and got a card called 3 of Birds, which is about being willing to take hold of the pain that pierces the heart like three swords, and then freeing it so that the swords become transformed into a snake for life energy, a beam of light for spiritual truth, and a river for the emotions that are bound up in pain. It’s one of the most painful cards in the entire deck, and yet also, because of its clarity and honesty, one of the most hopeful.
I send love to the little girl, and the woman of clear sight.
Ms. Rachelle, after the Bad Night.
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Abby was feeling quite tender after the election. On one hand, Obama is hope, but there were so many other kinds of feelings based on the results, too.
This is the challenge of enlightenment; that to be enlightened you have a broader vision and see where the unenlightened choose separation, defense & fear over connection, vulnerability & love.
They are right: ignorance is bliss. Awareness, well, that is awareness.
So many jump from cult to cult to remain in ego comforting ignorance, but eventually, the self has to fight the ego, to come out from smallness and myopia.
Enlightenment is enlightenment. Luckily, the course tells us that we have nothing to fear from engaging the quest for miracles, because even as we seem to separate from the masses, we become stronger in our connection to the universe.
The trans path is always an individual path. We can’t be “one of the gang” for very long until we find a part of us that doesn’t fit the constraints.
Yet, with enlightenment we can see ourselves in context, knowing that even if it isn’t going to come in one human lifetime, growth, change & connection will always win out in the long run.
Look for the miracle that helps you see things in a new way. Maybe look for how missteps become lessons that set us and our society back on the path later. Maybe you have some other miracle to come that lets you walk more with the holy spirit.
Enlightenment is hard, no doubt.
But would you really want to go back to more ignorance?
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I vividly remember once, years ago, when my sister asked me what she should do for me.
I offered what I would find valuable.
She blurted out “Well, I guess that I am not that enlightened!”
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My sister came to dinner Friday night.
I spent the moments after I found out hidden in the basement, crying.
My gut was clear: she had hurt me, she will hurt me.
But my mind was also clear: she is my sister and is she is hurting too.
Still, the physical pain the encounter brought me is still resonating in me a day and a half later.
She later came down and told me stories about how much crap she has to go through at work. I understand that she needs defenses to tolerate that, and anhedonia is the solution my father taught her. Having seen Amber Smith’s comments on Celebrity Rehab, well, I also understand how that strikes out against people who turn the lights on and force her to feel.
(Am I going to get someone invoking the authority of “people close to me,” invoking her authority, bashing me again for this statement? One more thing to fear that leads me to this pain, eh?)
I just came back from driving her to work. I have to pick up her mail this week, and help with her car transfer on Friday, much like I spent my 50th birthday helping her move into her new house.
My ears ring, my neck aches and it feels like someone kicked me in the kidneys.
Ah, stress.
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TBB got someone else directly questioning her gender yesterday.
It felt bad.
She remembered when she was a CD and a trans political leader told her about being read out at the airport and how it felt.
Crossdresser TBB thought it was just oversensitivity, something to be expected.
Transsexual TBB now knows it is a challenge to be faced, another gotcha that can shut you down.
Ain’t enlightenment a bitch?
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To be aware is to be challenged, challenged to stay aware in the face of a world that would prefer you silenced and blinded.
If enlightenment was easy, everyone would have it, eh?
But people don’t want it because the cost of being present in a world where so few people are is terrible.
Callan 