(i also have a new keyboard, so it's easier to type now. also have a new monitor, about time i say, i have so much good space on my desktop now, i feel happy about it.. but that means i need to clean up my room because i have created a huge mess to install all these new things.)
" I watched for what to do right. I needed other people to validate my effort to be real. It was important that they saw me as one of them. I don't think I ever pulled it off. Their kind of realness seemed always out of reach. These days, I'm trying less and less to be a real anything but the real me, whatever that ends up being.
Have you ever pretended to be another kind of person so that someone would like you better, or maybe so they wouldn't hurt you? Have you ever changed the kind of person you were in order to make people believe you were somehow more real? How did you ensure that you were looking and behaving within acceptable social parameters?
Everyone consciously or unconsciously changes who they are in response to their environment or to some relationship that they are negotiating at any given moment. Every life form does that. It's a kind of phenotypic plasticaly, an observable biological theory that says more or less that all life forms evolve according to their surroundings. They shift and change what they are so that their identity doesn't wind up causing their death and/or eventual extinction as a species.
Elephants stomping around in the polar regions of our planet evolved into woolly mammoths in response to the bone-deep cold. Their tropical ancestors in Africa and India retained their sun-resistant easier-to-cool nearly hairless gray hides. Life forms evolve not only over thousands of years, but sometimes over the course of just one lifetime. Some life form can evolve in a little over a few minutes. Humans do that. Our spirits and brains seem to have the kind of genetic RAM and processing speed that it takes to shift identities on the spot, the way a chameleon shifts color.
Sometimes we use costumes to change who we are, sometimes we use drugs and alcohol. We admire people who can shift identities well and seemingly with a few or no props: Robin Williams, Carol Burnett, John Belushi. They shuffle identities as effortlessly as a good poker player shuffles a deck of cards.
We don't learn to shift identities for purely whimsical reasons, or because we're bored or want to entertain people. It's something we do in order to survive. The ability to control who and what we are seem to be in the world is a life skill we learn through practice, just like any other life skill. Have you been practicing?
The less consciously we evolve our identities--who we are and how we're seen in the world--the better the chances are that one day we're going to wake up and not know where we are or how we got there. The skills that used to work for us will have stopped working. Our identities always stop working for us at some point. Why? Because the world around us is moving forward in time. Standards of cultural identities change depending on generation, degree of multiculturalism, and who's sitting in the White House. Identities in culture behave like software in an operating system: you have to keep an eye on what version you're using, and update it regularly, or you'll crash badly.
people who are reactionary try to keep the world from changing, rather than do the hard, but ultimately more realistic, work of changing themselves. People who don't see any way of changing themselves or the world spends a lot of time wishing they were dead.
When we consciously evolve toward an identity that we can live with, life becomes more of a game or a sport, life surfing. I'm not saying it's an easy or fun thing to do, just that it takes skill, it's exciting, and it's absolutely worth the commitment and sacrifice.
Growing up, I got pretty goof at being boy. But boy wasn't an identity I could live with. Boy wasn't how I wanted to be treated, and boy was never how I wanted to act. Boy never allowed me to truly express myself. Every waking moment that I walked through the world as boy and man made me feel like a liar and a phony. But after I went through with my gender change, I found myself still living a life of working hard at being, only now I was working hard at being girl. Nothing in the paradigm of my life allowed for being neither. And the more I tried to be boy or girl, the less I seemed to measure up to either, and the less I wanted to stay alive. It finally got to the point where it just didn't seem worth it any more. It came down to this: should I kill myself or should I make myself a life worth living? And it wasn't so much the question that kept me alive or even my answer. What kept me alive was the notion that it was me who was asking the question."
will be continued...
(no copyright taken.)
-[Pd]-
