My theory of attraction is that people experience a sort of bodily sense of increased gravity around someone they're attracted to. It's a feeling of being pulled towards them. We may be able to see some patterns emerge in the general types of people we are attracted to, but I don't know that we actually have a lot of choice in the matter. Given things like anti-LGBT priests being caught with male escorts, or government officials who vote against LGBT equality and end up getting caught exposing themselves to other men in public restrooms, I confidently believe that whomever we are truly drawn to, we are drawn to, and that is that.
Knowing that, it's easy to extrapolate that this is the case for not just me, but everyone else. But I must remain especially mindful of including people to whom I am drawn; because they may not be drawn to me. Or perhaps not in the same manner.
I should clarify that this kind of pull does not have to be sexual or romantic.
Returning to Anna as an excellent case in point, I am about 3000% sure that neither of us has a particularly sexual or romantic sort of attraction towards the other. But we do seem to mutually feel a strong platonic attraction, which has created, in me, a sense of being in a sort of sisterly relationship. We enjoy each other's company, and the easy conversation that flows between us. We hardly know each other, really, at this point. But we feel a mutual attraction in this familial and easy way that is often referred to as a "kindred spirit."
I went on to explain that when I experienced a more complete sort of attraction in the past (up to and including the very recent past), I noticed that I would feel a sort of compounding secondary attraction to the idea of being attracted. I was enjoying that feeling, and wanted to hold onto it. In order to do that, I began to paint over the person I was attracted to. They became, from my point of view, a canvas onto which I told my own story about them to myself. In the very beginning of this kind of painting, it is not hard to adjust to things I notice about the way they are that are different from the way I was going to draw them. But before long, they are invisible, hidden by what I want to see in them. The weight of expectation.
I noticed this happening in my mind most recently as I was drawn in a way I have never been drawn before to anyone. I don't mean that in the simple sense of Xtreme Powar Pull or anything. I just mean it is unique in its character, this sense of attraction. I feel powerfully magnetically pulled to her to the extent that I can tell when she enters a space I'm in before I have any way to really know that. I sense that she's arrived, because I feel pulled. I look in that general direction, and see her. I also feel equally powerfully magnetically repulsed, at a fixed distance. It's as if I am a comet who gets pulled into orbit. Exactly this close; hang around; but no closer. It is the most remarkable thing. I treasure it for its uniqueness. But I noticed myself beginning to covet her as its source.
So it was that one day when she did a thing that I found injurious, I found it especially so. Because on some level, I'd permitted myself to believe that she was not capable of injuring me in that way. I had painted over that part of her. I'd made it the realization of a beautiful dream, for me; a woman I'm drawn to in this powerful and mesmerizing way, who is also incapable of hurting me in the most painful ways. But it had nothing at all to do with her. The weight of expectation.
The pain of being hurt was doubled by a tiny sense of betrayal, just large enough to echo the pain back on itself, and double again, and again. But in experiencing that pain mindfully, I saw how empty it was. It was the realization that the movie I was watching wasn't real after all. This angelic creature — for what else would I be drawn to? — was just an actress in a role I'd cast her for, a role I'd been trying to fill without realizing it. She wasn't an angel at all. No flying warrior princess with gleaming armor and a sword that never missed, even when she threw it. No invincible Valkyrie, who would unfailingly be on my side in any fight. But a woman. Not just a woman, or only a woman. A woman. A completely independent person. I would say I am fond of her, but that is a thing I cannot say honestly while setting expectations upon her, for that is not kind. Expectations always weigh something.
I realized that many times in my past, when I'd allowed myself to believe that the women who joined me in failing at being together romantically had really been the ones at fault, I was engaging in this same practice, but not mindfully. I let it play out and run for months, or years. The ones who left me were betrayers. The problem wasn't that I'd misread them, because the attraction was so real. The painting I'd made was so lifelike. The problem had to be them.
But it never was. It never even could have been, because the biggest problem was that I was more interested in being with some idea loosely based on their life than with them. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that they were also doing the same thing with me. But what they were doing doesn't really matter, because what I was doing made every one of those relationships doomed from the start. (Yes, even with #FKAgirlfriend.)
The pain of experiencing all of those kinds of feelings was delightfully brief, this time around. And I am confident it will be one of the last, because most of the pain was the sense of mourning all the time I spent invested in these tools for painting the people I was drawn to out of existence, under a picture of what I decided they had to be.
This most recent and unique attraction still exists, of course. I still feel drawn to her, in exactly the same way I did before. I suppose this is why break-ups hurt so badly. Anyway, she messaged me the other day, telling me about a date she had coming up that night. I felt instinctively a sense of joy. This beautiful creature I was drawn to and intent on observing and protecting in some way, being kind to in some way, was telling me about something that she was excited about. I noticed a sense of joy in myself, a sense of satisfaction that my instinctive response to her telling me this had nothing at all to do with me. I worried that perhaps a few hours or days later, I might feel something else. But so far, I haven't.
By accepting who she is as she is in every moment, and not investing myself into an idea of her that nobody could ever live up to — if nothing else, paintings don't move; people do — I can be as kind as possible to everyone. To her, by seeing her truly, as she is. By demonstrating kindness to that actual person, and not my idea of her. To myself, by not carrying around this painting, and trying desperately to keep it between us, so I can only see something I want, and not someone I can be kind to.
I understand that this is the kindest way to relate to people, now. For myself, anyway. Your mileage may vary. But in understanding that whatever sort of attraction I feel towards anyone is entirely a product of myself, even if I qualify it as a response to them or something about them, I can understand that by extension, everyone else has the same set of conditions to work with, more or less. That is, whether I'm attracted to someone is not up to me; whether someone is attracted to me is not up to them.
What is up to each of us is what we do with that sense of attraction. For myself, I figure if I am going to be inexplicably drawn to someone, I may as well make the kindest possible thing out of that feeling. If nothing else, that keeps things simple; I try to find the kindest action in each moment as it is, already. I have mixed success. But the goal doesn't change, the intention doesn't change, and as long as I don't lose sight of that — as long as being present and being kind are the two foremost practices in my life — I think I shall do much less damage going forward. In fact I think I'll foster some real joy.
In coming to understand these mechanisms through the lens of romance, I realized that the same fundamental principles for attraction can be used to understand the bond between parents and children, because the same kinds of things go wrong for the same kinds of reasons. When children come into our lives, we feel some kind of pull towards them, generally. If we have two or more, we probably feel more pulled towards one, and call them "favorite," to ourselves, and hope nobody else notices. But in any case, it's a pull. It's the pull that we build a bond on, the one that has us doing our best to come home from grocery shopping with the same kids we took there.
I got my birth certificate in the mail the other day. In order to prep for a working retreat over the winter in Mexico, I need to get my passport, and in order to do that, I needed to get a certified copy of my birth certificate. I was born in 1975. I'm not sure what sort of technology they had back then for guessing at my gender. What I am sure of is that until a guess at my gender was made based on what my body looked like, I was freer than I would ever be after that.
The weight of expectation around gender is one of the biggest any of us has. It's even built into the phrasing we have used in birth announcements for at least as long as I've been alive: It's a _____! Without the reveal, we are not even people, really. Not "they," but "it." A thing waiting to have gender conferred upon it. But that is a false construction.
So, I was born, and the doctor said, "It's a boy!" and I screamed for the next 39 years. Mostly internally. Mostly at myself. What I was screaming for was my mother. I wanted her to see me. But she didn't. Because the moment someone told her, "it's a boy!" she started painting.
Being trans is not the only way to get a ticket to this show. In my case, it just put me in a seat with just the right view to see how the magic happened on stage; to see the painters painting. Had my mother been correctly told, "it's a girl!" when I was born, she would still have started painting. Perhaps she would have seen me longer; perhaps the things she felt she ought to paint, the things that said "girl" to her, would have naturally aligned better with what I was actually doing; with who I actually was. But she still would have been painting, and eventually, I would have disappeared.
I understand that teenage rebellion is not rebellion for the sake of rebellion. It is a child saying, I am tired of not being seen. I am tired of being unknown to you. You're so busy staring at your painting of me from when I was born that you haven't had time for me since. Well, you will make time for me. I will make you make time for me. You will see who I am. You will know.
It is rage and hurt at realizing on some level that the people who were supposed to best love us for who we are — the people who we know, deep down inside, were always supposed to teach us how to love ourselves, to teach us that receiving kindness is our birthright, that giving kindness is our duty — taught us that we were only worth covering up. That we were not even worth seeing, never mind acknowledging. Never mind loving.
To disappoint your parents is not a cruelty. It is a kindness. It is freeing them from the weight of the painting they've been holding up between you, the painting that parents start before their children are even born. It is offering them the opportunity to see you. It is giving them the only chance in the world that they will ever have of really putting that painting down. It is giving them the chance to learn how to love someone they have finally just met.
I would love to know what prompted you to finally transition? Have you done a blog post on that?
ReplyDeleteI realized, and then started coming out almost immediately. The Year Zero retrospective post is here:
Deletehttp://seranine.blogspot.com/2015/08/second-born.html