One Hell of a Ride

DISCLAIMER:  IF YOU'RE SQUEAMISH ABOUT MY LIFESTYLE OR THINK YOU MIGHT NOT WANT TO KNOW THAT PART OF MY LIFE EVEN EXISTS, YOU MAY WANT TO STOP READING RIGHT NOW.

It’s funny how beginnings and ends can be so intricately woven together, that with the blink of an eye you’ve made the transition from one to the other.  And your head is left spinning, and your heart is left weeping… and rejoicing at the ups and downs of the roller coaster that you just stepped off of.  And you’ve found yourself in this strange limbo of wishing to god that you were still on the ride, and just being immensely grateful that you got to ride at all, and hopeful that the next ride will come along soon.  I feel like I’ve just stepped off of my very first roller coaster.  My head is still spinning, and I feel a little nauseated at both the ride and this anxious fear that the next one is far away.  But it was one hell of a ride.  I got to experience the sensation of sleeping next to and holding someone I cared about, and whom I wanted to be sleeping next to.  I got to be amazed by the feelings and sensations of being with a woman.  I got to experience intimacy for the first time.  I was given so many firsts, including my first heartbreak.  My first tears shed over feelings and emotions that I’m still not capable of fully wrapping my head around.  I can’t define it, and I can’t seem to find a way to articulate it in a way that makes any sense to me.  And still... it was one hell of a ride!  

Cost vs. Value

This one is definitely more random, and if it would help, I'd give the whole back story to it's genesis, but I think that would only serve to complicate things more.  Suffice it to say, I was in a weird, Marxist kind of mood when I wrote it:

When I was eight years old I made an astonishing discovery.  My parents kept the allowance cups for all six of their children just behind the kitchen sink.  It was all too easy to reach up and move money from any of my siblings’ cups to my own, and in fact I did on several occasions.  At the time this amounted to just slightly more than a dollar, a paltry amount by most standards, but later in life, as I make preparations to pay an allowance to my own children, and having studied some in the field of economics, I have come to a realization about this money which nobody ever noticed was missing. 

            In studying the writings of Karl Marx I was struck by his theory of Use-Value.  This theory relates the value of a thing to its utility, and states that “Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth.”  What struck me especially about this is that these commodities only take on value when they are used or consumed.  By this reasoning, to have something, to simply be in possession of it holds no inherent value in and of itself.  Having grown up in a culture where doomsday preparations are a main priority this theory presented an interesting dilemma; that dilemma being that Marx’s theory rang true somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, but it also negated a large part of my life-long mental conditioning. 

            Frugality was yet another value that was instilled in me from a very young age, not only from my parents but from the culture which enveloped my small reality.  The prospect of purchasing something for less than the original price held immense value in my belief system.  Thus, whether an item was needed with any immediacy was not even a topic of discussion.  That the world would inevitably come crashing down around us and cause us to need all of these preparations was not just a possibility, nor was it a probability, it was as strongly held a belief as many have that the sun will continue to shine with each new morning. 

            With both of these strongly held “truths” in hand, that one must be in possession of large quantities of commodities, and that to acquire something for less than it was suggested to retail for represented a blessing, I began a feverish study of Marx and his Use-Value principle.  After several months of study I found myself at a completely different understanding of the inherent value of finite objects.  This new found understanding centered in the actual usefulness of an object verses the cost, both monetary and spatial, of maintaining its existence.  Both of these aspects are completely separate from the initial cost of acquiring the object, which I now believe has no merit beyond what one is capable of spending to acquire the object initially.  The conclusion which I came to was that if an object is not currently, or in the very near and real future in use, and needed, its value is diminished materially.  If said object also creates a spatial or monetary cost to maintain, it then takes on a negative value, draining both the family coffers and the space in which the family must live and function.

My Two Cents on it All (war)

It is the people in a war that make it real.  There is an enormous gulf between singing a cadence about killing commies and being faced with a young child, his arms reaching out to you because he knows that there is a chance that you will throw him some scraps from your lunch.  The people I met were not faceless terrorists, their only desire to end my life.  They were mothers, fathers and children, all just trying to survive in a place where either side of an armed conflict could shatter your world in an instant, and never give a second thought.  The people of Uzbekistan and Iraq welcomed us into their countries as we came to overthrow their governments.  They trusted us with a mission that would destroy their lives as they knew them.  They cheered our convoys as we made our way to their capital.  How could they have possibly known that we wouldn’t just liberate them; that we would stay and become a magnet for groups of militants who would further terrorize their cities and level their homes?  These people changed the war for me.  Instead of a random enemy they became faces and stories I cannot forget.

Oh Brother...

I text my brother well past the hours of socially acceptable telecommunications; asking “You still awake brother”?  You see I have just experienced Sarah Kay’s poem “Brother”, and am inspired.  My brother too was “never meant to fill my shadow”.  I find myself inspired by the force that is my younger brother.  He is good and kind and will serve his fellow man with all that he is until the day he dies; and I want to be him when I grow up.  He was always thus.  Back when I was obsessed with playing soldier and acting out destruction, in our conservative, thoroughly American home he was a pacifist, and not afraid to say so…. Despite the merciless mocking and tormenting of his older sister.  He saw the value of life from the start, and I had to learn it the hard way.  So I tell my brother, my hero that I would dedicate the work to him were it my own, and he is flattered.  And I tell him that he should be, that I hold few in as high esteem as him, and he replies that he loves me too, and my insides warm as I bask in his ambient goodness.  He would probably be embarrassed by something so praising of him, that’s his way, and it makes him even more…..

And I'm a Woman

AND I’M A WOMAN!!¹

28 January 2013

            I’ve spent most of my life trying to convince myself of certain things.  Among these are that I am, in fact, female, a girl, a chick, and eventually a woman.  For the vast majority of my life I truly believed that inseparable from this was a strict adherence to heterosexuality.  And so I put a great deal of effort into trying to mold, pound, force myself into a role that I was never meant to fill.  I made a very conscious effort to slip hetero sentiments into conversations, with everyone that I knew.  In fact, I got quite adept at these comments which were almost all centered on the attractive nature of the male form or heterosexual sex.  Of course these were all lies.  I’ve never in my life felt compelled of my own accord, and for myself only, to ogle any of the male sex, but I am by my very nature a student of life and a people watcher.  With these tools in my box I made an extensive study of heterosexual women and their comments and hoped beyond hope that if I imitated enough, I would one day become a real girl, a real woman.  The real crux of the matter in all of this is that after awhile it became something so far back in the recesses of my conscious mind that I didn’t even notice I was doing it anymore.  It had become mental muscle memory, simply repeating over and over again what I had trained it to do. 

            My world of dissolution came crashing down around me several years ago when I had reached a mental breaking point, and could no longer deny, at least to myself, that I am not in fact heterosexual.  One small, three lettered word, would end my fragile existence that I had spent decades building.  GAY.  Oh my god, can this really be?!  It was earth shattering, mind blowing, unthinkable, disgusting, sinful, and wrong….. wasn’t it?  Well of course it HAD to be.  It made me something that I hated most of all, a liar, and a hypocrite.  Or that’s how I felt at the time.  I refused to believe that from birth I was inundated with homophobic rants and slurs from nearly everyone whom I held in high esteem, and that those years of brainwashing could have anything to do with the self-loathing that I was now experiencing.  Hadn’t I prayed hard enough?!  Hadn’t I read my scriptures religiously and with fervor, doing everything “right”.  Hadn’t I married in the “right place” and to the “right” gender?  Hadn’t I done everything that I knew to make this horrific thing just go away?! 

            My resolve was then doubled that I would stay the course.  I had CHOSEN to marry a man, and to have children.  I had known my options; hadn’t I?  I had made conscious choices about the kind of life that I wanted to live, and the end result of exaltation that I wanted with my “eternal family”.  That had to be the end of the internal discussion I was agonizing over…. But the problem with this new conviction is that my brain is inherently intractable.  I lack the basic ability to cling to ideas and not be swayed by a good argument and supporting evidence.  Perhaps even more significant is the fact that with as much of a scholar as I am, and with as much reason as I labor to employ, I am just as much moved by my gut, my feelings, my conscience, my…whatever it is that you choose to call it.  Intuition perhaps is an adequate form.  As much as my head was convinced that I could overcome my nature, my gut was not completely swayed. 

            It was at this impasse that my brain and intuition came to rest for several more years.  It should perhaps be noted that I was not terribly happy with the conscious choices that I had made so many years ago.  My marriage had never been a happy or healthy one.  I had married a man whose nature was so contrary to my own that we could never come to a peace on anything.  To his credit, he had no clue what my nature was.  I had hidden it so well from everyone, myself included.  After years of combat, both in the army and in my own perverse psyche, I had come to believe that I was just an angry person.  This moniker was something that I wore like a badge of courage, something that I had earned in the war.  Once the PTSD label was added it all seemed to finally make sense, or so I thought.  I was crazy.  What a simple explanation to a lifetime of inner struggle! 

            Counseling was the beginning of the end of this life for me.  God, what a cliché!  “I found myself in counseling”.  Well, this was only partly true.  What I found was a very scared little girl who had never forgiven herself for things far beyond her control or capacity to understand, and who had never allowed herself to move from the tiny corner where she had huddled for twenty plus years.  For the first time in longer than I could remember, I was learning to own that word.  “Scared”.  In that instance I was no longer angry.  In that instance I realized that I had been living my entire life out of petrifying fear.  I was afraid.  I was scared.  I was terrified.  And all of those things were perfectly acceptable emotions!  Acceptance, this was another word that I learned to use, and to love.  I didn’t have to hold on, or fight off anymore.  I could simply accept that things had happened beyond my own control, and that I had continually made decisions that served to propagate this vicious cycle that had become my prison.  I didn’t have to regret these decisions.  I didn’t have to be angry anymore, at people, at my life.  After all, it was MY LIFE!  I didn’t owe anything to anyone, and nobody owed me anything either.  In these realizations I found a freedom and redemption that came without a single string or covenant attached. 

            After an immense upheaval and chain of events that included a divorce and a major move with my children, I found myself at a crossroads.  Once again, I could choose to stay the course, find another good Mormon man and marry and hope for the best, or I could finally shed the last remnant of shame that I had been carrying and finally admit to myself and to everyone else that I was never made for the standard mold, that I was gay.  The first time that I committed that word to paper in my long-neglected journal it was genuinely painful; agonizing even.  The first time that I said it aloud was even worse.  So with my newfound self awareness in hand, I constrained myself to writing it again, and then to saying it again.  Once I had done this enough to finally find some amount of comfort with it, I made myself tell others.  I mumbled my way through this process several times, dozens of times, before I could say it with a sense of pride and ownership. It wasn’t long before I could say it with fervor, unapologetically, and joyfully. 

            Perhaps most surprising to me in this whole journey was the vast outpouring of love and support that I received from friends and family.  This was not everyone’s reaction of course, but even those with the most ardent objections have begun to come around and see that I am no longer going through the motions of life, miserable but steadfast in my resolve to stick it out.   Even my harshest critics have begun to see merit in that.  It was very recently that my dear sister mentioned to me that I appear to be much more feminine than I ever had before, and upon reflection I realized that she was right.  I was finally FEELING like a woman.  I wasn’t just a mechanic, a mom, a hard worker, a good NCO.  I can finally happily own that I am all of these things, AND I’M A WOMAN!

1. Johnson, Kasey.  I stole this title.  No regrets because now I've cited my source and in academia that makes everything ok.

Fierce Fireworks, and Stuff

Sometimes you just need a good cry.  I have been told this by numerous friends over the years, friends whom I valued, and whose opinions I trusted.  This did not stop me from having serious doubts about this assertion anyway.  Don't get me wrong, I have certainly had my fair share of moments when life seemed beyond cruel and it was all I could do to just keep breathing.  In fact, I've had far more of these moments than I care to remember or admit to.  I have been so far down at the bottom of my emotional well that even the thought of suicide provided no relief.  Even at these times, I knew that I had two options.  The first was to just swallow any and all emotion, and put every conceivable energy into suppressing them.  The second was to just let go (at least as much as I was capable of at the time) and cry.  Inevitably in those moments when I've chosen to cry, I have only felt worse after my tear duct pyrotechnics took center stage.  It not served to make me feel vulnerable on top of everything else.
Given all of this, it was with great anxiety that I found myself slipping further and further down the rabbit hole not long ago.  The reality of my third move in eight months, once again doing it nearly entirely on my own and dragging my kids along with me, was setting in.  The Niagra Falls of other emotions crashing down the back door as the Move  assaulted from the North was only serving to add to the avalanche that I could feel coming any moment.  And then it happened.  As I sat on my bed, rolling coins, of all things, I came across my ring.  This ring that I picked out, that represented me better than any physical manifestation I've found before or since, came rolling out of a jar of coins and almost into my lap.  And that was the proverbial straw that broke this camels back.  The flood gates opened, and my body heaved as everything that I've been clinging on to and forcing down for dear life came streaming down my face. Suddenly months of anxiety, and fear, and regret, and anticipation, and suppressed emotion and repression were suddenly gone.  I knew that they had not left completely, and that I still had things I needed to work through, the weigh of them came crashing to the floor like the shards of a shattered mirror.    I that moment I had no choice but to laugh, and for the first time ever, I felt, and I felt better.
I never doubted my dear friends when they said how much better they felt after crying, I just didn't think it was possible for ME.  I didn't think that this opening of soul, this allowance of vulnerability and weakness could have any other outcome than shame and pain, not for me.  How wrong I was.  The question now is.....what the hell do I do with that?!