#4

Or perhaps my refusal to be pinned down by any logic that even so much as smells a little too definitive is a process that I undertake in order to keep myself erect. It is hard not to feel like a heel when your identity is throwing wrenches into all of your well meaning peer’s personal theories of their own suffering, but that my existence could be taken so personally is always suspect. I recognize now that I have never undertaken thinking as a means of narrowing down my experience into a streamlined morally correct and direct absorption of exact reality as a means of keeping myself afloat emotionally unless I was very unwell and handling it badly. I have come to understand that simplification, while useful and even necessary, can be cruel. One cannot see all the details at once, but what one chooses to filter out is always an interesting question.

It has not surprised me that there seems to be a correlation between my disinterest in caring about what others would like me to think at the expense of what I actually think and the improved quality of my relationships.

What kept me in that boring and unerotic space was coercion. Some of it was petty, some of it was not. Most of it was tied up with an autotheorization of someone’s personal trauma dictating that their emotional and erotic needs were so maligned as to need outside protection or to warrant punishment if something made the wound throb. This is understandable, of course it was, that was the rub. Everyone does what they can to feel safe. Sometimes these things are selfish, abusive, cruel. The prevalence of sexual assault in that space was unsettling and one could never be sure of how sexual violence was conceptualized there, it was a kind of free floating idea that could contaminate anyone, a crossed boundary could be leveraged by as an assault, or a confirmation that a partner was lacking in purity and goodness in a fundamental way and therefore open to ostracization, insults, or other punishments (no matter if this boundary was ever communicated) and so many sexual encounters was fraught because of it.

Instead of gut feelings and subjective reporting, events were measured by relative abjection. Victim and abuser were a hard binary, but seemingly any detail could be cast in either light. Who seemed the most abject as filtered through the understandings of which kind of human experience was objectively worse became a factor. Subjectivity of course was rendered impossible when any grievances had to be hashed out through dogpiling and blacklisting to secure the emotional safety for the person feeling victimized, and I suppose that outcome always felt more secure if the reasoning for the punishment was so morally pure, so perfect as to be an open and shut case in the court of community policing. There could have been no subjective reporting because everyone was constantly running these calculations as to who deserved what care, what attention, all abstractly decided according to a vague ruleset. The flip side is who should be "holding space", who is presumed to have the most space to hold. What this led to was being made to regulate someone else's difficult emotions out of guilt, which is not the same as holding space. It felt like a violation. All of this I understand as a means of filtering misery in a place where everyone is miserable, but that does not make it less cruel. There are better options, ones that don't rely on coercion and the abuse of any person's emotional capacities. The term I used again and again to talk about a particularly abusive relationship was "an emotional dumpster", like a cum dumpster, but for all of my girlfriend's most traumatic memories that I had to then internalize as my own in order to make sure to never upset her. We never had sex.

I look back on the time I spent in that space after having allowed myself to trust my own feelings again and I remember the sinking feelings I got even now, they were always present, only I was not allowed to take them seriously out of fear that my actions would be twisted into something definitively evil. Maybe I was just not caring enough, selfish, maybe I did not know what difficulty was, maybe I thought I was the center of universe, maybe I was weak, maybe I should've been braver for everyone else's sake. I am a man after all. I was told I could not trust those gut feelings because they betrayed some kind of hidden and unconscious bias or flaw that needed to be “checked”, and these morally mandated mental exercises served to dissociate me from what was happening right in front of me. This left my memory fuzzy as well, so I was never sure what was happening. I spent so much time doing this that this process has long since become rote, a constant and inevitable burden that I still feel anytime I interact with a person, or when a person interacts with me. 

I recognize now that this prioritization of “logic” (however prescribed and flawed) over any individual's intuition or feelings is a method of control I was already well aware of, one I had adapted to as something I necessarily had to believe in so that I could protect myself from harm. That harm was real, learning those "logical" rules did keep me safe. It no longer serves me now, keeps me in a state of terror and self-consciousness.

It is part of the same control over me that led me to believe that I could not express any feelings if I wanted to be taken seriously and not labeled crazy and hysterical, something that I knew was linked with my ability to have autonomy, which I would do anything for at the expense of myself. It also denoted that emotional intelligence and regulation were my domain, but solely for the benefit of others or a collective, and never for the benefit of myself and my own self knowledge. To do that was to be a selfish bitch. Actually, it was never presented as a form of knowledge, it was always taken for granted. It was a pernicious double bind. I lost sight of myself, I was no one except for what I could do for others. This misogynistic conditioning was so ingrained at such a young age that I am still blindsided by it. 

The idea that one cannot have an instinctual sense of what is right or wrong for them lost its sting once I began to secretly question it, read and write about it. But the ingrained sense of terror I felt while doing it made this arduous, draining. Often it still is.

It was difficult to shake the sense of total inferiority that was fed to me. Often it went along with the use of words I did not understand and references I was not familiar with, but I was pressed to accept the highly subjective and particularly motivated presentations of them as objective and true. These ideas became so interlinked with fear and uncertainty that I grew afraid of the broad concepts themselves and was hesitant to explore them for fear of confirming that I was, in fact, an idiot if I could not read them “correctly”, and that if I let this stupidity slip I would be hurt. I could not let it be known that I had read them differently and thought that I had the personal authority to come to my own conclusions.

I was afraid of the sinking suspicion that if I did read and explore these loaded ideas I would have to face the fact that these people, who were in fact most of my community and all of my friends, were full of shit, were petty and reductive and often selfish, which would have been fine if there was not this system of control serving to benefit whoever could game it. Probably this was not a conscious game, but one of survival within the system. I already understood that if I came to disagree I might lose. That ended up being the case. I turned out alright.

#3

I want against rigidity, I want what would let me wriggle free like a worm off a hook. I am not here to be digestible. I don’t even want to be well understood, not by most people. Maybe I don't believe it could be possible. I don’t know what anyone’s given understanding of understanding is unless I learn it, and I have been led to believe that to want that is to want too much. Everyone makes assumptions. I find more and more that I am not in a position to correct these assumptions. I get the feeling that my inability to make myself small and legible, my commitment to the complexity that I have come to know through my exploration and experience, runs the risk of making me a problem.

It is painful to change a way of seeing. It’s uncomfortable. Everyone is attached to the meanings they make, even the petty ones. I lose my narrative seemingly every week. I go out, I am diminished, I have to build myself back up again. I could believe that there is something wrong with the way I understand myself and my experiences that makes me weak. I could believe that I must fundamentally repress the parts of me that are broken down again and again, but I do not. It has taken me my whole life to find people who remind me that I should not. 

That kind of life affirming knowledge is hard to shake. When I meet people who do not hold me to rigid and abstract standards as an individual, who do not treat me like a sociological case study, who do not need to break me down to fit me into their narrative of personal suffering, competition, difference, hierarchy, I move seamlessly into it. I only notice that I have changed when I encounter that lack again and realize that I can recognize it as lack. The more I am loved the more being dehumanized and flattened hurts. I am not as numb as I used to be.

Who takes me seriously now is not predicated on gender. It can be gendered, filtered through lenses of assumptions and baggage, but the effect is largely the same. That speaks to something outside of me. When I understood that, I came to understand that who could respect me would be equally unpredictable and outside of my control. I am continually surprised.

No matter where I’ve been I have fallen outside of something. That too is something that lies outside of me. It is not me who is broken or wrong. Sometimes I am grateful for my long running loneliness. I would rather be lonely than diminished.

The ability to be honest and not deferential, to operate to the best of my ability from my knowledge, my intuition, to be true to my feelings is not looked kindly upon by everyone. Everything is more vibrant and the vulnerability is painful. It is not out of a desire for ease, it is not complacency, it is the most difficult thing I have put into practice. It has always been viewed as aggression and obstinacy, only now I will fall harder and with less cushion. The expectation that I defer, be diminished, quiet down has taken on a new specific dimension. I have no protections. If I want to be a man I must protect myself, but I am not that kind of man. If I want to be protected I must be a girl and I have never been the right kind of girl.

tip jar:

ko-fi.com/confessionsofamasc

#2

Things appear to stand apart from each other; they create contrast. Contrast leads to tension and tension does not inevitably end in terror. No, I don’t negate myself. I was called a little girl and inside of that little girl was the person who I am and who I have always been. That I call myself a man is not a contradiction and it is not a correction. If a mistake was made it was the mistake of the immediate dwindling of potentials for my life at the outset. I cannot correct this. My manhood was not a factory reset. “The past is never dead”, and all that. 

Being a man is not a burial, it is not even a resurrection. It seems beyond me that I arrived here. The mechanisms that clamped down on my life when I was born remain exactly where I have always known them to be. My ability to choose what I do with my body, with my self, my ability to be taken seriously, my labor, the roles people expect me to play in their lives remain fraught. People cannot take my word for that, but that is part of it.

I was a child when I came to know that I could become pregnant. This was a reality I could not allow. I was seized with terror. I understood that there was something about me that would make this experience life threatening, I was full of tension I could not place. Instinctually I knew this tension would be resolved through some kind violence. I insisted that I would not let it happen and my mother reassured me either that I wouldn’t have to or that I didn’t need to think about it yet, probably both. 

I had always been called a tomboy. I liked things that were “for boys”, which boiled down to adventure, exploration, knowing. I liked dragons, bugs, reptiles, fish. I don’t believe any of this to be gendered. I did not express a desire to be perceived as a boy, I insisted on wearing “boy” pull-up diapers because they had the cartoon characters I liked on them, a choice that attracted criticism from my preschool teachers. I had no interest in my appearance and I was not in any position to dress myself or dictate how I would like to look. That was never an option and it would not be until I was able to insist with enough force. I simply expressed a desire for the things that I liked and regarded everything else with ambivalence. 

My long hair was allowed to grow tangled, my disinterest in picking up on the feminine codes I was expected to understand, my outright resistance to them (I was terrified of getting my ears pierced, I hated feeling restricted by my hair or my clothes, I played rough and shamelessly) quickly left me without any solid social standing with the majority of my peers. I was not feminine, but I was not masculine. I was adrift. I was resented by caretakers for being difficult and then left alone for it. No other options were offered to me and my exploration went unnoticed. I doubt the adults in my life understood that there were other options and I doubt they would have had the energy to pay that much attention if they did. If they had been different people, perhaps there would have been concern or more outright anger and coercion than there was (and there inevitably was more and more of it), but they were simply not around. I slipped through the cracks.

I recognize this now as a part of the bigger issue of the neglect I endured as a child. If the adults in my life had been present perhaps I would have been made to learn to act like a little girl. But the fact that I did not was to my detriment, it has had permanent consequences. I did not escape the expectation.  I received plenty of reprimands and my isolation was stark and only increased as my peers grew socially and I grew in a different direction. There was a growing threat of violence that I felt coming for me, but I didn’t know why. It was written off as anxiety. No one taught me how to act in a way that would let me cohere socially and what I saw on my own I did not want. And so I was failing without knowing it, without understanding that I was. I felt I was lost alone in a very interesting jungle.

I was a child who was deeply alone, a ball of wants and curiosities with no existing shape I could measure them against, no structure to guide me. I did not talk to adults for many years of my life. My world was other children. I had the capacity to recognize affinities between myself and others, but no way of understanding that want, let alone actualizing them. 

I did have friends, at least one of whom I now know to be a butch woman. I played as if I were an equal with certain boys because we had not yet fully understood that we weren’t supposed to. I played with girls too, I admired them. We got along in different ways and similar ways. I don’t remember a secret simmering hatred or judgment anywhere in them, that was instilled later. There were certainly kids I avoided, boys who were cruel to girls, but mostly I did not understand my own impulses or instincts. I only followed them. I am struck by how we were all so full of potential in spite of everything.

#1

I was born in a hospital that I drive by sometimes. I don’t understand gender or sex more than anyone. I’ve read a lot of theory. I’ve taken comfort in it. It hasn't changed my conditions, but it's granted me a sense of stability. The best of it offers clarification. The worst of it makes me feel like I don’t exist. It’s like anything, it’s complicated. It has made me suspicious of any unifying theory of gender, of simplification. That abstraction feels like more of the same. The reduction, the disappearance, the slow death. Everything begs the question and everyone is too afraid to try and answer it.

The more I read the more ambiguity I am able to accept in myself and others. It usually isn't reciprocated.

I’m a man. Right now my hair is long. It’s annoying, it gets in the way. Recently I was enjoying wearing feminine clothing, but not so much at the moment. I used to date women. I used to be a lesbian. I used to be butch, in a lot of ways I still am. I got myself into a lot of trouble that way. I sought out people who could see my maleness somewhere inside of my womanhood. This was fraught. I try not to blame myself. My maleness made me vulnerable and people could tell. That's on them.

I don’t know what I look like. People see me as different things. I’ve been told that some of these different things lie in complete contradiction with each other. To some people I negate myself and they hate that. I don’t mind being a paradox. I didn’t make it a paradox. I know how I feel and I know what I want. How other people see me is not my responsibility. I know what feels right and what feels wrong. It's one of those things, like love. No justification needed. I like what this has given me, a general ambivalence I find freeing. No one owes me understanding, not even myself, just acceptance. I roll with the punches.

No one’s going to be able to know me from a short interaction. That’s fine. That’s not my problem. It’s not their problem either. But I correct them, I give them a chance. I am as honest as possible. It’s awkward. Sometimes it isn’t, sometimes there is that moment of two people meeting, like two comrades undercover. The nod, the smiles. Some people get angry. I avoid going places where they might be able to react. I don’t go out. Sometimes I don’t correct people. 

Sometimes I know that people want me to make myself smaller, more understandable, that I must diminish myself. Categorize, define, summarize, defend, defer. I get the feeling my complexity is the wrong kind of complexity. I hate deference, I want to be an equal participant in the conversation.

I was in line for a friend’s show, waiting to get my bag searched, my ID checked and a man behind me got close, started touching my bag. Same old. Bad jokes, mean jokes, stuff to try and make me feel vulnerable. Said he was putting his gun in my bag to hold onto. Trying to get me to engage to protect myself. Flatter him, don’t hurt his ego. That boring misogynistic flirting that kids start honing in grade school. I didn’t say anything. I made myself as uninteresting as I could. That hurt his feelings. “I bet you think I’m such an asshole”, he said with little kid anger. I continued to ignore him. I didn’t want him to hear my voice or see my face. He figured I was a girl. It's the hair. Then came his quick turn to vitriol, insults under his breath. I got inside and none of my friends were there yet. I pretended to be alright, cold-blooded. Like I don't feel anything.

I learned that quickly, that being a man is not a trump card, not for me. Some people tell me this can't be true, it's not the part about being a man. I become comprehensible to them only if they separate me from an important part of my whole, if they dictate myself back to me in a way they find acceptable, in line with their worldview. Sometimes I am asked to completely disavow it to be let back into life. That is a very old trick. I got tired of it when I was still a little girl.

I know that it is the catalyst. The thing about me, the nail in the coffin. No matter what kind of man I've been, it's been true. I can't forget it even if I'm told that I must be coming at it the wrong way because I have to hold that knowledge close to survive. When I abandon it I abandon myself. Bad things start to happen again.

Why is my understanding of the violence that happens to me up for debate? How can you debate a thing you can't even look wholly at? Who gets to abstract it, define it? I should really be asking, who decides what is too insignificant to be considered part of the definition? What violence gets to slip through the cracks, undefined as violence? Why? Why are my friends disappearing into abusive relationships like I did for most of my life? Why are my friends killing themselves? Why does no one notice?

I guess there are a lot of questions that everyone's afraid to ask.