Ya know- the weird thing about being in a position like mine is that it so often feels as though you’re living in the shadow of a person who never existed. My ambition in creating this blog was to as quickly and emphatically as possible knock the nitty-gritty of self-examination and focus on myself out- to get it out of the way- and then zoom in hard and stay focused on macro ideas beyond myself. Alas, here I am.
It’s the understatement of the century to say I’m not particularly fond of who I used to be. And really, who is? I mean- generally speaking. We all tend to grow and mature and develop as a person in ways that eclipse our former selves. It’s basic life shit. And with all the flowery words and research and examination in the world, I could obfuscate and dodge further exploration of myself in stark contrast with the practices that catalyzed my talent in writing to begin with. Disavowing the hand that feeds in the interest of avoiding the personal discomfort of such public self-exploration.
I used to write a lot more fiction for not wholly dissimilar reasons. Largely as another method of observing and analyzing or expressing myself without pointing any lenses too close to the fragile center at the heart of what I was conveying. Now, when I correspond with people one of the most frequent observations made about my style from its recipients is its conversational fluidity.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought and effort to the art of profound boredom. You know, those moments and interludes we all reflexively practice escaping through distractions to avoid being stuck for even just a moment too long with our own thoughts and feelings. Cell phones, laptops, and handheld gaming devices make a hell of a 21st century ping-pong paddle that kind of a way, don’t they? A part of adulthood and facing the material economic burdens and responsibilities of enduring within the civilization we’ve unwittingly been spawned into. It often necessarily entails the subjugation and deterioration of creativity and imagination for so tragically many of us.
I used to be able to listen to music, and see entire sweeping sagas play out before my mind’s eye. It’s- to use a crude analogy that some readers may find (with some hesitation to admit) compelling and relatable, similar to the ways in which indulging in vices like porn can mitigate the potency of sexual or intimate imagination. No citation needed. Not tryna shame anyone. If you know, you know. And statistics say (look it up for yourself, perv) that most people do. Maybe abolish the Puritanical cop who lives in your head. Or don’t. Whatever works for you.
In the most vanilla of terms- it used to be you could look at a boy (or girl, or both, or neither, or in-between) and they’d give ya the happy tingles. But now that little dopamine button in your brain needs risqué stories and images, or whatever floats your boat, sometimes to get your proverbial ship sailing. It’s not an ideal or healthy situation to sink too far into. That kind of erosion of creativity and imagination. It’s why, methinks adults who retain their creative capacity oftentimes seem in some ways outright magical to those who don’t quite so much.
I digress. My point’s been made. Ah, the succinct beauty of human truisms!
My final encounter with parental attempts at coercion to get me to participate in the hallowed social group activity of sports was during my freshman year of high school. It was cross-country. You know, the one where you run for a long time over a long distance on variable terrain? My best race time ever was a twenty-one minute and seven second 5K (that’s about three miles). I did not try. I hated every second of it. Still- I guess that wasn’t so bad. I think that’s maybe the only one where I placed and got some kind of a medal. It’s irrelevant really, and my memory of events from more than two decades ago that I didn’t particularly care for is at best hazy. String bean 14-year-old me didn’t appreciate the ease with which I was able to pull such feats out of thin air with little to no real preparation or discipline.
They pushed me into it thinking it would be a great way to meet new people and socialize as I entered high school. And as with so many other things in my lived experience, it was god awful and they were dead wrong.
Beyond the prevailing issue of my gender incongruity, I was a bonafide nerd. Always have been and imagine I always will be. It’s always been my opinion that sports are fine if you’re participating in them, and that’s your bag. But aggressive spectatorship and lunk-headed parasocial sports fandom has always seemed weird and juvenile, and superficial to me. “Yeah! The person I happen to like for x, y, z reasons did the thing! Go us!” It’s truly the most bizarre, socially sanctioned mass-ritual used to fill the void of intrinsic yearning for unattained accomplishment. At least the people cosplaying Batman are aware they’re pretending. Try telling the developmentally arrested sports fanatic that the contemporary gladiator whose merchandise he’s wearing is stupid. Go on- I’ll wait.
I digress again…
Another compounding issue of these efforts on the part of authority figures around me (like my parents) was the distance of my age from the age of those with whom I seemed to get along best. In grade school I made better friends with the young teens of junior high, and in high school I found myself most at home among the young adults of the local college scene. I’d been a member of the Japanese anime society (before it was cool) at the local community college since I was in the sixth grade. And I slowly aged into associating more with them, met with some resistance initially both by themselves and my parents (for reasons I found thoroughly infantilizing then, and more comprehensible to me in these later years).
Why don’t you hang out with people your own age? Or hang out with more of the guys?
Because- fuckheads- can’t you see they’re overwhelmingly awful to me for anything to do with me being any iota of who I actually am? Classic teenage angst!
Case in point: during my brief stint as a runner on the high school’s cross-country team, I garnered the nickname “Gilligan”. This was because as the only incoming freshman runner to the team, and an unenthusiastic one at that- when “we all” went out running, I was often left straggling on my own for vast stretches of distance and time with exception to when they’d jeeringly lap me. They’d do shit like call me “Gilligan” and stick me in the hotel room with the weird Polish exchange student alone when we traveled to attend races across the state. And they’d and pick at and laugh about all the strange little idiosyncrasies of my person in the sorts of bizarre male bonding rituals I have never, and blessedly will never have to come to fully comprehend.
Tangentially, I used to have this little quarter gumball machine plastic alien I carried with me everywhere in my pocket who I named Thurp. He was a silver-green plastic little guy with a giant head and a chibi body, and when they noticed me nervously fidgeting with him off to the side of a practice meet- I never heard the end of it.
I was also an avid, and impressively thorough note taker in high school (I still am), and when people kept robbing me of my notebooks during class to copy what I’d transcribed- I created a sort of simple, sequential geometric codex to take down notes in a way any would-be thieves couldn’t copy. And I originally coined it as Thurpish in the little guy’s honor. It was all part of the esoteric social lore of my alienated personage in those early days of an adolescence I somehow managed to get through.
Bringing it back around full circle, that sort of singularity- when I stop to meditate on it during quiet intermissions in my life today have pervaded and continue to pervade my existence. I eventually grew into the kind of person that everybody got along with, and thought was swell enough. But so much of that was founded upon performatively being a shell of myself and being the person who was “always there” at those needed moments for the crises in their more socially accepted and fully realized lives. Therapists in years since have told me it was a toxic, self-harming habitual trauma response that empathetic people often develop commonly classified as a caretaker personality. Avoiding or escaping yourself or your own issues in the bottomless well of other people’s problems.
It’s not all bad. It can be constructive when you know how to set healthy boundaries- and when you find people who will be there for you reciprocally. I had to fumble that ball (blegh, sports analogy), and play the part of both the asshole and the victim on all sides of its equation for years before I learned to balance it. I’m not some poor dying angel, nor am I- contrary to my sometimes guilt-laden apprehensions, some kinda irreconcilable monster. I beat myself up too harshly, and too often. Sometimes I carry the burden of the lessons learned and personal growth I’ve come to believe we all go through (in our own ways) a bit heavily for being prone to overanalysis.
In the wake of coming out to the world as myself a little later in life (during my late 20’s) almost a decade ago- I sank a lot of longstanding, close friendly and familiar ties. My immediate family, and some of my closer friends while initially receptive, inevitably succumbed (succame?) to one brand or another of the pitfalls of inhabiting a society that paints pictures of women like me in all too tragically and paradoxically sinister a light. An overwhelming number of my male former friends had me shaped out of their lives either as a consequence of their reflexive predations upon me (which instilled some telling wisdom about society), or by the social machinations of their significant others who began to regard me as some kind of looming menace. It happened 𝐚 𝐥𝐨𝐭, and in ways I could only more fully understand and appreciate years later after the fog of the Great Loss of those early years eventually cleared. It turned the grapes with which I was trying to craft the finer wine of my existence profoundly and sometimes agonizingly sour.
It wasn’t until years later when I began to rediscover my humanity by beginning to find novel community and purpose that I’d begin making a miraculous recovery from the wisdom-instilling traumatic culminations of it all.
That’s also not the point of this linguistic barf catharsis.
As a writer, and sometimes creative, I digest and express life and memory through the lens of metaphors and comparative analysis. And I think that the ancient memory of having been Gilligan is, as I’ve referred to in previous, broader, and more existential entries– a sort of mythopoetically fitting allegory for the course of my life thus far taken as a whole.
Wayward and juvenile as the moniker was fashioned, perhaps I never ceased to be a sort of Gilligan.
I’m now entering the back half of my 30’s, with a man I love who’s shared a life with me some years, and we’re both sorta materially stranded in a place we’re not exactly proud or contented with being. I’ve got an exceedingly modest gallery of friends- most of whom would be more accurately defined as, at best, decent acquaintances. Rebuilding senses of community, support, and purpose three decades into existence as a human being is no trivial feat! But still I rise. All the many storied efforts to the contrary, for better or worse, here I am.
I can soundly submit that anyone who knew me in the life I endured before, all those years ago, wouldn’t know me from Adam (or I guess more appropriately Eve) today. Some of the people I knew in my past life exhibited the strongest allergies in the dawn of the new one to my renewed sense of conviction, and the uncharacteristic kinds of confidence and self-assurance that I began to exhibit. So much of my quirky familiarity had unwittingly been built upon the masochistic exhibition of a sort of ongoing self-denial and subjugation of my natural senses of being and purpose. It was as tumultuous and intimidating as it was empowering for me to experience, and as I’m certain it was for them to witness.
It’s counterintuitive to think that being stranded within such scorched earth, isolating circumstances could spur the blossoming of anything hopeful. But I’ve had ample practice over decades with being completely alone in crowded spaces or even charmed company. It’s what happens when by survival necessity you’re rendered invisible or powerless, or when you can only be seen in your utility or the entertainment of any agreeable caricatures you manage to conjure. The years of Great Loss taught me the nuanced distinctions between isolation and solitude.
As I’ve thoroughly documented in a host of entries preceding this one, these are turbulent times we’re all living through to say the very least. The seeking out of community or purpose in any meaningful way while the environment (in some ways quite literally) around you devours itself and society atomizes itself ad infinitum can be tremendously challenging. But it’s fundamentally necessary, critical, and worthy.
Everybody loves a good David and Goliath story. Because everybody in some ways feels themselves the underdog: overwhelmed or underpowered. Outmatched or wanting for hope. But in truth, community and ingenuity have historically won the long trials of endurance and evolution. They have since the dawn of human history. It’s the core mantra of the phenomenal Netflix series 𝘚𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘦8: “I’m not just me, I’m also a we.” The series’ flawlessly executed pedagogical narrative fulcrum is precisely this principle in action.
A particular facet of the vantage point that being the kind of outlier among my own kind which my life has gifted me has been having the unwitting opportunity to examine and engage myself, the world, and others around me from a variety of rare perspectives (both intrinsic and extrinsic). It’s, for lack of a better metaphor, almost like being a visitor to the exhibit of humankind. It’s why people like me, who’ve existed for all of human history, have often been culturally revered as holy figures, shamans, priestesses, or even deities.
I’ve had more than my fair share of time to spend with profound boredom, and to steep and meditate within the wellsprings of imagination and creativity. For as much as I’ve been regarded as someone (in my former life perhaps overly) fond of talking (probably to avoid the kinds of intrusive thoughts that might coincide with perilous authenticity), I’ve also been a careful examiner of these things. The human world, society, and all its constituents around me continue to orbit my pace as distinctly apart from their own rhythms. Sometimes we meet. More seldom, but profoundly, do we synchronize. But I never fail- in fact, I cannot help but to continually ponder. Where will the tides of time and consequence take us?
Men, women, both, neither, and in-between people like me are sometimes heralded as much as harbingers of doom as we are portents of social progress. Especially in more recent decades. We’re subject to stereotyping and fall victim to wildly exaggerated archetypal modern myth spinning about our existences. I once had a pervert in upper management at a security gig I was working out me to a fellow female (“woman” sounds too clunky here) colleague that he would also frequently sexually harass in juvenile attempts to gain favor, and she in turn tried disclosing to me that she knew my secret by saying she’d seen the 90’s Robin Williams movie 𝘔𝘳𝘴. 𝘋𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘵𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘦, so she understood “transgenders”.
The douchebag manager got inevitably fired by pushing things too far with her, but (as has recurringly been an issue for me in the professional sphere, as mentioned in a previous article) his unscrupulously horny maneuvering had enduring consequences for me. [He called her “Big Red” or just “Red” because she was a redhead, if that helps paint a picture of his washed-up high school quarterback, thumb dick looking ass.]
My point is that for all our marginalization and hardship- people like me still, to this day, often carry socially abandoned, yet thoroughly historied wisdom. And that’s what we bring to the table of today’s trials and tribulations. We see, hear, and think about things in ways that are far outside the box imprisoning so many of the people around us. In ways that they’re often noticeably discreetly (or not so discreetly) suffering. By our very nature we know and understand things in ways and from perspectives most people never have to bother visiting or sitting with. Things a lot of people can’t even naturally conceive of for lack of being as outright confronted with them.
All those inexplicably evasive societal solutions people are often rooting around for in the milieu of their fraught lives around us are there within us in spades. Our very existences are profound, microcosmic acts of autonomous salvation and revolution. Sage wisdom about solidarity and personal and social insight grow in spades on the trees of reflexive necessity, and within the persevering virtue at its shores. Here on Gilligan’s Isle.