I had to run a few errands, today, and following the CDC’s recent recommendation, I wore a mask. Not just any old mask but one my wife made. And while we no longer live together, and while it looks like divorce is immanent, we continue to strive to be in each other’s lives. We come back to each other, over and over again, and grow, and stretch, and love, and listen–or try to–and, invariably, we crumble and fall. But, less and less frequently.
My partner–my wife of 29 years–is an amazing woman. I’ve always held her as my shero, and I used to joke that “I want to be like her when I grow up.” Little did I know how prophetic that was. So, these days as I settle into the rhythm of an “out” life, when I no longer have to deal with the nagging insecurities about whether transitioning is the right choice, and when I can focus more on making life as delicious as possible, I find myself in small moments recognizing my gesture, or expression of face, as her’s. In many ways, she taught me how to be a woman; she was my model for more than half my life.
She recently had an idea of a way to rebuild a positive connection between us, so dark and reactive were our last meetings. She proposed we each could take photos of beautiful things and text them to each other. Genius, right? Yes, I could do that, do my part in rebuilding our relationship. So, over the last several weeks, we’ve exchanged beautiful things, small wonderful things, and these remind me of all I love about her. She is not only a living example of grace, and humor, and charm, and wit, but she is also an energetic and faithful partner, a wonderful dancer, and a stunning baker; oh, and she makes these amazing quilts, and she runs 30 miles a week, and she survives on the egg-sandwich diet, with hot water and lemon, please. Together we nurtured two kids, two dogs, two cats–twice, and a project of a house. We created well together, warmth and laughter and love. And we always knew how to heat up the kitchen.
But, now, we shelter in place and text and see each other when it feels right, and when we venture out among our people, masks are necessary. We need protection to fortify ourselves against potential harm. It’s a strange irony. So much of the struggle for trans folk is to take off a mask and meet the world honestly, to let one’s true self shine through. And still, even as I have taken off the mask of manhood, and step into this new identity, I create a whole new set of masks. I am aware of these masks and I know which I prefer to wear these days, a playful, joyful mask with twinkling, mischievous eyes. A mask that habituates me to a smile, and the more convincing I can make it, the more real it will become.
Isn’t it odd that even in the quest for our authenticity, we don many masks? Yet this is putting into action as best we can what we feel and believe ourselves to be at our deepest awareness. I don’t say level because that would suggest a limit, and we live in an entirely open system. I understand “levels of the self” metaphorically, as illustrative of our multi-dimensionality , but in no sense would I hold there is a bottom or limit to consciousness. The limits we experience within ourselves reflect the limits of our awareness only. In this sense, authenticity means being true to what we know of ourselves, at that time. And Emerson reminds us that a foolish consistency is the hob-goblin of little minds. Things do change.
William James held that’s where the action is; the good stuff happens in the flux of things, and holding too tightly to an identity can choke a life of ongoing development, can preclude possibility. Opening up to the self is opening up to the flux, the slipstream as James calls it, and this opening up is not so much an action, James says, but a receptivity, a making oneself a sail for the creative wind, the vitality of life. And as we let go and surrender to the grace of existence, we recognize the eternal pulse within us, beyond description, beyond name, beyond any containment, yet constant within.
Transitioning for me amounted to unfolding like a sail to the wind of my psyche. I don’t want to hold this identity too tightly, though; I want to sustain the unfolding, put my self in the way of the possible, set out for territories unknown. And if along the way I have to don a mask or two, I just want to pick good ones, remembering that what fires together, wires together.
Don’t say anything about your self, you don’t want to be true.
Kay out
Transgender Transcendentalism 