The recent split was prompted entirely by my need to be who I am, not by lack of love on either side. I'm grateful for the gentleness of it, but reeling from the loss. So now seems to be a good time to focus on being my full self again, figuring out who that is at this point in my life, with everything new I've learned about myself, good and bad. To restate what it is I want and need to be.
A while back I had a half-finished post about that, couldn't get it out because of the dissonance in my head. I think I'll try again, see how much hard choices have brought me back to myself.
A silly online questionnaire on archetypes recently informed me I was:
46% intellectual
29% caregiver
25% advocate
The percentages are meaningless, but in their particular breakdown (
http://www.archetypes.com/category/archetypes/), these were certainly far and away the best matches for me, I won't argue that. (I will argue the validity of asking my gender for the first question grrrr)
Before I jump into the navel-gazing portion of tonight's program, a quick PSA. I do not think I am any more special a snowflake than anyone else. When I say "I am like this", it's not because I necessarily think I am uniquely or shockingly so, or that I am engaging in life-shattering revelations. Just testing how the ideas fit together in my head, because I think our aspirations and beliefs about ourselves create us to a great extent, and I try to create myself as intentionally and with as much self-awareness as I can. Ideally, I want to be able to recognize what is _true_ about me, and from that, make choices about the directions I go with the particular resources I have. I believe being honest about my strengths makes it easier for me to be humble about my many weaknesses, and also helps me be more clearly affirming of the complementary strengths others bring to the table without getting defensive or self-loathing. And overall, I want to be continually better at finding a life that capitalizes on the former and minimizes the latter.
As an example of this, I think I'll talk some about body image. It's comfortable territory for me, something I think and write about a lot, and have my entire adult life. I'm passionate about body acceptance, and loving my body is something I see as one of my great triumphs in the face of a fucked up culture. It's also something I see as a form of activism, in a very "the personal is political" kind of way. It matters to me not to feed into body hatred, and you'll find I will never partake in the "what part of your body do you hate?" casual water cooler conversation. I will not feed that beast. I will do my damndest to set an example, because there are still too few models for what it even looks like to not casually hate your body, especially if you're fat and female.
I said earlier about being clear about what is true, and making choices from that. My body is fat. It is pale, and has freckles, and has bobbles here and quirks there, and it is strong, and yet it breaks down entirely too frequently for my liking. These are all true. Facts. Even setting aside all the self-loathing paths I could choose, I'm still left with many ways I could conceptualize my body and shape my life. I could be cute, curvy, bouncy femme with it, appear soft and luscious. I could go old-school butch dyke with it, and use that mass to create a sense of masculine unapologetic taking-up-of-space. I could celebrate softness, or strength, or sheer size. So when I talk about the archetypes that resonate for me, certainly my physical body makes some paths an easier fit than others, but it is no such easy equation as "I identify with earth mothers because I'm a fat lady and that's all there is". Fuck that noise.
This is the post I'd started a few weeks ago:
I don't believe in Gods but I do believe in stories
I make the "gods" point to clarify that while issues of archetype and totems are spiritual for many people, that is not true for me, but it also doesn't make those ideas invalid to me. I'm an atheist and skeptic to the core, but I don't find that incompatible with recognizing that humans are storytellers, that we imagine ourselves into existence in many ways, that we create our own self-fulfilling prophecies.
I believe in the magic of neurochemistry and human imagination.
I believe the stories we tell ourselves and each other shape us, in real and meaningful ways. That knowing the stories a person resonates to, and the archetypes to which they aspire tells me something deeply important. Not "right" or "factual", but true. And equally, that it matters that I understand my own resonances in that regard.
And it can be hard to talk about these things, to not feel presumptuous or foolish for daring to compare ourselves to the larger-than-life and romantic. Especially if we fear others will look at us and see not a shred of it, or will believe that we confuse aspiration with actuality and are getting lost in our own deluded egos.
So I'm going to talk about what resonates for me, and hope you will be gentle and generous in your interpretation of my words.
First and foremost, I should clarify that I'm genderqueer; I identify with both masculine and feminine imagery of various sorts, and where my head is at in that regard shifts from day-to-day and moment-to-moment.
I'm also a reader, and that's probably equally important. For some reason I don't seem to have the skills at creating fiction, and have not been interested enough to put in the amount of work to find out whether I could, but characters live in my head, always have. I'm mostly an SF/F geek, so there's a lot of archetypal material out there for me to connect with. The characters I identify with or aspire to have most definitely shaped me. So have my political/philosophical traditions, especially feminist and activist history and heroes.
That archetype quiz for way back at the beginning of this post? Intellectual/Caregiver/Advocate -- yeah, this is where that's relevant. What traits matter most of to me to bring into the world, which do I most aspire to? Courage, wisdom, passion, strength, knowledge, reason, love, ethics, calm, protection, refuge. That's what I want to be in the world. I think of myself as a defensive warrior: a shield, not a sword. I aspire to cronehood, and seek to be balanced and wise in how I share knowledge. I also want to be a refuge for my loved ones and community, a place of calm and acceptance and love. I identify with the bear's physicality and strength but generally playful and placid nature. The more my life is in line with these goals, the more I live them minute-by-minute, the more whole and fulfilled and affirmed I feel. When I lose track of my aspirations, or disconnect from the ways in which I fulfill them (retreat socially, cease being involved in activism, etc), it crumples me up inside, breaks me in deep and scary ways. Getting back to how I need to be becomes a matter of psychological survival. I'm feeling more on-track in that regard than I have in a number of years now (since mid-2012).
There's a bunch of stuff still rattling in my brain that didn't make it in. I may add more in comments as I sort it out.