Being Numb.

[lady amarant]

I talk about the wall alot. That thing between you and your emotions when you are male.

But, you know, it occurs to me that, as much easier as T made it for that wall to be there, it's still something I built. From around the time that I went into denial when puberty struck in all its vengeance, I starting shutting off.

It hit me this morning, while watching a vid on the subject on Youtube, that I haven't cried for anybody close to me dying since my gran died around about the time I was 13 or 14. My aunt died last year in August. Despite being on HRT, I still can't seem to cry for her. And that horrifies me.

It just occurs to me that I don't know how not to be numb, to be shut off. I mean, I get emotional about things, but ... it's like it's a mental exercise, something I SHOULD be feeling. I hate that. It's like I could just as well be a humanoid robot with emotional responses approximated by programming. I'm like Data from Star-Trek. I want to feel, but I seem unable to.

How do you allow yourself to feel again? That wall is still there, despite the extra-strength bricks my T-fuelled brain supplied now being in short supply.

~Simone

[Laura91]

Well, that wall was there for me too...until I started HRT and then it crumbled into dust. Now I can let my emotions finally flow freely again. I did the same when I was a kid but then I realized that I had to put the wall up and I hated every minute of having it up there. Now I am finally free to be myself and it feels great.

[soldierjane]

The bricks are made by biology but we arrange them into the wall, we fortify it with our own compulsion of not wanting to be "found out". After all, who wants to cry or show emotion when gender conformity makes it so damning and even dangerous to do so? We survive with the cards we were dealt and it has probably saved our lives/sanity on more than one occasion. M2fs who have been more out in their gender expression from an early age, more exposed to the irresponsible dictums of the crowd, usually have a lot more horror stories than those of us who mostly burned behind the wall.
Either way you see it, it's an unfortunate situation to live through. But I digress.
How to feel again? Time, probably; happiness and a flexing of the emotions, a prolonged period in your life when you don't have to stuff your emotions to function so you can fight the learned urge to do so.

[Chaunte]

Simone,

My role model for constraining my emotions was Spock.  I guess that gives a hint to our age difference.    Nevertheless, both of us seriously constrained our emotions for a long, long time.

I am not a psychologist - nor do I play one on TV.  But let me give you my thoughts about how I dealt with a similar problem.

I know that I constrained my emotions to better control my own pain and frustrations.  It was easier to not accept the emotional impulses than to address what i was actually feeling. 

It took a long while before I gave myself permission to feel.  I was afraid of opening a Pandora's box, but keeping the box closed was killing me, so i raised the lid.  Old movies became my friend.  Not the action flicks of my male days, but movies where there was an emotional ending.  And they don't have to be "pure" chick-flicks, either.  Movies with a great tragic hero are a wonderful starting point.

But movies isolates you from the world, and I was tired of being isolated.  I needed to go out and experience life.

I go to the local Lilac Festival where you are surrounded by more blossems than you can count - where even I can be engulfed in their fragrance.  I watch approaching storms and let myself marvel at the sheer power of nature.  I listen to the gentle patter of falling snow and savour the stillness.  While others would curse the frozen world around them, I stop and gaze in wonder as the rising sun sparkled like diamonds on the ice-shrouded trees. 

I found, bit by bit, that I laughed mroe.  I listened more.  I shared my thoughts more.  I experienced the world, and I lived more.

This was before I started HRT. 

Now, I find the world a wonderous place.

But it all started with giving myself permission to feel.

Just my two cents worth.

Chaunte

[lady amarant]

It occurs to me that I've been making that same old mistake of confusing symptoms and causes, labelling something people choose, subconsciously or otherwise, a natural state. Not all guys are emotionally stunted cave-men. It's just that many, many of them choose to be.

~Simone



Posted on: 05 April 2008, 09:37:16And you know, it's weird. It's not like I can't cry, or that I don't feel things, I mean I do, these days, intensely so. But it's like ... she was my aunt, for goodness' sake, my mom's little sister, and there's still this ... gap there.

Maybe it's just a case of it being too distant, and having not felt much then, there's no reference-point now. She's simply ... gone.

~Simone