Quote from: Alice on December 11, 2007, 09:13:52 PM
Thanks Nichole,
I guess you are saying to change your expectation to meet reality. There are certain things expected of a female person and we must find them out to fit in better.
So what expectation do I have to change and do I need HRT to change my outlook? I was thinking I do not have many expectations except it will be har do be accepted as female. I am doing this to hopfully make my life better.
Alice
No, Alice, I don't think you NEED have HRT in order that your outlook changes. O, it might help, if it can free enough of the maddening male synapses for you to grow in a different way than you have been trained to grow.
IMO, it is NEVER about the superficial: brow-bossing or scalp-advances, saline or silicone implants. That stuff is, like a lot of our concerns about body, window-dressing for the soul. No one, imo, is 'naturally' a woman after years of being conditioned as a male. She has to have paid attention during that time -- like the monk chopping wood after enlightenment. He was paying attention afterwards. He was simply chopping wood. He wasn't chopping wood and considering what clothes he wanted to purchase at Saks so he could 'look female.'
There is a deep resonance for women within relationship. No, it isn't an essential difference. Males have it as well. It's a conditioned difference though in how we approach it, live in it. Males generally don't have much consideration for relational depth and texture. They needn't. For generation after generation they have expected and gotten relationship from women while they tended to the 'important' things: umm warfare and football and lotsa beer and being strong!! *smile*
And with women its different. We have spent many years, many generations in a 'subject' state. As I said in the other post, dominants and subjects invariably see a different world from one another. When I have been trained to see the world from a dominant perspective, there is so much that is small and delicate and crucial that I don't see, because I don't have to see it. Don't have to hold it as something that matters most in the core of my heart.
So to get that learning, to be a woman, you and I must keep the eyes of our hearts open. We must see what it is that we never saw before. Then we must be open to it, incorporate that. It is all well and good to be pretty, but women get pretty to be accepted in relation, in connection. Sometimes with men and sometimes with each other. We hold what men would often ignore as being unimportant: the quality of just listening without a need to break loose like a bull in a china shop to be "honest."
Honesty, you see, is admitting to oneself that what is core is relationship. That quality of having a web that you are part of, intimately. Your understanding of your place in that web and how important that place is, to you and to all the other ten thousand things.
Buddhists and Hindus have an idea called Indra's Net. I think of it as basically universe and all we experience among ourselves, together and separate. In Indra's Net there are jewels that form the net, many-faceted jewels, and each jewel reflects each other jewel, billions and trillions of them. The reflections form the mesh of the net. And from that net, nothing ever escapes.
We are caught in Indra's Net, Alice. But, in the ways we are raised men are not called upon to see that net. They do not realize it is the core of themselves. The reason, if you will, that we even exist. We exist for relation. Without it, children 'fail to thrive' and die. Without it, adults wither and die as well, generally causing much sorrow and suffering for themselves and others along the path to death.
No. 'Passing' for women is not a superficial thing alone. It is a heart-thing, a soul-thing, Alice. When I refuse to be blatantly and brashly "honest" what I refuse is to come out of relationship, because to do so will kill me. For, you see, there is a greater and much more vital honesty than just blathering away my egocentric notions about someone or something.
That honesty is that without that I could well die, and I will probably be very hurt at the least. Honesty is admitting into myself my own need and the richness that fulfillment of that need brings me. A richness so bright and so good that when I get it, I want more of it. So rich that when I get more of it it fills me and overflows to others as well. So that there is eventually more and more relationship. Strega Nona's spaghetti pot. *smile*
In Under-world I think we all have hurt. But, if one pays attention she can thrive outside of Under-world. She can pass. No, it's not about being submissive. It's about being attentive. To oneself and to others. It is about honesty and the eyes, the heart. It is not about make-up and surgeries and how I dress or do not.
Someone, many someones, have remarked that 'men take up a lot of space.' Yep, they do seem to. But, I have come to the realization that they take that exterior space because they are never much trained to fill their interior space. Self-efficacy requires that we fill our spaces, that we very literally 'live into ourselves.' And therein lies the largest difference in being male and being female it seems to me.
Being human requires social intelligence, we are drawn to that from the moment we enter the world through the womb, even before, in the womb. Yet, social and cultural conditioning has allowed about half of us to be trained out of that relationality from the time we are very young.
Men and women aren't from Mars and Venus. They are each from Earth. We are so much alike in our natural state that we cannot live without the interactions of each other. Yet, some of us believe that we can do so. That is what we have been trained to believe. That some are valuable and that others are less so. It's a lie meant to deceive ourselves. Deceive ourselves into believing that we can live without each other. That some are born to greatness and others born to serve.
So that is where you must go, I think, Alice. You must go to that place in yourself where the true and only you resides and you must free her. So much more to 'presentation' than a walk, a voice, looks, the shape of a jaw or the lie of hair on the head. So very much more.
