Gender Quake
March 4, 2010
GENDER QUAKE
I have been really remiss in posting here because I have had a pretty rough period for what appears to be totally unknown reasons. I mean, I have thoughts and feelings going through me, but all of them very conflicting and confusing; I could have been unwell, but the boundary between my health and mind is so pervious and fluid that I never quite know whether the depression is coming from a physical or psychic source. This is understandable considering everything is inextricably interconnected, if not undividedly one.
I shall talk about it in the past tense in the hope that it is over, which I think it is.
It is very hard to describe the jumble of feelings, but I did have some recognizable symptoms. In this post I shall speak of one of them. Others follow. Generally during difficult times I pray. I feel that prayer enlists the aid of the universe and helps a great deal. This time I couldn’t pray. I took no joy or comfort in my version of God because this god was male and I did not want to worship anything male. I have always been male identified and what I needed in my depression was feminine comforting and nurturing. I have had no image of this because my birth mother is not nurturing. In my despair I turned to Godina, my female God with big, cushy tits who held me in her arms and fed me her nourishing milk.
But the problem was that I had no way of praying to Godina, no method of worship that I know. Though the Sikh prayers (through which I worship) address the creative energy of life as Mother Father God, the pronouns, names, images, epithets used for God are male. I knew, and know, intellectually, that language, though it evolves and is alive, is very difficult to change consciously, but that knowledge didn’t prevent me from feeling angry. Though things have changed a teeny bit –‘ she’ used where always ‘he’ was –our language has hard wired a male god on our brains. And believe, me, it is very difficult to change the hard wiring. I don’t know if mine ever will because my god has been male ever since I was born and lay in my father’s arms. God’s maleness has seeped into the very fabric of me.
What was happening was that my entire way of believing and being was in an upheaval. Being away from prayer in dark times was hell. I couldn’t pray to a male god, and except for visions and fantasies of a rather large female with cushy tits who held me to her heart, visions that were consoling, I couldn’t pray to a female god either because no female structure or path has been provided for us in our journey. Though there has been a lot of talk and writing about the Goddess by female and male authors and visionaries, a path has not been charted out. I suspect that the concept of ‘path’ as a linear, progressive thing may be a very male concept; I also suspect that centuries of living in a patriarchal system has mutated our genes. We have had thousands of centuries of organized male religion, and our matriarchal beginnings are so remote and primitive that they don’t have a place in our memory and consciousness. We are a jumble now, and I hazard the speculation that a new creature is emerging from this jumble, one that consciously borrows congenial characteristics from any gender or even species.
I have no doubt that younger women will come along and chart female paths in the future, but till that happens, each of us has to carve out ‘paths’ for ourselves. Every time I pray now I am aware that I am praying to an energy that is beyond gender (though we need gender differentiation for our own, limited brains and selves); I am aware of what authors Polly Young-Eisendrath and Florence Wiedemann in Female Authority (The Guilford Press, 1987) call “interiorized inferiority” in women; I pay very close attention to sifting out and categorizing what ‘male’ and ‘female’ characteristics are and not allow the latter to tyrannize me. This is a HUGE task. But there is a precedent for it in one of Psyche’s tasks to sort the grains of a large mound of sand into its different colors. It is not a task that can be accomplished without the aid of all the natural forces of which we are composed. In Psyche’s case, this aid came in the form of ants.
I need to do this for myself – curdle my consciousness into its components – for the sake of greater awareness and peace. I need to do it to gain clarity into this half of the human experience. I am still grappling with this issue and will keep you posted on the developments.
I think I am, for the most part, out of that depression, though others await, I know. Depressions feel like hell but are very fertile phases. I feel profound changes in my being because of this recent one, not all of which I can articulate or feel comfortable with. I have been unable to write and writing has been my whole life. I trust this fallow phase (when I’m not freaking out). I’m also resting a whole lot when I can. I don’t want to do much of anything except solve some Su Doku puzzles which I’m getting better at, reading a bit, and packing to leave for India on the 21st to spend some time with my mother.
I think I just want to loaf now through my days. I would be happy doing so if it weren’t for this inner voice that is telling me I’m wasting my time. It is very male, and I don’t know how to deal with it yet. But I will find a way. As the psychologists say, my inner male and female will have to learn to get along. And more, love and marry.
So, folks, no wise words this time around, nothing organized or even too logical. I can’t wrap my brain around life anymore. I have moved into my female body and I wait patiently, when I can, to see what emerges out of it. I have been far, far closer to my father than my mother; I’ve been very male in my approach to my life, very achievement-oriented and ambitious but now something else, something gentle and less driven is striving to be born. I’ll keep you posted on its gender. Androgynous, I hope.
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