Subject: Supreme Suffering Seeks Perfection
callanw@crosswinds.net
Date: Wed 03 Jun 1998 - 23:30:20 BST
"You see, nobody understands the oppression and stigma *I* have to face. It's
easy for me to to look at other people and see how they are lucky, how they
have a leg up that I will never have. They have social benefits that are just
beyond me, the andvantage of the way they grew up, or their body, or the
procedures that they can go though, or a better and more compelling rationale
that gets people on their side, or lots of things. Yup, I am the worst off."
I am so often amazed that when people choose to rank oppressions they always
end up at the bottom -- or is it the top? The other guys grass is always
greener, they have breaks we don't have, they don't have problems like we do.
While we are really suffering, they are just whining when they tell of their
troubles, so easy to get over, not like ours.
It all leads to the whole "if only I was. . ." mindset that leads us to dream
of the one thing that would fix all our problems. "If only I was born
female/male/intersexed," "if only I had a different skin color, had more
money, grew up in a different family, then everything would be OK."
That attitude leads many people to pursue the magic bullet, find the magic
story, get the magic surgery that wil change their life forever and make
things perfect. They really believe that once they change that one detail,
they will be happy like the people who have that.
Of course, it never works. Humans have lots of challenges, and just being
rich or white or female or male or whatever is no guarantee of happiness. We
each wake up with ourselves in the morning, and rarely does one change make a
different -- pure transformation on all four levels (body, emotion, thought &
spirit) take work.
Often that work is opening our eyes to what we have to be grateful for, not to
how we are victims and hurt, but how we are blessed. It's when we can stop
building our identities on our wounds, move past the "if only" ideas and the
explanations of how we rank oppressions that we can start embracing the
humanity, the mess and the glory that exists in everyone's life. We can
actually hear other people's stories, listen to them with compassion, and
believe it when they say they have problems too, not wanting to believe that
they have it easy and we have it hardest.
Somehow, as we try to build theories and stories that bridge multiple human
challenges, even TS and IS -- or for me, TG -- I suspect that until people are
though wishing for a magic bullet that will make everything perfect -- thereby
saying that they can only be rescued by magic -- we will have trouble finding
the connections. That's why, for me, I really want to move beyond
illness/cure/no choice models to models that empower people to make their own
choices from humanity, to respecting each others stories.
Callan
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