Kicking Myself
May. 13th, 2014 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahunter3A pretty big chunk of the anger and frustration that I blogged about in my previous entry is actually directed towards myself. A lot of you folks reading it probably knew that.
What am I angry at myself about? Mostly for sort of dropping this for twelve years. Am I being fair to myself? No. (Yeah, I know that). Am I trying to make up for laying it aside and coasting, by being all fervent and intense about it now that I've decided to pick it back up? Yeah (I know that also).
So what's going on with this gordian knot of mixed-up angerfeelings? It's a useful and healthy process for me to prod them and poke them and untangle them a bit, so have a seat where you can look over my shoulder while I poke.
I'd gotten my article into print but I hadn't really gotten any traction among academic feminists or the more mainstream academic sociologists, and I was feeling cast out by both contingents. By 1992 when the article was printed, I was starting to realize I was not going to waltz off that campus with either the PhD in sociology or the women's studies certificate from the interdisciplinary feminist group.
What I did have (as anais_pf pointed out in a comment on my May 2nd blog entry) was the MSW in social work. That meant I could get a job as a social worker, which was important because I was no longer being funded as a grad student. Essentially I had run out of paid time. I could continue to be a grad student, continue to try to finish my degree, but it would have to occur in parallel to doing something else to earn money to pay the rent and buy the groceries. So you can see why I was feeling discouraged about my prospects for success in school at this point, yes?
Summary: In 1984 I'd come up with the idea of going into women's studies in college as a means of reaching out and connecting up with people about my ideas about gender and sexual orientation. Now, in 1992, that was looking like a dead end.
But that wasn't the only avenue available to me, was it?
Well... I had come to the New York City region not only to get into women's studies but also with the expectation that I'd find other people like me, connect up with them politically and socially, and then I'd no longer be trying to do this alone. And THAT had not happened.
I had found a place called Identity House in Manhattan pretty early on. And I had quickly discovered the night life and street scene culture that was present in certain areas of downtown Manhattan. But both of these environments were focused pretty narrowly on gay and lesbian identity. Here were people coming together because they were exceptions to the rule but I didn't fit in with them. Among them, as a smaller minority, were some guys who were "effeminate" gay guys who were out and proud about not being masculine. Exceptions even to the exceptions to the rule. (The average run of the mill gay guy either didn't consider himself nonmasculine, or, if he did, wasn't making that the main factor in his identity, contrary to the widespread stereotype of gay males as all being effeminate sissy types). I didn't fit in with these guys either.
They didn't really have a lot of actively involved people who considered themselves transgendered back then. In fact, the word in use was still "transsexual" and, if you were, it meant you thought you were born in the body of the wrong sex and that you probably wanted surgery, or had already had it, or were somewhere in between. I didn't go to meetings focused on them because there were no such meetings as far as I could tell, and even if there had been, I would once again have felt like an exception amongst these exceptions to the exceptions to the rule. Or so I thought.
Bit of a snob, wasn't I? Maybe. Maybe I could have done a better job of communicating and connecting there. I should perhaps have actively sought out the people who were associated with Identity House who were, you know, activists, who were there to be political about it, not just there to meet other folks like themselves or receive counseling.
At any rate, I didn't. I went to Identity House now and then, ended up on the periphery feeling like a misfit, and then I'd stop going. A few years later I'd try again, same results.
What I did do, in the years immediately following publication of my article, was focus on living my own life according to these understandings and ideas, work as a social worker with my gender ideas being part of my social philosophy, and upload my various articles to my own personal web space on the internet, where I thought maybe I could bypass the official authority of academia and "publish" and discuss my ideas there. Interestingly, that's exactly what everyone is urging me to do now, updated for the 2010s and so on, but it did not work for me. I got visitors, and they would leave little comments— "Love what you said" / "Kudos to you"— but my board did not turn into a discussion forum where people stayed behind to interact and discuss gender. As for my personal life, I was at that time in a communally shared household, living with about 10 other people, and networking with my housemates' other friends and associates; and I pursued a series of relationships with partners and tried to follow the lead of my gender ideas in seeking partners and structuring my relationships.
Then a second round of things falling apart hit me in the late 1990s. The social work agency folded when the associate director was caught embezzling funds, and I couldn't get a new job as a social worker. When I did get a job, it had nothing to do with society or social change. The fourth of a series of relationships that all existed between 1986 and 1996 came to an end and left me feeling emotionally bruised and worried that no one would ever want to be with me beyond briefly. We lost our communal household and were scattered in different directions. I ended up meeting someone new, moving in with her, and finding myself in a much more narrowly circumscribed life: work, where my social ideas had no relevance, and home, where my partner wasn't particularly interested in my gender ideas or inclined to take them seriously. No longer in a school environment or part of the communal household, I didn't meet many new people. And so I said less and less, and I thought less and less about it. I was tired, dammit. I was tired and things hadn't worked out as I'd planned.
So. Yeah, part of me is angry at myself. Worried that the window of opportunity to add my piece of the puzzle to the conversation has closed on me while I had my back turned. I worry that gender activists will say "This would SO have been topical in, like, 1984 or even 1994, but the world is not in need of your coming-out story at this point, it's been done, it's redundant, it's derivative". Worried that nobody gives a shit what someone 55 years old has to say about gender and sexual orientation, period. Maybe even worried that I'm simply out of the habit of trying to be understood, that I've become so Zen in my acceptance of things as they are that I will be tempted into just coasting, getting by reasonably happy in my personal life, only to wake up one day 90 years old and feel really bad that I didn't try harder to say some stuff to the rest of the world when I still had the energy to do so.
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Index of all Blog Posts
What am I angry at myself about? Mostly for sort of dropping this for twelve years. Am I being fair to myself? No. (Yeah, I know that). Am I trying to make up for laying it aside and coasting, by being all fervent and intense about it now that I've decided to pick it back up? Yeah (I know that also).
So what's going on with this gordian knot of mixed-up angerfeelings? It's a useful and healthy process for me to prod them and poke them and untangle them a bit, so have a seat where you can look over my shoulder while I poke.
I'd gotten my article into print but I hadn't really gotten any traction among academic feminists or the more mainstream academic sociologists, and I was feeling cast out by both contingents. By 1992 when the article was printed, I was starting to realize I was not going to waltz off that campus with either the PhD in sociology or the women's studies certificate from the interdisciplinary feminist group.
What I did have (as anais_pf pointed out in a comment on my May 2nd blog entry) was the MSW in social work. That meant I could get a job as a social worker, which was important because I was no longer being funded as a grad student. Essentially I had run out of paid time. I could continue to be a grad student, continue to try to finish my degree, but it would have to occur in parallel to doing something else to earn money to pay the rent and buy the groceries. So you can see why I was feeling discouraged about my prospects for success in school at this point, yes?
Summary: In 1984 I'd come up with the idea of going into women's studies in college as a means of reaching out and connecting up with people about my ideas about gender and sexual orientation. Now, in 1992, that was looking like a dead end.
But that wasn't the only avenue available to me, was it?
Well... I had come to the New York City region not only to get into women's studies but also with the expectation that I'd find other people like me, connect up with them politically and socially, and then I'd no longer be trying to do this alone. And THAT had not happened.
I had found a place called Identity House in Manhattan pretty early on. And I had quickly discovered the night life and street scene culture that was present in certain areas of downtown Manhattan. But both of these environments were focused pretty narrowly on gay and lesbian identity. Here were people coming together because they were exceptions to the rule but I didn't fit in with them. Among them, as a smaller minority, were some guys who were "effeminate" gay guys who were out and proud about not being masculine. Exceptions even to the exceptions to the rule. (The average run of the mill gay guy either didn't consider himself nonmasculine, or, if he did, wasn't making that the main factor in his identity, contrary to the widespread stereotype of gay males as all being effeminate sissy types). I didn't fit in with these guys either.
They didn't really have a lot of actively involved people who considered themselves transgendered back then. In fact, the word in use was still "transsexual" and, if you were, it meant you thought you were born in the body of the wrong sex and that you probably wanted surgery, or had already had it, or were somewhere in between. I didn't go to meetings focused on them because there were no such meetings as far as I could tell, and even if there had been, I would once again have felt like an exception amongst these exceptions to the exceptions to the rule. Or so I thought.
Bit of a snob, wasn't I? Maybe. Maybe I could have done a better job of communicating and connecting there. I should perhaps have actively sought out the people who were associated with Identity House who were, you know, activists, who were there to be political about it, not just there to meet other folks like themselves or receive counseling.
At any rate, I didn't. I went to Identity House now and then, ended up on the periphery feeling like a misfit, and then I'd stop going. A few years later I'd try again, same results.
What I did do, in the years immediately following publication of my article, was focus on living my own life according to these understandings and ideas, work as a social worker with my gender ideas being part of my social philosophy, and upload my various articles to my own personal web space on the internet, where I thought maybe I could bypass the official authority of academia and "publish" and discuss my ideas there. Interestingly, that's exactly what everyone is urging me to do now, updated for the 2010s and so on, but it did not work for me. I got visitors, and they would leave little comments— "Love what you said" / "Kudos to you"— but my board did not turn into a discussion forum where people stayed behind to interact and discuss gender. As for my personal life, I was at that time in a communally shared household, living with about 10 other people, and networking with my housemates' other friends and associates; and I pursued a series of relationships with partners and tried to follow the lead of my gender ideas in seeking partners and structuring my relationships.
Then a second round of things falling apart hit me in the late 1990s. The social work agency folded when the associate director was caught embezzling funds, and I couldn't get a new job as a social worker. When I did get a job, it had nothing to do with society or social change. The fourth of a series of relationships that all existed between 1986 and 1996 came to an end and left me feeling emotionally bruised and worried that no one would ever want to be with me beyond briefly. We lost our communal household and were scattered in different directions. I ended up meeting someone new, moving in with her, and finding myself in a much more narrowly circumscribed life: work, where my social ideas had no relevance, and home, where my partner wasn't particularly interested in my gender ideas or inclined to take them seriously. No longer in a school environment or part of the communal household, I didn't meet many new people. And so I said less and less, and I thought less and less about it. I was tired, dammit. I was tired and things hadn't worked out as I'd planned.
So. Yeah, part of me is angry at myself. Worried that the window of opportunity to add my piece of the puzzle to the conversation has closed on me while I had my back turned. I worry that gender activists will say "This would SO have been topical in, like, 1984 or even 1994, but the world is not in need of your coming-out story at this point, it's been done, it's redundant, it's derivative". Worried that nobody gives a shit what someone 55 years old has to say about gender and sexual orientation, period. Maybe even worried that I'm simply out of the habit of trying to be understood, that I've become so Zen in my acceptance of things as they are that I will be tempted into just coasting, getting by reasonably happy in my personal life, only to wake up one day 90 years old and feel really bad that I didn't try harder to say some stuff to the rest of the world when I still had the energy to do so.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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Date: 2014-05-14 01:40 am (UTC)