Division/Addition

Had a very good and very thorough conversation with another bisexual at work yesterday, following on the tails of a few conversations with many collective members about whether or not our store is a "true" collective.

I realized "the other" in a way I feel my anthropology courses in college both attempted to realize to me and also shielded in some way (after all, the "other" is a major component of anthropological study, so it is a threat to think of eliminating it).

I realized, when asked about why I "still" sleep with men, that I need to gender division - and addition - in my life to keep my own sense of self challenged.

I cannot just be with women. Of course this is a preference which goes far deeper and wider than my intellectual musings, but the musings do reflect something for me about my actions: why this "lifestyle" continues despite a great deal of difficulty in explaining it to most people - especially other folk in my ostensibly "inclusive" Lesbian Gay Bi Trans community, which I now basically avoid.

And I have, strangely enough, taken on a similar isolation at work, surrounded by folk I suspect will not actually come through with promises of community, and instead I am terrified of asking of them what I want from them.

It should come as no surprise that I did not find that kind of support in my family, nor have I learned to foster it yet with my family members who remain.

And finally, the great adder/divider. The coin of both sides: rage. The way I am joined to myself through some anger that makes the "me" who's body is not even the same after 28 years seem the same. The way I join moment to moment. And yet, the way I divide myself from each moment as it happens, making of a memory every minute passing. Obviously, it is a divider between myself and others, too.

Saddened by all of this distance from others and intimacy with my own crap, I went to meditation. I sat and saw it all come and go and come and go and, there is some relief. Came home to This American Life with stories straight out of New Orleans and couldn't even cry about that. But there again was some modicum of bizarre relief. Bit by bit I am cracking the code or the hard case that I have kept between myself and others for years. My stomach yearns for a breakout, for a bridge, for me to let down my guns. My body sneaks free when it can.

And when it does my heart can usually follow, in addition.