17-Set for Life

Nineteen-seventy-one was one tumultuous year. I left high school, left the Air Force, left my virginity, and left home for good to start my new life in my old Chicago suburb.

It was also the year my internal operating system became situated. I was at eighteen who I would be for the rest of my life. I kept learning, of course, and my attitudes about various things changed here and there—that’s life. But the prism through which I view the world had been set in place. Permanently.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the myriad tools psychologists and therapists and spiritualists and life coaches tout to handle the crap of life. I’ve used many over the decades, some useful, others non, most temporary at best, a few more harmful than helpful. All designed for folk like me to grapple with who and what we became over the course of our formative years—which pretty much culminate around age eighteen, give or take a year or two margin of error either way.

Not a peer-reviewed study. A sixty-plus-year observation.

So there I was in my tiny one-room + kitchenette-and-bath apartment, 2,000 miles from my parents, alone fully and long enough to consider my plusses and minuses—not so much to indulge introspection, but to fill out job applications and get through interviews.

“What did I consider my strengths? My weaknesses? Where did I see myself in five years?”

Obviously, I couldn’t be honest if I wanted to land a gig because the nurture aspect of my internality knew—not believed, not thought, not imagined the likelihood of, but knew—I was inherently worthless. Eighteen years of non-essentialinity, constant unacceptability, and non-conformingly wrongosity had set my sense-of-self as non-desirable from just about any angle. Of no commercial value to anyone for any reason.

In fact, the innermost depths of my shell-protected soul already acknowledged that only work and service could possibly justify my existence. Giving up, giving away, taking-care-of, rescuing were the only legitimate excuses for my continued presence in life. I had to chameleon-or-hide to keep me non-noticed, non-spatial in the world. My operating system was fueled by fear, my primary objective invisibility.

And no tool, mantra, affirmation, or visualization has ever altered that rudimentary perspective. I can fight it, ignore it, compensate for it, or work around it, but it is a core refraction of my being, the windmill against which I will forever tilt, the sense-of-self I was groomed to assume.

But if I moved the prism a bit or repositioned the light source, I could catch a glimpse of my nature’s wavelengths: An innately strong constitution. The ability to plow through against all odds despite all challenges. To see what others often don’t/can’t, to imagine beyond the norm and recognize solution nuggets buried in absolute muck.

I have a genetic disposition to question, examine, argue, consider—to accept the abstract, to cellularly understand that “no answer” is, in fact, often the best conclusion. Life is not meant to fall neatly into pre-established sortings or stratifications. Those shadings, too, are deep-coded into my being and cannot be excised by external forces or “grooming.”

And therein lies the real tragedy of today’s anti-LGBTQIA fervor, the horror of not letting kids be okay with their otherness, of denying they are born as they are. Stay with me—that’s not as broad a leap as it appears. Because just as no amount of influence or pressure can ever erase my two-sided sense of self, no intensity or quantity of grooming can possibly change a heterosexual into a homosexual, transexual, or asexual.

A person can definitely be manipulated into doing something they otherwise would not. Grooming transforms kids into pliant victims. Slaveowners (along with likely a lashing now and then) indoctrinated an entire people into Christianity, an unabashedly by-the-sword religion that click baits with heavenly love, only to reveal its real purpose behind the paywall: patriarchal white-supremacy domination to maintain patriarchal white-supremacy power.

But as much as unrelenting pressure can force people into accepting or doing things contrary to their better judgement, it cannot manipulate someone into being something they’re not.

Were that possible, my mother would have wangled me out of my non-girl “phase” before I ever achieved middle school. She didn’t because she couldn’t. No amount of pushing, isolating, exposing me to “inappropriate” books, or even threatening to withdraw her love could prevent me from being both girl/non-girl and boy/non-boy.

That, too, is part of my refraction. Non-negotiable. Non-changeable. Non-separable from my nurture/nature colorations.

Non-treating me as a pariah on the other hand—non-insisting my otherness was utterly wrong and wholly my fault, non-manipulating me to lie, hide, and deny my authentic self—might well have prevented me from embedding “worthless piece of boy/girl shit who cannot possibly ever give, give, give enough to justify their corporeal continuation” in my psyche.

Myriad spiritualists claim that I, as soul/spirit, arranged my current-life’s challenges as lessons to learn during this leg of my journey back to the divine. All struggle and pain is predestined for educational purposes, according to those who seek enlightenment in this world as a gateway to the next.

Could be. Don’t know. Don’t really give a fuck, because the past is over, the future is unknowable, so I live here. Now. In a here-and-now forever seen partly through the optics of strength, more through the ricochet of self-disparagement.

Such is the consequence of telling children their sense of self is wrong.

Granted, the very idea of non-adults having a sense-of-self defies the conformity mandated for mass-population control. But we others are a relatively small bunch in the grand scheme of things. Leaving us be, letting children learn about and embrace their true nature, cannot possibly upset the balance of life on earth.

In fact, the only disruptive power acceptance—nay, tolerance—can wield is over those whose fundamental operating system is fear—specifically those who worship/fear a particular implausible deity… or those who worship/fear their own sense-of-self.

Circling back to the mainstream of this episode, I couldn’t very well list my unproven merits in the plus column, so I fell back on the one notation hammered into my head from first breath: Pretty. Hardly a marketable commodity, of course, unless I planned to buy a mini-skirt and stake out a corner—and yes, the thought did momentarily flit between a few synapses until it fizzled out of its own accord. I got too cold, too tired, too scared to command more than half-a-handful of change on any urban street. Cents doth not pay dollars’ of rent.

Yet I instinctively knew it gave me a face-up in the job market. Good help was at a premium in those days—global population was still under four billion—and I was young, flexible, and willing to take on any position since I equally knew nothing about and had no ability in almost everything.

Plus, I knew how to lie.

Admittedly not always all that well, but certainly good enough to claim I’d maintained a 3.85 GPA both in high school and my one semester of college, because it was technically very close to being mostly true. I effortlessly non-elaborated on how I offset lousy math and science grades with English extra credits and history, journalism, and poli-sci midrange slides. My first-job proficiency looked wonderful on paper, so long as I non-mentioned it amounted to running a photocopy machine and collating its output. And my typing prowess sounded awfully impressive when I expressed as photon-computer skills, despite my convenient non-recalling my ex-boss’s name or contact information.

I’d quit because he didn’t have the money to pay me, but how was that going to make either one of us look good, right?

As for those inconsequential three weeks and two days I’d tried to serve my country? Never came up in conversation. I mean, come on, why would it? I was so obviously girl.

And pretty! Let’s don’t forget how much I was pretty! I’m pretty sure I landed the gig at Whatever Corporation because the guy interviewing me pretty much thought I’d be pretty easy, and I already knew how to non-dispel that pretty non-truth. Did he have clue one that the all-girl package across the desk from him was actually non-seducible boy?

In the immortal words of Brian Zsupnik, “Is there really a question here?”

Fortunately, the final production-office-clerk interview was with a guy who didn’t give half-a-shit what I looked like so long as I showed up on time, got the work done on time, and didn’t complain about his pack-and-a-half-a-day habit. I’d grown up in a smoker’s house—smelled like home. He didn’t even demand a fabricated answer to, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Honestly, why do they even ask it? A resilient little bugger, it popped up in almost every interview I ever sat through, every training seminar I ever dozed through, every application I ever lied through. So as a head’s up to my fellow others, “I forgot my crystal ball at home” is not the best response. Sure, it might provoke a chuckle, but the query will recycle until resolved. Along those lines, I have to also advise against, “Isn’t that question a slap in the face to all the mental-health gurus who tell us to live in the present?”

Yeah, that’s right, I still thought wrong, still thought about the wrong things, still voiced the wrong remarks and held the wrong opinions. And for the record, that particular aspect of my otherness consistently non-responded to countless job consultants, placement officers, human-resource counselors, and other sincerely altruistic folks’ efforts to groom out of me.

Because despite how earnest, well-meaning, or dogmatic the hawker, people cannot be groomed to be something or somebody they’re not.

Why is that so hard to understand?