Box of Extra Parts
I'm nonbinary; of course I understand...
The best part of DOC HOLLYWOOD, one of my favorite silly movies, is when the car mechanic finds Michael J. Fox dancing in the rotunda during the town’s harvest festival and lets him know his car is finally repaired. When Fox reaches to shake his hand, the mechanic gives him a box.
“There’s always some extra parts left over when I put ‘em back together. I don’t know why. But you go on and keep ‘em.”[1]
Wow, did I resonate with that!
When I was a little kid, I wanted a dump truck, building blocks, an Erector Set[2], a kid’s chemistry set. Instead, I got pretty boxes and a little girl’s vanity and dolls and pretend makeup kits.
I didn’t dare take the pretty boxes or furniture apart, but I dismantled the dolls and teeny toys apart to see what was inside, and to see if I could put them back together. Later, when I started disassembling watches and clocks, there were always some extra parts left over when I put them back together again. I didn’t know why. Everything fit back in the cases pretty good…
Frankly, I’ve had trouble with parts all my life. Every production supervisor knows that more mistakes are made on Wednesday than any other day of the week, and yeah, I was a Wednesday child (“Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe…”).
I don’t know if somebody on the assembly line that day jimmied in a broken doohickey or accidently grabbed a faulty thingamabob, but a lot of my corporeal parts just never performed up to manufacturer’s specs. If’n I’d been born in the 21st century, doctors and specialists probably would have taken me apart, replaced my defective pieces, jury-rigged a few connections, and thrown a coat of lacquer on the rest so I didn’t scare too many tourists. But I came into this lifetime in the 1950s when America was great, and if you didn’t think so, well, you were either a commie or worse—a “colored,” a homo, a kid, or, least of all, a female.
What did you do if you were a thirteen-year-old Black lesbian or transgender? You kept your head down and your damn mouth shut, that’s what you did.
What did I do as a secular Ashkenazi nonbinary/transmale? Same drill: head down, mouth shut. Lie, hide, deny.
But since writing these Substacks, I’ve come to realize I also have a box of extra non-physical parts left over from pieced-together me—ingredients included in most human creatures but that just didn’t fit in my spirit core makeup. One is righteous indignation, which I’ve written about before; another is its kissing cousin, tough love, which I haven’t.
I’m not a hoarder by nature, but I cannot throw away people. Even when I should. Even when all the books and protocols and professional mandates and online advice (“Somebody said it on Facebook, it has to be true!”) insist I must. The few times I have still make me cringe.
Because I don’t expect.
Not sure if’n that’s natural for me or early-nurture conditioning, but in the Kundalini triad, “No judgement, no competition, no expectation,” I’ve got that last piece nailed.
Once, casting aside all comfort and rationale, I shared with my daughter that superior ability comes with superior responsibility. At the time, I believed she and I had similar spirit cores, and so I planted an expectation I had of myself on my susceptible child.
A ghastly mistake. I’ve never forgiven myself—I doubt she’ll ever excuse me. But I sure as hell learned my lesson. Never, never expect.
The only person I expect anything from is me, and those self-demands rapidly manifest internally into first, responsibility, and soon thereafter, obligation. I don’t know if that’s how it works in other people’s psyches, but everyone gets a free ride with me. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s my rightness. It’s part of my spirit core.
Not necessarily my soul core, you understand. A gifted medical doctor I worked with eons ago believed spirit and soul were different essences. I non-retain his thoughts but to me, “soul” is solidified, attached yet distanced from my corporeal being. That makes sense to me, of course, because time, place, people, and incidents have always become distant to me at some point or another. Until they do, they’re “hot,” i.e., they can still trigger negative energy/reactions. Writing Turtle finally distanced my mother and the crap of my early life—and the instant it did, I completely lost all suicidal ideation. Instantly. It, too, became distant. I don’t know how else to explain it, but I used to dread Tom becoming distant to me, and I suspect my slow dissolve into depression and melancholy began the day I realized he had. We were/are, after all, mated.
Which doesn’t exactly bring me back to expectations, but I’m going there anyway, because I also suspect my expectation > responsibility > obligation schtick is likely not part of my soul core. Unfettered by human physicality, I’ll bet my spirit’s intractability will dissolve like sugared sprinkles on hot oatmeal. Will it then fill some of the cracks in my soul, or will its energy morph into yet another form altogether?
Don’t know and really don’t give half a hoot, onaccounta I live here, on this planet, in this feminine physique, at this nano-instant of cosmic time, and therefore must needs deal with those realities—one of which is yet another missing part of my being: absoluteness, which goes hand-in-hand with expectation.
Like all creatives, I’m attached to the concepts I share… but no matter how emphatic or confident my prose may come across to readers, I do not, cannot seem to experience the kind of decisiveness or unambiguousness the other humans I know, see, and watch apparently have. Perhaps it’s because I’ve written too many books and seen too many rule-exceptions to be non-aware that I cannot possibly know everything that’s going on, even when I’m certain that I do.
Or perhaps my nonbinarity cannot not see how every single incident, every minute decision, every line-in-the-sand stance is merely the visible side of that particular coin, and that I cannot possibly grok the other side, about which I know absatively nothing beyond my (logically inadequate) observations.
So to mimic a current TikTok meme: “I’m nonbinary. Of course I get why you cheat on your spouse.”
“I’m nonbinary. Of course I understand why you can’t keep a job.”
“I’m nonbinary. Of course I see the blinding fear that makes you support Trump.”
Would the world be better off if more people were nonbinary? If more people could not not see how everyone is dealing with their own myriad sets of coins?
I doubt it. Just as I doubt the Talking Points (aka R U Smart Enough to Vote) newsletter I send out every week will have any real impact on the 2024 election. But I’m nonbinary; of course my spirit core won’t let me not share both sides to today’s most vital concerns. Because I know they’re there; they cannot not exist. And so I can’t not acknowledge them, or send them out into the ether waves, or hope that here or there, a thought might spark, a needle might move, a mind might reconsider.
Not an expectation. A hope. A wish. A dream, as it were. But a material something.
[1] Doc Hollywood, 1991 romantic comedy, screenplay by Daniel Pynes, Jeffrey Price, and Peter S. Seaman, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, based on Neil B. Shulman’s book What?
[2] Still labeled “for Boys 6-12.”