Yeah, But How Do You Feel?
I have always struggled to identify my feelings. My therapist used to say, “I did not ask what you thought, I asked how you feel.” Having been raised in a fundamentalist home with hardened categories, I was taught that all decisions should be rational and feelings get in the way of good decisions. I had no practice feeling.
The core emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust all live on their own in the ether. They have no place to lay their heads save the space they demand in your being. And they do demand space. They show up at the door with their bags and inform you they are staying until you deal with them. This is especially true of the substantive trio of anger, fear, and sadness. Fundamentalists lock them in the basement, but everyone knows they are there, beneath the tidied surface.
I have since come to understand you have to allow these emotions entry when they arrive. They have an easement to come and go as they like. They do with all humans. You cannot stop them. You can decide to address them in the living room instead of putting them in the basement. And you can demand their departure when they have overstayed their welcome. But I get ahead of myself. I did not know any of this way back then.
By “then” I mean most of my married life. I, like a lot of husbands, relied on my wife to tell me how I felt. For Cathy, that was exhausting. Not only did she have to deal with her own feelings, she had to feel mine, in an exaggerated way, like you do as a therapist – “Your mother did WHAT!?” People don’t know how abnormal some actions are until you tell them. Wives routinely do this for their husbands because apart from anger, most husbands have no idea what they are feeling. Our culture allows men anger, but none of the other core emotions.
Post transition I did it again, with a friend, and then with another close friend. I finally came to see I was wearing souls out and I needed to feel my own emotions, unaided by another benevolent female. That is when I started memorizing poetry.
Poetry is the right brain finding its expression in language, not straightforward left brain language, but language used slant, as Emily Dickinson might say. I memorize poems that speak to me. I do not ask why they speak to me. They just do, and when they do, I memorize them. Then I pay attention to when they arise unbidden in the course of a day. The right brain is charged with bringing into consciousness what is unconscious.
The lyrics of songs also arrive unbidden, which is interesting, because I almost never know all the lyrics to a song. For me, songs are about the tune, especially the harmonies, not the words. So when the words arrive without invitation, I take notice.
I cannot tell you how often, as a child, I started belting out the African-American spiritual, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” I sang it with all my heart. No one in my family took notice. That is the fruit of fundamentalism.
Lately I keep having the entire David Whyte poem, The Soul Lives Contented running through the course of my days. It is not a poem about contentment. It is a poem about restlessness. The soul lives beneath the ego. The ego wants power and safety. It is a tyrant. The soul is here for the ride. Trembling, it reaches out for your hand, to get your attention, to invite you to the thin places where the ego is bedded down and the soul can speak directly to the gods.
See, not the language of the rational, reasonable, explicit, abstracted, compartmentalized, fragmented, left brain, but the singing, praising, feeling of the right brain. In Jung’s language this is where the self resides. In Christian language, it is the realm of the soul.
The soul is what answers the front door and allows the core emotions entry and takes them to the guest room. It knows what has to be dealt with. It might even help them unpack their bags. It is the soul that brings poems to mind, helping tease out what is going on in the realm of feeling that I learned to suppress so well. It is also what tells those emotions when it is time to go.
Though I am not certain, it seems to me that estrogen and anti-androgens make it easier for the soul to slip forth like a “tremor of pure sunlight before exhaustion” as Mary Oliver said in Maybe. Testosterone is the fuel of anger. Its absence I experience as pure blessing, one of the indicators that I am, in fact, transgender.
I always say I come from the borderlands between genders, a holy liminal space. I once had dinner at a house built by William Roebling, the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge. He put thick girders, left over from the construction of the bridge, in the walls of his house. The door jambs were thick, almost like passageways. That is the kind of liminal space in which I live, neither this room nor that, but a place in between not quite once before a time, but also not quite once upon a time.
Anyway, that is why I still look to my close female friends to tell me what I am feeling, like a man. It is also why I find myself having very strong emotions that demand expression. It feels like that is the estrogen at work, like a woman. As I said, I come from the land between the genders. Sometimes it is the land of the lost, but as I say so very often, it’s okay, because lost is a place too.
I am not sure where this post is going. I want it to circle around and reach a conclusion chock full of insight. Seems like that’s not gonna happen.
And so it goes.
