About five years ago I was sitting on the balcony outside my little garage apartment. I lived with my Leather family, and my little suite above the garage was my solitude, my sanctuary. I wasn’t sober then, I hadn’t found the strength yet. Having the drinks that always sat at my side, I was perched in a light rain, watching the clouds pass overhead, sipping to try to get back to drowsy and sleep. Dreams still swirled in my mind, as I’d just awoken from them and there I was, half-in, half-out, still existing in the in-between of the waking world and the one I’d just left behind.
In the dreams I was a man, long of limb, dark skin reflecting moonlight back at me, my black hair long to the middle of my back, I could still feel it stroking my waist as I walked in the night. In my hand were a feather and a stone, in the other was the branch from an oak. The elements threw off their energies, and they felt so different yet all the same. As I walked through the tall grasses I knew deep inside that this home wasn’t just a random landscape. It was the Americas before they were colonized. And I was native to this land, just as much belonging to her as I belonged to myself. More so even.
My legs strode, bare feet kissing the ground beneath them as I walked toe to heel, quietly blessing the earth with each step, quietly feeling her welcome me with every movement. And how the energies shifted…the stone and feather and branch were all so unalike yet they felt similar, in ways hard to express. I knew that even though in the world they presented so differently they were of the same atoms, same make, same origins. And my body felt the same. In walking I could feel the pure depth of what became Me, and it was small and diaphanous and all-encompassing and so very alone at the same time.
That feeling didn’t change as I walked. But my skin did. I lit up in different colors, yellows and blacks and reds and whites, but still felt the same. My hair grew longer, shorter, my arms and legs changing as well, I grew breasts, I felt my genitals shift, I was woman, I was man, I was everything in-between, until there was no longer a divide between any color of my skin. There was no longer a shifting of gender, I just was Me. I was, I belonged to the earth, I belonged to the birds that slept, the insects underground, the wind, the trees, I belonged no one and the stars above, I belonged to Me.
As I sat awake in the whispering rain I could still feel the light that was every color and none at the same time, the one that burst from my chest as I shifted, it alone stayed true.
Growing up I never had words for being more “boyish” than any other girl I knew. Jehovah’s Witnesses only believe in two genders, and I was a girl, that’s it. But when around other girls I felt “other”, not like them. I was a bull in a china closet, completely out of place and just as destructive. I was clumsy (still am) and awkward (never went away), and felt like an alien in human skin. There were no words for any of these things in the world I knew, and so I read and read like mad to try to understand myself and the world around me. I went through the motions of expectations piled upon me by my gender role, my place in my family, the place chosen for me by the congregation that was my entire world. And never did I feel that I truly fit in, be it with the JW kids I grew up with, or those “worldly” ones at public school.
It has stuck with me well into adulthood, the feeling of “other”. What can we do when we only have a few choices to choose from in which to identify ourselves and nothing truly fits? For years and years I struggled with it.
An iconic memory as a young teen was seeing Orlando starring Tilda Swinton for the first time. I remember I was at my Aunt’s house in the Austin area, and there stood this ethereal being who shifted roles and expectations and genders through centuries of living. Orlando took to each one as if the changes didn’t matter, only they as a person mattered, and whatever they chose for their life in each role was right, because they were purely Them. Their Me didn’t change, even though to the people around them everything seemed to.
And then I realized that I don’t have to fit, I don’t have to at all. That I have remained constant and myself this whole time, even as I tried on different suits and expectations and roles. They’ve all shifted and changed, as my skin and hair and gender did within my dream. As in the dream they just don’t matter, only that bright shaft of light that is Me matters.
Sitting in the rain that night, as I saw stars peek through the moving clouds, I realized that in past lives I must have been two-spirited. That it felt so right and pure to me, since childhood, and the feeling stuck with me, so I must have been before. I cried happy tears as my soul sang This Is Right, this is Me. I felt a true sadness that it didn’t apply to me now because I am very much a woman with curves and movements so fluid I could never pass as a man. I felt so lucky that my soul had experienced this before, and thought I didn’t deserve to feel it now because I very obviously am very obviously female, but how good it felt to know before in a life I was so very free.
But no longer can I rationalize that in this life I don’t “deserve” it. It makes no sense to deny something that feels more and more real and Me as days pass by. In the two and a half years of being alone and without a partner to have to wrap my mind around I’m learning to listen to my inner voice more deeply. To believe that I deserve what I love and know about myself, and that the body I inhabit now is just as much truly Me as I have been before as star dust. I’ve been inching my way solidly here for years now, and how dare I assume I don’t deserve it. It was as if I was dangling a treasure just out of my reach and satisfied to leave it there because I didn’t earn it through more struggle and tears.
This morning when I went for my usual dawn stroll I felt it echo, that dream. I was Me and everything shifted around the light at my core as I watched the sun peek out and climb. I saw the moon changed from full to waning glory the past few mornings, and smiled knowing she doesn’t change, only our perceptions of her do. Again and again there are signs, feathers lying in my path that I take and tuck in my hair for as long as they’ll stay with me…stones who call my attention from the trail…oaks that sigh my name as the wind tangles with them. This morning I walked in that dream again, and knew even if I didn’t think I deserved it I know who I am and what I have always been and always shall be. I am two-spirited. I am Me.
A Burd in Flight 