Back to the whole homophobia part. I just had a little light bulb about it. I think my problem in finishing off the defeat of the homophobia inside myself was just another failure of my ability to recognize the inability of synthesis. I saw nature vs nurture, and I could reinforce either one, but the evidence I would present to come into accord would come into conflict with the other side. The nature part of me just wanted to like girls and clearly pointed at them when I asked it what it wanted. The brain part of me though actually I think kind of wanted to be gay. I think I thought girls seemed crazy, I'd projected onto my mom and analysed her as crazy and blamed her for all kinds of stuff, so I was scared of opening myself to them. They're different, essentially different at some deep level, but the same at a deeper level, and that's confusing too, and was hard to register and process and I think I tossed it out when I hit conflict, and my brain was actually trying to convince my body the other side wasn't so bad. The value of masculinity seems to be gone in the modern world, technology takes the value of strength, chivalry is sexist, considering the girl you love a princess like I always dreamed off has been transformed from elevatory to reductionary. My whole childhood one of my strongest dreams was I would climb to the top of a mountain to rescue a princess, in huge leaps and bounds, and I'd get to the top and together we could go off into the clouds. I've always been a boy who has been a pretty serious BOY. Things have been easy for me, I got a black and white experience of sexual identity growing up. As a child I even had a relatively big wiener according to my Dad, and then I got sent to an all girls school, at which point I actually got to be pretty cute. I have all kinds of these beautiful memories of holding hands, and there's a part of my heart that still has an incredible crush on this girl Stephanie from my days at sacred heart. I remember her blond wavy hair, she had it so long, and the colour of her eyes sparkles in my head even to this day. That's from when I was a little kid. One of my biggest problems with girls is I actually want to be a bit of an excessive romantic. I think this came from my welsh side. I wrote tons of poems and shit even as a teenager, and I think scared off one of my first girlfriends by going overboard on my display of affection (moment of insight in retrospect, obviously interpretive and subjective, but carries a lesson for me so I'ma leave it, the reason I don't want to appear to assume too much supposition is she's currently a lesbian and I don't want to take credit for choices she feels are more significant. I'm not identifying myself as a god in her world, merely a possible trigger event I suppose.). That scared me out of displaying affection. First girl I let myself fall for was one who was reputed and known for sexual liberty, but I decided to trust, and I opened myself to her. And then closed myself to her, and didn't notice, I theorize in retrospect. She felt that even though I didn't see it, and ended up cheating on me and breaking up with me. Then, a couple weeks later, she told me she was pregnant. My reaction was quick. I was going to fly to Alberta to earn enough money to look after the child I'd accidentally created. This wasn't what she wanted/needed to hear. I told her we weren't getting back together. I wasn't going to be able to accept that black line of transgression which had taken place, because I couldn't accept my responsibility as the cause. I thought I was embracing my responsibility in taking the financial responsibility, but in fact was leaving a girl alone and terrified with a prospect and challenge far beyond what I understood. If you read this, I'm sorry, I wish I could have seen more clearly. She told me later it was a false read, and her mono had come back stopping her period. I chose to believe her. She'd faced dark challenges before, and if I dropped that weight on her and didn't help her carry it, that's something I owe deeply and never knew. I don't think the right way for me to respond is to try and pay back directly though, unless she asks of me to do so. Pay it forward, I suppose. The truth is, I don't need to know, I can look at both sides of that coin and learn as much as I can from each side. I don't think I would change my actions in retrospect though. If I had created a child, I wasn't ready to be a father of the type that she would have needed. That's the answer I'm choosing for now anyway.
Since that experience though I've been scared to let all this inner romantic nature out of me. I felt like I'd hurt myself and hurt girls and all sorts of other shit. I think I'm also a bit spooked about the idea that all this evidence of testosterone might mean I'm kind of extra likely to accidentally make a baby. I also recognized, at some level, through that experience, and then the series of experiences I had to follow, that this insight I felt about girls having some kind of a different experience and openness to experience than I did seemed true. I choose to believe that taking upon themselves the responsibility to create and nurture new life within their bodies gives them an openness and power we men don't have or understand. I feel like, from the outside, feminism is actually not giving women enough credit. My grandmothers are two of the toughest people I know, and they lived by the old ways. Cora could beat the crap out of any girl I know today with a wooden spoon, and she had worked harder by age 12 than a lot of my peers who feel elevated and free in this modern age have now. Christine made the act of self sacrifice of giving up her career in science after being a freakin genius with a PHD at a ridiculously young age, and helped support a husband who was a piece of changing the world, and raised two doctors and an engineer. The value, power, and everything else that I can't even explain about nurture and women's superior ability to do it is something beyond. I know if we look close enough it gets grayscale, and girls can develop strengths like we can, and everything else, but I feel like there really is some underlying difference. I don't think it's all inherent, but I think like what I'm finding in myself rather than being one or the other it's a complex nature-nurture structure. (Mr. Ellis you rule). My belief of understanding, the way I've chosen to see it, is by being more inherently structured to receive and be conducive of energy/thought/etc, they tend to have a more intense, emotional, subjective experience of life than most guys. They feel things we do and don't know what we do, and see what it means when we don't notice. Communication runs deeper, more naturally, more easily for girls. Us guys are doing a bunch of this stuff but we don't notice. It ends up making us silly some times. Puffy chests, red faces, raised hands, loud voices. Alot of things we do mean much more than we notice in them. Even we feel them, we're just less self-aware on the emotional level. I think perhaps girls get a more natural whole self-awareness, or perhaps more frequently nurture one, because they have/know they have the ability to create new life inside themselves...
Thing is, I guess part of what I felt like, and where some of the picture in my head came from, was that even though this feminine ideal is in some ways destroyed in culture, I held onto it, so it was real in my world, but I didn't seem to be able to find evidence to support the masculine ideal anymore, so I felt like it was unfair. It seemed to me in my interpretation that a lot of my trouble, a lot of the shit I was dealing with, was because I just wanted to be a boy, it was natural, it was right. I was a bit more intense than your average kid perhaps on that end, but I think this is a common phenomenon. Because I idolized the opposite sex and not my own I felt like the world wasn't fair or something, even though in my conscious mind I felt like it wasn't fair in the opposite direction and girls were getting shitty deals, in my subconscious mind I was holding onto the idea that their elevation in society giving them an unfair deal with both good sides. The truth is like everything else that was just my interpretation. There may be some truth to it. Maybe the loss of gender is having some negative consequences against its gains. Maybe it's just we're having growing pains and the system is glitching as we go through the transition. I don't really know. I'm choosing a role in it though.
I am going to choose to just embody my own masculinity, at least for now (never close myself to growth, or else the bad shit grows). It comes very naturally through me, so I should just let it. That means it's time to chase princesses and rescue them. It's time to bring back out old chivalrous dreaming Dave from elementary school and stop being scared to like girls. I've had this idea where giving compliments is somehow wrong, but it's because I felt like I was giving them with expectation rather than just as a gift. Choosing to see that putting positive energy of my kind out there can be nice to girls the way their kindness and even just getting to look at them is nice to me, and as long as I'm honest about it and do it from the right place. At that point, if the girl chooses to take it negatively and be creeped out it might be an error of conduct by me but it's at least not an act of disrespect, and I can be comfortable with that. Girls give me all kinds of good energy, the way I understand it best is from their beauty and nurturing, but their social skills and methods are while at times confusing and challenging at other times inspiring and enlightening. I have a feeling we are kind of the same on that. If we open ourselves to learning from these differences though, we can grow together even better.
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