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Released by conviction

  • Posted on May 18, 2013 at 9:01 am

This week I want to explain a bit more a short statement I left on Facebook, and go back over the whole idea of why trans people look for an expression for their feeling of ‘being wrong’ as they are. Some, but possibly a minority, felt from an early age ‘trapped in the wrong body’. That doesn’t work for all of us, and this analogy spoke better for me, so I’ll share it.

Imagine …

Supposing you were born in jail. This would be your whole known world. Everything around you would tell you that you were in ‘insider’, and that though visitors came and officers ‘went home’, you were not, by definition, an ‘outsider’.

Now suppose you were brought up, for your own good, to be a hermit within the jail, and that you purposely came to choose the three-metre confines. Is that not total freedom? How can you be imprisoned by anyone, if you make your confines your own? Nothing is imposed any more that is not your own imposition. You can live like this quite peaceably, providing nothing invites you to suspect that you may, by rights, be an ‘outsider’ after all.

Now allow yourself to imagine, after 54 years in this situation, that these suspicions have rooted themselves in you enough to feel that maybe you are not in jail because of anything you have done, but as a complete mistake. And yet you were a model prisoner, so no-one took any notice of you. Maybe there had been a time when you were not confined, when you went from being innocent, to charged, to accused, to being convicted. But who doubts the sentence of the convicted? And suppose all this happened in the first few minutes of your life …

And then, 54 years on, you dare to speak out as being an ‘outsider’, as ‘innocent’, of mistakes made by the jury and judge. Joy of joys, you are given leave to appeal, and you are subsequently released on the grounds on ‘unsafe conviction’. Not innocent, just a kind of parole: you may actually still be guilty. Many believe you must be. You know you might, at best, have to always live in this judicial limbo.

This is the feeling I have lived with for the past few years. I appealed, and nobody else was sure. However confident I felt (and not very, to begin with!) I was in need of convincing others that this wasn’t just some lifestyle choice, but a mistake, about something that was true since probably before I was born. I was required to convince three different psychiatrists, over the space of a year, that I didn’t just believe I am female, but that I really am. Yes, I could have lived with my own confidence for a lot longer, maybe the rest of my life, but anyone could say at any time that I wasn’t really female, I just had some kind of delusion. After all, it’s a mental diagnosis, isn’t it? ‘Yes, I know you feel like that, but you’re not really are you?

So was everyone wrong in those first few minutes of my life, when they declared me a boy? No. They pronounced a physical sex identification, but that was all. The subsequent interpretation was just a huge misunderstanding of gender that I lived with for the next 54 years.

Trapped?

A lot is said about the idea of being ’trapped in the wrong body’. I never felt that, but I have said elsewhere on my blog how the gender dysphoria actually gets worse after transition and before surgical intervention. Others have wrestled with the idea that being a ‘woman with a penis’ doesn’t have to be the end of the world, and you can find a satisfactory gender identity without surgical or clinical intervention. What’s wrong with being ‘third gender’, apart from social misunderstanding of the non-binary? Well, that’s just what I argued here pre-transition; there’s nothing wrong with that at all. It’s just not quite how it turned out for me.

Let’s try ‘in the right body, but trapped’ instead. My body is my own, it’s all I have had for a very long time, so why does it have to be wrong? Well, as with so many trans women at this stage, I look in the mirror in the morning and see a softening face, the loveliest hair I’ve ever had, seriously developing breasts, a posture that is quite in keeping, smooth, hair-free skin. And a penis. *Clang!*, *Clang!*, *Clang!* The bells are ringing ‘No! No! No!’ and I can’t look at myself. This is a part of me that I have to handle, keep clean, arrange comfortably, and recognise at every dressing and undressing, at every loo visit. I find myself just yearning to be ‘put back inside’. I am trapped, not by my body, but by what is incongruous. The body will do (I can’t change my skeleton) but until certain things are done, I’m stuck. Even if society embraced ‘women with penises’ I would not feel right. Others, I know, would.

Now let’s try ‘trapped in the wrong idea’. When I was born, and assigned ‘boy’ for my birth certificate, I became trapped in the wrong idea. Boys are male, not female; go and be a boy, be a man, do the male life. Consequently, the desire to be a girl or a woman was morally wrong, because gender is about sex and being sexually different is bad. I mean, you’re a boy, you have serial girlfriends – and you want to wear their knickers? I, the nice likeable, kindly person, had something bad inside me, and if anyone were to find out how I felt, I would not be nice any more, I would be perverted, wicked. In those circumstances, how could I possibly have told anyone, least of all my girlfriends or my wife? I call that trapped: imprisoned by the idea of what I was, and of what gender means. There was no ‘Get out of jail’ card.

Resolution

Fast shuttle to this week, because I’ve told the story already, and shared my utter confidence and self-belief. But on Tuesday night, quicker than expected, I received a copy of a letter from my last psychiatrist consultation at Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic to my GP, with a lengthy explanation and endorsement of my lifetime of difference, my incarceration, and ending with a formal written diagnosis as transsexual. I was cleared of all charges of being male. My gender is not my physical sex. Official. It could have had a red seal and a ribbon on the bottom, and I cried. My next visit is all about surgery: the trap is sprung.

This is what I meant by the analogy that began this blog. Nothing has changed, except that the proving, the repeated questioning, the interviews – all are over and I am cleared from being trapped in the wrong idea, released by my own conviction.

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Steam radio and my tranny experience

  • Posted on May 4, 2013 at 9:14 pm

I alluded in a previous blog (Risk of shock) to the joys of valve radios, amplifiers and similar. Not quite the kind that you toasted marshmallows on, and I remember ‘acorn valves’, which were the first step in miniaturisation. They were easy. If they glowed, they were probably working, and if the wax capacitors around them were mere blobs, something had gone wrong. Of course in those days they took time to warm up: no instant sound. A bit like my digital TV and radio really …

I remember it well

But I also remember buying my first, small white plastic-box, radio in a black leather case (that ate PP3 batteries like I eat cheese), from a friend. Under the bedcovers, turned the right way round, and it got Radio Luxembourg on 208m. That’s when things got personal.

They were called trannies. I can still remember the smell of the leather; and the studs …

And so I lived with a tranny for years. In bed at night they made my world a special place, and loosened all sorts of constraints, opening my eyes to the wider world. A tranny helped me grow up. And I understood them, on the inside; compared with what I had grown up to know, I could see real integrity.

On my 18th birthday a tranny arrived, and went to university with me, finally ending up spattered with paint while involved in home-making with me years later. I thought I understood trannies really well, until people started looking closely and saying: ‘Ah! I see!’

Actually they were saying ‘IC’. What I had thought of as integrity was now merely a chip, a small black centipede called an integrated circuit.

Reception: 208 or 101?

Whatever letters you choose, maybe LGBTQI or more (and in any sequence), there is a notion that everyone who is not heteronormative is part of an integrated circuit of sex/gender minority variants: one frequency band, tune in as you see fit. Some people on each segment carry a chip, but few are satisfied with the overall reception, and many have very sensitive antennae. But one thing it is not, is straight FM.

People born intersex have very little in common with the letters belonging to sexual orientation. People who feel they have no single fixed gender in the male/female convention will find it very difficult to decide what both their gender and sexual orientation handles could possibly be. Transsexuals may be less clear than non-transitioning transgender people about what it means to be homosexual, because gender is not sex. LGB people may not understand the differences between these ambiguities, especially when transvestites/cross-dressers of either gender base (or none) are added to the mix.

One reason the LGBTQI[...] grouping exists is because all are treated as minorities and are (or have been) discriminated against, in society and law, and are perceived by those who don’t or can’t or won’t understand, as ‘other’ and less than equal humans. Yes, they all have, or have had, a really bad reception. But that does not place them all in the same station, with the same frequency.

They all have their names. Just as I remember Luxembourg and Hilversum, Moscow, Paris, Monte Carlo (and Home, Light and Third), the pirates crept in, like Caroline, and Northsea International. So LGBTQI people have had their names too. They change, of course, and the triumph of some has been to reclaim and own them. Poof has no real impact, queer has been requisitioned elsewhere, others are happy and gay, my dearest lesbian friend offers dyke (she isn’t Welsh!) and there are few terms that really bite as insults in relation to sexual orientation, because in this country social acceptability has grown so much. You can’t jeer at someone for owning a mobile phone if almost everyone has one, or for having red hair (when you also see pink, green and purple), these days.

But you wouldn’t call a person of black African origin a n***er (and even I use asterisks to save me from Internet filters), even if you have heard a black comedian use the term.

Back to trannies

I’ve read a number of comments, social media threads, blogs and had conversations recently, on the use of the word Tranny. Offensive? Owned? Well-defined? Where are we? Well, it does depend on what country you live in, but here in the UK it does tend to be used for transvestites/cross-dressers, or drag behaviour, where it is about over-dressing, sometimes to parody. This isn’t a criticism by the way. When I realised my lifelong problem was gender identity I tried to hang onto my life as it was, by seeing myself as a cross-dresser, and conversed online with straight-up-and-proud trannies. But as I slipped out of that into the cold realisation that gender dysphoria was something a whole lot more serious to deal with, all the meaning and context of ‘tranny’ became foreign to me. If someone called me a tranny after that, it was a completely mistake of identity. Not appearance – identity. I was being mixed up with a chosen behaviour, a lifestyle, a temporary pretence, or even an indecision and gender part-timing. But I was no longer a man doing girl, I was a woman. And certainly not a tranny.

I wrote a poem Are you a man?! at a time when I would have honestly faced up to being a transvestite, and I was shouted at publicly in the street. I was OK as a tranny then, I guess. Now? Absolutely NOT! I have no doubts at all about my self-description: I am a woman with a transsexual history. That’s right, history. (It was his story, now it’s mine!) Some transsexuals feel perfectly comfortable at Sparkle (The National Transgender Celebration), and it is a wonderful opportunity for trans people of all kinds to meet, celebrate and feel they entirely belong and are accepted, however they choose to present. I don’t knock it one bit. It’s just that I identify as a woman, and sometimes now it’s a jolt to remember I’m off to a gender clinic again, because I have a diagnosis of ‘transsexual’. Why would an ordinary woman go to Sparkle? I guess they do, but it’s not for me.

So the simple thing to remember, when you’re joking in the pub, or even exchanging opinions about me when I’m not there, or commenting on a TV character or an article in the Daily Mail on the latest ‘sex-swap’ sensation (not), is that gender-lettered people in LGBTQI[...] are not the same as the sexuality-lettered people, and that transsexuals leap right out of the bracket for one simple reason.

If you are gay or bi or lesbian (even if you are also trans*) you tend to need other similar friends or lovers, because they affirm how you are. You can celebrate your sexuality but it doesn’t announce itself just because you come out. If you are transsexual, as soon as you come out everyone knows, you probably do it badly at first, but as you progress you can change and disappear again. The ambition of most of us is to become indistinguishable. Being a trans woman doesn’t require a transsexual partner or friends. In your old life everyone thought of you as a man, by the end everyone thinks of you as a woman. There’s nothing embarrassing or shameful about it, but you do leave it behind as far as possible. I don’t celebrate being transsexual, but I do celebrate my life as different and resolved.

So if you shout ‘Dykes!’ at two women holding hands, the intended insult will probably disappear as vapour in an instant (you deserve their rude reply). But if you shout ‘Tranny᾿ at me, you are saying I am inauthentic, and that hurts.

 

Footnotes

My first tranny had seven separate transistors. The first four-function calculators had seventy on a chip. Counting my personal digital devices now (TV, DAB radio, computers, phone, iPod etc.) I own over a billion transistors! A tranny will never be the same again.

It may seem that I am excluding F to M transsexuals. I’m not intending to be exclusive, but I think there is a lot less use of the tranny word against trans men, and I suspect the male drag scene is somewhat smaller and self-refers differently.

Continue reading Steam radio and my tranny experience »

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Cause, fault, blame, responsibility: an uncomfortable family

  • Posted on April 12, 2013 at 1:32 pm

Some long while ago I wrote on this blog in response to the accusation many people born trans face: that they are being selfish. (Self, Self(ish), Selfish)

What do people see? They see a person whom they thought quite stable and happy, suddenly doing something quite bizarre. And that apparent behaviour intrudes on their lives, disrupts and challenges it, whilst insisting on acceptance. That is not always forthcoming; families are destroyed by lack of understanding and unreadiness to change. Is this still the same person? Even a clinical diagnosis is met with scepticism. This, surely is a derangement, a lifestyle choice. With all our shared social conditioning, this is weird.

Blame

A man does not become a woman in our world. They become some pretence, some male-looking actor mistakenly persuaded that their role belongs in real life. Somewhere between this perception and the reality, so often, destructive and divisive forces are at work. I haven’t even been able to have the conversation with my grown-up daughter, to find out why we cannot even have dialogue about her impressions, feelings and perceptions. But surely there must be a mixture of confusion, embarrassment, anger and blame.

As I work out what possible grounds for divorce are honest and truthful, I compare this birth condition with others. A congenital muscle disorder that might leave me in a wheelchair? How disruptive is that, how life-changing, how relationship-changing? And yes, it can lead to marital breakdown, as can mastectomy or impotence. But blame? ‘I married a fit, strong man, not this!’ Is this completely different from gender? Is the love of the other really so different in each case?

Cause

My wife and I do not use the word ‘blame’. I consistently use the word ‘cause’, because I fully accept that the way I was born, being hidden so long, has resulted in loss of my family, marriage and home. I could no longer be ‘her man’. The operative element that has to be examined is choice. Why could I not have continued as I was? Well, all my life there was a part of me that I hated. I feared it; it was morally wrong to me, a perversion even. Largely unexpressed, but incapable of eradication. And therefore not something I could ever disclose. My wife said to me this week: ‘No-one should hate themselves.’ What kind of choice is this: between hating yourself – and being authentic but unloved and unwanted?

This is the result, and gender dysphoria is the cause. There is no blame. Why? Because my wife reacted and responded as the overwhelming majority of wives would. It’s very ordinary and simple really. As in my last blog, marriage is a self-serving contract; it is not really about the other at all. A wife has a husband for a reason, and if that husband is no longer going to play that male role, it’s over. Tough. I’ll let you be different if you’ll let me be normal, but don’t expect me to live with you, let alone want you like that. So there is a cause in the other too: conditioned normality within strict boundaries.

Fault

So much for cause but no blame. What about fault? Fault has several meanings. It can mean defective. This is my fault because there is something defective about me. It can mean a fault line. Two masses (or people) rubbing up alongside each other in contrary directions causing division and friction. It can mean the result of a careless or deliberate act that causes damage. Well, I still maintain that when a person experiences gender dysphoria, their transition into gender congruence is not a deliberate chosen act, but rather inevitable and perfectly fair and reasonable. There is no fault in being authentic: we are not nasty or even unloving people. Nor is it defect: only variance. 1 in 1,000 of us are to some degree intersex, 1 in 4,500 (birth identified) men and 1 in 8,000 women experience gender dysphoria. This is no defect deserving of rejection or blame. This is not fault.

The fault-line analogy is better. Both sides are working in opposite directions. So if fault has any meaning it belongs equally with the socially-conditioned partner for whom what the previously-loved partner is, matters vastly more than who they are. So love dies, because that is what it was founded on. This was our fault-line.

And so the cause, the blame, and the fault, when a family or a relationship fails under gender conflict, are equal. Neither side should bear more than the other. In a few cases, love is of a different kind. Perhaps sexuality is more fluid, or love more unconditional, or compassion profoundly greater. But losing everything is almost normal for the transitioning person, however lovely, loving, kind, talented, generous and committed they are. Person-hood does not play a part. I am fortunate compared with friends facing vindictiveness in partners. And in those cases, I do tend to feel that there is blame, simply because such attitudes are unjustified, deliberate and sustained.

Responsibility

And so finally, to ‘responsibility’. This is the missing word so often. It means whether you are the rejecting one or the rejected, you accept responsibility for the outcomes. Each must recognise the cause of their response, whether becoming authentic, or choosing to keep their norms unchallenged. And as above, this should be equal. As in my last blog, my marriage failed because of both of us. My dysphoria was the cause of my necessary change, but my wife’s conditioned normality was the cause of her rejection: our degrees of choice were perhaps not dissimilar. I shall not argue whether either of us could have resisted each of those pressures.

I took my responsibility by dissolving the emotional torture through leaving. I bore that burden first not just because I was no longer wanted, but because I felt I could and should. I had a life to develop and clear aims in achieving peace with myself after forty years. No-one was going to help me with that and I no longer hoped or expected it. But now we come to part two.

Part two is dispersal of our shared house and assets, and that means a secure family home that still exists, with cats and a productive garden, energy efficiency, and all we worked for together over 30 years. So it’s where the real hit is for my wife (son and cats), my daughter having just moved out to start on her own. It’s the end of everything, and it will hurt. Not me, so much, because I went through all that six months ago. I have nothing left other than the financial asset to help me find a more permanent and sustainable home. But I know it will raise in the others the same old feelings of cause, blame, fault – and responsibility. That too is equal. But I know that a new reality is sinking in for those who used to be my family; it’s time for them to realise their responsibility, not least in failing to gather around me when I needed it, and in the rejection that has now lost them their home too. They don’t even talk together about what has happened.

And that, however it is said, is not me blaming them. There are causes on both sides, there is responsibility too. And that needs to be fully recognised. ‘I take full responsibility for rejecting you and ending my love for you.’ How does that sound? I think it is fair, and perhaps worth voicing.

Continue reading Cause, fault, blame, responsibility: an uncomfortable family »

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About time

  • Posted on April 6, 2013 at 1:14 pm

ClockIt must be one of the most-repeated phrases offered me over this past six months. Give it time. It takes time. Time heals. Take your time. And here I am, with taking time enforced on me, and no idea of how quickly or slowly it will take to recover from pneumonia. The reason in part is that it is unpredictable and unseen. Had it been flu, symptomatic remedies, a few boxes of tissues, and I would bravely sit at my desk and recover as I worked. Fewer tissues means I would be getting better.

But somewhere inside one of my lungs, stuff has been going on unseen. Listened to and identified, x-rayed and seen, but not by me. I just feel unwell, breathless, hardly even coughing, but weakened and diminished. Discovering the financial penalty for this added a whole load of stress, and hasn’t helped. I have to earn so I can pay the rent, so I have to get well, and I have no idea of the timescales. I pushed myself a bit far this week, and really felt it, but without pushing and stretching I won’t know my limits.

But it isn’t actually time that will do anything; it’s healing. My body will heal itself, but can only do so one step at a time.

Last night I went for my penultimate counselling session, mainly to explain this time how I feel I have fulfilled that need. In respect to my reasons for returning to counselling, I am healed. It wasn’t time, and it wasn’t really any advice given. I found my peace through reflection, facing up to uncomfortable truths, nurturing myself, and accepting the kindness and generosity of others as genuine. The process has been very costly too. The expense of separating myself from the agonies of emotional rejection, facing the meaning of it, and arriving at my peace now, has probably been the biggest financial investment of my life. Is it a loss? Compared with my sense of wholeness and self-knowledge, no. That’s priceless. I have had the means, and I have used it to be where I need it to be.

Pneumonia will leave its scars for some time to come. As will the separation, because I have a head full of memories, wonderful memories of when I felt loved and wanted and could return the same. I picked a book up this morning that not only bore a loving inscription but two love notes, each to the other. And despite friendly text messages after my welfare this week, a quite empty feeling has crept in, where over 30 years of loving and ordinary life in partnership and mutual support, has simply evaporated to nothing at all. I thought love was solid. Instead it was fluid and volatile, dissipating easily into thin air.

I was asked in counselling how much I was saying that the love was not real. (Am I denying the past to protect myself?) It was real alright, it just wasn’t love as I thought of it. I reject none of it, I remember it all with great affection. But it is devalued by its dependency on my having played a role and filled a need, rather than being simply about being loved for myself. Yes, the same old being loved for what I am, not for who I am; that, I am afraid, is the bottom line and nothing has changed my mind. This is disappointment, not denial.

Marriage, essentially, is not about giving unconditional love. Those promises are not what they appear to be at all. It is a contract to be what the other needs, not to love the other as they need to be.

And so a realism has been allowed to speak at last too. I also know that being bonded with a woman was what kept me going, living as I did in the wrong gender role. It was a kind of proxy for my female soul. I do feel that my idea of love was the more profound (reader: the opposite is not ‘shallow’), but that is just my own judgement. I had the best friend, the most supportive companion and the most productive partnership out of those years that I could wish for, and yet I knew all along that we were not soul-mates. I may never find such a person, and what I had felt as good as I probably could ever have. Somehow I kept going for nearly 30 years, whilst knowing there was that confused part of me of which I dare not speak and share. Had I felt unconditional love, then of course I could. But I knew, and subsequently proved, that I could not.

And so it is that my true gender has found itself, asserting itself as greater than being loved for any part I could play. But with it has gone the meaning behind the kind of love given. Its dependency on my gender act (taken as genuine when of course it was not), makes it love of a different kind than I felt I was giving. Not false or shallow, just different. The agony was that I could not understand why I should withdraw any of my love, when it was all withdrawn from me; when I was missing her, but she was only missing the memory. Hence the evaporation, the cold distance, the knowing that I, as myself, am not missed at all. I know my emotional state over those months were blamed on hormones, but in the end they are only the same hormones in each of us. I am still on the hormones, but the storm of emotion has passed and memories feel so very distant.

I have arrived, at my first anniversary, a healed and complete person. I know myself as never before, I feel authentic and established. Unwell, but at peace with myself in a way I could never have imagined possible. Time is the nonsense in this. Did I transition later than I should? What if I had risked discovering love was not unconditional 20 years ago? Similarly, for many the process of transition takes a great deal longer than it has for me: how have I got here so quickly? People told me it took two or more years to get over a broken marriage, and yet I have made peace with it in much less. The only fixed time aspect is the legal practicalities, the dispersal of a shared life in goods. That will be painful, but I shall bear no guilt in knowing that we both must feel the pain. We each have our responsibilities for where we have been and how we have responded to the way I was born. It has not been ‘unreasonable behaviour’ by either of us, and we must not compare degrees of sadness. The marriage failed because of both of us, not just me.

One element of fixed time remains for me: the provable elapsed time lived in my true gender. Whatever I know, however established as a woman I am, however irrevocable my position, or certain my heart and mind, I must wait another year before I can request my rightful gender recognition certificate. Whatever procedures remain, that is a fixed time, and until then I cannot rest. Consequently, I have asked to be petitioned as the one to blame, so that I can be freed from marriage in time to apply for recognition of my true identity.

And so it is with immense gratitude that I know myself. And it’s about time. In some ways.

Continue reading About time »

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Risk of shock: emotional charge

  • Posted on April 1, 2013 at 7:25 pm

This one is bit more of a thought-piece, so settle down and think with me. It isn’t about gender at all really, it isn’t especially about me or anyone in particular, but I hope one or two readers will find it useful to reflect on. The thought just came out of struggling to describe what I and others around me have been experiencing, and seemed to fill a space that made sense. I hope it doesn’t come across as didactic: I don’t intend more than to provoke thought.

Have you ever emerged from or been pushed out of a relationship, and felt locked out of a place where you left part of yourself or your life in trust, unable to regain access for retrieval? (See I counted on you.) Or maybe gone back and been hurt all over again? Time and again we do it, putting ourselves through it all over. What if you are seen as the one to withdraw, and the other really isn’t letting go …? Will you miss that vital chance to put things right and be glorious again?

When I was in my teens I was very keen on electronics. In those days it included valves, waxy capacitors, big resistors that could get hot so you could smell the dust toasting. So we aren’t talking about 12 V power supplies or less, we are talking ‘high tension’, including 90 V batteries (yes, really). No microcircuits then, and in audio systems, a quality without hiss or noise you didn’t get until digital came along. It was simpler to understand too, but I guess a tad more dangerous to mess about with. I did get electric shocks, sometimes from big smoothing capacitors quite some time after switching off the mains power. Curiosity, incaution, call it what you will, it was a hazard that I wasn’t always careful enough about. I learned about electricity and its effects on the human body and came to understand how to work with it without getting hurt. About switching on, respecting, switching off, using insulation, and assuming nothing about connections.

Nowadays most appliances are double-insulated and not even earthed, with ‘no user serviceable parts’, and screws you don’t always find screwdrivers for in B&Q. But we are familiar with a tangled drawer full of chargers and the need to plug in the phone, laptop, toothbrush, camera, epilator or whatever, in order to keep life going.

And so the analogy: we keep our lives going emotionally by investing energy in safe places where we can get that energy back. We charge up our friendships, our working positions and colleagues, our managers and superiors, our families, and our partners and lovers. Then, when we need that extra in return to keep us going when we feel in deficit, we can draw on it, in terms of goodwill, support, kindness, opportunities, favours, love, excitement or stimulation – or security.

Think about where you charge up with your energies, where you invest your little surpluses, where you regard as the safe places to draw on, for the emergency supplies, the ego-boosters, the reassurances, the need to feel loved or wanted. You know where they are don’t you? Are they safe places? Secure and promissory? Or like a squirrel with its nuts, are you just optimistic about finding some again? Few of these emotional energy repositories, these batteries, offer you more back than you put in. You have to keep charging, watching the indicator for low charge, and making sure you don’t end up in an awkward place with nowhere to plug in when the power fails.

Most of these emotional batteries that we charge up will naturally discharge when left alone. The friend you haven’t spoken to in a year, the wife you haven’t really thought about with flowers or a night out, or a pampered day, the partner you’ve assumed needed nothing more than your presence to be fulfilled and valued, the parent you haven’t thanked or the child you haven’t given time to really listen to. Haven’t we all been there too? We connect with the emotional battery – and it’s flat. No energy flows, or only a trickle.

And sometimes we charge up so much we do damage. This little netbook PC has a battery-saving option to only charge up 80 per cent so the battery will have a longer overall lifespan. Leave rechargeable batteries in the charger too long and they just get hot. More is going in than can be held, so it’s either resisted or turned into a different kind of energy. Some relationships are unwittingly overcharged like that too, over-invested in, so that instead of a balance of internal batteries and external, we become dependent on them, or our expectations of them.

The thing is, these external batteries are not part of us, but of other complex, independent and interconnected people. They do not exist for us. There are exchange deals and others invest in us, but we all know when an old promise feels now unrealistic, or we no longer have the influence they thought we had, and need. If we have conflicting loyalties, indecision and changing circumstances, so do they. So isn’t it just a bit dangerous too, to depend on these emotional investments too completely? The partner who cheats? The colleague with more ambition than loyalty? The child who needs to grow through an issue before they can be reasonable? Or you, and your changing perspective on life, and needs?

OK. So you have just lost a relationship on which you depended. Your love, your commitment is all charged up, and they have disconnected, or there is a loose connection and sparks. You know to avoid emotional electrocution you must let go. But all your emotional energy is still stored up there, in their battery. It’s sitting there with gleaming terminals where your wires belong. Go connect!

Yikes! One touch and what you thought was your invested energy instead is a shock that knocks you off your feet. What? My invested energy? I want some of that back, like it used to be. Why doesn’t this battery work? Suddenly the polarity isn’t what it was, the voltage (potential) seems changed, or the current unmatched. That battery is someone else. Why did you charge it? Was it for their benefit (I love you so, till the end of time), or was it for you (if I keep their love I’ll be safe, till the end of time)?

Unconditional love or regard isn’t like that. It’s the jump leads when your power is down, it’s your spontaneous, unthinking giving when another needs it. It’s always there, because the other has reserves by not over-investing and draining themselves. So what are you thinking now? Where and what do you want to invest outside yourself, and how much do you want to believe that you have enough love and emotional resources for yourself and to share? Like electricity, you can’t keep it long, but you can generate it.

Now look at those batteries. You don’t have to lose a single relationship just because you aren’t borrowing their batteries. But is there one you just feel you have to keep going back to, to see if it’s still charged up, there for you? Maybe it’s time just to let it discharge. Don’t touch it, save the shock and hurt. Do you need the emotional energy? Or do you need the person? Even if they hurt you? Don’t confuse the person and their effect on you, for love and true giving.

Friendships and love happen all the time, if you have the capacity to let them come and go, so watch where your insecurities are charging something up that isn’t for the other at all, but for you. An ex-lover with a battery all charged up with your energy may not want to hurt you, but can’t help it. You can. There is a time to refuse connection until complete discharge, during which you can review your whole policy of emotional energy investments. You are a net creator of continual love and of kindness, if only you can learn not to store too much in the wrong places.

It might leave you with a changed perception of what love is, of being loved, and of how others see you. No bad thing perhaps. I too have been someone’s battery, and my polarity meant everything. That was my value, that was their investment, and that was everything. I too had a lot of emotional energy invested in them, and that was my mistake too, when they simply unplugged and it all went dead. I could resort to a lot of insulation, or I could change my energy policy. I’m choosing the latter, and I’m ready to connect. As a generator.

Continue reading Risk of shock: emotional charge »

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