Identities
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Jimmy
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Identity Politics Know Thyself Navel Gazing Picking your battles Relationships
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of months thinking about identities. I know this sounds like it’s going to descend rapidly into incomprehensible, murky, introspection, but bear with me. There is a point.
When I first started feeling able to be honest about my sexuality, and the fact that I’m kinky as all hell, I felt like I was completely re-inventing myself. A lot of things came bubbling up to the surface, all at once, and a lot of things had to be moved into the background to make room for them. For every new thing I was trying to express in my day to day presentation of myself, I had to leave something out, or so it felt at the time. It wasn’t that my focus had shifted on to different things, so much, it was just that I felt that certain aspects of myself contradicted others, and I was so used to having my reality denied (to having my assertions about my feelings, needs, and beliefs disbelieved, for whatever reason) that I felt I needed to back up these new claims by presenting a cohesive front, preferably one which tallied with an established stereotype.
When I first realised that I was attracted to men, I was so afraid of being contradicted, of having my credentials rejected, even, that I seized upon the first identity I could find which featured same-sex attraction, and adopted it wholesale. As it happened, the identity did not suit me well, not least because it did not feature opposite-sex attraction (bisexuality was not very widely accepted in that social group.) When I first realised I had submissive tendencies, I chose an identity which did not allow for expression of my dominant side. I spent many years oscillating between identities which fed only some parts of me, and forced me to starve others. This very sense of starvation only increased the devotion with which I attempted to conform to the next ready-made identity. Eventually, I reached a crisis point where I realised what I was doing, had a bit of a melt-down, and changed my approach.
The thing which made the difference, the thing which brought me to this breaking point, was cross-dressing, about which I will have another post later this week. In the past, during the times when I have felt able to express that side of myself at all, I have typically done it to the exclusion of everything else, and then left it behind entirely in a binge/purge kind of pattern. Realising that it was something that I would always need some of the time, but never need all of the time, led me to see a lot of things more clearly. There are very few positive models of cross-dressing men in the public perception, and it was this choice between subscribing to a view of myself which I found unpleasant, and knew to be inaccurate, and denying a part of myself which I needed to be able to express, that forced me to actually look at myself, and create a self-image which fitted what was there, rather than continuing to try to fit myself to a series of images which simply did not fit. This was not the first thing in which I started to allow myself to desire what came naturally, rather than that which I believed I ought to desire, but it was certainly one of the hardest to face.
Since then, it has seemed like I am far better equipped to deal with unexpected desires and aversions, and that I feel far less pressure to conform to my internal model of myself when it fails to accurately represent the person I actually am. It feels, frankly, like a terrible pressure which had been present for my entire life is slowly being released, and this is making it easier for me to move, breathe, and speak. I don’t mean to say that everything has been sweetness and light, in fact (because I have spent so long not allowing myself to feel any ‘negative’ emotions at all) there have been a lot of stormy patches, but there has been none of the yawning terror that I have so long associated with a crisis of identity, or with an inability to reconcile my needs with what I believe that my needs ought to be.
But it goes further than sexuality and kink. Last year, when I was working in a manual job and doing nothing else, I found it hard to keep myself drawing, writing, and making music. Over the first half of the winter, when I was working so hard to arrange treatment for my disability (there will be another post on this soon, too) I found it very hard to keep myself doing anything at all, because my overwhelming identity was as a disabled person. Over the past couple of months, while I have been reconstructing myself as a writer, among other things mostly related to the direct use of my brain, I have been resisting doing any kind of manual work at all.
There is a general opinion that one ought to settle into the hobbies, the talents, and even the kinks which will be your main interests for the rest of your life – Shona refers to it as ‘choosing your dance’ after the idea that, once you have decided the kind of music you like to dance to, you are never supposed to change it. I find that, at least for me, continually shifting the focus within myself is the best way to keep myself fulfilled, and that the longer I manage to keep juggling all my different skills, interests and desires, the more I am able to keep at one time.
So, bring on the weekly obsessions, and the skills you start learning for a couple of months, and then put down only to pick them up again ten years later. I have heard a lot of people call this kind of behaviour childish, or half-hearted, or indecisive. I believe that nothing can be further from the truth – once you have learned something, it stays learned. Saying that you have to work at every skill you start learning until you master it completely is a certain way to drain the fun out of everything, ever. The more you keep your brain, and your heart, and indeed your groin, flexible, the longer they will keep working for, and the more joy you will get out of each of them.
3:37 pm
This is very wise, I think. To my mind it’s related to the fallacy often seen in the kink scene that your preferred play orientation should be fixed – and the equally damaging idea that the more extreme your preference for one end of the power spectrum or t’other, the more “true” it is. I’m thinking about switch (and bisexual) invisibility, and the ridiculous, harmful and prevalent idea of “true submission” discussed in articles like this one and possibly responsible for lots of people failing to learn where their natural boundaries and preferences are.
One of the things that article discusses is the socal fallacy that once you’ve “chosen your dance” that’s it for life; that sexuality doesn’t tend to change over time. Which is of course bollocks. When I was 20 and said I was just submissive everyone said “ah, by the time you’re 30 you’ll have changed your mind” and I thought, what’s with that? And lo, at 27 I’m reconciling myself to a switch identity, and it’s not that I got it wrong the first time, it’s that I’ve grown and expanded as a person.
I think people, and popular culture, likes it when they can pigeonhole people into at-a-glance stereotypes, and so if you don’t squeeze into one category or another people will often do it for you. I also think that everyone starts out with a fairly simple number of identities as children, and the older you get the more faces of you there are. We have a positive cultural model for people gaining more skills – why not more identities? It’d make the whole process much easier.
1:01 pm
Yes! There’s an idea out there that as you gain more skills, or gain a deeper level of understanding of the skills you have, you narrow down to fewer and fewer interests. I think that this is flawed, but then again, I would, being 28. Nonetheless, I think that there should be less denigration of trying new things, or of people trying things out just for a bit.
And yes. The thing about some (usually more extreme, or sometimes more ‘usual’) interests or desires being seen as more real, and less affected, than others (particularly with regards to sexuality) is bollocks, and frequently angers me. Glad you liked the post. I seem to be completely failing to write porn, but I’m enjoying it anyway!
10:35 pm
That reminds me of a sentence which I have heard sometimes when someone learned something new about me or when I tried something for the first time: “But that’s so unlike you!” That sentence always made me think: No, this isn’t unlike me, it just doesn’t fit to how you see me.
I know that life can be made easier by sorting people into categories. So, I guess in a way all human beings do that in order to simplify their lives. But in my opinion it is great that in reality human beings are much more complex, that we can enjoy very different things and evolve over time, too. :-)
1:06 pm
Yes! I dislike it very much when people doubt that I truly enjoy something, just because it calls in to doubt how thoroughly they have understood my motivations. There is a post brewing about how some things are hard to accept because they involve giving up more than a certain amount of being right in the past, and this applies here. It also, I suppose, applies to the way in which it can be hard to relenqiuish the parts of an old identity which explicitly involve not enjoying some things, or holding a different identity. The idea that you have to be the same person, no matter who you are with, or what situation you are in, is fundamentally flawed.
My English teacher at school had something to say about this, along the lines of “Outside this classroom, you are somebody’s child, you might be somebody’s role model, or somebody’s lover, or the captain of the sports team. Inside this classroom, the only thing you are is a scholar. Act like it.” It was the first time I remember thinking that certain parts of myself should only be expressed in certain contexts, and that this was not necessarily dishonest.
12:24 pm
just had a look very good we all like it
1:04 pm
I can relate to a lot of what you’re saying. I’m getting on twice your age, and yet I still haven’t discovered my ‘true’ identity – should such a thing exist at all.
I’m coming around to the view that we are all multi-faceted individuals and are likely to have several ‘identities’ which together make up the whole of our personality. I agree that these things can evolve over time, as our interests and knowledge base increase.
Some of my ideas and preferences do conflict with others (my somewhat eclectic music collection being one of several examples). This used to cause me problems until I reached the conclusion that life itself can be a mess of contradictions, and a certain amount of conflict in our likes and dislikes could actually be a healthy thing.
If there is any advice I can give, it’s don’t waste time trying to conform to the impressions others might have formed about you. Don’t let others define you, and if anyone develops a bad impression of you, don’t bother loosing sleep over it. I’ve no doubt that some in my neighbourhood still regard me as the alcoholic who lives up the road, even though I’ve been as sober as a judge for thirteen weeks now (and counting…).
Moving on, it takes courage to start blogging, and whilst I don’t necessarily share your particular kinks I’m always interested in what turns others on, and I appreciate good writing.
12:35 pm
Hi Steve, good to have you reading this!
There is an extent, as you say, to which our whole selves do not necessarily fit into the views which others have formed about us, no matter how thoughtfully and carefully they may have been formed, and also an extent to which those views are prone to lag behind the reality of the situation.
I spent a few years in a very bad place, and I have only really come out of it properly over the last half year or so. I am currently going through the lengthy process of updating my old friends’ views of me, in line with the current ‘model’, and remaking connections which fell out of use in the intermediary period.
Well done for getting sober, seriously, and for staying there. You talk about the amount of courage necessary to start blogging, but the amount of courage it takes to come out of something like that and start rebuilding what you had before, well, that takes staggering amounts of it. Keep it up, and keep counting.
Glad you like the writing, too. :o)