eiblyn: (Default)
And so into the midst of my gender identity crisis comes a new addition. One of my g/f's is currently struggle to deal with some sexual issues and so I have been giving her lots of space, as she requested, and trying my damndest not to get jealous when she is involved with all the other people I date except me. *sighs* All right so that sounded a bit harsher than the reality, but the truth of the matter is that she will make out with my other g/f but won't let me touch her. My touch makes her freeze. Apparently I'm too masculine and so I make all of her alarm bells go off (tears still roll down my cheeks thinking about this). But she is now planning to be involved with a MAN that I date. True he and I are nothing serious and refuse to even think about going there again, but that's not the point. Is it possible that I am more masculine than the men I date? *sighs* That scares me. I'm just so goddamn angry. She knows that I'm having issues with my gender identity right now and that I feel more neutral than anything else and she knows that I'm trying to deal with my unbalanced masculinity and feminity. It may be the truth that I'm too masculine for her...but I don't know how to deal with that. I don't think it'll ever change and I'm honestly not sure I want it to. So maybe it's just time for me to move on...6 months isn't too bad..*sighs* I just don't want to hurt her
eiblyn: (Default)
I have never viewed myself as particularly feminine. In fact, that seems to be something that my mother has discouraged in me. But I never truly saw this as a problem until my women's studies class. Suddenly I am faced with the fact that every quality I see within myself that I admire I associate with being masculine. For some reason I think certain emotions are weak and so I rebel against them.

Crying is the bane of my existence at many times. I struggle so hard for people not to see me cry because I feel as if it makes me appear incapable of taking care of myself. Why is it that I feel like self-sufficient people don't cry? Why do I feel as if adults don't cry and by allowing myself to cry I'm being childish? Why do I try to hide my feelings of hurt and loneliness from everyone around me?

I am a dominate person. But somehow in my personal programming I decided that in order to be dominate I had to be masculine. And so I feel lost as if I must forsake everything that is pretty and girly in order to be in control of my life. I even have two different kinds of soap...one kind is Old Spice and one is scented like roses. I have two kinds of shampoo...one is unscented and one smells like vanilla. Often it feels as if I have two different parts of me warring over what I am going to be. I even see it in my relationships some. When I am attracted to women we are either equal or I am dominant. But with most of the men I have ever been with I have always made myself submissive in my lifestyle. It's never a conscious choice...it just happens. And then I'll wake up next to a man one morning and realize that neither of us are happy because I am not the woman he was attracted to (i.e. strong and independent) and that I am miserable because I am not being myself. I feel as if I'm trying to forsake my womanhood and live a life that is gender neutral. I keep my hair short and hide my body a lot. I often smell like a man and even when I use girl soap and girl shampoo I still use men's deodorant. I struggle to be emotionless in any emotion I deem weak or negative.

Most importantly...I want to stop. I want to find a way to be ok with being a woman. I want to find a satisfaction in myself that I don't think I've really known. I want to look at myself and think that I'm beautiful because I'm a woman not in spite of being a woman.
eiblyn: (Default)
My short term class for this year was on gender roles in the Arthurian Cycle which was then related to gender roles in society and modern life. This really makes me wonder about the gender roles in my own relations. My semi-domesticated partner and I definitely had gender roles in our relationship. But they were not quite conventional because I would cook, he would mow the grass...but he was incapable of handling any type of mechanical malfunction within our home and I was horrible at being motivated to clean. I can honestly say that there were quite a few nights when the words, "Honey, will you clean the bathtub so that I can take a bath? My shoulders hurt but it's looking kinda scary in there." came out of my mouth and he, being the wonderful man that he is, would go clean the bathtub. But by the same token I've also been in relationships where I cooked, cleaned and did the laundry and he played guitar and watched movies. Maybe the difference is sex. I've often noticed that I am far more likely to clean up after a man, or woman for that matter, if I am in love with them/having sex with them. My semi-domesticated partner was just that...someone that I shared my domestic life with but had no interest in sleeping with any more than he had any interest in sleeping with me. I love him...but in more of a "You-have-slept-naked-with-me-and-held-me-when-I-cried-at-night" kind of way. I think somehow I got it into my head that taking care of someone's household was showing them that I loved them. My mother does this all the time for my father...and she always puts the bread on his sandwhiches so that the tops don't match as her way of saying I love you. The question really becomes then, "Is it bad that I feel this way?" And I don't really think I know the answer.
eiblyn: (Default)
I was contemplating today the way in which I interact with other people trying to analyze my motives. Most intriguing to me are the moments in which I interact with those I do not know as opposed to those I am very close to. I have found that more often than not I act in a manner that has been defined by myself. Or at least I would like to think that I take the time to observe my own life and decide the manner in which I would like to behave. I must honestly consider that perhaps most of what I see as my self-defined code of behavior is adapted from the forced roles placed upon me by society.

Perhaps what I am more trying to determine is, how often do I truly think for myself instead of swallowing what others tell me? This is brought to mind by the discussions of the role of medieval women in my Gender in Camelot class. We have discussed that medieval women had little political power compared to their male contemporaries and they had fewer ways of disclosing their dissatisfaction with their governing system (nobility specifically which most noble women were hesitant to criticize as this was a system that kept them out of the fields with the peasants) as a majority of women could not read or write. Furthermore, of those that could read and write even fewer could read and write in Latin, which was considered one of the major languages of scholarship. All of this history was basically a wake up call to myself in which I needed to examine my own thought patterns and my own life and see how much of it I was living for myself and not for the way the rest of the world sees me. I don't suppose there is any easy way to try and measure this that would come out anywhere akin to accurate. But I do not consider this line of thinking to be a waste of time because it is only if I ask these questions and examine myself constantly can I hope to be true to myself.

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eiblyn

April 2015

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