Walking My Path

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.

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.