Sandpaper

Sometimes I think all my nerves endings  must be right on the surface
because I  feel the roughness of the world
like sandpaper rubbing against my skin.

The unwelcome of hurried lives,
the abrupt endings,
and  the sharpness of quick and thoughtless words,
scrape against me,
leaving cuts and scratches that I can't help but take personally. 

I run away and curl up in a protective ball to lick my wounds,
but  loneliness  draws me back out again.
I long for gentleness, for unhurried connection, 
for the slow caress  of attention,  
the  welcome  of thoughtful kindness, 
 and the warm softness of love.

Tired

Some days there just doesn't seem to be a point to any of it. I'm so tired of being different; tired of having  to explain myself. tired of having to ask for clarification or for special consideration, and  I'm tired of when I do ask, feeling like I'm asking too much.

I will never be, think, or see the  world like most people, and I'm tired of feeling  like there's something wrong with me because I don't, or because my healthy doesn't look like what others expect. I'm tired of having that difference judged as "still not well yet" because it doesn't look like the well of people who have lived totally different lives then mine. I'm tired of trying to live up to standards of thinking, seeing and doing that I will never be able to accomplish, and feeling like there's is something wrong with me because I don't. 

But what I'm most tired of, is being told that the reason I feel these things is because I have self confidence issues or don't know how to love myself, and if I didn't judged myself and others so harshly, I would feel loved and connected to all. 

How forgiveness has changed me

How forgiveness has change me

(As shared as a personal reflection on the Febuary 14th service at the first Unitarian Church of Victoria)

I have never hidden the fact that I grew up in less than ideal circumstances, and that I’ve had a lot of baggage and interpersonal relationship problems that I’ve had to work though, …am still working though, because of that experience. Part of my healing process was to extricated  myself from blame.  Blaming oneself is common to those who have suffered abuse, so I had to start with the work of recognizing where the responsibility for my childhood experiences lay to begin with. Without going into details, the end result was that I didn’t speak with my father for a very long time, and I thought that I would never speak to him again.

In March, 2013, I got a phone call from my brother, telling me that our father was in the hospital, that a neighbour had found him lying unconscious next to his car, surrounded by the groceries he had just brought home, …and that he had been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. 

Have you ever been convinced that you'd never forgive someone, and then when you did, you found  it was just the thing you needed to do?  ...It was a difficult decision to make, but I finally decided to phone my father. …The first words I remember him saying were: "When are you coming home?"

At first I thought he was confused, and I explained to him that I was home, here, in Victoria, but then I realized what he was asking me, and I knew then that everything had changed between us. He was old and sick, and he was the one who was vulnerable now. He was asking me to come home to see him before he died, and at that very moment I forgave him. 

I flew out east and went to see him in the hospital in Halifax - spent two weeks there. At first it all seemed so anti-climatic after the revelation I had while speaking to him on the phone.  There was no moment of reconciliation or apology, no outpouring of regret; only one small statement that he had offered two or three times, seemingly out of the blue; “as long as you are happy” he said, which I later realized was his way of telling me that he accepted my queer lifestyle.

 

This was an incredible gift in itself, as I never expected anything like that from him … but the best gift of all didn’t appear until after he had died. I began to  remember the times that he and I had gone fishing, and berry picking together,  ...how he had taught me how to bait a hook, how to light a campfire, and where to find Mayflowers in the spring. 

These are precious memories for me, and I believe my love of nature began there.  ... Not everything was bad while I was growing up, but the bad had covered up what good there was, and made it inaccessible. 

In forgiving my father I got those good memories back along with the realization of how significant they were in my life. Until then, I thought forgiveness was just something that you gave to someone else.  Little did I know how personally transforming and healing it could be.  I hope he got something from it, as well. 

Where has forgiveness taken you?

Hope

I’ve always been a defender of the underdog. I can remember as a child, even wanting to be black so that I could better understand what it was like, and then be able to speak more intelligently in defence of racial acceptance.  

Well, my skin colour never changed, but in a way, I did get my wish. I turned out to be transgender and queer, not just  pasty white; I have my very own personal set of differences to live with, speak  up for, and defend, …and, it's not always been easy. 

As a member of this church community, those difficulties are fading from my life. Not only have I found a place where I feel welcome, but as a Worship Associate I have found a way to turn my particular life experiences, the good and the bad, into something positive, something that might just help others like me find their way.  

And so I feel hopeful for my human family thinking that if my life can be so dramatically changed with love and acceptance, then so can the lives of others, and this world then can become a better place, one person at a time... 

This past month, however, I’ve had a bit of difficulty hanging onto that hope.  If all the terrorist attacks, wars and refugee crisis hadn’t  been enough to fling me into a deep despair, it’s back lash of mistrust and hateful xenophobia had. The shear magnitude of the amount of work that needs to be done to heal this world overwhelmed me and made my contributions seem inconsequential.

But then something quite  miraculous happened. 

A fellow church member posted a message of hope on our Facebook page, and that lead me to another message, and then another, and then pretty soon I was also sharing those messages.

Then our membership decided to sponsor a refugee family, and the weight on my heart lifted. 

I felt like celebrating because I suddenly realized that our UU Faith is not just based on the belief that each individual has the spark of love inside of them, but together we keep that flame burning in each other. With each of us doing our small part, we can keep that hope alive, and with that hope, I believe we can make a real difference in this world.  I know that it has made a huge difference in mine. 

(As presented as a personal reflection during the Dec. 6th First Unitarian Church of Victoria Sunday Service)

Working Towards Wholeness

All my life I needed someone to listen to my story. It seemed almost like an obsession; I would tell everyone, again and again, looking for something, I didn't know what.   I thought it was sympathy that I craved, but in hindsight I realized that what I really needed was to be heard, understood, and accepted so that I could then move beyond that need. 

My search led me to my Unitarian Universalist church, and even after 6 years of attending, every time I hear my Ministers speak of acceptance, connection, belonging, understanding and love for all..., tears stream down my face. Mostly now it's because I am deeply touched by our interconnection and common need for such things, but there is still deep healing happening in me; I can feel it. 

Now as a Worship Associate, I have been given the opportunity to tell my story, but this time the reason I am telling it is so that others like me will feel that welcome and the sense of belonging that I was given, so that they might also find a place to heal and become whole.  There is nothing more meaningful that I can do in this life than pass on that gift, and that too helps heal what was broken in me. 

In my church we speak about ministry as being what we as individuals can contribute to our larger community. My ministry is to work toward healing, to help make whole that which has been broken.  I share my stories now, not for kudos or personal gain, but to help dismantle the walls of otherness and the division they causes in this world. Even if those listening do not relate to my experiences, I hope that they can relate to my vulnerability and and our shared humanity.  For it is my belief that if we allowed ourselves and each other to be exactly who we are with all of our differences and imperfections, we will shed our disconnection and disassociation, and slowly, but surely, our world and all that's in it will begin to heal and become whole. 

Today I Will Be Peace

Boys and Girls, Ladies and Gentlemen.....

Boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, his and her’s, ... when I hear these words, I hear a list of expectations that I have never been able to quite live up to.

 "Boys are made of snips and snails, and puppy dog tails, and girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice." 

Ladies and gentlemen behave as perfectly acceptable examples of their socially assigned roles, with ladies being quiet and demure, and gentlemen being strong and supportive, politely opening doors and generally offering assistance to the weaker sex. ... I never really liked the idea of being weaker.

And the 'his and her’s', well those are our assigned clothing and accessory choices: his are practical, durable and comfortable, and her’s are frilly, pink, patterned, tight and revealing. … Let me tell you, ‘real men’ are much better at wearing pink than I am. 

I’ve always had difficulty fitting my whole self into the expectations of my birth assigned gender. … Snails and puppy dog tails seemed much more appealing to me than sugar and spice, … and quiet and demure, well, you can forget that one altogether. 

 

My gender expression tends to be fluid, somewhere in the middle and leaning a bit more toward the masculine side,  just as my personality contains both masculine and feminine  characteristics.

 … It’s not rocket science though; I should have figured it out a long time ago. I am  

what many Indigenous people call two-spirited. I now identify as transgender, but it wasn’t until recent years that I discovered that I had a choice; not until all these brave young trans people started to speak out about who they are and about how gender should not be dictated by the binary opposites of male and female. 

He and she were the only options our language gave me, and I believed I somehow had to make myself fit into those boxes, and I tried. I really did.

Now that I’ve tasted this new freedom, I can’t go back.  I can no longer call myself a woman without somehow feeling that I am telling a lie, and I’m really big on telling the truth. 

So what do I do now? What pronouns do I accept other’s using when they refer to me, ... what pronouns do 'I' use, when I’ve never really seen those that I have been using as being mine in the first place?

How are you? I am fine, thank you.

Recently I've caught myself asking the how are you question as a greeting and not waiting for a real answer, and I hope I caught this in time to stop it from becoming a habit. ... I want my exchanges to be real. When I ask, "how are you", I want the one I'm asking to know that I care enough about them to ask, and that I am wanting to hear their answer. ...It doesn't have to take long; we can all judge how much time we have to connect with each other and then gage our exchanges accordingly, and we can continue the conversation at a later time if need be...

But more often than not when I ask such a question I receive the standard "I'm fine, thank-you". And so I'm not exactly sure what it is I'm being thanked for.

If I had a magic wand I think I'd eliminate ALL this kind of false talk so that 'real' communication and connection can take place. ... It's becoming common knowledge that disconnection is one of the most common ailments of our time, and possibly one that causes so many others. ...We also know that it's possible to be kind and considerate without lying, and seriously, I think if someone finds that difficult then they need to take a look at the reason why.

I think our wanting to make things expedient and less demanding of ourselves is one of the reasons we end up feeling disconnected and unfulfilled. And then we all go off and look for something else to fill that need, something quicker and more imediately gratifying....

I believe that real exchanges are a good place to start to healing our broken world.

Uninhibited ramblings

A connection is a joyously shared responsibly, for a mutual understanding. But a slippage in that understanding can cause each  to take to their own corners in defence, no longer accepting responsibly for the beautiful oneness their past commitment had created . 

Maybe the world needs a naysayer or two. Someone to remind us that we need to stop occasionally and evaluate whether or not our good intentions are actually hitting their mark. 

Remembering the free and uninhibited conversations I once had in college while sharing a toke with a friend, tempts me to put out an advertisement saying: Wanted, someone to get high with; please feel free to jump into the conversation at anytime.

I sometimes worry that to be happy we need to see the world and all that exists on it through rose coloured glasses. We can be beautiful in our anger, profound in our sadness; there can be  no light without darkness, and if we are to keep moving  we have to accept that shadows are part of the journey. 

Imperfect

The next time you feel judged, try to remember that you are imperfect, but so am I, and so is everyone else. We live in an imperfect world where communication is at its best far from perfect.  Whether each of us are aware of it or not, our imperfections are part of our shared human experience, each of us doing the best that we can from whatever place we are occupying at that time. …It’s a wonder that we are ever on the same page.

It’s not necessary that we get it right every time; what is necessary is that we keep trying, and that we grant each other, and ourselves the grace to mess up occasionally and to begin again when we do.