Dear women and men, men and women. I also felt somewhat triggered and found myself sensing some wokeness and victimhood and an endless competition and futile verbal back/forth of “who suffered the most”. As was said: we probably all had various incarnations and hence had plenty of lives to endure as men as well as women in various settings. And we here know: all there is is lesson.
It is important to see and experience the various disadvantages but also advantages both genders encounter. There are so many variables, though: country, era, family, physical/mental etc. fitness. Those in the Work we will have gone through various types of additional suffering and arduous seeking to distinguish between false and real suffering, for example. And it sure has been making a lot of sense to me when I remember Gurdjieff/Ouspensky stating something along the lines of: people are prepared to give up all sorts of things but not their (false) suffering.
It seems we generally love to wallow in our suffering and it’s hard to break that. One can endlessly talk and write about it: even in a resolved sounding fashion and with a lot of insight, but life throws us many tests and before we know it we may resort to old strategies and coping mechanisms: blaming, shaming, victimhood, envy, jealousy, passive aggressiveness etc. are never as far away as I like to think. I put a lot of my many processes into arty fragment form (more my forte than linear writing) and like to call it “walking in as many moccasins as I could possibly muster” but I mean to be careful not to hijack his thread with my works.
I hope it’s fitting enough for this thread to share one of my more linear works here. It is a text I wrote quite a while ago (in light of past lives as opposed to where I am in this life). Bear with me - as the contemplation unfolds, the woman relevance gets clearer:
So here is the text:
Let me - for the sake of argument - contemplate this as a hypothesis:
Gayness in my past life (whether true or not seems less important than what I may be learning from it)
A lot would make sense. Why was I so inordinately interested in gayness? Why did I read many a book by them, watched films, listened intensly to gay songs, felt for their being missunderstood and rejected etc. Felt gay love to be higher, better, more beautiful than hetero-love.
Why did I love this gay teacher so much? I loved him and often felt confused - forgetting that I was a woman (though not wishing to be a man myself). Admiring him for loving men and not falling for women. Not being trapped by women but at the same time being a woman and being in a woman’s body and all the emotional set up that a woman experiences. I cannot say that I wanted to have a man’s body but I sure recall wanting to have the playful lightness and shruggy “don’t care”-attitude so prevalent among men who don’t feel its their job to look after everyone’s (emotional) needs. Though I have to say I also felt deeply for the emotional pain of others! Far too much so. Which may be at least one reason- though by no means an excuse - for “jumping out” (overwhelmed by others’ pain).
The child in an adult body, the playfulness, the comics, superman etc. versus household chores, cooking, changing nappies .
Yearning to occupy oneself with ”more important” but also: lighter things.
Oh yes.
Confused. But also not at all.
Tidy clean scrub.
Learning to care about women by being a woman, by learning - the hard way - what it’s like to have to go through all things woman.
It would make sense for me to think I might have been a gay man and perhaps for several lives.
Also: my strange moves, my searches, my going all over the place, my deep feeling for others but at the same time feeling trapped and scared and freaked out by all the demanding, disappointed, pained emotions coming my way and even more: my own very demanding emotions that - one might say- I was totally unfamiliar with. It’s like: o.k. I run away from the overbearing emotional demands and chains only to find out that I myself am wired that way and have to find a way of healthifying them.
Again: as if I was still kind of confusing myself for a gay man and relating to being one while at the same time experiencing my strange (kind of more male typical) moves as a woman with all the dire consequences that resulted from that. So: not understanding that my way of doing things clash with a woman’s emotional and physical make up. So: doing male things but paying for the wrong moves as a woman (does that make any sense?).
It’s as if I had to learn, really really learn what it’s like to be a woman with a woman’s body and realizing what it means for a woman to be a woman.
Learning - slowly slowly - to be more compassionate towards women. Not that gay men aren’t. We often feel: on the contrary: of all the men, they are often the ones who really feel for women but they are also often scared esless of women’s bonding emotions gone wrong: the possessive/devouring emotions. That’s perhaps why there is often a - what I call - almost cruel cut off point. All the understanding for women and feeling for them makes neglected, possessive women want to attach themselves more and more to their consolers. The problem is: a gay may be understanding but he is usually also repelled by the sexuality of a woman. He does not want to “go there”. So that understanding that many women crave and get from gays only goes so far and then there is no fullfilment, which may possibly be worse than not getting to that point of feeling understood. Because it does not go all the way. So gays, while often being far more understanding, do not have to solidly/reliably be there for the women and bear them on a daily basis. That’s where long suffering hetero man comes in. A loyal - even if sometimes less emotionally understanding - hetero will go to great lengths to be there for his woman. He wants to be with her. He goes all the way and puts up with everything that needs to be put up with as best as he can but many a woman will make him feel he is not available, understanding enough. Women are usually (emotionally) super demanding.
I have often seen it: a gay man being so very understanding of a woman’s plight and woes to the point of hyper-empathizing, then getting scared and panicked and “SLAM” EMERGENCY EXIT! The door is slammed shut, the gay must recover from near annihilation, find his own self, his emotions, his separateness from the devouring female. PHEW!
So in my case again: I run, I slam, I hide, I send women (and men) on wild goose chases so as to have a bit of breathing space, of separateness, of feeling myself and just as I am starting to feel fine and dandy in my hide-y space, the shock of shocks hits me: I am my own chainer, I am my own overbearing female, the neglected, disappointed, tearful, chainy, possessive, jealously guarding ENEMY!
NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
AAAAARGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
I cannot hide and shut out the WOMAN - I have to befriend her. I myself am one in this life and it’s just not constructive to antagonize, to flee from myself.
I am that which I am afraid of…..Arrrrghhhhh!
Yea and women are so possessive —— noooooooo- I AM (sometimes)
Yea and women are so bitchy and backbiting - NNNNNNOOOO - I AM (sometimes)
Yea and women are so manipulative and passive aggressive - NNNNNNNNOOOO - I AM (sometimes
Yea and women… can be so sweet and loving and warm and understanding and allowing and supportive and… (sometimes)
Learning realer, more reality abiding compassion.
For male and female, actually.
Ah, that’s why women are so difficult. O.k.
Ah, that’s why men are so difficult. O.k.
Ah, now I understand more and more and more. Ah, now I cannot so easily point fingers (sometimes) hm.
In any case, this discussion is not really about subjective personal experiences of women per se, but that women can share their personal, subjective experiences in order to look at and consider them in a more objective way, with some helpful input from others. Objective truth is genderless.
