In Consideration of The Great Deity: Perspective, Wild Women, Gender Identity

I started writing this a few weeks ago, feeling the need to skip ahead briefly, veer off the current path I have chosen to take with this blog, in order to discuss some recent, important shadow work.

I wanted to take advantage of Pride Month and share my life's struggles with gender identity.

The next part to my Past Life is mostly done, I just need to add to it/edit it.

I will start out with the story of La Loba (The Wolf Woman)

As relayed by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.:

THERE IS AN OLD WOMAN who lives in a hidden place that everyone knows in their souls but few have ever seen. As in the fairy tales of Eastern Europe, she seems to wait for lost or wandering people and seekers to come to her place.

She is circumspect, often hairy, always fat, and especially wishes to evade most company. She is both a crower and a cackler, generally having more animal sounds than human ones. I might say she lives among the rotten granite slopes in Tarahu- mara Indian territory. Or that she is buried outside Phoenix near a well. Perhaps she will be seen traveling south to Monte Albán in a burnt-out car with the back window shot out.

Or maybe she will be spotted standing by the highway near El Paso, or riding shotgun with truckers to Morelia, Mexico, or walking to market above Oaxaca with strangely formed boughs of firewood on her back. She calls herself by many names: La Huesera, Bone Woman; La Trapera, The Gatherer, and La Loba, Wolf Woman.

The sole work of La Loba is the collecting of bones. She collects and preserves especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world. Her cave is filled with the bones of all manner of desert creatures: the deer, the rattlesnake, the crow. But her specialty is wolves.

She creeps and crawls and sifts through the montañas, mountains, and arroyos, dry riverbeds, looking for wolf bones, and when she has assembled an entire skeleton, when the last bone is in place and the beautiful white sculpture of the creature is laid out before her, she sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing.

And when she is sure, she stands over the criatura, raises her arms over it, and sings out That is when the rib bones and leg bones of the wolf begin to flesh out and the creature becomes furred. La Loba sings some more, and more of the creature comes into being; its tail curls upward, shaggy and strong.

And La Loba sings more and the wolf creature begins to breathe.

And still La Loba sings so deeply that the floor of the desert shakes, and as she sings, the wolf opens its eyes, leaps up, and runs away down the canyon.

Somewhere in its running, whether by the speed of its running, or by splashing its way into a river, or by way of a ray of sunlight or moonlight hitting it right in the side, the wolf is suddenly transformed into a laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon.

Perspective

I remember turning twenty and staring out at the sun setting on my nineteenth year, the curtain closing on the year of my life when everything seemed to have happened to me all at once in a very short amount of time.

I was left enervated and feeling like a dehydrated husk, my soul inconceivably dry, not even visual color was as vibrant as it once was, like someone turned the saturation down to way low.

I went out of my mind for a little while, right after I was raped in my brother’s house on the bed his dirty dog slept on.

That night, I hadn’t slept.

“I am poured out like water,

 and all my bones are out of joint.

My heart has turned to wax;

    it has melted within me.

My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,

    and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;

    you lay me in the dust of death.” - Psalms 22:14-15

I consider The Deity often, I may forget to pray but all day long thoughts of God run on in the background of my mind, even when I’m not conscious of it. If you have real faith in God, you know the bond you have is closer than you know is reasonably or even rationally possible. And that bond deeply affects both your conscious and unconscious.

+++

Frame of mind matters in this life far more than anything that can and will happen. Tweak it, fine tune it, find the romance in all aspects of life, find out what fills you up.

Good perspective is true wealth.

Everything we experience is bringing us closer to our purpose fulfilled.

When people say “God is in control,” what they mean is: everything in your path is working on the side of God even if the obstacle is unaware of it.

I wish I had known that many years ago, I wish I had known so many things, had been as awake as I feel now, but the journey has to happen, with all the bumps and scrapes and nightmares, abuse, self harm, causing harm to others…

When you feel it all too deeply, detachment is like letting the tension out.

At the very beginning of my true faith journey of going into my twenties, the idea of detachment intrigued me, as well as philosophy in general.

After such a traumatic event, I needed to detach or I’d go insane, as a deeply sensitive person to the point of physical and mental anguish, I knew I was going to die if I did not learn how.

So detachment is a part of it, for me.

I was prone to dissociation early on plus maladaptive daydreaming which is a mental survival tactic that I feel is more of a self-induced, natural drug and a super power rather than a disorder.

I always feel it is just a part of the artist’s journey to embrace the intense waking dreams that can both terrify and enchant, most artists I know have crazy vivid images in their brains that helps them to create easier, demands it, even.

But I digress:

The spiritual gong was ringing at this point, and I was getting serious about my faith which trumped all else. I had always believed in God, I just became absolutely obsessed with Him post-rape.

And so, I went into a really dark five years; the first half of twenties was a fucking nightmare town with my sleep paralysis demon as the mayor. For real. I started to have so much terrifying sleep paralysis and stopped being able to take naps which is when that kind of thing usually occurred.

I had no idea how resentful I would become a little later on. People outside my immediate family would point out some abuse and I would act utterly shocked and offended, but the truth eventually sank in.

I began to become so aggravated often, I was disgruntled for having not been properly civilized whatsoever, for being locked away and not being prepared for the real world.

It was such a rocky start to my adult life, nowhere near where I had planned to be.

I wanted to be a housewife so badly. I wanted to be married to a wonderful man and have a ton of kids and be at home with them, and be happy and not have to work!!!!!!

That was my final dream after my big dreams of riches and popularity died, family was always in the cards for me. The reality began to set in after I began to date, that a lot more men need to be castrated and put on an island far away from society than I originally thought. Great men don’t grow on trees, they fall out of the sky once every blue moon.

I was angry that I wasn’t born in a time when things were cheaper and a traditional, one-income family lifestyle wasn’t just easy for upper middle class homes. But also, our labor situation is FUCKING INSANE WITH MINIMUM WAGE STILL BEING $7.25 WHAT!

I acted out a lot, putting myself in incredibly dangerous situations. I felt like a wisp, like a floating body so much of the time, just numbing out. I was desperate to forget that so far in life, I was failing at everything: shitty community college, shitty, dead-end jobs where I felt sick going into work everyday, shitty relationships, shitty, shitty, shitty.

But all the while, I really tried to remain a faithful, committed Christian. No matter what chaotic spiral I was headed down one week, I was always in some church on Sunday. I needed it like water, even if it was counterfeit Eucharist, I was constantly trying to get any drop of spiritual milk I could. But the Bible belt feels more like a wilderness than sanctified ground; many of these churches run like businesses, devoid of any beauty. I worked for a Nazarene Church for a few years, so I know a thing or two.

I remember feeling so intimated and afraid the first time I stepped into an Orthodox Christian church, now I know I could never live without the core-deep, spiritual sustenance it provides my soul.

Each breath we take is either against our will or in collaboration with the Creator, no in between. I think will comes after our instinct, or our primal animal urges. Instinctively we want to survive but we can always bypass our instincts unlike all other animals.

We are co-creators with God.

The weight of a burdensome circumstance can either crush our soul or prepare us for a bloodier battle ahead; the difference, how you look at it, is life and death.

Nature teaches us how to live harmoniously; through the tides we learn how simply life operates, pushing and pulling, rising and falling, being born and dying, the snake eating it’s own tail.

The absence of fear allows for us to do magic, and allows the muses of life to play with us.

Allow me to try and break it down like this:

The human world is a mess of tangled, thorny mazes. We turned paradise into a rotten playground of debauchery and murder. We play power games to keep the ego pumped full of hot air so we can float safely along in our stinky, engorged bubble that capitalism provides.

Your lack is my gain, only the ones with the sharpest teeth can even the score.

We are born screaming and flailing and until we grow up and learn to trust, we will die that way: screaming and flailing.

Don’t resist the flow, don’t fight it, awaken all of your senses to your weakness and God’s strength and His strength will vibrate through your nervous system, freshly lighting up each of your cells.

If the heat has turned up all of a sudden in your world, you can be assured that you are being shaped in that fire in order to survive a coming siege. Our ancestors and the Saints in Heaven, through their prayers, mix into the incense burnt to stimulate the nostrils of God above. The silhouettes of our prostrating ancestors dance in the shadow of the candle’s glow.

We have spiritual help, thank God.

So often I ask, “why?”

Some of my many therapists have asked me, "why do you need to know so badly? What will knowing accomplish?"

I don't know, man. I just need to know the reason, I want to connect the dots, fly above it, get a bird’s eye view, then trap it in a glass slide, stick it under the microscope. I'm curious, reckless, conceited.

I am Icarus.

We were created in the Creator’s image but with limits in comparison to Himself. Think of the end of time, try to mentally picture it. You glitch, you hit the wall, don't you?

Now most likely, if God were to allow us to think beyond what is possible in this dimension, we would fragment our feeble minds, the bone plates of our skulls figuratively collapsing in on itself like a black hole.

Spirit is animation and can only exist within a body, only God Himself is an outlaw to the rules.

And Glory to God.

I digress:

My perspective, through the right amount of detachment and also having a child, has been converted into finding magic in small things, rediscovering the beauty of nature up close, deepening my empathy as I daily see dead Palestinian children; my child and the children in my family and my friends’ children are all safe with all of their body parts attached to them, un-scorched, bones intact.

Rich, healthy perspective helps to positively touch the lives of those around us; it’s all energy

We can influence angels.

I envision a world full of peace and humor and most of all: true, awe-inspiring connection between people.

My body and my home is a little more alive with this kind of energy each day, not despite the bad days, but because of them. We try to take this energy we are working so hard to grow at home and give it out to others now. I think everyone just needs to be a little (or a lot) less up their own ass, and I am talking more to myself than anyone else.

Back in those less ripe years, I was so innocent and wholeheartedly trusted everyone I met; I discovered that I absolutely LOVE people which would prove to be a blessing and a curse because people are also very odd. (But when we accept people for who they are with no judgement, we find that we get along with most everyone)

Mentally, I was still a little kid; my mouth even held onto four of my baby teeth, two of which remain to this day.

I had been a late-bloomer, too: I was sixteen-and-a-half when I started my period. I had a job at a plant nursery with my brother, and as I stood there in the late June sun watering pots and pots of red hibiscus, I became a woman.

Womanhood

Slowly, later than most other girls my age, I began to develop into my adult body. I felt less mature, less graceful, less feminine than other girls. Women and girls fascinated me, I desperately wanted to keep up, to be a lady, but have fun and be free, too. I wanted to do it all with no barriers in my way.

While playing house as a child, if there were no boys around I was always more than willing to fulfill the role of husband. I would settle in nicely, puff myself up to be noble and strong, proud to be the boy version of myself I secretly got an odd satisfaction visualizing myself to be.

me @ 17 lol I did this for a Halloween contest, to Skype with my favorite spoken word band at the time. I was dressed as the lead singer: Dan Smith .I won lol

I looked so much like my brother, we got mistaken for twins all time when we were little; I was constantly compared to my father, even as I type this, the tears come because I just didn’t feel even worthy of calling myself a female for so many years. Honestly I think I felt that way up until I gave birth, it was like having a baby proved to myself that I was actually a woman, which is completely fucked up!!!!!!!

I feel sad that I felt that way.

The delay in puberty even more so confirmed that maybe I was intersex, I remember even asking my mom once, to which she laughed. So I just stuffed it down more.

I remember how massively painful and lonely it was to feel like I should be something I wasn’t. I had no idea what it was so I just carried on. It did seem to get easier the older I got.

Purity culture was definitely prominent as it is for many folks growing up evangelical, but sex was also revered, respected, highly praised in my household when it came to the context within marriage, and I do agree with that statement, go figure, I am still a Christian at the end of the day. BUT I am not judging.

My patron saint is the woman at the well who spoke to Jesus; she was a lil ho’ and Jesus still connected deeply with her and she gained her ultimate purpose in life: to share the well Water of Life with others.

It’s pride month, and I was raised to be disgusted by LGBTQ+ people. I remember wondering why they called it “homophobia” and now I know from my own injected fear that it is true.

Now I am convinced that literally everyone on Earth is a little queer.

My mom has always been so homophobic and even more so transphobic, if I had turned out to be a trans kid, I feel like she would disown me. That bitch and I are tight, so that should tell you something about the extent of her deep disgust in the existence of trans people. She has no idea that when she and I have trouble relating in the same stereotypically “feminine” way, I become “just like your father”

I recently had the thought that perhaps the energy of my stillborn baby uncle still sort of hangs around in my maternal grandparents. Wade was the first born child to them. Hours after his first breath he returned to the Light.

My grandparents never got over it, because of course they didn’t, you never forget that trauma and no one is ever the same after losing a child.

But my grandfather has always been very vocal about wishing he had a son and I believe that maybe my mother might have struggled with her gender as well, she was a tomboy all her life and was seen as less feminine or important in comparison to her highly favored sister. She wanted/wants so badly to please her father, I think she tried her best to fulfill the role of son.

I think if I had turned out to be fully lesbian my mom wouldn’t have as much of an issue.

Which is just awesome for a daughter who struggled with her gender more than her sexuality.

Though, I do have a memory of being like six or seven years old, seeing Tina Louise play that hot girl from Gilligan’s Island in a cheetah print bikini and then closing the door of my bedroom and going to town on my ratty, life-sized Barbie my dad found behind a dumpster on one of his jobs. LOL. I always knew I was attracted to women, I could never deny that. I hated/dislike my own breasts but adored/adore them on other women.

Tina Louise <3

I mean, have you seen women? God. Being around them makes me feel alive and at ease (beautiful women are especially a weakness of mine)

BUT why do I feel like an equal yet an imposter at the same time in a room full of women?

I am so mesmerized by the shape of them their softness, sweetness, their wisdom drenched in honey that can only radiate from our sacred wombs, no matter what age (perspective comes in handy here with both genders, finding the poetry in all things)

I deeply respect the feminine spirit; especially all of the wild women on Earth. Women are masters of pleasure and pain.

I am also terrified of disappointing my female counterparts, my sisters; their coyness makes me nervous yet intrigued, their shyness makes me feel like nurturing something, because I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress. I want to be open and authentic, forgiving, and long-suffering with other women.

I’ve genuinely fallen in love with women and I have had opportunities to be intimate them but I’ve just never felt the need or that deep of an urge. I know I would like it, but I honestly know deep down that my most prominent, primal sexual needs can really only be scratched by the opposite sex, I have too complicated of a daddy wound that I am just starting to truly heal now.

When you feel it all too deeply, detachment is like letting the tension out.

But I also feel so at ease with men, I feel I understand them a little bit from all my experience growing up with so many of them around. I have and have had rich friendships with men, and I have healed much of my anger and distrust of them now that I am married and have a son.

I feel like I have gone through life looking for my lost brothers.

And it's painful to think about the friendships I have lost. One friendship in particular tore me up when he walked away; his name was Jordan. He was a 6'1, 300 lb black man who lived with his mom and made great beats.

We would sit in his truck late at night in his mom's driveway, take massive bong rips and listen to his favorite music, the bass turned all the way up.

We sat and laughed till we cried and peed, and philosophized, empathized, harmonized, even made a little music together. He taught me about my strongly rooted racism, helped me to unpack it, and he introduced me to R&B, rap, soul, gospel, etc. I was in awe of his tastes and his talents. He had the deepest, silkiest voice I had ever heard and his poetry was out of this world.

He was convinced I had spiritual powers, but I think we just clicked.

His health wasn't the greatest because of his physical condition. I just wasn't attracted to him in that way, but I loved him down to his soul.

I still think about him from time to time, he truly changed my life.

I don't know if I even feel comfortable talking anymore about my masculine tendencies right now, because it's embarrassing to admit, and it takes a lot for me to feel that way.

Definitely in the future when I have more of that sorted out, I will open up more.

+++

At the end of the day, I think I am just a girl with a weird upbringing; if my parents hadn’t been so obsessed with comparing me to the male figures in my life while also trying to mold me into the perfect, most obedient, Evangelical, feminine girl playing her gender roles in their ideal fashion, I probably wouldn’t have struggled like I did, but also it made me into who I am: a little bit of both.

Or I may have still struggled, even so.

Hell, maybe I have a little more testosterone than the average female (my father always brags that his annual T test is consistently abnormally high and that explains it ALL) and I feel I may have a little more masculine energy than is typical, maybe.

To be totally honest, the nonbinary stuff has always seemed super odd and confusing to me, personally. Why does it seem to always be the people who are furries, ABDL (adult baby diaper lovers), or are chronically online but more than the average smartphone user, you know what I am talking about!!! And maybe that’s just all I see? I don’t see any of the normal ones because they are not crazy nuts on the internet having breakdowns, but there does seem to be a trend…

I do not believe there are more than two genders and I believe both masculine and feminine energies are equally as important, the reason we are constantly at war is completely demonic, and women just factually have it worse than men.

I also believe that some people have more of one than the other in their body, even if it doesn’t match up with what they were born with, for whatever reason, and I completely agree both sexuality and gender are spectrums.

I admittedly have a lot of prejudice against non-binary people and I am working on that more now. I’m not convinced that anyone can exist outside of the binaries, but I also know how it feels to feel like NEITHER, like you are just a body. The extra pronouns beyond he/she/they and sometimes ‘it’ seem as though personality has gotten mixed into gender, and personality feels almost like a gender-less anomaly.

Mainly, I feel like both genders most of the time. I guess that would naturally call for my pronouns to be: she/they but I don’t feel comfortable with that either, like at all.

I don’t know if I ever will.

None of it seems to matter in the grand scheme of things, it feels so self-indulgent of me, but again, I have a few decades of homophobic/transphobic baggage and I am slowly re-learning all kinds of shit.

Seriously, if this is offensive and you want to privately come at me, feel free. I am not saying any of this out of intentional hate, but out of curiosity and an open mind.

I am not struggling as much with my gender now as I did when I was a child, but I do know that regardless of whether we have an area for in-put or out-put, God loves us each and all.

To be young is to be “gay”!

To be youthful and full of life is to be sexual, it’s just that our over-fucked, war-demon of a country has thrown shit all over the meaning of such an important, natural thing.

Wild Women

Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. is an EXTREMELY excellent book. She is a Jungian psychoanalyst and she writes about the nature of woman especially in relation with wolves. The book is longer, and a little more of a difficult read because Dr. Pinkola is a genius and you know how difficult it can be to understand a genius sometimes…

On Audible, she reads an abridged version of it in a little over two hours; I’ve listened many times and there’s always something to glean from it.. Her voice is soft and glittering like dripping honeycomb, she captivates with her rock solid wild woman’s wisdom gathered from both sad and heroic feminine stories told all over the world, transcending race and language. Both men and women should indulge in this spiritual manual to understand the natural guide, or Divine instinct within everyone.

Read this delicious excerpt on the Wild Woman Archetype:

The comprehension of this Wild Woman nature is not a religion but a practice. It is a psychology in its truest sense: psukhi/psych, soul; ology or logos, a knowing of the soul. Without her, women are without ears to hear her soul-talk or to register the chiming of their own inner rhythms. Without her, women’s inner eyes are closed by some shadowy hand, and large parts of their days are spent in a semi-paralyzing ennui or else wishful thinking. Without her, women lose the sureness of their soul-footing.

Without her, they forget why they’re here, they hold on when they would best hold out. Without her they take too much or too little or nothing at all. Without her they are silent when they are in fact on fire. She is their regulator, she is their soulful heart, the same as the human heart that regulates the physical body.

When we lose touch with the instinctive psyche, we live in a semi-destroyed state and images and powers that are natural to the feminine are not allowed full development. When a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized, and her instincts and natural life cycles are lost, subsumed by the culture, or by the intellect or the ego—one’s own or those belonging to others.

Wild Woman is the health of all women. Without her, women’s psychology makes no sense. This wilder-woman is the prototypical woman... no matter what culture, no matter what era, no matter what politic, she does not change. Her cycles change, her symbolic representations change, but in essence, she does not change. She is what she is and she is whole.

She canalizes through women. If they are suppressed, she struggles upward. If women are free, she is free. Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogations she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for her. Even the most repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildest self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape.

That last bit gives me chill bumps.

Lastly, I would like to touch a bit on self love, another taboo subject growing up.

Self love

I’ve learned that loving yourself doesn’t have to be evil like we were taught (if raised evangelical).

I am learning to be practical about both my shortcomings and successes; thoughts are played in our head constantly and we do not have to take each one so personally. Lately, I have discovered that even if I can’t turn off the voice that only exists to call me a piece of shit whenever possible, I can fade it out a bit and not listen to it.

Same with the tape that loops guttural phrases of worship at the alter of myself.

I have the potential to do harm or good, whether by accident or on purpose.

I can clearly split myself into parts and name them with little judgement, though some days I am not so pragmatic.

I can be clumsy and careless, bumping through life like a clown car.

Like a toddler, I want to play more than work or sit still.

There is a restlessness inside my bones that cries to be worked out, that’s why my career involves so much movement

I can better channel my positive attributes now, my mind is calmer than it was five years ago, thank God for brain maturity, if only it matured a bit faster, but I know that we must face difficulties in order to fully grasp wisdom and learn.

I supposed I can sum self-love up this way:

Sometimes I assume

That God is looking down from the heavenly window, infinitely far away, impossibly close.

He is wearing glasses, not because He needs them, but because He thinks they look cool.

And He is looking down at me, looking over His decorative glasses, down on Earth where I stare back up into the pin light,

perhaps now, I can feel Him smiling back at me.

:) thanks for reading