Whispers from the wrong side

Hi,

Yesterday was a Chams meeting and with the heat wave this week, I decided not to pack a bag. When I arrived and started to set the room up, the AC unit said it was 30C. Yikes. 🙂 I’m not sure what would be on the floor first: me or the makeup I’d applied 😁

The funny thing about turning up in bloke mode is…. sometimes, it makes me doubt myself, or more accurately, my authenticity. Am I just, well, making it all up? I think the truth of it is no, I’m not. I’ve been on this gender circus (no clown references please 😉) for most of my life and I think I’ve been at a point where I sort of get where I fit.

Yet there’s that little voice that tells you negative things and I do my best not to listen to it. Most of the time I manage to bat it away or ignore it. Most of the time… I find it interesting in that I don’t apply the same criticism of judgement to anyone who attends in similar garb: I’d be an awful organiser if I did 😁

Ah, should’ve worn my Big Girl Pants

So, what – of anything can we draw from this ramble? I think we’re probably at the point on YATGB map where two streets meet: Be-Kind-To-Yourself Boulevard and You-Are-Valid Street. 🙂 It’s not about self deception, but knowing that concerns and slight wobbles in confidence are there throughout our lives. Maybe they’re actually useful, in that they cause us to think things through and not get caught in our own hype. So long as we’re not stuck in fretting, is it okay? Perhaps the best option, to take stock, be kind, and put false worries behind you.

Maybe there’s another way to look at it, that I feel okay about myself to turn up in Richard mode, and know that my friends at the group accept me for who I am however I look. Then again, I may be seeing myself up for some mild teasing 😁

L x

4 Comments

  1. Is this perhaps a reverse case of Imposter Syndrome, Lynn? 🙂
    I admit that I’ve often felt the same way at our group meetings when I attended in bloke mode due to timing (coming direct from work) and the lack of change facilities. In those instances the only other ones presenting as male were coming from the other direction, AFAB and transitioning from female to male, and I would feel doubly out of place. Not that I was ever made to feel that way. It was all happening inside my own head. The ideal of course, would be a place where everyone could just turn up and present however they felt at the time, even change back and forth during the evening if they felt like it, and no one would think anything odd about chatting to Lynn at one point and Richard later in evening.
    (There’s a strange short story, ‘Dinner at Helen’s’, where the title character does this at different points during an evening. The story premise is Ovid’s idea that we are essentially divided beings constantly looking for the other half that makes us complete – although I admit I read the myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis the other way, as a fusing rather than sundering, but then I came to it first via the Genesis track than the original.)

    1. “…It was all happening inside my own head…”

      I think that’s the crux of it as I’ve never been made to feel odd by my occasional attendance in Bob Mode. It’s more what’s running around in my mind that causes the feelings.

      Indeed, in the past when I’ve turned up as Lynn, got changed near closing time, and been wandering around putting things away in Richard mode, it’s been fine too. If anything, folk seemed mildly or momentarily interested to see difference between A and B.

      Is the short story available on line, at at? It sounds interesting.

      1. I had in mind to write something about that story sometime. It’s by William Carlson and as far as I know its only appearance was in an anthology edited by Thomas N. Scortia titled Strange Bedfellows (Random House 1973, my edition 1974, Pocket Books). I have only found citations to it online, but not the text. It is something of a curiosity and in prose style at least very much of its time.

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