A client and friend of mine is on the brink of a new adventure.
After a romantic lifetime of dating and loving men, she’s interested in a woman.*
(*I am writing this with her blessing, or else you wouldn’t hear a single peep out of me. No clients were outed in the making of this blog post.)
It’s stressing her out. Having a crush is stressful enough already: all the obsessing and daydreaming and distraction takes energy. It makes it hard to be productive, and hard to give a damn about many previously gave-a-damn-about things.
But aside from the disruptiveness of crushing on this person, it is seriously interfering with her view of what she thinks her life should be.
Her whole life, she’s wanted to be with men. To spend her days and make a home and have a family with a man.
And even though her new crush is nowhere near the stage where these home & family issues are pressing, just the appearance on the scene of a female love interest is making her re-evaluate every single thing she thought she knew about what she wants her life to look like.
She asked: where is the penis in this situation?
Which cracked me up, of course. As if every situation needs a penis! After we stopped laughing, we started peeling back layers.
It turned out that the bigger issue wasn’t what a hypothetical relationship might actually be like (she was already trying on the idea and getting more and more comfortable with it), but more the jarring disjunction between what she thought she wanted and the possibility of wanting something she had never considered.
And under this layer, she found a particular fear.
It was the ages-old, classic, so-common-it-should-be-boring, except-it’s-not-because-it’s-happening-to-you fear of being shunned.
It’s an old tribal fear, bred into us when we lived in groups and worried about predators and the elements – that the people we need to band together with for warmth and sustenance will turn us out, and we will die.
Which was no joke then, and no joke now.
This fear is not trivial. We’re talking life and death.
Back then, not conforming to the tribe’s requirements meant you would be out in the cold and would likely suffer a very short and unpleasant life.
Our limbic systems remember this, and try to protect us. To make us go back to the fireside, to keep us from making waves with our kin and neighbors, because we needed them to survive.
The tribe remembers this too, and can try to leverage it to control our behavior and get us to be more convenient and compliant.
The compliance could be about the gender or faith or color of the person you fall in love with. It could be about what you do for a living, or whether or not you have children, or what kind of housekeeper you are.
The beauty of it is, we don’t actually need the original tribe to survive anymore.
(Phew!)
True, de-programming the tribal brain indoctrination can be a lifelong project. But the choice to refuse to be measured by the tribal yardstick is available all the time. It’s available right now.
You still need people. But you can pick and choose and find some more agreeable ones to be with if your original tribe gives you grief.
If it helps, I give us all blanket permission to do just that. To go forth and find people who will not think that the price of membership in their tribe is handing them the right to dominate and control us.
And to declare our right to live our lives free from the obligation of appeasing tribal anxieties.
Related to this and other interesting hybrid situations large and small, I’m doing a free Hybridology Q & A teleclass.
You’re invited!
It’s next Friday, July 9th, at 3 pm Eastern. To get details and join in, you can sign up on my Happenings list here.
Comment Fu
This sharing-of-inner-worlds is a gift we give each other. This space is like a Quaker meeting that is happening in my living room. Honored guests, please speak as you are moved to. Let’s be awesome to each other, because graciousness among friends is why we hang out together.
Heidi
Twitter: ChrysalisBS
This is beautiful Amna, thank you for sharing. And thank you to your friend for being ok with you sharing (I know that probably wasn’t easy).
I’m fortunate to have been born into a fairly excepting tribe, for the most part… but I’ve had many friends who were not nearly so lucky. Their fortune was in finding, and creating their own tribe.
It’s an amazing and wonderful thing that we live in a time when such a thing is possible, but even so, it still takes a great deal of strength and courage, especially if you’re original tribe doesn’t understand (somehow, there’s always that little part of us that wants the acceptance of the tribe we were born into /sigh).
Much love, and support, and proud encouragement to your lovely friend!
Heidi’s last blog I have a confession to make
Julie
Twitter: escapeivrytower
Oh, I’ve been in that very space, the suddenly having to rethink my entire being because I fell in love with someone. It’s pretty painful. Many hugs to your friend.
And thanks for delineating this issue of tribe. I need to think more about that.
Julie’s last blog The problem of smartness
Wulfie
I’m still laughing about the penis bit.
This really smacked me up side my head. This need to fit in, to belong, to not make waves always arguing with the deeper part of me that freaking loves doing all those things. But the fear of rejection, of exposure, of being turned out…yeah. I hadn’t thought about any of this before and you’re right, it’s a biggy. And thank you for permission to jump ship!
Wulfie’s last blog Fourth of July – Friday Flash
Heather Plett
Twitter: heatherplett
You’ve expressed this so well! I deal with this all the time – wanting to forge the path I feel called toward, but not sure I can abandon the tribe if they try to hold me back.
I’m also realizing that I AM that tribe for my children and I have to be prepared for them to forge paths that look totally different from mine.
Mahala Mazerov
Twitter: LuminousHeart
I appreciate this post, in part because tribe has become such a buzzword on the internet. But tribe on the web is easy. You only deal with people who make you feel good. You don’t like someone you block them, unfriend them. And if someone does it to you, who cares? It’s not life or death.
The support you’ve given this client is a gift. Even with permission to step outside the tribal guidelines, even with permission to find a new tribe, it’s still far from easy.
It took years for my family to be comfortable with me being a Buddhist, even though I never made a big deal about it. (I told a friend I thought it actually would have been a teeny bit easier for them had I said I was gay. They knew gay people!)
Mahala Mazerov’s last blog Summer of Lovingkindness Invitational
Amna Ahmad
Twitter: AmnaAhmad
I love you guys who show up and read and hang out and say such smarty-smart things. LOVE. Thank you.
@Heidi – Totally agree. On the easy-to-hard spectrum, finding new tribe members is way easier than fully kicking out the disapproving tribe (and our desire to fit into it) completely. It’s really a life’s work.
@Julie – Ooh, retroactive hugs to you too. It’s really something – I can see that the world looks like a very different place after this kind of shift.
@Wulfie – Haha, I said the P-word on my blog! It wasn’t easy. I scandalized myself a little bit. Glad you’re amused. :) And glad to be able to help bring this stuff to the surface.
@Heather – It makes me so glad to hear that. Parents are THE dominant voices in the tribe in our heads, and we carry them around with us for a lifetime. How lucky your kids are to have a mom who gets this. :)
@Mahala – I thought about the current internet-popular use of “tribe” after I posted too. I think that the web definition is a watered-down version of the fierceness and power (for good and for bad) of the real thing that we all come from.
And, yes. It’s a big, long, nerve-requiring process. Permission is just the first step, I think – the thing that makes starting possible.
Elizabeth
Twitter: elizabethhalt
Someday, I mean to write a post about the leaving of a tribe. When I have enough distance. Because it is seriously scary to consider leaving the tribe – whatever it is – especially when it’s all you’ve known and you don’t believe that you are going to be able to find new tribe members. Or you don’t know how you will “survive” until you do. So you don’t .. and don’t .. and don’t ..
Permission would have been a useful first step. As would have the biological knowing. Your client is lucky to have you on her side.
Elizabeth’s last blog if you can see the fairies- clap your hands
Amna Ahmad
Twitter: AmnaAhmad
@Elizabeth – If you write such a post, I will love to read it.
And you said it: even considering leaving the tribe is terrifying. Thank you for saying that. You’ve given me a lot of good things to think about here – I think you’ve really captured the thoughts and fears that go with this particular process.
Tiara the Merch Girl
A friend just sent me a link to this blog, saying you remind her of me, and apparently this post was the impetus.
I see this line and I went “HOLY CRAP”.
“the jarring disjunction between what she thought she wanted and the possibility of wanting something she had never considered.”
A few years ago my boyfriend and I went through a rough patch in our relationship. Nothing actually *bad* between us, but a lot of interfering stress – including the stress of me wanting something I didn’t feel like I was allowed to want. Not so much being shunned (by who? :P), but feeling like my desires were selfish, that I wasn’t fair to him, that I was treating him as an object because I didn’t want commitment, I didn’t want monogamy, I didn’t want us to have to save ourselves for each other in case we were separated by distance (there was a possibility I’d move back overseas).
Turns out that was pretty much what he was after too. And still it took me MONTHS to believe him, because I kept thinking he was only saying that to appease me, and I was feeling immense guilt over it.
Fast forward to a couple of months ago. My boy introduces me to a friend of his, who he’d been raving about (“you two have so much in common!!”) and who I was jealous of for years (“zomg RIVAL”) before actually calming down and realising that hey, she’s pretty cool, and also – OMG HOT QUEER GIRL THAT TICKS A LOT OF MY BOXES.
She was just about to head off on an epic trip as we were introduced properly, so almost all our interaction has been online. After some months of casually talking to each other on Facebook, she finally realised that I liked her, and we get pretty flirty with each other. The flirtations get intense, and we have a bit of an online affair for about a week…
…and then she ends the whole thing saying that this isn’t usually like her, she doesn’t tend to form relationships online, she needs the emotional connection before things get sexual, etc. She enjoyed our time together, but it didn’t feel comfortable – it was too unusual. So we tried to keep things platonic, and it was ok for a little while.
Then things got weird. The mere fact that we were predominantly online friends (when most of the time her online friends were old friends from before) puzzled her. The way we did things were very different from each other. She was caught between enjoying the differences, enjoying what I gave her, and feeling uncomfortable because they were different. It got to the point where she felt like she couldn’t talk to me anymore because the discomfort took over.
(it wasn’t about being queer, we’ve been queer ages, more the online nature of the relationship. Which I didn’t even realise she took as a relationship – I just thought it was a very flirty friendship – until she told me that she considered it one of the best relationships she’s had. there you go.)
I’m relating this to my boyfriend and he said it sounds just like how I was when we had our rough patch – we had expectations of how relationships *should* be, how friendships *should* be, and when things don’t match the expectations we don’t know what to feel about them.
Wanting something you hadn’t considered. Feeling guilty because they feel so different from what you were used to. Not being able to deal with both enjoyment and discomfort.
god. I wonder if it’s a sign. It’s been about 2-3 weeks since we last spoken and she’s at the tail end of her epic trip. I was thinking about just gently dropping a hello next weekend (after a major project ends), try to rebuild the friendship from scratch, and this seems like a positive sign. thank you.
Elana
Hey Amna, loving that you’ve nailed the experience of a strange new desire rattling our ingrained behaviours and instincts…Have you read this btw?
http://bit.ly/abxBLw
So sorry I missed your teleclass! Timezones and work conspired to deprive me! Will you be sharing any of the juice post-class? Lemme know, and thank you for your intelligence, sensitivity and compassion. huggy.
E
Amna Ahmad
Twitter: AmnaAhmad
@Elana – Thank you for your always-kind words-and-vibes!
I’m going to send the recording to people on the list. So if you’re not on the Happenings list, hop on there! And I’ll be sending it around.