SAFE TO LOVE

The relationship between love and safety is a profound one, and one that came to me rather late in life.

I was a gregarious child that had a natural affinity for easily expressing love, affection, and openness. Perhaps that is true for most children. I can only speak of my own personal experience. I loved laughing, cuddling, talking, touching. I was a feminine male-child, and those were my most prevalent attributes. I was, as I was called frequently, a sissy. I lived way to the left of gender expectation, and it was troubling to my family, my authority figures, and to most people around me. The tribe in which I lived knew there job well and performed it with generationally practiced precision: they needed to beat me into submission and make me into the man the system demanded I be.

I was unintentionally stubborn. Something within me clung to the natural expression that was my authentic self. My tender heart was soft and open. My language was gentle, kind, and delivered in a high and melodious octave. My open heart connected easily to the hearts of others. Empathy was easy for me. I could embrace others pain and felt it was my purpose to listen, to feel, to allow, to compassion. I held a space of safety for people even at a young age. It felt safe for me to love. It felt right and true.

Eventually the tribal intolerance began to teach me that it wasn’t always safe to love. That love had conditions. That my natural expression was unacceptable; it was deemed by most to be unnatural. The family said it was so. My peers and teachers said that it was so. My church said that it was so. I was told that God said that it was so. That was the ultimate wound.

And so began my toughening up. So began my withholding. While my heart longed to love it did so behind the barriers of pretense and defense. It was no longer safe to love. Love meant rejection. Love meant abandonment. Love meant you have to hide in order to remain or even survive. I shut down and covered up. I lowered my voice and tried to add swagger to my steps. I joined the ranks of the deadened ones. I was veiled and inauthentic but on the surface I was safe.

It took a long time and a lot of tears to recover that soft and gentle self. The work isn’t done, but today I am largely free. Today I am open and I am safe in here. I do not and will not conform. I will not become less than my natural loving expression in order to belong to a club I never wanted to join. My safety now is in my own free expression of love. People can judge me, criticize me, demean me, and take away my earthly rights but they can never again force me to shroud what is natural and authentic to whom I am. Internal safety is what matters most, and loving expression is why I am here.

My voice is back to where it belongs, and I am very frequently called mam on the phone. I sometimes calmly correct them. Most often I simply smile. I am back to easily laughing, cuddling, talking, and touching. Oh, I still wince from time to time. It is a good reminder to open up and to celebrate my return to me.

So if I am a sissy I am content to be one. It is a small price for being safe in love.

OPEN THE WINDOW

I want to experience this day as if I were a dog hanging my head out of a moving car window.

I want to feel the breezes and winds of life blowing against my skin. I want to notice every scent that hangs upon those breezes. I want to relax my face, let my tongue hang out, and not care what I look like as I feel myself become one with the wind, the scents, and the sky.

I want to go for a ride with absolutely no thought of destination. I want to lean so far into the experience that I risk falling out of the car, and I want to know that the risk is worth the lean.

I want to let myself be taken for a ride by life. I want to trust so fully in the great Driver that I give no thought to the mechanics of the navigation, and never feel compelled to look back or over.

I want to be so completely taken by what I am seeing and feeling that it never occurs to me that I myself may be being watched.

I want to experience the thrill of freely and fully experiencing the experience, not distracting myself with fears about when the ride might end.

I want to end this day with messy hair, tired cheeks, reverberating wonder, and a body with only enough energy to fall into a delicious sleep that comes from having relished only the ride.

So open the door, and watch me hop right in. Roll down that window, and watch my head pop on out. Now speed up please. I have a lot of world to see, to taste, to smell, to wag.