RaccoonNotesGif

On cages

Last week I was chatting with a friend, she was returning from a concert and was sharing with me her experience there. She met a girl there from a different country while queuing up to enter the venue and the two of them became fast friends throughout the concert, even leaving the venue holding hands. Hearing this the first thought that crossed my mind was that I wanted that for myself, I was envious of what to me sounded like a truly wonderful experience, and I mentioned as much to her. Her reply was a very matter of fact “we are girls”.

That innocuous comment broke a dam that had been holding back a lifetime’s worth of repressed thoughts and emotions.

I was born a man. My parents, while progressive and open to me exploring things, raised me as a man. The societies and cultures that surrounded me my entire life taught me to act like a man. The communities around me treated me as a man and expected a man out of me.

All my life I’ve been holding out on small but significant things because they were “not fit for a man”. Pretty, colorful clothes? not fit for a man. Expressing my emotions openly? not fit for a man. Showing affection and love for my friends and peers? not fit for a man. Each time it happened it was a small enough thing that I could just shrug it off and move on, adding one more drop to the dam.

Manhood is about violence and power, about control and force, about anger and hate. Men are dangerous to themselves, to other men, to women, to anyone different. Men have taken over society through the threat of aggression.

Of course, it needs to be said “not all men”, some of us do fight back against that enduring culture. But, in the end, even when we fight back we are still men. We are still seen by society as men, we are still treated as men. I think that’s what hurts me the most to think about. That, even if I try to be the best man I can, in the eyes of the world I am still a threat.

A uniform is a uniform, it’s an identifier, it’s surface level. It does not determine who I am nor how I act, it is not prescriptive of my being. I can live with the annoyance of pretty clothes not being part of the uniform for men. I can do so because clothes are surface level, a mere shell on top of the real me. What I cannot live with is the realization that the label, the identity of “man”, also shackles me, it restricts the relation that the world has with me.

And so, to live the life I want to live, I must throw away the identity of “man”. I must shed the uniforms, the markers, the decor, the behaviour. I must change what the world sees when it sees me. I cannot be a man and live the life I need to live. I must choose between the two and the choice is clear.

I was also born autistic, I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 27 and I didn’t realize the meaning of the diagnosis until I was 30.

Growing up autistic, I was forced to build a cage around myself. A cage to constrain who I am, how I act, how I think, my autistic mask. This cage both limited me but also protected me. It shielded me from a society unwilling to accept a person who thinks differently, a person who doesn’t fit in. It allowed me to participate in life.

As limiting as that cage was, I am proud of it. I built it myself, I built it for myself, with my own self-interest at heart. It took sweat and blood and tears to build. Each piece shaped by struggles large and small over the span of my entire life. It is a monument to what I am capable of.

However, I eventually outgrew my cage and needed to leave it. The autism diagnosis gave me the key to unlock it and step out from it. For the first time since I had memory I had the freedom to not act “normal”, to be me.

It took a while to actually start doing so. Rather than proudly walking out, I hesitated, I tested the waters little by little. First a limb, then maybe a little peek. I had never in my life been outside the cage so I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know if it would be dangerous outside or not. Slowly I grew bolder, venturing further out eacah time, before retreating back to the comfort of the cage.

However, something was amiss. I had expected wide open fields beyond my own cage but instead I found that I could not go very far at all. The outside felt like my own cage, only a bit larger.

As it turns out, while I was busy building my own cage, society was busy building its own cage around that. I did not see that happening because my own cage blocked my vision of what was happening. Society had built a “man” shaped cage around me.

Unlike my own cage, society’s cage wasn’t built by me, it wasn’t built for me, nor with my interests in mind. It wasn’t comfortable, nor cozy, nor suited for me in any way at all. Unlike my own cage, I had been trapped against my will, without my knowledge, in a cage that, quite frankly, hurt to be in. Worst of all, I was unaware that this cage even existed. As far as I knew this was just the way things were.

That “we are girls” comment that I heard from my friend was a crack on the wall that allowed me to peer through and see my reality, see my gender, for what it was, a cage.

This time I needed no key to step out, I had no love for this cage, it granted me no protection, no comfort. I tore the wall down, at first prodding at the crack, then hammering with all my might, with anger and frustration and hate for the world that had trapped me in here.

And what I saw on the other side was, finally, freedom.

I am still holing up within my cage within the cage. I am wary of what is out there, I am unsure of where to go. But, for the first time in my life I can see what my life can be unconstrained by my gender.

This was my first attempt at writing anything of any length and substance that isn’t academic in nature. It’s probably not great but it is what it is.