There can be great joy in being different, whether the difference is race, gender or neurodiversity. The trick to making sure that you remain inside the joy of your existence is reminding yourself, as often as you need to (sometimes hourly!), that other people’s opinions are just that. If they’re critical, unkind, nasty, or mean-spirited when they talk or write about your diversity, THEY are the ones who CHOOSE TO live with that UGLINESS inside themselves, where it will continue to eat them up like a relentless malignant tumor. Don’t humor them with your time or your attention. Keep doing YOU!
Does this mean you’ll always be joyous and happy? Of course not! Shit (aka life — the good, the bad and the ugly) happens. But don’t make it your shit. Let the ringleaders of hate and disinformation showcase their hideous circus. All it does is reveal THEM, not YOU, and sane, empathetic onlookers will quickly discern who the actual blights are!
I’ve been watching a series of videos of people from all walks of life who were gobsmacked when they came to the realization that one or more of their own children or siblings, or uncles, or aunts were transgender. They went from freaked out, to scared for their loved ones, to becoming their fiercest, most loving advocates.
It’s the same with interracial marriages in some families and with neurodiversity in others. The shock, the fear, the slow understanding, and the eventual fierce advocacy takes a similar path.
What many people don’t understand is that, all too often, the person whose journey it is to admit being trans, or to having fallen in love with someone of another race,or having fallen in love with someone of the same gender, also has to go through the same series of feelings and sensations because most of us were raised under the same cultural influences and taboos. So, we “hid” our divergencies until hiding them became too painful to us and we realized we had to proclaim our true colors, intentions, and existences. It didn’t happen overnight for us, either. We may have known from a very early age who we were (as I did), but we didn’t have the insight, the words of explanation, or the permission of our caregivers to embrace our essential realities. We “acted” a part that never truly fitted who we are as unique individuals.
One of the best things about growing older is coming to the realization that we’re all just doing the best we can for ourselves in a society that often expects or wants us to be something or someone else. At a certain age (which is different for everyone), we decide we can survive the loss of false friends in our quest to find true allies. There is very little pain in it, too; just a gentle letting go of what wasn’t a good match in exchange for relationships (and sporadic solitudes) that fit like a well-worn glove, no matter how new they are to us.
That’s where I am. I’m focusing on the JOY side of living. The soft, warm place where the people I interact with share and return genuine warmth and love. The counterfeit relationships dissolve as more genuine ones gel.
I’m all about live and let live. My only prejudice is bigotry in all of its many sordid guises. I think bigots are a blight and the cause of most of our existential challenges in life. But they are entitled to their circumscribed fears and paranoias. I simply don’t have the time or the bandwidth anymore to let their handicap slow me down from embracing the joy that is mine every minute for the rest of my life.
