Sometimes I wonder how much of my personality is “I am different” as a result of other people having told me “you are different” during the formative years of my life vs a different background of experience; I don’t walk around screaming “I AM NOT LIKE YOU”, but I have an inherent dismissive response to anything I think of as “mainstream” – I don’t care about or love fashion trends as trends, I don’t care about brands – in fact, I generally actively dislike them, I find displays of power/wealth in cars, homes, or possessions generally distasteful, I hate reality TV with a burning passion, I can’t deal with the suburbs, and I love the new, the queer, the rebellious, and the boundary-pushing, and I certainly self-define as something at least slightly “other” – in interests, in style, in goals.
I discussed this with a friend from high school once; if we could have afforded the right brand names, or were a little less obviously smart(ass), or went to church, or had a more normal family structure, and fit in to the popular groups when we were young, would we BE those people? Or would we have grown to love the different, the bright, the angry, and the dismissed, anyway? Have I always failed to fit in because I am actually different in some essential piece of my character or did I just miss class on the day they taught people to feel comfortable in beige khakis? Obviously, the nature/nurture debate can be played on many screens at many different parts of our lives.
I love reading historical fiction and historical romance (I know, I know) and these stories ALWAYS have a female protagonist that is “different”; she is a teacher, or an explorer, she wears pants, she is educated, she can fight, she is strong and sassy, and most importantly, she would almost always rather be an old maid than fit into society’s expectation of a wife. Tisha was one of my FAVORITE books growing up – I was SURE if I lived in the past I would have been a teacher in Alaska too – working for equality for women and native peoples and fighting off the societal expectations of the provincials. Side note, here’s my dog wearing my bandana from Chicken, Alaska:
Seriously, I LOVED the book Tisha enough that I WENT to Chicken, Alaska. All four storefronts of it that remain.
One of the most frustrating parts of being so so so sad about not being physically able to have a baby is the fucking banality of it all. I truly and honestly HATE people who are all “a baby completes me”; “having a baby is the ultimate in woman-hood”; “parenthood is the most and ultimate gift and purpose in this world” blah, blah, fucking blah. Do you people not have any LIFE?? Heart and soul I believe that being a woman – being a human generally – is everything and anything you choose and reproduction is absolutely, positively, not a defining feature of any kind of womanhood or personhood. Having a baby certainly does not giving meaning to a life that is without meaning. And I have no particular emotional attachment to the concept of my specific genetics moving forward in time. But also, I start crying every. single. time. I think about the people I love having the experience I can never have.
So, it’s not just failing at something I put all my energy towards, not just that I lack any control over the situation (lack of control = my nemesis), and not just that I am so sad I will miss out on the beginning of my future child’s life. Nope, I also have to have a fucking personality crisis – does this obsession with a purely biological non-skill-or-intellect-based thing that is literally more luck than science for the majority of the population mean that I am NOT the forward-thinking bold and brave personality I always thought I would become? I’m trying to think of a plot more trite than “infertile woman made miserable by failure to reproduce” and I’m pretty much failing. Am I depressed because I cannot do the thing I want to do, or because I’m actually embarrassed in my own head that I am so upset that I cannot do the thing?!
I have been considering going to some sort of miscarriage/infertility support group because I cannot stop being sad – and I never, never, thought I would be that person. But my close friends and partner have been carrying the burden of listening to this sadness for too long and it doesn’t seem to be GOING anywhere – despite my co-extensive excitement about building a family through non-traditional (slow. difficult. uncertain.) means. I’m thinking I’ll just do my best to channel the fictional Sherlock Holmes from Elementary. If he can fictionally live through and find value in support groups to retain his fictional sobriety from his fictional addiction despite his towering fictional intelligence and dismissal of the normal world, then fuck it, I guess I can do it live.