things I learned at the doctor*

Someone who's opinion I have a hard time dismissing** told me last night that I carry the look of 'one who has been to the mountain', a shamanic otherness of marked knowledge that cannot be ignored or forgotten, and further that I change the power dynamic of any group or room I enter in profound and telling ways. This is the same person who told me I was the most spiritual person she knows***, and like that, I'm not sure how to take it.

I'm less shaken by this than by previous statements (I didn't freak out over 'shamanic', even though I have a long history of fighting tooth and nail the insistence of a necessary connection between it and gender variance so many others have shallowly suggested). A part of me really wants to preen, to enjoy the recognition of difference, and the positive, if slightly bittersweet, valence she's assigning, but another part isn't sure it wants to stand out, to be responsible for/to that difference (which tugs at the familiar and feared burden of 'potential', followed invariably by 'waste of'). I don't want to be perpetually o(O)ther; it feels like I've got more than enough of that going on as it is, but maybe this is a not so subtle suggestion to stop running from the is of this, to maybe consider it a premise and not a conditional or subjunctive?

This is all very tied in with the question of strength, of power. I'm told others see me as powerful, at times even commanding or magnetic; why do I always feel like the weakest person present, neurotically decentered and unstable, surrounded by confident monoliths? The only time I really feel powerful in the presence of others is when I'm angry, and I'm extremely reluctant to become to accustomed to that, to make that the default of my emotional kinesthesia. I need to figure out what it feels like to be strong, so I can work to summon that feeling more.






*of theology and psychology
*My therapist, a very interesting and excellent person, well beyond the bounds of potential transference.
** She's a Presbyterian minister, a panentheist, and probably a gnostic as well.

in other news

I've managed to fuck up my back something fierce. If I lay flat, it twinges and spasms, making sleep very challenging. If I breathe, move or stand in certain ways, the knot of constriction makes itself unmistakably and unpleasantly known. I don't remember doing anything to it, much less anything interesting or fun. Today's going to be a drag.