We were all going to dress up. I opened the dark wooden doors of the big cupboard in the utility room at Unstone Grange. At the bottom of the cupboard was a battered cardboard box. Inside the box was all sorts of things: brightly coloured tops, a high-vis vest, wigs and a feather boa.
Excitement was in the air. We were heading towards the final meal of our first week long residential of a two year training in Embodied Relational Therapy. We’d been told there was a tradition of dressing up for the last meal of each week.
The training had been intense: getting to know each other, talking about new models of therapy and exercises that jangled our own psychological material. The final meal would be a release of that intensity and a celebration of a good first week.
Someone lent me a maxi dress to wear. They helped me apply a little make-up and wrapped my head in a scarf. Some massive pink plastic flowers tucked into the scarf finished the look.
I became a character. I didn’t use the word ‘drag’, but I felt like a queen. She was a little haughty, a little mean and very cool. I sashayed into dinner and stayed in role.
Most of the students wore some kind of fancy dress. It was a very good and very memorable meal.
That first week of training was spring 2017. Later that same year I was sat at that same dining room table. It was another residential training block on the same course.
It was breakfast time and there were a just few people around. I was sitting with another student who was telling me about their voluntary work with an LGTBQ+ charity. I asked about queer clients. I stumbled over my words. Somehow I managed to ask the question in a way that implied that I was queer.
“Oh my god. Kaspa identifies as queer. That’s so cool.”
I umd and ahd and denied that’s what I’d meant and stuffed that truth right back down into a locked box in the dark of my unconscious mind.
The end of breakfast felt a little awkward.
More than a year later and it was the end of another week and another opportunity to dress up. I didn’t feel anything like the intensity of that first meal. I felt less excited and I felt less anxious.
I knew all these people and was looking forward to dinner with them all.
I pulled a blouse and a skirt out of the dressing up box. When I got changed I didn’t feel like a character. I didn’t feel like someone else. This wasn’t drag. Just me wearing clothes that I didn’t usually wear. I felt like myself. Maybe a little more so than usual.
I mentioned the difference at dinner. One of the course leaders said that they’d noticed the same thing. “Oh here’s Kaspa” they had thought “wearing different clothes to usual.”
It was another couple of years before I began talking about my gender identity. But these experiments were helpful data points.
Deconstructing our identities is a key practice in Buddhism. We pull at the causes and conditions that created us, we notice them one by one and discover there is nothing essential about being a person. Everything that makes us who we are is contingent, and everything is subject to change.
Buddhists are very good at doing that, and are very good at talking about it. Although initially that deconstruction can be unsettling, eventually it brings a sense of relief. Here I am, made up of the same stuff as everything else and none of it fixed or permanent.
It’s ultimately true that we are just collections of other things. Bones, muscles, nerves. Memories, feelings, thoughts. It’s true that none of those things last, and we can point to none of them individually and say, “oh, there I am.” I’m not the hair that falls to the floor at the barber shop.
It’s also true that this collection of things is something. It comes together in this way, at this time, to create this particular being.
And we can be more or less honest about the particular beings that we are.
When I say that I feel like myself I mean that I am being honest and accepting about who I am. Most importantly with myself, but also with everyone around me.
In those moments of self-acceptance I am more relaxed, more grounded and more of the different aspects of my personality are available to come and go in an easy way: the intellectual can shift into the comic, or into the vulnerable one.
When I was wearing that maxi dress I was less relaxed, and I cut parts of myself off to maintain the performance. I wasn’t sure if I’d be accepted wearing a dress unless I was performing. On some level I thought that playing a character was an acceptable way of experimenting with gender, and that experimenting with gender for its own sake was not okay. Eighteen months later, at that other dinner, I’d dropped those beliefs. (Maybe I’d just dropped them for that dinner, with that group of people, but still, it was progress!)
Before I was openly queer I was also cutting parts of myself off, in order to squeeze into what was expected of me. Sometimes I noticed the cost of that, and mostly I didn’t. Only in feeling more like myself I am able to notice how that wasn’t true earlier.
The road to self-acceptance is more difficult when we are conditioned by whole swathes of our culture that we are unacceptable or even ‘not real’. But it is worth it in the end.
I loved how you've made the transition from performing to your more authentic self. It makes me excited to see how much more of YOU we will be able to experience as this acceptance deepens. I also love how changing the way we represent ourselves to other people can change the way we represent ourselves to ourselves in order to elicit a deeper understanding of what's inside. Please keep sharing.
I so loved hearing you read this in your own voice. And I love whenever you share more pieces of your journey with us. Thank you!