How Healing Happens

Last week I wrote about how trauma makes it harder to empathize because we organize to defend against danger. Then on Sunday at a little gathering at my house a vivid counterpoint blasted through decades of suppressed shame. 

I was wearing my neck brace, unadorned, with a ruffled collar in the style I favor. Several weeks earlier my friends had helped sew a cover for the brace because I felt the silicone brace to be obscene. The problem was that the cover was super hard to put on and take off, so on this day I defiantly left it bare. My daughter's girlfriend, who is a trans woman, whom I had not met before, whom I will call xo, exclaimed, "I like the medical aesthetic." 

What? There is a medical aesthetic? And then we embarked on a lively discussion of prosthetics. It was a bit like coming out. That there could be anything interesting or attractive about tech support for disability was a shock to me. In a similar way, her beautiful existence as herself was a revelation to some older lesbian women in the room. She didn't seem to be defiant, just not swathed in the garb of normative illusion. 

Basic acceptance of and delight in each other seemed to be the background music in this gathering. How is this possible? A shit load of work and transformation, I reckon. Later I told my daughter how un-shamed I felt and how my friends were freed from their own shame by seeing xo's courage and beauty. I told her how some of us were not seen without being reviled or denigrated, and a text exchange with the girlfriend followed. Xo said "rly feel that," and noted how she often felt terrified and uncertain.

The lesson I take is that, yes of course we can understand each other, heal each other. We need to cross pollinate, so that whatever we've worked through or maybe not even struggled with can infiltrate the shame of the other. The non-disabled can unshackle the disabled. Trans people can jiggle the constraints of the conventionally gendered. And something healing happens for young people when older people are able to see and appreciate them pushing boundaries, maybe because it is easier to be an elder than a parent. 

I don't have a pithy finish except maybe to appreciate xo's tattoo. 

I'm still learning.

June 25, 2021