Rough Drafts
A Series of Pieces Written in The Wild
#4
The poet Joy Sullivan wrote, “Live a year in your own bones & learn alternatives” in a poem about the synonyms Thesaurus.com brings up for the words “lone woman.” I won’t rewrite those suggestions here because I’m sure you can already guess the sexist nonsense it brings up. I feel like the more I exist in my bones and in this world I feel how strongly the perception of my gender affects my ability or want to engage with people in a variety of ways. I’ve noticed this most strongly around parents of young kids. I try to make myself as unavailable as possible, not because I don’t like the children or have anything against them, but more as a way to let the other adults know that I will not be roped into babysitting. This hasn’t even been a suggestion, but my hyper vigilance around being conditioned as a helpful woman and assuming that people will assume and expect that role of me too has me literally running in the opposite direction. Like a mirage, I am here and then the closer you get I am gone. I’ve begun to wonder if I’m being an asshole or if this is a result of wanting to avoid situations where I was forced to be physically and emotionally available for other adults as a child and to my own detriment. It’s probably a little bit of both. But then I think about how if I were more masc presenting and identifying how those expectations would fly out the window and how looking at my actions through that lens makes me realize that all I’m doing is literally living my life and that even if some of the drive in that life is emotional unavailability, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I don’t need to be emotionally available to everyone or for everyone all the time. There’s so much talk about the negative aspects of emotional unavailability but not enough about the potential pros. Or the fact that just because I may be emotionally unavailable to someone doesn’t mean I’m emotionally unavailable to myself.
