A little bit of this a little bit of that. . . .

So there's always been some part of me that felt that I should've been a boy.  Even when I was little I wanted to be a boy, playing war and GI Joe with my friends rather than playing house.  When I was 12 I was a half man half woman for Halloween.   Now that I'm older, I feel that there are many traits in my personality that are very typically gendered as male.  Simultaneously, I love me my pretty dresses and high heels.  So what does that all boil down to?

I raise this question because as I'm navigating this project, it has been said to me several times that this is kind of "dude-like."  Building muscles is dude-like.  I mostly get this comment from men, I might add.  Why?  Are women not supposed to be strong, or strong-looking?  Maybe.  Is it the idea that a strong woman, Amazon warrior queen, hints at the possibility that a man is not needed?  Potentially.  In a city where many gay men traditionally take exceptional care of their appearance and are specimens of the male figure (I workout at Gold's gymn and I am playing Jr. psychiatrist here) and where their hetero counterparts are generally lacking in this department to the same degree, perhaps having a women aspire to some sort of "masculine" ideal is threatening to their ego in some way?  Perhaps.  But besides of all of that, I think this is partly a conversation about the inefficiency of genderizing.  "Gender" is such a loaded word that I hate to even use it, but what I'm getting at is a step beyond gender politics in general so I only bring it up to open that line of thinking.  It's a lot more complicated than man vs. woman.  I have a tendency to think that we all have all genders as a part of our Selves.  I have as many "man" tendencies as I do "woman" as well as many grey areas in between.   I openly embrace both polarities of these elements within myself  and I believe this is intrinsic to knowing one's Self in our ever-evolving quest to understand what it is to Be within the living, breathing organism that inhabits the world around us.

This He/She is not a new concept, nor is seeing the many aspects of our persona as multi-gendered.  The alchemical hermaphrodite is the highest spiritual being there is and that's a tradition that dates back to pre-history.  It is a perfect synthesis of the opposites, containing both and transcending both in its very being.  Think of it as a living embodiment of the yin/yang.   Tantric traditions say that our being is an amalgam of different components and that society teaches us to build up one of them as opposed to allowing ourselves to be loose and natural.  We feel a void because we are denying an aspect of our nature.  We seek to fill this void with another person, someone that seems to provide the material for our "missing half."  The truth is, that if you are filling your void with someone else, you will never succeed.  You will never be satisfied.  The missing half is within you, is a part of you.  To become whole is to realize your Self in all of its capacity.  

We are all cosmic androgynes in one way shape or form.  It is part of our journey to find the whole-ness within ourselves, to become a complete being.  It is our emotional evolution and our spiritual coming of age.

And I will leave you with my attempt at a body building pose.  Figure competition this year.  Body building next year?  Hah!  Maybe.  

Namaste.