I’ve been exposed recently more and more to the idea of gender fluidity. While I really don’t understand much of it, there’s parts of it that I think I do understand. Although I enjoy physical love with my husband and find him physically attractive, I never really found sex enjoyable in general and I don’t find human beings physically attractive at all, especially noses. I have written about that before. The pandemic with the mask just made me realize how much I just hate noses. However, there’s just something about human beings that I don’t find appealing. I wish that I could be like everyone else, but I’m not and if everyone else can be true to themselves, then I should be allowed to be me, too.
Today, I was thinking about the idea of gender fluidity and myth. I realized that there might be a different way to look at it. I had always heard that in different cultures there was a myth about how there were beings that had been split in two and they formed two different energies of male and female. These being became humans and they would spend their lives looking for their other half. When they found their soul mate, they would feel complete again. This idea of being having themselves spilt into two and having to unite their two halves to become one again is a familiar story in myth.
Having met my soulmate in my husband, it rings true to me. It literally feels like when I met him, everything changed. My life before I met him feels like a completely different life in comparison to the one I have now. I guess in a way it is. Before I met him, I was living as myself, now I am not a me, I am an us. Yet, I know that not everyone gets married. I know that not all marriages are heterosexual. So, the idea of this myth where the being is split in two halves of male and female seems to be a little rigid and not able to account for gender fluidity.
I wonder if maybe it still rings true, but maybe in a different way. Here’s my idea: maybe we were split in two, but those halves weren’t just male and female. Those halves were whatever they needed to be. And maybe there were beings that never got split up in the first place. These souls are complete by themselves, and they don’t need to seek out another person to complete them.
I can’t say that just because I don’t understand something that it is wrong or right. I do wonder though if maybe the myth should be updated. I think that as we walk along our life paths all of us feel like we need to feel complete somehow. I know in the Catholic faith, we are taught to find that through marriage or holy orders. In the far East, some find that sense of completion through mediation and being a monk. Why shouldn’t I support my brothers and sisters as they find their sense of self anyway that they can as long as they don’t hurt anyone else?
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
