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The question is: how to love?

You don’t know a thing unless you are perceiving it. This isn’t an epistemological statement—you are not meant to take this and run round-and-round in the solipsist death spiral. “My perceptions are necessarily imperfect,” you are not supposed to say, “ergo I cannot know anything.”

This is a statement about all those things that you actually do know, and act on, and use to make your self. It is a fact about those things.

When someone asks, “do you love me?” and you do, you don’t say, “I believe so.” Love isn’t a thing you believe, so it’s never a thing whose existence you can assert or prove. Love is a verb. It is a thing we do. It is a thing we have to build every day, with our words and with our tongues. It is not an easy thing, and it is fragile. This fragility is not the opposite of strength; like all fragile things, love is unbelievably strong.

I have hurt everyone I loved, some way, some how. And I have been hurt by them. These are the best relationships, the absolute strongest ones I hold. The love there is palpable, perceived, known.

You will hurt people; you will be hurt. I have hurt people; I have been hurt; I have hurt myself. These are words to hold onto, because without exception they are true.

~

Pause for a moment. Enter this place: You’re sitting in a stranger’s living room. You don’t know anyone else there, and they’re talking, and you can’t understand their words. You were not invited here—perhaps you are a ghost. The question is: what do you do?

You can tease apart their words and find openings, find unflagged assumptions and arguments with questionable grounds. You can accept just enough of what they way to reject the rest; You can do the analytic dance and come up with things to say, ways to push into that conversation.

You can do that, but it isn’t engagement, nor is it critique. It’s a shadow-play of both. To engage with someone, you have to know what they’re talking about. Know it actually. Perceive it, perceive them, and perceive their experiences as equal to yours.

The friend who told me this thing about knowledge also said: “I think people do violence to each other because they don’t know that it’s violence.” And that’s crazy, right? Looney-tunes, diving in the deep end crazy-talk. Except then he explained knowledge-as-perception, and his intent became clear: we hurt each other because the violence is not something we perceive. We hurt each other because we don’t perceive how in doing so, we are hurting ourselves.

Kids can play this game, where they pass rocks between each others hands. (They could throw them, and sometimes they do, but that’s a different game.) It’s amazing to watch, if they’re good. Their hands shift with incredible dexterity, slipping stones between them. This game does not work if you divide your rocks and my rocks. We have to be manipulating the same tokens in order to play.

So, now, the question is: how do we ensure that we’re playing the same game, shifting the same stones, telling the same stories?

~

You will hurt people you want love because you merely believe a thing that you need to perceive. Because when someone says, “You’re hurting me,” you think, “I know,” and don’t mean it. This is damage. Damage can be repaired.

I am not a woman trapped in a man’s body. This body is no man’s; it is mine, it is me, and there is no man in that equation. And I am not trapped in it. There are a million and one ways out of this body, and I have clung to it, tooth and claw, despite an endless line of people and institutions who would rather I vacate the premises, and have sometimes been willing to make me bleed to convince me they’re right.—Little light

When I read that, I believed it. I did not know it. And for that reason, I spent months added onto years hating my body and everything in it, including me. I spent years trying to build myself into someone who would be acceptable and beautiful, spent years in stark terror of falling into that liminal gender space that, I told myself, would be threatening to other people.

And it would be, and it is. But the root of that fear was not what other people would do to me; the root of that fear was me.

And then one day, I looked into the mirror and said, “Neat!” My body was doing something wonderful.

That had never happened before.

I’m going to tell this just like it didn’t happen: a flashbulb went off in my brain, and I realized what I was doing to myself, and I realized that it was pointless and harmful and only at that moment did I actually know that I loved myself. And that’s when my transphobia died.

That isn’t how it happened, but remembering, I can’t imagine it happening another way.

I didn’t say, “love is the only true radicalizing force,” either. That was another friend. Unlike the previous epiphany, when she said it, there was no doubt it was absolutely the most true thing I had ever heard.

~

Arguments are not going to change anyone. They might, under very optimistic circumstances, change someone’s mind, but that is simply insufficient. What’s in our minds has, at best, a tenuous connection to those things we build, and it’s those things that we build, with our hands and tongues, that need to change

People change when rather than understanding violence—sexual, racial, gendered, national—they perceive it. Like a flashbulb, this is hurting you becomes this is hurting us. That’s the thing—capitalized, italicized. Not simply understanding, not rational learned argument, but core perception. Getting there is messy. And it’s scary, and it’s emotional and it’s hard, and it hurts, but it is something that we need like we need air. To help someone, love them, and then you won’t need to help anymore. You’ll need to build something new, together.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 3:54 am and is filed under Culture, Fiction, Relationships, Sex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.