In my last email, I mentioned a second pattern-making question I wanted to introduce. I found it personally really helpful in the past couple of weeks.
I'm going for surgery in July to Thailand to have what we, right now, call ‘lower surgery’ or gender affirmative surgery, or what I’m quite enjoying calling in my head, a sex-change operation. Very retro.
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Obviously I'm really excited. It was a cancellation that I got offered much sooner than I expected. I jumped at the chance.
I’d thought I’d come to terms with living with my body as it is (“I’m FINE”), but then literally as I was driving home from Mum’s funeral, I realised this might be my one opportunity to have a surplus of cash and a light, a smile, just opened up in front of me.
I did, however, have a huge wobble the other day.
The clinic had let slip in an email a couple of weeks ago about not pooping for seven days after the surgery. As someone who is ordinarily, er, very well fibered that was quite a concern for me. They won’t send out any more information beforehand - you just get it when you arrive.
I realised I didn’t actually know anything about the first few days of recovery. So I, of course, went on Reddit.
I found a manga written/drawn probably more than 15 years ago by somebody who went to the same clinic. It was pretty detailed.
As I was reading it, I realised more than theoretically that the recovery is pretty intense because this is a major major surgery. Suddenly, I was panicking.
I really thought, Do I actually want to do this? Can I not just carry on how I have been?
I paced up and down, had a cry, talked to one of my partners.
A couple of days later, one of my siblings reflected back that I was saying like things like, “Well, I'm not getting any younger so if I'm going to do it, it needs to be now because if I wait a year or two, I'll just be a year or two older and that's not going to make me any more likely to recover easily.”
She pointed out that that's not a ‘towards’ perspective, that's like… a circumstantial perspective?
I had to really tune in and go, Do I actually want this to happen or not? Do I feel really committed to it?
The timing is not great in terms of some aspects of my life. We're in the (please gods) final stages of selling my mum's house. We are sorting out the death admin of my partner's mum’s estate. And we’re moving house suddenly and not by our choice.
And then on top of that, I now need to do all the admin for the Thailand trip plus do a massive handover of my job, because I'm going to be away for three months?
And yet, I do really want it.
Holding that certainty didn’t, however, take away all of the panic.
The main thing was the anticipation of pain and my realisation that I have never had any major medical procedures. I've been to the dentist. That's it. I've had horrible tooth pain and had a tooth out.
So I don't know how I'm going to deal with pain that goes on for an uncertain period of time but certainly for weeks. I don't know how I'm going to deal with the recovery. I don't know how both of us are going to deal with being in first a hospital room and then a hotel room for a month in Thailand.
And I don’t know how I actually deal with proper pain because I think in my head I decided that they just give you, like, enough painkillers so it doesn't really hurt.
But you're only in the hospital for a week and there's only so much morphine they can give you anyway and then you're in the hotel and then it's like paracetamol or Tramadol?
So. I remembered you and that pattern-making question I wanted to focus on.
Our last patternmaking question was
What is this an example of?
The question I’d like to suggest you experiment with is:
What does this whole thing remind me of?
This creates a different focus than the ‘What is this an example of?’ question which, I think, gives you loads and loads of different perspectives, but not necessarily many from your own experience, and therefore maybe not embodied knowledge.
“What does this whole thing remind me of?” links you to your experiences or metaphors that sometimes help you find resources you might not otherwise find.
So I was thinking about anticipation of pain to get a result that I really want.
Straightaway it reminded me of what I imagined it’s like to give birth: an anticipation of massive unavoidable pain that you’ve (probably) opted into and you know that the other side of that pain and recovery is something that you really want.
I haven’t watched 20 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy to not know that people can recover from pregnancy and, indeed, huge surgeries (but don’t be too likeable or get in a car or on a plane, just saying).
Like pregnancy, the surgery I’m having is also something that many people have gone through. Not as many as birth, but this particular clinic have done their technique with 180 people a year for the past 15-20 years.
It was helpful to engage that aspect, but it wasn't quite enough.
And then I went, Okay, what else does this whole situation remind me of?
And the thing that I think is really helpful is: it reminds me of a rite of passage.
Which is something that as a white person living in the decaying Western Empire I’m missing. I've never had a rite of passage into adulthood.
Didn't even have a prom, like Molly Ringwald and Duckie.
To be honest, I have had a very easy gender transition so far.
(I preface this by understanding that no one needs to change their body and everyone should be able to change their body if they want to. No matter their gender, no one should have to change their body in any way. It's not a requirement to be the gender that you are and to have that respected.)
Five years ago, I was able to go to a private service and have some counseling to make sure that a medical transition was what I wanted, and I was able to afford hormones. Recently, I was very easily able to transfer my prescription onto the National Health Service, therefore only paying £18 a month.
I like the changes in my body.
I was able because of my job to access voice training, which means I'm beginning to have a voice that I like.
But what about surgery?
I was talking about changing my body the other night with some people who I’d met for the first time and the conversation turned quite deep.
And I was saying that when I first went on hormones for the first time I could feel my fingers and my toes. Spiritually, energetically. Like, I'm not saying that my feet and toes were physically numb, but that I could feel them for the first time - it was like I was in my body.
But I still feel like I walk an inch off the ground.
And having put some vision on this with my meditation instructor, I think that this surgery is going to help me be fully embodied in the world and therefore be able to do the work that I'm here to do.
Which… is this. The email that you're reading right now is part of that work, creating this rhythm of six monthly lunar focus for leaders who see the deep interdependencies of this world and helping you feel less alone and helping you find who you are, what your best next step is and be fortified enough to take that next step.
That's my work.
And I have a sense that going through this experience is going to allow me to land here and then for the next 20 years (?) do the work that I'm here to do.
So being able to engage Rite of Passage energy is really helpful.
What does this mean?
I'm going to work out ways that I can remind myself of that energy and surround myself with images of people I admire, who have also been through rites of passage. I’m gonna potentially lineup some autobiographies of people who've gone through difficult things, not just trans people.
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There’s also a second part of this question that you can engage:
What does this remind me of in nature?
There are some really interesting things that come out of that.
For me in this situation, some of them are a bit embarrassing about caterpillars and goo and trust and butterflies.
But also the transformation of forest fires that lead to regeneration. Cutting back in order to bloom.
An image of a tree struck by lightning but somehow allowing new growth (is that a thing?).
Rather than just taking our perspective from other human situations, taking our guide from the bird people, the plant people, the insect people, the miracle of this planet links us to something grounded and fully embedded in interconnection.
Asking these questions makes me think about what you might call ‘Ways of Knowing’, which I think might be a bit of a misnomer.
Ways of knowing implies, well, knowing.
I think we might be better thinking about
sources of information or
sources of data or
sources of influences.
So one of the sources, one of the influences on our worldview and our decisions and actions is science and facts, what Western science and Western academic culture likes to think of as objective facts. Cool. Science is important.
There's other ways of accessing influences to add in different, deeper, lighter inputs in to those decisions.
There is intuition. There is metaphor. There is the learning from other experiences that are similar.
There is indigenous knowing and indigenous science.
There is what nature can teach us.
There is looking at history.
There is lived experience.
There is the thinking that happens through the body.
There is somatic knowing. The realisations that come when you're doing something physical with your hands and or your body.
There are lots of ways to access information, to access influences, to access knowings that are build on and augment factual knowing.
I wonder about the ways of knowing that we emphasise and where else might we be able to focus as we close this month of looking at complexity and mess.
How do we approach complexity and mess, which ways of knowing do we personally emphasise? Which influences do we culturally emphasise?
I was talking to someone the other night who spoke about seeing the unseen and as someone who has spent 20 years doing a type of meditation that is designed for real spiritual knowledge that made a lot of sense.
There is an aphorism I heard my teacher use: that a person with vision looks at where lots of things seem to be happening and sees nothing going on. But they'll look at where nothing seems to be happening and many things.
They see dark in the light and light in the dark.
Being able to imbibe different influences can help us to move through the world with more sensitivity, more discernment, more nuance, more wisdom.
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So… yes, I'm closing this month a bit ‘late’. The New Moon was several days ago.
We will transition into spending the rest of this lunar month focusing on our relationships with others.