I am officially naming this week in the life of my blog "Girl Interrupted week."
This week I am going to explore my current state of mind and see where it goes. This could be very boring reading. But hey it's only a week. This week I shall not censor myself as much as I normally do. And by censor, unfortunately I am not referring to anything saucy, because there is surprisingly little of that lurking around in my brain right now.
This weekend I read my brain into a frenzy. I read a book written by psychiatrists, I read a book by a person who suffered from a severe mental illness and recovered, I read everything about every personality disorder and mental illness I could find on the internet. I also read about theories of gender, sex, hermaphroditism and other complications relating to sex definition (I think everyone knows that this is a hot topic at present). I read until I thought my head would explode.
One thing that is evident to me is that the age of black and white thinking is slowly, slowly gasping it's last wheezy breaths. I reckon it will take generations to die, but it may be on it's way out.
When I studied philosophy we referred to this kind of thinking as binary oppositions. It is the human (or at least the Western human) desire to divide and categorise; black and white, good and bad, man and woman.
These categories in no way reflect our reality, but they do fit certain stereotypes of reality. Because it is so much easier for our poor little minds to think this way, we have accepted that it does in fact represent reality. In this way we have completely lost touch with said reality.
Philosophers have tried to subvert black and white thinking for ages, and many attempts have been made. Deconstruction was an abortive attempt, but it tried to reverse oppositions instead of eliminating them. Postmodernism has come and gone, and yet most people still cling to black and white thinking.
My current way of thinking is to see everything as Grey. I am happy to embrace the confusion and anarchy of grey thinking.
Don't get me wrong, it is exhausting, and sometimes I delight in cliches and stereotypes because they are so self-fulfilling and satisfying. I laugh at my complete lack of spatial awareness and sense of direction because it fulfills the female cliche.
But when there is a cliche that does not fit me I immediately feel alienated, othered, defective. And nobody fulfills all the cliches of their gender, race, culture, society. There is no need for all of us to go around feeling defective just because we insist on making the stereotype into the law of reality.
So I see things in shades of grey. There is no clearly defined "male" or female". I think of things in spectra and gradients, and each person fits somewhere on a spectrum for each and every sex and gender characteristic. And there are many characteristic which make up gender, and then sex.
This is how I see everything in the world. Undefined, in flux.
Basically we are all goop in a soup yeah, and we could just flow and adapt if we so desired.
Maybe there are already theories out there by cutting edge types who tear down grey thinking.
But my brain is geared for grey thinking to the point where I feel like I know nothing, am sure of nothing, can judge nothing. It is pretty confusing. But it's ok. It's an adventure. Weeeeeee.
