Aft Gang Agley
As a lover of words, I’m quite fond of the phrase, from a Robert Burns poem: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men aft gang agley.” There’s just something about its compactness of metaphor, succinctly implying the highs and lows of ambition, as well as its old, foreign wording... “oft go askew” just wouldn’t feel the same.
At the moment, I’m wondering how I let things go so far agley - er, I mean askew - that I haven’t posted to this blog in... ye gods, has it been THAT many weeks?? Of course, it’s easily blamed on the many unexpected challenges Life has recently gifted me - from a highly persistent respiratory infection that’s had me more or less laid up for nearly a month, to this insane run of quasi-crippling Antarctic East-Coast weather and an ever-so-slightly problematic home internet connection... but hey, if you don’t like any of those excuses, I’m sure I can come up with a few more!
But in the meantime, I’m busy recalling some of the other paths and promises of my life, thinking about how my own best-laid schemes have fared over the course of it. I have to say that “aft gang agley” is probably a pretty good description, overall. And of course, I can - and have - come up with many a good excuse for that, too.
These days I find I’m less interested in the excuses, and more interested in the twists and turns themselves, the inner realities that they reflect, and the shifts of identity that they foster. These things are not necessarily good or bad; they’re just very, very real. And what I’ve seen in my own life, time and again, is that they often reflect unrecognized truths - in some cases, truths that I’d been consciously trying to avoid recognizing.
For instance:
For most of the early part of my life, I was comfortably certain that I would end up as a scientist. An A student with a special passion for the sciences - physical science in particular - I was an avid backyard astronomer, cherished my Audubon Field Guide To North American Rocks and Minerals, and illicitly stayed up late teaching myself programming in BASIC on one of the first personal computers ever manufactured (the good old Commodore VIC-20 with its staggering 3583 bytes of free RAM).
I still remember what it was like to be that person. I remember... but I am not that person anymore. My life has taken a lot of unexpected turns between then and now.
There were long bitter years when I regretted this, felt it as a failing - and, of course, made excuses for it. And indeed, there were some pretty serious issues going on at the time when I abandoned that particular self, and they really do make for fine excuses - from the sense of gender disjunction that was growing more disturbing and distracting as high school went on, to the ever-increasing but carefully-hidden insanity of my highly dysfunctional family which also reached something of a peak during that period.
But from my longer vantage point in the present, I can also see other reasons why I might have allowed these things to turn me aside, rather than hanging on for dear life to the person I’d been, or thought I was. For one thing, the issues with my family and with my conflicting sense of identity were starting to push me more and more toward pondering deep questions about the human experience, instead of questions about the expansion of the universe or the possibilities of a unified field theory. I was also recognizing honestly that, while I enjoyed the logic of math, I was no ravenous number-cruncher, and that perhaps I wouldn’t enjoy trying to turn myself into one (assuming that was even possible) as would likely be needful to follow the paths I’d originally planned.
Frankly, all of this left me feeling quite lost indeed. Looking back, I can see how abruptly I abandoned that comfortable and familiar sense of self, the one I’d grown up with. It left me wide open to outside pressures to which I promptly succumbed, taking another tack into college which I knew in advance would be unsatisfying, dropping out in my second year as depression and apathy took over. I was a kid, and I didn’t yet understand that life is full of trial and error and new starts. I could have made one then, used college as an exploration - but I didn’t know how, didn’t know I was allowed to. (And probably wouldn’t have been allowed to, realistically.) I felt defeated.
Fast-forward about a dozen years, with a dozen years’ worth of new life experience and self-knowledge. When I returned to finally complete my bachelor’s degree, I was someone quite different than the person I’d been that first time around. I still laugh to realize how fully I’d somehow transformed from geek to nerd during those intervening years. This time, I found myself studying dead languages and world religions; I’d gone from messing around with edgy bits of theoretical physics and state-of-the-art technologies to memorizing declensions in classical Greek and the cuneiform clay-tablet writing of ancient Hittite. I completed my B.A. with a dual major in Classics and Humanities and started graduate work in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions. I was aiming for the life of an academic - researching, writing, teaching.
That, too, however, was a plan that went agley - again, in part, because of a series of external troubles that make for fine excuses, including the health problems that would eventually be diagnosed as CHF (congestive heart failure) - but also because, again, I had begun to learn more than I’d originally bargained for about myself and the world. For one thing, I hadn’t realized how much I’d begun curtailing other aspects of my life because I feared losing credibility as an academic if I was too involved in, say, LGBT activism (at that time I identified as lesbian) or non-mainstream (neo-Pagan) religious practice. I was also seeing, for the first time, what looked to me like the dark and dangerous side of Academia: the fact that its emphasis on objectivity can become a crutch for some who prefer to think that they have no biases, no personal motives, no need for introspection or critical self-analysis.
Thinking about this, I realize that I would have fought much harder to stay, despite those (admittedly highly problematic) health issues, if I’d felt that it was truly the right place for me at that time. But it clearly was not; I’d been too busy trying very hard to do things the way one is “supposed to,” toward a predictable and proper ending (the “successful” ending of a tenure-track position)... but only ended up feeling constricted and airless inside the box I’d been constructing for myself. And so there I was again, suddenly needing to let go of a sense of self that I’d been deeply and seriously invested in. I handled it better this time, with a more mature understanding of the hows and whys of it all - but it still left me feeling pretty lost.
I could mention other, similar times as well - and I’m betting that you can think of one or two times in your own life when it‘s happened to you, too. I’m pretty sure that this is a very common human experience, this re-formulation of the self that happens as we learn - often the hard way - about who we are and who we aren’t.
Coming out - to myself - as being Transgender has been just such a journey of redefinition, of identity-reformation... but with a difference. Perhaps many differences.
For one thing, this time, the schemes that went agley weren’t mine; they were foisted on me by factors outside my control, by Mother Nature and Society, and I’ve spent much of my now-meager store of patience and effort and energy trying to mitigate their debilitating effects.
And of course, for the first time in my life, I’m in a really supportive space - a circle of people who are supportive of me being me, whatever and whoever that is, rather than of the supposed-to’s that I was originally taught to honor above any sense of personal reality.
And this time, the identity that I’m letting go of is one that I bore only because I thought I had no choice; the one I’m feeling my way into is the one that has always felt right, though unattainable.
Frankly, I’m wondering how much my prior experience will help with this change. All of its possibilities and pitfalls feel new, unexplored. I’ve never been here before.
With this in mind, I think that one of the things I really need to do is to keep writing... keep questioning and exploring, with words as my path.
So I hope you’re not too bored with me yet, friends - because it really helps to know that someone is reading. And, appearances (i.e. this month and more of blank pages) notwithstanding... I’m not finished yet. Not by a longshot.
You see... I think this is where I find out, as the saying goes, whether I’m a man or a mouse. :)
At the moment, I’m wondering how I let things go so far agley - er, I mean askew - that I haven’t posted to this blog in... ye gods, has it been THAT many weeks?? Of course, it’s easily blamed on the many unexpected challenges Life has recently gifted me - from a highly persistent respiratory infection that’s had me more or less laid up for nearly a month, to this insane run of quasi-crippling Antarctic East-Coast weather and an ever-so-slightly problematic home internet connection... but hey, if you don’t like any of those excuses, I’m sure I can come up with a few more!
But in the meantime, I’m busy recalling some of the other paths and promises of my life, thinking about how my own best-laid schemes have fared over the course of it. I have to say that “aft gang agley” is probably a pretty good description, overall. And of course, I can - and have - come up with many a good excuse for that, too.
These days I find I’m less interested in the excuses, and more interested in the twists and turns themselves, the inner realities that they reflect, and the shifts of identity that they foster. These things are not necessarily good or bad; they’re just very, very real. And what I’ve seen in my own life, time and again, is that they often reflect unrecognized truths - in some cases, truths that I’d been consciously trying to avoid recognizing.
For instance:
For most of the early part of my life, I was comfortably certain that I would end up as a scientist. An A student with a special passion for the sciences - physical science in particular - I was an avid backyard astronomer, cherished my Audubon Field Guide To North American Rocks and Minerals, and illicitly stayed up late teaching myself programming in BASIC on one of the first personal computers ever manufactured (the good old Commodore VIC-20 with its staggering 3583 bytes of free RAM).
I still remember what it was like to be that person. I remember... but I am not that person anymore. My life has taken a lot of unexpected turns between then and now.
There were long bitter years when I regretted this, felt it as a failing - and, of course, made excuses for it. And indeed, there were some pretty serious issues going on at the time when I abandoned that particular self, and they really do make for fine excuses - from the sense of gender disjunction that was growing more disturbing and distracting as high school went on, to the ever-increasing but carefully-hidden insanity of my highly dysfunctional family which also reached something of a peak during that period.
But from my longer vantage point in the present, I can also see other reasons why I might have allowed these things to turn me aside, rather than hanging on for dear life to the person I’d been, or thought I was. For one thing, the issues with my family and with my conflicting sense of identity were starting to push me more and more toward pondering deep questions about the human experience, instead of questions about the expansion of the universe or the possibilities of a unified field theory. I was also recognizing honestly that, while I enjoyed the logic of math, I was no ravenous number-cruncher, and that perhaps I wouldn’t enjoy trying to turn myself into one (assuming that was even possible) as would likely be needful to follow the paths I’d originally planned.
Frankly, all of this left me feeling quite lost indeed. Looking back, I can see how abruptly I abandoned that comfortable and familiar sense of self, the one I’d grown up with. It left me wide open to outside pressures to which I promptly succumbed, taking another tack into college which I knew in advance would be unsatisfying, dropping out in my second year as depression and apathy took over. I was a kid, and I didn’t yet understand that life is full of trial and error and new starts. I could have made one then, used college as an exploration - but I didn’t know how, didn’t know I was allowed to. (And probably wouldn’t have been allowed to, realistically.) I felt defeated.
Fast-forward about a dozen years, with a dozen years’ worth of new life experience and self-knowledge. When I returned to finally complete my bachelor’s degree, I was someone quite different than the person I’d been that first time around. I still laugh to realize how fully I’d somehow transformed from geek to nerd during those intervening years. This time, I found myself studying dead languages and world religions; I’d gone from messing around with edgy bits of theoretical physics and state-of-the-art technologies to memorizing declensions in classical Greek and the cuneiform clay-tablet writing of ancient Hittite. I completed my B.A. with a dual major in Classics and Humanities and started graduate work in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Religions. I was aiming for the life of an academic - researching, writing, teaching.
That, too, however, was a plan that went agley - again, in part, because of a series of external troubles that make for fine excuses, including the health problems that would eventually be diagnosed as CHF (congestive heart failure) - but also because, again, I had begun to learn more than I’d originally bargained for about myself and the world. For one thing, I hadn’t realized how much I’d begun curtailing other aspects of my life because I feared losing credibility as an academic if I was too involved in, say, LGBT activism (at that time I identified as lesbian) or non-mainstream (neo-Pagan) religious practice. I was also seeing, for the first time, what looked to me like the dark and dangerous side of Academia: the fact that its emphasis on objectivity can become a crutch for some who prefer to think that they have no biases, no personal motives, no need for introspection or critical self-analysis.
Thinking about this, I realize that I would have fought much harder to stay, despite those (admittedly highly problematic) health issues, if I’d felt that it was truly the right place for me at that time. But it clearly was not; I’d been too busy trying very hard to do things the way one is “supposed to,” toward a predictable and proper ending (the “successful” ending of a tenure-track position)... but only ended up feeling constricted and airless inside the box I’d been constructing for myself. And so there I was again, suddenly needing to let go of a sense of self that I’d been deeply and seriously invested in. I handled it better this time, with a more mature understanding of the hows and whys of it all - but it still left me feeling pretty lost.
I could mention other, similar times as well - and I’m betting that you can think of one or two times in your own life when it‘s happened to you, too. I’m pretty sure that this is a very common human experience, this re-formulation of the self that happens as we learn - often the hard way - about who we are and who we aren’t.
Coming out - to myself - as being Transgender has been just such a journey of redefinition, of identity-reformation... but with a difference. Perhaps many differences.
For one thing, this time, the schemes that went agley weren’t mine; they were foisted on me by factors outside my control, by Mother Nature and Society, and I’ve spent much of my now-meager store of patience and effort and energy trying to mitigate their debilitating effects.
And of course, for the first time in my life, I’m in a really supportive space - a circle of people who are supportive of me being me, whatever and whoever that is, rather than of the supposed-to’s that I was originally taught to honor above any sense of personal reality.
And this time, the identity that I’m letting go of is one that I bore only because I thought I had no choice; the one I’m feeling my way into is the one that has always felt right, though unattainable.
Frankly, I’m wondering how much my prior experience will help with this change. All of its possibilities and pitfalls feel new, unexplored. I’ve never been here before.
With this in mind, I think that one of the things I really need to do is to keep writing... keep questioning and exploring, with words as my path.
So I hope you’re not too bored with me yet, friends - because it really helps to know that someone is reading. And, appearances (i.e. this month and more of blank pages) notwithstanding... I’m not finished yet. Not by a longshot.
You see... I think this is where I find out, as the saying goes, whether I’m a man or a mouse. :)
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