Dissonance and me

Cognitive dissonance! The words sounded so fancy to me that even before understanding what they meant in reality I was about to post it on my Facebook update. Fortunately, my therapist was prompt enough to suggest that might not be the greatest idea. This brings me to my second revelation I guess, yes I go to a therapist, fighting my cultural and social stigma around all things related to mental health and seeking help for it. And the reason for these visits, an extreme sense of isolation and fear of being left alone for the rest of my life will be my third confession. And now before I proceed I quote the dictionary meaning of the word dissonance, as I am going to use this as a theme to my life. Dissonance is “a tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements”.

 The dissonance most probably started the moment I was conceived as a result of an unplanned passion, and it has stayed with me ever since. As a person I am a planner, I plan my days and nights, my weeks and months ahead of time, I always have a plan D jotted out in case A, B and C fail. But even after planning everything in such details, I am perpetually confused.  The shadow of this dissonance has always chased me, nearly choking me at every other moment with its tight grip. Perhaps the uncertainty of my father’s  willingness to keep me or not affected my mother’s pregnancy, which in turn seems to have added a new set of genes in me,  genes for insecurity and that has grown bigger and bigger with time and makes up a big part of me now. Ironically, the moment I was born, this dissonance in my father’s mind faded for a while. After two “failed trials” and two girls in less than six years, he was finally able to produce an off spring with the right “tools” who would keep the family going forward. As the family celebrated the dissonance between the assumed and reality smiled, as if saying too early to assume anything.

My dissonance with myself andmy society started early on. It was my cousin’s wedding, and I was this adorable eight years old kid wearing a traditional Indian outfit and soon became everyone’s center of attraction by virtue of my nonstop talking. But the memory that stands out is how I felt when my cousin’s 20 something male friend came up to me and pinched my chubby cheeks. I did not know how orgasm felt back then but the excitement of that moment was similar. The dissonance in this situation was this incident happened in a very straight-traditional wedding set up. While I felt a rush of excitement when a man touched me my brain looked around and picked up data for future, the data being happiness is equal to a man and a woman in a wedlock producing kids.  And hence at that moment the journey of self-denial, self-harm and at the same time self-healing had already begun-a dissonance between the perceived and felt. I would go to bed every night hoping when I woke up next morning, Iwould feel  some attraction to my sisters’ female friends. A Hindu by birth, I had plenty of different gods to pray to every night; seems my romantic promiscuity started with my promiscuity with devotion to different gods.  Anyway, gods often answeredmy prayers, though just partially.  I was never attracted to my sisters’ female friends, but always was drawn by the teenage girl gossips that they brought in. while all these praying was going on in the dark of the night, I whipped myself to like sports, to act like a man, to talk about girls and breasts, and fulfill my male role in the society.  But reality looked different than all my efforts, instead of becoming this straight cool dude, I became this vintage personality at the age of 14 who lived in the 1920s. So dissonance became a reality, a teenager in the 1990s who likes to live a life of 1920s! Much later on I remember telling my closest ally, my mother I feel suffocated in the mould I made for myself.  

This phase continued until I was 24, I did everything to make myself invisible in the crowd, gained weight, grew a huge moustache, wore the most unappealing outfits so on and so forth. At this stage my dissonance was between the realization that I am higher than average smart but I was unworthy of anything that world has to offer. Although, dissonance is a very discomforting mental state, yet, by this time I was seasoned to live with it. Hence things were going pretty well, until I met this guy when I was 27 and he 21. We started going out and he somehow convinced me that to be attractive you do not need to be a certain type, and to wear colours certainly you do not need a six pack abs. And this woke the sleeping dissonance in me. My whole understanding of attractiveness and body-type was at stake. On the one hand I enjoyed being with him and having sex with him, on the other, my deep-rooted understanding that I did not deserve him as I am ugly made things complicated. At the end there was a new understanding from my end which opened me up to new possibilities of attraction and attractiveness and new sets of ideas gave away to the old idea of unworthiness. Little did I know every time I go from one idea to another, I break one dissonance and pave way to a new one.  

By this time, I was starting to be comfortable in my own skin, which basically meant I knew for sure I was different from the rest of my family and most of my friends, and I was beyond fixing. Around this same time I started taking more interest in my rights as  a gay man, which basically in Indian subcontinent was nothing, other than my privilege of being a male and being allowed to be sexual in society. My idea of being gay at that time was a man who sleeps with another man, and the definition of being a man was limited to having a specific body organ. I also cultivated an intellectual, super urban, leftist, gay, male only friend circle and a very normative boyfriend and we all had this holier than thou attitude towards everyone and everything. In my own understanding being gay was still limited to having sex with another male who will be presented as my best friend to the society and the roles became a little more intimate behind the closed doors. Hence no wonder when I met this girl from India living with her girlfriend in the small town of United States where I moved in subsequent years led to a complete breakdown of my understanding of a gay life! I saw for the first time someone of my kind not being scared or ashamed of her love and celebrating it.  It was a real scary moment where I knew it was time to let go of old set of ideas. So finally I took the big step, came out to everyone I thought I needed to and soon I became the stereotypical skinny jeans wearing, yoga practicing, all knowing, poetry writing, and always sexual person who would very easily become the center of any gathering by virtue of having an alternative life style. 

But as I said dissonance has always stalked me close enough and most of the time without my realizing how close it was. My next stop in this story of series of dissonances started in a very mundane way. It was a hook up where the guy I was about to hook up with told me before meeting me he was ready to do whatever as long as I did  not ask him to get naked. I heard a weird inner voice or felt a déjà vu moment when he said this but I was just as usual horny and did not care. So there he was, with a bright smile, I have not seen such a smile from a person I am just going to have a one night stand with in a long time. He was so sweet and pleasing I actually started liking him, but still we played by his rule. More intimate we got, the more my science trained cause-effect deduction based brain started racing to solve the puzzle. And in less than a couple of minutes I knew it. I knew that I was in bed with a man who was born with a vagina. Right at that moment when the brain was overpowered by affection and lust, I just did not feel any difference. So we had these wonderful several hours together where he finally revealed his secret to me. We both cried and laughed at the silliness of the society and said good bye in the early hours of the morning. But little did I know the dissonance will pin me down in its worst possible way in subsequent weeks. When it came, hell broke on me. My whole understanding of a man, his body, of my sexuality and identity was bulldozed. I did not know how to explain the whole situation, I stopped eating and sleeping, tried hating myself which I have always been very good at, being a jerk and being happy that I am finally attracted to both genitals now. At the end I intellectualized the whole situation. The worst thing one can do of a reality is to intellectualize it and dehumanize it by reducing it a concept. Slowly and eventually I have moved past a lot of  these confusions, am sure there are still more left, but I am at a far better standing now. I have stopped making intellectual assumptions about experiences that I have not live, for instance in this case knowing I have not lived the life of a trans-man I have no right intellectualizing him.  The most important realization for me right now is I do not need to know what body part you were born with to accept and appreciate you as a man, woman, neither or both.

At the end I have realized why I felt so excited about the words cognitive dissonance when my therapist told me that, I have somehow lived my entire life with several dissonances and will most probably continue doing that. I have transitioned from being extremely religious to suspicious of any religion, from being extreme nationalistic to believer of no-borders, from being hating myself for being able to love more than one person, emotionally and sexually at the same time to accepting and loving that. And I am waiting for the world to give me my next dissonance, so that I can break every possible construct that I live by today.