LastThursday

I often sit here feeling like I've lost an important part of myself over the years. It's pretty difficult to dissect what's been lost exactly, but I'll try my best. Here's a list of nouns I think I've lost or that have diminished and what they mean to me: Energy, vibrancy, excititability: I suppose this comes with age, except that I'm not infirm or in any way unhealthy, I'm fit enough to walk 15 miles in a day. So what gives? Social expectation? Lack of opportunity to express this energy? It just feels like I do still have this, but no outlet for it. I think especially most of the things I do are because I have to do and none of it switches me on. Fun, joy: Again no opportunity to engage with these. Fun and joy are often expressed with other people, especially in intimate situations (not necessarily sexual). I'm quite a humorous and at times sarcastic person and sometimes it works with people (not on a forum full of Americans however - dig). But I find most adults around me just have a humour by-pass, life is serious serious serious. Also, people are just incapable of laughing at themselves or their misfortunes. Connection, people: Maybe the root cause of my loss. As my friends have got married, had kids and maintain mortages, the level of connection has dramatically reduced. Ironically, this connection has increased during lockdown, go figure. I was very close to my sister for most of my childhood, but we have become disconnected as adults - although I'm working on this. I'm not close to my family, we keep each other at a respectable distance. I don't currently have a girlfriend - but I feel strongly ambivalent about having one. I don't do pets or plants. Sheesh. Experimentation: This is a tricky one. Experimentation is kind of a one shot process. Once alcohol, staying awake all night, nightclubs, sex, weed, other stuff, have meet experimented on, that's it. I am experimenting heavily with hypnosis and associated activities. But more of this please Me. Novelty: Again another difficult one, a sort of sister to experimentation. Most experimentation is about novelty, most novelty comes from experimentation. I think some new activites are needed. I have variously done creative writing, acting, song writing, Tai Chi, Badminton (still am). I have a strong interest in running and walking. Problem is none of those activies are novel. How do I turn on the novelty tap. Kindness, gratitude, helping others: It's not that I don't do these things, it's that I don't feel comfortable expressing these as much I want to. Brits are reserved and very sincere about all this stuff. I would just love it to be casual and informal. The way I currently show gratitude is by being physically present and attentive for the people I love. I'm also prepared to go out of my way to help my friends and family. However, I'm not particular verbal about expressing these things. I feel as though my exterior facade doesn't match my interior feelings around kidness and gratitude. Purpose: I've drifted ever since left University now over 25 years ago FFS. Before that my purpose was to escape the confines of London and to get educated as highly as possible and then to earn loads of dosh. I did all that and somewhere along the line gave up striving for anything much at all. Saying that, my scattergun attention doesn't help in this respect, nothing sticks long enough to stick to one purpose. There's no simple solution for this. It's quite possible, that I will never pick up a purpose until I pop my clogs. Optimism: I was an extremely happy go lucky young person. Despite all the odds of parents divorcing, lonely teenagehood, and being poor, I was still optimistic that things would go right and about the future. This has given way to a very pragmatic and grounded person however - which is fine but without optimism all the energy and motivation is sucked out of me. Pragmatism is great for weathering the storm of every day drudgery: working, paying bills and doing the rounds with friends and family, being adult. Pragmatism has also helped kill the anxious young adult I was - for that I'm very thankful. But without optimism life is nothing special. Hmm. What's the theme? People, people, people... How do I square getting to know more people with my lone wolf character? Kill the wolf.

And...? Sorry, just nosey.

Start counting from 1, and keep going to infinity and beyond. Notice that no number ever repeats.

We live in three worlds. The world of the public. The world of the private. The world of our thoughts, desires and fantasies. Each world is governed by it's own rules and code of conduct. The public space has to be shared with people and is therefore designed so that people get on with each other civilly. It's a world of lowest common denominators, not everything goes: nakedness, drug use, most sorts of deviancy from the norm are frowned upon. It's police and politics and politeness. It's the real world of weather and burning sun, concrete and highways; cars. The private space is looser in all those public taboos just mentioned. The only agreement needed is from your (un)loved ones who share your space. Whenever the outside public world intrudes an air of public normalcy pretended, or at least usual private practices are toned down. Recreational drug use is rife, the law doesn't apply. The private space is one of relaxation and letting loose and protection from the rigid public world just outside those windows. It is a place of sleep and dreams and sexual conduct. In a non-pandemic world it is an escape from the public workplace and its codes of conduct. It's a place to eat and shit comfortably. It is a place of deviancy and kink, where some of our fantasies are enacted and a space for getting lost in games both computerised and otherwise. The inner world of thought is the last refuge. If we choose to, it is a perfect place to keep secrets and lock away unpleasant things, even if they often poke us with their ugliness. It is the action centre, and the nerve centre of our sense of self. Here, the three worlds come together to be sorted and sifted into their respective zones. Here no laws apply, and we are unrestricted in our freedom, except for any self imposed imprisonment. We can become others at a moment's notice and then revert to ourselves when finished. We can travel back in time and far into the future. This is the space we use to learn about the other worlds and ourselves. It is a space to secretly hate others or secretly love them.

I wouldn't get too hung up on phrasing. Substitute any other empty abstract noun for energy: essence, vibration, type, orientation, flavour or whatever. I would agree that it can't be easily distentangled from socialization, so by that token the primality would seem contrived (by people). Maybe by analogy works: what is feline energy and canine energy? It would be tricky to put your finger on exactly what makes one or the other, but you know there's a difference and they're not arrived at through socialization. If you're playing charades you could mimic (embody) one or the other easily enough. Is cattiness and dogginess primal in the universe? Erm, no, but it is primal for those two groups of mamals. Can you embody both an essence of masculinity and feminity? The answer would seem to be yes and it's primal for humans at least. Universally? Dunno.

The thing you identify as "you" disappears. Change is constant, change is both death and birth at the same time. The identity "you" is copied and mutated and reused, but that's already happening in other people's minds. Just look at a photograph of "you" for example.

@Breakingthewall could something just be all structure? So structure is just appearance or thought? Can thought imagine nothing, and call it a something without structure? Is reality just (a) thought? Is this just cheating, by equating thought and reality? Is thought just reality?

How about a Turing machine running a non-terminating program? A Turing machine being the embodiment of what a calculation is, i.e. it is the base form of mathematical manipulation. A Turing machine requires an infinite one-dimensional tape though. Stephen Wolfram looked as cellular automata as a base for reality, he numbered them for convenience. One of the cellular automata is Turing complete (equivalent to a Turing machine). Cellular automata have extremely simple rules for each iteration. Some flutter out some don't.

Nice. A self replicating entity? That would make reality equal to this particle? Could you get structure out of reiteration? What about balance? What is reiteration, is it just copying? Is the copying perfect or imperfect?

Don't be so pessimistic. Maybe the question will actually get an answer today by a hippy internet kid? I'm hopeful.

@Breakingthewall good contemplation. More questions: What is something? Does something have an opposite? Is something contained in nothing or nothing contained in something? Can something really be the same as nothing and vice versa? How can nothing have any structure at all? (You say it's non-structure). What is a pattern? What is complexity? What is a form? Is it something or is form something else? Does form automatically have structure? Is structure form?

I'm going to be annoying, by asking more questions. What is "it" and "this" referring to? Who or what is doing the "work"? What is being in "balanced" and why is balance preferred?

No answers, just more questions: Why is reality structured at all? What would reality without structure be? Non-dual, chaos, something else? Is reality actually structured? Does the perceiver of the structure impose the structure? Is structure actually necessary to have consciousness and awareness and existence? What does structure actually mean? Is it subdivision or reduction or connection or cause and effect or objectification or what? Is structure purely conceptual?

@The_Truth_Seeker I applaud you for engaging in this topic. I originally posted about it precisely because there is judgement and stigma surrounding femininity. What better way to understand femininity than to embody it yourself? My aim for myself is to have a better balance of masculinity and femininity, not to be extreme in one or the other. I would never want to push this on to other people though. Generally, men will always have more of a masculine bias and women more feminine.

What isn't everything? What isn't infinity? Whatever the answer is to those two questions must also equal each other.

I realise I write like Charles Dickens. Not so much in Victorian language but more in the style of omniscient narrator. Despite really talking about myself in all my posts, I like to detach as if I'm some sort of drone recording a scene from a distance. Maybe this is indicative of how I view my world, that I'm somehow once removed from everything I say and do, and I'm just watching it all happen. So let's talk women's clothing. One aspect of feminity (my new embodiment), is how it's expressed as a form of body art. Clothing whether functional or expressive is always body art. It modifies the naked canvas of the wearer to convey artistic intent. What's the intent? Many things. It could signal subversion, group belonging, sexuality, authority, defined roles, richness, poverty, modesty, submission, dominance, gender, culture, age, temperament, period, class, or a combination of those. What specifically does this omniscient narrator think is feminine clothing? One aspect is roundness and softness. Often feminine dress is designed to accentuate the round features of the breasts and buttocks, by being tight fitting, modesty is only a secondary consideration and is catered for by varying amounts of coverage. This is enhancement rather than outright modification, like wearing eyeliner to accentuate the eyes. This is about letting the canvas itself speak, by bringing attention to it and lightly contouring it. PVC works because it sticks to and stretches well with skin, like a modified outer skin. Flow is important. This is soft undulating movement. Clothing that flows amplifies a woman's natural flowing movements. This is hard to pin down aesthetically, but when compared to more masculine movement, it is a more graceful and less rigid movement, which comes from having less muscle mass and finer frames (in general). Dresses, skirts, long hair (an extension of clothing) especially if it billows, baggy blouses and trousers, saris, kimonos, hijab. Flowing clothing is connected with feminine sensuality. Frilly attachments have a flowing undulation and is very prevalent in feminine underwear. Longer clothing such as coats are designed to swish. Pattern and sculpting is important. In a sense all clothing is sculpting. Flowers or plant life or tiger patterns (!) are feminine and prevalent. Lacework is reminiscent of patterns found in nature, folliage and filaments. All sorts of repeating and geometric patterns, stripes, polka dots, and often these are cut-outs strategically exposing the canvas below. These have the effect of modifying the immediate sensation of shape and volume of the body and break it up - but at the same accentuate movement where the patterns overlap and swish about against each other. It's about attention: look at me I'm feminine and here I am. This is clothing art as body modification. The sculpting is very often about strategically exposing the skin around the arms, ankles, knees, midriff, bust. This is about contrast, smooth pale skin, beautiful dark brown skin against patterned fabric. The contrast bringing attention to aesthetically femine parts of the body. These parts mostly being covered in masculine attire. Clothing is shorter to expose the canvas. Makeup and tatoos is body art and a form of clothing, permanent or temporary. Feminine makeup intensifies, it makes eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows and lips fuller, colour enhances and overlays onto natural features. Flaws are disguised, In this case it's the feminity that's being intensified, smooth skin and homogeneous healthy appearance. Feminine beauty is attached to looking healthy, flaws being a sign of potential bad health. Makeup is facial sculpting to intensify feminity. Shoes are used to accentuate and sculpt body form especially calves and buttocks. They increase height and feminine dominance. Heels force shorter more feminine steps and the click-clack against hard floors bring attention to the shorter steps. The slight instability in walking in heels increases the sway (and flowing movement) of the hips and buttocks. Shoes expose toes with painted toenails. They can be soft to the touch and look functional, but also accentuate feminine softness. Colour in shoes is very important. Long boots also accentuate and dress the lower legs. Shiny shoes gleam with constantly moving highlights, outlining feminine movement. Bright reds and primary colours also bring attention and can be used to indicate blood and sexuality. Red and light red (pink) are feminine colours. Pastel and unsaturated colours signal placidness and lightness, both feminine traits, in men this is used to constrast againt masculinity (but not generally used in masculine shoeware). Accesories, tights, stockings, jewellery, hats, scalfs further sculpt the outline and employ flow, highlighting, colour. Masculine body art generally has less accesorising, because this would break up the straighter lines and more homogenous look of male clothing.

I've spent my whole life in masculinity and doing quite well at it. However I feel that's not the whole story, I feel I could have a better balance. How do I get in touch with and embody feminine energy as a man? Note, that I'm not talking about sexual orientation, attraction or finding a woman.

Sometimes you reconnect with people you haven't seen in months or years or even decades. There's many reasons for a hiatus, such as physical distance or lack of time or an unresolved disagreement or just being focussed on different things. We can feel differently about different people. Some people we miss dearly and others we don't even remember, until they suddenly find us on Facebook and try and befriend us again. There very much feels like an obligation when someone tries to reconnect with you to reciprocate. I say obligation, because sometimes there's an unspoken reason you haven't kept in contact with that person. Maybe you never did much like them in the first place, or some flaw in their character put you off, or they simply didn't add anything to your life or even worse dragged you down. So the first reaction to being reconnected ought to be to just take some time to listen without judgement. If it's been a long time, they could have changed out of all recognition, and the same goes for you. It would take time for both of you to readjust your feelings and attitude towards each other. Give the reconnection a chance. Maybe second time round things will go differently. The second reaction is to go with your intuition. Is the person genuinely reconnecting because they actually missed you or thought more of you than you expected. Is the person doing it out of need and you would be in a happy position to help them? Is the person just nostalgic and wanting to relive a bit of youth, and maybe you do too? You will soon find out. Last is to use some logic. You have so far lived without this person in your life for a reasonable amount of time - so logically you can keep on so doing, it won't really make much difference in the long run if you decide not to reconnect. You don't have to feel guilty or obliged and you can just patiently wait and let the reconnection fizzle out again.

Great suggestion. Half way through, good film so far. Let's see what I get from it. I'm a great music lover both listening and playing. I do compose the odd piece the rare time inspiration takes hold. And I was good at art in school, mostly sketching and working with clay. Both those things are definitely avenues I should explore more - your suggestion is taken onboard. My work is very left brain heavy and I think it distracts me from my more creative side. @Epiphany_Inspired thanks that's a good reminder of how things fit together. I think with masculinity there's a tendency to translate intuition and emotion into logic and and analysis and then work with those (and pretend that intution and emotion don't exist). I'm guessing that maybe femininity cuts out the middle-man (lol) and uses intuition and emotion directly to reason with? What do you think?

Thanks I'll give it a read and Slow Sex too sounds intriguing @aurum. Sort of confused about this. Is feminity and masculinity an identity or are they just ways of being? I don't feel as though I will need to identify with feminity as much as to be feminine in some ways. But you're right, I do identify with masculinity sometimes even consciously so. Maybe I should be less identified with masculinity. Hmm, tricky stuff.

@Leo Nordin no worries it's cool. But are you talking about liberation from physical suffering or just mental suffering or what?

And the elephant in the room: "Why do I keep on being me?" The only solution is to remove "me" out of the question through destroying the ego. Then it's a simple case of answering "Why am?"

Because liberation is just a word. What's the opposite of liberation? Enslavement, restriction, rules, taboo, morality, law, respect, standards, love. It's not so clear that liberation is good. If I were completely liberated, I could walk around naked in the streets killing people and not care at all. I could end up in prison for years and not care at all about being abused every day - that would be true liberation from suffering. You wouldn't mind at all scraping a living on the streets. So being liberated involves treading a careful path and cherry picking how you want to be liberated. Survival and common decency are hard to let go of.

With my masculine analytical head on, these are some of things that have come up so far: Should I have a masc/fem switch, where I embody whichever suits the situation best? Or is it a sliding scale between one or the other. Or, is it a pix 'n mix of masc/fem traits that I can use at any particular time? (I realise the masculine tendency here in trying to see the utility of femininity.) Very much roles I have taken on in my life. Is it enough just to recognise them for what they are, or should I actually let go of these, or just tone them down? Or is it more about making space for more feminine roles? This resonates strongly with me. I feel like I have an aesthetic temperament, but it's not readily expressed outwardly. Paying much attention to my appearance for example seems like effort and vanity, but perhaps I should be doing it for myself than for other people? I love the idea of colourful clothing, my wardrobe is dark and inoffensive (and British). I used to wear brighter, lighter colours when I was younger. I also very much like the idea of flow and grace - flowing summer dresses with flowers - not sure I can pull that off in the heart of middle class England, but maybe in Brighton... That's a lot! And none of those am I particularly strong on. I suppose it's a case of practise and constant awareness of these domains and some bravery in embodying and showing these. I think I know what they mean, but do I really? Even paying close attention to my body seems weird. So far my body is very much a vehicle for "doing" stuff and not particularly something to be pad attention to closely. I have been doing some work with self-hypnosis though and paying more close attention to letting go of bodily tension: I have this image that masculinity is about rigidity, tension, accuracy - and that femininity is more about fluidity, lack of tension and looseness. I don't know I could be wrong. Certainly starting activities which are seen as feminine might be a good starting point. I used to do Tai Chi for a number of years, and liked the gracefulness of it, but I guess it's seen as mostly masculine. Yoga hasn't appealed, yet I haven't investigated it enough to know. But I'm sure there are also other feminine activities. Dancing is good, except I've got two left feet, I'm really bad. I will have to investigate more feminine activities. Very much something I do in private. I've certainly opened myself up to this in the last few years, and it feels great just to be able to let the emotion out. I know that I do have emotions, but because they're hard to analyse I don't know what to do with them, especially around other people. There's also the expectation of friends that expect me to be a certain way, so it's a bit of a game. To break out of my mould would take some courage. Oh very much, I said it to stop the thread degenerating. But certainly embodying and expressing connection, intimacy and presence seems very attractive to me. As @soos_mite_ah says: Prioritize human connection and intimacy. I'm not very forward in connecting with people and I think it stems from being embarrassed about myself (see my journal). Maybe getting in touch with my femininity and body and aesthetic is a way to be less embarrassed. I also feel strongly that I want to avoid neediness and that also stops me connecting with people. It's definitely a thorny problem for me, and maybe there's a feminine solution to it.

Amazing, some beautiful answers here. Too much depth, how do even start? Deep breath.