Oh shit!

I was just singing a little song to myself, and then I imagined myself singing that song to a lover, and that felt pretty good, and then I thought about how grateful I am that I finally have enough confidence to sing a song to someone, and then I imagined myself singing a song to my teenage child, and that didn’t feel so good because I imagined my teenage child getting embarrassed and scornful and wanting me to stop, and then I thought well, maybe I was right in holding back my song all these years, but then I thought wait. If the teenager doesn’t like my song, that’s probably just because the teenager doesn’t like herself very much. That’s why it’s so easy to sing songs to children because they like themselves and so they like your song. So if the teenager doesn’t like my song, that’s her problem, not mine. And then I thought about all those times teenagers are dicks to their parents and how that says a lot more about how the teenagers feel about themselves than it says about the parents. And then I thought about all those times my parents were dicks to me and how that said a lot more about how they felt about themselves than it said about me, and then I was like shit. That’s awesome. I’m going to sing as much as I want!

T-group

I have been wanting to write about T-group but I was afraid of not being able to do it justice. T-group is kind of like Burning Man in that you have to experience it to really get it. No amount of explanations or mental snapshots will be able to convey what it was like or why it was so valuable to me.

But I will try. This semester one of my classes was Group Dynamics. And this class was “a T-group.” I say was because this class didn’t last all semester and is already over. We met for a total of about 36 hours spread over the week-long retreat in August and over two more weekends in September and October, usually in 6-hour sessions with breaks.

The T in T-group stands for sensitivity training. T-groups are designed for people such as therapists who will be faced with other people’s feelings directed towards them and who need to be able to handle these feelings compassionately. As a therapist, clients might hate you or they might love you. They might tell you how incompetent you are or they might tell you they are in love with you. The thing is that everyone has other people’s feelings directed at them all the time, not just therapists! That’s why this experience was so valuable to me not just as a future therapist but also, and more importantly, as a human being.

What happened in T-group is that we sat around in a circle–12 of us, plus our instructor, a professor of psychology who had led many T-groups before. And the instruction was to talk about nothing but our feelings as a result of being in this particular group in this particular moment with these particular people. In the beginning we didn’t know each other at all. And you might think, “What kind of feelings are you going to have about complete strangers?” The answer is usually a lot. You might have prejudices, you might have admiration. You might feel repelled from some people and drawn to others. And that’s where you start. And as you express things such as “I really like you, and I have noticed that I have a strong desire for you to like me back,” feelings might come up in other people, such as jealousy or annoyance.

There is a saying that what happens in T-group stays in T-group. We weren’t even allowed to process what happened with each other outside of T-group. So I can’t talk in detail about some of the interactions that happened in our group–perhaps this is another reason why I have been hesitant to write about it–but I can talk about my own personal experience. And these are some of the things I got to face:

1) My fear of rejection from men. I noticed right away that I was not worried at all about connecting with the women in the group but felt insecure around the men, gay or straight.

2) My physical appearance: One day we talked quite a bit about how my piercings, black clothes, dark eyeliner, etc. affect others.

3) My discomfort with being German and having an accent: We touched on it a little but I want to go into it more in therapy.

Even though it might sound like it, T-group is not group therapy. It’s just about expressing feelings as they arise. It’s very focused on the present moment. We were asked to express our feelings as they related to a specific behavior by another person or event in the group. We even had a template for this:

“When you ____________, I felt ___________.”

The whole experience felt a little bit like Communicating Feelings 101. Maybe that’s why I got so much out of it: I had been lacking that in my life.

Dick

I made the best pun in therapy today. I said “I don’t want to be such a dick to myself anymore.” And what’s so great about that is that we were talking about my relationships to men, sex and penis-induced orgasms. You should have been there.

The cruel Midwest

I have a friend who shaves his head, is really tall and wears long skirts and platform boots to work. I also have a friend who has dreads past his butt and wears elaborate hoop earrings. Aside from their eccentric appearance, what these two friends have in common is that they are, at least in my experience, very comfortable with who they are. This is in contrast to many other freaks I know who have a certain insecurity about their freakish nature, who feel like outcasts. It just so happens that both of these confident friends grew up in small Midwestern towns, and the other day I talked about this to another freak from Oklahoma. He explained to me that when you grow up in an environment that is very hostile to freakishness, you develop a certain shell to the point that you don’t care anymore. The hostility just rolls right off of you. Then, when you come to a place like San Francisco which embraces freaks, you tend to feel very comfortable, like, “Oh hey, finally. There is all these other me’s running around here.” And I was like, well, I’m a freak from a small (not Midwestern but German) town, so why didn’t this happen to me? How did I grow up to be a freak with so much insecurity?

And I have two possible theories for this:

1) I didn’t get enough hostility and didn’t feel quite lonely enough as a youngster to develop the shell my friend spoke of: I always had friends and I never went through a period of being completely shunned by everyone in town due to my appearance. So maybe I just didn’t grow up in a black-and-white enough world to really feel the contrast when moving to San Francisco.

2) I was actually rejected by the freaks in my town, not by the “normal” people: There was a period as a teenager when I started dressing in a more freakish way but it was in line with a trend that many other teenagers were also embracing. And I ended up not getting along and feeling very intimidated by many of the very kids that dressed like me and liked the same music as me. Also, I don’t know if that actually counts as being a freak or if I was simply trying to fit in with the cool kids.

So maybe what happened to me is that I wasn’t actually a real freak and as a result I have felt insecure around people I perceive as real freaks. Maybe by the time I became a real freak, i.e. embodied my very own brand of eccentric, which was during my year as an exchange student in 1993/4, I had developed too much insecurity and not enough chip-off-my-shoulder confidence to feel comfortable among my own.

It wasn’t until I entered the darker communities in the Bay Area about five years ago that I felt truly embraced by a subculture that felt like my own. And now this comfort is expanding outwards to other communities. I think the reason it has been such a difficult and serpentine journey for me is that I felt rejected by my own subculture in Germany and instead of dealing with it, I ran away to America. At first America seemed like heaven with its kneesock-wearing thrift store whores, but my internal conflict soon caught up with me. Am I really a freak? Do freaks really like me? Yes and yes, I think.

The beginnings of a fashion sense

When I was about 9, I remember my 15-year-old neighbor wearing oversize wool sweaters that went almost down to her knees. I didn’t really understand why she wore those huge sweaters–I didn’t think they looked particularly good, and they also didn’t seem very practical. But I did understand that she was making a fashion statement. To me, she was sending the message that she was beautiful in her ugly sweaters, that she was subversive and rebellious, that she was expressing emotions through her clothing, and that she was in on a secret that I hadn’t yet discovered.