A year ago, a local trans woman put up a Facebook post that read “F*** all Trump supporters especially the ones in the community”. In the comments section, folks I knew in the community started talking about me.

I panicked.

In hindsight, I could have just ignored it and moved on. Letting folks have and express their opinions without taking them in to mean something about who I am. But my relationship with the Internet was more tense then.

I’d often doom-scroll and get hooked into conversations that were not nourishing, with people that I barely spent time with. I had a proclivity to engage with people who were angry with me—or more accurately, who I felt unsettled in the company of—instead of calmly disengaging. To allow my anxieties to chase excitement, instead of staying steady to soothe them.

I responded to a few comments including directly to the trans woman. That kicked off a series of events that isolated me from the local community. It was a difficult time, to say the least. It brought me squarely into the gracious arms of Jesus Christ.

Last week, I saw a possible future pathway for myself where I might end up being trans.

I want to name that in this piece I’m exploring my own internal experience with gender expression, and I may be conflating things that are distinct—such as cross-dressing, gender identity, and trans lives. I don’t claim to understand the trans experience from the inside, and I’m not intending to reduce it to the frameworks I’m using here. What I’m describing is a personal line of inquiry, not a definition of what it means to be trans.

I have a fairly masculine presentation. Based both on my own sense and off reflections I have received. In musculature. In the beard. In a steady gait.

And… I feel connected to a tender, soft heart. Such a tender, soft heart! So good! It feels so good to have a soft, tender beating heart and to feel it moment by moment and to have moved on from a life spent running away from its tenderness. Closing it up.

Truly there is nothing like a tender heart. I’d rather be alone with a soft, tender heart than be in any kind of situation where I’m forced to close my heart up.

You see, throughout my life, my heart had developed these calluses. Layer after layer of protective sheathes. When pain would arise, I’d find myself closing up in self-protection. Instead of opening my chest up to the skies and letting it flow out in a fountain of cleansing water. Of tears. Of grief. Cleansing waters gushing through my body and pouring out of my heart so that I could feel the softness again.

It used to be so painful to carry around past unacknowledged pain. I couldn’t cry out loud because it didn’t feel safe to cry. That unacknowledged past pain would keep coming up over and over again in present relational interactions. Back then, I didn’t know how to open up my chest to the skies towards the Heavenly Father who is the Spirit of Love and allow myself to be cleansed. I really didn’t know.

What I did know was how to protect and guard myself. I ended up carrying this tightness in my hips because I was too afraid to look at what was stored there. Till I saw it. This first clear moment where my hips locked up and froze.

Holy Grandfather! It’s so intense to receive a cock in any of the cavities of your body! So intense, truly. The first thrust. Oof. There is a way to thrust where who you are thrusting into, completely disappears from their body. And there is a way to thrust where two can softly merge. My grandfather did not know the difference.

I lived disconnected from how rigid my body had gotten from that first thrust. The sudden movement into me. All of that rigidity had calcified around my heart.

Boys don’t necessarily need to receive a cock in their ass to rigidify. Boys have such tender bodies and hearts. A whipping or a yelling suffices.

And then they grow up and thrust their own rigid cocks into cavities that are not fully ready to receive. And then the women moan in this confusing cocktail of pain and pleasure—it hurts so good.

Yes, I want it. No, I don’t want it.

Further cementing for the men that sudden thrusts from a calcified heart is the way. The only way they know! We don’t know the joy of being soft in the heart and slow and steady with the thrusts. Feeling the sheer intensity of physical human connection as every millimeter slips in.

Such is the electric nature of erotic connection that if I were to press up my thumb against the thumb of a woman I’m drawn to, sparks fly.

I did not know that back then. I could not feel.

So I lived with a calcified heart for so long. And now, my heart is so tender and soft.

For a sufficient period of time I have oscillated between the nourishing softness of my own heart and self-protective calcifications in relationing with others, that the intention to not calcify my heart ever has steadied itself. I’d rather be in the heartache of attempts to connect than calcify my heart protectively.

Oh, such deep heartache unfolds when an open heart meets another only for one of the hearts to start calcifying as a threshold of intimacy is reached. Intimacy can be a lot to feel. You never know when that could happen, really. Truly.

It can be quite sudden. Like the sudden thrusts that I have led with in the past. All I can do in that moment is to feel the pain and maintain a steady, open heart and see if the other person can soften or even wants to soften.

Much is revealed in such a moment about how a person orients. No amount of bumper stickers that carry the word love–either with a rainbow behind or Jesus in front—could tell you how a person orients in that moment where a threshold of intimacy is reached.

There are two starkly different orientations today.

One where grief is bottled up and the other where grief is gratefully released with the flow of waters. And you don’t know how the other person orients till you reach this tender place in intimacy where one of the hearts wants to calcify. In that tender moment, it can be difficult to tell sometimes—is it my heart that’s closing up or is it their heart?

That moment of calcified disconnection can be so painful.

This is where I feel thankful to the Heavenly Father for the Grace He has showered upon me through the myth—just the myth of Jesus Christ.

The word “myth” doesn’t necessarily mean falsehood. It lives in the verbal space beyond the duality of factual truth and falsehood. Therein, a myth touches a very different flavor of Truth. Truth that doesn’t need factual objective consensus amongst PhDs.

Much energy is spent arguing back and forth about factual objective consensus of a myth.

You don’t need to wait for factual objective consensus to receive the Grace of the Heavenly Father.

The myth suffices.

The myth of a man being crucified on a cross. Oof, so painful. Forget about whether he was God, incarnate or not for a minute. Forget his name even for a minute.

Just imagine a man crucified on a cross. Nails going through his wrists. In the heart of his palms. Hung on nails that pierce his ankles together.

People walking by, mocking him. Spitting at him.

This is on top of a life spent not being understood. Being asked questions meant to trick him into argumentation.

People walking by and relishing in his torture. Oh, so painful.

How could one not calcify their heart in such a situation! I don’t get it!

Imagine when you were in middle school and other kids bullied you. Wasn’t that so painful? You developed an early layer of calcification around your heart then. Created enemy images about those kids.

They are bad. They are evil. They hate you. They don’t care about you.
Instead of “ah, this is the best they can do at the moment to meet their needs”.

Imagine that moment when an older man or woman sexually took from you when you weren’t ready to give. Wasn’t that painful? Remember how you calcified your heart in response to that? That horrible abuser. That narcissist. That sex trafficker.
Instead of “ah, this is the best they can do at the moment to meet their needs. They don’t know any better. If they knew any better, they might have chosen that instead.”

Now imagine the pain of bleeding. The pain of being physically hurt. Maybe you stubbed your toe on a sharp rock. It was painful. And it pricked your toe. Blood gushed out. You winced and withdrew inwards.

Now imagine being really hungry. You haven’t had food in a while. Not even water. You are parched. Thirsty. Someone in front of you has food and water but they are not willing to share with you. They just drive by. They don’t look at you in the eyes. They just turn their eyes away. You find a piece of cardboard and scribble on it—“Anything helps. God bless.” Your handwriting is shaky because you have been freezing all night. So many people come, pause at the stop light and turn their eyes away. Some of them give you a dollar or two. A protein bar. In doing so, they feel really good about themselves. I have done my part. While you are still sitting their freezing, alone, broken, now with a protein bar and two extra dollars.

Now imagine all of that together. The mockery. The torture. The ignorance. All together on a wooden cross.

Who knows what was going on inside Jesus’ mind and heart? Truly, who knows?

Anyone who claims to know conclusively is dishonoring the nature of truth. And isn’t the Heavenly Father the Spirit of Love and Truth? If you are Christian, you should not dishonor truth.

Who knows what was going on inside his mind and heart and yet the words he chose were—

Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.

What an inspiration! What a demonstration of the Way! All the calcifications being released from the rigidized heart in a single miraculous instant. The full tenderness of the heart felt clearly. No more trauma left in the body. Your spirit steps beyond the paradigm of trauma. The body breathes easily now, even as you are being “traumatized”.

The Spirit of Forgiveness! So good! There’s nothing like it.

Freedom flows from forgiveness. Not needing anyone else to be anything else than what they are right now in this moment.

Not needing an apology from those who “wronged” you. Not needing them to act any differently now from how they acted when they “wronged” you.

Letting them be who they are and rooting inwards into who you are and being who you are.

Such spaciousness!

The best way of sharing the seemingly limited physical space that we have is to root in the infinite spaciousness within that each of us carries.

Quite the paradox, no? How can seemingly infinite individuations of consciousness share a limited physical space with infinite spaciousness and be free through that?

The softness of the heart doesn’t get stuck on paradoxes like the mind does.

What a Myth of Forgiveness! Such power. There is immense power in forgiveness. Nothing more powerful than forgiveness.

Back in the day, I used to mock Mahatma Gandhi because I felt hurt about losing “my country” to “foreigners”. I mocked Mahatma Gandhi like many hot blooded Indians do for leading with non-violence. Now I realize that it is such a powerful approach! Non-violence in your communication, non-violence in your being. The power of this approach is such that it seems to go beyond the paradigm of national boundaries.

I still really don’t get Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. I might have to fully read it at some point. How could you tell a man to pick up his weapons and kill his family? I really don’t get it. Perhaps it’s a story from a different realm? A different era that was soaked in forgiveness, and so it needed more violence? All men there were soy boys who bitched and gossiped, so it needed a man to pick up the sword?

Maybe there wasn’t enough violence in that realm where this myth unfolded? There’s enough in our realm, no? So our realm needs forgiveness.

Is there ever a place for violence? If someone reached angrily for my child, perhaps I would step in violently to stop that from happening? I don’t know.

I used to mock Mahatma Gandhi. Now I see that mockery is a crucial stage for the collective to go through to move on to the next stage in healing. Mahatma Gandhi recognized that in the line that is often attributed to him—

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win

Freeze, fawn, fight, release.

He was talking about me. I knew about this line and could see the truth in it while I used to mock Gandhi and yet I was so blinded by the mockery that I could not see myself in that line.

That kind of mockery was what Jesus encountered.

I used to mock Mahatma Gandhi before I realized that what mockery is.

In the frame of spiritual warfare, mockery is demonic.

Using less charged language, I’d say mockery—non-consensual mockery to be specific, not consensual variants of it like humiliation kink—is a low vibration state of othering but a stage, nevertheless in the journey towards oneness.

Mockery is how the weak and ignorant express anger.
Anger is how the weak and ignorant express grief.

Underneath grief there beats a soft, delicate tender heart that loves the person being mocked and raged at.

And what a joy it is to be in that tender hearted space. Truly, what a joy!

As a man, who presents quite masculine, who has cultivated a continual access to a tender heart, who has no desire left to calcify his heart, I would rather be tortured on a cross and mocked while still maintaining my inner access to the blissful peace of a soft, tender heart than to close my heart up.

Isn’t that what following Jesus Christ means? Isn’t that what “pick up your cross and follow me” means?

Did you think crucifixion was only for Jesus and his apostles and not for you?

This is a realm for crucifixion and maintaining an open heart while being crucified.

This is a realm for asking the Heavenly Father to forgive all those you hold enemy images of.

Anyone who has hurt you that you now hold resentment towards, justified by reducing the complex wholeness of their humanity to a particular act of hurt that they committed.

Mass murderer, rapist, child sex trafficker, narcissist.
Gold-digging bitch, nasty whore.

Release all enemy images.

The more enemy images I release the more I serve the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly Father.

What is heaven?

Heaven for someone could be regularly going to Epstein Island to access intimacy with young, nubile girls who seem to be enjoying you but are just stuck in a freeze-fawn response.

Heaven to Yudhisthira, Arjuna’s older brother in the Mahabharata, that the Bhagavad Gita is from, first appeared like hell, where he saw all his brothers—the victors of the Great War that Krishna catalyzed. When he chose to be with his brothers in hell, that same hell became heaven. Was it really heaven then? I don’t know.

Having to a jihadist might be a place where he gets to have sex with 72 virgins.

Are any of these realms where people are still individuated actually heaven? Or is heaven where we merge back into the One? I don’t know.

The Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus speaks of seems very different from what the words kingdom or heaven usually mean. I have traced this thread throughout the New Testament. Words change their meaning. Kings ride on donkeys to their crucifixion—not coronation—to drive that home. Words don’t mean what you might think they mean.

The way to serve that Kingdom of Heaven is to develop the heart. To release calcifications that prevent one from accessing its softness—true circumcision. Remember: words have stopped meaning what they were meant to mean.

To release enemy images of others that get in the way of accessing the Kingdom of Heaven within.

Moment by moment, this choice is presented—
Am I entertaining thought forms that label other humans negatively?

Every such choice to other another adds a calcification. Every choice to let go of such proclivities—”ah, they did the best they could in that moment to get their needs met”—grants me access to the soft peace of the Kingdom of Heaven.

That’s why Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. It is so close! And asks us all to repent—which is to choose a different action than we tend to when such thought forms appear.

If your authentic actions open yourself up to mass mockery, you have entered the fast-tracked route to permanent citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven.

There is a tradition of saints in Orthodox Christianity called the Holy Fools.

Foolishness for Christ refers to behavior that deliberately flouts society's conventions to serve the Kingdom of Heaven.

These fools, who were thoroughly mocked while they were alive, would spend all night petitioning the Heavenly Father for forgiveness of those who mocked them during the day.

I have not encountered a better technology for collective exorcism.

Show up during the day where a lot of hidden demons emerge in the humans who encounter you so that they may mock you. Spend the night praying for the release of those demons.

This is the fullest potential of the Agent Provocateur archetype—journeying from provoking for Ego thrills (the coyote), to feeling surprise and hurt when folks are provoked (the ostracized victim), to not acting to provoke an individual but showing up where the collective norms are flouted, receiving the mockery and praying for the healing of the mockers (the holy fool).

You are in a place of inner peace while being mocked because you have chosen to be who you truly are in that moment and nothing else and you see the mockery for what it is—not evil, no enemy images, not even “oh they are possessed”, but “ah, this is the best they can do right now to meet their needs”.

Permanent residency in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Oh, so peaceful. Others may look at you and be confused—why is this person so peaceful? His situation seems horrible.

That’s the paradox of the material world. Good outer conditions do not guarantee good inner conditions. Ah Vighnesh, it’s easy for you to say that from your privileged early retirement status. Perhaps. It still seems to be true when I look at the stories of these Holy Fools.

They are all called Saints now, but no one knew of their saintly nature back then. They were fools then. They performed healing miracles in secret. Just like Jesus did.

That’s the archetype of Jesus as I see it in the New Testament. A man who is mocked and persecuted everywhere he goes and performs healing miracles in secret.

If you aren’t being harassed regularly and secretly performing miracles, are you truly following Jesus Christ? I don’t know.

One way to be harassed daily in India is to be a man and cross dress as a woman. A man with a hairy chest who wears a sari is signing up for daily harassment.

All the demons would come out for the party. What a way to collectively heal a society!

There is a line in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus talks about eunuchs who serve the Kingdom of Heaven. This is a line that I have never heard referenced in any of the Christian church buildings—to contrast with a church, which is just a group of followers of Jesus—I entered over the past year in Western North Carolina.

For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.
Matthew 19:12

That’s one pathway I could see for myself. Cross-dressing as a lifestyle. Transitioning minus the hormones and the surgeries.

The more I have grown into a steady masculine presentation while staying soft-hearted, the more I have encountered flavors of relational challenges that make common complaints from women about men, clearer, through confusing, heart-wrenching ruptures of friendships with brothers.

Complaints like fragile male ego, mansplaining, gaslighting became clearer to me than they ever were through direct interactions with men I have tried to befriend over the past year. And Lord! Has that been a painful journey!

I have begun to wonder since—are people used to soft-heartedness from women but not from men? Could that be the crux of this flavor of challenges I have encountered in male friendships?

As a corollary, I wondered—what if I presented as a woman? I suppose I’d face a whole other set of challenges. A long line of men being seemingly led by their desire to stick their cock inside me. I have tasted a little bit of that from gay and bisexual men.

But I might not face these kind of challenges that I have encountered in platonic male friendship attempts. Would there be greater coherence in the soft-heartedness of my heart with my exterior presentation?

That soft-hearted coherence is something I have experienced in transitioned men that I have crossed paths with. It’s coupled with a flavor of what I’d call mutedness in expression. Is transitioning an adaptation to the environment in service of maintaining connection to a soft heart? A fee you pay so you can live with internal peace? Here, take my cock and balls and let me live peacefully please. There were times in the deepest of throes of my hyper-sexual porn addiction born from fully repressed sexual trauma where I fantasized about not having genitals. Other male adult survivors have shared similar stories with me in spaces where men can open up about their sexual trauma history—unfortunately far and few between.

Is transitioning how a man makes himself a Jesuit eunuch so that he can maintain a soft-heart, the passport to the Kingdom of Heaven?

Were there trans women who despised Trump in early 2025 who managed to not mock Trump supporters? Not hate them. Not cuss them out. Perhaps even pray for them?

I have cross-dressed before.

I cross-dressed for a college drama that I helped produce as the Dramatics Secretary of my boys-only hostel. In that, I acted as a woman and wore a saree. I walked over to the venue in a T-shirt and shorts and changed into a saree for the performance. Someone stole my man clothes during the performance (of course, if my friend was performing at a venue in a saree, I’d have been very sad if that prank idea had not occurred to me). So I had to walk back in that saree from the venue to my hostel.

It was a terrifying experience. And… there was a part of me that enjoyed the thrill of an adventure. Of doing something different. Different from the typical rounds of classes, binge eating, cackling at mean humor, Age of Empires II and pornography.

I got leered. Got cat calls. I did not dare look at any of the men doing it. Or perhaps I faked some bravado by grinning at them? I don’t remember. It was not comfortable at all. I may not have realized it back then, but it did help me build some empathy for women who experience this on the regular.

In this past year of realizing that it feels nice to maintain softness in my heart and developing a relational playbook to maintain continued access to it, I have developed greater empathy for the experience of women.

Some feminist terms that I might have had my eyes gloss over have actually started making sense to me. Oh, I get where that comes from now!

To illustrate, I will share a handful of stories inspired by real-life interactions with brothers.

Consider these my personal mythologies.

A personal mythology is a story driven entirely by the subjective narrative inside me. What I saw, what I thought, what I felt, what I expressed, what I did not express, what I imagined he was thinking, what I remember he said, what I remember he did. All rooted in my imperfect subjective perception and fallible memory.

And yet, each of these personal myths holds a valuable lesson worth sharing! Lessons that have helped me empathize better with women. What good news they brought!

I hold these brothers with tenderness, with great heartbreak for our flawed attempts at connection and I pray for their well-being regularly. The myths that they inspired below are an incomplete representation of the complex depths of their very human selves.

If I were to share a story that captured the fullness of me and the fullness of them, it would be very short—he and I are one.

Boring.

Spice needs incompleteness.

Gospel of Luke

When I met Luke, I had just embarked on my Shibari art portfolio—the Surrender Devotion Project—and contemplating running a Shibari dom business.

I remember telling him excitedly about it. He said he had no interest in exploring that with women.

I was intrigued. How men relate to and differ in how they relate to sensuality with women always intrigues me.

We developed a friendship and started collaborating on projects.

I was quite new then to creative projects. Very new to collaborating on them. Creative collaboration felt so intimate to me.

As intimate as physical sex.

One time we hosted a gathering together. What a gorgeously beautiful emergent co-created gathering it was! So profound!

As we started wrapping up the ritual, he told me he had to leave immediately and asked me if I could take care of the clean-up as he had planned dance practice with his girlfriend that was starting in 15 minutes.

I felt absolutely gut-wrenched.

I imagined being a woman who is about to get cozy in the arms of her lover after a beautiful lovemaking session and he tells her that he just got a call from another ‘ho.

I was expecting us to close out the gathering together, and perhaps have a short moment of conversation and appreciation for what we had just created. Our very first baby offering to the community!

Like some cuddling after sex, you know? Or a text the morning after?

The next morning, I audio messaged him letting him know that it did not feel good to have him leave so quickly after and I’d like to have a checkin with him. He got quite upset on receiving that. He had put in so much work for the gathering for so little monetary profit! How unreasonable of you, Vighnesh, to be upset after that!

What do you mean you are sad I didn’t text afterwards? I took you out for such a nice dinner!

That one interaction clued me into aspects of women’s dating behavior that I had been so confused by all my life!

I am so sorry to all the women I have had sex with and been absolutely oblivious to the heart-intimacy that the act creates!

As we were attempting to process (and failing at it), I remember him telling me that my feeling tender when he left quickly was just my story of what was going on inside me and not necessarily reality.

Gaslighting! I used to roll my eyes at that word before. Oh, all these women keep going on and on about men gaslighting 🙄

Do I not hold sovereignty over what I feel within? And how I verbalize what’s going on inside me? Someone else could feel unsettled by what I have shared about what I’m feeling, but how do we meet in connection if we don’t agree that each of us is sovereign over our respective internal experiences?

In hindsight, I could have let him express fully without getting so triggered and attempted to catch the heart thread in his expression and responded to that. But I was in a season of rebellion against Non-Violent Communication—which is the framework that teaches humans how to do what I just described—and not feeling particularly grounded. Back then, when there’d be a relational conflict, I felt this overwhelming urge to resolve it before anything else. It did not work. I needed to learn how to ground myself in isolation before I could show up in a grounded way to resolve conflicts. The Gospel of John, that follows, revealed that to me.

Shame, when not met within with tenderness, causes a man to attempt to change external reality.

Shame causes men to close up. To lose connection to their own feelings.

In order to not feel alone in that, men can find themselves attempting to convince women that what she is feeling is too much. Too crazy. Her story.

It seems easiest to open that door by presenting a possibility that is the polar opposite of what the woman might be expressing.

I’d say on average, women have a steadier inner connection to their emotions and feelings than men do. Would you agree? Is it because of the menstrual cycles that release from the body any blockages that might get in the way of that felt sense?

Women can react to such gaslighting by either succumbing and then later feeling victimized resentment—the source of Cancel Culture—or reacting to the boundary transgression of another person telling you how you are feeling by bursting out in anger.

“Aha! Anger!”, the numbed out man celebrates. Finally a language he can understand and play with. A language he was trained in from a young age by his father!

Crazy woman! Hysterical woman! Making a big deal about nothing!

Label her crazy and hysterical and stick her into a mental asylum while the rest of the numbed out society nods along and continues their favorite pastime of sticking cocks into little children.

May the Holy Father bless all the crazy, hysterical women who have yelled loud enough out on the streets while the rest of us were busy wanking out our miseries to videos of them being abused in the sheets.

Gospel of John

John and I met during my Christian era. I was looking for good Christian men to develop fellowship with. It helped that he also had a background in Authentic Relating. A Christian man who had exposure to conscious communication technologies. A rare intersection!

We hit it off very well. John considered himself Catholic, not Christian. Time and again, our fun theological debates would reach a point of disagreement, and I’d notice that at some point, he would start labeling me a Protestant.

I was barely playing around with the label Christian. I ultimately closed out that exploration discarding the label, after being turned off by the hypocrisy I saw of professed Christians claiming “it’s not about the religion but about a relationship with Jesus” and yet instinctively dismissing practices from other religions that they did not even seem to understand.

If it’s about your relationship with Jesus and not about religion, bro, how can you even have the concept of other religions in your language? Perhaps get out of your head a bit into your body, yeah? May be get out of your little town in Middle America and travel around not to convert but to get to know others, yeah? Shall we start a GoFundMe for Middle American Christian faithfuls to travel the world just for fun and adventure? May be learn a new language?

So, I was quite far from considering myself a Protestant, other than when debates with this Catholic brother reached a tender space of disagreement and heat.

In those moments I encountered aggravated, unsettling words and John assigned reductive labels to me. Labels that reduced the fullness of my humanity and replaced me with who he saw me as. John believed his anger at me was justified and righteous just like Jesus flipped the tables in the Temple, because I had uttered words that did not carry reverence towards the Institution & Doctrine of the Catholic Church.

There is a choice each of us has when we reach a point of disagreement with another. Respond to our projection of who we see them as or bring curiosity—the signature of love—to the other person. The Gospel of Luke taught me that.

I have had a deep hunger for steady brotherhood now for years. So I persisted.

He beats me up, but he pays the bills and I don’t have other options. I don’t want to divorce him.

I took it as an opportunity to explore the texture of what it felt to be projected upon and to explore what clear boundaries I needed to surface to navigate the connection into mutually nourishing places. On my end, as I realized later I was projecting some past father wounding onto him, coupled with an ungrounded, insatiable urge to help him “heal”—boy, that one’s been a difficult one to work myself out of!

I wondered if it was just a cultural difference in the manner of speech. John was Irish and I recalled a cultural meme about Irish hot-headedness.

The thorniness in our connection reached a crescendo in a theological debate on the subject of Christian call for the submissiveness of women in an online thread. I challenged an essay he had put forth presenting theological arguments for it.

The conversation escalated. John often used voice notes to share messages. At one point, he responded to another woman engaging in that thread by calmly claiming that I had not read his essay and that I was just triggered because of my sexual trauma.

I felt astonished at the calm clarity with which he spoke about what I had or had not done, and about what was going on inside me. I, in fact, had read his essay. And the nature of sexual trauma is such that it does color one’s perceptive lens, but of course, every human is much more than his or her trauma history!

As I sat with that encounter, I felt the pain of Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of Mary, where St. Peter, the hot-headed Patriarch of the Catholic Church, turns to the other men and dismisses her after she shares what Jesus revealed to her.

As I digested the experience further, I found myself understanding how a woman with a sexually traumatic past could get caught up in a dynamic where a man speaks with calm certainty about her inner experience. There can be something soothing about that calmness, something that makes it easy to question one’s own sense of reality, even when something feels off. Nearby well-wishers societally accustomed to trusting calmness over hysteria would be quite easily dismissed about their concerns for such a woman.

A man might well be raping his wife on the regular and when she bursts out in a hysteric trauma release of her past pain in a public setting, he could easily silence concerned bystanders: “Ssh, please don’t mind her. She has some mental issues.”

If I had been less rooted in my sense of self, I might have either adopted his frame—oh I’m so sorry I acted out of my trigger—or reacted in anger which then would have established my “trauma trigger”.

I got a glimpse of what women seem to have endured over eons of patriarchy.

Patriarchy was one of those terms that my eyes used to just gloss over a year ago. Now I get it.

Prior to my MAGA days, I would use it regularly without really understanding it to signal allyship because I thought that Liberal women in NYC only had sex with their allies. Then, I rejected it. Now I get it. In the era where I was rejecting the term, I played with “historically abusive societal tendencies” to de-gender the term but I can now read the term patriarchy without feeling called out.

The Ego is a framework of Identity. A set of Ideas that attempt to qualify the Self. Catholic or Protestant. Hindu or Christian. Hot or fat.

A Doctrine is an external framework of moralistic Ideas, often of the flavor—do this but not that.

There is a safety that the Ego finds in associating with a Doctrine.

It is a process of externalization. Agency is offloaded from the Self onto the Ego, onto the Doctrine.

When a group of humans attach their Ego to a Doctrine together, there is even greater safety, until you reach the borders demarcated by the Doctrinal set of Ideas.

In that there is an inherent Fragility.

Aha, that is what the Angry Feminists mean when they say fragile male ego. A state of life that is disconnected from the soft expansion of the heart, that makes it difficult to receive the cleansing healing of grief release and causes men to attack outwards out of a sense of protecting their Ego or the Doctrines they hold dear.

That is why I was getting hooked in online conversations about President Trump! My obsessiveness to defend the Trump/MAGA doctrine was reflected by John’s compulsive defense of Catholicism.

John was more politically moderate than I was, when we crossed paths. What a gift friendships can be as they help illuminate what otherwise is difficult to see in oneself!

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the frailest Ego of them all!

Fragile male ego and gaslighting are both narcissistic behavior patterns—another common phrase found in Angry Feminist Internet.

My ex was a narcissist! My ex before that was also a narcissist! All men are narcissists!

I didn’t quite understand what narcissism meant a year ago. Now I have a better sense.

When tenderness emerges in a relational connection, past hurt surfaces. In response to that, there is a proclivity to protect one self instead of weeping for the past hurt. The Self disappears away from the connection as the urge to protect takes over.

The nervous system collapses into a kind of rigidity, where only a narrow range of actions feel available. In full consciousness, one has access to a wide range of actions. When the blood of Jesus is washing over you, forgiveness is always an option in this wide range of actions.

When that collapse isn’t visible to the person themself, it can show up as attacking what seems uncollapsed in front of them—as a way of not being alone in that collapsed state.

When you are disconnected within and don’t know what you truly need in a moment, you end up doing exactly the opposite of what you really need. You create what you fear and are trying to protect yourself from! What a tragedy!

Like my second childhood rapist angrily sodomizing me while his inner child was cowering away in great horror.

The tragic story of patriarchy is the physical prowess of collapsed men, seeking uncollapsed liveliness, but destroying what is not collapsed in their attempts to take the liveliness from others. And rinse and repeat.

Liveliness can’t be taken.

As the collapsed man tries to but fails to release tears, the overwhelm of his nervous system signals the protectors within and they attack outwards. Like the State of Israel wiping out Palestinian civilians to protect themselves from the risk of another holocaust.

Within, there is a shaming voice that goes—you are bad for hurting this other person—if you are not practiced at feeling the shame, being with it and alchemizing it through tears, anger emerges in response to the shame and in the blink of an eye, you become a rigidly calcified strategy of collapse, control and attack.

So over this past year, I have had experiences that brought greater empathy for the common complaints that I have heard from women on the Internet. Complaints that I didn’t quite get before, till I had these challenging experiences with brothers.

Sitting with these jarring confusing experiences, I wondered, would it be the same or worse if I had a female presentation?

Would these tragic long arcs of investing in male friendships collapse into immediate mockery if I was a trans woman?

If I were to show up with a feminine exterior presentation, would I be frontloading all that confusion into the connection?

Then I could just receive the mockery during the day and pray at night for the mockers and be a Holy Fool for Jesus Christ.

Would that be an easier life?

One with less heart ache? Or is that just my Ego trying to protect my Heart?

Egos—such funny little fragile beings. Just need to be swaddled in a blanket, burped and a change of diapers every now and then, instead of handing them the steering wheel of your life.