NirvanaFunClub

I think it was my first birthday party, that I went to when I saw kids forming groups. But not the ones I thought. Or expected. They were not grouping-up with their best friends or hanging out with their parents or trying to cling on to a birthday boy. I remember entering the room and seeing girls gathered around the table. Talking, whispering, eyeing around. They were squirming in their seats, like they are being watched. Some of them were acting out like they were organising a conspiracy. I didn’t stay there. I didn’t feel welcome. Then I entered another room and boys there, were playing video games, yelling at the tv, at each other, chewing on snacks with potato chips almost spraying out of their mouths. They were laughing and the loudest one of them was laughing in a mean way. He was in a middle of belittling some other boy in the room. I did not feel comfortable there neither, but at least I felt like no one was paying any attention to me. Logical conclusion: I wanted to belong there!

Soon after my life became one long ‘I want to be accepted in the boys room’ after the other. I was trying to be invited to the boys gatherings, but I just couldn’t be. I was suspicious, not only to them but also to the girls. They thought I have some secret agenda. I didn’t have. Sometimes I really did like some boy in the group but most of the time I just wanted to be a boy in the group. I felt as if this is the place to be. I know what you are thinking, my thoughts as well, it didn’t take long I did a research on myself whether I wanted to be a boy, full on, in it’s entirety. But the conclusion was: no. Mostly because boys needed to know how to kiss and have sex. That prevailed over giving birth to kids and having boobs.

Soon enough I realised I have boy cousins. They were my way in. It was not the same as being part of the boys group at school or some other place I didn’t have the link to get in, but I needed to start somewhere, maybe to learn the lingo and then proceed to ‘get in’ by myself. I was annoyed by the fact that I need help ‘getting in’ and that it is not fully my effort that got me the opportunity, but the link to my cousins. Now that I think about it, I still have that useless way of thinking I need to do everything by myself, as if that is the only indicator of merit. But I got in, even though my cousins would look at the floor introducing me. They would apologetically conclude “This is my cousin from town” as if it was a punishment, and to make things worst I couldn’t immediately fit in. I tried, I really did, maybe that was the part of the problem: boys don’t try, at least they do not show it. I was too eager, too happy to be there. After those experiences I got the impression that I was clumsy, even worse, incapable, physically. I just couldn’t jump as effortlessly as they did. Or ride my bike with my hands on the handles.

After a while, especially during the summer I got to be invited to the boys group. There was not a lot of choice there, only us and another family of kids. I got to show of my boyish behaviour. I was more blunt than the worst one among them, more loud than the loudest, I even tried to belittle the little one (I am not proud of that, nor was I back then). And just when I got a hang of it, a new problem appeared on the horizon: “Jasper says that he likes you.” Oh lady Jesus, have mercy. “I do not like him.” But it was too late, my cousin was feeling a mix of being embarrassed and disappointed. I could not hang out with them any more, I felt uncomfortable around Jasper, and my cousin stopped playing with him because he didn’t know what to do with all that. All of the sudden I was a girl.

As time passed and I grew older, I still wanted to be at the table with then boys and now men. I always had this feeling that when men gather around the table business is being done. I can do business, I want to do business, I want to sit around that table, but every time I came near that table, business stoped and we belittled someone, usually me, and usually it was me doing it.

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The other day, I went to a conference about the “Investments”. It was an event for the people with financial but also political power, usually the one being gained through the other, like with my cousins granting me the access to the boys club. All the men wore suits and uncomfortable shoes and all the women had new hairstyles and wore heels. I didn’t know anyone there, so when the lunch break came I was waiting for everyone to get their food and sit around their tables to enter the dinning room. And it was like the first birthday party I went to: Women were grouped around their tables and men around theirs. Those people were in their prime years, in the capitalistic white people’s economy meaning: ‘ready to retire’ and they were still divided in the boys’ and girls’ clubs. I do admit, I feel safer in the girls’ club now. Around men I feel exposed for more than just my eyes, but I still miss women when I am around men and vice verse. I want to talk business and I want to talk equality, but most of all I want to talk with everyone about everything.

Let there be only one, and that is ‘a person’.