There’s something I’d like to add to my recent post on wholeness or wholesomeness.
During my wonderful recent summer trip, and as a result of it, I’ve often felt tempted to say something like “I’ve rediscovered myself”, especially when trying to summarize it to someone asking me how it went. But then I realize that this way of putting it is short of the truth: in reality how I feel is that this trip didn’t only enable me to “rediscover myself” but also, and even more wonderfully, to actually “find and discover even more”, about myself as well as the world around me.
I truly rediscovered myself and found more: I found more than what I had expected, maybe — or more than what I had before the year & a half of struggles and tough introspection.
And I keep finding more, even back here at home: more in myself, in the different aspects of my identity; more in my activities; more in the persons around me and in the interactions with people.
Yesterday, in particular, I had a wonderful experience with a new climbing buddy who is also non-binary, and in a similar way to me. Despite knowing each other very little and them being quite a shy and silent person, we resonated and related in deep and almost unexpected ways. The connection was delicate, like dew drops trickling off leaves in the pale morning light; yet somehow powerful, or profound. And for maybe the first time in my life I felt a truly gender-neutral connection: I felt extremely close to this person in a silent, delicate way, and totally gender-neutral in a comfortable, incredibly natural way, as if an imposed, cumbersome layer had been shed, a burden lifted at last. It felt almost as if I were naked, but not at all vulnerable: I actually felt comfortable and natural and safe as I have hardly ever felt before.
Somehow I felt as if my whole non-binary being were more than the sum or mixture of male-female: the whole felt more than the sum of the parts — and maybe even more so because it was in relation to another human being…
The Little Prince and the Fox 