bigtips

September 29, 2000 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

There's no such thing as making a problem vanish

by M.T. "the Big Tipper" Martone

I've been making lots of dates with pals I haven't seen months. With the first snap of autumn, I perk up from my summer-induced torpor, and start burning up the phone lines, making dates and catching up. And as I make contact, I realize that life has been rolling along in my psychic absence, and that there are many, many stories to hear.

I sat down at the dining room table to go through my phone book, and I noticed an unopened packet. My friend Karyn has been in a homeopathy program for the past two years, and has kept her

people up on her movements with a great newsletter. I picked the staple out with my thumbnail, and unfolded it into my lap. There was a brief synopsis of her recent

goings on, a recipe for plum marinade, and then some thoughts on what we tend to expect of healing:

"Is illness something that happens to us, or is it something that is more intrinsically about us? Is healing something that can be done to us, or is it something we must participate in and help to create ourselves? When we experience healing, are we the same person as before, or does healing change something about who we believe ourselves to be? Does the illness go away, or does it become transformed somehow? Is healing an event, a specific moment in time or is it the continuum we usually refer to as life, and thus something that we have the opportunity to find at any moment along that continuum?"

That really resonated with me. There's no such thing as curing an illness, or solving a problem into non-existence. It will always have happened, and that changes who we are. Sometimes we end up favoring that spot where damage occurred, and other times it heals over to be even stronger than it was to start. If we're paying attention, we learn compassion for other people who are healing, because we've felt that bad, and know what it takes to integrate it.

I caught up with one old friend over a thrift store record bin, and we discussed her marriage, which appears to be suffering some serious structural damage. She'd been a lesbian for as long as I'd known her, until she fell in love with a man and married him after a brief romantic courtship.

"I'm just not a straight woman,” she said. "When I was married to a woman, I didn't mind being a wife, but now I don't know

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who I am, and I cringe every time someone gives me something easily because I have a husband."

She hasn't lost her friends, but she feels like she's lost her identity. Does she still love him? She doesn't know. Would she marry him again? Never in a million years. She's feeling like she wants to live alone for the rest of her life, and that she has all she needs to do so happily. Except that she has a husband.

目の

BIG TIPS

Another friend

told me, over

Bathing Rama

noodles, that

she'd run into the woman who

broke up with her almost two years

ago.

"It's the lack of closure that's so sickening,__you know?" Tears

spilled down her cheeks. "I saw her on the corner, and honked my horn at her, then thought, what am I doing? She dropped me and wouldn't talk to me for over a year, and now that she wants things to be normal, I just can't do it. But I forget sometimes. She taught me everything I know about being a good lover now."

These conversations had put me in a quiet mood, so I went home to mess around with my computer. I hadn't been able to make a connection for weeks, so I finally broke down and called my friend, the internet guru. She sounded odd, and I asked her if she was okay. "I got some bad news today. My grandmother just died." I told her how sorry I was, and asked if she'd be flying out to the funeral. She said she'd probably go out'in a few weeks.

Why not right away? "Well, I'm out to my whole immediate family, but I have relatives I haven't seen in twenty years, and I don't want this to become all about me." Oh. I suggested that if they hadn't seen her in that long, they might have forgotten that she used to be a boy. Well, probably not. So she won't be going to the funeral.

Healing isn't necessarily fixing, is it? You make the best choices you can, with the information you have at the time. And when you're stuck, you hope the people you love can at least prop you up while you tough it out. And sometimes when you ask for advice, what you really need is for someone to listen to you and calm you with their attention and words, any words.

Karyn included this in her newsletter: "When we bless others, we offer them refuge from an indifferent world. The capacity to

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thentic selves. When people are blessed, they discover that their lives matter, that there is something in them worth blessing...

""

(Excerpted from My Grandfather's Blessings, by Rachel Naomi Remen.)

Burning questions? Contact me at the Chronicle, attention Big Tips, P.O. Box 5426, Cleveland 44101, or fax to 216631-1052. or e-mail to (a drizzle.com.

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