Open Letter to Femininity
Dear Femininity, and love
I was meant to write a letter about ghosting because many relationships in our modern age have ended people in goshting each other. Morso, the act of ghosting has led many people to abandon the idea of love. When one party doesn’t know how to articulate their feelings, the goshter remove themselves from the ghostee, the victim; what remains is that their heart has turned to tundra or a desert that can’t have water to replenish its soul. According to the author and columnist John Paul Bremmer
“There are people in this world, many who are afraid of their own wants. Some people don’t even know what those wants are. They can’t name them. There are people who, on the cusp of actualising that want, retreat when they are complicated by committed; anything worth having is bound to be”.
It is the loss that can not be explained with an explanation or a reason why your friend, romantic partner, a person you have invested in your whole being has disappeared.
Yet, I wonder why ghosting is, instead, what Is called the malaise of lovelessness. Likewise, the love that the media shows is a different type of love, manufactured and plastic.
However, I’m writing this to you about femm and Femininity because, in cultures around the world, the female has been the archetype of love. That is why when people think about love, they think about a mother’s love. In old bygone, pantheons of deities and goddesses are the holders of love. Think of Aphrodite and her kin in Greek Mythology, Dian Masalata in Tagalog mythology, and Oshun in Western African mythology.
In our patriarchal, capitalist world, we have to stop and wonder about the same archetype of unvulnerable and how that seeps down to the lovelessness in our day to day life. Moreover, we can not just rely on our women to hold the characters when this institution is detrimental to all sexes.
Men are socialised to be unvulnerable and more likely encouraged not to show any emotions. Today, many online therapy companies target men due to a lack of access to their feelings.
“To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings…the tyranny of patriarchal thing, the power of practical culture to hold us captive” (Hooks,18).
The socialisation of males trying to be themselves has prevented both males and females from removing the institution to create a better society. As a whole, the world’s malaise in the underpinnings of power belonging to male anger has prevented a fair system for males to actually feel like they can be loved and be outwardly vulnerable, not only towards males their partners but their friends and family. Even more so, this malaise of an institution is not just being unkept by males; it and females who see have as well kept rigid gender roles have prevented the fall of this institution.
As a person who has been socialised in this patriarchal society, though via Spanish imperialism, which gave us machismo, it has prevented me from being vulnerable with myself and the people I love. Moreover, it has prevented me from feeling the zeal and euphoria of being a human. To cry when it’s low, in its place, I have become a lier not only towards myself but others.
However, since going to a therapist, I have become a professional sadboi. Allowing myself to feel the tears that 10-year-old Timothy want to feel. In a chaotic world not only to this 10-year-old but this 25-year-old, as you all previously have read.
Capitalism as a whole seek value toward an idea or object; it ceases to create a system of generating more incredible wealth. However, in this day and of hyper-capitalism, people like Bezos have changed how we see gratification towards ownership. The same can be said with this idea of “loving”. Where have put a value on the people we have relations with, whether romantic or not. Although dating apps and social media have brought fruitful and sustainable relationships, they have also tainted seeing others. The easy access of transactional relations has fewer people’s desire to fave true actualised heart to heart relationships. In wanting gratification in relationships immediately, we removed the realised part of relationships investing in it. Likewise, this need for instant gratification has seeped low into our communities, as seen during the COIVD-19 pandemic; we have widened the narcissistic culture caring for lack of and not the need for the community surrounding us. As the author of the hour puts it.
“Greed is rightly considered a ‘deadly sin’ because it erodes the moral values that encourage us to care for the common good. Greed violates the spirit of connectedness and community natural to human survival. It writes out individual recognition of the need and concerns of everyone, prancing this awareness with harmful self-centeredness”. (Hooks, 117).
However, my dear friend, there is hope we are indebted to the human condition; their ever-presence of religious and philosophical ideas can sever us.
I reflected as I was once a young church boy. Hearing the word of Ahavah, a Hebrew word meaning love. In Christianity, derived from the Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. However, the definition of the word is not only a noun. Instead, the word is also a verb, a call to action for the followers of the faith. Many of the faithful followers believed that the heart was central to being human in those times. Our decisions were made, our emotions moved us, and we showed love. Through this prayer, God wanted his people to devote themselves though the ideals of loving outwardly as if it was second nature.
In Islam, there is Rahmah, one of the first words in the Quran. In popularity, mercy becomes the immediate translation instead of a more profound connotation of Rahmah. Compassion can only stand as if God gives you an understanding of your sins. Rather, the word can mean love. A love between a mother and her babe. A love between two friends. To enter a state of a loving euphoria, where one’s person’s needs and well being.
Sorren Kerikergarrd, in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Keriragarrad tells us to reject reasoning and instead take a leap of faith. His idea is that truth is subjective, and to have meaning in life, one must take out the reason and just trust faith. In the same way, we should take love a leap in faith without cause and be unsubjective towards it. Where in love and totals, love will not always be plain and straightforward, and there will be times that will hurt, and there will be times of elation.
“Love does not lead to an end to difficulties. it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth.” (229, Hooks)
Just as Jacob had wrestled with reconciliation, he took a leap of faith and trusted inwardly that he would find a way to love the people he had left.
Finally, in a letter between Austrian Neurologist Singmound Freud and German Theoretical Physics Albert Einstein, on the human condition and nurture. The letters would be later be published during World War II when they were in exile. In a letter form, Freud states,
“There areas you perceive, the will lone opposites, Love and Hate, transformed into theoretical entities; they are, perhaps, another aspect of those eternal polarities, attraction and reputation.”
They explained how every man had the right to life, and war/hate divides us all. In our practical capitalist society, we have divided our people into groups in dividing inequality. Leading to power structures where there is no room for vulnerability and love.
My dear friend, I won’t be talking about romantic love, as the primordial love stems from the family, familiar, and friends created. One can not begin to speak nor follow the acts of love in a romantic without understanding the importance of family and friends.
In our familiar bond, whether functional or dysfunctional, we all at least found ourselves in our familiar bonds, searching for love from the ones who bore us. When we have discovered dysfunction when our childhood needs aren’t met, leading us, many if not all, to believe that love is a feeling matters. The quote that Hooks gave us for her second chapter from Judith Viorst affirms that.
“Sever separation in early live leave emotional scars on the brain because they assault the essential human connection: The [parent-child] bond which teaches us that we are loveable the [parent-chaild] bound which teaches us how to love we cannot be whole human beings-needed, we may find to be human without the sustenance of this first attachment.” (Hooks,15)
I have found myself blessed with finding an abundance of love stemming from my familiar love. Both are located in the American nuclear family and the extended intergenerational family who have the honour of growing up and seeing them every weekend. However, when my parents and I have found ourselves in disagreements, I have felt like I had been abandoned. One of the main places that we have discovered disagreements was in me going therapy was like in many Filipino households, likewise in many immigrants, black and brown families. Finding the support, I need to get over childhood traumas that have to haunt me would have made my heart full. However, when we cannot locate ourselves in need of a found family that comprises our friends.
In a quote from one of the house fathers of the ball scene, Hector Xtrvangaza says,
“Blood does not a family make. Those are relatives. The family are those with whom you share your good, bad, and ugly and still love one another in the end. Those are the ones you select.”
Besides our extended or nuclear family, our friends and community members have been pillars of our socialisation. An extension of ourselves, where we can find the love and vulnerability outside our own families and find ways to self-love. We can see the forgiveness needed to forgive ourselves for our one wrongdoing.
Since moving to Boston, I have found myself in a community I can rely on. They may not be my brothers or sisters or family by Blood. But at least thought the wise words of Hector Xtrvagnza, they are the ones I lean on when I feel like the most shameful person in the world. The ones I mourn to if I can’t find the support needed. Besides emotional work, we have sacrificed time to be and commune with one another. The presence of finding community lets me grow and self-actualise myself to the human I need to be.
To my dear, the reader is still in the heart, knowing that it can be central to your being. It is the centre of your central nervous system and central to your emotions, desires and thought. Cause to truly, love and learn about love is seeking community and “family” that we can be favourable with and ourselves.
As I leave you. Why should love be held by females when it could well be the absolute equality of the masses? In the end, everything is from the heart.
From,
Timothy A.M Tumbokon
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Inspiration and Qoutes:
Steven Canals, Pose, 2018–2021
Tavis Bohlinger, Kierkegaard's Leap of Faith, 2018
John Paul Bremmer, I got Ghosted. Big Time, 2021
Guests, Rahmah- Not Just Love, 2012
Bell Hooks, All About Love New Visions, 2001
Bell Hooks, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love,2004
Maria Popova, Why War: Einstein and Freud’s Little-Known Correspondence on Violence, Peace, and Human Nature, 2013
The Bible Project, Heart
The Bible Project, Ahava
The Bible Project, Agape-Love
