I want...

Lying in bed at 3am this morning, I have been going over in my head how I have felt my life subtly and life-alteringly changing in the last year...

It's all been a long, but interestingly shifting process of transmogrification (an internally physical, mental, and or somewhat spiritual transformation...), where I have felt my inner self shift and change into what feels like a more spiritually and mentally centered 'the real me', in terms of thoughts, physical change (natural loss of weight and building of tone), strengthening of personality, sociability (being able to hold complete conversations with people and strangers, and actually talk over the phone, where I would have once shied away before), to most ultimately, a very real change and inner awareness of my inner butch self.

The more I read lesbian erotica, romances and just plain old detective novels, the more I can so much more innately identify with with the butch characters within them, the innate feelings of wanting to take care of a woman, to be the strong one (counter-balanced by a fiesty sexy femme strength), and oh so much lately appreciate all that is feminine and soft and female, and yet feel so at home standing in the men's department in a store, and running my eyes over just the right open-necked shirt, tailored blazer, waistcoat and tie that I just feel an innate need to wear when I go out to a lesbian bar or venue. I did that the other day, while waiting for my Mum to pay for her goods in a department store - just stood there and took in all the crisp linen and silk shirts all around me, and the pure joy I felt looking around at them and running my hands down the clean lines of them. I could feel my inner butch reasserting herself and breathing in a sigh of complete satisfaction in a way that she hasn't done for many, many years... since I so blindly felt the need and fear to suppress who I was in the hope of pleasing my Mum's expectations, and making the guy I was seeing at the time all those years ago happy, me not knowing or being too scared or naive to know the difference between liking someone a lot as a best friend, and not fancying the pants off of them, and mistaking that for a comfortable, though un-moving kind of love.

So many mistakes and years later, I have finally, bit by bit, let go of the constraints I put around my emotional and sexual self, and since being once again given the freedom to breathe and emotionally evolve, my inner butch seems to be gloriously asserting herself, and driving me crazy with almost constant appreciation of the beauty and lushness of women at every turn. Wonderful, and liberating, but maddening when one doesn't have a girlfriend to lavish this all on. I know, be patient, yadda, yadda. But tell that to my lusty mind that gets distracted by soft busts, soft curves and the gorgeous lines of a woman's figure when she saunters past in a smooth flowing dress, or flashes a fish-net stocking in my line of sight. I finally see what poor guys must go through every day...!(grin)

It's amazing, how I find parts of myself in the books that I have been reading... in the varied characters on board the cruise in Radclyffe & Karin Kallmaker's 'In Deep Waters', and then most prominently in my current bedside reading, 'The Perfect Valentine (Bella After Dark)', where the very subtle things mentioned in Karin Kallmaker's short story (Do Overs) just leapt off the page at me, and could really have been a description of me and how I was around a 'femme between the sheets' with one of my previous girlfriends. Then there's Dale in 'Not Single Enough', who worried about her insatiable libido, and waking her girlfriend up for the 3rd time to make love because she just couldn't get enough of her, and kind of liked being thought of the oaf that kept her up all night and put a sparkle in her eye... finally giving in to the thought that if they made love just one more time, then they'd get in enough sleep before she had to go to work, and that she could leave her girlfriend looking thoroughly lovely and sleepy in bed with breakfast and coffee in the morning... (I have been very guilty of doing and thinking all of that, so much so, it was like Kallmaker had plucked those lusty thoughts straight from my head {embarrassed, but happy smile}).

Yep, that's been me - completely hopelessly horny and romanticising for most of this holiday. I know, I'm in trouble...but hey, what can a girl do, but enjoy all these newly emerging feelings and recognition of her sexuality, and hope to learn and evolve enough so she can really indulge with her next girlfriend if she is lucky enough to meet her over the coming year...

In terms of body transformation, I feel a growing need to tone up - to eat healthier, to lose just those few extra pounds that mean that I will feel comfortable enough to cut my hair short around my oval face and effortlessly wear the type of tailored clothes that I feel so drawn to - my waist has naturally become so tiny now that I have come off of taking the contraceptive pill, and my arms so slightly more muscular, that I reckon a few hours working out at the gym a couple of times a week, coupled with some lovely long strolls may just get me where I feel my inner butch will feel so much happier being. There is a part of me that answered "Yes, that's me..." when I read Karin Kallmaker's 'Do Overs' short in 'The Perfect Valentine', when the femme, on admiring her butch's body mused how she loved seeing her butch as a strong woman "...with (full breasts), broad shoulders and muscular arms". Well, that's how my figure almost is at the moment, but softer, with some love handles and a slightly rounded tummy (3 dress sizes less from where I was a year ago), but on the way to where I'd like it to be, and would feel much more comfortable with.

And when my mind isn't stewing with lust and sensation and thoughts of all day in bed and sexy intelligent imaginative conversation with curvy femmes (I feel like a hormonic teenager!), I am so enjoying my sense of emerging spirituality and sense of self too. I have re-discovered my nomadic travelling streak, where I feel completely at ease chucking some clothes in a back-pack and hopping on a plane somewhere, staying in a no-frills hotel, and exploring and experiencing a place to pieces. I feel so much more centred now that my true self is emerging - more in tune with the world, with the uncanny coincidences that seem to happen around me so often now, with the amazingly good feeling I get from helping people, from doing a job well, from projecting my inner strength and calm when others need to be listened to, to opening up my mind, and to just feeling a little more Zen with the to the spiritual and physical world around us. I swear I was a hippy or a buddhist or something in a past life, but I must say, it's a glorious feeling to feel so in tune at times (well apart from when I have PMT, but that's a whole different, interesting, frustrating, demanding, intriguing animal all by itself).

I want to do so many things in 2008. I want to enter a Business/Entrepreneurial competition, where I get free business advice and classes, and the opportunity to win some money, confidence and ideas to help me to really go ahead and pursue my dream of starting up my own place and string of places over the years, which feels so imminently there able able to happen in my future over the next 18 months or so. I want to write, to write some fiction, some poetry, some songs, a play - all the things I have done or started to do and never actively pursued in the past because all the energy I was using to constrain all my natural sexuality and confirm to all the rules, was draining me artistically, emotionally and spiritually. Now I feel like I am finally evolving into the me I could have been, I feel like I should just let myself be, and see what of all these things I am drawn to I can do, and what I can leave to grow until I am ready/have time to nurture them with everything else going on in my life...

What I also want to do this year is downsize all my possessions, throw out a whole load of stuff, and move into a smaller 1 bedroom flat, with less rent, but also scope for me to nest and make the place my own. I also want a cat...that part of me that has wanted one and felt as if I have been missing a feline companion all these years... (yes, I'm aware of how lesbian that is, but hey, I'm evolving into one, or whatever turns out to be me).

I also want to get my plans for an online business into gear, so that I have some money coming in from a source that pays for itself... I figure that I've spent so many years making other people's websites function and look good, I may as well use this skill to help myself too, and hopefully fund a few of these lofty ideas I've been perculating and flinging around. ;0)

There is so much. So much that I know I am capable of bringing about, and of which I want to live up to for myself this year. It's a very tall order, but there never was any fun in aiming low, was there?

A slightly butcher, and hopefully as successful and slightly less fucked-up version of Bette Porter... here I come... (ah... the dreams of the slightly young at heart and positive... sigh):