If it’s in a woman’s head, it’s a female brain
Perfect example of being Cognitive GNC:
It is accepted, in the popular culture, that men do not process their emotions in real time. Practically every relationship book out there instructs women on how to understand and or deal with men.
Most of these books tend to approach it from the angle of… men can’t change, so you must adapt and work around them and just accept the way that they are.
If you’ve read these books, then you understand how to deal with ME. That basically describes how my emotional processing works. I CANNOT process my emotions in “real time”; I have to chew on it - offline, away from YOU in all likelihood - and get back to you. Possibly 24 hours later. I have to go into my “cave”. When I am dealing with too much emotional input, I shut down and go blank and *don’t feel anything at all*. I hate this feeling. All I may know is I don’t feel good - and I don’t know WHY - not for some time. It doesn’t mean I’m not in love with you or don’t care about you or whatever. It means I’m overloaded. Then once I’ve had downtime, my feelings will return - a little at a time.
I can hit my communication limit. When I do, I can’t interact. I need to just either rest, or blow off steam. That’s why you saw me laughing at a stupid movie an hour after you told me your cat died. That’s why I seemed happy the day you broke up with me, or why I seem oblivious to the fact that we just had a fight.
I NEED my mindless off time. ESPECIALLY if we’ve just shared intense emotions or I have to figure out how to deal with things. I cannot be “on” all the time. I need “space” like a man often claims to.
I can’t do the stereotypical lesbian “processing”. I just find that exhausting and it makes me feel like our interactions aren’t pleasant, they’re draining, and I process a lot of that as “beating a dead horse” - or as emotional manipulation.
I also sometimes feel like I don’t even understand mainstream/neurotypical female speech. I struggle with it. Most women leave me in the dust.
I CAN promise that I will not make you do the emotional heavy lifting for both of us. But I need you to be able to sit in that space while I figure out the right thing to say. Or be okay with me just sitting with you quietly and holding your hand, helping you out with practical things, holding you, or otherwise giving you some non-verbal form of support until I find my words again and my emotions come back online.
Where I run into this being an issue - women very, very commonly police other women, and many times, people aren’t even conscious of all the gendered ways in which they’ve been socialized. There is more to gender conformity than just performance. I even run into issues with women who would embrace gender non-conformity if it mostly applied to phenotype/physique, clothes, and personal style. I even run into issues with women who embrace butch women and genderqueer identities in their communities, their lives, their beds. They still like people who think like, emote like, and communicate like women. Which a great many butch and genderqueer women do.
Heterosexual and bisexual women are used to dealing with these very same traits in men. But many bi and lesbian women won’t tolerate the same traits in women. And many lesbians don’t HAVE to tolerate people with “male-ish brains”. So they won’t.
A beautiful exposition from a WOMAN (meaning, by definition, that her brain is part of/attached to a biologically FEmale body), whose personality doesn’t fit the dominant paradigm.
