I’m unsure how anyone else pigeonholes themselves but personally, I sit in the camp I call Two Spirit.

Two Spirit has been used by Native Americans for hundreds of years to describe in the main a person who has the spirit and or embodies both sexes.  For me, I say an in-betweeny type of person.  That’s me, or at least ways I think that’s me, wish it wasn’t because for me it’s hard.

Over the last 40-plus years, I have struggled in my own life to resolve what I am where I fit in and how I cope with being me.

This blog, website, portal, whatever you look on it as is my own personal take on my life, specifically regarding my gender/sex identification.

Yes, I have lived through many things from the loss of a baby, break-ups, make-ups, sporting successes, failures, redundancies, and adoption you name it.  It is all ‘grist to the mill’ but even now I struggle to feel like a regular person, a valuable part of society, I struggle to be, the me I once was and have no idea how to be the me I should be.

On my lowest days I sit waiting for death so the hurt will stop, on my best days I feel I have the world at my feet and anything is possible.  Yes, oh yes I have considered suicide, even researched going to Dignitas in Switzerland, but no, there’s always hope left in the bottom of the box.  Hope that tomorrow will be better and peace will prevail.  I can cook, clean, weld, DIY, play the guitar, write, build websites, draw, paint, garden, grow my own food, I innovate and make, create and do, love, oh I love with ALL my heart.  So on my good days or should I say in my best seasons through the year I almost haven’t enough hours in the day.

Yet, even with all those ups and downs, I stay still rooted deep inside of me to the place I am, fearful of so many things, using humour and my boundless skills in useful services to ‘win’ people over and to stop them looking at the startled rabbit that is me deep inside.

In so many ways I know I have lived, but don’t feel like I have ‘LIVED’, I suppose I have survived and not done a bad job of it in many ways.  Even though I have experiences in abundance I don’t feel I have lived fully as an authentic version of me, a free me, a version of me that doesn’t need to battle pre-judgement, bigotry, prejudice, discrimination, doesn’t have to feel like a foreign object clogging up the wheels of life.

For this blog I will limit my words per post to no more than 1000 words (no more than 5 minutes of reading) which will limit the time it takes to read through the post, more over it stops me from going off on a tangent, waxing lyrical or wallowing in my own self-pity.

My aim is to document a part of my life, how it feels to be me and maybe just maybe provide people with an insight into what being in-betweeny or Two Spirit is for me.  Maybe at the very least to show that there are so many different kinds of people on this tiny planet.  With almost 8 billion people on this tiny dot in the universe surely I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Let’s face it every single human being on this planet is in pursuit of one thing and one thing only, more happiness, we are all more or less the same.  The same singular motivation to be happy within the framework of our lives.

So before we go any further, let me be clear I do not in any way serve to disrespect the Native Americans who coined the phrase Two Spirit, I only feel drawn to it.  The logo itself, my own creation shows 3 eagle feathers depicting the female on one side male on the other and in-betweeny people in the middle, the bear claw shows strength, the heart is for love, and the turquoise beads communication with spirits and good fortune.  Finally, the rays behind the logo depict the rise and fall of the sun, each moment through the day everything no matter how big or small receives the rays of the sun.   The sun represents life-giving abundance, warmth, healing and peace.

I am not in any way genetically linked to Native Americans but spiritually I feel a connection and a bond, maybe it’s the oppression and suffering they have endured, maybe its the fact that they had a part of their culture taken away by forces great than them, maybe it’s simply because I revere their cultural wisdom which I believe is greater than many.

So from the heart of the North West of England let this little tale begin.