Making A Difference - The Effects Of Kindness

Catherine Sylvester

I suspect most, if not all of you will have heard of M Scott Peck and his book The Road Less Traveled. I could steal this title for my own story.

My journey began twelve years ago with my first diagnosis of cancer. I was thirty five years old, with a husband and two small kids, and I had just returned to adult education, with dreams of becoming an accountant.

My treatment that year impacted a lot on me and my family, but I did well at school and secured my place at Adelaide University. However, my marriage showed its first signs of crumbling. There I was, only thirty five, still alive and still in love with the man I had been living with since I was eighteen.

So I threw myself into Uni with a passion, discovering a love of writing, and not Accounting but Anthropology. I loved researching and writing on the concept of 'difference', and, in particular, non-mainstream communities. I began working with people who have disabilities. And I began to think about differences in sexual expression within the dominant norm of heterosexuality. ..

And...

I began to discover in myself feelings of same-sex attraction.

But for eight years, I embraced celibacy, and travelled the road of the non-sexual being.

I invite you now to think about what the image of the double bed means to us in our society. For most of us, it means 'normal'. It means 'couple', 'family', 'Mum and Dad and the Great Aussie Dream'. What happens when that image is shattered by the reality of a partner who sleeps in a single bed in the same home? We hid our difference from everyone. I felt ashamed and a failure.

There is no place for celibacy in the dominant norm of sexual expression. Celibacy is indeed being on a road less travelled.

Two years ago I faced cancer again, this time serious, advanced, and deadly.

What would I do with the time I had left? I had an affair, and a nervous breakdown. I left my husband and two kids to live on my own for the first time in my life. I was forty five years old. And I took up a friendship with a wonderful Lesbian woman who introduced me to her community. A new road to travel at last!

But for many of my friends, lesbian separatism meant that my continued feelings of relationship with men were like sleeping with the enemy. I was being marginalised, within the already marginalised!

And so I came to Bfriend.

With Truffy, I found kindness and compassion, a suspension of judgment, and a feeling of such safety that I could express my identity to myself. Was it possible? Could it be true? Is it really OK to be- Bisexual?

With other like-minded women in a group called Outskirts, I can laugh at the funny side of my life, and I can share sadness, pain and difficulty. I feel part of a community again, but more importantly, a sense of myself as a community of one. I am slowly becoming proud of my bisexuality, and I am no longer willing to have my sexual identity expressed by others, through the gender of whatever person is beside me. My sexuality is within me.

The image of the double bed is no longer important to me. Rather, the importance lies in my openness to the possibility of being whoever I want to be within that bed. I am now able to look ahead for any road that I come to, whether it be the busy heterosexual highway, or little-used 'Bi-ways' on the outskirts of town.