THE ULTIMATE MATURITY TEST is to have a zero way out.

You will hear some reality-bites of my life in the course of this text.

Even at twenty or thirty, a person is too young

to believe that he or she could "change over" to being a man or a woman, as they still have a good fifty or sixty years to live from the time of medical intervention.

The whole idea of "being in the wrong body" is a mental fixation that it "might be better to get another body in order to experience this "better". In truth, however, there is no "better" and anyone who has finally destroyed their sexual organs will have to realise that they have been fighting against themselves and life all this time and have lost.

Now it can't be helped when adults make this decision for themselves and some have to go to such extreme lengths to realise an error. They seem to want to experience the full impact of what irreversibility means.

Only when there are zero alternatives,

only when there is no other way at all, are such minds prepared to bow to their fate. And perhaps not even then, since the last alternative would be to take one's own life.

It allows for the interpretation that such a mind is in fact seeking not to be able to choose.

That a mind actually suffers from the agony of choice and that it believes it has to decide.

That the socially implanted idea that human life is based on choice, what to do with ones body.

That it can be manipulated, upgraded and prolonged as desired seems to trigger the impulse to test this idea on a deeper level.

While the only answer would be that there is no choice in the first place.

Once you are born, that is the body you will live with until you die. There are no alternatives to begin with.

The same can be said about pregnancy.

When I was pregnant, I had great difficulty accepting the pregnancy and all its accompanying symptoms. Something inside me was resisting it, out of fear of the birth and a future as a mum with a little baby.

I was an annoying pregnant woman

and complained to my gynaecologist about my condition. At some point he lost patience with me - I had expected him to confirm and console me - and said: "You have to accept the fact that you are pregnant."

During the rest of my visits to him, he didn't offer me a single alternative to understand my grief. He simply left me cold.
He did the only right thing to convey in this situation. Namely that my fate was sealed from the moment I conceived a child and that I had to accept the fact that my pregnancy was unpleasant until the end.

Because what else could he have said?

That it was unreasonable that I was pregnant? That I could choose not to be pregnant anymore? That was no longer possible at that point.
He couldn't even have said: "Get over it or kill your unborn child" (to use the more direct word for abortion). Because I had actually wanted to have a child. But apparently I wanted the child, but I didn't want the inconvenience that came with it.

Confirmation of my miserable mental state was precisely what I didn't need.

It was a rude and heartless reminder that there was no alternative to my situation. Nothing else would have convinced me to start making friends with my condition. Because that's what it's all about.

And you know immediately when you are lied to and being confirmed, since that's what you do, too: lie to yourself. But of course, you can ignore your own wisdom.

Pregnancy is therefore a very fitting analogy to life itself.

Pregnancy has a beginning, lasts nine months and has an end. Life itself has a beginning through birth, lasts a few decades and then comes to an end.
It is precisely this time, compressed into just a few months, that makes it extremely clear that there is no other alternative to it. You are either pregnant or you are not.

A lack of alternatives is the best life teacher of all.

The only way to avoid lying to yourself is to face it directly, harshly and without sugar-coating it.

Funnily enough, I had previously changed gynaecologists.

The previous gynaecologist didn't care for a second that I had become pregnant. He hadn't congratulated me or shown any kind of sympathy. Which - of course - I had expected from him. I remember how angry I was with him and that I ran down the stairs full of rage and despair and swore I would never go back to that practice again.

I waited for any reaction from those around me to the news

of my pregnancy and if they weren't happy (my mum in particular showed no positive emotion), it left me feeling insecure and sad. I was so deeply dependent on the reaction of those around me and so fixated on their positive feedback that I didn't realise that my doubts were correct. But other than I thought, or would have come to realize back then.

The reason for my dependence on positive affirmation

was that I could see very little positive in the fact that I was pregnant. But why was that?
Why was I a constant nuisance to myself, and, as a consequence, a nuisance to others?

Well, today I know.

First of all, I hadn't really thought wisely about who the father of the child should be. I had been with him for many years and knew him very well. And precisely because I knew him very well, and precisely because we had constant problems in our relationship, and precisely because we had already been through a separation, I knew deep down that my decision to have a child with this man and start a family had been the wrong one. I did it against my better judgement.

And because I acted against myself, the later course shall be of no surprise.

We had too much conflict with each other and the marriage didn't work out. I do not blame him for that. He was as immature as I was.

I was, during my pregnancy, this "teenage girl"

who doesn't want to face reality, who is utterly dependent on the cheerful responses of my fellas and if they did not cheer up, I resented them. It is so obvious that it is ridiculous!

Now, since I still had not enough evidence that deep down I felt the wrongness of my decision, I became deeply ill after the birth of my child. Life showed me its most ugly face and gifted me with severe depression.

The "wrongness" was neither my man at that time, nor was it to have a baby, nor was it that I was wrong as a human being in full.

The wrongness is avoidance of giving oneself the chance in becoming mature.

I was so strong in avoiding maturity that I went through the hardest test one can imagine. I hit rock bottom and thought of suicide. I have no answer, why I didn't actually commit it. But I didn't. Overcoming the depression means to overcome the fear towards life itself. I decided to go the hard way. These were the most difficult years to come. And it IS years (at least, for me).

But first, I went to a day clinic,

where they offered a place to stay during the day. It was a small setting where those who worked there, provided their presence to the women going there. That was all I needed. To not be alone during the day when my husband left the house to go to work. It was that I needed a place to be under control in order to not do something stupid.

Forget the therapeutic sessions,

forget them rummaging around in your "past" and what might be the cause for your "condition". Forget the psychology and the academia.

The therapeutic talking sessions did nothing for me, since what they are supposed to provide for is, that the expert has a justified place to practice their profession. And to collect data and write papers about what was collected. I am not saying that it is not needed. All I am saying is that it did not have significance to me.

I went through the sessions since that was required,

I probably could have said "no" to them but I didn't think of that. Talking about my problems and the causes was not what saved me killing myself. It was simply the place itself. To get up in the morning and to have a destination where you have to show up at a certain time. I wanted to be socially controlled.

Since that was, what I had been used to throughout my working life myself. Having a structured and ordered day.
Since I was not an established member of any community outside work, I had no backup environment which could have replaced one destination with another one. I had no destination to go to.

I was alone as a "modern mother" who had not thought about the fact that I will have to build up a whole new network from scratch. Since the working-network was not available. And the family network wasn't either.
Again, I was angry and frustrated about doing that all on my own.

My way out of it was to put my baby boy into day-care.

Everybody in the clinic recommended doing that, after I decided to end the program.

From their perspective it was the right thing to suggest. From my perspective it was the right thing to do. Since the only network you can start to build in a city is where other parents can be met. The price to pay for getting the chance to acquaint oneself with mothers and fathers is to leave your child there and to get used to the heart ache this causes you.

I have only one idea

how other mothers are able not only to take care of their babies on their own, do not put them into day care, do not put them into school and home school them, and do not become insane over the fact of doing it alone, is accepting to have NO alternative.

Which is that they accept to be alone in the first place.

They accept that responsibility from the outset and they realize that being on your own is the only way to go. Meaning, that "being with yourself" is a requirement for having peace.

But I, on the other hand, took every alternative I could get my hands on.

I took exactly the way out that made it impossible for me to face my fear completely. By placing myself in a supposedly fear-free environment, I robbed myself of the opportunity to face my strength. Because I didn't believe in it in the first place.

Presumably based on an early childhood trauma that no earthling in this world is spared. Every baby or toddler suffers a trauma at some point, they just don't remember it.

The first chance in life to experience a consciously induced trauma is puberty.

The fact that having sex with a human being is scary is true. You can only overcome this fear if you affirm it.

My first sexual experiences were painful, devoid of the pleasure that I only experienced much later. The very first penetration had more in common with rape than with pleasure. Thank God it didn't stop me from avoiding further experiences.

Applied to pregnancy and motherhood, I want to conjure up a fantasy.

In order for a woman to no longer be afraid of motherhood, she is sent into the forest alone for a while, with a bit food and the possibility of shelter. There, left completely alone from the community of others, with only the baby, the mother should experience that she is able to care for her child.

She has no one else. She is not allowed to return to the village before two weeks have passed. If she does, she has failed the test and must henceforth submit to the wisdom of the others who passed the test themselves.

Since she still owes to give proof of her strength. She is not allowed to give orders to others. Why should she? She can't be a role model because she yet has to become mature herself. She must feel ashamed of her failure which will motivate her to try again. So she sets out to face loneliness a second time.

She may succeed and she may not.

The others take it the way it is. If she succeeds she becomes a respectable member of the community. If not, she must submit herself under the guidance of the braver ones. She may be a person who has to be mothered or fathered her whole life.

But what she cannot demand is to be a fully respected member; instead, she must be denied it. She must live without the entitlement to make adult decisions for other members of the community. She cannot argue her way out. Since arguments are no replacement for the test. The others do ignore her arguments, no matter how eloquent she might argue.

She will be ordered around for the rest of her life. If that is not a motivation to set out for the test multiple times, I don't know what else might be.

That, in my eye, is the right attitude towards maturity and immaturity.

Converted to modernity,

we as moderns face the difficulty to not having these concrete experiences, and we have to abstract them on our own. Using our fantasy.

That is why I am against all this woke nonsense. Because, what it actually is, is to put humans into a deep state of dreaminess. That is why "woke" is a mocking term. It ought to be.

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Title-graphic: my own.