What's the opposite of peaking

[yubgummy]

I "peaked" a couple of years ago. It was wonderful in some ways to feel like I'd seen the light, that I was finally able to speak reality, etc. But it was also an emotional time - full of anger, despair, feeling lied to, losing friends, you all know the drill.

A close friend is now going through that and it made me realise that I've actually "gone back down the other side of the mountain". It's not that I've gone back to gender ideology, it's just that I've (re-)absorbed sexed reality back into my worldview and now I'm just calmly living my life. My friends know my views, I feel confident in my own perceptions of reality and don't feel a need to align them to anyone in particular. I just generally feel centred and grounded.

Anyone else go through something similar?

You've reclaimed normal.

Focused!

Not sure I’ve got there yet.

I *think once you realise the sheer horror of what's happening, it can be a bit overwhelming and all-consuming for a while. It becomes your default topic of focus. It all gets a bit "And another thing..."

After a while, you accept that's the state of affairs, you do what you can to counter it. Dig when asked to, sign petitions and email MPs, got to protests but it ticks along more in the back of your mind than the front.

Is that what you mean, OP?

I couldn't sustain the emotional intensity of my early reactions to all of this. I was wrung out and stepped back for a bi*

^^
I've done all he petitions, did drip drip to dh and family. Shining light was dh sending me the recent male rapist in Scotland like it was new info. Hallelujah he has started to see the light

I know exactly what you mean, OP. I'm similar. I reached peaking point years ago.
I think the peaking thing feels so substantial because what is happening is not only deeply disturbing and concerning, but you know that you will face dire societal ire for calling it out. You may be ostracised, lose your job, all for saying the obvious.
It comes as a deep shock.
But you absorb the shock over time, meet other women who have come to the same realisation,,and for me personally, see the enormous strides that we're making. That makes me feel much better in all of it.
The gender landscape is completely different now to what it was five years ago, both politically and culturally. I find that much easier to bear.

Yeah that can be a normal part of processing difficult realities. It isn’t that you don’t get it, it is that you completely get it but you have accepted how fucked up the world is and you can now tolerate the uncomfortableness of that reality. It is a great place to be. Radical acceptance is what therapists call it.

I like this!

Some people describe coming to terms with exiting gender ideology like "peaking" but a better analogy might be simply "seeing the light".

So - you've seen the light. It was extremely bright at first, but now your eyes have adjusted and you're used to it. So you're feeling basically normal, but you'll never, ever forget.

Plateauing?

Fifty quid says you didn’t go to mixed sex school.

You're looking for the consequence, or aftermath of Peaking, rather than its opposite.

It actually felt almost the opposite way around for me- like falling down a rabbit hole, flowed by the hard slog of climbing back out into the sunshine of tranquility.

We aren't all able to, if we have a responsibility or direct involvement that drags us constantly back into the depths.

There should be some storm metaphors, as well. Eye of the storm, maelstrom etc.

The one and only time I used a pool with a mixed sex changing village a man lay on the floor on his back and then shuffled along until his head was under my cubicle partition.

#nothankyou

An interesting thread! Peaking, for me, was of a somewhat different type, beginning (more than a decade ago) with my understanding of feminist theory which clearly implies that the origin of women's subjugation is in sex, and that gender roles, rules and stereotypes have been ways of contributing to that subjugation.

So if 'woman' would suddenly be defined as something not based on being female, feminist work would pretty much lose the language and the data that is relevant for improving the lot of women in this world.

Someone smart on Twitter used the parable of cats and dogs:

Everyone understands those two groups, how their needs etc. might differ in veterinary medicine and so on. If we were suddenly told that the group 'dogs' now consists of all dogs except dachshunds but also includes Siamese cats, and the group 'cats' now consists of all cats except Siamese cats but also includes dachshunds, writing about dogs and cats in veterinary medicine or laws about keeping pets etc. would become impossibly complicated.

I couldn't see how any feminist would not see this, so I thought that the work feminism was doing would not be affected by trans rights (i.e., that no trans activist would demand, and no feminist would agree to, the erasure of the female sex from language and the deconstruction of the female body into various parts).

In a sense that belief in peaceful coexistence was the more academic #bekind approach, and there are still many, many feminists trying to straddle the paradox of being in a movement which is based on combating sex-based discrimination while prioritising male transitioners' goals, and while also prioritising the feelings of those women who choose to identify as something else.

My proper peaking happened when I realised that I had been completely wrong!

That was a truly dark time, Watching the events unfurl online made me feel as if I was watching a natural experiment in one of the ways women may have historically become second-class citizens, that complicated mix of different incentives and different types of obliviousness, the unconscious tilt towards taking male concerns more seriously, the willingness of many women not to have firm boundaries, the rise of the Karen trend, the desire to be 'good' etc. And this made me question to what extent women could ever retrieve any of the things we were rapidly losing.

So the after-peak era for me has been based on the radical acceptance that all this is taking place, even though it's not a progressive development, and to keep on arguing for more evidence-based and nuanced conversations and the importance of the rights of all people, not just some.

I have seen the term The Age Of Endarkenment used to refer to various political movements of the recent decades (Trumpianism, radical Islam, increased authoritarianism and political polarisation all over the world), and this phenomenon belongs to that group. Distancing myself in these ways has helped me.