[[OLD]] A Handful of Daffodils (Forgotten Series, #7)

Epilogue

Five months later

The funny thing with therapy was that it didn't fix you. You didn't go and the therapist was able to say a few things and you were all better. It didn't work like that. Your therapist would give you sound bites that acted like tools and it was up to you if you would use them or not. When it came to making yourself better, you did it, no one else. Sure your therapist was there to help guide you and give you tools but the process of making yourself better was up to you.

Amber and I had worked on a lot. She had me do an unconscious bias test and it hadn't painted a very good picture. I was a sexist male. That was the end of it. How I had grown up, what the Old Ways had done was mould me into a type of male who, while didn't consciously think females were less than, certainly subconsciously believed it.

I preferred the opinion of males over females, not because the males had more experience on a subject but because I subconsciously believed females wouldn't understand or be able to comprehend the concepts I was speaking about. I tended to think of females on the terms of how useful they were to me and if they didn't meet any of the needs I required, I disregarded them. Where as I would accept each and every male on the basis of who he was as a person and not what he could do for me. I also tended to generalize females as vapid, catty, judgmental, naggy, who would manipulate you if you gave them half a chance creatures and if one was like Menza or Chrissie, who was sweet, kind, and never had a bad thing to say about anyone, she was an exception not proof that my generalizations were wrong. Where as males could be anything and I would never generalize them.

That was a process to work through. I knew I still had issues. A lot of them but Amber was helping me work through them. She had put me into sessions with Mari, telling me I had to have full conversations with her and I remembered the first few, feeling awkward and frustrated because I didn't think we had anything in common. I felt like I was hitting my head against a wall until Amber had asked me if I thought we didn't have anything in common because as a female there was no way Mari could understand any of my interests. She then said she knew I would have no issues having a conversation with a male I didn't know so why was Mari any different? Unless I didn't see her as a full person, I just saw her as a female first.

It turned out Mari and I did have a bit in common. She loved action movies, hated carrot cake, liked reading psychology books, something I had discovered I had enjoyed as well, and she liked the language of flowers. That had been slightly embarrassing for me when she figured it out. It turned out when I had asked Bennett to pick up Menza specific flowers for her weekly bouquet, Mari had realized I was using them to express myself and called me out on it in one of our sessions. I had been embarrassed, she thought it was sweet and then handed me some of her favourite books on the subject.

After I was able to have conversations with Mari in and out of therapy, Amber had grabbed Angie. That female and I had more in common than Mari and I did. She liked sparring, liked hanging out with a few beers, fishing, and hunting as a wolf. It had surprised me how much we had in common but that had been Amber's point. I never saw Angie as a person I could be friends with because she was female first before she was a person. Amber had explained that the division was created by the Old Ways to keep males superior to females but to also keep males from seeing the division. If I saw females as only females and not as people, having those oppressive rules put on them was easier to accept because they were just females. They didn't matter as much.

It made me think of all the other females I had come into contact with through out my entire life. It made me think of Lisa, a female I regaled to as William's female. She hadn't even had a name to me but she was a strong willed, stubborn female who, while flawed like so many others, had a spine of steel and I was certain the next male that attempted anything would find they would break before she would bend.