She or Her

So did I depart from Trea­sure Island some­what per­plexed by the sud­den appear­ance of the notion that feel­ing is a fem­i­nine qual­ity. For once my plane was in the air, I grew increas­ingly con­cerned about these spon­ta­neous ref­er­ences of mine to feel­ing as she or her, as if my body were inhab­ited by another per­son or woman who embod­ied all of my feel­ings. While I shud­dered at such a schiz­o­phrenic thought, I was reas­sured by my feel­ings that such ref­er­ences to feel­ing, as she or her, were quite nat­ural for young men my age, who tended to erro­neously asso­ciate feel­ing with women only.

I eas­ily debunked that myth, for I was a man with lots of feel­ing. Only I just didn’t like the way I felt, the con­stant ache inside my heart, which I had mis­tak­enly attrib­uted, at the time, to the great dis­tance that sep­a­rated me from my girl­friend, Mary. Hav­ing felt, at such times, as if I were stand­ing out­side of my body, ter­ri­bly removed from what I was really feel­ing, I real­ized my pain had more to do with the great dis­tance that sep­a­rated me from my soul than it had, with my sep­a­ra­tion from Mary, as the lat­ter real­ity merely reflected the for­mer truth. Now I under­stood why I had so much more feel­ing for Mary than I had for what I wanted to do with my life, for it was she who had cap­tured the image of my soul.