Atypical Trans Late Bloomer

The nature of life is torment; a struggle between need, want, and have- first for ourselves, then our progeny We tie ourselves in knots and wed Then children lock us into needs beyond our time and reach It seemed like a good idea at the time Reach one level, then Maslov beckons Or Kohlberg's stages tease. Learn, experience, come to know and do. Then: unlearn, try to repair harsh lessons Rat on a treadmill; rest is an illusion Drugs make time go away, not pain Oh to find a steady lasting calm Repair the damage done along the way, Associate today's tugs at heartstrings with the things done to you back then Recognize that what you called 'yourself' was a pastiche of survival techniques, a bag of pathologies and hidden scars Suspect you don't have a 'self' like the others do, just a bag of tricks that till now, has seen you through Worry about your children, what this life holds for them Worry about myself will I never find a pla...

I've realized over this year or two that I'm not a standard person. I don't fit into anybody's view of normal. I used to think I was normal. To put it mildly, I'm quirky. I don't fit into expectations. I don't fit into most people's categories. I don't get, I don't see, the things that most people do. I'm increasingly aware that the people around me suffer because of it. I managed to get to be this old, this comfortably, because I was in a career field that tolerated and sometimes elevated quirky people as long as they delivered results and I was somewhat good at what they wanted. This is to say that I've really only recently caught a glimmer of understanding about me. My pieces don't snap together into integrated pictures. I am very sorry that my quirky, my peculiarness, brings pain to others, to the people close to me. I really am. I apologize.

I've been asked (by a friend) to explain myself categorically, that is: to label myself, to submit myself to the mainstream's categories, for the ease of people trying to decide about me, to judge me, to evaluate me. It's an interesting 'ask'. I'm a misfit. I don't easily categorize, and I don't fit into categories at all for people who are Serious about labelling. I don't start off intending to frustrate a system of categories, I have no activist intent, I'm just unable to align with their structures and remain Myself. So 'misfit' is a tag that Others might apply to me. 'Eclectic' is another; it seems positive, kicky, rather non-judgemental. I guess 'strange' works. But I think the word that fits me is queer , both in its outdated usage and also in its recent usage. Back in the Day, 'queer' meant strange, peculiar, or non-functional. You could be a queer bird if, for instance, you registered to vote ...

Heard a tremendous NPR 8-minute interview with LuLu Miller , author of Why Fish Don't Exist , about how false or unhelpful categorizations and naming structures lead us into faulty mental frameworks that persist in our perceptions, feelings, and thinking; often these faulty frameworks serve us poorly. She said, imagine there's a lecture hall and the professor displays a slide showing a salmon, a lungfish, and a cow. The prof asks, Which two belong together? Which one does not belong? Most of the audience will say, the two fish belong together; the cow does not belong. And that seems to make sense. Two fish and a cow? Pretty easy to sort out . On examination, the facile answer falls short. A lungfish has lungs and an epiglottis, just like the cow. The cow's heart and the lungfish's heart are very similar. In fact, the cow and the lungfish have much more in common than the lungfish and the salmon. Turns out that grouping them by "which ones are fish" ...