Atypical Transgender 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...

From Sue Kerr, Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents we have a link to M. Molly Backes' tweet : I so get this and I appreciate Backes' explanation of it. I have Impossible Tasks. Usually I have one or maybe two Impossible Tasks. I just can't get started on them. If I'm somewhat forced to face them, I can procrastinate the day away. I enter them on my calendar. I slide them forward to the next day. Repeat. Currently my most egregious Impossible Task is the right and left directionals on the front of a Volvo. It's a 17-year old car and it looks it. It's a spare car that I'm not taking out on the roads, because the inspection is overdue. Because the right and left directional housings need to be replaced. Because the cable release for the front hood won't work. When I was in my 20's and not so afflicted by Impossible Tasks (and coincidentally, PTSD) this would have been something I took care of in an afternoon. Maybe a few days, if I needed to order...

Reading Healing Tasks: Psychotherapy and Adult Survivors of Childhood Abuse by James I Kepner. Re therapy I'm often questioning whether what we're doing is what we're supposed to be doing, so I thought I'd do some learning about what the process is supposed to be. This is a good read. There are, admittedly, some pages I don't get - either they're too abstract, or I'm not catching the nuance/implications. It's not a self-help book, it's much more a book for practitioners. There's a lot of good lessons for me. One lesson is the notion that prior trauma causes you to over-react to challenges. I did just that in an interaction while I was reading it, and it informed me to ask: Am I over-reacting? Why? and there was value in that. Another two lessons that I'm still pondering are: Depression is the result of long-unprocessed, accumulated, compounding-interest grief that hasn't been mourned, which presents as a general sadness or malais...