Atypical Trans Late Bloomer

Trigger Warnings: priest, rape, catholic, altar boy       click here to go away . I was invited, along with three other altar boys in my grade, to a weekend in the country at a house that my priest had. I didn't want to go but my parents had accepted on my behalf; it was all set up. I was all set up. He had a big car, a Lincoln or a Cadillac. Priests took vows of poverty, but their families could supply them with cars and second homes. I now see it as: there were all sorts of workarounds for their inconvenient constraints. We departed Brooklyn NY with the priest and four altar boys in the car. It was my first time outside of the city, my first time on a trip without my parents, my first time Upstate in the country. Brooklyn was the kind of place where most things were paved. There were parks and highways that had green spaces and some trees, but no really wild nature areas. My mother was a big fan of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens but I was indifferent to it. When we drove o

Trigger warnings: rape, beatings, jail, prisoner, Catholic, priest, family. Scroll down for content.        Or Click here to go away . The adjective catholic (with a lower-case c ) means: universal, comprehensive, widely shared. Something that's catholic is bigger than you might think. I need to set down my own catholic experience. You might not know anybody affected by the Catholic systemic child-rape scandal . Maybe you do know a victim and you aren't aware of it yet. I'm one of them. I was raped by Fr. Arnaud in Brooklyn's St. Theresa of Liseaux, on Avenue D and Troy Avenue. I volunteered to became an altar boy because on school-day funerals, you got out of class and sometimes you got $5. It seemed like a good deal. My dad recommended it. The old GI rubric holds true: Never Volunteer. From September 1965 to June 1968 - Fourth through Sixth grades - I was repeatedly raped by a parish priest. It happened in the rectory on Monday afternoons, and on overnigh

July 17, 2018: Hazmat team called to apparent suicide in Brush Creek Park also https://beavercountyradio.com/news/brush-creek-park-suicide/ .                              NORTH SEWICKLEY TWP. — A hazmat team was called Monday afternoon to Brush Creek Park when a deceased man was found seated in a parked car with two tanks of helium in the passenger seat, police said. North Sewickley Township Police Chief Jeff Becze said emergency responders were called at about 3:15 p.m. when a park employee found the car and noticed the man inside. The deceased man was identified as Cory J. Rust, 20, of Rochester. July 29, 2018: (not a suicide) Man, 25, dies after three jump into Mon River from Hot Metal Bridge                            A 25-year-old Pittsburgh man died Sunday night after three men jumped off the Hot Metal Bridge into the Monongahela River. Authorities responded to the bridge at 8:40 p.m. River Rescue and other personnel saw three men in the water. One appeared hurt and was ha

I have huge holes in my memory. There's lots of important things I don't remember, or I won't remember. I've been in therapy for four years with multiple focuses going on simultaneously: a gestalt practitioner, an EMDR practitioner, a family systems practitioner, etc. I've remembered more of my youth. I remember violent beatings from my father. I remember a priest raping me for three years. In Fourth, fifth, and six grade the parish priest was in my ass and in my mouth. I was 8, 9, 10 years old. I met a woman and we got married. We had kids. I had one recurring dream for decades about Dan which couldn't be true. But it was true. Now I remember Dan. Now I remember Allan in 7th grade and Ronald in 8th grade. Now I remember a man in Virgina, and a man in Spain. Now I remember David. At the time, I closed them each into an internal box and put them away; they were inconsistent with what I'd been told I should be. Otherwise: bad boy , and I couldn't

I've read a fair amount of articles and books, more written at the practitioner level than at the pop-help level, about How To Get Past Trauma. Mostly they say that to get past the trauma, you have to grieve and mourn what was lost, and then you need to wrap the trauma into a bigger meaning, a bigger context. Generally the professionals use both words, grief and mourn . I would have thought they were equivalent, but I gather they're different. What I read is that grief is internal, it's between the ears; mourning is external, it's spoken and interactive, it's public and involves other people. Mourning is a social/ cultural construct. I mourn what I lost from my father's beating me, including: I didn't have a normal childhood, whatever that is. I spent years worrying about getting in trouble and getting beaten by a grown man. I don't have healthy relationships. I don't ever relax. I'm constantly vigilant for threats and meanings and being

I recommend Hegemonic Sanity and Suicide by Jess Stohlmann-Rainey, which examines the good/bad categorization of suicide survivors, the bio-medical/ criminal paradigms of suicide, the failure of hospitalization programs to address suicide beyond short-term delays, and the hegemony of "sane" culture. Good reading.

Breaking Bad was a story about a person with cancer and no access to quality health insurance or medical treatment. Better Call Saul seems like a story about a person with mental illness and how the person, their surrounding people, and the system all fall to come to terms with it or provide help until they take their own life. In truth, Better Call Saul is a show that cynically used a mental-health train wreck to jump-start a prequel in an unexpected way, a story hung on an unexpected peg, to move the prequel from Day-0 to Season Four, where the "real" characters, now well-established, can move beyond Chuck and get their business on.

The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma , by Junot Diaz. In The New Yorker, April 16 2018. It's a compelling and powerful essay. Diaz writes, I never got any help, any kind of therapy. I never told anyone. My own trauma started when I was two-½ years old. Personally, I didn't get help, and I didn't tell anyone, and I barely remembered - until I was 58. That's 55 years lost, wasted, lived through the creative adjustments that a 2.5 year old conjured up in order to survive. What a waste of life. I am pretty bummed out about that. There's just no getting that back.