Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

Recently the most frequently misused term in the media has been "witch hunt" and it struck me: I really don't know much about the Salem Witch Trials . So down the rabbit hole I went, and I read about the trials, the accusations, the meagre justifications in law and process; and I came upon the story of Giles Corey , and his death by peine forte et dure , and I really related to him. Giles Corey was charged with witchcraft. However, the State was quite uncertain that they had jurisdiction for several reasons and so they artfully would ask the accused to enter a plea of guilty or not-guilty; by entering a plea, the accused accepted the jurisdiction of the court. By "standing mute" and refusing to enter a plea, the accused rejected the court's jurisdiction and the trial could not continue. Why did Giles Corey decline to enter a plea? If he pled and then was found guilty, his property would revert to the Crown. If he were never found guilty, his property woul...

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...

I had a curious brush with suicide. I'd been quite suicidal in 2017, and then an experience with my friend TM pulled me out of that. I still think of it often and easily put it aside, and I would have said that I wasn't at risk for suicide any longer. I was in a marriage-therapy session and my spouse said somethings that I went off in response to. The state of where we left things was simply unacceptable to me, I couldn't tolerate the situation, and when we got out of the room and I was waiting in the common space for my spouse to use the bathroom, I said to myself (I heard the words in my head): "Well this is no good, I can't go on like this, time to kill myself" Walking out of the office suite I decided: end of the hall, staircast, throw myself down the stairs to the ground floor and that was my exact intention. Got to the top of the stairs, walked directly to the edge, and realized: there was no way between the landings and the layout that I was going ...

I think a very good "first rule" is: first, do no harm . When I write here, I don't want to lead others into a worse place, so I try to self-censor some things. But the issue of HOPE keeps coming up. People will say, There's always Hope, and they seem to believe they're helping you when they say it. I say: hope is an abstraction that intends to communicate a good feeling without any change or evidence. Hope is a belief; hope is a fantasy with a significant population invested in it. There's a too-often used phrase: "hope and prayers", and they are similar things. They both ask you to accept the permanent presence of an invisible notion. I wonder, instead of Hope isn't it more honest to say: Maybe ? Maybe you'll get better. Maybe the suffering will stop, although you know our Buddhist friends position suffering as part of life. Maybe you'll be less of a load to those around you. Further: maybe you won't get better, but maybe...

The CNN coverage referred to the Decedant's media footprint in (successful white) American media, his backstory as a chef, referred to the existance of a 10-year old daughter, bore praise from other media people, referred to the recent Kate Spade suicide, and ended with the toll-free suicide hotline and an exhortation to call for help. It's a cliche'd format. No mention of the CDC report that suicide is up 20% in America since 1999. Or to put it another way, suicide is up since the Internet. More sensationalized reporting driven by money, on a topic known for contagious deaths after explicit reporting. The similarities of Bordain's story to the recently bruited Spade story are non-trivial. The media cycle will continue, generating clicks and eyeballs and money without regard to the impact on the audience, the dependants, or the trauma to those involved. We will revisit his Pittsburgh work . What would Fred Rogers have said about Bordain's demise? I think it wo...

A woman in her 50's named Kate Spade died this week. Survived by a minor child and her husband, she had a successful career in the fashion industry. That would have been sufficient. Unfortunately, the suicide of a prominent person is treated with sensationalism rather than discretion. The science that says publicized suicides can/will produce additional deaths is ignored in the pursuit of clicks and sales. First we're told she's killed herself, and how she took her life. Then we're told her marriage was problematic next we see comments by a sister and a brother-in-law, comments that probably weren't perfect for publication then the 13-year old daughter is brought in Then some details of the marriage - they'd been living apart for ten months, but not discussing divorce the note was teased: Bea, this wasn't your fault, ask your Dad The NYTimes went on to describe her product line in terms of class signifiers, eloquently discussed here , reducing the death ...

We don’t do that, which became: We don’t allow ourselves to do that. And be “we” I mean my family, and by family I mean my parents and siblings. Sidebar on “family” How Family Is Used to Excuse the Inexcusable Family is a construct, and like all constructs, it covers for something darker, and more complex, than we’d like to admit. Many families use words like “love” and “loyalty” to mask all matter of toxicity and aggression, both passive and overt. … invoking “the family” becomes a means of blunting anger, of sublimating resistance. When an authority invokes the family, it’s often to subjugate the subordinates and get them to willingly conform with “less”. I was raised believing that WE don’t do THOSE THINGS. Drugs, children out of marriage, major crime, blasphemy, second families, divorce, homosexuality. And yet, my cousins, aunts and uncles did those things, but we believed WE didn’t do those things. I thought it was a statement of virtue. I didn’t think we were elite or...

Assignment: describe yourself before and after your Dad and your Priest. Before my Dad and the Priest. I would place this at when I was age 2.5 years, because that’s when the beatings started. I was happy, enthusiastic, and curious. I had a big mop of curly hair like Harpo Marx; I greeted days and people with brio. I was happy in the house and out of the house. After my father started beating me, I was careful and wary. He started calling me Crisco (fat in the can) which I hated. He cut my hair short at home when my mother was out. Decades later, he told a sibling: when [me] was two and a-half, he had beaten me like he beat prisoners in the station house. He was a cop. Being outside was better than inside, being with others was better than being with my parents. I learned my block and my neighborhood. I still had most of the core of myself when I was out. I became a reader because he respected reading. Years later he’d say I had my head in the books too often, and why did I ...