Atypical Transgender Late Bloomer

I've had a dual diagnosis of depression and anxiety for decades. I think the meds I have serve me pretty well. I'm rarely too deep into these two monsters. The last few days I've have major anxiety in a way I haven't experience it ever before. I am completely anxious. I am afraid. Not just tense of apprehensive but afraid. Afraid as in, I smell a little differemt. I am frightened. There are days I've taken a single Klomopin for anxiety. Now I'm washing down two with a glass of wine. (Not recommended, btw). The Klonopin works well. When I take two in an evening, and certainly when I take two with a glass of wine, I'll wake up with a complete loss of memory; just a black hole. Can't drive that way. I don't know what I feel so frail and frighted about.

Six years ago now, I recovered lost memories of beatings and rapes and learning to be the best boy I could to avoid "being in trouble". My story has unraveled and become apparatent in non-linear ways, in hints and starts and later recognition. I've realized I wasn't the pure-hetero I spent 55 years pretending to be. I realized I didn't need to believe in the church that perpetrated the rapes, covered up for the crimes, and conspired to run a local catholic grade school as a rotating supply troop of young boys for the priests to enjoy. I've realized that when I presented myself as All-American to a young woman and proposed marriage, I was suppressing memories of events and desires and made a false presentation. When it all came to a head, and I wan't the man she thought she'd married, and I wasn't the man I said I was, that was the end of that. There was no fixing it. Now, alone and left to myself, I'm growing my hai...

click to embiggen in new window. click to embiggen in new window.   This is a bit of art I'm working on, and it certainly has a meaning for me but my impression is, that if I have to explain it then I haven't done it right. I'd sure appreciate any feedback in the comments, especially along the lines of: what works/doesn't work what meaning you find in it what feelings you find with it And if you click the image, it opens bigger in a new window. thank you very much!

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" ...

BiSexuality is a curious topic that people have Feelings about. I was recently pleased to read Dee's three posts: I Am Bisexual , Bisexuality: Six Experiences , and The Bisexual Experience . I'm really impressed at her communication skills and the breadth of her writing. I think she represents the cohort, the community, well. I had a discussion with a very good friend who was perplexed at a bisexual's ' fluidity ', the ease with which they switch from heterosexual to homosexual and back again. I thought, here's an opportunity to step up and R epresent. I'm not an evangelist, not a recruiter, just another person with a slice of my own experience and some understanding of the community. I suggested that a BiSexual was NOT a person who was homosexual for a while, and then later heterosexual for a while, in some repeated sequence. I said, homo's and hetero's are both monosexuals , and bisexuality isn't being Mono. Bisexuality is more of: n...