It's been a while since I updated the post-pandemic crisis. So here we are...
First, I've been faithfully and happily investing time, energy, and dollars into a weekly therapy session, started back in August. It's good work, solid work, and M my therapist is a nice combination of wise, intuitive, and resonant (queer friendly and knowledgable, and in sync with the mish-mash of science / holistic belief that make up my internal world). I look forward to my weekly hour - challenging, often dredging up tears and grief, but always nourishing and positive.
I've been down the therapy road a few times:
- In the early 90's as I wrestled with gender issues (with a men's movement / Robert Bly beating drums in the woods therapist). I was not exactly reparative therapy, but definitely working to heal what he saw as wounded masculinity rather than accepting my trans nature.
- In the late 90's, as a pretty happy and playful gender queer / androgyne, considering whether I needed / wanted to transition
- In the early 00's, as a candidate for gender transition, seeking psych approvals (mandated at the time) for hormones and surgery. As someone who had been a trans community fixture and pretty high functioning, it was all pro forma.
- The end of the 00's, when I found a life coach / counselor to talk to as I navigated the end of a relationship and moving into my own place.
And yet none of that work drilled down into the core. Understandable and forgiveable; pre-transition I needed my armor, my survival tools, just to make it through each day. The trauma was not just fresh, it was continuing. Now, late in life and with the end perhaps in sight, I finally am able to unpack it all.
And while the work continues, the list of stuff we've dug through in the past few months work has been impressive:
- First, a realization of how much I have lived my life in ways that are small, invisible, unobtrusive, inoffensive. I was intent on being "the good tranny", trying not to make waves, trying not to be visible, trying not to set off trip-wires with cisgender folks, with queer folk, with anyone. I've lived outside of gender for the better part of 15 years.
- Next, a realization of the trauma that comes with transition. I've pretty much lost every single person, community, memory, experience from the first 30 years of my life. Family, friends, education, employment - almost entirely gone. And angry and resentful at the bulk of humanity who still have that history.
- As a child, I was subjected to painful and traumatic medical procedures. Not repressed memories, I've noted and recalled this throughout my life. But I wrapped it in rationalization and minimized its impact. That little 5-6 year old kid tearfully walking into the doctors office alone to be painfully catheterized, over repeated visits. Yeah, that kid was traumatized, and carried that burden alone.
- That same kid, when gender started bubbling up as an issue, learned soon enough that there was no help coming from mom or dad - they had neither the information or the capacity to deal. So that became another burden that I was way too young to shoulder. But I did, equating these gender struggles with original sin.
- Finally, as a marriage came to an end, I shouldered the responsibility entirely, and only now, 30 years down the road, am I letting go of the guilt (and the various souvenirs and memories) from that unfortunate attempt to live a "normal" life
