Quote from: gracefulhat on November 13, 2018, 06:55:01 PM
@Lisa,
You're right, it can always be worse. I'm sorry that you've had such a difficult time, but it's great you were able to have an enjoyable time. Hopefully you will have another good Holiday Season like last year.
Oh jeez! I wasn't posting for sympathy because none is needed at all. I wasn't necessarily saying not having any family was worse than having to deal with parental and sibling drama either just that it's a different set of things to deal with. Some people might find my situation dreadful as much I find uncomfortable family situations, disagreement and attitudes to be because I've never had to face that.
All I can do is imagine a scenario like yours and try to put myself in your shoes when it comes to integrating acceptance of your transness into your family. Reading the narratives of others to fill in some of the blanks helps me to grasp what this must be like but all I really can do is try to visualize what these challenges are like because something like this is outside of my experience. It certainly must be hard and throw in all the normal stresses of the holiday season that can come with their own disappointments and depressive feelings because we've all been conditioned there are certain expectations of what the holidays are supposed to be like and reality often falls short so it easy to understand why you aren't in the happiest place right now.
I am not immune to the pressure of our expectations this time of year. Practically everything hints that this is the time for family, friends, connections and good times with those we are close to and love and this attitude is pervasive and inescapable in the traditional images and stories presented everywhere in our culture of what our holiday seasons are expected to be which tends to make those of us that don't have these connections or are struggling with our familial relationships somehow not the norm and outside or the traditional paradigm and it's easy to let ourselves be put down by this or get down about it. At times in my life, I have hated this time of year as it has exacerbated my feeling of being alone, if not lonely. One of the ways I coped in the past was by being the proverbial bah humbug grinch about the whole thing but over the years, I've mellowed to point to indifference about it all. Thanksgiving and Christmas are just another day and as long as I don't let the external expectations of all the things I'm supposedly missing get to me, everything is great and I relish not having obligations, places to be or not having to deal with family members and situations that I would rather not.
Sometimes though, in spite of the inherent struggles and clashes of personalities dealing with family situations, a part of me longs for it and it's kind of hard not to think of more abundant times when I did have parents, family and loved ones and I have spent more than a few holiday seasons really being depressed and sad and lonely and miserable but at some point, I just stopped doing this to myself and stopped missing things expectations made me think I should have in my life. All this was so much more difficult when I was young and in my 20's. I lost my parents when I was 25 and with no siblings or extended family, the holiday season was always really hard by myself but a lot of things in my life had been hard and somehow like I always have, I managed one way or another.
The man I married when I was 30 was much the same way. He was an only child too, had lost his mother and lived thousands of miles away from his father and the family he grew up with so he was kind of bah humbug about the whole holiday thing too as a way to not just get down about it all so for the 13 or so holiday seasons we were together we both learned to find these missing things within and just accept where we were in all of this, realize things weren't going to change and that it was up to nobody else but us to decide to be okay with things or be depressed about them.
So, the holidays themselves can involve a lot of uncomfortable feelings for many of us which is easy enough to understand and relate to but adding in the challenges of transition issues, rejection and lack of understanding and support must be extremely difficult and certainly, if you are bummed out or depressed and anxious about the whole thing, it is easy to understand why and not hard to sympathetic to how you must feel.
I've never had my transness be a factor in any of my familial relationships. As a young child, there was no hiding or pretending to be something I wasn't and my differences were just accepted and not seen as differences which was probably less idyllic than some of you might imagine because of the grave social issues it caused but the fact that I was a boy that grew up to be a girl wasn't really even a thing for my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. I never had to "come out" to anyone because I was never in, in the first place so I never had to face any negativity or stupid attitudes and crap and had always been thought of and treated like a girl so when I began living as one full time as a teenager, it just seemed like the normal thing for me to do and even though that's getting close to 50 years ago, my entire family saw this as the best thing for me and really the only thing that made any sense so I only had support and understanding. Like I said, the trans thing did not put a strain on my family relationships but that's not saying it didn't cause a lot of other problems.
I've been in romantic relationships half of my life and been single and alone the rest of the time for the holidays but this is not because of my past but because I simply don't have any family. Undoubtedly there are other factors involved in how I process this and I usually don't let the holidays bring me down as being alone is not unfamiliar to me. I was an only child severely socially ostracized and isolated and basically grounded for life during my high school years for safety because my parents were afraid someone was going to try to kill me again so you might say growing up prepared me for the times when I am alone and by myself. Either that or it broke something inside that makes me just be indifferent to all the hoopla and pressures of the holiday season and I usually make it through without getting bummed out or depressed. I usually save that for my birthday which is the first week of January! Then it's okay if I cry. (or drink a lot!)
I can't complain. My life has been pretty darned amazing and not saying I don't have my moody moments or that things aren't hard sometimes because who's life is always roses and sunshine but I am a happy, fulfilled person and life is good.
