Hi
I hope this post ends up making a little bit of sense. I don't know if it will or not, trying to figure out why I am even writing this, but I just feel compelled to.
A little over a year ago I posted here when I had a little crises in my life that was caused by sending out an email with some personal information in it. This freaked me out; it really hurt and embarrassed me and it messed me up inside. But I did not suffer any
real consequences for it such as loosing my job or having my wife leave me. In fact nothing at all happened, no one has ever said a word about it to me since it happened. It could still turn around and bite me in the rear someday but it hasn't yet.
So everything should have snapped back to normal and everything should have been just fine. But instead it's been an insane and totally confusing messed up year. Just nuts and here I am still driving myself nuts over it.
By snapping back to normal I mean repressing my feelings about myself and trying to fit everyone else's expectations of me. I did this through some serious negative self talk - "you can't be this way, stop being this way, get it together, be a man..." only with the spicy addition of a lot of four letter words that I would call myself in the process. It was really an act of beating the emotional / mental crap out of myself on a daily basis with the goal seemingly to keep what I felt inside and what I wanted contained and controlled because it just would not be acceptable for me to be different.
But the email just made it not work anymore - except in truth it was not even the email that set the train wreck in motion but rather something that happened a couple weeks before the email. That was a pre Halloween party with a prom theme and my wife had the brilliant idea that we should switch roles and hey that sounded like a lot of fun to me and off to the thrift store we went It should have been heaven for me. Yet I ended up being completely miserable, simply because it was not real and I found myself wanting it to badly to be real. That messed with my head seriously and for the first time I tried to take a look at myself and tried to write about it and that is what got attached to the email that went to people it should not have. sigh. It was not much writing, maybe 2 or 3 paragraphs. I was having a hard time actually writing about it hence it was a pretty short piece of writing.
Which brings me to the present. I went back and read the original thread that I wrote last year and there were a few things that bothered me about it - one was I stated that the writing said to the effect "hey I like wearing womens clothing!" which is not really true as the writing was more about my childhood and said something more along the lines that I was a boy that wanted to be a girl when I was young...
(And unrelated to the transgender topic - in the old thread I repeatedly referred to my daughter as "kid" in my posts which ticks me off because she is not just a "kid" - she is my daughter and the most important thing in the world to me deserving a great deal more then to be referred to as kid)
But getting to the point (if there really is one!), the time between last year and this year has been one fraked up emotional roller coaster ride and I have not figured out what I am all about – even though there has been improvement at least in my mental well being. I am not feeling like it is completely unacceptable for me to be different, I don't feel like I just want to die as much (still days when it all just seems to overwhelm me), most of that negative self talk telling myself I can't be this way has stopped and I am not as afraid as I used to be (though I still have a lot of fear) It's not great, but things are a little better.
But I still can't figure out what all is going on in regards to me, which considering all the time I have spent soul searching, reading the few books I could find on the subject and lurking here and on other sites I would think I would have a little bit of a better idea by now...but I still have knots of fear wrapped up around all of it, and not as much clarity as I wish I did - I find myself flip flopping between wanting to go back to trying to ignore and deny it all again or continue to try to understand and accept it, and getting honest with myself about all of it
Sorry to keep going on and I have probably put most of the people here asleep already with my psycho babble and used up to much space.... I love this forum, by the way. End post.
