I'm really struggling with this. The future is bright and I have a lot of confidence in myself as the person I am now - except when I remember who I used to be. I don't like who I was before transition. I didn't do my best, I had no will. I didn't even show up. I suppose you could say that I let dysphoria get the best of me. This lazy drug addict and drunk just counting time, using and mooching off people until he dies... It's really hard to reconcile that with the new person I've become. Suddenly I'm expanding, prospering through a will and a drive I never had. But then I remember that loser who wouldn't leave the house because he was a woman. It seems like he will always be there as testament to my failure as a person. How do I move on with him (her?) always whispering in my ear that I'm a loser?

I wish I wouldn't have been him; it's inconceivable to me now that I ever would've have been him - but I was and there's people who can testify as to his existence.

It's hard to stay confident with him around. Nothing has changed except my body and yet everything has changed.

Well, for me, moving on was easy, as there was nothing to move from. I don't remember being 14-15, and 16 is just a handful of good memories with my girlfriend Elaine. Before 14, I have some random memories from school, some haunts from my parents forcing me to leave the house, and some pleasant childhood memories. So, in my mind, I didn't exist before I transitioned. Seeing pictures of myself before 17 is like seeing a different person, and I mean that very literally.

So... Maybe you could think about it this way, you, the Nero we all know and love as our awesome Admin here on Susan's, is the only Nero. Who you were before, as a woman, that wasn't you, or at least isn't you anymore. Like you said, you're now prosperous. Moving ahead in life and living better. Thinking back to 'who you used to be' is just that, it's who you USED to be. This is who you are now, relish in that

That person was just a shell that hid the man inside.  Yes it was a part of your past, but it is just that "Past".  The only reason to remember how we were is to see how far we have come.  "she"  may have been a loser, but you are not.

How do we get past those days.  Forgive and Forget.  Forgive yourself for being that person and never forget who you are now.

Just remember that some one said  ...

QuoteThe future is bright and I have a lot of confidence in myself as the person I am now

you are no longer than person, but the one above.

Oh, god, you really touched a nerve. I'm struggling with my past, too, the person I became while I was busy trying to cope and stay alive. In a lot of ways, I still am that person. In some ways, not.

And I don't have time to write about this now, grr.

Quote from: Nero on November 21, 2010, 04:04:40 PM
I'm really struggling with this. The future is bright and I have a lot of confidence in myself as the person I am now - except when I remember who I used to be. I don't like who I was before transition. I didn't do my best, I had no will. I didn't even show up. I suppose you could say that I let dysphoria get the best of me. This lazy drug addict and drunk just counting time, using and mooching off people until he dies... It's really hard to reconcile that with the new person I've become. Suddenly I'm expanding, prospering through a will and a drive I never had. But then I remember that loser who wouldn't leave the house because he was a woman. It seems like he will always be there as testament to my failure as a person. How do I move on with him (her?) always whispering in my ear that I'm a loser?

I wish I wouldn't have been him; it's inconceivable to me now that I ever would've have been him - but I was and there's people who can testify as to his existence.

It's hard to stay confident with him around. Nothing has changed except my body and yet everything has changed.

I can really relate to that. When you find out how you get over it let me know, because I know I haven't.

How DO you move on when you can almost hear the worst aspects of yourself and your greatest failings as a person telling you constantly in your mind how worthless you are?

Up on the white veranda
She wears a necktie and a Panama hat
Her passport shows a face
From another time and place
She looks nothing like that
And all the remnants of her recent past
Are scattered in the wild wind
   - bob dylan

As bob himself would say (and did) Don't Look Back.  Or as Jer used to sing:

Our bible reads
Thou shalt not be afraid
Of the terror by night
Or the arrow that flies by day
Nor for the pestilence
That walketh in the darkness
Nor for the destruction
That waiteth in the noon-day hour

                         We will walk together little children
                         We don't ever have to worry
                         Through this world of trouble
                         We got to love one another
                         Let us take our fellow man by the hand
                         Try and help him to understand
                         We can all be together forever and forever
                         When we make it to the promised land

And bob wasn't alone in that not looking back stuff.  Ask Lot's wife.

It was a hostage situation and you, the real you, were being held against your will.

You can't airbrush that previous existence out of your life but you can put it in the right context in order to be able to move on.

That person mugged your soul and held it hostage until the day you began your transition, if you can't let the kidnapper go from your life now then you are still being held hostage, your life isn't your own, it's theirs.

I admit I do struggle... I can see that the before me wasn't a horrible person they were doing the best they could in the hopeless situation but I still feel deep guilt and regret in myself for not having done something sooner.

I look at my body when I'm having a shower and I understand the necessity of why the extreme damage had to happen. But I feel stupid cowardly and depreciated for not having found a way out of that nightmare sooner. Like I deserved all that pain there's simply nobody else to blame for it no assailant. All I've got is "I could have done this then, Could have pushed harder there."
ultimately I do feel like I've been greatly depreciated as a person in comparison to others by my experience. Trying to explain what happened even to myself to me makes me feel dirty useless and melodramatic idiot and almost no better than garbage

Ultimately tho Nero you need to know that you were ill and acting out of pain the pain is now gone or siginificantly reduced and that your a better person now.

I struggled with this too. But Nero, you are an amazing man. Like the others said, that wasn't you. Just remember, if you hold onto that past and let that past control who you are now it will never change. In life, things happen and sometimes they can't be changed but in this case it can.

In my case I used to be a scared and angry boy. My ex was abusive. I was a coward who let her do that. Now, I wish that I could change that but instead I let myself remember the mistake of not making her leave and vow to never let that happen again. I'm a firm believer in "everything happens for a reason". I just try to find the reason and change things where I can. I recovered because I realized that if I didn't recover I would never be able to move on.

I had a total mental collapse ( a collapse into reality my therapist called it), and anything that happened before I realised who I really am is a bit blurry most of the time.  I just try and remember the good bits.

Ah, we should not hate the past, for the past is what has made us who we are today. In some way, I'm sure, the past has helped you become stronger. Even if it's just knowing what you shouldn't be or do, the past has helped everyone.

Now we shouldn't love the past either! What we should love is the moment we're breathing in right now, the second we're alive and the day our world is still turning ever so slowly.

There's that old and extremely cheesy saying, "Yesterday is history, Tomorrow's a mystery, but Today is a gift. That's why they call it the present." (I know, it's really cheesy but hey...it kinda works!)

I've had the same problem and I've not even transitioned yet, I still look like a lady. See, I was a total (expletives) in high-school and when I got out of the house and didn't have to deal with a constantly stressful abuse situation anymore, I got lucid enough to behave like a human being and suddenly got really embarrassed of the person I'd been while I was taking out all my stress and anger on people who didn't deserve it.

You just have to remember that a man can't step into a river twice because it isn't the same river and it isn't the same man. We change, it's the course of things. Changing means that other person, though people remember him, is gone forever now. The past is gone; look to the future so you can greet it when it arrives.

what I say is 'I did my best'. 
How was I supposed to behave like my older brothers and the boys I grew up with when I didn't think like them or want to do the things they did or go the places they did or have different targets for my spending money?
So I muddled along making a mess of my life until eventually buying a computer and getting on the internent and finding the magic word transsexual.
Just yesterday I was trying to remember all the places I've lived and worked in but it's like a curtain has been pulled across all the adult years.

Can't really help, Nero, but this thread touched a nerve. Except, you describe my situation right now - pathetic loser who's afraid to leave the apartment because out there, I'm a "man". How do you move on when you're still in the middle of it ?

So, all I can do is give you my sympathies. I hope you recover. I really do hope you recover.

This resonates with what I wrote in my blog, about similarities between recovery from alcohol/drugs and recovering from being the person who you weren't, as part of transition.

I really don't want this to sound smug but I really didn't need to "recover" I really have not changed in the slightest other than physically.

In fact I had to fight the first idiot shrink I saw at age 16 precisely because he wanted me to need to "change" my persona and could not handle the fact that I didn't feel that need. Happily on the second go I saw someone more perceptive and hence became postop whilst still relatively young.

Yes I know that being intersex may alter my perceptions. I know I haven't battled addictions either. I also know that I had a very lucky privileged childhood and exceptionally understanding parents and of course that makes a difference too, but still I want to say that our past should never be seen as something to be overcome, but rather something to be built upon.

Even a life of addiction and idleness, if it really was that, can teach you something of value, and if you have the inclination that knowledge can become the inspiration for art, literature or helping others.

In short don't try to recover from what you were/are instead try to embrace it, learn from it, and build upon it.

Nero, you have been an inspiration to what is possible in overcoming an unpleasant past.

Were it not for an even deeper fear of being out of control (intense fear of men taking advantage of me in that state) I can easily see myself on  that same path.  The pain of being the wrong gender was extremely difficult!  We do the best we can with what we have.

And look where you are now!

Proud of you, my man.  Proud to know you.


Jay

I don't know if this will help, but it might .....

I grew up in the 50's when there wasn't anything that could be done (or at least very little) and in an abusive home. I was "odd" in that I didn't fit anywhere, being not quite a girl and definitely not a boy and not Gay either. I couldn't do the boy act - was about as effective as a dog pretending to be a cat LOL! - and I took a lot of abuse over it, particularly from my adopted mum who kept saying I was "defective" and kept trying to fix me. I was one messed up kid! But in the times when I could get away from home and BE myself I started to see a very different person, someone who was totally opposite to the creature in boy mode .... and I mean TOTALLY opposite!

I transitioned and had surgery at 24 and I dropped the old pretence completely and it was like dropping a heavy load! I started again with a blank slate. I didn't know who I was or what I would become but I was willing to find out and I really liked the person I was becoming.

Within a few years I looked back and I saw something remarkable! I saw how my early life all made perfect sense in that I had just been a young girl trying to deal with a terrible situation (and not dealing very well!). The dark moody times, the angry lashing-out, the pleas for help, the self-imposed isolation, the depression and suicide were all the result of the child not being able to escape the prison walls that cut her off from life and from growing up 'normal'.

In short, what I saw was that there never had been "someone else", just ME. Sure, I didn't deal with it very well but I was just a child and dealt with it the best I could. All in all I am pretty proud of that young girl for her strength, her stubbornness, and her resourcefulness in dealing as well as she did and for surviving. Those who have never faced extreme adversity don't understand that you do what you have to do to stay alive and sometimes the person you become to survive isn't a very nice person.

But that's over, it is in the past, so don't beat yourself up over it. You are out of prison now and have the chance to build your new life so let the past go.

@ Nero:

Man, you're awesome.  You really are.  You're a major inspiration to many of us here on Susan's Place.  Dude, you are NOT a loser ... no, nor ever really WERE a loser.  THE WORLD SYSTEM that brainwashes us as to what success is and how to measure ourselves against that standard is what is REALLY the loser. 

That sounds like utter nonsense, doesn't it?  Yeah, we understand that you're actually talking about you in girl mode back when ...   .  Yeah, we know that you're talking about how bad you felt then.  Man, most of us here can appreciate that to some extent, although we did not know or live about and through your own personal situation. 

Gender dysphoria can emotionally paralyze some of us.  It certainly did me.  Man, how do you feel about yourself now ... transitioning to the real you ... a guy?  Pretty darned good, I'd imagine, right?  Excellent.  The other people here have given you GREAT advice and comments.  Really, I cannot say anything they have not already said ... better than I could. 

My point is:  Look at the society we live in.  Society teaches us what constitutes "a winner" and what makes "a loser."  Society brainwashes us with these ideas, and many people just accept them.  Well, the financial-industrial-military-complex society that more and more is dominating the entire world that makes us think of ourselves as "losers" is itself the REAL loser.  Why?  Because, it's insane ... utterly insane.  It's becoming the same everywhere the world over, and it's just unreal.  Kindly watch these 2 videos, please, and then think about this society that teaches us that we're "losers."  These are way worth watching, really.  Check 'em out:

Low sound level, so you may need to turn it up:


This is seriously worth watching ... High sound level, so you may need to turn it down:

David Icke-The Greatest Speech for Humanity-V for Vendetta(Editors cut)

Nero, you're AWESOME, man.  It's not you.  It's this crazy society of ours.  Also, hopefully, transitioning has REALLY helped you find relief and happiness.  Maybe the only thing I can say to you is to concentrate you what's GOOD about you.  We become what we think about, so dwell on your good attributes.  Hope you can work it out, dude.  Hey, I'm struggling with this issue too ... you're NOT alone with this.

Peace       Lacey

Thanks Dee,
Always wanted the words to that song but never knew what it was called

Nero, One of the defining things about human beings is that we make mistakes. These may be major or minor or a combination. But the strong learn and can change. You have overcome a background that most people could not. You are a very brave and strong willed man to overcome those challenges.
I recall one Court case in Adelaide, a man was arrested with a history of petty violence, drunkenness, drug abuse etc.  'He' turned up to court as a well dressed, clean and confident woman. She explained that she was TG and was now living FT as the woman she knew she was. She was on the local therapy program, had got a job and had not had alcohol or taken drugs since she transitioned. She also had the medical and personal references that this was indeed the case. She explained that her past life of self destruction was based on her inability to accept she was female in a male body and the pain was overwhelming. The magistrate dismissed all charges against her former self. The Magistrate explained,  your past crimes are irrelevant, your future happiness and contribution to society is all that is important. 

I work with people with cancer. To a person they come to a point that they accept that the past is irrelevant. The present and the future are all that matters.

You are a good man Nero. No; you are more than that; you are an inspiring human being. I am proud to know you. I take great comfort from your strength. You help me every day by being the person you are.

Love my Brother

Never Self Pity.
You have nothing to be ashamed off, you have everything to be proud off.

Cindy