I tend to think of myself as being pretty privileged.
I'm white, educated, and for someone in their thirties, my transition has gone remarkably well.
But..
I also grew up really poor.
My parents were hippies and had moved to southwest Wales to be artists and keep animals. Part of the whole back to the land movement and all that.
When I was born they were in the midst of remodeling an old welsh mill house which had no indoor plumbing and was heated by two coal fires.
There were Goats and chickens and a lot of mud.
They were doing ok at it though and between two active capable adults progress was slow but steady.
Then when I was five my mum got cancer.
The details of that aren't terribly important but the end result was that my dad became her full time care giver and the family income was reduced to the UK's disabled living allowance.
My mother never recovered enough for my father to work more than part time and that meant it was impossible for him to get work that paid well enough to improve our financial situation.
Earn more money?
They cut your benefits.
It's a catch 22.
So we were poor.
I remember being furious at a friend on time because he spread "too much"jam on his toast. His utterly bewildered look said it all, and hot embarrassment took over as I tried to explain my outburst.
Didn't he know you were supposed to ration Jam?
I've been thinking a lot about opportunities I've missed in my life and I'm pretty angry about it.
I grew up poor, I was depressed and withdrawn as a child.
As a teenager I developed substance abuse problems.
I was diagnosed bi-polar and have spent my entire adult life dealing with the effects of that.
I was lucky enough to have well educated parents and lots of books, but the strains that poverty and cancer placed on my family meant that my parents simply didn't have the resources to help me in the ways I needed.
Constant periods of mania and depression have meant that I lack the sort of self discipline and ability to organize my life that mentally healthy adults typically develop. I have 32 years of bad habits that I need to unlearn.
These are real problems which have had real consequences for me, but people don't want to see anger.
I didn't want to see anger in myself and I believe that was a major component of my repressing my being trans for so long, and my depressive episodes.
The thing is, anger needs to be witnessed.
Anger is a restorative act of the self, we need our anger to help us re-establish our boundaries after our selves have been hurt, but anger is not a weapon, and should never be used as one.
One of the biggest problems I'm struggling with is the amount of anger I feel.
When I've tried to express it to people, to state how furious I am about what I've missed though misfortune, people always want to silver line it.
"Be proud of what u have done, don't concern yourself with what might have been"
"Everyone plays the coulda-shoulda-woulda game. The truth is, you have no idea what that other path would have brought."
While these sort of statements may be true, they're also totally dismissive of my emotions.
I'm not asking to change the past, I just want to have it acknowledged that these things were not benefits.
Not having access to adequate mental health care is not a character building experience, it's a shitty thing that no one should have to deal with.
Self rationing your intake or preserves at age 11 is not a life lesson in making do, it's a poverty that severely limits your potential.
Living 32 years in the wrong body wasn't a convoluted set of preconditions perfectly timed to allow me to blossom in some optimal way, it was crappy twist of genetic fate that lead to over 20 years of severe depressive episodes.
We cling so strongly to our sense of self that we use our attachment to it to casually dismiss our own suffering and the suffering of others.
When I started transitioning I was still deeply attached to the sense of self that I had lived with to that point, but I have changed. I've changed so much in how I think, how I feel and how I relate to the world around me that I can't consider myself the same person anymore. That person is gone and they will never exist again and I'm GLAD!
The idea that I should be "happy" about the bad stuff because I'd be someone else without it is crap. I've already made that change once and let me state categorically, what was lost was not worth saving.
Better starts produce better outcomes.
I can't change the past, but I have every right to feel angry about it because if I don't, if I silver line it, I'm going to let it happen again.
We need to learn to witness and honor anger in ourselves and in others, recognizing it for what it is and not seeking to douse the flames too quickly simply because we fear getting burned.
Other peoples anger is about them, not about us. In making it about us we poison it's restorative properties, just as we do to ourselves when we allow our own anger to become fixated on things outside of ourselves and we lash out.
Emotions are powerful things and they can be extremely dangerous. It's easy to understand why all societies have sought to suppress them. They are not the part of us we think of as I, they precede I and cannot be brought to account through dominance of the mind, rather they are messengers which call us to action and we dismiss them at our own risk.
The message will only keep getting louder the longer we ignore it.
