Maybe trying to use myself as a case study is in itself a symptom of PTSD, but since I consider myself a bit whacked, why not?
The trouble I’m going to have is looking backwards, and trying to move forward at the same time. I have to make sure I don’t trip too many times anyway. It’s not quite like going blindly forward, which I have done more than once in my drunken days. Wonder I can still see at all.
Why even look back, let sleeping dogs lie and move on? That’s the issue, I can’t.
Not yet. But this case study is intended to do just that. Allow me to move on that is. Break free of the chain.
I’m tired of beating myself up and tired of mourning a life that never was. My biggest issue in life has been defining my own self and sexual identity.
The traumatic event occurred in 1964.
The first I ever told someone, in this case a psychotherapist named Anne, was in 1992.
It wasn’t until 1995, after a nervous breakdown at Christmas, that I told my parents of being raped as a child. We were sitting at a doctors office, a psychiatrist, in Kansas City. Funny but I was sitting on the examining table, they occupied the two guest chairs, and the doctor her desk chair. Thirty-one years had passed since the event. Thirty-one years of living with guilt and shame for something a 7 year old thought he caused.
I retold the story in more detail while sitting in my aunt’s kitchen that evening. My aunt was the most affected during the telling, I can picture her as if it was today. The small white kitchen, small breakfast nook with the window overlooking the garden.
“Well god dammit” she said directly to me, as she slapped her forehead. Never a woman to swear.. “We should have known, we should have seen it.”
Yeppers. All the signs were there, but no one connected the dots. Am I happy with this? Of course not. All the signs… nightmares and bedwetting…complete avoidance of the men’s restroom. Fear of conflict and loud voices…yelling.
So I am going to change the game. I am going to lay out all the symptoms, signs and end results in front of the people I know and love and keep crying for help.
I’ve tried to find the answers myself, made wrong decisions myself. I’ve been helped, and hurt by the medical community. Lack of understanding of human sexuality, especially transwomen. I’ve tried to find the answers. I have poured years into practical research and study both online and in discussion with doctors. I’ve made 101 wrong decisions along the way. I’ve been helped and then hurt time and time again by the medical community. But I struggle on.
I am finally content with my sexuality, unsure, but content.
I’m open to suggestions…ideas…cures..on escaping the pull. That unforeseen force that pulls you downward, and much stronger than gravity. Those suffering with mental illness know that pull and release from it like paradise.
Or tell me your own story, there are lessons to be learned within each other..
We all have one. Story that is.