The older I get, the more I know when to get worried or not.

 

There is one big advantage to being young: The invincibility that one often feels propels us to take chances in life that older and wiser people might not take.  For example, when young, we often choose our mates on superficial characteristics.  For example: Is s/he good looking?  This question may have evolved as a way to determine the health characteristics of a person during the age that they are most fertile.  It also can reflect how high a status level a mate might have (especially in males), as both attractiveness and height can reflect both physical health and social position. 

But what questions should we ask as we get older?  What advantages do we have because we have successfully made it to old age?  This is where I feel that I have gotten better as I've gotten older.  Yes, my body is slowly breaking down as a normal part of aging.  But the memories and skills I've developed over those years have given me the insights to ask better questions when choosing a mate.

Lately, I've been thinking about how many big mistakes I've made in my life.  Some of these mistakes occurred because I didn't have enough knowledge to make wise decisions.  Others were made because I didn't have the skills to implement those wise decisions.  When I was young, I had low expectations - if the woman I dated accepted me and we didn't kill each other, then she was acceptable.  Can I say that I'd have married my late wife had I known what would happen in the future?  Maybe not.  But would she have chosen me had she known what would occur in our marriage?  Again, maybe not.  I could say similar things about other women I've dated.  But with RQS, both of us knew what we were getting early on in our relationship, and we have similar values with complimentary communication styles.  This makes having a healthy relationship possible, and we have yet to shout "Tastes Great!" or "Less Filling!" at each other..

Many men look for "a nurse and a purse" when they look for a woman in their senior years.  Women also look for the same, with emphasis on the purse due to inequality of wealth between the genders.  Neither of us wanted that.  We simply wanted companionship, with a little romance on the side.  RQS knew I was transgender from our second date, and I knew about her issues the day I met her.  We feel good when we're together, and I'm glad that she brings up issues for me to handle before they have the chance to fester and cause us problems.

I'm hoping that we'll be able to take advantage of the benefits of being old before the drawbacks cripple us and make it impossible for us to enjoy the rest of our lives.  After my mom died, my dad became less active over the years, and eventually not able to live on his own.  Neither RQS nor I want to have old age take away our abilities to live life without being in a care home.  The care home may be in our futures.  But until then, we will try to live as best we can.  (Albeit with me in dresses most of the time.)

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But what do I worry about?

Lately, I find myself worrying about the possibility that the United States will become a fundamentalist "Christian" autocracy led by a bombastic narcissistic grifter.  It's bad enough that this person is a cult leader.  Unfortunately, we have seen the mess he made of this country in his 4 years in power.  Now, he has had 4 years to learn how to cement his control over the country, I'm afraid of what he will do to anyone who is not a white, straight, christian, cisgender male.  As it stands GOP loyalists have turned the clock back to 1973.  I'm afraid that it will turn the clock back to 1925.  

If we examine the events that occurred to end the "Roaring Twenties", American society changed from being an optimistic, outward looking people to a pessimistic, inward looking people within a few years.  What will happen if the GOP gets full control of the country again?  Will they screw things up as they did in the 1920's?  Will America become more like Nazi Germany than the USA under the New Deal?  Who knows?  But this is what I worry about at night....

 

Anger

 

As my therapist taught me, anger is a secondary emotion.  It comes from the need to deal with another feeling which is often unidentified before anger erupts.  (I forgot exactly how he liked to describe it.)  Once a person gets angry, a lot of negative things can happen.

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Like many kids, I had an unhappy childhood.  My mother and grandmother were people who used fear to get their kids to comply with their directives. Both would get mad for reasons that normal children could not understand or deal with in a healthy manner. When my grandmother had a massive stroke, I was happy for a while - one source of terror was almost removed from my life.  The problem was that she became a shell of her former self, needing assistance for everything - including help to get up and being walked to the toilet.  At times, I had to babysit my grandmother when I should have been out playing.  One should not ask this, much demand this of a 7 year old child.  I guess this was one of the many causes of many feelings I had to repress.

At a certain time in my childhood, my parents realized something was wrong and took me to see several psychiatrists. Unfortunately, the DSM-4 (or whatever level it was then) didn't have entries for disorders caused by f**ked up family dynamics.  If they had, maybe I could have had a happier childhood, as I might have learned the skills to deal with many of the problems that come in life.

As I got older, the urge to get married and have children came along.  Knowing that my temper was a severe liability, I did not want to have children.  The risk of harming them as was done to me was too great.  But this also hurt my wife, as neither of us knew how to communicate our feelings to the other.  To this day, I'll never know if she would have wanted children, as we never had this discussion.  I feared letting myself get angry at her, as I felt that the only argument we'd have would destroy the relationship. So, when she became terminally ill, I can't be sure if either of us knew that we loved each other anymore because of our inability to communicate.

It took a while, but I eventually stumbled into an LCSW who taught me many of the skills needed to have a healthy relationship with someone else.  However, he couldn't help me deal with other issues that would cause me grief later on, such as settling for the first person who would put up with me after each loss.  

Just before the pandemic hit, I lost the two closest friends I had.  I need not rehash the reasons here.  But I ended up a better person because of it.  Now, I take a "Let it Slide" attitude to many things, as there are many more important things to be concerned about.  Letting go of anger, both repressed and non-repressed ended up being a good thing, as I can move forward to the future.  My current girlfriend can see when I get frustrated, and she knows that if she gives me a second to process what's going on, that I can stay rational and be the person she cares about.  Again, I am grateful to have her in my life at this time in my life.  But then, I've said this often in this blog....

Managing the contents of my closet

 

I'm one of those transgender women who love wearing dresses.  If I were born in a later generation, I'd likely want to wear different garments, as the cisgender women of my generation made their transition into preferring trouser-like garments years after I grew up.  In short, I modeled my clothing preferences on that of my mother, and I may always gravitate to those garments.

Unlike my mother, I enjoy wearing clothing with simple lines and strong colors.  Although I will wear patterns, I am more into solids - in either gender presentation. Although I have more patterned tops for when I present as male, it's only because these are the only tops available in my size. When presenting as a female, I prefer to let my costume jewelry do some of the talking. But I try never to over do it with  jewelry.

Over the years, I have bought way too many items of women's clothing, and I have had to purge some of these garments as they have gone out of style and no longer fit my needs.  Luckily, some charities have been beneficiaries of my purchases.  Today, I am gradually removing the cheaper garments from my closet, those garments which wore out quickly and were not meant to last.  In short, I'm trying to remove "fast fashion" from my wardrobe.

Shifting towards more sustainable fashion requires work.  Yes, I will continue to occasionally buy lower priced garments which I know will last a year or two. But I will not do this as often as I used to do it. (A gal's got to spruce up her wardrobe occasionally, doesn't she?)  The big question becomes: When I eventually get around to losing some weight, will my taste in women's clothing change and what will happen to my wardrobe when that happens?

Thoughts related to several conversations I've had over the past few days

I've documented issues related to the loss of a friendship, the breakup of another, and thought's I've had about things in general.  Yet, I've never tied everything together for general consumption.  This is my attempt to put things into perspective.

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I've been dating GFJ for a little over 5 years. And we have hit some problems in our relationship. Since I'm writing this entry before Thanksgiving, I am making the assumption that both of us will be with our own families during holiday season. (This is now true.)  I'd have been happy to have had the same kind of relationship that Vicki #1's dad had with his girlfriend - two people in love with each other, but not sharing a common living space.  Each of us would have had the freedom to live our lives as we see fit, but would have had the knowledge that each of us would be there for the other.  I do not know where this will end up, nor do I know if this situation is permanent.  But I do think that we were better off with each other being in our lives, and I think that separating on a good note leaves us many more options than I have with my former cruise partner.

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To check whether I was going nuts or not, I described the situation with my former cruise partner to several of my other friends.  Several of these friends would have liked to see me find a way to patch things up with her, as she was a close friend for several years. However, other friends noted that this woman's actions were abnormally controlling, even though they could be viewed as simple caring from another perspective.

I react very poorly to being controlled by others, and I would push anyone away who'd try to do this to me.  I guess this goes back to childhood, when my mother didn't respect that other people (especially her children) had opinions that differed significantly from hers.  I can still remember being on the phone with a friend, saying that the fancy service at one Chinese restaurant we went to was a little off putting to me.  My mom got very upset at this, as my opinion was very different from hers, and started an argument which resulted in my dad telling her off for one of the few times that I remember him doing so.  Incidents like this created a situation where neither my brother nor I have any pleasant memories of her.  Nor do either of us miss her, almost 20 years after her death.

My former cruise partner is a control freak, but this never got to me until a series of incidents on our last cruise together (documented in my previous blog).  Describing these incidents in detail to my friends, the one I consider my main reality check told me that she was now very glad that she never met my cruise partner.  The little incidents would have been driven her nuts!  Then, this friend said that she understood why I severed contact the way I did - the relationship could no longer nourish me the way it once did, and I didn't want to cause either of us any more pain.

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I also related these events to HWV (in passing) when we went out for dinner the other night. She and HWJ started asking me about romance and my transgender nature - intimate questions that I have no problems answering, when asked by people I've gotten to know a little.  It's amazing how little the average person knows about gender dysphoria, gender presentation, gender identification, and gender preference.  For most Cisgender people, it's way too easy to take many things for granted.

This was an educational conversation, as much for me as it was for them, as I was in the proper setting to talk about things.  Could I have talked this way with GFJ?  Probably not.  This is the kind of conversation which would have her walking away to give me more space to live as Marian - even when I gladly make the trade-off to share my life with someone I love.  (Thankfully, my dysphoria is very mild, as it allows me to live in both genders as needed.)  In a way, I am very envious of one of my Facebook friends I met at Fantasia Fair. She has a healthy relationship with her wife, a relationship which would only break up if she decides to transition completely, both socially and medically.

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Now we get to my recent conversation with Pat.  As I've mentioned, she's an idealist who thinks she is a realist.  She's a person who believes in leftist conspiracy theories, and will only accept the idea of impossibly large changes without plans, and not the incremental changes that realists like me promote.  There are serious problems with the world right now, climate change being one of them.  Although I believe in climate change/global warming, I still consider it an incompletely proven theory - the same way Einstein's theory became useful, even if not proven completely.  Pat is the type of person who will get involved in every Liberal cause, including Black Lives Matter, and then think she is "Woke".  Often, she doesn't have much of a clue about what is really going on, as she seems to always be looking for her Lefty Gold Medal to be pinned on her chest.  This will never happen, as she has no clue about how to affect any change, because she doesn't know how to convince people that change is needed.

Years ago, I learned that politics is a skill of making possible things happen, and knowing what things are possible and what things are not.  To break down the idea of "Separate but Equal" in the courts, many smaller cases had to be brought before the Supreme Court, building up a foundation to overturn prior court rulings.  Pat has no clue about this technique, and would have blown it by putting everything together in a single court case - and then losing it.  Society needs time to process major changes, it needs a plan to implement those changes, and it needs time to sell those changes to a large enough population who will support it.  Pat would destroy the world we live in with her ideals, as she would not pay enough attention to the details or planning needed to get any meaningful changes done.

With all of this, Pat understands why I severed contact with my former cruise partner.  I've grown enough to live without an important crutch in my life.  Yet, she doesn't understand that my growth also allows me to see her for what she is, and accept her as such.  At the age of 78, I doubt that she ever will grow any further - her mind is set in its ways, she distrusts everything the world has been built on, and she can provide no meaningful or effective steps that will make this world a better place.  All she can do is tilt at her windmills and bask in her "wokeness".

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As with everything I write about, it all comes back to me.  Years ago, I searched for any romantic interest that would have me for a partner.  I settled for my wife, a good woman, someone who deserved someone better than me.  It took me years after I lost her to cancer to then be able to appreciate a good woman when she came into my life.  And yet, I wasn't able to read GFJ's mind and give her the relationship security she needed. (No, there is no way I could have read her mind.  But this is a problem with many relationships - not enough quality communication.)  Whatever happens with GFJ and I, I feel I have learned something I might be able to bring into another relationship (if I ever decide to pursue one again.)