Why Realizing You’re Trans Can Take So Long: Six Life Lessons

I won’t weep for lost time. I turned thirty eight when I came out as trans and there’s no use swimming in melancholy about the past but I would like to rake the soil of my subconscious for lessons from a late blooming and so I present six lessons a long time coming.

The Care Trap
Whether you’re a natural born pleaser or you’ve worked to focus on giving care and attentiveness, these beautiful characteristics can crowd out your ability to hear yourself. I got it from my mother — the desire to make sure that everyone else is happy. It sounds like a lovely thing but it’s really full of problems. Apart from the fact that the desire to please can turn into its own form of egoism or manipulation, pleasers are easy to take advantage of. The impossibility of the task we set ourselves can turn into neurotic coping mechanisms as social reality swamps our efforts to care. And, most relevant to this post, pleasing others can completely cloud self knowledge. Everyone we meet has expectations of who we should be. For caring personalities, these expectations and desires can be traps. We want to please, we want to fulfil their expectations and just like that our inner voices are silenced. I grew up in a household of muscularly enforced expectations. I received the classic shouting off when caught playing with barbies and my beloved My Little Pony backpack…