In retirement your biorhythmic patterns change. After all, you have removed a large object in career which occupied much physical and mental space and now it needs replacing.
Once the novelty of vacation mode wears off, you need to get on with a new life.
Adapting will be even more challenging for older transgender people who may have put off authenticity due to life icebergs.
It takes time to let the dust settle and so patience is required. With all that free time to think we make small mental changes which bring us closer to comfort and balance.
It's like adapting to a new skin.
There are no shortcuts required here because we are in no rush to get to any place special.
Punching down is easy. We assess that someone is weaker than us and we degrade them to make ourselves feel better somehow; no matter how briefly.
Dave Chapelle has seen the writing on the wall and is trying to back away slowly from his right wing cheerleaders; the ones who rejoiced in the litany of transgender jokes he now says were meant differently. He sees MAGA disintegrating and the backlash coming and he wants off lest the stench remain attached to him.
We're supposed to be sympathetic.
His pronouncement that he is a proud member of team TERF wasn't intended how it sounded he tells us. It wasn't punching down as much as people thought. After all he had one transgender woman friend the way some whites say they have a black friend while letting their racism slip here and there.
Bringing renowned transphobe Elon Musk on stage wasn't helpful either.
It's too late for Dave and many others who made a decision while the going was good. A brain dead Lauren Boebert gleefully wanting his autograph in large part because of his barrage of anti-trans humor will remain on the public record.
A transition is never truly over. It is instead a constant process of becoming. We are moving fluidly through a series of mental changes which lead to a version of ourselves that radiates from the best of our lived experience.
It encompasses much more than just gender and is overwhelmingly guided and governed by our psychology.
Our original knowledge of self is based on our earliest neural pathways. In other words, what you were taught became reinforced through repetition until it became unquestioned orthodoxy.
Any divergences from that were outliers to be rejected.
Of course this is false but we don't know that in infancy and into adolescence and so we suppressed instincts which went elsewhere; all this reinforced through social pressure to conform.
The more restrictive your family upbringing and social norms were the less likely you were to escape their grip.
Look at film from the early 20th century for evidence of people being obedient sheep. From behaviour to manner of dress, everything was hermetically controlled.
Reprogramming the brain requires building new neural pathways which then allows individuality and instinct to flourish. We analyze our early instruction and build new brain coding which reinforces an authentic and emboldened sense of self.
The older we become the more imperative it becomes.
Our bullshit detector is working at peak efficiency.
Trumpism is fracturing at the seams but even after it's demise the repair will take decades. It's perhaps the dose of cod liver oil that was needed to make Americans realize that something is fundamentally wrong with their system.
77 million people thought that voting for a narcissist imbecile was a good idea and they are feeling the consequences daily. Farmers who are struggling to keep their farms are seen complaining on YouTube trying to make the mental connection and failing.
It turns out that losing your farm workers to ICE plus paying tariffs was too complicated a calculation so they went with simple hate and strawman arguments.
This level of stupidity isn't repairable in humans which is why it will keep happening again and again.
Just as my life as an out transgender person was increasingly falling into place, society was crumbling around me. More people in economic need and higher rates of anxiety and depression than I've ever seen in my lifetime.
This is when I need to turn outwards and be kind. I need to try and help in my own little ways.
Unresolved issues can create a lot of stress and turmoil for us. With me it got to a point that if you perturbed me I went straight for your jugular.
It harmed me more than it did anyone else.
When something remains unsettled it festers and colors us. We become ticking timebombs that we need to disarm.
This week I met some of the ladies from work for dinner and much of the discussion centered around career. One unsavory office character came up during our discussion and I recalled how many incidents I had with him over my 20 years there (my third and last firm).
I had concluded over time that he had unresolved issues and slowly but surely changed my approach towards him. If nothing else, it lowered the temperature between us in parallel with my increasing sense of self.
My getting a handle on my dysphoria over the years was helping to make me a less frustrated person. A dysphoria that my busy career was impeding me from adequately addressing.
This fellow's rap sheet with HR is very long and he continues to get away with his bad behavior. However, I know all too well that no amount of corporate stair climbing and fancy cars can substitute for internal peace.
One of the ladies unabashedly said she hates him and I can understand her sentiment as he remains the single most difficult character of my entire career.
However, by the end of time there, I no longer felt compelled to seek any discord with him.
What do we mean when we talk about identity and how do we know what aspects are intrinsically tied to it?
We can talk about physical traits, behavior, ideas, ethnicity, gender, experiences, career and social roles. Who a person is can encompass all of them and includes both a personal sense of self and how we are perceived by others.
How much we are attached to each can vary. For example someone may feel a strong affinity for their Italian ancestry and celebrate its cultural heritage while another person with the same ethnicity may feel completely detached from it.
We can think of a myriad of examples that measure what is ostensibly a sense of attachment or belonging along with their varying strengths.
In this era where identity is so often discussed (we speak often of identity politics for example), people want to plant their stake using traits which feel like home to them.
What people are drawn to is adopted as a key part of what defines them.
Interestingly, conservatives have used this found sense of self as fodder for criticism because finding uniqueness and especially diversity is antithetical to them. They want to boil things down to a simpler set of possibilities.
A black, feminist, lesbian professor who is a climate change advocate has too many unappetizing variables for them. It is too DEI and they want it whittled down to remove pride in identification with things they have distaste for.
Conservatives might prefer to simply call her a misguided soul and leave it at that.
The Carney liberals now have a majority government which will only hasten the policies being advanced to diversify the Canadian economy. The move away from the US will be permanent and make sure that we have more options going forward plus greater autonomy.
This is thanks to Trumpism which oddly did us a favor. The Maple MAGA movement of Pierre Poilievre was threatening the vision of unity by parroting, on a tamer scale, the toxic and divisive approach to the south of us.
We rejected it.
The vision for our country is about human rights; inclusiveness and uniting people rather than dividing the population to distract from bad governing.
We are making alliances with countries with similar values; a shared comprehension that differences aren't intrinsically evil but instead a strength. That science and education are things to be advanced and treasured.
Youth doesn't think in terms of a rigid binary so those stuck with the old mindset need to update their software. They see the divergence from old rigid norms as entirely expected.
In other words, youth isn't on the lookout for perfect archetypes of man and woman.
It tends to throw the concept of "passing" off kilter a bit since they are more aiming for originality and authenticity.
Your 60's can become a decade of reconciliation and clean up. We have lived for years with a well honed mask which is now fractured thanks to authenticity coming to the fore.
This process can sometimes feel unsettling.
We had spent much time and effort to meet expectation and after a while it became second nature. We operated on reflex and melded the real us with the fashioned persona on the assumption after a while that they were one and the same.
They aren't.
Separating the real you from the social persona then becomes challenging because what we had melded together now begs to be properly undone. It's never a clean process.
Good thing that age tends to bring both maturity and patience.
Transgender people have a series of calculations to make. They need to assess how every step they take forward will impact them adversely; how much of the life they lived before gets incorporated or left behind.
It's not for the faint of heart especially if you are older.
By far the most important aspect is their own psychology which must be able to withstand potential rejection from others. They must be able to sustain themselves outside the idea that everything will fall into place perfectly which never does in life.
One thing I realized very concretely is that the worse case scenario you imagine doesn't happen. At the same time, assuming the ideal will occur will be equally far fetched. The truth will be somewhere in between and lean towards more positive than you had assumed.
Also, some sort of compromise will be the order of the day if we don't entirely want to destroy everything we have built to this point.
If fear is our main road block we will remain stuck because moving forward into the unknown always involves some level of risk. Hence, we determine whether the regret of not acting becomes more powerful than the dread of moving forward.
We take baby steps and see how our psychology responds. It's an iterative process.
We then ask: "Is this what you imagined living authentically would be like and are things now better or worse?"
We humans love to categorize and label. We look for patterns and sources of commonality so we can apply a name and if we're lucky predictable behaviour.
It's a bit easier in the animal kingdom but with human beings the archetypes often defy being pegged down. Nevertheless we keep trying so we can feel comfortable in what we think we understand.
It makes us feel somehow safer.
The longer I live the more exceptions I find to everything. Yes, there are common threads to humanity but the anomalies abound. We are particular and peculiar which stems from the many variables contained within our brains.
Thankfully this messiness can be a source of comfort once we reach the Sophia stage of life (in the idiom of Carl Jung). We find solace in our originality and disregard opinion in a way we never have before. We don't seek approval, we don't respond to emotional blackmail and we stop people pleasing because our image of self is fed through internal means.
As the US economy continues its self-inflicted downward spiral, Canada has been trying to diversify by increasing its exports to other countries.
Prime Minister Carney has been quietly, calmly and maturely distancing himself from an incompetent and criminal regime south of the border because we Canadians have no choice.
The affordability crisis is hitting everyone and nowhere is it more evident than in the US where the combined effect of incomprehensible tariffs, cuts to health care, fuel, grocery and housing costs are crippling the average family. There is little to no safety net to count on.
Meanwhile Mexico is introducing nationalized medicine for its citizens which is only going to make their northern neighbors look bad by comparison.
The sins of free market capitalism plus the open corruption are accelerating the demise of an American empire which was already in trouble. The rest of us are getting hit with the shrapnel which is unavoidable.
Costs for basic goods are only going to increase as the domino effect hits the global supply chain. People already struggling will fall further into despair thanks to a war of choice which ultimately served no purpose other than to deflect from other scandals.
Electing imbeciles to run your country has consequences.
When the mind doesn't have enough outside distraction it looks for gaps. It looks for could've and should've instead of focusing on what we have.
This is very human.
We can get lost in lament sometimes especially as we age because not everything in life worked according to plan. Some hopes and dreams were dashed without knowing whether they would have worked out in the end.
Life is meant to challenge us and many things don't last. Friendships and marriages sometimes dissolve and we later realize that they brought us value in learning something about ourselves.
They forced us to face preconceived ideas about who we thought we were or were supposed to be.
Why people are gullible doesn’t just have one simple explanation but I believe the answer rests mostly on the idea that many of them want black and white solutions. They want to be led by someone else and told what to do.
Religious cults wouldn't exist otherwise.
In the US the Trump base would jump off the nearest cliff if told to by their leader which is frustrating for many of us. They will repeatedly vote against their own intetests because a simple message full of empty promises sounds better to them than reality.
Democracy is naturally messy as is life and not everyone gets what they want. However, when it works the most people possible gain benefits from its structure. In other words, there is some form of collective winning however imperfect. This means no one gets everything they want but at least most of the basics are covered through some shared discomfort.
Gullible people very much like simplicity which is why Trumpism was so appealing to them. They heard the grocery list of promises without reflecting on whether all of it was even possible.
These are grown adults we are talking about.
It is hard to feel sorry for MAGA voters once they wake from their stupor only after having been personally affected because you just know that they would do it all again in a heartbeat when the next used car salesman comes along.
Type "the case for transmedicalism" into ChatGPT and you will get a brief synopsis of the argument for gender dysphoria as innate birth condition.
The problem is that, even if technically true, it has sometimes been used as a bludgeon against others.
My view has always been that gender dysphoria is graded and as it ramps up, choice tends to be removed from a person if they want to lead a peaceful existence. They feel that something must be done to reduce or outright eliminate the dysphoria.
However, gender variance casts a wide net and our best strategy would be to let other people be. In other words, those who don't feel dysphoria but simply want to regale in the best aspects of euphoria should be allowed to without prejudice.
The problem of course is that gender contains a heavy dose of politics both within and outside the sphere of gender variance. Within the sphere, older people who have struggled and ultimately transitioned in the past haven't always been amused by being associated or compared to those content to adopt a more playful approach to gender expression.
Ultimately it isn't our business what someone else does provided our own house is in order and thankfully today's youth feel less compelled to carry the grudges of their elders. I believe this is in large part for having been spared the much heavier stigma of older people.
Neuroplasticity is the brain's capacity to rewire itself over time as response to lived experience, trauma or injury. It continues to function for as long as we're alive and permits us to restructure our thinking in ways that benefit us.
In other words, we aren't stuck if we don't want to be but repair can take a long time depending on our situation.
I remember someone who entered a religious sect at 17 only to finally leave it near age 60. He abandoned religion altogether after the long journey of realization and self discovery. His initial fervor had been whittled away to nothing.
All of us begin life with some level of indoctrination which must then be assessed and weighed. We must determine how much of it served us and how much turned out to be detrimental and antithetical to our essential natures.
I've written many times about motivation but perhaps wasn't very explicit. Motivation is important because without some understanding of what drives us we cannot decide on whether an outcome is beneficial.
A simple example would be that I have a pain in my foot which then motivates me to go to the doctor. My motivation is to eliminate the pain. Another one would be that I am motivated to exercise because it makes me feel good plus it keeps me healthy. I am depressed and I need to see a therapist is yet another example of motivation.
In all cases we are moving towards improving life quality.
Motivation involving more complex psychological drivers can be harder to understand. One can be motivated to gamble without intrinsically understanding what lies beneath the compulsion. Is it the thrill of risk, the potential promise of a payoff?
We humans behave in ways that aren't always steeped in self comprehension which is why sometimes our behaviour can be self destructive. The woman who is beaten by her husband and keeps going back may think she somehow deserves it because she is not worthy of love.
She has internalized low sense of self worth.
Motivation for any complex life decision or action requires analysis which considers risk and benefit. Otherwise we aren't taking into account potential negative outcomes we may not be willing to live with.
We ask ourselves "is my motivation to do something going to lead to a more positive and healthy version of me or am I helping someone else to improve their life?"
My son gets it. He is intelligent, inquisitive and thoughtful and things I have to explain to other people with more effort flows like water with him.
He just turned 26 and has that same uncertainty we all do at that age. This era only adding more angst than when I was the same age.
What I love about GenZ is that they don't care what you do or who you are. They want to know if you are reliable and a nice person. They have much less tendency to come pre-wired with the judgement criteria that we were filled with growing up.
They weren't subjected to the life is hard and mean warnings which our silent generation parents felt compelled to cram into our brains. They prepared us to deal with the cruel and stupid people which are always plentiful in the world.
But as society slowly immersed itself into more malleable terrain, the generation of my children saw that there was no danger in diversity of ideas or identities. They learned to fear less which is why less thoughtful boomers sometimes see them as lazy or disinterested.
They aren't.
Additionally they have a much harder economic ladder to climb with much less opportunity than we had.
People don't fundamentally change but circumstances do which is why the best toolkit we can possess is critical thinking bolstered by kindness, discipline and self-respect.
How others perceive us is of little importance compared to how we perceive ourselves. If self esteem and self respect depended on public opinion we would be in trouble.
Most of us wear some sort of mask to get by in the world except that with age it should become thinner as we are increasingly rooted in authenticity. We begin to care much more about respecting our autonomy and preserving our well being than following societal whims.
How others view this detachment is entirely their problem and not ours.
Finding this sense of liberation comes at the expense of opinions that are irrelevant; from people who don't know us very well and certainly don't live in our skin. We disregard them while remaining polite and cordial.
We simply have stopped dancing to the same music that they do.
He was looking for people to talk to on the metro platform and you knew he wasn't all connected. He stopped in front of me as I sat there and began spouting gibberish and some sexual innuendo.
I don't know if he knew I was transgender which isn't really relevant anyway. This could have happened to anyone.
I didn't pay him much mind and then the metro came. Suddenly the young black woman who had been sitting closeby ushered me into the car with her. She was beautiful and bold and lamented "no one says anything"
She told me she was 47 and worked in social work where she could help others. Meanwhile our friend sat at the far end of the car spouting drivel at both of us.
"Do you feel safe?" She asked and I said yes adding I have enough rage left over in me to do some damage if need be. I am still working on decanting it.
We both got off at the same stop and told her it was people like her who give me hope.
I have been riding the metro everyday for years without incident but acknowledge that there is an increasing number of people who are not mentally well and they are lost.
People like this young woman make me realize how much goodness is out there.
Anyone who tells you that life is easy hasn't been paying attention. Even when things are going relatively well, something will sprout up out of the blue which will test our ability to cope and adjust.
Most of the time we exist within a bandwidth of acceptable satisfaction while periodically peppered by anxiety, fear and even infectious joy.
We are enigmas who only appreciate how good we have it after we are tested by calamity and ultimately survive it.
When we no longer have mandatory tasks constantly filling our day we have more time for reflection. We can ponder how meandering, random and meaningless it all feels at times only to then change gears when a ray of insight pierces our negativity. We realize there is indeed a purpose and harmony to everything as the sun touches our face.
Many people live at a surface level where they don't question too deeply which perhaps spares them pain although I am not sure. After all, digging too much for answers might not yield fruitful results for them.
What I know is that we are at once simple and deeply complex creatures which was probably intended by design.
I left Facebook back in 2011 already realizing that things were going to get much worse.
There was something disquieting about the barrage of pablum and the obvious grandstanding by some people who wanted to advertise how well their lives were going.
The concept of keeping up with friends was slowly turning into over sharing and insipid content which wasn't in any way enlightening. Not long after were at the start of the conspiracy theories and toxic attacks which reversed what was supposed to originally have been fruitful and constructive dialogue.
Now even LinkedIn is a cesspool of self-aggrandizing and back slapping.
Social media has helped strengthen the divide between people and emboldened the anonymous to poison the well of discourse. We attack what we don't like without hesitation because there are few consequences. It's a cheap and temporary elevation of self esteem at the expense of someone we consider weaker.
I don't suspect that Mark Zuckerberg and company thought through the full spectrum of human behaviour when they unleashed this phenomenon on the world; one which is making all of us decidedly dumber.
MAGA is a zero sum cult. It's about needing to win at something when everything else isn't working anymore. It's about owning the libs, stopping "wokeism" or whatever else the right wing echo sphere tells them.
It's about grievance.
For just a few minutes these people need to feel superior to someone else because they have an axe to grind with how their life quality has declined over the years.
Trump gave them their walking papers and permission to be cruel and dismissive along with the promise they nothing bad would happen to them. They want to see others suffer for a change while they are spared.
It's easy to call these people stupid and some of them are. But mostly they are ignorant and incurious enough to fall for a snake oil salesman who tells them he will fix their misery.
They aren't policy wonks but instead just want to be able to pay their bills and stop feeling like they are always falling behind.
The American dream is gone for most of them and now the best hope is to hold down a steady income and staying healthy so they don't need to declare bankruptcy after being unable to pay their medical bills.
There's an old joke about the patient going to the doctor and lamenting "Doc it hurts when I do that" only to hear the doctor reply "then don't do that"
It reminds me of the simplistic messaging that some people are prone to give thinking it will help us. They don't understand someone else and use pop psychology to reduce the problem to "just get over it"
Most people don't comprehend what others go through and so they rely on a stiff upper lip suggestion that may have worked for them on some other issue. They don't intrinsically comprehend and so offer simplistic advice instead of a friendly ear and some empathy.
People mean well I suppose.
Perhaps because I am a very complicated person I don't appreciate reductive advice based on a presumption of understanding the problem. I prefer that if you can't relate, you just offer to earnestly listen.
The world doesn't operate on nuance but prefers to offer buzzwords and slogans so people can move on. You get an email from HR with suggestions on reducing stress while at the same time the company culture encourages it with its frantic chaos.
"There, there" they tell you "we understand. Just breathe deeply".
When I was in my twenties in the 1980's, life was on more of a preset pattern. The post war social order was very much in place and we didn't ask as many questions about what to do.
The presumption was that you would follow the tried and true model of your parents. You would finish school, get married and have kids. Society was set up to follow a template that most people could adopt even if the results ultimately varied.
These rules weren't just about what to do but also about who you could be.
Fast forward to today and my children at the same age I was then, have no such template. They ask themselves questions regarding their future and see no definitive path to follow because each option has so much more uncertainty.
There is both good and bad here because while not having a mold adds confusion, it also liberates you from the societal pressure to conform. People are less prone to ask you why you aren't following the rules.
Today, we are reimagining what the new social order will be and I think it will favor people with more tolerance for uncertainty and able to be more uniquely themselves. They are more apt to find their authenticity outside the sheep's pen.
How do we separate need from want? It may not be as obvious as we might think. We can also frame the question as choice versus no choice.
We need to sleep, eat and drink water to survive but after that it becomes a descending order of priority to figure out.
"I need to be rich" sounds more like a type of pathology than a need and we can imagine a whole host of other assertions that should make us reflect. The reason this is important is that need often gets us to a place of balance and harmony whereas want doesn't always improve our situation.
Need versus want blurs itself in our lives often impacted by what society considers imperatives. In the past we might fret about why we aren't yet married only to discover years later that we weren't suited for it.
A determined need became a want which ended up ultimately rejected.
It's important to make a distinction between the essential and the elective because life comes with inherent risks. Every decision we make has consequences which is why are better off judiciously considering what outcomes we truly cannot live without versus what we think we cannot live without.
Over time, life will teach us the distinction when we aren't sure and not always kindly.
There is only one universal truth and humans aren't privy to it.
Religions try to formulate ideas based on bits and pieces and sell comfort to quell what Soren Kierkegaard called existential angst. If they had found the truth there would only be one religion instead of hundreds.
People want certainty and faith provides a doorway that they can peek into. The more the greys perturb, the more orthodoxy they crave.
We don't know why we are here or what our exact purpose is but in the meantime we busy ourselves with temporary pursuits. Some of them lead nowhere whereas others might point us towards elevating our consciousness and attaining some form of higher meaning.
There is a common thread in all of us which is independent of race, creed, gender or orientation which becomes foundational in all religions that seek truth.
Even if we don't attain truth fully through any sect of faith, at least we congregate together for warmth and support while we wait for the answer.
Apparently, Kristi Noem's husband likes to wear huge fake breasts and pink hot pants while he chats online with fetish models. The hypocrisy of these people knows no bounds as they keep getting caught in scandals.
This kind of behaviour falls into the kink category and I saw someone earnestly ask on a YouTube channel if this person fits under the LGBTQ category.
Before I waded in, I saw two measured and intelligent responses. One from a gay man and another from someone who calls themselves gender fluid who both clarified things for the person asking.
Noem's husband is being termed a "crossdresser" in the media reports I have seen, but I know all too well most of them would disown him.
There is perhaps secretive authenticity happening here but certainly no identity issue to speak of and what makes this all so objectionable is that right wingers are so vocal about the types of things they do themselves in secret. In other words, they are massive hypocrites.
Who knew?
Whenever there is a large gathering of right wingers in one place such as a convention I have read that Grindr spikes as a consequence.
MAGA is fracturing at all levels; the entire American political right is, especially those who hitched their wagons to Trumpism with the most gusto.
The infighting among the pundits is almost delicious as the factions (pro and anti Israel, etc.) start complaining about what derailed their movement to bring America back to some mythical past where everything felt safer for them.
Even Ben Shapiro's right wing faux intelligentsia movement "The Daily Wire" is going bankrupt; one of its stalwart soldiers in Jordan Peterson also dealing with his numerous mental and physical health issues.
It turns out that hate and stupidity are expensive.
The unnecessary US excursion into Iran will prove extremely costly as even an immediate opening of the strait of Hormuz won't instantly bring the high prices hurtling back down. The urea needed for fertilizer production which was also blocked from passing will result in consequences for growers down the line. 50% of the world supply passes through there meaning everyone will feel some pain.
Trump, ever the reliable idiot, will back down but the damage won't be easily or quickly repaired. Those who could least afford price hikes and disruptions will as usual suffer the most harm.
Hate is indeed expensive.
Many are preparing their apology speeches now hoping they might work. But I wouldn't bet on it.
