"No one is going to save you"

 

Doubt is normal

There will be plenty of times that you doubt your transition (no matter the type) but this is not because it was the wrong thing to do. It is because you are human which means it comes with the territory. 

You have largely removed yourself from the euphoria/ dysphoria roller coaster and everyday normal life gets to be routine. 

That doesn't mean your existential angst goes away.That's permanent. 

Little things will go wrong which will then get lumped in with your being transgender which is perfectly normal. 

What would be abnormal is if you never doubted at all.

Rapid fire

Both the internet and plenty of books are full of advice about how to control our thoughts and our minds except that they generally don't work. This doesn't prevent the authors from selling their formulas like a magic elixir. 

The problem is that they advertise something that the human mind cannot adequately achieve. 

Our mind fires off random thoughts at rapid pace and we cannot always process them fast enough. Many of them play on our deepest fears and insecurities. 

The best we can hope for is mitigation and placing them within buckets of seriousness and prioritize them. Even then, just when we think we have achieved a method that works, some new crisis will derail our organization once again. 

That is because the brain is a noise generation machine which means it's output cannot be controlled. We can work on cleaning up our personal issues but that does not mean the mind won't operate any less randomly. 

It's firing tennis balls at us like a catapult and what we need to do is become a better player.

Smell

Trumpism is falling like a house of cards. 

You let an incompetent crook take over the reins of your nation and he wrecks your economy with false hope of jobs coming back and promises of lowering the cost of living. 

The exact opposite happens. Labour is increasingly lost to AI and tariffs sap the funds from bank accounts already depleted from the rising cost brought by inflation. 

It's a cautionary tale to be sure. 

I've been watching this closeup for years now. How the combination of human ignorance, stupidity, gullibility, greed and corruption work in tandem until its too late to reverse the damage. 

Allies are moving on and making deals among themselves because they have little choice. The aggression from a malevolent regime needs to be mitigated and their populations protected from the insanity. 

The people who supported Trump can't wash the stink off and it will remain a permanent part of their legacy. History doesn't allow you to rewrite it; certainly not in an era where everything is recorded in minute detail for digital posterity. 

The whole fiasco will form part of another lesson of what not to do if you want to retain your nation's reputation and political alliances. 

At Lindsey Graham's funeral an attendee sitting behind Trump was treated to one of his bowel movements and the expression of sheer disgust could not be hidden from the cameras. 

It was a moment which will live on to symbolize the entire 10 years of Trump's insurgency into America's political machinery.

Pure stink.

Trust

Do I trust people? Regretably no. My life experience has taught me not to. 

It's a shame this happens to us but over our lifetime we are met with deception, malice and insecurity which burns off any remaining innocence we still retained. 

The more we are marked by life, the more we will be hard pressed to come back to a balance that removes the jaded fatigue we have for people in general. 

We want to get some of that wonder and openness back which requires we let our guard down more than we think is wise. 

Trust implies confidence that the other person has our best interest at heart and that no hidden agenda exists on their part. We also count on a lack of erratic behaviour which can keep us guessing as to when the next crisis point will arrive. 

Trust must be earned and not given away so readily because I have seen too many incidents of both inadvertent and deliberate nature. 

Some people come with so much drama attached to them that they become a magnet for do-gooders ready to help repair them. They move from one unwitting victim to another until they are finally discovered.

We all crave someone who gets us which comes with effort from both parties plus the willingness to drop our deadliest weapons on the floor.

I second that

We may have our share of problems as a society but at least there's never been a better time to be a unique individual. 

I run around Montréal everyday and see every type of person with their own style of dressing and behaviour. No one takes particular notice of anyone else simply because there is too much variety to choose from. 

People have removed the obligation that previous generations adopted and "what will the neighbours think" has been replaced by "It's none of your business". 

I was walking with a neighbor recently who fretted about what to wear to a wedding. Her GenZ granddaughter told her to dress a little nicer than normal but but at the same time opt for what makes you speaks to you and says "this is me".

I second that.

It never changes

The global death toll due to COVID was at minimum 7 million but likely much more since many countries stopped counting after a while. 

Here we had a global pandemic not seen since the early 20th century and measures were undertaken to protect the public while experts determined how to tackle what they were facing. 

The logic was to make sure we protect the most vulnerable by exercising caution through the use of measures that some now say were excessive. Had we done nothing, who knows what the death toll would have been. 

In the US where 1.25 million people died (the highest of any country)  Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky had the highest death rates per capita correlating well with low rates of vaccination there. 

Of course now US conservatives 6 years later want to play Monday morning quarterback and say that the guidelines followed at the time were excessive and that the leading immunology expert in the country (who served under multiple presidents) was lying to them all along. 

Republicans are desperate and need something to hold on to before they get clobbered in the midterms. Dr Fauci will need to be that sacrificial lamb to feed to their dumbfounded base. 

It's a hail Mary pass but you have to try something to distract people from the price of groceries and gas brought to them by the current idiot running the place.

But fear not, it is 2026 and it might as well be the Salem witch trials. Different era, same level of ignorance.

Tough times

I have never in my life seen so many mentally disconnected people running around in public. They are often the ones talking loudly to themselves spouting gibberish. 

We can sometimes become their targets because much of their inhibitions have been greatly diminished. 

Anyone can be a potential target and I have seen people storm off metro cars after having suddenly kicked a seat out of the blue in sheer frustration. 

We are all fair game and I am always extremely cautious and mind my surroundings while keeping my emotions in check. 

I hold my temper and don't react because it would serve no purpose to put someone in their place who isn't balanced. My built up frustration with the negative aspects of this world is best saved for better occasions. 

Many people have lives that don't work at all for them and so they find ways to show their displeasure openly. Sometimes its an open diatribe in the middle of the street where people contour around them at a safe distance immersing faces into phones. 

Einstein was correct when he said that society operates on a great deal of fear, greed and stupidity except that we can try hard to break that cycle and make our presence known to say that we won't stand for it.

We want to make things better.

Inevitable?

Being transsexual didn't always come with perfect predictability as to what people would do about it. For one thing, before the 1950's there was but a tiny handful of transitions. For another, people had been living for millennia without such a possibility even existing. 

Therefore the approach that each person took had a lot to do with personal and family history, personality type, religious beliefs, strength of dysphoria, etc. 

In other words, there was a myriad of factors which didn't necessarily always lead to an inevitable conclusion. 

Today we have turned this on its head because the climate has seen transitions contain more elective elements. There are more variations possible (including social transition) where it becomes personalized. 

The medical transitions of the past tended to be those with the highest degree of inevitability; the ones that Harry Benjamin referred to as his type VI. They tended to be androphilic and very feminine in childhood which meant that things were generally more aligned in their favour to begin with. 

Once society began to change we saw a wider slice of transgender people find unique paths that better fit their particular situations. 

Unfortunately that has also meant increasing the number of regret cases (which gender criticals use as ammunition) despite their percentage remaining relatively small.

How we got here

How we got to this point in our history is fascinating because without a breakdown of trust in governments and public institutions in general we wouldn't be here. 

When we introduced the internet we democratized information. Suddenly we had the world at our fingertips but we didn't necessarily possess the skills to analyze it. 

Sure, we could access all sorts of research papers, reports, studies, etc but they were also becoming fodder for conspiracy theorists who could get captive audiences and show them how the work and conclusions were flawed. 

As our economies got worse for the average person that dissatisfaction was helping to build echo chambers where people could vent and blame those responsible. 

I've lived long enough to know that most people are not particularly well-informed yet their opinions are quite rigid. This signals a contradiction since one's viewpoint should ideally be anchored in some knowledge. 

However humans are emotional before they are rational and when you introduce uncertainty into their lives, that emotional response is magnified. 

Watch any reporter stick a microphone into the face of a random passerby and we are often treated to complete nonsense.

Once we gave people the impression that they had all the keys to the knowledge center we seemed to give them false confidence along with it. Suddenly the Dunning-Kruger effect was being illustrated on a 24/7 basis. 

The tribalism of this era comes from people being readily able find others who share their ideas. There is no one to tell them otherwise within their echo chambers where they find reinforcement instead of pushback. 

Most people mean well but they don't understand the forces at play at a geopolitical level. They can't connect the dots and fall for strawmanning tactics of political systems that aren't necessarily functioning towards a common overall good for the largest number of people.

Historically, the masses worked under the combination of monarch and clergy to tell them what to do but with a loss of confidence in both, people have less trust that there is an ordered system looking after them.

Trumpism was a misguided cry for help particularly among the most disenfranchised of low information voters.  They have now been finding out that no populist saviour will magically deliver them from all their problems.

Agency

The nature versus nurture debate has been going on forever. The inputs that go into creating a human being are understood to be sourced in both genetic predisposition as well as in social influences. 

We just don't know the exact proportions of each. 

However, being the product of both doesn't mean we don't have some agency over the process because we do. We can work on ourselves and allow the brain's neuroplasticity to create a modified version of the self. 

New neural pathways are created which negate the idea that we can't change when we indeed can. 

At the same time we should acknowledge that no one is going to come to our rescue. No specialist is going to rid us completely of childhood trauma or some other issue we need to repair. Here we are going to have to be our own best resource which we always are. 

Therefore the inputs go in (including all the messy little errors of our parents) and we then take the reins for the rest of the way.

Plenty of people use distractions such as over consumption to skip this part which is a shame because a lived life is one worthy of examination.