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My daily driver and my gay me

Discussion in 'LGBT Later in Life' started by brainwashed, Aug 17, 2020.

  1. brainwashed

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    I have an older Toyota car that's my daily driver. Its agile, peppy and fun to drive. About a month ago the power windows stopped working. Not altogether at once, but intermittently. It's summer, I like to have the windows down, the damn windows would not go down.

    I grew increasingly angry at the car. The intermittent nature of the windows working one day and not the next day drove me insane. I'd thought on the days the windows worked the problem was just a "thing" and went away. Two days the windows stopped working.

    Listen car if you don't stop fucking with me, I'm going to take you to the junk yard. Hear me? My anger turned to rage.

    Yesterday after a good nights sleep, multiple meditation sessions and a great bike ride, I calmed down. OK car, what is wrong? The problem turned out to be the wire harness in the drivers door. Constant opening and closing of the door, constantly bending the wire harness over and over, finally broke the wires that control the power windows. It's like bending a paper clip over and over until fatigue claims the clip, it breaks.

    I was ferrous at my mom. How could you take an innate part of me, my gay me, away from me? I grew ever increasingly mad at her. My anger towards her turned to rage.

    I joined a meditation group and learned how to meditate. I exercised and got lots of sleep. I calmed down. I learned how to forgive her, enough so I could function and turned to fixing me.

    I was talking with my mentor, another gay man, this morning about dating. He gave me tips & tricks on how to date. For the fist time in my life, I'm looking forward to learning how to be with someone I'm innately attracted to.

    Definitions:
    Daily driver = the car I drive around town on a daily basis.
     
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  2. OnTheHighway

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    I am curious, is your mom the only one you are mad at for taking your gay you away? Do you give her all of the credit for that?
     
  3. brainwashed

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    Per family standards of the 40s, 50s & 60s, the mother raised the kids. Dad's were absent. My dad was emotionally absent. He got the absent behavior from his dad who was absent from his life - so says another family member.

    But then came the boarding school which my mom forced me to go to. The school did major damage. Major. All this occurred, that I know of at this time, between 14-16 years of age. The mid teen years are very formative with all kinds of neurological networks being formed. Mid teens is really a bad time to fuck someone up.
     
  4. OnTheHighway

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    You have expressed those years in many posts. And between your mom and the school, that is quite a lot to absorb. I am just wondering if you had any broader exposure to negative messaging that might also be playing into your anger?
     
  5. brainwashed

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    Anything is possible. @Chip has made the same suggestion in the past. To be honest I'm in total disbelief at the 14-16 age impact - kind of.
     
  6. Contented

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    I slowly learned that as much as you may want to you cannot change the past. All the anger and hostility in the world will not erase the past. It can however stall your future. For some time I was terribly bitter about coming to grips with my homosexuality so late in life. Having missed those heady days of young gay sexuality while playing pretend straight guy I was angry. My therapist helped put all those negatives into perspective, box them up and bury them. He told me it was better to bury those grievances rather than embalm them. It took some work on my part but I managed to get past the anger and bitterness and concentrate on enjoying my life now as a gay man.
     
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  7. PatrickUK

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    Sometimes as adults we can get trapped in a pattern of protecting the child we used to be. If the child was wronged in some way a parallel incident or event can trigger ingrained emotions and reactions. For the gay or lesbian adult there may be plenty of triggering incidents or events.
     
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  8. OGS

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    I think there comes a time where you have to put things in context and let them go. I tried to kill myself my senior year in high school. Clearly there was a lot that was very broken about my childhood. But my parents and the people around me loved me and tried in the ways they had available to them. Might it all have worked out differently if they would have been open to the possibility of me being gay? Sure. But in the time and place it would have been like them being open to the possibility I was a space alien. People love the way they are able. Sometimes it's enough, sometimes it isn't. I love the way I'm able. Sometimes it's enough, sometimes it isn't.

    In the end my parents accepted me for who I am. It was awful for them, but they made it through. In the end the thing that prevented them from doing that earlier was that I didn't tell them earlier. That's on me. And we all move on.
     
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  9. Tightrope

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    I thought this would be about cars and stereotypes. But it is and it isn't. There is something very debilitating about losing power windows. But it's probably better that they're stuck up (no pun) than stuck down.

    I would call all this displacement. When things go wrong one after the other, we then "magically" and immediately go over to looking at everything else that happened to us in the past and that's currently wrong with our lives. I don't know why that happens. But I hear you because it sometimes happens to me. So, when I have periods of peacefulness and no obtrusive thoughts, I relish them. Peace.
     
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  10. Chip

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    Two excellent books I'd recommend: The Half-Lived Life, and The Anger Solution, both by John Lee. Both would, I think, be super helpful in this situation.
     
  11. Nickw

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    @brainwashed

    I’ve read your posts over the years and DO empathize that your mother caused you a significant amount of harm by her failure to engage you and accept you. I’m not diminishing that experience when I suggest what others have here.

    You need to find a way to move on. Simply put. In my case, my parents were not as abusive as yours; but, I decided I can blame them or I can thank them.

    One of the aspects of who I am that makes me the most satisfied is that I decided I could set aside my childhood and young adult issues with my patents and treat them as a learning experience and be a better person because I learned to be who I am regardless of this past.

    I know in cases of real abuse this is not as easy to do. Not nearly.

    I find you very articulate and engaging and we share a love of biking. So, maybe it is with some prejudice that I say this...”You are better than what your mom would have you believe”. It pains me to see you get sucked back into not believing this.
     
  12. brainwashed

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    Generally my parents were loving caring individuals. I understand them probably better than they understood themselves - I read a lot of books. I do have relapse moments ~2% of the time. Cant help it, I'm human.

    My mom went through a troubled childhood and then had to endure the Great Depression which she talked about from time to time - mom to child me, eat all your food less there will be non tomorrow. And then WW2. In a nut shell she was insecure.

    The crux in her behavior towards others, which I am researching now is, was her very strict Christian upbringing which of course she utilized in raising me. Im trying to get my arms around the "cult thinking of her Christian background" - closed mindedness, being gay is a sin (indirect thinking), you'll burn in hell.

    It's this cocktail of numbness and tote the party line that made her upbringing so toxic.

    Lately I've been studying the cult leader Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple. I want to understand the mechanisms employed on people to basically give their kids cyanide, yup killing their own kids - powerful stuff. Another way to look at this "total control" is to learn about Jaycee Dugard abduction - see link below. What mechanism hold a person like Joycee to her abductor? What mechanisms hold people to a nut like Jim Jones. What mechanisms hold me to my mom and her thinking for pretty much my entire life? Lastly are there parallels?

    In closing I want others on ECs to read my experiences and maybe reflect on their life experiences.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones

    https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/jonestown-13-things-you-should-know-about-cult-massacre-121974/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Jaycee_Dugard
     
  13. brainwashed

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    The books are on my book list. Thanks for the recommendation.