Something that puzzles everyone, including me, how could I possibly go through 40 years of adult life not being aware I had something as cataclysmic as Gender Dysphoria ticking away inside my brain.
The first time I was diagnosed, and refused to accept the diagnosis, this was the one question I thought that would refute the specialists conclusion of Gender Dysphoria. However I was to find I was not alone, there are many like me who reach middle and late middle age before events happen that allow it to resurface. We also share similar chracteristics: A ferocious driving energy, aggressive competitiveness, a need to constantly achieve and over achieve to prove virile masculinity... why such a high proportion of people like myself end up in the military or police often going into special units such as the SAS or firearms units.
I repressed GD by living all my adult life at a frantic pace. Leaving school my early jobs consisted of throwing myself into whatever projects came my way and when not busy working then practically every hour of my leisure time was spent climbing, sleep was not a choice, it was often a forced, exhausted end to a day.
I met my wife, we married, had children, I needed an education having left school with no qualifications, so I started studying, not at night school though, with the open university, only a degree was going to be good enough but when I got that degree it was not good enough for an over-achiever so it was years more of study to obtain a Masters in Business Administration. As my business career took off so that aggressive competitiveness ensured success and there was not one week when I worked less than 100 hours. Holidays were very unhappy experiences for me, a time of champing at the bit, fretting to be busy, I rarely smiled or laughed, everything was serious and focussed energy.
At the tender age of 40 I burnt out, overnight I had to stop work as my brain gave way to cerebro-vascular spasms that would send excruciating spasms of neuralgia through my body and down my face. For 5 years I lived my life in a sea of pain, as limbs started to lose strength I was advised to walk. I did, from Lands End to John O'Groats, over a thousand miles, and to make sure I over-achieved I did it three times, twice with my long suffering wife.
As my body fought back so I needed other distractions. I combined two of my loves, travelling and military history, and set up a travel company specialising in military history tours and for 3 years was permanently travelling all over the world. It had to stop, I had to see home eventually and in 1996 I sold the company. Looking back now this is when GD really started to resurface but at the time it was not apparent, what was apparent was the need to be even more busy, even more focussed, and I started throwing myself into charitable causes, crusades and campaigns, all of a compassionate nature. I became chairman and benefactor of a charity for disadvantaged children, one that often worked with the police on child abuse cases, I joined an internet support group as a carer and listener for adult survivors of child abuse, campaigned against the proliferation of so called "Child art" sites on the internet, on one occasion making myself available to the police to help in a paedophile investigation that run for three weeks and meant me engaging in a protracted convo with an internet paedophile attempting to procure a young girl. , I set up and run an accomodation project for the homeless, soon I was busy 20 hours a day 7 days a week again.
It couldn't continue. A series of events, ironically caused by the very issues I had been so compassionately involved with, conspired to turn my whole life upside down and very nearly totally derail it. I had to make a solemn promise, a promise partly made from very wounded hurt feelings of being betrayed by a scciety I had striven so hard to make better, and that promise was to my wife, that from now on I will hang up my crusading boots, spend more of my time with her, never get so passionately involved with any cause or crusade again, basically to retire.
Thats when the door was opened for GD to resurface, 18 months of the most unbelievable hell was to begin.
Forward to "emergence - and welcome to hell"
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