The past, the present, music and memories and new lives

[Deleted]

The past, the present, music and memories and new lives


Greetings my dears,

Would love to hear how memories of the long past affect you when an old song with associated memories plays, and how it dovetails into the new people we become after and during transition…

I am no longer who I was two years ago….

I am just now finding out who that is on a personality and emotional level. I feel it changing. Its overpowering, empowering, incredible

Satinjoy is a nice transsexual person, with deep feelings. Never was this way, was all fear and escapism and compensation… but the songs of old throw me hard….

Its strange when you fought it all those years and finally surrender after decades.

Tomorrow is 29 years clean and sober, and my 30th sober Thanksgiving (30.5 years no booze). Feels nice.

But memories, and choices made with no understanding of the power of dysphoria… the consequences of years later…

Thoughts my dears?

---Trinity

[Laura J]

Oh how I wish I could celebrate that long being booze free..!  :-/ For me it's almost 2 years now, this will be my second Christmas sober..  : 

Oh dear, this is hard to post to.?? 

Most of my friends wonder why I don't listen to any of the old music I was raised on, even 20-30 years after that.?  
I don't know how to explain it, those old songs just make me feel bad.. They remind me of experiences I had, how I felt personally during those years, and almost all of it is bad, just bad memories.. 

The new music today is like a clean slate, no history behing it, and most hold great memories now, especially foreign music my friends share with me from other countries, they just have such good vibes associated with them.. 

I'm truly not trying to relive my teen years or anything, it's just that the new music makes me feel much better inside than the old stuff I listened to for years and years ago.. 

[Deleted]

The past is the past, the present is now. Music and memories. Oh yeah. Lots of memories. Maybe too many. New life though. Who I am today isn't who I was yesterday or yesteryear and who I will be tomorrow will be shaped by who I was today. Yeah I know kind of crazy. :-/

[Edge]

I bought this cd soon after I had left my parents' house for the last time. This song especially was extremely fitting. It was a significant and empowering turning point in my life. Today, when I listen to this song, I feel strong and proud to be me.


www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HUlv4WpqDc

[Deleted]

Here is the problem, on estrogen my long term memorie is back, and people are playing 60s and 70s music at work. It is making me remember the days of drinking and drugs, of the gay discos, and the wild days, of sitting on broadway with a bottle of wine and a plastic rose watching the tourists and folks going to work try not to trip over my feet on the sidewalk.

Issues of regret hit, the past invades the present through music, it can do this through smells, touch, taste, old memories trigger, hard memories to handle, and somehow this triggers the dysphoria in me, I don't know why. Like I made a decision in the decision tree. Now theres one for hte forest. But I went right instead of left on transition, and wound up where I wound up, worth it for my wife and kids, but boy I need to get screwed so bad. Not going to happen.

Anyway, its all triggering. Bringing the past into the present. So does that happen to you too? Do you get unwanted flashes of the past influencing the now, has that changed since you started transitioning? It sure did with me, big time. And I am mid 50's in age, with teenage hormones and boobies. Yikes.

I do love it though.

Thoughts my dears?

Satinjoy/Trinity

[DCW]

I have a few.

Human League "Don't You Want Me" - This one isn't for associating hearing it but buying a CD of the album that contains the song. It was on the last day of my exchange trip to what was then the USSR; we arrived in Helsinki, Finland, in the afternoon and our flight home departed the next day. I found a little used music shop that had said album.

Dan Fogelberg "Same Auld Lang Syne" - I first heard this when driving past a business called "The Fiero Shop" between Christmas and New Year of 1994. I had just picked-up my things from Juniata College as my full-time career as a student abruptly ended. It was a very low point in my life, and, as though foreshadowing, things would not get much better the following year - I would break-up with my then-fiancee in the fall of 1995.

White Town "Your Woman" - The fall of 1997, sitting in a pizza shop named Granteed's on Mulberry Street in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with my then-girlfriend (now wife.) We had just moved in together, each finally having our own place.

Semisonic "Closing Time" - This only became meaningful to me a decade after its release. In 2008 I accepted a job in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and moved from the area where I had lived for my entire life. I was struggling a bit with that and "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end" meant a lot to me. I wouldn't realize how much it would mean for a while, as with that move I began to have progress in my transition (then stymied for more than a decade) and all.