I recently decided do use my employee assistance program at work to go talk to a therapist, mostly about how frustrated I have been with my job. I currently work in a hospital and an administrative role, dealing with a number of patients on a daily basis. Everybody seems to think Covid is the most frustrating thing with our jobs, but it isn't? It's just management and patients that seem to be frustrating. Anyway, as we were talking about other sources of frustration outside of work, I mentioned that I feel like I have very few outlets to relieve stress. One of the unintended consequences of Covid is that my kids are always home, because none of the neighborhood parents want their kids around my kids, simply because both my wife and I work in a hospital around Covid all the time. So, my kids spend a lot of time at home, even though we do go out and do a lot of things in the outdoors to get out, they're still around us all the time. I am closeted as far as my kids go, so this has been a major source of frustration for me. I try not to think about it much, but it is a frustration. I also moved to a new city two years ago, and don't really know anybody here outside of those I have worked with. The coworkers that I seem to work best with, and get along with, or a couple of lesbians, and we started hanging out on the weekends with a few other people from work and kind of have a little hang out group going. I'm not out to most of them, but I did tell one of them about Allison. She seems excepting, as I expected she would be,, and promised to keep that a secret for me. So at least somebody here knows a little bit about me that I don't have to keep bottled up.
As I was discussing further with a therapist last night, at my third session, we really haven't talked on gender stuff. We had mostly focused on coping strategies for how to handle work on a daily basis. When I saw her Wednesday night, she wanted to talk more about the gender issues because she felt like it might be a bigger source of frustration for me than we had discussed. As we discussed it further, she started asking questions that I don't really have answers for yet. Basically, exactly where I am on the spectrum, how does that affect my life, if I didn't have to hide it, I would my life be different, some things that I had discussed with other therapists in the past but hadn't really gone into very much. What impressed me was that she actually put together a plan for us to have more discussion after she reaches out to some colleagues to further educate herself. In the meantime, she's kind of opened a Pandora's box that I guess I haven't been willing to explore or acknowledge for myself. I don't believe I am transgendered, but I can't say I'm just a straight guy who likes wearing women's clothes either. So trying to figure that out, which is already really been a decades long journey, is going to be our goal.
