What I’m Thankful for

[supergee]

1. Bernadette
2. Kevin
3. Some of the smartest, nicest, most interesting friends & acquaintances in the world, specifically including those belonging to my dreamwidth and Facebook reading lists and my electronic and postal mailing lists.
4. My body. It’s an evolved animal, the product of millions of years of fighting, breeding, and dying, with all the problems that would suggest, but as far as we know, the human body is the only vehicle mind has. (It's a ride.) I’m thankful for mine in particular because it’s a strong one. It has survived 80+ years of as little exercise and nutritional correctness as I could get away with giving it. It has survived much abuse of assorted substances (and the only one of those I wouldn’t do over again is tobacco) and now survives without them.
6. All other minds, past and present: those who created computers to expand my mind and a Net to join it to others, medicines that allow me to survive the previously fatal weaknesses of my body, and words and pictures that have enriched my thoughts, and all those I have forgotten or taken for granted.

There used to be a #5, expressing modified rapture for my country, but that was before it re-elected a senile fascist.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Fwiw, I had to run when I was sixteen and wrote this recently as I noted more and more people having to consider doing the same:


There's a fair bit of discussion around on here about having to leave.

Having to leave the country where you were born.

As some of you know, I had to leave. I know some of you have also had to leave for various reasons.

When I was just sixteen at a Christmas time, my parents threw me out of the family home. I'd flunked school and come out to them as trans and that simply wouldn't do.

Threats were made to have me sectioned under the mental health acts. I didn't know at the time that they couldn't do that, so I ran.

I had a fairly new young person's ID card and it wasn't far to the coast from where I grew up so I got a train to Dover and got a ticket for the ferry to Oostende in Belgium.

I ended up in Brugge living in a rundown corner of town near a canal, in Kanalstraat indeed.

The block I lived in (I've written about it as some of you may recall) was a mix of people, mostly single girls, but included some street working girls (a group that I've had a soft spot for ever since) who looked out for me and didn't try to persuade me into that line of business and given that I was still not fixed you can imagine how dangerous that might have been.

I ended up as a language assistante teaching English to French speakers.

Brugge was where I Iearned to be me and where I learned that most people take the outward presentation as the inward person.

I was taken to by Patrice, an elderly café bar owner (I've written about him too) who became the dad I didn't have. I still remember him preaching to me about how a single young woman should behave! :o)

It remains my beloved second home and the Belgians who took me to their hearts my own people.

I lived for three years in Brugge and eventually came back to do uni at nineteen when I could see that all the threats were empty and that I could make my own way in life.

So yes, if you have to go it is doable.

As is coming back............

[sturgeonslawyer]

Merci. I appreciate your taking the time to tell me about this.

I'm at the opposite end of life -- sixty-six years old, with a lot of local friends, a house, a lifetime's accumulation of books and other random stuff... I am rather overwhelmed by this whole thing. Your story helps.

[cmcmck]

We're much of an age so I can see how much pressure this would create.

We last moved- to the other end of the UK- eight years back and I really wouldn't want to have to do it again.