Fear of change

[dismallyoriented]

I remember reading a post from an older trans man, about the moment he stopped being able to sympathize with other trans men who were earlier on in their transitions. He was sitting in a support group, listening to some younger guys vent about their social anxiety contacting doctors for access to healthcare, and realized his main reaction was impatience. A sort of, "well if you don't suck it up and do it, how are you going to get what you need?"

You have these sort of twin truths of "anxiety does in fact keep you from meeting basic needs in a way that Sucks Tremendously," and also the understanding that like. A phone call will not kill you. The understanding that at most the person receiving the call might be rude, or annoyed, but that even if it goes badly you will live to call another doctor's office. Obviously there are circumstances that can change this - if it takes you hours to gin up the ability to make this call at all, if you do in fact rely on this one office to access necessary care, the stakes of it going badly change. But for a large swathe of people, the danger is entirely in the head. And for someone who has done it already and learned how to cross that barrier, well. It can all feel very just make the jump already, doofus.

I've run into a couple folks who feel profound fear and anxiety about change or certain life experience milestones, in a way that has me feeling like the grumpy older guy. I say this as someone who did once struggle with severe social anxiety, and who still gets profoundly anxious about other things in my life. I feel both a sense of the severity of the obstacle, but also the impatience. It is sort of like learning how to ride a bike - something I did as a kid and Also experienced profound anxiety about for a bit, lmao. When I started moving from training wheels to a free-standing bike, I was so scared of falling over that after losing my balance for the first time, I simply did not touch my bike again for about a year - always opting for the Razor scooter or my roller blades. And like. My avoidance was entirely reasonable, it fucking blows to fall and get scraped up. It's scary and it hurts. It takes a lot of support and fortitude to willingly put yourself in the way of pain.

But also. Falling off a bike won't kill you, unless you've made the singularly ill-advised choice to start learning how on the side of a cliff, or in live traffic. It'll hurt, you'll maybe need to set the bike aside for a bit before being ready to try it again, but you won't die. You can get back on, and try again, and eventually you can do funny tricks like a running mount/dismount. Braver people than me pop wheelies.

When you're the one who's in the anxiety pit, and haven't taken the plunge yet, you have no point of reference for how it will go. How realistic any given bad outcome is, or how endurable it may be. You don't realize how survivable a given scenario is, until you've done it. And it is frustrating sometimes, to be the person on the other side, already on the bike or in the pool, knowing exactly how to make it through and watching someone else jump at shadows. But like, I don't think I could've talked kid me into getting onto the bike again any sooner. Not unless kid me could've believed that I was from the future, having already done it, and even that feels flimsy as hell when you're scared. The only thing that could've done it was kid me eventually getting back on the bike and taking another shot, until suddenly I could feel the bike balancing itself under my own speed. Until the moment of fear passed and I was okay, if not always the same after.

I just wish there were a way to pass that on to others easier. But they will get there on their own time.

Edit (3/24/25): I have found the original excerpt! It was an essay called "Trans Grit" by Cooper Lee Bombadier, collected in a 2016 anthology titled The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care, edited by zena sharman. You can find the excerpt [here]

Comments

[bodyetal]

crow&: the closest thing we’ve found to “artificially” passing that on to others (as in, not by having them just experience the thing) was in our DBT PE homework, where every exposure required us to list three worst case scenarios, how likely they were, and how bad they would realistically be. after, we’d have to say whether or not the worst case happened, and re-evaluate our rating of likelihood and badness.

obviously, we still often blew them out of proportion. most of the worst cases that happened had a much lower badness rating after (with some notable exceptions). but taking the time to actively think, “okay, what are the odds, and how bad can it get?” was often enough to make us realize that the worst case scenario wasn’t worth the cost of avoiding it.

pretty quickly, it became a habit outside of exposures; i have pretty severe social anxiety, but asking myself that is often enough to overcome it. (which feels extremely silly in hindsight, given all the things my social anxiety has stopped—and continues to stop—me from doing, but the times it works are more than enough to make up for the ridiculousness of the thing.)

[lb_lee]

Rogan: being pushed out of my housing because one of my roomies decided I was a pedophile helped break me of my fears of getting Gamergated, because I just packed my bag, went couch-surfing, and got on with it. The world didn’t end! I didn’t lose my customers, just a significant chunk of money. I was mad but lost no self-esteem, and it proved great emotional armoring as Trump II boarded the transphobia train and I started getting called a groomer by strangers. I could take it impersonally. And it meant I went, “well, trying to be a precious pure cinnamon roll sucked and failed, so I HOPE YOU LIKE DICKS, because there’s nothing to stop me now!”

Sometimes you just gotta get punched in the face and take the hit.