Mile-End Eight

This is the 8th blog post about me, a not so passable but still very sexy mature transsexual woman wandering in the streets of Montréal, Québec after landing in a shitty small room in a 65 room building following an eviction for renovations...

and after spending most time after transition locked away inside the apartment where I lived since 2015 and that I had to leave in a rush on July 5, 2021. It's not necessarily written in a chronological order, and I might (so it seems) be repeating myself. Excuse my English: not my 1st language.

Models

It might be always when the expectations are the lowest that better things happen. I went out last Friday with the lowest expectations ever, and a handsome young man smiled at me as I was going into the dépanneur to get cigarettes (with my last 10$), then at my exit smiled again and told me : how beautiful you are today!, in French, so the feminine ''belle'' made it very obvious that he was underlining my femininity.

It felt great, so is the feeling I get when my friend who lends me 30$ tells me I made a real difference in her life. I helped her quite a bit getting on the right track for a couple years, up until not long ago.

I tried all my life to help younger people grow. Share my experience of life without judging their behavior or thinking, never. I am young too. I really did always try to help, as soon as younger than me started to be around me; for the first twenty years or so of my life, I was always the youngest, so I remember… not being helped by anyone older than me, and I craved it, as I was the youngest of the family.

And I'll remain young. I had decided that already in my twenties. That means welcoming change. That means reinventing myself constantly, and it means also to really welcome change, novelty, and bad reactions to sometimes what I had liked the most and is now outdated, and much more letting go.

So now… now that I’m stuck here in this shitty room…

I really need to reinvent myself now. I didn't chose to do it this way, or to do it at all. I guess life always gets me stuck at some point where I have no choice but to do that... erase the past and try to look forward.

One of them turning points was when I admitted to myself I'm a woman, a transsexual woman, late 2008. It took me like seven years from that point on to the day I started my hormone therapy, by taking light testosterone blockers, low dose spironolactone (25mg? Yea, think it was). I felt its action in the minutes that followed on my scrotum and testes, within an hour, I swear. Then I couldn't stop, I liked it too much, and the next eight months saw my testosterone flew my system... my brain. Mostly my brain, and my body start to change under the action of the estrogen dermal patches I was prescribed by an incredible doctor I had then but who now quit the trade.

So I took the train, that was six years ago. I had a whole life of trying to be a man behind me, and I needed to let all my feminine side out, which I had simply hidden the best I could till then. As I posted here before, I realized early I couldn't fit into any of the categories of people... any model. I'm unique and special and cannot escape being myself, I realized it early in life. And I told my shrink in 2010 that I knew I would be a special kind of trans also if ever I came out.

(and also, I must add, I also admitted to myself I’m bisexual in 2008. It’s important to specify, as gender and sexual orientation are two separate things. I probly should have admitted to myself that I like sex with men earlier, as I always was hit on by members of the gay community, all along my life, and, uhhh. I guess I missed a lot of fun, but really, I could have put this search on myself aside and remain a trans woman nonetheless, it’s really two separate matters)

So... I get lost in all kind of digressions but my point is models.

I only could put a name on why I don’t have models, and found out at the same time it’d be very difficult for me to have one no matter how hard I try: 

I'm ASD. I'm into the autistic spectrum disorder and my behavior, many ways I had acted in the past are actually simply autistic traits. I'm not that unique, the way I act is the same way many other ASD act, it's even predictable. I can predict how I will behave and react, and that's why I smoke cannabis. It smoothes down ASD symptoms, traits, whatever you call it.

I first realized I’m ASD reading a weekly chronicle in a daily free paper, Metro. I went on her blog and all her articles were there; she simply described how she reacts, talks, think... I read them all, and it seemed she was describing my own life. That's when I realized I wasn't that unique, and that the fact that I was weird corresponded to autistic traits, I mean how I acted, how I talked to my bosses, how I lost my jobs all the time...

Then I read and read on autism, many very specialized books, and I understood how it works, and I can now not only explain my own behavior, I can also quickly identify autism traits in others, and predict how they will behave, if I know them well enough.

So I can predict my own future, in the short term, I do it all the time to try to avoid shit, to try to avoid saying things I shouldn't be saying, or at that moment.

I'm checking on myself. I have a big tendency to speak too much. I don't know what to say, so I say anything. I just open the valve of my brain. Direct stream. That's the Asperger side of the spectrum. Other ASD I know don't know what to say and therefore speak not. Especially about themselves, the inner self. Personally, I do that all the time. Direct stream. It's two opposite sides of autism, but it's the same problem at the source : the socialization chip is malfunctioning, or maybe is from a different origin (different type of homidae). ASDs think differently than most people. It's very rational, and emotions work differently.

Anyways I'm losing the subject again, here, maybe I'll remove these paragraphs about ASD, that wasn't my point.

My point was that, if ASD behavior is identifiable and detectable, they follow some patterns, it's the same for neurotypicals, that is those who are not on the ASD spectrum, so like 85% of any given population (in my opinion), there are models, transmitted by imitation (like any ape does in order to learn) that are so strong that it seems I'm meeting the same people on the street as 30 or 40 years ago, but they are 30 or 40, so… those I met in the past are either dead or 70-80 years old, and themselves look like the elders I knew then, so…

Humans repeat models, neurotypicals by imitation, those in the ASD by genetics. Yes. I’m saying that. Simply explained, I can read or see other people on the ASD behaving just like me, thinking just like me, and I don’t know them, never heard of them. I'm not following a model that I learned but many sides of my behavior can be found described in books on autism.

I never followed any model by imitation, I’m just not capable of doing that. I’m just myself.

There are, though, people on the ASD who follow models, certainly there are. It’s a spectrum. I’m somewhere on the spectrum, maybe mixed with a severe attention deficit (it plays in the same zones of the brain anyways ASD and ADD) where I’m totally to the opposite it seems.

And when  someone on ASD follows a model, they follow it very strictly and rigidly, with a deep belief that this is the only truth possible.

So... not me. I really tried to in the past, but the only models I can dig is languages, words, syntax, the only ones.

Communication with others is very important for me, with trees and dogs and cats and birds as well as with other humans.

I'm desperately trying to fit in a society that uses models without being able to follow any model.

It's the absurdity of my life.

Dominique Rock