Live a Little
It's very strange how after all these years, I now want to start living my life. It's crazy for someone like me, I think. I spend so much of my free time playing videogames, doodling, sometimes writing if I have the time (I already spend so much time writing in assignments for college). As I talked about in a post last weekend, I recently ordered from a bar for the first time at 23 years old, which surprised the bartender and everyone else there.
It hasn't been until today that I realized that I was doing the very thing I complain about.
Basically, as a trans man, I'm often told who to be. Most of the transphobic reactions I've received from the people in my life were about keeping up appearances: don't go on testosterone, the idea of you being anything other than youthful and dainty makes me uncomfortable, God made you beautiful the way you are, don't change, what is your grandmother going to think? It's been like this ever since I realized I'm not a girl.
Flash forward to last weekend. I'm very weird about rules. I told my roommates "no alcohol or weed in the apartment because I'm a yapper and I'll get us in trouble" (which is correct: we're on a dry campus and I am a big-time yapper). We went to a venue, I ordered a rosé (which I hated the taste of) and doodled in my notebook a little bit. Once I finished it, I went back and sat with my roommates. Then the alcohol kicked in because I forgot to eat a full meal beforehand. I was getting dizzy, but wasn't stumbling at least.
Talking to my roommates later, when I thought I was drunk, they said I wasn't because I wasn't slurring my words and wasn't openly stumbling. It was very strange, because I thought for sure that I was going to fall over. So the effects of alcohol on me weren't as dramatic or obvious to others as they are to me when I'm experiencing them.
Maybe as an autistic person it feels rebellious. "Autistic person orders rosé at a bar and my sense of their childlike innocence is gone." I probably have a lot of internalized ableism to work on if I think of myself like that. Or maybe I need to treat myself better than letting others infantilize me for my autism and transmasculinity that they hate so much. God forbid I have some agency.
God forbid I live a little.