I’ve had a lot of strange blog names over the years: DAOnC, My Little Corner of the Tuna Fish, my deadname a few times, Alyssa and Ania ‘Splain You a Thing. As I get older, the kind of strangeness that appeals to me shifts around, and it’s time to pick up a new one.
I’m Alyssa Gonzalez, and I write in the Perfumed Void.
In case you’ve been in a beautiful fantasy world for the past few years, I have a sad truth to report: the world is, just, full of allistic people. Not only that, but despite their comically overstated deficiencies at staying organized, attaining intense mastery of niche topics, and being at all bearable to be around, they control almost everything. Learning how to deal with their bizarre needs is a necessary life skill for the rest of us, and I came to learn what I have about how they operate from a still more noisome source: narcissistic, emotionally abusive parents.
Continue reading “What Narcissists Taught Me about Talking to Allistic People”
I wrote in my review of Kim Fu’s “For Today I Am a Boy” that one of the most emotionally resonant incidents in its protagonist’s life is when she, upon encountering her first transmasculine person, experiences a fit of inchoate, perverse jealousy: “Give me your girlhood, John, I thought nonsensically. You don’t want it? Give it to me. I want to be the woman you would have been.”
I claimed in that review that this feeling is common among transfeminine people. The truth is, I have no idea if indeed this sentiment appears in many of us. What I do know is, it has long gripped me.
There’s a very odd thing that sometimes happens in conversations. Some people think certain conversations shouldn’t take place at all, and resort to a variety of circumlocutions and thought-terminating clichés to try to shut it down. Perhaps the oddest of this is invoking the fictional “right to an opinion.”
A fairly subtle deception lies at the heart of this refrain, which merits teasing apart.
I’ve been on several Caribbean cruises. I’m also terrified of next month’s automatic bill payments. The juxtaposition of those two facts, both as true as they are incongruous next to one another, is something I’ve had to learn to understand, live with, and acknowledge as part of myself.
