The Softening

I've changed my mind about certain things. On other things, my mind changed on its own, with a little help from the new chemistry. A shift like the one I have been experiencing gives a very clear understanding of how changing one or two relatively small variables can end up changing everything.

For the longest time, I hardly felt much of anything. An emotion had to be pretty intense in order to break through the filter I had in place. Between the ages of 10 and 25, I cried maybe twice. Even when I felt like crying, and really wanted to cry, I somehow couldn't. I generally felt rather out of synch with everything around me, and people often did not make particularly much sense. With the help of my mother, I acquired a sort of ersatz empathy that allowed me to work out analytically how someone might feel in a given situation, but like much of my interpersonal skills, they were a combination of rote learning and mechanical analysis.

The first indication that this might be changing came a week or so after I started taking hormones. After over a decade of being unable to cry at even the most devastating events, I suddenly found myself sobbing uncontrollably, shaking, over a song. For the first time since childhood, I found myself completely overcome by a powerful emotion that welled up inside me and suddenly released. It was one of the most wonderful things I have ever experienced, a feeling not unlike just floating out on the ocean and letting the waves move through you.

That marked the beginning of what could be called a generalised softening. Gradually, I found myself becoming more and more receptive, more able to perceive and experience emotion. It was around this time that I began to have the first real experience of empathy, of feeling with someone, picking up on their energy and resonating with it. I had never felt so connected with other people before.

With this new feeling of connectedness emerged a new style of interaction, a style of interaction so completely different from anything I'd ever done before that I couldn't help but find it quite shocking even though it came so naturally, leading to the following internal monologue:

Metacognition: Um, 'scuse me, was that just...was that just nurturing?
Cognition: Well, duh! Didn't you get that memo?

I experienced this most intensely with a friend of mine, with whom I'd long drunk coffee, worked on papers, talked, joked, and smoked. Usually, our conversations revolved around the cack that is literary criticism, or our shared disgust for Bush, Pinochet, and other less-than-flauntable products of the human gene pool, and my (famously rib-tickling) one liners on those and other subjects. We'd cultivated this relationship for about a year, and enjoyed each other very much.

We didn't see each other most of the summer. A couple of months after I started hormones, we got together for coffee and drinks. Mostly, it was as always. I helped her with a project she was working on, and we caught up on what was going on in each other's lives. Then, suddenly, on a random impulse, I said it: "You know, I think you're my best friend around here." She replied that she felt the same way about me. From that moment on, things changed for us. For the first time, I had really opened up to her and told her how I felt. Since then, we have kept getting closer. We actually entrusted ourselves to each other, and formed a bond like no other I've ever felt. Now, we talk about everything. We share in each other's excitement, each other's successes, disappointments, dreams, and big ideas, not to mention my cooking.

And then, there's the sensuality. One of the effects of oestrogen is that some senses become heightened. The thinner, softer skin, with its increased number of nerve endings, becomes more receptive to touch and temperature. Sounds and scents take on a whole new dimension, and even the eyes seem to see more. With all of this going on, I found myself perceiving space, and the things in it, in a completely new way. When I looked at things before, I used to just see stuff. A table was a thing I ate off of and occasionally left things on. Now, the same things have valences that I had never perceived before. A table isn't just a table. It's where I see memories being created even before I've sat at it, where I see friends, family, and myself enjoying food and wine, talking, and laughing. I find myself designing and trying to create warm, welcoming, cozy spaces. I feel a real connection to my living space. I was slightly shocked to find myself suddenly thinking of my apartment as a home.

My "philosophy" of transition was based, largely, on a lot of ideas that I had had since long before. I had no intention of acceeding to gender stereotypes just because they were "what's done." I was going to be the one who would thumb her nose at all of it. I had long since made up my mind that none of it could have anything but an imposed societal basis, that men and women were totally identical, and should be treated identically. Upon reflection, I think that it was more sour grapes than anything that led me to that conclusion. I'm not allowed to experience it, so it must be a line of crap anyway, and the only reason they're buying into it is because they've been internalising it since before they even knew what was going on. Thus, when my mom began insisting, when I was around 15, that I hold the door for (other) women, I indignantly refused. I thought it was the most demeaning thing I'd ever heard.

Cognitive dissonance is fun when it comes with a side of irony. Within a decade of that indignant refusal, I found myself on the receiving end of chivalry. In this, as in many cases, I've had to revisit my view of things. It turns out that chivalry is quite nice when guys hold the door open, provided they're not basing it on offensive or otherwise bullshit assumptions. While I haven't changed my mind about the general principle that one shouldn't follow stereotypes just because they may be "the done thing," I've found that certain things might have more to them than pure external imposition. The new feelings, skills, inclinations, desires, and needs that have emerged - often in complete contradiction to deeply held beliefs - must have some internal, likely partially chemical, basis.

Fast Forward (Ella y él)

In my last post, I started in the present, jumped back over two decades, and ended at the beginning of the story. In keeping with this less-than-intimate relationship with linear time, tonight's post begins over five years after the last one left off.

Ultimately, chronology isn't that important to my story. Except sometimes. What's really important is context. Context is practically everything to what I am about to relate, for my story is one of a complete change of context, what annoying "postmodern" types who occasionally make me want to reconsider my views on gun control would polysyllabify to de- and recontextualisation.

Last time, I decided to back up a bit to give a brief account of my twenty-year stint amongst the men, Cliff's Notes on a guy who went to Europe and never came back. Today's instalment is about who did return from that stay on the Continent, and the world she found herself in.

Thinking about the world I've found myself in, I'm reminded of a line from the movie Pulp Fiction. In the scene that introduces us to Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield, played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson, Vincent is talking about the highlights of his stay in Europe:

[VINCENT]But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?

[JULES] What?

[VINCENT] It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit we got here,
they got there, but there they're a little different.

That's as good a synopsis as any I could provide. Looked at on a macro scale, my days aren't very different from his days. I sleep in to the extent possible, get ready at either an exaggeratedly leisurely or breakneck pace, go to class (or don't), work (or don't), take the bus, wait (and wait, and wait) for the bus, talk to friends, go home, watch TV, have dinner, stay up till all hours, and then repeat it all the next day. All these are experiences he had on numerous occasions.

But as soon as you shift the focus a little, it becomes quite apparent that this is not his life.

While he and I get ready in the morning (OK, afternoon) at roughly the same pace, he took one-third to half as long as I do. He had a lot less to do. Fifteen minute shower, tie back hair, pick halfway clean clothing off of floor, throw on eyeglasses, get backpack, and out the door. A simple, mechanical process, generally combined with swearing at having to be awake.

I wake up, snuggle in the bed for a little while, channeling the sort of positive, warm, cozy emotions that make me feel a little bit better about actually having to do stuff. I moisturise, brush my teeth, take the meds that allow me to have a normal female hormonal balance, step into the shower and savour the hot water. I get my hair untangled, wrap myself in a towel, vaguely approximating the world's softest and fluffiest strapless dress, and spend the next thirty to forty five minutes doing my hair. Then comes makeup, which takes less time, but more concentration, followed by the perennial question: What am I going to wear? The sheer range of options and possible combinations makes this a very complicated issue, and, when going through my laundry, I'm often struck at how surprising it is that I manage to get dressed at all.

Things are still basically the same once I leave my apartment. I get cigarettes and coffee, and wait for the bus. The what is the same, but the how couldn't be more different. The people at the convenience store and the café know me, and we have a little light banter going whenever we see each other. I know pretty many of the people at the café by name, and there's always a little small talk. He wasn't one for banter. He preferred to get what he came for and get the hell out. Conversations with people he didn't know well were to be avoided, and smalltalk made him antsy. He maintained the sort of studied monotone and expressionlessness in these situations that avoids extraneous connection. I generally smile at people, and enjoy a spot of conversation as I go about my business.

Not only do I interact differently; people interact differently with me. It starts with who they see in front of them. Looking at old pictures, particularly from the last years, I see a guy pretty much at the end of his rope. Someone who'd given up and just let himself go. Someone who had totally withdrawn and didn't really see much point in any of it anymore. While I can't speak for anyone else, that certainly doesn't seem to be what people see these days. In any case, they see someone that inspires them to use quite a few terms of endearment, someone that old guys seem to feel sort of paternal toward, someone that inspires a sort of protectiveness in guys in general (apart from the wide array of creeps the average city has to offer) , and that women feel comfortable opening up to.

As similar as our two lives are, the experiences that characterise the things we do every day are vastly different. He lived alone. He never deeply connected with anyone, and spent most of his life keeping up appearances and distance. He never felt much of anything. That part of him just faded away. He knew he wasn't really a "he," but had no real idea beyond speculation of what it was like to be a "she." I, on the other hand, have a very rich and fulfilling life. I have close, supportive relationships with my family, a best friend with whom I talk about everything, and am building a life for myself. I look forward to a future, and enjoy my present. Not only are our experiences different; our minds work differently, functioning on a different chemical basis (more on this later). We are, in one sense, two very different people with two rather different lives, who happened to have shared the same body.