00:00sort of. But how do you navigate all of this new? How do you make friends? How do you socialize?
00:07For instance, can you just go to a party? How do I know a party is happening? And if I
00:14do,
00:16what time do you show up? They say the party is at eight, but I know from TV you are
00:22not
00:23allowed to arrive at eight for some incomprehensible reason. You need to be late.
00:27I hate to be late, but fine. Okay, late. How late? Ten minutes? An hour? Who the fuck knows?
00:38Not all of my classmates seem to already know these rules, or at least they figure them out
00:44faster than I did. But all of these social cues which were obvious to them were completely lost
00:50on me. I wandered the halls of the dorms, feeling like, well, what most of you would feel like.
00:57At a Star Trek convention. Everybody is marching around in strange costumes, speaking a foreign
01:04language about temporal prime directives, dilithium chambers, and Cardassian neck ridges.
01:10There's text and subtext and inside jokes and decades of lore, which is separate from the
01:16character Lord Data's evil android twin who just wants to make out with the crystalline entity.
01:21I hate being singled out when I'm in an audience. Like, I know that you're dressed up as a dancey
01:28sex
01:29cat, and you've done all this feline Meisner work, but keep your paws to yourself. When somebody
01:35pretending to be a titillating tabby starts pawing at me, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
01:40Am I supposed to hiss at them or pet them? Am I a hot kitty too?
01:48And this vulnerability, this lack of poise, this not knowing everything, not being prepared
01:55for everything, those times where I needed help, I'd learned to hate this part of myself.
02:01To feel like it was ugly and shameful. That if it was seen by the outside world,
02:06it would be rejected and scorned. So I rejected and scorned it first.
02:11And I hid it. This giant part of myself behind the mask.
