A collision of worlds

On Wednesday evening I had a curious experience. I popped into a bar to have a drink on my way back to my hotel after dinner. A French expat engaged me in conversation. He was very friendly and we talked for quite a while. It emerged that he was attending the same conference that I was (a very large one), and that we knew some of the same people. It was a curious and intriguing situation – a collision of two worlds (my day-to-day male existence and my other existence as Karen). I enjoyed the conversation, and I enjoyed chatting in the same way that I am used to doing in many other circumstances. Such experiences give one hope; they make one feel accepted as another human being. That wonderful sense of being just like anybody else is hard to communicate adequately to somebody who’s not been so obviously “different” themselves, I suspect.