Start at the beginning

I am in Toronto, arrived yesterday. It was foggy driving into the city center from the airport. A sky line that reappeared several times as my uber driver wound his way to my boutique boarding room. A massive white neon cross stood tall over the warehouses outside the city. The bottom half of the vertical beam flashed on and off so that half the time it was transformed to a plus sign. I should write about that I thought.

The Ode, my boarding house for these few days, is a nice place to stay, but it lacks the formal touches of a hotel. My room has no egress, but to the narrow hallway where an exit sign marks the way to old paint chipped stairs. In a mild panic I started googling Toronto fire code last night and asked an LLM to do a review of the ode’s fire inspection history. It returned a hit on a lack of signage. This morning I walked back to the wooden stairs and found a printed piece of paper explaining emergency procedures, mainly being that one should exit the building in the event of a fire.

My mind has always loved to grab onto an anxiety and grip it tightly. During the conference today Kim Spence presented on autism and problematic sexual behaviors. She framed OCD, my childhood diagnosis along with ADHD, as a stress disorder. That makes sense I thought. It’s hard to not permit your inner hypochondriac to take over when you attend these sessions. A tepid trickle of hmp’s and hunn’s moves through the room as we review symptoms and behaviors.

A spectrum should have room for everybody; being on the spectrum a foregone conclusion. It seems odd to sit back absolving yourself of your place on the continuum, wondering how they all got there. Let us map the world with every spectrum and every score, a radar chart around each of our necks.