I’m writing this after just taking a fresh dose of Tylenol 3, so bear with me. Some of this might sound awesome. Some of this might sound like Drinking Out of Cups.

I finally had enough of Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief and started a novel just for fun (is the subtitle a nod to Pagels?). I’ve never read the alphabet series, so I’m a few pages into A is for Alibi. I think Kinsey and I are at the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It reminds me a little of Mallory’s Oracle, but only because Kinsey Milhone and Kathy Mallory are somewhat similar in their delivery and approach to their work. I love novels with strong women leads, because I want to be a strong woman and it doesn’t hurt to take their strength into myself. It’s like getting a shot in the arm of bravery, because if they can get up every morning and do what they do, so can I.

In terms of giving up on Amen, I can’t put it away entirely. I’m trying to finish it before Sunday, because the class has had this book for a while and I don’t want to show up unprepared. My former minister friends are very interested in my opinion. I don’t know that they’ll like what I have to say, but I’m willing to put myself out there, anyway. My answer to this entire book is that the author seems very full of herself. Absolutely sure that there’s not a deity, because prayer works regardless. The thing that makes me feel that she’s so conceited in her writing is that she may not mean to, but she speaks down to those who do believe there’s a deity, as if those who believe are just not as mature in their faith as she is.

Let me say for the record, “fuck that noise.”

Faith is not a journey toward believing there is no deity and praying, anyway. Faith is a spectrum, just like sexuality. To illustrate, I will go back almost ten years and tell you about the time I was sitting in the back of the church at Bridgeport while the Portland Lesbian Choir was setting up for their dress rehearsal (we rented out our space for concerts). One of the women was wearing a t-shirt that said, “100% Lesbian.” Nancy was in love with a woman, but had never dated any others. Before she met her partner, she considered herself straight. At the time, I was dating a man, for the first and only time as an adult (so far). We sat there for at least 20 minutes trying to decide what percentage of lesbian we were. Some days, I feel gayer than others.

It’s the same with religion. Sometimes I am absolutely sure there’s a God, and sometimes I’m not. But there is never a point at which I will go all the way toward atheism, because the question will never be settled for me. Just as I will never consider myself gay or lesbian, because to me, that is saying that even though I have only been married to women, that means the men I’ve dated don’t count. And of course they do. When Ryan and I were together, we dated for a year and two months, and that was in middle school… highly unusual for kids that young, and yet, we just fit. He was the cream in my coffee and the butter on my bread. It was one of the happiest times of my life. To call myself gay after that is just ridiculous. Bisexuality gets a bad rap because most people think it means that you date both sexes at the same time to be happy. Not so much. Bisexuality is a spectrum that lasts your whole life, and if I look at my whole life, I’ve been attracted to men as well as women, but never once has it occurred to me not to be monogamous.

To extrapolate a little further, my first wife was bisexual as well, and because of this, she really wanted to go to a bisexual conference held in Houston where one of the keynote speakers was the late and great Fritz Klein. Remember that name, because even though he died a relatively long time ago, he will teach you just as much about your sexuality now as he told me in that lecture. He took Alfred Kinsey’s work (the scale from 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 being completely homosexual) and added to it in ways that most people never think about, but should. Getting to meet and spend time with him is one of my fondest memories, but this is his legacy.

If you click on the image, it will show a version large enough to print that you can fill out on your own. Here’s the catch. No matter what you put in any of the boxes, Dr. Klein firmly believes that one box trumps them all, and that is self-identification. Say you fill out everything with numbers that say you are as queer as a three dollar bill. If you self-identify as straight, then you are. Period. You are what you say you are, and no one can tell you any different. Self-identification comes at your own pace, on your own time.

There should be some sort of grid for belief, as well. Perhaps I will be the one to make it. I certainly have enough information over my lifetime to complete something like it in terms of belief, prayer life, commitment to religious services, etc. It is a rolling set of emotions. Sometimes I feel more spiritual than others. Sometimes I feel more willing to commit to going to church than others. Sometimes I feel more altruism than others. However, if I look at my faith over my lifetime, I have consistently believed that I don’t know if there’s a God or not. I have never, not even once, believed that there was no God. I always fall into that category of, “who knows?”

I have told this story on Nadia before, but I will tell it again. Nadia Bolz-Weber is a loudmouthed, often profane, heavily tattooed Lutheran minister whom I seek to emulate, but in the best of ways. One of the stories she tells in her autobiography, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, is that she was called to the bedside of a man who said, “I’m an atheist!” She said that in her head, she was thinking, “good for you. I wish I could pull that off.” I knew intimately what she meant- that for this man, there was no struggle. It was black or white.

Even for “professional Christians,” it’s sometimes a struggle to believe that someone is listening when we pray. However, there are two things that keep me in the game at all times. The first is this scene from Shadowlands:

The second is that regardless of how I’m feeling when I show up for church in the morning, there is that moment where we’re all in deep prayer together, sharing joy and pain… or there’s that moment when we are hearing the words that have been said for hundreds of years that begin, “on the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: ‘take, eat; this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.'”

I don’t do all of this because I think God cares one way or the other. God is too big, too mystical, too unknowable to think that God might require worship. I do all of this because I see what it does in my own life, just like Jack Lewis. I do not have the option not to pray. It flows as easily from me as do blood, sweat & tears (as a brass player, you didn’t really think I was going to pass that up, did you?). It strengthens me when I think I do not have anything left. It shows me my flaws in my own reasoning because as I am praying, God whispers back… and of course I think the god-conscience is part of myself. I think that the god-conscience resides in every living being.

Where you fall on the spectrum is whether you decide to use it. If you don’t, it doesn’t mean that you are a bad person. It means that you have something else in your life that fills that spot for you. As a liberal Christian trying to take back the fanatical words of the Evangelical movement, I am sorry if you are an atheist and you have ever been treated badly by a Christian wanting to help you to death.

You are welcome to walk with me. I will even hold your hand. It is not either of our jobs to change each other’s minds, just to be together, because the spectrum is wide, but not so much when our fingers touch.

Amen.

I have a dentist appointment at 3:30 today, so I only have to hang on a little bit longer. By then, my Tylenol and ibuprofen will have worn off enough that if they give me a vicoprofen or a T3 it won’t bother my stomach and I might kiss them. Might. We’ll just see what happens when I get there. 🙂 Even if all they give me is laughing gas and try to make me forget about the pain, that will be enough. I have such problems with my teeth that I’ve just put off and put off due to cost that I’m in trouble. I’ve already had a tooth extracted on that side, and it’s affecting everything, including the way I drool. It’s attractive, let me tell you. And remember ladies, I’m single.

My tooth is the only thing I can really think about, so distraction is key. I’ve been watching the fourth season of Veep, and when I realized I was devouring it too fast, I switched back to reading Amen. Like I said earlier, I am reading it for Contemporary Theology class, but I fucking hate it. The author has an air of righteousness about her that is just so off-putting. It’s full of shit like, “if you believe x or so doctrine, keep doing what works for you, but…” It’s like reading a watered down version of Richard Dawkins, and I so wish I was kidding about that. Other people’s beliefs are their beliefs, and they are so cute. I am taking in her words without believing them. I want to argue her into the ground, and if I ever get the chance, I will. Because there’s a way to talk about belief without sounding like a sanctimonious prick. I will water my comments down in Sunday School, but you know me. I won’t water them down here. Mostly her thought process is that you can be an atheist and be a part of the life of the church and pray and all of these things, with which I totally agree. No one should ever be turned away from a church, because at its heart, church is about altruism just as much as it is about belief in God. If you are an atheist, you are always welcome at St. James and All Sinners, because even if you don’t believe in God, I will still put you to work feeding the homeless and asking you to bring extra socks and food.

And if you show up, there will be no discussion about whether your belief is right or wrong. It just is. There’s no proof either way… just as I expect that there will be no discussion about others’ beliefs without really trying to reach across the pews. I’m not going to talk you out of your atheism, and you’re not going to talk me out of my belief, so intelligent discussion can take place within those parameters. I am also not going to let anyone say that your beliefs are cute, but you’re really not mature enough in your faith to see that there’s not really a supreme being… or that there is. But, to me, it’s not the classic grandfather in the sky, but a place inside all of us that yearns for the divine and the mystical for answers. What scientists do not seem to understand is that faith does not answer the scientific problems of our time, but the human ones.

Faith and science can reside together because they accomplish different things. It will not help you to memorize the periodic table when your child is in surgery. It is then that we reach to the mystical and the divine for the prayers that we all pray in those times, such as Anne Lamott’s Help, Thanks, Wow.

When atheists describe to me the God in which they don’t believe, I often say, “I don’t believe in that God, either.” Frankly, the God of the Old Testament is a divine douchebag at times. But, in taking the Bible seriously and not literally, it is the words of the Jews writing that believed that’s what was happening, not necessarily what was. By the time the New Testament was put together, the understanding of God and the Trinity had progressed quite a bit. Theology had progressed into a world of promise and not vengeance. I often say that every parable of Jesus can be redacted to the one about the rich man and the servants who received talents, and what they did with them. The answer to that parable is directly tied to how much each servant believed in themselves.The rich man returns, rewards the two who made money, but severely punishes the servant who did nothing. To me, every parable of Jesus is directly tied to stopping putting all your talents in a hole, because are we really talking about money anymore? Yes, a talent was a denomination of money, but it extrapolates so well in today’s world. I’ve hid my talents for a long time, and I have a feeling I am not alone. People with much more bravery than me have reaped the reward of putting their talent out into the world and reaping its benefits four, five, even tenfold.

Maybe some of you even go to eleven.

It is here that I owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. By writing out my emotions and examining myself, I have put out a body of work that resonates with others as well, and it provided me the confidence to put my money where my mouth is. I have applied to school again. I have agreed to put on the stole and call myself Christ in the World (as all Christians are, but few go to school for it). I never would have had the confidence to do so if I hadn’t put myself out there on this web site, first. I rescued my talents from their hole in the ground by listening to you when you say that I’m a good writer. I came into myself, realizing that I had more talents than I thought I did. I got away from believing that I wasn’t good enough to fly solo, when in reality, I’ve been ready for a long time, I just didn’t have the chutzpah to GO FOR IT.

It was really the marriage article that did it. In one day, I went from obscurity to Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova and thousands of others knowing who I am, both as a writer and as a person. It encouraged me to keep going… and going… and going. The next article that I wrote was a piece on sex and marriage, which prompted one of my readers to say that maybe I’d end up as a marriage and family counselor. Actually, you get all of that when you put on the stole…. and I would like to think that all of my mistakes in my relationships give me a better idea of what not to tell people in their struggles than being perfect ever would. I feel that all of the changes I am making in my life are preparing me for that Biblical marriage I struggled to have with Dana, and though we failed, I learned things that couldn’t have been learned any other way. I think about her every day, about what went wrong and what went gloriously right. She is literally the best thing that ever happened to me (#lafawnduh) in terms of what an ideal marriage is and the things I’ve learned since in terms of how to keep something like that going- how to keep it sacred.

My next relationship (even if a miracle occurs and Dana and I get back together) will be a reflection of those things, because a relationship with Dana cannot be weighted down with the mistakes of the past. My next relationship will be new, whether it is someone from my past, or someone that I meet here in DC. We both should have turned to the Bible more, and the Internet less. We both should have had more communication and less checking out. We both should have done so many things, and those things I ponder in my heart.

Jesus sets forth the rules for a great marriage, and as Christians, we both ignored those rules when we should have learned them cold. For fuck’s sake, if I’d just taken my own advice in my marriage article, we might not be where we are right now, which is mostly estranged with the occasional e-mail or text. The last communication I got from her was on my birthday, for which I was so grateful because I moped that I hadn’t heard from her right up until I did, and then it seemed like my day was complete. My love for her is so absolute that if I hadn’t heard from her, I think I would still be crying over it.

My cardinal Biblical mistake was putting someone else above her, and it never should have happened. Not in a million years. But it did, because my friendship with Argo consumed me in a way I’d never experienced. She became my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night, but not in a way that I felt superceded Dana, but in retrospect, it did. It’s shitty how hindsight is 20/20. You would have to know all the ins and outs of my friendship with Argo to understand why I felt that way, but it’s not my story to tell. It’s hers.

The point here being that I understand my mistakes, because I’ve been spending a lot of time going over them. Extracting lessons and pain so that I can move forward, even though some of those ruminations pull me back into a time when we were happy- all three of us. It was so good right up until the train ran off the tracks and now I am alone, sitting in a lot of things I wish I could just put into the ground and hide.

But those mistakes are also the basis of why I want to pull everything out and look at it, so I can recover in my own time, enough to be able to take my talents out of the ground and multiply them. As I told my former minister friends, I can see the vision, but I cannot see the staircase…. not yet. But it helps that there are former ministers in my congregation that are willing to impart advice, HARD gained wisdom. And Matt is not shy about sharing his wisdom as well, which makes me feel that I have joined a special group. I have graduated from someone who wants to be a minister someday to asking those who’ve already done it how to create what I want.

They looked at me funny when I talked about not creating by committee. I think they think I want to be some kind of dictator. No, it’s just that I want people who are going to take the God energy emanating from me and put it into action without telling me what I should do. It seems mean. It really does. But at the same time, I do not want to be called to a church already in progress. I want to start my own, and have a denomination approach me, in the same vein as the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas. I am not talking about telling people what to do once the structure is in place. I am perfectly happy to delegate and create. But the vision is mine, and it cannot live in several people at once. It can only live in me, and having to fight an uphill battle every day does not appeal to me. I would rather start a small plant and watch it grow, like a Russian doll. There is a difference between being a visionary and a dictator. Visionaries put ideas in place and have others carry them out. Dictators are micro-managers who cannot let go of anything. Visionaries are open to ideas, but have the freedom to say whether it fits or not. I want a church that is well-run, self-sustaining, and committed to social justice. I believe the way to do that is by working from the top down, not the bottom up. It creates mixed messages and muddled ideas that may or may not move forward because the message is lost, tied up in committee for ages. As the great philosopher Martin Blank once said, look, I don’t want to get into a semantic argument, I just want the protein. I want people to follow me, knowing that the power does not come from within me, but from the holy authority given to me by the power of the stole.

I want to be able to say that I studied for this for a very long time, that I have been working in the church in various capacities since I was ten years old (mostly helping my mom with the children’s choir). I have been a lay preacher, thanks to Susan Leo at Bridgeport UCC, since 2003. When I graduate from Howard with that MDiv, I will have received even more training in the ways of interpreting the Bible, learning how to preach more effectively, and in going to a black school, having more awareness of race relations and how to bridge that gap in my own church. The first thing I want to do is to reach out to the homeless community, which in Silver Spring is almost exclusively black. I want to get in trouble with Jeffrey. I want the government of Montgomery County to know me as a troublemaker. I want to be worthy of an orange reflective vest that says “Clergy” on the back as I am actually walking the streets bringing the light of Christ to people who sorely need it more than I do. I am white. My family comes from money. I have never gone without a thing I need, and rarely gone without anything I wanted. My job is to learn to help people in concrete ways who have never had these things, possibly in their whole lives. When I see homeless teenagers, my heart melts into a puddle on the floor and I have to go into my nothing box just to be able to cope, to be able to calculate my next move without getting too angry or too incapacitated by my own tears to listen to those that need me.

Here’s the first time I learned that lesson. Years ago, I sang with a group called Bayou City Women’s Chorus, conducted by James Knapp. One of the pieces we were singing was called How Can I Keep from Singing, one of the pieces that I loved when Diane introduced it to our choir at Bridgeport, and she later told me that it was sung at a funeral for the family in our church that lost their infant twins. Between those two things, I could not keep my emotions unchecked. I was crying through the whole thing. James was not speaking directly to me, but it felt like it. He said that when we are singing for an audience, the emotions are for the AUDIENCE to have, not us. I have carried that advice ever since, and that’s mostly how I cope with ministry as well. It is not my job to have emotions in situations like this. It is for me to listen while others have theirs.

I was happy and shaken when several people said they wanted to come to my church, because it sounded like their kind of church (in the bulletin it said that I was starting my own church called St. James and All Sinners). I was only shaken because I realized that I needed to have a church as far away from CCC as I could get, because I didn’t want Matt to think I was trying to poach members from him. It’s my dream to start a church, but not at the expense of taking away from CCC. It’s my home. The home that is going to teach me to fly solo, one step at a time.

And this is everything I am thinking as I wait for 3:30, which cannot come fast enough. I have had enough of my own tears.

Amen

No one in my house has codeine, so I am doing my best with my split tooth until tomorrow with Tylenol and Advil. I also bought some ice cream, which I thought would help soften the blow, but as it turns out, not so much. I am having to drink my calories through Carnation Instant Breakfast because the OTC pain meds are taking the edge off, but I still cry when I eat. It’s just unavoidable, and I am not usually a cryer. I used to be. I really used to be. But at the same time, I developed a layer of clinical separation from my emotions so that I can think about things behind it without necessarily flooding out. Sometimes it’s a gift. Sometimes it’s a disaster. But there you go. This whole tooth thing is my undoing, because I cannot hide that much pain.

It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t on codeine today, because I had to be sharp for church. When we did the reception of new members, he told us to introduce ourselves and tell the congregation a little bit about us. Since I’d written nearly everything I wanted to say in the bulletin, I told the story of reading Matt for ages without knowing what he looked like or where he preached on the ground. He wasn’t at CCC when I started reading him, probably in 2008 or 2009, so it was a surprise and a half to walk into a church where I knew someone in the cloud and THERE HE WAS. In the flesh. I ended up telling that story without (thankfully) saying the words “drooling fangirl,” but I got my point across. As I said in my Facebook post about it, it made Matt blush and the congregation clap. #missionaccomplished

We also did a special anthem for the offertory where there was a soprano solo, and Karen, the one who sang it, is one of those voices that brings tears to your eyes because it is so pure and clean… the kind where when you listen to her, you have to will yourself to come in on time. It was gorgeous. Simply gorgeous. I cannot get that tone because my voice is a lot heavier (and LOUDER) than hers, so if I ever sing a solo in church, I hope she is as proud of me as I am of her. We are so different, and therefore we enjoy sitting next to each other. She brings out the best in me, and I hope she feels the same way in return, that I bring out the best in her as well.

And as an aside, the last hymn was cwm rhondda, and I sang the hell out of it. Just enjoyed myself and mad I wasn’t standing next to a bass. And of course I took the highest note possible at the end because I’m a whore like that. Wendy knows. Wendy was the first person to call me a “descant whore,” and Dana thought it was so funny she called me that pretty much the entire time we were married. 🙂

After church, I went down for coffee hour and several people came up to me wanting to know about St. James, and we ended up having a fascinating conversation on how to build a church and a book called Amen that they’re reading in the Contemporary Theology Sunday School class. I bought it for my Kindle as soon as I got home, because I want to go to the class next week. Apparently, this woman is teaching theology in such a way that her parishioners are having trouble following her. I said, that’s probably because she doesn’t teach in parables. I’m reading a book by William Barclay that talks about how Jesus taught in parables so that regular people could understand what he was saying. Here’s my favorite theological joke in the entire world:

Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and James Cone find themselves all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi. Who should come along but Jesus, and he asks the four famous theologians the same Christological question, “Who do you say that I am?”

Karl Barth stands up and says: “You are the totaliter aliter, the vestigious trinitatum who speaks to us in the modality of Christomonism.”

Not prepared for Barth’s brevity, Paul Tillich stumbles out: “You are he who heals our ambiguities and overcomes the split of angst and existential estrangement; you are he who speaks of the theonomous viewpoint of the analogia entis, the analogy of our being and the ground of all possibilities.”

Reinhold Niebuhr gives a cough for effect and says, in one breath: “You are the impossible possibility who brings to us, your children of light and children of darkness, the overwhelming oughtness in the midst of our fraught condition of estrangement and brokenness in the contiguity and existential anxieties of our ontological relationships.”

Finally James Cone gets up, and raises his voice: “You are my Oppressed One, my soul’s shalom, the One who was, who is, and who shall be, who has never left us alone in the struggle, the event of liberation in the lives of the oppressed struggling for freedom, and whose blackness is both literal and symbolic.”

And Jesus says, “what?”

Parables are found in the Old Testament as well, but I don’t think many people know them as such. For instance, let’s talk about Nathan:

Then the Lord sent Nathan to David. And he came to him, and said to him: “There were two men in one city, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had exceedingly many flocks and herds. But the poor man had nothing, except one little ewe lamb which he had bought and nourished; and it grew up together with him and with his children. It ate of his own food and drank from his own cup and lay in his bosom; and it was like a daughter to him. And a traveler came to the rich man, who refused to take from his own flock and from his own herd to prepare one for the wayfaring man who had come to him; but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.”

So David’s anger was greatly aroused against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this shall surely die! And he shall restore fourfold for the lamb, because he did this thing and because he had no pity.”

Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!

David had everything; Uriah had nothing. And yet David sent Uriah to the front lines of war just so he could take his wife. In that parable, David realizes what a delta bravo he was to Uriah… Nathan didn’t say that David was a douchebag to his face. He just pointed him in the right direction.

It’s the same with the parables of Jesus. Metaphors about the ways we act are the foundation of the understanding of theology for the lay person, who isn’t the one that signed up to learn words like “Christomonism” and “Eschatology.” That’s for me. Parables are for you. It’s not my idea. It’s William Barclay’s, but it’s one that I wholeheartedly embrace. I have a whole parable spelled out in my own abuse called “The Wheat and the Weeds.” I realized that no abuser/enabler relationship is without its good moments, and that’s why enablers stay. Especially since Diane was with me in my heart and mind all the time, and I was young enough for her to model speech and enculturation, we have a lot of the same facial expressions, speech patterns, you name it. I realized that trying to get rid of her completely within me was burning down a whole field, because I could not separate the wheat from the weeds without destroying who I am in the process.

When I learned that parable, it beget action. So parables are for everyone, even people who sign up to read Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr, and Cone.

Amen.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have a wallpaper changer app called Variety, and you can set it to put quotes on top of your desktop pictures. When I saw this quote, I realized that Roosevelt could probably understand me better than most, because he was a prisoner in his mind for a lot of his life. If my mind is full, I cannot imagine how his must have burst forth, thinking of things that no one has since (actually, I take that back. The Affordable Health Care Act would have made Roosevelt smile). But the point is that when I read this quote, I thought, “he just gets me.” Roosevelt was in a wheelchair because of polio.

I didn’t walk until I was almost two because my mind developed much faster than my body. I don’t think I’d be able to walk at all without the constant physical therapy that my mother endured, because seeing your child cry is one of the hardest jobs mothers have…. when you know something is good for them, but you see how bad it hurts in the moment and you can’t do anything about it. Miracles happen every day, and the fact that I can walk and talk and speak and write as well as I can is one of them. I have a cerebral palsy, possibly more than one, from being born eight weeks early in a hospital in 1977 and being oxygen deprived in the process. I learned to think much more quickly than I learned to do anything else. I could speak in full sentences at about one, and because I was born so early, I looked like I was half that age. One idiot in the grocery store thought my mom was throwing her voice.

I was a prisoner of my own mind for quite a long time, and I can’t imagine what was running through my head, but I do know that it made me verbally smarter than anyone in any of my classes until I got to college. Even through that, though, I was often a depressed child. I remember one summer when I was about ten or so that I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning, and my parents forced it on me every day- that I couldn’t spend the entire summer in my room sleeping all day. I had to get dressed, take a shower, go to the library, SOMETHING. I knew I wasn’t acting normally. There’s a difference between a kid off for the summer that sleeps late and someone who cannot perpetually propel themselves. I was a prisoner of my own mind, although it was years and years afterward that I was finally diagnosed with depression and even more years that I was diagnosed as bipolar so that I could get the right treatment for what ailed me. Getting a mood stablilizer on board was like getting new glasses- for the first time I knew what it was like to live without depression, and I knew that because my mood and behavior became lighter, more playful as the drug took effect… because let’s face it. I am hilarious when I am not mired in illness.

I still have ups and downs, but the swings are less frequent and disparate. Sometimes, I am comfortable as the life of the party. Sometimes I just want you to get off my lawn.

A prisoner of my own mind and what I think I can do with it.

On my best days, I see a church with hundreds of members all dedicated to social justice. We feed the homeless. We invite the homeless into the building and let them sit next to us. We baptize them if they want it… because the church is not the building, but the acceptance of everyone who shows up. On my worst days, I see a writer who can never finish a book, can never get out into the community enough to start the projects she wants to finish, because it’s just too hard. When you have depression, things that are easy for most people seem insurmountable for you. My darkest moments are Dana asking why they let me out of the hospital to begin with, as if I belonged there as easily as the furniture.

I crumpled in the face of it, because I wasn’t ready to leave the hospital, either. My nurse practitioner said that the ward was quiet all weekend, and she didn’t think I would get much therapeutically out of staying, so she was going to send me home to start outpatient. I agreed with her that it was a good treatment plan, and the thought of going home to Dana was comforting….. right up until I got there. She told me with finality that we were not getting back together when we were on the phone together at the hospital, and I uninvited her from visiting me because I needed to cry out my hope. I still do, in a lot of ways.

And that’s what this time of single-ness is for. Crying out hope, and making room for new people in my life. I am doing fine with making friends, but most of the time, I am content to be trapped in my own mind, because I have to learn to take care of myself, first.

In terms of taking care of myself, today is terrible. My entire body aches as if I am coming down with something, and I have split a tooth down to the nerve and it hurts so bad I’ve cried off and on all day. This is the exact reason I am glad I didn’t move in by myself. When I’m sick or upset or depressed, there are people here to catch me.

In fact, Samantha and I were talking the other day and she said, “Leslie, I think there was a reason you were sent to us.” It was music to my ears….. in a major key.

Sarah (my therapist) did not have any homework for me this week, which is really cramping my style. Her homework assignments have turned into writing prompts for this web site…….. good ones. In terms of visits and views, A Letter to Someone Who Hurt You has been shared around and it upped my stats considerably. That’s not why I wrote it, of course, but it doesn’t suck that people are identifying with the pain I’m going through. I have a sneaking suspicion that lots of people can relate to what’s going on with me…. it’s just that maybe they’re not writers or they haven’t found the courage to take up their own emotional space. What keeps me going is that anything I write could help someone else, so seeing stats going up doesn’t feed my ego so much as give me a community to work with. Shared pain is so much better than going through it alone, and even if people don’t comment, I see the resonance in graphs and social media buttons. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Dana about a year ago:

Leslie: I think one of the things that makes Argo so sacred to me is that when I’m sitting there alone, writing to her, she gets into my God space, and even when I’m not sure God is listening, I know she is.

Dana: (tears in her eyes) Go tell her. Right now.

It’s the same way with all of you. I put my prayers for the future and the pain of my past right out here for everyone to see because I know you’re listening. You get into my God space because when I am writing, there is never anyone here with me. I require it. I sit here with a diet grape soda or a Gosling’s ginger beer and type away at 80wpm. My fingers fly on the keyboard and it makes me happy because my fingers can keep up with my thoughts as they happen. Therefore, you are also getting that same slice of time. It is not all of me, it is a timestamp designed to tell you what I’m feeling in the moment. Tomorrow, it may change. Or not. It depends on what kind of interactions I’ve had that day. Maybe something has changed my mind, and maybe not. That’s the thing about being open-minded. People think you’re being hypocritical, when in reality, I don’t believe that the mind stays stagnant on much of anything.

Argo has said that when we fight and I also send love that hypocrisy is unbecoming. I told her that I didn’t see it that way, and I could see her eyebrows raising FROM HERE. I told her it was closer to looking up at the Sistine Chapel and having ALL THE FEELS. I don’t just have one set of feelings about anybody, and it has never occurred to me that you couldn’t be angry at someone and love them at the same time.

For instance, I love Dana. I love her more than myself at times. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to kick her ass. Some of the things she’s said to me still haunt me, and there are moments when I cannot sleep, I am ruminating so hard. She pushed me away from Argo for nothing, because Argo was never a threat and yet was constantly treated that way. She told me I would never amount to anything. She threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave her alone when we were having a simple conversation. It seemed especially designed to make me feel smaller than I already do. Fortunately, I didn’t take the bait.

I did in terms of Argo. I fucked that relationship up all to hell because I thought it would save my relationship with Dana…. would prove to her that she meant more to me than Argo because that’s how she felt. It didn’t work, and it caused more emotional damage to both Argo and me than, I think, any relationship I’ve ever had. That’s because we both fought like we were trying to cut each other off at the knees, and there wasn’t any part of us that could say, “ummmm…. wait a minute. Let’s back off before we say things we can’t take back.” Dana and I were fairly emotionally intelligent about fighting right up until we weren’t. Argo and I had both guns on the table pretty quick, because it’s easy to do when you can’t see each other’s eyes when you’re talking.

I was just this first child bulldog that couldn’t submit. To either of them…. and that’s possibly the only thing that would have saved either relationship.

Submission to Dana would have been, “I’m sorry I let an Internet relationship get out of hand so that I was spending more time on it than was comfortable for you. I’ll back off.”

Submission to Argo would have been, “you’re right. I wasn’t taking your feelings into account and I need to do a better job before I lose you, because it will happen if I let it.”

As a first child and as a master manipulator because of the “way I was raised,” I couldn’t submit to anyone, or even need them in the way that made them feel needed, wanted, vital to my life in a way that no one has been before or since. Most people only get those relationships once in a lifetime, and I screwed both of them up to the point that it’s going to take all of us a long time to get over it…. particularly with Argo, because I said some shitty, shitty words to her on the way out, trying to slam the door so she’d go away on her own and I wouldn’t have to make her. It’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life, because at least with Dana, I got to hug her and kiss her cheek and tell her goodbye. With Argo, I just acted like a jackass and there was no excuse for my behavior. I knew she was threatened by my attraction to her and I knew that it would be the shortest path to getting her to stop contacting me, so I capitalized on it, and as soon as the words left my mouth, I crumpled in agony because I knew I had said something I couldn’t take back and I wanted to with all my might, because I didn’t really feel that way. I was in love with the idea of her, not the reality. I was in love with this fictional character that I’d made up based on her. Who knows what she’s really like? Maybe one day I’ll find out. But not any time soon, that’s for damn sure.

I beat myself up a lot because I think I deserve it, and in no small measure, I do. I will never progress beyond acting as small and immature as I did without growing the fuck up. I am in hell over the relationship with Argo because I was responsible for treating her like shit when I really didn’t have to. I just did. There’s no excuse in the world that’s good enough, and it’s only been recently that we have come to a place of peace. Neither one of us want toxicity and hate running between us, so I printed out an e-mail that she sent me with lots of love and I keep it in the small pocket of my Kindle so that it’s with me every day. I look at it when I feel wrecked, or when I just need a confidence boost that though we may not communicate, we are no longer at war. Feeling like death warmed over all day, every day was just not working out for me, and now that feeling is gone….. mostly…. because when I get into a worthlessness loop, I take out that e-mail and read it again.

It was amazing how relatively easy it was to say goodbye to Dana in comparison, because even though she told me that she thought I had the capability to reach millions and she was jealous, she also told me that I would never amount to anything. In my worthlessness loop, guess which words stuck?

I try and overcome those words every fucking day. EVERY. FUCKING. DAY. I told Sarah that I didn’t want every session to be me bitching about my problems, that I wanted to do some visioning and values as well. Sort of a gestalt approach so that I can feel like I am more that the sum of my parts, because most of those parts feel like I can’t handle anything, that I’ll just fuck it up, so why even try?

The exception to that is looking for jobs. I had a lunch meeting with my friend Kathy, whom I met when I lived here before when she was working at Congressional Quarterly and Politico gave her an obscene amount of money to be able to poach her. I have several avenues to get into web production for several government web sites, and that is the kind of stuff that feeds me…. at least while I’m going to school and need money to support myself and this monster vision I have planned for later. I only need to raise about 15 million dollars. Mere pocket change…. but that is later. This is now.

As I am waiting for all of these things to happen, I am reading like a mad man. I just finished The Time Traveler’s Wife, and now I’m reading Things Fall Apart.

But hopefully, I’ll get to write the book Things Get Glued Back Together.

It’s true. I don’t want to write today. I feel like I’ve poured myself out on the page lately, and I am emotionally exhausted. However, that’s what a writer does. Gets emotionally exhausted and keeps going. It’s like an Energizer bunny of sad until it’s all out. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about how I wrecked my life from the ground up, and how much I miss Dana and Argo and Aaron and the whole bit until it got weird.

Actually, that sums up a lot of the last two years. It got weird.

I’m feeling particularly crispy today because I’m going back to Alexandria to hang out with my sister, who’s staying there at a conference for her work. Going back physically is hard work mentally, because there are so many things on that side of town that I’ve been trying not to feel since 2002. The hotel where I’m going is close to “our” old movie theater, and that shouldn’t seem like much, but it is. I remember clearly packing up our townhouse and feeling like the world was going to end and saying, “Leenie (my nickname for Kathleen), can we just take a break? I am too emotional to do anything right now. Let’s go to the movies.” We saw Blue Crush. I thought it was a terrible movie, but a great escape from the task at hand. It was doubly hard not being able to take her hand in the movie, because it was my natural instinct and she’d already fucked three of her coworkers just for spite. I couldn’t decide whether to be mad, or just enjoy the few hours we had left together where we weren’t at each other’s throats over the furniture. Someone close to me that I will not mention told me to just put it out in the front yard while it was raining.

I did not.

I participated in the end of that relationship. She chose the trump card of adultery, but I was mentally ill and had been let go from ExxonMobil, so now I was mentally ill without health insurance. I was too much for her to handle, because I couldn’t own my half of the relationship. Depression had gotten ahold of me and wouldn’t let go. However, in that case, I couldn’t really be blamed for it. I mean, I take responsibility for my *behavior* during that time, which was mostly nothing (it’s amazing how much doing nothing is doing everything)… but at the same time, I had a TERRIBLE psychiatrist that just kept adding pills to my protocol hoping they would help.

They did not.

I was on Lexapro, Wellbutrin, and Adderall all at the same time. I am bipolar, but we didn’t know that at the time. So they were just throwing all these drugs at me to treat unipolar and ADD and surprise, surprise, not only did they not work, they threw me into a level of frantic anxiety I haven’t seen before or since. Well, maybe lately, but this time I have a great psychiatrist, a great therapist, and the RIGHT diagnosis. Then, it was more like, “let’s put you on THIS for a few weeks and see if it does anything.” Yes. My psychiatrist actually said that. I don’t think “let’s see if it does anything” is said by the people that graduate first in their class in medical school.

It was a nightmare, and I am sure that adultery was sheer escapism. At the time, I blamed Kathleen for leaving me when I needed her the most, because she did. Straight up. But at the same time, allowing myself to see her side of the story gave me a bit of power. I wasn’t as much of a victim as I thought I was. I went through a grieving period, but the pain was much less intense when I realized that even if I only had 10% of the blame, I needed to own my fucking 10% for all it was worth.

I’m sure I had a lot more than 10% responsibility. I am just using it as an example of taking back my own power. I let her have so much when I was sick, and our patterns of behavior were just outrageous to begin with. I married her because it was comfortable. Being treated like crap was what I knew, and her control freak nature fit me perfectly. It was okay that she blew up at me when something wasn’t done her way. It was okay that we fought all the time over stupid shit because to talk about real emotions was just beyond her capabilities…. It was okay that she wanted to run my life and rage at me that I wasn’t doing enough, because when I tried to assert doing things my way, it caused an avalanche of emotional violence. I married a pattern instead of a person, and it was totally okay with me, because I didn’t know any different.

She accused me all the time of falling down on the job, and wouldn’t let me stand up, either. It was a trap. I didn’t know which way to go or which end was up. I was shat upon no matter what I did.

But I felt justified in my unworthiness, so being treated like crap was something that didn’t even register. It was just the way things were.

Being in therapy makes me feel more powerful, because “if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” I have been struck down, over and over, because of unworthiness. I feel bad about my sins, so therefore, living in perpetual punishment looks attractive.

No More.

No. More.

Sarah and I have a lot of work to do, and I have a lot of work to do on my own. I do not want to live in the darkness, but walk in the light. Part of walking in light is recording everything here, because then I can go back and re-live what I was feeling in those moments and hopefully not revisit them in later relationships. I have, for lack of a better description, an instruction manual on What Not to Do.™

For someone who didn’t want to write today, it seems like I found something to say. Let’s hope I learned something from it, because that’s what I hope every day. I am grateful that leaving Houston and heading for Silver Spring got me into a great mental health system and a loving family all at the same time. In fact, we are having some morning sickness around here…………. stay tuned.

I am joining the church next Sunday, and they’ve asked me to write a short bio of myself for the bulletin. One thing I will NOT put in is that I use TextWeek for sermon prep, so I have been following Matt Braddock at Dry Bones Arise for YEARS without knowing it was him. You’d think I would have read the “about me” section, and yet not. I am drooling fangirl impressed over him, and it was like meeting Oprah or Matt Damon when I realized I’d just walked into the church of someone I already knew in text, but had never met on the ground. Speaking of Matt, he told me that I made a good impression on the youth pastor search committee, and he’d be willing to ask the woman that got the job to mentor me if I’d like so that I had more experience to put on my resume. So, this man I’ve been reading for years now wants me to talk about next steps in terms of working with youth, ordination, etc. Can you look into my heart and see how much it means to me? I am flabbergasted. Simply shocked beyond all measure.

Drooling. Fangirl. I try not to show it, but OMG. I walked into the church and HE wants to help ME.

That’s a God moment right there if ever I’ve seen it.

So, here’s my bio. I hope it works. We’ll see once it’s printed.

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Leslie Lanagan is a native Texan and preacher’s kid, which is code for having lived in lots of places across the state. She settled in Houston from the age of 12, with detours in both Portland, Oregon and Alexandria, Virginia. She comes to us with the dream of being a DC-based writer and theologian. She has applied at Howard University to eventually earn a Masters of Divinity and later start a church of her own, tentatively named “St. James and All Sinners.” She is looking forward to volunteering with the youth group, singing in the choir, and drinking as much coffee after worship as possible. When she is not delving into theology, she is fond of going to the zoo and all of the other Smithsonian museums to gather inspiration.

My new URL for my blog feed is now at a Facebook Page address instead of my personal account. To join, please use this address instead:

https://www.facebook.com/StoriesThatAreAllTrue

It was the right thing to do. While it looks like I have less followers than I did before, I get a whole bunch more analysis than I did before in terms of how many people my posts reach. On paper (or on web site) it looks like I have a whole bunch less followers than I did, because it’s counting how many people are joining the page instead of all my personal followers, but in the cost/benefit analysis, it pays off in spades. Now I have a true picture of how many people are following my writing instead of looking at my own feed. It scared the hell out of me at first, because I was all like, “I only have 75 followers now?” And then I realized that it was taking my followers based on how many people were subscribed to the page instead of me and I felt all better. 🙂

If you haven’t had a chance to like my page so that it appears in your own Facebook feed, please do. It would be fun to actually build a community (obscure inside joke that goes all the way back to Con Law with Jill and Lindsay) based on my writing and how people respond to it, as well as using the page itself for Fanagan interaction. If you’re interested, I also have Fanagan t-shirts on CafePress. Let me know if you want one in the comments- for some reason, CafePress is being a little bitch and not loading correctly at the moment.

My favorite thing that I’ve made is a yellow messenger back that says “F*ck Comic Sans” in Comic Sans to be hipster ironic. Yes, I just said that.

It would rock my world if my international fans sign up, because I love that I am often more popular in Great Britain than I am here in the US. Perhaps it’s because I’m a Doctor Who fan and connected by an umbilical cord to the BBC, but who knows? I also have a big following in Australia, which is one of my favorite things on earth because I figure a country made from convicts is my kind of audience.

There’s so much I want to do with my Facebook Page. I want it to start the dialogue about so many things. I’m interested in politics, religion, movies, books (especially books), food, theology… you name it, and I probably have something to say about it. Plus, I’m not interested in what I think nearly as much as I am interested in what you think. The page is specifically designed for us to gather, because as I have said before, this is just as much your web site as it is mine. The comments mean so much more to me than my own writing sometimes, because I cannot always believe that God can hear my prayers and thoughts, but I can hang my hat on the fact that you do.

Religion is a spectrum, and I waffle all the time as to whether God is really there, and I would not be a good human being or pastor if I didn’t admit that up front. What rescues my faith week after week is going to church and FEELING the presence as we all gather together, and that something HAPPENS in the Eucharist. When we eat this bread and drink this cup, it is an ablution that I do not get anywhere else…. plus the feeling that every week, I am forgiven for the darkness that resides inside me, and I know that I am being brought into the light, one prayer and one piece of bread at the same time.

In terms of laughing at the Eucharist, I always go back to Bless Me, Ultima by Isabel Allende. The main character, a boy child, is Catholic. Catholics believe in an idea called transubstantiation, which is the idea that when you put the bread in your mouth, it literally becomes the body of Christ…. and the little boy wonders what to do when Christ gets stuck to the roof of his mouth. The first time I read that line, I nearly fell off the couch laughing.

In the UCC, we take communion metaphorically in remembrance of Jesus, but it is no less powerful. The only thing I don’t like is that there is not a kneeling rail. There is something comforting about it, even though I cannot put my finger on what it is. I know for sure that when my faith in God wavers (wafers?), it is the Eucharist that brings me back around, because even if I am not particularly faithful that week, I can show up and do the ritual. The ritual is the cleansing part of the service that makes me realize just how much the presence of God is in the room…. a never-ending loop that waffles (Leggo my Eggo, bitch).

I want people to take this journey with me, to open the dialogue between everyone from atheists to evangelicals. If I am called to be Christ in the world (like all Christians are), my job is to bridge gaps, not create them. With every Amazon gift certificate I’ve been given (it was my birthday on Sept. 10th), I have bought books that I will need as I walk my path of faith. This week it was some of the works of William Barclay, a Glaswegian professor of Biblical criticism that literally feeds my soul. Best. Presbyterian. Ever. I’ve also gotten copies of everything Nadia Bolz-Weber has written, except for her newest one- Salvation on the Small Screen?

In terms of the Barclay books, I accidentally ordered Vol. II instead of Volume I with, I think, Matthew. I just have to hope that if there is a passage on Matthew in the Revised Common Lectionary that it’s toward the back. 🙂 I also made it a point of ordering both volumes of John, because here’s the skinny on that. Mark, Matthew, and Luke are called the “synoptik” gospels, a Greek word meaning “seen together.” They are all taken from a source document that theologians call “Q.” John is a completely different animal, the only one called the gnostic gospel. It’s not necessarily  harder to understand, but since it stands alone, it meant more to me to have those two first.

By the time I finished buying those, I had about three dollars left, which I spent on the second book in a series that Meg recommended to me called The Soulkeepers Series, by an author named G. P. Ching. I haven’t finished the first one yet, but it is so interesting that I definitely want to know what happens. No spoilers. I hate that. Anyway, it’s science fiction, which I love as long as it starts in reality and delves deeper into the supernatural. Any book that starts out in fantasy is one where I have trouble keeping everyone’s names straight. My favorite science fiction writer is Michael Chrichton, and I am pissed off that he’s dead. In fact, I am angry that a lot of people are dead and stupid people live. For instance, I would do just about anything to bring David Halberstam and Christopher Hitchens back. You’d think I wouldn’t love Hitchens, but I do. I have been addicted to him since I started reading Vanity Fair. Speaking of Vanity Fair, there will never be another writer like Dominic Dunne, the diarist that covered the criminal trials of the “rich and the very, very rich.” I would trade him for both Donald Trump and Sarah Palin put together, but don’t tell them I said that. It just seems rude.

So, I hope I am making a play to sound interesting enough to follow. We shall see. I love “all y’all” and want to see us grow beyond me talking about myself… because I’m hilarious AND tired of hearing my own voice at the same time.

Welcome to “Stories.” We’ll leave the light on for ya.

Sarah gave me some homework to do, which is to write a letter to someone who has hurt you. I told her that I feel like I do enough of that on my blog, and should I just print some stuff out, or write a new one? She said, “either or both.”

Here is my response.

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Dear Leslie,

When Sarah gave you this assignment, she said to write to someone who’d hurt you. No one ever hurts you more than you. You’ve coasted on charm a lot of your life, but not maliciously… because you didn’t ever have enough bravery to look at the pain roiling underneath… or perhaps that’s unfair. It was so far down that it wouldn’t have occurred to you to look. Covering up all that anger led you to be your own worst enemy, because it left emotional blind spots in your heart and mind that have led you to lie, cheat, and steal just to fight your way to the middle. It’s disheartening watching you fight for the middle when you were born with so much visionary capability. You want to see things as they can be, and not as they are. While most people accuse you of living in the clouds, they do not have the capability to take that idealistic version of the world and implement it. That’s what visionaries do. It hurts to watch you squander all that talent because you are afraid to fail and afraid to succeed in equal measure. So you hide, and it’s one of the most self-destructing things you can do, but you do it anyway, year after year.

You don’t want to succeed because you know that in some ways, succeeding means making some people angry. No one is ever going to live your life for you, and you haven’t had the tools to take criticism, not to care when other people hurt because you are entitled to your own emotional space in the world, just like they are. It is not your job just to let everyone tell you what would be best for you and then to do it.

It’s painful to watch, this looking at you trying to get ahead and holding steadfastly to treading still water, so that not even the current is carrying you. You’ve had great jobs, great relationships… and yet, none of them seem to last as long as you want them to. The way you sabotage yourself is intensely frightening, and I hurt for all the moments that you’ve seen everything slipping away and haven’t had the tools to stop it from happening.

I hurt for every moment you’ve felt small in someone else’s presence, because not thinking that you have as much power in the relationship as someone else has led you to try and make yourself feel even smaller than they ever could’ve. Molehills become mountains and you don’t know what to do… don’t have the tools to know how to react to a molehill so that it stays that way. Every mistake is gargantuan. Every time you hurt someone’s feelings, you scream and cry so much more than times you’ve hurt yourself. Self-preservation has been gone for you a long time, so that when you enter into any relationship, there’s no way for you to handle conflict without always thinking the other person is right and going home and abusing yourself… and when you can’t be angry at the people who deserve it, you’re angry at the people you love. Innocent bystanders are tired of it, and I watch it hurt you because you cannot see the consequences to your actions, and people you love don’t understand why. Don’t understand why you don’t fit in, don’t see as they do, don’t know things that “God, everybody knows THAT.” Your abuse begets abuse to those around you, but not more than yourself, because you are in so much pain.

That abuse takes many forms, but most of it is in your mind. You think you are unworthy, and so you act like it. You don’t go out of your way to interact with people, because the less people you meet, the less room there is for any kind of conflict. You are happiest alone, and that probably hurts most of all, because you also know that you are hilariously funny and people love to be around you. It’s you that doesn’t want to be around them. It has caused you to focus inward to the point that even the people who love you are mystified as to why you don’t want to see them, don’t want to talk, don’t want any interaction past a few instant messages because they cannot see that you do not want to do anything wrong, say anything wrong, give anyone any reason anywhere to doubt that you are perfect. Because if you cannot be perfect and someone points out a flaw, they cannot see the hours of rumination you will attach to a moment they won’t even remember later. People think you are being selfish when they cannot get you to interact, but you rarely feel like it because that requires putting on a mask of massive proportions so that even if someone does point out one of your flaws, they’ll think you’re having a normal reaction because they cannot see all the threads that braid in your subconscience that you will interrogate later.

Your pain is mine and mine is yours, but we approach it quite differently. As the part of your mind that can comment on the rest of you, I see things that you don’t. I see that you are very much enjoyed when you are with other people. I also see that you cannot need them, because eventually, they’ll need you, and you know you’re going to disappoint them, anyway, so you back away without making friends. Being in community with other people is excruciating, because you know that you’ll forget to bring food to the potluck and forget to bring those pencils and water bottles you said you’d bring to choir last week… and in your innermost self, you also know that when you forget those small things, you’ll back away from the community altogether in your shame. You forget why you wanted to join a community in the first place, because it’s easier to be alone. There’s no shame in forgetting something if it only affects you.

You don’t know that people are generally willing to forgive you for forgetting small things, but to you, those are the big things…. or they will be, once you get done with yourself. You can barely handle getting yourself out the door, so it’s not surprising that you feel you continually disappoint others because you won’t engage. No, a Halloween party does not sound fun, because you have to dress up to go to those things and your costume will never be right enough, and you feel you know this up front, so it’s easier to stay home. You know you are not gifted that way, and as a perfectionist, you cannot walk into a party looking like a five-year-old made your costume… although if a five-year-old did make your costume, you would wear it.

Your love is gigantic, but few people know it due to the way you’ve let them down. Because you can only take care of yourself, you have no concept of what it’s like to be able to function in a group of friends who love and take care of each other. You never mean to be selfish, you just don’t want to do anything wrong, so it’s better to do nothing at all. You protect yourself to the point that every day is survival mode, and it’s painful watching your “failure to thrive”condition.

I see you with these glimpses of confidence, but they never last very long. You’re surprised that when you ask a girl to dance, she says yes. You’re surprised when people call you attractive. You’re surprised when people tell you that you are brilliant, because when they do, you know it is a lie of immense proportions. When you told Argo that you were fascinated by her brain, you meant that it was strong and vulnerable, angry and hilarious. That there wasn’t a day that went by that you didn’t think you’d ever met anyone smarter or more capable. When she said that she was fascinated by yours, you felt like an animal in the zoo… because why would someone like that think your brain was equally interesting? It couldn’t be. You missed a compliment of massive proportions due to your own unworthiness, and you miss them a lot, from everyone, due to the exact same thing. Your compliments to them are genuine, and their compliments to you are lies.

Watching you feel worthless is hurting me. Which is hurting you. Which is hurting me.

Leslie

My friend Stephanie just asked me if I have any tattoos. I said, “I have five.” She said, “do they have meaning?” I said, “yes.” And just waited. 😛 When she asked the inevitable, I told her I thought it would make a good blog entry and to please hold (your call is very important to us).

5. Tribal Dragonfly

The first shall be last and the last shall be first. This tattoo was not my first one, but it had the most significance until, well, if you’re even a casual reader, you’ve probably picked up on why… or you will when I tell you that it’s been Diane’s totem animal for the longest. I’d just left Portland behind, didn’t even want her to know about it. Just wanted to mark that time as significant in my life, because my life is literally defined by “before” and “after” in terms of the moment we walked into each other’s lives.  It’s on my back, somewhere. I can’t look at my back easily, so it’s been what seems like years since I’ve seen it. And then I moved back to Portland and never went swimming.

Eventually, this one will be covered up. I’ve already met with the artist (that was done over a year ago) and I know what it will be… a dragon breathing fire, encircling the dragonfly and singing it with greys and blacks. Because sometimes you can’t put out fire with water. You have to bring in a bigger fire. If that can’t be done because the lines on the dragonfly aren’t clear enough to be recreated, I’m still planning something for that area. Just not ready to let go of what it might be.

4. Celtic Knot

You’re never supposed to get matching tattoos in a relationship because what if it ends? So Dana and I got matching tattoos significant to our own families so that if we did break each other’s hearts, it wasn’t like she had a Leslie tattoo and vice versa. My last name is Lanagan, and she took my name when we married. Her grandmother’s last name was Mahoney, or as she says with a thick brogue, “we think it was O’MAhoney at some point.” The first time I talked to Dana after I’d gotten settled here was that they were our honing beacons. 😛 It’s also on my back, closer to the base of my spine.

3. Ichthus

My ichthus was my first tattoo. I designed it myself in Photoshop- the fish is a little rounder than usual, but that’s to accommodate YHWH in Hebrew in the middle. You would think that this would be at the top of the list, since my faith has so much say in who I am. But not more than these next two.

2. A Quill Dripping Blood

Based on an old saying that’s been attributed to many, many people: “Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and slice open a vein.” It’s on my left forearm.

1. $1.83

When I was working at Biddy McGraw’s in Portland, Oregon, we had a customer there we affectionately called “Bourbon Bill.” I’d just started my blog and was having some amount of success with it, but Bill was not buyin’ it. He said, “HOW MUSH HAB YOU MADE AS A WRITER?!” I said, “nothing.” He took all the money he had in his pants pockets and dumped it into my hands, saying, “THERE! NOW YOU’RE A PROFESSHIONAL WRITER!” The total was, in fact, $1.83. You cannot even imagine his face because he just did not know what to do when I started crying so hard I couldn’t even stand up. It was a MOMENT. I knew I wanted to remember it forever, and I’m so glad that I made the steps to ensure I always will. Plus, I will never forget FALLING OUT with laughter when Dana’s ex, Carol, saw my quill tattoo for the first time. She said, “aren’t you right-handed?” I’ve been laughing about that one for, oh, 11 years now? So this one’s on my right wrist.

What are yours?

Today’s soundtrack is Chopin, because he brings out ALL THE FEELS.

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Just because the name “Diane Syrcle” doesn’t hold weight in my heart anymore (that was a lie, but I tell myself that every day so it must be true) does not mean that I have gotten out of the worthlessness loop that started when we met. That’s because there were three things going on at the same time that told me I wasn’t worthwhile.

When I told Diane that people had confronted me about her being a lesbian, like I’ve said before, she didn’t confirm or deny. Just said, “how would you feel if people someday said that about you?” I’m sorry, someday? In that moment I knew it was true.

The second was my adult friends’ assessment of the situation, that our relationship was somehow unclean. Just like with my little sister, Diane and I were allowed to fight but say one word about her that’s negative where I can hear it and I will fucking end you… or at least, that’s how I felt at the time. I was just a kid. I didn’t have any power, and I certainly didn’t have the forethought to know that they were right. Do you remember the Anne of Green Gables movie with Megan Follows? I always thought that Anne and Diana were a little bit in love with each other, and that’s how this felt. I was very, very, very high on dopamine for the first time in my life. Surely you recall the first time you felt it, too. The other quote that always gets me comes from “My So-Called Life,” when Rayanne’s mother is trying to explain the friendship between Rayanne and Angela to Angela’s mother. She says, “Angela is the only person that, to Rayanne, puts the world in color.” I’m paraphrasing, but it’s stuck with me since I heard it the first time.

Two years later, I crashed. Diane moved to Dallas and my heart broke so badly that I physically thought I was going to die. Anxiety and panic will do it to you every time. It was the summer before ninth grade, and I couldn’t imagine starting high school without her. Ryan and I had mutually broken up because he kissed another girl at summer camp and I was in love with someone else. It was like, the high-five of breakups. It wasn’t like he couldn’t tell, in some sense, because she was all I talked about. If Tiger Beat had published her photos, they would have been plastered all over my wall. Since she was a schoolteacher, I had her school photos and an autographed (squee!) program from her goodbye concert in the corner of my dresser’s mirror. My dad called it my “Diane Syrcle” shrine and I almost kicked him in the shins because he thought that was HILARIOUS. I did not. We are talking 15-year-old righteous indignation here. There’s not much more powerful than that kind of stare. I learned to forge her signature because I thought it was cool, and as I explained to her, she couldn’t autograph a thousand CDs all by herself. It came in handy as book cover decoration and twice as bad grades that had to have an adult sign to say they’d read them (Sorry, Mom… statute of limitations and all that).

The third thing was one paragraph in the United Methodist Discipline explaining that “homosexuality was incompatible with Christian teaching,” or something asinine like that. I mean, at least if you’re going to be a raging homophobe, John Wesley is a great example of wording it politely, if you really want to know (I see what I did there… I got all Caulfield up in this bitch). The dark underbelly was feeling like I was incompatible with Christian teaching as well. I was just this big ball of anxiety and rage, and as you can tell from this web site, I haven’t exactly progressed from it in other relationships, either. It is my work to do with Sarah, my therapist, to move on from this darkness into the light.

The dark is strong in this one, but at least I come by it honestly.

I moved to Portland thinking that Diane and I could pick up where we left off, but she was so over it… and again, my heart broke into a million pieces with everyone else trying to pick me up when I fell. My friend Anne told me, and I will never forget this, to whisper all my hurt and rage into a rock and when I was finished, to throw it into the Columbia River.
I did.

Later, my friend Wendy (whom I used to call the poet laureate of N. 54th St.) said that the Columbia River goes around “Cape Disappointment” before it reaches the Pacific Ocean. I found it appropriate, named for the point at which Lewis & Clark thought the river ended and later found out that it went to the Pacific Ocean after all. I know that my rock didn’t make it to the Cape, but the water around it certainly did, carrying all my secrets with it.

There were quite a few rocks, actually…. all at different points in my Portland experience because when Diane was warm and affectionate toward me, the rest of the world faded away. Then, I’d open up to her and she’d run, so there’d be another trip, as my friend Karen says, “out the Gorge.”

My worthlessness loop didn’t really get any better until I truly befriended Dana, because when I told her my secrets and lies, she told me hers. It was an equal relationship, one in which I got back everything I put into it… and it was the first time I’d even been open to the idea. I was used to feeling like shit. It was foreign to me to be happy, and to have someone validate my pain because she knew Diane and could vouch for both sides of the equation because she could see it.

Happiness lasted longer with Dana than it had with anyone else, but the darkness returned in a big way as I started to vomit emotions everywhere the deeper Argo dived into the wreck, because she could see things that I couldn’t, and it wasn’t a matter of convincing me I’d been emotionally abused. It was that the more I talked, the more her alarm bells went off.

It hadn’t been all sweetness and light. Plus, since Dana was reading everything going between Argo and me, she was sythesizing information just as fast. They were a support system of enormous proportions, and it just turned Dana into a rabid dog because no one hurts more than when they’re watching the one they love suffer. There were times when she hurt so much more than me that she literally sat on her hands not to throttle Diane in the street.

During my friendship with Dana, I moved to Houston and moved back to Portland less than two years later. While I was gone, she seethed over Diane and me to the point that Diane didn’t go into the grocery store where Dana worked for eight months… and then was surprised when she wanted my contact information and Dana wouldn’t give it to her. Dana said she had to ask if I wanted it. Dana wasn’t nearly half as dumb as I was.

Hindsight is 20/20, but at the same time, it was also the reason I knew I was marrying the right woman. She knew all my shit and wanted to marry me, anyway… and as our relationship went on, her love just became too clean for me. Too much sludge in my soul not to feel justified in being treated like shit, so I sought out things to encourage it… things that were ultimately dealbreakers for Dana, and there were many, not just one.

As a result of all of these things, Christianity is hard. Nadia Bolz-Weber says that I should take a page from Martin Luther’s book and when shame threatens to overwhelm me, I “should throw things and get angry and say, ‘I AM BAPTIZED.’” Not “I was, but I am.”

Shame, redemption, and relief. Emphasis on the “redemption and relief,” appogiaturas intact if you’re humming the hymn in your head. Like Nadia, I just can’t pull off Atheism because in no way do I mean disrespect, but there’s no atonement in it for me. When I feel lower than low, I need someone to say that I am forgiven, because I won’t say it on my own. I hope my ego never gets so big that I think I don’t need it. As my worthiness and visioning capabilities go up, I will need God more and not less, because if I don’t, it will cause me to think I’m right (and righteous) way more than is humanly necessary. I’ve just realized that now I’ve pulled myself out of the shame so bad it nearly killed me into the will to survive.

On some days, I even think I’m thriving.

Amen.

When I write letters, I use notebook paper. It’s not fancy, it’s just comforting… kind of like writing notes to friends in school when I was young. The other day I wrote six pages to Argo, a letter that won’t be sent but just live in one of my dresser drawers. I write like that a lot. I still have a 15 page letter I wrote to Katharin somewhere in my archives. I don’t talk about Katharin much, only because there’s a lot of pain and sludge in my soul about that relationship. The point is not Katharin. The point is that sometimes, it’s the writing of the letters that brings the most ablution, not the mailing of them. I’d never put it together before, but perhaps there’s a reason why water and lines on notebook paper are both blue… they both bring out the most peace the longer you stare at them.

On those blue lines, my relationships with people can be what I need them to be instead of what they are. By not sending the letters on them, I can imagine a response instead of getting one. It’s part of my personality- the vision of what things can be instead of cold, hard reality. Imagination has become not so much with the escapism, but the creation of the future I want instead of the one I thought I would have in the years BA (before Argo). I’ve written before that Argo helped me kill the monster under my bed. In the years BA, that monster tied me to the cold, hard reality that I would never get what I wanted… and rumination to change that existence ate up any room I had to process what my life looked like outside of it. I couldn’t let go of the past because on blue lines, I tried to change it every single day.

Here is an excerpt from thinking about that time, in a blog entry from 2012 called When We Were Young:

I went to school and suffered through every class. Nothing mattered except making it to 6:00 PM, where I was supposedly doing homework and realistically writing you notes that I hoped you would enjoy. Over time, I noticed that when I was thinking about you, my handwriting started slanting to the left, my d’s looked like eighth notes and my D’s had to curve just so. I used endless amounts of paper, because if my D’s did not curve just so, I had to start over. It rarely occurred to me to just use pencil.

I’ve often called Diane my blog before I could type, and no sentence in my life rings with more truth than that one. Before I could type, there were more blue lines than you can possibly conceive. I wrote to her every day, at multiple times, because I did not like school and I was actively trying to get away from it. If you read When We Were Young, you will understand why. The $ .50 cent tour is that I could not concentrate on anything but her and how to save her from the life she was leading. I just didn’t understand that it wasn’t my job. She ended up saving herself, but I would like to think that our relationship was a block in the building, one piece of one wall that has my name on it, despite the fact that we have not spoken in years and I’m not really open to it now.

Being a Christian and wanting Christ’s resurrection in all things, for me, does not necessarily mean that I should open myself back up to relationships that hurt me. In these words I realize that Argo probably feels the same way about me, even though she would never use the words “Christ’s resurrection” in the first place. However, I would like to believe that just as I have found peace within myself over what happened with Diane as a child, that Argo will find peace over what happened between us. My twisted heart from childhood showed in my relationship with Argo, and that may not be fixable as I try to make myself clean.

In my relationship with Argo, I do not have the right to get my way… just as I believe Diane doesn’t, either. The difference is that Argo and I are both well into adulthood, and when Diane and I met, she was an adult and I, to put it mildly, was not. Argo and I both have emotional tools that just don’t happen in childhood, especially in a relationship where the balance of power is so off that it is a never-ending tug of war to bridge the divide between “being little and being big.”

The emotional tools of adulthood are something that I’ve had inside me for a long time, but refused to use them because I was stuck… a child in an adult’s body trying to fake it. I could give other people the use of my mental toolkit, but I couldn’t take those words and apply them to myself in any meaningful way. I would like to believe that’s why in the beginning, Argo thought I had amazing insight and clarity, and as she delved deeper into my psyche, she discovered that my id supplanted both my ego and superego, because that’s the engine that drives a child, and not the adult I present to the world. She loved the mask, and when it came down to the real me… well, let’s just say that was far less attractive.

It is the sludge in my soul that I am driving out with light after having lived in darkness for so very long.

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.

John 3:19-20

Because let’s face it, darkness hides our sins, but it doesn’t release them, either. On blue lines, I name them, and when I say them out loud, they become real. If they are not real to me, they are lost in the darkness somewhere I cannot reach, and therefore become the invisible albatross around my neck that I carry willingly, because I do not want anyone to find out what lies in my darkness, least of all me.

I’ve been reading Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber, and if you are my Facebook friend or a subscriber to my feed, you know that I’ve shared several quotes from it. Yet another line sticks with me, and the context is that she has just become a hospital chaplain for a clinical rotation requirement at Iliff. Someone says from their hospital bed, “I’m an atheist!” She thinks, “good for you. I wish I could pull that off.” Her point is the same as mine, that it takes divine intervention for most people to walk in light, because that thread of divinity is coming through us. It is not of us. I don’t believe that there’s a grandfather in the sky, but I do believe that when faced with darkness, my ego cannot be the biggest thing in the room. There is a submission when you believe in a higher power, and it does not matter which one… because most of the time, it is ego that creates darkness in the first place.

It is amazing how quickly giving up my ego and submitting to the power of the universe yielded much better results than thinking I could handle everything on my own. And by everything, I do mean everything. It may not be here, but you can fucking bet on it that there’s a piece of notebook paper somewhere, spilling it all out in purple or green ink (my personal favorites). In several instances, I have used a fountain pen filled with ink that I thought looked like writing with coffee and one of my friends said, “that looks like shit.” Appropriate, because the words themselves were absolute rage.

The rage was mud, the blue lines water washing it away.

Amen.

I don’t even know where to start today because my mind is full. There are so many things I want to tell you and yet, I cannot pick a window and stick with it. In one is my therapy appointment with Sarah. In another is my birthday tomorrow, and in another is the guy who literally thought I was stalking him at Starbucks and I thought we were going to have some trouble. The fight in me raised its ugly head, because flight has receded. I won’t back down.

I guess let’s start there. The guy came up to me and looked at my backpack and said, “is that Swiss Gear?” I looked at the red logo and said, “yes… I guess it is.” He said, “are you stalking me?” I said, “not yet…” thinking that the guy was joking so I joked back. I was sitting down and he was standing up, although he did not look in any way threatening. He was only a little taller than me, and just as thin. In a different life, we could have been twins. Except that he had wavy hair and I have straight, we really did look like brother and sister. The true difference between us was that even though we were both wearing nerd glasses, but he was hearing voices in his head and I do not.

I exude “don’t mess with me” now. I have had enough time around mental patients from being in government mental health care that it’s like a type of armor of “just try me.” I don’t know where I got it. I think most of it is thinking to myself “what would Jeffrey do?” The aforementioned insane nerd went over to another table and asked another girl if she was stalking him as well. I stood up and said, “dude, WHAT IS YOUR ANGLE?” I was hoping that someone from downstairs would hear there was trouble and call the police. As I was trying to calm mental nerd into a state of “I’m going to get my ass kicked if I keep this thing going,” the boy next to me at the computer table went downstairs and told them to call the police and get him out of here. Mental nerd saw the boy next to me going downstairs and starting heading out the door on his own before the fuzz arrived.

Good man.

So that’s what hardcore looks like… another version from my sweet Apple Sister, but hardcore nonetheless. Another reminder of the horrible things mental health can do and how I need to take care of myself so that hardcore for me keeps itself at bay.

Which leads me right into my session with Sarah, who I think is the therapist for me. She told me it was so brave of me to show up even though the last four therapists had wounded me to the core. She told me it was brave of me to check myself into the hospital when I told her what Argo said (“Leslie, why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?) and how it had beget action instead of just continuing to get worse. I told her that Argo’s words had reinforced that it was my mental illness making me think my suicidal thoughts and not my authentic personality, and all of the sudden I was able to take control of it. Own it. Get myself better instead of waiting for someone to magically show up and wave a wand. I was able to tell the difference between my personality and my illness, possibly for the first time in my life.

I just thought my illness was me, and it’s not. It’s like letting my diabetes get out of hand and refusing to go to the doctor until my leg is about to fall off. I didn’t continue to find a therapist that would work for me. I didn’t realize how bad my anxiety had gotten so that I felt the fight or flight physical response all the time instead of just when I needed it. I put all my faith in my ability to help myself, and didn’t realize until Argo said her magic words that I was wrong. I needed help, and quickly, or an illness that needed to be managed was going to kill me because what I believed about myself wasn’t real. It was a mirage I was chasing through the desert, or the road looking wet on a dry day from the sun right up until you drive near that patch.

There is a difference between me and my disease, and it took two things to convince me of it. The first was The Mental Illness Happy Hour. Paul Gilmartin repeated over and over how our negative thoughts are apart from what we are, that they are not a reflection of personality, but of illness…. Thus the title of the podcast, I’m sure.

The second was getting the right medication and the right cohort at the hospital. I couldn’t have had a better environment with which to tell the difference between who I am when I am sick and who I am when I am well.

Sarah listened to all of this, and asked me about early childhood trauma. I told her about my house burning down when I was 12, and six months later meeting Diane in the face of losing my home and my city (we’d just packed up and moved from a city of 2,000 people to Houston).

But I also told her my plans for St. James, and how I didn’t want all of our sessions to be about bitching about my problems, that I was a visionary and I needed help finding my own path, my own staircase to wholeness in terms of being a pastor and creating the church I know I’m here to, in a sense, own. I told her that nothing extraordinary, except perhaps The Bible, was ever created by committee. I told her that I wanted to be able to vision by getting people to follow me and what I want to create, not a group of people who are there to say, “I think we should do it THIS WAY.” My theory is this: if you want a pastor who’s spent all that money to become ordained and learn how to be a professional pastor, why are you hiring me if all you want to do is create the church you want? You could do that without me. The congregation is important to the life of a church, but “where there is no vision, the people perish.”

It took me a long time to learn that visioning wasn’t ego. It can be, if left unchecked, but at its core, visioning is the idea that what lives in one person’s brain cannot possibly live in several people’s at once.

So I talked to Sarah about the staircase and how to get me ready to take it. I told her that I’d been an INFJ since birth, and that this idea had lived in me a long time. That St. James was already started online and that I needed a vision in order to raise close to 15 million dollars- not for myself. It’s because real estate big enough to hold all of us in DC isn’t cheap.

I also told her that the first book I’d ever been given in terms of homework for therapy was before it was even a thing was The Four Agreements. She wrote in her notebook that I liked bibliotherapy, and I liked it. It has a title. I said, ‘as an aside, I am sure as a therapist you’ve run across Codependent No More” once or twice. That author has written a book called “The New Codependency” if you want to check it out.’ She laughed and said, “yeah. I think I’ve heard of it…” All therapists know about Codependent No More. It’s like some sort of textbook, you know, like Intern or One L.

I set therapy for Wednesday at 4:00 every week, because as I told Sarah, I go to church every week and this seems like a good mid-week check-in. She agreed. I think I have finally found someone who can help that won’t dump me. We’re probably the same age. If she tells me she’s close to retirement, I’m going to ask her to marry me, because obviously she’s independently wealthy. :P~~~~

My birthday is choir practice. I don’t know how I feel about that. On one hand, it will be great to be lost in the music. On the other, I’ll go home alone. It’s not the first time I’ve spent a birthday alone. I will probably write it out, because this is the first year in a long time in which I can truly say I feel a year older. Perhaps an accelerated five.

And on that note, it’s time to go home.

After the breakthrough in therapy, I realized that it was okay to be angry. Not filled with rage as I once had been, but the normal amount of angry that I kept inside because I felt that both Dana and Argo had stopped listening to me and only talked to each other about me. My anger centers around the fact that when they talked to each other, it changed the narrative of my life. I was no longer a person with a range of emotions, but a mental patient with which had to be dealt. My opinions and feelings didn’t have weight anymore. I was just a goat-ropin’ clusterfuck who couldn’t emote without them thinking that it was some kind of psychotic break, even though I’d been through enough therapy and med changes that I wasn’t the person I was before I went through it… and yet, they wouldn’t let my character change to reflect the real me and not the one they’d known in the past. I will admit that I was a bastard to both of them, and have spent many hours trying to think of ways to make it up to them. I doubt they will ever work, but thinking about how to put joy into their lives feeds me, even if it doesn’t feed them.

I remember so clearly the moment I realized the revelation that to them, I was no longer a person but just a mental patient. I have talked about it before, but it bears repeating now.

I was sitting on the floor of the hallway that looks into Dana’s room, talking to her about the time I’d spent in the hospital. She was asking me questions, and when I started to answer, she told me to stop while still asking me questions. I’d begin to answer, and she told me to stop while still putting another question into her response. I’d begin to answer and she told me that she was going to call the police if I didn’t leave her alone. I did not move from my place in the hallway, and I did not even raise my voice. I was, at that point, already taking Neurontin (the Klonopin would come later), so I never got rattled. I just answered the questions that she put before me until she called my dad and told him I was having a psychotic break. I wasn’t. It was just her way of “dealing with me,” because apparently I wasn’t allowed to have emotions anymore, even when I was quietly talking.

Apparently at one point, someone told Dana (I really don’t know who) that I was suffering from borderline personality disorder, and she turned it into a weapon of mass destruction. She talked to my dad for about a minute and a half, and then he asked her to put me on the phone. I told him honestly what had happened, and he said, “why don’t you just go to bed? It’s not like anything more is going to get done here tonight. She’s not listening.” I took his advice and locked myself in my office, my refuge from all the madness. I took a sleeping pill so that I would indeed get some rest, and it helped enormously because I slept for a full 12 hours.

In the hospital, that never would have happened because the nurses woke us up early and forced us into the showers, thinking that we wouldn’t take care of ourselves if left to our own devices. The problem with that is the sleeping pill I was taking wouldn’t wear off by then, so I would get ready for the day feeling like I was walking through Jell-o, and we weren’t allowed any more caffeine than a bottle of Diet Coke now and then, and cups of shitty coffee at breakfast. You know what I’m talking about. Hospital coffee. Plus, they wouldn’t put a coffee maker in the cafeteria. If you wanted more than one cup of coffee, you had to order it the night before, and they wouldn’t bring you a carafe. There would literally be three cups of coffee on my breakfast tray. It was something we all laughed about, and one woman in particular (maybe Rhonda?) said, “great. You’re already peppy and cheerful ENOUGH. Now you’re going to have MORE energy?” I laughed enough for three people I thought it was so funny.

I could have handled it if I could’ve drunk Monster in the morning, because three cups of shitty hospital coffee is punishment when you literally feel hung over from sleeping pills. I have the same sleeping pills now, and what I do is take all my morning meds with a 200mg caffeine tab and go back to bed for 30 minutes until it kicks in. It doesn’t make me jumpy, it just erases that feeling of never-ending lethargy. That way, I get a good night’s sleep, but I’m not STILL asleep and awake at the same time the next half a day.

The point of telling you all this is that I am taking care of myself in the right way. I am no longer subject to the physical effects of rage or that “fight or flight” feeling that used to make me crazy (for lack of a better word) because I couldn’t get it to recede on my own. I literally had a panic attack the day that Dana showed me The Reconciliation of a Penitent in the Book of Common Prayer. She had our priest walk her through it, and she brought it to me when she made the appointment with our priest. I fell to my knees and started hyperventilating. My sins became overwhelming at that point, just making me want to crawl on my belly with shame. It was in that moment that words like “I am a worm” really started making sense, and I started feeling ALL THE THINGS, perhaps for the first time since all of our fighting started.

I don’t think Dana realized what was happening, and called my dad and my stepmother to come over immediately. I didn’t need them at that moment, although it was comforting that they came. What I needed was to sit in my shame and my own penitence. I needed to feel the hurt. I needed to feel all the pain I’d caused. I needed to feel the way I’d been hiding and let it all come to the surface. It wasn’t the first time that the Book of Common prayer put me into that space. The words that get me every damn time are thus (taken from Rite I):

Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against thee
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved thee with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we earnestly repent.
For the sake of thy Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in thy will,
and walk in thy ways,
to the glory of thy Name.

Amen.

The church I consider my “home” in Houston is St. Martin’s, and when I started going there at 17, they used Rite I, so those are the words I have committed to memory. You could wake me up in the middle of the night and even with my sleepy eyes, I could recite them.

As an aside, every Episcopal church I have attended since has been Rite II, and I will never get used to it. I go with the flow, but I am a Rite I baby and that is all you need to know in terms of how deeply I feel when the pieces of Rite I that are not used in Rite II are missing. The pieces that are missing, to me, are the ones that are penitent beyond belief, and that is what I feel I need every Sunday.

The UCC does not have anything similar, but it will when I have my own church. It may be in modern, inclusive language, but I feel that other people have the same need I do… to be released from a week of sins, no matter how far down they go. For me, it can be anything from telling a white lie to outright flaming a relationship to the ground. My penitential order is a song by the Indigo Girls that Dana recommended to me called “I Believe in Love.” It fits my relationship with both Dana and Argo perfectly…

When we tried to rework all of this
Each to her rendition
Painted ourselves in a corner
Lost for ideas blindly fishing
For a compliment or kindness
Just to bring us into view
But you could not interpret me
and I could not interpret you.

With Dana, it’s the idea that even in our closeness, we did not know each other. With Argo, it was the same with a different twist. I knew her mind in the cloud, but I’d never given her a hug, I’d never met her for lunch, we’d never spent a Sunday with a bowl of popcorn and a bottle of wine devouring Veep.

With Argo, there was a sense that she was real, and at the same time, a wall between us of anonymity that kept her from being the human she was at the end of the line. It made it easier for me to flame our relationship into the ground because in a sense, I wasn’t hurting a real person. It was a mistake I will regret for the rest of my life, because she was/is as real as the keyboard on which I type.

It is telling to me that I was willing to hurt her in order to make sure Dana knew she was my one and only. Telling only because she wasn’t, at least in the traditional sense. I wanted to love them both- Dana as a wife and Argo as that friend who loves me beyond all measure. Most people have that, but Dana didn’t want me to have that friend. Didn’t want me to have a friend in which I could share my secrets and lies. Wanted me all to herself and would do anything to get it.

Dana manipulated me into thinking two incorrect things. The first is that Argo was that friend who would take without giving. The second is that Argo was really in love with me, she just couldn’t tell me, and that made her a threat to our relationship because there was no way that Dana could compete with Argo on any level. It was a brilliant way to isolate me from them both, because I couldn’t decide who was right. Dana had been the river of emotion running through my body from the moment we became best friends and later on, married from the first date. From the first date, she was the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life lying next to with my computer and my phone. I indeed asked her to marry me on our first date, because I knew it was right and good. We’d been best friends for years, and I got the sense that because we’d taken on each others problems as best friends, we already knew what contract we were signing.

Argo was my seven year itch with no romantic strings attached (except mine to her, through no fault of either of us given the way “I was raised”), and I’d hoped that Dana would see it for what it was and just let it go. I would get over the part of myself that Diane had planted, maybe not even consciously but for better or for worse, it was there. I would work it out, and Argo and I could be the friends that we set out to be- warm hearts that could go to each other in our pain.

When Dana didn’t let go, it gutted me in a way I’d never felt before. All the issues I’d been struggling with over the enormity of Diane’s abuse bubbled up in me and according to everyone else, I went crazy. According to me, I was just getting started on the path to being my authentic self.

When I was trying to put context around my behavior, to them it came across as me trying to blame outside influences for my behavior instead of owning them. I didn’t believe that for a minute, because I believe that I am responsible for my own choices and a product of my environment all at the same time. It was, to me, a ridiculous response because it was coming from them, not even trying to understand what I was trying to say but reading their own responses as Truth and mine as crazy.

The more they stopped listening, the more unworthy I felt. I got to the point where I wanted to kill myself because I felt it was better not to be there than it was to let the people closest to me hurt because of what I was to them. I am pretty good at recognizing when mental illness is telling me what to do instead of my honest personality, so I knew I was spiraling out, I just didn’t know how to fix it. I reached out to Argo and told her at that point how I felt, and though I have said this before, I will say it again. She told me, “why do you think it is everyone else’s job to fix you?” They were the words I needed to, as Jonathan says, “jump in for myself.”

Because Dana was there to see what was happening and Argo wasn’t, I sent her a voice mail saying that I’d checked myself into Methodist hospital’s psych ward and I wished I could send her a picture to ensure that my words matched my actions. It was a thank you of massive proportion, because it was her words that created my action in the first place. I didn’t just sit around and let my feelings of unworthiness get worse. For the first time in my life, I took steps to create my own future instead of letting other people dictate what was best.

As Susan Leo said, “resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.” Those words sustain me all the time. Every moment of every day, in fact, because the mess isn’t over. I just pray and pray and pray that I will be forgiven by both Dana and Argo, because I know that I am being penitent enough to forgive myself.

However, I identify with The Good Shepherd, searching and crying for my lost sheep.

Amen.

I switched my Facebook account to Stories That Are All True, and am using Tumblr to post to my LDLanagan account. Now I just need to make sure I’ve done everything correctly. Fingers crossed.

****Update*** I set it up right. I am a genius and you need my mind. Double points for catching the movie quote.