One of the things that makes me frustrated about this time in my life is how crazy this must all seem to the outside world because I can’t be any more specific that I can right now. It doesn’t make any sense why an Internet relationship would make me react this way, and I can’t give you any more than “if you knew, you wouldn’t think I was crazy at all.” Nothing in my life is as it appears, I can only show you what I can show you. I need to protect my beautiful girl as much as I’m protecting myself, and these entries are just for me. They are written so that I can tell what kind of progress I am making, but not telling her story. Please remember that you are missing at least 50%, and I am comfortable looking like a total wack job in front of the whole world. All I can do is rest in my belief that no one else’s opinion matters. You’re just looking at my reputation.
I am looking at my character.
If you cannot see the difference, then you’re probably not introspective. When you dive into yourself, you see the difference between what others think of you and how little it matters compared to whether you can look in the mirror every day. How others’ opinions don’t pay your bills. How no one else is going to save you, so you have to find ways to save yourself. It’s a tangled web I’m weaving. It looks from the outside like I’m a fly, but I built this web by hand in a rainstorm.
The fact that there’s a chunk missing doesn’t make me feel good, but it’s not my work to sit with that. It’s my work to look at what happened and why. I feel like it’s an important story…. Critically so as we slouch toward a digital society where everyone lives and loves like this to some degree. Also, it’s an important story, but not unusual. It is to people who haven’t lived on the net since ‘99, maybe…. If you look up “geek” in the dictionary, it’s just a picture of me and Wil Wheaton.….. where was I going with this?
It’s not an unusual story, or at least, it doesn’t begin in an unusual way. Our deal was to be confidantes. I love women, so that kind of shit made me catch feelings (an inconvenient truth). She loves women, too, but not in the same way. She caught feelings, too. They just didn’t match, and yet that doesn’t mean her feelings are lesser than. There is no such thing as “the friend zone.” Either you love someone and want them in your life, or you don’t. If you think otherwise, grow up.
I have always felt this way. It’s just that as my life starting spinning out of control, she was the unlucky recipient of shit rolling downhill, and it wasn’t pleasant for either one of us. She kicked my ass, daily, in a way that truly hurt for all the right reasons. I was in the hospital for a few days because I couldn’t get in to see a regular psychiatrist quick enough to deal with acute suicidal ideation, and it was my beautiful girl’s idea. Just move under your own power. I did, and I’ve never regretted it.
I haven’t regretted it to the point that think her strident, no bullshit personality could have saved other people struggling with depression as well, because depression uses the very best lies against you to make you powerless against your own thoughts. No one loves you. You’re too much. You’re so much no one will ever love you. No one will ever be able to put up with you.
I find it interesting that her words made me go to that place sometimes and lifted me out of it in others. It all depended on what my disease wanted out of me that day, and it was relentless. Neurotypical people want to save you, and there is no way to do that. It’s not that they’re incapable. It’s that they don’t know how to fight brain gremlins, and if we already feel like you think we’re too much, we’re not going to help you or even let you know what they are.
I got to that place with my beautiful girl. When she cut off her emotions from me, it didn’t feel safe to open up to her anymore. We weren’t dealing with our mutual brain gremlins anymore, which made me feel like a freak show most of the time. She’s neurotypical, which means that even our brain gremlins are different. But that doesn’t mean hers are less valid. It didn’t feel safe to have a sounding board that was just me talking to myself, because for as much as I got out of workshopping my issues, what makes me feel safe in a relationship is mutually diving into things. Feeling supported as well as supporting others. She supported me and wouldn’t let me support her, so I always felt like “the younger one.” I have bipolar and ADHD, which leads a lot of people to attribute my behavior to immaturity, when in reality, it’s just different. You don’t get the same behavior out of people who literally have no idea how to function in society.
It’s exhausting to feel like you’ve given 350% to something and it still looking like you’re in kindergarten because everything went wrong at once because of some fucking brain chemical or another. At night, I’m not relaxing. I’m paralyzed with indecision and it reads as lazy.
Here’s why it’s so much effort to be alive. I have to remember to do everything. Nothing becomes habit, nothing gets easier. The morning routine is hard every day. It does not “get easier once you get used to it.” Ever. You spend the same amount of energy on every task, every day.
Because I’m not just ADHD, my bipolar and anxiety remind me all the time of just how unacceptable that is, and it’s not something I can change. I just have to manage it. If I designed a house, it would have all my shit where I could see it, because my mind doesn’t store where things go. My mind doesn’t store the memory of where I put things, even if it was just a few minutes ago. I have very little peripheral vision, so I can drop something next to me and spend 20 minutes looking for it, because where I thought the thing dropped is several feet from where I thought it would be.
If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.
Speaking of my mother, it’s a shame that I didn’t get to have the relationship I wanted with her until the very end. I think all the time what it would be like to have my mom as my beautiful girl…. The one I look to for love because I can…. The one who’d die to protect me and I’d feel the same. I would never have traded one relationship for the other. It’s just a type of female friendship that my mother and I would have enjoyed.
I’m not sure that I mentioned what it was like seeing my aunt Nancy at my grandfather’s funeral. It was my father’s father, and I knew in less than a second that she hadn’t come for her. Of course Lone Star, Texas is a tiny town and they knew each other, but she was bringing my mother’s spirit even though it was the other side of my family.
I choked up and tried not to cry the minute she started talking. She could have read the phone book and I’d be sobbing. That’s because there’s about the same age difference between my mom and Nancy as there is between Lindsay and me, so their voices are for all practical intents and purposes, the same. That voice is still in my head days later, and I’m glad that she comes to DC all the time. My cousin Nathan is a doctor in Alexandria, VA, about 40 minutes from me.
My aunt still has a house in Lone Star, very near my grandfather’s on Starlight Lake. Our family has agreed to all chip in and keep the Lanagan house so we’ll be neighbors even if I’d originally come to spend time with my dad’s side of the family.
Here’s the thing about Lone Star, Texas.
It doesn’t seem ideal until you realize that with a fast internet connection and being able to buy land for a dollar, it’s not so bad. I’d never want to be that isolated full time, but I get it. If I could get an affordable lake house somewhere, that’d be the end of it for me, too…. It just wouldn’t be in Texas, and I’m not sure there are any lakes in this area where the houses aren’t a million dollars…. Wait. Scratch that. They were a million dollars in 2001. Now they’re seven.
The great thing about buying land is that if you didn’t have a lake before you bought it, you can just put one in. 😛
(Oh, that would be so fun. I’d love swimming in water with actual fish.)
So, you can do all that in bum fuck, Texas, and nothing on God’s green earth would tell me buying property there would work out well. I would hate the politics. I’d hate the struggle. I left all that behind because Lindsay is strong enough to work with those people and try to get them to change their minds. I am a nervous wreck when it comes to that kind of stuff. In this case, I think it helps her that she’s straight because she has more clinical separation than I do.
Maybe in ten years I’ll be grouchy enough to rejoin the cadre of Texans screaming to get their state back. Dallas, Houston, and Austin are tired. Get your shit together, Texas. I realize that in some ways, Austin is the problem….. but they have the same issue as DC. The government is conservative as shit, and the locals are actually smart.
Speaking of Texas, I reconnected with a high school friend from HSPVA that lives in The District, so he’s even closer to me than when he lived in Virginia. He posted on Facebook that he needed a house sitter because his regular one was unavailable, and even though we hadn’t talked in legit years, I thought, “this is an Honors Band friend. You gotta do it.” He felt the same way, so we spent some time together on Saturday. I met his partner, dogs, and corn snake. I think it will lead to more down the road, as we both have mutual friends here, as well as having gone to PVA, so our friends come through all the time.
I learned something I didn’t know, and that’s always fun. My 10th grade science teacher gave Beyoncé a C. 😛
I wasn’t there at the time. It must have been either the year I left or the year after, because I don’t remember whether B was two years behind me or three (yes, I am older than Beyoncé. I was hoping you wouldn’t notice).
Since I’ll be in The District all week, I’m looking forward to having a home base in the middle of everything. The house is indescribably close to the Metro, easier to walk from one to the other than drive because you can cut through parking lots. It’s also a classic DC row house, just the perfect house I’d have picked for myself had I wanted to live in the middle of the city all the time.
I do not regret choosing to live in the suburbs, because for what I pay, what I get is RIDICULOUS. I chose to have the smallest room in a GIANT house. I love having a real kitchen and not a shitty apartment galley. The only thing I would change is the stove- it’s electric and not gas. When we had to replace the stove, I asked if we could switch, but our kitchen isn’t wired up like that. No big deal. I have friends who will let me cook at their houses….. even if they have All-Clad, DANA. 😛
That is an old, old joke. Dana’s All-Clad set is heirloom. Her great grandkids wouldn’t have to buy new cookware, and I was there when they were new. It took Dana a little bit to trust me with them, and it became a running joke. Here’s a story she doesn’t know. I invited a woman over to hang out while she wasn’t home, another cook so I thought she was sane. I told her that Dana would freak the fuck out if she used steel wool on the pans, so please don’t. I come in the kitchen and there she is, scrubbing the fuck out of our pans with exactly the thing I told her not to use. I didn’t care if she wanted to “get away with it.” I bitched her out and we’re not friends anymore, mostly because she thought I was crazy for telling her what to do.
It was a “keep my wife’s name out your mouth” moment.
It’s ok, though…. That I looked crazy.
I did it because I had to.
Stories That Are All True 