Getting Help

I am touched to the point of tears that Bryn wants to create the audio version of “Stories.” As in, when the tracks are up on the web, it will be her voice and not mine. I said, “of course you can do it.” That’s because even though I was 19 when we met, that was still enough time for her to pick up my style and structure because her family raised me. I was 19. I was an idiot. Well, I suppose it didn’t start at 19, because I didn’t have much time with them until I actually moved. Before then, it was huge summer parties for a couple weeks three summers running. She hears me in her head when she reads, so I trust her when she speaks my truth.

She’s the one I go hard for because I can go to her as well.

We don’t have a hot emotional temperature, which makes me relieved in all the right ways. Yesterday, I told her that she was free to feel as deeply as she wanted about me. That there was nothing she could say that would frighten me away. That it’s already been three lifetimes, let’s go get some more. Now we want to go to Iceland AND Finland, because in Iceland we found a group that lets you ride horses and bills it as business terms. The horses even walk on a giant keyboard, so I guess you could work out logistics, create synergy, table it, and circle back around.

This is totally, completely us.

Bryn had a hand in scaring Sam half to death, because I speak dog and Sam doesn’t. My alpha dog is scary because it has to be… but Bryn goes a step above because she needs it. She worked with deaf dogs for a long time, so she had to train them by touch. When she told me that, I nearly asphyxiated and died. I said, “Bryn is the dog toucher, because when she whispers they can’t hear her.” Even now, tears are running down my face with laughter.

Bryn’s got big dick energy, too, because she’s kind af unless she needs to be a hardass. This is not because she’s trying to be difficult. What I mean is that working with animals makes you a hardass while you’re in the room with them. She’s not forceful with people, but she can piss off a primate without blinking, because they’re going to do what she says whether they like it or not. Bryn doesn’t work at the primate center anymore, which is a relief, tbh. She told me about two inch canines and I realized that I was a friggin’ idiot. She’d been in a lot of danger and I didn’t notice because I don’t know shit about monkeys. Because I’m so geeked out over spies, my reaction yesterday was that she was probably fine, but one op gone wrong…. Same with the military, where I could argue that is a primate center in and of itself. Where’s the lie?

I am also going to be adding Bryn as an author, which means that there will be more posts here, but I don’t mean that she’s taking over for me on some days. I just mean that you’ll have more to love since we collaborate well.

This is exactly what I mean about friends who know where you’re going and want to help. We even had the difficult conversation I needed to have in order to feel safe. “If this blows up, can you love me through that?” She said, and I’m going to cry, “I don’t know, but I want to try.” I’m not being an arrogant asshole. I’ve already been recognized in public at the level I currently occupy, and here’s where I’m going now that I wasn’t before.

I want to take over for Dooce, and I’m not apologizing for it.

I am done apologizing for my existence if I’m going to be the badass Heather said I’d be. I wish I was talking about Dooce, because then I’d have a memory of us meeting. We just have so much in common. I trauma dump here because she did it first, and it helped her right up until it didn’t.

I do not want to be an “influencer.” I want to help the people who are already a train wreck and find comfort in realizing they’re not alone. Bryn and I are both fucked up and we know it. That’s why we’re relentless in self discovery and don’t have much time for people who aren’t. We are so done with people who are emotionally unavailable, and as I told her yesterday, “we don’t feel it in words, we feel it in energy.” We can case a whole room that way in 30 seconds or less. Together, we are unstoppable and we know it.

You get vulnerable, you get stronger. It’s inversely proportional. If I lay out all my thoughts and feelings, I am teaching you how to love me. I am teaching you what I will tolerate and what I won’t, and there will be consequences for trampling over a set boundary. I’ve never had that before, because I’ve been such a people pleaser that I had no inner monologue that said “take care of yourself.”

Now that I do, I’m being called difficult, off meds, crazy, all the things. But it’s not because I am those things. It’s that I’m not letting people walk all over me. I walk softly, and carry a big stick.

I have big stick energy.