What’s your favorite month of the year? Why?
Like every baby born in September, we do not celebrate Advent as such. We suffer through the summer waiting for the sweet relief of “Back to School.” It is not necessarily a penitent season, but a chance to turn inward and see what no longer serves us. At no time have I ever turned down a Trapper Keeper, but there have been a few lesser items that simply did not please me. I changed pens a *lot* in high school. My favorite were the ones that have the rubber grip on the outside, medium point. Fine point is too great a chance to rip the page.
You know how when we were kids SEARS used to send out a catalogue that had all their presents for the year and you’d circle the things you wanted? Well, for Virgo Christmas it’s from Levenger. If you have a Levenger catalog, I’m betting you also have glasses, shirts from Brooks Brothers, a Mont Blanc fountain pen, and possibly a tweed jacket with patches on the sleeves. You may not have ever smoked a pipe, but you love them for aesthetics. You have penny loafers, which you probably bought at Bass in 1992.
We. Are. Virgo.
I’m going to switch gears because I couldn’t really make anything more out of this. “My stomach is empty and my heart is full.”
I will get to the daily prompt later. Right now I want to talk about my current feelings, which are all over the place- and yet I’m in the space where my words are worth so much. That putting things out there is valuable for me, because then it becomes valuable to other people. There’s so much that’s surface level in this world, and I like that you read me because you also dive deep.
The first thing I’ve realized is that I’ve been lying to myself since 2013. No one is my favorite author except Supergrover, because it was so much fun thinking about her enjoyment of my work because her insight was my diamond ring, truly. She never had to get down on one knee. Loving an author makes them react. She will never, ever in her five dollar life understand what happened inside me if she doesn’t get started on that book she needs to write, but won’t. I’d help drag it out of her if she’d let me. I didn’t move to DC to tell her story. I moved to DC to convince her that she needs to be immortal on her own…. essentially, that her description of her would be so much better than mine. If she’s not a 3D character here, my new reaction is “you’re a fabulous writer. Put up or shut up. Show me what a 3D character is and FUCKING MAKE ME ONE.” Stop treating me like I’m a dickhead all the time when I go out of my way so hardcore to bring positivity into our relationship that you choose not to see.
In the words of Kristina Mahr, “I took the tags off this love before I knew I wanted it. No, that’s not right. I took the tags off this love before I knew you wanted it.” One of the things that she does not understand is that I don’t need to meet her in person. That she can think it’s weird all she wants. Doesn’t mean it’s not true. Autistic people have very few relationships in person because the Internet is just as much of a godsend for them as it is for me…… which I did not know until I considered the possibility late in life. Being peer reviewed may have to be enough, because I don’t remember a whole lot of my day to day life as a kid, and that’s a lot of what goes into an autism diagnosis because research on what autism looks like in adults is more rare.
There’s not enough data on how autism changes after 46 years of social masking, and people are diagnosed older than I am. It doesn’t make me weird, it takes away my barriers to communication because I am not worried about my appearance and essentially stimming while I talk because of the typing. I can feel emotions more deeply when I’m reading because that’s my preferred communication style. Yes, my beautiful girl and I are both writers, but we’re yin and yang. She’s an architect, I’m a gardener. She wants bullet points, I want prose. I want to understand something she doesn’t- her. I only know this through speculation, but I know it was true at one point because she told me.
I also think she berates me for “expecting her to remember all our conversations,” and moves the target when I go back to zero and write as if she doesn’t remember anything. It makes my letters longer because AuDHD…. “allow me to explain more and better… more and better… more and better….” Meanwhile, my emotions are growing as I do it, because I am giving her more and more of me. She’s seen me naked a lot more than anyone I’ve ever slept with, and a lot more often. I think I saw a clip of her on Insta once, so I have very little idea of what she looks like. To me, we are not making love in the traditional sense. It’s so much more important than that.
We are making art.
She is struggling to respond because she does not tap into her emotions the way I do. Cannot because it’s bigger than me. It’s bigger than everyone. She’s buttoned up because she’s always been that way. It shouldn’t be our problem to deal with it, but it is. What I mean by “our problem” is that there’s never going to be a thing in our lives that are more important and we just all have to roll with it. All the time. It’s not the whole story, though. She keeps herself busy and actively runs from her emotions, and doesn’t believe me that laying everything on the table makes her stronger. I can see why. We were making progress and I self-sabotaged. I deserved there to be consequences, I did not deserve them for the next eight years…. and not because I’m demanding. It’s twisting around the definition of forgiveness, and absolutely all of this is because online can only do so much.
I can deal with virtual boundaries, but if we aren’t checking our stories on the ground, we need to keep things from spiraling. She is johnny on the spot when we’re in escalation mode, and has finally given me the closure I needed to move on by being an absolute dick. Her last words to me were “obviously you’re the only person who could change.” I responded, “that’s not true at all. You just haven’t told me anything since then. That’s my entire issue. When I lay out my feelings, you don’t.” It’s the healthiest thing I could have said, and that was the end of that, because fuck you only responding if I go apeshit about something.
She absolutely is neurodivergent, but not in the same way as me. She’s allistic and doesn’t have ADHD, but has a horrible case of CPTSD. For along time, I was the only person that knew this, and I didn’t tell anyone until I was sure she had. But, I can’t be more specific than trauma, and her story broke me in half. It’s not that it was so unusual, I was just already in deep grief. I was not thinking about leaving Dana, but the fissure had begun. However, I am not saying that I actively thought about cheating on Dana at all. Supergrover basically connected us umbilically because she didn’t think “Leslie’s a blogger” and just has to be frightened all the time that I’m going to say something I shouldn’t because I am. I don’t write in retaliation. I write in comprehension. Yes, I have felt red mist rage in my writing, but that’s for me to go back and look at it once time has passed. In every case, I’ve thought, “wow. I had to live through that.” More importantly, and thanks, Elizabeth Gilbert, I got to live through that. Every road led me here to Zac and Oliver, who is a dog. I’m mentioning him specifically because today is his birthday- please make a note. 😉 He’s a queer man. He lives on shoes and compliments. 😛
Zac and Supergrover are my muses, and both of them in my writing. For Zac, it’s being able to ask questions about intelligence fiction. Supergrover is my definition of non-fiction. It got real, real fast. But those two people come together in me on the page. It’s just that one is LibreOffice, and one is Gmail.
I finally started writing to Zac. I am not giving up the last book, I am just putting it on the back burner.
I know Supergrover. She won’t end on those words, and this may or may not be the end of our movie. If she doesn’t have a connection to me, her palm might itch or it might not. It depends on how much my writing affects her, both emotionally and in other arenas. The problem with being a blogger is not when you get blowback. It’s when they do. That’s because people don’t talk to me, the person who wrote the piece. They talk to the people involved, so the conversation is all hearsay. No one ever calls me up and says “what did you really mean?”
I have to be happy in my isolation most of the time because people don’t reach out and I forget to respond, anyway. I always respond in my head. I’m not saying it’s not an issue. I never want anyone else to feel unloved. The reason I say “have to be happy” is that it’s not like I never look up. When I do, it’s generally at times when people aren’t available. For instance, even if Supergrover and I were Superclose, I wouldn’t see her more than a couple times a year, if that. I don’t even know where she lives anymore, because you couldn’t pay me to care. I mean, I know she’s probably within a hundred miles of me so that it wouldn’t be a huge ask for that amount of time, but writing is just faster and easier because either she’s in bed or on a large assortment of airplanes. I know enough to know it’s not impressive, it’s exhausting.
To me, it’s funny that she’s a big deal and I treat her like my little sister. They are not dissimilar. This is because she’s a first child as well. When it comes to me, the line about Hillary Clinton being gay on SNL goes through my head. I treat her like she’s an asshole when she deserves it, and her responses are basically “I Googled it, and I do not like it.”
Here is what I know to be true. She’s bluffing. She remembers every goddamn detail better than I do. She could quote me in her sleep. Because that’s how she takes in information, too. She has never forgotten anything she’s read, ever….. and acts like she’s a dumbass for forgetting. It’s a con job. Believe it. (I am laughing uproariously right now.)
She’ll drop something I’ve said in front of me and I’m like, “holy shit. How did you remember that?” She doesn’t realize how much I delight in her, because she focuses on my ire. I offered her my whole heart, and I meant it. Love does not depend on the recipient, and I choose to love her deeply whether she returns my feelings or not. I am not trying to be creepy or stalkerish. Her trauma goes back a long way. I see her as a child I care for, not just an adult. Hard to break that strong a bond. It’s like losing custody after you’ve just gotten it, and that joke goes back a long way.
Custody of her is the easiest thing ever, a shared connection and not one borne of anything but wanting love. We have so much of it, and we’re not using it. That does not mean it gets destroyed. Her name is a waltz in my head, a quick three conducted in one because she’s never said her name in a voice note…. which means that even after 10 whole ass years, I pronounce her name differently than she does.
I pronounce her name like her mother would, she does not care for it. 😉 She says she prefers “the American sound?” I said “who the fuck prefers the Americanized sound of ANYTHING?!?!” She’s a doll baby and a grown ass woman, like we all are. I just notice the things she doesn’t, or doesn’t want to acknowledge, more likely. I see into people. I know I do. I am not wrong a hundred percent of the time and history backs me up with my readers and friends. If you find a lie here, it is 100% because you didn’t give me a piece of information you had before I published.
Also, I feel like I get into illustration mode and say “you” a lot, so reassurance that you is plural, not singular. It makes people think I’m yelling at them when I am actually speaking, essentially, ex cathedra by looking out over my readers. I am not talking to anyone but the whole world at once. Every one of you is a personal conversation because your emotions come up when you read. Just because we are not in sync when it happens doesn’t mean it’s not personalized.
I appreciate people like Sheila, Janie, and Supergrover because they’ve taken the time to interact with me a propos of nothing. Getting feedback is great because it lifts me out of my own echo chamber. My friends all think it’s TMI and don’t want to talk about it, and I’m just talking about laying out my own shit. I’m sure they think it’s rude and I think it’s rude when people trauma dump and emotionally vampire their friends. My blog allows me that- I am not speaking to anyone I know personally, so in real life it’s all social masking. I don’t have to dig deep because I’ve already done it. I start writing at dawn so that I am filling my own cup before trying to meet others’ demands.
It allows me to remember that I didn’t offhandedly or mistakenly give Supergrover her all access pass. She earned it. If there is a key to unlocking me, it’s a goddamn miracle I found it. The odds are so incredibly small that they’re infinitessimal. You cannot believe how many permutations of my life had to happen before she could…… and the beauty of it is that when she dropped into my lap, I was ready. Before, I would have rejected her friendship because I thought I didn’t deserve it. Just full stop I’m not worthy. I managed to get to know her and be so ridiculously charmed that I rejected her friendship a few more times just to be sure I devastated her a little better. I wish I could forgive myself, but I go back and forth between cringing and vomiting. She was murdering me with words, and I’m just as good at it.
What broke us is wanting to stop all of it, and her walking off. She vowed “not to respond to my attacks.” I continue to wonder what planet she’s actually on, but because e-mail, I can love her from here.
Stories That Are All True 