We are hosting 26 people for Thanksgiving. They are on the ground floor and I am in my room. There’s not any padding between me and them, which means I would have on BT headphones and white noise if I didn’t constantly deny myself ways to comfort myself. It sounds weird. I’ll get over it. But that’s called “demand avoidance.” When you need something from yourself or another person, it can strike at any time. It also doesn’t matter if it’s something small or large. Is taking a shower important? I would say it is. Still can’t always make myself without extreme unction. I am not lazy. I am debilitated by thinking about changing environments. Sensory issues matter.
The other day I said that my routine is not based on time, but becoming familiar with my environment. That waking up is just disorienting enough. It doesn’t matter whether I’m at my house or at Zac’s, the process is the same. Although after we wake up, my sensory issues haven’t been on high alert because it’s only Zac, his housemate, me, and Oliver (who is a dog). On the whole, I’d rather be at his house right now. š
Here’s the best part of our conversations this week without context:
Zac: Are you suggesting that object permanence is a problem?!?!
Leslie: Peek-a-boo, bitch
We were typing back and forth, but I hear Aaron Paul. Anybody?
I’m proud of us. We took a minor situation and resolved it while it was still a minor situation. Funny how I’ve been though of as a judgmental dickheaad for eight years, and as it turns out, I’m not when getting an actual answer out of someone and they don’t just “I AM BECOME DEATH” all over the place. Finding out that I’m not always the one that’s hard to please, despite popular opinion. But that was so long ago that I haven’t made many friends to counteract feeling so awful all the time.
I am sure that my beautiful girl felt awful, because I was being deeply emotionally intimate and if you don’t do that in your family, you’re going to hate it. Not that my words were perfect. I just don’t get from her that her family really does conflict. That sweeping everything under the rug is the family motto, not exclusive to her. She didn’t learn it in a vacuum, I didn’t learn my own family patterns that way, either. When they’re opposite, that means every single time I get angry at her she’s fucking terrified. I cannot have that. Both because I don’t want to be thought of as terrifying and I need someone to run counterpoint. She’s very good at that when she doesn’t assume malice…. a huge reason why she likes helping me with other relationships, not ours. She’d have a field day with Zac, but I hadn’t started dating him until maybe two weeks before we stopped talking.
There is no comparison between them because they’re so different in their roles in who they are to me. They’re not even similar personality-wise, although they both speak “acronym” and I don’t. š
Here is a truism for working anywhere in the federal government: if you are not familiar with acronyms used by the military, intelligence, State, DoD, White House, and press you are going to be lost at most parties. I had no idea what MENA meant, learned it was State designation for “Middle East North Africa,” and of course heard it again six more times. But that’s how living in Washington works. You don’t learn everything at once. You take a bite, and then another bite, until you get enough experience to finish a plate. When you have sampled every entree, the dessert is the ability to drink out of a fire hose. In other words, the cake is a lie.
But there’s no use crying over every mistake. We just keep on trying till we run out of cake.
At the end, we can look at the bald eagle with the same pride we look at the turkeys on our tables.
“This is for the bird.”
Stories That Are All True 