Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.
I’m starting to think that we’ve made it. We lived eight years past our grandfather, which I never in a million years thought would happen. I thought I was too unstable to last this long. But, thanks to our emotional growth in our 40s, we gained the will to live and to fight back. No one likes blowback. No one. I don’t like it about my writing, my people don’t like it about anything. People in general get defensive at blowback. I know I do. But it hits different when I emote and get punished for it. They emote and expect me to lie down and agree with them all the time. They’re not the jerk for the way they behaved. I’m the jerk for writing about it…. as if they’re not affecting my life at all.
When they affect my real life, they affect my story. I don’t make shit up. If we work through a conflict, people will see it in real time. Sometimes I wonder if Supergrover thought I was stirring up shit. I never was. I was expressing my real feelings about how her actions affected me. She’s been gone for roughly 15 years now, because she hit 100, too. We had a hard road the entire time, but it was worth it. Just wait it out. Eventually, she’ll read something that moves her and she’ll be back on your radar. I thought for many years that I wasn’t loved, and then found out I indeed was, in a very particular way and separate from her “real life,” but it wouldn’t have lasted our whole lives if we hadn’t had an absolutely horrible knock-down drag-out in 2023-2024.
We stopped being polite, and started getting real.
It was the thing that needed to happen to get us back on the same page, and not the asynchronous relationship we had before. Reading and drinking coffee at different times affected the story as well. What kind of mood were we in when we read each other?
I also needed to stop thinking of her as a fictional character, which I did given how much she dropped in and out of my life. Now, I don’t. But what I said last year became true. “I’m going to pour the love I have for you into the character because I cannot pour it into you. You have said that you do not accept it.” So, my character and I went on a journey and left her out of it, because she said that’s what she wanted.
Come to find out, she did not, because she didn’t see what the fictional part actually was because she didn’t ask me about it.
In retrospect, it was “the very best bad idea we’ve got sir. By far.” There is an “Argo” quote for every occasion. (I mine Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, and Alan Arkin for lines all the time).
If I had to pick a favorite line from Goodman, it’s when his assistant brings him a telephone and says, “Kevin Harkins for you, sir.” He picks up the phone and says, “hey, Tony.” He’s smoking a cigarette and laughing to himself. I’ve never seen a chuckle like that before. It was great.
In 2003, Supergrover sent me a note that said “Argo” was on TV and it made her think of me. You cannot imagine what a big compliment this was, because she’s not an intelligence peon like I’d like to believe I am. 😉 Our relationship expanded to fit both of us. She will also listen to my overtures while trying not to yawn.
I am still a lot.
Admitting that the storyline was a bad idea is great. But we had to work for a long time to come up with the right one. One that showed us both after we’d come into our power and stopped nitpicking each other.
I’m proud of you. Desperately, enormously proud of you. You’ve had a lot to deal with while struggling through this world not built for you. If there’s anything you should keep in mind, it’s that you’re not irregular, so your friends aren’t, either. I loved when you learned to stop trying to placate everyone else and started standing up for yourself, instead. It gave you hope and a future, just like Jeremiah predicted.
Because when you look at the future, you have to look at the past.
Yours, literally.
Leslie
Stories That Are All True 