One of the books that has really touched me over the past few years is “Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.” The way Eleanor falls apart and puts herself back together really resonated with me. At first, she’s quiet and mousy. Then, over the course of the book, she develops into a real person. Self-actualized. More than she thought she was.
I’m on a journey to find that, too, but I’m still in the middle. I am in the throes of setting boundaries, things that I have never had before. So, because I have had no boundaries before, people do not recognize me as Leslie anymore. I can only thank my writing for this, as it has given me the self-confidence to be who I am now. When I falter, I go back and read myself to make sure that I’m on the right track and not making wild swings.
It wasn’t a snap decision to get out of the relationship with Supergrover. It was a snap decision to get into it. I “married” her within 15 minutes, for two reasons. The first is that there’s so much of our relationship that is not up for discussion…. and by that, I mean publication. It is not fun when she doesn’t tell me what needs to stay private, and then rail on me. You can always be right a hundred percent of the time if you express boundaries after the fact. As in, it’s not that you should have told me what’s fair game and what’s not. It’s that you want the right to be angry later.
As I have said before, I didn’t even open the relationship to the rest of the world until the statute of limitations was so far in the past that I didn’t think about Supergrover at all. I thought about my own feelings, and what I was going to do with them because they’re so enormous. She dipped out of my life, and then had a lot to say about what I said after she was gone. It didn’t seem right or fair to hold me to a standard she never set. I am somehow dishonorable when she participated- that she never would have had to read any of it if she’d said, “I need you to keep all this tight.” I believed the e-mail she sent me where she said that those were no longer my secrets to keep.
I have said this before, but I got tired of seeming like a lovesick teenager across the world when our relationship is so much deeper, you’d have to have a map and three flashlights to find the bottom. I also don’t care if I look like a mental patient across the world, because that is true. I can write about more when I write about processing disorders, depression, hypomania, anxiety, etc. It is also not surprising that autism creates depression and anxiety. You feel like an alien all day long. No one can stand up to that kind of pressure, so our humor is very, very dark. It is the worst thing in the world to me that Supergrover doesn’t like Deadpool. She’s not a merc, but she’s got the mouth for it. She’s so damned funny.
But there’s a flip side to all of it:
“How long has it been since you had myelin on your nerves? The 80s?”
“Something like that.”
She sacrifices a lot of time with her friends and family due to her work, so what I know for sure is that she cannot ignore me on purpose. She is ignoring me with a purpose. Always. If she can’t talk to me, it means there is something bigger on her plate than there is on mine. I joke that at least her job is easier than us trying to resolve all the bullshit we’ve got going on, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she feels the same way, because she is very good at her job…..not so much with the emotions.
But I can tell how much she cares about me just by the way she writes. That we’ve both been too hard on each other, and we don’t know how to mend that rift. We get together and regress into old patterns. That’s the only thing I was trying to break. I need her, more than she knows. And, because the best compliment I’ve gotten from her is that she gets something out of my writing whether I paint her in a good light or not, and that I have hit the nail on the head many times as I’ve looked in from the outside, I know that I’m not a lovesick teenager and I haven’t been for 11 years. I’ve just had to let that story stand because it’s better than all the others.
Dana was right; Supergrover would always see me as a mental patient. The part she didn’t see is that it was planned. I actually did get sick enough to check myself in. That wasn’t the planned part. The planned part was making it obvious I’m an unreliable narrator. Am I projecting, or does she love me, too?
She loves me, too.
This is absolutely killing me, because of one thing she said to me. Just one.
“Did I start to think the other end of the string was out to get me?”
It’s yellow.
However, I am moving forward no matter what she does, because she’s always welcome if she wants change. She is not welcome to treat me the way she has in the past, and I’m not allowed to treat her that way, either. But at the same time, the thing that got us into this mess won’t get us out.
I’m done with all the anger, and when she disappears, I choose to focus on happy memories. I don’t let her anger touch me.
So, at this moment, since I know that Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine, maybe one day I will be, too.
Stories That Are All True 