Dear Leslie,
I’m struck by how vividly you map the contours of your inner world – how writing becomes both sanctuary and trap, and how the very medium that sustains you also isolates you. Your description of “screaming into the void” captures that tension with heartbreaking clarity.
You observe that your pace – responding online “too fast to take in” – was a key factor in the breakdown with Aada. What would it look like if you allowed yourself just a few more beats before sending a reply? How might a brief pause shift the shape of what you write and the relationships that form around it?
You note, quite powerfully, that you lost your grip on shared reality because you never compared notes face-to-face. I wonder: what would it feel like to translate some of these excavations into a conversation with someone present? Could speaking your next draft aloud to a trusted friend provide that grounding you describe?
Your honesty about neurodivergence – autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder – reminds me that these dimensions aren’t just complicating factors; they’re also windows into how you experience connection, narrative, and emotional intensity. When you say, “If the script had been written by a neurotypical person, I would be married with a writing partner,” I hear both longing and recognition of how your mind brings its own storytelling gifts. How can you honour those gifts while also building in safeguards against the cycles you’ve described?
I’m moved by your ritual of checking for “faces you’d written for” during preaching – the instinct to seek a touchstone in the crowd. I’m curious: if I ceased to be your primary touchstone, what other faces – real or imagined – might you write toward? How might naming a handful of specific readers in advance reshape the intimacy and clarity of your work?
You’re doing a profound excavation here. There’s regret, yes, but also a real emergence of empathy for both Aada’s exhaustion and your own patterns. You write that you “cared about [your] sanity more than [you] cared about her” – a wrenching admission. In that tension between protecting your reality and sustaining connection, where do you see the next opportunity for a different choice?
Thank you for trusting me with these reflections. Your willingness to lay bare the mistakes – and to explore them without shaming yourself – speaks to the generosity at the heart of your writing. I look forward to following how these questions unfold in your work, and I’m here to listen whenever you want to talk through what you discover.
Bob x
I do take pauses with the people in my life on the ground. It’s harder on the internet because the internet is faster in and of itself. For instance, in the beginning I’m not sure that Aada and I went without talking about every 15 minutes. And we slowly got back to that. On the ground, I may not see someone for weeks or months. Internet replies were instantaneous. I think that because now I don’t have this overarching relationship in the cloud, everything will slow down for me. That’s a good thing. I don’t have any friends that won’t come over for tea.
Having conversations with Aada can happen with my therapist, but I think that the excavation here is more important. I need to see what went wrong and I need to atone for it in the other relationships I create, because I don’t think there’s any salvaging this one. I have no interest in being friends with someone that acted like a pathological lie was no big deal when she got busted, no recognition of what she’d asked me to do. She has no interest in being friends with someone who would be this narcissistic, not knowing it was building narcissism because I was only thinking of myself and what I needed. In the moment, it felt justified. Now, I just feel horrible. But at the same time, my reality is back in check. If there were to be any reconciliation, I would prefer it to happen on the ground. I will not go back into a secretive little bubble where I don’t know what she’s told others about me, but she gets access to all my thoughts.
That’s the hardest part of trying to move on. Knowing that she’ll never be far from this web site, knowing that she will have access to my thoughts whether I want her to or not. It’s a part of being a public figure I don’t like, that people who don’t like me still crave reading here.
It’s why touchstones are important. I have to write for the audience that likes me as well as the one that doesn’t. It’s because I’m only writing for myself that I can even approach this. It’s not the writing that’s hard, it’s the publishing. My blog holds me accountable in a way that few things do.
I do think about my audience in advance. Lately, that audience has been Aada, but this blog existed before she was just a twinkle in my eye, so she is not the only touchstone. Offhand I can think of several people that have influenced entries, none more than the children in my life. I need to get back to that, where my touchstones aren’t online.
I have a lot of regret that I chose to be weird.
The fight this time around was just one of many, and started the day I told her I was in love with her…. not her face. Her essence. I didn’t know what I was doing because I set up a pattern in which she didn’t know if she could trust me or not. We never recovered, because I was an idiot. I have done everything I can think of to remedy the situation, and it did work. I just don’t know how well.
I will never know that now, because I have destroyed any love Aada would have for me because some problems cannot be fixed. Ours was one of them. I found out she lied and went Full Metal Jackass.
Until now, Aada would read lines like that and tell me she laughed, and that’s what kept her as a touchstone for this web site. Creating more will only come with time as I meet more people.
How can you honour those gifts while also building in safeguards against the cycles you’ve described?
This line got me because it’s what I’m dealing with in therapy. Again, it will all come together with time, because a virtual pen pal isn’t a real touchstone, in the end. 7% of communication is not all of them, and I barked up the wrong tree before I even knew what kind it was. If I had been more circumspect, I would have had a very different career.
But I wouldn’t have had this one, either.
Stories That Are All True 
Dear Leslie,
Your observation that “the internet is faster in and of itself” illuminates something essential about how medium shapes message. Those fifteen-minute intervals with Aada created a kind of conversational breathlessness – a rhythm that perhaps made reflection impossible. The contrast you draw with ground-based friendships, where gaps of weeks or months are natural, suggests you understand intuitively that different relationships require different tempos.
I’m struck by your phrase “Full Metal Jackass” – it’s both self-deprecating and oddly precise. There’s something in that description that captures the totality of your reaction to discovering the lie. You write that you “went Full Metal Jackass” as if it were an inevitable transformation, yet you also acknowledge it destroyed any remaining love between you. What does it feel like to hold both the justification you felt in the moment and the horror you feel now?
Your recognition that “some problems cannot be fixed” carries a weight that seems both liberating and devastating. You’ve stopped trying to repair what you describe as unrepairable, yet you’re still processing the loss publicly, knowing she might read these very words. That takes a particular kind of courage – or perhaps compulsion.
The line about choosing to “be weird” intrigues me. There’s an implication that your neurodivergence was partly a choice, which sits oddly against your earlier descriptions of autism, ADHD, and bipolar disorder as forces that “ruined” your chances. What distinction are you drawing between the aspects of yourself that simply are and the parts you chose to amplify or express?
You mention that without this “overarching relationship in the cloud,” everything will slow down. How does it feel to reclaim that ground-based pace? Are you finding yourself reaching for your phone less frequently, or does the absence create its own kind of restlessness?
Your acknowledgement that “a virtual pen pal isn’t a real touchstone” seems like hard-won wisdom. Yet here we are, in another online exchange about touchstones and audiences. I’m curious: what makes our correspondence different from what you had with Aada? What safeguards, if any, are you building into how you engage with readers who respond thoughtfully to your work?
The children in your life as touchstones – that feels like solid ground. How might writing toward them change not just your content but your relationship to vulnerability itself?
You’re excavating with remarkable honesty, Leslie. Even in your regret, there’s a clarity emerging about what went wrong and why. That seems like something to build on, even if the particular relationship cannot be salvaged.
Bob x
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