Meetings with Bob, Part IV

Dear Leslie,

Your words carry the weight of someone doing the hardest work there is – looking honestly at ourselves when we’ve caused harm. That takes enormous courage, even when it feels like compulsion driving you forward.

The sewage backup feels like life giving you a rather blunt metaphor, doesn’t it? Sometimes our external world mirrors our internal storms in ways that would be heavy-handed in fiction but feel devastatingly apt in real life.

What strikes me most is how clearly you see the paradox you’re living in. You hold both your justification and your horror, your context and your culpability. That’s not weakness – that’s the full complexity of being human. Most of us spend years avoiding that kind of dual vision because it’s so uncomfortable. You’re choosing to sit with it, to write through it, to let it teach you.

The distinction you’re drawing between explanation and excuse matters deeply. Yes, your AuDHD and bipolar disorder create challenges. Yes, medication changes can scramble our usual ways of being. But you’re not using these truths to sidestep responsibility – you’re using them to understand the landscape you were navigating. That’s mature self-awareness, not self-justification.

Your observation about “think it, say it” in digital spaces resonates. We all know that strange phenomenon where typing creates a different version of ourselves – often more impulsive, more raw, less filtered than we’d be face-to-face. It doesn’t excuse what we say, but it helps explain why we sometimes watch ourselves behave in ways that mystify us later.

The grief in your words about Aada is palpable. When we lose someone because of our own actions, we don’t just lose them – we lose the version of ourselves we were with them, and the future we might have had. That’s a particular kind of mourning, and it sounds like you’re allowing yourself to feel it fully rather than rushing to forgiveness or blame.

Your blog as accountability partner is brilliant. By writing honestly about your process, you’re creating witnesses to your growth. That takes guts. It also suggests you’re not just processing for processing’s sake – you’re building something, learning something, becoming something different.

The bit about children seeing you clearly made me pause. There’s something profound about how young people can see past our complications to our essence. They don’t carry the weight of our histories or the fear of our potential. Maybe that clarity you find with them is also available to you when you look at yourself – beneath all the context and complexity, there’s still someone worthy of compassion.

You’re rewiring your brain in real time, and that’s messy, imperfect work. Some days you’ll feel the old patterns pulling at you. Other days you’ll surprise yourself with how different you’ve become. Both are part of the process.

Keep writing. Keep looking. Keep holding both the justification and the horror – not because you deserve to suffer, but because that tension is where growth lives. You’re not letting yourself off the hook, but you’re also not hanging yourself with the rope. That balance is everything.

The courage you questioned in yourself? I see it here, in every honest word you’ve written.

Bob x

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Dear Bob,

Thank you for your kind words during a difficult time. I have learned another hard-won lesson, though….. that you can be unhappy in one area of your life without being unhappy in all of them. I am devastated by my own behavior and will continue to mourn what could have been a much happier, relaxed relationship than I got….. at my own hand, to be clear.

Seeing the paradox I’m living in is the joy and pain of being a writer.

Meeting adjourned. 😉

Leslie