I woke up in a funky mood:
I hummed when I didn’t know all the words and sang when I did, my mind on my money and my money on my mind. There are very few words I don’t know by now…. And in fact I used this first line in a sermon once… The only line from this particular song I could use. But the illustration was about how music commits words to memory, much like the early church did with settings and psalms. It was a new spin on old advice from Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of Riverside Church in New York City:
“Every good sermon begins in New York and ends in Jerusalem, or begins in Jerusalem and ends in New York.” Start with modern and bring in the scriptures, or start with the scriptures and end in modern day.
The other piece of advice I got in preaching, incidentally, is “when you run out of things to say, stop talking.”
I can do that in a sermon because I can track with an audience and tell when they’re bored, either changing direction or realizing I’ve lost them and wrapping up before I embarrass myself further. My lay preaching career, like all preaching careers, was hit and miss. Sometimes I was on fire. Sometimes the best people could do was, “your skirt was too short.” I guess I started wearing men’s clothing a Sunday too late.
The Gourds’ cover started in my head before I even woke up, and repeated in my head until I got to our next song, the song I sing when I miss Aada:
She, also, talked to me before I woke up, because she appears in my dreams as a wise sage occasionally. When she does, I think about all I’ve done and all I’ve left undone with her. The times we’ve shared in the past, even digitally, will stay with me as I move forward. Perhaps sometime later in life Aada will change her mind and lift the ban on interacting with me. I know that she will never just forget me, and will continue to respect me as a writer even if she does not choose to reach out. She would get angry at me if I asked her to leave me alone, telling me that I don’t have a leg to stand on in terms of losing fans.
But I would rather lose a fan than have someone show up here thinking that my thoughts at large are specifically targeted at her and not people like Bob Lynn, who showed up and worked through a few things with me at a time I needed it. In other ways, knowing that Aada is most likely reading from afar is comforting, because these are the only words of mine she has left. That may not mean much to her right now, but it may in the years to come when she is searching for the pieces of herself she found in me.
We moved like ships in the night, an asynchronous support system that was always on call. I wanted that to last my whole life, but my disease said, “not so fast, Leslie.”
My disease is not my personality, and I will spend a lifetime compensating for it if my past is any indication. Therapy and my cognitive behavioral health group are slowly putting me back together after what has been a wild and crazy ride, especially if you’ve been reading my blog entries over the past few months.
But I wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now, because I’ve laid out everything I’m willing to lay down for my friends and they’ve said no. I hear them, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have things to write about that involve them. I don’t get another story to write about while my real life is happening.
The most vehement supporter became the most vehement critic and the only thing that changed was that I was holding a mirror up to her face. She alternately agreed with me and not, and that’s what made her so angry. That I could read her like a book in some ways, but the ways in which I fell short were almost certainly because we didn’t say, “let’s go for lunch and clear all this up.” We would have become real to each other- and thus harder to rattle because our relationship was solid and not every day a new person wants out because the other has said two or three things they don’t like. Popping off like that was not one-sided
So now we’ve arrived at our last song, one I mentioned yesterday as being important to my lunch with Jane Ann as well:
I do not know whether this is really the end of my relationship with Aada because it has always stopped and started. I just have to guess that this is really the end and try to separate the best I can, because if I showed up again she’d just accuse me of opening a wound. That’s the last thing I’d ever want to do, because if I showed up again it would be to rebuild trust. To say that I absolutely do care, but I have a disorder that needs to be managed and we need to create boundaries around it. I think I have gone back to my normal self, but she may not. It’s not up to me to judge how long she’s hurt or even how she feels about me at all.
Therefore, I believe that there should be meditation in cathedrals of our own, because the pressure of trying to put everything back together the minute it broke is too much to expect of anyone. The conflict needs room to breathe, and Aada may be right. Our story may be over. But as I have said before, I never know what is going to make Aada reach out to me once she’s really had time to think about the relationship…. Or forget what’s wrong with it, take your pick.
She tells me she has a save the world complex, but I do, too. We were just two little girls trying to save each other, until both of us turned against each other. We were at a loss as to how to communicate, so I folded and made her choice for her. I made it impossible for her to want to interact with me because I knew I was not good for her. I’m a writer, a public figure. She made friends with a public figure when she had absolutely no business doing so, in retrospect. I didn’t mean to cause her pain at any time during these 12 years, but there’s no way I could tell the truth and write “The World According to Aada.” That’s Aada’s truth to own, and it’s no less valid than mine.
The problem is that she has told everyone her story about me except me, and my boundaries are simple. If you have a problem with me, tell me about it. And for God’s sakes, don’t lie. She had a habit of saving up all her frustrations with me and writing me these long letters telling me why she’d been so avoidant instead of being up front in the first place….. Not a people pleaser except in front of me because she was trying to impress me.
You cannot impress me more than I’d already been impressed. I thought she was the bees knees until she told me that a lie that was a gut punch (and she knew it), but it was an inert lie because it was to impress me. That was not the case, and it is the cathedral of my own, the cross I bear because I keep thinking, “what would it have been like if you told me you lied 12 years ago instead of weaving this complete tale of bullshit?”
I am hoping that because we’ve leveled each other an equal amount, that gives us both a chance to let go of anger and come to peace…. Piece by piece by piece.
Stories That Are All True 