The One They Want

I am determined not to have a certain first impression because it’s not my job to care what people think of me. They can do it on their own time. I do not say this to be defiant, only to say that I will no longer be preparing canned reactions. It is what it is. Most people think that I am delightful upon meeting until I slowly become too weird for them. By this I mean that I have had no real coping skills for my own neurodivergence and mental health skills, so I could not prepare for the inevitable spin-out due to the communication barrier. No one could help me because I couldn’t help myself.

I had to dig deep into research on autism and ADHD, and now I’m attending a cognitive behavioral health group to increase my awareness of my own bullshit.

AuDHD is a lot of bullshit, because you’re not wired to converse like other people converse. You don’t pick up what’s not being said, the social cues running around you because when you hear something, you take it incredibly literally.

Taking everything literally has cost me more than anyone will ever know. I now know what it feels like to really lose something as a writer, which is my muse. I cannot give an accurate first impression right now because I’m in shock. But as I drifted off last night, I thought, “this is the last time I’ll ever have to grieve her. She’s honestly and truly gone.” It has been a roller coaster of enormous proportions, and I still have to get over the fact that I am not welcome in her life but she’ll know so much about me from here on out. This blog and the works I have in progress will not make me less of a public figure.

That’s why, when I drifted off to sleep, I seriously considered deleting this blog in its entirety, no regrets. I thought about letting it go dormant and just not adding anything more. Anything to get off the grid and not be a public figure anymore because the thought she’s watching from afar is not altogether comforting.

Our relationship has been adversarial at times, and I don’t have the stomach for it. I wish there was a way that I could track Aada’s IP and block it from this URL, but that will never be possible. It will never be possible for me to hide published books from her, either. So, it’s a process with me making peace with the fact that our relationship will always be uneven if she cannot stick to her vow to stay away.

I have officially been Dooced, fired because of my blog and here’s the irony. Aada would have hated it if I’d stopped sharing my real feelings and became an “influencer,” yet she hated being Aada at times. I could have written about something lighter and lost her respect.

If I was going to lose her respect, I’m glad I lost it by being true to myself.

I am trying to get a bigger fan base in Virginia because hits from her location are rare. They stand out, and I want that not to be the case. So, I’m going to start writing about it when I go to Tiina’s. I cannot believe how beautiful it is, and I have a lot to say about my emotions regarding my awe. As time goes by, I’m hoping that my love for the land spreads to others.

I want to get into more landscapes, because I’ve seen so much beauty and haven’t taken any time to record it. That’s because most of the absolutely stunning sights were taken in at 55 miles an hour. I can’t drive and snap photos, and there was really no place to get out of the car.

It’s not just about Virginia, DC, and Maryland, though. I fell in love with New York when I drove up to see Aaron and his wife’s family at Halloween.

I would like to get into travel writing, as I have said before. But I don’t want to stop examining my life and my mental health issues. As I get healthier, my writing will, too. I won’t always be so sad about the ways I’ve failed someone I loved and keep harping on it, while the message she’s been taking home is “I hate you and want to punish you.”

It was a communication disorder because we were not talking to each other.

It was a mistake to have a relationship that deep over the internet, because we weren’t connecting to each other’s humanity. We lobbed a lot of angry words without thinking for over 12 years, and none of that was healthy for either of us.

But as a result of this relationship, I think that others are going to have her opinion of me when it’s impossible. She’s never really met me. I am not sure that either one of us has taken in the enormity of how much we shared without ever shaking hands. We never instituted any guardrails, nor was she open to them.

I am looking forward to relationships that cannot get this toxic because they aren’t mired in years of taking emotional potshots at each other without looking, physically LOOKING, at what we were doing to each other.

Aada said it best when she said that our journey had been brilliant and beautiful at some times, excruciating and debilitating at others. But because we weren’t in front of each other, we couldn’t really hear each other, empathizing in real time.

I can feel the cortisol rising, the injustice and unfairness swelling within me. I am so mad at myself that I cannot breathe. What calms me down is thinking, “how dare I feel my own feelings?”

Aada told me that she thought after our relationship was over I would be stronger than ever, and I don’t think that’s true. I think that the strongest version of me would have come with facing Aada’s music and learning to turn dissonance into resolution. But that is today. Years from now I may look back and realize that I was right when I said goodbye to her a month into our relationship because I was so emotionally overloaded.

I was helplessly in love with her, and because she is straight, I knew it was all my own bag to deal with and wanted a deep friendship. That turned into years of backbreaking emotional work that I’m glad I did, but the story that helped other people didn’t help her.

That’s what you should know about me as a writer. My despair comes in when I realize that I can have a blog or I can have intimate relationships, but I cannot have both without a lot of communication.

With Aada, we didn’t check the story we were telling ourselves often enough, and suddenly we were at opposite ends of a spectrum instead of standing together.

Because we didn’t really know each other and thought we did. Thought that writing and sending each other personal media was enough. That face time didn’t matter for well over a decade. It was dehumanizing, because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt we could fix this with eye contact and a hug.

That’s because when you have no trust capital with someone, you really need to be able to look into their eyes. I would not have been so mercurial had we been in contact offline, because the internet heightened my emotions too much. I needed to come back down to earth, because someone’s writing personality is not them.

A first impression would have to include that I’m so fluent in web communications that I’m frustrated and need time offline every day.

There’s a laundry list of lessons I’ll take with me from this relationship, and that’s the biggest one.

Being watched is the second. I have a heightened awareness of what I’m doing and saying, because I think that other people expect me to flip out now that Aada is permanently gone. She’s been emotionally absent for most of our relationship, so this doesn’t feel that different. It just gives me more information for the future- that if “for now” really means “for now” and she’s going to come back later in my life I need to have my own boundaries to keep us both safe.

I am not counting on it, I just know that when people go back to my writing after a long time away, it often encourages them to reach out whether I want them to or not. I have said publicly that I will never turn her away, and this is true. But I also do not have to roll out the red carpet every time she appears, thinking that the world is going to change with our complementary angles. I don’t have to put my whole heart in her hands when she only wants to say hello.

That’s what I mean about moving too fast. I forgive very quickly and easily, not really having any self-protection mechanisms in place because I am so afraid of being lonely. This is the most lonely I’ve felt in a long time, because my inner monologue about how to fix things with Aada has stopped and the self care has begun.

I ate some Dubai chocolate.

That made the world a little better, but it doesn’t fix everything. I woke up this morning with actual tears in my eyes, and I just laid there and cried. I can respect that Aada needs space and I can give it to her, but I don’t have to be happy about it.

She said that she could offer clarification on her job, but she wouldn’t. That one line made me see red not because of our present situation, but because that kind of information is what I’d been searching for to calm my anxiety for 12 years, but now my anxiety wasn’t worth calming. She amped it up, instead.

That’s why it’s just not worth flipping out. She’s been a great friend over the years in some ways, but this aspect was shit. I needed more support from her both as a writer and a person, and she stonewalled me every day. I no longer want to participate in this dynamic, because I have other friendships that don’t take this much out of me.

It is exhausting trying to be heard when you’re not. I need to go toward people who are actually listening. Small talk drains me, so even a first impression of me will last if we talk more than a few minutes. I want to know about people’s worlds, and I’m very curious. People like to talk about themselves, and I soak it up. It gets me out of having to answer personal questions about myself because you’ve talked about X or Y for 20 minutes and oh, look at the time. I have to go.

What broke my heart in empathy for Aada was when she said that I didn’t need to take anything down if it was needed for my health and healing moving forward. That she was willing to take the bullets my blog caused to fly. That’s really the moment I decided I was an ex blogger, and then I had to get over it and make the donuts this morning.

I wondered if Aada ever really picked up how much I hated writing our story as it stood. That I dreamed of so much more adventure and playfulness than we got. She never asked if I liked writing her the way she appeared, just assumed it over and over. The answer is “absolutelyfuckingnot.” Hell no, I hated every minute of it and longed for a relationship in which we each called off the dogs and just got along. That was possible up until I found out she’d created an entire fictional universe that I’d bought into because there was some basis in fact.

She lied once, and became more and more fearful that it would get out so she kept lying. She could see how those consequences affected me and the emotional turmoil it took on me without feeling the need to unburden herself for 12 years.

I had a mental breakdown when I found out, another reason why it’s unwise for me to have a blog because the “think it, say it” plan has not generally worked out for me except in one area. The more I fuck up, the more people read me. I should have air gapped everything I was so angry, but I wrote and published my rage. It didn’t matter. She “wasn’t coming back.”

Except she did.

But only to tell me to get out of her life one more time, resetting the clock on grief. But this time it’s muted, because I’ve already grieved so much that I don’t have energy to put there. I’d rather close my eyes and remember her smile.

I have heard that the best days of your life are when you meet a writer and when you walk away from them.

But it’s hard to know that on a first impression.