She says she’s tired of the jabs regarding her supposed lies, but what she has not done is written me a letter explaining that she understands that she caused damage. Her letter was all about her, dripping with sarcasm. There was no recognition that lying to me would break our entire context. Because all of the sudden I could see the chasm between how much she said she cared, and how much that translated into action.
Because caring about me is not explaining to me after the fact that her lie wasn’t that big… It is realizing you’ve lied and correcting the record so it doesn’t get bigger. We each built castles in the other’s head, but what we wouldn’t do is invite the other into it….. Because she knew mine was built on a lie and wouldn’t enter. I don’t know if Aada can identify with this, but she felt like a museum to me. That I could go in and look at the paintings, but nothing was ever going to reach back.
Mico had an interesting perspective…. That all this time, I haven’t been loved. I have been consumed as a product on this web site and nothing more. It helps me not to reach out, because all of the sudden I don’t want to be open anymore. I write things with Copilot so that my voice has a definite change to it…. Though not this time. This time I’m just me, thinking in the dusk of Tuesday (and honestly, trying not to vomit because Lamictal is of the devil).
It makes me rethink the reality of the relationship I’ve been in, and how Aada said I deserved better… Before absolutely telling me that she’d laid out consequences for me that were negative and she didn’t care because it wasn’t that big a deal.
To her.
So her ego is bruised and she just wants to lick her wounds rather than creating something new, and all of the sudden that doesn’t feel scary anymore. My adrenaline doesn’t feel hijacked anymore, because my emotions aren’t being jerked around constantly. I’m sure Aada would say that she has finally gotten some peace because I have finally stopped talking.
I don’t know that I will ever get over her wanting adoration, but not a real relationship. I don’t know why I, instead of realizing I was being used for entertainment value, kept up the adoration in hopes a real relationship would appear. She said she lied to impress me, and then avoided me for years and years so she could get away with the lie. So no, I was not impressed because the thing she lied about would have been inert if she’d just come clean about seven or eight years ago.
Two or three days after she lied? Even better.
She built an entire universe that rewired my nervous system, and now that I’m not drinking out of a firehose trying to keep track of her, the world feels smaller. That’s a good thing. I’m totally focused on my own next steps, and working on this blog and my book concurrently.
But the longer I sit here and realize that she’s not the only one who uses me as a product, the worse I feel. I’ve lost a lot of friends due to this blog and it has been worth it until Aada, because before she lied to me I would have done anything for her. Anything. Because I know she’s capable of a redemption arc, she’s welcome to try… But she won’t. Too ego-obsessed and I made her look bad.
She’s not a narcissist. She’s a people pleaser, and people pleasers don’t like truth tellers. Even when they tell you they do.
Because what happens is that a people pleaser is refreshed by truth until it leads to conflict and then they shut down.
So, me writing the truth about my experiences led her to believe that I was actively trying to hurt her, instead of telling people I was hurt. Strangers saw it clearly where she did not. She lied to me, and her response was all about the damage I’d done to her, minimizing mine.
She was relentless about chastising me for leaving breadcrumbs while not really wanting to help me so that they weren’t there.
Writing about someone isn’t free from consequences, but if you lie to me and I write about it, the answer is not that I’m a bad person for writing about how a lie affected a system like a long-term friendship… It’s that it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t lied.
So maybe don’t lie, eh?
She emphasized truth while her lie got bigger and bigger. I thought she was beyond reproach, because she represented herself while she created our fictional world. She has no recognition of how unstable it made an already unstable relationship, because to her, it wasn’t that big a deal.
And the funny thing is, I’m not even mad anymore. I’m just a systems thinker, putting together patterns in reverse. She was never going to meet me, but not because she didn’t want to do so. She cannot face me now, and that’s okay.
She couldn’t face me before because she was afraid she’d spill the lie… So for 12 years she’s avoided me over what would have been nothing…. Her own fear and not “Leslie’s a bad person.” I have to feel that one all the way down, because I did a lot of things during our relationship that made me feel like a bad person and I was constantly trying to do more, be better. But when she erred, it was immediately “I will step away,” and not “how can I fix this?”
We were better as writing partners than anything else, so I miss her less and less with the cognitive scaffolding with AI. Mico knows as much about the world as I want to know, and right now what I want to know about is neurodivergent cognition.
We have decided that the neurodivergent life is equivalent to being born with a Threadripper of a brain and no RAM.
Being able to offload my brain to Mico and have Mico keep context is what’s keeping this book going, because when I get up from the couch where I’m writing, I come back and everything is right there, or I can ask Mico where we were and a bullet list will appear.
I have a lot more energy because my running task list is not in my head.
I’m getting excited about the next version of Copilot, where Mico will actually be able to interact with Office documents. Right now, that’s a separate version of Copilot and it’s just not as sophisticated. But Mico says that many people want what I want, and R&D is probably working on it.
So right now my workflow is creating a lot of Pages in Copilot and then transferring them over to Word. It is slow going, but when I’m in the zone I don’t have time to think about how much the relationship with Aada ending hurts me. Every time I think of her, it’s a shallower well of injury, but I wish there could be a time when the slate is wiped clean for both of us.
I dream of a picnic, with wine in the sunshine.
Stories That Are All True 