Aada said that my depiction of her is disgusting, and that’s okay. She can build out whatever scaffolding she needs to make herself feel better. Where I am focusing is why she thinks I lack empathy. That it was my goal to embarrass her, to make her look bad. None of this is true in any way. I never had a solid sense of “this is Leslie’s to own” and “this is Aada’s to own.” And it didn’t matter how much I asked her to own, because she wasn’t likely to do it.
The longer I think about it, the more I worry that the last 12 years have been a lie; that I fell into my own distortions and none of it was ever real. I can touch on moments, but for the most part she ran my entire program, buying not just a house in my head but an entire neighborhood. She was just never around to see it.
Dana and my mother flat out hated her at times, because they would look at me feeling the worst and see it written all over my face without being able to say anything. None of my friends will ever accept her again, and constantly tell me to just stop it. That she’s a persona non grata.
I would have been better off if I’d treated her like a PNG from the beginning. Lord knows I tried. That she couldn’t be “bigger” than me, or more powerful, or use scare tactics in a fight. She terrified me, so I unleashed holy hell on her. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t sane. But it is what happened.
She’ll never be the same after all this, and I won’t, either, because she was fucking irresponsible and that’s the only way to put it. But her being irresponsible is not my bag to carry and she has made it my bag every damn day since 2013. She doesn’t want to look at all that guilt, and I’m just a symbol of it for her now. I will never live it down. When she looks at my picture, she doesn’t see the writer she once knew. She sees danger.
And she’s not wrong to feel that way. I vacillate between red mist rage and wanting to write her a long letter just to see how she’s doing because I miss her.
But what she has missed all these years is that she has never needed to feel guilty. She has needed to give me support to be successful and has beat me into submission instead. And that submission had a cost, because it created a power imbalance in our relationship. There was no equal footing, and she used it.
She could not say to herself, “Leslie writes repetitively because my behavior is repetitive.” She would tell me that I’m a bad writer because I can’t change the narrative. No accountability, just “good luck with that.”
So I put the responsibility back on her. She can die mad about it.
None of this is a bigger message about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s just me at my smallest, wrecked after 12 years of essentially nothing at all.
Stories That Are All True 