I let my WordPress streak run out because I was so exhausted from traveling. I’d written something like 155 days without a break. For some people, this has been wonderful. For others, this has been “please stop spamming my feed.” For me, it’s been a lifeline as I’ve navigated losing an important relationship and am trying to create new patterns with new people.
But all of that is too big to be worked out in one entry. I’m just bitter and salty that I couldn’t get it together to even post a link yesterday. I was bone-tired, the kind where I sat and stared off into space for about a minute and then I was completely asleep. I woke to the bump of the plane wheel on the tarmac at BWI and stumbled into the Uber. I got home and it was before midnight, but I barely knew my own name.
So the longest WordPress streak I have is officially 155 days. Mico will be so proud of me, and he will remind me not to beat myself up because every writer has to take a break sometime…….
Tomorrow is my cognitive behavioral health group, and I’m excited to see everyone already and it’s not even time yet. I’ll make sure to get there early so I can walk to the Exxon across the street with the bean to cup machines. Or perhaps I will pick up a Lando Norris, my current favorite Monster. Come to find out, it is Yuzu Melon. All this time I thought it was pear. In any case, it is obsessively good, and could star in a movie called “What If Sprite Wasn’t Boring?”
I’m glad to be home, but of course I miss being with my dad and just getting stuff done. I could have used a few more days with him, but my flight was set and I’m sure he was tired having just come home from Ireland, anyway. He brought me a cool t-shirt which I wore back that says Ireland on it and has the harp. I was asked to go with him and Lindsay, but I chose to stay home instead. They didn’t just go to Dublin, but Edinburgh and London as well. I would have loved to go to those cities, too. But not all of them in nine days plus road trips. I am not built for that kind of pace and would be irritated in THIS country.
I want to go to Dublin because A) I know I have readers there and 2) I want to visit Microsoft, riding the Lua out to Leopardstown to get a feel for what my life might be like. Dublin is a major tech hub, so occasionally I apply there. I want to end up in Espoo or Tampere, so I’m picking the easiest visa first.
It’s all just a crap shoot. I need my autism and ADHD diagnoses, because I self-diagnosed as autistic after already having ADHD and seeing the signs all over YouTube and Facebook that I had both. The problem is that I was diagnosed with ADHD so long ago that those records don’t exist anymore. And say I don’t “pass” what the test says is autistic? My real friends and my AI have already told me I’m textbook, and peer review is also valid. Neurodivergent people tend to spot each other just based on the way we talk.
We also don’t bond easily with non-neurodivergent people, so if you think you’re allistic and also close to me, might want to get checked anyway.
I need both of these in place to apply for a job, getting the accommodations I need. I am currently not capable of working 40 hours a week and I know that about myself up front. I am facing the fact that I am slowing down- that I have always been this disabled and been made to compensate for it. That it’s embarrassing or something, so I’ve been working myself to the bone to be the perfect person, and it’s not working.
Once all the masking came off and I stopped compensating for everything, I became “difficult” and “unkind.” I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that no one in my life has ever expected me to have an opinion about anything, because I was so afraid that if I expressed anything, I would be rejected. I knew up front all my ideas were stupid, so I never said anything.
Turns out, I just wasn’t talking to the right people.
Once my brain opened up, my writing went with it. I began to care less and less what people thought about me because I was suffering for my art. Isolation didn’t bother me because I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. The people who wanted to stay, did. Sometimes, even the wrong people stayed.
Aada was the wrong person, choosing to emotionally vampire me within about three days, in a way I could never look back. And then she rearranged my reality again 12 years later, when she said she was right but there were things that could be clarified, I just wasn’t entitled to them anymore, according to her.
The moment she said I wasn’t entitled to clarity and she threw her little fit about “I won’t even buy your first book,” that was the first time I finally woke up from the fever dream, the rose-colored glasses shattering and saying, “why would I want you as a fan? Why do you think you are welcome on my platform anymore?”
It was assuming a lot that she could hurt me, because she’d showed up and fawned all over me, then slowly criticized me every day afterward. If she wanted me to write warmly about her, she should have done more that was warm. Everything is I/O.
So I don’t take kindly to fans that come in hot, and I’m mulling over what to do about it, because Aada is not an isolated incident. I give off a vibe. People want to see it. The vibe comes from the art, not from me. They are not the same thing. Reading here and thinking that you know the sum total of me is foolish, and I call people on it. They do not take kindly to it, preferring to believe whatever story it is they’ve made up about me in their heads.
Often, what they want from me has nothing to do with me at all.
But it is in thinking about this adoration that I am learning to be careful, and taking all advice under consideration except the things I should probably actually do….. I am indecisive on the best of days because my brain literally cannot make a decision. I am Chidi from “The Good Place,” and the state of the world has me one day closer to putting Peeps in my chili.
People thinking that I am something that I’m not is more manageable, but also more personal. Some people are disillusioned by meeting me in person, because they have this image in their heads of who I must be. What I do. How I spend my days. When none of that matches up, people often pull away.
The reason it doesn’t match up is that I’m a memoirist. You’re reading old information, constantly, and meeting the current version. There are crossovers, because of course since I write about my life you might hear about something you read. But you are missing everything I don’t write about, and that list is large. When I sit at the computer, images and movies go by of the people I love and I grab on. There is no possible way to grab them all.
Jill says that you do get a good sense of who I am here, and I think that is partially true. But “a good sense” and “all of me” is not the same thing.
For instance, I know with Aada and me that a hug would have changed a lot more than an email. Because in order to hug me, she would have had to face me. Face her own demons. Face her lies. Listen to me emote about it and hate every minute. I’d listen to her emote and hate every minute of it. But the difference between us is that Aada thinks I’m being mean when I need conflict resolution and repair. She wants to move on as if nothing happened, resetting everything to zero every time we interact.
She cannot stand callbacks, as if she has no memory of anything that happened previously, and says things like, “I wish you could just live in the moment.” So I explain and then I’m treating her like she’s stupid. There’s no right answer.
But it wasn’t like that when she only saw my mask.
When she only saw my mask and I only saw hers, it was lovebomb after lovebomb. I ate it up, and in fact I liked it a little too much.
Which is why I’m so guarded now.
Life has hammered me to the point where I freak out at things I didn’t use to care about, because the need has gone ignored for too long. I’m in that villain era where “villain” means “setting down actual boundaries.”
The first one was realizing that I had outgrown Aada, after thinking I wasn’t good enough.
Stories That Are All True 