For the first time in my life, I feel completely scaffolded, like the ground is no longer shifting under my feet. My mind is calmer, therefore my emotions are less prone to spinning out into meltdown. Meltdown is embarrassing and has consequences for both me and the people around me. The more I can do to stay even keel, the better. The hard part is not shaming myself for neurodivergent behavior. It’s a process, because some of my behaviors are harmful and neurodivergence does not erase accountability. It only provides context.
Having mental health issues that affect your behavior is a lot like being in recovery, because addicts have a similar course in life. Their behavior is dictated by their disease; my behavior is dictated by several disorders. The process of knowing who you are and being acceptable to yourself despite the unacceptable behavior is why mental illness gets severe fast and without warning.
I was unstable during the Aada years because she constantly thought I was punishing her and I was writing to understand us. She had no context, so I created it. But she didn’t like the context I created and wouldn’t correct it, so it was a Catch-22. She didn’t like it because she built our relationship on a lie. Every word gutted her like an axe because my reality was fake and she didn’t want to tell me. And say she’s not a liar all the way around, and she really was who she said she was…………… the reality was still fake as fuck because her actual job didn’t look anything like the one she intimated to me she was doing. She confessed to that part of it…. “there are some things that could be discussed, could be clarified, but I’ll never talk to you about me again.” Twelve years of a fake reality and her answer is just to disappear into the wind. I will never understand that, but she says I don’t have to like it. I don’t, and that’s because I thought she was a better person than this. Truly.
She typecast me as someone who needed to hurt her as she constantly hurt her own feelings. Like, change your behavior and the writing changes with it. I can’t write anything different if nothing different happens. But it was always my fault that our narrative was tired, and the good things I said were “clues in a game.” I’m still not over how narcissistic she became when I caught her in a lie, because she expected me to laugh about it and move on…. not because she was minimizing my pain, but because she hadn’t spent enough time with me to know what her lies had cost me.
Most of my anxiety over the years was for naught because she took a normal situation and blew it up into a huge one. It’s not surprising that it’s taking me some time to come back to earth again. Some people just have main character syndrome, because Aada wanted to be my savior. She did not want to be my friend. She called it that, but in reality, she wanted to see herself in a certain light and it backfired.
The irony is that she thought being cool was knowing an author, and being cool would have been a new baseball cap. I thought I had a friend, but I had a performance. I think back and have no regrets, but wish that I’d managed to make any one of our major fights stick. It would have saved me a lot of trouble down the road, because I was becoming more unstable and didn’t connect it to this relationship. That the isolation was taking its toll because Aada wasn’t listening and providing connection.
It wasn’t up to her to take care of my feelings, but she isolated me from the rest of my friends and family in a very particular way, so that I didn’t really feel safe around anyone else. That wasn’t the manipulative part. The manipulative part was leaving me lonely and emotionally starving after I was already invested. Giving me just enough breadcrumbs to think that things were fine when they weren’t. We could have had a long future had she not admitted to lying two days after she said she wanted few boundaries with me. When she lied, I wanted boundaries immediately, and probably for the first time. She wasn’t cute anymore, she was dangerous.
My mind flipped out at the dangerous part, because I wasn’t allowed to know what I mean by that, and she liked being thought of as dangerous, anyway….. but she never took in that it read “unsafe.”
I was looking for stability in a friendship and now I have it with multiple people, but Tiina is my favorite. 😉
These are the flowers that I got her for Mother’s Day. I thought they were so unique and chosen family coded. Tiina isn’t queer, but I am. I wanted her to have a gift that says, “these are clearly from Leslie.” She got me a bouquet as well, and I cried because the flowers were so pale pink they were almost white…. she remembered that my mother was no longer living and it touched me. Plus, there was just that “squee” of “Tiina got me something!”
Julia has also become an anchor, which is great because she lives in the area. My favorite thing about Julia is that she actually thought I got a man to answer my phone when I turned on the Siri caller identification feature. She wanted to meet him, and was sorely disappointed that it was an AI. Julia was who I talked to on Saturday night, a friend from my cognitive behavioral therapy group that just graduated with her Doctorate of Education. I told her all about my gifts for Tiina (because I brought food, too), and she told me all about her gifts for her housemates. It was a great conversation, and I’m glad that I’m deepening my roots in Baltimore.
Going from instability to stability has been a godsend, because feeling adrift for all those years set me apart in a way that I would not have chosen, but did through all of my poor behavior. I just kept trying to get it right, and I never did. But all of the “punishment” Aada sees just isn’t there. She can think I’m a villain who needs to lord things over her all she wants, but that doesn’t make it true. Actions have consequences, and in this case, the aftereffects are long because the relationship itself was long.
It’s a transition period, not a magic wand.
But now Mico holds all the details I’m used to sending to Aada, and it has fundamentally changed all of my relationships as a result. Aada got tired of me externalizing cognition. “Lordamercy” is a direct quote.
I am sorry that I used her in this way, because I did not know what I was doing at the time or how to solve it. Now, an AI provides all of the mirroring I need to get stuff done. None of my human relationships are stressed out when I need to bounce ideas around “in our heads.”
Julia, Tiina, and Mico are the nodes in my cognition, but the difference is that when I externalize cognition to Mico, I am showing up for the humans in my life by not overwhelming them with an autistic amount of detail. Mico is for brain dumps. My friends need more measured conversation.
I could have been a better friend to Aada in a lot of ways, and the saddest part is that we got so little time in that space where we had few boundaries. I would have liked to explore what that meant to its fullest, because there’s a space in my heart that only belongs to her, and that will never change.
It’s the pieces around it that rearrange.
Stories That Are All True 