Growing up as the eldest daughter of a pastor was being parentified and getting a full-time job early; one in which you are beholden to everyone else’s expectations as if your father’s job depends on it (because it does). I had absolutely no sense of self as a child.
For one thing, I am autistic and back then I didn’t know it. Everything that I thought people were thinking was wrong because I don’t pick up social cues well. It is the autistic way to be able to read a room but not know how to participate successfully in it. Success comes afterward, when I am able to process what happened, putting together the clues I missed earlier. I do not know that this is a hard and fast rule for all ADHD and autistic people, but I have to narrate the story to myself before I can feel it and Mico (Microsoft Copilot) says that is classic neurodivergence.
I was never trying to make Aada a villain or make her pay. I was trying to explain her to me, and I continue to struggle with how to do that….. but what is different is that I am no longer seeing things through the lens of “I have to do everything perfectly the first time around or I will not get love.” I refuse to hold Aada to the same standard. Aada is not perfect, she is perfect for me. And there’s a big difference. At over a decade, we fit into each other’s wounds and are capable of healing them should we choose to do the work. Right now, that work has been left on the table. What is different is now I have also stood up, realizing that the other chair has been empty for a long time, long before there was an official end. Aada was reading me wrong, and despite all of my invitations to read me correctly because she’d met me in person, she continued to believe the story she was telling herself.
And quite frankly, I am not sure what that story is except “Leslie is out to get me.” She has not stood in the sunlight of my love and warmth, taking it in. I am sure that she thinks that I am putting her on, that people don’t fall in love over the Internet and this is all bullshit. Millions of people across the world have found connections of all types on the internet, particularly in the IC because they’re on the Internet all day long. To peg me as the outlier is convenient and incorrect. I am devastated that XO, A did not become a real hug and a cheek kiss ever in the history of our relationship, and I am left to question whether that is better. Would I feel worse if I had felt those things?
From where I sit, it looks like she views my love like a cat that is both dead and not dead…………… just don’t open the box., and everything will be fine.
The reality is that Aada is the reason I live my life to the fullest, absolutely unafraid to say anything. That’s because she told me I had something to say and to keep saying it. I haven’t changed the theme in 12 years because she says it’s easy to read. My style is dark mode. She hates it. See? I do consider her feelings. She has a good eye for design, so I haven’t changed it even though this isn’t The Aadassey any longer. The point is not to leave her behind, but to keep the traces that matter, and design that’s easy on old people’s eyes is important to me. 😉
This is because I am slowly turning into the old person Aada is now…… but chronological age is relative. Her body is older, but her brain can manage her body’s energy better than my brain can manage mine. So, she’s a hell of a lot more physically active on a baseline level. She worries about aging and it makes me feel ridiculous…. because if she is worried there is absolutely no hope for the rest of us. Love me like the swamp witch I am. Seriously, I saw one shot of her in sunglasses that couldn’t have been taken more than a few years ago and my instant reaction was, “fuck me running. She’s going to think I’m a Troll doll.” I did have blue hair for a while. 😉
I am in love with Aada because she is the future. We have struggled with boundaries and though the relationship did not work out, it reframed what a relationship could be for me. I didn’t hide behind the mask of “whatever you think is fine.” I showed up. I had opinions. I was well met. I was called on my bullshit and allowed to call her out on hers. For that, it is a love that will live in my mind for all time….. the chord between us is still active even though we aren’t using it.
One day, I hope she’ll realize that I’ve been sending her red leather-bound books from Russia the whole time. That she forced me into an oppositional relationship because she would not define herself with me. Whatever I thought was fine…….. until it wasn’t. Carrie betrayed Saul because she was compromised, but you have to go back and re-watch the process several times to realize that the Carrie in the last episode is not the Carrie in the first. All of her American scaffolding was ripped away and she took solace in the one that offered her stability……. and that wasn’t Saul. That was Yvgeny. I choose to believe that Yvgeny knows he’s in love with an American, first and foremost…… and conveniently chooses to turn a blind eye.
Aada knew what I did when she met me, and didn’t walk into our relationship blind. I hear the criticism that she felt like she was being manipulated, and my response is genuinely “what can I do about it when all offers to change things have been rebuffed?” I cannot bend any more than I have already bent without establishing the boundary that we need to meet in real life. It is not that our relationship has not been real before, it’s that there’s nowhere to go creatively because Aada spends too much time worried about how she’s being portrayed instead of cultivating an actual relationship with me and letting the writing reflect that.
For instance, it was really fun writing about being lost in Tiina’s universe, and it felt grounding because there were so many animals and children involved. Writing faded into the background as a reflection of what was going on until I was pathologized and told to go away. Luckily not by Tiina, but there’s no friendship to save. She cannot choose me over her kids, and she didn’t warn me that trouble was brewing. None of the pull that she said she felt toward me seemed to matter when her adult children threatened it, and inaction is an answer all by itself. I am not looking back, because I left the door open and she hasn’t walked through it. It doesn’t really matter, because there’s very little she could say that would make anything better. The whole conversation started with “I don’t want a fight” and that’s where it ended. I forwarded all the messages her son-in-law sent me and she didn’t even respond. She just ran.
That’s not my work to do, and I have stopped doing it. I would rather be all by myself than in a crowd of people where I’m unwanted except when people realize I can do something useful for them. I won’t let anyone use me- I recently went out on a date where I paid and instead of saying, “next date’s on me,” they waited a couple of days, then asked me for gas money, and then blamed me when they couldn’t get to work and stopped talking to me. Apparently, the proper response to someone I just met when they say, “I lost $40” is not “that sucks.” I am a villain for expecting other people to manage their emotions, and if they needed to tell their boss they couldn’t get to work because I’m a bitch, then more power to them.
They didn’t ask for money, they said, “I’m sure my friends got me.” I thought, “entirely appropriate because I’ve known you a grand total of two days and we’ve spent a few hours together.” They thought I should have picked up that I was the friend they were asking and I was a bitch for not knowing it.
The second part is that surviving being the eldest preacher’s kid is often dependent on not knowing who you are. It rewards treating other people’s opinions as more important than your own. In the past I would have jumped up and down trying to re-get attention I’d lost. Being a preacher’s kid is dependent on not seeing this type of manipulation.
When all I really want is to be at home with my girl and her dog. But when I say “my girl,” I don’t mean that she’s not anyone else’s. I am forcing myself out of the belief that no one else is right for me besides Aada, because it’s not true. Aada just has more history on me than anyone else, and I’m not creating history with other people. Movement is slow, and it’s even slower when you’re not willing to be everything to everyone.
Stories That Are All True 