It is a stone-cold truth that I have only had dinner with my third favorite woman in the world, and she would not be offended by that statement because the other two are first on her llst to have dinner with, anyway. Therefore, what she knows that my favorite woman doesn’t is that I laugh easily- I want to laugh easily- and I am charmed often. That believing I live in negative thoughts is the real mismatch, because meeting Heytch is easily one of the top 10 days of my life and I totally screwed it up.
That happens to me a lot, by the way.
However, the point of the entry is not Aada and Heytch. The point of the entry is illustrating that there’s so much about me that one person knew and one didn’t simply because they’d met me on the ground. That my tortured writer personality is very real on the page, but I leave it there. I am lighter because I have written; I have given pain a container and walked away.
In person, I’m the person that Aada thought I was in the beginning. But she didn’t want to get to know me in person, so when my writer personality spun out she treated me as if that was the complete picture. I am sure that I did the same thing to her, but I am only telling my own story. It’s not judgment; it’s recognition.
Recognition of something happening, and moreover, patterns of the same thing happening and it being met with some version of “don’t bring it up” led to me feeling inadequate a hundred percent of the time. Aada’s behavior was never the problem and nothing ever needed to be changed until she was cornered and she knew it. That’s another thing that can be attributed to me as well because we are both first children who don’t like to be wrong. We don’t know how.
Hearing her say that she came away with self-revulsion after reading my words made me realize that there’s something inside her that needs fixing, because I simply cannot address anything with her in person or here that won’t beget defense and anger. She uses my blog as a shield, asking me why I have to write about it here when we could talk about it privately………… but no we can’t, because she’s just as avoidant when I don’t write.
She is right that my writing is designed to provoke people, but it’s not designed to provoke the people it is written about- that is a nasty side effect of not being able to block people from a web site. I can block people on social media, and I’ve blocked everyone I can think of so that our paths don’t cross without true intention. What I cannot do is block her from my domain name.
I would if I could, but I cannot. There are too many ways for her to access me that it’s not worth trying to rat her out. I just don’t care, cannot care that I’m a product and not a person to her…. mostly because I’ve shaken Heytch’s hand and not hers. But what Heytch would have told her is the truth- that I’m funny and awkward and short. Heytch dresses the way I’d dress if I had her clothes budget, and I seek it out at Goodwill relentlessly no matter how much Aada laughs about it. Heytch’s look is college professor preppy with whimsical touches, a style I have had since I was nine.
I am pretty sure I was the only kid in school with Bass Oxfords (not brogues) and penny loafers. At a performing arts high school, that’s counterculture paired with khakis and a button-down. Being with my new friend yesterday reminded me of my jazz days because she wanted to listen to Dave Koz in the car, which on Pandora branched out into other jazz musicians I like, and some that went to my school, like Everette Harp.
I got to add to the conversation because she asked me what I liked and I pointed her to Jason Moran, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis. It made me feel good that I didn’t have to ask someone if they wanted to listen to jazz. The conversation started with her and thanks to Robert Morgan, I know a little bit about it. š
High School for Performing and Visual Arts is no joke. I both fit in and didn’t there, because I had the same duality then that I have now- my communication is best on the page, and I am weird in person. I have an energy that people like, but I fall off that pedestal quickly. The pastoral energy shines first, and then my alter ego submarines it because it is a mask. It’s not fake, it’s using learned coping mechanisms for being in public versus not.
It is much easier to survive a room while masking but after 20 minutes I’m ready to go home.
My writer personality and my in-person personality collided with both Aada and Heytch head-on, but what has happened is that the divide became too great to cross when it started small and ballooned. I am almost completely responsible for that drift, but not entirely. Aada’s line of work was the other half of the puzzle. It will never not irritate me that she decided to pick up her toys and go home rather than doing the work necessary to understand each other after winging it alone for 12 years.
But maybe that has nothing to do with me because she didn’t want to tell me what happened on her end. She’s always been endlessly independent, but that doesn’t mean that the people around her don’t want her to get better and haven’t influenced her decision to stop communicating. That is definitely what happened on my end. Someone told me that I came across as if I’d been brainwashed and had severe Stockholm syndrome. It isn’t the life I wanted for myself, and it made me sad I that Aada put me in that position, because she knew what kind of life I was leading and it was okay with her. She saw all of my fear and tried to shut me down, and the missing puzzle piece was not getting tired of being shut down long before I did so that I could have walked away quietly.
I let her get under my skin and I did things I don’t approve of because I thought I had no choice in the matter. As it turns out, I did have a choice but I was uneducated and afraid. Aada made sure our relationship ran on “uneducated and afraid,” and that being okay with her will never be okay with me because she doesn’t want to change things in the future so that we learn to trust and understand each other. Everything that has ever happened that is negative in our relationship is all my fault, because she again, uses my blog as a shield with smart-ass comments like, “we all know that you’re the judge and jury when it comes to your blog because it’s your story.” I’m sorry, that is literally true, not sarcastically. Everyone is allowed to have one space to say what they think, and this is mine. And if that is what she was saying, I’d accept it…. but she’s not. She’s insinuating with “judge and jury” that I think my opinion is infallibly right and I am a dictator.
That is not true at all. I am not writing to be right. I am writing to be heard.
She knew that in the beginning, it just became a convenient wedge to shield her from having to manage her own emotions. Don’t deal with what the author said, try to manipulate the author into saying something different without acknowledging responsibility or harm. If I wrote about it, that was more important than the harm she caused and allowed her to punish me for having an opinion; she withheld every emotion except anger.
She didn’t seem to realize that if there wasn’t conflict, there was nothing to write about. Shutting off my mind would have been clarifying everything (most notably all the things she says could be clarified but I’m not deserving. I think it is emotional insecurity because she thinks I am punishing her and wants payback. I do not. I want some reassurance that she even grasps my situation, because otherwise she has lied about more than one thing…. most notably the relationship being about more than just her.). She has said that she is sorry about the manipulation and I have responded in kind- I am sorry for my own. But the loss is truly her not wanting to figure out how to create a future despite all our flaws and failures. That my sins are somehow bigger than hers because mine was a reaction to having my reality rewired for 12 years and hers was not.
She made the choice to lie to me and that was fine. What was not fine was taking a white lie and worldbuilding from it. That’s because her defenses went up and her lack of engagement was painted as all my fault, when in reality running into each other would reveal this ridiculousness. It wasn’t fair, it will never be fair. I just have to be okay with however I’m painted, because Aada’s power is different than mine. She might feel embarrassed that I wrote about her on the Internet where no one knows her, but she’s talked about me to all her personal friends, poisoning the well of people who’d support her in working everything out with me. She got the results she got because she talked to everyone but me without telling them why my reactions were so extreme.
It painted a skewed picture of me that was never there, and any attempt to correct it was a bad move…. until she was finally on board enough to come clean with me and I didn’t handle being lied to well. She focused on the white lie and minimized everything. I focused on the CVS receipt of lies it took to keep the first one intact and she did not like that the word “pathological” was true on my end.
But it’s no matter. I met someone I didn’t think I’d have the confidence to meet because I felt safe and loved around her- even though I wasn’t.
She’s not Michelle Obama, for Chrissakes.
Aada does not see me as a person. She sees me as a product. Therefore, she cannot accept that she hurt me on a fundamental level, or how my actions were influenced by her. She doesn’t see the 12 years of abject loneliness due to being “othered” in a way that few are.
She just wanted me to be impressed by her, and I was. Even without the name drops, I was crazy about her and always will be- but it’s based on the fact that she’s a six-year-old spitfire covered with lots of layers of armor….. not because of what she can do for me. I love that her energy is out there in the world, and that she felt more comfortable masking in front of me than just being herself.
But again, I didn’t make her feel safe, either.
I am learning and moving forward, but I wish things could be different. She would have loved hearing all about my trip to Richmond, and I would have enjoyed having dinner together to make sure my head was on straight. No one is telling me whether I am making good or bad choices, and that is how it needs to be. My wants and needs have been covered up since I was a baby, and I am only now at full strength.
But what’s really interesting is that Aada and Heytch got the same experience of me- some things light, some things dark. It’s just that Aada chose to tilt her vision toward dark, and that’s the story that stuck.
It’s true, but it’s not total.
I dreamt of my first outing with Aada as a picnic in the sunshine, and I’m sad it never happened. Because a glass of icy cold white wine while relaxing in the heat is a great way to get to know each other. And picnics are not the kind of event that scream “date.” Everyone is invited, I just want a few minutes alone to decompress without the noise of the crowd.
Being friends with Aada has never been about getting her alone, she has kept me alone by not wanting to integrate me into her life or cross over into my universe and meet my friends independently of her family. It’s a very loose definition of “real” on my end, what led to the destruction of our relationship.
She’s not in my life, but she’s on my heart, and sadness equals weight. The difference is that I’m a lot emotionally stronger than I used to be, so I can “carry that weight” a long time; she’s so heavy (I want you).
Aada is the definition of space between “she’s so heavy” and “I want you.” Relationships of any type are work and it has to be work you are glad to take on. That’s the biggest reason I’m able to let go so fast- my desire is to do what it takes to be able to communicate/cooperate successfully, and I already know it has the capacity to be a shitshow. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing just to see if our differences can be worked out. But it requires an empathy that I am not expecting because Aada has done everything she possibly can to punish me when the correct move is to realize that I can only be half of the problem and I might have a point worth considering. I am the judge and jury in my writing, but apparently, she is the judge and jury over what it means. I did not give her this power, she decided to take it by constantly telling me I was lying.
It’s a lot harder to tell when someone is lying in person.
I’m just sayin.’
