There really are a lot of perks where I work. For instance, there was pizza delivered for lunch. Afterward, I wanted something sweet and realized I didn’t have any chocolate, so I decided a Coke would have to do. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a real Coke, loaded with ice like every Texan ever…. except in Texas, the type of Coke would be a Dr Pepper… we just don’t have any. Such a pity. Samantha thinks that it’s probably my blood type…. and she might be right.

Although since I’ve moved here, I’ve started buying the generic sodas at Giant, because I like the fruit ones without caffeine. They’re killing me, though, because the last two times I’ve been there, the diet grape has been out. Right now I have diet cola with lime (which turned out to be really good and doesn’t taste like Pledge™), diet root beer, and diet orange.

The diet orange tastes like diabetes.

I also bought a mixed case of Zevia when it was on sale at Whole Foods, because I had never seen it so cheap and probably wouldn’t again.Dr Zevia is quite tasty, and I’m glad that I don’t have any in my fridge because I am sure that the amount I drink of it is unhealthy entirely.

I also found Diet Gosling’s at Wegman’s, and oh my fuck. It is everything I have ever wanted in a soda. I’m getting a jones right now. I wonder if I could con someone into driving me.

I talk about diet soda a lot because it’s my only true vice. I only drink alcohol occasionally, because I’ve had my fill. When I was at Biddy’s, we used to get one shift drink every night, and I used it to try everything in the bar. I never ordered the same thing twice.The other fun night was when we found a cheat sheet of cocktail recipes behind the cash register and started trying those. The best one I found was called a “Pineapple Bomb.” 1 oz Southern Comfort, 1 oz Amaretto, 5 oz pineapple juice.

Treat yo’self.

For the record, I hate Southern Comfort, but it’s good in this.

The surprise in the bar was that my favorite turned out to be currant vodka and 7-up, or Tullamore Dew and soda with a bit of cherry juice to bring out the undertones of the whiskey.

I am a great mixologist, and I like to play around. But if I had to choose what Katt Williams calls “a drank, and a backup drank,” it would be Old Overholt and Jack Daniels. It’s best for your backup drink to be something everyone carries.

I drink both with a tablespoon of water to let it bloom.

And for those of you in Houston who like this sort of thing, Spec’s has a house brand of coconut rum that I used to drink straight out of the freezer, because it makes a coconut slushie. Tread carefully. Your ex doesn’t care about you, and no, you cannot do a handstand.

Going straight edge with the occasional drink has been the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. I used to have a drink every night after work, which invariably turned into two or three over the course of the evening, just laughing and talking with friends. It wasn’t enough to make me drunk over that period of time, but it affected the way my medication worked and I wasn’t sensitive to it when I clearly should have been.

Now, I feel better. Just don’t take away my diet soda. I will cut a bitch.

Our divorce announcement was the first thing I saw when I logged into Facebook this morning, and because I’d written about it yesterday, it did not make me as angry and sad as I thought it would. It’s like the post yesterday helped let out some of the air in my tires. But I still need some tea for this one. Irish Breakfast. I’m not fucking around here.

Hold please.

The tea that I made is very, very strong… and that’s the way I like it. Steeped for a very long time with lots of Splenda and CoffeeMate. It’s what’s called a “Builder’s Brew,” which is basically “it’ll put hair on your chest,” in the words of my friend Dianne Maurice. I’ve already had plenty of caffeine, but I don’t write well without a cup of tea beside me, and this entry requires writing well… or at least, to the best of my ability… which is slowly coming along. I think.

Dana usually called me “her beloved,” which I believe she picked up from my grandfather, who has called my grandmother that for years and years. They’ve never met, which is such a pity because it would explain a lot. 😛 My grandfather and I share a lot of the same characteristics, like a walk passed down from him to my father to me. Sam says that I “walk heavy,” and she can always tell when I’m in the house. It’s true.

It is also true that Dana looks like my grandmother in certain pictures, especially when “Nanny” was young- something I noticed long after we met and comforting when I figured it out. Over time, Dana became a Lanagan through and through, even picking up our special language, McLanamese. It’s a combination of all our last names- McCain, McMenemy, and Lanagan. There are certain phrases we’ve used over and over, since I was a teen, really… because if something is funny once, it’s funny a thousand times. Dana would slay me every time she used a “Lanaganism,” because it just proved to me that she wasn’t just my wife. She was a daughter-in-law, a sister-in-law, and an aunt to the cutest child on the planet.

However, in my family, we do not use qualifiers like “step” and “in-law.” For instance, Lindsay’s husband is not my brother-in-law, but my brother. I use them here to explain the legal family relationship, but she was a daughter, a sister, just like me. In some ways, and I’m not sure that this is a joke, my family liked her better than me… or at least, it seemed that way to me, and it made me happy. It just showed me that she was “one of us.” In that way, it is the biggest loss I’ve ever faced. Grief flows from me like a running river, because I didn’t just lose a partner. I lost a member of my family.

As an aside, the phrase “legal family relationship” reminds me of Counselor. She used to give lectures on how to get temporary restraining orders to battered women, and one of the funniest things about it was that she had to explain that you could put “husband” or “boyfriend,” but BABY DADDY IS NOT A LEGAL RELATIONSHIP. It put Dana and I into fits, and it was one of those phrases that just came up over and over… you know, because if it’s funny once, it’s funny a THOUSAND times.

I am writing all of this down to show that to me, Dana is not a person. She’s an event. My dad said that about Diane to me when I was a kid, and I instantly knew what he meant… that when I looked at Diane, I saw her in her current iteration, and every iteration that came before it.

When I met Dana, I thought she was the most obnoxious person I’d ever met in my life, and as I have said before, I looked at Diane and said, “Who. Is. That. Woman. That. Accents. Every. Word!” It wasn’t until Dana invited me into her silence that I began to love her for all she is worth, which is a whole hell of a lot. She was my world, in the very best sense of the word. In a way, we were perfect for each other, because we both had these faces that we presented to the rest of the world, and the people we were one-on-one. I learned that Dana was very different- quieter, smaller, still. And by smaller, I mean guided by the smallest part of her spirit she could find, rather than being the biggest personality in the room. I began to wish that more people could see the Dana I saw, and we had a code for it. When she was overacting like Shatner, I could lean forward and whisper, “dial it back, Dana.”

Alternatively, she could do the same for me in different ways. I am quiet and solitary to a fault as I grow older, and there is only so much togetherness I can take. Dana could tell with one look when I was done, and would start saying her goodbyes. It was marvelous having someone not afraid to run interference.

So when I think of Dana, I can see galaxies. I see her for who she is, and who she was, and I cry my eyes out thinking about the fact that I will not see her as she will be, which I have always thought was an amazing person, full in herself. Because of the way we both behaved, I don’t believe either one of us has the right to ask for forgiveness and reconciliation, not because I have the potential to act the same as I am, but because we might lapse back into old patterns and the progress we’ve made might get lost in the shuffle.

We might make good buddies, but we can’t. We just can’t. I cannot bear the thought of watching her love someone else in front of me, and I cannot speak to her future, but I can speak to the past, that when I’ve had girlfriends and Dana has filled the best friend role, she was jealous to a fault… and huge turf wars ensued. I can say for myself that the same thing would happen with me. We have so many old inside jokes that it would destroy me not to have her by my side.

It’s something that I should have known when I told her about my feelings for Argo. Period. The turf war began in her own mind, because Argo was never in the game. As I have said before, the main idea in crushing out on Argo was because it couldn’t go anywhere, and I felt safe in the knowing of it. I’d never kept anything a secret from Dana, and I didn’t think this one was one I should hold, either, because talking about it helped it to go away… until Dana became convinced that Argo was a threat because of all the truth we’d shared with each other… that Argo would fall in love with me regardless of orientation and gender. It was never true, not ever, but it seemed true to her and that was what mattered. I think I have said this before, that I shared that information with Argo, saying, “how I have that much power, I do not know.” It is true that I told Argo to relax, that I just wanted to flirt with her in a non-threatening way, and I opened the door to something I never should’ve in a million years… maybe two million… because Argo’s wordplay is sharper than mine, and without knowing it, she stepped over my comfort zone and I thought about those flirts for years… to the point where after I broke up with Dana, I had to know the truth, because Dana’s words had gotten under my skin. I took my shot with her, and I lost… but that didn’t mean I loved her any less. It wouldn’t have been fair not to love her for exactly who she is, and not some cocked up story.

My line was always that I wanted Dana to be my “I want to scratch my nails down your back” girlfriend and Argo to be my “wine and yoga pants” girlfriend- and never the twain shall meet… and I lost both of those chances when I lashed out at both of them, unreasonably so, because I did not have the tools to deal with what I was feeling. I had all the emotional tools to deal with other people’s problems when they put them in front of me, but I could not turn around and use that toolbox on myself. It is my life’s work to figure out how.

The dream of this church, St. James and All Sinners, is real… but I need to figure out my own mental shit before I can take on the responsibility of caring for others all the time. As I wrote to Susan, “I need to work on myself because pastors sometimes show up at the worst times in people’s lives. I want to feel everything, and have enough clinical separation that I am not carrying other people’s problems when I get home.” St. James is just another reason I miss Dana desperately, because she was willing to go the extra mile and become the partner I needed in ministry. Her ability to listen without trying to fix anything became a lifeline.

I met another woman at a Meetup that scared me to the point that I never called her back when she reached out to me the next morning… I just ghosted because in my mind, she was perfect for me. She’d been a church secretary for almost 25 years, and knew how to build a church from the ground up. I was still licking my wounds with Dana and Argo, and it was the last thing I needed, to feel the dopamine rush of “new relationship.” I took her goodnight kiss with me, and it fed my ego mightily, because I knew that I was attractive to someone else. But I couldn’t in good conscience drag someone else into the morass I was facing. Dana was still everything to me, and going into a new relationship would have taken away my focus on erasing that fact.

And Argo would never tell you this herself, but she is gorgeous. Just the type of goddess where if she asked you to jump naked and backwards off a diving board singing the “Star Spangled Banner” you’d do it or die trying. The dopamine rush of “new relationship” with her, no matter what it was, also had me dying inside for a while, because I’d pushed her away in the most ugly way possible. So out of character for me that I cannot help but cringe when I think of it. She thought I was angry that “I didn’t get my way,” but I never thought of it like that. I thought that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I never took my shot, and that even if I lost, it would have been heartbreaking not to ever have been brave enough to ask. Dana’s words resonated in me, hardcore, and I had to know for sure if Dana was right or wrong.

Dana was disastrously wrong, but I do not fault her for it. I take responsibility both for taking my shot (after Dana and I broke up), and the way I pushed Argo away with such vitriol. I knew that my attraction to her would not go away until she was out of my life completely (at least for a while), and I took the biggest and best shortcut to trying to push her away that my heart breaks at my own hand… just about every day, in fact.

The thing is that Argo would have ghosted had I just asked. I didn’t need to rage at her and try to make her feel like shit. It backfired in a major way, and that is all that needs to be said about that. It was a time in which I both needed her desperately as a sounding board and needed time to get my shit together before I could take down my protective walls with her. I was so utterly conflicted, confused, and angry.

I didn’t realize how much I needed medication to deal with anxiety, along with the protocol I was already taking. The medication does not deal with my mood and behavior- that is up to me and my therapist- but it does take away the impulsive fight-or-flight response to everything. It takes away the shortness of breath and the, as Nadia Bolz-Weber calls, “cortisol and sin” racing through my body when I feel anger.

I wish that Dana and Argo could both see me with different eyes, because when it was good, it was so, so good… and when it got bad, it was wicked.

If there is any hope at all in this garbage dump of a situation, it’s that this is not the end of our movie.

But it is for now.

Fin.

:::::::::PARTY ALERT:::::::::::::

Dana and I are getting married soon (obviously, QUITE soon), but we’re not going to do everything all at once. We’re going to go to the court house and get our legal benefits squared away immediately, then planning a wedding at Epiphany later. I cannot even. Oy the decisions. I am guessing that we will end up at a coffee shop/bar/restaurant/our backyard with food and drinks afterward. Let Dana and me know if you want to be on the txt distribution list for that and we’ll text you when we’re leaving for the courthouse. That way, you have enough time to get to our house/the meeting place by the time we’re done and can relax with “all y’all.”

Sometimes Facebook has a way of kicking me in the gut every morning. It will pass, but right now body memory is taking over and I remember exactly how I felt throughout this whole process. Soon, the memory will be our separation announcement, and even though it is here in the pensieve, it will still wake me up with sadness and rage when I see it pass by in the “memories” section that Facebook thinks is so cute.

What is so amazing is being able to go back to that memory on Facebook, and all the love that poured out for us as we began our new lives. At least 60 people expressed their sadness and their hope, and it meant the world to me. I didn’t think of it so much as an ending, but two new beginnings, and we both jumped at them. Dana found what she needed in Texas, because she didn’t have any memories attached to it save the ones we had together. I was haunted by a number of ghosts, most notably Diane’s, because learning who I was as an emotionally abused child made Houston the last place on earth I wanted to be every day. Houston had me emotionally regressing into the child I was, rather than the adult I wanted to be… which is why I think my moves to both DC and Portland fixed a lot of problems, because I was free to explore myself in a way that I couldn’t when I was so emotionally laden… until I realized that my relationship with Diane was never going to change, and in fact, our relationship had damaged me to a level even I couldn’t recognize, so I swept it under the rug for years and years until I came unglued. More than one of my friends, as I explained my teenage years, said, “are you kidding me? This IS sociopathic behavior.” At first, I couldn’t get angry with her. I recognized that if she indeed was sociopathic, that the break happened when she was a child, too. I blamed her abuser, instead of realizing that Diane needed to take responsibility for her own behavior…. which she has done with one e-mail and never face-to-face… and even the e-mail didn’t cover the extent of what I went through. It was basically, “I can see how some of those conversations might be confusing and upsetting to you.” Confusing and upsetting didn’t even begin to cover it. I was gaslit for years, with both Diane and her partner convincing me that I was just this kid with a crush who couldn’t age up. I was mentally unstable, and they were blameless.

I was mentally unstable, but they took no responsibility as to why.

Shame nearly killed me, because it was “all my fault.”

I wanted to marry Dana more than anything in the world, because I’d done it once already in the state of Oregon. I said the words I needed to say to ensure we’d be together forever, because I honestly and truly believed that we would. But as I began to see down to the core of my abused nature and just how much work I needed to do on myself, I realized that I’d jumped the gun in announcing that we were getting married, because Dana didn’t sign up to marry this version of me….. and that version is gone.

I am stronger and weaker than I’ve ever been. Some days, I am six feet tall and bulletproof. On others, I just need to hide under the covers. I am lonely, not for someone, but for her, and there is a huge difference. Someone to cuddle me and dry my tears would be a nice thing, but no one is her. In some ways, I will never get over it. In others, I am so glad she’s gone that tears of relief flow. I will never forget the moment my glasses smashed into my face and I crumpled on the floor with agony and broke up with her on the spot. I’d had about as much Dana as I could take, and I cannot speak for Dana, but I’m pretty sure she’d had all the Leslie she could take as well.

Neither of us had the emotional tools to deal with each other as we waged our own battles in our own minds. My head was in the clouds, because I wanted to be with Argo as much as I could to escape what was going on at home, and I don’t even mean that in a romantic way. We had our own language, our own emotional shorthand, and it was right and good. The idiocy of thinking that translated into romantic love is a mark left on me from childhood, and I had to learn to deal with it before I could move on.

We fought needlessly, all three of us, because I wanted to own my shit and get it right. I wanted to be married to Dana with romance and candles and “married” to Argo in loyalty and support, like all long-term close friends do. I once asked Argo what our relationship would look like in 20 years, and she told me that it was impossible to say, but hopefully strong and comfortable. I carried those words like a mantra, and destroyed them in one or two epic fights, going out of my mind with rage. But perhaps it was a gift from both of them to go it alone, and to figure out what I was going to do with me. I didn’t like me very much, and I took it out on both of them.

The reality of the situation was that I just wanted Dana and Argo to make room for each other so that I didn’t feel this constant tug-of-war between my love for both of them, outpouring in different ways. Dana told me that Argo would never see me as anything but a mental patient, and I hope that she was projecting things onto Argo that might be there and might not. What I do know is that Dana herself will always see me that way, because she has yet to own her part in all of this. The good news is that she doesn’t have to. I am far enough away from the situation to see that Dana doesn’t process the way I do, and she may never have words for me again.

One of the best examples of this is that I asked her if she could forgive me, and she said something very profound. She said, “I don’t even know myself well enough to know what you did and to figure out what I did, so forgiving you is impossible to say.” It was one of the best memories of our breakup, because those words really struck a chord with me, and I began to see her in a different light- that she was every bit as introspective as me, just not willing to let those feelings see air…. because perhaps to say it out loud makes it real, a mantra that Diane and I have had since I was little, and it is so true it hurts.

I hope that she is on her own journey now, and that the journey she’s taking brings her as much peace as the one I’ve taken alone. But it doesn’t erase my wish that there were do-overs and begin-agains. I have so many regrets, so much to work through, so much to let go before I can be the person God clearly wants me to be…. because what I have noticed is that God always calls the broken, and perhaps that is the point.

As I break open to let light in, all I want is peace. Ruminating over the end of my relationship with Dana brings me nothing but sadness, and I believe that I need to feel it. Really feel it. Get lost in it so that it doesn’t keep coming back to haunt me as I stuff it down and it comes up over and over later in life. I don’t want to seek someone else like her.

But I cannot say how utterly embarrassing it was for me to make this huge announcement on Facebook and then have to retract it. I felt like a huge failure, because I was the one that wrote an article on marriage that got shared all over the world and had I taken my own advice, I might not have felt so stupid now.

Believe me, I can solve all your problems in a hot minute. It’s solving my own that’s taking time.

Amen.

Dear Susan,

It’s funny how meeting someone on a train can change your whole outlook on life. There was a time when I didn’t know you, and then there was a time I did. It happened that fast. I feel the same way about the other friends I’ve made here. I’ve had some that have been with me since the last time around, Alexandria from 2001-2002, but not so many I don’t have room for more. I’ve met homeless people, people who work with homeless people, and heads of national organizations. My life experiences have run the gamut, and perhaps it is what I needed to open my mind to what the universe has in store for me… whatever that might be. Right now, I know that I need to focus on myself, because I cannot pour from an empty cup. After that, who knows? I just want to make sure that I have something to offer instead of giving away everything I have and feeling that there’s nothing left for me.

I am so guilty of that in the past. I would give away everything emotionally that I had inside, and then use fight-or-flight to try and get some of it back… mostly flight. I’m generally a lovah not a fightah, but I wouldn’t have said that about myself last year. I fought needlessly as I went out of my right mind and didn’t know how to handle it, and now I am picking up the pieces. There are people I desperately miss that I know will never speak to me again… I don’t even have to ask. But it doesn’t stop the hurt, mostly because it came at my own hand and not someone else’s. But, as an old soldier once told me, I can only tell you that, from my own journey, self awareness is extremely costly – and it is worth every bit of effort and expense you can pour in to it. So I’m taking her at her word.

Self-reliance is a gift, hard, hard won…. and even then, it’s not like I have some sort of special life-hacking ability. I stumble. I forget to take care of things that I should and over-worry about others. But the main thing is that I keep trying to get it right. I keep trying to prove myself to myself, when in the past, I had to prove myself to everyone else.

The best part is that I have a written record of how far I’ve come, and how far there is still to go. I was just going to write to you, and then I realized that this letter was bigger than just the two of us.

Love,

Leslie

I slept so hard that when the alarm went off, I thought, “fuck it. I’ll Uber.” I went back to sleep for another hour, because the sleeping medication I take works really, REALLY well. I also didn’t want to walk to the bus stop in the snow, or wait for the bus while the wind whipped across the back of my neck. I don’t Uber very often, because it’s $25/ride from Silver Spring to Landover, but I make enough money that I can treat myself once in a while.

It comes time to get ready for work, and I am checking my e-mail frantically, hoping there’s a message that we can all work from home because then I won’t have to go through the hassle of putting on pants. There’s no e-mail, so I go ahead and get ready, putting on nearly every warm thing I own, because not only is it cold outside, it’s cold in our building. For instance, I generally wear skiing silks under my trousers and I am comfortable all day. I am lacing up my snow boots when I hear, “ding!” I know instantly what it is.

Yup. We’re all working from home today. It was a good thing I decided to sleep in, because if I hadn’t, I would have gotten the notification as I was on the train to Landover, and then I would have been late to work in my own home. Beat that with a stick.

It’s still 20 minutes before I need to log in, so I’m blogging and drinking the soda I mentioned in the title. It tastes a bit like a fizzy Jolly Rancher, and it’s delicious. However, now that I’m going to be home today, I am a little irritated I have drunk so much caffeine that now I can’t make myself a pot of tea without having a heart attack (I don’t have decaf).

I don’t have much to report since Sunday. I’ve slept and read a lot, plus watched Mercy Street and Downton Abbey, but other than that, nothing has really been going on. There’s a quiet to the snow. The object of the game is just to stay warm, which takes energy in and of itself… or at least, it does for me. I tend to shiver violently when I’m cold.

I’m looking forward to the sun coming out. I enjoy the snow when the sun is shining and the world is bright and cold. Right now, it’s a bit dreary, but that will change. It doesn’t stay dreary around here for long. Maryland, like Texas, has the kind of weather that reminds one of the movie “Sybil.”

And on that note, it’s time to get to work.

One of the best preachers I’ve ever heard in my life is the Rev. Dr. William Lupfer. We met under very unusual circumstances, and I can honestly say that I have never been the same since. He made me laugh, he made me cry, and he gave me sentences that I will use in my sermons from here to eternity… credited, of course. But first, the story of how we met.

Dana and I had gone out with a group of friends to, I think, Ringler’s Annex in Portland, Oregon… the name of the bar is not important, but Dana was sitting next to me, and that is. Her uncle is an Episcopal priest in Sierra Madre, California, and at this table full of friends, she mentioned that fact.

The most handsome priest I’d ever seen came to our table and said, “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I heard the words ‘Episcopal priest’ and I had to come over.” He was having a beer with a friend and just decided to come and introduce himself. I was glad that he did, because he was funny, polite, and memorable.

So memorable, in fact, that when I decided Bridgeport UCC and I had had enough of each other, I remembered Bill and decided that I wanted to go to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Dana, having been an Episcopalian since birth, jumped at the chance to come with me.

A few weeks later, I auditioned for Dr. John Strege, and joined one of those choirs with blow your hair back repertory, and it was one of the best singing experiences of my life (singing Bach’s “Kick My Mass in H mol” conducted by early music expert Eric Milnes was a huge highlight).

This doesn’t really have much to do with what I learned from Bill, just to say that because of the choir, I got to hear him preach A LOT. He said two things that have stuck with me, one that pertains to today, and one that just made me laugh.

The first is, “when you have a theological problem, the first thing you should do is go and drink a beer with a Lutheran.” The crowd howled, because everyone knew he was referring to the late, great Marcus Borg.

The second is, “you’ll notice that in the Bible, Lent is referred to as 40 days and 40 nights… yet, on the calendar, it is 46. That is because you do not count the Sundays. Those Sundays are islands of mercy in the darkness.”

“Islands of mercy.”

That means that in the middle of the darkness, you can celebrate all the things you have given up to remind you of this penitential season.

What did you give up this year?

I decided to give up all my old stories to make room for new ones, and today, I just can’t. It’s Valentine’s Day, and I am very newly divorced, even though it’s been almost a year… or perhaps it’s that today, it feels new all over again. Last year was heart-rending in its sincerity, because Dana and I did not do anything special, but gave each other our undying love through words.

Because I gave up my old stories, these “islands of mercy” feel even more penitential. I am sorry for “all the things I have done, and all the things I have left undone…” Perhaps the things I have left undone even more so, because I could not enforce an emotional boundary with Dana, so I moved away from her to create one that is entirely physical. I cut off any chance of redemption, any chance of grace, any chance to let the Holy Spirit move in both of our hearts. However, I have come to know deep within that it was the right move, even though I am hurting. Perhaps my Holy Spirit moment was the knowledge that love, while almost everything, isn’t. My objective is to carry her in my heart, and go out with joy.

Holding on to the temptation to work on our relationship isn’t a temptation that I needed, or perhaps it was… because I needed to feel it in order to be able to turn away… which brings me directly to the Gospel reading for today.

After his baptism, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.”

Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.'”

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'”

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'”

Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

I have said that Jesus needed to be tempered in his faith, because he needed to rise up from being a regular Joe to the preacher that moved thousands, which, in that time, was a spectacular Nielsen rating, to put it in modern terms. Nowhere in the Gospel is Jesus’ refining fire more clear.

Jesus was strong in his faith, and did not succumb to the fame and fortune the Devil had to offer. He resisted the temptation to be known as one of my preacher pals calls “Jumping Jesus, the Bouncing Savior.” I think this is partially due to Jesus’ own mettle, and, venturing into fiction, wondering if the angels would have actually caught him had he abused his God-given power. In order to become the person God wanted him to be, Jesus knew that did not include taking power for himself, because he did not want power over. Jesus wanted power with… and perhaps that is what those forty days and forty nights were about in the first place… solidifying what kind of person he was going to be… what kind of preacher… what kind of message he was going to give to people who were just as broken as we are today.

Remember that at Christmas, the angels did not announce to the Sanhedrin that the Messiah had been born. The angels announced it to the poorest people they could find… people desperately needing the hope and grace the Christ offers as mediator and advocate.

However, no one has ever said that grace was easy. This Lent, I am literally crawling toward Easter. My temptation is to sit in my grief, ruminating over and over about everything I have done wrong, all the flaws in my character, all the ways in which I created Good Friday for myself. I was tempted by all the wrong things, and, unlike Jesus, I succumbed to them. Cortisol and sin raced through my body when I got angry in a table-flipping way. Love flowed through me for someone who was not part of my covenant with both Dana and God. I stumbled over and over into a darkness I thought would never end. I very nearly committed the mortal sin of suicide, because I did not think that I was creating a permanent solution to a temporary problem. At the time, I thought I was creating a permanent solution to a permanent problem.

I do not think that suicide is a sin for other people, because everyone has their own reasons for it and I am not the one who gets to say whether it is right or wrong for them. I believe it is a sin in my own code of ethics, because when I get into my small, still place, I realize that I would be, in effect, killing the Easter that might occur if I just wait.

In this first Sunday of Lent, I realize that creating that code of ethics is why we need it. Lent’s penitential potential is to create our own saving grace, to await the resurrection that invariably happens in the middle of the mess, to quote the Rev. Dr. Susan Leo.

During Lent, we are supposed to focus on the messes we’ve made, so that when Easter finally comes, we are able to resurrect ourselves.

Some Lents are always going to be harder than others. There is no way for me to know what kind of messes you’ve created, but I know we’ve all made them. We’ve all failed to resist temptation from the devils in our own minds. We’ve all metaphysically tried to make bread out of stones in order to lift ourselves up, only to find that the loaves we thought we were getting were only stones after all.

And as we reflect on the rocks, we remember that it is not long until we are renewed once again.

Just wait.

Amen.

I am going to stay home and write about the Scriptures today instead of going to church, because I just cannot bring myself to leave the house right now. I am ruminating in my own thoughts and I just want to be left that way. Facebook presented me with all my memories from this day, and I am overwhelmed. I need this time of rest and reflection in order to function in the world tomorrow. I don’t want to hide out, but I desperately need my space.

2015

To my Valentine, Dana, my “Palentine”, Aaron, and my “Galentine,” Argo… You are the faces I look to when I need love. You are the faces I look to when I give love. I cannot imagine life without any one of you, and hopefully we’ll all be old and gray on a beach somewhere flipping each other shit until the Jack runs out and Aaron has to drive us home. Sometimes, the only thing you want from the people you love is a night by the campfire, lying on blankets and looking up at the stars.

2014

The great thing about Valentine’s Day is that it recognizes all kinds of love. This year, not only is Dana my biggest and best Valentine, but so are all of you, the people that read me every day and follow my successes and failures- offering lots of humor and love to help me get through what Mary Oliver calls “this one wild and precious life.”

2013

Dana Bamberger Lanagan, I have loved you since the third or fourth time I met you. 😛 There is no one that I would rather share my heart (and sometimes, my brain). You are the Valentine everyone wishes they’d gotten- big and glittery with extra lollipops taped on the back. The kind you keep forever. I love you, darling. You are the best thing about waking up every morning, but of course, today is the kind of day to say those things out loud.

2012

Happy Valentine’s Day to the great love of my life, Dana Bamberger Lanagan. The reason she’s the great love of my life? She’s got too much information for us to ever break up. I love you, sweetheart!

2011

I am not a big fan of Valentine’s Day, even though I am half of a couple. It’s not the sentiments I hate, it’s the stores that look like red threw up everywhere. Again, though, I love the sentiment. Dana Bamberger is the absolute love of my life, and I wouldn’t be the woman that I am today had I not met her. She’s opened my eyes to so many things- I’m kinder, more patient, and better at darts.

I took Uber from work to the church so that I could get to the Ash Wednesday service, only to find out it was already over. It had started at 5:30. However, I did get there in time to clean up. At CCC, we have a professional kitchen, and I’ve been dying to get my hands on it. So what did I do when I walked in? I ate a metric fuck tonne of pancakes. But after that? John knows what I did. So do Drue, Knives, Dana, Shaun, Ian, et al. I made that grill my bitch. I used to be quite known for it, and by that I mean anal retentive. And by that I mean that if I was in the bar and it was someone else’s shift, I’d go back there and make sure it was up to code. My code.

We didn’t have any vinegar, so I used club soda and ice instead. We didn’t have a brick, so I used towels and a green scrub thingme. In fact, there’s an entire list of things that our kitchen needs and I will get them, because a day care meets in our church and I wasn’t going to let the youth group get yelled at. So I did the job with the tools I had, but next time, I’m coming prepared. I told the kids that we had to play “the health inspector is coming tomorrow.” I don’t know who it was, but there was a 17-year-old white boy I swore was an Ecuadoran dishwasher, he was so efficient. I couldn’t tell him that, only chuckle to myself, but he deserved tips. JMSK, he could have given Jimmy a run for his money, especially since we had a dishwasher half the size of one in a restaurant… but at least it was professional grade… enough to the point that I burned the ever-living shit out of my hands and I hadn’t felt more alive in months. I started giving orders, and one of the volunteers said they thought there was a janitor… I said, “not before preschool starts tomorrow.” I wasn’t dictatorial about it, just firm, because clearly someone needed to be in charge and no one had ever worked in a professional kitchen before. I knew this because no one knew that the appliances had to be wiped down, the floor had to be mopped, etc. I basically took them step-by-step through closing down Biddy’s, and it worked.

I mean, they were making *pancakes.* I assure you that no one in that kitchen knew more than me about cleaning up after brunch food. I missed Dana so much that I almost cried, because I thought to myself that if there was anything I’d forgotten, she would have remembered it. It’s scary when you realize that this IS your circus and these ARE your monkeys, but I did the best I could without her. I just made sure to go through her checklist as I was cleaning up…. and if there’s anything I *did* forget, it wasn’t anything major. Apparently, the youth group got ripped a new one last year, not by the pastor, but by the people at the day care center for the way they left the kitchen. I was not going to let that happen again. The only thing that really confused me is that there were no instructions on the dishwasher, and I couldn’t get the damn thing to drain. I pushed Off, like, ten times and then finally just closed the door. It drained and I said, “SMILINMIGHTYJESUS!” which is Christian for anything I would have said at Biddy’s.

My aim was to leave the kitchen better than I found it, and that wasn’t too hard considering they’d just stopped cooking the moment I walked in. I filled one of the sinks with soap and water and just started scrubbing everything down. The floor was the hardest, because the pancake batter was dried and stuck on like concrete. I spent quite a bit of time digging it out of the grout on the floor. I also emptied the grease traps and did all the things I knew to do that maybe the kitchen staff hadn’t done in a while.

And after all that, I did not get ashes, nor did I have alcohol.

But it was still a great holiday.

My favorite holiday since I don’t have a Valentine is Feb. 13th, “Galentine’s Day,” created by Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation. I have my own poetic and noble land mermaids, and I intend to spoil the hell out of them…. which reminds me…. I really need to go shopping after work.

I won’t mention names, but they all (hopefully) know who they are. They’re the ones that picked me up and dusted me off when I couldn’t see hope and life was this big, nebulous ball of “nunh unh.” I told Dana for a long time that my life would be boring without her. I wasn’t wrong.

But luckily, my gal pals have stepped the fuck up. It’s a different kind of love, and no less worthy of celebration. I think friendship gets ignored, as if it’s not as important as romance, but who else can you e-mail or text at 3:00 AM and say, “I’m hungry?” Who else will go to Walgreen’s for you in the middle of the night when you’re so sick you can’t move? Who else will tell you to grow the fuck up when you need it?

I wouldn’t be the person I am today had I not invested in friendship, really invested, treating my friends like family… which, to me, means “you can have anything you want out of my fridge” and “of course you can borrow that top.” I am in the unenviable position of trying to surreptitiously get people’s addresses so that they don’t know they have things coming.

My energy is creeping back up. My thought processes are becoming more and more positive every day. Dragons invade my dreams and tear through sadness with fire, and I know it’s my gal pals talking to me, destroying the obstacles in my path and helping me to reach greater heights than I could ever do on my own.

I wish I could take them all out for waffles, because they each deserve a stack on me.

Today is the first annual DC Ashed & Smashed, and if you are not familiar, it is a holiday in which Dana and I created ourselves. It’s been so long now that I do not remember what year it was, but Dana came to hear me sing at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral and then we went to Jake’s Grill in the Governor Hotel for drinks. We both had Hurricanes, which were inexplicably blue (Portland, eh), but the way the holiday got started is that the hostess saw the ashes on our foreheads and said, “Happy Ash Wednesday!” I turned to Dana and said, “is that like Happy Root Canal?” We went over and over what our holiday should be called.

Blessed and Blasted

Kneeling and Reeling

I’m sure there were a few others, but “Ashed and Smashed” won by a landslide. It’s been at least ten years, but I remember it like it was yesterday. I was reminded of it as I passed the Lutheran church, because their priests were ashing people in their cars as they went by. I am not sure of the theological precedence of that, because my tongue-in-cheek smartass answer (always) is “would you like fries with that?” I think it has more to do with thinking that the ashes are more to show off for your coworkers than you could possibly get in an run-by ashing. But I could be wrong. Lots of churches have had success with it, but it is not my theological cup of tea.

Tonight at CCC we are combining the Ash Wednesday service with pancakes, which is also theologically weird, but it has been proven over and over that people will not show up to things two nights a week at church. For those not in the know, pancakes on Fat Tuesday got started because during Passover, you could not make anything leavened. Pancakes were a way to use up all the yeast, fat, etc. before the penitential season.

Emotionally, I am trimming all my own fat this year. I think I’m going to give up my old stories to make room for new ones. I can’t really give up alcohol. I don’t drink enough for it to really cost me anything. For most people, it would be like giving up broccoli when they don’t eat it, anyway….. like George H.W. Bush. 😛

Time to run for the train.

Love you miss you mean it.

You guys know that I love Dana to the ends of the earth, and in some sense, I always will. But at the same time, the best thing that’s happened in being divorced is not having to watch any sport. At all. When I was a kid, my whole family followed The Cowboys (we lived two hours north of Dallas), and the Oilers (when we moved to Houston). However, every person in my immediate family is a music nerd just like me, so it wasn’t like we were all about it. It was just a thing that was on in the background while we ate. A lot. In fact, I don’t remember anything much about going to see live sporting events except the amount of food I consumed while pretending to watch.

When I married Dana, I learned more about the Washington Redskins, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the Sacramento Kings than I ever knew about any of my own Texas teams. I could recognize Deion Sanders, Emmett Smith, Warren Moon, etc…. but that’s about the limit to my sports knowledge. I was also in the marching band at Clements for two years, going to EVERY. DAMN. GAME. and I still can’t tell you the rules.

So, last night, I took a sleeping pill around 8:00-ish, and watched PBS until I fell asleep around 9:30. I didn’t even know who won the game until about 7:00 this morning (Broncos- go Peyton). I figured that the easiest way to watch my preferred amount of football was a few clips on Facebook. I was right.

Because Sarah Vowell recommended it, I watched Murder of a President, about James Garfield. I now believe that we lost an amazing amount of ground when he was killed, because he was so passionate about the rights of free blacks that eight full years with him as president would have changed the face of the 1960’s…. not only that, he was in a sense, murdered twice. Shot and then given septicemia by a doctor that refused to clean any of his wounds.

To me, that was way more interesting than football.

The other thing I have to include in this entry that happened, because I want to put it in the pensieve, is that Susan and I were going back and forth and she said, “no need to make a career out of reading into/out of things.” I laughed so hard tears came to my eyes and I thought, “I know me. We’ve met.”

It’s good to see that some things don’t change.

Time to get back to work. It’s amazing having a full night’s sleep. Monday doesn’t seem so, well, Monday.

Have a good one yourself. 🙂

I couldn’t bring myself to focus on Dana for more than about 20 minutes, and didn’t want to take the time to come back and post what I’d written in them. Today, things look better.

my dear, I have nothing to say.
my heart burns
like the evening sky.

– Sanober Khan

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.

– Sophocles

Dana and I rushed our decision to get married by quite a bit, but not because we were fools that wanted to rush in. For us, it was completely rational. We’d been best friends for three and a half years, and in this new iteration of our relationship, we decided that we wanted to be a family. It had so much less to do with romance and more to do with wanting no one to be able to say that we couldn’t visit each other in the hospital, that we couldn’t make life decision for each other if one of us got hurt, and even this was rational, because everyone in our biological family was at least a 2-3 hour flight away. For Dana’s parents, it was a lot more than that. DC to Portland is not an easy trip. We each wanted family that was right there. As I have said before, it seemed like the most natural thing I’d ever done in my life, because I knew what contract I was signing. I knew I was agreeing to take care of my best friend for the rest of her life, God willing and the creek don’t rise.

And, well, it did.

Today would have been our eighth anniversary, and my heart is absolutely bleeding out. I have gone over and over all the things I did to push Dana away instead of bringing her closer, and it’s a rare form of torture, all the feelings that plague me. Of course it takes two to tango, but I’m not focusing on that. I am focusing on me, and the things I don’t want to do wrong in my next relationship, God willing that it happens. Because of all the mistakes I made with Dana, I am very gunshy about being in romantic relationship with anyone. I hide in solitude for a reason. I am very capable of hurting someone without meaning it, or popping off in anger and trying to hurt someone as badly as they’ve hurt me. It’s a wrong-headed way of going through life, and I want no part of it anymore.

I kick myself for ever telling Dana anything about my relationship with Argo. Just anything. Because as Diana Gabaldon wrote in the first Outlander novel, “secrecy deserves honesty, but always respect.” I went off on a tangent in which the relationship couldn’t sustain, and I thought that Dana knew that down deep, that I had a lot of shit to own and move past, but my fidelity and actions belonged to her. Instead, it turned into a fight of gigantic proportions and blew us apart with one bomb after another, including the completely ridiculous assumption that Argo was struggling with the same feelings as me. I knew for a fact that she wasn’t, but I trusted Dana to the ends of the earth, and there was a nagging feeling within me that she might be right. If I’d kept the relationship with Argo on the downlow, I could have worked all that shit out in solitude, and it wouldn’t have given Dana so much ammunition to use against me when we fought. The reality is that I couldn’t know all of Argo. I could only know the face she presented to me through e-mail. So “love” was relative. I loved the idea of her way more than I loved the reality, because I didn’t know what it was.

That idea should have lived in my head, but I had never kept anything from Dana and when I let her into this part of my life, it was a fucking disaster. Just crying and moping all the time because I did not know how to navigate living in the cloud and on the ground at the same time. I chose the ground because I could see it. Living in the cloud was allowing my crops to wither, and I reached into my own heart and pulled out the piece that belonged to Argo, and it was the first time I’d ever done such a thing. Have you ever broken your own heart? It is so much worse than when someone else does it. I cut off all contact, because I realized that energy that was supposed to be Dana’s was going toward Argo at an alarming rate, because I felt she understood a side of me that no one else did. The truth is that Dana understood that part of me, too, but she was less vocal about it. I thought we were hand fasted into a truly shitty club, but as I strayed further and further away from her emotionally, I realized that we were; she just didn’t want to talk about it, or minimized it in a way that Argo never did. Because Argo understood me, I tried so hard to cut off contact and I never could. I wasn’t strong enough, and I’m still not. There’s a hole in my heart with both of them as I accept all the things that have gone down over the last two or three years…. all the things that are clearly mine to own in the ending of this relationship that have nothing to do with Dana and only my wrong-headed actions and reactions.

I should have realized that protecting Dana from my relationship with Argo was more important than rocking the stability of our relationship. I should have realized that even though Dana and I were married, that didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to have my own friends, my own conversations, simply my own, period. We didn’t have to come as a package deal in all things. I say this because now the “love feelings” Argo created in me with her life raft of enormous proportions are now a distant memory, and would have become so whether I was married or not. The love I felt for Argo never meant to me that I was out the door with Dana, only a problem I needed to resolve, because my conversations with Argo allowed me to be a better partner to Dana, as well. Argo wasn’t interested in hearing about those love feelings, because they scared her. But what she would talk about with me is all the ways I was being a jackass in my relationship with Dana, and it helped immensely. I began to focus on the ways that Argo cared about me in a deep friendship sort of way, and when Dana couldn’t see that, I pushed Argo away with such vitriol that I will never forget the way I behaved, and I’ve said I’m sorry a million times over, but that “I’m sorry” cannot come with empty words. They don’t mean anything unless my behavior changes to match it.

I cannot help but think that it might have happened with Dana as well, that an “I’m sorry” with changed behavior might have saved our relationship so that today would have actually been our eighth anniversary instead of me looking at it as a day of remembrance.

I am choosing to focus on all the laughter we had together in order to dig myself out of the mess I made on the way out. There were so many years where we made each other double over, laughing so hard no sound could come out. Those are the memories I want to take with me, because if I focus on everything that went wrong, this day will not bring me peace, which I have striven to create in myself.

I have said before that I want to walk humbly and hope that grace prevails, but grace does not mean contact with Dana. Grace means peace within myself over all that happened so I can bless and release it into the universe and have the universe call it good. For extremely personal reasons, I cannot let Dana into my life again, but I can remember all the joy she brought into my life. I could see that my life was running off the rails and my exit was necessary. All I will say is that I will not let Dana off the hook for her abusive behavior any more than I will let myself. It was great right up until it wasn’t, and we were fighting against each other instead of taking care of each other like we’d done previously.

I am sure that my treatment of her family didn’t help, but they put me into a corner and I lashed out butt-good. I should have realized that Dana didn’t need protecting, but I thought she did, and I thought I was doing the right thing at the time. Maybe now, not so much, but at the same time, I cannot go back and undo anything. I can only say for myself that I thought I was being the protector and advocate, when in reality I was just filled with rage at how Dana was being treated. I let that rage out, when I should have gone into my nothing box and tried to say the same thing with calmer words. But by that point, there were no calmer words. I’d said all the calm words I could think of and it didn’t get the point across, and when that happened, I lost it.

The good thing that came out of it was that Dana bonded with her family even closer, because now they had a common enemy. I don’t like that I was the enemy, but I do like that whatever it was that I said got through and they didn’t treat Dana the way they had previously. Sometimes boiling rage can be a good thing if used properly, but it wasn’t, clearly. It just created one more crack in our foundation, but for the record, at least Dana’s family realized that I needed her as much as she needed me and they couldn’t divide and conquer…. or could they?

It is something I will always ponder, but at the same time, it goes in the memory box just like all the other ways in which Dana’s presence and absence affect my life. One thing I have learned is that I am stronger than I thought I was, because this thermonuclear war of a breakup didn’t break me. It only reinforced the fact that I was right. The relationship was great for me in some ways, and awful in others, and in the end, the awful won out and I rebounded from it alone in my grief, rather than trying to cover it up with partying, other relationships, and the things people generally do when they’re too sad to function.

I’ve sat in my pain and worked it the fuck out, because again, changed behavior is the key to saying you’re sorry. I look back on the moments in which I raged and just cringe that I let my anger boil over in the first place…. and forgive myself because through all of my hospitalization and therapy I realized I did not have the tools to deal with anger and I needed to develop them. These emotional tools did not come overnight, because deep-seeded rage had been bubbling since I was a teenager and I let it out in the most inappropriate of ways.

I wish that Dana could know the person that I am instead of the person that I was, but that is not to be. What is to be is a peace and grace that passes all understanding, because I have prayed my way through the fucking mess. Sitting in it was the right thing to do, because I don’t think I’ll ever be capable of moving backward…. something that would have been imminent had I not recognized my own destruction and dealt with it.

Back in the day, I thought of both Argo and Dana as my rocks and my redeemers. That’s the part I take with me, instead of all the anger. They were my world, in the best sense of the word, but now I am, and I am enough.

Learning to rely on myself and my own intuition cost me months of self-reflection, but it was worth it. Because today was just a regular day, filled with a few memories and a celebratory Valentine’s Day heart filled with Twix. Now there’s a plastic heart that sits on my desk, and I know what it represents. Sweet freedom. Literally.

I have no motivation to write today. None. Yesterday I said I wasn’t feelin’ it, but that’s nothing compared to my lackadaisical attitude right now. Generating content for a blog is part of my life, because pages that are static do not get traffic. But at the same time, I tell the truth about what I think in terms of my life’s goals and issues. I can’t just make shit up out of thin air. And right now, all I’m doing is working my ass off, which makes my coworkers happy, but doesn’t generate a lot creatively… I’m too tired to care about my personal problems, and I know for damn sure that’s a good thing.

Tomorrow is my former anniversary with Dana, and Facebook presented me yesterday with my status update from Valentine’s Day last year. I don’t know why. It’s not even close to Valentine’s Day. But here it is. I was a mess:

I see a lot of bitching on Facebook about Valentine’s Day and how it’s so commercialized and all. Valentine’s Day is as meaningless as you make it. For instance, Dana and I did the grocery shopping we were going to do, anyway, and did some wine/liquor tasting at Spec’s. It was so simple, and so memorable. Later that day, she handed me two pages of handwritten notes describing her love for me on plain white notebook paper, saying that she had worked on it for two days and she hoped it was just right and that it had made people at her work cry so she was pretty sure it was good……… Crying just thinking at the memory of her words before she handed them to me, because it was just the most amazing, bare moment. A girl laying her heart in my hands and hoping it was enough.

I allowed myself to be a mess for ten minutes or so, and then I turned on an episode of History Detectives, in which they tried to find out exactly how Glenn Miller (bandleader) died. I’ve learned how to redirect when I’m focusing on the past, but I don’t let those moments slide, either. I allow myself to feel, and then I put whatever I’m feeling back in its box and lock it. I have come to the final decision that getting out of this relationship is the best thing that has ever happened to me, because my life is going in a completely different direction than hers, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. Now I realize that I do not want contact any more than she does, because there are personal issues that we’ll never fix and they’re not worth trying. The way Dana deals with her problems is completely different than the way I do, and they’re just not compatible. Realizing incompatibility allows me to take back my power and not feel so small.

I’ve also realized that a lot of marriage is having a good business partner, and we were never comfortable talking about any of that stuff, but it’s amazing how good I thought we were at the time. It’s amazing how good I thought we were together, period, when in reality there was a lot roiling under the surface. There are things I didn’t know that I should’ve. There are things she didn’t know that she should’ve…. but neither of us were willing to tap into those feelings until I started writing and uncovering the layers upon layers of shit I’d been thrown in my life and how it wired my behavior into everything else.

We became strangers in our own household, because we still did all that surface-y best friend stuff, but the opening up was a one-way street. The way she painted me to my face was narcissist bully, and I can see why she thought that. I need someone who can stand up to me and call me on my bullshit. I don’t need to be in relationship with someone who is scared to do so.

Or at least, that’s my take on it. One of these days I’ll meet that woman and she’ll kick my ass into next week and I’ll love every second of it because I’ll know for sure that I’ve found someone who can see right through the mask I present to the world and call it like she sees it. It reminds me of the day Argo called me a “judgmental dickhead” and I laughed so hard my desk chair sagged because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she is totally, totally right.

But that’s not all of who I am. That’s just a piece. I am not any one thing, and I am learning to love all of who I am, even the parts I’d rather not talk about, because they’ve all brought me to this place, this journey in which I didn’t even feel like writing today.

I am just not feelin’ it today. I doubt anything brilliant will come out of my mouth because I haven’t had any conversations in which I can lift wisdom verbatim. 😛 It’s so much easier to write these things when other people just write them for me. Thinking about Susan and waiting for a letter from her, because they make me smile in a world that’s kind of grey. And by “kind of,” I mean that it’s really starting to hit me that it’s been a year since the divorce and I only feel somewhat better. I mean, I start and end my day alone, and that feels good. It’s everything in the middle that sucks. Starting and ending my day alone makes me feel like I am adulting. Not having a partner feels like something is missing, like phantom pain in a missing limb. But I couldn’t be married to just anyone. It’s not being married that’s the thing. If I just wanted someone to take care of me or someone to do my finances or what the fuck ever, I could hire it done. I miss long conversations staring at the ceiling fan lying on our bed. I miss sharing secrets and flipping each other shit. I miss the piece of my soul that belonged to Dana, and I can’t wait until it’s just a dull roar. Our former anniversary is on the fourth, two days away, and body memory is threatening and full of joy all at the same time.

I don’t mistake the part for the whole, kind of like playing or singing something almost perfectly, missing a few notes. If I focus on the bad notes, I will not remember all the ones that floated off easily.

I made so many mistakes, but I choose to focus on the times I didn’t, because they bring me joy, and I want to live in that than the great Waterloo that has consumed me over the past few years.

I don’t know why Dana doesn’t want to have contact, I don’t know why she doesn’t want to work on our relationship, I don’t know why I’m not sure I would, either. But what I do know is that it doesn’t matter. I mean, I have some excellent guesses, but that’s all they are. There’s a difference between projecting feelings onto someone and knowing what they actually are, and that’s usually the disconnect in communication, anyway.

Focusing on those things will only drive me crazy instead of bringing me peace of mind. Peace of mind is focusing on the fact that I live in DC now, far away from anything that I have known previously because I live outside the city on the Maryland side, which I’ve never done before, but have grown to love. My neighborhood reminds me a lot of Portland, actually. There are so many things I love about it that it just doesn’t make sense to focus on what has been, but what will be. I have it on my to-do list to find a psychiatrist and a therapist, but it’s very hard now that I work 9:00a-6p. My primary care doctor can refill the protocol that I’m already on, and he takes my insurance. So it’s not like I’m twisting in the wind, just lacking some things that would really improve my quality of life if I could just remember to get up from my desk once in a while. I rarely leave here directly at 6:00. I am working more like 46-48 hours a week. We all do, and because I’m in the middle of a project, it’s hard to take personal time to go to the doctor. When things smooth out, I will be much more forward about asking, but right now, it’s too much. I can’t afford to lose time when I already have the medication I need, and I’m getting a lot of therapy right here (no, really), it’s just self-directed.

It sounds like a piss-poor excuse until I feel a bit anxious about actually asking my boss for time off, especially since I just started in Dec… but I’m sure you can all identify.

Ice cream also helps, especially when I’m not feelin’ it.

I am listening to a Spotify station that I use frequently while coding called “Deep Focus,” and it is working. I haven’t even looked up from my desk in five hours. There’s one script I can’t get to execute properly and I am getting frustrated, but not enough to slam my head against my desk… yet. I need a set of fresh eyes on it, because I am using exactly the same logic that I’m using with every other section that works, it just doesn’t work with this one. I know that every time there’s a problem with the code, it’s my fault, because the computer only does what I tell it. However, if I am using logic that works, why doesn’t it work all the way through? I am scratching my head. Thank God I took my anti-anxiety meds this morning. It’s a huge dose of Fuckitol™ so that I don’t end up a weeping mess when things Just. Won’t. Work. I can handle frustration much easier, and let me tell you, code that won’t work is just about as frustrating as it gets in my world. Thank God I’m not a surgeon or something, because at least when my job is frustrating because something doesn’t work, no one dies. Perspective.

I almost didn’t take a lunch today, and then I realized that if I didn’t eat, things would get even more frustrating because my energy would start flagging and things would seem even more insurmountable. Now that I have had a break and some food, maybe things will look different. It’s hard when you’re staring at the same code for hours at a time, because it’s usually something you think is there, but it’s not. Kind of like bloggign and not seeing tpyos. 😛

I will make this code my bitch, but it’s just taking a little longer than I thought it would. What makes me feel good about this project is that it’s for a very, very famous non-profit, so I feel like I’m doing something good for humanity even in my own nerdy way. It’s important to me to have soul in my job, and this is it. Reminds me of the time I was having a REALLY, REALLY crappy day at work doing support cases and one came across my desk and I dialed the number without looking. They answered the phone “Doctors Without Borders” and I nearly choked. All of the sudden, frustration over… because even though computer support can make your eyebrows go over your forehead, you’re not trying to save people in war-torn countries with outdated medical supplies… or none at all and improvising with strips of cloth and bubble gum. Perspective.

I woke up late and it just threw my day off to an enormous degree. I wasn’t late this morning, because I usually get up three hours before I need to be here, and today I woke up two. So it wasn’t a thing, I just didn’t get my writing time or my SBUX. I took a caffeine pill and drank a soda instead. I have to have lots of caffeine in the morning because I take sleeping pills to ensure I get a good night’s sleep. It helps to shake off the sleeping medication so that I can function. If I do not have caffeine in the morning, I kind of look like an extra on The Walking Dead.

However, I will not give up my sleeping pills, because I’ve found one that keeps me from dreaming, and that’s a good thing. When I dream, I go back in time and try to fix things that aren’t fixable and aren’t worthy of my time. I am in the process of moving forward, and dreaming about the past isn’t going to help that in the slightest. I don’t talk to Dana in my sleep anymore, I don’t talk to Argo, I don’t talk to anyone. While it was nice to have uninterrupted time with them in my dreams, it wasn’t helping me leave the past there.

It is onward and upward. Perspective.

Amen.