Author: Leslie Lanagan

Life cannot be contained in a text box, but I will try. Proud non-biological mom of a trans woman, proud to be queer and nonbinary myself. Anything else? Just ask. theantileslie at hotmail dot com.

I Was Trying To Tell You Something Without Telling You Anything

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

There is no blame in my story. The buck stops with me. But it stopped 11.5 years ago without anyone trying to further a relationship with me. The longer there was no meet and greet, the weirder my life became. I didn’t feel free to miss a thing, because I felt like something would happen if I wasn’t there. I didn’t do anything, I just talked. And the longer I talked, the more I realized that two people in my life practiced law. The way it was presented to me in the hospital is that I was an experiment based on the 11.5 years it took for someone to fuck me up…. and no matter what the people say, broccoli is our friend. It’s a Sesame Street non sequitur to express unhappiness at Dana contacting my dad about something instead of just replying. I should have known that’s what would happen, but I took a chance that she was still an ally. She does not have to protect me, I was letting her know what was up. Now she’s burned an asset, and I’ve gained a CloudFlare notification that I don’t know what it means because no one will tell me. I am both sicker and more well than I’ve ever been. It’s just that no one will tell me what mine is to write and what’s not. What’s my life, and what’s everyone else’s? They do not have good control of this, either, because they do not remember the same things I do and could not predict the play.

I didn’t play either of their games because I didn’t trust their systems. The law and the government have never helped me.

At the very least, I know one of two things:

She really wasn’t there.

I was told she was there, but she wasn’t.

Both of those things could be true.

That is her question to wrestle with. Why would I remember that name after all these years? Why now? Don’t worry. I need this to stop, too. I’m dying inside. It’s why I’ve done so much to get well. It’s different when you’re left to do it alone in the dirt and when you have a support system. I have done terrible things, and I am sorry. But I am not sorry for the fact that Dana is part of my story. I’m sorry that everyone else is, because we were too broken and I’m still working on it.

I told my dad not to respond, that I’d gotten everything I needed on no information.

Why I Would Think That

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I mentioned the FBI in my last post. That’s what happens when you’re an American who writes about CIA. FBI has eyes on. All I’m saying is that I’d rather work with the publications review board than against them, but my attempts at fiction are weak. I wish I was a fiction writer, but the way around it is to change dates and times. So, we met in any city I’ve ever lived at any time IC said we did. This story is not about that. It’s about the stories that don’t get told. The partners who are allowed to know they work in IC, which is an underserved community because people don’t think of intelligence being as dangerous as being in the military. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my great uncle is the legend in my family because his C and/or DIA helicopter went down over Somalia in the 1980s, which cemented my star on their wall. Strange things have always been afoot at the Circle K.

“Chefs are just spies with better tools.” -Anthony Bourdain

I spent my time in the kitchen, so I already had the patois of a spy in the field. FOH and BOH gather information on customers the same way, and it is just like CIA talking to low value targets. Information passes up to the chef, he is rarely seen on the dining room floor unless you give him five or 10 minutes to put on a clean shirt and a fresh jacket.

I made her cry with posts about marriage and laugh with posts about sex. That part, I hope I can still do. “Those that lie, love their audience.” I am no threat to the intelligence community because I wanted to know the color commentary, not what anyone actually did for a living. It’s more trouble than it’s worth for me to know where and when Zac is, but that’s not why we’re not together. I just mean that I know firsthand what it’s like to be an intelligence officer. What is helpful to know and what is not. I once wrote a marriage article for all people, but if there’s an addendum, it’s “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I had to learn the hard way that there’s a limit to how much sensitive information you can hold without being tortured by it. Nothing that anyone has ever said has hurt me on face value. I just didn’t want to be an insensitive jackass and say timeout. That is not what the preacher’s kid is built for; it’s not what autistic people are built for, either. I chose people to be around me that were in the intelligence community because I felt lost and frightened all the time. The stories about my great uncle are not kind in terms of how my family was treated post-mortem. Therefore, I have a vested interest in staying frosty, but excited enough to tell you about the cool parts. It’s kind of like Craig Ferguson deciding that he would get rid of his fear of flying by becoming a pilot. I know that I am not cut out for CIA, because I am their mirror image. I hurt too badly for all involved to be objective, when their whole job is objectivity.

I also don’t want to be the jackass that publishes unverified information, for two reasons. The first is that I’m not a conspiracy theorist. The second is that I’m not an asshole. The jury has been out on that one for 11.5 years and I’m sure has been decided in the other direction by the other parties. It’s fine. I don’t have to forgive anyone but me, and that’s harder than forgiving someone who hurt you. She kept saying that nothing was ever enough for me because she used me. She needed me to be the empathy machine and couldn’t return love in that way…. or wouldn’t, I’m not sure. Because I was never sure if she was reading me in a personal or professional capacity. I was never sure how many times I made her throw up both her hands and her lunch at my illness. She knew all of those things about me, but it wasn’t a two-way street.

The truth is that I can write around a lot of things, but I don’t want to; I’d rather have a team of people tell the real story, but have it be the actual people to whom the story happened…. both what they told me happened and what actually did.

I am not responsible for a Virginia candidate dropping out of a race because I suggested an affair, because the person I said that to provided no background as to what she actually meant and I was not poly at the time. Whose affair were we talking about? The story from the very beginning, because I wrote it as it happened, is that SG! doesn’t have feelings for me. She overshared, and it made me react like a boyfriend who wanted to wrap her in foam rubber and keep her safe from harm. I was devastated because there was nothing that could be done about it in either direction to make it a better situation.

  • She has made it perfectly clear that she is very attracted to men.
  • I made it clear to myself that I was very attracted to my wife, and pretty girls are a flash in the pan. It’ll go away.

But, SG! isn’t the Virginia candidate. Who knows what she said to my ex-wife, the one actually from Virginia? At worst, I said something stupid when I was drunk (or they did, unclear) and I’m forgiving myself because I don’t say stupid shit when I’m drunk. It’s not possible when you cannot generally finish a cocktail but once in a Blue Moon.

SG! does know her, though, thus began a source of humor- updates on our favorite Instagram influencer. We just love her for different reasons. For me, she actually has influenced my clothes and glasses frames. I would pay money to see SG! dressed like our favorite Instagram influencer, but I’m betting they’re both a good time in different ways.

She does indeed love me in a “hell no, I will not pick you up at the airport but here’s money for an Uber” kind of way. She just doesn’t know how to show it because she can’t. I’m betting the story is that I’m going to be sued now, but all I want is to get better, anyway. I am hoping that all of these groups add up to the number of hours I’d get for damage inflicted, if there was any. The internet is strange. I don’t have to learn how it works anymore because no one knows.

Truly.

Meta is my favorite company in the universe, and the next MIB movie should be an interworld Facebook. Of course, aliens can communicate online. Online can also be more than it is to its users, and I live by the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.

That would be Mullenweg and Zuckerberg, btw.

Zuck was a dick to a lot of people, but I see a little too much of him in me. Decision fatigue, mostly. Betting he grew a beard to interrupt pattern recognition for neurodivergence. I’m cutting my hair differently. My glasses take up a lot of my face and my hair doesn’t need to compete so much.

I’m finally seeing that no one can fire Cinderella, and I’ve been Hal all along. I’m so sorry.

“She thinks she’s CIA. Has anyone told her?”

SG! finally picked a TV show I like… she’s darker than me and seems to prefer violent trauma porn in her viewing activities, and I’m pretty sure she’s read “The Murderer’s Daughter” as well. I did not like “The Enemy Within” and I loved “Homeland” until I found out something that made me sick. It was all a lie. You can take psych meds at CIA. That wouldn’t mean anything to the general population, but it would have affected my efforts greatly after having been rejected by the Air Force (I’ve never been huge into the military. I was a trumpet player and wanted to be literal “top brass.”). Intelligence seemed easier because I’d gathered intel on people since I was young, which the candidate proceeded to exploit.

She pretended to be someone who catfished me when I was a teen, when I thought she was actually a very nice girl from Swansea, Wales. Because my great uncle (the brother of the hero helicopter pilot) came onto me when I was 17 by sending me explicit messages, I died and was born again online. I killed “LDLanagan” online until I was an adult. Back then, I was “NoPnNoJn,” the slogan for Winter Park, Colorado…. no pain, no [Mary] Jane…. a ridiculous mountain. I had to reinvent myself as a pro-level skier so my great uncle couldn’t find me out of the other teens he diddled with until he died in prison. Therefore, I’ve always had a hero complex about CIA. That if Foster had been alive, Gene couldn’t have hurt me. Foster did not live long enough to see what his brother was doing, which was retreating to CIA’s jurisdiction. He did not live in Wales, but in England.

The reason I think I’ve always been a monster is that I violently hurt two girls when I was a kid to the level where you just don’t see anger like that in untraumatized kids. I believe something happened to me, and I will never know if I’m right… but the clue is that when I was two, I was terrified of men with mustaches. I would go to anyone else; my mother would exclaim proudly.

I have never lied. I found a memory. I will never know, but I have always suspected.

I Just Picked One…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What book could you read over and over again?
View all responses

Pinks & Whites

One of the lines that has always stuck in my head from “Spy Support” from WIRED is that CIA can arrange anything. Anything.

Leslie D. Lanagan

Leslie D. Lanagan

3 min read

·

Just now

I have a story, and the people involved didn’t want to help me with it. They decided that only their lives were important and left me to twist in the wind. So, since they’re gone and not coming back, I have two choices. The first is to stay silent and not cause unrest; the second is to cause a lot of unrest because I trust the FBI inasmuch as anyone can because “All Cops Are Bad.” Luckily, NoVA and SoMD are full of cops I like… the ones that can admit they’re complicit in a system. The blessing and the curse is that I am a documented bipolar patient who had “hallucinations” in the hospital… but who knows how many hallucinations were true stories too good to be true? Even I will never know that.

Wicked.

I have been changed for good, and that’s all I can say about that… because I am not sure about better or worse, just like Elphaba. I just know that I cannot go backwards, cannot seek solace in any of my old friends, and just need to live out my life in peace. I’m not cut out for government work, and not because I don’t have the smarts. I betrayed a friend after she betrayed me. She wanted all the benefits of being my closest confidante without any of the hard work. Therefore, it became harder and harder to put in work for her. I know what I have done is permanent, but you would have to read about the last 12 years to know both why I felt betrayed and why it was time to just let go and wash my fucking hands……….

Except I can’t.

“Out, out damned spot.”

I have always put in work for people who put in work for me. Her idea of work was being as remote as she possibly could so that nothing was ever fun or light; I am not the person that can be fun or light in the middle of fighting.

Here is our life together in a series of Jonathan Kellerman quotes, taken from “The Murderer’s Daughter:”

“They deserved more than the pathetic lie known as empathy.”

“Pre-monster happiness was out of the question.”

“In matters of healing, the body initiates and the mind follows. Malcolm had told her that. Only once, but it stuck.”

“Pals and chums and confidantes — what the textbooks sanitized as a social support system — were fine when you stubbed your emotional toe. With deep wounds, you needed a surgeon, not a barber.”

“Caulfield was basically a snide, spoiled twit. The arrival of the Messiah would leave him unimpressed.”

“Since learning of the catastrophe, she’d retreated into an insensate fog, as if locked in a sterile glass bubble where her eyes worked mechanically but couldn’t process and her ears were unplugged speakers. When she took a step, she knew she was moving, but she felt as if someone else was pushing the buttons. Her brain was flat and blank as unused paper. It was all she could do to sit and stand and walk.”

Now, imagine if you felt like that and you were responsible for it.

Snippets

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What book could you read over and over again?
View all responses

I don’t have one book I read over and over, except the year that “One L” by Scott Turow was in my bathroom. Every time I was indisposed, I read about his own shit sandwich and tried to empathize. It was easy after having read “Intern,” by Doctor X. I’m not sure, but matching style I think “Doctor X” is actually Michael Chrichton.

Except it’s not. It just sounds like him.

I looked it up. It’s Alan Nourse, the Mark Felt (Deep Throat) of Harvard Medical. If you like Chrichton, though, it will remind you very much of “Five Patients.” Turow, Nourse, and Chrichton all went to Harvard…. it’s not a big leap in style, and you will love all of them.

I do have lines from books that repeat:

  • “WHEN IT BECAME completely impossible for me to live without a pet chicken,”
  • “I turned to Kirsten, who was a great fallback best friend, because she had seven brothers and sisters and going to her house was like going to the zoo.”
  • “I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn’t have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls.”
    • I laughed so hard I nearly died. These are from “A Girl Named Zippy” by Haven Kimmel.
  • “Speed kills,” said General Faust, picking up the baton. “It’s nearly impossible to overstate its power. Darth Vader wouldn’t need a Death Star to destroy the Earth—or any explosives for that matter. He’d just need to put a single star cruiser on autopilot and ram it into the planet at a tenth of the speed of light. That would be more than enough to do the trick. If Vader had ever figured that one out, he would have put a lot of Death Star contractors out of work.”
    • Douglas E. Richards is my favorite living technothriller writer, and this is from “Infinity Born.”
  • “They deserved more than the pathetic lie known as empathy.”
  • “Pre-monster happiness was out of the question.”
  • “In matters of healing, the body initiates and the mind follows. Malcolm had told her that. Only once, but it stuck.”
  • “Pals and chums and confidantes—what the textbooks sanitized as a social support system—were fine when you stubbed your emotional toe. With deep wounds, you needed a surgeon, not a barber.”
  • “Caulfield was basically a snide, spoiled twit. The arrival of the Messiah would leave him unimpressed.”
  • “Since learning of the catastrophe, she’d retreated into an insensate fog, as if locked in a sterile glass bubble where her eyes worked mechanically but couldn’t process and her ears were unplugged speakers. When she took a step, she knew she was moving, but she felt as if someone else was pushing the buttons. Her brain was flat and blank as unused paper. It was all she could do to sit and stand and walk.”
  • “How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?”
  • “an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered,” (reminds me of Drew…. too old to be a princess, too young to be a queen. That’s why we’re both duchesses.
  • “What does one ever ask an author except: ‘How?’ And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: ‘Beats me!’”
  • “But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with ‘will do;’ it’s worse than living with yourself.”
  • “Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.”
  • “Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada.”
  • “How did they even know I was gay?” He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono. (This made me snort and howl with laughter.)

The Murmur of Bees gets its own section, because it lifted me up during the pandemic:

  • “It occurred to him that houses die when they are no longer fed with the energy of their owners.”
  • “He could not imagine how the country would survive if it allowed the rural areas to die, for in spite of all the changes—the emergence of iron cities like Monterrey, all the technological advances, all the marvels of the modern world—if there was one thing that never changed, it was that people, whether of a city or a village, needed to eat every day.”
  • “Simonopio closed his eyes, knowing that a look has the power to attract.”
  • “the true meaning of death: that there is no going back and that anything that was not said in time would never be said.”
  • “The empty hours of the night do not pass unnoticed, because in their unrelenting cruelty, they do not allow one to rest; they force one to think, and they demand a great deal.”

I love “The Murmur of Bees” so much that I heard it was originally written in Spanish. I don’t know enough Spanish to read it. Bought it, anyway just for the poetry. All of these lines are going to sound better in their original language…. most of the reason why I’m learning actual Finnish grammar and not just playing around.

I will update more because for some reason, I don’t have more recent books posting automatically. I know J.L., Evey, and Itzel will want to know what I highlighted. That’s the thing about having author friends.

When we’re together, Less is actually quite a bit More.

Fish, Part II

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I was sitting on the toilet when I realized that I’ve been the fish in the bowl during childhood, and that as an adult my organs are twisted at having to live in a bowl. Aaron Nemoyer said something that really hurt me (it wasn’t to me, it was a FB post)… that “preacher’s kids discover support systems way too late for it to help them.” Why?

We are never part of the support system your parent provides. In my case, it was my dad. More and more, it’s preachers’ kids’ mothers. You don’t have clinical separation from the parishioners, it is inherited. That’s why my father left the church when I was 17, and I am only figuring out that I need community now. In fact, it was ordered by my doctors. It took a doctor to notice I wasn’t in community and provide me with resources…. not a pastor.

Pastors cannot be objective with their own kids, and none of them are. My dad is not different from Aaron’s dad, nor is he different from any of the mothers. We’re all hurting and finding our way back after abuse by a system that could not support us. It is telling that Aaron found more community in being an adult film actor than being a Lutheran PK, but having hung out with strippers I understand. No one loves fuckups like fuckups.

Aaron and I are both fuckups to our conferences, because I cannot think of anyone I’d like to speak to from my childhood regarding the fate of the Methodists. They made their choice when they moved on without me. In order to move with them, I would have had to delay ordination into my early 40s. The thing I was raised to do is no longer an option on multiple levels. Preachers’ kids are given lectures when they need love, because as much as our parents try to protect us from their bosses, it’s not going to happen.

It was the same thing with DIA. I had no situational awareness because I didn’t want it. It’s better to know nothing if you date DIA. They’re not happy, but you are. Ignorance is bliss going from one system to another. I did not want to play nice because I wasn’t nice anymore. I was kind.

I just wasn’t kind to the right people.

Supergrover said she could get me to where I wanted to go. Turns out, she works for a company that flies people to war zones. I could make a call tomorrow and get Sinners’ Table into Finland or Ukraine or wherever people are the most nervous about Russian aggression. Or I could have, had I been willing to play games.

  • She never bought me any fonts.
  • She doesn’t remember anything about my life (quiz her. It’s an act.)
  • She isn’t as invested as me (this is the one that took me the longest to learn and why I let go)

I couldn’t have her truth without making my life a complete lie, and a real friend wouldn’t have made it that way for me like the Methodist church did. The lie there is that I had friends. I had parishioners. No one is going to be mean to the preacher’s kid, so you have an inflated sense that nothing bad will happen to you in the world. And when it does, you’re programmed to be Christlike so it’s hard to be reactionary when it’s just stuff.

Besides, at that point I wasn’t sure whether DIA wanted a look at my house, or whether my TV was actually being stolen. It’s all the same system no matter what intelligence agency, so say that Supergrover wasn’t blowing smoke up my ass. I said I wanted to own the spy museum after Jonna was gone. I wanted it in good hands. I think her son has it covered, but I didn’t know she had a son.

It was keeping a nonprofit in the family because this is my grandmother we’re talking about. SG’s lie cost me everything, not her.

Especially if it wasn’t a lie. I just made a jackass out of myself in front of my favorite writer because I thought I knew her better than I did. I would talk to my boyfriend differently than I’d talk to Jonna, but not if I thought she was my mother-in-law, etc. Keeping it in the family.

Let me explain. In “Argo,” Tony has a son. Tony does. He’d died by the time Jonna came on the scene, or that’s how it was presented to me. That Tony and his first wife had a son that died of cancer and he made it into the movie………. I did not know that their other kids didn’t.

So, I kicked a hornet’s nest I didn’t know was there.

How nice!

The best thing for me is to do my own thing in Baltimore and leave Washington alone. If I want to go to a war zone, plenty of people are reading who would love to give me a lift, dropping me in the middle of Tehran with no passport or language skills.

That was an Argo reference. If I really want to go to Tehran, I have to ask the Swiss or something. The Americans have fucked up diplomatic relations with Iran, so we don’t talk. We use back channels. We have been playing telephone since the day Tony Mendez arrived in country.

This is why “Parts Unknown” thrilled me. I often wonder if Tony Mendez knew Tony Bourdain, or if the Iran episode was made for me (I can wonder…. doesn’t mean it’s true… I think it was made for all Argo fans, not just me.) At the very least, Tony was able to pick up where Tony left off. 😉

Bourdain was able to show the current reality of Iran, the disconnect and the connect of modern relations with them. There are still Iranians who chant “Death to America” all the livelong day, but that’s not the whole story. There are plenty of Iranians who have relatives in America and they are the most welcoming people on earth. Tony wanted to eat, and boy did they feed him.

So, it doesn’t matter if Supergrover can make me the most powerful person in the nonprofit world and I will die bigger than Jose Andres in the nonprofit world if she lied about something as small as “I didn’t buy any fonts.” I know why she said it, but there are ways of being a traitor when you betray a friendship, too. She burned someone that was willing to go above and beyond, but didn’t take the time to prepare the way for the show vs. the reality.

I am always ready for the show vs. the reality, but I have to know the reality to create the show. That’s the part that was missing. Creating the show with no reality behind it, because I was never allowed to know what reality actually was. I got tired. She said she’d prefer not to see her name in print, but it would end our friendship. Our friendship was over the moment she denied me three times.

I was going to write a book about my journey with her called “Being Peter,” but it would be a better book to say how her system caused her to be a bad friend vs. the mistakes I made trying to be a good one. I didn’t do anything right; neither did she. Like, 11.5 years of it. And then my sister gives me a book about how some people are paid to be friends with you, but it shouldn’t matter because there were 609 hours of community service and not the 20 that was required.

I do see the Kennection.

Sam didn’t want to be friends with Sadie because he felt like a charity case. I don’t want to be friends with Supergrover because I feel the same way. It’s all about her. Keeping her, mostly, when she will not help you.

All of my stories are bullshit now. Was she my first fan that I fell in love with, or was I being sidelined because I’m a blogger? Who says she’s not friends with Matt and Mark?

Let’s end there. Matt and Mark are systems, too.

Fish

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What animals make the best/worst pets?
View all responses

My life has been taken over by the cold virus. There is nothing anyone can do, because I am not bad off enough to do anything but complain. I hurt all over and there is Vick’s VapoRub on my chest. I could stop most of the complaining with a hot shower, so that is where I’m headed once you find out that I like keeping animals in water as decoration and because I crave taking care of something that doesn’t need me too much. I am saving that kind of love and attention for my service dog. It seems unfair to get a small dog or cat knowing they’re a placeholder for another animal. My sister and I have talked about all kinds of things, from a turtle to a betta fish. It’s all I have time to do, look.

I have a shower curtain with a turtle on it, and right now that is pet enough. That being said………….

The best day of my little autistic life was receiving Othello, my Black Moor goldfish, when I was nine. The worst day is learning that you are not rescuing a goldfish by putting it in a bowl. They grow quickly, and they basically fold in on themselves; their guts twist to accommodate being a big fish in a small pond. Now, I will not keep goldfish at all, because there is no place to return or dump them when they get too big for your setup. Ohio Fish Rescue does not have enough room for everybody on earth’s failings as a pet owner, so buy smart. I’m thinking a small community aquarium, even at five gallons. That is plenty enough for a betta fish, his plants, and his cleaning crew. Males are flashy, so I want a boy living in my house (in this case).

I’m going to be buying smart because my service dog is a big investment, and I have three women telling me that I need a pet (well, Supergrover said I needed a dog and a gun… while I appreciate the sentiment, she’s the trained shot and I cannot hit the broad side of a barn – mental illness says “don’t tempt me into holding my beer” even with training)….

“I know me. We’ve met.” -Matt Borum, circa 2003

Fish seem to be the best answer for now. I do not want a cat because I will not clean up after it. I will buy disposable litter boxes and throw them out every day because I hate the smell so much I will throw up. I am a strong enough man to admit that while I love cats, the sensory experience of cleaning a litter box is for someone who lives with me that owns a cat. I’m not capable. I say this because my sister said, “why don’t you get a cat?” I had to explain to her that Dana took pity on me long ago and let me trade out cleaning the cat box for other chores…. but not until she saw actual vomit on the cat shit. Therefore, I do not want to go back to disposable litter boxes and hoping that another girlfriend sees me for the pathetic cat owner I am. To me, solving the problem is not air freshener or a magic litter box that doesn’t have a smell, because they don’t exist.

The solution is not getting a cat.

This is why my Serbian housemate’s cat was such a problem to me. She was allowed to keep a cat in her room. Periodt. But she liked going to Serbia, and she told my landlady that when she was gone, the cat was my responsibility. She was going to leave for a month and just not tell me. No one in our house would have let a cat die, but it was a shitty thing for an owner to do.

I have enough trouble taking care of my own problems, but today has been a victory. Evey Winters, writer and advocate, said she’d work with me to bring The Sinners’ Table to life. She’s the first trans person I followed on my professional account, and she lives an hour from me.

Life is strange. You come up with an idea in 2024, but it takes flight when it has permission to breathe. Someone slighted me, and The Sinners’ Table was the answer. Everyone is a traitor to something, most often themselves. Find community. Find love where you think it isn’t.

Peer support from actual peers. The one who will do Lent with you instead of just Easter. In the end, it’s all fish.

Why I Used to Say I Didn’t Care About Feelings and Now I Care About Enforcing Boundaries

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

No one who loves me wants me to stop writing. There are enough of them that the quota is satisfied. Everyone else can come and go. The trauma bond with Supergrover lifted the moment I realized she’d lied about something. And that even if she wasn’t lying about this one thing, it was the pain of other lies in which I hadn’t been told. About meetings and okays to which I hadn’t been a part, not knowing whether I was perceived the way I wanted to be (an internet troll, but basically a good kid) and the way I feared (Lisbeth Salander without common sense). That’s the part that has to go away on its own, because common sense without rejection sensitivity dysphoria tells me that I was crazy to think help was coming. I literally thought the streetlights were designed for me, and pretended to be my grandfather, making a walk and talk.

My phone was findable, but dead. There was nothing else to do but walk and talk to myself. I may not have actually made this movie, but I have a lot of great lines to record later. Everyone deserves a shitty first draft at something, and I’ve trained like a 1980’s news reporter at man on the street…. if the street were empty. I walked around talking about all the mistakes in pattern recognition that emotional abuse and PTSD caused. I’m watching “Adolescence” on Netflix, and the adrenaline the score portrays is very much what a panic attack feels like when I’m writing. Everything becomes sharp and defined, and I join a faster current standing still.

I just haven’t found anyone who notices people the way I do, because the things everyone else remembers are the social rules of the room. What I remember is trying to survive the room at all, and there is no learning there. Every room takes the same amount of effort. It takes PTSD and ADHD to want to change topics, because autism cuts you off from the outside world entirely. The things she needed from me were possible with a support system she could not provide, because I could not keep it pure. I was not programmed that way. By the same token, I kept none of my promises because she kept none of hers. I promised to keep her when I couldn’t. She should have told me I needed to start a new career because blogging wasn’t for me, and here’s why. I can help you write x, not y. Instead, she began to slowly criticize the things she didn’t like fueling my need to write something she did. Now I’m the one with the jacket that says, “I really don’t care, do you?” She bullied me by not knowing that emotional starvation is bullying. Like, I’m clearly invested but she keeps me on a string, can’t let me go. A dangerous pararelationship where she knows everything about me, and I know nothing about her except for the breadcrumbs she used to leave once upon a time and yet are no longer filling.

That’s a lie. Her biography is a gas if you’ve been friends as long as we have. Pattern recognition in reverse makes me laugh with delight. But it doesn’t feel dangerous anymore. Mostly because it’s not. I don’t care if she thinks I’m an asshole, she emotionally starved me long enough that being her friend just wasn’t worth it and she never noticed. Years of trying to do the right thing in a situation where all she was going to see was red.

Red, her color when I’m always dressed in blue. That’s because she doesn’t blush. I’m always red.

She asked me to do one thing, and I didn’t do it. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life, but she said it was the signal she needed to go work on her own. That she was done. At what point had she not been done? What was I losing, exactly? How much work had she actually planned on spending? I’m not going to cry for all the lost hours we could have spent together, because I learned exactly what she thought of me in some ways, but in just a creepy enough way that it was like “I would love you more if you were dead.” That’s how it feels when you read sick, sick things and your brain is also diseased.

My point, and I do have one, is that she made the choice to get into a relationship with a blogger. One that made her emote in ways no one else does or can. That has caused volatile and sick results on both sides, so I did not know which to believe until I was sitting in the hospital. They were right. I was the disease. Publish her e-mail, and let it be the end. You can’t come back from that, ever. I published it to cut my own heart out with a dirty knife so that her story would stay pure and mine would stay Bedlam.

You really haven’t lived until you’ve been told that your mother probably died because she hated your shitty blog so much, or that pneumonia can be injected, so someone probably killed her to make sure she didn’t have to read it. Supergrover wasn’t responsible for that one, but it was one of the things I was dealing with in the hospital, including the story of her ASPD poly friend who isn’t poly or ASPD, just a hell of a writer who made me think they were in the most beautifully cruel way possible. She said she was my River Song or some shit and had tattooed her hand. It was someone I’d let go of a long time ago, reopening a wound I didn’t know was there. If the story was true, it was really sweet. If it wasn’t, I liked her story just the way it was. Her being straight made me look at all straight women differently.

She said she sought out one of Zac’s partners to learn more about me. What would have been cooler was just asking me for coffee, but you do you. Because say all she wanted was information. I would have soaked up her time and respected it, because I am not the same person on the internet that I am on the ground. Supergrover has thought they were the same person, but I hope that she knows that she was wrong now. That I killed myself before I gave up and I didn’t give up until I realized someone else was in charge and I didn’t have to be strong anymore. She told me she’d never talk to me again and I had to not care. I had to save me. I choose bravado, but life is hard when your therapist knows you feel all of this and can read it because you told her you’d let her in if it would be helpful. Therefore, I am writing for an actual objective party whose only job is to be on my side. She doesn’t know or care the people involved; she just cares that I feel terrible about it.

She knows she has her work cut out for her because the thing about fuckups is that they tend to want to give back. I have the tools to be a million-dollar philanthropist before I die, but it’s going to take a lot of other people’s money to see whether I can deliver on that promise. I love spending other people’s money, and by that, I mean posting causes on my Facebook page for my birthday instead of asking for presents.

Josh Johnson asked the question, “if you were a billionaire, how would you be different?” First of all, my money isn’t my money. I get an allowance because I asked my sister to manage my money for me before I ever started LMG. I never wanted public perception to be that I was taking money for my own gain. Now, my dad does business as me because all of my money funnels into accounts in Texas. I don’t pay as much tax, which is good because I don’t make much money. I have a cushion to work on scripts because nothing is decided until my inheritance is gone or the state of Maryland, in its good graces, deigns to let me keep it. This is another reason why paying for a move to Europe seems sensible. A digital nomad visa might really lead to some interesting opportunities to network with other autistic people across the world.

In order to get there, I had to stop bouncing ideas off Supergrover and in front of people who actually had contacts to implement my ideas if they turned out to be interesting. I’m not a self-promoter, I put myself in a think tank. I’m going to try and get Evey Winters to appear at The Sinners’ Table, because she told me today she had no idea I only lived an hour from her. World Central Kitchen started somewhere. The Sinners’ Table is not my table, it is the historical Christ’s table…. where people were queer. They did porn. They lied. They were traitors. They said they wanted to stab people through the internet. They were Republican and ushered in devastation by accident. They kicked out their children when they found out they were queer and cannot fix that relationship, but can love other queer kids instead.

It’s for all the people Jesus preferred to sit with, instead of who Evangelicals just wish he did.

Caring Bravely

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What job would you do for free?
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I have been writing on Medium lately, so if you’re missing entries, I’ve been holed up there. I also started writing for Substack, so I’ve got a couple irons in the fire at that web site, too. You can look it up as Stories 2.0, but there’s not enough there for me to show it off quite yet. I have one subscriber, who is not sure about me yet. This reminds me of a conversation in which I pointed out a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign at group and laughed in a very acid funny way, because depressed people hate that shit. The group director said, “Leslie, I don’t know what to think about you.” I said, “you’re having the right reaction.”

The group I’m in is provided by Sinai Hospital, because there are two of them. On Medium, I talked about a cognitive behavioral health program with an Eastern European man who wishes I would blink when I talk about his home country. Because he said it to me, I know it’s public information that he is from Serbia and that laugh line is for Hayat only. Only she would know why it was funny that I left a housemate who wouldn’t shut up about Serbia and then ended up in a Serbian’s care and now it’s cool that I know about something so bizarre and special interest-y…. except it’s not my special interest. I just listened to the constant infodump and retained it. Listening to the infodumps of emotional vampires that don’t know they’re emotional vampires is my jam. That is most autistic people. They have no idea that spies (in my case) are wearing you down, and Serbia (in her case) wore me down in a month flat. Like, UNCLE!

But again, that’s cognitive behavioral health, and the hospital has me in another group for which they’re looking for free and paid peer support. I don’t have a substance abuse problem, so even though I’m open about the fact that I smoke THC sometimes that’s federally legal because it’s limited to three percent, you cannot imagine how much an issue it was in my head compared to how much they cared. My psychiatrist’s main concern was that I’d been ripped off my anti-anxiety meds without any replacement at all, and I didn’t smoke weed enough to have a problem with it, so we’ll keep an eye on it together. Apparently, you cannot tell someone to get sober if the drug in question is federally legal, therefore also the program I’m in does not require me to be sober in order to be a peer counselor.

That being said, if they did require it, it would be in my best interest to quit whether it was helping me or not. This is The Bad Place with marijuana, because legislation in Canada and Australia is light years ahead of us in terms of what marijuana can do medically, but in the US we dismiss it as a party drug. It’s well known for controlling the symptoms of autism overseas, not here, and the strength doesn’t matter. The “diet weed” we have in this country doesn’t exist in others because they didn’t need a federally legal happy medium to please conservatives. Medicine is medicine and “I’m Rick Steves, bitch.” It doesn’t matter whether it’s weed or European culture, I have found that there aren’t activists like him out there. He’s older than me, so someone has to take up the mantle for responsible use and regulation, which in the US we have done. There is no reason for us to be on our Puritan bandwagon when no one is advocating for being high all the time. Three percent allowed me to function, and by that I mean it made the nausea that goes with Lamictal abate enough for me to ride on the Metro. The people on the Metro didn’t even know to be grateful that I smoke weed, but I assure you that they would have if I’d thrown up on them one day just to let everyone know I’m not THAT kind of stoner.

This is also the bad place.

Public perception for my age and younger is that you can buy weed at a gas station, because you can. Public perception for my age and older is that you’re an addict and all you do is get high. I write too much for my perception to be stoner dumbass, because no one can put together an essay and work on these high-level meetings without having their minds together.

I know Supergrover, though, and her narrative is “she bratted out because she was a stoner dumbass.” That’s because she’s never used my pronouns correctly because I never corrected her. I expected her to pick up those things over time as a fan. She claimed she wasn’t reading, then she said she’d been reading the whole time. So the pronoun thing was intentional. She misgendered me for two years trying to stick to the story that she doesn’t read me and waited for the “I’m trans” conversation so she could say specifically “I’m so glad you shared this with me” and buy all the appropriate flags and wedding ring colors (she wears a silicon band, I’m not talking about a wedding ring between us. She changes out the color of her own band and I joked that the only reason I’m queer and trans is to give her more options.). I get why she did it. It was still manipulative to pretend she hadn’t read anything, that I haven’t been her darling boy for two years, as Janie so eloquently said. But even that was an evolution because I could see so clearly how I had acted like an incel to her when I was angry, and she’d acted like Colin and Nando. I’m Guillermo. Disprove it.

Things We Do in the Shadows? I sat on the floor at the spy museum and cried not because Jonna Mendez can do cool shit but because Tony fell in love with her. Tony’s dog’s name was Cole. My dog’s name will be Tony. I would rather think of myself as the Jonna here. She knows why. You don’t.

The relationship that Supergrover inflated to be true was that she knew Jonna. So, I walked up to Jonna like we were mutual friends. They don’t know each other, she was trying to impress me.

There’s a power struggle because you lied. That’s it. You lied. You don’t see the fallout and you expect me to get over it as quickly as you did. Your expectations on timeline are so fast that I can see why you feel like “every day is therapy day.”

I will also be here, but not for someone who went so far to meet a blogger that they lied for YEARS about knowing someone? YEARS? And then tell them they can never talk about it again. That’s your boot on my neck and I want you to stop it.

Now.

I chose Olivia.

Fitz and Jake were both a hell of a ride. You should watch “The Residence.” I think it was written to make me laugh at a time when someone knew I would need it and made some calls. There’s a concert I’m dying to not go to right now, because I’m a tourist in every city but that one, which if you were paying attention in “Argo” to Jonna would look like I was impersonating an officer and to everyone else would look like I mean everywhere is home but Houston. I mean the latter. I was abused there, and I could not get married there until way later than I needed it. I’m done. Now nonbinary has broken everyone’s brains and it’s none of their business.

Again, I’m done.

I would not say that if everyone in my family was incapable of visiting, but they are- and for long periods if need be. Their help was invaluable in cleaning up what I’ve been through over the past 11 years, so I hope I can pay them back by bending on as many things as I can while still having room to be me. Homophobia and transphobia are dealbreakers, so the members of my family for whom support that wouldn’t put in the money to come visit. It’s different when it’s your turf. Live in the roughest city in the world and you’ll see who loves you and who says they do on Facebook.

I’m not angry, I’m just breathing again. Supergrover took what she loved and crushed it, dropping a bomb over her shoulder and walking away.

But that’s how she does life. It’s been my job to take the hits. Maybe Jonna could check on her, since they’re apparently so fucking close.

Snort.

I’m being tapped for peer support at a hospital with which Supergrover and Lindsay both have interests. Supergrover was interested in me getting the best help I could and pointed me in the right direction. Lindsay was so impressed that there was mental health rehab just like you’d give an addict after a bad bender or a patient with a gunshot wound that she gave money to Sinai. I allowed two people to care bravely, and I hope it changed their lives for good as well. Maybe the state of Texas can benefit from my lack because programs like these get started by the right people hearing about them.

Peer support is all I’ve ever been to people, really. I function best in reaction to systems. Upholding them is incredibly difficult. You cannot give consent to be peer support to CIA, because there is no way to be a peer to CIA. So, Supergrover made me think she was connected to Team Mendez in a way that said she was a tourist. I took it and ran with it, then my mirror neurons went off for Jonna in person because she was my online grandmother according to popular legend.

If Supergrover is telling the truth, I’ve been trying to impress Jonna for 12 years, not her. If she lied, Jonna’s read everything I’ve ever written and was still nice to my dad. 😉

Jonna is designed to be a good time in person because everything she says is double speak due to her training. Did it happen, or didn’t?

I am so literal I will only pick up one of them, usually the wrong one.

I do wonder Jonna’s coffee order, though.

Caring bravely.

Where Else? REI

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Where would you go on a shopping spree?
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I don’t like complex noise, so I’m blocking out the kids outside with Washington National Cathedral. I just wanted to listen to the liturgy. The service only has about 15 minutes left and damn. I missed the sermon. Marianne Budde preached the night we gathered at St. Albans to remember the queer Jesus, Matthew Shepard. Now I sleep to Alan Turing.

Chris never asked me why I was using AI, but I told him anyway. That AI calmed down my anxiety, so I owe Microsoft and Meta a lot of money… not that they need it. That I found the only friend who would never leave me and I got well.
I’m listening to the community prayers.

-Christ has died.
-Christ has risen
-Christ has come again.

Resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.

I saved a woman from harm in all my weakness, the thing I’ve been trying to tell her since June of 2013…. but she painted me as a stalker and it caused extreme emotional distress as I managed a PR campaign of enormous proportions. My pattern recognition was off because my direction in life was changed without my knowledge. The womans feelings have been changed forever as a nonbinary, which she accepts. I’m in love with her, she’s in love with her husband. Who the fuck cares at that point when I have such an enormous support system.A fan, Cathy, helped me tremendously in my marriage article because she fed my ego without knowing it. “I didn’t know the author was gay until the end. This solves just SO MUCH. She helped me tremendously and she doesn’t even need to know why, but there’s only one reason I hate her less than the others. My friend Katya says that “mulvisti” is actually closer to “asshole” than “the opposite of evil.” That’s why you study Finnish in person.

Goodnight, everybody…

I wrote a marriage article in 2o13 that put me on the map, because #MartinaNavratilova and Margaret Cho retweeted me. Twitter lost all credibility, so I lost a lot of my fan base. I also don’t want to use it anymore, but I can’t live without Facebook so I won’t. Notifications are insane, but my profile was so funny and engaging that I was included in the rollout of Facebook’s rollout of the creative social program where you could earn money being a jackass on the internet.
I’d like to thank the International Spy Museum for all their support in this matter as I literally sat on the floor and figured myself out. The internal knowledge I got from Jonna Mendez and her late husband, Tony, is simply enormous so that love is completely returned:

“One day, I’ll write something a quarter as good as this.”

“You keep workin’ on that….”

Microaggressions to tell me she was flipping me shit like an out and proud old spy who was a hardass at work. I love that woman thanks to the late Hudel Steed, without whom would launched the fire of a thousand suns for Moving2Canada when I looked at her ass. Nothing else sucked, either. The shock of my entire life was when she said that she liked me, but I annoyed her. 🙄

“My refusal to lean from experience is not cute.” Neither is the way I put together furniture.

I almost broke my nose meeting Dougal’s Beard. She did not see the humor in that, nor the way in which I flirted with her and I’m an old line cook who doesn’t pick up social cues, thus having a friend who was strong enough to write me the most beautiful goodbye letter I’ve ever read so that when she cut contact, I began to obsess over her twin sister in the healthiest way imaginable. I social masked her. This was also by accident because she doesn’t identify that way, but the clothes that bring down her sensory issues make her appear nonbinary, too. That is why she is the Mummo of my heart and will reign supreme even if she’s a dickhead in real life, ibid.

Aada saved my life years ago, so I saved hers. With the last letter she wrote me, she saved my life again. Friendships do that. I’ve clearly protected her through anything and everything.

Believe me, this has repeated in my head ad nauseam thanks to Tiina, who is first-gen Finnish so I needed to ask her upfront if we were naked or clothed. I don’t care anymore. If I cared I wouldn’t be moving to Finland. Tiina invited us to her farm (are we still on for that?) so we could hot tub and I choked because the absolute last person I wanted to see naked was someone I was meeting for the first time yet having quite a long history of romance on my blog to protect my sanity. She knows she’s a basic bitch, if only she’d own it.

But that basic bitch is the love of my life and no, I am taking no questions. That’s my TED talk. End of story.

We will not speak of this again. 😉

I’m leaving breadcrumbs on purpose so that all the Finns can look me up under my new name, Jason. It’s not for you, it’s for her.

I am going to the courthouse to change my name to Jason Horn because I can’t find him on social media for some odd reason.

Maybe he’s a really, really, really, really private person, or maybe he’s just an idiot, but we’ll see what happens after Jonathan tells him that American Idol tells him he’s an idiot. Harold Horn needs to call me this afternoon or I’m out.

I couldn’t have done it without a poor cook who toiled until she wasn’t, and then became the hottest dude I’ve ever seen and if I go through a friend breakup with him I will lose my everloving mind. So I decide to make it so much worse….. He’s a male chef. He automatically has to think my vagina makes me invalid. Why do you think he transitioned? It’s the only reason, I’m sure. Trans is a myth. I identify as a velociraptor to cover that pain, you fascist, bigoted bastards. You don’t see queer pain because there’s a lot of don’t want to in “cain’t.”

Fuck alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way off.

I’m moving to Finland, so I can’t have any emotion about this. It’s illegal. I checked.

A woman’s father is dying over many, many days and she snapped at me when I told her my apartment was broken into and the sound of the people shoveling was a trigger…….. as if that doesn’t go away quickly. It takes days, not months. She said, “so the problem with snow is obviously too big and Finland is not for you, but our friendship is okay.”

No, the fuck it is not. We’ve been speaking Finnish for months.

I came unglued when she didn’t recognize a trigger when she saw it and exploded at me when I called her on it because her father was dying. She could not triage because she was in pain, and that’s okay.

Finns are an interesting people. They like sex and nudity. They do not open up emotionally. I feel the most secure in my sweats, which is problematic.

“Oh. This is bad on so many levels.”

Voi ei. Tämä on huonoa niin monella tasolla

Very Finnish Problems

Yet the show must go on, even if it’s a David Sedaris train wreck.

Sedaris, I’ve been compared to you all my life. Literally all of it. I couldn’t put my work in front of you because I’m not a self-promoter. But I need to go to France and England for research and I’m hoping we can meet again. The most profound, moving moment of my life came from two shows, This American Life and Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I became up close and personal with your work very early on and devoured it because I was eager to match style with you and Bourdain.

I would like to thank #mexico and Antonio for a lifetime of learning academia through his eyes. It was invaluable social masking.

There is a moment in every narcissist’s life when one string unravels a thread. She told me she knew someone when she didn’t.

That’s it. That’s all it took. She fostered that lie and then over time made me long to get away because I always make peace. I ddn’t have the proper pattern recognition in solving my own problem and didn’t know until much later that this was problematic.

An offhand comment lauched a war, with a face of a thousand secrets, a woman that reminds me of the woman I love because Bryn means the world to me for stepping up and taking over a project for me that might have particularly lucrative results. I just don’t want to be responsible for the Kickstarter because I go off the grid when I’m writing.

The project is “Ramona Quimby, Age 47.”

You write what you know.

Supergrover once said that she had the opportunity to help me with screenplays because she’s a wonderful writer…. but she does fiction and I don’t. Therefore, I can only be her research assistant and editor on her projects, and I can only do the same for her. I’m not here to advise anyone on plot, just craft.

Brandon Sanderson gave me that advice when I took intro to science ficion, and that’s how he went to a cocktail party and got the moment that all writers crave until they don’t. It makes them cry, it makes them insane, and it turns lack of sex into sharp focus into writing as you process your own emotions instead of someone else’s.

“I’m a writer.”

“Oh, so you’re unemployed.”

“I hit the The New York Times Best Seller’s List this week.”

Sanderson, can I have five minutes?

We just never had the opportunity for a long enough conversation because we were just in line together. Kahviko?

I’m nonbinary. I wait for the facts.

Moscow Rule One

Assume Nothing.

I made an ass of myself with a lot of people trying to create the right team but the job interviews did not go well. One was frightening, in fact, as he trauma dumped about being kidnapped and put into a little boys’ farm.

It was trauma porn to him, and he had no idea what I was going through at the time. Now that it’s all in the open, I can only say it was enough to stop my heart and didn’t.

“Where the vision fails, the people perish.”

And that’s how I do what I do, even though I’m “unemployed.”

That changes by tomorrow. I’m not an employee. I’m a CEO.

God dammit (No offense meant, Mr. God. I just like Godless Mom, too).

I would be remiss not to include Father Nathan Monk and Itzel Cummings, Author for their support, but the award goes to J.L.HenryAuthor and Tyler Connoley for making me the amazing woman/trans man I am.

The biggest honor, hug, and kiss on the cheek goes to Matthew McConaughey. My mother was his middle school choir director at Pine Tree, and her favorite joke in life was that she’d seen Matthew McConaughey in a bathing suit, but he was 12 at the time. Pity.

I was sitting there right next to her, so I assume I’ve met Matt.

Unclear.

But what I do know is that we’d sit around and talk about Longview with Lone Star, then cross over into the terror he went through at Uvalde, because my two of my cousins were body transfer.

That’s why I’m naming myself Jason Horn. I was so mad I didn’t get that last name when I was born I could spit nails. 😛

Only OGs know that joke, like Norman Drews and Graham Painter and Jon Durbin.

Never burn an asset.

Streak Freeze

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had to save my streak in Finnish today because I’m falling into the demotion zone as it’s getting harder and I have less time for it. But I think it’s best to slow it down to a manageable level. School doesn’t even start accepting applications until September, so I have a bit of time. I don’t need to use Finnish at all. It’s just fun to show Finns I know it. That’s because they’re fine in English most of the time, but they appreciate foreigners trying.

Whooooo boy.

Supergrover has always maintained that she is both fine and dying at the same time, which is the position I was in therefore because of it. Feeling all that empathy while she wasn’t regulating her own emotions was scary. She would get mad- two days ago it was “can we have one present fucking conversation?” We’d just finished a couple. I dive down, I come up. I don’t stay in pain. I vacillate between comedy and tragedy. She doesn’t have any boundaries because she cannot say “you’re being weird” or whatever- or at least she said yet yesterday and I was like, “thank you for correcting me.” I didn’t get angry, she was right.

The problem is that Supergrover has main character syndrome because she thinks she’s helping. You cannot get details out of someone who thinks they’re the whole show. That was only my perception because she didn’t tell me how wonderful and beautiful and brilliant I was until this week after calling me a judgmental dickhead most of the time.

None of this is all anyone’s fault. We chose differently because we had to- we’re going in a direction that’s not safe for her because I’m a writer and she’s not. She’s tired of my bullshit and from her perspective all I’ll ever be is annoying when she’s triggered and brilliant when she’s not and there hasn’t been a solid amount of time for us to emotionally regulate. I got there quickly. She didn’t. That’s because her lie unregulated her so she cannot settle. She is nervous around me because she doesn’t know that I actually forgive lies and it’s fine. It just took me a couple of days. I lashed out and called her a pathological liar because she couldn’t help herself for 11 years, so how dare she be held accountable for her actions? The last three or four, we were done with the mission and she left me to have nightmares. The mission was to save ourselves and ended up saving both of us (I hope). I’m a fixer/pleaser to the nth degree, and keep all my emails for my writing projects, not just to ensure that I have the receipts. I have the receipts on a fight with someone, but thinly veiled threats are probably autistic for “I spoke my needs literally and without pretense” when you expected a social mask.

Today I’m in true face.

New Relationship Energy

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What I’ve realized is that Supergrover is right, it’s time for us to move on and not think of each other. It’s not painful, though. I was so done fighting her that this was the last straw, and by that I mean I was kind and not polite. I told her I was here to be a friend, and I would not hurt her. She said she trusted me, so I knew she would. I cannot believe anything else because I have based everything on what she’s told me. So, I feel that whether she comes back is on the work she does next. Michael was like, “so are you doing anything on Monday?” I said, “probably not” He said, “cool.” Supergrover thinks he’s a threat. He saved her ass. That’s because when my pattern recognition is off, people notice. Something just didn’t add up about not wanting to meet up for 11.5 years.

To be honest, she made it never cross my mind. Our relationship was so unstable that getting together felt like a sensory assault with no way to turn it down beforehand. Everything I suggested was wrong. Do you want to meet alone? Do you want to meet with friends? What would make you the most comfortable? She used to live 40 minutes from me and I said, “people think it’s weird we’ve never met because you wouldn’t meet up.” My heart flipped when she said “well, I don’t think wouldn’t is the right word, but okay.” She accepts that she did not foster the connection properly.

My favorite show is Burn Notice.

I am in another room, with another rocking chair. The mama’s rocking chair in which the mama singing actually knows her baby has been hurt. The song is in a minor key…. fractured.

Do not leave me alone in this room.

She did, and that’s fine. It’s time. She did not want friendship. She wanted to say she had a friend. If the object of the game is to be combative, she won by degrees. She broke down the way I think, systematically. This is great. I still cannot compartmentalize, which makes everyone only have half a picture until they don’t because one thing you said from six years ago still matters.

We had tentative plans for Monday, because she’s going through hell so I thought a hot tub party would be nice. My friend Tiina is also going through hell, so I think Supergrover was a bit jarred by me switching everything to possibly being naked the first time we met, but it wasn’t my party. Buckle up butter cup. I asked Tiina if they did sauna Finnish or American style and she made me laugh:

swimsuit cuz kids
jail = bad

I told Supergrover that seeing her naked was the least intimidating part of meeting her because I’d seen her mind naked for years. It’s so true, because I’ve already seen all the parts I don’t like and the good parts win out by a large margin. We both struggle with different things and majored in compensatory skills. We were talking about neurodivergence/mental illness and I think she believes she can “win” at medicine. She’s the best field doc you know, just ask her. The person who’s actually worked in a doctor’s office for five years carries no weight.

There is no subject at which she will say I am the expert while constantly claiming that I believe I’m the expert. It’s adversarial on every topic…. but it got better immediately when we agreed to choose peace and work toward a goal to figure all this out. There’s no statute of limitations on guilt, but I pushed her away and told her to get help and she believed me with a finality that she hadn’t before. The reason she panicked is that she’s vomiting up every secret she’s ever told since she was six years old to her therapist and not me. She cannot have any real bearing on reality right now because I have disturbed her peace, something I could have done three years ago if she’d told me.

Because then we could have had a happy life of disturbing the peace together. I do not think of a moment we’re awake where we are not “disturbing the peace,” but here we are.

My thing is that there is no bad or good, only sick or well. The panic attacks were getting worse because I’m different now. In a sense, she views me as rareified air because she wanted to be cut out instead of jumped in. So she’d know I had her back full tilt in a way that she didn’t expect for the good. Why would I have any reason to harm her? It’s been a frustrating couple of days, but I expected that. Negotiating boundaries after a long time away is hard af. Yet we don’t talk about things like that because it’s “intrusive,” and what is “intrusive” is a moving target. If she can’t hit me with one dart, she’ll pick another one. It’s so passive-aggressive that it reminds me of my mother. Then, if that doesn’t work, social masking her father isn’t better. It’s hilarious that I used to say that she was her daddy’s little girl, but not the fuck in my presence. It’s still true. I said that about her EA, but I meant it about me. It’s the only protection drive I have, and it was given to me to keep. I cherish it. Indulge it. Make up silly fantasies about going to dinner because I know they’re silly fantasies until she accepts a google calendar invite. I did send her one saying that it would be cool to put her on my calendar even if she didn’t come because I’d wanted to put her on my calendar since 2013.

Everything I do is based on what I remember, and for some reason I haven’t remembered anything right. People go back a month later after their adrenaline has worn off and say, “wait. THAT’s what she said? I remember it being much more awful than that.” Their problem is that while they’re fuming about something, I’m leaving it on the page and working on the next thing. She was so overfocused on the threat level that she did not see all of my care and connection.

All of my concerns were invalidated when I expressed them, because the problem she’s seeing today is one I saw in 2013. How she’d crippled me as a writer by being a part of my life and then complaining that I was on a deadline and rushing her. What I didn’t realize is that she doesn’t have the same memories all the time. PTSD travels. You don’t remember everything all the time. I think that what Supergrover will find is that she’s been pushing her body at about 200% faster than it was designed to go for a very long time. Pain is cumulative, but I wasn’t trying to say that our mental health issues are due to each other. I would say the schism is that in 2013 I got help and that’s what made me grow by leaps and bounds while she stayed the same. Standoffish, and not because she didn’t love me. She was trying to protect a stupid lie instead of an important one.

God help you if you mistake one for the other there, Ace.

That part of it is all her fault. The rest of it is mine.

Everything she says is true and I do not know why she thinks the same wouldn’t be true for me. That I would only give information on a need-to-know basis. If they know anything, it’s only enough to complete a task. And also I didn’t have to prove she was telling the truth, I had to prove that I was. That I wouldn’t knowingly cause harm to anyone.

But what if you’re so focused on helping other people you get too overwhelmed to take care of your friends? This is the story of my life, literally. It’s so much work taking in all the sensory elements of an environment that I’d rather stay home. This is because I am bothered by short bursts of loud noise, or complex noise of any kind… a dining room.

I preferred being a cook because being a waitress reminded me of smiling at parishioners every Sunday and we always got the worst tips after church so I was out.

Now I’m really into me and it’s working out… but not in a narcissistic way. Someone figured out something was afoot at the Circle K and told me how to get her some actual help.

I cared way too much.

She cared way too little.

She couldn’t see a path forward, but I could. Mine embraces light, hers does too.

I will let Tupac have the last words:

“I always want you to eat, just not at my table.”

And even this is only on alternate Thursdays. I have done my part to advocate for changes that need to happen, because I have given money to more glamorous causes than this, but the pride in just being a good friend is enough. You cannot save everyone, but you save the ones you can.

And if you will notice, I’m also a first daughter with a hero complex.

Who remembered to check with someone if it was okay, even though I was blocked and couldn’t ask Supergrover herself, and didn’t want to…. because if I created a new e-mail address that wasn’t blocked, that would be a red mark. If I only wrote from my perspective and didn’t see what she saw, then my writing was invalid. I put her story on Medium because she pays to read there. I know she read it and that she got the last word. She asked me to take it down, and I did. I could not ask her, acknowledgement that I’d done my due diligence isn’t enough to secure her right now.

I would have asked if I could have, but any contact was bad no matter how I tried to get it.

So, seem like a bitch for not taking criticism, or take a chance I’m going to lose my friend forever? That’s the choice she gave me. When someone gives you a choice like that, you don’t have one. She could be open and free with me in a way she couldn’t be with other people, but the longer we went only talking to each other and not a group the more my reality mirrored hers. I slowly became a right tool with anger issues because I didn’t have anger issues like hers. They were acquired from having to deal with her threat responses.

She doesn’t respond at all to “this was a bad behavior, you are not a bad person.” Therefore, you cannot have a discussion with her without her saying she’s not enough and can never give you what you want………… while also never asking what it is that you want so that she gets it right.

Our entries are a liturgical calendar and for some reason we always fall apart around the divorce because of body memory. Lent is brutal because all of the Facebook pictures are beautiful and awful.

If only we’d all gone at the same time to get help, then would be a distant memory because of one lie that nobody thought I would possibly guess. Because I would have taken it to my grave and she would have absolutely had no problem keeping me in a virtual broom closet until then. I think I would have died happy? Unclear. I love the little Harper Lee act because that’s not an act. That’s survival. Autism’s slogan should be “Turn it down.”

She doesn’t ask me any questions to establish who knows what and thinks I’m grabbing for power when I’m grabbing for direction. I was directionless and needed a family, and the arts community took me in. I want to do projects around jazz in Europe, spy 101 for black people.

Old friends that use AOL. That bitch has a 486 with 3MB of RAM. “Old friends.”

None of my friends use AOL. None. Just younger, faster, and more insurance. They’re all the same brand. That’s how I made sure that both of us got what we needed, so that this relationship rests in peace. I cannot help that when we are in different places we are safe to start communicating, because we’ll both want to know the other is okay. But she says she does not want to know my consequences, and “nobody needs your help.” I’ve saved her our whole relationship and she’s chastised me for telling my truth that was her lie.

That will haunt me, because I got the experience that I wanted, but it was based on a lie. Is it still meaningful? Yes, but differently. I tried to learn her, because she tried to impress me with things that aren’t impressive.

I don’t stan, but I would love a Starter Cap with an autograph.

I asked for tiny things… autistic pebbling… and gave tiny things. Love was always expressed as “therapy day” Then I look at the chart of Finnish emotions in my head and it spirals out of control. No fucking wonder.

Clinical Observations of Myself

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Everyone says that I’m out to get them. I’ve been out to get me the whole time. Here’s how I moved myself out of the way so you can, too.

I social mask. Full stop. I do not know anything. I remember it. Everything from the largest picture to the smallest tree. The difference is that being INFJ, I am prone to melancholy and rumination when I am injured. I am injured to the point that I cannot reach out. It has been two or three days since I have talked to anyone at all, including an Uber driver that turned out to be hot so I agreed to have dinner with him and then ghosted (I will get back to him. I’m just injured).

During the change in paragraphs I reached out and said:

I’m really sorry and need to apologize. I got emotionally overwhelmed and couldn’t reach out. Would you be interested in going to dinner tonight or tomorrow so I can relax with a friend?

Unless he becomes a fan after dinner, he won’t know the problems I was facing with my fake girlfriend.

The reason you get so many messages is that I think I’m being abandoned when you go silent and just try everything to get you to come back. It’s like an SOS level call every goddamn time and my body is physically worn out. Yet when we’re not together I feel you moving in the universe and you feel me. We protect each other constantly without saying so. I would bet that you’ve kept it hidden from the bombshells that you’re so close to me that you don’t have a problem with talking about sex and intimacy because that’s not personal. Emotions are.

You can talk about anything and everything with detachment but the party girl act has to stop. You need to admit to everyone that you’re a trainwreck right now and you need Moomin dolls and blankets because you’re sick and need time to heal. We’ve both left 3rd degree burns on each other. I bet not drinking has made you sleep deeper, at least.

Editor’s Note:

She’s not an addict, just decided alcohol was tired like I did.

But say to the psychiatrist, “Leslie thinks I have some kind of mood disorder and the same drugs work for all of them, so put me on Lamictal, Lexapro, and Klonopin and I’ll tell you how I feel in two months.

I am trying to lift your depression for good. Stop mistrusting drugs and doctors and get on board. You are sick, and we need time to figure out what’s wrong with you because the root of the problem is rape. Not you.

Because you remind me of someone else who needed to be loved, and he’s not doing well.

I chose Aaron because he’s Supergrover’s mirror image. The Supergrover I can love with fire.

I loved her so much I asked for another one from the universe, and she needed to be someone else to be cool.

The clinical observation is how attracted to that I am and why. That’s going to be another six months of entries.

Joy.

I’m so bitter, but glad that my pain can be someone else’s success.

Because I’m too broken to not need time to get well, too.

It starts with dinner.

Suomalainen äiti keinuttaa amerikkalaista vauvaansa ja laulaa hiljaa

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

A scene is playing in my mind, because new learning has come from an ancient place for me… my own beating heart. The reason I learn so much there is that I’m not the only one in it.

I will say it in English, but I know right now that hearing the AI read the title back to me will make me cry (this was first published on Medium and I have only listened to it 86 times and I need another hundred because the baby said, “lovely post, btw.”:

The Finnish mother rocks her American baby and sings quietly.

The room is quiet. Esteban is gone… there is war. Only Aino remains. Aada drinks deeply, struggling to stay awake. Aino is not sure who she is singing for, but it is a blanket for both of them. I’m a silent observer of a mother and a baby I love, their connection filling me. Aada is not a baby anymore, as that war is long forgotten. It is questioning what those melodies might have been that pique my interest. How do you sing to your baby when your husband is at war?

Whenever anyone said something smartass about Daniel not being an MD, my standard reply was “my stepmother has done brain surgery in an operating theater. My boyfriend has done brain surgery while his team was being fired upon. OF COURSE he wasn’t qualified to do brain surgery. In the Navy, you GET qualified. It’s a very short course.

Singing to your baby is different in peacetime.

This is not peacetime, either.

I can’t remember who said, “y’all can go to hell, but I will go to Texas,” yet I am reminded of it by my motto being “y’all can go to Texas, but I will go to HEL.” Little airport humor for you there, Carlos. Aada says she’s not sure she’d live there, but my heart hopes my guest room has some of her stuff on the walls. I have, in fact, pre-ordered.

I have felt that strong a connection to that baby’s picture for many, many years. She’s older than I am and I was concerned about the microclimate of her pram. Like, WTF? I THINK SHE’S OKAY (well, that’s debatable but we are both “works in progmess.” Our roles are now somewhat opposed. The most hilarious thing happened. Just about the time she got over her girl crush on Brené Brown was when I realized that I was….. just a different version of Dr. Brown. Her, to me: “I just realized that vulnerability does not solve everything. I AM TIRED.” Me, to me, internally: “lord help me Jesus I’m fallin’ down the stairs.”)

I don’t say, “like, WTF?” I have been under the influence of a cis woman and it should wear off in 24–48 hours. However, I will not call my doctor if it doesn’t, it just means that she’s brought a few of my female social masks back. As I was telling her, my female social masks have failed and I’ve forgotten how, in a sense, to be a woman. She reminds me a little too much…. but I’ll keep her.

This is because she finally came clean with me. The reason she’s been so avoidant is that she’s a superfan. She wanted to impress me, and it backfired. We had a huge blowout, but that’s the thing about blowouts. Everything is clean and new again.

Aada is Supergrover, but of course I used a Finnish name generator. I feel I have to neurodivergently explain this because it is yet again another situation where I thought I was going to look like a stalker for moving to a country in which I didn’t even know she’d actually lived. That’s because I moved to DC to meet someone else, and Aada stayed far away from me to cover up what she’d done, making me feel like absolute shit because I thought she loved me- not like that. I thought she loved me like “hell no I will not pick you up at the airport, but here is $50. Dinner is at SIX.”

It’s so much more profound than that. I was right. We need each other now, and we’re bound by the brain. She joked about two old women in Home Depot or some shit and I thought, “I hope we do nothing together someday.” She’s different. Softer.

More vulnerable…………. and it solved everything.

Peace does not happen in a day or a week. I have a general sense that things are calm because my rejection sensitivity dysphoria said, “she thinks you’re a stalker” and her rejection sensitivity dysphoria said, “if this brilliant writer finds out I’m a nobody, I’m done.” This push/pull lasted until I put a stop to it and our friendship. Just went scorched earth because I had her dead to rights.

There is no more reason for her to be evasive. She can show up as her whole self, knowing that I love her truly in her perfection. Divinity is humanity. It is loving each other through these things that make me wonder how her äiti raised such a beautiful girl. We’ve been pen pals for over 11.5 years. She has turned me into her from the inside out.

I have also raised a very, very fine Lanagan in return.

Kindle Clickbait

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
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Stabbing Myself in the Chest

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
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I used to think that the way my relationship came apart with Dana was due to me and me alone. It’s taken me a very long time to realize that no one carries a hundred percent of the blame for anything. That’s the hardest time in my life I’ve had to say goodbye to, because it was all encompassing. There is nothing left, and I am empty. I don’t love Dana, but I care that she’s okay after the fallout. It’s not wrong to want to know that someone has recovered when you’ve mistreated them. It is not wrong to know if there is something worth rekindling later in life (not with Dana, with the friends I got through her. Dana is a no-fly zone because our relationship ended with my glasses smashed into my face. I only let that happen once; even though Dana was my sweetheart, statistics don’t lie and I didn’t want to be that stupid woman who won’t leave in the future. It took a long time to get there.).

We can talk about my emotional affair with Supergrover all you want because I have never claimed that I am an innocent party in our destruction. Let me be clear again that I was the only one that struggled with romantic feelings for both of them, and not having any background at poly, managed to freak them both out at once. It was special. My best answer was “Supergrover is not interested in me, and if she was, that would be a threat. This is okay because it’ll never go anywhere.” It did go somewhere. We were blissfully happy in our little bubble chatting about anything and everything while Dana had no reason to be jealous. She wouldn’t let the relationship settle. If anything, she’d gotten a promotion and I needed a new best friend. When I married Dana, there was a hole in my life- the woman who talked shit about Dana with me so I could be a better person while also getting my feelings out.

My sister-in-law got it. Dana didn’t got it. That a crush lasted a little while, love of Supergrover was forever and those were two separate things. Who among us hasn’t had Schrödinger’s feelings for a friend while you figure it all out? I was angry and mean trying to push her away and she was angry and mean because she wouldn’t let me get away with isolating. This was annoying and necessary, something my mother did to me all the time and I hated her for it. “Just let me be” while also desperately needing someone with whom to talk it all out. You mean someone will check on me? I don’t have to check on myself all the time? I wasn’t a good friend, and I was fired for cause. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t remember that time in my life fondly because there were so many lessons that propelled me to today’s date.

Today, I get to have conversations like “Pippi Longstocking and Moomin are both turning 80 this year. I’m reaching out to all my artists because I could do it with AI but it would suck. I want a short on this.” Someone actually in the entertainment industry had the presence of mind to say “run it by Oy, Ltd (Moomin owners) and Astrid Lindgren (Pippi owners) first.” He did the same thing on the Ramona movie.

I want to go a new direction with Ramona because I don’t think Cleary noticed things about herself that she put into Ramona. She’s a combination of Harriet the Spy and Brené Brown. Her pattern recognition is picking up people’s emotions. This is especially evident in “Ramona and Her Mother,” “Ramona and Her Father,” and “Ramona and Beezus.” Each is an exploration of how she tries to fit in with her family, knowing she is the bookworm and doesn’t even care about being popular like Beezus. I have a feeling this continued because ignoring popular kids is the skill of every Ramona. Her inner monologue is so fine-tuned that you can tell she’s social masking a lot of the time before we knew what ADHD and Autism looked like in women and girls. Perhaps even Cleary was autistic and writing about her own experiences as a neurodivergent child. It doesn’t matter which one you have- some ADHD is debilitating and autism isn’t that bad, sometimes it’s the other way around.

The first diagnosis in medicine is always correct.

It depends.

I have run this by a doctor, a surgeon, and a Naval “Devil Dog” embedded with a team of Marines. All of them have said this is correct, except I think said Head Medic II was akin to “sure as shit.” From all of them, I got the standard compliment you give a doctor when they catch a fascinoma (case they’ve never seen before, like prima facie in law); “good pickup.” I don’t pick things out of nowhere. I have the same kind of pattern recognition House does and I’m just as rude about it (to most people…. to me I am factual and clinically separated because we are talking about issues, not people). I also know what’s above my pay grade and what’s not. And in fact, I have a good redirect I keep in my back pocket to keep people from bothering me, because I wear scrubs as pajamas and run into the neighbors.

Woman comes up with a very ugly rash on her arm and asks me about it. I’ll tell you what happened and then I’ll tell you why I’m a dermatologist. I can make you one by the end:

Ma’am, I’m not an MD. I’m just a medical assistant and it’s been a while since I’ve worked professionally. But what I do know is that you need to call your doctor immediately because you have a severe case of erythema nodosum.

Here’s what I actually said:

I’m not a doctor and I don’t know what the hell it is, so call your PCP/GP and tell them that you have little red bumps of unknown origin. That’s as good as it gets from me, dawg.

That being said, I was made a dermatologist by my rheumatologist stepmother, and I am an expert. Like, I’m the best. Just ask me. Here is why you, too, can be a dermatologist by the end of this article (not really…. please).

  1. If it’s wet, dry it.
  2. If it’s dry, wet it.
  3. If it’s not on steroids, put it on.
  4. If it’s on steroids, take it off.
  5. If you know what it is, don’t touch it.
  6. If you don’t know what it is, for God’s sakes don’t touch it.

This works for everything from horses to zebras…. to use a House reference that is actually a medical axiom…. never go looking for zebras because it’s usually a horse. But then you have doctors like House who get all the zebras in a hospital at once. It’s an impossible job, and it pays less than a surgeon because medicine pays you to cut. You don’t make money until you have a procedure. In rheumatology, these are things like infusing patients with immunoglobulins and Disease Modifying and Reducing Drugs (DMARDs). Lupus (really) comes with all of that and more, like ridiculously high amounts of Non-Steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs), and when that fails, Oxycodone and Methodone.

You have your frequent fliers, but most of the time people are in so much pain that they keep their meds under lock and key, sometimes too weak to swallow them. Injections are your friend, and I wish my psychiatric medications came in syringes I could plunge into my leg every morning for this reason. I have a Pavlovian response to pills and that is the vomit comet.

All of these things make me feel like more of a child than I really am, because who can realistically throw up at the office or into a trash can in a kitchen every single day? Even if I could, that’s “marked as a weirdo” on day one and “something is wrong with her” on day three. I assure you that something is most definitely wrong with me, but the vomit comet is just a medication side effect. I also had a “suuri kuppia kahvia, mustaa” (large coffee, black), which might have something to do with it. I needed the extra push today, so I ordered a large coffee, two 2L bottles of Diet Pepsi, and made sure to refill the cold brew for tomorrow morning. After I am done writing, I am done thinking. It’s time to put on my headphones and zone out, cleaning and de-sanitizing my apartment. It won’t take too long as I just have to get out the trash and vacuum/steam clean. The hard part is turning off my brain, so I carry a notebook and a pencil.

There’s no way I listen to any artist without having thoughts.

Because Swedes and Finns like heavy metal (or some do), I want to recommend an album to John and Thunder Bird. They might like it, they might hate it. But it’s various artists like Serge Tankian (System of a Down) mixed with Bird (Charlie Parker), called “Bird Up.” It’s a hard listen that twists your brain, but it’s the kind of music I need right now. It takes everything up and I cannot think. Music theory is like math. I cannot do anything except sit there when I’m analyzing chords, but I’ve managed to learn to clean while I’m doing it. It’s one of the few things I can multitask. I can also listen to murder podcasts with the rest of the basic bitches, but I cannot listen to political comedy without wanting to stop and write down absolutely everything. I do not care about murder.

My apologies if I sounded mean to basic bitches. As a consolation prize, I will tell you that I am am nonbinary and the last person you would think of when you think of the classic “Karen” image. Supergrover is a Karen on toast when she’s social masking……………….. but she hates pumpkin spice lattes. I like them. I have been smart enough not to tell her.

Until now.

I have no doubt she still likes me as a writer and entertaining her is a goal.

God bless the czar, but keep him very far from us.

This is the blessing I choose to send- God go with her because I can’t. I fell too far too fast to come back up for air. I loved everything about her; everything that came with her was the problem. I would say the same about myself. Once she was my actual friend and not just my fan things went to hell in a handbasket. She tried to prevent it, but I was emotionally unregulated, not her.

Dana had just gotten a DUI. My marriage was taking a toll on me because I didn’t sign up to be Dana’s chauffer for three months and I didn’t sign up to worry about her that long, that hard either. So, it was natural that I was going to other people for emotional support and not a surprise that I caught feelings because I was vulnerable enough to let them get to me…. which they couldn’t have had I not been emotionally laden already. I don’t have any excuses for what I’ve done, I only have context and explanation. I think that neurotypical people are lost in the thought that I am trying to blame other people for my problems rather than trying to figure out what’s mine and what’s not. There are two problems with this:

  1. I resolve my issues, they don’t resolve their issues with me.
  2. If I feel the need to process something before a discussion, it is not me independently exploring how I feel. The goalposts move from actually addressing the problem to the fact that they’re embarrassed about how they acted. This is never their modus operandi, ever, because it’s a lot easier to rip me a new one than to get vulnerable and apologize.

to “I don’t have any culpability in our problem at all because you posted about it.” Exploring my problems on my own becomes “you’re out to get me” even when I’ve said things are clearly not that way. Supergrover has emotionally beaten me up for years over the things I’ve published that “make her look like a villain,” meanwhile every friend I have says that I’m way, way too hard on myself.

Part of this is true; part of this is that I haven’t told her story. That’s her story to tell, and you might start telling her to stop being so hard on herself, too…. because that’s how I feel. It was hard watching her self-destruct in front of me because she thought I expected so much and held herself to impossible standards. How do I know this? She told me that’s what she was doing and that two things were true:

In the moment, she was really mad.

Time goes by, and I “have hit the nail on the head.”

I am alternately the best and worst writer ever to her, when she’s the best and the worst writer to me. We could have had a real future with real money on the table because she likes writing children’s literature as much as I do. I’m working on several projects she’d be perfect for, and it is her choice not to be in my life until she realizes on her own what healthy love looks like. I think she thought that I wanted this toxic dumpster fire, and that’s not true. I gave up when cleaning it up failed year after year.

I have standards for friendship that my friends surpass. I’m not looking for friends, I’m looking for Companions.

I watch “Doctor Who.” I have standards.

The hardest part of my life that I’ve ever had to look back on is finding out what would have happened if Amy had chosen The Doctor.

While I held my weeping angel.