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.
For me to to go to the moon, we would have to pretend my assets are limitless first. I would not want to go to the moon on the cheap. I would feel weird about only paying $49.99, because if it seems too good to be true……. So, short answer, at least a million. It doesn’t cost as much to go to the moon as it does to stay at present because we have no standing facilities. I am also not ignorant about the cost of fuel. Everybody hates hauling people places who don’t kick them some money for gas. I just don’t know what’s in the scope of the question, so the price of the ticket would be dependent on the length of the trip. In short, how much of their resources am I using?
We don’t have a hotel on the moon already, so I’m thinking maybe just a moon landing? If we are assuming my assets are limitless, I could have a hotel built….. provided I got the approval of several different earth governments. But I don’t think I’d want to go that route, either, because then I’d be constantly stuck in the battle between the US and everyone else, particularly Russia. I would never be able to get away with a hotel in space and not have to constantly check it for bugs. The panic of the space race in the 50’s was real, and there are carryovers- like knowing if I built a hotel on the moon, GRU would be on my ass for all eternity. First, they’d try to recruit me as an asset, then, when they realized I wouldn’t do it, become passive aggressive and put me under surveillance, anyway.
Our relationship with the Russian people is inversely proportionate to our distrust/hatred of their government, particularly among astronauts who have lived in Star City for weeks at a time. We love Russian food and culture, we do not love the competition. Thank you for Tetris.
Our fear was that if Russia won the space race, they would arm the moon with nuclear weapons. It seems crazy now, but we were genuinely frightened. This was not Trump hysteria. This was based on actual facts. The dissolution of the USSR abated that fear because all of the sudden, Russia didn’t have enough money to run with the big boys. I don’t know how much that has changed, really, I just know Russian attitude hasn’t. If Putin doesn’t have the money to destroy us, he certainly has the will.
It’s an interesting point of history at NASA and CIA…. how science had to move with intelligence and vice versa. It’s a beautiful dance if you get time for the deep dive. The best part is that neither space program nor intelligence agency got everything right, and most of the space race ends up being a comedy of errors that’s not actually funny because we could have all ended up dead. 😛
Now, we have a branch of the military called “Space Force,” and I think it’s ridiculous and not because we don’t need the intelligence (we are nowhere near ready to talk about putting a standing military in space). It’s because all of the things that we could do are within the scope of another branch…. but it’s too late, now. I have a Space Force patch from Zac that I need to sew on my bag. I do wish it had a batter name than that, though, because it sounds like a cliche. Like naming a dog Spot and thinking that’s original.
I mean, I get it. Air Force, etc. But it still sounds like a Seth MacFarlane show…….. except MacFarlane’s two space shows, “Cosmos” and “The Orville,” have been outstanding.
What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?
I am at a crossroads right now, and I don’t know what to do. Historically, because of my mental and physical limitations, I am great at getting jobs because I mask and seem neurotypical to get by…… get severely overwhelmed and stop performing………. and the death spiral begins. I get social anxiety at work, which has only been exacerbated over the last eight years by many different things. But social anxiety and masking are only part of it. Right now I am unsure of how capable I am and need both counseling and a neurology consult.
My brain just does not fire and I do not understand logical processes. I also have to understand what I’m doing to buy in. When I seem to fail at enough things that neurodivergents struggle with and neurotypical people don’t, I tend to beat the hell out of myself because I didn’t know it was ADHD struggling against autism so that even I couldn’t tell what was what and didn’t think of myself as autistic until i watched a shit ton of YouTube videos, got peer reviewed, and now need a confirmation. But don’t underestimate the value of people relating to other people’s stories. I have found myself in multiple videos on autism, stories from multiple people and lectures by doctors and psychologists. It’s overwhelming because now I know why I’ve always felt like an alien.
I am so interested in other people that I’ve stood back and studied group dynamics for years…. since I was a child. What I cannot do is then turn around and see why my reactions are so different. To not really know why people’s interactions with me are confusing because everything makes sense in my brain- except for office politics. I have never been able to figure out those because so much goes on that is hierarchical and you don’t know who is really doing what. Your name comes up in meetings you don’t attend, and people are so full of HR-speak that you cannot find a clear path with a map and a flashlight because no one will tell you the truth…… that they have reached their ability to explain something and now I’m just being obstinate.
No, I am trying desperately to please you and I do not know how because something that makes sense in the moment fails when you walk away. Over time, this becomes truly problematic because it comes across as not being able to work independently….. and I’m not entirely sure this is untrue. I seem to have the most success with writing, but I cannot count on it because the validation from writing comes in believing in myself. The compliments I’ve gotten are astounding, but since I haven’t gotten them on a large enough scale, I cannot bet my future on going viral. What I do know is that by helping myself, I help others. I would be a good Glennon Doyle-type character, if only to end up married to a soccer player. 😉
That depends on other people seeing it first.
I don’t have the ability to do everything, but it’s different when you can hire it out rather than having to be the one where everyone’s expectations are heaped upon you and as a neurodivergent, you have no coping skills on how to mask in unfamiliar situations. It’s not a canned response. You have to be okay with going to your boss and asking for help more than everyone else, and they only have so much time and patience. Their executive function isn’t fucked up, but mine sure is.
Because of the cerebral palsy affecting my movement and my neurodivergence affecting my brain, I feel incapable a hundred percent of the time- until I sit down to write.
So, when you ask me about other career paths I’ve considered, literally all of them. I do not have the echo chamber that says “keep plugging away. Eventually you won’t be in trouble all the time.” I always am. The last time I had job security, I was in a government job where it was almost impossible to get fired and on a college campus where everyone attributed my gaps in functioning to being young. I am a child in an adult’s body because that’s how people treat me. It is hard to break those patterns because you don’t know what’s going on and why you can’t get with the program. It is not built for you. No one in an office has taken me under their wing without getting so frustrated they wanted to fire me that I wasn’t let go within six months. It was always attributed to other things, but in the kitchen my ADHD and lack of masking worked in my favor while also not having the dexterity to move fast and carry heavy shit. Because of my floppy muscles, I couldn’t predict when I could or I couldn’t hang. People saw it as my performance going up and down, and they always do. But it’s never a case of my limitations. It’s that I’m lazy.
In any job, you are defined by who you are…. the popular kids, the geeks, and the mean girls all have to work together. The degrees are not as pronounced but the microaggressions are real. You are marked quickly as a “type,” and if that type is incompetent because they don’t understand what I’m putting down, it’s never a matter that they didn’t explain it where I could pick it up. The hierarchy doesn’t have time to adjust.. they have time to hire someone they feel can actually do the job.
People expect me to be so capable because they’ve seen me “act normal” my whole life. I am fucked and having to catch up. Occupational therapy and seeing if it helps, because I drop so many details that I don’t feel capable and constantly have that message reinforced. I wish I had stayed in academia constantly. The river is slower, and makes the learning curve less steep because I have time to get comfortable in my environment, but even that is tough if I don’t have an office. Cubical farms are death to the ADHD and the autistic.
I cannot solve someone’s problem on the phone while hearing everyone else’s conversations and write down the problem and contact other people on line two. It’s too much stimulation and it’s what was expected of me every single day. I liked night shifts because of it. My body screamed in pain and I didn’t care because I could focus better. I dropped less. If you wonder why mainstreaming is hard on both parties, stuff like this is it. We get overstimulated and can’t function, you get frustrated and angry. Perhaps guilty that we don’t get it, because you know we’re neurodivergent and you’re still at wit’s end. You’re running a business here, man. You’re not a special needs teacher and we get it. We just don’t know how to deal with it and feel constantly horrible about ourselves for things we can’t control. It’s relentless.
When you get into simple jobs that I can do, they generally involve physical activity. I could be in a bakery, more laid back than a restaurant, but I can’ lift 60 pounds of flour. I can’t stock in a grocery store because everything is as heavy there as it would be in a kitchen. Perhaps a courtesy clerk. I don’t have a problem with an entry-level job because I don’t have to be brilliant at my job. I have to be brilliant at writing.
I am one of those people for whom disability would be perfect, but I don’t know whether I want to go that route. It involves giving up a lot, and I don’t know whether it would be worth it in the end. I need to wait until I get finished with the diagnostician and the neurologist. With disability, I have the ability to focus on what I do the most well, the job I actually can handle, with no ability to keep money I make from it. So, I’d rather learn what I need to know and so far behind the eight ball.
That’s because I refused to admit I have limitations before. Not only to everyone, but lying to myself as well. I have the energy to sit at my computer all day and type like a coder, but not the talent for STEM. I have tried to learn programming many times, and I do not have the executive function to understand logic to that degree. It’s like playing the pipe organ. I cannot keep track of what all my limbs are doing, and I cannot keep track of the music while I’m doing it.
I went downstairs to get some tea (maple espresso), and my housemate Magda told me that I was like a mushroom. That I grew where I was planted. She meant that I needed to get out more. I took it as a compliment. I also take trash and turn it into beauty. So rare a pig searched for me, something plentiful yet hard to find.
You can’t use truffles in everything. They have a very specific set of applications, and the rest seem off…… it’s just…… unclear.
Lindsay and I have been through the emotional ringer because of our stepfather’s death, and I use that term loosely because my mom didn’t marry him until the aforementioned trip when I was 24 in which my wife called me up nd told me she was cheating on me and she was leaving. So, I don’t have fond memories of their wedding at all. She wanted to be the monarch, I wanted to be the democracy. I did not like it, and I’m glad the trash took itself out. I was miserable for a while, but not long enough for it to matter in retrospect.
It’s been a complicated relationship the whole time. Trying to appease my mother and being frighteningly uncomfortable around him because he felt entitled to my body and I don’t as a general rule like people who don’t know me touching me in a seductive way, being more familiar than they have any right to be. He kissed me on the lips once without asking and I thought I was going to punch him with rage and didn’t. He told Lindsay and me that he was sorry, that he had kissed his other daughters on the lips without incident…. *but they had grown up with him.* He, like every man I know, felt entitled to touch me and obsessed with Lindsay to a degree where I am not noticed.
But that came later. At first he picked up on the fact that my mother loved Lindsay’s voice and she didn’t treat me the same, so he buttered me up with compliments to make me feel better. It wasn’t necessary. I am used to walking in the world behind her, because the attention she gets that I don’t might be annoying, but she saves me from having to deal with a lot, too. Everyone, in my observation, rushes in to do things for Lindsay in a way they don’t rush in for me.
But our stepsisters didn’t even bother to tell either of us that Forbes was being buried next to my mother and give us the time and date. Lindsay found out on Facebook. No one in that family who is still alive ever accepted us, but I had a relationship with the oldest, who thought I was brilliant and deserved to work in DC. The funniest conversation we ever had was her outrage that Ben Affleck played Tony Mendez because he wasn’t Hispanic. I wish I had gotten to reassure her that Tony didn’t care. He just thought he was more handsome than Ben. 😉
It’s nice that I have some good memories, but they weren’t consistent because Susan lived in San Antonio and I lived in Houston at the time. She was half Latina, half white and was the chair of the Mexican studies department at University of Texas- San Antonio. We both identified with The Struggle, a perspective no one in my family shared because they are all white. Someone actually said to me “why do you focus on minority issues. You don’t have to live with them.” She was making fun of Oregon, deservedly so, but still. It felt like she as laughing in a way I didn’t like.
But that’s Texas for you. Everyone riding the line with polite racism…… which is ridiculous because we annexed part of Mexico in the 1800’s. So many, many, many Latinx people are discriminated against every day when their families have been Texans for hundreds of years. There is no “go back where you came from.” We’re on their land, Holmes. Slow your fucking roll, Karen.
I feel like I have to apologize to the Karens in my life, particularly the ones who are Latina, because they are not the stereotype. But there’s just no other word to give that complete a picture of a white woman who feels like she owns everything and everyone. Double that for POC and queers, depending on whether they’re an angry liberal Karen or a MAGA Karen (which now stands for *making attorneys get attorneys.*)
So, Lindsay went apeshit after the funeral on the youngest two of our stepsisters because she was so hurt. Forbes’ sister in law tried to make it okay, but there’s not a way to make it so. Lindsay was traumatized, and so was I because when Lindsay went to the cemetery and sent me pictures on the anniversary of my mother’s death, the gash was still there from the burial and the headstone wasn’t there for carving.
I made sure my mom’s side is beautiful. It has a treble staff with the beginning notes to “Amazing Grace.” Forbes was a CPA so his side looks like an incomplete Word Document.
And if that’s not enough, I don’t know whether this is true or not, but I haven’t to Forbes’ lawyer directly, but apparently Lindsay gets to start her financial planning and I don’t because I don’t have a trustee and it will have to be set up before the money is mine. Lindsay says this is not true, that both our trusts are set up the same way, so the jury is still out. We are also requesting a list of beneficiaries for our dad’s retirement, because we think that Forbes may have used it on a down payment for a house he built with the woman he married six months after my mother died. This was not problematic to me. He had health problems and if his wife wanted to take over his care and feeding, great. The problem is that our mother didn’t leave us any money in her will. She left it to Forbes to manage. The money that we got from him doesn’t add up. It feels like he may have padded the gifts to his biological daughters with money that wasn’t his by dividing everything equally.
I need it for my retirement, but it’s a possibility that I’d sink it into a down payment on a house if I wasn’t taxed at 40%. This is because I think I could do better with DC real estate than I could with an IRA. It would also be a crash pad for my sister. But the money we have isn’t enough for a down payment unless we bought an apartment or condo in a shitty neighborhood, paying attention to when industries might move in. If we’d had the money for an apartment in ’01, Kathleen and I would both be in a very different financial situation, especially considering where we lived. If we’d applied for a mortgage to buy a house in Alexandria or Arlington, we would have made a nest egg no matter how long we stayed. If we’d kept the house as a joint asset and just rented it out, today we would be millionaires, especially if we’d been willing to risk it a bit and buy in Columbia Heights or Shaw. You can buy a house anywhere in the city of Washington, but you’ll get the most bang for your buck if you go into a neighborhood that is currently trashed out. Washington, DC is only 60 square miles. That means property values begin to skyrocket quickly in undiscovered pockets. Think about the people that bought in Georgetown in the 70s. Their houses are worth five million.
I don’t have the money to dream big, because it takes money to make it. But it’s a nice thought and a good thing for both Lindsay and me, so we’ll see. Even if we never do it, the idea is fun to explore. I don’t know that Lindsay wants to work past retirement age, so I don’t know if she would even need a pad in DC by then. So, it’s the equivalent of just searching Zillow for house porn.
It feels better than arguing in my head about why I don’t walk in the world like Lindsay, and how I can use my strengths so that people don’t see me as her weaker, meeker counterpart. I am learning to deal with my emotions differently, which lets go of a lot of rage. I don’t feel like everything is going wrong all the time because I have more emotional strength to be able to handle something like this. I am not getting edgy at an enormous change that as of yet, I do not understand.
New environments are difficult for me to handle, and this is one of them. I have never had to think about money before in this way, and it’s frightening to have something explained to you that you had no capacity to understand in the first place. It feels good to be in a different financial place than I was few years ago, but untangling the emotional strings around it is difficult…. most notably that I’m angry my mother died. My mother is the one that I could have just said, “I cannot make this phone call under any circumstances right now and it’s time sensitive. Will you help me?” My mother would not have understood why I couldn’t make a phone call due to social anxiety, but she’d do it anyway. I will make a phone call for you because I am not emotionally invested in what the other person has to say. I will clean your house for the same reason. There needs to be an exchange between people like this who all clean each other’s houses for free, because we don’t have the emotional attachment as to how it became that way. Shame and guilt, etc. I don’t think it’d be a problem as long as we don’t get lazy and under value what others are doing for us. Bartering vs. getting work done for free because you can’t be arsed.
I don’t want any more stimuli than grief most of the time, because it’s what I can handle right now. It has to be managed before I can manage anything else. It’s not a constant scream of pain anymore, just that my reactions are always going to be irritated and angry if I’m thinking about grief and dealing with other people.
When I am being short with people, I only want it to refer to my height.
When I love someone, I love their food. I make breakfast the best, in my estimation, because I spent so many hours bonding with Dana over our brunch program (chef and ex-wife for those just joining us)… but it wasn’t just that. We loved to cook together more than life itself, and breakfast was the thing that made her face light up. Breakfast food comes easily to me, because now I picture what Dana would do and how she would do it every morning of my life. This is not a bad thing. We’re not together anymore, but I decided to stop spending time with our negative memories a long time ago. I will talk about them to use them as an illustration, occasionally, but I would never talk shit about her just for sport. Our fights make us both worse characters, because our joy was so apparent. I am also not in love with her anymore, which I know is confusing…… and yet not, in my brain. I can write about her in all the romantic terms I want because of the tense. It may sound like I’m in love with her, but not when you look at all the “used to” instead of what is happening in my life right now. Remembering someone fondly is easy. In your memory, they become the people who fucked you up, and it doesn’t matter because you’re at peace with the fact that you fucked them up, too. No one is 100% a victim…. or at least, that is the case most of the time. I am sure there are examples, but by and large everyone contributes. Just like when I cook.
Because breakfast food is my love language, I used to have dreams of cooking Supergrover breakfast, and I don’t mean that in a sultry “morning after” kind of way………….. anymore. 😉 I mean that I could have been the chef, directing everyone as to what to do. That’s my happy place. Lording over a kitchen in order to teach other people how to fend for themselves. I want to go into a kitchen where I am given that authority without the responsibility. For instance, everyone saying “you should do it because I’m not a chef.” That’s not helping me, that’s succumbing to fear. If you don’t teach other people to work with you, over time you’ll become the cook all the time. “You’re just so good.”
That’s what’s great about marrying a professional cook. They work on you from day one, and it’s better if you want them to do so. They are not going to be your personal chef. I, like her, started with the basics. An egg. Diced vegetables……… repeatedly. Respecting first contact with eggs and knowing when to flip them. Interestingly enough, learning to make an omelet is so storied as part of a cook’s education, but Dana never taught me and I was never in a restaurant where it was on the menu and had to get up to speed fast. I play around in my own kitchen, but I’ve never folded anything successfully…. and because of anything but effort. I can only get better so fast, because I can only feed myself so much. I can only store so much when I make it ahead of time. Getting good at pancakes and oatmeal took a week or so of doing multiple iterations every single day.
Breakfast is also the only time I bake. I do everything from a can or box, but still. My favorite are orange rolls. The bread is the same as a cinnamon roll, it’s just the at the icing has orange or orange juice in it. They’re pretty divine…… If I’m in a savory mood, though, scones are stupid easy and forgiving. You can throw anything into them and the dough will react like a pancake, adjusting so that the food doesn’t take a left turn at Albequerque when you used a teaspoon and a quarter of something because you didn’t measure it. Cooks, by and large, hate baking because they’re used to tweaking by hand. You can do that with dough and pancakes. You cannot do it with cakes. In general, dinner service and pastry are two different fiefdoms, and bakers’ personalities are more laid back because they’re not in the same pressure cooker that the brigade is. Of course, there are exceptions. But most restaurants don’t sell as much dessert as they do main courses, anyway. Most nights the restaurants I’ve worked in could have had only one person on pastry, because we didn’t need more than a pie’s worth of dessert all night. Dessert went out of fashion with Atkins and South Beach. For people who aren’t foodies, dessert has been passed over for more bacon.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The only thing I don’t use much is chocolate. I mean, I’ll put chocolate in pancakes a lot of the time, but it’s just a flavor note. I don’t make chocolate pancakes with chocolate chips and chocolate sauce because I’m not a Death by Chocolate sort of chick. Black raspberry chip vs. New York Super Fudge Chunk.
Ice cream is the dessert that’s my specialty, but I don’t have an ice cream maker, so I haven’t done it since Tapalaya.
First, you take a bunch of bacon and cook it in a rondeau. Then, you strain the bacon and put it aside, making ice cream base in the pan loaded with bacon flavoring with the drippings from straining it and re-adding it to the base. But the bacon just makes it insane when I prefer plain sweet cream or Mexican vanilla. Mexican vanilla is the one place skim milk is a good application, because you can make an amazing ice milk with it. Ice milk, to me, tastes better without fat because you can tell a difference between it and ice cream.
I would rather have ice cream with 23% butter fat and just eat less of it.
Except on the nights when I’ve been too tired to cook and it was immediately available. I can save my cooking for the morning, when I have the most energy for it. Getting up early and eating breakfast sets the tone for how much energy I’m going to have later. If I just drink coffee because I’m too lazy to eat, I don’t have enough strength to mask and I recede inside myself rather than sounding like a put-out dickhead because I can’t cope with my environment and it’s not personal but it sure sounds like it. I take precautions not to be that guy. I can’t get by on a piece of toast. My body needs a load of energy early on. So, I need eggs at a minimum. Eggs with more butter than people usually add and probably peanut butter toast and some Greek yogurt (full fat). Vegan sausage patties if I have them, and I don’t care whether it’s Just Egg (plant based eggs) or actual chicken eggs. One doesn’t really taste that much different than the other when I add all my spices. I love Old Bay or simply salt, pepper, and garlic. Season eggs like you would season a chicken. For instance, Montreal Chicken Seasoning is really amazing in a scramble. So are Tony Chachere’s, Paul Prudhomme’s Chicken or Red Fish Magic, and Slap Ya Mama. SYM is Cajun spice like Tony Chachere’s with the heat turned up. It’s probably beyond most people’s comfort level, so use sparingly when cooking for white people.
Another breakfast favorite is extraordinarily thick Greek pudding with cinnamon and nothing else. It makes your brain *find* sweetness in the cinnamon rather than sugar. If I had an Instant Pot, I could learn to make my own and I would, because I like it thicker than most companies make it. Yogurt is particularly good with fruit like raisins, prunes, and dried cranberries, because if you add them and put it in the fridge, they’ll plump back up. Yogurt with plums sounds more legit, right? Raisins are good in ice cream base for the same reason, particularly rum raisin and putting the alcohol in the base at the end so that the alcohol doesn’t all cook out. The bite of alcohol stands up to the fat of ice cream base very well. It will also make you feel tipsy immediately. Tread carefully. It will hit you before you really know what you’re doing.
Two scoops would have done it.
That’s an old joke for three people.
I think I’ll wrap it up there, because I have so much to discuss that doesn’t have to do with food. But I’m going to go make some breakfast first.
What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to?
There are so many risks I’d like to take, but haven’t been able. To count is to number the stars.
The biggest risk I’d like to take is having children in my life. That I don’t want to have them, but I’m not afraid of my partner wanting/having them. It is not that I am specifically looking to date a mother. I am saying that I had to let go of a lot of fear when I was dating Sam, because it was a thing between us that she had kids… but by “thing between us,” it’s the the possibility of being “mom’s girlfriend who lets us get away with murder” became real in a way it wasn’t before. I have no doubt that I would have been particularly good with her kids, because they were every bit the music nerds I was as a child. I started brass in fifth grade in “the system,” shorthand for the toughest music program in the nation, depending on where you go. But excellence in music is something Texas schools take very, very seriously. So, it’s not competition inside your school so much as it is the willingness to thrash other bands, publicly. In my band, we never did “Flight of the Bumblebee,” but that scene in Drumline is indicative of the kinds of things my band could do. My one year in marching band, we did a suite from “On the Waterfront.” I’ve never seen the movie, but Bernstein wrote a great score. What this has to do with the kids is that they were the type kids who would not have been impressed by this because their bands probably did something better…… and the conversations about it transcend age, because you remember what you’ve played and the circumstances surrounding it forever.
In fact, the biggest reason I’d like to have children in my life is to pass on everything I know about music. Classical music is a driving passion in my life, and something that children simply do not love without repeated exposure to it. I promise that even to a child who hates it, if your favorite piece is Moonlight Sonata, they remember…. and it will make them cry when they lose you. I, for all practical intents and purposes, cannot listen to solo piano often. My response is visceral and primal. Grief is a gaping wound you’re constntly living around and trying to ignore its presence. I work on my shit all day long- living around grief is not that you become immune to growth because you can’t get over it. It’s that you are no longer who you used to be. You are not only grieving the one you lost, but the self you presented in front of them.
The closest my mother ever got to an unguarded version of me was telling her I was in trouble psychologically and letting her visit me in the hospital. In the past, I wouldn’t have told her something like that, that I needed her in that specific way, because it was both Lindsay’s and my mission not to upset her. We hid things from her because we knew they’d set her off, worrying her needlessly. We did that successfully, but our mother didn’t really know us, either.
There were two things that set her off after the divorce. My being queer, because I was part of that “perfect family” vision she lost and it made me feel guilty AND the fact that I was the child that reminded her of my dad the most in temperament and she did not appreciate that fact in the slightest. When she was angry at me, she was fighting with someone who wasn’t in the room. I can have empathy for it, but it doesn’t erase the fact that in some ways, we just became incompatible. That’s because she gave me the message constantly that being like him was bad. I spent a lot of time at my dad’s house because of it, because the longer we lived together, the more I became anxious about it.
One of the biggest pain points I had to reconcile in therapy about my childhood was feeling like I threw Lindsay to the wolves. That my mother completely decompensated and I didn’t help because I couldn’t. My autistic nature and sense of justice makes me the kind of person that will argue with a signpost. Her depressive nature made me feel bad about needing to talk about our relationship on that level and my mother’s refusal to go there. She did not want to admit she was sick. She did not want to admit that she needed therapy and medication. I am not saying this lightly, like I’m just this therapy case that thinks everyone should do what I do. I am saying that in my clinical observation, she was a trainwreck….. and she couldn’t clean it up because she didn’t think she deserved it. Depression ate her lunch as well as blindness. She was stuck in a permanent state of Eeyore that left a pallor over the whole house. Her depression rubbed up against mine and it was every bit as detrimental as adding a depressant like alcohol to already depressed behavior. It went forth and multiplied.
Fundamentally, she did not like me. I am not saying she didn’t love me with all of her heart and mind. I am saying she did not like the way I processed emotions because it came across as blunt and narcissistic because she would never have had me tested for anything that would have put me into special classes. She didn’t want to face a social stigma if she didn’t have to. Autism makes you sound like you’re the biggest asshole in the world, that everything revolves around you, when in most cases it’s that I’m not thinking about your response and I throw truth bombs when you aren’t used to them. If you are a person that avoids confrontation, then all observations of behavior like I have on my blog are going to feel like an attack. That’s because my words don’t carry the weight of social construct or nicety. I am not working from that core, masking my thoughts. I am letting them flow through me and writing is my every day example of how my mind works. I am trying to create a YouTube video in your mind about autism and ADHD through the cunning use of word pictures.
My brain processes information differently than any of my friends, but I would say that Supergrover and I have the closest thinking style to each other than the rest…. except Beck. We are so connected I am not sure we are actually different people. I am feeling the same heady rush you get in a romance because new relationship energy is focused no matter what kind it is. It makes me feel good, a new source of dopamine that gets constantly refilled because I am not using her for it. We refill each other’s cups of energy because we’re focused so hard on ourselves. You work differently from a place of abundance than you do of scarcity. The biggest risk I’ve already taken is unmasking. I’ll never do anything more important, because when everything is already out there, my blog cannot be used for blackmail. I can be confident in my intuition again, because I have extensive knowledge of what is and is not normal for me.
I am never telling people what they should do in a conversation, just “this is what I’m hearing and that is how it makes me feel.” I am a stickler for not using the words “you made me” in a conversation….. or, more accurately, when people say “you tried to make me.” Absolute bullshit this time, Sherlock. I express needs and retreat or move forward depending on your responses. Some of them are naturally going to make me feel good. Some of them are going to make me feel bad. But you didn’t make me or try to make me feel any of those things. I am responding. I am not going to put myself through blaming myself for your words. That I should have known something that you did, because you have a certain picture in your mind of how our interaction should have gone accoding to social convention, when I am always standing just to the left of those. I can see and analyze human behavior, but I have to know if the person is neurotypical or neurodivergent first, because that’s going to alter how I view someone’s perception. What they are capable of seeing and what they’re not.
For instance, I would take responsibility for Supergrover’s care and feeding if she was ill, but I would not take responsibiity for knowing whether she needed it or not. That I should have been somehow able to divine when she was ill and what that meant for me in terms of how I should respond. I am using this virtual relationship on purpose, because taking responsibility for helping her get well is something she has never asked of me, therefore it can be a fictional example instead of a real one. But people in relationships do this to each other all the time. They leave their expectations unsaid so their needs are unmet and blame the other person for just not seeing it. I can blame my mother for that in a way I cannot blame others, because if something about my behavior isn’t noticed, the hierarchy of parenthood says it’s something she should have…. and should have listened when I expressed needs in a way that no one else should have to do now. But I do not blame her for not responding to my needs when I was so excellent at keeping them hidden. I am saying that when I opened up, she seemed immediately uncomfortable with my life. Therefore, the urge to open up wasn’t necessary right up until it was unavoidable.
I have no doubt that other queer kids feel this every day. That they are told through thought, word, and deed that they are not enough. That their parents have no idea how much cultural stigma affects them because they are fed an extra helping at home when our growth and development is fundamental to setting our personalities. The message that we are not enough is so loud that our suicide rates are up to three times larger than the general population. We are not far enough out of white supremacy Jesus apologists everywhere for straight people not to be enculturated that way, that straight is the only way and if you’re gay, be celibate about it.
Sex is one of God’s greatest gifts and on the present day base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, yet despite homosexuality naturally occuring in every population on earth, including animals, and evangelicals feel nothing about the fact that they’re justifying stunting queer people that way. That there should be no discussion about the fact that science is real and the Bible is not, and I say that because nothing is provable, not that the truths it holds don’t matter. I do have faith, but it’s centered on what Jesus accomplished and not sticky, sticky blood theology.
There is a fountain filled with blood……
Give me a break.
I wear an icthus, not a death instrument. I believe in intelligence and espionage, thus loving the story of smuggling Jesus out of Israel and into Egypt, and the new church establishing the sign of the fish to know whether they’re safe or not. For the uninitiated, if you were Jewish and a part of the new sect vs. orthodox, you would drag your shoe in the sand in the shape of the bottom arc of the fish. If the other person was Christian, they would drag their foot in the opposite arc. It was an underground way of spreading the message.
Those are the good parts I take away from the Bible and not the hypocrisy surrounding it. If I take in the message of the Southern Baptist church, I am forced into a state of shame that even God wouldn’t want. God promises a future in the Old Testament to prosper you, and anything that steps on my personal liberty to a degree in which that promise is not extended to me is over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero. There is a direct correlation between evangelical Christianity and American police thinking they are the sole judge, jury, and executioner when, in fact, all lives matter. We are not saying that black lives matter. We are saying your behavior takes away from that message. That you are saying one thing and doing another, constantly speaking out of both sides of your face. Calling out hypocrisy is different than oppression. The police are also white supremacy apologists because their religion tells them it’s okay…. and the police skew conservative on social issues. Clearly.
Clearly.
See? Now I sound judgmental about policemen when I am judgmental of the system. My ire with the police and my ire with men are the same. I have a boyfriend. Clearly I am not anti-male. But I am definitely critical of the ways in which white men are groomed to treat women, and critical of men who aren’t strong enough to stand up to that systemic change and let it happen. The police continue to believe black lives matter less no matter how much we might attempt to break them of the habit…. but things are changing, slowly. I think there’s a wreckoning going on and people who don’t normally stand up are finally feeling the burn. We cannot let our culture go to hell in a handbasket, and we are slowly destroying each other. We cannot legislate our way out of treating each other like shit.
Especially when so many of us process information differently and because of it, we are treated as less than as well. Mentally ill people are seen as their diagnosis and not their personality. I will always be known for the ups and downs of bipolar and not what I manage to accomplish in spite of it. Some days, I am not even capable of enough spoons to leave the house. I get everything delivered so leaving the house is only dependent on the things I can’t find with Uber Eats or Amazon. What no one seems to get is that needs to be my normal. That I function better with less stimulation and engagement, so please. Invite me to anything and everything, but have sympathy for the fact that I cannot have as much energy as you all the time. Let me off the hook for social engagements immediately and don’t walk away mad about it because I am not conforming to what you need in that moment.
That’s because when I do have spoons, you’ll get the very best of me. I won’t always let you down. I am just different. What I am saying is that I cannot respond to that much stimuli all the time, and I isolate in order to gather energy for it. I am not shy, I just don’t have much of a social battery and when it runs out, I need to get the fuck out of public. When I panic with social anxiety, I don’t expect anyone to be happy about it. I am saying that I am trying my best, and please be patient with me.
I am not responsible for your reaction, only to be sensitive to the fact that I am not always working on my time and I need to roll with it. I can’t completely drop out of society except for my weird little collection of internet friends, the clown shoes to my stripey tent. What makes my friends so lenient with me is that they can be absolutely honest with me as well. You don’t want to go to something I planned five minutes before? Sure, no problem, but I will be angry if you don’t reschedule. Not rescheduling is the friendship death knell. I think that’s why I prefer internet relationships. I can’t remember who said it, but “the kind of people I’m attracted to are the kind of people who also don’t want to leave their house.”
If it seems weird, think about how many college students have bonded without ever having met since 2001, when distance education really began to get in full swing. I have no doubt it led to romances after showing off in class…. easy when you’re virtual and also in the same city so the transition isn’t a huge vacation with a once in a lifetime chance of it working out. If I moved to DC “for Supergrover” at all, it’s so that if our relationship would go in that direction, it could without incident. For instance, saying “meet you in Dupont” is different than “my plane lands at 10:44.” It’s the safety and security of meeting for lunch instead of meeting for lunch after picking them up, hating each other, and being stuck with each other for three to seven days.
It was Ted Lasso who said, “be curious, not judgmental.” I’ve been like this my whole life, my autistic gift for rambling manifesting as truly personal questions that some people are into and some find offensive. What becomes problematic is two people who love to have deep discussions start out as the first and degrade into the latter. If someone hurts you and still asks intrusive questions, you’re going to see it as an attack when the other person’s tone hasn’t changed. Then, it’s harder to mend the problem.
Emotional problems will never resolve with the ignorance of them.
Fighting through it is hell on earth, so the best thing that people can do for themselves is to spend time with a third party, because the longer you sit in that tension, the more you make decisions based on how you feel without the other person’s input and it starts the drift. One fissure snowballs, and people tend to ghost each other quickly due to lack of emotional bravery. They cannot sit in the cognitive dissonce of fighting without taking so much personally that they walk away thinking that they’ve been wronged on both sides…. at the end of a fight, not the beginning.
The biggest risk you’ll ever take is being vulnerable enough to work it out, especially when times get tough, because that involves strength you didn’t know you had and don’t develop until you have the desire. Relationships devolve into push/pull, because equilibrium is harder and harder to maintain.
Insecure attachments do not feed anyone. You have to know when your attachment style doesn’t feed you, because you cannot go any longer without understanding how they became that way. When you start with the question of how they behaved, you end at the possible things you might have triggered it, and not for malice. Checking where you could have done something differently that would have helped and didn’t, then cataloguing it to deal with another problem later on. That’s how you win or learn rather than losing. Each failure becomes a building block instead of a seminar on how much you suck.
Continuing to believe that “you made me” is a thing will constantly make you feel angry or guilty. Knowing that you’re responsible for contributing to a problem without being responsible for others’ reactions is key. It keeps you humble enough to leave room for negotiation, because you recognize everything isn’t all about you. I’ve realized I sound like a narcissist because I will keep arguing ad nauseam, making the other person feel unheard and like my word is law when in reality I just have an anxious attachment style and the need to turn over a problem in my mind until I can stop overexplaining. I often walk off in an argument, but not without it being understood that I am coming back…… most of the time. The swings were too big with Supergrover because the problem was so great. I couldn’t stand the thought of going one more minute like this and having to put energy toward it because of the trauma bond.
In short, I never would have tried to become Supergrover’s real friend because I didn’t feel secure enough to rest in it. I was just willing to work on it until I did, because the safety and securiy of knowing we could meet for lunch and not have it be a big deal has always been off. I invited her to go with me to something and she said no, but “someday, perhaps.” It’s the only time I’ve ever “asked her out,” because I knew that to ask more than once was beyond her comfort zone and I got tired of waiting to know if she still thought the idea was weird. I felt like the only way out was through, that we should sit in it until it wasn’t weird anymore. Until we could commit like an angel and a demon who have each other’s backs for all eternity. Lucifer and all his brothers….. but taking turns as to who is demonic and angelic all the time because they do. Never forget that Lucifer is a fallen angel, a child of God like everyone else. Neil Gaiman is the only writer I’ve ever met to capture this perfectly. “Good Omens” is a masterpiece. Neil Gaiman is entirely responsible for us being called “The Holy and the Moly,” changing frequently. I think she would have been a good sous chef. I think I would have, too, just in a different area of her life.
It fits in with all my other nonbinary natures, and it’s a huge risk to acknowledge it because I have imposter syndrome. That my writing doesn’t matter, that I’m bullshitting people over my gender, that people only tolerate queerness or disability to be nice, the list goes on and on. But acknowledging it allowed me to let go of anger, guilt, frustration at that treatment and just call it out as it comes up.
In the world of “Let it Go,” I am Roy Kent, looking up at Rebecca and mouthing the words.
The more I understand the disconnect in my personality, which is neurodivergent to a bigger degree than I thought, I understand more about why my reactions seem so two-faced when I’m not mallicious in the slightest and so hurt when I hurt people with my own fallibility. I am not saying that I have an excuse for every wrong thing I’ve ever done. I’m saying that maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself because a public lashing every day is only so helpful. When you have problems, you have to start searching for solutions. I always start with medicine, because you can’t live in a doctor’s house and not begin the process of thinking that way, just like when you turn 18 in a lawyer’s house should count as One L. Plus, for background on my novel, I got three books from the Kindle store on how to think like a spy, because one of the plot points is a recruitment in Paris with enormous consequences. My protagonist has to be a confident enough asset that a case officer can trust them.
I know exactly jack and shit about how to do that, which is why I spend so much time at the Spy Museum reading non-fiction set in France and Asia. I know a lot about The Cold War and the transition from OSS to CIA. I don’t know anything about Viet Nam, which is why it is both inconvenient and not that I’ve decided to write a book about it. Pros include going to places I never thought I’d go, meeting people I never thought I’d meet in real life that only exist as avatars, and possibly having a good enough proposal to get a grant to finish, and I believe with all my heart that I can do it because Jonna Mendez said, “maybe we should hire you.” 😉 Cons include leaving my house.
This is because half of my brain speaks ADHD, and half of my brain speaks Autism. The way those brains fire are completely different, yet there is crossover in behavior… not what drives it. Therefore, I am constantly tempted by change and hate it within a month. Why I have more energy than I think I do, constantly. Why I look like a vulnerable narcissist a good bit of the time and I can stop apologizing for it now. The way I describe situations hurts neurotypical people because they’re reading my words with a voice I don’t intend. I am being kind and not nice. They are being nice and not kind. I do not interpret words no matter how they’re delivered without running them through a million checksystems before I know how I feel about something. That’s because my first reaction is ADHD, no impulse control. My response is autistic. I go deep inside myself and ruminate, getting burnout quickly and having to regroup with no if or when as to my reappearance. This is because it takes time and patience for me to get the energy to do social masking……. because when I don’t my interactions hurt people.
The urge not to sugarcoat things anymore is how I’m letting myself off the hook. That I was doing myself more harm by trying to sugar coat something because my emphasis was on the wrong point. It’s not that I am not listening. It is that I don’t understand. I am not a narcissist because I’m direct. I act like one because I’ve made the executive decision not to care about what comes out of my mouth because I cannot control your reactions. I can only control what I say. I can be mindful about that without concentrating on my fear of your response. Fear is what causes burnout and isolation. Burnout is difficult, because you cannot predict spoons in advance. So, you take a day off and it’s fine, but it’s not enough transition time to reset anything.
The other thing is that my autistic nature has a tough time with having days off because of my need for structure and schedule…. and burnout because masking becomes exhausting quickly.
The main difference between being a narcissist and not is empathy. It’s not that I don’t have it. Far from it. I process it differently than a neurotypical brain and get edgy at being misunderstood all the time, even by other people who are neurodivergent because not all quirks line up. When you both have processing disorders, the way you communicate is sometimes more difficult and less. It’s hard to tell what’s a bad pattern and what is us continually reading each other wrong?
I learned in one YouTube video why my entire marriage to Dana was on the rocks from day one, and it’s something that neither of us would have picked up on because I wasn’t a writer back then in the sense that I am now. I didn’t spend hours alone every day like I’ve done for the last eight years. We did not have the coping mechanisms to deal with autism, ADHD, and cerabral palsy because only one of us had all three. I was never going to get as much alone time as I needed from an extrovert. She was never going to get as much interaction as she needed from me. The longer I went into writer mode, the more I got comfortable with receding into total autism mode…. where writing took away all my barriers in communication and I felt freer when I wasn’t constrained by other people’s opinions….. not that I don’t need other people in my life.
Writing brought on the process of unmasking all of this. Why do I write from the early morning and sometimes again into the night? Because I am not interrupted. There is no one to tell me to shut up because if my friends don’t want to talk to me, they don’t have to. Other people will read my words and it will resonate with them instead. The last thing I want in this world is to feel like a burden, so I retreat to an enormous degree. I want to invite friends into my inner circle that understand me, rather than having to save up enough energy to mask. I just don’t have that kind of disorder. I refuse to be continually uncomfortable all the time, and it was my 37th birthday that really got me thinking about all this… in retrospect, of course.
My birthday that year was at the end of my first year of friendship with Supergrover, cute and cuddly monster that she is. So, we’d had a year of talking nearly every day, nearly every hour. It was so adorable it made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. I couldn’t have been happier on the first day of kindergarten. This is relevent because my birthday party was where I realized another, darker nature of the fissure with Dana and it was becoming more apparent. We simply were not compatible on a fundamental level and had ignored it for years. Keep in mind that I am not saying all the other reasons are now invalid. I am saying that they are the many cores I’ve been working through these past 10 years. The problem is that complex. No one thing is true, it is a wheel in which I stuck too big a stick. But the birthday party stuck harder.
Dana and my friends threw a birthday party for me the night before my first day at work. I didn’t have to be there until 0900, so it was no big deal. We weren’t big partiers. Even if everyone stayed until midnight, it was fine. Still plenty enough time to sleep, as I wouldn’t have slept a full eight hours on the night before my first day, anyway.
Well, people get there and I’m cool for about an hour tops. This is not unusual. What was unusual was being strong enough to say, “the house is huge. You guys go ahead.” I was okay with it and also not. My birthday party wasn’t for me. To design a birthday party for me is to make sure I am not completely overstimulated at every moment. But I didn’t know that ahead of time. I just surfed up and down, masking and not. Deciding on the fly and suddenly needing to leave. It makes me seem like an all-around self-centered jerk when in reality my nerves are on fire.
They’re on fire from masking and from trauma, inextricably interrelated so fire is never one alarm. One sets off the other, an alarm as loud as morning prayer in Damascus and which also changes five times a day. My prayer is to be stable, inshallah. We can’t always get what we want. I haven’t stopped trying.
I can only ask for so much patience from other people while I work out my shit, while also accepting that my brain and body are more complicated than most. I’ve been beating the shit out of myself for not understanding everything perfectly since I was born, and assuming that my limitations are other people’s fault a hundred percent of the time. None of that is objectively or subjectively true, but the neurotypical world is set up for me to feel like a failure. Representation matters, but in terms of autism and ADHD in adults, no one cares. Apparently, ADHD is only for children and we should have just learned to cope by now.
If I had been diagnosed as autistic, that is seen differently in other people’s minds. People look at ADHD and just see spazzed out little boys. You begin to see how ADHD works in women by looking at autism first. That’s because they aren’t the same, but again, present that way. People with ADHD tend to have problems logically. People with autism tend to have problems emotionally. My body has decided to cut out the middle man and have those two disorders duke it out for supremacy when both of them suck.
ADHD will only rescue me from autistic burnout for so long. That’s why when I travel, I’ve loved the seven and 10 day trips I’ve taken and hated the shorter ones. Not enough transition time to really enjoy myself. But again, “hating” is relative. I loved going to Paris, but it was a long haul for three or four days. It completely upended my rhythm for months. It was worth it, but for my thrill-seeking ADHD side. My autistic side was nervous and fearful the entire time. I am sure I was delightful company because of it, because my dad and sister don’t expect me to see fear in front of them when it’s relentless. It’s not fear of them. It’s that everything in my environment affects me differently than it does them. They’re both neurodivergent, but not autistic as far as I can tell. That’s because my dad and sister can change his environments at will and I cannot keep up with either of them.
It affects everything, from feeling out of place socially to the tag on my shirt to the people talking about their problems way over there that I’ve somehow managed to overhear. It’s too much stimuli in every outside environment, which is why I take public transportation. It is built-in, ironclad transition time. If I am driving, I am still in control of something. If I’m riding the train, I can fall asleep….. which I often did coming home from my job as a SQL developer because I could only handle so many people and problems in one day before I passed out. I know I prefer the train because I did have a car here for a while and wrecked it because of rumination. I got so lost in my own head that I took an unmarked curve a little too fast and couldn’t correct in time. Or, at least, I assumed it was marked until the cop told me it was marked on the other side of the freeway. Well, thanks a lot. That was helpful. I’ve never been here in my life.
I decided that being neurodivergent and having eye problems was not the best recipe for a driver. Getting my Fire HD and Bluetooth keyboard was the committment I needed to make the hour and a half on the train count. It’s a great writing environment as long as you don’t forget your headphones. I find that either movie soundtracks (Argo, The Bourne Identity, Syriana for me) or white noise are my best bets for being able to tune everything out except the motion the train makes, unperterbed by the sound. Reinforcing boundaries is hard when you know that some people are just crazier than you’ll ever be. Logic keeps chasing them, but they’re stronger and faster.
It’s not the sound of the train that’s bothersome, but the people on it. Most DC locals keep to themselves. Tourists will talk to anyone, for any reason, at any time. Most Americans are too polite to turn down genuine interest because we don’t want to seem rude, while avoiding tourists is a DC sport. There is also a huge difference between the federal government and the DC population. There is a reason that 5:00 in DC used to be called “white flight” and it has gotten so much better over the years, but we aren’t done yet. Therefore, there’s disagreements of all kinds on the Metro and you just have to ignore it when it gets loud…. that is, if I am completely uninterested in the conversation and not jumping in because I can’t not. “I had the right to remain silent. I did not have the ability. -Ron White
Again, ADHD vs. Autism. Am I worried about challenging my political beliefs on the subway to learn something and have more to talk about here, or am I worried that my sock is sliding down into my shoe? Are we going to talk about peace in the Middle East or why Whole Foods doesn’t have the veggie dogs I like and why I am nuclear pissed about it?
But if we’re going to talk about love, know that I’m not trying to hurt you when I describe real life situations, and I’m not trying to evade fault. I am owning what is mine, without speaking for you. I think that is being kind, in spite of the fact that it wasn’t nice.
I don’t need you to understand it. I just need you to respect it. Otherwise, I’m just another Leslie crying at her birthday party. I’m betting that if you are autistic, you have cried, too, when it happened to you.
Today is not the greatest day to have this prompt, because I’m dealing with a lot. Part of it is just now having any freedom at all to tell any stories about the whole ordeal with Supergrover, because now I just want it to be over and the story won’t quit. I need to put it down with force, and my dreams are eating my lunch. There’s a reason for this. You don’t meet extraordinary people without loving them through extraordinary problems. She didn’t do anything wrong, ever. My reactions are my own and have nothing to do with her. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard and I’m not entitled to my feelings after a decade, and it’s the entire reason why I need it all to end. I went into this relationship not knowing she didn’t think of me and what I do at all. I will never stop saying this, because even though she didn’t think it through, I’m not blaming her.
Where I feel blame comes in is pretending we’re okay when we are clearly, clearly not. I am not proud of any of this, yet that doesn’t mean it’s not still my story. It doesn’t mean that other people won’t connect to deep trauma and the bonds we create to deal with them. My problem here is that we managed to turn on each other and when we did, she discarded and I kept lovebombing because that’s what I do. She discarded me, later came back and forgave me, and then my mother died.
I was a completely different person who needed her in a completely different way. I stood up, and she didn’t rise to meet me. I do not know whether that is because she couldn’t, or whether she wouldn’t, and that’s not my call. My call is what to do with all her feelings because I cannot get a read on her and I’ve been walking on eggshells ever since. I would say she was a narcissist except she’s clearly not. It’s not like she discarded me for no reason. I earned it free and clear. I came onto my best friend while under duress, not because of anything she did, but because I was in a situation where I couldn’t deal and thought getting her to run away from me was easier than just telling her flat out, “you cannot be my friend. I do not have a clear path to you yet, because I cannot decide how I feel and it’s not a good thing.” If I had, we might have been able to save the relationship, essentially just putting it off until I was really myself again.
We didn’t have that kind of time. I needed to get there faster, and I didn’t. It is such a time of trial and pain that I am stil recovering a decade later. It doesn’t all have to do with her, she was just the lucky recipient of all the shit happening in my life that rolled downhill. I remember sitting on the floor of my apartment before Dana and I moved from Portland, telling her all my most intimate secrets while she told me hers.
It was never her looks that bound us. It never is when you fall in love from the inside out. Remember, our relationship is 99% text. Her words stuck with me because they were in my head, tone of voice fabricated when a phone call would have solved so much. Everything she said echoed in my chest, which made her voice louder in my echo chamber as well. When we were lovebombing each other, it was a high I’ll never experience again, because this was too unique a situation.
Dating Zac is my refuge in all of this, because I need time to rest and relax in a way I’ve never needed before. I cannot be fully present in a relationship right now, and he’s not waiting on me to decide anything because he doesn’t need me to do it. I can handle going out on dates, even platonic ones (going to Charlotte Cardin with Lindsay tomorrow night). I cannot handle the relationship escalator, because I cannot care for someone else in the way that I want while all this is going on. Believe me, it’s not that I can’t or stubbornly won’t move on. It’s all the things I can’t say, summed up by other factors at play. The triggers she left are still there and it’s going to take a while to get them out.
The triggers are large, but I agreed to take them on without knowing ahead of time what it really meant. That she’d always be the baby I’d respond to in the middle of the night with something to drink, Tylenol, and if she ever got old enough, I’ll throw in diaper changes for free. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. If that’s ont love, it’s saying I’d be tested when she said she had wonky organs. If that’s not love, I wouldn’t reach out for her in the middle of the night, without knowing what dream it will be that will make me do it, and being embarrassed that it even happens because like I said, I didn’t know. If my girlfriend heard me calling for her, I couldn’t tell her why and it would be a bad situation fast to wake up in the middle of the night with the wrong name on my lips, even for the purest of purposes and not anything to do with cheating. It’s because she’s done things like that for me in real life that make me want her protection, and then it flips, and the things I’d like to do for her as a repayment flip and it’s a different scenario altogether.
But when I express this to Supergrover, she says that she already has a very full life and can’t do anything for me. This is truly problematic because when we told each other all that stuff, we were drunk as fuck on each other’s brain chemicals and it looked a whole lot different once the effects started wearing off, because she’s not trusting enough to open up again and I have so far been inconsistent enough that when her eyebrows go over her forehead in exasperation because she didn’t ask for this shit, I pick up all my toys and go home because I didn’t sign up for that.
When I forgive someone, I mean it. I don’t let them do me dirty and then set boundaries where they can never work it out with me; I’m just too unwilling to trust an apology with changed behavior. I’ve never become jaded, and I’m proud of that. Jaded comes in when I don’t see changed behavior and I’m trying my absolute best. Where we were before determines how willing I am to set those boundaries, where no amount of feeling wronged erases love or care or connection for me. To love someone so unconditionally that I’d push the big red button on this web site if it came to that, because having the freedom to say what I want with no restrictions on it became a bad thing over time when she wouldn’t commit.
Because then I started having real problems with no peers except her, and she was shit at dealing with mental health. She didn’t know me well enough to know what would happen when we exchanged secrets with me, and neither one of us were prepared for the fallout because we knew each other’s deepest secrets without the context for it…….. except being in the honeymoon phase of a relationship where you can’t see anything going wrong. This person is never going to do anything wrong. There is nothing this person could do that would make me feel differently about them, etc.
I got that deep, but she did and she didn’t. This is because she pushed me away and brought me closer so that I never knew which end was really up. When we get too far apart, we start attracting each other like magnets, but to different degrees. Since I treated her with the same intense lovebombing after we made up, I don’t think I made sense to her. That’s not how it works in her world. If you fuck up, she’ll never open up again and I blew it. I didn’t protect the one baby I made promises to and it broke my heart in half. I jumped up and down trying to get her to see that my behavior was driven by something outside me that I couldn’t control, and it wasn’t my feelings for her. It was that ADHD kicked my ass in the moment and caused waves. Then, when I did the work and became healthy, she couldn’t trust that it was true.
I do not blame her for this. I blame both of us for keeping a toxic pattern and Supergrover being unwilling to work on solutions so that both of us felt well and healthy again. I feel like since she was coming from a very suspect place, she thought I was coming at her from that direction, too. That I was holding something over her head that I didn’t. I was facing the reality of the situation and asking to move on, and the reality is not pleasant. If she felt guilt, it was of her own doing because I didn’t bring up the past in order for that to happen. I will take responsibility for my tone sounding judgmental, but it’s not because I was trying to be judgmental. I’m ADHD and Autistic, raised by a pastor and later a doctor.
I don’t see judgment. I run numbers, emotionally speaking. Where’s the percentage in our behaviors in this situation and what needs to happen in light of it….. not “you’re bad and I hate you.” And of course, because that’s what she thought I was saying to her, that’s how she treated me. That I was always wrong, terrible, and judgmental because I was so mean to her all the time.
No, cielo. That is not true nor has it ever been. I do not see you as wrong and bad, but a mirror reflection of me. When I move my right hand, you move your left. When I learned to love me, the love for you grew deeper because you’ve always lived inside me, my Impossible Girl as I became yours over 10 years. The two Timeless Children that fall into each other the most often. The ones who love so intensely that it flames out, because avoidant/anxious patterns fill a need. We have, as my friend Donna Schuurman said, “compatible wounds.” I am not calling you out, that’s a psychological term she uses that has stuck with me for over 20 years. That’s why I bellieve managed correctly, our relationship makes us perfect for each other. Left untouched, we’ll emotionally destroy each other……… and that’s exactly what has happened. We have left so much “done and left undone” that those sins are grevious unto me.
This relationship will sustain us or it will kill us, and in order for it to stop hurting us that way, we will have to have it out. There’s no way around it, and she doesn’t have time, which ramps up my feeling that she doesn’t think I’m worth it. That she won’t submit to any boundaries I set forth because I don’t deserve them with her. And then, just when I think all hope is lost, there she is. My dragon. The one I love more than all the others. It’s just that safety and security for me is so lacking and so secure without knowing what day it is. I cannot cope and shouldn’t have to, and not because I am feeling entitled and want to intrude upon her life. It’s that she forgave me and I jumped through hoops to prove myself because of it. What I didn’t know is that it wouldn’t work and nothing would ever be the same. That I’d carry a constant feeling of “I can’t do anything right” and constantly have it validated. I am not that person. I am not wrong and bad all the time, and I refuse to be treated that way when I’m just expressing needs.
I tend to get angrier than I should because the longer she goes without addressing anything the less I want to walk on eggshells around her, but I run up into the limits of her forgiveness that way and it just hurts. There was no choice for me except to walk away until Supergrover can love herself the way I love both of us. That her reactions need to come from a place of joy again, because I know they do for other people. I’m just standing outside a big circle, sort of forgiven and yet not. She is folded into my family and content to be so without really recognizing that I need her, too. That if our relationship continues, I can be tight or not at all. I cannot walk in insecure attachments trying to heal them alone.
It’s running over the problem with Supergrover again in my mind because my autism naturally makes me ruminate over it constantly…. and yet, there’s a reason for that. I hit 45 and all of the sudden boundaries meant something to me when I’d never been able to do it before. I established boundaries with everyone in my life and she was so proud of the process until the last one was her. She was the last one for many reasons, the biggest being that I was depressed and isolating because I couldn’t focus on both of us, and it was time to let go if we weren’t moving forward, anyway, because I could not maintain the cognitive dissonance of loving someone so much and having a ceiling on how much it meant to her, and to have the level go up and down every day was frightening. I hung in as long as I could, but I’m not waiting on the world to change. I just hope it does, because I’ve done more work on myself for the past 10 years that would not have been possible if I hadn’t started from a place of pain and reclaimed my life in such a way that I was more stable and capable of dealing with emotions.
If nothing else, I hope she’s proud I’ve gotten there, and I know she is. She’s told me so. What she will not do is get there herself, because it’s too hard and it hurts too much. She’s told me there’s just so much she’ll never let go of. I also know I’m one of them. Even if we never speak again, we’ve changed each other to such a degree that we don’t fit in the old containers we made for each other. They used to stack, and now they’re warped.
I am most proud of getting rid of the floppy plastic boundaries and starting to build with steel……. and it’s okay if that’s with someone else. But we could be The Proud Family if we gave it both our pennies.
Hm. Today it’s “Sunday mornin’ rain is fallin,” and I’m hearing Adam Levine singing in my head. I made myself an outstanding cup of coffee in which I mixed every kind I have in one airtight container (the only one I have, thus mixing the end of other bags). It’s Cafe Bustelo, Community Coffee King Cake, and some kind of Folgers I don’t remember buying, but someone did. Not sure what I’ll brew next, but I have a lot of tea I’m looking forward to as well. I still haven’t drunk all the Pu-erh John sent me and I’ve also got lots of Stash English Breakfast and powdered matcha. Of everything I make in the morning, I like matcha the best. I just don’t like to drink it every morning because making it takes longer than a Keurig pod. I have about two hours before I have to “get ready for church,” and by that I mean I’d like to take a shower before I watch YouTube. It might be a good day to take a look at the scriptures later.
I had a line cook that didn’t know me from Adam come after me online for saying that the pen with which Biblical literalists paint the Bible is the root of all evil, and he thought I was saying that Christians were the root of all evil. Ripped me a new one for saying David and Jonathan were in love. We can’t even prove Jesus and John weren’t, it’s just more likely that he had a partner and a housecarl……. like me.
If that wasn’t clear, I meant he was married to Mary Magdalene and it is written that John is his favorite Disciple, so I’m sure he showed up big for everyone to think that and write it down. I don’t think it was sex. I think it was being willing to give up your career for someone else’s…….. like me.
The line cook said that if he made fun of my community, it would be a hate crime. But if I made fun of his, that was fine. Got butt hurt, so I knew that it was a pointless fight before it started. I said, “you don’t even know who you’re talking about when you say I have no idea what I’m talking about, and this is not a fight you want to have with me.” And I tapped out, because I couldn’t get across to someone with a literalist view of the Bible that taking the Bible seriously and not literally is the only thing I can do in this day and age. There is no proof, and we need to stop pretending there is. There’s not even any proof in the Bible that God exists, only people’s reactions and responses to them. No Biblical literalist is going to accept that as truth, so why bother? He doesn’t study theological giants. I do. If I am the one studying debates between Rowan Williams and Christopher Hitchens to learn the finer points of what puts Christopher off about organized religion, I can use it. I can use Hitch’s words against him in a wonderful way, because I know he doesn’t care about Christians who take constructive criticism and use their faith to improve themselves. I feel like Christianity would do a lot better in this country if it stayed in its lane.
It is embarrassing. EMBARRASSING. That England does this better than we do and they have had divine right of kings and no separation of church and state since the beginning is one of the weirdest things on earth. We supposedly built this country on separation of church and state….. but what we really said in effect with our cullture is that each state was free to pick its own organized religion. Georgia and Massachussetts Bay were not the same.
We of the United States have never protected freedomm from religion as much as we’ve needed, and I’m tired of it. Again, there is only so much of white supremacy Jesus that can be justified, as well as hypocrisy. People are leaving the church in droves and we shouldn’t stop them because we brought this upon ourselves. Our membership will change when we do and not before. In my opinion, I can hold everything I love about religion in my own heart. I don’t need the church if it decides to die, and it seeems to be doing much to help itself along the way. Catholocism will probably die before it changes because Pope Francis is not as liberal as it needs to get. He is just a Band-Aid, and cannot be even that because there are so few priests willing to push the envelope further than saying that gays and the divorced are people.
You have to leave behind what no longer serves you. I have already decided that I am right for the church, but they decided when I was 15 that they were not right for me. I moved to a denomination where I could be ordained, I was just tired by then…… and frankly, too hurt. I really think so. I think I went into shock at my situation, then my adulthood believing I wanted something I didn’t. It wasn’t untrue. It waas when I was ADHD and masking I could handle leading a congregation. When I was autistic and trying to comfort myself, I couldn’t handle even one other person in the room because of overstimulation. All of my behavior cannot be contributed to depression and hypomania, because my energy levels switch too fast for that.
I am a neurodivergent that is self-aware to an enormous degree. I realized that I should not handle a congregation because of what I could do to them and vice versa. I don’t think that mentally ill people make good pastors, because you react differently to emotional stimuli when you feel good, and the difference is so striking that you can’t project stability because you aren’t stable, actually. And there’s no shame in it. Realizing that you are not mentally healthy enough to take on the needs of others because your own health is a lot to manage is courageous.
I didn’t want to stop leadding people. I wanted to start leading people in a different way. I think I do because so many people tell me that. A woman yesterday told me that I have a very interesting life and that I wrote from deep inside me. Exactly what I was trying to portray in my writing and something I needed to hear because things haven’t been going all that well in my estimation.
I have no doubt that Supergrover has looked in on me and decided that healing and moving on is better for me, but I’m only doing it because I have no other choice. It’s what I’m working on because I have already done all I’m going to do. The way I write is assuming she’s out because she told me she was, but she rarely holds me to one entry or letter forever. We’re just not close enough to stop her ire because we’re not checking the story we’re telling ourselves anymore. She has no idea what I’m doing or not doing in trying to portray our lives when they meet. I use the adrenaline of sex to cover a lot of other ground and I promise she’d rather people think we were naked in the middle of the freeway, and even more interesting to think about what has more adrenaline than sex? All right. You’ve got me. She designs roller coasters.
She doesn’t like all this, but she gets it. Symbolism in writing is a thing. Also, Dana will laugh. She doesn’t like it, but she gets it……. or at least, I hope they both laugh because it’s been 10 years since all that for Dana and 8 years of trying to manage just the two of us since. It’s an interesting conundrum because the longer I go without contact, the more okay I am. And then I’ll hit a trigger and need her immediately, but I self-soothe instead of getting anxious she’s not around. However, I do not think this is the way our relationship should go. I think we’d be much happier if we made the commitment to be imortant on both sides. This is because the more we communicate intensely in the time we have, neither of us have to worry about each other. For instance, having one 45 minute meeting early on would save us a lot of them later, preferable for people who are both obsessed with other things, including their families.
It’s weird to feel like our spines are sewn so we don’t face each other, and our strength is in the seam. I wish I could watch her face when she reads that line, because I think it’s one of the images that she’ll love. I have so many perfect pictures of us, and exactly none of them are something she wouldn’t enjoy as well. That by now Michael is real to me in a way he wasn’t before, especially the way he changed her life in a way that I would have wanted for her if I’d been able…. and not just on one level, but many. I told her than and she thought I was trying to make her feel bad. No, just trying to say that I love her for who she is, not who I’m trying to get her to be. That she can be straight if she has to be. I am absolutely certain at times she wonders why, because I’ve never met a woman who didn’t say that if they were in any way queer their husbands would never hear from them again.
What has happened over time is that I want to be there like a family member without forgetting where I started. That our relationship is an evolution and I’m always going to treat her like I used to be attracted to her and not because I am and trying to hide it. It’s that I can’t change my speech patterns. I’ll always have a hundred terms of endearment for her. She will always take my breath away in a photo or audio/video. There’s not a moment I feel I won’t love her forever in a way that people remember love in third grade. What she has to decide is if she’s okay with that in a friendship. That it’s tinged with romance because I felt those feelings and moved on, not that I’m uncomfortable with her life now. And I know she knows that, and feels so guilty that she cannot be there to catch me right now, because she thinks I have no idea what she’s dealing with and I do. Desperately and completely. It’s why I have no idea whether she’s taking time to mull things over or never coming back. She does not have time to pay attention to anything. She, like Mel, is in the position of starting her own kitchen and I treat them the same way. “See you in three years.”
What she views as goading and provoking is not that I get impatient with timing. I get impatient that no matter how long we go, there’s never an e-mail longer than a few words…. which indicates that no matter what I’m talking about, she’s always avoiding it. When she does have time, she’ll respond to anything that doesn’t involve our relationship. We don’t work through anything and yet she’d eat anyone’s face off who tried to look at me in a way I didn’t like and I feel exactly the same way about her. I would bitch slap her boss if I thought they needed it, and neither one of them would like that very much….. but I would. I would be Mrs. Don Draper on their asses and every single one of them would hate me down to the mailroom. The thought of this makes me laugh harder than it should, because she is definitely a Don Draper-type personality (or comes across that way in text), and I feel like I have the sensibility of Betty’s chihuahua personality.
The funny thing about Betty Draper and me is seeing how much she got away with and what I could’ve….. I am actually pretty happy she ended up with a husband when I think about how her life would be different with a female partner. Like, this could be a script. I’ll think about it. However, it would not be based on us. Just the idea is funny. All powerful women who have wives act differently in a large crowd than those with husbands. It doesn’t jive with the way straight women are vetted to work at high levels in government or industry. The way they are groomed to react like men because nothing gets done if they don’t. A woman with a wife has been pissed off by that her whole life and has the strength to fight back because she doesn’t have to deal with it at home. Her career is also the worst when it comes to her partner being a writer, so if they were like me in any way at all, it would only be that they have that one thing in common to create comedic tension.
And the thing is, Supergrover is just an archetype. Hillary Clinton. Michelle Obama. My sister Lindsay. Carly Fiorina. Melinda Gates. Helen Thomas. I could base what I’m thinking about on any one of them…. the push/pull of a powerful person meeting a no one on the Internet and finding out the other one is smarter in some ways. I feel that I am older than Supergrover, that she is older and sometimes not wiser. I hope that she is impressed enough that she would agree with me and that she is every bit as much right as me on the opposite end of the spectrum. That we all age at different rates and in different ways. But to find that it transcends class is a particular blessing. If she thinks I’m smart, I’m smarter than nearly everyone and no one could have convinced me of it that didn’t have her pedigree. I’ve felt like a dumbass since I was born because I didn’t realize how much I had stacked against me. How much the Internet took away my limitations in communication. I feel smarter around her than anyone else because it comes with such strong belief in myself. She also has the presence of Picard. When she says something, it’s with the authority to make it so. She thinks I think of her as a suburban mom. No, I think of her an an Evelyn. A Michelle Yeoh, an accurate description of her beauty in one picture.
She doesn’t have a prayer life except running, and I hope it’s productive. Sometimes, you feel more in prayer by zoning out and letting your body do the work. Sometimes, it’s thinking through things. The answer comes from praying, not what happens afterward. You know yourself, you’re just afraid to say what you want outside of the intimacy of prayer, because that would involve talking to someone else with an opinion. Either way is fine, and I feel like she is taking care of herself by listening to her body. I am taking care of her by listening to her mind and sending her support by letting her know that I’m thinking about her. But if I tell her that I’m thinking of her and she doesn’t want to open up to me, it doesn’t mean my prayer hasn’t mattered. It means thoughts and prayers can be only that because I haven’t been invited to sit down at that particular table.
I picked up a term on “Covert Affairs” that I really like and I use it all the time to describe my blog. At CIA, to talk about security credentials, they talk about who has been “read in.” In my life, that fits perfectly, because I know exactly down to the letter I’ve typed how much you guys have been read in, and it’s only the amount I want you to have. To go further than this is not helping me, it’s hurting them. That’s because if they wanted to tell their sides, it would be in the comments section, not from me. I reveal so much that anything more is their story to tell. I don’t push limits on purpose. It’s hard to negotiate boundaries and hard when you’re brave with them out of necessity, not lack of love for others.
Dana and I had a hard time because when Supergrover found out that I’d read Dana in on something that she didn’t okay, I freaked out. It wasn’t the initial secret that kept Dana and I emotionally apart, but its reverberations and how she reacted to me after it. I was a hndful, and so was she. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. When I say I didn’t have a choice on whether to leave Dana (because that would have involved our triangle or foursome being solid and it wasn’t), I mean that if Supergrover had talked to Dana and I had talked to Michael, Dana and I could have worked it out. But, I was left in the position of choosing between them and Dana had to lose because Supergrover forced my hand in a way that no one else could. I had to write about her to handle our lives together and I couldn’t let Dana see my reactions to it. Case closed.
But then Supergrover had the audacity to look at the clusterfuck she created and make it all about her. That she hadn’t created a situation I couldn’t handle, but that I was stalking her by coming to DC……. then getting surprised when I was perturbed about that. We’ve been stuck in that push/pull since 2015, and I didn’t decide to stop loving her. I decided to stop working on it.
I can handle what she’s dealing with on my own, but no I can’t. She can read this blog and not worry about her safety, but no she can’t. We could solve all this in an afternoon, even if it was just chatting on Facebook Messenger, but I’m betting we won’t. After eight years and no need to look me up because I gave her all my contact info, she cannot possibly have been too busy to connect. She just wouldn’t. She decided what kind of person I was then and has looked at me through that lens ever since……. the one that says I’m perfect for everyone else except her because she can’t forgive me and never will. Not in the way that truly means redemption and intimacy. But she said she could do nothing about how I felt, how she felt, etc…… but she could do something about the present. If she can, I hope she will. I just will not accept being the person she only talks to short sentences at a time. I don’t want to get by on a glass of water when I have ridden her waves.
I am working on why she affected me the most because I don’t completely understand how it happened, but I want to. I want to even if she does not, because even if she didn’t want the next decades, I did. Even one is a long time when you’re talking about life afterward and how it changes. But it is very interesting to work on the issue of how relationships change over time when you don’t have context for anything but each other- the fact that I have seen she has dogs, but never petted them. That I have heard she has a husband and kids, but never met them. That she likes art but I’ve never been to her house, etc. And yet by writing to each other like a soldier and a lovesick girlfriend for 10 years, it has created the same type intimacy now that they felt then. Do you think my love for Supergrover is less real than those type movies and novels based on very real life? Hayat only spent a few hours more with Mike than I spent with Supergrover before we created a lifetime connection like reader/writer, which carries more responsibility for me now than I had before. It is not a wonder that I wanted my wife and that responsibility to be locked into one person because it was too hard to manage it when they weren’t. But that’s because I was green and didn’t know what I was doing. It’s easier now that I don’t feel the pressure that she’s paying attention to anything I say. I just hope it shows I do see her in 3D when she can open her eyes to that possibility. I think that the message will resonate later, it’s just that right now it’s incredibly loud and extremely close.
Working on how I feel about everyone else is easy because I don’t have the pressure of keeping their identity secret to the degree I do with Supergrover, which is why it’s so hard to put anyone else above her for any reason. I’ll do that when she’s older. Right now she’s my baby, and I have to wait to go back to work til she’s in kindergarten. It’s the best analogy I could possibly have for what we’re going through, and I hope she takes it in because I’m childless so what I’m putting down is not something she’d pick up. That I am definitely responding to a baby, but it’s her. She doesn’t see it because she doesn’t think she needs it, and I’m the one that sees the burn on her face when no one else can. It’s a lot. She’s a lot. But thank God my life isn’t anything else, because I’d still believe I was straight trash if it hadn’t happened.
I don’t want to be disrespectful to her, ever, so I’m just arranging my life so that it doesn’t matter when she’s here and when she’s not. I am Amy Pond and River Song, setting a place for her at dinner in case she shows up. And with her even unto Trenzalore………….. but only when and if she’ll have me.
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
I love the idea that the writing prompt is about something people don’t know about us and all we do all day is tell people stuff other people don’t know about us. So, I’ll go through a quick list for new people just in case I publish in a different time zone (I start at 0500, but between writing and doing the things I need to do to get ready to write, I’m ADHD. I write a paragraph and get up and down I just don’t scroll up until I read it back. I will publish anything I think because boundaries have already been established in my mind. Nothing I publish is something I can’t stand by later. Other people can be mad, but I can walk away clean. You make the choice not to be in this blog by whether you interact with me, and it’ll be hard and I’ll miss you, but I won’t tolerate criticism as ad hominem attacks. I will drop you with force and I won’t ghost you. You’ll know exactly why you pissed me off so that I won’t stab you in the back on my web site. I don’t say anything about people I wouldn’t say to them.
It’s not because I love you any less. It’s that my life isn’t easy dealing with blowback when my echo chamber already thinks I’m a bad person. I do a better job of kicking my ass than you do, so leave me be. You can watch how I do it or don’t, because while I’m explaining your behavior, you’ll get closer to me if you let it happen. You’ll understand a pattern and why it went wrong rather than making you read my mind all the time. But my writing won’t do that if you think you’re always right. It doesn’t bother me if my friends don’t read me, in fact I prefer it because it also keeps people from getting impressed with me. The highs and lows are too big a swing. So that means:
Supergrover told me something that’s too hard to forget because of my chosen art form, because it would make waves bigger than either of us want to handle to have her identified. Therefore, I view her as my primary partner because she’s the one in which the breadcrumbs on my web site are worth something, no matter how small. And it isn’t that I’d even be writing about us. Breadcrumbs are unintentional because she’s the river that runs beneath my emotions. She comes through me by now because I’ve adopted the style in which she writes and it affects my speech every day. I am more strident at times than I used to be because I have better boundaries. At others, I’m just as romantic with language as I used to be because that’s how I wrote before I met her. Complete change in tone because I was obsessed with the way she wrote…. and proud that my words have certainly been used in powerful rooms without her even thinking she was doing it, because she doesn’t remember everything I’ve written, but it creeps in. It’s fun thinking about exactly about she could have told “this is a goat roping clusterfuck.” Or, “now that you’re mad you’re just packing up your toys and going home.” That one makes me laugh even harder.
Lindsay is my younger sister who doesn’t live with me anymore, but stays close most of the time. She lives in Houston and works in DC, so she’s far away and part of my life depending on the day of the year. We are close because of proximity. Her career is in government relations, so whether she’s been a private or public lobbyist, I’ll never stop running into her. I am so goddamn blessed because I got to move away from Houston without moving away from her. That’s actually the biggest reason I chose DC again vs. going back to Portland to be with Bryn and her whole family like I had been before. There were other factors at play on my end besides my love for Supergrover. I knew that if Mayor Pete won the election, she would end up working in the White House. And I knew that before you did. Also, there are many other candidates that woud appoint her here, I just don’t think she wants to live here. I think that she would do it if she had to, and at that point would be glad to have a local to keep her grounded and she has a thousand of them by now. She would fit in here like she lived here before she even packed.
Bryn is my partner in the sense that you should go to her if something happens to me and you want to know about me. My last wishes, all that shit. She’s basically a human document repository, not someone I could marry because I think you should live in the same city for that. Doesn’t make us in less of a long distance relationship and her family has plenty of friends in that model, so no one would make it weird. There are female names that are synonymous in our lives that aren’t together, so we’re the ones synonymous in their minds. You have a partner and a housecarl. Don’t make it weird. Play Skyrim instead and my whole life will come together in front of you. I’d like to be a good companion, but most of the time I’m a dumbass. I can’t tell you how many times Lydia has gotten me killed and I hate that I could be someone else’s when it’s their turn to crawl through a Falmer dungeon.
Zac is my romantic partner, and I think we’ve been together a year or so. It’s hard to tell because we’ve just been dating off and on. It’s not like we see each other every day. We’re not building a future together unless it’s good for the order- that I’d like to stay single and not have it bother anyone that I’m already dating someone when we go out on our first date. Doesn’t mean they can’t still be my last. I am free to marry someone else. Not Zac. But Zac plays such a large role in my life that I’m not really all that tempted to date anyone else. It’s not that I wouldn’t, it’s that I’m happy as I am. Content. I’m not so much avoiding dating as I am not threatened by the fact that no one else is asking me out and I’ll end up alone. I won’t. Zac would be my boyfriend until he died if I let him and it was a mutually agreeable situation. We don’t have plans to get closer and we don’t have plans to break up unless it’s necessary. I don’t see that as a bad relationship. I see that as connection and leaving each other better than when we found us. We don’t have to get married for the relationship to matter.
He’s an intelligence officer that doesn’t get bored when I want to talk about it and it’s my autistic obsession in life. It’s Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s partner asking her to make an appointment with him to talk about whales because she was overwhelming him all the time with random facts.
Like, he might read the thing I wrote about Israel, and say “you’re technically right, but here’s where you went wrong.” He could tell me in detail if I had his security clearance, but I don’t and I don’t care for it. I’d just like to be able to talk about intelligence like I was in school for it, not that I’m pumping people who have classified information to spill it. Zac is always in control of the narrative, so he always knows the boundaries on what he can say and is excellent about not revealing anything that isn’t already public because he checks. I’m saying that clearly because if I was on his contact sheet, CIA and FBI might not see my interst as only that. That it’s the equivalent of dating someone retired, and lots of people do that. They’re the ones that have the responsibility of carrying that shit, and they know they’re bound not to make you. So, Zac gives me the kind of information you’d get from a college professor in undergrad and I go look up what’s public. Here’s how that conversation goes:
Leslie: What’s going on in Russia right now? Zac: Crops, grain, “medical medical medical.”
Except that the “medical, medical, medical” part is a quote from a book. From Zac, it’s slow finger wag, emphatic fist shake, or dumb look. That’s the part I know where he’s hog tied and I need to quit. The earlier he starts hemming and hawing, the more badass I know he is. That his Aaron Sorkin walk and talks are better than everyone else’s…. including Aaron Sorkin’s.
That’s because even Aaron Sorkin will never know what could replace “medical, medical, medical.”
Hayat and Mike are my landlords, Edu and Magda rent with me. We all live in one house including Hayat and Mike’s daughter, Samantha. This is possible because there’s an addition that makes it really one and a half houses. It’s impressively large, and I’m glad I chose a group house over an apartment because my autistic side needs absolute quiet and when I need community I don’t have to leave the house for it.
I have been in the same house since 2015, a blessing and a curse because I didn’t get to spend the last year of my mother’s life with her before a took off running again. But I couldn’t have known it was the last year of her life because I took it for granted that she would live past 65. She didn’t even think I was mature enough to drive from DC to Houston because it’s not something she would be brave enough to do and I drove to Portland by myself no problem. It would have been nothing getting through the mountains because I’d already done Shasta in November. This was the Blue Ridge in August. If I had known how the weather was going to be that day, that it was a miracle I didn’t have to stop and chain up with the chains I’d have to go buy, I would have stayed in a hotel another night- to see if the weather cleared up but also to be able to go buy chains and learn how to chain up if it didn’t.
Turns out, chaining up is not that hard. I’ve done it on a Jeep and a Saturn. It was easier on the Saturn and the little car was a lot more fun in the snow. In the Jeep, there was four wheel drive AND chains. Nothing exciting happened. There was no adrenaline in it. I’m just glad I get on the bus and train now instead.
My dad is still living- retired and a trumpet player and on the board of everything everywhere all at once. He’s been a world-class musician since he was in high school, making All-State Band three years running and his senior year, he got first chair. Which means that by the time he auditioned for chairs in that band, when he got first it meant he was literally the best trumpet player in the nation, I believe, because Texas Music Educator’s Association is tough shit. Even band and choir directors know when they take a job in Texas, all the other teachers and choirs/bands have it out for you and standards are high. In the band I joined, there were maybe two in the state that were better than us, and it wasn’t HSPVA. I actually got into a much better situation when we moved to Clements musically. That’s because Clements had a lot more money and a lot more clout. So, both my dad and I have been through “the system,” but I was never that great a player. I just had fun (most of the time). I feel more at home as a singer, so I focus on that.
I write because I feel more at home as a writer than I do as a conversationalist, and people get the same amount of information without me being uncomfortable. Where this becomes problematic is that other people aren’t writers and won’t reply to me because they’re intimidated. They do not accept that they’re not as good a writer as me without recognizing there’s a reason for that and don’t make it a thing. It will ruin our relationship if you think I’m better than you. It’s not that. It’s that I write these long ass essays that are somehow enjoyed all over the world every single day and you don’t. You don’t have to sit there and think about why you’re not a good writer because I don’t expect you to be me. I expect you to know what communication mode works best for you and I will also accomodate you if you’re willing to speak to me that way because you don’t like writing….. but expect that I will expect you too read those letters, not write back if you like talking better. The way this works for me is Facebook Messenger. Bryn, Beck, and Andy have no problem sending me a voice message while I’m still typing. At that point, I start sending them voice messages as well because I know they’re not in a writing mood. It reminds me to branch out.
Beck is the woman I referred to when I wrote about “my wife.” She’s not, I was kidding, and there’s no chance of that happening, either. She’s the one who sets my brain on fire right now because we’re talking about law and conflict resolution likein my old paralegal days. It brings back a side of me I didn’t know I needed, because I feel at home in the law, just like I feel at home with international affairs. I write about intelligence because CIA doesn’t hire people with neurodivergence that have to take medication for it. It’s just too dangerous. But I would have been great if I’d been medically healthy because I would have been as happy in the JAG as I would have been at State, which is really the only government job I’m interested in and also feel like I should have tried to get into State when I was 23.
And all of that is forgiven and forgotten because I didn’t have the capability to think all that through because State is an adult job and I don’t know how to do that. Neurodivergent people do not have job security, ever, because neurotypical people do not like working with us. They can complain to HR all they want and it does no good, so they have to make you look incompetent when they get tired of explaining things in the way you can hear it. Bosses who say that’s not true are the ones that make life easier. But all people aren’t them, either.
It’s a dirty little open secret. Whether you are physically or mentally disabled, getting an interview is harder. They require you to report your conditions if you have them to get ergonomics and/or special considerations, but it makes employers take one look at your resume and think “retard” in a very nasty way. Doesn’t matter whether they’re put off by bipolar or cerebral palsy, I’m not getting in there if I tell people I’m disabled on a web form because I have to in order to get the interview and the considerations afterward because they have to decide if I’m worth it first. Or, I can not tell them….. and that’s worse. I will launch into the song and dance of masking behavior until I can’t keep it up anymore and need those considerations and get fired for it.
I am fucked in getting disability unless I hire a fuck ton of lawyers, and then I’m not sure I can have any assets and now I do because my mom and stepfather are both dead. I don’t want to touch them because I’d be heavily taxed, but I don’t know whether being on disability would allow me to keep them or not when I turned 65. Then, I would also face the social stigma of being disabled, making it harder to date. No one wants to take on a financial project because they don’t want to be the one that pays for everything when they don’t like my cheaper suggestions because that’s the way I can treat them. Zac doesn’t care because we don’t do anything truly expensive except stop at the liquor store on the way home because Zac likes whiskey and I like N/A spirits and a hotel bottle of whatever it is that someone has created this week that’s new. I think the last time it was rum punched up with sour apple liqeur. It was okay. But again, it was like $4. I wish I could be the girlfriend and the friend and the daughter that paid for everything, and I might be later in life if my ideas or blog take off. Who knows? Dooce got to be Dooce, Wil and Jenny got to be Wil and Jenny. Who knows what will happen to me? At this point, it’s exciting to see what’s to come because I’m getting answers to questions I’ve had my whole life.
Mel is a chef I write to in England that has some of the same issues in the kitchen that I do. We work through the emotional side of it and talk about cooking. It feeds me in a way no one else does. Tyler and J.L. are my newest connections, writers who are on a whole other level than me and have taken control of my education. It’s the right move for me, because being around Supergrover all those years was like training for a writer’s room, and it would blow her hair back to be in this group as well. Writing isn’t what she does for a living, but she’s good at it.
She has a blog that she thinks I haven’t read and when she said it I was hurt because you could wake me up in the middle of the night and I could recite lines form it verbatim. There weren’t that many entries and I can quote all of them. I just won’t.
The community that supports me are the only ones who really deserve to know the things that no one else knows about me. But maybe I should give you one. Something good, yet not so deep I end on a downer.
Something no one knows about me is that I don’t have peers. Not really. I’m too complicated and so are my friends. There is no one on earth that can identify with me in every way possible, why I doubt I’ll be happier than I am right now with Zac and Bryn filling two completly different roles as my inner circle. The jury is still out on whether Supergrover comes back to me, but not on the fact that my mama wolverine goes off like hers does, both trauma bonded and angry with each other and refusing to connect.
But if I have more than three people who know everything, it’s not because I don’t want more friends. It’s that I become saturated and overwhelmed easily. I am not trying to be avoidant, just protective, which is where I see Supergrover headed for me and I’m sorry I didn’t see the signs earlier. But it wouldn’t have saved me any pain at all. I just would have started the process earlier. But it would have made feeling put upon last even longer, because there’s a little bit of me that will always feel that way, and not because she put me out with telling me. She put me out with not communicating afterward. We have a situation that changes day by day because I’m a writer. She hates press. Even worse when I’m not a journalist and I’m not fact checking. It’s just like, my opinion, man.
She wants me to write from her perspective. Consider her feelings. I would if I knew what they are. I do not know any of her feelings to be able to consider them.
But I know this.
I love her, something everyone knows. She loves me, something that everyone knows.
And still the truth runs deeper than just that fact. Everything does. We do as people, we do as situations we deal with. And now we’ve stopped leaning on each other and I’m on my own, trying to figure out how to move on when she’s not listening and it’s a disaster. She thinks I’m a dick for pushing her away. I think she’s a dick because she isn’t bringing me closer and it really fucking hurts in a concrete way, not an objective one. And if she saw what I saw, she would see objective danger and come back and say she’s sorry so we could work together instead of against each other. If she doesn’t, whatever she says is on her, and I don’t care how much she says she can deal with it, no she can’t. If I stop protecting her, other people might, too, and that’s bad. I love her so much and she treats me like a mean girl.
I was mad because she was ignoring me, not because I didn’t understand everything on her plate. I wasn’t saying I wasn’t patient. I was saying I think eight years is enough to get over something and you don’t have to get over it but you have to stop shitting on me. Your issues are your issues now.
It’s time for her to tell me everything I don’t know about her, and she’s hog tied like he is in another galaxy far, far away.
I don’t rebel against her story. I regret that she doesn’t tell me the parts that Zac does… the things he needs from me before he has to start saying “medical, medical, medical” like Lauren Graham.).
Today I watched a short video called “Five Signs It’s Both,” about the dual diagnosis of autism and ADHD. How they are constantly at odds with each other. It made me realize that’s exactly why people don’t like my blog. It seems like I say one thing and do another, when in reality my ADHD and Autism are duking it out. My whole body is changing, and there goes my perspective. Two things can both be true. It’s no secret to me that knowing those two things together is what makes me feel nonbinary and bisexual. I can’t choose a label because there isn’t one for me. I cannot predict what other people think of what I do and say, but I at least know why my blog sounds so different all the time. I’ve always described it as “working on different cores,” but it’s the two sides of my neurodivergence. They look like two different perspectives to other people, so therefore I’m a mess and they’re always right. I’m an inconsistent liar when you don’t know or have empathy for neurodivergence. I got by as a kid by completely ignoring my autism, because ADHD gave me the energy to be “on” in public. I didn’t have time to realize that the way I thought was always going to be a battle, and that I’d never have thoughts I’d stop turning over. This is one of them. My behavior doesn’t make sense to people who can only see things one way. Everything else looks fake.
I am certain that a lot of triggers were installed that way. That I am too introverted. That I am too extroverted. That I am too shy. That I talk too much. That I am heartless. That I am frighteningly intense with my emotions. That I cannot possibly love someone as much as I do when I don’t really know them. That I can, so deeply and tenderly. I am a lot of things, but I am working from avatar state all the time. At no time do I get to turn off any part of my neurodivergence, just like when Aang and Korra are in the zone…… except I never get the luxury of focusing on one aspect of bending at a time.
It’s why I made the rookie mistake of thinking that Supergrover could learn to love me eventually, but I made a mistake in saying something. I should have kept my mouth shut and let her come to me if it was going to happen at all. And then my ADHD and hypomania kept me from not saying anything. I keep looking at this part of my life because I think it tells me a lot about my personality everywhere else. That I’d made a decision never to tell her already and impulsivity ate my lunch on several occasions. I didn’t mean harm, ever, I was just high on brain chemicals. There are two things about her that if you knew your response would be, “ok. I get it.” Even if you don’t like it, you’d get it. And her picture isn’t even first, but it doesn’t hurt her game at all.
The impulse was that I was betting that she was so gorgeous and so smart that very few people were willing to lay that piece of information on the table because they were so fucking intimidated by her. That my only edge was having nothing to lose. In the end, she was up for wordplay, and I was fine with that. Still am, but at first was taken aback by my reaction. It was more powerful than I thought it would be and then I knew that our emotional connection had done something to me, also unexpected. I didn’t stop loving my wife, ever. I started loving Supergrover. Those things were not mutually exclusive I never cheated on my wife. Ever. Not once. That’s because she knew how I felt and she knew the situation. It was never going to happen, just be patient because I’m miserable. Her “over the line” moment was hitting me when she got angry. We as a couple had the option of making up until then. We didn’t break up because of Supergrover. We broke up because I didn’t get better on Dana’s timeline when all I can say about that time in my life is OTHER FACTORS AT PLAY.
“Medical, medical, medical.” -Lauren Graham
For the uninitiated, the quote means that she’s on a show with medical jargon. When the writers don’t know the term for something, they use medical as a placeholder word for a diagnosis or a procedure, etc. The medical consultants will add that onto the sides as they evolve. So, basically I just made an inside joke with Lauren Graham by using “medical” as slang for “yadda yadda yadda.”
My only problem with this arrangement is that there is no medical consultant anymore, so no one gets an evolved version later. What my autism/ADHD personality tells me is that I desperately need other people to help me check the story I’m telling myself because I am always seeing things in two completely different ways. Looking at the world as nonbinary because I can’t, not that I won’t. My executive function is worse than I thought, though my creative output seems to be outstanding. Everything about me is confusing, especially since I’m just now making sense of all this. Why special classes would have seemed easy and regular classes were hard. Why I was reading at 3 or 4 and failing nearly everything. Why I’m bright and a moron a hundred percent of the time….. because it depends on which part of my personality you agree with that day, not something that’s dependent all upon me. I don’t get to choose whether I have ADHD or Autism. You don’t get to choose that it’s frustrating to deal with, because I assume that if you love me, you care how I feel in our relationship. You also have the freedom to walk away if I’m just that complicated.
It’s not even that hard anymore, after feeling abandoned by so many people. It hasn’t been right or fair, but it has taught me a lot. The truth of the matter is that I’ve participated in lots of struggles brought on by me. I have also done things that I couldn’t control and I didn’t know why. Learning that I was made for my personality to be complicated intead of thinking I’m a shady fuckup is progress….. it’s not that I’m a liar. It’s that life isn’t lived in soundbites. It’s why when a problem deserves attention like intelligence, I will make intelligence my interest because I started in political science and gravitated toward international affairs. I do not like the military because I believe that you can solve more problems with information and diplomacy than you can with bombs and terrorism. I don’t love CIA and NSA and all that because they’re perfect. I love them because people hate case officers when the military does the same shit, yet we would never stop supporting our troops. You know how all autistic kids have that tendency to pick one thing? Well, like in Extraordinary Attorney Woo, we are going to have to schedule a meeting to talk about international affairs, just like she does for whales. I could go on and on about intel from the time I was born. That’s because most of the book talks I’ve been to and the topics the spy museum covers the most in depth are that period. They’re the ones who were active when I was born. Stories of getting in and out of East Germany and tangles with the KGB are exciting because the Berlin Wall didn’t fall until 1991, which made me an eighth grader. Plenty of time to have aged enough where I was obsessed with news. The earliest news story I remember has nothing to do with CIA, but just how long I’ve been obsessed. It was the kidnapping of John Walsh’s son Adam. News became a powerful drug, especially stories about stranger danger.
The next story I remember clearly is the Iran Contra affair. I didn’t know anything about socialism or communism back then, but it seemed like the Contras were really hard on do-gooders….. but I’ll confess that I laughed when Reagan heard that the press helicopters were being shot in Nicaragua and said, “well, there’s a little good in everybody.” But those are the statements by presidents that slipped through the cracks for me. How much I see that now, fascists are always the first to start the rumors that the press doesn’t like facts. How in the hell did Trump get ahold of this country so tightly that even the Post and the Times were suspect? Do they have a long history of putting bullshit into the ether or something? I don’t think so. Why would they suddenly start in 2016? That’s because they didn’t. Democrats view the press as a necessary evil. They don’t help journalists do their jobs, necessarily, but they also view reporters as being able to get the truth out in a respected publication. They’re not being interviewed by the dumbest bloggers in the nation. There are professional fact checkers. Republicans will tell you that the facts are an illusion.
My great uncle flew Apaches in Somalia, shot down in the 80s. What no one knew is that he was covert ops and was flying missions for both C and DIA (C is Central, D is defense, both intelligence agencies for those overseas). No one in our family got his effects back until 10 years later, which added to the mystery of what really happened to my great uncle. It made two people in our family interested in working for CIA, me and James. James is said uncle’s son, and instead of being an intelligence officer, he decided to do contracting work for CIA instead. CIA needs tradesmen because stuff like this happens. If we hire tradespeople overseas, we can’t be sure it won’t be like when we ended up with a building FULL THE FUCK UP WITH BUGS……. luckily, it wasn’t an important building with classified information. It was only the US Embassy.
Because I see things with both ADHD and Autistic eyes, I can accept the fact that both intelligence officers and soldiers do horrific things. But we tend to villify CIA and celebrate Marines, for example. It’s not good for the country because the military will never promote solving anything. They’re dependent on conflict because when we are not actively fighting, profits go down. So, there’s no incentive to use CIA to stop things from happening when we can. This is not true for all leaders, but this is true for warmongers. It really depends how you vote. Some leaders are all about collaboration. Some leaders are so awful they’ll go into CIA’s house and shit all over them on day one (not even close to the worst thing Trump has ever done, but his blatant disregard for his own intelligence officers and respect for their community and traditions- like begging for clearly unearned security clearances- is just beyond the pale. If you’re going to tell people you believe someone else’s intelligence agency over yours, get your clearance with them. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. I’m sure Moscow is lovely this time of year.
I am also not sure that the Trump administration didn’t also have a Mossad plant. It wasn’t just Russia that got our attention. We definitely flirted with Israel. This is not fact in any way, shape, or form. This is my opinion not after shooting my mouth off randomly, but by searching the news for articles just like it. With ADHD and Autism, you vacillate between complete disinterest and absolute obsession. Right now I couldn’t get up from writing at gunpoint because I am in the zone- listening to EDM and a beat that won’t quit. Even when I subdivide I’m still going fast. Every once in a while I go downstairs for a new bottle of iced tea (green with lemon is my favorite), but other than that I look like Mr. Robot. Oh my God. My God. I look like Mr. Robot and he’s clearly coded as autistic. He is not me in all ways, because he doesn’t have those ADHD bursts of energy. And yet he also wears five things. He would look good in an American Giant hoodie and would know about Bombas socks.
The only difference between us is that the keyboard I use has RGB, which I set to a whitish silver. Even if you don’t like bright pink or whatever, a backlit Bluetooth keyboard and mouse are essential for me because I like being able to see them if they drop somewhere…. especially because they’re wireless. It makes them even harder to keep track of, because I lose them like most people lose umbrellas.
All of this is to say that I found someone’s story that is moving me to think about the difference between neurodivergence and masking behavior, because I haven’t really thought about how it would make me feel better to know I wasn’t alone. That I could read about ADHD and that was the same. That I could read about Autism and know what all autistic people were like. I didn’t feel like a bad person because I couldn’t get my story straight. It’s just like my eyes. Sometimes I drop something and immediately can’t find it because I don’t have 3D vision. Sometimes my right or my left eye shifts to be dominant and what I just saw isn’t there…. as if it never was. A magic trick I constantly play on myself. So, in order to be really in touch with my body, I have to know what I need. Am I in an autistic mood where everything needs to be designed for my comfort, or do I feel the ADHD pull of being hyper and wanting to talk to people? Going out is too loud. Staying in is too boring.
I love restaurants, and that’s it. Like, the most exciting I get is a bar that has darts. I do not want to come with you to a club. I don’t like to dance unless it’s a slow song and at that point, why go out when you could stay in? 😉 I would also rather walk around town arm in arm than do anything planned, because like I said earlier, my attachment style is talking to people like they talk to themselves when they’re alone, as in, they don’t have to front with me and I’ll listen to whatever they say. I offered this to Supergrover, and she said thank you, but she didn’t realize that I might actually be good for her in that capacity because she doesn’t look at me that way anymore. Doesn’t mean I haven’t talked to hundreds of people before her that would have informed my opinions when she used me as a sounding board. I make a good judge of people by judging their actions and not who they are as people.
One of the things I did with Supergrover that really, really cost me is that she thought I was trying to make her feel bad when I assumed she knew I was quoting her. I should have known that her life moved too fast and furious to be able to do that, but I could no longer tolerate being ripped to pieces when I referenced the fact that she’d said it so she wouldn’t think I was judging her. I was fucked either way.
The message was “go away and leave me alone” and “I don’t want to go.” This was not one-sided. What I mean is that after a fight, I always showed back up and tried to resolve things. Sometimes, she did before I got there. Sometimes, I got there before she did. But the pull has been irresistible because we do have such a long history. My process is getting all of that to fade into the background, because I want her to come back and don’t think she deserves it. I can hold both in my mind, so the answer is on her. I can sit in cognitive dissonance for years on end. Gray area doesn’t bother me. What I cannot stand is being in the push/pull. I would rather someone go away until they’re sure they’re right for me. I have already decided I am right for them.
I didn’t make Supergrover leave because of something she did. I told Supergrover to take a right when she wouldn’t talk to me. I didn’t care what the outcome was, I wanted her to stop being the party of “no.” Stop telling me what I can’t do and start telling me what I can. How much of me do you want? How much of you do you want me to have? This is all confusing and unbreakable. It would have been easier had Michael and Dana known about this. But they didn’t and they did. We told them what we talked about. I didn’t tell Dana what it meant for me. That I couldn’t have both of them and Dana couldn’t have me. Not because she wasn’t a good partner. There was so much distress in her voice too many times at having mutual friends to believe that I didn’t do the right thing. That’s because it has come up again and I’ve dealt with it. You can’t even imagine what it cost me, and she only knows about one of them after Dana and I broke up, but there were two people I met that would have been problematic for us. One was small. One was not so small. I was angry at both situations, but not at her. I wanted empathy. A “yeah. That sucks. Let’s go eat ice cream about it.” What I got was just more anger. It felt like “how dare you be disappointed.” I felt like I couldn’t have a full range of emotion because everything was an indictment on her personality and her looks.
Oh my fucking God is that not ever true in any way at all.
If this was an 80’s movie, I’d go with standing in front of her house like John Cusack or one of the hundreds that say, “I LOVE YOU, YOU IDIOT!” It may or may not be raining, all that shit. The only carryover from anything romantic is that I like her married name, so that’s what I call her. Just like Jim from The Office calls Pam by her last name. I loved that stage in their relationship and it’s the one thing I do that I truly love, because I know how he looks at Pam when he says it and that’s as far as it goes. The reason it’s a holdover is that for me the feelings of wistful longing are so far back that it’s just tradition. I didn’t even call her by her last name when she was single, because I had a hundred terms of endearment for her until that one stuck. The best ones are the ones I can’t publish, because there are always going to be things that are just for me. For instance, you’ll never see the picture she took for me and not because she wouldn’t want to publish it. It’s that I wouldn’t publish it anyway because I want us to have some things that are just our own. I talk about her. I don’t have to prove anything. I take it that if I say she’s gorgeous, you’ll just believe me because whether that’s true subjectively or objectively isn’t the point. To my readers, it’s not a beauty contest. To me, I can call up that picture at a moment’s notice because I like her eyes better in that one that I do in the others, also it’s the most recent. She hasn’t changed a bit in all these years, as beautiful as the day I laid eyes on her.
My ADHD side says that everything will be okay if we can just change our patterns and the easiest way to do that is to just sit down with each other at a resturant. My autisitc side is freaking out like I’ve been chosen to do Wipeout tomorrow. Just shaking like a leaf at the thought. It’s so easy, and so hard, depending on the day.
I’m sure my emotions are intense, and there’s really no way to know what’s trauma, either. But what I do know is that thinking someone is beautiful inside and out is enough. Wanting to be near someone is not wanting all of them. Wanting to talk about big ideas is enough. A baseball cap because you didn’t want to brush your hair is fine. However she shows up, she’s enough. If I had enough time, I might be able to prove it to her.
But not when she and everyone else think that I can’t keep my story straight. I can. Both of them.
She keeps arguing with me about how great she is and wants to lose. It’s heartbreaking. I would give her anything she needed at any time, but I need her to be consistent in telling me how she feels so that both of us are tracking together more often.
I am hoping that by acknowledging how my brain works, I am spreading visibility on the spectrum between autism and ADHD. How they can be at odds with each other in ways you don’t even realize.
Do lazy days make you feel rested or unproductive?
Let’s get one thing straight.
As a writer, there is no such thing as a lazy day. Work is inverted. In order to put out content, you have to spend time thinking about the ideas before you start typing. Writers look lazy and unproductive because they’re lost in thought….. and that’s a good thing. I sit at my keyboard with my head working independently of my hands. I will stare off into space, typing as I think of something. Some days, the thoughts are fast and furious. If I feel that kind of mood, I’ll put on some EDM and dare the bpm to keep up. EDM really makes me type faster, because it takes an extraordinarily high amount of beats per minute before I lag.
This is not to say that there is no such thing as being a lazy writer. I’m just not, so I don’t assume others are, either. To me, being a lazy writer is avoiding typing. That if you really want to be a writer, you’ll do it. The longer you say you’re a writer and don’t type anything is where the issue lies. If there are stories inside you that you can’t type, you are only limiting yourself by your own fear.
Intelligence is one of my favorite topics, and I love Jonna Mendez on YouTube. She’s a former spy (Chief of Disguise before she retired) who is also a local, so I cannot remember if I heard this from her directly at her book talk here (for The Moscow Rules), or whether it’s from one of her videos with Wired Magazine. But she says that the bigger the crowd, the more no one notices what you do. it inspired me as a writer, because of course the bigger the sample selection of readers, the less will care what I do. I can say whatever I want, because people are always going to be lost in their own lives and so am I. I’ll deal with their feelings about me when they realize I have feelings about them. When you think about it that way, you allow yourself to step off a ledge. Those who know you best might not catch you, because they cannot adjust the version of you in their heads. It might take a different audience for you to level up. As a blogger, my audience gets bigger and changes every day in different ways. Sometimes it’s that Facebook brings in more people than WordPress. Sometimes, it’s that i’m more popular in India or the UK than I am here in the US. Sometimes the US is even third, and those are the days I really, really relax. Whatever it is, it is not waiting for criticism or letting me cripple myself with fear. It is also not letting fear of criticism build, either. It’s getting bigger and getting used to it. I can only dish as much as I can take, and my level is just about where the trolls come in.
I write in the dark to walk in the light, because I cannot take in what others think at all. It would paralyze me. Everyone’s a critic and most of the time wonder why I stop writing about them. So, in order for someone to criticize me and for me to need to keep writing about them after that must take a hell of a lot. Trust me, you don’t even know.
There’s no way to be lazy with the way a writer’s mind works. You haven’t signed up for a nine to five job. It doesn’t matter if the baby woke up fifteen minutes ago and you just got back to bed and “why God? Why won’t it stop?” If you have an idea that you know will express how you feel as art, you have to write it down. I don’t mean writing down every thought you have. I know on this blog it seems like it. I mean leaving yourself key words so that you can pick up the brainstorming session later. It is so very, very difficult to strike gold at an inconvenient time because the creative process is a flow. It, like grace, does not leave you where it found you. To help this, I have two modes and I do one or the other. The first is that I have a lime green Moleskin so it’s easy to see that also has a pen attached next to me in bed. Not on the nightstand. I literally sleep with it like a teddy bear. If I want to write something down, I use the flashlight on my phone. This is my preference almost 100% of the time because the idea is cemented in the writing of it. But occasionally, I’ll be lazy and just say, “Siri. Open Notepad.” I don’t know what the app is officially called, I just said that to Siri one day and it worked. I use voice dictation rather than voice notes, though since Beck and I communicate with them, I’m liking it more. So, perhaps. The best thing about voice dictation is that speaking aloud and reading it later helps ensure I’ll remember it.
It’s also not a lazy day if you take the time to have deep interactions with people, because as a writer you have to have things to describe. Your life is on display, particularly when you write fiction. On my blog, people already know I’m talking about them. Case closed. Not knowing for sure creates buzz that isn’t here. But at the same time, you have to have real life experiences on which to base your world. For me, that’s my angle on everyone else’s behavior and not because their behavior is bad. This blog is the result of trying to overexplain to myself why people are doing what they are doing. It is less intimidating than trying to build a fictional world, which is why I’ve gotten into a professional writers’ group on Facebook that’s really not for sissies. Supergrover would be so proud of me, and I know it. I also know that I’ll miss telling her about my criticisms because she would want to see me grow over time just as much as my writing group does.
Do you remember that scene in “Eat. Pray. Love.” when Liz and her friend are talking about all the people signing her divorce decree? Like, they weren’t even there… Mother Theresa and people like that. Well, that’s how I feel about Supergrover. That if she knew about the wriing group thing, it would make her feel good so I’m imagining her signing off on it.
Most days I know I cannot be a writer without her, and I wish I could mean that differently, because it would make me look like less of a sad sack with an excuse not to be great. It’s not that. It’s that when you love someone, your dreams have to be balanced. You have to take the other person’s fears into consideration. I do not want to be great in a way that ever costs her something. What thrilled me about being together was that we both made the other feel capable and strong… but only when it was good. We turned on each other and never recovered. Now, I’m struggling with a work in progress that could introduce questions neither of us want to answer and she doesn’t see that as problematic. I do as I’m looking down the road. My romantic life doesn’t depend on her. My career as a writer does. At no time do I mean this blog. I mean I don’t want a book to be published and I get those questions nd handle them badly. I’m working through it because I believe my idea has legs, but it’s not anything I’ve talked about before. It’s something I sit in when I look lazy.
I have new ideas for books every day, but I don’t let it control me. Having an idea for a new work in progress is like being polyamorous. You need the stability of the day in, day out grind…. doesn’t mean your life won’t flip upside down during new relationship energy. I cannot fall prey to those bursts of dopamine, because it’s just my ADHD. Those are the things that go into my Moleskine or I dictate into my phone. They’re the brain droppings that could later on become content in my books.
You work every minute of every day of your life when you write. This is because whether you’re completely immobile or laying brick or cooking or coding software or selling insurance or modeling hand cream, you’re still writing.
You’re writing when you’re doing everything else. The collation of your ideas is the most important part, because it really helps to have a clear map of a subject before you start typing. If you think that is not true of this web site, that I wander into nowhere, you’re both right and wrong. I do not see plot and character until I am reading something back. Not while I’m laying it down. It’s the only thing that allows me to be completely open and honest- my willingness to completely change my opinion. I also look at “All Things Considered,” but it might take me a week or two to get there. I can’t explain everything I was feeling during a situation in one entry. To hold me to a single entry is a literary device called “synecdoche,” when a part represents a whole… like calling cars your “wheels” or female lawyers “skirts.” I do not know whether “skirts” is offensive or not, because I never heard it said with derision. But I’m also from the South, so please don’t cancel me in New York or some shit. My synecdoche for Supergrover was “Cheerios,” and yet it doesn’t come close to representing her whole self. Reducing me as a writer to a snapshot of my day isn’t fair or helpful, but lets my beautiful girl score as many political points as she needs to avoid opening up to me. Therefore, I rattle on about her here because our shit is unresolved. She thinks I’m doing it to get back at her, I think I’m doing it because this is how I survived life before her. She seems to forget that I was a writer for 10 years who also blogged before we met, so it doesn’t seem to occur to her that I’d be processing this way no matter how our relationship was doing.
It doesn’t surprise me that her synecdoche for me is “entry.” I cannot get her to accept that she is everything, everywhere, all at once. That no one entry can contain the complexity of our relationship and doesn’t try. That’s because I hope I’m explaining to her like I’m explaining to everyone else; I haven’t stopped seeing the world in 3D, writing about the world around me. She has stopped talking to me about what I’m doing. I don’t have enough information to put it to rest, and I never will at this point. I just had to let the train wreck happen and pick up the pieces. I am just not blessed to have someone who thinks they can learn something from it. She thinks I’m out to get her when I’m the main character on my own blog. How dare me! Of course I should write about my anger from your perspective……. no, I can’t, and here’s why. That’s expecting someone else to read your mind and then getting upset when it doesn’t happen.
What all writers know is that the more we look lazy and unproductive while writing and no one understands the way we process, the easier it is to lapse into thinking your only friend is you….. wherein you spend even more time alone writing into a Moleskine or asking Siri to open Notepad.
When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?
The first person? The very first person?
Me.
I don’t have the same definition of success as most people, because I’m not most people. My personality dictates that I am frighteningly intense with emotions because I take the time to know how I feel with certainty. I don’t hem and haw over people’s feelings anymore, because I realized it was masking behavior. I have worked with people on the spectrum since I was in college. It’s par for the course in IT. But what I never put together is that the way I process emotions is a symptom of ADHD, Autism, and PTSD. Figuring out where behavior is coming from is nigh impossible…. but what it does mean is that I have words to explain it now that I didn’t before, because I met two successful people.
They’re best friends who are in a partnership, but without the hassle of romance. They have, in essense, what Bryn and I have. The absolute faith that we could step off a plane tomorrow, move in together, and live happily ever after as partners who enjoy each other. Romance doesn’t enter the picture because it can’t. I don’t want to chase her across the country and she doesn’t want to chase me, either. It would mean moving to a place where I wasn’t comfortable and having to sit in it until it didn’t hurt anymore. If she came here, she’d have to let go of an amazing community and we’d be relying on each other for a lot until she established herself. Obviously I have thought about this a lot. It’s not because I’m on a quest to steal her away from her boyfriend and complete life in Oregon. I’ve thought about it a lot because she’s the one I’d want whether we were officially together or not.
What I have found is that even when you don’t have a significant other, you still need a partner to bounce ideas off of so you don’t always make every decision on your own echo chamber instead of what people actually say. I’m careful with my words and the meaning of them because we both have an anxious attachment style. Again, an anxious attachment is not a bad thing. You just have to do a ton of work on yourself to shut down The Committee™ that tells you they’re just being nice.
I know because I’ve been treating Supergrover like that for 10 years, but it isn’t an undeserved or uninformed judgment call. If someone has an avoidant attachment style, it doesn’t mean “I ignore people.” It means “I ignore me and focus on you to avoid having to do the work.” Both Supergrover and I do this to an enormous degree, we just come at it from opposite ends of the spectrum. One bleeds out for the other; the other feeds the bleeding out because especially in neurodivergent relationships (one or both halves), we think there must be a way to explain how we feel that makes sense and we will turn it over in our brains until it does. But if your neurodivergence is depression (unipolar or bipolar), your brain knows the very best lies to use against you. Mine, for 46 years, has been that everyone is just being nice to me………. also not an uninformed opinion due to the fact that my personality is only found in 9% of the population. I’ve been able to express needs on this level since I learned to speak.
I just didn’t.
I was praised for never needing anything, so I’d do all sorts of shit to prove I was the perfect child. When I was 14, I felt like my emotional abuser was abandoning me, and she was really the only mother I had at this point. My mother was not malicious, she just didn’t make me comfortable enough to open up. And said emotional abuser said she was an open book and acted like it wasn’t true. So, whether she said it was on the up and up or it wasn’t, it didn’t matter. As a child, her perceptions were my reality. She was also an avoidant personality and within a decade of first contact I’d become a complete shell of a person. That’s because I moved to Portland to be with her, a non-romantic partner in life because what I know now is that I need what Lucy Maude Montgomery calls “a bosom friend.” Before, I put everything in one basket emotionally and my relationships tended to break because of it. Most of the time, it’s that I put too much pressure on the relationship in the beginning because I opened up too much too soon. Having such a close friend takes all that pressure off dating, as does my blog (a blessing and a curse). Writing serves as my partner and lover a hundred percent of the time.
That’s because I had to fall in love with me before I could fall in love with anyone else. It’s not a trite saying. It’s owning a lot and it can get so bad that you end up curled on the floor of the bathroom crying. Sometimes it manifests in behavior- the kind that creates reactions that you know are wrong and will have devastating effects on both parties, but your brain is trying to save you. Picking apart unhealthy reflexes takes me hours every day because I let it.
Making the commitment to get to know myself has cost me in other areas of my life, but it doesn’t mean I’m self-obsessed for a negative purpose. I am not castigating everyone else, I am explaining how others’ reactions to me affect me. I never approach any situation thinking that the other party is wrong and I’m right. If I love you enough to struggle, I will give you as long as it takes to get it together…. and not because I need to be with perfect people. It’s that we won’t get along if you think the way I process is weird. If you take an active interest in reading here because you think it gives you an angle that it doesn’t. Feel free to throw anything you want back in my face as long as it will lead to productivity in our relationship. Get as angry as you want, but don’t walk away if you value me. Take the time to understand why your reaction was angry so that we can discuss it when cooler heads prevail. You are free to walk away in your own anger, but I’ll talk about all our problems here until I can smile and laugh with you again.
Relationships are all about success when both parties want to understand how to reach common ground because they can express how they feel about something. Ironically enough, the people I think do the best at this are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. From what I gather, they are both trying to get emotionally intelligent about themselves before they discuss being real partners again. I had to change my mind when I realized how ragingly hypocritical I was of them, because they were doing exacty what I tell people to do on this web site. Know yourself first. How bad do you think I wish Supergrover had a blog where I could read what she’s been thinking this whole time as well? I’d cut off my arm for it no regrets.
Before, I thought of this couple as unsuccessful.
Though it is not true by any societal standard. We of the United States tend to measure success in wealth. My personality doesn’t do that. Success is owning your behavior and realizing how great you are, because you’ve finally let yourself off the hook for having raged at someone when it’s a symptom of something bigger. That you couldn’t have done any better because that’s all the life experience you had at the time. One of the things I think limited my relationship with Supergrover is that I got time blindness and realized we had gone a very long way down a very bad road without resolving anything, so we were outwardly nice and not kind. We’d fight because we’d let rage and resentment build. I was trying to fix that problem, and Supergrover doesn’t have the time or want with me because I think she’s terrified of how she really feels, because a lot would come up and it would end her emotionally. I am not putting her down in the slightest. We are just not in the same place mentally to be able to accept our flaws and move on, because only I am laying my thoughts on the table.
Before, I thought we were successful and had a shot at redeeming the other in our own eyes if we resolved all the cognitive dissonance. As we spent longer and longer without meeting, our behavior toward each other became entrenched and it was an impossibly large connection to break, because I said I reach for her in the night when I get scared. What I did not say is who was rescuing whom in that situation and what the circumstances might be. That’s the part where only she has answers. My basic, fundamental need in this relationship was ignored in this relationship because I thought if she forgave me on the surface in the moment, over time I’d be able to heal her with my explanations as to why I did what I did and be able to dig deeper into the building blocks of our relationship.
By the time I realized that it was an anxious attachment that was costing me dearly, the cornerstone had been set and the foundation had been laid. If I had recognized that, I never would have told her that I had feelings for her in the first place. That’s because it introduced a fracture in the relationship and we don’t get the right to those anymore. I cannot distance myself from her any more than she can distance herself from me, and that’s what creates the feeling that she’s my primary partner now. The push/pull has become too great a swing, though, because I feel like I’m doing my best to show up every day without fail, because we would not be successful together (with her as my “heterosexual lifemate”) if I was inconsistent. You cannot prove to someone with an avoidant attachment style that you’re really in it for the long haul. It is almost impossible, because they feel so guilty about and jealous of your ability to emote when they can’t.
In explaining what I know about attachments to everyone, hopefully I can explain it to her, too. What I realized is that she was a hurt little girl and so was I. When we were fighting, it was the feeling of getting so angry that you’re fighting with someone who isn’t even in the room. Taking out your anger on someone else who is also not even in the room when you’ve only had a virtual relationship. I am explaining what I know about attachments to kick my own ass as well. With your parents, you cannot and should not attribute rage to triggers you didn’t create. You had no culpability back then and there’s no statute of limitations. You are always allowed, even in your 70s if by some miracle your parents are still alive, to blame your parents for things like a child because that’s not the relationship you set up and that’s how it was supposed to be.
Dog parents know this better than human parents, I think, because few people are unwilling to apply pack mentality to their children. When you do that, you leave the entire family anxious because no one knows the rules. Children are not culpable for the actions of the alpha. Ever. It is impossible by design. If you’re mad at your adult children, it is 100% your responsibility to fix it, because they shouldn’t ever take responsibility for their emotional reactions in front of you. The burden of proof is on you, and you will fuck up your children if you invert that dynamic. They’ll get PTSD reactions and you’ll say “not my fault. You’re an adult now.” In every other relationship in your life, that is a stone cold fact. It’s not taking responsibility for the life you nurtured when you are called on your behavior. Here’s the truth with your kids that’s ironclad. If your actions and your words don’t line up and we spend our whole lives guessing, then when we’re adults we will be forced to go low contact or no contact because we cannot find ourselves without it. Boundaries not being clear as children makes adults who can’t negotiate them because they never learned.
An adult is the equivalent of an Irish Wolfhound puppy. Still young. Still looks like a grown ass adult when in reality, they’re less than a year old. I don’t know anyone who is successful at navigating attachment styles and love languages who does’t intrinsically view people that way. Do you think that anyone is actually capable of being president without that job completely dicing them emotionally and reducing them to their most childlike selves when they’re alone? My attachment style comes from wanting to get to know people in the way they talk to themselves when no one is there. It’s an anxious attachment style because if I show that I am genuinely interested in their problems, they’ll keep talking and I get to avoid my own shit. The anxiety part is thinking that people are just being nice. That they’re a good friend and you’re a bad one. That in order to keep avoiding myself, I must do things to please them to get them to continue opening up to me. This was a well-entrenched pattern installed in my mother. She died before my hopes that she’d self actualize came true in as big a way as it needed to be for her to really enjoy her life. She was just starting that process of individuation from my stepfather, trying to understand why she didn’t enjoy life as much before, getting emotionally stronger every day.
And that’s the worst feeling in the entire world. To know that she was on the cusp of something great for her and she didn’t live to see it. But I lived to see how much she left behind in terms of how she touched people’s lives, the good outcomes in trying to please everyone. I think she did enjoy her life, just like I do. I just think that her life was ruled by self doubt. Both Lindsay and I absolutely rebelled against that. Just like Supergrover, she is one of the purest people I have ever met in my life who will also eat your face off if you cross her, particularly if the object of your ire is me. She has always been physically stronger than me to quite a large degree because I’m disabled. She’s the younger sister, therefore she doesn’t view me as leaning on her and thinking of her as older and wiser as I do. That there are just some things I will never be able to do, and one of them is having her presence when I walk into a room. I get respect when I talk to people for a little while, because people who don’t interact with me in any meaningful way don’t see me as an emotionally mature adult. They see me as a cute toy because I’m small. An easy target to bully especially when you double down because the way you think is normal and the way I think is not……… when in reality a lot more people need their brain chemicals balanced than will ever actually go to the doctor for it.
My mother never did. I would have given anytihng, anything to see her after six weeks of Lexapro. But as her daughter, I couldn’t push her. The closest I’ve ever gotten is straight up telling her I thought she should talk to someone. That’s because even though I’m the child, you cannot see the forest for the trees when you’re in it. Depression, especially when untreated, will make you a shell of a person who does nothing but think about how bad they are. “Let’s do something really scary.” “We could go to bed early and be alone with our thoughts.”
Hell is not other people. It’s being uncertain about where you err and other people don’t, because you are not taking time to look at the pattern in an objective manner. Two egos duke it out because there’s too much pride involved. You’re not coming to a place of vulnerability with each other, you’re just butting heads and the longer it goes on, the pettier your fights will get so that you think the fight is about one thing when it’s generally about something else…… but you don’t know that because you can’t see it.
That’s why being a writer is so important to me. I am not looking at anything but being successful about how I express my needs, and the long journey it has taken me to get there. To me, prayer is a tool for journaling. Trying to make these blog entries when they’re really letters to God, because God is the punching bag who can take it and Supergrover isn’t…… and never should have been put in that position given the enormity of my emotions where she is concerned. The roots of our permutation as friends are unresolved, so she thinks I’m throwing darts when I write from a third person perspective. That I am telling her what I notice, not trying to make her feel one way or the other about it. The letters are persuasive by their nature, not by objective fact…. because people aren’t thinking of what you’re expressing. They’re focusing on their reactions. How it affects them is more important to them than their behavior affects you, and that’s just looking out for number one. It has nothing to do with intentional hurt most of the time. It is the nature of being human. Being responsible and letting go of guilt. Being mindful and carrying no shame.
The more you can state your own boundaries, the more people are capable of relaxing in your presence. That’s why some people are naturally drawn to others. Those who do the work attract people who don’t because in the short term, it feels like you’re fulfilling each other’s every need, and it breaks down because of division of labor. You cannot divide and conquer a relationship. You can only sit down with mediation.
Your ultimate success depends on how willing you are to acknowledge when you’re the problem and can work with people to handle your own flaws while you handle theirs. You can’t change people. This is how you get quirks to line up. They’re only negative when you can’t be sensitive to others’ needs, just as important as yours and yet you still discard them because people tend to believe they’re right a hundred percent of the time. That doesn’t come from arrogance. That comes from how you were raised, the reason you are not responsible for your reactions to your parents and you are to your friends. The hierarchy is set and you cannot break it until the child is ready to be the alpha of their own lives. In some families, this leads to outright physical violence, but I am not speaking from experience personally. I’m speaking from the perspective of having spoken to thousands of people over my lifetime about their trauma responses, because I feel so welcoming to people that they emotionally vampire me because I can’t not let them, or I couldn’t…………..
Until I became successful, like I thought everyone else was but me.
I will certainly try to keep to a topic, but no promises. I’m in a space case sort of mood because I am miserable. Nothing serious like COVID, just allergies that won’t quit. I am laughing over “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” right this moment because I’ve been saying that Sudafed PE should say “does not work” right on the box. One of the things on the show I listened to last week was that the FDA just released a statement saying “Sudafed PE does not work.” So, if I want to feel better, that means a very hot shower and taking my inconvenienced ass downtown where I can get the real stuff. If you can get alcohol delivered, I don’t know why you can’t get Sudafed. Couldn’t you just use the same ID scanner I’d get if I needed an emergency White Claw? Seems like an unrealistic expectation that I would want one, but someone does. 😉
It would make someone a good neighbor to do this for me, but I don’t actually know any. The queer boys next door seem to be nonplussed about me. I think it’s because they’re probably 10 years younger and upwardly mobile yuppies. It doesn’t mean that they don’t like me or vice versa, just that we don’t have much in common. I hold out hope, though, because we’ve only been able to meet each other and have said “hi” from our yards. Maybe by next year it will look totally different. I have no idea, but having cute boys next door never hurt anyone.
One of my other neighbors is Gladys Kravitz and we are united in the fact that we don’t like her at all. She can take a long walk on a short pier. She saw all our cars in front of the house and called the county on us, saying that we had too many people to all be living in one house. So, I had two weeks to get my disaster area of a room in spotless shape (which I almost never do because AuDHD) before the county came to inspect. They got here and saw that everyone has a bedroom and we haven’t spoken since. I think that was five or six years ago.
My landlords are kind of my neigbors, but not really. We have separate entrances and don’t interact much. However, if I needed something, I could call eihter of them immediately. We don’t talk every day, but we gather for holiday meals…. though that may change this year. I don’t know what the plans are, but my landlords have one daughter that live with us and one daughter that just recently bought a huge house. So I don’t know what Thanksgiving and Christmas look like for me yet, but what I do know is that I’m not slated to come back to Houston for either holiday as of yet, but it’s very early. My dad and I are the kind of people that will wake up one day and say, “I want to go to DC” or whatever and just do it. He just has a lot more frequent flier miles than I do. 😉
In short, stay tuned.
The people that affect me much more than my actual neighbors are the friends I’ve met through becoming a writer. In particular, J.L. Henry and Tyler Moore are essentially taking over my education. Tyler added me to his writing group, and I swear it was like getting into grad school. I am done. Floored. I cannot thank Tyler enough, and I will be back to group as soon as my latest stint in Facebook Jail is over. This time, I got banned for something even more stupid. I hit the enter key and was promptly accused of bullying. The text box for the infraction was blank. I can’t get anyone to look at my case, so I’m stuck until November 11th.
Therefore, if you find something you think is worthy of posting on Facebook, I would really appreciate it. Not asking for random praise, just that engagement is important…. but at the same time, I know not every entry is worth sharing, either. I hope you all find something and probably will because the thing about AuDHD is that by not staying on topic, you’ll cover so much ground that there’s a topic for everyone.
I have learned that non-tech people will listen to my opinions on linux even though 90% of my readers will never actually use it. That’s because I have the tech background that is almost exlusively “translating Geek to English” and I’ve gotten the IT job every single time I’ve put that on my cover letter or resume. It’s true, I am operating system agnostic, but I hate iOS for iPhones the most. Luke Miani agrees with me, and he’s one of the preeminent Mac vloggers on YouTube (also a local, incidentally). I should reach out to him and ask him if he needs a copywriter or something. Huge for my CV. Anyway, Luke, if you’re reading this, do you need a copy editor or something? (He doesn’t know I’m alive, it was a joke).
Also, do you guys like vlogs? I’ve done a couple, but I’d be willing to do more. I just don’t because my primary mode of communication is writing. It’s nice to get out of that rut, though, and just talk into the camera like I’m video calling Bryn instead. I might do it, anyway, just because I know Bryn likes them. I will eventually start recording my entries again, but it will take some time. The only reason I don’t do it now is that I need server space. I can’t decide whether I want to host the .mp3 files myself, or buy into something like SoundCloud. I could do all that on YouTube, but I specifically want audio because Bryn “likes to listen to me like a podcast.” If I can find a way to do that, it’s priority one. If more of you want it than that, drop a dime in the box and it’ll be done by tomorrow. 😛
Speaking of donations, I don’t ask for them but it’s a necessary evil. I don’t make buckets off it or anything, but I love it when people will send me $3 and say it’s for a cup of coffee to keep me going. You know what makes me feel better than three dollars for coffee to keep me going? nothing. It’s so much less about income and so much more about validation. I also don’t expect to make real money here- I am building a religion, living Comfort Eagle….. my hat is on backwards. I’ll show you my tattoos. I am in the blogging business I am calling you DUDE!
Today is tomorrow. Tomorrow is today. Yesterday is weaving in and out.
Cake provide the lyrics to my life at all times. My favorite painting of all time is “The Persistence of Memory,” and of all things I would tattoo on my body (as opposed to will) is a dripping clock. I don’t care if Dali was ADHD or not. He make the official logo.
I don’t know what this has to do with Neighbors. I’ve never even watched that show.
But I do know what it’s like to be ADHD and just feel like talking for no particular purpose. I lead down winding roads, and one of the criticisms I only get from my family and friends is that it seems like you “wander into nowhere” and that leads them to believe whether I’m on an up or a down. I’m Bipolar II, and you have never seen a woman get angrier in your life than when receiving that particular criticism. It’s because they become parental about it, infantilizing me to an enormous degree when I have so far made it through 46 years while on ups and downs. Slow your roll. They aren’t very good neighbors when they do it, even under the guise of being helpful. Depression and mania are two completely different sets of emotions and physical responses. Anxiety adds another level. At no time does this turn off my AuDHD need to ramble about nothing. I don’t do it because it is easy. I do it because it is hard.
Rambling about nothing, like neighbors, is the easy part. Anyone could do it. But I would challenge anyone to be as brave as I am in these pages. I don’t get to know you like an Internet neighbor I wave to- you guys really know me. You see me every day. You know what my life is like if you even read once a week….. it’s probably better if you only read once a week (in my estimation) because themes are repetitive as I look at them from more than one angle. Finding an angle on something is what brings me peace, because I can walk away from that writing session feeling lighter.
No one sees all the crying.
I write differenty at Starbucks. I don’t dive as deep so I don’t have emotional reactions in the store. I cannot do what I do without sitting alone in a room, lights off, with the door locked for safety. This is entirely doable since I start writing at 0500 and the house is eerily silent. But in that kind of mood, before the sun is up, I sit down at the keyboard and slice open a vein.
The Supergrover entries take the most out of me, the reason I was so offended when she said I didn’t write her as a 3D character. It was a body blow, and I hope she really takes in how much she wrecked me with that one line. Not a 3D character? Have you even read me, bro?
Anyway, I shake and cry and try to find things that make me laugh, because that was the biggest clusterfuck I have ever been party to, and I’ll never be the same. Neither will she. In some respects, I want her to come back and say she was wrong. In others, I hope she deletes everything and moves on with her life. It depends on what day it is. How bad the pain hurts. How much her behavior affected me and really fucking sucks to deal with on a daily basis, because it’s relentless breaking a trauma bond, and I’m sure she thinks I’m being dramatic. She can also take a long walk on a short pier, because I have wrestled our problems to the ground with no solution, because she’s the only one with answers to my questions, and they’re too big for me to handle alone.
And she knows it.
I’ve told her that for 10 years, and nothing. She doesn’t deal in emotions. I don’t deal in avoidance of them. We are totally fucked unless someone gives, and it’s not going to be me this time. I have done all the giving in I’m going to do because it’s been a decade. If she was going to show up in any real way, she would have done it by now. Fuck the hypocrisy and either get right with me or move it along. Your mama wolverine claws are coming out and you don’t even want to hug me? Get out of here with that bullshit.
I am so done there’s not even a word for it, and I still reach out for her in the middle of the night when I’m scared. Again, only one with the answers. But fuck my feelings, right?
I told her it came across as “only Supergrover is allowed to need things.”
And here’s the plain truth. In a lot of cases, she is. But she doesn’t get this one. She fucked up, she knows it, and won’t deal with reality because that involves feelings she can’t access. That’s because she thinks she’s fine. I do not. I think she’s a hurt little girl and needs a mama wolverine just as badly as I do……… because there’s always going to be things we share with friends that we wouldn’t share with our biological mothers.
I bet she didn’t even think of that, and when she does, so much of my need to be near her will make sense. We are now, in a very real sense, mothering each other. And if she has to wonder why, I’m going to need her to put on her fucking glasses and “read through many lines” again. She reads my e-mails so fast that she’s only picking up a quarter of my meaning, like saying I called her a liar. What I actually said was based around “the lies you tell,” a Southern way of saying you’re being polite to save someone else from harm. I said “the lies you (universal) tell,” and that’s not like you (personal) at all.” I wasn’t saying “you’re a liar.” I was saying “I think you’re being nice and not laying your feelings on the table because you want to protect me from emotional injury.”
No, she saved up all her “laying it out on the table” when I expressed the same need I’d been expressing ad nauseam for 10 years and she wrote me a long ass e-mail saying she didn’t have time to answer anything and I’d just have to be happy with the neverending cycle we’ve got going, which is toxic. We aren’t toxic people, but we do not have patterns of healthy people, mostly because she won’t open up to me except when she’s telling me how busy she is. Letters that really hurt me and don’t get us any closer to healing are long and involved. E-mails that say “I was just thinking about you. How are you?” are almost nonexistent.
She says way too little, and I say way too much.
We have turned into me and the queer boys next door, waving to each other but not really making an effort. I love her too much for that. I cannot put toothpaste back into a tube, another thing I’ve been saying for 10 years. If you can’t commit, as a general rule for all my friends, then please just leave me be. I don’t have room for any more anxious attachments with avoidant people. One is enough, because no matter how hard I try, I can’t turn off my mama wolverine, either.
Let’s first get the fantasy out of the way. I could try living without depression. If only there was a medication that could do that…. even when medication works, it’s a Band-Aid, not a cure. If you thought I was weird before I was on medication, trust me, the medication didn’t touch any of that. Still lost in a world of my own making, which has been very dark and I’m trying to find my way out.
It’s been 10 years, and I’m starting to wonder when I’ll be able to wake up in the middle of the night without reaching for Supergrover. I don’t wish she was mine in those moments. If it’s that time of night, she’s there to calm a fear or kiss an emotional boo-boo. For the last 10 years, I’ve tried to tell Supergrover that. I’ve tried to tell her she represents safety and security in my dreams, the one who’s always bailing me out because if I fall I land on her cape. She thinks I’m trying to make her feel bad, and I know why but I do not accept it as valid. Her feelings as to why I’m trying to make her feel bad are based on something she told me, something I love but that she thinks I hate and must need to berate her about it.
I wish I could try asking her flat out, “why do you think I’m trying to guilt you and make you feel bad that you can’t be my partner? The reason I ask is that I feel like I’m trying to tell you I feel safe and you’re mad about it.” I have a working understanding of basic biology. To hold something like that over my beautiful girl’s head would be the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever done in the history of the universe, and I have never done it. What I have done is told her why I thought what I thought every step of the way. I was talking to her to have empathy, not to encourage. I asked her, “surely you’ve spent more time getting over someone than you wanted?” She agreed, but now it’s eight or nine years later and she still thinks I am trying to make her feel guilty for something I was never trying to guilt her over in the first place.
The fact that she even feels bad that she can’t be my partner is touching to an enormous degree, because I wonder what it is she actually liked about that picture to even inspire feeling bad. What would make her feel guilty she couldn’t do it? Her letters read as bittersweet and they made me cry because of it. The picture of us together wasn’t being intimate romantically, clearly, but I do think she saw the dogs, books, and witty banter thing pretty clear. When we’re together, it’s like having a steady stream of memes to your inbox except we’re just that funny so there aren’t pictures.
Of course, she was already dating Michael at this point and had been for a long time (without my knowledge- this was early- so it might have just been her fixer/pleaser nature bucking at not pleasing me. But at the same time, I hope she does know that my heart was in the right place even when I didn’t show it. I am far less reactionary when I’m not being trolled on the Internet, and I can say the same for our mutual friend.
It changed the whole way I do relationships on multiple levels. The first is that unless my partner is military and just wants to, I won’t get married again. That’s because I know within myself from being queer that I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me who to love. If I married someone, it’s because the legal benefits outweighed staying single, particularly with dating someone military. Being a dependent is a whole other thing.
But what I know from being queer is that you don’t have to get married for love. It’s not because I’m throwing a shit fit over tradition. It’s that marriage was never a part of my childhood, teenage years, or early adulthood. I could look in on it, I could not envision it because I am a Weird Barbie. I also know that all my readers know that Zac is military, so I feel like I should say that dating him is not about trying to convince him we should. I don’t have a “game” here except having the closeness of romance without the obligations of romance, which seem bigger at 46 than they did at 24. So, if you are looking for an eventual wedding invite, you’re not getting one. Die mad about it.
My next partner will get a completely different version of me than anyone has ever seen, because I’ve grown past Sam and she’s the only one who saw the previous model. But they’ll get a different model because I’ve already met the most important person in my life. It’s unfortunate that the most important and the biggest romance are not the same person, but I hope each will learn to roll in their own time. For Supergrover, that might mean roaring in someone’s face or it may mean we’re done. But what I’ve noticed is that she says “I vowed not to respond to your e-mails or blog posts” a lot…… and it jump starts my heart in all the right ways. She is reading. She is absorbing. She is getting something out of it.
I wish I could try hugging her for the first time. I think it would solve a hell of a lot. It would make our relationship look so much different to find the way we fit against each other in a hug, because it says everything about how much we trust each other. You can totally tell distance between people because guys don’t generally want to hug at all. If they do when they meet, they are generally either trauma bonded or actual siblings. for instance, I have noticed that combat vets hug each other more than most, and I am blessed to know enough combat vets to say that. I hate that they got their personalities through such intense pressure and pain, but trauma makes all of us who we are. I understand them and they understand me because PTSD looks the same in all people, no matter whether you were emotionally abused, raped, or kidnapped (as an adult or child). Physical and emotional pain set up the same way. Your emotional fibromyalgia starts with a reality break in all cases.
For me, the reality was raising my mom, because my biological mom didn’t want to and my emotional abuser was a fucking mess who couldn’t get it together until she did. I walked on eggshells around her all the time, which means I have the same reflexes as a combat vet now. Where we differ is in degrees. But it’s all the same shit. No matter what happened in childhood (including combat here because 18 is only an adult in theory), it will be measurable with the same llst of symptoms. Believe it or don’t, it feels just like being autistic or having ADHD. You are wakling around with a third degree burn on your face and acting like it’s not there……. until you doo the work and realize how relentless the burn is and try to turn it down. The severity of your emotional injury depends on the length of time it takes to get your reaction times and behaviors back to whatever your new version of normal might be.
My thing about Supergrover is this type of work is what we set ourselves up for. The emotional affair we were having was completely on the up and up except when I decided to ruin it for all sorts of reasons. The first time it happened, it was because I couldn’t get rid of her internally. She was my every waking thought because she couldn’t not be. Supergrover didn’t plan that part of it, because she didn’t know anything about me as a writer. My process as opposed to what’s published. All this time, she’s read my e-mails and blog posts and thought she knew me. She does, deeply, to the point where if it had been an arranged marriage, we would have figured it out eventually because the rest was too good……… the same way it is now when it’s an arranged marriage of an entirely different nature. No one should attach seduction or it being sordid in any way….. I crave her because now I’m not naturally designed not to. It’s a trauma bond, like you’d have with someone in your foxhole.
What is it that Diana Gabaldon says about secrets? I can’t remember the whole thing, but it was basically about Claire knowing Jamie doesn’t cheat on her. That when he’s with John (or whomever, I can’t recall), secrecy deserves respect. That if something was up, Jamie would just tell her. The same is true of me and Supergrover. The difference now is that she believes I believe she could suddenly be touched by an angel and change her mind about Michael; it makes her terrified to open up to me anymore, and I let her get away with that for far too long. It was not a friendship anymore and I couldn’t break the addiction. I could say the same for her.
I could try trusting her for the first time. I fell in love with every inch of her because she told me the truth, always, even when I didn’t like it. She stood up to my bullshit and I finally felt like I’d met my match intellectually. She could go as hard and as long as I wanted with argument and rhetoric. She always had her p and q statements in a row. We were never merely contrary unless we were just trying to act like eight year olds, which she will absolutely cop to- in retrospect, it was childish, and a war that never should have happened on either side of the equation. I wasn’t stalking her. We were both trolling the hell out of each other, trying to find hot buttons we could use and which ones should be on speed dial. Which ones were just enough below the belt to inspire fear.
Hers were just better, and I folded first. I wanted her to see that she wasn’t so tough because she was treating me like she was. We both called each other’s bluff, the moment I realized she’d have to be my primary partner now (from my perspective- she could share. I can’t.). That she’s hot shit, and therefore a relationship with her hits different and she’s blissfully unaware of that fact. She ended me for a while because I had to figure out what to do. I was in charge of something I never asked for and also wanted. I have only wanted to dive into her to the level she wants me there. And now I’m there to the point where I’ll never get out. Think about how much Peppa the Pig has changed the entire speech pattern of a generation of children. This is us, and i hope that I am as talented as Peppa the Pig.
It would please me if she told the author of Peppa Pig that, and it is not a sure bet she doesn’t know them. It is not a sure bet she doesn’t know anyone. That’s because in terms of gait and manner she’s kind of like Olivia from Scandal or SVU, take your pick. I like the image of Olivia becauuse Supergrover showed up like my white knight and that was Shonda’s vision for Olivia. Why she wears white all the time. Supergrover looks beautiful in white, and she also wears it all the time.
She’s also the whitest person I know despite not actually being white.
I don’t crave the sameness of her life, but the difference she makes in mine. For her, every day is the same. Just normal, everyday, suburban crap. And then she gets to work but when the shit hits her fan, it also hits different. My life feeds hers and vice versa because we’re too different for direct comparison until you get to how much information our minds are capable of processing at once and the capability for Large Discussions is unbeatable. We can talk like Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earheart instead of The Trailer Park Boys….. and given that we both grew up in similar situations, not a turn our lives wouldn’t have taken had we each been looking for it.
I have been doing things for the first time for 10 years just through the nature of the path my life has taken. One of her firsts is only having enough time to get to know a tiny fraction of me, so she’s missing out on all the emotional intimacy I have to offer and trading it for a mistake I made so long ago that it should have been forgotten by now. I am not chiding her for holding onto it. Her right. Her perogative. But not her perogative how long I stay when she forgives me on the surface and makes it where we don’t have any firsts to share.
I don’t have strict principles because I’m AuDHD. ADHD and Autistic people may only have one: “annoy the shit out of everyone and see who stays.” I can joke about that because we drive each other up the wall. But when we joke about our symptoms, we’re not punching down. The thing about “seeing who stays” is that neurotypical people do not have an easy time in neurodivergent spaces like my house.
Zac and I are made for each other in this respect, because his house is a neurodivergent safe space as well. He’d have to tell you what his neurodivergence is, I just know that we have a lot of crossover because we love being together and are also bad at scheduling. He gets busy or has a TDY (temporary duty) elsewhere, I’m utterly obsessed with writing and forget to look up. All of the sudden it’s been several weeks or a month. That’s because neither one of us treat the other like a possession. I can’t remember who said it, but “he’s mine like my neighborhood, not my notebook.” It’s an attitude I carry now, because I feel like Bryn is mine in that way, too, and so is Supergrover even if she never puts it together that I am indeed the friend I said I would be from the beginning.
(I am her old, grumpy wizard and she is my young, brave, crazy knight. I am chronologically younger, but wouldn’t have her energy level at gunpoint. Not enough Diet Coke in the world. “Doctor Who,” as I’ve mentioned before, is not the only television analogy that fits between us, because we are very much like Arthur and Merlin from the BBC drama “Merlin” and Merlin and “Wart” from “The Sword in the Stone.” I take that back. She is still like “Wart,” but I am definitely, definitely Archimedes. She will be remembered as King Arthur, and I see her as Wart to cope. I do the same thing with my younger sister. Her professional persona is intimidating, so when I’m talking to her in real life it helps to think of her as a six year old. That reminds me of a principle I live by. Never treat anyone as if they’re older than 12 because they won’t respect you for it if they’re bad people. Good people need people who disagree with them and ignore their celebrity status. The evil are certain about everything, especially how important they are.)
Now, if there’s any principle I live with, it’s wanting relationships that are as drama-free as the one with Zac…. although I hope that Zac knows just as much as I do that our inattention doesn’t mean less care. We’re busy and we live over an hour from each other. The principle is just to be the person that has the other’s back. I frequently wish I could do as much for him as he does for me, but we’re at different points in our lives. It’s kind of different getting to be a princess every once in a while…… A princess that wears space man underwear, but still.
As I was reading back over earlier paragraphs, I realized that one of the principles I live with now is that my sister needs me more than she used to in a very concrete way. I am what she has left of my mom, because we’re still in touch with our aunts and uncle, of course, but we lived with her. My dad can tell her some stories, but not all because I was there with her after they divorced. I am the institutional memory of what was and will be, not because I can predict the future. I can just predict I won’t want to stop writing it down as it happens.
It’s something I know that I hope I can pass on to Supergrover and Bryn, as we’re all eldest children but their mothers are still living. My mother’s life was cut short by so damn much that I am going to be there for things that my mother never could, in way she never could because Lindsay and I didn’t open up to her like we open up to each other. I hope I can pass on that your siblings become your children when you realize you’re what’s left. No one gives you that authority, you’re just doing what you’ve always done and it feels weird not to try because grief is this whole other thing you will never understand. I don’t even say “I know how you feel” when someone tells me that they’ve lost their mother, because we almost certainly aren’t going to have the same experience. I am jealous even now at how much older Supergrover is than me and she still has her mom.
On the other hand, if she hadn’t died so young, me dating Zac (or any man) would have killed her… I wouldn’t have allowed myself to struggle with those questions on my web site because I never allowed myself to date anyone without thinking it was permanent before. Without knowing up front they were capable of marriage. It’s only because I’m starting to look at what I can manage that I can handle the dissonance between what works for other people and what works for me. I could not dive into myself to this degree if I was responsible for other people, and as I get busier I hope I will look back at this time in my life as a burst of creativity no matter how painful. I hope I’m now on a better path because I took the time to search for it.
I can’t control what principles guide others, the most important principle for interacting with others I live by.
Stories That Are All True 