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.
Let me start by saying that my first thoughts were fairly unprintable on this topic, but I decided to take it seriously, anyway.
I don’t exercise at all. Not purposefully, anyway. I walk a lot because I don’t have a car and I like it that way. A lot of my writing gets done on Hwy 29 between East-West Hwy and Franklin Ave. I wear Bluetooth headphones and listen to music, left foot on the downbeat. When I think of something good, I stop and record what I’m thinking.
A typical walk for me is at least a half hour. That’s because I keep changing my mind. I walk to the bus stop, and get bored of waiting, so I’ll start walking and tell myself there’s a bus stop every major street, so why worry? But then I get to the next bus stop and I still don’t want to wait. I’ll go three miles that way, anything to avoid slowing movement. Movement is creativity.
I’m not talking about dance. Movement creates inertia. If I start out with an idea at the house, I’ll have a book series at the entrance to the Metro, and a short audio clip of what my topic is to get started. When I’m on the train, I get out my tablet and keyboard.
I would like to be serious about exercising, in a perfect world. I’d like a trainer and I would work hard with them. For me, it’s not about losing weight. It’s that I have balance issues and a brain palsy that makes my muscles rebel, against what I have no idea. Strengthening my core is essential to staying upright. I am also of the age that I have been laid out flat on my back from a bad sneeze. Training would stop most of that, too.
Something to think of for the future, that walking won’t solve everything. My body is complicated, and yet, it’s not. I don’t care about what and when I eat, ever, because my blog won’t write itself. I know I will walk until I have something. It’s funny how my weight goes up and down dependent on how much I’m thinking about that day. If my mind is full, I can predict six miles. Not in a row, but throughout the day.
There’s a ton of shops within walking distance of my house, whether it’s going toward downtown Silver Spring and into DC, or toward my neighborhood shopping center, which has the basics. 7-Eleven gets most of my money, because when I forget my water bottle, I stop in for a soda. I like Big Gulps best, because I generally want the ice as bad as I need a shot of caffeine. Or, at least, up until I found Liquid Death sparkling water. If I’m going the fizzy water route, I’ll also “do a shot.” “Doing shots” is how I refer to getting pep in the middle of the day in hopes of not seeming so incredibly old. 5 Hour Energy is the top brand, but there are a hundred of them. My favorite is sour apple with a lime seltzer “back.”
Today is a bit different because I’m packing my “going to Zac’s” bag. Zac has an appointment on this side of town, so he offered to swing by and pick me up rather than me taking the train. My “going to Zac’s bag” is basically full of electronics. Getting on the train home would be impossible without my phone/smart watch, and of course they don’t have the same charger…. That would be insane.
I’m writing about going to Zac’s so that when I read this later, I will remember that Bryn asked for a picture of me with Oliver, Zac’s puppy dog. I am already blessed with “The Daily Zac” and “The Daily Oliver” photos, so it wouldn’t naturally occur to me to take one myself. 😛
Getting those two pictures are the highlights of my day… fuel for the road ahead, which is often lonely due to necessity. I can’t just hand off my story ideas to anyone else and say “I’m tired. You do it.” It’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s that I would feel terrible about asking people to work for free on the off chance a book does well. I am not so precious about my idea that I wouldn’t like a research assistant, for example, but I am also not willing to pay them in dreams.
I just have to keep walking so that my ideas flow organically through me and onto the page. Getting a proposal together is difficult, but definitely easier than trying to finish this book on my own (meaning the alternate history). It’s such a large scope and I’m such a small person. I continually hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew, especially in terms of showing talent.
All I can do is believe in myself, and keep walking, one foot in front of the other.
Just one book? Forever? If I only get to have one, it’s a Bible. Not because I’m a religious zealot. I enjoy theology and reading criticism… but in the absence of other books, I’d have to make my own. Very, very hard without the source material. Over time, I would absolutely entertain myself by writing both First and Second SpongeBob to see if anyone noticed.
The Bible isn’t an answer. It’s a lens through which I see everything else. By taking these stories seriously and not literally, I can tap into something useful… the power of me. When I look at the historical Jesus, I’m looking in a mirror. I feel like every Christian says this, but I’m never sure if they mean it. They leave out the “historical” part and that’s what creates problems. They’re not connecting to him, but the marketing campaign that tried to rebrand him as white. They’re connecting themselves to something that has never even existed.
The “prosperity gospel” people drive me up the wall, and it is extremely important to understand why. Jesus is all about setting priorities, and money wasn’t on the list. I am angry that so many people think Christianity is *only* mega churches so that small communities engaging in social justice are also thought of as suspect.
Meanwhile, the income disparity just gets more intense as people want church that looks like a rock concert, when to me it’s the very worst of both. It’s pedantic to preach to people on an eighth grade level. Assume your audience is smarter than you are, because it is true.
Moving what is basically my textbook out of the way, you guys already know I love Argo, but it’s not my favorite book by Team Mendez. That’s Spy Dust, the love story between Jonna and Tony. I read it shortly after I met Jonna in person, and it was exactly the book I needed at exactly the right time. They’d both been married before. It was their second act after facing lots of hardship, and it was beautiful (both their relationship and the prose that came out of it).
Fiction changes by the hour. It would be impossible to list all the novels I love. When push comes to shove, I still can’t pick one.
Catcher in the Rye comes up quite frequently. People love it because of the foul language (for the time) and the “Holden Caulfied is just cool” factor. I also love those things, but it’s more than that. It’s written from my favorite perspective, probably because I’m a blogger. It’s first person with an unreliable narrator. Holden’s were stories that were all true and God knows if any of them happened.
I am also very impressed with my own writing, but not in the moment. It takes about five years for me to be proud of an entry because I have to be a different person than I was when I wrote said piece. I’m proud when I look at it with a more objective eye… I feel like I’m connecting to another writer and critiquing their work because at that point, I’m not emotionally attached to it. I also have to be my own biggest fan, because to make my blog dependent on external validation is crazy. It’s a journal and you’re invited, both to read and talk back. To need your love and adoration is to handicap myself, because it’s letting the audience become my boss, writing what they want to read rather than this space actually being useful for my own growth and development.
I absolutely do go back and read what I’ve written, because again, that’s what’s useful to me. I read my entries and look at what I was trying to accomplish and ask myself if I’ve done it. Most of the time, I am not sure. What I do know is that people don’t think I know how I come across, and they are very worried. To me, that’s caring about what other people think more than I care about myself.
I’m not being cruel and callous about hurting people with fallout. I am saying that I can’t think about the outside world. I have to let the audience find me because I need this web site more than everyone else.
My personality type says there are callbacks and patterns, so I go back and find them. I throw things back in my face. I get angry at myself. And somehow, good writing comes out of it sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes I’m an angry, judgmental dickhead. I like the bumper sticker wisdom of “when you ask yourself ‘what would Jesus do,’ remember that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is a viable option.”
This is why I’d take a Bible over anything else. People worried over him the exact same way that people worry over me. They even say some of the same things. It is enough to make me shut down this whole site at times, and I have to force myself not to do it; I’ve done it once before and it really screwed up my future.
It screwed me up inside when the same people that tried to force my hand were so outraged in the moment, then months later said, “you were always such a great writer. Why don’t you do it anymore?” Notice I said that they tried to force my hand. It didn’t work. What did work was feeling so terrible about anything and everything I’d done that my poor self esteem cased and trashed everything I’d built in less than 20 seconds. At the height of my popularity, I was up there with Wil Wheaton and Heather Armstrong. Dooce had only started a couple of years before me, when she actually talked about things that got her in trouble. She built her entire audience off of brutal truth…… and then….. didn’t.
I can’t be bitter, because it was my decision. I am just telling you the cost of shamethat comes with having readers. As a writer, you only fear two things. The first is that no one will read your work. The second is that everyone will.
Over the years, people start to appreciate my writing more and more, and I’m not talking about strangers. I’m talking about my friends who don’t remember what happened when and I’m the only one that remembered to write it down. That’s why I’m so careful to talk about people in a three dimensional way. Once the subject removes themselves from the equation and starts reading about themselves as if they were a different person, “all of a sudden” I’m the greatest writer who ever lived because mine was the story that stuck.
If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?
The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the prompt is “Tony Mendez in Argo,” and then I realized that I’ve said that dude is my favorite writer for eleventy billion entries so maybe pick someone else. It’s not an actual Kevin. It’s a rhetorical Kevin.
If you get that joke because you’re also an Argo fan, you’re welcome.
I think I would be a good spy because my survival instincts make me sharper and more creative, focusing on “stage presence” and not the information smash and grab that comes along with it. Tony believed that it was all a show, magic tricks and transcendent acting, because to fail is the worst kind of anxiety. From his books, it’s not that bad when something is happening to you. It gets bad when something is happening to your asset, because the lack of control and the helpless feelings come and visit you in the night.
That could be the whole entry right there, but at the same time, you already knew all that about me and I’m going to branch out.
There are lots of good options. I’m sort of like Michael Valentine from “Stranger in a Strange Land” already, because I am the same personality type as Jesus (INFJ). I didn’t just make that up. Jesus is historically thought of as INFJ, and Martin Luther King, Jr. actually was.
Wow. There’s my answer. Huh.
The writing prompt doesn’t say that it has to be a fictional character.
I don’t identify with his divinity, I empathize with his humanity.
Martin Luther King was just as flawed as I am now. Led people toward the promised land, yet wanted to bang everything that moved. Cheated on his wife multiple times, but we don’t remember that part of it. We remember the story that stuck.
I am hoping that even though I am just as flawed, I am worthy of that kind of redemption in history. That I’ll be remembered for calling out prejudice and hypocrisy wherever I see it. That I will acknowledge that white supremacy Evangelical Christianity has ruled the United States for hundreds of years……. and the black Evangelical church also gives itself permission to think I am only sin personified. It is not the same, but if we walk a mile in each other’s shoes, we can tell where they pinch.
All I am saying is that when you’re talking about discrimination against queer people and the “word of God,” all races are equally bad at it if they’re the sort of people who think God wrote the Bible, that people like Matthew and Paul were just conduits because God couldn’t hold the pen.
The evangelical church has given its followers permission to exclude and berate anyone they don’t think measure up to their standards, and it’s funny how keeping those standards applies to everyone except them…. when being queer was never actually a sin in the first place. At some point, I will probably go through the “clobber passages,” the pieces of the Bible taken out of context to say that I’m a sin. I will refute them all and then I’ll get raked over the coals on social media. But if you aren’t willing to take the chance that Westboro Baptist will picket your funeral, you’re not doing Christianity right.
I’m picking up the mantle they left behind, but not because I’m all that and a bag of chips. It’s that talking to people and making them believe in themselves is my gift, and thus far, I haven’t been using much of it.
Or have I?
Who knows. It’s not an actual Kevin. It’s a rhetorical Kevin.
I posted the audio yesterday as well, but here is a transcript if you’d like to read instead of listen.
I know you guys generally don’t know or care about the Revised Common Lectionary OR the Book of Common Prayer, but the people who steal my sermons DO and I let them because I don’t care. I want my words heard all over the world whether I get credit for my ideas or not. If I hit a home run, it’s always because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants- Jesus, most notably. Use all my stuff and forget about the brand on the ball. Also, I post late in the day so you can’t use it this year. The Bible is put together by the Church universal so that you go through the whole thing in a cycle, complete every three years.
Here is the gospel on which I am basing this entry/sermon. It’s one of my two big holidays, just roll with it.
Every sermon I preach, when I am preparing I realize that Jesus and I are the same person (within reason). He was Jewish, I am Christian. He chased tax collectors from the temple with a whip, and I feel that way about anyone who excludes anyone. I’m also older than Jesus now, so I know that had he lived longer, we would have been more alike. We are both judgmental dickheads, and not because we’re not correct. We just get angrier than everyone else… ok, maybe not everyone. Jesus is the kind of empath that I feel he popped off and regretted a lot, another hallmark of people who know you’re not doing life right, because that’s what our personality does. We don’t want to rag on you. We want to build you up. We want you to join us in our utopia, and you will get there if you listen to us. But if you’re going after people with a whip to do it, I’m guessing there had to be a game of “Let’s Be an Asshole” somewhere.
I do what he does with language. My words are often harsh because I don’t feel heard, and neither did he among his family and friends. Nothing good could come out of Nazareth because they couldn’t see him for what he was and is…. an INFJ with anger management issues. Tell me that’s not me sitting on a Ritz, because nothing good has come out of DC, either.
If you’re lost right now in terms of the phrase “nothing good can come out of Nazareth,” it’s emotional shorthand for strangers listening to you easier than your own family and friends when you have big ideas that seem crazy. According to a Chiat/Day commercial, the only people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the only ones who do.
Jesus was insane. Just batshit.
He thought he could take on everyone who would listen, and like me, if you miss the message, he will flat school you. To me, he is also very funny. Anyone who can make a fig tree die just by yelling at it is familiar with my work………………… #shatnerellipsis
For me, the message has always been his. Widen the net. It’s the biggest message there is. For God’s sakes (literally), the symbol that best represents him IS A FISH. Here’s why. Wearing a crucifix is focusing on his death and not his life. It’s skipping over everything he was trying to accomplish and focusing on everything he didn’t. Do you think it really mattered to Jesus that he was sent to die? He ALREADY KNEW it would happen. So he made the best of it. Out, loud, and proud in terms of knowing what he was here to do….. “I’m here to help the shit out of you. Roll with it or don’t. I don’t have time to want people who don’t want me.”
Tell me THAT’s not me sitting on a Ritz.
If you think that I am trying to say that I am also literally the child of God, remember that I have always said that I do not identify with his divinity. I empathize with his humanity. My heart is continually broken that he didn’t get to live out his entire life naturally, speaking in plain language so that people could understand (Aramaic rather than Hebrew). He was an Idealist painted as someone trying to overthrow the government when he just wanted to feed people.
Besides, God might not be my father, but I was born to upper management. My street creds are solid without any letters. I don’t need them because I’ve been steeped in these stories since I was born, and when I’m preaching, I do every bit as much research as can be done from one Sunday to the next…. the interminable march of Sundays back through the ages and forwards towards our own deaths and resurrections. It’s just that we don’t take resurrection literally, and it’s the one thing we should. If you take nothing else away from the Easter story, it’s this one. Your story matters. You are every bit as capable of telling it as Jesus was. I got a line from an Atheist that I’ll use today, on the most holy of days, because I find absolute truth anywhere I can get it.
At the time, there were lots of people claiming to be the Messiah. His is the story that stuck.
Holy God. “His is the story that stuck.” I went dumb and mute (dumb being a double entendre, for the record).
I was talking about how the Bible is an ancient blog at best, the story of how Christianity was born according to the people who lived it. We can argue all day over whether it’s real, or we could stick to the story that stuck.
Today’s gospel is the story of Mary Magdalene running to tell Simon Peter that Jesus is gone.
Skipping over the OUTRIGHT AND TOTAL MISOGYNY of this passage to focus on other things (this might be a clue we’ll use again later), both Mary and Simon Peter walked into a tomb and saw that their best friend’s body had been stolen. Let’s leave Jesus’ resurrection out of this. Imagine the horror of losing your friend/possible husband to death and not being able to bury him. Imagine the sheer panic of finding out that the grave of their loved one had been robbed, the logical conclusion. Some of the disciples went home. They didn’t stick around long enough (no guilt, they couldn’t have known) for the rest of the story and had to endure that shock. In this moment, the resurrection doesn’t even matter. I wonder how long they sat there and kicked themselves over Jesus saying that they had to walk with the light while they had it. The Disciples are often portrayed as dumb guys, but here’s what I’ve learned in my 45 years. It’s not that anyone is stupid. It’s that the message doesn’t mean anything until you’re ready to hear it.
They did not hear “you have to walk with me, because my life isn’t going to be very long.” At this point, I start wondering what messages I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.
Even The Book of Acts reads like “holy shit, what do we do now? I know there were instructions.”
Their best friend has just died. In that moment, I’m surprised they were capable of any complete thought….. and then his body was stolen.
It’s a miracle that Jesus even ended up in a tomb in the first place. He was poor and the Romans wouldn’t have cared about burying any of the people they crucified. The only reason that Jesus was buried is that he had a very powerful friend that the government needed, so he could ask for something large and actually receive it.
Here’s the moment that judgmental dickhead became divine.
He told you that. He told you that you could ask for something large and be powerful enough to actually receive it. Grace and mercy are free of charge. So is forgiveness. You can let go of anything that is keeping your body in a tomb, graduating into the promise of new hope.
I will do anything for the experience of having done it, because I am a firm believer that you don’t say something is bad if you’ve never eaten it…. and that statement has many transitive properties.
Most writers work for free while they’re doing something else for money, and everything I do for money feeds this web site in more ways than one. So whether I’m in Global Information Services or trying to be a cook, I’m still me. To really understand me, you’ll have to read “The Sol Majestic,” which explores the idea of ivory tower vs. hard work. I am both sides of the equation. I am blue collar and an academic because one feeds the other. I do not need a job that captures any more of my attention than is necessary to feed myself, because I don’t live on earth most of the time. My head is in the clouds, and I am constantly wandering for a foothold.
In the clouds, there are no footholds. Blue collar work is an anchor to keep me from flying too close to the sun. Brandon Sanderson says that if you want to be a writer, lay brick or similar, because you need something that your body can do independently of your mind. I agree, because you can get into a rhythm while at the same time giving your characters room to play. I only have two fiction projects in the works and trade off between them, and it’s slow going because I’m a blogger. It’s not that I’m a bad writer, it’s that I’m so inexperienced with style and structure.
At some point I will have to borrow structure from Jonna Mendez, former Chief of Disguise at CIA and in my opinion, the best non-fiction writer that ever lived tied with her husband. Here’s why. Jonna and Tony have the ability to capture what fiction does without writing it. Their books present like spy capers and you get lost in their movies, internal videos that play as you’re reading. I didn’t just read about trying not to get caught in Tehran and Moscow. For the length of the book, I lived it.
Then I met her in person and the books changed yet again, because not only could I picture her more completely in her stories, they were scarier because I really, really liked her. It’s one thing to read about strangers in peril… quite another when you have an emotional attachment to the story. It made me a bigger fan, though. I have two copies of each book by Team Mendez, autographed paper and Kindle.
If it seems weird that I have both, it’s that the Kindle versions came first and the autographs are keepsakes. Plus, I don’t like to write in the margins of my books and it’s not because I’m a purist and think writing in books is bad. It’s that if I want to make a note about something, I want data I can use. If I write a note by hand, I then have to type it. Wasted energy when I can just attach a keyboard to my tablet or Kindle (yes, Kindles support them). I wouldn’t have thought of this unless I’d reviewed so many books that it was necessary. So much easier to copy and paste text from my notes, and it syncs with Goodreads and a few other programs so I can access everything on every device I own.
I would like to say that I love reviewing books, but I don’t. I’m a voracious reader and therefore, my standards are extraordinarily high. I also don’t want to hurt any writer’s chance of making more money. Even if you’re a shitty writer, you still deserve to eat. It’s a different perspective for me because I am also a shitty writer who deserves to eat, so I probably empathize too much when I should be ruthless.
Speaking of which, I still owe Finn Bell a couple of reviews, because he’s one of my favorite writers in the entire world…. mostly because he writes characters and mysteries that you don’t want to end and there are too many questions running through my mind as to what happened after the story ended. I asked him about that, and he said he couldn’t tell me anything because he was keeping things tight for future stories.
I get it, and at the same time, “AAAAAAAAGH! WHAT HAPPENED TO THE PRIEST, FINN?!?!?!?!”
Speaking of priests, preaching is another job I’d do for free as long as I didn’t have to do anything else. It is ultimately the reason I changed my mind about starting a church. I realized that I was too immobilized by grief over my mother’s death to do things like pastoral care when I was the one that needed it so badly. You can become a wounded healer, but only up and to a point. It’s a balancing act of being empathetic and not getting your own crazy spatter all over your congregation. Don’t think it doesn’t happen. I have watched it on many an occasion and didn’t want that for myself.
It was hard enough coming unglued with no one watching except readers who weren’t in the room where I type. I could say what I liked and process “verbally” without feeling like I had a responsibility to keep it together for everyone else.
Here’s what you don’t know before your mother dies that you sure as hell know afterward. If you are the oldest, you are the new matriarch of the family and it might not be because your family wants or needs that. It’s your own mother lion protection mechanism because you were the one your mother trusted with “the rest of them.” You aren’t prepared for that kind of responsibility and if your siblings are also adults, they didn’t give it to you. You took it because that’s what you’ve always done… sacrificing self to take care of everyone that came behind you.
You feel alone in a way you never have, because now it’s all on you…. even when no one needs you and the responsibility is an illusion.
The phrase “even if no one needs you” is not wiping the blood off my cross or anything. It’s that at adult age, “need” is relative. For instance, I want people to want me, not fall apart because they think they can’t function without me. So many people confuse desire with need, and it ate my lunch for a while as I walked toward the new normal. The pace never accelerates. I have run toward nothing.
I’m not sure there’s ever been a sense of loss as great as continuing my own life afterward, because it was so painful. I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to live because who cares? That’s the other part no one will tell you. When the person who brought you into the world leaves, a huge part of your tether develops a rip and you aren’t carrying a needle and thread.
Of course this is magnified by my bipolar disorder, but I do know these feelings are also universal. Specificity is measured in tiny increments.
I’d be a grief counselor for free. Nothing fills my soul faster than a mutual stitch and bitch, because if you haven’t lost a parent, there’s no way to understand. I am not being pedantic. You just don’t even know until you get there. It will hit you like a head on collision where you’re driving a Trabant into an oncoming train, and this is true whether you liked said parent or not, because those two people made you. I am not speaking literally. Adopted kids go through the same stuff.
It’s that the core personality is set by six years old, according to Erik Erickson, and generally your parents are there for that. Even your facial expressions and mannerisms take on new meaning when you realize that you are indeed looking at your mother (in my case) and you aren’t offended that she’s staring back, because you’re not a copy anymore. You’re what’s left.
If you haven’t lost a parent, you can empathize with me, but don’t you dare say you know how I feel. I wouldn’t even say that to another person who lost a parent. Just because their parent died doesn’t mean they’re having the same experience.
The one thing we have in common is that “hell is other people.” They don’t know what to say and you can’t get mad because you know they mean well…. even though when they say “I would fall apart if my mother died” you want to scream “WELL IT’S A GOOD THING I’M GOING THROUGH IT AND NOT YOU, JACKASS.” Don’t get me started. It isn’t helpful to get angry, just to say to people the best thing they *can* say to someone grieving is “I’m so sorry.” Don’t add anything. Let those words be humble and enough because they are….. and let me explain why.
When MY mother dies, it’s not your turn to have emotion. It will be your turn, but it is not in that instant. To focus on how you would feel if it happened to you is bullshit to someone to whom it has happened. It will come across as “God, I am so glad I’m not you.” It’s also frustrating for people to say that they don’t know what to say and avoid you when you are literally handing them a script with only two or three words.
When I was in the thick of it, just deep, deep grief, I needed people to do things for me. Two problems with that. I didn’t know what I needed and couldn’t ask for help because it was too much energy… both in the figuring it out and in the asking. I was alone in my room for months because no one is prepared to have their mom die. No one. At the same time, I wasn’t prepared in the slightest. It’s not like anyone could have predicted an embolism because the doctors didn’t know they needed to look for one. I can imagine the notes:
Patient is a 65 year old white female presenting with moderate pain and limited mobility in her left leg. Waiting for x-ray to confirm fractOH MY GOD SHE’S DEAD.
Speaking of “white female,” I’m laughing because one of the doctors I work with decided to create a macro in a word processor that would automatically change “if” into Indian female. Hilarity ensued. EVERYTHING in medicine depends on “if” and “it depends.”
My analogy for this is that all doctors are half programmer, half waitress. All of them. Doesn’t matter the specialty. It’s soft skills and “if, then.” So many medical problems are just spaghetti code (everything loops back around into a tangled mess).
And then you look at psychologists/licensed counselors and the spaghetti code analogy gets even stronger. People aren’t machines, and logic isn’t emotion.
It’s honestly why I’d cook for free, and I proved it when I was willing to do it for eight bucks an hour. I needed a logical job so that my emotions were a separate part of me. The place I kept to myself because I already had a place to vent and a partner to help carry the financial load (absolutely the most important reason to keep Dana in the back of my mind if and when I start making real money).
So if you ask me what I’ll do for free, I have touched on so many subjects that the answer is anything, as long as it serves a purpose. I think it’s good advice. You can have it.
This is another story that goes all the way back to my very first girlfriend ever. Her name is Meagan (I called her Nutmeag.), and she’s so Canadian there’s probably a moose in her driveway right now. The way we met is mildly interesting. My 11th grade best friend was friends with her, but I didn’t know Meag at all. I just knew of her.
My senior year of high school, she ended up in my English class. Her desk was diagonal to mine, and I cannot tell you how many hours I spent staring at the back of her head, wondering if she liked me.
I had to wonder because Dr. Hudel Steed, our English teacher, laid down the law. This class is going to be hard as shit, get someone’s number. I had an opening on the first day of school to meet her, so I knocked over three desks to get to her. Why wouldn’t I? My best friend had vouched for her character. She was already in.
I also didn’t know what kind of gift I was opening when I walked through my front door and the phone was already ringing that afternoon. She was desperate to ask a pointed question that she thought was veiled, and I knew it even then. She wanted to know if it was safe to come out to me, and the question was “why do you wear pride rings?” I could sense where she was going and said, “I’m gay. Do you have a problem with that?” She said, “no, I’m a Melissa Etheridge fan.” From that day forward, my life was never the same in too many ways to enumerate. Our first kiss rendered me absolutely helpless, the way a first kiss is supposed to feel. It was Princess Diaries all up in that shit.
Therefore, I love Canadian everything…. Including Roots, a clothing brand that offered to make the kit. One of the pieces was a pork pie hat, which Roots sold separately to customers. I bought it, and brought it with me on a cruise to Mexico years and years later.
The hat was for cold weather, but it was Spring Break in Enseñada. The Pacific Ocean is cold even when temperatures are three digits. I was standing on the deck looking down at the pool when a woman came up to me and pointed at some swimmers. She said, “see all those people down there? We’ve been wondering what kind of athlete you are for 20 minutes.”
So, of course I turned around and yelled “I’m a SKIIER!”
I also learned that while Meagan might not think my impression of her is dead on, no one noticed I wasn’t actually Canadian. I could have spoken in my own accent, but I didn’t. I played that character for all it was worth and oh my God that’s why Tony and Jonna Mendez are my favorite authors…. It’s all coming together now. THAT’s why I love the Argo script so much…. “Canadians don’t pronounce the second t.” “No one will know that.” “If you are caught, they will find someone who knows that.” OMFG. I wanted to know if my cover as Meag would hold up when when my constructive criticism thus far had been “it’s good you’re still trying.” For the record, it’s “Turrono,” frequently spoken so fast it sounds like “Tron-o.”
I just learned things that were deeper than mere mimicry, like when Canadians tend to say “eh” and when they don’t. It’s not just being able to imitate someone, but to understand the things that have informed why they do them. To understand how to say “house” and “mouse” like I was born in Alberta while also understanding that it is annoying as fuck when people ask if “y’all have Christmas on the same day.”
People don’t open up to me because they’re afraid of what I’ll write later. I am capable of taking on the world’s pain and am constantly laden. I think my blog has become a coping mechanism for weeding people out, I just couldn’t say that out loud until now because I didn’t know it was true. But it is.
There’s another level, though. It’s a shield. You don’t want what I perceived to be your behavior on this web site? Don’t be my friend. I’m also not hiding who I am or lying about the fact that I’m a blogger. We’ll have extensive discussions on what I can and can’t say and we’ll come to a peace about it. I just won’t give you editorial control. What will change is my own feelings in writing about you, and being able to sense that I’m hurting you. It changes me when I’ve hurt someone, and I don’t like it at all. Alternatively, you didn’t want your terrible words on a web site? Be nicer. I will tell your story as fairly and balanced as I think it can be, but it won’t happen overnight. It will happen through the tapestry of our lives, when sometimes I’m so full of love for you that it spills out onto the page. It might take an entry or it might take a year, but I’ll write about the bad things, too. If your choice is to walk away before you see the whole picture of anyone on this blog, you can. No hard feelings. No one is asking you to read my work, as far as I can tell. I will, but it’s like church. I’m showing you which one I go to and completely uninterested in offending you. I want to show you what I like and have no self-regulatory mechanisms, as well as things that make me babble, almost certainly brain gremlins.
I’m also showing you the very best and the very worst of me. I will take the knife and stab it further into my chest than I will anyone else’s. And because we’re close, you know I’m a blogger that talks about my life and I will never stab you in the back. I might anger you, but you knew it was coming. You also know that when the fight is over, I’ll be back to glowing about you because life is life. Relationships come in seasons and they certainly aren’t all perfect. If the hurt is bad enough, I won’t write about you at all because I can’t, then maybe when I can look at the situation differently something will come to me that reads universal above being personal. People think I’m talking about them, but I’m using them as illustrations for bigger ideas than that because I think in terms of individuals and groups.
For instance, I cannot tell you how many suburban moms probably think “why does she think I’m into all this shit?” First of all, I don’t care if you are or you aren’t. I’m going to talk about my life and invite you to do things. How do I know you’re not into it if I don’t ask? For instance, if I ask you to get a matching tattoo and you don’t like them, all you have to say is “I don’t like them” or “I’m Jewish.”
At the same time, I want to describe my life. I want you to see how madly in love I was with Dana and at the same time, the way she destroyed me (and vice versa, just differently and I cannot speak for her). Both of those things are indelibly true, written on my skin because we have matching tattoos. They’re not romantic, or they’re not anymore. It’s a Celtic knot and both our families are from Ireland. If it was her name, it would have been on my ass (it’s a stupid fucking gimmick and everyone knows it). We just decided that those kinds of matching tattoos were vomit inducing and painful to remove. We got symbols that would represent our family jointly and severally. I am so glad we did it, because it is artwork in my museum, representative of my history and I’m proud of it.
Here’s the other important thing. I don’t stick around for the other side of the story because you’ve already told me you don’t want me to hear it if you end our relationship without talking about the hows and whys. Perhaps my loved ones are all saying how much they hate me now and because I don’t care, they are free to continue hating me for as long as they want because it’s only killing them.
I do my best to make people memories so that I am not talking as if I care about the outcome of our future interactions because I can’t. I am hurt too badly to feel out next steps, and you didn’t stick around long enough for me to get over it. To ask/require that I don’t write about something is difficult because I’ll try my best, but I cannot function without blogging and you’re asking me to be less than I could be. I have to decide whether what you’re offering is worth all that.
The other thing is that you only see what I choose to show, and being able to explore these problems without talking about others is helpful because some problems are a way to explain others, using a library of images in my head from one issue to explain another to illustrate human behavior. I don’t care if that’s how you process information, I just need you not to care that I do it and it would help if you were completely unimpressed with me as a writer. Yes, it’s cool to say things like “I’m bigger in India and Ireland than I am in the US.” No, it was not cool to give my URL to a potential date only to have a fan show up for coffee. She knew me chapter and verse, and proceeded to berate me that my answers from four years ago were not the same ones I just gave in the moment, as in nothing had ever happened to change my mind or should have had the capability. After that I just wanted someone who didn’t speak English.
The pen is mightier than the sword, and I know that because when I experience physical rage, it comes out through typing. I can use my words to keep me from doing something kinetic. I see red and talk myself down.
And what people fail to notice is that if you hurt me bad enough, I will never talk about you at all, because some things are too painful to explore, even for me, even after years of experience. Nothing in my life is as it seems, but I’m not being shady in the slightest. There are some boxes in my subconscience where I’ve thrown away the key.
The way I eventually get there is dreaming, because in my dreams I have enough clinical separation to think about a problem hardcore without it affecting me physically. The way that becomes problematic is that when I have real conversations later, people aren’t following the script. I can’t stop myself from writing them, so I’m having to develop real emotional power so that I’m not quick to react when people aren’t picking up what I’m putting down…. Because that’s a trauma reflex.
I’m quick to react because I think I’m being abandoned and I will do anything to prevent that pain in myself, most likely pushing you away first so that the story I’m telling myself cannot be that you left. It would kill me.
And I just figured that out by writing.
So, in effect, Ireland and India are the ones to whom I’m speaking, and I allow you to listen (speaking to my real friends and family). Words are precious and I’m choosing to let you read my thoughts. To me, when you give me blowback, it means that you’re allowed to have opinions and I’m not, and you care more about India and Ireland than you do about me.
And I just figured that out by writing, too. I explained me to me so that I can grow from where I am and not have to repeat the same pattern. I can age, letting go of the things that no longer serve me. The rate is getting faster because I have less time now than I did 20 years ago.
When I’m looking for friends now, it’s a different capacity, because they’re the ones I want at my funeral because someone has to say nice things and it might as well be because they actually loved me out loud and where I could feel it.
Most people get frustrated that they can’t win with me while also not asking any questions at all, just running around shooting arrows in every direction while I am standing there fucking holding directions but my opinion doesn’t matter. I am not dictatorial or anything, it’s that I own half a problem. If you’d rather wander around in the dark rather than trying to understand me, your choice.
But don’t be offended when I give India and Ireland the map instead. They care, so you don’t have to.
If you are one of the three people dying laughing right now because you know what an inside joke I’ve just made, you’re welcome. Tell the others, except Steve. Nobody does shit to David like that.
You have to go back decades with me to understand that paragraph, because it originated when Lindsay and I ended up in the same Constitutional Law class at University of Houston (I had a full time job and she was five years behind me, so she caught up easily). Not for nothing, she got a better grade in the class than me and I destroyed her on three of the four tests. The only one I blew was after my girlfriend had been an asshole to me that day and I couldn’t refocus. I came back with like a 102 on the final, which is the only reason we’re still cool. Between that fight and teaching my cat to wake me up at 0530 by sticking one claw up my nose (yes, really), I would have had good authority to leave well enough alone… and missed all the good things she brought into my life later.
It’s why I held my own beautiful girl in my heart for so long, but the writing prompt today reminds me that I put her down to make room for community improvement. If she does the work, the key to my clubhouse still unlocks everything. If she doesn’t, she’s not dumb enough to show up regardless. We both know it will end up exactly the same way…. But showing up scared, willing to be weird until it’s not? That’s not the clown shoes, that’s the tent. That’s the whole show, and I am the world’s best audience.
My job now is to find someone who does have emotional bravery and isn’t afraid to use it, because I think she just thought that she could go back to being a fan, just dropping in and out like people I’ve known for five minutes. I can’t do that. If you know me at all, you know I can’t do that. My love for my friends is gigantic, and I don’t give it freely because it’s too much energy to spend on anyone who doesn’t want it. I want friends that want me. Be a fan. Just don’t tell me you’re reading and what you liked, because it will cut me like a knife thinking of all the times I wished you were my sous…. And that line goes out to quite a few more people than you might think. Didn’t Tony Bourdain say something like “a sous chef with a criminal mind is a thing of beauty?” If you’re my ride or die, this description probably fits, and has for a lot more years than this blog has existed. But it’s not NOT about my beautiful girl, either.
Keeping in mind that my analyses of our problems are likely stupid assumptions because they’re all I have to go on, my guesses are educated. That’s because I have analyzed the problem through heuristics that have come at me since I was born- patterns that people follow regardless of income, social status, job, seniority at job, etc. Communities and people are universal. You can be President of the United States and a hurt child simultaneously, because every adult that does anything is a hurt child, just bigger.
That whole idea is how I am helping my community. With all that divides us, we’re just all frightened, hurt children who need each other while at the same time, insisting we don’t.
If it seems like I’m breaking apart for no reason, I’m a part of her brain and she’s a part of my soul and we’ve been wrapped tight for almost ten years. Being connected is as autonomic a reflex as I’ve got in this world. The hardest part of this whole thing is that we were going to have an occasion on our hands pretty soon and I didn’t want to make it. I was wrecked inside because I tried so hard every single day after I broke trust and she hardly ever talked to me in my own love language so that when she said she was impressed, I could hear it. When she said she trusted me, it was real.
I was all Maury Povitch on that shit. I have spent countless hours with my thoughts and they have all given indications “that was a lie.” The worst part is that I couldn’t tell her how I felt in a way she could hear me and vice versa, because I really couldn’t tell that she couldn’t tell that I wasn’t guilting her. I was raking myself over the coals and she was listening to it. I was prostrate with grief and shame. Sounds came out of me that were wounded animal for days. I may never get over it, and she did nothing. I helped myself to this train wreck and smiled through the devastation because I knew that I could blame her for absolutely nothing. That I was going to fall on my sword for all eternity because I couldn’t look myself in the mirror for years. She was the one who put light in my eyes after a long day’s journey into night…. And take that for every turn of phrase you want.
I also don’t think she ever took in all the ways I just wanted to be in her sunshine. I created a tape in her that said I only wanted her body and she’s dealt with that shit her whole life. I’m certain that I made a mistake where hearing “I’ll take on everything” didn’t mean anything. You’d just have to know how big everything is, equivalent to a month of mea culpa that didn’t have to happen. I could have stayed silent and not acknowledged guilt, shame, and remorse. I suppose I wanted everyone else to see it when she couldn’t.
Because this is all my own doing, I’m not mourning her nearly as much as I’m feeling terrible about the way I acted and not being able to communicate where she was open to listening and hearing. In my opinion, when we were e-mailing, she frequently responded so quickly that I knew it was going to be a reaction and not a response. When I called her on it, another huge fight when I even said I wasn’t basing my words on anything but timestamps. The reason I think that is her responses didn’t change to empathy very often. So much more you’re just trying to provoke me. Seriously? Get bent. If you really think that, it’s why I’ll leave you behind. As if I don’t have just as much going on that would prevent me from having the time or need to goad you into anything. I am 45 years old. Just because she’s chronologically older doesn’t mean shit, I assure you.
We’re both children when we fight (when we both tap into our inner eight year olds, that’s the moment when all the color drains from our fire and God help both of us because we have no problem absolutely destroying each other and we’re way too fucking good at it. There’s also no way in hell it would have turned into this if she’d ever bothered to get off her keyboard warrior high horse or ask me to get off mine when it was my turn to be champion at “Let’s Be an Asshole,” and ironically the score is love when we’re the most furious.
We would have been different friends altogether had we ever hugged and I can point to the exact moment we chose the wrong fork in the road. It was agreeing to Skype and then not making it happen. Not normalizing everything killed us, and it was all my fault. The phone, even on VoIP, goes both ways. It was a series of unfortunate events for me that started right there, because I know me. We’ve met.
Every single thing in our lives felt bigger because there were only operatic swells of emotion on the page… the emotional equivalent of freebasing cocaine, not the measured conversation of two people who love each other and want to solve all our shit together. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that I am just as loved as she is because it would be impossible for it not to be true. My signature is sewn into her heart and it has been for too long for it not to count.
I remember from one of our first conversations telling work to shove it and drinking wine together in the sunshine, a daydream to put myelin back on each other’s nerves. I had just sent her a copy of a piece I was working on for church, and I am so much more impressive to people who have no natural ability for music than I am to people who actually know what they’re doing, just mutual admiration because her comfort was thinking about getting away from her actual life for a hot second and mine was thinking she was the sun in the whole equation. I’ve always thought that, and I have told her on multiple occasions. I hope someday she’ll believe it.
What is also just as true is I’m telling you it hurts because I would hope you love me enough to stop. If you are trying to tell me the same thing after years of me being butt hurt that I’ve been talking and nothing has ever changed? Get out of here with your bullshit. You may have time commitments, but I will be patient for years on end…. Not even a pediconference to make sure we were on the same page. She doesn’t owe me anything, but if I tell someone day after day after day that they are safe and loved and they still hold me at arm’s length? How long do I have to hold onto a relationship that isn’t really there? It’s not on her to get to decide how I spend my energy, either. I’m not going to keep my calendar dates open for Godot over there… and still, she’s the only one that can light me up from the inside at Such Great Heights while The District Sleeps Alone Tonight, waiting for The Postal Service.
Which is why I’m willing to say this relationship is dead in the first place, and why my faith tells me that it will actually never be over because resurrection happens in the middle of the mess. If it seems like I can tie this relationship to Easter really easily, it’s because we’ve blown each other to bits this time of year more than we haven’t. I think it’s body memory. So much happened in March and April of several years running, and now that pain is intrinsic. We feel it underneath and react, again, like butt hurt little girls. It will never be any different because she’s the person in my life outside my biological family where it’s easy to regress. She’s got my hot buttons on speed dial. It would change if it could, but I don’t think it will. If she accuses me of trying to get her attention, I’ll get offended and say so.
Pain ensues, usually with her anger and me taking it lying down because I have to. I feel like I owe it to her to make up for past mistakes. I’m Roy Kent asking Ted Lasso to scream at me in every fight, but she won’t fight about that. She’ll fight about everything else under the sun, just not that. Is it any wonder that her big line about me is that I can’t be counted on for anything but constantly saying we’re done and not done when I am waffling between feeling worthless and standing up for myself every single day, without fail, for seven years? I just got to a place where not wanting to feel that miserable every day sounded better than continuing my campaign for self harm.
God, so much goes into love that attraction is the least of my worries. It was never about that, and I fucked myself in every sense of the phrase. I just wanted to be hers, in whatever way that meant, and now I am, or I hope so. I hope that my words run through her mind when she needs them the most, like asking God to live in the parts of her that tell her she is right and good, and when she’s telling herself that she’s not, to yell at her… a lot. She’s an atheist. That doesn’t mean my prayers don’t matter. She has always called me her pinch hitter, and sports mean so much more to her than they do to me. It’s a compliment I take very, very seriously.
BUT.
If I need something, and you’re not even hearing me and just assuming that I’m trying to hurt you, we’re done. This one is just a hundred times worse because my term of endearment for her came from Sesame Street and hers for me was a goddess once upon a time, but it sure as hell wasn’t later on. There was never a different one, just constantly telling me through thought, word, and deed that judgmental dickhead was all I’d ever get. That I sat in judgment of everything instead of pleading for relief. There is nothing in this universe that is less true than me wanting to hurt anyone, least of all the one I love the most. I am working through my trauma reflexes, picking them apart one by one, trying to turn them off so that I am even less capable of being rattled so that when her tail goes off I can get out of the way before she strikes. I have managed it to do it before, and I was looking forward to more of the same… but she caught me on a very bad day and I exploded. I didn’t even give her time to blink when I told her to take a right, and I am still shaking with such anger that I can’t tell from one day to the next what my end goal is here. I really don’t have one. My get up and go got up and left. It’s ok. She’ll never know what she lost because she refused to believe it existed, because how could it? I fucked her up, and there’s no way she would attribute that to my own trauma reflexes and not actual ire… even though that’s been my excuse for why it’s okay for her to hurt me, because of course she has the right to be furious. I just felt like time was up, and I’d suffered enough. She accused me of constantly creating the narrative that I’m a victim. If she’d ever bothered to look for it, there would be this amount of mea culpa a thousand times over. But if the story you’re telling yourself is that I live to be a victim, it ceases to be my problem what you think of me…. Especially when I send multiple page essays on why I think you are so much more deserving of love than I am in objective, not subjective manners… and have for almost ten years, seven of which I knew you wouldn’t grasp my meaning because you weren’t looking for it. You wanted someone to tell you that you didn’t deserve love, so that’s what you heard no matter how much I talked.
It became a time warp. Assuming that I deserved all the punishment I gave myself made it where I didn’t notice that I’d been doing it for seven years. I apologized without ceasing, through every fight, and after a while, I was the only one that ever did… another severe crack in our foundation.
But what a beautiful foundation. It even came with mascara and a tote bag.
And that’s why I was crying as I explained to the bees that La Dame Blanche had gone back to Paris, but they still have all of me. My light isn’t as bright yet. They still have time to watch my hair turn white in the sunshine, long after the storm has faded.
I won’t remember her as anything but my muse, and I just have to hope to God that she remembers who she is. If she does, I’ll be thankful. If she doesn’t, I will still be thankful because the relationship was too turbulent to continue unchecked. I can’t focus on processing a thunderstorm without looking at the strength of my boat….
Another Lenten/Easter reference because if you look at Lake Kinnaret, you can tell that the Sea of Galilee was no great feat to cross. The amount of danger wasn’t equal to the strength of the storm, but the worthiness of the craft. I can only control one of those things.
How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?
I never needed to do anything for the pandemic. I’m an introvert homebody by nature. I also didn’t like wearing masks, so staying home was more comfortable, anyway. Everyone in my family has had it but me, and I still don’t have the last booster because it was too much energy to schedule when my risk factor was so damn low. I have the first three, though, and they did come in handy when my friend Robert Glasper (sat behind me in history in high school) came to DC and played “The Reach” (an addition to the Kennedy Center that focuses on hip-hop). It’s so fabulous. If I were to plan the perfect date, I’d want to go see Robert. Romantic, platonic, whatever. It’s a great place to sit outside and have a drink before or after the show, because the garden patio is just as much fun as looking at the art indoors. My last trip was incredible because it was one of my favorite artists on my actual birthday.
I also really, really like seeing Robert alone so that no one talks to me and I can just take pictures of him and the band. Last time he was on tour with Yasiin Bey. It was funny, I told Robert to tell him he was my favorite alien (he played Ford Prefect in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), then walked away and thought, “I’m a friggin’ Doctor Who fan. I’m an idiot.” The only person that he plays with that I’m desperate to see is Jason Moran, because I was actually closer to Jason than Robert. I get to see Jason more because he actually works here (still lives in NYC, but is also jazz director at the KenCen). I’ve just never seen both my guys outside of the High School for Performing and Visual Arts bubble.
I would even get the last booster for that one.
Seeing Robert was definitely the highlight interruption in my otherwise quiet existence, because I’d rather play with my characters or talk to all y’all than do much else. If you knew the main characters I was working with, you’d spend time with them, too, and there are only five people on earth who know the answer to that question. If any one of them talks, it will do an enormous amount of damage. This is it. This is my magnum opus, and I can’t think of anyone who would figure it out faster than my chef of an ex-wife. I’ve left breadcrumbs all through this friggin’ web site in hopes that she gets the hint. She just looms so large in my memory that if I succeed here, I’ll be able to trace it all the way back to “hi, I’m Dana.”
God, don’t you wish you knew which breadcrumbs were only for her? I bet you do. Maybe in 20 years, because I swear to Christ if the idea is executed properly, it’s worth millions. I can take that check to the bank and cash it, because three of the five are subject matter experts. Dana could guess all three with only three guesses given if she picks up what I’m putting down.
I’ve already put it in writing to The Five that if I get rich, so do they. So does Dana. So does pretty much everyone I ever knew because there’s no such thing as a self-made millionaire, even if it was just sacrificing giving gifts to your friends even when you really, really want to because they’ve been so kind to you.
For instance, one of the huge gifts that Zac has given me is his time. We’ve been dating casually for months (I only see him every few weeks and that’s fine with me because again, characters.), and his gift is not only his time, but his house as well. If I need a different office once in a while because I’m going stir crazy, he’ll leave for his office and “leave me in mine.” I’m not sure he sees it as a gift, but it’s more precious than gold. I think the one true thing I’ve said about this novel over and over is “it’s got spies in it.”
Zac is an SME because he works in a smaller agency than CIA, but collects raw data from all the intelligence bureaus we have. He’s not a spy, but spy adjacent (I think……….. you never friggin’ know in this town). That way, he can at least teach me unclassified jargon, because if he doesn’t know it, he can at least point me in the right direction. Neither one of my characters *start* as intelligence officers or assets/agents. I’m borrowing structure from Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, an alternate history in which Picasso and Einstein meet at the Lapin Agile, a cafe in Paris. The book is their conversation.
It opens up all kinds of possibilities for me as a writer, because my story actually does start in Paris. As I’ve been telling Daniel, I’ll go with you everywhere, it’s just that the only places I have to live for a while are Paris and Ho Chi Minh City. The majority of the story takes place in Viet Nam, so I want to go there first on a 90 day visa. I’ve found a range of apartments, and there are huge ones in the middle of the city for $4-600/mo. I could get by on a studio for $200, but it’s better for me to have a separate office. If I’m going to have a work in progress that’s worth this much, I want a friggin’ door that locks when people come over. If you think I’m being paranoid, ideas are my currency. I’m the product. If this isn’t the right idea for me, it’s the right idea for someone, and Joe Hack is not going to decide to take a stab at it.
I’d sell it to “The Daniels” rather than keep it on my home computer if it was unsecured (speaking of which, they’re one of the few directors I’d even attempt to trust). Yes, I know that Daniel and Daniel are separate people, but if I can live with being “the girls” for almost a decade, they can roll with it or don’t).
Now do you see why the pandemic didn’t affect me at all? I’ve just rambled on for like 15 minutes and not even looked up.
And for my Ted Lasso fans, I didn’t even know I wanted Trent Crimm, Independent to be a Diamond Dog until he wasn’t. And yes, I’m just as much of a train wreck as Ted, and I’m proud of him because he’s doing the work.
We kept each other company during the pandemic, Ted doing work at his house and me doing work in mine.
I just can’t with me sometimes. I’m so tired of being an Idealist. I am tired of constantly living in the story that INFJs tell themselves, that the world will be utopia if we just do x and y to climb toward z. We all do it. We all take on the pain of the world and analyze it until we understand. My trauma reflexes make me nitpick and I often don’t realize I’m doing it. I’m sure it makes me, too, sound like a hardass. I’m just the type person that will hug and kiss you while saying “I know you’re a mess. Let’s get you back together.”
I will only do that for the people I love the most, because that’s how much energy I can dedicate to staying with someone until the process is complete. I’ve always thought I would be an excellent executive assistant for that reason… dedicated to helping one person succeed and hopefully becoming so focused that it’s not possible for that energy to leak toward everyone in the room; I feel their pain even when I’m supposed to be partying. I have a glass of wine and the feeling intensifies, which is probably why I only have one drinking buddy. Therefore, we’re sitting and talking to each other and my energy is only on him. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a party, engrossed in a conversation, and solving a marital problem in my head. It wasn’t mine. It was across the room.
I joke about only supporting gay marriage if both chicks are hot, but I swear, some days………
It’s not that I hate myself all the time. It’s that I hate not being able to see what’s in front of me. I am an Idealist with no self-regulatory mechanisms. I can tell within a handshake or two whether I want to have your babies. Doesn’t mean it’ll happen. I can just see it.
What I can’t do is simply focus on shaking your hand. The pictures start flying across my mind within a few minutes of talking. Generally, I know whether I love people within a day or so, and it’s not meant to be frightening to hear it. More like Philia/Eros. Context matters, but it’s not generally up to me as to which one it will be, neither is it quantifiable or binary. It is a feeling that encompasses so much, and we will choose our own adventure. Lust is felt in a hot second. Love takes time to figure itself out, because it is a hard working verb. Everything from “here’s where it’s safe to leave a mark” to “of course I’ll pick you up at Dulles.” I would venture to say that the latter means more, because no one wants to pick up anyone at Dulles.
I am intimidated that as an Idealist, with a framework in place, I can see everything from here to the airport within a very short period of time. I’ll tell you where I’m going and invite you, but if I’ve made the effort to assure you that you are safe and loved, then don’t be surprised if I am unhappy you’re no longer with us. I hate it when anyone separates from the company. I’m just not very good at it. I’m like The Doctor when he’s traveled alone too long. I’m just Twelve all the time and wish I was Eleven.
It would not be unlike me to have a companion called a carer because they care so I don’t have to.
In fact, it would be great to be able to delegate. I can to a certain extent because my sister doesn’t build futures the way I do, but she does understand people and often brings me back down to earth. I know I say things that are too deep too early, and part of it is natural. Part of it is that after I’ve said it, it’s a “separating the men from the boys” exercise. If you can’t tell me what you’re feeling or you run from large emotions, duly noted. That’s the kind of stuff that really makes me feel unloved and I won’t stand for it, especially since I will absolutely pour my everything into helping you succeed, because it’s filling my own purpose in life.
Sometimes I wish I had a secretary that would warn me when “that pretty lady is causing all kinds of hell,” even when it’s me.
I think it would help me to stay on track, not get lost in the world I’m building instead of navigating the one where I live. I think the phrase I’ve heard more in my life than any other is “God, Leslie. Chill.” I don’t have much chill. I am Leslieserious about everything until someone reminds me to not.
I look up and realize I’ve been lost in the story I’m telling myself. Maybe it’s time for more sleep. Maybe it’s time for a beer and a chat with friends at a pub. Maybe it’s turning off the news and not reading so many biographies.
I am certain I would be more lovable that way, more appealing to other people. I am just uncertain that I would love me through it.
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
This particular morning is thinking about Easter. Not only that there are a million metaphors for resurrection, but that you can choose them. You are capable of telling your energy which resurrections are necessary. Sometimes, you have to decide which hurts worse. Living with the idea that a situation is dead or overindulging the fact that it is alive and nourishing because you are wishing it into being. It’s a bubble. What happens when it pops and it doesn’t even resemble reality? What if the resurrection is metaphor for changing the story you’re telling yourself?
For me, it’s looking at relationships. For you, the thing that’s “alive” might be that you’re happy at your job. It’s up to you to decide if death and resurrection is worth more than life limping along. And yes, I will use death and resurrection because anyone who has ever attempted to change careers knows that’s exactly how hard it feels some days.
Which brings me right back around to morning routines. Morning is when my mind naturally works the best and most efficiently. In my world, mornings are absolute quiet, because I cannot think and do anything else. I dedicate myself to an idea completely and don’t move until I am capable of a complete thought, which leads to me either getting out a tablet and keyboard or Moleskine that already has a pen attached because Lord knows if I don’t keep it attached I’ll never see it again.
I start writing (or talking into the microphone, or making a video) between 0530 and 0700. The variance comes from my medication. I take a mood stabilizer which sometimes keeps me awake, therefore I sleep a little later some days to compensate. Truly, though, my best work is at 5:00 AM. It doesn’t matter if I got up or stayed up. If I notice my edge is slipping, I’ll take sleeping medication during the evening news because I know that myelin on my nerves and getting up when I’m naturally the most fighting fit in terms of writing will do me a world of good with self esteem.
For instance, in doing the post-mortem on this friend breakup, I realized that I’d lost myself before it even began and these problems predated anything I ever did to sexually harass her, which I absolutely did and for which I take complete responsibility. I was a mess, but my damage didn’t have to become hers and I’ll always be sorry for it. What I won’t miss is her blunt assessment of everything because it made her sound like such a hardass all the time, and because I loved her, I ignored how it made me feel. When I said something about it, I was abruptly invited to go to hell. I can point to that fight less than a week after we met.
I knew when I broke trust that it would be an uphill battle based on not just the original fight, but every fight after that. We had a fundamental issue with communication from the beginning, and I wish I’d kept her as a fan who wanted access and otherwise just left well enough alone. I’m just not smart enough to ignore that much dopamine in one place. I am also not the type of person that can squeeze my feelings back into a smaller container. I would much rather you just take your leave because you’ll pull back, but my feelings won’t. I will just put too much energy where it isn’t wanted for *years* because I believe that scar tissue is stronger, that our relationship will be better once we’ve actually talked through something big.
If your whole idea of relationships is that they deserve to die a horrible death once trust is broken, there’s not a lot of hope for me in that equation. I am so, so human. I will never live a life free of sin, and I forgive just as easily during the phase where we’re fighting it out in hopes of a better outcome. But I won’t yield until I hear something that rings *true.* One sentence is all it takes. One moment of real vulnerability.
The part of realizing that resurrection shouldn’t happen in this case is that my friend said she didn’t hold anything over my head, that we were all good, while at the same time treating me completely differently. A decade ago I knew things about her no one knew, and vice versa… compared with not mentioning that the guy she started dating but hadn’t met her kids yet was now her husband. If you want that marked a change in our relationship, it’s fine, but don’t pretend that everything is the same. It’s not and it never will be. Things being the same is just a story you’re telling yourself, or more accurately, the story I told me.
Her reaction was not trusting that I do love her for absolutely everything she is, not trusting that my love for her would extend to her husband as well. I would step in front of a bus for him, no questions asked, simply because she loves him. Everything that matters to her matters to me. Besides, if he’s any smart at all he already knows she’s too good for him. I don’t have to remind him…
I also know that her trauma reflexes caused her to react that way, because they told her that once I screwed up, I was always going to screw up. Opening her heart to me was always going to end badly. It’s true I needed time to recover. You don’t get hit in the face with that much fantastic every day. I took my leave, tail slung between my legs, and she kept reading.
I thought we were done for life and then I wondered how in the hell she knew my dad was going in for heart surgery (I really do think of this blog as letters to myself in the future and sometimes forget that looking up what I’m doing currently is a thing that people do). I should have known we were done when my mother died two or three days later and her response was an e-mail when she lived a half hour from me. Nothing was the same because we were both scared of each other. I got over it and eventually started letting her see everything again.
She continued to be shut down like a steel trap unless she was laying out her feelings about my other love interests/friends/reptiles of some sort. I am not devaluing this aspect of our relationship, because it made me feel guarded and protected. Not being able to see herself as clearly as she saw others made it feel as if I was on the outside of that protection in those instances, because I didn’t have anything helpful to say anymore. My rights had been revoked. It was a credentials fail all the way around.
Speaking of credentials, that’s one of the funniest conversations we’ve ever had. Her not knowing jack shit about computers and me teaching her how to irritate the fuck out of her IT Guys at work. Their misery is my happy place.
I’m processing out all this pain because hurt people hurt people. I don’t want to be capable of losing myself this way anymore, hoping against hope and trying not to breathe wrong. Remembering making her laugh is the best I can do right now, otherwise my rage takes my breath away. I don’t feel emotions at half-strength. I find that if I get as angry as I need to get and grieve as hard as I need to while it’s happening, it won’t come back in five years and bite me.
I am letting the death and resurrection occur within me as we speak, because I chose it. This one matters, and it is necessary. I know I’m lost, and I’m trying to get found because amazing grace does have a sweet, sweet sound. You’ll just never hear that hymn out of me if I can help it because I’ve sung it enough now for four lifetimes… most especially irritating at the tempo of a funeral dirge.
It’s not time for that…. Well, I suppose it is until Sunday morning. But the point is that come Sunday morning, it’s time for lilies and a pipe organ and a brass quintet and the Widor Toccata with the all the stops pulled out. I want to feel the bass in my chest. I want resurrection to burst forth as new as it ever has been.
Even though it is thousands of years old.
Now the morning routine is switching to making a cup of tea and regathering the strength to resurrect something else.
Let me start off by saying that I do not believe there is a unique person in the world. We are all startlingly alike, for as much as we’d like to divide ourselves. What makes us unique are not our personality traits, but the billions of permutations in human behavior and your reactions to them. No one is a special little snowflake, yet no one knows how to be you, either.
Taking a Meyers-Briggs exam helped to give me a framework, but it doesn’t tap into how my personality changes with trauma reflexes. The letters, INFJ, stand alone. It doesn’t change how my trauma reflexes kick in when someone hurts someone I love, though, which is objectively worse for me. If someone tried to come after the kid or the dragon, I would bite ankles until it was handled. I would be more likely to help the kid, because dragon, hello…….. Watch out, she sneezes, and the allergies are KICKING HER ASS THIS YEAR, capiche?
I would suit up to play, but I can’t think of a more unnecessary character in any fight unless the answer is a REALLY MEAN LETTER.
Speaking of which, if you have been a victim of assault by grammar, you are entitled to compensation in the form of a letter. It is freely given, and freely received. Choose your own adventure, just know what you want ahead of time. I’m too old to guess and too intense a relationship for anyone who doesn’t want it. I already have people that will go the distance, I don’t have to fight to be heard. I have only the things that make me unique, which is an incredible ability to give and not so good with the taking, apparently, because I need you to spell it out.
Actually, I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. I think I’m unique at how fast I’ll decide to step away from bullshit after running into it face first for years, just lost, confused, but full of hope for the future.
It’s the hope that’ll kill you, especially if there are dreams involved without a plan. I will take that hint posthaste, because it means two things. The first is that you’re not a dreamer, or you can’t commit to even a dream because you can’t see that far. The second is that if you’re not a dreamer, you’ll be irritated with the amount of dreaming I do.
So, better to find people that will engage in my dreams and not talk around them.
I see the things that make me unique, so I also see the things that make others different, like trauma. If you have trauma reflexes, period, that’s one set of reactions you didn’t have at birth. The magnitude doesn’t just add on, it compounds. For instance, it’s not sexual trauma plus combat trauma, it’s one multiplied by the other, or divided out because you chose combat to feel and not feel all at once. Sometimes it’s playing trauma to your strengths, sometimes it’s descending into madness because that’s another path your brain can take to protect you.
Once you get to my age, we’ve all got trauma reflexes from something or another. It’s just degrees. Some people stick to others with their level of trauma, not realizing that most trauma presents the same. It’s navigating the world with third degree burns and not letting anyone know you’re currently on fire.
Those are the things that make you unique. The rest is just a construct. There’s no such thing as gender or race. We made them and the two acceptable heteronormative expressions of them, and have adapted with varying levels of ease. The truth is a whole spectrum of thoughts and feelings that can’t be duplicated from one person to another.
I know I’m not trans. I know it for sure. I also know that I don’t present as female unless you’re a person that needs to stare and figure out my complex construct. By now, most people have a complex construct or a switch that flips from their public armor to the place that’s just the lowest case version of them.
I have never wanted anything but to find the lowest case version of people, to make them feel safe enough to be that with me because I am with them. I will prod people and ask questions unashamedly, but not for my own benefit. I am relentlessly driven to HELP THE SHIT OUT OF YOU.
But if you say you don’t want or need my help, it transfers to the next available representative. I don’t vibe with everyone, and I don’t need to. The only people that have said “no more” are generally threatened by someone being direct with them because they’re the ones that get to be direct. My uniqueness is bringing out things in people they didn’t know were there, staying with them until they believe it.
I am so direct because I don’t bullshit with feelings. I will tell it like it is, and I can feel the energy coming back at me and decide whether it’s worth it to continue. This is because it took me a long time to recognize that boundaries are there for a reason and not having any is a disaster.
I am not going to wait around for disaster to happen, especially if it’s happened so many times before I’ve forgotten half to cope. I have to “forget” a lot of shit because people don’t like having things thrown back in their faces, and they also ignore patterns so you can’t tell them anything.
But that’s just me being frustrated with my own personality type and wishing that I was the heteronormative, flighty airhead my gender stereotype seems to think I am. Good God, I could use a fifteen minute break into my nothing box.
Visions of my friends and family and how I could help dance across my mind, and sometimes I can execute them. Sometimes I’m not capable. My trauma reflexes make me angry or silent or both. Couple that with having chronic disorders with mental health, and it’s a scary ship to right. So of course I have dreams of fixing other people. It’s my unique coping mechanism to deal with the horror of being me.
But it’s only horror in my worst moments, because I have friends whose problems are objectively worse than mine. As a liberal Christian, my faith tells me there is no such thing as competitive suffering. Just because people like Daniel and Zac need your love and compassion doesn’t mean I am not also deserving on a different playing field.
Those playing fields are the uniqueness to being human, not being human itself.
We made all that up. It’s unique to being human.
We just keep acquiring letters and no one should be there to tell us we shouldn’t. Own them. Here are mine: INFJ, ADHD, PTSD. They make me more unique and funny than I’ll ever be on my own. Focusing on what my letters gave me rather than what they took away bleeds over into my real life… Someone wanting to throw them all away….. when they’re the one thing that made me unique.
I laugh so easily, and shake when it happens. Being happy changes my whole posture, and the dumbest jokes will do it. Most embarrassingly it’s when I’ve made a “dad joke” and no one else is there. When I make myself laugh, I tend to make others wonder if there’s something wrong. It seems so conceited when it’s really the laughter of knowing I’ve thought of something you’ll read later.
My audience is always with me, not as a monolith, but a whisper. The person to whom I am continually speaking whether or not you are present. It’s a one-way conversation. Making you laugh is a great part of my day, because I might not get a laugh at that joke this year, but I might in three.
In terms of types of humor, I love wordplay. It makes me laugh harder when I realize something is a double entendre, or a joke due to convenient homophones. Moments like that live in my memory a long time, and I bring them back to life upon remembering. Truly rare writing craft with a joke is something to be shared and nurtured.
Beauty makes me laugh, because that is my response when something is too big emotionally to take in… the difference between hearing someone say that they are Puerto Rican and Ukrainian and receiving a photograph of them. One is a random factoid brushed off by small talk. One is a pair of eyes staring back at you, begging to be seen.
I laugh with intrinsic joy… happiness so bright it can’t help but escape upon remembrance of the thousand smiles before it. Memories age like fine wine, and Southerners get drunk with pleasure. Some of the biggest laughs I’ve had in recent memory are talking about my childhood with The War Daniel, because we slip back into NE Texas-isms and he remembers things that I don’t and vice versa.
Editor’s Note: If you have to get married, make sure it’s the person who remembers you had a Black Moor goldfish in third grade and when you can’t remember what you named it they know it’s Othello and you know they’re not bullshitting you because it’s so on-brand. It also matters that Daniel actually came to my house and talked to my fish in third grade. He didn’t know I kept fish as a kid. He knew THAT FISH SPECIFICALLY.
The sheer amount of bullshit I will not get away with if I marry Daniel is what’s currently making me laugh, and it has nothing to do with Daniel being male, because the women I’ve dated/married (save Dana) were just like him in terms of reacting with their minds. What is different about Daniel and the other women is that he is constantly in touch with his feelings. Full stop. I am not in touch with my logic. I never have been…. So between having a better logical/emotional toolbox than me and being big enough to pick me up, put me on a shelf, and walk away tears are streaming down my cheeks with laughter.
Comedy equals tragedy plus time.
Now we’re cooking with gas, aren’t we? I love dark humor because I was never raped or molested, but something happened. I didn’t make sense of it for a long time, and becoming a cook finally gave me access to a library of images that would actually make me feel something. It takes a lot to make me laugh at times because stupid doesn’t always cut it. I am not a cutter physically because my keyboard is the extension of my mind just like my right arm ends in a chef’s knife when I’m cooking. Sometimes when it seems like I am the most selfish person you’ve ever met, I’m actually trying to protect my energy. I am such an introvert that I protect my energy in order to be able to laugh.
This is less weird than it seems. When I am in public, whether that’s with one person or several, I want to be present and in the moment. If my social battery is charged, I’ll often come off as hyper because I haven’t had any social interaction with anyone in days. If it is drained, I will fall into trauma reflex mode, and that’s when I’m just a delish and a delight, I assure you.
Trauma reflex mode is a direct result of meds being off and/or not getting enough sleep. Sleeping actually puts myelin back on my nerves in a way that Starbucks will never capture. I also take medication to ensure I sleep deeply so that I can laugh more at myself… being irritated by everything I do generally means I’ve tried to replace sleep with caffeine and my body is noticing.
When I make the commitment to sleep, it changes what I think is funny and the way I write about it. When I’m feeling safe and secure, I don’t interrupt that vibe much with jokes about trauma or podcasts about crime. I can always tell when I need to re-dedicate myself to sleep when I’ve listened to more than three Crime Junkies in a day.
When I’m dreaming, I build things. I process information with my feelings, so generally I build relationships. I think about how they could get better. So much of my humor is informed by the dream I had about you last night, and I don’t mean that in a shady way in the slightest. Sleeping is a playground for my characters, whether I’m working on the book or my real life issues.
I love that there’s so much humor inside me that no one will ever see, because it belongs to someone. I am more situationally funny than I am “joke funny.” I mean, I do have comedic timing, all preacher’s kids ought to by 45, but the thing I value the most in a relationship are callbacks. It makes me laugh when I tell a joke from ten years ago and you spike one over the net with a riposte like you’re sitting in that memory with me.
That’s the golden ticket. That’s winning at life, especially if I am lovingly the butt of said joke.
I’m also very clever at wordplay, and will probably make fun of me better than you.
Stories That Are All True 