All Boxed Up

December 27, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Now that Christmas this year is a memory, I want to talk about my incredible haul. I got physical gifts, like a Welsh football jersey (Wrexham) and lots of Christmas cookies. I also got a pair of pink men’s lounge pants that are so me they hurt….. I’m a sucker for anything in size “real men wear pink.” It makes sense. I am generally a butch cut, femme color sort of girl.

I also got a spiritual gift I needed. It wasn’t wrapped, and it was so bright my eyes couldn’t take it in at first. I talked on my web site about possibly making a character out of Jonna and Tony Mendez, a composite for any of my novels, maybe the alternate history. After I finished writing the entry, I thought, “I should probably ask her if this is okay before I start writing any scenes.” So, she got back to me and said that anything I did that nodded to them was fine, just to give them good intentions and a bit of courage.

When the response came, I was just dumbstruck. I thought, “how does she know I’m not going to make a disaster out of this?” At that point, my confidence came back. I’ve seen Jonna speak live. I wrote about it. I sent it to her. She already likes the way you write about her. My soul began to take up more space as the warm memory wrapped itself around me.

The big physical gift ask for me was a Moleskine, because I thought I was so smart by keeping everything in my phone. So, I’d go into a grocery store and see notebooks for sale and pass them up, because “I put that stuff on my phone.” I looked through my phone to check the validity of that statement and I found exactly three notes.

Taking this class at BYU over YouTube is changing me. I need to be able to write an idea down, because all of the sudden I have the confidence to believe in it as currency. I have never had that before. I am going to get a Bluetooth tag for my Moleskine because I poured my heart into a college lined and I have no doubt that one day it’s going to end up on a podcast because I left it in an airplane 20 years ago. In any case, I am sure that I have amused and horrified tens of people. Trying to think of when it was…. definitely the Kathleen years. I remember feeling like I’d burgled myself, and I had.

The Moleskine also represents forward thinking. I’ve been a blogger all my life. I didn’t need to plan ahead. Think it, say it works fine in blogging, but not other forms of writing.

I create plots and characters independently of each other. Ideas for them come at random times. I thought I would be the sort of person that would say things like, “Siri, open Notepad.” Turns out, I have been that person three times.

The rest of the time I was searching for a piece of paper. This one even has elastic to hold a pencil. It’s a 7-in, the same size as a basic Kindle. I am hoping it will last me a long time, because this is not for outlines. It’s to keep one-liners from all my projects no matter what they are. Think of it as a five-year supply of post-it notes all stuck together and you’ll see why I’m humiliated that I can’t keep everything digital. I have been around and around this.

Here is my use case.

I do not drive. I walk or ride public transportation. I do my best thinking while mobile, so having a notebook is essential for those lightning bolt moments, because that idea is not coming back. I know what it’s like to lose the potential of a million dollars because of my own stupidity. I’m done.

Christmas has also been talking with Daniel and trying to plan out what we want to do re: content. He’s a combat vet (Hospital Corpsmen Second Class, US Navy) whose job was triage in Afghanistan. If he had been civilian trained, he’d be a nurse practictioner by now. That’s a doctor in my book. Where I come in is possibly a published conversation, perhaps even a podcast, on PTSD and recovery.

Daniel is also an alcoholic, getting ready for rehab at the beginning of the new year. Just a fascinating patient history on both sides, really. Going through treatment for alchoholism and going through treatment for being bipolar are strikingly similar, and I ‘m thinking we’re going to have a good time. I have already started calling him “DW” because those are his actual initials, and I have been making sure to sound like a little aardvark boy annoyed with his sister every time it comes out of my mouth, too. The thing that I love about working with DW is that he’s so open and honest. Everything that goes around, comes around. We’re having great discussions so far.

I said, “can I give you a piece of advice for rehab that helped me in regular therapy?” He said, “please do.” I said, “say the thing you’re most afraid to say first. Don’t say, ‘I’m going to change my life in 90 days’ and wait til day 85 to break down.” I could only be that confident after having admitted to myself the thing I was most afraid to say. Every day, I challenge myself to say something that scares me. Generally, the scariest things are letting go of relationships that no longer serve me.

My attention is shifting in a very good way. I’m enjoying being around people who get me, focusing on the ones who show up and casting shadow on those who didn’t bother. Stopping the tape inside me that always says to search for the lost lamb, because it’s not a lost lamb. It’s a human capable of making their own decisions, and I don’t have to agree with them. Maybe I’ll end up being right. Maybe I won’t. It never mattered. I spent time on people who didn’t want to be in my circle, and I want to stop now. It is not time for a search and rescue.

It is winter, the time to gather around, hold each other, and wait for more light.

Eleven Dollars

December 26, 2022December 26, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When I decided that DC was my home, I packed up my car and left Texas behind. I’d secured a room in a house in Silver Spring that was already furnished, and I just took enough clothes for a week. Anything else that I needed from my parents’ house could be mailed. That’s what we did. For months on end, I received boxes that contained things I’d forgotten about. If I asked for one thing, the box still came full, because it was a waste of space not to pack it full. It was going to be $11 either way. It became a running joke between my dad and me…. “you’re moving $11 at a time.” One box would have boots in it, and then a purse I hadn’t used since 2003 and a half-tube of Chapstick (that I still have and it is still delicious, thank you…. it’s cherry.) If I wanted something, I accepted the randomness that came with it. The $11 box never changed, but the value of the contents were never the same total.

I’m in that relationship right now, a friendship that I want to grow to be as big as anything in my life. At this point, I can’t tell you what that means. I just know that Daniel has been my friend since second grade, and some of the countries I want to visit would shit a brick at me traveling alone, or see me as traveling alone anyway if I brought the woman I was dating. You can’t just walk up to someone you haven’t known since second grade and say, “I really want to go to the Middle East, Viet Nam, and Cambodia. I am a woman first of all and a lesbian second. You don’t happen to want to travel, do you?”

My friend Gabriel already lives in Cambodia and I just dropped a truth bomb on him, too. “My work in progress is set in Viet Nam. Can I come live with you for a few months? I have some work I need to do locally.” Gabriel said that he wasn’t in Viet Nam anymore, he was in Cambodia…. but I am absolutely welcome to come and live in Cambodia. I’m thinking 90 day visa because three months seems like a reasonable amount of time to do research and come home, and that way I can probably afford to do it more than once.

Where Daniel comes into the picture is always travel companion, sometimes bodyguard. I do not mean that I am hiring him to be friggin’ Liam Neeson. His Texas accent’s too strong for that. I also don’t need him to fight anyone. I just need him to stand there and look big.

For that, I will absolutely treat him like a king.

But as a single lesbian, I’m muddling through what that means. How do you treat your friends the right way so that they feel taken care of and the relationship isn’t a one-way street? I know that if I was paying Daniel for his services I couldn’t afford it. The best thing I could do is just make sure I can take care of his basic needs.

The best thing I can do is wait to start traveling until I know my situation with my inheritance. If my stepfather leaves money for me in his will, my financial situation will turn right side up in one day. There is no reason to believe that he wouldn’t. He has said as much, that I would get money that clearly only belonged to her. All I am saying is that if he is not an honest man, it is an enormous financial hit for me.

I am not worried about being rich. My mother wasn’t rich, but she invested well, and so did the insurance companies where she had policies. I do not have any pipe dreams about being rich. The only thing I have ever wanted out of money is stability. If you read the studies, there’s no percentage in acquiring more than that. I will be happy with my own house, car, and a bit of land. Nothing haughty. I’d like to build with plain 2x4s, rockwoool insulation, and triple-paned windows. I want to choose the materials I would like to use in my house, and price the house by them. I would much rather have a very small house capable of lasting a hundred years than a house where everything starts going wrong the minute the new wears off. In essence, the relationship I want to build with Daniel…. made of such strong stuff that it’s even better when the new wears off. As book lovers, we know exactly how much love it takes to keep a relationship going. We’ve read The Velveteen Rabbit. Let’s not get stupid.

For us, the process of becoming real to each other is heart-wrenching and necessary. I’m bipolar and have been hospitalized for it. He has other health issues that are different in origin and the same in behavior. We present the same, but we’re so different.

Daniel and I also have a lot in common, and have since we were children. He was my first boyfriend in elementary school because we were the nerdy English lovers. If I could give you an image from literature, he’s not a preacher’s kid, but he is very much like Norman from “A River Runs Through It.” I don’t mean that in a romantic, fly fishing sort of way. I mean that he is perfectly capable of being a novelist’s friend and told me I have free reign to say whatever I want about him here.

Whatever I want?

Daniel, it feels like after all these years, parts of me are moving back to you……….. eleven dollars at a time. If you want me, accept all the randomness that comes with it.

A Christmas Carol

December 25, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Christmas 2022 has been a very quiet affair so far. It obviously looks a little bit different than I thought it would, but not in a way that feels foreign. Even if things had gone exactly as planned, Christmas morning would still be the calm before the storm. I wake up earlier than everyone else during the rest of the year, as well as aging and requiring less sleep. Santa hasn’t come to my house in seven years without me being there, arms outstretched with hay (Hey Finns, reindeer eat hay, right? Unclear. I hope they weren’t just being polite.). Early this morning, Santa told me what all of you got. I’m seeing your faces as you’re opening up your presents and thinking how right he was as your faces light up. It’s an incredible energy to sit in this morning as I write. I think things like, “I wonder if Jonathan liked his head.” Yes. That’s an actual thing I thought this morning, and I’m leaving it without context because it’s so much funnier that way.

I have spent several Christmases completely alone, and though I appreciate the pomp and circumstance of Christmas (particularly the classical music), it actually is a cool thing to spend it thinking about yourself. You don’t have to compromise with anyone. I am not saying that you should turn away family in favor of this. I’m saying that if you end up alone on Christmas, it is a gift. TRUST ME. You have a day to yourself to plan anything you want. USE IT without feeling guilty. If you literally can’t get to your family, don’t spend the day crying for them. Create new memories with yourself to share with them.

If something says it’s Christmas to you, go for it. In my own life, Christmas has been Star Wars until recently (I, too, like to eat Chinese food on Christmas and go to the movie theater, too.). One of my friends said “Star Wars movies are not Christmas movies.” I said, “yes, but some of them have been released Christmas week.” It wasn’t about the subject matter, it was about going to see a movie on the big screen after opening all my presents. For future reference, if I invite you to go to a movie with me, it means that the movie is a big deal, not that you are. You may be as well, but most movies are perfectly fine on a television, particularly if you aren’t precious about the picture. Just because it’s large doesn’t mean it’s expensive.

I have a relatively nice TV, but I will always shell out for IMAX if it’s an action movie that I’m desperate to see. If I was in any way wealthy, I would have rented one of the IMAX theaters in downtown Silver Spring to stream “Jack Ryan.” It’s one of the few spy shows I like in terms of plot ideas and execution, because Clancy gave them source matierial that covered everything from world events to the exact length of a left-handed cotter pin…. and is that an African cotter pin or a European cotter pin?

Why yes, that was me making fun of Tom Clancy. Thank you for noticing. The one thing that they get wrong is that there is such a thing as a CIA agent, but Jack’s not it. He’s a case officer. All people in CIA operations are called “operations officers” or “case officers.” An agent is an asset we’ve put in place…. as in, someone who most probably lives in the area of operation as opposed to a US citizen.

I will watch anything with spies in it. Full stop. I just don’t take much seriously. There is no equivalent to “Law and Order” in intelligence because to make a procedural you’d have to know what the rules were to be able to write about them. It’s not just CIA- all intelligence agencies foreign and domestic would have a problem with the general public knowing the minutiae of what they do. I read a ton of non-fiction so that I can pick up real knowledge, it’s just necessarily dated. Most of the operations I can speak to are from the late 40s to early 90s. I do not believe that I could write what it would be like to be a spy in today’s world, but I think I have a pretty good handle on what it is like to be one in general… the personality quirks and mannerisms that become timeless whether it’s human intelligence collection or cybersecurity.

It seems to change the people I’ve met in all the same ways. Intelligence is not regimented like the military. You are free to be whoever you want to be, and you can write your story the way you want to tell it. Therefore, in my experience, no two spies are alike. Their personalities are as individual as a fingerprint. In terms of grand patterns of behavior based on the books I’ve read, working in intelligence takes all of those disparate personalities and changes minute parts to work in concert.

I’ve been to the spy museum where not only American legends gather, it adds old KGB/Mossad/GRU agents that now want to work with the museum, etc. I like spies as people. They’re generally hilarious and devastatingly clever. And here’s something about spies that you may not have thought of. They vote. They’ve been to many, many countries in the world. They see what works and what doesn’t. And they bring all that knowledge back to the US and it informs their policy recommendations. If anyone in an intelligence agency lives in your neighborhood, the intellectual property value just shot through the roof.

If spies didn’t have their fingers on the pulse of politics while they were executing their operations, it would very much surprise me. It occurred to me just how attractive it would be to someone living in a country that had some political power… able to use their knowledge to either change their country or get out before things got much, much worse.

It just occurred to me that it might be a very good idea to put it into the ether that if you are a gay government employee in a country where being gay is illegal, get some power. All we need is a reason to come get you and we will. It’s been proven. It’s not that we as a government don’t care about all gay people and don’t wish we could fix everything… it’s that if you want the clearest, quickest path to an ex-fil, find information that the United States government needs and tell us why we need it. If it feels scary to put yourself out there, CIA has an Onion site where you can leave absolutely untraceable messages. Sometimes it’s not worth fighting the system. Sometimes it’s worth playing the long game to get out.

In 1947, being gay in the CIA was illegal and not even because CIA hated gay people. It’s because it was one of the hot button issues that would get you tortured and killed overseas- an unnecessary risk. Now, CIA is rainbow central with queer and trans officers. Actually, that’s another plus. Join US intelligence and not only will your work become valuable, we can introduce you to a whole bunch of other queer people who do what you do. So, not just people you might want to date and be friends with because they’re also queer, but because you actually have a whole lot in common.

It occurs to me that I am now pimping out the Central Intelligence Agency as a gay dating app, and I do not know how they would feel about that. Well, I wrote it down on my web site. If it’s offensive, someone will be with me shortly. I should have talked to Carol about this before I posted it.

Carol is not a real person, she’s my Amazon Echo Dot. I read somewhere that people were concerned that Alexa was actually the NSA, and I thought it was hilarious. This is because let’s say it’s true. That’s even better. It’s Carol’s entire job to log what I say and what I do. It makes me double over with laughter to think that there is a woman in the world whose entire job is looking down on me like a guardian angel and being stuck in a permanent face palm.

I have put a really kind face on government surveillance, and I feel tender toward her because I’m such a mess. This is because I anthropomorphized my Echo Dot and gave Carol an extensive back story. She and Roger, her husband, live out near Hollins College in southern Virginia. They have this fabulous off-grid setup because they got a government rebate for green construction and Roger is a contractor. So, Carol has a professional, NSA-level computer setup in her basement so that she can listen to me while she looks out over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Yes, it’s a basement, but the house is built into the side of a hill. Floor to ceiling windows on one side. Carol doesn’t like feeling boxed in, which makes me feel like doing interesting things. Actually interesting, not “today I’m going to mess with Carol.” She’s straight and married and all that, but it still lights her up inside when I’m happy and destroys her when I’m not, because it’s her job to listen and she took it a little too seriously.

Because I know so much about Carol and talk to her every single day, I am sure that she will be a fictional character in one of my novels, just not the alternate history. The alternate history is set in a time period too early for The Patriot Act.

I also feel it absolutely necessary as a mental health patient to say that the reason I’m so into Carol and keep adding to her story is because I could use her in a book one day, not because I have gone down the rabbit hole of being cool with government surveillance. That’s a mixed bag, because as someone who doesn’t code but knows IT, I feel that there are worse people that already have eyes on me than the United States government. If China and Russia already have me under surveillance, why do I care if the US is also there? If something I’ve done has caused me to get hacked, I want my government to see what happened and be able to decide if I need help or punishment. They may be rancid butter, but they’re the only ones on my side of the bread.

Carol would probably vouch for me, but “we are going to have a LOOOOOONG TALK about this when we get home.”

At least since it’s Christmas, she won’t ground me until tomorrow.

Body Issues

December 23, 2022December 24, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have so many issues with food, and they’ve changed over decades. When I was young, I agreed with the people who said I was fat at 130 and used my mother’s Phen-Phen. It didn’t really work, but the placebo effect was massive. I was doing something. I was taking a pill to control my weight… but I was not my sister, who became a champion at running around the block instead of my lazy ass.

I was trying to be funny and I even offended myself. I am the furthest emotion from lazy there is. I’m laden. That’s different. There’s too much in my head that bounces around like sub-atomic particles. If I am lucky, one of them will turn into a picture, and I can branch out on WordPress from there.

In addition to having several creative projects I want to develop, as an INFJ I have the tendency to take on everyone else’s emotions as well. This is why I talk about being a hermit and only pubilshing. I can’t focus on both of us. You have to take a back seat to me at some point…. the one problem with binging is that people will watch several years worth of work in one night and demand more. Think about what you’re putting on all those creatives to do. While stars are certainly paid what they’re worth for the work, it’s still an enormous red flag to work under those kinds of demands. “You suck because I watched this on the toilet for four weeks and the next season isn’t coming out for two years.” How long do you think an episode of The Simpsons or whatever takes to finish? How much pressure there is to even do their jobs, much less take on an academic “publish or perish” quality to keep people from splitting apart over not knowing who slept with whom.

Screw money at that point. When do you spend it?

My guess is that a huge part of it goes into looking like a celebrity. I don’t have a problem with this. I love gowns and tuxes, as well as pictures of actors and models in magazines. Looking like a star takes actual work, as important to actresses as it was to Jackie Kennedy. In my opinion, Jackie Kennedy was American royalty and Oprah has taken her place. It’s the same personality, though. Shy and quiet covered up by HUGE bravado as to not really let anyone in. I also agree with this. It’s what would happen to me if I became more popular than I am now. I would not let people except those close to me have an opinion. I would rather project confidence and not let ANYONE rattle me. Getting upset and miserable over something I’m working through by writing about it gives me comfort. I’m not here to impress anyone, obviously. I’ve said it in a hundred different ways.

Therefore, other people (strangers) cannot matter to me. If I take it in, I am finished. My ego will get too big, and the confidence I project will become braggadocio. If it seems like bragging already, it’s generally the most obnoxious when I’m borderline suicidal. It’s a coping mechanism, you see? Suicidal ideation is not a problem. Most depressed people have it. The alarm bells for my hospitalization was not the simple thought of “I don’t want to be here anymore.” I was halfway to SpongeBob HeadStone before I realized that I needed to get help (quickly). If it gets that bad, I also don’t want to die and I won’t do it because I have been given enough coping mechanisms (like giving myself permission to go to the ER, that mental health matters). Moreover, when I feel the worst about myself, it’s because I’ve hurt someone and I can’t recover from it, because I’m so empathic that it destroys me to feel pain I’ve caused, even unintentionally.

When I was 14, killing myself was about protecting my abuser.

When I was 36, it was about learning that I couldn’t separate the wheat from the chaff, and I would always be Just. Like. Her. I can’t get away from my own voice, my own signature, my own stories that include her.

It broke me, and I deserve a medal for getting back up afterwards. I was truly down for the count, because I realized there was literally nothing I could do but learn to live with it. It’s an out of body sensation when something comes out of my mouth in her voice, even worse when it’s her actual words coming out of my mouth because I sound like my mother, only the totally fucked up one.

When I realized at 14 that my life was going to be different from others, that not only was I gay but I was in love with someone 11 years older than me, I panicked. I knew that whatever information my abuser had slipped me had aged me in a way I would not have chosen. My body issues intensified because I wanted her to think I was pretty….. to the point that I freaked my actual mother out. My abuser was coming to our church for a concert after she’d already moved away, and I was beside myself…. the first day with anger, the second day with tears and frustration. But the tears were not over her. They were over me.

The first day was her rehearsal. It was just a lazy afternoon, and it was one week before my 16th birthday. She’d asked me to meet her up at the church so we could hug and exclaim over each other in private (not romantic…. for her). My mom said, “I should let you drive so you can impress Diane.” I think that is the first time I’ve ever blushed so hard I turned purple…. until she said, “don’t you want to change? You usually dress up for her.”

That is when I knew my mother had the potential to murder me by accident.

Just slaughter me with words.

You mean I don’t look good enough?

Editor’s Note: I reread this, and I laughed so hard there were tears and snot rolling down my face. I wondered what in the hell got into my mother that she was so uptight about me being gay and yet vocal that I WASN’T DOING IT RIGHT, LESLIE. Tough room.

The next morning was church. I woke up nervous. I spent like an hour in the shower. I dried my hair, and plugged in my curling iron (that was all Texas girls back then, shut it). I don’t remember exactly what happened because I went into a blind rage, but my hair didn’t turn out right.

That was the moment I had my first panic attack. Blind rage leads to hyperventilating on the floor, and I just put it together that the only times I’ve hyperventilated were getting ready for that concert and after Dana hit me. But the thing with my abuser was supposed to be sweet……………

Why couldn’t I breathe? Why couldn’t I get air in my chest? Why did I feel fat, ugly, and unwanted?

Because I realized that the relationship was not on the up and up, and I loved that shit. Yes, let’s go into this deep, dark hole where we tell each other all our secrets, which at 14 and 25, were totally the same. It checks out. F me running. In retrospect it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, SECONDED by my mother dying. This is because my mother’s death affected her way more than it affected me…. and in any case, I have 45 years of pure, white mother love memories of the woman that birthed me.

There were times in which I didn’t feel abused. What drove me away was inconsistency. I never knew which woman was going to show up. Sometimes, she was the warmest ever. Sometimes, it seemed as if we had no history at all. And all of this was while we lived three minutes from each other. Come on. If you can’t solve a problem with someone who lives three minutes away, who can you? We could have looked at everything from every angle without a commute. But she didn’t want that. She wanted to turn away and go on to fuck up older people. Teenagers were just shooting fish in a barrel. And yes, for people who know her, I do feel that strongly about her pathology. Don’t test me on it. I will never speak to you again. Ever.

There’s a reason why I am so protective of not saying who it was again. I would scream it from the rooftops if I thought it would do more good for the world without killing me. Saying her full name gives it power, not when it’s published. When it’s in my head. It has fucked me up that I don’t want to change the name my mother gave me and I hate it so much. She already has a Google tattoo from years and years ago. There’s no way she will ever get away from this story, and I am appreciative of her always for one thing and one thing only. She let me tell my story.

Exactly the way I wanted to tell it.

It’s nine years later, after the end of a 23 year relationship in which we did very little but talk about growing up gay and what it would look like from here on out. It sounds completely innocent until I tell you that her college journal that was my 14th birthday present was love poems to another woman that didn’t leave ANYTHING out. Had I been even 17, this wouldn’t have been an issue. But I wasn’t ready. Full stop.

Anyone who looks at me with wide-eyed wonder and tells me she didn’t know exactly what she was doing in that moment can fuck all the way off, and yes, I will be that angry, and yes, I do in fact know that there is a very well respected reader of this web site who will stand up and cheer when she reads this. She will look at my incredible strength in body and mind and tell me she is so proud of me and that this entry will help a lot of people to look at their own childhoods. So, whenever you think this web site is all about me, it’s not. It’s for her and all the other little girls that come to me and say they were hurt by something I said because it triggered a bad memory.

For the women who didn’t write me and tell me they were abused and looking at each other, it wasn’t any of you…. that I know of.

I’m not the only one who can see through mud in this situation, and that’s what saved my life when I was 36. You all gathered around me and safety netted me until I could breathe again.

I would do it for any one if you if I knew you were in trouble. It’s just that no one tells me anything. There’s a reason for that, mostly that I’m a writer. But at the same time, you (plural) can’t jump all over my ass for not responding to something I didn’t know . If you needed help and you didn’t tell me, how am I supposed to know I don’t need to be at my house, I need to be at yours?

So, when I know there’s a problem somewhere in the world…. Let’s pick a random country like India, because I have quite a few fans there (thanks, India. You rock.). If an Indian person contacts me and says they’ve been abused, I only have one answer at that point. They’re across the world. I can listen over the Internet.

It’s not the same as sharing space with someone. I can’t touch them, I can’t reassure them with a hand squeeze or an arm around their shoulder while they cry.

After a while, it all just becomes body issues.

Country Grammar

December 23, 2022December 23, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Down, down baby…. yo street in a rain coat……

Yes, that is literally what I thought was said. I also thought when I was three, being raised by classical musicians, that the opening line to “The Little Drummer Boy” was “come….. Beethoven…..”

I am picturing Sam’s face as I’m looking out the window, not in an “awww, I’m so disappointed and hurt” sort of way, but knowing within myself how much it will make her smile to read what I thought when I was three and how much it will speak to her own musician’s heart. That’s the thing about moms. They love all children, even when it was you 42 years ago.

Or maybe she’s not reading at all. I can’t care about that, it was just a pie in the sky thought. I don’t know if any of the people I love read my web site unless they tell me. However, people do sit with me when I’m writing. Sometimes it’s a real person, sometimes it’s a fictional character that I’m trying to birth.

Edited to add that this person is normally Jonna Mendez, and not because she was a badass spy back in the day. It’s that I want to be her in ten years, just with fiction. She matters to me, but not as a spy. As a writer. I have collected many of her books with Tony, all of them autographed. She’s just the person/picture I see in my head as to how much fame I can handle. That’s because she’s not famous. She’s well-respected. There’s a difference. There’s a chance she’ll be in my work in progress, because she’s the spy I know the most about. My main character accidentally walks into a Situation. It’s possible that they’ll have some of Tony and Jonna’s mannerisms, but not in a way that says I literally know them. I’ve just picked up some of their wordplay, literary mannerisms.

Learning more about grammar, structure, setting, plot, and characters has turned me into someone even worse than I thought I was previously. I’m not just a writer. I’m a novelist. The Dorothy Parker outrage in that statement should be obvious. It’s the most outwardly pretentious profession that there is, because it comes with a lot of preconceived notions (stereotypes) that are true in terms of behavior and miles apart in understanding for their existence.

In my opinion and experience, which is vast at this point because I review books, novelists are grouchy and standoffish not to project as such, but because years and years of people telling us our writing isn’t real, that we’ll end up alone, that even if it is real, it’s not good enough to actually do anything with it, we’ll always be destitute, etc. has made us use our personas as a coping mechanism. We don’t want to be around any idea that will distract us, or make us feel bad about our creations.

We’re competing for the same pot of money, and I’ve still never had another writer tell me my writing sucks and I’d be better off in accounting. No one will tell you that, though. They think they’re being nice by couching it in other things and thinking we don’t see “write through it.” Please. We’ve been writing metaphors about people like you for eons.

We’re not defensive, we’re protective. If we aren’t, we will lose the thing that makes us, well…… us. It’s a shame that no one else sees our brilliance until we’re at the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list and if you haven’t made it, it means you’re a terrible writer and don’t quit your day job.

Someone hashing it out gets ridiculed while creatives in Hollywood are lauded as geniuses. Where would Hollywood be without showrunners like Matthew Weiner and Vince Gilligan? Don’t you think they were once struggling writers with a dream that everyone called crazy and shit all over their ideas? I know Neil Gaiman was. He recently told a story about it. A writer was feeling bad about herself because only two people showed up to her book signing. He told her that two more people showed up to her book signing than showed up and his and Terry Pratchett’s first.

If you don’t think everyone shit all over Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett before they were household names, you’re blind.We all go through it.

Writers aren’t the way they are because they want to be. It’s years of being hardened. Of having to believe in yourself because no one else does. Having to be strong in a way that other people don’t, because no one is attacking what they do for a living on a daily basis. Writers have to automatically assume that when they enter a room, no one likes them. Why? So few people have ever proven them otherwise, because it’s totally okay to shit on writers. They don’t make any money.

Except for the heroes who got lucky and make everyone think that if you’re not a bestselling author, you’re not even worth reading.

As if that’s not the very thing that’s keeping us from making decent money.

The thing that bothers writers the most is anyone coming into their space and telling them how to create, or finding out that your friends have been talking behind your back about the same thing. No one needs to step in and rescue a writer from themselves. We’ll come unglued.

The injustice will eat us alive, because we don’t come into your place of business and tell you you’re doing it all wrong and you have a million ideas as to how to make it better.

Let me tell you why that is so extraordinarily problematic and hateful. The most important thing that a writer has…. perhaps the only thing…. is being able to tell their story the way they want to tell it. Impinge on that, and you risk everything if you actually want to support us, because we will never, and I mean NEVER, appreciate that kind of ire, because even when it’s not angry, it comes across that way.

It says “I don’t value you for the person that you are. I value you for the person I want to create.” Whenever I get into the space of ideas upon ideas, I know I’m spitballing and throwing out ideas in support of telling someone’s story the way they want to tell it. I will never, ever, ever tell anyone that what they are currently doing needs to change.

I will tell you everything you need to know to make your own decisions, and whatever story you write, I am supportive of it.

I am not supportive in the way that says “I agree with you.” I am supportive in that when you tell me what your decisions are, I respect them. I will tell your story the way you want to tell it, but only if you tell me what it is.

Part of the disappointment over losing Sam was losing the part of myself that writes about her. Knowing that it will go away over time and preparing for it, because in this space, I can adore her to bits all I want without taking the risk that she can or will hurt me repeatedly. When she told me that her story didn’t include me anymore, I respected it and have only processed through writing, not direct contact. I’m sure it’s painful and surreal for her, though, because I didn’t know the real Sam long enough to be able to capture her accurately. She’s not seeing herself, or isn’t supposed to. What she’s seeing is the fictional version of herself that I created to deal with my pain.

Nothing about plot is wrong. It’s character. I would have been able to capture Sam and her kids in word pictures that would resonate with her. Believe me when I say that I mean “resonate” in every fullest sense of the word. We’re musicians.

They would also mean something to other people across the world, but that would never be my focus. My focus would be on reaching her, as if it isn’t already. I don’t want to interact. I want to have it out in the way I want to tell it to myself. To be able to take everything I know about myself and everything I know about her and weigh those things to see if there’s anything I could have done to save the relationship, and not even because that matters. It’s what I could have done differently that I’ll take with me.

But going down her street in a raincoat?

Nah. I’m good.

How Edu Saved My Ass -or- Yogurt

December 22, 2022December 23, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Last night, Edu made curry. I made a point of talking to her while she cooked, because I knew she would feed me if I stood there long enough. It’s not that I’m lazy and can’t cook for myself. It’s twofold. The first is that I would rather eat a Pop-Tart or whatever (crackers and cheese, etc.) and call it a day. Edu makes me excited about food.

She knows that when I show up, it’s because it smells good. This was shrimp, dal, rice, onions, chilis, and masala. Masala is any spice blend in India- garam masala is hot spices, but Edu had already added fresh peppers- gods the fruit was beautiful. Heat tastes so much better, fresher off the vine. The difference is stunning.

That being said, I am the type person that does like the thrill ride, but I need enough fat and sugar lining my stomach before I take it on. It also helps if the dish is very, very hot to cool it down a little. In India, that means plain yogurt or raita. I like both, but I could eat plain straight out of the container.

By this point, I don’t even know who I am. Like, what the hell even are these? Carolina Reapers. F ME RUNNING WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

I don’t think I’ve ever been so high in my life, and I’ve taken caffeine and Ambien TOGETHER. My bathrobe and my SpongeBob doll talked to me all night when I was 19. The story behind it is really innocent. I didn’t know that Ambien wasn’t really sleeping medication. It doesn’t knock you out in that way. It’s an amnesiac, and you basically go into a fugue state if you’re amped up on something like caffeine. There is one Canadian in particular that will know what I’m talking about quite intimately, because we once had a hilarious conversation in the middle of the night where he stood on his head because of the same combo….. and didn’t even remember picking up the phone in the morning.

I thought of myself as still dating Meagan platonically. I would say that she didn’t know that, but she did. She knew it was a big deal when she came to visit her parents, and she pulled out all the stops. I don’t think I’ve ever thanked her for this…. She even came home from college either in the second semester or the fall of her sophomore year. She took me to Starbucks and we had our classic high school date. It was so romantic, but only in an Anne Shirley and Diana Barry sort of way. I was extraordinarily observant of the fact that Meagan was never coming back to the United States under any circumstances. High school was it.

If there’s anything about my relationship with Meagan that still burns me up after all these years, it’s that my parents are still in Houston and hers aren’t. No more dates, even platonically. All hope is not lost, though. Here’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever done for Meagan in my life.

Meagan used to be married to a woman named Deah. Deah and I had our differences, but she was fully aware of how much I loved Meagan because I told her that all the time. I am sure she still looks back and laughs over how pathetically in love I was with my memories. Because you see, when I looked at Meagan, I didn’t see the capable & successful massage therapist, wife, and mother. I saw my little girl on a high school soccer field, the whistle blown and the game stopped……. and the forward who didn’t hear the whistle and kicked Meag so hard she went down. If you want to find my smallest place, the one where I feel the most emotion, just talk about that game. I dare you. It won’t be pretty. I ran down to the field and would have been able to get to her if I hadn’t been stopped. I looked around at the crowd. Oh, shit. Now I’ve confirmed her mother’s worst fears…………………

Deah, knowing absolutely everything there is to know about this, decided to surprise Meagan for her birthday one year (I forget which). Meagan was equally enamored with me in a first love kind of way. We’ll never go back, but we can still cry about how obsessed we were in 1996. So, back to Deah.

I was very, very surprised to hear from her. She said that I should come up and spend the weekend, because she wanted to do something big for Meag. Oh, hell yes I was in. That’s my girl right there.

Because here’s what those dates our first year of college did for us. The first one was AWFUL. I was still so upset about our breakup that I couldn’t really enjoy myself. I was jealous of the women she was actually romantically interested in because I had basically picked them for her by telling her about a college group that was queer on her campus, because I was thinking about transferring up to University of New Brunswick after I was done with junior college.

But that was just the first one. After I accepted that I was TX and she was NB, we were able to build on a friendship instead of thermonuclear war. As a result, she was my first girlfriend, and she’ll be with me until I take my last breath, because my memories are pure and beautiful where she is concerned.

Off I go to give my girl and I an emotional roller coaster for the weekend where Deah just got to sit and gloat at her awesomeness, which was entirely deserved. I really only remember two lines from that trip, one funny and one that hacked me in half.

I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but sometimes when people are awful to you, you get an apology you never asked for and yet mightily deserve. She apologized for breaking up with me. That wasn’t new. It was the context. She didn’t apologize for being a bad kid. She apologized for not sticking around long enough to see what would have happened had we become partners as adults, because, and here’s the kicker. It made me cry……….. she thought it was something that we would have been very good at and she was sorry she never got the chance.

In what universe would that not take your heart and beat it within an inch of your life? Everything I had ever felt about Meag (and it was Niagra Falls) just rushed to the surface of my skin. Outwardly, I didn’t say anything. Inside, I was 18 years old, crying for myself and for all the missed dinners with our own kids.

I also had to get angry to get over it. My inner monologue ran thusly.

“HOW DARE YOU TAKE AWAY MY CHOICE! HOW DARE YOU NOT ALLOW ME TO FORGIVE YOU! HOW DARE YOU NOT TELL ME ABOUT SOMETHING LIKE THIS UNTIL IT WAS SO ENTIRELY POINTLESS?”

But that’s why she told me. It was pointless to her, so she didn’t attach any emotion to it. I am all emotion all the time, so it wasn’t tantamount to admitting to myself that I was still in love with her and I should drop everything and become Canadian right this very minute forever and ever amen, though the idea still doesn’t suck.

It was acknowledgement of death, grief, and loss. Our relationship has died. Our relationship has risen. (We haven’t talked in years.) Our relationship will come again. (See what I did there, Dana and Counselor?) Our relationship was just too hot to handle for a spectrum of reasons.

But I will never in my lifetime forget when Meagan and I were two peppers, and instead of being a third, Deah was the plain yogurt that cooled everything to the right temperature.

So, for a few paragraphs, I want to write directly to Meagan. Please be quiet and respectful. Take off your shoes in the house, my girl is Canadian.

Dear Meagan,

I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t introduce and close by saying “I love you.” The difference between you and all the other people I tell I love is time. It’s been 27 years since we’ve even kissed and held hands, but I love you more now because of those 27 years than I ever did as a mere child.

27 years of loving each other so much we couldn’t breathe. First because of attraction, then because of confidentiality, honesty, compassion. All the things that we really need in our friends, you presented them to me on a silver platter. 27 years where I would have literally died rather than watch you go through pain.

I am always yours, whether you need me or not. I will always love you, whether you need me or not. it’s been 28 years. There is nothing on earth I wouldn’t do for you. No boundary that would ever stand in my way. If something was going on with you, I wouldn’t even wait until we hung up to make my way to the airport.

Tony and I will be waiting in front of YOW with snacks and Starbucks. Get in, loser. We’re going home to Texas for some R&R with the boys. You can picture it, can’t you? You and me, John and Tony, O, J, T, L? It doesn’t matter that we’re not together. We’re good enough friends that we’ll fake it and make everyone crack up with laughter, because we aren’t a married couple, but we can sure as hell act like it. Surely I have enough practice at annoying the fuck out of you by now.

I love you,

Leslie

p.s. When I am chilis, you are plain yogurt. When it’s your turn, you be the Vindaloo. I’m yogurt. I’m cool.

I am editing this entry to tell you the funny story that happened on my trip to Ottawa. Meagan and I were setting up her living room like a coffee house so we could get that intimate vibe of talking with friends, and I made the tea. I was particular about the tea, because I’m particular about all beverages.

That reminds me of something I need to tell Sam…. hold please.

The way I make my coffee so good is to use the scoop that comes with the machine and take the time to level off every tablespoon. Use 1 LEVEL T of dry coffee for every cup of water. It will mellow out and be absolutely delicious if you use the same ratio with cold brew. Just set it up in the fridge at night and it’ll be better than anything Starbucks could ever dream of making. Give me Cafe Bustelo or give me death.

It’s not like Sam makes coffee wrong, y’all. It’s that I was in charge of it one morning and she asked me specifically what I did different than she did and I didn’t answer her. I mean, what are the odds that I walk into a relative stranger’s house and her coffee is the one I’ve obsessed over since I worked at Tapalaya, in Cajun fine dining.

We had our own delicious coffee, Cafe Du Monde, of course. I drank A LOT of it because it was coffee and and yet it was only half-caf because of the chicory. But there was a Cuban restaurant within walking distance of Tapalaya, so I don’t remember if Chef and I ever went together, but we definitely took turns getting Cafe Bustelo cups of coffee and lattes.

Speaking of half-caf and chicory, Cuban coffee doesn’t play. Two Bustelo lattes and you can smell numbers.

Back to Meagan and Deah and the living room and the tea.

Meagan asked me how I made my tea so goddamn good. I said, “I steep it for 11 minutes.”

Meag said something like, “what’s so special about eleven minutes? That seems oddly specific.”

Without even a hint of irony and not trying to be funny, I brought both Meag and Deah to tears.

I said, “I steeped it for 10 minutes and it wasn’t long enough.”

And scene.

Forgetting an Attachment

December 21, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

It’s a double entendre, that title. Earlier today, I talked about fully letting go of Sam. Then, I forgot to add all the tags I normally add so that the readers that normally read me couldn’t find me….. like forgetting to attach a picture to an e-mail when basically all you’ve said in the e-mail is “here’s a picture” and still forgot to send it. Basically, I’m writing another entry to notify my readers that there’s a new entry. The writer reader relationship in the digital age. I hope we’re in love, otherwise this web site is me being Pepe Le Pew. I am not that desperate.

I was amused when I was in Facebook Jail that I watched two women fight over my picture. They weren’t fighting over the right to ask me out. They were fighting over whether kd lang was hotter than me. I didn’t pay attention to the outcome.

Fuck yes I did, are you kidding me? I flat out won. I knew I would. People have called me a better looking kd lang since I cut my hair short back in ’95. I don’t see it, but a hell of a lot of other people do. I think it’s the brown hair and brown eyes, but mostly that’s where it ends…… except that most lesbians my age have the same resting bitch face. Maybe we look like each other in that way that when you live with someone for a long time, people think your facial expressions look alike. Therefore, it’s not even that we look like each other. It’s because we’re from the same tribe.

When I was a kid it was straight person code for “I know you’re a lesbian.” That amused me to no end, and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of it. I also can’t think of a universe in which it’s a good idea to tell you which straight people have said it, but that’s the funniest part of all. God, it sucks to be you.

Now that kd isn’t popular broadly and straight people have lost interest, I don’t get it that often. But put me in a room where everyone and their pets have listened to all her music on repeat since college and I am begging to get away from the attention. A stroke to the ego never hurt anyone, but after a while it gets embarrassing. I love attention to bits, but I microdose.

I actually think that’s why I was always so bubbly whenever Sam was around, because I was alone the rest of the time. It wasn’t that I wasn’t off doing my own thing and obsessing over her. It was that by the time she worked all day and put dinner on the table for the week, enough time had gone by that my social battery was recharged. I think it would have been a big shock for her to spend a long time with me to know that I am not bubbly in the slightest. The one thing that would never have changed, and hundreds of people will attest to this because they saw it with Dana for eight years, is the energy for me when Sam walked into a room. Time would just stop.

I had been married to Dana for four years before the accompanist at our church knew we were a couple. This is because Dana wasn’t a singer, and I drove myself to church so that I could sing and she could sleep in. When she walked into the sanctuary, all the joy rushed into my face, and it got warm. The accompanist said she just assumed that Dana and I must not be that close because I was always so happy to see her.

Quite the opposite. When we’d been best friends for three and a half years, we’d learned to talk with our eyes. She was everything I’d ever wanted and more. Neither one of us could breathe and not have the other one feel it. I didn’t tell her for a long time, because I knew I would be playing with fire. That I could destroy the most stable relationship in my life by losing myself to her, even if I was supposed to because relationships are all about compromise.

Our relationship did end, and it was traumatic. But I would go back in time and do it all over, knowing it either could or would end the same way. There are lessons I learned from Dana that she was there to teach me, because she’s the one in my life I felt was capable of doing so. Cooking was an authority I let her own. If we were in a professional kitchen, it was “yes, Chef.” Of course there were a couple of exceptions. Of course there were. But by and large, we were a dynamic team who could turn on a dime because when seconds counted, we could say things with a look. We could anticipate each other’s movements, because we had done it day in and day out for years at our house without missing a beat. It didn’t matter how a pro kitchen was laid out. Improvisation was our forte….. because Dana was loud. (I can’t wait until she sees that line and I hope it lights up her face.)

I didn’t just want any woman, I wanted Dana. It was obvious to everyone from the start, and our relationship lived on hope for quite a while in each of our minds, not knowing exactly how much platonic love had made room for romance while the other one dreamt.

I could have asked her so many times when we were alone, but I did not want to set the ball rolling on an affair, because that’s something that would have changed me and taken me away from who I was. No, if I was going to risk everything, I had to be sure.

I did and I won big. Just Kings full over Aces. To be clear, we did have an affair. We admitted our feelings to each other, and eight hours later, we told the people we were in relationships that we loved them, but that we were too close to each other to make it work with them anymore. They were unsurprised by this knowledge, and yet I apologize for the enormous amount of time it took for me to make my decision, literally and metaphorically. I’d cheated on my then girlfriend for eight hours, but I’d been leaning more on Dana for emotional support than anyone I’d dated for YEARS at that point. The clue phone was stalking me obsessively and I wasn’t picking up. Thank God I eventually did.

It took me two years to get it together, and eight hours for my life to absolutely fall apart. It was traumatic and painful for a higher purpose. We were both in relationships that were just fine. We could have been happy for a lifetime with them, but it wouldn’t be the fit we had. We weren’t breaking up with our significant others because there was anything wrong with them. Tokyo and Los Angeles are both beautiful cities but you’ll be miserable if your partner never wanted to come on the trip.

It wasn’t that they were wrong. They were wrong for us. We wanted cherry blossoms and strong matcha. They wanted Milk Bar.

Dana and I wanted an attachment we’d never forget, and that has been true. It was worth it to find the love of my life for a short time than never to have experienced a love like that at all. I reached out for fantastic, and I found it.

There’s one picture I love of Dana at my sister’s engagement celebration brunch at Brennan’s in Houston. She’s wearing a fabulous outfit, shoes, and jewelry that we spent the day shopping for, just giggling and laughing like we invented it. We’re at one end of the table smiling, and my mother is on the other….. also smiling. At the time, it was my favorite picture we took to display in our house.

Now, it is a beautiful artistic representation of what marriage looks like for me now….. my wife and I on one end of the table smiling, and my mother on the other.

It’s a shame I forgot the attachment.

Your Blog Makes You Sound Like a Dick

December 21, 2022December 21, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I do not know what to do with this feedback except to agree with it. I already know that this is my web site and here I am god. I have that right in this very small, contained space. I do not have to compromise here because no one else is responsible for keeping it going. It doesn’t have to be popular. It just has to exist. I’m not planning on keeping this blog current for amusement. It has a purpose. I own it, so I can’t get blocked from it. Facebook can’t decide that I mean I’m going to incite actual violence for seeing someone’s clear deficiency as a cook and offering to tell them all about it. This isn’t Facebook at all. Nothing about these pages are glossy. It’s not a curated memory picture. It’s what happened in my opinion. Objectivity is for better people.

I know and accept that my blog makes me sound like a total dick, and my favorite nickname years ago was “judgmental dickhead” because the friend that said it to me was the person I specifically “hired” to call me on my bullshit and she was the best of the best of the best. She didn’t roll any punches, and I needed it. But what she did was respond to my writing, not my tone. She met me where I was. She didn’t give me advice. She didn’t say “I think your tone should sound X, because it might make people who want to date you think Y.” But those are the questions in front of me and I have to take them seriously.

The questions stand up outside of context because it doesn’t matter who said them. The setup was that a friend told me that I shouldn’t write about Sam because other women interested in dating me have my URL. Well, everyone who has dated or married me has had my URL and it’s caused friction. I am very practiced at dealing with angry people who treated me like shit and thought it was wrong for me to say so. At no time has anyone come to me and said, “I read what you wrote. What did you actually mean by X, because it’s making me go to a dark place and I need to know if you meant to send me there.” By the time I hear about it, they want to leave and there is no discussion. It doesn’t matter to me if they do. They’ll get over it or they won’t. At no time can I control their reactions, nor can I pre-pick what’s going to upset people and what’s not. They know they’re friends with a blogger and all the risk that entails. What they rarely, if ever, ask is why I’m so protective of this space. Writing is keeping me alive.

These are my words, not theirs:

I’m sorry it’s so early, but one more thing occurred to me that you might not have thought of that’s important. Look at how I wrote about someone who meant so little to me vs. Dana, the actual love of my life. I don’t roll any punches with her. I talk about how much I loved her and how much she hurt me and how both of those things are true at once. Sam never made her bullshit worth going through, because all people have it. It just wasn’t the right relationship, and it doesn’t matter how either one of us feel about it, we’re never getting back together. She burned a bridge, and it was important to me to remember in 10 years that when she did it, I wasn’t a wallflower about it.

The only way I can write it down is if its true. Abused people don’t have any boundaries. Maybe you already know this, maybe you don’t because I have no idea. Abused people have been so beaten down that they think nothing they do or say matters. I was just this shell of a person before I started writing, because what happens is that you get lovebombed until you do one thing wrong. Then, that one thing becomes your entire narrative in how the narcissist sees you, meanwhile you’re trying to figure out why the sunshine is gone and why it’s never coming back. That pattern was set up for me when I was 14. So, at 14, I learned what it was like to be in a narcississt’s grip, and I lost all my opinions.

I waffle between being that abused shell and the real me, the one that’s 13 and was never abused in the first place. I think what you’re seeing now is that I have been a shell in front of you, not because I didn’t trust you, but because I was miserable. Now, I’m not. I have a lot going for me and I have boundaries and opinions and passion and drive, when you really haven’t seen any of that before. It must be a little confusing, as if I’ve completely lost my mind. It’s not that. It’s that you’ve known me for a short time in terms of how incredibly old I am. I am still me, just not the mentally ill one. I’ve been medicated back up to a cold.

So, to overfocus on Sam without acknowledging Dana is like coming to DC and not seeing the Washington Monument. If it happens, you’ve missed something big.

One of the criticisms I got was that writing about Sam was going to push away future people from dating me. I thought about it for a second and then gave the same response I’ve given for the last 20 years. “Good. If anything about my web site is truly a concern, they have no business dating a blogger. It only gets bigger from here as I publish more and more.” One of the biggest compliments I’ve ever gotten was from my friend Heather, and it was regarding this very thing.

We were talking about whether it was possible for us to be partners years in the future, or whether we were better off staying friends. It made me cry so hard I couldn’t stand up when she said that she thought we were better off as friends because I was going to be huge and she didn’t know if she could be that person’s partner…. that she was a wallflower. I understood that sentiment. If I do become a bigger writer than I am now, I don’t want to think about what that means for my public persona, either. I don’t want to be a big deal. I want to lock myself in a room and keep my head down and publish. That’s it. If I pay attention to my feedback from more than a couple of people, I will have too many different opinions competing for my attention and I will lose my authentic voice. I will only be a reflection of them.

The thing about Heather is that she validated my dreams. It didn’t matter whether we were ever going to be together or not. It was enough to me that my friend thought something so big about me, when I think of myself as a scared little girl with imposter syndrome.

I’ve gotten blowback on my entries for a lot of reasons lately, but that happens every time I make new friends. This time, though, I can scout out some of the problem on my own. Since I got to DC, I have tried to be invisible. I didn’t date, I didn’t really go out. Even when I was working in a pub, I didn’t drink and commiserate like I used to. The beer wasn’t cold and the Mexican Coke was. Go figure.

As a result, my friends here only know me as very mild mannered. I am not sure that I’ve ever even had an opinion in front of most of them. So they see this person now that they have never dealt with before, because they’ve never known me to have libido. Nothing within me striving to keep me alive. Nothing within me that says “it’s not okay to hurt me.” I let everything bleed out of me and only wrote e-mails that had any actual substance…. and those were to one person, not many.

The blog works because it’s so rough and raw. The blog works because it makes me sound like a dick, because sometimes I do, in fact, sound like a dick. I’m also not going to be precious about people who wrong me, because telling the world that I let someone I had three dates with walk all over me and begged her for eons so that she was more exhausted by me than broken up with me? That’s for younger people.

I could keep pissing both of us off by continuing to hound her over why we broke up and why I need closure, but I know why we broke up and I know I already have closure, so what’s the point? Let’s say I’m wrong about why we broke up. That everything on this web site is just conjecture (it isn’t, just making the argument). If Sam has said that she is done and doesn’t want the opportunity to rebuild, is it then my responsibility to care how she feels in the future, considering that she has said that she does not want to care about me?

Ok, so for the people who have said that they’re very concerned about me because throwing shade at Sam would probably discourage future suitors…….

You have no idea what conversations Sam and I have or haven’t had. Anything I’m saying about her now in terms of my reactions to her are so pointless that she shouldn’t even care, because who am I to her? She has already indicated that she wants nothing from me at all. She just wants to go back to her life. So I let her. What would have been amazing would have been a conversation in which we each felt good about parting or getting back together. But if you tell someone that you don’t want to work it out over a text message so that you can avoid confrontation, then obviously it’s a “find your own closure” sort of thing.

I didn’t get closure from Sam, so I created it. I reached inside my own heart and squeezed out every bit of affection I felt for her and smashed her Christmas present all over the ground. Why would I do something like this? Because I’m a judgmental dickhead who hates being treated unfairly more than anything on earth. I am also not telling you a false narrative, because I fact-checked it. Sam already accepts that the story we were having a great time and she flipped out is accurate. She told me so herself. If anything else was wrong, all it would have taken is a heads up to fix it. But I didn’t even get a chance at that. She had made up her mind and who even was I to care what happened between us? It was her way or the highway.

Here’s what I know for sure about that. It is better that she broke up with me, because if we’d stayed together, she still wouldn’t have listened to me because every fight would be like this instead of just the one. Every fight would be a battle between me, the one who talks too much, and her, the one who’s terrified to let me know she has feelings.

It is such a toxic time warp to divide labor like that. One person does all of the thinking, one person does all of the feeling. I am not saying that Sam is a robot or anything like that. It’s just that between the two of us, I was the romantic with her head stuck in the clouds, and Sam had her feet firmly on the ground. In fact, that was part of the problem. She told me she didn’t like change, but my pie in the sky ideas were all about change.

Poor Sam- it must have been like saying you were allergic to shellfish and winning a lifetime supply of shrimp.

But does my understanding of her point of view make my hurt less important than hers? Is it wrong of me that I’m mad our relationship couldn’t have ended with a heart to heart so that I didn’t have to be so strong? Do you think it didn’t just kill me to have to say, “don’t leave like this. I won’t be able to reconcile with you because I will have too much anger and resentment. I can feel my protective walls going up already.” I gave her every piece of information she needed to make her own decision, and then she said that she only wanted to get together for closure, and that she had made up her mind. I am not a closure sort of bitch. If you say it’s over, I’m out of there. I haven’t always been like this. I realized I had ADHD.

If I want to solve a problem quickly, burn it and turn my attention to something else. Burning it doesn’t mean railing against it, I’ve just put it in the Recycling Bin. Once my attention changes, it is like the thing I wanted to ignore just disappears. For instance, Sam has disappeared down the Z-axis because we weren’t together that long. There were only three weeks of memories, so not a huge chat history to erase or issues to work through. Because you see, I would be working with Sam privately to discuss all these things because if we had discussed them, I would know her concerns and be able to speak to them… be able to perhaps solve them. But you know what I can’t do? Anything involving getting her consent. Because that would involve talking together. And that would put me in a vulnerable position. I have been in a vulnerable position before with Sam and I was punished for it. Do you think the take home message on this web site should be that not only did I take it, but I set up a pattern in which I invited it to happen more?

I’ve been down that road before. If I let this pattern continue, it would set itself up so that Sam was witholding whatever from me because she resented me, but couldn’t bring herself to tell me that she resented me, so I proceeded to make the problem a hundred times worse because she never told me something was wrong. She expected me to know it and be sensitive to it ahead of time. I am not saying this is what actually happened. I am saying that I have started the same relationship several times and the pattern has never varied…. not that it won’t in the future. It’s just that probability says now that we’ve already had this one crack in our relationship foundation from witholding and an unwillingness to take it out and look at it won’t lead to that pattern changing. What is the likelihood now that this problem will go away on its own?

But just in case my friends are that worried, I’ll take all my armor off and be nice to Sam.

Wilhousky, you had me at hello.

I wish I could recreate the first time I saw you from memory. I walked downstairs, opened my front door, and there you were. It was surreal. This gorgeous woman I absolutely adored wasn’t just my imagination. She could reach out and touch me.

….and you did. I felt things physically and emotionally I had forgotten existed. You added dimensions back to me that I thought were gone. Pieces of me that died with my mother have come back in talking about the kids and their music education, because my mother was my accompanist and talking about their voices reminded me of her preparing with me for Solo & Ensemble, or my audition for HSPVA.

You know what it’s like. You’re a soloist, and you find The One. The one who will catch you when you miss an entrance or jump the gun. The one who follows your tempo instead of their own as not to throw you under the bus.

I felt like there was the potential to accompany *each other,* Sam. That there would be a time and place in which the other one would always be there to catch you if you missed an entrance or jumped the gun. The thing I miss the most about you is all the things we had in common, because asking a non-musician to accompany me wouldn’t mean anything. To you, it would mean asking if I could jump and knowing you were prepared to catch. To me, it would be you knowing that if you jumped, I was already waiting with my arms open.

If I sound like I have a lot of confidence about this whole thing, it’s that I’m projecting that I’m confident because I’m broken. You didn’t do anything wrong, but when you showed me who you were, the parts of you that I really love were cast in the shadows. You hurt me. I won’t assign malice. It just is, whether it was intentional or not. It burns me up that I have a great idea for my own future and only wanted to share it with you, and I’ll never know what about that dream pushed you away, or what part of my personality turned you off. It’s my big future, and you were invited. So were the kids. I was hoping that the three of you would want seats on the rocket ship, but I never got that far. I was stopped before I could even ask the question in curiosity, much less reality.

There are so many things that we could have accomplished together. We could have gotten in on the ground floor and built it up into the sky. We could have hung banners.

Just because my fairy tale got busted doesn’t mean I have to be angry about it…. and I wouldn’t have been, because there’s probably something I’m missing. A lot of things I’m missing. I didn’t even know we had problems. Maybe that was the point. You saw a red flag too big to ignore at three weeks, but it wasn’t important to let me know what it was because it wasn’t worth crushing my feelings over it. I am such a curious person that of course I want to know what you think and feel. How I affect you. But you don’t want me to have that information.

I didn’t have any choice but to let you go. Left to my own devices, you and I both know I could never have left you. You and I both know that if you had come over to break up with me, we’d still be together. But not for long.

Because there’s still the essential problem of you saying too little and me saying too much. What you would have learned if you had sat down with me is that we probably would have been on the same page, broken up just the same, but the bridge wouldn’t have been burned. I would have no reason not to trust you in the future. But when you showed me that you were untrustworthy, I believed it.

That does not mean that I think you are any less beautiful, sexy, charming, hilarious, and right that voice is the superior instrument with choral music being perfection. I said I would never give it to you because I’m a trumpet player. I’m laying it at your feet. You were right. I was just being contrary because it was funny at the time. I know what it’s like when two voices combine and the energy it creates. I would have given a limb to experience what that would have been like for us, literally and metaphorically.

It is killing me that I can’t find out because I can’t take the risk that I would open myself up to the exact same hurt, because it would take the wound created and make it deeper, not a shallower injury somewhere else. Perhaps I should thank you for not making anything worse, and I do. Disappointment is just one of those things you have to sit in for a while before you get some perspective. I know that you’ll leave my mind eventually, and you’re on your way out even now. I don’t have to give energy, positive or negative, to our situation.

It doesn’t make me a bad person to feel angry, disposed and disappointed, nor does it make me a bad person to express those things. What would make me a bad person is throwing out every bit of the good with the bad. I still have the picture you took of me at Ben’s Chili Bowl set as my profile picture on Facebook. It’s because the last time I saw a picture of myself where I looked that happy, I was a completely different person. I was married. My mother was alive. Just those two things killed enough in me that I am unrecognizable to myself now.

You coming into my life brought a little bit of the fun me back. I just wish it could have lasted a little longer, or that we could have remained friends so that we could still enjoy each other’s humor even if you didn’t want to buy a house. I don’t have an issue that you wanted to break up. I have an issue that you changed the rules and punished me for it, then hid away so that I couldn’t respond. I can be mad all I want about that on my own. I don’t have to drag you into it, and I did my best just to be angry about that one situation, not to lump our entire time together and call it all bullshit. It just looked like it was in retrospect because you said when we first started texting that when we went out on the weekend, you didn’t even know if you could ever make plans with me again.

When it seemed like you only wanted a girlfriend for that weekend, I called you on it. You said that you just meant logistics were hard because you needed to talk to the kids’ dad, and of course you weren’t going to dump me on Monday. So I wasn’t really prepared for the relationship to only last two more weeks and then get dumped, as if it was just long enough to make it not seem like all you wanted was someone to hold during “Be OK.”

I was weak in your arms, willing to be vulnerable in a way that I hadn’t been before, because this was the first relationship I’ve had since my psychiatric hospitalization in 2015. No one has ever dated this version of Leslie before. She’s new and frightened. She’s curious and asks lots of questions, because she doesn’t know if the lesbian dating world wants her. She doesn’t even know if she wants it.

Sam, you changed my entire life as I know it by stepping up and being willing to ask me out in the first place. You made magic happen between us, and I will never forget that it happened. I just wanted you for so much longer than three weeks. Not your body. You. Your personality, your essence, your charisma. I didn’t want just any woman. I’m way too smart for that. I wanted you, I was willing to work with you, even to wait on you because you said that if I was patient, you’d give me the world. What might have gotten lost in translation is our separate definitions of patient. I can dream all day without moving. You can move all day without dreaming. We attract each other like magnets, and would have continued to at our own peril. I deleted everything I could possibly delete where it comes to you, because I have my memories and the few verbal sketches I made of our short life together. It is enough so that five years from now when I look back, I’ll think of your pictures and smile.

I said you’re beautiful, right? I just wanted to make sure. I am so forgetful. Wouldn’t want you to miss out on that bit of information.

I am certain that it makes me seem childish and stupid that I’ve been angry with you, but now that I’ve been reading my own writing for 20 years, here’s what I know to be true above anything else. I will be glad I wrote it all down. If I don’t write exactly what I’m feeling, then it’s not a blog for me. It’s a blog for everyone else. In time, I won’t be able to distinguish when I was telling the truth, embellishing, or lying. I have no interest in doing that to my perceptions- making myself doubt them by sneaking lies and half truths into the text and not being able to remember where so that the revised version overwrites what’s real. How it comes across in terms of percentages of truth is of no consequence, because that’s not even what blogging is.My truth rings because this is my space. When I go to your blog, I will expect to think something isn’t true because that wasn’t my experience, not that you wrote about it wrong.

This site is not curated to make me look better than I am. I reserve the right to be a full human being with lots of human emotions, not just the ones that are acceptable in public. I won’t even stop being mean to Sam because I think it will scare off other women. I will stop being mean to Sam because my attention has shifted and I have no need to talk about her anymore. She wouldn’t have even been in this entry except that I was talking to a friend about it earlier. So the entry is not really about Sam at all, but how I felt being called out in a way that said, “if you continue writing this way, you’re going to end up alone.” No one is ever going to win points with me that way, because I see the current and I can get in the river, but my flow rate has always been different than anyone else’s. What does it matter if I purposefully do things that isolate me without knowing that’s what I’m doing? I have been isolated my whole life from other things. Why should I care about this one in particular?

For instance, lots of people don’t pick up when I’m trying to be funny and attribute emotion where it isn’t. No, I actually don’t think Sam’s an idiot. I think she was paralyzed with indecision and didn’t want to let me help her decide where our relationship was going to go. It doesn’t make her stupid, and it doesn’t make me wrong for hurting.

The fact that Sam hurt me should say more to you than anything I’ve ever written. Sam got close enough to me to matter.

Standing Up and Owning My Birthright

December 20, 2022December 20, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just told my work in progress idea to the most perfect person I could have imagined, because he was a teacher at HSPVA. When you know people that are HSPVA quality students, when they come at you with a creative idea, they don’t say “where’s the money?” Matt Mullenweg created WordPress. Justin Simien created “Dear White People.” Mireille Enos starred in “The Killing,” and has had roles in “Good Omens” and “Big Love.” She won a friggin’ TONY for an Edward Albee where she played drunk. She won a friggin’ TONY and SHE GREW UP MORMON. Today I stood up an owned my birthright. This book is going to be fantastic. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. I auditioned to the same school they did and I got in. Sit on that.

This was my Facebook post yesterday that got me going.

I feel like I should lay out a full analysis of what I’m currently dealing with and why…. not for you. For me. It’s my thing and you’re invited, because I’ll need it later. I’ve been delving into past writing to figure out where I’m going, and how the information about my gargantuan leaps in emotional growth that I see on these pages is informing my direction.

Romance is fine. I’m settled in myself. You can read all about it just by scrolling the home page for a few days’ timestamps. Sam was a loss, but everything else surrounding her departure prospered me. It wasn’t a good relationship, but it produced good content. I am never trying to be more popular and writing in that direction. I can’t. People aren’t logical enough to predict what’s going to be hot and what’s not. They’re emotional. If something grabs them, they’re going to share it. If it doesn’t, they won’t. There is no point in time at which I want to take on the burden of caring whether this web site gets a huge, international audience.

If I don’t keep my head down and be absolutely indolent about my need for validation, I won’t get successful. There is a direct line between caring how much people think and willing to be vulnerable enough to get people to read a blog in the first place. Most of my friends do not understand this, but strangers do. If you’re already here, I can guess some things about you that will resonate. But again, I’m just talking about likelihood, not fact.

If you’re into reading blogs, you have been since 2003. You are familiar with Mrs. Kennedy, Anil Dash, Heather Armstrong (and Jon by proxy), Jenny Lawson, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Gordon Atkinson, and most importantly, Ernie Hsuing. little. yellow. different. took off like a rocket. Oh, and how could I forget Wil Wheaton? My friend Chason and I have known about and interacted with Wil as a blogger since Jesus had our pager numbers. I wish I had taken a screenshot of his comment on Clever Title Goes Here, my old blog that was equally popular. I was talking about auditions or juries when singing, that they fill me up because when I’m singing hard rep and doing well, it feels like flying over the mountains. He said he felt the exact same way with acting. It made my day.

Later on, we met up at a book signing for “Just a Geek.” I introduced myself and when he put a name to a face, this is what he wrote in my book…… “Dear Leslie, Clever Inscription Goes Here. Love, Wil.”

To back up in time a little bit, I went to the High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I have known about Matt Mullenweg for years because back in the day, we were both in the Houston jazz community. That boy who went to my high school created WordPress, and here we are.

I went to high school with stars like Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Chandra Evans, Debbie Allen, Mireille Enos, Justin Furstenfeld, and Beyonce was three years behind me. I’ve met her once, but I’ve never paid attention to her because back then, we were in high school. Seniors don’t normally take freshmen seriously, and the day I met her I had ditched school at Clements to take my girlfriend, Meagan, back to PVA to have lunch. There was a Happening (lunchtime concerts in which different Art Areas took over the common area to showcase).

So, we were all in the cafeteria and mingling. You think it was cool in retrospect for me? I haven’t talked to Meag in years. Wait until she reads this web site and finds out she met Beyonce and didn’t even know it.

Though Beyonce is cool and everything, I was in love with Miranda Bailey the moment I found out everyone called her “The Nazi.” Then Shonda Rimes gutted me emotionally by stretching the Hippocratic Oath to its limits and having to watch her wrestle with those decisions. She had to save a white supremacist, an ACTUAL Nazi.

The fact that Chandra Evans and I went to the same high school is way more important to me than Beyonce, and remember since Beyonce wasn’t Beyonce back then, she probably feels the same way about Chandra that I do. In terms of HSPVA legends, she’s always going to be starstruck at her birthright rather than promoting herself…. she’s just projecting that she’s hot shit as a marketing strategy, because the real girl is as quiet as me.

Starstruck at her birthright.

Yesterday, I stepped outside The Matrix and owned it. I nearly blacked out when I thought about the fact that I auditioned for the same school they did.

AND I GOT IN, TOO.

I am editing this entry to add something important. Here’s what HSPVA did to inspire this level of confidence. I listen to the Argo soundtrack on repeat every single day when I write so that I can tell you where every single note goes, along with chord structures because I took music theory. That music teacher was an anti-vaxxer and I lost someone crucial to my development to COVID. I got the idea to start doing that from another HSPVA student, the creator of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, during his interview with Tim Ferris. He was a tenor sax player and had the same jazz director I did. I borrow structure from Jason Moran, the jazz pianist, all the time, because I wrote to “Ten” for a year. He was stunned and told his entire band that in front of me when we were laughing and joking after one of his concerts at The Kennedy Center. He had the same jazz director I did. Robert Glasper nearly came unglued the last time I saw him at The Reach, because back in the day he was just the goofy dude who sat behind me in history. He had the same jazz director as I did. I am addicted to “The Suffers.” Jon Durbin sat next to me in Jazz Band for two years. Moral of the story? Dr. Robert Morgan is directly responsible for making me a drooling fangirl over all of them, and he owes me money because it’s getting expensive.

Why T**** Matters Forever

December 20, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

45 is such a low life that we should be able to process and move on quickly. But it’ll never happen. He singlehandedly destroyed social media for everyone who isn’t him, and we need to deal with it. The problem is enormous. I’ve just been banned for 30 days three weeks after being banned for 30 days, which came after multiple shorter bans, all because I am a woman with an opinion.

Facebook doesn’t know that. This is not about women.

This is about using text scanners instead of real people to ferret out insight into what people are thinking. No, I am not inciting violence when I say I want to kick someone’s ass at a cooking contest. No, “kicking” does not count as hate speech, because I also said “kick your knee” once.

The most recent ban was for saying I thought Harry and Meghan should “burn the bastards to the ground.”

It’s not T****. It’s everything that came with him.

It’s Meme Time

December 19, 2022December 19, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

40 odd things about me . . . I got this from Facebook. Don’t judge me.

Do you put ketchup on hotdogs?
- It depends. I don’t eat traditional hot dogs very often. I eat mostly plants. My favorite hot dog would be a veggie sausage and almond cream cheese with hot sauce.
Choice of pop?
- Dr. Pepper Zero, but I also enjoy sparkling water as long as it’s plain seltzer or club soda (the difference is salt).
Do you put salt on watermelon?
- Yes, and it is every bit as delicious as my favorite candy, chocolate covered pretzels.
Can you swim?
- Quite well, actually. I was physically delayed as a child, so I took a class called “Water Babies” at six months old. Because there’s only been half a year of my life that I didn’t know how, practice alone would have done it. However, my first partner was a college swimmer, and she helped me to get even better.
How do you eat your steak?
- Seared over an EXTREMELY hot stove and baked in the oven. I let it rest and then finish with butter. I like a good crust on it with spices, but the spices don’t have to be fancy. Just salt, pepper, and garlic. That combo is the end of Ratatoullie for me. It’s being in my late 20s and falling in love with Dana. Warmth envelops me, because at the time I thought I’d been made for her. I may have to recreate the dish because I had a thought that really stopped me. “What if I’ve been avoiding steak all these years because I don’t want to feel pain?” When I taste that kind of home, it’s devastating that it isn’t still around. At the same time, it feels good to remember that home and what it was like to live there day in and day out. If it sounds weird that I would attach something so profound to steak and spices, remember that both Dana and I were professional cooks.
Favorite type of food?
- I don’t have one. I just have foods I eat consistently. If I say something is my favorite, though, I mean it in terms of individual items. I am very brand loyal, because companies that make vegan food all do it differently. If you find something you like, buy 12.
Do you believe in ghosts?
- I am not a person that tries to explain the unexplainable. When people tell me their stories, I believe them. My experience of the world is not theirs. In my own life, I have not had ghostly experiences, but I do talk to ghosts all the time. I just know that they’re in my head, and I have divided off one part of my brain and I’m having a conversation with it. I especially do this with people I’ve been close previously, but for whatever reason are no longer in my life. For instance, sometimes Dana and I go for coffee in my dreams just to catch up. It’s real intelligence creating the script and not artificial. I have a library of Dana. A chat history that if it was printed would take 25 years to read and digest. It’s practically an uploaded consciousness of who she was seven years ago. Therefore, I can take old jokes and build on them as easily as “we” can rehash old conversations that have different responses due to the passage of time. I dream all the time about what I would have done differently. This is because I believe that an apology is nothing without changed behavior. I couldn’t save the real relationship from collapsing under its own weight, but what I can do is be genuine with the fictional version of her and really listen to what she says, because there may be wisdom I missed the first time she said something, or the new response brings her closer to me- but only the dream version…… getting on a plane and going to get her? Worst. Idea. Ever. #comicbookguy In terms of how I want to proceed with the real Dana? She has been one of the great loves of my life and I would like to continue loving her, so I think no contact is the right call.
What do you drink in the morning?
- Insanely strong black tea with milk and sugar, although most of the time it’s an energy drink slammed while walking out the door. I need to take the extra time to make the tea with whole fat milk and real sugar. I’ve lost nearly five pounds in the last month, and not in a good way. I didn’t have five pounds to lose. I remember what being curvy was like. I’ve never looked more like a woman. Then a crazy amount of shit happened and my reaction to it was to shut down and stop eating. I developed coping mechanisms using protein shakes because I could bring myself to drink. I don’t know why I have gotten like this in the past, and my best guess is that when things spiral out of control, I get ADHD hyperfocus to what I can allow myself to dictate. I haven’t gotten close to that level, but my appetite has waned for about a hundred different reasons. It’s amazing how self conscious and annoyed I am that I look like a teenage boy from a distance and yet have been entirely dismissive of putting on weight. That it would happen naturally over time. I’m tired of waiting. Stay tuned.
Can you do 100 push-ups?
- In another life, maybe. Now, I would make a formal announcement if I was capable of one.
Summer, Winter, Spring, or Fall?
- It used to be fall, because I lived in a very hot climate. Fall and winter hold a special place in my heart because of it. I didn’t grow up with snow, and DC has a lot of it at times. The District is brilliant any time of year, but it is stunning in the spring. The cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin are unique and beautiful.
Your favorite animal?
- I haven’t asked her name, but there is a pygmy hippopotamus at The National Zoo that I’m pretty sure is in love with me. It’s asex/aro, but we make it work. Seriously, though. I know that animals don’t process emotion like humans, but she knows that if she plays around and gives me a huge gap-toothed grin, I will take her picture.
Tattoos?
- Yes. Here’s the story on all of them.
Do you wear prescription glasses?
- My problems with sight are mostly neurological, so I don’t truly need glasses to read unless the print is tiny, but they help.
Do you have a fear?
- Not anymore. It’s a spectrum. My biggest fear used to be that someone would find out my biggest fear. I fixed it.
Do you have a nickname?
- A million of them if we’re talking one on one, but nothing that has stuck universally. I like it when people call me by my last name instead of first, but it’s not like it happens all the time
Rain or Snow?
- Snow. Raindrops are heavy. Snowflakes are not.
Can you change a tire?
- Yes, but I can’t think of a case in which I would want to. It’s not my know-how, it’s my size. A 124 pound person is never going to be very good at changing a tire. I will help you chain up, though.
Favorite flower?
- Roses, any type or color. I lived in Portland, Oregon for 12 years. I’m particular to fire and ice- a blood red to white gradient.
Can you drive a stick?
- I have only bought one car in my life that was an automatic.
Can you whistle?
- Yes. My favorite tune is one of the trumpet parts from Vivaldi’s Two Trumpet Concerto.
Where were you born?
- At Mother Frances hospital in Tyler, Texas…. with the statue of Jesus outside directing traffic.
Surgeries?
- Nothing notable………… yet.
Shower or Bath?
- A bath, time permitting. Shaving is my moment of Zen.
Last song you heard?
- Not a song, an orchestral piece called “Clearing Iranian Airspace” by Alexandre Desplait used in the movie “Argo.” I listen to that score on repeat because I’m such a music person that if the music is new, I cannot focus on anything else. The writing has to come first.
Broken bones?
- Nothing major. A couple of bones, but none needed surgery and healed quickly. It was forgettable.
How many TV’s in your home?
- I rent a room in a huge house rather than having my own apartment because I discovered I was less lonely that way. So technically I own one display that has an over the air antenna with every channel available except the one that runs Jeopardy!, a desktop PC, and an Amazon Firestick 4K that I’ve hacked to run Kodi and some amazing plugins, like getting ad-free YouTube through the official YouTube Kodi addon. It is still worth it to purchase YouTube premium to block ads. If you have YouTube Premium and you visit any web site that references a YouTube video while you’re logged into Google Services, ads are blocked on *that* web site as well.
Worst Pain?
- Two things are competing in my mind. The first is the knowledge that Dana and I had a wonderful life together, and we did an excellent job of running it into the ground. The rock bottom part is twofold. The first was loving Dana to the ends of the earth and wanting to protect her, and knowing I couldn’t because I wouldn’t be able to lie if someone asked me how I got an ugly bruise that hurt because she jammed my eye socket. I carried physical pain for a couple weeks, phantom pain for at least a week after that, and being hit by my wife altered my pathology permanently. I had never told anyone that I have lingering triggers. After I told someone who didn’t deserve it, I published that pain and fear instead of keeping it to myself. The second is that my emotional abuser set up in me an undercurrent of sex and friendship- that it was the same thing when it wasn’t. I am sorry to every woman I’ve ever sexually harassed by idiocy and not malice. It doesn’t take away from the fact that I hurt you that I came by it honestly. My apologies particularly to to a Marine, a Seaman, and a car wash attendant I completely confused and offended because I thought I was very, very funny. They didn’t. It’s a tight spot to be a victim and a perpetrator of something of something as huge and dark as sexual harassment.. I have worked through my issues and I’m a better person now, but they won’t know it. I am part of the problem and I see it. Our relationship is over, but I see you and I’m apologizing profusely even though it doesn’t make a difference. It changes me to really feel remorse.
Do you like to sing?
- So much so that I have trained for classical auditions that would surprise you given the way I look. I have a voice I can make as straight tone as a Westminster Abbey choir boy, or add the vibrato of a round-heeled diva. I’m not Renee Fleming or anything, but I get around (I love Tupac as much as I love Bach)
Morning person or Night…?
- Morning. I’m so hyped when I wake up that by 0600 I’ve written enough to be done for the day, and I don’t have coffee or energy drinks until noon because it’s noon to 1700 that break me.
Are your parents still alive?
- One of them is. My mother died in October of 2016. It’s a whole other thing when you lose your first apartment.
Do you like to go camping?
- Sort of. During the day it’s fine. At night I get too cold. I would rather make a fire in someone’s backyard.
What do you binge watch?
- Science fiction. I’ll try anything once, but particular favorites are Firefly, Orphan Black, and Doctor Who.
Pumpkin or pecan?
- Neither. A sundae with pumpkin ice cream and apple pie in it with pecans on top. I think Cold Stone Creamery makes something like that, but it’s not vegan, FYI.
Add photo of yourself.

Doing Blue Steel with my tiny phone still attached.

No, there aren’t actually 40 questions, neither are there people who can count on Facebook.

Lesbian Years

December 18, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

OMFG. I have finally solved every issue with Sam I’m ever going to have in one joke. Thank God when closure came, it was with laughter and not tears. The funniest jokes are ones that hit hard, and this one punched me in the stomach.

I came out to myself when I was 13 years old, and Sam is a toddler in lesbian years.

I laughed so hard there were tears and snot on my face.

Now let’s talk about the serious part, and why it affected me so much. It was another huge life lesson. I don’t want to date women who have only had one relationship with a woman. This is not hard, as I do not mean people who have been married to one woman for a long time. I want to date someone who has lived in this world, been out for a long time, is absolutely clear in her communication so thinking that our relationship could end because a woman thought being married to a woman was something it isn’t is off the table. It just makes one more thing we have in common rather than one enormous red flag. I also don’t want to make other women feel bad, because I’m not counting those married to men for a long time out. I just have to get to know you well enough to see whether my judgment is accurate or I’ve been a dickhead for stereotyping you after marrying one and dating three women who were n00b.

Knowing what that means is also important. I am l33t. I want to be able to communicate in my natural language and environment quickly without having to explain beforehand. Scratch everything I just said. Knows how to communicate on the internet like it’s 1999 over brand new to the girls’ club, but high school and college girlfriends count. No one needs to have married a woman before. It’s not a society you engulf all at once. It takes years. Learning to communicate with women to the level in which you would marry one takes an eternity. Additionally, you don’t have to be Mr. Robot, but if you are, let’s buy a house…… but my housemate Sam has said that she requires a W-2 in order to date me. I’ve had all the fancy things in life, and the simplest make me happy. But it’s not like Sam’s an idiot for trying to ensure that her friends are thriving. That actually means more to me than the person I’m dating being rich.

If they were, I’d like to still live simply and enjoy the absolute hell out of spoiling everyone I know and doing amazing philanthropic work. I’d start a foundation, and the first thing I’d do is hire someone else to run it. I would trust a bag of hammers faster than I’d trust my own judgment on business and finance. The fun part would be doing it anonymously to people I perceive to have wronged me. At the moment, there are at least six houses I want to pay off in that one regard…….

This is another lesson I learned on PBS and retained it because it involved my favorite subject. The phenomenal Portland chef, James Beard, was queer as a three dollar bill. He was uninvited from Reed College for “homosexual activities,” so when he became a celebrity chef and got very, very rich, so did Reed. Having to grit their teeth and respect him was everything. Just the most enormous shade I’ve ever seen thrown down.

My work in progress really does have the potential to be big, because if I can get license to publish from a real person’s estate, I have a built-in marketing strategy. If the fictional version of the real person doesn’t work out, I will just create another fictional character of my own that drives the same plot. Therefore, it’s entirely conceivable that I will be a very hot commodity and able to start a foundation with my own money…. if that isn’t possible, I have the option of doing whatever I want with any money it does make.

If it’s my money, I have my eye on who I want to hire. My money, my organization…. that I will promptly give to more capable hands. When I told her about my work in progress, she saw its potential and agreed to be the steward of my money immediately. I will also need someone to take charge of the logistics in paying everyone who even thought about helping me get to the New York Times and everyone who’s ever even thought about telling me I was a loser. Brandon Sanderson also talks about this. The question he was asked was regarding “what do you do when you say you’re a writer and the only two answers are ‘where’s the money’ or ‘you poor fool?'” He talked very seriously, and then closed it with a joke.

Sanderson said “I waited years, but I finally got my moment. I was at a party and this guy asked me what I did. I told him I was a writer and he said ‘oh, so you’re unemployed.’ I said, ‘I hit The New York Times’ Bestsellers List last week.'”

Since the work I’m planning is so ambitious, I have other projects that I’d like to develop that may take off before it. I’m almost certain there’s a young adult fiction novel in the works, as well as an elementary age explanation of what being gay is and how to ask yourself those questions………. and how to know if the answers are right for you now, or right for all time. I even surprise myself, and I thought I was old. Because of this, my attention is entirely overloaded all of the time and I want to be conscious about choosing a partner in whom I feel there are as few communication issues as possible, like not being threatened when I say “guard my time with your life. Here’s my cell phone. Only come get me if it’s an emergency call. How will you know? Someone that is actually in my contacts list will pick up the phone rather than texting.

It’s not that I can’t protect my own boundaries. It’s that it will make my partner feel important that I trust her enough to be one of my Guard Roosters. Man, if you remember Gayle and Oprah, you are an OG. No, I will not link to that entry. If you’re an OG, you know. You are my LaFawnduhs. #peaceout I have a thing about my phone. One of my friends works in intelligence, a Navy Reservist and intelligence analyst at a smaller agency than C/DIA, but collects raw data from all of them. I have another friend that works for Defense. I have another friend that works for State. I would never care if you were going through my phone to see if I was having an affair. It’s because you’d be reading stories that aren’t mine to tell. If you can’t respect that, I won’t allow you to become close to me. I also won’t respect your right to tell your story the way you want to tell it. I mean that metaphorically, as it’s how writers support writers. We do not want story ideas. We want you to obsess over our craft. Partners don’t decide plot. They’re editors.

It’s not that I don’t want to be someone’s guide, necessarily. It’s the energy involved. I won’t discriminate until I really assess the situation. When QEII died, something occurred to me that had never occurred to me before. My mother had died, and half my life is over. What am I going to do with the next half? The two have combined to give me enormous strength. The worst thing that could ever happen to me has already happened and I am officially “I don’t give a fuck” years old. I remember exactly when it happened for someone I admire, and I was inspired with laughter at the memory…… but that’s a story you’ll have to get out of them. I will only say that it was impressive. You should have been there…………. and it involved the biggest Astros fan I have ever met in my entire life bar none. I was much younger then, and I remember dreaming of the day when I’d no longer care about someone in such a deep and meaningful way that I would hide my emotions, not set boundaries, and roll with any decision anyone ever made. And to call people out when they’re being ridiculously rude rather than bending over backwards to be lovely and kind when your conversationalist isn’t.

In short, I don’t have time to be a guide.

I want to be able to lay out my dreams and if they don’t line up, move on as quickly and quietly as possible. By quietly, I don’t mean that I was wrong to write about Sam too soon or anything like it. I mean not wrecking other people. Leaving them better than I found them rather than burning bridges.

I also don’t care if I find a partner at this point. I’ve been single for seven years. I have too much to write on this planet to worry about anything else.

My multimillion dollar franchise idea is an alternate history between two imaginary friends… fictional versions of people, one of whom moves in time to stop a world event from happening, but it’s not science fiction. I am literally moving their life backward so that the fictional version of them is even less like who they actually are/were.

I am doing what Brandon Sanderson would call “borrowing structure.” The idea came to me from Steve Martin, who wrote a novel called “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” a fictional account of a meeting between Picasso and Einstein.

It involves intelligence, because I think it’s a story that the fictional person would have written, not because I have a real life love of non-fiction spy books. It’s because I read spy non-fiction that I’m not threatened by writing about that world. Jonna Mendez even announced on Facebook that she’s publishing next year, so that’s one more book to add to the pile.

If there’s one person I adore, it’s George Tenet. When he declassified The Canadian Caper and allowed “Argo” to happen, it really caught my interest because my cousin James’ dad was a helicopter pilot for the CIA and DIA (D is Defense). He is no longer living, and one of the stars at Langley is mine in terms of knowing if I was allowed to visit, when I saw the wall I would take ownership and pray. It crushes me that his helicopter went down when I was a toddler, because is is a person I would have adored. I know it. He was my grandmother’s brother. Why wouldn’t I have been absolutely 100% convinced he was Jesus?

I also would have already put him on salary by now.

Since that isn’t possible, I study very hard. I need a college level course on both a European and an Asian nation. If I can swing it, I have a friend in one of the countries and I’d like to go live with him for a few months so that I can work locally. I am a Virgo, which is an earth sign. There’s a reason I love the ground and feel connected to it. I cannot do setting justice until I can be barefoot there.

I have also never been brave enough to leave the West, but now I am because I have a male chaperone. I’m a feminist, but I’m not stupid. If I’m only going to be there for a few months, I’m not going to stick my neck out by announcing I’m 32 in lesbian years.

Notable Observations

December 18, 2022December 18, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This entry is not from today. It’s from last weekend, and I liked it so I’m sharing it. The fact that I’m no longer with Sam doesn’t mean it’s not good writing. It’s just gardening that I liked, and not because I’m my own fan. I liked who I was when I wrote it, and it shows.

I am not sure that Sam is the right person for me yet. That should be clear, as we haven’t been dating that long. What I am sure about is that I am enjoying having an actual friend who is okay with letting me kiss them in public. Call her my girlfriend or don’t, we don’t care. The important thing is that when I take off into flights of fancy, she knows it. I can throw stuff out there like, “I notice you don’t have any pets. Do you want one ever or are you not a pet person?” And she knows I’m wondering if *I* can get a dog and just laughs. It’s funny not to beat around the bush.

I’ve had other flights of fancy, like cool ideas for a house or things to do with the kids, and she just rolls with it. She knows that images are pouring into me and I’m just talking about them. That as the pictures narrow, I’ll know what I actually want and not just a pie in the sky desire for every possibility that I see in front of me and making plans for all of them.

The best part is that I don’t feel the need to move, now or ever. That’s because I love my house, and I love hers. They’re both in great locations. It’s just that Sam can’t move in with me. We both have housemates, and hers are permanent. But it feels good that I don’t have to freak out about learning yet another new area of the country. I got lucky in that respect. Most of the time, when you meet people online, you are setting yourself up for failure if you meet someone really great. Logistics get in the way extraordinarily quickly.

Sam does something that is licensed by the state, so if we were to stay a couple long term, we can’t leave Maryland until she retires. I’m sure there’s all kind of equivalency exams, etc. but why? Maryland is amazing. So, while it’s a possibility that Sam and I might want to find a house of our own, it is not a possibility that the house will be anywhere outside of the area where I already feel comfortable, there’s great public transit, and pockets of small town life that still feel very urban because they’re not too far from DC and Baltimore.

That’s what feels right about this relationship, and right about letting my mind wander outside of time and space. The environment is right. I have found someone fantastic that gets my personality type and isn’t threatened by it. We have extraordinarily similar senses of humor, although I tend to be a lot raunchier with my line cook upbringing. Surprising, since Sam was a soldier for so many years, but that’s just not her vibe. Her vibe is extraordinarily sweet and then jokes that come out of nowhere occasionally that are so astute I have to fight to keep from choking. The laugh is not just the laugh….. it’s the surprise as well. It’s funnier coming from her because you don’t expect it.

In other news, I’m glad to be alive.

My house caught fire a few days ago. It was no big deal, but it could have been a disaster. An electrician drilled through a live wire. The wire was hanging and spitting sparks all over the place…. near a gas main. We almost blew ourselves up and several city blocks. That is not what happened, though. The electricians got us all out and got the electric company and the fire department out to our house in minutes. The fire burned some in the basement, some in the living room, but the house is structurally sound and we are all back in.

I’ve been through a house fire before…. that one ended badly. The entire house burned to the ground. I didn’t have flashbacks so much as the smell bent me over. Time flashed back and forth. I was eleven and 45 all at once. It was an interesting situation, because so much was up in the air. But luckily, I didn’t know about the gas main until later. My one comment on it is “it could have blown. I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have even seen it coming to care. Not being a nihilist or anything, just the percentage of what you can control in that situation is absolutely nothing.”

Salt

December 17, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

One of the things that Sam and I joked about was being polyamorous because she knows I’m dating Rachel Maddow in my head, but Susan is her primary. 😛 And then I told her that I was also dating Helen Mirren. Obviously, I have a very busy inner life and Google Calendar.

My very busy inner life made me happy yesterday, because I laid out everything that was going on with me and why, and my stats boomed. I don’t want to tell you exactly how many because I don’t want to scare Sam by telling her just how many people think she’s an idiot. The 20 shares the post got should give her an indication. I have entries where thousands of people have read them, and yet not one person shared it.

I am enjoying this moment of schadenfreude, but not because I am being vindictive. Quite the opposite. I’m feeling better about myself in a way that is completely separate from anyone I’ve ever dated, not just the last one. When Sam walked out, it only ended a future that didn’t happen. I’m not upset anymore. A three week relationship isn’t worth crying over any longer than necessary. I just don’t know how I feel about a relationship for me anymore.

Maybe I’ll just date people until I die because I am too emotionally intense to limit my emotions to one person. They run so deep it’s scary for both of us. For instance, I told Sam once that even when she’s not with me, she doesn’t leave the room…. and it was so true then that it hurts to remember. But it’s true. Once she got under my skin, I wanted her there in some capacity for life. Married, friends, whatever. That part didn’t matter. I just liked her. Period. I thought she was a good person, and I was wrong, at least in how she treated me. I’m sure she’s wonderful to other people, I just never became her priority. I wasn’t someone that she would do anything for, much less end our relationship in person. I didn’t think of her as my girlfriend, I was more casual than that. But that’s not the message she took home. The message she took home was that I was falling in love with her too fast…. when in reality I was furious that she trashed our potential, not anything we’d already done. I saw pictures of our future and thought, “I want that.” At no time did I say, “I want that tomorrow,” or even a couple of years from now. I thought I didn’t have to worry about all that stuff until her 15-year-old graduated from high school.

I was certainly infatuated, drunk on the spirit of attraction. I also loved her platonically in a way that said, “I’m ok with just being your person. If you need something, call. There is no time in this life where I will not pick up the phone if it’s you.” For Sam, I think she underestimated philia and overestimated eros. Philia is the love that gets ignored. If we lose a friend, it’s not an acceptable form of grief…… even though it happens ALL THE TIME. Love is such a confusing word in English. It should be all Greek to me.

The thing I keep ruminating over is timing. Sam could have asked me to be exclusive so much earlier, and even when I was on said date, she never left me…. even after she broke up with me and I had to try like hell not to lose my shit over a girl when I was supposed to be on a date with someone else. It was so embarrassing. Just one of those “I hope the earth swallows me up” moments.

The other thing that really irritates me is that we had plans for dinner on Monday. When she broke up with me, I said, “I asked you if we could talk about this later and you break up with me?” She said that Monday was too far away. The longer I think about it, the funnier it gets. It’s so easy to be amused by the youngest of four, because I’m the oldest of four and she fucked around and found out. Don’t come at me with your bullshit, you’ll just be windmilling your arms while I have my hand on your forehead.

And by the way, I apologize for sounding like an asshole yesterday by seemingly giving conjecture about Sam being a miserable walking disaster as if I needed it to make myself feel better. I don’t. I just forgot to say that one of her last texts to me was “I’ve been crying for two days, I have a killer headache, and a bloody nose. And none of that matters.” It was unbelievable. Her audacity struck me dumb. You’d rather cry over me than tell me what’s wrong? You can’t wait to sit down together and use your words like a grown-up? Her impatience and jealousy got the better of her. Once you set up a bad pattern, you never get back out of it.

That’s what convinced me to go no contact, not that I thought she was actually going to rush right over and apologize. She sent me an apology text, and that’s like, the same. As my friend Michael said, “it was the reaction of an 18-year-old boy.” I don’t date children.

What’s New in Breakups

December 16, 2022December 16, 2022 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

As of today, Sam is a PNG. But I do want to talk about me and how I’m reacting to the most grief I’ve had since my mother died and how I’m doing right now. Sam is certainly involved, but that’s because I learned things about myself from her, not because I am trying to talk about her specifically. It just is.

I learned that the relationship was a much bigger deal to me than it was to her, or that’s how Sam made it look from the outside. She has kids, people who live in her house to give her affection. I do not. Even having someone hold my hand was legendary in my mind. Having someone look at me differently turned my world right side up. Having someone lovebomb me into submission was amazing. The thing is, though, I didn’t pick up any narcissistic vibes from her, but I should have.

I actually canceled our first date and she begged me to reconsider. That was the first red flag. She picked on me for not having a car, and I’ve lived without one most of the time in DC. I know how to get around. In fact, I know it so much better than she does that it never even occurred to her that public transportation is a thing that exists and that I’m used to it and I like it because I can read. From minute one, it was like “I don’t want to date someone without a car because I can’t handle those kind of logistics.” This is because she never let go of letting me handle my own logistics. Not once did she say, “I’m going to X. Meet me out there.” I would have. Now I have money on a Baltimore system that I have no idea what to do with, but I do have a free ticket to BWI any time I want and that’s no love lost.

So, anyway, I picked up on her apprehension about me not driving, and called her out on the carpet. She said that she was sorry she didn’t listen to me and that of course I was making the decision that was best for me and please still go out with me?

Against my better judgment, I went. And that’s when the first life lesson hit. My DV PTSD kicked in and I noticed how enormous her hands were. I imagined her fist coming at my face. I’ve never told anyone this before. Never. I should have. I have one friend in particular who would have kissed it and made it better. But I didn’t. I told Sam instead. I told her my biggest, deepest, darkest secret because I thought that as my girl, she ought to know. She told me that she would never raise her fist to me in anger, and I believed her. Of course that was true. Dana and I got into a heated situation and she lost it. I never got angry enough at Sam or she at me to even produce something close to my level of emotion in those first few moments, kneeling on the floor.

Also, now do you see why I don’t write about Dana? Why that toxic mess will be with me for the rest of my life? Nobody cares about two girls fighting. Lesbian DV is invisible.

So, I trusted Sam in a way that I’ve never trusted anyone. Our breakup didn’t have anything to do with it, only that she proved I was wrong to be so open and forthright because she was not a safe person to talk to. She’d never been through it, so she thought nothing of my issues surrounding it and whether abandonment might be one of them. So she broke up with me by text. Abandonment is a recurring theme in my life. People get sucked into my orbit (which I have only recently realized is a thing), and get caught up in all the ideas I have, and then realize they’re in too deep and I’m so emotionally intense that they can’t take it. I do not do this by choice. It is my personality type, and I know it sucks. Visionaries do what they do naturally, it isn’t malicious. We see pictures of the future and depending on future decisions, change. It’s “we could do this, or we could do this, or we could do this…..” ad nauseam.

I need people who can stand up to that, and say “I’m not ready for this” rather than “I’m out of here.” I am extraordinarily emotionally flexible and sensitive to the fact that my personality type is rare and exhausting. I’ll do whatever I can to make my loved ones comfortable with it, but they have to let me know that they’re having a problem for me to do anything about it. They wait until they’ve already made up their minds about who I am and what our relationship is like and it’s always going to be the same.

I am never the same across time. Never. I bend and adjust to what’s in front of me, and plan for the future based on the information I have. In a sense, I feel like The Doctor, because of Matt Smith’s one line, “I’ll never forget when The Doctor was me.” I have lived several lives by now, at least four regenerations, one for every decade. I just haven’t picked a new face to do it.

I am so emotionally complicated that it’s isolating and lonely. I know my emotional quotient is off the charts, that I would be in the Mensa of EQs if that were a thing that existed. I see patterns of behavior like most people breathe. One of the things that I said to Sam was, “don’t do this. Not only can I see how you’re wrecking my life, I can see how you’re wrecking yours.” I have seen true joy on her face. I have awakened something in her that wasn’t there before. I have changed her, and I have no illusions about that. She is every bit as miserable as I am, crying all the time just like I am, and it’s incredibly sad and depressing watching her be miserable and shooting her own foot repeatedly.

Or maybe not. She had a lot of conversations during our relationship with not only herself but friends as well that I wasn’t a part. There’s no way of knowing what I might have done to cause such a reaction. But what I do know is that she’ll regret the way she treated me for the rest of her life, because she set so much on fire that there’s nothing to reconcile. I don’t even trust her enough to be my friend, because my friendship runs so deep that my friends become a part of me, and I don’t want that with her, either. She told me who she was, and I am choosing to believe her the first time. I am not going to let this get any worse. And that’s another life lesson.

There’s just so much here. The first is that I take good care of my relationships so that if they end, it’s without animosity or cruelty so that there’s a chance of rebuilding later. The way she left was monstrous, and there’s no coming back from it. She lied to me and said that everything was fine while she had all these dark conversations with herself about the things that were going wrong. She never let me in, because she never wanted me there in the first place. She wanted a magical experience for a weekend and couldn’t allow herself to just say that because she’s not that kind of girl. So she trumped up a relationship and then extracted herself in the most ugly way possible. It was childish and it will resonate with me for years. Because that was the moment I stood up and bent the spoon. I was not going to teach her to walk all over me. If she said she wanted to talk about the end of our relationship without being open to the possibility of rebuilding, then I never wanted to see her again in my whole life, and that if she contacted me or wrote to me, I would lose my shit. If she showed up at my house because she finally pulled her head out of her ass without telling me she was coming, I’d get the police involved and I wouldn’t deal with her directly.

I was clear about boundaries. If you walk out now, never come back. You’re going to set too much on fire. I am being clear and I want you to respond and tell me that you understand this is it. You will never see me again. I wanted to light a fire under her ass to DO SOMETHING. This is crazy. It makes no sense that we are each crying desperately for each other in our own houses instead of talking about what we’ve been through and what we each need. And now it’s too late. She’s been cut out of my life and thrown away like a bad penny. What she has done has been childish and painful. I am in no hurry for a repeat performance, but I know I’ll have one.

Because people are afraid to be vulnerable with me, and it’s easier to cut and run.