I haven’t had much time to actually work on my site, because I’ve been too busy wrapped up in my own head and trying to create a life worth writing about…. even if I did have to end that phrase with a preposition. Yes, I realize. Know the rules, break the rules, etc. Hopefully the new design is a bit cleaner, easier to read, and has less of an annoying footer on every post that I didn’t even realize was there until I delved into the “widgets” section. Well, technically, that’s not true at all. I knew it was there. I was just too lazy to do anything about it. Perhaps lazy is the wrong word. Unmotivated at best, which is different because I’m not lazy about the writing. Just how it looks to the general public. I also didn’t realize that my PayPal link had disappeared, so I fixed that, too. I hardly ever talk about money on this web site, but domain name cost has come around, so anybody that has a spare dollar would be thanked immediately and profusely. There are some of you that have donated that have not given me your home addresses so that I can send you a thank-you card, complete with signature in case it ever becomes worth something. Let me know. My e-mail address is ldlanagan AT gmail DOT com, and you can always find me on Facebook.

However, even if no one ever donated, I’d still be spilling my guts, because as I’ve said from the very beginning, this web site is for me, and you are invited. Money helps, but it is not the driving force as to why I do this. Not then, not now, not ever.

The whole reason I chose WordPress.com over buying my own server space is so that I didn’t have to work on development in the first place. I mean, I’m a total bad ass when it comes to HTML/CSS, but that’s never been the focus of this web site, and it never will be. I had a donor who bought me WordPress premium for a year so that I could add my own CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and what I found was that I used it for custom fonts and not much more. I can only hope you don’t care about drop shadows and shit…. because you know it’s true if it has a drop shadow, an impressive font, and a graphic  that expresses more than I do.

WordPress already does all the things I need, and the free themes are infinitely easier to deal with than either creating my own or customizing something already built to my own satisfaction. If I went down that rabbit hole, I’d never get back out. I am a perfectionist. Every #class and #id would have to be perfect, and I would drive myself crazy in my own Virgo way. It’s such a blessing to have all of those things already set. I nearly said “taken care of,” thus ending another sentence with a preposition. I AM TRYING, PEOPLE.

Perhaps a couple of cups of coffee will help, as I have not had any for three or four days, and because I haven’t kept track of how long it’s been, I didn’t realize that my headaches were almost entirely due to the lack of them. I’ve been waking up dehydrated, and I don’t like the metallic taste of water, so I add mix-ins to my water bottles and drink two or three as soon as I wake up. Because of this, I always feel better, but not thirsty enough to brew coffee as well. Then, about 10:00 AM, I’d get a horrible headache and not be able to figure out why. #dumbassattack

I realize that I could have just rode out the withdrawal, but coffee is also motivation to adult…. you know, using my grown up manners and able to speak in complete sentences, even when it’s early. I do limit my caffeine intake, though, because I need to get to bed early, as well. I am much more productive in the morning than in the evening. To get to peak performance, I usually sleep from 9p-5a. As of late, I have given this up, and it shows. “Peak performance” has dropped off in the face of grief, which leads to depression, which leads to isolation, which leads to not having enough energy to use my grown-up manners and speak in complete sentences (just making sure YOU’RE PAYING ATTENTION). It’s getting warm enough that I can also write outside, which is my favorite thing ever… although today is out because it’s raining cats and dogs. Even though the porch is covered, rain blows in sideways and I hate writing while soggy… much less taking the chance that my iPad will get ruined. I’m about to switch to a Windows 8 tablet, though, because the WordPress app I use now requires iOS 10, and my iPad isn’t new enough to upgrade.

My dad sent me a full-fledged Windows 8 tablet, which means it has a touch screen and tablet mode, plus full desktop mode so that I can install regular apps like Quicken and Plants vs. Zombies. It also has a keyboard with a USB port, so that I can use a regular mouse, and Bluetooth so that I am not tied to said keyboard if I want to add a mouse and headphones. It is superior to my iPad in every way, not because I don’t like iOS, but because it offers way more functionality. The only way in which it is inferior is that I’ve looked it up, and it is not upgrade ready, because Windows 10 works on a different partitioning scheme and will brick the whole tablet if I try. But Windows 8 isn’t that bad as long as I keep it in desktop mode. Plus, there’s no better price than free.

I thought about selling my iPad and getting a new one, but because it can’t upgrade past iOS 9.3.5, it isn’t worth anything. And yes, I know Android tablets are cheap, but the ones I can afford won’t upgrade past the OS that comes with it, either…. even though they are also superior to the iPad because Jesus will come before Apple offers an expansion slot and a radio. I suppose that I don’t necessarily need a radio anymore, because most stations stream…. but the radio uses less battery and I love NPR.

My local station doesn’t stream (or it didn’t the last time I looked), so I usually download OPB, waiting for the woman that Dana and I used to call my corporeally challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio. This is because I went out on two or three dates with her before she admitted she already had a girlfriend in San Francisco and I was out. I didn’t even touch her, thank God, but that didn’t stop Dana and me from making fun of the situation for years on end…. actually, almost a decade.

It’s stuff like that I really miss, those conversations that were epic tennis matches in which the story didn’t really exist without both of us telling it at the same time. They were much, much funnier that way- between my dry-witted delivery and Dana’s rubber face/physical humor it brought the story to life, as if you were dancing in it.

There were so many of them I’ve forgotten, but I promise that if Dana started her part, I’d pick it back up like no time had passed.

I can’t think of any friend in my life that I have that with anymore, but it came from being best friends for almost four years before we realized what everyone else knew first. I was so pissed at her when she told me that she had a crush on me six weeks after we met, because I wasn’t there yet and I couldn’t even conceive of returning her affections. It got weird, but we pushed through it…. and it wasn’t until we had time apart that I realized she’d become the face I loved, wanted to see every day for my whole life, and when she helped me move all my stuff from Portland to Houston in a very ill-advised move (which I was excited about at the time, but in retrospect…..), I realized 20 minutes after she left that my entire world had just gotten on that plane…. and even then it wasn’t about romance. It was that Dana’s wife, Carol, was on the road all the time, and we’d developed our own routines (both comedic and practical), the thing that saved me over and over when I got my heart broken and needed a friend.

Dana came to visit me in Houston and I went to visit her in Portland. When she came to visit me, I had a girlfriend at the time who was overly jealous and paranoid that I would leave her, to the point that she didn’t even want me to go back to night school because she thought I’d run off with my professor. She didn’t want me to see my doctor because I mentioned in passing that she was cute. But that was nothing compared to seeing the tennis matches between Dana and me, and then later on, Meag and me… even though both were married and settled and there was no chance in hell that I was out the door with either of them.

When I went to visit Dana in Portland, she was having ankle surgery, and the front door was unlocked when I got in from the airport. I walked in and said, “honey, I’m home!” It was a joke that didn’t turn out to be so much of a joke…. but if you know anything about me, it’s that I often say things before my brain has a chance to connect consequences. It didn’t necessarily change Dana, because I’d told her over and over that I wasn’t interested. It was just the thing that started the tape that I was wrong.

On that Sunday, we wrestled with whether to go to the cathedral or to Bridgeport, because I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to go to the church that sustained me when I fell out with Diane and Susan, or whether I wanted to take a chance seeing all my friends. I argued with myself until 10:00, which made my decision for me because Trinity had already started. Of course it was on purpose….. not in the moment, but in retrospect…..

So, I show up for the service with Dana and Carol in tow, and I was excited for about fifteen minutes. The rest of the service, I cried like a baby. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t seeing Diane and Susan that broke my heart, but the woman I’d loved beyond all reason and responsibility, a relationship that started out as a May/December fling and was supposed to stay that way until shit got real. To my friends, age didn’t matter. Her friends, which had once been mutual, dumped me in a hot second.

I have said many times that my friendship with Dana started as a pity invite to Easter dinner, because her empath heart went out to me. For me, it was joining a new social circle so that I wasn’t lonely all the time, and still scary because it wasn’t like I knew these people well. We’d run into each other at church, but that was the beginning and the end of it.

Attending Bridgeport brought all of it back. All of it. The anger at me for supposedly “taking advantage of her,” the humiliation of having been dumped by someone I could see a life with, despite all odds and reason, because she couldn’t see a life with me. It wasn’t just that I missed her. It was that I missed the person I was when I was with her. Stronger, more capable, ready to take on the world. Those three months helped define who I am now, because what I’ve found is that it’s not the amount of time, but the amount of growth that happens in it. However, we didn’t really “break up” so much as take our relationship underground and hope no one found out. When I realized just how much I was being gutted like a fish, I was out. It took almost a year to realize I didn’t want to be with anyone who was seemingly ashamed to be with me.

By that time, Dana had earned her best friend status, and she listened patiently and picked up all the pieces of my heart (and my apartment) so that I could function again.

She was also the person that picked up all the pieces when Diane decided that she could drop in and out of my life at will… and as soon as I started to emote, would ghost again and put my heart into a blender. It was in those moments that I realized that I didn’t love Dana, I was in love with her, and it came down to something very, very simple and profound at the same time.

My friend Holly told me it would help if I went into the Gorge and sang it out, that music would fill the hole that Diane left. So, Dana and I hiked up to Wahkeena Falls and I stood up to my knees in freezing water and, with my voice shaking, started with the Rutter Pie Jesu and ended up screaming my lungs out. It wasn’t enough to sing. There was so much pain inside me that I didn’t even have words. It was as if I’d turned from choir nerd to insane banshee on a mission.

Dana was sitting on a rock about four yards from me, and when I turned around, tears were streaming down her cheeks, and I knew. The fact that she was crying simply because someone else had hurt me was the tipping point.

I waited patiently until we were both ready to end the relationships we were currently in, because we realized that if we’d stayed with them, life would have been fine… but we didn’t want fine anymore. We wanted spectacular. It didn’t come around again until I went to Portland for a job interview and my girlfriend forbade me from seeing Dana at all. The final blow was my girlfriend realizing that I’d made a purchase in Dana’s neighborhood (not with her), and my girlfriend blowing up at me because she was tracking me through our checking account. So, after that, I did what I always do. I went to Dana for her advice and counsel.

For the first time, I saw the white hot flash of Dana’s anger as she told me I needed to leave under no uncertain circumstances. That this girl was ruining my life and I was oblivious to it. Believe me when I tell you that she was right. Not only was my girlfriend’s paranoia over the top, I got an internship with the Human Rights Campaign writing national Sunday School curriculum and I was forbidden to take it because my girlfriend thought that I’d go for three months and it would turn into a permanent position and I would leave her. There was no universe in which she thought I would’ve asked her to move with me and that I wasn’t out the door at all. I lived an entire life of appeasement, being isolated from all my friends because she thought any one of them could be my next great love.

Dana, again, was crying because someone else had hurt me…. so I hatched a plan to leave and so did she. It was time to stop putting things off, because our marriage was inevitable. There was no one that understood me better, no one that would more willingly step in front of a bus for me if it meant I was safe. There’s no one I should have listened to more than Dana, and for that, I’ll always be sorry.

In many ways, I put Argo’s needs above hers, even when I didn’t realize I was doing it. Though the flaming disaster where everyone got burned and scarred didn’t happen overnight, it did indeed happen… at my own hand, no less. And, actually, that is not entirely true. I wonder every day what might have happened had Dana and Argo become friends as well, so that Argo and I were not living in our own little bubble, with no one anywhere to pop it.

It might have avoided so many tears on my part, because I couldn’t endure the tug-of-war. There were so many things that Argo specifically told me not to tell Dana, so that I retreated from her in every way, because I wasn’t programmed to keep secrets from her, ever. And then, Argo told me to make sure Dana saw everything, to ensure that she knew Argo was not having an emotional affair with me… and when I showed it to her, unedited, Argo was furious. Actually, furious doesn’t even begin to cover it, because I didn’t know that what she meant was to keep our confidences and show her everything else when she said “make sure Dana sees all.”

Dana waffled between thinking that Argo was telling the truth and Argo was lying to herself. Pure, unbridled jealousy and anger came out at both of us…. obviously, because it led to Every. Single. Fight. turning from me wanting to work on our own issues and Dana turning it into why should we work on this when you don’t love me anymore?

I would have agreed with her had it been even remotely true. I loved Dana like I love air and water. I’ve never forgotten her kindness, her protection, her unlimited capacity for love.

I’ve never been polyamorous a day in my life. A passing crush was just that. It went away, just not as quickly as it appeared. Because of confidentiality, I can’t say why. I can say that I was lost in trying to fix everything in Argo’s world…. my natural state of fixer/pleaser on high alert. The problem was that I didn’t need to fix anything. I just needed to listen. She wasn’t looking for solutions, just a place to vent.

Once I really took that in, I let go of all of it. The blushing teenage feelings, the need to fix everything, the need to put Dana at arm’s length so that Argo and I could have our secrets in a place Dana couldn’t reach.

It was just too late in the game, and even a Hail Mary pass wouldn’t have won it… mostly because by the time I could have made it, Dana had made her choice to take our fights from emotional to physical, and even though I entertained the idea that it was a one-time thing and we could go back to normal, in my heart of hearts I knew nothing would ever be the same again. I couldn’t apologize enough, I couldn’t walk on eggshells for the rest of my life knowing that the possibility of violence existed.

Physical violence was a huge reason that I moved so far away. I wanted to make sure it never happened again, and her fist couldn’t reach 1800 miles…. the flip side being that I thought if we had long enough to cool off, a visit to her parents might include a visit with me, not to reconnect romantically but to start our tennis matches over. At first, it was a yes, and then it was a no…. not even when I reassured her that it wouldn’t just be a visit with me, but Pri-Diddy as well (they’d met before in Portland). It wasn’t just us sitting alone with no one to run interference…. not that I really thought I needed it, I just thought it would be more comfortable because it would ensure that our conversations never went too deep for comfort…. that we could be funny again.

However, again, I don’t want to be friends with anyone that doesn’t want to be friends with me, so saying goodbye got easy…. not on this web site, for sure, because I had so much to process about her that was my own journey and not one I needed to take with her. It’s all my work to do to prepare myself for my next chapters, whatever they may bring.

I realize that this entry has jumped all over the place, but the beginning was just turning on the faucet before it really began to run. I tend to start writing about anything until I find a groove and things start spilling out.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, know that I am grateful. I reread my own words all the time to hold myself accountable, but it doesn’t hurt to know that someone is listening, especially people who have no horse in the race. You are all invaluable to me.

Every. Single. One.

 

 

 

In order to write, you have to have something to write about. Most of the time, I’ve been lost in brain-bending fog, but lately a couple of my friends have dragged me out of it. Dan and I had lunch yesterday in Foggy Bottom, near where she works with State. It was nice to just sit and talk outside, and she told me that there are probably resources for loss and grief on Mother’s Day. I think I’m going to need it. The last Mother’s Day picture I have of us together is Lindsay and Mom sitting in a car holding me up on an iPhone with FaceTime going, so that my face is a little blurry. It was really funny to me at the time, but feeds into my regret that I didn’t actually show up that day. But I can’t beat myself up for everything I didn’t know, even though I am really, really good at it.

Today is the kind of day that I’m really missing Argo & Dana, because one would have had virtual hugs and one would have had real ones. Romance means nothing to me, I just wish I had my friends back… but it wasn’t a mistake to leave, because I realized early on that my relationships with both were complicated and might not necessarily get me where I want to go… but that doesn’t stop grief, which is different than losing a mother but, in some ways, no less painful because I lost a support system in the process.

And then I think about how you don’t bounce back with an enormous amount of work, especially with physical and emotional violence, and how I never want to be that friend again. I am infinitely careful with my heart, because not only do I not want to hurt anyone, I don’t want them to hurt me, either.

But it has come to my attention that perhaps I am trying too hard, because the past dogs me in a way that I’ve never experienced. First it was marriage divorce, then friend divorce, then my dad getting cancer, then losing my job, then my mother dying, then my stepfather getting throat cancer with decreasing will to go through all the horrible treatment in store for him…. he’s had cancer before, and it was relatively easy to show up for chemo. This time around, the radiation is painful and awful on the body and the heart. My family is rallying around him, but there’s only so much one can do with the depression of chronic pain. In a lot of ways, I feel like my track record for surviving crappy days is 100%, and this, too, shall pass. It’s just hard to sit on my perch from Silver Spring and watching these things happen to people I love. With the death of my mother, it is not her death that’s hard. It’s the aftermath that leaves my family and her friends lost and confused.

I am doing my best to kick the shit out of Option B, because like Sheryl Sandberg, Option A no longer exists. Now that I’ve had time to grieve, really grieve, I am ready to accept that reality. Bringing everything from pain into promise won’t happen overnight, and in fact will take baby steps in that direction until I don’t realize how far I’ve come. When you see small changes every day, you have to look back over a month or so to see how far baby steps have taken you.

Prianka and Dan are a large part of why I am not completely losing my mind, because they’re up for both laughter and deep conversation in which I can say anything I want without judgment, and instead of just listening, offering concrete suggestions. Some of them do not apply to me- I don’t have money to just take off on vacation… well, I do, but it would completely wipe me out in terms of savings. But there are small vacations all over the place, like laughing with them.

Being able to have more than one friend in which I can have a full range of emotions is helpful, because they both know that I am capable of laughter, but sometimes it doesn’t come easily. The thing about grief is that sometimes it comes out of nowhere, and sometimes, I’m just not feeling happy that day all around.

After lots of time to process it, I realize that I made a mistake in thinking that I’d never get what I wanted from the friend that only wanted to joke with me, because it was the one source in which I could forget about life for a while. The problem was that I didn’t want to. So what if she doesn’t want me to have a full range of emotions? So what if she doesn’t want to have conversations that lead to forward motion. Perhaps breathing and staying in one place would have been a better option. But the niggling thought in the back of my head is that I am not that person anymore. I don’t have surface level laughter unless I am in that head space, which doesn’t happen on days when I am sad about everything. She thinks it delves into negativity, which is the last thing on my mind. I needed to breathe through what I wanted, and a friend that ghosts when I need her the most and not the least is damaging.

The thing is, though, there are cords, which as a music person, I prefer to call “chords,” that run between me and all my friends. I truly, desperately cannot afford to cut any one of them, even if it’s better for me in the long run. Losing a friend is the last thing I would want to happen in a time when I have already lost so much. But, as I’ve thought about extensively, at what cost?

Is it doing more damage to hide my full range of emotions, or is it more important to keep that chord alive in the remote hope that it eventually goes both ways? I am not sure that I cannot torture myself over the things that won’t happen over the sure things that will. The other thing is that I don’t tend to go for one-sided relationships in which the other person doesn’t want anything but one-liners. I need more than that, so is the question is whether I can get those things with other people without hoping she’ll eventually relent and let me talk about the things that bother me? Technically, I believe I can write about my own life and she’ll hear me, but I don’t believe that she’ll respond in kind so that the relationship doesn’t continue to be one-sided, and that hurts as well… I don’t want to be a taker all the time. I want to be a giver, and that is the part that’s missing…. the ability to listen to what’s going on in her life and offer her the type support she’s offered me over the years.

Because my mother died, I have taken up more room in all my relationships, but with people who know that when something goes wrong in their lives, I’m up for those conversations as well. In fact, it’s a welcome distraction to think about someone else’s problems for a change. My friends have intentionally held space for me, and it’s time to return the favor.

My mother is gone. Gone. It’s been enough time now that I don’t need or want to think about it all the time. I want to hold space for my friends inasmuch as they’ve done it for me. I am growing tired of isolation and am ready to rejoin the world, and would have been months ago had interviewers actually called me back. It’s hard not to have a place to go that will distract me in a way I truly need… which is why it may be time to go back to the kitchen, a job that will take over my whole life if I let it, and I will.

I picture a griddle letting burgers confit. I picture perfect French fries and desserts that will make you slap your mama. I picture soups and chilis that dance on the palate… all things of which I am capable while I eat sandwiches at home because the last thing I want to do when I get home from cooking is cook for myself.

IT makes me more financially stable, but it doesn’t make me happy. So, whichever interview I get first is the job I’ll take, because there are advantages to each. I know enough about IT that when it doesn’t make me happy, I can find small things about the job that will…. mostly coworkers and a lack of isolation.

I did get out yesterday. I got a cute haircut and some brown sandals so that as the weather heats up, my shorts won’t look weird with knee socks. Neither were expensive, but it did make me feel better to have talked to my hairstylist and the woman who’d rung me up at the shoe store. It was a release to do normal things…. even when it feels like normalcy lives in a different galaxy from where I sit.

 

A week or two ago, I was listening to On Being with Krista Tippett. Her two guests were Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant (link to podcast and transcript), authors of the book Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. In the intervening time between the podcast and the purchase, my grandfather recommended the book to my father, who then recommended it to me. I told him that I’d already heard of it, but didn’t plan on purchasing until I realized that Facebook and Amazon ads for Mother’s Day were becoming pervasive, as if I was somehow delinquent in buying my mother something. She’s already got the only jewelry she’ll ever need…. and the days of making her a card with macaroni and glitter are long over.

Amazon, I understand. Facebook (where, ironically, Sandberg works) should know better. Their targeted ads should have picked up that my mother was dead in a hundred different ways, most notably that I added “Loss of a Loved One” as a Life Event and tagged my mother’s profile. That realization led me to the “Buy with One-Click” button in about 5.5 seconds, because ladies and gentlemen, I am exhausted.

I started the book, and only got two pages in before I highlighted a sentence. My own mind lifted me from the pages and into my own stream-of-consciousness. The sentence is, grief is a demanding companion. I have found this to be true, akin to Dexter’s “dark passenger,” without the need for plastic wrap.

Grief is the shitty roommate who always leaves its dishes in the sink and never remembers to reload the toilet paper. Grief is the toxic friendship who says it’s all about me, isolating you from other loved ones because its idea of give and take is that there isn’t any…. won’t be for a long time, and with a parent or spouse, longer than that…. never truly losing its grip, but loosening from a choker to a pendant… perhaps moving from a tight hold around your neck to your watch wrist instead. It will never be the other one, because grief revolves around time…. taking out the linear and the chronological.

The main idea of the book is that Plan A is no longer an option, so live the hell out of Plan B, providing steps forward to create one. Some of the concepts I’m already familiar with- that you have to make plans to be happy to change your own mood, rather than waiting for the grief to lift so you can be happy. Your mood doesn’t change on its own, and won’t no matter how hard you beg.

This is perhaps the hardest part of being in grief. Knowing that you have the choice to make yourself happy or miserable and not being able to see joy as a valid option. Logically, you know if they knew it would make your dead loved one inconsolable that their death left you incapable of living your own life. Emotionally, there is a mental-which-leads-to-physical brain fog that upends everything. Where am I? What year is it? What am I doing? Who are you people again? This is because you attempt to distract yourself and all the while, grief is screaming thinkaboutmethinkaboutmethinkaboutmethinkaboutmethinkaboutmethinkaboutmethinkaboutme……………………. like being stuck in an Evangelical church where the accompanist only knows one praise hymn. #liveit #loveit #singitahundredtimes

I am a Highly Sensitive Person, meaning that I feel things far deeper and for far longer than I should. I hold on to mistakes I’ve made for years on end, turning them over and over in my head until I can make sense of them, often through dreaming. I want to make things right that cannot go back together, which often stops me from moving on and creating a future. I cower in fear at the thought that I might hurt someone with my own “crazy spatter…” especially after having done it already and never wanting to go back to rock bottom again. I have always been funny and polite, and I’d like to keep it that way… not in a “hiding my authentic self show mode” kind of way, but honestly being that person.

Watching myself “going Bodmin” was literally that… an out-of-body experience that seemed like it was happening to someone else because it was so contrary to who I’ve always been. I lost many allies in the battle against myself, the best reason I can think of for keeping myself well and healthy emotionally.

I can’t thank my doctors at Methodist enough for seeing the PTSD for what it was, and bringing down my anxiety from 11. This is because I never realized I even had PTSD until I began exploring my youth and what it had done to me on this web site. Watching it surface in black & white made the blood drain from my face, and the anxiety I didn’t even know I felt rise to my throat and simultaneously drop to my stomach.

Watching all of this happen turned me into a different person, one who pushed everyone away in every way I could think of to make them realize I wasn’t worth their time and effort… not because I didn’t need it. I needed it more, not less. I felt it was protecting them from me. If they went away, I wasn’t capable of hurting them anymore. It was cutting out my own heart with a sword, but I thought it was better than cutting out theirs.

What I didn’t realize then that I do now is that it was too late. I’d already cut out their hearts with my words, ones that I’d give anything to take back, but it’s all a little too little too late. Finding new life and new hope in DC was the jump start I needed to recover, but it doesn’t help in my darkest moments. I am more careful than I’ve ever been with friendships in terms of holding them at arm’s length for their protection, not mine. This will change the longer I know them, but even two years is too soon to know my entire life story. Everything has to unfold in its own time, even if they’re readers of this web site… because even though this site reveals snapshots of what I was thinking, it is just that. A snapshot of me and not who I am in three dimensions.

For instance, if you only read me, you’ll never know how quick I am with a hug or an arm around your shoulder when you need it. You’ll never know how I would literally give you the shirt off my back if you didn’t have one. You’ll never know the lengths to which I would go to take care of a friend in trouble, and now that I know better, how hard I would fight in the midst of you trying to push me away when you need me the most.

The hardest part of being a person with a mental illness, and I’m pretty sure this is universal, is admitting you need help. I took that brave step and admitted myself to the hospital when I couldn’t get a new patient appointment with a psychiatrist for three weeks and I needed help right the fuck now.

I will never forget Argo’s words, the ones that made everything click and all the puzzle pieces fall into place… why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you? The reason those words spurred me into action is that I didn’t realize my own power. I didn’t trust my own intuition enough. I let others decide things for me to evade culpability when things became a disaster- it wasn’t my decision, it was theirs.

It was an AHA! Moment when I realized I could trust me, and that I was strong enough to take criticism for the decisions I made when other people didn’t agree with me. Criticism used to be my kryptonite, the thing that rendered me helpless because God forbid anyone think I was doing something wrong.

There are still words of criticism that gut me like an ax, words that won’t go away under any circumstances, and they are Dana’s… being in a relationship with you is too hard. They are words that keep me from moving forward, because I cannot tell whether they say more about me or her…. because she didn’t say that being in a relationship was too hard for her, but universally. So I take it to mean that I am too hard to be in relationship with, period. It’s been over two years and I can’t bring myself to let go with my friends, much less any potential romantic relationship.

The one time I put myself out there, it didn’t go anywhere, and for that, I am grateful… but it still took over two years to even take that one step in forward motion.

In a lot of ways, I feel like I am resting on my back foot, that comfortable place that isn’t scary and reaps no rewards.

What might I have gained with said friend who only wanted to talk about pleasantries a year or five down the line? What might I have gained without being so protective of myself? Would I have ever gained a safe space to be who I am, or did I do the right thing by thinking up front that it would never happen? Was I trusting my intuition, or pushing someone away that ultimately had my best interests at heart?

My protection mechanisms are too great, and I know it. I have often accused others of having a barbed wire fence around their hearts without realizing that I have one, too… and when we meet each other, closeness cannot happen because neither one will take it down.

The only people I have trusted completely are my choir, because I thought they had a right to know why it was so difficult for me to come to rehearsal and church. That being bipolar and anxiety-ridden extends even to people I know well, and my mother dying only makes it worse because she was a church musician her entire life, and there are pieces that my conductor pulls out that I just lose my snot and cannot breathe. Even though it is okay with them when it happens, that it wouldn’t matter if I cried through every piece, I don’t want them to see me that way. My biggest fear is coming completely undone in public, and it has happened twice more than I’ve wanted, which is a grand total of two. Even in safe space, I am afraid.

I am lost and crying even as I write this, because living in a world without my mother so prematurely is a different kind of lost than I’ve ever felt. Losing your mother is never, ever easy… as is losing either parent or step-parent… however, a life cut short is a different kind of grief. You are not just mourning the past, but the lost future as well. Forbes, Lindsay, and I should have had 15-20 more years with her than we got. Forbes is over a decade older than my mother, and it is inconceivable to him that she died first. It’s six months later, and time is still malleable, because sometimes it has passed and sometimes it hasn’t.

My friend Susan said that her mother was still alive, but that when she died, it would bring her to her knees. At first, I was angry and jealous that she said it, because her mother was still alive and mine wasn’t. Anger and jealousy turned to gratitude when I realized she’d expressed something that I couldn’t and didn’t.

“Bring me to my knees” is so accurate that it hurts to even type. She saw writing on the wall that I couldn’t read until I began to live it… those words have soaked into my muscles and I carry them as if they are sewn there, right next to Dana’s… mostly because my mother was one of the people who never thought I was hard to love, even when I made it so.

I’d like to believe that I’m making it right, one day at a time, by becoming more open and actively trying to live as if I’ve been hurt, but I will recover. I just have to remember that recovery is a process, and it won’t come together all in one day… or even in the same way it used to be. It is the creation of the new normal… that even if Dana and I were still married and Argo and I were still flipping each other shit across the miles time would still weave in and out because sometimes the light in me can’t help but extinguish itself….

because I’ve been brought to my knees.

Yesterday was the pig roast at Dan’s, and I can’t tell whether I ate too much, or it was just my first time in public in ages where a lot of people were gathered, but I woke up this morning feeling like death warmed over…. but I’m guessing still a sight better than the pig. I should have taken a picture of it before we started hacking away, but I didn’t think of it until I’d already cut off both cheeks.

Later on in the day, I heard some woman say, “somebody even ate the cheeks!” I turned around and said, that was me. They thought it was weird. Pork belly and cheeks are pretty much the most expensive thing on the menu if you order at a restaurant. Who’s weird now? You don’t become a cook without knowing these things, especially if you’ve worked for John-Michael Kinkaid- something about which I’ll always be proud. Although if Kinkaid had been there, we probably would have hacked out the offal as well. I believe in nose to tail, just wasn’t brave enough in my technical ability with no true Chef’s knife/santoku. It was literally the best pork I’d ever tasted, but of course the cheeks and skin were extraordinarily fatty and I’ve been eating a vegetarian/vegan diet at home for as long as I can remember (I don’t have anything against meat, it’s just that I don’t buy it for the house because I’m afraid I won’t use it before it spoils- I’m not much of a cook these days). During the night, the pig decided it was payback time…. though, thankfully, I did not have any dreams in which someone hacked off my cheeks and ate them just for spite.

I just ate enough fat for three lifetimes, and my stomach will not let me forget it anytime soon. I had some steel-cut oatmeal and yogurt (Vanana from Trader Joe’s, my favorite) to try and start the cleaning out process- trying to get rid of whatever it was I was reacting to, but it didn’t really help. I finally went to 7-Eleven and got a Coke and some Pepto Bismol, hoping that activated charcoal would do better than oatmeal. It’s been about an hour, and I do feel marginally better, but not better enough to actually get out and do things. The reason I am not totally convinced it was the food was that when I isolate and get out of the public eye, when I emerge from my cocoon I am exposed to all kinds of things that I’m not normally…. especially when there are little kids around. I once dated a teacher and it was the sickest I’d ever been in my life. Every week there was something new she was immune to and those little snot factories passed on to me.

Yes, my stomach hurts, but I also had a fever before I knocked it out with arthritis-strength Tylenol. If I’m still feeling poorly tomorrow, I’ll go and see Dr. Akoto, my Nigerian-American GP that is sometimes hard to understand, but absolutely on top of it medically. I wish that I was fluent in French, because my friend Courtney uses him as well, and she says that while it’s hard to understand him in English, his French is perfect and she has no issues. #funfact

Sufficed to say, nothing hit me in the way of illness until I got home, so the party was really, really fun. My cousin Nathan (who also lives in their hood) and his wife Emily stopped by for a little bit, and lots of the people I’d met through Dan were there, so it’s not like I just had one person to talk to, but many.

It was a good end to a sad week, because I asked the friend I wrote about in an earlier entry if we had a dialogue worth continuing to reach common ground, and she said no. It was not unexpected in the slightest. I knew that unless I wanted a friendship where nothing grew, and I was just top-level hilarious, she was outta there. What I should have said is that if she just wanted top-level hilarious, read my Facebook feed like everyone else. That’s where I’m funny and there’s rarely anything of substance.

It is here that I write about everything from the funny to the disastrous, and even though it hurt to hear that I’m not her cup of tea, it felt good that she’s not mine, either. It has been my experience that friendships grow or die, and rarely remain stagnant over years. There’s only so many Trump jokes I can tell before I say how are you? and really mean it. She managed to doorknob me with some choice words that I will not repeat, but solidified my decision that this was not a friendship I’d ever be happy with.

Dan took me aside late in the evening and said those very words, how are you?, and I told her everything that was going on with my stepdad, and said that I wasn’t looking for advice because I really just needed to say words out loud. She laughed and said, good, ’cause I ain’t got nothin’ for ya. What she did offer was a night in Dupont at a Greek restaurant and this bar we love where you can play board games. I told her that I remembered laughing about how heteronormative and whitewashed she noticed Guess Who? was. We agreed to take pictures of it for future reference.

The last thing she said to me as I was walking to my car was, don’t forget to reach out to me.

Consider it done.

In a lot of ways, the Leslie Avenue Capers are just beginning… but we have such a solid foundation on which to build… and by that, I do not mean stealing street signs, as much as the devil on my shoulder says I should. 😉

 

 

Oh, dear little baby Jesus am I suffering from allergies. It’s bad enough today that I took Zyrtec, Humibid, Sudafed PE, and a Benedryl kicker… all the while slamming coffee and chai so that I don’t get tired from it. I have found that even Zyrtec and Benedryl are no match for caffeine and Sudafed, whether it’s regular or PE. I have to go to the pharmacy today, anyway, because it’s time for a refill on my psych meds. While I am there, I will get the real stuff (Sudafed, I mean). Sudafed PE is the COLA brand of decongestants, when what you really need is Coca-Cola Classic.™ There’s nothing wrong with off-brand COLA, or Hydrox, or any number of generics. But you know the real stuff is better (except for possibly Hydrox. Those things are addictive).

The coffee is Cafe Bustelo, and the chai was homemade by my Indian roommate, Edu. I have Stash bags that will do in a pinch, but if someone offers to make you homemade chai, take it.

The reason I am doing all of this is to prevent my allergies from settling in my mask and chest, because it makes me very sick, very fast. I just had a round of antibiotics, and I’m not looking to have a second one. I might not be able to avoid it because shit happens, but I won’t be able to say that I didn’t try. I get sick a lot in the spring, and not because I’m not doing everything I can to prevent it. It’s that there’s only so much I can do with damn near everything is in bloom all at once. I’ve been taking my Zyrtec religiously, because it really needs about six weeks to build up in your system before it reaches maximum efficacy, and I’ve been taking it for a year now. At first, it made me really sleepy, and then I got over it. Part of it was caffeine, and the other part is that the longer I took it, the more my body adjusted to it and it didn’t bother me anymore.

I haven’t always been a Zyrtec advocate. When Allegra first came out, I thought it was a miracle drug. However, when Dana and I didn’t have insurance, we found the generic of Zyrtec at Dollar Tree, and a dollar was two weeks’ worth. Then, when I moved here, my dad sent me a bottle of brand from Costco, a year’s supply. Here is the good news- though brand name was a gift and I am grateful, there is really no noticeable difference from the generic for which I paid a dollar. You’re welcome, poor people. I’ve been there.

I still buy my Sudafed PE and Humibid there. There’s just no reason to spend $8-12 when I don’t have to. Even if I was rich beyond my wildest dreams, I’d still shop at Dollar Tree, because how do you think people keep their money? 😛 The only time I’ve ever changed my mind about that was when I didn’t have a car and CVS was within walking distance and Dollar Tree was, to put it mildly, not.

I need to stay healthy because my sister arrives today, and will be in DC for a series of trips over the next few months. I can’t tell you how much fun it was to have her in Annapolis for five weeks (a few days a week at a time), because not only did I love hanging out with her, I fell in love with Annapolis as well. It’s such a cute little town, and except for the water and all the boats, reminds me a lot of Frederick…. the adorable little town with the great restaurants and the running into David Sedaris. DC is a lot closer for me, which makes it even easier to meet up. I live 11 mi. as the crow flies from The White House, so it takes 40 minutes on the train to get to Dupont Circle, and less than that for Federal Triangle, etc. But Dupont is somewhat responsible for kick-starting my adult life, so I go back often. Larry’s Ice Cream is still there, but the HRC store is toast… as is the lesbian book store, Lambda Rising. There used to be so much for the queer community in Dupont, but as the rent has gone higher and higher, it’s not the “fruit loop” it once was… taken over by yuppies just as much as The Montrose in Houston…. and by that I also mean really rich gay men, because obviously gay men have more disposable income because you have two men in a house that make more than women.

Generally, the gays that have kids do not settle there, because it’s too expensive to pay the rent and raise children at the same time. They are DINKs (double income no kids) that tend to live on shoes and compliments, much like tenors. It’s probably a stereotype, but the thing about stereotypes is that they start with a grain of truth……..

I think I’m done rambling for now. I’m not sure. If I have something really great I forgot to put here, I’ll check in with you later.

TTFN love you miss you mean it.

 

I have this friend.

She’s quick with a joke or a light of your smoke, but there’s someplace that she’d rather be.

Where the Billy Joel quote comes in is that she’ll joke and laugh with me, but if I poke into the real, she ghosts…. then, after a while, she’ll try me again and see if anything has changed… do I want a relationship that’s only as deep as an orange juice glass?

It troubles me because I am all about the real. It’s not that I don’t have time for pleasantries, it’s that after a few minutes of small talk, I get bored. I’m not interested in the weather unless there’s three feet of snow on the ground or taking pictures of a thunderstorm’s destruction. I’m interested in what she thinks about love, politics, the chessboard that is the world stage, how the NSA can get my good side while popping popcorn, how my head is in the clouds because I see things the way they could be instead of the way they are. Talking about idealism and how I wish I could do more to change the world in which we live.

Telling her when it’s time for me to take a chance on romance.

Telling her when grief overwhelms me.

And, because relationships are a two-way street, being supportive of everything she says and does, because even when I don’t agree, they’re her feelings and all feelings are valid. Even when the logic regarding them is upside down and backwards, they’re still right and good, because logic is often inversely proportionate to emotion. With logic, there’s always a black and white answer. With emotion, there are shades of grey all over the place. To put emotion in logic’s box is not bothering to listen. It’s treating every issue as if there’s an immediate solution instead of a process.

For me, the process is how to deal with lopsided affection, because I want to delve into conversations she can’t or won’t have. I suppose we all have friends like that, the ones that are only supposed to be good for a glass of wine now and then, where everything emotional is put away for a few laughs and that’s both the beginning and the end of it.

This may sound weird, but I’ve never had any friends like that. They all know me as the one to come to when they need to vent, or that I’m excited about big picture ideas and leave small things on the side of the road we’re walking.

It’s a conundrum, because I don’t want to put emotion where it’s not wanted… in some ways, it’s too late for that. She’s just yet another friend that I screwed over when I was too emotionally ill to see what I was doing, thus wanting to have a relationship with me, but not one that really explores either of our thought processes.

I called her on it, and she said I just think it would be cool to talk about regular things, like regular people do. Herein lies the rub. When has anyone in the history of my life known me as a regular person?

To be a regular person, or not to be a regular person. That is the question.

I’m not the hard-ass that says it has to be all or nothing, because it doesn’t. I just don’t know how to navigate it, and I don’t see it as a fault or a flaw. I am not opposed to just being regular people, but what is it that you people do? Of course, if you’re one of my readers, I’m betting you’re not a regular person, either, so maybe I’m asking the wrong audience. 😛

What is too much? When is too much? When have I stuck my foot in my mouth because I have delved too deep? How do I know when I’m bringing something up that would have been fine years ago but is not fine now? How do I erase history for the greater good? Moving on is essential, right, and good… but when I think of how to proceed, Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know goes through my head… not because any of the lyrics in the song ring true for this friendship, but because I want both of us to let go of anything that has happened before to let those people be somebodies that we used to know and our present relationship to just be.

Therefore, I feel foolish that I don’t know how to just be. My mind is always going to be cycling at a thousand miles a minute, I’m never going to be one of those people that can talk about surface platitudes very long, and most of all, I don’t think I’ll ever change… and it’s not for lack of want. It’s that my personality is already set. I’ll be 40 in September, and especially as I age, I learn more and more that people can modify behavior, but their core, malleable in youth, has solidified from cartilage to bone.

But seeing someone flip out due to a host of external factors is not the same thing as seeing into their core. The thinker/overthinker was set when I was a baby, because even though I have no memory of actually being a baby, I can’t imagine that being nearly immobile until I was almost two didn’t lead me into living in my head…. a natural part of digging into the personality type (INFJ) already there.

It means the world to me that she thinks it’s cool to have any relationship with me. I think she’s cool right back. But is that relationship really accepting me for who I am? Who I’ve always been? Can I turn back the running faucet that is always my mind into the drip she wants? I’m not tryin’ to drown her when she only wants a sip.

I’m also not trying to make her into anything she’s not, either. People were born to be different and to connect on their similarities, although there are some relationships that are just too different to work. It has been shown over and over that opposites attract in the short term, similar attracts over the long haul…. mostly because you’re not trying to hammer a round peg in a square hole EVERY. DAMN. DAY. hoping that eventually it will fit effortlessly.

I’m sure there has to be a compromise somewhere, the medium that will make us both happy. Friendship is not marriage, where you have to compromise all day, every day. You just don’t see each other that often, therefore, no need to work that hard.

So why is this hard for me?

In the end, I have no idea. Well, I do, but it has so much more to do with me than it will ever have to do with her. I suppose the answer lies in just being me, and if she ghosts because of it, than it means I need to lean on the friends that see me for exactly who I am, and have no need or want to change it.

Maybe that’s what I don’t have time for. It’s not small talk. It’s the lack of real talk. I will talk about world issues with people I just met in order to avoid surface-y questions that don’t go anywhere.

I want to know the times in your life when you’ve thought of yourself as a badass, or when you feel like you’ve failed miserably. I want to know the travel on your bucket list. I want to know the interesting conversations that you’ve had with the people around you… from the big picture to the smallest detail.

I could give a shit where you bought your shoes… unless it’s a precursor, the first floor on the elevator down.

Then, I’ll want to know if they were on sale.

I’m reading a novel series by Thomas Perry revolving around a woman named Jane Whitefield. She’s not a member of any established intelligence agency, but it’s a good romp through the world of private contract security. She is so incredibly real to me that sometimes I have trouble remembering she’s a fictional character.

I am particularly interested in the relationship she has with her next door neighbor, who sees people (mostly men) coming to her house at all hours of the night, and jumps to the conclusion that she must be a whore. I laughed out loud at that one.

She thinks of herself as a guide, someone who gets people off the grid when they need it the most…. a guide, in the author’s words, not mine. But her methods are sometimes nefarious… but that may be too strong a word because “he needed killin'” is a valid defense.

She’ll do anything to keep Precious Cargo safe.

In addition to her professional life, delving into the personal is fascinating. Like, how much should she tell, and to whom? How do you deal with coming home after having to kill three people and not be able to talk about it? How do you deal with manipulating people with lies for their own protection?

If there’s anything I don’t like about the series, it’s that it’s incredibly serious. She’s not a “merc with a mouth,” so there’s very precious comedic relief/dark humor in order to deal with overwhelming emotions, mostly fear.

I’m also reading a series by John Gilstrap about a guy named Jonathan Grave (nicknamed “Digger”), a voyage through the world of ex-fil ops. I can tell that Gilstrap is local because when one of the characters gets hurt, they’re taken to the same hospital I went to when I got sick at work and the initial Dx was appendicitis (it wasn’t). Gilstrap says it’s one of the best in the world. It must be, because when I got there, there weren’t any beds available, so they put me in the hallway and shoved enough morphine in me that I didn’t care. Everyone who walked past saw me at 24 curled up with my SpongeBob doll, a gift from my then-brother in law, Ryan, and his husband, Tom.

[Incidentally, eventually I thought I was too old for it and gave it to Goodwill. It was, in fact, a horrible decision, because it was “life-size” and made a wonderful pillow, albeit one with feet.]

Reading about intel in DC feels so much more real than in other cities… not that it doesn’t happen, but when you picture The Agency, you picture Langley…. or in my case, driving from Silver Spring to Alexandria on the GW Parkway and seeing the entrance sign for George H.W. Bush. I devoured the TV show Covert Affairs, and one of the most consistent shots in the entire series is Annie Walker driving her little red Volkswagen down the same road and taking that exit.

It’s all research for my own novel, learning how and when “things” happen and the dialogue that surrounds it. Even though Jane Whitefield isn’t CIA, she’s definitely an archetype in the same vein. Actually, Jonathan Grave isn’t, either, but again, an archetype that fits. It wouldn’t surprise me if Gilstrap had, at one time or another, been at the Head Shed himself. There are too many details that scream “former life experiences” rather than “I looked it up on the Interwebs.”

He’s very thorough, in my best Maude Lebowski impression.

For the first time in months, I’ve been so wrapped up in something that my grief fades into the background, and I am overwhelmed with gratitude. It helps to be “somewhere else.”

I got an e-mail from a friend that made my day, offering concrete suggestions for how she’d support me through all of this, and a line made me laugh, that she’d bring me anything I was craving (well, not ANYTHING). I wrote her back and said, “so I guess crack is out?” Crack is definitely out. I’m not sharing, she replied. The line would be A LOT funnier if I could tell you what she does for a living (and no, she’s not intel, just Maryland important enough to maintain confidentiality).

I’m smart enough to know that I’m not at the writing stage, yet…. I am at the “staring off into space and hoping an idea sticks” stage. The only thing that bothers me is that when I read fiction, I tend to pick up the style of the last writer I just read, and the reason it’s a concern is that I don’t want to be John Gilstrap or Thomas Perry. I want to be Leslie Lanagan. I don’t need to fill their shoes. I brought my own.

Though this novel is about escapism into a different world, it’s also about legacy. I could give a shit about money. When a parent dies, your own mortality starts to weigh on you like a ton of bricks. In my case, that legacy is taking shape one entry at a time for now and hopefully a published book later on.

My grandchildren’s grandchildren, should I be so lucky, won’t just have the basic birth and death certificates. They’ll know me. Really know me. That’s why this blog and this novel and all the other writing ideas aren’t about money or fame, or anything even close to it. It’s that I don’t want my life to be lost to history when I’m gone.

In my own way, I am also making myself into a guide, leading people into wholeness by laying out all my cautionary tales.

If that’s all my writing ever does, it’s enough. My goals are humble, because I cannot imagine past them, and don’t really want to. Fame has its drawbacks. For instance, I don’t picture what it would be like to be Anthony Bourdain or Elizabeth Gilbert in a grocery store. It’s too scary for an introvert to contemplate. I know myself, that I would lapse back into the show mode of my childhood, not wanting to show my authentic self to complete strangers, because often, it’s not at your own hand. It’s people assuming that because they’ve read your work, they know you better than they really do and ask obnoxious and intrusive questions that you’d have trouble answering in a laid back coffee shop, much less while put on the spot.

As this blog has become modestly popular, it has started already. But luckily, it comes through e-mails and Facebook messages where I have a chance to think about my reply before I send it…. and at this point, I don’t have so many people writing to me that I can’t answer them all.

Authors walk a fine line between wanting to talk about intimate details of their lives in order to exorcise pain, and at the same time, hoping that the writing stands on its own. Cheryl Strayed has said that she doesn’t answer questions directly most of the time, because she feels that there’s nothing she has to add that hasn’t already been put in print.

I understand that feeling implicitly, and in my case, it manifests as my writing is okay and sometimes good, therefore, meeting me would just be anticlimactic because there’s no backspace in conversation.

As the old saying goes, there are some things that just shouldn’t be said, which I usually realize right after I’ve said them. The flip side is that because I enjoy so much alone time and people know it, I have few conversations at all. People tend to read me instead of reaching out, because they truly believe that they know how I’m doing based on snapshots of how I’m feeling at any given moment.

It feels kind of like being stalked in the mildest form of the word, like looking up old girlfriends on Facebook just to see what they’re doing now with no intention of actually asking them. Say I’ve written something about someone that they didn’t like. They’ll stop speaking to me, but that doesn’t mean they’re not spending ridiculous amounts of time reading hoping their names will show up again….

It’s a direct line of one-way communication, which for most people is enough; they don’t actually have time to reach out, anyway. I respect this. People lead busy lives with their own families, often sacrificing time with friends not because they don’t want it, but because being a member of a family is all-consuming- a cocoon of their own making.

Most of the time, this makes me ridiculously happy, because I am also cocooning, just not with anyone else. At the same time, there’s a lot between and behind the lines………………….. and the spaces.

#prayingonthespaces

Yesterday, I missed Easter services for the first time in years. I grew up as a preacher’s kid, so therefore even when I became an adult living away from my parents, church was still important to me. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve missed Easter… and the last time was when Dana and I both had respiratory infections (perhaps the flu, I forget) and it made our whole house sound like a TB ward.

This year, I was just as sick, emotion-wise. Nothing could have stirred me from my bed. Nothing. I was so shaken that I just spent the morning staring at the ceiling. I knew for sure that there wasn’t going to be any music I could make it through, and Matt streams live on FB, so I have the chance to go back and listen to him if I feel like it later on.

If that wasn’t enough, the year I had to miss Easter because of being sick, a friend left a Facebook comment I found in the “memories” section that said, “Diane sang ‘Holy City’ this morning and mentioned your old church and your mom accompanying her.”

Je-ruuuuuuusalem, Je-RUUUUUsalem…. lift up your gates and sing! Hoooooosaaaannnaaaaah iiin the HIIIIIIIIIIGHEST, Hosannah to your King……….

I have so many thoughts about that, ranging from being thankful for the memory to wanting to set something on fire (I didn’t). My mom & Diane always enjoyed working together, but my memories of both of them are so different. It was a blessing to hear them together, voice and grand piano ringing in the Austin stone cathedral. On the other hand, Diane said lots of gorgeous things about me publicly while treating me like crap privately… just a needy nuisance because I couldn’t tell fiction from reality. I couldn’t tell show mode from what she really wanted from me and how she was never going to give me what I needed in return.

Our last conversation went something like I don’t want to spend any time with you, and after 20 years I’m willing to stop avoiding that truth… a truth that would have been nice to know a long, long, LONG time ago. I was 36 at the time, embarrassed about almost 23 years’ worth of lies. I beat myself up for not realizing that show mode wasn’t reality, and never would be. Had I been an adult when we met, I think I would have taken it in stride. But I wasn’t. I was a child absolutely enthralled by her voice at first, and that faded into the background as we became actual friends, because there was so much more to her than that. Hearing her sing was always nice, but I was never a fan in the true sense of the word. I wanted to talk about our lives, which had nothing to do with music…. and that worked fairly well until she moved to Portland and Susan came into the picture.

It’s not Susan’s fault, by any means. It’s that Diane was a very unhappy person at the time and I was her go-to gal when she needed someone to listen. I know now that adults should never use children to work out their issues, but that meant both jack and shit to me then. I became this repository for all these things I didn’t know how to handle, but I tried…. and then when Susan came along and Diane was happy, I was no longer needed and therefore discarded.

It didn’t matter that I’d known Diane twice as long. It didn’t matter that I was the only person in her life (nearby, not ever) that could remember her in every iteration from “just graduated from college” to “phenomenal arts success that could turn anything to gold.” It didn’t matter that when she first moved to Portland, I got letters before she met Susan when I didn’t write that said, hello? Is your hand broken? It didn’t matter that the day I graduated from high school, she was pulling for me to move to Portland to get out of the Bible belt and start my life in a post-gay world. It didn’t matter that when I didn’t move and she met Susan, she was telling her that she thought when I was 18, I’d just go away. It didn’t matter that she issued invitation after invitation to come visit, and after I got there, the reality never matched up to the pictures she presented to me…. that she missed me, she loved me, etc. etc. etc. It didn’t matter that at the same time she was struggling with how to tell me that she didn’t want to spend any time with me, we went to a concert together and she introduced me as “her best friend.”

Show mode.

In short, I wasn’t a real friend, just handy as a prop. She could tell people that I was this young woman she’d mentored from the time I was 12, and people thought it was so sweet and loving of her to do it.

So, yesterday morning I felt both used and abandoned, after crying my eyes out that this was my first Easter without my mother.

Because if there’s anything I can truly say I hate about my former relationship with Diane, it’s the rift it caused between me and my own mother. I spent so many years defending Diane that my mother and I drifted apart, because my mother could see that I was troubled and wouldn’t talk under any circumstances…. not even to a therapist. The one time I opened up to a therapist, he invited my parents in and told them that there was no equal relationship, that I was just obsessed, as if it were all my fault…. that I was never taken advantage of, I was just crazy…. but therapists would never use the word crazy. He saw it as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, instead of rightly thinking that 14-year-olds should not have to deal with adult problems on a regular basis… That there was no bait-and-switch aspect, but of course one would think that if you never saw her letters (and probably couldn’t read them anyway if you know her handwriting 😛 ). I didn’t open up to a therapist again until I was 37.

To be a little more fair to my therapist, I didn’t tell him that I was constantly on high alert that Diane was living in an untenable situation… with an alcoholic weed dealer who once brought a pound of weed into the house, and she was constantly afraid of losing her job, both for being arrested in connection with her wife and the possibility of being “outed.”

I got to hear from Diane’s friends that she felt loss over the relationship, and I thought, show mode. If there was any loss on her part, I can only believe that it was because she couldn’t use me to prop up her own ego anymore. She did tell me that she was sorry because she knew that some of those conversations must’ve confused and upset me. I could have been nicer about it, because my only reply was if your idea of making amends is writing one e-mail, reading it is thanks, I’m all better now. I think I’d just hit my limit on being nice.

Clearly, there were genuine moments, but just enough to keep me hooked in so that I couldn’t walk away…. because she loved me.

Just enough to let my pure, white mother love transfer away because I thought my mom was being homophobic and defensive; she wasn’t trying to protect me, a thought that makes my stomach turn because it is so much a part of why I didn’t walk in the light while I had it.

But the thing about mothers is that they’ll forgive anything, and when I started writing about all the gaslighting and crazymaking, the first thing my mother said to me was, is there anything I can do? I started to cry because I felt like I’d completely fucked her over for years and years and she wants to know what she can do for me?

It led to a series of conversations in which I actually did open up, so that by the time she died, she’d had at least three years of hearing all the time that she was right, that the relationship should never have happened, that Diane should have listened to my mother and left me alone rather than taking our relationship underground so that we could hide our letters and phone calls.

I’d do my homework in front of the mailbox so that if a letter came, I’d be the first to see it, knowing that if my parents found it first, it would be trashed. I used to keep them in a backpack in my closet until an air conditioner started leaking right where I kept it (of course) and every damn letter was ruined…. including my favorite, the one where she said she’d left her wife and gotten away from the life that could have ruined her, as well.

I remember opening it at school, no one knowing why I was sobbing onto my marching band uniform…. but they weren’t tears of sadness. If anything, they were joy and relief that I was off the hook from worrying about her all the damn time.

Why that wasn’t a selling point in terms of being close to my mother again, I’ll never know. She tried so hard to connect with me. I remember that one year, my birthday fell on a Friday, and we invited the entire band to come to the house afterward for cake and ice cream. Only one person showed up, but believe me when I say that one person was enough. Had the entire band actually showed, I would have enjoyed the party for about fifteen minutes, my limit in huge crowds. But again, dear God she tried.

Our closest moments were always her accompanying me, whether I was playing my horn or singing. We could work together far easier than being comfortable talking deeply into the night…. and, of course, not only did she accompany me, she accompanied all my band and orchestra friends, as well.

Because I was her daughter, she liked accompanying me the best, but I wasn’t as technically proficient as others. She always said that of her professional accomplishments, it was accompanying Sylvia Danburg, who went on to become the concertmaster at the Met from HSPVA/Julliard that she considered a highlight. Diane was also Met material, which is why my mom always talked lovingly about working with her, too. Diane got the audition in Dallas, and advanced to New York, but the weekend in which it was scheduled, a freak snowstorm hit Dallas and she couldn’t get out in time.

My mother and I just had fun, but she was so much more than just the “having fun” type. All grand piano accompaniments for concertos are orchestra reductions, and she would practice for hours upon hours. I am positive that whenever I got a I at Solo & Ensemble, it was never due to me. I just “hired” the right accompanist.

I am desperately sad that she’ll never accompany me again, because I spent an enormous amount of time and work on becoming a real singer instead of a trumpet player who just fakes it. We never got to do any of the great rep of which I’m now capable. The best I’ve gotten to do so far is that when I sang the Pie Jesu movement of Requiem by John Rutter, my friend Karen held up my cell phone during dress and my mom listened from Houston. Later, Dana showed her the tape, which made her cry, but it wasn’t the same as being there (of course). When I did The Lord is My Shepherd movement from same work, my mom had a church job of her own and the best I could do was send her a link to my Soundcloud account. She had just retired from teaching the May before she died, and we’d planned to work together at CCC when she could come up for a weekend.

Yesterday, I was just so angry that I did not get a dream deferred. I got a dream that died.

No preparation, no saying goodbye, no anything but alive and then dead in the time it takes a clock to tick.

I am sure that, as Susan said once in her Easter sermon, that resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.

Just not this one, literally. It will be my own. Just not this Easter. This Easter was so painful that shaken and stirred doesn’t even begin to cover it. I went to bed as early as possible just so that it would be over more quickly.

Technically, Monday is still Easter…………………….

The Son Also Rises.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

I can’t.

I am sitting here sobbing at my computer listening to the Easter anthem that was my mom’s favorite, but with SATB choir and grand piano, a faster tempo and the left hand bass running eighth notes ringing throughout the church.

I can’t do it. I can’t talk about resurrection today. I can’t listen to a sermon about things coming back to life, within you or without you.

I can’t.

There is always metaphorical resurrection in all things, bridges that can be burnt to a crisp and then someone comes along and offers you a brand new two by four and says, “let’s get to work.”

When Jesus died, the disciples were not only horrified, they had no idea what to do. It’s not like they had a succession plan in place. He died, and they were scrambling. They kept thinking back to all his parables and how they were too dumb to really hear what Jesus was saying…. that you have to walk in the light while you have it. Darkness descended over Israel and you could practically see the light bulb turn on. Ohhhhhhh……

And now I sit here, the dumbest disciple of all, not having walked in the light while I had it, and now it’s gone. This morning my dad made sure I had Peeps and a hollow bunny to fill with Dr Pepper, but there was no trail of Cadbury eggs to my presents. No fluffy and obnoxious Easter grass with candy stuck to it and a few toys. No plastic soccer ball for me, no princess dolls for my sister.

I think it was third grade that it was a goldfish…. the start of a lifelong obsession because now I’ll buy one for eight cents and put it into a tank big enough that it has room to grow and two years later, one of two things happens. The first is that the feeder fish was too small for the people who caught it to realize it would become a Koi. The second is that it was too small for them to realize it would become a Black Moor, or something equally beautiful and exotic. The “ugly duckling” becomes a swan under my eyes.

I am feeling about eight cents tall, and hoping that time will release the beautiful Koi inside me.

Because for better or worse, I am the succession plan. Just, please God. Not today.

I can’t.

 

Things are looking up after a really long slog lately. I got some excellent feedback on the fiction I wrote- not just “hey, this is interesting,” but ideas for moving the story forward when I really wasn’t sure what I wanted out of it. I also want to work on character development, making them amalgams of people I’ve known in my past, but no one character enveloping one person. For instance, Pri-Diddy is Indian and Auna is African-American and James’ family is originally from England, so how to take one person and embody all of that rather than having single characters based on each one. Now, James, Pri-Diddy, and Auna are not characters in my novel as of yet, but like I said, a good example of my thought process. And, of course, I have to fit in there somewhere.

No matter what any novelist tells you, fiction is real life disguised, no matter how outrageous the plot. Perhaps the author is trying to reconcile his/her childhood. Perhaps the author is trying to make peace with haunted dreams. Perhaps fiction is the dream, a way to subsconsciously enter a sacred space so that the absurd works out the tangible. There are things about my own past in which I am just not willing to let go in first person… writing around them so that hopefully only I can read between the lines… or perhaps to put “myself” in situations that I’d like to experience, but haven’t.

I am generally envious of authors who get book advances, but not because I need the money for basic sustenance. For now, I’m writing about the intelligence community, and all the letters are right down the road. But say I was writing about India. A book advance is a plane ticket, rather than having to Google everything instead of live it.

But even writing about the intelligence community is a world of looking at declassified ops and other novels in the same genre, because it is unlikely that someone is going to walk up to me and say, “hey, I work for the NSA and I hear you’re working on a book. Why don’t I help you out?” It’s also unlikely that I’d run into Valerie Plame at a party, but it would be awesome if I did, because she’s helped out a lot of fiction writers, including acting as a television consultant.

I do have friends at State, and people who work at State are often put on task forces with The Agency, but I only know that because of, again, declassified ops and novels in that genre. If my friends were on those task forces, they obviously couldn’t tell me about it.

I feel like I’m writing blind, and that’s ok. Writing a novel, for the most part, is less about facts and more about releasing the demons you don’t want to ascribe to yourself, anyway. Your own flaws and failures come out in character backstory. The trick is to write it in such a way that no one knows which characters have the aspects of you or your alter ego.

It’s such a process, learning to write fiction. With blogging, I don’t have to know plot points and character development, because I’m living them. Fiction is a chessboard, and I’ve never been even a good chess player, much less a great one. But chess, like fiction, is something I enjoy, even if I have to keep the computer setting on stupid.

I don’t think I am very good at writing fiction, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try. Here is a rough draft of something I’m working on… I apologize in advance. You probably won’t get more than this, as it’s something I need to keep woodshedding as opposed to publishing on the fly, but it’s something I’m excited to present as a snippet, anyway.

For those who aren’t in the know, Susan Plummer is a nod to the character in The Equalizer, played by Melissa Leo.

—————

Susan Plummer was having her nails done when the message alert dinged on her work phone. It was her day off, which meant taking care of herself. However, even after ten years at the agency with a modicum of seniority, it still meant that personal days were always in quotation marks, tethered by electronic devices designed to render dead zones obsolete. No hour of her day was off the grid, and she heaved a deep sigh. A message when she’d clearly told her underlings only to contact her if the building was on fire, she knew that whatever had been sent was, in the words of Dorothy Parker, a fresh hell.

Well, at least it wasn’t a stale hell. If it was, they could have handled it on their own. She was caught between two ideas. The first was that she hadn’t had a day off in six weeks. The second was piqued curiosity. What in the crippling fuck could be that important?

It was an e-mail forward with only two words… she knows. Under it was an e-mail sent to the DoD webmaster that said a White Hat had found some vulnerabilities and wanted to talk.

No, they didn’t. They wanted to negotiate, she thought. Those fuckers always want something in return. It was time to get a team together and check it out. No face-to-face, just gathering intel. If they found anything, things could escalate quickly.

There was something about the e-mail that struck her as odd. If this person had truly meant malice, why would they give their own name and contact information? They’d, in effect, saved DoD tons of taxpayer dollars and legwork. Well, that was at least something. She would choose her team carefully, because intel ops had gone wrong before. She couldn’t take a chance that this one would, because things would end up going in one of two directions. Either she’d give her a job, or burn her so hard that when she even thought about touching a computer her gag reflex would engage.

Actually, there were two things that had struck her as odd, not just the one. In her entire career with the agency, the number of female hackers she’d investigated was a grand total of one… this one. Who was she, and what could she possibly want out of this? It would have to wait until she got to the office. She’d pissed off her nail technician long enough, who’d started to chat about Susan’s self importance, not knowing that Susan started out as a linguist and Vietnamese was in her wheelhouse.

She apologized for her rudeness, saying that it was an annoying work thing as the blood drained from her nail technician’s face.

When the appointment was over, Susan drove home and called for her agency driver. Mike served two purposes, carrying her around in a vehicle capable of withstanding bullets, and for better or for worse, freeing her up to work in the backseat.

Time to make the donuts, she thought, and smudged her red paint on the door handle.

Fuck.

———————-

Susan was sitting at her desk, staring at pictures of a woman with kind eyes, a great smile, and hair that flopped in every direction. Though she’d checked out every page in this woman’s terrifying browser history, she smiled back at the screen in spite of herself. This was the tiny sprite supposedly fucking up her program? Although there was one unsettling aspect in the last image.

She was staring directly at the camera.

Susan thought back to the first e-mail that alerted her to this woman’s presence, and thought about its relevance. It was right.

She. Knows.

But the what remained to be seen. She picked up the phone.

Steve, let’s go ahead and bring her in.

I used to tease Dana all the time when I was right, because the joke was always that it didn’t happen all that often. Encoded in her DNA is a fanatical need to be right, but she comes by it quite honestly. I remember getting into an argument with her dad once, where he said that you couldn’t check into an airline with an iPhone. I told him that I thought you could, and he still didn’t believe me, so I printed out an article detailing the process and brought it to him. He said that I was still wrong because you couldn’t check in multiple people on one phone. It was at that point I figured out that I’d never be right about anything, and to learn to nod and smile while boiling inside. I’m just not competitive enough to try more than once.

Eventually, I hit my limit, but it took seven years. I remember talking to a friend about it that knew all of us, and I told her that I thought I’d have to win a Pullitzer Prize before they improved their opinion of me, and she said trust me, they’ll find something wrong with that, too. I didn’t realize how much it got to me until another friend came to me and said, I think you and Dana are fantastic, but I don’t think you’re fantastic together. She dismisses your ideas all the time, and the flowers that Dana brought you when you came home from your first day at Alert Logic were my idea. He thought it was ridiculous that I was willing to do everything I could to support Dana, both as a wife and a breadwinner, and not exactly getting a return on my investment. I didn’t think that was exactly true, because there were so many things that happened behind closed doors that were authentic and beautiful….. but still….

I’d been laughing off a serious problem for years, and I didn’t even realize it. Wait. That’s not true at all. I noticed that at home, I was wrong a lot, whether I actually was or not… and in public Dana would shower affection on me to the point that it looked like she was putting on a show. It didn’t seem authentic, because it was just too over the top. I’d sit there and blush to my feet without saying anything, because I preferred the Dana that was quieter, more real, less acTING, thank YOU! It was especially embarrassing after she’d had a couple of drinks, because the show included PDA that crossed the line, maybe not for some people, but definitely for someone as shy as me in that arena. For future reference, don’t grab my ass in a room full of people. It will not end well for you, because I refuse to ignore my discomfort anymore.

There are so many things I miss desperately about that relationship, but the Dana Lanagan Show™ is not one of them. Completely changing my surroundings, even though it might have seemed crazy to move, was the absolute right choice for me. I got the chance to truly start over in a city where I already felt comfortable, as opposed to taking off for Minneapolis and hoping for the best.

But the idea wasn’t crazy to my family, and they’ve supported me wholeheartedly throughout this transition. I’ve started to pay more attention to the people that support me vs. the people who try to find everything wrong with what I’m doing. I’m quite tired of the my judgment rocks, and yours sucks attitude. Because what I’ve learned is that I have to make the decisions that are best for me, because no one else is or can be responsible for the choices I make, no matter how angry someone is that I don’t follow their advice when it isn’t right for me. I genuinely ask for help when I need it, and unsolicited opinions drive me up the wall… something I had to deal with up close and personally because in the past I’ve often been guilty of it. I had to learn to release my inner judgmental dickhead (which I’m still laughing about, because the J in INFJ didn’t get past Argo… and I loved that she would genuinely call me on my bullshit). I had to learn that if I didn’t like it, no one else did, either. I decided to stop dishing it when I couldn’t take it.

Mistakes are something people have to learn on their own, and no one can predict their future for them.

Argo genuinely thought I was making a bad mistake because she thought that this move was some sort of grand gesture for her, and asked Dana if she needed a restraining order. I understand her thought process, because she couldn’t see me emote, couldn’t see my own thought process, couldn’t or wouldn’t see my own history with DC and how much I regretted ever leaving. There was a tiny thought in the back of my head that if we could see each other emote, it would change our relationship drastically, because there would be no more of either of us hiding behind a black and white screen. But that meeting had to come either as a mutual agreement or at her invitation. To think that I would seek her out when she clearly didn’t want it was over the line, Smokey. Because she chose to change the focus off all my reasons for moving and make herself the sole purpose, I was in a world of pain. By the time I actually moved, we weren’t even speaking, because we’d had a huge blowout of a fight, my fucked up thought process that if I could make it where she didn’t want to speak to me, it might reassure Dana that I was hers and hers alone. Obviously, it did not work.

Argo’s opinion meant way too much to me, and I internalized what she thought to the point that when I first moved here, I didn’t leave my house for days, even though we were separated by a fair number of miles. I had to keep reminding myself that I pushed her away so that she wouldn’t even have a chance to reject me…. that it was my choice, not hers. I had to keep reminding myself that even if we weren’t, it wouldn’t matter, because we were not in a good place emotionally and wanting to meet her on the ground just wouldn’t happen at my own hand. I had no intention of running face first into a barbed wire fence.

I’d made it impossible for her to trust me, to believe that I loved her enough to try and let go. That I had other friends in DC besides her and fully intent on making more, setting down the deep roots that I didn’t before, because my entire life revolved around Kathleen and I had no other support system besides my coworkers (who are still my friends, but have moved on to other cities).

I walked around in a complete daze, not knowing what to do with myself at first, because it was a body blow to lose a friend and a wife in such a short period of time, even though I take full responsibility for it. Just because you created the problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. In a lot of ways, it hurts more, because there’s so much if I’d only….. For a long time, I thought there was something I could say, something I could do, something I could achieve that would heal everything.

It was a gargantuan task to learn to stop caring so much. I wished desperately that I could go back in time, but there’s no crossing your own timeline. Not only that, I have come to feel that it was a fixed point, something that had to happen to motivate me into true change… to approach life differently all the way around. Especially because our entire relationship is chronicled in my inbox, it invites me to revisit all of the ways I participated in a relationship that started out as amazing and descended into toxicity and pain. All I wanted was my sweet, small a Argo to come back to me, but the ship had sailed. She left port with no return trip.

At times, I tried to forget. At others, I wailed like a wounded animal, sobs so deep that I shook uncontrollably- knowing that it took finding that level of pain to be able to release it. It is always a life changing moment when you fall into a deep hole you dug yourself. I had to claw my way back up, and over the years, it has been successful…. or at the very least, sufficient.

Back in the day, I thought it was a possibility that eventually Dana, Lindsay, and Matt would all move here and, along with Argo, I’d have the urban family I’d created in Portland and still miss…. not to replace them, but to create something new that was just as fulfilling. But then, Argo and I were running towards each other and not away. She thought that living in Portland, especially so close to Diane, was toxic in and of itself, and said that Dana and I should move to DC and that our brains made us imminently hireable. I told her then that it was on the three to five year plan, and three years later, almost to the day, the plan was set in motion.

So moving to DC was never impulsive, and had been on my life plan for far longer than anyone knew. Originally, it was in the plan because Dana’s parents are at least ten years older than mine. Released from family obligations, I’m still glad I made the right choice for me.

My sister and Matt haven’t moved here, but I am extraordinarily blessed that her job allows her to travel here quite frequently.

I have to hope that now Argo sees the whole chessboard, and not just single pieces. I’d be here even if I didn’t meet her at all…. but I’m glad I did. She continues to bring joy and laughter into my life even if it is only in retrospect, because as we say in Texas, she’s funny as grits.

I chose to remember all of our laughter and released all our pain, and I’m finally right about something.

Last night one of my friends asked me if I’d ever thought of publishing an anthology of my blog entries, because he thought I’d really grown as a writer. The short answer is “yes.” However, I don’t want to be self-aggrandizing. I’d like for someone who’s capable of publishing to ask for one… mostly because I don’t know which of my entries really resonate with people, and which don’t.

The marriage article I wrote years ago (published on Facebook as a Note in 2012 and on this web site in 2013) got a lot of traction all over the world due to an amazing amount of social media shares, ending up on both Margaret Cho’s and Martina Navratilova’s Twitter feeds. But that one article does not a book make, and though Dana was my world at the time, I’m so embarrassed by all the mistakes I made that reading it on my own is extraordinarily painful. If I really knew what I was talking about, why didn’t my own marriage succeed?

I suppose the short answer is that it did for a very long time, and not to mistake the part for the whole.

But still.

Dear God… make me a bird, so I can fly far…. far, far away.

It’s haunting, really. A few nights ago, for the first time in years, I rolled over in bed half asleep and said, Dana, can I have a drink of your water? She always liked to have a Mason Jar on her nightstand, and didn’t mind sharing. The dream startled me, and I woke up in a sweat, because obviously my subconscious mind had forgotten she wasn’t there. I am trying to figure out what the dream represented, because I have a history of “body memory,” things coming to me in the night over events that happened on the same day in years past. I feel the same tension over again, long held in scar tissue so that it surfaces when I least expect it, because I don’t remember what the original event might have been.

I am not good with times, places, and orders of events. I am good at remembering the tiniest details of how I felt. I won’t remember the date, but I’ll remember what it felt like to be near you, whether that interaction was positive or negative. I’ll remember what you were wearing down to the accessories and the look on your face. I’ll remember what the air smelled like if we were outside. I’ll remember paragraphs of things you said, but when you said them is lost to history.

In that way, my blog (or as The Divine Mrs. B named it, The Pensieve) is invaluable because when I sit down and write about my experiences, the date and timestamp comes with it. Left to my own devices, sometimes it feels like light years since I was married to Dana and at others, we just broke up yesterday. It is the dance of intimacy in my own head, and very few people are able to cut in.

One of the universal things that happens to me is that in my waking hours, I lose truamatic events and focus on the good things that happen in all my relationships. It is only when I have hours upon hours to dream that the trauma rises up from its grave. In some instances, those dreams torture me. In others, I am just replaying the scene for discernment and clarity.

When I am awake, I just want to walk in the joy that people bring into my life, because I am trying so hard to let peace win. I am not the same person I was before I realized the toll emotional abuse as a child had taken on me… how my actions and reactions had been rewired by all of it until it bubbled up into a world of crazy, or so I thought.

When you’ve been through the cyclone of crazymaking and gaslighting, the things that have been modeled for you show up in your own moods and behaviors. When I truly thought I was descending into madness, it was actually the process of transitioning away from unhealthy patterns, because what was normal for me wasn’t normal for everyone else.

It is an isolated place to feel as if no one understands, and no one ever will. I stuffed down that feeling for far too long- over two decades, in fact. The “insanity” was finally vomiting up all my trauma as I could see down into my core. It was a nightmare I thought would never end, because my life got a lot worse until I emotionally broke in half. Finally, finally, I got some light back in my eyes. The thing I never thought would end is now just a whisper of my past… motivation to keep reaching for my ideal self instead of wandering through my mental graveyard wondering how I came up short.

Emotional illness and a chemical imbalance has always complicated things. Was I a more vulnerable target because I was so depressed, or did the depression begin when I was told things I was too young to handle?

The answer I’ve come up with is twofold. The first is that you can’t talk away a chemical imbalance, just like you can’t go to talk therapy to heal a heart attack. Because I didn’t know I had a chemical imbalance, I wasn’t medicated until I was 19… and even then, it wasn’t the right diagnosis. I was taking unipolar depression medication when I was actually bipolar, and didn’t discover what it was like to live without depression until I got the mood stabilizer I needed and no doctor caught until five years later.

I’m always a little gunshy about saying I’m bipolar, because the images you see in media are not the symptoms I experience. Bipolar disorder is a spectrum, just like autism, and I am at the weakest end. My “ups” are not true mania, but what is called hypomania. This means that I experience horrendous downs with very view ups, and the ups aren’t very high. I get insomnia and flurries of activity, such as actually wanting to go outside… I feel more at ease interacting with people, because I cease to feel as if the pod people have come to get me.

But these symptoms are when I am off meds. Taking medication every day manages them so that I have a normal range of emotions and I don’t cycle unpredictably. However, I do get situational depression that medication just can’t help, and that’s where the chicken and egg conundrum roll over and over in my head.

It is the second aspect of my depression that answers my own question of “which came first?” Again, you can’t talk about a chemical imbalance and hope it heals itself… but you can use talk therapy for the life experiences that have made you who and what you are. I see them as disparate, one medical, one psychological. This is because my trauma reflexes can be eased into wholness, but I’ll still have to take medication for the rest of my life. This is because I’ve gone off-meds a couple of times; once, I thought my depression was situational and after talk therapy, I could wean myself off of it. The second time, I didn’t have insurance or enough cash to pay out of pocket.

Both times, I’ve crashed and burned like a 747 slamming into the mountains.

The thing is, though, some of my depression is situational, events that used to run across my mind as hurricanes which, in recent years, have tone themselves down to mere pouring rain.

Though this web site has really only been for me, I have been flabbergasted at the way I’ve become a Nouwen “wounded healer.” By opening up and showing others all my flaws and failures, I’ve found so many people that identify with them.

If there’s any merit to an anthology, it would only be an invitation to a wider audience that might get something out of it, because most of my entries over the past three years have been a manual on What Not to Do.™

There’s a flip side to bringing in a wider audience. I already get freaked at the number of people that quote me to me… and while it is nice to know that there are lines people remember, it is also stomach-clenching to feel caught like a deer in headlights, held accountable by others to my own words when I feel I am doing my dead-level best to slash through sin… a loaded word, but I can’t think of a better one.

Just because you had a rough childhood doesn’t mean that you’re not responsible for your actions and reactions once you “age out.” Children cannot be held responsible for not knowing they need help, but adults certainly can.

When I back to the things I’ve written, I also think about my friends, and what it would do to our lives to open them up in a distributed book. Some people I disguise. Some, I don’t. It depends on whether we’re close or not. If people are a part of my daily life, I want them to be as real to you as they are to me.

If they aren’t, or if they’ve specifically asked for confidentiality, they get nicknames that hopefully disguise them well enough for my entire audience to be kept in the dark. Over time, I have realized that I am not nearly as good at this as I think I am.

There are accidental breadcrumbs all over the place, plot holes that would have to be patched because living in DC requires it.

But in a lot of ways, I don’t feel that I need to write a book, because I write the equivalent of a chapter a week.

My “book” is already being written, one post at a time… and I would much rather be respected by a small audience than launched onto an international stage… I mean, I’m already on one. I’ve been read in every single country in the world, and I can prove it. But to go on a press junket promoting my own pain for profit isn’t necessarily my idea of a good time.

I’m not exactly a private person, especially one-on-one. It’s getting paid for it that’s problematic. Having a “pay what you want” button to cover server cost isn’t the same thing. It’s not that I don’t think my work isn’t worth something. It’s that my writing is about my life, and facing the possibility of my friends and my former loves feeling exploited is unacceptable.

An anthology would be a long conversation, particularly with the friends I have who are very private people. It’s one thing to show up on a modestly popular blog. It’s quite another to show up on Amazon. Of course, that’s assuming that it sells, and for me, that’s assuming a lot. But I don’t think so much of myself that I know it would. I am just thinking aloud about the possibility that it would, and how that would affect not only my own life, but others’ lives as well.

As I am learning more and more, it’s not all about me.

It never has been, and it never will be.