The quote from Dana that I’ve been waiting for arrived in my memories this morning. It made me happy to an enormous degree, because like I said yesterday, there is something precious about going back far enough that the divorce fades and just how funny we were together takes its place. All of our conversations in the humorous vein are tennis matches, and if there’s anything I miss about our relationship more than anything else, it’s that. Dana picked up all the parts of the conversation I forgot, or corrected me when I didn’t get a line just perfectly. I regret not taking more pictures. I regret staying home too much and not creating fantastic memories, because they say that money can’t buy you happiness, but it can if you spend it on the right things, experiences over objects. Most of the time, we were broke because either I didn’t have a job or she didn’t, but in the moments where we were doing really well, we didn’t take advantage of our middle-classness… and how I wish that we could bum around DC, because nearly everything is free.

Perhaps that will come in time, after we’ve had enough life experiences apart from each other that the pain of divorce will ease. I desperately miss being married to her, and getting away from her was the right thing entirely… but that doesn’t ease the fact that it was almost always amazing while it lasted. I don’t want to get back together, but in time, I’d like to be comfortable with friendship again. I’m not right now. You can’t grieve someone and go to them for comfort. You can’t cross a river and look back, wondering if the other person is still behind you. In the days after our divorce, when we were still living together, it was a mistake to try and roll back into our friendship immediately, because I couldn’t do it. We’d have an intimate moment (friendship-wise), and either my heart or my ovaries would explode. In retrospect, I am glad that we did not have children or buy a house or any of the things that would have made our separation all the more difficult.

I am still on the fence about having kids, and I have never once doubted that Dana would have been an awesome co-parent. But at this point in my life, at almost 39, the pool of women available to date have kids of their own, and I wonder if I’d make a good step-parent. It’s also not inconceivable that I could get pregnant (see what I did there) if I met someone, but going to the OB/GYN with Dana wrecked me, because our doctor said (when I was 35) that it would be considered a geriatric pregnancy. Now, while that may be a medical term, emotionally it made me feel 80 years old. And, of course, that was before I discovered all the ways I was truly mentally ill, having gone through teen drama/trauma and wondering if I’d be a good parent…. although I do have excellent role models for the task. My mother and father already have grandchildren of their own due to remarrying, but I cannot imagine how thrilled they would be if I did find the right family structure and I did decide to conceive. My sister and Matt have already decided that they don’t want children, and not only that, their last name isn’t Lanagan. I worry that I am the end of the line sometimes, and though it doesn’t weigh heavily, it is a thought that crosses my mind.

Though my possible future step-kids wouldn’t have the same last name as me, having kids who live with me (even if only part-time) would definitely be fun. It’s something to think about as I start to dip my toe in the dating world, because now that it’s been a year since the divorce, I have decided that I am not ready to date unless that person comes along that I simply cannot ignore; there’s a spark that’s not worth denying. My favorite plan is that it won’t happen for at least another year, but it doesn’t work that way. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. I didn’t write it, but it’s no less true.

I also wouldn’t mind dating someone older than me, with the decision of children already made. That’s what on-the-fence really means to me… that the direction of my life will, in some ways, not belong to me, because it is a shared vision instead of a solo endeavor. There is also the looming question in my mind of whether I want the life I had as a child for either my own children or my steps, should I ever have them. Being a preacher’s kid is tough, moving a lot and having all sets of eyes on you all the time. Your family is your refuge. At the same time, I do not want to sacrifice the dream of being ordained and starting a church plant, so I have to wait for that person who will seriously consider those things with me, and in the best sense, not mind.

My dream for St. James is that it is on a river, with a huge parking lot on one side and a deck that leads down to the water on the other. That way, people have the option to choose how they’d like themselves or their children to be baptized. Don’t think that O Brother, Where Art Thou? didn’t go into that decision. 😛

I haven’t started fundraising as much as I’d like, but I am constantly “paying myself” by putting away savings, because in order to finish at University of Houston, I’m going to need money…. and then I’m going to need more money to finish at Howard.I would like to do all of this without graduating with a mountain of debt, but there are programs for that, especially for people who intend to enrich their own communities with non-profits. One of the local Congressmen has even suggested a program that will erase school debt by entering civil service. I dig it.

In my own mind, it is never too late to get my shit together, and getting the divorce and moving to DC was the first step in doing so. It is an exordium of enormous proportions. As I bless and release the past, I am making room for the future. It’s so big it needs a room of its own. It’s time to be the visionary my personality type dictates, instead of hoping that everything will come together with a knock on my door.

Nothing worth having comes without an enormous amount of work, and this is no exception. Jesus and I have the same personality type, given his extraordinary visionary qualities and the scene in which he loses his shit at the money-changers in front of the temple. I love the snarky quote, “in thinking about What Would Jesus Do?, remember that getting angry and flipping over tables is a viable option.” I don’t know who came up with it, but it makes me laugh every single time. You know how in the Bible, there are little descriptions of what you’re about to read? It would please me to no end if that particular scene was changed to “Jesus Loses His Shit.”

I personally think he’d get a kick out of it. Remember that he was a common man raised up into divinity, which means that there was nothing that the people around him did that he didn’t do himself. He was a joiner… a community organizer… and got people to follow him not because he was preaching from a place of judgment, but a place of, “I’m just like everyone else.”

In the end, not so much. And for that, I am grateful. I take all of him. His humanness, his divinity, his holy authority, and the lens he provides for me to look at the world.

In a country where laws are being passed that would affect me directly as a lesbian, I only have to look at Jesus to know how wrong they are. It is a table-flipping moment, and I applaud those who are doing just that.

Amen.

 

One of my favorite songs in the entire world is Feeling Good by Michael Buble. I don’t think I’m quite up to feeling good, but I’m getting there. Today, the best I can say is that I’m “feeling all right.” But it is a new dawn, a new day, a new life for me. Things are percolating nicely. Drinking cold coffee left over from yesterday and it tastes even better…. don’t know why, probably because all the chlorine in the water has dissipated. I don’t normally drink coffee in the morning, but I have some leftover Christmas blend, and I wanted to use it up. My dad and my cousin have given me a lot of Starbucks money over the past year, and instead of buying individual cups, I spent a lot of the money on beans… mostly because Starbucks tastes better fresh and you have no idea how long it’s been sitting there unless you arrive when they open. Christmas blend is the bomb, but I really, really miss morning Joe, named after Joe Scarborough. He probably did something that made him lose the endorsement, SBUX being the liberal company that it is, but I have yet to find the same blend with a different name. They also used to have what was called a “Tribute blend.” It was not the greatest coffee in the world….. you know where I’m going here. Although in a different turn, the best packaging would have been teenagers fighting to the death over a bag.

I realized yesterday that I wrote that entry on the first day of my period, which as all women know, is the worst day of the month to feel anything. Maybe that’s why I was ready to cry at the drop of a hat and sick to my stomach. At the same time, that day is when I feel the most vulnerable, and missing “A-dog” was more intense than normal. This morning, I took some ibuprofen and Sudafed, and things feel a lot more even keel. Grieving for Argo and Dana at the same time is just about the worst feeling on earth, and the best all at the same time. This morning’s memory on Facebook was wonderful:

Cutest conversation with Dana today:

Me: I take you, your crazy family, your crazy, your adorableness. I take it all.

Dana: Good, because you don’t get a discount on parts.

See, this is why I like the “memories” feature on Facebook, because they’re not all sad and depressing. Some of them are incredibly funny. My favorite, and I can’t wait for it to come up, is this one:

Me: I am so grumpy.

Dana: I know you are not grumpy with me, because I have been cute *all day.*

It’s memories like these that keep me going in the face of incredible grief, because occasionally, if I reach back far enough, the memories of how terrible divorce were fade into the background and I can just remember how much I loved her and how much I felt loved by her.

Dana is the first relationship I’d ever had in my life where we were both on equal footing. My “type” has generally been ball-breaking bitches, Type A personalities because I was just so, well, “B.” It was good right up until it wasn’t. Type A and type B work well in the short term, because the Type A helps the Type B get shit handled and the Type B reminds the Type A that it’s ok to calm down once in a while and stop and smell the roses. In the long term, it’s like dating a steam-roller.

However, as the trauma of my youth has begun to fade, I’ve realized that I am more Type A than I have ever given myself credit for…… and maybe, that’s where the breakdown in communication with Dana occurred. I wasn’t the same person, and had different reactions to everything. My counselors in the hospital warned me this would happen. That people who weren’t used to me acting differently would pull away because they didn’t recognize me anymore. I have a huge personality in a tiny body, I’ve just never used it.

Until now.

I love my work, I love my home, I get up excited for the day ahead. My moments of grief are abated when I am working, because it is the time in my life where I feel like I’m really on top of my game.

My room still looks like “dumped girl,” but I am trying to fix it. I bought a book (a real book, not a Kindle version so I could write in the margins) called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo. Over three million copies have been sold, so I figured that if it worked for them, it might work for me.

The bottom line is that I need to get rid of a lot of my stuff. Like, a lot of it. Not everything has a place and I end up with stuff all over my room that I just don’t know what to do with, as if a teenage boy has moved in and taken over my life…. which reminds me of something someone said to me once (I would quote them, but I don’t remember who said it), that I was like a teenage boy…. and his mother.

Not far off, really.

I am hoping that this book will elevate me from feeling all right to feeling good. To really see the dragonflies in the sun instead of living in perpetual rain.

Amen.

Scales had to cancel on Thursday, so we ended up meeting for lunch after I got out of church yesterday. A lot of talking and listening was done. I’m a little farther on my journey than she is on hers, so I felt like I was able to give advice… but not until I said, “do you want my advice, or do you just want me to listen?” I have learned to ask that question many times over, because sometimes all people want is a place to be heard. Everything I said was hard, hard won, and it made me recede into the depths of myself. I came home emotionally drained, not from listening to her, but from going deep inside myself to tell her about the conclusions I’ve made in my recent past…. my flawed, fucked up past that is basically a manual on “What Not to Do.” The mask came down, and I spoke honestly… which I’m not used to doing after meeting someone exactly once before… and at the same time, she made me feel comfortable enough that I could, because she wasn’t Scales,™ either. We each just needed time to decompress, and it was much needed on both ends.

I have been and continue to be a mess on the inside, just a jumble of emotion that won’t go away until I unpack it all. It’s been five days since Argo and I have had any contact with each other, and another five days before that. I can’t remember the last time I went five days without e-mailing her a go get ’em, tiger e-mail… and it hurts, deeply, but I know I’m doing the right thing. It is as if the flood is passing and the rainbow has started to come out. Light in my eyes is returning, when I have been days without it. There have been times where I’ve felt my heart was literally walking outside my body where she was concerned, and now, not so much. I finally got sick and tired of being sick and tired… not physically, just emotionally. Heartsick to an enormous degree and trying to sleep it off… because that’s what I do when my body is trying to release a storm. I’ve been taking my sleeping medication very early, so that I am dead to the world before 9:00, and getting up at 6:00 so I have time to move about my day slowly before I have to be at the office. It’s helping me not to forget things because I have enough to make tea, eat breakfast, pack, take meds, etc. And actually, this morning I woke up at 5:15 and just read until my alarm went off.

Depression hurts. It just does. Not the bipolar kind, but the type you feel situationally when you’re just moving in the world sad. I didn’t realize how much the weight of Argo’s go-to emotion regarding me would always be dark and twisty affected me until I didn’t have to think about it all the time… because her assumptions are not my story, and they never will be.

As I have said before, I couldn’t apologize enough, forgive enough, or love enough to ease her pain, and now I see it. There is no compromise on anything, and now that the give and take has ended, so does the relationship. I received plenty of recognition for the things I did wrong, and very little over the things I did right. There were genuine moments, clearly, but the bottom line is that I can’t make things right, and it’s killing me to try when it’s never going to happen.

It’s just sad that it took a wrecking ball for me to recognize that fact, when there were subtle signs all along that I missed entirely because I either couldn’t or wouldn’t pay attention to them. I’m not sure which, because I don’t think I consciously ignored anything. I think I just didn’t realize that there was nothing I could do, because shoots of green seemed to take shape and I believe I took too much stock in them.

I didn’t think anything would go back to the way it was; neither one of us were prepared for that. But I did think that there was a possibility, a hope, that peace would win out and over time, the rift would be healed to the point that we could spend time laughing again.

I was wrong.

In the meantime, I just feel sick to my stomach and ready to cry at the drop of a hat, because where there was once great love and affection, there is now a black hole. I’m not angry, I’m not bitter, I’m not happy she’s gone, there’s just nothing. A great big emptiness that in the moment, nothing fills… or at least, that’s how I feel when I’m alone. Lunch with Scales is really the first time I’ve allowed myself to let go, to laugh at myself, because I know me. We’ve met.

It felt good to laugh. It felt good to have someone value my opinion. It felt great to hug her goodbye, because I can’t remember the last time I hugged someone. For the first time in a long time, I allowed myself to feel content…. maybe not over the top happy, but enough to let my soul relax and just be the me that I know I am, rather than the me that was pushed upon me, instead.

We’re getting together again on Thursday, and it’s nice to have something to look forward to.

I also bought tickets to DC United v. New England Revolution, because even though Raul Diaz Arce and Alexi Lalas aren’t playing, they’re the two teams I loved the most when I was in high school. I don’t know who I’m taking, but even if I don’t take anyone, I know I’m going to have a good time. I felt like I needed to get out more, and the tickets were cheap. I’ve been living like a hermit since I got here, and am only now beginning to branch out.

Shoots of green are beginning to take shape, even if they’re growing in a different direction.

Amen.

 

There are no words this morning. It’s cold, grey, and wet… just like the day we went to the courthouse in the first place. We were both wearing sweats, because we didn’t feel the need to dress up. It was, after all, just a document. We’d been best friends for three and a half years, with everyone else thinking we were having an affair and trying to hide it… but no.

In those three years and change, I simply desperately needed a friend. My heart had been put through a blender, and Dana was married. Not only that, part of those three years, we were separated by 1800 miles, Dana in Portland and me in Houston, with Dana narrating M*A*S*H* reruns to me over the telephone. When I moved back, things happened quickly, because time apart had made both of us realize that our friends were right, we belonged together… or maybe it was just me that needed convincing, because six weeks after Dana met me, she told me that she’d told her wife that she had a crush on me. I didn’t know what to do with that information, but it comes in handy now comforting me over the Argo situation, that I am not the only one who has ever been emotionally attracted to someone outside of a relationship and I won’t ever be, because it happens to the best of us.

Initially, I wanted to write the story of what happened that day, but the truth is, I don’t remember it. I wasn’t blogging then, so I didn’t write it down. It is lost except for this picture that speaks a thousand words simultaneously in light of what has happened since then. None of our friends came with us; this picture was taken by a reporter and appeared in The Portland Tribune as part of the story on Multnomah County giving out domestic partnership licenses. It appeared as my Facebook memory in the “Eight Years Ago Today” section. Our eighth anniversary would have been last Feb. 4th, but I must have posted the picture a lot later. Seeing these memories scroll by is a good thing, I think, but I also feel it is a bit like getting blanched early in the morning. But let us not forget that blanching stops the cooking process. Little by little, the fire in me dissipates as I hit the ice water.

My friend Wendy’s words hit me like a brick.

You don’t have to love it. You just have to live it.

I thought of this title while thinking of “Scales,” my new friend’s nickname until I can get to know her enough to pick out something more entirely appropriate… Counselor was already taken, and should remain that way, because even though I doubt she’ll show up again, that doesn’t mean that I don’t love her and I’m going to take her nickname away, because I’ve called her that since the moment I met her… and even though she couldn’t represent me because of family ties, I still gave her a dollar just in case. 🙂

Scales reminds me of taking a paralegal course at University of Houston, when one of my professors got the scales of justice tattooed on her ankle when she graduated from law school. She said that a woman on a plane said, “I love your tattoo. I’m a Libra, too.” Then she facepalmed in front of the class. I never did anything with my paralegal certificate, because every law firm to which I applied needed at least a year of experience… and how does one acquire said experience if no one is willing to take a chance on you? And, how much could I have used of said program because I moved to Oregon, and am only familiar with Texas civil and criminal codes? I did decide, however, that if I wanted to be a paralegal or an attorney (having taken Con Law in undergrad and gotten bitten by the bug hardcore), that I would definitely want to be a criminal defender…. because there is far less paperwork. That’s it. I could give a shit whether people were guilty or innocent, just don’t make me fill out things. I could also go my entire life without Bates labeling eight boxes of discovery. However, time is on my side in that respect. Now, there’s software that when you scan a document, it will Bates label for you. When I was in the course, you had to put the label on the document and recopy it….. and we’re talking discovery that could easily lead to 10,000 pages, especially in a civil suit.

One of my bosses at University of Houston (then-head of the Information Systems department) also had a JD and had passed the bar, so he used to joke, want to see my $75,000 card?

However, my legal background has served me once, although I never had to use it. Because there were no assets in my divorce from Dana, and we both just wanted a quick and dirty separation, I offered to go pro se if we needed to go to court. Neither of us wanted to hurt each other, we just wanted it to be over…. and even if there had been assets, I would have been of the mind to let her have whatever she wanted, because all I wanted was out. She could not see the path I was walking, that the Argo situation would resolve itself one way or another, and that life would go on. She would have been horrified at the way I chose to handle the Argo situation, but I can only plead mental illness, and a lot of it. However, even though I was never turned into a newt, I got better. Mental health, like addiction, is not something that has a cure-all. It’s a daily struggle with ups and downs, particularly when I feel like I’ve been treated unjustly or unfairly. My justice-oriented nature, INFJ and perpetual armchair law student, sometimes makes my blood boil, and because I was emotionally abused as a child, pieces of my emotions that are supposed to help me deal are missing. For instance, one of the things that made me the most angry with Dana was her sense of appeasement. Telling everyone I was crazy and that we’d never get back together while kissing me on the sidewalk and wanting to spend time with me. I felt even more nuts than I already was. As far as I’m concerned, with the policy of appeasement, the list goes 1) Dana 2) Neville Chamberlain. Knowing how bad I needed out came over time, because at first, I thought there was too much history between us to ever stop working on our relationship, as painful as it might have been for both of us. But within months, I realized that getting out of that relationship provided me with a sense of self-worth I’d not had EVER. In terms of divorce, the rules are simple.

All that needs to be done is file the paperwork with Multnomah county, and as long as I don’t contest it, the matter is resolved. I thought we might have to go to court only because of the Supreme Court decision, that our domestic partnership might have automatically become a marriage and thus, need of a day in court. In some ways, I am sorry I won’t get one, if only to have a formal acknowledgement. In fact, I would have invited my close friends and family as a sort of makeshift ceremony, because it is just as important for your community to recognize dissolution as it is to recognize that the marriage took place. The UCC even has a liturgy for it, and if I’d thought about it before I left Houston, I might have been interested in having it. I don’t know that Dana would have gone for it, but it wouldn’t have hurt to ask. All she could have said was no, and she never could have said yes if I didn’t ask.

I’ve been asked before why I write so much about Argo in comparison to how much I write about Dana, and the answer is so very simple. Argo was a very short relationship/catalyst to allow me to realize my worth. Dana will take years to untangle. Just years. The chord that runs between us is enormous, and I use the word both in the geometrical sense and the C minor I hope will one day resolve…. although I think the Piccardy third is on me.

And it is as I go through this journey into wholeness, I am looking forward to having dinner with Scales tonight. We’re going to a local Ethiopian joint, because Silver Spring has AMAZING African food. The African population here is quite large, and they cook…. blessedly. I should say up front that I already know I’m not girlfriend material, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to broaden my horizons, especially with someone who is so damn smart. I mean, making it through law school in the first place is taxing enough. But she’s moved past that, onto bigger and better things, and those are equally exciting. We are a talk for five hours kind of pair… and that’s putting it mildly.

And as for Arpeggios, that’s me.

Scales and Arpeggios. Has a ring to it. Maybe one day I’ll buy her a friendship bracelet, you know, after she French braids my hair and we do face masks together.

Amen.

 

 

I met a woman on Tinder that piqued my interest as a friend, because as I told her, I don’t want to date anyone I don’t know… and the fact that I really, really don’t want to start dating, at least not yet. It’s too much for me. I’d just like to meet more local people to go and do things with, and to keep my mind humming about something other than the past. I think we’re off to a good start.

Like most people in DC, I can’t tell you who she is or what she does, because her job isn’t shadow government B-16 sensitive (Scandal, holla!) but sensitive enough that if anything on this blog were to be traced back to her, it might cause problems. However, I can tell you that she is a recovering lawyer and Episcopalian, Southern, although different Southern than me. North and South Carolina as opposed to the great state of Texas (its full title), and has about as much accent as I do (take that for what you will).

When I swiped right, I was blown away that I’d already been matched. We had some great conversations over e-mail, but as you might imagine, I am quite gunshy about continuing that whole thing, so we met up pretty quickly. I told her that my writing was barely a quarter of me, and to only know my writing personality is not advisable… but I wasn’t lecturing her, just hard-won experience on my part…. obvi.

She is equal parts power suit and blue jeans, hilarious and lovely. Plus, there was this funny exchange:

Leslie: I gather that you are kick my ass smart. I love brains like that.

Her: Best. Opening Line. Ever.

Eventually she’ll get a nickname on this blog, but it takes me a while to come up with these things, because I want the nickname to be a reflection of who that person is. Argo, to me, was a ship of enormous proportions, carrying me through uncharted water. I had a thousand other nicknames for her, but Argo was the one that stuck on this blog, although my favorite is probably A-dog O’Bling Bling, because it is funny to me to imagine just how much she would hate it.

She never said anything about it, so maybe I’m wrong, but in my head it was “gods…. are you mental?” (shut it)

I’m in a space where I am not underestimating friendship. I want to take the chance of being close, trying not to be jaded and bitter on the idea because I’ve come such a long way… or trying to, anyway. Trying to be honest with myself and others, trying to be a better writer than I was the day before (to varying results), and the surprise of hearing that it was my blog was one of the things that made her want to meet me, as opposed to running away.

That was my perfect scenario, anyway. I figure why bother with people who can’t wrap their brains around the enormity of writing every day, and writing seriously about my own mistakes. I don’t think I would be willing to take the heartbreak of introducing someone to my blog long after I met them, because I cannot see that going well, ever. Something akin to, “why didn’t you tell me all this?” Ummmm, because I thought you’d think I was a freak show…. not that it’s a dealbreaker if you think that.

People can think I’m as cracked as they want as long as they’re willing to accept that there are also enormously amazing things about me, too. I remember the first day of ninth grade at HSPVA, when my Algebra teacher, Dr. Papakonstantinou, got up in front of the class and said, “I teach at Rice half a day in upper mathematics and here half a day with Algebra and Calculus. I also can’t ride a bike or drive a stick shift car.” And that, to me, is me in a nutshell. I’ll tell you all my flaws as long as you recognize that there are also things I do incredibly well.

Write me off as just the crazy part and you are seriously missing out, because some of the fun IS the crazy. It’s just all part of the creative process, and how I come up with big ideas instead of small ones. The words in the English language that drive me the most crazy are “we’ve always done it this way.”

We’ve always done it this way is a death knell, and following rules gets you nowhere in my line of work (the writing part, not the SQL part). But rules are important in their own right, and the one I want to keep most of all is that I will not let my past impede my future. I know who I am, and who I am says to let go of all the things I can’t control, when I tried so hard to be stuck in them and failed.

What has ruminating on the past ever got me except problems I couldn’t solve with people who didn’t care?

There won’t ever be a part of me that wishes things had been different, but that was then. This is now.

What am I going to do with it?

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what’s known in Greek as the “synoptik” gospels, which means “seen together.” There are so many similarities that we know they were taken from the same source document, simply called “Q.” My friend Knives, who has been one of my Atheist friends for years, posted a picture on my Facebook page that had me laughing for days (even though Mark was left out… pity). I had to admit to him that the only reason I got the joke is that I learned he played “Discord” in the new My Little Pony series, so I watched the documentary Bronies on Netflix… and that’s how I learned who he was on Star Trek. I have never been a true Trekker… I’ve only seen a couple of episodes, most notably The Trouble with Tribbles. Loved it, but have never really gotten on the bandwagon of watching every series, even though more than one person has said, “I envy you getting to experience it all for the first time.” One of the pastors I admire, Chuck Currie, manages to work Star Trek into his sermons a lot, for the simple reason that most episodes are morality plays. The first episode I ever watched was Kirk inviting one of his best friends onto The Enterprise, only to learn that he had become evil and the pain it caused him. He was in denial most of the episode, because he had to see to believe.

You would think that our gospel reading today would also be found in the synoptik gospels, because it is an important one… yet nowhere in Matthew, Mark, or Luke are these words to be found… Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe. It is as if Thomas was in denial the entire episode, because he had to see it.

I believe that this is one of the pericopes that clearly separate the synoptik from the gnostic. The synoptiks are mostly facts, but in John, it’s all about feelings. Knowing God comes from deep within, and not the need to prove that Jesus was the Messiah through evangelizing his Davidic heritage. This is not to say that feelings are absent, just not as mystic.

Jesus’ reaction is pragmatic… sure, touch me. I don’t care. If that’s what you need, I’m all for it. But he also calls Thomas out on the carpet by blessing those who believe without seeing… Perhaps a little passive-aggressive, but very effective. In the Gospel of John, it is not about seeing with your eyes. It is about seeing with your heart.

Thomas, however, was not really trying to be a jackass… or at least, that is what I choose to believe. We all have these moments in our lives when something seems impossible, and we are not jaded… just trying to wrap our brains around something that can’t be put together without more information. We wander around, thinking and overthinking, ruminating (or as Aaron and I call it, “mooing”) on how the puzzle pieces can possibly fit together.

Sometimes we are overwhelmed by the sheer hugeness or complexity of something. We can’t get our arms around it. We can’t get it figured out. We are unable to organize it or to bring it under control. We are overwhelmed in a way that makes us feel small, weak and inadequate (congregationalresources.org).

Think of the days in between the crucifixion and the resurrection… Good Friday and Holy Saturday. In Proverbs 29:18 KJV, it says, where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he. The glue that held the disciples together was gone. The rules and conventions they lived by fell by the wayside in the midst of overwhelming grief. Feeling small, weak, and inadequate must have hit the nail on the head (maybe THAT was a poor choice of words). For a long time, I have called Acts “The Gospel of Holy Shit, What Do We Do Now?” The disciples were lost, alone, afraid… hiding from the Jews that they knew were after them, next, because it was thought they were just as guilty of sedition as Jesus.

But that is not the end of their movie. In the time between the resurrection and the ascension, I can only think of Obi Wan Kenobi… if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Søren Kierkegaard had the same thought in the 19th century: the tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins. If you’ve ever been to church camp, I assure you that you know these words… it only takes a spark to get a fire going.

Jesus’ appearance to the disciples can only be described as imbuing them with holy authority once again, to let them know that they were capable preachers despite the fact that he would now love and direct them from the cloud rather than on the ground. I can imagine their pain and suffering as they knew they would only have him for a few more days, and regretting every moment they did not spend with Jesus while they had him on earth. He warned them that he was not long for this world, but I’m not sure the disciples could wrap their brains around that, either. There was no way  that they could have absorbed the horrible reality that their leader, mediator, paraclete and advocate was going to be murdered as a common criminal. Jesus’ appearance was a spark of motivation.

For me, it’s like being family to a CIA agent. I can’t imagine what would have happened emotionally to the people that my great uncle Foster “read in,” because the concept of losing him was a constant reality, too big to wrap their brains around and especially the part where he supposedly died in a helicopter crash and “rose again” as a different identity that our family never knew. For all practical intents and purposes, he was dead to us… until years later, when we ACTUALLY got his personal effects… I am not close to that side of my family, so when I say “we,” I don’t actually mean “me,” but it is a family story that sticks with me every day. I am not allowed to  go into the CIA building at Langley, because no one is…. and yet, I choose to believe that a star on the wall is his… one of those unnamed heroes that died in the line of duty… twice.

The difference between Jesus and my great uncle Foster is that he was allowed to tell no one of his resurrection. He was not allowed to appear to his family and friends to assure them that he was still alive, well, and doing what he loved… but to me, it is my real-life connection to what the disciples must have gone through, and I can connect to that experience in a visceral way. Their leader was gone. They were sorely afraid of their own deaths, because if the Sanhedrin had convicted Jesus and handed him over to the Romans, what was to stop them from doing it to everyone else? Judas was the only one to take the easy way out. He tried to get in good with the Romans for betraying Jesus, and then killed himself… partly, I think, because of his guilt, and partly because he didn’t think for a moment that “getting in good with the Romans” was going to work and he’d rather take his own life than let them get him. Of course, that is my own opinion, but venturing into fiction, seems entirely plausible. The Jews who did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah were out for blood to stop the coup they felt was happening and they were doing everything they could to quash the rebellion.

Jesus’ appearance to the disciples was a way to tell them to keep going in the face of their fears, because he knew how much it would cost them, and yet, how utterly important it was. The Sanhedrin was power over. Jesus’ was power with… a rising up by people who felt powerless and wanted to reclaim it. Needless to say, it worked, because thousands of years later, Jesus’ words are used for liberation all over the world… to lift people up and make them feel more worthy than the hell that’s being handed down. Now, Jesus is not a person, but a movement, and we are invited. Jesus made it clear that although he was the cornerstone, he was not the whole church.

WE ARE.

Jesus sparked the disciples into action, and many preachers that followed after them, down to the very people we sit next to in the pews. Hear the words of Acts 5:27:32:

When the temple police had brought the apostles, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than any human authority. The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.

Christian is not an adjective. Christian is a verb. Just as “adulting” has become a thing, so should “Christianing.” We talk all the time about how adulting is hard. Why are we not saying the same thing about “Christianing?” Jesus’ message has been mangled in some denominations as wealth through the power of belief, when most of the time, belief is fraught with uncertainty. And yet, the Apostles refused to be beaten down, no matter how much it cost them, mostly the uncertainty that they would live.

To combat our own uncertainty, it is our job to feed hungry children, lift up the oppressed, believe #blacklivesmatter, support the entire queer community as they still battle discrimination every damn day despite the Supreme Court ruling that demands equality, and most of all, welcome the immigrants and the refugees. Christ was all about welcoming the stranger, the parable of The Good Samaritan written all over everywhere. It’s not our job to judge why people have chosen to come to this country illegally. It is our job to give them safe sanctuary…

bottles

blankets

water

food

clothes

Obviously, they’ve come here to escape something, and it shouldn’t matter what that something is to us. Jesus’ resurrection is in every time we look into a stranger’s eyes, feel that fear of not knowing them, and TAKING CARE OF THEM ANYWAY.

It is not our job  to kick people while they’re already down, because if we are meant to be Christ in the world, it is our job to lift them up. Christianing is hard because you have to put away your judgmental crap, and I hear it all the time from conservative “Christians” who wouldn’t know the face of Christ if it was staring right at them. Mostly because he wouldn’t show up as the almighty Christian superhero they’ve invented. He would show up as a Syrian refugee, a woman that paid a coyote thousands of pesos to be able to lift herself out of poverty in a new life, a farm worker paid pennies on the dollar, a thirteen year old accused of a crime and stuck in the adult population.

You don’t have to be Thomas in this situation, because there is nothing to make you doubt that your ability to be Christ in the world will be found by putting your finger in Jesus’ wounds to believe that he has risen indeed. All you have to do is open your eyes… because now, the resurrection is not Jesus. The resurrection is our ability to lift up ourselves when we are stuck in the Good Fridays and Holy Saturdays of our lives… the madness and grief that occurs when we look around at our world and realize that the laws we’ve created do not make us happy, but continue to oppress.

We need a paradigm shift as liberal Christians, that when the vision fails, the people do not perish but create their own. We are able to bring heaven and erase hell on earth, but it is not a requirement. You can be happy to live in your bubble and pretend that everything is ok, because Christianing is hard, hard work, and it costs us something to be the extravagant welcome that Jesus gave to us.

When we eat this bread and drink this cup, it is home in a single sip… a way back to the preacher that strengthens us, the martyr whose rule has begun because an idea beget a sea change… the one that says “when you show up at the table, you get food, anyway.” You get sustenance for the journey ahead, the hard road that you will walk if you make Christian the unbelievable verb it needs to be. But again, it’s not a requirement.

We are invited.

RSVP.

 

When I finally figured out the root cause of my emotional abuse, I wrote a blog entry entitled What it Looked Like When I Stood Up. At issue was that I had been through hell and back trying to release my shame at everything that had happened as a teenager, and through it all, Diane had been silent. She wouldn’t talk to me, she flaked on meeting with a mediator, and when I told her that my nephew was in heart surgery and that Dana and I were too emotionally crispy to function, it would hurt beyond belief if she let me down again. So she sent me a note while my nephew was in surgery that our relationship was over. I thought it was the shittiest thing she ever could have done, and at the same time, poetic and beautiful because Philip (known to this web site as Wi-Phi because his full name is William Philip) lived and our relationship died at the same moment. I am of two minds on the issue. The first is that there’s no way she could have known he was on the table at that very moment. The second is that she is calculating enough to know when to launch an RPG that will hurt like a motherfucker for years afterward, and this was no different.

We hadn’t talked in months, and she sent me a picture of herself with her Portland Timbers scarf and a program signed by all of the players I loved… a note that said withuot my influence, she wouldn’t be there. I’m glad that I gave her a love of soccer, as Meag (high school girlfriend for those just joining us) gave to me, but this was beyond the pale. Just dropping a sweet note as if we were buds. Dana was incredibly supportive of my anger, confusion, and sadness. Argo made me courageous, because her words were, “gross. She doesn’t deserve to be buds with you… not your heart, not your soul, not your guts, anything. One day she will have no more power over you.” I felt ten feet tall, because I knew she was right.

That day came a few months later, because I just stopped caring. Kristie’s advice got through to me, because I couldn’t release myself from her grip, and then one day it just clicked. I could direct my own emotions.

I feel the same way about Argo, that one day, it will just click and I can stop caring so much. The difference is that I feel Argo is worthy of that friendship, because she did something for me last night that changed everything.

She stood up.

She owned it. She fucking owned it. It’s not all my fault. I am not responsible for anything and everything that went wrong anymore. The weight lifted off my shoulders is enormous, and I loved that moment with such white-hot pure love, as if it was radiating within me.

It makes letting go so much easier, because when she stood up, it was everything. It was ALL THE FEELS.

It was another part of being able to let go in peace. I gave up the thought that I didn’t want to be around her for a million dollars. I just prayed. I prayed for her happiness, her success, her drive and passion and all the things that make her, well, her. We clearly need to stop interacting, and I clearly need to stop caring so much, because my feelings are clearly not reciprocated. It’s complicated and messy as I try to pick up the pieces, but not impossible…. just sad beyond belief.

When we wrote to each other, she used these long ellipses that made her sound like Shatner, and it gave me one of my greatest inspirations… I even started a hashtag for it on Twitter and Facebook… that not only should you pray on the words, but the spaces in between…………………………………….#prayingonthespaces

And that’s what I’m doing right now. Taking her words, her ownership, and praying not only on the words, but the spaces in between. I feel that I can do so much more good for myself by holding her in my heart as a blessing, and just forget about the times we were at each other’s throats. There were quite a few moments when I just wanted to throw in the towel, I was so ashamed of my past and I just wanted life to be over, and she saw how depressed I was getting and literally kissed my soul…. saving my life over and over. If I focus on that fact, I will never stop praying for her, because the light she shone on me made me a better person. In fact, I will never be the same.

There’s so much I cannot say about this relationship because it would break confidentiality, but those are the moments I, in the words of Luke, ponder in my heart. I can either let go in anger, or I can smile that this relationship ever happened.

I wanted us to grow into wholeness, but you can’t help a little old lady cross the street if she doesn’t want to go. And this is where our paths diverge, and maybe always will. I need to grow more as a person regardless of whether her footsteps are beside me or not… and I think the Footsteps poem about Jesus is terribly cliche, but it has relevance here… that there were moments in time where there were only one set of footsteps on my path, because she carried me, my metaphysical Christ in the world even though she’s an atheist.

But now we will walk our own paths, because I saw what it looked like when she stood up, and it was a beautiful moment of growth and strength and everything I wish for her in the future. I will keep that moment for a lifetime, adding it to the tapestry in my mind.

Because she’s never met me outside of my writer personality, there’s so much that I wish could have happened, but I can stop regretting that I ever met her. I will always smile at the memory of her, and if that is all that is to be in our movie, it was a great one.

My Argo, my great ship who carried me through literally the worst time in my life. It’s not something you forget, and it’s not something you minimize, which I was trying to do in order to let go. I thought that it would be easier to dislike her to make it easier to separate, but as it tuns out, what I need to do is send more love, more peace, more forgiveness, more humility, more grace into the world. I don’t have to e-mail it. She’ll just know.

Amen.

We’re going to right the world and live. I mean live our lives the way lives were meant to be lived. With the throat and wrists. With rage and desire, and joy and grief, and love till it hurts, maybe. But goddamn, girl. Live.

Sandra Cisneros

It’s been such a long day that I’m just now taking a lunch writing break. I have a wallpaper changer that puts quotes on my desktop, and this one hit me where I live. I remember reading The House on Mango Street when I was at HSPVA, and it was my first introduction to chicana literature.

Cisneros has never been married or started a family, saying that her writing is her child and she’d rather live alone. I have never identified more with that sentiment, because trying to write about my own life and the things that happen in it cause me to retreat into a dark room and just think it out. Right now my mind is consumed with Dana, Argo, and letting go of the white-hot pure love I have for both of them, because I thought they were the people with whom I’d LIVE! like this. Rage and desire, joy and grief spilling out as Dana and I made our way through a marriage that weathered hurricanes and adventures with Argo that made her realize that I am indeed a badass and could be an even better one with her… or so I thought. At this point, letting go of all the toxicity in both relationships is what is allowing me to LIVE!

I want that peace and solitude to create passage. It is not lost on me that I have said many times that I slept deeply in the belly of the Argo, knowing my passage was safe. Now I’ve left the Argo and jumped in the water headfirst, and I’m not very good at diving so it was more like a belly flop that continues to hurt my stomach. Things were said and done that were unforgivable on both ends, so why not find my own path? I may not be a great diver, but I was small and weak as a child, so I’ve had swimming lessons since I was six months old. Preemies are actually really good swimmers because they haven’t forgotten the dolphin reflex they used in the womb. It strengthened my legs, and I am sure that it is one of the reasons I can walk….. badly, but still. I have the tools to walk my own path, bring myself out of the deep, and have the courage to go boldly into the valleys of my own vulnerabilities.

I have a quill tattoo on my left forearm that drips blood, based on a quote that has been attributed to many people… writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and slice open a vein. [Editor’s Note: Dana used to be married to a woman named Carol. She took one look at my writer’s tattoo and said, “aren’t you right-handed?” I laughed so hard I nearly fell off the couch because it was such a great #dumbassattack] My tattoo reminds me every day of my tensile strength. All of the people I interact with bend me to a certain degree, but at the end of the day, I feel unbreakable because of this space. I can think through everything, including all of the mistakes I’ve made, and over time, it looks better. It feels better. I have more compassion for myself when I think, wow… did I really say that? Blog entries are slices of time that say how I’m feeling in the moment… how I am LIVING! As Emily Saliers wrote in the song Ghost, I dance the edge of sanity I’ve never been this close. And maybe that’s all living really is. Being willing to dance the edge of sanity to get real emotions, real experiences, life-altering mountain-tops you never thought you’d reach because you can see the valleys and look how far you’ve traveled up. Having this blog is a straight-out miracle. I’ve gotten a lot of flak over it, but usually it’s from the same people who adored my writing until they could see themselves in it, as if I couldn’t write as truthfully and beautifully about them as I could about the people they read about when they stepped in.

For instance, Argo and I were horrible to each other, but I will always write about how much of a miracle it was when she found me. We probably won’t speak, but that doesn’t erase the past and how much I needed her at that time in my life. She provided me with reasons to think I was bigger than I was- capable of doing more things with my time than I was currently capable of. That I could think bigger. She was right- I fell in love with absolute honesty and trust, and I ran away from it like a house on fire. I torched her so many times that it’s no wonder she has such shitty opinions of me now and I have to live with that idea. But to open up to me is fraught, and I would say the same of her. That’s how we were so capable of learning each other’s hot buttons in the first place. Our trust issues were immense, and instead of taking care of each other, we turned on each other and it was just World War Three, with my wife caught in the middle of trying to keep the peace and trying to get me the fuck away from her all in the same breath… because once that trust was broken, it was broken for good.

And yet, a line from Wicked comes to my mind when I think of Argo- I don’t know that I’ve been changed for the better, but I’ve been changed for good. I will never be the same after this. Not in a million years. I once told her that her tapestry was in the great museum of my head, that even though our relationship was in black and white, I could see her in color.

So that’s what I hold onto in order to let go of anger. It wasn’t all bad. It was one of those experiences that I needed to have, my soulmate in the Elizabeth Gilbert definition that there are these people that shake you out of your current reality and aren’t designed to be permanent.

There will never be a time when I can say I don’t love her, because you can love people and dislike them all at the same time. We do it with family members and friends all the time. Like, I love you but i think you’re being a total jackass right now. It’s definitely been said to me many times. Cognitive dissonance is one of my specialties. it seems I can hold eight opinions at once on any given topic.

For instance, I would give a limb to see Dana again, bury my face in her neck and cry and apologize and want to kick her ass into next week simultaneously. And that’s just how relationships are, when you LIVE! When you FEEL ALL THE THINGS! It’s horrible and messy and completely divine. We are perfect in our imperfection if we can let go enough to let others see them and respond.

It gives me something to help other people, and I truly take it in that there are people that feel good about helping me… this ecosystem that spans the country because I’ve lived in Portland, Houston, and DC…. Internationally if you count my friend Randy, who checks in from Qatar and I get a little thrill every time Qatar appears in my stats.

I nicknamed this blog “international television” for a reason. People read me all over the world, and in some small way, I hope that by laying out my brokenness and grief I am helping them not to feel so alone. Sometimes you break open to let light in…. when you really, really LIVE!

I found a Dana story that needs to be told. Here it is:

I downloaded Amazon Prime Music for my phone, and put it on the Top Country station. I can’t say I’m really a country fan, per se, but I enjoy the fact that most songs are slow enough I can actually understand the lyrics. So I’m listening along, and I hear this song, and it just breaks my shit up. I realize that losing Argo is not about “breaking up,” because she’s just my friend, but it still hurts like a bitch. So it was great to laugh in the middle of pain. By the time the song was over, I was all like, “behold the field where I sow my fucks, and see that it is barren.”

I’m going to be ok. Everything is going to be ok.

Today I’m using Microsoft Word to blog, when I normally just use a text editor. I’m trying to cut down on the number of typos I get from rushing to publish, because I think that my courage will run out the longer I look at something… and it’s true. The longer I spend on editing, the more I believe my words don’t matter, so I’ll move on to something else rather than writing anything. Perhaps it’s a little too stupid and careless to publish whatever I want, but for everyone that thinks as such, there are a hundred more who applaud me for my bravery in just telling what’s going on in my life. As for the last couple of days, “shitstorm” just about covers it… and in the end, my life hasn’t changed all that much. I lost a friend who’d no longer become good for me, and I can feel good about that. I miss saying things like “kick ass, take names, be good, all that shit…” but in the end, I realized that I was saying those words every morning just as much for me. Uplifting myself by uplifting others, so perhaps I should just e-mail myself every morning. It would do just as much good, perhaps more, because I know I’m pouring a go-get ‘em attitude into someone that really needs it.

Last night I went to bed at 7:30 and slept hard until my alarm went off. The last two days have been emotionally draining as much as physically. When I’m upset, I don’t eat. This morning looked a lot brighter and I was able to manage cereal with bananas and yogurt and a couple of tangerines. I still feel stupid at all the signs I missed, that this thing could have entirely been avoided if I’d just realized nothing was ever going to go back together and to stop trying. It’s not in my nature to think that way, but perhaps it needs to become so. The well of hope became poisoned water, and I drank enough of it to get sick.

All I wanted was to be heard, understood… and when that didn’t happen, the breakdown was complete. I remember years ago that Argo hurt me HARDCORE. To the point where we didn’t talk for hours in a day when we were used to not going 15 minutes. She said that my silence was voluminous, and when I told her that she’d hurt me, she said that she wouldn’t apologize for what she’d said, but she’d apologize for hurting me.

In this instance, I see no difference. I couldn’t apologize for something I didn’t think was wrong, but I could apologize for her hurt feelings, so I did.

It doesn’t matter what the truth is. She’s going to believe what she wants to believe, thus my need to get as far away from this situation as humanly possible. The bitch of it is that if she’d bothered to get to know me, we could have cleared up a lot.

During my illness, she didn’t talk to me a whole lot, just to Dana… and I can’t imagine what those conversations might have entailed, but my guess is that they were a far cry from reality.

Because reality is that I couldn’t get a new patient appointment for three weeks, and I didn’t have any other choice but to go to the emergency room, because there was no doctor that would prescribe for me without me actually being their patient. My time in the hospital was very successful, by all counts, because I learned that there are coping mechanisms for anxiety and angry that I’d just never learned (and lots of people never do). The other thing I learned is that a lot of my “attention deficit” was actually boxes that could be checked on a trauma diagnosis kit. That when I didn’t know what to do, my attention would shift to something I did know… my own memories. If I couldn’t solve the present, I would continually try to solve the past.

And in retrospect, this is starting to sound very familiar and scary. However, I am so much better at solving the present now, because I have the tools to do it…. But not with people who know the old buttons to push to ensure that they will get an old reaction instead of a new one. No one is immune to being “worked over,” and I am no exception. It was a stunning realization that I had grown past Argo, that I didn’t want to be held to my old self because if we had anything to resolve, she wouldn’t approach me as someone who’d been working on my issues. She’d just push buttons until she got what she wanted.

Pushing those buttons has never and will never make my behavior okay, but it takes a gargantuan amount of strength to walk away when you are feeling threatened. I don’t know too many people who would have walked away from having the same buttons pushed I did, and it doesn’t matter what they are. People who feel provoked are provoked for all sorts of reasons, and we all struggle with those moments of “cortisol and sin” that we know aren’t going to end well, because in the end, we’ve given the provoker exactly what they need to “prove” their rightness.

I keep going over and over in my mind what I should have done instead. The first is that I never should have responded to her e-mail. I said I was done. I should have meant it. That would have cut the fight off at the pass, because it would have been me saying, “fight with God if you have to, but you’re not going to get to me.” But our relationship has been like that for years- Argo coming after me with both guns blazing and when she sends across those escalated words, I jump on them like a dog with a bone. I undo myself, not her.

It reminded me of the fight with Dana, where I couldn’t let her just provoke me and walk away. What I should have done in that situation is gotten in my car and driven away. But I couldn’t let her be “bigger than me.” I couldn’t let her win. Anger bubbles up in me from deep inside, and over time, both Argo and Dana learned to capitalize on it so that I would feel ashamed at my behavior with no recognition on their part that I was capable of a calm conversation, I just wasn’t going to have it if there was already a gun on the table.

Feeling threatened is what has driven most of my emotions since I was a teenager. I have so much work to do on responses to adrenaline, because fight-or-flight overtakes me in a way that I cannot see clearly anymore. I can only see spots in front of my eyes and not a path through to get what I want without trying to threaten the person more than they’ve just threatened me.

I don’t know what to do to de-escalate the conversation myself to get the guns off the table in the first place.

When Argo wrote to me and said that she was getting blowback from her friends and I said I was done, she said, “If you continue to refer to me in your blog, drive by “areas of interest”, and send me fucked up emails, I will be forced to seek legal action. I can promise you that.” My throat closed up because I was like, “what fucked up e-mails? Yes, I realize that there are plenty from over a year ago, but nothing since and in fact, signs of growth in others. If I’d known that driving by places I’d seen in pictures and wanted to see for real was going to lead her to that place, I never would have done it, because it was the last thing on my mind to hurt someone. Facebook is just a medium. Real life is real life. I could understand the stalking aspect if she thought I was trying to get pictures of her house or something fucked up like that. But I was 50 miles outside of the city, most notably to see all the places I wanted to go with Dana and just didn’t get to while we were together. Imagining what those friendships might have been like had we not used C3 to blow them up.

While I was on my sightseeing trip, it was incredibly sad and cathartic, and I cannot help that part of my strength in letting go of Argo now is due to the fact that some of the places I saw said, “let her go” as well. The reason I kept holding on to our strength is that perhaps a month ago, she told me that the best present I could have given her is getting well. Her nastiness now is uncalled for, but not unexpected. Like every fallible human ever, she escalated and I engaged, thus “proving” that I haven’t gotten well at all. I am sure she has all the proof she needs to believe that I am the villain in all of this. I don’t believe that I am a villain. I believe that I am perfectly imperfect, that I have the ability to accept myself in the face of being unacceptable, to quote Paul Tillich.

I am as perfect as humans ever get.

I woke up so depressed that I thought I needed a mental health day, and in the end, just threw on my clothes and ran. My job is muscle memory, for the most part, and I decided that I could either feel like shit at home, or feel like shit at work. I chose…………. wisely. Argo sent me a note that said she was getting some blowback from people who wanted to make sure she was okay, as if I had something to do with blowing her cover. There’s only two people in the world that I’ve ever told who the nickname really is. One is Dana, and one is someone I thought was my friend, but as it turns out, not so much. I was pleading for help, years ago, where we’d gotten into this place where neither one of us were good for each other anymore, and I would have given a limb to make it right. So if anyone knows outside of them, I didn’t tell them, and in my humble experience Dana can’t keep a secret to save her life. This is not a slam; she just gets exuberant and things slip out, one of the many reasons I realized I couldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her and getting the hell out of Dodge allowed me to stop being afraid of what she might say at any given moment. So, the breech didn’t come from me, and of that I am sure.

Argo told me to shut it down and never contact her ever again. The contacting is easy. A snake bit me, and when a snake bites you, you don’t blame the snake. You just move on and try to get the venom out. But it is quite a different thing to tell someone that they cannot have their personal space to say what they think and mean it. I told her I’d lawyer up if I had to, because she didn’t have a case. Sedition and/or libel have no place here, because I have been up front that these are my opinions, not facts, and they never will be. Freedom of speech is freedom of speech, and of course, this was after telling me that she hadn’t and wouldn’t read what I had to say. My only reply to that was that it was like telling me she didn’t like oranges without ever actually having one.

At issue was the trip I took down to Dumfries, Stafford, FXBG, etc. because there was nothing that I could do to overcome the idea that I was somehow stalking her, even though that was the last thing on my mind… I have said this before and I will say this again, that it was important to me to see things in real life that I’d only seen in pictures, without bothering anyone and without even anyone knowing I was there. I wrote about it because that’s my thing. I go and observe and take pictures and spend some time reflecting on the past three years and all the things I’ve done to isolate people I truly love. I thought it was benign, so I sent her a picture of my adventures and the response was swift and immediate. I felt like I was a mere journalist. She thought I was trying to seek out ways to make her feel uncomfortable. I apologized profusely and told her that there was no way I meant to hurt her, but by then, she was already on the fucked-up train of “I wish I’d never met you, that there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t regret letting you into my life.”

And finally, I got angry enough to feel the same way. Apparently, for Argo to feel heard, I have to agree with her assessment, and I didn’t, but I did apologize for engendering her discomfort. That it was important for me to have my own space, and important for her to have her emotional space as well without discounting how she felt and writing it off. I handled it in the best way I knew how, which was to just listen, take in her words, and own that her feelings were important whether I agreed with them or not. I can’t erase her feelings, but I *can* stick to my guns that my intentions were pure and I will not be held hostage by her shitty accusations anymore. It just doesn’t work like that.

I’m angry that prayers, well-wishes, check-ins, and just general friend-love have gone out the window in favor of burning this bridge to the ground over something that I feel she’s been waiting for. If her hatred of me was so deep-seated, it’s something I would have liked to know as I tried to put the work into solving something I thought could go back together with enough work and time. That I owned every bit of what I did to make her uncomfortable and did everything to get out of the situation that caused me to act and react that way, including getting away from Dana and Aaron, with whom I was content to sit in my nothing box and have all these dreams without action. There’s a solid reason I left Houston, and it wasn’t to be with Argo. It was to find myself, and I have.

What I realized is a friend that placates you into thinking that things are getting better while just waiting for you to fuck up isn’t a friend at all. Waiting to push my hot buttons untll I regress into the person she wants me to be is just about the shittiest thing she could have done, because she ratchets up that anger in me that needs to pop off just to treat her as shitty as she’s just treated me, without letting anger roll off because she’s intentionally trying to get me to pop off just so she can “prove” I haven’t changed. It is as if she stores up those hot buttons and uses them to great effect, such as telling me that she would not hesitate to get a restraining order even though I have been nowhere near her ever in the history of this move.

I told her that if anyone needed a restraining order, it wasn’t her. It was me. That I was tired of being placated and lied to while she held on to this undercurrent of hatred and regret without telling me she was doing so. Any friend that would do that to me just isn’t.

I don’t want any contact with her, because I see that she brings out the worst in me because she actively tries to escalate a conversation and I fall for it every time. I just regress because she won’t accept me as I am, just pigeonhole me as the bitch while she walks away clean. It is never *our* fault we’ve fucked things up, just mine. According to Argo, she’s never done anything wrong in the history of our relationship except befriending me. It hurts like a motherfucker to hear, but at least now I know her true colors instead of her hiding behind this facade of “I’m glad things are beter.”

She doesn’t have the right to make me feel small anymore, because I won’t let her get away with it. I never have, and I never will. The fact that she will not look inside herself is not my problem. The fact that I carry all this weight of grief and sadness has nothing to do with her… because like I said, in this relationship, she hasn’t made a mistake yet. It reminds me of Katharin, because when she was a school counselor at JJP (John J. Pershing Middle School), she said that if you believe the parents, no kid in the history of the school has ever done anything wrong.

Her days of treating me like shit are numbered, because one day I will look back at this relationship and decide that I was never worthy of the hell she put me through while denying it ever happened. I wish I could hate her. I wish I could get angry enough not to want her in my life. I wish I could tell her to take a long walk on a short pier. But when I look back at the interactions we’ve had, the good wins out and I cannot focus on the bad. But she can. And therein lies the rub. We’ve both given each other a good amount of road rash, but at least I can admit my part. She sticks hard to her guns that I created this entire thing. I hope that strategy works out well for her. I’ve always thought it was better to keep the peace and take it and just sit in my wrongness, hoping that one day, she would, too. But none of the resurrections I’ve hoped for have taken, even when I thought they did and we were good. Because I cannot get out from under things she won’t talk about…. and there are fucking plenty.

Yesterday, when she contacted me and said that people were checking on her based on what I’d written, I said, “I’m done. Your mess. You clean it up.” It’s not my responsibility to take on the feelings of her friends, especially since they are her place to fall and not mine. I didn’t tell these people she was Argo, but someone did, and instead of asking me what I meant, she just came out guns blazing. I got provoked into white-hot anger, and again said some things that were beyond the pale.

I apologized this morning, saying that even though I felt provoked, that didn’t make my words okay, and that it wasn’t important to me whether she responded, but it was important to me that I returned to an even keel.

But I also expressed my feelings about that matter, that when a snake bites you, do you really blame the snake? No. You just try like hell to get the venom out. Her snake in the grass approach to treating me like a friend and having these deep-seated feelings of hate and regret running underneath were not the way I expected this relationship to end. I thought that my words and actions would count for someting, that she would see that I only wanted the best for her, and I can’t help but think that this latest iteration was planned. It was her chance to get rid of me and she took it, because then she’d never have to face the reality of her own mistakes. She could just hold everything over my head and continue to believe that she is always right, no matter how I feel about the situation, because of course, my feelings don’t matter.

I should have listened to Dana when she said that I was pouring emotions down a hole; that I’d never get anything back… because in the beginning, our relationship was mutual and beautiful and the friend my INFJ personality profile said I’d get… this person that would walk with me my whole life because I only have the ability to create a few friendships at a time and devote myself deeply to them without having a ton of acquaintances just to make small talk. But when that piece of us broke, there was no redemption, as much as I might have wanted it. I feel wrecked at all the times I prayed for her, wished her well, sent peace offerings, and thought we were on our way to being the valued people to each other we once were. But Dana was right. That part of us would never come back, and I couldn’t love enough, forgive enough, apologize enough to make those dreams come true. All the love and care we poured into each other turned nasty on a dime, and if things could change that quickly, where the hell was I that I didn’t see it?

I just feel so stupid that I didn’t recognize what Dana was trying to tell me… that the relationship was broken beyond repair and yet, I still tried in vain. It’s the hardest part of me to realize that relationships are broken, because I don’t think they ever end. If I think of my whole lifetime in DC, what if we end up at the same party? What if I innocently end up in her neighborhood because one of of *my* friends lives there? Is she going to see that I have my own life and my own friends, or is she going to try and take that away from me as well? I don’t think that these things will come to pass anytime soon, but I have a long vision and a long memory.

So, in short, I have to stop caring altogether and just say “que sera, sera.” Her take on it is that I will never hear from her directly ever again. She’s said it before, and within a few days, we’ve been in contact with each other after having the make-up conversations that needed to happen. But I don’t think it’ll happen this time, because I am too strong to let her in. I have real trust issues now. I spend my days regretting I ever met her, when I never had to before. I was doing my dead-level best to be open and transparent, and if I truly was the stalker she’s making me out to be, I never would have told her shit. Stalkers live on being secretive and obtuse about what they’re doing. Stalkers have this dark side to them that says people need to be watched from the bushes. I don’t have that bone in my body. I have a writer and observer’s point of view, curious to a fault, and obviously that curiosity was scary to Argo and I didn’t think it would be because again, I was so transparent. I even said, “I’ll send you a picture of my license plate if that’s what you need to know that you’ll NEVER see me in your neighborhood.” I was willing to work with her fear to resolve it, not add to it. I am not the person she believes that I am, and to live with these false assumptions is hell on earth, because I just start to feel more and more worthless, more and more depressed. I WILL NOT let her put me into that place of fear ever again, and I will not be scared of her. She wants a restraining order, get one. Total waste of money because I wouldn’t choose to be around her for a million dollars. She gutted me like a fish, and I know I hurt her, too… so why add to it? Why cause even more destruction without meaning to? I stepped into it up to my ass without ever meaning any harm. She’s the one that took it and ran with it, and how could I have been so stupid that sending little prayers and checking in when she’s had a bad day and giving her jokes to lift her spirits would count for anything? It must be a good feeling to know that you’ve never done anything wrong. I can’t say the same, but I can say that I own it. She emotionally can’t, and never will, and I should have known it long ago.

But my family will catch me. I know they will, both bio and my host family.

Please hold Sam and Dominic in your prayers as Dom’s mother is about to transition due to a long battle with cancer.

Those are the people I need to focus on, pray for, check in, and love to the best of my ability. But at the same time, I will have a hard time ever letting anyone in, letting anyone see the real me, because I don’t want a relationship in which people use those flaws to beat me with them. So perhaps I will have a lot of acquaintances, because I don’t want relationships that are more than orange-juice glass deep. Maybe someday someone will change my mind, but it won’t happen anytime soon. I’m too busy trying to go back inside myself, trying to get rid of the hot buttons Argo knows to push so that if she ever tries to push them again, they just won’t work.

If there’s any time I wish I was six feet tall and bulletproof, it’s now. I’m going to go home and do all my laundry so that I can suit up. Leslie Lanagan™ is back, because I need a chance to put this away and lock the box so that I’m not undone by Argo’s revelations. Right now, the box is too small and I can’t close the lid. But when I do, I will feel like there’s nothing she can do to scare me, nothing she can do to make me regress in a ball of anxiety, nothing she can do to get to me… and I will protect myself from anyone else ever trying to do the same.

It would be so easy to say, “fuck off.” But it’s more complicated than that. As things always are. I have my good memories, and I will take those with me instead. What she does with our memories is none of my business, but if no contact is what makes this better, I’m all for it. I don’t want strife, I want peace… and trying to prove it failed miserably. I can’t help but think what might have happened if she’d really just taken in that I was curious, being the me I always am, rather than jumping on the “you’re a shitty person” bandwagon. But again, if she can’t love me, I can. There is no one smarter than me ABOUT ME. And What I Know for Sure™ is that I have a well of love within me that’s waiting for the right friend and not the wrong one. I just hope that when he/she shows up, I’m not so jaded that friendship cannot happen… the kind that is real, painful and honest, true to its core.

I miss Aaron desperately because I’ve already let him in. He knows my shit and chooses to love me, anyway. But I made a mistake with him, too, and it caused me to suit up. I was talking to him about Dana, and he lost his shit saying that I was putting him in the middle. It was then that I realized he’d become Dana’s friend and I couldn’t count on him to be my person anymore. A wall went up that will never come back down.

It also saddens me that Dana isn’t my go-to guy anymore, but so many walls have gone up there that I won’t let her in, either.

It’s time to go for lunch with Pri-Diddy if she’s in town, because what I know for sure is that she will come up with several TED Talks and motivational videos that encourage my growth forward and not back. Maybe she is the person that my INFJ profile said I’d get, bcause every time I see her, I am filled with peace…. my enormous guru in a tiny body. But at the same time, I am not ready to give all of myself to her in the way that old friends do. I am too content to suit up.

At this point, I trust no one except myself, and maybe that’s what the snakebite was for. To learn that lesson wholeheartedly. If you want to see the real me, you’re going to have to fight through layers and layers of mistrust because I didn’t know just how much this relationship was going to wreck me and hopefully build me up in ways I didn’t know I needed. Moving on from a fountain of dysfunction is what’s best for me right now, as well as suiting up to prove to myself that I am worthy of love even through the wreckage.

I feel like last night was a car wreck of enormous proportions, skidding on a mountain without a guardrail. I’m supposed to take a Klonopin in the morning and one at night. Instead, I took them both so that I wouldn’t feel the physical effects of being so angry at all the lies. I wanted to be able to write about them clearly, without cortisol and sin racing through my body. After I finish, I’m going to listen to Nadia Bolz-Weber preach, because her words have a way of breaking down my walls. I could let her in, because we both have some of the same wounds. I need someone who will understand them, but I’m not going to seek her out because I know she has a million people who already want a piece of her.

Instead, I think I’m going to start group therapy, because I got more out of Al=Anon than I’ve ever gotten anywhere else. I never forget that my troubles started with the revelation of Diane’s partner being an alcoholic and a weed dealer, that it made me on high alert as a 7th grader, taking on problems that were never meant to be mine but wanted to solve, anyway. You can’t imagine what it was like to see my friend in pain and wanting to be the knight in shining armor that destroyed the situation for her. But I was so little, an ankle-biter at best.

I think it was the start of wanting to join the military, because not only could I be in a jazz band, I would get bigger… more muscular, able to take on the destruction that Diane’s ex was putting into her life.

I couldn’t join because of medical reasons, but I still want to be one of those people that abides by the code. Honor, justice, impeccable honesty, and the ability to see violence for the greater good as our world continues to be attacked both literally and virtually in the cyber world.

I have great role models for this, soldiers that I look up to in times of great need. They don’t need to interact with me, because I’ve learned from them in the past and I carry their lessons in my heart.

But Volfe will always be my person, keeping me on the right track. He was the first person to tell me that I was amazing, Dana was amazing, but we were not amazing together, and that it was better for us to be amazing apart. He saw things in our relationship that bothered him to no end, and as we chatted in a parking lot, he laid out for me what he saw. It was truly the beginning of the end, or two new beginnings, as I prefer to think of it.

It was at that time I leaned on Argo for emotional support, and she was giving it to me in spades. I got so desperate for Dana to calm down that I sent Argo an e-mail that said, “could you send me a 12 page report with graphs and pictures on how much you like dick? It would help. Thanks.” I laughed until I farted when she e-mailed me back and I realized she’d changed the subject line to “bullet points.”

It’s that kind of shit that makes me want her in my life, no matter how much it costs me, because those e-mails were life rafts, and I took them. I grabbed on to Argo’s belief in me that I could accomplish anything I set out to do, and left Dana’s shitty words that I’d never amount to anything. I’ve said this before, but taking that life raft was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, because of course my worthlessness loop said that Dana was right. She was just throwing emotional grenades designed to hurt, and that one put me on the ground.

But Argo’s belief in me made me realize that if I wanted to start a church and touch many lives, I WOULD. She sent me an e-mail that I stared at for an hour without being able to say anything…. “I don’t believe in God…. but I do believe in you.”

I will sit shivah for this relationship, perhaps for far longer than I need to because it takes me a while to get this shit out of my system. When Meag and I broke up, I didn’t open up to anyone for three years. It was Kathleen that finally got through to me, because I saw clearly that we had what my friend Donna Schuurman would call “compatible wounds.” As it turns out, those compatible wounds were our undoing, but in the beginning, they were comforting and familiar. Why wouldn’t I want to be with someone who’d survived something every bit as traumatic as me? But the relationship turned bipolar, dealing with the same issues over and over as we both rose and dipped into good feelings and awful ones.

I could say the same for Argo. The relationship became bipolar, hot and cold. When the sun shined, it was magnificent, and the chill was frightening. All I wanted was for the sun to shine again, and I thought it would this year. That things were getting better to the point where the bipolar would stop.

It didn’t, and I am left with picking up the pieces, meat tenderizer on my skin as I pull the poison out. It is not lost on me that some of the poison is mine, but it is also not lost on me that some of it is not.

I give thanks for the way that Argo carried me, loved me like a mountain lion biting a cub on the neck to carry it to safety.

I also give thanks that when that part of us ended, I could own my own stuff and walk away, whole and complete within myself.

Amen.

I can’t hide it anymore. I tried. I wanted the relationship to be publicly dead so we could work on our issues in private. We started doing some really good work, listening to each other and trying to hear what the other needed. I sent peace offerings because I truly believed that saying I was sorry wasn’t enough if it didn’t come with changed behavior as well. I wanted to be the friend I couldn’t when I was so ill, stuck in the middle of a morass I thought I’d never be able to release. I put things on her plate that never deserved to be there, because I didn’t have Diane anymore, and that dark place in me that believes others’ stories are more important than mine reared its ugly head. The sunflower within me leaned toward her light, because it was immense and powerful when it shone upon me. I felt special in a way that I’d never felt before, because I was truly sharing my pain, rather than someone just listening. We had our own emotional shorthand, our own fights that ended in “make up text,” kisses on my boo-boos of enormous proportion. Because I was so far away, it made perfect sense at the time that sharing ourselves over text was a way to be close to each other without the impossible task of meshing schedules…. although I was excited by the possibility of having her visit Houston so I could show her my house, take her to my Mexican restaurants, take her to all the places I loved because I thought that just like having Dana and Chef there making Houston feel different, she would be no exception. Back then, it wasn’t a thing for us to visit each other, because the rabbit hole had not become something to isolate us from each other rather than bringing us together. Dana and I had a huge guest bedroom, and nothing would have pleased me more than for it to become “Argo’s Room,” if only for a few days of getting to know each others real personalities instead of the ones we presented to each other in black & white. For instance, we are both fucking hilarious, and the days of flipping each other shit are the ones I remember so very fondly.

But things happened that because of my abused nature, I had a hard time dealing with on my own. I should have gone to therapy immediately, rather than trying to heal myself on my own. For instance, we were intoxicated by our conversations from the first time we had a real conversation. My favorite memory of that day is when she said she ran to Eminem, rapping as she went along. I said, “I’m sorry… you rap to Eminem! Explain to me exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you….. USE BIG WORDS.” Of course, I was joking at that time, but Argo took it seriously and said, “you won’t fall in love with me, as adorable as I might be. You’ll just fall in love with absolute and complete honesty.” It was just true… and at the same time, she is, for a fact, adorable. 🙂

My abused nature says that I need to know everything about you in the next twenty minutes… you’re my new best friend, call me every day. It was intense and beautiful, this way that we came together in moments of need for both of us. I cannot tell her story, but I can tell mine. When I began throwing up all my emotions about my abuse, for the first time in my life, getting angry and despondent that I hadn’t been smart enough to figure it out long ago, she took those wounds and cleaned them with disinfectant, putting on band-aids and xs and os for support.

Wires were crossed in ways that I never meant for them to happen. Dana was just as completely threatened as I was, because I was not immune to the fact that Argo was getting energy that wasn’t supposed to go to her. Dana and I had a coming to Jesus meeting over it, because I could handle not talking so much with Argo, not sending so much energy her way, but my boundary was “you cannot take her away from me. I need her.” Separating from her completely would have been damaging for both of us, and it has been every time it has happened, because it’s happened now more times than I can count. It is the continual dance of intimacy, having a close moment and realizing that shit got real and pulling away from each other afterward.

I kick myself every time it happens, because I have never had a friend who was willing to be wrapped up in me, that it actually would be damaging to her to pull away. I’ve underestimated friendship my whole life, partly because I believed that if there was no sex involved, there couldn’t possibly be that much emotion attached to a relationship… and partly because I didn’t think I was worthy of such a relationship to begin with.

After I became so mentally ill and needed my psychology and psychiatry adjusted back to normal, Argo’s attitude toward me never changed. She still saw me as someone whose bad side would always be lurking underneath… that nothing I could do would correct the way she felt… although she did say that the peace offerings I sent her were very cool and thoughtful, which made me feel like a million dollars… a win at the end of a long football game where we’re just grinding it out. Thus, my impression that we were doing good work to rebuild from the scorched earth up.

But I made a mistake, and instead of seeing it as a mistake that I dearly wanted to rectify, she used it as justification that I’d always be this dark personality, that I’d never really get away from it, and I just couldn’t live like that anymore. I couldn’t live with someone hanging my past over my head, because any credit I’d earned was destroyed in a hot second, rather than seeing me as the entire narrative I am. I will always be a work in progress, I will never be perfect, and I also will never make her dark opinion of me come true.

It was Lindsay that opened my eyes, that every time Argo says something negative about me, I lose the light in my eyes because her opinion means so much that I can’t take in others’ love of me, the people who really want me around and value my opinion and treat me like the lovable nerd I am. When I get into this dark, dark space, the thing that sustains me is realizing that people really do treat my Facebook and Twitter pages like “the hot list,” and if I look at my stats by country, I have literally been read in EVERY country in the world. Taking that in is just enormous, and something I continue to wrap my brain around because it is too much to take in all at once.

Argo can have all the shitty feelings she wants about me, because it’s not my job to listen to them anymore. It’s my job to find people who want to support me in all that I do, rather than getting under my skin in a way that makes me take those shitty feelings and start the worthlessness loop running hardcore. I don’t hear from her when I am doing great things, but I will always hear from her if she feels the need to read me the riot act. Living like that is so harmful that I can’t take it anymore, because our relationship will never change unless she can give me some credit, and she. Just. Won’t. We both think it’s better not to communicate now, and I am ready for it. I never thought I would be. I never thought I would be strong enough. I never thought I’d be ready to slice out a piece of my own heart and call it good.

But don’t get me wrong. I won’t get over this overnight, or even over months. Slicing out my own heart is so much harder than having someone else do it. I don’t want to be angry, I don’t want to be sad, I don’t want to create problems where they don’t exist. It is just a letting go, and I am accepting of it.

Because I just can’t live this way anymore. I am not the person she thinks I am, and her insistence that she can read me over e-mail is not reality and never will be. I am gestalt in the best sense of the word- more than the sum of my parts. Now it’s my job to decide what I’m going to do with it.

Amen.

I am not feeling well today. I got some blowback from my trip yesterday, and I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to be sad. I was trying to let go of all my feelings of anger at everything that’s gone down over the past few years…. just me and my journal and my camera. I went to all the places I thought would help, and it worked. I came home feeling like a million dollars, until someone told me it seemed stalker-y and truly baffling. I think that’s because I handle problems differently than most people. I want to go back to the scene of the crime and try to put my self-worth back together one picture and one blog entry at a time.

But today my self-worth is in the toilet, and I haven’t taken my lunch break until now. I just wanted to stay busy, muscle-memory floating me until I couldn’t avoid crying anymore. It’s as if perception is more important than reality, and people would rather believe their own realities than trying to understand mine.

The point is that I wanted to be alone.

I wanted to let go of things that truly trouble me, not create problems for anyone else. I am a writer and observer, and that’s what I was doing. Really feeling my feelings, digging deep into them so that they wouldn’t dog me anymore. There are times when I cannot breathe, the past eats me up inside. I needed to relieve the pressure as to keep my even-keel personality. Anxiety medication can only do so much, so I took it and went exploring.

I got to see things I’ve only seen in pictures, and thought they’re worth a thousand words, it was nothing compared to seeing everything for real. Sitting at Dana’s old school was a way to see how she incubated. It was sad and beautiful in one breath, and I chose to take pictures of beautiful things there. But the blowback was not from her, just another friend who deemed it “creepy AF.” Well, I think it’s “creepy AF” to try and dictate to someone how they should grieve, how they should act, how they should process.

I wish I could tell you why it was important, but I don’t exactly know. I didn’t take off with a specific mission in mind, just an idea that it would help me let go…. and as I was driving home, I really felt it.

She is not of me anymore. I do not see her as an extension of me, a missing limb with extraordinarily intense phantom pain.

There’s no need to go back in time anymore. I saw everything I needed to see in order to move forward. A huge wave of peace washed over me as I saw things for what they were.

But I cannot ignore the blowback, and I am blue and just want to crawl under my bed. I am not “creepy AF,” and I know this within myself…. but the person who said it got under my skin and my coping mechanisms in order to see myself for who I am and what I believe have been stepped on to an enormous degree.

I know myself, and what I know is that I need to put on some gangsta rap and get shit handled. But even that will only do so much, because sadness is threatening to undo me. I am caught between a rock and a hard place, and trying not to explode in anger or tears.

Tears would probably be more cathartic, because anger would only lead to those words getting more under my skin than less. I am trying harder these days to let anger roll off my back, because it doesn’t serve me well. When “cortisol and sin” threaten to come out of me, I pray without ceasing. I pray because I can’t help myself. I don’t pray because it changes God, I pray be cause it changes me (paraphrasing C.S. Lewis).

All I want is to walk humbly, and hope grace prevails. But that does not happen can cannot when perception means more than reality. It is a lesson I am learning slowly but surely. There’s nothing I can do to change anyone’s impression of me. I can only reach out to people who want the same things I do. Peace in the world and peace within ourselves, the ability to stumble and be forgiven for it.

I will not let this overtake me, ultimately, but I feel like complete and total shit right now. I can’t wait until it’s time to go home, so Eggsy and I can blast NWA (just saw Straight Outta Compton and so damn impressed) and I can try like hell to forget this day ever happened.