I have never in my lifetime connected to a set of scriptures as deeply as Mark 6:4-6. I sat with them for a long time, at first fuming in anger and then letting my emotions roll off me like a sine wave crashing on the shore. I was angry at all the people who called me crazy. That thought moving to DC was specifically designed to hurt someone. That my dream of creating St. James and All Sinners as a building on the Anacostia was less important to me than meeting Argo. If this was all about Argo, I could have just come to visit. I didn’t have to fucking move. I felt rejected in my hometown, so I left. I didn’t want to go to a city where I didn’t know anyone, because I was afraid to completely start over. In a sense, coming back to DC was coming home, because I never should have left in the first place. Two years ago, even Argo was on board. She said, “come here- NoVA is tolerant of all… even Republicans.” That was when I laughed and told her it was definitely a possibility because Dana’s parents are here.

Moving to DC has been in the works a long time, because I cannot even tell you how much Houston gives me the creeps. I love my family, and would willingly step in front of a bus for any one of them. It’s the city itself where I falter. I hate the rednecks that would willingly bash me into a tree. I hate that not wearing makeup had one of my bosses say to me that I always looked like I didn’t feel good because I wasn’t “dressing up,” and I hate that feeling I get when I want to show my girlfriend/wife affection. I look around with so much internalized homophobia that I cannot let go at all. It is with me, an ever-present albatross around my neck that tightens when I don’t know who’s watching and if I am in a safe neighborhood, etc. Houston has changed, attitudes have changed, and I have not. I will never forget the abuse I experienced at HSPVA. It stays with me and I cannot let it go. I have said before that I didn’t want to marry Dana and it didn’t have anything to do with fidelity and companionship. It had everything to do with my own fears and how I hadn’t let go of them, even though it’s been 25 years since I came out.

When I came to DC, I was able to let go of a little bit of my fear. My church had plenty of gay couples, so Kathleen and I fit right in. Getting out of Houston is a relief so great it’s only between God and me. It’s HARD to talk about internalized homophobia. It’s HARD to talk about the fact that society has changed around me and I still feel at times that I have to hide who I am, even though I don’t. In Portland and DC, the relief is palpable. There are still places in southern VA that I fear to tread, but the important part is that I left a city I viewed could hurt me, whether that was the truth or not. My perception is everything to me, and the fight against gay rights in Texas is just a shitshow of epic proportions, and I am glad to watch the fight from really, really far away.

It pains me to think what I could have accomplished if I’d stayed, but I cannot concentrate on that. I have to concentrate on what’s next. In fact, when my dad heard about my divorce from Dana, the first thing he said- the FIRST thing- was “what’s next, Mrs. Landingham?” I can see it. I can see my dream as clearly as I see the empty cup of tea in front of me.

Hold please.

Ok, the empty teacup problem is fixed. Now I can concentrate on the topic at hand.

What’s next?

I have not heard anything from Howard, and I am a little pissed. I do not want to know if I got in, I just want to know that they’ve got my essay and all that. Just an acknowledgement that my $50 was well spent. I am having dinner with Pri Diddy and Elena on Thursday, so I think I’ll just go to Howard then. It’s the same Metro stop. I’ll go to Admissions and Financial Aid because a) I’m poor b) in this line of work, I’ll probably always be poor. Unless Oprah, from whom all blessings flow.

Speaking of which, if anyone knows her and can get some of my stuff to her, I’d appreciate it. My calendar is pretty empty these days. I think I can JUGGLE SOME STUFF AROUND if she calls.

I also want to get back to my fiction, but I am still too emotionally invested in letting go of Dana and Argo to spend time on it, because the emotions that run behind it are our Trinity of sorts. It’s a psychological thriller because Argo said that would sell, and she’s usually right about things, so psychological thriller it is. However, because it is in a sense, about us, it’s too extremely loud and incredibly close for me to delve right in. Maybe a year from now. Maybe two. Maybe five. However long it takes to get these women further down the z-axis so that when I write about their characters, it doesn’t hurt me as much as it does right now. We were so good together right up until we weren’t. The difference between Argo and me is that I choose to focus on the good things I love about her, and she focuses on the things she hates about me. Maybe that will go away with time, but I doubt it. Neither one of us trust easily, neither one of us want to let down our walls to let the other one in, neither one of us wants to live in toxicity.

I would like to think that some of the toxicity is gone simply because Dana is out of the picture and there is no triangulation. I didn’t divorce Dana because of it, just that no triangulation is an added bonus. I hated the way they both pulled away from me when I got really sick, because I needed them more and not less. Luckily, I had other friends to pick me up when I fell, but I was butt-hurt it wasn’t them… this is because I know within myself that if it had been Dana or Argo that was really sick, I would have tried to pick them up in an instant. They both became part of my heartbeat, and I never would have let them hurt- either of them- when I was in my right mind. I wasn’t, and I threw emotional grenades at both of them because I couldn’t see clearly enough to stop. I was lost in my own illness, unable to care for anyone else but me because I was in deep survival mode, pushing them away even though I had no business doing so. It just flipped my shit when all three of us were sharing deep information and then everything turned on a dime and all of the sudden, I was the psycho instead of the one with amazing insights and an ability to read them. Argo’s comment about a restraining order was fucking ridiculous, but I shouldn’t have seen it, anyway. I was playing with Dana’s phone because she let me, and I couldn’t help myself. I peeked at their conversation and found out way more than I ever wanted to know. I own that it’s my fault. I had no right to know what Dana knew, no right to snoop even though she gave me her phone willingly. At that point, we were broken up. I should have known better, and I acted horribly anyway… not for malice, just for curiosity.

To say that I was surprised was an understatement. If Argo had told me directly that she felt threatened, I could have assured her things were fine. I just needed time to cool off, redirect, and refocus my energy. It wouldn’t be a thing that haunts me every day. To think that I hurt someone to the point that they felt threatened is mind-numbingly bizarre to my world, that she would think something like that about me without talking to me, but I understand, and have let go of most of those feelings of anger and abandonment. People like me create strong bonds, and I trashed ours without even realizing what I was doing. However, even though I was really sick, that doesn’t mean that I get off easy. I still have to own my behavior. I didn’t think she would think my words mattered that much- that she would write me off instead of going to that place, the one that says I am not worthy of her trust.

I think I am, but she has no right to trust me right now. I have said it before and I will say it again that if the stars were to align, I’d start at the axiom that she shouldn’t trust me as far as she can throw me and I could earn it back, day by day, week by week, until trust was reestablished.

Right now, I do not trust myself, and that is the worst part of this whole thing. I broke trust within myself that says I am worthy of love, worthy of trust, worthy of anything but solitude. Daphne du Maurier says writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard. This quote resonates with me because the mirror I hold up to the world is one that not everyone likes. They do not want to interact with me because they know that to be in my life is to be in my writing somewhere, because they are my life. If they don’t want to be here, they disconnect from my life… and that is okay with me, because I do not want friends that are constantly worrying about what I am going to say. That do not trust me to give my own impressions without revealing theirs. They have their own truth, which may or may not line up with mine, and that is okay, too. We all have an enormous emotional space in the world, yet few people use it.

That’s all this blog really is. Using my emotional space in the world to ask myself how past history will not be repeated. How I can dig myself out of the holes I’ve dug. How I can safely say to myself “what’s next?” because the past is no longer affecting my future.

I do not have an obsession over either Argo or Dana. I am processing the past, and that is quite different. Not understanding that is threatening, but the reality is that processing is healing, not obsession. Processing is taking a large amount of grief and making it smaller, day by day. You cannot imagine the loss I feel regarding Argo, because what we had was so white and pure that it destroys me that I destroyed that relationship… more than once, in fact, because as Dana’s jealousy became more and more important to me, I pushed Argo away with fire, and yet, I needed her so much at times I couldn’t breathe. I just couldn’t tell her because it made Dana’s eyebrows go over her forehead. Pushing Argo away was literally me reaching into my heart and slashing it with a machete, because behind the fire was so much love I didn’t know what to do with it. I imprinted on her practically the first day I met her, because my world exploded with her brain and her heart reaching out to mine. I have so much rage at myself over the way I treated her, because it was totally avoidable.

I am going to a therapist to try and deal with myself. To try and learn to love myself despite the deep wounds I caused in the people around me. To try and pick myself back up so that I can be the wounded healer I was meant to be, instead of the human grenade launcher.

“What’s next, Mrs. Landingham?”

Reaching out to God, hoping it will heal my heart so that I can heal others. I may not be able to heal the rift with Dana and Argo, but I can pay forward the gifts they gave me while our relationships were alive. It helps to focus on what we did right rather than what we did wrong. I feel like they are always with me when I view it that way. I carry them in my heart and try to feel their pain, try to own what I’ve done so that I can let go in peace.

I cannot help but hope that they’ll come back in their own time, but that is not my decision. I have no control over whether that happens or not. What I can control is how much negativity I’m sending them in my own thoughts, and I have reduced it to none most days.

What’s next is going out with joy, and trying to see everything as a blessing, including bad behavior, because otherwise, how would I learn? How would I grow? I am not fully formed yet, but there are moments. Moments where I feel six feet tall and bulletproof. Moments where my confidence is unfettered. Moments where I am not stuck in the smallest version of me.

What’s next is that the world is going to see me getting bigger. Allowing for more, praying for more, going for more than I thought I could because my words matter to more people than just me. I will be fighting the war up from behaving badly to redemption, even if that redemption is only between me and God. I have to own my mistakes and pray for absolution, because looking inward is the only solution at this point. I acknowledge my humanness, I acknowledge all of the things I’ve broken in the last two years, and I don’t want to feel worthless anymore.

It’s a clarion call. The war up has begun. The horses are ready. The muskets are loaded. It’s go time.

Amen

---

Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph,[a] Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

Then he went about among the villages teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

Mark 6:1-13

This scripture is coming off a monster set of events, culminating in Jesus coming home… and then promptly leaving because the people who know him best don’t seem to be on his side. For the last few weeks, Jesus has been preaching to crowds gathered to hear him, clamoring to touch him like 15-year-old girls at a Beatles concert. Despite his admonition to tell no one, they have heard of his miracles:

• The disciples and Jesus were on a boat (you know what word I’m thinking, don’t you? :P) out on the Sea of Galilee when a storm cropped up. The disciples were kind of pissed that Jesus was just laying there, asleep. So they wake him up and he calms the sea. Calms. The. Sea.
• A woman walking in the crowd around Jesus touches the hem of his garment and Jesus feels the power go out of him that heals her and says, “who touched me?”
• Jesus raises a 12-year-old girl from the dead, and it’s not just any 12-year-old girl. It’s the daughter of a ruler of the synagogue.

After these events, Jesus leaves Galilee and heads for home. It’s been a successful mission, and venturing into fiction, I think Jesus might have been a little homesick….. right up until he got there.

It’s been said many times that “you can’t go home again,” and perhaps that phrase has its origins right here. They just gutter snipe him into the ground. Instead of being amazed by his ability, they scoff at the gifts he’s been given in a way that clearly says, “WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS?” It’s amazing how quickly the scriptures have him pack up and get the hell out of Dodge (“on second thought, let us not go to Nazareth, for it is a silly place”). It is back to the business at hand, because clearly he cannot “work from home.” When Jesus felt the rejection of his own people, it caused him to break down, because he couldn’t heal many because most of them had hurt him, deeply. The power he felt went out of him in the face of his pain… and yet, this is not where the story ends.

Rejection begat action as Jesus took back his own power, consecrating the disciples and giving them authority to heal in his name… as well as laying down the gauntlet for what his kind of ministry entails. You don’t get extra clothes. You don’t get a beggar’s bag. You don’t get your one “luxury item.” This is not Survivor. They are told to basically live hand to mouth if they’re going to be given holy authority; they don’t even begin to understand why until they start healing people for real and find out most of those people have even less than they do. They are tasked to see more, do more, BE more than they ever thought possible because they were not trying to hand down riches from above, but trying to help people lift themselves up. In the current political climate, it is notable that they are also not asked to evangelize by pushing their beliefs onto other people, simply to fold people into the family if they are willing to listen.

This is another scripture that gets used as a clobber passage in terms of evangelism, because they think Jesus means “make a big damn deal out of shaking the dirt off your sandals.” It’s the passive aggressive way of saying “screw you guys, I’m goin’ home.” That’s not my take on it at all. I think Jesus just wants to make the statement publicly with his ministry that if the people do not accept him, it’s really not his problem (in my head I’m thinkin’ “because he’s really not paid enough to care”). He is responsible for leading his people, not people who don’t want to be led in the first place.

In the early church, there were many, many people rejected by their families because they thought Jesus was a nutbag. They had to go and find their own niches within their church family, creating community among themselves to adhere to what they believed… and while they were being rejected, Jesus was slowing changing the power dynamic all the way around him…. it was no longer power over, but power with.

In an excerpt from his book Zealot, Reza Aslan talks about this phenomenon:

Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’ head as he writhed in pain – “King of the Jews” – was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus’ crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e. treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time was killed. Nor did Jesus die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called lestai, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but that actually means “bandits” and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel.

Sedition. Treason. Insurrection. Rebellion.

The Romans did not understand nor care to that Jesus was not talking about a coup d’etat… or was he? The political picture that the Romans paint of him bears little resemblance to the sweet shepherd we know, and then again, the Bible does not delve much into the political history of first century Palestine, either. As this is Fourth of July weekend, think of the Romans as Britain and the Jews as the struggling new country trying to assert its freedom. Jesus and Thomas Paine (author of Common Sense) had much in common because they were both trying to lay out why a revolution should occur. The Romans had much more physical ways of keeping rule than simply taxing the Jews out of house and home. There were times when the streets ran red with Jewish blood.

The choice Jesus made was to stand up and fight against his oppressors, not by trying to take power from them, but by raising the people up through the power of the Holy Spirit, the great oneness that binds us all together. It was not his intent to take on the Roman government by force, but to make the people recognize that they were worth more than the Romans were handing down, and to give them strength in the midst of their fight upward.

Jesus has determined that he may not win over all hearts and minds, but it is foolish not to try.

It’s amazing how much liberation and resurrection have in common. Liberation theology is an interpretation of Christian faith out of the experience of the poor… an attempt to read the Bible and key Christian doctrines with the eyes of the poor (Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology: Essential Facts about the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America–and Beyond). In its essence, how could Christianity have been anything more than that? Jesus asks his disciples to take on the characteristics of those to which they minister, because he does not want the people to think that power comes from people greater than them, but from people who look just like them.

In modern-day DC, we have the chance to do that ministry every single day. I am not here to guilt you into giving up your extra clothes and your bags, but at the same time, if there’s a part of you that feels like you’re just a little more equal than everyone else, I ask you to examine it. When you emerge into these new beliefs, it may not be without conflict. Those around you may still believe that The War of Northern Aggression was all about states’ rights. Those around you may still believe that homosexuality is a sickness and that people who choose to be homosexual are allowing themselves to “wallow in sin.” Those around you may fight the idea that we should have women clergy, women bishops, women justices, women presidents. Those around you may not feel like gender identity is even a real thing. That these men and women are just choosing to play dress-up instead of the years and years of psychological torture they’ve endured with the brain of one gender and the body of another. However, if you believe in the power of Christ Jesus, opening your heart to include all of these people you’ve formerly condemned is non-negotiable, including those who oppress you.

Although, Jesus does not say that if people oppress you, you have to like it. Walk away. Just don’t carry any animosity toward them. Wipe the dirt off your sandals and go and find other people like you, who will support you in all of your works. Do not continue to live in darkness, but accept your light for what it is. Develop it. Light is not a destination, but a journey, and saying to yourself that you are going to treat people the way Jesus did is the first step down on holy ground.

The second is that in liberating others from your discrimination, you have liberated yourself from your own negative thoughts. What will you do to fill your mind afterward? The possibilities are endless. You may realize that you have more power inside yourself than you ever thought possible. More love. More empathy. More ability to give unto others because you are not thinking about how their lives inconvenience you. You’re thinking about endemic problems in society and how to solve them. You are rising above your discrimination and your hatred in order to form a more perfect union… both in community, and with God.

Your friends and family may think you’re crazy….. but the people who think they’re crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.

Amen.

In “Confessions of a Winning Poker Player,” Jack King said, “Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.” It seems true to me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I can’t stop thinking of how I lost it.

Matt Damon as Michael McDermott in Rounders

One of these days there’s going to be a morning where I don’t want to vomit when I wake up. Where I don’t open my eyes and immediately think of the tough beats of my career, that neither Argo nor Dana want to have anything to do with me because they’ve written me off as a psycho. One of these days, I will stop taking responsibility for every aspect of every wrong in both relationships, and I will realize that I can have some of my self-worth back. Right now, though, I’ve broken the cardinal fucking rule… always leave yourself an out. In the emotional sense, to me that means keeping a part of myself for me. Part of me that says I have a ton of worth in my writing, singing, creativity… the way that doctors know that when everything else fails, they have the operating room.

Because I’ve written so many volumes about the fights the three of us have had and how those fights have shaped me, I lost faith in myself as a writer, because they both stopped talking to me and started using my blog as the be all and end all of who I was as a person. That I was only based on what I wrote, and not who I was. That a blog entry was just a slice of time, and not the entirety of my being. They would reference my writing without follow-up questions, like, “did you mean to say x?” It would have meant a lot to me to be able to defend what I said or not. To be able to say, “no, I was just mad at the time,” or “if the shoe fits, wear it, but I didn’t say it directly to you,” or even better yet, “you’re welcome” when I’d said something sweet. No one in this blog is a 2D character.

It was worse with Argo, the seeing me as what I wrote, because we’d both get mad and bring out the big guns quick, and we are really fucking good at it. I would have liked to see what that passion would have looked like in real life, and I do not mean anything romantic by it at all. In the beginning, it was passion for life and all it had to offer… which to me means that OF COURSE we were at each other’s throats when we were mad. Passion for life usually means passion at both ends of the spectrum…. the “I’m going to win, DAMNIT” that comes with being passionate people and as first children, a monstrous inability to be wrong which always escalated into heights unknown to God and man. The internet provided us a wall to be as mean to each other as we possibly could- on the same side politically and still acting like Internet trolls to each other when we didn’t agree.

And, for me, breaking the other cardinal fucking rule. Crossing a line that never should have been crossed. I own it. I call myself out on it constantly, and I sit in those ruins because if that line hadn’t been crossed, I would still have her right now. Right this moment. It’s fucking Friday. Where else would she be? I mean, come on. I AM ADORABLE (kidding, kidding).

With Dana, it’s a little more difficult for me to imagine where we would be if I hadn’t been so vocal about falling for Argo, because what I see now that I didn’t see then is that we were products of very similar backgrounds and we caused a lot of damage to each other until it boiled over. Argo was just a catalyst to recognize it, I suppose. There were plenty of reasons why we needed to break up long before we did, mostly because we were the perfect couple on the outside, even to us, because we couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about anything real… again, even to each other.

These things became even more obvious as Argo began to overclock my processor. I saw the world differently, and there was no going back. I felt like I couldn’t fit into the box that Dana made for me, because I couldn’t fit into the box I made for me, either. I was writing about different things than I ever had before, even praying for things I’d never prayed for before. I arrived into the fullness of myself, and for a sapiocentric person like myself, the falling in love part was both unavoidable and, in three words, really fucking stupid.

It’s the “really fucking stupid” part where I trip mightily, pretty much every day. I think to myself, “surely this will pass. Surely she will see that I am not the sum total of what I write.” And then I remember how much vitriol was spewed at me and I think not. That vitriol didn’t come out of nowhere, though. I said some things to her that I didn’t think I could’ve or should’ve said to anyone, but again, that layer of anonymity was crucial in terms of seeing the whole chessboard. She didn’t deserve any of the things I said, but she got them anyway because I wasn’t right in front of her face. Had I been, I doubt she would have gotten anything out of me, much less all of the anger and the undercurrent of sexual feelings I own that led to our demise. No wonder she doesn’t want to meet me. I don’t even want to meet that me.

But again, circumstances are everything. My marriage was falling apart and I was trying to make her mad enough to stomp off. I knew I wasn’t capable of being vulnerable and just saying, “I cannot handle this.” I had to exquisitely piss her off, and it worked marvelously well. My only comfort in this whole thing is that I know I come by it honestly, and exactly from whom it was inherited. It doesn’t excuse my behavior in the slightest, but it does shed some context as to how this will never happen again. With Argo, with anyone. My abuse buttons got pushed because I felt threatened when Dana couldn’t accept Argo as my friend, so I blew her out of the water and in doing so, I became someone I didn’t recognize or even like. In my own fucked up way, I thought that if I could piss Argo off enough to stomp off, and had some time alone to get over whatever it was I thought was going on, then I could get Dana back.

With several months’ worth of retrospect, what should have happened is that I should have made the first breakup with Dana stick and leaned on Argo appropriately (if she’d let me). Hindsight is always 20/20. I should have listened to the friend (not Argo) that said, “I love you both, but I do NOT like the way she treats you. It seems like your opinions don’t matter.” But no. I had to handle things in the shittiest way possible because that’s what I knew to do.

I feel like such a winner.

I know I need to move forward and stop concentrating on this incredible bad beat, and it will come with time. Right now, though, I am content to be single and get to know myself for who I really am, and not the psycho I’ve been made out to be, because here’s the deal. I treated them like crap, and I own it. But I also did not come to DC just to stalk Argo and that’s a thing that’s been laid on my head that’s just not there, has never been there, and I resent the hell out of it. The only thing I wanted from Argo in this whole exchange is one meeting where she got to see me in the flesh, and know for sure that I am just a sweet nerd that let her internet troll get the best of her. She doesn’t want it, so that’s that. I am not EVER going to make a reason for us to interact. Not ever…. to the point where if I see something I think she’d enjoy, I don’t go. I do not want awkward to become onomatopoetic.

I rejoice in the friends I do have here, and lament that she is not one of them, but I own why. I more than own why.

For the first time in my whole fucking life, I know that I sat down at the table with the mad Russian, and emptied my own pockets.

My eldest stepsister on my mother’s side is dead.

She’d had a long history of alcohol and drug addiction, but we aren’t sure whether that was her actual cause of death. Because she was found dead, there will be an autopsy to determine it. It looked to the people who found her that she’d had a stroke, which is perfectly natural, so there is no reason to believe that drugs were involved… but I cannot believe that her history was on her side in that regard. The stroke was just the last thing that happened.

I don’t think that she would mind me telling you this, because she was an out and proud AA member (lovingly calling it “high school with ash trays”), one of those people that succeeded for fifteen years right up until she didn’t.

We didn’t know each other well, and in fact, have only met each other once in the flesh… but we were close on Facebook Messenger. There were moments in time where we reached across the divide and got to know each other for our own people, without my mom and her dad, discussing secrets in the night like sisters do. There was a mutual admiration society. She was half white, half latina. I am all white, all lesbian. There was a lot of shared ground in discrimination, and our pride came from the fact that when we met each other, she was the department chair in Mexican American Studies at UTA, and I had just gotten word that I’d gotten an internship in DC writing national Sunday School curriculum for the Human Rights Campaign.

She’d ask me for help with her computer, and we’d chat away, because wisdom always comes when you’re doing something else. She found that she needed God in the same way I did, to get her ego out of the way to live life on life’s own terms. I do not know what happened next; she pulled away from me and I didn’t hear from her for several years after. I was surprised when she came to Houston for an extended period to rest and recover and didn’t want to see me, but I did not take it personally. She didn’t want to see anyone.

But what I wanted more than anything was to give her a hug, tell her everything was going to be okay, and kick her ass into next week… not because I wanted to be mean to her. It’s that when you’re so far down, you have to have someone else kick your ass until you can kick your own. I don’t know from addiction, but I do know from depression. Kicking her ass wouldn’t have been easy for me, because the ass-kicking doesn’t take place from lording above. It takes place from getting down in.

You have to be able to say, “I have been there, and I know the way out.” I would have told her about Dana and Argo. I would have told her about my depression and how it mutilated me into a person I’d never seen before. I would have told her all of the things you cannot tell someone who hasn’t been there herself, and hoped that the ass-kicking came from a resolution not to make all of my mistakes…. and the strange thing is that my own ass would have been kicked in hearing all of hers. Mutual ass-kicking and mutual admiration in two hands bound together.

Death is a different kind of knowing the way out, the kind where it is a relief, because not only are you not a worry to yourself, but no one else, either… or so you think.

Her eldest son just graduated from college, and is now tasked with making arrangements.

Goodnight, sweet sister. Let me sing you to sleep.

There’s a reason they call it that, you know.

Hundreds of people who never thought marriage equality would happen in their children’s lifetimes, much less theirs, gathered in the church, one by one and then five by five and then ten by ten until it was all of us together. Some people, like for instance, me, were weeping. I am a sympathetic cryer anyway, but no sympathy needed. The straight woman next to me said, “I don’t know why you’re crying, but you’re making my husband and me cry, too.” I looked at her a little bit startled, and said, “I never thought this day would come.” I thought a moment, and said, “and also because the church has spent years hurting people like us, and yet, here we are.”

I’m sitting in a Whole Foods in Georgetown stuffing down sweet and sour tofu with vegetable fried rice, because I needed comfort food to decompress and debrief. The music was so glorious, and I won’t lie. The last hymn was “Marching to Zion,” and I turned on my Diane-Syrcle-opera-voice afterburners, the kind where when I do it, Wendy calls me a “descant whore.” And then, after Dana and I moved to Houston, she started calling me a descant whore in Wendy’s place. It just felt so glorious, though, soaring above the people next to me and yet, just blending in. The tenors behind me were obviously descant whores as well, so I leaned into their sound and it was all of us together. After the last note (A with attitude), we patted each other on the back and smiled in the musician’s fraternity sort of way, that knowing look we all have when we know we are not reading from the approved notes on the page. We also sang the descant on First Song of Isaiah, because I cannot remember the last time I didn’t. If you’re wondering why I am telling you all this, just being a diva all over the place, it’s because it wasn’t until that moment I realized with pain in my chest and shortness of breath that Dana and Argo weren’t there. Dana wasn’t there to be half embarrassed and half amazed, and I have long told Argo that all I wanted to do in DC was hit the B-flat at the end of something where she could hear it.

And then, I had a Dana moment so severe I had to sit down. I had to borrow a pen. I went up to a woman and said, “I notice that you have a bag. Might there be a pen in it I could borrow?” Her partner said, “she is the woman with a pen,” and pulls it off the clip on her shirt. I said, completely second nature, “I know that woman. I have that woman at home.” And all of the sudden it came crashing back that no, I don’t. It was just my standard response for the last 12 years coming out of my mouth before I could stop it. The concept of not being a “we” is fine most of the time until these things happen… the moments when I forget that standard responses no longer apply. I got the dean of the cathedral to sign my BCP, and he said, “Andy Doyle confirmed you? I was just at a meeting with him last week!” I said, “Bishop Doyle is one of the most fantastic people on earth, and he is doing God’s work down there.” He looked at me and smiled and said something about the audacity of Texas to refuse the SCOTUS opinion while I looked at the Maryland flag above me and tried not to flood out, because I still had to give back the pen.

I walked over to the woman and gave her back her pen, begrudgingly, because it was a fantastic one… and then went to a chair with a kneeling pad and said a quick prayer for the end of my own marriage, just an Episcopal “forgive me for the things I have done, and the things I have left undone.”

Then, I headed toward the preacher, a Baptist (I KNOW). I told her that I was a preacher and writer myself, and her sermon was well put-together and really spoke of a sense of occasion.

And it did.

She preached about the fight. The struggle. The people that have died to get us this right, because they have. You might think that’s stretching a bit, but it is definitely not. Gay rights started in earnest after the fight between the cops and the drag queens at Stonewall Inn in New York City, and have slowly come to the rest of the nation since 1969. Harvey Milk was gunned down in cold blood, and there have been no shortage of people that have killed themselves due to the hopelessness that gay bashing has produced… so, not only have people been beaten to death and shot, people have killed themselves because they thought that they were next- the situation was hopeless. 

She spoke of the current fight, sitting on boards and councils and being on TV while people yelled at her, cursed her out, called her ministry unfit. Treated her like a sad, lost dog that only needed to be pointed in the direction of the “correct” God. She did not say if she was a lesbian herself, but if she is straight, that almost makes her more worthy of respect because she chose to enter that fight willingly, and DID NOT BACK DOWN when it got hard.

It was hard on all of us together, but we made it. In joining together at the NATIONAL cathedral, I would like to think that we represented a nation whose mourning had come to an end, the morning after a long night’s journey without stars.

That’s why I had to let the last note ring in the cathedral. Some of that win was for me.

Amen.

My family on my dad’s side is Irish, and here is our motto:

Patriae Infelici Fidelis

Faithful to an Unhappy Country

I get tired just thinking about it. Reminds me of this completely memorable line in The Departed:

Colin: [to Madolyn] If we’re not gonna make it, it’s gotta be you that gets out, cause I’m not capable. I’m fucking Irish, I’ll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life.

I’m wondering if this is why it’s so hard for me to let go of people, no matter how they treat me. I cannot stop saying I’m sorry, I cannot stop making amends, and I cannot deal with the fact that I just need to stop caring. I’m not capable. It’s hard for me to come to that point where I realize that I am taking on way more responsibility than is rightfully mine just to smooth things over and make good. I stop caring about whether things are right or fair or good and just take the blame because it’s better to be wrong and together than right and alone. I stop standing up for myself and just acquiesce.

For instance, Argo and Dana both believe that I constantly treated them like shit. There were plenty of times when I was in the wrong and I wholeheartedly accept that, but constantly? You can tell from this web site that’s not true. I have given them love, and in their anger, they wipe it away as if it is nothing. I am the villain, the crazy person, the easy way to dispose of their situations with me because it means never having to acknowledge their parts in our relationship. Never acknowledging that it always takes two to tango in a fight. Never seeing that I have valid emotions toward them, both positive and negative…. but they choose what they see, and what they see is all of the times I was wrong and never the times I was right.

And yes, I have used always and never, which therapists tell everyone that’s a bad idea. But in this case, it is apt. They do not see me as a human with a full range of emotions, just a psycho.

Tidy.

I finally had to come to a place in my healing that said, “if that’s what they want to believe, then let them believe it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, because it’s their perception, not reality.” Or, as a great philosopher once said, “well, that’s just like, your opinion, man.” However, it does not stop me from being faithful in trying to forgive them for their opinion of me because it just hurts me. All the way around.

I never in a million years thought that Dana would say to me, “your eyes don’t look like home anymore.” This was after a fight in which I told her that her words created a tape in me that pushed all my abuse buttons at once. I had to breathe through it like labor, and I was thinking, deeply, about the issue at hand. When I told her as much, she said, “I just keep making it worse!” Meaning that she thought I was keeping score and she was losing. There was never any scoreboard. I never kept track of anything in terms of judgment, but if a new behavior smacked of an old one, I would tell her so. People who don’t want to open up to you and examine their behaviors tend to say you’re “throwing things back in their faces.” People who are comfortable with themselves are open to analyzing behavior and talking about it. Because in a discussion, how do you come to resolution if you are not open to creating new patterns, new ways of being in the world rather than repeating them? If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

The other thing is that when people say to you “you’re just throwing things back in my face,” they tend to stomp off and end the discussion altogether, so that no progress is made at all. Then, the relationship is just the same fight, over and over and over and over and over ad nauseam, infinitum. I should know that I cannot change people, and I shouldn’t try. But what do you do when their pattern hurts you and you can’t change it? What happens when the person cannot listen to your complaints and take them in and change themselves without your influence?

The relationship ends.

My forgiveness is just about instantaneous, but my memory is long. Not only that, I thrive on conversations about analyzing behavior, because while that is not my profession, it is my personality type. With Dana, those conversations were especially difficult because she insisted that her memory was better than mine, that I wasn’t remembering things right, that I didn’t have a point because my memory just didn’t work.

My father will tell you that is inaccurate. So will Diane… one of my favorite lines that she ever said to me is “why do you think I don’t tell you anything? You remember it.”

Even Argo plays that game. That I cannot “keep my story straight.” It’s not that. It’s like the old story about all the blind men touching different parts of an elephant. They all have different perspectives that don’t line up. I remember different details at different times, and the timestamp matters. Everything I have remembered is true to the best of my ability, but they aren’t all on the same place on the z-axis. Some are closer, some are further away, and they switch places at random. The best way to get a story out of me is to ask me to tell it three or four or six or eight times and then look at them synoptically.

Except for the fistfight between Dana and me. The trauma from that evening caused spots to disappear, and I don’t know that I will ever get them back. They’re just dead. And this applies to both things I said and did as well as the things she said and did. I am not trying to make anyone look better or worse in that scenario, I just can’t bring up what I can’t remember. The most traumatic moments compete with each other, they do not line up chronologically… and that is my weakness, because it makes Dana’s memory “better.” Therefore, easier for her to throw my viewpoint out altogether because obviously, I am a liar.

It hurts that these perceptions are from the same people that initially thought I was brilliant, clever, funny… and none of those attributes seem to matter anymore. Their opinion is that none of the emotional RPGs they threw at me were as bad as the ones I threw at them. They were never actors, only responders. Nothing I ever said to them was in response to their nastiness, they just came out of thin air. I call bullshit, and should. Things get said in anger that don’t get said in peace, on both sides of the equation, but apparently only my words matter. I am so tired of it that I could scream, but screaming doesn’t do any good because it goes up against a brick wall and bounces back toward me… because they didn’t hurt me at all. I’m just a bad person.

They accuse me of analyzing their behavior for creating excuses. I do not excuse any of my behavior. Not in the slightest. But I am not only a product of my decisions, but my reactions as well. Trying to understand the complete picture does not mean that I am making excuses. It means that I am trying to understand all of the working parts in a situation and not just mine.

Circumstances are everything.

Trying to understand circumstances is bringing the whole picture to life, because I understand the pawns that I moved, but I also want to understand the ones they did. I want to see the whole board for what it is, and not just quietly stand next to the king.

I do not see what is wrong with that, but to them, obviously it is. I just need to find people in my life that also like to understand the whole chessboard… that do not think actions and reactions are singular.

Everything matters.

But right now, in my smallest place, I am living up to my name. Extraordinarily faithful to an unhappy country in which there are only two citizens.

I changed the words of the psalm because I am crying to you, my Fanagans, the ones I turn to in both joy and pain. Somehow, I knew it was going to happen, but I did not expect it to affect me this deeply.

I got a text message from an old friend congratulating Dana and me because now we could get married in Texas. I mean, obviously an old friend because Dana and I broke up in February… or at least, I think it was February. This entire year has just been a blur of activity.

I feel the loss acutely. The loss of family, the loss of friend, the lost of comfort and safety and home and all of those things that marriage represents. The wisdom is that it was a loss I needed, a catalyst toward greater things because when I said I wanted them, Dana did not want them with me. She doesn’t like that I’m a blogger, doesn’t like how my writing affects her, and I accept it. She thinks that I have the capability to lead millions, but thinks that those people are more important than she is. I validate that those are her feelings, but they were never my own. There will never be another person like her in my life… but now, she is just a memory. When she said that she didn’t want to be a part of this life, I let her go. I released her into the ether and sometimes I see her in my dreams and we go for coffee, just like we did on the ground. But nothing more. Not ever.

What I realized is that our patterns together were never going to get me where I needed to go. That I was never going to achieve much by just hanging out, going with the flow, doing nothing. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed my nothing quite a bit. Many deep conversations will live in my memory because we gave ourselves the space for them to happen. We sat in the backyard, we sat on the couch, we sat at the kitchen table, just talking. Wisdom always happens when you’re doing something else.

The thing is, though, those conversations were not being followed by actions, because we just enjoyed our nothing so much. When I noticed that our nothing box was leading to inaction, she took it as a personal affront, thought I was saying that because of her, I wasn’t succeeding. It was never my truth, but it was hers. My truth is that I thought of doing great things, but I also enjoyed the sweet, still moments, and I lingered in them a little too long for someone that’s about to be 38. I felt the pull of mortality, that I would not be able to do what I perceived I’d been sent here to do on this planet, that I felt a calling greater than myself… while sitting on the couch and talking about it but not putting anything into action. The fault was in how much time I was sitting around doing nothing, not her.

It was also easy to let go knowing how much she thinks of me as the manipulator. The actor, and never the responder. It always takes two to tango, and I am shamed beyond belief because some of the emotional arrows she threw stuck to my heart in a way that it’s taking major emotional surgery to get them out. Anything that happened in that relationship, save leaning on Argo for emotional support instead of Dana, is ours to own and not just me.

The biggest thing is that I explore myself to a frightening degree, and Dana just wasn’t down for it. Didn’t want to explore herself and get answers as to who she was and why she acts the way she acts and who she is in the larger picture of the network, the one we all strive to achieve. My asking her to do it was not well-received.

It was taken as launching emotional grenades and waiting for them to go off, when I thought of them as peeling back the layers of an onion, wanting her to open up to me when she would not.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

– H. L. Mencken

I didn’t want to marry anyone who wouldn’t dig deep, didn’t want me to know them on that level. In the end, it was that way with Argo, too. They thought I was just pushing their buttons, when in reality, I thought they’d never answered those questions because no one had ever asked. I was trapped in this cycle of my closest friend and my wife battling me over stupid shit because they didn’t want to open up.

In a way, I was more surprised that Argo thought I was trying to push her buttons because the entire reason we became friends was to be able to ask those questions of each other, open up in a way that we never had before. When it became clear that I was going too deep for them, they both pushed me away, so I retreated to my own silence, asking those questions of myself.

I thought that by asking questions of them, they would ask questions of me. That we would all be able to wrestle with our demons in order to release them. They grew tired of what they viewed as bringing up old shit, when I found that it was the only thing that gave me the strength to keep going. That knowing myself was a battle for which I was initially unprepared, but has brought me more gifts than anyone could possibly imagine.

I can’t breathe when I think of all the times I thought I was starting a dialogue and they thought I was starting a war. That I became this person that wanted to meddle instead of this person that was just curious. You never think you’re being nosy when it’s a close friend and your wife. In my mind, it was information that I’d hope we’d want to know about each other.

We’d all fought our separate wars, and I wanted to hear their stories. But you can’t get anyone to tell you a story if they don’t wanna.

I lifted myself out of the situation so begrudgingly. I thought they both had so much more to share, so much more meat to chew that we left unresolved.

In a way, it tells me that it’s time to find people that will share their stories. That aren’t threatened by introspection. That do not take my knowing of them as a threat. It turns my attention away from them, because while they were the people I needed then, they are not the people I need, now.

How I wish they could be, though.

My Con Law professor had me from the first class by saying that the Supreme Court Justices were nothing but “nine guys in robes.” He wasn’t discounting the women at all, just making the point that you don’t have to be a lawyer… hell, you don’t even have to have a GED to be on the Supreme Court. It’s an at-will position. Sometimes they make right decisions. Sometimes they don’t. They are no more and no less than the rest of us, powers derived only from the ones we give them ourselves. On some days, it seems like it.

On some days, they seem hundreds of feet tall…. like today.

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.

It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage,” Justice Kennedy said of the couples challenging state bans on same-sex marriage. “Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

-Anthony Kennedy, Author of Majority Opinion

Today, we all have a chance to breathe, take in these words, and find them self-evident. Words that are beautiful enough to be carved on the facades of state and federal buildings the country over as we prepare a new way of being in the world, gay and straight people alike.

For instance, we can all stop calling it “gay marriage” now… because there is no difference. One marriage license does not have any demarcation from the other… or at least, it won’t a few weeks from now. I am sure that there are thousands of clerks across the nation taking heterosexual marriage licenses out of their file cabinets and making the necessary changes in black ink. Some of them have tears in their eyes as they do it, not knowing that this day would ever come.

I certainly didn’t.

I didn’t even want to plan a wedding with my then-wife of 7 years because I was too internally homophobic to stand up in front of everyone. I talked a good game, like just how many brass quintets we would need, but inside, my heart was turning upside down. She talked to the priest before I was ready to have that conversation, and I did not get to hear it. My stomach churned as she was recounting it. I loved her (in some ways, still do), but as I have said before, my internal fear was “what if we planned a wedding and nobody came? What if it just looks silly?” My ex-wife’s parents said they would be there, begrudgingly, after SEVEN YEARS OF TRYING, but their attitude was way closer to my own because it was the same attitude that let me beat myself down for years and years. That it somehow just wasn’t right… interesting because I have been to lots of gay weddings and never felt that way about my friends. Just about me.

In my formative coming out years, gay marriages were the equivalent of hopping over a broom so quick no one would see it. Vows were taken in the privacy of your own home. Rings were worn on any finger but THAT ONE. Pronouns were altered. Gay marriage wasn’t out loud, it was on the down-low.

Now, marriage has a sense of legitimacy for me, because while Kathleen and I have a civil union in Vermont that still hasn’t been annulled (which I can now get based on abandonment because she is married and has a kid by someone else now) and Dana and I have a domestic partnership in Oregon (I asked her to file to no avail), it didn’t feel THE SAME AS EVERYONE ELSE.

And that is what the Supreme Court did for me today. It made nothing I asked any different from anyone else. There don’t have to be special words, special documents, special anythings for me to get married. It is as if the weight of a thousand Chevrolets has been lifted from my chest.

It’s too late to marry Dana. It will always be too late for that. But what it does allow is that when my Sassenach comes along, I’ll know that it’s ok to ask her if she’ll marry me. I know that if I am someone else’s, it’s ok for her to ask me to marry her. I won’t have to feel like we have to go into our bedroom and close the door so no one finds out what we’re saying to each other…….

Thanks to nine guys in robes.

I can’t remember the date, but I remember the conversation. Aaron and I were talking and I said, “are you making room for grief?” He said, “I don’t have to. Grief makes its own room.” That statement knocked me on my ass with Truth. I divide truth and Truth. Truth with a small t is subjective. Truth with a capital T is objective. I loved Aaron’s words because they were in no way subjective at all. “Grief makes its own room” affects everyone at one time or another.

I am just so sad at all the things I’ve broken, and the reality is smacking me in the face that there is no going back. That I will never get a clean slate with any of the people I’ve hurt, because they don’t want to get hurt again. I understand that so much that my body vibrates with pain… not because I am hurting for me, but because I am hurting for them. I wish I could be the one to heal what I broke, rather than them moving on and not seeing what I see… that I was so sick I wanted to die, and I lashed out rather than opening up to push everyone away so I wouldn’t hurt so much if I got enough courage to actually do it. I sat in my pain day after day, and I recognized the signs in myself that it was getting serious and I needed help.

With mental illness, getting help labels you for life. I am now a documented Bipolar II patient, with medical records that say I’ve been hospitalized for it. There would be no reason to worry that employers would find out if I lived anywhere else, but most government jobs here require at least a bit of security clearance. It limits my options, because no one is going to issue me Top Secret. I’m not talking about intelligence agencies, either. I’m not qualified to apply, anyway. I’m talking about civilian jobs that require Top Secret because they intersect with the military in terms of electronic records, databases, etc.

It doesn’t matter that I have done everything I possibly can to scale down, to make my life manageable so that I can pay attention to my disease and fight against it. Bipolar is every bit the battle that people make cancer out to be, and in some ways, it’s worse… because even though you have a mental illness, you cannot un-own behavior and some people never get over your actions enough to acknowledge that sick people get well and relationships have the ability to rebuild from the ground up. To them, you are a crazy person and it’s ok to write you off completely no matter how much damage they cause to you because you have to deal with the fact that this illness bites you in the ass and the side effect is a lot of loneliness. People tend to kill themselves over mental illness because as people leave, their worthlessness dwindles into nothing because it is obvious to them that the people they love cannot love them back.

I think that’s why I liked being a cook. Cooks aren’t generally mentally ill, but they do have a reputation for substance abuse, which makes their behavior flip out as much as being Bipolar and they have to own their shit as well. It’s not the same thing, but it is comforting nonetheless. We have a lot in common, but enough difference to make it interesting.

If you’re wondering, when I’m on Tinder and they ask me what I write (my profile says that I’m a writer so they know that before they swipe), I send them my URL. That’s because I don’t want to become friends or date anyone who thinks I’m too much to handle. Sending them my URL is a “separating the men from the boys” type test because I am not interested in anyone that cannot meet me where I am, accept that I am Bipolar II, and want to get to know me in spite of it.

I am, as we used to say every Sunday at Bridgeport, “acknowledging my humanness.”

There’s been a lot of fallout (my own Fallout 4) over the Argo situation because some people around me thought that moving to DC was genuinely bizarre stalker behavior. That I was running towards Argo expecting that we would be buds when I wasn’t. I knew that she was furious with me and I accepted it wholeheartedly. As poet Wendy Thompson once said, “you don’t have to love it, you just have to live it.” I moved to Maryland to show Argo that I meant business when I said I wanted to move back to DC, but I didn’t want to be anywhere near her. I didn’t want to give her the impression of jack shit, that the city was big enough for both of us. Plus, even though my cousin Nathan lives in Old Town, I didn’t want to go back to my old neighborhood and re-live the memories I had with Kathleen. I have relived them enough.

As an aside, I will tell you one of the funny ones. Kathleen took me to a tapas bar for my birthday in 2001, and every time we told people that’s what we’d done, they startled because they thought we’d said we went to a topless bar.

Which as an aside, leads me to tell you that my birthday is September 10th. It was September 10th, 2001.

Let that sink in before you read further.

The mussels were not fresh at the tapas bar, and I called in sick to work the next morning because I wasn’t finished throwing up yet.

It was horrifying, because I heard it happen. HEARD IT. My father was good friends with Barbara Olson’s mother, and I cringe every time I think about the cold hard fact that I heard Barbara die.

When the plane slammed into the Pentagon, my pictures rattled and I was THREE MILES away.

Let THAT sink in for a little minute.

To me, the bizarre behavior was moving to Portland in the first place. Moving back to DC was reclaiming my Paris, the city that feeds my soul and has since I was eight. I’d asked Dana long before we broke up if she’d consider moving back, and we put it on the 3-5 year plan.

Maybe my detractors didn’t know that, but it’s ok. I could write a fucking book on everything they don’t know. Let them think I’m batshit crazy, because I certainly can be, but not about this. I have said before and I will say it again that I have always told Argo that the world would explode with our agreement, and nothing less. I behaved badly, but that doesn’t mean that I am a bad person, that I am not capable of owning my behavior and moving on from it.

When Kathleen and I divorced, I folded into myself and I just wanted Diane… not as a girlfriend, but the mothermentorsisterfriend that she’d become over our 25-year relationship. I wanted her hugs and her laughter and her care and concern until later on, when it all fell apart. When I started talking, I couldn’t stop… incensed that she offered to go to therapy with me and I told her straight out that my nephew was in medical crisis and please do not let me down because I cannot handle the grief and the waiting to see if my nephew was going to live (he did, and he is now two).

Editor’s Note: Speaking of which, I owe him a letter.

However, that does not erase the fact that the letter saying she would not meet with me came when my nephew was literally on the operating table. In a way, it said, “fuck you, that’s how.” In another, it was very healing because the relationship died and the baby boy was born, making it through the operation on his heart all at the same time… as Susan Leo eloquently said, “a resurrection in the middle of the mess.”

Let me put this in perspective for you. Wi-Phi was born with the vena cava and the aorta in reverse. It was major surgery, and we were all waiting to hear whether he would live or die, the operation was so massive. I will remember it forever, especially since he is my first nephew. I don’t know if there will be others, so right now it’s ok to say he’s my favorite.

However, it was Dana that stayed by his side for an entire summer, and they bonded in a way that we just didn’t. It is something I will regret always, so I write him letters that he can read when he’s older. That he’ll know how much I prayed for him when he was little.

The emotional beating from Diane and the anxiety of Wi-Phi’s surgery did not cause my mental spiral, but they certainly did not help. Argo’s care and concern in my life helped heal all of that, because as she heard me talk, she recognized something I did not. Diane didn’t deserve all my care and concern, so I should stop worrying about her, stop ruminating on the past and what could have been, stop loving her altogether.

As the enabler, it took more strength than I was able to muster to let go (then), and again, I folded into myself. I lashed out butt good. Argo’s words saved me from myself because she was so patient, so kind, so loving. Everything I needed and wanted in a friendship, and I broke that too. My ability to receive love had been trashed long before I met her, and I fought against it tooth and nail because how could I ever believe that someone like that loved someone like me? I struggled with my feelings for her because I knew that deep down, I was capable of being the friend she needed and I was fucking it up left and right, mostly because Dana’s jealousy made it hard for me to give of myself. It is useless to wonder what if? However, I will say that I think it would have been a different relationship had those been group conversations instead of Argo and I being lost in our own little world. It is not as if Argo required it from me. Dana just didn’t put any shoe leather into getting to know her. If she had, she would have seen that all three of us could be friends and it didn’t have to be the toxic triangle it became. It ended badly, as all toxic triangles do.

Argo pulled away and called it off. Dana and I got a divorce. I have felt freer than I have in years, because Dana didn’t like sharing me with Argo and in a lot of ways, rightfully so. In others, Argo became a convenient way to wound me when we were fighting.

It was masterful the way she manipulated me by treating Argo as “the other woman,” using her as her excuse not to interact with me, not to open up to me, to get courage to leave because I was clearly the problem and she had nothing to own. She yelled at me, and I will hurt from it always, “so what you’re saying is that I drove you to Argo and it’s all my fault?” That is not the truth and I will not accept it.

We developed a pattern of checking out from each other. Dana would zone out while I talked to Argo, waiting for Dana to be ready to engage. When she was ready, Argo and I would still be talking and I didn’t want to leave in the middle of the conversation. So, when I was ready to engage, Dana was doing other things and didn’t want to engage with me. It wasn’t anyone’s fault because the issue was that we weren’t ready to engage at the same time. It was a shared responsibility, and I cannot take on more than is rightfully mine.

Then, the pattern changed to telling me she was ok with my friendship with Argo and CLEARLY. NOT. I ignored Dana’s feelings because I felt it was outright manipulation. That she was ok with it until she could use it as an RPG in a fight.

And use it she did. Like I said before…

Masterful.

She could not look into her own heart and see how her actions affected me. She could not see into my heart and how she was wrapped around it. She could not accept that past history twisted my relationship with Argo and that I needed help for it, not separation from her. She also did not see that my personality type dictates that I am most comfortable with one or two friends that will willingly walk in my inner world as a companion, and that she did not have the right to expect that my friends wouldn’t be almost as important to me as my wife.

I didn’t see how she couldn’t see it… she’s a Doctor Who fan. I would have made the same choice that Amy Pond did, choosing her husband over her friend, but when they were all together, she loved The Doctor and Rory equally. Rory was jealous at times, but he always came around in the end.

She did not see that having a close friend was valuable as a sounding board to make sure that I was on the right track for success in marriage… that my words regarding Argo were an operatic swell of emotion on the page because that’s the kind of writer I am… and who knows what would have happened had Argo and I sat down for a cup of tea. Maybe the separation of being on the Internet allowed us to get to know each other in a different way than people do on the ground, and who knows whether we’d gotten along on the ground or not? We never tried.

Argo has said that will never happen, another thing that I don’t have to love, but I do have to live. I have long called Argo The Doctor because since she was a virtual friend, she was very much the madman in a box. I talked about her to Dana and Aaron but she wasn’t real to them. She was only real to me.

If I have hope in a cup of tea, it’s because of rule number one. Let’s all say it together.

The Doctor lies. 😉

I bless her and release her both awake and in dreams, but the door will always be open for resurrection (She will never, ever get off the hook for pizza night.). I am trying to do great things with my life to pay her friendship forward. That regardless of how it ended, I still value all the gifts she gave me and the purity of her care.

You can’t go back and cross your own timeline to recreate the past, but you can move forward with grace if you have the strength to look at yourself and tell yourself that you have handled things in the shittiest way possible and incinerate it so that you don’t do it again.

It’s been said many times that you have to break yourself open to let light in. I am in that place, shattered but not defeated, because my dreams outweigh thinking about my worthlessness. Hope is a miraculous thing as long as you are doing the work to make your dreams happen.

Hope is terrible if you’re just sitting there waiting… unless your only hope is dating the person that delivers your pizza.

Which is not unreasonable. As I have said before, dating the pizza delivery person has its advantages. You know three things right off the bat:

1. They are employed.
2. They have a vehicle.
3. They already know where you live.

And on that note, it’s time to walk to the 7-11 because that’s where the homeless people gather. I get a Big Gulp and let their stories envelop me while I mainline Diet Coke. I can’t do much, but I can absorb their stories and at least give them a few moments of comfort that they’ve been heard.

Sometimes I get stories like, “my father just died.” I offer to pray with them, and no one has ever said, “I’m not a God person.” I cannot imagine that there aren’t homeless atheists, but a few moments of quiet and reflection never hurt anyone.

Next Big Gulp’s on you.

I am so sensitive.

Seriously, I have a very thin skin and it doesn’t take much to make me tear up. However, Capital Pride is an emotional thing for me, anyway. It is awe-inspiring to stand in front of the Capitol Building and see all the rainbow flags. I came out to myself in 1987, and to the world in 1992. I was so young. I was ten in 1987, at a slumber party with all the girls in my class. One of them looked so perfect, so serene in her sleep that I held her hand. I will let your mind ponder the scene as to what happened when she woke up. It was not pretty.

Actually, I’ll call them out. Statute of limitations and all that. She and her best friend offered me a Coke and when I took a big sip, I realized they’d put suntan lotion in it. They laughed and called me queer as if it was a bad word, and then, it was (we’ve taken it back). To add insult to injury, they called me “Fat and Flat Lanagan” for the rest of the year. I was neither, but I believed them anyway and eating became a battle of will. It still is when I feel insecure, but it somehow is comforting that I know the root cause- exactly how it started… drops of fear that turned into a raging river when I realized I was never going to fit in. There was nothing flat about me except the denial that I wasn’t gay, because I just wanted to have friends.

Walking down the street with thousands of other gay people is a future I never could have imagined back then. As I have said before, the best I thought it would get is having a girlfriend and not freaking the fuck out that someone would call my house and another woman answered my phone, because that would mean that I’d been “caught.” Gay marriage was as foreign a concept as sex with ducks.

Worthlessness and shame kept building in me. My weight went up and down as I went on long hunger strikes and then remembered, “oh, I have to eat or I’ll faint.” Not eating is easy to hide, and I did it very well for years.

Now, I’m not shy about it. My parents and friends know I don’t have a block against drinking, so I just switch to protein shakes and life goes on until my body reminds me that it’s ok. No one is going to judge you for eating a hamburger. But then? Oh, then. Worthlessness, just like grief, makes its own room… you feel you can’t do anything about it, so in the words of Dexter Morgan, you develop a dark passenger. It’s a place inside yourself that you can go to have someone to talk to, someone that will commiserate with you because she knows exactly what you’re going through… and no one else does. It is isolation and darkness that breeds… and then it bleeds.

It comes out in behaviors that you don’t know are abnormal. They just are. I could talk about emotional abuse from others, but in terms of gay pride, it has to begin with the abuse I inflicted on myself because I couldn’t notice the wonderful things happening around me.

I didn’t want to marry Dana; it won’t be a shock to her to read this, because she knows that I’m not talking about being faithful to her for the rest of my life. I’m talking about the fear that made me short of breath when I thought of having a wedding. As I told Argo, it was that little girl fear of “what if we planned a wedding and no one came?” It wasn’t reality. But facts are hard to face when your emotions fight against you in one bloody battle after another. After a while, you don’t even notice you’re walking in Culloden field.

The English slaughter was twofold.

First, there was a night between Dana and me where she could have said, “I have a headache…” She didn’t. She said I was being aggressive. She shot an RPG when she could have used a flyswatter and as I told Argo, “my marriage fell apart in one word.” I should have listened to that still, small voice telling me to leave, but I didn’t. We patched things up and a few weeks later, the real fight began. We both said ugly, ugly words to each other. I know I said things that were just as awful to Dana, but the ones that stick in my head night after night after night are “let me go or I’m going to break your arm.” Why was I so determined? Why couldn’t I back down? Why couldn’t I admit that it was better to let her go cool off than to try and steer her back into conversation?

Because I couldn’t lose gracefully. My king was not going to fall. She was not going to bully me out of talking about money or Argo or anything else. I “needed” to stand my ground. I own my part that it kept the situation escalated. I could have let her walk away… but she was famous for it. Our relationship died over everything Dana wouldn’t tell me. One line in a letter to Argo sticks out… that “if Dana and I do break up, it will be because she’s pushed me away so many times that I can’t reach her.” I didn’t want her to wriggle away. I wanted accountability. Argo was not an action but a response. Dana used Argo unmercilessly while she hid things from me and called me psychotic because it was so much easier than facing the music head on.

There is nothing on God’s green earth that would excuse emotional infidelity, and I make none. I am shamed beyond belief that I let it happen, especially because I didn’t trigger Argo in the same way; there was no reciprocity and I needed it to be so… because yes, my heart was entangled, but there were no bad Jack and Coke decisions, either.

Just me, alone in my deserved silence and shame.

Second, Dana said that I would never amount to anything, the line that her parents have used to trigger me for years. I thought, “it’s time to go. They’ve won.” I thought Dana had individuated enough to see me for who I was, but she did not notice when money and praise and respect and honor and all of those things started to roll in because of this web site. When the light bulb turned on, she said, “I think you have the possibility to reach millions, and I’m kind of jealous. But I also believe that it won’t happen (and I’m paraphrasing to condense) because you’re ADHD.”

When I objected to that comment, she said, “I believed in you when no one else did.”

There has never been one day in my entire life that only Dana believed in me, but she definitely made me believe that was true…… and that’s when I finally said, “no more.” I don’t want her friendship, I don’t want her energy, and I for damn sure don’t want to fight anymore. I am leaving the door open to changing my mind on friendship because I don’t know if I’m just angry right now, or if it will take a lifetime to undo the damage I experienced at her hand.

And because shit rolls downhill, I am living in hell because I lashed out at one of the great loves of my life, no matter what role she plays. Emotional intimacy between us turned into unparalleled enmity, because we are both as mean as we are kind. We got to a point where there was no home base, no place either of us could stand without being attacked.

There’s no pride in what happened with either woman, and that’s the story I told Prianka as we were walking down the parade route.

She said, “Leslie, it’s bullshit that you won’t amount to anything. You’ve just got to see that this is all for you. All of it. People are cheering and whooping and hollering and it’s all for you. Take it in.”

My chest swelled and my eyes teared up and I saw the parade for the first time, even though I’d been attending for years. I’d made it. I’d made it through teasing as a child, through a horrible teenage experience all the way around, through thinking that living with a woman was wrong, through an abusive marriage all the way around (because I will never be the only victim), through hurting the one person I thought would be the INFJ companion that the description of my personality said I would receive.

I made it. I am on my way. In the space of the time that I’ve been here, I’ve found a church, a ministry I want to help grow in downtown Silver Spring that helps homeless people reenter society a little easier….. and I’ve applied to go back to school.

I once was lost, but now I’m found……… and what I found is that it’s all for me. I just didn’t know it.