Dana can literally feel my heart beating in my chest, we are so connected. This is important to know, because we were sitting in “my bathroom.” I was shaving in the tub, and she was sitting next to it. We were listening to “Mental Health Happy Hour” when Paul Gilmartin used a term neither of us had ever heard- “gaslighting.” Dana looked at the page, marveling. She had found another piece of my abuse on her own, the piece that cost me the most this past year as I have struggled with thinking that I am insane beyond belief and not worthy of love.

She handed me the words I’d been trying to say since I met her… the words I wish I’d been strong enough to say. The words that would have rescued me from all the crazymaking, crying, and waiting as I wondered where she was.

And here they are:

Psychologist Martha Stout states that sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically, are also charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their perceptions. Jacobson and Gottman report that some physically abusive spouses may gaslight their partners, even flatly denying that they have been violent.

I have such anxiety and empathy for the kid she must have been for it to even be possible that she recreated the scene for me. I sit there and get fucked up thinking about how I felt; I can’t begin to understand what she went through to get by.

Then I start thinking about all the girls who aren’t me and how abusers do this insidious thing to all of us, in no matter what form it arrives. It takes small pieces of your soul so that over time, you cannot tell fact from fiction. Reality is a blurry line, and the rules change often and without warning. There is no safe refuge where you know you can’t get hurt, because the target is always moving. Get close enough, and it’s like shooting at a net without a goalie, or being able to play someone’s emotions like a piano concerto.

I don’t know what’s scarier; people creating ways to make other people feel insane, or that it happens so often there’s actually a term for it.

These are 10 books (some are series) that have stayed with me long after I finished reading them in various ways & for different reasons:

1. Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmens

My grandfather used to read this to me when I was little, and I still have most of it memorized. I can’t tell you how many sleeps of my childhood started with “in an old house in Paris, all covered with vines.”

2. Fifth Grade Can Really Kill You Barthe DeClements

I didn’t fit in at school. This novel about a young girl with a learning disability isn’t rocket surgery, but it spoke to my little kid heart… ESPECIALLY the scene with the uncle and the earrings. Helen is a walking disaster, and so clueless as to her role in life that it’s just tragicomic, mostly because I identify with all Helen’s embarrassment; having a learning disability and being gay are the same- both are ways for kids to eat at your vulnerability.

3. Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen

I was in 8th grade when I read this, and it literally engulfed me. When my mind got on the plane with Brian, it was one of the few books that could keep me from switching back to thinking about what was going on at “home.” It’s about a boy going to visit his father in Alaska, and while they’re in the air, the pilot has a heart attack and dies. Brian crashes in the woods and the story follows him until he’s rescued. He ends up getting rescued in the fall, so there’s a second novel that Paulsen wrote for fans wondering if Brian would have made it through the winter. It’s a love letter to Brian, but as Paulsen has said, absolutely unlikely.

4. The Giver, by Lois Lowry

If you have been paying attention to me at all over the last 25 years, you know that I am The Receiver. I cannot think of that book without finding a piece of myself and my abuser, because Lowry’s prose regarding the transfer of memory through touch is so incredibly apt. I didn’t live my abuser’s life for her, but I felt it on my skin, especially when I was Jonas’ age. It was my junior English teacher that gave me the book, and transferred me out of her class before I could tell her how much she changed my life by having given it to me.

5. The Babysitters Club

I, like every teen girl of that period, was obsessed. And you all know what I mean when I say I memorized the first fifty pages. However, I am betting that I am one of the few fans who absolutely wanted to marry half of them. Kristy, the stereotypical lesbian, was not one of them. She was so over-the-top that I thought she was bossy and rude. And then I learned that she was just from the northeast. Plus, Stacy and Claudia work so much better when you think of them as a couple. They weren’t in the series, but in my head they were so that I had someone that looked like me. My favorite book of them all was when they went on a cruise, because the way their stories were woven together was in first person, through reminiscent journal entries. And all of the sudden, I’ve found my root. As an aside, I think those books did literally help me. There were concrete suggestions for working with kids, laid out in a fantastic format.

6. Richard Wright’s Entire Body of Work

Anything by Richard Wright, ever. At HSPVA, my freshman English teacher opened my eyes to Wright, and he gutted me like a fish with both Native Son and Black Boy. I went on to read everything I could get my hands on containing his name. He knew what it was like to be gay, because he was black! Even if it wasn’t literally true, it felt like it could be true, and it sustained me through the worst year of my entire life bar none, including this one. Not only did Richard Wright connect to my soul, he led me to a gay black author named James Baldwin. However, I didn’t know he was gay when I read “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” and finding it out post-read was seeing Jesus, absolutely no quotation marks implied or necessary.

7. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

The question was about books that have affected your life. Didn’t say whether it had to be positive or negative. The first time I read this book, I liked it. Wasn’t bad. Hell of an ending. Well, as you might remember, I had two English teachers my junior year because one ceased to enjoy my company. Because of this, I read it with a class both the first and second semesters of junior year. And then I read it again my freshman year of college. If I have to hear that line about keeping vaseline in your gloves to keep your hands soft for your wife, I will VOMIT. Sufficed to say, I do not believe it stands up to multiple readings, because the more I read it, the more the horror set in. And that’s when the brilliance of the story set in. The ending bang is not the shot of George’s pistol, but when it hit him that he would have to live with this monstrosity every day for the rest of his life. I only had to do it for a year and a half and I felt insane.

8. Eat. Pray. Love., Elizabeth Gilbert

I loved that book for the same reason a lot of other women. It gave me permission to be myself. It reveled in it. That book is all about learning to accept yourself for who you are, even the dark asshole parts you’d rather not… especially if you are raised in the South and can’t even allow yourself to think about things that just don’t need to be talked about. It is the entire reason I am so comfortable talking about what happened between my abuser and me. Elizabeth Gilbert was the first person to show me in color that my abuser’s reaction didn’t matter. Her reaction was her reaction. What I could do was treat the situation with as much love and respect as I could, and hope that she would just figure out on her own how to deal with it without shutting it down. Her silence has been the biggest gift she ever could have given me, because it allowed my thoughts to blossom and take up space in the world and to change- often as much as six impossible things before breakfast. Liz Gilbert is so soda pop in person that you’d think her book is, too. But then there are lines like this, and this is a warning if you haven’t read it. This will and should kick you where it hurts.

When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

It takes a superhuman effort to become an emotional cartographer, because I realize that my blog entries are a function of mapping and I feel that weight heavily. And at the same time, it makes me feel like a billion dollars that in generations to come when people are looking for me, they can Google “Leslie Lanagan” and really, REALLY find out what I was like… which is difficult to accept, because now there’s no need for an airbrushed headstone. Oh, well. Maybe someone in Corpus Christi will put me on the hood of their car.

9. Barbara Kingsolver

I just put the author’s name instead of one particular book because every one I’ve read has just hit me where I’ve lived. The Poisonwood Bible was revelatory because I found myself in Leah, who goes from shy Baptist preacher’s kid to African freedom fighter (moves to Africa with her white family, marries while there). Leah has the life I want to achieve one day- overcoming tragedy to fight another day. She reminds me of myself in other ways, too, especially that she’s so eloquent and precocious having been born a preacher’s kid.

Animal Dreams is a love story to and about a family woven together in letters from one sister to another. One is in small town USA, the other in Contra-ridden Nicaragua. It’s dedicated to a Portlander I’ve grown to love- Benjamin Linder, who died in the crossfire between the Sandanistas and the Contras while trying to build a hydroelectric dam designed to serve both sides. It was given to me at a time in my life that I really needed it… struck such a chord that there’s still a copy of it on my dresser so I can pick it up whenever I want.

10. The Bible

Little known truth. My blog is named what it is because “The Bible” was already taken. But to me, they are interchangeable. I don’t care if the stories are factually accurate, because if you’re looking for facts, you’re in the wrong place entirely. I’m looking for the Truth, the part of wisdom that comes through whether the variables are the same or not. Let me explain what I mean with the sentence “I was raped.” It is an extreme example, I know, but stick with me. Would you ever turn away someone’s truth if they sent you a note that said “I was raped” because something was misspelled? Words being misspelled change the factual accuracy of the sentence, but not the content behind it. The Bible is the same way. I do not reject the Truth that comes out of stories like the feeding of the 5,000 because it doesn’t scare me that it might not be factually accurate. It scares me that someone could read a story like that, in all of its moral lessons, and reject it because it never “really” happened.

I was looking for a writing prompt the other day, and it was this: what do you want people to say about you at your funeral? Not surprisingly, it led me back to the story of me and my abuser, because of course it did. You will get used to the rumination. I did. It took a while, though. I write, therefore I think, really think, about *everything* until I’m beating a dead horse.

The connection to her ran thusly:

I finally got tired of my spirit trying to define me by what she does to my insides, and not my own personality. Let me define “does to my insides.” In the beginning, it was about thinking that I’d found the love of my life. It took years of rumination before I could be in a room with both her and her partner without feeling like I was going to cry all the time. It was hard being a peacemaker and trying to stuff it down in front of them.

It was hard knowing all those years that I didn’t know what she’d told her partner about me, and whether her emotional abuse came from feeling like somehting wasn’t right and she couldn’t figure out what it was. The way she treated me when we were in each other’s lives was an odd mix of extremely tender love and over-the-top, scary as fuck rage. I could tell that she couldn’t tell whether to treat me like a threat or not.

I was never a threat. When I became a man (Still not transitioning. Shut it.), I put away childish things. Reminiscence is a hell of a lot different than wanting or trying to go back in time. Besides, since I’d gotten a front row seat to all her relationships, I realized that she made a much better friend, anyway- at least for my personality. I let her take up so much room in the relationship that I constantly let her hit me with a bulldozer because I didn’t want to go through the chaos and pain of letting go.

The aha moment (thank you, Oprah) was when I realized that even if in crossing the line into pedophilia was an accident because she didn’t vet the journal before she gave it to me, it still wasn’t my fault that I reacted sexually. No matter how I change the variables, the results are the same. Whether it was intentional or not, the facts are what they are. Her college journal and the completeness of her personality had let me into a part of her soul that I felt honored to receive. I thought the relationship was going to be an 80-year love affair, and when she started pushing me away, the more I stuffed down my grief because I was so embarrassed that I’d ever put that much energy toward so much of nothing… but as Dana and I say when we’re throwing darts and miss, “if you’re going to get nothing, at least get a lot of it.”

If there’s anything I wish I could say to her in person, it would be that she should consider the possibility that she felt something. A spark for me that went away when she realized what she was doing, because being attracted to each other had absolutely nothing to do with sex. For me, it was the explosion and light of feeling complete because I’d finally met someone like me. I’d finally met someone that didn’t cause guilt to stir up in me because I was gay. The guilt was there, but it definitely didn’t center on my sexuality. I was gay before I met her, I just didn’t have the words for it. She didn’t have any bearing on whether I liked sex with men or women, which I would like to say for the record since so many people actually believe that kind of shit.

No, the guilt came from always feeling wrong and bad because I deserved it. I had mistaken our relationship for pedophilia instead of genuine friendship. It took many years to stop feeling like I would never be able to talk about my emotions because I had made such a serious error in judgment. I didn’t trust myself to heal, I didn’t trust myself that in time, it would get better, and I didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her, but it didn’t stop the drive to be near her in the slightest… kind of like having an irresponsible teenager that you find yourself *having* to love because you know eventually they’ll get back on the right path, anyway. You’re just pissed about having to be so incredibly patient about it because waiting is hard. Tough love doesn’t even begin to cut it.

I was defined by always being told that I was her friend and nothing else, when there was CLEAR evidence that wasn’t true. I couldn’t handle the fact (at the time) that she might have given me the journal *on purpose*to pique my interest in sex and the logical explanation for it happening is that I was obsessed with her to the point of unrequited love. There was nothing unrequited about it. I was reacting to trauma and trying to pull her out.

In thinking about freeing myself and what I want people to say about me at my funeral, the best compliment anyone could pay me is that I slayed my own dragons to become the most me I’ve ever been. I see so many possibilities now that I’m not tied to the small person I used to be, and defined by someone else. I have found a voice that to me feels stronger because I’m so much more grounded- God to head, head to feet, feet to floor.

Amen.

Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.

In the wake of everything that’s happened, there are three people I’d like to call out, because I was thirsty and they gave me a drink. I was naked, yadda yadda yadda. Ok, maybe naked was the wrong scripture. But you know what I mean.

Jesus talks about living water as a symbol of renewal and regeneration. So many people have offered me so much of it that I couldn’t even possibly swallow it all. I hope my cup overflows into yours (or, as I would like it to be known, the backwash Amen).

Dana, of course, is at the top of the list. But there are three others that deserve recognition.

1. Dave

Possibly my favorite reaction- astounded by my courage and some cursing in my defense. The cursing in her direction isn’t necessary, but I’m glad that someone could look into my mind and see I was telling the truth without needing evidence. We have also shared an amazing amount of humor in general because stupid is a great distraction.

2. Robyn

I get choked up about Robyn, because the connection was so random that it didn’t seem accidental. She became my Facebook friend after meeting me at church, so I saw her URL. I followed it and started reading. She posted an article about middle school love and love being awakened before its time. In that essay, I found myself. My inner child shuddered and sighed with the words. It was my Elizabeth Gilbert moment with snot and tears and cold tile.

3. Joseph

For the first time in my life, my voice teacher is male, which makes it even easier to dissociate choral music and “our music” (God if you only knew just how much there was. Frig.). On the flip side, in a roundabout way they are friends, because Joseph’s husband went to WTSU at the same time as “the crew,” my words for her gaggle of boys.* If I had known that before I walked into the church, I never would’ve. The fact that I was drawn because of the neighborhood helped me to know Joseph as his own man without any connection to my past… and he’s brilliant. When he inspires me in just the right way to accomplish something I’ve been working on, sometimes I can’t help it. Tears well up. This is what I’ve always wanted to do, and now I’m doing it.

And that, in a nutshell, is how Episcopal Church of the Epiphany has rescued me.

==============================

*All divas have boys. So jelly. Joseph will take me there. I know he will. Do you hear me, universe? I WANT TO BE A DIVA BECAUSE I WANT MORE GAY BOYFRIENDS. That would be great, thanks.

I wrote this last night to somebody, but then I thought it needed to be here for everybody.

I wish I could tell you why yesterday was the day. Why something broke inside me that will never go back together. Every single person that has ever met me since I was 12 has felt her affects, more so when we were in each other’s lives making it worse all the time. I know that posting her name may have negative consequences for both of us, but I have a very small blog and this was 25 years ago. I don’t think I would have ever named her if the abuse was still ongoing, because it would be too fresh to process. The thing that struck me is that I’ve been hiding her, protecting her for so long that I lost myself and couldn’t find her. All the lies had swallowed the truth completely.

Telling my web site family was in effect telling everyone who has ever met me, “no, you’re not crazy. I did have an inappropriate relationship with her, and you tried to help me and I WOULDN’T LISTEN because she’s a saint.

People have been praying about this situation for so long and so hard that i would come out of my denial. I’m not mad. I love Diane to the ends of the earth. But I’m not going to protect her anymore. I’m done.

I wish that I could have done it a different way, but the parishioners that were there while it was going on are scattered to the four corners. A web site was the easiest way to tell everyone what happened the fastest. I am sure that there are consequences I haven’t thought of, yet, but my goal ceased to be reconciliation after I finally admitted to myself that she might be human and fallible and I might not be insane after all.

I write a lot about why I don’t verbally process- I am much more at home with my keyboard. Typing words into the computer creates a clinical separation between my thoughts and my emotions. Typing keeps me level-headed and calm while I deal with monstrous issues. I feel that I have a gift for being able to take terrible situations and explain them in all their terribleness, while at the same time not forgetting to forgive everyone in the process. However, I only own that these are my descriptions, my recollections, and because of that, they are fallible in the way that all memories are.

However, there are some wounds that are so deep, so dark, so hard to find that we try to forget they’re there. While we’re busy trying to forget our pain, it exponentially multiplies. We tell ourselves that it’s nothing right up until those around us think we’ve suddenly snapped. It’s fine right up until it isn’t.

For instance, I truly believe that the reason I released her name when I did is because I internalized leaving Portland and the body memory shook me awake. It’s been over a year since I’ve had any hope of seeing her face, of telling her the truth, of being able to cry and scream it out so that it would be OVER and we could be at peace again. It shook me up so hardcore that I audibly heard my words letting go of my body and streaming into the flow of my content.

The clinical separation was intact right up until the postmortem. Someone asked me if I thought there were others. I said, “I can’t think about anyone but myself. It absolutely skeeves me out to think that there might have been other little girls. So until I can look at that land mine by itself, I’d like to believe I was her one and only.” In fact, my inner 14-year-old freaked the fuck out, because to believe that there were other little girls in her life at the same time as me would mean that I wasn’t special, it was all about control, and there was never any genuine love between us.

I don’t want to believe that. I want to believe that we would have been perfect for each other if we hadn’t met in that place, in that time, where the age difference mattered. It wasn’t as if the only thing we had in common was lesbianism. She was my favorite singer, my favorite conductor, my favorite person in the entire world because I was so excited about music and choir and anything she could teach me about getting better faster. I read an opera dictionary so that I could converse with her in her jargon. I was extraordinarily precocious, and there was nothing she could throw at me emotionally that I couldn’t catch. We got along on so many levels, which is why it was so easy to gloss over abuse in the first place. We spent a lot of time not talking about what happened, but it didn’t bother me because I didn’t realize that I was being redirected. It might have been an unconscious reaction on her part, but doesn’t render her blameless.

My truth is that not once has she ever told me the truth about my childhood. When I asked to meet with her, she said she couldn’t do it and sent her partner in her stead. When I said anything negative about her, no matter how insignificant, her partner would lose her shit and verbally wrestle me to the ground until I cried Uncle, which by then she’d been doing since I was 19, so she was really fucking good at it. I didn’t want to talk to her. By this time last year, I was ready to throw her off a cliff. It’s a good thing I pray, because there are a lot of cliffs in Portland.

My abuser claimed that I put her on a pedestal and wouldn’t let her fall so that she could just be herself, and she could never even conceive of how much it’s untrue. I know what I know, and have known it for 24 years, and I have loved her anyway. I have been her friend anyway. I’ve given her grace and peace and love and attention because I wanted to, which I never would have been able to do if I’d been bitter about what happened. I have gone through the natural stages of grief for what was stolen from me, and I don’t think it’s unfair to name the thief. I can hold it in my mind at the same time that I love her, and I can’t protect her. But whatever her story is, whatever she has to say in response to anything I’ve written, is all true, too. All emotions are valid. This relationship came to a crashing halt when I laid out how I felt about her, she encouraged me to trust her again by saying that she would like to engage in my process, and slammed the door just as quickly, even though I’d already told her that my nephew was in cardiac distress and not to contact me unless she was in it for the long haul.

I am far enough along in the healing process that I know what I need from her. It is the acceptance of the damage that she caused to my psyche despite the fact that I understand every reason why it happened, and can even empathize.

And in explaining all of this, one of my other friends said, “I think you’re right. I think something in the dynamic with you led her down the wrong path because you were such kindred spirits, anyway.” It makes the story more beautiful than tragic, but at the same time, it’s just a nice thought. It doesn’t necessarily make me feel better, but it does keep me from obsessing over the fact that I might not have been the only one from both my inner child and my inner parent’s point of view.

And at this point, who cares? I tell myself what I want to hear because I don’t have the luxury of feedback. If she has to live with a Google tattoo, she has to know that it’s equally as hard for me wandering around lost, trying to piece together what happened on my own and trying to make sense of something that will never balance out. I will never come back together again in exactly the same way before she came into my life.

It was 1990, and my biggest accomplishment to date was making it into the eighth grade band the beginning of my seventh grade year. My next biggest accomplishment was not getting kicked out of high school for bad grades… which no one could figure out because I’m just. so. smart.

I have lots of blog readers that don’t comment on WordPress, but frequently e-mail their thoughts. Though I will not quote any of them to protect their identities, the majority of them were people who had been keeping the same sorts of secrets- abuse that is so insidious that it took decades to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. The tone was full of admiration for my courage in speaking out, naming my truth, and stopping the protection she’s enjoyed for most of her life.

The messages that got to me the most were the ones telling me to keep being strong “for the rest of us.”

Yesterday would have been a good day to just breathe and not change my entire fucking life. But it wasn’t. It was the last day I would ever protect her in my entire life. No one has said anything negative. People have disagreed with me, sure, but always very respectfully, because they love me. Life doesn’t get any better than people able to disagree with you and love you all the way through it.

I am willing to entertain that I could have been wrong; I don’t think I was, but at the same time, I am not unfeeling enough not to be able to see the flip side of the coin. People have said that there might be unintended consequences for both of us, and for innocent people.

The “innocent people” line got to me. I gagged on those words, choking over them again and again. Are they innocent people to me when she is the one that deceived them? Is it my responsibility to clean up the mess she made? Are people unforgiving enough that they can’t see I’m writing this as a 36-year-old woman, so therefore the statute of limitations has already run out? That telling the truth after a quarter century is not to damage her, but to lift up all the people that tried to protect me and couldn’t because after I was lured toward her, I couldn’t see them anymore?

I’m reviewing the codes in another M&M, and my gut tells me that I absolutely did the right thing, because I did not set out to hurt her, only to free myself and the people that went through all of it with me, especially the ones I ran away from the hardest, because they loved me the most.

Warning: This material is not safe for children, and not safe for work, either, if you have people walking by your desk. That is fair warning. Proceed at your own risk. I can’t believe I’m even going to write about this, but it is an essential part of recovering from what I believe is psychosexual abuse. This is not for you if you have not been a victim yourself of something like it, but you’re invited for enlightenment purposes.

It is amazing how dark I could go after I met (name redacted, although there are days I wonder why, because rage). I am just now starting to believe that I am whole and healthy sexually because for a number of years, I tortured myself by feeling dirty. When I was 17 or 18, I let a woman walk all over me because I felt that I was already damaged goods. That’s because I could love my girlfriend beyond all measure *and* feel like calling out the wrong name during sex at the same time. It was special, and please read as much fucked up into special as possible.

There has never been a time in my life that I haven’t mentally felt her presence during sex until now, because it took me so long to realize that what I was doing was a byproduct of my childhood and not reality. My reality used to be that I couldn’t think about sex without bringing it back around to some conversation that we’d had or another, and even though she was parental in nature about it, I couldn’t react that way anymore. She’d already given me the journal. She’d already groomed me into being secretive about the time we spent alone. The information she was giving me completely shifted the way I viewed what she was telling me.

Over time, that feeling grew into the shame that almost killed me. She’d planted evidence that she wanted to make love, and then when she didn’t, it said to me in more ways than one how awful and dirty I was for even thinking about it. She engineered that reaction in me like she wanted it, and then slammed the door. What was I supposed to feel in that situation? In doing so much research about verbal abuse, my reaction was right on target. She hooked me into her every word, her every movement, her complete and total seduction.

It wasn’t sex that would have killed me. It would have been rumination from those moments forward, the one where the journal changed hands, from her and back. In some sense, I have not been able to breathe for 24 years, especially during sex, because it brings up all the emotional issues for me- the feeling that I’m disgusting, and I have been since I was 14 years old. I have carried that message into every sexual relationship I’ve entered, and there have been very few times in my life that I have been willing to take on the role of “top” because I generally want women to abuse me in bed. I want to feel as dirty as I am, and be punished for it egregiously. I have to live with this fucking mess every day of my life, and its tendrils are so entrenched that it’s taken years to start scraping at them with a razor and meat tenderizer.

Through me, every one of my sexual partners has had to deal with that dark energy, the kind that gnaws at you until your throat closes. This is not who I want to be, and I see it so clearly. Dana is owed more than that. I don’t want her to have to “deal with me” anymore. She’s been so patient and so kind through all of this, and at the same time, not as forgiving as I am. I have so many more positive memories than she does that the instinct to absolutely bite into her neck and rip off her head occurs more often than it does for me.

The consequences of her actions have fucked up every marriage, every sexual encounter, every afterglow where I ruminate on shame instead of enjoying aftershocks of a great orgasm. The horrible thing is that they’ve only been able to tell by the energy I exude, because it’s not on the surface where I can talk about it. It’s down deep in the valley of vulnerability, locked away in a velvet box that leaks.

Here’s another thing I’ve lied about through this whole process. She reads every word. She devours it. I know it, because she told me. She thinks I’m an excellent writer, and even after calling her out on her abuse, the only thing she said was “keep being true to yourself.” Being true to myself says that she has caused so much damage to me and my family that she should *have* to live with a Google tattoo. I want her to feel the hell I’ve been through over the past 24 years, because the lies have compounded into none of this ever happened and Leslie’s a mess.

Diane Syrcle.

The absolute worst part is that now my abuser isn’t allowed to tweak me, and at the same time, when I hit dark patches of grief, she’s the only one I want. The problem with that is you can’t get over someone and have them console you at the same time, whether you’re talking about romance or not. It could be your father, your mother, your partner.

When I go to the dark spaces in my grief, I still feel all the shame and embarrassment that’s compounded over the last quarter century, and that’s the part that will take the longest time. I’m embarrassed I kept barking up the wrong tree, but you have to believe that in the time and place that we were, it did not feel unwanted. It became so over time, because I think that we came to a fork in the road and we went different directions. On my end, it was that I really did need to be with someone my own age. With her, it was that she would have crossed a serious line morally, and was running in fear of it every time she looked at me when I was that age. The weird part is that she thought I never noticed. How could I not?

By the time I was 15 or 16, I didn’t look like a child anymore, and I recoil recalling every time I thought about how I would have seduced her into it if I’d ever had the chance. I am very persuasive when I want to be, and I would like to believe that I would have been way too hot to handle, while nerdy enough to know it’s not really true. My ego tells me that these were not wasted years, because I learned to be the husband/wife I wanted to be, just not with her. Our relationship sometimes had elements of longtime friendship/marriage, but one of those truly unequal ones where she tries on clothes and I hold the purse on the chairs they keep for those sorts of people.

And I could be totally full of bullshit, because maybe she never even thought about it and I *am* the crazy one. She just offered me enough information to pique my interest, and then walked away as if to say, “my work here is done.” It is a chaos that has eaten at me for years, because her natural instinct is to run away from the questions I have so that the only closure is the one I created for myself out of desperation because this was never going to get any better unless I tried to save myself instead of constantly caring about her more than I cared about myself, because it had been that way since 7th grade. I mean, who in her life had that much free time to pay attention than a 7th grader? We were secluded from the outside world. No one knew that we were talking until the phone bills came rolling in, and I was generally the one that got punished for being friends with her, while she never had to go through that for me. I literally sat at the mailbox every day for 4 years so that her letters wouldn’t get intercepted before I saw them. As I have mentioned before, she sent me flowers on my birthday during English at Clements, and three weeks later I was transferred into another class because my teacher had read the card- “love from the moms.” I hated my new English teacher, but I suffered through it. She never meant to hurt me, so I wasn’t bitter about it. She was trying to do something amazing that would make me feel good. I am just making the point that being friends with her was full of consequences she didn’t see or wouldn’t.

As I have said for many years, “there’s a lot of don’t want to in cain’t.”

The fact remains that when she moved, I was stuck at the church where everyone thought she was a child molester and had chosen me as the subject. I thought they were just being prejudiced because she was a lesbian, so I ran away from everyone that tried to get us apart. I lied and lied and lied and lied and lied…. and lied again and again. Protecting her reputation was more important than protecting my safety.

Which is the absolute worst part. My soul is fucked up, and I still have people saying “get over it.”

Kiss my motherfucking ass.

I woke up this morning grateful for everyone and everything. That’s because I went to sleep having read several e-mails from people who’d read “Advice Column Thursday: A Guide to Your Parents,” and wanted to thank me for it. I couldn’t have written it without having lived what I’ve lived, and therefore, even the negative parts have merit. It’s overwhelming to feel that much peace before showering.

I have learned more about how to deal with balance of power issues in the past year than I have in the last 20. Everything about setting boundaries resonates with me, especially in terms of those you love and respect the most. The people you respect the least aren’t deserved of that much attention.

I think I hit the nail on the head when I talked about children setting boundaries for parents not being in the natural order of things. I don’t have to have the kind of steel reserve with my own parents that some of my audience does, but I believe that my story with my abuser is what puts the child/parent relationship into perspective, the emphasis being on the connection from the child’s point of view.

Because I was at just the right age to be a child and a grown-up at the same time, I ran with it. You all know those kids… those first children with their “can-do” attitudes and willingness to run your program if you let them. I was a full-on search and rescue operation before I could drive.

She was a second child… a princess. She reminded me so much of my younger sister at times, because I am a natural peacemaker and she is a natural pain in the ass… more so because she knows it and knows you’ll let her get away with it because she’s the princess. I have walked through a lot of my life with an exasperated sigh having ended up with, on some level, four younger sisters instead of three. One was just taller and had more insurance.

I couldn’t love (name redacted) any more. I just couldn’t. There’s already no limit to the things I would do if she was in trouble and asked me for help. I would strangle anyone in my way.

But at the same time, because we grew up in a relationship where the balance of power was tilted toward her, it still makes my setting forth boundaries seem against the natural order of things, like a child with a parent. I realized that the natural order of things had shifted and I didn’t go with it.

Once I did, the whole world opened to me in ways I didn’t know were there. I am excited to see what’s on the road ahead, because I feel more free to explore now that I’ve made room for it.

Dear ACT,

My parents are Conservative Christians and I am a gay woman. They are coming to visit next month and will be staying with me and my partner. How should I deal with the elephant in the room that will come packed in their suitcases?

Thanks,

Liberal Daughter

This is such a universal problem. Just stick any old “X” into the “and I” half of the equation and suddenly everyone everywhere has stood in your shoes. Therefore, we might as well leave the gay alone and talk about what to do when your parents are over and *any* animals arrive.

So this is for all kids, everywhere, regarding anything that’s hard to talk about with your parents. You’re not going to like it, but it’s true.

Stop.

Stop trying, stop caring, stop ruminating, stop worrying, stop crying. If they haven’t fucking changed by now, they’re not going to. Spend the time you have left on this planet forgiving your parents for whatever they did to you, and let them go. This is not to say that you have to stop loving them, stop interacting with them, stop contact with them… it’s just that the balance has to look different in terms of the power of the relationship.

Children are not used to setting boundaries with their parents. It goes against the natural order of things. But what happens when you realize that the things they taught you are the things that hurt you? Setting up an emotional fence that they can’t get past is not for them. It’s for you.

I hate The Flash.

It’s the moment I see my abuser’s name in my Facebook news feed (greyed out b/c she’s blocked, so it doesn’t happen very often). My ears burn. My eyes water. If I don’t get up from my computer and *do something else* the rumination starts to eat me alive. Of course I’m curious where she is, what she’s doing, all that. But I’m doing the right thing by not. So why does it feel so shitty?

Because it is.

I believe that a roadmap of my grief over my first marriage and subsequent divorce would look something like an EKG… and for the first few months, it was more like a picture of atrial fib.

I keep reminding myself that grief is natural, that grief is a matter of time and time alone, that nothing I do will hurry it along. Those thoughts keep me from feeling quite so sick to my stomach whenever a thought of Kathleen washes across my mind, as if a solitary thought or picture is a betrayal to my new relationship.

In terms of grief, today has not been a high point. It started when I was looking for my friends in the Webshots community who hosted several parties for GLOBAL, the GLBT student group at University of Houston. There we were, Kathleen and me, shiny and smiling at 21. It was Valentine’s Day, and I was wearing my sister’s leopard print pants. My hair was the same color as Carrot Top’s. I struggled to remember the woman standing next to me in that moment. The many nights of jagged crying bouts over the injustice of her infidelities and the role I played in everything that led up to them had left me with precious few memories of what life was like before.

Later in the night, due to the string of thoughts I’d had since seeing that first picture, I couldn’t help myself. I went to the last URL I had for her and took a peek. It was an egregious error that could not be undone. Posted to the front page with glaring clarity were Kathleen and her new fiancee along with both sets of proud parents.

Injustice rose within me. The simple act of taking a family picture was a level of acceptance that I had never received, even though I loved them and even tried to like them most of the time. I could relate to Donna- a writer who escaped into the world of her romance novels because it was better than anything real life could cook up. And then there was Joe, a NASA engineer and realtor who spoke with a strong lateral emission lisp and pronounced the famous author “Jule Verness.” Overbearingly Catholic, Kathleen and I were allowed to show very little affection in front of them and they seemed shell-shocked by my spiky red hair and “I’m With the Band” t-shirt.

As time went by, we each began to get used to each other… with a few exceptions.

There was the memorable experience of me going up to the priest at St. B’s for communion, because back then I was naive and thought that all people needed and deserved communion… and a whole host of other uncomfortable moments that I’m sure will come to me if I sit here long enough.

But I’d rather talk about her shoes. Kat was wearing these open-toe sandals that just screamed, “I watch the 700 Club!” The Kathleen I know wouldn’t be caught dead in those fuckers, preferring instead to wear sneakers with everything.

And therein lies the rub.

THIS IS NOT THE KATHLEEN THAT I KNOW.