Category: Uncategorized

Me, Mostly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What bothers you and why?
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It’s hard to point fingers at anyone else for bothering me when I am such a handful. I didn’t even know whether to put an emoticon after that, because I don’t know that I’m joking. From my writing to my behavior, there’s nothing I cannot criticize, but I’m trying to be kinder to myself. If one’s behavior affects treatment of others, then it is up to me to be happier on the inside.

The first thing I did to make myself happier was to buy a membership to the National Aquarium. I was invited to go on Sunday, and the price of a membership was cheaper than buying two tickets individually. I thought that was a much better deal as I am obsessed with aquarium fish and don’t want to have an aquarium at my house. Plus, I’ve never been there before and I hear it is world class. Many of you don’t know this about me, but I watch videos on aquascaping all the time and look forward to being able to set up my own tank once I have a living situation conducive to it. I have had freshwater tanks in the past, but I’ve never actually landscaped one with live plants. I think that I would be less bothered once I was paying attention to my minuscule pets. I’d like to have shrimp, catfish, snails, and a betta. A cleanup crew and a betta fish wouldn’t take up that much room, probably 10 gallons, and that way the tank wouldn’t be a monster job to clean.

The reason my living space couldn’t handle an aquarium is that the water pressure is so low here it would take hours to fill a 10 gallon tank. It bothers me with every sink and the bathtub. I could write an entire entry on why this apartment complex sucks and why you shouldn’t live here, but I don’t want to give any indication as to where I live. Baltimore is close enough.

I am thinking now of moving back to the DMV in December, because my lease ends on November 30th. I love Baltimore itself, but the public transportation isn’t as good as I thought it would be. I need to be back on the Metro. My current group, Cognitive Behavioral Health, has another office in Rockville. I would like to stay with my people, and one of my counselors would be the same. It all depends on what kind of deal I can find with my living situation, because like I said, Baltimore is not the problem when I can get around. Uber is too expensive to take all the time, but it does provide an excellent stopgap when a trip on the Metro/bus is going to take two hours.

I do know that I need to stay in Maryland because I am getting so many benefits from Medicaid expansion. We will have to see how the “big, ugly bill” affects me in the future, but so far I have had no interruptions in service. So while I love Virginia, I am solidly staying on this side of the Potomac.

It bothers me that I have to think about all of this. I don’t want to be disabled, but here we are.

It bothers me that I have always been disabled, but these problems are just now being addressed. Better late than never, but I could have been helped with government services in Portland when I spent so many years without health insurance. I have been eligible for services since I was 18 years old, but I didn’t know why until my mother died. I found solid proof that I have had cerebral palsy since I was a baby, after she spent years trying to convince me that I was fine. My dad was overreacting. But interestingly enough, cerebral palsy is not why my care team wants me to file for disability. My bipolar disorder got the best of me, and that bothers me, too.

Most of the reason it bothers me is that I have a hum in my brain that will not go away. I think it was caused by stopping Lexapro suddenly, because even though I’m back on it now, the sound has not gone away. It is similar to the Emergency Broadcast System that used to play on TV during flood warnings (ahem), a minor second that drones 24/7 and demands my attention above all else. It’s hard for me to pay attention at the best of times because I have the ADHD/Autism combo meal. This is just shitty icing on a burnt cake.

I suppose the one thing that doesn’t bother me anymore is having to prove that something is wrong with me. I am settling into the life of a disabled person, learning to contribute to society through being a voice for other disabled people right here on this web site. My voice counts because as people read about me, they identify with my struggles. Or, if they cannot identify, they at least learn to have empathy.

It bothers me that most disabled people are written off as living off the government, when most of us would do absolutely anything to return to normal life. My life is anything but normal. I spend most of my time by myself. It’s isolating and lonely not to have a place to go each day, which is why I’m so grateful to have a group of other disabled people to meet with twice a week (once on Zoom, once in person).

However, at least with an aquarium membership, I have a place to go whenever I want that will feed me. I remind myself of the character Sam from “Atypical.” He goes to the aquarium to feed his love of penguins. Perhaps I will also find an animal that will be my special interest. I do love puffer fish……….

It helps to be bothered less by my living situation now that I’ve figured out a plan- Rockville is on the Red Line, with easy access to the National Zoo. It’s the place I love to write the most when it’s not hot, so until I move I want to try and find a place to write at the aquarium. All I require is a bench, because I carry a tablet and a keyboard in my backpack at all times. After I move, it will be back to finding a “replacement Kevin.”

Some of you may remember that Kevin is a giraffe. I used to sit next to him and write blog entries, having no idea what the giraffe’s actual name might be. I just named him Kevin for my own amusement. Then, one day I went to find Kevin and found out the Zoo had closed the entire giraffe exhibit. Kevin had moved.

Kevin is probably the reason I felt the most comfortable moving to Baltimore in the first place. I needed out of the DC area just to catch my breath, and it felt like he was the last tie to that area. But now I would say that my breath has been caught, and I miss DC more than I thought I would. Now that I have settled on a place, I feel at peace. My time in Baltimore will be much easier to survive knowing it won’t last forever.

It might even make my apartment less bothersome, but I doubt it. I’ve been without a dishwasher for what seems like a lifetime because the water pressure is so low it makes washing dishes incredibly taxing. I have submitted requests for everything that is wrong with my apartment and no one has come by. The last straw for me was finding a mouse eating my bread and hot dog buns.

I am paying too much for this apartment to have problems like this, especially those that go unaddressed. I am bothered that I cannot seem to be “the heavy” and get the repairmen out here on my own. I just hate letting people in that I don’t know, so I work around the problems on my own. I know I need help, but I have trouble helping myself. My dad and my sister advocate for me as much as they can, but it’s hard when they live so far away.

However, my sister is a lobbyist, so that’s another reason why Rockville is a better choice for me than Baltimore. When she’s in her DC office, I’d like to be closer than I am now. We have too much fun together to make her come all this way. However, I know that I have introduced her to a place she loves as well. Again, Baltimore is not really the problem. The Inner Harbor is gorgeous, as is Fell’s Point. It’s getting around Baltimore that’s the hard part. When she comes to visit, she rents a car and all of my problems disappear. I don’t drive, so it’s nice that she’s willing to drive me around.

The most fun I’ve had in Baltimore is when she’s come to visit, because she looks up restaurants and decides where we’re going to go in advance. It becomes a “staycation” for me because it’s always a place I haven’t heard of yet. Of the two of us, she’s the social butterfly. I wish I was more like her, because she’s so headstrong that I feel taken care of in her presence. I wish I could extend that feeling to others.

It bothers me that I’m her older sister and I’m not able to provide that feeling of safety to her. I am sure I had my moments when we were young and this is just payback, but still. I wish that I was large and in charge, but I have a struggling relationship with taking care of myself, much less others.

Which brings us back around… it’s hard to point fingers at anything that bothers me more than my treatment of myself, so it’s time to get happier.

It starts with looking at fish.

I’m Not Sure There Are 10 Certain Things in Life

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.
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Here we go. I will try:

  1. I am a sinner, a worm. All I can do is ask for repeated forgiveness. That’s the beauty of faith, I guess, but somehow God forgiving me doesn’t do as much good as being able to forgive myself. That will take a lifetime, and I have to be prepared, because no one gets out of life without sin, including me.
  2. Evangelical Christianity will bring about its own death due to hypocrisy, but the social justice warriors dedicated to the message of the historical Christ are doing their best to stop the death of the church altogether. I have chosen the right side of history because even if the church dies, I still have the message of the historical Christ inside me. There are many messages that the church has handed down that deserve to die, such as Evangelical treatment of queer people. The reason the Evangelical church deserves their fate is the unfailing attitude that the net was full after they got in.
  3. I am certain that you will forgive me for ending a sentence with a preposition.
  4. I am not good at reaching out, but I am certain that I am getting better because I have to do so. It is not my choice to be more extroverted, but I do want to be included in a social safety net. No man is an island, probably the truest sentence I know. Perhaps my need will lead me back into a church, but I’m not quite ready for that yet- I’m certain. If I do re-join a church, it will be because the music got me there. I miss being a singer, and could use the money if I was hired to be a section leader.
  5. I am certain that I am a spoonie, and I am dealing with those repercussions. Having bipolar, AuDHD, and cerebral palsy are all problems that I’ve masked and ignored since I was old enough to be aware that I wasn’t like other kids. Now that I’m aging, they are all a straight up problem to be solved. My care team is recommending that I file for disability because I already have a solid case due to my last two hospitalizations, and I am not sure how I feel about that…. the “hallucinations” I experienced were curated by an unknown quantity, and the only reason I cannot prove it is that I was too dumb to remember to take screenshots. It’s a rabbit hole I could go down for hours, trying to prove that I did not make up the reasons I was hospitalized. Alternatively, if I just say that I hallucinated everything, it’s better for my disability case. But I wish I could put my illness on the organization that caused it, because my illness was nothing if not organized. Of that, I am certain. I am also aware that I sound “crazy” to anyone that would read this paragraph in abstentia, that only the people who were there would know what I meant. This paragraph is for them. I really wish my relationship with Heytch had been real, whether we were off in our own little world or I’d been accepted into her family as one of the crew. Because of the power of suggestion, I had created a deep inner landscape, a garden with deep roots and a master gardener to tend me, kissing the top of my head as she scoots out the door for her next adventure.
  6. I am certain that I am not a gardener, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try and create deep roots in other areas of my life. I am one who waits for nourishing rain, of which we are getting a lot of this year. In fact, the skies are dark surrounding my apartment, and it is up to me whether to stay inside or to dance between the drops.
  7. I am certain that I am making progress in Spanish, and may take home the gold trophy this week for the most XP on Duolingo. Because I do not work, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to perfect learning a second language instead. From Duolingo, I will graduate to reading books and watching the news. I do not know if I will become fluent, but that is not the goal. The goal is to be able to have comfortable conversations with people, which I can do at the Home Depot next to my apartment. As ICE gets more and more active, I need to have my finger on the pulse of the community it is trying to destroy.
  8. I am certain that even if I never have a “real job,” I will continue to write. Sometimes that will be here, sometimes that will be on Medium, and sometimes that will be with published books. I look forward to creating an anthology for Kindle Unlimited, and I will let everyone know when it is finished. You’ll find some of your favorite entries, and some of mine.
  9. I am certain that I have a lot of apologies to make in all of my sinning, and look forward to the chance to make them. But again, you can only resurrect a relationship if both parties are interested. To my Finnish baby, I am so sorry. I popped off and got too angry, too fast. I don’t deserve your forgiveness or your friendship, but I hope that one day you’ll remember that I wasn’t always angry. That there is a lot of love we are both throwing away in the moment, and we’ll have to wonder whether it was worth it to move on rather than trying to compromise our way to healthier patterns. Perhaps that will come with peace and forward motion to other things, and perhaps it will bring us back together. I am uncertain which way is healthier, but I do know that it’s not only my feelings that matter. Your feelings matter, and I was too hasty. Of that, I am certain.
  10. I am certain that I will die someday, and I’m thinking about legacy on this web site already. That’s because I do not think about what is going on in the moment, but about what someone will discover when they read 50 or 100 years from now. Even though the dues for the URL may not be paid, the Internet Archive holds all our secrets. I am trying to paint a portrait of real life- how one human lived. It is something that is missing from the thousands of years before us and I think it’s very important. I don’t need to know how kings and queens lived their lives, but the struggles of the everyman. I do not think that my words are exalted in any way, it only matters that they exist.

Wisdom

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What do you think gets better with age?
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I think that the only thing that gets better with age is wisdom. You have enough life experiences to react with more ease and grace than you did in your younger years because so much has happened to you that you know what deserves your time and what doesn’t. You have enough regrets to know not to commit the same mistakes, as well as enough victories to know what works.

You become better at regulating your own emotions, and controlling your own behavior. You realize that every problem begins and ends with you. You have no need to count on others to provide the answers, because you realize that they are only speaking from their experiences when they provide advice, which cannot line up to your own. It isn’t that you stop taking advice (necessarily), it just looks different because you have a better sense of what will fit you and what won’t.

I have recognized that these are the things I need to work on in my own life, this continuing to learn emotional regulation and impulse control. I lost the great love of my life over it, because I was so angry that she lied I could not function. As a result, it made me so depressed I needed counseling and still struggle with those demons. The thing that makes me feel better about the whole situation is that I am not the great love of hers, so we will drift apart naturally over time as I forgive myself and move on.

The thing is, though, I am being dragged kicking and screaming toward my own redemption. Getting better with age feels so far away because this relationship did not express any wisdom in controlling impulses or emotional regulation. I popped off. Full stop. That comes with my brand of neurodivergence, but it doesn’t mean that I am not accountable for my actions. I am filled with sentences like, “if I could go back, these are the things I would change.” But they are useless and would fall on deaf ears.

I sit like an old wizard twisting his beard, alone in my castle.

What I can do is provide comfort to myself- that I haven’t met all the people I’m going to love in my life, nor have I met all the people who are going to love me. I can only work on myself and try to become the idealist my personality profile says I am. I am tripped up by my own mental illness, and that comes with its own set of problems. They require addressing, because I am tired of not being included in the safety net of a local friend group and it’s my health that stops me from getting out and making one.

I have become too introverted with age, refusing to leave my house in favor of communicating through writing. Though there is nothing wrong with that in moderation, the pendulum has swung too far. Letters are not enough, but it’s amazing how much they’ve provided over the years. I have more friends in other places than I do in Baltimore and DC, and keep in touch with them daily thanks to the Internet. But something is missing without contact comfort, and I’m tired of pretending that I don’t need handshakes, hugs, and face time.

I suppose that also had to come with age, because I had to go on this journey to figure it out.

I have spent the last 12 years touch-starved and lonely because I was more interested in learning about my pen pal than reaching out to people in my area. I gave her too much power, another morsel of wisdom that has only come with age. I am not sorry that I fell in love with her writing, because she’s damn good at it. But I’m sorry that it isolated me to the point where I didn’t want relationships with other people. I just hung on two words:

Someday, perhaps…..

I still hang on those words occasionally because none of this feels real. Nothing feels final because it never has. We will always have a reader/writer connection because even when she’s not in touch with me, she’s still reading here. I can only hope that I will write something that will resonate with her, because she sees that I am learning and growing in wisdom. That may be a pipe dream, but I’m allowed to have them.

Wisdom is telling me to have a wait and see attitude, because every time I think that my connection to her is shallow, she surprises me with depth. She has always surprised me with depth, because I will get two or three words from her for months on end, feeling rejected and small until the Mama Wolverine claws come out of nowhere and slash my problems from me. If nothing else, I will miss that about her in the future.

Getting better with age is allowing myself to be my own Mama Wolverine, slashing problems away on my own. I think that has been the point all these years, learning to stand up for myself. I didn’t so much fall in love with a pen pal as I fell in love with the person I was when I was writing to her. Even she says that meeting her in person couldn’t live up to my imagination, which made me blush because she knows my imagination better than I do and I think was trying to poke a little fun.

Eventually, what I hope gets better with age is letting go of her as the voice in my head to which I compare my own.

Spanish and Sundry

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are you most excited about for the future?
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I have finally reached a section of Duolingo that has vocabulary I haven’t studied and I’m on my own. It makes me excited for the future because I can’t skate by on 30 year old lessons in school. I am actually using the software to prepare me for trips to Mexico in the future- none of which are planned, by the way, but I have a better shot of going to Mexico than anywhere else. Granted, when I get there I will mostly be asking them why they don’t wear the green t-shirts and where the bank might be, but it’s a start. 😉

Kidding, but not by much. I remember the first time I went to Mexico on a mission trip. My Spanish was equal to that of a Mexican toddler, but the people were so kind and corrected me with such love that it lit a fire in me to learn more. I learned that Sylvia and Hector were getting married, that Marta was building a new house, and that little kids don’t listen to me no matter what language I speak (I was on a trip to teach vacation Bible school). It was my turn to listen because I picked up more just soaking up conversation than I would have trying to talk. For instance, those are the real names of the people I met, stuck in my brain even though it is now over 30 years since the last time I went to Reynosa. There is just no substitution for immersion, so it’s time to start finding telenovelas on Pluto TV, or watching the news on Telemundo/Univision.

I had friend recommend “La Reina del Sur,” but I have already watched “Queen of the South” on Netflix. It would be a good brush-up to have a show with which I’m already familiar, but there are others I haven’t seen that might be better after I finish it. For instance, I have not seen the original “Yo Soy Betty, la Fea.” That’s “Ugly Betty” for you American viewers. I have found it on Peacock and Apple TV+ according to reddit, so I will be searching it out after I finish this blog entry.

Because I have an auditory processing disorder (comes free with neurodivergence), I like to have the subtitles on as I listen. People don’t have subtitles, but I need the extra help while I am learning.

There is a point to all of this. Many of the homeless people I have encountered, as well as the workers in my neighborhood, speak Spanish and their English is poor. Instead of making them learn English, I want to turn the view of Americans on its head. I’m perfectly willing to put myself out there, mostly because if I get a job in the future, I want to work at Home Depot.

That’s another thing I’m looking forward to in the future- discussing jobs I could do with my care team so that I am not reliant on SSI/SSDI unless I really want to be. I am eligible for both because I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when I was 18 mos old. I don’t regret the choices I’ve made in my life with my career, but it would have been nice to know that I could have gotten disability from the jump. The reason I didn’t know is that my mother hid all the paperwork I needed to file and my sister found them among her personal effects after she died, well into my late 30s.

My mental health is not helping the situation, so I am looking forward to working all of this out. I either have a journey into the workforce or a journey into the court system in which I’ll have to fight for my right not to party.

But there are things I can do on my own to further my education, and a second language has filled the hole in my heart at not being able to work in the immediate future. Right now, my job is to attend classes at Cognitive Behavioral Health and learn all I can when I’m not there.

I actually started with Finnish, but after a 43 day streak, I was hospitalized for my mental health. After I got out of the hospital, it had been just long enough since I’d studied that I don’t remember much. It seems like I forgot Finnish in “kaksitoista sekuntia,” or 12 seconds.

Duolingo is also not the best learning tool for Finnish, because it does not have the AI features that Swedish and Spanish do. Everything is done with the keyboard and reading, so you don’t get to practice by speaking out loud. The reason Swedish is important is that the cooking school I would like to attend next year is in a Swedish-speaking region of Finland, Vaasa. The school is called Vamia, and it was recommended to me by a YouTuber named Cyril:

At this point, I do not know if this school is right for me because the tuition is free, but living in Europe is not. I am saving my pennies and riding out the lease I have in the United States until November, and then I’ll decide what to do. I know I would like to go to Vaasa before I decide to move there, but even that is a stretch on my budget. I just have to hope that I will get more subscribers to both my Medium and WordPress blog, because every subscriber here adds to my ad revenue, and every reader on Medium adds to the income I get the longer you scroll through my drivel. 😉

Culinary school would accomplish two things. The first is that I would like to work with Finnish YouTubers like Cyril to create a channel with Finnish content. I think I would be hilariously cranky like Anthony Bourdain, because that is my kitchen personality. The second is that I want to start a ministry for unhoused people that revolves around the kitchen, and I would be better equipped to do that having been trained as a chef and not merely the line cook I am now.

Traditional advice is to work in a kitchen before you go to culinary school to make sure you like it. I have 10 years under my belt, from dish to pantry to sauté. I have worked every station and though I cannot say I am excellent at any of them, I know I will get better by hanging in at school. Plus, there are plenty of jobs I could do without learning Finnish until I’m ready, because most Finns speak English, especially in the hospitality industry. Vamia also instructs in English, with (I’m guessing) the requisite amount of French required.

In the meantime, I am looking forward to all the nonprofit ideas I have coming to fruition. I have to have a Plan B in case going to school in Europe is not feasible… and it’s probably not, to be perfectly honest. I want to go more than anything, but again, it’s going to take a lot of money I don’t have yet. But that’s the thing about dreams. When other people know you want something, they are willing to help. For instance, my readers showing up every day. Each little bit helps.

If I stay in the Baltimore area, my idea is to create a nonprofit called “The Sinners’ Table.” It centers around accepting all the people that society rejects, giving them a fine dining experience they could never afford on their own. I am doing the hard work of identifying stakeholders and writing a business plan, because that is something I can do in my spare time while I am waiting to see what is going to happen with my job and school aspirations. If other people have to run it because I am not eligible for a job, I will be able to volunteer.

But why Finland in the meantime?

I would only have to worry about my living expenses and not the fabulously high cost of tuition. Any Le Cordon Bleu institution in the United States would bankrupt me quickly, while I can find housing for the rough cost of living in DC or Baltimore. Some things would be more expensive, like clothing (I’m not skimping out on cold weather gear), but an apartment is roughly the same. The biggest cost to my family would be me being so far away that it’s hard to visit. However, culinary school does not last that long. If I like Finland so much that I want to stay and get permanent residency or citizenship, that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I come to it. I don’t get to see my family that much as it stands now, because they’re all in Texas…. far away from the current flooding, I might add.

My biggest problem is that I am an idealist who doesn’t necessarily know how to break down large ideas into small steps for execution. I generally work best in a team for that, and I’m lucky to have one under me now. I have gathered the best and the brightest at Lanagan Media Group, most of whom went to high school with me at High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Instead of using AI, I get immediate feedback from an arts brain trust.

Because make no mistake, cooking is art in any language.

And in the United States, the language in the kitchen is overwhelmingly Spanish. I want to be able to speak to my employees in whatever language they feel the most comfortable. Therefore, Finnish can wait.

But not for long.

The Aada-See

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What could you let go of, for the sake of harmony?
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The Homerian epic that has been my relationship with Aada needs to go for my own peace of mind. We have hurt each other over and over, trying to change… neither one of us has done well in that area. So now, it’s a blessing and releasing. I have asked God before to go with her where I can’t, and I repeat that prayer today. If I cannot be the friend that she needs, then I don’t want to be her friend at all.

It’s not that I don’t have hope of a redemption story, it’s that you can only have a redemption story if both parties are interested. She says that I have a need to manipulate both her and our relationship, without taking into account all the ways she’s manipulated me over the years. That’s for her and her therapist to work out, because her therapist will never meet me. She will never take in the drastic changes in my own personality as Aada’s edicts came down from on high.

The biggest is that I’d never had to keep a secret from my wife before, and that caused way more problems than it was worth. I suppose that I’m grateful I got to see Dana become violent so I knew she was capable of it before I spent any more time with her, but it all started with Aada saying “don’t talk to anyone.” The problem is that she made it where I couldn’t talk to her, either. I sat alone in my room with the weight of the world bearing on my stomach.

However, that was not our only problem.

She doesn’t realize just how much her lie cost me, and she never will. That’s because she didn’t come with me to a book talk with my favorite author. I couldn’t glance back at her and see her eyes when the question was asked, “so are you looking for a job now?” She couldn’t see the torrent of emotions running underneath my skin, but she could have if she’d been able to see my face. I was too nervous to say yes without her approval.

Through it all, I’ve charted our friendship on this web site, and I think it has helped me to see some perspective. I do not like it when Aada gets main character syndrome and fails to take in what I am actually saying. She skips over my pain and concentrates on her own. That has to stop, for both our sake. I am writing in hopes that she’ll listen to me. She is reading to look for attacks that aren’t there. She reams me out and I cry…. lather, rinse, repeat. It has been going on for 12 years now, and for the life of me I don’t know why I’ve hung in.

I guess you would just have to know how beautiful she is in spite of all her flaws and failures to know why she has been my Achilles heel.

But for the sake of harmony, I cannot hang in anymore.

She will continue to read everything I write, calling it toxic. The only way to stop that is to write about other things… I have to find a new muse, something that fills me with the passion to write. It shouldn’t be a person, because it puts too much on one relationship. I need to find nature, or God, or something.

The only thing left is to thank her for being the inspiration behind my writing thus far, and forgive her for all her missteps.

It’s so much easier than forgiving myself for mine.

Estudio Mucho

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Learning Spanish has always been dear to my heart. While I know I should be studying Finnish if I want to get a job there, I have found that I am burning out because it is so difficult. I switched to Spanish so that I could get a break and actually make some headway on Duolingo.

I studied for two years in high school, and as it turns out, Spanish hasn’t changed that much. Therefore, I am making it quickly through the ranks with a 96% average. My only problem is that I need for people to speak slower, and that isn’t always possible. I have an auditory processing disorder where voices sound like garbled noise and it takes me some time to figure out what was actually said. This is not exclusive to Spanish, it’s just much harder because words are strung together at a much faster rate.

I am finding that reading in Spanish is more my speed. I can take my time and really figure out context. I can also speak Spanish, but it gets problematic when I can’t understand their replies. Like I said, Spanish is so much faster, especially for someone who grew up in the South. I don’t even speak English with any speed. The urgency of Spanish seems unparalleled.

I’m also frustrated that it’s Spanish from Spain and not Mexico, so things sound a bit different to my Tex-Mex ear. My favorite phrase has always been “habla despacio, por favor” (speak slower, please), and I’m thankful that Duolingo actually has a button for that. It makes me wish that people had a button, too.

Boop!

It’s also frustrating that it’s not as easy as it was in high school because Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area in my brain are set for life. Language acquisition comes from both of those places, and their malleability is on the downslope. I never got to full fluency, but I was at least able to carry on full conversations while on mission trips and vacations in Mexico.

That’s my goal- I could be fluent if I lived there and didn’t have a choice. Because I do, I nope out to English when it gets “too hard.” I am such a perfectionist that it gets “too hard” easily, because I have rejection sensitivity dysphoria even with software.

I have learned to regroup and go back later. I’m determined to succeed, and have a 70 day streak going. I should get some books or access to Rosetta Stone through the library, but I’m not quite ready to take the plunge. I just know that of all the languages I could speak in the US, English and Spanish are the most useful.

I remember when I got to Maryland, I went up to a janitor in the mall and realized pretty quickly he didn’t speak English. So, I flipped into Spanish to get directions to the bathroom and he looked like a spaceship had landed and little burritos walked out. I could understand- I don’t imagine that gringos walk up to him and speak Spanish all that often.

Especially since white people are known for telling brown people to “speak American.” That’s not a thing. We speak English. I mention this because I saw a video the other day of a couple walking up to a train conductor in London, of all places. They asked him if he spoke American. When he said he spoke English, they walked away until their 10-year-old said “I can still understand him.”

If I had one wish, it would be to speak every language in the world. I would love to be able to understand anything and everything regardless of country. I think that’s why I’ve flipped around so much on Duolingo. Spanish is my home base, but I’ve dabbled in Arabic, Russian, Finnish, and Swedish. Of all those languages, I enjoyed Finnish the most. I got to where I could write my own blog titles and have Medium’s voice AI read them back to me. Hearing myself in Finnish was quite a trip.

Hearing myself in Spanish isn’t as exciting, only because I’m used to it…. and in fact, because I grew up in Texas, Spanish doesn’t even sound foreign. The only time I’ve had trouble was with dialects in the kitchen. Again, mine is Mexican. The cooks in my Silver Spring pub used a Salvadoran dialect. It’s one of those things that is mostly the same right up until it’s not.

Hilarity ensued.

Luckily, I’ve blocked all of it out.

Quietly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
How do you express your gratitude?
View all responses

I go into my closet to pray, thanking God for the little things. I have an apartment with running water. I have a trust to make sure that I don’t have to work when I cannot. I have a family that understands I have cerebral palsy, Austism, ADHD, and bipolar disorder with psychotic features. I have friends who would do anything for me. I have a deep relationship with the historical Christ, who directs me toward social justice, and an ability to write about it. I have talent when it comes to crafting sentences, from which I do not know where it started. If I had to guess, it was in elementary school.

My first win was an essay on adult illiteracy called “I Forgot My Reading Glasses,” in which I was asked to read it in front of the class in fifth grade.I have always been grateful that I can communicate with many people, and I draw people to me with it.

I am grateful that I have had mega fans over the years, one that thought I was world famous and several who have thought I should write books in addition to blogging. I don’t know if I will ever write a book, but because I write so many words on this web site, I am grateful that I know I’m capable of publishing.

I am grateful that some people think I should write an anthology of the blog entries I’ve already written, and should look for a literary agent. I do not think my writing is as good as my readers do, but I am over the moon that many people think it is.

I do not know what the future holds for me, but gratitude flows within me that I have so many options. I do not want to go down in history as just a writer, so I’m also grateful that my nonprofit ideas are taking off. I really do want to give the unhoused a place to go, to eat and learn to cook. I am unsure how to do this, because both my ideas seem to resonate. The first is a set of pop-ups to give the unhoused “dinner with dignity,” food that they could never afford on their own.

The second is to build a library based on Oodi, which not only has books but a maker space as well where anyone can rent tools, there’s a kitchen space for all I want to do with my pop-ups and cooking classes, and is a bigger idea than all of my other ones put together.

Yesterday, I came up with the idea to write to Oodi and ask if I could have a copy of their original business plan for the Finnish government. I need a guide as to how to get the idea through the Maryland house. My sister is a lobbyist, and I know that she could help me with the form, perhaps sending me a blank bill to fill out. I need to find a sponsor, but I don’t know any….. yet. I know when I find someone, that will be a great day full of thanks and tears.

I do not want to sit on my laurels, I want to bring hope to other people while I am able. I am not sure that people will take me seriously, but it only takes one person to believe in me.

I am grateful that I can come up with lots of creative ideas on a dime, and these have resonated with people I admire. I have said many times that I came to the area to do great things, and I am working toward them by joining Kindle Unlimited and checking out all the books I can find on starting a nonprofit.

Gratitude will get me the rest of the way, because so many legislators go without thanks as they work towards ideas that may never come to fruition. Saying “thank you” instead of being angry that things aren’t happening fast enough is key, because right now ideas for the disenfranchised don’t pass through congress quickly if I want to take this idea to the federal government instead. I have a feeling I will need both state and federal grants to get the library I want, because Baltimore is a small city. I do not know if their budget will sustain a library like Oodi, but it would be a shame not to try since that is a democratic base.

It starts with me, though. I have to put in the work and I’m grateful that I do have enough energy to sit and type at my computer. I am also grateful for the 10 years I spent in the kitchen, because while I am not capable of a full-time job there anymore, I am definitely capable of creating a brigade for other people. I know how to organize stations, and I know how to teach. I learned from the best, and I intend to pass on my knowledge to people who need jobs and don’t know how to get started.

Those that can’t, teach…. and the hardest part of teaching is remembering what it was like not to know. I do remember those days fondly, and not every dish I make turns out perfectly. I have gratitude that other people can and will see me fail. I am not a chef lording my talent above them on high. I am human, and so are my potential students. Sometimes, failing up is the best lesson, and instead of getting angry at yourself, you have to figure out what that failure is trying to teach you.

It’s reaching up for gratitude because anger will only lead to more mistakes, especially if you are under pressure during service.

I am also taking a lesson from José Andrés, that feeding people is not political. I do not want to check political credentials at the door, but there must be a basic respect for all. I will be grateful if this library does not turn into a political fight because people of all backgrounds find themselves without a place to live.

The Sinners’ Table is being elevated because I realized that it is a great project in and of itself, but we have a chance to add even more specialties with a library that rents out equipment, gives the unhoused a place to go during the day, and provides more avenues for learning than just cooking.

We have the ability to create a performing arts center with classes of all kinds in a soundproof basement or top floor, providing beginner lessons on instruments that kids cannot afford on their own. When people think of “the unhoused,” they rarely think of hungry children who also need an outlet for their emotions.

I have a feeling that private donors would be interested in this as well, but government money is key because I need buy-in. They’re the ones that will give me the money to build what I need or overhaul a historic building without having to endure the ups and downs of private fundraising, of which I’m sure I will also do plenty if government grants aren’t enough.

I keep telling my HR and PR teams at Lanagan Media group that their favorite word needs to become “endowment.” That’s because I cannot think of a city that needs something like this more than Baltimore. There are places within my city that look like a war zone, and have the crime statistics to prove it.

People turn away from crime when they feel loved and needed, when they feel their own gratitude shining through. Recidivism goes down when people become educated, and a library like this gives all people, rich and poor, a place to go that is free.

It’s also a way to redeem my own sins and feel gratitude that I’m actually giving back to my community. My plan, should it work out, is to actually spend time in Finland at a vocational school so that I can actually get my chef stripes. I need to learn more about teaching while working in the bubble that comes with culinary school. The school itself, Vami, is free. Living in Europe is not.

My gratitude will overflow if I get my wish to study there, because I cannot find a free school in the United States. However, I do feel that it is necessary to become a chef in order to lead others in an administrative fashion, because I am not cut out for the line. I am cut out for HR, inventory, menu planning, and teaching the prep and line cooks what I need them to do. They’re the ones that will take on the heavy lifting of feeding the multitudes. I have put in enough time to know that cerebral palsy and 50 lb bags of flour do not mix.

In school, I would have a lot more support with things like that than I would in the fast-paced world of the line. I have heard too much about what culinary school is like not to believe it, because I’ve had friends that have been to Johnson & Wales, Oregon Culinary Institute, and Culinary Institute of America. All of these stories have led me to believe that I could make it through school with a lot more ease than I could work in a restaurant every day, and it is the education I am missing in order to create the fine dining experience I want the unhoused to have when I get back.

I would have gratitude that I got to sit out what’s happening in America for a while. I do not like the direction that the country is going and I need a break from the constant crazymaking. I am over the Republicans being the party of “no” and the Democrats trying to appease everyone all the time so that we cannot make headway. Gratitude would be the ability to forget what is happening and focus on Finland, even though the odds are that it would be attacked by Russia while I was there.

The thing is, though, the Finnish military is prepared and no one is better than them at fighting in that climate. I would be safe nearly anywhere, and with an American passport, I could leave at the first sign of trouble. I would stay if I became fluent in Finnish and Russian, though, because I know I could help just by overhearing conversations and reporting them.

My gratitude would be turning my blog into an important war story about someone who once was lost and then was found in the strangest way possible… that when it got dangerous, I got calm.

That’s the gratitude with ADHD and Autism. The crazier it is around me, the more calm I become. I think I would be an excellent war reporter because my instincts are sharper when my cortisol is sky-high.

I quietly take in my surroundings and triage what needs to be done, then when the cortisol subsides, I write about my experiences.

Feeling the gratitude that I was once again able to make it through something I thought I couldn’t.

Dreaming

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I know that because I betrayed Aada, she will never trust me again. That’s because she will not give me a chance to rebuild. The thought is devastating, and runs on repeat in my head. All of my thoughts of her are now intrusive, because there’s nothing I can or should do. I just need to leave well enough alone.

Unfortunately, that is not my personality.

I want to fix everything. Surely, there’s something I can do, something I can say that will make things right. I don’t do well with relationships ending, because I don’t think they ever do. As long as we’re both breathing, there’s still a connection. It is manhole cover in size, and I cannot manage to shut it down.

My energy goes through that chord even when we’re not talking, because I know that she can use all the prayers she can get, even though she wouldn’t call it that. She doesn’t “do” prayers. She used to call me her “pinch hitter,” and I hope that at the very least, she’ll think of me that way now. I know I have done wrong, but I do not want that to be my only narrative.

I don’t want to provoke her, as she says my blog entries are designed to do. I want to tell my other readers that this relationship has left me in a million little pieces. I have felt every feeling for her that a human can express, from deep love to deep anger. My anger got the best of me quite a few times over the years… and so has hers. Through it, we’ve managed to forgive over and over.

Therefore, even though Aada says that her decision is final, it does not feel real. It won’t for a very long time, because I will need to turn away from writing to her. I will need to turn away from writing about her. I will need to stop making her my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night. I will need to find other people to make those touchstones, and it is frightening.

I do not like moving on from someone I’ve loved this much over the years, one who agreed to be my yellow string on the murder board of polyamory (red strings are romantic, yellow strings are emotional support- making that very clear). Cutting a string is tantamount to cutting off a limb for me, because I feel emotions down to my neurons. Pain tears through me when I think that the other end of the string is an empty slot.

The truth is that she made friends with a blogger, not knowing what that meant. I made friends with someone in government, not knowing what that meant, either. We should have worked closely together, or she should have told me I couldn’t have a blog. Either would have been acceptable, as her career came first.

I don’t know how I lost sight of that fact, but I did. I didn’t say to myself, “self, you’re running in a different league now. Cut the shit.” Because all my writing is shit to me. I throw it out there and let other people tell me whether it’s good or not. It’s not my decision as to what has value.

Aada found tremendous value in my words at first, and then as our relationship became more enmeshed, the more she hated being a featured player. I am sure that I have done my part in embarrassing the hell out of her, but I hope I explained my writing to her behind the scenes well enough that she won’t hate it all in the future.

That’s dreaming, I’m sure.

I wish that I could stop crying, that the grief would lift long enough for me to get out and start making other friends. But so far, I’ve just stayed in my own little bubble. I need time and space to emote. Because I’m autistic, my emotions are large and need room to breathe. I need time alone for red mist rage at myself, because I did not get the future that I wanted.

I sabotaged it, and I will never know why. Perhaps I was tired of keeping secrets all the time, that it made my life too small. Perhaps I was tired of all the isolation, because Aada would not let me get closer to her. She kept me at arm’s length and let me sit in my discomfort at not knowing who she really was. I mean, I do know her writing voice and could pick it out of a lineup. I have memorized her face, but only in one photo.

I have dreamed many times of making her laugh, have sent her videos and pictures of myself so she could get to know me “in person.” I wanted to make the transition from online to offline as easy as possible. But I think that wanting to meet in person was just too intimidating. I cannot help but believe that when I asked her about it, she got nervous and started fighting with me just to end our relationship before it could happen.

I can see how meeting me would be intimidating given all that I’ve written, but I am strikingly different in conversation. I am disconnected from my writing and do not retain blog entries. Our relationship would have been without context. All of the love that I poured into my writing may or may not have been there after a coffee together, because who knows if we would have gotten along as well without the anonymous wall that the Internet presents?

I think about that all the time… that normalization of our friendship would have cut her out of my blog almost immediately. Why would I need to write about her? I just saw her yesterday! Etc.

I dream about what I would do if Aada came back to me and said that what I did was horrible and I have a ladder to climb if I really want to make things better. My answer is “anything. I’d do anything.” It is not up to me to decide how hurt she is, nor how many steps I’d have to climb. And right now, it’s just a dream.

I am preparing for the worst, that I’ll never see her again, and my heart is bleeding out. Hope slowly drains from me as I fumble around on this web site, trying to explain how a virtual relationship got me so twisted up that I cannot breathe. I am lucky that I have other people in my life who have gone through the same thing, that 10 years later it still hurts to think of an Internet friend who is no longer.

I remember saying that I thought she was scared, that frankly, she didn’t know what would happen if we were alone in a room together. Would our easy give and take transfer to conversation, or would we tear each other apart? She did not answer.

She did not answer a lot of my questions, preferring to hold her emotions close to the vest. I am attracted to that, because my emotions spill all over everywhere and I constantly tell myself that I need to learn compartmentalization. In all my friends and romantic partners, there’s been that disconnect in which I constantly crave their emotions when they are unable to show them.

I think that Aada was attracted to me energy-wise for the opposite reason. She saw her inability to emote and wanted to be more like me. That I was a breath of fresh air when she was stuck in the doldrums. But over time, that led to too many fights because I required her to do emotional labor.

I extol my love for Aada all over the place, but I wasn’t always happy with her. No relationship can claim that it’s always happy if it’s in any way dynamic.

Our dynamic was to have a very close moment and then separate, because Aada could not sustain it. Our dance of intimacy required separation after difficult conversations. I did not like it, because I couldn’t understand why closeness couldn’t stay in place. Now that I know more about her, I know that it wasn’t personal. It’s what she requires, and I fell down on the job.

I want to give her what she requires, and right now that is separation. It is not good for me, but her needs must come first. I am the one that hurt her this time, and it doesn’t matter what I think anymore.

I look in the mirror, and I am shattered.

Into a million little pieces that will eventually rearrange into a different order, with or without her.

A Letter That May Never Be Read

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Aada,

In trying to talk about my own feelings, I exposed the world to my perceptions of what yours might be. It was wrong, and I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you why I did it, but there is no answer to that, just like there is no answer to the reason why you lied to me. What I do know for sure is that I did not set out to hurt you, that you were collateral damage in trying to explain my journey to everyone else.

I am sorry, like you said, “a million times over.”

I have no excuse for my behavior because there isn’t one. I fucked up. I also accept that you have no interest in working toward a future, and that’s what scares me the most. I don’t know who I am without you. I think, though, that I am going to find out.

This phase of my life has been rewarding, but also tremendously lonely and isolating. Your insistence that I tell no one anything at any time was also manipulative, because it marked all my other friends as unsafe. I sat with unbelievable anxiety in the pit of my stomach while I waited for letters from you, not reaching out to anyone else because I couldn’t. If anyone asked me what was wrong, I would not be able to tell them. I got to where I wouldn’t leave the house. My mental illness spiraled out of control. I didn’t get any relief until you said I could write about what I wanted.

I took your words seriously, that there’s nothing I could say that would hurt you now that your life is different. Then, come to find out, that wasn’t true at all. We could have avoided a lot of missteps in my publishing life if you had been clearer. I thought that for the first time, our lives were equally boring.

But they’re not.

If I had known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have published anything about our relationship at all, and yet it is the richest tapestry on this web site. I hope that one day your anger will lift, and you will go back a few years. I think you will be surprised at how much I’ve learned. That seems to be the way, anyway. My friends read about themselves and are incensed in the moment, and then when time has passed, my words just hit different.

I was never trying to manipulate you. I was trying to illustrate you- to paint you with words. I have often ripped you off blind, using things you’ve said so that you know I’m paying attention.

One of the most profound things you’ve ever said to me is that I “paint my feelings as fact.” I am still not sure what that means, but it’s such a beautiful line that I repeat it. I guess I just have never met a writer who didn’t paint their feelings as fact, because it’s their story.

It’s a line that I wish had led to an in-person conversation, because I would have liked to look into your eyes as you explained what you meant. I would have liked to look into your eyes as you explained lots of things. But knowing me, I would have worn a baseball cap to hide mine. I was social masked into eye contact at a young age. I could not hold your gaze long, but I would have tried.

I would have tried harder to be the friend that you needed me to be with more support from you, because guessing what was okay to publish and what wasn’t landed me in this mess. I do not blame you. I can only blame myself. But what I do know is that if we’d had any kind of production meeting, you’d be happier with the result.

I needed my editor.

I would burn this whole blog down to get her back, because that’s how much I believe in our ability to write together. You write fiction, I write nonfiction. I’ve had so many ideas over the years as to how we could harness this and make it profitable. Maybe I’d be a better editor for you because I wouldn’t catch plot holes, but I’d definitely catch spelling/grammar mistakes.

It’s just another dream that died, because we’re not on the same page.

I wish I could stop being so sad. My life feels over. I keep thinking about the conversations we had before I was admitted to Sinai and wondering how it all went to hell. I do know that when I was in the hospital, you were with me in spirit. You sat at the foot of my bed while I slept, watching to make sure I got healthy. There were too many signs of you to ignore.

How did you get that green shirt to me? How did it get back to you?

You are always the best.

We could start writing there… it’s a story that needs to be told in fiction for both of us, doesn’t it?

You are always the best.

You told me 12 years ago that you’d have lots of juicy bits for my first novel, and I still don’t know how to write fiction. I don’t visualize anything. My brain doesn’t come with that feature. You can see the whole map at once. I have a feeling that’s a large part of our story without saying anything. That you saw the whole map while I fumbled in the dark.

I’m still trying to find my way without a lantern.

That’s because I want to stay in my lane, writing what I know while you build the fictional worlds. I’d be a good research assistant and Dagger’s not hiring….

I wish I’d known how much you thought of me, wanted to impress me, wanted to be my friend as much as I wanted to be yours. I know all of that can’t possibly still be true, but I’m flattered nonetheless.

I wasn’t the one that said you were a nobody. To me, you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. I was trying to send you a message, and you thought I was being literal, launching an assault with words.

I thought you would know by now how I feel about you after years and years of telling you EVERY DAY how much I feel for you. I’m not sure a day has gone by in 12 years that I haven’t written to you, my blog coming in second because if I was responding to you, my other readers just didn’t matter.

I believe that part of you is proud to be Aada, because when I write about other subjects my emotions don’t run as deep or as real. Part of you, I’m sure, would like me to push the big red button and move on to something else. But how are you going to feel when I do?

You said that you learn more about yourself when you’re reading me, and that comment sticks in my mind as well. It’s what I wish every reader took away. That they read me to learn more about them.

Stay away for as long as you need, because the thing about letters is that they keep. The thing about blog entries is that they keep. You have a treasure trove here that you may not want to lose. I have not always behaved badly. Neither have you. We have grown and learned much just by being so incredibly different.

You are logic. I am emotion. We are built to be complementary angles, but we flounder by dividing up all the labor. Sometimes, I must be more logical. Sometimes, you must be more emotional. But that’s only if there’s a relationship to fix. I don’t think there is right now, I’m just going off past history. Eventually, you’ll want to know what I’m up to and you’ll drop a note out of nowhere, and I will be prepared. I know you well enough to know that you’re thinking, “that’s impossible.” But life is long, and we haven’t managed to stay away from each other yet.

I really would sit down with you and your therapist if the opportunity presented itself, because I do not want to be a manipulative force in your life. I have told you for years that I came to DC to do great things, and in no world do I want you to be excluded from them.

I would also sit down with your husband and answer any question he threw at me, and in my imagination, the first is, “what in the absolute hell is wrong with you?” I would probably cry and say that many doctors have tried to figure that out, but they’re still scratching their heads. Join the club.

If this is really the end, I hope he’s the one for you. I hope your family, friends, and colleagues are there to fill the hole that I left in your heart. I’m only now realizing that I made one, because our relationship was so turbulent that I didn’t take in your feelings, not a quarter of them.

I have cried so many nights, wanting to please you and not knowing that I already did. That I am enough, all by myself. I’m sorry for every moment that you did not feel like enough, all by yourself… and that is what was so surprising about your lie. That you didn’t believe I was sufficiently impressed with you, as you are.

My God, Aada… if you only knew.

When my mother died, the only person I wanted was you. I couldn’t emote in front of people, but I could write letters into the night. I would not have recovered without it. So know that even if we never speak again, I will always remember your contributions to making me feel like there is life after the death of a loved one.

My life won’t be as interesting without you, but I have to be prepared for the fact that your anger will stay in place. That what I have done is too big to forget or forgive.

All I can say is that the emotions you said I had weren’t accurate in the slightest. You read me wrong, just like I read you wrong.

My point for the last year has been that we need to stop reading each other, because there are so many ways we could communicate our feelings. I have heard you talk in a voice note, but you have never picked up the phone. I have never seen your body language, micro aggressions, facial expressions, anything to indicate what is going on with you except words in the heat of the moment.

Surely there is a part of you that wishes you knew those things about me… that we hadn’t put it off so long. I hate that I know your coffee order and have never actually gotten to bring you one. I hate that we have never taken a walk. I hate that I only know you in black and white, because I know that there’s a well of information I’m missing and so are you.

We could fix this if we tried, but I cannot hope for that. I can only hope that I can recover on my own. But know that it is a setback of enormous proportions. I will have to work hard to forgive myself for everything I have done and left undone.

Because you are always the best.

Love,

Leslie

Structure of My Own Making

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your daily habits?
View all responses

When I wrote about this prompt last year, I remember saying that I didn’t have any daily habits. That was 100% true at the time, but now I’m charged with creating a structure with which I can live. My care team at Cognitive Behavioral Health does not think I am ready for a job yet, so I am muddling through what that actually means. Am I disabled for good and should start pursuing government assistance, or am I capable of slowly creating my own recovery into the workforce? My writing does provide a little bit of income, and as I get more popular here and on Medium, I see results. I’ve been a blogger for a very long time, but so far I’ve only had one fan who was so impressed she thought I should be world famous. I would like a few more of those. 😉 But nothing good will happen if I do not take care of myself.

This starts with setting medication reminders in my phone. My day flags if I do not have the correct doses at the right time. I have always been good about taking my medication because I had a doctor tell me that most bipolar patients stop taking their medication when they feel better, not realizing that it’s the medication that’s making them feel that way. However, I was not so on top of it that I remembered to take it at the same time. I’m also on a lot more medication than I used to be……………

I’ll talk about my psychiatric drugs because I think that people need to learn about them. I am not a doctor, just a waiting room that doesn’t suck (thanks, Paul Gilmartin. I stole that line from you). Crazy meds need to be talked about because it’s such a major undertaking to be put on them:

  • Lamictal (lamotrigine)
    • The first time I was put on this mood stabilizer was the first time I knew what it was like to live without depression. It took about six weeks for the fog to lift, but I’d never been more grateful in my life. The only side effect I’ve experienced so far is nausea, and it was very hard to deal with for a long time. Now, I’ve just decided to stay on it regardless of the side effects because other mood stabilizers make my weight balloon. It’s also an old drug now, so it’s relatively cheap if you don’t have insurance.
  • Lexapro (escitalopram)
    • This is the gold standard of SSRIs, and most bipolar people don’t take them. That’s why I think my diagnosis may be wrong, that I actually have autism and not bipolar disorder. In a bipolar patient, SSRIs tend to make them flip out with suicidal ideation, negative/intrusive thoughts, etc. My SSRI keeps me at an even keel when I am really paying attention to my body. As for side effects, I haven’t noticed any of them.
  • Buspar (buspirone)
    • This is what replaced my benzos for anxiety, because it is not related to them and yet performs the same function. It’s better for me because there’s no risk of addiction long term. I do not have an addictive personality, but better safe than sorry. I have been on Klonopin for over 10 years, but my new clinic doesn’t prescribe benzos to anyone. The entire hospital system has put their feet down over it, so I have to adjust. Now that I’ve been on it for several weeks, I am unsure whether it works or not. I will keep you posted. The one thing I do know is that it’s the most important drug for me to take at the same time every day, because it will flat stop working if I miss even one dose.

My crazy meds aren’t the only ones I take, they’re just the most important for keeping my structure stable. It feels like everything is hitting all at once as I age, because I didn’t have to worry about hormone replacement therapy even a year ago.

As an aside, it’s a big joke with my sister that because I’m enby, I thought that if I was going to do hormone replacement therapy, it would be in the other direction…. after that particular doctor’s appointment, I went home and consoled myself by buying both the book and audiobook of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.” I needed some Stress Tabs #10 and some candy bars (but maybe not 11). As it turns out, the book and audio were not enough. I also watched the movie on Prime just to see Kathy Bates… “how do you accidentally run into someone…. how do you accidentally run into someone six times?” I get it now. I’m older and I have more insurance.

My medication is working, and for that I am grateful. Now, my schedule runs from sun up to sun down, skipping the night owl routine altogether. And in fact, when I took my sleeping medication yesterday, the sun wasn’t even fully down yet. I prefer to work in the quiet of the morning, especially on the weekends before the kids in my apartment complex wake. The ones who live above me are particularly loud, which is why I’m glad I have good headphones. I hunker down in my office after a night of wild dreams and try to remember what they are. It provides a writing exercise that’s all my own, propelling me into really thinking about my life and what I want to accomplish. I accomplish nothing without coffee, through which all things are possible.

Coffee is also part of remembering to take my medication, because I have found that a lot of caffeine is just enough to control my ADHD, but Ritalin or Adderrall is too big a jump. I have a coffee machine that makes a cup at a time, and my preferred coffee is Cafe Bustelo. It’s in honor of my old chef, John Kinkaid, because we used to walk to a Cuban restaurant between prep and service for their Cafe Bustelo lattes.

I mentioned in “Why It All Still Hurts” that I was working on a nonprofit, and I am… but that dream has been deferred. Kinkaid was killed in a car accident. I am still reeling from the grief, but I got Kindle Unlimited and added five books on starting a nonprofit to my library. Again, the idea is dinner with dignity, offering the unhoused food they could never afford on their own, and opening my kitchen up to take homeless people on as apprentices if they’d like to learn the trade. I am still sold on this idea, it’s just going to take a lot longer to accomplish than I thought.

That’s because the longer I think about it, the more ideas I have. What if instead of this one nonprofit, we were able to build a library like Oodi in Baltimore? There, I could have my cooking classes and a place to serve food, plus books and maker tools for everyone. My structure these days is centered on how to spend the government’s money for the good of the people. Learning about Oodi and all the services they provide gave me a bigger goal than just “dinner with dignity.” It would give the unhoused a place to go. Maybe my purpose is not to go to Finland, but to bring Finnish ideas to a city that needs them. I want to redirect Maryland’s money from the DC metro area and Annapolis to Baltimore, because it is so underserved. A lot of the city is completely trashed out with no way to fix anything…. or so it seems from an outsider’s perspective that just moved here in December.

I need more time to watch and wait, gathering stakeholders and formatting a business plan. Perhaps my structure will always be internal, because that’s how autists work best. I do not want to go down in history as merely a blogger. I want to create something beautiful that will last and bring hope to people that might not be feeling it that day.

I find that working on giving hope to other people is the easiest way to claim hope for myself. I am slowly building a structure into which I can grow, taking others’ ideas and implementing them like a plant takes root in the soil.

But it all starts with remembering to take my medication.

I Feel So Weird

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I feel like the poster child for the digital age, having had an entire relationship from beginning to end over the Internet, pen pals for 12 years with only a few pictures and one voice note to show for it. That’s because I’ve deleted the millions and millions of words between us on one e-mail account, and am in the process of cleaning out the others. I cannot bring myself to delete the last one, though, because it’s so full of anger that it lets me know two things. The first is that I didn’t get the e-mail I wanted, but I did get the e-mail I deserved. The second is that Aada does indeed love me, because people who don’t care don’t get that angry.

My journey to take is why I was so doubtful that her love was real. That I needed it to be more grounded when she thought it was already in the dirt. Why was I so insistent that meeting in person would fix everything? Because my writer personality is not the sum total of me. I’m introverted and quiet unless I’m involved in a conversation with people who are giving me energy. In person, I am much less likely to engage, preferring to watch my surroundings. I wanted her to know that side of me, because she’s the person I wanted to sit next to as I stared out into the beyond.

If I think back to when my mother died, that’s when I needed her the most. She’s got big mom energy, and I needed to soak in it. She didn’t have to say anything in my grief, I just wanted her presence.

I still do, and I hope that over time she forgets how angry she is right now. I wish that I had been a less turbulent force in her life, because I own my part. There was no way we couldn’t be turbulent without the normalcy of conversation… e-mail allowed us to go down the wrong path much faster than we would looking into each other’s eyes.

I wish she’d seen my crooked-yet-endearing smile. I wish she’d seen my disabilities. I wish she’d seen my autism up close and personal, as well as the ADHD that plagues me. All of these things would have given her more insight into this person that she thought was so impressive at first… because I do not think that I am.

I wish I’d taken in that she wanted to impress me, because I was always trying to impress her.

What would it have looked like if she’d told me long ago that she was intimidated by me, that she’d lied about knowing an author to impress me before it became pathological? I would have laughed. But by the time she’d told me about her lie, it was so deep and involved that I could not help but react in anger.

What would it be like if I could take all that back? What would it be like if I could go back to day one?

I might have gotten our picnic if I’d just been cool. I could not be cool because I fell all over myself in hero worship, not knowing that she was equally jazzed… I mean, why would anyone be impressed with me? I’m a third rate hack who emotionally vomits all over the Internet.

I’m not Jenny Lawson, for Chrissakes.

Am I embarrassed that I fell in love with her? No, but I’m embarrassed by all the ways I’ve shown it. I’m sure her husband would have some choice words for me, but I’m not even sure he knows I exist. However, if he does, I hope he’s taken it in stride and would roast me rather than be angry, because of all people he should know that his wife is utterly incapable of returning feelings for an enby with a female body. And besides, I don’t know her in 3D. Behind every beautiful straight woman is a man who is often sick of her shit. I don’t have to put up with any of it, so how could I really know what it’s like?

The butterflies in my stomach would have gone away much easier watching her actually be said straight woman. Over the internet, her patois is as gruff as any man’s. Meanwhile, in real life apparently she is cute and cuddly because I’m the one that got the cactus. I don’t feel bad for wanting to meet the cute and cuddly side of her, but I don’t know why it couldn’t be arranged. I am sure that I scared her with the intensity of my love- but to be fair, she scared me with the intensity of hers. She cannot return my feelings when it comes to romance, but God help anyone who tried to cross me. Many of my former friends and exes, we joke, are buried under her pool. I hope she will do me a solid and keep them there.

She has told me that I am part of her wild and crazy brain, so I can only hope that when the heat dies down, she’ll come back to me. I don’t hope for much, but I do hope for that. Life is long, and grief is weird. She will never truly leave me, because she only tries to stay away from my web site. There is no telling what I will say that will make her think, “Leslie needs me.”

Let me clear that right up. There’s no situation in which I don’t need her. I pop off and get angry, saying that I don’t want this relationship but I cannot bring myself to actually mean it. She got under my skin in two seconds flat, and I haven’t stopped thinking about her for 12 years. I have often put my own needs below hers, and I thought that since she told me there was nothing I could say that would hurt her professionally that I could write about what I wanted. There was a gap between what was said and what was meant. I cannot take back anything I’ve written

Nothing here is meant to provoke her, but it does. This is a problem because when she says I’m trying to make her mad, she will not listen to me when I say that my writing is not for her. It’s for everyone, because I’m not trying to do anything but show my audience what it’s like to live in my own head, to think with me through enormous relationship problems that they may be going through themselves. I think that my digital love is a new take on relationships because it’s something that has happened many times to people my age and younger, the architects of the current social media landscape when it first began because we were the people lost in Internet Relay Chat first.

Aada is not my first digital love, but she’s the longest, outlasting my marriage by four years.

No one in my life takes in that part of it. She is now the longest love of my life, and I do not know what to do with that information except file it away, knowing it’s true and yet trying to forget. I need to connect with other people and I’m at a loss as to how. I want to secret away into our little bubble again, and I’ve had a hard time adjusting (really hard). I cannot believe I was willing to give up so much for e-mail… because she was going to meet me in person one day. Surely it will be next year. Maybe now that it’s been five years. Maybe now that it’s been eight. At the 11 year mark, we talked seriously about baby steps. I am certain that she thought she needed to unburden herself of this lie before she actually met me in person, and ran when I got angry… not knowing that I would indeed get over it.

I keep composing an e-mail in my head…

Dear Aada,

Don’t do this. Don’t cut me off. We are each a part of each other’s wild and crazy brains. Losing you is like losing my right hand…………….

And that’s where it ends because I know that she doesn’t feel that way about me.

Or does she?

That is where I have always been unclear, because I am so vocal about my love for her and she’s got all her emotions tied behind her back… but the wall comes down occasionally and the Mama Wolverine claws come out with the clear message that I am hers. Those are the moments I’ve lived for, because they’re few and far between… yet just so precious.

I am mystified that Aada’s therapist thinks that I have a need to manipulate her and our relationship because I am a blogger who writes about their relationships and experiences. I have always been that. It’s why Aada sought me out in the first place- she was impressed by the way I lived my life out loud. And then everything she loved about my writing became something to castigate once she was my actual friend.

I have not changed. Aada’s view of me has changed.

The difference between her and me is that I would actually sit down with her and her therapist and try to create healthy coping mechanisms to bring our relationship into the future. I know that my writing is a basket of crazy and I do not want to stop Aada from getting healthy if I’m the problem… nor do I really want a future without her.

I think that being digital friends allowed patterns to become entrenched that do not happen in verbal conversation, and that we could find a way forwards with some frank discussions with eye contact. I don’t believe that I’m not the problem. I don’t believe I’m the solution, either. I just want to be. It is not in my nature to hurt someone and not have empathy swallow me up. I have done wrong and I know it.

I have also admitted my flaws and failures every step of the way.

The bitch of it is that I know we love each other. I know it like I know the earth is round. But sometimes, love isn’t enough. The way I hurt her may be too big to fix, because I broke her confidence due to my own mental illness. I was so depressed and anxious that her love couldn’t reach me.

So what would I do in the future that’s different? I would listen closer, because I don’t think I really took in her feelings. They are muted in a way that I cannot always see/hear/feel them. I miss social cues, particularly over the Internet, so I’ve glossed over what she’s written and published my own takes on what I thought she said instead of what she actually did.

I would insist on meeting in person, as intimidating as that is to both of us, because it would lessen my need to write about her if I wasn’t lost in imagining who she is… because that’s all an Internet friend can do, imagine the context in which a person operates. I imagined her as a hero, and she hasn’t entirely fallen off that pedestal for me to see her as a normal person.

It blinded me to a lot, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t take for my journey now.

That doesn’t make it less weird.

Boundaries

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I wish that I could have stuck to the boundaries that Aada set for me about not talking to anyone. I really do. It would have made my life a whole lot easier in terms of not upsetting the apple cart. She didn’t recognize that her secrets were big enough to constantly make me sick to my stomach with anxiety… and not because I didn’t tell her. She was too busy to pay attention to all the warning signs that I was going down. I cannot imagine how much a face to face conversation would have helped, but I cannot hope for that anymore. I can only hope that as I move forwards in time, my mind will quiet on its own.

I have been told that my actions were disgusting, that I had a need to prove something by talking about our relationship. I had nothing to prove because all I wanted was relief. I was isolated beyond belief with one friend who wouldn’t really let me have any others, because I couldn’t share what was troubling me to any of them. I chose Michael because I thought… no, I didn’t really think. I was desperate. I couldn’t hold on anymore. He quieted all the anxiety in my mind, but he also caught Aada in a lie. When he did that, one string pulled all the others.

She said I was like a child in a toy store with “you’ll sure as shit get her side, Dagger.” No, that wasn’t delight. That was anger. That was truth pain. That was “if she lies to everyone else, she’ll lie to you, too.” But at least Dagger “isn’t Michelle Obama, for Chrissakes.” My reaction to that line is unprintable, because she knew it would hurt… and it did. That’s because Dagger is precious to me. No one disrespects Dagger in my presence, one so large they identify as the definite article. Michael told me to e-mail them both at the same time, because if they knew each other, it wouldn’t be a big deal. They didn’t, and it was…. especially because the lie snowballed over 12 years to the point that she made me block her on Facebook, ending a relationship I wanted professionally.

I’m just sick over all of it… some days so angry I cannot function that Aada picked up her toys and went home… at others willing to beg and plead like a five year old. I cannot be angry at anyone but me, because apparently if I’d done everything she said the way she said to do it, I’d be sipping coffee on her back porch right now. But is it all really my fault when I told Aada for years that I was anxious and upset? Yes, it really is. The stakes were too high, and I ignored them. I also cannot take anything back.

It is not true that I am the only one at fault for our demise, however. We both did a number on each other when all we really wanted was love… again, not like that. She’s been my muse for 12 years because the only thing more beautiful than her face is her mind… and I met her mind first.

Oh, wait.

That’s not true. The first time I saw her picture I was instantly charmed because she looked like a comic book character. Her hair spoke to me. 😛

I hate small talk, so little jokes became heart to heart conversations in which I disconnected from everyone else just to spend more time with her. And because I couldn’t tell anyone about our conversations, when I was with other people I was there but not present. I retreated into myself so fully that even my family had trouble connecting with me, and that was fine with Aada as well. As long as her secrets were safe, who cared what happened to me?

I waited until I got the all clear from her- that there was nothing I could say that would hurt her- before I started talking about the last few years. Then, a few days ago, she told me that wasn’t true. That people in her professional life had told her they were reading my blog and that was dangerous. So, Aada’s work people, welcome aboard, I guess. I wouldn’t have invited you, but now that you’re here, I suppose you can stay… as if I have any control over who reads me at all, or would even know.

Don’t give her any shit, she’s already been through it having to deal with my sorry ass… though that’s what I hear you’ve already been doing- making sure she’s okay. Keep doing it. If she won’t let me love her, then congratulations. It’s your job now. I’m alternately the easiest and hardest act to follow you’ll find.

That’s because I drive her insane, but I’ve had my moments.

And this is where I start to cry and shake, because those moments are precious to me. I will never love like this again because there will be no circumstances in my life like the ones in which we met. You’ll have to go back and read all 12 years because I’m too tired to talk about them today.

I am not too tired to talk about how my brain chemicals are rearranged with grief, because I deleted everything in my Gmail account both from and to her. That means that our most precious moments from when our relationship began are no more. They at least live in my memory, but I cannot take them out and read them as they happened. In some ways, this is for the best as I tended to reread often and dwell on them, not moving forward in time. I just wasn’t smart enough to see all the consequences involved between what is said and what is meant.

“There’s nothing you could say that would hurt me” has been the biggest lie of all, because of course when you lot showed up (Aada’s work colleagues), I wanted to crawl in a hole and die. The very least you could do is send me some swag through the mail.

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

After all the shit we’ve been through, I’m still finishing up this entry in tears because despite everything, I’m losing my favorite person. But I think that “my favorite person” has been an idea for a long time, and she’s not real. I’ve never gotten to sit down with her and hammer out details on what is acceptable to say and what isn’t, so no wonder my blog is an absolute shit show when she reads. The one thing that makes me sad is that when she reads, she does not take in my thoughts and feelings. She does not see me as a separate person. If she doesn’t agree with something I thought and felt, it is not that we’re different, it’s that I lied.

For instance, I said, “I do not want you to feel like you’re cheating on your husband when you’re talking to me.” That doesn’t mean that Aada has ever actually felt this way. It meant it was something I worried about. I didn’t lie about jack shit, because if Aada had said, “I’ve never felt that,” I would have been relieved and that would have been the end of the conversation.

She says that she is also not the person I portray here, and that I agree with wholeheartedly. I only know her in 2D, while the rest of her friends and family get to experience her laughter. I have never heard her laugh….

And I’m sure not laughing now. I broke a ton of boundaries after I thought it was safe, because there was nothing I could say that would hurt her.

When the best thing for me would probably have been not to talk at all.

Bold of You to Assume I’d Have to Be Forced

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?
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I have a lot of clothes, but really only two outfits. In the summer, I wear jeans and a t-shirt with a hoodie in my backpack for those buildings where the air conditioning is turned down to “Ice Capades.” In the winter, I add leggings and a thermal shirt because my hoodie is often warm enough without a coat if I have on layers. If I were forced to wear an outfit all day, every day, it would fall under those guidelines.

I am just very particular.

American Giant hoodie

Bombas socks

Uniqlo HeatTech long underwear (and if it’s really cold, Merino wool or Reebok synthetics under that, because your base layer must be waterproof. Cotton is not.)

Uniqlo midweight HeatTech shirt

They’re so comfortable I miss them in the summer. I don’t do well in heat, and wish I lived in Finland. I am still holding out for going to school there next year, because I’m stuck in a lease until the end of November. It just depends on what kind of financial position I’m in, because school itself is free, but living in Europe is not.

Plus, there’s the added complication of getting my family and friends to visit me or vice versa. I have recently learned that planes go both ways. 😉 Of all my friends, Bryn ( @one4paws ) is the most likely to be comfortable because she lives in the Pacific Northwest. Our summers would be drastically similar. Winter is where it differs, but I believe we’d have a blast looking at the northern lights and going to see Santa. The woman is not afraid of a parka, and neither am I. We are also a united front when it comes to animal skins. There is nothing wrong with using what has worked in that climate for thousands of years. But try synthetic first.

My current favorite synthetic is a pair of lined waterproof pants for playing in the snow, and my favorite organic is lined wool trousers on the few days a year I have to play dress-up. Both would come in handy in the wilds of Finland…. but not nearly as much as my extensive collection of hoodies (bunny hugs). My favorite says, “Baltimore…. there’s more than murder here.” It has a rainbow and the fonts are choice. It’s my favorite gift I’ve ever gotten from my sister except for the apron that said, “be nice to me or I’ll poison your food.”

Baltimore is so quirky that I choose that sweatshirt as my ghost outfit. I believe Edgar Allen Poe would laugh.

One of the reasons I wear it constantly is that I dream of running into John Waters while I’m wearing it. You never know who you’re going to meet just walking around. I got to meet David Sedaris in a coffee shop in Frederick, so meeting my favorite writers is not impossible.

I also tend to wear sweatshirts year round because I don’t like the sensory experience of the wind on my skin. I will take them off if it gets too hot, but it has to be extraordinarily still outside for me to feel comfortable. I have one very lightweight hoodie that accomplishes this- a full zip waffle weave that isn’t really to keep me warm. It just keeps the goosebumps away.

All of my clothing issues are tied to autism, because once I figured out that I was more neurodivergent than advertised (I was diagnosed with ADHD in college), I started paying attention to them.

The reason autistic adults call it “unmasking” is that we were often pushed into ignoring our discomfort to please others, or told that our sensory issues just aren’t that bad and to get over them. Now that I am in control, I try to buy the best clothes I can afford when I have to buy new, or I spend hours at Goodwill searching through crap to find gold. It’s out there, like Burberry, Brooks Brothers, and London Fog. I am still searching for Thomas Pink. It will be my coup when I find it.

And in fact, I would rather find those things at Goodwill because they feel better when they’ve already been laundered a thousand times before they get to you. Fine clothing outlasts fast fashion by a mile, and I will always gravitate towards it.

I have also somewhat given up on jeans. I have one pair, but I prefer an elastic waistband and tailored cuffs (I rarely tuck in my shirts, so the waist doesn’t matter). These pants from ParisDiary are my go-to and I have them in tan, brown, and dark red. They look great with any outfit and the material is extremely comfortable. They say that they are joggers, and this is true. I’ve worn them in the gym, but they seem too fancy for it. I think they are meant for traveling. I wouldn’t wear anything else on an airplane. And, of course, because of the brand I would like to go back to Paris just to walk around in them……………….. with my diary.

They are also the perfect pants to wear in the winter because with the elastic waistband, they expand to accommodate my layers. I would much rather wear leggings under joggers than stuff myself into trousers. I am also not immune to a good pair of cargo pants…. alarmingly out of fashion in today’s world but too comfortable for me to ignore. I love Dickies when I can find the right size, particularly at Goodwill because again, they’re more comfortable after they’ve been worn in and laundered.

For shoes, I vacillate between Converse, New Balance, and Crocs.

Crocs are always on my list because even though some people would say they’re ugly, they’re the most comfortable shoes I’ve ever owned and I do not buy the classic style with holes. Mine are the ones that you would wear in a professional kitchen or hospital, and look more like Dansko clogs than shoes for little kids.

Speaking of Dansko, I wear Crocs instead because they do not have a heel. I have worn Danskos in the kitchen before and I have fallen off of them. That’s too dangerous when everything is either hot, sharp, or both.

I don’t work in a kitchen anymore, but my love of Crocs is undying. They make me feel safe, and that’s the point of all my clothing. I have cerebral palsy, and wearing constrictive clothing makes my movement even more stilted than it already is. There’s no way for me to mitigate every time I fall (balance is my biggest issue), but comfortable clothes and shoes help. Plus, Crocs have the added bonus of cooks actually wanting to talk to me because they know I’m already in their tribe.

One of my favorite trips on the bus was when my seatmate and I were comparing kitchen shoes. I asked him where he worked, and it was my favorite restaurant, Zaytinya. We chatted away in Spanish (I’m not fluent, but I try hard) as I asked him questions “talking shop.”

I guess that’s my complete outfit. You know, if I was “forced.”

How Do I Keep from Screaming?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have done it this time. I have successfully killed a relationship that I really wanted to last long after we did, because we’re both writers. I just want to scream into the void, hoping it swallows me up.

The one thing that keeps me going is Jesus, and I wish I was being funny. The resurrection is a wonderful metaphor for forgiving each other later in life and moving on… or what I will do to resurrect myself after this little death. Who knows which way it will go given our long history of death and resurrection already? I’m trying to stay away from her, she’s trying to stay away from me. It’s not going that well on either side because she still reads me. Maybe all we need is time to get over what has happened, and maybe it’s best if we move on. I think that depends on a lot of factors, but I know what I want. It’s her- it’s always been her. I just don’t think she’ll choose me, because I’ve let her down. I’ve hurt her and I know it, but I don’t know how to make it up to her. I can’t just write my way out of this one, but I can try…. resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.

If there is a second thing helping the resurrection along, it’s my blog, because at the very least the last 12 years will outlive me, a biography for those who lie and love their audience.

I am so sad that I want to get down on my knees and beg, and I’m not sure why. Our relationship has been turbulent from the beginning and I don’t know why I should want that. Mostly, it’s what I know and cannot turn away quickly… but that is dismissive of who Aada is as a person I want to work with to create something beautiful. Our relationship has been that at times, and we’ve both wanted to get back to it. I cannot know what our future holds, together or separately. I can just throw wishes up into the air and see if any of them stick.

I want our attachment to be secure and non-volatile. She seems to think that I manipulate her so it will never turn into that. She loves me enough to say goodbye over and over, but not enough to make sure it doesn’t happen in advance. I do not like the roller coaster. I like my dreams in which we’re just us, laughing over whatever… even if it’s at my expense. I think I would make her laugh. I accidentally do my own stunts. The fact that she’s now married doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because she’s so secure in that relationship and I’m so secure in the fact that she loves me the best way she knows how (when we’re getting along).

I was jealous of her then-boyfriend for about three minutes. Three minutes is all it took to realize two things. The first was that I loved her so much that I needed for her to be happy, no matter what that looked like. The second was that I needed her emotional support way more than I needed romance, and she was up for it. I didn’t want to be bitter and angry I didn’t get a diamond ring, I wanted to be overjoyed that this woman would have me in her life at all… and that’s been my theme over the years. Just be happy she loves you on her terms, because you cannot believe how deep that water runs.

I wanted her to be with me for all of my huge life events, and so far I cannot even get her to meet for lunch. We make great pen pals, but she will not show herself. It makes no sense to me because she literally lied about knowing my favorite author just to impress me, so if she was so impressed, why has she stayed away? If I think about that part of it too long, I actually do start screaming. She wanted to meet me because she was impressed with me, and then stayed away for over a decade.

WHY? WHY, GOD? WHY? I’M SERIOUS!

God doesn’t know, either.

I used to dream of taking her on a picnic so that we could drink wine in the sunshine, forgetting about all our problems. And yes, I am aware that she already has friends and family with whom to do such a thing. I never wanted any part in separating her from any of them… most particularly her now-husband.

Because I cannot hide behind anything I’ve ever written, I was hoping that he’d roast the everliving shit out of me on a daily basis (I am laughing very hard). I’ve never met Mr. Aada, but the reason I’d want to is to make sure he loves her the way she needs to be loved. How would I do that? By watching them together. I have no need to intrude because if Aada is happy, then so am I. I’ve had 12 years to get used to the idea that she’s not queer and not available. I have also had 12 years to intimately understand that my heart flipped the fuck out and it doesn’t matter. My feelings just stay steady, my heart walking out of my chest when I think of her………. I just let her set boundaries and abide by them.

When I read the Outlander series, I knew I wanted to be the Lord John Grey to her Jamie for the rest of my life.

She has not so quietly loved me like a house on fire in return, because she absolutely is my James Alexander Malcolm McKenzie Fraser. I can speak to her in ways that other people can’t because she’s glued to my writing. I draw her like a moth to a flame. She’s intimidated by me because she thinks that her writing isn’t as good as mine, when in reality I think that my writing pales in comparison to hers. She doesn’t often have time to write long letters, but when she does I memorize them. I wish everyone could read her long letters, or that she was also a blogger. I think you’d find that I’m the hack.

If you meet her, you’ll never forget.

If you love her, it will be a runaway train.

If you lose her, you’ll rue the day.

Which is why I’m just here, screaming into the void. I know on some level that this post is delusional, because I’ve done enough to push her away for the rest of our lives. But maybe it’s not. Maybe something will push us back together that neither one of us can see right now, because I have no idea what she’ll read and think, “that motherfucker…. let me get my purse.”

That is a direct quote from her regarding the last man that tried to hurt me. Now, I’m sure that I’m the one with the big purse headed towards me. I just wish there was something I could do to change the arc.

In short, this sucks.

I hate our situation and am desperate to improve it, but there’s nothing I can do. My heart hurts and the only solution for that is Ben & Jerry’s.

And time spent screaming into the void.

Learning to Manage

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I wrote last night that I was learning to manage without Aada in my life, but this morning I have a different take. When she’s not in contact with me, I try to do everything I can to distract myself from the fact that she’s not coming back. That all the dreams I had for working together are dead. I’d sent her an e-mail last week, imploring her not to be embarrassed about lying, because my friend Michael had posited that she was, and that was the reason she was staying away. I wanted her to know I didn’t care. I just wanted my friend back. I then went back to avoiding thinking about her at all, and forgot I’d sent anything.

So yesterday, when I actually did get correspondence from Aada, my adrenaline, dopamine, and cortisol went sky high. As I mentioned, it was not pleasant, and “ripped me a new asshole.”

Technically, she ripped me a brand new two bedroom, two bathroom double wide asshole, as from the movie “Bernie.”

I was up most of the night after two sleeping pills because I just could not quiet my mind. I kept rereading her anger and wanting to quiet it, knowing nothing will do that but time. I have learned over the years that it’s better not to fight fire with fire, so my response was as meek as I get. I also don’t think she’ll get it, because the last line of her e-mail was that she was going to block me… but she’ll read it here:

You may have blocked me already, but I only have two things to say. The first is that I didn’t lie to you. I deleted everything in my Gmail account and then found the one from January in my Hotmail account months later. Not the same thing. The second is that you missed the point about [my friend] Michael. He told me he thought you were avoiding me because you were embarrassed, and I was trying to tell you not to be.

That is all. I wish you all the love and peace in the world, and I wish I could be part of it. But I know I’m sick, and I’m trying to get well. I wanted you to be a part of the wellness, but I’m not sure you’d ever be open to it. 

I’ll still be writing for myself about my own thoughts and feelings whether you’re there to read them or not. That’s how it’s always been, that’s how it’ll always be. You’ve been the center of my world for the past 12 years and I’m supposed to get over it and forget it in a few months?

No.

I am sorry for all the hurt that I’ve caused, and I am trying to work forwards without you. It’s not going so well, to be honest. Even seeing that I got an e-mail from you nine hours ago made my heart beat too fast because I thought, “she’ll never get this one. I’ll be too late.”

I don’t know how to talk to you anymore, but I won’t stop blogging. I don’t have another life to write about instead. This is the only one I’ve got.

If you thought I lied about anything in January, you could have told me that then. I would have listened.

I don’t set out to irritate you, I just do.

I don’t know what else to say.

I stared at the ceiling until sleep finally overtook me around 3:00 AM.

She called me out on saying that I deleted all my e-mails from her. She called me out on betraying her confidence. She called me out on everything I’ve ever done, and I deserved it. That doesn’t mean I don’t get the right to feel. She isolated me from every one of my other friends with her schtick and wouldn’t accept me into her life with full faith and credit. So, I couldn’t get close to her, and I couldn’t get close to anyone else. I thought I was doing the right thing by confiding in someone else who was also IC, because I needed an objective ear. He just happened to put together more than I actually said because he already knew the building blocks.

I don’t think Aada ever took in how damaging her isolation was to me, and still doesn’t. She said she had no interest in being friends with me because I talked to Michael about her, and that’s fine. Michael and I actually have a healthy relationship in which he doesn’t require me to be secretive, isolating to the point where I have no other friends. It was this kind of shit fit that led to my divorce as well. “Don’t talk to me, and don’t talk to anyone else, either.”

She feels that she’s not responsible for my divorce in any way, that it was all my decision. But what choice did I have, really? I couldn’t compartmentalize, therefore I couldn’t keep secrets from my wife. I also couldn’t separate from Aada because the damage had already been done. I was trauma bonded to her on multiple levels, one that I felt go off last night, sending my brain chemicals into such overdrive that enough sleeping medication to down a baby elephant didn’t help.

I am tired of the narrative that I manipulate our relationship when she is guilty of doing the same. I cannot attach to other people in the same way I used to because according to her, I shouldn’t talk about our relationship at all. So while she’s off in her own little world, I have to cope with it. Talking with my wife always helped, because we’d pray about it together… until Aada hit the roof that I’d even said anything. In the church, my life has always been about care, connection, and community. I did not know how to section off a rope so my Members Only jacket was secure.

The Members Only jacket was a straight trip to a straitjacket instead.

I have spun out many times over the years, wanting her love and affection because I wasn’t getting it anywhere else. Recently, she told me I could say whatever I wanted…. and that turned out to be a false flag. Last night she berated me for my blog entries as if she’d never said that.

I cannot predict other people’s reactions to my writing, I can only go off what they say in advance. And to be fair, no one likes being written about all the time. I am free to say whatever I want as long as I glow about her, but saying anything negative is off limits. It’s not fair to me as a writer, because everyone in my life is 3D. There are going to be times when I’m happy and not, because I have the full range of emotions as a human being.

Learning to manage without Aada is trying to find the truth in all the years we wrote to each other while making room for new people. I don’t have enough life experience to move on yet, because talking about my last 12 years invariably involves all the time I spent writing to this one person. I’m trying to curate new experiences, like bumming around Baltimore with my sister, but not enough time has passed for me to change my writing altogether. It’s a conundrum, and one I won’t know how to solve with anything but time.

My cognitive behavioral health group helps, because I’m slowly making friends there. I even found two guys who go to my gym (though I haven’t run into them there). Walking seems to help, because the longer my endorphins stay high, the easier it is to feel like I’m walking away from my old life and into something new. Aada’s e-mail was just the high of seeing her name in my inbox and the aftermath of realizing she was not going to be kind.

She deserved her pound of flesh and I won’t take it away from her, but no one ever wants to be read the riot act. It was just more shaming into isolation. It feels as if I should have been happy only having one pen pal the rest of my life, a relationship so massive that it prevented me from seeing other people… yet not. Because I’m free to have a relationship with anyone I choose if I gain the ability to cut off a limb, or so it seems to me.

It’s not realistic, and I know that she does not give me the same courtesy. She can’t, because I’m a public figure… in moderation, of course. I choose to live my life out loud here, the thing she loved so much about me when we met. She took a butterfly and slowly cut off its wings.

I am not the only manipulative person in our relationship. But again, if that’s what her therapist thinks, then more power to them. They don’t know me, have never interviewed me, so what could they really know from one side of the story that may or may not be accurate? My guess is that it isn’t, because I cannot tell you how many times I’ve written Aada e-mail in which she completely missed the point I was trying to make and skewed it into something else. If she’s only taking what she reads into our relationship to her therapist, then of course the therapist doesn’t know shit from Shinola.â„¢

Again, there are three sides to every story…. yours, mine, and the truth.

It’s Aada’s therapist’s job to be on her side, and I support that. But to use that as “evidence” that one person is entirely wrong in a relationship when they’ve never met them is ludicrous.

I do know that I’ve done wrong, but I don’t think I’m the only one that has done wrong. Having someone lump all that on my head is just cruel. It makes it where I can’t sleep at night.

I’m learning to manage, but I cannot say it’s going well.