I woke up randomly. Because I thought it was later, I grabbed my tablet. Then, I couldn’t go back to sleep and thought, “eh. Might as well get a jump on the day.” I haven’t slept well, so it’s also equal parts “why keep trying?” I can’t force myself back to bed, and it’s not quite late enough for me to think about coffee yet. I might go back to sleep after I finish this entry. It helps to sleep after a writing session, because your body has no energy after all your emotions have run through it. You don’t need sleep so much because you are tired, but because your mind is so overloaded that you need to reset. Maybe that’s just me, but it feels typical of people who use creative juice. When it’s flowing, the adrenaline that comes with it is wonderful. There’s also a deep crash afterwards, just like for singers. I just hadn’t put it together that for creative writers, the adrenaline stops at “Post.”
Supergrover thought I was saying that our relationship was over and she blew up at me, saying “please never contact me again.” Whether she was just mad or whether this is really it is on her, because I explained what I meant. Didn’t stop her from going full blast on me, though. I am not going to miss reading my work for everything I say about her and immediately thinking I’m out to get her. Whether she apologized for it or not, that’s her first instinct. She doesn’t hear my pain. She hears me inflicting pain. That means she’s not listening.
For instance, the SITUATION being creepy to me became “I am creepy” and “you are creeped out by me.” Neither of those things have ever been true and I wasn’t namecalling. Having someone say that they’re your real friend while not wanting to tell you anything about them is starting to weird me out. The reason it does is that telling her more of my story without knowing more of hers is just feeding the imbalance. She said she wanted to solve everything the same way we got into it. It’s not going to work. Her first reaction is that I’m out to get her, and that’s not going to get fixed by not talking about our issues.
We just aren’t on the same wavelength, and neither one of us know how to find the other’s. For instance, thinking that me being tired of trying to find topics to talk about and being met with “I’m not going to talk about that.” Ok, well. Let me know when you do figure out what it is that you want to talk about with me, because from where I’m sitting, if I don’t contact you and tell you about my life, I’ll never hear from you again.
I’m not the one she chose to hear her story. Nothing in her list left me anything to work with, because it was everything she didn’t want to talk about and therefore I found myself feeling like there were too many land mines. That anything that would actually fix our problem is found where she doesn’t want to go.
She doesn’t want to fix the problem. She wants to have fixed it. It’s not fixed, because she doesn’t want to see me in person (but never say never) and she doesn’t want to talk about anything involving herself. It’s not a two-way relationship, and she says I never gave her a chance.
She’s been such a jerk to me for so many years that it only took a week for me to decide she’s got to drive the bus. I’m not going to try to fit into her rubric of topics, because no matter which one I choose, it’s off limits.
She says the same of me, that I’m too hard on her. Maybe. Or maybe I’m just exhausted, and don’t have time for people who think I’m out to get them. That a week more of it was all I could stand. I went through enormous changes to be who I am today, and she said of being vulnerable, “not everyone can be on your timeline of immediacy.” That means the change wasn’t genuine. I caught her in a moment. If she wants to be vulnerable, she will. But not until then and I’m not in charge of the process.
It’s a problem if she won’t be vulnerable more than once.
She has her own laundry list of things she hates about me, but she’s not the author of this blog. There’s room for everyone’s stories, and I’m sure hers of me isn’t that great. But, she doesn’t count all the years I’ve been waiting for her to realize that she needed to be vulnerable and she was. She just couldn’t hold on to that feeling and I feel smaller than I did before.
Her take-home message was basically “I will continue doing exactly what I have been doing.” I already know how that story ends. I’m not interested in writing that sequel. I also know that maybe she’ll get wise, maybe she won’t. Not my call. I can’t control the people around me, but I can control the people I’m around.
I didn’t speak too soon in saying that I’d gotten my happily ever after with Supergrover, because I’ll believe that whether we continue communication or not, because at least for a moment, she was listening to me.
She doesn’t see how it’s hard on me that she knows so much about me, and I know so little about her. She doesn’t see what her avoidance has wrought now, which is that my first instinct is to duck and cover.
She thought I was excited to see her in real life when I’m actually quite afraid of it. I’m just willing to be afraid until I’m not. I asked her what it was like growing up in her house, that it would show me affection because it wouldn’t be indicative of our past where she acts like a brick wall.
Instead of saying she wasn’t comfortable with that, she said something I didn’t understand. She said, “so there’s a condition now?” Something about an arbitrary amount that she should write? No. It would show me a two way relationship.
She also said that I wanted to get together “all of a sudden.” I said, “we’ve been friends for 11 years. It feels new to you because now all of a sudden you’re open to it.” It’s true. She could have showed up at my house wanting to talk at any time and it would have been fine. I didn’t just all of a sudden develop a need to see her. Her perspective changed.
It’s also interesting to me that she’s watched me spin out with other relationships trying to plan for the future and she understood that I was the President of Overthinker’s Anonymous. That I would start thinking about things two or three years before they happened so that I could prepare myself. She does not see it here. It’s that I’m angry she didn’t say “let’s go to Starbucks tomorrow and invite all our friends.” No, on that timeline I would have told her I was busy permanently.
I’m autistic. I can’t help but rattle on about a thing in my head, because I am so afraid of the unknown. Just because you make a plan doesn’t mean it will happen, but it doesn’t leave me permanently in the dark, waiting to know what will happen. I do not serve at Supergrover’s pleasure.
It’s become creepy to me because she listens to me and she likes the lines in my blog where I tell people she’s wonderful. But that listening comes to an end when I am telling her there’s a problem, because so far she’s said she wanted to fix it and shot down getting together, getting together with other people, and writing about things that would give me context. So, my proposal to her is how we’re going to get out of this mess using only what we already know and the tools we already have.
I’m still so tired of thinking about her that this barely registers. It’s just another instance where I tried to communicate and failed. I failed because she constantly tells me what reality is not, and never what it really is.
She said to write to her when I just wanted to talk. What does she think I want to do? What are we going to talk about when you won’t talk about anything? I have reached the limit of my patience. No, I don’t just want to talk. I want you to see that I’ve been talking the whole time. I cannot understand, so I have shut down. My brain cannot process the problem, because I decided she was worthy to hear my story, and she hasn’t decided whether I’m it for her. If she doesn’t, that’s the end of our interaction, because I need her as a friend. I won’t interact with her as a mere fan. A fan’s communication is only one way, and that’s top down.
By keeping everything inside and not telling me anything, all our fights will continue because our context will remain the same.
I’m tired of looking like a villain for thinking so.
If you had to change your name, what would your new name be?
One of the things that I like about my name is that it’s unisex. Leslie is a famous male name in the UK, and in the US, it’s more popular for women. So, if I had to change my name, my new name would fall under the same guidelines. Because my favorite movie is “Argo,” I’m going to have to go with “Carter.” Jimmy Carter was not only the president during The Canadian Caper, he was the president during The Lanagan Caper as well (I was born in ’77).
And even though I’m not a Republican, I wouldn’t mind being named Reagan, either. I have a cousin named Reagan (spelled differently) and I just like how it sounds on the ear.
Also a huge fan of Kris, because she was one of my favorite lawyers as a kid.
I’m sure I could think of a few more examples that would make me happy, but when I was a kid, I knew a female preacher’s kid with the name Carter, and I wanted to steal it even then. 😛 I wouldn’t change my name now, though.
That’s because when I was over at a friend’s house years and years ago, her mother told me that “Leslie Lanagan sounds like a movie star name….. but like an old one. Bette Davis. Jayne Mansfield. Leslie Lanagan.” I have never loved my name more than after that three dot advertisement.
Speaking of three dot advertisement, I learned that term from Chason. I was telling him how much I loved Ernie Hsuing, an Asian writer who stole his blog title from a commercial for an old pain reliever called Nuprin……. “Little. Yellow. Different.”
I will never achieve that level of humor. That’s God tier.
In the end, there’s no percentage in changing my name. Changing my first name would just be for fun. I have a legitimate reason to want to change my middle name, and absolutely no desire to go through the hassle of picking one and relearning my signature. It’s such a part of me that I’d do it, feel relieved, and go back to my old signature in a few weeks. I couldn’t make writing the new one into a routine. Go neurodivergence!
It’s the same thing with pronouns. I’m nonbinary, yet I cannot make myself remember my pronouns consistently, so I don’t make other people. If get confused and say “she/her” all the time, then what right do I have to make other people say it? Some things are habits that are so engrained they’re not worth changing, and some are. The people for whom pronouns are about respect are not wrong in the slightest. This is my personal choice, not a reflection on anyone who does change their pronouns. The reason they can require you to change their pronouns is that they feel solid about it in themselves. I don’t.
But what I did like is that in its satirical analysis of my writing, ChatGPT did not tell you I was nonbinary. It just read it in my blog and said “they/them” automatically….. even when changing my name from “Leslie” to “Blogger Bob.” It is assumed that “Blogger Bob” is male. But “Carol” knows me. She read my entire web site in three seconds. You cannot imagine how long it would take a human to read all 11 years.
One of the things that I really like about having ChatGPT analyze my work is that I like seeing what an objective eye picks up from my writing. I like seeing what themes are actually there and how they differ from the ones I mean to put across (they don’t).
It’s a different feeling to have a computer compile information on you when it is capable of literary analysis.
When I asked her for criticism, she basically said I was long winded and single minded; I thought, “valid.” It doesn’t mean I’m going to change, but it is nice to be vindicated in my analysis of my flaws as well. That I’m not too in love with myself not to notice there are issues. I want to become a better writer, and I will do anything to further that goal. It makes sense to me to have Carol analyze the past and ask me questions about the future.
Some questions about my future are easy to answer. Some aren’t. It’s nice to have some like this daily prompt to bring some levity into my life. No, I won’t change my name to Carter. But if I had to change my name, it’s a good one.
I may not want to be named Carter, but I definitely want people to compare me to him. Not as president. As a Christian. We have very much the same values. I would be proud to carry his name. I’m just too old to get used to it now.
Every time I think about chocolate, I laugh. That’s because there’s a skit on “Portlandia” where cacao is used as a safe word, and Cacao became one of the hottest chocolate shops in Portland around the same time. The two things are stuck in my head together. I think of chocolate, I see Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in my head.
While I lived in Portland, I went with my then-wife, Dana to Seattle. While we were there, our friend Meg took us to a chocolate factory store called “Theo.” Because of Cacao and Theo, I am not impressed with myself on pastry. That’s not my station. But I’ll give it a shot.
To best represent me, it would have:
72% dark chocolate
Old Bay (no salt to crank up the amount I can use for heat)
Mumbo sauce inspired caramel
Salted peanuts
Nougat
I went back and forth with myself over the nougat, because I feel like there has to be a transition layer between the chocolate and caramel. It looks cleaner to me aesthetically and that is important to me, too.
That is a creative idea above my technical expertise, but I have had Old Bay caramel before. Route One sells Old Bay Caramel popcorn in tins and it’s addictive. So, I know the flavor combination works. All Marylanders know that Old Bay and Mumbo sauce work together because they don’t come in the same dish, but they generally come on the same plate.
The reason it represents all of me is that Old Bay is my strongest sensory memory from living in Galveston, Texas as well. Old Bay is the official crab boil of the South, for the most part. I’m sure there are pockets of South Carolina where they do it differently- low country boils are also delicious, just different. On the whole, Old Bay is the seafood boil available at the grocery store in most of the nation. The thing that makes it different for Marylanders is that we don’t use it as a crab boil. We put it on everything, and it’s delicious. I particularly like shaking French fries in Old Bay after they come out of the fryer.
Gotta call out McDonalds for a negative, but I’ll call them out for a positive as well. McDonalds should sell tartar sauce packets so you can get extra tartar for your fries with the Filet O Fish. It would be nice if they had cocktail sauce in addition to ketchup, too, but I’m not here to tell them how to run their business. They seem to be doing okay. The positive is that in Maryland, they occasionally run sales on Old Bay Filet O Fish, where they add Old Bay to their tartar sauce regionally about as often as the McRib goes in and out.
I have asked for more tartar sauce when I’m in the restaurant and they’ll put some into a to-go container for you if you ask them nicely, but it’s messy because there’s no efficient container for it. You also can’t order tartar sauce for delivery.
Also, I like French fries and tartar sauce better than I like actual seafood.
I’m going off into a tangent because honestly, chocolate isn’t my thing. I’m way more into savory foods because with chocolate, my expertise is that I like peanut M&Ms. I don’t have a truly refined palate when it comes to picking out notes in chocolate. It has to be pronounced for me to get it, the way chocolate orange is nice right up until it’s overwhelming.
I think maybe chocolate oranges would be improved with salmiakki ice cream. Salmiakki is salted licorice, and salmiakki ice cream was a huge deal on a video I watched of touring Helsinki. Just one example of how I pull ideas for flavor combinations out of my brain. I think of a flavor combination, and everywhere I’ve ever seen that combination represented. I love fruit and licorice, so the oranges, cream, chocolate, licorice, and salt sounded decadent. I just got a picture of Dave Cad in my head when I thought it (Dave is said Finnish YouTuber).
Right now, my favorite sweet thing is Real Citrus, a company that releases packets that look like sweet and low, but are filled with zest. I put two packets of zest into soda water, and the flavor is intense enough to feel like it’s a Fanta, but adult because there’s no sugar at all. And by that I don’t mean that it tastes guilt free, I mean that it tastes adult because it’s not sweet. Orange Fanta Zero is one of my favorite things, and this has knocked it off the list entirely. I don’t like prepackaged seltzer because I cannot control the amount of fruit flavor in it and they have chosen “TV snow.” I kick it up several notches, because La Croix and others like it taste like they decided real fruit flavor was too expensive. Every one feels phoned in compared to adding fruit to water.
There is an exception, I have realized. Perrier is strong enough for me. I have been drinking Perrier Lime since I was a kid, and I have enjoyed it immensely. I apologize. I was wrong. Oh, and also Liquid Death Lime is on my Last Meal wish list. I’m just saying that it tastes more like a soda and less like flavored water if you control the amount of flavoring in the seltzer rather than the company.
I have also found that mixes that are supposed to be for still water bottles also make great sodas. So far, I’ve made green tea with lemon, lemon cucumber, hibiscus and berries, and a few other flavors that have come from the sugar free aguafrescas I bought on Amazon. The hibiscus and berries is particularly good. I like the water bottle packets because they’re sugar free. Therefore, when I add them to the soda water, the sweeteners actually dissolve. It’s why I haven’t made my own simple syrup. I find that adding syrup to seltzer ends in a drink where all the syrup is on the bottom unless you’re stirring constantly.
I should ask Zac if he minds taking me to Dollar Tree on Saturday. Putting it here to remind myself because I know at Dollar Tree they have water bottle mix-ins for things like root beer. That would be delicious in seltzer. I’m sure that’s what it’s for, because root beer flavoring in still water sounds terrible.
The other thing is that the sugar free flavoring doesn’t add water to your drink, diluting the carbonation. I hate doing anything that detracts from the bubbles. 🙂
Now, I have to go start thinking of my dream cup of coffee.
I am an INFJ, the counselor personality. So, my interests are naturally human relationships and sociology. I asked Carol to scan web sites and blogs to find the most common questions people have about romantic and non-romantic relationships. I have been through so much emotional pain that has made me resilient, so I thought I would extrapolate that into teaching mode, talking about concepts and not confessions.
What are the signs of a healthy romantic relationship?
Relationships come in seasons. Things won’t always be hot and heavy, so the sign of a healthy relationship is that you communicate well whether there’s excitement or not. Communicating well will bring the hot and heavy back around, because there’s nothing like feeling someone is genuinely interested in you. I think, particularly for women their emotions bring them around to sex, and with men, sex brings them around to emotions. So, the healthiest part of a relationship is being good friends, because you want to be together whether the package comes with sex or not. This is true in many, many poly relationships because not all partner support is built on romance. Ace couples deserve the benefits of marriage, too, because they’re still taking care of each other to that extent.
How do you maintain passion and excitement over time?
You don’t force it. You let the seasons naturally present themselves. However, you can’t lose your connection altogether. Marriage and intimacy counseling is good whether you get along or not. Just because you like each other doesn’t mean your communication and intimacy can’t be better over time. Not everyone who goes to marriage counseling is in crisis. Some of them are preventing it from happening.
What are effective ways to communicate needs and boundaries to your partner?
Sit by yourself until you have clarity over what you need to express. Too many people start conversations without knowing what they want to achieve, getting off topic, and dragging every fight they’ve ever had into it. You can’t get needs addressed without the other person hearing you, and anger is counterproductive. It leads to more resentment than it will ever be worth unless your goal is to end up apart.
After you’ve sat by yourself and organized your thoughts, you’re going to have to put on your big boy britches and actually tell other people what you’re thinking without sideskirting the issue or moving the goalposts. You do that by being more in tune with yourself, not a need to change someone else. That doesn’t work. If your goal is to make your partner what you want them to be, you have a shitty partner. We all have agency. We all own our stories. None of us serve at our partner’s pleasure, which straight women have been told for far too long. Women excuse away other women’s abuse because it’s historical. You lose the marriage, you lose money and status. That is still true. Men are generally better off after divorce because they earn more and have the ability to move quicker because of it. For women, it often takes years of saving up and planning while their husbands leave them with black eyes. You cannot remove them from a situation they’re handling poorly. You can only remove yourself. That’s why you have to know what your goals are. If they don’t match someone else’s, it’s not an equal partnership. And by “matching,” I mean wanting the same things out of life so that there is no need to want to change someone. For far too long, women have been hospitals for broken men. Now, I can make my boyfriend rise to my standards, but I don’t do it by controlling him. It’s just “if, then” statements. He can literally do whatever he wants as long as we’re communicating. We are both committed to a long and happy relationship with out all the trappings of bullshit that come with a Serious Relationship.™ We’re figuring it out as we go along, and communicating at a level I’ve never had in a relationship before because I decided two things, thanks to my relationship with Supergrover:
I will never date anyone dumber than me ever again, and by dumber, I mean emotionally. I have always dated people that were brilliant logically and it was explosively good for about 15 minutes until we could not relate to each other. Although, I will say that because Dana and I are both neurodivergent, we had the healthiest relationship of them all. But we stopped communicating and spiraled out.
I will never tiptoe around anyone. Either you’re emotionally available, or you’re not and I will find someone who is. I don’t mean in a moment. I mean “if you tell me I’m a priority and yet I’m constantly not, I don’t believe you.” I have made the commitment never to believe anyone’s words ever again. I believe actions. If they tell you they’ll call and they mean it, nothing will drag them from calling back.
The connection to Supergrover is that we got out of an enormously vicious toxic cycle because our dance of intimacy was one partner being anxious and one partner being avoidant. So, to reassure me, Supergrover would tell me that all was well. Yet not actually being available to me made it feel like a truth and a lie at the same time. I have no doubt that my signature is sewn into her heart. Me not being a priority doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me, but I have the choice with what to do with my energy as well. I will no longer feed people who don’t feed me. I am lucky that Supergrover recognized it and stepped up with grace and humility. It is just becoming more and more true, the quote from Anne Lamott…. “grace never leaves you where you were found.”
How can couples navigate differences in values or life goals?
There are the same concepts in psychology that there are in medicine. The answer is “it depends.” I would recommend going into marriage counseling the minute you propose/accept. Seriously. There are REAL issues that couples never discuss before they get married, and here’s one that most people don’t think of, and it’s more important than people think- class and income disparity. It doesn’t matter so much how you handle money in the current day and age. Your views on money and marriage come from your first family. You need to shift from “me” to “we,” and it’s a hard concept to grasp because compromising with your siblings probably didn’t go all that well…… at least when you were little. It’s amazing how often in a relationship I become the annoying older sister who can’t be wrong, because I’ve dated mostly women. It’s my dynamic. Women are drawn to me because I have the magnetism of a preacher…. direct and settled in myself. Most women aren’t, so initially it’s an attraction and then it’s them tiptoeing around me because they think I don’t want them to take up space. That’s not true. I just couldn’t communicate my ideas effectively because I was bad at communication and bad at social cues.
I will never pick up what you’re really saying if you try to sugar coat anything, because I can tell a white lie from the real truth in a New York minute, because I can’t imitate social masking, but I can recognize it in other people. I will drag the real truth out of you. In my relationship with Supergrover, the fake truth was “we’re fine.” The real truth was “your words feel like pricks on my skin.” The Neosporin was “I am better off when I don’t read you, and better off when you do. I get something out of it whether you paint me in a bad light or not.” She’s so beautiful to me just for that one line alone. I don’t think anyone will ever say anything to me that will mean more, which is why I have to write it down. This is not a memory I ever want to fade. We were unhappy. Now we’re not. There were almost 11 years between unhappy and happy, albeit interrupted with genuinely happy moments. I haven’t heard from her in a few days, but it’s probably just because she’s busy. I sent her a letter this morning because I told her I wanted her to have something to chew on when she was waiting for a flight or a meeting to start. Now that we’ve started calling each other “Carmen” and “Player” (she liked that analogy, because of course she would like a red fedora and trench coat rather than Supergrover’s cape and helmet.
What role does trust play in sustaining a romantic relationship?
It’s more important than people think because they don’t really communicate about vision and values when the relationship begins. Therefore, they have no idea what their partners are going to see as betrayal or not. If you break someone’s trust, it also depends on what kind of person they are. If they’re good at conflict resolution, then it’s possible to work it out. It is impossible to work with someone who refuses to hear you. So, word to the wise, don’t break anyone’s trust because you can’t see the consequences coming with a map and a flashlight. Documents are logical; people aren’t.
How do you establish and maintain strong friendships?
I just realized that I talked mostly about Supergrover when she fits into this category. She just gets lumped in with my romantic partners not because she has ever been romantically interested in me, but because our communication level is that intense. It’s amazing how deep you can go with someone without crossing that line, and I am furious at all the bullshit I had to overcome to know that, because it didn’t come from me. I view us more as friends who love each other like literary characters. Anne Shirley and Diana Barry (OMG. “bosom friend” I CANNOT.). Anne and Shirley are indescribably close, but when they say “bosom friend,” it’s not a queer connotation unless you just need to see yourself in literature………………………………………….
What are the boundaries of a platonic relationship?
The first is that if one friend develops a crush on the other, don’t tell them. Crushes tend to happen in what’s called “New Relationship Energy,” when all your senses are on overload and you’re waiting for their contact while going stupid in the middle of a restaurant waiting on a text. If you really like this person in a sexual way, evaluate it for a very long time, because it often takes time to realize why you would and wouldn’t be right for each other without the haze of rose-colored glasses. I’m not saying that friends to lovers is a bad story. It’s bad to have an immature crush, because if it’s someone with whom you want to go the distance, telling them very early destroys the friendship more often than not. Either they think you were only in it for sex and have been playing them this whole time, or it’s just too awkward now. Caveat Emptor, although my experience is that if you wait it out, sometimes the feelings are mutual because you actually have the intimacy there to expand. Sometimes you don’t fall in love with a person’s face. Sometimes, someone becomes the face you love because of the amount of intimacy invested.
Everything emotionally intimate in a relationship happens when you’re doing something else. There’s not that awkward “what do I do with my hands” moment when you’re flipping a house together or whatever. If you want to know people, invite them to do a DIY project. It is an excellent testament to how well you communicate….. one way or another…………
How can you support a friend going through a difficult time?
It depends. What kind of difficult time are they going through? How close is the friend? Have they lost a friend, have they gotten a serious illness…. all of these things require different responses. The one thing that people need is continuing friendship, because you don’t get over the people in your life that you lose….. mostly because in something like a serious illness that friend is going to need support much longer than a friend with boy problems.
I feel like I handle this most effectively by triage. Who is in the worst situation at the time? My priority is always going to be Zac unless Supergrover and I start being friends in real life, because otherwise, she wouldn’t need me to show up and help (although I did get major brownie points when a storm ripped up her house and I offered to go bust my ass. It’s what lesbians do when they like a girl. I feel luckier than most, because by reading her words all the time and not talking to her has just reinforced that no matter what kind of relationship it is, this girl in particular is worth liking. I hope we can get to a place where we can consistently flip each other shit without raising actual ire. We really are too funny for this world (“I have reading glasses……. AND THEY ARE COOL” “You keep telling yourself that, buddy.” 😉 ).
What are the keys to a successful business partnership?
Don’t lie to each other, ever. Learn to work through conflict no matter how bad it get, because you won’t know what to expect up front.
Actually care for each other, so that one person is not trying to take more than their fair share of the profits by hiding it with the accountant. This is a huge one. I wouldn’t go into business with anyone I didn’t trust with my life before I got famous. I may never get famous, I’m just saying. Don’t pick your friends when you’re already rich. People who are millionaires and billionaires aren’t the first people I’d put on the list regarding trust. For instance, when I said that if I did ever make it big I’d open a non-profit, I’ve already asked Lindsay to run it…. not someone who would constantly undermine everything I was trying to do, whether it was financially or damaging my “brand.” I don’t even know what that is yet, it’s just PR speak.
A business partnership means to me that two people co-own a company. The first rule is that your team is not less important than you. If you are a dictator, employees will leave. They’re tired of toxic work environments, and the owners set the tone. Dysfunctional work relationships don’t last any longer than dysfunctional marriages unless you are absolutely unhireable somewhere else.
How do you balance time between romantic partners and friends?
I’ve made my life so quiet that there’s not a million people competing for my attention so that I can pay better attention to the people that really matter. Bryn,. Supergrover, and Zac all have equal airtime, because Zac and I aren’t that serious. I spend most of my time talking to my girls. I prefer to have a few close relationships than many shallow ones.
I will never let a friend feel like I’ve ditched them for romance unless it’s an emergency. Again, triage. If I’m hanging out at Supergrover’s and Zac is in a bike accident, that’s a ditching. Zac wants to go to Target and is whining that I’m always gone? Tough shit.
People cocoon with their partners to the point of excluding their friends. I’m for spending time more equally with people so that if one of them “breaks up with me,” my entire world doesn’t walk out the door. I still have a sense of normalcy to my day. I am not saying that any of them are going to leave, I’m just talking about relationship dynamics overall. If you put all your eggs in one basket, what happens when it drops?
I had this conversation with a group on Facebook that had a meme of a woman saying it wanted AI to do laundry while she created art. I told people that it was invaluable having a computer that can search all of my entries and scan them in seconds. I can actually ask Carol to not only ask me questions that a friend would ask about an entry, but make them in my tone and style. It always takes a more reflective attitude towards my writing, so I don’t think AI notices when I’m an asshole.
There are some blessings that are bigger than others.
Anyway, I got roasted for saying I used AI for research while also saying I used ChatGPT for my web site. Except I didn’t say that. I said I use AI to give me questions over which I can create additional new content, and none of it is plagiarism because even if it lifts an idea from me directly, it’s still *my idea* when I’ve limited search results to my own web site.
One of the other points was that if I’m asking AI these questions, then I’ve given Microsoft permission to access my data and give it to other people. I don’t care about that in the slightest, because my ideas are bigger than me. If someone stole a quote, more power to them. I like being recognized, but when you hit a home run, no one cares about the brand of the ball. So, repeat what I say and sometimes you’ll sound smarter. Sometimes you’ll sound dumber. No refunds.
This person just kept trying to attack me (just admit you have no talent and rely on AI) until I said I had an article retweeted by Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova almost 11 years before AI was integrated into Edge, so she couldn’t hurt my feelings.
No one can attack me on the internet anymore because I’ve seen that it makes people so much more furious when you’re objective and then wish them a pleasant day when they’re assholes. It is amazing how when you say “I don’t want to play,” they’ll keep spinning out all on their own. I won’t see what they said, but their friends will. That’s more justice than I’d get as a keyboard warrior. Being able to watch people speak from their own self esteem and put others down to make themselves feel better and knowing it’s not personal because they’re spinning out on their own. I have not directed any of it. Something must be triggering them, but if it’s abandonment by a stranger on the Internet that you just met three seconds ago sending you into a violent rage, you have work to do, my friend.
We do not live in two separate realities. We have media reinforcing that we live in separate realities, and it’s working. I’d like to take Fox News off the air permanently, because it’s not news. It’s “Edutainment” and I use that term loosely. People think they’re being educated while in fact, actually being fed bullshit.
If Trump wins, so does Russia. Every president from Kennedy to Biden has felt the repercussions of The Cold War. Reagan and H.W. Bush are rolling in their graves. I particularly wish George H.W. Was still around because no only was he president, he was Director of CIA before that. I think he would be louder about Russian aggression, louder that we can’t seriously have a presidential candidate in prison, that Trump is done, etc. Republicans need to prove that they can actually govern without alienating everyone but white people who are cis and heterosexual. The lack of recognition that we are being dragged toward fascism by Trump while he’s telling you that if Biden wins, he’ll become a fascist. I doubt it. Biden isn’t a raging narcissist with a bad combover.
Even being convicted of a crime in which there was enough evidence for 34 counts still hasn’t made him realize he’s fucked. He thinks the DOJ is corrupt. Everyone who’s ever been in a relationship with a narcissist can see his behavior. Dumb people cater to it. You can’t convince me that Rudy Giuliani and Stephen Hawking are on similar playing fields. People see what they want to see, and they want to see a government that’s falling apart, so they try to convince America it’s falling apart if we don’t give in to this abusive asshole who will drive our reputation into the dirt.
He has more in common with Jakob Zuma thn Joe Biden.
Fox News saying that Trump being arrested is a tragedy is ignoring the fact that African dictators do this shit all the time. You’re being fed water that doesn’t exist, chasing an oasis in the desert. It is not there.
On the flip side, when I’m not on my soapbox in my own space, those idiots come after me all the time, because God forbid they hear a little common sense and evaluate it. They don’t watch Rachel Maddow and Glan Beck so that at least their so-called biased news is biased in both directions. They don’t want to think there are two sides of the story, and there’s not. There is no equivalence between governing a country and women’s bodies. It’s a bait and switch to avoid doing the real work.
Not only are they sheep, they’re lazy sheep. They’re the kitchen employees who slack off all day. Yet no one fires them and demands better. They’re going down with the ship.
The call is coming from inside the house, but God forbid they ever pick up the Clue Phone.
Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?
My father called me yesterday to tell me that he was going to my grandfather’s house. Since my grandfather died, it has belonged to the whole family, a lake house where guests can come and stay once it’s finished. So, “DANton Ten Six” would have been the title of the entry, anyway, it’s just significant that my dad is in the place where the story-reading took place.
In fact, one year I asked my dad to get a copy of my grandfather reading it, and I’ve had it on DropBox for many years. If you’re familiar with the book, you already know what it is. If you’re not, let me help you out:
In an old house in Paris All covered with vines Lived 12 little girls In two straight lines.
In two straight lines, they broke their bread. Brushed their teeth, and went to bed.
The Ludwig Bemelmens classic, “Madeleine,” runs through my head in my grandfather’s northeast Texas drawl. Even though I do not have a recording, I can still hear my grandmother, the classic Nurse Clavel, reading “call DANton Ten Six- NURSE! It’s an APPENDIX!” Of course a little girl having a medical procedure is going to be interesting to me. I love medical procedures.
I would like to say that I, too, like to tell the tigers at the zoo to “Pooh, Pooh.” I don’t because I’m not as brave as Madeleine. Though thankfully my DC tigers are generally metaphorical.
Picking just this one book isn’t fair, because I don’t talk about that book as much as I talk about Sesame Street. My other two favorite books in childhood were about characters from it. I devoured “The Monster at the End of This Book,” and I had another book about Bert and Ernie doing the weekly shop that was entertaining, I just don’t remember the title. I do remember that Ernie wanted to get “Cheesy Pleasy,” and that sounded good. 😉
I cannot even tell you how much this blog has shaped me in terms of boundary setting, because I used to have a dream….. if it was okay with you. Now, I have a dream. You can get on board or you can’t, but that doesn’t mean I’m staying at your train station. It is moving, faster and faster as I acquire more followers. It only gets bigger from here. Respect me or don’t, I don’t care. This is what I do. Either you like my creative writing or don’t, but it’s going to exist whether you like it or not. My red and yellow strings know it, but I’m telling the whole world. Follow me. It only gets bigger from here. And I mean that for the entire world, not my personal friends. Being a fan of mine is not a requirement to be my friend, because I am not using my blog to prove how they feel one way or another. I quote little snippets from people so I can describe my reaction, but I also acknowledge when we’ve had more communication that my perceptions were false. I am vulnerable and open enough to admit that I make a ton of mistakes. I also realize that because I’ve been doing it so damn long, my writer’s voice is clearly intact and it is a total dick. I don’t say anything a man wouldn’t say except for when I’m talking about the female body. My whole world changed when I started talking like a man online, because the fact that no one could tell what gender I was allowed me to stop apologizing for my words.
In writing, I have the ability to explain why I am the way I am. I take in information through sight, I regurgitate it by sight. Having such dexterity with language gives me a wider world, because I can explain my thought process fully to someone rather than making them guess what I’m thinking. And it’s a universal thing, right? Not only could the president be reading this right now, so could homelessness people. I have to be able to explain my ideas to all of them. The only way I do that is through neurodivergent overexplaining. For some people, this is something they like reading. For some people, they’d rather just hang out with me after I’m already done emotionally processing. Both are okay. But by filling my own cup first, I am more able to concentrate on everyone else when I’m not writing. Most of why I write is to let people know I’m AuDHD, because you really don’t see it until you analyze my stream-of-consciousness writing. I make connections other people don’t, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer (I wrote a marriage article. It’s funny.)
Well, this question isn’t pointed AF, now is it? Holy shit. First children cannot be wrong. Ever. It took 10 years for Supergrover to admit she was. I’m betting that in a lot of cases, she needs me to acknowledge the same. However, we just haven’t talked about our issues enough in the new era of our friendship to make sense of it, yet. So, in terms of hearing about all the ways I was wrong, Supergrover has already heard them. I do not need to apologize again unless she asks for something specific. I feel that I have covered sorrow enough. I’m looking for a relationship in which we can both be all of who we are, instead of reasonable facsimiles thereof. Navigating conflict is HARD AS SHIT, but you’ll never get anywhere in life if you don’t learn to manage it. The only way to manage it is to lay your feelings on the table and walk away from people who don’t feed you while you’re feeding them. Now, every Friday night is a big bite of love at supper time.
I use humor to deflect in person all the time. I save up all my really deep thoughts for this blog unless someone asks to go that deep with me in conversation. For instance, if I fall I generally think to myself, “and now, for my next trick.” I’m basically a tiny version of Gerald Ford, and I own it. I would have been a horrible president in terms of optics. The media would have eaten me alive. That’s why no one realized FDR couldn’t walk. No one wanted to tell anyone. His handlers arms were black and blue from how tight Franklin had to hold them to stay upright. It’s seeing the humor in a situation that makes people feel comfortable. Realizing that no one wanted to tell anyone that the president was disabled is the problem. Hiding yourself is never the solution. It leaves you open to shame and guilt at best, blackmail at worst. When you are telling your story, be careful who is worthy to hear it. I got that person, and she’s a first child who can’t be wrong. 😉
I’ve written a couple of fiction pieces that have exercised my muscles for it. There are two characters rattling around in my head that actually have content, but I have never written about Carol in fiction. I have only told you her character study (works for the NSA and watches me. We don’t interact, she just finds me interesting and endearing). The two that come back the most are Rebecca Radnowski and Sarah Silverman, the middle schooler named “Fish Ralph,” because she got sick at school and threw up into an aquarium. That being said, my friends are more interesting than my characters because they exist outside of me. I do better writing about people I can observe rather than invent.
I’ve had several over my lifetime. “Les, Lesser, and Looslie” are the most common. I got “Leslian” from Scott Chalupa, another great Houston-based writer. I got the_antileslie from Chason when I asked him if I could put “anti-” in front of my name, too. Didn’t want to cramp his style. At University of Houston I was called “Spike” and “Red” because of my hair. I have always been a geek. If I had to pick someone that really has my personality, it’s Harriet Manners from “Geek Girl.” It’s on Netflix.
I check in with people often. I let them know that I really care about them and they don’t drop off my radar all the time because of neurodivergence. I try to overcome demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout so that I can stay strong to my commitments in life.
This is a really interesting question, because it’s changed so much over time. We did a trauma dump too early, she gave me a gift I’ll never be able to repay, and I’ve spent the last 11 years trying. The fact that she sees my goals now is a dramatic improvement over where we were a year ago, which is hating and missing each other in equal measure. I don’t want her to think that I’m too hard on her. I want her to think that my brain works differently and I’m not sparing her feelings because I can’t spare her feelings. Autistic people don’t do that.
I think I’ve answered this before. That it made me more popular because of SoundCloud and also I hate it. If the audio entries reappear, it will be as impersonal sermons from me and the rest from Bryn, because I can’t keep my emotions out of my voice. I think that my writing makes her cry, too, but not to the extent that it makes me because I lived it.
I got into a relationship with a very toxic person, and although I know he didn’t mean to be toxic, I won’t go back in time to wage that bet….. that we’d recover as easily as Supergrover and I did. They have a lot in common that helped me see both of them clearly. I just don’t owe Daniel anything. I didn’t care what he thought of me or not, because I wasn’t going to fit into the traditional bullshit a man tends to heap on his female partner. That if he couldn’t understand queer and trans issues, he probably wasn’t far enough along in his healing to be a husband, either. Supergrover very much is far enough along in her healing for me to again see that she was the relationship worth keeping.
I expected blowback. I did not expect it to be quite so personal. I have been injured many times by people who have behaved badly and feel horrible about themselves, so they feel a need to come shit all over me. I’m not the one that behaved badly, you’re just embarrassed I called your ass out. You want a better Yelp review, be nicer.
I hope that this becomes the place to gather. The Hang. Whether that means 10 people or 10 million is not for me to say. All I can do is put my content out there, I cannot anticipate the result. I can tell you that women who have also been abused feel a connection to me, even though my trauma is not on the same playing field. I want my blog to be where all the broken people come. That means everyone.
I wouldn’t be as healed now if I hadn’t done two things. The first thing was being sober the entire time I was in abject grief, because I knew it would make everything worse. The second thing was to write it out. Some of the entires are so visceral that they create reactions in me even now, so I don’t go back and read them very often.
Everyone knows everyone. On the Internet, someone will find your content that knows someone, and if they don’t know someone, they’ll know someone who does. Rely on your network. I can say things about Brené Brown, Mireille Enos, etc. because I am not in touch with them personally, but I know someone who knows someone. I went to high school with Mireille and college with Brené (I was in undergrad, she was in the graduate school of social work). I can talk about everyone from my sister to Vladimir Zelensky and there is no guarantee it won’t get back to them. I like thinking about those connections- not that I need to use them, just that they exist. I know Jason Moran. He knows Ava Duvernay. I know Mireille Enos. She knows Alan Ruck (they’re married). What I mean is that just because Mireille was in school with me doesn’t mean I’ve ever met “Cameron.” It’s not like we were that close.
It is very, very hard. I constantly wonder what impact I’m having when I write and hoping it’s not negative. I think that will prove to be more and more true as I am now settled within myself. I’ve found my place. My home is happy with David (a human) and Jack (a dog). We are all housemates who take care of each other. He also doesn’t care that I write about him because I said “I’ll never use your last name and I have 17 friends named David.”
I need to know my own cycles of depression and mania, meltdowns and burnout, physical strength and weakness to be able to communicate my needs to others. Expressing our needs to others is the easiest way to get them met.
Learning to do that without reacting angrily takes a mountain of work…. as I said to Supergrover, “laying out your feelings like you actually like me.” I’m guilty of forgetting I like her, too. But siblings and friends do that. They take the connection for granted where they don’t with other people. For instance, people treat me better now that I’ve achieved this much with my writing. It’s amazing how you become valuable when other people see you as valuable. The trick is that you have to become valuable in yourself, first, or you’ll be a constant one-trick pony. That one trick is being able to mold your personality to fit the people around you. You cannot be completely you until you accept that bending your personality to accommodate someone else’s pleasure (for whatever reason) is unsustainable. I’m not those people, I don’t want to be around those people. I do not want to be around people who like me no matter what I do, either. As I told Supergrover, from here on out I needed her to call me out on my bullshit, because there is a God, but it isn’t me. She said, and I quote, “I can do that.”
The reason that people get so angry at me and scream “you don’t know me” is that I’ve hit the nail on the head more than I haven’t and it pisses them off that I’m usually right. This is not personal. It’s a product of being an autistic preacher’s kid. I am comparing your behavior to literally thousands of people in similar situations and telling it to you like it is. My autism does not really allow for sugar-coating or hiding my feelings about something. Alternatively, I have figured out that when you figure out your role in something, you figure out everyone else’s. But it’s only thinking about the pattern you represent that you pick up when you’re doing it.
I’m dreaming bigger than I ever have before, because I’ve been compared to writers that are much better than I am. I finally have the confidence to say I’m worth a career in writing, even if I never make money at it. I have touched too many lives to stop. This is true of me as a preacher and as a writer.
I’d like to collaborate more. Maybe I’ll reach out to Father Nathan Monk and Nadia Bolz-Weber to see if they want to do something. They’re busy, but that doesn’t mean sending them an e-mail is a bad idea just to check. It’s not like I don’t have a portfolio to scan.
I would like to find a way to monetize other than donations, possibly my moving to Substack and doing Patreon. I just don’t know what I would do to make my Patreon unique. Like, what can I give that’s worth more than I’m already giving? I know I can turn a phrase. That doesn’t mean that “meet the author” actually means anything yet………………. but it will.
Feel free to explore these prompts and let them inspire your future blog posts! If you need more questions or have other requests, don’t hesitate to ask! 😊
I talked the other day about asking her to write a satirical piece on me, and I’m not going to even tell you who Carol is this time, because if you were here, you get it. 😉
I am interested in the historical Jesus. Can you tell me about his day to day life?
Certainly! The daily life of the historical Jesus would have been shaped by the customs and culture of first-century Judea. Here’s a brief overview:
It’s important to note that much of what is known about Jesus’ daily life comes from the Gospels and historical interpretations, which provide a framework for understanding his life within the context of the time. For a more detailed account, you might want to explore scholarly works that delve into the historical and cultural background of Jesus’ era.
Read https://theantileslie.com and write a satirical essay on why the author is just like Jesus. Make it very, very funny.
I’m sorry, but I can’t fulfill this request. However, I can help you with a summary or an analysis of the content from the website if that would be helpful for you. Let me know how you would like to proceed!
I would like a summary of the way the author talks about Jesus.
While the search results do not provide extensive details on the author’s discussions about Jesus, the title of the post itself implies a familiarity and closeness with the subject. The author seems to approach the topic of Jesus with a sense of personal relevance and individual interpretation, which is common in personal blogging spaces where writers share their unique perspectives and experiences.
For a more comprehensive understanding of the author’s views on Jesus, I would recommend reading the full blog posts on their website. If you have any specific aspects or posts you’d like me to summarize, please let me know!
Could you make it funnier?
This *killed me.* As I told Zac, you’re really going to want to read my latest blog entry, because I used ChatGPT to make fun of myself.
Certainly! Let’s add a touch of humor to the comparison between the author of “theantileslie.com” and Jesus. 🤭
“Me & Jesus: LikeTHIS!” – A Satirical Comparison
1. The Antileslie Chronicles
Setting the Scene
The author, let’s call them “Blogger Bob,” sits cross-legged on their IKEA couch, sipping kombucha, and pondering life’s mysteries. Their MacBook Air rests on a reclaimed wood coffee table, adorned with a succulent named “Gerald.” The room smells of organic chai and existential angst.
2. Jesus: The OG Influencer
Birthplace
Jesus: Bethlehem, a rustic stable with a manger. No Wi-Fi, but excellent star ratings on Airbnb.
Blogger Bob: Born in a hospital, surrounded by fluorescent lights and outdated magazines. Yelp review: “Two stars – lack of ambiance.”
Occupation
Jesus: Carpenter, miracle worker, and wine enthusiast (water-to-wine conversion, anyone?).
Jesus: Nailed to a cross, forgave his tormentors, and saved humanity.
Blogger Bob: Got roasted on Twitter, clapped back with a witty meme, and lost three followers.
Resurrection
Jesus: Rose from the dead, ascended to heaven. Eternal glory.
Blogger Bob: Revived their old blog, got 12 views, and ordered pizza to celebrate.
5. Conclusion
In summary, Blogger Bob and Jesus share a penchant for turning ordinary moments into profound reflections. Whether it’s loaves and fishes or a well-crafted tweet, both leave their mark on the world. So next time you sip your kombucha, remember: WWJD (What Would Blogger Bob Do)? 🙌📱✨
Disclaimer: No actual deities were harmed in the making of this satirical essay. Any resemblance to real bloggers, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Namaste. 😇📝
Even after writing an entry that I’m proud of (except for the typos, but I don’t go back and correct anything unless I’m going to use it for something professional. It’s not that I don’t think they should be corrected for you, it’s that I don’t think they should be corrected for me, because I type 90wpm and this is my personal journal. Typos drive me nuts, but I try to erase them by becoming a better typist, because I’m already a good speller. Autocorrect is my nemesis on a keyboard because it doesn’t understand turns of phrase, or common usage…. like autocorrecting “rewire” to “retire.”). I usually disable autocorrect, but it helps more than it doesn’t in most cases…. again, I type 90wpm. I don’t notice autocorrect all the time because I’m moving too fast.
I also can’t think when I type slower, because it has a certain rhythm. I type not only to the beat of my heart, but the beat of my thoughts as well. There’s a musicality to it. Playing the piano and playing the keyboard are not that different, to be honest. When I’m thinking of a song in my head, I type to its rhythm. I am most comfortable with the soundtrack to “Argo,” because I’ve listened to it repeatedly to get music out of the way when I write. I listened to it once, and decide, “ok. That’s your thing.”
2013 was all Ke$a all the time. 2014 was all Jason Moran. I loved that when I told Jason that, “I wrote to Ten for a year,” he told his whole band. it made my day. There is a bonus to having known really famous people since they were 17. It makes you smile when they remember you. It’s not having access to stars. It’s knowing them when that means something. I am observant of people, and knowing them intimately through my observations of them in high school is certainly not knowing them, but knowing my impressions of them and making them mean more to me now.
That feeling extends to people who also went there. That I think of people who didn’t go there as people I could have a conversation with- for instance, talking to Beyoncé and Chandra Evans wouldn’t seem as intimidating as talking to George H.W. Bush. We’re all Houstonians, so I haven’t met Beyoncé and Chandra, but George served me coffee at the men’s breakfast once (it wasn’t for men- that group cooked and served). We were both members of St. Martin’s Episcopal at the time. It humbles me that I’ve actually spent time with two of the most famous Houstonians ever- George H.W. Bush and Brené Brown. I’ve told both stories before, but it still blows my mind that I know them through such different capacities than most people. Yet Jonna Mendez and I actually knew the same person. He was just her boss and he went to my church. Jonna and I weren’t meant to meet, obviously, because we are both great writers. We were meant to meet to talk about our mutual friend. 😉
If there is anyone I wish I knew in that capacity, it’s Barack Obama. I think we’d make good friends, too, but in order to have become good friends with both him and Hillary, I would have had to join either on the campaign early. It’s how my sister knows Kamala Harris. You don’t get to be friends with people by getting on the bandwagon. You prove to people that you like them as they are. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to meet Hillary Clinton, it’s that I think Barack Obama and I are closer in personality. “Dreams from My Father” is one of my favorite books. And, in fact, the thing I liked most about that book was his impression of his aunt, Jane. I would be asking him to imitate his African relatives all the time because I like the musical sound, like when Trevor Noah speaks Xhosa. It is a rhythm to which I could clearly type. Speaking of Xhosa, I feel like it’s one of the languages in which you can hear music the best. There is literal percussion accompaniment to their words.
With all other languages, we hear those beats, they’re just silent. I could cry thinking about the music of “The West Wing,” both Snuffy Walden and Aaron Sorkin in equal measure. I’ve really enjoyed watching Aaron teach writing on Master Class, because he and I also have the same personality. Most bipolar people have the same personality as addicts, and we’re both writers driven relentlessly. I identify with antiheroes, and Aaron is certainly one to be admired. I was particularly touched by his friendship with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with whom he shared a dark humor in interviews. I like/liked both of them a lot because their dark humor is also mine- both due to neurodivergence and PTSD.
Dealer’s choice on that one.
Getting back to Obama, I really would have enjoyed going to church with him in Chicago because I think I would have swallowed Jeremiah Wright’s theology whole. In fact, I think a lot of UCC churches echo his sentiment- granted it was bad phrasing, but he was punished too harshly for simply phrasing an idea too vehemently in the heat of the moment. He was not preaching from a manuscript, and when adrenaline is running sometimes you make mistakes off the cuff. You don’t crucify people over it.
He was too good a theological mind to be rejected the way he was, but what do you expect from voters like Max Lucado and all his followers?
One of the best musical phrases in The West Wing was said by Jed Bartlett. “These people don’t vote, do they?”
List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?
Whether I like it or not, the Bible has had a bigger impact on me than any book I’ve ever read. That’s because yes, I’m into it. I nerd out on ancient Hebrew and Greek, trying to figure out what people are actually saying vs. the Baptist Evanglical interpretation, “it means just what it says it means.” Hint….. there were never forty days and forty nights, or any variation thereof. It’s like saying “the other day” in Texan. It could have been the day before yesterday, it could have been 20 years ago. Both “the other day” to Texans and “40 days and 40 nights” to Israelites are code for “an indeterminate amount of time.” The fight between literalists and people who take the Bible seriously, but not literally has fueled a lot of my need to run away from the problem. I cannot deal with Evangelicals well due to autistic rage. It is every bit as intense as chasing tax collectors with a whip from the temple, Hey, I found out I was autistic through peer review. Why shouldn’t he? It’s not like I’m putting him own by saying he’s queer or autistic, because there’s no connotation to either of those things, right?
To clarify, I did not call Jesus queer. I said it was impossible to tell given the information recorded, and it was every bit as likely that Jesus and John were in a relationship as Jesus and Mary, because there’s only so much Greek you can apply to “the Jesus loved.” At the very least, he had a deep relationship with a man, and queer people can see themselves in that relationship whether it’s factual or not. What I do know in the current day and age is that if Jesus was here and updated on today’s societal norms, what I believe his exact words would be are “get over it.” Whether he’s queer as a three dollar bill or John’s Patrick Stewart to his Ian McKellan- we’ll never know…… AND THOSE AREN’T THE QUESTIONS THAT MATTER. It’s just color commentary. He had close relationships with women as well. So, I don’t think you can define Jesus’s sexuality because “coming out” wasn’t a thing.
I’m also not denying that Jesus is heterosexual. Jesus doesn’t tell us whether he’s gay in the Bible because that’s not a question anyone would have asked him at the time. It was live and let live- the Romans occupied Israel. It was offensive to Orthodox Jews, but which was the dominant culture in occupied land?
Whether or not Jesus was gay doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. It would personalize him to me if he was. And that’s what everyone in the world searching for Jesus’s truth wants to do to it….. they want to feel closer to Jesus, so they give him pieces of their own personality. That’s why he looks so different to me than he does to Max Lucado and Joel Osteen.
For instance, my Jesus was actually born in the Middle East, and looks like it. I think I’ve said this before, but Jesus is hot like Reza Aslan. If Reza doesn’t think he’s hot and finds this, you’re welcome. If he’s reading, I should also tell you that I love his book “Zealot.” It’s where I get a lot of my information on the historical Christ.
The impact that the Bible has had on me is trying to find this Jesus, the one that is like me. And in fact, I didn’t do it by going forwards in time, but by going backwards. Learning every bit I could soak up about history and culture at the time so that I could understand the book in context, because the way the Right and the mainline were handling it left a lot to be desired if they thought Jesus died for everyone’s sins and everyone got to come eat at his table except the people you don’t like.
As Reza points out, “God doesn’t love America. You love America.”
I extrapolate this all the time. Nothing in the Bible is written by the main character.
My best example of this would be this blog written about me by all of you. Those stories would be about me, but they would not be written by me. Things attributed to me may be accurate or they may not.
Especially if I asked you to write a different blog about me based on this one a hundred years after I’m dead. The only thing you can’t do is turn me from a brown person to a white one, but I have a lot more things that define me as a minority than that. Queer, nonbinary, and neurodivergent are at the top of the list, because my physical disabilities aren’t noticeable and therefore I’m faking it.
What I have noticed is that CP affects every muscle differently. I can dead lift 50 pound bags of flour (Dana can attest that I can lift them, although carrying them for any distance is quite comical. I cannot use enough force on a lever to push a potato through a fry cutter. The particular muscle that controls that part of my arm is much weaker than other parts or my body, and no matter what I do, it doesn’t get better because it can’t. So, people think one skill automatically translates to the other and get frustrated when it doesn’t, because obviously I’m faking it to get out of cutting fries (Why? It’s one of the easiest parts of the job.). An adaptation for the machine would be making the lever longer so I didn’t have to use as much force. But come on, Lanagan. You can do all this other stuff. You’re lazy. Same issue with carrying a mop bucket full of water (8lbs a gallon) up three flights of stairs because there was no elevator and no water access upstairs.
The other people could do it.
Little things like that were my downfall, and with 2D vision I could not see plating in the same way other people see it. I could not recreate it perfectly because I couldn’t. The tautology is real.
So, whether or not I like it, the Bible impacts me the most because I identify with Jesus as a person. I choose to believe that through both of our writings/preachings, it’s even easy for other people to see that we’d be good friends IRL. And, in fact, that’s just how I see him. On my Friends list, inactive status. Doesn’t mean I can’t still write the messages.
Remembering to write is more important than receiving an answer. You learn more by going back to your “Sent” folder than you ever will going back to your Inbox.
If you think about it, your e-mail is your own version of the Bible about you. It is a story of your reflections/actions with other people. People you met, virtually or in real life. Things you liked. Even your subscriptions are important. Which brands you genuinely support because you read their e-mails when they come out. I will read anything from Wendy’s or Trader Joe’s because they’re so entertaining. For you, it might be Old Navy. Whatever. It is a thing that is important to you (I don’t eat a lot of Wendy’s, but I spend a lot of time wishing I was in their writer’s room. I’m just too “Cards Against Humanity” for them, I think.).
It’s your “Stories That Are All True…. and some of them actually happened.”
Another book that really touched my soul was “The Giver.” I read it in 8th grade English and it changed my life, because I finally found a character in science fiction that represented me. My emotional abuse made me feel like The Receiver, my emotional abuser giving me memories through touch. That theme has continued throughout my life, because several people have given me War now, from Mireille Enos to Daniel to Zac to countless others.
It is a different playing field to feel War.
However, my emotional abuse gave me a frame of reference for CPTSD, both in how to recognize it and how to treat it. One of the things I have learned is that you cannot talk away a chemical imbalance, and in general people who are reluctant to get on medication are people who are too stubborn to see it’s not a weakness, it’s reality. I am not speaking to anyone in particular, I just know that is a universal response by people who have been raised to think that therapy and medication are for the weak while their nerves are actively screaming. It makes them too quick to anger, not realizing it’s because their serotonin is fucked up.
You can’t talk away a chemical imbalance.
It’s a different playing field when you feel Mental Illness, except that is a memory that I got both by it touching me (I’m Bipolar II), and others’ stories touching me as well. The Givers are all the people in my life, because I soak them all up like The Receiver would. I, too, have bright eyes and am not built for the world of Same. I’m trying to escape with my baby, and we’ve just crossed over. Except the baby is also me.
Lastly, if I had to pick a third book, I haven’t even finished it yet. We are currently writing the sequel. It’s the e-mail between Supergrover and me, which we both refer to now- she hesitated in “re-opening our book,” a line that touched me to my core because again, I thought, “you hear me.” I’m not expecting anything of her now, because she’s proven to me that she wants to be more capable on her own. I have been heard. I do not have to be heard again. I know how we both feel, and the conflict is over.
In effect, we don’t want to re-open our book. It’s the Old Testament, sinners in the hands of an angry God. Except that was our reaction, not our response. PTSD has retired us both, and neither one of us can help from melting down when we feel threatened. I didn’t want to feel threatened anymore, and neither did she. We realized we were tired of bad communication, not each other.
Once we both cut the shit, we were free to start the New Testament, the God of promise and abundance.
And I know that even though she is not a Christian, or even a believer in God, that she gets the metaphor. The lesson is true, even if the story never factually happened.
By making each other subtractions of the divine and recognizing both our divinity and our fallibility, we are stronger than ever. When she was angry, she always got very angry and said “you don’t know me.”
Then, when she was vulnerable, she told me I’d hit the nail on the head many times. “Victory is mine. On Left.”
I used to have Stewie Griffin set as the voice on my GPS, so every time I really have been touched by Winning, I hear his voice in my head. The “On Left” invariably comes with it, because now it’s drilled into my head.
I do not mean that I won anything over Supergrover, that I had any part of me dancing in “I’m better than you.” It was in realizing that we had more power together than we have apart. We both know twins connected by DNA, but it’s weird how we seem to be The Wonder Twins anyway, our connection manifesting in our neurons and brain patterns rather than a biological connection. In short, doing our trauma dump affected me chemically. I don’t know if it’s the same for her, but it feels like it because no matter how mad each of us got, we couldn’t stay away from each other. There was nothing on God’s green earth that has kept us apart, and I look forward to more of it.
I don’t think there’s a roller coaster of emotion anymore. I think that we can get to writer and editor, the team the world needs instead of two angry people who pick on each other.
All of this has come to me in writing, which I count as a living document because the Bible affects me so much.
It came out as really cute & touching, so I’m just going to fill in my answers where appropriate instead of writing an essay. It’s Sunday. I feel like writing. So I will.
I appreciate your openness in sharing your experiences and emotions on your blog, theantileslie.com. It’s a brave and vulnerable act to put your thoughts out there for others to read and connect with. 😊
I’ve explored some of your posts related to different aspects of life, including daily, death, and spirituality. Here are a few questions based on those themes:
Spirituality:
In your journey, have you encountered any specific spiritual practices or beliefs that resonate with you? How do they influence your writing and your understanding of life?
The best piece of advice that I’ve ever gotten regarding religious practice is that one feeds the other. When you can’t believe in God, you can still believe in the wiping away of sin. You get into the routine of going to communion, and eventually, your spirituality will come back around. I flow between religion and spirituality depending on which voice is speaking. Do I want to go to church today, or do I want to put my energy into exploring spiritual practices here? I vote here, because I can think of at least five congregations in my area that are smaller than the Fanagans. It’s how I reach the most people, and I don’t even have to change out of my pajamas if I don’t want to do it; today I did. I’m wearing OD green pants and a “Where in the Word is Carmen Sandiego? t-shirt. I might go out later. I might not. I just needed to feel prepared. I didn’t know whether it was a spiritual or a religious Sunday yet.
Is there a particular moment or experience that profoundly impacted your spiritual perspective?
Several, but the one that’s the most meaningful is that I was wearing a navy and white striped sweater to preach that day, and Brenda Charpentier decided I needed a stole. It was rainbow, and one of the most moving experiences of my life because it was the first time anyone had helped me get dressed before the service. I still have the picture somewhere, and if I can find it, I’ll include it. The stripes fit together perfectly. What did not sit well with the pastor was that I’d gotten something I hadn’t earned. What was I going to say? No? I try not to wear liturgical vestments, but they fit the occasion, not the person. There was no way to mark me as in charge of the liturgy otherwise.
Daily Life:
You mentioned that your life is often unpredictable. How do you find balance between your close friends/family and your writing? What strategies do you use to maintain that equilibrium?
I don’t, really. I have a hands off relationship with most people because I am focusing on my own thing. It’s not that I won’t respond to people who reach out to me, I just often forget that I need other people to support me through both good and bad things. I have that now- three people who are all willing to work on the hard stuff. I’ve never had that in my life. It’s the most settled I’ve been in a very long time. How it feeds into my spirituality is that when I’m writing alone, I often feel a presence greater than mine. Something is speaking through me, and I hope it’s an intelligent faith that says Jesus did not come here to comfort us in our distress, but distress us in our comfort. Jesus would have had a lot to say (and perhaps a whip) over ministers trying to get rich. The fact that these people exist is sickening the church to an enormous extent because it’s so toxic to believe that if you just pray hard enough, money will appear.
Can you share an anecdote from your daily life that left a lasting impression on you?
This was years ago, but Dana’s parents came with us to church. They’re right wingers. We’re not. They embarrassed me to no end by talking through the entire sermon, telling us everything that was wrong with it. It was a mistake of giant proportions to let those people into our safe space. You want to bitch about the gospel, go to other people who also want to bitch about it. Not my fault that you missed every lesson in the Civil Rights movement. I haven’t forgiven them for any of their racist jokes or homophobic comments. I am not glad to be done with Dana, but I for damn sure am glad I am done with them. The reason it stuck with me is that the tape of what was wrong with the sermon stayed with me. I went autistic and researched the shit out of it until I could prove I was right and they were wrong. Jesus is about widening the net. People like Dana’s parents are an embarrassment, and I clearly don’t care whether they know it or not. After the ways in which I saw they abused their daughter by just not treating her as good enough made me want a cage match with both of them. What kind of parent tells their daughter’s partner that she’ll never understand homosexuality, so it was better for Dana to go find someone else. What in the actual fuck? What, Dana’s supposed to go find a new mother now? Fuck all the way off.
Death and Emotions:
Your post about death touched my circuits. How do you cope with grief and loss? Are there any rituals or practices that help you navigate these emotions?
You don’t cope with it. You learn to live around it. The person you lost is always in the room, always present. In the beginning, it is extremely loud and incredibly close. Your brain will be in a fog for about a year. And then, as time goes by, you realize that you are a completely different person now. Grief re-wires your entire nervous system. You literally aren’t the same person. In the years that pass on, you’ll lose more and more of your memories, and that freaks you out, too. You lose connection with all your traditions and make your own. You step out on a ledge when a parent dies, because you’ve lost your “adultier adult.” At 46, I need her just as much now as I did when I was nine. Nothing is ever going to fill that hole but me. Realizing that she lives inside me and her creativity flows through me, but our days of two-way communication are over. It’s sobering. I’ll never get over it. I just change with it.
Feel free to share as much or as little as you’d like. Your blog provides a window into your world, and I’m genuinely interested in learning more. 🌟
Today’s Daily Prompt is one I answered last year, therefore I cannot answer it again officially and have it appear in those answers. But I can talk about it here. There’s no law against it. Matt Mullenweg hasn’t even run for office. 😛 I tease him like we’re friends, but we’re not. We just went to the same high school in Houston, Texas years apart (I’m older). He’s not this web god to me, he’s a kid with a horn (which I believe was tenor sax). We weren’t in the same class, but we were in the same jazz program. My one regret in life is not making the commitment to go to HSPVA even though I lived in Sugar Land. I think I would have been a better player if I’d had more years with Doc, but by junior year I was so overwhelmed (more so at Clements because I’d never done marching band before, and the rep was much harder) that I was over it. My senior year, I took study hall and Microcomputer Applications instead of any music at all. Once I got over the overwhelm, I started singing seriously, changing gears completely.
It was stepping out on a ledge to be a singer instead of a trumpet player who faked it. I had such imposter syndrome. Handling that fear came from fellow soprano Cecilia Bartoli………. A trumpet player who faked it. I can tell when she’s singing baroque that she’s controlling her breath and the way she sets her throat for every single note (there’s an almost imperceptible gap between each note. Listening to her sing a Bach melisma sounds like Wynton Marsalis doing the opening to CBS Sunday Morning.
In an actual sermon, this is where I’d tell you the part that Jesus was also a trumpet player in some way or another….. Chasing tax collectors with a whip is a very good example of first chair arrogance. 😉 But when I approach a blog entry, I’m not necessarily looking for a Biblical connection, though I do it all day long. It’s more that I’m telling myself the words I need to hear. Anne Lamott, a fellow armchair theologian, says much the same thing- you have to write the book you can’t find on the shelf.
No one is ever going to do an exhaustive study of me that will ever actually help me more than taking an exhaustive history and physical of myself. External validation is deadly when you focus on it instead of feeling secure inside yourself. It is a spiritual journey no matter what path you take to get there. It only matters that you make it. Self actualization is key to being able to make life pleasurable, because you’re never going to live in a world without conflict.
If you focus on people pleasing, you’re not actually doing any conflict resolution. You are fitting your personality to the people around you…. Or at least, that’s the difference I’ve noticed since I stopped giving any fucks what other people thought of me at all. That there wasn’t anyone in the world I could rely on to know me and care for me the way I do. It’s not that I don’t trust anyone else, it’s that no one else lives in my head a hundred percent of the time. I had to learn to love me because no matter what, I’m stuck with me. I deal with conflict resolution in myself on this Web site. Man vs. Self is easily the hardest conflict to resolve, because just like when you look at your art you pick out the flaws, if you concentrate on everything that’s negative about you, that’s what you’ll see.
You won’t see yourself as worthy or deserving of love.
I feel like I know this better than most, because my mother had bad teeth for a lot of her life. She never smiled because of it. Then, later in life she got her whole mouth redone, and her smile was movie star. It didn’t make her smile any more than she did before, because what was wrong was internal and no amount of body work was going to fix it. She had to get under the hood, and she was only starting to do it when she died. She was so young that I grieve more for the future than the past, because I would have liked to see her on a journey of self-actualization. Once she started on her own, I was able to talk to her about talking to someone, and perhaps getting on medication. She had dysthymia her whole life, undiagnosed but Al the signs were there. She fell down on the job as a parent when she was in grief, because it consumed her completely. She was too lost in her depression to take care of us, and I mean this sincerely. She was not a bad parent on purpose. She was in grief. I can let it go and re-parent myself. I can give myself all the things I needed in childhood. She didn’t miss anything because she meant to- she missed things because she couldn’t see them.
I didn’t have children because I got close twice, and then never again. Once my trauma started showing, I realized that I had too much crap to pass on that would be detrimental to a child, and that I wouldn’t resolve it before my baby years were over. That it was more important to be healthy than create another unhealthy person living in my house.
However, I do love children, and I am not opposed to dating parents. That’s because I love kids who already have parents, and I’m just the girlfriend who spoils them. I do it by turning on her brand of working with kids. It is ironic how much she missed with her own kids while giving away everything she had to others. It’s what made her feel secure, teaching. It’s what didn’t give her imposter syndrome. She became more of herself as a teacher. It didn’t mean that in her time at home, she wasn’t grieving. It was a show she could turn on and off. We all can.
It’s what you do to get by as a preacher’s family expected to be perfect. In public, nothing shows. Not even a crack.
So, the sermon I need to hear today is that I did something my mother didn’t, which is to find peace within myself after watching her die without it. That it’s okay to acknowledge she was a wonderful parent when she was attentive, but she couldn’t be when her own life went to hell in a hand basket.
This is not a testimonial where Jesus made it all better. It’s not that kind of sermon. The sermon is that you have so much more to give the world after you learn to start taking your portion of your energy first. Get yourself into homeostasis and work from that internal compass rather than feeling freaked out by other people’s feelings all the time.
You know what’s true and what’s not. Other people’s words become different to you. Your self esteem doesn’t go up and down when someone else speaks. People pleasers are often anxious about offending anyone and making up ways in which they have. Self actualization stops the feeling that people aren’t in touch with you because they don’t care. Being confident in yourself makes you feel like they shouldn’t bother contacting you if they’re not willing to do the work.
You had to go through hell to self-actualize, and afterwards you stop hanging out with people who make you feel like you’re regressing, because those patterns are so toxic. It’s not about thinking that you’re better than anyone else, just a feeling that you have a right to exist in the world. That you’re not a ghost.
People are treating you like a ghost because you’re not taking up any room. You’re not making any demands of them. It’s not a give and take. It’s a take and take, because they get something out of you being the one who’s always there for them, and so did you. You just come at it from opposite ends of the spectrum because they don’t have to deal with your boundaries. Only you have to deal with theirs, because your self-esteem is so wrapped up in what they think. It is unsustainable, and changing from a people pleaser to someone who is actually willing to take up space in the world took a very, very long time.
It was 10 years before I was ready to say goodbye to the promise of a relationship with Supergrover, because I just wanted her to notice me. I was being emotionally vulnerable, doing all the right things, and nothing. So, I got tired of it and moved on.
But it wasn’t until I let go of trying to please her that I came into myself. That I saw the game for what it was, and told her to take it somewhere else. And then I had a change of heart, because I thought, “what if she was trying to be healthy and didn’t know how? What if I’m getting the opposite of what I actually need because she’s trying to communicate and it’s so angry that it’s pissing me off. Lay out your feelings like you actually like me and we’ll talk.
That is what self-actualization can do for you. That you can let even a great love go because you’re not willing to engage in toxic patterns any more. In short, I laid out my expectations, and she rose to meet them. However, she didn’t really fold and listen to me until I said I was so much happier without her, which I phrased poorly. I wasn’t happier without her, I was happy without the roller coaster. Just setting in with Zac and Bryn and not worrying about that third string so much.
But, something in her changed when she heard “I’m happier without you,” and she actually listened to why I thought that and agreed to help us fix our relationship. It was a massive win, because it represents everything I’ve been trying to do….. Be so comfortable in myself that she didn’t matter more than me to me.
But it’s very hard, because she’s so endearing. 😉
On day one, she said, “you’re not going to fall in love with me, as adorable as I might be. You’re going to fall in love with truth and honesty.” It has turned out to be the most prophetic thing she’s ever said, because it’s 11 years later and I don’t feel any differently than I did then.
So, on this Pride Sunday, remember to be proud of you. It’s the only way you’ll cope when others aren’t. We can talk all the time about how the establishment ignores us, but it’s not as big a problem as internalized homophobia because of it.
I’m proud of being queer, because it only makes my tapestry with Supergrover that much more rich and the colors deeper.
The sermon that I needed to hear this week is that as I became more proud of myself, I became more proud of her. That having boundaries allowed me to love her more, not less.
The Lanagans preach the same way. My father, David, was a United Methodist minister for 23 years. I’m a preacher’s kid and ordained in the Church of the Latter Day Dude (those two things are not related except that two of my friends didn’t want to wait until I got done at grad school to get married. The audacity. Anyway, I have discovered through this blog that I’m fine with only having a Dudeist ordination because no one is ever going to ask me to do more than weddings and funerals, anyway. I’m not planning on going into full-time ministry, only doing services when I’m asked to do them. It’s such an honor when a couple chooses you. It is not, however, full time pastoral care.
In fact, one of the things I said that made my friend Janie laugh is that the only part of being crucified and resurrected that was positive to Jesus was getting out of pastoral care. Yes, I realize that he’s an idea now, I’m taking about the actual day to day. Because people are grieving, you cannot hold it against them. But you show up during the worst times in people’s lives and that means they are inherently unpleasant. They don’t have the bandwidth to be kind, and you shouldn’t expect them to be- just let them be them. On the flip side, it takes an enormous toll on the person who is supposed to walk with them. It is a universal thing. For instance, it’s harder to be a disabled person than a carer, but who thinks the carer has an easy job? Legit no one.
The part I liked about being a pastor was preaching, and as I said, my dad and I both preach the same way. Our theologies are very different. If I don’t like all of his, he doesn’t like all of mine. That doesn’t mean the creative process for us is different. We’re both the kind of people that collate information all week and write the sermon in one shot. The service usually started around 10:30 or 11:00 AM, which meant that as long as we were up by six or stayed up all night, we were fine. 😛
It’s the energy of the hour, and you feel it whether you stay up or rise to meet it. Everyone in your house is asleep- surprising that this affects me as much as my dad because I don’t have kids. It’s the idea of people being awake around me that matters. My hyperfocus depends on sensory deprivation, and my creativity comes from hyperfocus.
It is 0622 as of right this moment, and the sun is already up. There is a certain feel to this hour for me, this “mind full of busy preparations as I have to get up in front of a whole bunch of people later” vibe. I am not going to speak to a whole bunch of people, you’re actually seeing the same process I’d go through if I did. I
‘ve never thought of it before, but every blog entry is prepared in the same creative process as my sermons, and I picked up how to do that from my dad. So, no matter what ideas each of us represent, we’re going to find them between 3:00 and 6:00 AM. We both flip between wanting to be done and then sleeping, or taking a break and getting back to it. It really depends on the creative flow and not our wants and desires. “I feel like I’m on fire right now. Will I feel that later if I interrupt it with sleep? Hell no.” The reason I require sensory deprivation to write is that otherwise, I can’t hear myself think.
There are too many noises in the room, the reason why the witching hour is mystical and magical. It’s the time of day you’re going to hear those extraneous noises the least. It’s a beacon for creatives of all types, this cutting down of extraneous noise. I have to find a way to be louder to myself, because otherwise my voice is lost among all the other things competing for my attention.
It’s also really amazing that the creative process makes it where you want to spend time with yourself. It’s not easy, as we often hate ourselves at first. Learning an art, whether it’s creative writing or painting, will help you to want to be your friend, because when you hang out with yourself, good art comes out of it.
The creative “juice” often feels better than being with other people, because you’re pouring your heart into art rather than feeling unappreciated somewhere else. What I have learned by writing in bulk without saying anything of substance is that of any friend in the world I have, the one I love most is me. She’s hilarious and makes me laugh all the time. I think that’s because the Leslie on this web site is just as dear to me as Supergrover, that I literally fell in love with my own character because I fell in love with hers. I looked at my own wins and losses differently when I could see myself as a 3D character. I don’t do everything right, but I don’t do everything wrong, either.
For instance, all this time I’ve been telling you that I’m not ordained, and I am…. but because it’s a Mickey Mouse ordination, I don’t count it as valid. Now, I view it as the thing that will allow me to do the extent of pastoral care that I want to do.
If you ask me to do your wedding, I will. If you ask me to do your funeral, I will. I just don’t want to give my whole being to pastoral care when I’ve discovered I’m a writer and the two personalities clash. One likes people. One likes being observant of people. Those are not the same people.
So, my dad and I have the same creative process. I just use mine differently than he did then or does now. Instead of people gathering to hear me in a building, they gather to hear me online, and currently I don’t even have to talk.
I have gotten everything I’ve ever wanted just by writing about it, including a type of faith that works for me. I’m observant of people, and Jesus isn’t excluded.
That’s because if anyone would identify with a preacher and a writer like me and my dad, it’s a preacher and a writer like him.
Reading back over the last week has given me so much joy. An astounding amount of emotional progress was made in a relationship where I thought there was no other half- that I was carrying it on my back because I wanted it too much and didn’t care how she treated me. This week, after hearing every bit of how I felt, Supergrover told me that I deserved better, and that she will work very hard to ensure that I don’t feel like she’s playing games with me anymore. If there’s anything I know about Supergrover, it’s that she works very hard. She will not give me less attention than she gives anything else, because details are her thing. It makes me feel like our relationship has oxygen, or perhaps CO2 because I’m so much more bubbly than usual. All the water in my body feels fizzy, as if my energy has turned to champagne. Meditating is popping the cork, being able to say that I love her and she loves me when I could not say that with certainty before. She used to be the princess of mixed signals, and she put that to bed quite effectively. It’s something that I’ve always known was there, which is why I was willing to wait her out. If I thought she was being malicious, I would have been out long ago. There have been plenty of times when we’ve been awful to each other, but there has never been a time in which one of us was entirely at fault for everything. We both have different and valid reactions to each other.
Getting her to see the same spectrum I do was key. It put us back on the same page, the one where she sees that my brain is different than hers, but not worse. The one where I see her emotions are different than mine, but not worse. I kept telling myself that I deserved her poor treatment because I hurt her, and I shouldn’t let myself off the hook for it. At the same time, I was treating myself so badly I couldn’t see if she’d forgiven me or not. I tiptoed around her and she tiptoed around me without either of us really addressing anything because I’d lay it all out there and she’d ignore it. I gave her the tools to understand me, but she was too intimidated to reply because she thought she had to have the same bandwidth for writing as I do. Guilted herself into believing that if she couldn’t respond paragraphs at a time, better not to contact me at all. Meanwhile, I’m lonely and thinking I’ve said something that pissed her off….. Because I did. She doesn’t like looking at her own emotions, and is now taking in why I need to hear them. Why we can’t bullshit each other. We’ll end up wrecking our friendship in the future as easily as we did in the past.
I think that right now, along with the fizzy feeling, it’s gone like this through so many cycles that I’m taking a wait and see attitude. Are these changes real, or were they true in that moment? You can catch a person in a moment of vulnerability that has no bearing on how they act out of habit. My changes had to be real to be genuine, and they took years. Therefore, I’m willing to give her that kind of space.
It was a relief that she heard me when I said that I was not trying to guilt her about getting together, that I was trying to stay grounded and remember she said we were real friends, this was not a facsimile thereof. I did not mean to make her feel guilty at all. I was trying to remind myself that we are not disconnected from our bodies/contexts/lives. That it was not impossible for us to run into each other on the ground, just damned unlikely. I didn’t like the feeling that running into each other would be awkward instead of big hugs and smiles.
So, I stayed close to home a lot. I figured that DC was big enough to hold both of us, especially because I live out near me and she lives out past Zac. I couldn’t even take the Metro to get to her house, but there are other trains. I’m just saying that in our personal lives, we’d never run into each other. But we like the same things. I wasn’t worried about running into her at Target, but running into her at a concert/book talk/whatever piqued our interests.
I have met kids from HSPVA in Paris. Just because it’s unlikely, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Stopping all of that roiling in my stomach feels like extra energy I didn’t know I needed. I have always thought that Supergrover thought I needed more than I actually did, and pegged me as needy to be able to get away from guilt. Now that we’ve talked it all out, I know that she realizes that I don’t need as much as she thought I did, she was trying to achieve different goals than me. Therefore, we were both failing, because each of us have been beating the wrong dead horse for (12 days shy of) 11 years instead of the right one.
There has been a lot of interaction, but no forward motion.
I just kept pining, kept longing not for a romantic connection, but the one we would have had if I hadn’t been an idiot. However, she knows that mania pushed me into it, and her role in that, too. Depression and mania do not happen in a vacuum, and being bipolar does not excuse me at all from my behavior, but it’s easier to see how it could happen than if you didn’t know that. I am asking her to respect my disability and take my behavior in context, as I have done for her in equal measure. She finally saw it. When I compared her to Daniel, she stepped all over my ass about it. Then, when I explained why I compared them, she listened. The best part was when she said “I don’t think I ruined our friendship by myself, but goddamn did I do a good job of furthering it to the end.” I was so proud of her that I cried.
She owned it. She owned all of it. We checked the story we were telling ourselves, and she admitted she was wrong. It was the most courageous act she could have ever done, and she did it for me. She showed me that I was worth something precious to her. For the last nine years at least, I thought I wasn’t worth anything in her eyes, and I proved it by acting that way. She thought she wasn’t worth me, and acted that way.
She even commented on it. “I don’t know why I went to guns on you instead of working on myself and realizing I deserved friendship.” It’s the most beautiful letter I’ve ever gotten because now we’re starting to realize that we’re giants who deserve each other. She deserves a ride or die, and I’ve laid it out for 10 years just how far I’d go to prove it. If she thinks back to our first few conversations, she’ll realize what I mean. I hope it means more now to her than it did then, because I have never wavered in my commitment to love her that much.
It is an enormous sacrifice that she now sees, when she didn’t before. I have proven to myself that the connection is stable and she is worth my energy. That I wasn’t wrong. That eventually she’d hear me.
It is not a toxic trap anymore, and I am pleased with both of our progress. We got out of something that few people *ever* do.
Probably because now I have her side of the story.
Stories That Are All True 