The Devil is in the Details

January 1, 2024January 2, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

What are your biggest challenges?

Being autistic makes me naturally come across as demanding, when I am not demanding anything but the truth all the time; it is how I take in the world. If you bullshit me, it takes me a long time to regain trust. Therefore, I spend a lot of time being in anxiety about the situation, and it’s something I just don’t want to do anymore.

My biggest weakness in life is Supergrover, and it sounds romantic and yet it’s not. When she refused me as a partner, it didn’t mean that she refused me or cared about me any less. The feeling is mutual, most definitely. I don’t know how to turn it off after 10 years, and the only reason I bothered chasing her down (virtually), is because I wanted whatever our relationship grew into, not what it was in the moment.

In the moment, we were always hotheaded and angry, without exception, because that’s what an anxious/avoidant attachment does. It is not personal, ever. If someone is being avoidant and you need information to function in the relationship (and you do, always), then the relationship cannot proceed because it can’t. The tautology is real. True intimacy is by sharing information, not by hiding it. Saying we were fine was okay with me, but not after years and years. Something about it didn’t feel authentic, and I couldn’t fix it. But there were genuine moments, clearly, or she would be off my radar.

I’ll always keep the promises I made to the best of my ability, which is why it’s so hard for us both to make room for each other. My blog is a threat, objectively, and I understand that. But in order to describe what is happening with me, some information is necessary. I can use little things to talk about big things….. because the little things are the things that mean the most, not what is impressive.

In the future, for the readers I haven’t met yet, if you can’t understand that I’m a writer and try constantly to take it away from me because you think it’s a threat, then I don’t have time for you- not that you aren’t valuable and special, but it takes a lot out of me to write and this is what I do. If you don’t like this, you don’t like me on a very fundamental level. And I don’t need those friends.

I’m not going to stand for anyone having a problem with my writing, because I’m going to do it whether you’re in my life or not. It’s what I have when I feel the most unwanted- I can entertain myself by putting myself out there to strangers when you don’t want to talk. If you won’t listen, someone else will. And that’s all I’m asking. That this blog is my way of coping with life, and I learn more about myself than when I am in conversation, and it drove me to write six books’ worth of my journey as it was happening, not reviewing everything when it’s long in the past. Here’s the thing that’s most important about being a writer: you learn intimately that patterns repeat and there are no real surprises in life if you take that attitude.

If people are avoidant about bad things, they’ll be avoidant about good things, too. The person that won’t open up at work probably has trouble opening up to people they like as well. It’s never personal, it’s how they operate. A person like that in a relationship where the other person spills their guts is going to irritate the fuck out them, no matter whether it’s me or anyone else……

because patterns repeat and if you don’t change the dynamic, you’ll get stuck. It’s how the most people connect instantly and come off the rails over time. If you have trouble believing this is true, think about how many women leave their husbands because they work all the time, never share anything, and shut down when there’s a problem. It’s not anything personal to them, it’s how they operate. If they’ve caused damage to other people in their lives, they are 100% going to cause damage to you. I don’t look at it like “everyone is out to get you.” I look at it like “everyone has their own issues and how they respond is none of my business.”

For all people, the way they respond to my writing is important. What I have found over time is that everyone loves my writing as long as it’s about people they don’t know. For 99.9% of the world, this is true. But if you stop liking the mirror I hold up once I’m writing about you, then it was never about supporting me. It was always about adoring me and then discarding because they just can’t handle it. I didn’t leave those people behind, I grew past them.

I don’t go around picking people to write about because I don’t have to. All my friends are interesting enough to be characters in fiction. I don’t even make them a real person unless they’re close enough to me to warrant writing about them in the first place.

If you love the good and praise it often, and don’t like the bad and kick me in the nuts over it, then it shows that you’re not in it for the long haul. It’s really that simple. I will never kick anyone, because I am doing two things that they’re ignoring.

I have never found all the bad in someone without finding the good, but it may not be in the same entry. I am only talking about a snapshot of my day, and I change my mind frequently. Therefore, it might be a hit piece one day because I think your actions are fucking me up, and it might be that you are the best person in the world for me because we’ve just had a breakthrough and I want to celebrate it. I do not go after people, I reflect them as they are in my perception. As my perception changes, so do the characters they represent. I am laying out my thoughts this way so that they’ll change, not because I am trying to direct ire at them. I have the right to say I went through something bad and it hurt, without bugging you to read about it. If you want to know what I think, you’ll read. If you don’t, you won’t. But at no time should you take it personally. I write about everyone in the same way.

If I didn’t, then you would see that I’m only mining my friends for the gossip and not what is really happening in real time. It wouldn’t change me, because I’d just be a vicious, vindictive person and not trying to do therapy on my own. You are reading my most intimate thoughts regarding the people surrounding me, not the happenings around town like I’m the local Gladys Kravitz.

I try to be non-specific about people that matter. But if I start out with your real name, I won’t change it unless there’s a solid reason, and I have them. If you’re not named, you’re not that important, and I want the people around me to know that. I also know that it’s better to write about people than it is to not, because when I stop writing about them because they hate the negative things, they rail that I’m not only writing the positive. No, if you insist that you like an international audience thinking the sun shines out of your ass, then you don’t make a good character. Flat out.

It’s why I’m having so much trouble believing that any of my friends don’t see themselves as a 3D character, because I’ve even been nice to exes that have slashed my heart in two- less so with Kathleen, mostly because I don’t remember our day to day life together, but I definitely remember how she left. But again, emotionally unavailable so she wouldn’t talk about underlying issues, but would beat the hell out of me emotionally if I didn’t clean something to her standards, recognizing that not everyone grew up the same way. I fold the towels the way my mother did, and so does everyone else. It’s not worth relationship crisis, but she did it often enough that I knew she’d never open up. But I couldn’t leave, and I don’t think she could either- which is why she pulled such an egregious trump card.

And the thing is, if our relationship had been set up with poly in the first place, that she couldn’t commit to monogamy, so we’d make other things our touchstones, I don’t think I would have handled it as well then as I would now, but it would have been better than ambushing me with so many lies, and waiting until I was out of town to cheat.

Due to that experience, and having my own new relationship experience while I was still married, I can’t commit to it, either. It’s not because I’m incapable, it’s because I never want to be accused of cheating ever again. It’s not cheating if you’re not breaking an agreement…. so I just won’t make it.

I’m not going to trade new relationship energy (no matter what kind- platonic relationships are just as fulfilling) for my entire life falling apart. I cannot put all my eggs in one basket anymore, and part of it is that my heart is already gone. I don’t have a choice about that, and yet, I do. I want a scenario where when I have to make Supergrover a big deal in my own life that it doesn’t affect any of the others, and if Supergrover is in any way picking up what I’m putting down, she knows to the very depth of her being that I made the right decision by putting her first, even in my marriage.

I will never apologize, ever, for that stone cold fact, because I cannot do anything about it. She should have realized that when we don’t interact, it almost affects me more than when she is. We have a hard out, not subjective like with my other friends, and she has taken no responsibility for that fact. What she has taken responsibility for is changing my life and she wishes she’d never told me anything at all, when it’s the best gift I’ve ever been given. But gifts don’t come without potential problems when the wrapping is fallible- and I mean human, not that anyone has to be perfect; they can’t.

So, when I talk about biggest challenges, they’re always emotional because that’s the wavelength I’m riding and not many people are. Most people don’t know themselves as well as I do, so I seem threatening when I’m just certain. I can also listen to someone else without agreeing with them; then, they become threatened that it’s going to take different words to convince me they’re right, because I’m not trying to find a situation I can “win,” but a situation in which we both get what we want. It takes time and effort to do that, but it’s not impossible. People just cut out long before the discussion is over, and if you’re supposedly in it for the long haul, then you’ll meet me halfway.

Because I see their biggest challenges, too.

Ringing It In

December 31, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I know it’s popular to go out on New Year’s Eve, but tonight I am actually sitting in the dark, with the noise turned down to zero except for the fireworks (oy with the fireworks already). It’s a combination of a lot of factors. The first is that Zac is off on a mini-vacation, I have a headache that might have prevented me from going out, anyway, and I’d like to close out the year with something good.

My last post of 2023 lets me say two things. The first is that long ago, I said that I was writing my love story with Supergrover, not that it was mutual, but that it was mine. Over 10 years, we grew to accept each other; I couldn’t imagine my life without her and I didn’t right up until I wasn’t given a choice. I couldn’t let her get away with letting me feel so bad all the time. I wasn’t guessing right, and I was getting punished all the time for not being able to read her mind. It began to outweigh her mama wolverine claws coming out when other people hurt me, because she was closer and more important to me than absolutely any of the others.

I would have been much happier if for once, she turned the wolverine claws on herself. I could acknowledge when I was the problem. She couldn’t. She’d tell me she was licking her wounds, but not what they were. So, I listened to all of her pain without her being specific enough for me to change anything. She lumped it all together, as if she wasn’t my Evelyn, my everything everywhere all at once. She overfocused on the negative and ignored the positive, because I don’t think she believed my feelings could run that deep. But it’s okay. It’s what I meant by “she’ll never know what she lost,” because she got under my skin. I mean, absolutely set me on fire. I used it to become a better writer, and if I do sell books in the future, absolutely every dollar has been inspired by her in one way or another.

I don’t have to write about her at all to write about her, because she’d come across even better in fiction than she would in real life. She’s one of the few personalities I’ve met that could walk onto a procedural and act like she owned the place. If you’re one of her closest friends, they’ll never find the body.

Sometimes I worry about the things she keeps in her safe, the place in her heart where I reside; it’s not just me, though. I genuinely care about Michael and the rest of her whole famn damily. They’ve got someone out there loving them that they can receive whether they return it or not.

I said in “All the Things You Never Knew” that it was our love story and how it grew to accommodate both of us….. and I desperately hope that will continue, but in a very faraway, dreamlike state. I think I’m still in shock that when I laid out everything I was dealing with, she told me to go find new friends. After 10 years, if you can’t lay it down, we don’t have a future until you get yourself together. I do not have time for her if she does not have time for me.

The problem is not that I didn’t want the friendship she had to offer. It’s that our problems are too wide and deep to continue that dynamic without resolving the monster conflict that lies underneath. So, if I wrote 614,000 words this year and multiply that by 10, I have written at least 60 books that all have a thread of her running through it. And that’s not including the long e-mails that I’ve crafted especially for her. It’s a lot, and I’m sure it’s overwhelming.

But she’s a lot.

I would never have been changed to this degree by someone who couldn’t think faster than me. I don’t think my thoughts are better or worse, but AuDHD moves fast and furious with someone who’s a special interest. I wanted to resolve this conflict, and I got overwhelmed with talking to a brick wall. That didn’t mean I didn’t want her care, connection…… it meant I wanted more of it and was jumping up and down for attention by not doing it, then popping off with rage the longer I resented it.

But our anger feeds the other’s to an enormous degree, so we’re magnetic and repel as often as we attract. I feel sad because I only wanted to be on the fridge. Whether she chooses to be my yellow string or not, she only has to grab onto it, because I will deal with anyone’s red flags as long as they have a commitment to dealing with them on their own. If I have to learn conflict resolution, why don’t you (plural, true in every conflict everywhere and not a slam).

Here’s healthy for you.

I was really missing Zac, so I asked him if he had any time in the next couple of weeks. I just need to decompress and I love being at his house just as much as I love being with him. What I really love is when he works from home, but whether he’s there or not it’s very quiet. When he works from home, it’s still quiet. His office is kitty corner to his bedroom, so all I hear is him typing, and occasionally taking a call- but that’s rare because most things in intelligence are done in writing. But to be clear, I don’t know what’s classified and what’s not, so I tune everything out or close the door. I love that we’ve reached the stage where it doesn’t matter whether he’s home or not, I’m welcome and I know it, constantly.

So, he proposed a couple of dates, and I said “either work for me.” He said, “we’ll see.” I responded by saying “I don’t understand.” He didn’t get back to me and I was still thinking about it, so I said, “this unsettles me. You gave me a couple of dates, so I thought you already had them cleared, and you haven’t expressed lack of interest before, so it confused me.” I’m paraphrasing, because I told him that it came off as lack of interest, not that he actually meant it.

He responded by saying that no, it had nothing to do with lack of interest, just that now he didn’t know which days were good for him. Matter solved immediately, no bullshit. I didn’t give into my anxiety and start tiptoeing around him because I thought he was put off by me. It clears up a lot when instead of sitting in your bad dreams, you just ask if you’re right first.

It also helps when you believe everyone the first time, because after that it’s your anxiety to manage. Their actions will tell you whether they’re hiding something, and so will your intuition. But you can’t go on that until you just plain confront the situation, because perception is not reality.

What I’ve written a book about is how not confronting a situation made it a whole lot worse. I wonder all the time what would have happened if we’d just been big people and met up to really resolve everything. But if she was uncomfortable about that, all I asked is that she be more like Zac- you don’t have to manage my anxiety, but could you at least lay down the law all the time so that I’m not shooting in the dark as to how to love you so that you feel it?

60 books.

And whether it comes back around to writing another book or not depends on the coauthor, because contrary to popular opinion, I am not a dictator. I don’t wish for good communication because I live in this faraway land. It’s necessary for every relationship on earth. I am not special, and neither is anyone else in this regard.

So, in all of these volumes, it brings me to the second thing that the last post of 2023 allows me to say. Another author noticed me, a very good one, and recommended that everyone get involved with reading me. She also said that there was a tremendous depth to my work, and it made every tear worth it.

I can assure you, there’s been at least 614,000.

What She Did

December 31, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

What makes you feel nostalgic?

View all responses

The thing that makes me feel the most nostalgic is when I open my inbox and see all the e-mail I’ve received over the years. I never delete anything (in case that is a thing you’d like to know). I also don’t archive anything. I take the good with the bad, the chateaubriand with the Spam (“I’ll have your Spam. I love it.”).

WordPress tells me that I wrote 614,000 words this year, and I feel like every single one of them was dragged out of me to varying degrees. I wrote when I was elated or devastated. I wrote whether I felt physically well or that day was a disaster. I don’t know that I turned pain to beauty in all cases, but I do know that I wrote it down. It doesn’t matter whether it’s recognized or not; it matters in how much all my writing changes me.

Over the last 10 years, I have become more introverted and keep to myself. I think it’s always been that way, but at the same time, I needed to learn self-reliance as well. The last decade can only be described as “hard as shit,” but I’m looking forward to that getting better. It has to, because I swear to Christ it can’t get worse. When I think of everything that has made me who I am, the last 10 years have contained everything I needed to know to be successful by breaking me into a million pieces first. I hope that you never learn what it feels like to be hit by a partner. I wish for you even less that when it happens, people assume you did something to deserve it.

Some people think that about everyone no matter what, but I feel that when it’s just two girls fighting, who cares? Neither Dana nor I were in a good place, and we chose to handle it with avoidance and rage. At times, it was unbearable because I could feel her being nice to me because she knew I was ill, while taking no responsibility for being a factor in my downward spiral. If she’s not an alcoholic, I can at least say with certainty that at the time, she had a problem with drinking. She was not drinking the night she hit me, but she got a DUI and spiraled out afterwards. I did not handle it well, and I’ll never forget the people who stepped in for me when I couldn’t step in for myself.

Nostalgia arrives in the most powerful of ways from reading Supergrover’s old e-mails. It’s not because I need to live in the past, it’s that in a lot of ways, she helped me create a new future. But now it’s my work to do, and I’m on my own. I will never give up hope that the matter is not closed, but I feel it should be- at least for the foreseeable future. I am thinking that she has left the building, but I have no proof of that. All I know is that she’s hiding something, and she won’t tell me what it is. I would rather live the rest of my life without her than continue to tiptoe around her trying not to upset her…… and failing miserably.

There were two gut punches that I’ll never forget, and in order to erase them, it would take a lot.

She has said that she’s exhausted by everything and she wants to throw all my e-mails away.
She has said that I do not write her as a 3D character, that she’s always the same.

That first thing is easier to forgive than the second, believe me. I do not believe the latter is true, because I have talked about all the times she’s been avoidant and all the times in which I was absolutely ecstatic to even be on her radar.

I have written this before, but it is apt here….. “She walks in beauty, and I do because of it.”

I would not be the person that I am today had we not met, because she thinks so much differently than I do that it opened up new neural pathways in my brain. The logical jumps she was making were not the messages I would have gotten, and she doesn’t miss a trick (even with nachos). So, over time, I began to pick up her patois and my writing voice is totally different than it was in 2013. I’m more strident, and I take a lot less crap. But sometimes I go overboard, even with her, and that’s definitely what happened in this case. She made me strong enough to stand there and fight with her, but didn’t like her tone being parroted back to her, either. I’m guessing that’s because she’s a terse writer, anyway, and if you irk her, she’ll make sure you know it. But, then you push back, and she will fucking destroy the land where you live.

She also gives in to the other extreme, loving with wild abandon when she feels safe. I broke her trust, and we could not get back to “safe.” I don’t blame her- it’s a sad situation, not “Supergrover is a bad friend.” But as I’ve said before, I created the original break, and I felt that absolutely never opening up again was not the answer. We had to resolve our conflict, because otherwise, we’d keep being pissed off under the surface and people please until the end of time.

We are both guilty of this; neither one of us wanted to rock the boat.

So, in a lot of ways, when I’m writing here, I am only talking about the character, not the person. She has made it so unpleasant to talk about conflict and resolve it that I just don’t want to try until I have some buy-in. Actually, a lot of buy-in. None of this is fair- not the mistake I made, not the pattern we set up to deal with it yet not, not our treatment of each other when people-pleasing failed. I am sure I have been a frequent topic of conversation because everyone knows what I think, every day….. and not because I am trying to speak to anyone. The people involved read my writing, so they think I’m speaking to them. The reality is, though, that I am just as happy with using them as an illustration for people who don’t know me at all. There are patterns in everyone’s behavior, and I can see my own in stark relief.

Whether I’m bathed in light or shadow depends on where you’re standing.

So, in terms of nostalgia, the last 10 years are going to be monumental in my memory, because some of it is universal and some of it is alarmingly specific. In all cases, I loved hard….. but not often well. Sometimes it’s because I’m mired in my own crap, sometimes it’s because you can’t have a great relationship all the time and conflict is going to arise. If someone else is avoidant, there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t have authority over anyone, but by the same token, they don’t have authority over me, either.

Adults don’t have authority over other adults except for asking them about things you’re making up right now, because they’ve probably made it up before. It doesn’t matter what the advice is about, we’re all making up everything as we go along. Life takes on a heightened definition when you realize everything begins and ends with you. It’s not how others behaved, it’s what you allowed. Trust your intuition, because no one else has your best interests at heart, even if they say they do- this is not always for malice. Sometimes it’s just that someone else’s idea of what’s good for you is, in fact, really shitty advice.

So, when she says “who cares what I think,” the deepest parts of my heart only have two words:

I do.

The One About Which I’m Thinking

December 30, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What relationships have a positive impact on you?

No one has ever had a completely negative impact on me, because I see the good in everything and everyone. That doesn’t mean good people don’t do bad things. It means that I see both ends of the spectrum of human behavior and I don’t meet anyone that hasn’t proved it all to be true. Every human on earth is a glorious mess. We’re all a bunch of red flags, and we don’t work nearly hard enough to stay together. Not as couples, not as friends, and certainly not as states and nations. You just have to remember to live for the highs.

I won’t let anyone into my life without understanding it may not be forever- people come and go, so let them. I have had many people in my life for which I would go through hell and back before I’d admit it was a bad relationship. It’s hard when people screw you over. It’s worse when you’re at fault. People can and do resolve monster conflicts, but both parties have to buy in. You will never get anywhere if one person wants to resolve conflict and the other doesn’t.

However, “doesn’t” is relative. Sometimes, it looks like ghosting. Sometimes it looks like saying everything is fine, but it doesn’t feel right. If it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t. When you have no idea what’s wrong, do not guess. You’re wrong. Or, more accurately, the less you know about how someone feels, the more apt you are to make things worse.

I am a craftsman.

I am not good at talking about relationships because mine all go so well. I am good at talking about relationships because I’ve been through the ringer. I have made every mistake a person can make in a relationship, a lot of them way more expensive than I could afford.

I can describe the mistakes I’ve made, and also write what I wish I’d done in retrospect. I cannot breathe life into a dead relationship, but I can talk about it while it lived.

Right this very moment, the relationship that I have with myself is having a positive impact on me. I have a lot of things to think about, deeply, because I need to direct my energy and resources where it will do the most good. I don’t know what that means for me, but I do know that my life looks different than it did a few years ago, and I’m adrift…. but not in a bad way. In a way that I need to be self-sufficient for now (while also dearly wishing I wasn’t… I’m not the “adultier adult” type).

I have made so many mistakes, but somehow they have a positive impact. I think it’s because I’m driven to lead from the back. I have found over and over that people will not be vulnerable with me if I am not willing to lay all my cards on the table first. What is true of blogging is true of conversation; I just do not opine like this in person. It seems rude, because it is. If you wanted to read this, you typed in the URL or clicked the link. In short, when I’m in a crowd, I generally think “no one asked you.” I keep to myself, because I like hearing other people talk to each other. I like being around conversation more than I like being in one.

There are also many things I’ve said out loud that probably sounded better in my head…….. and stretching the definition of “several” things I’ve said that shouldn’t even have made it past my brain. The vetting process is getting better, but it’s not absolute. However, I think of those times and there’s not a one I don’t regret….. but you don’t get to be 46 without regrets.

However, I think I’ve spent long enough talking about regrets and am really starting to embrace the writer’s life…. ecstatic to be alone and also together with Zac (and Oliver, who is a dog). As a writer, I need more alone time than most. I also love dating an extrovert because he’ll drag me out of the house….. and even if we just end up watching a movie, I still got out of MY house. 😛

I’m looking forward to two dates in the future, because I’ll get to introduce him to Jason Moran (jazz pianist) and Jonna Mendez (former Chief of Disguise at CIA and my favorite living writer). We’ve got plans sooner than that, but those are important because both Jason and Jonna are important to me, and so is Zac in a completely different orbit.

Jonna, I believe, will find him completely charming because I’m going to bet she didn’t have “meet Leslie’s BOYfriend” on her bingo card.

Don’t ruin this for me. Shhhhh.

The Short of Sport

December 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you started a sports team, what would the colors and mascot be?

Let me start off by saying that I am not a sports person. I love stories about athletes, and feel it is akin to watching superhero origin stories that are within the realm of possibility. For instance, I could imitate Abby Wambach’s career, even though I’m not athletic, better than I could imitate Wonder Woman’s….. unless I turned out to be the guy who gives polygraphs at CIA. The man who created Wonder Woman also created the precursor to the polygraphs used today. That being said, if I had any kind of team sport, the colors would be red, navy, and white. That’s because I like National Team jerseys best. 😉

I would say “let’s make American football a national sport,” except that few countries have adopted it enough that we could make a decent number of teams in a world cup or Olympics. So that’s probably out. I would say “quadball,” but I don’t know how many teams outside of colleges exist (JK Rowling has burned down her career so bad that even “quidditch” is a dead name). I will say that a national quadball team would look smart, even if they cannot actually fly.

In fact, let’s go with that. Quadball isn’t a real sport outside of colleges, but I like the idea of a national team, anyway. I don’t know how the game is played on land in terms of that whole “not flying on a broomstick” thing, but I think that the teams should have cloaks, anyway. They’re reversible, navy and red. Depending on whether we’re home or away, the uniforms are either white with red and blue accents, or blue with white and red accents.

If, for some reason, we do get the ability to fly during quadball games, I’d also figure out a way to rig up the brooms with LEDs or something to make them show up better at night games.

But again, I’m not a sports person. I know how to make it sound like I know something about sports by nodding and sounding empathetic. I don’t know the rules of anything, really. Even the sports I’m most rabid about (futbol/baseball), I cannot tell you the finer points. But I can tell you all about Beckham and Messi and Chastain and Hamm. That’s a t-shirt.

Again, superhero origin stories. People think they’re on Disney+, but I’ve found them on ESPN. Not only do I feel like I can obtain life lessons, you cannot convince me that Abby Wambach and I would not be best friends from day one. We wouldn’t be able to shut up. First of all, because I’ve been around soccer players my whole adult life, I can’t tell you every fact about the game, but I can definitely empathize with life on and off the pitch. The second is that as an INFJ, I’m very much like her wife, Glennon Doyle. So, she’d remind me of my first girlfriend, I’d remind her of her current wife…. hilarity ensues.

The best thing about ESPN origin stories is that athletes are so…. well…. human.

I’d like my own team of ’em, in smart red and navy reversible cloaks.

I Have No Heart or Brain

December 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

How have your political views changed over time?

They say that if you are a conservative when you are young, you have no heart. They say that if you are liberal when you’re old, you have no brain. They do not suggest the unexplored third option, the permanently exhausted political science student who really doesn’t like any of you. 😉 Actually, I think it’s also due to age. Gen X (technically, I’m a Xennial) is now the adult in the room, because people older than us don’t understand technology, people younger don’t know how to function without it. We are the hybrids that remember what it was like to function on paper, the glue holding pre- and post- internet together.

If there’s anything I credit with my political views changing, it’s being in college before the Internet was really a thing. I was still fascinated by T1 connections at that point- you mean it’s always on? I don’t have to dial into anything? Plus, when I got to university, I was studying poli sci in school and my boss in IT was also a lawyer.

A lawyer who had a t-shirt that said, “Charter Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.” Today, this would be ominous. It was 2000, so I still laughed. I’m not sure anyone knew back then how this whole thing would turn out, but I didn’t have Donald Trump on my Bingo card, I’ll tell you that much.

I will say that I think younger people than me are coming up with the best ideas on the liberal end of the spectrum, and I think what being conservative in your elder years means to me is deciding which of these ideas are too wild to fund and which ones are worth pursuing. At its heart, universal basic income is a good idea. Other countries have implemented it and it works. But how do we scale up something like that without breaking the funds available for such a thing?

When it comes to money, I want everyone at the table in terms of ideology. I want James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on every single issue, not what passes for dialogue now. It’s not a good idea if you can’t explain a liberal idea to a conservative or vice versa. That’s because 99% of the time people don’t get what they want because they don”t actually know the question.

The liberals don’t have worse ideas, they just can’t sell them. I think it was Aaron Sorkin who wrote that originally, but it has stuck with me. The Republicans demand complete buy-in and loyalty, the Democrats don’t because we like free thinkers. While not a bad thing, this has cost Democrats DEARLY and they have no idea how to fix it.

I’m including me in that statement, because I’d like to see the party embrace bigger and better ideas, but also to have a concrete idea of how to fund them. There is no sense of polity in the Democratic Party, because both Bill Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are Democrats, but their platforms were/are worlds apart. Hillary Clinton’s is closer, but that’s only because she stayed in presidential politics longer.

I am definitely a Clinton Democrat, because it’s the lens through which I take in information. I voted for Bill in 1996, my first election….. although I also went to the Republican convention in 1992 and was thrilled about it, because back then it was just a chance to go to a major convention, because first of all I was a child and couldn’t vote. Second of all, George H.W. Bush grew to love both Clintons, so I think he’d forgive me for voting for them.

In terms of the way I was raised, I didn’t really know anything about my parents or grandparents’ political leanings until I was older, because they didn’t wear hats like they were pitching for either party. The only thing I remember from being a young kid is that my grandfather did not like LBJ, because of the Viet Nam war.

Fair.

But if you do a little digging, you find that it’s not the whole story. The thing that people are most known for isn’t necessarily what is going to do the most good or the most damage from a historical perspective. I agree with my grandfather that LBJ made some terrible calls during Viet Nam, but we also wouldn’t have gotten Great Society passed without him.

It is controversial to the general public, but not in political science circles to say that Lyndon Johnson was objectively a better president than John Kennedy. That when you take away the mythology of Camelot, Kennedy was wonderful for the American image and Johnson was more effective legislatively because he knew how to whip. I do think that John Kennedy deserved to be president, and that he was good at it- most political science students agree that it would be easier and more fair to compare both of them at full term, but we’ll never get that chance.

What I do not think is that we’ve managed to capture the fever behind one idea like “Great Society” that will get us elected….. and The New Deal before it. We need people on the extreme fringe of the party to come up with the new and better ideas, so that the more conservative members of the party can red team them. It’s not “shooting everything down,” but it seems that way because a red team’s job is to take you to the mat before you’re in front of the Republicans.

When I think about red teaming now, I think about Molly Ivins, who was not afraid to call out hypocrisy or bullshit on either side of the aisle, and was in fact more mystified by Texas politics than anything else. She thought it was wilder and weirder, and proved it every day in her columns.

I am not standing outside looking in, I am definitely a Democrat. But at the same time, I do not discount conservative ideas. I discount bigotry, and that has become 99% of the Republican platform. How we got here is not really a mystery. If you’ve studied the rise of Hitler, you know that what is happening now is what happened in Germany- the people were starving for a leader, and they chose the most racist asshole they could find because he parroted all their shitty beliefs.

Trump is not Hitler in his later years, but we’re ignoring the signs of fascism nonetheless. Here are two things that you really need to take in about this, and they’re important:

Trump discredited CIA on day one. He went into their house and told them point blank that he trusted the Russians more than them. So, the message from day one was “don’t believe the intelligence experts that have historically been the best in the world, and only pay attention to me.”
Trump discredited the journalists. So, not only should you not believe the raw data coming out of CIA (filtered for publication through State and the committees on intelligence in Congress), you should not believe any stories written about it.

Trump has the same outlook on domestic policy. Don’t read any stories about me, only look at me. Meanwhile, he’s not really running the country because he doesn’t know fuck all. Getting his whole family security clearances was downright offensive to the spies I’ve met, because that is not a community you join easily or lightly. You have to be trusted beyond a reasonable doubt to carry that kind of information, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Jared Kushner is not one of those people, and neither is Donald Trump.

The president of the United States WAS NOT QUALIFIED to see the documents he saw, and managed to show other world leaders things that he should have had in his possession because he’s the president and should have had enough sense he was actively harming American interests.

But that doesn’t matter, because he’s a Russian UI.

Putin’s revenge for Khrushchev’s treatment by Kennedy was to make us implode, and I believe it worked. There are people who still believe with a passion that the election was stolen due to Russian interference that Trump welcomed. Trump didn’t want to be president. He wanted to have been president. I believe that he sincerely thought he was going to lose, and 2016 was a bid to get more people into his DC hotel, not a legitimate presidential campaign. Hillary and Donald have known each other too damn long for either one of them not to see through the other’s bullshit, and I don’t think that Trump really thought he had a chance, which is why he was such a total asshole the entire campaign. I honestly think he was wondering “what do I have to do to lose?” By the end.

But we elected him anyway, and the rank and file judges and State employee jobs stayed open for months because there was no one to direct presidential appointments.

People, the damn president of the United States didn’t know he was president of Puerto Rico, and that’s just okay because people in the US don’t know that, either. Do you think that the president is less the president to our territories?

The president also commands lots of people overseas being Commander in Chief and American representative in global affairs. Honestly, the fact that Trump got to be that for us is alarming, and other heads of state noticed. Do you really think that Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Barrett, and especially Sauli Niinistö (president of Finland- rake the forests? Get out of here with that bullshit.) and Kim Kielsen (premier of Greenland- I’m sorry. You want to buy WHAT now?) were in any way impressed with us at all? The only reason we didn’t lose the plot with the UK is that they’re experiencing the same wave of conservatism that we are.

If there’s any way in which my political views have changed, it’s by leaving the Democratic and Republican parties alone and just doing my own thing by studying world systems. I’m looking at the forest, not the trees. I love dating someone who works in intelligence, because I am with someone who also has the ability to look at global systems and not get stuck in the minutiae of daily life. The world looks different when you’re talking about countries at war and humanitarian aid and everything that comes with it, vs. the fact that Chuy’s is too far away for my liking and Whole Foods continues to be out of the veggie dogs I like.

Perspective.

Years ago, I was on IM with Supergrover and I was telling her that I was having a really crappy day….. and that one of my cases to call back didn’t have a name at the top, so I dialed the number and the woman answered “Doctors Without Borders.” I died for a second because absolutely anything I was thinking about that day melted away with perspective. There’s never going to be a day in my life more stressful than being a doctor in a war torn country.

It’s like working for NASA and actually being an astronaut. Not the person on the ground that has every resource available to them at a moment’s notice. No, the guy who’s stuck in a tin can having only what they brought with them. IF MSF doesn’t bring a medication with them, it may be unlikely to get a local supply. We’re not talking total health here- we’re talking HIV vaccinations and TB tests.

So, again, if we’re talking about politics, then I’m probably not the person to ask how to fix the party.

But I think the first step is leaving your heart and mind out of it, and committing not to elect someone who tells you that what you’re seeing and hearing is the truth, when he’s just the mouthpiece.

In this case, you should absolutely pay attention to the people behind the curtain. They’ll be the ones trying to save us from ourselves.

The Writer’s Room

December 27, 2023December 27, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

You get to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?

I will do this writing prompt as an exercise, but know that readers and writers don’t stop. There is no perfect place to read and write, because what makes someone good at either is being able to do it anywhere…. thus the reason I use a tablet and keyboard for everything rather than my desktop. I want to be able to get better whether I’m in my living room or in a restaurant… but I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos on construction, so here’s what I’d do if I bothered to stay in one place.

The perfect reading/writing space for me is a cabin, and I’d like to build it myself (with a group of friends if they’re into that kind of thing). I wouldn’t like it to be very large, but I do want it to be made of the best materials, like rock wool insulation (my house burned down when I was in sixth grade, and it’s almost fireproof). Depending on how long the build I could create and still have people show up, I’d like to do two stories, but a root cellar and a first floor, not a full two-story house.

Where me being a writer comes in is that my desk would probably end up in the root cellar, even if I built myself a whole ass office. I want the place that has the least amount of sensory input, which is why a root cellar would be preferable to an office on the main floor.

The fictional character that’s been with me so long we’re roommates is Carol, and because of our past conversations, she would like a word. Carol works for NSA, so basically her perfect office is mine. When I’ve written about her before (“A Christmas Carol”), I’ve talked about how her husband, Roger, is a contractor and asked Carol where she wanted to live. They built their house into the side of a mountain, so Carol’s office is in a basement….. but only technically. She’s got a basement office in the Blue Ridge range, therefore also equipped with a stunning view. It is not lost on her that whether she is bathed in light or shadow is dependent on where she’s standing, which she feels is an accurate metaphor for her work.

I do not know that I could afford a piece of land like Carol and Roger’s, but the idea is cool. But let’s just pretend that I only have grass and trees. A regular cabin is fine to start.

So, we’ve got the resources we need except the things we need to buy. Instead of buying the lumber, I go ahead and buy all the tools to process cutting down my own trees. Everyone within a 10 mile radius will come to me for milling the trees they’ve cut down in their own yards, so I’ll make it back, or I can just sell all the equipment when I’m finished…. but I doubt I would do that because eventually I would see outbuilding opportunities….. 😉

I also want a stone floor, but in this weather I’d like a heating system for it. So, we’ll put one of those underfloor doohickeys in that connects to the hot water and keeps it running so the stones don’t cool down. But in terms of “stone,” I think I actually want polished concrete. I’ve seen so much of it done that there’s a wide range on what it would look like completed.

But for now, we’ve got the materials for framing, insulation, and the floor. Let’s make sure to add some drywall and fancy hardware for the inevitable doors. I’m not sure what I would like in terms of hardware, and Carol shops online all day. She’ll handle it.

(Because that’s what they do at NSA, right? Sometimes I even eyeroll at myself.)

My office tends to be very plain. I would like a desk and chair that are both too comfortable to leave, and outside of that, I don’t have expensive tastes. I don’t even really have expensive tastes in furniture, I’ve just had a $50 “gaming chair” and an Aeron and I’m going to tell you there’s quite a bit of difference after having sat in each of them for years.

So, I’d want to get an Aeron from a used furniture dealer because they’ll last a hundred years. I don’t need new….. and a big ass desk, because an Aeron won’t fit under anything small. If the room is large enough, I’d like to have the Aeron ottoman and another small chair behind me so that I can use my ottoman when I’m not using my desk and I also have room for another person to sit (but that chair cannot be comfortable enough to invite people to stay long term….)

If I did not put my desk in the root cellar and made the whole first floor my office, I’d like a wood-burning stove. That way, I could make coffee quickly in addition to staying warm. 🙂

The only thing I would take time to do on paper that I won’t here is mark where all the outlets go. As a tech person, I have to have a lot of them….. but what I’ve noticed is that I don’t necessarily need a lot of power. I mostly just need a lot of places to charge small things.

It would be nice to have electricity, even to be on the grid. However, I know that realistically I could get by on a jackery and a cell phone connection if that’s what was available.

I just don’t know that I’d ever bring these plans to fruition, because it’s unlikely that I’d find land like this near the Metro. That’s okay, though. Maybe someday I’ll get lucky like Carol and my husband will be a contractor, too. I could even say that. “Are you a contractor? My fictional character is married to a contractor and I’m jealous of her, soooo…..” Because that would make me sound completely stable.

But here’s what I know to be true. In order for Carol to live in that house with Roger, I had to think of it first. So, is Roger really that important in the whole scheme of things?

Yes, you’re right. He does fix everything.

Hmmmmmmmm.

I obviously need more than one thinking chair, here.

Saturn SL 2

December 26, 2023December 26, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 7 Comments

What is your all time favorite automobile?

I don’t have expensive tastes, because I like the clutch on an SL 2 better than anything I’ve driven. Roomy enough not to be a short stick, but compact enough that it was very different from driving a pickup. You felt like you were in more of a sports car than you were, because basically the engine on the SL 2 was equivalent to a base mustang.

I will say for the record that I’m not a very good driver, which is why I take the bus and train everywhere. It’s not that I am intentionally bad and need more training. It’s that I don’t have 3D vision, so sometimes things come out of nowhere. It’s so much easier to drive when someone else is with me, but that doesn’t happen often. But it could. Like, if Zac didn’t want to drive, he could ask me and I wouldn’t panic because he’d be in the car and I just need an extra set of eyes. I don’t have my own car because that second set of eyes can’t be with me on every trip. Not Zac’s. I mean that most people spend so much time driving when they’re alone that it’s actually more difficult to get someone to ride with you than you might think.

Everyone likes to be alone in their cars, including me. It’s just that being alone in my car is also not good for me, because I cannot ensure I won’t run a red light because I didn’t see it, or have an accident because I was following too close. If I got a car, I would be constantly worried about driving alone and also I hate traffic. For me, cars in DC are for weekends, because I’ve never gotten anywhere faster in rush hour traffic than taking the Metro. People think it’s easier to drive, and it’s really not. The only time driving comes in handy is when you need the cargo area. The other thing is that time spent driving in traffic is malleable to a large degree. With the Metro, you can predict when you’ll get somewhere almost perfectly because there are going to be fewer delays on the train than the stop and go in traffic. It makes me feel better just to sit back and relax, because if we have an accident, which is unlikely, I’m not the guy they’re going to find at fault. It’s not about eschewing responsibility, it’s that I believe my doctors when they say driving without 3D vision is an issue.

It’s still fun to drive an SL 2, though. Just the greatest, most comfortable shifter and a bangin’ stereo. I bought mine new and even the factory was perfect. The night I got it I ran it into a pole at The Mucky Duck. I had it fixed immediately, but it was just the first indicator that Houston isn’t my thing. I need to be in a city built for public transportation, and Houston is a lot of things, but that’s not one of them.

I also get the pleasure of not having to be attached to one car, because since I take Uber I’ve ridden in just about all makes and models. I honestly haven’t picked a favorite because after a while they all run together. The times I’ve been picked up in a Tesla are always memorable, but not because I’d like to drive one. I just think that the glass roofs are cool.

If I bought a brand new car, and I could if I wanted to pay the ongoing cost (I don’t), I would want a Tesla with all the bells and whistles because their technology would enable me to drive as well as someone with 3-D vision. However, I do not want to give Tesla my money because first of all, I don’t like Elon Musk. Second of all, even with technology I would still be responsible, and the whole point of taking public transportation is to be able to zone out and do my own thing in traffic. Having to stand on the platforms in cold weather has never taken away from the fact that once I get on the train, I can read all the way to my destination, or watch movies I’ve downloaded. Completely different vibe, and with Uber/the bus, I can get anywhere from the train stations, even if a bus isn’t available.

If you’re not going to have a car in a city, you can’t get your friends to cart you around, but good luck getting them to believe that you mean it. All of my friends are very protective of me, and I’m lucky that they think of things like picking me up at the Metro. But that’s because I have amazing friends and they want to do it for me, not that I require it. I appreciate that they’re willing to work with my comfort level with driving and not make me fit into theirs, because for the most part, Maryland is a train culture and Virginia is a car culture, because there’s quite a big space difference in the two states.

When you cross the Potomac, things get more condensed. Virginia looks very much like Texas until you get to the immediate DC area. When you cross from Arlington into The District, space is at a minimum and everything begins to look more like New England. I prefer that kind of architecture, but I also love that Zac’s house backs up to a nature preserve.

It is just unlikely that I would drive there………..

Without my Saturn SL-2.

The Christmas Gift

December 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had to post about this immediately, because I knew that all of you would want to know it. That it would mean more to you because you’re rooting for me, not that intelligence is your special interest as well. This is a text message between my dad and Jonna Mendez, who I think walks on water (mostly because I’ve met her several times and she is the real deal. They say “never meet your heroes,” but I did and not only does she have the outgoing personality of a spy, she has the introverted personality of a writer. We’re so much alike and yet different:

I love that my dad just assumed I was going to the book talk, and so did Jonna. They don’t know me AT ALL. 😉 I’m proud that I’m known by a CIA employee because it’s just too much fun. I’m also glad that I have multiple friends who have worked for the agency in the past, and it was really funny. At Zac’s Christmas party, I met someone and her husband who both said they were “recovering CIA” like “recovering Catholic.” I laughed very hard at that one, because if you read John le Carré’s work, you are very familiar with why they would say that. MI-6 is the same culture as CIA, and he doesn’t brag about it.

It’s more interesting that all three spies- Jonna, John, and (Jonna’s late husband), Tony- write about their agencies the same way. The agencies are different and their personalities are the same. Jonna and Tony decided to come out as spies and write non-fiction. Carré didn’t let anyone know he was a spy until very late in his career because he hid it in fiction. But you always wondered how he knew so much.

And because I’ve met Jonna and read John, I know I would get along with all the writer spies, Ian Fleming included. There’s just a rhythm to writing about intelligence, because it has to be about balance if you want to show the true picture. People are James Bond-level happy at their jobs, but you can’t ignore the fact that they’ve done wild, crazy, dangerous, horrible, obnoxious things to other countries, either. You take the good, you take the bad. You take them both and there you have… the facts of life.

The funniest thing is that my dad also got me an umbrella. This will not make sense to you, but I laughed because I lived in Portland, Oregon and all Portlanders go apeshit if they see umbrellas because we don’t believe in them. It is offensive in our culture. Portland’s rain is a wet blanket most of the time. It’s not a big deal to walk from the car inside a building because it’s not “really coming down out there.” Then, you move to another city that has toad stranglers and you’ll die before you break down. I really did need a good umbrella, but it would be a cold day in hell before I’d consider purchasing one for myself.

The only gift I didn’t get was Bluetooth cans, and I have found that those are invaluable, so I ordered them with Christmas money. I would have put them on my list, except that they didn’t break until after it was published and I’d already gotten the packages they sent. Luckily, though, my dad thought it would be sweet to buy Christmas dinner and I was able to get what I wanted at both the grocery store and buy my earmuffs. They’re so much better when they come with a ton of bass standing on the Metro platforms outside in 20 degree weather.

Cold weather is one of those things I love until I’m either extremely cold or burning up due to adding more layers than I need. I love being outside, but the trick is being dressed for it. If you just move around enough to create body heat, you can re-start the insulation process. Most of the time, when I’m not warm enough, it’s because there’s not enough body heat for my clothes to absorb. I wear a puffy vest under my pea coat, and if it’s really cold, a complete set of thermal underwear from Uniqlo where both top and bottom are rated for extreme cold. If I know it’s going to be too cold for my arms, I will wear a hoodie as well. One of my Christmas gifts was a glove and scarf combination that I put together as separates because I wanted tech gloves that could stay on with my phone and tablet.

My e-mail just dinged, and it was from someone I desperately wanted to hear from this morning.

If you know me, you jumped to Supergrover, because I’ve thought I’ve wanted an e-mail from her for months, and what I’m learning is that she got the message to put up or shut up. I’m happier now, and have standards on what it would take to resolve our conflict. It is not “go back and do the same thing,” and I wish our pattern was good for both of us, but I can’t maintain a good one all by myself.

It was not Supergrover. It was from Zac. He read my Facebook post and it was a calendar invitation for the Mendez book launch. I cannot even describe how I feel about that.

He remembered that I wanted to go, because several weeks ago I told him that Jonna was probably going to be giving a talk for “In True Face” at the Spy museum and invited him to go with me. I also said, “she doesn’t have a date for it yet, I just know for sure that there’s a 95% chance.” I invited him because he works at a smaller intelligence agency than CIA, but is familiar because they’re one of his clients. Therefore, I knew that he would be the only one of my friends who wouldn’t be bored by the talk. I needed someone who would actually enjoy it rather than fidgeting and asking questions. I require quiet to process auditory information, which is why I like lectures and sermons.

The two most important men in my life gave me the best Christmas ever, because it was completely tailored to me and my special interest. It was so thoughtful, and so appreciated.

I hope you got a fat stack of presents, too.

Music: A Correction

December 25, 2023December 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I left out a very important word in my last entry, so I’m going to clear that up real quick. I said that I couldn’t read music and I forgot the word “piano.” I can read treble clef. That’s it. If you play the piano, this is problematic. I’m a trumpet player and a soprano, which means I’ve never had to learn to count two rhythms at once, and it’s not playing them that’s the problem. I can listen to music and pick out both hands by ear (sometimes, anyway). It’s being able to read what is happening on the page.

I took piano in college, and I didn’t get it then, either. My mother played all my pieces for me and I memorized how she played them. I learned them by ear and my professor never knew the difference.

So, when I say “I can’t read music,” I can. But not really. I can count one rhythm…….. *poorly.*

One word can change an entire sentence, and that word, again, is piano. But if you only need the right hand, I’ll figure it out.

I’m Writing and Not Sleeping

December 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

How are you creative?

My neighbors are setting off fireworks and it’s 00:32. We might be here a while. I haven’t heard anything that sounded like it was the big finale, although the bangs are getting further apart. It’s enough to be very distracting because while I know what it is, it’s still more sensory information coming at me than I want. Plus, I agreed to FaceTime my family in the morning, so I’m not happy that it’s impossible to sleep right now. Every time I think it’s over, there’s a couple more. I have jumped mile-high several times in the last hour.

That’s the other weird thing. Who buys enough fireworks that they’ll last for an hour except a city? I can tell it’s not downtown because the sound is too close. Therefore, that means my neighbors must have been stockpiling those puppies for a while.

So, when I think about being creative, I think about being able to leave fireworks behind. I get so involved in thinking and typing that there’s no room for anything else. The only thing I don’t have right now are Bluetooth cans, because I broke mine and am waiting for a new pair to be delivered. When there are loud noises like this outside, or when there’s a lot of people downstairs and I can make out what they’re saying (noise level is good when there’s interaction, because I like the busyness. It’s too much when my brain is trying to process what they’re saying while I’m trying to think on my own. It’s the same problem I had at work….. being expected to have a conversation and transcribe it at the same time so that the call could be short and I could take the next call faster. I cannot read music, either. That’s because I cannot run two thought processes at the same time. Listening to someone, responding to them, and writing it all down is just as impossible for me as counting the bass and treble clefs. If we’re talking about an orchestral score, there are multiple parts in those two clefs, plus the violas are in alto clef. I am brave enough to play in an orchestra. I admire conductors.

My best illustration of what I can’t do that other conductors can is based on a man who was my dad’s All-State conductor, but I can’t remember which year or his name, which is probably good because I wouldn’t want to confuse him with the conductor who threw stands (he made All-State all four years- if you’re in Texas, you’re impressed. Trumpet is vicious competition because of our egos, and he, in fact, won the whole ass thing. It was also unexpected, because he was from Daingerfield, competing against players who already had access to Juilliard-level instruction because they lived in a big city).

Anyway, this clarinet player shows up and says that one of her keys is broken, so one of the notes doesn’t play and she has to go home. If I remember the story, it was a B flat. The conductor says, “sit down. You don’t have a B flat in this piece.” The conductor isn’t keeping track of one part. They know all of them.

Because I have had good relationships with all my conductors, no matter their personality, I believe that I’d get along just as well with Michael Tilson Thomas and Marin Alsop as I did with my conductor in sixth grade band. Just because they’re known all over the world doesn’t mean that we don’t speak the same language. Neither of them would ever ask me to play with them, but I’d never want to do so- more fun to watch them work than it is to be onstage. I also don’t like when they’re in the pit and you can’t see them. I love it when symphonies/operas project the conductor onto a screen. It’s so the singers can see them, but it feels like it’s just for me. I’m going to go with that.

I’m creative if I know things about you. I will remember things about you down to the smallest detail, so that when it’s time to pick out a gift, I will score a win. Zac does the same thing, so I hope I pleased him with his gifts, too. I got him bracelets made of “nautical rope,” and when they arrived they weren’t exactly the style I thought they’d be, and I teared up when there were five in the package and he put one on me, too. I said, “awwww, it’s our first Christmas together and you got me jewelry.” But that’s not all. I also found him black hoop earrings that look like a dragon is eating its tail. I like dragons, and Zac is into fantasy, so I didn’t think that dragon earrings would be a miss.

Speaking of dragons, my favorite is Paarthurnax. My favorite tinvak (conversation in Dragon) goes something like this (I don’t remember it verbatim):

Paarthurnax Do you know why I choose to live here, at the top of the Monahvin, which your kind calls “Throat of the World?”
Dragonborn: I don’t know. Dragons like mountains, right?
Paarthurnax: Hmmm, true…..

Just the sound of his voice is amusing, because it’s like “got you there.” Like, it hadn’t occurred to him that to a human, this was a completely normal human thing to do.

Speaking of Paarthurnax, I had to go to Sky Temple Haven after the main storyline and was so satisfied that Delphine attacked me so I could rightfully beat the crap out of her. She’s such a bitch to you that players generally beat the hell out of her if they get the chance…… and then find out she’s marked essential so you can do it over and over and over. This is a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. You can be vindictive AF, but you can kill Paarthurnax but not the woman that wants him dead? Insane.

I think the fireworks are finally over, so I think I’ll spend a few minutes reading, because I might hear Santa.

We Have Covered This

December 24, 2023December 24, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Who are the biggest influences in your life?

I laughed to myself when I wrote that title, because everyone I write about is a big influence. I can’t think of anyone that has affected me more in both good ways and bad than going back over my years and seeing what happened.

Zac is my biggest influence right now, because for Christmas he got me a box of cards with fiction challenges on them. I may start a different blog for that, at his suggestion for his own site, because it would look disjointed to have fiction and non together. I will wait and see whether I’m actually prone to publishing the results first.

Speaking of Mr. Wood, I had no idea that a comment and a blog entry about me was written by him, because I absolutely didn’t see the play on words with “Mr. Would.” I was reading too fast and I saw “Mr. World.” But even if I had read it correctly, it wouldn’t have helped me, because Zac didn’t mention that he was a blogger. I am looking forward to another blogger in the house, because I need to know how it feels to be written about, and I can’t think of a person that sees more of my range of emotion.

That doesn’t make it not funny that I didn’t know that Mr. Would was actually my boyfriend. This is because I thought I was going to meet someone new in the area, and was surprised to see t hat we’d already met. We’ve been dating for a YEAR and I didn’t know he had a blog. A YEAR. YEAR, people. A YEAR.

Now I’m really laughing.

He was probably gathering intelligence to see how good an idea it was to tell me he was a blogger, and that just makes me laugh harder because of course I’m kidding. I have the same philosophy as Bryn. “Write what you want, we’ll work it out.” He actually took me to the mat over traveling, and that’s what made me think I had a superfan on my hands. He said that I didn’t include places I’d said I’d wanted to go before, and was surprised I didn’t mention them again. So, I have this entire ass blog entry written about me by MY BOYFRIEND, and all I got was a pingback.

No, it is AS IF he listens to me, and I could cry when I think about that intensity. I know I am valued because when I say something, he remembers it. I have never been in a relationship with someone so much like me, with the possible exception of Dana. The thing is, though, she would adore Zac as well because he’s like both of us. Neurodivergent and also in the military. Neither Dana nor I have served, but her dad was a Marine and she speaks acronym. I definitely have a type, and it doesn’t have to do with looks. It has to do with the way someone thinks.

So I’m sitting there reading like, “does he memorize my shit?!”

The only reason I didn’t think of Zac at all is that this has happened before. I know I’ve mentioned it, but for new readers there was Stephanie (at least, I think that was her name, it was years ago). Stephanie invited me for coffee through a dating site (the miracle is that I said yes). I sent her my URL because I separate the children from the adults fast. If you can’t handle that I’m a writer, we’re not going to have much in coommon.

Stephanie proceeded to read back four years’ worth of entries, and then pretended like my blog was law and I couldn’t change. It was an hour’s worth of “now you’re saying this, but four years ago, you said….”

I’d gotten divorced, moved to DC, and my mother died in relatively quick procession. But of course no one changes because of anything as simple as that.

But right now, I can’t dwell on anything in my real life, because tonight is not about me. Jesus is one of the biggest influences in my life, and it’s almost time. Mary can sense it. Her water is about to break. Right now? This very moment? I’m just waiting for the baby.

Tonight Luke will come out in his scrubs, and announce that he’s here. The baby that will one day change the world. Tonight is the night that the membrane between heaven and earth stretches so thin, we can touch the face of God.

The miracle is not that Jesus was a virgin birth, but that he survived at all. Can you really imagine being a baby and lying that close to cow shit? Can you imagine delivering your son in a barn? It was so long ago that they didn’t know about germs, so it probably wasn’t as scary for Mary because she didn’t know what could happen, but we do.

If your baby got that close to death, don’t you think they’re divine?

On this Christmas Eve, know that it doesn’t take a miracle to make someone a child of God. We were all born innocent, and we make the decision to resurrect ourselves all the time. It’s the message we’re missing in the middle of the mess.

Whether or not tonight means that The Messiah is being born is irrelevant to me, because this is not a story about magic. This is a story about mystery.

Jesus survived, and the odds were stacked against him. So, in remembrance, I’m mentally gathering the layette. I’m buying everyone blue bubble gum cigars. I’m writing the announcement for the newspaper. It’s all I can do, this waiting.

My area is by the Pepsi machine.

Strawberry Letter #23

December 23, 2023December 23, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Share what you know about the year you were born.

The number one hit by The Brothers Johnson in the title was at the top of the charts the day I was born. When the funk bass starts, and you move; if you have heard Louis start that vamp it’s still going on in your head right now……. so addictive that you might have to find another earworm to get rid of this one.

(Small aside- if you are a Louis Johnson fan (bassist), Thundercat is his heir apparent.)

I was delivered on September 10th, 1977, so for most of what happened during that year I was only marginally present. Jimmy Carter had just been inaugurated as president the previous January (election in ’76, the first presidential election since Richard Nixon resigned). As far as I can gather, it was not one of those years that had a huge historical event. It was a year in which we were recovering from being led by a criminal, which has no bearing on today.

There were smaller accomplishments.

The first official flight of the Concorde took off from JFK after having had several successful test flights. It cut travel time to London in half. Interestingly enough, cutting the flight time in half wasn’t the end goal. As I grew, the Concorde got better. Its fastest speed run from the US to the UK was 2:52:59, and then it was discontinued (thank God, for environmental reasons, yet still sad…… I don’t know why. I wasn’t buying tickets).

That wasn’t the only advance in business, though, because 1977 was one of the years in which personal computer companies were popping up everywhere. Instead of a mainframe and dumb terminals (like at the office), you could get a fully functioning machine that fit on your desk.

Kids, I’m taking a moment out to say that because things have changed so much, I am not sure that you’ll have a reference for this, so I’ll explain.

Before the personal computer, at an office you’d have what was called the “server room,” and every desktop monitor was reflecting what was going on in the server room. None of the desktop terminals functioned independently, similar to today, when it is impossible to use some apps without being connected to the Internet and for the very same reason- the processing is done on the web servers, not on your local device….. which is why a solid network connection is every bit as vital as the CPU/RAM/graphics card/etc. But back then, there was no “internet,” there was the intranet. The server you were connected to was physically located near you, because everything was a wired connection.

I do not think that the Internet would be what it is today if we hadn’t learned how to pipe data through a wireless connection. I believe this was possible because our drive to be wireless all the time came from internet connectivity through your cell. Having a basic web browser on a dumb phone led to everyone being connected, all the time, for better or for worse. But in 1977, we couldn’t see it coming yet. We were satisfied with creating documents and saving them to a floppy disk for easy carrying….. until you bent it…… and then, cell phones only supported calling. Short Messaging System (SMS) had not been invented.

We could not see the future, but how computers operate in 2023 is merely an evolution, it is not wildly different from anything we did back then. What we learned at networking an office turned out to be instrumental in how we network the whole world at once.

In terms of the world at the time, things were tense with the USSR, but in different ways than they are today…. the biggest reason is that the Soviet Republic fell apart, and now there’s only Russia. Any dreams they had of world dominance went with the republic’s collapse. They didn’t have the money to be big players anymore, and honestly, I don’t know that they have it now. As with American leaders, they make it look good….. but who knows what cards Putin is really holding?

(The answer is Hilary Clinton, btw. When the former Secretary of State to the most powerful nation in the world says Putin is masterminding our demise by having a Russian UI in the White House, you believe her. I’m sure your next question is “what’s a UI?” Useful Idiot- the stooge planted in a country who doesn’t do anything outright evil to show they’re being traitorous, just makes mistakes that are bad for American interests because they’re being manipulated by a foreign state. When we elected Trump, we learned that Russia thought they were getting a UI, then even they were surprised with 45 because there was so much emphasis on the “I,” not so much with the “U.” You get what you pay for……… I’m sure Putin thought it was marvelous when 45 went into CIA’s house and ripped them a new asshole. I didn’t. “Say that to Martin Freeman’s FACE.”)

Speaking of Hillary, I don’t know what she was doing in 1977, but I do know that it was near the beginning of of Hillary becoming a one-person monolithic idea of who a president’s partner should be; as such, it was the beginning of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” But the 70s would have been the beginning of social justice awareness, because back then was when the emphasis on social justice really took hold with white people. It’s not that there weren’t white people interested in social justice before, it’s that American Christianity divided in half, and the horseshoe of extremities divided into Evangelical white supremacy apologists and “the woke.” If white supremacy was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for everyone.

Except there is no way for Jesus to be a white supremacy apologist because the image painted of him in every white church in America looks like Jesus was the only French baby born in the Middle East, and at that time, it would have been a severe anomaly because people didn’t generally travel that far, first of all, and second it’s impossible for him to be white as as a descendent of Jesse and David. It was part of Matthew’s whole schtick. He was the captain in charge of “see? I told you he’s the Messiah. I’ve followed quite a few.” Kidding, but not inaccurate. Matthew focused on proof…. not of Jesus’ divinity as the actual son of God, but proving to Jews that he (waves hand) was the Messiah they were looking for.

But in the end, it wasn’t proof that mattered. It was “how do we appropriate Jesus’ culture and religion to fit our justified racism and inequality?” Thus, the Democrats eschewed religion and the cancer of racism spread into the Republican Party at an alarming rate, because they didn’t have to believe racism was wrong.

That’s not limited to the US, by the way. In the 1970s, they were also struggling with this very idea in South Africa. As Trevor Noah has pointed out, when South Africa came up with apartheid, they researched all the ways you could be racist, and took the worst of each system and applied it. Guess what? Most of the really evil stuff came from us.

If you remember nothing else about South Africa, it’s that Jim Crow laws are directly responsible for apartheid being implemented and maintained, because we built the system that had the largest impact on apartheid policies. So, the cancer that is Evangelical white supremacy spread and made South Africa malignant, too.

Even Thai people applaud Ho=Ho great job.

It was Barry Goldwater who warned us, and we didn’t like AuH2O, so we didn’t listen and now we’re fucked:

Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.

Want to hear something really interesting? Goldwater was a progressive Republican, the people most lonely at parties. You cannot convince me otherwise if he also said, “you don’t have to be straight to be in the military. You have to be able to shoot straight.” Millions of gay men have said, “I can do that.” Despite it, “those preachers” became the voice of Christianity and people like Jimmy Carter, Barry Goldwater, and me are left out of the conversation.

I was telling a Facebook group who was, at the time, coming down hard on Evangelical colonialism through mission trips. I said, “I am a Jimmy Carter Democrat. I know that mission trips on the whole are problematic, but I’m a Jimmy Carter Democrat. I didn’t talk about faith, I helped build them a house.” I got emotionally pummeled into the ground. Par for the course. American Christianity as a whole does not like Jimmy Carter’s version of Christianity unless it’s a meme of him and not the rest of us.

Stephen Colbert said it better than the rest of us, the question we should have asked ourselves before we let the Republican Party become a theocracy:

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.

So, if there’s anything good that came out of 1977, it’s that I got the liberal version of Christianity in the Methodist church…………….

Just like Hillary Clinton.

Yes… No… Maybe?

December 22, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

Are you a good judge of character?

I am an excellent judge of character in other people, but what I don’t know is how much of my behavior is inspired by me. I tend to pick out emotionally unavailable people, anyway, so I wouldn’t know if I was doing something annoying or not because they would not volunteer that information. Therefore, I could not change.

It’s why I had so much empathy for Jon Armstrong during his divorce from Heather (Dooce). He went through absolute hell with her, and I know this because my caretakers are often overwhelmed when I get mentally ill. I go into autistic meltdown and burnout, which is code for “doesn’t play well with others.” So, when Jon said “she told me everything that was wrong and just left so I couldn’t change it” (not a direct quote, I’m paraphrasing), my mirror neurons went off and my heart went out to him. Mentally ill people can be so ungrateful, but it’s not because they are actively trying to be emotionally abusive or narcissistic. It means that they’re in so much pain they can’t see past it.

I don’t blame Heather for leaving, either. Her feelings are absolutely valid. I just know from experience that perception is not reality. Whether what Heather saw was accurate or not is missing the point. There is no wrong feeling, there are consequences for acting on them. Depression, particularly bipolar, blows everything out of proportion because sometimes you’re depressed and sometimes you’re manic. You are not seeing what things are really like, you’re seeing them in a fun house mirror.

Whether I’m a good judge of character depends on when you meet me. My perception is different depending on my mood, and that’s not a good thing, but it’s real. It’s my work to do, because mental illness is not the whole answer. It’s developing coping mechanisms and safety nets. Depressed and anxious people do not actually believe that we are loved and we are not a burden on our families or society at large.

The hardest part of a mental processing disorder and/or mental illness is that you’re either slow or crazy, take your pick. I’ve never been called “slow” mentally, but I pick up facial expressions and microaggressions easily. I know what emotions look like on people’s faces and even when my perception is wrong, my judgment on other’s motivations/moods are generally correct. This is because in order to understand a conflict, you have to understand both people’s interests and what motivates people to get closer to you vs. further away.

Most of this is through looking approachable, not being nice. Nice is not kind. Those are two completely separate things. “Nice” says “no, we’re all good” while you continue to distance yourself from me. I noticed discrepancies between words and actions quicker than others do when the words are actually coming out of their mouths, because since my intuition on what I’m going to do is rock solid. I don’t make bad leaps by judging character, but by noticing the hypocrisy and seeing what happens if you call people on it. If they’re angry you noticed a problem and want to talk about it, that’s the biggest red flag you’re ignoring if you’re a people pleaser who lives not to rock the boat.

Most abused people exhibit this, particularly those who have been emotionally abused young by people who are supposed to take care of them. For instance (this didn’t happen to me, just an example), children raised by alcoholic parents are programmed to invert the dynamic. Boys are just as susceptible to becoming a parental figure as girls, though with girls it generally comes faster because women are designed societally to be people pleasers, anyway. But I know this to be true from the number of “mama’s boys” I’ve met, both straight and gay, who weren’t babysitting their mothers because they just wanted to do so; they realized their mother or father couldn’t take care of themselves and didn’t want to watch them struggle, because watching them struggle means that they’re angry and absolutely will take it out on them.

My stepfather is a perfect example. His mother was a horrible alcoholic and actually died from it in a roundabout way. She didn’t live long enough to die of cirrhosis. She was on a drunk and passed out in the snow. She didn’t wake up….. and obviously, he married my mother. The classic image of a “mama’s boy” is not him. That being said, he had to grow up fast. Running a household was nothing to him because he’d been doing it since he was five.

Again, he ran the household as a child until she died in the snow and someone (I don’t remember if it was his family or a neighbor) just found her. I cannot imagine that kind of trauma, and I don’t want to try.

Everyone is fighting something, which is why I believe there are no red flags. I have never met anyone, particularly a woman, that wasn’t fighting massive trauma. Absolutely all of my girlfriends have been sexually assaulted, more than not raped in childhood. That’s not an anomaly where I just went out and picked women who were abused. I have experience with abuse because again, ALL women. All of ’em. Every woman you know has at least a creepy story about a man, and in this culture it’s surprising when you get off that easy if one in four women is raped at least once in their lifetime.

In fact, for most of history it wasn’t rape if you were married to them.

Some mothers are even vicious enough to tell their children that they’re a product of marital rape and make their kids walk around with that knowledge until they’re adults and start unpacking it. It gets worse before it gets better. I cannot stress this enough. You will recover, but at times it feels like you should give up.

But here’s the thing….. during the Renaissance, beautiful statues were often finished in wax to cover mistakes. This is a double-edged sword as an illustration when it comes to PTSD. The first is that the statues weren’t any less beautiful. The second is that when finished with wax, it didn’t mean that the flaw wasn’t still underneath. What you get out of healing is what you put into it. Are you using the wax to cover your wounds, or are you examining the dead spots in your emotions? Are you using the wax as filler not because you are ignoring pain signals, but because you’re rerouting them?

A statue without wax is called “sin cera.” “Without wax.” A statue sin cera was incredibly rare….. another truism because you can make a statue sin cera, but no person ever could be. It is the nature of being animate, fully human and fully divine.

The sculpture you start carving after abuse looks completely different than the one you were carving before, because you don’t have the same thought processes anymore……. however, you do not get a new piece of marble. Maybe you’ve chipped more away. Maybe you’ve taken the “clippings” and rearranged them into something new.

People who have been abused and then are driven to success sometimes drive me insane because they’re so insistent they’re fine. Meanwhile, it’s not that they’re so perfect, it’s that everyone has learned to tiptoe around them. They’re not fine in terms of their emotions, but they don’t notice because why would they? Everyone around them is FINE.

Meanwhile, families who have someone with PTSD become the planets revolving around the sun…. in effect, nurturing it and asking it to warm them when they’re not capable of it. If they’re scared of their emotions, they’re scared of yours.

A lot of the women in my life are or have been a big deal. The two most successful women I know are complete wire monkeys, both raped in childhood and driven to control their entire universes so it never happens again……. not realizing that by trying to control everything, that includes controlling the people around them.

The planets orbit the sun, completely dependent on its behavior and not daring to deviate from the pattern that’s currently working….. but it won’t forever and instead of calling bullshit, the people around “the sun” adopt new ways of trying to please to avoid emotional injury.

Are you people-pleasing because you’re naturally programmed to give all of yourself away, or are you giving all of yourself away to try and mitigate damage?

I don’t know. Sometimes I’m a good judge of character. Sometimes I’m not. It’s especially wishy-washy in trying to determine my own. I am selfless and giving to an enormous degree, but not so much that I’d be willing to do anything to get love. But that’s a relatively new development. In the past, I was so afraid to lose a connection that I just wouldn’t do it. I would cower in fear instead of saying “this is bullshit. You don’t get to control my feelings in addition to yours.”

Whether or not the person listens is the best judge of character there is, because whether you’re wrong or not, your feelings still deserve to be heard. I am the worst person in the world at giving up in relationships, because I believe that certainly there must be a combination of words that will unlock you and make you open up, but it has never worked with a woman who has been raped.

Ever.

But that’s a perception with empathy, not a judgment call. The most upsetting thing is that statistics don’t lie and culture doesn’t change.

But you can.

When I’m Pharrell Without the Hat

December 21, 2023December 21, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When are you most happy?

I am most happy when all my relationships are in balance. I do not expect perfection in anything, but I do expect excellence. I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I can pick out patterns that I do not like and ask to change them. If it doesn’t happen, I don’t keep hammering the point anymore, because people’s actions tell you their intentions. I have a larger tolerance for it the longer our relationship, but I do not feel guilty for setting boundaries. I am allowed to take up space in the world.

My opinion matters, even when it’s wrong, because I am not explaining something to be right. I am explaining something to be heard. The one way to truly piss me off= the quickest and shortest path to rage, is this conversation.

Neurotypical: Explain to me exactly how this happened.
Leslie: (starts explaining an AuDHD amount)
Neurotypical: I don’t need your fucking excuses.

What I have not done is actually call people on it. I could have said so many times, “you asked me to explain, and I did, so I am not getting why you’re annoyed/angry.” This conversation happens quite frequently with neurotypical bosses…. or in the kitchen, because there’s no time for an AuDHD-length explanation. I am at a loss because I do not know what neurotypical people do in the same situation, because I am not picking up what you’re putting down if you ask me for an explanations and then write me off as making excuses. I don’t do excuses.

For instance, with this blog I feel like I’ve made it clear that I’ve done a lot wrong. At no time have I excused my own behavior away, and I’m not using my entries as justification, either. These entries are all context, because behavior doesn’t come out of a vacuum….. and for me, context is important. I am not trying to merely understand a situation, but to grok it.

It is honestly how I am able to be so forgiving and loving in my relationships, because if I start with the axiom that I’m not perfect, it allows me to see others’ humanity as well….. particularly if I write about them. Writing allows me to see the ways I’ve been treated in both negative and positive ways, and that is the nature of relationships. No one is wrong or right all the time. You are often presented with situations in which both halves of the relationship are right to different degrees…. and instead of focusing on the 80% on which we’re agreed, we’ll fight tooth and nail over 20% of a problem. Or worse, we won’t tell each other our feelings at all, content to resent.

If someone says nothing is wrong, and it clearly is, the energy surrounding them pushes you away. It’s your body’s intuition saying something is wrong, and you have to believe your intuition over what people are saying. This is very much affected by depression, because someone else’s words will come across to you differently than they would if you didn’t have it.

The way I handle this is to acknowledge that my attachment style is anxious; all I ask is that people not irritate it. I choose to do this by communicating early and often, and to take people’s words to the bank and see if they cash. If they say nothing’s wrong, but there’s no concrete reason for them to be snappish and nitpicking, then they’re probably not telling the truth. So, you ask what’s wrong and if nothing changes, you don’t have the right to say “you’re the one that needs to change, because I’ve tried everything.” I can only control my actions, not theirs. I also won’t do other people’s emotional work for them. I have consistently found people with avoidant attachment styles and made them out in my head to be more emotionally capable than they are. It leads me to believe that people will rise to an occasion that just never will.

That’s because I don’t believe there are red flags, and I’ve never been wrong to hold onto a relationship with a deeply flawed person, because I am also deeply flawed. I don’t get the kind of love I need from unbroken people, because if you’ve never been through trauma, you will come to resent me. Here’s something really scary. I have never in my lifetime had to look for a girlfriend with trauma. It’s not because I chose the most toxic woman in the room, it’s because I was dating women.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

People who haven’t been through trauma treat PTSD like autism in that even if you don’t know someone is autistic, you know their reactions are different from yours and you somehow judge your own reactions less harshly than mine. But honestly, it’s not blame I can put on anything but the fact that neurotypical people have always believed they were more capable than neurodivergent people because workplaces reward all the things that come easily to allistic people and feel threatened by neurodivergence because we’re not “following the script.”

I believe that I could work out a two state solution for Israel and Palestine easier than I could make myself follow a morning and evening routine for any length of time. I have empathy for demand avoidance, because I’ve felt it down to taking a shower. I have empathy for executive dysfunction, because I panic when I have more than two things on my plate. The absolute worst feeling in the world to me is presenting my task list to my boss and asking which is the most important and them saying it doesn’t matter. What I have learned is that it means “it doesn’t matter if you’re neurotypical, because what you accomplish is not what I would have accomplished, nor any other neurotypical.” It is not that one is morally superior, it’s that an autistic person has different pattern recognition than an allistic one. Therefore, all autistic thought processes are going to seem ludicrous to a neurotypical boss.

To be fair, if I’m not doing something that 90% of people would do, it’s not all the boss’s fault. It’s lack of education. No one knows what to do with autistic people after they graduate high school. I have been lucky in that I have had some neurotypical bosses who have also been parents of neurodivergent kids. Therefore, they had experience in “being the boss of” someone neurodivergent and how to get them to perform what you need because the way of asking looks different. I also think that I get along better with female bosses than male, because that’s another communication style difference when it comes to empathy. Most female bosses- most, not all- understand the neurodivergent way of thinking even if they’re neurotypical because dollars to donuts if their kids aren’t ADHD, they’ve still been around ADHD kids their whole lives. Because which parent is usually the one who knows their kid’s friends?

Plus, there’s little discernable difference in being neurodivergent and being female, because violence occurs to all women to varying degrees. Not one of us escapes it, and one in four women have been raped. PTSD, particularly when it’s chronic (e.g. raped in childhood), will give you the same symptoms as ADHD and autism; the trauma rewires your thought processes and reactions. Most people make the mistake of thinking that going on medication and doing therapy will fix everything and it will all go back to normal. This is untrue.

If you had an idea of what your life would have looked like before trauma and you’re trying to get back there, it’s never going to happen. Give up. Slash those old dreams, because they’re the ones you won’t fulfill and think it’s “your fault.” You have to make a new dream starting from where you are, not where you used to be. That map marker fell off the day you were traumatized. We all tend to undercut the abuser on how much we were abused, and take more responsibility than we need. For me, it was always that I deserved to feel the way I did because I asked for it, and that’s not unique at all. Most abused children think this. I was never physically abused, and it didn’t matter. Emotional abuse hurts worse to someone who already has bipolar depression.

In my case, it’s not really bipolar depression. My downs are so incredibly profound that hypomania looks like a regular person amount of energy…. one on caffeine, I’ll grant you, but a regular person nonetheless. My biggest symptom of hypomania is insomnia. I have roughly the same thought processes in an up that I do in a down, I just don’t get enough rest unless I take sleeping medication, and even then sometimes it fails. It depends on how married to the idea of being awake my brain is that day.

Not sleeping well makes me focus on what’s wrong instead of what’s right. I self-sabotage a lot, because I attribute negative things that aren’t there….. and in a relationship with an avoidant attachment style, you won’t know whether your negative feelings are wrong or right….. because they’re avoidant.

Which brings us up to now.

Zac and Bryn are partner-level close to me because if I say I feel anxious, they’ll tell me whether I am right or wrong in terms of their emotions. They will not let the story I’m telling myself be that they’re avoiding something and don’t want to be close. I won’t let them tell themselves that story, either.

If you’re not emotionally avoidant, you have to ask yourself how long you’ll tolerate someone who is. That’s because good relationships don’t function with that kind of blame cycle. “If I don’t tell you how I feel, then I don’t have to express myself AND I can also blame you for not considering something you didn’t know.” I can assure you that your needs will never get met by me if you do not tell me what they are. To think that I should be able to root around in your head and find your feelings is crazymaking….. particularly when it comes to things like my relationship with Sam. She couldn’t say “I want you all to myself and I also don’t have time for you,” so she couldn’t let me deal with it and decide what I was going to do. So, when I told her that I had a date with Zac, it was during one of our very first conversations because I wanted my words and actions to line up. I knew Zac wouldn’t care what I decided, I just needed to give him more information, too. I would have been fine with it if Sam had said she wanted me to herself. I’m a writer. I don’t need to see people in person much to connect with them. It wouldn’t have been a big deal, but it was because she didn’t ask for it and lashed out.

By lashing out, I mean that my first date with Zac was on a Wednesday, and we had plans for dinner the next Monday. She couldn’t wait that long. Breaking up with me had to be done while I was with him, apparently. She admits that things were going great and she just flipped out, so I’m not telling tales out of school. She thought she could handle it, and she couldn’t. But what she didn’t get didn’t come from something I couldn’t provide. It came from something for which she never asked.

I will not put up with any kind of loyalty test based on “if you really liked me, you would…” This is because you don’t say those things out loud, they’re societal conventions anyway, so it’s not like I’m not thinking the same thing…… No, I can guarantee that our thought processes are nowhere near similar. I have the rarest personality type in the world, literally a Christ figure because the historical Jesus is thought of as “INFJ,” then made even more rare with AuDHD. In fact, there is such a large crossover between autism and INFJ that I’m wondering if Jesus was autistic as well. His robes were all made of the same material, as well as his shoes, and he only ate like five things. I’m laughing, but really. The Sermon on the Mount seems like it was written by an autistic person. Who would wish more for the meek to inherit the earth?

That thought makes me the most happy, the Advent devotional that’s something missing from the diaspora. Maybe I’ll take it on, because if there’s female theology, queer theology, etc. there should definitely be neurodivergent theology. People who are mentally and physically disabled are very much part of the Disinherited (“Jesus and The Disinherited” is a relatively small book, always found in an inside pocket of Martin Luther King, Jr’s suit coat.). Liberation theology means more to those who need it. Not that all people aren’t worthy of having their wrongs forgiven. Not all people look at the resurrection in the light of Jesus having to struggle…. losing the battle, but not the war. His ideas got him killed, and it takes a strong man to say that these ideas will last forever even if I don’t.

It’s why I write digitally instead of in a paper journal. I know from The Wayback Machine that things on the internet don’t disappear. There’s the lesson. If you’re famous enough that dirt on you is a good thing, it doesn’t matter if you take it down or not. Whether you’re immortalized in the Wayback Machine before you take it down is directly linked to how fast you remove it. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that the Internet Archive has taken a snapshot of the server. For instance, Matt Rife will never be able to live down sending people to a web site for disabled kids’ helmets as an “apology” for his domestic violence jokes….. this is not problematic to me, that he will go away at some point; I never thought he was that great a comedian in the first place. Like, some clever lines, to be sure, but I took him about as seriously as I took Dane Cook. I’d rather see Matteo Lane than Dane Cook, because he isn’t a commercial for toxic masculinity and does the same kind of crowd work.

Crowd work makes me happy, whether it’s a brilliant comedian or rapper, because clever written lines are my jam. I feel like rappers tend to be more like Stephen Fry than anyone else, because in order to drop a verse, you have to know a little bit about everything. For instance, readers are better rappers than non-readers, just like novelists are better writers when they read, fiction or not.

Stephen Fry, rappers, and writers are all deconstructing words as we use them, and rappers do it faster than the rest of us. You don’t have to be smart to enter the arena (and bring a knife), but you have to be smart to win at freestyle verse. That’s because I believe it was easier for Billy Joel to write “We Didn’t Start the Fire” than it was to do the research for it. Imagine what you’d have to do to be able to think of something that clever on the fly….. and yet rappers do it all the time.

Listening to rap and hip hop is when I’m the most happy…. because the only people who come close are bloggers like me.