How I Present

December 1, 2023December 1, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have known I was neurodivergent since college and have a confirmed ADHD diagnosis. Therefore, I was already familiar with how the autistic brain works to some degree. There are many new studies coming out that argue autism spectrum disorder should be included, not a separate diagnosis. I agree with this, but only partially. Some symptoms overlap, some don’t. Depending on the situation, ASD and ADHD are completely at odds. My case is complicated because I am also bipolar, but one is not the other. ADHD and Autism don’t really have bearing on the health of the brain, just how it works.

How depression comes in is convincing me that I do not belong without my social masks, therefore it is easier not to engage. But it’s not all depression, because sometimes “willing to engage” is about the sensory environment to which I’ve been invited. When I am in meltdown, I do not leave the house. I am in meltdown/burnout cycles a lot. Therefore, I don’t leave the house a lot because when my depression lifts, I’m still an introvert. I just think different thoughts when I’m alone. I don’t concentrate my energy externally, because in a lot of ways it is seeking a validation that won’t ever be there. Someone else said this, but pretend that I did because I’ve slept since then….. “when you say that I have ‘mild autism,’ what you really mean is that my autism affects you mildly.” I know my behavior goes off the rails, and I take responsibility for that because I’m not five. I also don’t have many relationships that last long, par for the course.

Zac and I are successful, I think, because we’re not putting any pressure on our relationship. We both just exist. We don’t have any expectations of each other except that time together is sacred and if we don’t have it, we make it. Yes, Zac is poly and I’m undetermined, but that doesn’t mean that I am not respectful of his time and other partners. It’s not because I was ever uninterested in being with Zac full time, it’s that I recognize that he’s not available and I’m not capable.

I believe that you have to have a series of failed relationships before you admit defeat because the fairy tale is so real as children. One day, a man will come along that will complete me, and he will be everything I ever wanted. First of all, I’m queer so that’s unlikely…. yet not impossible. I do have a preference, but it’s not a hard and fast rule because all people’s brains are interesting to me until proven otherwise.

I had to get to a place of “not being the marrying kind,” because I’ve been autistic, adhd, queer, and poly since I was born. I just had to find that out over 46 years and not immediately..

They say that you have to know things about your childhood as it’s part of an official ASD diagnosis. Here are the things that stand out to me:

I believe that I was bullied a lot less than other kids when I was a child, because I had the street cred of being the preacher’s daughter. To the extent that I was bullied, it was for being intense, weird, sensitive, and the last person you should pick in any group project ever. I do not work well with others, and I also do not function well outside of it. This is because I have my own system (obviously), and getting a neurotypical person to work with it is obnoxiously hard….. especially when you don’t know you need those allowances. Only once in my life have I been top dog at “group,” and that’s because of my autism, not in spite of it. I disconnected completely from what was going on and just stared at my computer, essentially transcribing the lecture and going to class on my own. I e-mailed every transcription to my group, and because of it, I didn’t really have any group work. All my classmates recognized I had CLEARLY already done my part.

I do not process voices well when it comes to learning, therefore I had the same problem in school that I had at Alert Logic. I could not write anything down while I was talking, or while listening. Those are two separate skills and I am a monotropic thinker. Multitasking just does not happen. I’m sorry. A very real tip for dealing with me (or any autistic person person you’ve just met, as this is extraordinarily common) is that if you need something, write it down. Let us have something to refer to later so nothing drops off the radar. This is true of ADHD as well.

What generally happened in school was feeling beaten up by teachers because when they were talking, I was listening (and nothing else). If you don’t take notes, your teacher thinks you are a straight up problem. Yet, without taking notes and focusing seriously on their voices, if they’d asked me what they’d said, I could have repeated the lecture verbatim. My “performance improvement plan” became writing down all my assignments and making sure the teacher initialed it before I left. This would have been a great solution if teachers hadn’t felt put upon. I should fucking know when things are due, and the fact that I just can’t get it together shows what a dumbass I really am, because if I just applied myself, this wouldn’t happen. Repeat with every boss ever, and why autism and ADHD are so invisible. When you are as smart as I am, disability is invisible (and why so many women are being diagnosed in their 40s and 50s with ADHD/ASD. Women are not taught that they have limitations, women are taught that they are failing at life. You cannot keep up the pace of a busy working wife, parent, and coworker, and everyone will let you know it. There are accommodations for all autistic quirks. Good luck getting society to respect them, use them.

I take in everything I read, deeply. It’s a different relationship altogether than lectures/sermons. Therefore, I could study very hard and not be able to regurgitate it during a test, because demand avoidance would eat my lunch and performance went out the window. On math tests, I rarely got more than 20% right because my logical function is so poor. I absolutely do not know how I graduated from high school, and I still have nightmares that I didn’t.

Speaking of which, part of my reticence in going back to college has nothing to do with money. I could take out an assload of debt, and I’d probably get into lots of schools around here. I doubt I could pass Algebra. I didn’t even really pass logic. I have taken everything I can possibly take that’s in my major and minor (Political Science and Psychology, respectively), but the basics from freshman and sophomore year elude me. I am really choosing whether it’s important to finish the degree, or setting myself up for failure when I’ve already gotten everything out of college that one would want- specialized training. I write about international affairs all the time. I just learned this week that while I was at UH studying Milosevich/Kosovo, several of my friends were on the ground there.

At that point, who of us really studied international affairs?

My friends who signed on the dotted line will absolutely know more than me about world conflict, and if I’d been medically able, the military would have been good for me. I know this. Clear instructions. Black and white with no gray area. Iron steel structure, taking refuge in a system. Living the life I’ve been living with a safety net I’d never had before………… and that’s how political science and John le Carré became inextricably interrelated in my mind.

Speaking of “inextricably interrelated,” that comes from my freshman psych 101 professor talking about how neurodivergent people need a combination of therapy and medication, that neither will work alone. As a result, I’ve quoted her for almost 25 years. Her name is Victoria Schultz-Zwahr (or it was then) and I have never been more in love with a class because I was finally getting answers to questions I’ve had my whole life. The only problem is that the class was focused on basic things like generalized anxiety disorder, unipolar and bipolar depression, etc. We didn’t get into the differences between an allistic and an autistic brain, otherwise I believe the light bulb would have gone on much earlier.

College was easier than grade school because no one cared. My professors who had three and four degrees could give a shit where grade school teachers failed. I knew I had three tests and/or papers due on day one, not a “pop quiz” or saying “we’re having a test on Wednesday” (and it’s Monday). I did so much better in Con Law than I have in any other class.

But my grade school experience is just a reflection of my life now. Always wanting to talk to people older than me (then, the teachers) because there was generally no small talk. Generally no bullying except for the things that all neurotypical people do to neurodivergent kids who are bright. Again, it’s not your perception…. couldn’t be. It’s always my brain.

I learned that I understood math a little bit during the first few weeks of geometry. That was when geometrical concepts were in words, proofs. When we got back to numbers and angles, I fell from an A to an F and no one noticed. It wasn’t my work ethic, it was lack of function. I don’t even see geography like most people due to lack of stereopsis (3D vision).

So, of course I was married and of course I’ve fallen in love with every best friend I’ve ever had, which generally makes the relationship end because I tend to find unavailable people attractive. This is because I can get lost in my own little autistic world and have a monotropic thought process in which there’s a secret world under the real one. That has been true since I was 12 years old, but I got that bubble with an older woman because I’d been trying for it since I was born.

Just leave me alone and let me ruminate to escape the reality of being autistic, thanks.

The reality of autism is that you do not function well in relationships, partially because of a lack you can’t correct and partially because of society’s treatment of autistic people in general.

True but crude- just because I can hold my urine and my conversations doesn’t mean I’m not autistic. Just because when I meltdown I social mask it into mild discomfort doesn’t mean I’m not in hell. Even “high functioning” is offensive, because what it means is that you see me as high-functioning…. as I said earlier. These concepts of “functioning” were invented by neurotypical people to classify us, not an actual label of competence or not. I am not high or low functioning, I am either high needs or low……. and here’s the thing….. they switch off being dominant.

If I have a few good days in a row, I think I’m higher functioning than I really am and “all of a sudden” nope out of everything. That’s because I am only now discerning when meltdown and burnout are coming. When my sensory issues and social masking are just too much, and I cannot deal. This is true of all autistic people, but mental illness makes you believe that you’re worthless because your brain is trying to protect you. It wants you to isolate because when no one else is there, it’s the only time you’re safe….. and other people prove it to you all day long.

However, if you go into an autism group and say that you’re exploring and not diagnosed yet, prepare for the shit storm to begin. I know because I’ve done it. Those groups all have rules that say “self-diagnosed is valid,” but so far they haven’t meant it. That’s because they think I made my decision on whether I’m ASD on a TikTok.

Here’s three things about that. The first is that autism presents differently in men and women, to the same degree that ADHD does. Some children are extraordinarily hyper, some stare out the window…. both valid, both ADHD. The second is that an official diagnosis is not something to be taken lightly, and it’s not that I’m unwilling to go through the process, it’s that it’s intimidating. The third thing is that if you self-diagnose as autism, there is probably a 90% chance that you’re autistic, because who gives themselves that label voluntarily if they don’t absolutely need it? I know I’m autistic like I knew I was queer at 12. Who would come out as gay if they didn’t have to? Who would recant all that and say “no, actually I’m bisexual” if they didn’t mean it? Who in their everloving minds would come out as poly in a society that holds up monogamy like a beacon and cheating is par for the course? People have multiple partners all the fucking time, it’s just dishonest.

Keeping an affair from your partner for many years is not poly. It’s just cheating, and you are very much an absolute dickhead if that’s how you approach it.

For instance, cheating on Zac would not be having another partner. It would be having another partner and not telling him. He doesn’t need to be up in my business nor do I need to be up in his, but that’s his health on the line, not mine alone.

I think what separates mono and poly people is being willing to have those truly fucking difficult conversations without blinking. But in order to know whether you’re neurodivergent and mono or neurodivergent and poly takes a while. Because Autism and sexual orientation are both spectrums, it is a noted thing that lots of neurodivergent people fall onto the poly side of the scale because that’s how autism/ADHD work. You are in each moment, without the ability to plan ahead. It feels like in this blog I am retconning it, but that’s not true. Things just look different after time has taken place.

When I go on this journey to discover the past and what I can learn about it, other people’s memories are competing with mine, thus blowback. Supergrover got me with “telling our story as if it is fact,” when she didn’t tell me a story. I cannot think about something I haven’t read/heard. She thought that our memories should be the same, and there’s no way for that to be possible. I’ve loved her for 10 years with an intensity I’d never found anywhere else. The fact that she was straight mattered less than zero in the end…. not even a real number, as it turns out, because we couldn’t divide by it.

She couldn’t see that our stories did not match up, and wouldn’t until we compared notes. She expected me to divine what she was thinking, and I am very bad at that. I picked out all my worst flaws and tried to explain it- to her it all seems like bullshit. As I told her, “I would have found a way to work your side into it if you’d told me what it was.”

It’s what led me down the poly path, that the emotional attachment was just as important as romance, and having Zac in my life doesn’t mean that Supergrover is not a priority. She just doesn’t get all of me, which is best because I think she’d like to spend some time with her husband as well. 😉

But I didn’t tell her about Zac, and I didn’t tell her about poly, because I knew she’d be freaked and pop off at me in neurotypical rage. She’d been popping off with rage a lot at me, and I decided this was the thing that wasn’t worth it. I needed help, and thought there would only be recriminations, when she clearly helped make me poly in the first place because of the hard out, not because of who she is as a person. I cannot give my heart completely to anyone else, and it’s a miracle that I opened up this much…… because she’s avoidant and compartmentalize while I bleed out.

This is another continuing pattern since I was five- loving someone so much and having them be annoyed at my neurodivergence is a hard row to hoe……. but I learned it in childhood.

I wasn’t kidding when I said that I couldn’t put anyone before her, and that has proved true on many occasions…… yet it goes unrecognized and I’m just a judgmental dickhead out to get her. The reality is that she married me with her secrets, and she needs to fucking get over it. Just because that’s my opinion doesn’t make it right for her…… at the same time, you get tired of being in a friendship and thinking only their thoughts matter because they say they do.

She thinks I’m a demanding asshole because I need resolution on a few things, not that she’s a bad person. She gets annoyed when I bring up something more than once, and I’m tired of that shit, too. It’s not rehashing if you never gave me any information to begin with, is it? It’s all a stalling tactic and I’m done.

But I wouldn’t know it was a stalling tactic if I hadn’t gone back to the beginning and saw that it was all a bunch of stalling tactics in which at first my willingness to speak truth to power was appreciated, then not so much. I wasn’t the only one who participated in our relationship becoming unhealthy, because at least I was willing to entertain the fact that there might be a problem. But in order to resolve everything, she’d have to be vulnerable, and she doesn’t do that. Not with anyone….. I don’t pray for much anymore, but I do pray that Michael was able to make better inroads than I did, because as far as I know, he’s never done anything to break her trust.

She trusted me before him, and I’ll never forget it. At the same time, I was in autistic meltdown and burnout, so shit rolled downhill. I apologize for every moment I was enraged, but I do not shy away from the fact that the problem was real and not all in my head. It was a gaslighting technique, but it wasn’t personal, ever. It’s just the natural consequences of telling someone you have processing disorders and metal illness because convention says “as soon as you perceive that you don’t understand something, say it must be because my brain is broken.” All neurotypical people do this. All of them. If everyone is having the same issue, it’s systemic.

It is often why I stay home, why my mother had to drag me out of the house all the time. I was depressed when I realized I was queer in northeast Texas, because I couldn’t see that going well. But it was more than depression, because from the time I was in third grade I had a computer in my room. I’ve been doing the same thing I do now since I was nine. Get up and write so you can be lost in your own thought processes rather than having to understand someone else’s.

So, in person, I present as kind, warm, funny, outgoing, etc…… and yet….. I still have autism.

The Ones I Didn’t Get

December 1, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make? Why?

The hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make are the ones I didn’t get. Because do you really get a choice not to feel confused down to your very soul when your wife cannot function? You’d think I was talking about Dana, but no. I could not function and she could not handle it. Then, she started to self-destruct and I was too sick to stop anything. I have been writing a book on my illness, to a large degree, because when you have access to my thought process, you see all my processing disorders and mental illness through stream-of-consciousness memories.

It’s not just a deconstruction of my marriage, though, because I talk about all my relationships here to one degree or another.

This morning, the thing that made me smile was my first boyfriend, Ryan, finding out that I’m still attracted to men and asking me what I’m doing this weekend. It was hilarious, and I teased him about being slow on the uptake because I’d been posting about Zac for a year (this was just a funny meme). What I didn’t say and should have was, “actually I’m free.” There’s a reason it’s really important that Ryan laughed and joked with me about it, because breaking up with Ryan isn’t a decision I got, either.

Lesbians older than me convinced me that bisexuality was a lie. Kids are stupid, ergo I thought women were magic. There was no such thing as people who loved both, because if you fell in love with a woman, you couldn’t go back (like they had some sort of secret poison? Idfk. I can’t do the math.). I do not believe that anyone meant me harm. I think their attitudes toward Ryan were based in their own prejudice and internalized homophobia. It’s not like I’ve never been burned by a bi girl, but what I knew even then is that the men weren’t the problem.

Marrying Kathleen was a mistake because it was an anxious/avoidant attachment and when she was avoidant, she acted out. No normal person in a relationship that gets frustrated is going to cheat for months and destroy you while you’re out of town. She can justify it all she wants, but it’s not going to reconcile. In turn, I do not blame Dana for all my feelings for Supergrover. Just because I felt things for someone else while married to her doesn’t mean that I was horrible about it.

It was contentious because those feelings existed at all, not because I was trying to push Dana away. It just did. It was a ball I didn’t realize I was setting in motion until many, many years after the fact. This is because I went back and started exploring the root cause of the pain. Dana and I only looked stable from the outside when we got to Houston. We were actually broken beyond repair and needed a therapist. We didn’t go. Therefore, things fell apart quickly.

Feelings for Supergrover didn’t come out of a vacuum, they were the siren call of something darker- a life without having to fight through a marriage at all. Yes, Supergrover gave me a task that would limit other people from getting into our bubble, and then thought I thought there was something unappealing about that. I did not trade one situation for a worse one, and I got tired of Supergrover insisting that I had. As I’ve said before, I didn’t do anything because she told me to do anything. I did it because it needed doing.

I didn’t leave Dana for good because she was a bad wife, or that our problems weren’t reconcilable (until she hit me). It was because there are three forms of communication in Texas….. telephone, television, tell Dana. If Supergrover has any reticence about this, she shouldn’t, because basically I felt like I had a deep, irreconcilable issue that resolved the moment my glasses smashed into my face.

Dana’s voice echoes in my head constantly regarding a particular event, the one where I knew it was over in retrospect. I won’t say more, but it was huge and ended in a voice mail to Supergrover telling her that I knew she’d had something big come up at work and I was crying that I’d been a distraction to it.

But, the phrase that runs through my head is haunting and it replays every single night, and the one thing that would unlock all the context and hits the hard out. I’m betting that Supergrover does not want to know what this phrase is, because then she’ll have to face the reality of knowing what I do. It was never going to work, the three of us. Ever.

That’s because it was a moment in which her boss was wrecked, too, and we were having a day of it. I was a panicked mess over our shit, and it was just not a good day for me to go into meltdown (as if it ever is) because she was in meltdown as well over her shit. We seem to have a lot of those days, but for all that, she’s still my beautiful girl. Doesn’t mean she didn’t alienate Dana from me, yet nothing is her fault, either. I hope I have made it abundantly clear that neither of these things is the answer- that it was a spectrum of answers and I had to choose between staying married or “the very best bad idea we’ve got, sir.”

Editor’s Note:

There is an “Argo” quote for every occasion.

In the end, I had to ask myself what I was going to give up for this relationship, and as it turns out, a whole lot. But I didn’t do it because she needed me, or I had this wild fantasy that everything was going to work out in the end. By the time I moved to Washington, we were officially done and I was freaked out at the possibility of moving with that insecure connection because I realized it was going to be hell on earth to convince someone I didn’t do something because of her. She took it so personally that she couldn’t see my point anymore, except it was the same point I’d been making for several years before I got sick. The timing of everything was just off, and I can’t help that- even more now that nine years have passed.

When I got sick, Dana’s parents didn’t move from the area, so I thought that our paths would stop being parallel, but wouldn’t go off in completely different directions. Dana could visit, not live with me, etc. But again, I quickly learned that’s not how being hit works. The longer the shock wore off, the more depressed and anxious I got.

I know for certain that to the outside world it looked like I was waiting for a woman in a situation that would never happen. This is not true. I was terrified. I could make her priority one in my head because nothing would happen. I was safe. She was the only woman in my life that I could love with wild abandon that I knew for sure wouldn’t hurt me. I just had to hang in until her anger was resolved.

In some ways, winter melted into spring, and the thaw warmed both of us. But we’ve never gone back to The Moment, either. She was never the definite article, because she has two in my mind. For every time she was The Moment, there were three times where she was The Doctor.

If you don’t know what The Moment is, I won’t make you either go back and look it up or research Doctor Who online. The Moment is a weapon that is capable of destroying entire universes, entire species, and that’s the point. He’s trying to save the universe from collapse, but in order to do it, he has to kill his own people in addition to the Dalek invasion.

Editor’s Note:

I had to look up the exact number, and Doctor Who is so popular that all I did was type “how many Gallifreyans died in The Time War?” It popped up immediately.

Eight to 10 billion Time Lords died that day, leaving The Doctor completely alone except his mirror image, The Master. There are two interesting concepts here. The first is that Supergrover is my mirror image, because we are both Timeless Children, steeped in that DNA. The second is that I have decided the “The Timeless Child” is all abused children because of what Tecteun did to The Doctor. She adopted him and ran experiments on The Doctor, which The Doctor couldn’t have recognized to due regeneration. She was a mad scientist with a willing participant because The Doctor didn’t know any better. The Doctor was regenerated all the time like a rat in a lab, ending with William Hartnell….. who unsurprisingly stole a TARDIS. I think it’s institutional memory, to be honest. Even if The Doctor didn’t recognize what was done, The Doctor still felt all the pain of an insecure environment, just like all Timeless Children do. I hope we find out as we go along why she stopped with William Hartnell. Why The Doctor ended up as his particular persona….. which as I remember, is not altogether pleasant and for good reason, as it turns out. However, with Supergrover, we are The Holy and the Moly, and we change it around often. Neither of us is coded as The Master, neither of us are pure enough to be The Doctor. But, The Doctor is not pure enough to be The Doctor, and he knows it…… felt it deeply as he wrestled with The Moment that day. Let’s not forget that thought the genocide was later rectified, he still made the choice to blow up his people. As a result, The Doctor, like all Timeless Children, is also The Master when The Doctor feels weak….. “a good man goes to war.” Luckily, “prisoner zero has escaped.”

Editor’s Note:

I switch between him, she, they, and The Doctor because it isn’t clear in canon whether The Doctor goes by “they” now or is always the definite article. The Meep cleared that up when The Meep said that The Meep always identifies as the definite article, and The Doctor says, “ya, I do that.” The reason it’s confusing is the actor who played the role when the story took place. The Doctor might be the definite article, but Matt Smith and Jodie Whitaker aren’t. Therefore, I try to remember to use the definite article or “they,” but I get lost quickly.)

To that end, I had to wrestle with The Moment. She had to walk with me through all of my decisions whether they were the worst or the best.

It’s what makes my worst decision also the best, depending on where you stand.

…. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. ….

Android and Sundry

November 30, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve finished up my Christmas list, and it was harder than I thought it would be because I really don’t need anything. I could upgrade my Fire tablet, but I have an iPad Pro (First gen) and a basic Kindle (I lost my Oasis in the chaos of the fire). If my current Fire can’t handle something, the iPad Pro certainly will. I’m not a gamer, so that’s why cheap tablets work so well for me. Even if I wanted to install an emulator for things like NES and Playstation, those games are so old that it would not tax my current tablet or newer. In fact, to replace my current tablet with something I’d like more would be a substantial jump in money for something that is just cool, not necessary.

I’m actually surprised at how well my current Fire HD 10+ does split screen, so if you need a laptop, I highly recommend you pick one up. Because it’s not the newest release, it will be maybe $80. With a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, you’ll gain the functionality of a full desktop and your bag weight will still be manageable. The newer version of the 10-in only comes with 3GB of RAM as well, but it has a faster CPU. In order to get 4GB, you have to upgrade to the Fire 11 Max, which is stunning hardware and not enough motivation to upgrade because you can’t install stock Android on it and there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack….. omg, this wigs me out so much, this whole going to Bluetooth and HDMI/Thunderbolt for everything. I have a very nice stereo system that only comes in wired. I hate having to charge my headphones. It’s at least as big a form factor as the 10-inch, so saving space isn’t it.

I don’t think I should have to replace my audio equipment just because computer companies are short-sighted. In order to get the same usage out of your Bluetooth headphones that you could out of wired, you’d need 10 pairs to constantly keep charging them, and if you forget your cable on the go, good luck. God bless. The best pair of headphones I own are wired Sony that cost less than $20, and because it’s a wired connection, much deeper and richer than Bluetooth. Audiophiles do not like Bluetooth. It’s knowing how to use a Nikon and settling for a phone cam. So, I will be staying with my current iPad and Fire for now, because by now they are like pets. 😉

I’m not doing anything but surfing the web, creating documents, and watching videos. I don’t think there’s any percentage in upgrading until I have a reason for it, like editing video and thus need more RAM. RAM doesn’t make your tablet faster. It makes it where you can keep more applications open at one time without it lagging. I would recommend at least 4GB for the current build of all Google apps. Chrome is a memory hog in and of itself, but 4GB of RAM will allow you to put it side by side with something else and have full control in both windows.

Plus, things will change when my new computer arrives. I’ve never had one with DDR4 or an M.2 drive, both things that will seriously pick up the pace in my desktop department. That means I can use USB-C to transfer files back and forth from my Fire tablet and edit them on that drive instead. It won’t mean much in terms of text, but it will mean everything in terms of audio/video.

Even then, I didn’t pick out something STUPID fast, I just joined the 21st century. Linux has astounding support for the AMD gpu, so Ubuntu will install right out of the box and it already comes with Windows 11. Since Windows 11 is going to contain Skyrim, I’m going to add a separate SSD with something like Linux Mint.

I know the M.2 drive is faster, but I’m not sure whether I want to partition it yet. All of these things are to be discussed with myself when said computer actually arrives (Saturday). What I do know is that I’ll plug it in and use it as is so I can activate the Windows 11 license and add it to my Microsoft account. Then, I can uninstall and reinstall everything to my heart’s content. The one thing I like about having DRM on Windows is that I don’t have to have a key every time I reinstall. I spent the 90s memorizing Windows keys, I shit you not. I must have had to install it 500 times, and I stopped having to look down at the jewel case on install 48.

The only reason you ever need to reinstall Windows right off the bat is if you buy a pre-built and there are proprietary applications you just can’t delete. If that is the case, I will be downloading my own installation media. I hate that stuff the same way I hate Fire OS. The Fire tablet did not have to reinvent the wheel with Fire OS. Nearly everything in the Google Play store requires Google Services Framework, so if you have Fire OS, you either have to hack it to run GSF or suffer life without them. You can download some apps from the Aurora Store, but what you’ll find is that anything you really want to install has to come through Play.

This is not true if you’re a Microsoft person, and if you are, that’s great. Microsoft apps like office and Edge (a derivative of Chrome) will install just fine. If you use Gmail, the e-mail application that comes with Fire OS is mostly elegant and will incorporate your calendar as well. However, you will not have access to Google apps like Drive, Docs, Sheets, etc. It was a bad decision to branch off into FireOS, but at least they only tell you that Google Play isn’t supported, they haven’t shut down the homebrew community altogether. XDA has made what’s called “The Fire Toolbox,” which will turn off all the Amazon apps you don’t use and install Google Play services for you. At one point, you could also install alternate launchers, but I think that may be the one thing that is locked down.

I have said this before, but it bears repeating that Amazon is making some stupid awesome hardware and selling the products for what they’re worth. There is no reason that they need to lock me into their version of OS hell while they’re at it. I would love to be able to install stock Android or Ubuntu Touch or whatever it is that I like on the hardware that I purchased. Even Steve Jobs recognized there was a use case for installing Windows on a Mac and that’s why we have BootStrap.

I would understand if the Fire Max 11 came with lockscreen ads and FireOS because it was a loss leader to get you to buy into the Amazon universe. It’s not. Other companies are selling equal or better hardware for the same price. The only place I hear Amazon is really competing with Apple is that their new stylus is comparable to an Apple Pencil. But I’ve only heard that from tech reviewers on YouTube, I have never used one.

And while we’re on the Apple Pencil, let me tell you that it is the coolest thing on earth and I love it to absolute pieces………… I’ve used it three times this year. I like to color, but I don’t like to handwrite things. My iPad has a touch screen, so I don’t need it as a mouse. I have a matte screen to make the Apple Pencil feel real, as it it actually sounds like graphite scratching across the “paper,” and yet it still feels like once keyboards came out, pens were so over.

I would also skip the new Amazon keyboard case, because it has a touchpad that I can believe will drive you nuts from accidentally hitting it all the time. When I had a laptop, I disabled it and carried a mouse everywhere. I have not seen the keyboard settings in FireOS to know if you can disable it or not. Tell me how it works out. 😉

Eventually, I had to face the reality that while I’m a tech enthusiast, I don’t want to be one of those people who collects gadgets and therefore e-waste. I have enough already. If I ever upgrade, I wouldn’t even know where to start with the technology I already have because it’s so old it’s not really worth anything. I am looking at the reality of what I really do in a day, and basing my tech decisions on it. Every problem that I have with an application will not be fixed with a faster machine. A lot of stability on a tablet comes from network connection, because apps are basically front-ends for the web. If you’re going to get a new tablet, it’s more important that it does dual-band networking (2.4 and 5G) than the amount of RAM. I’m lucky in that dual band came out for the Fire with the last iteration, so there’s not even a reason to upgrade there.

I do think it’s fun reviewing new things, but there again…. I can review it, but what do I do with it after that? I can only use so many computers at once. I am reaching saturation with technology and need it less, not more. I am learning to go off the grid when I write. I am learning that time is sacred. I am learning that my technology is not a leash that means “respond to everyone immediately or you’re a terrible person.” I had to learn that my time was valuable, that my writing was valuable, that even if no one ever read it that it was good for me to get it all out.

I just don’t have to spend a thousand dollars on a tablet to do it….. even if it was a really, really cool machine.

My Family Does

November 30, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays?

I don’t cook anything for holidays anymore, because when I got divorced and moved to DC, I moved in with a family who already had Thanksgiving wired, and I wasn’t the only cook in the house. One of my housemates when I first arrived had gone to Johnson & Wales, and was the chef at Jaleo Crystal City (Jose Andres is the executive chef, I mean the guy who actually ran the restaurant on a day-to-day basis). Therefore, I know Jose Andres intimately, even if he doesn’t know me…. and all of his secrets are safe. 😉

We used to laugh together about the things that happened around us that we were helpless to stop. Neither one of us in all of our cosmic culinary power could get people to stop putting knives in the dishwasher or in the bottom of the sink. More than once did we look at each other and say, “I can’t.” We honestly didn’t spend that much time together, it’s that our relationship was like all brothers in arms. We had an emotional shorthand not there for others in the house. If you are not a person with ADHD/Autism when you start a kitchen job, you will gain the ability to see the kitchen that way. Everything in cooking is a sensory issue, and you’re learning to fine-tune it. The tiniest changes will cause absolute anarchy.

For me, a big one is soap. They’re all concentrated differently, and it seems there is a large leap from generic to brand. It also affects the kitchen to change the smell of the dish soap, because you get used to how those fragrances mix with spice. For instance, going from a floral scent to a lemon scent gave me gastrointestinal issues because the lemon mixed with the scent of eggs and ruined Hollandaise sauce for me because every time I think of it one of the flavor notes is surfactant.

Soap is a trigger for a much bigger sensory issue overall. Most autistic people who have sensory issues with smell are because it’s turned up to “pregnant woman.” I throw up more due to bad smells than anything else, and why when I live alone and have a cat, I have disposable litter boxes and change them out often rather than ever force myself to change it. I was lucky in that Dana didn’t mind and had permanent boxes at her house, but I wasn’t counting on her to care for Asher. I had my own system, I just didn’t have to use it. I wasn’t allergic to chores. I traded that one out.

Being married is really the last time I had any holiday traditions, because when I moved to DC, I was folded into an established family here, Lebanese heritage and not Irish. For Thanksgiving and Christmas we have turkey and dolmades. Stuffing and kibbi (Kibbi is actually one of our dog’s names, too- “meatball,” basically, in Arabic). It’s a wonderful life. Hayat and I have talked often about the fact that “I’ve picked up Arabic,” because when I first moved in, Hayat spoke Arabic and Nasim spoke Farsi. I asked both of them if it would bother them for me to listen in on their phone calls, because I didn’t want it to feel creepy and I knew they wouldn’t really, either since I don’t understand either language. I just wanted to take away the feeling that I was trying not to watch them by making it obvious that I was.

Listening to Nasim was hearing the end of “Argo” all day long. Learning the Levantine dialect of Arabic was learning the rolling lilt of the ocean and not the Middle East RP equivalent, Cairo (I checked). Some words in Egypt and Lebanon are different, some words are the same because Lebanon has had a bigger influx of Mediterranean immigrants. In fact, my cover photo on Facebook is a picture Hayat took of the marina in Beirut, now a city on my bucket list if it ever calms down enough for me to go. I would feel comfortable with Daniel or Zac in that situation, but I would not feel comfortable traveling without someone who could defend both of us. That whole idea started the romance with Daniel, because I initially wanted a travel companion and then I realized I wanted him. I don’t know whether Zac and I will ever travel together or not, but what I do know is that he may have not been in the same situations as Daniel, but not because he didn’t train for them.

But Zac and I haven’t started our own traditions yet because we haven’t spent a Christmas together. Since he celebrates Yuletide and not Christmas proper, it doesn’t matter whether I see him on the 25th or not. What I do know is that we as people are a spectrum. Maybe we’ll go for Chinese, maybe we’ll finally watch “The Pigeon Tunnel,” the Apple TV+ documentary based on interviews and John le Carré’s last book. I would have jumped on it the moment I saw it if I wasn’t so insistent about not cheating on him. Infidelity is one thing. This is couple TV. THERE ARE RULES. There are shows I still haven’t finished because I promised Dana I’d wait. It’s getting a bit ridiculous. Still can’t do it.

I have been asked to make a Christmas list and so far the only thing on it is a long-sleeved SAS t-shirt. I’d also like a Senators baseball cap because of the Duke Ellington concert in the spring, because even if I didn’t wear it, oh my God would it ever look good with Jason’s signature on the side. For my international readers, the Senators are the current hockey team in Ottawa, but the baseball team in DC was called the Senators when we first joined the league. Duke Ellington started selling peanuts when he was like, 11?

When Jason told me that he was going to do a Duke Ellington concert in The District, I told him that he was a brave, brave man. He laughed because he knew exactly what I meant. If you come for Ellington in his hometown crowd, you best not miss. Here’s what I know that you don’t. Jason is objectively better at piano than Ellington ever was. He can take Elllington’s ideas to a place that the composer himself couldn’t- another brain seeing different patterns. Ask me how I know that? He’s been doing it since he was 17 (probably younger, but I’ve known him since then), the Mozart of jazz, too many notes that boggle the mind.

I do not say this lightly. It probably sounds like I’m just part of the Houston jazz scene and trying to promote my boy. No. Jason is different. Jason goes to places I don’t like and I don’t know why and then I fall on my ass when I figure out the chord structure. It’s not that I didn’t like Jason, it’s that my mind wasn’t big enough to hold Jason yet. I had to grow into him. He’s an artist that is perfectly capable of giving you a beautiful haircut that you don’t like until you realize you were wrong. You thought it was a mess, and it makes your whole face.

The last time I saw Jason, I left the Kennedy Center and walked around for two hours trying to deconstruct that concert in my mind. Every time I came to a new metro stop, I decided I wasn’t done thinking about jazz yet. If you’ve never been to see Jason, I do not believe you have a grasp of modern jazz and where it’s going. I hope the concert is not too esoteric for Zac, but I don’t think it will be. I just think the difference is that when he looks at Jason, he sees the finished product. I see every iteration. Tall, skinny, quiet, softspoken when he does, can’t get used to the fact that he doesn’t wear a stocking cap every day. Can’t believe he and John Schutza aren’t a thing at lunch anymore.

Zac is going to become a bridge from my old life to my new one, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. I know Jason wouldn’t necessarily look for me at the concert, but what I do know is that he would be disappointed if I came to the concert and didn’t say anything. If I had my life to do over, I would have loved to be as serious a jazz musician as Jason. But, on the other hand, I did not have the ability of Konrad Johnson to “see where they were going and go with them.” I did not have Jason’s ability to see the rules of composition in such a way that he plays as if they aren’t there. No open fourths? Here’s seven in a row. Deal. Not a real example, but on brand.

Jason, like I am, is an unapologetic artist trying to get the audience to come to him, and he’s so good at his craft that he deserves to be a leader.

If there’s anything in my family that starts with me, it’s a love of music- the only special interest I had before intelligence because the first time I ever sang in front of an audience (congregation), I was three. Never in my lifetime did I think I’d get involved with it enough to understand what an open fourth might be, but here we are.

I know that when we talk about dishes, we’re often talking about the things put on the table. To me, sharing music with someone is every bit as important as a Christmas or Thanksgiving table. It’s where my mind goes now that I don’t have to cook for either holiday.

I also talk about music not to talk about what is going to be missing.

Also, here is a meme to express my feelings, one of my love languages:

Bold of You to Assume I Need Sleep Now…..

November 29, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?

I would play it by ear. I don’t have the kind of mind that would plan it out in advance. I function way better as the red team than the planner/finisher.

Some people are unfamiliar with the term “red team,” but it’s journalism slang for people who point out the flaws in your plan. There’s a whole episode on the red team in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom.” Very, very much like prepping a presidential candidate for a debate; the red team researches the blowback you’re going to get before you publish something.

It is so much easier to red team than it is to create it because an autistic mind sees patterns and can tell you what doesn’t fit. Other people can do it, too, but allistic and autistic people have different criteria for pattern recognition. This pattern recognition is created by our autism, but also our extensive social masking. We research neurotypical people, but we do not take it in. We do not become neurotypical by socializing with you. We make ourselves seem more acceptable to you and you interpret it as “getting better.”

But, if you try to tell a neurotypical person that they’re wrong about something, you’re fucked. Because mental health issues mean they treat you with kid gloves. Your opinion comes across as “why does this child think she knows anything?” There’s a huge superiority complex that comes from not having mental health issues or processing disorders. It’s such a catch-22 because you can’t hide it and living with the consequences of telling people is a concentrated tisane of depression and anxiety, served to you every morning even when you don’t sleep.

It makes people feel better about themselves when they’re in conflict with you and you have mental health issues. People are so much more likely to write off my feelings as symptoms of my mental health than actually consider the fact that they might have hurt me. I am responsible for hearing when I have hurt someone and responding; I am also responsible for knowing when people are seeing symptoms when I express needs. Normal things that people should care about, should worry about, all of the sudden become “you should take something for that.” Bitch, please. My psychologist thinks you’re a freak show and my psychiatrist says “not enough medication in the world.” Truly, there is no medication in the world that will fix someone’s perception that it’s always your brain (therefore, you’re always wrong) because you have a diagnosed problem with yours and they don’t. It would be gaslighting if it was malicious, but it’s not. It’s every bit as systemic as racism.

It’s the sign, being treated like a pest. That’s the sign that someone thinks of you as mentally ill and not a person anymore… but not consciously. It’s not personal, it’s global. I am a diagnosis to a lot of people, and I finally stopped catering to them because I started treating me like a diagnosis as well. It didn’t do anything to make me feel better and often made me feel worse…. and in fact, a lot of the “symptoms” people see are indeed symptoms- of autism, not depression and anxiety or hypomania. In some ways, it was such a blessing because the symptoms I thought I had from depression were actually processing disorders. I felt lighter than I had in years, because that means my depression isn’t as bad as I think it is.

There’s never going to be a time I can wean off of my depression medication, but there is a lot of comfort in things being unique to me as a person rather than brought on by depression. They just tend to work in tandem. If my autism gives me demand avoidance, my depression will tell me I’m useless and worthless. Anxiety will tell me that if I do not get with the program, I will keep on being worthless. The boss music moves faster, and the threat never appears.

Therefore, I’ve never fallen into a pit of fire, but I haven’t saved the princess, either.

I take that back. I have saved the princess once. I bought an NES controller for my PC, and downloaded an emulator capable of cheats like a Game Genie. The only time I’ve ever beaten Super Mario Brothers was turning up the cheats to full-on invincible. I didn’t have to do that for Alduin (main storyline villain in Skyrim, a dragon).

If I didn’t sleep at all, I’d probably play video games more. I don’t have time for them, which is why I stick to Skyrim and don’t pick up new titles. If you get into Skyrim, it’s different than getting into any other game. There are so many makers of free content addons called “mods” that add quests and characters that you’ll never finish it all. I haven’t even finished all of the quests in the main game, much less expansion packs. While Bethesda is amazing, the creators didn’t make Skyrim immortal. The modders did. It’s basically a video gamer’s blog, because they keep updating the story and the software as newer hardware comes out (getting Skyrim Legendary Edition to run on Windows 10 should be in your quest journal).

Besides, I’m a monotropic thinker. I am happy disappearing into Skyrim more than once rather than getting used to new game mechanics every time. I can change them slowly over time if I want. Part of the joy of the creators’ community is that they’re able to create new animations as well.

And, of course, I love the Thieves Guild, and not because they’re bad. It’s because it’s the closest you get in Skyrim to being a spy. You’re tasked with burning someone’s beehives and stealing something out of someone’s house without anyone knowing you were there. I may not be Jack Reacher, but I get to feel like it for a little bit.

It is so easy to me looking back to see how intelligence became my special interest. Hearing about my great uncle when I was a kid made intelligence feel secretive in a good way. I know for sure that my great uncle was a watchdog on CIA and the military, part of the solution and not the problem.

I have a couple of stories that prove to me that the American government is not lily white from that era, so I also do not think of spies as superheroes. Because James Bond is, well, James Bond, no one thinks of spies as the babies they really are. Most are recruited at the same age as people in the military. CIA recruits at universities as well because they always need people fluent in more than one language. As John le Carré points out, when you’re old enough to do those jobs well, people stop asking you to do them.

What I do think is that I identify with living a double life. My personality on the street is not shown online, and my online personality isn’t me in real life. I am not hiding one from the other, you just can’t only know me in one way and see everything. It’s not the way I’m trying to present online and in person. “The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan.

If I never slept at all, I think I would spend more time researching. It’s my favorite thing whether it’s intelligence operations or biographies of real people. This is because the more non-fiction I read, the more I have a library of images in my head to make correlations. Reading about intelligence is like reading any novel. You find random facts about everything while on one topic. That’s because nothing happens with one decision. With worldwide intelligence, you may have to visit Mexico and Iran in a day. So, in the course of one operation I can learn the habits and mannerisms of a policeman in Oaxaca and a tea shop owner in downtown Tehran.

I am deadly serious in that I believe the Netflix version of “Carmen Sandiego” is the most realistic show we have about intelligence available currently. Carmen is a young woman, but I’m not sure how young. Her friends seem to be teenagers, so maybe college? Anyway, she has a ground support team (ginger twins named Zack nd Ivy) and a handler, Player.

Player is not on the scene, he’s kind of like Justin Long in “Galaxy Quest.” He’s at the computer with the floorplans in front of him, but he’s never in Carmen’s physical location. And because they’re an intelligence agency unto their own, they’re not trying to mimic another one poorly. I really like the relationship between case officer and handler when it’s written as a funny and touching buddy comedy, which this is (my other favorite is “Spy” with Melissa McCarthy and Miranda Hart). In this version of Carmen Sandiego, Player is written very much like her little brother, and it makes child labor so endearing. 😉

Speaking of “child labor,” I love The Disney Channel. They’re the ones that have 14-year-old children saving the world at every turn. I believe that’s a lot more realistic than expecting me to figure it out. Plus, I love writing for adolescents, because it doesn’t take fancy language to make a good story.

It is not lost on me that I bond with these weird little families because Player is coded as autistic. Carmen is coded as CPTSD. Zack and Ivy are clearly ADHD. Ivy is also coded as queer. When you’re the ones picked to live in the shadows, you don’t get to pick and choose who comes with you. The relationships just keep getting bigger to accept who everyone is. Player is never going to be on the ground support. Zack and Ivy are never going to sit still. Carmen is never going to let other people control anything, because she deals in burning beehives.

If you love “Doctor Who,” you’ll probably love “Carmen Sandiego” as well, because it’s very much the same idea. Zack, Ivy, and Player are very much Carmen’s “fam.” And she has more important companions in her life, but that would involve spoilers I’d be devastated to give you before the story unfolded on Netflix.

Often the best representations of intelligence agencies across the world are fictional, because then people have so much more license with it. Less chance CIA would get upset with me if I changed their name and gave them global power to track down alien activity. Maybe throw in Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as the main characters. I don’t know. Seems risky. Think anyone would watch it?

I am watching very closely at how fictional characters are written across the board. My alternate history combines my two greatest passions in life, so I don’t know whether passion for cooking fed intelligence or the other way around, but now they are inextricably interrelated into the plot of my novel. The one thing that will happen for this alternate history with certainty is that OSS will not transition to CIA. It will transition to something else (or stay OSS, because its future would also be fictional). To me, it is better to create my own intelligence agency with its own fictional structure/rules than it is to guess what CIAs structures are and be wrong. I am a Virgo. I can’t be wrong. It creates a blip in the Matrix.

I have archetypes for my characters thanks to YouTube. There are lots of interviews with people from DIA, CIA, NSA, etc. Here is the one truism I can tell you from hours of all that. In every single one, someone says, “when you were a kid, did you think about working in intelligence?” In every single one, they say “nope. It just fell into my lap.” I think this is due to age. Most of the interviews I’ve watched are with people that are at least my age. When we were kids, spies were approached. There was no “go to CIA’s web site and apply.” Future female spies will be able to say that they applied when they were 18, all they did was send in a resume.

In fact, the way Tony was recruited was through an ad in the newspaper for a government artist. He was intrigued because he thought, “what would the government want with an artist?” Turns out, when an intelligence agency wants people to forge passports and documents, they call it “government artist” in the newspaper. 😉

I am certain that people still get approached because there are people out there doing all sorts of things that would be useful to CIA. For instance, you might love languages or cartography and think you’ll end up as a professor somewhere. But when you get up to six languages or images no one else has, someone will be impressed.

And honestly, we’re starting to be impressed as a country. People loved Madam Secretary, which is a great example of a show that shows how government works (heightened, but realistic). Not everything is accomplished in the shadows, but……….. “for everything else, there’s Visa?” When I think of CIA and State, I don’t want to picture Elizabeth. I want to read the real stories of the people in those jobs. I have read every word Hillary Clinton has ever written, both fiction and non.

I suppose I am trying to find what any writer is- the ability to find themselves while constantly researching other people.

I Just Thought of Something….

November 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I have thoughts and need to write them down for myself. Then, I realize that they’ll mean something to someone else and I just write here, instead.

It just hit me on the head that Supergrover is beating herself up over what she thinks I think of her, and not what I actually do. Therefore, she doesn’t realize that because I’m creating a portrait of her, she is not just beloved by me. I think that she thinks I want to write about her because of what she does. I knew that wasn’t right, but I did feel this. One day, she’s going to be Jon Armstrong. One day, she’s going to be Victor Lawson. One day, people are going to compare Victor to her instead of the other way around. And I’m sure about that.

I cannot paint a true portrait without a bad side to a person, because that’s not real life. John le Carré taught me that.

“The cat sat on a mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is a story.”

I started reading “The Pigeon Tunnel,” and as I was reading I realized that though people say that my writing sounds like David Sedaris, it feels like I’m him in a different body just by the way he writes. This is for two reasons. The first is that we’re the same “type.” Both interested in news and government for the purposes of writing about it. Both interested in holding up a mirror to the world, because bad experiences are the spoils of war for a writer. As poet Mary Karr has said, “happiness writes white.”

David (Cornwall- real name, sorry- I use them interchangeably) has the same way that I do of talking about terribly serious subjects while adding just enough humor to keep the person reading. He seems like the same kind of serious that I am, because while the things that have happened to me are funny, I think David Sedaris is more camp than I am. David Cornwall is a dry wit, and that fits my personality nicely.

I like “The Pigeon Tunnel” the best of all Cornwell’s books because he’s not masquerading as George Smiley. It’s reading the non-fiction behind the fiction, just like I wanted to do in my own book idea of alternating chapters. I’ve also heard both David Cornwell and David Sedaris in interviews and I feel like they both represent me as a person. David Sedaris often explains the way I think to me, and David Cornwell explains how I write.

Apparently, I am an old English geezer at heart, which I hope makes him laugh wherever he is. He’s entertained me so much over the years. I think that’s because he’s such a marvelous blend of people like Rachel Maddow, David Halberstam, Tom Clancy…….. and also Ian Fleming. Basically, living in a system and writing the criticism of it. You can tell it’s a mixed bag. Even more when he was no longer under cover and people knew who he was. After his father heard that “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” had sold 15 million copies, he swindled him for the rest of his life and complained when Cornwell said, “no. Enough is enough.” Basically, his father wanted him to invest in some kind of farm. David said, “if you want a farm, I will buy you one and give you an allowance for maintenance.” I’m not sure he ever heard from him again.

He reminds me a lot of Jonna and Tony Mendez, which I learned quickly because after I saw “Argo,” I began looking for other stuff like it. I didn’t want to know what being a spy was like based on what I saw in movies because real spies had confirmed for me that the day-to-day job is better in terms of learning how policy is shaped, but most of it’s too boring to be filmed. I think it would be cool to be on one of the committees for intelligence in Congress, because I am definitely a “don’t tell me how you got this” kind of dude. I don’t need the semantics, I just want the protein.

George Smiley is just relatable. An Everyman with a normal job, with moments that would fry your hair. Every intelligence job seems to be akin to being the goalie of a soccer team. It’s red tape bureaucracy AND “oh shit, they’re coming.” What le Carré was trying to do in his books was to erase the public’s perception that all spies are like James Bond. At the time, CIA was all over MI-6 to get their shit together, they had a mole. Just like with Rick Aames, they went after the wrong people first because Kim Philby was good at covering his tracks right up until he wasn’t. People say that Philby was a double agent. I’ll believe it when I see that he also did something good for the British.

I genuinely believed that John changed MI=5/6 for the better by being honest about what was going on. They were a mess. He couldn’t fix it, but he could write it down. Especially when you can’t fix anything, having a voice is important. Even screaming into the void produces results because you don’t have to be heard to feel spent. That relief comes from getting it all out.

John does this so masterfully in “The Pigeon Tunnel,” explaining that his father was a crook, making him live in “show mode,” often doing errands for his dad when his dad couldn’t show his face in public. His father was not scared of the police. It was so much worse. It was the Russian mafia. So, John le Carré and David Cornwell are indeed two different people, but John has been around longer than his pen name. When you live a life like that, you have two personalities. His father constantly lost everything. He was well versed in espionage and needed refuge in the system. It was living the life he’d already been living, while having the stability of a government paycheck and normalcy at home. Living on an extreme edge, but with a safety net he’d never had before.

I don’t know how long into his career it was that he developed a knack for fiction. I don’t believe he thought of it as fiction, necessarily. He was just talking about people at the office. Guess what? They knew it was them. They got mad. They also got over it when he sold 15 million copies……. somehow, when other people loved his characters and the author was a great name to throw down at parties, they didn’t mind so much.

Reading “The Pigeon Tunnel” gave me new insight into who I am….. and how writing is not what I do. It is who I am, too. That’s because my blog is nothing more than a reflection of what I’m thinking. You are getting access to my brain without a filter. Sometimes, it definitely needs it, but generally those entries are popular so I know I can just be who I am and you’ll just roll with it. You know I’m Andy Rooney at the end of 60 Minutes over here. Just a string of words put together in a way that I hope others will find pleasing, but I don’t use it for that. I go back and see what’s changed and what hasn’t. I’m my own biggest fan, because reading my blog is not going to help anyone more than me. It’s a survival manual by now.

I also gain a better opinion of myself by reading myself with a dispassionate third eye, because I stop treating myself the way I normally do when the piece isn’t so close to home. I have empathy for myself in the same way I would in reading someone else’s work. Because I can look back over my life in a way that most people can’t, I think I do have a solid case for the fact that I am the greatest man who ever lived…. I was born… to give and give and give.

After the havoc that I’m gonna wreak, I hope my song also comes with full choir, band, and possibly even Shaker Melody…. but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. What people forget about blogs is that the story is always in motion. Essentially, that they are living in a book that is still happening. If they don’t like my writing, they don’t have to read it. I don’t require anyone who knows me to read it, but they often tell me when they do. The only thing they can’t do is coerce me into not telling my stories. I am strong enough to say that they can limit their interactions with me, but I’m a writer and this is what I do. I have plenty of people in my life who don’t mind that I do this, because they know that I wouldn’t do it if I could do anything else. Writing isn’t to impress anyone. It’s to tamp down the madness of feeling several things at once. How do you make a decision if you don’t try to see both sides of the story? How are people so certain they’re right so much of the time?

I would rather spend time with people who don’t read blogs at all than have to anticipate what their blowback is going to do to me emotionally all the time. I own my story. I own my perceptions. I am very perceptive and that’s one of the first things that Jonna Mendez noticed when I wrote a piece on going to her book talk and sent it to her. Having a spy tell you that you’re perceptive is pretty great, I want you to know…… because again, Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive at all.

I don’t know why, but I feel more at home writing about the British system most of the time. Oh, wait. Yes I do. I know exactly why. CIA doesn’t publish how they do operations, so there’s no real way to know what the American equivalent of C or M might be. I couldn’t tell you the difference between one American case officer and the next, but C, M, and Bond are all different levels and different personalities. If I had any job in the Bond universe, I think I would like to be Moneypenny. I don’t know whether I’d have the hots for Bond or not, but what I do know is that I would love hearing everything coming in and going out of M’s office. If we could make Bond regenerate into Hannah Waddingham, I’d be smitten. I also have a clear picture of who should play M in this fictional universe.

Jenna Redgrave has played the head of UNIT so long that she’s the archetype of who should play against Hannah. I don’t know that she’d get the role, but I think she’d be amazing if she took it.

It’s all an exploration of character, and how I accidentally make people in my life fictional characters on purpose. That’s because in trying to describe our lives together, I am only drinking from the well of my own memory. Therefore, anything that’s not fact checked is a fictional universe, and will change as my facts do.

I am trying to be as fair and balanced as I can, because I think like a journalist. There are just some times where there can’t be two sides of the story because this is my web site. I have to take care of me, and my writing is the only thing that does it. But as I learn more, I evolve and so do they.

Supergrover didn’t start out as Jon Armstrong and Victor Lawson. She earned it. In the end, she’ll never be more real to people than she is here unless she writes her own story. No one, even her, knows how valuable that really is. I haven’t said a thing I wouldn’t say to someone who worked at a gas station. I am not impressed by power/influence because my sister has it and I know what that life is like. It’s right for her and I’m happy she can do it, and also know that I can’t. I feel the same way about my beautiful girl…. “you do you and it’s okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard and I’m not entitled to my feelings.”

For as much as I come across like John le Carré, I also sound like Walter Isaacson. Walter’s books are so good because he explores people so in-depth it’s like you’re in the room with them. He made me love Steve Wozniak and continue to think that Steve Jobs was productive yet clearly insane. It wasn’t a puff piece.

But, of course, you’re going to hate it if someone comes to you and says, “I’m a biographer. Can I write a book about you?” There was never a discussion like that with Supergrover because we were idiots. The first is that she told me something I can’t talk about and it’s hard. The second is that her job and my blog are completely at odds with each other, because I’m not “on her social media team.” She isn’t on my radar because I decided to write about her. She decided to be my friend, and is therefore a character because of it.

One that is every bit as strong and comfortable as the blog “characters” we’ve both come to love over the years. She would have let me keep Beyoncé, too.

This Should Be Short, and Yet It’s Not

November 28, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Name your top three pet peeves.

Before we get started today, I finally found the perfect keyboard for me. When I use it, I feel like Jason Moran (jazz pianist). The touch feels like it’s made to help me go faster. It’s kind of like having a new car, honestly. Like, there is a big difference in the feel of an accelerator on an old Toyota and a new BMW. With the brand new Bimmer, you’re going to touch the accelerator and be a quarter mile down the road. It’s nice to have a keyboard that is not in the way of being able to jump in that fast. The amount of force on the key to make a letter is almost negligible, but it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s that middle of the road touch between mechanical and laptop. If I had to name the biggest sensory issue I have in life, it’s the touch of a keyboard. I think this is because I know how important it is. I would not know that touch was important if I hadn’t lived with a pianist.

Because of my mother, I have words to express what I need out of a keyboard in the first place.

The prompt today is about pet peeves.

My biggest one is that my housemate has a maid and I don’t. I am terrible at keeping things organized, so my room is a mess and I white knuckle through the common areas because since we have a housekeeper, it is manageable. The problem is the six days a week when our housekeeper isn’t here. There are three of us, and only two of us help. Only the entitled one shares a bathroom with me, so I am constantly cleaning up after her. The way she does this is to say that because I have touched something, she cannot touch it. She comes from a culture that does not accept homosexuality and pretends that it is contagious and I am unclean. I have been laughing at her for nine years now, and it’s not funny anymore. I cannot beg her to do it, I cannot get my landlord to make her do it, because my landlord has talked to her about it also for nine years. So, if she washes her hair in the sink, it’s my problem. Has been for nine years….. because I’m gay and that makes sense to her.

Because it’s been so long, I feel trapped between “this is unacceptable” and “this is my weird little family.” There is no way I do not have empathy for someone so twisted in their world outlook that they make me treat me this way. It’s not anger. It’s pity. I look down on her because she does clean up after our guests whether she brought them or not. I say that her culture dictates homosexuality as unclean because it sounds like very Karen behavior, and she’s the furthest thing from it. I cannot see it all the way around as entitled behavior because she’s been taught since she was a little girl that I should be in jail or dead. Therefore, I can understand and be angry all at once.

Another big one is not responding to emotion with emotion. I do not ever want to hear the phrase “you should have known” ever again. I am out of the anticipation business. I cannot be the expert on how I felt and how you felt, too. Because then you’ll berate me when I haven’t anticipated correctly. You have to be strong enough to communicate your needs with me. It is only my job to become emotionally flexible enough to hear them without reacting in autistic meltdown. It is not pretty and I always regret it. Always. However, now I have new ways to learn coping mechanisms. I don’t want people to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells, the way I feel when I’m trying to guess how to make our relationship better.

My answer for this pet peeve is time. I need to hear/read what you think and walk away. Let me have time to process, because I will look at it differently if I change my environment and come back. I do not trust my first reaction. Please always remember that about me and when I say I need time, let me go. I was emotionally abused as a child. I have trauma reflexes. That means my first reaction to everything comes from that place, and I don’t want to operate that way anymore. I react with autistic meltdown because you’ve interrupted my reality so violently that my environment feels different in panic. I often react with panic because I have been corrected so much about every little thing that I feel like a dog surrounded by an electric fence in most relationships. In anxious/avoidant, the avoidant person will move the target to avoid confrontation, so you cannot please them. Meanwhile, the anxious person feels like they can’t do anything right. Every relationship I’ve ever had has been like this to some degree, because I am the common denominator.

If you have trauma reflexes, after the trauma is over you’ll gravitate toward one of those extremes, and they marry each other constantly. That’s because one of you is social masking an abuser and one of you is social masking an enabler. The younger you are when abuse occurs, the more that pattern is ingrained. The person you really are is hidden underneath those trauma reflexes, because you built them to protect the bubble an abuser creates with you. Everything about how I react as an adult is based on how I reacted as a child to hearing secrets that were too big for me. I have learned that my first instinct is to protect myself from violence. If when I express needs, I am met with violence, I will do anything to avoid saying something and I become part of the problem. So much of writing to Supergrover all those years was learning how to walk in the world in a different way.

Because she’s a boss, her thought processes got under my skin quickly. Every time she got angry at me, I made a note of how and why. It wasn’t to throw things back in her face. It was, “I’m a nobody and she’s not. What can I pick up here?” She’s also not a politician, so she could give a fuck if she wins and influences me. 😉 If she goes back and reads my blog, she will see that it’s just a collection of things she’s said in new contexts, and so many of those lines I got when she was adding new definition to furious. The reason I love her so much is that I find lines that flatten me in letters that are meant to convey annoyance, rage, whatever. I thought, “it must be love if you delight in even this.” For instance, when she said “be careful painting your feelings as fact.” I have quoted that in this blog at least 10 times because it was an image I could use and beautifully.

I wish I could get her to see that I stare at her Renoir like she stares at my Jackson Pollack. They are both beautiful in their own way. We are so magnetic when we are both painting our feelings as fact, because what is happening is that she has so much more to work with than I do. Whether she really doesn’t have time, or whether she’s avoiding writing back to feel guilty, the effect is the same. She knows more about me and can think about it than I know about her and can do the same. She has more context about my life, my mental health, my family dynamics, my entire heart and soul on the page, basically….. because when she said I could, I started using a finer brush- that I’d give her details and she’d write back.

Writing back became a pet peeve because she’d find the things she didn’t like and leave out the things she did. I didn’t like living in negative feedback, because then she started to feel like every boss I’d ever had. Assuming malice where none was meant, turning everything back around as if I’d meant to hurt her by being honest about something, and just generally dealing with the fact that she doesn’t deal in emotions and I do. I write so much about this relationship because it became a list of what’s wrong with me and why. But instead of just saying she was wrong, I dug deep into myself and figured out what was going on.

She did not. Therefore, every time we came back together after blowing each other to bits, nothing changed because she’d react in the old way and I’d regress. I got tired of feeling like she was provoking me and telling me I was the one always provoking her. I was not, I was asking her what was going on in her mind regarding where we are and where we’re going because we have shit to deal with if we’re going to create a secure attachment.

The exhaustion came from feeling as loved as I’ve ever felt and a complete dumbass depending on the day; I never knew which woman was going to show up. As a result, neither did she. It was tumultuous and extreme because we were fighting our own battles in ourselves. My way to cope is to use my blog to be Jackson Pollack. Just like an artist, I am throwing my feelings onto canvas so I can look at them from an objective third eye. Her way is to throw herself into work and pretend that our problems will go away. So, I think it’s better to be apart, because I can’t go on having issues with her that are infinitely solvable with any kind of real conversation at all…. and by that, I mean she doesn’t have to come and pick me up or anything. Just send me an e-mail with your Renoir so that I have two pieces of art in my museum. I have only been saying “I feel neglected and this isn’t okay” because I am asking for so very little. I don’t care that she can’t be available all the time, I care that when she’s here she’s present.

I need to be less reactionary, and so does she. I don’t want to end the relationship, but I also don’t want to live in highs and lows, either. It’s too disruptive to an autistic mind, craving stability and having a volatile monotropic thought process. I am not saying I never had security. I’m saying that her coping mechanism was to end the relationship every single time she was mad about something, and then we couldn’t stay away from each other. Just binge/purge for 10 years straight. If my writing had any effect at all on her, it’s that it didn’t make her fall in love with me, but it did make a future in which we were alternately mad as hell AND also craving each other’s words. What do you think it means to her to be a voracious reader and have crafted pages like mine for long haul flights? What do you think it means to me that I’m the author she reads? That bond is unbreakable, which is how I know with a 60-70% chance that she is absolutely hanging on every word here while also not saying a damn thing. Good for her, because if I can’t entertain her one way, I can entertain her another. The delivery method does not matter, and if she isn’t reading, I also don’t care. I just think her morbid curiosity is stronger than her will. 😉

I do not pretend she is dedicated because I’m writing to her. I am explaining my experiences with her, and it would devastate me to publish something just because I thought she wouldn’t hear about it. I have to consider the possibility because it would wreck me if I didn’t, because there could be repercussions for her, not me. I am trying to anticipate what will and will not be offensive to publish, working within limits. So many things here are analogies for something else that will come across to her differently than the point I’m trying to make…. and also having to be aware of that, too. How much am I entitled to my stories and how much am I just actively hurting her? She doesn’t see that it hurts me not to know, and keeps everything close to the vest.

That’s not her fault, either. That’s just the difference between us. I have something she lacks- the ability to spill my guts emotionally. She has something I don’t- the ability to protect myself emotionally by not constantly focusing on others’ needs. We are both lying to the other- she’s as much a people pleaser as I am, she just makes it look good……. and I only know because of how much she tried to please me. I regret every single time that I “made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for me,” because her feelings are valid and yet not a message I ever intended to send. How she got from “you’re the absolute love of my life and I’ll never put anyone above you again” is just beyond my comprehension, but it’s also my reality. I don’t get the right to make that reality untrue…. and she fucking knows it. That’s my anger issue.

That she cuts and runs when it’s hard, and it’s deservedly hard because it’s so fucking worth it. She does not see that’s what I’m saying. She sees it as “you’re a bad person.” I am not asking to change the nature of our relationship and make her act differently, I am saying that “this is a thing we should manage, not avoid.” Absolutely all of this is because of who she is as a person, but it’s not a dealbreaker at all. It’s that I need someone who can deal with the fallout, and she’s insistent on it not being her while also saying I shouldn’t talk to anyone else. It’s devastating to an enormous degree for both of us, because whatever she’s avoiding in me has nothing to do with me at all. I am asking for something she does not have to give. She’s 10 feet tall and bulletproof IRL while also putty in front of me, because she thinks she’s not good enough for me…. and has thought that about many other people. It didn’t start with me, and I know that.

For most people, she’d be a walking red flag. She doesn’t see that she gets to be that with me. That I’m the person who willingly said “the flag is a lie.” My feelings were deep and immediate because of it, and she’s run from it ever since.

The first fissure was treating me like I was suspect and avoiding me because I’d done something wrong….. except the story she was telling herself was fiction. It was a diversion tactic to avoid talking about the fact that she was wigged I’d told her I’d had feelings for her. I tried to be cool. I really did. But I was wigged that both she and Dana were angry at me about it, because I didn’t have a secure environment anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not in the cloud anymore.

It was a time of trial, and instead of blaming everything on others, I got the help I needed. But the problem with Supergrover never went away. Just avoid, avoid, avoid. Checking in once in a while and gifts were enough. It confused me, and she got angry if I said so. I began to walk on eggshells in a way that I don’t for anyone else anymore. I have explained both sides of the story; Dana was going down, but that didn’t not mean that Supergrover led to my decision to break up with her. I couldn’t deal with both their anger at once, and Supergrover was the more stable choice at that point. It wasn’t the whole story….. but it made cutting ties to Dana so much easier when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would benefit me.

She just got freaked that I chose to come back to Washington to do it, because she thought it meant that I was leaving Dana for her. What she did not realize was that a tiny part of it was for her, but not all of it. I could have broken ties with Dana from Houston just as easily. What I could not do is live in a city without a car. What I could not do is find impartial friends who didn’t know me from Adam…. I know my friends. I know that they love Dana every bit as much as they love me. I also knew that Dana needed them more than I did and it was easier not to give them a choice. You can keep up with me online, she needs you to jump in. Go to her.

Just because Dana was a walking red flag didn’t mean I didn’t love both of them equally. Dana just didn’t like sharing me and didn’t have a choice. Every “come to Jesus” meeting was a rehash because she treated me so differently and I never knew which Dana was going to show up, either. We all have trauma reflexes, full stop.

The entire problem was that when Supergrover pulled back, she didn’t have that choice, either. She thoughtlessly put something into my head that will affect me forever and decided she had the right to just let me cope. I don’t have the right to make her do anything, but I do have the right to be angry that she did indeed fail me in some respects, and absolutely delighted me in others. She is a spectrum, a 3D character, you might say. 😉

I loved checking in once in a while. I loved getting gifts in my e-mail. All that stuff was so rock solid. What wasn’t was all my anxiety roiling underneath, the feelings she refused to acknowledge that she had created. The feeling of “not good enough” doesn’t come from the fact that she is failing me. She is failing us. I could love her more deeply and be less reactionary with more information. I do not feel anger at her, I feel angry about my insecure attachment and environment because of it. Her conflict avoidance told me more than anything I could ask her outright, because she thought I was hysterical and overemotional…. because she doesn’t see that my approach to life is so different. She sees it as needing me to get with the program while also not explaining what the program entails. Hard to be successful when you don’t know the rules, but she doesn’t do rules, either.

Therefore, I feel like she steps all over my boundaries by withholding information, and I step all over hers for asking for it. We are at an impasse and always will be, because now it’s up to her to accept my reality. If she doesn’t, a part of me will always be angry with her, but it doesn’t mean that my love gets smaller. It only means that it will remain unresolved, and that causes feelings of injustice. An INFJ does not do well with injustice, local or global.

So, now I’m just working on the anger, and she’s not working on the anger she “doesn’t have.” She says in words that I’m just projecting. In her actions, I feel on target. That’s because she’s never vulnerable about anything. When she’s mad at me, I don’t know it. As you can see, that doesn’t cause problems at all. I didn’t walk away because I was angry. I got tired of feeling like my emotions don’t matter to her while she’s saying that’s untrue in words and deeds.

She did something enormous for me when we met, and I think in some sense I’ve come across as ungrateful because she sees me pointing out problems as throwing emotional bombs. That’s not true at all. I can handle bigger emotions than she can, so I write from that place. She reads it while being buttoned up, so it feels like an attack because she can’t receive what I actually mean. She is moving too fast and accusing me of moving too slowly. Again, the leap between a neurotypical and neurodivergent brain with the exception of both having CPTSD. It’s amazing to me how our traumas are on completely different playing fields, yet our reactions are the same, yet mirror images of each other. I forced us into a bad pattern, and it is better to walk away and lick my wounds than it is to convince her I’m right.

My emotional strength makes me care about myself in a different way than I did before……. but not entirely.

“For all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel, Summer, Highland Falls

Hers is a gift I’ll never be able to repay, because now I have the confidence to believe that if I speak, powerful people will listen because that’s what I’ve been taught. At the same time, I can’t go on with such an inflexible power structure, because the avoidant one always has it. They don’t do things wrong, you’re a problem.

All I want is reconciliation on my terms, because we’ve been on hers for so long and it’s not helping either of us. If it’s not helping either of us, I have other friends. She thinks of me as someone who points out everything wrong with her…. and in my mind, she is everything amazing about being on this planet.

The last pet peeve is that she’s funnier than me.

God Bless the Outcasts

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

Who are your current most favorite people?

I have always had a low opinion of myself, and am slowly changing it. I feel stronger now than I ever have, because acknowledging that I’m autistic allowed me to feel like a real person instead of an alien. When I think of the ways my mother tried to hide from me that I was physically disabled, it feels similar. I didn’t stop experiencing symptoms of CP when I didn’t know I had it, I just felt lazy and incompetent because everyone told me I was fully capable and just needed to work harder. Those people were absolutely wrong, and I had no way of correcting them.

There were a lot of background conversations over me that had nothing to do with me- yet affected the course of my life. My mom thought it was more important for me to feel absolutely normal….. and so did my dad. They just did not agree on methodology to reach that conclusion. My dad thought it was important for me to know I had limitations. My mother thought that telling me about them would just make me feel more different, more fucked up, etc. They both had valid points of view, it’s just that my mother was objectively, devastatingly wrong. I can listen to a thing without agreeing with it. Her feelings were valid. Her choice was still awful.

Every single time my dad brought up the fact that I wasn’t like other kids and needed help, she immediately started minimizing it. She told me that my dad had a penchant for hyperbole, and it was a gaslighting operation that lasted years. It affected my opinion of myself because I constantly treated myself as if nothing was wrong with me, I was just stupid…… because my mom wanted me to believe that I was “more physically capable than I really was.” In retrospect, I think that is untrue. I think my dad understood the assignment.

He understood that if your child got a diagnosis like that, you now have a different child and not because they’re a different person. You gain a different library of images as to what will make your child successful, because trying to fit them into the society we’ve already created will beat them into a bloody pulp……. daily.

It was impossible for me, monkey in the middle, to see through either of them in any kind of objective way. Even my eye problems are connected to CP. I have what’s called an “alternating isotropia.” That means both of my eyes are capable of strabismus (turning), it depends on which field of vision my brain has picked to use in that moment. Am I right or left-eye dominant?

Over time, I have become more and more dependent on my right eye because as my left has deteriorated, my brain is smart enough to use it consistently. As a child, when both eyes were strong, I wrote a book every day on why stereopsis is absolutely necessary.

I do not have what’s known as “course stereopsis” or “fine stereopsis.” This means that I have neither the feeling that I am immersed in my environment, nor the ability to tell spatially where things are. A good example is not being able to judge the riser on a staircase, tripping up or down on the trades. Most of the time, I fall going up because I have not lifted my foot high enough from one trade to the other…. I am not clumsy because I didn’t see the step at all. I am clumsy because I saw it and I could not judge the distance correctly.

The worst time this has ever occurred was on the concrete steps in front of my elementary school. We’d just gotten back from a football game, and it was late. Because of my physical disabilities, my social masks for it make me more tired, more quickly than I realize. I’ll get into show mode and ignore myself. As my exhaustion sets in, mistakes are made. I do not have depth perception or angle of convergence. Walking in an unfamiliar environment takes four times the energy that it does for someone without these difficulties because I have to anticipate everything….. and I’m auDHD. We as a people are not known for planning ahead. I basically broke my whole face.

In short, as a cook my brain is my most valuable feature. I can put together flavor combinations faster than I can plate….. for most people, plating is the easiest thing in the kitchen. For me, it’s the hardest because my plate is always going to look slightly off until I white knuckle through it. It’s not that I am trying to be difficult. I have to do everything by how it feels because my brain is not just all of the sudden going to start using my eyes correctly.

I was today years old when I learned that it was all connected physically. We can leave auDHD out of it for a second. I thought that my lack of 3D vision was from medical malpractice, and I don’t believe I’m entirely wrong on that one. What I do believe is that there is an equal chance that a doctor made a mistake in the delivery room as there is “I got CP, and lack of stereopsis is a symptom of it. Seriously. I was born with it. I’m 46. Today years old.

The reason it’s impossible to tell is that I haven’t had a neurological workup since I was 18 months old. Hypotonia doesn’t generally get worse, but is chronically misdiagnosed from one to the other. It would be interesting if I found the key to unlocking me completely at random……. just like I stumbled into autism.

I couldn’t judge the difference between a neurotypical brain and a neurodivergent one, either. This is because I did not do the research on ADHD that I should’ve when I was diagnosed. I went to the doctor. I got medication. It worked. End of story……. or is it?

No, there was so much more. There was social perception of the neurodivergent brain (childish). I can tell you for sure this is not true. We show up at the office with the best of intentions and work so much harder for a lesser result. I get it. Doesn’t make it suck less.

Neurotypicals, we don’t want to work for you. We really don’t. It affects our self-esteem a ridiculous amount. Every meeting with the boss means immediate termination, because the boss only comes to your desk when you are a straight-up problem for them. I get it. We are a problem for you. No doubt. But is it really better for your neurodivergent employees to fucking beat the shit out of themselves every single day? Is it worth it to you, as a boss, to have employees that fear you to that degree? We live in our failures because you make us.

The vice president of Alert Logic, in his letter to me that won me the second Rock Star award in six months, said that “if every Alert Logic employee was like Leslie, we’d have a much better company.” I was fired six months later because I couldn’t write things down while I talked. Here is what I know to be true. The vice president wouldn’t have fired me. Middle management got frustrated and gave up.

It wasn’t a problem that I got fired. That tiny piece paled in comparison to the fallout, because I wasn’t just supporting myself. I was supporting Dana as well, because she hadn’t found a job yet (another huge red flag). We had no income coming in at all, and I was blamed heavily for it instead of Dana saying, “you know what? I should get a job.” She did after I got fired, of course, but she didn’t do a damn thing to help me in terms of money or finding her own support system while I was at work. The reason I didn’t find it problematic at first is because I got the “perfect job for me” and I made plenty of money to give her whatever kind of life she wanted. She just didn’t go out and grab it, staying home to support me instead.

I will never be able to repay that gift, because she did indeed help me. It just didn’t work out in the long run. I am not berating her for her decisions, just telling you how they affected me. In some ways, I got everything I ever wanted. In some ways, it was the beginning of the end….. mostly due to Dana’s DUI. That’s conjecture, but even if it’s bullshit, it’s my perception.

Dana’s self-esteem went to shit before we ever moved to Houston because she felt so humiliated and guilty. Therefore, her depression got worse as I got stronger. What I know is that if I had been the one who’d been arrested, Dana would have reacted the same way I did…. out of her mind trying to get to me and supportive the whole way through. But when you’re fighting your own battle, you often don’t see your squire, the one who is tasked with and vetted to help you. It’s not like I didn’t know what contract I was signing. I just never in a million years realized how fast it was going to devolve into a manic rambling spiral….. for me.

Dana is not bipolar (as far as I know). Therefore, only I was ever cycling up. Dana just had to wallow because she was physically incapable of not. I mean, what would you do in that situation? Wouldn’t it make you feel worthless? I can’t imagine, but I’ve had so many friends go through it.

If you think I’m crazy to want to marry Daniel after what I went through with Dana, here’s the difference. Daniel made the commitment to himself (and therefore me and Cora) to get sober and stay that way. His alcoholism had gotten to the point where it was untenable, so he knew that it was “get better or die” time. That he had the impetus on his own to say “enough is enough. I’m done.”

It often takes hitting a truly hard rock bottom to see how you don’t need to be temporarily done anymore. I also don’t know the recidivism rate on DUI… whether I was right in believing that Dana was absolutely going to be arrested again because the first time didn’t change her behavior. I got to the point where I thought, “even if I’m wrong and this never happens again, I cannot trust that it won’t.” In retrospect, I was not having an emotional affair because I needed it for the present. I needed it to give me strength for the future.

I couldn’t think about cheating. I could only lay it out in front of Dana and say, “this is what is happening to me. It’s a new relationship energy that’s swallowing me whole because it’s so bright and happy.” What I did not say is “you’re going down and I don’t want to go with you.” In short, the plan was just to be honest and work my way through it. As Supergrover and I became closer, the hard outs alienated Dana. It was a Supermess.

Supergrover and I absolutely deserved a space of our own because of the hard out, and couldn’t get it because Dana was convinced that Supergrover would read my writing and feel touched by an angel or some shit. Though that’s not what happened at all, I appreciate Dana’s confidence in my ability.

Or as I told Supergrover, “I never railed that you were straight, dear heart. It’s that I thought you might be Cynthia Nixon and in effect, you’re not because I’m not that good a writer.” Yes, because that’s how sexual orientation works….. because it doesn’t right up until people like Cynthia say “uh-oh. What is this?” So, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility in my mind…. and it wasn’t real, either. I believed her, truly. I was wrong. That didn’t make my thoughts wrong, just wrong for her.

It was honestly a relief to learn about Michael, because when said feelings occurred, she presented to me as a single mom for months. I thought of her in a completely different way because that’s how she told me to think of her. She wasn’t wrong not to tell me. I should have done a lot of things differently and I feel solid about that. What I did know is that if I was ridiculously worried about her all the time, he made me stop.

If you knew the whole story, it would not be a surprise to you how I got from “Supergrover needs someone like me” to Supergrover needs me” so goddamn fast- and how, in some ways- learning about Michael’s existence felt too late to do any good for me, because I was so wrecked…. and not because she rejected me. It was all my own shit to get rid of, and I did. I went from wanting to be the partner to being happy to be the virtual guard dog.

It was my job to feel protective of her, and I most certainly did. Godzilla has nothing on me, and neither does Lloyd Dobbler. If I thought it would do any good at all, I would play fuckin’ Peter Gabriel.

Months ago, maybe October, I laid it all out there for her. My entire thought process from beginning to end, why I felt so close to her even if she didn’t feel close to me. That this is how much I love you and want to help. All I got back was “don’t think your psychoanalysis is correct.” Fuck me running. I can’t win with this woman and I am tired. I have done everything she’s asked for jack shit in return, so I finally got the message to move on. She stomped all over my heart and it had nothing to do with romance.

Fatality.

This is all due, I believe, to auDHD. She cannot understand why I sound rude and demanding even though I’m the most tenderheart bear she’s ever met. Why my love letter came across as “psychoanalysis” and not “I will sit with you even when you need to be silent.” I know from experience that she is also walking around town with a third degree burn on her face. I only wanted to be Neosporin to help the scars heal.

I cannot undo anything that happened to her. I really can’t. But what I can do is receive her. Listen to her. But, of course when she said she was too overwhelmed yet again, after five years, I realized that it wasn’t all time commitments and I was pouring more energy into her than she really wanted, even if she couldn’t just stop being nice and tell me that.

I need to hear things flat out, and I can give what I require. All of my personality is designed for helping others, but you have to see past the wrapping paper. I am not here to be nice, I am here to be kind. I won’t just let anyone struggle.

What I know for sure is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s a little kid or the president of the United States….. I will not stand by. That’s because we’re all misfits on the edge of society. There’s so much less “normal” out there than people think.

Therefore, my most favorite people are the outcasts……. there are so many more of us than will ever visit the “in-crowd…..” because we’ll be barred from it eventually, anyway….. even after two Rock Star awards.

God bless the outcasts, which, as it turns out, means “God bless the whole world.”

My Favorite Animals for What?

November 26, 2023November 26, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What are your favorite animals?

Fair question, right?

To eat, I say my favorite is pork because I like face bacon and all those esoteric things that professional cooks eat. I like offal, but some of it is awful. My advice is that stuff like hearts, brains, and marrow might not taste good to you, but they’ll definitely taste better than kidneys and livers. I don’t eat filters (immortal words from Dana, she’s right tho). I don’t care whether we’re going to Luby’s Cafeteria or a three Michelin star fine dining experience. I am not eating liver and onions, I am not eating it dressed up as $200 fois gras. The only person that has ever gotten me to eat a second bite of fois gras is Gabriel Rucker, head chef of Portland’s Le Pigeon (do not pronounce it in French). It is not “le pigh-jhon”). It didn’t taste any less like an assload of iron, but there was so much more to explore within the flavor. The crisp edges. The raspberry jelly donut. Just….. fuck me. Yet, I still couldn’t get away from the taste of blood, and not even blood. Just the constant taste of a coin in the back of your throat, and it will stick long after you’ve finished. It’d be okay if it was the jelly donut that reappeared………..

I also love the zoo with a deep and abiding passion, particularly in the Spring because it’s free and I can go write there every single day if I want. It’s lovely when it’s between 60-70 degrees….. not so much in August. I pick a table in front of whichever enclosure pleases me, and the animals’ activity makes writing easier. When I go to the zoo, I only sometimes go during tourist season…. but when I do, those days are often invaluable.

There’s a reason for that. Sometimes I am very much in the mood for an overwhelmingly large crowd, because in that space, I am not taking it all in. I wear a baseball cap AND cans, a move score blasting so that I’m only watching the crowd, I’m not listening to it. Sounds trip me up all the time- it’s my sensory issue, from the notifications on my phone that sometimes scare the life out of me to people talking and not realizing they’re talking to me because every sound in the room is equally loud and I do not process voices in the same way I process reading. This is true of most autistic people.

Editor’s Note:

If you are struggling to reach an autistic person, try laying out all your feelings in text. Write them a letter. Use Facebook Messenger. We don’t lack empathy, we lack the ability to process it correctly…… particularly in conversation. Again, voices are hard- so much easier to process it in our own way, get back to you and see if we’ve understood.

I am using it as cover. I learned this from Jonna Mendez, actually, in one of her videos for “Wired” magazine on YouTube (I’ll put one of my favorites at the end- she is so fabulous). The funniest thing ever said in a comment came from someone who understood the assignment. He said, “she was the Chief of Disguise. I was really expecting her to turn into a black dude at the end.” I died for a second, but I know something he doesn’t. The first mask she ever made for herself that actually animated when she put it on was indeed a black dude. In her memory, it was fabulous, but she could not walk it, talk it….. because she is indeed a white woman. 😉

Her next big coup was fooling George H.W. Bush by “borrowing someone else’s face,” and as I result I kidded her in person that we had mutual friends. George H.W. Bush and I used to go to the same church…….. what is really, really amazing is that she fooled him in the Oval and not when he was director of CIA. LEGEND. The other really funny thing is that she got dressed at a friend’s house before they went to the White House, and their dog didn’t like her when she first got there and went apeshit over her in disguise. 😉 Additionally, she was working for Tony when he came up with the quick change…. that you could completely change your look in between 37-45 steps depending on whether Jonna or Tony is telling the story. The funniest part of that whole thing is that Tony and Jonna’s boss was a narcoleptic (I KNOW), and Jonna’s job was to stand at his desk and make sure he was awake the whole time to see Tony do it. He started out as himself, the spy you see in “Argo” played by Ben Affleck (much to my Latinx stepsister’s dismay and humorous consternation).

It didn’t matter who played Tony, because that’s not what was interesting about him……. and also, Tony didn’t care that a Latino didn’t play him The only thing that Jonna noted about Ben’s character had nothing to do with race. It wasn’t public at the time, but Tony had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and his personality kind of flipped. Ben based the character on that personality because Ben and Tony spent time together. He did not know what Tony was like at the time. She said that he was more effusive with his emotions back then, and that it would have been in some ways a different movie if Ben had known Tony for many years. I’m paraphrasing her, but I am writing in the spirit of what she said. Even still, it wasn’t Tony’s personality that drew me in. He didn’t have to have that personality for me to love him. It was his brain, especially after he and Jonna laid out their thought processes so brilliantly in their books that not only do I have them all on my Kindle, my dad gifted me all of them autographed as keepsakes. And in fact, one of them I bought on my own and she signed it in front of me. It was one of the most significant moments of my life…… because I realized that even if I couldn’t be a spy, I could be them after they retired.

My idea is that I am capable of short stories where I do not feel capable as a novelist. I’d like to write Bond level stories for a chapter, and then lay out the research for why I wrote it. It would be cool to write science fiction like Men in Black, then explore why I picked their ops based on my enormity of reading…. and this is completely separate from my alternate history, because I have had the idea vetted and the red team says it’s huge; it will be a knockout if executed correctly. You can’t get that one out of me because I don’t want to give the idea away to anyone who’d publish a shittier version before I did. This idea is free because it’s universal. No two books written in both fiction and non-fiction would be the same. Even if you’ve read something like it, you’ve never heard it in my voice…… which, I think, would be “Rachel Maddow on the non-fiction parts and an amalgamation of Tony and Jonna when it’s fiction, and also me because they’re not neurodivergent (or I’m not brave enough to ask). I would write that in the inscription, to make it clear that it’s just a character and people shouldn’t attribute my indiosyncracies to her- necessary when you’re writing about someone who is still living and almost certain to read it. Calling someone autistic or coding them that way is not for the faint of heart because I wouldn’t let a dog I didn’t like be treated the way people treat me. It’s not my friends and family. It’s the way I walk in the world…… and I would die of embarrassment if I passed on the “wealth.”

I had to think about that.

In trying to hold a mirror up to the world around me, it often causes me to attribute my own idiosyncracies with someone else. I think I do it the most often with Supergrover because she is a mirror image of me. She emotes too little, and I emote too much. It is indeed the gap between neurotypical and neurodivergent. It causes issues because I tell her how I see the world and she doesn’t return the favor. Therefore, I write from my own echo chamber. We aren’t checking the stories we’re telling ourselves, and that kind of love is harmful to both of us. It is my responsibility to take care of my anxious attachment style. It is her responsibility to interrupt my reality with her story so that I am not basing every decision on what only I think. My self image isn’t strong enough for that. My history is that if I really love someone and they’re being avoidant, I’ll just cave for years on end to avoid ending the relationship.

I became aware that this story was total bullshit and realized that in order for Supergrover and I to move on, I needed a love big enough to silence the voices in my head. I needed her to tell me exactly what was up in her brain when she read it. I am neurodivergent, therefore I take everything literally. Meeting up one day was a “someday, perhaps,” and I waited five years. It wasn’t all because I was holding onto her. It’s that there was a pandemic. Why blame her for something so beyond her control? Alternatively, she didn’t seem to recognize when I shot for the moon and talked about a time in which she was retired and had nowhere to be….. anything from traveling to things neither of us have experienced to showing off our own experiences to the other to just having a damn cup of coffee together instead of in async. In short, I understood the assignment, I’m just establishing my area of operations.

I’m going to have to read “Nuking the Moon” by Vince Houghton, because I love the era of CIA involved in the space race. It is also an alternative title to this blog, apparently……. because having a relationship like ours would feel so relatable to every autistic reader. My friends become my special interest when I write to them. I don’t think of us as potentially falling in love later in life like I did with Dana. Dana and I worked on each other for a while, and she had me the first time she winked at me…… I just only know that in retrospect, because when you’re sapiosexual, someone has to open up to you over time. When you’re autistic, is has to be a forest fire to get you to notice…… and she’ll know exactly where she was when said wink occurred. It was not the same situation with Supergrover because she’s straight and she’s already met her life partner, anyway. I just like being cool enough to know her. It’s why I have no regrets at all right now, I’m just sad.).

Every neurodivergent person I’ve ever met has felt this way. Every single one. I haven’t realized my power in saying things that identify with AuDHD because I didn’t realize the rabbit hole was that deep.

Again, saying all this is not about my beautiful girl and me. It’s how perception of me would affect any character I write whether they’re fictional, living their lives, or dead now but their estate will freak. Any and all of these are bad, I assure you.

I should talk to Cora about this book because she absolutely is a novelist and creates entire fictional worlds. We could say a lot by not saying it at all. In fiction, you do things by showing. I want every character in the book to be neurodivergent and to show it by how they present. The book would basically contain how to communicate with a neurodivergent when they are trying to speak to a neurotypical. I can do this very well with spies because they are drenched in facts, not emotions.

Spies know everything, in my humble opinion. They take in too much information about the world every single day and remember random factoids all day long (e.g. American spies learning how to dress and count in Europe), allowing them to move quickly and quietly as the smartest person in the room. It’s not just Jonna and Tony that have taught me that lesson. It’s everyone I’ve ever met at the International Spy Museum or heard on SpyCast.

Even people who work at the museum are smarter than the average bear. In particular, shout out to Vince Houghton and Dr. Andrew Hammond, who both have served as the host of SpyCast. Otherwise, I would not know all this because I wouldn’t have gotten interested in real-life intelligence over Bond movie magic. Bond is the face of something very, very real…… and it has scared me more than once. I posted on an autism group that my special interest was intelligence, and the comments were varied from “oh, that’s so cool” to “does the American-based “International Spy Museum” have a wing for CoIntelPro?” Jesus God, let’s drag out every bad thing CIA has ever done right off the bat. I do not like those people. I really don’t. That’s because when you dig deep, you see that misses and wins are part of every organization. If the swing for a win is big enough, things are going to go very, very wrong- and faster than anyone would think.

But when I personally think of spies, I think about people like Julia Child, Virginia Hall, Alma Katsu (all OSS/CIA, but Virginia Hall also worked for MI-6 before she came to us), John le Carré (David Cornwell, MI-6, also a fiction author), and Jack Barsky (KGB). In terms of fiction, I’m not a Bond fan until we’re talking about the current set of movies, because the old ones are dated and incredibly misogynistic. (Pussy Galore? COME ON.). My favorite M is obviously Judi Dench, my favorite C is Stephen Fry in “Doctor Who.” And if I had to give an award to any intelligence officer in a fictional universe, there are two. I love K from MiB (“I never worked for a funeral home.”) and Carmen Sandiego (“Fedora the Explorer”).

In some ways, “Argo” is also a fictional universe because reel bears little resemblance to real. For instance, Alan Arkin’s character is completely made up, but John Goodman’s isn’t. John Chambers, his character, went on to do other sci-fi movies and his last one was “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” That being said, “Argo” is not Tony’s best book. It’s tremendous, but “The Moscow Rules” is better.

I think this is because in ’79 I was two. I don’t remember the hostage crisis in Iran. I very, very much remember “Mr. President, tear down that wall.” If you are not familiar, there used ot be a wall dividing East and West Germany. The dividing line was in Berlin. West Berlin had all the benefits of democracy and capitalism. East Berlin was controlled by communism, so this was a direct appeal by Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev. In reality, Reagan and George H.W. Bush probably advanced the wall coming down by roughly 11 days. That’s hyperbole, but it’s the funniest line about the Cold War I’ve read so far (no past or present government employee said this; I was researching a paper in college for International Affairs.). Jonna and Tony were instrumental in all of this, protecting their assets and underlings like their own children. They also came up with two pieces of spy technology that changed the direction of the war…. and I’m saying it, they didn’t. They’re too humble.

Speaking of children, the first thing they came up with was called a “Jack in the Box.” It was literally a large version of the toy. This is because all the spies in Tony’s department (he was Chief of Disguise then) were taught that there is no distinguishable difference between espionage and magic. The area of operation is your “stage,” or your ring depending on the size of the circus. There are two operations going on at the same time. The first is that you’re trying to pop smoke (military slang for creating a distraction). The second is that you are actively saying to the crown, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Apt.

When CIA got a new building, they covered it in green glass. I don’t know what they called Langley before it was built as a code name/slang, but now it’s “Oz” (I don’t think Tony came up with it, but that’s on brand for him, clearly). In fact, one of the things that marks me as an intelligence superfan is that in “Argo,” Ben Affleck runs through the old building and ends up standing on the famous seal in the new one. I don’t know if you know that, but I know like five people who would know that…… and now I’m wondering if Zac is one of them.

ADHD moment- Zac is not a spy, but he works with the data they collect. He’s been in intelligence since he joined the military, which in my mind makes him a great boyfriend and a lucky bastard all at once. 😛 Unfortunately, he does not have the kind of badge where he can escort visitors, but he’s lucky that he doesn’t. I would have asked him to take me to a wide assortment of gift shops…………………… repeatedly. I’m lucky, though, because he remembers me when he goes. My baseball cap and “nightgown” are from the one at CIA (by nightgown I mean a CIA t-shirt that’s way too big on me), my sweat pants are from the one at the Pentagon, and I have a t-shirt from, I think, the one at DIA that’s for little kids (it’s my favorite). Interestingly enough, I don’t wear my intelligence/military shit all the time because they’re so great. It’s an added bonus that all their shit vibes with my sensory issues. If I ever find out who makes their clothes, I’d also buy a ton of stuff without the logo. This is because it doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I get treated like a human comment section. Not all of them are nice. The best one was from a tween who pulled on my coat and said, “Do you work there? I want to be CIA, too.” I freaked out because she was the most beautiful girlchilde……. a future Alpha Kappa Alpha that could one day be Tracy Walder. And by freaked out I mean that this was on the Metro platform so my emotions and sensory perception were already turned up to hell and I just cried. Flat out. But it was after she walked away. The last thing I wanted to do was freak her out, too. It was good that we were in such a public place.

When you think everyone is watching, turns out no one is.

To the rest of the world, this comes across as hilarious. To me, I just stare and quote Sarah Silverman on Jimmy Kimmel. That if she had kids, she’d tell them that “mommy believes she’s one of God’s chosen people, and daddy believes Jesus is magic.” Not sure he’s ever been compared to Jesus, but he’s a Moses in “Argo.” Sarah’s argument is valid for both of us.

Again, what I’ve learned from Jonna and Tony is moving in a crowd with my sensory issues muted by headphones and having my head covered. I can get lost in my own little world, and I generally want to because conversation is difficult for me when every noise feels the same and often drowns them out.

I was going to the zoo that day. I found that I love giraffes and kept going with my day. Not going to see me walking one down Connecticut because the zoo had “Adoption Day.” And, I would have to check with all of them, but I do not have room for a giraffe and (correct me if I’m wrong) neither do Zac, Supergrover & Michael, or Bryn & Dave. I do know enough to know that Zac, Michael, and Dave would have to convince me, Supergrover, and Bryn that no, we do not need a giraffe (they both have a heart that beats for animals). Also, I cannot afford to relocate both myself and a giraffe to Oregon. It would be easier to make friends with an Oregonian giraffe, which is a whole mood.

What would it look like to be an Oregonian giraffe? They don’t wear patchouli essential oil or hemp flip flops, do they? The only thing I know about Oregon giraffes is that they probably love The Indigo Girls. I do not say this lightly, actually, because The Indigo Girls have consistently been one of the best concerts at the zoo over the years. There’s no way that the animals don’t like the music, at least in some cases….. and Indigo Girls play acoustic just enough of the time that I can’t see how it would get on their nerves as much as electric. I love how I have worked all of this out in my head…….

If you’ve never been to the zoo in Oregon for a concert, it’s like going to Miller Outdoor Theater or Cynthia Mitchell Woods Pavillion in Houston or Wolf Trap in DC. Primates and parrots can both sing “Get Out the Map” by now. I would have enjoyed teaching it to Kevin, who is a giraffe.

Kevin and I used to hang out. The way his enclosure was built, there was a table with a bench bolted to the ground right in front of him. Like, I couldn’t reach out and pet him, but akin to being in the same bedroom or kitchen. Space, but not much of it. He always sat right in front of me, as if he knew he was my inspiration, posing for a portrait…… yet a devilish one. I have never seen a giraffe roll their eyes, but I liked to imagine that Kevin did. It fit the theme. If wishes were giraffes, writers would ride.I just called him that and now I can’t remember why. But anyway, I thought of us as tight because he heard about the rough drafts of so much that’s here now.

It’s not his real name. I was just gathering intel and needed a codename for my asset.

They

November 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I just finished the 60th Anniversary Special of Doctor Who, and I am crying so hard I can’t really type… but I’m going to try. I am also going to limit my comments and hope there are no spoilers, because it literally just dropped. If I have spoiled something despite my best intentions, “I’m so, so sorry. Fixed point in time.”

There was a lady in a wheelchair.

There was a queer main character, two if you count The Doctor.

There’s more to upset people that the show is too “woke,” which is arguably its best feature. See, inclusivity just happens naturally when the show runner is one of the brightest queer TV writers in the firmament. Not only did he create the new version of Doctor Who, he created “Queer as Folk,” which was the bravest show anyone could do back then. Just trampled over every definition of “woke” there was, these being two of the few spaces on TV queer owned and operated. I do not think that a straight writer would have handled this story as beautifully. Not an impossibility, but like men who write well for women, extraordinarily rare. If you are a part of the queer community, it’s the biggest love letter you’ll ever get (at least, from Russell).

I assume The Doctor is part of the queer community now that they’re a they. The references to Jodie are hilarious, and honestly, she didn’t feel missing, but they did. As in, the 50th was so much different with Four, War, Ten, and Eleven. But it’s quickly a non-issue, just something that made this special unique. There are new companions and old, plus a very sweet nod to the late Bernard Cribbins. It was also amazing that Kate Lethbridge-Stewart got a shout-out, because if I had any job in that universe, it’d be the one next to her. Jesus, she’s amazing.

The one trick Russell missed was a shoutout to Nine. You’ll see what I mean, but a very Jackie Tyler moment happens, it’s just not Jackie. I missed Billie Piper, but only because she was in the 50th as well. I loved Rose and The Doctor Donna equally. It has already been reported that Donna Noble is the companion this time around, so I will tell you that I was simply astounded at her performance. You know it’s going to be funny with Catherine, but in this she digs really, really deep. Every bit as moving as when she lost her mind, but more poignant because we’ve traveled with her so long.

And, of course, there’s a scene where, in a touching moment of friendship, all my emotions flooded and I just sobbed like a baby.

But when I stopped, the friendship energy kept going…. will keep me going. I have found even more meaning in the word “they………..”

Because it’s a love letter to the queer community.

In Another Life, Hood to Coast in One Day

November 25, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Beach or mountains? Which do you prefer? Why?

I seem to have fixed my keyboard issues except for the “a” key. Sometimes it works, sometimes the repeat rate makes me insane because it slows my typing speed to a crawl. Even though I type very fast, I will not sit there and actively look at a typo. So, I did what you do in a tech situation for peripherals. If something breaks, buy a new one. The old one will fix itself immediately. Definitely worked on my Apple Pencil, and it was only $100 for that pro tip…. and you just got it for free.

I accept tips.

If you’re a consistent reader, you just laughed as hard as I did. I hope that when she bought her next Big Gulp with it, she got something good. I love sugar free now, buat as a kid, it was always a suicide…. which is basically a Long Island Iced Tea for a nine-year-old. It’s what we in the US call it when you fill your cup with a little bit of every soda on tap. It’s one of those drinks you remember fondly, and then you go have one out of nostalgia and realize why you stopped.

All of this is background information on why I prefer the mountains to the beach. In the mountains, I can both ski and write. I love to swim, I do not like the beach. I am not afraid of being stung or bitten as I have already been stung by Portuguese men of war. MEN. Apologies to Dana for not getting her out of the way fast enough when she said, “hey. What’s that floating breast implant?”

The funniest part of that incident was a scuba diver telling us to go to a convenience store and buy some chewing tobacco to soak up the stingers. Just mix it with water and make a paste. We needed more soda anyway. Sold. Dana insisted on calling my doctor stepmother. I said, “Dana, if I call her, she’s just going to say that we’re idiots for not believing the subject matter expert in front of us.” So Dana says she’ll call her. I could hear the whole thing and she wasn’t on mute….. The shit eating grin on my face at “ARE YOU CRAZY?” was legendary.

I see into people. I know I do…..

I walked away tremendously satisfied, but it was just another instance of how Dana stepped all over me. I didn’t see it until one of my closest friends pointed it out. That I’d taken on a tremendous amount of responsibility and he was the one that suggested that Dana bring me flowers the night I got home from my first day at work. That she was really thoughtless toward me so much more than I realized. This is not someone who pined for me. This was someone who drove with his girlfriend to help me move- he drove my truck from Portland to Houston with all our stuff, and then I gave it to him as payment.

It was so cool. When I first got it, he gave me a bumper number like the military. He asked me what I wanted, and without blinking I said, “11” (Matt Smith, my favorite Doctor). Then, he spray painted a Dalek on the door- and not even a minimalist symbol, either. It was a whole mood.

In short, this was not a play for me. It was “stop being blind.”

Seven years and I just thought she was loud and boisterous. It didn’t occur to me that especially after she got her DUI, I don’t know if she was drinking more or if she was just angry and felt guilty all the time, but the constant superiority over her memory being infallible and mine being crap didn’t earn her any favors.

I write about memories all the time, and I’m very good at it. I know this because my family says I remember those memories accurately, and you cannot feel good writing about your family until they tell you that. My mother had a very, very good memory and I got it from her. I hate it. I really, really hate it. This is because when I get into an argument with someone close to me- Dana, Supergrover, Meagan, whomever- I am very good about saying “this is a pattern and we need to change it…. and here are the six times it has happened before.” It’s not noticing. It’s not caring. It’s “throwing things back in my face.” Meanwhile, they’re moving the goalpost further away from accomplishing anything. Everything becomes all about my behavior and not attacking the problem together.

Sometimes I just want to be bad at remembering things. It’s not always pleasant. I don’t just remember the good things. It makes my writing better and my feelings disparate. Just like being nonbinary, it’s a spectrum. I have laughed and felt weird the whole time I’m writing…. yet this is not for me later today. This is for me in five years.

You get it today, but I won’t understand it fully until I’ve read it without context. What was happening in the room while I was writing. I don’t remember every entry, but I do remember the hard ones. “Go Tell the Bees” has been the hardest on me in years. Even though it wasn’t all the closure I needed, I did cry all the way through it, which meant several hours of gut-wrenching pain. I dragged it out of me, and I love it so much now that time has passed. In the moment, I published it and walked away. I later recorded it, and had to pause when it became too much.

Even last night when I read the prompt about beach vs. mountains, I thought about what our trip to Coos Bay would have looked like.

I realized after I’d fallen down on the job of trying to be the most perfect friend who ever friended that there was a big difference in my personality and my illness. That I didn’t give two shits about Michael. I’m in a solo-poly relationship, so obviously jealousy is such a problem for me. It was never anything about that. All my social masks failed at once and I was stumbling around, grasping at straws. But we’ve come a long way in 10 years. The last picture she sent me was so incredibly sweet.

I said, “I haven’t had a recent pic of you in a long time. Send me one? Nothing fancy, just want to match a name to a face. Don’t make it weird.” It is a goddamn portrait, the most beautiful picture I’ve ever seen of anyone because in that moment, she just turned the camera around on her front porch, and the way she’s smiling, I know she knows she’s looking at me and no one else. I’ve always loved pictures of her, but I’ve never had one where I just flat out asked and therefore I knew she was thinking of me. She said she must be getting soft in her old age if she was willing to send a pic to anyone, and my heart “grew three sizes that day.” It was a moment I’ll never forget, because she recognized it was a moment, too.

My allergies may or may not be acting up right now….. mostly because even though I love the mountains, I’d never go there ever again for one moonlit walk in our jeans and sweatpants, the uniform of Coos Bay…….. which is in the state where we started and created our own.

This is For the Bird

November 24, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

We are hosting 26 people for Thanksgiving. They are on the ground floor and I am in my room. There’s not any padding between me and them, which means I would have on BT headphones and white noise if I didn’t constantly deny myself ways to comfort myself. It sounds weird. I’ll get over it. But that’s called “demand avoidance.” When you need something from yourself or another person, it can strike at any time. It also doesn’t matter if it’s something small or large. Is taking a shower important? I would say it is. Still can’t always make myself without extreme unction. I am not lazy. I am debilitated by thinking about changing environments. Sensory issues matter.

The other day I said that my routine is not based on time, but becoming familiar with my environment. That waking up is just disorienting enough. It doesn’t matter whether I’m at my house or at Zac’s, the process is the same. Although after we wake up, my sensory issues haven’t been on high alert because it’s only Zac, his housemate, me, and Oliver (who is a dog). On the whole, I’d rather be at his house right now. 😛

Here’s the best part of our conversations this week without context:

Zac: Are you suggesting that object permanence is a problem?!?!
Leslie: Peek-a-boo, bitch

We were typing back and forth, but I hear Aaron Paul. Anybody?

I’m proud of us. We took a minor situation and resolved it while it was still a minor situation. Funny how I’ve been though of as a judgmental dickheaad for eight years, and as it turns out, I’m not when getting an actual answer out of someone and they don’t just “I AM BECOME DEATH” all over the place. Finding out that I’m not always the one that’s hard to please, despite popular opinion. But that was so long ago that I haven’t made many friends to counteract feeling so awful all the time.

I am sure that my beautiful girl felt awful, because I was being deeply emotionally intimate and if you don’t do that in your family, you’re going to hate it. Not that my words were perfect. I just don’t get from her that her family really does conflict. That sweeping everything under the rug is the family motto, not exclusive to her. She didn’t learn it in a vacuum, I didn’t learn my own family patterns that way, either. When they’re opposite, that means every single time I get angry at her she’s fucking terrified. I cannot have that. Both because I don’t want to be thought of as terrifying and I need someone to run counterpoint. She’s very good at that when she doesn’t assume malice…. a huge reason why she likes helping me with other relationships, not ours. She’d have a field day with Zac, but I hadn’t started dating him until maybe two weeks before we stopped talking.

There is no comparison between them because they’re so different in their roles in who they are to me. They’re not even similar personality-wise, although they both speak “acronym” and I don’t. 🙄

Here is a truism for working anywhere in the federal government: if you are not familiar with acronyms used by the military, intelligence, State, DoD, White House, and press you are going to be lost at most parties. I had no idea what MENA meant, learned it was State designation for “Middle East North Africa,” and of course heard it again six more times. But that’s how living in Washington works. You don’t learn everything at once. You take a bite, and then another bite, until you get enough experience to finish a plate. When you have sampled every entree, the dessert is the ability to drink out of a fire hose. In other words, the cake is a lie.

But there’s no use crying over every mistake. We just keep on trying till we run out of cake.

At the end, we can look at the bald eagle with the same pride we look at the turkeys on our tables.

“This is for the bird.”

If You Know, You Know

November 23, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

You guys will not believe what just happened. I just got four pictures.

Zac said:

This is Oliver, who is a dog.

I think my heart might explode..

Impossible to Choose

November 23, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?

I am not posting so late because it’s Thanksgiving. I am posting so late because my keyboard decided not to work on Android anymore and I’ve been fighting with it most of the morning. I finally just charged my iPad because I want to watch “For All Mankind” when I’m done. Catching you up because that’s how my day has played out so far- autistic meltdown in which I proceeded to slap the shit out of my tablet and remembered breaking it was a thing I could do and stopped. Just red mist rage with absolutely no emotion behind it except hatred of an inanimate object.

I’m going to have to get a new computer soon, because my desktop is toast. I think it’s the motherboard, because the PCI lanes are hosed (professional opinion, not fact) and my external graphics card has joined the choir invisible. So, I switched over to the onboard AMD and that’s when I realized it wasn’t PCI that was fucked. It was the whole thing. I’m trapped because I really want a Raspberry Pi, but there are so many damn things that won’t run on it bare metal, because the software is written for Intel/AMD chips and not ARM. It’s like putting Windows software on a Mac with Parallels. Software emulation only works if the chip is STUPID fast to cover the gaps in coding.

For instance, I can’t realistically play Skyrim, the absolute only game I play (I used to play Fallout 3 because it’s set in DC, but I’m over it.). I imagine that it *might* run on the ARM version of Windows, but I can’t imagine it working out well. There’s plenty of emulation like Steam decks and all that, but it’ll make the game run like a three legged dog on a Pi.

The historical figure I would like to meet most is Linus Torvalds, because he’s the genius behind all of this. Raspberry Pi would not be a thing without Linux, and he lives in Portland……..

which is handy, because he might be the only other person in the city that celebrates Finnish Independence day with Bryn and me.

Linus and I have our differences. He prefers KDE (linux desktop- menuing system and all that). I prefer MATE (pronounced like the tea) and Cinnamon, which look like Windows 95 and 7, respectively. It’s a Windows-type interface and workflow that doesn’t constantly try to sell me something. Let me tell you, that is the beauty of linux in a nutshell….. which in retrospect is a good joke because Tim O’Reilly & associates actually wrote “Linux in a Nutshell.”

And here’s the thing. If you’re not married to Windows software, you won’t really notice a difference. There are certain things you’ll want to install, like Microsoft Office, with emulation and not that LibreOffice isn’t perfect when you create and maintain documents in it. Microsoft Office plays well with others most of the time, not 100%. I wouldn’t install Microsoft Office unless I was working for someone that required it, because the file format will open in Office and if something is wrong, I can just print a PDF instead. For every piece of Windows software that you have, there is an alternative. It’s just a learning curve that believe me is worth it. Every time I think about popups asking how likely I am to recommend Windows to my friends, or a reminder to buy Microsoft-branded server space, or subscription-model software, my eyes twitch.

The only thing I pay for in terms of software and security updates is my VPN. I flip it to Canada so I can be an American trying to be a Canadian while watching a movie about Americans trying to be Canadians.

This reminds me of a quick aside. The very first time I went to the International Spy Museum (and I know just how big a laugh I’m going to get here) it was at the old digs on F St. You walk in and there’s a collection of covers on the wall. They tell you to pick one, because you’ll be required to maintain it. What they do not tell you is that it is going to be a series of computer-based questions. So, I pick this kid named Colin from the UK, and I proceed to come up with mannerisms, accent…… like a jackass in front of all these people……. but I take most things literally. AuDHD for the win. That day, I did not consider myself as going to the museum. I was a whole ass exhibit.

Back to you, Bob. Let’s go to the phones.

Linux gaming is getting better and better in terms of graphics card support being equal to Windows, but there are really no Triple A open source titles. Xonotic is a ridiculously fun first person shooter, but it doesn’t look like Rocket League or anything. The one open source game that I think is really well done is 0ad. You build civilizations (you can literally think about the Roman empire), and the game mechanics are much like StarCraft. You gather resources and fight other nations.

OUTSTANDING.

Again, we would not have any of this without Linus, and I get to be astounded by its progress every single day because I started with an idealistic Red Hat phase in college. I flirted with The Fedora, but I married Debian. I call Red Hat “The Fedora” because it reminds me of the time someone snapped at Carmen Sandiego on the new Netflix series, calling her “Fedora the Explorer” and I died for a second.

Speaking of Carmen, I like how her backstory is ridiculously muddled from spy to thief. She has worked for all of the intelligence agencies (they phrase it as “so many she’s forgotten”), and in the new series is basically counterintelligence, stealing from thieves and collaborating with government spies. It looks like MI-6, but it could be anything generic. The English woman and the French man are partners.

On Carmen Sandiego, you will find my alias. He’s called “Player,” and his entire job is to sit there at the computer, also obsessed with news and intelligence. He takes in information as fast as I do, bright as fuck.

Coded autistic, especially because his graphical user interface looks a lot like The Fedora.

Thank you for everything, Linus. I hope you have a nice Finnish Independence Day. Next year…. in Jerusalem, eh?

Today I Learned

November 22, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

When I was in the hospital (psych emergency/med check) nine years ago, some of the people around me started telling others I was borderline personality disorder. Not only was it not true, BPD carries a stigma, like psychiatrists saying they won’t have more than one borderline patient at a time because they’re so difficult. Bluntness and seeming malice are par for the course when none is meant, but one of these things is not like the other. I am not Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. I social mask until I can’t and the people around me have no idea what the hell to do when I stop. My problem is that social masking has been a part of my life since I learned to walk/talk. How am I supposed to know what’s neurotypical and what’s not? I have been made to believe that I’m a lot crazier than I am.

I was falling apart because my social masks all failed at once and it was a straight up crisis. How anyone could be surprised I ended up in a pych emergency after two therapists saying I was so fucked up it was going to take a very long time to heal is beyond me. You mean none of this is ever going to get any better? This is what my life looks like now? People don’t kill themselves because bipolar makes them sad. They kill themselves because managing bipolar disorder is fucking relentless.

“Borderline” was “over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero.” Here is why I am so fucking furious at the person(s) who said it. I’ve seen my chart. I was never diagnosed with BPD. Ever. I have had meltdowns, burnout, sensory issues, you name it. But I have never had an attachment disorder. I attach too much, if anything. I’ve been in emotionally abusive relationships for forever, because I assumed that people who thought I was a difficult monster were correct. I didn’t have any coping mechanisms for autism, so I just assumed I was the worst person who ever lived. I handle things wrong all the time, but because it’s not the same way a neurotypical person would handle things wrong, it’s a bigger mistake (to them). To them, they are justified in infantilizing me, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s at home or at work.

I got an incorrect label, and I was trapped in other people’s opinions with BPD; autism creates sympathy and treating me like I’m mentally delayed, and BPD means I am so unstable I cannot function. Both choices in how I’m treated blow. There’s no way not to report disabilities because social masking will fail at some point and I have no way to fit into society if I’m dead honest….. or at least, that is my belief right this very moment because I am not done with the process of acceptance. I do not even know how to function anymore because everything I’ve done in the past has been “getting by” and also incorrect for me, because I can’t just white knuckle my way through neurotypical society forever. I will die alone, and I am not kidding. I know myself. I’ll get tired of being misunderstood and just sit in my little autistic nest. It is so much easier not to engage than it is to be sure that you’re a burden on everyone. It’s also never unclear that you are. Social masking leads people to believe that I am an entitled, lazy asshole and that if I just worked harder, I’d be fine.

How long would you last at a job where people treat you like you’re five? Realistically, how long could you put up with being treated that way knowing that your life is a series of performance improvement plans no matter the field and always having meetings about your problematic behavior…… because my tone is always off or I can’t keep up or I need to go to the doctor too much. You name it. Meanwhile, I have never told an employer I was autistic for them to be able to help me because I didn’t know. Considering just how well jobs do with ADHD, I have to assume “not well.” Left to my own devices, I write the length of a novel/novella every month, not year. If I was a fiction writer, Nanowrimo would last two weeks. With a brilliant storyline I can write for six or seven hours at 90wpm. I barely look up. I am the model employee because I can tailor my environment to productivity and there’s no office “HOA.”

I do have a fiction work in progress, but I don’t know how to write fiction yet. I’m going to school for it on YouTube (no lie- plenty of college writing classes available- that kid at Harvard with the cell phone in his lap is my future….. I feel like I should be sending these kids money somehow but it’ll have to be the thought that counts. In order to learn all of this, I had to stop caring about everyone else. Also not for malice. Because they were programmed to all treat me a certain way, with certain perceptions, and none of them were correct.

I basically came to DC so I could meet an impartial set of doctors and friends. The ones in Houston weren’t it. This is because I started researching AuDHD because of several memes in ADHD groups on Facebook that mentioned it and I felt attacked. I don’t put much stock in memes, but I do in MDs/PhDs. I am tired of being thought of as this dark triad motherfucker when I talk all the time about the empathy I feel for my friends, how I bleed out trying to take care of others and come off as rude and demanding, anyway. I can certainly be clearer and better in my conversations, but there will be no conversation after “you’re not autistic.” This is because if you accuse me of not having autism, I won’t say you’re wrong. I will ask you for $3,000, the cheapest estimate I’ve found for an official diagnosis in Maryland. There is also a possibility that I would not be diagnosed as autistic, and yet that doesn’t mean it’s not true, either. For one, I’ve already mentioned that AuDHD is chronically misdiagnosed, and two…. what was two again? AuDHD. 😉 Two is that autism is missed in girls a lot. A lot a lot. I used to be an autistic girl, but I’ve had neurotypical behavior slammed in my face and social masked it for 46 years. Again, we do not have enough data on ASD to know how it presents in adults. What I can tell you is that AuDHD is more common than it’s not, a comorbidity like fibromyalgia and, well, anything.

If I was borderline, I would not notice or care that I was making an attachment worse or better. What does happen is that my brain works differently and some things just fall off my radar, including relationships. I finally decided to fix that by not looking for one overarching relationship, but a boyfriend and several emotional support girlfriends. If I meet another partner down the road, that’s a whole other conversation, but I’m happy as I am and so is Oliver, who is a dog (Zac is happy, too, but let’s remember who’s important here). I can disconnect ad be with other partners when I’m not with him, but I don’t have more than one red string (red strings and yellow strings are romance and emotional support, what a poly relationship “murder board” looks like).

I think of us as mono/poly or solo/poly because I don’t care what Zac does when he’s not with me. If he needs me, he’ll call. If I need him, I’ll call. I don’t want him up in my business with Bryn and Supergrover, he doesn’t want me up in his business with his partners, either. Believe me, it’s not that I wouldn’t respond emotionally if he was hurt. He’d just have to ask me to respond because I’m not constantly anticipating his needs. He does want to meet Lindsay, though, so make a note L Cubed (my grandfather, Alvie, always used to call me L Squared and Lindsay L cubed because her middle name starts with L as well). I asked her if she was going to be in town for Finnish Independence Day and she is, and you cannot even believe what a big fucking deal that is. I use that holiday to replace one I lost long, long ago. I needed to fill my time on that day (6 Dec) so I looked up other holidays I could get behind instead. Finnish Independence Day was absolutely it because it screamed “special interest.” Is it really your special interest if 99% of the world thinks it’s normal? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most people will not be lighting blue and white candles with me in the United States, but that doesn’t make any difference. I am using my strenths. I am replacing the dumpster fire of my teenage years with salmiakki, pulli, kahvi, and perhaps a bit of vodka for good measure.

Although I just remembered that the next time I see Zac will be Dec. 10, so I may celebrate it twice just to be sure to hate the Russians a little more. It’s the one war where I know I could have helped, because I’m a good skier. Do you guys know about this? Apparently, the Russians invaded Finland, so they put on their white camo and fuckin’ disappeared. The Russians never knew what hit them…… I know this because I watched several hour-long videos of the war because that’s AuDHD in a nutshell.

So, I went down the auDHD YouTube rabbit hole as well, and have listened to probably 40 hours of lectures by now. It’s all making sense….. like knowing that learning extensively about Finland is weird for an American, but if their independence had been won in June we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. Luck of the draw. Next horrific date to block out might be independence for the Dutch….. and “if there’s anything I hate, it’s people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, and the Dutch” (From one of my favorite spy movies, “Goldmember”).

Speaking of “Goldmember,” learning about ADHD and/or autism gave me enough confidence to say, like Foxy Cleopatra, “I’m a whole lotta woman.” That’s because by doing the work, I learned there was nothing wrong with me. I am strong and beautiful because of my struggles, not in spite of them. So many people have told me that my writing is so good that I’m going to be a very big deal. One reason, not the whole story, is that I didn’t believe it myself. I do now, because I resonate with people in other countries, not just my own. I have appealed to an international audience for almost 24 years now….. I just haven’t been driving the bus. I hadn’t really looked at ways to monetize, or ways to attract readers.

Ok, I haave to say up front thaat this keyboard is driving me nuts becaause you caan’t slow down the repeat raate aaand the aa key is out of control. Hold pleaase.

I think I’ve corrected most of it, but this is what it looks like before, so just prepare for this entry to look Dutch by the end if it doesn’t work. I’ll try switching to aanother keyboaard, but no promises. They’re aall problematic. Th other keyboard randomly makes keys stop working, and at 90 wpm, I get overwhelmed with trying to edit very fast. I could just buy another BT keyboard, but I’ve never had one that didn’t develop problems with connection if they didn’t have it already.

But let’s get back to autism and society. One of my biggest problems is that ADHD does not get the validity it deserves. I know this because there’s some argument that ADHD should be part of ASD, and yet just like autism, there are people who believe it’s not real and people who believe they can fix you.

If you ever want to see an autistic meltdown from me, mention ABA. I will not be elaborating further, but if you have plans to wipe “Autism Speaks” off the planet, please let me know where to show up with chocolate and lowers. If you even dip a toe in to videos by autistic people, you will realize that Autism Speaks is for parents, and parents are frustrated and burned out with a kid they feel is impossible. I use high functioning and low functioning for clarity’s sake, but lots and lots and lots of autistic people won’t. I think I’m not offended because I have a use case for that library of images. Trying to prove that I’m autistic in a world where disability porn shows people what I’m “supposed” to look like is cruel. You think autism means mental retardation. Incorrect. In some ways, my brain is 10x faster than yours. In some ways, your brain is 10x faster than mine. In my experience, neurotypicals want to make me solely responsible for minding the gap. It is true that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences or anything else that would derail being a functioning adult. It does mean that in relationships, neurotypical people see themselves as superior to me because they’ve been socialized to call my actions childish and this will not change in my lifetime- die mad about it.

Should it be okay that autism is naturally occurring, yet you are okay and I am fucked up? This is how every conflict comes across to us when you are irritated with our symptoms, as if we’re THRILLED to have them. Who I projected and who I really was were always at odds until now. When my mother died, I found out my actual diagnosis and that I am indeed physically disabled when she’d gaslit me into believing my father lied to me my whole fucking life while the papers were in her effects and Lindsay found them. I went nuclear for both me and my dad, because that was fucking abhorrent. My parents have always been at odds about me, since I was a kid. I’ve always been difficult, frighteningly intense, high needs (vs. low function) and trying to be invisible, social masking normalcy as not to cause even more problems. I can tell when people don’t like me, and I’ve struggled with it my whole life because I didn’t know what it was about me that was offputting.

Now I know that my emotions are just turned up to hell and other people’s aren’t. They’ve never had to learn to manage emotions this big because they don’t manage their emotions at all. Social masking teaches you to analyze human behavior so you’ll fit in. However, you cannot replicate it because your points of view are wildly different. We dream of worlds where we’ll be understood- obsessed with sci-fi to an enormous degree.

I am not Supergrover’s partner, I just call her that because that’s what yellow strings are called. In reality, she is my Doctor, and a part of me will always be Martha Jones. She does not watch the show, so will you hear my emotions when I say something that means everything to me and nothing to her? I hope she never forgets the time that The Doctor was her.

It led me here, to this place, where I know myself well enough to be able to communicate what is right for me and what’s not. I am not constantly afraid of everything, common among neurodivergents because how they’ll be perceived sits in their stomachs like a rock. I know I’m auDHD, and if I see a benefit to an official diagnosis, I’ll get one. I do not see a benefit in trying to prove that I’m autistic. In my experience, trying to convince someone that you are less crazy than they think but still diagnosed is futile. Just like trying to convince someone that you’re disabled when you “don’t look like it.”

I do not know what to do now, but I do know two things. The first is that I am not lazy. The second is that I am not malicious.

To conclude, here is a meme to express my feelings, one of my love languages.