Category: Uncategorized

Presently, Yes

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

Do you trust your instincts?

Janie told me this morning that every lid had a pot, and that I’d move on from having an ill-fitting one. I loved that, because it was an easy way to say you and your beautiful girl are not compatible without saying either of us are bad people. The conclusion she came to at the end was the correct one- I choose to love her whether Supergrover returns my feelings or not- and in my mind, she’s just a memory. I have no reason to believe that I am worth anything in her eyes anymore, because she cannot admit that she is fallible in any real way, cannot take responsibility for fucking anything ever, and blames fuck all on me…… because she can. I acknowledge that I hurt her. Deeply. What she will not acknowledge is that she hurt me, too, and has made it clear that only she deserves things to go back to normal.

I have been jumping up and down for attention by being understanding of all her time issues and endearing quirks, but she thinks I’m jumping up and down for attention when I’m angry because she doesn’t see why I should be angry when her emotions are always locked down. If they weren’t, she’d be passionate about something, too. If she can’t have emotions for the length of a paragraph, and frankly, it would take a lot for me to believe that she can, she doesn’t deserve my friendship. It’s not because being cut off from her emotions is a bad thing. It’s because it leads her to treat me “like a girl.”

She’s butch as FUCK on the inside, possibly more two-spirited than I am due to all her social masking. I also know a thousand women just like her, because that’s what we do to women in Washington. We take college kids like Hillary Rodham and turn them into fucking robots. Washington women have to prove they can run with the boys, and if you want to be powerful, you’re going to be subjected to a litany of dick-measuring contests. Over the last 10 years, I’ve been to Home Depot three different times to get a longer tape measure.

The paragraph above is probably a paragraph she will hate because she does not see how she’s been vetted and how it benefits her to social mask men…. or, she would definitely see that, she would just take exception to the words I used to describe the process because she’s not queer. She doesn’t see the gender spectrum like I do. And that’s okay. This is not trying to force her into thinking my way, because clearly I’m going to think them with or without her consent.

Supergrover is just the last woman in a long line where I made everything all about them. Everything. When they were upset, I’d cower. This was different because this time I actually did something wrong and regretted it, which should have made me run from her and didn’t because I was so afraid, caught in a Catch-22 I didn’t see coming. We don’t have a secure attachment anymore, and every time I’ve tried to say “we have horrible communication,” she’s changed the subject. It was the closure that I missed.

I am only now learning how to trust my instincts. And my instinct is telling me that she will never become less of a problem in my life because I’m never going to be less of a writer. I gave her a choice- work with me or get out of my fucking way.

I’ll miss her.

Virgo Christmas -or- Getting Somewhere… Out There

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite month of the year? Why?

Like every baby born in September, we do not celebrate Advent as such. We suffer through the summer waiting for the sweet relief of “Back to School.” It is not necessarily a penitent season, but a chance to turn inward and see what no longer serves us. At no time have I ever turned down a Trapper Keeper, but there have been a few lesser items that simply did not please me. I changed pens a *lot* in high school. My favorite were the ones that have the rubber grip on the outside, medium point. Fine point is too great a chance to rip the page.

You know how when we were kids SEARS used to send out a catalogue that had all their presents for the year and you’d circle the things you wanted? Well, for Virgo Christmas it’s from Levenger. If you have a Levenger catalog, I’m betting you also have glasses, shirts from Brooks Brothers, a Mont Blanc fountain pen, and possibly a tweed jacket with patches on the sleeves. You may not have ever smoked a pipe, but you love them for aesthetics. You have penny loafers, which you probably bought at Bass in 1992.

We. Are. Virgo.

I’m going to switch gears because I couldn’t really make anything more out of this. “My stomach is empty and my heart is full.”

I will get to the daily prompt later. Right now I want to talk about my current feelings, which are all over the place- and yet I’m in the space where my words are worth so much. That putting things out there is valuable for me, because then it becomes valuable to other people. There’s so much that’s surface level in this world, and I like that you read me because you also dive deep.

The first thing I’ve realized is that I’ve been lying to myself since 2013. No one is my favorite author except Supergrover, because it was so much fun thinking about her enjoyment of my work because her insight was my diamond ring, truly. She never had to get down on one knee. Loving an author makes them react. She will never, ever in her five dollar life understand what happened inside me if she doesn’t get started on that book she needs to write, but won’t. I’d help drag it out of her if she’d let me. I didn’t move to DC to tell her story. I moved to DC to convince her that she needs to be immortal on her own…. essentially, that her description of her would be so much better than mine. If she’s not a 3D character here, my new reaction is “you’re a fabulous writer. Put up or shut up. Show me what a 3D character is and FUCKING MAKE ME ONE.” Stop treating me like I’m a dickhead all the time when I go out of my way so hardcore to bring positivity into our relationship that you choose not to see.

In the words of Kristina Mahr, “I took the tags off this love before I knew I wanted it. No, that’s not right. I took the tags off this love before I knew you wanted it.” One of the things that she does not understand is that I don’t need to meet her in person. That she can think it’s weird all she wants. Doesn’t mean it’s not true. Autistic people have very few relationships in person because the Internet is just as much of a godsend for them as it is for me…… which I did not know until I considered the possibility late in life. Being peer reviewed may have to be enough, because I don’t remember a whole lot of my day to day life as a kid, and that’s a lot of what goes into an autism diagnosis because research on what autism looks like in adults is more rare.

There’s not enough data on how autism changes after 46 years of social masking, and people are diagnosed older than I am. It doesn’t make me weird, it takes away my barriers to communication because I am not worried about my appearance and essentially stimming while I talk because of the typing. I can feel emotions more deeply when I’m reading because that’s my preferred communication style. Yes, my beautiful girl and I are both writers, but we’re yin and yang. She’s an architect, I’m a gardener. She wants bullet points, I want prose. I want to understand something she doesn’t- her. I only know this through speculation, but I know it was true at one point because she told me.

I also think she berates me for “expecting her to remember all our conversations,” and moves the target when I go back to zero and write as if she doesn’t remember anything. It makes my letters longer because AuDHD…. “allow me to explain more and better… more and better… more and better….” Meanwhile, my emotions are growing as I do it, because I am giving her more and more of me. She’s seen me naked a lot more than anyone I’ve ever slept with, and a lot more often. I think I saw a clip of her on Insta once, so I have very little idea of what she looks like. To me, we are not making love in the traditional sense. It’s so much more important than that.

We are making art.

She is struggling to respond because she does not tap into her emotions the way I do. Cannot because it’s bigger than me. It’s bigger than everyone. She’s buttoned up because she’s always been that way. It shouldn’t be our problem to deal with it, but it is. What I mean by “our problem” is that there’s never going to be a thing in our lives that are more important and we just all have to roll with it. All the time. It’s not the whole story, though. She keeps herself busy and actively runs from her emotions, and doesn’t believe me that laying everything on the table makes her stronger. I can see why. We were making progress and I self-sabotaged. I deserved there to be consequences, I did not deserve them for the next eight years…. and not because I’m demanding. It’s twisting around the definition of forgiveness, and absolutely all of this is because online can only do so much.

I can deal with virtual boundaries, but if we aren’t checking our stories on the ground, we need to keep things from spiraling. She is johnny on the spot when we’re in escalation mode, and has finally given me the closure I needed to move on by being an absolute dick. Her last words to me were “obviously you’re the only person who could change.” I responded, “that’s not true at all. You just haven’t told me anything since then. That’s my entire issue. When I lay out my feelings, you don’t.” It’s the healthiest thing I could have said, and that was the end of that, because fuck you only responding if I go apeshit about something.

She absolutely is neurodivergent, but not in the same way as me. She’s allistic and doesn’t have ADHD, but has a horrible case of CPTSD. For along time, I was the only person that knew this, and I didn’t tell anyone until I was sure she had. But, I can’t be more specific than trauma, and her story broke me in half. It’s not that it was so unusual, I was just already in deep grief. I was not thinking about leaving Dana, but the fissure had begun. However, I am not saying that I actively thought about cheating on Dana at all. Supergrover basically connected us umbilically because she didn’t think “Leslie’s a blogger” and just has to be frightened all the time that I’m going to say something I shouldn’t because I am. I don’t write in retaliation. I write in comprehension. Yes, I have felt red mist rage in my writing, but that’s for me to go back and look at it once time has passed. In every case, I’ve thought, “wow. I had to live through that.” More importantly, and thanks, Elizabeth Gilbert, I got to live through that. Every road led me here to Zac and Oliver, who is a dog. I’m mentioning him specifically because today is his birthday- please make a note. 😉 He’s a queer man. He lives on shoes and compliments. 😛

Zac and Supergrover are my muses, and both of them in my writing. For Zac, it’s being able to ask questions about intelligence fiction. Supergrover is my definition of non-fiction. It got real, real fast. But those two people come together in me on the page. It’s just that one is LibreOffice, and one is Gmail.

I finally started writing to Zac. I am not giving up the last book, I am just putting it on the back burner.

I know Supergrover. She won’t end on those words, and this may or may not be the end of our movie. If she doesn’t have a connection to me, her palm might itch or it might not. It depends on how much my writing affects her, both emotionally and in other arenas. The problem with being a blogger is not when you get blowback. It’s when they do. That’s because people don’t talk to me, the person who wrote the piece. They talk to the people involved, so the conversation is all hearsay. No one ever calls me up and says “what did you really mean?”

I have to be happy in my isolation most of the time because people don’t reach out and I forget to respond, anyway. I always respond in my head. I’m not saying it’s not an issue. I never want anyone else to feel unloved. The reason I say “have to be happy” is that it’s not like I never look up. When I do, it’s generally at times when people aren’t available. For instance, even if Supergrover and I were Superclose, I wouldn’t see her more than a couple times a year, if that. I don’t even know where she lives anymore, because you couldn’t pay me to care. I mean, I know she’s probably within a hundred miles of me so that it wouldn’t be a huge ask for that amount of time, but writing is just faster and easier because either she’s in bed or on a large assortment of airplanes. I know enough to know it’s not impressive, it’s exhausting.

To me, it’s funny that she’s a big deal and I treat her like my little sister. They are not dissimilar. This is because she’s a first child as well. When it comes to me, the line about Hillary Clinton being gay on SNL goes through my head. I treat her like she’s an asshole when she deserves it, and her responses are basically “I Googled it, and I do not like it.”

Here is what I know to be true. She’s bluffing. She remembers every goddamn detail better than I do. She could quote me in her sleep. Because that’s how she takes in information, too. She has never forgotten anything she’s read, ever….. and acts like she’s a dumbass for forgetting. It’s a con job. Believe it. (I am laughing uproariously right now.)

She’ll drop something I’ve said in front of me and I’m like, “holy shit. How did you remember that?” She doesn’t realize how much I delight in her, because she focuses on my ire. I offered her my whole heart, and I meant it. Love does not depend on the recipient, and I choose to love her deeply whether she returns my feelings or not. I am not trying to be creepy or stalkerish. Her trauma goes back a long way. I see her as a child I care for, not just an adult. Hard to break that strong a bond. It’s like losing custody after you’ve just gotten it, and that joke goes back a long way.

Custody of her is the easiest thing ever, a shared connection and not one borne of anything but wanting love. We have so much of it, and we’re not using it. That does not mean it gets destroyed. Her name is a waltz in my head, a quick three conducted in one because she’s never said her name in a voice note…. which means that even after 10 whole ass years, I pronounce her name differently than she does.

I pronounce her name like her mother would, she does not care for it. 😉 She says she prefers “the American sound?” I said “who the fuck prefers the Americanized sound of ANYTHING?!?!” She’s a doll baby and a grown ass woman, like we all are. I just notice the things she doesn’t, or doesn’t want to acknowledge, more likely. I see into people. I know I do. I am not wrong a hundred percent of the time and history backs me up with my readers and friends. If you find a lie here, it is 100% because you didn’t give me a piece of information you had before I published.

Also, I feel like I get into illustration mode and say “you” a lot, so reassurance that you is plural, not singular. It makes people think I’m yelling at them when I am actually speaking, essentially, ex cathedra by looking out over my readers. I am not talking to anyone but the whole world at once. Every one of you is a personal conversation because your emotions come up when you read. Just because we are not in sync when it happens doesn’t mean it’s not personalized.

I appreciate people like Sheila, Janie, and Supergrover because they’ve taken the time to interact with me a propos of nothing. Getting feedback is great because it lifts me out of my own echo chamber. My friends all think it’s TMI and don’t want to talk about it, and I’m just talking about laying out my own shit. I’m sure they think it’s rude and I think it’s rude when people trauma dump and emotionally vampire their friends. My blog allows me that- I am not speaking to anyone I know personally, so in real life it’s all social masking. I don’t have to dig deep because I’ve already done it. I start writing at dawn so that I am filling my own cup before trying to meet others’ demands.

It allows me to remember that I didn’t offhandedly or mistakenly give Supergrover her all access pass. She earned it. If there is a key to unlocking me, it’s a goddamn miracle I found it. The odds are so incredibly small that they’re infinitessimal. You cannot believe how many permutations of my life had to happen before she could…… and the beauty of it is that when she dropped into my lap, I was ready. Before, I would have rejected her friendship because I thought I didn’t deserve it. Just full stop I’m not worthy. I managed to get to know her and be so ridiculously charmed that I rejected her friendship a few more times just to be sure I devastated her a little better. I wish I could forgive myself, but I go back and forth between cringing and vomiting. She was murdering me with words, and I’m just as good at it.

What broke us is wanting to stop all of it, and her walking off. She vowed “not to respond to my attacks.” I continue to wonder what planet she’s actually on, but because e-mail, I can love her from here.

Let’s All Say it Together- The International Spy Museum

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What is your favorite place to go in your city?

If you’ve read me even twice, you probably know I love intelligence. I believe wholeheartedly that I could have been a spy based on my preacher’s kid upbringing (really, really not much different growing/maintaining a congregation and recruiting/handling assets), genetics (great uncle was C/DIA), and the fact that I’ve “done” news like cocaine since I was eight.

There is a direct correlation.

When I was eight years old, I came to Washington for the first time. It was love at first sight. A miracle dropped in my lap that the first offer Kathleen got out of school was from ExxonMobil, because we got to choose whether we lived in Houston or DC. Moving became a monotropic thought process in which I envisioned my life playing out much differently….. and it did. Absolutely none of the plans I made for myself materialized, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a hell of a good time making them.

If you’re that kid, the one that grows up in a small town and travels so that they see how much bigger the world really is than 40 square miles, you become a “type.” By 10 I had been to Mexico, the UK, and The Bahamas. I noticed the highs and the lows, the looming cathedrals and the neighborhoods made with tin. Global issues become important early. News becomes important early. Politics become important early. You begin to see that working for the government might be a positive thing because instead of reading the news, you are helping create it.

Kids like me end up at State or at the Washington Post. Rarely do we want to be the story. We want to shape it, especially for writers who process “verbally” in stream-of-consciousness spaghetti code. Writing about my life in DC is learning how to say “Hello, World” in every language.

(Sometimes when I write, I imagine people’s faces as they’re reading and now I’m smiling to myself knowing my programmer friends. Just for them, that line should be “every language……….. except JavaScript. Fuck JavaScript.)

My autism and ADHD are why my plans haven’t come to fruition, and my bipolar disorder threw my first choice out the window. So, right now, I am trying to concentrate my energy where I feel it can manifest. I am a better writer than I am anything else, and I know that I’m not the best. What I do know is that by writing every single day, there’s no way to get worse. I am sure that this brings hope to many, many people. Living in DC is where I feel the most alive, because I’m tapped into The Source. The United States is a living, breathing entity, and I am deep within the carotid artery (or the vena cava, depending on administration).

When I go to The Spy Museum, it’s not about seeing the exhibits. I’ve done it 10 times, they don’t change it that much. I hardly ever go during the day anymore, because it’s more fun at night. After the museum closes, all the Bond mannequins…. kidding…. after the museum closes, that’s when they do book talks and record SpyCast, how I met Jonna Mendez and Tracy Walder.

Jonna is one of my writing heroes, because she writes about the stuff I like in the way I like to hear it. She’s got a very concise, no bullshit tone and the wit of someone like David Halberstam or Rachel Maddow, who have also written a wealth of political non-fiction thrillers. I should tell Jonna that if she sees an uptick in sales the next few days, merry Christmas. The post I talked about yesterday for reddit re: Spy Dust and Moscow Rules has had 471 upvotes in 23 hours. I hope I sold her a thousand copies, and I’m not even going to tell her about it because “Secret Santa” is a thing. Book sales are the best gift I could have picked.

A woman said her dad wouldn’t read a book about intelligence if it was written by a woman, and I think that if Jonna can’t convince him, he’s a misogynistic lost cause……. being Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive or anything (my eyes are rolling out of my head). I like Spy Dust better in terms of being able to pick out Tony’s voice from hers, but The Moscow Rules is my favorite of them all….. and I thought Argo was hard to beat. The book was made in reaction to the film, and it was still better.

I have a different relationship with/to Tracy than I do with/to Jonna because Tracy is so much younger, and in fact, is a bit younger than me (I think). Do you ever have a moment where someone says something and your heart just walks out of your body in empathy? I know it happens to people with their families, but Tracy was a complete stranger to me when she told the audience that she was born with hypotonia. I had never met another person who’d been born with it, she’d never met anyone outside her family. It was not just that kind of moment for me. The emotions we felt at seeing each other mattered. It is one of, if not the most intimate moment of my life. I wasn’t proposing or having a baby, and yet it was still that big because the chance of us connecting was so small, our affliction so rare. It’s one of the few times in a relatively unfamiliar situation in which I’ve been able to breathe that deeply.

However, there is a reason I chose Jonna over Tracy with the reddit comment. That dude is already predisposed to disliking female intelligence writers, so handing him a book with a sorority sister protagonist didn’t seem like the wisest choice. You get Jonna until you can handle pink coffee mugs without being an asshole about it. But make no mistake, he definitely needs to read it. There’s more dirt on scumbags like him inside FBI who don’t trust women in intelligence. To be clear, Tracy did not have problems at CIA. She had problems with FBI. Tracy has a problem with FBI, so they have a problem with me. It’s just that simple.

I am sure that Tracy appreciates the support in which I do legit nothing but talk shit about the FBI on my web site……… but hey, she has a great autobiography called The Unexpected Spy. It’s a thrill ride through her life having worked at both agencies, and thrilling to find out that CIA is actually as forward-thinking as I thought it was. Tracy also made an interesting style choice. When you write a book involving CIA (and I’m not sure if it applies to me, but it definitely applies to employees), it has to go through a publications review board. When Tracy got her manuscript back from the PRB, there were parts that were blacked out….. and she just left them in and published as is. Tracy’s is the one book I don’t have on my Kindle, and the one hardback I’m grateful to own, because the words come across the same on e-paper with Jonna and Tony, but the feel of the paper with its saturating amount of black ink looks official.

And in fact, I liked it so much that she signed my book after the lecture and as she was writing the inscription, I asked her if she would black out a word. Tracy understood the assignment. 😉 She blacks out one word, and you can still see what it is, so she asks around and finds a black Sharpie. She hands it back and it says:

To Leslie-

Go [redacted] the world.

Then she says, “there. Now no one knows what I told you to do to the world.”

We’ve (sort of) kept in touch- I should reach out and see what she’s up to these days. Last I heard she was in Dallas (went to SMU just like my dad, went back to teach at Hockaday). If she ever comes to DC, first coffee’s on me.

Here’s to hoping we can [redacted] the world together……..

because the Spy Museum is my favorite place in my city.

I am including the link to both book talks, and I’m in them at the Q&A. In the Walder video, I’m wearing my CIA baseball cap. In the Mendez video, I am “Sir Not Appearing in This Film,” because the video cuts off right when Jonna stops speaking.

The Lanagan Rules

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes, you can do for other writers what you don’t do for yourself- promote them. I am currently over the moon because one of my comments on reddit is getting more and more upvotes by the minute. In r/suggestmeabook, a woman was telling the sub that her dad wouldn’t read intelligence writers if they were female. At last count, it was at 100, so safe to say my work is done. Here is what I said, and huge props to both women:

Alma Katsu is a former CIA case officer and she’s brilliant. She’s so quick she could run circles around him, so she’s probably your best bet. I’m a member of the International Spy Museum and a huge fan of fiction and non-fiction. For non-fiction, your go-to is going to be Spy Dust or The Moscow Rules by Jonna and Tony Mendez. They’re a husband and wife team who each served as Chief of Disguise for CIA 10 years apart. She will also wipe the floor with him because their stories are true. Women don’t just write these stories. They make them.

Women are better at being little gray men than little gray men. Anonymity has its privileges, and so does reading these marvelous books. For Katsu, start with Red Widow. One of the things that it touches on that made me cry was the reality of losing an asset/colleague while female. Some of them become emotional. It works out as well for female spies to be emotional as it does for the rest of us……………..

I Am Not Normal -or- “Hi, My Nickname is ‘Way Too Much.'”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the first impression you want to give people?

I have bigger problems when people think I am normal than when they don’t. This is because neurodivergent and neurotypical people have two different perspectives, and the neurotypical person (also referred to as “allistic”) is always going to assume I am just like them because majority is implied– neurotypical. I do not have to start every conversation with “hi, my name is Leslie, and I’m an autistic (‘hi, Leslie’),” but I do not think it would hurt if I did. When I do not, people can see that I am irregular, but they can’t put their finger on why.

I have cerebral palsy so I move and look different, but not by so much that you’d think “neurodivergent and physically disabled.” My biggest issue in life is not looking disabled or autistic enough, because I can say it all I want and there’s still going to be a look of disbelief when I actually show people I’m not Bruce Almighty. I would rather people love me backstage, because my social masks are worth nothing. It’s valuable to go through the process of an official diagnosis just for confirmation that you’re not crazy. You’ve done the research and you believe you. It is only when you believe that you know more about your own brain than other people do that they push back. Why do you think you’re the authority on telling other people who you are? “You don’t look autistic” is my favorite. I struggle with imposter syndrome because of it, or I did……….

I actually do think I look autistic now that I know. Like, I just looked around one day and realized my closet was serving Young Sheldon realness (also “Old Sheldon” realness due to all the long–sleeved t-shirts)……. which is also serving Jim Parsons realness because we are both Houston gays of a certain age (he’s older), and our accents are nearly identical when we fall back on them. If you met Jim and me together, it would seem like you met two people who have always known each other, and I mean it. That boy knows what HATCH is, maybe thought about going. For all I know, Michael has a picture of him somewhere.

Michael and I met at a Houston gay club, then found out we were both HATCHlings and he starts going through a photo album on his phone. Complete strangers, except not…….. I was in his pictures. I was in my 30s and the pictures were taken when I was 18 or 19 and he was still in diapers (15). In short, Jim Parsons has the same accent as the gays who raised me. I love him like he personally vouched for me at The Ripcord…… because that’s what you do at the end of the night in Houston if you’re with the boys.

When I’m with “the boys,” I feel more comfortable in a club, gay or straight. That’s because the club is an unfamiliar environment with lights and sounds that are way too fuckin’ loud, but the boys feel like home when the club doesn’t. My favorite memory of clubbing in Houston is the night I went to JR’s in a white t-shirt, jeans, and red leather CFM pumps. It was a great outfit, but within two hours I thought I’d never be able to walk again. My friend Brian knew that I could hardly stand up, so he carried me to my car. I looked like the butchest fairy princess on record.

Looking like a butch fairy princess is also a neurodivergent trait, interestingly enough. Neurodivergent people have loose definitions of gender and sexuality. The spectrums between gay and straight, male and female, mono and poly are all enormous, why I call it “Avatar state,” and you probably will, too, if you’ve seen Avatar: The Last Airbender (not the movie- skip it).

“How dare you make me, a bisexual, choose between two or more things?” #bumperstickerwisdom

I identify with Toph because she’s physically disabled (blind) and coded as autistic in her bluntness. This was even more apparent in Legend of Korra. But, of course, that is not acknowledged because There is No War in Ba Sing Se. Problems do not go away if you sweep them under the rug, and get worse the longer you ignore them. Local is national.

We were engulfed in flames, the embodiment of our own ignorance because the former president going after John McCain for being a POW never even raised an eyebrow. FUCK those people. How could you not see that and the former president’s treatment of the mentally handicapped thinking, “this is surely a leader?” People who think the former president is Jesus have never recognized he’s actually Brian…….. but they know he’s the Messiah. They’ve followed quite a few (I’m not convinced God wanted George W. Bush, either…… but they were).

I am not nearly as furious at the former president’s supporters as I am at the people who stood by and did nothing, and there are a ton of them. Voting participation is usually less or right at half in a presidential election, and you have to pay people to show up for the mayor/city council/state leg, dog catcher, etc. I believe that is actually an elected position in West University because my math teacher in 10th grade was mayor and I think I remember her mentioning it.

OMG, now *that* woman was a monotropic thought process…………. Where were we again? 😉

I do not know how people see me the way they do, I just know that it is the same way that people have looked at others who have raised me. I am not dissimilar from a pastor or an opera singer, because that’s what was modeled for me. I have a stage presence every bit as big as theirs, and I never want to use it ever again, because it’s everything about me that’s not really there. It’s the end of the movie, and I’m stepping out from behind the curtain……. while everything is still in color. I am trying to stop the desaturation, or at the very least, turn up the shadows to make stunning, stark grayscale photography. I have said “pay no attention long enough.”

Perhaps Jack Ryan’s archetype can’t be autistic easily, which is why it was easy to let go of that dream. I don’t think I could have taken the pressure cooker, even as an analyst. Some analysts are even forward-deployed, and though I think it would be exciting, I know through talking to Zac and Daniel that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. They both got to explore, they both went through trauma. Both are figuring it out with me.

I have an alternating lateral isotropia which makes one eye focus while the other eye drifts. I have no 3D vision. I don’t always have the correct social masks and say things that people just don’t say in a conversation. They don’t know how to address the elephant in the room….. how to tell me that I’m weird because I obviously don’t already know.

People gloss over my limitations all the time and I am brutally honest about them. Others think I’m shitting on myself and placate me, later realizing I was right and they resent me “because I didn’t tell them.” They still feel snowed because they were seeing me through their filters and not the ones I told them existed. In essence, what is happening is that my social masking is so good, so practiced, that when I say I’m autistic or ADHD it is dismissed. I am not special. Most women with autism/ADHD face this to some extent. It’s more often for me having been raised in a fish bowl because I am skilled at making things look fine (while everything is actually on fire).

Other people seem inversely weird to me, and I could not put my finger on it, either. Until now, I’ve thought I was an alien, taking refuge in science fiction (dear God how did I not know this was coming…… I’m basically Mac and PC [John Hodgman and Justin Long]). Come to find out, it’s because people have been asking me to do things way beyond my capability and I’ve let them down because “I didn’t know any better.” It is never that I told them I was ADHD (haven’t had to tell an employer I’m autistic), explained that it meant I had limitations, and you didn’t look it up. I am only responsible for half of a conversation, and I have never been good at holding people accountable for their part. I hate and am also too weak to stand up to authority most days.

The thing is, though, I run a tight ship with an order all its own, which generally looks like there has been some sort of struggle. I desperately need structure and hate authority simultaneously, because my system is in collaboration with no one and I am lost in my own little world– no one is capable of helping me maintain it; I couldn’t explain it if anyone offered. It’s comfortable in my mind, but it also feels like waiting for God to make Eve when I don’t have a sounding board. According to Zac, this might take a while (he’s an atheist). It’s an apt description because the most beloved trees in my mental garden touch upon knowledge of humanity and the divine.

I think deep thoughts and ask the real questions of myself every day. “Why am I like this?” is a constant refrain, but not a pejorative. Fuel to keep the fire going. Writing is working and I’m getting further along in my healing journey, like just now realizing that I was programmed to look for people like my 10th grade teacher because I was already chasing a cougar (she was young, but I was 11 years younger). Oh my FUCK have I just played a huge hand in making myself feel better and someone else worse, just not her. All the archetypes that came afterward, Supergrover the last and most precious in a line because I’d never met anyone like her, and I never will again. It is all just so sad- one f the reasons I’m isolating because I don’t want to take out grief or anger on others. She calmed me and won’t let me calm her. Somehow, we’ve become a part of each other’s heartbeat despite actively disliking each other and stuck in a loophole-less Massey Pre-Nup.

Relationships like ours don’t happen often,, where both people are just too much for the other because of our different outlooks on life. We actually have little in common if you look outside our thoughts. We track together, but “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” We are in different social, professional, and relationship situations, with the difference being an absolute power balance and not one we made. Alternatively, there is no such situation in which I wouldn’t just roll with it. You need snacks? Ok. You need me to steal something? Ok. I’ll be at the National Archives by eight. LET’S DO THIS. My inner Nicholas Cage is struggling to get out. 😉

Just text me first.

I grew through wanting bugs to be features and realizing I couldn’t just release the beta as official and publish a patch later…. I am not Microsoft, and she is not Windows…… but her e-mail address does mark her as having had a 56K modem that came with a proprietary CD (Compuserve, Wow, take your pick- not even AOL? Really?), because that’s the only way you would have gotten an e-mail address that ancient, and yes, I am making fun of her. That’s because she’s basically “Windows 98 and the Plus Pack!” years old.

It would have been fun teaching her terms like “mommy save,” the idea that women only have one personal folder and it is the desktop. You know it immediately because you sit down at the computer and the icons are layered (we also have what we called “12:00 flashers,” ’cause every appliance in their house is always blinking 12.). And that line isn’t making fun of her because A) I don’t know what her desktop is like. II) I was making fun of my users and my own mother from “back in the day.”

My mother assumed that if it plugged into the wall, I could fix it. This is not untrue if we’re talking about a desktop/laptop/tablet/phone. I, like Daniel Stern, have no concept of how to program a VCR. “The cows can tape something by now.” My mother once flew me from Portland to Houston because it was cheaper to house and feed me for a few days than it was to call the Geek Squad and I provide better service. I am sure that she did want to see me as well, but she got a bargain, ijs.

All of these things combine to make me dig down on every topic. I’m creative. I like writing. I like computers because they enable me to write. I like tablets because they allow me to write anywhere with a minimum amount of effort. It genuinely seems like the longer I say silent, the more the words flow.

In Scotland, I can find no record of it, but my parents tell me that they chose my name because it meant “quiet spirit.” Today I realized for the first time just how much they actually nailed it.

There are lots of bugs, but the feature is me. The best impression I can give is that I allow myself to take up room in the world because I am not frightened of yours. Be as big as you are.

I’m trying.

Charlie McCarthy

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The reason I write stream of consciousness all the time is that I need a sounding board, and it can’t be me until I have had some distance from a problem. I can pick out my own problematic behaviors if I’m not in the heat of the moment. It’s the main reason I know I’m autistic and not a narcissist. I have pure motives, my social masks did not until my emotional abuse stopped. I only knew how to react from a PTSD perspective because since I didn’t think I was abused, I never bothered to look up trauma responses.

Therefore, the trauma bond transferred from the emotional abuser to Supergrover. It’s not because she’s a narcissist and I needed that pattern to repeat. It’s that we both laid our guts on the table emotionally and that had consequences beyond our control. In terms of my writing, nothing is under Supergrover’s control, either. That’s because in her absence, I spend time with her character because the lovable things about her are my new social masks, matching my values to my vision.

When I first lost my rose-colored glasses, my behavior regressed to that of the age I was emotionally abused, 14. Now, 10 years later, I am finally 11, the person I was when I met her. I am not yet 46 because I do not know enough about myself to be comfortable in my own skin right now. I am 21 at best, because emotionally I can be a fully-functioning adult. Logically, not so much. I have to tailor-make every job to me, so far unsuccessful, not due to effort. Due to every pattern I’ve had while working. It’s trite, but “I wasn’t born to fit in, I was born to stand out.” It’s what people always say when they’re fucked six ways to Sunday.

Burnout wears on you.

What restarts the fire is adding new kindling. The example I just thought of as a “spark” is finding out there are hackers who originally thought about sending me a SQL injection and changed their minds because “she knows the command line. She’s good.” This has never happened. I just think it’s funny considering how many hits I get from Eastern Europe (speaking of Eastern Europe, the new season of “For All Mankind” has dropped……….. #intelligence #iykyk). It’s an image of GRU, Mossad, NSA, etc. that doesn’t scare me. Considering how much hacking I’ve studied, I love espionage enough to know that I’ll never be off the grid. Cameras all over London are nothing compared to developing for the web……. and yes, I have seen people dumb enough to put a web cam on an HTML/DB server. It’s a special kind of stupid.

I don’t cover my web cam with a Post-It because I’m not interesting. I don’t even care if pastors use my sermon illustrations in their own without credit, because when you hit a home run, nobody cares about the brand of the ball. That is only my personal opinion; with other writers YMMV.

In some ways, being trained as a web designer taught me that it was like being trained as a sharpshooter. That respecting Internet privacy was every bit as crucial as respecting the business end of a scoped shotgun. There are consequences for content far beyond your reach, as Karens have found out recently and minorities have known for centuries.

Burnout wears on you.

It’s easy to rail on neurotypical, straight, white, cis people because they need it, frankly. Having the majority claim oppression is too fucking rich. Because whites own so much wealth, they are literally rich from ruining legit everything. Reaganomics wasn’t the best idea they ever had. When things were supposed to trickle down, the rich asked for and were granted bigger cups. It didn’t work, and we’re stuck. It was the equivalent of “let’s tell the poor to fuck all the way off.” Meanwhile, the rest of the world is looking at us like we’re crazy because we absolutely are.

It’s easy to say things like this when I’m not in front of a crowd- that my words have more impact because they flow easier and aren’t compromising with others’ stories because it renders me a weak narrator. People get onto me for creating my own narrative. Of course I do. What else am I supposed to do? Should I be beholden to anticipating your every need?

That has been paralyzing, because it’s always meant “I love your writing and you are entitled to your stories as long as you never mention we know each other.” Everyone likes reading my observations about everyone else. They are not going back and looking at their actions in third person omniscient like I am…. and not positing why I would do what I do in reaction to them, either. It is never their behavior, only the paragraph that triggered it.

When I acknowledge my inner angel and asshole, it doesn’t seem that others are brave enough to do the same. No one in the history of my blog has ever apologized for their behavior when they stepped all over my ass and got pissed when I stopped apologizing for my words as well. I also would never say anything behind my friends’ backs that I wouldn’t say to their faces, and sincerely dislike friends who do otherwise. If you have a problem with me and talk to everyone else about it, that’s on you. Nothing will get better by telling other people the problem, and clearly you are more in tune with those friends than you are with me, so please go ahead.

Your services are no longer needed because I cannot solve a problem if you do not tell me what it is. I will disconnect immediately from people like that because it doesn’t result in being able to shrug things off easily. The quicker the dump, the better. I waffle between holy terror meltdown and incapacitation; I’m done with those kinds of swings. I’m not going to pass out over anger anymore, because I don’t do much but self-soothe and my echo chamber is a hot mess.

I don’t disconnect quickly from people because I don’t like them. I disconnect because when people are angry, my echo chamber turns everything into “you’re the worst person who ever lived.” I can work on turning down the volume, but I can’t pretend a little bit of it won’t always be there because internalized homophobia and hatred of my processing disorders/mental illness is ever-present. Society reinforces it by people confusing autism with Down’s Syndrome… which I believe is the root cause of the phrase “you don’t look autistic.” Autism doesn’t refer to genetics. It refers to the way your brain processes your environment, logic, and emotions.

Logic is more disparate over the spectrum because of differences in executive function. I could be a therapist better than a programmer because my EQ is so much higher than my IQ. If there’s a MENSA of EQs, I’m certainly in it. I’m the Stephen Hawking of human behavior. I’m not the only one. Most autistic people are like this because they have to study neurotypical people so hard to social mask them……. because acting like themselves leads to “problematic behavior.” It’s not the behavior, it’s the context I got from what you said, which, if you’re neurotypical, will hardly ever match what you meant.

What I mean about logic being a spectrum is the difference between STEM autistic and creative autistic. Creatives don’t process things like scientists. Creative autistics have problems processing a process, essentially. STEM autistics have problems processing their feelings about a process. That’s a spectrum, too, and varies because so many of us also have ADHD. Autism in women is not generally caught when the person has both processing disorders. Their ADHD makes their interest vary so much that doctors tend to downplay their experiences.

If someone does not believe that I am autistic and low functioning in terms of logical processes, I don’t have anything to prove. You can see it in my life everywhere you look if you want to find it. If you don’t, you won’t. Neither of those things are my issue, I just respond to you the way you respond to me. Saying “you don’t look autistic” or “everyone’s a little bit autistic” is just dismissive of a devastating process. Your entire life changes from the moment that light bulb goes off. It’s better knowing than not. It’s debilitating knowing that in a lot of cases, it does not get better because it’s not all up to you.

People often like reading/writing about things they love and cannot do themselves. I was attracted initially to being a spy or a diplomat (or “both”) because I studied international relations and political science at University of Houston. I left UH (early, but not by much- if I went back, I could graduate pretty quickly); I wanted to travel the world, and working for the government was the easiest path since I couldn’t get into the military. I didn’t follow up on civil service because by the time I was rejected, I’d moved on from traveling because my autistic side showed up more and more as I aged. When I first moved to DC in 2001, I don’t think I left my house for six weeks due to meltdown and burnout from changing so much, so fast. I was not dissatisfied, I was exhausted.

I actually tried to join the military before I graduated from high school because I wanted to be in a jazz band that came to HSPVA called “The Airmen of Note.” Speaking of them, I once heard the joke that the Air Force is a group of people who stand next to the military, which is basically recycled from the “fact” that drummers are a group of people who stand next to musicians.

I am not an arrogant asshole out of the bandstand and kitchen, but I can damn well “play it on TV.” Being a dick on the line is child’s play next to being the only woman in the absolute cesspool of humanity that is top brass, and we’re not talking about the Air Force anymore.

It remains to be seen whether I’ll ever take the Civil Service exam, because I’m having trouble conceiving of being anything other than a writer, because I can shed light on things without having to work inside them as long as I do the research. I very much learned this from Rachel Maddow. She’s not a spy, a diplomat, a soldier, etc. She’s just an observer to all of it, painting her feelings as fact because she’s taken the time to read them all and digest, imparting what she understands based on what she’s read, not because of a pathological need to be right.

The moment I moved here, I started searching for a job as a cub reporter and found out quickly I was too old for the job because no one would look at me. It’s not the job I wanted, it’s the job I thought I could do. I already just pull the string and 3,000 words will come out. Deadlines are every bit as solid as ticket times, and you’re reacting to what’s happening rightthefucknow rather than having to sit on a story for weeks until you get it perfect.

I am glad I continue to train myself like a journalist, because my other works are going faster now that I “work out” before I get to them. Writing is a muscle, and my emotions feed it. I decide whether I like the feel of my craft or not, and what styles advance me, what doesn’t.

Being a wishy-washy storyteller is boring to other people, I am not a dictator over my friends. That’s because I don’t have a lock on our future. I have a lock on my reactions to our past. I’m never going to be nosier than you’ll let me.

It’s just hard to be curious and have people think it’s nosy. In my relationships, I want to know what makes those people tick. Them not telling me those things makes me feel rejected, because I don’t mean any harm and yet have caused anger. I genuinely care or I would never ask you anything.

I’m not going to stick around if my curiosity is intrusive because I’m autistic and I’m not going to walk on eggshells or change. It’s impossible. It’s not my personality, it’s my disability. You can deal with it or you can’t, and that’s not my bag. I have become better about seeing the people that show up instead of wanting people who don’t.

It’s only when I’m truly alone that I want Supergrover whether she wants me or not. It’s too powerful to grow through the thermonuclear war to not pay attention. I learned who I was, who I didn’t want to be anymore. I learned who I love and how. I made a list of what’s wrong with me and why. I don’t apologize for the things over which I have no control anymore, because I absolutely don’t believe I “should have known better” in front of people who don’t talk. They will never know how my responses would have changed if they knew how I felt and weren’t brave enough to ask.

In some ways, I write everything here to push through rejection sensitivity disorder, meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, impulse control, etc. I could keep naming symptoms that suck for quite a while, but writing gives me structure I don’t get elsewhere. I don’t have demand avoidance over things I understand intimately. I also use my writing as a jumping off point for conversation, so people already know how I feel before I see them if they’re fans, and don’t if they don’t want to know. Their choice. Being a fan is not a requirement, but you’ll get more of me if you are. Full stop. This is because the autism doesn’t mix well with conversation. It is even easier to have a conversation through chat than verbally. A lot of autistic people process through writing to cut down on social masking, so I am very much not alone in this trait.

I’m admitting that I am not the person I thought I was because it makes me feel better about myself. That I am finding solid answers about working around limitations rather than being ignorant of them. I am also not using autism for anything but a Google or YouTube search term. It’s not an excuse, but it is very much my responsibility to let you know so that you do not hold me to neurotypical standards, which harp on a neurodivergent person’s greatest weaknesses. It’s a trap (Zoidberg gif)!

It feels like my only choice is to do this by myself, because even if people are dismissive, that doesn’t make it untrue or less difficult. You only have to study how much AuDHD and ASD is missed in women for five minutes to understand that what I’m telling you is not bullshit. You only have to spend another five minutes to know why so many people avoid an official diagnosis. It’s expensive and intimidating, leads to more discrimination at work. An official diagnosis can help you stay employed at some companies, get your resume left in the dust at others. It depends on how the culture of the office views neurotypical people as a whole. If you are any combination of the neurodivergent disorders, you have problems keeping track of important things because sensory issues impede your comprehension. Having an open office plan for every employee is like picking on kids for being fussy eaters. They’re both neurodivergent traits that result in neurotypical people saying “get over it.”

Autistic people can be astronomically talented and unemployed because they cannot “get with the program.” If you have a policy that I must be able to write, talk on the phone, and listen to everyone else’s conversations just because other people can do it is insane. People want to have hired neurodivergent people. They do not want to work with them. We are HR window dressings like all the other minorities.

There are two sides to every story. I also understand why having neurodivergent employees with needs so highly specialized is problematic. You cannot provide enough space to block out noise for me, and even if I wear headphones my eyes are tracking an enormous amount of activity. All of that matters in terms of performance. How many things am I expected to keep track of at once, knowing that the very same things that limit me at work make me the most frustrated at home. Guaranteed. I don’t dislike those things about myself any less than they do. I’m just tired of feeling like a failure, and see promise in my writing because it’s helping me. I have the attitude that it doesn’t matter if readers show up for not, because I do my bit in asking people to read without being obnoxious. There’s a difference between building my audience slowly and actively trying to be the center of attention. I don’t want to “go viral.” I want people to know my name when shit hits Amazon.

I ask for donations, you don’t get a paywall. To me, that’s enough. A few ads aren’t that obtrusive, and I know that because of my stats. People wouldn’t stay if the design wasn’t easy to read, and ads in paragraph breaks are mostly fine. I honest to God do not want to be famous. I want to be respected. I am, among a very small audience (small being relative for the web), and am growing every day. Life is small ball. You don’t hit a home run every time you’re at bat, or at least, I don’t.

It’s just so much different understanding the rules, and how they’re different in the National and American Leagues.

The Secret Lives of Puppets, by TJ Klune

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What book are you reading right now?

I can’t tell you anything about this book, really, because I just started it last night. It’s not as fast a read as “House in the Cerulean Sea” or “Under the Whispering Door.” However, I am encountering my first ace character and we are not dissimilar. When I’m not thinking about it, it’s not important. Obviously. There were seven years between Dana and Zac because I was delusional. I wish I could put it better than that, but it was ridiculous to think I could make a mistake like that because it would be something she’d struggle to forgive. That being said, she also made a mistake I’m struggling to forgive, because it changed the course of my life in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen for myself knowing so much now that I didn’t then. What is important to me is that I have absolutely no problem with the entire world knowing I was straight up out of my fuckin’ mind, because that’s what made the mistake possible. I was in autistic meltdown and taking it out on her.

Then, I literally got burnout for seven years.

My executive function cratered because I felt so horrible. This is what I mean about her having a husband that can spoil her in a way I would’ve wanted, because I owe her a lot more than he does. She should have gotten all the best parts of me, and she didn’t. People can and do change, but not without a backbreaking amount of emotional work. I loved her so hard, I was willing to sit in the pain of rejection until it didn’t hurt anymore; I wanted us both to forgive each other and move on. I wrote her long letters into the night explaining my feelings to that end.

When they didn’t work, I had to stop the pattern of me needing her so much without her securing our attachment. It felt creepy because at the time I didn’t know I was autistic. I didn’t know I was a monotropic thinker and that every time I fall in love that woman becomes my entire special interest. Additionally, I didn’t love her because she was perfect, I loved us in our imperfections because I felt so powerful virtually “standing next to her.” I was a fool, but it was worth it and it always will be.

I don’t know why she wants me to carry the weight of her indecision, but I don’t have to love it. I just have to live it. It is perfectly ok to stop a toxic cycle and cry myself to sleep until it gets better. 10 years is not nothing, and everyone can tell I’ll never get over it because I won’t shut up about it. One of the friends I consider to be the most precious in my mind gave me that line…. “Leslie, you don’t have to love it. You just have to live it.” After that, I called her “the poet laureate of Skidmore Street.” What I do know is that “It Gets Better.” I don’t ruminate over the women in my past as much as I do Dana and Supergrover because they’re the most recent. The immediate reaction is that she’s my Achilles’ Heel. Over time, this will relax. I just have to let it happen because she seems bound and determined to let it.

This may not be the entire reason, but part of it is that my beautiful girl is so goddamn stubborn. She vows not to respond and does. We have done it to each other so much that it doesn’t mean anything anymore and I’ve stopped trying to make it. What I know for sure is that it could go either way based on past history and I’m prepared for every eventuality. That’s what I meant about being able to see living together (the spinster in the attic) to never speaking again. It’s a wide spectrum because we are as people. We are both so brilliant and so stupid about this. I thought yesterday about writing to her, “I wish you’d take it in that I love you like most people love babies…. that wild, crazy love no matter what their future holds.” I realized that’s how most autistic people I’ve met love others. I hope she sees that I’m trying to social mask the right way, but sometimes things are going to get lost in translation. Neurotypical and neurodivergent are two different languages. She’s speaking Hebrew, and it’s all Greek to me (little Biblical humor for you there). Autistic rage and burnout are tangible, they’re so loud. I don’t mean to be rude or avoidant. I am trying to cope with as much as I can handle, which as it turns out is a smaller amount than I’ve been led to believe.

I have covered my social masking until now. Writing is the only way I knew it existed. Being disconnected from Supergrover’s facial expressions while I talked cost me dearly, but writing letters to each other all the time drew me in, because you can’t social mask if you’re not adjusting at every eye twitch. I have said this before, but virtually it’s easy to go a long way down the wrong road very fast.

I have said that we looked before we leapt, but it wasn’t a bad move. It just needs to be managed, and I’m the only one that wants to manage it. It is unfathomable to me that she doesn’t see my point, so I’m done worrying what she thinks if she’s ignoring all my warning signs. That I am trying to tell her something without telling her something. But I can’t hold it over her head that she’s obstinate. I just have to wait it out and wear the wound on my skin until it becomes healthy, stronger scar tissue.

It’s not hard not knowing how she feels. It’s hard not knowing her reactions to what I write. At the same time, she wasn’t here when she was here, only once telling me I was too close to the hard out and making me afraid I’d ever do it again. I’ve seen her warning rattle enough for a lifetime. She has never seen mine, but mine is not about biting her. It’s about trying not to bite her. I am sure that I have made mistakes that I would absolutely regret in publishing anything, much less about this. But I don’t get to feel regret if you don’t tell me you were hurt and why.

Only strangers respond to my writing because it’s not personal. I respect that and like it very, very much because it means that I can be off in my own little world with my own silly observations and no one cares. The only time my friends respond to my writing, really, is when they’re so angry that they can’t see straight. Every deep, intimate, positive portrayal goes out the window because no one can see their own bullshit or respect that I did and have an opinion about it. This has been true since 2003.

There are only two exceptions to this. Bryn tells me when I’ve written something beautiful, and I love when she loves how I’ve portrayed her. She is the 3D character that sees she’s a 3D character. If we got in a fight, she wouldn’t give two shits what I said here, because talking it out personally is more important. She actually would say “what can I do to ease your mind about that?” The same is true of Supergrover, or was until 2014. After that, I was rightfully “PNG’d back to Langley” (slang at CIA for being demoted to a desk jockey- persona non grata).

I just hate it because we used to be Jack and Greer.

“The Secret Lives of Puppets” touches on this because since the protagonist is ace, the story revolves around deep platonic relationships. Sometimes, the universe sends you the book you need to read at the time you need the words most. Finding this book was a godsend in terms of learning about myself. That I focus on deep relationships whether they’re romantic or not. In fact, in this book, the “puppets” are mostly androids and robots.

Using androids and puppets doesn’t mean that I didn’t already pick up the message that friendship is valuable… and being a writer may not make our friendship continue, but it does make it immortal. She will live in me for a lifetime, and after we pass, our words to each other will still be here.

If people know me at all, they know that I might be a mess sometimes, but I love my friends and want to make all of us live forever.

………even without new dialogue.

Laughing So Hard You Must Send Help

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I made pasta with pesto. It was an entire box of spaghetti, so I just ate as much as I wanted and put the rest away. Pasta acts as a sponge and gets dry overnight in the fridge, so rather than eating too-dry pasta, I just made a second sauce. You can do that with pasta, and it tastes better than reheating the same thing. Tomorrow, I might add diced tomatoes.

Today, it was Alfredo. I browned some pumpkin seeds in salted butter, adding garlic powder and black pepper. Then, I added flour. The flour sauteed for a few seconds as I got out my whisk and milk (it’s important to have the heat very low for roux. Gives you more time to catch a mistake). I do not know how much flour. I whisk in milk slowly. I don’t know how much of that, either. If I add too much, it will take longer because I will have to wait for the sauce to reduce before I can add the Parmesan-Romano.

I am a professional cook and do everything by feel and palate. It’s not “being a snob,” it’s 10 years of experience at work, my entire adult life at home. A roux just a 1:1 Tbsp. ratio flour/butter and a half cup of milk being exact, but you can break the rules if you know how to follow them. If I know what the sauce is supposed to look like, I can change gears on the fly, where butter is clutch and flour is accelerator. Some people measure. I guesstimate accurately, and there are very few mistakes in flavor I cannot fix; I really only throw things away if they’re burnt, or, God forbid there’s blood on it now (accidents happen).

I am telling you what to do because I know what I’m doing, not because this is some kind of food magic only I possess… and that’s actually the point of this entry. When I was cooking, I was thinking about one of my last entries in which I talked about running a kitchen at home, and today I was thinking that relationships are so telling by how you work in one. If you are in a relationship, dinner is always a two-man job. I know that this is impossible every single night, I just think that whoever is home should participate. Both “stations” suck, so trade off.

One person is mostly the cook, one person is mostly on dish. There is a chef and a sous, because it’s easier for one person to manage the recipe and assign parts out. The most essential thing that a sous can do is be available. Chop the onions. Grate the cheese. Most importantly, wash every pot and pan as they’re done using it. There are some things where you can cook and clean at the same time, like if I have a rice cooker going and I want sausage to go on top or whatever. Those things are going to be done at such different times that I can handle it.

But having a pot washer is invaluable with pasta because the pasta goes into the collander, then back into the pot. You pour the sauce from the saute pan into the pasta pot so you can mix/reheat. The other person washes the saute pan and the collander, because the person mixing pasta has gone on to plating. Once the food is plated, one person can carry everything out while the other washes the pasta pot.

When the pasta pot is clean, the only thing left is putting plates and silverware into the dishwasher.

It takes teamwork to run a kitchen that smoothly, but it will change your life on days where you eat all three meals at home. Plus, it’s easier for me to social mask around all that stuff. Being in a partnership reminds me to do things like eat.

I look forward to cooking with Zac one day, because he does like it. He buys all kinds of interesting things for me to discover when I’m housesitting, like blocks of haloumi cheese that I seared with za’atar (that was so good I ate most of it right out of the pan). That being said, when we’ve gotten together we’ve either gone out or to Trader Joe’s, where inevitably there will be something new and different we must buy immediately.

My favorite meal we’ve eaten together is Korean fried chicken. I do like the flavor of southern fried chicken, but not like I love this. I could eat soy garlic or spicy chicken every day for the rest of my life (just not exclusively). Most people eat chicken, veggies, and rice in some combination most days. If you have a close, deep, personal relationship with Popeyes, Korean fried chicken will be up there on your list, too. It’s also almost as good to take off the skin if you have to avoid high-fat, because the marinade is just as good as the sauce. Plus, cooking it on the bone will yield better results than taking out the skin and bones beforehand (morbid, yet true). There’s a reason drums and flats are more popular than boneless. Not the same playing field.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I do like chicken nuggets. I just don’t like McNuggets. I think they taste fake. I do like grocery store chicken, like Dino Nuggets. They’re great with a little salt, pepper, and garlic before you put them in the oven. Season them just like you would patties for a chicken sandwich- ditto for vegetarian or vegan Quorn. Quorn nuggets and patties are my go-to at home.

This is because I also like to buy my own wing sauce rather than buying nuggets that are just “Buffalo flavored.” :::stares in Morningstar Farms::: Right now my favorite wing sauce is ghost pepper and tastes more on the Sriracha end of the spectrum than Buffalo. I pair it with Daiya bleu cheese most of the time. If I have time, I’ll make it. Cream dressings are one of the few things that it’s easier for me to make than buy because the ingredients are so cheap. Even if I was a millionaire, it would not make sense to me to pay for mayo I was going to use in a dressing. I would only use the dressing for one night. I would need the preservatives in pre-made mayo.

Thinking about the jobs you have in the kitchen requires both understanding what they want to eat. The thing that my ex-wife and I learned in a restaurant was how to divide up a recipe without thinking, at home or at work (she was my first chef… which is cute to the point of nausea). If she was grilling, I was making sides. If people were coming over and it was a bigger operation, we were both making sides and rotating who went out to flip the bird in front of the neighbors. 😉

The thing that made our relationship work in the kitchen is that I liked making sides and Dana liked grilling, but if she didn’t feel like it, I could grill and she could make sides. Both jobs were important, and we were both outstanding cooks. It was nice to both be competent so we didn’t have to do anything, we chose which jobs we wanted.

In our professional kitchen, I liked making things like eggs, pancakes, and oatmeal. She also liked eggs, but liked being on the meat side of the griddle- I can only assume because she was a butcher (butcher than what?).

When my father got the job in the Heights, my mother met another piano player and they used to do four handed duets together. I loved how all four parts fit together, and there’s not a better description in my mind now that Dana and I were always a two-handed duet and oh, dear God I just heard it.

I can’t top that. I’m dead.

18th and Potomac

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

Sometimes I use old West Wing episode titles rather than making my own because I live in DC. They’re plays on words for something that really happened. 18th and Potomac is where Mrs. Landingham died in a car wreck. The car wreck in this case is that my smallest dream (therefore my most desperate, my heartbeat) is the least affordable- a house in the DMV is going to set you back enormously. You, your children and grandchildren may buy well and it returns your investment fivefold. But in order to do that, it takes about half a million dollars (at least- better if it’s a 500k downpayment to make the mortgage reasonable).

That’s because in order to get an actual deal, you want to buy the worst house in the best location…. anyone can make money in Georgetown these days no matter what you buy, but the jump in value will be much smaller from the time you move in to move out.

It takes special skill to buy a house in SE Waterfront, which one of my friends did in 2001. If you weren’t there, you have no concept of what it looked like. It was a concrete jungle in a neighborhood with high crime, and this is important, at the time. He completely overhauled the entire thing, building custom everything. That house is worth at least a million just because of the land, more because the house is absolutely one of a kind.

In DC, the sky is the limit on real estate, because as I’ve mentioned before, DC is only 60 sq. miles. It moves fast and furious. I know other cities are more expensive- I’m not sure that the market is as consistently volatile with a third of the House rotating in and out with all their staff, the Senate rotating in and out every six years with all their staff, and the military, intelligence agencies, and State all having jobs that move them around the world (even if the DMV is home base). DC is a permanent address for fewer people than it isn’t.

You don’t get to know our city until you know our poverty. This is because poor people don’t move in the same way as middle class government salaries. Lower economic classes tend to grow where they’re planted because they don’t have the money to do anything else. Therefore, the poorest people are the richest institutional memory. You don’t go to them for history of the nation, you go to them for the history of DC. They are the authority on the riots in the 60s, the night Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated (DC is heavily black, and I think at one point the majority), the best mumbo sauce, go-go music, Duke Ellington, and, apparently, public television. We have three stations within, like 30 miles. It’s fabulous. This Old House is always on somewhere. DC isn’t a city, it’s a whole mood. God willing, I will live here a very long time.

I will never in my lifetime make enough money to buy a house in the neighborhood where I rent, though. The house is just “nice” in comparison to the location, and it’s gorgeous. My mother left me enough money for a down payment on a small house in northeast Texas if I wanted to buy it today (I’d be taxed at 40%, so no thank you), or a better area when I turn 65. Even with leaving the money where it is and not touching it until then (I’m 46 now), it still wouldn’t be a down payment in Silver Spring, Maryland….. I am open to moving within a certain radius, like Hagersville (home of the Southern MD Blue Crabs, who happen to be in the same league with the Sugar Land Skeeters, my home town minor league). I would also consider buying a small house in Baltimore, because getting between the two cities is stupid easy and Baltimore is much, much cheaper. I could even commute if I had to, more and more possible with remote work.

It’s funny, I never would have said that I wanted a house here until I had been here awhile. I lived in Alexandria, Virginia the first time I moved in 2001. (I’ve lived in both MD and VA, but not DC proper…. like I tell people I’m from Houston, when I lived in a suburb for most of it.) I thought of myself as Virginian until I’d been back for more time than I thought it would take. There is a much different vibe in Maryland. MUCH different. You feel it- going over the Potomac introduces you to something you ignore in the South….. Yankees.

Maryland is the last state under the Mason-Dixon line. No one is undermining its pedigree as part of the south. However, our culture is led by New England, not Virginia. Annapolis has politics closer to Trenton and Albany than Richmond. The difference between someone raised in the North and in the South becomes clear…… and racism isn’t everything, but it’s a lot.

The further you go into the suburbs on the Virginia side, the more people make jokes about this being “St. Bob’s Country,” where “Bob” is Robert E. Lee…. or that if your last name is “Lee” in that area, you are either of THE Lees or you are Chinese. At no time do those people recognize why that’s not funny. If you have any blowback to any of their “jokes,” they will remind you that Robert E. Lee gave the government the land for Arlington Cemetery. To push back on that one is never a good idea, because it’s their only sword in the fight; they get feral when you knock it out of their hands because they’ve lost the high ground so goddamn fast.

Living in Maryland is escaping all of that, because once you cross the river, Virginia isn’t even a thing anymore. The time it takes to adjust to the culture between Maryland and Virginia is longer than it takes to drive here, I’ll just put it like that.

Culture is the entire reason we don’t cross-pollinate, why Zac thinks I live a thousand miles away and Google Maps ETA (0633) tells me that if I leave right now in an Uber it will take 33 minutes…. and it’s only two and a half hours door to door if I took public transportation the whole way (leaving out shortcuts like being picked up at the Metro or Ubering from the station to take care of Oliver, who is a dog. It would cut off my commute to Zac by a large margin if he lived near the Metro, but he hadn’t met me before he decided to move (that was a joke, Zachary- please laugh).

No one I know who lives in Virginia is someone who thinks they’re a racist, and I don’t either unless they’re just white and that’s the only standard we’re going on. I do, because even when people aren’t overtly racist, they still benefit from racism.

Racism is a top-down system of oppression that minorities cannot duplicate. Living in that system, upholding it makes one racist. To be antiracist is to be loud about the fact that you are calling out behaviors you exhibit; you have to realize that you are at least currently steeped in those attitudes if you refuse to grow away from them. I am a huge fan of the writer who, I think, Tweeted that they were tired of catering to old people that lived through the entire ass Civil Rights movement and didn’t learn shit from Shinola.™ I’m paraphrasing.

I have become louder about this as I’ve realized that my white partners have not made the connection and I am too pissed off to be with another white person who cannot admit complicity. I mentioned this was an issue with Daniel, but he’s not the only Southern white person I’ve ever dated, either. Don’t think that shit didn’t happen more than once. I didn’t get the lines about Richmond from nowhere. One of my partners had bigger fuckin’ problems than Daniel about it…. and the worst part is that white people characterize them as jokes because they think minorities are cute.

In “Go Tell a Watchman,” Harper Lee makes the point that white people like taking care of black people and race relations would have been fine if they hadn’t stopped seeing the white savior complex as a good thing. Whites weren’t hiring black people after the Civil War. They could get slave wages at best without colleges being open to them.

Abolutionists/Progressives had left slavery in the dust (introducing egregious hiring practices, redlining, the Tuskeegee experiments and Henrietta Lacks), trading it for their do-gooder feelings. “If we give to charity, we can help minorities by keeping them from falling into the river and not exploring why the current is so strong.

This is where my red mist rage is directed. Fuck the white savior complex. The Green Book was a fucking masterpiece at highlighting bullshit, brilliant because it was so fucking atrocious and satirical- if you were picking up the subtext and feeling more tender toward the black queer musical genius than his fucking driver. That scene in the bar. My God. I have never wanted to give a standing ovation to a musician more. Let’s not ignore the queer part. Mahershala Ali played a big hate double ticket.

I am not “progressive Karen,” the virtue-signaling haircut with an attitude. I won’t unload on someone about it unless it naturally comes up. Cultural norms about race inform those about sexuality. I don’t want to beat white people over the head, I want to say how I feel and have the right people come to me.

If you’re a white person who can’t admit they’re a racist by being enculturated as one, we don’t have much in common. I’d rather spend my time around people who share my values and goals. Which, I might add, means I get along more with queer POC than white, because there’s a special hell for people who have more than one minority at play. I’m not just white and queer. I have two information processing disorders, mentally ill and physically disabled…. although mental illness is not a processing disorder and I am making that distinction. That is the stone cold fact that “mental health goes up and down, but AuDHD will affect you (suck) no matter what”

I am AuDHD (autism and ADHD, I can’t remember if I’ve directly explained the word before- telling you about it in case you want to watch a video on YouTube or something. That’s been the most helpful for me- here’s what to do now that you know. The bitch of it is that autism and ADHD present the same way a lot of the time, but the coding is generally different on the backend. You’re trapped, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.).

I also have a Bipolar II diagnosis. I’m a big hate double ticket in that I am both making people uncomfortable with my queerness in some arenas, and infantilized in others. Discrimination either comes from straight culture not accepting me, or all people with wrongheaded ideas about autism, ADHD, and bipolar rendering me an incapable adult….. or alternatively, the reaction to saying I’m autistic is generally “you don’t look autistic.” When I figure out how to do that, I’ll let you know. If you know an autistic person, you know one autistic person. No two people are alike, and AuDHD is more complicated than autism alone.

Therefore, I feel incapable enough on my own time. I do not need any reinforcement in this arena.

Editor’s Note:

All of the sudden, I have developed an *immediate* need for coffee. Hold please.

Now that I have coffee next to me, we can get back to why living in DC is so important to me.

I would have not grown in any of these ways regarding antiracism if I hadn’t moved, full stop. Living here in 2001 was only my second exposure to black people that didn’t speak AAVE, and had a completely different culture (the first was meeting black people in The Bahamas- Freeport specifically- with a British [RP] accent). I am no longer a product of my northeast Texas upbringing, and I just thought about this- I was no longer a product of my upbringing the moment we landed in the Bahamas.

I got out of my culture, and I noticed. The repetition of that idea had an impact, that black culture was not monolithic. The first time was in the 80s. The second was 2001. Most people don’t ever learn that when they’re eight or nine in the Deep South; most people in the Deep South don’t go to The Bahamas, and I’m not being an asshole. Look it up. People rarely leave their state and don’t have passports, and this is not limited to the South. They’re oblivious because sometimes they can’t get out, sometimes they don’t wanna. That’s a crapshoot.

And, of course, even then you’re taking a huge bet on cultural awareness. Americans are Americans everywhere we go. If there’s anything that going to The Farm would do for me that I’d value more than anything else is language skills in something besides English…..

I’m closer to being fluent in Spanish than anything else- I identify as gringo Texican- the white girl with seven abuelas in three different cities. Incidentally, I also have a Lebanese Omm (Arabic for “mother”). She speaks the Levantine dialect, so I’m sorry if this is not the word for mother in others- I was trying to be sweet. I am at least worth a “habibi” from her most of the time… (it’s Arabic for “sweetheart,” or something like it…. akin to mulkvisti in Finland- “one I hate less than the others”).

The other invaluable asset to spy training is not looking like so much of an American when I travel…. especially when not starting to count from my thumb in Europe can cause such devastation. 😉

Luckily, I don’t have to go to The Farm to pick up all these things, because between retired spies on YouTube and the plethora of non-fiction books on espionage I have enough information to be able to adapt into a lot of cultures. I can’t always look “not American,” but I can at least be aware of cultural norms even if I can’t social mask them.

In effect, my smallest dream is fulfilling my largest. In order to travel, I need to know the feel of home. The feel of home is being excited about world events, making history… have always made history.

Because let’s face it. When you’re talking about the United States,

I live in the history.

Now, not only is DC where we keep the history of the nation, I am part of it. I am loud about it in some spaces, quiet in others. I will never be anything but a silent observer in Frederick Douglass’s house, the African American History Museum, or staring at the stunning photographs on the wall at Ben’s Chili Bowl. It’s actually, in some ways, a more moving experience than the entire museum. I reserve the right to change my mind when I go back to see Chadwick Boseman’s original Black Panther costume. He’s a hometown sensation and I absolutely will stand in front of it and cry.

What I have noticed through having a blog is that being a silent observer allows me to take that information away and slam it into the faces of people who most need to hear it. I am not responsible for changing the black community, I am responsible for changing my own….. living where I most want to live in the world.

Show Mode -or- Fixed Point in Time

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been disconnected from everyone lately, because having two people validate my experience as AuDHD has made me run. I am not isolating to piss people off, it’s just that there’s three people in my life for which I have enough energy because I’ve made commitments to them. To augment that is to overload my sensory perception while I’m going through a hell of a lot, and I have not taken this tack my whole life, just the last 10 years (on purpose- I’ve isolated, but through mental illness, not working out a processing disorder). Meeting Supergrover was the catalyst for leaving Dana, but falling in love with her was not.

While I had a virtual relationship, it unlocked the disconnect between ADHD and autism. Dana and I began to drift as I holed up in my office to write. It wasn’t just attraction on my end; it was being able to process through writing all the time and becoming dramatically more introverted and quiet. I have a tendency to let another person drag me along because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, so me being steamrolled for eight years in this relationship is what I do. If I am not pleasing someone, I will not give up. I didn’t give up on the woman that emotionally abused me until someone who could read the situation blind (three someones, actually) and tell how she messed me up. They gave me permission, in a sense, to stop. Nothing was ever going to change or get better, because she made a horrible emotional mistake and was running from it. She gave me a college journal that was full of information about sex I never should have had at 14. Whether she meant to or not, she’s opened a door to something that I couldn’t handle…… but I was 14, so I wanted to…….. JFC I was so wrecked. I wanted to be married before I could drive or vote. She piqued my interest on so many levels that I know it wasn’t all abuse and there were genuine moments.

I wouldn’t be the singer or the personality I am today without her, for evil or for awesome. I would like to think that as I grew, I shed the things about her that no longer served me and tried to let go of rage. My rage toward her is the biggest trigger that makes basic anger multiply into red mist rage. At the time, in my mind I wasn’t being abused. She was a bird with a broken wing and I was going to help her fly again…….. in my infinite 14-year-old wisdom.

Guilt and anger led her to tell everyone how mentally ill and obsessed with her I was, because she opened herself up to becoming a monotropic thought process for me and fucked me over. The reason that the relationship with Supergrover is not the same, because the woman who abused me was a narcissist who fed on my emotions. Supergrover didn’t trust me after I’d hurt her. I got screwed over by my emotional abuser, so I perpetuated a bad pattern. Full stop. But regaining trust was impossible because for as much as Supergrover hates when I say it, their mutual experiences are the same, therefore so are their trauma reflexes. That doesn’t mean their behavior comes from the same source. I could not take responsibility for being 14, but I can take responsibility for being 36.

My isolation is thinking about The Gospel of Billy Joel:

They say that these are not the best of times, but they’re the only times I’ve ever known….. and I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own. I have seen that sad surrender in my lover’s eyes… I can only stand apart and sympathize, for we are always what our situations hand us… it’s either sadness or euphoria. So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing has ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same. -Psalm Summer, Highland Falls 1:1-2

I wrote that from memory because an interviewer asked Joel what song was his favorite of all the ones he’s written, and this is it. I don’t have anything but the first two verses memorized, but that’s because they’ve changed my life the most. I realized that my entire personality was living life in two different time streams, because my writing digs backward as I move forward. It’s not a thing I do, it is a comprehensive response to life. I skirt the edge with blowback not because I’m asking for it, itching for a fight. It’s that I cannot understand my environments without it. What other people think of me is none of my business.

I did not come to that thick a skin unscathed, I just want you to know that. I had to tank my blog out of embarrassment and stop writing for a few years to get up the confidence to come back. It’s all connected, though. If I hadn’t taken the time out to regroup, I might not have written the article on Facebook Notes that translated into more popularity than I’ve ever had…. popularity that snagged my beautiful girl out of my peripheral vision and made her the whole show. I didn’t fall in love with simple adoration. Like Driving Miss Daisy, it was “I’m here to take you where you want to go.” You want to know how well Supergrover knows me? She bought me a font.

She’s crazy gorgeous, and remembers all my favorite things. Tell me my feelings are wrong. I’ll wait as long as it takes for all y’all to catch up. 😉

And in fact, I do not not think she had the same effect on Dana, the source of her jealousy and ire. It’s just a whole other thing because our adoration looked different. As my beautiful girl and I opened up to each other, it excluded her in a major way. Her jealousy was not wrong or bad, just, I feel, misplaced. Logic and emotion are not the same. Even if she didn’t understand my feelings, she completely understood why I would feel that way.

That being said, I do not think that Dana and I would have worked it out later because a) I couldn’t shut up and II) she overfocused on Supergrover being a monotropic thought process for me and not that I was actively trying to remove her (not from my life, from my “obsession” that’s actually autism- a trauma bond making it impossible to not make her my first thought every morning.). Thoughts of being with her were fleeting. Thoughts of supporting her were not.

I told her I would be the Merlin to her Arthur, and at no time did I stop meaning it. I figured out the balance years ago, and waited for the butterflies to fade. They did, but she hasn’t left the space she occupies in my head. Due to a series of fortunate events, I might be able to move her from a monotropic thought process to a passing interest, but she’ll never move out. She’s in the tapestry of my writing and my gray matter.

But, sensibly, since I couldn’t shut up about her it made her nervous. I didn’t have to love it, but I did have to live it. Therefore, I just had to be okay with seeming threatening in order to leave Dana; I didn’t want to be within a hundred miles of her. Staying in Houston would have been okay if I’d moved to a different quadrant. Leaving to go back to a familiar city was better, because I felt that the biggest mistake of my adulthood was leaving DC originally and not establishing myself on my own…….. social masking my closest friend was easier, treacherous when I realized that she wasn’t, in fact, my closest friend.

If I hadn’t left DC, I wouldn’t have been in water that kept getting hotter. I also wouldn’t be where I am now, so out of pain came glory. If I hadn’t moved back to Portland, no one would have been able to see the patterns we established in my childhood because they wouldn’t have been current patterns. An abuser always cold shoulders you when they’re done…… but you’re still pining for them because they trained your body with a Pavlovian response.

In fact, that’s why we “broke up.” It was years before Supergrover and I connected, but the spell had been broken and I’d started to reevaluate. There are three instances that pushed me into a cathedral of my own.

First, coming to Portland was rough on day one. Basically, I’d come to visit about four weeks before and we solidified plans for me to move. Then, when I arrived with my car, she looked more freaked out than I’d ever seen her in my life, like telling me I should move and encouraging me to find a job and a place was just child’s play. Like we hadn’t been discussing this since she got the job offer in 1996 or 7. It wasn’t a dumb move. She’d moved to Dallas so she could live with her partner while she used her for free rent to get through grad school (don’t think I couldn’t suss that out- her partner was every bit as much trouble as Dana- with her DUI, not Dana’s ability as a wife.) With the emotional abuser, as it turns out, “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions were the same.”). Coming to Portland was about being able to have someone to lean on, even if we weren’t a couple…. just like had been modeled for me. She might have stayed with her partner, but not because she meant it.

Secondly, I know said emotional abuser saw the pattern repeat coming, the abusive one between her and me. I know she did. For every time she pushed me away, her love for me was the purest thing in her life. I know this because I got in under the wire. As I got older, I was not a person. I was an event….. an opera with many intermissions, plot twists, and both sopranos die at the end.

I don’t know how she knew, because I don’t know how she knew Dana’s drinking history. But I swear to God that’s what her eyes said….. “this is a mistake, but I know you cannot even see it yet because I have walked this path and you haven’t.” I was mad AF and still defend Dana to the ends of the earth.

Thirdly, at the time, it came across like “you’re better than Dana. She works at a grocery store.” It was very muddled because she was not the only one who held such an opinion. Neurodivergents have trouble holding down jobs. Period. She had to find the job she could do, not where she’s the most talented. Consistency over excitement. Hospitality every single day. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t studied Shakespeare. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t a technical theater major in college. That doesn’t mean she’s not an actor. She would have been hilarious on Portlandia- I would have, too, in the writer’s room.

But did my current friends see that? No. No, they didn’t. I didn’t just dump the abuser, I dumped all of them, too. They weren’t my real friends because they couldn’t see Dana the way I could. I saw her the same way as the people who birthed her, grew up with her. I didn’t live in her limitations, I reveled in her strength. Despite her truly bad case of ADHD, she’s higher functioning than I am. Social masking her was like social masking my sister (and that line is specific).

I learned all of this by going down to the river to pray, studying about that good old way.

One day when I was particularly wrecked about all this, two friends took me hiking in the Columbia River Gorge, where I sent my tears down Wahkeena Falls, out into the river, and around Cape Disappointment. They were the friends who bailed me out the first time I got dumped by this woman in a way I knew we’d never come back.

I mentioned before that abusers install a back door in you that activates dopamine/sex drive because it feels exactly like the first rush- if they’ve been turning the sunshine away from you to regain access. This came in the form of a phone call when I was in my 20s, one that when I got it, I didn’t want anything more in my life…… until it was over.

I would say her tone was seductive because I’d just watched her do it to someone else, but I’m willing to entertain the fact it’s not correct. At the very least, her tone felt inviting in a very heightened way, and I’m dead serious, not spitballing. She said that she felt like I was a woman she’d like to get to know. I don’t remember anything else because it was a trigger. I went into fight or flight immediately and damn near passed out from red mist rage. I’d had a full-on panic attack at work and went home early. It was 10 years before I knew why I’d been triggered, and couldn’t explain why I felt the way I felt, but avoided her from there on out.

Two things about that. The first is that when I reacted, she immediately pushed me away and I knew there was no chance to prepare my environment and “win” another chance. Second of all, I have to believe that she knew what she was doing. She didn’t stop herself, but she realized it was wrong afterward. On some level, she realized it was hurtful because of the back door and because it was a little too little too late.

I watched her marry a partner I didn’t like because she was just like me, the spitting image except older and more degrees. I watched her manipulate her best friend into “friends with some benefits,” keeping her on a leash for years. Someone I’d once wanted so bad I couldn’t breathe proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that she didn’t deserve me in her life, much less as a partner.

She has no idea how much damage she’s done, because since I was social masking her, I’ve been the best and worst of her without ever understanding why. It’s not that I’m not the best of my own mother as well, it’s that we didn’t spend time together as intimately for her to know me on that level. She got frustrated, I did, too, we gave up.

Years later, I went back to the Gorge with Dana, crying and singing my eyes out; it was the moment I knew I wanted to marry her, in retrospect. We were years away from it, and I knew. That’s because when I was finished crying and singing, I looked over and Dana was crying, watching me. She saw how much pain I was experiencing and took it on. It is a gift I will never be able to repay. I traded something valuable for something valuable, even though the relationship wasn’t valuable to me at the end. We became a bad thing for each other, we didn’t start that way.

Those three experiences shaped me- the ablutions in the river after a truly rough jump scare. I was so frightened of everything because I lost all my social masks at once; they weren’t social masks. They were triggers, and why I don’t like to speak. Speaking means not having enough time to think or delete things so I can never be sure when I will say something without thinking that she used to say and the pitch perfect imitation becomes the jump scare. When I mentioned having her sense of musicality, that’s the healthy part. The negative part is that I’m not in shape because I don’t like to hear myself sing.

I’m a lot more low-functioning than people think because of her and my dad. They’re both unique presences on stage and social masking them covered up just about all my executive function disarray because I was always “on.” What covers my executive function now is not covering it, because people thought I was coasting on charm because I was lazy….. not that when I don’t have a social mask for something, I am utterly and completely fucked. “Coasting on charm” is not a want sort of situation. I am only now trying to social mask Leslie Lanagan,™ because for once in my life, I don’t think she’s that bad. I also don’t think that “Diving Into the Wreck” is something I should avoid.

Supergrover and the rest of my friends don’t have all this context (or, they didn’t until I started writing it down). They haven’t known me since I was 12 years old.

Supergrover in particular gets on my ass about said abusive relationship, always has from day one. She does not see why I do not spit white hot rage all over this woman every day of my life. Easy answer is that monotropic thought process damn near killed me for real. Fuck her, but I’m taking my peace on my own by telling my story exactly the way I want to tell it, because she’s the one person in my life that I absolutely want to tank her career. Writing it out over and over gives the story less power and I’m done being worried about what she thinks, have been for 10 years. I’m not a vindictive motherfucker. She’s just worked with too many kids over the years and I’m also done protecting her. We cannot, do not have any more mutual friends….. or if we do, I run away when she comes up. I don’t talk shit about her in person because I already have a “shelf” for that.

I would Google tattoo her every day of my life if I hadn’t indirectly told Supergrover I wouldn’t. She didn’t ask me to do it, just disapproved of my approach to things because she knew my attention needed to be redirected before I did- not that my ire toward this person was unearned and/or undeserved. She encouraged me to lose my shit on many occasions. Though I decided loving Supergrover was worth my all-encompassing attention, I didn’t get over that abuse immediately because of the genuine moments it contained. My experience, unlike others, wasn’t all negative and I had to wade through it. With the information I had at the time, I wouldn’t do anything else but move to Portland if I could do it over.

For better or for worse, Supergrover is a wolf with terrible yellow eyes when she’s angry. When she met me, she found an excellent use for her jaws in my emotional abuser. When Supergrover bit her, the abuser’s claws finally, finally let go of me…… a mask falling off like the end of a Very Special Episode of Scooby Doo. What was valuable was not concrete. I’d had an experience with my cat recently that felt the same way. Asher was closer to a human than she was a cat, and I could tell the moment her personality left her body, because her face changed and she looked like a wild animal. Revealing the emotional abuse gave that face a different context, looking no less feral.

Supergrover and I are so much better at fighting for each other than we are fighting against, because if someone crosses her, God help them.

The only reason I was okay with the abusive relationship dying at the end is that I got time to make my peace. I was reborn into something I never would have been otherwise. My grumpy old wizard did find a knight, a “Wart” who’s already Arthur and I have to avert my eyes (WELL,STOP IT). I made it to Camelot, which is indeed a silly place.

Because I don’t have to think about abuse anymore, Supergrover has been in my head for 10 years as I process my mutual experience with abuser. Her anger carries me when I don’t feel it enough, and that was important in the months afterward- just not now because none of that is close anymore. I can write about it with the emotional separation I need not to explode emotional landmines.

I’ll let you know if Supergrover moves from her castle “in the cloud.” Just because I gave her an eviction notice means legit nothing in terms of the way I process, and she’s stubborn enough to keep me around in her mind, too. No matter what, we have a past, present, and future

…….because I live in two time streams, forward and backward. Where they meet is a fixed point in time, and you can’t cross your own timelline (I’m so, so sorry). You can only understand it after you’ve passed it by.

Dooced

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)?

For Heather

Web design and development are the coolest things I’ve ever found (and kept) as special interests job-wise. That’s because of anything I’ve ever found, it has led to this moment. Lucrative in the beginning by being IT, possibly lucrative later on as well because I know how to express myself using those tools. I don’t think I have the capability to be a developer anymore, because there’s too much Python, MySQL, and JavaScript for me to keep up. When I started, it was only HTML and CSS. Toward the end, I learned how to read XML, but not write it. Therefore, I can still design, I’d just have to hire out the backend (things like making database connections if I had a content management system, pulling in APIs from other apps, etc.). I know how to edit a script to connect to a database with my username and password securely, but not all the ins and outs of getting the results from the database to appear in a web page. Although in terms of development, search engine optimization is very important, and I do know how to do that. And in fact, search engine optimization is why I’m still here and not using something like Dreamhost.

I have access to a community here that likes to read……. which, if you write 1500 to 3,000 words a day is pretty damn important.

Without getting interested in computers, I wouldn’t have been interested when my friends Joe and Luke said they were starting a linux server and did I want an account on it? I started writing on Darkstar, their (our) server. It connected to the web and you could get to it from the outside, but things didn’t start getting interesting until WordPress, the next big thing I found and kept. However, I didn’t have to transfer from Darkstar to WordPress directly. By that time, my job at University of Houston covered three things that propelled me here. The first was web design, getting used to publishing to a production server to make sure there were no issues before I went live (I caused a few disgruntled looks occasionally, but luckily I never broke a site designed to serve millions of people at once (oops, my bad…. should I leave a note?).

Design includes things like how the page looks, like the columns and where the ads fall and all that (I don’t control ad page breaks- sorry if they suck).

The second aspect of my job was development. Generally, when I was working on design, I’d do it in Photoshop/Illustrator first to get page layout. Development is being able to slice the images I just made and get them to fall the same way through an HTML interpreter. Believe it or don’t, that is a million times easier than page layout in Microsoft Word (amiright?).

The third aspect is content, at which I kick ass and take names. I doubt I’d be able to find all my articles now, because I worked for UH from 1999-2001. When I graduated from lab supervision to the web, I helped run a web zine (looked professional, but that’s basically what it was) called “Information Technology Daily News.” It is in no small part why I can write 1500-3,000 words every single day without blinking. I was trained like a journalist.

It was through that job that I interviewed Helen Thomas, unofficial dean of the White House press corps (the one who said “thank you, Mr. President” at the end of every gaggle). She and people like Sam Donaldson would get information and run to the phones, so I asked her how the Internet had changed all that with a 24-hour news cycle. In Helen’s own spicy way, she said basically it was a bitch on wheels. The question was possible through continuing legal education, but I got into the law school with a press pass.

Editor’s Note:

I didn’t want to see Helen Thomas at all…. eyeroll…. the Mia Hamm and Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson of news? I was dead. DEAD. Boss came through for me even though Helen Thomas was one of his least favorite people on earth (had a t-shirt that I thought was hilarious; it said “charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy.” I remember when I could laugh at that…..) I cried when I saw Helen’s old press pass at the Newseum later that same year.).

The transition from Houston to DC in 2001 was when I really started getting popular, blog-wise. This is because my friend Chason, one of my staff at UH (I was sort of in charge of my area once the original supervisor of the zine left, but I didn’t have hire and fire privileges, just input.) introduced me to people like Anil Dash, Ernie Hsuing, and Wil Wheaton. He may have introduced me to Dooce as well, but I can’t remember how I found her. I just know it was right after she’d gotten “dooced” for her “Asian Database Administrator” comments, but hadn’t taken anything down yet. It was before Jon Armstrong, before Leta was just a twinkle in Heather’s imagination.

The path to Chason was the one directly to Chuck, the former Congressman (who was a dog), the Avon World Sales Leader, BYU dry humping and Sprite,™ and what to do about blowback (nothing).

I wouldn’t have gotten good at WordPress without her, and I miss her every day. People tell me that I sound like David Sedaris and the compliment is astounding….. meanwhile, “I am sparing you the DETAILS OF EARL’S ANGINA.” I wrote a piece on her the moment I found out she died. It was one of the worst moments of my life…. yet, it didn’t have anything to do with her at all. It’s that my virtual friend lost her battle with neurodivergence. I do not know her from Adam, because even though we are both OG, we never crossed paths.

I was not but a few years from a time in my life that I felt that way- not that I wanted to die or anything like that. It was having to choose between physically sick and mentally well every day of my life….. the relentlessness of managing a disease like that, not a particular want to escape from people….. And by that I mean dropping out of society, not my personal relationships. In short, I know what it’s like to be Dooce even if we’ve never been in the same room.

Painting my feelings as fact, she stopped checking the story she was telling herself, betraying heather and leaning on Dooce.™ I do not believe she was a narcissist. I believe that she was protecting her brain from injury with social masking. Blowback will do that to you, and why I believe she started focusing on products instead of her life. People understand “influencers.” They do not understand blogging and why it’s important.

For most of history, we have had to divine it. We had to search for signs of life in archaeology and ancient language. Blogs will eventually shed light into how we lived. The observers to history and culture will be valued in a way that they aren’t currently, like authors becoming famous posthumously.

Speaking of “posthumously,” the second worst moment during Heather’s death was seeing my stats spike as a result. It was a mixed bag of knowing my time has come and what to do about it. I am not the only blogger left standing, because Jenny (The Bloggess) and Wil (Wheaton) are still going strong. We are more of a group than we’re not, all writing through the painful moments in life and trying to make sense of them. It’s carving out our own niché while also being similar…. even the way Dooce, Jenny, and I use humor is simpatico.

That means there’s only four people that I can think of off the top of my head that have been left doing what I do. One of them is me, and one of them has passed away. I am not special because I am getting better. I am special because I am getting rare. I may be getting better, too, but that’s not the source in terms of why people read. I learned though Supergrover that I was talented, that I did have promise in a way that, if I played my cards right, I would be a success. Other rabid fans to come after her have said that I’m going to be a big deal. But it only took 10 years for me to realize that I had to have the same confidence in my writing that they did.

I can stand in 20 years of observations on society without that confidence. I can stand in the fact that I can write about a lot of topics, and people will still find it interesting. I am floored that people will wade through Android/Linux to find Zac, Bryn, Supergrover, Lindsay, Oliver (who is a dog), and the characters that are less prevalent, but no less important. It all adds to the fabric of my life, which gets richer with age as I shed my need for approval.

I get to own my story. I get to take up space.

Heather “From Whom All Blessings Flow” Armstrong is counting on me…… and now my nose is getting red, the first sign I’m about to cry. It’s okay to be wrecked, tears are not a problem….. which is what I do to correct the story I’m telling myself. I needed to hear desperately that the world needed me, and if I could have convinced her of the same, I would have made it a full-time job….. one in which I could go the distance, and we’d have been able to cross the finish line together.

So, when push comes to shove, Heather is the most important thing I’ve found and kept. First, I read her. Then, she moved out of her mind and into mine. I’ve tried to make it nice for her.

She has a pool.

Only Other People Can Do That

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?

It is a slight exaggeration, but I (like all other autistic people) cannot survive while skipping any part of my routine. Mine just isn’t organized by time. It is organized by sense of security. The bigger the task at hand and emotions attached to it, the bigger the sensory issues, demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout.

Taking medication and not taking it are both things that cause demand avoidance. My routine is generally waiting to get uncomfortable enough while unmedicated because if I don’t experience physical side effects, I will avoid taking pills. Even thinking about taking medication makes me gag. If I had no physical side effects, I would set a reminder. But I don’t have to. My brain notices when a chemical isn’t there and screams bloody murder…. so I got that goin’ for me.

I very, very much wish I could just tell a pharmacist what chemicals I need and be able to choose the delivery, because it would help me a ton to be able to inject myself or drink a suspension. Swallowing pills is hell on my sensory perception, and it wasn’t that way until I needed to take multiple pills every day. My throat has a Pavlovian response to the thought “I need my meds.” It gets tight before I even put the pill in my mouth. If I taste something bad, like the salt in the lamotrigine, my gag reflex will engage. This gets reinforced by happening every day, the reaction more intense over time. It’s a lot to manage. A lot.

If you have a tendency to tell smart/successful people “you don’t look autistic,” please stop. Success is relative. Some high functioning autistic people seem successful, and whether they are or aren’t can only be self-reported because money is not happiness. In every single video I’ve watched about Autism at work, it’s been a vlogger who has at least three degrees, but still no job has lasted more than a few years. Therefore, that means whether someone is working at Wal-Mart or partner at Baker Botts, the odds of them staying employed are the same….. why I admire people like Glennon Doyle, Brené Brown, and Mark Zuckerberg. They do wildly different things, but they all created their own jobs that played to their strengths rather than fitting into a system.

I’m pointing out Zuckerberg specifically because he’s the kind of neurodivergence that best represents me. I have the same sensory issues (I wear the same things, like hoodies), I write content for the web and know how to code some stuff, I social mask through everything and notice when he can’t (watching him in front of Congress was fascinating), etc. I’m just not as rigid as he is because my ADHD pulls me away from complete sameness. He is also the kind of person that whether you were e-mailing him or talking to him the conversation would be wildly different. I promise that people like us are hated all over the world for being cogs that just don’t fit. If Facebook hadn’t been his idea, he would have been fired a long time ago because he doesn’t play well with others. He would have had a better shot at staying employed than someone like me, but only by virtue of the fact that the coding he can do is so monetarily valuable. People are willing to put up with a lot of autistic quirks if not doing so means millions of dollars down the drain. Companies throw out a lot of talent by hiring autistic people without knowing what that really means.

This is why so many people are on disability that “don’t look like they need it.” Taking a shower is not routine. Brushing your teeth is not routine. Making yourself food is not routine. The reason it is not is that for a neurodivergent person, it’s like you learn that thing every day. You don’t “get into the habit.” The reason it feels like learning it again is that you have to put the same amount of effort into taking a shower now as you did when you were eight. It’s not secondhand nature. An autistic person’s strict routine is something they built to keep themselves safe and secure emotionally, but it’s not that they’re different than me. It’s that their structure, their routine is their single interest and they get it done with laser-like focus.

It is not, in IT vernacular, a cron job. Those people are white-knuckling it through life. So am I, because I do not experience my routine as iron like a special interest. I do not demand it of myself……… letting my need for absolute structure and my ADHD impulsivity fight for dominance. I can create a system to defeat ADHD and it will be brilliant. I do not have the executive function to stick to it.

I am the most successful in a relationship when someone else has a strict routine because I social mask it. I am not “codependent,” I literally have no idea how to create a routine to take care of myself and stick to it, emphasis on the repetition being harder than the creation of a system. I swear to God there were days in my marriage I only took showers because Dana dragged me in. It helped more than anything because it kept demand avoidance from eating my lunch. I am often pulled out of my comfort zone because my sensory issues are so high. I have said this before, but I experience demand avoidance in the winter the worst because doing things like changing my clothes is a bigger swing in terms of sensory environment. This is not a bad thing. If I showered every single day in the winter, my skin would dry out too much. It’s just an example of why autism is so hard. Demand avoidance isn’t being childish or lazy. It’s a disability.

I would be great at being married to someone that had an iron structure quirk…….. in some ways…….. as long as my partner recognized that my ADHD would HATE THEM SO MUCH and my autism would never let them go.

Stuff like this is why creative autistics have millions and millions of followers on YouTube and “won’t get a real job.” Creative autistics own things like writing/producing videos about autism (and anything else, but this niché is needed and lucrative). Neurodivergence is devastating and hilarious. They’re finding both ends of the spectrum on camera while I wrestle it out here.

When you’re autistic/ADHD, you start a job with disabilities that make you look “childish.” You don’t develop weaknesses at said job. That’s why if you get put on a performance improvement plan or whatever, you might as well quit. You social mask until you can’t, and then the wheels fall off…… because being autistic at work is a lot to manage all on its own. Demand avoidance will start eating your lunch, because you don’t understand why this keeps happening. If you are undiagnosed, things won’t get better until you research coping mechanisms for your experiences. If you are diagnosed, you know that there’s an upper limit on how much you can do to fit in.

I am also ADHD. I am not the kind of autistic who “gotta be home by 4:00. Gotta be home by Wapner.” Though social masking, I am the kind of autistic person who needs to watch Wapner and would be horrified to let anyone know that. Not watching Wapner would have to feel like gum surgery before the cognitive dissonance was enough for me to say something.

I do wonder what Raymond would have thought of Tivo, though.

Interrupting me is not interrupting a process that needs to happen the same way every day, but interrupting the way I feel as I adjust to a new environment. A new environment is also an old environment by the nature of how sleep works, so “easing into the day” is not a thing. I do not need to have coffee by 0500, get into the shower by 0545, etc. to function. I am disoriented by waking up and not having anything familiar around me.

I need a partner to function and don’t really want to find one. I think I do, but my behavior suggests that I’m really okay white-knuckling my way through life. That I feel more safe and secure by myself right now than I do with someone else. Yes, I have a boyfriend, but not the kind where I have to compromise all the time or learn his schedule/habits. I am glad he doesn’t need me for that because I don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver. I don’t want our relationship to be anything that it isn’t. I love him and Oliver, who is a dog. Love for them is a spectrum from red string to yellow, and we are choosing our adventure together.

I am learning in retrospect that I wanted to marry Daniel because I’d be social masking a doctor all the time. You do whatever you can to learn ways to cope in life, and look around for people you deem doing better than you. The War Daniel, in all of his flaws and failures, has always been a train wreck waiting to happen…… and so have I. Our cars just weren’t headed towards each other until we got so overwhelmed with our environment that we changed directions. We would have been great if we’d kept attacking only the problem.

Social masking Supergrover every day was handy because she thinks in a way that gets powerful people to follow her, so I haven’t learned more coping mechanisms to deal with my disability, but I have learned ways to be more effective in how I speak….. and by effective, I mean “concise.”

Concise is not something I am here, but that’s because this is entirely my place, my rules.

Additionally, every autistic person is an amalgamation of every neurotypical person they know, because they’ve been criticized for every neurodivergent behavior they’ve ever had. Third Rock from the Sun would have worked just as well with the exact same script only substituting aliens for an autistic group house. We are all trying to learn how people do things because our own ways don’t work.

That effort is how processing disorders quickly become mental illness. You don’t develop symptoms of mental illness from autism/ADHD. You develop mental illness from not fitting into the system and feeling horrible about it. My life would be different if I didn’t have the capability to tell when my needs exhausted people. The fact that I do means “80-90% of the time.” That’s because as a preacher’s kid, I have more heuristics for social masking than most people, and I’m female, which carries a rigid structure of behavior in and of itself. Neurodivergent women are often trained into making eye contact, giving affection, and dealing with the discomfort quietly.

When women aren’t social masking, they’re punished like children because their fathers/husbands have been trained to treat them like property, anyway. For lesbians, this is less of a problem, but comes in with male boss relationships if nothing else. Autistic men get away with so much problematic behavior that it’s ridiculous, because women didn’t create a system of power over them in which they have to live up to it. When it comes to how to be a good wife, there are a thousand books explaining the job.

There are a thousand self-help books for men, too, but being a husband is not from the perspective that they should tamp down their behavior- like a 50s women’s rag with lines like “freshen up and run the vacuum around the house before he gets home.” I can understand that a man is autistic AND mansplaining. Just because it’s his autism making him look like an asshole and not narcissism doesn’t mean it’s not offensive.

Perception is reality, but men are not expected to social mask to that degree. Their opinion is expected to be better than mine…. but who knows whether it is or isn’t? There are a million men smarter than me out there (lowballing) that I could learn a ton from, but that’s because I hold their reputations in high esteem, not because I think a man’s voice inherently has more authority than mine…… but they’re programmed to think it does.

There is so much that it takes to make me feel secure in my environment, but a routine is just a good cup of coffee or two in a mug that feels right in my hand. The feel of the mug is as important as the taste of the coffee. A routine is picking up my tablet first thing so that I can look at the WordPress writing prompt for the day and get the creative juice flowing while I wait for the cup to brew (I have a pod-based system; I use Café Bustelo from the can and a refillable pod.).

I only take the time to grab coffee, refill my water bottle, and use the bathroom before I jump into the writing prompt. I think one of my best qualities as a writer is being able to see what comes out when I just let my mind wander a propos of nothing. It’s a writing prompt, and whatever it made me think is okay. If the essay has nothing to do with the prompt, who the fuck cares? It’s not sticking to the instructions. I have understood the assignment because no matter what came out of me, the prompt for it was the same. In writing, there’s no way to really “prompt someone in the wrong direction.”

I write until I get hungry, or I bring my tablet and keyboard to the breakfast table and stuff my face between paragraphs. On those days, it’s generally eggs Florentine and toast, but I’m out of spinach and I’ve started writing before cooking, anyway. 😉

For those of you who are wondering, I’ll probably have eggs and cheese later. This week, real eggs were cheaper, but my actual favorite is those plant-based folded eggs you put in the microwave.

I read that last paragraph again and now it’s about a half hour later. I realized I was starving and went downstairs to grab a sandwich (wheat toast, egg, ham, swiss, salted butter, mustard, and black pepper). The first sandwich was so good I made another one with cheddar.

Cheddar and eggs go well with mustard because it’s a very, very, very rich Mournet. You can either scramble cheddar and mustard into the eggs before you serve them, or just make the eggs plain and put on the rest separately. I don’t know which texture will appeal to you better, but I do know that the flavor is famous. Mournet is a derivative of bechamel, a mother sauce in culinary school. Bechamel is a roux and some milk, reduced for thickness. Mournet adds cheddar and mustard. Stone ground is particularly pretty…. but I don’t notice presentation first. I am trying to make comfort food, my transition into the morning.

I used to binge caffeine, then I looked up this ancient technique called “going to bed earlier.” So, I don’t need as much coffee in the AM as I used to because I’m not counting on it as a replacement. What I do need immediately is water, and I keep a few 20 oz. soda bottles in my room for it. I don’t want to knock over anything without a lid. I ease into the day better with water than anything else, because I learned that sometimes by body said “coffee” because of addiction when it was really saying “I am a plant and I am not doing well.”

The thing about being an autistic person in an alistic world is that you don’t live in a hydroponics farm. All your basic needs are not automatically scheduled. You are at the mercy of yourself, and you’re not a very good boss.

Some people deal with that by having an extreme routine. Some people are paralyzed by them and avoid all social interaction, because when you have demand avoidance over your basic needs, you cannot begin to think about fitting into public because you cannot take on others’ demands if yours aren’t met first. It’s a spectrum of behavior and the masking of it.

You’re so afraid that people will not love you if you stop social masking that it just becomes the part of your routine that you always try to skip…….. if other people will let you.

Life is Like a Full Time Job

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I ran across a post on Facebook about looking for friends. They said they were an enneagram two looking for another one. I had no idea what the hell that meant, so I took the test on my own. I am a four, The Individualist. Apparently, this is the INFJ of enneagram, because it had all the traits of a healthy four, and all the negatives. It was fucking brutal. Enneagram is one of those tests where it comes off like psychological “data” indicating what’s wrong with you and why……. through a web form, so that’s legit.

The good news is that my personality is as rare as I think it is. The bad news is that my personality is as rare as I think it is (before the ADHD/Autism/PTSD/Bipolar enter the chat). INFJ in Meyers-Briggs–speak is about leadership and finding yourself in order to find others. Four sounds like they want to make the world revolve around them……. but, of course, they do this while also giving examples of great “narcissist” fours in history- Jesus, Rumi, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr………. and Leslie Lanagan.

Ok. I get it.

Amazing people, enormous flaws (even Jesus, die mad about it).

I believe that Meyers-Briggs INFJ is more accurate (kinder?) for me than Enneagram Type Four, because my personality does not lend itself to narcissism. My personality lends itself to being able to look at a situation from more than one angle and people believe I am two-faced. When life is a spectrum of possibilities, two things can be true at once. More than two things can be true at once.

I cannot control anything but me, and I don’t try. I, like the INFJ/healthy four I am, have retreated into the silence to regroup. I’m learning what I can about other people who are also like me, beginning the vamp to “Take Five,” and we started in common time.

With an enneagram, you lean more toward one number than the other in terms of lower and upper limits. For instance, if you are a four who also has characteristics of three, you would be a four wing three. I am a four wing five, which means that I am just as inquisitive about the rest of the world as I am about me. It seemed to be one of the few bright spots in which the results didn’t focus on telling you why you were fucked as a human. The only other bright spot is that I learned which enneagrams I’m most compatible with, so at least if someone asks me where I fall, I don’t have to pretend I know what they’re talking about…… At the same time, I also believe “four wing five” would translate to 4/5 time, not 5/4, but Dave Brubeck didn’t write a chart in 4/5. 😉

It seems to me that enneagram has a lot to learn from “Ted Lasso” about being curious and not judgmental…. because essentially what it says is that we’re some of the most unique people on earth and also have to let everyone know it….. when people don’t respond, we’ll isolate and say “I liked it better that way, anyway.” I am sure this comes out in autistic rage, but even if behavior comes across that way you can’t always attribute underlying emotions.

Because it’s a spectrum, I know that other people are going to read different interpretations into it, but I feel that Individualists/Idealists fall into the trap of alienation and have to cope. We’re not begging for attention and the description makes it feel like we are. There’s no narcissism to it, there’s only handling a lonely world for neurodivergents. What are people supposed to do when they feel lonely besides pretend they like it?

There is a strong correlation between neurodivergence, four, and INFJ; however, the enneagram four copy was very much like getting a performance review at HR where they list all your worst characteristics to your face because they can’t just say “autistic.”

Language around “INFJ” talks about the good things in your life- that you’ll love one or two people intensely (perhaps three, but no more than a partner and two friends at a time), but shun more superficial relationships. INFJs are all about relentlessly trying to understand themselves, and the enneagram does not speak kindly to this. The description makes you feel like a loser, because it seems like extroversion is an ideal.

The enneagram will straight up tell you that if you don’t make friends, you’ll have a tendency to make being alone your personality, that individualism is the point because we’re too unique for the unwashed masses (Jesus would like a word). All personality types have their good and bad sides, and it isn’t wrong as long as extremes aren’t overrepresented. They often are. That being said, I was relieved to find that I have a lot of healthy four traits, and the enneagram does tell you what they are. It’s just that the list is a lot shorter, because apparently people like hearing how awful they are in great detail.

The biggest of the positives about a four is their ability to laugh at themselves. The trap in being a four is thinking that you’re such a special little snowflake no one can possibly understand or love you. Again, the wording of the enneagram is harsh and I do not like it. In my opinion, it is ableist.

Most creatives are coming from a place of deep pain, and autistic people score four/INFJ in droves. Therefore, the population of INFJs is already a group of people who have been led to believe that they’re lesser than. There is no need for all that because we can whip our asses on our own time.

When you’re autistic, getting out of bed and leaving the house takes work. No one is making us dive into self-pity except for hearing people talk about disability as if it’s an excuse. The world is designed like that, not us. Telling you no one is listening and nothing changing is par for the course; neurotypicals put the onus on the disabled person to fit in and this is proven, not my personal opinion.

If you’re an INFJ and autistic, you probably love personality tests. It took me a while to figure out why, though. Learning ourselves in-depth helps us figure out social masking easier, because when we find out how we fit into the puzzle, it’s easier to see where the other pieces go. Output can be dangerous if you don’t know yourself well enough to know what applies and what doesn’t. It’s not an exact science, and there’s no way to score it accurately (what is true today might not be true under different circumstances later).

Reading your enneagram, to me, is like reading “What’s My Toxic Trait?” porn because then you can compare how awful you are to other people. If you have mental illness, the trap is not feeling sorry for yourself. The trap is entering the pain Olympics. I’m going to be the best at therapy by proving I’m way more fucked up than you. It’s especially gratifying to see your therapist realize this is, in fact, her first rodeo.

Part of the reason I’m such an intimidating case is that in medicine, everything combines into comorbidities. In psychiatry, if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother. 😉 When a therapist is deciding how to work with me, they’re doing a lot of processing on the backend. What they get with me that they don’t get with most patients is that I want to understand me as badly as they do, and I can speak their language. I have not done enough reading to diagnose anyone including me, but I have read enough to be confident discussing my own body and treatment. I come into therapy already more self-aware than most patients, and this is not something I’ve said about myself. This is what every therapist I’ve ever had has told me after I let them read a few blog entries. They joke about “what do you need me for?”

Technically, they’re right. I don’t need them. I want them to provide feedback on what I’m learning about myself, but therapy cannot be my only outlet for my feelings because it’s harder for me to process while speaking than writing. It takes the energy of having to social mask away, when in therapy I’d be trying to balance the energy in the room. I’d notice the therapist’s discomfort and change tacks, fully realizing that’s their job. I am not a very good patient, just like I’m not a very good parishioner. The struggle is real.

I tried “Better Help.” Perhaps it’s just that I didn’t get the right therapist, but she told me that the way it worked was that I’d write and she’d respond. The problem was she didn’t. I’d write just like I do here, and I’d get a link to a Google document about something and no actual treatment. I think their therapists are overloaded and I didn’t get the right one for me. Doesn’t mean I feel inclined to go back. I will find something- a hybrid.

What I know is that even if this isn’t the answer, it is an answer I didn’t have yesterday. Autism is a new and frightening world, because so much of it makes sense in the context of feelings and issues I’ve had since childhood. So much of it is new in terms of not knowing how far behind the eight ball I’ve been in not having a diagnosis. I have never learned coping mechanisms for rage and burnout. I didn’t know I was social masking, I just felt alone. Alone and overwhelmed with no ability to do anything except cry in frustration. You can’t get it right, you’ll never please your boss, and you can’t clock out.

With autism, you don’t have to get a job to know hard work. Life is like a full time job.

They’re Not Infamous…. They’re MORE THAN Famous

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Who is the most famous or infamous person you have ever met?

In terms of famous friends, I have a plethora. That’s because I went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston (freshman and sophomore year), and I’ve kept up with two artists over the long haul. Of everyone, I’m closest to Jason Moran and Robert Glasper, because our shared niche interest is jazz (they’re pianists, I was a trumpet player). Not only did we attend the same school, Jason was around in my department, Robert and I were in the same class.

Our other teachers birthed good people. Robert “Doc” Morgan birthed our trademarks. It just took a while to see that I am actually as talented as Robert and Jason, just not at jazz. 😉 Doc is the jazz director that not only is he legend status at HSPVA (retired now), he’s legend status across the world in jazz education. So, really, the most famous person I’ve met is Doc, because I only know two famous kids that came from his classes and he knows them all.

He also knows Beyoncé by nature of the fact that she went to HSPVA and was in the music department, but he didn’t have her as a student. It’s such a shame. If she had, she might have been successful. 😉

I am less close to the rest of the Texas creatives that have come before me, and I’d like to remedy that when I can. I’ve never met Sandra Bullock, Tommy Lee Jones, Chandra Evans (also PVA), Reneé Zellweger, and Jim Parsons, sadly. Of everyone on the list, it should come as no surprise that Tommy is at the top, because intelligence is my special interest and he’s the greatest MiB who ever lived (“Went to Vegas. Saw white tigers fly around the room. Your act ain’t nothin’ special, slick.”).

Few people know that the scene in MiBII where Will Smith starts “conversing” with Biz Markie in the post office through beatboxing was actually Tommy’s idea. Just brilliant. Brilliant. So, if you see Tommy Lee Jones on the street, tell him I said hello and I’d like to hug his neck, in Texas vernacular.

I didn’t mention Matthew McConaughey in that bunch, because I actually have met him. In fact, every time I write his name out I hear my dad’s voice in my head, because he always kidded Matt’s parents that their last name was pronounced “Mac-a-nog-eee.” Sounding it out like that in my head is the only way I remember to spell it. The reason my mom and dad are better acquainted is that Matt’s family belonged to our church. Matt also had a junior high choir director who was married to his pastor, with a three year old girl named Leslie. I have no doubt that we’d love each other if we spent time together, we just haven’t. Both our dads thought of the other one as “a mess,” what you say in Texas when the other person is creative and a bit impish. “A mess,” in Texas, is a good thing.

In Texas, you get called “a mess” if you’re doing anything that is not pre-approved, and that list is small. People alternately admire and fear you for being different. Where they fall on the spectrum depends on the area. Are you trying to be different in El Paso or Austin? El Paso is still heavily Christian, Roman Catholic in particular. Austin has dementia and thinks it’s in Oregon.

“Keep Austin Weird” is not a thing. Texans think it is a thing, but it’s a Portland slogan they adopted. Ditto for “People’s Republic of Austin.” It’s like the whole city of Austin packed up the t-shirts at Powell’s Books and decided they own the slogans now. I will be surprised if, in 20 years, people in Austin still think Voodoo Donut is from Oregon. That’s how culture works, and I’m glad Portland handed it down. Texas needs more areas where you don’t feel oppressed by the Bible, and I say that as someone who loves the Bible….. I just love it in the context it was made. I am not trying to fit modern society into constraints thousands of years old.

If it seems like I’m wandering off, I’m not. When I talk about famous people I’ve met, I’m talking about the context around them, too. I’d want to meet my Texas creatives because we’d have the same leftover ideas from our childhood environments to make us feel familiar to each other before we even met.

A good example of that would be Matt and me. I don’t know him from Adam. Would still instantly take him in if he was in trouble because my mom thought he hung the moon. I cannot think of a single situation in which he would need me for that, but I don’t mean it any less. Loving Matt isn’t Hollywood stargazing for me. It’s felt animals going into the ark. Juice and cookies. Swimming parties.

He’s the most famous person I’ve ever met, I just wasn’t old enough to retain the memory. It’s fun thinking what I would do if I got a new one.

IFLS

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first. -Newton’s Third Law of Physics

I knew I was attracted to Supergrover’s personality from the moment I met her. Again, cute, cuddly, and (works) blue. She was attracted to me because I was vulnerable with her in a way no one else could be- she read my thoughts here and thought she found a safe space. She did, it just took initiation into a really shitty club, the one in which I’m not social masking so there are maybe three people in it. Her husband spoils her in a way I would have wanted, because she put up with too much bullshit for discount yogurt coupon.

She talks me down off the ceiling, and the reason I’m over the moon is that she does it whether I need it or not. In those moments, I may not be able to look into her eyes, but I see the forehead kiss coming. The problem comes in when Supergrover doesn’t take the time to correct the story I’m telling myself and we get off track. But I don’t want to be off track. I am open and communicating, which comes across as rude and demanding. It’s how she came across after she didn’t want to solve anything anymore. Therefore, I used her tone thinking that’s how she’d respond to me. That when we came back together and regrouped after I’d had time and space to think about it, there would be a continuation of her giving me no bullshit answers and me doing the same.

What actually happened is that my no bullshit answers were taken as “you’re trying to hurt me.” Meanwhile, my heart’s all tied up and I’m lovesick because she thinks that. It leads to more anxiety on my part and avoidance on hers. It finally became untenable, because I was tired of having made a commitment to her like I did and not getting a say in anything…… while she said I dictated everything. Easy to be a dictator when I’m the only one who initiates and first response is anger. I wanted her to keep standing up to me by confiding in me. Being stronger by being vulnerable. Raging inside that she couldn’t and it was all my fault. After eight years of it, I finally decided something true. I matched her tone for tone and it wasn’t all me.

Turns out if I can’t date her, she can’t date her, either. That’s because we’re annoying as shit from different ends of the spectrum. I’m laid back. She’s persnickety. “Do not miss a detail or I will incinerate you if my ire is in full force” is on brand. Mine would be “your nachos look better than mine.” That’s because she’d never ask something of someone else that she wouldn’t do herself, and she wouldn’t miss a trick with nachos, either.

There are certain songs that remind me of her.

If you said “goodbye” to me tonight, there would still be music left to write. What else would I do? I’m so inspired by you. That hasn’t happened for the longest time.

She hides like a child but she’s always a woman to me.

Those are Billy Joel lines that have come through my head recently, but I’ve attributed others.

She’s like a one-way ticket and you can’t come back….. singin’ yeaaaahhhh, you want her, but she’s so mean.

I’ll never let her go, but only in terms of the character she presents here. There will still be music left to write because all creatives use their pain as art, no matter what kind it may be. For me, it’s having a love so deep and so ethereal that it has become a mind worm, but stopping our interaction has made it healthier. I do not ruminate on the questions when I know there aren’t going to be any answers…. as in, I’m not expecting them, waiting on them.

I never should have been waiting on them in the first place, but you’d have to understand details I can’t share as to why that didn’t happen. Why she got twisted further into me rather than further away.

We leapt before we looked, and were only now starting to see real promise- or were we? I don’t think so, because our relationship hung on thinking about perhaps one day maybe never doing something and what I could do for her. She is not selfish at all. I had time to be sweet to her and I wanted to do so. When she had time, she wanted to as well. We’ve sent each other all kinds of digital shit, particularly books and coffee because Amazon and Starbucks are the easiest to transfer back and forth.

We just don’t have the same time; people are right when they say everyone’s got the same 24 hours, but wrong at both ends of the spectrum. A poor person doesn’t get as much accomplished because they can’t travel very far, very fast. You have to have money for gas or public transportation. A powerful person doesn’t accomplish very much because they can’t focus on anything with everyone pulling them in all directions. The difference is small ball. Conversations and research add up. You might have had five minutes a day, but that’s 25 minutes at the end of a work week.

An ADHD or Autistic person does not do that consistently because their thought process is not going to pick up at the same place the next day. They have to come up with a new great idea, because they had it at 3:15, then Carol had an issue, then they got back to their desks and remembered the seed. But then there was only about an hour or an hour and a half left in the day, which isn’t time to fully flesh out the idea. By 5:30, it might as well be, “what idea?”

This is why conversations with Supergrover are so important to me. She’s big picture, and I’m details in terms of spitballing creative ideas or solving a problem. But that’s because she keeps track of everything and all my brainstorming will be off the cuff. My disability comes in where she shouldn’t be expected to keep track of everything, and I’m ADHD. We both have to learn to cope if we have a shot at friendship down the road, and it will be a long time before I’m ready to say we won’t. This is because traditionally when we try to separate, no we can’t.

There are just two reasons it feels final. The first is that I have a legitimate issue with her, I’m not just trying to be an annoying little shit. I’m sorry she’s busy, but I’ve been in the waiting room for eight years. The second is that she sabotaged one of my relationships and I let her because it was good for both of us. And yet also wouldn’t compromise with me on anything later when I felt I’d proven myself trustworthy.

I never railed at her for being straight, I never railed at her for telling me what she told me so that we couldn’t separate, I never tried to make her feel bad because she married a man. I never did a lot of things, she just assumed. She’d read a shit ton of my writing and decided what it meant and how to feel about it all on her own, which she should have. But she didn’t share with me any of her interpretations so that if her assumptions were wrong, I could correct them. She also wouldn’t correct any of my assumptions, then rail that I’d made them. It was not healthy, and her last words to me were “obviously, you’re the only person who can change…” as if I’d lorded my changes over her. I’m not better than her, I’m just different. I felt like I’d done a very good job of listening to her needs and responding, and I was being repaid in anger and guilt.

Reminded me of going to the hospital after Dana hit me and her saying, “must be nice to just be able to check out like that” after she’d hit me. Both Supergrover and Dana caused me to feel things that I’d never felt before in the extreme. I will never forget what it felt like to be hit by a partner. I will never forget what it’s like to be alone in a room with Supergrover, which is how I viewed our relationship- displaced in space and time, a room of our own. 😉 Different experiences, yet not. Different environments, yet not.

In the case of the failed relationship, I felt like I’d anticipated Supergrover’s needs jumping up and down for attention and it didn’t work out the way I thought it would. I don’t know what I was expecting given the previous few years, but it wasn’t what I got.

I got a big gift from her, but there was nothing on the card to indicate that it was transactional. Most of our gifts were “just because,” so if it meant “thank you,” I didn’t pick it up. Therefore, I recognize that she spoke to me in her love language and I am grateful. I just think it’s foolish for only one of us to study the language. It means only I’m in a foreign country.

Marcus? Marcus would get lost in his own museum.

And in fact, that’s exactly what I did. I wrote into the night, creating new memories with her and reveling in her old stories when she told them. I told her I wanted to be the Merlin to her Arthur, but I know in my heart of hearts that she did not believe I was telling the truth. This is not real? I ended up wishing that it could be more than each of us curled up reading each other from thousands of miles away, but grateful for even a 30 second interaction because her time is as precious as she is.

My beautiful girl is such a force of nature that I had to be mad at God for a while. First, railing at them because I’d been born queer because the relationship would be so much easier if I hadn’t. Then, railing because since she shut down communicating with me, it felt like she thought she was them.

She thought I was mean and vice vera.

Whatever objects of mine weren’t in motion before she appeared certainly started rolling afterward. The entry before last took place at Marylhurst, the year leading up to meeting Supergrover. Before I knew it was an emotional affair on my end, and I was always preventing her from being uncomfortable because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and I knew she would be.

Not only was I blunt, I couldn’t get a read on what was okay and what wasn’t. Our reactions used to be so similar that when she put me in motion, we moved in the same direction.

Now, for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction in which her actions were always pure and she was perfect, and I was trying to take her for a ride. This was in no way true, but I see how she’d get that impression. I thought she would see with eight years of diligence that I wasn’t going anywhere and I was taking my end of the bargain seriously, but an avoidant attachment will run from an anxious one every time because they are not used to communicating with people clearly enough to avoid small anxieties that then spiral. Slights unfold in the memory.

I also don’t know when our relationship is affected by outside sources, and she held that against me, too. She asked why I wrote like she does everything because of me. If you don’t tell me there’s an outside force, I’m not going to look for it. I have enough problems not spiraling out without anticipating even more blowback because the moving goalpost would be “why do you attribute things to my friends and family?” I didn’t want her out of my life because I thought she was a bad person. I thought our relationship was difficult because I couldn’t love her any more than I already did unless she showed me how.

She has no idea how many e-mails I’ve written with tears streaming down my face because of it. Whatever you call it- a chord running between us, wearing her metaphysical ring, two toys in the same sandbox, etc.- I wasn’t prepared for how hard it was to undo a trauma bond, and I’ve been left with no other choice. I am not holding onto hope because I think it’s realistic. I am holding onto hope because neither one of us has been able to avoid each other no matter what our feelings have been for 10 years. It’s a tapestry.

I just decided to stop stitching until we went to Target together to buy fabric softener….. and she has to drive for many reasons. She doesn’t get to have an engine that good and not let me watch her play with it :::sly grin::: because she’d know how to raise the hair on the back of my neck safely. That’s why she’s the alpha in our relationship. One of only four or five people I’d trust to catch in one of those exercises where I just have to hope I don’t hit anything as I lean back.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am angry that she does not see me as someone who would catch her and it has become useless to keep saying it and hope she takes it in. Maybe she will in retrospect, but even so it’s unlikely to result in reconnection. That’s because I’ve told her over and over that if she comes back, it has to be big. She has to lay all her feelings on the table so that I feel secure.

I know her first thought when she read that (the first time) was “why didn’t she just ask me to poke myself with a fork instead?” That’s because she’s cute and cuddly, but doesn’t indulge that side of herself. Doesn’t realize that the things she sees as “darts” from me are actually the things I love most about her. I’m not criticizing her, I’m telling her I notice her “-isms.” She has personal and professional quirks that make her unique. She doesn’t see that I think she’s uniquely inspiring and stupid gorgeous because she isn’t looking for it. That doesn’t make it less true.

I say everything wrong, but no I don’t because no one is ever wrong a hundred percent of the time. All of this has become a drumbeat because if I do not concentrate on resolving the issue and keep looking back across the river, I won’t be able to rescue myself.

She has told me to find people that bring good things into my life, that don’t cause me issues. Two huge problems with that. The first is that if I move on, she still causes issues because the bond is unbreakable. We leapt before we looked, and now I’m paying for it dearly. I am sure I am not the only one, I just don’t know her side of the story because she’s so adamant about not telling it.

So now, my task is to find something that will turn my attention, and I’m finding all sorts of temporary interests, but not anything so magical that it would interrupt how I’m feeling currently. Part of it is being a monotropic thinker caught up in a rumination that won’t go away. Part of it is that the situation cannot be duplicated, so if I lose her, I lose a once in a lifetime experience. My broken heart was caused entirely by thinking that I was the only one who got the chance of a lifetime. I forgot that when I saw her trademark and thought it was cool, she had met Leslie Lanagan.™

I don’t think that because of anything but Newton. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Supergrover fell in love with my writing. I started believing in myself. Any belief in myself started with “you like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.”

I was joking. We’d just met like, 30 minutes ago. It was a mistake, and a big one….. but not for the reason you might think. I didn’t pull a trigger in her that meant anything sexual, but I made her feel good and vice versa. We amped up each other’s dopamine so that we felt this heightened bubble around us that excluded the rest of the world for evil and for awesome. It was private and healthy until it was private and not. And I’m not even sure how private it is, sweating bullets over everything about everything.

What I know is that if I keep putting one foot in front of the other, my attention will eventually turn. I think that’s best because she’s given no indication that me asking her to step up would do any good at all, and in fact most things I say piss her off because she can only accept my truth when she sees herself the same way I do. If those stories are different, she will become defensive and accusatory. At that point, I’ll just explode because I am so tired of trying to make it work.

The reason I’m tired of seeming “demanding” is that I’m not asking for anything huge. If she actually asked what my terms were, filling them would be the bare minimum in a virtual friendship. It’s not that I blame her for always being busy. I blame her for doing everything she can not to talk about her feelings so that I constantly feel like the failure in our relationship because I’ve asked her to emote. Anything above clear communication in text, like having lunch, is above and beyond. Penciling in lunch is what I’m willing to do, not what I need.

What I need is her to stop moving the goalposts so that I actually get positive feedback. When she holds off reading because she feels angry/guilty, she opens the e-mail and responds to it with anger and guilt…… if the issue is between us. She has time to post-mortem with me if she is not a party. She will help me improve any relationship except for ours.

It felt like I was settling for a connection that would be insecure my whole life because I would walk on eggshells to keep her until I died…….. because bringing up anything about our relationship makes her avoid me. It has to stop for as much as she walks in beauty and I do because of it.

Two reasons for giving up. The first is that I genuinely don’t want to take up her time. The second is that I don’t want the occasions when we do have time to interact to be contentious. I can’t be one of those “Christmas and Easter” friends because we’ve been so close in the past that it physically hurts when we’re distant. Having that distance is the only thing that allows me to keep that thought process at bay. It’s exhausting for the feelings I have about her to rush in and out. Riding the waves is a good thing, but it’s dangerous when the water levels are so different at low and high tides.

I am astounded by the entry where she told me she had read as much as she was going to read, that it’d been okay up to now. There were tears running down my face; my face felt as if it had never really been washed before. The reason I was crying is that the entry was much later than I thought it would be, and she’d read everything that was truly important to me. She didn’t agree with all of it, and that’s okay. Just knowing she read it is enough. Knowing she was still reading while I was at full strength, not social masking. Letting my autism run wild over our experiences so that I could process them through my fingers.

Of course it hurt that she said she wouldn’t read anymore, but it hasn’t been true at any other time in our relationship, so I’m convinced if it’s not true now, it will be. I have no doubt she loves reading about you. For some reason, in her mind I am very perceptive about everyone on this blog as well as completely 100% wrong when she’s in it.

I am not surprised at this attitude, as it’s most people’s attitude about my writing. It’s irritating as shit because people will read me for days/months/years and really get a feel for my writing. They’ll fall in love with it and treat me like a hero. They’ll build me up til I think I’m James Dean on toast. Then, when they’ve convinced me they really want to be a part of my life, they see what I’ve written about them and it quickly begins a downward spiral if I say anything but “the sun shines out of their asses.” I have not changed a thing in terms of the way I operate, but they’ve changed their perspective on me.

I love that Supergrover read the entry about all the things she never knew, about telling the bees she was gone… and might have even heard me read it. If she did, I hope she likes it, because that’s the purest love letter I’ve ever written to anyone.

Falling in love with straight women is never advisable. It’s cliché for a reason, though. Happens all the time. When it comes to being attracted to someone, mistakes are made whether people are the same sexual orientation or not. Plus, even if we had both been queer, that’s no guarantee that we would have been attracted to each other. I’m not even sure I’d be attracted to her physically because I’ve never seen her in person. Yes, her photo is gorgeous; I can’t go on that because you can’t judge how you feel around them by it.

This is why I’m so sure that what she looks like doesn’t even matter. That whether we meet or not, our brains are connected and that’s what’s important to me. Our brains being connected is just not a good thing until we establish healthy patterns and tamp down all the rage.

She and I, like Dana and me would’ve if we’d gotten back together, restarted with a lot of hostility. Over time, we each came around and I kept growing. I felt like we were getting closer, but I think now that I felt the intimacy of opening up to her. That theory holds up because my feelings didn’t degrade if she stopped talking- still haven’t, won’t. What I went through with her was a dream, but a disjointed one…. the kind where you think you’re going to learn the meaning of life….. until you realize it’s all just a bunch of green glass and movie magic.

I am not sorry for wanting her to be my somewhere over the rainbow, but I am sorry that she knows it….. and I couldn’t get around it by hiding her to her because I’m just not that good a writer. Hiding her to people who don’t already know her is hard enough. The reason she knows I love her this much is not just because I told her. I thought it was easier to go the hard route and just be honest with everyone, including you.

Generally, after I talked to her, I talked about her…….. and she read it. The reason we didn’t leave it at a one-note conversation is because I wasn’t writing my feelings about her to her. I was writing my feelings about her to you and she was listening. Sometimes it made her angry. Sometimes I touched her heart. The worst days was when she perceived I was doing the former when I was trying to overdo it on the latter. All I’ve ever wanted is to change her mind and heart, because I wouldn’t be who I am if she hadn’t changed mine.

She knows how I feel about her, how I’ll always feel about her. I will stay in motion especially being acted on by an outside force. In so many ways because our relationship is virtual, losing her is losing me. There are moments when my social mask is her because none of my other friends know her and won’t pick up the imitation. We’re both good people. If something worked on me, it’ll work on someone else.

Supergrover is sort of neurotypical with ironclad boundaries and morals. Therefore, it was imperative to pick up her social masking. She is much more stable than I am in that arena (I’m autistic/ADHD and she’s not, but she has PTSD so I’d be surprised if social masking hasn’t been a part of her life since she picked a favorite Crayon.). We are both incredibly complicated constructs, what makes us attracted to each other on a magnetic level because our conversations just keep digging down.

At first, she was good about thanking me for calling her out and not immediately getting angry, but it didn’t last because I got on her last fuckin’ nerve. I’m not saying her reactions weren’t anything I didn’t deserve, just that I was thoughtless and it had bigger consequences than I could see on the current chessboard. You often don’t when you’re playing black.

I didn’t get anywhere in our relationship until I pushed over my king for the last time….. except it wasn’t, because Supergrover was used to having a fight and would provoke me when I said I needed time. I am responsible for not walking away at that point, but because autism, I’m not very good at that. So, we’d spend our days ripping each other apart when this is someone I wanted to love for all time.

It mystified me that we were fighting over how beautiful she was and I was losing. I’ve loved beautiful women since forever and I’d still never seen anything like her……… and I would say that if I’d never seen a pic.

Her letters were like uncut coke to an autistic brain. I lit up like a Christmas tree every time a notification came in. My senses were heightened because I’d been in burnout/depression when we met and the dopamine of new relationship energy pulled me out. I missed DC (I lived in Oregon then), and for as much as I thought of myself as a lovesick girlfriend obsessed with punctuation, I thought of her letters as “news from home,” too.

I had never had a relationship that was so deep emotionally without being physical, so it took a while to learn how straight women do that. Definitely something I needed to know because I’ve misinterpreted lots of signals the wrong way in both directions. One of the things that’s come from being so tired of walking in gray area is if I’m interested in someone, just tell them. Don’t stop to hem and haw over whether they’re straight or not. If they are, they’ll tell you.

I realized I was pigeonholing women by anticipating whether they were or weren’t based on a non-existent set of facts that are actually just stereotypes. I’m not saying that telling Supergrover I had feelings for her was wrong, I’m saying that I was an idiot for thinking it wouldn’t change things as much as it did, because she was already a monotropic thought process without bringing all that romance shit into it. I felt like a seventh grader. Ugh. Eyeroll.

The one thing I will not do is pretend it didn’t happen. Supergrover has to learn to deal with my feelings if she wants to be in my life because I do not want a relationship where only one of us is getting what we need. What I need is for her to stop the push/pull of adoring me when I adore her here- deeply, intimately… and saying “you’re the only one who ever ruins anything” after we have text.

If this was a movie, our indecision over whether to be good to each other or not would make the audience throw popcorn at the screen. So many times we have duelled, enough that now there’s never a winner because we decided to attack each other instead of the problem.

I want to be kind to her. I want to love her like no one else does, and I can be safe and secure in the fact that I do. It has been such a circuitous route that it is impossible to remember every turn. I do know that at some times, it has felt like Google Maps just told us to swim.

Right now what I am doing is making sure that when I’m older, I still have these memories. It’s not a lot to write down to move on. It’s a lot to write down to record. Hindsight is 20/20, and I cannot look forward before I look back. If I am only looking forward, I am not seeing the mistakes I’ve already made.

Autistic people take in information by reading a lot of the time because processing someone’s voice is more difficult than text. In effect, I’m writing down my memories because it makes social masking stick in my head.

Social masking doesn’t mean that I’m not being real with you when I do it. I am not trying to learn how to emote. I am learning how people receive it so that I can be more effective in my communication. It would be nice if people did the same for me, but neurotypical people don’t generally do that. It’s not how society works. If you are not having a meltdown and stimming by rocking, “you don’t look autistic.” If you hear people say that, they’re certainly not the type who’s prepared to be sensitive to it.

The world doesn’t owe me any favors in terms of excusing my behavior because I’m autistic. It is only a tool for me to learn how my reactions are different by having them classified into a group. I would like to make the whole world more accessible, but that’s not my call. My call is being able to act upon an outside force because it acts upon me, not cower away because I’m afraid to take up room.

For instance, I know that I rejected a lot of love in my equal and opposite reaction to Supergrover because it wasn’t the package I wanted. She thought I was being selfish, like a child who’s had their favorite toy taken away. Our problems weren’t child’s play, so I don’t know why she thought the solutions were easy. She took up an enormous amount of room in the relationship and, I feel, blamed me for wanting a solid 10-20% rather than a rolling approval rating with large spikes.

I’ve said it so many times, and mostly that’s just to convince me I did the right thing. It is torture in the moments I think I didn’t, because if so, I traded a lot for a little. There had to be multiple battles for me to concede the war, because I kept changing tacks and nothing got better. It was hell walking away, and an even bigger hell to stay and be caught in a gray area that felt like it had an electric fence. No matter how much I tried not to get buzzed, I hit a wire somewhere.

The two scenarios are so different because the honeymoon phase is so different from where we are now. It would have to have been that explosive to create this much pain.

Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction, but some elements are more stable than others.

I am not coming from a place of lack, begging her to come home. I am coming from a place of abundance that I ever got to love her at all.

For cesium, there was flourine. For me, there was you…. and the joy and light of being complete.