What’s something most people don’t know about you?

I love the idea that the writing prompt is about something people don’t know about us and all we do all day is tell people stuff other people don’t know about us. So, I’ll go through a quick list for new people just in case I publish in a different time zone (I start at 0500, but between writing and doing the things I need to do to get ready to write, I’m ADHD. I write a paragraph and get up and down I just don’t scroll up until I read it back. I will publish anything I think because boundaries have already been established in my mind. Nothing I publish is something I can’t stand by later. Other people can be mad, but I can walk away clean. You make the choice not to be in this blog by whether you interact with me, and it’ll be hard and I’ll miss you, but I won’t tolerate criticism as ad hominem attacks. I will drop you with force and I won’t ghost you. You’ll know exactly why you pissed me off so that I won’t stab you in the back on my web site. I don’t say anything about people I wouldn’t say to them.

It’s not because I love you any less. It’s that my life isn’t easy dealing with blowback when my echo chamber already thinks I’m a bad person. I do a better job of kicking my ass than you do, so leave me be. You can watch how I do it or don’t, because while I’m explaining your behavior, you’ll get closer to me if you let it happen. You’ll understand a pattern and why it went wrong rather than making you read my mind all the time. But my writing won’t do that if you think you’re always right. It doesn’t bother me if my friends don’t read me, in fact I prefer it because it also keeps people from getting impressed with me. The highs and lows are too big a swing. So that means:

Supergrover told me something that’s too hard to forget because of my chosen art form, because it would make waves bigger than either of us want to handle to have her identified. Therefore, I view her as my primary partner because she’s the one in which the breadcrumbs on my web site are worth something, no matter how small. And it isn’t that I’d even be writing about us. Breadcrumbs are unintentional because she’s the river that runs beneath my emotions. She comes through me by now because I’ve adopted the style in which she writes and it affects my speech every day. I am more strident at times than I used to be because I have better boundaries. At others, I’m just as romantic with language as I used to be because that’s how I wrote before I met her. Complete change in tone because I was obsessed with the way she wrote…. and proud that my words have certainly been used in powerful rooms without her even thinking she was doing it, because she doesn’t remember everything I’ve written, but it creeps in. It’s fun thinking about exactly about she could have told “this is a goat roping clusterfuck.” Or, “now that you’re mad you’re just packing up your toys and going home.” That one makes me laugh even harder.

Lindsay is my younger sister who doesn’t live with me anymore, but stays close most of the time. She lives in Houston and works in DC, so she’s far away and part of my life depending on the day of the year. We are close because of proximity. Her career is in government relations, so whether she’s been a private or public lobbyist, I’ll never stop running into her. I am so goddamn blessed because I got to move away from Houston without moving away from her. That’s actually the biggest reason I chose DC again vs. going back to Portland to be with Bryn and her whole family like I had been before. There were other factors at play on my end besides my love for Supergrover. I knew that if Mayor Pete won the election, she would end up working in the White House. And I knew that before you did. Also, there are many other candidates that woud appoint her here, I just don’t think she wants to live here. I think that she would do it if she had to, and at that point would be glad to have a local to keep her grounded and she has a thousand of them by now. She would fit in here like she lived here before she even packed.

Bryn is my partner in the sense that you should go to her if something happens to me and you want to know about me. My last wishes, all that shit. She’s basically a human document repository, not someone I could marry because I think you should live in the same city for that. Doesn’t make us in less of a long distance relationship and her family has plenty of friends in that model, so no one would make it weird. There are female names that are synonymous in our lives that aren’t together, so we’re the ones synonymous in their minds. You have a partner and a housecarl. Don’t make it weird. Play Skyrim instead and my whole life will come together in front of you. I’d like to be a good companion, but most of the time I’m a dumbass. I can’t tell you how many times Lydia has gotten me killed and I hate that I could be someone else’s when it’s their turn to crawl through a Falmer dungeon.

Zac is my romantic partner, and I think we’ve been together a year or so. It’s hard to tell because we’ve just been dating off and on. It’s not like we see each other every day. We’re not building a future together unless it’s good for the order- that I’d like to stay single and not have it bother anyone that I’m already dating someone when we go out on our first date. Doesn’t mean they can’t still be my last. I am free to marry someone else. Not Zac. But Zac plays such a large role in my life that I’m not really all that tempted to date anyone else. It’s not that I wouldn’t, it’s that I’m happy as I am. Content. I’m not so much avoiding dating as I am not threatened by the fact that no one else is asking me out and I’ll end up alone. I won’t. Zac would be my boyfriend until he died if I let him and it was a mutually agreeable situation. We don’t have plans to get closer and we don’t have plans to break up unless it’s necessary. I don’t see that as a bad relationship. I see that as connection and leaving each other better than when we found us. We don’t have to get married for the relationship to matter.

He’s an intelligence officer that doesn’t get bored when I want to talk about it and it’s my autistic obsession in life. It’s Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s partner asking her to make an appointment with him to talk about whales because she was overwhelming him all the time with random facts.

Like, he might read the thing I wrote about Israel, and say “you’re technically right, but here’s where you went wrong.” He could tell me in detail if I had his security clearance, but I don’t and I don’t care for it. I’d just like to be able to talk about intelligence like I was in school for it, not that I’m pumping people who have classified information to spill it. Zac is always in control of the narrative, so he always knows the boundaries on what he can say and is excellent about not revealing anything that isn’t already public because he checks. I’m saying that clearly because if I was on his contact sheet, CIA and FBI might not see my interst as only that. That it’s the equivalent of dating someone retired, and lots of people do that. They’re the ones that have the responsibility of carrying that shit, and they know they’re bound not to make you. So, Zac gives me the kind of information you’d get from a college professor in undergrad and I go look up what’s public. Here’s how that conversation goes:

Leslie: What’s going on in Russia right now?
Zac: Crops, grain, “medical medical medical.”

Except that the “medical, medical, medical” part is a quote from a book. From Zac, it’s slow finger wag, emphatic fist shake, or dumb look. That’s the part I know where he’s hog tied and I need to quit. The earlier he starts hemming and hawing, the more badass I know he is. That his Aaron Sorkin walk and talks are better than everyone else’s…. including Aaron Sorkin’s.

That’s because even Aaron Sorkin will never know what could replace “medical, medical, medical.”

Hayat and Mike are my landlords, Edu and Magda rent with me. We all live in one house including Hayat and Mike’s daughter, Samantha. This is possible because there’s an addition that makes it really one and a half houses. It’s impressively large, and I’m glad I chose a group house over an apartment because my autistic side needs absolute quiet and when I need community I don’t have to leave the house for it.

I have been in the same house since 2015, a blessing and a curse because I didn’t get to spend the last year of my mother’s life with her before a took off running again. But I couldn’t have known it was the last year of her life because I took it for granted that she would live past 65. She didn’t even think I was mature enough to drive from DC to Houston because it’s not something she would be brave enough to do and I drove to Portland by myself no problem. It would have been nothing getting through the mountains because I’d already done Shasta in November. This was the Blue Ridge in August. If I had known how the weather was going to be that day, that it was a miracle I didn’t have to stop and chain up with the chains I’d have to go buy, I would have stayed in a hotel another night- to see if the weather cleared up but also to be able to go buy chains and learn how to chain up if it didn’t.

Turns out, chaining up is not that hard. I’ve done it on a Jeep and a Saturn. It was easier on the Saturn and the little car was a lot more fun in the snow. In the Jeep, there was four wheel drive AND chains. Nothing exciting happened. There was no adrenaline in it. I’m just glad I get on the bus and train now instead.

My dad is still living- retired and a trumpet player and on the board of everything everywhere all at once. He’s been a world-class musician since he was in high school, making All-State Band three years running and his senior year, he got first chair. Which means that by the time he auditioned for chairs in that band, when he got first it meant he was literally the best trumpet player in the nation, I believe, because Texas Music Educator’s Association is tough shit. Even band and choir directors know when they take a job in Texas, all the other teachers and choirs/bands have it out for you and standards are high. In the band I joined, there were maybe two in the state that were better than us, and it wasn’t HSPVA. I actually got into a much better situation when we moved to Clements musically. That’s because Clements had a lot more money and a lot more clout. So, both my dad and I have been through “the system,” but I was never that great a player. I just had fun (most of the time). I feel more at home as a singer, so I focus on that.

I write because I feel more at home as a writer than I do as a conversationalist, and people get the same amount of information without me being uncomfortable. Where this becomes problematic is that other people aren’t writers and won’t reply to me because they’re intimidated. They do not accept that they’re not as good a writer as me without recognizing there’s a reason for that and don’t make it a thing. It will ruin our relationship if you think I’m better than you. It’s not that. It’s that I write these long ass essays that are somehow enjoyed all over the world every single day and you don’t. You don’t have to sit there and think about why you’re not a good writer because I don’t expect you to be me. I expect you to know what communication mode works best for you and I will also accomodate you if you’re willing to speak to me that way because you don’t like writing….. but expect that I will expect you too read those letters, not write back if you like talking better. The way this works for me is Facebook Messenger. Bryn, Beck, and Andy have no problem sending me a voice message while I’m still typing. At that point, I start sending them voice messages as well because I know they’re not in a writing mood. It reminds me to branch out.

Beck is the woman I referred to when I wrote about “my wife.” She’s not, I was kidding, and there’s no chance of that happening, either. She’s the one who sets my brain on fire right now because we’re talking about law and conflict resolution likein my old paralegal days. It brings back a side of me I didn’t know I needed, because I feel at home in the law, just like I feel at home with international affairs. I write about intelligence because CIA doesn’t hire people with neurodivergence that have to take medication for it. It’s just too dangerous. But I would have been great if I’d been medically healthy because I would have been as happy in the JAG as I would have been at State, which is really the only government job I’m interested in and also feel like I should have tried to get into State when I was 23.

And all of that is forgiven and forgotten because I didn’t have the capability to think all that through because State is an adult job and I don’t know how to do that. Neurodivergent people do not have job security, ever, because neurotypical people do not like working with us. They can complain to HR all they want and it does no good, so they have to make you look incompetent when they get tired of explaining things in the way you can hear it. Bosses who say that’s not true are the ones that make life easier. But all people aren’t them, either.

It’s a dirty little open secret. Whether you are physically or mentally disabled, getting an interview is harder. They require you to report your conditions if you have them to get ergonomics and/or special considerations, but it makes employers take one look at your resume and think “retard” in a very nasty way. Doesn’t matter whether they’re put off by bipolar or cerebral palsy, I’m not getting in there if I tell people I’m disabled on a web form because I have to in order to get the interview and the considerations afterward because they have to decide if I’m worth it first. Or, I can not tell them….. and that’s worse. I will launch into the song and dance of masking behavior until I can’t keep it up anymore and need those considerations and get fired for it.

I am fucked in getting disability unless I hire a fuck ton of lawyers, and then I’m not sure I can have any assets and now I do because my mom and stepfather are both dead. I don’t want to touch them because I’d be heavily taxed, but I don’t know whether being on disability would allow me to keep them or not when I turned 65. Then, I would also face the social stigma of being disabled, making it harder to date. No one wants to take on a financial project because they don’t want to be the one that pays for everything when they don’t like my cheaper suggestions because that’s the way I can treat them. Zac doesn’t care because we don’t do anything truly expensive except stop at the liquor store on the way home because Zac likes whiskey and I like N/A spirits and a hotel bottle of whatever it is that someone has created this week that’s new. I think the last time it was rum punched up with sour apple liqeur. It was okay. But again, it was like $4. I wish I could be the girlfriend and the friend and the daughter that paid for everything, and I might be later in life if my ideas or blog take off. Who knows? Dooce got to be Dooce, Wil and Jenny got to be Wil and Jenny. Who knows what will happen to me? At this point, it’s exciting to see what’s to come because I’m getting answers to questions I’ve had my whole life.

Mel is a chef I write to in England that has some of the same issues in the kitchen that I do. We work through the emotional side of it and talk about cooking. It feeds me in a way no one else does. Tyler and J.L. are my newest connections, writers who are on a whole other level than me and have taken control of my education. It’s the right move for me, because being around Supergrover all those years was like training for a writer’s room, and it would blow her hair back to be in this group as well. Writing isn’t what she does for a living, but she’s good at it.

She has a blog that she thinks I haven’t read and when she said it I was hurt because you could wake me up in the middle of the night and I could recite lines form it verbatim. There weren’t that many entries and I can quote all of them. I just won’t.

The community that supports me are the only ones who really deserve to know the things that no one else knows about me. But maybe I should give you one. Something good, yet not so deep I end on a downer.

Something no one knows about me is that I don’t have peers. Not really. I’m too complicated and so are my friends. There is no one on earth that can identify with me in every way possible, why I doubt I’ll be happier than I am right now with Zac and Bryn filling two completly different roles as my inner circle. The jury is still out on whether Supergrover comes back to me, but not on the fact that my mama wolverine goes off like hers does, both trauma bonded and angry with each other and refusing to connect.

But if I have more than three people who know everything, it’s not because I don’t want more friends. It’s that I become saturated and overwhelmed easily. I am not trying to be avoidant, just protective, which is where I see Supergrover headed for me and I’m sorry I didn’t see the signs earlier. But it wouldn’t have saved me any pain at all. I just would have started the process earlier. But it would have made feeling put upon last even longer, because there’s a little bit of me that will always feel that way, and not because she put me out with telling me. She put me out with not communicating afterward. We have a situation that changes day by day because I’m a writer. She hates press. Even worse when I’m not a journalist and I’m not fact checking. It’s just like, my opinion, man.

She wants me to write from her perspective. Consider her feelings. I would if I knew what they are. I do not know any of her feelings to be able to consider them.

But I know this.

I love her, something everyone knows. She loves me, something that everyone knows.

And still the truth runs deeper than just that fact. Everything does. We do as people, we do as situations we deal with. And now we’ve stopped leaning on each other and I’m on my own, trying to figure out how to move on when she’s not listening and it’s a disaster. She thinks I’m a dick for pushing her away. I think she’s a dick because she isn’t bringing me closer and it really fucking hurts in a concrete way, not an objective one. And if she saw what I saw, she would see objective danger and come back and say she’s sorry so we could work together instead of against each other. If she doesn’t, whatever she says is on her, and I don’t care how much she says she can deal with it, no she can’t. If I stop protecting her, other people might, too, and that’s bad. I love her so much and she treats me like a mean girl.

I was mad because she was ignoring me, not because I didn’t understand everything on her plate. I wasn’t saying I wasn’t patient. I was saying I think eight years is enough to get over something and you don’t have to get over it but you have to stop shitting on me. Your issues are your issues now.

It’s time for her to tell me everything I don’t know about her, and she’s hog tied like he is in another galaxy far, far away.

I don’t rebel against her story. I regret that she doesn’t tell me the parts that Zac does… the things he needs from me before he has to start saying “medical, medical, medical” like Lauren Graham.).

When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?

The first person? The very first person?

Me.

I don’t have the same definition of success as most people, because I’m not most people. My personality dictates that I am frighteningly intense with emotions because I take the time to know how I feel with certainty. I don’t hem and haw over people’s feelings anymore, because I realized it was masking behavior. I have worked with people on the spectrum since I was in college. It’s par for the course in IT. But what I never put together is that the way I process emotions is a symptom of ADHD, Autism, and PTSD. Figuring out where behavior is coming from is nigh impossible…. but what it does mean is that I have words to explain it now that I didn’t before, because I met two successful people.

They’re best friends who are in a partnership, but without the hassle of romance. They have, in essense, what Bryn and I have. The absolute faith that we could step off a plane tomorrow, move in together, and live happily ever after as partners who enjoy each other. Romance doesn’t enter the picture because it can’t. I don’t want to chase her across the country and she doesn’t want to chase me, either. It would mean moving to a place where I wasn’t comfortable and having to sit in it until it didn’t hurt anymore. If she came here, she’d have to let go of an amazing community and we’d be relying on each other for a lot until she established herself. Obviously I have thought about this a lot. It’s not because I’m on a quest to steal her away from her boyfriend and complete life in Oregon. I’ve thought about it a lot because she’s the one I’d want whether we were officially together or not.

What I have found is that even when you don’t have a significant other, you still need a partner to bounce ideas off of so you don’t always make every decision on your own echo chamber instead of what people actually say. I’m careful with my words and the meaning of them because we both have an anxious attachment style. Again, an anxious attachment is not a bad thing. You just have to do a ton of work on yourself to shut down The Committee™ that tells you they’re just being nice.

I know because I’ve been treating Supergrover like that for 10 years, but it isn’t an undeserved or uninformed judgment call. If someone has an avoidant attachment style, it doesn’t mean “I ignore people.” It means “I ignore me and focus on you to avoid having to do the work.” Both Supergrover and I do this to an enormous degree, we just come at it from opposite ends of the spectrum. One bleeds out for the other; the other feeds the bleeding out because especially in neurodivergent relationships (one or both halves), we think there must be a way to explain how we feel that makes sense and we will turn it over in our brains until it does. But if your neurodivergence is depression (unipolar or bipolar), your brain knows the very best lies to use against you. Mine, for 46 years, has been that everyone is just being nice to me………. also not an uninformed opinion due to the fact that my personality is only found in 9% of the population. I’ve been able to express needs on this level since I learned to speak.

I just didn’t.

I was praised for never needing anything, so I’d do all sorts of shit to prove I was the perfect child. When I was 14, I felt like my emotional abuser was abandoning me, and she was really the only mother I had at this point. My mother was not malicious, she just didn’t make me comfortable enough to open up. And said emotional abuser said she was an open book and acted like it wasn’t true. So, whether she said it was on the up and up or it wasn’t, it didn’t matter. As a child, her perceptions were my reality. She was also an avoidant personality and within a decade of first contact I’d become a complete shell of a person. That’s because I moved to Portland to be with her, a non-romantic partner in life because what I know now is that I need what Lucy Maude Montgomery calls “a bosom friend.” Before, I put everything in one basket emotionally and my relationships tended to break because of it. Most of the time, it’s that I put too much pressure on the relationship in the beginning because I opened up too much too soon. Having such a close friend takes all that pressure off dating, as does my blog (a blessing and a curse). Writing serves as my partner and lover a hundred percent of the time.

That’s because I had to fall in love with me before I could fall in love with anyone else. It’s not a trite saying. It’s owning a lot and it can get so bad that you end up curled on the floor of the bathroom crying. Sometimes it manifests in behavior- the kind that creates reactions that you know are wrong and will have devastating effects on both parties, but your brain is trying to save you. Picking apart unhealthy reflexes takes me hours every day because I let it.

Making the commitment to get to know myself has cost me in other areas of my life, but it doesn’t mean I’m self-obsessed for a negative purpose. I am not castigating everyone else, I am explaining how others’ reactions to me affect me. I never approach any situation thinking that the other party is wrong and I’m right. If I love you enough to struggle, I will give you as long as it takes to get it together…. and not because I need to be with perfect people. It’s that we won’t get along if you think the way I process is weird. If you take an active interest in reading here because you think it gives you an angle that it doesn’t. Feel free to throw anything you want back in my face as long as it will lead to productivity in our relationship. Get as angry as you want, but don’t walk away if you value me. Take the time to understand why your reaction was angry so that we can discuss it when cooler heads prevail. You are free to walk away in your own anger, but I’ll talk about all our problems here until I can smile and laugh with you again.

Relationships are all about success when both parties want to understand how to reach common ground because they can express how they feel about something. Ironically enough, the people I think do the best at this are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. From what I gather, they are both trying to get emotionally intelligent about themselves before they discuss being real partners again. I had to change my mind when I realized how ragingly hypocritical I was of them, because they were doing exacty what I tell people to do on this web site. Know yourself first. How bad do you think I wish Supergrover had a blog where I could read what she’s been thinking this whole time as well? I’d cut off my arm for it no regrets.

Before, I thought of this couple as unsuccessful.

Though it is not true by any societal standard. We of the United States tend to measure success in wealth. My personality doesn’t do that. Success is owning your behavior and realizing how great you are, because you’ve finally let yourself off the hook for having raged at someone when it’s a symptom of something bigger. That you couldn’t have done any better because that’s all the life experience you had at the time. One of the things I think limited my relationship with Supergrover is that I got time blindness and realized we had gone a very long way down a very bad road without resolving anything, so we were outwardly nice and not kind. We’d fight because we’d let rage and resentment build. I was trying to fix that problem, and Supergrover doesn’t have the time or want with me because I think she’s terrified of how she really feels, because a lot would come up and it would end her emotionally. I am not putting her down in the slightest. We are just not in the same place mentally to be able to accept our flaws and move on, because only I am laying my thoughts on the table.

Before, I thought we were successful and had a shot at redeeming the other in our own eyes if we resolved all the cognitive dissonance. As we spent longer and longer without meeting, our behavior toward each other became entrenched and it was an impossibly large connection to break, because I said I reach for her in the night when I get scared. What I did not say is who was rescuing whom in that situation and what the circumstances might be. That’s the part where only she has answers. My basic, fundamental need in this relationship was ignored in this relationship because I thought if she forgave me on the surface in the moment, over time I’d be able to heal her with my explanations as to why I did what I did and be able to dig deeper into the building blocks of our relationship.

By the time I realized that it was an anxious attachment that was costing me dearly, the cornerstone had been set and the foundation had been laid. If I had recognized that, I never would have told her that I had feelings for her in the first place. That’s because it introduced a fracture in the relationship and we don’t get the right to those anymore. I cannot distance myself from her any more than she can distance herself from me, and that’s what creates the feeling that she’s my primary partner now. The push/pull has become too great a swing, though, because I feel like I’m doing my best to show up every day without fail, because we would not be successful together (with her as my “heterosexual lifemate”) if I was inconsistent. You cannot prove to someone with an avoidant attachment style that you’re really in it for the long haul. It is almost impossible, because they feel so guilty about and jealous of your ability to emote when they can’t.

In explaining what I know about attachments to everyone, hopefully I can explain it to her, too. What I realized is that she was a hurt little girl and so was I. When we were fighting, it was the feeling of getting so angry that you’re fighting with someone who isn’t even in the room. Taking out your anger on someone else who is also not even in the room when you’ve only had a virtual relationship. I am explaining what I know about attachments to kick my own ass as well. With your parents, you cannot and should not attribute rage to triggers you didn’t create. You had no culpability back then and there’s no statute of limitations. You are always allowed, even in your 70s if by some miracle your parents are still alive, to blame your parents for things like a child because that’s not the relationship you set up and that’s how it was supposed to be.

Dog parents know this better than human parents, I think, because few people are unwilling to apply pack mentality to their children. When you do that, you leave the entire family anxious because no one knows the rules. Children are not culpable for the actions of the alpha. Ever. It is impossible by design. If you’re mad at your adult children, it is 100% your responsibility to fix it, because they shouldn’t ever take responsibility for their emotional reactions in front of you. The burden of proof is on you, and you will fuck up your children if you invert that dynamic. They’ll get PTSD reactions and you’ll say “not my fault. You’re an adult now.” In every other relationship in your life, that is a stone cold fact. It’s not taking responsibility for the life you nurtured when you are called on your behavior. Here’s the truth with your kids that’s ironclad. If your actions and your words don’t line up and we spend our whole lives guessing, then when we’re adults we will be forced to go low contact or no contact because we cannot find ourselves without it. Boundaries not being clear as children makes adults who can’t negotiate them because they never learned.

An adult is the equivalent of an Irish Wolfhound puppy. Still young. Still looks like a grown ass adult when in reality, they’re less than a year old. I don’t know anyone who is successful at navigating attachment styles and love languages who does’t intrinsically view people that way. Do you think that anyone is actually capable of being president without that job completely dicing them emotionally and reducing them to their most childlike selves when they’re alone? My attachment style comes from wanting to get to know people in the way they talk to themselves when no one is there. It’s an anxious attachment style because if I show that I am genuinely interested in their problems, they’ll keep talking and I get to avoid my own shit. The anxiety part is thinking that people are just being nice. That they’re a good friend and you’re a bad one. That in order to keep avoiding myself, I must do things to please them to get them to continue opening up to me. This was a well-entrenched pattern installed in my mother. She died before my hopes that she’d self actualize came true in as big a way as it needed to be for her to really enjoy her life. She was just starting that process of individuation from my stepfather, trying to understand why she didn’t enjoy life as much before, getting emotionally stronger every day.

And that’s the worst feeling in the entire world. To know that she was on the cusp of something great for her and she didn’t live to see it. But I lived to see how much she left behind in terms of how she touched people’s lives, the good outcomes in trying to please everyone. I think she did enjoy her life, just like I do. I just think that her life was ruled by self doubt. Both Lindsay and I absolutely rebelled against that. Just like Supergrover, she is one of the purest people I have ever met in my life who will also eat your face off if you cross her, particularly if the object of your ire is me. She has always been physically stronger than me to quite a large degree because I’m disabled. She’s the younger sister, therefore she doesn’t view me as leaning on her and thinking of her as older and wiser as I do. That there are just some things I will never be able to do, and one of them is having her presence when I walk into a room. I get respect when I talk to people for a little while, because people who don’t interact with me in any meaningful way don’t see me as an emotionally mature adult. They see me as a cute toy because I’m small. An easy target to bully especially when you double down because the way you think is normal and the way I think is not……… when in reality a lot more people need their brain chemicals balanced than will ever actually go to the doctor for it.

My mother never did. I would have given anytihng, anything to see her after six weeks of Lexapro. But as her daughter, I couldn’t push her. The closest I’ve ever gotten is straight up telling her I thought she should talk to someone. That’s because even though I’m the child, you cannot see the forest for the trees when you’re in it. Depression, especially when untreated, will make you a shell of a person who does nothing but think about how bad they are. “Let’s do something really scary.” “We could go to bed early and be alone with our thoughts.”

Hell is not other people. It’s being uncertain about where you err and other people don’t, because you are not taking time to look at the pattern in an objective manner. Two egos duke it out because there’s too much pride involved. You’re not coming to a place of vulnerability with each other, you’re just butting heads and the longer it goes on, the pettier your fights will get so that you think the fight is about one thing when it’s generally about something else…… but you don’t know that because you can’t see it.

That’s why being a writer is so important to me. I am not looking at anything but being successful about how I express my needs, and the long journey it has taken me to get there. To me, prayer is a tool for journaling. Trying to make these blog entries when they’re really letters to God, because God is the punching bag who can take it and Supergrover isn’t…… and never should have been put in that position given the enormity of my emotions where she is concerned. The roots of our permutation as friends are unresolved, so she thinks I’m throwing darts when I write from a third person perspective. That I am telling her what I notice, not trying to make her feel one way or the other about it. The letters are persuasive by their nature, not by objective fact…. because people aren’t thinking of what you’re expressing. They’re focusing on their reactions. How it affects them is more important to them than their behavior affects you, and that’s just looking out for number one. It has nothing to do with intentional hurt most of the time. It is the nature of being human. Being responsible and letting go of guilt. Being mindful and carrying no shame.

The more you can state your own boundaries, the more people are capable of relaxing in your presence. That’s why some people are naturally drawn to others. Those who do the work attract people who don’t because in the short term, it feels like you’re fulfilling each other’s every need, and it breaks down because of division of labor. You cannot divide and conquer a relationship. You can only sit down with mediation.

Your ultimate success depends on how willing you are to acknowledge when you’re the problem and can work with people to handle your own flaws while you handle theirs. You can’t change people. This is how you get quirks to line up. They’re only negative when you can’t be sensitive to others’ needs, just as important as yours and yet you still discard them because people tend to believe they’re right a hundred percent of the time. That doesn’t come from arrogance. That comes from how you were raised, the reason you are not responsible for your reactions to your parents and you are to your friends. The hierarchy is set and you cannot break it until the child is ready to be the alpha of their own lives. In some families, this leads to outright physical violence, but I am not speaking from experience personally. I’m speaking from the perspective of having spoken to thousands of people over my lifetime about their trauma responses, because I feel so welcoming to people that they emotionally vampire me because I can’t not let them, or I couldn’t…………..

Until I became successful, like I thought everyone else was but me.

What’s something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail.

Breaking up with Dana and my best friend at the same time was the most exquisite pain God’s ever dished up, and I have to attribute it to mental illness. It was all my fault, or at least, that’s the way I perceived it at the time. I treated meeting Supergrover like I treated meeting everyone else….. when in reality I fell in love with Prince T’Challah.

I am laughing out loud as I see me running around in circles like Meredith Grey, because our situation was very much the pilot of Grey’s Anatomy. The look on Meredith’s face when she realizes just who she’s been lusting after is basically the entire plot to my life that year, and I underestimated the effect of having accidentally walked into power just like it. I have had every single one of those “oh,shit” moments and some of them so priceless I wish I’d gotten them on video.

Accidentally walking into that kind of power changes you, and I don’t have to say much because there are like six TV seasons of how that played out. Both high and low points, clearly.

If I couldn’t fail, I would tell her I loved her every single day of my life, that she changed me in ways no one else ever could, and I’m sorry that I get angry when my needs aren’t being met- and not in a snarky way. Just saying that I know having needs is one thing. Expressing anger is another. I’d tell her I know she’s terrified of conflict and it would be better if we could see each other’s eyes when we talked, and if that still wasn’t possible, then at least take more time to reply to each other so anger isn’t running high.

If I couldn’t fail, I’d tell our friends and family we couldn’t fail again and to get used to it. We need other romantic partners, but when we say that, it doesn’t mean “I don’t need you.” I need her to be less avoidant in her attachment and me to be less anxious in mine. Yet when we’re feeding each other the right way, it’s like being hooked up to a battery pack so your computer never has to stop processing.

When I was on the West Coast, that was easy because I needed the brain at different times than she did. 😉

With her, I can picture everything from living together (me as the old spinster in the attic, not the partner…. don’t make it weird) to never making up at all. The reason I think all of this is so sad is that I think we could fix everything with one of those hugs that lasts, what, 7 seconds or some shit? Where it lasts long enough to break down your walls and you relax? The reason I have enough room for all of that in my mind is that I’ve been thinking over ways to make the relationship work long before I knew whether it would or wouldn’t.

Nothing has ever been dependent on living together or in the same city. Living as the spinster in her attic was a Boo Radley reference, because I know that’s the literary character that represents me the most…… and one of her favorite stories in the world is “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I’m a writer. It wouldn’t matter to me if she was home or not. It would matter to me that I was around her stuff, my pocket litter blending with hers. I cannot wish for more of her, and neither can anyone else. Even if I was Michael, I couldn’t ask for more than getting to live with her stuff…… and it’s why I treat him like he walks on water. We couldn’t be more different, and we couldn’t be any more crazy about her. We each see very different sides of her and yet have the most in common when it comes to things that come up in our conversations. Michael has just been wearing his big boy pants longer than me.

She may be married, but she is an old spinster in an attic personality, too. Not only is being “on” a shit ton of work, she thinks she has too much sludge in her soul to be loved, and I don’t know who told her that but I want to kill them. And I want them to die badly, publicly….. the way all women who love women feel about the patriarchy. We’re the ones that are trying to repair that kind of damage from male egos.

She has not made the connection that Scout and Boo are the same person at different points in their lives……. and she is most certainly a Scout.

If I couldn’t fail, I would tell her I love her every day of my life………… like I have for the last 10 years. Because here’s the thing. We are both Scout and Boo. Our personalities both vary to that degree. Does it really matter if our love languages always match up perfectly? Fuck no. I can take our memories and have it be enough. But I do know she loves me back. Just because it’s different than the way she loves her partner doesn’t make it less real or invalid. The Dragonborn needs a partner and a housecarl. I had to level up so that I wasn’t Lydia, charging us into battle ahead of her call.

If I couldn’t fail and the message would be received as it was intended, it would be to tell Michael I understand what it’s like being married to a king. Support people need support people.

If I couldn’t fail, I wouldn’t.