Category: Uncategorized

Tuesdays and Also July

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

…….and also never.

I have never needed Jeremy Bearimy more than I do right now. However, I wouldn’t know how to change things if I went back in time. I’d only be able to go with the flow, knowing what I know now. I don’t know if I would or wouldn’t survive Life on Mars. Either I’ll save humanity over and over, or I’ll take in the whole vortex. There is no in between.

I’ll decide in the car. Guess it depends on who’s driving.

If I had to go back in time, I would be Meagan’s friend and let go of the idea that we’d be good together. I was too wrapped up in my damage to pay attention, and it wasn’t fair to her. She just thought I was intense and weird, so she either went on a date with someone else or had a one night stand. She was also supposed to be a mutual friend, so seeing her after Meagan noped out wasn’t the best experience. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. It was written all over my body. It was more grief than I could carry. The relationship wasn’t fair to either of us, because I’m not the alpha dog…. or I wasn’t at 18. She found an alpha dog and married her. I was livid, and not for the reasons you think. I loved her more than me, and to see her commit for a lifetime to someone that would steamroll her every single day made my heart break into a million little pieces. My friend was fucked, and it only took about a decade for her to see it.

This is not blaming her. I just see how it is.

That’s because I love those type women as well. She had it together better than I did, but cut off from her emotions a good bit of the time. I only say that because my dad said I was after I started dating her. That I receded into my shell.

Hm. That has no bearing on “this thing we’ve created and managed.” My eyes are rolling out of my head. That phrase hurt worse than a one night stand. I never got laid, but I am well and truly fucked. It’s too much. And yet, 10 years is not nothing. I have the right to be upset for the time it takes for waves of tears to wash over shallower wells of injury. It doesn’t feel like the end of a romance with my beautiful girl. It feels like wondering where it all went. I know we both participated. I have owned my part. At the same time, the story will not go away.

It’s just that now, I like her character more than I like her. It’s painful, but it’s true. I love her like I love all my friends and family, but I don’t have to like her. She was not being very likable at last interaction, and neither was I because of it. If I start a letter with “I don’t want to fight about this,” the answer is generally not “you’re not getting what you need and I am not going to give you any more than three words. Die mad about it.” I am doing the work so that I don’t. She doesn’t get to steal happiness anymore.

She replaced it with fear that had nothing to do with either one of us. It was our filters for it. We fought because it was easy to read each other wrong and I felt constantly impaled. She would say that she wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been such an asshole to her, and she’s right. She has also been great about saying I’m forgiven and treated me like dog shit. So, which story do I believe? Do I believe that I am worthy of this treatment, or do I believe that what I did was eight years ago and she’s still a brick wall. It made me so angry that I realized I could not live that way anymore. I had just met Zac and reconnected with Bryn, and I felt settled in a way that I haven’t in a long time. I realized that because her dark begets dark, I couldn’t shine a light bright enough to get through to her. It was her choice to say “you are clearly not getting what you need, and I am hell bent on never giving it to you.” She created a fucking mess, and then blamed me for everything. But because I hurt her, what she did became totally invalid. I couldn’t have pain anymore. I couldn’t have issues anymore. Her right. Her barometer. She would not submit on it and admit that things had not gone as planned on either side.

She thought she was trash, and treated me as an extension.

I do not have to entertain her opinion anymore, but not wanting it is a whole other thing. If she wanted to break me, she did. I think she did want to break me, because when she’s angry she’s quiet as well. Her words reverberate, and she has never grasped how much. So, of course she doesn’t have to apologize. It wasn’t lashing out. If I hadn’t done what I did, she wouldn’t have been forced to treat me like shit until I gave up.

That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

I needed her to pick up the clue phone, but I was always too much for her. If I am too much for you, now I don’t care how important you are in my life. This aggression will not stand, man. That’s because I’m an easy target to blame for other people’s refusal to look inside themselves. There’s never an actual conflict where we both present stories and try to figure out objective truth. Very few people do what I do, because they hate it. It’s too hard and it hurts too much. And yet, I do it anyway because it helped me to see what I was doing to participate in everything without doing the same thing to her. I didn’t make it all her fault. She saw it as that, but that’s because she was looking for it.

If your self esteem is so low that you cannot open up about anything due to fear of other people, you will hurt them. That’s because you’ll make everything about me. You didn’t do anything, I made you. If I hadn’t x, you wouldn’t have had to do y.

First of all, that’s bullshit. She acted too much like a victim for someone who supposedly forgave me. It was her damage, not mine. If she only needs to be hurt once to lock down forever, I’m out.

Our relationship devolved into as long as I agreed to do everything she said and keep quiet about anything that was bothering me, she was ready for anything. She actually said that I was the only one who ever trashed anything. It was a dick move on her part.

I didn’t respect her boundaries because she didn’t tell me what they were. I would just hit a land mine and she’d explode. I have the ability to make her feel things that other people don’t, because I can say it in a way that actually makes her emote. She just doesn’t do that for me. She gets angry at me and tells someone else.

Meanwhile, I am of the opinion that if the information goes out, it has to go to the right person.

She was my perfect picture of the companion that my INFJ personality profile said I’d get. She traded friendship for shallow communication because apparently it takes a very long time to write e-mails unless she’s telling me to fuck off. Those she takes time with.

Meanwhile, I know why she’s hurt. I know why she’s angry. I know why she cuts off her emotions. I can have sympathy for all that and still think she’s on a path of destruction. She can’t cancel everyone when they make a mistake.

If she goes through life treating everyone like me, that when they hurt her she recedes into her fortress and nopes out, that’s going to lead to a lot of short friendships. But that’s the view from where I sit. Maybe she has managed to meet people that never do anything that ruffles her feathers. For their sake, I hope so.

She’s a lot to lose, and if you piss her off, she’ll hold it over your head for the next 30 years. But she’ll also be nice and not tell you that.

It comes out when her actions and words don’t line up.

She treated me like I was sick when I wasn’t. My perception when she check in on my dad was that my mother died two or three days later, so she felt like she couldn’t tell me that she didn’t really want to be my friend, she just wanted to send me a compliment. At first, it felt like she pitied me, coddled me, anything to make me not get upset at anything. She walked on eggshells no matter what I did, because don’t upset the crazy person. She took away my agency.

She’d beat me emotionally like a southern mama with a hair brush,

I didn’t walk away because she deserved to take a shot at me. But she didn’t deserve eight years of it.

Meanwhile, I also walked on eggshells and tried to please her because I felt like she thought I was a threat. The truth is that I have never even been within 15 minutes of her, and when I truly tried to walk away, she wouldn’t let me go. She could say the same thing about me.

But she wouldn’t believe any of it.

A Comprehensive Response

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I blog, therefore I am healthy.

Writing is a comprehensive response to life. That is true no matter what kind, but particularly blogging because the story moves forward every single day, because it’s a choice to post, not a responsibility. I do not feel like I have an audience to whom I owe anything. If I needed to, I’d push the red button and everything would be gone. Nothing threatens you if you don’t need something out of it. I would be giving up a lot, but I wouldn’t stop writing. It’s a huge deal to be a blogger, because people cannot predict what you’ll remember and think they can.

Someone might be totally freaked out and barking up my tree not to write about them, but what they don’t know is that if I can’t make an illustration out of them that works, I won’t. Not everyone makes a good character. Telling them that is worse than blowback, because their ego gets involved. What do you mean, I don’t make a good character?

I feel like I handle this better than most after coming out to straight people without a clue. You’ll never see a more butt hurt child than when they’ve told a gay person they don’t like them “that way” and the person says “you’re not my type.” They are horribly offended in the most hilarious of ways. It is more than physical attraction, and they’ve taken your rejection as if you think it isn’t.

My straight girl crush was because I was struggling in my marriage and it was easier to feel high as hell on new relationship energy than it was to deal at home. She is drop dead gorgeous and it didn’t mean anything to me because I wasn’t looking at her picture while I wrote. She was the equivalent of my “corporeally challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.” (I went on a date with a woman from OPB/NPR… maybe two… but this is what Dana and I called her for 15 years.) I could have a crush on a straight girl because it couldn’t go anywhere. I’d get all the good stuff without all the bad except I didn’t. My trauma bond screamed with empathy because she didn’t give me a slap bracelet after the fire.

When I say that someone makes a bad character, I mean that when I write about you, the emotions fall flat on the page. If I can’t make myself feel anything, no one else will feel it, either. If you go back to my older entries, you’ll be able to tell when I’m distressed. I can, but I also have the memory of writing the piece if it’s so overwhelming it made me sob. People think I get really angry when I’m actually crying my eyes out. I am literally pouring myself out onto the page so that I have an accurate idea of how my mental and physical health are treating me. I realize when I’ve been too harsh. I realize when I’ve been too nice.

What makes Supergrover such a great character is because when I write about her I can cry. Not many people evoke emotion in me like that because I just won’t get vulnerable enough. When I write about my beautiful girl, I step into a museum with ten years’ worth of collected art. Some of it was bought and paid for. Some of it we stole in a heist. We’d push and pull and tumble and roll, but for whatever reason, we didn’t cut each other off. That’s because the museum had no easily accessible exits.

I became exhausted because bringing up conflict and it never getting resolved was eating my self-esteem for every meal.

It was very, very confusing because we’d have a fight and she’d say we were done. When I assumed she meant it, I’d try to move on and then she’d drop in. When I assumed that she was just angry af and apologized, it was perceived as me trying to get attention. She would tell me that she told me it was over and I just pushed, but I have two solid memories that stick with me.

The first was a huge fight that really was the end of it for me. Like, I am just not capable. She reads on my blog that my dad is having surgery and checks in. I was pleased, but I felt weird about it because I thought, “surely she sees why this would be problematic.” It felt like “leave me the fuck alone, but I’m going to make sure you know I’m watching.” It has never gotten any more resolved than this, because when she dropped in on me, it was fine. When I dropped in on her, she felt creeped out because she thought it was me saying “I’m always watching.” It happened again when we had another blowout and I thought maybe then I’d get a break long enough to figure out what really happened. Someone said something to her that reminded her of me, and she was back in my DMs.

Neither one of us could break the connection, just “tumbling through a freefall, no one’s going to go unscathed….. but it’s not because you held back, and it’s not how I behaved.” Now I’m humming…. “and I believe that underneath it all, you are my friend. And the way that I fell for you, I’ll never fall that way again. I still believe despite our differences that what we have’s enough” because I believe in her (and I believe in love). You know I have the ability to cry about this if I’m writing and suddenly quote Indigo Girls.

I told my friend Missy that I didn’t even listen to them for the longest because it created a “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” amount of “AS IF I’M NOT WEIRD ENOUGH.” I had a stereo in my room. Their albums didn’t leave when I did for years.

Now, one of my favorite songs is “When We Were Writers.”

Writing is not what Supergrover does for a living, but she does write in her spare time to get away from work. She’s right. It’s a bubble, When I say that I can’t do something or I have to go because I’m writing, it is taken every bit as seriously as when Lindsay says, “I’m going on a run.” Nothing else is more sacred than spending time alone so you can actually hear your thoughts.

With a virtual relationship, you never have to feel alone. That’s because their physical presence has never been needed. The relationship wasn’t created that way. We’d become each other in our work, borrowing style, structure, and tone. It was quite sophisticated in retrospect. It’s amazing how much we were able to do for each other virtually, and now everyone knows it because of the pandemic. We were virtual BEFORE IT WAS COOL.

We’d trade off being The Holy and The Moly.

We both went scorched earth too much when it was infinitely possible to just be out with it and either be done or decide we have something and work toward it. My emotions were larger than hers and always have been. She absolutely knew this. But I do not think that she ever thought that she’d be reopening a wound if she reached out. My part in all this is that because my feelings were large, I ignored everything bad and just kept on believing that one day, I’d find the combination of words that would unlock her. In my mind’s eye, I’m 14. She’s six. I’m older, and I should have known better.

When you know better, you do better. Maya Angelou’s words, but true for me as well. I don’t even know if she likes Coke, but she has a unique name and I knew for damn sure she wasn’t going to find a “Share a Coke with…..” bottle anywhere. So I ordered her one from Atlanta. There were actually six. One with her actual name, one with her character’s name, her husband, her kids, and her dogs. Except the Coke bottle said “Boytoy” on her husband’s because that’s how we referred to him. She never saw them, because I mixed up the address and put my name on the wrong part of the form. So they got a box addressed to me for a reason completely unknown to them and returned it. I was furious because it cost so much to do, but I was only angry at myself for mixing up the web form. It was so unique, and ADHD fucked me. I was absolutely miserable because it was the nicest thing I could think of to do virtually because I’d been a jackass. It was the friend equivalent of having to sleep on the couch and buying chocolates and flowers to beg.

Since she wears suits and crap for work, she also travels sometimes. I sent her a bracelet with a charm for her favorite cause. She told me it was perfect and sent me a picture of her wrist. I feasted on that for weeks because now I could go wherever she was, metaphysically. She just isn’t the sort of person that would tell me where she went, because it’s not important in her daily life and that’s really what I wanted to hear. I don’t care how she’s doing professionally. I care how she’s doing emotionally. I am the red telephone where she is concerned. Even now that we’re done I won’t hear a bad word about her because my friends don’t care about her. They care about me. They don’t recognize how much she gave me because even I’ve never heard her side of the story. I couldn’t make anything better. She was looking for hurt, so she found it.

The bracelet said to me that as long as I kept my behavior consistent, she’d know that my drug protocol was working , and not to worry if I spiraled out, that it had nothing to do with her. It had to do with my mental health, and no one else is in charge of managing it. I know when to go to the ER/psych ward. If that doesn’t end up being the whole story, still not her damage. Blame poor health and bad medicine, not the patient.

It all seems scary to people the way I lay it out because I’m dispassionate. I have a disease. It has to be managed. People need to know they’re off the hook for checking in on me, because when mental health issues pop up, if I don’t do anything that’s my fault.

“Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?”

Wow. That was dark, even for me. I’m mostly fine, so that’s not an indication that things are about to get worse. It’s just a reality check. Run the numbers, don’t diagnose me.

I am awaiting the cause of Sinead O’Connor’s death. I think I already know what it is…. and no matter what it is, you don’t die at 56 of natural causes.

I don’t want to know, but I ran the numbers.

Here’s the other thing you need to know. You cannot guess what mood I’m in, or whether I’m experiencing depression or hypomania in my work because I write about things that have already happened and I’m searching for the road ahead. I map out what I feel now to plan for what I’ll feel later. It’s not because I know you better than you, it’s that I have to decide how I’m going to react to our next interaction based on past history. I will know whether it’s time to stand up for myself or apologize with fancy Coke.

However, I did not just send a gift and assume that she’d take it as “I’m sorry.” It’s just that her love language is action and mine is words of affirmation. I compromised, she didn’t. She could respond in her own love language, but she couldn’t meet me halfway and talk about her feelings. I never knew which way was up. It’s just not fair to leave someone in that much confusion because my need was being rejected. I needed her to show up, be present in the moment. Instead, her responses were dismissive or angry. Meanwhile, I’m trying to do things that make her less angry and annoyed, but I couldn’t because I was guessing all the time. I got done with guessing way too far past my breaking point. She had enough information to blow up my life, not the other way around. And yet she saw me as a threat without realizing she felt like one to me, too. We were in the same boat, just back to back.

She is the Aunt Voula. I am the Toula. She will be everyone’s favorite and I’m okay with that because she’s my favorite, too. We’re in that weird age gap where I’m not young enough to be her kid, but not an average age between siblings, either.

In the beginning, she treated me like an equal. After fights, she treated me like a pest. It is my fault I treated her badly, and her fault that she never got over it.

The problem isn’t even that she “never got over it.” It’s that she is free to be someone who decides how they feel about you on a daily basis for someone else. It was chaotic and I was tired of the swings.

It wasn’t good for my mental and physical health.

Even If You Won’t Do it for Me

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am still thinking about that woman from earlier, the “ally.” You only got what she said, not the thread that followed. The first thing I said that pissed her off was that I doubted anyone but queer OGs her age would recognize the pink triangle…. but “your apprehension about meeting a partner doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. I’m fighting for my right to be safe here.” I thought it was making a fair point. It doesn’t mean anything because when you don’t want to be queer, you can take it off.

She responded by saying how she would protect me “even if I didn’t do that for her.” Serious question. From whom or what am I protecting Karen? Who is out to get her? Most likely, men. But I am harassed that way every single time I leave my house in addition to comments about my being queer, how it would be nice to watch me be queer, etc. I go through just as much as Karen, but the difference is that no one is going to think asking a lesbian if he can watch her fuck her girlfriend is offensive. Even the wife of the man who asks is just going to punch his shoulder. She might get upset if he asks to join in, but in my experience women are shit at defending me……… sometimes even acting jealous as if I set her man’s sights on me just to get him away from her. That’s because in her mind WE WERE ROOMMATES.

So, the point about “I don’t have to protect you” whizzed by her ear.

I wish I could get it out of my head, because of two things. The first is that I am direct and I don’t give a fuck if you’re not in my inner circle. I didn’t know this woman at all. Therefore, she didn’t know my history, either. So, I’m recovering from all the things that straight people have said to me and I warned her that would cause a rift between her and her daughter, because actions speak louder than words. I would really like to know whether she’s the proud parent she says she is. When actions and words don’t line up, kids notice first.

Because she was all wrapped up in herself and feeling so butt hurt, she stopped taking in everything I was saying. Yes, I was direct, but I wasn’t an asshole. I’m kind, but I’m not nice. I have been so nice for so long that I didn’t even know who I was anymore. When women take back their power, it always looks like rage. That’s probably because it is to some degree, but when you’ve never said “don’t treat me like that,” people will take up as much space as you let them.

I’m sorry she has mental health issues. I really am. But somehow I manage to be sick AF with mental health issues most of the time and wear a rainbow flag.

I am not sure Karen has taken it in how much easier she has it than me. The barrier to entry when you do not look like a traditional female is enormous. The barrier to entry when you don’t act like one is higher. You can be a powerful woman, sure. But even if you’re one of the best in the *world,* someone’s still going to ask you if you’ve put the coffee on because apparently male hands are broken when they enter the office.

I don’t have a problem being the secretary who makes the coffee. I’m talking about the jackass that met Jo Sharp, didn’t know who she was, and proceeded to ream her out because she didn’t know the first thing about the works of Jo Sharp. Twitter spits truth sometimes. My problem is not being the secretary that makes the coffee, it’s being the CEO of the company and if Zac was standing next to me I’d be invisible and people would tell him all evening what a good job he was doing.

I spent my 20s as a computer geek. I fixed professors’ computers, taught them basic stuff, really, and I never had a white male professor ask me for help. Not once. If something was wrong, it was the school’s fault. I walk into a shit show, and then he’s trying to micromanage me, practically putting his hand over mine on the mouse, mansplaining everything that’s wrong, etc. and yet he still can’t figure out shit from Shinola. The nicest professors admitted when they were idiots. The ones that realized they were idiots when I pushed one button never were. They’d spend the next few minutes telling me how their idea would have worked (no. It wouldn’t.).

She acted like a child when she didn’t get the response she wanted, and I wasn’t the only one trying to make these points. We weren’t mean, we gave her a reality check on her pride so it didn’t bounce, then she got angry at me. That’s fine. But it doesn’t make her allyship better or more inclusive because when I said, “I’m speaking,” I had that right. If you are an ally, my words first. Always. I do not need you to lead from the front. When queer people are speaking, sit the fuck down. Listening is your only job, and you haven’t proved yourselves spectacular so far at 101.

I am not saying that I am the be all and end all. I am saying that I am queer and you are not. You can be empathetic, but you can’t be sympathetic. You have never been through anything similar unless you’re a racial minority, and even then not really. There’s just more context toward people understanding that white, straight, cis people are directly affecting our lives with a system they built and could give fuck all that anyone complains. We’re not going to destroy the system. We’re not even going to change it til long after I die.

It’s one of the reasons I’m so direct. I don’t have time. I’m here, I’m queer, and…

I’m speaking.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have found that being direct has cost me a lot, because especially with women, they think I’m attacking them because I’m not sugar coating anything to protect their feelings. They’re responsible for their feelings. I should not have to do the emotional work of walking around in someone’s mind to determine the reaction I’m going to get before I say something. It makes me people please and my need gets ignored.

That’s because I used to stuff everything down. Anything anyone has ever said to me that mattered is still there. So is everything that has been done to me because I am a victim of childhood emotional abuse and queer, so I’m a big hate double ticket being female as well. Women being chattel is not something we created for ourselves. Queers being construed as mentally ill pedophiles is not something we created for ourselves. Hell, even being female wasn’t part of the plan. It’s just the hand I was dealt.

My mind isn’t all cis, which gives me some confidence now that I’m not four damn years old. I will not take anyone’s shit anymore.

First of all, if we are in a relationship, we have to forgive each other over and over and over and over. I will not accept anything less, because I cannot abide passive-aggressive abandonment. “There’s a problem, so instead of being a grown up, I’m going to avoid you for all eternity.” If you don’t love me enough to struggle, GTFO.

State boundaries clearly and be consistent on letting me know when they change. Again, I will not predict you.

If you’re a homophobe or a misogynist, you cannot come see me until after you’ve already done the work. My friend Erin said that straight people should check with queer people before they decide to say they’re an ally. I told her it meant a lot to me that I could have an opinion on that. That an ally shirt is not something you buy for yourself.

It’s also problematic to buy things that say “ally” on it for some people, because it becomes clear that you’re not willing to take on our burdens. God forbid someone think you were gay. The point of being an ally is realizing it’s relentless. You have a habit of putting on all your rainbow shit until something happens that you don’t like. Maybe it’s that someone hit on you. Maybe it’s that you experienced discrimination. Either way, when you take it off because it’s too hard, fuck you sideways.

Resurrection happens in the middle of the mess, but it will never happen if you believe you’re the main character in every goddamn story. If you’re going to ask me to recommend what you should do as an ally, and then say I’m attacking you because you ended the paragraph by explaining why it’s too hard to look queer, you are not welcome at my table.

Alternatively, I could never get my beautiful girl to open up enough to figure out how we could solve all our shit, and it was a similar issue. By holding everything in, she became the main character in every story because I was constantly begging her to open up because we went through some shit and had way different reactions to it. I NEEDED her, and she half-assed it. The only reason I say this is because she never explained to me that she was any busier, but I knew how I was being treated.

She was an open book once I learned to read, it’s just that now my opinions are not valid. I cannot always be wrong. I am too smart for that. If you insist that your words are never the problem, GTFO.

It’s not that you’ve pissed me off so bad we can’t work it out. It’s that we have a bad pattern and me doing all the work isn’t going to solve jack shit. Go with God. Don’t accept any wooden nickels. May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. Just don’t come back to me until you know what you want and you can say it out loud. Have the integrity to own that you are responsible for a percentage of what is happening in every situation. Even my emotional abuse isn’t that woman’s problem anymore, because I’m a grown ass woman.

There are absolutes in life you can’t change, though, and with my beautiful girl I found a big one. She did not. We need to be together and yet we are apart. This is not personal. This is that not being able to have a relationship with her causes consequences bigger than me and she’s fucking blind to it. But that’s all her shit. If she doesn’t figure it out, then she can watch as I trip over a land mine.

I will struggle to forgive noping out when I needed her most. I realize that she needed time to recover, but I gave her eight years. It seemed like she didn’t have any other dogs to kick because I was getting massive anger in response to legit nothing.

My beautiful girl, I will always annoy the everliving shit out of you and make you angry because it doesn’t take much. Every accusation was a confession, and we can both be dead honest about that. We were seeing each other through our own filters. I would never escape judgmental dickhead. I would never be her goddess of the moon ever again.

But she saw me being a writer as a threat, so instead of just asking me what I was going to write or helping me craft the narrative or helping me gain understanding about ANYTHING so that I had parameters? She told me that she could no longer allow my words to cause fear in her and to go find new friends. I was livid. I hadn’t written anything about her in a long time because she hated it so much. I could write beautifully about everyone but her, unless I fed her ego and then she’d realize being a character wasn’t so bad. She just couldn’t see herself as true in my eyes. That both sides of the spectrum exist in her just as much as it is in me.

She couldn’t see red to indigo, and beat my ass with blue.

So, now when anyone crosses me, I ask myself what she would do. It works. I’m not a totally different person. I have confidence in what I believe for the first time in forever. I do not think she has the same confidence in her own beliefs when it comes to emotions and relationships. This is because my experience of her is that dealing with conflict is bad and we don’t need to do it at all. Not talking about it is the same.

I’m a verbal processor and I was trying to work through some shit. She could read it. Instead of realizing that I didn’t have to make sense of the way she felt, I only had to make sense of my own emotions, she felt like I was on her ass. Got annoyed when I asked for fucking anything, called me a judgmental dickhead 80% of the time, but if I told her that, she’d say that she thinks I have an extraordinary mind and she’s wildly impressed with me as a person.

Well, start fucking acting like it.

I don’t need friends who don’t respect my opinion on things because they think they’re the whole story. If we can’t collaborate, I am out.

This one relationship is reflective of how I feel about homophobia. It is not my job to struggle with it. It’s yours.

Maybe you should talk to someone.

WE DON’T OWE YOU SAFE SPACE EVER

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had one of the most toxic conversations I’ve ever had with an ally because this time I could feel the anger instead of letting medication stuff it down. I also had enough strength to direct my emotions appropriately. I told her to fuck off and namaste.

I’m the proud mother of a gay daughter. But I’m also straight, single and well over a certain age. We live in a gay friendly town and never had any issues. The ONLY a reason I do not wear rainbows, is because it’s hard enough trying to meet a life partner without them assuming I’m gay. And I am not very good at telling when someone of either sex is attracted to me in that way. I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t know I was on a date with someone. Perhaps there should be a special symbol that means “I support and protect you even though I’m not one of you” . Give me some ideas and I’ll design it and make it.

I told Zac he could have anything he wanted if he went to this thread and started it with “as the man Leslie met (while she was wearing rainbow shit, I’ll grant you- it was terrifying)……………

This is after an entire thread on why straight, cis people are problematic because you can’t be an ally AND scream “no homo.” That comes out in a range of ways. This is exhibit A, because it’s an example of someone who:

  • Told me she had a gay child, so she can’t possibly be homophobic.
  • Wanted me to do work for her instead of looking it up.
  • Missed all the messages where I was trying to tell her that she doesn’t deserve safe space from me or anyone else because she doesn’t need it.
  • Didn’t listen when I said she’s probably saying all that shit around her child and actions speak louder than words. You know what will kill us? Literally? Telling us to our faces that it’s just too hard to be us, so let’s just not do it.
  • Didn’t listen when I said that people were being let into a sacred space. That for a lot of history, queer people have needed those symbols to find each other because we were trying to avoid having our skulls bashed in.
  • Reacted with straight fragility and said something about mental health issues and not needing this to push her over the edge.

It was a rehash of everything I was trying to tell The War Daniel, hopefully in a less angry tone, but this woman hit a trigger without even recognizing she was doing it. Straight people do this to queers all day, every day, because it’s enculturated behavior. I do not get to say I’m not a racist when I do racist shit accidentally all the time. Here’s where we’re different. I TAKE THE FUCKING NOTE.

She reminded me of my grandmother, Rena, who would have put this woman away. “You can’t help it that you’re ugly, but you could stay home.” I am finding the fuck out that I am more Rena than anyone in my biological family. She would fuck you up and bake you a pie. That’s a Texas yellow dog Democrat in a sentence. Tell horrible people to go to hell, but make sure they enjoy it.

She missed the part where I said that I realized I would have to leave Texas because my life was too hard there. I needed to live with real grown-ups. This kind of shit makes me want to settle in Canada or overseas, because it’s not that those countries are SO much more liberal, it’s that queer issues aren’t a thing EVERY election. They don’t have to worry about federal legislation EVERY two years…… and during that time, there will almost certainly be a naturally occurring event that will somehow become my fault. The queers absolutely ruined New Orleans. Remember? You forgive uneducated assholes because too few people care and we’ve made too many allowances for racist, homophobic, and transphobic behavior. I will never again kowtow to people who say they just can’t change. If being with me is important to them, they’ll change. Otherwise, I don’t have time for people who can’t get it in their heads that their homophobia actually hurts. It’s not innocuous and stop asking us to pretend it is. If I ever have to hear “he’s just so set in his ways,” that person is going to be driven out of the temple with a whip.

This person didn’t mention anything about the church, but it’s responsible for everything homophobia is today. The difference between being a sexual minority vs. a racial minority is that if I got black and white Evangelicals together, they’d all tell me to go to hell because I’m a sinner and I deserve it.

Straight, white, cis people are not the only issue here, Dude.

I don’t call out the black church as often as I probably should, because I’m not black. Those churches do not see me speaking with any authority because I’m not black, even though the minority I represent is present in every congregation everywhere. China. Russia. Iran. Uganda. It’s all the same. Skin color makes no difference to me because on this one issue you’re all equally terrible people.

I hate it when I say things like “I could have been killed in the Holocaust” and it STILL becomes all about them.

You can’t be an ally and scream “no homo.”

I don’t owe you safe space. You’re not in front of the firing squad.

The Letting Go Show

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I said something about a Supergrover playlist the other day, that she reminds me of the color green, new life, new earth, etc. But what I needed in the moment was to release pain before I could enjoy everything again without anger or resentment. Here is the list.

  • She’s So Mean, Matchbox Twenty
    • Her clothes are on the floor and my records are scratched, but she’s the best thing that ever happened to me.
  • I Believe in Love, Indigo Girls
    • When we tried to rework all of this, each to our rendition, painted blindly in a corner, lost for ideas blinding fishing for a compliment or kindness just to bring us into view. You could not interpret me, and I could not interpret you.
  • Unwell, Matchbox Twenty
    • I wasn’t crazy, I was unwell. She’s hell on wheels in a black dress, but not by choice.
  • Hold On, Wilson Phillips
    • This is a direct result of the movie “Bridesmaids,” and it is completely responsible for making me cry and blow my nose at red lights.
  • Nobody Knows, The Tony Rich Project
    • It’s everything you can’t say, because no one wants to hear it.
  • Pink Triangle, Weezer
    • It’s the quickest way to make me sob with empathy at Rivers’ plight, because I would know nothing about the reverse….. #eyeroll
  • Not Your Fault, AWOLNATION
    • I yelled at her for so much that didn’t have anything to do with her, and that’s where I’d start if I got to meet her on the ground. Just “I’m sorry” all over the place. Alternatively, there were other times when I felt she was doing the same thing to me with no hesitation or apology. It cuts both ways.
  • Despacito, Louis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee
    • This is probably the most controversial song on the list because I loved it based on the idea that I was blogging the most innocuous things about her because no one else would think they were important and the narrator talks about writing on her body. This is what happens when you decide a song is about someone and ABSOLUTELYFUCKINGNOT fluent in Spanish. Dude is a creep, and my thought was beautiful because she was writing our story on my shoulderblades as well. I still like it, it’s just not a mutual story anymore. The ink on my skin I got from the amusement park is fading and when it goes, there’s no re-entry. I will not let people tell me one thing and do another. I want to hold your hand while the ride lasts, and if you decide to jump, my emotional support can’t depend on whether I’m happy about it or not. It can’t depend on getting things I want that you don’t, and vice versa, trying to convince the other we’re right. Relationships aren’t supposed to be THAT much work. You aren’t supposed to find dealbreakers once a week.
  • Superman, Eminem
    • This is only when I’m really angry, or I skip it. She was the equivalent of “I’m not fazed, I hang around big stars all day, It’s not a big deal to me anyway… you’re just plain old Marshall to me.” I was all “girl, you run that game. First off you don’t know Marshall. At all so don’t grow partial… that’s ammo for my arsenal.” Great at first, a shit show later. I could never recapture her attention even though I wanted to rescue her.
  • Love Game, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar
    • The chorus makes me laugh my ass off in this context. “Have a blessed day.” I am the little fuckin’ Ferris wheel and I have no shame.
  • Business, Eminem
    • I desperately want to know what it would be like if Dre and Em were us. She would drop me like a sack of potatoes in a rap battle. You can do that when you have ten years of blackmail. Alternatively, I’m cleaning out my closet.
  • Closer, Nine Inch Nails
    • It’s not about her. It’s the cry of The Timeless Child. It’s perfect when you see it in the context of abuse.
  • Dope Nose, Weezer
    • This has no particular meaning, just a good beat to make me feel good….. even if it is a little “Peter Gunn.”
  • This Could Be the Start of Something Big, Count Basie
    • I can’t not hear brass like that without thinking of her. She’s too quick. I should have put this as the intro track.
  • Church, Lyle Lovett
    • She should have joined me at National Cathedral if she wanted to see me fly like a lead trumpet. Not getting to see her face while I was riding on a high C makes me sad. She has heard me on a recording and all I have to say is that you didn’t even see the best part yet.
  • Til the Sun Comes Up, David and Devine
    • The video says more than the song.
  • Paper Bag, Fiona Apple
    • What it feels like to struggle with ***gestures toward everything***
  • Hit Me Baby One More Time, Bowling for Soup
    • Chad Michael Murray played me in a movie. It is every bit as embarrassing as it sounds, thank you for noticing.
  • This mashup. It’s too cool to describe.

I Am Already Changing Modern Society

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What would you change about modern society?

I am already holding a mirror in front of society, because my microcosm represents everyone else. People read me because if it’s true for a hundred people (my on the ground reach), it will be true for a thousand. If it’s true for a thousand, it is a good indication that everyone will find something they can relate to written by me. That’s because I’m a bisexual man wrapped in a lesbian’s body, a minority who is trapped in the majority (I’m white), with spirituality and religion weaving themselves into the themes of my life.

I am always spiritual and seeking an audience with God. I am sometimes religious. I enjoy church and miss it, then go back and see why I don’t go anymore. It’s not that I don’t believe in organized religion. I believe in it so much because it has the power to change you if you let it. It’s just different for me because I don’t find God there anymore. I find God in other ways because I know how the sausage is made. It’s like being a musician and a line cook. Everything changes once you’ve been on stage, sat in the orchestra pit, and worked in the kitchen. I enjoyed being a lay preacher of all the jobs I’ve had in church, so I lay out my thoughts here as if I was preaching.

Every entry has a thread of that preacher persona running through it because I’m making connections through a library of images collected from every piece of media I’ve ever consumed. Very few entries are so stream of consciousness that I forget to tie it up at the end. It is short sighted AND impressive that every entry I write is one shot, hit post, go back and fix typos. When I go back and read something from five years ago, I am astounded at how quick I am at writing sentences that will flatten me emotionally and other people say that as well. My marriage entry, the one that was shared all over the world, some of them celebrities? It took about half an hour.

My blog is the very best example I can give you in terms of why I was terrible at school until I got to college. It all looks like the ADHD kid who stayed up all night trying to finish a paper. In college, you can do that because there is no daily homework to be checked. English and Language Arts didn’t eat my lunch, but remembering to turn things in sure did.

Blogging is how I know to use my ADHD superpower. I have been capable of thinking very deep thoughts and writing them down since I was a child. I have not been so capable at remembering the minutiae of life. I can best be summed up by Rhythm of Love by The White Ts, because this is a conversation that makes me laugh in terms of several relationships where I’m this man……..

My head is stuck in the clouds,
She begs me to come down,
Says "boy, quit fooling around."

No one likes a dreamer. Even fewer like what happens when our creativity is cut off or managed. Russian and Chinese TV is an extreme example of it, but it’s the best illustration I can think of at the moment. They are held back by strict standards. I would be lucky to find some.

I tell people I like the view from up here, and their constant quest becomes telling me why I’m wrong. I don’t write because I’m talented. I write because no one will ever understand themselves without being able to read themselves later with a dispassionate eye. Journaling is so important whether you let others read it or not. I am glad that’s the message the church instilled in me that stuck. Praying gets your ego out of the way, but it will creep back in when you think about a situation in retrospect and you can’t fact check anything. If someone tells you you’re being unfair, you have no way to check and see if they’re right. You won’t know when you need to yield, and dollars to donuts you won’t figure it out immediately because it takes so long to convince you that you might, indeed, be fallible.

You develop a more acute sense as to whether people are listening to you, because you have concrete examples of where you did and did not take in love or justified anger. If you grew up in a family that doesn’t fight and you’re terrified of it, that’ll be something I need to know up front, because I know it will make you run from every conflict for all time and to be gentle. Also, to learn when you’re running too much of the time and decide whether I want the relationship to continue. I can stop doing your emotional work for you at any time when you refuse to show up.

I see so much on the Internet about how women are not hospitals for broken men, and yet we are. We so are. Men can’t emote for the most part and you become their entire emotional support system within three months flat. It’s not because they’re not capable of having multiple relationships so they’re not putting everything on you. It’s that they won’t emote in front of anyone but you. The best thing you can do is encourage your partner to go to therapy and get their shit handled. You cannot do anything more. You can only notice when you’re not seeing results and move on. You get to decide how tired you’re going to be from getting your needs constantly ignored while they think nothing of trauma dumping while not being able to take it when they dish.

Men, 99% of the time it’s your fault. Period. End of story. You were not socialized to do anything but be angry all the time and it’s a lifelong battle to be whole again. It is not that you are generally wrong in your beliefs. It means that you are really bad at communication because you fear other people so much. If you open up to a woman and she breaks your heart, then what are you going to do? Who do you tell about those feelings? Why do you need another emotional support person/rebound right away? You can’t handle your emotions on your own. Everything stems from that one issue.

You can’t handle a household, either, because you weren’t taught those skills because why would you ever need them? Your mother’s frustration doesn’t mean shit to you, Holmes. She’s not going to be there forever to wipe your ass, but she loves you enough to do it even though you’re ungrateful because you’re not taught to look around and notice women’s contributions to your life, either.

You need to be able to communicate your needs and wants so that we don’t have to take care of you physically or emotionally. If you want a woman to cook and clean and raise the children and stay home all the time so you can be with others, you are free to be that for someone else. I’m not playing. There are going to be certain times when you’ll submit or I’ll walk away, and you’ll have those dealbreakers as well. It takes a tremendous amount of work to be in any serious relationship, and men are treating all their relationships with women as if they matter so much less. That’s because their way of doing everything is better according to them. I don’t have rights because I shouldn’t need them, etc.

If I wanted to get my tubes tied, in a lot of states I’d have to marry Zac to get my tubes tied, because I need my husband’s permission…. and then we’d have a marriage that didn’t mean anything to either one of us, I just needed health care.

This has no place in society at any time.

My happiness and survival shouldn’t be dependent on whether I’m working, and I don’t mean whether I can be lazy or not. It’s whether I can afford health insurance on my own or walk away from a job with really good benefits because my boss is a walking nightmare.

Proving that you have a disability severe enough not to work is a nightmare for many people. That’s why you have to get a lawyer and it costs money to be different. It is severely ableist and makes people live check to check because it’s not enough to generate savings. The one thing that’s sacred about disability is that they can’t take it away from you and make you dependent on your own money again. In order to live paycheck to paycheck, there cannot be an end in sight. A gap will drown you immediately.

If you have to go to the ER without health insurance, you will almost certainly be fucked for a number of years. You have to pay a lot of money to get Band-Aids and ibuprofen, because women’s pain doesn’t mean as much as men’s to doctors. They’ll think nothing of prescribing another white man enough oxy to down an elephant, but you’re suspicious or needy for being hysterical when you’re in pain.

They need to cut that shit out if they’re going to say Tylenol and Advil are strong enough to compete with narcotics after surgery and/or childbirth. It will work in the days and months after, but never immediately. That’s not your first call when you’ve sliced someone open, ever, unless the patient is an addict and are self-aware enough to know they need nerve blockers instead.

If you can’t get narcotics after a serious injury that all people with eyes can see, your arm’s off, you’ve cut your bleeding leg off, etc., it is not merely a flesh wound. Your doctor’s just an asshole.

Ibuprofen is right out.

I am not pushing for giving out oxy like Tic-Tacs. I am saying that narcotics have a time and place, and that place is in the delivery room, the ER, and the recovery room. It takes more than your hospital stay to heal, and most doctors are very concerned that Karen is going to become a frequent flyer while ignoring Chad’s warning signs. Chad gets what Chad wants. If not, it’s time to call Daddy.

Daddy will think his daughters’ lives are worth less and not with words. It will play out in actions. Boys get condoms and a later curfew because their dad is just as excited about the loss of his son’s virginity as he is, while shaming the women that provide the outlet.

The whore/madonna complex is real and it’s deep.

Either we’re the ones that wipe your asses or the dirty sluts who will actually sleep with you.

It’s why I’ve dated women so long. I don’t have to deal with your bullshit. I can live around it.

Here’s the take home message that really ties the room together:

Modern society is only going to change when men realize that they’re just as emotionally needy as everyone else, while blaming women for being hysterical. This will not change in my lifetime. I can only get more men to see what it’s like for women from an outside perspective.

It’s the difference between getting the ticket to La Boheme and playing in the pit. We’re just “the help.” It’s the same issue with media. You love Succession and Archer while shitting on arts grants. All of it stems from having your creativity and humility quashed.

In order to change society right now, start getting there faster and keep up.

“When my coach said ‘you run like a girl,’ I told him that if he picked up the pace, he could run like a girl, too.”

– a paraphrase of Mia Hamm

Sensory Issues

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I realized that I’d told you I have sensory issues, and that I do my best to mute them while they’re not my focus. Here are the things that make me feel the most comfortable:

  • Professional-grade Crocs, the kind you wear in a kitchen or hospital. They keep my feet on the ground, whereaas Danskos have a heel and it makes my foot rock side to side. That is a disaster for someone with floppy muscles. I don’t care what people think of me when I wear Crocs, but I for damn sure notice what they think of me when I fall. There are very few Good Samaritans in this world and I’ve found that to be true everywhere. I can be walking around with blood on my face and pants and no one says jack shit.
  • American Giant’s “The Original Hoodie” is the only jacket you’ll ever need in your entire life. The only reason you’ll ever need another one is to change colors, because it gets better the more you wear it. Yes, they’re over a hundred bucks, but they get cheaper than nearly anything else when I look at price per wear. Same with the Crocs. It turns into less than pennies.
  • Unchallenging food, like white bread, pasta, yogurt, etc. I will get wild with yogurt because I don’t like sweets. I leave it as is and just add fresh fruit. Not many people like it that tart, and my favorite flavor at all yogurt shops is plain. If you mix it with dark chocolate yogurt, it will taste like the best sour cream donut you’ve ever had in your life.
  • Bombas socks are the tightest elastic that holds over time. My whole thing is about making my body feel secure, so anything I can do to stabilize is critically important. I need to feel balanced, and I am irritated when one foot feels more bound than the other, etc.
  • Button downs, but only the ones that have buttons on the collar as well. I also like it better when they’re 20 years old and white or blue having been laundered a thousand times and still look classic. I joke that it’s the “Visiting Professor” collection at Macy’s, and I also love sports coats and Nehru jackets that fit like a glove because of it. I also want everything to have a place and look put together. It’s almost impossible to get a collar correct when you iron and have it stay that way. What looks good on the board has fallen flat by the time you put it on.
  • I like Dockers because they’re just as comfortable as American Giant and Crocs. They just don’t last very long and they’re confusing to buy because every fit is a little bit different. You have to get the name of the make and model, and sure as shit by the time you look it up to order more it’s not there.
  • Big boys’ dress shirts are always welcome because I prefer men’s clothing because of the way they feel and have a teenage frame…. with the exception that I’m just between a size 16 in boys’ pants and a size 30 in men’s length. It’s mix and match, but nothing too crazy. I’m a visiting professor.
  • I will do anything to get my hair out of my way, and wear my CIA baseball cap almost everywhere. I cover my head a Muslim amount because it makes me feel safe. I can hide behind it, both because people aren’t staring into my eyes and for some reason CIA is more intimidating than other agencies. I can’t figure that out. The FBI was built on slave catchers, but CIA is the problem. Ok. Whatever blows your dress up. I am genuinely using it like I would use a yarmulke or a hijab. I am hiding in plain sight, because I have trouble believing that people want to notice me. I make people jump too high sometimes, and it’s all my own shit. These sensory inputs being dulled helps me to keep from swinging at every pitch. If I don’t work on my reactions, I’m not keeping up my end of the bargain in relationships and cleaning my own house before I clean someone else’s.
  • I pay close attention to bar soap because I like to use it to shave. You actually use up body wash and shaving cream much more quickly. The bare minimum is Dove, but I have a housemate who cold presses her own soap and lotion bars that don’t have any scent to them (or are lightly scented). My favorite is charcoal, but I have to have a serious cleanup afterward. All the shower walls are dark gray when I want to turn off the water. It’s nice having the cleanest products available in a quantity that makes me think my housemate likes making soap faster than she can give it away. I’ll have to gift some to Zac if and when I remember it. If I write it here, there’s a solid chance.
  • I enjoy soap designed for men from high end shops because they always have both cologne and shaving in mind. Basic men’s soap is wax stripper with no conditioners. High end men’s soap is designed to make it harder to cut yourself. Soap and a brush is so much better than anything else I’ve tried, and I’ve had to remember all the best stuff because my skin will freak out at anything less. The best part is that Dove really works on my face and in shaving my legs. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It’s just something I value- continued safety is not nothing, and that’s what grocery store soap offers. It will never change.
  • Things never changing is why I love futbol jerseys so much. I can ask Lindsay to bring me one from any country in the world and it will feel the same. If I ask her to bring me a scarf, it will feel the same. Right now she’s in Barcelona and I’m wearing a Messi jersey.
  • I will start a new game of Skyrim like people rewatch The Office. There is comfort in hearing dialogue you’ve already heard, like a famous comedy routine. There is also camaraderie. We used to be adventurers like you, but we took an arrow to the knee (got married).
  • I go through phases with media. It’s “binge/purge.” I have to see it, then I need to retreat and write my own content. Lather, rinse, repeat. The hardest part is coming back and looking at my own writing, because it’s twofold. Both the WTF? of what I’m saying and the “WTF?” of how I wrote it. How did I miss that twice?
  • If I was wealthy, I would put a lot of money into peripherals that I don’t now. My Fire tablet is not great on its own. It’s great with a keyboard that makes me feel comfortable. It’s long lasting because Office and Chrome don’t require many system resources and the Fire can handle a browser and a text editor in split screen. Therefore, even with my sub-$200 throwdown laptop, I am just as productive as I would be on a $4,000 laptop. It’s not because I wouldn’t use that expensive a computer if I had it, it’s just that I don’t have a need for it. I will save up for an M1 or a Ryzen when I start seriously thinking about video rendering. If everything can be done using Audacity, Google Photos, and JetPack, I have no need to put together a monster gaming rig.
  • Because of what my current tablet will do, I think if I bought a new computer it would be a top of the line Samsung or M1 iPad, because there is no need to carry something heavy when you just don’t have to. I don’t even need an M1 iPad to do what I currently do. I have an old iPad Pro first gen that will edit the videos on my phone quite handily. I would get a gaming-rig level processor if I bought a camera that required it or it would take an hour and a half to render everything. I can’t have my computer incapacitated that much of the time. If I was shooting/working in RAW with a Nikon or a professional studio camera, that’s a whole other thing. If I needed that kind of editor, it would be easier to let a professional do it than it would to save up enough money to buy that kind of workstation.
  • Touch and feel above everything else. So much of the world is uncertain that it helps to have things you can count on. Clothes are one of the easiest ways to make yourself feel safe, because when you feel good, you act completely differently than when you’re threatened. It also helps to look at why you feel threatened so that clothes don’t become a permanent trap to hold in all your feelings.
  • It works as a relationship analogy as well. If you’re going to wear a suit, remember to occasionally change to sneakers and a zipper cardigan. If you learn nothing else from Mr. Rogers, learn that. No relationship will ever progress until you learn to be as vulnerable as you were the first time you saw his face, and you will not feel any differently after learning that he was also a very flawed human and treat your relationships like that as well. You cannot cancel everyone, and you will not know what’s up until you can look at the situation from a third person perspective. That’s much easier for me than it is for most because I can go back and read myself with a dispassionate eye. I am clothed in the softest material to allow myself to feel words more deeply.
  • If I can’t distract myself, I won’t. So if I dress weird to you, I don’t care. If I eat weird to you, I don’t care. If people believe I’m in the wrong relationships or saying weird things about people, I don’t care. That’s because all the people I do care about have laid out their boundaries and so have I. Other people are free to look at me from the very, very outside and make their own judgments, because their opinions can’t matter. I have to write what I saw because I have to remember things accurately according to what I was thinking in the moment. Otherwise, this is not even self help to me, much less others going through something similar.
  • So. Crocs? You have to give me this one. Especially if you later admit you also own them. I will notice. 😉

How Am I Working?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What do you listen to while you work?

When I am writing, I have two modes. The first is complete silence, sometimes with a blocker like white noise or several fans in the room. The second is listening to either the soundtrack to Argo or The Bourne Supremacy. It has to be spy music, and it has to be Middle Eastern in nature. I don’t write about spies in my daily life, but the music translates into everything else because it’s mathematically quick when my brain isn’t. It jogs things I wouldn’t have thought about on my own. It is basically making my thoughts compete to the rhythm and tempo of the music.

When I’m doing chores, I like to listen to rap or hip hop. Sometimes angry country where women kill their husbands. It’s not hilarious if you haven’t lived in the South and grown up on these jokes…. like how in Texas, we don’t get divorced, we just have big backyards……… thus the joke about Bryn having a yard large enough to *garden.* I may not ever put a ring on her finger, but good luck proving she’s not mine. With us both being bisexual, I can’t prove one way or the other what’s going to happen, and there are too many complications to figure it out so why try? The story will unfold either way, and both of us are happy right now having other partners and just leaning on each other the way a best friend would. To think that is more important than having a romantic partner is crazy because I will never find a better friend. We undervalue friends in our society, and to me it’s your other marriage because you can’t go to anyone else the same way you can with them because no one else catalogues the books in your library.

Right now, there is an entire reddit thread of people who are crying over bff divorces, people who feel exactly the way I do about Bryn. No one is her, no one will ever be her, she broke my heart in third grade and I’m still not over it, et cetera. Third grade and you’re 55? Yes, let’s make sure that never happens. If I want her, I need to act like it.

We are learning how to love each other and be strong women at the same time, which is actually a bigger deal than everyone else might think, because being lost in trauma bonds constantly makes us doubt that the other one is sincere. I, like her and Michael, am stuck fighting her on letting me love her….. and she’s sharpening her weapons to take care of me because we are The Timeless Child. I will not tell you her story, because she is starting to believe that she needs to tell it herself and I have the platform to allow her to do it.

I realized I had told her how much I loved her because she could see how big a decision it was to add an author on my platform, responding by making my platform even better. She has a completely different writing voice and reminds me to be happier. I could return the favor.

We both run the gamut between reading a room and making those observations float into our echo chambers. We pick up the negative emotions in a room first, because we are programmed to respond to everyone else’s unhappiness because we are trying to keep our secrets. We are in protective mode of our spirits and bodies. This is not a problem. We have taught ourselves that we are worth protecting. The echo chamber just makes the negative emotions feel bigger and scarier than they really are because the boss music is playing, but they (jointly and/or severally) can’t touch us because we also have good boundaries.

Bryn will have my undying emotion forever, just an eternal soldier’s flame because our emotions run so deep they stack like a sandwich. That’s because she studies animal behavior just as closely as human behavior and she takes in all the things about homo sapiens that we cannot see. Her book title is literally “All the Dark We Cannot See.” Bryn “grew up with me” starting when I was 19 years old. So if our mutual friends want to start sweating bullets, this is where they should start.

Fuck them and their little cult of adoration. They just make me even more glad I got away from them and have spent the last 10 years worshipping the goddess who made me see what a nightmare you’d all become, because the people that do nothing are culpable.

This goes back to when I was 12.

My confusion and horror started then (but horror came later when I really understood its aftermath, but that’s what causes the panic attacks…. buy now, pay later). I was 12, and you very much weren’t. This is the call of The Timeless Child. It never changes, and it never gets better, because our abusers have taught us to beat the system and we do it whether we want to or not because we’re trapped. You have to identify, and you’re bad at it……………… because you don’t study animal behavior and Bryn does. I swear to fucking Christ, if you want to find an abuser, don’t hire a detective. Hire a dog trainer and I fucking mean it.

That’s because the child is acting just like a dog. Frightened behavior leading from the abuser making them alpha dog, and everyone else are puppies they have to take care of or their lives get worse. We will protect ourselves forever to avoid emotions and it goes two ways. They generally marry each other. The first is the one that cuts off all their emotions. The other is the one that bleeds out. One only takes care of themselves. The other can’t get out of bed in the morning, they’re so emotionally laden.

For the former, the sins of the world do not affect them. For the other, they’re the caretakers. They want everyone to feel safe and work toward it happening. It all stems from animal behavior. One becomes Black Panther, the other becomes Erik Kilmonger.

It will never vary unless you break the cycle. Bryn and I found each other. Instead of trying to handle someone’s emotions because they don’t have any by choice, we’re handling someone’s emotions that will handle ours. It’s a radical concept, being healthy and responding in a way she can hear it because I’ve found out that we’re the same person. Trying to love someone who can’t hear it is exhausting.

Although, I will tell my beautiful girl to reassure her that one of her three word e-mails cut me in half because that was the moment that all her love flooded into me at once and I realized that her feelings were large and I shouldn’t have blown it (for the 345454354354435345435th time). It’s one of the times I can quote her because it’s so innocuous:

“Also. Thank you.”

There was a big goddamn thank you because when she is humble she is fucking quiet. You can hear a pin drop.

Those words reverberated and she didn’t take in that part of it. She only took in the part where the consequences for me were vast and I also expressed unhappiness about it because it was a more complicated issue than I thought it would be. No support, no commiseration, no anything.

Just another confusing moment that could have been cleared up and just won’t. I don’t have to be sad about it, because I’ve let it go. But I just won’t go into a relationship expecting that someone understands they need to respond when their actions have caused pain and lift me up so that I can deal. I’m tired of dealing with people who are content to let me struggle. It is more work than I should be allowed to take on without positive reinforcement. That there are certain things I will do for you as long as you are doing certain things for me. That a relationship is a balance between anger and love and what we feed is what we get. I have absolutely been the villain in one case and the victim in another. I get that I’m not going to be the hero in every story and I’m tired of catering to people who think they’re the whole story. I was just willing to bend more on this one because first of all, when I was wrong I was really wrong. Secondly, when she was wrong she was really, really wrong as well. Neither of us could hear love very well, and we both focused on “everything was bad.” I thought she didn’t express herself enough to be clear over time, because saying everything was fine and withholding love was devastating because she’d gone from sunshine to cold, but not really. It was a spectrum as well, so I was feeling her out a lot of the time because only her annoyance would come through and she’d withdraw, then come back and make me wonder why she was reaching out if she was always so angry.

I found someone who is not always so angry.

We have music in common and listen to a lot of the same things. I’m looking forward to collaborating with her because I know she’ll only make me a better writer because I’m responding to her.

I know it to be solid because I have been smart about responding to my beautiful girl as well. I have learned how to be me by learning what I both do and do not want. Both lessons were just as important. I need to find the people that will forgive you over and over without shutting down, because I will always be human and so will they. I will give them the responsibility of helping me manage my emotions because I am offering that as well. The way I think of you rubs off. You’ll find yourself feeling better about who you are because I’ve told you that you do matter in a way that you can hear it. It’s the basis of something healthy and sustainable. It was where I thought Supergrover and I were going, because I’d been that for her before. But because I had hurt her, it wasn’t that she was malicious, it was that she was one type, and I was the other. But our behavior lined up. We could zipper our DNA, because it was permanently sealed when we were kids. She cuts off her emotions, I become the frightened dog. It’s how we’re programmed and she couldn’t see it.

That’s why the ostinato is “help her anyway.” I’m hoping that in time, she’ll realize we were just wrong for each other from the beginning because we couldn’t take care of each other once there was a schism. There was a power dynamic in all areas because there was a solid one in place from something that was pure.

She approached me like a dog as well. Loyal to a fault. Sniffed my hand and decided I could pet her head. Let me hold her leash. Would heel to an enormous degree and bark at everyone else. I did something to offend her, and the bark turned toward me for every conflict for all time because she had something concrete she could use and so did I. We just became two different types of dogs and couldn’t break the cycle.

It didn’t stop me from loving her and wishing for something healthy. We’d just gone too far into the woods and gotten lost from each other. It was a conflict like a dog being too heavy to carry who’d gotten injured. I was working on pure adrenaline, and my energy had run out six trees ago. But I never stopped loving her. Not once for one moment. I could get angry enough to tell her to fuck off for all eternity and never in six billion years mean it. I’d just get tired of dealing with her anger and confusion bullshit that I needed a fucking break. Any break in that pattern would cause unrest because she started to feel a push/pull that I didn’t. I knew she could be alpha dog if she wanted, and she was unsure. It was terrifying because when I had a conflict with her, she reacted as if I was trying to hurt her and not trying to get her to pay attention to the fact that it hurts me when she pulls back and it shouldn’t feel like an obligation because it shouldn’t hurt when I pull back, either. That’s because we both know where we stand at all times because we’re both emoting good and bad things.

Alternatively, I have the choice to believe whether she means good or ill and react appropriately. Everything doesn’t need to be put through the ringer of bad or good behavior and I overexplain because it’s a trauma response. But she never learned that I needed to tell her everything because that’s who I am.

Her self esteem went up and down as we talked because she decided that I would always be a threat. My trauma response irked hers and we were connected at the brain despite the fact that we brought out the worst in each other. I will be sorry about it for the rest of my life, but I will not think we should have continued hurting each other, either.

That’s why I want her man to be the best he can be. It’s not that I can’t be the shorter, more female version of him, just someone who cares about her without reason or rhyme because it’s so crazy solid and immense. It’s that she won’t let me be him anymore, because she’ll never see me like that again. It was a painful goodbye because it had to be. I would never walk away unless I felt it was necessary. Her words didn’t ring true consistently and she would say the same thing. It’s just that I was looking for desperately needed love and she was looking for desperately needed anger and guilt. We focused on all the wrong things, and I sat with the bees and cried while she felt justified in treating me this way because I’d always be an asshole.

What she confided in me was never the problem, because she never focused on what I was actually saying.

I will always love her a crazy amount, just beyond all measure because she proved to me every day she was worth it and wouldn’t acknowledge why I saw that. She thought she had too much sludge in her soul to be mine, and I thought I was sitting next to Christ in a hallucination. That’s funny because she’s an atheist.

I will never forget finding my person. The one I was meant to love like this. She wasn’t meant to be my Jamie. She was meant to be my Jenny, and she let me go………… but we’ll always be the same person on the opposite ends of the spectrum because we acted like dogs.

…………………..and Bryn is a dog trainer.

The Wood Song

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment 
...but the wood is tired 
and the wood is old
And we'll make it fine
if the weather holds
But if the weather holds
we'll have missed the point.
That's where I need to go......

Here’s what you need to know about Zac.

The journey I wouldn’t have taken led me to where I actually needed to go.

If you have to date someone, make sure it’s the kind who reads a blog entry about them trading off holding their dog’s leash and when you get to their house, say, “we should get a picture of you going up the hill because you’re holding Oliver’s leash.” My heart melted on the spot and I will never recover. He’s listening, perhaps a little too well. I’m not used to it, and small kindnesses enter an echo chamber as well. It’s not because I’m distorting them. It’s that the small things *are* the large things. He’s not threatened that I’m a writer and we’ve actually sat down to discuss those boundaries before anything pops up. So you’re free to know that yes, I’m dating a man ten years younger than me because I had no idea how old Zac was when I asked him out and being a cougar is an added bonus. In every lesbian’s life, there is a point at which they stop chasing cougars because they realize they are them. I will let your mind wander as to when I decided that was a real thing.

It was just too wholesome, and the whole weekend was allowing each other room to be us, without diminishing either. Most of our weekend was spent outside. There was this hike, but he also has an Olympic-sized neighborhood pool that looks a lot like the one where I took a picture of Human Oliver. We had access to grills and a griddle, and we took sausages both days. One had a central American vibe, like jack cheese and peppers. The other one was loaded baked potato, and I have never had anything like it. The texture was incredible. I cannot see myself as being so interested in sausage that I actually bought the stuff to make it, but there wouldn’t be another sausage I did make that didn’t have mashed potatoes in the recipe somewhere.

I had my new favorite drink this weekend, a non-alcoholic beer called “Chelada Nada” by Athletic. The black pepper and lime go as hard as alcohol, so you’re not missing the bite. Chelada is basically Bloody Mary Mix and beer, so if you didn’t “grow up” on it, kind of an acquired taste. Very, very popular in northern Mexico/southern Texas.

That was the other funny part. I ate a HUGE meal before I got on the train because last time my downfall was being handed alcohol on an empty stomach. Then, I had several beers and the NA Chelada beat the pants off all of them. It appeals to my little cook heart, because how in the fuck did Athletic do it? Seriously? I am ACTUALLY looking forward to your letters on this one as opposed to using a line Craig Ferguson said on The Late Late Show almost every night during its entire run.

We also spent time on the back deck just talking, sometimes sitting in the hot tub, sometimes sitting at the table with all our vices sat between us.

Life happened while we were doing something else.

Life taught me how to stop with all that lesbian shit, and I don’t mean that nearly as horribly as it sounds. Not everything has to have a conversation or processing about something. Part of it is that our relationship is not heavy. Part of it is that women are generally much more into talking about feelings. With Zac, I’m not all up in my head unless we’re doing our own thing.

It’s funny that we’ve had the same trauma dump you start in the beginning of every relationship because we’re getting to know each other……………… we’re just not handling it the way two women would do. When I am listening to Zac, I am not hearing a monologue of “how does this affect me?” My opinion of myself is not going up and down when he talks. I am not holding back information because I’m not sure of his reaction, or going to the other extreme and saying too much. We both have moments of expounding, and both allow for it.

I don’t want to marry Zac, but he let me know that marrying a man is possible. It’s not that I wasn’t bisexual, it’s just been the wrong situation. It has also been a journey. I’m not the same person I was when I was 25. Bisexuality does not always refer to having two partners, although some people construe it to be that. No, it’s that when you look over your entire life, you are probably bisexual. There is no such thing as an ex-gay. There are only bisexuals with people they trusted. Bisexuality is not my Sam Axe/Chuck Finley. It’s why I will never date another straight man, even if they were a person of color. It’s not the same.

Even if my husband and I were completely monogamous and had heterosexual privilege, the memories of bullying remain. We have the same reflexes. I still look around to see who’s watching before I kiss him. WHY WOULD I DO THAT?

Realizing that little tidbit was a fucking treat. It’s a trauma reflex. Zac understands that when he’s really affectionate in public, it is pushing the needle too far at times. I want to be moved in the right direction, but at my own pace. That’s because he’s had to look around to see who was watching to protect his physical safety as well. A straight man would not empathize to the level a queer one could, possibly treating me as if I were stupid or frigid.

The novelty of me dating a man as an idea has not gone away. It truly makes me laugh because I’m not their type and I don’t even know them. The reverse is also true. They’re not my type right up until they are. It just took a long time to find bisexuality as an identity because thoughts of men were so passing. They didn’t register because they didn’t have to, and I’ve missed a lot of messages in the middle of the mess.

I grew to accept more, and when I did, Zac rose to meet me………

If the weather had held, I would not be here in this moment. I am taking a moment to say a silent prayer to the storm.

Starch

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your go-to comfort food?

I don’t have a go-to comfort food, I have a comfort Venn diagram in which any combination of groceries could be my go-to, but starch is always the base. It’s going to be some kind of rice, mashed potatoes, or corn. Possibly all three if we are eating fried chicken.

I also enjoy fried and baked potatoes, so sometimes the base is French fries whether I’m at home or out. As I was telling Zac, I like the fries at Zaytinya, because I will slowly build the most monster poutine you’ve ever seen in your life if you sit next to me long enough. See Lindsay for details. I am a human trash compactor.

One of the reasons I eat so much is that I have trouble maintaining my weight. It follows my anxiety to an enormous degree. When I am troubled, I do not eat. You can take that check to the bank and cash it. When I feel out of control, it presents by controlling what I can…… presenting as “food is unsafe, but drinks are okay.” I buy cases of Instant Breakfast when it happens. I also don’t eat much. Yes, it may be 2,000 calories but I haven’t been hungry enough to eat more than once a day for years.

Not being hungry is hard to diagnose, because when I get down to “food is a straight up problem,” sometimes it’s me and sometimes it’s a drug interaction. ADHD medication is not known for allowing you to have nice things. Physically well and mentally stable are constantly buying new military equipment to blow the other away. My physical health says “eat all the things,” and mentally that feels like an overwhelming task. It is hard to grocery shop when you have medically induced appetite suppression. I’ve cried when I realized I needed to buy enough food for a week, but everything looked unappealing. I have teared up at restaurants because there was nothing on the menu that sounded good. Being ADHD is a kitchen superhero skill, but only in managing other people’s food.

Therefore, I rarely step outside my comfort zone when I’m doing other things. I can’t focus on food when I have two sentences that are falling flat. Not focusing on food is going to be a sandwich and potato chips, or baking French fries in the oven if I have them.

Dating Zac has brought my appetite back a little bit, because I am more likely to eat if someone is eating with me. That’s because they’ll get hungry when I don’t and thus remind me to cook something, or cook it for me and bring it to the room where I’m tearing my hair out.

So much of my blood is spilled on these pages, more in the lines you don’t read.

Most of the time, my own blog entries make me go to the place of not finding a carb I wouldn’t inhale. It takes a lot out of me to read this shit, because you didn’t live it, are not living it. Depending on how you think my situation is going, you have no concept of that fact. Some entries break me, but they let light in.

I am taking the places inside me that are empty and filling them with gold. I would even settle for wax, because no human is ever sin cera. In sculpting, if you were able to see the angel in the rock and get it out in one shot, it was called “sin cera,” without wax, because there’s no filler to cover a mistake.

On days when I can get the entry out of me sin cera, I feel well. If I take myself to the mat, the road through hell is paved by Ore-Ida.

Oh! You’re Awake!

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?

I’ve actually put enough into Skyrim to enjoy it. I’m not the gamer in my family, my brother-in-law is. I started with Fallout 3 on a whim, and Skyrim is made by the same company. The gameplay is fun, but what makes it so enormous it’s hard to take in is the story and the score.

Oh my God. The score. I could listen to the Skyrim soundtrack for 12 hours straight, and other people agree with me because there are 12 hour Youtube videos that play it for background noise.

Skyrim also takes place in the equivalent of Scandinavia, and it’s fascinating learning how the gamers portray characters living in that amount of snow. Even the architecture changes as you go, and you can spend thousands of dollars on graphics cards and mods to make Skyrim look like you’re literally walking through it. Just photorealistic. The great part is that even the vanilla game is gorgeous. You just have to tweak it to run on Windows 10/11. That’s actually the hardest part…. being able to sort through all the memory managers to find one that works.

My character is a wood elf, because they’re archers and it boosts my natural ability there. She has gray hair in a short asymetrical haircut, purple makeup accents, and purple war paint. I wear Orcish armor not because it’s the best you can get. It’s the sharpest I can dress.

I set it on stupid easy level because the story and puzzles are the best part. Killing things gets repetitive and doesn’t move anything forward. I have also added a ton of mods that extend the storyline and let you collect cool things so that the game is less about fighting overall. In fact, I use an alternate start so I can go to Windhelm first and book it to Solstheim. That way, I can get the first Black Book, and the power that allows your companion to stand in your wake and not get hurt. This has been the theme of my life, finding that particular enchantment. I also enjoy wielding Bloodskaal Blade because of the energy that pulses through it. Then, I go on the quest to get the warhammer with the chaos damage enchantment…. mostly because it’s fun to destroy it and enchant a bow. Arrows are so much cooler when they also shock, burn, or freeze the victim.

Those three things set me up for the rest of the game. You’ll be ridiculously overpowered and one shot kills are really fun, particularly at long range. As ESO would say, “get wrecked, sir.” I also make a point to collect everything in the game at one point or another because there’s a spectacular mod called Legacy of the Dragonborn where you become an employee of a museum dedicated to yourself. It’s ridiculous and also makes sense in the context of the story. So, the game is more balanced that way because I’m not willing to be the bad guy without significant reward. Checking items off that list is crack.

My favorite storyline starts out with becoming a thief, because I had to set beehives on fire and get out before anyone noticed. It’s fun being able to test your smarts at deception without your life depending on it. I am not Jack Ryan, but I will never admit it.

In the vanilla game, my favorite player home is a toss-up. I have bought all of them except Hjerim. Windhelm sucks as a place to live because the people are coded as particularly hostile even though you’ve just saved their lives. So, obviously I work for the government.

Ironic because I think that’s actually the house I’d love the most. The best thing about the vanilla houses is that everything works. There’s not going to be a glitch where if it says a relic can be put there, it will hang upside down or something.

The mods make it where you can store everything you collect, so I also like my safehouse in the museum.

That’s because in addition to tools like a forge and a workbench, I have archaeology tools there as well. If I want to display something in my home, I can make a fake. That way, I still have all my stuff and the museum fills up simultaneously.

I love that Skyrim feels so pristine and beautiful even though my computer was top of the line in 2014-15. I didn’t have to spend more than $60 for a graphics card that would play the hell out of it. I am sure that if I’d beefed up the graphics card more, I could play more recent games. But I haven’t played Skyrim enough to see all of it and I finish one story before moving on. I don’t really have time to game, so I don’t until I’m truly out of things to do.

Explaining my level of gaming is important because I don’t want people to assume that if they’re in a relationship with me, that means they need to know gaming is a huge part of my life. I play Skyrim when there’s nothing good on TV. It’ll keep.

Being able to Shout is a tremendous power, and something we don’t do nearly enough in our daily lives. We just have to manage how worthy the target is of that shout. If you don’t address something, it shows where your priorities lie. We’re responsible for telling you we’d like something to be higher priority, because if we’ve never expressed a need we’ve become part of the problem (that was Bryn’s idea). Whether you care about the outcome should mean less, because you’re not responsible for what someone else does, says, or understands.

In Skyrim, this shows up in aggression towards other characters. You absolutely get to decide how much shit you’re going to take from people and damn the consequences. What you have to decide is who is worthy when they state their own boundaries in return, and notice when they aren’t being set.

In short, if you kill undead soldiers long enough, you realize that everything and everyone is a spectrum. You have perspective on what matters. You will accept consequences from your partners, family, and friends. That’s because you can’t be vulnerable to the whole world. Protecting your energy enough so that you can fly under your own power is key. Getting too spread out is enormously frustrating. I am an empath fixer/pleaser, which makes me even more likely to shoot someone in the face to deal with my wallflower nature. I do the same things that other people do when I play violent video games and listen to rap. It’s just to blow off some steam. I can let them be angry enough for both of us. I can also let my character be braver and more dedicated than I am and let my character rise to meet theirs.

The more I write about myself, when I get some distance from a situation I actually love my character here, and I’m not saying that because I think of myself as fiction. It’s that to you, my audience, I am fictional because you live in India and I don’t. You’re falling in love with a story, not a person.

It is not lost on me that a huge part of falling for my beautiful girl was reading my own blog entries when I wanted to spend time with her while she was away. I didn’t just fall for the person she was, I fell for the person I made her in my mind and poured onto the page.

It is not unlike what I would do in a video game. I create a character, and then I read good or bad depending on the decisions I’ve made in my past.

My beautiful girl is not Supergrover, they’re the words I would use to describe her, and the actions I would have taken to make a future that had room for both of us. I am writing down everything I didn’t get that I wanted, not to guilt, goad, and provoke but to be able to come back later and read the story of what happened….. like all moms and sisters read baby books.

Trying to find the child in everyone is the only way to improve relationships. We all need to be sensitive to the fact that we are still the people we were in first grade, covered up by an enormous amount of scar tissue. If you take the time to reclaim your inner child and work from that place of vulnerability, your reactions will go back to what they once were…. when the troubles of the world seemed so small because you didn’t have to adult so hard.

Skyrim is a way to find out what that inner child really wants, and can choose all of it. It’s a do over for your life if you follow the story that way. You can choose to be a villain, but you also have to live with it. Living with those consequences isn’t the flex you think it is.

Yesterday’s entry broke me.

I sobbed all the way through writing it, and made myself cry several times on the train while I was reading it. Such a beautiful goodbye and “peace be with you” that even if nothing more happens, something did.

If I’d been at home, I would have played Skyrim to stop the tears. As it so happens, it was date night with Zac. We had the best conversation I’ve ever had about my blog tied only with my conversation with Bryn. I’d already been crying over my writing earlier, and Zac isn’t a fan yet. He’s said that he needs to be a die hard because it’s important to me, and yet it’s not. I am perfectly happy for him to be a fan, but I also love having someone who is oblivious because they haven’t already read what I wrote today so my conversation is fucking boring and they don’t know how to tell me. That’s my own interpretation, but it is not untrue because I can read microexpressions so easily.

He said something interesting, because he summed up everything I believe. He said, “if you come after me, I know you’ll only go after the parts of our relationship that are bad. You’re not going to come for me professionally because you know what I do.” I have not let myself get close enough to Zac to have bad parts of our relationship, therefore it was a very theoretical conversation. It’s not that I don’t trust him. It’s that I don’t trust me. I don’t trust me not to become lost in him, and to a certain degree giving up my drive to do and be more. It’s not that I would fall so in love I was blind. It’s that my personality is dedicated to helping someone understand themselves, and I would be so busy doing that because it affects my life directly that my audience might dwindle. As a person writing a book I hope to *sell,* that is a very bad thing.

One of the reasons I post so much is that it’s the best way I know to heal myself. I cannot speak for others, I can only let them read my experiences and decide if they want what I have. I’m offering peace for people who’ve been through a lot. I’m showing you how to get there because as I get happier, my writing does. Light begets light.

My only job in life was protecting Paarthurnax, and I found out that sometimes I’m Alduin. However, I would not have learned to accept the angel and the demon I am as one being without them.

But hey.

It’s only a video game.

We Will Come, Because We Love Our Girl

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Dear Michael,

I wish I’d thought to write this letter a long time ago, because I have things to say to you that should have come from me years ago. You know everything I didn’t. Just more than I can possibly take in. It was a shitty hand to be dealt for both of us, because here’s the thing…. the woman we love didn’t let us bond, so we couldn’t talk to each other about the ways we could support her. I wonder all the time what it would have been like had I been your wing man long ago, because I would have. I would have cheered you on from the beginning. All the things I never knew cost me, and you should know it. We both know how it feels.

She should have let us feel each other out and then claim our corners to regroup. It would never have come together in one hour. We both would have had to learn to manage the other’s feelings and not get frightened of them, because we both know they’re large.

We should have been allowed to make room for each other, and I was stuck in the bathroom. I hope we’re both sorry we never sat down at your table and just served every dish we’d created over eight 10 years. If you were me, you would have traded those two for a lifetime and you fucking know it.

We should have been allowed to bond because we didn’t have a full house and wouldn’t until all parties saw all the cards. I would have dealt you a hand if you’d been allowed.

What I know for sure is that that we all would have won and rotated hands. What I know to be even more certain is that you and I would remember every loss and celebrate every victory until we were dead.

If you’re the man I know she’d choose, I know you’d move heaven and earth just to stand next to her. If you didn’t turn out to be that man, God have mercy on your soul for this life and every lifetime after. My feelings are just as feral as hers and I will find you.

My only job in this whole equation would have been to allow you to be the best husband you knew how to be, because I wanted to be you and I’m just not capable for many reasons. Neither is she. That doesn’t mean that my protective nature went away when she said it should. She may be her daddy’s little girl, but not the fuck in my presence. I said that about her EA. But her EA was me.

It was my role to be “The Girl Whisperer,” and we never got that chance. So here is an itemized list of things you’ll do if you love her:

  • If you can’t cry when she does, you’re not paying attention. She doesn’t generally cry, so by the time you get to that point with her, she has no myelin on her nerves and she’s working practically blind.
  • She loves levity because of it. It preserves her armor for too long until she’s desperately needing help because she hasn’t asked for it. You are going to have to fight her on accepting love every day, and if your game isn’t sharp, her life will pass you by because you’re not really taking it in.
  • If men do not talk to her first, they will overfocus on her beauty and undermine her smarts. If you have never seen her with someone who has underestimated her and taken in its enormity, you are missing out on the best part of her. When you realize that you are missing out, course correct immediately. Your story is not more important. Her story is only more important right now.
  • If you give up, you will never see what delayed gratification looks like, and it is immense. You cannot take it in. She will see your sacrifice, I promise. She sees it too much and it weighs on her. I am walking away because I did not want to cause those swings of emotion in her. I didn’t need her to think about me while she was busy. Neither do you, but don’t go too long. One resentful feeling can be put away. Years of them can’t without resolution.
  • When she doesn’t have time, she doesn’t take time. Do everything you can to lower the volume on television channels in her mind. You can’t turn them all off, but you can make your signal more pure. I hear she likes well-written letters.
  • If you write something beautiful for her, she will keep it forever. Even if everything ever written between us has been put into the trash, she’ll be able to quote her favorite lines from memory. This is not a humblebrag. This is acknowledging sometimes a piece of notebook paper and a pen end up being more expensive in value than a day at a spa.
  • She is also a writer. If you can’t reach her through talking, switch mediums.
  • Dark begets dark. Make sure she knows she’s an absolute diamond every second of every day, and make sure she knows she’s of the purest color, cut, clarity, and brilliance. That’s because she won’t tell herself, and her inner monologue keeps her from seeing how beautiful she really is.
  • I will never get over this loss, and you won’t either if it happens. Make her your first priority because you can’t not. You will not be able to afford those consequences, and I assure you from the wisdom of my experience.
  • Everything I write has a thread of her running through it, and if you were me, they’d be mostly about her. It’s not because I’m not capable of doing my own thing. It’s because my story isn’t more important right now. It will be more important later. I had to choose which story was worth telling. Look at me and tell me it’s mine. I dare you.
  • Because she’s a boss, she’s going to remembered for her professional accomplishments. I hope you’ll come here to read about her emotional accomplishments, and know that they are much more important than anything anyone else will ever read, and only we know it. We’re the ones that love her for who she is. We will remember all the things other people never knew.
  • She uses ellipses to an enormous degree. It’s your job to find out where the trail goes.
  • Sometimes, that trail leads to me. Being apart is injuring all three of us.
  • It is not lost on me that I can move on, but if you ever do it’s going to be a straight up problem. I’m glad she knows you well enough to know that I am not projecting jack shit. You’re a rock and I fucking love you for it. You have no idea. Just none.
  • Make sure that you’re capable of telling when she’s in hell, especially when it’s your fault. Most of the time it will be. That’s the hand we’ve been dealt.
  • In moments when it gets difficult, remember that her love will overtake you with a forest fire’s intensity. Remember everything you love about her in order to keep the flame in your mind and not the ash.
  • She thinks she needs less help than she does. You’re going to be stuck in a fight to let her love you, so sharpen your weapons.

I have never wanted anything but Kings full over Aces for you. I would have reached out. I would have been a better person if she’d let me grow into that role. I would have trusted you to drive, and just slept in the car.

There are so many more bullet points, but I couldn’t go any longer without expressing all the things you never knew, either.

There are so many things we could have shared. I will leave it up to you to decide what I mean because that’s exactly why I need you…………………. on some days more than I need her. It’s just that you have the Google Calendar and I have a yellow string.

That yellow string is now yours if you want it. I just wanted to offer because that’s all I was ever trying to do. If our relationship was going to get healthy, it had to be the three of us, with a relationship that allowed for more as I accepted it from the universe.

You’re the coauthor of her story, I just wrote it down.

Always and as you wish,

Leslie

Let’s Think About Breakfast

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What foods would you like to make?

Because Dana and I had a brunch gig for years, we made a lot of breakfast at home. It’s the thing we knew how to cook the most quickly and efficiently. We were also auditioning recipes for the restaurant. The most fun I ever had off the clock was picking my own chesterberries, because it made me feel like a real chef. They weren’t even for the restaurant, but they were by the time we got back from our little “pick your own” road trip. I still have a cute picture from that day, but I don’t want to post it without asking and I don’t want to ask. So, know that chesterberries are a cross between a berry and a grape, and in some applications (I know this is Oregon heresy), better than marionberries. I look forward to your letters.

I started out with simple syrup (1:1 sugar to water) and added the berries. I let everything cook for a while so that it became a thick, smooth compote. I must have added at least a pinch of cinnamon, but I don’t remember putting in anything else because even cinnamon is too much for some berries. You literally have to know their personalities as well as you know your coworkers. The point was to make the chesterberries sweet without adding anything that would cover up their natural undertones.

I know I used it for stuffed French Toast. If I had it to do over, I would have made chesterberry Croque Monsieurs. That’s because I already know it’s traditionally served with raspberry jelly and making anything more “Oregonian” is a big hit.

If you cannot see how much I love food, I spent half a day picking berries for myself and donated them to the restaurant at the end. I didn’t even ask to be reimbursed for them, and it’s not even because it would have been a whole other thing. It’s because I was thinking about work when I wasn’t there to an ENORMOUS degree. What I found is that I could cook every dish a thousand times without blinking, which gave me the confidence to have an opinion. There was no executive chef. If I want to make hazelnut pancakes, go for it.

I think the most adventurous I ever got was pineapple thyme stuffed French toast, but not because that’s the most adventurous thing I can do. It’s that in a restaurant, you can try whatever you want. That doesn’t mean someone else is going to agree and pay money for it. The pineapple thyme worked, but I did not have the luxury of making just anything avant garde.

For instance, my chili in Oregon is never as hot as I make it here.

Also, anything can become breakfast if you put eggs on it:

  • The aforementioned chili
  • Cheese pizza
  • veggies and kale/spring mix/spinach/etc. sauted with sesame oil and hit with rice wine vinegar to finish.
  • Rice, beans, salsa, and cheese
  • Cheese pizza
    • Tthere are more, but this one will blow your mind so I have to say it twice. It tastes the best putting them raw on a frozen pizza and letting them bake together. It just mellows the egg out because caramelization is key.)

Therefore, I do not go out of my way to make breakfast, because I don’t really do anything to make it special. I don’t separate out what I will and will not eat into times of day. What makes me a pro to everyone else is coming downstairs in the morning and seeing me flip my eggs like a boss. Everyone can tell the difference between a home cook and a pro by how much fear they have that veggies will go everywhere.

That’s partially because it will go everywhere when you miss and most people are too scared to make a mess. They’re too scared to suck until they don’t. If I miss, it’s a two minute cleanup job because I’ve done it so many times on the line and had my ass beaten for not working clean that I could give a shit who’s watching at home. I can do all the things I used to do in a pro kitchen and actually enjoy it because no one is telling me I’m terrible at it.

By the way, this is no indication of how good I am. Some people think I’m great. Some people think I’m terrible. It’s just that the people who think I’m great know nothing and the people who think I’m terrible were kind enough to make me as much better as I could handle. No one was trying to make me feel bad. It was like private lessons in voice or trumpet. It’s isolating to a sandbox so when you get on stage, everything is perfect.

If you want to get good at flipping eggs, you’ll need way more butter than you think. Flipping eggs is not for people who think butter is the devil. Even margarine doesn’t have the same properties. Hell, even olive oil sucks at this particular application.

If you want to get really good, take out your egg pan and try to flip a piece of bread. Getting really good sometimes requires buying multiple pounds of veggies you won’t use, either. You cannot learn how to cut a carrot in a day. In a pro kitchen, you can’t learn to cut any veggie in a day. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just that it won’t look natural until you can make an entire pan of something and it all looks the same.

Carrots and apples are my favorite, because as Chef taught me, always find an edge. Turn the vegetable so that the most mass is always touching the cutting board. It makes julienne and batonet so much easier. If you’re wondering, learning to julienne/batonet an apple and carrot were for spicy cole slaw. It was a particularly unsweet Granny Smith. I had to practice that shit for weeks, because of my lack of 3D vision. It affects the way my knife comes down.

Therefore, I’m a speed demon at home because I don’t have to perfect anything. It’s only me. I still treat myself like I’m in the kitchen, just not like I’m constantly going to get fired, because I’m the boss and fuck her, she’s a bitch.

By the way, when I stopped thinking all my opinions were like that, my life got better *FAST.*

I am well and truly fucked in terms of technique, and if I married another chef/pro cook, that’ll be why. Together, we have a complete education and I’ll miss that part of being married to Dana forever.

It’s something I’ll seek out in a partner, because if I don’t have it, I know enough to teach it. I don’t care if someone’s interest is cooking or not. They’ll know how to feed us by themselves if it kills me, because my worst nightmare is feeding someone until I die because “I’m the pro.”

I don’t care if my husband has made his past wives eat shit because they thought they were so important. Remember who I am in the kitchen and submit, or you will not last very long. If being with me is important to you, you will learn to cook. It’s that simple.

You can treat me like a know-nothing asshole or you can treat it as lessons from a truly great chef who taught me every day, and that isn’t limited to one person. Dana is not more important than the Johns, Drew, or Knives. It’s just that Dana was with me for the most meals both served at at home. We started making brunch based on the very idea that because we worked well at home, we’d work well at work. This was absolutely true except when Mommy and Daddy were fighting, and you can take a guess as to who was whom on those days, because it was never a one way street. However, if the conversation was only about the food and didn’t move goalposts, I was wrong. Period. End of story. I didn’t spend time and money at culinary school. She did. She earned those fucking blue stripes and I heard about it to the point that I cannot watch Julie & Julia anymore without sobbing through the scene where Julia is cutting onions.

When we’re talking about “Mommy and Daddy fighting,” we’re talking about less than 4% of the time. And who cares about the other 97%….. 😉

And if Dana had been honest with herself, she would have realized that we needed to pack up and move to DC for all sorts of reasons, because she didn’t think about who I am and what I do, either. She thought working and playing on the Internet was invalid, and I’m a fucking blogger. She was never going to see me as valid, and she was never going to truly see what I’d gotten myself into, or she did and didn’t want to play. Either way, she knows and it’s just as bad as she thought it would play out because the Internet relationship didn’t listen to me and what I do.

I hope she feels relief that I actually said, “Dana wasn’t right, but she wasn’t wrong, either.” I hope for two things. The first is eventually feeling peace that I did the right thing. The second is that my beautiful girl didn’t get screwed over by me (for that particular issue) and I wish I could take away that pain. Not being able to is a massive regret, and now I am either so far down the list that I’m not worth addressing, or I fell off. I won’t know it for years, and I might not know it, ever. She has truly gone into the wind at my own invitation, which was warranted. She cannot come back until she gets herself together, because she couldn’t learn to sous. She’s a boss. She couldn’t generate her own light to compensate for the lack of light from above (God, Ani is brilliant). She couldn’t learn how to bend and sway like all same-sex relationships no matter who they are to each other. She flat out learned to love me, worried for me, protected me, all the things. What she could not do is let me do those things for her and didn’t see that as a problem. It showed me exactly who she thought I was.

I also, if I could have a third thing, I wish she would realize that it’s not just me that gave up someone fantastic. She truly fucked up, because we could have had something. It wasn’t what I thought it could or would be, but it’s so solid you could build a house on it. I watch videos on DIY, and I know what it takes to make a foundation. The concrete is now cured.

Now I’m overexplaining why I don’t have private lessons anymore and why I feel bad about it. DC might have changed both our lives in concrete ways, but we’ll never know that, either.

I didn’t choose the wrong relationship, we chose to move to the wrong ass city.

And that’s why I started doubting all my decisions. I lost True North and I paid for it.

I just never got change.

We’re Trapped and We Should Lean on Each Other

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking about relationships with men a lot lately, because the one I have with Zac is the gold standard now. This is because in terms of men who know how to be emotionally available to women without losing masculinity, watching him a master class. I am picturing him having a very busy day and hoping this makes him smile and relax for a minute.

This is because Zac is everything I want to be, and I’m not sure he even knows it. I am quietly learning to accept that I’m nonbinary and pansexual not because of anything but wanting to make sure the horsepower thrills me before I buy the whole car. Alternatively, I want someone I can grow with, so that the shell stays pristine in my mind because I was there when they started looking at cherry pickers.

I’m not going to change my pronouns, because gender expression means nothing to me. People say all kinds of things to get my attention and it’s always the tone of voice that matters. What I mean is that I see such a difference in gender with the way my mind presents in stream-of-conscious thought. I was raised to be a preacher’s kid, and that is an acting job. What other people do not know is that if you are born into a family with a public facing parent, you have been accepted to a company to which you never applied. People deal with this in different ways. I deal with it by being a wallflower in person and Anthony Bourdain here.

When I say I’m trying to be Anthony Bourdain, I mean it. I have taken on his writing style because it’s useful, and I do that with every writing voice I need. When I write about the kitchen, I need his authority, because we are roughly the same level. I am not treating him as Anthony Bourdain, star of Food Network, Travel Channel, and CNN. I am treating him as my boss who is like every boss I’ve ever had. I know him. We’ve met. Here’s what Anthony would tell you if he was here.

I am so proud of Leslie I can’t breathe because she had the balls to dress down a chef when he put knives in her sink.

That’s because he knows that he is fallible, possibly more than everyone else the way that doctors who acknowledge their humanity will tell you that you actually don’t want a shot from them, they’re terrible at it because they don’t do it all day. You want an ER nurse.

Bourdain was not a great chef, and I don’t know that because I’ve judged him on his food and talent. I know that because he told me that in Kitchen Confidential. He told me that he was a journeyman line cook who rose through the ranks to become chef, and that resonated with me because it said to me that Anthony didn’t have anything I didn’t.

I am awed by his humanity, and that is what makes him divine.

The relationship I have with Anthony in my head is very much like any of my Internet relationships except the possibility of meeting on the ground was cut short by an enormous amount of time. What I do know is that we would instantly bond. It wouldn’t take a drink. That’s because I’m already in Anthony’s tribe….. a tribe that would have both of us.

Relating to guys on that level is just what I do. If we’re in the same tribe, we bond and it’s on like a house on fire. When I bond with men who are in relationships, I become “The Girl Whisperer,” and I don’t do anything but let them talk it out. They know what they want. They just don’t have the clarity to see it.

Alternatively, here’s something hilarious. Lesbians act like men and they fucking hate it. They write it off as us being militant and angry, but never at the fact that we are matching style and structure. Some of thinking that lesbians are angry means they can dish but they can’t take it. They’ll start to feel things they can’t handle because no one has ever taught them to feel anything because of our childhood socializations. When they start to feel things they can’t handle, that’s when the rage starts.

When your protector mode runs up against mine, everyone else is going to see some shit.

Nowhere is this more evident than a lesbian and her father in law. Her father doesn’t think I can take care of shit, and he will tell me that daily in thought, word, and deed even after 25 years. The best I’ve ever gotten from any girlfriend’s parents is mild annoyance at my existence. Whenever I tried to change that pattern, it ranged from “you’re the girl that made my daughter gay” to “you don’t have the right to an opinion here because I’m her father and I don’t understand lesbians so I’m just going to have to assume that I’m responsible for her until she dies.” Fathers don’t even assume daughters can take care of themselves, so why would they think I am capable of doing something his daughter isn’t? The truth is that we do have trouble taking care of ourselves because the system isn’t built for us. Even if laws have changed, attitudes haven’t…… and if we act mean about it, that’s our problem. We should have just laid there and thought of England.

So, as a writer, I never believed that I could take care of anyone until I got some kind of deal going, and I was realistic enough to believe that I needed to support myself if I wanted to be a blogger. It has just taken an enormous amount of time to be able to figure out how I can do that, because eating and writing are equally important as much as I might think they’re not. My ire does not lie with writers who are kidding themselves. Sometimes people do go off on a pipe dream. My problem is that when creatives say they’re willing to work for peanuts so they have time to do something else, that’s not seen as valid because I’m supposed to be accumulating wealth every second of every day.

I have an idea big enough to attract comic book artists, movie directors, and other writers. In the right hands, it’s worth millions and I know what I have. If I take my focus off of it, I need to sell the idea. But then I face having my idea executed badly. I want to be free to be there for the whole process. To write the book and see if readers like it. To accept a movie deal if it is offered. To make my friends last forever as their fictional versions. They don’t think of that when it’s just a blog. But they’ll damn sure know if they were in something like Black Panther.

My job is to believe they could be….. and it affects my relationship with men to an enormous degree. I’m not the dog they need to kick, so I teach them pretty quick not to come up in my yard unless they’re willing to let me hold the leash.

With Zac, I just get to be myself, and we both trade off holding Oliver’s leash when we’re on the same hike.