Thanks to Humibid, Pseudophed, and ibuprofen, my cold has not gotten any worse… but I’m not better yet, either. To top it all off, today is the first day of my period. I just feel like crap all over. Seriously, body. Thanks for that…. although it does explain why, two days ago, I ate half a pan pizza all by myself. Then, the next day, I ate the rest of it. During PMS, it’s the only time I am truly hungry. My body just says, “EAT ALL THE THINGS.” The rest of the time, I am content with very small meals and a granola bar every now and again.

I need to go to the grocery store (still), because I am running out of things to eat AND I still don’t have any cough medicine. It’s time to up my game. When I truly have a cough, I skip right from Robitussin to Delsym, which I believe is actually the better choice. It also comes in my two favorite flavors, orange and grape. When I’m on Delsym, it really does work as well as codeine, except that sometimes codeine works better at night. We’ll see how it goes. My GP wants to see me back in two weeks, but if my cough gets any worse, I may go back earlier and get a prescription for the codeine version of cough syrup. It makes me sick to my stomach, but it’s worth it when I’m asleep and can’t feel the nausea, anyway.

Speaking of nausea, and I’ve had a lot of it over my lifetime, my favorite remedy in the world is ginger Altoids or Gosling’s ginger beer. Gosling’s is the best ginger beer on the planet, because it gets real. It’s hot and spicy, amazing straight out of the fridge as not to water it down with ice. I’ve been on Lamictal for almost ten years now, and one of the manufacturers of the generic included an ingredient that made me feel pregnant all the time. I called it the “blue diamond of death.” I also carried ginger Altoids in my bag to avoid throwing it back up, thus my nausea recommendation above. Haribo also makes an amazing lemon-ginger gummy that works just as well if you can find them- they’re pretty rare as children don’t like them much (they burn with the hotness).

Now that my pharmacy has a different manufacturer, I don’t get that ever-present nausea anymore, because the “blue diamond of death” has been replaced by a white, round pill with no side effects at all. I am a simple woman. It doesn’t take much to impress me, but this certainly did. It improved my quality of life by quite a bit.

As of right now, I am sitting in bed with my iPad and Bluetooth keyboard, with a roll of toilet paper (I don’t have any Kleenex, either.) and a trash bag next to my bed so I don’t have wads of toilet paper all over my room. Yesterday, I was in full-on nesting mode, what Dana and I used to call “lose the egg” day. My room is spotless except for the full laundry baskets filled with clothes I need to wash and put away. In order to motivate myself, I am listening to a channel I created on Spotify called “The Real Slim Lady.” It’s everything that Eminem has ever put out.

Don’t judge me. The Slim Shady albums (both I and II) are AMAZING. “Headlights” on SSII brings me to tears every time, especially if you’ve seen “8 Mile.” I have therapy at 4:00, plus some worksheets I need to finish before then. There are certain “homework assignments” that my Medicaid requires to make sure I’m progressing in the right direction. It’s the “gangsta rap and handle it” approach this AM… although I don’ think Em is really gangsta because there’s so much pop mixed in. I may need to switch to Mike Jones later in the afternoon to make sure I’ve got it “all sewed up.” Sarah will be so glad to hear about my job interview, even though I didn’t get the job. I can’t wait to tell her all about it. Afterward, I think I will go to the liquor store and treat myself to a six-pack of Gosling’s. It makes me feel wird to go to a liquor store just to buy soda, but I haven’t found a grocery store that carries it.

The last time I went to buy it, one of the other customers asked me what it was good for. I told her there were two excellent cocktails she could make- Kraken and ginger or Old Overholt and ginger. Rye and ginger carries so much weight in my heart, because I’d never heard of it before I went to Ottawa and hung out with Meag. Apparently it is not popular in the U.S., but one of the best cocktails I have ever put in my mouth. It was another Canadian that introduced me to Old Overholt, a friend invited to “orphan Thanksgiving” at Susan & Diane’s. It has a great price point, about $17 a bottle and tastes much better (to me, anyway) than anything much more expensive… the exception that I don’t have any because I don’t drink much anymore. I’m just over it. My taste buds have changed, with the exception that I was so nervous during a date I drank more than I should’ve and suffered the consequences.

Being two years away from 40 makes hangovers not even worth it, especially since I don’t enjoy alcohol much anymore. For instance, Dom gave me a 12-pack of Tecate left over from one of his parties, and that was in June. There are still six left. It doesn’t matter- I am so up for fun and shenanigans that people think I must be drunk, anyway.

There are two things that began changing my taste buds. The first is that I do not enjoy drinking in front of people in recovery, and I have a lot of friends who have suffered with addiction.  The second thing is that I would rather make caffeine my drug of choice, because it makes the evening last longer. I remember going to clubs and karaoke with recovering friends in Portland. The first time I came home wired for sound because the bar gave free refills to designated drivers, and I must have had, like, seven Diet Cokes. The second time, the bar sold Monster.

Mission accomplished.

My favorite energy drink is Rock Star Recovery. I am sure it is supposed to be for the seriously hung over, because it has B vitamins in it. But it is delicious beyond belief. Most convenience stores carry the lemonade, but the orangeade seems to come straight from heaven. The grapeade is good, too, and so is the coconut water.

When I worked at the airport as a line cook, though, I depended on Monster 2x. These are not for the faint of heart, but work beautifully if you are on the brunch shift.

Speaking of the brunch shift, one of the funniest lines that Anthony Bourdain wrote in “Kitchen Confidential” is that he’d gotten fired from some kind of fancy restaurant, and the only job he could get was brunch cook. He wrote that “the smell of failure is Hollandaise.” At the time, I was a brunch cook as well, and I laughed so hard there were tears and snot running down my face, especially since I HATE THE SMELL OF HOLLANDAISE… although one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten from Dana is that my Hollandaise is better than hers (she’s Cordon Bleu certified), and she was REALLY impressed that I never used a blender. I would just add the eggs and the vinegar or lemon juice and whisk like a motherfucker until I reached sabayon and began to add the butter.

Luckily, at Biddy’s we didn’t use Hollandaise, but Bearnaise. It smells so much better that I actually do like it a lot. Even though the smell of Hollandaise makes me nauseous all on my own, there was another tipping point. The dishwashing liquid we used at Biddy’s smelled strongly of lemon, and washing the egg pans at the end of our shift (Dana and I worked together at brunch) made it a hundred times worse. No, I take that back. It made it a THOUSAND times worse.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to that time in my life, because Dana and I were so good together in the kitchen. We had the dance down perfectly. Not only did we have “the dance” perfected, we also had such a strong connection to each other that we could save tons of time on tickets by being able to have entire conversations with our eyes. There was only one time that I made a true mistake. I had a migraine and thought I could handle cooking on my own, anyway. I cut Dana and she went to the bar for her shift drink. I got so sick I just wanted to curl up on the floor, but according to Oregon law, if you’ve had an alcoholic drink, you CANNOT come back into the kitchen. That was a pump up the gangsta rap and get it HANDLED moment as well.

There’s nothing like cooking in a pub when you’d literally rather be dead than feel the migraine coursing through your capillaries. I can’t remember who walked to the convenience store for me, but one of the cooks did and got me a Monster and I took some ibuprofen. I “Kept Calm and Sold the Rail,” but it was literally the worst day of my life in terms of professional cooking. You cannot imagine my relief when the kitchen closed for the night.

It makes me go to my happy place when I think of working at Biddy’s, especially since I feel so bad right now.

Kleenex me, Jeeves.

As predicted, the recruiter called and said that I was not smart enough for a basic computer support position. She didn’t use those words, of course, but that was the gist of it. I get it. I am not a math person. But never in the history of my career have I had to figure out equations in order to say, “Thank you for calling, my name is Leslie. How can I help you?” Even when the computer support job involved knowing command line linux. As I told her in the interview, those things are different skills altogether. It’s back to the drawing board, but I know something will come up. I saw a Hulu commercial that made me laugh- something about getting a job in McClean and “what can silver do for you?” For those not in the know, the silver line is basically the train to the tech corridor.

Apparently, I interview well. One of the things that the recruiter said was that I was great to work with, and I think that if the decision was up to her, I probably would have gotten the job. This is the second interview in which I have done well, but other people have done more weller than me. It’s ok. I will find the right fit, even if it’s flipping burgers. I’m actually really good at that, by the way.

I think it’s funny that I’ve called Argo a burger-flippin’ ho as a joke many times, and now I might get that chance to be my own. 😛

I can’t remember whether I’ve told you this or not (too lazy to look it up), but despite all of our strife, I got the sweetest letter from Argo that I’ve gotten in months, so I printed it out and I keep it in the pocket of my Kindle case so I can look at it when I feel sad or nervous. She has this way of building me up that no one else ever has, so it is wonderful to be able to read that e-mail when I’m about to go into a stress-filled situation. It’s one of her superpowers as I wander trying to find my own.

One of them, apparently, is interviewing. I’m not taking the rejections with me. I am taking the sweet words that the people rejecting me have said, because I know that they are sincere… especially the ones from Christ Church, because I know for sure that it was a hard decision for them. I look forward to earning my superpower as youth volunteer, because I need it for my resume in case I find another youth director position that doesn’t require being ordained. I can’t wait to meet Rev. Susannah and work with her to accomplish her goals. If she wants me to, I can also help with visioning, but that is her call and not mine. Perhaps she is a visionary as well, and I will help her carry her mission forward whether I agree with her or not. As a volunteer, it is not my job to work against her, but to help her as much as I can.

I read a post on Facebook that resonated with me to the point that it hurt. It said to be careful of destination addiction, that what you’re seeking is somewhere else. I have fallen prey to that many times, and I am committing to settling in DC forever. If something goes terribly wrong, that doesn’t mean I need to run. It means that I need to take my Klonopin and Neurontin, pump up some gangsta rap, and get it HANDLED. DC is my home now, and I am putting down some serious roots. My choir director is overjoyed that I will be here over Christmas, because we are doing some serious work together.

I am starting to believe, really believe, that singing is one of my superpowers. When I warm up, I use different muscles than I do in my daily life, and it makes me walk taller with much more confidence than usual. I am going to commit to asking Nae if he needs a wedding singer, because that would help bring in money, even if it’s a small honorarium. I have thought about looking for a job as a ringer in another church, but I can’t. CCC is my home, and it is helping me mentally as I get my shit together. I also, under no circumstances, want to stop working with Nae.

I will also commit to asking Giles if he will work with me as well, because he was my first voice teacher and carries so much weight in my heart because of it. He’s so busy during the school year that it may not work out, but all he can say is no, and he will definitely say no if I never ask the question. Giles and I met through GLOBAL, the gay/straight alliance at University of Houston. He became my voice teacher when he was taking a pedagogy class and needed a student. He listened to my recording at Epiphany, and he made me feel so good about it. He told me how much stronger my voice has gotten since we last worked together, which of course brought tears to my eyes.

I also wouldn’t mind working with Zach again, because he gave me some pointers that really, really helped, like massaging my trachea before warming up.

Speaking of which, I need to see if deep-tissue massage and chiropractic appointments are covered by my insurance. I think it would really help in terms of the problems with my back. My friends Susie and Cynthia told me that I look like I walk around in constant pain, and they’re not wrong.  When I think about my back, though, it connects to the day I sent Meag a picture of it and she said she couldn’t wait to get her hands on me (no flirt intended).  She is one of the best LMTs in Canada, evidenced by the fact that the Canadian board that certifies LMTs has asked her to be on the panels more than once.

In other news, my dad is coming to visit soon. I can’t wait to have a few days with him all to myself. His superpower is that when he called, he told me he was coming over a weekend so he could go to church with me. If that’s not the sweetest music I’ve heard in a long time, I don’t know what is. Our love is a superpower that runs so deep I’m not sure I even have words for it.

Amen.

Yesterday I interviewed with a company called “Frontpoint Security.” I mention them by name because there are several reviews of the interview on Glassdoor, with replies from the company themselves, so I don’t think it’s unfair to name them here. It started as a wonderful day- cold and full of sunshine. I was excited that the train ride took almost an hour and 20, because I was reading a great novel (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry). I arrived full of hope and the enjoyment of reading. That lasted right up until the interview began. Without any questions about my customer service experience, they handed me a five or six page logic test with math SAT questions. I had two problems there. The first is that I’ve gotten a D in logic twice, because I could not get the hang of taking verbal questions and turning them into equations. For instance, I am still not sure whether Jill is taller than Kelly, shorter than Kelly, or that Jill and Kelly are the same height just because Anne is taller than Jill. I am also not sure how many days it took for a water lily to become covered with water in the middle of a pond. The second is that I’ve never been through SAT prep, because I never had to take it. I went to a junior college for my first two years, and because they had their own entrance exams, I took them instead. I was placed in remedial math, and the very least I can say about that is I passed. I still have a ways to go in getting my Bachelor’s, mostly because I did not have time for a full-time job and advanced trig.

The reason that I skipped the SAT is that I was in the hospital with a migraine that wouldn’t quit, and I stayed there for longer than I’ve ever stayed in a hospital, except for the time I got meningismus, irritation of the meninges rather than full-on meningitis, and still no less painful. The migraine and the meningismus required the same battery of tests, including repeated spinal taps (I went to eleven). Plus, one of the medications I was given made me go from fine to batshit crazy in less than five minutes. A nurse got the order wrong, and instead of giving me a shot in the arm or hip of Stadol, pushed it into my IV. Meagan and Lindsay were standing there when it happened, and their eyes became larger and larger until my dad walked in and told Meagan to take Lindsay home. They were both in panic mode, because the effect of the drug was that I couldn’t stop talking, and at a pace so rapid that it was downright scary. I just kept saying over and over, “I’llbefineoncemydadgetshere. Iwantmydadbecausehe’llknowwhattodo….” along with a litany of orders to the nurses to get my dad the fuck here. When he arrived, he was in scrubs and I had never been more glad to see anyone in my life. I don’t remember what happened next, but I do remember that it calmed me down the slightest bit. Something was ordered for me- I think it was Haldol- but what the nurse did was inexcusable because she’d seen the order and didn’t read the whole thing. I think I missed three weeks of school, and when I was let go from the hospital, I still had to go for another spinal tap because the migraine hadn’t lifted. He told me to drive myself and lent me his van. I drove there, but they gave me a spinal tap and driving home was one of the scariest things I’d ever been through because I could barely lift my head over the steering wheel.

So, these questions are put in front of me and I realize how unprepared I am for this and begin to freak the fuck out. I asked the recruiter how much these questions counted, and did she want to know anything about my experience and career so far? She said,  “of course. It’s just that the manager came up with these questions to see how you’d get through training.” So, I told her everything I could possibly think of that would tilt my chances, including the Rock Star award I won at Alert Logic where a senior vice president had listened to my call and sent all the senior managers a note that if everyone else was like me, our Net Promoter Score was ensured. He talked about how I was cheerful at 3:00 AM, and thought it was brilliant that I chatted him up about football and Doctor Who since he was calling from the UK. The funniest thing that happened was that after I’d validated him by asking his security question, I said, “this is a question I ask all my British customers. Who is your Doctor?” He answered with the name of his GP. When I explained what I meant, he laughed heartily.

I also told her about the other Rock Star award I’d won because I was on the phone with a customer with another AL employee at the same time, and how he’d nominated me for it because of the great customer service I’d given while we were on the phone together. I was sitting there trying not to shake, but the memories of those two awards were something I focused on because it meant more to me than anything to prove that I was worthy of the job itself….. and worthy as a person. I was trying to self-soothe, because I knew I’d blown that test because I couldn’t even finish it and external validation was worthless.

She said I would hear something by Monday or Tuesday, so I am spending my weekend wound tight as a tick. I want a job where I can read all the way to work, and finish several chapters at once. I want a job that starts with great pay and ticks up with quality assurance. I want a job that has metrics out the ass because I like checking my performance every morning. It’s quite soothing not to go weeks without knowing how you’re doing…. like only getting a report card in school every six weeks.

It sounds like a great challenge, one for which I feel ready.

At Alert Logic, so much was going on with me emotionally that I crumpled with anxiety and threw up before meetings. I am not sure that I was healthy enough to take that job in the first place, having just come from Portland because I was so far down that I needed to come home and lean into my family for support. Now, I am free of all of it, and working with Sarah has gotten me on track for a wonderful life instead of one that’s merely mediocre. I came home because I was so depressed that I thought I might kill myself, but the only thing that stopped me was the dream of becoming a famous writer. In essence, I needed to stay alive for you, and I do not say that lightly.

Those feelings resurfaced when Dana and I had our ugly blowout, and I realized that I needed more help than my family and friends could provide. That was when I decided that being in a psych ward was better than leaning on people so unprepared to handle depression this overwhelming. As my romance with Dana and my friendship with Argo ended, I realized that the support system I had was slipping through my fingers, and I didn’t have anyone else that knew the ins and outs of the situation like they did. The suicidal thoughts and plans didn’t come from wanting to cause anyone pain, but to cause them relief that they didn’t have to worry about me anymore. Those thoughts are never reality, which is why Argo’s words gave me the strength I needed to take my life into my own hands and pull myself up enough not to ask my friends for help, but to submit to the fact that I was ill and needed to take my own steps to get better, rather than expecting everyone else to “fix me.”

My nature made it harder to get better in the hospital than I wanted to, because my empath mirror neurons went off and I began to believe that everyone else had it worse than me and they needed my support more than I needed theirs… another belief that probably cost me because I couldn’t recognize that we were all in the same boat. We were all broken in our own ways, and yes, I was just as sick as they were, but I took their stories on as my own, as I have done my whole life. The Lanagan Search & Rescue system became acute as my roommate told me she was a cutter and could I watch over her to make sure she didn’t cut herself in our room?

Luckily, she was not in my cohort, so I had meetings/classes all day without her. We all spilled our pasts and what brought us to this situation, this last-ditch effort to keep ourselves stable. The story that got me the most verklempt was a guy that wanted to kill himself over his job. God, no job is worth that, but his ego was tied to it and a project failure threw him into a downward spiral. Another reached hers by walking in on her husband committing adultery in their bed. Another arrived with scars on her wrists. It was terrifying and uplifting all at the same time, because sharing brought us close together and gave us hope that despite all our problems, we’d make it if we just stuck to the program not unlike AA, but similar in terms of sharing our stories and keeping it up during outpatient.

There were so many people I just wanted to take into my arms and not let go, because I am not the type person that can see suffering and walk away from it. However, the entire point of the program was learning how to soothe ourselves, and hugging was strictly forbidden. In some ways, I felt alone. I was the only lesbian, so there were few people that could really identify with me. I was also angry, because my social worker was a lesbian and absolutely lost her clinical separation and started to cry. Why would I be angry about that? Because it was my job to cry, and I didn’t want to sense weakness in the people around me that were supposed to help me because I didn’t want to take on their emotions about me. It was pity. Just straight out where I could see it, and the last thing I wanted or needed.

What I did learn in all of this was that I was right. Diane had been a problem, and not a solution. She knew I would need her as I started coming out, but didn’t realize that my young ears weren’t the appropriate place for her to talk about her life. She was right and wrong all at the same time, and would have been a wonderful resource had she kept her clinical separation intact as well. But she didn’t, and I ached for her in more ways than one.

If you click on both links, you will see the change in my tone in talking about her. The first is idealistic and wonderful, painful and real. The second is after all of the talks I’d had with friends who didn’t think my story was what I thought it was, and proved it to me.

Now, I am alone with my books and tea, wanting to reach up for something more than just sitting by myself, fictional characters often replacing real interaction. I’m having dinner with Pri-Diddy next Tuesday, where I know that she will enfold me in one of those hugs designed to heal pain…. because I am exhausted.

Sometimes my medication gives me very intense, lucid dreams. Last night, my high school love visited me for the first time in years. We talked for hours, just catching up on our lives. When I woke up, I realized how much I missed her, and had some interesting insights on my current life (as dreams are wont to do). I remembered the days in which I was tortured that she was married to someone else, not because I was in love with her still, but because being an ex caused certain……… issues.

They aren’t married anymore, haven’t been for a long time. But I drew so many correlations between her ex-wife and mine that it was illuminating to an amazing and frightening degree. Her ex-wife ran hot and cold with me, because in some instances, she handled the closeness between Meag and me, and sometimes she didn’t. Does that sound familiar in any way to some of you long-term readers? The hot was just as intense as the cold. I want to talk about the hot first.

It all started with Tim Horton’s, as many Canadian stories do. Here is an excerpt from an entry I wrote about an anniversary with Kathleen. The setup is that we were staying at an inn in Vermont, and it wasn’t far to Ottawa from there:

I’d forgotten that Quebec is the only province in Canada where they don’t have to put signs in both French and English. The entire menu is in French. Not only do I not know what a TimBit is, I don’t know how to ask for one. I am standing there in a puddle of self pity. ALL I WANT IS A DONUT AND SOME COFFEE AND NOW I’M IN A FUCKING FOREIGN COUNTRY AND I CAN’T READ!

I go up to the counter. I ask for a TimBit and a large coffee in English. The woman points to the menu overhead. You can’t get one TimBit. The quantities and prices are scattered as if put there by someone with a killer hangover. I point to the one I want. I pay. It’s like ten dollars. I don’t care.

My order comes up, and all I see is this HUGE BOX. I have ordered ENOUGH FUCKING TIMBITS TO FEED THE ENTIRE CANADIAN ARMY, AND ALL THEIR SQUIRRELS.

We’re walking out of the restaurant, and I’m going to kill Meagan. All she had to say was, “it’s kind of like a donut hole, eh.” So I call her up. And she’s laughing hysterically. “Oh man,” she says. “I never should have done that to ya in Quebec.”

Years later, Deah hatched a plan.

She wanted me to come to the house without Meag knowing, and knock on the door with a box of TimBits. It was brilliant, especially because their daughter is named Tym, so they’re not TimBits anymore. They’re TymBits. So, Deah shows up at the airport with the box, and we drive straight back to the house. Deah stands back, and there are butterflies in my stomach as I knock on the door.

The look on her face was priceless… so full of love and absolute shock that I’m glad there’s not a picture. That look was just for me. She grabbed me and hugged me for what seemed like an hour. It wasn’t, of course, but in my memory it stays that way. Deah is smiling like the cat that swallowed the canary, because she’s managed to pull this off. It was #winning in massive proportions. We had a great time just BEING. We didn’t do anything, and that’s when Meag introduced me to The Joel Plasket Emergency, because “our song” became Nowhere with You:

Our thing was Starbucks, so we went for a coffee and sat there just as we did when we were 18. It was our “date place” in Sugar Land, there being few places for 18-year-olds to party in our quiet suburb. Her poison was a hazelnut latte, and mine was raspberry because I liked getting a “pink drink.” She told me that she was sorry we missed truly being partners, because she thought it was something we’d probably have done well. It was a compliment I’d been waiting to hear for a very long time, because we were secure in our places in life. It wasn’t a flirt, just a recognition that the way things went down was full of regret for both of us. She thought that she’d treated me so poorly that she didn’t even have a right to ask. My inner rage went to eleven internally, because I didn’t know what I would have said, but she’d taken away my choice. Then, rage melted away as I realized that we were exactly where we needed to be at that time in our lives, and to be angry about it was pointless. We’d made our choices, the right ones… at least then, anyway.

At other times, Deah treated the intimacy between Meag and me as a threat, when I really, really wasn’t. All I wanted was to be a part of Meagan’s life in a real way, and it wasn’t that far to Ottawa from DC, so I could really be present in a way that I couldn’t when we’d only see each other sporadically. At the time, her parents were living in Sugar Land, so visits home were always a path back to me and letting the ghosts of our past rise as we went by our old high school and “our” Starbucks (which, incidentally, isn’t there anymore… and don’t think I’m not sad about that fact). I remember clearly the time when we had to run an errand, and she leaned over and said, “want to be 18 again?” I said, “hell, yeah.” She rolled down all the windows, opened the sun roof, and turned up the stereo as we raced down Palm Royale.

I can understand Deah’s hot and cold in a whole new way, because it was not dissimilar to the way Dana treated Argo. She was never a threat, but Dana treated her that way, anyway. I think that was the point of the dream- to get me to understand in a way that I couldn’t until this morning. I am so thankful to whatever brought on the dream, but I would like to believe it was my God place, the one that whispers to me in pieces of wisdom that I, in the words of Mary, “ponder in my heart.”

It is also comforting that years after the conversation we had in the past, we are still in the places we need to be to grow in the right direction. Maybe one day we’ll have another moment in which we can just be 18 again, the ghosts rising from our past…

With TymBits.

Dear Bryn,

It’s been a trip around the sun of gargantuan proportions. So many ups, so many downs, and through it all we’ve maintained our senses of humor. Well, most of the time, anyway. Some shit has just been sad. We’ve walked this path together, forged when we were infants in emotional growth and are starting to feel ten feet tall and bulletproof because when we talk, we realize that we aren’t alone. Have never been alone. We’ve had each other.

I miss the days of sitting on your back porch, watching the dogs play as we delve deeper and deeper into conversation. I miss hugs that were designed to last one second longer, because we’d just emptied our souls and needed to lean in and hold on. I love that we’ve been able to keep up our long friend-love affair by having text. I thought I was an intense personality that would never find someone with whom to roam the earth, because as I get deeper in conversation, people tend to say, “whoa. I’m out.” It was a relief to meet my match… someone not afraid of introspection and hearing others process theirs.

In my personality type profile (INFJ, sometimes P when I’m not feeling like a “judgmental dickhead“), it mentions that in my life, I will cultivate deep relationships with very few people, and hold on to them… rather than having a bunch of friends I know to varying degrees. Thank you for being one of those people. I look forward to the day when I can walk with you around the streets of DC, pointing out cool stuff and saying, “ok, this is fantastic, but let me show you THIS!” Most notably, I want to take you to the zoo. It’s amazing how much inspiration I get from sitting with my laptop or my tablet and just writing in front of the giraffes. Plus, the zoo is within a park, so make sure to point out beautiful joggers. 😛

It would also be fun to go dancing again. That was one of the best nights I’ve ever had in Portland, even though that’s usually not my scene. Let’s hit up somewhere cool (I’d have to ask around, because again, usually not my scene) and take shots of Red Bull. Wired for sound to make the evening last as long as possible.

I just wanted to tell you how much you mean to me, because I figure it’s the best birthday present I have to offer. I figure that in my writing, what I can offer you is my heart. Thank you for taking such good care of it.

Happy birthday, love. I hope you get lots of presents.

Always (and I mean ALWAYS),

Leslie

I had to walk to the 7-Eleven because I’d run out of necessities like hot dog buns. While I was walking, I was listening to an episode of The Diane Rehm Show that featured Sherry Turkle, an expert on digital education and how technology is changing the population in general. I know for sure it changed my relationship with Dana, Argo, and Aaron… all in different ways.

With Dana, there was the obvious “we both check out on our phones when we’re doing nearly anything.” In fact, I would say that our entire relationship changed when Dana got an iPhone, because then both of us were using our phones as our computers, and therefore, it changed our interactions with each other. There were times when we’d instant message in the same house, and that’s not weird. Studies show that it happens to families all over the world, not just ours. When she had a “dumb phone,” she pulled me away from my electronics. It wasn’t her responsibility to do so, but she did… and I did not know how grateful to be for that until tonight. When we both took time out to look things up, something else would grab our attention, and whatever we’d been talking about would be lost. It also made it much easier for us to be wrong or right in an argument about a fact, because instead of just talking about it, we’d Google the answer. We are both trivia nerds, so it was not unusual for us to get in minor scrapes over when the elevator was invented, or whether Cezanne or Gougin painted a particular painting, or what the fuck ever. Even if I knew the answer cold, even based on past conversations I’d had with her, Dana would still take out her phone and look it up. When I was right, she was never as happy as when I was wrong. I’m not the best loser, but I always tried to pretend it didn’t matter to me as not to up the ante….

But it did. Technology changed our relationship for both better and worse, because there were times when I genuinely wanted to look things up as well… we’d sit next to each other and share the screen, both interested in reading the Wikipedia article. That was when technology was an amazing help. Other times, I wanted to talk to connect with her, and stopping to look something up provided what I now believe was an unnecessary distraction.

I will say for the record that she comes by it honestly. I got in a scrape with her dad over whether you could check in at an airline with an iPhone, and I said you could. When he verbally wrestled me to the ground, I printed out an article showing him you could. He still said I was wrong because you couldn’t check in the entire party on one phone. Bambergers do not like to be wrong, so perhaps that was a piece of wisdom I missed in all of Dana’s fact-checking. It’s in her DNA.

Yet another place where I could have been more giving and just let things slide. The thing is, though, because we could see each other, there was also a lot of hugging, kissing, jokes, and laughter.

With Argo, I learned from this podcast that only 20% of communication is verbal, and some studies push it down to 7%. So to say that we knew each other was relative. I know I made the mistake of thinking I knew her better than I did, and I would say the same of her. Our ideas of each other’s personalities were skewed by quite a bit because we never saw each other in the context of facial expressions, tones in our voices, etc. I realized that in a lot of our e-mails, I was inferring her tone rather than knowing it, and that piece made all the difference. Maybe if I could have heard her tone of voice in her writing, I would have said a lot of things differently, gave a lot more when I saw she was upset, etc. I also know that it’s a lot easier to reveal things about yourself that you wouldn’t say if someone was sitting right in front of you, so there’s that.

Actions and reactions on paper are totally different than in person… and totally different than on the phone. There are so many levels to communication that it was a mistake to limit ourselves to only one. My words hurt her, and I couldn’t see it. Her words hurt me, and she couldn’t see it. There was no way to just chill. There was no way to see tears and respond to them. There was no way to know whether we were joking or serious without a fuckton of emoticons. In a way, it was a great release to be able to send my words out into the ether, but when my words didn’t engender the response I thought they would, there was no way for us to look at each other and come to complete resolution. The part that I *do* know about Argo is that she is the most hilarious person I’ve ever met in my life, but it’s a hard road back to hilarity when talking about something serious in only black and white. She entered my life as a “Fanagan,” so in effect, the thing that drew her to me became something she despised.

But it’s ok. She only knew 20% of me, and I only knew 20% of her. Who knows what would have happened had we known the other 80%? I don’t know whether it would be better or worse, but I do know that it would be different.

With Aaron, it’s an interesting dichotomy. We have known each other in a friend-intimate way. He knows he can have whatever he wants out of my fridge, and I know that both of us feel a real loss in terms of “going nowhere with you.” We called it “running Aarons.” However, now that we’re in different cities, I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve talked on the phone. Now our relationship is much more like the one I had with Argo, checking in with each other online all the time… the difference being that I’ve been around him long enough that most of the time, when I infer his tone, it’s correct, because I’ve been there day in and day out to know how he would say something and sometimes, why he would say it. At the same time, though, I don’t know how he has grown in the time that I’ve left, and I have to make room for it. So maybe I know 40% of him. 60% on a good day. 😛

As for me, I have gotten the strange telephobia that’s sweeping the nation. With me, I want to see you in person, or I want to write to you. That middle ground, for some reason, has become lost to me. When I was younger, I could spend hours on the phone. Now, a phone call makes me sweat. It’s common knowledge that getting over a fear is tackling it head-on, so perhaps being single right now is better for me because I don’t get to bargain with Dana over whether she’ll call for me or not. I don’t have a choice whether to face my fear. I just have to muscle through it, along with a lot of other people.

And in all of this, my only question is whether we are creating new forms of dialogue, or destroying something that can’t be replaced. Sometimes people need to hear my voice. Sometimes people need to be able to hug me. Sometimes, there need to be conversations that cannot be interrupted because someone liked my status.

I’d continue this entry, but my phone just went off. I hope it’s a letter, but it’s probably just spam. It doesn’t matter. You know I’m going to look anyway.

I’ve never lived with a real guy before. With Grant, he was a metrosexual, so his beauty products were equal to mine. He cleaned up after himself, and never let the bathroom get real. You know what I mean. He might have left the kitchen a wreck most days, but the bathroom was his sanctuary just as much as mine.

Duncan is one of those men that has never heard of Comet, leaves his dirty shorts hanging in the bathroom to dry on the back of the door, and tends to make yellow stains on the toilet that I clean up, not because he’s lazy, but because it would never occur to him that was a problem. He just doesn’t notice.

Because a) we’re not married and 2) I believe in equality, I don’t care whether the toilet seat is up or down. I figure that he shouldn’t have to remember to put the toilet seat down for me because I don’t have to remember to leave the seat up for him. Where it is is just where it is, you know? However, it would be nice that whether the seat is up or down, it’s clean.

My room looks somewhat akin to the CIA or the FBI thinking that I have papers hidden somewhere that they have to find by turning everything upside down. It’s not necessarily unclean, just unkempt. If I had a guest coming over, I could get it spotless in less than 15 minutes. I need to put the clothes in the hamper and take down the recycling, but other than that, I’m golden. I’m trying to keep everything in some semblence of order because my therapist says it will help, and I’m willing to try anything. I wish I could get back the “anal Annie” attitude I developed in my Portland apartment, but apparently that OCD was short-lived, probably because it was tied to that time in my life, and that time in my life is never coming back, either.

My point is this. As long as I take my dishes downstairs so that I don’t get bugs or mold, I could give a shit what my room looks like. Sometimes my crazy spatter is heavier than others. But I would never in a million gazillion years let that spill over into a common area of the house. My space is my space. Our space is our space, and never the twain shall meet.

I have always had this attitude in group houses, and it has served me well. Duncan is thisclose to getting a reprimand from Hayat, because I’m not going to confront Duncan. Hayat can be “the heavy” a lot better than I can. She is a ball-breaking tornado in a tiny body, and I just love watching her do it. 

It’s kind of a spectator sport. 

When she’s on the telephone, I pretend not to listen so that I get to hear her order people around at work. She is very, very good at what she does, although privately I call her “Chandler,” because I’ve lived here since April and I still don’t know what that is exactly. It has to do with spreadsheets.

I should have taken a picture of the bathroom before I cleaned it. Hindsight is 20/20. All I’ll really have to say is “yellow stains” and she’ll get the picture. Duncan is an attorney who is trying to get into the CIA (really) and always studying for some kind of exam. I’m not sure what that exam entails, because I thought that if intelligence wanted you, you’d know it.

I have a CIA baseball cap that my dad bought for me at a tourist shop, and it gives me no small amount of pleasure to fuck with people about it. I mean, come on. If you’re actually in the CIA, why in the everliving hell would you advertise that fact? Apparently, some people don’t know that.

This one lady said, “are you really in the CIA?” I said, “yes. In fact, it was really easy. I just took a Blockbuster Video application and crossed out ‘Blockbuster Video’ and wrote in ‘CIA’ at the top in crayon, dropped it in the mail, and ‘voila!’ I can’t take credit for that Blockbuster Video line.  James came up with it in high school when one of our friends wanted to be in the FBI. But it’s a good joke, so I lifted it for my own amusement.

The woman looked at me wide-eyed, like she couldn’t tell whether I was kidding or not and just walked off. I just thought to myself, “…aaaaaaand, my work here is done.”

My next touristy purchase is going to be the t-shirt that says, “NSA: The Only Agency That Cares Enough to Listen.”

In case you’re wondering, the crayon was “Burnt Sienna.” I don’t think they would have taken me if it had been “Cerulean.” Although, you are totally screwed if you want to join the CIA, because Blockbuster Video closed all their stores, and Best Buy just won’t cut it.

Good luck, Duncan.  Maybe I’ll lend you my hat if you’ll clean the fucking bathroom.

The high today is supposed to be 52 degrees. Right now it is 48 and partly cloudy. My body is saying, “I remember this.” Right now I am wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt, an oxford, my hoodie, jeans, and two pairs of socks (one of them being thick and woolly). If need be, I have a down jacket to put on top of all my layers, but I doubt I will, because within five minutes of walking, I’m ready to take it off, anyway. When I’m walking, I rarely need a coat because the movement in itself creates enough body heat to keep my inner layers warm. When my mother gave me a Macy’s gift card, I splurged on a Ralph Lauren double-weight hoodie, and I am not sure I have taken it off since she bought it for me because Samantha likes to keep the air conditioning (as I have said before) somewhere between low-boy and walk-in. If you do not know what those are, you’ve never worked in a restaurant. A low-boy is a refrigerator under the prep area. A walk-in is a freezer as big as a dorm room. Needless to say, wearing layers has come in handy since April, and especially handy since August. I am slowly re-acclimating to the cold, and I cannot say it is not welcome.

One of the reasons I stayed in Portland so long was the cold. I do not like the humid heat of Houston, and I love fall clothes and being bundled up like a walking sheet set with comforter. In Maryland, we get our fair share of hot weather, but it doesn’t last as long… another plus being that when it is cold, the sun still shines, so my Vitamin D level doesn’t plummet into nothing. Once I came home from Portland and Angela (my doctor stepmother) ran a set of bloods on me and a few days later, I got a phone call:

Angela: Congratulations! You have the lowest Vitamin D level in the history of my entire practice!
Leslie: I’d like to thank location, location, location. What do I win? An Amana side by side refrigerator/freezer?

My Vitamin D level was six, and normal is somewhere between 20 and 50. I took the pills religiously, but they didn’t work for me. Apparently, what I needed was natural sunshine. When Dana and I moved to Houston in 2013, I sat outside in the backyard and drank water no matter how hot it was. I would sit there for at least an hour a day, and not only did I get a farmer’s tan, I started to feel better, less depressed even, within a week or so. Since it worked, it only encouraged me to sit out there and sweat some more. I made friends. There was Clarence, the toad that lived under the house, an abundance of squirrels, and a bat I named “Batly” after the clumsy character with huge glasses on Eureeka’s Castle, but Dana preferred “Batholomew.”

In the cold of Maryland, it feels right. Sunshine and warm clothes together, with an equal amount of squirrels, cardinals, blue jays, orioles, and hummingbirds. We also have the occasional rabbit, because we Nassers (me being the adopted one) will feed everyone. We’ve got a “squirrel feeder” because the other Nassers will not take my advice about how to keep them out of the bird feeder (toss the birdseed in chili oil, because mammals can taste heat and birds can’t). We put peanuts all over the yard. We even have the occasional bee, which pleases me to no end. I stay away from them because I am allergic, but nothing makes me happier than the fact that they can feed themselves in our yard.

As a former line cook, the fact that bees are dying in large quantities is enough to get me to break into tears, but that’s an entry unto itself. We’ll talk about that another time.

Just now, as I’ve been writing this, the clouds have drifted away and it is truly sunny. It’s still 48 degrees, but the neighborhood looks so pretty bathed in sunlight.

I wish we’d had that weather yesterday, because I went with a group from church out to our retreat house in West Virginia. People were hiking the hills and taking hay rides, which sounded awesome in theory and terrible in practice. I spent most of my day huddled by the campfire, because even though I was warm enough without my down jacket, I forgot to bring gloves. Gloves would have made all the difference, because even when I put my hands in my pockets, it wasn’t enough to keep me from shivering violently. I sat there most of the day, trying to remember everything Matt, Ned, and Dana had ever shown me about making a fire. I did pretty well, actually, and kept us going with monstrous heat in the middle of a misty Portland-like day. Everything was beautiful, with the leaves turning and the grass so green that I couldn’t believe the picture I’d taken. There was no correction at all, and the grass popped out at me. In the photo, I am standing in front of the retreat house, looking out toward the entrance and exit road. I wish I’d taken more pictures, but I got a great shot, and I figured, “let’s quit while we’re ahead.” The rest of the shots I could have gotten included things like cars, orange cones, etc. I wanted the shots I got to be pure, and completely free of anything modern. I wouldn’t have liked any of the shots I’d gotten if I’d had to spend time editing out pickup trucks, and I don’t think you would’ve, either. I tend to spend too much time on editing photos, and would rather concentrate on my eye for photography so that editing doesn’t really need to happen in the first place.

I think it would be a great place to take the youth group on retreat, but the house needs to be brought up to code in order to let the kids sleep there. It might be a project the youth might think about taking on, especially if we have some Eagle Scouts able to supervise. I sincerely believe that Eagle Scouts can do anything. It might be a good conversation to have with Rev. Susannah, who is the woman that actually got the job as the youth director at CCC. I am looking forward to working with her, because as I have said before, all of this is preparing me to fly solo. Learning how to manage a youth group, I believe, is the best step you can take before becoming a senior pastor, because nine times out of ten, you don’t get people to come to your church by adults randomly showing up. The kids hear about the youth groups their friends attend, and that, in turn, brings their parents into the fold. It works the same with young kids’ Christian Education, although in our church, that’s a completely different department, led by Rev. Audrey. I firmly believe anything we can do to get more kids active in our children and youth programs is a good thing, because our congregation is getting older. New lifeblood is coming in, but it would be great to see the rate progress, and I believe it will. There are so many ways for people to plug in, especially kids. Everything from Sunday School to string orchestra.

This church is so amazing that I can’t help but gush about it…… while I wrap up in my layers and try to recreate the acclimatization I had to Portland cold way back when….. but at least my Vitamin D level is normal. 😉

Compromise is so hard, because it has to mean that the other person is listening… and you can’t make them. You can’t make anybody do anything, but in a relationship, it’s hard to convey needs and have the other person adjust their behavior. I am not speaking to anyone directly, just focusing on the weakness in myself. I have a hard time with not winning, even when it’s not a competition. If I knew the answer as to how to fix it, I would probably still be married. I would have made a great lawyer, because I will argue a point until you agree with me whether you want to or not. I have heard over and over in my life, “I just can’t win with you.” Sometimes, that’s true. I am so verbally flexible that few people have the chutzpah to stay with me all the way to the end of an argument, because even without meaning to, I am exhausting.

I want to examine every detail, every aspect, every feeling, every behavior. Most people don’t want to go that deep, and usually my response to “I can’t win with you” is, “yes. You can. We’re just not done yet.” It’s like there’s two sides to a coin in my brain. I want to “win” the argument, and at the same time, to me, a win doesn’t mean I am victorious. It means that we talked through it all the way to the end. I am so much more willing to give when I understand the problem, and it takes me a Sherlock Holmes amount of information before I can make a decision- the exception being that I can’t deduce as fast as he can, so arguments take me a lot of time to process. I want to get all the way inside your brain, know everything you think about a situation. Most people don’t have that kind of endurance emotionally, and to me, “I can’t win with you” is just throwing up their hands in exhaustion and walking off to end the argument so that I don’t have a complete picture with which to ponder.

One of my favorite lines in an argument is “stay with me, Jimbo.” I ask deep, probing questions that most people don’t answer because they don’t know the answer themselves. They don’t know themselves that well, so how could they possibly tell me? It causes frustration because they’re not going as deep as I am. Very few people can. As an INFJ, I am introspective to a fault. If you ask me something about myself, I’ve probably already thought about it. In fact, I like it when people ask me those questions, because I am bad at small talk because I don’t care.

I don’t want to talk about trivial things. I want to talk about big ideas rather than small ones… even in arguments. I want to break us both open like coconuts so that we can get to that vulnerable place of what’s really wrong, instead of the thing you’re actually telling me. I can see behind the mask. Arguments are never about small things. The small things cover up the big things, and I will probe until I find it.

I am also not very good at having my feelings invalidated, the source of just about every bit of anger I’ve ever had in an argument. If I bring up something that’s bothering me and the response is something akin to “it’s all in your head,” it brings up a lot of childhood stuff that still makes me angry and I get enraged to the point where I’m not even fighting with you anymore. I’m fighting with me and the ghosts in my head. I don’t need people to say that I’m right, only that my reality is my reality. That how I view things is important because logic and emotion are not the same, just like science and religion. Just because you don’t feel the same things I feel doesn’t mean that my feelings are wrong or bad- just different. I would much rather have someone say to me that they disagree with my assessment, but they heard me, and better yet, heard something that resonated with them even if they didn’t agree with everything.

I hear truth even when I’m angry, and hearing truth is the easiest way for me to calm myself. My whole body will relax when we reach a point of connection, an aha! moment where we both feel the same way. Sometimes that takes more than a few minutes to achieve.

I am many things, but able to work in soundbites is not one of them. Sometimes, my questions are repetitive because I want to go back to something we talked about earlier and I don’t remember what you said, but I remember how I felt when you said it and I want to go back there and explore it again because there was something I was going to say and we moved on before I could respond.

It’s tiresome, but worth it to me when I grok a situation rather than just skimming the surface. I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I don’t want to be a Southerner anymore- the type person that covers up the deep and dark with a lot of cake and icing. Secrets kill relationships. Old tapes from childhoods kill relationships when the other partner doesn’t know about them and doesn’t bother to ask.

We all have monsters in the dark rooms of our minds that we’re afraid to take out and examine, because we don’t realize that when the light shines into them, it was a coat the whole time.

As I have begun to explore my dark side, I’ve found coats, toys, Legos, you name it. When I flipped on the switch, everything looked different.

It’s a new thing I’m trying out.

I type so fast that my keyboard is constantly ahead of my tablet’s ability to process it. Interestingly enough, my old Android tablet is probably the best of them at it, but the new versions of WordPress hate it, so I hardly ever keep it with me. The coolest thing about my Bluetooth keyboard is that it has three slots, and a dial to control it. My iPad is one, my phone is two, and my Android is three. I tend to set it in the slot vertically, because it makes the paragraphs look like normal size. 🙂

I’m at Starbucks trying to process everything that happened in therapy, because for the first time, I felt some real emotions bubble up. Most of the time, because of the meds I’m on, I can’t feel the physical reactions to stress, anxiety, and rage (using the Oxford comma because anxiety and rage do not always overlap). Today, for the first time, my chest got tight despite the medication, and I realized that Sarah was hitting me where I needed to be hit. I told her about the night Diane passed me her diary, and she started asking about what my triggers were for that event. I told her that since the relationship lasted almost 25 years, there were any number of things that would set me off, but that in particular, there are pieces of music… and that I can remember so clearly how the air smelled that if the air smells the same, I will go right back to that moment. I wish I could describe that smell in a Nathaniel Hawthorne kind of way, but what I remember most is that it was tinged with the smell of burning leaves, a clear sense of fall crispness (It was Sept 10, 1992). It’s amazing how often the air smells like that year after year. She asked if there were any songs on the radio, and I said “no, it was never that kind of music. There are just things that my conductors have pulled out over the years, even her, that I have to muscle my way through.” There was only once I completely lost it. She did not take it well.

When we were young, one of the pieces I clearly remember singing with her in adult choir is John Rutter’s For the Beauty of the Earth. She chose it for our last anthem as a choir together at Bridgeport UCC, and I didn’t know it at the time, but I was having a panic attack. Diane is one of those people that before she gets ready to do something, she wants a bubble around her of silence so she can prepare. We are not dissimilar that way, so I went to her and said, “I’m sorry to interrupt the bubble but I am so sad that this is the last Sunday I’ll have you as a conductor and this piece reminds me of being a kid in the adult choir, your elbow on my shoulder.” I was crying so hard I could barely breathe, and she gave someone the look of “get her out of here.” The rejection meant a lot to me in retrospect, because it was the moment that whomever it was that I knew wasn’t ever coming back.

Either that, or she didn’t want to become a blubbering mess, either, and I will accept that answer as well. But I did not like how she could look at me in all of my panic and tears without realizing that even a kind look or a quick hug would have gone so far… “a compliment or kindness, just to bring us into view, but you could not interpret me… and I could not interpret you.” The service itself went fine, and I was over the panic attack before it even started. I just wanted a moment of recognition that we were ending where we began, and it was sad. Extraordinarily so. Even though Dana and I were right across the street, once Bridgeport ended, I might as well have been living in Abu Dhabi.

Later on, I asked if I could meet with her, and she said no, but I could meet with her partner, instead. It worked about as well as it sounded it did. It was Susan’s job to protect Diane, and she jumped down my throat any time I had anything negative to say. My relationship with Diane predated hers by seven years- there’s no way I should have allowed that conversation to happen, because there is no way that Susan would have had any frame of reference for it. There were things between Diane and me that I didn’t want to tell Susan for exactly that reason- first of all, she wasn’t there. Second of all, she had no reason to believe me, and she didn’t.

Everything was all in my head, but I do not think that was necessarily Susan’s fault. I have no idea what Diane told Susan about me, and my guess is not enough. Susan’s idea is that my feelings about Diane were a crush that I couldn’t get over and it was just this big bag of shit I’d been carrying around for too many years.

Well, as it turns out, she was right about the second part.

Sarah told me that it wasn’t my fault that as a child, I should have taken on the responsibility of saving a full-grown adult. I agree with her, but how could I not? Her stories were all I could think of when I closed my eyes. How to get her out of her present situation. How to get her to see that I was the safe space. How to get her to see that I would never hurt her, and she was choosing to stay with someone who would. Jeri never had any intention of getting help, and there would have been no judge in the world lenient enough that Jeri wouldn’t have been locked up for keeping a pound of marijuana in the house. A pound.

I am spilling all of these “family” secrets because I don’t believe that Diane deserves to be protected anymore. I’ll never get a day in court, but I can get a day (years) in the press. It will be a Google tattoo of enormous proportion, and even if there are unintended consequences for me, there are zero fucks given. I don’t have any more to give.

It’s time to start shifting the blame where it belongs, rather than having me believe for the rest of my life that it was wholeheartedly appropriate for her to use a child for adult problems. Even when she wasn’t aware of it, I was the parent and she was the child. So many nights I went to bed wondering if she was okay…. that I thought it was only a matter of time before Jeri would leave a mark on her that would show. That it was only a matter of time until she was arrested as an accessory. That was my life, starting at 13 years old. Wondering each and every day, most of the day, with no small amount of worry…. and at the same time, feeling the worthlessness of stupidity. My instincts were off regarding the nature of Diane’s intentions, or at least they were until the adults around me convinced me to consider that perhaps Diane knew exactly what she was doing…. and if I couldn’t believe that, to believe how entirely inappropriate it was for a 25 year old woman to use a 14 year old girl as an emotional garbage can.

Part of me thinks that Diane never vetted the journal before she gave it to me, therefore she had no idea the way it would open my mind. The other part thinks that she wanted to open my mind that way so she could inflict the emotional abuse on me that she had suffered herself. I don’t think she could bring herself to perpetuate the cycle of actually sexually abusing a child, but I do believe that she thought what she was doing wasn’t wrong because she wasn’t touching me. It’s what abusers do. They justify everything, and I cannot believe a thought like that would not cross her mind at one point or another.

Years and years later, she told me that she was sorry for the way that she treated me, because she could see how some of those conversations would have been confusing and upsetting to me. It seemed too dismissively simple, and I couldn’t help it. I snapped back that if writing one e-mail of apology was all she was going to do to say she was sorry, then reading it meant “thanks, I’m all better now.”

After that, she offered to attend one of my therapy sessions with me, and I sent her an e-mail giving her my doctor’s information and told her to schedule it, because I wanted insurance that she was actually serious. She told me that she was not the schedule-maker. I wrote her a couple of days later and said that I’d changed my mind about doing therapy together, because I did not want memories of her with my doctor, or even in the room that I go for safe space… but that she was welcome to attend Al-anon with me so that in the room, we were both on equal footing.

That didn’t go over well. By that time, I was out of ideas and tired of trying to please her, so I just stopped. I started talking to Dana and my friends about what had happened, and their alarm bells went off in a major way. Finally, recognition that there was a problem, even if it didn’t come from her. I just hated that I had to get so far down before I could find the way up.

The universe is calling me to get better. Calling for me to feel rest and relief from what has been done to me. Reaching out as if to say, “I have great things for you if and when you are ready….. just try to keep up.”

This one is going to jump around a bit, but I wanted to start with Twitter, because people are starting to follow me like gangbusters, but I have my doubts as to whether they are real people or not. Does anyone else have this problem? I am getting followed by all sorts of companies and media outlets that seem more interested in commerce than reading my feed. I don’t mind, necessarily, because a follower is a follower. However, I am not in need of search engine optimization, real estate, or clothing. I go to Macy’s. End of story.

I actually don’t Tweet all that often, I just use it for my blog feed most of the time, which is exciting because my work is getting a much broader audience. I’ve also got some exciting new followers, like the rewrite editor at USA Today, and some liberal Christian ones from tagging Nadia Bolz-Weber in a reply to a Tweet from one of her fans and including her. It’s truly humbling that word is getting around, and that people seem to like the way I weave my faith all the way through my web site, because it’s not just something I do. Faith is who I am.

For instance, I constantly believe that most of the words that flow out of me are actually prayers in disguise, because my strength doesn’t come from hiding my emotions, but from releasing them and being vulnerable. Life has imitated art as I become less and less scared of being vulnerable in front of people, and not wearing the mask I was programmed to wear at a very young age.

First, there was the natural mask of preacher’s kid, because you don’t want everyone in your congregation to know the ins and outs of your family. No one ever told me to do this, I just knew to be on my best behavior because if I wasn’t, my parents weren’t going to hear it from two or three people, but two or three hundred. It just wasn’t worth it to be vulnerable and human in front of people because when you are the preacher’s kid, they treat you differently and hold you to a higher standard, as if the black robe my father wore extended to the rest of us. The first thing my sister said when my dad announced he was leaving the ministry was, “does that mean we can cuss now?” My personal mask got thicker when the emotional abuse started, because then I had even more to hide.

It wasn’t just about being a preacher’s kid anymore. It was about protecting my relationship with Diane at all costs, because I knew that if I talked, it would be taken away from me. As it was, we were on thin ice and trying to find time alone rather than people seeing us together. I would say now that it wasn’t romantic, but certainly seductive to slip away under the radar.

It was also weird that being a preacher’s kid comes with a false sense of security on the part of other parents, that letting their kids hang out with me was safe because of course I was a “good kid.” In some ways, I was, but my problems were not things that other kids should have heard at that age, because I’d gone from 14 to 25 almost overnight. I was not young and sheltered, but an abused kid with abused kid emotional reactions. Hanging out with kids my own age seemed juvenile to me and hard on them, because it was. They didn’t need to hear my shit, and I didn’t want to talk about the things I should have been focusing on when I was that age. I wanted to have adult conversations because I’d lost the skills to hear 7th and 8th grade problems because they were just so trivial to me. Did I want to talk about problems in our classes or 7th grade relationships? No. I wanted friends who also talked about adult things, because I couldn’t relate to kid stuff anymore. It wasn’t interesting compared with drug-dealing, alcoholic girlfriends and being a closeted teacher. When I was a junior in high school, I had a panic attack before I left for the homecoming dance, because I was going with a boy and not only did I feel like I was cheating on the one I loved, I felt like I wasn’t being true to myself, either. Gary was an excellent beard, it was just a shame he didn’t know it. Before the prom (Gary was a year ahead of me), I got an allergic reaction brought on by stress and an internal histrionic mess. Angela came over and shot me up with cortisone so I could still go.

Years later, watching Queer as Folk, I cried all the way through the scene where Brian showed up at Justin’s senior prom, because I would have given away a limb for Diane to have done that for me….. the only difference being that I have two left feet.

It was an interesting relationship, because even at that age, I knew she was telling me things I wasn’t mature enough to hear without taking on her problems as my own. I am an empath, and my mirror neurons were on high alert for the entirety of 7th and 8th grade. Even when Diane moved away, they still went off, but it was less so because we were just writing to each other and talking on the phone rather than seeing each other twice a week. Having some space and time to respond was much easier for me than being in the moment with her, because then I had less time to come up with something to say. I am still that way. I told Sarah last week at therapy that I am uncomfortable without a delete key. That I have problems starting up real conversations sometimes because while I am fast on my feet with quips and jokes, I am not necessarily able to come up with anything truly meaningful on the spot, because I am too impulsive and often say things that would have come out better if I’d seen them in black and white first. There are so many times in conversation that awkward becomes ononmatopoetic, either because I’ve reached too deep into my emotions and people don’t know how to respond to it, or I’ve used a sarcastic joke that just doesn’t land.

I joke when I am uncomfortable. A lot. Most of the time, it’s conversations where a simple I hear you or , “uh huh” is all that’s really necessary. I am also fond of using obscure movie or Doctor Who references that people don’t get instead of showing real emotions. I think a lot of people are guilty of this, but in my journey to become the authentic “accidental saint” that I am, it’s something I want to change. The problems of the world are real, and people tend to open themselves up to me. They do not want pablum in return, especially when they’ve just bled out emotionally.

The juxtaposition is kind of weird, because on paper, I have the ability to respond with much more grace and mercy than I ever could in conversation, because unless the person is someone I know really well, I often feel like I have a mental patient magnet on my forehead. For instance, one time I rode the bus in Portland, and it was a not a quick trip. I struck up a conversation with the driver, and made the mistake of telling him that I was a psychology major (which I was, at the time. I’ve switched to political science, but have enough hours that I’ve already completed my minor). Upon hearing this, the bus driver seemed to think that meant I was a licenced therapist, and proceeded to tell me about all of his problems whether I wanted to hear them or not. He went deep, and I honestly felt like a doctor trapped on an airplane. If you tell people you’re a doctor on an airplane, they tend to open up about their maladies. It’s the same with being a pastor or a therapist. Tell people what you really do for a living, and your reading time is effectively lost.

Sometimes I hate it when people……… emote.

You don’t know the person well enough to really assess their situation, so it’s hard to act as if you are. However, I am too polite to actually tell them to stop talking. I hear Rigby from Regular Show in my head a lot, because one of his catchphrases is yelling, “STOP TALKING!” There are rarely times that I wish for a turbulence or the bus to crash, but sometimes it wouldn’t hurt, you know?

For instance, I would never in a million years wear a clerical collar while traveling. There are times when I am just not up to be moved by other people’s words, because I have 1800 books on my Kindle and I’d like to finish them at some point. I say “moved by other people’s words,” because sometimes I am open to the universe and allow grace to happen in situations with strangers. I am also intensely introverted. It just depends on my mood, like it does with everyone else, I suppose. I just have to remember that sometimes, burying myself in a book is cutting off allowing grace to happen.

Hold on. I have to Tweet about this.

I got up this moring around 8:00, which is a drastic change from my usual sleep cycle, and I am so grateful. Tomorrow I have an appointment at 8:30 AM, and now I know that I’ll make it. I have done everything I can to make myself tired enough to go to bed at a reasonable hour, and I think it’s working. I had a dentist appointment today, where the dentist said that I needed to heal a little bit more before she continued working, so the visit was over in approximately 15 minutes. I walked to Starbucks and got myself “the usual” (iced black tea, no extra water, cream and five Splenda), and then proceeded on to Dunkin’ Donuts, because I heard in the news that all the stores were closing, so I’d better eat there one last time. I got a regular donut with an indiscriminate purple icing on top, which they called “marionberry,” but actually just tasted like sugar. Now I know why they’re closing… or perhaps I should have gotten a Boston Cream pie. It doesn’t matter. If they’re still open the next time I pass, maybe I’ll give them another try.

From there, I proceeded to the Silver Spring Metro, where I read Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People, by my spirit animal, Nadia Bolz-Weber. I was headed to Tenleytown, which is not a short ride, but I will go miles for a cute haircut. I’m trying to get it back to the haircut that Auna said looked like “sex,” because it’s the best compliment I’ve ever gotten in my whole life bar none. And if there’s ever a time when I want to look unattainably hot, it’s now. I don’t want a relationship with anyone, or at least, not anytime soon. But nothing would please me more than to get attention like that. It strokes my ego and makes me feel good, something that in this time in my life, I could desperately use. I’m sad most of the time, because I have a lot of stuff to work out with my therapist. People thinking I look good is at least a piece of candy back toward Happiness (I saw Inside Out today).

As I was riding toward my cute haircut, there were quotes that stood out to me and I’m still thinking about them. Three of them, I posted on Facebook.

• Those most qualified to speak the gospel are those who truly know how unqualified they are to speak the gospel.
  • I got teary-eyed, thinking about what the Book of Common Prayer calls the things we have done, and the things we have left undone. If you’ve even read a few of my entries, you are probably familiar with why I was crying on a train… but not hard. Just that slow drip of tears that you’re trying to stop and two get away from you.
• I remembered that, at one point in my life, my own depression had felt so present, so much like a character in my life, that it had actually felt right to go ahead and give her a name. I named my depression “Frances.”
  • When I read that, my whole body responded. Nothing had ever felt more true in my life. I am a different person when my meds aren’t right, when I am truly suffering. I suffered so much that I voluntarily hospitalized myself, and even then couldn’t let go of everything that was bothering me, because I couldn’t reach down into that level of pain. I named my depression “Rebecca Radnowski” between Dupont and Woodley Park because she’s my alter ego in fiction. I call her “R-rad” for short. And that’s pronounced Rad-Nov-ski, just in case you’re wondering. In 2002, my friend Anne told me that when she got really depressed, it was like the pod people were coming to take her away, meaning that she felt like a different person. Same software, different case.
• I can go from zero to batshit crazy in no time at all. It’s like a speed ball of adrenaline, cortisol, and sin- an anger accelerant- racing through my bloodstream, causing my chest and neck to tighten and my brain to shut down into single-thought mode. It makes me understand why exorcisms in the Bible were always so physical in nature.
  • I had the exact same feeling when I would get a shitty e-mail from Argo. My blood would boil, my face would flush, my entire body would just panic and I would not take the time to respond. I would just react. That cortisol and sin made it where I didn’t have the tools to de-escalate the situation, so I would just try to be shittier to her than she’d been to me. Obviously, it worked extraordinarily well. The demon within me would not wait to be cast out, so that I could see her words for what they actually were, instead of what I thought they were in my anxiety-induced state. My mind played tricks on me between what she said and what I thought she said. I understand the Geresene demoniac in a whole new way, because now I know there are my own moments where I know I need Jesus to cast out the demons inside me so that I can move out of the tombs and walk in front of other people, clothed and in my right mind. My house is a far cry from living in the tombs, but it is no less isolation than to which Legion sentenced himself. I believe that he chose to take his demons into the tombs to avoid what my friend Sash calls “crazy spatter.” It is a term for which I’ve been looking since I was a teenager. I must protect you from me.

I often wonder what it was that gave Legion the permission he needed to release his demons, because obviously that is the journey I am on as well. What might Jesus have said that resulted in so much “wasted bacon” (I didn’t write it, but I nearly fell on the floor when I read it.)? I only have one story that’s even close. When Kathleen and I were dating, there was one morning where I decided to try prenatal vitamins. We weren’t trying to get pregnant, I’d just heard they were good for you- strong nails, hair, etc. It’s like, 8:15 AM and we’re trying to leave for work (at the time, she worked for me at University of Houston, but that is another story altogether). I took all my medications without food, and vitamins are notorious for making you nauseous if you don’t eat first. So here I am, not wanting to make either of us late for work, literally trying to hold down what I know is going to be a downpour of epic proportions. Kathleen looked at me and said, “it’s ok, Leslie. Go ahead and throw up.” I opened the door to the car and the driveway was never the same afterward.

What was it about me that would not submit to the nausea? Would not let the demon be cast out when it clearly needed to happen. Why did I need PERMISSION to help myself? Why did Legion?

My best guess is that mental illness pushes you so far down that you don’t know how to give yourself permission anymore. When I was in my 20s, I was in a large age-gap relationship. She was two years younger than my stepmother, and I was an adult, but not an an adultier adult- the one you’d look for in any situation that required direction. We were really, really close friends, and when our brains connected, so did our bodies. The age difference didn’t bother me at all, and it didn’t bother my friends, either. But it really bothered hers. Really.

I remember Diane saying after we’d been together three months that it was long enough to create a pattern, and I really needed to think about my future and what I wanted to do with it. It was incredibly condescending, because her partner is 15 years older than she is. In retrospect, I wonder if she was trying to save me from her own experiences, and I do not say that lightly. In my own opinion, deep down I wonder if Diane missed her 30s, because she met her partner when she was 28 and went right into trying to be the same age as her partner so the age difference didn’t show as much. She achieved so much during that time, but she wouldn’t come to Bitchin’ 80’s Night at the Fez with me, either. Because we had such a platonic relationship by then, I wanted to be the person that brought out the side of her that I knew when she was young and giggly, but by then, that person was gone. And as I said, it’s just my opinion, but it resonated with me after that talk, and I will never forget it.

My reality was that the age difference didn’t bother me, and everyone needed to shut the fuck up and get over it. We were lost in our own little world, and that world was one of the experiences that defined me later on. When we came to the fork in the road, where she agreed with her friends that it should just stay a fling before it got even more serious, I was devastated. She was so brilliant, so funny, so amazing that if she’d chosen me as a partner, I would have spent every moment of it in slow motion, just to make sure I captured it all… took it all in because it was glorious. We were at the same place in our lives- she was getting divorced and I had just gotten divorced, and that point of pain brought us together because we could open up to each other. My friend Donna, a grief expert, calls it coming together over “compatible wounds.” Even though she was older, she didn’t hold it over my head. She would let me comfort her. She would let me, for lack of a better term, minister to her needs without pulling the age card, not ever… and we could enjoy our differences.

The funniest one was when we passed Baskin Robbins and she said that for a long time, she didn’t know there was chocolate ice cream. That she liked vanilla with chocolate on it. I quipped, “had it been invented yet?” I can’t remember whether she said, “watch it, Lanagan” or just flipped me the bird. But our relationship was like that. Able to flip each other shit in just the right way.

Losing that relationship changed me, and I could not give myself permission to take care of myself. I lived in my tomb and even though I didn’t walk around naked, the isolation was so intense that I got desperate. I had to get vulnerable enough to ask Dana for help. It was literally like asking her permission to cast out my demon. I called her and said, “my apartment looks like dumped girl. Please help me.”

And she did.

I let her into my wreck of an apartment and we spent hours culling things, doing laundry, picking up Coke cans (in the South, everything is a Coke), scrubbing every inch of the pain I’d let build until all of these easy tasks had become insurmountable to someone so broken.

It worked.

As a thank you, I became “anal Annie” about my apartment. I kept it so clean you could eat off the floors because I never wanted to have to ask Dana for that kind of help again. Dana’s permission clothed me and put me in my right mind.

Today I had another moment where I needed grace, because I was almost hit by a car.

In Accidental Saints, Nadia tells a story where she pulls a pregnant woman aside between the first service and the second because they’d had a congregational meeting where someone ripped her a new one and she had to just stand there and take it. Had to be the pastor in charge, and not a flawed human being like we all are. She tells the pregnant woman, “can you pray over me? I am too angry to do the liturgy.” As they prayed, the pregnant woman put Nadia’s hands on her belly, and she could feel the new life inside her as the woman asked God to take away her anger.

I was on the way home after reading this and even though I pulled the stop cord at the right time, the bus driver kept right on going. It was at least a half mile back to my house, maybe more, and I had to cross then entrances and the exits to the Beltway. One woman did not understand the concept of a crosswalk and nearly plowed into me as I was carrying my heavy bags- one from CVS filled with beauty products for my so-complicated-it-makes-me-angry skin and a new Bluetooth keyboard with a slot for my phone, my iPad, and my Android tablet that I bought with the last of my birthday money. Both bags were heavy, and I was in a foul mood because of the bus driver because I don’t normally carry bags of stuff on the bus and the ONE day I do, he missed my stop. By the time the driver screeched on her brakes, I’d just had it. I screamed at her, “IT’S A CROSSWALK!” She, of course, blamed me, and my anger and panic went to eleven. So I’m walking back toward my house just cursing a blue streak and then it happens.

The landmark for my street is Christ Congregational Church.

The last church my father pastored in Sugar Land, Texas is called Christ United Methodist Church. I don’t remember when he preached this sermon, and it might have even been his first one in that congregation, but the message was what does it mean to be a member of a church that has Christ right in the title (I’m paraphrasing)? As I saw the sign for my own church, with the big rainbow flag lit up to make sure that we were known as open and affirming, that phrase hit me from my hair to my feet. I stopped and prayed, and because of Nadia’s story, I metaphysically reached out and touched Mary’s belly, just to feel Jesus kicking. I let new life and new hope flood me.

I prayed that God would take away my anger, and evict Rebecca so I could just be me. My heart stopped racing. The panic attack that was building melted and I was enveloped in grace.

I suppose all I needed was a cross walk.

Yesterday I sent Argo a quick note just to say that I was reading over old entries and that my heart was hurting over the friendship we used to have. I didn’t necessarily want a response, but I did want her to hear me, and I hope she did. I can never be sure if she gets my letters or not, but that part doesn’t bother me. It is as if having a line to her is more important than her having a line back. She’ll use it if she wants, or she won’t. It is not my right to have feelings over whether she responds. That part is on her. All I can do is tell her my heart hurts. What she does with that information is completely up to her, because I don’t want her to think that there is anger or impatience on my end for a reply. Because that part of me is gone. Her life is busier than mine, so all I can hope is that being prayed for is comforting even when she doesn’t have the time or the want to reply.

Sometimes I think it’s easier living in DC, because now I know for sure that even when we don’t talk, we are sleeping under the same modicum of sky. I don’t think or hope that we’ll be buds, but I do find comfort that if she wants to reach out to me, that I am here. Reaching out to her is way more about trying to heal me and all of the down and dirty shit I did to her to get her to go away, when in reality, that’s the last thing I wanted and I acted shitty to her, anyway. I thought it would make me feel better that she wasn’t a factor in my life anymore, that I could move on with my life without the constant struggle to try and get Dana to make room. Impulsivity ate my lunch during that time, and had I really pondered what I needed instead of reacting quickly, things might have turned out quite differently. There would be time to Netflix and chill in the literal definition- I hate that it’s become a euphemism, when I would like nothing more than to binge-watch something with popcorn or Coco Puffs or whatever between us. As I have said before, I grieve for all the lost bacon cheeseburgers, all the lost great bottles of wine, all the things you do for your friends when either they’re having a bad day or you are.

I also miss that feeling of having that friend that knows you. Maybe doesn’t know what you look like, but has seen your soul and loves you anyway. It’s amazing how much we have seen of each other in black and white- even Dana has said this more than once, that I have seen her soul and love her anyway, as well. It wasn’t the wrong decision to let Dana into my inner sanctum, to let her read what was happening between Argo and me, because I think she got a better understanding of how I felt than if I’d kept everything a secret. It’s just not how Dana and I rolled. There were times when Dana had so much empathy for both of us, and I wish she could have held onto that feeling a little longer, because we both needed it from her. It was complicated, and it was simple.

Complicated in that because of my past, there’d never been a time where I thought a woman wanted to get close to me without the end goal of sleeping together. I didn’t know what to do with that information, and I handled it fairly poorly like a total dickhead. Simple in that if I’d ever had a real friendship in my life, one that wasn’t tainted with that kind of thought process, I could have been an amazing friend to her that would have lasted as long as we did. It tortures me, mostly in my sleep, because I hear all the laughter behind the things we wrote to each other and I miss it so, so much. Women create these amazing bonds with each other that I’d never had before, so it didn’t occur to me that it was Argo’s angle. To create a close bond with each other where we could be open and caring friends without anything illicit.

I was so lost over everything I didn’t know, had never known, and I blew it.

I bought all these books on female friendship to try and get an idea of how these things were supposed to operate, but none of it was anything I could learn in a book. I only found comfort in the fact that many straight women blow it with their own friends regardless of the sexuality of the other. In fact, no one in the books blew it because they told their friends they were in love with them, but they hurt nonetheless. The repeating line in the book is that “no one is her.”

But the thing was, I couldn’t be in love with all of her. I didn’t know all of her. I just knew her brain, and it was the most fascinating mind I’d ever come across. My sapiosexuality (where thoughts and feelings create attraction) got the better of me the closer we became, to the point where I couldn’t hide it. Not from Dana, not from Aaron, and especially not from her. She freaked the fuck out, and so did I. I hadn’t meant to scare her in the slightest. Just to acknowledge that the rabbit hole we were creating allowed a lot of room for falling in love with absolute honesty and trust. The more she stood up to me, the more I realized I needed someone in my life like her. One of the funniest things that has stuck with me is the day that she called me a “judgemental dickhead.”

Even Dana guffawed at that, because we both knew it was true. I’m laughing even now as I type this, because I think it is one of the few things that Argo could have said that would have gotten Dana completely on board. The conversation went something like this:

Leslie: Argo called me a “judgemental dickhead.”

Dana: Did she really say that?

Leslie: WHY? DO YOU LIKE HER BETTER NOW?

Dana just grinned conspiratorially, and I knew for the moment that the waters were calm. Maybe if Argo had called me a few more choice names, she would have realized that the only threat to her was that Argo was going to make me a better partner if it killed her.

In the end, though, Dana knew that it was an easy shot just to bring up Argo while we were fighting, and it would send me into hysterics, because I didn’t want to lose either one of them. Argo was Dana’s excuse for a long time in not connecting with me, because it was so much easier to fight dirty. To pretend that Argo and I were having some sort of affair when there was absolutely no evidence of it except that my own heart was divided, but not in a way that tilted toward leaving Dana. Not ever. My heart was divided because Argo really did need me, just not in the way that Dana did… and Dana wouldn’t give Argo the access she wanted because she was so threatened. When Argo needed me, it was someone to listen. Someone to respond with love and care and prayers, even though she didn’t believe in God, she did believe in me as her “pinch hitter.” Because I was so far away, I ended nearly every letter with “God of the universe, protect my precious Argo.” But wanting to love Argo up in terms of wrapping her in prayers did not mean that I did not feel a connection to Dana that surpassed all measure, all space and time.

As time went on, I learned that it was imperative to stop thinking of Argo with any intimacy besides friendship, and though the connection didn’t change fast, it DID change. I felt horrible about the way Dana felt isolated, because Argo did not reach out to Dana when she needed something, only me. So even though my connection to Argo changed, Dana’s jealousy didn’t, because she constantly felt left out.

Dana was in the middle of a West Wing marathon, so I tried to explain it this way, that Leo needed the President more than his wife at times. It was a bad analogy, because Jenny left Leo… but funny how I just now put that together. #dumbassattack

The bottom line is that when Argo needed me, I felt special in a way that I’d never felt before, and it was a dopamine rush not part of my relationship with Dana, because we’d been together so long that our relationship had settled into long-term companionship coupled with amazing rushes of romance and even though that was what I wanted and needed, Dana did not understand the dopamine rush of new relationship because to her, it meant that she wasn’t important anymore. That I didn’t need her. That I didn’t want her. That I didn’t pray for her just as much. That I was attracted to her in all the right ways, because she was the right one for me and always would be, or so I thought.

Argo was giving me bigger things to think about than I’d ever thought of before, reaching down into my soul and guts and extracting an enormous ghost out of my closet and monster under my bed. It made me blush like a teenager, and for that, I will always be sorry, because that’s not what women friendship is about. But it had never been modeled for me, so I was trapped between thinking that Dana was ok with it and she was not…. but it was amazing how those two things came out at different times. Most often, she was fine with it until we had to talk about something serious, and her modus operandi was to switch the issue at hand to Argo’s “threat.” It was a bait-and-switch operation that worked masterfully well. For instance, how did talking about money devolve into Argo? How did talking about problems in our own relationship devolve into Argo?

For every moment that Argo felt used, I couldn’t apologize enough, because it’s not that I wouldn’t tell her what happened. Dana was angry that I’d told her, and my only reply to that was “I tell Argo everything. Everything. I can’t help that you’re mad and jealous, but I’m not going to stop because I need a sounding board other than you.” It was a serious mess of a situation, because Dana did not have her own friend that she could confide in about me, except she did…. she just wouldn’t use them. She would occasionally, but it wasn’t like Argo and me, where I could drop her an e-mail and she’d get back to me when she could. We talked all the time, multiple times a day. I don’t think that Dana used her own resources like that, and perhaps I leaned on Argo too much, and she wouldn’t just tell me that outright, because she knew it would hurt.

I felt that I could lean on Argo easier because she was never out to hurt me, and I felt like Dana was. Argo never said anything that would have isolated me from Dana, but there was plenty of that going the other direction. Argo loved that I’d found the love of my life, but Dana did not love that I thought I’d found the friend-love of my life because to her, it didn’t mean that I’d found someone to eat cheeseburgers and drink beer with. It meant that I’d fallen for Dana’s brain in the past, and the threat of me loving someone else’s was unacceptable.

Whenever Dana and I fought, all I wanted was for Argo to be RIGHT THERE. To show Dana that the connection in the cloud was much different than the connection on the ground. For all I know, in real life I might have thought she was persnickety beyond belief and she would have driven me crazy…. or whatever it might have been where reality separated itself from fantasy. The thing with friends is that you can tell them to go home. With Dana, there was never that option, and there never would have been. The only reason I said uncle was that she raised her hand to me, first. She reached out and pushed me with such force that I just reacted by hitting her, and my small fist left nothing but emotional damage, and maybe a few defensive scratch marks, but nothing compared to the bruise under my eye when my glasses smashed into my face. It was then I knew that our ability to abuse each other had gone too far, too fast, and part of the reason was that Dana’s fantasy was that I was leaving her. I never would have thought about it had emotional not become physical, and even in the Facebook post announcing our divorce, I still wrote that I thought there might be redemption down the road.

She only read the title of the Life Event, which said “End of Relationship.” None of the paragraphs afterward even registered.

I don’t know what to say about that, because in the moment, she approved the post and then later railed at me that she didn’t have the chance to tell people quietly. I was stuck in the battle of who to call first. Was it more important to tell her family first, or mine? Facebook was the only way I could think of where everyone was on equal ground, and would all know at the same time… as well as all of our friends who would have a chance to read and respond to what I’d written, and respond they did. They sent us both such love and affection that I will never forget it. Not in my whole life. Because to me, the fight was over. We both needed all the prayers and well-wishes that our community could provide.

My inspiration in doing this was my friend Greg, who when he and his wife lost their infant twins, gathered their community together and were so open in their grief. The community that supported them helped them through a time in their lives that was impossibly sad, and I wanted the same thing for Dana and me- to be supported by our community even though some were in Portland, some were in DC, and some were in Houston.

Maybe it would have been better to let our friends know privately, but I cannot second-guess myself and I won’t. I don’t think that we would have gotten even a third of the love that poured out for us if we’d kept our pain private. It meant something to me that people had our backs. Not mine, not hers, but OURS.

There’s so many things I have done. So many things I have left undone….. so much that I am having trouble because I don’t know what to say. I just have to keep breathing, and hope that the love that poured out for us in the beginning is still there. We both need your prayers and if you’re local, your presence.

Sometimes I just need a bacon cheeseburger and a friend to split it with me.

Nae (Pearson, my conductor) has started me down the path of true soprano rep. In the back of my mind, I am screaming, “I am not ready for this,” while the front seems ok with it. The funniest thing that happened is that he started playing the Mozart Alleluia and he asked me if I’d heard it. I said I’d heard the melody, but I didn’t know the words or anything. He said, “it’s just Alleluia.” I’d only heard the instrumental version in the past, so I didn’t know it had words (had word?). It has melismas in it, which as a recovering trumpet player are the hardest thing for me in terms of progressing musically. You’ve heard them without knowing what they’re called if you’ve ever been to see Handel’s Messiah. With Bach, they go on for PAGES. It’s easier to sing them in a choir, because you can stagger the breathing across the section. In a solo, they have to be spot on with breath control. But that’s not my issue.

With playing brass, you tend to set your throat for every note. Melismas are too fast to be able to do that, and letting go of my old brass-playing ways has been a problem since I starting singing in earnest. Some people never get over it. Cecilia Bartoli certainly hasn’t, and that’s probably why some singers think she has poor vocal technique. I don’t think so. I have pity for the fact that she was a trumpet player long before she became a soprano as well. I don’t think it’s hurt her career any- people seem to love her. But at the same time, I have to lose the brass attitude if I’m going to “convert.” It is as if my entire body has to break open to lose my past, and that goes into every section of my life, not just music. But it is music that will make the other parts flow together. What I have learned is that music is capable of saving my life. It was disconnecting from Diane and Susan and Bridgeport and going to Trinity Cathedral and working on Bach’s Mass in H mol that reminded me there was life and breath and faith outside of what I was going through in church… although it also showed me the depth of my own selfishness when my grandmother died during the dress rehearsal and I wasn’t there for the actual performance. Of course I wanted to be at home, but my selfishness kept me from enjoying the fact that our family would all be gathered together for what seemed like the last time…. right up until I got there. When the plane landed in Texas, all was forgotten. It was just a bummer I had to work out, because I’d attended rehearsals EVERY NIGHT for almost six weeks. The music ran through my head in my grief, and then I realized that the rehearsals had their purpose. The music sustained me at a very low time in my life, and if you do it right, being in an orchestra or choir is an extraordinary high.

For me, being in a choir is the closest I’ll ever get to heaven’s glory. I don’t believe in the traditional versions of ACTUAL heaven and hell, but I do believe in the chord that runs between people, and nowhere in the world is that more evident than a choir or an orchestra. From the first downbeat until the last note ends and the overtones resound in the church, there is a palpable feel of presence in an In This Very Room kind of way.

With my new choir, I am slowly settling in. Ingrid, the woman that sits next to me, is just fabulous AND hilarious in a Diane/Sco/Argo sort of way, which means that if you looked them up in the dictionary, the first word would be irreverent. Nae pulled out the first hymn in choir practice, and I said, “It’s about to get all Episcopal in here!” Ingrid was all like, “let’s get it on, bitches.” I have met my match in terms of making other choir members laugh, but I got her. We’re doing The Lamb, a setting of a William Blake poem by John Tavener. When he said to pull it out, I said, “that one’s baaaaad.” She was all like, really? Is that what we’re doing now?” I said, “I will be doing this every time he pulls it out, every year. If it’s funny once, it’s funny a thousand times.” I’m doing pretty well at this talking to strangers thing, because after a couple of rehearsals, Ingrid doesn’t feel like a stranger anymore. We’re going to do the Lakme Flower Duet in church soon. She says she’s an alto, but she’s lying. She’s totally a mezzo in alto’s clothing.

So, anyway, she was telling me that her daughter told her on the way out the door that her look was “lesbian chic.” She was wearing a t-shirt, a sweater, and those Dr Marten boots that have like, 16 holes or something. I told her it worked on her… because it did. 🙂 She laughed and it was just nice to laugh and joke all the way through rehearsal as if I’d been there for years. She told me that she couldn’t go to our retreat because she was going to Cub Scout camp with her son. She told me to drink a lot of vodka for her when I said jokingly and slyly, “I’ll pray for you…” This kind of camaraderie was what I was looking for at Epiphany, and it just never happened. My experience of Epiphany was completely different than Dana’s, because even though we had GREAT friends there, none of them were in the choir with me. I was on my own, and it was tough shit. I don’t mean to bag on Joseph. He changed my life in terms of the way he took me under his wing and gave me voice lessons that literally raised my self-esteem and gave me a worth I will never forget. I just didn’t find anyone I clicked with and I felt alone because everyone clicked with each other. One of the basses told me that I was so loud he needed to turn down his hearing aid, and the marking was FF. I can flat do FF. But I wasn’t any louder than anyone else, and it just seemed like a mean thing to say, especially since it’s especially hard to stay on pitch with a hearing aid. I had a snappy comeback, and I bit my tongue.

The exception to that rule is I clicked with an alto, but it didn’t help me any because she was as far away from me as she could get in both rehearsal and the service.

Dana joined the handbell choir and had a TON of fun with everyone. It was like coming home for her, a great way to plug in that I just didn’t get. I was a little bit jealous, and because Diane started as my handbell conductor, I just couldn’t bring myself to join. Just. Could. Not. My memories of hiding under the handbell table and all of the emotions that went with it made it where I couldn’t even look at a handbell because it just screams TRIGGER TRIGGER TRIGGER. Coming to CCC Silver Spring was the connection I was missing in my life, because Nae was right. He’s the only mean one, and it’s mean in a very funny way. I really like him, because he really likes me. It’s a mutual admiration society, and because he gives me such complicated rep, to me it’s like he really believes in me. I may not believe I am capable of this, but he does, so I’m going to take him at his word.

And then, at the end of rehearsal, for the first time, someone offered me a ride home. It’s only an 8 minute walk, but it’s still the sign that I’m starting to fit in. If only I could remember the lady’s name…. But we climbed into her little Subaru and talked all the way to my house, as if there’s never been a time when we weren’t friends.

Amen.