Today in therapy I talked to Sarah about the kind of person I am, and how a lot of it is not who I want to be. We’re having to start with the basics.

I told her how hard it was that since I didn’t have a job, getting my sleep cycle straight is next to impossible (although I do have a solid line- more on that later). She asked me what my normal sleep cycle was, and I asked her if she meant my ideal or what it is now. She said, “both.” I told her I was the happiest when I was waking up just as dawn broke, and writing from that place of promise. I told her that now, a lot of my writing happens in the middle of the night, and the difference in tone is palpable, like when I went on overnights at Alert Logic… that I even see myself differently in a new dawn then I do at the end of my day. My sleep cycle now is that I can’t fall asleep, so I take a sleeping pill, and then I sleep too much. I will take a sleeping pill at 7:00 and still not fall asleep until 3:00 AM… and then it feels like I’m walking through Jell-o, but that I’m trying to combat it by taking a caffeine pill 20-30 minutes before I get out of bed. I also told her that I was used to being able to function on four hours’ sleep, but it’s not happening anymore and I am none too happy about it. After years and years and years of being able to pull all-nighters, that part of me is slowly ending. It’s like saying goodbye to an old friend, because I have to admit to myself that I am getting older.

I have really felt my age this year. There’s no such thing as competitive suffering, so I do not want to hear from readers who are older than me that say I don’t have it so bad…. complain all you want about your own ailments, as long as it’s not directed at how much worse I’ll have it when I’m your age. I’m almost 40 (a little less than two years), and my arthritis is starting to show. I need more sleep when I used to pride myself on not. My back is the worst, and now I’m registered with a PCP, so that’s the next order of business. It’s getting to where ibuprofen doesn’t cut it anymore, because I have a corkscrew scoliosis that continues to get worse and when I knock it on things, no amount of pain medication is enough to keep me from crying out.

I don’t think the two things are related, but it seems like the first time I had a spinal tap was the first time I noticed that the lower discs in my back stuck out, especially because they were bruised. That was when I was in fifth grade, and the problem has compounded ever since (it went to eleven). Chairs are my worst enemy.

Emotionally, I wonder how I let it get this bad. Sarah says not to be too hard on myself, because bipolar and trauma are a lot to manage and there are so many facets that go into mental health that it’s not surprising my physical health has suffered. I know part of it early on was that I could not fall asleep without Dana, couldn’t even imagine it, so I would just recreate her in my mind and create this fantasy world that she was just away on business. I knew it wasn’t real, it was just comforting, but it worked until I could stand on my own (or lie down, as it were).

Now, my ruminations center on what I’m going to do for a future- that I wasn’t sure I ever wanted a relationship with a partner again. It didn’t come from a place of denial, but from a place of being overly focused on work and not necessarily wanting to drag a wife and family into it with me. I think it takes having lived that life to know how hard it could be for my wife and kids, anyway. I had a wonderful childhood, but there were things about it that drove me crazy, like people commenting on my parents’ parenting. One little old lady went up to my mother and reamed her out because she thought I was too young to be wearing false eyelashes, and wouldn’t believe my mother when my mother told her, “ummm, those ARE her eyelashes.”

I have empathy for the fact that being a minister’s partner is a tough gig, and do I really want that for them?

I also started to get into the meat and potatoes of what happened with Diane, and how for the longest time the abuse wasn’t really real. In fact, it wasn’t real until I was 35. People were telling me it was an abusive relationship from the time it began, but I loved her. Plain and simple. If you love someone, you are not looking for their flaws, and won’t.

It wasn’t until the emotional swings became so great that my childhood emotions started bubbling up in front of me and I could see them in a way that I couldn’t before, because I wasn’t willing to discuss the fact that there might be a problem. It is amazing how far I went to cover everything up, mostly because those abusive actions felt normal to me. Healthy reactions feel unhealthy now and it is hard to lean into them and know they are right. I am learning so much, so quickly that my body is responding, but not at the rate that I’m taking in information.

Dana was very angry with me that it took Argo to get me to see what she’d been trying to tell me. I don’t think she knew how important it was to me for someone completely outside the situation to look in on it with fresh eyes and say, “ummmm….. yeah. That’s fucked up.” Dana knew both Diane and me. Had partied with us for years. Making excuses for Diane’s behavior was easy for me with Dana because whatever doubts there were in her mind about what happened in my childhood were muted by the fact that Dana loved her, too. It made it hard for me to hear her doubts, and when one of her friends told us that Diane had been attracted to me when I was young, it made Dana’s blood boil and me feel absolute vindication that I wasn’t crazy. I don’t know whether he was telling the truth; I don’t know that any of us would have considered him the most reliable source. But I would have taken anything at that point to feel right.

That I hadn’t been confused. That I’d picked up what she’d put down without missing a beat, because that’s what tortured me the most. That I was wrong. That I was so mentally addled that I’d made this huge mistake. That my intuition, those feelings that went to the center of my heart, mind, and body were off to such a disconcerting degree. It is what created the split in my personality- the part that is bubbly, bright and perky and the part that doesn’t trust anyone or anything if she can help it.

Thinking that I hadn’t made a mistake made me feel that I was as smart as I thought I was. Feeling like Diane had come on to me and then having her swear up and down for years and years that she didn’t allowed me to beat myself up because I thought I was so stupid.

It’s taken disconnecting from everything to be able to wrap my mind around the fact that I am smart, and I always have been… way above average, actually, which is why my diagnosis of depression makes me so sad. I am not in the mood to hear that I am right on track for recovery from this disorder I have to manage, because I don’t want to hear that I have a disorder I have to manage. It’s not that I won’t. It’s just disheartening that it’s a lifetime battle, now, where as before I thought that with the right medication it would go away. Yes, I’d have to take pills, but after that my brain would function as normal.

You don’t get over trauma with medication. You just have to talk, and keep talking.

The sleight of hand reference comes from two things. The first is how easily Diane was able to give me adult reading material and then convince me that it was all on the up and up. The second is how I’ve extrapolated that into the ends justify the means. That it’s how the world works; you can use darkness all you want as long as the end result is a greater good. I’ve said and done things in this vein that frighten me, and therein lies the focus of my therapy. Where do those sorts of actions/reactions stop and healthy ones begin?

Part of getting healthy is getting a job that gets me out of the house every day, so that I do not have a chance to isolate. My homework for this week is to go to a store or something and strike up a conversation with a stranger every single day. To that end, I went to a book group that I swore I wouldn’t go to this morning. Just so happens one of the women in the group is married to the director of the National Autism Foundation, and they need someone to do marketing and social media.

And on that note, all I have to say is….

Amen

I haven’t done one of these in a while, so I thought it was imperative for today. After all the time I spend filling out online applications, I like to rest with books and TV. So here are a few of the things I’ve found that are really outstanding.

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Quantico

When you go into the Metro Center stop, there are posters all over the place with the characters wondering who the mole might be on this show about a brand new class of future FBI agents. I decided to check it out. No self-respecting FBI agent would probably watch it, because it’s ridiculous. And so much fun. Seriously. It starts off with a bang, literally. Two people meet on a plane and lie to each other about where they’re going, have sex in the back of a car, and then find out they’re both in the same class at the academy. So, right away there’s a possible love interest. It’s kind of like Grey’s Anatomy meets DC. It’s action-packed- car chases and the like. I’ve never wanted to work in intelligence more, but I don’t think I have the grades or the smarts to be able to keep track of that many lies at once… but they do. Also, one of the actors from Cougar Town is in it, and that is a plus in my book.

Dr. Ken

Ken Jeong went to medical school before he became a comedian, and as a doctor’s kid, I laughed so hard I fell off the couch at the first scene. He’s with his therapist, whom we later learn is his wife. But the line that got me was that he’s complaining that all his patients are horrible. It is the sitcom you never knew you needed to watch, but if you’re a doctor or in a doctor’s family, you will laugh all the way through it. For instance, he calls one patient a WebMDbag. You might have seen that commercial, but the whole scene is FANTASTIC.

The Soulkeepers Series by G. P. Ching

This is a set of liberal Christian novels that battles good and evil by making Lucifer, Fate, Time, Death, and God into real characters. I got sucked in by my friend Meg, who I don’t think realized that it would absorb me like crack. The first book is free on Amazon. Be prepared. The rest of the books are cheap, and they are quick reads. I devoured them like a six-pack of Diet Coke (a necessity for sopranos everywhere). The Soulkeepers all have different powers that they use to defeat Watchers, their term for Lucifer’s minions, and the series starts in a town about the size of Naples, the small East Texas town where I grew up. The main character is a Watcher who doesn’t really want to be a Watcher anymore, so she lives on earth and becomes a Helper to the Soulkeepers, clearly in violation of her terms, because as a fallen Watcher, she is supposed to be neutral in the fight between good and evil. I am fairly sure that this is a young adult novel, and I would recommend it for Senior High youth groups everywhere. The reason I call it liberal theology is that there are two gay Soulkeepers, and it’s not a thing. In fact, God is supportive. You’ve got to love that. Really. People from a small town dealing with the supernatural grabbed my attention right away, and there are so many twists and turns that I didn’t even try to speculate what would happen. I just let myself be carried by the ride. In particular, I think that Rev. Dan and Rev. Karakay would be as gripped as I was. Read it, y’all. Like, yesterday. Like I said, it’s crack, because the first one’s free. I will also say that I particularly identified with the main character, because I have a friend who is very much a Watcher on earth, trying to figure out what’s right and wrong depending on where she stands. That friend might be me… or it might not. Maybe it’s you. It’s interesting how much the FBI class and the fight between good and evil have in common. If you like Quantico, you’ll probably like this series.

Having a Large Backup Drive

Backup drives are cheap, and mine is 3TB. I got it for my birthday, and I don’t know how I lived without it before. I put EVERYTHING on it, because then I don’t have to worry if my computer crashes. I can just reformat it and go along about my business. Ubuntu is a bit unstable, and sometimes I can’t find the answers on my own, so I just wipe the hard drive to get rid of the errors. I should be trying to troubleshoot all this shit, but girl, I ain’t got time fo’ dat. You can do it one of two ways. The first is that you can set automatic backups of your home directory, or you can set your directories to the drive itself. I have chosen the latter option, so that nothing is stored on my hard drive in the first place. It houses all my music, videos, documents, EVERYTHING. I have hundreds and hundreds of files on it, and I still have 2.6 GB left. It will keep me for a while. I cannot stress it enough. Back up, back up, back up. If your computer does not have a USB 3.0 port, buy a new computer, unless your computer is so expensive that you’d rather just add the card. I choose to buy cheap computers so that if something goes wrong, they’re not impossible to replace. For instance, I have dual core laptop that was less than $300 bucks at Best Buy. It’s not fast enough to run many games, but is fast enough to support VirtualBox. That way, I can install Windows XP, just for nostalgia. I even have the Plus! pack. 🙂

Getting a Therapist

My friends are the greatest thing in the world to me. I couldn’t have made this time of transition without them, particularly Stephanie and Kathy, who get me out of the house and take me to do things so that I am not alone all the time, which I am wont to do. They know my shit, and they want to be around me, anyway. But there are things from my past in which I need an objective ear, someone who doesn’t have a horse in the race. She doesn’t know Dana, she doesn’t know Argo, she doesn’t know anyone in my life. She thinks it’s sweet the way I talk about both of them, and it’s nice knowing from an objective perspective that I am not necessarily the douchebag I play on national television (my nickname for this web site). There are just times when you can’t be sorry enough, and getting on with your life is excruciating…. and necessary. This is the first time I’ve really stuck with therapy since I was in the eighth grade, when the Diane issue surfaced and I needed someone to talk to, but wouldn’t actually say anything. Most of my therapy sessions were like the one in Good Will Hunting, where I watched the clock until the session ended. At that time, protecting Diane was more important than protecting myself. In the immortal words of the great philosopher Cher, if I could turn back time….

Cheerwine

Cheerwine has been around a long time, but now that I live on the East Coast, it is much easier to find (it’s made in N. Carolina, I believe). It’s a cherry cola, but way more emphasis on the cherry than the cola. It is MAGNIFICENT! If you live somewhere they don’t have it, order some off the internet. In Houston, they sell it in bottles and sometimes 12-packs at Spec’s. Go see Dana at West U. She’ll point you in the right direction. If you are into soda as much as I am, this is one you won’t want to miss. In fact, it is so popular that some delta bravo went to 7-Eleven and cleaned them out. Bought every bottle, including all the diet, and that person was not me. They have not replenished their stock, and I am spitting nails. Why didn’t I think of it first?

Caffeine Pills

Tread carefully with these, because I am sure that they are easy to abuse. One of my friends told me that she started using them instead of Ritalin, and she had to stop immediately. However, I take one a day, early in the morning, with a Diet Dr Pepper (not my favorite, but on sale). That makes it about 250 mg altogether, and as I have mentioned before, I take it between the time that my alarm goes off and the first snooze nine minutes later. That way, by the time I am ready to get into the shower, the caffeine has kicked in, and I am not tempted to go back to bed. I also don’t have to go downstairs, steep the tea, make the coffee, etc. before I take a hot, hot shower. I love doing that, too, but not in addition to what I’ve already taken. To me, it is easier to take a pill upstairs (where the shower is located), then to try and force myself to go downstairs and back up. Is it lazy? Not so much. The pill kicks in quicker than the coffee or tea, and I feel like I am ready for the day much faster than I would be otherwise. The only thing is that Larry (remember Larry?) looks at me funny when I make it to Starbucks and only want decaf.

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So that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. Feel free to add more recommendations in the comments. You can also ask me to review things if you have suggestions. I am fond of weird food and drinks. Just not too much beer or other alcohols. I’ve had my fill. The only thing that’s really tasted good to me lately is a Manhattan made with rye. Otherwise, I’m good.

I set my alarm for 7:30 so that I could be at the church by 9:00 to attend Sunday School and choir practice. It was really important that I was there for World Communion Sunday, because there was a lot of music- one of the biggest sets of the entire season. I kept hitting the snooze button because I stayed up late reading, not remembering that if you hit the snooze button too many times, it turns off and stops ringing entirely. The next time I woke up, it was 11:15 and church starts at 10:30. I feel like a dickhead of enormous proportions, because if I was going to miss a Sunday, this wasn’t it. I am one of the few sopranos who has the vocal power to act as what I call “lead trumpet player.” We have one other one, Ingrid, but she wasn’t there at choir practice on Thursday and I just have to hope to God she made it to church.

The other breakdown is that Samantha is out of town visiting one of her other close friends, and so there was no one to give me a wake-up call. I should have texted her last night, because my phone ringing is one of the few things that will get me up when my alarm won’t. To combat the problem, I took the Best Buy gift card that my aunt and my mom gave me for my birthday and bought a clock radio of massive proportions. It has a volume setting that goes to “oh my fuck,” and it will connect with bluetooth and act as a speaker phone so that Samantha doesn’t have to come upstairs and jump on me, which she’s threatened to do many times.

Also, my cat, Asher, is dead. She died a long time ago, but it’s another breakdown in the system because rain, shine, sleet, snow, whatever, every morning that little fucker stuck one claw up my nose at 5:30 AM. With that alarm, there is no snooze. My ex-girlfriend, Angela, stuck her finger up my nose to wake me up one morning, and I think Asher extrapolated for the next four years.

Dear Angela,

THANKS FOR THAT.

Love,

Leslie

I cannot get a new cat for a couple of reasons. The first is that I don’t want to pay for food, water, vet checks, etc. The second is that we have dogs, and Nassers aren’t big on cats, so I’d have to hide her in my room at all times. This does not work for me. I’d rather wait until I have an apartment of my own and she can move freely about my sofas and chairs as God intended.

I actually already have a cat, but I left him with Dana, which for the record, was REALLY Dana doing me a solid.

She was so cute. She said, “of course I have to do you a solid or the house will blow up.” The link for “doing me a solid” is to Hulu for the episode. You might need a subscription to watch it. I am pretty sure that I pay for Hulu *just* to watch Regular Show. It is the most brilliant show on television, built for kids and adults, because the adult jokes go right over the kids’ heads. Soda is beer and pizza is weed, so the guys are absolute stoners and get into all kinds of trouble. Seriously, I have watched Just Set Up the Chairs approximately 58 times, and that is underestimating.

When I was working for Alert Logic, I used to go home for lunch. Regular Show episodes are about 12 minutes, so I would grab a sandwich and have just enough time for an episode before I had to drive back. There were WEEKS where I would watch Just Set Up the Chairs every day.

My other favorite was an episode of Adventure Time called Trouble in Lumpy Space, because I will watch ANYTHING with Lumpy Space Princess. I got an LSP throw blanket for when I was working overnight and would sleep on my lunch break. I also used to have a Mordecai and Rigby belt, but Dana stole it from me. Eh. I did her a solid.

The other breakdown in the system is that I usually take a 200mg caffeine tab as soon as my alarm goes off, so that if I hit the snooze button a couple of times, it’s kicked in and I can go right to a shower. I have so many tips, tricks, and failsafes. It’s a shame I didn’t use them.

I did go to church yesterday, though. It’s ok that I preached to myself. I fell asleep in the middle, though.

World Communion Sunday was started in 1933 at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1933 was the worst year of The Great Depression, and people all over were worried about the rise of Nazism and Fascism. The prevailing attitude that year was one of fear and anxiety, much like today as we combat hunger, inequality, and terrorism. Shadyside’s response to these attitudes back then was to create a Sunday in which we all celebrate the Eucharist at once, drawing the circle wide in prayer and thanksgiving…. one that continues in our fear and doubt even today. Attitudes of anxiety have risen and fallen over the years since World Communion Sunday was created, but the idea that at least once a year, we all (regardless of denomination) come to the table together has not.

We come to the table regardless of our circumstance in life, and we receive food, anyway.

It is interesting that because we are coming to the communion table in unity, today’s gospel is, in part, about divorce… or, at least it is on the surface. It is hard to tell whether the Pharisees really wanted to know what Jesus thought, or whether it was another legal entrapment they could use to perpetuate his demise. They ask, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Notice that with the Pharisees, we are not talking about love, fidelity, roses, and candles. They want to know one thing. Is it lawful? It is in this moment that Jesus gets an amen from me because he does this political sidestep of massive proportions and turns the question back around on them. He says,what did Moses command you? I know this is venturing into fiction, but I think Jesus gets nauseous every time the Pharisees try to talk to him, and he knows that anything he says can and will be used against him in a court of law, so the mask he presents to the world comes down to hide his fear. He won’t use his own words, but those of someone whom the Pharisees already follow. The Pharisees answer, Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.

I’m going to have to stop us riiiiiiiiiight there.

There’s some history that needs to be explained, because that time and structure was quite different than the one we have today. First of all, just as children don’t choose their parents, they didn’t choose their partners, either. Boys and girls were paired off according to their parents’ deals with each other, and some women were not even lucky enough to marry someone of their own age. If a family had a chance to move up in stature, but their daughter was 13 and the groom was 35, this was not considered any sort of deal breaker. Money was money and women were property. In fact, in Mosaic law, a woman could not initiate divorce. Only a man could.

Because marriage then had to do with property, stature, and honor of the families involved, divorce was significantly more complicated than it is today… and by property, I also mean the bride herself. Women could not initiate divorce because in the eyes of the law, they weren’t people in any case.

Here is where Jesus crosses the line from the legal to the spiritual with the Pharisees:

Because of your hardness of heart he [Editor’s Note: Moses] wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.

The Gospel does not record what the Pharisees have to say about this, instead skipping to a private conversation between Jesus and the Disciples. They ask him about divorce again and he says, whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.

Something jumped out at me in this text very quickly, and that is in front of the Pharisees, Jesus only mentions a husband divorcing his wife. In private, he talks about the ability of a woman to divorce her husband. In private, beyond the gaze of the Pharisees, Jesus supported marriage equality between both partners. Both people are allowed to have grounds for divorce.

In this one instance, Jesus changes the definition of marriage. However, he does not change the content. The only grounds for divorce are adultery, and not, as some liberal Jews were beginning to think, for any fault in the wife at all. For instance, Jesus did not think it was lawful to divorce your wife if she ruined your dinner or ruined your favorite shirt, even in front of the Pharisees… departing from Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which notes grounds for divorce as a husband simply finding something displeasing about his wife.

I believe that Jesus’ interpretation of divorce was that it should only happen when something cracks the foundation of marriage, because cracking the foundation is rarely something that can be undone.

Dana and I were sitting in the congregation at Second Baptist Church in Houston, Texas, when Dr. Ed Young was preaching on the topic of divorce. He took out both a blue and a pink piece of paper and glued them together. When it had dried somewhat, he started to try and take the blue and pink pieces of paper back apart. Invariably, and I am sure you’re ahead of me here, there were little pink pieces of paper still on the blue side and little blue pieces of paper still on the pink side. He made the point that once we have been put together, there is no way to separate cleanly. In a Southern Baptist church, of course he wouldn’t have held up two pink or blue pieces of paper, but the message was the same. Even though the pieces of paper are the same color, is it any easier to separate them wholly into what they were before they were joined?

I cannot speak for Dana, but I know that her emotional paper is still inside me, and will be for a lifetime. I will always think about the regrets I had in cracking our foundation, which started slow and ended with a thunderclap. We didn’t just break up with each other, we broke up our families, as well… and this is exactly the image that Jesus is trying to get us to see. What God has put together, let no one put asunder is true even after a divorce has taken place. No one can take away my memories of Dana, and no one can take away her memories of me…. the good, the bad, the terrible, the glorious… they’re all there in movies we revisit, sometimes whether we want to or not.

Jesus is right- those memories do not go away in being with other people, and I believe that is how we should interpret his words about committing adultery with future partners. The people we divorce still sit with us and we with them. Moving on does not mean that our memories are erased, but with the passage of time, perhaps we sit with them easier. We pray through the pain, both for forgiveness from God and from the person we have wronged, because let’s face it. In a divorce, no one wins. We have both wronged each other.

Your invitation today is how you’re going to react in treating those who have been divorced. Are you going to sit in judgment like a Pharisee, or are you going to open the circle wider to be inclusive of those who have been emotionally injured in that way? Are you going to look at the divorced in shame, or are you going to simply say, I’m sorry for your loss? If you aren’t there yet, perhaps this is the Sunday you’ll progress toward equality, because gathering at the table means that no one is left to sit watching from the pews. No one is shamed. No one is turned away empty-handed.

We are one bread, one body…. o’er all the earth.

Amen.

Today I just feel like writing about what’s been happening… nothing big or exciting, just want to invite you into my sun room for a cup of coffee (or tea, if you prefer). We have to sit in the sun room because Hurricane Joaquin is coming and the weather is dreary- too dreary to sit outside, because when the rain starts, it usually blows up onto the porch. I have about two hours before I have to leave for choir, the perfect time for a stitch and bitch club. I usually go to choir 30 minutes early so that I can warm up before I go in. Makes everything so much easier because if I go in cold, I don’t have the control over my voice that I need to be flexible. I need my high As to float off, not sound like a strangled cat, which I have done and it is attractive, let me tell you….. The best part is that I can warm up in the sanctuary, and the acoustics are incredible. There’s a balcony in the back, and I sing to it, replacing the friend on the wall that Joseph used as focus. Singing is the one thing in my life that really makes me feel special, because it strengthened me when I graduated into a real soprano from a trumpet player just faking it.

Yes, I still hear Diane in a lot of my flourishes, but I cannot turn off that part of myself, and at this point, I’ve made my piece with it. Piece instead of peace because I am not sure I will ever have true peace with that issue, but it is a piece of myself. A compartment in which she lives and breathes through me. It is the one part of me that will never let go of her, because she taught me too much to turn back.

I’ve talked a lot about her in therapy, and Sarah is helping me breathe through it… much too close to labor for my taste, but it is working. It is amazing how birthing new emotions is like birthing a baby, because everything hurts. I have to breathe all the way down, and after a session, my abdomen and diaphragm are stretched to capacity. It’s to combat the fight-or-flight impulse, because in writing down all of my emotions, very few people talk back to me. It is a different thing to have someone pulling me through the pain and trying to turn it into action on my part. Trying to help me put my life back together so that I don’t feel like a victim but a survivor. It was amazing how much I thought I knew when I was a teenager, and how I thought all of it was normal. All the sunshine, all the chill, all the opening up to me and then pulling away when she thought she’d said too much and I was responding with love but she wasn’t taking it in… or it seemed like it. It was a dance of intimacy where she would tell me things that were too mature for me to hear, and then not give me a place to go with how I felt about it. She was very open when I was talking about my own life, and very closed off when I wanted to talk about hers. It wasn’t equal in a ton of ways, but abuse is so black and white when you’re that age that it doesn’t occur to you that someone can stunt your emotional growth without ever touching you.

Yesterday, I was railing at Sarah. “Why didn’t I realize this when I was 21? 25? I feel too old for this shit and at the same time, I feel like a 14-year-old girl in a 38-year-old woman’s body!” I have married that pattern my whole life, wanting to save women in trouble from whatever it was that was bothering them without thinking of myself at all. Without thinking of career or interests or anything that might have individuated me from them. I was just the Lanagan Search and Rescue system, without applying any of those lessons learned to myself.

My reflex in breaking up with Dana is that I’ve had enough. Dana and I had an interesting relationship in that we both had wounds left over from childhood and we were both trying to save each other, with very little forward progress. We both latched onto each other in our need, and it was so, so good right up until it wasn’t.

I hoped like hell that it could be good again, and I lost. Straight up. She came in Kings full over Aces and said it just wasn’t going to happen.

I disappeared into my books and my silence. I isolate all the time, because I am not ready for a relationship with anyone. My closest friend right now is my roommate, Samantha, which allows me to isolate and have a friend at the same time. We both like our space, and retreat into it often… but at the same time, we share some of the same emotional wounds and can lean on each other when necessary. In fact, it was me that convinced Samantha she needed Vesta as much as I do, and now we go together on Wednesdays so that she can drive me, which is sweet even though the office is within walking distance.

In the last few months, I have found more solace in books than I have in other people, and it is as if they are returning me to the person I used to be. When I was a kid, I was also a voracious reader, and it feels good to be lost in reading and singing and focusing on the things I love rather than what someone else does. I have treated myself differently during this breakup, because when I broke up with Kathleen, I didn’t do all the work necessary to get past the search and rescue system, and I just ended up in the same relationship over and over.

Katharin isolated me from all my friends and when I told her about protesting the war in Iraq and the safe sanctuary program at Bridgeport, she punched a hole in the wall she was so angry. She didn’t want to be with someone who thought immigrants deserved safe sanctuary and the war in Iraq was wrong… even though I told her that I always support boots on the ground, I just don’t always support the commander in chief. Supporting the soldiers that have to carry out the President’s wishes is a lot different than supporting the higher-ups. The worst part was that we were having company dear to me the next day, and I had to find a way to get the wall fixed before they arrived.

She also held it over my head that I was a little bit woo-woo. That I’d celebrated Solstice and Beltane and had no problem with the idea of Wicca as a practice because most of Christianity was borne of it. I changed too much of myself to try and make that relationship fit, and it wasn’t until Dana started getting angry that I noticed. She was my fierce protector, and told me flat out how abusive Katharin was and to get the fuck away from her. She didn’t say it in those words, but the fire in her eyes told me everything I needed to know. Katharin wasn’t one of us, would never fit in, because Dana and I loved each other for who we were, warts and all… and so did Bryn and Matt and Holly and all of my other friends. I didn’t need to change for anyone else, and I needed to re-join the people that would never try and make me.

Loving Dana was realizing that it was the first time someone had ever tried to save me. She held me while I cried, listened to my frustrations, and gave me emotional band-aids of massive proportions. Losing her is indeed the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and I have so many regrets to work out with Sarah. On some days, I feel incomplete without her. On others, I am happy to have this time to myself. Maybe someday we’ll be friends, but I am too angry about the way she manipulated me to see her as anything but danger. It was ridiculous how she kissed me on the street like she meant it and then handed me my heart in a trash bag because I could hear her talking to her mother about how she was never going back, but I’m guessing that her mother didn’t know she was kissing me and I didn’t know the extent of how much she’d told her mother about what we’d been through.

I miss her hugs the most… the way our bodies just fit together and I could rest my chin on her shoulder in happiness and in pain. But I don’t miss her embarrassing the crap out of me at parties and I don’t miss the fights where she was trying to tell me something and crying so hard I couldn’t understand her so that I got irritated that I couldn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t have enough patience. I didn’t have enough give. By the end, I was in complete survival mode, because neither one of us could handle the other. We’d taken care of each other over the years, and it was heartbreaking when we stopped. It was either Argo or Dana and that’s where the rubber met the road. This after months and months of me begging and pleading with her that I would back off, but please don’t take her away from me. Please don’t isolate me from a relationship that has become a life raft of enormous proportion. Please don’t use her in fights as if she is a threat, because she’s not. I’m working through a hell of a lot of issues right now and I could use more than one supportive ear…. please…. please…..

I felt it was better to come straight out and tell Dana that I was struggling with my feelings for Argo because it was an explosive connection from the beginning and I didn’t know what to do because I knew that my struggle was mine to own. Argo was threatened by it, and there was no reason to assume that she was the problem.

She wasn’t. I was.

The process happened exactly like I thought it would with Argo. My feelings for her went away and I could just see her as a buddy, but it came too late to save my relationship with Dana, because Dana thought that I was on my way out, anyway…. which was the furthest thing from the truth of the matter. The truth was that if Dana had stuck around for the entire process, she would have seen the changes I’ve undergone in person, but maybe she didn’t want to… and that’s on her.

I wish she’d stuck around to see the changes I’ve undergone in person, but I didn’t invite her to move with me and I didn’t want to. By that time in my life, I was tired of fighting and ready for solitude. Now the pendulum has swung too far and I have trouble making myself interact with anyone because I don’t want to hurt them and I don’t want them to hurt me. Sarah says that it’s unhealthy the amount of time I spend alone and I tell her it’s ok, I’m comfortable there and she says, “but that’s the problem.”

Church is helping- these relationships that aren’t deep but enlightening all the same. My mind is piqued with all kinds of information on theology and a progressive one at that. I am trying, but at the same time, I’d hide under the handbell tables if we had them.

That was my safe sanctuary when I was a tween. Diane would come and find me and sit under them with me, and I would give a limb to have any one of those moments back. Yes, it was inappropriate… but the way she held me can’t be duplicated by anyone else, either. I miss her hugs the most… the way I could just cling to her for a moment and the whole world would be blocked out. From the moment I met her, she lit me up from the inside. Those are the moments I feel I’m allowed to miss, because I can put the inappropriateness in a different box and just enjoy the good times in my mind.

All of these women have changed me, in both good and bad ways, but I wouldn’t trade any of the experiences I’ve had for anything in the world. I choose to believe that with Diane, it was a kindred spirit kind of love, which is why she still sits on my shoulder occasionally, my angel when I am making music.

Dana is the angel I reach for in the night, sometimes disappointed that she’s not there and sometimes relieved that it’s just a dream.

Argo is the angel I call on when I need the chord that runs between us, because regardless of the past, it is still strong on my end. Now that we are at peace, the chord is shimmery and silver. Sometimes it feels tangible. She is the Argo, the ship that takes me safely from journey to journey. One of these days, I will have the courage to be Jason, the captain of my own ship. Right now, I’m just simple Argonaut, letting the ship sway me to sleep as I travel.

Because I am working so hard on me, the waters are calm, no matter what Joaquin decides.

My angels carry me even in the midst of the storm… literally and figuratively.

Amen.

I’m writing this after just taking a fresh dose of Tylenol 3, so bear with me. Some of this might sound awesome. Some of this might sound like Drinking Out of Cups.

I finally had enough of Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief and started a novel just for fun (is the subtitle a nod to Pagels?). I’ve never read the alphabet series, so I’m a few pages into A is for Alibi. I think Kinsey and I are at the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It reminds me a little of Mallory’s Oracle, but only because Kinsey Milhone and Kathy Mallory are somewhat similar in their delivery and approach to their work. I love novels with strong women leads, because I want to be a strong woman and it doesn’t hurt to take their strength into myself. It’s like getting a shot in the arm of bravery, because if they can get up every morning and do what they do, so can I.

In terms of giving up on Amen, I can’t put it away entirely. I’m trying to finish it before Sunday, because the class has had this book for a while and I don’t want to show up unprepared. My former minister friends are very interested in my opinion. I don’t know that they’ll like what I have to say, but I’m willing to put myself out there, anyway. My answer to this entire book is that the author seems very full of herself. Absolutely sure that there’s not a deity, because prayer works regardless. The thing that makes me feel that she’s so conceited in her writing is that she may not mean to, but she speaks down to those who do believe there’s a deity, as if those who believe are just not as mature in their faith as she is.

Let me say for the record, “fuck that noise.”

Faith is not a journey toward believing there is no deity and praying, anyway. Faith is a spectrum, just like sexuality. To illustrate, I will go back almost ten years and tell you about the time I was sitting in the back of the church at Bridgeport while the Portland Lesbian Choir was setting up for their dress rehearsal (we rented out our space for concerts). One of the women was wearing a t-shirt that said, “100% Lesbian.” Nancy was in love with a woman, but had never dated any others. Before she met her partner, she considered herself straight. At the time, I was dating a man, for the first and only time as an adult (so far). We sat there for at least 20 minutes trying to decide what percentage of lesbian we were. Some days, I feel gayer than others.

It’s the same with religion. Sometimes I am absolutely sure there’s a God, and sometimes I’m not. But there is never a point at which I will go all the way toward atheism, because the question will never be settled for me. Just as I will never consider myself gay or lesbian, because to me, that is saying that even though I have only been married to women, that means the men I’ve dated don’t count. And of course they do. When Ryan and I were together, we dated for a year and two months, and that was in middle school… highly unusual for kids that young, and yet, we just fit. He was the cream in my coffee and the butter on my bread. It was one of the happiest times of my life. To call myself gay after that is just ridiculous. Bisexuality gets a bad rap because most people think it means that you date both sexes at the same time to be happy. Not so much. Bisexuality is a spectrum that lasts your whole life, and if I look at my whole life, I’ve been attracted to men as well as women, but never once has it occurred to me not to be monogamous.

To extrapolate a little further, my first wife was bisexual as well, and because of this, she really wanted to go to a bisexual conference held in Houston where one of the keynote speakers was the late and great Fritz Klein. Remember that name, because even though he died a relatively long time ago, he will teach you just as much about your sexuality now as he told me in that lecture. He took Alfred Kinsey’s work (the scale from 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 being completely homosexual) and added to it in ways that most people never think about, but should. Getting to meet and spend time with him is one of my fondest memories, but this is his legacy.

If you click on the image, it will show a version large enough to print that you can fill out on your own. Here’s the catch. No matter what you put in any of the boxes, Dr. Klein firmly believes that one box trumps them all, and that is self-identification. Say you fill out everything with numbers that say you are as queer as a three dollar bill. If you self-identify as straight, then you are. Period. You are what you say you are, and no one can tell you any different. Self-identification comes at your own pace, on your own time.

There should be some sort of grid for belief, as well. Perhaps I will be the one to make it. I certainly have enough information over my lifetime to complete something like it in terms of belief, prayer life, commitment to religious services, etc. It is a rolling set of emotions. Sometimes I feel more spiritual than others. Sometimes I feel more willing to commit to going to church than others. Sometimes I feel more altruism than others. However, if I look at my faith over my lifetime, I have consistently believed that I don’t know if there’s a God or not. I have never, not even once, believed that there was no God. I always fall into that category of, “who knows?”

I have told this story on Nadia before, but I will tell it again. Nadia Bolz-Weber is a loudmouthed, often profane, heavily tattooed Lutheran minister whom I seek to emulate, but in the best of ways. One of the stories she tells in her autobiography, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, is that she was called to the bedside of a man who said, “I’m an atheist!” She said that in her head, she was thinking, “good for you. I wish I could pull that off.” I knew intimately what she meant- that for this man, there was no struggle. It was black or white.

Even for “professional Christians,” it’s sometimes a struggle to believe that someone is listening when we pray. However, there are two things that keep me in the game at all times. The first is this scene from Shadowlands:

The second is that regardless of how I’m feeling when I show up for church in the morning, there is that moment where we’re all in deep prayer together, sharing joy and pain… or there’s that moment when we are hearing the words that have been said for hundreds of years that begin, “on the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: ‘take, eat; this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.'”

I don’t do all of this because I think God cares one way or the other. God is too big, too mystical, too unknowable to think that God might require worship. I do all of this because I see what it does in my own life, just like Jack Lewis. I do not have the option not to pray. It flows as easily from me as do blood, sweat & tears (as a brass player, you didn’t really think I was going to pass that up, did you?). It strengthens me when I think I do not have anything left. It shows me my flaws in my own reasoning because as I am praying, God whispers back… and of course I think the god-conscience is part of myself. I think that the god-conscience resides in every living being.

Where you fall on the spectrum is whether you decide to use it. If you don’t, it doesn’t mean that you are a bad person. It means that you have something else in your life that fills that spot for you. As a liberal Christian trying to take back the fanatical words of the Evangelical movement, I am sorry if you are an atheist and you have ever been treated badly by a Christian wanting to help you to death.

You are welcome to walk with me. I will even hold your hand. It is not either of our jobs to change each other’s minds, just to be together, because the spectrum is wide, but not so much when our fingers touch.

Amen.

I have a dentist appointment at 3:30 today, so I only have to hang on a little bit longer. By then, my Tylenol and ibuprofen will have worn off enough that if they give me a vicoprofen or a T3 it won’t bother my stomach and I might kiss them. Might. We’ll just see what happens when I get there. 🙂 Even if all they give me is laughing gas and try to make me forget about the pain, that will be enough. I have such problems with my teeth that I’ve just put off and put off due to cost that I’m in trouble. I’ve already had a tooth extracted on that side, and it’s affecting everything, including the way I drool. It’s attractive, let me tell you. And remember ladies, I’m single.

My tooth is the only thing I can really think about, so distraction is key. I’ve been watching the fourth season of Veep, and when I realized I was devouring it too fast, I switched back to reading Amen. Like I said earlier, I am reading it for Contemporary Theology class, but I fucking hate it. The author has an air of righteousness about her that is just so off-putting. It’s full of shit like, “if you believe x or so doctrine, keep doing what works for you, but…” It’s like reading a watered down version of Richard Dawkins, and I so wish I was kidding about that. Other people’s beliefs are their beliefs, and they are so cute. I am taking in her words without believing them. I want to argue her into the ground, and if I ever get the chance, I will. Because there’s a way to talk about belief without sounding like a sanctimonious prick. I will water my comments down in Sunday School, but you know me. I won’t water them down here. Mostly her thought process is that you can be an atheist and be a part of the life of the church and pray and all of these things, with which I totally agree. No one should ever be turned away from a church, because at its heart, church is about altruism just as much as it is about belief in God. If you are an atheist, you are always welcome at St. James and All Sinners, because even if you don’t believe in God, I will still put you to work feeding the homeless and asking you to bring extra socks and food.

And if you show up, there will be no discussion about whether your belief is right or wrong. It just is. There’s no proof either way… just as I expect that there will be no discussion about others’ beliefs without really trying to reach across the pews. I’m not going to talk you out of your atheism, and you’re not going to talk me out of my belief, so intelligent discussion can take place within those parameters. I am also not going to let anyone say that your beliefs are cute, but you’re really not mature enough in your faith to see that there’s not really a supreme being… or that there is. But, to me, it’s not the classic grandfather in the sky, but a place inside all of us that yearns for the divine and the mystical for answers. What scientists do not seem to understand is that faith does not answer the scientific problems of our time, but the human ones.

Faith and science can reside together because they accomplish different things. It will not help you to memorize the periodic table when your child is in surgery. It is then that we reach to the mystical and the divine for the prayers that we all pray in those times, such as Anne Lamott’s Help, Thanks, Wow.

When atheists describe to me the God in which they don’t believe, I often say, “I don’t believe in that God, either.” Frankly, the God of the Old Testament is a divine douchebag at times. But, in taking the Bible seriously and not literally, it is the words of the Jews writing that believed that’s what was happening, not necessarily what was. By the time the New Testament was put together, the understanding of God and the Trinity had progressed quite a bit. Theology had progressed into a world of promise and not vengeance. I often say that every parable of Jesus can be redacted to the one about the rich man and the servants who received talents, and what they did with them. The answer to that parable is directly tied to how much each servant believed in themselves.The rich man returns, rewards the two who made money, but severely punishes the servant who did nothing. To me, every parable of Jesus is directly tied to stopping putting all your talents in a hole, because are we really talking about money anymore? Yes, a talent was a denomination of money, but it extrapolates so well in today’s world. I’ve hid my talents for a long time, and I have a feeling I am not alone. People with much more bravery than me have reaped the reward of putting their talent out into the world and reaping its benefits four, five, even tenfold.

Maybe some of you even go to eleven.

It is here that I owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. By writing out my emotions and examining myself, I have put out a body of work that resonates with others as well, and it provided me the confidence to put my money where my mouth is. I have applied to school again. I have agreed to put on the stole and call myself Christ in the World (as all Christians are, but few go to school for it). I never would have had the confidence to do so if I hadn’t put myself out there on this web site, first. I rescued my talents from their hole in the ground by listening to you when you say that I’m a good writer. I came into myself, realizing that I had more talents than I thought I did. I got away from believing that I wasn’t good enough to fly solo, when in reality, I’ve been ready for a long time, I just didn’t have the chutzpah to GO FOR IT.

It was really the marriage article that did it. In one day, I went from obscurity to Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova and thousands of others knowing who I am, both as a writer and as a person. It encouraged me to keep going… and going… and going. The next article that I wrote was a piece on sex and marriage, which prompted one of my readers to say that maybe I’d end up as a marriage and family counselor. Actually, you get all of that when you put on the stole…. and I would like to think that all of my mistakes in my relationships give me a better idea of what not to tell people in their struggles than being perfect ever would. I feel that all of the changes I am making in my life are preparing me for that Biblical marriage I struggled to have with Dana, and though we failed, I learned things that couldn’t have been learned any other way. I think about her every day, about what went wrong and what went gloriously right. She is literally the best thing that ever happened to me (#lafawnduh) in terms of what an ideal marriage is and the things I’ve learned since in terms of how to keep something like that going- how to keep it sacred.

My next relationship (even if a miracle occurs and Dana and I get back together) will be a reflection of those things, because a relationship with Dana cannot be weighted down with the mistakes of the past. My next relationship will be new, whether it is someone from my past, or someone that I meet here in DC. We both should have turned to the Bible more, and the Internet less. We both should have had more communication and less checking out. We both should have done so many things, and those things I ponder in my heart.

Jesus sets forth the rules for a great marriage, and as Christians, we both ignored those rules when we should have learned them cold. For fuck’s sake, if I’d just taken my own advice in my marriage article, we might not be where we are right now, which is mostly estranged with the occasional e-mail or text. The last communication I got from her was on my birthday, for which I was so grateful because I moped that I hadn’t heard from her right up until I did, and then it seemed like my day was complete. My love for her is so absolute that if I hadn’t heard from her, I think I would still be crying over it.

My cardinal Biblical mistake was putting someone else above her, and it never should have happened. Not in a million years. But it did, because my friendship with Argo consumed me in a way I’d never experienced. She became my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night, but not in a way that I felt superceded Dana, but in retrospect, it did. It’s shitty how hindsight is 20/20. You would have to know all the ins and outs of my friendship with Argo to understand why I felt that way, but it’s not my story to tell. It’s hers.

The point here being that I understand my mistakes, because I’ve been spending a lot of time going over them. Extracting lessons and pain so that I can move forward, even though some of those ruminations pull me back into a time when we were happy- all three of us. It was so good right up until the train ran off the tracks and now I am alone, sitting in a lot of things I wish I could just put into the ground and hide.

But those mistakes are also the basis of why I want to pull everything out and look at it, so I can recover in my own time, enough to be able to take my talents out of the ground and multiply them. As I told my former minister friends, I can see the vision, but I cannot see the staircase…. not yet. But it helps that there are former ministers in my congregation that are willing to impart advice, HARD gained wisdom. And Matt is not shy about sharing his wisdom as well, which makes me feel that I have joined a special group. I have graduated from someone who wants to be a minister someday to asking those who’ve already done it how to create what I want.

They looked at me funny when I talked about not creating by committee. I think they think I want to be some kind of dictator. No, it’s just that I want people who are going to take the God energy emanating from me and put it into action without telling me what I should do. It seems mean. It really does. But at the same time, I do not want to be called to a church already in progress. I want to start my own, and have a denomination approach me, in the same vein as the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas. I am not talking about telling people what to do once the structure is in place. I am perfectly happy to delegate and create. But the vision is mine, and it cannot live in several people at once. It can only live in me, and having to fight an uphill battle every day does not appeal to me. I would rather start a small plant and watch it grow, like a Russian doll. There is a difference between being a visionary and a dictator. Visionaries put ideas in place and have others carry them out. Dictators are micro-managers who cannot let go of anything. Visionaries are open to ideas, but have the freedom to say whether it fits or not. I want a church that is well-run, self-sustaining, and committed to social justice. I believe the way to do that is by working from the top down, not the bottom up. It creates mixed messages and muddled ideas that may or may not move forward because the message is lost, tied up in committee for ages. As the great philosopher Martin Blank once said, look, I don’t want to get into a semantic argument, I just want the protein. I want people to follow me, knowing that the power does not come from within me, but from the holy authority given to me by the power of the stole.

I want to be able to say that I studied for this for a very long time, that I have been working in the church in various capacities since I was ten years old (mostly helping my mom with the children’s choir). I have been a lay preacher, thanks to Susan Leo at Bridgeport UCC, since 2003. When I graduate from Howard with that MDiv, I will have received even more training in the ways of interpreting the Bible, learning how to preach more effectively, and in going to a black school, having more awareness of race relations and how to bridge that gap in my own church. The first thing I want to do is to reach out to the homeless community, which in Silver Spring is almost exclusively black. I want to get in trouble with Jeffrey. I want the government of Montgomery County to know me as a troublemaker. I want to be worthy of an orange reflective vest that says “Clergy” on the back as I am actually walking the streets bringing the light of Christ to people who sorely need it more than I do. I am white. My family comes from money. I have never gone without a thing I need, and rarely gone without anything I wanted. My job is to learn to help people in concrete ways who have never had these things, possibly in their whole lives. When I see homeless teenagers, my heart melts into a puddle on the floor and I have to go into my nothing box just to be able to cope, to be able to calculate my next move without getting too angry or too incapacitated by my own tears to listen to those that need me.

Here’s the first time I learned that lesson. Years ago, I sang with a group called Bayou City Women’s Chorus, conducted by James Knapp. One of the pieces we were singing was called How Can I Keep from Singing, one of the pieces that I loved when Diane introduced it to our choir at Bridgeport, and she later told me that it was sung at a funeral for the family in our church that lost their infant twins. Between those two things, I could not keep my emotions unchecked. I was crying through the whole thing. James was not speaking directly to me, but it felt like it. He said that when we are singing for an audience, the emotions are for the AUDIENCE to have, not us. I have carried that advice ever since, and that’s mostly how I cope with ministry as well. It is not my job to have emotions in situations like this. It is for me to listen while others have theirs.

I was happy and shaken when several people said they wanted to come to my church, because it sounded like their kind of church (in the bulletin it said that I was starting my own church called St. James and All Sinners). I was only shaken because I realized that I needed to have a church as far away from CCC as I could get, because I didn’t want Matt to think I was trying to poach members from him. It’s my dream to start a church, but not at the expense of taking away from CCC. It’s my home. The home that is going to teach me to fly solo, one step at a time.

And this is everything I am thinking as I wait for 3:30, which cannot come fast enough. I have had enough of my own tears.

Amen

No one in my house has codeine, so I am doing my best with my split tooth until tomorrow with Tylenol and Advil. I also bought some ice cream, which I thought would help soften the blow, but as it turns out, not so much. I am having to drink my calories through Carnation Instant Breakfast because the OTC pain meds are taking the edge off, but I still cry when I eat. It’s just unavoidable, and I am not usually a cryer. I used to be. I really used to be. But at the same time, I developed a layer of clinical separation from my emotions so that I can think about things behind it without necessarily flooding out. Sometimes it’s a gift. Sometimes it’s a disaster. But there you go. This whole tooth thing is my undoing, because I cannot hide that much pain.

It’s probably a good thing I wasn’t on codeine today, because I had to be sharp for church. When we did the reception of new members, he told us to introduce ourselves and tell the congregation a little bit about us. Since I’d written nearly everything I wanted to say in the bulletin, I told the story of reading Matt for ages without knowing what he looked like or where he preached on the ground. He wasn’t at CCC when I started reading him, probably in 2008 or 2009, so it was a surprise and a half to walk into a church where I knew someone in the cloud and THERE HE WAS. In the flesh. I ended up telling that story without (thankfully) saying the words “drooling fangirl,” but I got my point across. As I said in my Facebook post about it, it made Matt blush and the congregation clap. #missionaccomplished

We also did a special anthem for the offertory where there was a soprano solo, and Karen, the one who sang it, is one of those voices that brings tears to your eyes because it is so pure and clean… the kind where when you listen to her, you have to will yourself to come in on time. It was gorgeous. Simply gorgeous. I cannot get that tone because my voice is a lot heavier (and LOUDER) than hers, so if I ever sing a solo in church, I hope she is as proud of me as I am of her. We are so different, and therefore we enjoy sitting next to each other. She brings out the best in me, and I hope she feels the same way in return, that I bring out the best in her as well.

And as an aside, the last hymn was cwm rhondda, and I sang the hell out of it. Just enjoyed myself and mad I wasn’t standing next to a bass. And of course I took the highest note possible at the end because I’m a whore like that. Wendy knows. Wendy was the first person to call me a “descant whore,” and Dana thought it was so funny she called me that pretty much the entire time we were married. 🙂

After church, I went down for coffee hour and several people came up to me wanting to know about St. James, and we ended up having a fascinating conversation on how to build a church and a book called Amen that they’re reading in the Contemporary Theology Sunday School class. I bought it for my Kindle as soon as I got home, because I want to go to the class next week. Apparently, this woman is teaching theology in such a way that her parishioners are having trouble following her. I said, that’s probably because she doesn’t teach in parables. I’m reading a book by William Barclay that talks about how Jesus taught in parables so that regular people could understand what he was saying. Here’s my favorite theological joke in the entire world:

Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and James Cone find themselves all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi. Who should come along but Jesus, and he asks the four famous theologians the same Christological question, “Who do you say that I am?”

Karl Barth stands up and says: “You are the totaliter aliter, the vestigious trinitatum who speaks to us in the modality of Christomonism.”

Not prepared for Barth’s brevity, Paul Tillich stumbles out: “You are he who heals our ambiguities and overcomes the split of angst and existential estrangement; you are he who speaks of the theonomous viewpoint of the analogia entis, the analogy of our being and the ground of all possibilities.”

Reinhold Niebuhr gives a cough for effect and says, in one breath: “You are the impossible possibility who brings to us, your children of light and children of darkness, the overwhelming oughtness in the midst of our fraught condition of estrangement and brokenness in the contiguity and existential anxieties of our ontological relationships.”

Finally James Cone gets up, and raises his voice: “You are my Oppressed One, my soul’s shalom, the One who was, who is, and who shall be, who has never left us alone in the struggle, the event of liberation in the lives of the oppressed struggling for freedom, and whose blackness is both literal and symbolic.”

And Jesus says, “what?”

Parables are found in the Old Testament as well, but I don’t think many people know them as such. For instance, let’s talk about Nathan:

Then the Lord sent Nathan to David. And he came to him, and said to him: “There were two men in one city, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had exceedingly many flocks and herds. But the poor man had nothing, except one little ewe lamb which he had bought and nourished; and it grew up together with him and with his children. It ate of his own food and drank from his own cup and lay in his bosom; and it was like a daughter to him. And a traveler came to the rich man, who refused to take from his own flock and from his own herd to prepare one for the wayfaring man who had come to him; but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.”

So David’s anger was greatly aroused against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this shall surely die! And he shall restore fourfold for the lamb, because he did this thing and because he had no pity.”

Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!

David had everything; Uriah had nothing. And yet David sent Uriah to the front lines of war just so he could take his wife. In that parable, David realizes what a delta bravo he was to Uriah… Nathan didn’t say that David was a douchebag to his face. He just pointed him in the right direction.

It’s the same with the parables of Jesus. Metaphors about the ways we act are the foundation of the understanding of theology for the lay person, who isn’t the one that signed up to learn words like “Christomonism” and “Eschatology.” That’s for me. Parables are for you. It’s not my idea. It’s William Barclay’s, but it’s one that I wholeheartedly embrace. I have a whole parable spelled out in my own abuse called “The Wheat and the Weeds.” I realized that no abuser/enabler relationship is without its good moments, and that’s why enablers stay. Especially since Diane was with me in my heart and mind all the time, and I was young enough for her to model speech and enculturation, we have a lot of the same facial expressions, speech patterns, you name it. I realized that trying to get rid of her completely within me was burning down a whole field, because I could not separate the wheat from the weeds without destroying who I am in the process.

When I learned that parable, it beget action. So parables are for everyone, even people who sign up to read Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr, and Cone.

Amen.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have a wallpaper changer app called Variety, and you can set it to put quotes on top of your desktop pictures. When I saw this quote, I realized that Roosevelt could probably understand me better than most, because he was a prisoner in his mind for a lot of his life. If my mind is full, I cannot imagine how his must have burst forth, thinking of things that no one has since (actually, I take that back. The Affordable Health Care Act would have made Roosevelt smile). But the point is that when I read this quote, I thought, “he just gets me.” Roosevelt was in a wheelchair because of polio.

I didn’t walk until I was almost two because my mind developed much faster than my body. I don’t think I’d be able to walk at all without the constant physical therapy that my mother endured, because seeing your child cry is one of the hardest jobs mothers have…. when you know something is good for them, but you see how bad it hurts in the moment and you can’t do anything about it. Miracles happen every day, and the fact that I can walk and talk and speak and write as well as I can is one of them. I have a cerebral palsy, possibly more than one, from being born eight weeks early in a hospital in 1977 and being oxygen deprived in the process. I learned to think much more quickly than I learned to do anything else. I could speak in full sentences at about one, and because I was born so early, I looked like I was half that age. One idiot in the grocery store thought my mom was throwing her voice.

I was a prisoner of my own mind for quite a long time, and I can’t imagine what was running through my head, but I do know that it made me verbally smarter than anyone in any of my classes until I got to college. Even through that, though, I was often a depressed child. I remember one summer when I was about ten or so that I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning, and my parents forced it on me every day- that I couldn’t spend the entire summer in my room sleeping all day. I had to get dressed, take a shower, go to the library, SOMETHING. I knew I wasn’t acting normally. There’s a difference between a kid off for the summer that sleeps late and someone who cannot perpetually propel themselves. I was a prisoner of my own mind, although it was years and years afterward that I was finally diagnosed with depression and even more years that I was diagnosed as bipolar so that I could get the right treatment for what ailed me. Getting a mood stablilizer on board was like getting new glasses- for the first time I knew what it was like to live without depression, and I knew that because my mood and behavior became lighter, more playful as the drug took effect… because let’s face it. I am hilarious when I am not mired in illness.

I still have ups and downs, but the swings are less frequent and disparate. Sometimes, I am comfortable as the life of the party. Sometimes I just want you to get off my lawn.

A prisoner of my own mind and what I think I can do with it.

On my best days, I see a church with hundreds of members all dedicated to social justice. We feed the homeless. We invite the homeless into the building and let them sit next to us. We baptize them if they want it… because the church is not the building, but the acceptance of everyone who shows up. On my worst days, I see a writer who can never finish a book, can never get out into the community enough to start the projects she wants to finish, because it’s just too hard. When you have depression, things that are easy for most people seem insurmountable for you. My darkest moments are Dana asking why they let me out of the hospital to begin with, as if I belonged there as easily as the furniture.

I crumpled in the face of it, because I wasn’t ready to leave the hospital, either. My nurse practitioner said that the ward was quiet all weekend, and she didn’t think I would get much therapeutically out of staying, so she was going to send me home to start outpatient. I agreed with her that it was a good treatment plan, and the thought of going home to Dana was comforting….. right up until I got there. She told me with finality that we were not getting back together when we were on the phone together at the hospital, and I uninvited her from visiting me because I needed to cry out my hope. I still do, in a lot of ways.

And that’s what this time of single-ness is for. Crying out hope, and making room for new people in my life. I am doing fine with making friends, but most of the time, I am content to be trapped in my own mind, because I have to learn to take care of myself, first.

In terms of taking care of myself, today is terrible. My entire body aches as if I am coming down with something, and I have split a tooth down to the nerve and it hurts so bad I’ve cried off and on all day. This is the exact reason I am glad I didn’t move in by myself. When I’m sick or upset or depressed, there are people here to catch me.

In fact, Samantha and I were talking the other day and she said, “Leslie, I think there was a reason you were sent to us.” It was music to my ears….. in a major key.

Sarah (my therapist) did not have any homework for me this week, which is really cramping my style. Her homework assignments have turned into writing prompts for this web site…….. good ones. In terms of visits and views, A Letter to Someone Who Hurt You has been shared around and it upped my stats considerably. That’s not why I wrote it, of course, but it doesn’t suck that people are identifying with the pain I’m going through. I have a sneaking suspicion that lots of people can relate to what’s going on with me…. it’s just that maybe they’re not writers or they haven’t found the courage to take up their own emotional space. What keeps me going is that anything I write could help someone else, so seeing stats going up doesn’t feed my ego so much as give me a community to work with. Shared pain is so much better than going through it alone, and even if people don’t comment, I see the resonance in graphs and social media buttons. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Dana about a year ago:

Leslie: I think one of the things that makes Argo so sacred to me is that when I’m sitting there alone, writing to her, she gets into my God space, and even when I’m not sure God is listening, I know she is.

Dana: (tears in her eyes) Go tell her. Right now.

It’s the same way with all of you. I put my prayers for the future and the pain of my past right out here for everyone to see because I know you’re listening. You get into my God space because when I am writing, there is never anyone here with me. I require it. I sit here with a diet grape soda or a Gosling’s ginger beer and type away at 80wpm. My fingers fly on the keyboard and it makes me happy because my fingers can keep up with my thoughts as they happen. Therefore, you are also getting that same slice of time. It is not all of me, it is a timestamp designed to tell you what I’m feeling in the moment. Tomorrow, it may change. Or not. It depends on what kind of interactions I’ve had that day. Maybe something has changed my mind, and maybe not. That’s the thing about being open-minded. People think you’re being hypocritical, when in reality, I don’t believe that the mind stays stagnant on much of anything.

Argo has said that when we fight and I also send love that hypocrisy is unbecoming. I told her that I didn’t see it that way, and I could see her eyebrows raising FROM HERE. I told her it was closer to looking up at the Sistine Chapel and having ALL THE FEELS. I don’t just have one set of feelings about anybody, and it has never occurred to me that you couldn’t be angry at someone and love them at the same time.

For instance, I love Dana. I love her more than myself at times. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to kick her ass. Some of the things she’s said to me still haunt me, and there are moments when I cannot sleep, I am ruminating so hard. She pushed me away from Argo for nothing, because Argo was never a threat and yet was constantly treated that way. She told me I would never amount to anything. She threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave her alone when we were having a simple conversation. It seemed especially designed to make me feel smaller than I already do. Fortunately, I didn’t take the bait.

I did in terms of Argo. I fucked that relationship up all to hell because I thought it would save my relationship with Dana…. would prove to her that she meant more to me than Argo because that’s how she felt. It didn’t work, and it caused more emotional damage to both Argo and me than, I think, any relationship I’ve ever had. That’s because we both fought like we were trying to cut each other off at the knees, and there wasn’t any part of us that could say, “ummmm…. wait a minute. Let’s back off before we say things we can’t take back.” Dana and I were fairly emotionally intelligent about fighting right up until we weren’t. Argo and I had both guns on the table pretty quick, because it’s easy to do when you can’t see each other’s eyes when you’re talking.

I was just this first child bulldog that couldn’t submit. To either of them…. and that’s possibly the only thing that would have saved either relationship.

Submission to Dana would have been, “I’m sorry I let an Internet relationship get out of hand so that I was spending more time on it than was comfortable for you. I’ll back off.”

Submission to Argo would have been, “you’re right. I wasn’t taking your feelings into account and I need to do a better job before I lose you, because it will happen if I let it.”

As a first child and as a master manipulator because of the “way I was raised,” I couldn’t submit to anyone, or even need them in the way that made them feel needed, wanted, vital to my life in a way that no one has been before or since. Most people only get those relationships once in a lifetime, and I screwed both of them up to the point that it’s going to take all of us a long time to get over it…. particularly with Argo, because I said some shitty, shitty words to her on the way out, trying to slam the door so she’d go away on her own and I wouldn’t have to make her. It’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life, because at least with Dana, I got to hug her and kiss her cheek and tell her goodbye. With Argo, I just acted like a jackass and there was no excuse for my behavior. I knew she was threatened by my attraction to her and I knew that it would be the shortest path to getting her to stop contacting me, so I capitalized on it, and as soon as the words left my mouth, I crumpled in agony because I knew I had said something I couldn’t take back and I wanted to with all my might, because I didn’t really feel that way. I was in love with the idea of her, not the reality. I was in love with this fictional character that I’d made up based on her. Who knows what she’s really like? Maybe one day I’ll find out. But not any time soon, that’s for damn sure.

I beat myself up a lot because I think I deserve it, and in no small measure, I do. I will never progress beyond acting as small and immature as I did without growing the fuck up. I am in hell over the relationship with Argo because I was responsible for treating her like shit when I really didn’t have to. I just did. There’s no excuse in the world that’s good enough, and it’s only been recently that we have come to a place of peace. Neither one of us want toxicity and hate running between us, so I printed out an e-mail that she sent me with lots of love and I keep it in the small pocket of my Kindle so that it’s with me every day. I look at it when I feel wrecked, or when I just need a confidence boost that though we may not communicate, we are no longer at war. Feeling like death warmed over all day, every day was just not working out for me, and now that feeling is gone….. mostly…. because when I get into a worthlessness loop, I take out that e-mail and read it again.

It was amazing how relatively easy it was to say goodbye to Dana in comparison, because even though she told me that she thought I had the capability to reach millions and she was jealous, she also told me that I would never amount to anything. In my worthlessness loop, guess which words stuck?

I try and overcome those words every fucking day. EVERY. FUCKING. DAY. I told Sarah that I didn’t want every session to be me bitching about my problems, that I wanted to do some visioning and values as well. Sort of a gestalt approach so that I can feel like I am more that the sum of my parts, because most of those parts feel like I can’t handle anything, that I’ll just fuck it up, so why even try?

The exception to that is looking for jobs. I had a lunch meeting with my friend Kathy, whom I met when I lived here before when she was working at Congressional Quarterly and Politico gave her an obscene amount of money to be able to poach her. I have several avenues to get into web production for several government web sites, and that is the kind of stuff that feeds me…. at least while I’m going to school and need money to support myself and this monster vision I have planned for later. I only need to raise about 15 million dollars. Mere pocket change…. but that is later. This is now.

As I am waiting for all of these things to happen, I am reading like a mad man. I just finished The Time Traveler’s Wife, and now I’m reading Things Fall Apart.

But hopefully, I’ll get to write the book Things Get Glued Back Together.

It’s true. I don’t want to write today. I feel like I’ve poured myself out on the page lately, and I am emotionally exhausted. However, that’s what a writer does. Gets emotionally exhausted and keeps going. It’s like an Energizer bunny of sad until it’s all out. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about how I wrecked my life from the ground up, and how much I miss Dana and Argo and Aaron and the whole bit until it got weird.

Actually, that sums up a lot of the last two years. It got weird.

I’m feeling particularly crispy today because I’m going back to Alexandria to hang out with my sister, who’s staying there at a conference for her work. Going back physically is hard work mentally, because there are so many things on that side of town that I’ve been trying not to feel since 2002. The hotel where I’m going is close to “our” old movie theater, and that shouldn’t seem like much, but it is. I remember clearly packing up our townhouse and feeling like the world was going to end and saying, “Leenie (my nickname for Kathleen), can we just take a break? I am too emotional to do anything right now. Let’s go to the movies.” We saw Blue Crush. I thought it was a terrible movie, but a great escape from the task at hand. It was doubly hard not being able to take her hand in the movie, because it was my natural instinct and she’d already fucked three of her coworkers just for spite. I couldn’t decide whether to be mad, or just enjoy the few hours we had left together where we weren’t at each other’s throats over the furniture. Someone close to me that I will not mention told me to just put it out in the front yard while it was raining.

I did not.

I participated in the end of that relationship. She chose the trump card of adultery, but I was mentally ill and had been let go from ExxonMobil, so now I was mentally ill without health insurance. I was too much for her to handle, because I couldn’t own my half of the relationship. Depression had gotten ahold of me and wouldn’t let go. However, in that case, I couldn’t really be blamed for it. I mean, I take responsibility for my *behavior* during that time, which was mostly nothing (it’s amazing how much doing nothing is doing everything)… but at the same time, I had a TERRIBLE psychiatrist that just kept adding pills to my protocol hoping they would help.

They did not.

I was on Lexapro, Wellbutrin, and Adderall all at the same time. I am bipolar, but we didn’t know that at the time. So they were just throwing all these drugs at me to treat unipolar and ADD and surprise, surprise, not only did they not work, they threw me into a level of frantic anxiety I haven’t seen before or since. Well, maybe lately, but this time I have a great psychiatrist, a great therapist, and the RIGHT diagnosis. Then, it was more like, “let’s put you on THIS for a few weeks and see if it does anything.” Yes. My psychiatrist actually said that. I don’t think “let’s see if it does anything” is said by the people that graduate first in their class in medical school.

It was a nightmare, and I am sure that adultery was sheer escapism. At the time, I blamed Kathleen for leaving me when I needed her the most, because she did. Straight up. But at the same time, allowing myself to see her side of the story gave me a bit of power. I wasn’t as much of a victim as I thought I was. I went through a grieving period, but the pain was much less intense when I realized that even if I only had 10% of the blame, I needed to own my fucking 10% for all it was worth.

I’m sure I had a lot more than 10% responsibility. I am just using it as an example of taking back my own power. I let her have so much when I was sick, and our patterns of behavior were just outrageous to begin with. I married her because it was comfortable. Being treated like crap was what I knew, and her control freak nature fit me perfectly. It was okay that she blew up at me when something wasn’t done her way. It was okay that we fought all the time over stupid shit because to talk about real emotions was just beyond her capabilities…. It was okay that she wanted to run my life and rage at me that I wasn’t doing enough, because when I tried to assert doing things my way, it caused an avalanche of emotional violence. I married a pattern instead of a person, and it was totally okay with me, because I didn’t know any different.

She accused me all the time of falling down on the job, and wouldn’t let me stand up, either. It was a trap. I didn’t know which way to go or which end was up. I was shat upon no matter what I did.

But I felt justified in my unworthiness, so being treated like crap was something that didn’t even register. It was just the way things were.

Being in therapy makes me feel more powerful, because “if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” I have been struck down, over and over, because of unworthiness. I feel bad about my sins, so therefore, living in perpetual punishment looks attractive.

No More.

No. More.

Sarah and I have a lot of work to do, and I have a lot of work to do on my own. I do not want to live in the darkness, but walk in the light. Part of walking in light is recording everything here, because then I can go back and re-live what I was feeling in those moments and hopefully not revisit them in later relationships. I have, for lack of a better description, an instruction manual on What Not to Do.™

For someone who didn’t want to write today, it seems like I found something to say. Let’s hope I learned something from it, because that’s what I hope every day. I am grateful that leaving Houston and heading for Silver Spring got me into a great mental health system and a loving family all at the same time. In fact, we are having some morning sickness around here…………. stay tuned.

I am joining the church next Sunday, and they’ve asked me to write a short bio of myself for the bulletin. One thing I will NOT put in is that I use TextWeek for sermon prep, so I have been following Matt Braddock at Dry Bones Arise for YEARS without knowing it was him. You’d think I would have read the “about me” section, and yet not. I am drooling fangirl impressed over him, and it was like meeting Oprah or Matt Damon when I realized I’d just walked into the church of someone I already knew in text, but had never met on the ground. Speaking of Matt, he told me that I made a good impression on the youth pastor search committee, and he’d be willing to ask the woman that got the job to mentor me if I’d like so that I had more experience to put on my resume. So, this man I’ve been reading for years now wants me to talk about next steps in terms of working with youth, ordination, etc. Can you look into my heart and see how much it means to me? I am flabbergasted. Simply shocked beyond all measure.

Drooling. Fangirl. I try not to show it, but OMG. I walked into the church and HE wants to help ME.

That’s a God moment right there if ever I’ve seen it.

So, here’s my bio. I hope it works. We’ll see once it’s printed.

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Leslie Lanagan is a native Texan and preacher’s kid, which is code for having lived in lots of places across the state. She settled in Houston from the age of 12, with detours in both Portland, Oregon and Alexandria, Virginia. She comes to us with the dream of being a DC-based writer and theologian. She has applied at Howard University to eventually earn a Masters of Divinity and later start a church of her own, tentatively named “St. James and All Sinners.” She is looking forward to volunteering with the youth group, singing in the choir, and drinking as much coffee after worship as possible. When she is not delving into theology, she is fond of going to the zoo and all of the other Smithsonian museums to gather inspiration.

My new URL for my blog feed is now at a Facebook Page address instead of my personal account. To join, please use this address instead:

https://www.facebook.com/StoriesThatAreAllTrue

It was the right thing to do. While it looks like I have less followers than I did before, I get a whole bunch more analysis than I did before in terms of how many people my posts reach. On paper (or on web site) it looks like I have a whole bunch less followers than I did, because it’s counting how many people are joining the page instead of all my personal followers, but in the cost/benefit analysis, it pays off in spades. Now I have a true picture of how many people are following my writing instead of looking at my own feed. It scared the hell out of me at first, because I was all like, “I only have 75 followers now?” And then I realized that it was taking my followers based on how many people were subscribed to the page instead of me and I felt all better. 🙂

If you haven’t had a chance to like my page so that it appears in your own Facebook feed, please do. It would be fun to actually build a community (obscure inside joke that goes all the way back to Con Law with Jill and Lindsay) based on my writing and how people respond to it, as well as using the page itself for Fanagan interaction. If you’re interested, I also have Fanagan t-shirts on CafePress. Let me know if you want one in the comments- for some reason, CafePress is being a little bitch and not loading correctly at the moment.

My favorite thing that I’ve made is a yellow messenger back that says “F*ck Comic Sans” in Comic Sans to be hipster ironic. Yes, I just said that.

It would rock my world if my international fans sign up, because I love that I am often more popular in Great Britain than I am here in the US. Perhaps it’s because I’m a Doctor Who fan and connected by an umbilical cord to the BBC, but who knows? I also have a big following in Australia, which is one of my favorite things on earth because I figure a country made from convicts is my kind of audience.

There’s so much I want to do with my Facebook Page. I want it to start the dialogue about so many things. I’m interested in politics, religion, movies, books (especially books), food, theology… you name it, and I probably have something to say about it. Plus, I’m not interested in what I think nearly as much as I am interested in what you think. The page is specifically designed for us to gather, because as I have said before, this is just as much your web site as it is mine. The comments mean so much more to me than my own writing sometimes, because I cannot always believe that God can hear my prayers and thoughts, but I can hang my hat on the fact that you do.

Religion is a spectrum, and I waffle all the time as to whether God is really there, and I would not be a good human being or pastor if I didn’t admit that up front. What rescues my faith week after week is going to church and FEELING the presence as we all gather together, and that something HAPPENS in the Eucharist. When we eat this bread and drink this cup, it is an ablution that I do not get anywhere else…. plus the feeling that every week, I am forgiven for the darkness that resides inside me, and I know that I am being brought into the light, one prayer and one piece of bread at the same time.

In terms of laughing at the Eucharist, I always go back to Bless Me, Ultima by Isabel Allende. The main character, a boy child, is Catholic. Catholics believe in an idea called transubstantiation, which is the idea that when you put the bread in your mouth, it literally becomes the body of Christ…. and the little boy wonders what to do when Christ gets stuck to the roof of his mouth. The first time I read that line, I nearly fell off the couch laughing.

In the UCC, we take communion metaphorically in remembrance of Jesus, but it is no less powerful. The only thing I don’t like is that there is not a kneeling rail. There is something comforting about it, even though I cannot put my finger on what it is. I know for sure that when my faith in God wavers (wafers?), it is the Eucharist that brings me back around, because even if I am not particularly faithful that week, I can show up and do the ritual. The ritual is the cleansing part of the service that makes me realize just how much the presence of God is in the room…. a never-ending loop that waffles (Leggo my Eggo, bitch).

I want people to take this journey with me, to open the dialogue between everyone from atheists to evangelicals. If I am called to be Christ in the world (like all Christians are), my job is to bridge gaps, not create them. With every Amazon gift certificate I’ve been given (it was my birthday on Sept. 10th), I have bought books that I will need as I walk my path of faith. This week it was some of the works of William Barclay, a Glaswegian professor of Biblical criticism that literally feeds my soul. Best. Presbyterian. Ever. I’ve also gotten copies of everything Nadia Bolz-Weber has written, except for her newest one- Salvation on the Small Screen?

In terms of the Barclay books, I accidentally ordered Vol. II instead of Volume I with, I think, Matthew. I just have to hope that if there is a passage on Matthew in the Revised Common Lectionary that it’s toward the back. 🙂 I also made it a point of ordering both volumes of John, because here’s the skinny on that. Mark, Matthew, and Luke are called the “synoptik” gospels, a Greek word meaning “seen together.” They are all taken from a source document that theologians call “Q.” John is a completely different animal, the only one called the gnostic gospel. It’s not necessarily  harder to understand, but since it stands alone, it meant more to me to have those two first.

By the time I finished buying those, I had about three dollars left, which I spent on the second book in a series that Meg recommended to me called The Soulkeepers Series, by an author named G. P. Ching. I haven’t finished the first one yet, but it is so interesting that I definitely want to know what happens. No spoilers. I hate that. Anyway, it’s science fiction, which I love as long as it starts in reality and delves deeper into the supernatural. Any book that starts out in fantasy is one where I have trouble keeping everyone’s names straight. My favorite science fiction writer is Michael Chrichton, and I am pissed off that he’s dead. In fact, I am angry that a lot of people are dead and stupid people live. For instance, I would do just about anything to bring David Halberstam and Christopher Hitchens back. You’d think I wouldn’t love Hitchens, but I do. I have been addicted to him since I started reading Vanity Fair. Speaking of Vanity Fair, there will never be another writer like Dominic Dunne, the diarist that covered the criminal trials of the “rich and the very, very rich.” I would trade him for both Donald Trump and Sarah Palin put together, but don’t tell them I said that. It just seems rude.

So, I hope I am making a play to sound interesting enough to follow. We shall see. I love “all y’all” and want to see us grow beyond me talking about myself… because I’m hilarious AND tired of hearing my own voice at the same time.

Welcome to “Stories.” We’ll leave the light on for ya.

Sarah gave me some homework to do, which is to write a letter to someone who has hurt you. I told her that I feel like I do enough of that on my blog, and should I just print some stuff out, or write a new one? She said, “either or both.”

Here is my response.

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Dear Leslie,

When Sarah gave you this assignment, she said to write to someone who’d hurt you. No one ever hurts you more than you. You’ve coasted on charm a lot of your life, but not maliciously… because you didn’t ever have enough bravery to look at the pain roiling underneath… or perhaps that’s unfair. It was so far down that it wouldn’t have occurred to you to look. Covering up all that anger led you to be your own worst enemy, because it left emotional blind spots in your heart and mind that have led you to lie, cheat, and steal just to fight your way to the middle. It’s disheartening watching you fight for the middle when you were born with so much visionary capability. You want to see things as they can be, and not as they are. While most people accuse you of living in the clouds, they do not have the capability to take that idealistic version of the world and implement it. That’s what visionaries do. It hurts to watch you squander all that talent because you are afraid to fail and afraid to succeed in equal measure. So you hide, and it’s one of the most self-destructing things you can do, but you do it anyway, year after year.

You don’t want to succeed because you know that in some ways, succeeding means making some people angry. No one is ever going to live your life for you, and you haven’t had the tools to take criticism, not to care when other people hurt because you are entitled to your own emotional space in the world, just like they are. It is not your job just to let everyone tell you what would be best for you and then to do it.

It’s painful to watch, this looking at you trying to get ahead and holding steadfastly to treading still water, so that not even the current is carrying you. You’ve had great jobs, great relationships… and yet, none of them seem to last as long as you want them to. The way you sabotage yourself is intensely frightening, and I hurt for all the moments that you’ve seen everything slipping away and haven’t had the tools to stop it from happening.

I hurt for every moment you’ve felt small in someone else’s presence, because not thinking that you have as much power in the relationship as someone else has led you to try and make yourself feel even smaller than they ever could’ve. Molehills become mountains and you don’t know what to do… don’t have the tools to know how to react to a molehill so that it stays that way. Every mistake is gargantuan. Every time you hurt someone’s feelings, you scream and cry so much more than times you’ve hurt yourself. Self-preservation has been gone for you a long time, so that when you enter into any relationship, there’s no way for you to handle conflict without always thinking the other person is right and going home and abusing yourself… and when you can’t be angry at the people who deserve it, you’re angry at the people you love. Innocent bystanders are tired of it, and I watch it hurt you because you cannot see the consequences to your actions, and people you love don’t understand why. Don’t understand why you don’t fit in, don’t see as they do, don’t know things that “God, everybody knows THAT.” Your abuse begets abuse to those around you, but not more than yourself, because you are in so much pain.

That abuse takes many forms, but most of it is in your mind. You think you are unworthy, and so you act like it. You don’t go out of your way to interact with people, because the less people you meet, the less room there is for any kind of conflict. You are happiest alone, and that probably hurts most of all, because you also know that you are hilariously funny and people love to be around you. It’s you that doesn’t want to be around them. It has caused you to focus inward to the point that even the people who love you are mystified as to why you don’t want to see them, don’t want to talk, don’t want any interaction past a few instant messages because they cannot see that you do not want to do anything wrong, say anything wrong, give anyone any reason anywhere to doubt that you are perfect. Because if you cannot be perfect and someone points out a flaw, they cannot see the hours of rumination you will attach to a moment they won’t even remember later. People think you are being selfish when they cannot get you to interact, but you rarely feel like it because that requires putting on a mask of massive proportions so that even if someone does point out one of your flaws, they’ll think you’re having a normal reaction because they cannot see all the threads that braid in your subconscience that you will interrogate later.

Your pain is mine and mine is yours, but we approach it quite differently. As the part of your mind that can comment on the rest of you, I see things that you don’t. I see that you are very much enjoyed when you are with other people. I also see that you cannot need them, because eventually, they’ll need you, and you know you’re going to disappoint them, anyway, so you back away without making friends. Being in community with other people is excruciating, because you know that you’ll forget to bring food to the potluck and forget to bring those pencils and water bottles you said you’d bring to choir last week… and in your innermost self, you also know that when you forget those small things, you’ll back away from the community altogether in your shame. You forget why you wanted to join a community in the first place, because it’s easier to be alone. There’s no shame in forgetting something if it only affects you.

You don’t know that people are generally willing to forgive you for forgetting small things, but to you, those are the big things…. or they will be, once you get done with yourself. You can barely handle getting yourself out the door, so it’s not surprising that you feel you continually disappoint others because you won’t engage. No, a Halloween party does not sound fun, because you have to dress up to go to those things and your costume will never be right enough, and you feel you know this up front, so it’s easier to stay home. You know you are not gifted that way, and as a perfectionist, you cannot walk into a party looking like a five-year-old made your costume… although if a five-year-old did make your costume, you would wear it.

Your love is gigantic, but few people know it due to the way you’ve let them down. Because you can only take care of yourself, you have no concept of what it’s like to be able to function in a group of friends who love and take care of each other. You never mean to be selfish, you just don’t want to do anything wrong, so it’s better to do nothing at all. You protect yourself to the point that every day is survival mode, and it’s painful watching your “failure to thrive”condition.

I see you with these glimpses of confidence, but they never last very long. You’re surprised that when you ask a girl to dance, she says yes. You’re surprised when people call you attractive. You’re surprised when people tell you that you are brilliant, because when they do, you know it is a lie of immense proportions. When you told Argo that you were fascinated by her brain, you meant that it was strong and vulnerable, angry and hilarious. That there wasn’t a day that went by that you didn’t think you’d ever met anyone smarter or more capable. When she said that she was fascinated by yours, you felt like an animal in the zoo… because why would someone like that think your brain was equally interesting? It couldn’t be. You missed a compliment of massive proportions due to your own unworthiness, and you miss them a lot, from everyone, due to the exact same thing. Your compliments to them are genuine, and their compliments to you are lies.

Watching you feel worthless is hurting me. Which is hurting you. Which is hurting me.

Leslie