This is a picture of me waiting in Dupont for the train back to Takoma after the Meetup. I am not amused, because I thought that the bouncer was holding the door open for me, and it was clear glass that had just been cleaned, transparent from ceiling to floor. My glasses banged into my face right good, and I was bleeding all over the place when I walked out of the bar. The bouncer looked at me with pity, because clearly I must have been drunk off my ass. I wasn’t… just clumsy and thinking about other things. We went to No. 9, between 14th & 15th on P. If you know the place, you know it was loud (very loud), and the kind of establishment I would never frequent unless something good was going on. Gay bars intimidate me. The idea of standing in a hot crowd, bodies smashed wall to wall, is my idea of a bad time.

However, I thought that going to the Meetup was something good going on, and I was not wrong. The other women thought I was hot. I got very ummm, direct feedback as the night went on. I got numbers, emphasis on the s. I made a connection with one, flabbergasted that she’d worked for both the Methodists and the Presbyterians as an admin assistant and could build a church blind. Intimidated that she’d had twins at 15 and they were now 21. The fact that anyone my age has kids old enough to drink is both amazeballs and terrifying. Another woman was 21, asked to come to the “Women in Their 30s” group by her roommate. I LOVED HER, because she sounded just like BMO from Adventure Time. I showed her a picture of BMO and she giggled. She thought I was hot, too, and I told her I was old enough to be her mother. She giggled and said she liked older women.

Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.

I met another girl who said she was bisexual and when I said that wasn’t a deal to me, she sighed with actual relief. Lesbians are not known for their open-mindedness in this arena. I am, because to me, this is like saying that only the women I’ve dated matter. My first love was a boy, Ryan, and he made me swoon on a regular basis. It matters.

And then there was K-money, who taught English in Spain and just here for the summer. Former doctor’s wife. Impressed me right away, because obviously.

So many women, so little time.

And then I realized I already had a girlfriend and she was too much to handle- me. I couldn’t in good conscience drag anyone into that. However, I was continually amused at these women trying.

I was, in a sense, fresh meat. I didn’t not like it.

I also figured out why Dupont isn’t called “The Froot Loop” anymore. It’s so expensive that most of the gay bars have lost their leases and it’s not really the gay neighborhood anymore. Things have changed since I was away, and that’s okay. An old queen lawyer for the city explained it all to me while I was waiting for the women to show up, and possibly the best conversation of the evening, except for when the church secretary missed my cheek and kissed my lips goodnight. I don’t know and don’t care whether it was on purpose.

Perhaps that’s why I walked into a door. It’s been known to happen (winking at Argo and Dana because they know that story well).

I am also embarrassed to say that the other reason I didn’t really want to call anyone back is that I still love Argo, and it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t love me. It’s just going to take time, perhaps lots of it. She says it’s over, and it’s better that way. My only comment is, “for whom?” I don’t agree that it’s better this way, but I am willing to deal. I just don’t want to. There’s a huge difference. Your heart doesn’t always dictate love, and perhaps it never does. Lack of attraction on her part doesn’t matter in the slightest. Love does. I am the picture of Lord John Grey, wanting to put away talking about attraction and just love her for who she is, which is a straight girl with hopefully an amazing man that CAN give her what she needs. I’m just icing, and I’m okay with that. Someone else can be my cake (and, tongue in cheek, I can eat it, too). I’m not about to go all John Cusack boombox on her….. again. I took my shot. I lost. So okay, because I didn’t expect her to swoon. I just knew that I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t…. that even if she said no, I hadn’t been brave enough to fucking ask. One of my friends supported me in this, as long as I could handle her response. I can.

I am sure she thought it was crazy, especially after not meeting in person. But to me, what did it matter what she looked like? I was in love with her mind, not her body. However, I would be remiss not to say that in the few pictures I’ve seen, the words “worshipful Goddess” are not enough. But I didn’t know that in the beginning. It was all mind, all the time. What I knew was that I could and would want that mind for a lifetime, and still do, but only on her terms, which at the time, was a lifetime of loyalty, and for me, that was enough.

However, she didn’t end the relationship because I, in a sense, “manned up,” and for it, I am eternally grateful. There were other reasons, deeply personal to only us, and I will keep it that way.

And that’s where my mind went as these women were throwing themselves at me. I know that seems egotistical, but let me say for the record that it was kind of scary. I didn’t like it, because I am too Southern and polite to just put it all out there. I thought all the way home, just completely lost in my own reverie. I tried to read on the way home and realized I was looking at the same page over and over. I put my Kindle away and just stared out the window, blood running down my face with nothing but my sleeve to catch it.

I did like the cocktails, though. Perfect, with Dairy Queen style ice. I had an Old Fashioned, my normal drink of choice. The drinks were buy one, get one free. I gave my second drink away, because with the meds I’m on, one is enough. But that one was enough to last me for days.

Dairy Queen ice. Almost worth the scars.

Tomorrow I am going to lunch with Judy, and Happy Hour with a Meetup called “Women in Their 30’s.” My mom is tentatively coming to visit on Sunday if she can work out the plane situation. Excited for this burst of activity; something to look forward to in a world that’s been a little bit grey… at my own insistence, but still. Grief is lifting because I’ve been able to exorcise so many demons here and put them away. Let others think about them besides me so I can rest. Sitting in my silence has been self-induced and necessary. I haven’t been able to eat for days, because I’ve been so anxious about the Argo/Dana situation. I don’t want to let go, and I must. That fact eats away at me all day, every day. Not having a job is terrifying, because I have too much time on my hands to be sad. I don’t have compartmentalization from it. The only relief is my time with Pri Diddy.

She’s one of those people with whom I feel safe. I can open up to her in a way that touches my very soul, because when I offer up broken, she offers comfort. She helps me to be a better version of myself, one step at a time. I cannot thank her enough for her love and patience as she walks beside me.

I am getting to know her wife, Elena, and she is so great. I can envision a future in which we’re The Three Musketeers. Hanging out with both of them is solid. When I am with them, I am thinking only about them and not me. Thinking about not me is amazing. I don’t know what I would do without either one of them.

The only thing I hate about DC is that my skin is breaking out hardcore because of the humidity and being out in it all day. My skin was like that in Houston, too, but in Portland, it was clearer than it had ever been, and I’m not sure why. I do know that the air had a lot to do with it, though. I think I need another round of Accutane, because I’ve been through everything else and basically for me, they all say “does not work” right on the bottle. Accutane is torture while you’re on it, but the protocol is short and I’m not about to get pregnant, so the birth defect side effects don’t apply to me. I just need to be conscious about always carrying lip balm, lotion, and Ibuprofen, because ironically enough, Accutane causes my back to hurt…. A lot.

Psych appt. on the 28th is coming up quick. Still apprehensive about it, because I want to like my doctor and I hope he’s as knowledgeable as I need him to be. I suppose it could be a she, but to me the classic image of a psychiatrist is a male New York Jew. It’s a long story. You just had to be there.

Anyway, if I think the doctor is stupid, I will rebel hardcore. Doctors generally aren’t, but at the same time, the guy that graduates last in medical school still gets a license, capice? I don’t want to switch meds, I don’t want him to talk down to me, and I for damn sure don’t want him to think that he knows more about my mind than I do. I spend every day with it.

I will never say that I know more than a doctor. That’s not what I mean. I have been a psych patient since I was in early college, when I first discovered that I was depressed and I could not pull myself out of it. I have had what seems like a hundred different protocols because every SSRI I’ve ever tried has stopped working after a few months. Things did not improve dramatically until I saw a different psychiatrist in 2006 who said I’d been misdiagnosed with unipolar and started bipolar treatment on me. It worked within two weeks, and for the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to live without depression. I have been on that same protocol, with the exception of adding the gabapentin, since then. I have occasionally used Xanax in the past as needed for panic attacks, but I’ve only had two or three of those… and not one since starting the gabapentin.

The worst was after my fistfight with Dana. She went to her priest and told her what happened, and her priest walked her through a Rite for grievous sins as a way to let go. She came home and showed it to me in the Book of Common Prayer, and it was then that I collapsed on the floor, hyperventilating as if there were no tomorrow. I could only think of my own grievous sins. I did not want the divorce except in a fit of anger, and I said as much in my Facebook post. Dana took the title that Facebook put on it, “End of Relationship,” and said that since I’d ended it, there was no turning back. She did not take into account the long exposition where I said that our paths could ultimately lead back to each other.

She lost faith in me, she lost the ability to be romantic with me, she lost my friendship when she said I’d never amount to anything.

In time, I contacted her and said that I’d changed my mind on friendship, but only if she was open to it. That was weeks ago, and I haven’t heard back, so I’m thinking I should just get on with my life and leave her behind. I couldn’t stand for her coming back into my life if all she was going to do was tear me down, anyway.

The same goes for Argo. I want her in my life at whatever level she’d like to participate, but not if she still sees me as any kind of threat or wants to unleash her anger. Actually, I take that back. I need to hear how much I’ve hurt her. I need to hear what a mess I made in her life so that she knows I care about her feelings. I also want to experience the feel of her hugs and the simple joy of sitting across the table from her.

But if that is not to be, then again, I just need to get on with my life.

Lunch with Judy and meeting new people will help. I am reaching out. I am reaching up.

God to head, head to feet, feet to floor.

Amen.

I don’t know what I was supposed to have been before abuse, but I don’t think it was this. In a lot of ways, I believe I am perfect as is. I also believe that the track for my life was interrupted… that at 37, I would be much more settled than I am now. I don’t have money or property or children or a steady job or degrees or any of the things that most people my age manage to achieve. I am grateful for my life experiences, but at the same time, there are a lot of people wondering these things with me. It’s the look of “why aren’t you there yet?” The short answer is, “I’m just not.” I’m never looking for the short answer.

The long answer begins with escapism, and perhaps that is also where it ends. At 13 or 14, I began to think that helping Diane achieve her goals and being her friend was more important than investing in myself. This is typical of emotionally abused people. They begin to feel incompetent even if the abuser tells them they’re not. The root of this, for me, is not trusting my own intuition. I thought Diane was making a play for me by giving me her college journal; either she wasn’t, or she changed her mind. In either case, I was wrong about something so gargantuanly huge that it told me my instincts were off. It led to not being able to trust myself with anything else. I was the co-pilot to my own life and let other people make decisions for me because then, if they turned out to be wrong, they hadn’t been my decisions in the first place. I was able to shift blame onto other people for my life choices because they weren’t. They were a series of reactions.

“Blame” is a strong word, but I don’t really have anything less potent to offer. I mean “blame” in the sense that I was reacting to other people rather than making my own decisions, but that does not mean that the decisions made for me were always negative. What I found was that when I “put my big girl panties on” and made my own decisions, I was wrong about them, too… reinforcing the pattern that I was untrustworthy and it was better to listen to my music and play with my iPhone than drive. I can fix your life in a matter of minutes. Mine? Not so much.

I have found that abuse tends to create two personality types.

The first is the person that feels they have to control everything about their environment. They cannot, even for one second, let go, even if it is to let other people take care of them.

The second is the person that feels they have no control over anything, because it has been wrested away and they get used to the feel of it.

I am definitely in the latter category. The journey of this web site is not to go from type 2 to type 1, but to try and create a balance. When I go into control freak mode, I am unable to accept criticism, unable to be open to the universe. When I let go of control completely, I feel steamrolled and unworthy.

I am so good at that steamrolled part right up until I’m not. I have a very long fuse. I am happy to co-pilot until I feel that no choices are my own, and then I lash out like a banshee on fire. Everyone else gets that “run away, run away” look on their faces because it’s a side of me they’ve never seen. I mean, I’m so affable, right?

I unleash my inner control freak to take back my power and because I have had a lot of deep-seeded rage for a long time, it often goes……….. poorly. I said yesterday that I’m now on gabapentin, which has released a lot of that rage so I don’t get rattled like that anymore. I’m looking forward to seeing how that affects me in the future. Right now, I am only concentrating on me. I do not have the ability to work on relationships because I have retreated from all of them, save the ones that aren’t too deep with my “host family.” Occasionally I will open up to James or Aaron, but for the most part, I sit in my own silence, thinking about what I’m going to do without outside influences…. possibly for the first time in my life.

All of the advice and counsel I have given other people over the years has been startlingly wise when I’ve actually applied it to me. As it turns out, I do know what I’m doing given the space to really use the tools I’ve been given. That’s because now there are no voices that say “you’re doing it wrong.” All of my relationships, whether romantic or platonic, have taken on that role for me- the “you’re doing it wrong” part, because even if they started out as equal, I would invariably slide into old patterns and give up my voice. It’s what I know. I don’t have experience in listening to others’ voices and not taking them in as more important as my own, particularly with those I feel are in authority over me… not so much with bosses, but my girlfriends become authority figures in their own right, because to keep them happy is my “job.”

I believe that Dana and I did not succeed because we both had that drive in us. We both followed without leading. We both shifted blame for life decisions onto the other one.

I did not succeed with Katharin or Kathleen because they were both the classic “I can’t lose control of anything” personalities and I was terrified of both of them. That is because their anger and judgment was swift, and I did not know how to react to it except to lie down and take it…. obviously, I was wrong. Obviously I was incapable.

With Kathleen, I developed a very unhealthy pattern called “learned helplessness.” If I did a shitty job at something, she’d come along and do it for me. This is not because I was incapable of taking care of myself. This was because she only wanted things done her way, and no matter how hard I tried, it was never right enough. So, the obvious answer was to let her do everything so I didn’t get yelled at, stomped on, or had any other type of emotional violence levied my way.

In retrospect, that pattern started to show itself with Dana, too, because when I’d clean up the kitchen, she’d come along behind me and “fix it.” she didn’t like the way I folded towels or t-shirts or pretty much anything else except cooking, so I let her do it because I hated being treated like a toddler. It wasn’t that I was incapable. I just felt like her standards were a moving target and I never quite measured up. When I stood up for myself, it invariably devolved into every mistake I’d ever made, and it wasn’t worth it to start those fights just to get some power in the relationship.

I am sure she would disagree with me, because my emotional standards were also a moving target. She felt like she couldn’t win with me, and while that wasn’t always true, it was her emotion about it, and all emotions are valid. I have heard the phrase “I can’t win with you” over my lifetime a lot… however, it has always been with people who have trouble letting go of control. I get along very well with people in which those patterns are not established, and it is amazing how quickly I can force a relationship into it. It’s like a superpower.

With Argo, it was a mutual, healthy relationship by all counts until I just became so me that I couldn’t deal. I viewed her as an authority figure because I learned early on that my emotions toward her were “you’re so much smarter than I am.” My feeling about this has changed. Her IQ is higher, but my EQ tops hers. Our relationship devolved into “you do all the thinking, I’ll do all the emoting.” It worked well for a little bit…. as those relationships are wont to do. It changed over time when ALL I did was emote.

And, come to think of it, that’s been my pattern with that personality type since I was a kid. My power didn’t lie in thinking through things, but emoting through them. Led by your heart is a nasty way to go, because when you let go of critical thinking, you let go of a part of yourself that’s probably not supposed to go. Control freaks (and I use this term lovingly) are happy to tell you what they think. People that don’t want to control anything are happy to tell you how they feel about things, but not so much with the thinking themselves. Things are the way they are. You react, instead of thinking forward.

It’s hard to create your own life when your ability to think forward is arrested, because you lose the ability to take care of yourself if the thinker disappears. I have said up until now that my perfect job is “housewife,” because in thinking that I couldn’t think, I was happy to stay home and isolate. Thinking is for other people.

Also, I think I knew innately that my real superpower came from writing things down, and what would be better than being able to isolate in my own house, with little responsibility but cleaning so that I could spend the rest of the time lost in my own emotions? The breakdown comes in where I stop taking care of the house, I stop taking care of myself, and I stop taking care of my family because being lost in my emotions invariably leads to shutting out the entire world. I start to live in one room of the house, because I feel safer there, kind of like kenneling a dog.

I am an excellent puppy.

The change started when I became responsible for this web site. It gave me drive and focus, because I had to put out content every day. When responses started rolling in, I realized that I was a better thinker than I thought I was, and it gave me even more inertia because that’s what self-esteem will get you. It seemed sudden that I began to get out of the box Dana built for me, the one that said I couldn’t take care of myself, and she rebelled against my new personality. So did I, because I did not recognize all the changes I’d made too fast. Especially with Argo, it became “necessary” to retreat into my old patterns because I was too afraid to take on being in charge of my own life… not yet, anyway. I thought I needed her advice on just about damn near everything, and as it turns out, I didn’t. I just thought I did, having had years of practice at thinking I didn’t know a damn thing.

I slowly gave up my individuation, and the equal relationship we had in the beginning turned nasty, because she didn’t want that responsibility. I put so much on her plate, without even really meaning to do so. I loved her ball-breaking bitch attitude like I loved air. She got shit HANDLED. I wanted to be like that until I felt my balls were in a vise as well.

I should speak more to that, because if she reads that line, she will not like it… and she shouldn’t.

I gave up too much power because I was gargantuanly wrong about something in our relationship (mostly the amount of love and energy she was willing to give me) and I gave up my power. When I started emoting, her reactions varied from annoyance to anger, and I started to feel like I couldn’t do anything right. I couldn’t take back my power once I’d lost it because she was not in front of my face. We were inferring each other’s personalities rather than being willing to cry it out over tea and Kleenex. I crumpled in all of this, ruminating endlessly with Dana about it until I got so angry that between Dana’s jealousy and Argo’s refusal to see me as anything but a basketcase led me to react with such anger that I said some things that I think it will take her a long time to get over, and there’s a part of me that thinks she won’t ever, they were such direct hits on her soul. In the moment, I meant to crush and destroy. Seconds later, I realized that I was so wrong that I crumpled in grief, knowing I’d caused so much pain and wishing like hell I could take it back. Tears streamed down my face at my own inadequacy at explaining myself in a way that did not include unleashing rage.

I went to the other extreme, wanting to lie in front of her naked to the core. Let her rage at my soul, too. Let her inflict the same sort of damage on me that I’d done to her, because maybe it would even the score, or at least, let her get in some good parting shots so that I wouldn’t feel so bereft at what I’d done. As a sexually abused woman, I would have let her degrade me if she’d wanted. Permanent scars to remind me every day of what I’d done. It absolutely tortures me when I think of those ugly words, because there are no do-overs, and in this case, probably no begin-agains, either.

If there were, it would be incumbent upon me to protect her heart in every way imaginable, and I would spend every breath trying. She saved me from a disastrous fate, and this is how I repaid it? In my own mind, it’s good that she went away to protect herself from me… but the still small voice in me also says that I want to make it right. I want to love her the way she should have been loved and treasured all along.

These are my lessons to learn, so that in new relationships I have an awareness of all these things. I have an amazing capacity to love, and I want to let it show…. just not without loving myself, first.

Last night my computer crashed, and I nearly had a heart attack. Full on panic engulfed me because I could not be without a keyboard for the two or three weeks it would take to send it to the manufacturer and get it back. However, there was nothing else to do about it, so I hopped on the Metro and headed for Columbia Heights. It’s not the closest Best Buy, but it is the closest fun spot to hang. I figured I could go for tea or coffee if the news was really bad.

When I got to said Best Buy, my computer hadn’t crashed… exactly. It was kind of like taking your car to the mechanic. I couldn’t get into the BIOS to check what was wrong. It was just stuck on the TOSHIBA screen and wouldn’t do anything. Of course, at the store, getting into the BIOS worked, and for whatever reason, the time and date were wrong. If the time and date on the BIOS don’t match the one in the operating system, it won’t boot. He changed the date, rebooted, and the heavens opened; choirs of angels sang alleluias that sounded something like “Linux Mint has ARRIVED!” The Geek Squad guy saw the Linux Mint logo and said, “man… you ain’t playin’ around.” I thought that was hilarious because Linux Mint is barely discernable from Windows or MacOS if you’re not using the command line. I do, but at the same time, Linux Mint is the baby step…. linux for idio….. I mean, inexperienced users. You install it, you press the Firefox button, and presto. It works right out of the box.

I saw a funny quote on Facebook earlier this morning, one that literally made me laugh out loud instead of just typing “lol.” It said, “there are two kinds of linux distributions…. the ones we bitch about, and the ones nobody uses.” Truth. Ubuntu and Linux Mint for the desktop, CentOS and RHEL for servers. Beyond that, the distributions I used in college are barely a whisper. My friend Leslie nearly made me spit soda through my nose when she said that she had a “Red Hat phase in her young, idealistic years.” In fact, I can think of three or four people who will read that and laugh out loud as well, hopefully not while in the middle of a grape Zevia (those are the bomb). Red Hat is still around, but in my opinion lags behind Ubuntu and Linux Mint because the video is never as smooth, the install is more hassle, and yum/dnf can bite me (except for the fastest-mirror plugin- that shit is cool).

In other news, this is the best coffee I’ve had in a long time, which is serious business because it’s only like, the second or third cup I’ve had since I’ve moved to DC. In my house we drink tea now. Tea is cool.

Right now I’m recommending the coconut black hi-caf from Republic of Tea… if you like coconut. Some people don’t want to drink coconut every morning, but to me, it’s delicious. Sometimes I mix it with Bengali chai that my new Indian roommate gave me. I have always wanted to live with an Indian woman because I follow her around hoping she’ll feed me.

She does.

She also has a teenage daughter, and it’s nice to have that energy in the house. She’s not one of those bitchy mean girls. She’s perfectly perfect in every way, and I mean that sincerely. Her mother has it wired, because thank the little baby Jesus that if I had to live with a teenager, it’s one that actually communicates and doesn’t roll her eyes. Plus, she’s nice to me. I think she likes my hair.

My cup of coffee is out, so I’m gonna need to cut this short. More later…. I just felt the urge to celebrate the fact that lallybroch (my hostname) is alive and well, and that my phone isn’t going to die because I actually had a cable on me.

Ok, Irish goodbye. Thought I was done. Not so much. Packing. Gotta talk about it.
Getting ready to leave the house is so much more complicated without a car. It’s kind of like packing up to take the baby out. I don’t have to pack diapers (not for a few more years, anyway) but I do have to bring my coputer, my phone, my wallet, my keys, my Kindle, a coat or hoodie in case of monstrous air conditioning or pouring rain, a reusable grocery bag, and whatever else I need to drag around all over DC in order to avoid having to go an hour back to the house if I forgot something.

I think to myself, “would I rather have a car?” The answer is always no. I changed my mind completely when I started walking every day, because I noticed more how my vision affects me in a way I hadn’t before. I fall A LOT. I have health insurance. If I scrape my knee, it’s an easy fix. I run into another car, not so much.

I’d rather carry lallybroch, safe in her backpack, and hope for the best.

I have said before that me moving to DC just because Argo is in the area is an Elastigirl type stretch. I have a bigger life here than that, and I knew I would before I got here. It isn’t like there’s no connection at all, though. Because we’d only met each other online, and the wall inherent with that, I thought that meeting in person would take care of the problem. That she would be able to see the woman behind the mask, the one that I really am instead of the personality I created for myself… which was not all that charming, to be frank.

I angered easily, much more so than I do in person. I loved heartily, too, but that didn’t always show. It was better for Dana for Argo and me to be fighting, but only slightly, because I would mope and cry about it while spending time with her…. Present, but not there. When Argo and I would bring out the big guns, it was Dana and Aaron that picked up the pieces, begging me to just forget about her and cut off all contact. It wasn’t like I didn’t try. I pushed Argo away in every dimension you could possibly imagine, because I wasn’t vulnerable with her. I couldn’t just say how much her words affected me and that I couldn’t be married to someone else and continue a relationship that felt this heavy, this clandestine. I was manipulative to a fault, sending her WAY over the line flirts because it freaked her out and I knew it would work. She’d run from me, and that would be that.

In short, I was such a fucking asshole to her, and I thought if anything would prove that I wasn’t the “judgmental dickhead” (one of her pet names for me that was startlingly accurate) I’d been in the past, it would be the repetition of small things that friends do for each other. Like paying for ice cream because she left her wallet at the office. Bringing her a book I’d liked with all my notes in the margins. Showing up with a six-pack of cold beer and a hug when her eyebrows are about to go over her forehead with stress.

The kind of simple shit you do just to show you care. The kind of stuff you can’t do over the Internet, at least not easily. I used to kid her that because we’d met over the Internet, I couldn’t know that she was really telling me the truth about anything and she probably worked at a car wash or something. She said she accepted tips, so I Paypal-ed her two bucks with a note that said my car looked gorgeous. Just simple shit that I knew would make her laugh in the massive wake of all my destruction because I couldn’t see her. It wasn’t personal, this eruption of sorts. It was me rebelling against my entire life, and shit rolled downhill.

So if I regret anything, it’s that I’m not that friend to her anymore. That I caused her to pull away because I needed it. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away from her under normal circumstances, but these just weren’t. My wife thought I was already out the door, my best friend felt ignored, and I was isolating more and more not to have to think about any of it.

I couldn’t get Dana to understand that working through a crush on someone who couldn’t ever return it was quite a bit different than her interpretation… it was only a matter of time before Argo realized she was in love with me. My interpretation was that married people get crushes because they have eyes, but it’s their deal to get rid of those feelings. I couldn’t get her to understand that if Argo had been a lesbian, I wouldn’t have gotten close to her, anyway, because I would have seen the threat innately. I have said this over and over and over, but the words never really sunk in. I was not looking for anything but friendship, and as Argo’s words washed over me, I opened up to her in a way that I hadn’t with anyone else. My heart was a series of locked doors until Argo showed up with the right set of keys.

It was a Richard Gere white horse moment for me, and it tilted my vision her way. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t return my feelings- I couldn’t rightfully give them, anyway. I was married and she was straight. But that didn’t stop the emotion from pouring forth and the hours I spent feeling so guilty I was paralyzed with fear. It didn’t have to be that way, but it was.

Now that I am single and reflecting on everything that happened, I realize how bright and pure a presence Argo was for me, and if I had treated it as such, that light would have shined in me for a lifetime. I once asked Argo, “what does our friendship look like in five years? 20?” She said hopefully strong and comfortable. She was willing to meet me where I was, let me work out my shit on my own, and come out on the other side of it with open arms.

Dana added to my guilt and fear rather than helping ease it. I didn’t know if she was right, that Argo was hiding feelings from me because she knew I was married, or whether she was manipulating me to get what she wanted, which was me all to herself. Dana could not see that she was safe, that my intentions were pure in terms of keeping my fidelity to her and working out how I felt about Argo with a therapist who could shed some light on these repeating patterns I’d had since childhood. She would, in a sense, make room for Argo at the table, and consistently try to squeeze her out. It was an expanding and contracting problem that would not go away. I begged and plead with Dana to listen to me, that she could have as much of me as she needed but my boundary was please don’t take Argo away from me completely. She is not the problem here.

I am.

Dana’s intuition was that the relationship was not healthy, that I was giving love to someone who wouldn’t give it back, and I was astounded. The thing that I underestimated THE MOST in my relationship with Argo is how much she thought about me, cared about me, wanted me in her life but I couldn’t REST in it. I took the emotional temperature of that relationship so often that it made my head hurt, but it was like, “are you there?” “Are you still there?” I had to check, because I wasn’t sure. She was, though.

If I had just relaxed, there would have been more moments where she pinged me out of the blue. There would have been more moments where she saw something that made her think of me. I never gave her a chance to miss me, because I didn’t think she would.

She did.

Sitting alone in my room, I ponder all of these things in my heart, knowing that I could have resolved so many of these problems with patience. My eyes water at all the things I’ve done, and all the things I’ve left undone…. My perpetual connection to the Book of Common Prayer because it’s on repeat in my mind.

There will, quite sincerely, never be another Argo, because when I was willing and able to walk in her inner world without fear, she was able to walk in mine. It was healing and I could inhale bigger breaths. I could see farther down into my own emotions. My brain seemed to work at a higher function, because in thinking all of those huge thoughts, I had someone to catch me in all the right ways a friend should- calling me out when I was clearly wrong and supporting everything I wanted to do in this one “wild and precious life.” Everyone needs a friend like that, and I got her.

She was magnificent, and I wish I could say the same thing about me.

Dana’s continual line was that I fell in love with her brain, first…. And that if I could fall in love with her brain, I could fall in love with someone else’s. That much is true. But the choices behind the emotions were mine to make and I handled everything wrong. Just everything. Now I am sure they both want me to find new friends and leave them the hell alone. But my grief isn’t over, and I choose to experience it now so that it doesn’t dog me forever…. Because I am not grieving what they did to me. I am grieving how I behaved, and trying to prepare for a future in which this never happens again. I acted like a teenager because that’s what I knew to do. I wasn’t healthy, and in some cases, I wasn’t even sane.

Coming back into my body after a long absence has been a journey, not a destination. It is happening day by day as I reach out for jobs over the Internet, meet hiring managers at stores, and network at church with people who have their own businesses. It is meeting friends for lunch and knowing that I am safe in them. It is reaching out and up for more, because I value myself more than I ever have.

This web site has been part of that huge growth in self-esteem. My sermons get shared. I have no doubt that I am being ripped off in congregations all over the world, and it makes me happy. My words are what I have to offer, and they aren’t cheap. They’ve cost me almost everything I have.

The universe is paying it back, though, because the more I lay my pain to paper, the more people support me in my pain and laugh with me when the jokes are actually funny. Ups and downs in life are unavoidable, and in writing them down, I get a huge amount of satisfaction in knowing I can put my problems away afterward. They live in the ether, now. I don’t have to carry them around with me. It is freeing to an enormous degree, like when people say they’ve given their problems to God.

God works through this web site by introducing me to people who are also no strangers to pain. Have also caused unrest and lived to regret it. Can sympathize with where I am and root for where I’m going. I am finding my way in the world, one step at a time…. But luckily, the path is actually a stairway.

One of my good friends from Con Law at University of Houston, Katrina, is moving to DC to go to American University. I couldn’t be happier if I tried. That class bonded us for life, as it did Lindsay, Jill, and me. Dr. Wall was fabulous, but his class was a bitch. He’ll tell you that up front. I shared my notes with Lindsay, Katrina, and Jill. The four of us were a study group and all did very well. I got 102 on the final, thanks to bonus points. Lindsay only got 100. 😛 However, overall, Lindsay got the higher grade, so let’s call it even.

I was also going to take Civil Liberties with Dr. Wall, but my girlfriend at the time was very, very possessive and didn’t want me to take the class because she thought I was in love with him. I cannot believe I listened to her, because it wasn’t just that. She didn’t want me going to night school because that meant I wouldn’t be at home with her. I also got an internship in DC writing national Sunday School curriculum that she didn’t support, and I listened to her then, too. She was afraid that the internship would lead to a full-time job and that I would never come back. Had I realized at the time how much she was holding me back with her jealousy, I would have ended the relationship a lot sooner. I mean, seriously. She didn’t want me to finish my college degree because it meant I wouldn’t be home at night two fucking days a week. Luckily, I came to my senses before we got married, and that was the end of that.

It was agony and ecstasy, that time in my life. I was doing well in school, my dad paid for my sister and me to get paralegal certificates and attended the class with us. We joked that we were Lanagan, Lanagan, Lanagan, and Schwartz….. Schwartz was the silent partner. My then-girlfriend hated that, too, because I was busy on Saturdays and Sundays. She eventually came around and gave me a Cross pen for my graduation from paralegal school, but her anxiety during the whole thing was monumental. One of my professors took an interest in me, and that tortured her as well.

When I went to the doctor, I told her that my doctor was cute and she asked me if I was going to run away with her. When I said no, she’s pregnant (indicating that she was happily settled), she said, “you’d run away with her and take another man’s child?” Ummmm, no. Sit down, freak show.

And then, when we were about to move to Portland, she said that she really needed me to finish my Bachelor’s degree because it would prove that I wasn’t such a flake. So, she didn’t want me to go to night school and she wanted me to finish my degree. How does that work? I am still bitter, but not at her. I’m bitter that I didn’t see the abuse happening because she was isolating me from everyone else I loved and all the things I wanted to do that fed me. I could have moved to DC so much sooner, and I didn’t because someone else told me not to. How did I let that happen? What was it within me that had me listening to someone that was actively trying to cut me off from my life just because she was jealous? I should have known something was up, and innately I did, but I didn’t do anything about it until we went on a house-hunting trip and got into a fight so hardcore that she started screaming “hit me! hit me!”

She left to go pack her shit and I realized that my house was more peaceful without her than it was with her. She realized the same thing, but needed to be the victim so she could go to her family and tell them that I’d broken it off…… even though it was taking her longer and longer and longer to leave Corpus Christi to come to Oregon. After six weeks, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t leaving. She just needed me to let her off the hook.

So I did.

Then I was able to take a deep, deep breath and get on with my life. Dana was my best friend, and I fell into her arms as if we’d never left each other, but there was something new. We found that we kissed well together, and did for seven glorious years. She probably wouldn’t say they were glorious, because we had difficult problems with communication and the same fights over and over. But to me, they were a tapestry, and to only focus on the bad is something I just can’t do.

There is nothing I could ever say that would apologize to Dana enough for how our relationship ended, because even though Argo was never competing with Dana in terms of romance, my attention was divided to a very large degree, and leaned toward Argo when it shouldn’t have, ever. I never should have created communication with someone else that was so private it was like we were lost in our own little world. Dana read everything coming in and going out, so it wasn’t like I was excluding her…. but she could see the energy we were passing in between us, and it was too close for her comfort. She didn’t like sharing me with anyone else, even though she said she was okay with it.

I gave too much of my heart to Argo, not even paying attention to what it was doing to Dana because I took her words at face value and didn’t really look into it. I was too drawn in by Argo’s presence, which is enormous, even in e-mail. She thinks bigger. Her mind is a chess board and she’s thinking 50 moves ahead of everyone else. It was like getting to sit at the cool kids’ table for the first time in my life.

And as my virtual world got better and better, my life on the ground crumbled because I wasn’t watching it wither. I was busy falling in love with words while direct action floated by me unrecognized. It reminded me of when Meagan left for college. My body was in America and my heart was in Canada. I waited by the computer and the mailbox for her letters, and when I didn’t, I was thinking about them. Living in the air and suffering on the ground. Carrying the emotions of the letters and not paying attention to what was going on around me.

I couldn’t help it. It’d been that way since I was a teenager, waiting for Diane’s letters before my mother could steal them. I had no compartmentalization, and apparently, still don’t…. as evidenced by my marriage crumbling as I waited for Argo to respond. Straight out, it was fucked up. I take responsibility for everything about it, because it wasn’t like it was a new problem, just a repeat of a pattern I’d had my whole life, and something I just realized needs to go to my therapist. Being single is the best thing for me if I’m going to live in this virtual world, because I cannot drag anyone else into it. It is mine, wholly, and I hope that I will get another pen pal as outstanding as Argo, because apparently writing letters is my jam.

When I am ready, there will be another partner, but I don’t see it yet. I am too wrapped up in letting go. My heart beats for Dana and Argo, and that hasn’t changed in two years and some change. I write about them to keep them alive in my memory, hoping that there is some combination of words that will touch their hearts in time. I do not have the ability to mend what I’ve broken as evidenced by their lack of response, but I do have the ability to make them live forever.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. Focusing on my inner world makes it where I can’t enjoy my outer one….. But what outer one? I invite my friends into my silence rather than putting myself out there, probably to my detriment but at the same time, unavoidable due to personality type. I am most happy at home with a book. I can’t remember the last time I watched TV, because I enjoy the silence of being lost in a novel. Every once in a while, it envelops me to the point where I forget about my problems, and for that I am grateful.

I feel more settled within myself, though. I have returned to the person that I was before. Before abuse, before girlfriends, before marriage. I am just me, with my tea and my books. There is a sense of calm that surrounds me that I’ve not felt in years.

Maybe all of this was breaking eggs to make an omelet, but I cannot think of it that way, yet. My heart still walks out of my body when I think of either Dana or Argo, and I send prayers of protection and safety constantly. Just because they aren’t physically here doesn’t mean they aren’t with me in spirit. Praying for their peace after the disaster I caused makes me feel better, even if they can’t hear it.

Maybe one day we’ll have a chance to hug it out, pull out our books, and all read together. One can dream, anyway………………………#prayingonthespaces

I don’t think that John realized what a hornet’s nest he’d stepped in when he rebuked Herod Antipas for marrying Herodias, his brother Herod Philip’s wife. Herod Antipas divorced his own wife and Herodias divorced Herod Philip so they could be together. According to the Torah, this was not permissible. John’s admonition was based on a Talmudic law spelled out in Leviticus twice:

Leviticus 18:16

Do not have sexual relations with your brother’s wife; that would dishonor your brother.

Leviticus 20:21

If a man marries his brother’s wife, it is an act of impurity; he has dishonored his brother. They will be childless.

Herodias and Herod Antipas reacted…………. poorly. In a stunning display of “I’LL SHOW HIM!,” John was arrested and jailed. Speaking truth to power did not go well for him because Herod Antipas and Herodias had way more power than John did and used it to satisfy their own egos that the grudge was HANDLED (did you hear Olivia Pope’s voice in the word HANDLED? I did.).

After John is put in jail, it’s Herod Antipas’ birthday. Herodias (also called Salome) does some very seductive dancing that I am sure had every man in the room standing at attention (wink, wink; nudge, nudge). It brings Herod Antipas to his knees, he is so taken with her, so he says that he will give Herodias anything she wants. Anything…. up to and including half of his kingdom. HALF OF HIS KINGDOM. Salome doesn’t know what she wants, and goes to consult her mother.

When I read this Scripture, the first thing I thought was, “oh good. Now the mother is involved. This is not going to end well.” She’s so angry with John that she doesn’t just want him jailed, she wants him dead. The pericope does not record how Salome feels about this, because the story is rushed in the classic Markan way- immediately. However, it does include Herod Antipas’ feelings. He was troubled greatly over Herodias’ request because when John preached, Herod Antipas liked to listen. I do not believe that they were friends, exactly, but Herod knew what kind of mind the world was losing, and he did not want that blood on his hands.

And now we arrive at the heart of the matter. If Herod Antipas liked John and his preaching style, why did he agree to Herodias’ request? There are so many things he could have said, like “I promised to give you a gift, not commit a crime.” Or how about “I was wrong to say I would give you anything you wanted. The deal is off.” John the Baptist was murdered because Herod Antipas did not have enough courage to back out. In the immortal words of Limp Bizkit, “his mouth wrote a check his ass couldn’t cash.” He was caught between a rock and a hard place, because he didn’t want to look weak…. and yet, saving John the Baptist would have made him even stronger, because he could have stood up to his wife, and he didn’t. He sent a soldier with orders to bring John’s head back on a platter. I cannot even imagine Herod Antipas’ face when he saw it…. and what did Herodias want with the platter, anyway? Why such a cruel and unusual punishment? Did she put it on the table next to the fried chicken? That part of the story isn’t revealed, but the anger and malice toward John the Baptist shows clearly.

I don’t think that Herod Antipas realized that his wife and her mother were that devious. How could he have imagined that when he offered his wife a gift that it would turn into all hell breaking loose? John’s death led to Herod’s first wife’s father attacking his army in retalliation, and both the Jews and the Romans were furious. Herod Antipas and Herodias were thrown out, sent away for the rest of their lives because of what they had done.

Herod knew that his conscience wasn’t right, which is why I believe he wanted so much for Jesus to be the reincarnation of John, that somehow the world would get back everything it lost when he ordered John’s murder.

The question we have to ask ourselves if we’re going to be like Herod Antipas, or are we going to be like John? When Herod Antipas was faced with a situation that required real backbone, he emotionally crumpled and gave in to peer pressure. John, on the other hand, was not afraid to call out those in power that were not being lawful. I am sure that he did not realize that there would be enough malice aforethought to get him killed, but at the same time, he had the cojones to say something in the first place, which was brave in and of itself.

There’s a little bit of Herod Antipas and a little bit of John in all of us, because the answer to every situation is “it depends.” Moreover, we have the ability to choose between them at will. We all have the strength to be John in those moments, but giving in to peer pressure is so much easier. It’s the path of least resistance. The story is strikingly similar to Pontius Pilate, who didn’t think that Jesus deserved to be crucified and bent to peer pressure, anyway. The comfort in all of this is that we are not alone. People have been struggling to choose courage over the path of least resistance for thousands of years. Why should we be any different?

Our choices may not include dancing girls and murder, but the ones we make are important to us. In each one, we have to say to ourselves, “who am I?” Is this a battle worth fighting? How do you know when it is?

This is the power of prayer. Right here. The whole ball of wax. Those questions we all face, to be courageous or not, are the ones we sit with until the answer comes. Oneness with the power of the universe comes in the quiet. The answers come from your still, small voice if you are willing to listen. Praying is often uneasy, because feelings spill out of you that maybe you’re not ready to handle. You want to run from them in a Herod Antipas kind of way….. but if you sit long enough and get used to really digging into those emotions, the answer will come. You will arrive in the fullness of yourself, because all of the sudden you’ll be able to direct your emotions rather than reacting to them. Knowing what is right and wrong will come easier to you, and you will discover emotional strength you never knew you had.

Prayer is submission, asking for guidance instead of trying to handle everything on your own…. in a sense. You’ll wrestle with both sides of your mind as the discernment process begins…. and slowly, clarity will reveal itself.

It will be the courage to be John in the world, to stand up for what you believe without shrinking into your smallest place, the one that says, “oh, ok….. whatever they want is fine” even when it is CLEARLY. NOT.

Our psalm addresses this strength, saying that listening to Christ, the Mediator and Advocate, will make truth spring up from the earth. You will feel it happen. You’ll have the courage of John more and more often, because you are not leading people with ego but submission. People will be attracted to your peace, because you won’t get rattled at hard decisions. You will go into your closet and pray, asking God what to do, and emerge renewed in your faith in yourself.

It is a steep climb from being Herold to being John. When in your life have you watched things happen that you clearly knew were wrong and yet went along with them, anyway?

• Does it happen in your work?
• Does it happen in your family
• Does it happen in your marriage?

What would your conscience look like if you sat still and prayed for 20 solid minutes? Have you ever given yourself that gift of silence? Have you given yourself that slow, measured way of working through every aspect of a problem, knot by knot?

Obviously, John did. He had the courage to stand up for what was right, because he trusted himself enough to do so. It cost him his life, and at the same time, I believe that Herod Antipas suffered as well. Is it better to stand up for what you believe, or to feel guilty because you didn’t?

It all comes down to how you handle fear. It is your choice to stand up for what you believe or not… and the power of prayer is what will propel you toward courage…. but only if you let it.

Amen.

The question I get asked the most from readers is why do you write about Argo more than Dana? Your relationship was so much longer. To me, that question answers itself, but I will speak to it. The reason I write about Argo more than Dana is because our relationship was so much longer. Argo is under my skin, so close I can touch it. Dana is a river of emotion that reaches down into the depths of my soul and heart. The river is so mighty I haven’t gotten there yet. It’s going to take a long time for emotion to bubble up, and I’m starting to feel it, but it’s not there yet. I need time to process what happened with Dana internally before the writing begins, because right now, it is something that washes over me, every day, in pictures but not in words. I cannot describe them yet. My emotions are too deep, too entrenched for me to add words.

In a sense, being friends with Argo provided the catalyst I needed to leave Dana, because our relationship as a married couple was in so much trouble that I could see the writing on the wall. However, those feelings are in retrospect, something that I felt but could not put my finger on it. Hindsight is 20/20, and I am starting to see what a mess I made on the way out with both of them. I could have had them both as friends and companions for a lifetime, but my illness took hold of me and I said relationship-ending things that I couldn’t control with my loggorhea, a litany of hurt for both of them as I struggled with indoor voice and outdoor voice.

Loving Argo in my need was not a sin. Being in love with her crossed the line. I pushed her buttons in an extraordinary way, and it is something that I will regret for the rest of my life. She has the type brain that you only meet once in a lifetime, if ever, and the urge to get inside it was strong… never for malice, just for curiosity. I wanted to know how it worked, and she let me in. She now says she wished the relationship never happened. In my worst moments, I think that, too, because the pain is so great. In my best moments, I think to myself that walking in her inner world for a little bit was better than never having done it at all….. and I smile.

This is because I know for sure that she was fascinated by my mind as well… and who doesn’t like people who think that about you? As I told her, I mourn for all the lost conversations, all the lost stories, all the lost cheeseburgers, and all the lost Netflix. I knew I had the capability to accept boundaries, I just hadn’t gotten there yet, and, my apologies to Matt Damon, we’ve run out of time. However, because the intellectual pull was so strong, Dana just got this sense that Argo would eventually bend to my will. It was crazymaking. I knew the boundaries of my relationship with Argo, that having in love feelings was my shit to own and get rid of. Dana took it to a whole other level when we fought, saying that she worried that Argo was in love with my brain as well… that it transcended sexuality and gender.

As it turns out, not so much.

We both wanted to shake Dana until she remembered what was real. However, the shit I had to own provided Dana with a spectrum of emotional bombs that she created out of nothing, because they weren’t based on my process. They were based on Argo being a threat to her. In hindsight, I think she created those bombs because she was ready to part as well, but she didn’t know how to say it, so it was easier for her to latch on to the idea that she couldn’t compete with Argo.

But Argo was never in the game to begin with.

It also made Argo incredibly angry that Dana said things to me that should have gone to Argo directly, and I told her as much. Then, when Dana didn’t say anything, I went to Argo and said that Dana was too polite and Southern to bring up things on her own, so would you please check with her? I was trying to be a good wife. I really was. I thought that opening the dialogue between them was a good thing. However, it blew up in my face mightily when Argo checked with Dana and she said she was fine. Argo didn’t realize how loaded that fine was. She accused me of using Dana to manipulate her instead. I can see why she would think that- who wouldn’t? The problem is that I wasn’t. I was really trying to be open and honest and it came across as malicious.

I was mad that, in a sense, I felt betrayed. When Dana wouldn’t open up, it caused Argo to feel negatively toward me. I shouldn’t have ever said anything, because it was triangulation at its finest. I just couldn’t think of what else to do. I wanted Argo to give Dana the complete picture of our relationship, that she was a loving and open heart for me…. everything that was pure and right and good. I was the one who was struggling, not her. The mark that Diane left on me is that deep friendship and sex are the same thing. I don’t think it was entirely her fault. She is responsible for the choices she made, but I cannot imagine what was done to her to make her capable of doing so. I had to untangle my feelings about Argo one step at a time, and knowing that she wasn’t struggling with those feelings as well made me know for sure it was my knot, with frayed edges (I’m a frayed knot!). What should have happened was therapy, butt quick. What did happen was me thinking I was capable of doing it all on my own, because when you have depression and anxiety, the thought of going to a therapist is scary, especially when you’ve been to two really bad ones. You also have a startlingly poor ability to ask for help.

Now that it’s been long enough for me to have clarity, the in love feelings for Argo are a distant memory, but as I’ve said before, my writing life lags behind my real life as I get clarity on the past. You’ll hear what I’m thinking now quite a bit later. Now, I just want my sweet Argo back, the one that made me think of Lindsay at three years old, singing Somewhere Out There at a talent show on our summer cruise. Thinking of Argo and I sleeping under the same pale moonlight was comforting as we reached out with our words. Distance meant nothing in terms of emotion. It still doesn’t. I am closer physically, but the medium of connection hasn’t changed, and probably won’t. I have done enough.

It doesn’t stop me from praying for her, though. Every night, I ended our letters with the same prayer:

God of the Universe, protect my precious Argo……………. #prayingonthespaces

And by the way, I got the long ellipses from her, because every time she did it, I told her that it made her writing voice sound like Shatner.

I………….. was……… pleased.

Even if we no longer have much in common, we would have always had the past, which, in some ways, is just as important as the present or future. It is where we come from, what makes us who we are.

-Emily Giffin, Where We Belong

Everything takes more energy when you have a broken heart, and mine is shattered. My connections to both Argo and Dana are gone, and in the words of Jack White, “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself.” I go through the motions every day, bringing up jobs on Monster.com and applying for anything and everything, whether I’m qualified or not. It doesn’t matter. Just to get a call back on my resume is amazing. I have a head hunter that’s looking out for me, and my next step is to find my local Manpower or Robert Half. If that fails, I know I can get a job canvassing for a number of causes, because I am great at talking to people I don’t know. I can be quite perky at times, when the “Leslie Lanagan Show” is engaged.

With it, I can hide a lot of broken, as we all do.

In my silence, the broken is showing. Writing about it is the only thing that helps, especially since as I heal, I have a written record of how much pain I was in and how I struggled with the war up. It is horseshit to say that I am responsible for every wrong in this loss, but I feel as though I am. Dana and I shook hands on the fistfight, because she agreed to take 75% of the blame if I would take 25%. I would have settled for 49%. She was quite generous. Sometimes I wake up in the night, surprised she isn’t there, but those moments come less and less frequently as my electronics take up the other side of the bed and I remember that we liked having separate bedrooms just for that reason… well, and the whole naughty neighbor fantasy. That was hot. I smile in remembrance of that one all the time. Going to have to remember that one for future use. 🙂

I hate that our passion for each other is gone, in both cases really. Argo and I were intoxicated with our conversations at first, not going without talking even for an hour. We’d dash off quick notes and chat when we had the time, lost in a world of hilarity because witty banter was kind of our thing. She is a mastermind at witty banter. In the history of our relationship, I think I only shot the goal into the net once. I can’t tell you what the joke was, but I will tell you that it landed and I laughed for several days at having Kings full over Aces.

With Dana, the passion was real and it was deep. Because we’d been best friends for so long, we connected in a way that I’ve never experienced. Dana’s first words to me after we finally (FINALLY!) kissed were, “I’m amazing in bed. I just thought you should know.” She then smiled a little sheepishly and I will tell you that Dana *never* lies.

Now that I’ve stroked her ego (I hope), I will also tell you that it was passion at the other end of the spectrum. When we got mad, it was guns on the table and cutting each other to the quick. We needed counseling, badly, but for some reason we didn’t go. I do not know what that reason is, but if I had to guess it was overconfidence. We didn’t need therapy because after a fight, we were generally very good at making up. But there were some fights that were just never-ending, and the biggest ones had to do with my impression that I couldn’t trust her. I couldn’t say things in confidence and not have them repeated. It embarrassed me to no end, and in a sense, I got very tired of feeling betrayed because she always blamed it on her ADHD and that she “forgot” I’d said it in confidence.

When it got to the point that I stopped telling her things, I knew we were in trouble. Why I didn’t insist on therapy is beyond me, because maybe we could have saved a relationship that for the most part, was easy and unencumbered in the way that all long-term friends interact. I would give anything to hug her. Anything.

I would give anything to make Argo laugh. Anything.

I wonder if a little breathing room will help, and in the meantime, I am doing my best to move on in case it doesn’t. I am leaning on the people who said they would follow me, James in particular. I have never heard those words out loud, and they changed me. James said straight out, “I will follow you.” He supports me in my desire to become a shepherd, ministering to those in need. He’s been my friend since I was 17 and he was 16, the first day of chemistry class in my senior year and his junior. What brought us together is that he noticed my rainbow ring necklace, and he was ASTOUNDED that anyone had enough cojones to come out in a conservative suburb. We laughed and joked all the way through class, and then after school, we went to a coffee shop and laughed some more.

My first love, Meag, worked in the office during my chemistry class, so she came to pick up the attendance roll every morning. I told James from the first day of school that I had a crush on her, and it made my LIFE that I got the girl. So, she’d come to pick up the attendance and no matter what we were doing, NO MATTER WHAT, when she stuck her head in I would yell, “Hiiii, Meagan!” That was another thing James remembers fondly about that class, because he was surprised that I always got away with it.

James knows that I have the ability to lead people, which is why my church is named St. James and All Sinners. I named it after him, because he deserves it. The faith in James of Zebedee lives strong in him, because James was Jesus’ first follower as well. It’s nice to have a hand to hold on my journey, because no one is self-made. I love his willingness to walk beside me as I battle my demons to let them go. Ours is an interesting tapestry, filled with love and mutual respect. He is a true companion, and one that I value beyond belief.

I also revel in the love of Jonathan (Handsome Johnny) and Kara, atheists who cheer me on as someone who wants Christianity done right, instead of the conservative, fear-based beat down that the picture of classic Christianity has become. Their insights and compliments are invaluable on this journey, and I want them to feel accepted for all that they are… which, to me, are people that I can argue with to temper me by fire, but are always up for the idea that Christianity means caring for the least of us.

My past is slowly leading me into my future, and I wish I had begged more with Dana and Argo, before things got so fucked up in my illness. I wish I had said clearly, “please do not walk off when the best part of my life is in front of me.” Perhaps they are not meant to be with me, because this is something I had to do alone, in a sense, because even though I have companions, the majority of the time I sit in silence, preparing. I have to have a real job to pay for rent, food, tuition, books, etc… However, that does not mean that I am not constantly praying myself into existence. When I feel the weakest, I look at a notecard my dad gave me at the airport in Houston, when I was getting on the plane to come to DC. It says:

Leslie,

The new adventure begins…

The Lord bless you and keep you
The Lord make his face
to shine upon you
and be gracious to you
The Lord lift up
his countenance upon you
and give you peace

Numbers 6:24-26

I believe in you.

Love,

Dad

I am so determined for St. James to be a reality that even my dad sees that I am unstoppable. That notecard means more to me than diamonds, because it shows me that someone who has done what I’m about to do sees that I am capable. In a sense, I have been preparing since I was 18. However, it took Argo releasing me from my past to really see the future as it could be and not as it was. She gave me the ability to fly when I was barely walking.

Where I come from has a lot of pain, and where I am going has a lot of promise. All I had to do was realize it, and that self-actualization came at just the right time, because now, I am ready for it.

Amen.

You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an inner exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.

– Sheila Graham

In terms of philosophy, I am fond of Thomas Aquinas. He is the one that came up with the theory of the first mover, that something put the universe into motion, and whatever that *thing* is, he calls God. I once saw a t-shirt to that effect that made me laugh: “I believe in the Big Bang Theory. God said ‘bang’ and it was.” Whether Aquinas was right or not is neither here nor there. In terms of the divine, I cannot concentrate on facts. It is as if the stories are true, without necessarily being factual (I see what I did there…). Do you understand the difference? Ruth Reichl, the longtime editor of Gourmet Magazine, says that she has a way of never letting facts get in the way of a good story. That is how I approach the Bible, as a living document, a lens through which to see the world, but the facts will never line up. The Bible is a reflection on the divine. Whether God is there or not, in a sense, does not matter. It is where the rubber meets the road to me with atheists. When they say to me that God does not exist, I simply say, “what does that matter? Facts feed the brain, and universal truth feeds the soul.” In that vein, I do not believe in the classic “father in the sky” interpretation. I believe in the forceful, violent wind of the Holy Spirit, which, ironically, comes to me in Will Smith’s voice in MIB… that NYPD stands for Nock Yo Punkass Down. The Holy Spirit is remarkably similar.

As I have said before in My Jesus, he is not there so much to comfort me in my distress but to distress me out of my comfort. When the Holy Spirit beckons me to do something, I turn to the Gospels for inspiration. Asking what Jesus would do is not a bracelet, but a lifestyle. Those bracelets drive me up the wall because Jesus cannot be reduced to a soundbite. He is not 11 seconds at 11:00. It’s a more complicated answer than that, evidenced by the Biblical scholars that spend a lifetime working out the meanings of the parables. There are hundreds of respected authors on the topic that would agree with me. Reaching out for answers from Jesus is work. Real work. The kind where you feel exhausted at the end of an hour because your mind is moving so fast.

It is that drive for exhaustion that leads me to the Holy Spirit. The need for understanding of the divine and our reactions to it. What might we accomplish if we recognized a higher power, not for control but to get our fucking egos out of the way? I am not saying that atheists are not important to our society. What kind of faith would I have if I could not discuss it intelligently with the other side (and I often do)? They are not my enemy, they are the ones I lean against to strengthen my belief. In fact, I have one friend, Andrew, that I worked with at Biddy McGraw’s. When we weren’t on the line, we were sitting and talking, sometimes about God and Not God. I began to call him “Christopher,” after Christopher Hitchens, and he began to call me “Rowan,” after Rowan Williams. It was an interesting dialogue, because we recognized our love for each other. He was my “work husband,” and to get heated about an argument was to damage that relationship, not worth it to either of us. However, we were both passionate about our beliefs, and as I have learned over the years, fire does not burn you if you won’t let it. You can choose it to temper you and make you stronger.

That’s what I did… I used “Christopher’s” fire to make me more solid, to be able to argue my beliefs intelligently. I used it to decide what mattered to me in the Bible and what didn’t. For instance, I am not sure whether Jesus’s miracles ever happened. I am shaky on substitutionary atonement. I think transubstantiation is a little bit gross and entirely morbid. But here is what I do believe, wholeheartedly. It’s a quote from C.S. Lewis that I picked up in the movie “Shadowlands:” I don’t pray to God because it changes God. I pray to God because it changes me. For me, prayer is everpresentlovingkindness, a way to center myself when I feel weak. It is a spot inside me that tells me I am right and good, and it is where I lean in order to keep going. It organizes my thoughts in a way that I do not get anywhere else, and the surrender is in asking for help… because when you ask the universe for help, it takes your ego and your pride and moves it over so that you can see the world differently.

I believe in the power of ritual. That the remembrance of Christ is essential to faith, and communion is a representation of it. Every time we go to the rail and kneel in submission, we are sitting in the Upper Room with Christ, sharing the last meal of the disciples, home in a single sip. Even if you cannot believe in miracles, you can believe in the message. I believe that nearly every parable boils down into believing in yourself. Believing in your ability to change the way you react to the world. Kneeling in calm and peace as you wait for the bread and the cup to come around to you is acknowledging the man who helped you achieve that peace in the first place.

I believe in the power of the newborn Jesus, that the story is a call to renew our faith every year. Hope and new life wrapped up in turning inward to wait for the baby and rejoice when he arrives. Who doesn’t believe in the power of a baby? That, in a sense, when the baby is born we all receive a little of their tabula rasa, their clean slate? We remember what it was like to be children, their innocence calling to us with their first ventures out into the world.

I believe in the resurrection, whether it bodily happened or not. The message is clear even if the facts aren’t… the power lies not in Jesus’ resurrection itself, but its example that we have the ability to resurrect ourselves. We can recover from the bad beats, either created for us or by us. Resurrection happens in ourselves and in our communities. In our churches and in our world. There are so many real-life examples of this. The resurrection happened after September 11th. You could feel it. There are so many other instances, but I choose to focus on this one because it was so readily apparent that it was palpable. As a country, we came together in support. We mourned together, openly and loudly. We rebuilt. We survived, even though it was hard work.

What I want, so desperately I can feel it, is to help these resurrections happen. I want the training and the resources to guide others to wholeness, because I know that I have a lot of work to do before I am whole myself. Choosing a church where I could thrive was the first step. Choosing a school where I could go all the way to my MDiv without stopping was the second. Choosing a therapist that could guide me in all of the ways I have failed so that I could put them behind me in order to succeed was the third. I am measuring my steps, because in the future I am liable to have lots of people that come to me for help, and the last thing I want to do is hurt them. If I’m going to be a shepherd, I want to be a good one. I have said many times that being a pastor is only being in front of people 10% of the time. The 90% is people being in front of you.

I cannot hide in my crystal tower and write people into wholeness. I need to give up my bag, my extra tunic, and my huge fucking ego. Healing people by the power of the Holy Spirit does not come from above. It comes from getting down into the problem and working up. When I kneel in prayer, I ask for the guidance to do all of these things, because if I don’t, I will become one of those people who get others to follow them instead of following Christ. There’s plenty of them out there, and I won’t mention names, but you know who they are. I am never going to ask anyone to buy me a private jet………

What erupts through my skin is the power of knowing. I am this person. I am this shepherd. I have the ability to lead, because the energy that created the world is asking me to serve. I have run long enough. If God is the Great I Am, then I am the little one. I know myself, and that is the best gift the Holy Spirit has ever endowed.

I have never in my lifetime connected to a set of scriptures as deeply as Mark 6:4-6. I sat with them for a long time, at first fuming in anger and then letting my emotions roll off me like a sine wave crashing on the shore. I was angry at all the people who called me crazy. That thought moving to DC was specifically designed to hurt someone. That my dream of creating St. James and All Sinners as a building on the Anacostia was less important to me than meeting Argo. If this was all about Argo, I could have just come to visit. I didn’t have to fucking move. I felt rejected in my hometown, so I left. I didn’t want to go to a city where I didn’t know anyone, because I was afraid to completely start over. In a sense, coming back to DC was coming home, because I never should have left in the first place. Two years ago, even Argo was on board. She said, “come here- NoVA is tolerant of all… even Republicans.” That was when I laughed and told her it was definitely a possibility because Dana’s parents are here.

Moving to DC has been in the works a long time, because I cannot even tell you how much Houston gives me the creeps. I love my family, and would willingly step in front of a bus for any one of them. It’s the city itself where I falter. I hate the rednecks that would willingly bash me into a tree. I hate that not wearing makeup had one of my bosses say to me that I always looked like I didn’t feel good because I wasn’t “dressing up,” and I hate that feeling I get when I want to show my girlfriend/wife affection. I look around with so much internalized homophobia that I cannot let go at all. It is with me, an ever-present albatross around my neck that tightens when I don’t know who’s watching and if I am in a safe neighborhood, etc. Houston has changed, attitudes have changed, and I have not. I will never forget the abuse I experienced at HSPVA. It stays with me and I cannot let it go. I have said before that I didn’t want to marry Dana and it didn’t have anything to do with fidelity and companionship. It had everything to do with my own fears and how I hadn’t let go of them, even though it’s been 25 years since I came out.

When I came to DC, I was able to let go of a little bit of my fear. My church had plenty of gay couples, so Kathleen and I fit right in. Getting out of Houston is a relief so great it’s only between God and me. It’s HARD to talk about internalized homophobia. It’s HARD to talk about the fact that society has changed around me and I still feel at times that I have to hide who I am, even though I don’t. In Portland and DC, the relief is palpable. There are still places in southern VA that I fear to tread, but the important part is that I left a city I viewed could hurt me, whether that was the truth or not. My perception is everything to me, and the fight against gay rights in Texas is just a shitshow of epic proportions, and I am glad to watch the fight from really, really far away.

It pains me to think what I could have accomplished if I’d stayed, but I cannot concentrate on that. I have to concentrate on what’s next. In fact, when my dad heard about my divorce from Dana, the first thing he said- the FIRST thing- was “what’s next, Mrs. Landingham?” I can see it. I can see my dream as clearly as I see the empty cup of tea in front of me.

Hold please.

Ok, the empty teacup problem is fixed. Now I can concentrate on the topic at hand.

What’s next?

I have not heard anything from Howard, and I am a little pissed. I do not want to know if I got in, I just want to know that they’ve got my essay and all that. Just an acknowledgement that my $50 was well spent. I am having dinner with Pri Diddy and Elena on Thursday, so I think I’ll just go to Howard then. It’s the same Metro stop. I’ll go to Admissions and Financial Aid because a) I’m poor b) in this line of work, I’ll probably always be poor. Unless Oprah, from whom all blessings flow.

Speaking of which, if anyone knows her and can get some of my stuff to her, I’d appreciate it. My calendar is pretty empty these days. I think I can JUGGLE SOME STUFF AROUND if she calls.

I also want to get back to my fiction, but I am still too emotionally invested in letting go of Dana and Argo to spend time on it, because the emotions that run behind it are our Trinity of sorts. It’s a psychological thriller because Argo said that would sell, and she’s usually right about things, so psychological thriller it is. However, because it is in a sense, about us, it’s too extremely loud and incredibly close for me to delve right in. Maybe a year from now. Maybe two. Maybe five. However long it takes to get these women further down the z-axis so that when I write about their characters, it doesn’t hurt me as much as it does right now. We were so good together right up until we weren’t. The difference between Argo and me is that I choose to focus on the good things I love about her, and she focuses on the things she hates about me. Maybe that will go away with time, but I doubt it. Neither one of us trust easily, neither one of us want to let down our walls to let the other one in, neither one of us wants to live in toxicity.

I would like to think that some of the toxicity is gone simply because Dana is out of the picture and there is no triangulation. I didn’t divorce Dana because of it, just that no triangulation is an added bonus. I hated the way they both pulled away from me when I got really sick, because I needed them more and not less. Luckily, I had other friends to pick me up when I fell, but I was butt-hurt it wasn’t them… this is because I know within myself that if it had been Dana or Argo that was really sick, I would have tried to pick them up in an instant. They both became part of my heartbeat, and I never would have let them hurt- either of them- when I was in my right mind. I wasn’t, and I threw emotional grenades at both of them because I couldn’t see clearly enough to stop. I was lost in my own illness, unable to care for anyone else but me because I was in deep survival mode, pushing them away even though I had no business doing so. It just flipped my shit when all three of us were sharing deep information and then everything turned on a dime and all of the sudden, I was the psycho instead of the one with amazing insights and an ability to read them. Argo’s comment about a restraining order was fucking ridiculous, but I shouldn’t have seen it, anyway. I was playing with Dana’s phone because she let me, and I couldn’t help myself. I peeked at their conversation and found out way more than I ever wanted to know. I own that it’s my fault. I had no right to know what Dana knew, no right to snoop even though she gave me her phone willingly. At that point, we were broken up. I should have known better, and I acted horribly anyway… not for malice, just for curiosity.

To say that I was surprised was an understatement. If Argo had told me directly that she felt threatened, I could have assured her things were fine. I just needed time to cool off, redirect, and refocus my energy. It wouldn’t be a thing that haunts me every day. To think that I hurt someone to the point that they felt threatened is mind-numbingly bizarre to my world, that she would think something like that about me without talking to me, but I understand, and have let go of most of those feelings of anger and abandonment. People like me create strong bonds, and I trashed ours without even realizing what I was doing. However, even though I was really sick, that doesn’t mean that I get off easy. I still have to own my behavior. I didn’t think she would think my words mattered that much- that she would write me off instead of going to that place, the one that says I am not worthy of her trust.

I think I am, but she has no right to trust me right now. I have said it before and I will say it again that if the stars were to align, I’d start at the axiom that she shouldn’t trust me as far as she can throw me and I could earn it back, day by day, week by week, until trust was reestablished.

Right now, I do not trust myself, and that is the worst part of this whole thing. I broke trust within myself that says I am worthy of love, worthy of trust, worthy of anything but solitude. Daphne du Maurier says writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard. This quote resonates with me because the mirror I hold up to the world is one that not everyone likes. They do not want to interact with me because they know that to be in my life is to be in my writing somewhere, because they are my life. If they don’t want to be here, they disconnect from my life… and that is okay with me, because I do not want friends that are constantly worrying about what I am going to say. That do not trust me to give my own impressions without revealing theirs. They have their own truth, which may or may not line up with mine, and that is okay, too. We all have an enormous emotional space in the world, yet few people use it.

That’s all this blog really is. Using my emotional space in the world to ask myself how past history will not be repeated. How I can dig myself out of the holes I’ve dug. How I can safely say to myself “what’s next?” because the past is no longer affecting my future.

I do not have an obsession over either Argo or Dana. I am processing the past, and that is quite different. Not understanding that is threatening, but the reality is that processing is healing, not obsession. Processing is taking a large amount of grief and making it smaller, day by day. You cannot imagine the loss I feel regarding Argo, because what we had was so white and pure that it destroys me that I destroyed that relationship… more than once, in fact, because as Dana’s jealousy became more and more important to me, I pushed Argo away with fire, and yet, I needed her so much at times I couldn’t breathe. I just couldn’t tell her because it made Dana’s eyebrows go over her forehead. Pushing Argo away was literally me reaching into my heart and slashing it with a machete, because behind the fire was so much love I didn’t know what to do with it. I imprinted on her practically the first day I met her, because my world exploded with her brain and her heart reaching out to mine. I have so much rage at myself over the way I treated her, because it was totally avoidable.

I am going to a therapist to try and deal with myself. To try and learn to love myself despite the deep wounds I caused in the people around me. To try and pick myself back up so that I can be the wounded healer I was meant to be, instead of the human grenade launcher.

“What’s next, Mrs. Landingham?”

Reaching out to God, hoping it will heal my heart so that I can heal others. I may not be able to heal the rift with Dana and Argo, but I can pay forward the gifts they gave me while our relationships were alive. It helps to focus on what we did right rather than what we did wrong. I feel like they are always with me when I view it that way. I carry them in my heart and try to feel their pain, try to own what I’ve done so that I can let go in peace.

I cannot help but hope that they’ll come back in their own time, but that is not my decision. I have no control over whether that happens or not. What I can control is how much negativity I’m sending them in my own thoughts, and I have reduced it to none most days.

What’s next is going out with joy, and trying to see everything as a blessing, including bad behavior, because otherwise, how would I learn? How would I grow? I am not fully formed yet, but there are moments. Moments where I feel six feet tall and bulletproof. Moments where my confidence is unfettered. Moments where I am not stuck in the smallest version of me.

What’s next is that the world is going to see me getting bigger. Allowing for more, praying for more, going for more than I thought I could because my words matter to more people than just me. I will be fighting the war up from behaving badly to redemption, even if that redemption is only between me and God. I have to own my mistakes and pray for absolution, because looking inward is the only solution at this point. I acknowledge my humanness, I acknowledge all of the things I’ve broken in the last two years, and I don’t want to feel worthless anymore.

It’s a clarion call. The war up has begun. The horses are ready. The muskets are loaded. It’s go time.

Amen

---

Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph,[a] Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

Then he went about among the villages teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

Mark 6:1-13

This scripture is coming off a monster set of events, culminating in Jesus coming home… and then promptly leaving because the people who know him best don’t seem to be on his side. For the last few weeks, Jesus has been preaching to crowds gathered to hear him, clamoring to touch him like 15-year-old girls at a Beatles concert. Despite his admonition to tell no one, they have heard of his miracles:

• The disciples and Jesus were on a boat (you know what word I’m thinking, don’t you? :P) out on the Sea of Galilee when a storm cropped up. The disciples were kind of pissed that Jesus was just laying there, asleep. So they wake him up and he calms the sea. Calms. The. Sea.
• A woman walking in the crowd around Jesus touches the hem of his garment and Jesus feels the power go out of him that heals her and says, “who touched me?”
• Jesus raises a 12-year-old girl from the dead, and it’s not just any 12-year-old girl. It’s the daughter of a ruler of the synagogue.

After these events, Jesus leaves Galilee and heads for home. It’s been a successful mission, and venturing into fiction, I think Jesus might have been a little homesick….. right up until he got there.

It’s been said many times that “you can’t go home again,” and perhaps that phrase has its origins right here. They just gutter snipe him into the ground. Instead of being amazed by his ability, they scoff at the gifts he’s been given in a way that clearly says, “WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS?” It’s amazing how quickly the scriptures have him pack up and get the hell out of Dodge (“on second thought, let us not go to Nazareth, for it is a silly place”). It is back to the business at hand, because clearly he cannot “work from home.” When Jesus felt the rejection of his own people, it caused him to break down, because he couldn’t heal many because most of them had hurt him, deeply. The power he felt went out of him in the face of his pain… and yet, this is not where the story ends.

Rejection begat action as Jesus took back his own power, consecrating the disciples and giving them authority to heal in his name… as well as laying down the gauntlet for what his kind of ministry entails. You don’t get extra clothes. You don’t get a beggar’s bag. You don’t get your one “luxury item.” This is not Survivor. They are told to basically live hand to mouth if they’re going to be given holy authority; they don’t even begin to understand why until they start healing people for real and find out most of those people have even less than they do. They are tasked to see more, do more, BE more than they ever thought possible because they were not trying to hand down riches from above, but trying to help people lift themselves up. In the current political climate, it is notable that they are also not asked to evangelize by pushing their beliefs onto other people, simply to fold people into the family if they are willing to listen.

This is another scripture that gets used as a clobber passage in terms of evangelism, because they think Jesus means “make a big damn deal out of shaking the dirt off your sandals.” It’s the passive aggressive way of saying “screw you guys, I’m goin’ home.” That’s not my take on it at all. I think Jesus just wants to make the statement publicly with his ministry that if the people do not accept him, it’s really not his problem (in my head I’m thinkin’ “because he’s really not paid enough to care”). He is responsible for leading his people, not people who don’t want to be led in the first place.

In the early church, there were many, many people rejected by their families because they thought Jesus was a nutbag. They had to go and find their own niches within their church family, creating community among themselves to adhere to what they believed… and while they were being rejected, Jesus was slowing changing the power dynamic all the way around him…. it was no longer power over, but power with.

In an excerpt from his book Zealot, Reza Aslan talks about this phenomenon:

Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’ head as he writhed in pain – “King of the Jews” – was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus’ crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e. treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time was killed. Nor did Jesus die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called lestai, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but that actually means “bandits” and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel.

Sedition. Treason. Insurrection. Rebellion.

The Romans did not understand nor care to that Jesus was not talking about a coup d’etat… or was he? The political picture that the Romans paint of him bears little resemblance to the sweet shepherd we know, and then again, the Bible does not delve much into the political history of first century Palestine, either. As this is Fourth of July weekend, think of the Romans as Britain and the Jews as the struggling new country trying to assert its freedom. Jesus and Thomas Paine (author of Common Sense) had much in common because they were both trying to lay out why a revolution should occur. The Romans had much more physical ways of keeping rule than simply taxing the Jews out of house and home. There were times when the streets ran red with Jewish blood.

The choice Jesus made was to stand up and fight against his oppressors, not by trying to take power from them, but by raising the people up through the power of the Holy Spirit, the great oneness that binds us all together. It was not his intent to take on the Roman government by force, but to make the people recognize that they were worth more than the Romans were handing down, and to give them strength in the midst of their fight upward.

Jesus has determined that he may not win over all hearts and minds, but it is foolish not to try.

It’s amazing how much liberation and resurrection have in common. Liberation theology is an interpretation of Christian faith out of the experience of the poor… an attempt to read the Bible and key Christian doctrines with the eyes of the poor (Phillip Berryman, Liberation Theology: Essential Facts about the Revolutionary Movement in Latin America–and Beyond). In its essence, how could Christianity have been anything more than that? Jesus asks his disciples to take on the characteristics of those to which they minister, because he does not want the people to think that power comes from people greater than them, but from people who look just like them.

In modern-day DC, we have the chance to do that ministry every single day. I am not here to guilt you into giving up your extra clothes and your bags, but at the same time, if there’s a part of you that feels like you’re just a little more equal than everyone else, I ask you to examine it. When you emerge into these new beliefs, it may not be without conflict. Those around you may still believe that The War of Northern Aggression was all about states’ rights. Those around you may still believe that homosexuality is a sickness and that people who choose to be homosexual are allowing themselves to “wallow in sin.” Those around you may fight the idea that we should have women clergy, women bishops, women justices, women presidents. Those around you may not feel like gender identity is even a real thing. That these men and women are just choosing to play dress-up instead of the years and years of psychological torture they’ve endured with the brain of one gender and the body of another. However, if you believe in the power of Christ Jesus, opening your heart to include all of these people you’ve formerly condemned is non-negotiable, including those who oppress you.

Although, Jesus does not say that if people oppress you, you have to like it. Walk away. Just don’t carry any animosity toward them. Wipe the dirt off your sandals and go and find other people like you, who will support you in all of your works. Do not continue to live in darkness, but accept your light for what it is. Develop it. Light is not a destination, but a journey, and saying to yourself that you are going to treat people the way Jesus did is the first step down on holy ground.

The second is that in liberating others from your discrimination, you have liberated yourself from your own negative thoughts. What will you do to fill your mind afterward? The possibilities are endless. You may realize that you have more power inside yourself than you ever thought possible. More love. More empathy. More ability to give unto others because you are not thinking about how their lives inconvenience you. You’re thinking about endemic problems in society and how to solve them. You are rising above your discrimination and your hatred in order to form a more perfect union… both in community, and with God.

Your friends and family may think you’re crazy….. but the people who think they’re crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.

Amen.

In “Confessions of a Winning Poker Player,” Jack King said, “Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.” It seems true to me, cause walking in here, I can hardly remember how I built my bankroll, but I can’t stop thinking of how I lost it.

Matt Damon as Michael McDermott in Rounders

One of these days there’s going to be a morning where I don’t want to vomit when I wake up. Where I don’t open my eyes and immediately think of the tough beats of my career, that neither Argo nor Dana want to have anything to do with me because they’ve written me off as a psycho. One of these days, I will stop taking responsibility for every aspect of every wrong in both relationships, and I will realize that I can have some of my self-worth back. Right now, though, I’ve broken the cardinal fucking rule… always leave yourself an out. In the emotional sense, to me that means keeping a part of myself for me. Part of me that says I have a ton of worth in my writing, singing, creativity… the way that doctors know that when everything else fails, they have the operating room.

Because I’ve written so many volumes about the fights the three of us have had and how those fights have shaped me, I lost faith in myself as a writer, because they both stopped talking to me and started using my blog as the be all and end all of who I was as a person. That I was only based on what I wrote, and not who I was. That a blog entry was just a slice of time, and not the entirety of my being. They would reference my writing without follow-up questions, like, “did you mean to say x?” It would have meant a lot to me to be able to defend what I said or not. To be able to say, “no, I was just mad at the time,” or “if the shoe fits, wear it, but I didn’t say it directly to you,” or even better yet, “you’re welcome” when I’d said something sweet. No one in this blog is a 2D character.

It was worse with Argo, the seeing me as what I wrote, because we’d both get mad and bring out the big guns quick, and we are really fucking good at it. I would have liked to see what that passion would have looked like in real life, and I do not mean anything romantic by it at all. In the beginning, it was passion for life and all it had to offer… which to me means that OF COURSE we were at each other’s throats when we were mad. Passion for life usually means passion at both ends of the spectrum…. the “I’m going to win, DAMNIT” that comes with being passionate people and as first children, a monstrous inability to be wrong which always escalated into heights unknown to God and man. The internet provided us a wall to be as mean to each other as we possibly could- on the same side politically and still acting like Internet trolls to each other when we didn’t agree.

And, for me, breaking the other cardinal fucking rule. Crossing a line that never should have been crossed. I own it. I call myself out on it constantly, and I sit in those ruins because if that line hadn’t been crossed, I would still have her right now. Right this moment. It’s fucking Friday. Where else would she be? I mean, come on. I AM ADORABLE (kidding, kidding).

With Dana, it’s a little more difficult for me to imagine where we would be if I hadn’t been so vocal about falling for Argo, because what I see now that I didn’t see then is that we were products of very similar backgrounds and we caused a lot of damage to each other until it boiled over. Argo was just a catalyst to recognize it, I suppose. There were plenty of reasons why we needed to break up long before we did, mostly because we were the perfect couple on the outside, even to us, because we couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about anything real… again, even to each other.

These things became even more obvious as Argo began to overclock my processor. I saw the world differently, and there was no going back. I felt like I couldn’t fit into the box that Dana made for me, because I couldn’t fit into the box I made for me, either. I was writing about different things than I ever had before, even praying for things I’d never prayed for before. I arrived into the fullness of myself, and for a sapiocentric person like myself, the falling in love part was both unavoidable and, in three words, really fucking stupid.

It’s the “really fucking stupid” part where I trip mightily, pretty much every day. I think to myself, “surely this will pass. Surely she will see that I am not the sum total of what I write.” And then I remember how much vitriol was spewed at me and I think not. That vitriol didn’t come out of nowhere, though. I said some things to her that I didn’t think I could’ve or should’ve said to anyone, but again, that layer of anonymity was crucial in terms of seeing the whole chessboard. She didn’t deserve any of the things I said, but she got them anyway because I wasn’t right in front of her face. Had I been, I doubt she would have gotten anything out of me, much less all of the anger and the undercurrent of sexual feelings I own that led to our demise. No wonder she doesn’t want to meet me. I don’t even want to meet that me.

But again, circumstances are everything. My marriage was falling apart and I was trying to make her mad enough to stomp off. I knew I wasn’t capable of being vulnerable and just saying, “I cannot handle this.” I had to exquisitely piss her off, and it worked marvelously well. My only comfort in this whole thing is that I know I come by it honestly, and exactly from whom it was inherited. It doesn’t excuse my behavior in the slightest, but it does shed some context as to how this will never happen again. With Argo, with anyone. My abuse buttons got pushed because I felt threatened when Dana couldn’t accept Argo as my friend, so I blew her out of the water and in doing so, I became someone I didn’t recognize or even like. In my own fucked up way, I thought that if I could piss Argo off enough to stomp off, and had some time alone to get over whatever it was I thought was going on, then I could get Dana back.

With several months’ worth of retrospect, what should have happened is that I should have made the first breakup with Dana stick and leaned on Argo appropriately (if she’d let me). Hindsight is always 20/20. I should have listened to the friend (not Argo) that said, “I love you both, but I do NOT like the way she treats you. It seems like your opinions don’t matter.” But no. I had to handle things in the shittiest way possible because that’s what I knew to do.

I feel like such a winner.

I know I need to move forward and stop concentrating on this incredible bad beat, and it will come with time. Right now, though, I am content to be single and get to know myself for who I really am, and not the psycho I’ve been made out to be, because here’s the deal. I treated them like crap, and I own it. But I also did not come to DC just to stalk Argo and that’s a thing that’s been laid on my head that’s just not there, has never been there, and I resent the hell out of it. The only thing I wanted from Argo in this whole exchange is one meeting where she got to see me in the flesh, and know for sure that I am just a sweet nerd that let her internet troll get the best of her. She doesn’t want it, so that’s that. I am not EVER going to make a reason for us to interact. Not ever…. to the point where if I see something I think she’d enjoy, I don’t go. I do not want awkward to become onomatopoetic.

I rejoice in the friends I do have here, and lament that she is not one of them, but I own why. I more than own why.

For the first time in my whole fucking life, I know that I sat down at the table with the mad Russian, and emptied my own pockets.

My eldest stepsister on my mother’s side is dead.

She’d had a long history of alcohol and drug addiction, but we aren’t sure whether that was her actual cause of death. Because she was found dead, there will be an autopsy to determine it. It looked to the people who found her that she’d had a stroke, which is perfectly natural, so there is no reason to believe that drugs were involved… but I cannot believe that her history was on her side in that regard. The stroke was just the last thing that happened.

I don’t think that she would mind me telling you this, because she was an out and proud AA member (lovingly calling it “high school with ash trays”), one of those people that succeeded for fifteen years right up until she didn’t.

We didn’t know each other well, and in fact, have only met each other once in the flesh… but we were close on Facebook Messenger. There were moments in time where we reached across the divide and got to know each other for our own people, without my mom and her dad, discussing secrets in the night like sisters do. There was a mutual admiration society. She was half white, half latina. I am all white, all lesbian. There was a lot of shared ground in discrimination, and our pride came from the fact that when we met each other, she was the department chair in Mexican American Studies at UTA, and I had just gotten word that I’d gotten an internship in DC writing national Sunday School curriculum for the Human Rights Campaign.

She’d ask me for help with her computer, and we’d chat away, because wisdom always comes when you’re doing something else. She found that she needed God in the same way I did, to get her ego out of the way to live life on life’s own terms. I do not know what happened next; she pulled away from me and I didn’t hear from her for several years after. I was surprised when she came to Houston for an extended period to rest and recover and didn’t want to see me, but I did not take it personally. She didn’t want to see anyone.

But what I wanted more than anything was to give her a hug, tell her everything was going to be okay, and kick her ass into next week… not because I wanted to be mean to her. It’s that when you’re so far down, you have to have someone else kick your ass until you can kick your own. I don’t know from addiction, but I do know from depression. Kicking her ass wouldn’t have been easy for me, because the ass-kicking doesn’t take place from lording above. It takes place from getting down in.

You have to be able to say, “I have been there, and I know the way out.” I would have told her about Dana and Argo. I would have told her about my depression and how it mutilated me into a person I’d never seen before. I would have told her all of the things you cannot tell someone who hasn’t been there herself, and hoped that the ass-kicking came from a resolution not to make all of my mistakes…. and the strange thing is that my own ass would have been kicked in hearing all of hers. Mutual ass-kicking and mutual admiration in two hands bound together.

Death is a different kind of knowing the way out, the kind where it is a relief, because not only are you not a worry to yourself, but no one else, either… or so you think.

Her eldest son just graduated from college, and is now tasked with making arrangements.

Goodnight, sweet sister. Let me sing you to sleep.