I called Dana about 4:30, and said, “I want to write about my chemical dependency class in the hospital, and it led me back to when you got your DUI. I promise you, it won’t be a slam. It will be about everything we fucking learned.” She agreed, and I said, “I LOVE YOU FOR THIS!” Yes. I told her I loved her, as I did every day and am maybe a little gun shy about it now, but I still mean it with all that I am. My next door neighbor and I were talking and I said, “I’m going to wait a year and a half or so and then ask her out again.” I am not planning on the answer. I am planning on the ask. This is because Dana and I define day in and day out love. We know it like we know the earth is round. We know it to the degree that attractions to other people don’t bother us, because we know that attractions come and go, but our love stays the same. You know why? Because I realized long ago that I have the emotional capacity to love more than one person, but I didn’t have the time or the will to manage my feelings to that degree.

I learned this by dating. I loved the ability to go out and do things with different people, but I did not like the time constraints that go with it. Jealousy ensues. There’s infighting and lots of it. As you know, Dana tends to wound me about Argo, because even though she’s a breeder, in the past Dana has even said that eventually, Argo will fall for me anyway. I laughed so hard my desk chair sagged. I have about as much chance with her as I do with Matt Damon and Oprah. I just enjoy her humor, which is good because there’s a lot of it. She throws me a bone once in a while just because she knows I fucking eat it up, but that’s the extent of it. For instance, I was talking to her about this phenomenon of bending her to my will.

“How can I decide whether I’m in love with you or not if I haven’t seen your rack? What kind of idiot do you take me for?” I laughed out loud when her reply hit my inbox.

Two letters.

DD.

Actually, I laughed out loud for several days over that one. I’m laughing now as I type this. It’s such a great memory that I have to pause and smile and glow because Argo gets me. I don’t have to be in love with her to love her for all she’s worth, and I sit in it constantly.

The only reason I can do this is because Dana made room. Dana and I have been through so much that even connecting with someone else on an explosive level didn’t give her much pause, but she had to sit with it for a very long time. Still sitting with it. Still sitting with anger and resentment that she thought I was trying to replace her and I thought I was trying to save her from me. Argo listened to all the thoughts I had- those moments where a quick note with an aha! Moment led to hilarity and a depth I’ve never experienced. I needed a safe place to fall, and even though Dana had her sister, she didn’t realize that I needed Argo in the same way. I needed a sounding board to vent about our issues so that I had more tools to work with in our next encounter, whether it was romantic or angry.

Of COURSE because of my history with Diane, I struggled with the difference between bff and crush because those two relationships are wired in my head to be the same. Seriously, THANKS FOR THAT. However, it was so much easier for me that Argo is straight because for her to be a lesbian would face me with an impossible choice. I needed both of them to make room for each other, because I didn’t want either to go away.

The fact that Argo and I haven’t spoken recently and Dana and I are getting a divorce is both devastating and liberating. I have been caught in this mind fuck for two years, and I am ready to be on my own. I need time to process these last seven years until I can understand them inside and out. I want an M&M (Mortality & Morbidity) that lasts years, because that is what it will take to get both of them out of my system if that is what they want our future to be. I am not holding my breath on either of them, because I have done enough. As Dana’s depression got worse and worse, I kept running to Argo for emotional support that she couldn’t give anymore because I needed her more than she needed me. It wasn’t always that way, but it is now. It is as if the mission is over with both of them. I needed them desperately at this time in my life, and though it is devastating to think what might have been, it is even more exciting thinking about what is to be.

But in order to understand the future, you have to understand the past.

Dana had imbibed a little more than normal, but I was even more fucked up so I didn’t notice and didn’t call her on it when she wanted to drive home. We went through the drive-thru at Taco Bell, so close to our apartment that when the cop started following us, we ended up in the driveway of our apartment complex, lights flashing. There is an official report in Portland somewhere that says Dana failed a field sobriety test and a Breathalyzer, and I had Taco Bell lettuce on my face.

So there’s that.

I am so drunk that I cannot even see straight and the officer asks me who I want to call. I am sobbing as I say, “Volfe.” At that point, he’s the only one I want to see and I want him to pick me up and fireman carry me to safety, as he has done so many times metaphorically. If there’s anything I miss about living in Portland, it is the proximity to my soldier.

So he comes to get me and takes me to safety and I wake up yelling, “DANA!” Volfe sits down and sighs. “Dana has been arrested and she is in jail. We have to go get her.” I have no words. The color has drained completely out of my face as I remember in bits and pieces what happened the night before. We were drinking and throwing darts, and to say it got a bit out of hand is probably accurate. We had the judgment of drunk people, which is exactly how I ended up driving Dana to the airport at 2:30 every morning for three months straight. You cannot possibly understand how inconvenient it was for me, because I hate driving. Being the only one in the family that could drive was scary and intimidating, because I couldn’t rely on her to let me check out and just run the music. I got more confidence about driving in those three months, but mostly I learned how much I love Dana.
It terrified me when Volfe and I showed up at the Multnomah County jail and Dana had been released a half hour earlier and taken the bus home. We didn’t make it in time. She thought she’d been abandoned. I was screaming inside because SHIT. I FUCKING FAILED HER. I wanted to be there to receive her, to tell her how much I loved her and how it was ok, we’d make it through, we can do anything. I did when Volfe and I arrived at the house, where she was wailing, and rightfully so.

In those moments, you need to be left to self-soothe, because it is the only thing that will really get you motivated to never let these things happen again. My AA friends let me fall against them because they knew Dana and I. We’d made a horrible mistake by taking the car home that night, but we weren’t absolute lushes. They heard the cry for help, though, and came running. I could tell them all of the things running through my mind as I felt the responsibility of caring for someone who couldn’t drive and had the worst possible choice to drive her around now. I have always had anxiety about driving with Dana in the car, because I love having her as a second pair of eyes, but she also turns into the archetype coach who teaches driver ed when we’re out and about. I am sure that I need it. I just resent it because it’s pedantic and yet necessary.

She also hates the GPS, because she likes to memorize a map and direct herself. I am not competent to roam the streets without Siri. This is not because I can’t memorize a map. It’s that if Siri didn’t remind me where I was going, I would just wander around until I got wherever I was going, which may or may not be the place I originally intended. It is serendipitous, certainly, but not so much with the direct. I use Apple Maps and Google Maps so that location is not something I have to store. I am thinking in seven different planes and the GPS takes care of one of them for me. It is marvelous.

Driving Dana in the dark made me a better person. The night crew at 7-11 became our friends. We’d stop for caffeine and most of the time for me it was coffee with cream and marshmallows. For my Portland readers, it’s the one at Powell and 65th? Somwhere around there, anyway. It’s the one that’s next to the two stop lights in a row that annoy me to this day.

Yeah, maybe I should let that one go.

I loved the way that I was able to jump in for Dana without judgment, and went to all her open classes. In fact, I paid $50 for one of them, and it was the best $50 I have spent in ten years. If there is anything you need to know about me, it’s that I am fascinated by medicine. I can read journals for fun. So when I paid my hard earned cash and sat down, a woman appeared on stage and said “I’m a nurse.” Brain. Engaged. Hyperspaaaace! She taught the class how alcohol and marijuana affect the brain during all decision-making processes and an MRI of a 22-year-old who had huge clumps of grey matter missing. Then, they brought up a guy who’d wrecked his truck by slamming into a J-wall at 75 mph. He’d worked at Fred Meyer, so the entire catalog of SKU numbers was still in his head and he couldn’t remember what he’d eaten five minutes earlier. Long term memory intact and short term memory ripped to shit. The guy couldn’t even drive because he’d forget where he was.

In my chemical dependency class in the hospital, I opened up about what it was like for me to go to AA with my friends when they were having birthdays and chairing meetings. It was finding God in the middle of the mess. The people that taught me the best way to live life is this mantra: “Son of a bitch, everything’s real” (SOBER). By that I mean that beer culture is not my culture anymore. It makes my depression worse, but it’s not like I don’t love a drink now and again. If I have $20 to go out, I am the one that will get one $15 drink instead of four or five shitty ones…. because now I know what my brain looks like. It’s losing grey matter I don’t have to lose. 🙂

Since those lectures, I haven’t drunk more than one beer out and driven home. Decision-making ability starts at the first sip. I cannot lose control like that anymore, and I do not like it. What I have learned is that I was living in a culture that’s all pubs all the time, and when I moved to Houston, it wasn’t a thing. I learned that I would rather be at home not spending money, and even though diet soda is a chemical shitstorm, it replaced alcohol as the default beverage of choice. If you move to Portland, be prepared for the onslaught of beers you’ll be asked to sample. Some people handle it well. Some people do not. However, it only took one night of bad judgment for us to say “no more” (Cue Billie Piper, will you?).

No more.

Learning ourselves in that moment was finding Gallifrey, except it had been on the TARDIS console the whole time… a round piece of glass and a slice of time.

This is just a guess, but I think it has legs. What I know for sure is that River has her finger on my lips saying, “Spoilers!”

I make my own spoilers now. I know what’s coming, and I am impressed. My Fanagans have really started getting the numbers up, which makes me feel like I must be doing something right. I think I am, because my gratitude flows like a river for those of you that know I am just taking up my space in the world and if you don’t agree with me, you have the right to say what you want. I am not entitled to your opinion unless you want to give it. Knowing it gives me strength for the next day, when I look at my tattoo and imagine the knife needed to make the blood flow. My tattoo is based on the saying, “writing is easy. You sit at the typewriter and slice open a vein.” It’s on my forearm, where I see it every day. Every day I know pieces of me leave my body and stream into this space. I can wander and wander and dream of what will be, because that is my destiny. To prepare the way for you…. not because I need to. Because God has asked, I sat with it for 20 years, and I am going to do something about it. I will no longer tolerate my indolence on this issue because if there is anything that AA has taught me it is how to be courageous……… because being courageous is nothing more than knowing yourself inside out. As I said in my chemical dependency class, “I am so jealous that I can’t go to AA because I’m a normie. Where’s the AA for people who don’t really drink and yet still can’t get their shit together?” Everyone laughed, hard, and my AAdar went off when I said that I love AA just as much as I love church, because somebody’s higher power could be Burger King and yet, it still manages to get their ego out of the way. The leader of the group smiled and said, “that’s exactly what AA is like.” She nodded at me KNOWINGLY and I met her eyes. I received her gaze with a smile, kind of like when you figure out someone’s gay and you need to let them know without words that whatever they’re about to say is ok.

And that’s what I learned from Dana’s DUI.

Everything they’re about to say is ok, and everything I say is ok, too.

The job that I wanted in DC isn’t right for me because they won’t take 15 years of experience over a Bachelor’s degree, but that’s ok. I have found plenty of tech jobs where that’s not a problem. No one in my department at Alert Logic had finished college, but they can administer servers, program anything, etc. They started on the job in college just like I did, and made more money than we thought could be made and fuck college, that’s how. I do not want to tell you why I left college, because it’s a long, tragic story that will take me 15 years to finish. I have other things to work on, mostly a resume that showcases exactly what I’ve done to say that I have this much experience with computers.

My background is academic technology, and if a job came open at a university, I’d go. It’s the best place to be the most well-rounded at work. The computer support is basic, and the benefits of working for a school are obvious. Like, hashtag obvious. More days off than everyone else, more benefits than you can use, etc. It was stupid to follow Kathleen to DC because I could have stayed at University of Houston until I retired. However, following her to DC was a choice I needed to make because it was the first time that I was living on my own with no parental involvement at all. I wandered around the city, even the bad neighborhoods that I was told to explicitly ignore because more than one person said I wouldn’t come back. They were wrong. I have met more friendly people in Anacostia than I ever did in Alexandria. Because here’s where the rubber meets the road- poor people need each other more than everyone else. We survive by banding together, and in DC, that never meant anything racist. Girl, we are all poor together.

So today I went to the shittiest apartment complex I’d ever seen and walked around in amazement. There were construction workers all over the place in beautify mode. I am interested in apartments where they keep the grounds looking nice, and there’s a pool and a playground on the “campus.” Everyone speaks Spanish, but that wasn’t a thing. I went up to a stranger and said, “Donde esta la offcina?” (Where is the office?) He told me and I walked totally in the opposite direction. I went back and said, “Lo siento, mi espanol is muy mal. Repite por favor, y habla despacio.” (I’m sorry, my Spanish is very bad. Could you repeat it and speak slowly?”) They were so kind to me in my broken Spanish that a man dressed as a vaquero walked me there himself. We chatted and he said, “It’s ok, my English isn’t very good, either.” I want to move into this complex, if for no other reason than in a year I’ll be fluent. My Spanish IS bad right now, but I had two years in high school and multiple mission trips to Reynosa. I am EXCELLENT at speaking Spanish when I am dropped into immersion mode. In order to speak Spanish well, you have to be able to think and dream in Spanish, too. That happens in immersion mode. When you don’t have the choice BUT to speak Spanish, it’s amazing how quickly you adapt.

Plus, who doesn’t want to live with Mexicans? Seriously. Why the hell would you want to live in a community where no one knows how to fix things themselves? The minute your car breaks down, you’ve got three Tios and two Primos with the hood up, telling you what’s wrong and all the aftermarket stuff I can add (whoa there, cabron…. you know it’s true…). The Mexican people as a whole just make me happy, and I want to say it out loud. Of course we have people from different Central and South American countries, but let’s face it, in my neighborhood it’s all Mexico all the time. You can tell by the futbol flags. You can root for Mexico, or you can move. There’s really no other option.

YAY MEXICO!!!!!!

But at night the abuelitas will sit around and tell you stories and feed you until you think your guts are going to explode and then say, “it’s time to fix dinner.”

The apartment itself is a one bedroom with den for $710. It’s more than I want to pay, so I have to keep looking. I just don’t want to. This one is perfect.

Tios included.

 

That’s the tagline for the lawyer’s firm that I will call “Counselor” for the rest of my life. If I can’t get closure with her, I will get closure without her. She is one of the lights of my life, being Dana’s sister, the one that she could go to with everything because I am only one person and sometimes I am the problem, not the solution. She is the reason we were married as long as we were, because she was Dana’s safe place to fall, and always will be.

She carried so much weight in our family, sometimes being stuck in the middle as Dana and I both rebelled against parental approval. We didn’t need it. We were going to be married whether they liked it or not, and they could get on board or they couldn’t. Their actions did not affect us. Our reaction was constantly not to have one. To pretend that it mattered was to stop being us and start being what they wanted, instead. She looked into us and called it good, even though we had to be selfish and set boundaries because the more we let them in, the more they had the power to destroy. They thought I was a deadbeat. They thought I was holding Dana back. They have thought this about every person Dana’s ever been with, because they have a perfect video tape of Dana’s wedding that does not include me or any other vagina.

She stayed with us. She prayed with us. She never let us forget that she was on our side just as much as she was on theirs. Her reaction was constantly not to have one, because there was nothing left to do but be judge and advocate for us both; handy because she like, does that for a living. As I told Argo, I love her sometimes more than myself for it. She didn’t have to be kind and loving, but she was. She didn’t have to be accepting, but she was. She didn’t even have to like me, which is good because we are both so strong that we cannot help but fight like first children, either. But with Counselor, fights end in hugs and tears and cheek kisses, because even when I don’t like her, I love her as easily as breathing in and out.

The funniest one is that she got mad at me for changing the settings on her washer because it cost more money and I joked with Dana and her parents that I was going to go to the bank and get ten dollars in pennies and just spread them out all over the top of the washer. I will not tell you whether the joke landed, because that would be inappropriate. I don’t mean to embarrass Counselor, only to tell her that I accept her for all her fire and all her ice and everything in between. I also cannot help flipping her shit about being the older child that I am. Peering down over a book most days.

And that is the beginning is the end is the beginning. It doesn’t matter whether Counselor loves me or not, just that loving her makes me a better person in all the right ways. She is strong, admirable, one of the great loves of my academic life…… which is why I generally date second children. I can’t help but burn bridges with first children, because we have a pathological need to be right. Injustice is grievous unto us, and we are vocal when wronged. It’s a lead the charge into hell relationship all the way around……..

Which makes me think.

The thing that always helped Dana and me is that she kept me grounded and I kept her from swinging at every pitch- until our roles reversed and she was climbing the ceiling with want and I was the one to say no. The relationship fell apart when Dana felt wrong all the time. It was not reality; I am a verbal processor. She wants to apologize once and have the conversation be over because she does not want to talk about touchy feely shit most of the time. That’s why we’re breaking up- I need time to process without the conversation ending.

I will get closure with or without her.

When I was at Epiphany, I had a revelation. I told it to Christine and told her to run with it, no credit to me because all preachers help each other. She hasn’t used it, so I’m stealing it back. We have to talk about the comma, people, because I think we’re screwing it up. There are hundreds of commas in the Book of Common Prayer, but this one knocked me on my ass (which was pretty easy since I was kneeling in my choir stall at the time). It’s in the Nicene Creed. When I say it, you’ll all recognize it and think, “HOLY SHITBALLS! Why didn’t I think of this before?”

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

OF ALL THAT IS,

When I realized that I thought that pause was important, I started using it. I stopped saying the creed out loud so that I could dwell on that comma for as long as I wanted without it getting weird. That comma, to me, is the enormity of human life, because if I believe that I am God and God is me and we are all God together, then that is our purpose…. to BE all that IS, seen and unseen. Stop seeing the Grandfather in the Sky and know you are him. If you are female, you are her. Take off his robes of majesty and let God walk beside you, a humble servant in Christ Jesus, knowing that he is not struggling to be more like you.

Amen

Last night, for the first time since our fistfight, I was invited again into Dana’s silence, and I listened. I sat on the floor outside her room because I wanted to hear her, but I did not want her to feel threatened. She didn’t even have to look at me unless she wanted to. But I wanted to know some things- and I wanted to know what she thought about me. We healed a lot of past injuries because when I expressed myself, Dana heard me and did not reach for the phone to call someone else. The breakthrough, and the one I will take with me, was that she finally said, “I’m sorry I caused you phantom pain. Where is it?” Then I had her touch my cheek where it still hurt. As she was touching my cheek, I reached out and hugged her and sobbed harder than I ever have in my life. It healed a part of me that I didn’t know would ever come back. She apologized in a beautiful, beautiful way and it really did make things look better. It wasn’t that she couldn’t apologize enough; it was that I could not name what I needed from her to move on.

Now, I have, and it feels so much better. For those of you reading my blog as if every sentence means hope, you can shut that down. If you think that one hug means that we’re getting back together, you obviously don’t know how separation works. We’re still a mishmash of feelings that need to be processed on our own, but as I told Dana last night, “I think I can at least be a little friendlier to you now.” The hard part isn’t loving her day in and day out. That part is autonomic, like breathing. It’s the liking her. This goes on both sides. I am an asshole and an angel. So are we all. I think that separation and/or closure is where you own both sides of yourself in their entirety. Dana says that I never told anyone that I punched her first. “Yes, I have.” I said. “It’s just that most of the people I’ve talked to have said that since you pushed me first, I just went off like a rat dog.”

Well, there’s that.

I know myself. We’ve met. It is so true that there aren’t better words for it. Dana said, “did you tell everyone that you charged at me with a Coke Zero and threw it in my face and then ran off?” Ummmm, yes. I did. I’ve also told them that I thought it was a “get the fuck away” warning shot and you took it as reason to charge. I am not running away from this fight. I am owning every bit of my 5’4 inches and my 118.4 pounds on ER arrival. I know I am not a saint; I would never expect anyone to think so. But I do expect that someone who bullied me realizes their own strength. Dana is the receiver for a liquor store. She can move pallets by herself. When she was working at Tapalaya, she routinely carried 50 pound bags of flour up the stairs over her shoulder, using the other hand to hold onto the rail. At my 170 lb heaviest, I have never had that kind of strength, and that was ten years ago. I lost the weight by beating Dana into submission.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

I mean that I had just met a French-trained cook, and everything she cooked me had 2000 calories and huge portion sizes. I finally made her give in to the tyranny of the Mediterranean and cook with some damn olive oil once in a while. Taught her all the snacks I know that taste good even though they don’t have a lot of calories. I lost a lot of weight quickly. Dana did not, because she was not ready to give up cooking butter-fried butter for dinner. This was early in our relationship, before we were even dating.

The moment I moved in, I went from “you can eat like this when I’m not here” to “oh hell no, not on my watch.” I wasn’t worried about Dana gaining weight. I was worried that if I kept up her diet, it would ruin mine. Eating became about willpower because I could not give in and let myself eat a thousand more calories than I needed.

Dana strains to understand why I control my diet the way I do. It’s because I know what I look like at 170, and I prefer 118. It’s not about how I look. It’s about excess. It’s about not making my body too big for my frame. It’s about giving myself everything my own body needs, and denying because I want something, not because it’s bad for me. For instance, I would almost always rather have a second piece of chicken than a piece of cake. So I eat two pieces of chicken, realizing that I have traded the calories I had left over for cake for chicken now.

Dana would serve me two pieces of chicken, all the fixins, and a beer and then ask me if I wanted cake. I couldn’t even move. And if you are reading closely, I have just told you the story of our entire marriage.

Zero 7 is playing in my head as I write this; I’m debating whether to interrupt the silence by actually pressing “play.” I’m sitting in my office, and Dana is at work. When I close my mind, things are the same, and I am not spinning in the devastating tailspin of divorce. Shit just flies everywhere. I would imagine that things will be calmer from now on, because there is no way on God’s green earth that we can work this out. It’s too big, too difficult, and at the bottom of it, the cliche phrase, “irreconcilable differences.”

I was asking Aaron this morning if he would ever date a non-technical person ever again, and he said, “no.” We’ve both realized that if you don’t work in technology, you don’t even have a shot at understanding what we say when we get home. It has never really been a problem before- I have had tech jobs in the past- but this has been different because I didn’t have a web site launching then, either.

My web site launch has been the death of us, and I won’t apologize for it. Dana made the choice not to understand me, and she is making the choice to move on. I am not saying that I want to be together and Dana is fucking it up. I mean that the relationship was suffering under the weight of being two totally different personalities that really didn’t have that many interests in common unless we worked incredibly hard at it. The more Dana got lost in herself and her own needs, the easier it was to gutter snipe me into the ground. She wanted me to take care of her and I wanted her to take care of herself. I was too busy to be there for her every need, and she chose to take it personally rather than seeing that I was trying to reach out for something better than I have.

What do I mean by “taking it personally?” Dana doesn’t see my writing as a “real job.” Dana does not see that when I post on Facebook or Tweet, I am reaching out to people that actually have resources that I don’t. How do you reach donors to a vision in this day and age? You use the Internet. It’s not really done any other way. The only reason Scandal is still on the air is that Kerry Washington and Shonda Rimes started a social media blitz that saved it from cancellation…. and I suppose that’s what I’m asking for in my blog. Don’t cancel me.

Although, for people who just like to read my writing to criticize, you are free to walk out the door at no charge. Change the channel and don’t read my shit. I promise you, if you stop reading my blog, then you won’t have to worry what I am going through and that is preferable to me than hearing your opinion. I am creating my own opinions by going back and reading my entries and deciding what logic is valid in all of these emotions….. because all emotions are valid, but the logic behind them gets screwed up quickly. This blog is kind of like the rough draft of my life, and I am crafting the finished piece. What you are seeing is stream-of-conscious, but I don’t live my life that way. It takes a million thoughts for me to choose a direction.

Yesterday, I posted on Facebook that I wanted to know if Dana was right- do the glasses make me any hotter? I could tell that the consensus was that I shouldn’t be asking the question. Bitch, please. I don’t want to date anyone ever again, and I am happy to die alone with my books and my computer. No, SERIOUSLY. I am complete and whole in myself because I know myself so well. I didn’t need a lecture on when to start dating again, because it’s just not going to happen.

I am in love with Dana, and it is going to take time to undo it. I have friends who let me cry on them and hug them and get angry that life is so unfair. Those friends are the people who allow me to be single and not ever feel weird about it. I may not have a life partner, but I DO have a family. That’s what I need right now… just people to love on me without any romantic energy at all.

Because that’s what happens when a relationship ends with violence. You make jokes about dating again…. hell, you might even go out on one date. But in the end, you can’t get over the fact that they are capable of hurting you. The last one did. So you go home and read a book instead. I cover up my fear with bravado, and Dana is infinitely sorry that anything she did caused this in me. I believe her, I forgive her, but I cannot walk away from the pain just because I have said, “I forgive you.” I am giving myself enough room to forget, because Dana is so close to me that I could not walk away from this relationship with anger, and constantly replaying the tape of her fist coming toward my face isn’t helpful to either one of us, because it reduces Dana to a fraction of a person and not the whole spectrum that she is.

Plus, I’ve been telling Argo about all of Dana’s manipulations for two years (not saying I don’t manipulate, I’m just writing about Dana at the moment). Even without feedback, I could go and look at what I’d written to her and realize that we should have broken up long ago. We were both manipulating each other to get what we wanted, rather than taking out our damage piece by piece in order to solve the communication problems that come with me being an abused female.

I honestly have detachment issues in a lot of places because I have been abandoned just enough in my lifetime to think that’s how every relationship ends, but I don’t protect against it. I just know that sometimes relationships work and sometimes they don’t. It was awful that it took us seven years to figure out that we should have stayed friends all along, but who doesn’t want that romantic story with their best friend? I’m glad it lasted as long as it did. No relationship ends with one fight. It’s just that right now. I am too crispy to talk to Dana without it devolving into our past. At first, I did not realize how serious she was about breaking up, because she approved the Facebook post and said she really liked the part about “if you think you deserved a phone call, we do not owe it to you. We do not want anyone to say “they knew first.” it was the right thing to say at the right time, because when you are in a fight with your significant other, the LAST thing you want is your gramama, your ontee, and Big Pam wrestling it out and thinking that they’re helping.

I have learned that this is all about submission to the authority of someone I trust. Me. I had to submit to the fact that I did not need to ask for help. All the answers are inside me. I have an incredible emotional toolbox that I have given away to every female who’s ever asked for it, but I have never used my skills to propel myself. Oh, God do people ever HATE that. Again, no one is used to me having opinions.

It’s also hard for me to walk in the light and create empathy for people who’d rather stay in darkness, but Jesus did, so I will, too. It makes me take a closer look at my second favorite scripture (first is Jeremiah 29:11), John 3:19- even more important to me as I start my ministry. it says, “this is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”

Do you know why this scripture is so important to ministry? People love darkness because they hide from light when they are too shamed to reach up. Someone, something has broken them so that they think they are better off in darkness, slinking around in black ink because that’s all they think they deserve.

The light of Christ came to me through a gorgeous woman that didn’t even know what she was doing. She just showed up. I did the rest. She proved to me that Diane’s dragon was worth slaying, that I didn’t need to live in shame any longer, and the John scripture knocked me on my ass. I was hiding not because I had to, but because it was what I thought I deserved. Once I thought I deserved more than that, my life began to change rapidly.

The light became my writing, because so many people picked it up and ran with it. I would be remiss not to thank my twins and my angel. They got me through the darkest part of my life, the one where I didn’t think I was worth anything and needed more in terms of survival mode than I ever would admit out loud. I clicked off safe, I gutter sniped, I pushed them away every chance I got because I didn’t think I was worthy of people like them…. what with their jobs and their smiles and all that good, clean shit. I wasn’t anywhere near good and clean. I was a reject, even from God at first. The first step up was realizing that I’d conquered a fear I’d had since I was little. The second step up was realizing that I thought everyone was going to leave, and I pushed them away until they did. It was easier than letting them in and really telling them what was going on. That because of my past, Dana stepped into the pattern of enabler and I was the abuser, because of course everything that happens to me happens to other people. I cannot help it. There are just some days where I cannot NOT be sad, lonely, and angry.

It helps me to remember that I am loved when I think of my dad and Aaron, and all they’re doing to help keep me sane (or as sane as I get, anyway). They are the people that when I blew everyone else away, kept showing up. You would think that I don’t have clinical separation from my parents, and you would be wrong about that. First of all, when Diane inflicted her abuse, encouraged me to believe that I couldn’t trust them because they didn’t understand the whole lesbian thing.

So I cannot even let my parents in without a tremendous amount of work on myself, which I am glad to do and sorry I have to. The bitch of it is that they’re the most well adjusted, and constantly check on me in a very good way. But because of my abuse, sometimes I can’t see their help. I see it as taking away my agency. It’s a threat. It’s so bad that when my dad dropped me off at the Methodist emergency room, tears were at the corner of my eyes because even though it was TOTALLY unreasonable, I still thought he was never coming back. I’m a psych patient that checked myself in. I am no longer redeemable to anyone, because I have gone off the deep end.

Plus, while I was in the hospital, Dana broke up with me for good. She says that I “called it” by not listening to her when she was begging on the floor after I’d been hit. She did not accept that of course I could not take her back in the same moment that she physically injured me. I had to have time to process whether I thought our relationship was going to go back together, and that was not acceptable to Dana at all. I wanted to really talk now that we’d had a few days apart, and that ended in disaster- Dana calling my father and saying I was having a psychotic episode. I know I have mentioned that before, and I am still fucking furious. She says that I will not let go of a problem and let it drop. She’s right, but so am I. We don’t get anywhere in a conversation if you’re of the mindset not to try and understand me before I even open my mouth.

It was talking to a brick wall, and finally I admitted defeat. This was not going to work, she was too incensed at me for posting on Facebook that our relationship was ending, but neither of us were ruling out a second act. To me, that meant we were on the rocks, but there would at least be a conversation in which we post-mortemed that fight and tried to understand why it happened in the first place. Then I realized there was no discussion. Dana’s pathology had turned to destroy when she got into the place of being so filled with rage that I wasn’t in the room anymore.

And in the end, even though Dana doesn’t want to work on it, I think I’m done, too. I cannot take on a mental patient that has problems just as complex as mine and won’t get help, even though this fight is ridiculously huge. I am shaming myself for not calling the police, either before it got to the escalation point or when my cheek was turning purple. It was also a really hard hit because it wasn’t just Dana’s fist. It was that her fist caught the bottom of my glasses and pushed them into my eye socket. The bottom still experiences phantom pain, because all the physical stuff is over, but the emotions still haunt me.

So how do I move forward? By keeping going. I am going to step out of this world and go find another one, because this one got stale. I don’t have to deal with Dana’s carpet-sucking depression and ADHD that turns her into a cartoon character. She doesn’t have to deal with a bipolar wife who takes all her medication and still sometimes doesn’t feel right. If she thinks that I’m too much to handle, being her partner is hard as fuck. I am tired of being “the sick one.” I am resentful that when we came to Houston, she waited a year and a half to find a job and let herself waste away until I couldn’t handle it and exploded at her parents. They are still mad at me for the thermonuclear way that I went off, but they were failing to see that Dana desperately needed help and she wasn’t getting it. Wasn’t even taking care of herself. She’d been rejected and she couldn’t handle it, so all of the stress of running a huge household and having a job where I really had to pay attention and needing time to write. I didn’t have the support from Dana to manage anything, because while she would pack my lunch every morning, I wasn’t sure what I’d come home to. Mostly Netflix binging.

When I left Alert Logic, it forced her to look for a job since I did not want to be the only source of income for our family. Things started to balance out until Dana started bitching that I didn’t have a job and there had been many times in my life where I hadn’t. That is because Dana is a master at taking the things her parents say and lobbing them at me after we’ve already discussed what we’re going to do without them. I always felt that we were living under parental approval instead of being in our late 30s. Her parents think I’m a fucking deadbeat and I am ok with that. In fact, I will let them think that until I am a household name. It won’t matter. Once I’m a household name, when I come up, it will still be to reflect on what a douchebag I am and how I couldn’t keep it together and it is a fucking miracle that I was ever able to make something of myself.

Neither Dana’s parents or Dana’s sister have talked to me since our breakup, which just reinforces how little they think of me. I am sure that they’re supposed to think of Dana, and that will always be ok. But I gave them a warning shot that something like this was going to happen and even though they took it seriously, at first her mother said that she was never going to understand Dana the way that Dana needed to be understood and that perhaps Dana should find a different mother figure.

Again, I’m sorry. What? Dana doesn’t need a mother that’s ok with the gay thing. Dana needs someone to stay on her so that plans become reality. She has not been motivated to take care of herself until she was offered a job that was right up her alley, and it has taken over her whole life. Even when she is not working, she is thinking about work. Yesterday I told her that I wanted to talk about division of property after she got home from work. After many text messages, it is 6:30 and she is still not home. I am sympathetic to the fact that she is working long, and pissed off because it feels like she blew me off…. especially since an hour and a half had gone by and THEN she said, let’s just talk on the phone. I could have left so much earlier, and I made the effort to stay until I realized that I was just going to have to sit and wait, no matter what. Dana’s job is more important than I am, and I will not miss that aspect of our relationship because it’s always been that way. She cannot leave when her shift is over. She has to diddle around, shoot the shit, and do any number of chores that all “take a minute” and add up to me sitting in a deli seating area or waiting in the car until she’s finally done. Realistically, I could have made myself a lot happier knowing that her shift ends at 5:00, so when she says “be there at 5:00,” it really means be there at 5:45. But no. I always waited, getting more and more resentful because she would come by to where I was sitting every ten minutes and tell me she was almost ready to go. So thinking that she would actually be on time for our meeting was cruel and unusual mental punishment for myself. I knew I was going to resent having to wait, and I did it anyway. Finally, when we were on the phone, I said, “it really pisses me off that you were so late and in the end, said we could have talked by phone. I could have left the house by now and taken care of some stuff, but I was waiting for you. It’s not an ex-wife thing. It’s a courtesy thing.” She agreed with me, but every time I say I’m pissed off about something, she goes into a first grade teacher voice that is too pedantic for talking to a woman that is almost 40 and feels every bit of it.

In fact, it’s like my whole body exploded, and I realized that I had more choices than being talked to in a voice that sounds like, “I don’t want to anger you, so I’m just going to appease you.” She is afraid of my anger, and I need a woman that can stand up to it. Throw it back in my face. Tell me what’s wrong in the moment instead of saving up her anger until she explodes. One that will talk about her feelings and let me know how I’m doing in terms of taking care of her heart. In the immortal words of Meryl Streep, there are certain things I will no longer tolerate.

The biggest thing I will never tolerate again is thinking that my problems are so much worse than hers.

Swirl is my favorite place to get yogurt, but it is also the summation of my entire existence. Everything is being swirled together. I do not have a full minute of thinking one way about anything. Sometimes, Dana is the most evil person that ever lived, and sometimes I think this is the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. I did not allow for counseling in the moment that she hit me because I was terrified. I posted our separation on Facebook. Dana is saying that it’s over, that we can’t work on it because I’ve already our divorce. I told her that I didn’t even rule out the possibility of getting together in the Facebook post itself, but that was neither here nor there. It was the crux of the problem. I did something we can’t undo.

She has a problem with how many followers I have. I said, “why do you even care what they think? I don’t.” For real. If we are in a conflict, I am running my mouth to deal with it. I don’t give a shit what you say to me afterward. Your story is not mine. Get your own fucking blog. It will be so much easier than trying to meld all our personalities on this one. I don’t mean that as a gutter snipe. I mean, you have all the tools in terms of using your emotions as an outlet on the page that I do. The fact that you do not use it is not my problem. The fact that you would rather attack me than let me have my space is not going to happen. To me, success comes from doing what you love and letting the money come to you. If people believe in me as a writer/theologian/pastor/etc., then they will give me enough money to implement some sort of plan. If they don’t, then this blog continues to be for me what it’s always been. My private thoughts that people are allowed to read to understand me. I do not count on my blog as a financial resource. I count on it to heal me and maybe one day, when my writing is sharp enough, people will approach ME instead of the other way around.

What do I mean by “giving me enough money?” I mean that I could afford to live cheap and travel a lot, both in terms of missionary work and travel writing. I could start a homeless ministry in a neighborhood that needs it. The food is the faith, people. Giving people food is the key to ministry. You do it every week- home in one wafer. No matter who shows up at the table, you give them food, anyway.

Speaking of ministry, I left Epiphany butt-quick. Just disappeared. I hope you will forgive me. It is not my place to fall, and Christine and Lisa are not my priests. I have always looked at going to church as continuing theological education, because as a preacher’s kid in another denomination, I do not have the ability to function as a parishioner AT ALL. What do you even go to priests for, anyway? I mean, aren’t priests and parents the same thing? Um, no. Not anymore. Yet still don’t wish for the skills. Priests don’t take care of me unless I take care of them. It is a mutual relationship and not a power hierarchy. Honestly, anyone who wants authority in my life right now I just cannot handle. If you can meet me where I am, I will receive you. You start treating me as lesser than, and I’m out. And right now, you only get one shot to do it right, because I am in the place of wet cat in a corner claws extended. I have gotten so much better than last week, but now is not the “I want to meet new people” phase. I am protecting you. Believe me.

I scare Dana so bad that she can even look at me the right way. When I told Aaron and Angela (the Red, old girlfriend from Bayou City Women’s Chorus days…. the Red because my stepmom was red at the time, too, so we called them The Red and the Med) that Dana had said she was scared of me, they fell on their fucking asses laughing. “She’s LOOKED at you, RIGHT?” was the consensus. Normally I am incensed by people calling me small. Today it’s all I need. I need validation that the fistfight never should have happened. I’ve gotten letters that say that since she pushed me first, anything after that was defensive mode and they don’t blame me for anything that happened after that.

It’s in that moment that Argo’s dog comes romping across my mind, and I lean into the feeling of praying to God……. funny only because I can’t tell you his name.

The biggest reason Dana and I are breaking up is that she does not understand the world that I live in and I don’t understand hers. She thinks that when I’m talking to friends on Facebook that I am talking to people I don’t know. Since she doesn’t know to whom I am speaking, I think she thinks I sit here and get people to love me.

I do, but not my friends. You cannot be my friend if you are impressed by me. It’s for people who think of my feed as sort of “The Hot List.” For the ability to reach millions instead of just one. As for chatting, the only person I’ve ever really chatted with on a consistent basis is Argo. The rest are friends from middle school, high school, college, etc. I KNOW THEM. Like, on the ground. Argo is the exception to the rule, because we developed an unusual kinship by sharing stories and jokes and just talking about our lives. It was amazing how someone so far physically could be so close emotionally when I needed her the most. She just loved on me from afar, and her letters were worth as much as hugs to me, so when Dana said that she thought her life was better because she got lots of hugs from real people, I told her that plenty of people hug me. Plenty of people write to me and say that they want to hug me.

She then told me that she thought I had the ability to lead millions and she was somewhat jealous. Nice to hear from a former part of the dream, but meaningless to me right now as she tries to “manage a mental patient.” She, in fact, told me today that I was too much for her to “handle.” I felt like the biggest burden in the entire world, and my worthlessness loop went off in a hurry. Then I remembered that Dana doesn’t have to handle shit. She never did. The more she tried to “handle” me, the more I rebelled, because Dana comes across like my mother after ten years.

I do not want to be handled, and with Dana, I wonder when in her mind she decided she needed to. The more suffocated I felt on the inside, the more it showed on the outside. Without meaning to, she reinforced my worthlessness by taking care of my every need and telling me that she worried about me because she didn’t think I was taking care of myself.

I wasn’t…. but not because I couldn’t. I didn’t have control over anything, so I started wasting away to nothing and trying to make up for it with a smoothie now and then because that’s all I can manage. She has no idea how far her fist to my face set me back in terms of recovery from abuse, because while I am emotionally abusive, my abuse would never go to the place of physically injuring someone’s face. By the time there is that much rage involved, it should have been taken care of long ago and just wasn’t. That kind of rage doesn’t come from a fight with your wife. That kind of rage comes from being mad since childhood and only now having an outlet. That’s just conjecture on my part- I have no idea what she’s really thinking. She does not share and I do not want to know.

It has been the most humiliating thing that has ever happened to me that Dana’s responses to my hospitalization run the gamut from “I’m so glad you got help” to “why didn’t they keep you longer?” to “it must be nice to have insurance and just be able to check out like that.” This, to me, demonstrated her complete and total inability to see that the setback she caused in my recovery led me to making plans to commit suicide and that’s why I checked into the hospital. I wanted the plans to stop, because I knew that was the very last exit before you get to SpongeBob HeadStone.

She did not believe me when I said that the nurse practitioner signed my release papers before I left because she didn’t think I would get much out of staying in group over the weekend. She thought I could get more done in outpatient, because that’s where the real work is. Why she didn’t just call the clinic and verify I was telling the truth, I don’t know. But it would have been very easy to prove

Now I have to listen as revisionist history takes place- on both sides- but at the same time, it incenses me that Dana thinks our relationship ended with a Facebook post and I say it ended when she punched me in the face with my glasses on while I was already crying, the fight in me a puddle on the floor.

She’s been saying we were going to break up since, oh, our first date. Her reaction to my new glasses was “you’re so hot now you’re going to leave me.” The more she tried to “handle” me, the more insecure I felt, especially in terms of my glasses. When I thought, “maybe I should take them off” just to please her, I should have known it was going to be our last fight ever.

Dana and I got into a fistfight and that’s why our relationship is over. I came back home against medical advice******* because when I got to the ER, my weight was 118 lbs and my heart rate was 97. The fight started over money and invariably devolved into the amount of time I spend with Argo, because it’s an easy political shot that takes no time to wound me at all.

I won’t lie. I gave as good as I got in that fight. But there are two things that will stay with me. The first is that I emotionally escalated. The second is that Dana physically escalated by pushing me. We fought, and then Dana says that she walked away and I reengaged. I disagree, but I have been telling people exactly what she said because to me, none of that part matters. She outweighs me by a hundred pounds. There is no way that fight ever should have happened.

But now Dana is trying to say that because I’ve manipulated her for years, I deserved everything I got in that fight, including two broken blood vessels in my face. However, she doesn’t say it on the surface. She says everything in an “I’m sorry, but…..” As in, “I’m sorry I hit you, but you’ve been a monster for so long that I just exploded.”

Now Argo’s on board with Dana and they can both go fuck themselves, because Argo’s first reaction to hearing that I wanted to be with ALL my friends and my old church and try to undo the damage that I did to myself by leaving DC in the first place is actually an elaborate ploy to get close to her and wants to know if she should get a restraining order. I’m sorry, what? I am interviewing all over everywhere. If I get a job here, then I get a job here. I am not completely dissociating. I haven’t figured out what I’m doing, and I figured it was better to ask my friends for help than go to strangers.

So far, I have been wrong about that. Neither Dana nor Argo will let go of past hurt long enough to see that they see the darkness in me, but not the light. They are both judging me as a split personality, not one that is slowly reconnecting its damaged neurons to make new thought processes that were supposed to grow and just didn’t. For those of you who are about to say that I am a monster for publishing this, I asked Dana if I could write about it if I said exactly what she told me. I don’t care. I don’t have to disagree or not. She can argue all she wants that it’s my fault. She can hear from Argo all day long that this is really about her and nothing I am doing is to make a better life for myself down the road- to not be stuck in the day-to-day of being a cashier and really try to make something of myself before I die.

I am the one that checked myself into a psych ward, and they are the sickest people I know.

******My friend Stacy said, “why did you leave against medical advice? I thought they were helping you.” That’s not what I meant. I meant that they advised me not to go home, to go straight to a battered women’s shelter, and I went home because I thought I was coming home to my best friend. I still did, but I didn’t count on the fact that the emotional swings would be much, much larger. I made a horrible mistake and I don’t want to do anything about it tonight. I just took my Neurontin and my Atarax and shut the door to my office.

The greatest moment of my right now just happened. My dad invited me to go to a jazz concert tonight. Seriously, it makes my entire fucking year. Because you know what we do when we go to jazz concerts? We allow ourselves to be GIANTS together and flip each other shit like the adult trumpet players we are. Check this out. Argo, you will friggin’ spit your coffee all over your keyboard. I am almost arrogant enough to be sure of it.

Last Sunday, I was feeling kind of low, so I decided to go visit my dad between rehearsal and service at Second Baptist. I didn’t want to get into politics or religion. I just like the guys on the brass line A LOT because OF COURSE I DO. They are part of my heart- the brotherhood of being the leadership in most cases, especially in a band vs. an orchestra. Exponentially multiply that by oh, 11 (because our ability to out-asshole each other goes to 11), and then you might have some idea of the arrogance that goes on in the trumpet section of a jazz band. BELIEVE ME, it does not matter which one.

Here is as much of the conversation on Sunday as I remember. 😉

Mike: Haven’t I met you before?
Me: Yes, I’ve played here once.
David: You notice we only asked her once.
Mike: You can replace your father at any time.

Dad is talking to Noe and doesn’t hear what Mike says. I thought it was so funny that I said, “Dad, did you hear what Mike said?” I tell him and Noe is busy on his phone. Doesn’t even look up when saying, “you notice you had to ASK your father if he could hear you…….” I set ’em up, you knock ’em down. It’s been that way since birth. When I was two or three he taught me how to say “antidisestablishmentarianism” and “beta hemolytic streptococci” so I could be the straight man, ironically.

Seriously, I wear it so well.

Joel is the music director at Second and a dead ringer for my boss at Marylhurst. Because of it, I like his face. It’s a good one. I remember his manager love for his employees and his kindness. There will never be another boss like that for me, and I mean it. It is unusual to feel good feelings for a boss, and I am so glad to have had three or four relationships like that. Speaking of which, my old boss from University of Houston is picking me up for lunch.

Doors are opening that I never thought possible, and I wish you the light of life as well. It feels good to be able to give what I’ve been so lucky to receive. You will never know how grateful I am to you, for responding to me in the same way you do to Heather and Jenny. You don’t sugar coat, you tell me what you think. And that means more than gold to me, which is good because as I writer, I’ll never have much. Unless Oprah calls. Then I will lose my mind with gratitude.

No, SERIOUSLY (in a Meredith, Izzie, and Christina kind of way).

I knew that breaking up with Dana would break me, but I didn’t realize the degree until I got home last night. I was telling her about my feelings and having a very intense moment of “small-l leslie,” and instead she called my dad and told him that she thought I was having a psychotic episode. She then told me that she would call the police if I didn’t go away, even though I was sitting on the floor, talking in my smallest voice. I am on a medication for stress and anxiety. I cannot get rattled to the same degree ever again. Dana has the right to feel what she wants about me, and I have the right to say it was a bad call. I have never and will never want my father to be involved in my marriage. I was trying to tell her about my weekend. She asked me to stop, and I told her that we were just getting somewhere, because she would get deeper and deeper and say, “this conversation is over,” so that I had plenty of chances to hear her and few chances to talk.

Dana told me that the reason Angela called her first was that she was appalled I posted our divorce on Facebook. She thought THAT was the reason for my psychotic break. Without breaking confidentiality, all I will say is that Dana has chosen my parents over me, and it breaks my heart. I refuse to talk shit about Dana, but at the same time, I think I am well within my right to say that maybe she is overstating her right-ness and overstating my wrong-ness so that she can feel better about walking away. I feel so broken that it doesn’t matter whether she walks away or not. I have to fix myself regardless of her decisions, and I am glad that I have so many options available to me that do not include reconciling with her. It is obvious to me that she does not understand the depth and breadth of fear that she’s re-enforced by threatening to call my father and possibly the police at a time when I needed her more and not less. I may not be the wife anymore, but I am still the person that remembers hiking to the top of Angels’ Rest and having Dana hold on to my ankles while I got a shot of the entire gorge.

My problem is realizing that woman is gone. She left some time ago. She just didn’t tell me about it. The last fight redefined us, and no apology is enough on either side at this time. I just want to go on record as saying that I am working through an enormous thunderstorm, and again, people are reacting as if I am entirely mentally unstable when I feel more in my body than I ever have. Letting go of Diane was a thunderstorm that luckily took way less time to exorcise than it did to create it, but only because someone proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was experiencing post-traumatic stress. It wasn’t that I couldn’t “get my shit together.” I will be in occupational therapy for a long time as I learn to manage my trauma reflexes and break them down to create new healthy patterns.

When I said that it felt like everyone was out to get me, I don’t mean all of you. I mean the people in my life closest to me. Because when Dana retreats, that’s not my friends retreating. That’s my entire world thinking that I am a monster…. that I have abused her emotionally for so long that I deserve everything she’s given me so far, and if you are a party to our inner monologues, you know what fucking bullshit that is. I could never give as much as I got in a fight. Ever. I am not wired that way. I just have a Napoleon complex that comes out when threatened. I am a five ton personality in a rat dog body.

Maybe that’s why I love Argo’s dog.

The scar is an X on her wrist.

So that’s what hardcore looks like. It could have been me, but it wasn’t. The scar is on her wrist, but implanted in my brain. I cannot forget it. It stays in my mind, a reminder that I cannot give up ever again. I see that X in my dreams, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt how much pain it takes to get there.

We all have different stories, but the idea is the same. We are all grieving the loss of control of our lives and what led us to believe that we were worthless enough to stop taking care of ourselves. For my roommate, it’s the dopamine from cutting. For Siobahn, it was catching her husband in the act of adultery. No one has talked about childhood abuse and it’s effect on them. In some ways, it has been a loss to be unique, if that makes any sense at all. However, both my nurse practitioner and my social worker are lesbians (I’m guessing…. gaydar intact….) and they cannot even. It BOTHERS me that they lost their clinical separation because my issues hit too close to home for them. This is why I prefer male therapists. Women tend to lose their objectivity with me, but men are too gruff for that (generally). It’s like having built-in clinical separation instead of trying hard to maintain it.

Plus, I’m a Lanagan. I can move people to tears. You know it’s true. We’ve met. I don’t mean to say that I’m better than them. I’m a WRITER. I tell my story LIKE A WRITER. Many people are unprepared for how deep I can go and be both incensed AND hilarious at the same time. I am ambivalent about going home today. My nurse practitioner said that it’s really quiet on the weekends here, and she wanted to release me so I could go to outpatient. A little part of me is like, OH JESUS I AM NOT READY. I mean, it’s nice to have time to not worry about anything. It is nice to get feedback on what I say, and my group is as close as a heartbeat. It’s a cohort where we are all mutually in love up to our EYEBALLS because we know each other so well. It physically hurts that I’m not allowed to touch them at all. I want to hug, comfort, etc., but the idea is to learn to self-soothe, which is great when I’m talking, but horrible when the floor belongs to others. I just want my entire group to move in with me so that we can protect each other forever, but that’s not life and never will be.

What is life is learning that social services are open to me that I never knew existed. If you need help, the number is 211. However, having done my research, Montrose Counseling Center is the most well-rounded, and they don’t give a shit about your sexuality if you’re a straight person and you need help and feel welcome in an LGBT environment. It’s ok. We don’t bite that hard. But anyway, these people are capable of finding me a cheap place to live if Dana wants to stay in the house (fine with me, I’m not married to anything- especially having survived a complete and total house fire at 11. It’s freeing. I could lose a vase from the Ming Dynasty and I would be like, “oh well. It’s just a vase.” Why? Because my house started burning and the only thing that mattered was me. Fuck everything else. I am so proud of myself, because at least when my world was literally falling down around me I could function.

I am the type person that is calm, cool, and collected in a crisis. Well, usually anyway. I am the type person that will take care of what needs to be done, fuck all how I feel. I will break down when we are all safe. But sometimes, though, I don’t break down after a crisis and I just carry it. One of the things that I told my nurse practitioner is that it didn’t feel like my muscles had as much stress since the Neurontin med change.

I also told her that since it was our last meeting, she was really cute (shut it. We’ve met).

I love my nurse practitioner. I really hate that she works here because I want her to have her own practice so that she can be my actual doctor instead of just the one I saw for a few days. She understands that I try to be the funniest person in the room and she is going to try and kick my ass in all the right ways. I cannot abide a doctor I don’t think is smarter than me. I do not have that problem.

I also have a social worker that is hooking me up with all kinds of services. I don’t know which I’ll need because Dana doesn’t know where she wants to go, either- or I assume. I cannot talk to her right now. I told her to come last night and then she told me that she was grieving the loss of our relationship and I said, “did we make a mistake?” She said she didn’t think so. I was so down that I just uninvited her. I’m grieving, too. I do not want to believe that it is over, and I am also ready to leave and never look back. It is a strong cognitive dissonance, because I do not know which I want more.

I still think that moving to DC is the best option for me at this time. It’s not really that I need a change of venue. That’s just an added bonus. It’s that I’ve lived there before and I have friends from DC to New York that I NEVER get to see. Plus, I miss walking downtown. I used to take the Metro in and just get lost for hours on purpose. In DC, there is so much to see that it is beneficial to wander around by yourself. I tend to take lots of pictures and journal my findings. My favorite place to sit is on The Mall, because it is the BEST people-watching. Sometimes you’re watching famous people, but most of the time, you are watching families out with their dogs. So calming to be by myself- an observer and recorder, like most writers are.

I can picture my apartment. Hopefully SE Waterfront, near my old church. It’s a funny story about how we found it to begin with. My first wife, Kathleen, and I were in Lambda Rising when I found a book with Susan Leo standing in the sanctuary at Westminster. I took it as a sign from God and the first Sunday I met Brian and Ruth Hamilton, the co-pastors, they were doing coffee and muffins for communion. Ruth said, “I hope you don’t mind.” I said, “of course not. Coffee has always been a life-giving substance for me.” It THRILLS me that Ruth and Brian are STILL THERE!!!! So, even if I live in a different area and decide on a different church because of it, I still want to visit occasionally. I helped put in the tile floor in the sanctuary.

But that is later. Right now I have to make sure that I am stable enough to go to work every day. The struggles I have been having at work are all due to repressed trauma that hasn’t been treated until now. I am hoping that getting rid of the trauma is as easy as getting it, but I know that’s impossible. It is good to feel hope today. It is good to feel alive and to know what I want to do and where I am going. I am applying all over the place, and I have a friend who works for Congressional Quarterly that is next on my list for a phone call (look at me! I make calls now!) I will also be applying at The White House, because I deserve to have a shot at an interview to be Sam Seaborn. I don’t know that I deserve the job, but I deserve to be SEEN AND HEARD. What I do know is that people can tell within a millisecond that I am every bit the writer I say I am.

By myself- an observer and recorder, like most writers are.

Which brings me to two awfulsome moments (thanks, Paul Gilmartin):

1. My occupational therapist said that I couldn’t write the whole time. I had to do these worksheets (that she has never given me, so I have no idea what she’s talking about). I said, “would you mind if I sat at the computer and type? My wrist hurts too bad to hold a pen.” She told me that it uses exactly the same muscles to type as it does to write and handed me a golf pencil. I said, “this is total crap,” and I left, because I did not want to engage in a fight. Diana (roommate) said, “I was there and she was shitty to you.” Nice to have validation and to know that my roommate has my back.
2. Mike (the Viet Nam vet in the wheelchair) told me he was leaving and I said, “give me a hug before you go.” We hugged and the orderly yelled “NO HUGGING!” I turned around and said, “I FORGOT!” He took exception to that. They’ll probably put me on Haldol for it (kidding, this is not Nurse Ratchett up in this bitch)

I told Argo that she broke me open to let all the light rush in with “why do you think it is everyone else’s job to fix you?” It did not occur to me that I could “man up” and get someone to drive me to the hospital and admit myself. I mean, why would it? I have no self-preservation. I am content to help you until I die. And by that, I do not mean Argo. I mean “you plural.” It doesn’t matter who she (most likely) is. It might even be a man. It’s not about attraction. It’s about seeing need and wanting to respond to it. Thursday was when I got my first taste of self-preservation, because even though it broke me open to let light in, it also just plain broke me. I went to her for help, and for whatever reason, it was not given. It was a swift kick in the ass that I’m not sure I didn’t need. I mean, her advice was really fucking sound. Her delivery is as awful as mine. We have done a fucking number on each other because I am who I am and she is who she is and instead of trying to be enormous together, we have gutter-sniped each other into the ground. Not because either of us really wanted to. We just hurt each other so bad that both of our walls went up. It happens. Whether they come down or not will not be decided for weeks, months, years. But I can’t worry about her right now. I can worry about her later, but only if she wants me to. I think it depends on how she sees me. I have not been kind to her, and I want to make amends by truly working on myself until we can interact safely and with much kindness, instead of the constant barrage of “fuck off and die.”

That is because neither one of us can handle emotional intimacy. Argo’s is not my story to tell, but I will say one thing. We cannot let each other in because our pattern is to get close, not be able to handle it, and then get in a fight that forces both of us to retreat. It has happened too many times for either one of us to believe that the other one really wants to change. I hope that I proved to her that I do love her and want her in my life because I am willing to lay my life on the line and say “it’s me. I know it’s me. If nothing else, I need her to realize that I am not doing this for her. I am doing this because I want to know what’s wrong with me, and how to turn off my defenses when they get so thick that no one can help me because I won’t let them. I have gotten really into the psycho/bio connection, which is good to study if I want to be a minister one day (my parishioners will never know how much I am doing to protect the future them. I have to have clinical separation or I will get into this position again because I will carry their problems like I carry my own.
I have five minutes of work time left, and I am so glad that they recognize I’m a writer and that I will heal more by continuing it than doing anything else. They don’t mind if I write about them. They think they’re famous. Shhhhhhhhh……. 😉

I am not sure why I hit my limit yesterday, I just knew I’d had enough. Most of the people here actually *are* in worse shape than me, which is totally part of the problem as an empath. I am trying to get over feeling everyone else’s pain. My roommate is a fucking cutter on 72 hour suicide watch. Good times. She’s actually one of the sweetest people I have ever met. Her name is Diana, because of course it is. My nurse practitioner looks like Susan, because of course she does (seriously, such a dead ringer I cried and hugged her anyway).

But all that stuff happened when I reached the unit. I got somewhat better when, ironically, billing came by. Turns out the billing lady used to have depression as bad as me and we cried and prayed together in the ER. Because that’s what I do. I’m about to die and I offer to pray over you. Because what can I do for you that I won’t do for myself? Pretty much goddamn everything. I am tired of being so emotionally laden from empathy that I cannot function. It is not that you have problems. You’re allowed. It’s that I can’t see a problem without wanting to fix it, particularly if it is something emotional because I’m already in my element anyway. Diana said, “I’m not sure I can make it. Will you stay with me?” She’s 21. I want to put her in my pocket and take her home. She reminds me of my stepsister Caitlin. I’m 5’4. She is probably 4’8. From Boston- so far from home that no one will visit her. I have taken her under my wing (because of course I have). It’s what I do. I just love people until they can’t stand it anymore. It comes from a very good place, but comes across as “smother mother.” Luckily, Diana is borderline so she won’t even notice.

I met with the mobile assessment team this morning. They thought I was hilarious, intelligent, and didn’t hesitate to speak to me like a colleague. There was nothing I couldn’t handle anyway. I’m fucked up in the head. It is unlikely that anything they give me will be unfamiliar.

I am more concerned about occupational therapy, because that is where I really struggle. The one thing that I learned today is that everything I *thought* was just ADD is also a trauma checklist. It’s hard to hear that I’ve been misdiagnosed in some sense, because I didn’t think of what Diane did to me as trauma. My nurse practitioner was tracking all the way through. “OF COURSE! Coming across like that, how would you even know what questions to ask.?” I told her that was Argo’s first reaction as well.

Unresolved trauma damn near killed me and I want Diane to know it. I don’t care if she responds in the slightest. I just want her to HEAR me. After we met, I could no longer live my life because I was living yours. It is now a pattern that I need to break desperately and don’t have the slightest idea how. That’s what these people are for.

But all the things I was telling you guys about that I thought were ADD? Not so much. I have been living in PTSD every day since my 14th birthday. No wonder I almost died. *I* couldn’t even describe what was wrong. By Saturday I was hyperventilating so much that I couldn’t really inhale. So again, the answer to why “I thought everyone else could fix me” is that I had been gaslit so successfully that I didn’t even want my own life, much less hers. I remember sobbing into her voicemail. Please don’t let me leave Portland without seeing you at all……” But the sociopath was already in place. Just WALL. So I turned on my sociopath. Wall. Trying so hard to keep each other out we couldn’t let others in.

My dad said that being able to turn off my emotions was a good skill to have. I said that it came at an enormous price. All the things, really. There is no limit to the amount of emotion I can deny myself, especially love. I feel love from God because God can’t go away and everyone else can. I am destroyed at my own hand in all cases, really. Argo said, “can’t you see the common denominator is you?”

Yes, I can you burger flippin’ ho.

However, it’s not all me. I do not have the same reactions to ANYTHING anymore. I have hit rock bottom, the place that says I don’t deserve to live and I will actively take steps to finish the job if I don’t ask for help. It gives you something, that place. You get there and you think “it cannot possibly get any worse.” So you start offending people left and right because they aren’t used to you not being abused and you’re not used to being able to stand up for yourself…. not maliciously….. you can’t even see what’s different. But they can.

I understand myself differently now. I understand the ways I manipulate people now, because until I checked in, nothing had scared me enough to be able to say out loud that I thought she loved me so much and I’d ALSO been turned on by a predator. Seeing her behavior afterward, I do not believe she planned to go through with it. If she did, she changed her mind. But what I know is that 25 year olds don’t let 14 year olds read their journals. Period.

Why is that one moment in time so important? Because Diane is so funny. She is a Southerner that also covers up shit with cake and icing. But that moment. The one where she gave me my presents? The mask came down and I saw her for the first time. If you’ve ever met diane (and I pretty much guarantee you haven’t because you wouldn’t know what to look for). Her eyes were dark and intense. Seductive, but not in a loving way. She did not wax rhapsodic. There was no light to make that happen. What did happen was adrenaline at the thought of getting caught. For older couples, it’s the thought of getting caught having sex. For me, it was the thought of my mom walking in on any of our conversations. I lived for it. How long can we keep the game up?

Til Thursday, apparently.