In my grief therapy group that I attended after my divorce from Kathleen, one of the exercises we did was to list all our losses- those things we knew we’d never get from that person again. For my inner 37-year-old, I have to deal with loss itself. In an abusive relationship, if you are the enabler, you have to admit you lost. You were never going to change them in the first place.

It hurts, all those moments you spent wishing that something would change. That something would finally click, and the face you loved would love you in return, the way you needed it to. It doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship. It could be your father or mother. If you were in this type relationship with your mother or your father, you probably spent a lot of time wondering if you’d ever win.

Did you?

For me, it was not necessarily that I wanted her to be my girlfriend. I was already confused as to whether that was an intention or not. But beyond eros, there were a thousand other types of love wrapped in the chord that runs between us. It was so intense that even I don’t understand it. The closest parallel I can draw is in Twilight (I know, right?) when Jacob, in his love for Bella, imprints on her child. He has been in love with her for so long, and yet so much of it is beyond eros. I imprinted on my abuser, and it is so entrenched that it will never go away, because I would have to destroy the wheat and the weeds.

I imprinted on her, and she says to this day that it never happened for her. I believe her, and I don’t all at the same time. I believe that there is a leaking velvet box inside her soul, as well. I believe that if she doesn’t see the chord that runs between us, it may not be that it isn’t there. It may be that she can’t acknowledge it because it’s so fucked up and so true at the same time. But that’s conjecture on my part, just what I use to pass the time.

People ask the abused all the time why they stay. I think I’ve figured it out. It’s that the chord between two people in a relationship carries all sorts of things, positive and negative. What you pick up depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for positive aspects, they will leap out at you when you start to weigh pros and cons.

The negative that leapt out at me was that I never should have had to spend my entire life pining over one woman because she woke up my sex life before it was ready and treated me like I was her best friend. I never should have had a tape that ingrained that said she was The One when I was 13 years old. No matter what she thinks this is still undeniably true. Boom. It stands on its own without any emotion behind it- she did something wrong.

Why did I stay? I justified that wrong for a long time. It wasn’t until I tried to have a relationship that was more important than ours that this problem hurt in just the right way so I could see it clearly and when I did, I went into shock.

The shock has only sort of started wearing off, because the longer I sit with this problem, the shadier I feel.

I felt like I couldn’t save her, and the whole time she was playing me. Before I could drive. Before I could type. Before I could vote. Before I could responsibly be trusted with anything.

In the still of the night, I know it’s not that she hasn’t done this to others. I was just the youngest.

It’s been an interesting week, that’s for damn sure- especially physically. When I get stressed out, I tend to get psychosomatic illnesses like headaches and stomachaches. Not bad enough to stay home and check out of life, but bad enough to be a constant annoyance. My allergies are kicking up terribly, too, which adds a layer of frustration because when I get up to that level of snot, my singing suffers and my stomach hurts from even more post-nasal drip. Between those two things, I’m in relatively good shape… it’s just that hell hath no fury than when I’m inconvenienced in any way. I saw that on Facebook. You can steal it.

This week I have really been looking at my heart, or trying to. As I said earlier, the balance looks different between my abuser and me, and I am slowly determining what that means as I let go and remember. As I laugh and cry and look at old pictures and read old letters in her beautiful and consistently unreadable handwriting that slants to the left. I spent HOURS trying to reproduce it, and the only ones I ever got right were the D’s. I will tell you that it’s because my middle name starts with D; if you believe that, you haven’t been paying attention.

I remember what it was like to touch her… not in a romantic way, but in the way that you’d hug family. Even if this doesn’t ring true on her side, in my humble opinion the chord that runs between us is bigger and stronger than anything else in our lives. This is not that there aren’t people who are more important day-to-day, but I truly believe that if she *could* love someone the way she wanted to, I’d be it… and again, not romantically. I’m just talking about a relationship without constant hiccups and push/pull as we just stuff and deny, lying to those who try to get close.

She has told me with both faces that these things are true. Sometimes, I am the most important person in the world for her, and then the sun turns, and I am left to wonder what happened to the face I loved.

From what I hear, this is typical of this type relationship, and either I can hang with that or I can hang separately. I chose to hang separately, because I couldn’t take the swings. It was like playing Texas Holdem, knowing you’ve got the straight, and not realizing until after you’ve gone all in that she’s holding Kings full over Aces. You know the scene in “Rounders” where all the of the blood drains from Matt Damon’s face after he loses his roll?

Yeah, like that.

I find myself thinking a lot about that face… the duality of loving someone so much that it’s like having my heart beating outside my chest, and has been for so long that I don’t know where it started… and at the same time, realizing that it’s not impossible for someone with round cheeks and a great smile to be capable of abuse.

…but the Mississippi’s mighty,
and it starts in Minnesota,
at a place where you could walk across
with five steps down.

And I guess that’s how you started,
like a pinprick to my heart…
But at this point you rush right through me
and I start to drown….

Emily Saliers, Ghost

If we had a song, this would be it. She gave me a copy of the album and Ghost starts out, “there’s a letter on the desktop that I dug out of a drawer, the last truce we ever came to in our adolescent war.”

Letter? Adolescent war? Emily Saliers put an arrow through my chest.

I also think about the innocent people who aren’t me, and to that, I say this. It was going on under your noses the entire time we lived in the same city. You didn’t notice, because I didn’t call attention to it. I am every bit as responsible for all the lies as you are from that standpoint, because even though I had good reasons for it, I still covered it up right up until I couldn’t.

The gaslighting was everything- I covered for her, and she painted me as mentally unstable. But that’s not the person you know. That’s the person I do.

When you met her, she wasn’t 23. When I met her, she wasn’t a fully cooked adult yet. When you met her, you got to see her realized dreams, and not the poor college kid that made my heart beat faster. You weren’t there for her graduate school going away concert. You weren’t there to see the ways people abused her to even make her capable of connecting with me on that level.

So in short, I think about you and wonder if you’re talking about me in the same way. My peace comes from knowing that you are only reacting in fear, and haven’t made the connection that there are layers upon layers upon levels upon levels upon years and years of things you don’t know. Be mindful that not only is it terrifying going through all this, it’s even worse realizing that our friendship was abusive and I am taking a torchlight to the most fundamental impact on my development from the time I hit tweenage on.

You cannot imagine how much I value this writing space, because right now I’m talking to keep myself from shutting down entirely. I am grateful when you listen.

I’m not going to hell. I’m going through it.
———-

Friend: Do you really think that you are the only one? And I ask that both honestly AND rhetorically, and not to hurt you or diminish the feelings you had for her.

Me: The thought frightens my inner child so badly that I almost threw up on my keyboard.

Friend: She’s lived on the earth a long time. And not always within your sight line.

Me: I know. And I acknowledge. But I haven’t been able to look at that blast radius yet. My ego is too tied up right now. It turns my childhood from an accidental love story to To Catch a Predator

Friend: I think it was a combination, to be honest. And I mean that sincerely. Based on what you’ve said, and what I’ve read in your posts.

Me: I really, really hope so. To think there are others really taps into my worthlessness loop. I wasn’t special. I was just a hole.

Friend: Even if she “couldn’t help it”, it was still wrong.

Me: I am only saying that “I couldn’t help it” feels better than “I fucked half of teenage Amarillo before I got to you.”

Friend: Ya, I get it. For what it’s worth, she didn’t.

Me: ROFLMAO. It’s worth a lot. Thank you.

Christine is the senior rector of Episcopal Church of the Epiphany, but more importantly, she is MY PRIEST. I say that with every bit as much reverence as most people say that Tom Baker is their Doctor. Actually, becoming a priest and becoming The Doctor are a lot alike. Same software (theology), different case (personality). I have been meaning to e-mail Christine since, like, a hundred years.

Lisa is a recurring celebrant/preacher at Epiphany since she’s already gone through what my friend Sarah (of Going Jesus) once called “the swimsuit competition.”

Dear Christine & Lisa,

I thought I had my life all figured out until yesterday. I was sitting there, minding my own business (I WASSSSAH!), when I got an instant message from an old friend who asked me if I’d do her wedding in a far off, dreamy-eyed sort of way. What happened the first time someone asked that of you? Do you remember what it was like being a young priest, and really feeling the mantle? My reaction was confusing and humbling. My first thought was, “why would you want someone in network security to do your wedding?” It took me a second to remember WHO I AM.

I am not defined by my job. I am defined by the love of Christ that runs through my veins like water for grape juice. I am defined by the truth I find when separating the red letters from the black. I am defined by the feeling I get that even though we may not be related by blood, we are still siblings. It’s funny, the older I get, the more I read the Bible with younger eyes. Really digging deep theologically in my late 30s is so much different than my early 20s. It my early 20s, I was the academician. Now, I am the gnostic.

For me, God is every side of every story ever written. You cannot think God. Either you feel it or you don’t, and I am not interested in belittling anyone. My problem with organized religion is that when it comes to the people that just aren’t feeling it, they’re feeling oppression from other “Christians” that’s going to turn them away from Christianity before they really get a chance to experience it on their own. It’s especially prevalent in small-town Texas, where you are either Methodist, Baptist, or Other, but never EVER “none.”

Deciding whether I wanted to be a priest has been going on a long time, mostly because I fight between the idea of living a normal life and an extraordinary one. I know that sounds so arrogant, but to take on the mantle of priest at all is, in a sense, arrogance. You’re advertising to the world that you are a spiritual guide with your vestments and still fallibly human on the inside. One of my church members in Portland put a stole on me when I was preaching one Sunday and my stars aligned. There’s a picture from that day in which I am so grounded that I look back on it and God whispers, “get it handled. You are not supposed to be protecting these kinds of networks. You’re supposed to be creating mine.” God is such a bitch sometimes. I’m all like, “I think I know what I’m doing” and God is all like, “you clearly don’t, but thanks for ALL YOUR HELP.” God, in my mind, sounds a lot like Chandler Bing.

If there’s someone from the Bible that I really identify with right now, it’s Moses. Not larger-than-life Charlton Heston Moses, but the kid who, when asked to lead the slaves out of Egypt, asked God why God didn’t want his brother, instead. It is the kind of transformation I am seeking. I want the kind of healing that will just stop me from saying “no” to the universe.

Love,
Leslie

One of my Portland friends told me that she’s moving to the Midwest. It feels good that I can have “my city” back, because I doubt that I ever would have gone back to Portland if there was even a whisper of a possibility of running into her. It’s not that goodwill doesn’t exist from my direction, it’s that I would much rather love her from waaaaaaaaaaaay over here. I am much more happy with the thought of having good memories than creating bad ones.

I think about what she means to me now and the balance looks different. The more people hear my story, the more convinced I am that I am not crazy and something really did happen between us. Whether that meant she wanted to lord control over me or whether it was really love is moot. Either way, I have been and will be affected for the rest of my life. She can deny me the truth for the rest of her life, but I will not let that affect mine. This is because I can hold it in my mind that I could be absolutely wrong about everything, but she has never once offered any explanation for anything and tight-lipped silence says more to me than anything. It’s not that silence equals guilt. It’s that not telling me anything has been worse than telling me everything (I hope). I am prepared for the possibility that the reason I don’t know the real truth has two possibilities: 1) Neither does she 2) she thinks it would be too malicious for me to bear.

I waffle between those two ideas often, because the former is much less threatening. The more I read about the psychological tactics that were used to get me to stay in the relationship, though, the less I feel secure. I wander through years and years of memories every day trying to come to some approximation of peace, and sometimes I find it. But the tendency to ruminate is so entrenched that peace is temporary.

I am learning every day that this “breakup” is solely dependent on me releasing myself from ruminating about a problem that’s been turning in my head since September of 1990, but I am not going to be able to do it alone. On one hand, I view her as one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met in my life, and on the other, she is a dark force that has controlled my breathing, never letting it relax from fight or flight.

I’m sure by now she probably thinks it would have been easier to just pay more attention to me, but I don’t think that at all. If I hadn’t had to go through this pain at this time, it would have been put off and become even more explosive. It needed to happen, and even if I didn’t learn the Truth, I still had to learn my own. By now, we’d had entire psychological battles in front of two congregations in two states in two denominations in two different DECADES. How much further did I have to be entrenched to see what was going on?

But that was the point! Keep me entrenched and I won’t be able to see that I’m whole, happy, and healthy… because you need me to be lesser than. I feel so much more powerful now, as if I have come back into my body after a long dream. Parts of myself are coming together better than before they were torn, because scar tissue is so much stronger.

It is starting to bother me that where I look for sustenance rarely contains articles about children entrenched in relationships with narcissists, because of course it does. I don’t want to read about narcissists dating habits, because I never dated one. It was never my choice. I was just in the right (or the wrong, depending) place at the wrong time. I sense my shame and try to go numb because I know I have to read it anyway. It’s the only way my wounds will heal. We were not dating, but sexual information passed between us so that I was sure we weren’t dating logically and married emotionally. Because that part of my life has never made sense- my utter devotion despite being kicked in the gut repeatedly- I spent years and years searching for “the hook.” How did I get so involved on an emotional level while being convinced I wasn’t? Here is my unverified theory.

She needed me more than I needed her, and telling me that there was no hope while stroking my ego gave her just enough separation from me that I was never going to be The One, but I’d give her whatever she wanted. Even if she couldn’t be The One for me, I was still welcome to waste as much energy on her as possible. I was still welcome to give her anything and everything about myself, which she would learn to use later in cruel, seemingly thoughtless remarks (that seemed meticulously planned). I’d listen to her emotional horror stories and I would show up emotionally. That’s what I could do, and did, for two years of my life at a time when two years was two eons emotionally. I arrived at the church where she was a scholarship singer the summer after my sixth grade year, and she moved to Dallas the summer after my eighth. By then, our dysfunction was entrenched, and we would never break it until I could hold it in my head that our relationship wasn’t healthy. Then, it seemed impossible. I didn’t have the life experience to see the ways in which I was being coerced, partially because she was sneaky about the ways she tweaked me so that she always had plausible deniability, and partly because let’s face it. Damn. I know how to pick ’em. Imagine that at 24 and you tell me how many kinds of knocked on my ass I was. At 12 and 13, there weren’t enough love songs in the world to describe a single moment of how I felt. There was just too much explosive joy.

The story where she gave me the journal happened on Sept. 10th, 1991. We moved to Houston the first week of June in 1990. That means there had already been a year’s worth of contact with each other before the journal came into it. A year’s worth of hanging onto her every word, and analyzing it to make sure I was feeling what I thought I was feeling. A year to be completely sucked in. A year to completely hear everything I needed to know in order to become a stark-raving lunatic at a moment’s notice if anyone tried to hurt her. The dynamic was always push/pull. There were no problems at all until I tried to stop paying attention to her at all.

There was lots of bait to get me to stay addicted, while she was telling me that she had to hold me at arm’s length because I was so obsessed with her. I now call this my “the cake is a lie” moment. That’s how she does it. It clicked. It doesn’t matter how I feel, because by the time I’ve been discarded, there are new people she’s suckered into doing my old job. It kind of feels like getting fired for a job I was never qualified for in the first place. It’s like she all of the sudden discovered that I was just three little boys standing on each others shoulders inside of a large trench coat.

Matthew 18:15-20

Jesus said, “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Christine preached on the Old Testament reading this morning, so I thought I’d write a reflection on “the other one,” even though it was the very last thing I wanted to do today.

It just so happened that this Gospel scared the ever living shit out of me and I didn’t want to write about it. I just didn’t. I was kicking and screaming and being a total eight-year-old about it in my head. And that’s when I realized I had to write about it because it bothered me so damn much. Why does this scripture stop me in my tracks? Is scripture supposed to hurt? I’m going to have to find a way to reframe this one, because it makes my skin crawl. I sit there and get completely fucked up thinking about how my abuser and I lapsed into a world of our own, under the watchful eyes of our congregation. They could see that I was just becoming a whisper of an adult at 14, and they were suspicions of her attention/intention.

Sufficed to say, I wasn’t. There was maybe a month’s time in which someone could have unentangled us. It was that quick. My parents turned around and they didn’t live with me anymore, because only my body showed up to family events. The rest of me lived with her. Which, if you’ve ever seen us in the same room together, that description will click in your mind. There was a long period of time where I felt like I was waiting on her, and when I stopped waiting and tried to walk, she’d pretend that she hadn’t given me the silent treatment for six months and I could walk on water.

Not seeing this truth about her is what led to the theme of my life so far. It started with one or two church members that were worried about me (and rightfully so). By the time those two got to me, my heart was gone and the trap was set. Then there were four or six or eight. You weren’t getting anything out of me. I’d die first. The weird thing was thinking that it actually *might* be necessary. I’d die to keep a secret safe. Of course I would. I clearly remember nightmares in which a whole host of things stole my repose, including beheading my abuser’s attacker so I could, in turn, free myself. To just kill him was entirely too forgiving. I may have felt even more rage than my abuser herself, because hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Someone mentally entered my cave and threatened my pack. I was dark, and I wish I could say moreso because of the abuse, but all women are abused in some way or another. It just takes different forms. That is to say there’s nothing special about my story except that it’s mine. I’m glad that I’m understanding it more as I find out on my own how her actions affected mine.

My powers in understanding the human dance because of my pastor father created a loyal friend whose intentions toward protection were sullied by inaction. I did everything I could to help her, and I had already been discarded. She was everything to me, and I still have no earthly idea if I mean anything to her at all… because I know I will always have a piece of her heart when she sits back and thinks for a second, but it’s never going to be like it used to, when those thoughts drove her to write to me and let me, piece by piece, know her like no one else… not better or worse, just different. The difference is that I put forth effort, and the more I needed the dopamine from her abuse and didn’t get it, the sicker emotionally I got and the more effort I put forth. I felt as if I could metaphorically hang myself, because I’d certainly been given enough emotional rope.

Growing up this past year has included forgiving my congregation for the fear they instilled in me of them because I did not want to believe that someone I loved so much could stand at a distance with her hand on my head while I windmilled toward her. The people that saw it tried to get me out and I assured them that she was helping me. She was, genuinely, but I more than paid for it.

God, I am so glad that I got to own this part of the Lectionary. I think I would have had a really hard time in church if Christine had done it, and the Old Testament suits her preaching style well. It’s like playing against type. David preaching a sermon about Goliath. However, I will expand it to say that she is a wonderful, wonderful preacher. I was simply thankful that I did not become a basketcase in public, because I’m so emotionally vulnerable at church, anyway, that sometimes tears start before I have time to prepare and then I’m being handed Kleenex by everyone and receiving pats on my back while I pray and lose my snot with grief.

Electronic is playing in the background as I write this. It is a passion of mine, because drum and bass helps me think- really. I like everything I do set to a soundtrack of consistently mind-blowing mathematics. In short, it’s like looking at my music while I’m writing and scoffing, “keep up.”

Wow, that was arrogant. I like it.

Every day I have these confident-to-the-point-of-arrogance moments that make me see the person I’m becoming. I hope that means strong enough to be a leader and vulnerable enough to stay empathetic. That is just one of the amazing positives my abuser instilled in me. Even when you’re the leader, you get down in the dirt. Literally. She helped the groundskeepers install in the mulch in front of her office. Do you install mulch? I don’t know. I’m not really Oregonian.

I still get a little dreamy-eyed at that memory because I knew it was a life lesson as it was happening, like the wisdom that comes from throwing  a ball around with your dad, because I was there too- shoveling with everyone else. If you know anything about her, I want you to take away that she is literally the most powerful person I know, and she does crap like that all the time.*

Actually, she’s not the *most* powerful person I know, and when I say that, I mean it professionally. However, to tell you the most powerful person I know is just bragging. I can’t tell you the most powerful, but I can tell you the most famous. Donald Faison (Turk from “Scrubs” and “Murray” in Clueless) is married to one of my cousins. How close we are, I’m not sure. I don’t care about the math. I just work here.

Also, I have a cousin who appeared on American Idol. He used to be a funeral director and Simon Whatshisface (not Cowell, the producer) asked him to sing “You Raise Me Up.” Oh that’s so funny! I’ll bet he’s never heard a joke like that before! However, it was his brother that stole the show with the funny. In the package, he said, “Jason’s a horrible funeral director. Why do people go to him?” Then, later, “I hope this doesn’t go to his head, ’cause he’s got a really tiny head.”

Jonathan’s delivery was so spot-on that I would have given him a sitcom immediately. Of course, that’s not the only time he’s brought the funny. One year he came to Christmas wearing a yarmulke and called himself “Rabbi Claus.” Jonathan is a vanilla white Southern Baptist male. To think of him as a Jew *is* the joke. He was also not unaware of the physical comedy of a large man in a small hat.

All right. I think that’s enough for today. I have to go to work. What are you up to?

 

 

________________________________________________

*That’s the thing about lesbians. We don’t hire contractors so much as we learn to be them.

 

What were we talking about? The music just changed and I lost my tricycle of thought.

You know why there’s so many spelling mistakes in my blog despite the fact that I am a grammar Nazi? I know I’m being creative when I pour out my soul, and I don’t want my self-doubt to get in the way. I hit “Post” when I’m finished writing. I will go back and edit later. To edit before hitting post is to give myself a chance to think about what I’m about to put out into the world, which to some would be necessary. For me, it creates vomit-inducing visions of imagined repercussions to the point of absolute paralysis. It’s a perpetuation of the cycle I’ve always had, which is that my words aren’t worth anything. The more I think about the effect my writing has on you, the less I can think about how my writing affects me- and effects me, for that matter. My writing launches me into being, one day at a time.

True courage, where I can take the quotes off, comes after publication. I have never said anything in this blog that is untrue to me; where I have made errors are from lack of information, not malice. I know that I can stand by anything that I have written on any day, because it is so utterly me. Writing for “Stories” has been prayer. If you read it, you can see all my pain, all my raw places, and the way they’re being nourished… or not. You see all the places that I do in black and white that need work. I can rest at peace knowing that there’s nothing external that could rock me any more than I’m capable of doing myself. As I was telling my friend Aaron this morning, “if there’s anything I’ve learned this year, it’s that it’s all in my head.” Funny, because that phrase used to drive me crazy when they used it. Now I’ve re-framed those words to mean that I now have the internal power to drive those dark thoughts away, when I was previously defenseless.

The effect of growing up in church life is that you become an empath at an early age, whether you were biologically wired for it or not. The way that played out for me is that when my abuser told me things about her life that made me want to protect her, it affected me more deeply than I think was ever intended, and yet it shattered something in me.

There were people out there like that, and one of them had hurt the one I was supposed to protect. My process now is to back away from living in fight or flight mode. My knee-jerk reaction to everything was just an exposed nerve, and the upward climb is re-adding myelin.

My dad and I were at breakfast, and he said, “where are you going with this?”

Without hesitating, I said that I hoped my story was worth something in terms of helping other people learn to identify insidious types of abuse because so many other people are coerced into believing it wasn’t or isn’t real, as well. I also said that it was important to me to have written record of how far I’ve come…. or not, as the case may be.

My blog lets me just INFJackass all over the place. I am so judgmental. There are some days when I feel my life could be better represented with a table-flipping Jesus bobblehead. I look back at my old entries just to make sure those moods pass, frankly. It’s not pretty. I’m angry and self-righteous and think I have a right to be… right up until I really start looking at it and say, “that’s enough.” Then, I go back to beating myself up for having said anything at all, and it starts the vicious cycle over again…. stuff, deny, emotionally vomit later.

I click “Post” before I have the chance to think my words are worthless in the hopes of avoiding the worthlessness loop altogether.

The other day, Dana and I were with our friend Stacy at lunch. Stacy asked me if I wanted a recommendation for a therapist (she’s a pastor, has the hookups). Dana, without missing a beat, says, “is that going to be ok with you? She’s not Jewish. Stacy stood there and looked confused while Dana explained that when I pick out new therapists, I go through my insurance booklet and circle all the names that sound like New York Jews. My last therapist was a guy out in the burbs of Portland- it took me 20 minutes to get to his office- and yet nothing could dissuade me. He was the guy. I would drive 20 minutes for Howard Rosenbaum, who will always have my respect because he called my sweet Dana a “Portland Pioneering SuperJew.”

Dana’s Jewish ethnically. It’s a long story. She’ll tell you.

“Oh, but she IS Jewish!” Stacy said. HA! Bet you didn’t think of that one, DANA! My Methodist pastor friend ALSO knows Jewish therapists….

…and that is how I came to be, sitting here with my laptop and coffee, waiting for Goodman. She’s supposed to call at 9:00 to schedule my new patient appointment. It’s only 6:46.

It was on June 9th of 2013 that I all of the sudden and without warning moved to Australia… well, not exactly. Metaphorically, with dingos and kangaroos running through my mind. It was mentally walking through the center of the earth to come out on the other side and finding out the toilets really do flush backwards (to us). It was a surreal moment, this upending of my planet earth, and still hasn’t stopped feeling exhilarating and creepy.

June 9th, 2013 is contained in three words for me.

June 9th, 2013 is the day the gaslighting stopped working.

It stopped working for me that the story written for me was that I’d had a cute crush on her growing up, and that I never really grew out of it. Sure, it was weird, but what are ya gonna do?

It stopped working for me that my role in the relationship was failure, because obviously I was failing. If I wasn’t falling short as a human being, then she wouldn’t have to push me away.

If I had a problem with her behavior, she had no issue with inviting me over to talk- as long as it could be somehow re-spun by the end of the conversation that she is completely blameless… and I am ridiculous for even bringing it up.

It didn’t work for me, because I kept wondering why I was willing to try so hard when my batting average was always zero. I kept at it for two reasons. The first is that someday I was bound to get *something* right, and the second is that I really believed everything was all my fault. Really.

It was June 9th, 2013 that I was yanked my my bellybutton and dragged through the mantle, quickly and with force. It wasn’t all my fault. She said so with three little words. They started the downward decline into mental instability, because they created the moment that the color drained out of my face and I could no longer ignore everything that happened. I was not going to let her get away with blaming me for everything that’s been wrong with our relationship for the last 24 years because they are her words, not mine. She owned the game. She owned it.

Three words.

I. Befriended. You.

When I saw it was her number, I didn’t want to pick up. However, I knew that she read my blog, and it was my responsibility to take care of the people taking care of me. But I still had that knot of fear in my stomach knowing that when I said “hello,” the conversation would change my life.

It was my mother.

She asked me if I remembered when I was little my parents asking me if we should press charges against her. At the time, of course I was shocked and horrified. I wasn’t being physically abused, so of course there was nothing to press charges *for.* Plus, I wasn’t going to let anyone come within a hundred feet of her, anyway, because to harm her on my watch was… unwise. This is the trap I’ve been caught in my whole life, except for the first 12 years. It is the idea that so many people thought I was being molested, and because it never happened physically, her abuse wasn’t real. It didn’t occur to me that having my feelings rewired so that I was programmed to think of her needs before anyone else’s, including my own, was abuse in and of itself. For children, it’s black or it’s white. The answer to “are you being abused?” was always no because no penetration had ever taken place. Does that make sense?

My mom asked me what took me so long to figure it out. I told her that it didn’t take me very long at all, but that it screwed me when my abuser became a preacher’s wife, because then I felt like I had to protect both of them. AND I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY I WOULD HAVE WANTED TO PROTECT A PASTOR BEYOND ALL MEASURE. When my abuser married a minister, it carried the dynamics from my first family all the way to Oregon. It was living in a fish bowl growing up, and deciding to switch to a bigger tank.

My reaction to their marriage became to constantly stuff and deny everything that happened, because that’s what had gotten me through the last 20 years… didn’t make sense to change now… I realized yesterday morning that I wasn’t ignorant of the situation. I was willfully trying to keep it from bubbling up because I didn’t want to ruin any of us, least of all me, which was a step in the right direction because normally I am quite the little martyr with no self-esteem or preservation.

And now it makes me angry, because the pastor I swore to myself to protect constantly thought of me as the annoying little puppy that wouldn’t go away. That I hadn’t acknowledged my childhood crush on my abuser and couldn’t let it go. That I was stuck in some sort of time warp and couldn’t “age up.” It was horribly abusive considering I never told her what my real role in her life was. My real role was to keep her church members from ever finding out how bad her rage issues really were. I couldn’t help it. I could lead them as to where to find the problem, but I could not speak outright; to do so was to betray 20 years of family secrets. Writing this today is not about airing them, it is about acknowledging that I am not the weak, meek person she thinks I am. I literally tried to save her fucking career because I was so wired that way. My truth is that I could have ended her career in a half second. All I would have had to do is tell someone at the Conference level that I was doing the bulletins for Sunday morning worship when she exploded at me and started screaming because one of the pages hadn’t turned out right. I thought we were alone, so I took it and went home feeling excoriated. We were not alone- another church member heard the whole thing and came to me the next day kicking herself that she hadn’t called the police.

Called the police.

Called the police.

I still choke on those words sometimes.

I just want to put it out there, in black and white, that I am not late to the party. I’m not stupid. I took their fucking abuse because it meant no one else needed to. It sickens me that when I lay out my emotions, the general response I get is “why didn’t you tell anyone earlier?”

Because I couldn’t, you fucking jackass. I just couldn’t. You have no idea. I didn’t tell anyone anything until I was emotionally bleeding out. My mom says I need to find something else to write about. I said, “I can’t. It’s all I can think about. It’s what comes to me when my eyes close.” An old friend who’s known me since I was 17 suggested going to treatment for PTSD, to try and get those memories rewired so that when I think about them, they’re just memories. They’re not literally happening over and over. I think it’s a really good idea, so there’s my next step. It’s time to admit that it’s going to take more than just prayer to really get rid of the shame and fear I live with.

Because that much fear and shame isn’t really living.

Dana can literally feel my heart beating in my chest, we are so connected. This is important to know, because we were sitting in “my bathroom.” I was shaving in the tub, and she was sitting next to it. We were listening to “Mental Health Happy Hour” when Paul Gilmartin used a term neither of us had ever heard- “gaslighting.” Dana looked at the page, marveling. She had found another piece of my abuse on her own, the piece that cost me the most this past year as I have struggled with thinking that I am insane beyond belief and not worthy of love.

She handed me the words I’d been trying to say since I met her… the words I wish I’d been strong enough to say. The words that would have rescued me from all the crazymaking, crying, and waiting as I wondered where she was.

And here they are:

Psychologist Martha Stout states that sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically, are also charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their perceptions. Jacobson and Gottman report that some physically abusive spouses may gaslight their partners, even flatly denying that they have been violent.

I have such anxiety and empathy for the kid she must have been for it to even be possible that she recreated the scene for me. I sit there and get fucked up thinking about how I felt; I can’t begin to understand what she went through to get by.

Then I start thinking about all the girls who aren’t me and how abusers do this insidious thing to all of us, in no matter what form it arrives. It takes small pieces of your soul so that over time, you cannot tell fact from fiction. Reality is a blurry line, and the rules change often and without warning. There is no safe refuge where you know you can’t get hurt, because the target is always moving. Get close enough, and it’s like shooting at a net without a goalie, or being able to play someone’s emotions like a piano concerto.

I don’t know what’s scarier; people creating ways to make other people feel insane, or that it happens so often there’s actually a term for it.

These are 10 books (some are series) that have stayed with me long after I finished reading them in various ways & for different reasons:

1. Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmens

My grandfather used to read this to me when I was little, and I still have most of it memorized. I can’t tell you how many sleeps of my childhood started with “in an old house in Paris, all covered with vines.”

2. Fifth Grade Can Really Kill You Barthe DeClements

I didn’t fit in at school. This novel about a young girl with a learning disability isn’t rocket surgery, but it spoke to my little kid heart… ESPECIALLY the scene with the uncle and the earrings. Helen is a walking disaster, and so clueless as to her role in life that it’s just tragicomic, mostly because I identify with all Helen’s embarrassment; having a learning disability and being gay are the same- both are ways for kids to eat at your vulnerability.

3. Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen

I was in 8th grade when I read this, and it literally engulfed me. When my mind got on the plane with Brian, it was one of the few books that could keep me from switching back to thinking about what was going on at “home.” It’s about a boy going to visit his father in Alaska, and while they’re in the air, the pilot has a heart attack and dies. Brian crashes in the woods and the story follows him until he’s rescued. He ends up getting rescued in the fall, so there’s a second novel that Paulsen wrote for fans wondering if Brian would have made it through the winter. It’s a love letter to Brian, but as Paulsen has said, absolutely unlikely.

4. The Giver, by Lois Lowry

If you have been paying attention to me at all over the last 25 years, you know that I am The Receiver. I cannot think of that book without finding a piece of myself and my abuser, because Lowry’s prose regarding the transfer of memory through touch is so incredibly apt. I didn’t live my abuser’s life for her, but I felt it on my skin, especially when I was Jonas’ age. It was my junior English teacher that gave me the book, and transferred me out of her class before I could tell her how much she changed my life by having given it to me.

5. The Babysitters Club

I, like every teen girl of that period, was obsessed. And you all know what I mean when I say I memorized the first fifty pages. However, I am betting that I am one of the few fans who absolutely wanted to marry half of them. Kristy, the stereotypical lesbian, was not one of them. She was so over-the-top that I thought she was bossy and rude. And then I learned that she was just from the northeast. Plus, Stacy and Claudia work so much better when you think of them as a couple. They weren’t in the series, but in my head they were so that I had someone that looked like me. My favorite book of them all was when they went on a cruise, because the way their stories were woven together was in first person, through reminiscent journal entries. And all of the sudden, I’ve found my root. As an aside, I think those books did literally help me. There were concrete suggestions for working with kids, laid out in a fantastic format.

6. Richard Wright’s Entire Body of Work

Anything by Richard Wright, ever. At HSPVA, my freshman English teacher opened my eyes to Wright, and he gutted me like a fish with both Native Son and Black Boy. I went on to read everything I could get my hands on containing his name. He knew what it was like to be gay, because he was black! Even if it wasn’t literally true, it felt like it could be true, and it sustained me through the worst year of my entire life bar none, including this one. Not only did Richard Wright connect to my soul, he led me to a gay black author named James Baldwin. However, I didn’t know he was gay when I read “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” and finding it out post-read was seeing Jesus, absolutely no quotation marks implied or necessary.

7. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

The question was about books that have affected your life. Didn’t say whether it had to be positive or negative. The first time I read this book, I liked it. Wasn’t bad. Hell of an ending. Well, as you might remember, I had two English teachers my junior year because one ceased to enjoy my company. Because of this, I read it with a class both the first and second semesters of junior year. And then I read it again my freshman year of college. If I have to hear that line about keeping vaseline in your gloves to keep your hands soft for your wife, I will VOMIT. Sufficed to say, I do not believe it stands up to multiple readings, because the more I read it, the more the horror set in. And that’s when the brilliance of the story set in. The ending bang is not the shot of George’s pistol, but when it hit him that he would have to live with this monstrosity every day for the rest of his life. I only had to do it for a year and a half and I felt insane.

8. Eat. Pray. Love., Elizabeth Gilbert

I loved that book for the same reason a lot of other women. It gave me permission to be myself. It reveled in it. That book is all about learning to accept yourself for who you are, even the dark asshole parts you’d rather not… especially if you are raised in the South and can’t even allow yourself to think about things that just don’t need to be talked about. It is the entire reason I am so comfortable talking about what happened between my abuser and me. Elizabeth Gilbert was the first person to show me in color that my abuser’s reaction didn’t matter. Her reaction was her reaction. What I could do was treat the situation with as much love and respect as I could, and hope that she would just figure out on her own how to deal with it without shutting it down. Her silence has been the biggest gift she ever could have given me, because it allowed my thoughts to blossom and take up space in the world and to change- often as much as six impossible things before breakfast. Liz Gilbert is so soda pop in person that you’d think her book is, too. But then there are lines like this, and this is a warning if you haven’t read it. This will and should kick you where it hurts.

When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

It takes a superhuman effort to become an emotional cartographer, because I realize that my blog entries are a function of mapping and I feel that weight heavily. And at the same time, it makes me feel like a billion dollars that in generations to come when people are looking for me, they can Google “Leslie Lanagan” and really, REALLY find out what I was like… which is difficult to accept, because now there’s no need for an airbrushed headstone. Oh, well. Maybe someone in Corpus Christi will put me on the hood of their car.

9. Barbara Kingsolver

I just put the author’s name instead of one particular book because every one I’ve read has just hit me where I’ve lived. The Poisonwood Bible was revelatory because I found myself in Leah, who goes from shy Baptist preacher’s kid to African freedom fighter (moves to Africa with her white family, marries while there). Leah has the life I want to achieve one day- overcoming tragedy to fight another day. She reminds me of myself in other ways, too, especially that she’s so eloquent and precocious having been born a preacher’s kid.

Animal Dreams is a love story to and about a family woven together in letters from one sister to another. One is in small town USA, the other in Contra-ridden Nicaragua. It’s dedicated to a Portlander I’ve grown to love- Benjamin Linder, who died in the crossfire between the Sandanistas and the Contras while trying to build a hydroelectric dam designed to serve both sides. It was given to me at a time in my life that I really needed it… struck such a chord that there’s still a copy of it on my dresser so I can pick it up whenever I want.

10. The Bible

Little known truth. My blog is named what it is because “The Bible” was already taken. But to me, they are interchangeable. I don’t care if the stories are factually accurate, because if you’re looking for facts, you’re in the wrong place entirely. I’m looking for the Truth, the part of wisdom that comes through whether the variables are the same or not. Let me explain what I mean with the sentence “I was raped.” It is an extreme example, I know, but stick with me. Would you ever turn away someone’s truth if they sent you a note that said “I was raped” because something was misspelled? Words being misspelled change the factual accuracy of the sentence, but not the content behind it. The Bible is the same way. I do not reject the Truth that comes out of stories like the feeding of the 5,000 because it doesn’t scare me that it might not be factually accurate. It scares me that someone could read a story like that, in all of its moral lessons, and reject it because it never “really” happened.

I was looking for a writing prompt the other day, and it was this: what do you want people to say about you at your funeral? Not surprisingly, it led me back to the story of me and my abuser, because of course it did. You will get used to the rumination. I did. It took a while, though. I write, therefore I think, really think, about *everything* until I’m beating a dead horse.

The connection to her ran thusly:

I finally got tired of my spirit trying to define me by what she does to my insides, and not my own personality. Let me define “does to my insides.” In the beginning, it was about thinking that I’d found the love of my life. It took years of rumination before I could be in a room with both her and her partner without feeling like I was going to cry all the time. It was hard being a peacemaker and trying to stuff it down in front of them.

It was hard knowing all those years that I didn’t know what she’d told her partner about me, and whether her emotional abuse came from feeling like somehting wasn’t right and she couldn’t figure out what it was. The way she treated me when we were in each other’s lives was an odd mix of extremely tender love and over-the-top, scary as fuck rage. I could tell that she couldn’t tell whether to treat me like a threat or not.

I was never a threat. When I became a man (Still not transitioning. Shut it.), I put away childish things. Reminiscence is a hell of a lot different than wanting or trying to go back in time. Besides, since I’d gotten a front row seat to all her relationships, I realized that she made a much better friend, anyway- at least for my personality. I let her take up so much room in the relationship that I constantly let her hit me with a bulldozer because I didn’t want to go through the chaos and pain of letting go.

The aha moment (thank you, Oprah) was when I realized that even if in crossing the line into pedophilia was an accident because she didn’t vet the journal before she gave it to me, it still wasn’t my fault that I reacted sexually. No matter how I change the variables, the results are the same. Whether it was intentional or not, the facts are what they are. Her college journal and the completeness of her personality had let me into a part of her soul that I felt honored to receive. I thought the relationship was going to be an 80-year love affair, and when she started pushing me away, the more I stuffed down my grief because I was so embarrassed that I’d ever put that much energy toward so much of nothing… but as Dana and I say when we’re throwing darts and miss, “if you’re going to get nothing, at least get a lot of it.”

If there’s anything I wish I could say to her in person, it would be that she should consider the possibility that she felt something. A spark for me that went away when she realized what she was doing, because being attracted to each other had absolutely nothing to do with sex. For me, it was the explosion and light of feeling complete because I’d finally met someone like me. I’d finally met someone that didn’t cause guilt to stir up in me because I was gay. The guilt was there, but it definitely didn’t center on my sexuality. I was gay before I met her, I just didn’t have the words for it. She didn’t have any bearing on whether I liked sex with men or women, which I would like to say for the record since so many people actually believe that kind of shit.

No, the guilt came from always feeling wrong and bad because I deserved it. I had mistaken our relationship for pedophilia instead of genuine friendship. It took many years to stop feeling like I would never be able to talk about my emotions because I had made such a serious error in judgment. I didn’t trust myself to heal, I didn’t trust myself that in time, it would get better, and I didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her, but it didn’t stop the drive to be near her in the slightest… kind of like having an irresponsible teenager that you find yourself *having* to love because you know eventually they’ll get back on the right path, anyway. You’re just pissed about having to be so incredibly patient about it because waiting is hard. Tough love doesn’t even begin to cut it.

I was defined by always being told that I was her friend and nothing else, when there was CLEAR evidence that wasn’t true. I couldn’t handle the fact (at the time) that she might have given me the journal *on purpose*to pique my interest in sex and the logical explanation for it happening is that I was obsessed with her to the point of unrequited love. There was nothing unrequited about it. I was reacting to trauma and trying to pull her out.

In thinking about freeing myself and what I want people to say about me at my funeral, the best compliment anyone could pay me is that I slayed my own dragons to become the most me I’ve ever been. I see so many possibilities now that I’m not tied to the small person I used to be, and defined by someone else. I have found a voice that to me feels stronger because I’m so much more grounded- God to head, head to feet, feet to floor.

Amen.