My friend L-train (or L-money, or The L____anator, or any number of endearing things I’m thinking that day) has a friend that worked as an editor for one of my favorite magazines of all time. I will not mention which one, but if you know that David Sedaris is in the stable, you’ll get there quickly. He’s a spirit writer/reviewer, so I was talking on L-train’s thread about whiskey and ran across him myself and got to have a bit of a conversation. Whether or not it goes anywhere, I introduced myself to a working writer/editor and felt like we each had something to offer each other. I am comfortable enough in myself to say that I will enjoy his writing and he will enjoy mine, which is a far cry from hoping that someone notices you. It’s not a feeling of dreaming up, but knowing I have the skills to climb there on my own and hope that the world agrees with me.

I told him to read “Home in a Single Sip,” because it weaves wine tasting into communion. I also told him that I didn’t know if he believed in God or not, but it didn’t matter because good writers know good writing regardless. Maybe something will happen with my agreement with myself to contact him personally; maybe not, but you don’t hope for that, because it puts your hope in other people fulfilling your expectations instead of fulfilling them on your own.

I originally asked L-money to pass on the article TO him, but then I realized that was kind of sixth grade of me and messaged him privately with a link to my blog (forgot you could do that without being friends), then messaged L-train to say she didn’t have to be the middle man anymore.

If something is going to happen, it begins with my agreement, not L-train’s or anyone else’s. I put my writing into rareified air. I hope it sticks. It has so far. Why should I be worried from here on out?

I already have a lawyer in my family (wink, wink- nudge, nudge- Know what I mean?)

😉

As I have mentioned before, I have a board of directors that help keep me sane. One of them I’ve known since high school, one of them I’ve never physically met, and one of them was on the board in Portland without even knowing it and now watches over me from Alaska. It’s a rolling hierarchy for me, because I have mental health issues and my life goes better when I realize that there is nothing I can do but manage it, and sometimes other people are better judges than I am of my behavior, because I simply cannot see it from the outside like they can. The older I get, having people to which I am accountable is important, because it helps me from falling through the safety net of society by saying and doing things that are so beyond the pale that it alienates people instead of heals them, which is always going to be my intent; being human and fallible prevents me from healing everyone, every time. Sometimes, I’m angry, and even if it’s not your fault, you’re going to think that. I do not have the ability to be objective with the board. They are not my patients or parishioners, and never will be. They are the ones I feel safe in having normal human reactions- in front of people objectively, I cannot let my emotions be a part of “things.” It’s kind of a good attitude to have at any job, because it will stop you from ruminating about petty shit and start to define yourself by what you do for passion instead of money. It’s a Portland attitude that I wear proudly in Houston. When people ask what I do, I rarely if ever tell them what I do for a living, even when I worked at huge corporations. I am a writer, and that’s all you ever need to know about me, because it is not my job but my definition.

It is the board of directors to which I allow surrender in order to make me capable of these ideals, and in my life, I struggle with the pride that comes before the fall. I do not mean that I am weaker than they are. I mean that they are the people that get to see the entire range of who leslie is when it is not appropriate to show it to the whole world, because it affects your confidentiality and not mine alone. Ministering is not blogging, and parishioners aren’t friends. It is a distinct disconnect I will have all my life to ensure clinical separation between my problems and yours. I don’t want to project what I think based on what I’d do if I were you, and I don’t want to ruminate on your problems while I’m trying to have a conversation with my wife and can’t bring myself into the present. I’m sorry. Your problems just cannot be important enough to me that it screws up my marriage, and I think everyone in this profession would agree with that boundary. No one wants to sleep on the sofa.

However, I will take on the problems of the board, because they take on mine. I will comfort them as they comfort me, and with this I hope to live in harmony, but can’t help causing waves occasionally and they can’t, either. We all continue to let our hearts get bigger with acceptance of each other, the wholeness of that person’s being, because it is ice and fire and everything in between, hopefully settling in front of a roaring fire that is constrained only by it’s hearth so that we do not burn.

Fire tempers and makes us stronger. We fight, we have make-up text, we move on, and the scar tissue from that fight heals so that the relationship is stronger and more flexible, not less. Our range of motion has increased, and we are capable of handling dischord [sic].

I didn’t become the full range of humanness until I realized what a gift I’d been given in people who were willing to fight it out with me and come through on the other side stronger than we ever were before. I have a massive disrespect for friends who hear things they don’t like and release their inner eight-year-old and stomp off mad, never to return.

Thanks are necessary for the woman in the story I just linked; she was the one that called me on my bullshit, I apologized, and we moved on to laugh and joke another day. It was taking scar tissue and making a metaphorically elite athlete out of it. L-money, thanks for tempering me. You cannot imagine how much I needed it.

See? Board of directors. They save me when I can’t save myself. Let me know if you create your own. It’s a miracle to me in and of itself.

 

I had to call in sick to work last night, which should never happen, ever, but these were extenuating circumstances. Both the bursitis and the myofascial tissue in my shoulder/back were inflamed to the point that it hurt to inhale and I was stuck in my office for quite a long time, literally unable to move. I called the doc and she said “all I can really do for it is shoot it.” So off Dana and I went to get me a sub-ac and some trigger point injections. I feel better today, and can inhale without my shoulder spasming. I have the day off today, so I’ll be ready for the weekend. I just need to do some appropriate stretches because when I favor the injury, it pinches off even more. I am in so much pain that tears have come several times…. but it’s welcoming, cooling. I’m not crying because anything is emotionally wrong, it just is what it is. Crying is not a sign of weakness, just an acceptance that I’m in pain and after the injections and Advil, I’m still in pain.

I have taken something, which has restored my ability to complain.

In my family, this conversation has happened approximately 14,0000 times:

McLanemy Kid: My ____ hurts.
Doc: Have you taken anything for it?
McLK: No
Doc: Has it kicked in yet? Well, I guess you can’t get tachyphylaxis from nothing.

Tachyphylaxis is a medical term describing an acute decrease in the response to a drug after its administration, therefore it is like a joke, except jokes are funny. We’ve got a million of ’em. Welcome to the McLanemy Family, where our motto is “take a dumb joke and run it into the ground. If it’s funny once, it is funny a thousand times.”

I cut myself at work on Tuesday, not bad, but enough to get that first cut out of the way. It’s a badge of honor on your own chef’s knife…. with one that the kitchen owns, you’re just a dumbass who cuts themselves. What do you do? Wash it, stick some SuperGlue on it, and keep moving. There is no crying or hurting yourself in cooking. I once burned myself so bad that a plastic spoon fused onto my skin. What did I do? I ripped it off, put some silver sulfidine on my hand, and kept going.

You can learn a lot about life by cooking in a professional kitchen. With mine, sure, but especially on a huge brigade where you’re just one part of the machine. You don’t let people down even when your own house is in flames. Just looking at that sentence makes me sweat, because if you’ve been reading my blog lately, it is trying to learn how not to let people down emotionally when my own house is on fire.

Cooking is life if you pay attention long enough.

You’ll have to get past all our tattoos and piercings, but then you’ll find that we cooks are some of the sweetest, most damaged people on earth…… and by that, I mean that you’ll find people at ages where their life experiences seem impossible. We are all “night people” for a reason, and a lot of it is that we know we don’t work well with others, so we work with each other.

I may have to put up with a few fake dick jokes now and again, but say it one more time, Larry…. one more time. Your sister thinks I’m hot. So does your mom. My MO in the kitchen is to get at least one cook a night to say, “DAMN, man……” And then, my work here is done and I can start breaking down. Bring me those cups, would you?

Truth time. Thomas Lauderdale once bought fizzy water from me at Laurelwood pub. He was running for a flight, and so he just paid at the register. I said, “Does anyone ever tell you that you look like Thomas Lauderdale?” He just gave me this kind of pained expression and I said quietly, “oh my God! It’s you!” He winked and left.

FB post re: Thomas Lauderdale and possible run for mayor of Portland, Oregon

For this tweet, I was favorited and retweeted (because FB posts can do that now) by both “Best of Portland” and “Today in Portland.” Let’s not tell them I’m not there, shall we? It did not happen today. I worked at Laurelwood E Terminal what seemed like a million years ago. In some ways, I wish I was still there. Both Dana and I got to meet a crapload of famous people and hear about the others….. there being two Laurelwoods and two terminals, we competed. All in all, let’s see… there was Silas Weir Mitchell (Monroe from Grimm), Lauren Potter (Becky from Glee), Garth Brooks, and Silas Weir Mitchell again, because I made Dana go up to him and say, “my wife hits me every time she sees your car.” In the show, he drives a yellow bug (yes, I also punch her during Once Upon a Time). I got a laugh from Monroe. Beat that with a stick.

I am sure that Dana can remember more than I can. I was the prep cook, so most of my work entailed standing in the back of the kitchen and making grab-n-go sandwiches for the cold case out front. I had my own little niche back there, complete with radio. I was known for being the only one in the kitchen that listened to NPR, especially on Saturday mornings. About a month after that, I had my first Christ moment in a restaurant.

We had a mother and daughter team that worked brunch/lunch with us, totally enmeshed like besties and very cute to be near. One day, the daughter came up to me and said that her mother was lamenting on some far away earthquake. The daughter exclaimed “where did you hear THAT?” The mother said, “oh, Leslie has NPR on in the back all day.” She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “thank you for educating my mother.” I had to excuse myself to the restroom as my allergies were acting up terribly. Tears all over the place. Damn redness.

Pretty sure I walked into a wall on the way out, but that’s how my mind works. Power, grace, and style.

Today is The Divine Mrs. B‘s daughter’s birthday. She’s six, just like Christopher Robin. While she’s enjoying her six-year-old birthday party in Las Vegas, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is going to hear the case for marriage equality. By the time her now six-year-old eyes are closed, we could live in yet another new world.

Now we are six, as well.

That book has always lived in my mind with a sense of occasion. NOW we are six. It is just as important to a six-year-old the kind of world she creates for herself as it is the world we create for her. It is hearing “now we are six” to be reminded that I AM SIX and I know how to use it.

My life’s work is remembering I’ve already passed those milestones and have gone on to create some indelible writings, even if only on my own skin. It’s time for me to take stock of all my “sixness,” and technically, I do it every day. “What do I feel strong about today? What can I get done that will make me feel enormous with self-satisfaction?”

For Ava, it might be cleaning her room or getting an A at school. For me, well, yeah. Kind of the same, really. Except my As aren’t in school. They’re in conduct. 🙂

It is so interesting to me that Ava is six this year, because I kind of had my own “Now We Are Six” moment in August when I published The Cost of Shame; someone told me that they were proud of me and the way I lived my life and it was pulling myself up from my boot straps and hearing the sonic boom of my own words and living through it, breathing so that I could inhale more deeply than I ever could’ve before.

I hope that the Fifth Circuit feels the same way- that they have enough chutzpah to stand up and say that marriage inequality is over, because NOW WE ARE SIX, AMERICA.

We’ve had enough of our own five-year-old moments. Let’s all grow up together.

A person who had been baptized as a small infant once said to me, “As far as I’m concerned, nothing happened.” She did not have any memory of it, of course, but something dramatic happened, and her subsequent life as a Christian was proof of it.

–Michael Rogness, WorkingPreacher. org

I cannot empathize with the sentiment that when I was baptized as an infant nothing happened, because my baptism was hilarious. When I think of myself and who I am and have been over the years, of course this happened to me. It couldn’t not.

As I have said before, when I was a kid my dad was a pastor. Therefore, I was not baptized by my father, I was baptized by his then-bishop, Bishop Crutchfield. When he put the water on my head, I urinated all over him. I don’t know whether he was a good boss or not, having been so little when my dad worked for him, but I imagine my dad going to two emotional places depending on the nature of their relationship….. the first being abject horror and the second being a pat on the head for a job well done. In any case, after the laying on of blessed water, my own seal had been set… one that I was not exactly present for but comes in handy nonetheless. Even in baptism, I am legendary in an unusual way.

We are at that point in the story with Jesus. Our gospel today is John the Baptist and the baptizing of Jesus, where God swoops in like Gladys Herdman writ large and says, you are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. Even in baptism, he is legendary in an unusual way. Jesus got the spirit descending like a dove, I got a story that follows me to this day about peeing on someone. Seems legit. It’s like we have ONE BRAIN.

The present day connection is a struggle for preachers that John, one of the commenters, brought up:

I think one of the hardest things for people to understand both about baptism and eucharist is that something really does happen in these sacraments. They really do impart God’s grace–they are not simply rites. Yet, in people’s experience of life these connections are not always made. One of the challenges for us as preachers is to struggle with helping people make these connections– to enter into the mystery of how indeed God’s grace in these sacraments is really present. When someone says to us that for them “nothing happened” in their baptism, or reception of eucharist, it is important to remember that their experience of “nothing happening” is something happening–and invite them to explore and struggle with what that feeling of nothing happening is inviting them to engage. Can even this experience and feeling become an invitation to open themselves (and ourselves) to new possibilities of experiencing God’s grace and presence in ways that transcend our objective experience and reasonable thought–opening to us that mystical dimension of encounter with the holy?  After all, the benefits of both baptism and eucharist are not dependent on our understanding of them, intellectually or otherwise. Perhaps if we can help people into such an engagement, we can reawaken a sense of the mystical realities that have become largely lost in our time.

Those words undid me for a little bit. I had to really think about them, because I was born with the type personality that does that…. to the conclusion of all else, mostly. I want to bring you the light of ritual, that it is a connection worth having to keep you strapped to the earth when you’re about to fall off. I had that moment, and my faith was the safety net that caught me. Looking toward mysticism instead of away from it is a valuable tool to understanding yourself, even as an Atheist- if you can’t believe in a God but you CAN believe in The Force, The Doctor, and Captain Mal, you can relate to what I am saying. It is not God that unlocks you, it is your agreement. It is not God’s promise but how and when you meet it.

Mary chose to save the world from itself; I say again, “what are you here to do?”

What does your own baptism entail? There is a reason the phrase “baptism by fire” is so popular. It is emotional shorthand for a truly gigantic idea…. that only the brightest hope and promise for our lives is based on the degree to which we screw up and feel saved by inner peace instead of distracting the journey with drugs, sex, and screwing with other people’s emotions just because that’s what you know to do and won’t step out of it because you feel like you can’t and won’t because it hurts too much to try.

That’s fire. Looking at your own iniquities and being able to own them and express them out loud so that people know when you act on your kid fears, it’s not their fault. It’s what causes the Holy Spirit to descend upon you like a dove, because just like a thief that’s been caught, you’ll be able to sleep soundly again.

The light in Christ’s baptism is when we take it into ourselves and wake up baptized with the possibility of new light…. That sleep refreshes us into the innocence of an infant so that there is a balance between having to be tough as nails to protect yourself and weak enough to admit when you’ve really done it this time.

To bring the theological into the present, do you think that George Zimmerman will ever understand the enormity of what he’s done and the movement he’s started? What will it take for him to redeem himself in his own eyes? What will it take for him to stare down into all of those emotions and try to move on? This is assuming he is not a sociopath that can turn off his emotions entirely. He’s just a normal human being showing a disastrous amount of poor judgment. Light words in an enormous case, but if I can’t have empathy for criminals, I am in the wrong business entirely.

There have been many criminals baptized in Jesus’ name, and my best hope for them is that it isn’t a temporary response…. that they are truly turning away from the darkness in their hearts to create more hope for their families and friends, who by now are convinced that they will never get what they need because they’re not there. My mother used to teach many children whose lives had been interrupted by their parents in jail, some at the same time. The more the conversion is true and empowering, the more hope there is for taking darkness and using it to repel light………

Because you’ve been there. You’ve seen darkness enough to know that you need a baptism, even if you don’t think God is here….. because you are.

Maybe your darkness isn’t that severe, but it is the level of redemption you receive when you realize that baptism is the real deal, physically and metaphorically. It is a physical act that represents an enormous gift when you are old enough to take it in. It is the promise that living faithfully will prosper you more than fumbling in the darkness.

Like peeing on your dad’s boss in front of an entire sanctuary.

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

In losing my sexual innocence at such a young age, I gained abilities far above my age that made my choices for me. Therefore, all of my relationships have had a dark edge to them that I’m still processing; I do not want to live in darkness anymore, and I want to choose light. I have an ability to be manipulative to the point that I don’t even realize I’m doing it. Now I’ve got the realization and it is painstaking but worth it to go through all of the relationships I’ve screwed up by trying to hide my real self.

The ones that are the closest to me take the brunt of my illness and as I have said before, it is huge. I say things without thinking that floor them, and they have no idea how to respond, so they retreat………. which is exactly what I wanted. I don’t need you. I’ve never needed anyone. Why should you be any different? You’re just going to screw me eventually….. we might as well get it over with…….. That is my illness. To get you to run away from me because I know you don’t want me, anyway. You say so, but you don’t mean it. It’s ok, no one else does, either.

Those are the tapes that have allowed me to live in darkness until now. Those are the feelings so deep-seeded that they cause me to react with anger when it isn’t necessary. To fight to the death because then I don’t have to think about how much emotional damage I am to you when we’re together. I know I’m a tornado. I know you can’t take it. So I make sure you won’t.

How’s that strategy workin’ out? Not so much, actually.

When I saw how my ability to degrade myself was spinning me into Katie Ka-boom, I realized that my destructive abilities were winning out over rational choices. Anger was making me go to a place I didn’t recognize, and didn’t want to. I learned a lot about my base self in 2014, what things triggered me into darkness and what didn’t. I took stock of the people my darkness drove away, and what it must have meant to them to have someone in their lives so ridiculously hard to love (at times). I had to look at why I needed to make it so hard. At the time it made sense to me- the tapes running in my teenage head said that I needed to hide my real self because no one could love that person, anyway.

My entire reality flooded with warmth and light when I saw just how much it wasn’t true. Having women write to me and tell me that something I’ve written resonated with them, or stayed in their minds long after they thought it would made me see that I absolutely spill my guts out on this web site and therefore, the impossible person I am to love is out there in black and white and PEOPLE LOVE ME ANYWAY.

I make it my choice to see your ability, and I am humbled by it. I can only say in the smallest, most sincere voice in the world, thank you.

Kristie said that I’d become her loudest and most insistent angel, and I immediately christened myself Gladys Herdman’s disciple. “SHAZAAM! HEY! UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN!” I’m sorry that I tend to kick people in the back of the face emotionally, but it is my life’s work on earth- to tell my story and hope that you identify with a piece, because it might allow you to go home and create something better than I’ve said here. It’s all about building on each other.

I will not share what happened with my 7th grade best friend, because at least for a little while, I need to keep it under wraps. We’ve got a lot to do, but ultimately we’re ready to do the hard work in order to end up in a better place. Hugs, cheek kisses, an arm around my shoulder. Another addition to the Board of Directors. She keeps me humble because she always has. I knew that the darkness of my abuse would break her, and I didn’t need to change her life, too. This will be a better story if you’ll wait for it, because there are too many puzzle pieces that need to fall together in my own mind before I can process it efficiently. It’s about breathing all the way down before I exhale words, and I have plenty of stuff that bothers the shit out of me that is also entertaining and, ummm, insistent.

I’m making friends at work that share my interests and are funny, smart, and talented. I had so much fun with Greg when he was working as a wine steward for New Seasons Market and teaching for the International Sommelier Guild. He would light up from the inside about history, geography, and tasting it…. wine, yes, but elements of the past that have aged into beauty.

Aaron is taking Josie to school this morning, and then I have plans with him to sit on the couch and chat for a bit before taking on the enormity of our house right now. I have been acting like dumped girl and the kitchen shows it. I finally had enough of feeling rejected and decided not to reject myself. As Olivia Pope said in Scandal, “I CHOOSE OLIVIA.”

I feel I have righted some enormous wrongs- enough to have peace that I can move on, knowing that whether I ever talk to her again, she changed my life in ways that she cannot comprehend not having known me since I was a kid. My words are large to and about her are large because I was trying to make her understand something that cannot possibly be translated….. all the kid fears she quieted in her soft and gentle whispering, all the adult bad behaviors she called me on so I could finally see them and try to make amends.

It was breaking eggs to make an omelet, and it feels good to be cheesy. I cannot wait to see the one I’ve waited for, but couldn’t receive because of my own insecurities and flaws. I am an absolute 7th grade mushball when I’m around her, and Dana will find it incredibly cute. Now I can say a lot of things out loud that I never could have before…. most of which is forgiving myself for thinking that she couldn’t handle the mess I was in, because while it might have hurt her, she also might have given me the strength to have talked- another thing that is lost to history, but something I cannot avoid running through my mind quickly- a picture I cannot grab.

I think about things, because now I am my own loudest and most insistent angel, making me think about things until I have worked them to resolution. Sometimes it takes one of the board to get me to see that I should take the things I say to heart. If it’s helped other people, imagine what it could do for me. 🙂

Sometimes I just stare at Dana while she’s asleep because I can’t believe that much energy is at rest. Dana is perpetual motion, and to understand that is to understand her. I have learned so much about being a wife and being *her* wife that it’s a humbling feeling to know that there are enormous wrongs and enormous rights on both sides, and that for almost seven years (since 2008) we have gone past the definition of married into accepted family member. She is Aunt Dana, and will be for the rest of her life, God willing and the creek don’t rise. In a marriage, you strive for equality and when the balance is interrupted, trouble starts. I cannot say that will never happen to Dana and I because the odds are that we have a 50/50 shot at making it that far. I only think of it in terms of emergency preparedness. What would I do if my entire world was gone? It really puts my world in perspective fast, and therefore I am bound to give her what she needs so that the relationship flourishes and the odds are ever in our favor (see what I did there?). I cannot prepare for her reactions and responses, but what I can do is strive every day to make her feel wanted, accepted, loved, and cherished. Sometimes when you can’t have faith, you let your actions reignite it.

For Dana and me, the forest fire comes in waves, and the heat is so intense that it makes me sweat. For instance, the first words out of her mouth after the first time we kissed were, “I’m amazing in bed. I just thought you should know.” Challenge. Accepted. It was her confidence that did it. I would do anything for a night with her, much less all of them. Just lucky, I guess. 🙂

I feel sorry for people who don’t connect in the ways that keep Dana and I sane, because by now we’ve been through so much tempering fire that we have the type foundation that lasts decades…………… However, feeling sorry is not about trying to get others to feel jealous. It’s that I wish I could find a way to give that marriage to you because I know how it feels. It connects you in a way that temporary relationships cannot. There is a chord that runs between Dana and me that would take a chainsaw to sever because the memories in both our minds of each other are gigantic, life-changing moments where we each let our hearts get bigger to accept who the other one is. It is agape and Eros tied into one. The more she is interested and engaged in our relationship, the more she feeds my need to delve deeper into her inner landscape. She was the first to know about my abuse next to Diane, because I wrote about it privately for months and months before I realized that she would never, ever respond and I should give up trying. I was right. The picture from the soccer game was just candy from a van. When I stopped her from playing her mind games with me, she left me so fast my head spun, and has since 1990, never ending after having to process all of the 24 years before. It was just another way to rip open the scab, and Dana cried with me. She took my anger into herself and fought Diane in my head tooth and nail, hoping every day that I would realize that Diane shouldn’t have any of me and I was only beating my head against a wall and it was time to stop. She toyed with my emotions because I told her up front that I was in love with her, so there was no way that at 25 she let go of the poetry that told me who she was in bed. I fell in love in a very adult way, growing up in an instant. Can you imagine? Can you sit with me and feel how it felt to want to marry someone after reading her words written in her handwriting, more powerful to me than untold wealth, have an impenetrable wall go up between us that held me at arm’s length like a dog on a chain? It’s a long sentence. I hope you read it in one breath. That space of exhale became a metaphysical pneumothorax, lung collapsed by the weight of grief at too young an age to handle it.

I can’t help but think that igniting my body was the key to her plan to befriend me, because it assured I wouldn’t stray or talk. She could pour secrets into me like water and I would take it in, all the while living in the discomfort of being in love with her and being treated like crap for it

If ________ is my metaphysical risen Christ moment, then Dana has been John the Baptist all along, preaching as an assist until ________ shot the goal into the net. When the train came in, it was Dana that helped me get on. She listened for hours, and I talked (and talked and talked and talked) about what Diane meant in my life as she kept saying “the journal was on purpose. She knew what she was doing.” It was an ostinato of epic proportions and I could hear her words but I could not take them in because we’d been tied up with Diane for the entirety of our relationship and my problems with her hadn’t gotten any better, ever, so why waste your life energy on it?

_________ rescued me with her heart and her words. Dana rescued me by being there with her actions, loving me in an incredible way that brings tears to my eyes when I think of it. Since Dana had known Diane forever, I couldn’t hear her words. It took a new friend that saw it without a horse in the race except I know the facts and you are damn lucky she got away from you when she did.

I applaud running away to avoid living in darkness. I am dark enough to say I don’t feel damn lucky she got away. I love her every bit as much as I did when I was 12, and my heart aches for what we could have been had I been older, again, a past we cannot fix. Because she doesn’t feel the same way and doesn’t see how her actions influenced my entire life and caused more emotional fire hazard zones in my brain than anyone else, I think she wanted someone on that leash, a pet person she could take to the groomers. She could slowly and over time fuck me up to the point of having no teenage years to speak of because I was in this gigantic relationship that people who have been friends with her as an adult have walked away from her because of the exact same shit. They were stronger than I ever could have been because I was in love with her because our brains connected when I was a kid, not our bodies. If we had connected physically, I have no doubt that it would have been explosive not because of our actions, but because of the kindred spirit relationship that the tapestry of our past has wrought. Thoughts of her were a never-ending repetition of facts, trying to figure out the breadcrumbs dropped. It was a game of thrones, and naming her was the red wedding all over the place because all of the sudden, I didn’t care who knew. Her parents, her siblings, anyone because I’d been protecting myself and beating myself up so severely for so long that I thought I would give my parents the gift of my own relief. I think they knew it was going on, but they couldn’t prove anything and I did everything to hide it. You have no idea. None.

I am sure this is rambling all over the place, but at the same time, there is a connection. The connection is that I have been damn hard to love, and Dana preached to me that someday someone will come and you will believe and when she did, Dana helped me not to waste time on her words, either. I wish I had leaned into Dana’s strength, but it was the objectivity of fresh eyes that had to convince me of all I was letting go if I lived in shame a second longer. That I have donned a mantle beautifully in this web site and my self-worth got a B12 shot.

We are all giants together emotionally in our own right. When talking about balance of power, it’s the degree to which someone feels small in your presence. If they do, you’re going at life in a way that spits anger all over the place when the world doesn’t need it.

I feel like the last week or so has really been examining my Board of Directors and who should be there and who shouldn’t. We voted Diane out, we voted _______ in, and we got new drapes in the conference room. Writing the letter to my middle school friend has my stomach in knots, but it is the best thing I have ever written about her because I was no longer coming into our relationship with shame. I wanted to make her feel enormous, and I hope I did. She was instrumental in getting me to see that I could have flaws and people would love me anyway, based on actions alone.

I am not running in fear of any of my tornadoes, because now that I’ve been through them, I am in OZ.

This article made my skin crawl. It’s called Childhood Guilt, Adult Depression?, and explores the idea that if you experience extreme childhood guilt between the ages of four and 12, it is often correlated with a host of adult psychiatric illnesses. I was not the healthiest of children when Diane met me in 1990, having just been through a total and complete disaster of a house fire six months earlier.

Guilt because I was the only one home for what seemed like several hours before anyone knew that the house was burning but me. The fire trucks arrived before my mom and dad, and my mother nearly had a heart attack right on the street until she saw me coming from a neighbor’s.

Guilt that it was five days before Christmas, and I hadn’t done enough to save anything. They ask in Scruples what you’d grab if your house was burning? In my case, nothing. Not one fucking thing. I let it all burn and didn’t stick around to watch jack shit. I just ran. In Scruples, what they fail to include is the moment of horror when you SMELL the fire coming toward you and think you’re about to be in it. If you are reasonable enough in that instance to remember to grab your crap, congratulations. You are obviously a better person than I was.

So, six months after one of the worst days of my life, I had the best one.

Guilt about my faith and how I wanted to hide myself from it for thinking that girls couldn’t marry girls.

Guilt about giving myself away to someone before either of us was ready for it.

Guilt that I couldn’t pull away on my own even though I was in love to a degree that angels would have written about it with someone my own age. I didn’t find out until I was an adult that I should have tried harder, because she loved me, too. She flirted with me once and it emotionally bombed me into oblivion, because I realized how much I’d given away just to feel guilty and shameful, unable to walk out of my ruminations and into the present.

The flirting was not “I want to take you to Phase II.” We’re both old, married, settled, complete in our own lives. Hearing that she would have had fun with me in the science lab fed my ego mightily, but that didn’t mean it didn’t make my throat close and my eyes well up with tears at all that had been lost to history. I haven’t talked to her, I don’t know if she reads me, but I hope that when her inner middle schooler reads this, she hears me loud and clear. I ran away at a time when I needed you more, not less. I should have reached out and let you know what I was feeling so that you could make a choice whether you wanted to cross that line with me or not. But I didn’t. I cut you off at the pass because I thought you’d reject me anyway. I was used to it by then…………. But it’s true. At that time in my life, I loved you like I loved air. To say that you were the one that got away is an understatement of gigantic proportions. I just couldn’t actually say those words out loud, and you will live in my storybook forever. Remember when I thought your dad had taught me how to make hash browns so I went home and tried to make them for my parents? Your dad didn’t tell me the part about microwaving the potatoes before you put them in the skillet and they were raw on the inside and black on the outside. Remember when we used to sit next to each other on the piano while you would play studiously and I would just mess around AS IF we could play four-handed duets?

How did I not know? When I think back on it, I did. If something had happened, I know the moment it should’ve. We were talking about going up to NE Texas and taking you with us; I don’t remember why, but it had to do with a doctor I was going to see up there. You said that you just wanted to hold me or let me put my head in your lap. That was the moment I broke my own heart, because I didn’t know for sure what your reaction would be, and I ran away in shame. You told me plainly how much you loved me, and I want you to know that I heard you. We cannot go back, but it gives me peace to know that if I’d asked, you would have at least thought about your answer.

It was just so much easier to live in darkness.

Guilt that obviously unconditional love didn’t work with Diane, because even as a kid, I knew that she was saying one thing but meant another. For instance, she told me that her life was an open book and that I could tell anyone anything I wanted, while at the same time insinuating that if I told anyone anything at any time, then she would pack up her toys and go home. Loving her was all about appeasement because what I wanted most in the world was to keep her happy so that she would open up to me. If she was mad, she would just shut down completely and it would be a struggle to get her to hear me, even as a teenager. My words were large, even then, because I found that she wouldn’t hear me if I didn’t speak up. I promise you, I was the fucking Neville Chamberlain of children.

She taught me how to treat her, which turned me into the type of kid that walked on a not-quite-frozen pond, never knowing if or when I’d fall through.

I stopped falling when I filled the hole she left in me with love for myself and my own abilities, rather than just the support person for hers. There is just still so much guilt because I thought that one day, I’d win. And by that, I mean I thought that things would be peaceful and hope for a better relationship would win out over the way we treat each other now, which is complete radio silence and it seems to be better for both of us all around. I am not sure that I would ever want contact with her again, because I know within myself that I could not stop her from stealing me again. We would lapse into old patterns like Laurel and Hardy. I don’t even want to try and clean up that hot mess anymore. We are done because I am done with thinking about it. It took everything I had for so long that I literally feel exhausted.

As if something was stolen from me, even if only by remote control………… and yet, I still feel guilty.

Bipolar sucks.

I read a book this week called “My Other Ex: Women’s True Stories of Losing and Leaving Friends.” I was looking for a way to deal with the loss of my own friendship when I realized that this book should be required reading from second grade on. It was so sad to me that there are women out there still grieving the loss of the friend they had in second grade, because the new ones aren’t, well, her.

No one is, well, her.

And that’s the point of the book. We all make these incredible connections in life and for whatever reason, they’re not always designed to be permanent. The most heartening relationships were the ones that reconciled into something more beautiful than was torn, but it was often not necessary to the author’s growth and development. Sometimes, the growth and development was realizing why the relationship was harmful and wishing good things on everything that is past without willing a future as well.

I don’t know where I am in my own story, and at this point, it doesn’t matter. It is a mystery that I lean into and try not to hope when hope seems like it hurts too much.

Just read the book. You’ll know what I mean.

———————————-

There’s a woman’s story in there frighteningly close to the one I had with Diane, although it went into outright physically sexual abuse and ours never did. When they met, the author was 10 and the woman was 31. I wore her scars on my skin, because she will never forget it, either. We all move on, but we don’t forget. There are too many triggers to let us.

My heart pines not for Diane, but for the person I was when I was near her. I felt funnier, more alive in every breath. I didn’t know why, and it didn’t matter. But that person was amazing, and I’ll miss her. That’s why I have to make peace with all this. I cannot think about the person I was without thinking of the person she was, too…. so the best way to deal with it is to turn those memories into old movies you watch with popcorn and see with the eyes of someone who no longer wishes to add more to the story, but to look at the one already there. Just as you cannot go back to the lake when you were eight and be the person that you were one more time until you agree to see what’s around you with eight-year-old eyes, you cannot go back to someone that has harmed you and intentionally ask for more until the person that hurt you has felt true remorse and has acted on it.

When you go back to the lake, it will feel rich and nostalgic, but your body will not interact with the water the way it did when your skin was young. You will step into it differently, and your limbs will no longer be gangly but coordinated with the practice of 20 summers….. You will have to see your innocence with your mind. When true remorse is expressed with action, it is an act of choosing light. It is an act that says “we are bigger than the conflict at hand.” Your mind will reach for the past just as if you can feel the sand in your toes and see the sailboats going by.

But reaching for the past isn’t about dwelling in it for misery. It’s dwelling in it to see what needs to change so that the past stays that way. Forgiveness is the act of seeing the world with childlike eyes. The miracle of children is their resilience. It’s a good thing to remember that the sign of age is that loss of flexibility, that inability to wipe the slate clean quite as fast.

I will no longer dwell on what it means to reconcile with someone who represents love and psychological torture in equal measure. My words are strong, and I mean them. I spent too many nights with bad dreams not to tell it like it is, and on the flip side of the coin, too many good memories to see everything with fire.

In this book, I found myself with new eyes. I can give thanks for the people we were to each other for its own sake. In loving her, I found a version of myself that I really love about me….. patient, kind, creative, musical, a heartbeat that said “you’re the one” because I didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to happen. It turned me into a loyal friend and spouse, just not with her.

I am an INFJ. I am defined by large relationships. Aaron and Dana walk around in my inner landscape daily because I let them. It took me a long time to take all my walls down with them, particularly with Dana because I hadn’t resolved all my issues with Diane until last year…… and there were a few that I didn’t want to tell anyone, much less everyone. The impetus to tell arrived because I was stuck. I didn’t know where to go emotionally, and I could not get it handled on my own.

Giving me her journal without any expected take home message except read it changed me. It changed the color of the world to rose, as it does for everyone who falls in love the first time. She just couldn’t accept that by the time she wanted to raise me as some sort of “mentee,” that image had been blown out of the water long ago by reading about touching women not much older than me.

It didn’t get to be a thunderstorm until I realized that Diane had had enough of me. I couldn’t give her any more, and I couldn’t go on pretending there wasn’t a problem, either. I had to grow up and move on, and was getting frustrated at my utter inability. Surely there was something behind all the words, all the “I love yous” said too frequently without backup action.

Friendship has relaxed me into being able to say “I love you,” but only when I mean it and not as a reflex, because it makes the words mean less the more you say them about everyone and everything. That was a lesson learned the hard way- that people aren’t going to take it the way I mean it- I care about you, I want to be your friend, you are amazing, etc.

It is taken as over-the-top admiration when I just mean to make you feel good for the few minutes that we interact. It’s something that I picked up from Diane long ago, and I’ve had to stop it out of absolute reflex. It got to the point that I didn’t realize I was doing it, just an autonomic response of an inappropriate level of intimacy.

Now that I’ve gotten out of the tremendously large black cloud I was trying to hold inside me, my “I love yous” feel differently….. more heartfelt…. my heart actually moves when I say them so that I feel the words as they leave my body.

Praying on the spaces……………….

I have an ink and paper journal that I hardly ever use because of my carpal tunnel syndrome, but still, it has its uses when I’m out and about, so I keep it around. I mostly use it to sit at SBUX and doodle, which, in my line of work, is what you’re paying for at $25/book. Writers unpack while thinking about something else and it’s the connection between the old thing that’s been running for 20 years and the new thing that just started 20 seconds ago that’s why you’re running to the bookstore screaming “shut up and take my money!” Well, I suppose you don’t have to yell if you’re using Whispernet, but you get my drift.

Anyway, the first sentence in every entry is “the beer is cold” whether I was drinking beer or not. It just became a thing. A phrase that means nothing to anyone but me, which is that when I sit down, I’d start the conversation by talking to someone. The best way you do that is with small talk. So whomever metaphysically came to sit with me while I wrote (my dad, my boss, my friends, my girlfriends, etc) got the opening line… the beer is cold…..

You haven’t been able to go to a bookstore and “buy me” yet, but you might one day. I’m like a young wine. Give me some time to mature as a human and as a writer before expecting something that great. Now is not the time for fruit. Now is the time for seeds.

I took yesterday off from doing everything except cooking. Stayed in my private brain space instead of my public one because I had a lot on my mind and a lot of baking to do about it. Pain tastes better when accompanied by blueberry muffins. And by pain, I don’t mean gut-wrenchingly so…. just “oh my God it’s 2015 and I haven’t even learned 2014 yet…. 2013 is still waiting for me to bat cleanup……….” I am trying to mentally clean out my closet, and several years are attacking me at once.

I feel a peace that I haven’t felt, well, ever. So much of me has been torched that there isn’t much left. I am an empty shell, but do not misunderstand me. The fire needed to burn me up so that only good nutrients remained. I had to go through so much pain to reach so much peace. I treated people out of my illness instead of out of my empathy, and now that I’m aware of the problem, I can do so much more about it than I could when I didn’t know it was happening at all. Awareness in mental illness is key. I have learned all the ways that other people can and will hurt me; now I am learning all the ways that I hurt people to protect myself and why they are simply no longer necessary. There is no fight anymore, if there ever was… and that is my 2014 in a nutshell.

Even if it was never a fight, I fucking won.

My stepmom is a doctor. My father was the manager of her practice and medical assistant from the time he left the ministry until two weeks ago when he retired. He left the ministry in 1995. Our friendship changed when you said literally the magic words, the shibboleth I needed to hear to unlock from you. Bedside manner. I sat in fear and awe and trembling in front of the Hippocratic oath. The Hippocratic symbol is from the Bible, from the earliest origins of Judaism. It is from when Moses lifted the serpent on the stick for the Israelites to give them something to look at and be healed. It is a direct foreshadowing to the crucifixion, and just one of the ways that Judaism birthed Christianity 2,000 years ago. When you said that my bedside manner was poor, it made me realize the enormity of my abusive nature and how I needed to publish it to have a record of what to keep myself accountable to later. My heart flipped with joy when you responded to Dana because I knew that at least I would hear from you once in a while and smile. I keep in touch with you because it’s not about you. It’s about the idea that you’re listening whether I know it or not, and that my words stick with you as much as yours give me comfort every day.

God of the universe, protect my precious ____. Let her know that she is loved beyond all measure, and the foundation of my religious dedication and rediscovered ability to funnel light that hasn’t been truly heartfelt since 1989, before I met the woman that literally changed the course of my life. Let her know that she is now in that category, women who for me divide time. There was a time before I knew you, and there is now. One chapter in my life closed and another opened to someone who proved to me that the greatness I thought I had was still there. That Diane didn’t destroy it, she put it on hold. She didn’t destroy me, and before I met you, I never would have believed it. Not for real. You gave me the closure I needed to move on. You plucked me from the sea of my own tears, and caught me in a way that I’ll never forget.

I am sorry that I used you. I am sorry that I abused you. I will never stop trying to prove to you that you see my authentic self, and that you see that the light that I show to others is a direct hit on your influence and power. I want it to make you feel enormous, because you ignited a forest fire that I never want to forget started with your flipping the match.

You are my goddess, my Muse. I am humbled in your presence.

Do you see how you are literally the first bishop in an enormous church? People build cathedrals to goddesses, and you’re the only one besides Dana and Aaron that will ever know in terms of your name. Hundreds of years from now, people will be able to touch your face.

Utterly, completely yours in all the right ways instead of all the wrong ones. I love you, _______. I am going to build great things in your honor, and you will come to dwell in everything I do, because it is a thank you that will ring throughout time. People will know who you are because of me.

You, an Agnostic, are the closest thing to my metaphysical risen Christ that I will ever see in this lifetime. I want you to know that, take it in, and realize what you started- the miracle of life.

Love,
Leslie

There are few joys in life better than making friends with your big sister’s friends. That’s because big sisters pick out the cool people so that you don’t have to vet them on your own. Big sisters share. My big sister gave me Kristie, and therefore, she went from my big sister to THE BEST BIG SISTER IN THE HISTORY OF THE ENTIRE WORLD BAR NONE. Thanks, counselor. *kiss*

Kristie, it’s your birthday today according to Facebook… and in my book, on birthdays you go all out. You tell people that they matter to you, that their trip around the sun is parallel to yours in all the right ways. God’s honest truth was that if Kristie hadn’t showed up when she did in all her ScarJo superpowers, my world would be a very different place.

I still would have been stuck in the depravity of ruminations that don’t go anywhere. Kristie’s best advice to me has just been not to care so much, because obviously, they aren’t caring about me. It’s a lesson you learn over and over in life.

“When people tell you who they are, believe them.” -Maya Angelou

I am up front about the fact that I am one of the most loving people you will ever meet crossed with the biggest introverted Don Rickles since Don Rickles. Kristie’s sunshine helped defeat that part of me that felt so “get off my lawn.” She just loved me through an incredibly difficult time in my life, when I was all tears and snot for more of my existence than I ever wanted.

In my book, we are related by blood because let us not forget, I got an in with my big sister’s friend.

Kristie, happy birthday. You are one of the lights that keeps me sane when I can’t help but fumble in the dark. You are precious to me, and always will be.

Blessings for this and every trip around the sun.