I’ve had just enough time away from the events of the summer that my body and mind are starting to relax. When I think about how tightly wound I was, I can’t help but wonder why my response was so vehement. The thing is, though, I’m not in that place anymore. I don’t understand me the way I did in the moment. I only have lenses that provide me with a window of past insight.

As far as I can tell, it has been a process of learning to self-soothe my way into wholeness and the acceptance of who I really am… and how that person is different than the person I thought I was.

In a way, it seems childish to define myself by another person’s actions. That’s not what adults are supposed to do (even though we do it a lot)… or at least, that’s what it looks like from this far away. In the middle of it, I was re-living everything I’d been taught as a child, unable to “age it up” because it didn’t fit me anymore.

I also had to learn that it was okay to tell, ok to release, ok to stop taking her story at face value without allowing myself any input. Up until last summer, I really had this feeling that what she said was gospel, and I didn’t get to help write it. After almost a quarter century of feeling bound and gagged, it was time to stop trying to save her and start trying to save myself.

The best news I’ve gotten in a long time is that it worked… but that doesn’t mean I don’t have days where I rethink things and wondered if I could have handled it any better. The reality is that it’s wasted time, and I try to catch myself in the act so that I can consciously move to a different topic.

But, of course, that only works for so long, and then I have to think about it or it will keep popping up. That’s another thing I’ve learned. Stuffing things down doesn’t work, because it will come back up, either as an emotional well of grief or pychosomatic illness… and by that, I do not mean that the symptoms aren’t real, just that they’re brought upon by stress.

For me, that stress came from knowing things about my family that only family members know… but others have gotten a taste of it over the years… or at least, enough to know that my story is valid. Anger and fear boiled over when I realized that the situation wouldn’t change just because I wanted it to. The situation didn’t change when I presented my side of the story. The situation didn’t change when I made it clear that I wasn’t dealing with my own childhood issues, but the ones created for me by someone else.

Adults have so much power when you’re a kid… often much more than even they know. In this case, I don’t think that she can plead ignorance. She would always refer to how lopsided our affection was, but there was no recognition that as the adult, she set it up that way. I just didn’t have that kind of power.

The blessing this year was seeing that I had gained it.

On Saturday nights, I work alone. I have an impossibly large caseload, but so much time on my hands that I’m already way ahead of the game. No one expects me to finish the whole thing, but it wouldn’t be a bad feeling if I did. When no one else is here, I can get an impossible amount done. At the same time, though, it’s Saturday night and I’m here while my friends are either out partying or getting together at someone’s house. If I was home, it would be mine. Alas, I am not.

I deal with this by calling the morning I get home “my party.” I invite Dana as if it were a real thing. If she’s asleep, I watch a movie, and when she wakes up, I say things like, “we enjoyed it. Too bad you weren’t here.” And then she says that she’s always fashionably late to a party and I laugh to myself that even when the party is held in our living room, Dana doesn’t show up on time.

What she lacks in promptness, she makes up for in enthusiasm. Dana is the best guest I could have chosen if I was going to throw a party every day. We are just hilarious, and it makes me happy that we can laugh at each other instead of zoning out to TV. You all are welcome to come to my party, but I don’t generally send out invites because very few people want to drink a beer in the backyard when the sun is barely up… especially on a Thursday or Friday, my days off.

Fortunately, that may change soon. I don’t know exactly when or what shift I’ll be on, but it might be good to have a day schedule again. It’s a catch-22, because I like actually working at night when there’s less going on, but at the same time, it wreaks havoc on my personal life. I don’t know what I want, so I think I’ll just take what they give me. I don’t have that much seniority, anyway. 🙂

 

Mike: I like your hair that way. It looks like you just rolled out of bed.
Me: …

The hardest part of working nights is knowing what time to do things so that your brain remembers how to live. When you work days, there is a certain rhythm. Working nights is recreating that rhythm when you have to figure it out on your own. I do things like forget to take medication or forget to shower because I haven’t ordered my day the right way. I am sure that showering is a priority, but did I take a shower “this morning,” or perhaps “last night?” When I wake up, it’s not even “tomorrow” yet.

I am fairly certain that I don’t have much longer on this shift, which makes me excited and reticent all at the same time.

Nights have their own pace, their own topics of conversation, and the pleasure of knowing that we’re not like everyone else. For starters, everyone just expects you to be tired. What they don’t know is that we’re not tired. We’re beyond tired. We drink more caffeine than you can possibly imagine and by the end of the shift, the caffeine isn’t even working anymore. We’re running on the fumes of adrenaline present right up until they’re not. It’s an exact moment, one in which all of the energy in your body exits like the plane is diving toward the scene of the crash. I was at my dad’s a couple of months ago and in the middle of dinner, all the blood ran out of my face and I said, “I have to go home.” It was instantly like, “yeah… get her out of here… she’s goin’ down.”

It’s happened to me multiple times. Sorry I fell asleep at your birthday party, Stacy. For those of you keeping score, that was when I fell asleep at the Indian restaurant. We’re going to a Mexican restaurant on Thursday. I’m thinking about loading up on chiles and jalapenos to give me a fighting chance. If my mouth is burning, it is less likely that Dana will have to carry me home fireman-style.

It’s a hard day for my old church community in Portland. Eight years ago today, we lost Ellie and Quinn, infant twins of members that had been at Bridgeport since the beginning. Their parents’ loss was incredible, but there was a sense that we all lost them, and we did. It was a moment that shook everyone, and we all reacted differently to the same type of stress.

When I opened Spotify today, Bach’s Mass in H Mol was on my recommendations page. I turned it on, and as the Kyrie started, I saw a picture of the girls in my Facebook news feed. I didn’t mean to celebrate their lives in this way, but it made the picture all the more poignant.

My mind instantly went to my abuser, because it’s on days like this that her absence is viscerally noticeable. After the girls’ funeral, I got a letter from her saying that she didn’t want to miss the possibility of us- not in a romantic way, just in an “I think of you as my family” sort of way. It hit me like a ton of bricks, because so much relief and gratitude flowed from me.

It was one of the great letters of my life, because it described in detail what it was like to attend such a service, including small details like the smell of the grass, and what people wore- it was near Easter, after all. She set the scene for me, and her writing was so painful and real that it made me realize how our connection had stayed so strong, despite not always being in the same city; her writing speaks to me in a way that breaks my soul into little pieces, but not in a bad way. It’s just that when she cracks my outer shell, it lets the light shine through. In some ways, she’s a better writer than I am, but I will never admit it. 😉

The brass are magnificent as the Mass plays on, from the Et Resurrexit to the Sanctus. It brings me peace, as if the brass are the heralds of great joy. That’s because in the story of Quinn and Ellie’s loss, there is so much resurrection. Beginning again was a superhuman feat in which we all passed from grief into once again experiencing joy. We had to give ourselves permission.

Just like I had to give myself permission to write down this memory, because the letter and the twins are inexplicably interrelated in my mind. I can’t think of one without the other… but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Walking away from creating bad memories and focusing on the good ones is what resurrected me.

It’s 5:30 AM, and the house is quiet- except for Dana’s occasional toss, turn, or snore. I am trying to decide what I want to do next, because I have to keep myself busy until the appropriate time for me to go to bed. Lately, I’ve found that it keeps my schedule sane if I sleep right up until I have to get to work, because that’s what you do in the morning. I wind down between noon and 1:00 PM, and wake up somewhere between 8:00-10:00. It’s not the best schedule I’ve ever had, but I am more used to it than when I started. Apparently, flipping my schedule around so that I’m up all night is more me than I thought previously. However, it does feed my dark side, and I’ve had to become conscious of it.

For instance, I feel like I’m a lot more snappish, because the rest I’m getting is not as deep. I am a lot more isolated, because the only people I see regularly are my coworkers and Dana. I am not available when the rest of my friends are, and when I make allowances to be available to them, I am either exhausted at work or fall asleep in front of God and everybody. So far, I have fallen asleep at a night club and at an Indian restaurant. It’s okay, though. People just assume I’m drunk and that someone will eventually take me home.

It is good that I have an online life in which I create content for the web rather than consume it. There hasn’t been a better outlet than writing during this graveyard shift because it’s something I do where I do not need or want interaction with other people. I do not have to carve out alone time to create this web site. I have built-in swaths of time where I don’t have to ask anyone to leave me alone so I can spend time in my head (with my head?).

My writing is becoming more important to me after having to put it away for a while. Writing about my childhood took a lot out of me, and it gave me some fear about blogging… but not for the reasons you might think. Blogging has a singular subject, which is you, the author. Many people write professional blogs, but that’s not how the medium started. The medium started with the idea that all our stories matter, and we should have a place to put them.

The struggle for me is not dealing with others emotions when they read what I’ve written. It’s gathering the strength to get my words out of me in the first place. I have a separation regarding what I write and what you read, because I know so well what I’ve written and what it cost me that anything you say in reaction is not going to have a tenth of the emotion that I had myself before I hit “post.”

I don’t shut down posting when I’ve had too much of you. I shut down posting when I’ve had too much of me.

Does that ever happen to you? I get lost in my own version of myself when I’m processing, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am exhausting. If I had me as a friend, my role would be the one to tell me to shut up and enjoy the moment.

Not blogging is shutting up and enjoying the moment. I have to take a break between digging really deep into the past and preparing for my future. I tend to write about things that happened a long time ago for two reasons.

The first is that I am of the age where knowing how you got hurt way back when gives you better strategy for dealing with emotions right here and now. The second is that I have to have some distance from a memory before I can describe it in detail. The present goes by so fast that I cannot live it and reflect on it simultaneously… although I did like Dmetri Martin’s joke about liking digital cameras because it makes it possible to reminisce immediately.

My blog is always going to be months and years behind what is currently happening, which is the best reason I know to get together in person…

Until I fall asleep.

I’m starting to lean in to the excitement of being.

Years ago, Oprah did a talk show on education, and a mother stood up to ask a question. She said, “how can I get my young black son to stay in school?” Oprah didn’t flinch. She said to tell him that the price had been paid for him to get an education and he should take that crown and Put. It. On. I was literally struck dumb with emotion. She was right. So many people died for him to have that opportunity. What was the point in wasting it?

I remembered the story because I’ve been sitting in the back yard alone, thinking about the kind of human I want to be. I have had such a hard time and so many people around me have sacrificed to help me get better… particularly Dana, without whom my stars would never align. What am I going to do with my life now that they’ve done it? How do I prove to myself that their efforts were not wasted, and neither is my time on this planet?

Jason Moran and the Bandwagon is playing in my headphones while Dana and the cats are snuggled up in bed. I’m trying to keep my schedule flipped around so that I don’t have such a hard time staying up on Saturday. Because of this, I’m in a contemplative mood, and jazz is the perfect fit.

I spent the first part of my night reading standard operating procedures for work, because I was in this total mood to beautify everything. Earlier, I realized that the house looked a little too lived in and scrubbed down the kitchen until it shone. That lead to wanting to continue being a rock star at work… beautifying my soul, because my confidence about what I read put me in a fantastic mood.

Now that I feel good, I want more of it.

Action begets action, and I want to do everything I can to move myself forward. The trick is not taking on too much at once, because I don’t want all the plates I have spinning to break. I’m measuring my expansion to avoid hostile takeover as Jason flips to a minor key.

It’s a chord that gives me pause. My mind flips to my insecurities, and I realize that I don’t want to go there. I want to figure out how to re-frame pain into warmth and openness. Everything that I’ve thought of as contrived about life is morphing into the way things actually are. Life really is that beautiful, but you have to look for it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. See? It sounds like a Hallmark card. It sounds like something somebody else would say while I sit behind them and laugh.

I laugh because sometimes I feel that platitudes are sound bites for emotions never meant to be boxed in the first place. Lately, I’ve realized that the limitation is not in the emotions themselves, but the difficulty of describing them to someone else. The English language feels inadequate in moments where the experience is just too big to digest verbally.

To go back to my entry from yesterday, the biggest way I’ve changed is that letting go of my abuser erased the tape in my head so that I stopped looking for approval from it. She can’t parent me inside my own head. Wow, that sounds creepy to say out loud, but that doesn’t make it untrue. My abuser wanted me to come to this realization and didn’t realize the role she was playing in order to keep it from happening. I could not process the enormity of loss and care what she thought at the same time.

I also know that I have come to this realization several times before, have broken this pattern, and she thinks that we can be friends again, but she doesn’t change her behavior at all, and the cycle repeats itself. Until she can allow herself to be vulnerable with me, I will react to her the same way, because the expectation of me is that we can just push all this unpleasantness under the rug and go on behaving the way we always have. It ruins me from the inside out, and I just don’t have the energy anymore. I can’t think of it in terms of all the years I didn’t make the connection that I was exhausted. I have to think of it as “how do I fill my life with relationships that don’t exhaust me?”

The two relationships that always give back are Dana and work, so I have thrown myself into both. Paying more attention to both. Learning more, faster than I ever have. Racing toward my destiny…

…whatever that is.

Sometimes Dana comes and hangs out with me in our bedroom until I fall asleep, because it’s so difficult for me to drift off without her next to me. It was one of those days on Monday when I told her I couldn’t think of anything to write. Writing has become how I think deeply about an issue, especially if that issue is a conflict, because I have to weigh both sides endlessly until I come to a resolution. Right now, there is no conflict… which is wonderful, but at the same time, I doubt any of you want to hear about what I had for lunch.

There is also no need to create a story where there is none because I don’t want to write about what I had for lunch (I’m having roast chicken, by the way). I just have to wait until inspiration strikes me, which it did… twice.

Dana sparked me the first time by saying, “why don’t you write about all the ways you’ve changed since ‘all this stuff’ has happened?” By “all this stuff,” I am sure she means the story of how my perspective was systematically changed by an abuser so I couldn’t tell what was fantasy and what was reality. She would simultaneously call me a family member and dispute it at the same time, so I never really understood which way was True North.

The biggest way that I’ve changed is that my story doesn’t. I know what’s real for me, what is tangible and present at all times without the feeling that the floor is about to fall out from under me. I feel more grounded than I ever have, capable of being a lightning rod instead of a scorched branch. In short, I’ve learned not to care.

For someone as dialed in to their emotions as I am, learning not to care so much was a gargantuan feat of will. I had to undo years and years of processing data the same way, which was that if I could only be more impressive, then the family I’d been told I had would actually answer the phone. I thought that I was garbage because I’d loved so hard and still failed. I failed her, and I failed myself, because my ego was so tied up in her success.

It sounds like a crazy mess when you think of both people as fully-functioning adults. The fallacy in that logic is I wasn’t a fully-functioning adult when we met, so that when I became so, she was my Achilles heel… the computer hacker with back-door access.

In healthy relationships, both sides have that ability to undo each other, and I mean that in the best possible way. We have to have those people that remind us who we are, who we have been, so that the future is different than the past. Relationships tumble and roll in tides of emotion as one person gives and one person takes. When you don’t let yourself take, you wind up with a relationship that breeds contempt and resentment. The “giver” feels used, and the “taker” feels guilty.

The disconnect in abusive relationships is that they don’t roll over continually. The “giver” rages that you want/need too much because the protective walls that they’ve built up around themselves prevent them from allowing themselves to take… until one day, they’ve had enough and you’ve really stepped in it because they obviously bear no culpability for their role in your dance.

Being able to see past that pattern literally saved my life, because I could finally walk away from encouraging myself to feel worthless. In retrospect, I wonder why I couldn’t have brought myself to do it earlier; it’s not that I have regrets, because I don’t. I’m just curious about the person I would have been had I made this connection in my twenties instead of my thirties. One of the things that really held me back was my own internalized homophobia, and that little kid feeling of “no one likes me except .”

When I was a kid, it’s not just that I needed a safe place. I did, but there was a larger issue at hand. The world reacted to me differently than it does now. In the present day, I am different than most people, but I am no longer bad, wrong, shameful… the list goes on. I don’t just have to have that one special place I go for encouragement and comfort. I have many of them.

The next time I was sparked to write was hearing my friend Frances sing at the Mucky Duck on St. Patrick’s Day. Her voice was so pure, and touched the smallest, most vulnerable piece of my soul. Frances is one of those singers that will tell you she can’t sing, and then she’ll go up on stage and rip your heart out with beauty. Her fingers fly up and down the walking bass. The sound is warm and inviting. Frances’ voice and accompaniment starts to feel like a room you wish you could sit inside, or at least take a peek.

And then all of the sudden you realize that the reason you want to go there is because it is stripped bare, all the way down to the elements, so that it is beautifully, perfectly, amazingly clean.

The way you’d be if you weren’t just so damned human.

So much weight has lifted off my shoulders that for the first time I can clearly remember, I feel happy all the time, and deliciously, ridiculously, wickedly funny. I have to believe I’m funny, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to put content on the web. I wouldn’t be able to invite you into my corner of the world if I didn’t believe I was good at it. The positive side has to outweigh the negative in order to care about sharing it. I rest on the faith that there are people who get me, and they vastly outnumber the people that don’t.

There’s been a lot of times in my life where I’ve mistaken the part for the whole and given up because I thought it had to be perfect or nothing at all. There wasn’t a lot of grey area. It’s been the source of my depression, and I didn’t know what it was until now. I didn’t have any grey area because my ability to trust myself had been shattered into a million pieces. Learning that process has been exhilarating, and continually shifts my mind from student to teacher. It unlocks part of my brain that I didn’t know was there, and it affects everything. I’m making much more solid decisions in every area of my life because I trust that I can handle others’ reactions- good or bad – without taking my love from them or being unable to receive it.

It’s the journey of man, isn’t it? Learning not to react like a cave man when your den is threatened? Feeling closer to animal instincts because when you don’t live that way, you are missing a voice? You’re missing the party that’s going on above you, and worst of all, you don’t even know it. Years later, you’ll never confess to being the person that you were back then, because you can hardly believe it yourself. You can hardly believe that someone like you has to remember something like that. It happens to all of us, “that” being the x variable you go to when asked about something embarrassing. You have to learn the point at which participating in other people’s lives is less important than not having to face triggers to begin with.

Once you release your hot-button issues into the ether and see that the criticism you give yourself is so much more cold than the reception coming from your peers, you stop believing that you are holding down chaos… and start believing you have something to contribute that is more beautiful than the pain you have to force yourself to share. You stop obsessing over how to hide that you’ve been hurt, and you notice when people remind you of your losses because loss triggers unwanted grief.

It’s exhausting. It takes a long time to find headphones for your mind. Something to speed up the reaction time to life because you’re not constantly looking at the play-by-play of coming up with a lie on the spot and judging whether it’s plausible or not by the reactions you get.

You have to be willing to feel caught and angry and guilty, and who honestly has the time? You do everything to avoid taking it for yourself, because you’ll remember it a lot longer than anyone wants to spend on the subject, including you. You have to decide when to archive, and be disciplined about it, because just like physically cleaning the garage, it needs more time the longer you go without a mental trip to Goodwill. If something is important enough to pop back up, you know where it is. Eventually, you get too tired to schlep through the garage and you’d rather carry a laundry bag than a U-haul.

You have to recognize the people in your life who know where your pain is, because if they get any satisfaction out of seeing your negative reactions, they’re not going to tell you about it. They’ll play the game until the king is dead. People bully us all the time, and the violence is returned when we react with claws extended to emotionally predict when we’re going to be hurt. Especially when shrinking back in fear is a learned behavior over many years, it takes more time to realize that the people you love are also the people that hurt you and when you’ve had enough. You have to see what it looks like when the people you’ve hurt realize they’ve hurt you, because time has a way of softening your relationship with your flaws when you can just rest in the fact that eventually, you’ll come to accept that you have the ability to stop trying to protect those people. Life is limiting the damage you cause to a manageable ratio, while at the same time ignoring others’ ability to hurt you without striking you dumb in fear. Life is learning to trust that the people who carry your heart carry it willingly, because when they don’t, your life is measured in your response time.

You have to see the beauty that comes from telling a story in your own perspective, something that says “I am not a mistake because I did y.” If there’s a meaning to life, it’s finding a balance to good and bad that has more greyscale than 8-bit. Learn to recognize when your behavior triggers others into negative behavior. Spend as much time thinking about how you cause reactions, because you’re taught to believe that the people you loved when you were small are still the people who get your attention now. The more you shut them out, the less they’ll care when you slip out of your network. Once you’re out, it takes a gargantuan effort to get back in.

Life is a struggle until you learn to handle the spotlight as the crowd grows. I’ll consider it handled now that I can average people’s opinions of me. How much something bothers me depends on how many people I’m willing to tell.

We are all in varying stages of acceptance of ourselves- depending on the lengths people will go to in order to hide from communication.

The people that mean the most to me are the people that would never criticize me without being open to criticism themselves, because it gets harder and harder to accept that there is such a thing as conditional love and you don’t get to decide who has it.

Dana found the recording of me singing the Pie Jesu solo with the Bridgeport choir and community orchestra. The date on the tape surprised me. It was a reality check that the performance was almost ten years ago now. It feels absolutely wonderful to be in a different place now than I was then, because everything in my life was in upheaval. I literally had no friends, because I had a fling with someone that became a real relationship when we were both smart enough to know better and dumb enough not to care. My friends called it long before the inevitable heartbreak, and instead of just being my friends through thick and thin, they dumped me.

It was a good thing, because I never would have made friends with Dana if they hadn’t. In retrospect, in fact, it is the best thing that has ever happened to me, because it was then that I slowly started to take inventory of my own life and discover the role I was playing in all of my relationships, not just the fling. It was the beginning of becoming Leslie Lanagan. Well, it’s not like I wasn’t before, but like I have said, I have been a very reactive person in the past. Now I can hold my own, and for that, I will always be grateful to this time in my life.

As my friend Wendy said, “you don’t have to love it. You just have to live it.” It’s become my mantra when times get hard.

Right now, though, things aren’t hard. I have a roof over my head, a great job, a spouse that adores me (and vice versa). It doesn’t get any better than that. Grief over the past is wasted energy, and I’m coming to a new understanding of exactly what that means. Enough time has passed since the fallout with my abuser that I am able to look at it more objectively than I ever could’ve while I was in the relationship, especially since I constantly held myself responsible for actions that couldn’t and wouldn’t ever be my fault. One of my friends said, and I remember it all the time, that I needed to stop taking responsibility for her actions by thinking I had power when I didn’t. At 12 and 13, it was not my responsibility to take care of her, and at 14, it was not my responsibility to try and be the person that she seemed to need, because it took away my power to direct my own life.

I point to the moment she gave me her college journal as the exact time in which I lost control. I wasn’t so much interested in having sex so much as I thought that was part of making an adult happy. I thought that I wouldn’t be worth her time and energy. It was much the way I’ve fallen in love as an adult. I don’t pick people to date based on their looks. I fall in love with their stories. I fall in love with their quirks. I fall in love with their vulnerability, and not their strength. It was such a mature relationship on my part that for a lot of years, I didn’t realize how “little” I was. This relationship stopped my own growth into the Leslie you know and love today. In some areas of my life, when I was 14, I was ready to be an adult, and would have welcomed the chance. In others, I was barely out of sixth grade.

I couldn’t see the pattern that defines abusive relationships- the absolute sunshine and the dark chill that comes when they see your reaction and shut down. It’s a pattern that, once you recognize it, you start to take inventory of all your relationships to try and figure out whether they’re healthy and whether that’s due to you. Abused people pick up the traits of their abusers all the time. It is not unreasonable to think that my relationship with this person has influenced a lot of the relationships that came afterward.

The difference between being trapped in that abusive relationship and taking my leave from it is that now, I am able to voice those manipulations and take responsibility for them. I can stand in front of someone and ask for forgiveness because I was wrong. I don’t have to deflect everything away from me and pretend that things are perfect so that from the outside, my life looks way more normal than it actually is… which is what I’ve been doing since childhood.

I have found that this outlook on life has served me well. People are generous when I offer apologies, and I have a sincere sense of what it means to be in relationship with others. It creates roles and responsibilities that I ran from in order to avoid conflict. Knowing the difference between healthy and abusive relationships has literally allowed me to rejoin life and live in community, rather than trying to go it alone.

I have days where I just don’t want to deal, but they are few and far between. The wound is starting to heal, and the new pink flesh is starting to cover the scar. It feels good to be on the right track again, because there were just so many years where I couldn’t differentiate between the life I wanted and the life. Now that I do, there’s just no substitute.

Where I fall short in all of this is that some days, I start thinking about my own life and I get mired in what was. And I’m really not talking about the relationship with my abuser. It’s looking back over all of the shame I felt and the role I played and how all of this mess became untenable in the first place. Just because I’ve stopped taking responsibility for her actions doesn’t mean I don’t have a metric fuck tonne of emotion regarding mine.

I repeated the same pattern I had with her when I was a child when I was an adult. Neither one of us saw the damage she had done, so it was just this weird amalgam of needing to take responsibility for my behavior and not knowing how. I didn’t have those tools, because to start a new relationship is one thing. To change entrenched patterns over a lifetime is another. I’d be fine and then when we’d get together, I’d just regress into my inner teenager, because that’s what we do with people we’ve known that long. I know you do it; you all have relatives.

Where I go mentally in all of this is that when I began to recognize my role in our relationship and tried to change the balance of power, it did not sit well. She would beg and plead for me to take an adult role with her, and when I did, it was met with brick-wall resistance. Why shouldn’t it? Why would you give up a place of power voluntarily when you’ve always had it?

It is only by the grace of God that I came through this whole and happy. I did not know what kind of relationship I had with this woman until I was ready. I did not realize how detrimental it was to see all relationships as those in which I needed to make other people happy.

One of my friends was just diagnosed with cancer. I’m not close to him, but his husband is my choir director. Any time anyone gets cancer, it is an absolute garbage dump of a situation for everyone involved, but there are so many people praying for him that it’s incredible. He’s the choir director for the largest Methodist church on Galveston, and I am sure that his choir is just as distraught as ours. I wrote to my choir director and told him that since I work overnight, I’d be happy to help him with whatever he needs. I just hope he knows I mean it and will reach out. The hardest part of really needing help is not wanting to ask.

I haven’t really had much time to think the past few days, so it’s not like I have a treasure trove of things to say. I should mention, though, that An Open Letter to Gay Men is going to be read on “After Hours” Sunday morning, because Jimmy Carper, the longtime host, passed away recently. It’s a gift to be read, and I hope people enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing.

I slept almost ten hours today, after spending the first part of the week unable to sleep very much at all. As a result, I feel much better today. I’ve had some caffeine, and now it just feels like a regular workday. I don’t think I’m getting used to it, per se, but at the same time, it’s nice to forget, even for a few minutes, that it’s actually 2:19 AM.

I’m listing to Aquarium by Aqua. My friend Drew introduced me to Aqua, because I’d heard Barbie Girl and nothing else. Happy Boys and Happy Girls, along with Doctor Jones, are my favorite tracks. In fact, Drew and I always add a Doctor Who twist. Doctor Jones and Martha Jones are interchangeable, because Martha Jones is actually a doctor. Wait. Who am I kidding? I could listen to that whole album on repeat. It just makes me laugh, and I can always use a laugh. While the music is playing, I am back at Biddy McGraw’s, dancing around the kitchen with Drew, who was the type of boss that insisted on dance breaks. If you don’t have that boss, man, it sucks to be you.

It’s my Friday, and I have no idea what Dana and I are doing this weekend. If the weather is good, I want to cook outside. It’s been nasty weather lately, as is per normal for winter on the Gulf Coast. There are patches of sunshine, but at the same time, absolute toad-strangler storms that cause flash flooding. Alternatively, we’ve also had some really hot weather for February. Like, the kind of weather that you pray for in Portland. If there is a number one reason why I’m glad I’m not in Portland, it’s that I haven’t had to dig my car out of the snow, I haven’t had grey skies every day, and I’m not constantly cold because my clothes are wet.

Technically, that’s three reasons. I just want to assure my friends there that living without them is hard. Living without the weather is not.

I also must say for the record that the food is better here, and you will do nothing to convince me otherwise.

And on that note, I must be off.

I am alone in the department tonight, and things are very quiet. I’m searching through old cases, deciding who can be called in the middle of the night and who needs an e-mail. It is methodical work, and the rhythm is somehow sustaining. As I’m starting this, it’s about 2:30 AM, and the next person does not arrive for four hours. In a way, I miss the human contact of coworkers, but at the same time, it’s nice to be able to work at my own buzzsaw pace.

The work is repetitive enough that I start to wander through my own valley of vulnerability, and wonder what it will take to get me to open up to the outside world. I feel like I have been isolating a lot… partly due to my schedule and partly due to feeling overwhelmed in a way that I can’t place. I haven’t been to a psychiatrist since I’ve been in town, so that’s probably my next move. I want to make sure it’s nothing physical before I decide whether this new mood is just me continuing to move in the world like Tall. Mustache. Fishing Hat.

For those of you just now joining us, Tall. Mustache. Fishing Hat. was an alias I used for an old grouch at my first Al-anon meeting. He just had no qualms whatsoever revealing his inner asshole. He knew he was a douchebag, and that didn’t seem to affect anything except the amount of laughter he got during his share. In fact, that was the take-home message for me. You can be as flawed as you want to be if you couch it in uproarious humor.

Right now I feel like the love child of Louis C.K. and Oscar the Grouch. As in, it’s amazing the thousands of fucks I don’t give. I have my work, and I have Dana. Beyond that, I’m not sure what to do with myself, although I want to try. I approach it with the best of intentions. I want to be social. I want to do stuff. You know, in that ideal perfect world where when I get home from work I want to do stuff and I have enough energy to see it through.

I’ve even been missing from choir for the last few weeks because it is a ROUGH HAUL going to rehearsal before work and church afterwards. It’s like this Twilight Zone of emotion. I want to be there. I feel like a zombie. I need to rehearse. I need to sleep… and on and on and on until I realize I have deliberated so long it’s already started and I go back to bed, wishing I could be in two places at once. I love my conductor and I miss him so much. If only choir could meet in my living room. I would be all about that.

In other news, I’m getting better at bash scripting and coding in Python. That may not mean much to you, but it means a ton of money if I actually move into a programming role down the line. I used to think that coding was the wrong career path for me because it limited my contact with other people. Then I turned 30, and I realized I’d had enough of customer service to last my whole entire life. I did it anyway, because of course, I was paid to do it. I was also very good at it, which made all the difference. Though it wasn’t challenging, it was satisfying to press one button and have people think that I had done some voodoo magic on their computers.

Programming is a different type of thinking; it has its own syntax and grammar that once painstakingly learned, can be applied in all computer languages and not just one. As it turns out, there are lots of ways to say “if that happens, do this.” In fact, there are almost as many programming languages as there are verbal languages in which to swear when your programs don’t run.

The first thing I’m going to build is a text editor that can write my blog entries for me and just e-mail me when they’re done. 🙂

I am just in a crappy mood. There’s nothing that can be done about it, per se. The thing that would do me the most good is flipping my schedule back around… but until my night shift rotation is over, that’s just “unpossible.” Even when I’m in a crappy mood, though, I don’t show it to other people. I am still my nice, sweet, accommodating self on the phone and via e-mail, while inside I am burning for a good night’s sleep.

It bothers me that I’m not in a good mood, because that’s not my normal personality. My normal personality is fun-loving, if a bit introspective. It’s hard to replicate that when I spend my “days” feeling like I’ve been run over with a MAC truck. Before you even ask, I am definitely getting enough sleep. It’s just not the same type. It’s interrupted and jagged. My dreams are fragments of conversations and places long left in the Kodak Carousel of my mind.

Actually, I’m going to have a little fun with that one. Here, without any context or explanation, are some of the punchlines to the fragments:

1. TURN IT BACK ON!
2. Two would have done it.
3. Awwww…. you have the boobs I always wanted.
4. It’s just true.
5. Why are you touching my butt?
6. OUTSTANDING!
7. Not my goat…
8. When you don’t count, you slow down, and the Baptists beat us to lunch!
9. …and then Kevin got bored.
10. Oh look! Better people.

If any of you want to use this as a quiz, I’ll tell you if you’re right or not.

1. You’ll have to dig really deep for this one. I doubt you got it.
2. You didn’t get this one, either. But if I told you the story, it would make you cry with laughter.
3. Not that one, the other one.
4. Probably not- less a story, and more a phrase I picked up.
5. Probably not. But it was said by one person at the top of the ladder to someone at the bottom.
6. There’s no way you didn’t get this one if you know where the reference came from (video game).
7. You totally got this one.
8. My Portland friends wouldn’t get this one, but my Houston ones might.
9. Every story that begins this way includes peals of laughter and “OH MY GOD!”
10. Never gonna get it. Cue En Vogue.

There’s no rhyme or reason as to whether my dreams are going to be funny, sad, or both. But that’s how I like it. Life is varied, and so are dreams. Without sad dreams, the funny ones aren’t funny enough to get me to laugh in my sleep.

Even though I am often in a crappy mood, I laugh a lot more these days. Being punch-drunk in the mornings after I get off work somehow sharpens my comedic reflexes, but the lack of myelin on my nerves means that the jokes are most likely in the rated R to X spectrum and back again. I can’t help it. I’m just on the “think it, say it” plan… and sometimes I leave out the “think it.”

I don’t know. Maybe that’s in my best interest for now. It’s been a long time since my primary focus was humor, even if it is Tosh-worthy. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to change my focus and drive so that humor and love radiates instead of grief and heartbreak. Because, see, losing this person cracked me open in a way that I didn’t anticipate. She was, as I have said before, my blog before I could type. I feel like I’ve lost the audience for which my writing flows the most easily, because I’ve been doing it since June of 1990. You have replaced that audience in more ways than you’ll ever know, but at the same time, writing letters to her specifically was a writing exercise in and of itself. There was not a single school day (and I wish I could say I was kidding about this) from the 7th grade on in which I didn’t scribble something. There’s a familiar patois to it that, in a lot of ways, feels like a mojo I’m trying to recover.

It’s one of the main reasons why I’m having trouble with my regular rhythm of posting. I have to find ways in which I can express myself that are different than I’ve ever done before. I feel like I’ve said what I want to say about the relationship itself, because I’ve told all there is to tell. The remainder is how it affects me and will continue to affect me, even though my hope is for a natural denouement as I find the person that I was meant to be.

Keep supporting me. Keep telling me to write to you. Let the patois develop between us, so that we have a thing, too. It feels like a mojo I’m trying to develop. 😉

“You get used to it” is the worst advice I’ve ever gotten about working the graveyard shift. I know that I’m only a couple of days in, but sleeping during the day is just unnatural. So is having my “evening” in the morning. The best thing about my day is that Dana doesn’t currently have a job and can spend time with me when I can spend time with her. I purposefully asked if she could hold off on getting a job until I was settled, because I knew I would never see her if I didn’t. I can go without seeing her for a few weeks, but a few months is absolutely the worst form of torture. We have too much fun together to give it up.

I am not one of those partners that wants to make Dana stay home and manage the house. I want Dana to do whatever it is that she wants to do, and I encourage her to that end. At the same time, it will be different for my whole family when she decides that she’s had enough. None of us want to deprive her of anything she wants, and at the same time, it is so nice having “that person.” She is the go-to person when someone needs a ride, someone needs a babysitter, someone needs a storage locker cleaned out while I’m sleeping… Dana is my hero, because she comes through when no one else can. Additionally, she cooks and cleans so that our house is always beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I never want to give it up. If Dana decides she’s done, we’ll get a maid with the extra income. It’s totally worth it. Then Dana will have someone to clean *her* house, too.

In other news, my evening makes me feel weird for other reasons. Is it acceptable to have a beer at 8:00 in the morning if you work overnight? Somehow, I don’t think so. So, my cold beer after work has turned into a cold glass of punch… which is refreshing, but not refreshing enough to replace what, in my mind, is the best part of my day. It’s not the alcohol itself. It’s the relaxation with Dana in the backyard with a fire going. I am sure that other people would disagree and say, “of course it’s acceptable to drink in the morning! You work graveyard!” But drinking in the morning is such a taboo that I’m just not down. Plus, drinking at home is fine, but there aren’t many bars open at 8:00 AM to get the kind of camaraderie that comes at 4:00 PM. There’s also no happy hour food.

What a bummer.

Our case load is very light at night. In fact, tonight, there is no backlog at all. At night, we are mostly paid to be on call in case something blows up. That’s the thing with network security. It’s much like being a futbol goalie. Just be there to CATCH. I write. One of my co-workers talks on the phone. The other one is reading. We’re all, in a sense, waiting. Not that we want anything bad to happen, mind you. It’s that we’re on the sidelines waiting for someone to put us in.

I’m also glad that overnight is mostly e-mail. I found that out the hard way, when I thought I was going to leave a message on someone’s voice mail at work and it forwarded to his home phone and I woke him up at 3:45 AM. Because of this, we decided to switch our policies. Hey, you know. Anything I can do to help change things up. 🙂 Although, this is only something that would happen to me. I make mistakes so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

I forgot my headphones, which is the worst form or torture in this place. I keep myself awake by listening to two things- the Raw Comedy station on Pandora, and anything by Combichrist on Spotify. Drum and bass are spirit-lifters, as are dirty jokes. Especially dirty jokes. My favorite comic is John Mulaney, who isn’t really dirty, but he makes me laugh more than the other comics *combined.” My favorite bit is when he’s talking about how some drag queens have this sense of entitlement: “Don’t you know who I AM? I’m STRAWBERRY ALARM CLOCK!” “Oh, I’m sorry… it’s just that I don’t go to that ONE BAR WHERE YOU GET FREE DRINKS.” John is also part of the genius that is Stefon on Saturday Night Live… and for that, I will always be grateful.

Shit. It is only one friggin’ thirty.

I mentioned in my last entry that Dana and I are both very busy this week. We’re getting ready for her parents to arrive on Saturday, and I am transitioning to nights on Sunday at 11:00 PM. In order to get used to it, I’m going with my friend Scott to KPFT, where the radio station is dedicating three hours to the memory of Jimmy Carper, longtime host of After Hours. Then, I’m going to church around 10:00, and afterward, we’re hosting a party for the Superbowl, as well as our sixth anniversary. Somewhere in there, I have to sleep.

I am fairly certain that it’s just going to be a 90-day rotation, but to me, that’s unsettling enough for one year. The last time I thought I was going to nights, I made it three days before I felt like my world was coming apart, starting with every muscle and bone in my body screaming for rest. It’s lucky that I’ve spent most of my life in the dark. I enjoy being a night owl, once I get used to it. But that 5:00-8:00 range is psychotic. That’s when you *really* start trying to keep yourself awake and cursing the people who did this to you. There is only so long that sleep can be replaced by caffeine, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve slept ten hours during the day. It’s not the same. Your circadian rhythm will still kick in. All of my coworkers say that the rotation is just short enough that the day you get used to it is the day you find out it’s over.

Great.

The one thing that staying up all night does for me is keep my depression to a minimum. The chemicals needed to keep yourself awake against your circadian rhythm’s siren call include dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. I will get the same drugs I take in pill form naturally… not enough to stop taking my medication, but enough to help them work more effectively.

Alternatively, when I stay up all night, I am so tired that I cry as easily as a baby. It’s not that anything is especially wrong. It’s just that emotions are running high… and don’t even get me started on long distance commercials. But crying is cathartic, and if that’s what it takes to get used to being upside down from the rest of the world, then so be it. I could probably use a couple of good cries, anyway. I spend a lot of my day trying to be strong and grown up and all that, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not still vulnerable on the inside. Everyone is, I suppose. Some people are better at showing it than others, though.

My vulnerability is that I’ve gotten over missing my abuser, but I haven’t gotten over missing who I used to be, because I haven’t yet figured out who I want to be in the future. I feel trapped, kind of like when I live in Houston, I miss Portland and vice versa. Neither feels like home anymore, but Houston is becoming more so as I get grounded at work. I’ve never had a job like this before, one where I am excited to get out of bed every morning.

But going back to “who I used to be…” I know that I have changed so much, and need to do more work on myself. It’s just that who I used to be is so familiar. That’s the Leslie I know. We’re friends. This new Leslie is so different that I don’t know how to feel about her, yet. It’s like when The Doctor regenerates and he checks out his new body. Same software, different case.

Some days, I can’t wait to see her. How she’s growing, how she’s doing, where we are together. Other days, I want to crawl inside the old me, because the new me has done something that I wouldn’t normally do and I’m frightened that I’m changing so rapidly. For instance, the new me is not afraid of conflict, and uses the tools she’s advised for other people all her life without giving herself the benefit of their use. It’s in those moments that I have these out of body experiences where old me does the running commentary on the new me. My friends who are in AA call it “the committee.”

As a preacher’s kid, I am predisposed to hate committees.

…but at the same time, I am lying to myself when I say that I’ve gotten over missing my abuser. It’s a strange and tangled web we weave, long-term relationships with people who intentionally or not cause us harm. I thought of her incessantly yesterday when I found out that Jimmy was dead, because she was the first one to know that I wasn’t going to be straight when I grew up, and that I was going to need things like After Hours to give me strength. It was a moment in which I remembered her in her green Gap sweater and penny loafers and blue and white striped Oxford shirt and wished I could cry into it.

…and I didn’t even stay up all night.

I had a meeting this week that I’ll never forget. One of the participants said to me afterward, “I am so proud of you. It’s like you just found your voice.” If there’s anything that I’ve been trying to do over this past year, it’s exactly that. I needed to be my own again, and now I’m starting to reap the benefits of that decision. It isn’t exactly time for an epilogue, but I’ll take what I can get.

I still have days where I scream with rage at the injustice of everything that happened to me… but in the end, because of what happened to her, it gets harder and harder to stay angry. As I get older, I see the bigger picture. I have empathy for the fact that you can’t engineer a child’s reality without having a fractured reality of your own. The part of the equation that is not mine to own is how to fix her reality as well. However, I had to learn that part. It did not come easily. It was the equivalent of trying to help a little old lady across the street who didn’t want to go that way, anyway, and spent our entire walk banging me on the head with her purse.

It is literally amazing to me how many times I got smacked upside the head before I realized I probably needed it to stop. Now that it has, my life feels, well, bigger. Barring any unforeseen obstacles at work, I am on track for a gorgeous future. There’s also opportunity for travel, as my company is opening several overseas locations. I’m at the point where moving doesn’t sound appealing, but if someone needed me to be an expat for a while, I am sure that I would have the ENTIRE Bloomsbury collection on my Kindle and my bags packed before Dana could say, “where are we going, again?”

This is going to be an absolutely crazybusy week for Dana and me, but it feels like the right amount of full as opposed to being overwhelming because I already have too much to think about to enjoy being a part of my own life… if that makes any sense at all. The effect of having my abuser in my life is that I was trapped in the mind worm of how to help her, how to rescue her, while I let everything I loved drown. It started when I was so young that I didn’t know how I was affecting my future. From the moment I started 7th grade, my grades were terrible because I wasn’t doing that kind of homework. I have no doubt that my abuser could never have seen herself as such, because she didn’t really take it into account that things she would talk about with friends her own age would terrify me. Had no concept of the fact that no one in her life had time to love her like a 7th grader. It was just math homework. I could put that off.

And now, almost 25 years later, I’m going back and doing the homework I should have been doing all along. It’s harder- it always is when you know the basics of everything and the intricacies of nothing. In school, as in every part of my life outside of my abuser, I just did enough to pass. I realized that in order to have a life worth living, I needed to “show my work.”

I needed to approach every area of my life with the same love and devotion that I gave to my abuser, because it was misdirected. She couldn’t, wouldn’t love me back, and even if she could, it wasn’t going to be a substitute for being a well-rounded, whole, healthy individual. I also got tired of being so over-focused on her that other people thought I was *in love* with her as opposed to just loving her.

God’s honest truth is that I was in love with her when I was a kid, but as an adult- I’d say from about 19/20 on- it was more a case of “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is grown, he will not part from it.” By the time I was an adult, I’d been caught in her alternate reality for over 7 years. I didn’t know any better, and I didn’t have anyone to show me differently because I wouldn’t tell anyone what was going on with me, anyway.

I am blessed beyond belief that even though few other people in the world get it, Dana does. Dana understands the concept of loving someone completely without being *in love* with them. Moving heaven and earth for the people you love even though there’s no chance of romance, because that’s just not part of the package. Partially, I think that’s because she knew that’s how I loved her at first. I didn’t fall in love with Dana right away, but I loved her like the rest of the world didn’t exist. If Dana needed me, I’d drop everything, but there wasn’t an element of physical attraction until years later.

And in those years, I learned the difference between how it felt to love someone like that who really wanted and needed it… and someone who didn’t. It was the beginning of recognizing that something was wrong, really wrong, and how much I needed to fix it.

Time to get back to my homework.