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.

This morning I have to go to the dentist because I broke a tooth all the way to the root. We’re not busy right now, but we’re down some people. My best wish is that the extraction doesn’t take so much out of me that I can’t come back to work. I arrived at the office around 7:30, and I got to speak to the doctor directly because the staff hadn’t arrived. He personally looked at his schedule and said that if I was in pain, he’d try to get me in as soon as possible. I said, “do you recommend narcotics, or will I be okay with ibuprofen?” He said that he’d have to wait until he got down in there to be able to see what was wrong. I don’t want to think about not coming back to work, but at the same time, I’m not going to take calls while I’m a) in pain b) high as a kite. I think that would be, in the vernacular, a “career limiting move.”

It’s about 20 minutes until my appointment, and now I am getting nervous. I haven’t been to the dentist in a long time- partially because I’ve been uninsured for a long time and partially because I am deathly afraid of what it will cost regardless of whether I have insurance or not.

An extraction with insurance shouldn’t be that bad, which is why I decided to go ahead and do it. Well, that and I am in excruciating pain. Yeah, that too.

Things have been going so well that I almost forgot. I spend my days learning so much, so fast, that there really isn’t time to think about the past and what I’ve been through. Keeping busy has been the balm to my grief. I constantly walk away from the thoughts that used to hold me hostage, because dwelling on them keeps me from focusing on what’s really important.

And then I fall asleep.

It’s in dreams that my subconscious tries to work out how I feel. Last night, the vision was of the evening I went to my abuser’s house, and her partner told me that the back story between my abuser and me was “this big bag of shit that I’d been carrying around forever.” Then she coached me on changing my story so that it was unrecognizable from what really happened. I knew it was wrong, but I was too scared to disagree.

Again, I was not dreaming something new. I was reliving a memory that had already happened and analyzing it now that I’d had some distance from it.

Next, I went back a little further, to the first time I’d ever come to visit. She was called away on business (or said she was, anyway) and left me alone with her partner for the night. Her partner became so angry when I washed a dish incorrectly that she stuck my hands under running water so hot that it left burns on my skin. It was the first time I’d ever experienced that kind of anger, and in retrospect, it was the first time I’d ever really experienced physical abuse.

I thought I was doing the right thing by not arguing and just accepting what happened. I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping this information from my abuser, which, at the time, was someone I thought of as a close friend. I thought I was protecting her, and at the same time, I didn’t think she would believe me, anyway.

As time went on, they both became so well-known that breathing anything seemed impossible. I also knew that the moment I said something was the moment it all ended. My parents would get involved, and there would be no more. She would pick up her toys and go home in order to avoid that whole scene.

When I woke up, I realized that even when I was a teenager, I knew that if I spoke about the game out loud, that’s what would happen.

Just because I didn’t have the strength then didn’t mean it was going to be that way forever. However, that’s the part I didn’t know. I kept myself in that place of fear for a very long time, because I didn’t think I had the strength to go through as much pain as I have been through in the last year. What I know for sure is that I’m sort of glad that I waited. If I had tried to go through this while it was still fresh in my mind, I might have died. It would have been a stupid thing to do, to kill myself, but at the time I thought that all her secrets would die with me and I wouldn’t have to carry them anymore. I was too young to see that I never should’ve had to carry them in the first place. I was too young to see that because I wasn’t being raped, I was still being used. I still had my attention yanked away from my life and focused on hers. I still had years and years of people saying that I was so over-focused on her that it was weird, but I didn’t realize how I got to be so emotionally laden in the first place, so I couldn’t fix it. I was too afraid of her leaving and not giving me attention, love, focus anymore that the abuse became second-nature. Of course she could use me. Of course. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Finally, finally, I realized that I could give her all the love in the entire world and it still wouldn’t be enough to get her to see that my needs mattered, too. I needed a friend as good as me, too.

I woke up to the fact that I had plenty of them… just not her. I saw our abusive relationship for what it was, instead of walking on eggshells and hoping not to fall through… not knowing that falling through them was the best thing I could have done.

But I know it now.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. -Martin Luther King, Jr.

I needed Christmas this year. I needed all the hope and wonder that comes with waiting for the baby. Metaphorically, I was sitting in the hospital with my scrubs on, checking my phone every few minutes for the time and making sure the cigars were safely tucked away in my jacket pocket. Any minute now, Mary was going to deliver and all the joy we’d been waiting for would come into the world. All I had to do was make it to Christmas Eve.

Waiting is hard. I’m not very good at it. Knowing that Christmas was coming, but not here, had me pacing the floor at times. I didn’t need presents (I got a lot), I didn’t need food (I ate a lot), but I desperately needed the awe of a baby that came from nothing and rose to be one of the most powerful people in the history of the world. I needed my antihero, the one that reminds me that I, too, am capable of something great.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that it’s been a tough year for me. I left a place and several relationships that sustained me for many years… and now no longer served me. I realized that I was literally giving myself away. Telling people with thought, word, and deed that it was ok that I couldn’t count on them. It was ok that if I needed something, they were too busy for me. It was ok that if they needed anything, I would drop everything and run in exchange for being treated badly. I felt sad and unfulfilled, and when I finally got up the courage to say, “hey, I feel sad and unfulfilled,” they couldn’t imagine what I meant. Everything was fine.

I had to leave to save myself, my sanity, for the people that really matter to me. I couldn’t waste any more time hoping that these people would change, and would be the people that they’d said they would. I felt that in a lot of ways, my life had been hijacked, and that made me even sadder.

I feel that I should take a moment to explain what I mean by “hijacked,” for the people who are reading this blog for the first time.

When I was 12 years old, I realized two things. The first is that I was hopelessly in love with a woman who was capable of controlling me because I let her. At 12, I didn’t know anything about the push and pull of abusive relationships, the type where only their needs matter and when you say something to that effect, they pull away and shut down emotionally. At 12, I thought it was all my fault that she was pushing away. I thought I was defective in some way, and I would do everything I could to regain her attention and her love. That finely engineered control was probably a learned behavior from her own past, and for many years, I thought I could be the one to save her… to teach her what real love could be, should be.

However, as mature as I was for my age, I still couldn’t be an adult. God knows I tried. She would come to me with problems, stories and lies that I couldn’t understand, but would puzzle them over in my mind as if I was capable of making everything all right again. She created a fantasy land in which I was the closest thing she had to a daughter, that our ties were closer than blood… and I bought it hook, line, and sinker.

She always said that there was nothing romantic between us, but there were a few fleeting moments in which I thought it might be a possibility. That was because I couldn’t see the manipulation for what it was. She would use me any way she could, and when you’re a confused kid, you don’t see the ploys for what they are. The attention feels real. The love feels real. The smiles feel real. I can only hope that the way she loved me was because she didn’t know how to love the right way. I couldn’t bear to think of her as maliciously scheming against me.

All of the emotion that was poured into me as a child turned me into the woman that won’t walk away, won’t give up, because there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done to keep her safe and happy… because then maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad about myself, because if she succeeded, then I would, too.

It is the hallmark of an abusive relationship, and one that started when I was too helpless to see it… because when I was 12, she was 23. Old enough to know better. Old enough to do better. Too young to see that she was repeating the cycle of everything that had been done to her. Because of that relationship, I grew up so fast, because I was trying to be older and wiser. Trying to invert our relationship so that I could take care of the woman I loved, because the stories she told me about her life away from me were enough to make the hairs on my arm stand up. She wasn’t safe, wouldn’t be for many years, and I desperately wanted to fix it.

It wasn’t until almost a quarter century later, this year, that I realized there had been so much damage done to me that I couldn’t breathe, I was so racked with anxiety. I could see that she wasn’t safe, wouldn’t be, because what I saw when I looked with my own heart into her life made the hairs on my arm stand up…

I called her and cried into her voice mail. “Please, please come with me. I can’t help but feel like I’m leaving a man behind. You’ve always said that I’m the closest thing you have to a daughter, and if that is true, and that is reality, hear me say, ‘Mom, let’s go home.’” The voice mail was not returned, but since then I have spent so much time hoping that I’m wrong. Not only that, it’s not my battle to fight. I knew that now it was time to leave her behind, because she’d made her choice. She didn’t even want to see me when I told her that I was leaving, and it was devastating, but it gave me strength. I was doing the right thing.

I have mourned this loss for months, and in a lot of ways, I feel like I’m still in shock. It’s not really real. This isn’t happening, because now I am left with redefining myself. It is back-breaking emotional work, this putting myself back together, because I hardly have any memories of my life before she came into it.

The thing I have clung to in all of this is the Christ child coming again, because the joy it brings cannot be contained. The music is glorious; the words even more so. It is the balm to my sadness, this unbridled joy, and I plan to use it to the best of my ability.

May the light touch you as well.

It felt so good to be at choir last night. I’m not sure what was different, but it definitely felt better than it has in the past. I was doing all the right things- breathing all the way down to my diaphragm to the point that my stomach muscles hurt in only the way that singers hurt after a long rehearsal. I’m sure it will get easier the more I do it, but it’s been a while (too long), and I am not in the shape that I once was.

Last night, for the first time in several years, high notes felt like flying. I could hear within myself that I was doing well, without the need for external validation. I mean, that’s always nice, too, but it’s a good night when you can praise yourself.

That being said, I got a great compliment from the soprano on my right at Lessons and Carols. She said that she liked singing next to me because she thought our voices blended so well. It’s the secret to great choral work- adjusting to the sectional sound, instead of falling in love with the sound of your own voice. I think every singer occasionally falls into that trap, but in my case, it’s generally unintentional. I get buried in trying to read the music and my eyes drift from the conductor… and all of the sudden, I’m dragging so far behind I think I’m ahead.

I used to hate conductors that would make the choir memorize their music, but now I understand perfectly. When you don’t have a folder in front of you, it’s harder to look away from the person giving you the beat.

I am also very lucky, because my conductor is so artistic that I want to watch him. I like the way he works, from the first warm-up to the last amen. Additionally, focusing on him keeps me in the moment. There is nothing but the now, the groundswell of feeling that comes from being a part of something greater than you could ever accomplish on your own.

The thing that is missing for me right now, and will only come with time, is camaraderie with the other singers. Right now, I’m too new. They’re still getting used to me, and me to them. There’s not the easy give and take that comes from being in a group that knows you well. On the plus side, I have decided that this is the group where I want to put in my dues. Things will look so much different once they can stop giving me the once over and decide that indeed, I do know what I’m doing.

I’ve been in church choirs my whole life, from the small and somewhat tonally challenged to blow-your-hair-back repertory that challenges professionals. I know the Episcopal service like the back of my hand, and for some reason, I have an easier time reading choral music than when I’m in an orchestra. Don’t ask me why. I can’t explain it. Maybe it has something to do with being able to hear better the other moving parts of the piece, because the tenors and basses are close to me rather than spread out like musicians are in the pit.

It also helps that so much of the music is familiar to me, and I haven’t had to sight-read very much. I am gifted at a lot of things, but that is not one of them. It has very little to do with rhythms, though. It’s that it’s hard to read the treble clef line and the words at the same time when you have no peripheral vision, which I do not. I have monocular vision, but that is another story entirely.
I routinely get lost when there are five verses to something and I have never heard it before… and sometimes hilarity ensues, even when the hymn is familiar to me. So far, I have sung “when I fall on my face” instead of “when I fall on my knees,” and angels have fallen prostate instead of prostrate since I was a teenager.

The world of choral music is opening up to me again, after I’d tried to close the door. As I have said before, I am in the process of making peace with who I am, because the emotional abuse I endured came from a choral musician and at first, I wanted to leave everything behind that reminded me of her. It was when I realized that what had been done was done, and there was no way to ever accomplish such a lofty goal. I am a choral musician, and I was before her influence. I just had to remind myself of it, because we’d been in choir for so long together that nearly everything a church conductor could possibly program would clench my stomach in grief. In “Slash and Burn,” I made the connection that it was hard when I reminded myself of her, because my anger toward her would make me hate myself, too.

As my process has gone on, that part of myself has just had to cope, and my past is making peace with my future, note by note and measure by measure. There are still some times in rehearsal when her presence is very real, and it no longer frightens me. It used to, when I believed that I couldn’t go to that place of remembrance because I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. The mind worm was just too intense to ignore. I would see every iteration of us from 1990 to the present.

The process has been to realize that I value myself so much more than I did, and that being lost in what was held nothing precious. They were not wasted years, but our journeys diverged sharply, and I have to believe that is what should have happened. I could no longer ignore that I put my trust in someone that could not and would not put their trust in me.

It has been beautiful music in a minor key, but thanks be to God for realizing it was time for a Piccardy third.

Amen.

There are so many areas of my life that should come with a warning, or at the very least, #dumbassattack. For instance, today I was trying to run some tests on a computer and I decided that it was all kinds of fucked up until I realized I was logged into the wrong one. Dana chuckled to herself when she saw me getting ready to process into the church for Lessons and Carols and I noticed that my choir folder was upside down, so therefore, my hymnal was, too. When I was in band, I was famous for forgetting, of all things, my trumpet. When I worked at ExxonMobil in Fairfax, I used to forget my badge and have to be walked up like a visitor.

Alert Logic is the only company that has ever had my back on this. All the doors are biometric. However, there have been two days since I’ve started that I’ve almost forgotten my computer, and once, I forgot my charger. Luckily, someone was absent that day so I didn’t have to go home and get it.

I am excellent at laughing about it, because that’s just who I am. I’m forgetful, clumsy, and I will forget your name within about fifteen seconds… the flip side being that I will remember your face, your hair, and what you were wearing the first time I met you until I die. I will also probably remember what we talked about if it was interesting.

For instance, the first time I met Dana, she was wearing a sweatshirt from George Mason University, which I remembered because in Virginia, my office was right down the street from one of the campuses. I also remember that she and her then-girlfriend chased me down the street and pulled up next to me just so Dana could say, “I like your Saturn.”

Not only do I remember what people say, I remember the way they say it if I think it’s cute. If something you say has a musical lilt to it, I’ll remember it by the melody it renders.

It’s just true. 🙂

Because I can laugh at myself so easily, I also know that remembering people and conversations is something I think I do well. One of my friends actually told me, “why do you think I don’t tell you anything? You remember it.” Ahhh, the blessing and the curse.

Because I can tell you both good and bad things about me, I know that I am startlingly self-aware, and I don’t need anyone else to tell me that. I am most often “lost in my own little world” as people constantly comment, because honestly, talking to myself is more interesting than talking to you. I have a longer relationship with me. We have history. We know each other, and there’s not much I can say to scare me.

Talking to other people is a different story.

When I talk to me, I don’t have to worry that I’m going to get offended. I have a tendency to be a little anxious in social situations for a number of reasons. It was drilled into me years ago that there’s a possibility people won’t like me because I’m gay, so I have that old tape running… even though that is changing so much, so quickly. However, I still live in Texas. That’s enough said right there.

I also have a lot of mind worms that continually run in my head, because I’m just not done thinking about them yet. To me, it’s like a computer that does encryption. They work on the same problem for years at a time until they get it right. I can’t do that with math and numbers, but I would like to think that I can with human relations. I think all the time about how to make my relationship with Dana even better than it already is. I think all the time about my role within my family and how it affects all of us, especially since I’ve been away for so long. I think about the grief that I’m going through, and how I know that one day, it will taper off into nothing. But until then, I have to have time to examine the role I played in all of this… what I can do to take back my power… what I can do to be a better person than i was the day before.

I am not a one-trick pony, even though this blog has felt like it. Whether you like it or not, this blog is not entertainment. It is for me, and you are invited. I have said many times that this blog is a community, and I mean it. However, communities share frustrations and ask for help. I am not here to be the punching bag when you’d rather be entertained.

Honestly, I play the clown all day, every day in my personal life. If you meet me in person, you’ll think that I am funny, engaging, and you’ll want to see me again. But you’ll never know this part of me. You’ll never be invited past the walls I’ve learned to put up to protect myself from letting people get too close.

With that in mind, if you never meet me in person, you will never know my entire personality. If you want to judge the things I put out into the ether as the only things that make up my personality, then you’re free to do so. You’re also free to believe that my wife is a saint for putting up with me because I obviously have so many issues that it never balances out and she’s always the one that’s left holding the bag when there’s a problem in our relationship, because obviously, if we have a problem, it’s because of me.

You’re also free to believe that I am a complete nut job, because that doesn’t threaten me in the slightest. I have a chemical imbalance. Nutjob happens.

There are always going to be things in this blog that reflect a part of me, but there’s never going to be anything that represents everything. There’s so much more bad and so much more good and so much more crazy then I could ever capture in an essay…

And you’re invited.

Yesterday, in the middle of trimming the tree, I realized that I had made a dire mistake.

I’d woken up around 5:30, and spent some time watching TV before I rattled Dana out of bed. By the time she got up and we got breakfast rolling, it was 8:30. We got busy pulling the branches apart in star patterns, and by 10:30, I was curled in the fetal position on the guest bed crying my eyes out.

Nothing was wrong except that I’d forgotten to take my psych meds. I have to take them at the same time every day, or the lag time in getting another dose on board will cause my brain to rebel. It starts to feel a little sticky, like I’m hung over, and if I don’t take my medicine right then, I have about 20 minutes until my brain says, “screw you, lady… they don’t pay me enough for this” and begins trying to climb out of my skull. If there is absolutely no way that I can get to my medication when I need it, I can SOMETIMES self-medicate with large doses of caffeine and Advil.

Yesterday, apparently, I took a large dose of distraction along with a heaping tablespoon of “I’m going to ignore the signs because I’m busy.”

Oprah says that if you don’t listen to a sign the first time, it will get louder and louder until it knocks your punk ass down. Consider my punk ass knocked. Dana brought me my meds in the guest room and held me while I sobbed in misery until the medication kicked in. She didn’t have to. She could have just watched TV until I cried it out. It’s not like there’s anything emotionally wrong. But she didn’t. She stayed and “sniggled” me until it was over, and I couldn’t have been more grateful, because I was able to bounce back faster. Literally, within ten minutes I was able to go back to trimming the tree.

But let’s back up for a second. I want to talk about what happens before my medicine kicks in, because it’s clinically important to me that I get this down in writing.

Do you remember those old commercials by the Emergency Broadcasting System? The ones where this grating electronic tone plays for almost a minute until a voice comes on and says “THIS HAS BEEN A TEST OF THE…” Now, they still have those commercials every once in a while, but the tone they play isn’t nearly as grating.

I know, because the old one is the one that plays in my head when I’m late taking my medication. It is as if the left side of my brain is playing an A while the right is playing an A Flat. The twenty minutes it takes for the medication to kick in fully is the twenty minutes it takes for that A flat to become an F. Hell, even a G is an improvement. While this is happening I just stand there like John Malkovich screaming “IT’S MY HEAD!”

But as soon as the meds kick in, I’m fine. It happens just as quickly as a pianist letting go of the keys.

 

As I told Dana this morning, “it’s her birthday. I’m trying to keep my chin up, but if I’m having a moment, just let me go.” There will be a celebratory whiskey shot after dinner, because as Dana reminded me, there are always going to be good things that I want to remember. I’ve written before about the first birthday she had after we met. I called THE BIGGEST radio station in town because they announced birthdays, and I sent her a rosebud at school with a card that said, “for all you do, this bud’s for you.” I was 13. When I turned 17, she got me back. She sent me flowers in the middle of English. It was bigger than my desk, and the card said, “Happy birthday from the moms.” It was the most thrilling moment of my school year, because first of all, I was thrilled that she remembered, and second of all, she was able to give me a present while being just as sneaky as me. 🙂

Holidays are the hardest with grief, especially if the person you’re grieving is still alive. There’s a want to reach out, the holidays soften your heart, and then you realize that until the conflict ends, you don’t have much to say anyway. It’s just too big to ignore. So you remember on your own, and laugh to yourself at all the good memories. It wasn’t all bad, or they wouldn’t come to mind, anyway.

And that’s just where I am today. Maybe next year will be easier.

I have found that jazz is the thing that keeps me going all day long. Since there are rarely words, I can focus on what I’m doing a little better than if I was trying to understand what a musician was saying verbally. Additionally, I think that kind of higher-level mathematics running through my head makes a difference in how quickly I can think through a problem.

If you are not familiar with the way jazz works, then you won’t be familiar with just how much math it goes through in even one measure. There are eight notes in every scale, steps that have to be counted in order to know which notes fit into which key signature. There are half steps to create augmentation, suspension, and the diminishment of chords to support those 16 notes, which is known as a chromatic scale and the foundation of a solo.

Then, if that weren’t enough to keep track of, there are thousands of combinations as to how a measure can be divided, depending on time signature.

It’s mathematically the same for classical musicians~ the Mozart effect is real, and Claude Debussy is one of my favorite composers because he often uses jazz chords in a classical setting.

When I was a kid, I went to a performing and visual arts high school, and I took one year of music theory. Because I am pathetically terrible with math, it did not go well. However, I developed a healthy respect for the difference between musicians who guessed at the right key, and those who knew it. For instance, I was a guesser. People like Wynton Marsalis and Jason Moran are not… which is probably why they’re famous jazz musicians and I can’t remember where I parked at the mall.

If you never look into the heart of a jazz musician, you won’t have any idea what they’re saying to you. You’ll write it off as masturbatory noise, as if jazz is the process of a musician falling in love with the sound of his/her own horn. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Jazz speaks in ways that the human voice cannot.

One of the best examples I can think of to illustrate this is the way Terence Blanchard solos. I went to see him in concert a few weeks ago, and the first thing I thought when he finished his first four was that he’s a novelist. He just doesn’t write his stories in words.

Characters are created on the fly. Sometimes, they’re whiny and belligerant. Sometimes they just want to sing you to sleep. His horn shakes and rattles the imagination into believing that all of the sudden, the personalities his horn takes on are going to come out on stage, because the experience is so visceral, and just, well, real.

The other added bonus of listening to jazz is that the more you do it, the more you begin to feel the subdivisions and calculations. Maybe you’re not that mathematically quick, but at least your guesses become more educated as time goes on.

When I was about 14, I went to Houston’s Summer Jazz Workshop. Conrad Johnson (founder of Thunder Soul at Kashmere High) was teaching there, and he was an absolute joy. In fact, he gave my dad and me one of the great lines about jazz of all time. My dad complimented him on a solo, and he said…

“I saw which way they was goin’ and thought I’d go with ’em.”