Schrรถdinger’s Happiness

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Do you remember life before the internet?
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I remember life before the Internet very well, but whether we were happier?

I cannot say.

I have learned, certainly, that there are limits on how much happiness the Internet can bring you. I’ve also learned that sometimes when you cannot find friends in your own area, you need to cast a wider net. Life before the Internet has been idealized as utopia, but it brought the smartest minds in the firmament together.

That’s been a long time gripe of people my age, because In the Beginning,โ„ข only smart & truly dedicated people were on it. This is not because America Online didn’t exist. In those days, most computers did not come with modems and you had to get that working, first. If you managed to install your modem correctly, then the install software for AOL, CompuServe, and a few other smaller players could get you up and running fast…. but even then, you were running a modified version of the Internet; none of those companies told you that once you were connected, you could download Netscape Navigator or use Internet Explorer to get out of the curated version of the Internet those companies presented.

People my age were the first to go through this ultimate transition from offline to on. We’ve seen every iteration culturally, because of course the military had ARPANET to be able to talk to each other years before…. but we were the last generation to go from completely analog (free) to not being able to leave the house without some sort of device (tethered). Most children do not have that now, because even if children aren’t allowed a cell phone, they’re generally allowed a wi-fi device and they are sometimes given away by their schools.

In my fifth grade classroom, I could not have known that this was the case while I was playing The Oregon Trail. I could not have known that the computer was the red flag to all of this, that people would take desktop computing so seriously that they made an entire society around your computer in your pocket. And in fact, the newest Samsung devices are designed to be both your desktop and your phone using the “Dex” interface. Android is designed to be your one stop shop for all computing needs because God forbid you go a single moment without your electronic babysitter.

Electronic babysitters crept up.

First it was our beepers. Then it was our cell phones. Then it was our cell phones with access to our e-mail and a terrible web browser. Then it was smart phones. Now, it’s smart phones that can connect to your computer monitor and become a desktop.

There is no more room in our society for “dead zones,” which for me used to mean going on hikes in the Columbia River Gorge where my phone and GPS were no use. Not having access to those things doesn’t generally make one panic. It makes everyone around you panic. In that way, I do miss life before the Internet. People had more tolerance for it taking a half hour to get a call back. Now, it is expected that you are available for everyone’s every need all of the time.

The flip side is that I knew I was queer when I was 10 years old in Texas, so by the time America Online rolled around, I was ready for it. I didn’t have queer friends where I lived, but I had them in lots of other countries. Before I had the Internet, I was indescribably lonely. It wasn’t the echo chamber you see now, because Internet Relay Chat and America Online were not curated so that you only saw the news your side of the Congressional aisle wanted you to see. The schism took years to complete. It was easier to get along with everyone when we all had differences of opinion on funding, not whether only white, straight, cis, male people deserved to be American. White, cis, straight women are encouraged to be people as long as they understand they are nothing more than their husband’s pets.

Yesterday (Memorial Day), the current American society pissed on the graves of everyone who fought to eradicate fascism during WWII while the rest of the world scratched their heads at our “unique” antics (read: insane). That would not have happened if the disinformation campaign by Russia had not been running for many years. It’s all connected. Ignorance is bliss in this case. Not only can your device create a complete profile of your likes and dislikes, the information is forwarded to the government. Notice I didn’t say “our government.” You actually don’t know which one is mining your data, which is another reason to long for 1985. Sometimes, it’s the good guys, like CIA and NSA.

I may be rancid butter, but at least I’m on your side of the bread. -Jim Mattox

Sometimes it’s our collective enemies, like Russia and China. The American president has oft been accused of cozying up to them because he wants that kind of authoritative power… and he’s doing his best to get it while throwing the rest of us under the bus. Ukraine has been put in an impossible situation, Finland and Poland are preparing to be next. However, it is hard to get the average American to consider the Ukrainians, Poles, and Finns. It is hard to get the average American to care about more than the price of eggs, especially when they will believe a lie easier than the truth. What is more plausible? That the American president can wave a magic wand and bring down the price of anything, or that prices fluctuate and it has very little to do with the current president at all? Generally, when we are talking about the economy, we need to look at who was the president eight to 12 years back.

Democrats spend time cleaning up after ideas like Reaganomics, but the trickle down theory hangs on like a bad penny.

Poor people are still waiting for Reagan’s theory to work, and he’s been dead for years.

The gaslighting put forth by the Republican party is that it will, if given long enough. Meanwhile, greed envelops the nation and somehow the cup which is supposed to overflow keeps getting larger to accommodate more wealth. That message was the predominant one before the advent of the Internet, because Reagan’s “Morning in America” was all the rage. In this way, life has not changed one bit. Instead of Michael Deaver (known as “The Wizard of Oz” for the packaging of news content on the administration and sending it straight to the station to make Reagan look competent) and his bag of tricks, we have an entire party, along with its own news channel, trying to tell us there’s nothing to see here. It’s not a different message. It’s just a different scale. You’ll all be richer and better off if the greed of the billionaires is allowed to run unchecked.

Instead of three television stations, though, we have social media and a 24 hour news cycle….. along with foreign actors that are willing to help spread that message because it brings about more destruction in the unity of the country. There is no way to get a break from your news being tailored to you so that you only believe what you’re allowed to see.

The only answer is to unplug.

I’m Still Figuring That Out

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are you good at?
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I treated myself to new-to-me running shoes today, because my old ones were bought in 2015. I do not know what happened to them, because they’re still perfectly comfortable. However, the rubber is starting to fall off and the tread feels like it has been dipped in chemicals so that they do not grip. Instead of being able to walk/run, I tend to slide around when I’m wearing them, particularly at the gym because everything is tiled. When I changed into them, I could tell an immediate difference because the floor at the store was polished concrete and I was able to jog in place without slipping.

I suppose that I am good at shopping, because a parishioner at one of our churches when I was a kid gave me a black belt in Goodwill. I have bought everything there, including important occasion outfits, just because I know my brands. That’s the secret to being really good at shopping, in my humble opinion. Even if I struck it rich, I would still rather have a $3-500 suit that’s been laundered a thousand times to make sure it’s soft than something brand new off the rack. My best find was in the early aughts, a full London Fog trench with liner for $24.

I also don’t mind not having the latest style of anything, because my clothes could best be described as the “Visiting Professor’s Collection” at Macy’s. Anything I buy is going to look timeless, because my shirts tend to come in three colors:

  • White
  • Blue
  • White and Blue pinstripes

However, I also like a bit of whimsy. These shoes remind me of Warhol and Lichtenstein, so I think they’ll look perfect with jeans and a button down. I am going to calm down the orange laces a bit by changing to UpUGo elastic laces. They’re not quite as bright, and I don’t have to tie them. I’m certain they’re mostly for children, but I wear boys’ shoes, anyway. Plus, who doesn’t love shoes with a cute little button on top?

I suppose I am good at writing, although writing is like courage. In the moment, you’re just doing what it is you need to do to survive. You don’t realize until afterwards that you’ve been courageous. I do not think I am a good writer. I put things out into the world and other people tell me if I’m a good writer or not. My therapist said that I must know I’m a good writer…. I did not know what to say to that. I’m glad she thinks that, mostly, because she’s more learned than I am. I have learned that I do not want to be an egomaniac, I just want to have confidence. I know that’s what she was talking about, but even telling people I think I’m a good writer sounds arrogant to me, so I don’t.

I do think that I could do a good job handling communications for modern executives, though, because most people do not know how to write introductory e-mails for basic correspondence. I was actually talking to my sister about this the other day, that the secretary she would have been given in the 1950’s would have handled the heavy lifting that AI is trying to do currently. First of all, it is unlikely that a woman would have had her job in the 1950s, but I definitely could have been the Peggy Olson to her Don Draper if given the chance.

I might be happy as a church employee of some kind, because that’s the type correspondence I can manage easily. I was reminded of this today when my sister asked my dad if he’d had a mobile phone in the early 1990s and I replied how I used to answer it. In the car, it was “Rev. Lanagan’s rolling office!” At home, it was “Lanagan summer home… summer home, summer not.” One of the parishioners had some alternatives to this which are really, really funny…. and also unprintable.

I have a good memory because they’re not really memories. An autist sees everything, everywhere, all at once as if no time has passed. This is both good and bad as I also have no friendship degradation mechanics. That’s a psychological term for calling up your best friend in third grade as if they’re still in the same place you are. If they are also neurodivergent, like as not, they are. If they are neurotypical, “Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

I am not good at reading a room, and that has served me well in some cases. Please believe that I have crashed and burned in others, but sometimes not reading a room correctly takes away the fear one feels in an unfamiliar situation and allows me to talk to people I never would have otherwise. For instance, I wasn’t approaching Jonna Mendez, chief of disguise and better than a mere mortal. I was approaching an old friend of Aada’s. Now that I know Aada lied and there’s no connection between them, I fear Jonna like the goddess she is.

That’s probably not healthy, but it is what it is.

Realistically, I know that Jonna puts on her running shoes one foot at a time just like me. But in my head she has attained a mythical status. I got all my books signed when I went to see her, so I have no need to bug her again. It’s probably just embarrassment on my part and she wouldn’t think twice.

But in my head, what if it’s not?

What if I’ve embarrassed myself to the point where I’m no longer wanted? I’d rather just keep my memories sacred and walk away, because I’d rather not find out what happens next in this particular story. I have other friends that work in intelligence and can regale me with stories when we’re both old and, more importantly, “outside with a drink in our hands……………” as Jonna so eloquently put it at the book talk for “The Moscow Rules.”

Those are the friends to whom I’d like to be a research assistant on their books, because I like writing non-fiction. I am not a novelist, and doubt I ever will be. I’m not running away from writing fiction, I just don’t get it. For instance, I don’t visualize inside my head, so I don’t really know how to write setting. I’m a gardener, so I have problems with plot. Because I’m a blogger, I’m solid at character studies……………. sometimes.

I am sure that I could learn these things over time, but conventional wisdom is to write what you know. So far, what I know is the world around me. Washington reads like a novel whether you aim for fiction or not. The characters and plots are interesting in and of themselves, and you do not have to make them up. I will never know what my real story in Washington is, because a lot of it happened behind my back. This is not a bad thing, as I fell into a safety net of sorts. One I hated, but still. That whole time in my life would just be a book called “Heytch,” because the trap I fell into was wanting to love her the way she wanted to be loved.

For the record, I showed up at the hospital because two incredibly unlikely stories were presented to me and I was betting that at least one was true. It was the one where she and her husband were wild about each other, and I could just come and live with them as a member of the family. That she was not poly and never had been; that she made it up to entice me when she didn’t need it. I would have followed her into the ocean no matter what.

If you really know me, you know just how little dating means to me, and how much I love deep conversations over coffee that never lead to romance. I could picture us as little old ladies together, and that meant more to me than gold, especially with her big sister right there to kiss the top of my head as she walked by on the odd occasion we ran into each other. Maybe I will write that story, if only for me, because of course it’s fiction now.

Sometimes I wonder how much of fiction is really fiction, and how much of it is people writing down what they thought was happening to them that later turned out not to come to pass. Fiction equals nonfiction plus time, I suppose.

Lots of people will tell you that I had hallucinations, and it is up to you to decide whether I really did or not. It has to be fiction now because all of the evidence has been scrubbed, even by me. I wish I had taken many, many screenshots…. but I didn’t. It would have been nice to have the photo of Heytch’s hand bound to mine, her saying that she was my River Song, because even if it wasn’t real, it was beautiful.

I would have been excellent at telling fact from fiction in person, but everything was presented to me over the internet with the ominous phrase “you are always the best.” One version of the story took this literally, a woman laying her heart at my feet. The other talked about all the destruction I’d caused with my blog because I was too arrogant to see I was causing it. Both stories are true, because I have never pretended to be the best at anything and yet, these people are also entitled to their opinion. What I believe to be true is that no one in that bunch believes in second chances, and I could have explained a lot with one, but in person.

Adding more to our internet history was only adding fuel to an enormous fire with no opportunity to put it out.

I just thought “Heytch” was cute once upon a time. I would have cut off a limb to meet Aada. Both were unique experiences, but they were completely different. I’m also in a completely different emotional place regarding both of them, that I will continue to write what I want because they had no shame in absolutely submarining me. I will never feel credible in the way that I did before I was hospitalized, because when I talk about their internet shenanigans, they are written off as hallucinations that never happened…………. all the evidence is gone.

I’m not sure whether I should thank them or not, because I am good at being sober. I was never abusing any substance, but I wouldn’t have given them up if they hadn’t intervened. It’s not that I realized I was an addict, it’s that I got a better offer. I don’t know what that offer is yet, because I haven’t chased it. My cognitive behavioral health counselor says that I’m not ready for a job, and I believe him for now. We’ll be reevaluating that in the future, because I know that I am capable of a lot more than I’m doing right now, and in fact, capable of a lot more than most people when I can give up my habit of assuming everything.

It’s not possible to be an autist in a neurotypical world without assuming things because if you don’t, people will talk down to you as if you are stupid and just don’t get it. I have found that I needed to switch to a neurodivergent workflow, and that was the kitchen at first. It just cannot be now because everything is too heavy, too hot, and too sharp. I am done with the hit parade of injuries at every shift because I cannot move fast enough and my balance leaves a lot to be desired.

I’m not healed enough from my trip to the hospital not to dwell on it here, because it threw me for such a loop. Because it was over the internet, I can tell you that many things were told to me that simply were not true. That’s part of my not making assumptions gig. Just because I was told I was talking to someone over the internet doesn’t mean I actually was. For that, particularly to Dana, I am sorry. She got roped into this because she was there from the beginning, not because I had this burning need to reach out to her after 11.6 years.

I still think of her fondly and hope she is well, and wish I could take back the e-mail I sent her because she did not deserve it. If I could have words with these internet people, I definitely would. They know who they are, and they haven’t stopped reading. I assume that I am still always the best, both for evil and for awesome.

I’m quieter, though, and take up a lot less space in the world because I don’t want it. A writer is a person who wants you to hear all their stories without knowing you’ve actually read them. I will take these running shoes and use them to propel me further away from controversy because I’m done with it.

I got a better offer, but it remains to be seen whether it still stands. We shall find out, though, because I am always the best.

The One I Want is the One I Got

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Who would you like to talk to soon?
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I sent my dad a funny text message the other day, that it was time for baby’s first colonoscopy, so add that one to the baby book (I sent my mother a similar text message the day I got my first gray eyebrow). A few days later, though, I started to panic because I don’t have any close friends in Baltimore. I just moved here in December, and having a colonoscopy requires someone to drive you home and keep an eye on you after the sedative. My dad and my sister are too busy to fly up here at a moment’s notice, so I don’t generally ask them for anything due to fear of hearing “no.” I could hear what my cognitive behavioral health specialist would think of that and he called bullshit in my head before I even asked him.

I chose my sister, Lindsay, because at the moment there was more chance that my sister would come up than he would as he’s already in charge of a million different things, much less my ass.

See what I did there?

So, gathering my strength, I sent my sister a text message asking if, since I could schedule around her, could she come up for this procedure? I was surprised and pleased when she said yes, and I might even get to see her twice as she already has to be in DC for something later (DC and Baltimore are not far apart, about 35 miles….. the time to travel varies greatly by traffic……. pro tip is to always take the train.). She said that if I scheduled the procedure for 10 June, then we’d be able to celebrate my mother’s birthday on the 11th. I told her I had to see the gastroenterologist first, but that sounded entirely doable depending on the availability of the hospital schedule.

I know for sure that it’s going to be my first time drinking the sludge, two years past when I should have done it because the original guidelines were that I didn’t have to worry about it until 50. It has moved to 45 without me noticing so now I’m late. Typical. But better late than never. I don’t have a history of gut problems, so I don’t foresee a problem with cancer or anything else. I just know that my sister’s job is to do some work while I sleep it off or something.

But this isn’t the only medical thing happening in my life. I have to have a Well Woman exam, which I am calling a Well “Woman” exam. Here’s why this is exciting. My doctor asked if I had a problem seeing a male doctor, and told me his name…. but the hospital system isn’t updated and his deadname popped up. Therefore, for the first time EVER IN THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE I GOT A TRANS MAN AS A GYNECOLOGIST!!!!!

I think.

His deadname could be a man’s name, but it would be highly, highly unusual….. like me. There are male Leslies out there, but not many in the modern age. If he is a bio male, I don’t care. Doctors don’t really have a gender to me. Their pronouns are they/them because the doctor and the God inside them live concurrently. You cannot be successful as a doctor if you do not make peace with the fact that you are God every day to the people sitting in front of you…. and that they will think you are Old Testament if you accidentally kill their loved one, and New Testament if you succeed. If there is a gender in my head, doctors are divided into surgical and medical.

I have so little community that I thought about calling the gynecologist’s office and asking if that doctor would like me removed from his service because he needed friends, too. I haven’t seen him yet, so no harm, no foul. But in the end, I decided that I would need an ally inside the system as well as friends in the community. If I am right and the name in the system is a deadname, then I am sure he can point me in the right direction of people who’d be willing to drive me home after a medical procedure because I actually know them well enough to ask. For instance, just pointing me to community resources is enough, and I know he would care about those things.

Gynecology is already set up to take care of women culturally, so I don’t think trans men would be any different. There is a different questionnaire for my gynecologist’s office than I’ve ever seen in any doctor’s office ever. Taking care of women culturally is asking questions like:

  • Have you ever been a victim of domestic violence?
  • Are there guns in the house?
  • Are the guns within reach of your children?

My psychiatrist is also trying to protect me because I told her that as an enby, I had body dysphoria over my breasts and that I had a lot of back pain due to them, anyway, so I would like a referral. The big beautiful bill passed the House, and she has never mentioned trans medicine again, saying, “did you ask your PCP about your back pain?” Coded language. I’m into it. If this bill fails in the Senate, we’ll have a buffer zone with which to work. But we are both preparing for the worst. That’s because I am not lying in order to get a breast reduction/double mastectomy. Body dysphoria is not genetic, but the back pain I experience certainly is.

The good news is that with exercise, I’m losing some of the fat tissue in my breasts on my own. Life doesn’t feel so heavy. Even my mammogram technician said that my breasts were very dense. My stepmother (a medical doctor) told me that caffeine makes it worse, so I have never done myself any favors in this area. If you were here watching me type, you would laugh. There’s a tallboy of Death Wish Coffee next to me (it’s delicious), so obviously I follow instructions to the letter.

Rule following gets you nowhere in my line of work, which is probably why I’m willing to lay out my medical history and future in front of you. You will learn more from me than you will hurt me with your criticisms of what I’m doing, because those will be different audiences altogether. Trans men need to see themselves, and I don’t know what kind of trans man I am yet. Am I the kind that wants drugs to rearrange my fat deposits as well? I do not know. What I do know is that of everything I struggle with in terms of trans medicine, it’s my voice that bothers me the most…. for evil and for awesome.

On one hand, I will tell you that I’m a soprano and when I’m warmed up, I’m cooking.

This is just an example because it’s unaccompanied, a loop for my friend Aaron to use in a storytelling podcast for The Sinners’ Table that’s coming down the pike. Now, let’s turn it up to 11:

This is another clip from a voice lesson in which I laugh about the fact that I do not know what happens when I’m singing. The afterburners turn on and I just go. It makes me wish I’d chosen voice at HSPVA and Clements (though at Clements I was in one year of choir and made All-Region). Now that it’s 12 years later, I can tell you that I was fighting a war in my head, two women battling it out for my affections…. the one who trained my voice vs. the one that deserved the victory lap. When Joseph (Houston voice teacher) says, “are you thinking differently?,” it’s realizing that this piece was designed to serve up gratitude.

Now, my journey is to decide what kind of singer I am, because drugs to redistribute my fat deposits so that I look more like a trans man than a woman will also make me a tenor. Some days, I think that would make me happy. Some days, I lean into my diva attitude because it’s very much like my trumpet player attitude. I have also noticed that most trans men develop vocal fry, and that is not appealing to me, either. Again, priorities.

I think I am happiest with staying in one place for now, moving cautiously toward enby because I do not know what the drugs will do and cannot predict whether I will be happy with them. I have been stuck on the idea of breast reduction or double mastectomy forever because Tig Notaro has my perfect body. She doesn’t identify as nonbinary, but she looks exactly like I want to look.

It makes me feel bad that she got her look through cancer because I can imagine us getting into a huge fight over it. “I got this look through cancer and you want to do this voluntarily? Are you crazy?” Well, now we are talking about a completely separate issue. I am most definitely crazy, but I take medication for that. As far as I’m aware, there is no brain surgery that removes crazy, but if there was, I would have gotten a referral for that, too.

I’m tired of talking into a void, and want to get louder about trans issues. That’s because nonbinary and trans do not mean the same thing, but we are the same umbrella. I can wear either flag…. and in fact I would like Jonna Mendez to know that I got the most fabulous t-shirt for pride ever created. It’s gray and has the enby flag colors across a bar code, with “Assume Nothing” up the side.

The reason Jonna would think it was cool is that “Assume Nothing” is rule number one in her world (she used to be Chief of Disguise at CIA). I could learn a lot from her, I think, because as an autist I have to assume everything. It is what allowed me to compile scripts in my head to be able to respond like a neurotypical………… when I could social mask.

Now, I see that she has the right idea and I don’t. Go into every conversation as if you don’t know anything and join other people’s realities. It is the only way to see all of them with grace. The transition has not been the smoothest, but I am learning. I am certain that everyone in my life deserves my sincerest apologies for the way I’ve acted over the last 12 years, because I’ve been completely alone, trusting in my own intuition. It’s not ideal.

Now, I’m branching out. I’m trying to be more open in hopes of attracting energy to me. I am done hiding in the shadows.

But I might want to hide in the shadows until after my colonoscopy is finished. Nobody wants to see that. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Exercise tells me which way I will go, because I cannot make a decision about my body while I am consumed with depression and anxiety over the way I look. I do not struggle with weight loss or gain, I just needed to feel good about something and I chose having the routine of getting to the gym as something that would help me feel less terrible. I have cerebral palsy, so I chose my workout carefully. There’s a program on the treadmills that will keep your heart rate in the target zone with incline rather than speed. Therefore, every session feels more like hiking than jogging.

It makes me happy because Bryn lives in Portland, Oregon and I’m sure that if I asked her, she’d be happy to drive me out the Gorge when I visited. I do not remember whether she likes to hike or not, but if she doesn’t I am sure she would drop me off at the base of Multnomah Falls and pick me up several miles down the road as I limp toward the car, energy spent. It makes me feel good to be prepared for that kind of hiking, because Multnomah is easy…. as you go, it gets harder. I haven’t made it to Larch Mountain without feeling like death warmed over, but perhaps I will as time goes on. And that’s without even researching hiking in my area, because I haven’t done it yet. I need to, because my entire hiking experience cannot be based on sacred memories.

The treadmill is my hiking sandbox. I can wander as far as I want through the rolling hills of any city in the world thanks to being able to watch YouTube on my phone. It’s a lot more fun to think about difficult questions and answers while also staring at the beauty of Paris, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Oslo.

What is not difficult is realizing that my life is bigger than me. Recording it for other trans people to read is my gift to you, because there’s just not a lot out there. Of course all who show up are welcome, but I am trying to reach an intentionally small audience. We are in a culture war where the focus is on trans women and what they might possibly do to cis women.

The biggest indicator of who the real perpetrators of violence might be is a movie I watched long ago. I’d tell you about it, but boys don’t cry.

The Long and Winding Road of Words

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What is the legacy you want to leave behind?
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The legacy I want to leave behind is obviously this record that I was alive. It is not valuable to everyone, all the time. That’s because I do not write what anyone wants to hear except me. If it was not a real record of what I was thinking, I would not have a character arc, the ups and downs of mental health in real time. I do not want to be an influencer, because that gets people killed. Their neediness for likes makes their self esteem rise and fall depending on how often people respond. I need people to come toward me rather than trying to attract you. One leads to a sustaining career as a working writer built on mutual respect. The other leads to jumping up and down for attention in hopes that someone will notice me, eventually giving up my real self for someone that more find palatable.

It’s important for women to have a voice, and as an enby, that’s part of my identity. The other part is trans man….. but I’m pretty sure I also identify as a train wreck. Sandi Toksvig brought it to my attention that women are not given equal airtime on Wikipedia, therefore they’re not given equal airtime in AI, either…. even though Microsoft Copilot’s begat is a matrilineal line (Ada Lovelace). I am trying to add to the diaspora and it does not matter to me whether history judges me as right or wrong. I need it to judge me as being marked “present.” I know that I was a C student, but lots of neurodivergent people are. It’s not that we’re not bright. It’s that we’re not all that clear on how school works and don’t care enough about authority to find out.

I am certain that if I’d played the game better, I would be in a different place now. One of the things that occurred to me when I was thinking about my writing is that my mother, Dana, and Ada all came from military families. Yet none of that military structure passed onto me. I didn’t just pick it up by osmosis, much to my detriment.

Let’s be clear. I already know I’m a mess. I’ve told life experiences that other people just aren’t brave enough to put to paper, but I am because I am full steam ahead. Write now, think later. Writing now and thinking later is what allows growth and change. I pore over the entries where I’m angry, then figure out why. I was so angry in “Doubt” that I spent money on a gym membership. I thought, “at least if I cannot flood my brain with good feelings through care and connection, I can do it through exercise.” I don’t think Aada is ever coming back because she reads my web site and decides what kind of person I am based upon it. She reads my letters the same way. Therefore, there is nothing to indicate that a hug or a handshake would make things better. It is incumbent upon me to move away from her, because she was gone many years ago. She just decided not to tell me.

If she hadn’t been, I might have been invited to get to know her and her family on a different level than our relationship sustained. I realize all of the ways I isolated her, but I would have isolated myself from her if she’d said “this is all our relationship will ever be. You will never meet me in person.” The longer we went without meeting and kahvi was a daydream, the weirder I felt about the state of affairs.

She’s a people pleaser and didn’t want to hurt me. I’m a people pleaser except when it comes to my blog. It’s the one place I have to call my own. Therefore, meeting me in person would have led to us both trying to please each other, and she would have gotten a much different version of me than she was used to seeing.

Aada was always inordinately funny, and that’s the person I wanted to meet. The hardass she displayed could kick rocks. I am sure that she would say that I was funny, and the blogger could kick rocks. But that’s the thing, right? People fall in love with you, or your writing. They rarely fall in love with both…. not that Aada was ever in love with me. The “in love” butterflies were my domain, but they were reigned in and settled into a comfortable nest; I didn’t give into them, I worked through them. That’s another legacy piece for me….. that I felt such incredible intensity for someone and realized how to walk it back into something viable and sustainable….. I think. I will never know if I did or I didn’t, trusting in my own intuition. Aada’s story will always be that I betrayed her.

She made up an egregious lie that is too detailed for me to ever believe that it was a lie, not really. Not when she accused me of having people’s lives in my own hands if I published something she wrote. This is where my mental health nose-dives, and where Michael steps in to remind me that Aada was the pathological liar, not me.

She’d been lying so long she didn’t even realize she was doing it, and I had to remind her that “the receipts go to fuckin’ CVS, Aada. We met in 2013, which by my count is not very recent.” She said she did it because that’s what I needed from her, as if I asked her to foster this ridiculous fabrication.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- she could have worked at a car wash and I would have been no less impressed. I’ll be spending the actual 12th anniversary of when we met without her (I’m guessing), because Michael told me that there is a game afoot based on a novel here, and I have to figure it out. The only hint I’ve seen so far is that I’m probably the Ethan Allen.

Obscure joke. Talk to your parents.

Aada would say that I left myself with no options, because I did not play the game correctly. If I’d played the game correctly, she could have made all my dreams come true. I saw that in the curated version of our friendship’s future. There was a job, a dog, support services, and all of it taken away because I wouldn’t do exactly what she said at all times. I have no respect for authority and I never have. Her life is ruled by it because she doesn’t follow rules, she makes other people follow them.

When I go off-book, it’s a disaster. When she goes off-book, they just write a new one.

I could cry about it, and I have in the past. Not so much anymore. I realized that I did not want to be subject to her laws, that I wanted to be treated like an equal. Where was the part where she showed up for me? Where was the part where she proved she was capable of being my friend? She said she’d done all of this to meet a blogger, and I surmise freaked out when it worked.

I wish I’d been the person I am now when we met. The person I was then was too brash, too boastful, too full of herself because that person could social mask. There was no easy entry into the softest parts of me until baby Aada whispered her name.

I struggled with recovery from sex abuse and got my wires crossed in a way that couldn’t be undone, and in some sense, may never in terms of sentimentality. It’s not the big picture that makes me cry. It’s things like looking in my Apple Watch face gallery and seeing that Apple has used the picture she took of herself for my contact list to create the most beautiful watch face I’ve ever seen and cannot bear to use.

She has never gotten her wires crossed, which made her a safe person with whom to lose my mind. I’m not saying that I didn’t cause her emotional trauma as well, only that she’s trained to deal with crazy people and I’m not.

(This might be a clue we’ll use again later.)

I didn’t guard against her in any way, and therefore all of her emotions controlled mine. She did listen to me there, because what I had to say resonated… that yes, I’d gotten my wires crossed, but that wasn’t the sum total of me. That the part of me who views her as family in an “I’m so sorry, this meeting is over because I have to get on a train to Virginia RTFN” kind of way was hurting in the same way her other family members would hurt if she was in trouble.

It was my error to separate myself, but that was a mark left from childhood. It’s gone now. I am constantly trying to appeal to my better angels and to not repeat the mistakes of the past, because I didn’t just hurt Aada in my own misery. I hurt everyone around me because I couldn’t see them.

I couldn’t even see me.

Thankfully, you could.

Zip, Zap, Zop

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today in group we learned an energy passing game called “Zip, Zap, Zop.” The object of the game is to make the energy go seamlessly between people, the next person picking up the word in the series where you left off. If you mix up words, you’re out. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve actually felt energy leaving my body toward another person because I actually had it to give. But the game was the end of the session, after we all learned about how to take care of ourselves.

Or rather, what we are doing to take care of ourselves. My answer was exercise, because it just makes me feel good whether I want to or not. There’s no way to avoid the rush of endorphins when I’m finished. I can better handle everything else when I feel solid in my body. However, I have noticed something that is very, very true. If you skip a day, the next day is harder.

So I only skipped a day, Wednesday.

It’s akin to the second lesson I learned. Pausing a program on the machine just makes it harder to start again. That’s because when you pause it to take a drink of water, your heart rate nosedives. I walk on the treadmill because I have balance issues, so as soon as I hit the restart button I go from zero percent incline to nine. It’s ridiculous. Steady wins the race, apparently, because I stopped pausing the treadmill in order to avoid the swings. The incline to get back up to a healthy heart rate was too steep for someone who already feels uncomfortable in a gym in the first place.

Reminds me of something my dad has told me over and over, because Doc Severinson (former bandleader on The Tonight Show) told his band this at SMU regarding practicing his trumpet:

  • If I miss one day, I notice.
  • If I miss two days, my band notices.
  • If I miss three days, everybody notices.

There is no one that pays attention to my body that close, even me. What I’m talking about is everyone noticing my emotions. When I am not secure in my body for any amount of time, I will fold into myself. Autism is an undertow for which I have not discovered a solution except forcing myself out into the world and hoping for the best. I am a different person when I cannot gather the energy to connect with others. I am prone to self-indulgence and I know it.

It is hard to decide what is my story and what is just straight up cyber-bullying when you are trying to show your own mental illness in real time. That’s because in order to show what is genuinely me, I have to divorce myself from my emotions about others. I say things that I would never say in conversation because in conversation, I am not disconnected from them. There are lots of entries, particularly about Aada, that I should take down. But I won’t, because like as not the same entries that are angry will also contain a line she liked.

I cannot take anything back, but I can move forward with other people. I do not know what her consequences were except to say that the thing she was the most worried about has not come to pass because I was never out to get her… and in no universe would she ever send me anything that couldn’t be published. She needed a way out, and I gave her one. If this is not true, she can come back and say that. But my suspicion is that she won’t. She has always been too proud to admit that vulnerability solves anything, and she did not see how her lack of vulnerability beat me down over the years. In that way, I am glad to be free of her. You don’t judge the sum total of a person based on one thing, though, especially when it’s clear they need help.

She did not understand the position she put me in; I didn’t understand hers. I also genuinely made a mistake, because I was working too fast. Luckily, I was able to delete the entry before too many people saw it, including someone who could bring my heart rate back down to normal when she disappeared. I gave her too much power and I freely admit it. I will also not apologize because I trusted her with it.

She did not see how she broke my trust over and over that she would show up eventually. That I wasn’t giving her all this energy for nothing. That, in effect, the reason our relationship crashed and burned is that I was very polite at some times and very demanding at others; it didn’t matter. Nothing worked. There was never equilibrium in our relationship and it was something I desperately needed.

But being demanding wasn’t my modus operandi. That’s the ’tism. I get into “explaining mode” and think I am doing a very good job of it. Then, Aada would lash out at me for questioning her smarts. That never occurred to me in a million years. I just sound like a professor because my archetype is Bert from “Sesame Street.” And in fact, I know someone she loves that sounds just like me when I get going, and they don’t have that relationship at all. I know for certain that we’d have gotten along in person, if only she’d given me a chance.

So much of this relationship fell apart because it was so rich AND ALSO never there.

She was offended by nearly everything because her threat meter was so high. I wish I could have done more to take it down, but I was threatened in return. A piece of my heart was walking outside of my body and she wasn’t taking very good care of it. Neither was I, because it wouldn’t come back to me so I could shore it up. There were no words of affirmation, there was only fear and doubt.

I suppose the biggest lesson for me is that she wanted to save the world, and I wanted to save her, specifically. I thought she was falling down on the job at home because she was so work-focused. But the truth is that I couldn’t see her entire life at home, I could only see my part of it. Her attitude towards me routinely made me cry. There was no solution because her answer for everything was “buck up, Buttercup.” My answer for everything was “we can work on this together.” Never the twain shall meet. Any attempt to bridge the gap was over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero.

My job over the next few years is to figure out why I’ve been attracted to that my whole life.

Aada is not the first emotionally unavailable person to charm me, but I hope she’s the last. To be clear, she was never my partner, but I learned how to be…. and not to be…. the partner I wanted to show others I could be if I got my ducks in a row.

The first was giving up any substance that allowed me respite from anxiety, because it was numbing me out too much. No alcohol, no weed, no benzos…. just breathing techniques at first. The alcohol was first, weed second, benzos last. All of them cold turkey because I do not have an addictive personality. Telling myself that I could be a better person if I didn’t have them was enough, and I was right.

Because I quit everything, I was able to add a long-term anxiolytic called “Buspar.” No one really knows how it works except that it interacts with both your serotonin and dopamine receptors over time. It takes about six weeks to get it to maximum efficacy, so I’m looking forward to seeing how my life changes in that time. The most notable relief (if it works) will be not having a constant hum in my brain around which is hard to think. It’s loud enough to block out entire thoughts, which is why I write every day, but often not enough to publish. I have hundreds of drafts on this web site that have never come to light because of this noise.

It’s another way my mental health drags me into the deep end of the ocean. My quality of life is sometimes poor, because my thoughts are quite literally drowning in sound. Imagine that you are asked to write anything and your constant companion is the Emergency Broadcast System:

There is a reason for every single thing I have done, but it is this sound that has isolated me more than anything. I cannot connect to people when I cannot hear them. My head is too painful.

All I can do is run away, on a treadmill that stays in place so I don’t wander too far from home.

That’s because on the days when my Buspar works and my workout is fruitful, someone can shoot me a zip, and I’ll be there to catch. Whether someone is there to receive my zap and their zop is thankfully not up to me. I cannot control any of that. All I can do is put energy into the universe, and hope it comes back to me.

Maybe Aada doesn’t believe in forgiveness. Maybe she shouldn’t. That’s not for me to say. But what I do know is that happiness is found one foot in front of the other, and finding out two friends also go to my gym.

You find angels when you’re not looking for them, and they’re always in disguise. But you won’t be ready if you’re not even looking, and that’s what my mental health does to me. It limits my ability to look for the angels in my midst, because I do not believe I deserve them.

Or I didn’t until I started putting energy into trying to be an angel to someone else. I don’t know who that is, but what I do know is that it’s the purest thing I’ve ever said.

Running Away from Negative Thoughts

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have all kinds of negative thoughts because I have bipolar. I’m not sure that I manage them all that well, but working out has given me a shortcut. That’s because from the moment I start working out, my body is flooded with all these endorphins that make me feel good whether I want to or not. Most of the time, I am the copy of Bert from “Sesame Street.” I get lost in my own mind, and I forget to acknowledge what is good and positive. I think I draw the Ernies of the world out of the woodwork, because most of them want to save or change me. It has never worked, because I am a bird (pigeon?) with a broken wing. Healing cannot come from external sources, but from my body deciding that my wing has been broken long enough and it is healed now.

What I have learned is that social masking taught me that I should not be happy staying at home with my bottle cap and paper clip collection.

Incidentally, I am 47 years old and I just used a “Sesame Street” reference. PBS funding matters.

I didn’t learn to be happy until I met other people like me, who struggle with the same kinds of issues. None of their people understand, either, because being AuDHD is a rough gig, and so is being bipolar. I need friends who, “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel And in fact, the female presentation of ADHD is so close to autism that I’m not sure that ADHD is the right diagnosis anymore, because amphetamines only work half the time. This may also be a function of age. My ability to compile scripts is slowing down; as I get closer to a deadline, that is no indication that I’m going to have the same rush of energy I did in my 20s. Maybe it was always autism, and because I was intelligent, there was no one to suspect I had it.

Being a bio female has as much to do with it as intelligence.

Doctors have pattern recognition on white boys, but they miss women and people of color all the time. New research says that trans and nonbinary people are up to six times more likely to be autistic (NPR), and that queer people are more likely to be autistic overall. Now we are graduating from “Sesame Street” to “Blues Clues.”

But we internalize it, don’t we? We take in all those messages of hate from the Religious Right (who is neither) that there is some kind of moral failing instead of solid science and reason. We are told every day of our lives that there is something wrong with us and that just has to be okay, because there are too many people in this country whose answer is for us to adjust and be cool with all the relatives who pray for you to change. That their prayers are as good as your science.

I should say for the record that I’m a very liberal Christian. I am not knocking Christianity, but unaccepting denominations. My prayers are as good as my science, because they are on equal footing. I did not give up my brain to be spiritual. I need both. Science tells me the “what.” Religion tells me the “why.” Too many people confuse the two and throw the baby out with the bathwater. But what I have found is that it helps me to get my ego out of the way. I cannot change people, I can only change me. I can only lead by people wanting what I have, because it comes from a light that is perpetual except when I put it out.

The way my light goes out the most often is through negative thinking. Imposter syndrome gets me a lot, as does the thought that the world would be better off without me. This message is reinforced everywhere I look because the world is not kind to nonbinary people; the world is never kind to people they don’t understand. What they don’t know is that it took me several years to understand. I get it. But if my brain can expand to a new way of thinking, so can everyone else’s…. because I did not coin the term. The reason it’s new and different is that the word was coined by people much younger than me. People my age and older are dismissive, and that’s fine. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but me as long as people respect my right to exist.

It also does not work with my current attitude, which is Southern preacher’s kid who does everything not to offend. I am getting stronger. Misgendering and mislabeling me is not okay. I prefer they/them. If someone defaults to a binary out of habit, I try to correct them because the sound of “she” grates on my nerves. As you and I go through this process (my audience is very much the keeper of my secrets), “he” feels more and more like home because there are too many web sites where there is no option. Changes are coming for me that I need desperately, like shopping for clothes that make me feel comfortable in my own skin. I asked my brother in law just to send me his closet in a “small.” Hey, it might work.

The problem is that androgynous people have been a joke for so long that it’s only now we’re recognizing validity. I remember not liking the SNL character “Pat” from the beginning, my first taste of realizing “ohhhh….. that’s what I look like in my head.” I remember seeing Tig Notaro after her double mastectomy and thinking, “that’s who I want to look like because she’s female but her shirts hang right.” And then I immediately felt shame and doubt about my body because I thought, “Tig got her body through cancer. Is this something that anyone should do voluntarily?” Body modification is also nothing new, but that didn’t stop me from a whole host of negative thoughts.

I get lost in my head about relationships because being autistic makes my thought processes different than the rest of the world, even other autistic people. They don’t understand, they get upset, and I get upset because I don’t understand what I have done. I am trying to slow down…. and speed up. The more I run, the more the endorphins make the bad feelings not so “extremely loud and incredibly close.” Well, technically, I just walk really fast. Me running on a treadmill is my balance at its shakiest. I control my heartrate through incline, not speed.

Making friends with the gym as a lifelong nerd has come with the perk of not concentrating on anything but what’s right in front of me…. namely, the imaginary hill I’m climbing. My headphones drown out everything but Maury Povitch, Steve Wilkos, or whatever trash TV the gym has streaming.

It makes me happy to know that I will never be the father.

But it does lead me to think about the life I’ve come from, and the kind I want in the future. No more partners where I enable their drinking because I go into it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, believing everything an alcoholic has to say. This is not a slam against Dana, because it has happened over and over. I think it is my personality. Drunks are charismatic people, and so am I. Drunks are loose-lipped, and so am I. Drunks make their signals toward you overwhelmingly obvious, and I don’t notice smaller ones because that’s what an autist tends to do. We miss social cues until they’re unfailingly large, the realm of drunks and narcissists.

I know what I want, and it isn’t that. Love needs to be quieter.

I’m much quieter, that’s for sure.

I go into the valley of vulnerability when it’s just me and salt and sweat…. but I don’t think about meeting people at the gym because of Aaron Sorkin. Every time someone cute walks by, I think about C.J. Cregg from “The West Wing” saying that she’d like to go to the gym to meet an interesting man and then falling off the treadmill in front of him.

Something happened today that was very different and out of the ordinary. I was walking home, and I saw my reflection for the first time in weeks. The running is already making a difference because I’ve gone every day. I thought I looked good.

It’s a start.

Game on.

Feeling Like a Woman is Not My Vibe

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The featured image for this entry is the last time I actually felt female. I can pinpoint it because it’s the last time I wore that suit with a shell showing off my cleavage; I was not in a hurry to button up to my collar like I do now. In retrospect, I’ve always been nonbinary and switch hit my social masks depending on who I needed to be.

That day, I looked in my closet and the only thing I had to wear that would look appropriate in the Mexican Embassy was something I’d never wear now. I don’t wear jewelry unless you count the CZ earring in my left ear, only there because the hoops I got at the tattoo shop had to be removed for an MRI. My hair is cut much shorter, and I don’t wear makeup to compensate. I don’t make an attractive man or woman, in my estimation, so I’m working on how to fix that. It’s not about what would attract other people, but what would give me more self confidence in leaving the house. This look isn’t it anymore, especially since I would like to meet more people who are excellent at what they do in hopes of becoming one of them.

Yes, that is Pati Jinich from Pati’s Mexican Table. My dad bought tickets for us to go and see her, then called and said he wasn’t coming because he didn’t feel well. “Careful, dad… I’ll steal your girlfriend from you,” I quipped. That’s because my stepmother has called Pati my dad’s girlfriend for many years. I have told this story before, but it bears repeating because it’s entirely representative of who I am as a person. I will say anything to anyone not realizing the gravity of the situation because I don’t pick up on social cues. This is to my detriment, but in this one instance, it worked out. I tell Pati this story at the beginning of the dinner. The shock and amazement is that she remembered the story and remembered to prank my dad after it was over. I got the picture because I’m 5’2 and biologically female, decidedly not Pati’s actual type…. but we’re both old line cooks, so anything goes, apparently. Hey, she’s the one that told me to text the photo to my dad immediately because she wanted to see what he said.

He thought it was hilarious, of course.

It’s a good memory to go out on, because since I’ve joined a gym I’m trying to get into guy mode about it. Female mode at the gym is my mother’s voice in my head counting every calorie both up and down. Guy mode is focusing on results. I had no shame about Taco Bell afterwards because it’s the Universal Guy Meal of Working Out, that chicken bowl. I used butter at breakfast even though I had high heat PAM ready to go. I’m not going to change everything overnight because I’m grieving. Going through all these changes without the one person who used to listen to them is breaking my heart, as I am sure that in some sense it is breaking hers. It did not have to end this way, because here’s what she wanted me to say that I did not:

I was angry that you lied to me. You do not see the fallout. But you are not more important to me than someone who has juice. You’re all the electricity I’ll ever need.

She thought I chose someone with celebrity over her quiet spirit, when I chose them because they’d never lied to me and she had.

That’s because I was able to explain nonbinary to her and she listened. Not many people will. My line about it is that “I do not roll out of bed wanting to be a man. The phone ringing is the biggest reminder that I’m a bio female. It does not make me crave masculinity, but gives me a reminder to perform femininity.” Nonbinary is just that, picking and choosing which gender goes with which situation. How often do you actually think about it?

I am not over losing the emotional connection we had, but it’s something I strive for in this new life without her. There’s no replacement, but she is my mirror image. We are sewn at the spine, each facing out in different directions. I’ve been awfully hard on her because I’m so hurt and enraged. It doesn’t make sense that she ran away from me because she lied. It doesn’t make sense that she lied to me for 12 years because she thought that I needed something from her that I didn’t.

Everything I’ve ever loved, it started with loving a girl first. I picked her special interest so we’d have something to talk about. Over time, she didn’t want to talk about anything else, which she construed into “Leslie wants to know about this thing.” No, baby Aada. I told Michael today that if you’d turned out to be a Sandwich Artist at Subway I would have helped you make better sandwiches, along with telling him that I’d always told you if you worked in a car wash I would love you just as much as I do right now.

So much so that I know I’m losing femininity just by talking about it. I just seem so pathetic because women are strong. Men are the weak ones. Men are the ones where you can rip their hearts out in front of them and they have to pretend not to care while they’re still breathing, but it’s lucky they still do. There’s so much unexplored territory in our relationship that just has to rest in peace, because I know to the very core of my being that being yours was the real fantasy all along. That I didn’t want all of your heart, just a piece. That I wanted more until I realized it was impossible. Be happy that she loves you for who you are. And I was.

The only reason I have this blog is to explore all the millions of emotions coursing through me because I am not easily understood no matter what I say. Writing volumes doesn’t often help, especially when you’re getting blowback over things you’ve said without defending yourself. I didn’t need you to defend yourself. I needed you to show up for me like I’ve always shown up for you. As I’ve said previously, there will be no thank you for the 12 years of silence you’ve already gotten, just annoyance and anger that I could not keep quiet forever, genuinely or not so genuinely losing my mind depending on who is telling the story.

You did not cause my misfortune, but you did not help it dissipate, either. We have different ways of handling things and you were so convinced that your way was correct that I ended up in a psych ward twice over. At what point do you not take responsibility and say, “well, that could have gone better.” Why are all the pricks I’ve left on your skin? Do you not see the ones you leave on mine? You can tell by the way I write that every entry starts out as universal and filters out into all the things I didn’t get to say, won’t get to say. They’re not for you anymore, they’re for everyone.

I wanted to have conversations in private before I wrote my blog entries forever, because I’m a writer and you’re an editor. But even that conversation needed to happen in person, the bane of your existence because you weren’t brave enough to admit that I was your friend. Or perhaps you were afraid of what would happen had your husband and I had our yellow and red string conversations because he didn’t want to hear me out. Whatever the case, it’s not worth exploring because that is only pain for me. I have said many times that when I lose you, I don’t know who I am for a little bit…. that’s because the mirrors talk to each other.

Red light, blue light…..

Your overwhelming cis femininity showed me who I was. I could be an enby because with you, my inner trans man was always on full display. I would have liked more of that, just you tousling my hair instead of saying it looked cute in a photo.

I never wanted to be more than you wanted to handle, but I couldn’t be a disembodied voice anymore, either. Not connecting with you led to not connecting with anyone. Not connecting with my dad and sister until I had to call them, embarrassed from the Sinai ER, was the last straw. That’s because you’ve already said there’s no reconciliation between us, that our journey is over. I do want you in my life, but not with that attitude. If you change your mind, I will not say “how dare you reopen that wound?” I will say, “welcome home.” That’s because you are not a wound to me. We have wounded each other, and we deserve the chance to apologize.

In short, I’m sorry for all the things I’ve said and done that enraged you, and know that it’s up to you whether forgiveness is real. You say that I wonder why you don’t trust people. I don’t, actually. You never trusted me from the beginning and didn’t understand how different we were. I had to learn to sink or swim. I noticed you were drowning and I stayed with you until far past the time when I should have cut bait to save myself. I am hoping that you got something out of this blog over the years, because I said something 12 years ago that has never been more true than today:

The hottest woman I know taught me to be a better man.

I have grown, not all the time. Not every day. Sometimes, I am a miserable sinner and I know it. Sometimes there are things I have done, sometimes there are things I have left undone. But what I don’t want you to do is mistake the part for the whole. I loved you every day, all day, not expecting anything in return. I did not get truly angry at you until I found out about a lie that cost me a relationship with someone else and you had the audacity to downplay it.

You’re not going to cost me any more relationships with other people, and my hope is that eventually, you’ll be healed enough to see that we both did a number on each other. No one won here. We deserve each other, both for evil and for awesome.

How do I know this? The picture with Pati Jinich means less to me than the photos I took for you just to show off my new haircuts.

Balance

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I am seeking a new balance to home life and work life because I know I’m a writer and need to keep at it. I’ve been the same character for 12 years, and now is a time of explosive growth as I no longer have a hard shell around me keeping me from connecting to other people. I have hid not only in my one house, but one room of one house, trying to avoid the simple act of being a blabbermouth. Now, that restriction has been lifted and I can tell what I want, when I want, within reason. I just had to choose. Do I want a relationship with Aada, or do I want a relationship with me?

I chose me, because her idea of choosing me was simply to write to me over the internet. I would keep living in a small room, my life incomplete, while I stared at the ghost in my shell. I think the nickname is apt because we slowly hacked each other from the inside out. I say that I fell in love with the wrong woman all the time, because she did not fall in love with me. I was stuck, because she loved me in the way that she could…. deeply, grabbing for approval at times. She just didn’t need my approval and didn’t trust in her own instincts. Her last interaction with me was a huge fight in which I fell asleep and I woke up to, “you know what?”

If someone starts a sentence with, “you know what?” then you don’t have to read the rest to know someone is going to take a bite out of your ass. I told her not to assume that just because I was taking a nap that meant I was abandoning her. Just recently, I went back and re-read our conversations and what I found is that I did not want to connect with her anymore. She was offended by everything and I could not find a topic that made both of us happy. Michael told me that I would be happier without her, and he turned out to be right, but not for the reason he said. He calls her “the fraudster.” But the things she lied about were inert. Nothing that couldn’t have been forgiven because I liked the goofball she was inside when she let loose.

But I wasn’t allowed to see that person. Every sentence I wrote caused defense, and I became an angry person in response. I hated being that person and so did she. I can tell because she has blocked me on everything as if I never existed. That’s how she gets through life. There’s no working through something and coming to resolution. There’s just moving on. I don’t do that. I work hard at changing what was wrong. I commended her for being vulnerable. And yet, her e-mail to me was still a flame war in which her therapist supposedly said that I was responsible for manipulating her for 12 years. Maybe that’s true, because her therapist will never know my side of the story unless she’s reading me here. I hope they are. Because I am as angry as I was in “Dope” and as sweet and sentimental as I was in “All the Things You Never Knew.” I do not have one attitude when it comes to Aada because there’s not a single day that describes our relationship except the distance of never working together in person. I believe it would have solved a lot, and there would never have had to be a flame war in which I felt threatened.

The impossible position she put me in was that she wasn’t real. She just taunted me saying that I wanted fame and fortune by publishing something she wrote, when in reality I was starting to look like a crazy person, in love with a ghost who never showed up. In love with my own imagination. For one shining moment, she was there in all her glory and it didn’t matter that I looked like a manipulative asshole. It didn’t matter that she thought that. I could deal with those consequences easier than I could deal with my friends and family always saying that she was a figment of my imagination.

Now, the whole world thinks I’m an absolute lunatic and that just has to be okay. There’s a reason I am the way I am, and it’s because it was revealed to me how the Internet actually works. I cannot speak to that, either, except to say that I discovered that the mirrors talk to each other. We are skating on an ice rink in which the machines underneath control the hardness. While you’re “elbows up,” everyone underneath is making sure you don’t fall through. It was a wild ride, and I talked how I normally talked…. I’m sure managing to offend several people in my life because I thought I was only talking to “my girl.”

It was a dream, all of it, a conspiracy to get me to the hospital. I needed it, but their methods were absolutely cruel. I will never forget thinking that my night was going to be flying to Finland with someone I hadn’t seen in 12 years and really liked, after 12 years of sitting alone. She was already married, but was telling me she was poly and her husband was cool with it. I didn’t want a full-time girlfriend because I’m working on myself. This seemed like the perfect solution because she doesn’t even live in my state. She works in media, or did, anyway, and would have been good as a sounding board no matter whether the date lead to something else or didn’t. I wasn’t ready to commit; I was ready to hear her out.

This is because I wasn’t sure she was out as poly to anyone but her husband. There was a big chance she’d hide me away in Africa or Asia and I had to know if it was worth it first. All of my emotions were stirred in a way they hadn’t been because I’d been so cut off from feeling anything that it was nice to feel something genuine. My move to Baltimore had just been one more way to isolate myself because I was having trouble taking care of myself in light of all the pressure I was under. It was just more social masking so that no one had to see me suffer because I didn’t want them to. And in fact, they wouldn’t have without Aada’s access. She’s the one I told everything, and I don’t regret it. I regret that she is too angry to see that me publishing her e-mail is not her biggest problem.

Her biggest problem is that she crushed me for 12 years and I just took it. I just fell down and let her, because it wasn’t my secrets that were killing me. I got to where I was fucking feral. I can’t apologize enough to make a difference, because I’ve already done all the apologizing I’m going to do. So has she, because every time she says, “I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know,” I know it’s just words to placate me. She’s never going to actually do anything different.

“I’m more sorry than you’ll ever know” would have been “I’ll meet you at the hospital.”

In the immortal words of my friend Aaron Brown when I asked him if he was making room for grief, “I don’t have to make room for grief. It makes its own.” I’m just sad. Everything I’ve known for 12 years is gone and I am going to be blamed for it ad nauseam. I should, in a lot of ways. I was the one that sexually harassed Aada over the internet 12 years ago, when my marriage was ending and I was trying to make Dana angry, not Aada. But Aada decided what kind of person I was from the very beginning, and treated me like a jackass even when I was on my knees praying. There are some sins that cannot be forgiven by another person, they can only be forgiven by God. I didn’t take the hint. I wrote volumes. I sent presents. I changed how I thought of her because you don’t think about your heroes that way. Anything I could do to move on from that one time in my life was positive progress, and she accepted me for who I am…. eventually…. without telling me that she’d never see me in person just in case.

We could have started there.

We could have started with honesty, but that’s not her policy. Her policy is a web of lies in which no one can get through. Try, and she’s the spider that has no problem injecting poison. She won’t listen to reason, that vulnerability is necessary to survive a relationship with someone who is all vulnerable, all the time. Because I was never angry she lied for a living. I was angry she lied to me.

I justify publishing what I did because there’s no way to unpublish it, not because I actually meant harm. They’re all the lies I tell myself to keep myself alive. She didn’t deserve to have her e-mail published in its entirety because I was a dumbass and didn’t proofread, but there’s a million reasons why it was necessary to save my own sanity. It’s a sacrifice I’ve made along the way, and now I think I’m getting it back.

I didn’t choose to stop smoking weed when she said I should, or when the twins said I should, but when I was given actual anxiolytic medication to replace it. I didn’t decide to start taking care of myself until my anxiety was solved. When I was trapped between her lies and my silence, I didn’t know my next move and staying in my room was the only one I could think of that wouldn’t cause damage. From the Internet, I could be watched. From the Internet, there are no private conversations. From the Internet, she is “from whom no secrets are hid.”

The problem was when I treated her like God, I treated myself like a worm.

It was a bleak outlook for the rest of my days, when what I wanted was freedom with her. She hid from me when it would have delighted me to see her flash a smile in my direction at least once. Even the picture she took for me only has a hint of a smile, but I’m glad I have it in my box of treasures from that time in my life. I cannot look at it, but someday.

Maybe when I get my smile fixed, I’ll be able to return one. My medications have ruined my teeth and I haven’t done anything about it. I only now think I am deserving of a new smile. I only now think I am capable of growing into the person I was meant to be, because the last 12 years have been so stunted. I was trying to take care of someone else’s inner child, and ignoring my own while she cried.

All I got in return for that was lots of defense and anger. That’s not my bag. I own that I did sin against her, and what I said was not small or easily forgiven. But what should have happened is blocking me on everything immediately and letting this process happen 12 years ago if she wasn’t going to put on her big girl panties and work it out. She just got the chance to snipe at me every day instead.

I put up with it because I thought I deserved it and didn’t have enough strength to block her…….. until I did. She noticed and sent me two e-mails reading me the riot act over shit I never said. That should have been even more of an indication that this was going to end badly, but I did not pay attention. I just let her have her say….. because she only pays attention to the ways in which I hurt her.

She’s never really taken in my pain, and never will. That’s because she cannot see it. Having boundaries means teaching people how to love you, and she’s a people pleaser. No one knows how to relax around her because she does not give them any directives. If you tell her that it doesn’t matter what she does now, she takes that as “you hate me.” When I literally meant “I can welcome you or I can push you away, but the next steps are on you.” She chose to step away, as I knew she would. Abandonment is the only skill she’s actually practiced.

I have grieved this relationship over and over because she doesn’t want to work on it. She would like to say she worked on it. But she’ll get to three internet exchanges and get so heated that she tells me to fuck off before I can even breathe. I have done the same, but less and less over the years as I have dealt with my trauma and learned how to breathe.

Bryn and I have a code phrase for this… “HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?!”

I used it on Aada, and she said, “100%.” She understands that she’s the one standing outside the group of people who will accept her for who she is and catering to the people who see her for the way she’s curated.

She doesn’t like people that are fucked up because she cannot admit that she’s fucked up. She has to believe that she has it all together. I could have offered her friends and a future not based on social masking, but based on who she actually is….. a six year old covered with layers of PTSD that made her invincible to the outside world while she’s dying inside.

I’m in this position because I wouldn’t join the narrative that she’s fine. I’m in this position because publishing her e-mail was just the last thing that happened. The real truth is that she was never going to unmask.

She’s a trademark, and she likes it that way.

I’m a spoonie, and I don’t have the ability to mask anymore. As I got more and more into finding my true self away from other neurotypicals, she became more defensive. Because as I’ve said, I think she’s neurodivergent and a spoonie as well. She just pushes herself to the very limit of her abilities and explodes when it comes to her personal life. Or, at least, I hope that’s only my experience of her. She makes me think that everyone around her is in danger of the cold disconnection I got. I wonder if her divorce from her first husband years ago actually happened the way she thinks, or if she didn’t know all the things about herself that she does now.

Because in Aada’s life, everything happens to her. She doesn’t cause anything. Everyone is toxic but her. If you view your life that way, you will end up only talking to yourself, only connecting with yourself, and thinking that’s normal. For instance, I’m toxic because I hurt her, but she’s not toxic because she hurt me. I have a more nuanced view. We both caused each other damage that could be resolved and our relationship healed.

But there’s no room for nuance with Aada. She’s not vulnerable enough to admit that her trauma causes me pain. She’s not vulnerable enough to admit that she causes problems inasmuch as I do. It’s so much easier to “blow ’em off and keep goin’,” but at what point do you just run out of people to lean on? I hope that in our conversations, it led her to let other people in to everything that I know, because the disembodied voice of a stranger on the internet didn’t help me over time. Hugs might have, though. Since I can’t hug her, I hope someone did.

I chose to move to Baltimore so that there would be no one around to hug me. I chose to be alone because I thought I was doing the right thing. Now, I’m trying to leave my house as often as I can, because eventually I hope I’ll find someone to love that is actually available.

No internet connection needed.

Something Completely Different

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I decided to change my life, and I did. I wrote down a laundry list of what was wrong with me and why, then went to my primary care physician and got referrals. We were just establishing a baseline of care, but I needed to get the ball rolling on several things, most notably my CP assessment since the last one I had was in 1978. I do not really need to know I have CP. I can tell by the way I move. It’s just for my own peace of mind…. needing a doctor to say, “I see you.”

I’ve been referred to a breast surgeon to talk about trans medicine, dermatology to talk about a rash on my stomach, and back to my psychiatrist to talk about autism and ADHD. I was diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar disorder in college, but those records are long gone. I need to redo the assessment because no one is going to take my word for it that I need amphetamines, or that I’ve tried Stratera and we can try it again but it didn’t work the first time……… there’s just no record of that, either. If no one believed me that I took benzos for anxiety, they’re not going to believe I took amphetamines, either). I do think my therapist has my back, though. Or maybe it was someone on my care team at my cognitive behavioral health program.

Two days ago, I went to pick up something else at the pharmacy hospital, and Buspar was waiting for me. That’s not enough to get it to full efficacy, but I can say that I feel so much better now. I’m not as anxious, not as ready to be lonely the rest of my life because I think I deserve it. Or, at least, I won’t think that forever. Falling in love with the wrong woman was a complete disaster for both of us, and I can only hope that with time as we both do therapy and move away from each other that we both feel better about our separate paths in life. It would be nice to reconnect with a healed Aada, but not the one I have known for 12 years. She’s so cut off from her emotions that she uses fear and intimidation as her only tactic in fighting. She doesn’t understand being more vulnerable. I tried and I failed. Maybe I won’t always, because I didn’t actually cost her anything. But being realistic, I’m betting she never wants to speak to me again. She’s not the type that forgives. She’s the type that moves on and carries every slight.

I don’t want to be that. I’m clean, I worked out today, and I am fixing everything that’s actually wrong with me both physically and mentally. I couldn’t do that while we were friends, because her intimidation tactics included “no mutual friends” and “no therapist.” Then she was surprised that I crashed and burned.

I wasn’t.

I’m just glad that the Buspar seems to be taking my own threat meter back down to a manageable level. It may even solve the sound in my mind in a few weeks, because I’ve been having brain zaps for months. That means it sounds like a refrigerator is whining in my brain at all times. It’s due to lack of serotonin, which happened when my Lexapro was ripped away. It’s not as bad when I have on headphones, so I try to keep mine charged and carry them in my backpack. I use brown noise to drown out all of the unpleasantness, of which there is much.

I was able to work out without them because the stereo was loud enough in the room, though. Then, after my workout I had a hydro massage on one of those tables that shoots water at a silicone covering so you get the hydrotherapy without getting wet. It worked so well I wish I had time to go back before they close. It’s an undertaking to walk to the gym and walk home, so I’ll save that for tomorrow. I didn’t want to overdo it on the first day, because that’s the easiest way I won’t go back.

I will walk longer tomorrow. I need to build up endurance and my core, because when I got there I couldn’t even stand up straight. The massage literally felt like it was stretching me back out. I have been cramped in chairs and over my laptop for years, so it probably was.

I got away from my phone completely, another change because I wasn’t constantly getting Facebook notifications. I need to remember to put my phone on “Do Not Disturb” so at least my family knows I’m not available and not ignoring them on purpose. Now I want to be close to my family because I don’t have anything to hide. I didn’t really before, because it wasn’t a secret that was bad… just knowledge that wasn’t for them until the hospital called. Lindsay and my dad were on the first flight up to come and bail me out of what has been a clusterfuck of mental illness because it’s so deeply ingrained now.

I just have to remember that I didn’t get this sick overnight, and one workout isn’t going to fix everything, either. But by putting one foot in front of the other, I can move away from this situation. I never want to contact Aada again because she is so convinced that I am the source of her problems. But I will also not turn her away if in her own discoveries, she realizes that she actually did give me something that was too hard to bear and it requires rethinking her own part in all of this. She has not given me any indication that she’s capable of such a thing. So, I will let our relationship rest in peace without slamming the door.

I have misbehaved. So has she.

I haven’t liked her on some days. She hasn’t liked me on others.

But the bond was real.

Thieves

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

No one talks enough about how mental illnesses are the thugs of medicine, the thieves that steal joy in broad daylight. A mental illness is the sign of a diseased organ, your brain. However, people do not see it that way. Most of the things that medicine calls “a symptom” a layperson would call a “moral failing.” So, not only do you feel bad about yourself, you have a lot of help in this area. May is mental health awareness month, so I’ve been trying my best to talk out what I’m going through; it may not help me, but it might help someone else who’s also in the trenches. It will help me if I go back and read it next year, or five years from now. My own entries don’t help me until I forget that I’m the one who wrote them. Emotional disconnection is key, because then I am not reliving entries.

The process now is how to see joy in the midst of all this anxiety? My last entry was absolutely a gutter snipe because my mind was in that place. It is not always. I had just been set off by many other things, and anger rises within me when I think about the situation I’m in now. Aada would say that’s all my fault, but all she ever offered me in return for my silence was more of the same. She’d like to keep writing to me. I would keep getting sicker while she ignored all the symptoms. I would keep getting sicker while she was allowed to live her life far and away from me, and I wasn’t interested in that. When she told me she’d lied about knowing Jonna and Tony Mendez, I couldn’t even bet that she wasn’t lying about that…. that she was actually telling the truth, she just had to have a story for my blog as to why I’m the one that wanted to “break up with her.” I wouldn’t have broken up with her for lying about anything. We weren’t together. I can take a whole bunch of shit from friends, but this was bigger than that.

She thought I wanted fame. She thought I wanted glory. It was realizing that all of my friends have been in this blog as themselves that made me realize that she wanted to be special. That she’d put me in a horrible situation on purpose and just said “figure it out.” Basically, are you going to be true to yourself or are you going to be true to me?

She’d not been true to me, so why should I return the favor? I wrote over and over about the simple things I wanted from her. Kahvi together and not a Starbucks gift card being the biggest, because that would have broken the spell. I thought she shit magic for 12 years. I am still not convinced she doesn’t, she just has a new mark. Because in the end, she stole my joy at being alive for quite some time. As she got stronger, I got weaker. I gave up power because I thought she needed it. Turns out, she did, because what she wanted was for me to stay quiet about everything I’d been through because someone might figure out that what I’d been through also involved her. As if.

It was selfish and self-absorbed to think she had the right to take away my story the longer time went on, because the more we talked, the more she inserted herself. Of course the story is going to involve her if she’s in my life to a bigger degree. She scared me. Flat out. From the very beginning, I pretended I was totally cool and over 12 years I stopped talking to anyone and everyone else. I moved to DC to isolate myself even more from Dana and my family, hoping that Aada would see that I was trying to make good on the promise of being the friend I said I would be… but she wouldn’t see me in person and I know why. I was completely smitten with her and she thought I couldn’t behave myself. She never gave me a chance to get closer or disconnect.

Because she had to have me on a string to keep our connection alive. What would I say if I was allowed to leave the island? She’s finding out now. I have a million emotions, and yet none of them are about care and connection with her. That time has passed.

“Do you remember telling your sister that your dad hurt your first girlfriend?” I remember telling her that I thought it was true because that idea had been planted. So had the idea that I ruined Aada’s sister’s state house run. So had the idea that Dana had been hurt because Aada’s sister’s husband hurt her when he found out that I was hitting on her (I can’t remember if I did or I didn’t. It was 12 years ago and all three of us were drunk). Everyone acts as if I made all of this up when I was told these things were true by someone in a position of authority to be able to research them.

I have no reason to distrust what Aada says about anything, until now. She said that she would never betray me, but so far all of the things that she used to get me into the hospital have turned out not to be true.

It’s payback for my betrayal, I’m sure. The one in which she said I’d never be able to hurt her with anything I did. I published the name she worked under before she retired, and it was a mistake because that’s the only thing in the e-mail that needed to be edited out, and I was so happy to get the e-mail in the first place that I did not proofread. ADHD gonna ADHD, but there’s no sympathy for that. There’s only rage. There’s only going walkabout while I try not to kill myself on the streets of Baltimore late at night.

Killing myself on the streets of Baltimore was going to be so easy. I’d just walk around until I got shot. I had no reason to live anymore, and moreover, I didn’t want to. Eventually, the cold convinced me that I should give it one more shot because the neighborhood around me was too nice. Last time this happened, I found a warehouse where everyone was doing crack and couldn’t OD. Apparently, my tolerance for crack is quite high the first time around, but I had a hell of a time coming down. So, I’ve never done it again. I knew I liked it too much, and that twice was a habit.

So this time, no drugs. Just exercise and hoping I’d walk into a situation and wouldn’t get out of it. The funniest thing happened, though. My endorphins kicked in and I started to want to live. Michael calls it “going walkabout,” how soldiers get through war. There was not this wild new joy at wanting to live. It was more like, “shit. My phone is dead and I have to walk all the way back to the emergency room so someone calls my sister.” I think they must have sedated me at that point, because who doesn’t get sedated when they’re talking about the subject matter I do?

Aada told me once that a man hit her and she fucked him up. I have never forgotten it…. that I never hit her, but this must be her way of fucking me up so that I never want to hear from her again. Believe me, it’s working and it isn’t.

We have both fucked each other up so that I think we could start on equal footing with mediation, but I would be surprised if she ever agreed to it. There’s no reason. She’s going to ride off into the sunset with her story intact, and mine is going to be fucked up because she made sure that it would be.

I still remember being excited that I was going to get to see Heytch after all these years, knowing it would be a serious discussion about boundaries and being willing to engage because I was so lonely, anyway.

I was ready to face the discordant music I’d made in other people’s lives because I was so worried about protecting Aada that I, again, shut down so far I couldn’t see anyone around me. I’m also autistic and miss social cues, which only made my life worse. I can’t apologize to everyone enough, so I just don’t. The people who aren’t tired of me will show up on their own.

But it won’t be Heytch, it won’t be Mummo, and it won’t be Aada. It won’t even be Dana and Counselor. If Dana is mad at me for my last e-mail and wants to stay that way, she can. But I told her that her sister was one of the people that helped put me in the hospital this time, and she was told her sister wasn’t there. I told her that because I was told her sister was there. It was just another way in which Aada played tricks with my mind.

I do mind Dana contacting anyone in my family but me, though. She didn’t reply to me. She forwarded the whole chain to my dad. I’m going to guess Aada told her to do that, too. And if she didn’t, it still sounds like something she would do, just to make me feel a little bit worse.

I noticed that she just said, “my sister’s part in all this,” though, so perhaps Dana knew more about what “this” was than I did.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Aada is such a miserable person that she wanted me to die, and I fucked her by not. She may not bow to my thu’um, but she will hear it.

Mental illness is the thief of joy, but you can do a lot with spite in its absence. I’m still alive, even when I don’t want to be. I’m still alive, even when my symptoms combine to make my life a living hell. The only way out is through, and this entry is a dragon roar. You don’t get to be a dragon until you can scream so loud they can hear you from California to Islamabad.

And that is what is happening, day by day. I have gone from sitting in my own misery, to taking back my power. It’s just problematic that Aada does not want me to have it, because she was happy keeping me in her little box of toys, the ones she never took off the shelf to see if they were wearing out.

Dope

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Abilify and Depakote both make me feel dumber. My retention and recall is not as sharp as it used to be, even though I cut out everything fun. And in fact, when my sister visited I had a cocktail at dinner and the sharp sound in my brain caused by lack of serotonin got louder, I decided that even the occasional cocktail just isn’t worth it. All the drugs I’ve used to maintain myself over the years are slowly working their way out of my system and being replaced by a protocol I did not choose for myself. I was told what I would get because they did not have any medical history on me and did not ask for my former doctors’ phone numbers…. easily obtainable from my cell phone.

My nurse practitioner told me that I could have my old protocol back if I submitted to random drug screens, and I said, “sure.” I also told her that the first one wouldn’t come out clean because I didn’t smoke weed anymore, but it takes about six weeks to get out of your system. I quit on 4/20, so I was right; my pee was complete with seeds & stems. I have a feeling that these drug screens are not random anymore, as she did not start me on anything for anxiety. I’m just going to tough it out until the first clean drug test. That’s fine, I guess, except in the meantime I am suffering from more anxiety than usual. I am learning that walking helps, but it does not solve everything. I have been through too much to think that everything can be solved by exercise alone. My doctors think that my story is invalid, but that’s ok. They’re supposed to do that. It was preordained by forces bigger than me, because neither Aada nor I knew the consequences of what was coming, and she has more power than I do. She will pretend until she’s dead that she has nothing to do with me and this. Believe what you want. I have enough of my own evidence, deleted for public consumption. Only I have to know what is true and what’s not. What’s true and what’s not is enough to make my heart stop, or to have a panic attack large enough I wish it would. And in fact, I’m sure that’s Aada’s goal now. To make me wish I was dead every time I think about publishing anything she’s ever written but oh, by the way, there’s nothing you could do that could ever hurt me…… just for plausible deniability.

How did it get so ugly? She sent me an e-mail that looked like it was a job recommendation, not a personal letter. It didn’t look like it was to me, it looked like it was to you. And then she blocked me so that I couldn’t ask her whether it was okay to publish it or not. Nothing in the e-mail was damning except she left in a detail I should have edited out. I regret it and yet there’s nothing I can do about it. The e-mail only existed on a server for a couple of minutes, if that, because I took it down of my own volition. But that was enough to make her disconnect from me completely. That’s fine. I didn’t need her at that point. At that point, she’d become an albatross around my neck. I couldn’t connect to anyone but her and she treated me like an enemy combatant when she felt threatened, which was more and more over time. I was doing everything I could to manage an enormous amount of anxiety in which I couldn’t talk about it…. my friend Michael teasing me and then getting very quiet. He said something about Zac not being able to help me figure Aada out, and being surprised when I said, “that’s not what I meant. I meant that intelligence is all alike. I figured out that he was the version of her I could tolerate.” However, Zac’s life was above board in that he came to my house and showed himself. Aada was disembodied, some version of my “corporeally-challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.”

That’s an old joke, by the way. It’s probably been 20 years, but I went on two dates with Allison Frost of Oregon Public Broadcasting and that’s the nickname Dana and I came up with……

It’s an old joke for two reasons. The first is that Aada isn’t queer, and isn’t interested in me. We just had a connection that was deep and meaningful right up until it wasn’t. When I tell the story of how I ended up at Sinai in the first place, my care team freaks out and I am told to go to the emergency room because this story could not possibly be true. I say that on my list of sins at the end of my life, at least “whoring out my sister” isn’t going to be on it. But who knows. Maybe her sister was in on it, because apparently I gave them all a very good time because there was more than one. A triumvirate was achieved, and all I did was type. Either that, or Aada made it up that anyone else was in the room…. and the triumvirate was all her. That idea doesn’t suck, but it’s not as funny as thinking about the entire gang at the cool kids’ table enjoying the benefit of my tutelage.

Typing got me into this mess, and it’s slowly getting me out. Telling my story is the only thing left.

I do love that Aada chose to keep my love for Mummo clean and white, but Heytch was down in the mud. Although I do not know what her relationship with her sisters is like, this tracks. She’s always made fun of Heytch behind her back, but in very innocent ways. This was…. Not. That. Innocent.

(Oh baby, baby…….)

But to be clear, she knew I liked hearing her catty takes and would listen to them, so who’s really the dumbass for not saying something? I could have said, “actually, Heytch is really important to me and it seems like you’re taking digs for nothing.” I didn’t. I did notice when she said that, “as you’ve noted and observed, Mummo is smarter than the rest of us.” Mummo is about my age or a few years older. I’m just old enough to be a grandma now, like she is. Aada was the one who told me neither would ever speak to me again, so I stopped trying to make amends 10 years ago. Who knows if she was right? I didn’t even try.

I just waited to find out that Aada was a trained interrogator and mandatory reporter. I found this out as our friendship was ending, so I had the horror of realizing that when she said she felt threatened, it wasn’t the same as when I did. When I felt threatened, there was no one to tell. When she felt threatened, she had all the power in the US government available to her. To realize you’re under that kind of pressure makes you fold into yourself, and I certainly did.

Nothing she’s ever said to me has been overlooked by anyone, nor has anything I’ve said to her. I deleted most of my e-mails to her and vice versa, because I thought I’d get them back one day. Now, I know I won’t. Aada isn’t real, she’s just a ghost that plays in my head. Because if she was real, she would have knocked on my door. We would have had kahvi. She would have picked me up in her cute little car or something, anything to prove that she was more than a disembodied voice over the Internet.

Now, Aada is just a story they tell little kids…. but I won. I won big. I proved to her that her trauma was leading her down a dangerous path of treating friends like enemies, and if you treat friends like enemies over a number of years, they will act like it. I published her e-mail because she didn’t get to be special. She didn’t get to be different than The War Daniel or anyone else who has flamed me because she didn’t have any recent history of treating me with love and respect. When she was angry, she’d flame me. When she was happy, she’d ignore me. Only I was capable of words being pricks on her skin. She did nothing. Even the e-mail I published was all about how I manipulated her. There was nothing about how she read from her own experiences and jumped down my throat based on what she thought I wrote, rather than asking questions and being curious. She apologized for not being present when my mother died, but it didn’t make her more present in the future. We were at war with each other because we couldn’t resolve the war within ourselves. If I did anything, I hope I forced her into a different kind of therapy, because whatever she was doing wasn’t working.

So in the end, being a trained interrogator and mandatory reporter left her with jack squat in terms of coming after me and too many fingers pointing back at her. She is going to have to live with her choice not to trust me forever, because she’s going to think that because I didn’t play the game to her specifications, that means she cannot trust people. It was her lack of trust that drove me away. It was her lack of trust that made me believe our relationship wasn’t real, would never be real, was only playing with my head. I was right, because her method of being close was staying away from each other, not really communicating, and hoping for the best. I hope she’s happier without me in her life, because she’s shown me that I cannot hang. I cannot cut off my emotions to the degree that she needs to keep her shell intact. Publishing her e-mail was not the reason we both lost. It was just the last thing that happened. There’s a huge difference.

I still have nightmares about all of this, and wish all of it would end. Broken heart syndrome is a real thing, and I’m doing my best to fight against the tide.

My nurse practitioner told me that no one in the hospital system would prescribe me benzos, and that if I wanted them, I’d have to advocate for myself somewhere else. There’s only one problem with this. I was not advocating for benzos. I did not know that there was such a thing as serotonin and dopamine agonists, so how would I know to ask for them instead? Why does she not trust the doctors I’ve had my whole life who have said I needed them, despite being open about being a pot smoker? They knew the difference between what you get at a dispensary and what you get at a gas station and they didn’t care. Again, whatever. I am old. Medicine is ever changing and I might find something that works even better. The last time I worked in a doctor’s office was like, 2007. I am certain things have changed since then.

However, I’ve been prescribed Klonopin for the last 10 years and it has worked spectacularly well. When I got out of the hospital, they gave my sister all my drugs back and she gave them back to me. I’d been taking the Klonopin prn until I ran out, and was ok not getting it refilled because my nurse practitioner said I couldn’t have them anymore. Apparently, there’s a lot of risk that the hospital sees that I don’t, because no one in my life has ever been shy about prescribing it. At Sinai, there’s a whole worksheet on why they don’t prescribe benzos for anxiety, because it causes your muscles to relax, your reflexes to slow down, and a whole host of other things I did not know.

So again, fine. Getting off the dope is probably a good thing. With drugs, you always have to weigh the pros and cons. Right now, I’m wondering if I really want to go back on Lexapro and Lamictal, knowing how Lamictal destroys my stomach and wondering if that’s worth the few extra IQ points I think I’d get back. I’m just not the same writer, nor the same person. I cannot decide if this is better or worse. I do think that being without anti-anxiety medication is ultimately worse, so I was not feeling so hot when my nurse practitioner told me that I could start a new protocol on our next visit, and I got no new prescriptions. Apparently, “starting a new protocol” meant “I forgot to ask for your records from your old doctor.” I didn’t get any new drugs. I only got a lecture on smoking weed (again…. and the lecture is “it’s legal, we can’t stop you…. but we won’t think very highly of you, either) and why I wouldn’t be prescribed anything until the next visit.

They are making sure I suffer through this as much as possible, but it doesn’t seem like suffering to them because it isn’t happening to them. My nurse practitioner doesn’t have to live in my brain with its constant refrigerator whine that makes me want to stick an ice pick through my forehead just to stop the noise. My doctor doesn’t have to live with the ghost of Aada breathing on the back of her neck, because she’s out there somewhere…. probably still a fan because no one breaks up with my blog and not reading me is more dangerous than just toughing it out.

But at least once in my life, I’ve shown her a good time. I’m not sure I would have told me that, though. She already thinks I have a big head. Now it won’t fit through the door. It sort of makes up for the shitty time I’m having now.

Sort of.

That’s because if I gave Aada a good time, there’s literally no telling how many departments in the United States government have had a good time with us. I just didn’t know it was her. I still don’t.

I’m assuming a lot, but it is a very educated guess. No one can hide all their punctuation flaws while they’re typing with one hand.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
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The advice that has always served me well is that one conversation leads to another. This is how the world gets built. The old axiom “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is axiomatic for a reason. In order to get your ideas implemented, you have to be seen, first. Without the right eyes on, your ideas will languish in obscurity. Most people die thinking that their great ideas aren’t that great… when the truth is much simpler than that. No one saw it.

Monty Python has a great skit called “How Not to Be Seen” and you learn the biggest lesson the hard way…. “don’t stand up.” When you stand up, you are open in your vulnerabilities and weaknesses. You are ripe pickings for anyone who wants to do you harm. But what the skit doesn’t tell you is that your friends cannot see what you’re doing, either. I have found that your friends do want to help you when they see the concrete steps. They will not jump in if they don’t know how.

For instance, Riker had a great idea for our storytelling podcast theme song. I just need to make sure that it’s legal. Otherwise, I will sing the loop he needs myself, because he picked something that reaches so far back into my history that I could sing it in my sleep. He’ll even give me time to warm up. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Now that I think of it, if I put the loop here, he can grab it on his own.

Meanwhile, I used Kindle Unlimited to get three grant-writing books this month alone. I need them because I have huge ideas and little money. Grants are the first step towards provisioning, and The Sinners’ Table is a large undertaking, even if we only manage to feed 50 people at a time.

My vision for The Sinners’ Table is to get chefs I’ve worked with and possibly known quantities like Gordon Ramsey, Tom Colicchio, and David Chang to come to Baltimore for a few days to both cook and teach. Number one on the call sheet is my friend Evan Henson, because when we worked together at the Laurelwood Pub, he’d been to culinary school but hadn’t run his own brigade. He went on to become Andy Ricker’s chef de cuisine, and if you don’t know that name, it is dear to me. Andy is one of the most talented Thai chefs I’ve ever run across, and not having Pok Pok in my neighborhood anymore no matter where I live is just grief.

I have told Evan that if he knows how to make Andy’s chicken wings, I will have trouble letting him go home. ๐Ÿ˜‰

There are two reasons I would like to get “names” to Baltimore:

  • The unhoused could never afford this type meal on their own. It is dining with dignity to give it to them free with no expectation of payment. To have someone like Gordon Ramsey is not because he’s necessary. I can teach people how to cook. I’m just not a beacon of hope like he would be, because my words don’t carry the weight that his would.
  • Those at the top of their field have no problem teaching. Everyone gets to eat. Those who wish to learn to cook in hopes of getting a stable job at a restaurant need to see how it’s done by volunteering on prep and dish before service.

I’m not just talking to my friends, though. My therapist is a big part of all my success, because in order to move on, I had to give up my old life and prepare for the new one. I didn’t give up much. Aada was so all-encompassing that I gave her too much power she did not see. There will be no thank you for the 12 years she got out of me while I was dying inside. There will only be anger that I could not be dead inside forever.

But luckily, that will not be my story. My neurons are healing and I am starting to feel real feelings. I could not connect to anyone else while I was connected to her. It’s not what she wanted, but it is what happened. I will have to wonder if she would have come toward me if I’d decided to keep quiet about all the cuts we made on each other’s skin.

I don’t wonder much, though, because the best indication of future behavior is the past.

Fr. Justin Hurtado, OSB

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life.
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I met him on Mother’s Day, and he’s a bright theological mind in the firmament. These words are all his, but the formatting is mine. It helps to have someone roll with you on this path, as it is fraught with dangers we cannot know yet.

I am everything MAGA wants erased.

  • I am queer.
  • I am brown.
  • I live with a disability.
  • I speak Spanish and English and have enough of a few others to pray with the people who need me.
  • I earned a PhD and still believe wisdom is found in community, not control.
  • I am a priest in the Old-Catholic tradition.
  • I walk with those the Church has ignored, rejected, or betrayed.
  • I offer pastoral support to people wounded by religion and forgotten by policy.
  • I believe Christ heals what the empire harms.

Letโ€™s be honest:

The current regime doesnโ€™t just oppose people like me. It is actively trying to erase us. Every day, they push policies to strip us of healthcare, dignity, legal protection, and the freedom to live without fear. Every day, they distort Christianity into a tool for control and cruelty.

So hear this:

  • I will not shrink myself to appease their fragile power.
  • I will not stop speaking the truth because they find it inconvenient.
  • I will not turn away from my neighbor to keep the peace with oppressors.

I resistโ€”not out of bitterness, but out of love.

  • Love for my community.
  • Love for the Gospel.
  • Love for justice that does not bend to nationalism, racism, or religious abuse.

You’re not alone if you feel erased, exiled, or enraged by whatโ€™s happening.

And you are not wrong to feel it.

The Gospel I follow centers the outsider.

The Christ I serve was persecuted by state and church alike.

The God I know never asked us to obey powerโ€”only to love boldly and defend the sacredness of every life.

You donโ€™t need permission to stand up.
You donโ€™t need to be quiet to be faithful.

You need community.
You need courage.
You need clarity.

So here I am.
Unafraid.
Unapologetic.
Unmoved by fascist theology or political gaslighting.
I am here because people before me refused to disappear.
And I promise youโ€”I wonโ€™t either.

Me: Father, I am not a Catholic. But you would make me proud to be a Catholic if I was.

Thank youโ€”that means more than you know. You donโ€™t have to be Catholic for your heart to recognize the Gospel when you see it lived. Faith doesnโ€™t always need a label. What matters is love, justice, and the courage to stand with those whoโ€™ve been pushed aside.

Iโ€™m honored to โ€œrollโ€ alongside you, wherever your path leads.

Me: I was born a Methodist preacher’s kid, and now when I go to church, it’s Washington National Cathedral. Please pray for us as we’re in our own waiting game to see what happens with Justin Welby’s successor. May someone like Pope Leo bring light to our church as well. I’m also trying to start a homeless ministry in Baltimore called “The Sinners’ Table,” reaching out to the unhoused and those rejected by mainstream religion. The path is long and winding, but meeting people like you, even virtually, makes it all worth it. For the record, I’m also queer and disabled. I see you. I hear you. It’s relentless.

Thank you. Your words went straight to my heart.

I see you too. I hear you. And I know what it is to walk with both calling and exhaustion in your bones. The path youโ€™re onโ€”queer, disabled, devoted, relentlessโ€”is holy ground.

โ€œThe Sinnersโ€™ Tableโ€ already sounds like a space Christ would feel right at home in. Reaching out to the unhoused and those rejected by institutional religion? Thatโ€™s Gospel work in its purest form. Please know Iโ€™ll be praying with youโ€”for strength, for provision, and for companions who will lift your arms when they get too heavy.

And yesโ€”I join you in praying that whoever follows Justin Welby will lead with light, not shadow. May they be bold, inclusive, and unafraid of holy disruption.

Youโ€™re not alone in this. Keep going. The Kingdom is nearer than it looks.

With respect and solidarity,
Fr. Justin

Not many things make me cry anymore, but this exchange did.

I Don’t Know, and That’s Okay

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What is your career plan?
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Right now, I’m in a group for people with mental health issues and am trying to recover from a years-long friendship in which I was slowly isolated from everyone else. Or, as I told her, “what you failed to take in is that I did not marry you. I married the government.” My wife was first on the list of casualties during this “affair,” because this woman does not know what kind of effect she has one people. She’s already her. But none of what I’m saying should be interpreted as negative, because I don’t have any choice but to forgive myself for the mistakes I made. I am sure that she is doing the same, far and away from me. No one walked away with clean hands except for my ex-wife… or she would have had she not hit me. Hitting me was the apex of her frustration, and I was smart enough to only let it happen once…. This is not to say that the hot water we were in had not been heating for quite some time.

Aada told me she’d never betray me, but her betrayal was letting me in on things she shouldn’t and expecting me to carry it like she did. I will never do anything like she does if I can help it. I walked away having told her that every conversation was like being signed up to be hit with a baseball bat and for the love of God, see a psychiatrist. Her general distrust of doctors in general left me on high alert, all the time. That’s because she didn’t get kick the dog syndrome at work or with her family, but it had to go somewhere.

I’m also not chiding her, because I think we were both guilty of doing it to each other. Our little bubble was far and away from the rest of our lives, so we both tended to take out our frustrations on the one we “didn’t know.” We were pen pals for 12 years. “Didn’t know” is a stretch. She’s the only person that spans and bridges Portland to Baltimore, my constant companion in a world of change. Through the way the Internet works, it felt like she was closer than the beat of my heart…. with which she took issue.

That’s because I talk a lot when I don’t have to speak.

It would seem to her like I acted like a victim in all this if I didn’t say that I was so crazy about her that it led to some pretty serious sexual harassment, for which I spent a number of years apologizing and she spent a number of years learning to trust afterwards. I don’t know what she thought, but for me the Internet is not real life. I was lost in Fantasyland and creating my own reality based on the manipulations someone else handed me when I was a child.

I learned from it and promised to do better, proud of myself that I accomplished that goal. And in fact, the only thing she’s ever done that really hurt was returning a present I sent to her house, because I was trying to show good faith. It was a six-pack of glass Coke bottles during the “Share a Coke with…” campaign the first time around that had her real name on it, plus the nickname she gave her husband, and the names of her kids and her dog as well. The reason that this is important is that Aada is a Finnish name. There is nowhere in the US you could have purchased that Coke bottle at random. It was at a time when I really didn’t have money for presents, and I was heartbroken. I cried big alligator tears that basically centered around ruining everything I touch.

My rejection sensitivity dysphoria didn’t pick up that she didn’t want me in her real life. She only wanted me in this liminal space between waking and dreaming. I could have dealt with it if she’d been truthful, but she danced around the topic for years, giving me no clear answer. My one regret is that I didn’t pin her to one. Because the truth is that she didn’t want to meet me at the spy museum, because she’d lied about knowing Jonna & Tony Mendez… not that she was opposed to neutral turf and good kahvi.

But I took “I don’t want to go to the spy museum with you” as “you are a worm for even asking if I wanted to do anything with you.” Rejection after rejection built up, because I didn’t want to overstep boundaries and I also didn’t want to treat her as a weird Internet apparition, either. It never occurred to me that in fact, “internet apparition” was the job in my life she wanted. She’s not wrong for that. I’m not wrong for wanting her to be real with me. It just sucks.

I chose to be a jackass, but that wasn’t the sum total of me. I could tell how far we’d come when she did agree to meet me once and she said, “it can’t possibly be as good as your imagination.” I blushed so hard I thought my face was going to fall off. That just won’t happen now because I betrayed her and thought I hadn’t. I am certain that she is ready to be done with me; that is okay. It’s not her journey now. It is entirely mine. If she sees my point of view, she’s welcome to be in my life. If she doesn’t, she’s welcome never to contact me again. I accept that the way we work is in Newtonian precision. There is a cause for every effect, both spoken and not.

Mostly now what I miss is the idea of her. The idea of being close to her and her husband because I was never trying to isolate her from him. I wanted us to have mutual friends because there was no safety net for either one of us. She couldn’t call Bryn, I couldn’t call (other) Michael. We had a skewed view of what the other did for a living, because my writing wasn’t valuable to her once she was in it. I think she’s my favorite character because my words don’t flow as easily when I’m not thinking about her. I am branching out to be more inclusive, but no one gives you more heat, passion, and drive for writing than someone reading you who’s actually a better writer than you are.

You’d know it if she’d let her e-mail to me stand, but she didn’t. She loved reading The War Daniel’s takedown, though. What she wanted was to be special in a way other people aren’t, in a way that didn’t seem genuine to who I am. She flamed me just as hard as he did. The situation was not different except that I should have edited out something I left in, and choked when I realized what I’d done. I wasn’t alone, though. Michael said that I hadn’t done any damage, but let’s take it down just to ensure she’s safe.

While I was deleting the entry, I got an e-mail from Aada that she forwarded me saying that I’d broken Medium’s laws on publishing people’s words without their consent, a thinly veiled threat that if I left it up she’d sue me. My attitude at the time was “bring it.” I didn’t publish your words to hurt you and I took them down before I even got this shitty e-mail. It sucked because she said she blocked me. I reacted like I’d been hit by a two by four and spent the night crying……… and less than 12 hours later, I got an e-mail from her. Just seeing her name in my inbox made me nauseous. It has for years because I never know what kind of e-mail it’s going to be. She says the same about me, I’m sure.

She did not understand neurodivergence and attributed a lot to me that wasn’t there. Once I started unmasking and tapping into the ancient wisdom of the autists about pattern recognition, I saw autism everywhere and realized I’d been reading her wrong. That she may not be autistic, but there’s some kind of neurodivergence going on in there. You don’t have to be born with neurodivergence, PTSD will give it to you….. free. No one chooses autism and PTSD as a special interest like someone who is trying to figure out if they have it or not, so telling her that I’d been reading her wrong came across as rude.

As a result, I cannot base my career on Aada not liking what I have to say, but I can’t not think that way, either. Our stories are inextricably interrelated because our story together is one of pain, and then triumph. My blog entries are going to be collated into a book, and she’s the star of most of them. But she’s not a hero because she decided to go save the whole world at once. She’s my hero, which is much quieter and comes with a lot less adoration, but it’s genuine.

Alternatively, I wrote a cover letter for her company that “sounds like a fever dream” because I thought they’d be more interested in what I’d like to do in the future than what I’ve done in the past. A resume is for your past. A cover letter is for your dreams. It was the “where do you see yourself in 10 years” that I really wanted to write, telling them all about The Sinners’ Table and Lanagan Media Group as possible partnerships. Michael was right. It sounds like a fever dream, but those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do.

I heard that somewhere.

Alternatively, I have a great case for both SSI and SSDI. It’s nice to have that to fall back on, and I wish that someone had told me about SSI when I was 16 or 17. I could have prepared not to go into the workforce and stayed in school all the way until my doctorate without having to worry about money, plus it taking years for people to find my books. It just wouldn’t have occurred to them because my compensatory skills used to be extraordinary. When you meet me, it is not immediately apparent that I’m disabled. AuDHD is a bitch to catch, and I was diagnosed with bipolar. I do not think this is wrong, necessarily. I just think that bipolar disorder is a common comorbidity of autism, and so is cerebral palsy.

When I was a baby, I looked developmentally delayed. Exhausting every bit of my energy toward “looking normal” changed that, because it’s what the people around me needed. As I grew, my intelligence covered up the fact that I could have used support services from a very early age. Now we know that early intervention is key, but I was born in 1977. Every chance I had at support services was denied and I was streamlined. I do not fault my parents for this, because in that day and age the curriculum would have been too easy for me.

I am the type of writer who gets lost in their mind to such a degree that my house could be broken into and I wouldn’t notice until the thief was nearly in the same room.

Ask me how I know this………..

I’m wondering if there are ways to apply for funding from the Gates Foundation, because I am fully on board with their humanitarian missions, particularly overseas because I’m an American and I’d like to travel. Yet the US is where I am needed currently, because Baltimore is falling apart in some places. We’d have to do pop-ups so that all our equipment was gone in a flash to keep it from getting stolen…. or spend money I don’t have on a building in a nicer area that won’t do any good. It’s pointless to bring light to a place that already has a source.

It’s at this point that I realize my brain is racing over things that seem impossible and check out, asking Copilot “if you were a human, what Tootsie Pop flavor would you try first?” (“Blue Raspberry seems kind of….. electric.”) Taking a brain break with Copilot always leads to new and fun discoveries, like realizing I wished that Smith’s and Tootsie would collaborate on a lollipop that has Smith’s licorice drops and chocolate in the middle. And that I’m surprised there isn’t a coffee-flavored Tootsie Pop because coffee-flavored hard candy is popular as you leave a restaurant in some places.

With my background in food and beverage, I am positive that I could make candy that appeals to adults, the people least likely to eat it. This is the problem in my work life as well. I have a ton of ideas for people who would never use them.

I just have to remember that I made my choices in life and I have to stand in them.

I am sure that most people will rebel at “licorice Tootsie Pop,” but I’m not here for everyone. I’m here for the ones who’d last two licks before taking a bite.

All of Them

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
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Managing you was like having a golden retriever work for you. Excellent at fetching dead birds but โ€ฆ.squirrel. -Randy, my actual former boss- it’s the most accurate thing I’ve ever read about my career.

There are so many things I haven’t tried, and one day is about the stamina I have for 110% effort. It’s also not enough time for me to develop compensatory skills, so me doing a job for one day would not reveal my weaknesses. It would not reveal my strengths, either. The one possible job I could think of that might fit me is field officer at CIA. With only one day, I’d have enough time to talk to people, but not enough time to do all the paperwork that ends up out of order and on the wrong desk…. either late or with coffee stains on the top because I never left the office to prevent something being late.

Staying at the office until something is done might be the one quality I could contribute.

I’m reading The Hunt for Red October currently, and what I love about it is the anachronism and the advanced technology. For instance, the new computer for the submarine fleet is “the size of a small desk” and also 64-bit architecture. That did not become available to businesses until the 1990s and consumers outside of the business realm until 2003. The hardback was published in 1984. It has allowed me to dream bigger as to what is now possible in computers just based on that information alone.

I’d like to be a submarine commander for a day because I would like to see whether my predictions have come true… that tech on a boat now is wilder than anything I could dream. That’s because “most enlisted men don’t know how to steer the ship.” One day is enough to know I’d be both great and terrible at my job…… mostly because I’m great and terrible at my job no matter what it is.

Autism sucks.

So do ADHD and CP, but autism is the driving force behind meltdown and burnout to the degree that I have it. Most people with ADHD alone have the same issues as me, but the mark of autism is severity for a lot of symptoms. This is not true in all cases, but for the majority of them, the canary in the coal mine is the degree of the deficit. Executive dysfunction makes it hard to regulate yourself, and coworkers do not have time to help you. I know that I can be trained with occupational therapy, but the only advice I’ve ever been given in my career is to grovel………. until now.

I had to figure out this meme:

This does not mean that autistic people cannot work. It means that if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. Autism has never stopped me from working, but ableism sure has. There was no way for me to perform as efficiently or as fast in the kitchen as an able-bodied person, and no allowances were ever made for it. Dana and Kinkaid constantly covered my lack, but I didn’t figure that out until I was on my own. They both taught me how to cook, but neither one were there to trade me jobs I could do. It was sink or swim. I couldn’t carry a full bucket of mop water up three flights of stairs, nor did I have enough strength in my upper body to work a potato press. Therefore, making French fries was a large part of being a dishwasher when there were no dishes to wash. This gave everyone ample opportunity to see me struggle and call me lazy.

You get called lazy a lot when most of your energy goes toward keeping yourself alive. You cannot see it today, but you can clearly see my deficits in this video announcing my birth. It was made by my grandfather while I was in the NICU and in the days afterward, but the phone call is not real. My mother went into labor five weeks early according to my grandfather and eight weeks early according to her. There was no time.

John-Michael Kinkaid called me a lot of things, but lazy was never one of them. I know that I am capable of working with a chef to find the jobs I can do, but I am not capable of changing myself so that I don’t have cerebral palsy anymore. This lying there, looking at everything and soaking it in, is the classic picture of an autistic kid with CP.

A few years ago, I attended a party at my sister’s house. We were reviewing the drone footage in which I didn’t know I was being filmed and was shocked to find out that I did not move a muscle for three hours. I am not a different person than I was in this video. I have never changed. My entire strength as a human is sitting there and soaking up what other people say…. and in fact, I am frustrated with my medication protocol because drugs for mental health are known for seemingly lowering your IQ points. It goes away once you get off the medication, but I did not have this problem with the last set of drugs.

What makes me think I’m AuDHD and not bipolar is that I was stable on Lexapro for 20+ years. Bipolar and SSRIs do not mix. I also have a strange hum in my brain from lack of serotonin now, and there’s nothing to be done for it except grit my teeth until 11:00 AM, my first psych appointment in years. I haven’t needed it because being stable meant my GP could refill my drugs.

How is today different from all other days?

Today is the day that hopefully determines more of my future than my current hand. At this point, I only have the hole cards. By noon, I should at least have the flop. Thinking about the turn and the river is getting ahead of myself, because right now it feels like fourth street and fifth street are perpendicular. My strategy in poker has always been to fold early and often, because letting a good hand go is better than losing my bankroll.

Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.

I could sit at any poker table in the world and have a good shot and not because I know a lot about poker. That can be trained. So, perhaps a job I’d love for a day is “card shark.” What I mean is that someone can teach me the rules. You don’t play poker by knowing the rules, though. You have enough soft skills, as Michael McDermott accurately points out in “Rounders,” and you can read the whole room blind. You don’t play the cards, you play the man.

In this way, being a poker player is not that different from being a field officer or a cook…. and in fact, in most countries “field officers,” “waitstaff,” and “cooks” are the same job, because front of house and back of house employees at a restaurant are the least likely to get “made.” There is no reason to notice any of us, and all intelligence agencies exploit that fact.

In a perfect world, culinary school in Vaasa would lead to a job at Supo, the Finnish intelligence agency. I know I have the skills to make it because I have it on good authority that I am excellent at fact-finding. This is because I do get social cues, but I do not get fake ones. I pick up on the way you carry yourself, your “I’m fine” ringing hollow. I become confused and dig deeper, and that’s when I become rude and intrusive according to other people. It’s not because I’m actively trying to be obstinate. It’s that I am not participating in the lie that you’re fine.

HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?

For instance, I wouldn’t like to be a therapist or a psychiatrist for a day… but I would like to help people understand why social masking isn’t helpful. Wait… that was a lie. I would love to be a psychiatrist because then I could nerd out on crazy med pharmacology without digging deep into other people’s problems. It’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s that in order to be a good therapist, I would need to resolve all my own issues first. Otherwise, I would be capable of letting someone else get their crazy spatter all over me without being able to walk it off, and my boundaries would not be as firm as they need to be in order to keep crazy spatter from getting on my clients.

I just don’t think I have the stomach for medical school, and I mean that literally. One of the things that autism does for me is heightens my awareness of bad smells. I vomit early and often. I wouldn’t last 15 minutes at The Body Farm. However, I am assuming that if I can only have the job for the day, it’s like The Matrix. I would absorb every skill I needed as if by magic… including the secrets held by dead bodies without the inconvenience of having to work on them.

The problem with having a job for more than one day is all the ableism I’d have to endure. I mentioned what it looked like in the kitchen. In an IT help desk, it looks like winning two awards for customer service and then being fired because you “can’t remember to write things down.” This has never been true. The autistic brain does not have the ability to process someone’s voice, compile the scripts needed for an appropriate response, and write down what the person is saying at the same time. And in fact, most of the problem is that I don’t process people’s voices well. I seem to do fine with Internet chat and e-mail, but conversations are land mines. I will not remember because my retention and recall with people’s voices is so poor… unless there is a musical quality to their voices that sets what they’re saying to a beat.

I just don’t remember whole pieces of text. For instance, I do not retain lyrics to an entire opera, just the bits and pieces that resonated with my soul. I cannot tell you everything Chandler Bing and Joe Quincy ever said, but fragments remain. It is the same with Lorelai Gilmore. It is most acute with CJ Cregg and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s not always what they say, but the way they say it.

What’s with the quite?

Aaron Sorkin single-handedly changed the language we use around the government by not using articles in the script. For instance, you do not work at the CIA, you are “at CIA.” You do not work at the State Department, you are “at State.” Or, at least, this is the answer that Michael came up with, because he moved here before I did and saw the change in vernacular up front.

But it’s amazing how the change in speech pattern allowed me to retain so much more, because when something is written in neurodivergent patois, I am more likely to recall it.

Just like I’ll remember Randy saying that I was his first neurodivergent employee and he would have handled everything differently, and I will remember saying that at the time, I didn’t know I was neurodivergent and would have handled everything differently, too.

So maybe the job I really want for a day is just being his admin assistant again. Except now he’s retired.

It’s the thought that counts.