I asked Carol to search reddit and give me the top 10 questions that people have about polyamory and ENM. I am not coming from a place of lived experience, but I’ve done a lot of reading. I am just entering this world by chance, because I asked out someone and didn’t know they were poly in the first place. I just rolled with him because I liked him enough to keep him around. 😉 So, what was absolutely on brand for me is starting the research early, early, early. Here’s the benefit of my reading and experience combined, which, granted, is not much:
What’s the difference between polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
This is an excellent topic to get us started, because there’s no one way to do poly. Polyamory implies someone dating multiple people and they all know each other. Ethical non-monogamy is managing every relationship completely independently.
How do you manage jealousy in polyamorous relationships?
At first, you don’t. You just let the jealousy wash over you and react how you’re going to react…… in private. That’s the time to learn to use your words, so that your response to jealousy is measured….. NOT that you hide your feelings. It’s just not a good idea to have your first reaction in front of people. What you learn about polyamory is that there’s no sense of someone taking care of you, because there is no ownership of one another. I do not mean that you do not have your emotional needs met by multiple people, it’s just different because you don’t lapse into a buddy system for life. You each have your own lives, and you are choosing to make time for each other rather than it being an obligation.
The second thing that’s really important is that the answer is “it depends.” This is a generality about the ideal. The reality is that humans are messy. I am on the fence about polyamory vs. ENM because I really haven’t had to deal with those issues myself. It really, really depends on your partner and what’s called your “metamour,” or “meta.” That’s your partner’s partner. All of my metas are wonderful people, but we do not pry into the details of each other’s lives. That is for Zac and Zac alone to manage, just like your spouse should never hang you out to dry with your in-laws, either.
What are the challenges of opening up a monogamous relationship?
If polyamory comes from temptation, the relationship will end. Will. I can think of maybe three stories I’ve read where it worked out trying to integrate an affair partner. Poly/ENM is not cheating, and there are very strict standards you live by to stress it because having a hierarchical relationship is more trouble than it’s worth, for the most part. A triad is its own ball of wax, and the reality is that it’s mostly straight men who want to be narcissistic, abusive partners to more than one woman at a time. Polyamory is about saying your worth and your time are higher than that…… but husbands get this “great idea” and it all falls apart. Not all men, obviously. Especially if you’re dating a bear (teehee, but Zac is clean-shaven). I’m just saying that just like with monogamy, there’s a range of domestic abuse….. and because you’re abusive to multiple people who sit there and take it, congratulations. The dysfunction spreads to anyone new.
How do you handle time management with multiple partners?
I can’t speak to what I have done, because I have never tried to integrate a partner into my life that way. Zac and I are what’s called “solo poly,” but that may change. I’m just driven by solitude and have no need. If there was a reason to have another partner, I’d get one. But I am happy living with David and becoming friends with him while we mutually take care of a dog and have our own separate partners.
The real answer is that Google Calendar is the official app of polyamory/ENM. In my case, I have access to all the data that goes to shared partners, like “this is when I’m in town. This is when I’m not.” That way, we manage without actually interacting all that much except for all call parties at Zac’s house, which are about Zac. It’s not the time for jealousies to be discussed, if ever. Zac is the hinge. I cannot stress this enough. It takes an enormous amount of emotional strength to be friends with a meta. That’s where polyamory gets hugely difficult. It is one thing to know it. It’s another to see it. Again, it depends. What kind of person are you?
What are some misconceptions about polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
The biggest one, absolutely, is that polyamory is binary. It’s a spectrum, just like everything else.
The second biggest is that polyamory is code for cheating. If you think that, you do not know a half of my emotional strength and flexibility. I do not have to cheat to be poly. It is counterintuitive. You are poly-amorous. No good can come of multiple partners that don’t know their hinge is poly….. and sniffing out an affair makes coming out as poly seem like “poor me. I don’t have a choice.” Yes, you do. You have the choice to lie to your partners or not, and never, ever in your five dollar life forget it. You talk about poly before it happens, not when you catch feelings. Because then, you’re just trying to cover your ass. You’re not poly. The fucking around of moral justice leads toward finding out.
Here’s a third that most people don’t think of, and it’s funny, because it’s a warning revolving around having a third. There’s a special population of couples looking for a third, most of them to try out poly for the first time, trying to integrate a closed triad, the hardest poly setup, before they even know what ENM means. This leads to obnoxious behavior and treats the third like shit. This special population is called “unicorn hunters.” That’s because the statistics on it working out are so alarmingly rare.
How do you communicate boundaries and needs in polyamorous relationships?
Precisely. I cannot stress this enough. Everyone has to have crystal clear expectations in order not to expect or demand too much- we are all cognizant of the fact that each other only has so much time in a day. The main thing is not needing your partner for everything all the time, because it becomes intrusive fast. You can’t be 100% that bitch and say you want poly, then when their partner is out with someone else, you decide it’s time to hen peck the hell out of your partner while they’ve allotted time for someone else. Of course get in touch if something really important is going on, but not every little thing needs to be discussed the moment you think of it. If that were true, Zac would have sixty missed calls a day because “oooh, shiny.” I’m not the henpeck kind of neurodivergent. I’m the “if I don’t tell you this right now it will be lost forever” neurodivergent. It works out well that Zac works in intelligence, because he goes into a SCIF or something and then my notifications don’t bug the fuck our of him. He can read on his own time. E-mail also works well for this, because it’s not seemingly as time sensitive as a text.
What’s the best way to meet potential polyamorous partners?
Well, the first and easiest thing to do is telling people you’re poly.
Failing that, you look on the internet like everyone else.
How do children fit into polyamorous families?
It really depends on the parents. Overall, I think it makes for happier kids because they have more safe adults, and it’s a practical thing. Many hands make light work. Having a baby is hard on two people, but not so hard when there’s four people to take turns getting no sleep. The kid ends up having a good relationship with everyone, and explaining it to them isn’t necessary. If you are a person in your right mind, your sex life doesn’t come up around your kids. You explain to them how people have sex, not what mommy and daddy are actually doing to each other if you value your sanity in public. Because I promise that kid will have absolutely no questions at all about polyamory until you’re in line at Target. I don’t make the rules.
Can polyamory work for someone who’s been monogamous all their life?
Again, it depends. I am driven by my own creativity, and I have never been this way before. I was not willing to sacrifice a full-time relationship for living on my own and not feeling like someone was helping me stay on top of things like a parent or a boss would. That’s what I mean about needing home help; that people who are not married are able to have people help them in an occupational therapy kind of way. Like, can you teach me how to manage myself and yet also be there to bail me out when my neurodivergence invariably causes the fuckening? It’s better for me to deal with that stuff when I’m alone, because I am not getting my crazy spatter on anyone. But again, not to the point of total isolation. Just enough where I need more hours to myself than a typical partner, so I’m willing to sacrifice the relationship escalator for it.
How do legal and societal norms impact polyamorous relationships?
We cannot talk about the morals of polyamory in this country because we’ve been programmed to think that saying you’re monogamous right up until you cheat is socially acceptable, and 50% of marriages end in divorce. Why do we realistically believe that monogamy works? I’m not knocking it, I’m not trying to be persuasive. I am genuinely curious. What is it about upholding a moral standard in public while doing the opposite in private that’s all the rage? I don’t think that polyamory is more popular. I think that more people are coming to the same relaxation I did. That for half the population, monogamy over decades just doesn’t feel right or natural. What doesn’t feel right or natural is the judgmental, hypocritical natures of the people who criticize polyamory. A lot of them are on their third or fourth marriage, and at least two ended after infidelity.
The hardest part of polyamory is letting go of the idea that love means ownership.
One of my readers, Susan, really got to me in one of my latest entries. In saying this, I mean that it made me think, not that it wounded me in any way. I turned it over and over in my head, because in order to understand why I’m okay with Zac having multiple relationships and me being unsure about whether I will in turn is not because I am scared of managing multiple relationships in person.
I am AuDHD. When I am with someone, I am truly present and in the moment. What I am not good at is getting back to people and being responsible about the feeding and upkeep of a relationship. But Zac being poly takes the pressure off me because he has a lot of the same thought processes as me. He hasn’t defined “neurodivergent,” but in my case……
As Zac’s roommate would say, “the ’tism is real.”
I do not know that when I am not with that person, I would remember to keep them in the loop. This is something that Zac and I have in common, because we understand each other on a truly deep level. We say “how dare you attack me like this?” a lot.
But the point is that neither Zac nor I feel possessive of each other in a way that would impede on our other relationships, because we’re both the kind of people with no executive function.
But in order to understand how I got here, you’d have to understand a journey that started when I was very, very young.
In my childhood, I was told that someday a man would come and he’d be everything I’d ever want. As it turns out, this was true. Even though we broke up, I wouldn’t trade my relationship with Ryan for anything in the world. We took a break for a while to give each other space, but that lasted all of a few years. Now, the chord that runs between us is major in terms of music and close in terms of geometry.
Our schedules haven’t lined up to see each other, but that hasn’t stopped us from chatting online or on the phone when he’s on his way to work. It’s been a while, but it doesn’t matter. We pick up right where we left off, because we both have such tender feelings about each other when we tap into our memories.
I do think that we were both really going through something and needed the experiences of being with the other people in our lives, especially because now Ryan is a father, his son in on the jokes in which I share. What I do not think for a moment is that I didn’t get that fantasy while it lasted.
At the same time I was dating Ryan, I was dealing with all the problems that my emotional abuser put in my head, because I’m autistic and turning those problems into solutions becomes a full-time job. I drifted from Ryan because even if she didn’t mean to do it, she still opened the door to my sexuality by giving me her college journal. It doesn’t matter whether she just didn’t proof it or whether it was on purpose because the effect was the same.
She became a monotropic thought process because I realized that for as many red flags as this woman had, I was on board.
This is not what I think now, but at the time I realized that I was good at active listening, good at pattern recognition on things she didn’t see, and genuinely made her feel better about herself. Nothing about her opening up to me physically was threatening because my excuse was that for a lot of history, our age difference wouldn’t have mattered a damn.
I did not realize it was emotional abuse until I was 36 years old.
Therefore, one of the reasons my relationship with Ryan was so incredibly perfect is that because we met at summer camp, I was away from this woman long enough to connect with someone else in a major way.
Therefore, I spent a lot of time with Ryan before the emotionally abusive relationship overshadowed everything else. If I use the same murder board as Zac’s friends, where my yellow strings are just as important as my red, I’ve been poly since I was 14 years old.
I never had a relationship after Ryan where I could make someone else my first priority, because even though I wasn’t with this person all the time, the monotropic thought processes didn’t go away in her absence. I have a feeling I’m giving a lot of clarity to a lot of people right now……….
So, when I dated my first girlfriend, she was there in the shadows. I’ve never had a relationship where someone isn’t lurking in the shadows, affecting my thought processes to the point where I’m taking my eye off the ball.
I lost being married to it, because when the emotional abuser went away, what I missed most about her were the years we were separated and writing letters to each other. It did a lot to heal the fact that she wasn’t in love with me, but definitely did want me as a yellow string (when it was convenient).
That’s because when we were only writing letters to each other, I had a secret world, an inner landscape to whom I’ve given very few people access. I don’t judge people by how well we get along in bed, but by how well we get along out of it. That’s why my platonic relationships are so important to me. I do not need the safety and security of a full-time boyfriend because I’m trying to be my own person. However, I do know that there is someone in my corner that I could call in any kind of jam. He might not be able to do anything about it, but he would to the best of his ability; I know that because of how I’ve seen him treat his friends over the last year.
Editor’s Note:
To Zac-
I see you. I take in a lot. They’re confused. We are not.…….. xoxo
Here’s where I also stopped believing in monogamy. So many women advertised it on their dating profiles that when I was looking for a partner, I didn’t know what any of the hell all that meant….. then, as I was doing the reading on polyamory, I started learning about AuDHD. Through the combination of all those subreddits, I could listen to other people’s experiences without replying.
I have found so many people that have been on my same pipeline, which runs thusly:
INFJ
ADHD
Coming out as queer
Autism (as a comorbidity)
Nonbinary
Polyamorous
There is a huge crossover between being queer (either through sexual orientation or gender) and neurodivergent. It’s not a circle, but the Venn Diagram is solid.
There is a huge crossover between being autistic and being INFJ, the personality that’s already a thousand years old when they’re born.
There’s a huge crossover between the number of autistic and queer people who have decided gender is not a thing.
And we all recognize that getting our neurodivergent brain is never going to happen, so we adjust our expectations on what can be expected of us in a relationship.
It hasn’t been my outlook on relationships for my whole life. I was single for five years when I met Zac, single for seven before I actually asked him out, and after a year am finally comfortable with how polyamory works and I’m a fan.
However, I would never have thought about it if I was hurting another relationship to do so. For instance, I wouldn’t have asked Dana to open our relationship because it would have hurt both of us…… we both would have felt like we were losing something with each other, not gaining…….. and when we were with other partners, they didn’t like us at all because we really only talked to each other, like we were the main characters instead of our girlfriends.
Part of this is true, part of it is that for a lot of our relationship, we weren’t in the same city; it was a big deal when she called, which added to our partners’ ire. I don’t blame them. But Dana and I would have been better off as friends from the beginning, because we were great at that. Once we dragged our whole family into it, things began to get messy.
I would have given anything at one point for that relationship to last the rest of my life. Just so many things went wrong so fast that staying monogamous was the least of my worries. I had to get out for my safety, and even if we’d had counseling, when you get hit by someone, you don’t take the chance it happens twice.
I’m never going to be one of those people who likes putting all their eggs in one basket anymore, because what I’ve learned is that it’s better for you to have more than one person to fall on. Your entire world doesn’t walk out the door at once. I still feel this way about Supergrover, because the way I wrote to her was so regimented that it feels like a bit of a loss….. not so much because of her, but because I’m having to reroute a lot of impulses. In some ways, I’ll never give those up,because I see things that remind me of her all the time.
Polyamory is a system adjusted to me, rather than me having to fit into yet another system in which I have to social mask my way through it. It’s easier not to social mask in front of Zac because since we’re both neurodivergent, he’ll always have empathy even if he can’t have sympathy.
He said something to me that meant a lot, which is that our relationship is not “cutesy.” I don’t want that type of relationship because it leads to “acting as if.” I’d rather have emotional bravery and he’s shown me he has it.
So, in short, it’s not that I never wanted a marriage that lasted decades. I could have pictured it with Ryan, Meagan, and Dana. It just didn’t work out that way. I think it ultimately turned out better than I could have imagined. In no world would I have gotten the space to write what I needed to write out of someone jealous, because they simply would have tried to sabotage my writing time because spending time together is obviously the most important thing in my life, and any time away from each other means that I need room to cheat.
That leads to the millions upon millions of partners justifying why it was right to go through someone’s phone. I feel like if you can’t trust your partner to the point where you feel you need to go through their phone, your intuition has already given you an answer…… and doesn’t make you judge, jury, and executioner when you have no moral leg to stand on invading someone’s privacy.
You don’t have to confirm how someone else feels. You have to confirm how you feel in therapy, because you’re not going to change someone else.
I have done too much trying to change people in the past by writing about them, and not because changing people works. People have to want to change from the inside out, and sometimes hearing how I really feel about something puts new light on what their behavior is doing to me, and it creates an understanding that wasn’t there before.
In a relationship, I find it’s more helpful to lead from the back. That if I lay out my insecurities first, you’re more likely to open up to me in return because I’ve made it look not so scary.
Here’s where things get tricky, though. The first is that I make it look easy. In order to lay out my vulnerabilities first, I had to learn how to do that over years. It is not something I learned on the fly, it is something I’ve learned over my whole life.
I’ve always been an observer to human behavior, and I remind myself of Dominick Dunne when he used to write columns for Vanity Fair, covering the trials of the “rich, and the very, very rich.” In some ways, I feel like I’m trying to be Rachel Maddow, weaving my experiences in and out so that my emotional connections and how they come together are as researched as my intelligence special interest turned up an autistic amount.
This is because it’s one thing to get a soundbite from someone, and rare to get an essay, particularly one that goes through an entire range of emotions about one person. Understanding that range of emotion in a person is very important to communication with them, because it gives them more context on me than I will ever have on them.
However, just like with my readers, I have a bubble with them, too. Just like I invite my readers to be vulnerable in the comments, I invite my friends to be vulnerable by opening up to them in person (as well as I can without stumbling over my words because it’s verbal). People tell me things and both love and hate it. I do not stop writing about someone when I’ve said something that they haven’t liked. I’ve stopped writing about them altogether because they’ve proven that they aren’t supportive of me as a writer, because doing that doesn’t look like only being adored. You’ll get your moments, I promise you. But you won’t get all of them, because no one can.
We are divine in our messiness, not in our ability to keep things under control.
All of my thought processes combine to make me “messy,” and honestly one of the things I started wondering when I started exploring poly was whether it was actually fair to be this intense all the time around one person. No one can be my everything because they’ve all burned out under that plan.
But again, I believed the fairy tale. In some ways, I got it.
But there came a point when the dream just changed.
My life would be a lot easier if I became a novelist. That way, at least I can blame blowback on my editor…. “no, that’s not you. My editor added those details in post.” If you’re a novelist, you probably just laughed.
I am sure there are quite a few “fictional” characters out there, but to be honest, I’m not that good at writing “voice” yet, so most of my characters in fiction tend to be me. However, I am a 46-year-old with female parts who doesn’t necessarily think “girl” in reference to herself, but it doesn’t bother me either way. Like, I could see transitioning, but I don’t feel passionate about it. I figured if I had a real, burning desire I would know it. For instance, being queer kicked in immediately. I knew what I wanted, and liked what I got. I figure that if I was trans, I would know it in the same way. But nonbinary as a label isn’t threatening. I’m just too lazy to care about pronouns. I’ll take them all. The reason I’m too lazy to care about pronouns is that I’ve been saying “she” all my life. If I can’t remember my pronouns, why should I expect that of someone else? I like things geared at younger people because I feel that in order to explain an adult idea to a child, you are most probably a better writer than I am. This is a lot of words to say that even though my characters are all me, it’s not always a problem because I’m a lot of people already.
I am testing my mettle in fiction, but not every day. I am taking it slowly because I have a tremendous idea, but I’m at the bottom of a staircase. It is akin to hearing the third movement of the Hummel Concerto when you have just been given your first Arban book. It’s something you want to play, but you’re not there yet.
It’s the same way with my alternate history. It’s big in scope and has the potential to be very popular, because lit about the food industry sells, as well as lit about spies. These two things are inextricably interrelated, two men in a platonic love story as in “The Courier.” They’re from the same world, but different countries. Therefore, they have different governments.
This is why when you see waitstaff and cooks playing assets in movies, that’s real. You can take that to the bank and cash it. CIA (and all intelligence agencies) want “the little gray man,” someone who will not be noticed in any way. Is there anyone less noticed in society than waitstaff? The service industry loves books about cooks and waitstaff who become spies, serial killers, homicidal maniacs, etc. because we’re all just trying to hold down the madness. Art that can express it is rare, which is why Anthony Bourdain is my patron saint. I have two of his prayer candles, because one wasn’t enough.
In terms of what I could do differently, I could review TV shows about kitchens and tell you what’s good and what’s not. However, I will not be doing that until I can turn down my sensitivity to those sounds. I lasted 10 minutes into “The Bear,” and not because I wasn’t interested in the story. It was the ticket machine. Just trigger, trigger, trigger.
So, now I’m just trying to reflect everything I take in. I played the intro/tutorial to Fallout 4 the other day, and I did not realize that my Vault 111 jumpsuit was not equipped and ran out into the street in my underwear. Despite that wardrobe malfunction, I can say that the intro is great. Terrifyingly great.
War. War never changes.
People keep telling me I’d love Starfield, too, but I haven’t gotten it because the full install is over 100GB, and I just don’t have that kind of storage space right now with Fallout 4 and Skyrim on an SSD. I have a mechanical hard drive that’s 6 TB, but it doesn’t work with my current computer as a game drive because only a 2.5 in drive will fit in the bay. That 6TB will have to be media, because I don’t think running games off a USB drive is the best thing ever. I’ve ordered a small screwdriver set so that I can open the case and add another drive, but originally that drive was going to be Ubuntu. Now that I’ve learned Windows 11 isn’t obnoxious (but I’d still kill for a .bat file that turned off all the upsell), I’ve realized that I can use the other drive for games as well, but I just don’t game enough to justify it right now. It will take me five years to finish Fallout 4 at this rate.
For me, doing something differently is using Windows 11 at all. I cannot tell you how much I hate OneDrive popping up to ask me if I want storage space, how likely I am to recommend Windows to a friend, and asking me if I want to buy Office like a random dick pic.
Meanwhile, I have all the open source applications I could ever want or need. LibreOffice is the love of my life. Seriously, I love it a WordPerfect amount. Microsoft Word has blown except in one instance. I liked the version on my Mac SE, which was probably version one.
Then, I thought WordPerfect was where it was at, and then it got Linux’ed. Microsoft bought out the market share, so you had to have Word. Still mad about it, but mostly because Corel bought WordPerfect and they didn’t even get enough interest to keep the product going. So, basically, LibreOffice has become the jack of all trades. You can change the user interface to look like whatever word processor you came from previously.
I have a version of The GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) called “GIMPshop,” which is basically just The GIMP with a .bat file for Windows that changes all the keyboard shortcuts to Adobe Photoshop. I could do things differently by becoming an expert on The GIMP instead, but I’ve slept since then and am taking the easy route.
If something you’d like to do differently is get good at editing photos, I highly recommend searching for “You Suck at Photoshop.” It’s a comedy tutorial where you learn layers, correction, etc. from a guy whose fiancée has just broken up with him and he’s a miserable train wreck. Very much “my kind of thing.”
In terms of doing audio differently, I really should think more about recording things, or just talking to the camera. I’ve done it before, but putting myself out there on video is sometimes difficult. My voice triggers me, and grief isn’t a straight line. However, over time it’s just become normal to be mute at home. It’s probably babying a wound, but at the same time, I talk plenty by writing. I’m not shutting anyone out. I am only asking them to switch to my preferred means of communication. I’m also not inflexible about that. “Preferred” doesn’t mean that I’m not capable of recognizing that I don’t always get what I want.
Speaking causes different kinds of grief. I don’t like grieving my mother when I am unprepared, and the fastest way is to hear her through talking. I don’t like grieving the woman who emotionally abused me when I’m unprepared for it, either, and the shortest way to get there is talking or singing. Especially in conversation with people I don’t know well, I fall back on tried and true stories. Some of them are her punchlines. I do it so naturally that I’ll get right up to the punchline before I realize what I’ve said and I have to keep going even though I have reached my breaking point….
So, what I could do differently is be more effusive about speaking. What I have noticed, though, is that in a digital society, we’re all moving in this direction. My sister and I both agree that the energy required for a phone call and the energy required for an e-mail are not the same. It does not diminish our want to connect, just the mode in which we do it.
Perhaps it’s generational, but not necessarily because the pandemic hit everyone in the same way. We all retreated to the quiet and safety of our homes and got used to writing a lot more than we did. Then, we found that we were just as productive at home as we were at the office, and isolated from each other even more. I know people who had coworkers they never met the entire pandemic- a couple that had never even heard the other’s voices and they’d been best friends for years.
I have said this before, but I’ll say it again. The pandemic silver lining was saving my ass. I didn’t have to prove to anyone anymore why I felt the way I felt about someone I’d never met in person, but had heard their voice and it charmed me even more.
But one thing I would have done differently is not made it a relationship where we’d never met in person. It was one of those things we were planning and then we both wigged each other out and it just didn’t happen. The best I got was “someday, perhaps.” If being busy is really all it is, she would have revisited the conversation. I didn’t, because her history is that when I bring up something more than once, I’m nagging her.
But, if I’d known then what I know now, I would have been on a plane the next day. I would have had that first conversation in person, because it was one that needed to be in person and we were stupid enough to believe that writing was enough. It is, if you already know the person. We only knew random factoids about each other and then both laid emotional guns on the table.
I would have gone to her long before that ever happened and said, “want to go for a walk?”
If I could do things differently, I would have said I was tired of feeling like she was wired in and I was somewhere off in the bathroom. She is the Chandler of my friends, but I needed to understand a little more nuance than that in order to be a good writer….. and I wouldn’t if I’d started in fiction. It’s only because we are real-life friends that it’s a problem.
If I could do things differently, I wish I could convince her that she doesn’t need to feel guilty about not replying. I’ve tried to convince her of that for years. I know that she will write back when she has time, and she doesn’t often have it. So, when I was angry about something, it actually worked in both of our favors to let it lie for a bit. Neither one of us are very good at that. Both adept writers, with epees for pens.
All of that being said, I couldn’t make a fictional character out of her, but someone else could. The way I write, she’s more beautiful just as she is.
I am an excellent judge of character in other people, but what I don’t know is how much of my behavior is inspired by me. I tend to pick out emotionally unavailable people, anyway, so I wouldn’t know if I was doing something annoying or not because they would not volunteer that information. Therefore, I could not change.
It’s why I had so much empathy for Jon Armstrong during his divorce from Heather (Dooce). He went through absolute hell with her, and I know this because my caretakers are often overwhelmed when I get mentally ill. I go into autistic meltdown and burnout, which is code for “doesn’t play well with others.” So, when Jon said “she told me everything that was wrong and just left so I couldn’t change it” (not a direct quote, I’m paraphrasing), my mirror neurons went off and my heart went out to him. Mentally ill people can be so ungrateful, but it’s not because they are actively trying to be emotionally abusive or narcissistic. It means that they’re in so much pain they can’t see past it.
I don’t blame Heather for leaving, either. Her feelings are absolutely valid. I just know from experience that perception is not reality. Whether what Heather saw was accurate or not is missing the point. There is no wrong feeling, there are consequences for acting on them. Depression, particularly bipolar, blows everything out of proportion because sometimes you’re depressed and sometimes you’re manic. You are not seeing what things are really like, you’re seeing them in a fun house mirror.
Whether I’m a good judge of character depends on when you meet me. My perception is different depending on my mood, and that’s not a good thing, but it’s real. It’s my work to do, because mental illness is not the whole answer. It’s developing coping mechanisms and safety nets. Depressed and anxious people do not actually believe that we are loved and we are not a burden on our families or society at large.
The hardest part of a mental processing disorder and/or mental illness is that you’re either slow or crazy, take your pick. I’ve never been called “slow” mentally, but I pick up facial expressions and microaggressions easily. I know what emotions look like on people’s faces and even when my perception is wrong, my judgment on other’s motivations/moods are generally correct. This is because in order to understand a conflict, you have to understand both people’s interests and what motivates people to get closer to you vs. further away.
Most of this is through looking approachable, not being nice. Nice is not kind. Those are two completely separate things. “Nice” says “no, we’re all good” while you continue to distance yourself from me. I noticed discrepancies between words and actions quicker than others do when the words are actually coming out of their mouths, because since my intuition on what I’m going to do is rock solid. I don’t make bad leaps by judging character, but by noticing the hypocrisy and seeing what happens if you call people on it. If they’re angry you noticed a problem and want to talk about it, that’s the biggest red flag you’re ignoring if you’re a people pleaser who lives not to rock the boat.
Most abused people exhibit this, particularly those who have been emotionally abused young by people who are supposed to take care of them. For instance (this didn’t happen to me, just an example), children raised by alcoholic parents are programmed to invert the dynamic. Boys are just as susceptible to becoming a parental figure as girls, though with girls it generally comes faster because women are designed societally to be people pleasers, anyway. But I know this to be true from the number of “mama’s boys” I’ve met, both straight and gay, who weren’t babysitting their mothers because they just wanted to do so; they realized their mother or father couldn’t take care of themselves and didn’t want to watch them struggle, because watching them struggle means that they’re angry and absolutely will take it out on them.
My stepfather is a perfect example. His mother was a horrible alcoholic and actually died from it in a roundabout way. She didn’t live long enough to die of cirrhosis. She was on a drunk and passed out in the snow. She didn’t wake up….. and obviously, he married my mother. The classic image of a “mama’s boy” is not him. That being said, he had to grow up fast. Running a household was nothing to him because he’d been doing it since he was five.
Again, he ran the household as a child until she died in the snow and someone (I don’t remember if it was his family or a neighbor) just found her. I cannot imagine that kind of trauma, and I don’t want to try.
Everyone is fighting something, which is why I believe there are no red flags. I have never met anyone, particularly a woman, that wasn’t fighting massive trauma. Absolutely all of my girlfriends have been sexually assaulted, more than not raped in childhood. That’s not an anomaly where I just went out and picked women who were abused. I have experience with abuse because again, ALL women. All of ’em. Every woman you know has at least a creepy story about a man, and in this culture it’s surprising when you get off that easy if one in four women is raped at least once in their lifetime.
In fact, for most of history it wasn’t rape if you were married to them.
Some mothers are even vicious enough to tell their children that they’re a product of marital rape and make their kids walk around with that knowledge until they’re adults and start unpacking it. It gets worse before it gets better. I cannot stress this enough. You will recover, but at times it feels like you should give up.
But here’s the thing….. during the Renaissance, beautiful statues were often finished in wax to cover mistakes. This is a double-edged sword as an illustration when it comes to PTSD. The first is that the statues weren’t any less beautiful. The second is that when finished with wax, it didn’t mean that the flaw wasn’t still underneath. What you get out of healing is what you put into it. Are you using the wax to cover your wounds, or are you examining the dead spots in your emotions? Are you using the wax as filler not because you are ignoring pain signals, but because you’re rerouting them?
A statue without wax is called “sin cera.” “Without wax.” A statue sin cera was incredibly rare….. another truism because you can make a statue sin cera, but no person ever could be. It is the nature of being animate, fully human and fully divine.
The sculpture you start carving after abuse looks completely different than the one you were carving before, because you don’t have the same thought processes anymore……. however, you do not get a new piece of marble. Maybe you’ve chipped more away. Maybe you’ve taken the “clippings” and rearranged them into something new.
People who have been abused and then are driven to success sometimes drive me insane because they’re so insistent they’re fine. Meanwhile, it’s not that they’re so perfect, it’s that everyone has learned to tiptoe around them. They’re not fine in terms of their emotions, but they don’t notice because why would they? Everyone around them is FINE.
Meanwhile, families who have someone with PTSD become the planets revolving around the sun…. in effect, nurturing it and asking it to warm them when they’re not capable of it. If they’re scared of their emotions, they’re scared of yours.
A lot of the women in my life are or have been a big deal. The two most successful women I know are complete wire monkeys, both raped in childhood and driven to control their entire universes so it never happens again……. not realizing that by trying to control everything, that includes controlling the people around them.
The planets orbit the sun, completely dependent on its behavior and not daring to deviate from the pattern that’s currently working….. but it won’t forever and instead of calling bullshit, the people around “the sun” adopt new ways of trying to please to avoid emotional injury.
Are you people-pleasing because you’re naturally programmed to give all of yourself away, or are you giving all of yourself away to try and mitigate damage?
I don’t know. Sometimes I’m a good judge of character. Sometimes I’m not. It’s especially wishy-washy in trying to determine my own. I am selfless and giving to an enormous degree, but not so much that I’d be willing to do anything to get love. But that’s a relatively new development. In the past, I was so afraid to lose a connection that I just wouldn’t do it. I would cower in fear instead of saying “this is bullshit. You don’t get to control my feelings in addition to yours.”
Whether or not the person listens is the best judge of character there is, because whether you’re wrong or not, your feelings still deserve to be heard. I am the worst person in the world at giving up in relationships, because I believe that certainly there must be a combination of words that will unlock you and make you open up, but it has never worked with a woman who has been raped.
Ever.
But that’s a perception with empathy, not a judgment call. The most upsetting thing is that statistics don’t lie and culture doesn’t change.
I can get used to any schedule except being awake all night long. Either I go to bed early and rise with the sun, or I go to bed around 0300-0400 and sleep until noon. That was the schedule that worked best when I was in the kitchen, because I’d get home around 11:00 PM, and could spend my “evening” writing. I think it made me a better cook than in the days when Dana and I would go out after work, because 1) when I wasn’t in the kitchen, I was somewhere far, far away 2) I was never hung over, so I picked up all the shifts due to brown bottle flu and was probably the highest paid employee and not because of salary.
Yes, I had limitations. That doesn’t matter when you just need a body, and the one scheduled is less functional than me. I worked six and seven days a week to keep busy; my disability kept me from perfection and struggled with excellence. At no time did it mean I got less hours, because in a kitchen everyone works long hours and compete with it. If I worked 50 hours, I was lazy ’cause you worked 60. It wasn’t just keeping busy, though. The neurodivergent brain does not know what to do in the absence of structure, and I had no idea what to do with time off. If I got out of the rhythm, it was harder to do it again….. disorienting and exhausting, again trading mental health for physical.
I was a permanently exhausted pigeon, but also very happy. Supergrover was a million miles away (which is what we in MD call “Virginia”), which meant that when I wasn’t at work, I wasn’t the same person. I very much had the feeling of the protagonist in Avatar, because of my physical disability and how all of those barriers were taken away on the world of Pandora. It was amazing learning to speak Na’avi, and if there’s anything I will miss about our communications the most, it would be the ones in which I had to say, “I know you’re busy, so is it “‘wink and nod,’ ’emphatic fist shake,’ or “slow finger wag?'” With Bryn, I could shorten this to “Borum it,” because we all picked it up imitating Matt, Bryn’s older brother. That day, it was “SFW.” Duly noted, beautiful girl. 😉
I also feel that Supergrover and I came to the same impasse I’ve come to with every friend I’ve had, which started with the woman who emotionally abused me- it was her deflection tactic….. “why do you think I don’t tell you anything? You remember it.” I’m a monotropic thinker, human relationships are my special interest, and I basically memorize most of what I’ve read because if it’s not a special interest, you love it a weird amount. I was also completely honest with Supergrover. If you do this, you won’t become “my friend.” I’m an INFJ. That means if we’re going to be close, you’ll be a companion, not just a friend. My personality profile says I only have one or two friends at a time, and I love them deeply. Just unreasonably, and that will always be true of people like Zac and Bryn. If Supergrover wants her spot, it’ll always be open because of the hard out, and as you could see yesterday, I’m not happy about the fact that she is diametrically opposed to this now. That’s because for everything in which I can’t walk away, I understand the assignment and she doesn’t. That when she told me what she did, it would cement our bond for life and we couldn’t be careless with it. So, in short, she’s terrified that I remember everything and call her on it so we can stay healthy.
I know this pattern so well. Your idea of love is so fucked up that you don’t recognize it when people are willing to change their behavior to something healthy, because you don’t recognize it as love. I have so much empathy for her, but it’s time to stop caring if she is no longer willing to engage, because I cannot go without an emotional depth she doesn’t have and not because it’s not inside her. It’s the things she won’t acknowledge to herself, and therefore can’t help me. I know I’ve said this before, probably many times, but watching all these videos about CPTSD and how it rewires you got me to see that Supergrover and I were both extremely damaged people who rushed into a deep relationship before we really got to know each other……….. except did we? I saw the incompatibility within weeks. She is not built to hang with an INFJ, and most people just frankly aren’t. We demand going to a rich emotional place because we’ve discovered it in ourselves and want to drag our friends toward “enlightenment.”
What is stopping me from becoming someone like Martha Beck (interestingly enough, also neurodivergent, queer, and poly) is realizing that’s not really how INFJ works for someone who’s already introverted. I can write about this stuff, but with my processing disorders I am just not as fluid as a public speaker. I can and have to turn on the afterburners when I preach, but I still do not feel that I can process information and speak at the same time.
I thought yesterday about why I was able to transcribe Dr. Wall’s Con Law class when I hadn’t been able to do that before. It was the laptop, entirely. This absolutely is an accommodating for neurodivergetnt kids, and I will take any teacher to the mat over it that I possibly can. Because I’m not Gen Z, I would encourage them to let neurodivergent kids keep their phones. If you don’t have an app to let them respond, then have the kids put their phones in airplane mode so they can use their notepads. Otherwise, if you don’t give the kids laptops, they are in the position of having to buy a second device…… when they are probably already used to the tactile experience of typing on their phones, just like I am the most comfortable at the keyboard.
When I said I was “going to class on my own,” I did not mean that I was going to class while I was in it. I used hyperfocus to drown out everything in the room so that I could hear a voice without listening to it, getting things down without comprehending it….. just like I do with my blog. Stream-of-consciousness is basically “first draft, get it all out.” Therefore, sometimes I’m quicker at crafting beautiful sentences than others. Sometimes, it’s crap you have to wade through to get to the good stuff, because that’s how I work. I start at one point and dive, ending up at another. Overthinking makes me a good writer, because while I’m getting the words out, I am not even looking at the screen. I am staring off into space, touch typing as I think about the next sentence rather than the one I’m currently typing. My brain moves just the right amount faster than my fingers, therefore my typing is not lagging behind because I’m three sentences ahead in my mind rather than just one.
An editor at a Canadian newspaper, Janie, told me that once all this was edited, I’d be surprised what I’d written. That made my confidence shoot up, because I think I’m only writing about what I know- me and how I interact with others, and my reactions to their reactions….. and no hearsay. I don’t say “one of my friends told me that Bryn…..” because I can’t verify that it’s true. Just a for-instance, Supergrover or Bryn could tell me that Dave or Michael did something. I would not write about it unless I could verify that what Michael or Dave said was accurate, because then it’s not something that happened to me. It’s someone else’s story.
For instance, I know it like the back of my hand that even if Supergrover walks away thinking I’m the meanest person on earth, it doesn’t mean I didn’t get the story I wanted and we’re not all good. It means that I will take our memories away and be okay with not creating new ones.
Because I think of Supergrover this way, it is very, very hard to switch to past tense, but I know for sure that will come with time if she doesn’t show back up eventually. It will hurt, it already hurts, but yet it is also not my problem anymore. I have explained it to the best of my ability without so much input from anyone else because I don’t talk about our relationship in person and I don’t talk to her about it, either. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s all due to avoidance on her part; it doesn’t matter why. She’s doing what’s best for her, and I’m doing what’s best for me. I hope that she’s angry AF, because it’s the one thing that will lead her to realize that there is a life beyond walking in anger all the time.
I give her so much latitude because of her job. I know that there are times when she’s not able to respond for very good reason and not because I’ve said something wrong. But when she does reply, it’s to point out everything I’ve said that’s wrong, when it’s not my focus at all. My focus is on a healthy relationship, cleaning up a toxic mess that just doesn’t need to be there. I also have the right to step away when I cannot get any compromise on anything ever. At that point, I just need to stop caring, and I can’t……. also for good reason.
So, I’m in a bad way over it, but writing it out helps. It also helps that this is the only relationship that I have that’s in turmoil, so I don’t have to think about it all the time and I have plenty of love in my life that’s healthy in the extreme. It’s all about using my ADHD to change my focus, but it doesn’t mean that a monotropic thought process drops off the radar…… again, do you have a special interest if you don’t just love it a weird amount?
I would think it was manipulation if it wasn’t a learned behavior from childhood. When I said that I wanted that bubble with an older woman and I got it when I was 12 by trying for it since I was born, it’s not because I was sexualized early or anything like that. It’s because adults treated me like a real person.
As a 16-year-old preacher’s kid who’d had many years of running behavioral heuristics on 200-1500 people at a time, the problems of my friends felt juvenile and pedestrian. I didn’t connect with anything they said, because it wasn’t monster dramatic and that’s what I was used to; people call pastors during the worst moments of their lives, and I actively tried to listen in to everything……….. and those times I even understood the language.
Again, I don’t process voices well, so those conversations would repeat in my head ad nauseam, special interest engaged, because there were two operations at play. The first is hearing something without context so that you can regurgitate it later by rote, even if you don’t understand it. The second operation is picking up what’s neurotypical and what’s not, so a lot of my social masking comes from the PTSD that belonged to other people, because those were the conversations I heard. Therefore, in my mind, it was completely normal to have wild emotional swings all the time and to live in that kind of pressure cooker. It’s what makes me able to work with cooks.
You can do everything by hearing and not taking it in, because you hear something, and then you own it. You don’t need to ask for clarification because there isn’t any, just get it done as quickly as possible. You are also, unless you’re on plating, only responsible for one part of a dish. A good example is a steak salad. Grill does the steak, pantry does the salad. I hand you the finished steak to slice over the salad, I am not in charge of presentation. Even if you have six burgers at once, it’s plenty of time to get all six setups and servings of fries done.
Quick, gotta move fast, gotta perform miracles. Gee willikers, Dre, holy bat syllables! Look at all the bullshit that goes on in Gotham! When I’m gone, time to get rid of these rap criminals……
If SCOTUS can quote Eminem, so can I. Line cooks are absolutely rap criminals. 😉
When you work in a kitchen, it’s the same feel as working in a church. Some of the best conversations I’ve had in a church came from cooking together for a pot luck after the service, or the traditional Easter brunch (which Dana and I did with another line cook one year and the three of us absolutely destroyed it…. that’s good, by the way. Just like comics, we bomb and we kill…… nightly.).
On Easter, you’re feeding three separate crowds. The first is the people who want breakfast after the sunrise service (that’s popular on Easter only). The second wave is the musicians who have come before the 9:00 or the 11:00 service (usually 10:00-10:30 in the Episcopal church). This is going to be a larger crowd of musicians than normal, because you probably already have a choir. You probably do not have a brass quintet, a harpist, an orchestra, or whatever else it is that you do to “boost the ratings.”
Church takes many forms, but for me it is ancient…. the interminable march of Sundays back into the dark ages. The Episcopal church is my favorite because I know that other people I love are saying the same words at the same time I am…..
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies…..
I didn’t even have to look it up, and the tears have already started. It’s called the “prayer of humble access,” and it is the shortest and fastest path to getting my heart to bleed all over the communion rail. That’s because it’s The Moment. The communion rail is where I wrestle with the bomb that could destroy millions, my own internalized rage. When I knew that everything was over with Kathleen, I went to church and laid my head on the communion rail, I was so wrecked. As the choir sang “lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” I folded because I had a lot of them.
I didn’t blame Kathleen entirely for her behavior, either, because she didn’t have the skills to deal with me. Just as traumatized as Supergrover, perhaps more so because the effects of her abuse lasted for years in what any adult except another traumatized one would see as wildly inappropriate and must be stopped. No one noticed.
One of the things that I wish Supergrover would take in is that she’s not scarred, not broken, literally perfect. This is because I have enough experience to say that there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just stubborn. 😉 In these moments, John the Gnostic speaks to me:
This is the verdict: light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
We do not run from the light because it’s not there. We run from the light out of fear. Fear of not being loved. Fear that the light is too bright. Fear that our sins are too great and everyone else’s are acceptable. Fear of separation from others, thus the feeling of being separated from God while it’s just not true.
Whether I’m in the kitchen, whether I’m writing, whether I’m queer, whether I’m poly, whether I am anything I have more power when I name it and claim it than I do by keeping it all in and having preconceived notions about what others are going to think. You stop attracting light to you because of shame and not being vulnerable about it…. therefore, you’ll never get to a place of acceptance through the torture of cognitive dissonance.
My life got so much better when my priest said “we are all very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, who are also heirs, through faith…” because it was the first time in my life I’d ever believed someone meant it……. after meeting the wrong priest, first, but still.
For Houstonians, Larry Gipson at St. Martins told me I’d never be a priest because I was gay. My revenge is that he’s Catholic now. Karma took care of him, because the Episcopal church as a whole disagreed with him and left him in the Middle Ages. I will not say any more about that except I can think of several people I’d like to go with him. Like, if you’re going to be a homophobic asshole, put a warning sign out, amiright?
There are many Catholic parishes who have quietly ignored The Pope for many, many years. They also have an organized queer group within the Catholic church. Just like protestants, there is a range. I would feel comfortable walking into any American Episcopal church, but I could not just walk into any Anglican or Catholic church (Anglican being the name of ECUSA churches who left over female ordination and homosexual marriage/ordination.
So, if I go to church at all, it’s St. Alban’s (better known as National Cathedral). I will never be discriminated against ever again, and I need that for me. Other people don’t. The “frozen chosen” have in the past had problems with “the most segregated hour in America,” but that has changed so much across the world, especially with the election of Michael Curry. Plus, there’s a lot of immigration from Africa going on in Houston and DC, so Episcopal churches have naturally gained more black members over the years. And that doesn’t all come from, say, Nigerians being active in the Anglican church overseas. Some of it is that you go to church once because it’s in your neighborhood, decide you’re cool with it, and stay.
My grandparents were Presbyterian, but the church in Lone Star they liked the best was Methodist. Ergo, we were Methodists now. I have to say that Paw Paw made an excellent choice. I got to meet Matt McConaughey before you even knew who he was.
My mother’s favorite joke in life was “I’ve seen Matt in a bathing suit….. of course, he was 12 at the time.” I’ve mentioned this before, but for new readers my dad confirmed Matt into the church when he was a tween, and my mother was his middle school choir director. I was three, so yes, I have met and spent time with him, but I’m going to bet we don’t remember each other and the only reason I keep up with him is because I see him everywhere I look.
Plus, his mom is in Bernie and it was great to see her, too, despite all Matthew’s justified and reported anger at her. I’m not telling tales out of school when I say that Kay wrecked him by giving press interviews about private matters, and it is not lost on me that I do the same thing, essentially, but the difference is that my friends don’t care that I do it. Even Supergrover, who is the maddest of them all, says I’m entitled to my stories and to keep at it, essentially. She doesn’t have to like it, she just has to live it.
That’s because she’s a fucking fan.
The rest of my friends are busy on self-discovery, particularly Bryn and we compare notes. We’re all driven by self-improvement and reparenting ourselves…. not to point out what our parents lacked, but to point out all the times we didn’t say anything and became part of the problem.
I was social masking because maybe if I did, I’d deserve to be loved. That’s the deepest tape I’m trying to get rid of, because that comes with altering and accepting my entire reality as an autistic and physically disabled person. If you compare yourself to someone neurotypical, you will always fall short and berate yourself. Acknowledging I’m simply not capable of some things is necessary because I cannot be held to the same expectations by other people.
I would have no relationships as a result, because they’d all walk off in frustration and still do despite my best efforts. I cannot always be in my body and respond from a place that’s not ensconced in pain. I am human. What becomes a problem is being willing to forgive anyone for anything and not receiving the same courtesy.
This is because I believe neurotypical people are holding me to the standard expectations of a neurotypical person and also get frustrated I can’t “get it together.” When I said that high needs and low trade off, this is what I mean. Sometimes, I am a functional person with a routine. Sometimes, my autism makes me get lost in my own brain and lack of function comes from the inability to change channels.
When I was a child, this presented as being emotional leaps and bounds ahead of my peers and listening to everyone’s problems, then meltdown and burnout after school making me unable to do homework. I couldn’t do eighth grade math when my then lady-love was married to a drug dealer who got drunk at a church party and threw up at one of our best friend’s houses. That stayed with me as a monotropic thought process for years on end, a 14-year-old on a mission to love a 25-year-old through it… another avoidant personality who didn’t know what the hell to do with either my emotions or the situation she was actually in.
As an adult, this presents the same exact way. People are my monotropic thought process and their emotional weight stops me from carrying anything else. So, is the question isolating myself entirely so that I don’t have a jackass magnet on my forehead (the term I use for being on the Metro and someone saying “my dad hit me as a child” or something equally heavy within minutes… the jackass magnet is a reference to the fact that I cannot keep myself from letting it in, not that those people have done anything wrong.
There are two words I could use right now to explain what I mean, and nearly everyone knows them but I’m so mad at JK Rowling right now that every time I say something mean about her, I wish it had been worse.
If you just can’t stand not knowing because you’re not a fan, someone put it in the comments or something. I’m done.
In short, I cannot read minds, and I cannot protect my mind………
People expect me to read minds because the societal response is clear and I am just not on that wavelength. I think big thoughts, and I’m not going to apologize for that. While you’re thinking about how I didn’t do X when you wanted Y, I’m thinking about how the whole company should run and how to change it for the better because my scope is different than yours.
In college, I began to learn how international systems work, the chessboard, and because of my history in the “underworld” of abuse, I was drawn to government espionage (corporate doesn’t do it for me). You’re thinking about the village, I’m thinking about the world. I am not dissimilar from any spy, really, because most of them are truly damaged people who needed refuge in the system…. and that was appealing to me, not a drawback.
The reason spies are generally damaged people is that those are the people who are willing to cut ties. It’s a lot to manage, your real life and your cover identity, so it’s better to be like me and not have many significant relationships so you can keep your necessary lies straight. If you’re an abused kid in any form, whether it’s being young and raped or being 18 and getting shot, you don’t trust anyone.
I listen to everything. I talk a quarter to never. I have selective mutism often. Part of it is that I’d much rather write than talk, part of it is being emotionally abused over many years and having those threads so woven into me that I never know when that woman’s expressions are going to come out of me rather than my own. I sound just like her because that’s who I was social masking as a teen.
Again, from 12-36 years old I was social masking someone who’d been raped as a child, was currently dating a drug dealer, and had a very unstable career because opera is just like that and she was a queer teacher in a conservative school district. My memories of her are crystal clear down to the smell of the air.
As a result, I do not trust anyone or anything at anytime, but I listen to things intensely without processing their voices until after said conversation is over, because I am not both talking and listening anymore. In those cases, talking is limited to sympathetic nods and breaking eye contact when it gets to be too much sensory information…. which it always is. You don’t walk off the Metro with conversations like “my husband beats me” unscathed.
In effect, what’s happening is that I take in information like a doctor, then have my emotional response later. In a neurotypical person’s brain, they’ve “dealt with it and moved on.” I am “lost in the past,” when you’re walking around like a ticking time bomb and I’m trying to stay calm about it.
I am an INFJ, and I’m here to drag you kicking and screaming toward believing in yourselves. I am here to love the shit out of you.
What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make? Why?
The hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make are the ones I didn’t get. Because do you really get a choice not to feel confused down to your very soul when your wife cannot function? You’d think I was talking about Dana, but no. I could not function and she could not handle it. Then, she started to self-destruct and I was too sick to stop anything. I have been writing a book on my illness, to a large degree, because when you have access to my thought process, you see all my processing disorders and mental illness through stream-of-consciousness memories.
It’s not just a deconstruction of my marriage, though, because I talk about all my relationships here to one degree or another.
This morning, the thing that made me smile was my first boyfriend, Ryan, finding out that I’m still attracted to men and asking me what I’m doing this weekend. It was hilarious, and I teased him about being slow on the uptake because I’d been posting about Zac for a year (this was just a funny meme). What I didn’t say and should have was, “actually I’m free.” There’s a reason it’s really important that Ryan laughed and joked with me about it, because breaking up with Ryan isn’t a decision I got, either.
Lesbians older than me convinced me that bisexuality was a lie. Kids are stupid, ergo I thought women were magic. There was no such thing as people who loved both, because if you fell in love with a woman, you couldn’t go back (like they had some sort of secret poison? Idfk. I can’t do the math.). I do not believe that anyone meant me harm. I think their attitudes toward Ryan were based in their own prejudice and internalized homophobia. It’s not like I’ve never been burned by a bi girl, but what I knew even then is that the men weren’t the problem.
Marrying Kathleen was a mistake because it was an anxious/avoidant attachment and when she was avoidant, she acted out. No normal person in a relationship that gets frustrated is going to cheat for months and destroy you while you’re out of town. She can justify it all she wants, but it’s not going to reconcile. In turn, I do not blame Dana for all my feelings for Supergrover. Just because I felt things for someone else while married to her doesn’t mean that I was horrible about it.
It was contentious because those feelings existed at all, not because I was trying to push Dana away. It just did. It was a ball I didn’t realize I was setting in motion until many, many years after the fact. This is because I went back and started exploring the root cause of the pain. Dana and I only looked stable from the outside when we got to Houston. We were actually broken beyond repair and needed a therapist. We didn’t go. Therefore, things fell apart quickly.
Feelings for Supergrover didn’t come out of a vacuum, they were the siren call of something darker- a life without having to fight through a marriage at all. Yes, Supergrover gave me a task that would limit other people from getting into our bubble, and then thought I thought there was something unappealing about that. I did not trade one situation for a worse one, and I got tired of Supergrover insisting that I had. As I’ve said before, I didn’t do anything because she told me to do anything. I did it because it needed doing.
I didn’t leave Dana for good because she was a bad wife, or that our problems weren’t reconcilable (until she hit me). It was because there are three forms of communication in Texas….. telephone, television, tell Dana. If Supergrover has any reticence about this, she shouldn’t, because basically I felt like I had a deep, irreconcilable issue that resolved the moment my glasses smashed into my face.
Dana’s voice echoes in my head constantly regarding a particular event, the one where I knew it was over in retrospect. I won’t say more, but it was huge and ended in a voice mail to Supergrover telling her that I knew she’d had something big come up at work and I was crying that I’d been a distraction to it.
But, the phrase that runs through my head is haunting and it replays every single night, and the one thing that would unlock all the context and hits the hard out. I’m betting that Supergrover does not want to know what this phrase is, because then she’ll have to face the reality of knowing what I do. It was never going to work, the three of us. Ever.
That’s because it was a moment in which her boss was wrecked, too, and we were having a day of it. I was a panicked mess over our shit, and it was just not a good day for me to go into meltdown (as if it ever is) because she was in meltdown as well over her shit. We seem to have a lot of those days, but for all that, she’s still my beautiful girl. Doesn’t mean she didn’t alienate Dana from me, yet nothing is her fault, either. I hope I have made it abundantly clear that neither of these things is the answer- that it was a spectrum of answers and I had to choose between staying married or “the very best bad idea we’ve got, sir.”
Editor’s Note:
There is an “Argo” quote for every occasion.
In the end, I had to ask myself what I was going to give up for this relationship, and as it turns out, a whole lot. But I didn’t do it because she needed me, or I had this wild fantasy that everything was going to work out in the end. By the time I moved to Washington, we were officially done and I was freaked out at the possibility of moving with that insecure connection because I realized it was going to be hell on earth to convince someone I didn’t do something because of her. She took it so personally that she couldn’t see my point anymore, except it was the same point I’d been making for several years before I got sick. The timing of everything was just off, and I can’t help that- even more now that nine years have passed.
When I got sick, Dana’s parents didn’t move from the area, so I thought that our paths would stop being parallel, but wouldn’t go off in completely different directions. Dana could visit, not live with me, etc. But again, I quickly learned that’s not how being hit works. The longer the shock wore off, the more depressed and anxious I got.
I know for certain that to the outside world it looked like I was waiting for a woman in a situation that would never happen. This is not true. I was terrified. I could make her priority one in my head because nothing would happen. I was safe. She was the only woman in my life that I could love with wild abandon that I knew for sure wouldn’t hurt me. I just had to hang in until her anger was resolved.
In some ways, winter melted into spring, and the thaw warmed both of us. But we’ve never gone back to The Moment, either. She was never the definite article, because she has two in my mind. For every time she was The Moment, there were three times where she was The Doctor.
If you don’t know what The Moment is, I won’t make you either go back and look it up or research Doctor Who online. The Moment is a weapon that is capable of destroying entire universes, entire species, and that’s the point. He’s trying to save the universe from collapse, but in order to do it, he has to kill his own people in addition to the Dalek invasion.
Editor’s Note:
I had to look up the exact number, and Doctor Who is so popular that all I did was type “how many Gallifreyans died in The Time War?” It popped up immediately.
Eight to 10 billion Time Lords died that day, leaving The Doctor completely alone except his mirror image, The Master. There are two interesting concepts here. The first is that Supergrover is my mirror image, because we are both Timeless Children, steeped in that DNA. The second is that I have decided the “The Timeless Child” is all abused children because of what Tecteun did to The Doctor. She adopted him and ran experiments on The Doctor, which The Doctor couldn’t have recognized to due regeneration. She was a mad scientist with a willing participant because The Doctor didn’t know any better. The Doctor was regenerated all the time like a rat in a lab, ending with William Hartnell….. who unsurprisingly stole a TARDIS. I think it’s institutional memory, to be honest. Even if The Doctor didn’t recognize what was done, The Doctor still felt all the pain of an insecure environment, just like all Timeless Children do. I hope we find out as we go along why she stopped with William Hartnell. Why The Doctor ended up as his particular persona….. which as I remember, is not altogether pleasant and for good reason, as it turns out. However, with Supergrover, we are The Holy and the Moly, and we change it around often. Neither of us is coded as The Master, neither of us are pure enough to be The Doctor. But, The Doctor is not pure enough to be The Doctor, and he knows it…… felt it deeply as he wrestled with The Moment that day. Let’s not forget that thought the genocide was later rectified, he still made the choice to blow up his people. As a result, The Doctor, like all Timeless Children, is also The Master when The Doctor feels weak….. “a good man goes to war.” Luckily, “prisoner zero has escaped.”
Editor’s Note:
I switch between him, she, they, and The Doctor because it isn’t clear in canon whether The Doctor goes by “they” now or is always the definite article. The Meep cleared that up when The Meep said that The Meep always identifies as the definite article, and The Doctor says, “ya, I do that.” The reason it’s confusing is the actor who played the role when the story took place. The Doctor might be the definite article, but Matt Smith and Jodie Whitaker aren’t. Therefore, I try to remember to use the definite article or “they,” but I get lost quickly.)
To that end, I had to wrestle with The Moment. She had to walk with me through all of my decisions whether they were the worst or the best.
It’s what makes my worst decision also the best, depending on where you stand.
Before we get started today, I finally found the perfect keyboard for me. When I use it, I feel like Jason Moran (jazz pianist). The touch feels like it’s made to help me go faster. It’s kind of like having a new car, honestly. Like, there is a big difference in the feel of an accelerator on an old Toyota and a new BMW. With the brand new Bimmer, you’re going to touch the accelerator and be a quarter mile down the road. It’s nice to have a keyboard that is not in the way of being able to jump in that fast. The amount of force on the key to make a letter is almost negligible, but it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s that middle of the road touch between mechanical and laptop. If I had to name the biggest sensory issue I have in life, it’s the touch of a keyboard. I think this is because I know how important it is. I would not know that touch was important if I hadn’t lived with a pianist.
Because of my mother, I have words to express what I need out of a keyboard in the first place.
The prompt today is about pet peeves.
My biggest one is that my housemate has a maid and I don’t. I am terrible at keeping things organized, so my room is a mess and I white knuckle through the common areas because since we have a housekeeper, it is manageable. The problem is the six days a week when our housekeeper isn’t here. There are three of us, and only two of us help. Only the entitled one shares a bathroom with me, so I am constantly cleaning up after her. The way she does this is to say that because I have touched something, she cannot touch it. She comes from a culture that does not accept homosexuality and pretends that it is contagious and I am unclean. I have been laughing at her for nine years now, and it’s not funny anymore. I cannot beg her to do it, I cannot get my landlord to make her do it, because my landlord has talked to her about it also for nine years. So, if she washes her hair in the sink, it’s my problem. Has been for nine years….. because I’m gay and that makes sense to her.
Because it’s been so long, I feel trapped between “this is unacceptable” and “this is my weird little family.” There is no way I do not have empathy for someone so twisted in their world outlook that they make me treat me this way. It’s not anger. It’s pity. I look down on her because she does clean up after our guests whether she brought them or not. I say that her culture dictates homosexuality as unclean because it sounds like very Karen behavior, and she’s the furthest thing from it. I cannot see it all the way around as entitled behavior because she’s been taught since she was a little girl that I should be in jail or dead. Therefore, I can understand and be angry all at once.
Another big one is not responding to emotion with emotion. I do not ever want to hear the phrase “you should have known” ever again. I am out of the anticipation business. I cannot be the expert on how I felt and how you felt, too. Because then you’ll berate me when I haven’t anticipated correctly. You have to be strong enough to communicate your needs with me. It is only my job to become emotionally flexible enough to hear them without reacting in autistic meltdown. It is not pretty and I always regret it. Always. However, now I have new ways to learn coping mechanisms. I don’t want people to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells, the way I feel when I’m trying to guess how to make our relationship better.
My answer for this pet peeve is time. I need to hear/read what you think and walk away. Let me have time to process, because I will look at it differently if I change my environment and come back. I do not trust my first reaction. Please always remember that about me and when I say I need time, let me go. I was emotionally abused as a child. I have trauma reflexes. That means my first reaction to everything comes from that place, and I don’t want to operate that way anymore. I react with autistic meltdown because you’ve interrupted my reality so violently that my environment feels different in panic. I often react with panic because I have been corrected so much about every little thing that I feel like a dog surrounded by an electric fence in most relationships. In anxious/avoidant, the avoidant person will move the target to avoid confrontation, so you cannot please them. Meanwhile, the anxious person feels like they can’t do anything right. Every relationship I’ve ever had has been like this to some degree, because I am the common denominator.
If you have trauma reflexes, after the trauma is over you’ll gravitate toward one of those extremes, and they marry each other constantly. That’s because one of you is social masking an abuser and one of you is social masking an enabler. The younger you are when abuse occurs, the more that pattern is ingrained. The person you really are is hidden underneath those trauma reflexes, because you built them to protect the bubble an abuser creates with you. Everything about how I react as an adult is based on how I reacted as a child to hearing secrets that were too big for me. I have learned that my first instinct is to protect myself from violence. If when I express needs, I am met with violence, I will do anything to avoid saying something and I become part of the problem. So much of writing to Supergrover all those years was learning how to walk in the world in a different way.
Because she’s a boss, her thought processes got under my skin quickly. Every time she got angry at me, I made a note of how and why. It wasn’t to throw things back in her face. It was, “I’m a nobody and she’s not. What can I pick up here?” She’s also not a politician, so she could give a fuck if she wins and influences me. 😉 If she goes back and reads my blog, she will see that it’s just a collection of things she’s said in new contexts, and so many of those lines I got when she was adding new definition to furious. The reason I love her so much is that I find lines that flatten me in letters that are meant to convey annoyance, rage, whatever. I thought, “it must be love if you delight in even this.” For instance, when she said “be careful painting your feelings as fact.” I have quoted that in this blog at least 10 times because it was an image I could use and beautifully.
I wish I could get her to see that I stare at her Renoir like she stares at my Jackson Pollack. They are both beautiful in their own way. We are so magnetic when we are both painting our feelings as fact, because what is happening is that she has so much more to work with than I do. Whether she really doesn’t have time, or whether she’s avoiding writing back to feel guilty, the effect is the same. She knows more about me and can think about it than I know about her and can do the same. She has more context about my life, my mental health, my family dynamics, my entire heart and soul on the page, basically….. because when she said I could, I started using a finer brush- that I’d give her details and she’d write back.
Writing back became a pet peeve because she’d find the things she didn’t like and leave out the things she did. I didn’t like living in negative feedback, because then she started to feel like every boss I’d ever had. Assuming malice where none was meant, turning everything back around as if I’d meant to hurt her by being honest about something, and just generally dealing with the fact that she doesn’t deal in emotions and I do. I write so much about this relationship because it became a list of what’s wrong with me and why. But instead of just saying she was wrong, I dug deep into myself and figured out what was going on.
She did not. Therefore, every time we came back together after blowing each other to bits, nothing changed because she’d react in the old way and I’d regress. I got tired of feeling like she was provoking me and telling me I was the one always provoking her. I was not, I was asking her what was going on in her mind regarding where we are and where we’re going because we have shit to deal with if we’re going to create a secure attachment.
The exhaustion came from feeling as loved as I’ve ever felt and a complete dumbass depending on the day; I never knew which woman was going to show up. As a result, neither did she. It was tumultuous and extreme because we were fighting our own battles in ourselves. My way to cope is to use my blog to be Jackson Pollack. Just like an artist, I am throwing my feelings onto canvas so I can look at them from an objective third eye. Her way is to throw herself into work and pretend that our problems will go away. So, I think it’s better to be apart, because I can’t go on having issues with her that are infinitely solvable with any kind of real conversation at all…. and by that, I mean she doesn’t have to come and pick me up or anything. Just send me an e-mail with your Renoir so that I have two pieces of art in my museum. I have only been saying “I feel neglected and this isn’t okay” because I am asking for so very little. I don’t care that she can’t be available all the time, I care that when she’s here she’s present.
I need to be less reactionary, and so does she. I don’t want to end the relationship, but I also don’t want to live in highs and lows, either. It’s too disruptive to an autistic mind, craving stability and having a volatile monotropic thought process. I am not saying I never had security. I’m saying that her coping mechanism was to end the relationship every single time she was mad about something, and then we couldn’t stay away from each other. Just binge/purge for 10 years straight. If my writing had any effect at all on her, it’s that it didn’t make her fall in love with me, but it did make a future in which we were alternately mad as hell AND also craving each other’s words. What do you think it means to her to be a voracious reader and have crafted pages like mine for long haul flights? What do you think it means to me that I’m the author she reads? That bond is unbreakable, which is how I know with a 60-70% chance that she is absolutely hanging on every word here while also not saying a damn thing. Good for her, because if I can’t entertain her one way, I can entertain her another. The delivery method does not matter, and if she isn’t reading, I also don’t care. I just think her morbid curiosity is stronger than her will. 😉
I do not pretend she is dedicated because I’m writing to her. I am explaining my experiences with her, and it would devastate me to publish something just because I thought she wouldn’t hear about it. I have to consider the possibility because it would wreck me if I didn’t, because there could be repercussions for her, not me. I am trying to anticipate what will and will not be offensive to publish, working within limits. So many things here are analogies for something else that will come across to her differently than the point I’m trying to make…. and also having to be aware of that, too. How much am I entitled to my stories and how much am I just actively hurting her? She doesn’t see that it hurts me not to know, and keeps everything close to the vest.
That’s not her fault, either. That’s just the difference between us. I have something she lacks- the ability to spill my guts emotionally. She has something I don’t- the ability to protect myself emotionally by not constantly focusing on others’ needs. We are both lying to the other- she’s as much a people pleaser as I am, she just makes it look good……. and I only know because of how much she tried to please me. I regret every single time that I “made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for me,” because her feelings are valid and yet not a message I ever intended to send. How she got from “you’re the absolute love of my life and I’ll never put anyone above you again” is just beyond my comprehension, but it’s also my reality. I don’t get the right to make that reality untrue…. and she fucking knows it. That’s my anger issue.
That she cuts and runs when it’s hard, and it’s deservedly hard because it’s so fucking worth it. She does not see that’s what I’m saying. She sees it as “you’re a bad person.” I am not asking to change the nature of our relationship and make her act differently, I am saying that “this is a thing we should manage, not avoid.” Absolutely all of this is because of who she is as a person, but it’s not a dealbreaker at all. It’s that I need someone who can deal with the fallout, and she’s insistent on it not being her while also saying I shouldn’t talk to anyone else. It’s devastating to an enormous degree for both of us, because whatever she’s avoiding in me has nothing to do with me at all. I am asking for something she does not have to give. She’s 10 feet tall and bulletproof IRL while also putty in front of me, because she thinks she’s not good enough for me…. and has thought that about many other people. It didn’t start with me, and I know that.
For most people, she’d be a walking red flag. She doesn’t see that she gets to be that with me. That I’m the person who willingly said “the flag is a lie.” My feelings were deep and immediate because of it, and she’s run from it ever since.
The first fissure was treating me like I was suspect and avoiding me because I’d done something wrong….. except the story she was telling herself was fiction. It was a diversion tactic to avoid talking about the fact that she was wigged I’d told her I’d had feelings for her. I tried to be cool. I really did. But I was wigged that both she and Dana were angry at me about it, because I didn’t have a secure environment anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not in the cloud anymore.
It was a time of trial, and instead of blaming everything on others, I got the help I needed. But the problem with Supergrover never went away. Just avoid, avoid, avoid. Checking in once in a while and gifts were enough. It confused me, and she got angry if I said so. I began to walk on eggshells in a way that I don’t for anyone else anymore. I have explained both sides of the story; Dana was going down, but that didn’t not mean that Supergrover led to my decision to break up with her. I couldn’t deal with both their anger at once, and Supergrover was the more stable choice at that point. It wasn’t the whole story….. but it made cutting ties to Dana so much easier when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would benefit me.
She just got freaked that I chose to come back to Washington to do it, because she thought it meant that I was leaving Dana for her. What she did not realize was that a tiny part of it was for her, but not all of it. I could have broken ties with Dana from Houston just as easily. What I could not do is live in a city without a car. What I could not do is find impartial friends who didn’t know me from Adam…. I know my friends. I know that they love Dana every bit as much as they love me. I also knew that Dana needed them more than I did and it was easier not to give them a choice. You can keep up with me online, she needs you to jump in. Go to her.
Just because Dana was a walking red flag didn’t mean I didn’t love both of them equally. Dana just didn’t like sharing me and didn’t have a choice. Every “come to Jesus” meeting was a rehash because she treated me so differently and I never knew which Dana was going to show up, either. We all have trauma reflexes, full stop.
The entire problem was that when Supergrover pulled back, she didn’t have that choice, either. She thoughtlessly put something into my head that will affect me forever and decided she had the right to just let me cope. I don’t have the right to make her do anything, but I do have the right to be angry that she did indeed fail me in some respects, and absolutely delighted me in others. She is a spectrum, a 3D character, you might say. 😉
I loved checking in once in a while. I loved getting gifts in my e-mail. All that stuff was so rock solid. What wasn’t was all my anxiety roiling underneath, the feelings she refused to acknowledge that she had created. The feeling of “not good enough” doesn’t come from the fact that she is failing me. She is failing us. I could love her more deeply and be less reactionary with more information. I do not feel anger at her, I feel angry about my insecure attachment and environment because of it. Her conflict avoidance told me more than anything I could ask her outright, because she thought I was hysterical and overemotional…. because she doesn’t see that my approach to life is so different. She sees it as needing me to get with the program while also not explaining what the program entails. Hard to be successful when you don’t know the rules, but she doesn’t do rules, either.
Therefore, I feel like she steps all over my boundaries by withholding information, and I step all over hers for asking for it. We are at an impasse and always will be, because now it’s up to her to accept my reality. If she doesn’t, a part of me will always be angry with her, but it doesn’t mean that my love gets smaller. It only means that it will remain unresolved, and that causes feelings of injustice. An INFJ does not do well with injustice, local or global.
So, now I’m just working on the anger, and she’s not working on the anger she “doesn’t have.” She says in words that I’m just projecting. In her actions, I feel on target. That’s because she’s never vulnerable about anything. When she’s mad at me, I don’t know it. As you can see, that doesn’t cause problems at all. I didn’t walk away because I was angry. I got tired of feeling like my emotions don’t matter to her while she’s saying that’s untrue in words and deeds.
She did something enormous for me when we met, and I think in some sense I’ve come across as ungrateful because she sees me pointing out problems as throwing emotional bombs. That’s not true at all. I can handle bigger emotions than she can, so I write from that place. She reads it while being buttoned up, so it feels like an attack because she can’t receive what I actually mean. She is moving too fast and accusing me of moving too slowly. Again, the leap between a neurotypical and neurodivergent brain with the exception of both having CPTSD. It’s amazing to me how our traumas are on completely different playing fields, yet our reactions are the same, yet mirror images of each other. I forced us into a bad pattern, and it is better to walk away and lick my wounds than it is to convince her I’m right.
My emotional strength makes me care about myself in a different way than I did before……. but not entirely.
“For all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel, Summer, Highland Falls
Hers is a gift I’ll never be able to repay, because now I have the confidence to believe that if I speak, powerful people will listen because that’s what I’ve been taught. At the same time, I can’t go on with such an inflexible power structure, because the avoidant one always has it. They don’t do things wrong, you’re a problem.
All I want is reconciliation on my terms, because we’ve been on hers for so long and it’s not helping either of us. If it’s not helping either of us, I have other friends. She thinks of me as someone who points out everything wrong with her…. and in my mind, she is everything amazing about being on this planet.
I have always had a low opinion of myself, and am slowly changing it. I feel stronger now than I ever have, because acknowledging that I’m autistic allowed me to feel like a real person instead of an alien. When I think of the ways my mother tried to hide from me that I was physically disabled, it feels similar. I didn’t stop experiencing symptoms of CP when I didn’t know I had it, I just felt lazy and incompetent because everyone told me I was fully capable and just needed to work harder. Those people were absolutely wrong, and I had no way of correcting them.
There were a lot of background conversations over me that had nothing to do with me- yet affected the course of my life. My mom thought it was more important for me to feel absolutely normal….. and so did my dad. They just did not agree on methodology to reach that conclusion. My dad thought it was important for me to know I had limitations. My mother thought that telling me about them would just make me feel more different, more fucked up, etc. They both had valid points of view, it’s just that my mother was objectively, devastatingly wrong. I can listen to a thing without agreeing with it. Her feelings were valid. Her choice was still awful.
Every single time my dad brought up the fact that I wasn’t like other kids and needed help, she immediately started minimizing it. She told me that my dad had a penchant for hyperbole, and it was a gaslighting operation that lasted years. It affected my opinion of myself because I constantly treated myself as if nothing was wrong with me, I was just stupid…… because my mom wanted me to believe that I was “more physically capable than I really was.” In retrospect, I think that is untrue. I think my dad understood the assignment.
He understood that if your child got a diagnosis like that, you now have a different child and not because they’re a different person. You gain a different library of images as to what will make your child successful, because trying to fit them into the society we’ve already created will beat them into a bloody pulp……. daily.
It was impossible for me, monkey in the middle, to see through either of them in any kind of objective way. Even my eye problems are connected to CP. I have what’s called an “alternating isotropia.” That means both of my eyes are capable of strabismus (turning), it depends on which field of vision my brain has picked to use in that moment. Am I right or left-eye dominant?
Over time, I have become more and more dependent on my right eye because as my left has deteriorated, my brain is smart enough to use it consistently. As a child, when both eyes were strong, I wrote a book every day on why stereopsis is absolutely necessary.
I do not have what’s known as “course stereopsis” or “fine stereopsis.” This means that I have neither the feeling that I am immersed in my environment, nor the ability to tell spatially where things are. A good example is not being able to judge the riser on a staircase, tripping up or down on the trades. Most of the time, I fall going up because I have not lifted my foot high enough from one trade to the other…. I am not clumsy because I didn’t see the step at all. I am clumsy because I saw it and I could not judge the distance correctly.
The worst time this has ever occurred was on the concrete steps in front of my elementary school. We’d just gotten back from a football game, and it was late. Because of my physical disabilities, my social masks for it make me more tired, more quickly than I realize. I’ll get into show mode and ignore myself. As my exhaustion sets in, mistakes are made. I do not have depth perception or angle of convergence. Walking in an unfamiliar environment takes four times the energy that it does for someone without these difficulties because I have to anticipate everything….. and I’m auDHD. We as a people are not known for planning ahead. I basically broke my whole face.
In short, as a cook my brain is my most valuable feature. I can put together flavor combinations faster than I can plate….. for most people, plating is the easiest thing in the kitchen. For me, it’s the hardest because my plate is always going to look slightly off until I white knuckle through it. It’s not that I am trying to be difficult. I have to do everything by how it feels because my brain is not just all of the sudden going to start using my eyes correctly.
I was today years old when I learned that it was all connected physically. We can leave auDHD out of it for a second. I thought that my lack of 3D vision was from medical malpractice, and I don’t believe I’m entirely wrong on that one. What I do believe is that there is an equal chance that a doctor made a mistake in the delivery room as there is “I got CP, and lack of stereopsis is a symptom of it. Seriously. I was born with it. I’m 46. Today years old.
The reason it’s impossible to tell is that I haven’t had a neurological workup since I was 18 months old. Hypotonia doesn’t generally get worse, but is chronically misdiagnosed from one to the other. It would be interesting if I found the key to unlocking me completely at random……. just like I stumbled into autism.
I couldn’t judge the difference between a neurotypical brain and a neurodivergent one, either. This is because I did not do the research on ADHD that I should’ve when I was diagnosed. I went to the doctor. I got medication. It worked. End of story……. or is it?
No, there was so much more. There was social perception of the neurodivergent brain (childish). I can tell you for sure this is not true. We show up at the office with the best of intentions and work so much harder for a lesser result. I get it. Doesn’t make it suck less.
Neurotypicals, we don’t want to work for you. We really don’t. It affects our self-esteem a ridiculous amount. Every meeting with the boss means immediate termination, because the boss only comes to your desk when you are a straight-up problem for them. I get it. We are a problem for you. No doubt. But is it really better for your neurodivergent employees to fucking beat the shit out of themselves every single day? Is it worth it to you, as a boss, to have employees that fear you to that degree? We live in our failures because you make us.
The vice president of Alert Logic, in his letter to me that won me the second Rock Star award in six months, said that “if every Alert Logic employee was like Leslie, we’d have a much better company.” I was fired six months later because I couldn’t write things down while I talked. Here is what I know to be true. The vice president wouldn’t have fired me. Middle management got frustrated and gave up.
It wasn’t a problem that I got fired. That tiny piece paled in comparison to the fallout, because I wasn’t just supporting myself. I was supporting Dana as well, because she hadn’t found a job yet (another huge red flag). We had no income coming in at all, and I was blamed heavily for it instead of Dana saying, “you know what? I should get a job.” She did after I got fired, of course, but she didn’t do a damn thing to help me in terms of money or finding her own support system while I was at work. The reason I didn’t find it problematic at first is because I got the “perfect job for me” and I made plenty of money to give her whatever kind of life she wanted. She just didn’t go out and grab it, staying home to support me instead.
I will never be able to repay that gift, because she did indeed help me. It just didn’t work out in the long run. I am not berating her for her decisions, just telling you how they affected me. In some ways, I got everything I ever wanted. In some ways, it was the beginning of the end….. mostly due to Dana’s DUI. That’s conjecture, but even if it’s bullshit, it’s my perception.
Dana’s self-esteem went to shit before we ever moved to Houston because she felt so humiliated and guilty. Therefore, her depression got worse as I got stronger. What I know is that if I had been the one who’d been arrested, Dana would have reacted the same way I did…. out of her mind trying to get to me and supportive the whole way through. But when you’re fighting your own battle, you often don’t see your squire, the one who is tasked with and vetted to help you. It’s not like I didn’t know what contract I was signing. I just never in a million years realized how fast it was going to devolve into a manic rambling spiral….. for me.
Dana is not bipolar (as far as I know). Therefore, only I was ever cycling up. Dana just had to wallow because she was physically incapable of not. I mean, what would you do in that situation? Wouldn’t it make you feel worthless? I can’t imagine, but I’ve had so many friends go through it.
If you think I’m crazy to want to marry Daniel after what I went through with Dana, here’s the difference. Daniel made the commitment to himself (and therefore me and Cora) to get sober and stay that way. His alcoholism had gotten to the point where it was untenable, so he knew that it was “get better or die” time. That he had the impetus on his own to say “enough is enough. I’m done.”
It often takes hitting a truly hard rock bottom to see how you don’t need to be temporarily done anymore. I also don’t know the recidivism rate on DUI… whether I was right in believing that Dana was absolutely going to be arrested again because the first time didn’t change her behavior. I got to the point where I thought, “even if I’m wrong and this never happens again, I cannot trust that it won’t.” In retrospect, I was not having an emotional affair because I needed it for the present. I needed it to give me strength for the future.
I couldn’t think about cheating. I could only lay it out in front of Dana and say, “this is what is happening to me. It’s a new relationship energy that’s swallowing me whole because it’s so bright and happy.” What I did not say is “you’re going down and I don’t want to go with you.” In short, the plan was just to be honest and work my way through it. As Supergrover and I became closer, the hard outs alienated Dana. It was a Supermess.
Supergrover and I absolutely deserved a space of our own because of the hard out, and couldn’t get it because Dana was convinced that Supergrover would read my writing and feel touched by an angel or some shit. Though that’s not what happened at all, I appreciate Dana’s confidence in my ability.
Or as I told Supergrover, “I never railed that you were straight, dear heart. It’s that I thought you might be Cynthia Nixon and in effect, you’re not because I’m not that good a writer.” Yes, because that’s how sexual orientation works….. because it doesn’t right up until people like Cynthia say “uh-oh. What is this?” So, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility in my mind…. and it wasn’t real, either. I believed her, truly. I was wrong. That didn’t make my thoughts wrong, just wrong for her.
It was honestly a relief to learn about Michael, because when said feelings occurred, she presented to me as a single mom for months. I thought of her in a completely different way because that’s how she told me to think of her. She wasn’t wrong not to tell me. I should have done a lot of things differently and I feel solid about that. What I did know is that if I was ridiculously worried about her all the time, he made me stop.
If you knew the whole story, it would not be a surprise to you how I got from “Supergrover needs someone like me” to Supergrover needs me” so goddamn fast- and how, in some ways- learning about Michael’s existence felt too late to do any good for me, because I was so wrecked…. and not because she rejected me. It was all my own shit to get rid of, and I did. I went from wanting to be the partner to being happy to be the virtual guard dog.
It was my job to feel protective of her, and I most certainly did. Godzilla has nothing on me, and neither does Lloyd Dobbler. If I thought it would do any good at all, I would play fuckin’ Peter Gabriel.
Months ago, maybe October, I laid it all out there for her. My entire thought process from beginning to end, why I felt so close to her even if she didn’t feel close to me. That this is how much I love you and want to help. All I got back was “don’t think your psychoanalysis is correct.” Fuck me running. I can’t win with this woman and I am tired. I have done everything she’s asked for jack shit in return, so I finally got the message to move on. She stomped all over my heart and it had nothing to do with romance.
Fatality.
This is all due, I believe, to auDHD. She cannot understand why I sound rude and demanding even though I’m the most tenderheart bear she’s ever met. Why my love letter came across as “psychoanalysis” and not “I will sit with you even when you need to be silent.” I know from experience that she is also walking around town with a third degree burn on her face. I only wanted to be Neosporin to help the scars heal.
I cannot undo anything that happened to her. I really can’t. But what I can do is receive her. Listen to her. But, of course when she said she was too overwhelmed yet again, after five years, I realized that it wasn’t all time commitments and I was pouring more energy into her than she really wanted, even if she couldn’t just stop being nice and tell me that.
I need to hear things flat out, and I can give what I require. All of my personality is designed for helping others, but you have to see past the wrapping paper. I am not here to be nice, I am here to be kind. I won’t just let anyone struggle.
What I know for sure is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s a little kid or the president of the United States….. I will not stand by. That’s because we’re all misfits on the edge of society. There’s so much less “normal” out there than people think.
Therefore, my most favorite people are the outcasts……. there are so many more of us than will ever visit the “in-crowd…..” because we’ll be barred from it eventually, anyway….. even after two Rock Star awards.
God bless the outcasts, which, as it turns out, means “God bless the whole world.”
Hillary Clinton was going to be the first female president of the United States right up until she wasn’t. We didn’t think the world would completely shut down right up until it did. Both of those things have American historical precedent, but the Spanish Flu was so long ago that we’d forgotten nature could do that. So, two things. The first is that my predictions may or may not be accurate. The second is that the future depends on my pattern recognition of what has happened in my past. It is only by acknowledging it that I’ve gained the strength to move on. I sat in pain because I didn’t recognize the source…….. until I started writing consistently enough that when I’m dealing with a present problem I could think about ones like it in the past and see what I did then.
I get to decide whether what I did then would still serve me now. Most of the time, it doesn’t, and that’s the helpful part. When you can see the consequences of your actions, you don’t just have a theory on how future events could spiral out. You have evidence. Writing a journal like this would help me if I published it or not. Privately, it would serve me just as well. Publicly, it is something I do well because I have an ability to communicate= when I am not completely overwhelmed by social masking.
Social masking is the process of learning how neurotypical people do things, and you learn this whether you have autism, ADHD, or childhood PTSD. I have all three, but my PTSD is not on the level of someone who has been sexually abused or in a theater of war. It’s just that all PTSD reactions are similar, the difference is in degrees.
The longer you have normal reactions before the abuse occurs, the more time you’ll have banked with them so that your personality will integrate easier after the abuse is over (it still takes extensive therapy, though). For instance, being sexually abused is horrible for children and teenagers. Horrible. There is no competitive suffering. I’m talking about the number of years of heuristics based on normal human responses in growth and development vs. feeling like a four year old combat vet. Your entire personality, according to Erik Erickson, is set by the time you’re six years old. The younger you are, the more trauma reflexes are deeply ingrained because they were put there before the concrete hardened.
I have learned this through love, and a whole lot of it. My first wife’s childhood babysitter talked her brother into molesting her in front of him when she was a little girl. The person I considered my best friend in middle school and the character I call Supergrover both went through similar malicious events, though not exactly. The only problem is that the person I considered to be my best friend in middle school was actually an adult who, knowingly or not, passed her reflexes onto me. Trying to be a loving friend, I gave too much of myself away so that I developed that split personality as well. We are both singers used to crowds and both hiding a lot in private. The difference is that I am aware that I have huge flaws and failures and do something about them. She knew everything was wrong and it was okay with her.
She was a narcissist of the first order, the adult that needed a parent because she inverted that dynamic almost immediately. Consciously or unconsciously, she knew I was an easy target. I bought it hook, line, and sinker. She wasn’t using me, she was a hurt bird with a broken wing and I was helping her. Why would I think that I needed to be a serious support system for a 25 year old when I was 14? Why would I think I had the power to be a support system with all my vast library of life history?
I reacted to Supergrover with that whole “hurt bird” schtick because she did the same thing to me- but I don’t mean this in a negative way. I mean that she was the one who realized my wings were broken and she didn’t see herself as the only one who needed to be hugged and kissed back together. So much of my love of and for her is based on that one idea. The power dynamic of my childhood was erased once that particular wound healed. My reactions later were based on having done something wrong and inducing the pattern again so that my reactions were regressing. The power dynamic is around us, not within us.
I learned that predicting the future is not being able to control how other people react to me, but being able to recognize when my behavior says I am trying to ruin something because that’s how I feel comfortable. I have been so far unwilling to live without the push/pull of tainted love (cue the music).
Being able to recognize that pattern is what allows me to keep all my relationships in balance. I am responsible for cleaning up my own damage, and noticing when other people don’t clean up theirs. I sit in judgment of their actions, not of their character. I believe there is good in everyone, they just don’t always take the time to find it. I often stay far too long in relationships because I am an Idealist and focus on who the person could be instead of who they are.
I don’t exactly know how to stop that because first of all, it’s a feature, not a bug. The INFJ personality type is all about dragging people kicking and screaming toward utopia…….. yet, there is an underside. The trap of that Meyers-Briggs type is not being able to wipe the dirt off your sandals because your empathy is taking over common sense. You start justifying every behavior and allow yourself to be treated poorly because they’re going to stop. You have seen it in your ideal world and are ignoring the real one at your peril. That’s because in the real world, if you called them on their behavior, they’d change to respect your boundaries…… but they don’t and you have time blindness to it because your idealism says you should…. and this is even before we start talking about echo chambers and how your self esteem plays into it.
There is a thing as forgiving someone not seven times, but seven times seven. There is also no shame in trying to stop hammering away at something because it was so wonderful in the beginning and paradise lost.
In three years, I would like to find it again by being able to communicate naturally for an autistic person; I can handle the extreme emotions that come with both it and ADHD (I have classic female ADD, but the DSM doesn’t differentiate anymore. I am also just plain autistic because Asperger’s is not a thing.). I’ve known I was ADHD since I was a child, but I did not know that ADHD and Autism are inextricably interrelated in a ton of cases- they can be two separate diagnoses, but often aren’t.
The reason it’s hard to uncover the Autism/ADHD personality is that the two processing disorders make you exhibit some behaviors that are similar and some that are wildly different. That balance makes you look neurotypical. I am also capable of social masking, which is what we’re talking about when you see those dramatic meltdowns on “The Good Doctor.” Some autistic people can social mask, but that level of distress is happening internally and we have to pretend to be fine.
I also need to learn how to handle autistic burnout, which is a lot like neurotypical burnout but goes quite a bit deeper. Social masking is exhausting and it takes a hundred times more energy for neurodivergent people to leave the house because of it. If you’ve ever seen an autistic meltdown, imagine the strength it takes to tamp down that kind of reaction. We are told all the time that we are wrong and bad, and don’t worry. We believe it.
That being said, if there’s anything that I hope can be accomplished in three years, it’s feeling less of that by loving me more.
Let’s first get the fantasy out of the way. I could try living without depression. If only there was a medication that could do that…. even when medication works, it’s a Band-Aid, not a cure. If you thought I was weird before I was on medication, trust me, the medication didn’t touch any of that. Still lost in a world of my own making, which has been very dark and I’m trying to find my way out.
It’s been 10 years, and I’m starting to wonder when I’ll be able to wake up in the middle of the night without reaching for Supergrover. I don’t wish she was mine in those moments. If it’s that time of night, she’s there to calm a fear or kiss an emotional boo-boo. For the last 10 years, I’ve tried to tell Supergrover that. I’ve tried to tell her she represents safety and security in my dreams, the one who’s always bailing me out because if I fall I land on her cape. She thinks I’m trying to make her feel bad, and I know why but I do not accept it as valid. Her feelings as to why I’m trying to make her feel bad are based on something she told me, something I love but that she thinks I hate and must need to berate her about it.
I wish I could try asking her flat out, “why do you think I’m trying to guilt you and make you feel bad that you can’t be my partner? The reason I ask is that I feel like I’m trying to tell you I feel safe and you’re mad about it.” I have a working understanding of basic biology. To hold something like that over my beautiful girl’s head would be the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever done in the history of the universe, and I have never done it. What I have done is told her why I thought what I thought every step of the way. I was talking to her to have empathy, not to encourage. I asked her, “surely you’ve spent more time getting over someone than you wanted?” She agreed, but now it’s eight or nine years later and she still thinks I am trying to make her feel guilty for something I was never trying to guilt her over in the first place.
The fact that she even feels bad that she can’t be my partner is touching to an enormous degree, because I wonder what it is she actually liked about that picture to even inspire feeling bad. What would make her feel guilty she couldn’t do it? Her letters read as bittersweet and they made me cry because of it. The picture of us together wasn’t being intimate romantically, clearly, but I do think she saw the dogs, books, and witty banter thing pretty clear. When we’re together, it’s like having a steady stream of memes to your inbox except we’re just that funny so there aren’t pictures.
Of course, she was already dating Michael at this point and had been for a long time (without my knowledge- this was early- so it might have just been her fixer/pleaser nature bucking at not pleasing me. But at the same time, I hope she does know that my heart was in the right place even when I didn’t show it. I am far less reactionary when I’m not being trolled on the Internet, and I can say the same for our mutual friend.
It changed the whole way I do relationships on multiple levels. The first is that unless my partner is military and just wants to, I won’t get married again. That’s because I know within myself from being queer that I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me who to love. If I married someone, it’s because the legal benefits outweighed staying single, particularly with dating someone military. Being a dependent is a whole other thing.
But what I know from being queer is that you don’t have to get married for love. It’s not because I’m throwing a shit fit over tradition. It’s that marriage was never a part of my childhood, teenage years, or early adulthood. I could look in on it, I could not envision it because I am a Weird Barbie. I also know that all my readers know that Zac is military, so I feel like I should say that dating him is not about trying to convince him we should. I don’t have a “game” here except having the closeness of romance without the obligations of romance, which seem bigger at 46 than they did at 24. So, if you are looking for an eventual wedding invite, you’re not getting one. Die mad about it.
My next partner will get a completely different version of me than anyone has ever seen, because I’ve grown past Sam and she’s the only one who saw the previous model. But they’ll get a different model because I’ve already met the most important person in my life. It’s unfortunate that the most important and the biggest romance are not the same person, but I hope each will learn to roll in their own time. For Supergrover, that might mean roaring in someone’s face or it may mean we’re done. But what I’ve noticed is that she says “I vowed not to respond to your e-mails or blog posts” a lot…… and it jump starts my heart in all the right ways. She is reading. She is absorbing. She is getting something out of it.
I wish I could try hugging her for the first time. I think it would solve a hell of a lot. It would make our relationship look so much different to find the way we fit against each other in a hug, because it says everything about how much we trust each other. You can totally tell distance between people because guys don’t generally want to hug at all. If they do when they meet, they are generally either trauma bonded or actual siblings. for instance, I have noticed that combat vets hug each other more than most, and I am blessed to know enough combat vets to say that. I hate that they got their personalities through such intense pressure and pain, but trauma makes all of us who we are. I understand them and they understand me because PTSD looks the same in all people, no matter whether you were emotionally abused, raped, or kidnapped (as an adult or child). Physical and emotional pain set up the same way. Your emotional fibromyalgia starts with a reality break in all cases.
For me, the reality was raising my mom, because my biological mom didn’t want to and my emotional abuser was a fucking mess who couldn’t get it together until she did. I walked on eggshells around her all the time, which means I have the same reflexes as a combat vet now. Where we differ is in degrees. But it’s all the same shit. No matter what happened in childhood (including combat here because 18 is only an adult in theory), it will be measurable with the same llst of symptoms. Believe it or don’t, it feels just like being autistic or having ADHD. You are wakling around with a third degree burn on your face and acting like it’s not there……. until you doo the work and realize how relentless the burn is and try to turn it down. The severity of your emotional injury depends on the length of time it takes to get your reaction times and behaviors back to whatever your new version of normal might be.
My thing about Supergrover is this type of work is what we set ourselves up for. The emotional affair we were having was completely on the up and up except when I decided to ruin it for all sorts of reasons. The first time it happened, it was because I couldn’t get rid of her internally. She was my every waking thought because she couldn’t not be. Supergrover didn’t plan that part of it, because she didn’t know anything about me as a writer. My process as opposed to what’s published. All this time, she’s read my e-mails and blog posts and thought she knew me. She does, deeply, to the point where if it had been an arranged marriage, we would have figured it out eventually because the rest was too good……… the same way it is now when it’s an arranged marriage of an entirely different nature. No one should attach seduction or it being sordid in any way….. I crave her because now I’m not naturally designed not to. It’s a trauma bond, like you’d have with someone in your foxhole.
What is it that Diana Gabaldon says about secrets? I can’t remember the whole thing, but it was basically about Claire knowing Jamie doesn’t cheat on her. That when he’s with John (or whomever, I can’t recall), secrecy deserves respect. That if something was up, Jamie would just tell her. The same is true of me and Supergrover. The difference now is that she believes I believe she could suddenly be touched by an angel and change her mind about Michael; it makes her terrified to open up to me anymore, and I let her get away with that for far too long. It was not a friendship anymore and I couldn’t break the addiction. I could say the same for her.
I could try trusting her for the first time. I fell in love with every inch of her because she told me the truth, always, even when I didn’t like it. She stood up to my bullshit and I finally felt like I’d met my match intellectually. She could go as hard and as long as I wanted with argument and rhetoric. She always had her p and q statements in a row. We were never merely contrary unless we were just trying to act like eight year olds, which she will absolutely cop to- in retrospect, it was childish, and a war that never should have happened on either side of the equation. I wasn’t stalking her. We were both trolling the hell out of each other, trying to find hot buttons we could use and which ones should be on speed dial. Which ones were just enough below the belt to inspire fear.
Hers were just better, and I folded first. I wanted her to see that she wasn’t so tough because she was treating me like she was. We both called each other’s bluff, the moment I realized she’d have to be my primary partner now (from my perspective- she could share. I can’t.). That she’s hot shit, and therefore a relationship with her hits different and she’s blissfully unaware of that fact. She ended me for a while because I had to figure out what to do. I was in charge of something I never asked for and also wanted. I have only wanted to dive into her to the level she wants me there. And now I’m there to the point where I’ll never get out. Think about how much Peppa the Pig has changed the entire speech pattern of a generation of children. This is us, and i hope that I am as talented as Peppa the Pig.
It would please me if she told the author of Peppa Pig that, and it is not a sure bet she doesn’t know them. It is not a sure bet she doesn’t know anyone. That’s because in terms of gait and manner she’s kind of like Olivia from Scandal or SVU, take your pick. I like the image of Olivia becauuse Supergrover showed up like my white knight and that was Shonda’s vision for Olivia. Why she wears white all the time. Supergrover looks beautiful in white, and she also wears it all the time.
She’s also the whitest person I know despite not actually being white.
I don’t crave the sameness of her life, but the difference she makes in mine. For her, every day is the same. Just normal, everyday, suburban crap. And then she gets to work but when the shit hits her fan, it also hits different. My life feeds hers and vice versa because we’re too different for direct comparison until you get to how much information our minds are capable of processing at once and the capability for Large Discussions is unbeatable. We can talk like Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earheart instead of The Trailer Park Boys….. and given that we both grew up in similar situations, not a turn our lives wouldn’t have taken had we each been looking for it.
I have been doing things for the first time for 10 years just through the nature of the path my life has taken. One of her firsts is only having enough time to get to know a tiny fraction of me, so she’s missing out on all the emotional intimacy I have to offer and trading it for a mistake I made so long ago that it should have been forgotten by now. I am not chiding her for holding onto it. Her right. Her perogative. But not her perogative how long I stay when she forgives me on the surface and makes it where we don’t have any firsts to share.
I just lost paragraphs and paragraphs of this essay because WordPress screwed me, including the part where I said this was an expose on what it’s like to live that life of bipolar depression, not an indictment of my situation right now. My answer is that I, like all bipolar patients, struggle with life feeling like a series of moments where you’re putting off killing yourself… and that Supergrover was the thing that helped me keep all of that in perspective. That there are bigger things than me at work, a chessboard I’d never see with other factors at play, and a face I’d never forget because she’s “hell on wheels in a black dress.” She lost that beloved position in my life because she couldn’t commit and I was exhausted. Doesn’t mean I currently love her any less. I’m just sad. But full of hope because I am so much more than I thought I was. That’s due to her covering my ass. She’s not getting that I need her to own the fact that it’s difficult saving hers while also being a writer who publicly examines her life and her deciding that she wants to tap out is problematic and is absolutely contrary to the Mama Wolverine she said she was. Not interacting doesn’t take away my need to dive into the wreck, and it’s dangerous on many levels because I understand her better than most people and not because I’m a diagnostician. I am holding more cards. Again, it would have been so much more clear if I hadn’t lost the lead. Literally.
What you see is what you get. My situation is dire, and the reason I go on busting Supergrover up is that the dire part is completely and totally her fault. She cannot escape that fact, and doesn’t think she owes me anything when I agreed to help her carry her bag of shit. I’m not so much married to her as married to it. And she knows it. But it’s my behavior and not what triggered it until she comes back and says she’s been licking her wounds. It touches me that she thinks about me while she’s away. That what I say does resonate with her. That my words may be used in situations that matter. That I am actively building up someone who really, really needs it. That I pray to God all the peace that’s running through our chord is with her in the darkest moments of her life, because they are darker than mine. Her life feeds mine and is part of what puts off killing myself because I spent so many years loving her more than me. My first instinct is to protect her, and she knows it.
Thinkinng I was stalking her was over the line, Smokey. Mark it zero.
I can respect her thinking it and I don’t punish her for it. I really don’t. I punish her for not talking to me about it and telling the one person who hated my guts at that moment……… the wife who was tired of my crap and used that information to great effect. She ended my marriage with it and thought nothing of it. Me breaking up with Dana didn’t involve her actuallly believing that I was stalking someone. It ended because she wanted to break up and needed information she could hold over my head, and that’s what she picked because those closest to us know our biggest vulnerabilities. She hit below the belt for YEARS on this one issue when it was completely fucked up for her to think I would ever walk away from Supergrover. Ever. And she knows it and she supported it. So, instead of working with me, she got tired of my crap and used every bit of information Supergrover gave her to berate all my opinions and bully me for something that she knew wasn’t my fault. I wasn’t the actor. I was the responder. And she knew it.
Supergrover didn’t leave me even in my darkest hours. The complete darkest. She, like Dana’s alcoholism (which I will state exactly that way because I’m describing her behavior in retrospect, not what I believed in the moment.), according to Homer Simpson, was “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” Dana’s alcoholism made her alternate between funny and scary. I could say the same about Supergrover all day every day and twice on Sunday, because her words at the beginning of our relationship affected the way I viewed her and she didn’t correct any of my assumptions. In my mind, her little girl decisions on how to cope with consistent out of body experiences made her who she is. She is 12 feet tall and bullet proof and when she’s angry she has no problem lettiing you know that. Our power imbalance causes me great anxiety whether we’re getting along or not, because I am reading between the lines on a lot of shit. She doesn’t have time for me and now that she’s said it, I’m out. But I still see her face is everything I do because she made it where I can’t not.
I can’t afford it, and neither can she.
I spend time with her character because she won’t talk about our issues with me. She takes all her feelings about me and tells someone else, then finally, finallly, after eight years broke it down and said she could do nothing for me. It felt like a bullet to the chest because I’d given up so much for her already without her even having to ask. I had to do those things to protect myself as much as her. Anticipating her needs was so easy right up until it wasn’t.
Seriously, when we’re working on all cylinders, it feels like flying over the mountains. The best audition you ever had. Hitting a high C perfectly in a concert. Knowing powerful, powerful writers I don’t. Knowing that if I’d moved here when we were at our best, I would have been welcomed with open arms because she didn’t constantly think of me as a low-key threat and I didn’t think of her that way, either. She might have even picked me up from the airport back in those days. I know she would have picked me up at her old Metro stop… at the very least, she would send someone else to do that. She’s very good at that, and I mean that so very lovingly and not in a snarky way at all.
But there were things that gutted me. Like moving and not giving me her address so I could surprise her once in a while. The last things that were meaningful to both of us were a bracelet with her favorite cause on it (and it’s now fairly ironic) and a pen that was meant to be a gag. It was her present, but I lit up like I was Santa Claus himself. I also just thought of a joke about her that she would love and now I’m laughing very hard and sad I can’t tell it. Too close to the hard out. But anyway, since I knew those things were big hits, as well as some books in case she wanted to change careers that I thought would be helpful (these were all different Christmas and birthday presents on different years, I’m not a baller trying to win her like a carnival prize). There is one way that I am more precious to her than her husband and always will be, and not because she kept anything from him. It was that she told me before she told him, so she remembers that, not that she didn’t want him to know.
Because Michael and I are the only ones who know all her secrets at once, it’s why I need him more than I’m jealous. I know they control every bit of her behavior and I know that if I’m struggling, so is he and I will not apologize for that statement. She is a queen and she needs to be told that every single day and not because I don’t want her to have it. I really believe that shit. If you believe nothing else I tell you, believe THAT. She has released so much dragon fire for me while also accepting a hell of a lot. Doesn’t seem to give a fuck that I’m in love ith this character every bit as much as I love her in real life. Is, I hope, secretly proud of the little bubble I’ve made for us in this corner of the Internet while also respecting her privacy.
It’s a lot, but it keeps me from putting off the things I love the most about life. It gives me a different perspective, one that’s bigger than I used to have. I realized that from the very beginning, my hunger for her was always about knowledge, not that particular kind of intimacy. It’s why the idea attracted and repelled me for far longer than it should have, and it was my own choice to be miserable over it…. but again, the way she laid everything out anyone would have. She knew how I felt from the very beginning. That what she did turned me on because it felt like she had shown up like fucking Richard Gere while I was in the middle of a tumultuous relationship. It was a hardcore disaster, but a bomb I needed to wrestle with like The Moment. I decided that especially in retrospect, but even in the moment, I knew I was making the right decison. The bomb was going to go off, and it was going to be hell on earth, but I’d be able to escape domestic violence and alcoholism if I left right the fuck now.
Supergrover has changed her mind many times over whether she wants to respond or not, and it kills me when she vacillates between Mama Wolverine and I don’t even want to tell you how I feel.
But that push pull is exactly what I need to keep the mystery of faith……..
Once you hear the emergency brakes, you’re likely to hear them again.
I do not call her a character like The Doctor in real life. I call her a character here because it’s just an outline of who she is, not the complete picture. You can’t ever know that because there’s so much I can’t include. So much she’s seen that I haven’t that I can’t talk about. So many things about her life that affect me, but I can’t hold onto her as tight as I can for once in our lives. It would help me a lot to know she’s real at this point. Or, as I told her a hundred years ago, “besides. Can I really make a decision like whether I’m in love with you or not if I haven’t seen your rack? What kind of idiot do you take me for, woman?” Then, she punched me in the metaphorical balls with the answer and I told her to fuck off. Now I’m laughing so hard I might fall off the couch. Grasshopper will never in her lifetime reach satori compared to that. Or, at least if I have, I wouldn’t know it. I hate it that she’s funnier than me. She needs to tone it down. 😉
Learning what I’ve learned over the years has been the 10 years I’ve needed that the first therapist I told all this to said I’d need to get over it. That’s because the trauma started years before I met Supergrover and she was the one who told me her secrets in hopes of understanding my own. It’s what makes us two peas in a pod, and our relationship goes better for both of us when she recognizes it. By now, again, it’s not getting any better because instead of talking through the situaton, she’s avoiding it. What I have not thought until having months to think about it is that our relationship is crazygonuts because we haven’t met in real life. I have been perfectly happy with not meeting before now, and will be. Our relationship is not dependent on it, and wouldn’t need to be. I just believe we will continue the same pattern until we make the commitment to each other to break it, and I can’t think of anything faster than realizing the other actually exists in a way we haven’t experienced before. We get angry and troll the hell out of each other in a way we couldn’t do in person. It’s the shortest way to make us stop regressing.
I’m proud of myself for recognizing what I needed and stepping away, because I really can’t handle Supergrover’s life without being able to understand it from her perspective. I also can’t stop living vicariously through her because I need to know what the boundaries are on the hard out before I start writing that day. She talks around everything and I Socratic Method everything until I figure it out on my own. It’s exhausting, and figuring out how to pray for her and love her from a distance is so much easier than working without a net.
I just can’t stop caring that I might identify her, so I feel the weight she put on our relationship in a deep and meaningful way that I’d rather share with her than carry alone. It would feel different after a walk on The Mall, and it’s what calms my internal rage. That whether it was romantic or platonic, all of my dreams where we share a glass of wine or a meal have been picnics in the sunshine. Walking around a pond feeding ducks. Now we can do that in my dreams, but I have no need to wine her and dine her even in lucid dreaming because it’s just not worth it to dwell, even in dreams. Nothing is going to change, so why bother? I am proud that even when I hit the sleep stage where I’m so crazy I don’t remember my own name, I don’t go there.
We walk on the beach as if we’ve been doing it our whole lives, and I want to be there for the rest of it. It’s what saves me from living my life as a miserable bipolar patient staving off the inevitable. When we’re together, I feel like I could do anything. No one has ever given me those feelings in such a unique was so that they were instantly believable and objective in fact.
What I have been putting off is laying out these feelings in front of her. That I’m as married to her as Michael will ever be, and those conversations in the sunshine are more than gold to me, even when I’m making them up. And I know they’re made up, because they’re the out of body experiences that help me deal with my real life…. complicated, wild, and wonderful because I once fell in love with a girl, standing in front of a girl, asking to be a fan because she thought I was a great writer. I wish I could bottle that feeling and use it as hair product.
It stops everything I used to want to stop putting off, which makes me feel safe in a way I’ve never felt before. I sleep better because this love became mine, completely by chance and no less wild and wonderful than the ups and downs of a decade in which we’d seen each other every day.
But if we’d seen each other every day, we wouldn’t have this, either. The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems…… according to Homer Simpson.
What would you do if you lost all your possessions?
My house, the United Methodist parsonage in Naples, Texas, burned down to the ground on December 20, 1990.
It was a child’s Christmas in wails. Presents were given that year that would have been cool had they not been distorted by smoke or water damage, and I only know that looking back. Alternatively, we got presents that we knew were collected five minutes ago, and knew enough to be grateful because we had an awareness that of course no one has our lists anymore. Lindsay and I were grateful for any normalcy at all. The the first few hours, I internalized absolutely everything because I was the only one home. My parents and sister weren’t there. So, I did what I always did in that situation. I became a very tiny hostess to the fire department….. so sorry I was inconveniencing them. There were church members in my neighborhood that were all flocking to the middle of the street and I just started doing everything through an out of body experience. Too much pain to stay connected. In order to emote where people could understand me, I had to put my feelings away. My trauma reflexes do not all come from emotional abuse as a teen, but those reflexes were built on someone who’d already developed those reflexes independently.
I learn a lot about trauma using myself as a case study, because I’m looking back far enough into the past that I write like I’m someone else’s little girl. It’s a lot easier to parent yourself when you see yourself now as a different person…… because when you do all the work, you realize that you are indeed the same person and uncovering all your trauma allows you to reclaim the childlike parts of yourself that were stolen. I also use myself as a case study because even if I had an MD and a PhD, I would still never be as sure about someone else’s history as I am about my own. Patients lie, and about the stupidest shit because they think doctors are judgmental (they’re not, and you have no idea what you’re doing when you leave something out, capiche?). Doctors are, for the most part, judgmental like our last letter in Myers-Briggs is J, not judgmental like an asshole. A doctor is just as much of a geek as a computer programmer. Don’t hold back the tools that let them “if, then.” My dad was a pastor and my grandmother worked in a blood lab. I’ve been steeped in the languages of ministry and medicine since I was born, so it’s entirely possible for me to lose my shit and be completely fine in the same exact moment.
My computer had melted into my desk. My hangers had melted onto and into my clothes. When it all started, I’d been the only one home in my pajamas, getting ready for a district-wide church dance and even had a date.
I was wearing pantyhose and curlers with a Snoopy nightgown when I rang the doorbell next door. I was in preacher’s kid trauma victim mode, the first time I’d ever experienced trauma in its true sense. My house was burning down in front of my eyes and I was the only one of the four of us who knew it. My mother and sister were shopping. My father was delivering communion to shut-ins. It was all me.
All. Me.
I had just turned 12 three months earlier. My grandfather wouldn’t have known what to do in this situation, it was so unique. Age couldn’t line up to experience here because what happened was rare. The other thing is that I would not have felt as alone today. This was at least 10 years before I had a cell phone (because I’m that old, not “we didn’t buy one”) and every contact programmed into it so I wasn’t dependent on my memory for the numbers. In that kind of situation, you’re glad emergency services only have three numbers to remember.
If I’d had my current cell phone, I could have called my mother and sister at the shops. I could have called my dad while he was visiting the elderly. I could have called my grandparents because they only lived about a half hour away. My cell phone now is not handy to me because it can call out. It’s handy because without it, I wouldn’t know who to call.
(As an aside, aren’t cell phones a miracle? I have been impressed with being able to walk around and talk on the phone anywhere since our mobile was in a black bag.)
I am certain that I assured Doris nothing was wrong, it was no big deal, but I had to call the fire department. And would it be okay if I waited with you? I was doing all those things you do when you’re a preacher’s kid, assuring everyone around me that everything was under control.
So, in short, I learned two lessons. The first is that stuff doesn’t matter. The only thing I lost that were precious to me were photographs, and even those don’t matter anymore because any I have that are precious are also on Facebook or WordPress, so they’re backed up. There is no material thing I could lose that would hurt me, really. What hurt me was the second lesson.
Even when things are fucked six ways to Sunday, the reflex to make everyone else more comfortable is intact.
It’s something you don’t find until you lose everything else. You don’t find it until all the bullshit is stripped away and realize you’re pretending to be fine. The reality break from trauma makes it where you live and reflect. You have a binge-purge relationship with feelings because when they come up, you are too overwhelmed. It’s a continual cycle.
It was a brand new ball game when I realized that an anxious attachment is just an avoidant attachment style in disguise. I’ve just been avoiding me.
I am not picking something I don’t know anything about, but if I start now, I might learn some of the finer points by the time I die. I will never know them all. There is a crossover, and I’m starting to think that I’m more autistic than ADHD. Stopping the Adderrall only convinces me some of the time. I mean, I can list the symptoms I have and they’re all text book……. but they’re also signs of being autistic and trauma reflexes. Even if I went to a doctor, I think my issues are so complex that they would think what I do…. it’s not a case of just one thing. Everything in medicine starts with one diagnosis. Just one.
“It depends.”
That’s why med students are asked for diagnosis, secondary diagnoses, and protocols.
Experts in medicine are not counted by how many As they got in medical school, though if they fuck up, that’s definitely an indication. No, being a superb doctor depends only on what you’ve seen and what you haven’t.
You’ve seen it if you’ve ever watched “House” (it’s not lupus). Those kids go through every dependency like they’re on a bender searching for House’s opioids. They don’t tell you this on the show, but every illness they’re talking about is what’s called a “fascinoma,” probably Latin for “first case” or something. I’m too lazy to look it up, but that’s what it means for lay people, anyway. In law, it’s “prima facie” (pronounced “fa-chee.”). My three fields have dependencies in common. You have no idea how much they matter in Ubuntu.
In all of these things, particularly Ubuntu and medicine, the consequences for being wrong are drastic and cause gastrointestinal distress.
Here’s why I’m specifically mentioning Ubuntu. Most linux nerds have autism. Most nerds, for that matter. You don’t have to be neurodivergent to be a nerd, but neurotypicals, you should know not to intrude on a safe space. You do it all the fucking time by thinking you’re going to be cool and go to ComicCon, but when you get there you’re somehow put off by the other patrons. If you can’t learn anything about the Autism spectrum by observing a Star Trek convention, you’re not paying attention. Neurotypicals seem to live by the slogan “walk softly and carry a big stick.” That’s because you’re perfectly lovely until we do something you don’t understand, and then you get judgmental and sometimes angrily so.
Supergrover definitely didn’t have empathy for it, but at the same time, she didn’t know enough about me to really take it in, because she knows from autism. And she didn’t see any neurodivergence in me not because she wouldn’t, but because she couldn’t. I’m not blaming her, because it would have been totally different if I’d been hanging out at her house for the last eight years. If she’d actually seen me in my day in, day out appearance and mannerisms, she would have had me pegged by the way I walk. Also, I’m not sure that it would occur to her how much crossover there is between me and some of the other people she interacts with on a daily basis. She didn’t get it and not because she didn’t want to. It was impossible to do all that online.
“The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan
I think after a while, we just got so used to our rhythm that meeting up seemed weird, plus I could have more of her if I was only in her DMs because I was the only one traveling with her consistently. I am not sure that anyone e-mails her more than me (by quite a large margin…. and if that’s not true, what I lack in frequency, I make up for in volume.
I wonder if she ever knew I was writing letters to her like a WWII-era high school sweetheart. I didn’t even realize that until today. News from the home front, essentially. I wanted to be one of the pictures taped up in the cockpit, but I never wanted to be the only one unless that was a possibility. Next to her son or something. I don’t know.. Just not left in a box in Virginia.
I know by now that I am every bit the photo I say I am, and here’s how I know that.
She rips me off all the time. We’ve been writing to each other for 10 years. I absolutely know that things I’ve said have entered her lexicon, and she quotes me almost every day. I know they weren’t all bad lines, and hers weren’t either. I think I’ve said “painting my feelings as fact” 50 times since she said it. She says “pack up your toys and go home” now. There are word associations with me by the thousands. This is why I believe that I am her Impossible Girl, woven into her from the inside out. I haven’t changed her because we interact. I have changed her because now our brains are inextricably interrelated because reading someone’s most important thoughts makes them last a lifetime. She has two legacies now…… the one that’s big and impressive, and the one that fucking matters. We’ve been writing to each other for 10 years. I absolutely know that things I’ve said have entered her lexicon, and she quotes me almost every day. I know they weren’t all bad lines, and hers weren’t either. I think I’ve said “painting my feelings as fact” 50 times since she said it. She says “pack up your toys and go home” now. T This is why I believe that I am her Impossible Girl, woven into her from the inside out. I haven’t changed her because we interact. I have changed her because now our brains are inextricably interrelated because reading someone’s most intimate thoughts is different than having a conversation.
Reading things makes you retain information longer than conversation.
It’s just that she’s so busy she cannot retain all of it. I’ve made it impossible. “LORDAMERCY” is a direct quote. 😛 I wish she would just not read it until she had time rather than responding immediately, because writing is what I do, not her. Of course I’m going to have more output than her if I’m workshopping an idea. During one of our big fights about it, I called her out on the carpet and she didn’t respond at all to it. “I told you to create a folder in Outlook and a filter so that my e-mails weren’t coming directly to your inbox, but going into that folder so you weren’t getting notifications for them. It was your choice not to do it. I didn’t expect you to be johnny on the spot, but you were.” That’s because she’s a fixer/pleaser always trying to please me as well.
Interestingly enough, this did not start happening until after I was a total idiot, so I’m wondering if she’s reacting to me like she reacts to her husband now. That nothing is ever good enough for me because she’s trying to please me and doesn’t see that I don’t need it. That gives me more empathy than anger, enough to bring me to tears because if I’d noticed what she was doing, I could have said, “my beautiful girl……. stop. You’re perfect.” And in fact I did try to say that a million different ways, but it didn’t take.
She is so pure- concentrated hope, love, sweetness, and light. She will also eat your face off.
Only my mother knows the whole story, and she didn’t hear it until long after she died. I comforted her and told her she could go, because I was safe. That she never had to worry about me again, both because she couldn’t and didn’t have to anymore. All the mother-love I have in me transferred to her and not as a replacement. Because she has kids. She’s already a mom. She got offended when I said she had that vibe, like it was some sort of joke. Even if I had been joking, I would have meant “I think of you as that vibe because it’s the one I need most desperately.” But it’s a mix. I kidded her later about our past and she destroyed me, not a sick burn that I thought was funny, either.
I told her that, too. Then she got even more defensive. I realize that I dropped an absolute bomb on her, but it’s never about me. Ever. I don’t have needs. I just said something to piss her off. It’s only my behavior, not what triggered it.
But my mother is the only one who knows exactly who I’m dressing down when I do it and she would be horrified. Absolutely horrified. That’s because my mother put a lot of stock into titles. But the rest of the world sees her as her title. In my head, she’s six. Our inner children talk to each other in adults’ voices. (What could possibly go wrong? Editor’s Note: A LOT). I am not sure that she’s taken in that I’m 14 when I talk to her…. and I’m not 14 with anyone else, because I don’t trust anyone else that much. She got in under the wire and disarmed the bomb. You only think my anger management is bad now. She metaphysically hugged and kissed me back together…. but I’m still a work in progmess. I have just begun the process to complete the transition.
Transitioning is a big word in my community. I hope I have a quarter of resurrection in me that my friend Evan has. God, he’s the most beautiful trans boy I know, and a redhead like Zac. Trans people have a lot of crucifixion moments. Lots of Sanhedrins out there, lots of Pilates…… but unlike Pilate, they were never chosen by anyone to have input.
I don’t have contempt for the Sanhedrin, because they were always going to be assholes. I have contempt for people who have the ability to not be an asshole and DON’T. Pilate could have saved all this from happening…. crucifying someone for their words and not their actions, a minority in culture because the Jews were ruled by the Romans. Jesus has more in common with Sandra Bland than he has with Joel Osteen, and please go right up and tell him to his face…. also don’t be an asshole. Put that shit on YouTube and send me a link. 😉
I would give up my life’s savings for that asshole to get a clue. He is a white supremacy Jesus apologist with one of the biggest platforms in the world.
He could overhaul American Christianity………….. but he doesn’t.
What all of this has to do with ADHD and Autism is that I’ve been rambling for 30 minutes without stopping regarding things that excite me because I can. I cannot do this in conversation witih anyone else, and I have stopped trying. No one puts up with it
Even when I can’t help it.
So I have to learn it on my own.
I just want you guys to know that I’m crying right now. Writing these entries take a lot out of me, a tempest in a teacup. Sorry for the cut and paste mess.I left it in because it proved my point.
I have talked about the unconventional arrangement accidentally made between me and a friend, that we are bound out of loyalty and not romance. That at first, it was impossible for me to remain cool when she was so hot (and boy does that not have anything to do with her looks). She’s married, I’m as settled as I want to be. But just because it’s not romantic doesn’t mean there aren’t a huge set of problems between two people some days.
That relationship led me to thinking about politics, when one of my friends was talking about how the Republicans are the dad.
Republicans are the dad.
Republicans are the dad.
It has become a toxic relationship not because Republicans are the dad, but because they see being kind as soft……………..
They’re treating all Democrats like they treat women.
Toxic masculinity has reared it’s ugly head. I don’t know that people really grasp what happened on 1/6 in terms of intelligence. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran all saw us shit ourselves on international tellevision.
Get your shit together, Congress.
Toxic men and vegan lesbians are going to have to put away their egos for a second and work together. I think they’re the ones with the biggest egos in the room here, let’s face it.
It is not lost on me that vegan lesbians are a very effective weapon against toxic masculinity- because we aren’t dependent on men for sex. We see right through what you’re doing (before you do) because we had to learn we didn’t want it when we were nine…. and not even the creepy touches. Touching at all. Thinking you’re entitled to hugs and kisses from me.Thinking that my wife nd I exist for your pleasure. I assure you we exist for ours. If that makes you feel bad, it must be so hard to be you. I have empathy for a man. Men do get close to me. Obviously. That being said, as a collective you’re so fucked up I don’t think you could find a clue with both hands and a flashlight.
My favorite fact in life is that the picturesque farm where Langley is built was owned by a lesbian couple before they bought it. So, to me that just says that we have the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agency and lesbians sold them their whole look. You are welcome. Thanks for eventually hiring us. That was rude. I’m sorry. You have made up for it many times with the way you’ve embraced trans people, women in particular. But even though I was a bitch to you, it leads to my next point. Please forgive me, I was on a roll…………. and I know you guys hate when I do that. 😉
It’s not your Alexa that’s dangerous. It’s your microwave. Don’t tell them I told you Pop Secret information. They’ll put me over the stove in a Jiffy.
I think it’s hilarious that men are so bitter that we’re so angry, because what is it in society we could possibly dislike? I mean, we got our own credit cards in the 70s. Straight women will take your crap because they want you and also you have in large part done jack shit to make women less financially dependent on you when it comes to needing money and love. It seems like we have to choose between those two things quite a lot when we need groceries.
It matters when we’re pregnant and vulnerable and we have to nickel and dime you for everything because you aren’t doing the planning for the household and think everything costs a fortune and absolutely go apeshit even when numbers don’t lie. You’ll go off like a bomb and if we’re lucky, we’ll get the money after you’ve come back to reality. If we’re strong enough, we’ll beat your ass (verbally and physically). Not all of us fight the same way, but we’re all furious. We will absolutely go balls to the wall with you and steal your wives while we’re at it (KIDDING, Jesus. Calm it down.).
Traditional marriage is killing this country, because the only people that ever talk about it are the people who are still trying to hold up a system that doesn’t and shouldn’t exist. They hate queers and all the other expletives. In fact, their view of women informs their view of queer men. Queer men are soft. Democrats are soft. Transitive properties that all add up to a disorienting set of problems because they’re tangled as tight as that necklace you left in your underwear drawer when you were nine. There’s no clear path, and we’re trying. It would be helpful to be able to cull laws like old e-mail. To have one set of people working to maintain this system while another tries to create something better. I don’t know what that looks like in total, but I don’t mean switching from capitalism to communism. I want a system more like Canada, which is a capitalist society with a free market that also has a better safety net than we do because they aren’t nickel and diming vulnerable people who have to choose between love and money.
They don’t have it all figured out yet, either.
But they’re in mediation and we’ve literally got guns on the table.
Republicans are trying to be the husband that slaps his wife around. The party of no. Led by a naked, soulless, incompetent, greedy imbecile that those people think is an Emperor.
Democrats cannot stop violence by being passive all the time because we’re getting asses handed to us on most things. That’s because we don’t want to respond with violence and peace doesn’t work. It’s a gridlock.
We need a restraining order, because there comes a time in every abused person’s life when they’re just done. That’s where I am now. Just done. It’s not that I won’t vote and volunteer and all that stuff. It’s that I have burnout because I’m not moving the needle, and really no one is on a grand scale. Realistically, how long do you think it will take white supremacy to fade if we start working on right now? My guess is at least a century or perhaps two. I do not mean working on it legislatively. Legislatively does a quarter of nothing for me. That’s because Congress reflects culture, it doesn’t create it. If there is no culture for something irregular, we will not legislate it into being.
We are stuck in this, from the global to the personal. This is just unsustainable, and I am shocked at how many people think it is.
Because all of us, women and minorities, have to ask daddy for everything.
I was just reading my last entry when something jumped out at me that I didn’t see before. My sister-in-law was saving me by protecting Dana. That’s because even when I didn’t understand it, it was better to go no contact with Dana…. and if Dana felt the need to reach out, she was right there to remind her it was a bad idea because she’d worked in a women’s domestic violence practice. She was and still is a lawyer for women like me. She knew something I didn’t because she’d seen it a thousand times. If it happens once, it will happen again.
I was only confused for about six months as to whether we’d ever get back together or not, but Counselor wasn’t. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she heard our problems from my perspective, which is trying to find the objective truth of the matter. There were so many good and bad points, but one was ironclad.
If it happens once, it will happen again.
It only gets worse from there, spiraling out until she has to explain to you while you’re getting a restraining order that “baby daddy” is not a legal relationship.
I just heard that in her voice and now I’m falling over with laughter, even though this is serious stuff.
Counselor was aware how bad it could have gotten, even with us living in different states. I don’t know whether they’re still in Virginia or not, but when I moved here they were. There was a chance we’d decide to get together because we were feeling nice and then see each other again and revert.
It only gets worse from there.
I know she got that because I invited her to come with me, Pri Diddy, and her then-girlfriend to Capital Pride because we also had to go to the bank together to separate our accounts. She stood me up. I was so angry because I missed her, but I don’t think she got there on her own. I think Counselor was looking out for me even when I didn’t know it. She knew I couldn’t take a chance even if it was offered. I didn’t.
I could be wrong. Dana could have gotten there on her own because she wanted to be nice and not kind, but I doubt it. She was really excited at first. I have people in my life that really look out for me and I notice, even when it’s long after the fact. I have to remember that not only does Counselor know why I left, she also knows why I had to on many levels.
She’s the only one who’d put it all together, could see my position from every angle, with a clarity I didn’t have- both because being hit had never happened to me before and she lives and breathes this stuff.
It’s all conjecture, but I think the theory has legs. It’s another good memory to bank when I get down on myself for failing at being married. I wasn’t failing, she was winning because she is very good at her job. I’m sure she felt trapped knowing her sister deserved empathy and a second mugshot.
She knows I ran to DC for an empathy I’d never get from Dana again, because I wouldn’t be able to hear it even if Dana did get it together permanently. I’d be trapped in a relationship that was secretive by nature, not because Supergrover and I were trying to spite her. She felt threatened and betrayed by my closeness with Supergrover, but she’d broken my trust already with her DUI, because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Supergrover became my emotional support honey badger almost immediately because Supergrover didn’t have a history of driving Dana to work in the middle of the night for three months while also maintaining a full-time job because her license was suspended, then not recognizing that as love and thinking I was running from her six months later. She could not accept that I was running for good reason. She didn’t stop drinking after that. Even if she wasn’t an alcoholic, she could get caught up in the legal system because she’d already been caught once. I don’t know if she’s an alcoholic, because that’s not my story to tell. I can only tell you what happened and she was at the very least cavalier with her ability to drive while hammered.
I ran towards Supergrover in a way that would break our relationship because I couldn’t get through to Dana that I didn’t want to go down with her and I didn’t want to be the source of her happiness. She was lumping a lot on me that didn’t need to be there. I was wrong for having a lopsided emotional affair where my affections weren’t returned, but our conversations were relief from everything that had been going on with Dana for the last few years. The pull to be near Supergrover wasn’t nearly as strong as the need to escape from Dana, because the situation had become untenable and I didn’t notice until I met and was emotionally vulnerable with someone who actually had their shit together, even when they don’t feel like it.
I am here for all of it. Her quirks, her flaws, her ability to be both the most intelligent and the funniest person in every room, and the quiet space that’s just for me.
Sometimes people direct you where you need to go. This was help where I least thought I deserved it. Everyone loved me kindly without being polite. It was the same thing as hearing the doctors and nurses talk about you when they think you’re out of it. The way Counselor loved me was objective, certain, and kept something worse from happening whether it was from my end or Dana’s.
Stories That Are All True 