Somehow I did not post yesterday’s entry before the clock flipped over on the server. So, I did today’s writing prompt yesterday and now I have no idea what to do. I still have food prompt pieces to finish, but it’s not a “finishing” mood. It requires an editorial brain I do not have today. This is the winter of our discontent, the long, dark Bloguary of the soul, the long day’s journey into white (live, laugh, love).
I am being so dramatic for someone who just has to come up with a damn writing prompt on her own. Leslie, you do this every day. Every. Day. Buck up, buttercup.
Pack a lunch, son.
When I’m sitting in my room writing, I remember that scene from the 50th Anniversary Special for “Doctor Who.” Ten, Eleven, and The War Doctor are arguing, and for those who don’t watch the show, that’s three actors playing the same person at different points in their lives. Matt Smith (Eleven) starts laughing when they’re arguing and says, “I just realized this is what it must be like when I’m alone.” “What it’s like when I’m alone” is very much John Hurt, Matt Smith, and David Tennant arguing in my head, because that’s how it’s the easiest to tell what issues are working on which processor.
For instance, the heartbreak of losing Supergrover at my own hand eight years ago is nothing compared to the pain of trying to make it work and repelling each other so that neither of us were happy. But the threads processing on that core are alongside the other core, which is joy that goes all the way back to “you like to rap to Eminem? Explain to me exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS..” She said “you’ll fall in love with truth an honesty, as adorable as I might be.”
She’s right. I confused them and then got my head on straight. Trying to prove that my head is on straight has been enormous, because I was jumping up and down for attention in my own way, just not the ways in which she thought I was. She was getting mad at me by focusing on the wrong things. For instance, I wrote her something that meant “there’s nothing that you could tell me that would scare me away and I love you.” She took it as “who you are as a person is bad.” Those messages are drastically different.
Thus, trying to write it all out and it seems repetitive because I’m aware of the fact that not everyone reads every day. I have become the Ann M. Martin of bloggers. There’s a story here, but you have to make it through explaining club rules and characters for the people that would be confused if they read a book as a standalone. It also gives me room to stretch out because I’m not working on all cores every day. I see thoughts from the day before and something jumps out at me.
Blogging seems self-aggrandizing when you’re processing because it’s necessarily all about you. You can’t think about anyone else’s behavior as good or bad, you have to say what happened and how you reacted. You are not an authority on how the other person acted and reacted, because you’re not their combination of experiences or family history. Where it gets problematic is other people thinking I’m being a dick when I’m trying to say “I don’t live in your head, but you certainly live in mine.” Everything I wish I could tell them, but can’t because neither of us have time. I reflect on my problems in the third person when I do.
They’re free to read it, but when they do, they often think that I’m writing the way something went down to hurt them, when I’m trying to understand me. This is not limited to Supergrover, because I talked about her yesterday. This is every single person in my life who is threatened by the fact that I write. She told me at last interaction that I was entitled to all my stories, and I hope to God that’s true. I would never say anything to negatively affect her on purpose, and I’ll leave it at that.
Not just Supergrover, everyone in my life so far has thought about the negative things I’ve said more than the positive. If they can’t give me hell, they take it out on Lindsay because she’s local. I’m not Walter Winchell. I’m Brene Brown in real life. How her stories of “the story you’re telling yourself” play out in an anxious/avoidant trauma bond and how most people have them with their parents even when they haven’t been emotionally or sexually abused. Just as often the child has one style before and one style after. The style after is a mask, a myth we made in the middle of the mess to cope. The relationship with an abuser is always an anxious/avoidant attachment because the kid is so keyed up about accidentally giving someone away, and the adult is a monster, shearing a sheep many times because you can only skin it once.
Just so Supergrover doesn’t get wires crossed and think I’m saying my abuse repeated and she’s the monster, let me take a second and reassure her that’s not what happened at all. We’re just two different attachment styles because of who we are as people, and it’s the two adult attachment styles that have the most compatible wounds because our emotional blind spots are completely different. People who have an avoidant/attachment style have it because someone withheld love from them when they didn’t act as planned, especially their abuser, the one they’ve been programmed to think of as God. Your personality goes back to the moment your reality broke, the moment you became responsible for secrets too big for you to carry…. because the way you’re covering it up is counter to how you used to act, it’s taken as a behavioral issue and few people are smart enough to outsmart a child who’s been programmed not to trust their parents or therapist.
I ran toward Supergrover not because of anything illicit like an affair. It’s that her inner circle feels like being part of Lindsay’s, where I can’t tell people everything she’s working on, even when it affects me directly- like Lindsay’s hand in queer legislation but on different issues. I have been programmed to be a confidant from childhood, and it’s a whole other thing to choose to hear stories that are large rather than to have them put on your shoulders during years 12-14; you don’t even know enough to know that adults don’t do that to kids when they’re healthy. It’s the same dynamic as when a parent’s a drunk- the inversion of parent/child roles. With Supergrover, I get to bring my whole self to the table. I don’t forget about the past, I use it to inform my future. Supergrover and I just did that thing where fools rush in. Now she thinks I want her to tell her my stories so that I have more material, and I think that the reason I have to process so much on my own is that she’s ok with letting me twist in the wind and it is not okay. There are three sides to every story…. yours, mine, and the objective truth. Peace is found in knowing that I am finding my truth and reaching for the objective. But I don’t know the whole story, I know as much as I’m allowed to hear.
While that’s happening, Lindsaay told me I can write the story of us and our ugly stepsisters and to say whatever the fuck I want. My mother and her husband are both dead, and we no longer speak to their family. We just want to move on. The gist of it is that Lindsay found out about the funeral from Facebook. Our stepsisters didn’t even tell us when the graveside service was so we could be there when he was buried next to our mother. I’m going to do a saga, I’m not just mentioning it. I want to find the objective truth, the third eye looking down on both sides. I can’t know the story they told themselves, but I know the story of how it made me feell.
I will find it by writing it out, and so might they. But they’d never let me open the book.
Bold of you to assume that I would have the life I have without music at all. I accidentally got an arranged marriage out of it because we told each other we loved, admired, and trusted each other to a level that it’s been a disaster every time we’ve tried to separate. I got this “job,” not unwanted, just problematic and have had it for 10 years. Being together and separate creates a different set of consequences, so the music I listen to varies by what I have to say and how I know it’s going to affect me. For this entry, it will be “Nobody Knows,” by The Tony Rich Project. It expresses our problems greatly, and also explains why she’s the woman I think of when I hear “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” and “Love You Madly,” and that last one is to reclaim it from another face due to pain. She’s a 3D character. ๐
Additionally, I’m sure Mel is upset that I haven’t finished my food entries, because they cut deep (due to tapping into my work history) and I want her to think they’re good. It would help if she heard Beethoven’s ninth symphony instead of the blues (not that there’s anything wrong with the blues, but if you hear it after you cook, you’ve probably fucked up).
If I can impress both of us, then I’ve impressed the rest of our clan because I’m American and she’s Indonesian (living in the UK).
However, I need to process and I’ll tell you the music I listened to at the end and how it inspired this. I’ll say it first and then I’ll say it again. Sometimes you accidentally create a right-hand ring and resent it. I want to be her Lord John Grey and I’m totally her Frank. I want to describe what that’s like in detail for myself in another 10 years. I don’t write about what I do know, I write about what it’s like for me not to get it.
My food entries get more attention than everything else because it’s more universal, but everything else explains a relationship between adults where both are traumatized in different ways and how they act toward each other as adults- when the abuse happened in childhood. My friend Donna wrote a book called “Never the Same,” about kids who lose parents and siblings. It could be a title for abused kids as well. These pages are more important than anyone will ever know, because if I could be more specific, I could reach even more people in the shit with this kind of bond in a more specialized way. It’s a different thing to love someone with a power imbalance this big, because priorities are ironclad out of necessity. You will never be number one on the call sheet, and if you have different romantic partners, you won’t be number two, either.
Even more when the person who is more powerful pretends the imbalance isn’t there until she just can’t anymore because she can’t plan a future, either. Isn’t mindful that though she has a partner, kids, parents, and siblings, our situation is unique to theirs by a wide margin except her partner. Dana and I weren’t a team on this, and neither were they when I actually needed Michael more than her, because only he would know what was up. She has entrusted me and hung me out to dry. I deserved it, and we still can’t get around the facts. The only one that can help me is the one who least wants to do it, and not even because I was an asshole. She doesn’t make me a priority because she can’t.
She’s not a fixer/pleaser in her work life, but she is at home because she feels guilty and no one can lift it. Her power imbalance with herself is the same one she has with me, so when she digs deep, there’s no one to tell her to release them and find more small joys. I need her to have solid memories of everything good about her life so that when she gets hard on herself, she can see how much people love her.
Even me, the one that gets passed over. In part I think that’s because she can’t, because I’m not part of her inner circle and she’d have to figure out a reason she’d need to be in Washington at hours she doesn’t need to be there, because she’s not very good at it…. and now she can’t joke with her husband that she has to go see her sidepiece because she wouldn’t think that was funny, because it’s been long enough for me to resolve those issues and apparently not enough for her. I used to joke that we were having an affair under everyone’s noses, because you can’t imagine how much truth there is to that.
To Michael:
I was only using a euphemism for the adrenaline and dopamine rush and I have been the whole time.
She never did anything inappropriate in case you haven’t been reading over her shoulder. If you had been, I still would have been an absolute jackass because my brain chemicals still would have been turned up to 11, but when I came down you would have realized immediately that I was no threat. I was just high, like other people in your lives except the drugs were street legal. If it didn’t happen to you, too, I can’t imagine why. Seriously. We could write a book together that we couldn’t publish. I asked her if she needed a book like it, but didn’t take in that my part’s done. If you divorce her, no you didn’t and make that clear.
Don’t ever make anything blow up in her face and let her believe that you mean it, the lecture you would have given me that I should have thought of on day one. I said it in the heat of the moment. I never want either of you to think that because I’m a blogger, that means I’m a threat. And even then, I threatened to call for help. I am not trying to be threatened or threatening, I am trying to handle/fix it in myself without hurting her, and I don’t know when I’m leaving breadcrumbs, because I only need 15 minutes to establish what’s okay and what’s not; I’ve realized that my promises to her are bigger than yours by nature of what we do, not who we are to each other. I will promise to keep her even if she doesn’t promise to keep me.
God help your soul no matter how she and I play out, because if we stay apart and I find out you guys divorce, there will be dragon fire because mine is getting stronger every day. If we reconcile and you guys support me the way I support you, then you’re really fucked because then you have to deal with both of us simultaneously. I already know we’re a handful jointly and severally. But, according to the prevailing wisdom, she’s a handful on her own and you’re capable. Good luck and God bless. But know that I’ll love you in a very concrete way until I die, because she’ll let you know what her emotional needs are when she can’t let me for reasons.
The “honeymoon phase” doesn’t last long in most relationships, and we accidentally created a habit where we needed to lean on each other like we were using each other as furniture and both felt threatened enough to run at every chance it was available. I threatened to blow up her life because she blew mine to hell and wouldn’t deal with the fact that she affected my life’s course without accepting that it had played out with an anxious attachment style trauma bonded to an avoidant attachment style. It’s how most people who are abused cope. They don’t know their own attachment styles and love languages because to dive into that means you realize that you’ve been protecting yourself by dealing with everyone else’s bullshit while ignoring your own. It’s too hard and it hurts too much.
When you completely lose who you are, your reality break will dictate how you sway. When your reality breaks as a child because you’ve been sexually or emotionally abused, the abuser and the child form an anxious/avoidant attachment style because the power imbalance is absolute. You’ll search for it all the time, wanting the push pull of being abused and not learning to accept more. I had higher emotional standards for friendship, but not time together. Quality over quantity. When Supergrover got my letters, she read them as “you’re a bad person and that’s why I don’t like you.” I wasn’t judging her, I was making a case. I felt like I had to keep making it over and over because I saw our pattern for what it was and knew it would never break on its own. If you doo what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve allready got.
She couldn’t answer without anger because forgiveness was the story she was telling me while also holding in a lot of anger because she thought she couldn’t trust me anymore & I proved to her beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the most important person in my life because of what I do, and it didn’t help because her presence doesn’t help her, because she doesn’t think I think she’s wonderful despite all her flaws and failures. The failures are just where we need to resolve conflict, not where we need to beat up on each other.
I opened up about her so we could resolve everything and move on. She thought I was lecturing her on what a bad person she was. Who would want to get close to someone like that? Love has to be built when you’ve both been thoughtless.
She doesn’t take in that my anxious attachment is causing me pain, I get angry at being ignored for years on end.
Because she can’t take in that I’m a Christian and she’s not, she doesn’t take in that I’m trying to be the peace that calms her by praying for her and she thinks I’m trying to make her life hell.
She ignores the fact that I use her face when I’m praying just to put a personal spin on what God is, the place in me where I can talk about my most epic fails and rise from the ash. Therefore, I am trying to find the place where the peace inside her is also her. I dig into myself to teach her how to love me, trying to lead from the back by laying out all my worst flaws first. One of my valleys of vulnerability is where she’s the choice woven into me like the Impossible Girl on Doctor Who, while also feeding The Master.
I sent her a whole ass essay on why this was, and she thought I was saying she was a bad person. That was the day I listened to Bolero on repeat to slow my heartbeat to a manageable level. I know without a shadow of a a doubt I am more important than her family in some ways, and I’m not knocking any of them. I’m playing on a unique field, and I feel like a goalie who doesn’t know which team she’s playing this week.
I saw a meme that made me laugh for this very reason….. a little kid who was jealous of the other team getting to change colors every week and his mom had to explain to him that they were, in fact, different teams.
(If you can’t handle me at my Supergrover, you don’t deserve me at my Bourdain. I am laughing uproariously. I don’t care what stuff of mine you read, it’s just funny because I hold myself to the same standard. Unfortunately, I’m not that great a writer and I still have to read it.)
It happens more often than any other pattern. The person who holds everything back is attracted to the one who can emote, and the dance of intimacy is fighting with someone you’re completely addicted to in a literal sense. You can’t separate because the brain chemicals when you’re together. It’s not a sweet waltz. It’s the Habanera with emotional guns blazing because the swings are extreme. Those extremes don’t settle any if the relationship is platonic. You can fight with your siblings this way, too, because generally you shut down after abuse and your reactions are that way with everyone no matter how close you are.
I have broken my streak of 60-odd days just to listen to music, sleep, and relax. My body can’t lean towards insomnia forever, so I caught up. My body has a binge/purge relationship with sleeping, so I use music to help me stay awake AND asleep. They’re just different moods.
The alarms on my phone are NI**as in Paris (Kanye and Jay-Z) and Rap God (Eminem). I love both those songs, but the rhythm gets into my head and I can’t go back to sleep, especially when Em gets into 32nd and 64th note patterns while still being able to make out what he’s saying. It’s incredible. I couldn’t do it at gunpoint. I can’t do 64th note melismas while I’m singing without oxygen in the middle, and he did so well he published it and that song is famous across the world. Eminem is the modern-day Bach in that one album, because you cannot tell me that word-based melismas are easier than the ones in Mass in B Minor. Not possible.
If you have gotten to this point, thank you for reading. Each paragraph flowed into another as I was processing out loud the enormous difference between my ideal future and the one I’ve created. INFJs always search for the ideal and generally want relationships where the other person is also interested in it………….. yet will settle for being unhappy because so few people are like us and we don’t know enough to find them. I’m an INFJ. Daniel is an INTJ. Both our realities are broken for different reasons, neither more important than the other.
Daniel said that he had been in love with me for 36 years. I know why, but this is conjecture. He knew to want love from someone who’d give it to him in the way he could hear it, even when Supergrover has needs that trump his, because he knows what it’s like to desperately need help with stories you have to hold inside you while also popping smoke. He would understand when I joked that I was having an affair with Michael’s wife. That she and I share a more important bond so it is what it is whether he likes it or not.
We’re a handful, and he’s capable.
Editor’s Note:
This entry was inspired by Jason Moran’s complicated rhythms on “Ten,” because it helps me make connections faster than Tony Rich. I also listened to Wynton Marsalis’ “From the Plantation to the Penetentiary” and “Let the Bright Seraphim” with Kathleen Battle. It was like listening to a symphony in terms of odd numbers in movements vs. even. I enjoy making the playlist, and she enjoys running to Eminem and blasting Cake. Waking up to Rap God isn’t an accident, and I’ve set it for every morning.
Michael and I are toast (in a very funny way). We know it like the backs of our hands, because one of us forgot our real books because of ADHD and his is coded because he’s a normal person….. and even if I could read from it, I’d have to transpose.
It’s not really a question. I know I’m an asshole a good bit of the time… or I seem that way, because I’m direct and don’t sugar coat anything. I live the mantra of “be kind, not nice.” The difference is that “nice” says “oh, it’s okay” no matter what the other person does or says. “Kind” says “these are my boundaries. If you want a relationship with me, here’s how.” The reason it’s kind and not nice is that it’s counterintuitive. It’s hard as hell to have conversations about emotional boundaries and no one likes them, so let’s just avoid, avoid, avoid. That’s when a problem goes from small to enormous. I talked about that this morning when the daily writing prompt hit me hard…. and then something else hit me harder.
I don’t use all my e-mail accounts all the time, because I’ve gotten lazy and don’t authenticate every e-mail account on every device. It hasn’t been a problem until today.
I missed an e-mail from “The War Daniel.”
It’s been sitting there since August 25, and I know him. He probably thinks I’m mad at him when I just didn’t see the e-mail. I mean, yes. I’m totally mad at him and he can take a right….. and then I think, “the reason I say ‘take a right’ is that I got it from him and I hear him in my head every time I say it. Might want to slow your roll there, hoss.”
For those just joining us, Daniel is my ex-fiancee. He broke off the engagement in a fit of rage, but the fight was so worth having that it was good he just left. His daughter is trans. I’m bi. He didn’t know shit about either, and thought I was trying to fight him when I was trying to reach him. He couldn’t see anything except his own pain, which I do not discount. He’s an addict. I know from addicts. Bipolar presents the same and I’ve been a line cook for years. I’ve wondered if the reason someone didn’t show up for work is that they drank themselves to death. Daniel’s alcoholism is absolutely that severe, because he’s a combat vet. It’s a long row to hoe for both of us. That being said, I have the skills to be in a relationship with someone that traumatized because for some people, that level of addiction is the worst thing they’ll ever witness. For me, it’s Tuesday.
He’s equipped to handle me because he’s the equivalent of a nurse practitioner. He knows from bipolar. I am sure that he’s seen a thousand cases over the years, because if you don’t have it and you’re an addict, please get in line. Your diagnosis will arrive shortly because alcoholism will induce it. Alcohol is the pitocin of the whole operation. Congratulations, it’s mental illness.
The e-mail only said “checking on you,” and my reply was equally innocuous.
But it doesn’t take away from the fact that he had the courage to show up. He didn’t make excuses or apologies. He checked in on me.
That’s something.
It’s something that could lead to something else, or not, and either way it’s fine. I’ve had enough distance from actually being asked to marry someone and having it blow up in my face later to forgive something like that. Here’s why it’s so easy. I know Daniel was in a lot of haze and confusion, and he won’t be completely competent to make any decisions like that until the fog clears out of his brain. I know it like the back of my hand. He is not fine. He will be fine.
As I said months ago, “what kind of partner would I be if I gave up on him right now?”
I choose to acknowledge his humanity now so that I can acknowledge his divinity later. I hope we’ll get to have that conversation, but I’m not banking on it. He’s just turning over in my head because of the e-mail. I honestly haven’t thought about our situation, because of his alcoholism. It’s not that I’m unfeeling or uncaring, but Supergrover and I discussed it and we agree that family and friends are not the people to help someone out of something like that. I had to let him go- and the hardest part was not being able to take him and drop him off at rehab. Not being able to go to family days. It would be the case no matter what, because I don’t live in the same state.
I didn’t just pick him up after he fell off a turnip truck, either. He’s been my friend since second grade. He was my first boyfriend in any official sense, a badge he wears proudly. He doesn’t care that I’ve been with women since. He’ll wear rainbows and shit as easily as I will. It’s not broad strokes he has problems with. It’s the fact that he’s not queer at all. I am not saying that to slam him or make him feel bad, it’s just that his frame of reference is completely different. He does want to learn, he was just dealing with too much at once.
Having completely spiraled out in the same situation, I have a lot of empathy. I honestly cannot hold back forgiveness because I am so sympathetic to what happens when everything conspires to make you crazy. Daniel is not as fabulous as I am, though, because he needs alcohol to be that level of crazy and I can handle it all on my own….. the badge I wear proudly.
I hope I’ll have the chance to teach him how to love me a second time…… because everyone sucks here. Placing blame will get us even closer to nowhere. We both pop off and regret. We both love hard. It remains to be seen what will happen, because I don’t put a lot of stock into three word e-mails….. except one I got from the aforementioned Supergrover that I would like to forward to Daniel because he doesn’t know how enormous it is and I do:
What personality trait in people raises a red flag with you?
“The opposite of faith is not doubt. It is certainty.” -Anne Lamott’s priest friend, Tom
Everyone knows that guy. The one who paints their feelings as fact in a bad way. I differentiate because I often paint my feelings as fact, but that’s because I have the certainty of knowing I could be wrong, and my next responses will adapt to it. It’s what happens when you show up to an argument with the hoped outcome of reconciliation. When the only thing you have certainty about is the fact that you’re right, it’s not an argument anymore. It’s a lecture.
This particular topic hits hard because it’s exactly what Supergrover thought I was trying to do to her. To paint my feelings to get her submission, not her argument. I could not convince her otherwise no matter what happened because she didn’t know any of my other friends, had never been to any of my houses (I’ve lived in several over the last 10 years), had never looked at me while we were talking.
None of my friends think I’m a dictator except her. I have to remind myself of that constantly, because her avoidance tactic is to dismiss the whole argument outright and posit that my way of arguing must be because I’m judging her and not the situation.
She also doesn’t want to really resolve anything, so she hasn’t gotten the fun side of me in a long time- because we are not the same. She’ll sweep everything under the rug and act like nothing’s wrong for years on end. I will not. That’s because I have done it most of my life and catering to other people’s problems didn’t really help me at all. It helps her for me to need nothing, and I tried as hard as I could to be that for her… and not because she told me to do so. I know her reality, and just like I would never call Lindsay in the middle of the day and expect her to drop everything (if I was in a medical emergency, maybe), I wouldn’t call my beautiful girl, either. The difference between the two situations is if Lindsay arrived and she was mad at me, we would have it out between beeps on the heart monitor.
Supgergrover is the kind of person that keeps everything close to the vest, one with a stunning array of pockets. It has nothing to do with her professional persona, she’s always been like that. She’s always been a secret-keeper because abused kids are. I used to be exactly like her in the ways I didn’t want to be, now I’m exactly like her in ways that make me feel stronger than I’ve ever been.
I don’t protect people’s feelings, ever, because what I find is that in protecting people’s feelings, you’re actually not doing that at all. You’re avoiding feeling guilty and horrible in the moment, so you decide to sugarcoat something and then time happens. Now, that person has no idea how to respond to your new reality. When they react the old way because you weren’t clear, it just adds more kindling to the fire.
The flip side of the coin is that if you don’t tell anyone anything, you have the safety and security of your secrets not getting out, but that’s all. You aren’t creating the future of the relationship. Secrecy cuts off two-way communication because when you’re afraid of talking about one secret, you become afraid of talking about all of them. Letting another person do all the talking might make you relax in the moment, but they won’t walk away with clear boundaries and neither will you.
This is why secrets kill. They affect your ability to listen and to talk. Instead of having a conversation where two people are entirely focused on each other, it’s one person talking and one person sweating bullets about talking because they’re not really in the conversation. They’re lost in preparing to discuss something while running through the checklist of things they’re “not allowed” to say. You can take out the quotes when talking about adult issues, it’s just that so often “the thing we don’t talk about” is something a person should absolutely talk about, perhaps call the police for good measure. A person who is eight can be reliably trusted to keep a lid on what happens while their parents are away because, and I say this facetiously, kids are stupid.
That’s because to most parents, abuse happens to other kids. It’s not the the children who have done something wrong and have somehow deserved their lots in life. It’s that they’re good parents. They’re watchful. They don’t know any sexual predators.
People who have been abused have a better eye on their kids than those that haven’t, just because they understand the nature of the process. However, it doesn’t make them better at parenting if they haven’t healed themselves. They’ll have emotional blind spots for the rest of their lives, and they don’t gain sight with therapy. Your brain is permanently disfigured the way your skin would look if you’d been through a fire. You don’t get a therapist to get back the life you would have had before the abuse happened. You get a therapist to find out what you’re going to do with your new reality.
I’m outspoken because I am not the person that people have thought I was all these years. I couldn’t have been. I was holding on to emotional abuse because, and I say this facetiously, kids are stupid.
When you are certain about things, you know that there are no abusers around your child. But that’s the bad example I’m using for a lot of different things. For instance, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once said on international television that there were no gay people in Iran. You cannot tell me that this is an objective fact, but he was certain.
The American election wasn’t stolen in 2016, but some people are certain of it….. while ignoring the certainty of Russian celebration.
The only way to survive in this world is to act like you know absolutely nothing, because the moment you get locked into “the way things are,” you lose the ability to move into “the way things will be.” It is even harder for people who have dealt with childhood abuse, because they already fear change…. a secret might slip….
Being raised as a preacher’s kid caused me to alternate between carrying my heart on my sleeve and shutting down so that my real emotions remained hidden. This is due in a small way to my dad’s congregation and trying constantly to be the one who doesn’t need anything from anyone. I was actively trying for perfection in this area, because according to my mother, I needed to be the perfect child. But she didn’t say that in words. It was more that we had a job to do. Stiff upper lip and all that. It was bonkers, because my dad was the one with the actual job and he never expected any of that crap. My mother was the puppet master, and I don’t know that she knew that, but we did. We all lived in fear of rocking the boat.
This is going to sound horrible, but you’ve never known me to do anything but tell the truth. I never told my mother to shut the hell up and get with the program, and I desperately needed to do it for my own sanity. And, of course, she’s not here to defend herself, but on this one, she really can’t. It’s the one time in my life where I thought, “I will never forgive her ever in my lifetime.” I was just angry, of course. I did indeed get over it. But it took a very, very, very, very, very long time.
When I came out, my mother cornered me in my room and told me “I will not embarrass this family that way.” There’s more to it than that, but thankfully I’ve blocked it out. Only that one line remains, a scar on my skin healed over with time, but never forgotten.
Here’s what she never really took in:
Everyone already knew and talked shit behind her back. They knew before I DID. People with eyes recognize baby queers, even if their parents don’t. When I was 14, they thought I was being molested and at least two people cornered her and told her she needed to get me the hell out of that situation. It was too late, because I was already gone. It was a Supergrover kind of love at the wrong place and wrong time. However, if that hadn’t been a factor, I do think I would have been stuck in a miserable relationship considering how I think marriage is working out for her partner. I wouldn’t be her for cold hard cash. I am sure that she professes her love to everyone no matter the case…… because she has more in common with my mother than she would ever admit. She’s the puppet master, and I don’t know that she knew that, but we did.
Actually, that’s bullshit. Of course she fucking knew. I had all the rights and responsibilities of a partner, listening to all the crap going on in her life that was wildly inappropriate for a teenager. But I didn’t have her. She wanted me to be the one that wanted her while she played blissfully ignorant. I didn’t get laid, but I was well and truly fucked. The situation didn’t have to be romantic for it to be terrible. Supergrover is actually a tiny, tiny bit older than this woman, and I’m picturing her at her age when I was 14, and that was my BAZINGA! moment. I couldn’t picture her telling me jack shit for anything in the world….. to protect me, the very thing that I thought was happening and it turns out it, in fact, was not.
At some point, I’m going to go see about a boy. He’s already married, so it’s not like that. It”s that he was my boyfriend before Ryan, so, seventh grade, the one that was there every single Sunday and could probably tell me a lot more than I could tell him about what was going on if he remembers at all. It’s not that I was insignificant to him, it’s that it’s been 31 years now.
If he doesn’t remember, his dad could have written the dissertation. He was one of the ones that really saw through the bullshit, and he didn’t stop anything, but he was really the first person that made me absolutely lock down.
Unfortunately, the F is no longer with us.
Contrast my mother’s reaction to everyone else’s, including the actual pastor in the family.. My dad told the United Methodist Annual Confereence to shut the hell up and get with the program. Very politely, of course. He went to the floor, where there were hundreds of his colleagues gathered to vote on whether “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” You could wake up a Methodist in the middle of the night and the only thing they know from The Discipline is that one line.
I would have been an incredible Methodist pastor. The best, really, because I learned from the best. I would have brought something new and completely different to them if they hadn’t taken me out like it was Trash Day in Harris County.
Here is a paraphrase of what he said, made all the more brave, crazy, and stupid because it was 1995. The other thing you should know is he did not tell me what he was going to do beforehand. He didn’t tell anyone. He stepped out on a ledge, and he flew:
“It’s really easy to say that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching…. to group everyone together and call them ‘the homosexuals.’ But it looks different when it’s Carol’s niece. Bob’s nephew. David’s daughter.”
The vote did indeed pass, but it was closer than it had ever been.
I went to the church that day seeking God. They weren’t there until my dad finished.
The Bible says in Matthew 18:20 “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them.” In that moment, no one else was in the room except my dad and me. It wasn’t the first time I had a spiritual experience. Life is full of them. But that’s the moment “Jesus wept” became extremely loud and incredibly close. The church itself was just an expensive building….. as if no one had bothered to invite him. He wept in sorrow for some of his followers, and elation for others.
Jesus wasn’t crying because I’m queer and therefore bad or unworthy. He was crying because these supposed “fishers of men” were trying to lift the net after they got into it. But they will certainly spend queer money……. because they love you…….. when you tithe. Otherwise, good luck. You can belong to a church for 30 years and give them millions, but they still won’t do your wedding or ordain you.
When I could have been a “contenduh.” I know I talk a lot of shit, but not about this. When I’m on fire, I’m unstoppable. It just doesn’t happen all the time…… but that’s not being a bad preacher/pastor. That’s being a perfect human.
My dad didn’t quit his job because of me. He acknowledged his divinity and his humanity. It is both too complicated to explain and above your pay grade to know why. But on the way out, he raised hell in front of THE PEOPLE WHO FUCKING DESERVED IT.
Not me.
But everything was fine.
You can completely ignore me and I will be totally fine until I explode, angry at the world because NO ONE IS PAYING ATTENTION TO ME. It seems so ridiculous on my part to feel like a toddler, but sometimes I do. It’s okay for no one to notice that I’m sad or hurt or depressed or whatever… but if they love me, what should happen when I fade into the woodwork and am not noticed for years? I can keep it up flawlessly right up until I can’t.
How I have turned needing other people into not needing them at all is knowing that everything in the world would disappear and it would take a lot for me to notice if I was in the middle of an entry. I am now in charge of taking care of me, and I am much better about expressing a full range of emotions, especially when I am sitting alone and writing here, because nothing is directed. It is not my job to have a reaction when I’m finished.
Again, I don’t need friends. I want them. I cannot be dependent on them for validation, however.
It is to acknowledge that writing itself is a spiritual experience, and you (plural) becomes you (singular) in my mind…………
Where two or three are gathered, and Christ walks into the room.
If I know Christ as well as I think I do, here’s what Jesus would have said to the Annual Conference that day, actually the words of “Paul” in the second letter to the Corinthians:
You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts. known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the Living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
Such confidence we have through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant- not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
Homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.
The letter of the law killed me…….. and resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.
There is nothing more responsible for that rebirth than you are.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Coffee and doughnuts will be served in the Fellowship Hall. ๐
People with attention deficit or autism don’t create habits. There is nothing in our brain to create subroutines and keep them going. Every task takes the same amount of energy as learning to do something the first time, from brushing your teeth to remembering to take out the garbage on Wednesday nights because trash day is Thursday. Trash day seems insurmountable to someone with time blindness.
There is a meme going around Facebook that addresses this. “The problem with 10:30 PM is that it is one minute before 2:30 AM if you’re not careful.” The way time slips away at night for most people is how time works in neurodivergent people all day long. It’s relentless. We live and die by our calendars and task lists with alarms, because otherwise we’d have no real sense of the month, day, or year. It my mind, it has been six minutes since my mother died and also years.
Memories are arranged by importance, not when they happened. Time blindness was actually a good thing in one case. The way I was treated during my childhood melted away and I stopped thinking about it at all. It just failed to register. Every bad memory I have of ages 12-36 is not locked away anymore because it doesn’t have to be. None of those things can create a reaction in me unless I let it.
I will dig deep into them for resolution, but that is only to make the present me a better human being. It has nothing to do with trying to resolve those memories to make anything better for them. Too much has been done for there to ever be reconciliation, and if being sorry was ever childhood abuser’s intent, she would have come to me long before now. She said she was sorry, but I don’t believe it because her actions didn’t line up. I had every right to make her jump as high as I wanted, so when she proved that she couldn’t even do the barest minimum, it was okay to be done.
Our relationship was virtual in that before the Internet, there were letters and calls. Even with both of those things, you’re not really living the same reality. You’re fitting each other into your real lives…… except it cost me money I didn’t have. There was no such thing as long distance calling across the country for free. I didn’t even have a cell phone until I was an adult, so my parents knew who I was calling because they could see the number on the bill. I think they thought that making me pay the money back would make me quit calling. They did not understand the game. They did not understand the trap. They did not understand being willing to die before you’d tell a secret.
It is my habit to treat everything I know with that kind of security because it was ingrained when I was 12. It doesn’t matter how the secret makes me feel, even if it is toxic I have proven that I won’t say a word. It made me who I am for richer or for poorer. In some ways, I’ve kept secrets that have made me sicker. In others, it makes me powerful enough to be someone like Bayard Rustin, who knew all MLK’s secrets and lies. If I’d go so far for the wrong woman, just think of how far I’d go if I met someone like Martin?
Olivia Pope completed me because I saw her as having to manage the same secrets I did when I was a child. It was translated through the lens of politics, but to me keeping Fitz’ and Jake’s secrets was as difficult as keeping mine.
There was also light and dark. Keeping the president’s secrets was one thing because he was a public figure. Jake very much wasn’t. But one fed the other and Shonda Rimes healed me with a bit of media. Art imitates life, and it was so awe-inspiring to have that mirror.
My abuser’s public persona needed to be protected, and so did the dark undercurrent from everything else in her life. I knew that because I was a preacher’s kid. I’d been taught to be that kind of friend since I was born. Therefore, no one could get a word out of me and even though my personality changed practically overnight, no one noticed because I was already hard to predict being ADHD. I always had my head in the clouds to one degree or another. I am an INFJ, the pastors to the whole world at once. I am built for it, and all the things I don’t know cost me because I think I can take on way more than I can without support from everyone else. That requires someone like Bryn, who can deal in emotions as large as mine consistently because she knows I can offer what I require. Her secrets are mine, in some cases, literally. When Supergrover convinced me of what I’d been ignoring, I didn’t get to tell her that she helped another little girl, too, because I got to pass on the knowledge that her strange feelings weren’t strange at all.
There was a reason I became a frightened dog, not sure which way was up in almost every relationship of my life. I had so much to protect and nowhere near the ability to choose how. The secrets made me the alpha dog, given the responsibility of protecting the person and the path, but no support in how to do it. I think that’s because of the nature of the cycle of abuse. No one taught them how to react during trauma, either.
Support would be empathy that goes in both directions. No abuser tells a child thank you for keeping those secrets. No one notices when you’re saving their career. Therefore, as adults we know we need it. We know that a relationship is not equal when one person is the dumping ground emotionally for another………. because they’re so focused on themselves that they don’t think to ask about us.
It’s not that we mind being the emotional dumping ground, we’re asking for equal airtime. Reconnecting with Bryn reminded me why that was so important. That I couldn’t have a healthy, successful relationship until I’d been in a more serious one with her in terms of emotional intimacy because I needed to learn what a healthy relationship felt like before I could extrapolate that into a full-on romance with someone else. I even know that’s hard, because Bryn wouldn’t care if I slept with someone else, but she’d for damn sure notice if I ditched her emotionally for someone else. It would have to be a balance, because she needs to know that I have enough love in me that my partner will know how much you matter to me and not taking us as a package deal is in and of itself a dealbreaker. There will be times where she is way more important than you. Die mad about it.
I feel like that’s the way Zac loves me. That if something was up, depending on the situation there would be times when I was more important, die mad about it. But at the same time, I am also respecting the fact that he and I are not close enough to expect his attention the majority of the time and I am not asking him for that. I am saying that if I was in the hospital, I could call him from there because he would definitely want to know. That would be true whether we were dating or not. I don’t care about the dating as much as I care about the not, because a long term relationship isn’t built on romance. The cornerstone is knowing you’ve got someone who will be there for you in a crisis, big or small, because even if they can’t do anything to fix it acknowledge that they want to know. Acknowledge how big that is. Relationships take showing up, and people won’t if you don’t communicate that you need it. You’ll just feel stepped on all the time, and I’m telling you it’s your own doing if you’re the Type B who never says anything.
Not saying anything doesn’t allow our friends to respond the way we want them to. It doesn’t test anything. It doesn’t allow you to notice the way you’d be treated if you needed something, and that is completely fear-based. You’d rather not know until it’s so bad you can’t ignore it.
Choose not to stuff things down so that you can see if someone can give you what you require instead of constantly giving them what they need emotionally in hopes that someday will come because they’ll divine that you’re in trouble.
I moved heaven and earth to stand next to greatness because I could give what I required. The fact that she couldn’t is of no consequence, because I love it here. The main problem is how to get Bryn to think it’s her idea to move here. ๐
The thing is, people, I have that friend. I have that friend who would move heaven and earth to be near me if I needed her. Even if it damn near killed me, I’d do the same for her. It would be a lot. I’d have to live in the city where I chose to continue a very toxic relationship based on the one we had when I was a child. But her life is so different there that I could see it working out long term. I think it would be hell on wheels in the beginning as I grappled with being grateful to be near her and muting all the triggers that would reappear.
I was in a bad relationship the last time I lived in DC, too, with the same archetype of the woman I’m talking about when I call that character “Supergrover.” It was like trying to hug a cactus every day. I got a lot of negative attention…. It will pop up if you search for “The Great Raspberry Jello Caper” or something like that.
It was so different, though, because Kathleen and I were both adults. I could expect her to respond like I thought she would, or I could express needs and she’d kick my ass. It was unsustainable. I have chosen that relationship over and over, making them that if they weren’t that already.
It’s the pattern with which I’ve become most familiar, and I bring it out in people after having wronged them, then them getting very resentful that I need anything because the fissure has begun.
Bryn deserves me because she doesn’t expect me to be perfect, and I’ve tested her on that to an enormous degree. I have never intentionally tried to hurt her, and she knows that, too. It counts for a lot.
What I have learned is that Bryn is completely unique, and Supergrover is a dime a dozen. That’s because once a fissure began, the power imbalance was set for the rest of our time together. It was imperative for me to jump high because I’d found someone I could be as vulnerable with as I could with Bryn. That became problematic when I was vulnerable to her about her. I was trying to be tender and to heal wounds. She thought I was trying to load her up with guilt, make her feel bad, etc. and didn’t tell me that for a long time. I wrote her the longest love letter of my life, annotated with detail about why I wanted to help her. I wanted her to know that I really saw her. It was not a one-way transaction. I shouldn’t have said anything, because she just took it as psychoanalysis and that I was trying to provoke her.
I thought she was the sweetest person I’d ever met, and she liked thinking that I thought of her as a monster. It’s why I call her Supergrover…. that even when she acts monstrous, she’s still cuddly, furry, and blue. It’s the smallest part of her, the little girl I love.
Sometimes you see a writing prompt and you know it’s going to hurt. I’m going to be blessing and releasing a lot of pain. It’s not going to be easy, but I hope it’s going to be worth it.
Dear Leslie,
You are my precious, precious child and I wish I could protect you. You’ll learn to protect yourself, but it will take so long you’ll lose hope. Just when you think it’s never coming back, you’ll find the woman of your dreams. It’s not what you think. She’s safe. Do not fear her. You’ll know her by her suits and crap for work. She will hug you so tight all your pieces will glue back together. Please don’t be too jaded to let her. There’s going to be a lot more pain before It Gets Better. Love her to the best of your ability- it’s for life if you can learn to be kind even under stress because sometimes………..
Things Fall Apart
You need to learn about the Civil Rights Movement. I know you know what it is, but dig deep. You’re already thinking big thoughts. You want to be the Martin Luther King, Jr. of pink people. In some ways, you already are- but in order to be great, you’re going to have to find a way to be strong. You already know this, but I’m not sure you know how much. Those big thoughts will never go away, and you have a stunning ability to write and speak in a way that people will listen. The hard part will never be getting others to believe in you. The hard part is getting you to believe in both of us.
I know you’re fragile and broken. I know you don’t recognize love unless it destroys you. Just keep writing to deal with pain, and start taking Tylenol before school. The one thing I can tell you about the future is that we find out Tylenol also dulls emotional pain. The next three years will be the hardest of your life so far, and I’ll be 46 soon if that’s any indication. You’re going to grow in so many ways, but everything you know right now is not everything I know, and I cannot change anything because you are a child. It’s not our call yet. I know you don’t feel like a child, haven’t for a long time. But Leslie, you are…. even if this letter doesn’t convince you.
I know it will be hard for you to accept it as reality, but it is true. It will be true for a long time, longer than you thought possible. Just hang in. I cannot give you anything more specific, because if you don’t go through the hard parts, you won’t get where I am now. It’s all going to be okay if you can learn to walk through fire.
You are capable of leading your people, but you need to protect your energy until it’s time to step off a ledge. You will feel in your bones when it is time to jump. You’re a superhero, but no capes. it is very good advice. Live in the now, darling. It will be Incredible, and you think that being Incredible will come later, and it will in some ways. In others, you’re already the bravest person I know.
Being “out” at school is one of the most courageous things you’ll ever do. You will not be at your schools long enough to see what you’ve done, but it matters. People still talk about it as if you’re some sort of hero…… and yet, you’re just trying to survive. Stop listening to her music so you can hear your own. If you work hard, you’ll be as good as she is. There is no doubt.
If you work harder, you’ll be even better. Maybe don’t go to PVA for trumpet next year. I think you’ll have more fun in choir. Just don’t be a soprano. Be an alto if you want to survive. I know you already know this, but it bears repeating. You will turn out to be a lyric soprano, but it’s not your personality. Just “cigar and vodka it down” (that was a joke). Your inner diva will come out regardless when the right teacher comes along. You’ll be able to sing to the heavens while you’re in hell.
I can picture you walking the halls of High School for Performing and Visual Arts with your Walkman, because Jason Moran said that you needed to listen to everything and he had a Walkman, too. But only you and I know that it’s not jazz on the tape. It’s her.
I know this is the biggest heartbreak you’ve ever had, and there will be so many more. Some will be older, some will be younger… but if you’re not careful with picking a partner (this is a future word you will like), you’ll be exactly where you are now. Jumping up and down for an approval that will never come because of what has happened over the last two years. This will happen over and over until your person arrives, and even then it won’t go all that great. Just keep hope alive. With enough courage, you’ll gain a lot of respect. It’s just that no one will tell you that until years later. You’re going to think people don’t care about you, when in reality you’re their hero.
I need you to do something for me. I need you to take better care of Lindsay.
This is critically important. Tell her you love her in both words and actions. Protect her while you still can, because later on it’s her turn and you won’t want to feel like you haven’t done enough. You just don’t know how she’ll save you, and if I could tell you I don’t think you’d recover from the happiness. Through her, you’ll get to tell Jimmy Carper about the clock radio under your pillow, the story every teen in Houston has for him.
I know you’ve harbored a lot of pain. This is one of the things that will go right. She’s the best thing about your life. I know you already love her. Make sure she knows it goes to 11. If all goes according to the same plan, you’ll look up to her. Literally. I’m sorry, but you’ve grown as much as you’re going to grow. You’re going to be in her shadow, but I also know that you already know that’s where you want to be. Her shadow is The Grand Prize Game.
You’re going to get the new bike, Archway cookies, the Bun bars, AND the photogirrafic pimento.
Spoilers. However, I cannot tell you how much joy will come out of your pain. It’s coming out right now in this letter. That’s because you’ll learn how to look over your life as I have, like you’re doing right now. It’s going to change your life. Lean in, and enjoy the ride.
You’re just not there yet, but already know you’re a disaster in the PVA hallway- a ticking time bomb that’s about to go off….. but I checked with me and it’s still okay for you to tell your nemesis to go to hell. Remember that nemesis rhymes with emesis. Do with that what you will.
You’re going to vomit up emotions until you’re dry heaving, and then you’ll keep on doing it because you don’t know how to stop. You already have a good friend, though. Dianne is safe. You’ll love her more as the years go by, and realize you were on the wrong track. The extra N means that she is a better person, even if you can’t imagine that’s true.
She’ll pick you up in her little green Volvo and it will change your life, in what you think are small ways, but here is the secret to life. The small things are the big things……. because she knows what you refuse to acknowledge at home- and think you’re hiding at church. She will hear the distress in your voice when no one else does. Love her to the moon and back. Love her until you think you just can’t and then love her a little more. She sees you, Leslie.
Look for the people who see you. Always. I give you permission to walk away from anyone. Protect yourself, but not so much you can’t receive love.
If you keep that in your mind and keep writing, you will go places and see things you never thought you could. You’ll meet people that define you, because you’ll love yourself when you’re with them. Cut yourself some slack. You’re a pretty great kid. It’s okay to love yourself, too….. even when it seems selfish.
The only thing I would suggest is that when Dana invites you for Easter dinner, go.
I have found that being direct has cost me a lot, because especially with women, they think I’m attacking them because I’m not sugar coating anything to protect their feelings. They’re responsible for their feelings. I should not have to do the emotional work of walking around in someone’s mind to determine the reaction I’m going to get before I say something. It makes me people please and my need gets ignored.
That’s because I used to stuff everything down. Anything anyone has ever said to me that mattered is still there. So is everything that has been done to me because I am a victim of childhood emotional abuse and queer, so I’m a big hate double ticket being female as well. Women being chattel is not something we created for ourselves. Queers being construed as mentally ill pedophiles is not something we created for ourselves. Hell, even being female wasn’t part of the plan. It’s just the hand I was dealt.
My mind isn’t all cis, which gives me some confidence now that I’m not four damn years old. I will not take anyone’s shit anymore.
First of all, if we are in a relationship, we have to forgive each other over and over and over and over. I will not accept anything less, because I cannot abide passive-aggressive abandonment. “There’s a problem, so instead of being a grown up, I’m going to avoid you for all eternity.” If you don’t love me enough to struggle, GTFO.
State boundaries clearly and be consistent on letting me know when they change. Again, I will not predict you.
If you’re a homophobe or a misogynist, you cannot come see me until after you’ve already done the work. My friend Erin said that straight people should check with queer people before they decide to say they’re an ally. I told her it meant a lot to me that I could have an opinion on that. That an ally shirt is not something you buy for yourself.
It’s also problematic to buy things that say “ally” on it for some people, because it becomes clear that you’re not willing to take on our burdens. God forbid someone think you were gay. The point of being an ally is realizing it’s relentless. You have a habit of putting on all your rainbow shit until something happens that you don’t like. Maybe it’s that someone hit on you. Maybe it’s that you experienced discrimination. Either way, when you take it off because it’s too hard, fuck you sideways.
Resurrection happens in the middle of the mess, but it will never happen if you believe you’re the main character in every goddamn story. If you’re going to ask me to recommend what you should do as an ally, and then say I’m attacking you because you ended the paragraph by explaining why it’s too hard to look queer, you are not welcome at my table.
Alternatively, I could never get my beautiful girl to open up enough to figure out how we could solve all our shit, and it was a similar issue. By holding everything in, she became the main character in every story because I was constantly begging her to open up because we went through some shit and had way different reactions to it. I NEEDED her, and she half-assed it. The only reason I say this is because she never explained to me that she was any busier, but I knew how I was being treated.
She was an open book once I learned to read, it’s just that now my opinions are not valid. I cannot always be wrong. I am too smart for that. If you insist that your words are never the problem, GTFO.
It’s not that you’ve pissed me off so bad we can’t work it out. It’s that we have a bad pattern and me doing all the work isn’t going to solve jack shit. Go with God. Don’t accept any wooden nickels. May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. Just don’t come back to me until you know what you want and you can say it out loud. Have the integrity to own that you are responsible for a percentage of what is happening in every situation. Even my emotional abuse isn’t that woman’s problem anymore, because I’m a grown ass woman.
There are absolutes in life you can’t change, though, and with my beautiful girl I found a big one. She did not. We need to be together and yet we are apart. This is not personal. This is that not being able to have a relationship with her causes consequences bigger than me and she’s fucking blind to it. But that’s all her shit. If she doesn’t figure it out, then she can watch as I trip over a land mine.
I will struggle to forgive noping out when I needed her most. I realize that she needed time to recover, but I gave her eight years. It seemed like she didn’t have any other dogs to kick because I was getting massive anger in response to legit nothing.
My beautiful girl, I will always annoy the everliving shit out of you and make you angry because it doesn’t take much. Every accusation was a confession, and we can both be dead honest about that. We were seeing each other through our own filters. I would never escape judgmental dickhead. I would never be her goddess of the moon ever again.
But she saw me being a writer as a threat, so instead of just asking me what I was going to write or helping me craft the narrative or helping me gain understanding about ANYTHING so that I had parameters? She told me that she could no longer allow my words to cause fear in her and to go find new friends. I was livid. I hadn’t written anything about her in a long time because she hated it so much. I could write beautifully about everyone but her, unless I fed her ego and then she’d realize being a character wasn’t so bad. She just couldn’t see herself as true in my eyes. That both sides of the spectrum exist in her just as much as it is in me.
She couldn’t see red to indigo, and beat my ass with blue.
So, now when anyone crosses me, I ask myself what she would do. It works. I’m not a totally different person. I have confidence in what I believe for the first time in forever. I do not think she has the same confidence in her own beliefs when it comes to emotions and relationships. This is because my experience of her is that dealing with conflict is bad and we don’t need to do it at all. Not talking about it is the same.
I’m a verbal processor and I was trying to work through some shit. She could read it. Instead of realizing that I didn’t have to make sense of the way she felt, I only had to make sense of my own emotions, she felt like I was on her ass. Got annoyed when I asked for fucking anything, called me a judgmental dickhead 80% of the time, but if I told her that, she’d say that she thinks I have an extraordinary mind and she’s wildly impressed with me as a person.
Well, start fucking acting like it.
I don’t need friends who don’t respect my opinion on things because they think they’re the whole story. If we can’t collaborate, I am out.
This one relationship is reflective of how I feel about homophobia. It is not my job to struggle with it. It’s yours.
When I am writing, I have two modes. The first is complete silence, sometimes with a blocker like white noise or several fans in the room. The second is listening to either the soundtrack to Argo or The Bourne Supremacy. It has to be spy music, and it has to be Middle Eastern in nature. I don’t write about spies in my daily life, but the music translates into everything else because it’s mathematically quick when my brain isn’t. It jogs things I wouldn’t have thought about on my own. It is basically making my thoughts compete to the rhythm and tempo of the music.
When I’m doing chores, I like to listen to rap or hip hop. Sometimes angry country where women kill their husbands. It’s not hilarious if you haven’t lived in the South and grown up on these jokes…. like how in Texas, we don’t get divorced, we just have big backyards……… thus the joke about Bryn having a yard large enough to *garden.* I may not ever put a ring on her finger, but good luck proving she’s not mine. With us both being bisexual, I can’t prove one way or the other what’s going to happen, and there are too many complications to figure it out so why try? The story will unfold either way, and both of us are happy right now having other partners and just leaning on each other the way a best friend would. To think that is more important than having a romantic partner is crazy because I will never find a better friend. We undervalue friends in our society, and to me it’s your other marriage because you can’t go to anyone else the same way you can with them because no one else catalogues the books in your library.
Right now, there is an entire reddit thread of people who are crying over bff divorces, people who feel exactly the way I do about Bryn. No one is her, no one will ever be her, she broke my heart in third grade and I’m still not over it, et cetera. Third grade and you’re 55? Yes, let’s make sure that never happens. If I want her, I need to act like it.
We are learning how to love each other and be strong women at the same time, which is actually a bigger deal than everyone else might think, because being lost in trauma bonds constantly makes us doubt that the other one is sincere. I, like her and Michael, am stuck fighting her on letting me love her….. and she’s sharpening her weapons to take care of me because we are The Timeless Child. I will not tell you her story, because she is starting to believe that she needs to tell it herself and I have the platform to allow her to do it.
I realized I had told her how much I loved her because she could see how big a decision it was to add an author on my platform, responding by making my platform even better. She has a completely different writing voice and reminds me to be happier. I could return the favor.
We both run the gamut between reading a room and making those observations float into our echo chambers. We pick up the negative emotions in a room first, because we are programmed to respond to everyone else’s unhappiness because we are trying to keep our secrets. We are in protective mode of our spirits and bodies. This is not a problem. We have taught ourselves that we are worth protecting. The echo chamber just makes the negative emotions feel bigger and scarier than they really are because the boss music is playing, but they (jointly and/or severally) can’t touch us because we also have good boundaries.
Bryn will have my undying emotion forever, just an eternal soldier’s flame because our emotions run so deep they stack like a sandwich. That’s because she studies animal behavior just as closely as human behavior and she takes in all the things about homo sapiens that we cannot see. Her book title is literally “All the Dark We Cannot See.” Bryn “grew up with me” starting when I was 19 years old. So if our mutual friends want to start sweating bullets, this is where they should start.
Fuck them and their little cult of adoration. They just make me even more glad I got away from them and have spent the last 10 years worshipping the goddess who made me see what a nightmare you’d all become, because the people that do nothing are culpable.
This goes back to when I was 12.
My confusion and horror started then (but horror came later when I really understood its aftermath, but that’s what causes the panic attacks…. buy now, pay later). I was 12, and you very much weren’t. This is the call of The Timeless Child. It never changes, and it never gets better, because our abusers have taught us to beat the system and we do it whether we want to or not because we’re trapped. You have to identify, and you’re bad at it……………… because you don’t study animal behavior and Bryn does. I swear to fucking Christ, if you want to find an abuser, don’t hire a detective. Hire a dog trainer and I fucking mean it.
That’s because the child is acting just like a dog. Frightened behavior leading from the abuser making them alpha dog, and everyone else are puppies they have to take care of or their lives get worse. We will protect ourselves forever to avoid emotions and it goes two ways. They generally marry each other. The first is the one that cuts off all their emotions. The other is the one that bleeds out. One only takes care of themselves. The other can’t get out of bed in the morning, they’re so emotionally laden.
For the former, the sins of the world do not affect them. For the other, they’re the caretakers. They want everyone to feel safe and work toward it happening. It all stems from animal behavior. One becomes Black Panther, the other becomes Erik Kilmonger.
It will never vary unless you break the cycle. Bryn and I found each other. Instead of trying to handle someone’s emotions because they don’t have any by choice, we’re handling someone’s emotions that will handle ours. It’s a radical concept, being healthy and responding in a way she can hear it because I’ve found out that we’re the same person. Trying to love someone who can’t hear it is exhausting.
Although, I will tell my beautiful girl to reassure her that one of her three word e-mails cut me in half because that was the moment that all her love flooded into me at once and I realized that her feelings were large and I shouldn’t have blown it (for the 345454354354435345435th time). It’s one of the times I can quote her because it’s so innocuous:
“Also. Thank you.”
There was a big goddamn thank you because when she is humble she is fucking quiet. You can hear a pin drop.
Those words reverberated and she didn’t take in that part of it. She only took in the part where the consequences for me were vast and I also expressed unhappiness about it because it was a more complicated issue than I thought it would be. No support, no commiseration, no anything.
Just another confusing moment that could have been cleared up and just won’t. I don’t have to be sad about it, because I’ve let it go. But I just won’t go into a relationship expecting that someone understands they need to respond when their actions have caused pain and lift me up so that I can deal. I’m tired of dealing with people who are content to let me struggle. It is more work than I should be allowed to take on without positive reinforcement. That there are certain things I will do for you as long as you are doing certain things for me. That a relationship is a balance between anger and love and what we feed is what we get. I have absolutely been the villain in one case and the victim in another. I get that I’m not going to be the hero in every story and I’m tired of catering to people who think they’re the whole story. I was just willing to bend more on this one because first of all, when I was wrong I was really wrong. Secondly, when she was wrong she was really, really wrong as well. Neither of us could hear love very well, and we both focused on “everything was bad.” I thought she didn’t express herself enough to be clear over time, because saying everything was fine and withholding love was devastating because she’d gone from sunshine to cold, but not really. It was a spectrum as well, so I was feeling her out a lot of the time because only her annoyance would come through and she’d withdraw, then come back and make me wonder why she was reaching out if she was always so angry.
I found someone who is not always so angry.
We have music in common and listen to a lot of the same things. I’m looking forward to collaborating with her because I know she’ll only make me a better writer because I’m responding to her.
I know it to be solid because I have been smart about responding to my beautiful girl as well. I have learned how to be me by learning what I both do and do not want. Both lessons were just as important. I need to find the people that will forgive you over and over without shutting down, because I will always be human and so will they. I will give them the responsibility of helping me manage my emotions because I am offering that as well. The way I think of you rubs off. You’ll find yourself feeling better about who you are because I’ve told you that you do matter in a way that you can hear it. It’s the basis of something healthy and sustainable. It was where I thought Supergrover and I were going, because I’d been that for her before. But because I had hurt her, it wasn’t that she was malicious, it was that she was one type, and I was the other. But our behavior lined up. We could zipper our DNA, because it was permanently sealed when we were kids. She cuts off her emotions, I become the frightened dog. It’s how we’re programmed and she couldn’t see it.
That’s why the ostinato is “help her anyway.” I’m hoping that in time, she’ll realize we were just wrong for each other from the beginning because we couldn’t take care of each other once there was a schism. There was a power dynamic in all areas because there was a solid one in place from something that was pure.
She approached me like a dog as well. Loyal to a fault. Sniffed my hand and decided I could pet her head. Let me hold her leash. Would heel to an enormous degree and bark at everyone else. I did something to offend her, and the bark turned toward me for every conflict for all time because she had something concrete she could use and so did I. We just became two different types of dogs and couldn’t break the cycle.
It didn’t stop me from loving her and wishing for something healthy. We’d just gone too far into the woods and gotten lost from each other. It was a conflict like a dog being too heavy to carry who’d gotten injured. I was working on pure adrenaline, and my energy had run out six trees ago. But I never stopped loving her. Not once for one moment. I could get angry enough to tell her to fuck off for all eternity and never in six billion years mean it. I’d just get tired of dealing with her anger and confusion bullshit that I needed a fucking break. Any break in that pattern would cause unrest because she started to feel a push/pull that I didn’t. I knew she could be alpha dog if she wanted, and she was unsure. It was terrifying because when I had a conflict with her, she reacted as if I was trying to hurt her and not trying to get her to pay attention to the fact that it hurts me when she pulls back and it shouldn’t feel like an obligation because it shouldn’t hurt when I pull back, either. That’s because we both know where we stand at all times because we’re both emoting good and bad things.
Alternatively, I have the choice to believe whether she means good or ill and react appropriately. Everything doesn’t need to be put through the ringer of bad or good behavior and I overexplain because it’s a trauma response. But she never learned that I needed to tell her everything because that’s who I am.
Her self esteem went up and down as we talked because she decided that I would always be a threat. My trauma response irked hers and we were connected at the brain despite the fact that we brought out the worst in each other. I will be sorry about it for the rest of my life, but I will not think we should have continued hurting each other, either.
That’s why I want her man to be the best he can be. It’s not that I can’t be the shorter, more female version of him, just someone who cares about her without reason or rhyme because it’s so crazy solid and immense. It’s that she won’t let me be him anymore, because she’ll never see me like that again. It was a painful goodbye because it had to be. I would never walk away unless I felt it was necessary. Her words didn’t ring true consistently and she would say the same thing. It’s just that I was looking for desperately needed love and she was looking for desperately needed anger and guilt. We focused on all the wrong things, and I sat with the bees and cried while she felt justified in treating me this way because I’d always be an asshole.
What she confided in me was never the problem, because she never focused on what I was actually saying.
I will always love her a crazy amount, just beyond all measure because she proved to me every day she was worth it and wouldn’t acknowledge why I saw that. She thought she had too much sludge in her soul to be mine, and I thought I was sitting next to Christ in a hallucination. That’s funny because she’s an atheist.
I will never forget finding my person. The one I was meant to love like this. She wasn’t meant to be my Jamie. She was meant to be my Jenny, and she let me go………… but we’ll always be the same person on the opposite ends of the spectrum because we acted like dogs.
Here’s a hard truth. I didn’t say that Jack’s dad wasn’t Clark. In the real world, it very much could have been. To ignore that is heinous. I was pursued by my great uncle, and I know he did harm to others. It was not Foster, to be clear. If Foster had known, there wouldn’t be the other uncle. He would have protected me, and I know it like I know the back of my hand.
If you descend into madness enough to hurt a child, neither one of you will ever come back. Hurting children creates the same reaction in any degree. The spectrum is large. However, adults are fallible. They often don’t see what the adult is doing to their child, and fuck any training, they’ve memorized how to beat it.
They have also taught said child how to beat it, thus introducing the possibility that when they’re grown, they’ll have the power to do it to someone else because life is so unfair. This is not true of people who walk in light, but no one tells you how hard it is. How hard you’ll have to dig deep to pull a trigger out. Again, recovery doesn’t look like sunshine and rainbows. It means crying in the shower for 45 minutes while you decide what to do. It means isolating so you have room to breathe, feeling cut off and relieved all at the same time. It looks like thinking about very difficult things, and it takes stamina to get through a fourth of it.
You are learning to carry your own emotional weight so that you can filter everything through your trauma reflexes without reacting. You will know that you have made progress when you feel that trigger and it no longer hurts.
But feeling it until you don’t isn’t for pussies.
If you’re an empath fixer/pleaser, that looks like work. We feel all emotions physically. All of them. If you are distressed, we are. If you are sad, we are. If you are on top of the moon, we just want to go with you. This is because INFJ friends are relentless about healing other people. We all do it. We are pastors, social workers, and freeloading lazy assholes until we’re Brandon Sanderson.
My trauma reflexes often dam that up, but it also doesn’t invalidate what I said about me. It just takes me longer to get there because I have to recover from bodily shock. When someone wants to go toe to toe with me, I’m for it. But not until we’ve both gotten some distance from the problem. If I tell you I’m out for now, I mean it. It doesn’t mean I hate you and we’re done. It means that I need some space because I don’t want my rage to go off. I do not want to take my illness out on you. To ignore that is unwise, because I’m a wordsmith and make it pretty impossible not to remember your favorite lines. Alternatively, when I manage to avoid reacting, I am great at discussing boundaries. If my friends think that I’m pushing, they need to take a hard look at what I actually said and believe it. I’m not playing games, I don’t have the time or the want. I don’t make shit up. Especially if you want to know why I think something, I’ll go back to what you said and cite it.
It’s not to “throw something in your face,” it’s to say “here’s the reference.” All abused kids have some form of this, because they’ve probably been told they’re lying. Therefore, everything after that becomes “I’m telling the truth” and also being human and lying to put a protective arm over your face until you can stand up for your truth.
Jack and I are the same person, and we don’t even know each other yet. Again, it’s not because I’m like him in terms of what happened to him, but how all children react. If this is you, get help immediately. You don’t know what you’re doing around you, because either you’re the abuser or the enabler in every relationship in your life because you were too goddamned little to know the difference between that cycle and something clean.
If you don’t learn to recognize it, being the abuser or the enabler will be your only story, and yours is the story that sticks.
I’m just going to let my mind wander. None of the people or situations are real. SVU Rules.
Jack sits up in the middle of the night, and realizes his bed is wet. He is too old to be doing this, and he knows it. He’s been out of training pants for a long time, and his eyes betray his years. He heaves a pregnant sigh and gathers up his bedclothes. It’s happening again, and he knows why. It’s the monster in his head and the ghost out to get him. It’s the memory of having been told secrets too hard for him, even with an ancient soul. He knows that monsters aren’t fictional, even if he can’t admit it.
Jack walks downstairs to the laundry and dumps in everything. He looks at the clock. It’s 5:00 AM. He might as well start the coffee. He knows it will keep his mother from complaining if she wakes up to the smell. Keeping his mother under wraps has been his job since he was born. He knows the cycle will never end. Coffee and gin for the rest of his life.
He sighs again.
Since no one else drinks coffee, he only makes four cups. He takes care to level his tablespoons and measure the water. Jack thinks to himself that he should probably learn to cook because then he could be a TV star, and then dismisses that idea because he knows you have to like girls to do that.
This is the level at which Jack’s mind operates at nine years old. He knows who he is, he knows he is male, and he knows he is queer. He also knows that if he treats his mother with love and never displeases her, his life gets better. His dad is in jail. Has been for a long time. He lives in the shadows, and not because he wants to be there.
This is also the way he thinks all day about everything. It never stops. Sometimes he talks to himself about himself. The rest of the time he talks to himself about how to make things better for everyone else. He can do that because people leave him alone to an enormous degree. He is not being raised, he is raising himself….. and he is self aware.
Everything in his life is a nebulous gray, because it hinges on someone else’s schedule and desires. He notices when people don’t want to be near him, and doesn’t care. He’s his own best company.
But. There are complications.
Jack knows he cannot let his secret out, and you will not even know it by the end of this story. This story is about physical and emotional reactions to trauma, and how they play out. Jack is an amalgamation of the process it takes for humans to become monsters from the victim’s point of view. He thought it was healthy until the first wet dream. He’s nine. He’ll cling to men who aren’t him for decades hoping to recreate that experience, turning healthy relationships into trash until they step out of the situation and do the work. But you can’t accept your fate, and will actively self-sabotage if it looks too clean. You’ll doubt yourself forever, unable to recognize beauty for what it is………… because there’s always a catch, and sometimes it’s an obstacle you put there yourself.
To an extent, abusers don’t know what they’re doing. They know they’re fucking you up in the moment, but they never in a million years guess how long recovery takes. Jack will face therapy every week of his life and take medication chronically because his reality broke a few years ago.
But what about when you can’t take medication because your family has forbidden it? Jack longs to be bigger and stronger. His parents won’t let him be that, but his abuser still does. Clark has a stranglehold on Jack, and will until he gets bored. Then, he’ll conveniently move.
Jack’s behaviors are set. They’re completely different than they were, and no one has noticed, he doesn’t feel appreciated unless Clark is there. Clark is Jack’s person. He won’t betray him for anything in the world. It doesn’t take much to betray Clark, so Jack’s days are numbered. At this point, he doesn’t know what hell awaits him as he’s expected to move on from this as if nothing happened. He tries to be invisible because if he talks Clark will go away. He can’t stand him, and he’s trapped with him. He won’t realize until much later that getting his body to react was planned. He won’t realize how much weight he was carrying. He won’t realize the enormous work it will take to shed it and will not be able to function until it’s resolved. Even then, things that Clark did or said will trigger Jack in an instant.
No one noticed when his night terrors started. No one noticed when his grades dropped. No one noticed whether he gained or lost weight. No one looked at the stoned, frightened look he gave everyone else.
His parents are suspect, and need to stay uninformed or the fun stuff will stop. He hates himself that he loves it.
As he sits, he broods and gets frustrated. Being frustrated always leads to a white hot rage as if one is fainting.
Being able to let out his demons appropriately is going to be a battle. If he turns out to be a regular person, he’ll have wins and losses like everyone else. Even as a regular person, he’ll be a sociopath to one degree or another. That’s because you don’t have to be born with psychopathic tendencies. The reality break will do it for you quite efficiently. Jack will become a criminal or the greatest American who ever lived, and he’ll decide in the car.
Life is what happens when Jack is supposed to be doing something else.
He’s supposed to be doing his homework. He’s supposed to be doing his chores. He’s supposed to be watching his sister. He’s supposed to be a lot of things. But he doesn’t live on the ground anymore.
When someone has complete control, it’s an adrenaline-filled high that fuels thoughts of them while they’re not there. It increases their control while not having to do a damn thing.
Clark perpetuated a cycle, and so will Jack. But he doesn’t know those implications, and it’s not even because I’m the author and he isn’t. It’s that all abused children are The Timeless Child. None of them have all of these symptoms, but if you’ve read up, they’re accurate for someone.
Jack doesn’t know what story he’s going to tell, because someone took control of the pen, violently at first. Then, it was love. He said he was sorry. If he trashes this relationship, he’ll have no one else. So even though he was a dickhead, he’s forgiven over and over because Jack can’t even breathe when he thinks of Clark. A child thinks that it will get better for far longer than they should because they have absolutely no experience with relationships. They don’t even know many adults besides their parents….. the people Clark told not to tell.
In every adult conflict in his life, there will be echoes of this. If he can keep one secret, he’ll keep them all.
That’s what will make him a world leader or a white nationalist. Just because you have to cut off your emotions to protect yourself doesn’t mean that you can’t learn to deal. It means that your first reaction will always be wrong. Your programming before your reality. Until you change the disk, you’ll react the same way.
Some of it’s little, like letting my characters play while I’m cooking so that movements are in quick bursts as I react to how things sound/smell.
Some of it’s big, like not having the fight I needed to have with Supergrover eight years ago and knowing when to give up. She knew she couldn’t give up then, and so did I. I am more sorry than she’ll ever know that I decided she was worth keeping around. This is because her words lifted me up, and also dropped me from maximum height for the most damage.
That’s because my mind doesn’t track like hers, and she invalidated it. I was so in “don’t displease her” mode that I couldn’t look at her and say, “look. You forgave me, but nothing has changed since we declared we were forgiven. I still feel exactly the same way, and you’re deaf.” She’ll take responsibility for making a mistake, but if there are consequences for me from her decisions, she’s proven time and again that she’s not capable of hearing me and how dare I even have the audacity to ask her questions? She cut off her nose to spite her face, and I am enjoying thinking about how that’s not working out for her the way she might have thought, and not for malice. It’s that nothing on this web site would have been published if I was talking to her and didn’t have to talk about her because conversation was a viable option.
But because she understands exactly none of that now (big fan and patron until I started doing the same thing to her that I do to everyone in my life, no exceptions unless they make shitty characters), she feels free to write me off with no regrets. However, she’s fully capable of passing regret onto me.
She couldn’t hear a problem and not have it echo deeply as if she was doing something irredeemable. I reacted the same way to her at times. It grew unhealthy, and when I tried to change the pattern, she let me have it.
We are both too goddamn arrogant in our daily lives, and that played into it, too. I was just willing to take off my armor with her, even though she’d gotten dressed a long time ago.
So, every day I walked bare skin through a mine field, praying they didn’t go off.
This repeated every day for eight years. Even when I was arrogant, I was an inch tall trying to make up for that fact. She’s such a part of me that she had no idea what it would do to me later in life if we bonded, because she wasn’t thinking about me and what I do.
Thinking about me and what I do is my entire problem with her. She thinks that she’s protecting me by not telling me anything, ever, and it leaves me in a fucking state of panic.
That’s due to the trauma bond screaming, I guess.
She is every bit as responsible for our story as I am, but it’s convenient to step around that. She stopped owning it years ago, and by that I mean she’d say one thing and do another. That’s fine unless you also don’t express why you’re doing something. Helping me to understand was never her priority, and she didn’t want to help me.
I didn’t notice when signal became noise, and by that I don’t like being noise for her when I was a huge signal. We both have responsibilities to each other and we just stopped negotiating them.
When I was sick, she knew I was going to be sick forever, and though I’d told her I had mental health issues in the beginning, she didn’t know how they’d present. I didn’t either. My problem lies not with what I did, because I know I made a mistake and I own it. Have apologized for it every single day since even if it wasn’t written down. My problem is that she forgave me, and I was so focused on forgiveness that I allowed for some very bad behavior because I thought I deserved it.
I didn’t hold her accountable to the words “I forgive you,” and treated myself as if I was the sole cause of all her issues from 2013 til a few months ago. The worst part is that I spent an enormous amount of time on self-discovery, self-reflection, healing, all that. It has made a difference to everyone but her. It’s just another way for her to say one thing and do another. If I’m angry, she’ll yell at me. If I quietly express displeasure, she’ll tell me she doesn’t have time for it and to go find new friends. I wish she’d known what kind of person she was before she put all her shit on me. I got well, and she acted the same. She thought she was such a big shot for keeping our relationship going because I was such a train wreck, as if I should have been so grateful.
I was, because I couldn’t see what she was doing. She kept me on a hook, and is now enjoying watching me twist in the wind as I struggle with questions we both should have had to answer. Her failure to show up probably comes from fear, and mine comes from having done it so often I’m bleeding emotionally without any support from her.
I can’t rely on her, because she’s just as much of a train wreck as all the other people I’m trying to attract as readers, because she doesn’t accept being human and fallible as valid. The only thing she understands is her own process, and everyone else is fucked up.
It’s not malicious. She’s the product of her experience. But I don’t have to live with it, either.
This friendship was an activity that made me lose way too much time, but I do not regret it. What I mean is that I wish I had realized that in her mind, I’d always be sick. There’d never come a time when my mental health was managed enough that I was capable of being her friend. But she couldn’t say that, so she engineered a relationship in which I’d feel so bad I’d quit.
Before I really dig deep, I am angry af at Facebook because Iโm in FB jail until about 9:00 PM, and even then I canโt use โgroupsโ for a month. This is because a woman was asking for consolation over a breakup and I said โcheer up, pretty girl. If youโre going through hell, keep going. Also, men are trash. :Pโ The only difference is here I did not say that was a Winston Churchill group, because this is WordPress and weโre smarter than everyone else.
So, for the first time in history, I can blame Winston Churchill for Facebook jail and not me. However, if a man was really petty and reported the comment, that also blows. Either way, again. Facebook is not North Korea, but it might has well be. As I wrote in โThe Art of War,โ thereโs no department of people who determine what you meant. If you say any violent words at all, a text scanner will decide you were trying to incite violence. Ok. I get it. Not so bad. Whatโs bad is that if you are caught once, you are marked, and things spiral out of control very, very quickly.
I wasnโt able to use Facebook from Thanksgiving to New Years, either, and it sucked being cut off from my friends and family with absolutely no oversight board at all. The reason I know this is that you can appeal a decision and the decision comes back within one minute, then you are invited to appeal from another board where it takes 30 days to even get your case looked at, so the ban will run out before you can even get someone to look.
Since Iโve been off the radar so long, it really surprised me that now Iโm on it because I truly think someone reported the comment. This is because there were already hearts and laughter from other people in the group, including the author of the post. The only thing that doesnโt make sense is a man being offended by something so innocuous. It doesnโt matter.
Iโm already on the radar.
One of the reasons I got so mad at โyour blog makes you sound like a dickโ is that this person insinuated that if I wasnโt such an asshole, then Facebook wouldnโt keep restricting me. It was humiliating, because her voice had the tone of someone speaking to a small child with developmental delays. She was using it as a political point when I hadnโt said anything to cause those kinds of blocks except use English a computer didnโt understand. But it served her purpose, so she was absolutely going to use it. Fuck my feelings. I hope sheโs happy about how that turned out for her, because Iโll never speak to her again if I can help it.
Thatโs because I donโt like judgmental dickheads, eitherโฆโฆ especially ones who arenโt writers. People who arenโt writers have a MILLION ideas on what constitutes real writing and what doesnโt. If Iโd listened to her, this would be a resume and some recipes. Iโm sure you would have all been thrilled. Meanwhile, yesterday was the biggest day for likes in the history of my blog and Iโve had 50 million readers validate that I am indeed hot shit next to a policy wonk. If youโre ever my friend on the ground, the fastest and shortest way to get dumped as my friend is to come up in my yard and tell me how to write, then when I say I donโt like it, convince your friends that youโre right and Iโm wrong, then invite me to sit and listen to thoughts about my work inspired by someone elseโs thoughts about my work because hearsay is exactly what I need to be successful. Why didnโt I think of that before?
How did I not know that I didnโt need to read Shakespeare. Going to a class where people discuss the motivations of the writer off book is enough. I am not Shakespeare, nor will I ever be. But the point stands. If youโre going to have people criticize my work and make me listen to it, it would help if they had actually read what they were talking about.
After that, I realized Iโd never change her and she had no business being friends with a blogger. After having so many friends not believe in my writing, I donโt have time. Either you understand where Iโm going, or you donโt. Itโs that simple. That friend reamed me out because a woman text message broke up with me and I was unhappy about it, so I wrote about it like Iโve been doing every day for 20 yearsโฆ.. but her feelings matter more than 20 years of posting, right? This blog is mine, because I donโt want to write for the manager at Burger King… as if that was my target demographic. My target demographic is people neither one of us would ever think weโd meet. Other creatives.
My blog isnโt fantastic because Iโm such a great writer. Itโs fantastic because Iโm the one that bothered to remember to write things down. On this blog, the woman who hurt me does not get to then share airtime. There is no Fairness Doctrine here.
This is also not Facebook. If you make a comment, Iโll approve it. Go nuts in the comments and tell me what a dick I am and it only drives up my engagement, so even if your opinion hurts, Iโll still let everyone see it. The site isnโt fair and balanced because thereโs only me, and I donโt live in anyone elseโs head. I canโt. It makes me try to please everyone, coming up with content based on what you want to read.
Not caring is the only thing that allows me to get words out at all. Iโve catered to other people my whole life, and Iโm done. Have been for quite a while.
Someone said they thought it was weird that Iโd given Supergrover the passcode to my phone and the light went off in their heads when I said, โwhen youโre bipolar, someone has to know.โ There are solid reasons for everything I do. Everything. When you invalidate those reasons and write me off as stupid or crazy, I wonโt stay mad, but kiss me goodbye.
I didnโt tell my beautiful girl why, either, so if sheโs wondering why she has a passcode for a phone sheโs never seen, worry no more. I knew I couldnโt change my story, and sheโs the only one I trust in that particular regard. The reason Iโm telling you and not her is that i I told her it was โjust in cases,โ she would have internalized it and told me that I was just trying to piss her off and she didnโt have time for this shit.
No one does, cielo. No one does.
The fact that no one has time for this shit is why bipolar patients kill ourselves in droves.
My friends donโt have time to deal with bipolar bullshit, so Iโm passing the savings on to you. Why? No one is requiring you to be here, and no one is telling you to stay. You choose to listen, you choose whether to respond. I donโt even link to things most of the time so that the past can stay passed. Itโs fine if others donโt want to deal with me. My ire comes in when youโre stomping all over the place I go when I donโt want to deal with me.
I especially donโt like being โhandledโ when Iโve been your friend despite the fact that I made the executive decision not to punch your wife in the face on many occasions. I thought she was such an asshole to you. She thought I was a threat and treated me as such, a stand-in for all the people she canโt yell at. She looked at me like The Other Woman for years and years, all because she was mad at you and taking it out on me. How did you react? By catering to her and making me feel like The Other Woman as well.
The two of you turned what was clean, healthy friendship into something sordid by having to have a conversation about it every time you took me outโฆ.. and donโt think I couldnโt hear you talking about me because at the time, your house was too small to talk shit in the kitchen while Iโm in the living room. So, it was actually very, very easy to tell both of you to go to hell because by the time my โfriendโ jumped on my ass about writing, I was exhausted. I couldnโt prove to her partner that I didnโt want romance, and you were a pussywhipped little bitch about it.
I was devastated by my own relationship troubles and my motherโs death. I didnโt have time to think about either one of you and now Iโm glad I donโt. Thatโs because if either of you had bothered to look for it, you would have seen that I didnโt have time to love someone that way. I was toast. I need to rest, heal, relax, gather strength.
I chose to listen for years despite wanting to scream โLEAVE HER!โ If she was willing to treat both of us like shit, I thought she should be permanently uninvited to your life, because youโre sunny and wonderful and connected. Sheโs not. My beautiful girl told me to leave you behind years before I actually did, because the triangle was toxic. The more I insisted that we were just friends, the more the partner took out her anger on me.
Sheโd only have had to talk to me once to know that no one had a chance with me because my significant fulfilling relationship was very, very real and all in my head. It rode the line because pictures and voice memos are not enough. I never even got to shake her hand, and yet there were days when my heart beat only for her and we fought like cats and dogs because of it.
She couldnโt tell me how much she was not in the mood for my foolishness, and I didnโt feel all that great about hers, either. She came back to me, claimed to be my friend, and then did everything she possibly could to disprove that fact, because she was wonderful to me in some ways, but mostly dismissive. I had been discarded, and that was of my own doing. But if you come back and continue to treat me like shit, thatโs your fault. That is not on me. That treatment of me is not based on what I did, but because you told me you forgave me and didnโt. Therefore, I was stepping all over boundaries I didnโt even know were there. When she told me she didnโt play games because she didnโt have time, I told her that maybe that was true with her other friends, but not with me. That she had plenty of games, she just didnโt tell anyone the rules and was perfectly comfortable leaving me in the dark every moment of every day.
I didnโt leave her behind because she was a bad person or that her gifts were unwelcome or that I didnโt love her to absolute pieces. I left her behind because people make plans for their priorities and excuses for everything else. It was again a case of going hard for someone I couldnโt go toโฆ. Because since Iโd hurt her, anything I did that was genuine felt like a lie. It wasnโt, but thatโs not how it felt to her and I take nothing away from it. She couldnโt see me, and lied to herself that she could.
Her heuristics told me that since Iโd once been unkind, I would always be that and everything else was a mask. Forgiveness was relative. I was not reacting to the words โI forgive you,โ because she said them. I reacted to being treated badly after she said she forgave me, because Iโve never been taught that definition of friendship. I know how to negotiate boundaries. I know how to emote to try and be understood. I am emotionally brave, but I was willing to be as humble to the point of groveling as long as forgiveness was real.
If you read my words looking for anger, youโll find them. In fact, you might find whole angry entries. But one entry does not a blog make. I am a spectrum. Being me is actually kind of difficult, because my personality and writing creates its own orbit. I am very, very powerful that way, and I have to be aware of it because Iโve seen what it does to people through the woman that groomed me and the other public figures in my life with the same personality. Thereโs never just one narcissist. If you find one, youโll be attracted to it forever and then getting better with age becomes Whack a Mole.
Iโm winning.
I just realized that the reason my blog entries sound like letters is that I am trying to differentiate between someone and their partner because theyโre both the same sex. Ah, well. Content over grammar, I suppose. I am a grammar nazi, but not to the tune of caring about stream of consciousness writing.
Getting better with age is seeing these kinds of patterns and walking away. My truth was not theirs. I was walking around DC with my heart butterflied on my sleeve.
I have to start this entry as a letter to you, or I will lose my courage and not post this at all. Clearing it up with the Fanagans that you have said “write whatever you want. I don’t care.” So, fair warning. I will.
I also know that you are not frightened by the title, because you know where I’m going with this because we just talked about it this afternoon. All of this is to avoid blowback. I know that “don’t go bitch to Bryn. You only think I’ll fuck you up. Bryn will hide your body” is sound advice.
No one would ever know. In order to be truly frightening, you have a big backyard…… of which I am stunningly aware in case I’m ever an asshole. ๐
I have loved you for three lifetimes, and I will love you for as many as we have left. I have no idea what our future holds, but I know that whether we’re together in the same city or apart is of no consequence. Facebook video calls travel, and we don’t waste time on small talk. My pain is yours, and your pain is mine.
My heart sighs in palpable relief that our lovebombing has been genuine for over a quarter of a century. As I told you on the phone, I should have known the first time we disappeared at a party that it was for life…. the way it would have been with more people in our circle if they hadn’t been such dipshits, and I only use that word specifically because our mutual friend’s partner didn’t understand trauma bonds and said friend was absolutely handfasted to me whether she asked me to marry her or not.
If that partner had wanted to undo it, she should have shown up ten fucking years earlier. Michael Jackson is more famous, but he has too many fucking faces. Some of them are round cheeked and have a great smile.
If our “friend” had been truly honest, she would have said as much. She would have said to her partner that she had roped me in and there was nothing she could do about it, so fucking deal. She should have said that it would injure us both. What she told her partner was that she “thought I would go away when I was 18.”
The partner before her was a fucking mess, so she dicked me around. She needed someone, but it shouldn’t have been me for two reasons. The first is that I was in middle school. Take that in, bitches. The second is that as an INFJ, I could feel her emotions coursing through me better than I could feel my own. I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL.
I know you know the story, but you weren’t there for the beginning. You weren’t there when I lost my life and started living hers. You weren’t there when I was 14 at school and 25 at home. I’m so sorry if sitting in this shit is painful. Don’t read it all at once.
You notice that no one asked about the other little girls.
But I fucking noticed.
I talked, and most of our friend group shot me to shit because they couldn’t see me as a hurt child. They fucking wrote me off as a bipolar adult and people were STILL BEING HURT. Oh my fuck I am never going to stop being angry about this, even though she’s forgiven honestly and completely. I cannot carry that much pain, and I refuse. It’s just the lingering anger that irritates my trauma bond. Hearing Cynthia Erivo sing the Rutter Pie Jesu on Fresh Air almost sent me to the hospital because I thought I was going to die and it was just a panic attack. Do you know how traumatized you have to be to feel like there’s no difference between a panic attack and a myocardial infarction? (LMGTFY)
Yes, you know what that is (say that in a Dalek voice- obligatory Doctor Who joke).
All the love that doesn’t belong to Oliver (since you are aware that you are in second place with both puppies),
Leslie
Once I started talking about being abused, I couldn’t stop. I would drop another Google tattoo, except every time I see her name I want to fucking throw up. That’s because she fucked me up, and never apologized for it except one e-mail in 23 years….. she said, and I quote, “I can see how some of those conversations would be confusing and upsetting to you.” AYFKM? That’s it? That’s 23 years’ worth of apologies?
Then she had the audacity to make an “It Gets Better” video for young people. I won’t link to it, because it makes me vomit. She became the director of the Portland YOUTH Philharmonic, and no one knew SHIT. I protected that path for all it was worth, and I am so done. SO. DONE.
There’s going to be a lot of cursing in this one because I’m so fucking angry right now. One trauma bond snapping reminded me of that one, in which the relationship was over twice as long a time period and every bit the same outcome. It’s just that in this case, she was the one that fucked me over, and I did not stop the cycle. I took it out on someone who absolutely did not deserve it, and I cannot blame anyone for that except sitting it at that woman’s table and making sure she doesn’t return the fucking casserole dish. I had no culpability. None.
That’s because I realized that my beautiful girl lovebombed the fuck out of me, and I did it to her right back. Here’s the thing, though. People who have been lovebombed by narcissists don’t recognize when it’s genuine. They don’t recognize love that goes that deep, that crazy, that a relationship can keep up that intensity, because they’re constantly wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. There is a moment in every relationship with a narcissist where you do something wrong, the sun turns, and you’ll never see it again. You will be trapped in a trauma bond with the wrong ass person. You will grovel like a worm to get that dopamine back, because childhood PTSD doesn’t allow for much else. Narcissists fucking bank on it.
I didn’t trust Supergrover’s love as far as I could throw it, and acted as such. For her, I’m betting that’s relatable in The Later Years. I know this because changing her tune from lovebombing to no affection in her tone at all and completely shutting down emotionally let me know she was in protection mode, strengthening the fortress so that I couldn’t get in.
That’s because if you think trading dick for a live in chef is offensive, you should have seen what she let me get away with in The Early Years. It fucked me up, because I knew I had no chance at any real relationship with her again. She fucking told me she had to lose weight and I told her I’d take it off in a week. Joking was fine before, but not fine after, and it would have been a beautiful thing to know that before I stepped into it up to my ass. I even joked about having an affair under everyone’s radar, and the way I phrased it made even her laugh. So, to have that be a trigger instead of a source of amusement also ate my lunch, because it made everything seem so much worse. I would hope that she has found in retrospect that my sapiosexuality had been groomed. That I did not escape perpetuating carnage, but when I realized it, there wasn’t a hole in the ground big enough.
THANKS FOR THAT. I won’t go into namecalling, but you can imagine what’s in my head right now. It’s not great. I want to tear her limb from limb the way I wanted to take her partner apart WHEN I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL. I had all the rights and responsibilities of a loving partner without any of the fun stuff, because she has had and will have emotional affairs with anyone dumb enough to fall for it. People don’t change without significant work, there’s no statute of limitations on guilt, and there’s a lot of “don’t want to” in “can’t.” If you become her best friend, which she will tell you often that she is, but really you are her pet person because she knows she’s better than you. She doesn’t pick people smarter. No predator does. I also doubt that age matters. She can take a fully functioning adult and make them a shell of a person and it doesn’t take even a week. I can name names, and I would if I could ask them first. I blocked the minors on Facebook because I didn’t have enough strength to reach out. I also didn’t have enough strength to look at their faces in my feed. If she read this, she’d be furious, because she doesn’t see what I saw. She lovebombed the fuck out of every woman around her, no matter whether they were little girls or grown ass adults. In order to find people to control, you have to put out feelers.
The relationship with my beautiful girl was a reflection of what had happened 10 years earlier, and it’s eating my fucking lunch, so may I repeat myself…… THANKS FOR THAT. She should have had to destroy herself over it. Get right with God. What the fuck ever. But let me let you in on a little secret. Her actions fucked me up so bad that a therapist told me she was too close to retirement to take me on… that healing me would take five to ten years….. and because I couldn’t see the feelers, I couldn’t take in real love, either. It was suspect. Unsafe. My heart beat to it….. “unsafe. Unsafe. Unsafe. Unsafe.” I became the Master when I took in the whole vortex at once. Here’s where I surprised Zac by going dark. All abused children are “The Timeless Child.” Even The Master and The Doctor are the same person. If I think about that long enough, it gets chewier.
It leads my mind to Dexter violence. Thank God I’m not violent, I’m just a kid with a keyboard, which is absolutely more than she’ll ever have and very effective. I won’t physically hurt you, but in a letter I’m Hattori Hanzo. I will leave you in ribbons. You’ll never get me out of my head, which is far superior to a good ass kicking. That’s because my therapy is right here where I can go back to it. If I falter in strength, I have a place to go that says fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
What killed me was pointing my sword in the wrong direction, and dear God I didn’t mean a double entendre but I see it and I can’t decide whether to leave it or save my ass. Eh, I’ll leave it. It’s a brilliant self own, if nothing else.
But what I’m really saying is that I lost my mind and she fucking stole the TARDIS and said, “drinks on the moon?” It has never occurred to me before now, but I’m not Rory the Roman. I haven’t been. For 10 years, I have been The Master and her Impossible Girl. She has no idea how much I mean this, and because she doesn’t watch Doctor Who, she won’t take in its enormity. For every bit that I felt a connection with The War Daniel, I felt the same pull toward her in a different way. I wanted both of them not just for this regeneration, but for all of them. The child, the teenager, the decades with different stories and faces. I would have loved her with this much intensity until she died if she would have only let me. Our bond makes it almost impossible for anything else to seem important, again, so personal to the two of us that I just don’t want to let go of it. I never will, even if people don’t understand and I have no choice but to look like a nutter. It makes me anxious that people will again write me off as a bipolar adult when they couldn’t find a clue with both hands.
Also. I love how The Doctor says they’re “not that kind of Doctor,” yet The Master and The Doctor are the same person and their initials are MD. To all the Whovians who will gatekeep and say I’m wrong, they just share DNA, Southerners never let facts get in the way of a good story. See title of blog.
I have to be angry here, because if I don’t, the MIDDLE SCHOOL trauma bond will reactivate. Who else would she tell her secrets besides someone she could control? It was too risky to be vulnerable with someone she couldn’t. My beautiful girl tried to control me in the same way, for entirely pure reasons. There is nothing in the world I feel more than her right to feel however she wants. It’s just that she seemed to be wrapped too tight, I was wrapped too loose, and we never rapped.
“You like Eminem? Explain exactly how I’m not going to fall in love with you. USE BIG WORDS.” (When did you say that? Day one. She appealed to my ego, and no writer in the world would react differently, especially an unknown quantity like me.) DO YOU SEE WHAT THAT WOMAN MADE ME LOSE? I perpetuated the cycle, and I lost a friend who would have moved mountains for me. I know that because she did it. In every way possible, I wanted to save her because she saved me first. I wrote that line about Dana, but only half of it did I really mean for her. It didn’t make my feelings for Dana less intense, only shared.
I spent 2003 obsessed with The Eminem Show. I am not sure she didn’t. Now, I listen to “Love Game” all the time and nearly fall apart with laughter.
“Have a blessed day.”
She’s told me what she drives, and I know damn well that if we were screaming down 66 we’d have all the windows down and the music blasting loud enough for the entire city to enjoy. I don’t think of this song as being about her. I imagine us both enjoying thinking about subject matter.
Now, when I have a genuine need from my beautiful girl, she only tells me that she is frankly tired of being guilted over it. To take an example from the song, neither one of us forgot the other’s birthday……… at first. That’s actually the thing that drew me to her the most when we started talking reconciliation. She forgot several years running and then couldn’t always e-mail me on my actual day, but started remembering again. She even sent me a fairy tale book last year, and I ate it up (it wasn’t Stephen King. It was a reimagining of Peter Pan). It wasn’t that it was never enough for me. It’s that remembering my birthday is a huge damn deal. I don’t care about the presents, I care that she’s so busy she can’t even breathe. She barely knows the date and time. And yet for a moment the clock stopped on Sept. 11th, with a note saying she’s sorry she forgot. I was completely fucking undone, because that showed me so much love and respect that I could not even. It wasn’t that she couldn’t commit to small things. It’s that she thought I was too much for her on the big things. Even the big things could have been solved with Jack Daniels on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Eight years since the original break (seven and a half at most) and she thinks all I’m doing is trying to rattle her. Does this even make any sense if my letters are the same as my blog? That I see everything as a spectrum and not only will I let her know what is going wrong, but what is going right? I have been every bit as rabid with love as I have been with you. How she could look at that and say I see nothing but negative says I’m not the only one with rejection sensitivity dysphoria.
And yet, I am careful about painting my feelings as fact, because even though I write like that, I am relentless in saying “this is only my opinion.” Take it or leave it, seriously. I don’t care how you respond. I care whether I’m stuffing down emotions because all INFJs get ill from negative feelings. We feel everything, which is one of the reasons I think my bond with both women was so incredibly hard on me.
So.
Fuck Michael Jackson.
If you think the two stories aren’t inextricably interrelated, you’ve never seen my abuser work a room. Fuck me. She’s so powerful she can suck up everything. The carnage in her wake…..
She was a fucking opera singer. In what world would a lesbian who looked like that, had that much talent, and made it unclear whether she was romantically interested or not would I not lose my fucking mind? I was 14. My hormones had kicked in very, very recently. I had no idea what love was.
Here’s the reason I’m a ninja blade. It is now 33 years later, and I am only now able to really staunch the bleeding. To say she didn’t know what she was doing is criminal, even though she didn’t break any laws. Let’s say she didn’t. Let’s say all the other women were totally above board, even though anyone with eyes could see something was wrong. She was 25 years old.
23 years of the monster in my head and the ghost out to get me.
Now, I’m living my life by telling everyone who doesn’t believe me to go to hell, because you were there and you did nothing. You didn’t save any of the others, and you didn’t believe me. You should check in with them and make sure they’re okay, because when I saw them, they were FUBAR and you were silent, because you thought you were better than them, too…….. because she was still lovebombing you. You didn’t walk into the game, because you were stronger than her. We were weak and couldn’t hack it. Seems legit.
It’s interesting that she met me when I was 12, but I didn’t feel sexual energy in my direction until I was 14. Two things are completely fucked up about that. The first is that it shows grooming with intent. The second is that no healthy adult tells a child things that are way too big for them. It created my most devastating secret; I learned the power of what childhood emotional abuse could do. We don’t understand it, but we crave our abusers. We walk toward it because the control is complete. We feel ourselves wanting to have sex years before we’re ready, because whether you’re a monster or totally clueless, you’ve already fucked us no beers.
So, to my beautiful girl, thank you for everything. Thank you for listening all those years. Thank you for loving me to the best of your ability. Thank you for publicly declaring your love for me, because it showed me how much I mattered to you. Thank you for letting me walk away with my head held high, because you were there to catch.
My nose got broken when I was a kid. I am sure I walked straight into something, because if it had been a fight, I would have remembered. What I do know is that my nose is still feels weird about its โnewโ configuration.
My foot got broken when Lindsay decided that I could learn to skateboard in the living room, and it didnโt go all that well. It was just a hairline fracture until I worked an entire shift at a restaurant waiting tables without realizing that the pain was because of a broken bone, ensuring that it went from a nuisance to a big damn deal.
I went to the ER when I got home, after a concerned girlfriend said I should probably get an X-ray and everyone else was asleep. I think she must have driven 45 minutes to an hour to make sure I went to the doctor instead of just telling her I would. Incredibly sweet on her part, because like as not it would still be broken and me scratching my head as to why had she not been persuasive.
I broke my wrist in front of a Starbucks, because I tripped on the sidewalk going towards the door. Thatโs the most painful and irritating thing Iโve ever been through. My cast was a hot mess. Luckily, everything healed correctly and no lingering pain. The funniest was not being able to make it to my appointment to get my cast off, so my girlfriendโs dad took it off with his Dremel.
Speaking of which, my girlfriendโs dad was a good time, because he was conservative as shit, but made me laugh on a regular basisโฆ. This is because he was funny both when he knew it and when he didnโt. He also lived in Corpus Christi, which is why I was away from my doctor in he first place. Katharin and I had driven to Corpus for a visit. Corpus is one of my favorite places now, because Iโve spent enough time there to get to know it. The beaches are just amazing, and I didnโt think I could love a beach more than the ones where I lived on Galveston.
Since then, which was probably 2015, I havenโt broken anything. The worst thing thatโs happened is falling downtown and hurting myself, which by now has happened too many times to count, not all of them memorable. The ones that are stick out. The ones that donโt leave bruises, so I know something happened, but not when and where. Having cerebral palsy makes you off balance all the time, and not having depth perception on top of it makes me a bit of a comedian to the outside world. I run into doorjambs the most, because I canโt calculate the distance of my shoulder from it, nor can I pay attention to both sides of the jamb at once. I overcorrect left and right, so my shoulders look like I box.
Maybe I should box. I could work out and go an entire sparring session without being able to hit anything. ๐ I can just picture trying to punch in the right direction and missing the target by half an inchโฆ. And that would happen more than once, every instance funny in its own way.
Breaking my wrist was awful because it was my right. I canโt write for shit, especially with my left hand. I couldnโt really type one-handed, either, but I managed that easier than a pen. I remember long, rambling phone conversations with Dana in which I was trying not to let on that I was in pain while she chatted about the latest goings on in Portland and the entire plot of the M*A*S*H* episode she was currently watching.
Thereโs a story there, and it fits in well with the theme of Katharin being good for me and not. Katharin was funny and engaging in public, and behind closed doors was a very unhappy person. I couldnโt do anything about that. There were several red flags surrounding this one, but this one crushed me. I spent time and money running around getting her flowers and an enormous cake for her birthday, and I got no thank you for it. I got a treatise on how sad it made her that I didnโt get her a card. I didnโt do it intentionally, I was just excited about the cake because it was themed especially for her. She told me once that she loved white cake, because it reminded her of special occasions, like birthdays and weddings.
Not only did I get her a white cake because of it, I remember that quote so fondly that white is my favorite cake now, too. I love weddings and birthday parties, or the idea of them, anyway. Itโs like the first few minutes of โLove Actuallyโ when you see people greeting each other at Heathrow.
I wrote her what I thought was a beautiful essay about how much I was grateful she was born, and it still took her several days to get over a slight I hadnโt intended and thought she was making a mountain out of a molehill.
In fact, what drove me away was her treatment of Dana.
She didnโt have the right to be concerned when Dana was in Oregon and I was in Texas, because I wasnโt giving off those kind of vibes. In fact, it didnโt occur to me just how stupid Iโd been until Dana saw how Katharin treated me and read me the riot act over it, that it was painful to watch. This is because Katharin knew that Dana lived in SE Portland and forbid me to see Dana at all, so sheโd check my bank account and see if any of my charges were in SE. Just everything she could do to spy on me to make sure I was keeping up my part of the bargainโฆ.. one I did not make. She didnโt have the street credibility to ask something like that of me, because Iโd never been in love with Dana and I didnโt see it happening until I realized how much it touched me for Dana to hurt for me. That she was the kind of person I needed to be with rather than the one who set to tear me down instead of build me up.
This is because Iโd won an internship with the Human Rights Campaign to write Sunday School curriculum for churches all over the nation. I would have been amazing at it, but Katharin didnโt want me to go and my friends said that it was a big deal for her, because who manages the house for three months, etc? My opinion was that Katharin and I hadnโt been together long enough for me to worry about her on that levelโฆ. It had only been a few months, not a few years. And even then, what spouse actively throws a fit over their partner getting the job of their dreams?
I threw away an amazing opportunity with the reward of continuing to get beat up emotionally all the time. Thatโs when Meagan and Deah came to visit, and when they wanted to spend a night with me, I said โof course!โ Then, the day before they got to my house, Katharin was so mad at me for letting an ex spend the night (with her wife and child in the guest room, helloโฆโฆ weโve been friends since high schoolโฆโฆ) that she punched a hole in the wall. Luckily, it was fixed and painted before company arrived.
Katharin also had very specific ideas about what would make me less of a flake, which she phrased in just that way. I couldnโt stop the behaviors that made me feel bad, and I had such hope for the future. We were going to move to Portland together, and she started flaking on whether she was coming or not. She must have told me she wasnโt coming twice before I broke up with her for good, but that didnโt stop her from going nuclear when I did, because she needed to believe that I left. Realizing that sheโd put on a show of saying she was excited about moving, then going to Corpus for the summer and getting settled in was her own choice, because it made it harder to leave when she was so integrated back into her first family. By this time, I knew I wanted to be with Dana, but it wasnโt the only reason I broke up with Katharin. I would have broken up with Katharin because of Danaโs opinion regardless. If my best friend is saying โI donโt like how she treats youโ and she has known me longer than you, guess what?
I didnโt need Dana to tell me what to do. I knew what to do. She just confirmed that it was as bad as I thought it was. These things werenโt normal, particularly going through my bank transactions to see if I was even in the same quadrant of Portland as her. You would just have to know how many of my friends live in SE to know how laughable this really is. I donโt think I have any friends anywhere else in the city because those neighborhoods are too normal for us.
The love affair with Dana started in earnest when she drove with me to move my stuff into my new apartment, but it was just a whisper. Nothing happened on that trip at all, it just opened my eyes to the fact that when Danaโs plane took off, my entire world was going to go with it. I let her go, because I didnโt have any plans to return to Portland and wanted to move on with my life. Then, Houston got in my way. I just wasnโt happy because I wasnโt the same person in that context and I liked Portland Leslie better.
So, being with Dana never would have happened had I not gone back. It wasnโt that I didnโt see it, itโs that I couldnโt indulge it.
I think Dana felt the same way, that it would have been a great story.
When I moved back to Portland, we realized that we were both settling for fine and wanted to reach out for fabulous. And we were, but we werenโt the same people Houston, either. It seemed like such an incredible opportunity, and it was wasted.
I donโt regret ending my relationship with Dana when it got bad, I regret not keeping it amazing. When it was time to be there, it was necessary. When it was clear that we were turning on each other instead of towards, the signs were clear that starting over was going to be easier than going straight through.
But Iโll never forget being in so much pain in the ER, my wrist limp beside me and the pain meds struggling to keep up. Katharin said, โwhoโs Mamaโs brave little soldierโ She was actually imitating her mother, I think, because it made me crack up.
Stories That Are All True 