Tag: addiction

Eleven Dollars, Part Two

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

I have gotten out of the creative groove lately, and I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s that I need to live a little more before I have something to say. Maybe I just need to turn on the faucet and write until I hit something good. I’m sorry for the wandering you are about to endure, but you might be able to take something away from it, at the very least that you’re probably not as mentally, obnoxiously up and down as I have been over the last few months.

I would never tell her this, but Sam broke me. In every way possible, she just ripped out my guts and handed them to me. Again, I don’t have to be mad about that, but it’s still true. She busted my fairy tale in a matter of a few minutes, as if I never meant anything to her. It can’t be true, because she’s going to hear me in her head for years to come. It’s just how I feel, because I don’t need to get together with her to know the things I did to alienate her. I just don’t care. My mother dying has made me stop caring about a whole bunch of stuff. Why someone outright dumped me instead of being willing to be vulnerable is beyond my comprehension and creates apathy. Grief is hard, breaking up is not hard, comparitively speaking.

After that, I just converted to “blink” decisions. I wasn’t having any luck being patient and/or sexy enough to warrant a message back, and I have enough friends that are willing to love me through all this that agreeing to marry Daniel was not a whim. It was a dream. He had it in his head that I already thought he had the perfect life. No, I was talking about the perfect life I wanted to create with him and Cora, our little rainbow family.

That rainbow family has been torn apart because I refused to apologize for having fights over equality with him. His point was that he was punching down, and only he had that right. He was going to rehab, and it was way more important than Cora and I feeling safe in what we hoped to be our home. If he gets it into his head that he can get back to learning about us, it’s a dream I still want. Daniel offered me everything on a silver platter, and because I thought the drugs to control his cravings had him sane, I believed him hook, line, and sinker.

That is why I believe that he wants to break up with me now. He’s living the hard, rock-bottom truth that he’s an alcoholic and no more medication to make that pain go away. It’s blatantly obvious that he’s an aloholic in recovery because of his PTSD, and I have complete sympathy for that. Because he’s furious with me, he’s said that he’s already found a new group of friends that accept him for exactly who he is. Apparently, he is also dating someone else in rehab, which I am almost sure was just a lie for two reasons. The first is that I don’t care. We never agreed to be exclusive during this time and people in rehab get horny faster than the nurses can catch them, but all hell will break loose if they find out. You’re not even supposed to have a relationship at all until you’ve been out of recovery for a year.

The second thing is that he is my primary. It’s not that I ever want to leave him. It’s that if he comes back, he’s it for me, even if I’m dating someone else. I tell people that. Sure, I’ll date you, but I have a primary partner and I will drop you like a hot potato. Your choice.

But the thing is, Daniel would never make me choose monogamy over polyamory because he’s scared that he wouldn’t be enough for me. That I’d eventually meet a woman and leave him. It’s what makes me lean toward polyamory because I can see it so clearly that I don’t want to cause him pain. I also know that you can open a relationship in the beginning, but you can’t do it later.

But the bottom line is that I don’t know what I want. I have to feel all that out. I can see never wanting to let him out of my sight. I feel our bond is too strong to spend a minute without him ever again. But that’s right now, not ten years from now. If it could happen to Dana and me, it could happen again. Our relationship was closed, but I fell in love with my best friend, anyway. It ripped us apart and caused no amount of enmity, because my best friend would rather have a root canal than be romantic with me. She never would have gotten any of my blushing teenage feelings if I’d thought there was a chance of an actual affair. It was frightening to contemplate. It would have wrecked us even faster if I’d actually been tempted, or I wouldn’t, because I would have seen the threat coming and headed it off at the pass. Actually, I tried, but that worked about as well as cutting off my own arm. I was her friend, too. Why did I think it wouldn’t injure her if I said I couldn’t be friends anymore with her because it was threatening to my marriage.

In short, the only reason I’d ever consider polyamory is taking the chance at agreeing to monogamy and failing yet again and having another breakup to sort out. I also don’t want to cheat. It depends on what Daniel wants to do, because I know he only wants me. He just knows how many relationships I’ve had with women and how they’re more intense sometimes than they are with men. I don’t want to lose my whole life over it.

So basically, I’d probably agree to an open relationship and then never actually do anything about it, but I will never say never because stranger things have happened to me that turned out to be wonderful, but it was hard to grow in that direction.

I’ve been dating Zach for a few months now, and Daniel thinks he’s cool as hell. Zach will return the favor when Daniel is ready to be a complete Doc instead of a complete dick. There will be interviews, because Daniel already trusts him and I’m not sending him to somone he doesn’t know (they haven’t met in person, but they will should the stars align). Zac just wants to know that Daniel has the mental and physical capability to be a husband.

Zac can, but he’s not the marrying kind. He is already full up, I think. I’m just one of the people who hangs out with him while we talk about life.

I hope that Daniel can get it together, though, because I want that conversation to happen. I want Zac to see that going through rehab and giving Daniel the chance to get well was the right thing to do. Cora says that my faith in her father is not misplaced. I hope she is right, and at the very least, I’m proud of what it means for their relationship.

The thing about Daniel that hurts me the most is that he wanted to get married right out of rehab, not so we could be together any faster, but to make travel easier, as well as getting me a PTSD Doc with trauma experience and better meds. Saying goodbye to that is a major loss, because I’d never had someone offer me such a big world of “fix-it” than him, and not because I asked. He’s a Doc. He saw I needed it.

Then, later he got angry that I saw him as “having this perfect life.” No, I don’t. I think he’s in the shit. I wanted him to have more to dream of than a dead end job somewhere just to make ends meet. His possibilities are endless, but they are only suggestions. If Daniel wants to move to the beach in a country where we can both live off his retirement, or I could get a job over the Intenet making American money to supplement his retirement, our digital nomad plan has legs.

My basic philosophy on Daniel is that anything he creates now is his choice… from relationships to writing to whatever he wants to do. It’s just that he’s already done his job. He was embedded with Marines in Kandahar during Operation Enduring Freedom. He deserves to do nothing if that’s what he wants. I just think he’s too curious about music, literature, and history to stay bored if he gets that way.

I just want him to know that I do have his best interests at heart. I’m trying to integrate him into a completely queer family, and if you’ve grown up in NE Texas all your life, that is a tall task. He thinks I want to “reprogram him.” No, I want you to take interest in not treating people as if you’re the center of the universe. He can’t help it. He’s an alcoholic. He’s not capable. But it doesn’t make me sorry that I called him out. It makes me human that I’m willing to take all his shit just to hopefully get the reward of a husband and daughter that might never come.

Well, the kid stays in the picture, but you know what I mean.

I can’t picture a life without Cora anymore because I know where she lives. I feel that she is in great danger. I have just as much trauma regarding Cora walking out her front door every day as I do thinking about how crushed I would have been had Daniel not made it home.

Again, it’s NE Texas and there she is sin. So am I. I could also be shot for being trans because I’m genderqueer. I don’t look like a stereotypical woman, so if someone wasn’t paying attention, they’re not going to care if they shoot us both and I would not know how to cope if she died and I lived.

I want her to move to Baltimore with me, because we’ll get a better deal and it’s not too far from Johns Hopkins or the VA. Because of Texas’ inane laws, Cora cannot get the medication or the surgery she needs and she’s 24 years old. If she wants those things, I think it would be completely doable at Johns Hopkins and if the VA does trans medicine, we could also go to Walter Reed, because that would be free to her.

If there are any veterans out there who know if Walter Reed does trans medicine, that would be helpful. Otherwise, it would be cheaper to fly to Thailand first class and get her care there.

I have never met Cora’s mother, but I would like to be friends with her, too, especially if Daniel is uncomfortable visiting her if she’s living with me. I hope he doesn’t. I’m just as much of his friend as I ever was. I am sure that he’s behind his daughter a hundred percent, and I don’t care how he feels about me in terms of getting back together, because obviously Cora’s treatment is not about him.

I think some part of him thinks he’s responsible for all this, because he doesn’t want her to put away her old pictures because he likes reminiscing. He doesn’t want to burn the old birth certificate as a ceremony. He also thinks he’s alone in all this, that millions of parents haven’t gone through the same thing, having a funeral for the child they lost so they can better accept the child they have.

No one raised Cora to be trans, she just is. She’s been wearing a mask since she was born. For her to break out of it, she needs the support of her entire family in lockstep.

I need them to buy the books. I need them to research on the web. I need her parents to see how they’re contributing to her feelings of unworthiness.

I see this more clearly than Daniel because no one raised me to be queer, either. Learning to be a husband and a wife was a time of trial. I don’t know shit from shinola when it comes to finance, important documents, etc. None of my partners have ever been good at this stuff, either, because they were raised the same as me.

That being said, when I’m with men, I tend to treat them like I’m their husbands because no one has ever done it for them before. Treating their minds and their bodies like they are as beautiful as women, letting them open up with anything and everything they want to talk about, letting them be the little boys they were before life hit them in the face.

Men are more tender when you strip away the bullshit of masculinity as an identity. Even the idea of femininity is bullshit, because when I say that I am all female, it doesn’t register that I, too, am an archetype of a woman and I don’t have to wear makeup or clothes to impress to address that fact. I just don’t care that much and want to be comfortable.

I have genderfluid relationships no matter which gender I’m in a relationship with, because I’ve been with women for so damn long that I don’t approach anything with the manners of a stereotypical wife. Therefore, I have no idea how to treat men, so I treat them like women. It works. I still have some of my butch identity that way, and men are forced into a feminine identity that’s always been there, but dormant since they were children. It makes perfect sense. The dance of intimacy is right because we’re both just people, he no more important than me.

It’s something that I want with Daniel, because I think that kind of love will help him heal from his war wounds. I can be his husband if he’ll let me. He’ll get a kind of love that equalizes us so that the power dynamic is gone. He can be submissive with his emotions and his body if he needs to, and it’s ok. It’s why I’m ok with him being in recovery and why I’m ok with waiting a year to see if the breakup was the right move or not. Part of me will never get over it if it’s real.

But one day, I hope he’ll start moving back to me, Eleven Dollars at a time.

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Meeting at Starbucks

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

I’m a different kind of friend than I used to be, because I didn’t have friends with problems worse than mine. Objectively worse. I have never been to basic training, nor have I been in combat. I have friends who have been in the armed services, but none who have laid themselves bare in front of me and allowed me to publish what he said the way Daniel has done so that I really felt I was there. In the beginning, I was catatonic. I stared at the wall for hours without even daring to breathe. Hearing that your partner has been through that kind of trauma rewires you, because it changes the way you know you need to react to them. Their reflexes are categorically different than yours.

It feels like a graduation to a capability of a different kind of listening. I now know that when you come home from war, there are the stories you tell other people, and the stories you tell God. Then, someone tells you a story he’s only told God and says it’s ok to publish. Now a lot more people have heard what it’s really like, what my partner is dealing with. He seems to think that he has broken up with me, and all I have to say about that is “we’ll see.” I’m not going to do anything to change his mind. I am ridiculously happy as is. I just think that he may think breaking up was a little premature and I am willing to say that the connection on the phone line was obviously at fault.

The War Daniel is the love of my life, and he should know it. He should feel it. He should use it as fuel. I am not the enemy. I am not the “woke mob.” I am the one who sat next to him in Mrs. Tomberlain’s second grade class, Mrs. Allen’s third, Mrs. Forrest’s fourth, Mrs. Lanagan’s fifth, and Mrs. Duncan’s sixth.

Being the love of my life doesn’t give him a pass to make homophobic and transphobic comments. It gives him the right to apologize and change his behavior, because one is nothing without the other.

I have to know that if I’m going to marry a man, it’s one who loves me for who I am, not who he hoped I would be, even as it rips me in half to say that I can and will walk away because our trauma bond is so deep. If he needs me to apologize for calling him on terrible behavior just because he wasn’t in his right mind, that’s where I draw the line. I agreed to take on his pain, and he agreed to take on mine. Anything less than that is not a relationship, it’s using me as a dumping ground for emotions and then not giving me a place to go with them.

And yet he did, because he said I could publish anything and everything he ever said to me. I love that he did it because I can spend time with him “in the room” but not physically present. The problem comes in when the information is not going to the right person. I don’t know that he’s listening or cares. I can’t care about that right now, because to wonder is to hope that his attention is on me when it should be on getting well.

Therefore, with my attention turned, I pay more attention to other combat veterans. I understand them in a way that I didn’t before, that they’re all wearing masks. I came close to getting a friend that worked at Starbucks that might have understood, but due to miscommunication, I think I embarrassed myself.

The barista was wearing some type of Navy swag, and I told him that my partner was a Doc. He said, “I was HM2.” My eyes got excited and I said, “were you in Kandahar?” He said, “I never made it out of Germany.” My face must have said it all and I didn’t mean to make it say anything. He treated me with respect and said that he was never embedded.

It occurred to me that my face must have said, “he wouldn’t understand.”

Because he wouldn’t.

I’m a different kind of friend than I used to be.

The Woke Mob and How to Join

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

Be queer and concerned about someone trans, apparently.

Also, when someone says “don’t call me a drunk,” the right answer is not “but you are a drunk, Daniel.” Probably not my finest moment, but I didn’t think about it because the friends I have who are drunks have been sober a long time…. Which made me sound like I was an expert punching down at 101 over there, but it just didn’t register.

Once he’s admitted he’s an alcoholic every day until May, then at 30 meetings in 30 days, and then every meeting for the rest of his life, maybe he’ll have some compassion for why saying “you are a drunk” didn’t phase me, but probably should have because I didn’t realize I was dealing with an AA newborn. I have done that, I have been the newborn while my friend was getting treatment, but we were learning together so that I could support her and be knowledgeable while doing so…… I’m more like the convert who’s mad there’s not a group for people who don’t have addictions and yet still can’t get their shit together.

At least, that’s what I thought until I remembered there was such a group for people like me.

To say that I have been to a few more AA meetings than he has is correct. However, I’m just a normie who goes to open meetings to support her friends. I’ve never actually been through addiction as a patient. Just as one of the people they delightfully injure until they realize they are doing it…. and let’s get real, some never do. I just have to lick my wounds with Tall. Mustache. Fishing Hat. There’s got to be a DC version somewhere. There’s a version in every AA and Al-Anon meeting in the country.

I cut The War Daniel off after he went vitriolic and broke up with me. Again, I didn’t break up with me, he did… It’s not that I don’t want to reconnect later. He just needs to sit his ass down for a while. Maybe he’ll change his mind when he realizes that I am not a threat, and neither is the “woke mob” mentality that’s been served to him in NE Texas and not its actual definition. He was fine and wanted to learn everything about everything until five minutes before “Son Of’a Bitch, Everything’s Real.” He is somewhere between it and DENIAL (Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying).

Daniel has no idea what I’m doing because he has been blocked on Facebook, and I have no idea about him. I didn’t do it to avoid him. I did it to avoid making things worse. He says it’s over. I say “you’re in rehab.” I do not believe that you can make a decision like whether you want to get married, travel the world, or even get a major haircut without letting your brain clear out from that. So, I’m giving him until January next and say “you can always come home again.” He can, but if he has no interest, I can’t help that. In fact, I am helpless here. He means too much to me to turn back now. It would be a loss like I’ve never felt before, and have already been mourning because I don’t know whether it’s real.

I just don’t think it’s possible to go from wanting to marry someone one day and wanting to break up with them the next unless your nerves are so fried that you can’t handle anything of substance. Despite it, we are in a large argument right now that will not resolve because neither of us will give an inch because we’re both right. I just happen to think I’m a little more right than he is.

He is correct in thinking that rehab is a big deal. He is incorrect in saying homophobic shit repeatedly and getting called on it repeatedly because he does it repeatedly.
Now we’ve gone from the proverbial “baby, I’ll try” to “you fuckers don’t even tell us the rules.”

We did.

You just threw a bitch fit about it.

Daniel’s point, and I get it, is that he’s a white, cis, straight male who’s about to enter rehab and he can’t handle all this. He’s correct about the rehab patient thing. If he pretends to be a white oppressed male one minute longer than he needs to get well, my boot will leave tracks on his ass. He needs me to back off. I can roll with it when it’s just me. I’ve been taking shit like that my whole life, starting when I was 10. It’s not that people do things on purpose. They do things that they’ve never been taught are wrong and then don’t remember. Then, they’re offensive all over again and I have to endure that pain another time. If you don’t catch it when it happens, then you’re really screwed. There’s even less chance that someone will remember what you said if you ask them to recall something. There is no way I could put Daniel through any of that unless I was punching down.

Punching down is a relatively easy concept, but I can’t explain it in English. We don’t have two verbs to tell people about yourself. In Spanish, there are two. “Ser” is “to be.” It’s for things that cannot be changed, like being black or trans. The other verb that also means “to be” is “estar.” Estar is for a transitory state, like hungry or crying.

“Estoy cansada” is correct. I am tired. When I wake up after a nap, I won’t be tired anymore. Daniel might not have thought this in reality, but he handled my situation as if being queer was a transitory state. That I could give up being so angry. The problem was that I wasn’t agnry. I was annoyed. Again, nothing new. Just hard to keep it under wraps all the time because Daniel isn’t even the millionth customer. That had to be ten years ago. I am not angry. I am exhausted, and there is a world of difference. What I have learned so far is that I will bend, but I will not break.

Here’s the line in the sand, and it’s easy to draw it because I’ve left as much room for him in my life as he deserves…. a chance to redeem himself. Rehab grace only lasts so long before Sweetpea begs to be let off leash. She sent me a picture of herself the other day. She doesn’t play video games at all……. and the picture of her was *Alduin* (incidentally, she doesn’t know it, but I am very much like Paarthurnax).

Like I said, I can take it when it comes to me. It’s just that he has a trans daughter. So, he does twice the irritating shit that he used to and is even more angry that he has to adjust. Apparently rehab is also going to fix homophobia, transphobia, and aggressions toward both. He sees me as the enemy now, when all I’ve tried to convey is the normal amount of “hey, that hurts.”

When Daniel and I first started talking, I thought he was fine. He wasn’t. The medication he was taking to control his cravings, plus the one beer he was drinking a day to make sure he didn’t accidentally commit suicide kept him stable.

So, I was on board. I’ve been down the rabbit hole of addiction with friends several times before, and my ex-wife got a DUI years ago, so not only did I learn about addiction and the brain, I also drove my wife around for three months until she got her license back. This was torture for two reasons. The first is that I hate driving. The second is that I hated Dana more than usual when I was driving. I’ll just let your mind wander on that one.

We’d spent a lot of time talking about the TV show MASH, because Daniel was a Navy hospital corpsman embedded with a team of Marines in Kandahar during Operation Enduring Freedom. His stories are just humbling, and always make me cry… just thinking about the sheer number of times I’ve almost lost him is enormous. Thinking about his service record is intimidating. Sometimes I think “why would somebody like him love somebody like me?” I’m not being down on myself. It’s just that you have to dig under the war hero stuff to make it make sense. He’s a writer. You can tell that clearly.

My work in progress is set in Viet Nam. Obviously, I have friends who are soldiers to help me with patois, but it would be nice to have a coauthor on the project who actually knew what he was doing with that kind of dialogue. The most frustrating thing about being married to a Marine’s daughter was all of the acronyms. No one can penetrate all that without private lessons, and no one gave them to me.

They were very content to let me go on not understanding their conversations. Dana and I were together almost eight years. In all that time, I have learned that a PX is like a Wal-Mart. I am sure that I could do better if I dug deep, but tax free means something. Maybe not for candy and sodas, but you can get things like TVs and gaming consoles. Again, not free. But a major discount. Anything else I picked up was from context clues, and here is a big one.

Flying standby.

My guess is that even Daniel hasn’t thought of this in his “you fuckers” haze, but he can show up at any base in the entire world and fly standby to anywhere else. If Cora and I are invited, we can go with him. We cannot go unaccompanied anywhere, but that really doesn’t matter. I don’t want to go anywhere without him.

I was starting to be glad that Sam was a hit and run, because I saw so much potential here. We planned all kinds of trips, from Helsinki to Cairo to Phnom Penh and back to wherever we’ve chosen as home. As I was telling Cora, “I’m fine with living overseas or staying in this area. It’s just that we can’t live in Texas anymore.” She’s trans, and they’re losing out on nearly every right imaginable in the State Leg. I will probably go to a Molly Ivins level of batshit crazy if I think about it too long, so let’s move on.
Daniel thinks that I wake up every day to wrestle the devil du jour, and while it’s an interesting phrase, it’s bullshit ALL DAY. He’s not the devil, and I’m not the “woke mafia” of legend. I’m trying to keep him from doing irreparable damage to our relationship, and more importantly, the one between him and his daughter. I do not want to be the cause of Daniel losing his daughter, and if he keeps it up, that’s what’s likely going to happen. Cora is going to be just as angry as I was, and it will not go well for Daniel.

But I cannot tell him that. I have told him. He has heard me. He is too overloaded to change right now. I have to be brave and hope that he’s willing to change later. I cannot hope that he cares enough to make amends, but I can hope that when his brain chemicals are level, he realizes that he betrayed his daughter and the woman he wanted to marry by saying that he already had new friends now that accepted him for exactly who he was.

Life is not black and white. There’s so much gray area here, because normally I wouldn’t put up with any of this. It’s that he doesn’t live in the world of awake yet. Alcoholism was keeping his night terrors at bay. Sobriety has made them rise from their graves. That is conjecture, but it has happened to my other AA friends.

I also think that I have been too flippant because I have so many AA friends that it didn’t occur to me that Daniel had never been. I’m sure it was annoying because I was talking like he’d been in the program for years and it was like, five days.

But the point still stands.

At this moment, Daniel does believe that he has hurt both me and Cora. He just doesn’t register our pain as valid. His is much more important than ours whether we think so or not.

It’s why I’m trying to be so kind and loving, and have my anger moments, but let them go. I wouldn’t even have posted anything about this except that Daniel is being stubborn and not talking to me at all. It was time to prepare for the end of the relationship on Stories after I’d had time to process it on my own. In fact, I’ve been processing so much that the only thing I can come up with is just to let it lie. Don’t respond, don’t talk, don’t breathe where Daniel is concerned. He’s got too much on his plate to worry about me, which was his point originally (even if the execution left A LOT to be desired).

He also knows that the reason this is a big fight is that he didn’t just offend me. I am not the only queer person in his life, and not only did I jump in for myself, I interrupted years and years of family-entrenched behaviors.

As the interrupter, I became the enemy.

I’m used to it. I’ve only had one relationship where I really got along with my girlfriend’s parents, and that was Kat’s. I don’t think they ever believed Kat was bi to begin with, and I have to say that I should have agreed with them. It would have explained so much. However, I would not have met Dana, and Dana opened a door for me that taught me how to think in a different way.

I just feel as if I shouldn’t emotionally bleed out over this, because he doesn’t deserve it. He would if we’d been together long, but we weren’t. The difference between me and him and everyone else is that I’ll wait for him.

I bet that seems surprising.

Too much other shit going on to explain everything in a way that wouldn’t “out” other people, so I won’t. All I have to say about the whole situation is “thank God for grace.” I know I am capable of it, I hope that The War Daniel is, too.

I know for certain that if he was able to disconnect that quickly, it would have been a horrible relationship. Any time we needed to talk about anything, he’d fold into himself and become a brick wall. I’ve been in that relationship before. I’m tired of it. I want to go back to the lovebombing, because I believe that’s the person Daniel really is, and the person I’m not talking to is the one who is alcohol-deprived, miserable and lonely as much as he says he has new friends.

If there’s anything I also know about Daniel, it’s that he does want to learn. He won’t be happy staying in a place where everybody is just like him. Where he doesn’t learn anything about how to love a trans woman properly through listening to both of us (trans pain and queer pain are alike and specialized). He doesn’t spend any time with Robin DiAngelo. He doesn’t have to sit through the thousand lectures I’ve heard over my life in order to become this “woke mob” unto my own. If we have an incompatibility, it is this. It’s not that he can’t or won’t learn, it’s that I’m so far ahead of him that he can’t listen to me anymore. He just thinks I’m pedantic, meddling, and the kid was fine til I came along.

I have so much more power than I thought.

That being said, I won’t grieve long. Even if I did everything to the worst of my ability, one fact remains. I got Daniel to rehab in the first place. The reason the relationship could die is not because I don’t think I’ve met the love of my life. I have, and I know it. There will never be another War Daniel in my life, so I hope that this one remembers to check in. It’s that he cannot continue to make me a part of “you fuckers.” I get that he’s angry. I even get why. I don’t think that expecting Daniel to understand that I’m hurting is invalid during treatment. Again, though, I can’t count him out. Rehab is such a tricky thing. You know an alcoholic/addict is sick, but when do you start holding them accountable for all of their words? I am weighing whether I am hurting myself for a goal that will never come.

I don’t think he’s done anything that says I won’t love him.

Yet.

He is The War Daniel, but if I have a character, it is Rory the Roman. It will take as long as it takes, possibly centuries. He doesn’t know what that means, either.

But I’m betting you do.

Working on My House

~ theantileslie ~ 1 Comment

I believe that most things are a house of cards. Humans aren’t strong enough to build everything right the first time… even me. I am glad that I have the strength to go back into the basement, and have so many stories that have gone through countless revisions over time based on telling them again and again (sometimes over and over to one person….. sorry about that, all y’all). Today I discovered a new level of dark. Luckily, I had a friend to guide me down, and then back up again.

We went to high school together. They were there. Leaving even their gender out because they wouldn’t want it to be known that they noticed.

They didn’t know it, but they were doing guided meditation. I closed my eyes and saw Carrie, my partner in that woman’s class. It was a health class, and we were “married” and caring for our egg child. I got lucky. All the boys were taken. Carrie was (and probably still is) a gorgeous girl. I knew she was straight. It wasn’t about that. For an hour a day, she was my arm candy. 🙂 James, Alex…. don’t tell her.

(note to my French Horn brassholes- I just made it up. Tell the others.)

As an aside, I am DYING thinking about how hard Sam will laugh at “brassholes.” She should know. She had a near miss in terms of almost marrying one. I absolutely thought she was the love of my life, and if you didn’t think I mourned that relationship, she hit me harder and deeper than she will ever know. That’s because I didn’t tell her what she did wrong. I didn’t care. Let’s just say that I got the thing I wanted, and in return, she hit and run. Take that phrase and run with it.

She absolutely devastated me. To get over it, I had to cut off all my emotions and pretend that she meant nothing to me, because she made for damn sure I knew I meant nothing to her. I blocked her on everything. E-mail, phone number, all social media. I was crushed. It was my first real relationship in seven years. Why wouldn’t that kind of thing destroy me? Do you have any concept of how long that is? I didn’t even get Leah while I was waiting for Rebekah. I was completely alone. Touch starved except for a few hugs along the way. Depressed. Down and out.

Sam and her kids were balm to a soul that needed them, and I can only say that now, when the outcome of that relationship no longer matters to me. She could have had me for multiple lifetimes, and she threw me away like the bird shit on a newspaper after one day in the cage.

Yet, the only way she’ll ever know how I feel is if she comes up in my yard. My dog bites, motherfucker. I reserve the right to be angry at any time. I also reserve the right to not.

That relationship still confounds me, I just don’t care enough to find out why. She didn’t want to get together to figure our stuff out, it was just over by text message. Why are you guys more concerned that I started dating Daniel so quickly when it wasn’t me that wanted to separate? Why are you guys on me about Daniel at all? Isn’t he a logical successor to be my partner after realizing what Dana had done?

On my very first date with Sam (sorry if I’ve told this story before, but it’s a card that needs to fall), she texts me to tell me that she’s sitting on my front porch. I run downstairs to meet her, and she’s adorable. My heart didn’t even take five seconds to assess the situation. Just a seductive, take your breath away fantasy from the moment I said “yes.” She matched me feeling for feeling, or so it seemed. I saw so much of myself in her. I thought that we’d be together so much longer than three weeks, but I did something. I just don’t care what it was, because it might not have anything to o with me at all. And since she’s not going to marry me, I don’t really care what it was that I did. I would correct my behavior if it mattered.

Back to why Dana even matters. She definitely shouldn’t, but she does. When she hit me, she installed a trigger. Sam’s fist coming at my face whether I wanted it to or not. I realized that I might never get rid of he tripwire, because Sam had fixed hers, but what about the next woman?

Just another reason why I trauma bonded to The War Daniel. He’s huge. He’s weapons trained. No one would ever fuck with me ever again. I have had enough of the bullshit in life and not enough enjoyment. So “noping out” to a different country and trying to make a life there is attractive to me whether Daniel comes or not. My top choices are Aberdeen and Phnom Penh. Two completely different cities, two completely different cultures. It’s just that I have friends in both places. Suzanne has known me for somewhere between 10 and 15 years. I don’t remember, but I do know that she was friends with both Dana and me. It’s not that she remembers Dana, it’s that she’s familiar with the story of my life so far.

My friend in Cambodia has known *of* me for a long time, but we’ve recently connected because I was brave enough to ask him if I could come and visit. I know I will go there first, just not when. The attraction to him is that he’s the exact opposite of Suzanne’s story. He’s only just finding out who I am. So obviously I need six months a year in both.

I have listened to all the sad music. It’s enough that I have to deal with idiots who think that I move really fast in dating. What in the actual fuck? Am I supposed to mourn people longer than the relationship actually lasted?

I broke up with Theresa because I had spent *weeks* planning the perfect first date and she told me that she was backing out and just wanted to talk on the phone “this trip.” No, baby. That’s not happening. We have done too much to go backward and reassess. It’s too hard and it’s too much. We’ve been talking for three weeks. If you can’t have a drink with me, it’s not happening.

That relationship was weird, too, because we were off to such a good start, and then I probably ran my mouth too much or something, because lots of people have no idea how INFJ people operate. They make plans, then contingencies, thn more contingencies. For instance, here was the process of cleaning my room this week. It was hell.

I’d been trying to organize little by little when the house caught fire and I needed to get it ogether immediately. I reserved maids over the Internet. First mistake. Two appointments. Two companies. Two no-shows. Finally, I contacted Hayat (landlady for those just joining us) and asked her to get her own handymen out here and I’d pay them. Even that tuned into a nightmare.

It’s all done now, except for the cleaning and designing. The paint cans and drop cloths are still all over everywhere. It’s painted bright white, like the marina where I wish I lived in Beirut. I’ll include a photo because it’s hanging in my living room. I want my room to feel the same way… that when I’m dreaming, I’m not in my own bed. I’m there.

While I am working on my ugly house of cards, I can dream of what it will look like when I am finished. I want a welcoming space, full of that same pure energy of white and teal and waves and sailboats…. though it isn’t for everyone, Beirut is my happy place. I have been Lebanese for almost eight years now. When I see it for real, I will fall.

….just like a house of cards.

Beirut, Lebanon

CIA, MI6, and MiB

~ theantileslie ~ 1 Comment

I can’t find it.

This has never happened to me before in terms of writing. Ever. I’m a blogger, right? So I’ve hit post and never had to search through a directory tree in 20 years. The worst part is that I’m fluent in DOS and Linux, so I know how to do all the shit that would compare and contrast documents…. and it didn’t even occur to me to do that with my writing until right now.

I even have a pen pal that I’ve known since Jesus was a boy and I know to create different subject lines so that all our crap doesn’t mix together, like separating personal from professional (editing vs. friendship, really… not for this, for my books…. this is graffiti with punctuation [cracked me up in Contagion]).

Today I started with creative writing instead of memoir type stuff because every time I write about my life, blowback comes from somewhere. So, no more about that. I’ll write about things long enough in the past that they don’t matter anymore, or put up fiction. If I write about a decision that is currently being made, there are just so many, many people who have an opinion that is either stupid or invalid.

Let’s start with Daniel.

I would marry that boy like yesterday. I still feel that way even though right now he is acting like a jackass by being a doctor and a patient.

Now, why would I know what his motivations are?

If you have to wonder, you’re not my friend.

How do you know that I don’t have years and years of experience with addicts?

I’m a line cook. I’ve wondered if people relapsed to the point of wondering if they died and that’s why they didn’t show up today or give me a call.

I’m not laughing.

If you are, you’re not my friend.

How do you know that I’m building a family too fast?

My daughter is trans and 24. The reason I call her my daughter is not because she actually is. It’s that her biological mother is straight and I’m both bisexual and genderqueer. I get it, where her mom and dad are blind. I am giving her the relationship I should have gotten.

If you have to wonder, you’re not my friend.

None of you have ever asked if I had friends who I’ve married in terms of loyalty and confidentiality so I have people that hold me together. I have friends in multiple places who support me and I can reach out any time, day or night, because it might be 1100 there. My friend Suzanne is in Aberdeen. I wake up at 0400. I have coffee, she has tea.

Since I’ve never gotten asked that question, I feel like it’s necessary. I have friends who have supported me for years and years now. I don’t need a romantic partner. I want one, but I don’t have to have one to function.

And finally about this topic, if you know all of the above, than you’ll know that my absolute best friend at one point was a severe alcoholic and now she’s one of the most successful people I know. All of you who are so incredibly worried about me can stop now.

Even if Daniel broke up with me every day from here til kingdom come, I wouldn’t believe it until January 2024, which is the conservative estimate on how long it takes his brain to clear. Right now he’s finding out that life is rough without medication to control cravings and all that shit.

So if you think for one second that I thought this would be easy, that I’d have it made in the shade, or that I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. Daniel was in a bad place. I sold him a fantasy to give him the courage to get to rehab. He did. My work here is done. But that isn’t the whole story. The whole story is that I love him more than anyone on earth, including me. He just doesn’t know it, because his brain is dopamine-starved and using every trick in the book to try and get him to believe that he’s a worthless piece of shit.

Here’s the thing. I sold him a fantasy to get him to rehab. I want to make the fantasy real so we can be done with rehab and off to living in Fez, Cairo, Casablanca, wherever. I don’t care. Just anywhere to get us somewhere cheaper. The US is bananas. I didn’t fake him out. I didn’t do anything but promise him a fantasy that was doable if he would only get his shit together.

Every addict in the room is quietly nodding. They might not agree with what I did, but they will also tell you to do whatever you have to do to get your partner into rehab. WHATEVER. So I did. I got him there. Whether he comes home and still wants to marry me is up for grabs. But does it really matter?

I GOT HIM TO REHAB. I MADE SURE HE WAS GOING TO LIVE. I HELPED SAVE HIM.

The rest is totally up to him, and I’m going to let him figure out all that. He’s the one in therapy most of the day, so I think I can move on to something else. They’ve got him. I can rest until May.

And I will, because I’ve already got two best friends who love me enough to marry me, but not enough for the fun stuff. That is for the love of my life if he decides he wants it.

Again, none of this comes from a place of “he’s going to screw up.” Addicts, raise your hands. Who among you got through the last drunk and getting into rehab without fucking up some relationship or another?

I thought so. I can hear you choking with laughter from here.

Now that I have explained myself and hopefully shut the shit down (can I get a witness? HELL YEAH!), it’s time for today’s lesson on metaphor.

Men in Black II is a documentary.

K was a designation in the British system of intelligence. If you’ve seen the more recent Bond films, K has not been in use since WWII, I believe. However, it’s the rank above M, played by Ralph Fiennes and Judi Dench. You don’t see C in movies very often, but my biggest example of who C is comes from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I can’t remember whether C is the bad guy in that one or not. I’ve slept since then. No UK disrespect meant. The C I’m talking about is basically Stephen Fry in Doctor Who.

Q means quartermaster. In MiBII, this is like the scene where K says, “guess I’ll have to buy The White Album again.” That’s because Q is representative of an entire department of people. In the US, it’s called the Office of Technical Services. Back when it was OSS and CIA hadn’t started…… chefs and cooks, sit down. You’ll need it……. Julia Child worked for OTS. She developed shark repellant. Why case officers would need such a thing is where I draw the line in terms of research.

Z is probably also a rank somewhere, but to me it refers to the decryption of the Zimmerman Telegram in 1917. That was the first time in modern history that signals intelligence (SIGINT) was useful on the world stage. Interestingly enough, the guy that played Z (Zed) was in my grandfather’s class in high school.

In terms of rank, I’m not sure where Zed falls. My guess is that he’s C.

C was named for Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming. If I were to compare him to an American, it would be “Wild Bill” Donovan, because he’s the one that started OSS to begin with. Cumming managed to wrangle together MI6, which is why the head job is named after him. I’m honestly not sure who he would match in today’s CIA, because they don’t publish how they do things. For instance, are people like John Brennan C, or is C under cover and people like Brennan are just figureheads?

Damn, Gina.

If you got that joke, you can stay.

If you’re wondering whether I just like Bond and spy shit or if I have a direction with this, yes to the first and still working on the second.

People have no idea why I like spy stuff. At 18 I wanted to be a trumpet player in the Airmen of Note. I didn’t care that the Air Force was basically a group of people standing next to the military. I just wanted to play.

I didn’t get to, which began my lifelong obsession with books and movies where people fought each other without using violence.

And then CIA appeared on Doctor Who, and it was all over for me. Of course I can love Everett. Of course I can love The Doctor when Richard Nixon asks him how he’ll be remembered, and of course The Doctor can’t say SHIT, and just says, “Oh, Dickie. THey’ll never forget you.”

Of course I love MI6 and CIA. They’re basically the closest thing to magic we have on this earth, and as I was telling my friend Zac, “it’s like science fiction because they already know the new technology coming out, but they can’t tell us about it.” It’s real in the way that real magic occurs.

MiB training even reflects real life. Jonna and Tony Mendez both write beautifully about taking their subordinates to Georgetown and giving them a head start while they make everyone and no one makes them. Jonna was even the old guy….. Chief of Disguise gonna Chief of Disguise. Can you imagine being a case officer and finding out your boss was Tony Mendez, then stayed in long enough to have also had his wife as a boss? That’s magic.

Like taking an American and a British intelligence agency and filling it full of aliens and putting a Burger King in the lobby of the spaceport.

In terms of the actual training at MiB, case officers in VA had to lose themselves in Georgetown and try to pick out who was watching them. J shot a little girl alien because she was carrying a chemistry textbook that was way too advanced for her. It’s the difference between life and death, that noticing things.

Down to a Lay’s potato chip bag life and death.

That Burger King isn’t really a joke, either. If you look on CIA’s web site, they’ll tell you they have a Starbucks at Langley and it’s one of the busiest in the world.

I have also found a place for The Hot Sheets that’s really friggin’ funny. In my head, The Hot Sheets are the Presidential Daily Briefings.

I swear to Christ, you just cannot get photographic journalism better than this. Even Shane Harris couldn’t write something this good (teasing him because he’s the local National Security reporter at WaPo and has been on Maddow several times). I don’t stop hoping, though. Pro tip, Harris. Memorize it.

Zed, think about it. I could be Agent H………

Capacity

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

One of my confidants once told me that I have an enormous ability to love. She also said that I had an enormous ability for rage. What I have to say about that is I’m a trumpet player and a soprano, and Sam proved it to me for three weeks straight. One of the trumpet players I followed religiously as a tween and teen was Doc Severinson in Johnny Carson’s old band. When I was 12, I thought I was destined to take over for him, but I have said many many times that there was a flaw in my plan. I didn’t practice enough.

I wanted to. I wanted to practice six hours a day like my dad did, but I started out as a euphonium player. I had braces, and the trumpet mouthpiece was too small. However, the euphonium mouthpiece was large enough to fit over them, trumpet training wheels.

Well, taking the training wheels off didn’t go very well. I had a beautiful, fat sound I was in love with and an embouchure I wasn’t. I went years without acknowledging that I was in physical and emotional pain about it. That I would never be the kind of musician I wanted to be, and I had chosen an instrument before I really gave voice a chance.

In voice, I might not have made All-State in “the system” (code for Texas Music Educator’s Association, or TMEA), but I would have had a WAY better shot. When I was untrained with raw talent, I was okay. Once I was trained I was fabulous. I can’t sing like Jennifer Hudson or Beyonce. You’re thinking of Lindsay, my younger sister. I’m the one that owns at classical music….. just everything from early English to Hebrew. I speak many, many languages through choir, even if I don’t know the direct translation. In “the system,” I made it to All Region as an alto, but marching contest was on the same day. They literally couldn’t do without me. I was screwed.

Today I found out I feel the same way about Daniel. That if he wasn’t in my life, I would never recover. There are many, many, many reasons for this, but let me tell you one fundamental.

My mother was a substitute music teacher for my elementary school when I was in third through fifth grades. When I was in third grade, my mother took over for my music teacher. Guess who was in my class?

He is the only person that has asked to date me since my mother died that knew her well, even if it was in childhood. Daniel went to school with me from second to sixth grade. I lived longer in Naples, Texas than I did anywhere else as a preacher’s kid. Daniel knows my dad in his capacity as a pastor, and legit no one remembers or talks about that except when my biological sister and I are alone, because we’re the only ones that have that context……

Or we were, anyway.

I am way less interested in the fact that I am losing my lesbian label forever and way more in the fact that of the four personality elements in Meyers-Briggs, three of ours match. He is also an Idealist and writer. He’s been to war, which means his stories are awesome and I love to listen and read.

I think I’m obsessed with him. It’s good the feeling is mutual. Just puke. I remember his little boy voice and it’s irritating because I know it will absolutely make me nauseous to other people when he moves here.

We’re playing around with titles to call each other later in life. I am tickled by “wife partner,” because I’m a writer and it’s a play on words. The most sugary way to tell someone you’re a gay couple is “she’s my life partner.” Or, because I’m old, it was the term before wife was a thing among female couples.

I have purposely started asking all people when they only say that they’re married and I don’t know their partner how they gender identify. I want to know pronouns ahead of time, especially before I meet them so I don’t have preconceived notions about their gender before their identity is presented to me and I get in the wrong habit of something. Also, visibility matters, and being in a relationship is one of those things where no one’s choice should be a pejorative. Let people do life with whoever they want. Christ, it’s so much harder than everyone thinks. Let people have their pleasures, and marriages are…. or they’re supposed to be. The thing I am least worried about in this relationship is getting along, because we were raised in the same context.

That also means more to me than Daniel being a man. Pretty much everything does.

I recently lost the person I thought of as my inner compass, the one that would be the one at the end of my letters for all time. Something that I thought was irreplaceable isn’t so much. It’s comforting, though I’m not bragging. I’m relieved. She was my true North, everything that was honorable about me when I couldn’t be that for myself. It gave me hope, strength, love, and faith until it didn’t and I realized that I was in too deep to fix whatever was wrong, because she didn’t talk. I could try to clean up the mess on my own, but as we say in Texas, “you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go…. particularly when she is banging her purse.”

Editor’s Note:

I have a ton of funny Texas sayings and I will be publishing them at some point, as well as a clip of Daniel talking eventually so that all my friends could hear what my accent sounded like before we moved to Houston….. Naples was roughly 1600 people when we lived there. Not sure what it is now. Sufficed to say that Houston was……… a change for me.

The capacity to love Daniel comes so easily to me that it’s scary, and I can tell that I am ramping up with dopamine, such a blessing because when I wake up in the morning my brain chemicals are right. I am literally going gangbusters, and feeling the connection I felt 36 years ago return full force. There are so many reasons for this.

None of them having to do with me just meeting the right man. Homophobia sucks. I know there’s going to be a lot of people reading this who are Evangelicals. I’m not. Sexuality is a spectrum. It has been proven by science…. many, many researchers, not just one study. I would say look into it, but my guess is that you won’t. So don’t judge me. You can’t know that part of me. It is not for you. Who in their right minds wants to be involved in my sex life if they’re not my partner? Please don’t think I need that kind of help. I gave you “what you want.” It looks like what you want from the outside, but it isn’t. I write and I know things. You may write, but not about me to the extent that I do.

It wasn’t easy going back to memories of my supposed elementary school friends bullying me, and this is not something I’ve addressed with Daniel yet. It’s just something he’ll have to come to me about later when he’s had some time to digest. It’s just that if and when I go to our hometown, there are people I don’t care to see (not you). It’s not because I carry any ill will or even care that I was bullied. It’s not taking the chance that they’re just bigger now. I will serve them their asses fried, and no one needs to see that. I just pictured Dana laughing at that, and it cracked me up. She would have an absolutely unprintable response, so line cook that it tickles me to death that I know it and you don’t.

All Boxed Up

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

Now that Christmas this year is a memory, I want to talk about my incredible haul. I got physical gifts, like a Welsh football jersey (Wrexham) and lots of Christmas cookies. I also got a pair of pink men’s lounge pants that are so me they hurt….. I’m a sucker for anything in size “real men wear pink.” It makes sense. I am generally a butch cut, femme color sort of girl.

I also got a spiritual gift I needed. It wasn’t wrapped, and it was so bright my eyes couldn’t take it in at first. I talked on my web site about possibly making a character out of Jonna and Tony Mendez, a composite for any of my novels, maybe the alternate history. After I finished writing the entry, I thought, “I should probably ask her if this is okay before I start writing any scenes.” So, she got back to me and said that anything I did that nodded to them was fine, just to give them good intentions and a bit of courage.

When the response came, I was just dumbstruck. I thought, “how does she know I’m not going to make a disaster out of this?” At that point, my confidence came back. I’ve seen Jonna speak live. I wrote about it. I sent it to her. She already likes the way you write about her. My soul began to take up more space as the warm memory wrapped itself around me.

The big physical gift ask for me was a Moleskine, because I thought I was so smart by keeping everything in my phone. So, I’d go into a grocery store and see notebooks for sale and pass them up, because “I put that stuff on my phone.” I looked through my phone to check the validity of that statement and I found exactly three notes.

Taking this class at BYU over YouTube is changing me. I need to be able to write an idea down, because all of the sudden I have the confidence to believe in it as currency. I have never had that before. I am going to get a Bluetooth tag for my Moleskine because I poured my heart into a college lined and I have no doubt that one day it’s going to end up on a podcast because I left it in an airplane 20 years ago. In any case, I am sure that I have amused and horrified tens of people. Trying to think of when it was…. definitely the Kathleen years. I remember feeling like I’d burgled myself, and I had.

The Moleskine also represents forward thinking. I’ve been a blogger all my life. I didn’t need to plan ahead. Think it, say it works fine in blogging, but not other forms of writing.

I create plots and characters independently of each other. Ideas for them come at random times. I thought I would be the sort of person that would say things like, “Siri, open Notepad.” Turns out, I have been that person three times.

The rest of the time I was searching for a piece of paper. This one even has elastic to hold a pencil. It’s a 7-in, the same size as a basic Kindle. I am hoping it will last me a long time, because this is not for outlines. It’s to keep one-liners from all my projects no matter what they are. Think of it as a five-year supply of post-it notes all stuck together and you’ll see why I’m humiliated that I can’t keep everything digital. I have been around and around this.

Here is my use case.

I do not drive. I walk or ride public transportation. I do my best thinking while mobile, so having a notebook is essential for those lightning bolt moments, because that idea is not coming back. I know what it’s like to lose the potential of a million dollars because of my own stupidity. I’m done.

Christmas has also been talking with Daniel and trying to plan out what we want to do re: content. He’s a combat vet (Hospital Corpsmen Second Class, US Navy) whose job was triage in Afghanistan. If he had been civilian trained, he’d be a nurse practictioner by now. That’s a doctor in my book. Where I come in is possibly a published conversation, perhaps even a podcast, on PTSD and recovery.

Daniel is also an alcoholic, getting ready for rehab at the beginning of the new year. Just a fascinating patient history on both sides, really. Going through treatment for alchoholism and going through treatment for being bipolar are strikingly similar, and I ‘m thinking we’re going to have a good time. I have already started calling him “DW” because those are his actual initials, and I have been making sure to sound like a little aardvark boy annoyed with his sister every time it comes out of my mouth, too. The thing that I love about working with DW is that he’s so open and honest. Everything that goes around, comes around. We’re having great discussions so far.

I said, “can I give you a piece of advice for rehab that helped me in regular therapy?” He said, “please do.” I said, “say the thing you’re most afraid to say first. Don’t say, ‘I’m going to change my life in 90 days’ and wait til day 85 to break down.” I could only be that confident after having admitted to myself the thing I was most afraid to say. Every day, I challenge myself to say something that scares me. Generally, the scariest things are letting go of relationships that no longer serve me.

My attention is shifting in a very good way. I’m enjoying being around people who get me, focusing on the ones who show up and casting shadow on those who didn’t bother. Stopping the tape inside me that always says to search for the lost lamb, because it’s not a lost lamb. It’s a human capable of making their own decisions, and I don’t have to agree with them. Maybe I’ll end up being right. Maybe I won’t. It never mattered. I spent time on people who didn’t want to be in my circle, and I want to stop now. It is not time for a search and rescue.

It is winter, the time to gather around, hold each other, and wait for more light.

Sometimes

~ theantileslie ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I wish my mother hadn’t died. The reason I say only sometimes instead of all the time is that there isn’t a damn thing I could have done to save her, and there’s not a damn thing I could do to bring her back. Therefore, thinking that every day is just a way to drive myself crazy, and if the past is any indication, it’s not that far a trip. The flight attendants don’t even have enough time to bring out the drink cart.

I’m still waiting for what Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant call post-traumatic growth. It’s possible that it’s happening already, but because I talk to myself every day, I don’t see the changes that come over a year. I can look back at past blog entries to get an idea, but it’s not the same. If I look back by reading, it’s almost as if what went on happened to someone else. It’s been the best way I know how to forgive myself… having the deep knowing that I would forgive this foreign person much more easily than I’d forgive me. It’s how I’ve gotten through every bad thing that’s happened over the last four years. It’s become clear to me that I can’t atone for every wrong, but I can pray and change my behavior accordingly so that I don’t make the same mistakes again. At the very least, I can move on to make new ones. Perhaps that is the post-traumatic growth I’ve been looking for in the first place. I am learning to give up on perfection and become satisfied with excellence…. because perfectionist anxiety is crippling.

For instance, I wanted to be the perfect wife and friend. I ended up behaving so badly that I didn’t even recognize myself. My moral compass became smashed glass and metal on the floor, and I had to learn how to fix it on my own, without any YouTube videos, Google searches, or even card catalogs. Though therapy is helping me cope, no one gets better only focusing on themselves and their goals for one hour a week. It has been backbreaking, mind-bending work to get back to the person I was before I started vomiting up the emotions surrounding emotional abuse that as a teenager, I didn’t recognize or even have words to explain…. with the added bonus of being sent to therapy and, not wanting to get anyone in trouble, danced around every issue; I talked for an hour without saying anything. Therapy as a teenager was something I was asked to do; it was not anything I would have chosen on my own.

That being said, I had to take a battery of multiple choice tests that revealed just how broken and screwed up I was, because I couldn’t figure out how to outsmart those. So, my therapist knew exactly how worthless I felt, exactly how low my self-esteem really was, and exactly how much I needed them. And yet, you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go.

However, those emotions couldn’t stay locked down forever… and it only took 23 years. Finally talking scraped off every scab, and cut down into fully-formed scars. I didn’t so much get over anything as stuff it down and pretend it never happened. I didn’t know it at the time, but moving to Portland was just an opportunity for it to be proven to me over and over that really, nothing happened, and I was crazy to think so… to the point where I would swear on a stack of Bibles that it was gospel truth… because why would anyone who claimed to love me so much cover up truth like that? I exhibited every symptom of trauma. I was coached on what to say. I was told that my past was just this big bag of shit I’d been carrying around forever, and I needed to just let it go…. but as anyone who has lived through emotional trauma knows, it’s impossible until you find the problem… that not letting go is not a function of not wanting it to happen.

It’s a function of reliving what happened over and over and over and over ad nauseam because you can’t figure out whether what you think happened or not. Confusion wracks your brain because gaslighting causes you to doubt your own version of events, your truth. Your intuition battles your programming, as if you are living with a 3,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. It’s just one rumination after another…. this big bag of shit you carry around forever and just need to let it go…. but it’s the emotional equivalent of telling someone with depression to snap out of it. Well, Jesus H. Christ. I wish I’d thought of that.

In a way, though, I did snap out of it. The atomic bomb has dropped, but I am still working through the repercussions. I liken it to a local band that’s been together for 15 years being called an overnight success. In my case, though, it’s the reverse. There was a snap of recognition, and then a therapist who told me it would take five or ten years to really feel well…. and even then, it would be a lifetime of choosing healthy patterns in order not to fall back on old, damaged ones. All of my relationships have fallen prey to them in varying degrees, which is why it has been essential for me to create brand new relationships with the new context I’ve been given; my past is not a factor and I cannot be reminded of it from people who didn’t know me before…. when I was completely in the throes of grief, rage, and poor impulse control.

Poor impulse control is a function of ADHD, but compounds exponentially with trauma, because especially when fear presents as rage, you cannot give yourself enough time to weigh consequences and form measured responses. The phrase even keel is not even in your vocabulary in those moments. Cortisol and sin races through your brain because you do not have the ability to second guess. I’ve talked to too many people who have gone through this scenario to know that I’m not special. In terms of fight or flight, trauma-related rage doesn’t even present flight as an option. In those moments, you’re just a loose cannon unfocused on a target, often choosing……………. poorly. You can’t even tell yourself to calm the fuck down, and God help anyone who decides to say it to you.

But most of that rage boils down to one thing; I have to push you away because I am not worthy of your time or energy because I have the capability to destroy you with my pain, even when you say you can take it and there’s no way I can mess you up. This is because in almost every case, you can’t get angry with the person who deserves it. They disappear and leave you to sit in your own tangled knot, because surely they’re not responsible.

While it is true that adults often abuse each other, the most insidious type of abuse is emotional between an adult and a child, because the child automatically believes that whatever is happening is their fault, because the adult is in a position of absolute power and control. Moreover, if no physical/sexual abuse happens, there is no clear message that anything wrong happened at all. I would never say that it is worse than raping or hitting a child. I would only say that it is more muddled and confusing because there is no line in the sand to go back as an adult and say you are definitely sure someone stepped over it. Many, many, many children have had their childhoods taken away earlier in much more horrible ways, and my heart bleeds out for them. But there is also no such thing as competitive suffering.

It’s not the same boat, but it’s the same ocean.

Emotional and physical abuse present with the same symptoms, much like addiction. Symptoms of addiction are the same whether it’s to drugs, alcohol, gambling/spending, food, or sex. I would compare addiction to food and sex to emotional abuse, because it’s harder to figure out addictions to things you need to live a healthy life vs. things you can do without. You need the right amount of food and sex in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Looking at the pyramid, I haven’t seen the right amount of cocaine yet.

If I extrapolate that into emotional abuse, I crave connection without abusing or enabling, codependency or projection.

In terms of how wishing my mother hadn’t died when she did works into all this is that she’ll never get to see me as a truly happy adult…. thriving instead of barely surviving for years on end…. or worse, just flat-out lying about how I was feeling in order to Suit Up.™ At the very least, I was able to take off the mask for three years, but there should have been so many more. In terms of recovery, three years is the blink of an eye.

Which is exactly how fast I lost her.