What gives you direction in life?

I cannot use the daily prompt tag very often because I did 99% of them last year. Please follow me if you’d like to read more. You can also keep up with me on Facebook, where you can interact with me, other readers of the blog, and great authors I’ve come to know in my time as a Facebook creator.

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I have had both Android-based and Apple phones. Either way, I use Google Maps because I find it superior. I don’t know why. I just like the interface better than Apple Maps, and Google maps does the same thing on my watch that Apple Maps does, which is to buzz my watch when it’s time to turn. If I have my headphones in, there’s no need for it because the turn by turn navigation is in my ear, but when I don’t the haptic feedback on my watch is actually better than an audio alert.

I started out with my literal answer because the prompt reminded me of something Kathleen told me, the story of her college interview. Now, Kathleen (like every person I’ve ever dated) was incredibly smart. She was a business major at University of Houston, and ended up accepting a position at ExxonMobil in Global Information Systems. That’s how I moved to DC in the first place. Basically, the last person you’d ever think did something like this, which only made it funnier.

Kathleen was trying to get into Simmons, which is a women’s college in Boston on The Fenway. They are known for library science, I believe, but it wasn’t her interest. She wanted to live in Boston on The Fenway. I would like to point out that she DID get in after this, she just didn’t graduate there.

The interviewer asked her what she would bring to the college, and she said, “the blanket my grandma gave me, probably my pot-bellied bear (stuffed animal)……….” I was CRYING, shaking with laughter and so was she because of course she laughed about it in retrospect.

I don’t know everything she did end up taking with her to Boston, but she did take me (later on). She was supposed to graduate in the class of 2000, which she did, just in Houston. But her best friend was still graduating from Simmons that year, so I got the grand tour. The school’s address is literally 500 The Fenway, so we had access to everything right in our backyards. I loved Boston and wished I could have stayed longer.

I remember one souvenir I got that trip- a Harvard medical school sweatshirt for my dad. I didn’t go to a class at Harvard, but I did sit in on one at MIT. I think it was a math class, but I’ve slept since then. Whatever it was, I did not understand it. I don’t remember it because there are no “good lines” to connect me to it. My brain works through echologia. If there’s not a valuable thought or idea attached to a memory, it fades because I don’t repeat it in my head. In my head, good writing runs like a tape.

I can remember snippets of my dad’s sermons and it has been 29 years since he’s done a single service (not counting weddings or funerals). He will do those if someone asks him. As in, when you leave the church you stop doing active ministry, but they don’t take away your ordination. He can still sign legal documents as the officiant, etc. He left the church the summer before my 17th birthday, and went into medicine as a second career until he “retired.” In quotes because his philanthropy work takes up a lot of time. I tend to confuse people when I say I’m a preacher’s kid, because they don’t know my dad as a Rev. Meanwhile, I only had one grade school year in which he wasn’t a pastor.

“Can we cuss now?” -Lindsay L. Lanagan, 1995

I cannot say it was a different direction for my life as well, because like I said, I was almost 17. Not enough time for things to change drastically in terms of what I would do once high school was over, etc. I think those things would have played out the same, because being ADHD/autistic of course I didn’t plan anything in advance. I just took the basic entrance exams for junior college in Fort Bend, then transferred to UH. I’ve never even taken the SAT.

It just occurred to me to say out loud that I tend to have a delayed response to stress, thinking I’m fine until I break apart into a million pieces. It puts my behavior over the last 10 years in stark relief, that I’m fine right up until I’m not. That I will not explode because I am intentionally trying to hurt someone. I don’t realize that I’m overwhelmed, overstimulated, and at my breaking point.

In high school, that presented as a migraine that wouldn’t go away and landed me in the hospital for four days. The only reason I was mad about it is that I had to take my finals, because I had a good enough average to be excused and then I had too many absences. It wasn’t bad, though, just an annoyance at having to go to school longer than my peers. I was freaked out because I wanted to be at home with Meagan, because she’d gotten into University of New Brunswick and was leaving soon….. Another reason I had a full blown migraine. I was melting down due to stress and grief.

Dating a Canadian was really hard, because there was something so FINAL about her going to school in a different country. I knew she was never coming back, and I was right. She has never moved back to the US. Although what I can say is that researching immigration wasn’t wrong, and that I would have been happy if I’d done it even if the relationship had still failed. I have spent enough time in Ottawa with Meag to know I would have liked living there. But honestly, the more I researched immigration, the more final everything became because an autistic 18 year old cannot handle the logistics of an international move. I was overwhelmed by details from the beginning.

In terms of direction, what I knew is that if I wanted to go to UNB as well, I had to like the school on its own merit because people break up. So, I sent for an information packet and got an interactive CD-ROM that included a tour of the campus and some games to get you familiar with living there, like a scavenger hunt. It’s the most clever and creative recruitment tool I’ve ever seen anyone do, and WAY ahead of its time because it was basically the precursor to things like interactive web sites. I didn’t get anything like it from any of the other schools to which I applied, but does it surprise you that UNB got me by giving me something I didn’t have for my computer?

Do I regret not following Meag back to Canada? My perspective has changed. It’s a mixed bag, right? My answer today is very different than it was before the 2016 election, but even as a teenager I agreed with Canada’s socialist policies. People who say “socialist” like it’s a bad word because conservatives have convinced them it is. Meanwhile, Alberta has a thriving oil economy just like Texas and yet the people of Alberta still have nationalized health care and Texas has a lot more money. There is still income disparity, but no one is left to die on the streets. You can have capitalism and socialism.

Ask Deadpool.

Knowing what I know now, I would be horrified to change a thing that would have altered the course of my life away from eventually coming back to DC. The way it happened is just too oddly specific to recreate, and while my life would have been great as a Canadian, I would have kicked the shit out of myself for not going to Portland. If I hadn’t given up on immigration, I wouldn’t have met Dana.

Meeting Dana altered the direction of my life the most, because I’ve lived in Portland twice. I had to move back because I missed her too much; my girlfriend was way too jealous and possessive for me to have any friends. I mean it. She was emotionally abusive, and though she never punched me, she punched through a wall in my apartment (NOT HERS) when I told her that Meag was coming to stay with me……. Even when I didn’t say “Meag is coming to stay with me and we’re going to be alone in my apartment digging up old memories.” It wasn’t some sort of game. I said, “Meag, her partner, and their little girl are coming to stay with me.” She was still apoplectic and told me that it was inappropriate and I should have asked her if they could spend the night.

We didn’t live together.

We’d been dating three months.

And on some level I still thought I was an asshole and she was right. She said something to me that I’ve forgiven, but I’ve never forgotten.

She said something about not feeling secure in our relationship, that I was really committed, and then said “you look like such a flake when you haven’t finished your degree.” She was a middle school counselor, and it was like she’d never seen anyone with ADHD before……… And she’d never pulled that card before, it was just politically convenient and she knew it would hurt.

It hurt because she knew I was brilliant. She knew I’d turned down an internship with the Human Rights Campaign writing national Sunday school curriculum because she didn’t want me to go. She, like me, thought there was something so FINAL about going away, as if three months was enough that I’d just say “I live here now.” It might have been, but it wouldn’t have been “I want to move back to DC without you.” I felt secure in the relationship, not in Texas. For her, those two things were one and the same. I have several friends who are engineers and manage to have great marriages despite being asked to travel for work, often longer than three months. If that little time apart destroys a relationship, then it wasn’t a real relationship in the first place.

It changed the direction of my life, the giving up of that internship to kowtow to my girlfriend’s fears. Dana put the kibosh on that real quick. She was the one who put the puzzle pieces together and saw how I was being manipulated before I did. Dana’s former partner was an alcoholic, and so was my girlfriend. She could tell a lot without me having to say anything.

I don’t have a problem with alcoholics and addicts. I have a problem with alcoholics not admitting that even though they don’t drink, they’re still dry drunks. As in, the problems that made them drink haven’t gone away and they still exhibit the behaviors of someone who drinks, like manipulation, isolation, etc. I am not saying that if you have problems with alcohol, then you are emotionally abusive. I am saying that I do not have time for alcoholics and addicts who think alcohol is the entire problem. That the only thing they need to do is stop drinking. They don’t have to have therapy, they don’t have to go to meetings, they don’t have to do anything besides not drink.

So, you have a sober person who, for the first time in literal years is feeling real emotions again, and they don’t know what to do with them. Whatever drove them to drink or use is still the monkey on their backs and the ghost out to get them. They’re actively running away from their emotions because they’re not used to them. If you have an addictive personality, you have an addictive personality. That’s why so many former drug and alcohol users start smoking half a pack a day, drinking coffee as a water substitute, and/or you’ll never find something sugary that they don’t like. They cannot be addicted to the things they were in the past, so they find new ones.

But please know that I am not speaking from personal experience in an arena where it’s all about personal experience. I am not trying to speak for an alcoholic or addict, these are just observations I’ve learned from being a coworker in the kitchen and having had friends go through the recovery process. Having an addict living in your house gives you a front-row seat to how that brain works, and it is not so dissimilar from ADHD. If you were neurotypical before you started drinking, there’s a possibility your thought processes will go back to normal. Unfortunately, neurodivergence may be your new normal because the alcohol gave you so much dopamine that your brain cannot possibly keep up. It cannot produce more dopamine than what you used to get from the alcohol, so your brain just sits there and screams. It is possible that you have accidentally induced bipolar disorder, or that you were self-medicating to manage bipolar disorder you didn’t know you had.

Chicken and egg debate on bipolar vs. addict. We’ll never know, but it’s extraordinarily common.

From my perspective, an alcoholic and a bipolar person are perfect for each other because they present so similarly. However, that’s dependent on a lot of factors….. The biggest one is that half of the couple realizes they’re bipolar and what it does to you, and the other realizes they’re an addict and what that does to you. You have to speak from a vulnerable place and know you are capable of being wrong. Red flags are only problematic if you’re managing someone else’s. Knowing you have red flags and saying “I’m working on it” is completely different than trying to hide them and hope no one notices.

Your life becomes more manageable when you realize that you’ve been acting egocentric, and find something to get it out of the way. When you are no longer the center of your own universe, things look very different. “Egocentric,” however, cannot be equated to “selfish.” Plenty of people are egocentric because they feel that asking for things is putting someone else out. Being that shut down is egocentric because you have stopped participating in a give and take, making people guess your needs….. Often, when angry, blaming another person for everything you failed to tell them. In no example of any behavior that I’ve given on this Web site am I immune to being part of the universal “you.” The only behavior I don’t have is drinking too much on a consistent basis. If I feel any amount of hung over, I pull back more. For instance, if I had four drinks over the course of an evening with friends and I felt hung over the next morning, the next time I’d drink three. What I’ve discovered is that the best answer is not to drink at all unless it’s a once in a while treat. Because I’m a blogger/diarist, I absolutely hate losing control. I can tell I’m feeling tipsy when this monologue slows down, and that’s not a good thing. I need every bit of creative juice I’ve got.

I have learned that you do not want alcohol to numb your inner monologue unless the play is shit.

The play is the thing.