Tag: Authors

Staying Up

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What could you do more of?

I am slowly starting to stay up later and sleep in. Not by much. Just one or two hours. I’m starting this entry at 7:48, after I’ve done the things I need to do to get going. I have taken my medication, and gotten myself something to drink, and settled in. Therefore, I woke up at 0700 instead of 0500 for love.

That’s because the person that most represents safety to me and vice versa is in Portland, Oregon. That’s three hours into the past from here. I’ve done it with other friends, had this asynchronous life because I’ve had friends in Portland since 1996 or something like that and moved to DC in May of 2001. The events of September 11th did not drive me away. Kathleen did. It was the best mistake I’ve ever made. When I went to Portland, I found everything I have ever needed to know myself. It affects me every day, and I’m grateful to my time there for it, no matter how low my Vitamin D was when I got home (six).

I don’t stay up for me. I stay up for Bryn. I want her as a real part of my life rather than a fake one, and video calling is easier for both of us in the evening. It’s just that her evening is generally my bedtime when I’m getting up at 0500. When I get up at 0500, sometimes it’s so early for her that she hasn’t gone to bed yet. We make it work, and yet we don’t. It’s not a matter of how much we love and adore each other, just that our relationship isn’t as full of practical love as it would be if we lived in the same neighborhood. Maybe we will eventually, but I don’t want either of us to do the hard sell on each other. Our lives will unfold as they should. The difference between this relationship and most of my other virtual ones is that I don’t video call with them, ever. I barely even do audio. I can do that with Bryn because we’ve had so much face time over the years that we call each other no matter what we’re doing or how we look because the video call is more important than fixing up for it. Video calls are so much easier when you don’t give a shit how you look on camera. It’s not that we look bad, it’s that we’re going to love each other no matter how we look, so why waste time on something so frivolous?

I like our back and forth, the way we’re both on the “think it, say it” plan because we can be. It’s a trust that’s implicit and makes it easy to breathe. She’s made the commitment to learn my attachment style and love language, but she doesn’t really have to do research because they’re the same as mine. She understands something in me because she wears it on her skin, not because she’s lost in a book…. or if she is, it’s the one I’m writing for us.

You’ll just have to put up with romantic and flowery language from me about her because I am Anne Shirley crazy for her. She knows that she is my Diana Barry…. so much lighter than I am in some ways, darker in others. We complete, not compete. I am the friend that would get her drunk on purpose, though, and she wouldn’t complain because I’m an excellent bartender and it doesn’t take much for either of us. 😉

I am sort of in a relationship in terms of having a companion but not a possible husband, and she definitely is in a relationship with promise. It fits us to a T to have other partners, while also making space for each other; our history is too long for us not to put each other first in some ways. I might have to be around for the next boyfriend, and Dave will be excused for cause. I have no reason to believe this will be the case, it’s just a sitrep. We’re a package deal, get used to it. 😉

Being with our respective guys gives us more to talk about, not less. I don’t feel jealous and neither does she. It’s nice to have a place to unload about everything, because neither of us blink when the other has a problem. We’re on it like a team. Later I have to call Multnomah County on some business of my own, so I’m going to do hers as well. It’s no thing because if I have to do something over the phone, I know she’d be my proxy if something needed to be done in person. It’s a give and take now that I have someone on the ground that I can trust to have my back in a city where I used to live and still need to bat cleanup.

I’m not divorced yet, or at least, I have been unwilling to check. Dana told me she would take care of it, but I haven’t been sent anything to sign and I don’t think people have the capability to divorce someone without their knowledge. I could be wrong, but I can’t assume Dana is more likely than me to fill out paperwork, either, even though she said she would. I am not being catty. Paperwork causes anxiety for both of us sometimes because of the emotional attachment it represents. We’re both ADHD. If it fell off her radar, it won’t come back.

I can have empathy because in some ways, we’re the same person and that will never change.

Now my mother lion has kicked in, because I should have done it long ago for Dana and followed up on the paperwork myself, because I know it was difficult for two reasons. The first is that the way our relationship ended is shameful to both of us given the connection we threw away. We should have been able to deal with the Supergrover issue because I shouldn’t have gotten so high on her. Dana would know exactly how being married and being lost in new relationship energy would feel, because she was married during most of the time she was dealing with her feelings for me……………. yet another reason I didn’t want to get involved in the first place.

I struggled with the idea of having an affair because she was using her wife as a safety net if I said no and I knew it. That’s because her wife knew what Dana was doing, too, and was never blind to it. She saw how Dana reacted to me and thought her days were numbered, then stuck around watching Dana be lovesick over me for years and putting up with that shit. By the time she broke up with her wife, even our girlfriends were convinced we should be together instead of with them because we couldn’t stop talking about each other. Being friends was easy. Taking the leap was hard……………. right up until it wasn’t. By the time we were ready to leap, we had years of emotional closeness feeding our fire. We loved each other because of what we’d been to each other as friends, not because we each thought the other was perfect. We knew what contract we were signing, and we were better for it.

For a while.

She could not accept that the same thing was not happening to her. That my feelings were supposed to have been light and flirty wordplay to give me some dopamine after Dana and me going through a really rough time. Supergrover wasn’t threatened, and she was so cute about flirting with me one time that I knew I’d opened the door to something I could dish, but I could not take. I thought I was a silver-penned devil.

I was, in fact, mistaken.

I laid the golden fiddle at her feet because I had gone down to Georgia and knew that I’d been beat. It was a mistake. It called my bluff. I felt things I never had because it was attention from someone who really deserved mine.

It was all a mistake. It was not a happy compromise, It jumped me further into something she was rightfully afraid would happen. It jumped me into something the relationship couldn’t sustain, but it wasn’t her fault because I pretended to be so cool. it was the beginning of the end with both of them. It just will never be a new beginning with Dana because I can forgive her punching me, but it’s not worth a chance it would happen again and the statistics are against us.

I fucked up asking for more patience from both of them and then not actually doing anything to move myself forward. It was my own choice to feel heat for someone that would never feel that way about me, but that’s based on all the other relationships I’ve had, the mark my emotional abuser left on me. That I couldn’t really know someone until I’d slept with them. I know that because if someone opens me up emotionally, I tend to want all of them. I don’t tie people’s worth to it, though.

If they just want to be friends and I love them that much, I’ll sit in that pain until it goes away. I certainly have done enough of that to feel secure. It’ll never happen again, like women who do fall in love and realize later that it was never the sex that mattered and they’re better off as roommates and friends. But it’s because I’ve felt those feelings that I’m a real and genuine friend and also never less protective and possessive of her than her husband- and not because I want to “keep her safe from him” by acting like a jealous fool. It’s not him that matters. It’s the the rest of the world.

I’m not here to fight her battles for her, just with her. But I won’t if she acts like I don’t matter, gets angry when I tell her that, and treats me like an annoyance a good bit of the time. I’m not here for that, but I am for the relationship in which we do the work to be strong and comfortable at 20 years, like we predicted we would be in the beginning. I can live with boundaries, but not when I don’t know what they are. I will fuck up, and I have. I was out of control, then lost and finding my way back.

I can’t be lost anymore, because I’m tired of feeling insecure. I can’t make up fantasies to ignore the reality of the situation because they feed me. She avoids me in a way she shouldn’t, and that’s not my call. But because she says that she’s enormously impressed with me as a person, everything I’ve said tracks. There is room for all our feelings by now because nothing happens quickly anymore. There’s not an exhilarated rush of trying to know each other as fast as we can.

Our feelings are extreme on both ends. The lovebombing is absolutely genuine, and so is our conflict. The reality is that I would have left Dana no matter what because of two hard outs, not just one……… and now need Supergrover in my life despite her not needing me because of the first hard out’s upper limits, not because I am “trying to get her back.” I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t at that time. Life was full of hard choices, and I did the best I could with the information I had. It didn’t matter what Supergrover thought. It matters what I thought would happen to me in the future. Supergrover didn’t think about that and I know she didn’t because I didn’t, either. We both got lost in new relationship energy and told each other things that would have consequences long into the future without knowing how stable we were or weren’t. Without knowing how stable I was with Dana, because even I didn’t recognize the toll her DUI would take on me and how that was more of a threat to me than anything Supergrover said that enticed me. I never want to have to bail anyone else out of jail, because it was traumatic. My friend Volfe drove me downtown to pick her up, and she had already left on the bus. I was racing to get to her only to have my hopes dashed. I did get to see her later, but she knew we were coming to get her and she left, anyway. It made me crazy to the point I couldn’t think, and then Dana lost her license. The entire legal process wore me down, and Supergrover was the gift I needed at a time when I was really open to receiving it.

I fucked up by loving her so completely I couldn’t see anything else, and not because it was wrong. Some of my actions were crazy, but I’m not. It was all painful and could have been avoided. But I’d already run from her several times, saying that I couldn’t be friends with a woman who excited me this much, and because we couldn’t separate, we didn’t. The swings just became bigger as my emotions grew. It was embarrassing to tell her I had to back off and why so she didn’t feel like I was dumping her because I wanted to. I had to. Dana could compete with romantic love, but platonic trumped it because it had to, not because I wanted it to, for two reasons. I felt like I couldn’t have reactions in front of Dana anymore, because it drove her crazy for me to have a woman in my life that was just as important as she was for very different reasons. She could not accept that Supergrover and I needed a relationship that was separate from her out of necessity, not malice. I knew that every one of my actions would be up for discussion with someone. As Sam Seaborn would say, “oh, this is bad on so many levels.”

Having a relationship with someone who runs hot and cold is not my jam when they’re as close to me as Supergrover is. If we hadn’t already been so close, running hot and cold wouldn’t be a thing because I wouldn’t notice or care.

I reached out for Bryn because our attachment is secure. I don’t have to worry because there are no swings too big. We know that the other’s style is anxious, so we take care of it up front rather than letting the other believe we’re pulling back, or let the other know when we need some space, but we’ll talk about what was said later; we need time to reflect. It is not time to choose what kind of life we want together, we just know it’s there if we want it. I cannot be on thin ice. I cannot run from her love because it’s just too big. I can’t jump into something the relationship can’t sustain. We are there for every regeneration, making it a good story in the end.

I could do, need to do more of staying up…………… to read the chapters she has written on her own.

It All Mixes Together

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

I remember things by the way people say them, because if it’s a good line, I will hear it in their voices for the rest of my life. Good lines often have a cadence to them. For instance, my pastor came up with “resurrection happens in the middle of the mess.” I came up with “messages I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.” I gravitated toward it because it had the same musicality. One line leads to the next, a call and answer. Resurrection happens by examining the emotional places you’ve never been.

I have memories playing in my head like movies a good bit of the time. My writing is what happens when I stick my head into a pensieve, and I’m giving you access to it. The messages I’ve missed are often in plain sight when I’m seeing me as a different person, rather than perpetually reliving things. I am not reliving anything, I am searching for what I can do better in the future, and that only happens when you can look at yourself and see both your inner Aziraphale and Crowley.

How do I know what will work in the future if I don’t know how I broke the past? I know how I’ve broken my past because I wrote it down, essentially giving myself a past because few people write about their lives to this degree. When they go back to reassess, their memories are faulty. You cannot say that yours is infallible, but if there’s a blog entry on what happened written that day, that memory is secure by the nature of the timestamp. I’m not just making shit up. I am also very musical with words by nature of crafting rhythmic phrases on my horn, music only I can hear because only I know the voices on who said what.

I retain information with rhythm, essentially becoming a mimic in my writing and in my thoughts; I don’t just go back to that one line. It feels like I’m standing in the same room again, even just for a few seconds.

I give myself a lot of good advice by going back and reading what I thought years ago and seeing if I’m doing okay comparatively. Except that I don’t think of it as listening to myself, but the people who inspired my writing that day. It’s like an actor watching their old films. They aren’t living in the story on screen, but the one about how the art was created.

I like having written intimate things about the people in my life, hoping that the musicality of my words will stick with them, because being my friend isn’t easy. They all have their favorites, I’m sure, and their favorites never match up to my favorite things I’ve written about them.

Bryn loves the mirror I hold up on our relationship because she says it teaches her new things about herself. She gets what I’m trying to be, which is so real that people identify. I don’t want to be famous, I want to be heard. That’s why I don’t have to be on Oprah to know I’m making a difference. My platform is smaller, sure, but a platform nonetheless. And on the Internet, where everything is protected by a wall of anonymity, I never know when I’m speaking to people like her or people like me.

In fact, now that I think about it, Oprah did give me the best advice ever. On the last episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she talked about how everyone has a platform. Your family. Your church unit. Your work colleagues. All of those people add up, so no matter how small you think that platform is, it’s enormous. Use it.

Oprah’s not on at 4:00 PM anymore, so someone has to pick up the slack.

It’s the message I’ve missed in the middle of the mess.

A List, Physically and Mentally

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What things give you energy?

I am addicted to caffeine because I’m not on Adderrall currently. When I’m on Adderrall, I switch to something innocuous like fruit punch, or stick with diet soda rather than coffee/energy drinks. I still have to have a little to avoid withdrawal headaches. The problem becomes upper limits on dosage with caffeine, because in order for it to keep me awake, I need twice or three times as much as everyone else. The first few doses are just to keep my brain functioning normally. To stay awake, I need something like cold brew at regular intervals. Cold brew is high in caffeine on its own just due to how long it steeps, but also frequent re-upping to keep the bus from going under 50.

Caffeine will manage my symptoms up and to a point, but I’ll need the Adderrall back eventually. I can’t do a drug holiday forever. Sometimes I just have to suck it up and choose sick over crazy. The struggle is real.

Right now the thing that’s giving me energy is Pepsi Max, or Pepsi Zero Sugar, whatever they’re calling it this week. If my mother wasn’t dead, knowing I drink Pepsi now would have killed her. The fact that Pepsi gets any of my money at all is exclusively due to her untimely demise. You only think telling her I’m queer was hard. I didn’t even bother on this one. Too emotionally fraught.

I now know sugar gives me energy, or at least it does in other people’s eyes. My second day at Alert Logic, I asked one of my coworkers for a Sour Patch Kid and she said no. I asked her why and one of my other coworkers said, “you haven’t blinked since you got here.” I always thought it was them that gave me energy and not the candy. I remember Dana asking my supervisor why she didn’t keep me in line and she said, “I don’t hit children.” It was really funny because I must have been at least 10 years older than she was. Said supervisor also said I was “prehistoric” and I said, “why do you think I have so many dinosaurs on my t-shirts?”

Alert Logic fed all my addictions- coworkers where it actually felt good to be together after hours, the ambience of a room full of hackers when we weren’t on the phones (the sound of everyone typing at odd intervals is addicting to a writer), and a Starbucks machine that would fuck you up six ways to Sunday. You don’t leave Alert Logic when you separate from the company. You leave the Starbucks machine. Especially working overnight, those multiple free Americanos saved my ass. I got a Starbucks habit too expensive to maintain on my own.

In terms of my personal life, emotional intimacy turns me on. I want to know everything about a person down to the nth degree. This is because I don’t see people in 2D. I want to know all the things that make someone tick. It is not for malice, it is for curiosity. I am exploring the things that make up your character, what has affected you and what hasn’t. It gives me so much energy that I have to feed my inner sociopath once in a while. I do not mean giving in to any kind of dark side, I mean cutting off my emotions to protect myself from taking on everyone else’s. Clinical separation, not Dexter. 😉

I know quite a few people like that. People who cut off their emotions so they can even handle their shit at all. It’s the one thing that generally comes out of a reality break in childhood that’s useful. You’re not always cutting off your emotions to hide the secrets you protect when you’re being abused. You’re protecting your own energy so that you can put yourself first.

If you have been abused, you will never be first until you find out why that should be. Your abuser will be God in your life, the one on that you protect at all costs even though it would help you. After you get away from them, they’ll still be God, it’s just that now they’re the monkey on your back and the ghost out to get you.

My emotional abuser gave up her relationship with me when I put it together that she was God in my mind for all the wrong reasons instead of the right ones. The choir members who knew us both finally got through to me, but there was still doubt in my mind that it was abuse. We were just quiet, sweet music nerds and kindred spirits. You just couldn’t tell that we were quiet nerds because we both had huge show modes…… which honestly in retrospect I see why I was so attracted to Dana. I found someone who expressed love the same way my emotional abuser and I showed love, not good or bad but fact. We loved each other’s show modes and quiet moments equally. In fact, Dana had a crush on me six weeks after she met me. It took me three years to get on board because I needed her to let me in to the point where I could see if she had a mode besides show. I could not be with a show at home. Sometimes I was, but for the most part we were both introverted, preferring to spend time with each other more than anyone else.

The clash came in when I starting growing rapidly and she didn’t. She didn’t know me anymore, and vice versa. Supergrover was the first person I told my story to who didn’t have a dog in the fight. She could see what I refused to acknowledge, but couldn’t anymore when someone was reading the facts blind. Dana and I could have made it with more support, but I was sick and so was she. I have to believe that she was sick when she hit me because all people who abuse physically have some kind of screw loose. It makes it easier to move on than thinking of her in terms of good or bad. Thinking about our funny memories is vastly preferable to feeling phantom pain when I tap into those memories.

It stops me from dating other people, and I just happen to have another very good reason to avoid it. Someone else already has a piece of me that I can’t share and don’t want to because it’s just too painful. So I don’t. I don’t want to take the chance that I’ll have another relationship where I feel like I need to sneak around and hope it doesn’t get noticed. I’m not very good at it, so I don’t engage. I have to have Woodward and Bernstein ironclad boundaries with no capability with a girlfriend. They go through phones and are extremely entitled about it.

I’m not angry that I have to keep secrets. I signed up for this. I’m angry that I need things emotionally from someone who drains my energy because she can’t love me in a way I can hear it, and I drain her energy by being the least accessible person in her life due to the nature of where we live. From where she sits, Maryland is a different country. It is to all Virginians. Zac thanks me profusely for absolutely not going out of my way. It’s hilarious to me. I think that’s because I still have Houston geography in my mind. Everything takes a long time. On the train, I zone out. When we get there is when we get there. Going to Zac’s gives me energy, it doesn’t take it.

It’s not just Zac, it’s his house and starting to feel more at home there. It didn’t occur to me that Zac felt bad when I said coming to his house felt like a vacation to me, because it lifts me out of my real life for a while. I meant having the house to myself for a bit after he leaves for work without having to worry about my housemates making noise, especially when I’ve been recording. I also don’t have any other friends in intelligence, so those conversations always give me energy, too. Sometimes the vacation is just getting out of my head and into Oliver’s (Oliver is a dog).

Zac’s point I didn’t think of but value is that he is my real life. Thank God for that. I didn’t want to go any longer without a companion, because I learned from The Doctor that I can’t travel alone.

It zaps my energy.

I Don’t Have Favorite Children

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What’s your all-time favorite album?

The Eminem Show, Eminem

In order to know why it means so much to me, you’d have to know the circumstances in my life when it came out. Maybe six months before, my wife had slept with two of her coworkers in one weekend while I was out of town, and I know that because she called me while I was still away to tell me that and break up with me. I was not feeling particularly kind toward women at the time. I couldn’t get angry, but my music could. Eminem literally became the paramedic healing my emotional wounds, because his pain stood out to me. I am Stan yet I have wonderful boundaries and I don’t care he didn’t write me back. 😉 I hate to do this to all my other favorites, but this one takes the cake.

That anger went away quicker than it would have on its own because through someone else’s eyes I could see that my pain was valid in his artistic expression……. when to put out my own was worse because I protected her when I shouldn’t have on my blog and only told my closest friends how bad it got. I can look at either one of them and they know which person I mean when I say “Sgt. Fucktard” and both of them will fall out with laughter, because now I can laugh about it, too (such a pity that neither live in DC now).

I barely even remember her name is Kat anymore, and that’s for the better. Karma was good to me. If she knew what I knew about what happened to me, she’d be too jealous to be happy, and that would be true if I’d never published anything at all, especially blog entries. It’s a beautiful thing when you meet someone that is worth your career. It puts everything into perspective really, really fast. The love of my life isn’t out of romance, it’s that she has a space in my heart no one else can have or will ever duplicate because I have to lose the master.

Also, this part of “Cleaning Out My Closet” made me stronger: “have you ever been hated or discriminated against? I have. I’ve been protested and demonstrated against… picket signs for my wicked rhymes…” It felt a lot like blowback from my web site because I have never been protested against by more than one or two people at a time, but it felt like hell because my first reaction was always to pull the plug; I wanted to please them and my career said “people think you’re a good writer. If you want to be able to do this for money, you have to keep going. Dooce didn’t become Dooce overnight and you won’t become Leslie Lanagan that fast, either.” Eminem slowly gave me the confidence to push away people who don’t like being on this blog and gather the people who tolerate it, even if they don’t outright love it.

I felt like Supergrover felt like she was in some sort of hostage situation, that I was writing about her to provoke her so she’d have to be stuck with me, yet didn’t get that my feelings would naturally go away if I wasn’t focusing constantly on her. This is, in fact, not our situation at all. She’s acting blind when she shouldn’t or can’t.

She’s my first thought every day, nearly every moment because I accidentally went from a blogger to a journalist in 15 seconds flat. It’s not as cool as it sounds, but yes it is. Both extremes are enormous, and I cannot cope with the downside alone. I shouldn’t have to ever and it’s a gift she can’t or won’t give. I feel that by letting me into the little things, I have more material to protect her because I have a bigger library of analogies to protect her identity publicly, because she might not freak in my personal life (although she very well might, too), but there would be hell to pay if it leaked here, and she would be well within her rights and responsibilities to hate my guts. I don’t protect her like a lover. It’s so much deeper than that.

I’m neurodivergent. Rambling like this at parties just doesn’t happen. I am literally using my quirks for me rather than against thanks to having the strength to stand up for myself. It’s just that now, one of the friends I ramble about is the least likely to need or want it. So, I cut her loose off and on to see if these feelings will go away and they never do, because either I’ll apologize again or she’ll drop in and yet won’t. Three word e-mails most of the time aren’t going to cut it and she’s avoiding it and blaming it on time. It’s a conversation we desperately need to have in a situation where we can’t have it. Given the option, I’d choose her over writing every time, mostly because she’d never ask me to pull the plug unless this was a real problem and not a possible one. She thinks I’m entitled to my stories even when they’re all bullshit, but doesn’t realize they’re all bullshit because I’m doing the very thing I need to do. Even when I’m angry.

Especially when I’m angry. Right now I’m angry that she doesn’t see that she opened up herself to having a right hand ring out of necessity and by blowing up each other’s lives and not talking about it, the right hand ring burns us instead of tempers. She thinks I should get over it. I think I should think through it with her brain and my heart, because that’s how we show love. She does the thinking, I do the feeling. She would rather have a root canal than acknowledge what she’s done and move on from it, because it seems to me that I’m activating guilt where it doesn’t belong by needing something she doesn’t deal with in herself and also needs desperately. We could support each other, but we don’t. That ship, in some respects, has crashed against the rocks because of a Siren, and now she’s having a heart attack. Because she doesn’t have time to heal me and feels guilty, because she thinks I’m asking for so much more than I really am.

I don’t need to have chocolate and coffee with her every week, I need her to acknowledge that she’s the Earl Grey in the box, the one most people sleep on and I adore because she didn’t sleep on me. I am not the person that when she comes to work all this out, I heap guilt on her. I express needs and that’s what she reads, so she doesn’t respond like a mama wolverine when she’s the issue, but God help everyone else. There are a couple people in my life that if they became mutual friends, they’d regret it. I would have looked forward to seeing that in person. Something equivalent to “surely you do not believe that this person who is a mental bag of rocks is worthy of you?” Probably everything I would have felt about her husband until I realized that he was perfect for her and I was wrong. I have never been convinced that we would be even close to happy as partners, we’re just connected by chance. The enlightening that she found her person would have been a good day, too.

Lesbians totally have a straight guy side to them in terms of possession and jealousy because we’ve been taught to act that way by men. Not that they’ve straight up told us that, they’ve just modeled it for centuries. In my head I’m Anne Lister without the hairstyle. It’s unfortunate that Supergrover married a man on purpose and a gentleman jack by accident with loyalty, because now she has two guard dogs that probably wouldn’t always agree with each other (but I’m certainly willing to have that fight as it is so worth having).

The Eminem Show had the same effect on me that my mother’s cemetery has on me now. It gave me perspective on the fact that more people than me were in pain much worse than mine. It helps me now to release pain in the situation with Supergrover, because I will never be jealous, but always possessive where she’s concerned. She hasn’t made the connection that she needs me to be possessive. I see something she doesn’t. It sucks.

History repeats with music, because it also contains some of the tracks she likes. I’m naturally gravitating towards it. One of the things I remember from our first few years is listening to that album again because some of her favorites are ones I usually skipped, but became beautiful to me because she loved them. I am listening to this album because I have the right to that much anger and I feel same type pull that makes me crave her words, while she thinks I am telling her that I regret meeting her when I need her to open up. I am doing my best to curb my enthusiasm, but it cannot go away so it won’t. I am the Impossible Girl because I have to be wound into her whether I want to be or not, because it’s for life, even by accident.

It’s an album, a presentation. I haven’t bought any songs separately.

I bought the album, so I go to all the concerts, waiting for a Piccardy Third that might never come. We’re in the middle of the rap battle, not the delight of singing to Hailie. I look forward with hope because to not is not being me. When we resolve, so does the chord.

If and when it does, get ready for “the most feared duet since me and Elton played career Russian Roulette.”

This is the Thursday of Our Discontent

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know how I did it.

But I have a guess.

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.

Every Day

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

How often do you walk or run?

I do not have a car, therefore I take the bus or the Metro everywhere. This leads to a good deal of walking, but I prefer it to driving. I didn’t think I’d like it at first, but I love all the guilt-free reading and writing time. I carry my Fire tablet and my Bluetooth keyboard everywhere, and it fits perfectly in my lap without making me take up more than my fair share of room. Plus, mobility is great for creation. My ideas come faster and more furious when I’m walking, and I’m grateful.

I never take walking for granted, although I will say up front I’m bad at it. I look untrained in the ways of walking sometimes because I have a mild case of cerebral palsy that affects my movement and balance. It is still preferable to what my life might be like if my CP was worse. I have empathy for everyone who struggles with physical issues, and there is no such thing as competitive suffering. I have perspective. I suffer much less than people with walkers or in wheelchairs, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t suffer at all.

I prefer walking when my friends are with me, because it’s ok for me to hold onto them when I need it. In fact, I think Zac prefers it. 😉 CP is not the only thing that makes me need to hold onto others. I don’t have depth perception, so sometimes I don’t lift my foot high enough for a step and trip. Sometimes I don’t judge the distance from the doorjamb to my shoulder correctly and hit it harder than one might think. I also have an alternating field of vision because my eyes don’t track together, so the worst I’ve ever been hurt is when I haven’t seen a step down. This is because my reflexes aren’t generally fast enough to save me. It is not unusual for me to have a scrape on my face because of it. I am generally covered in bruises, only some of which I can explain because it’s just too time consuming to walk back through my day and post-mortem.

When I’m exhausted, all of these issues get a hundred times worse.

My friends are helpful. Strangers are not. I have fallen and hurt myself to the point that my pants are ripped, my knee is skinned up, and there’s blood on my face…. yet no one has ever offered to help me up unless they already knew me. I do not expect strangers to help me, I’m just surprised because it’s hard for me to see other people in pain and not stop.

I would like to continue being surprised about this rather than jaded and bitter. No one is just like me, and few people are as empathetic, and I don’t mean this as “I’m all that and you’re trash.” I mean that my personality type, INFJ, is only present in 9-15% of the world’s population. We are the pastors, counselors, and social workers of the entire population. We are not all religious, but we are all spiritual. The reason we’re the empaths of the world is that we’re relentless in self discovery. We want to find us so we can find you.

People only understand each other to the level that they understand themselves, because when someone tells another their story, the listener is filtering it though all their life experiences. Whether the other person’s experience is good or bad is based on the listener’s first family, the partner they have with their family, and the way they have always operated.

I have been walking and thinking about this for 10 years now, because 10 years ago I had an experience for which very few people have filters. I didn’t know shit from Shinolaâ„¢ and made a ton of mistakes. I grew from them, but I’ll never be the same person I was, either. It’s one of the reasons I love Doctor Who. We all have many lives, we just don’t change faces to do it. I never want to forget that story, nor the ones that proceeded from it. They are more beautiful to me as I age, because I never want to forget this version of me.

I am writing a story; I want it to be a good one in the end.

Right this moment, it is not good or bad. It is not time to choose. It is time to reflect, give myself distance, and pick up the pieces. My routine has changed greatly, and I am thankful for it…. most of the time. At others, the situation and people are so irreplaceable that it feels like I will never get over losing it. I set the ball in motion for all this happening, and that makes me even more prone to bouts of deep grief, because it’s harder to forgive yourself than anyone else.

If I do forgive myself, it will only be by putting one foot in front of the other, forging a new path…. without becoming so bitter and jaded that I’m unable to forgive and forget. Not only do I not want to close the door permanently, it would be incredibly unfair of me to do so considering how many times I’ve walked away and reneged. I just don’t want to go out of my way to fix things anymore. Eventually, you start noticing when a relationship has no return on investment, because we were not checking the story we were telling ourselves. It was off to an enormous degree. It hurt that my arguments were always shut down; that I was not allowed to need anything while she was allowed to ask for everything and receive it, no questions asked. The imbalance was okay for a while. Too long, actually. The last straw for me was the person who brought those circumstances into my life disagreed with me for many reasons, and wouldn’t tell me what they were.

We fought tooth and nail, when that wasn’t my goal at all. Depending on the day, we were each trying to hug a cactus. We would be able to complete each other and celebrate our differences if we were both willing to slow our roll. Our adrenaline ran too high, and we crashed. Neither one of us has it in us anymore.

But even when I’m angry, she’s still my favorite person. I call her Supergrover because even when I think she’s acting monstrous, she’s still cuddly, adorable, and blue. Ok, maybe not that last one. But she does have a double master’s in irreverence and profanity. We are so much alike that it’s easy to see how we got here. People generally hate things in other people that they hate about themselves.

We are sitting back to back, unable or unwilling to simply turn around…..

And walk back towards the other.

Absolutely, with Caveats -or- 1800 People

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Do you see yourself as a leader?

I am not a traditional leader, and I never will be. I have had the best examples of leadership in the entire world, and my process was stopping feeling inferior to them. My way of leading is just different because when the Internet went large scale, into personal computers when it was military-only before, I was an early adopter. I disappeared into that world because I’m a better writer than conversationalist, and other people wouldn’t say that about me at all.

It has everything to do with how comfortable I am writing alone and in front of people. Other people do not perceive this about me, it’s my own observation about myself. I feel happier writing alone because focusing on social propriety gives me nausea. I don’t feel relaxed in a crowd.

I lead by seclusion because I don’t have to organize events and ask you to be here. Everyone just drops by and takes what they need. Sometimes they talk to me. Sometimes they stay silent. It all matters.

For instance, I know I have roughly 1800 people between Facebook and WordPress that choose to receive updates every single day. My web stats, meaning people who visit the site without a notification from me, are exponentially larger than that. I have an awareness that I’m not Elvis or anything, but if I say something, i need to know people are listening. I don’t think of my words as innocuous. I don’t have that luxury. I shouldn’t even have the luxury of leaving in typos, but I do. That’s because I don’t have the courage to write and edit. If I go back to fix something before a piece is published, I will get so bogged down in my own insecurities that I won’t publish at all. Nothing is ever good enough when there are 1800 people receiving your words the *moment* you hit “Post.”

I think of it as power for good and evil that all of these essays are written in one shot, don’t even look at it. Part of it is erasing imposter syndrome. I don’t “want to be a writer someday.” I am a writer now. My audience never has to get any bigger for me to feel validated, because I know that if I had been a pastor instead of a writer, I would be an even bigger deal in my community because people would see me getting up in front of 1800 people every Sunday morning. I “preach” every morning like it’s Sunday and I am ridiculously happy about that because I like the feel of leadership without having to attend any committee meetings. The other part of it is that if I hit post before I read something, I get to be a fan, too.

I like looking at myself as if I don’t know me. I love me like I love The Bloggess. I love me like I love Wil Wheaton. I love me like I love Dooce. No one can tell me I’m less talented than they are. it would have been amazing to have us all in one room. I’ve met Wil, but not Jenny and Heather (Dooce). It destroys me that I’ll never meet Heather, because we would have had the same witty banter I had with Wil. It’s a unique crowd, because we were the first wave of bloggers…. or at least, Wil, Heather, and I were.

Jenny started a little later than we did and I’m so happy for her success, because our content deals with the same stuff. Sometimes even the same mental health issues. In fact, she was just talking about how she made a coloring book for adults and I asked her a question I thought needed asking. “Have you thought of writing a children’s book about Beyonce?” For the uninitiated, Beyonce is Jenny’s giant metal rooster, though I think Jenny would do a bang up job on a children’s book about Queen Bey. Of course I do. We’re all Texans.

Because I am comfortable with the level of notoriety I have right now, I am not focused on driving engagement. Engagement has become self-sustaining. I don’t have to constantly advertise because other people will tell their friends to read me. I hate advertising myself. I’d rather keep my head down and let others do the talking.

I am not trying to fit into another person’s reality, shoving content into their faces. I am inviting you to mine. This is my weird little world. I own it. I wrote the charter. By thinking of my web site as me and one other person- all of you boiled down to a singular “you” in my mind), I don’t have to feel the anxiety of preaching, singing, or playing an instrument in front of a crowd. I have no social anxiety when I’m writing. A ton of anxieties, to be sure, but none of them having to do with being in public. My reactions are my own, tightly controlled. By that I mean I will cry and scream and beat the wall and tear my clothes and all of those things, it’s just in the privacy of my own home.

I tell you things I can’t tell anyone else, because I don’t force conversations to go my way, either. I don’t mean my desired outcome, I mean the path the conversation takes isn’t entirely dependent on me in public…. here, it would be a disaster area if I couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation while you’re not in the room…. and that’s how I think of our relationship. We are very close, even if you don’t know it.

Honestly

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite word?

The reason “honestly” is my favorite word is that it rhymes just for me. If you ask me what I mean, I will tell you that I can’t do that. It only rhymes for me. It’s not even an inside joke. It’s music only I can hear…. a waltz, and Strauss is about to bring in the horns.

I love music honestly and completely, the most pure thing in my life because there’s nothing a choir and orchestra can’t fix. In my head, anyway. When I’m sad or angry, two things happen. The first is that I sing it out. The second is that I conduct it out.

The last time I had to conduct about a problem, it was Desplait. Alexandre Desplait wrote the score to “Argo,” and conducting anything on that album is a full body workout. I am a terrible conductor. Just terrible. I don’t do it to get better. I do it to get exhausted.

It’s the only way I really fall asleep. I have never slept much, and people kid me all the time. “Do you ever sleep?” is popular in my crowd, but it’s true I don’t need much. Most of the time I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 0500 unprompted. This week it’s a little different because I can tell that my mood is swinging upward, and I don’t know that because of mood and behavior. The only real side effect that I have consistently with hypomania is insomnia. I feel lucky that it’s not worse, but it’s like getting my period. I am tired and in pain all the time because of brain race. Why can’t I sleep if I’m so tired? My body is not running the show. If my brain says it’s an all nighter, my body will fight it tooth and nail. When that happens, I can take 75 or 100mg of Benedryl and it won’t do a damn thing.

I’ll have to see a doc about it eventually, but I’m a writer so I hardly notice. Have I been writing for three hours or three days? It is always a mystery when I’m finished writing as to the date, day, and time. Luckily, I can look it up quickly. I just notice that finishing writing is a lot like waking up in the morning- discombobulating because you don’t know where you are after writing, either. But that’s what makes writing worth it. If you are a writer, fiction or non, you get to live in three worlds instead of just waking and dreaming. The characters and research turn into plot and setting. You cannot see anything outside of it while thoughts are pouring forth. A bear could rip out the back wall on my house and if I was writing, I wouldn’t even notice. I don’t even need headphones most of the time.

I’m not saying that my process is any different because I have it wired and other authors don’t. I am explaining a universal concept. All writers are more than one person. Even with non-fiction, there’s your writing personality and your physical space personality. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes they’re not. I hope Karen Slaughter is a “not.” 😉

I take responsibility for everything I write, because I know that I’m influencing culture. My platform has gotten bigger over the years, but so many people have repeated the things I’ve written/said as their own that I hear my own words out of someone else’s mouth a lot…… particularly when they’re forgetful because I have the memory of an elephant for what I read. I can remember conversations with Supergrover nearly verbatim because being friends virtually meant I had to read everything to respond. That’s the way I take in information the best. So, part of the reason that she thinks I’m judging her is that I’m actually using her words and she doesn’t remember that she said them. I don’t mean that in a “gotcha” kind of way. I remember everything she’s said, not just the words that hurt. That’s because she’s a great writer and I try to quote her as much as I can because the way she said something fits an occasion perfectly and I got nothin.’

I can’t talk about my writing without talking about my inspiration.

Honestly.

There is No Such Thing

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Describe your ideal week.

There is no such thing as an ideal week for me. My life is too up and down to predict. What I do know is that an ideal week is spent balanced between my close friends/family and my writing. Enough isolation to satisfy me because my friends remind me why I don’t want it. I’ve had some incredible experiences over the last couple of days. It is a combination of things, mostly being able to say yes to things I said no to previously; it had the potential to make me avoid feeling bad about myself, and Timeless Children don’t do that. If there is blame to be had anywhere, we’ll find it. That is because we are used to being the cause of conflict because our abusers have told us that if we say anything, we will be. We don’t do it to protect us. That’s a side effect. We do it to protect you because we know you’re the adult and we’re not. You’ll be believed and we won’t.

I write to avoid a lot of that stuff because I don’t have the bandwidth to think about relationships on that level all the time, and I don’t pay as much attention to relationships in which I’m not in tune. I know when I’m not, I can sense it by the other person’s energy. Writing causes isolation and it feeds me, so I lose track of the world around me. It’s using my mental illness for fun and profit, really. I’ll never be The Bloggess, but there is a solid chance I’ll be Leslie Lanagan.

I put down my worries for a while and went to a bar that had an arcade with Zac, who then proceeded to treat me to Chinese-Peruvian fusion in a restaurant he was flabbergasted I didn’t know because it was a Jose Andres…. and I’d said that I love any excuse to throw Jose some money. Picking that restaurant in particular was part of the gift. It was eating amazing food, and supporting World Central Kitchen, which I believe is right up there with Doctors Without Borders in terms of reputation.

Today I’ve been shopping around on Amazon because I got a gift certificate. I ended up with a henley and three long-sleeved t-shirts because they’re essential in the fall. I basically spend all winter dressed like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory.”

I saw a t-shirt with a hammer and sickle that said “totally not a Russian spy” and I thought about it. I’ll have plenty of time to think it over in the future because Amazon will remind me I looked at that t-shirt once a week until I’m dead.

Tonight, Lindsay is taking me out to dinner (a bonus birthday gift because we’re going to a concert at the end of next month). She’s staying in Falls Church, Virginia, so we’re trying to work out where. I am just glad that I am getting a second night out in a row. I’m not sure that’s happened in years. I like it, because my appetite is suppressed most of the time and I eat more when other people are eating with me. Eating and drinking are very much alike that way. Not as much fun to eat or drink alone, whether it’s the glass of wine together after the kids are in bed or the coffee together before they wake up.

Those are the moments I live for with my friends, because the conversation is generally more intimate and I don’t do well with small talk. It doesn’t register, so I stop paying attention. The friends I love the most feel free to say whatever they want, when they want. That’s because they allow me the same courtesy.

It’s what makes every week an ideal week. I always have room to be me.

This Might Be Short…. Or Not

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Name the professional athletes you respect the most and why.

Before we get started, today is my birthday and tomorrow Lindsay is taking me out for dinner because she had a meeting and was able to swing it. I love that we manage living in different cities so easily because she works here. I’m not the only reason she fits in. She knows the city better than I do. Also, I did write yesterday. It was just so bad and rambled off into nothing that I thought, “I don’t even like what I think today. This blogger sucks.” It helps to focus on elite athletes and people who think like them.

In a lot of ways, this city knows Lindsay better than I do, because I do not walk in her circles, often rarified air. She and I are perfect for each other the way Supergrover and I are in that we can be objective about what’s going on in the other’s life because it doesn’t affect our friendships at all. I have no official Washington power and wouldn’t use it if I did. Therefore, either one of them could say anything to me and it wouldn’t be boring. Lindsay drills down into policy all the time, and I’m neurodivergent and a paralegal in the state of Texas. I can hang, and I can nerd out just as far as she can. I just don’t get paid to do it. I can advise without being involved. I would be very happy working for Lindsay’s organization in DC, but I wouldn’t have the relationship that I have with her if I took the job. Same with Supergrover. Better to listen to her than to think I can do a thing. Since they both suit up to play, it’s fun being the opposite side of them. That reminds them taking a minute to enjoy a nice meal and an expertly made cocktail is a good thing.

Lindsay and I have this great relationship where her interests and mine line up, so we get along like we’d just met yesterday. At the same time, when I look at her I see every iteration. I see her inner child and try to remind her of it when she’s stressed out from all the things it takes to be her. We have a very West Wing relationship in that she used to be Charlie, the body man, for Annise Parker and I would be great at being hers…… or I think I would. I would probably end up getting fired. I’m good at being the Charlie she only talks to over the phone. 😛

Explaining how I feel about Lindsay explains how I feel about Supergrover in a nutshell, and not because I mean my loving words less toward Lindsay. It’s that Lindsay and I don’t have a hard out, so I can use Lindsay’s concepts for feelings that are very much the same with both women. I already have three sisters, so it’s no hard leap to feel love that intense for Supergrover as well. I honestly don’t remember how my mind worked before she unlocked all my doors. It was like a scene from The Matrix. If I’m Neo, she’s The Oracle.

Those who think they know everything are annoying to those of us who do, which seems to be a mantra for all three of us depending on the situation. We are all in agreement that this applies to the orange gelatinous shitbag. We could all out-think and out-maneuver him easily.

I don’t really know anything about sports, and they do. They’d be better at answering this question than I am, but I do look to them for inspiration. I just don’t watch games that much. I absolutely love two things. The first is looking them up on YouTube to see what makes them great. I don’t want to be a bandwagon fan, I want to see them defy physics and decide on my own. The reason I have to look them up on YouTube is that I love the story of what it takes to be an elite athlete, so I’ll watch a documentary on ESPN about them and fall in love with their public character rather than their play. I can tell you about David Beckham’s early life and family ties better than I can tell you how he played.

I can tell you why it’s exciting and induces tears for me to watch Trinity Rodman play because since I’ve seen what a powerhouse her dad is, I imagine what a proud father he must be and it’s like a long distance commercial up in here.

Everyone loves Michael Jordan, but the “character” that resonated with me most in “The Last Dance” was Scottie Pippen. He was truly the unsung hero of the operation, its Ginger Rogers to Jordan’s Fred Astaire. They both made each other better, and I don’t think Jordan is appreciative. He comes off like a narcissist whether other people agree with me or not. Scottie has the heart of a journeyman cook who will occasionally blow your mind. Experimental, brave, crazy, also knows and copes with the fact that he’ll never be chef. So he’ll be the best damn sous this restaurant has ever seen.

We don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it. Scottie should have gotten loud in salary negotiations, and I’m not berating him. I’m just agreeing with him. His relationship with Michael was very much Aaron Rogers and Jordy Nelson. I’ll pick ’em up if you put ’em down. Shake……. and BAKE!

The trick is learning to be respected instead of famous. If you focus on the attention the star is getting instead of you, then you miss out on the best part of getting to be an elite athlete. The people who know the game will see you differently. It’s not the same as having millions of bandwagon fans.

It resonates with me because I’m a Scottie. I’d rather be a speechwriter on a campaign than a candidate. I’m Leo in that if I worked for a candidate, I would hope for the friendships that Lindsay got with Annise Parker, Nick Lampson, and Peter Brown (the Houston candidates Lindsay worked for before she started lobbying).

It takes an elite athlete’s courage to be Lindsay and Supergrover. Supergrover actually is an elite athlete, which I’m sure goes a lot into what she does because she’s been mentally preparing to the level she does now since she was all-State three years running in high school. Six letters and she even stopped to wonder why I wanted to wear that jacket. 😉 Now, our relationship feels the same as mine with Lindsay because I only want to drill down into policy.

I had to grow into that role with both women because I didn’t want to seem like a dumbass when they talked about their lives, because to them the things they say are completely normal and mundane. I stand there and feel like I didn’t get the assigned reading.

I do everything I can to combat that. I know for sure Lindsay is going to be in the newspaper no matter what job she has from here on out. She’s responsible for introducing a lot of legislation that makes people mad af and they pay her the big bucks not to back down. The Texas legislature is going insane regarding trans healthcare and its lack of support for it. And Supergrover would never be in the news on purpose. She’s the most private person I know, which is why it’s so unfortunate that our careers rub up against each other. It’s a constant source of ire to the point that she is the only person that could get me to tear it down and almost did to take care of the problem because she was worth it in a way no one else was. If she reamed me out for saying something sensitive, I wasn’t going to be the blogger that didn’t hear her. It was too important.

What was too important on my end was being able to use this space to process our relationship when I felt I couldn’t go directly to her…… but I could. It wouldn’t take long for her to get over what I said that she thought was negative because she loved the lines that were specifically crafted to adore her in public. To let her see how I talk about her behind her back. How every story is true to my limited knowledge and ability as a writer, but it is my superpower the way her work is to her. I just don’t think she realized that she was setting herself up to be a character when she befriended me and how her world would bleed over into mine.

In these pages is a magnificent story of two people who met by chance, one much more powerful than the other, which attracted us in a stranger on a train sort of way because nothing we said would get back to any of her friends or colleagues. This became the lie we told ourselves very quickly, because I could be honest with both her and Dana and say “this is a lot to manage and I need to work it out on my own.” The hard out made my decision for me in all kinds of ways, ranging from her not thinking about the consequences to me actively trying to destroy what we had built because she flipped me out mentally with her story and hasn’t really taken responsibility for hearing what it’s like to be me and adjusting to it, because she created a new reality for me. The disconnect between my real life and the one I present here is enormous, but it’s because I’m good at using small things to represent the big things. It’s just too much to handle for me if I slip up. I could accidentally ruin her life by accident, and the consequences would be dire no matter what happened as a result.

I don’t want to be that writer for her. I feel like I’ve done what Tony Mendez calls “falling in love with your asset” in “The Moscow Rules.” It’s an emotional shorthand for being so close to the subject that it takes away any impartiality, something we crafted by not normalizing everything by picking up the phone. Two sides to that coin. The first is that we would have stopped being as emotionally intimate with each other and that was the drug that kept us taking hits all those years. The second is that it really would have taken talking in real time, because I don’t know about her, but a few voicemails doesn’t convey everything that could have been avoided by hearing each other’s tones of voice.

Platonic love hit me harder than I’ve ever been hit in my life, and I’m sapiosexual and bipolar. One line bled into the other, and the butterflies in my stomach hit harder as well. Getting rid of them was enormous and had to be done to save our friendship, because I didn’t want to live without her unless I absolutely had to…. it just mixed me up so much inside because I’d lay out all these thoughts and feelings thinking she’s sitting there thinking I’m a judgmental dickhead when she’s just busy and needs more time. Then, at others, she really does treat me like a judgmental dickhead so there’s no way to know which person is going to show up. Is our situation dire enough to stay together at all costs, or do I only know random factoids about your life today? The highs and lows were too big because of the medium, and yet they were exciting. It was a thrill ride.

Because she’s Michael Jordan. She needs a Scottie Pippen. So, she got into my head and made me believe I could be that for her. If nothing else, because she was in my head, she taught me to think like an elite athlete as well. That if I was going to be Scottie Pippen, I was more than capable. I grew to be wildly impressed with me. To love me like I love her. It’s wild and wonderful because I am.

Six letters, though.

SMDH.

No, I Just Hurt

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Are you holding a grudge? About?

I am not a person that holds onto things. There’s a part of me that would love a day with any one person from my past whether they’ve wronged me or not, with one glaring exception that I wouldn’t have thought would come in my lifetime……….. but I’m not even holding onto anger regarding that situation. I’m just angry about it in my writing because I do not want her as the kind of fan who thinks she can reach out any time she wants, because that would destroy me…… for a bit. There’s no one alive who ever really gets over anything. It just moves from a place of pain to “this is something that has happened,” but if the situation comes back up, the feelings you had then are still stored in your body. Even if the same thing isn’t happening, it will feel the same way.

I would like to see the look on Supergrover’s face if and when we had to have we had that conversation, because my beautiful girl is a monster on a leash…… that she carries in her mouth and will let you hold if she thinks you are worthy of lifting Mjolnir. My mind bent like a pretzel when she decided I was. If you try to hurt me, you try to hurt us. It won’t go well for you whether it’s her or me that made your hackles go up. That one fan coming up into my yard would set us both off, I don’t care how pissed we are at each other, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that crap. It’s the same way on both sides. When someone comes after her, I want to jump between them. It’s just not possible, so I hope it’s the thought that counts.

There is such a thing as loving someone until you die while also knowing you aren’t good for each other, and either you need to correct the problem or move on. It might be hell in the moment, but love doesn’t go away. If I found out that something was going on with her I could actually fix, it would be done already. It doesn’t mean I should sit and wait around until she needs me. It means that no matter what happens between us, I’ve made promises that I intend to keep.

I think it’s cute that she’s a boss ass bitch and I’m basically “Player” from Carmen Sandiego. It makes our perspectives wildly different and thus easier for us to call out each other’s bullshit because we’re objective and uninvolved with any of the people the other might talk about.

That part I really did like about our relationship, and I’ve made other friends that way. I am not as close to them because it hasn’t been as long, but still the same feeling of two people in wildly different situations that can listen to the other because they don’t care about anyone but the person they’re talking to in the moment.

I don’t have to care what their husbands do, what their kids do, what their friends do because I am not trying to maintain a relationship with any of them, therefore I don’t have to balance my emotions because if I say something about one, it affects my relationship with the other. Conversations are sacred, and so is trust. I’ve learned everything about how to do virtual relationships the wrong way, so I’m adapting to make it better. I found someone that made me think so hard about myself that it was sink or swim. I could deal with the fact that me being in love with her was a pipe dream and move on, but nothing can be unsaid and I’m a writer. I don’t have the safety and security of knowing when I’m close to the hard out because I want to be seen as the loving friend I said I’d be….. after I was a total dick, of course. Rejection sucks, but it doesn’t last forever and I am not the kind of person that believes in the friend zone. There was never going to be a time where my ruminations meant that if she said no to me, her friendship didn’t mean anything to me. It would be the opposite. I know how we work. She’d fire me in a hot second, probably due to annoyance alone. But I’ve always wanted to know the things that don’t mean anything, like I said about Zac’s work colleagues the other day. She’s unique in a different way, but the concept is the same. I liken it to Cyrus and Olivia from Scandal, after hours, when it’s just them and wine and popcorn.

One of these days, she most certainly will wonder whatever happened to me and look it up. If the stars align, I hope it’s at a book table…….. where I’d gaze lovingly into her eyes, and ask her to sign my book.

I believe in fairy tales. I would never hold a grudge that meant we couldn’t fix it in the end. There’s a solid reason we should be friends, but she thinks I need too much when she hasn’t said what she needs from me and how we could establish boundaries that made us both happy. Believe it or not, I do not enjoy being ripped a new one for my crafted pages and having them called lectures by a judgmental dickhead. She never knew how my responses would have changed had she told me honestly how she was feeling and focused on the good things I was telling her, or asking me about things she thought were negative so that I could tell her if they weren’t.

Because our ways of showing love are so wildly different, neither one of us were getting what we needed from the other. I tried to correct that problem, and she bailed. But she didn’t take back her friendship. She said that nothing was ever going to change and the way she treated me blew sometimes and was incredible at others. I tried to love her in a way she could hear it, and sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn’t. It was very confusing for both of us and she didn’t have time to mull it over. I got tired of so often being responded to when she thought I was trying to fight her and not when I was telling her that I thought she was the greatest human being I’d ever met. Poll ten people that know her. We all agree, even if nine of them work for her.

I don’t dwell on my negative feelings because to me, the things that I’ve written about her combine to make a truly intimate portrait of our relationship all the way through, and it means something. Even now, I know it means something. Even if Michael and me are the only people who ever read it, it doesn’t matter. We’re the ones that will need it the most if she goes before we do, which I only say because now that my mother died so young, I can’t be sure of anything. The dice of the universe will roll one way or the other. I don’t have to focus on what might happen, I feel happy that I have prepared something that will last longer than all three of us. One of these days, WordPress will be an artifact. People will want to know how we lived, and a blog is a good example of writing about daily life. Sometimes I feel like I’m a column in a small town newspaper.

Not feeling guilt or remorse over any relationship once I feel enough time has moved forward to have closure is essential. I don’t want to be the type person that spends her life wishing things were different and not actively trying to fill my time with new opportunities.

But you guys have read every day what I’ve dealt with in all of this. How it’s painful and glorious, but there’s no problem that is not solvable if we both want to work on it. I’m just okay if she doesn’t, because my memories are enough. It’s pointless to hold a grudge, because it will do more to hurt you than they will ever care.

Hell….. with Beads

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.

A friend said this about New Orleans, but this is how I feel about travel. It’s a full-on parade of thought; I’m excited until I’ve been away from home for an amount of time that’s never enough to settle. It’s why I’d like to do Air BnB. It would be great to spend a month in Paris rather than a few days in a hotel and at a better rate. Paris is a city that in order to understand it, you have to adapt. You’re from the United States. Your rhythm is not the same. That cognitive dissonance takes time to resolve, so I like trips that are long enough to make you forget your other reality and stop comparing things to it. When I’m in Mexico, what takes the longest is flipping my brain into Spanish. Having conversations where you are both processing thoughts and emotions while translating is exhausting, and Mexicans are so kind about it. The French are not, or at least not the ones I’ve met because I’ve only been to Paris. It has less to do with the fact that I only know a few words and they’re frustrated and more with the fact that Paris is like New York and London. They don’t have time for you not to know what you want, just like if you need something from someone on the tube in London, say the bare minimum and move on. Talking to strangers isn’t their thing in either city. It would take me a long time to adapt to Paris, but “my wife” says that when she reads me, she sees colors of David Sedaris.

That wasn’t flattering at all, JFC.

It makes me feel comfortable that David is the kind of person that if I ran into him in Paris, we might be able to strike up a friendship because I would remind him of the time we met in Frederick without hounding him for anything. I have so many creative friends in my life that fame doesn’t faze me. I just want to sit at the table if they think I’m worthy of it. Writers don’t give other people their time if they don’t think that person can keep up with them intellectually. They have so much fun and devastation on their own that it takes a lot to get through to them. You have to prove that your company is better than “the characters they keep.” Nothing is more important than complete isolation when you’re writing. For me, that looks very much like the classic image of a coder because I did web development for a long time. My favorite tools are text editors that color code and I type with all the lights off and my editor in dark mode. I’m just not doing the HTML because WordPress does that for me. I mention the way I work because it leads to the fact that the story of the farthest I’ve ever traveled includes times where I haven’t left my house.

I have lost myself in this world where I spill out everything in order to lead from the back, and it has fed me in every way that’s been missing. I love feeling confident in the fact that I can express myself, and don’t mind that my archetypes are Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Mr. Robot. I also have to accept that the virtual world is not the physical, and to be responsible with relationships. For instance, I don’t know if my new writer friend knew how I felt beforehand, but it made me feel good that when I asked to friend her, she really saw me as an actual friend because when she messaged me, she sent voice notes instead of typing. It just normalized everything, and she’s got a gorgeous voice Yes, we’ve sung for each other, and now I know a karaoke night would be in order if I was in the ATL or she was headed to Air and Space.

I have to remember the fact that other people don’t have the archetype of Mr. Robot and don’t write like they’re coding into the night, one thought pouring into the next at a frantic pace, made more urgent by the sound of their own typing. I get going and I say things that are over the line without truly thinking of the consequences. The separation of being virtual heightens everything, and I don’t want to feed into it.

I don’t want “my wife” to feel like I am wandering from who I really am, and she can be a better judge of that by hearing what I mean in the way I meant it. Her voice notes were just a good reminder to keep it real, and we’re having a good time. She’s not only an actress starring in a play right now, she’s a recovering attorney who went to school in the DMV and does conflict management in the ATL now. Endlessly fascinating and we haven’t found a lag in conversation yet. It’s what really examining how far from home I was willing to go has meant to me over the last 10 years. It’s been the journey to hell and back with someone because I caused the root of the conflict. Losing someone is one thing. Being responsible for it is another.

It’s why I’m glad there’s medication to help me cope with all my silly ruminations, and ironic that the more I spill them, the more you gather. My medication just introduces upper and lower limits. It guides the direction of my compass, the only thing that matters when sailing foreign seas.

Midvale School for the Gifted -or- Push/Pull

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today’s writing prompt was a waste. Something about interviewing someone. I am not calling someone at 0700 on a Saturday for anything, a lot of the time because my friends live in other time zones.

I call my dad too early a lot of the time because I’m high energy in the morning and it just does not compute sometimes that not only is it early, it’s an hour earlier for him. I do not feel as bad about it as I probably should, because when I lived two hours behind him, he had no problem calling me at the ass crack of dawn. I wish he’d call me at dawn here, because as a restaurant employee I was not as flexible about it as I could be now. 😉

Making an interview a daily writing prompt is just not that great because I am looking for a jumping off point inside my own head without making me dependent upon waiting for other people’s input. It’s standing there in front of the “pull” door and pushing with all your might. I mean, this prompt does have some barrier to entry, anyway. In order to get it done, I need two things. The first is the courage to ask people if they’d be willing to be interviewed. The second is waiting for them to have time. I need this blog to run on my schedule, which is why I turned it around on my audience. The comments section will eventually become the entry, because maybe someone won’t comment for five minutes or five years, but it will be *something.*

I am sure that Bryn would have picked up if she heard the phone in her sleep, and she’s on vacation so she could just roll over and go back to sleep once we’re done, but it’s 0415 in Oregon. I am going to go out on a limb here and saying that moving on to a different thing to write about is actually saving our relationship. 😛 However, she will attest that among our mutual friends, she would have the least offensive reaction to being woken up. I’m the best friend, and she has priorities. I don’t think I’m the be all and end all for her, I’m just glad to be 1 or 2 on the call sheet, depending on the situation. If the problem is with me, she calls Dave. If the problem is with him, she calls me. Dave and I are all good. I love him because she loves him and that will never change. However, make no mistake. If Bryn decides Dave is out, he’s out. It’s not that I don’t value him as a person, we just haven’t known each other since 1997, so that boundary is pretty firm. Besides, Dave is a good guy and I don’t see it happening. I’m just saying Bryn is my ride or die and Dave gets a seat in the car as long as she’s navigating and controlling the music.. 😉

(In olden times, children, the passengers looked up directions for the driver. It was very 20th century of us.)

If I was really going to turn this entry up to stupid o’clock, it would be contacting Supergrover after many months and being all like, “hey, I know you’re probably mad af, but inquiring minds want to know.” She has absolutely no idea how much people love her, because even if she doesn’t think I write her in 3D, no one else does. That’s because they aren’t taking anything personally.

I think if there’s anything I could ask her, it’s “could you speak more to being written as “Flat Stanley?” This is because what she has said already is that I alternate between lifting her up for being her and excoriating her for being her. I honestly laughed at that slightly, because I thought, “what does she think being written in 3D actually is?”

I think that she thinks me acknowledging there’s a problem means I think less of her when the opposite is true. My love for her runs deeper within me than any river. When we met, she immediately got under my skin. Just made me explode into growth after years of being an arrested teenager. My response was to blow up my whole life because I could not stop vomiting emotions about someone else and say married. This is not limited to emotions about the friendship/relationship in this thing we’ve created and managed (now that I’m over it, “this thing we’ve created and managed” has become stupid funny. If it’s funny once, it will still be funny a hundred times later. Welcome to the Lanagan family, where our motto is “if it’s funny, run it into the ground.”). I was recovering from emotional abuse as a teenager, and picking out all that shrapnel was best done on my own. I should have recognized that and got out of my marriage quicker, because I needed to be introspective and it naturally pushed everyone away, anyway. I could have avoided all of that, and I didn’t.

I don’t expect anyone to forgive me, but I forgive me. If I can’t have compassion from others, I will have compassion for myself. It’s the only thing that matters, in the end. They don’t have to live with me, but I do.

It was really difficult forgiving myself for something entirely relatable when you live in my body, not so much to people who can’t see the thought processes zinging around in my mind. I was too green in a situation I didn’t understand and didn’t handle it well….. immediately. Within a couple years, everything was back to normal on my end, but not hers. She emotionally shut down and blamed me for painting my feelings as fact. I was not trying to be an arbiter/dictator. I was trying to reach common ground and I got tired of doing it all by myself.

I shut it all down for my own sanity, but at the same time, a decade of love tilted at a hundred and crazy percent doesn’t calm down overnight. She is my personal forest fire, and cleaned my clock with it. But it didn’t burn everything down for malice. No. By the time the fire ended, the slap bracelet was an empty field of ash enriched earth. Ripe for planting something self-sustaining when previously the growth stopped in its tracks when I felt anxious and overwhelmed.I also didn’t have any love or forgiveness to give myself before it happened, and afterward it became my mission. My beautiful girl said many times “why do you expect everyone else to fix you?” Two things about that. The first is she was right. I did need to develop inner strength. The flip side of the coin is that if she needed me to step up, there wouldn’t even be two seconds between “I have a problem” and “what can I do?”

If it were in my power to do so, I would wrap her in foam rubber and make everyone keep a six foot distance. That’s not your badass out there in the world.

That’s mine.

People get tripped up on love when there are problems/issues because I am trying to be objective and they think it’s a referendum on them. I’m actually saying that I would love them like a house on fire no matter how many issues there are. We are too old not to believe everything will be perfect for all time. We just have to make our quirks line up. I can do that because she is a 3D character.

As I told her, “Flat Stanley” has a history of exquisite topography.

It reminds me of a scene from “my so-called life.” Rayanne’s mom is talking to Angela’s, and Angela’s mother is not so sure about Rayanne. She literally looks perturbed when Rayanne’s mother says that for Rayanne, the world is black and white. Angela is the only one in color. It’s such a good line that I’ve remembered it since it aired. This is because if you have an emotional connection with me, you become the only ones in color.

Years and years ago, before my handwriting turned into a carpal tunnel pile of garbage, I collected fountain pens. It was never about the pens. It was about bottles of ink from black and espresso to peacock (favorite) and purple. Green, never red. When I changed moods, I changed colors.

But I didn’t change muses.

She is black, espresso, peacock, purple, and pink. Green, never red. She lives in every color.

I just decided to stop pushing on the pull door.

Doesn’t mean she fades to gray.

I Would Have To Pretend to Make it Interesting

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?

I Google very little. I absorb news, and expect my audience to look things up if they’re confused. It’s work easily done and taken off me, because I can just refer to a story instead of trying to find the link again amongst thousands I skim. Therefore, most of my Google searches are in support of my very random brain trying to process what it’s hearing. I am also not writing a part of my book that requires things like “please God NSA this is for a novel how fast does someone die with cyanide?

I don’t even have to look that up. It’s seconds, thanks to “The Moscow Rules” by Tony and Jonna Mendez. We had a Russian asset take one by biting into a pen. He was dead before he hit the floor. It’s a completely tragic end, but better than Russian torture and death.

I feel I should say that I am not being gloom and doom here. My dad is all good so far and there’s nothing to worry about. If there was, I’d know it with accuracy.

Because I retain so much information, it’s like I cook. I forget everything I know in relying on recipes and just look at the ingredients I have. When I write, I have Googled ahead of time rather than working toward a point. Clearly. 😉

I have not once Googled myself to see what other people are saying about me. I get enough of that in my own life. Besides, I don’t think anyone is saying much of anything. Life is long, though. Maybe something I write will go truly viral like Dooce, but even if it doesn’t, I am happy with my life right now. I write because I cannot stop, not based on its worth to other people. It’s my outlet, not theirs.

I don’t even care if Bryn and Zac read, because sometimes it’s really nice to have a conversation that’s not based on what I wrote that day. That people aren’t anticipating what I’ll say based on what they understand before our next interaction. I can and often do change my mind between entries, and when I do, I will explain it here.

I figured out why it bothered me so much when my beautiful girl is upset that I write her as flat. It’s that she’s a part of me, and if I’m writing her flat, then I’m coming across as that, too. I march to the beat of my own drum, but the rhythm has changed over the years. Life is in the rests.

That’s got to stop, obviously. However, it won’t change unless we do. We will see each other as part of ourselves because our conversations are not out loud. They resonate deeply because of lack of tone of voice. It’s a lot different when you’re always making up your own and it doesn’t match up.

I could not say the things I say about anyone out loud (unless I was working a crowd and it was innocuous enough not to be offensive) because my neurodivergent urge is to just run and hide, but be clear in my communication when I don’t want to be in front of people. My social battery varies from Oprah to Harper Lee.

I take a lot of things people say way too seriously because I want them to know that what they’ve said has resonated and I’m listening. That’s because most of the time their words are echoing through my filters and I’m hearing something different than they’re saying. We do it to each other all the time in conversation, it’s just quicker to correct a mistake.

Even Zac and I are good at this- saving up conversations for in person face time. The reason I say we’re good at it is that tabling a discussion doesn’t make it go away. He’s better at circling back around than I am.

It’s a balance because sometimes I feel I express myself better in writing, sometimes in speaking. Either way, I am better at connecting with people in a public forum than one on one. That’s because if people hear you speak live, they are less likely to take anything personally because I have good boundaries and they know I won’t embarrass them. I’m a good person to ask when you need someone to speak at a wedding reception or a funeral. I’m really funny, I promise. I’m just a grump of a writer. We all are to some extent. Hard exterior from years of self abuse because not only do we think we’re not that great, neither does anyone else. People say that they respect authors. Most of the time, they respect fame.

I find it easier to express conflict in writing and love in person, so if you only know me in one arena, you’re getting more of me in one area and less of me in others. I don’t mean that I am always on fire about everything, it’s that I can be conflict avoidant in person, but tell them how I feel under no pressure to respond. I will tell you how long I think is reasonable to keep checking in to see if you are listening, but I am not goading you to respond, I am telling you my boundaries. I will disconnect, but I will express unhappiness easier because I’m not taking it personally. I focus on the people who show up.

It’s the only healthy thing to do, because you know for sure that you’re in the right relationship when you don’t feel like you have to do anything to get love. That you won’t always get when you need, but you’re allowed to be you and bitch about it until we can agree. Nothing is worse than feeling more lonely in a relationship than actually by yourself.

Show up for the family and friends who don’t make you feel lonely because they accept all of who you are. Who alternate between lifting you up and not making you the main character in every story so that you can see I accept you no matter what. That there’s nothing on earth that would make me run from something feeding both of us.

The last thing I Googled something that really meant a lot to me was stories about losing your female friends. One was a reddit thread, one was a book I bought called “Your Other Ex.” I thought it was so hard to explain our bond when there are legit millions telling this same story. Some of it goes back to childhood. I think it really is as hard as a breakup because losing Supergrover was losing the two things that mean the most to me about our relationship. The first is that she’s the bridge between my old life and my new one, and she’s been that for two moves now, not just one. Her feelings are probably about the same given that she’s now offered to hide several bodies under her pool. But it would be nice to hear it out loud. I’m not so much of a judgmental dickhead when that’s the energy I feel coming off you. I pick up on aggression just as easily as she does, but she did not like me trying to work it through or de-escalate. It came off as condescending when I was trying to not be “that guy.” The one who tells you to calm down. I thought I was telling her that I heard her rage and to have it out, but don’t run when that makes me feel rage, either. Sometimes I can keep my lid on. Sometimes I am not smart enough to take the high road.

We used to be great at taking care of each other, but then we both told each other things we cannot take back ever at all. Instead of continuing to take care of each other, we turned away. We shouldn’t have done what we did for all sorts of reasons because it made logistics complicated. I needed to have a real life that accommodated time travel, basically. Meeting her was like gaining a dual processor, and not even a basic ARM. I mean top of the line Threadripper.

That has way more than two physical cores, but you get the picture.

You have to give room for lag given our senior citizen appearance in tone of voice.

But it’s also a complicated construct, because our issues aged both of us in different ways, and yet it feels no different than fighting with another little girl when I was eight. Still that primal scream when you lose someone really important at that age. No one tells you that it’s just as hard having a friend from toddlerhood to junior high disappear as much as it is from age 35 to 45. On the young end of the spectrum, she saved me in a way that I will never pay back. On the end, she ignored my attempts to try. Our relationship got so fucked up from not changing mediums when we didn’t trust each other that it was great she was here if she wanted more, but it’s better for me that she doesn’t. Because here’s what could happen if she’d let it. We could forgive ourselves and each other and accept this new reality rather than slamming each other to the ground when there’s a problem.

I regret everything I’ve done to make myself seem like an untrustworthy friend, and find it useless to jump up and down trying to prove it now…. that DC has been home in my head since I was 23, not because we met. That I was correcting a mistake instead of trying to get to her, because I was writing down all the ways it changed me. I didn’t think it would ever change her mind about anything. I just love it here. I went to the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington on a whim from a text. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in Houston.

I don’t think any of that came through as clearly as I needed it to- that I was leaving for DC to be a better friend and not a worse one, because if I’d stayed in DC and regretted moving to Portland, I would have missed meeting her at all. The opposite was true. I liked having the TARDIS land on my lawn. Who wouldn’t?

It does affect the way I think, though. I am hesitant to have a relationship that is all virtual again. There are too many traps to fall into, mostly that I think I’m not asking a lot when I write to someone in order to be heard and it fails. Then what do you do? You start fighting tot distance yourselves when it’s not really possible.

Whether I’ll consider being a virtual friend to her is based on whether the internet is helpful or hurtful, whether I can capture real feelings and so can she without sacrificing humanity and focusing on individual divinity.

If there’s anyone I don’t want to write flat, it’s the voice I hear when I type. It’s just a shame I made it up.

Because I don’t Google normally.

Right Now- 0500

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What’s your favorite time of day?

Most of my audience is overseas, so they actually wake me up most days now. That’s because my watch starts getting notifications before my alarm goes off, generally regarding the entry from the day before. I sometimes start writing right away, sometimes I go downstairs to grab a cup of coffee first. But this audience is my first thought of the day because the Pavolvian urge to grab my tablet and keyboard when someone likes an entry is ingrained. I’ve been on WordPress a lot longer than I’ve done Facebook, but it’s that kind of vibe.

This morning, I wrote out the title of the entry, then promptly decided I needed something to drink and by the time I got back around to picking this back up, hours had gone by. It’s ADHD in a nutshell. Every new promise in the morning must be followed, even ahead of the five promises you’ve already said you’d explore. I have a lot of new beginnings because I have trouble finding middles and ends. ADHD is particularly talented at making you feel like a dumbass. and being a writer is a way to cope. Having a record of what’s happening is a way to keep track of progress… or not. Writing is such a wonderful tool to give yourself therapy when you can’t afford it or can’t get a doctor right away. Even when you do get a doctor, they still can’t spend more than an hour a week with you. Getting better takes so much more effort than that.

People wait to do therapy until they’re in a couple, and I had a thought about that. “If you don’t have time to fix yourself, why do you think you have time to fix someone else?” I’d rather be healthy before I get in a relationship because it keeps conflict to a minimum. I don’t have a problem saying what I mean and meaning what I say. I can give what I require.

I don’t have time for people who don’t have time to fix themselves, because it makes them want to fix me. If there are problems in our relationship, it’s not always going to be 100% my fault. I don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who is so defensive that they think it is because they cannot acknowledge their own humanity.

It’s good now that I know what I’m looking for, because maybe I can avoid that trap in the future. I seem to enjoy people who don’t emote, probably because I don’t want to deal with it….. while also being frustrated that they can’t deal with my emotions, either.

Looking for healthy patterns in which we both have each other’s backs is very important, as well as taking all the lessons I’ve learned over the last 10 years and not making the same mistakes. I have a clean slate in this regard. I am no longer holding onto the past as if I can make it better for the future. I am realizing that those are going to be two very different things and the trick is not to be threatened.

I am threatened by everything, to a certain extent. I already know I don’t fit in most places, and I am sometimes fearless, sometimes a wallflower. I make room for all of those moods, but I don’t expect everyone else to do so…… which is mostly why I write my reflections here. Then, they’re just an open secret because if the people involved want to see how their characters are playing out, they’re welcome. But they’re not required, and I will write them out just as easily as I wrote them in.

The writing reflects life, not the other way around. When I talk about knowing where I’m going on this web site, I’m talking about knowing what emotional changes I have to make within myself because so many times I’ve reread things I’ve written and thought, “that probably sounded better in my head.”

I’m still reeling that my beautiful girl thought I wrote her as a flat character, when I can see every emotion I’ve ever had about her in these pages, more in the words you don’t read.

The urge to write about her has faded except for batting cleanup.

I never could get through to her that her good parts and her bad parts come together to make her the purest person I’ve ever met. That I didn’t hate her for what she’d done, I made my life bigger to accommodate her. That I was in it for the long haul if she was, because I had prepared.

She thought I was saying that I wished our relationship never happened, and I cry at that thought even now. In trying to make it better, I made it worse.

That doesn’t mean my thought process was wrong, it means that she didn’t get the intended message. I’m not sure how it got turned into the complete opposite, but that’s not my call. I don’t have to love it, I just have to live it.

What does feel good is knowing two things. The first is that I cannot un-know or un-say anything. It might lead her to look at my writing in a different way when temperatures aren’t running so high. I do love her in a way I cannot even understand, it runs so deep. But I will have that whether I have her or not, so I have not lost anything in the transaction.

I told her that I poured my love into the character because I could not pour it into her. She has said too many times that she does not accept it. She doesn’t really accept that I have a different reality than her, so I cannot expect her to understand her way around the whole problem. I cannot even do that.

But what I can do is make sure that she knows I was never coming from a place of destruction. That we had to be in the shit for a little while to create something new that we both would enjoy. Like, why should she be the only one that gets to make fun of me and Michael? I am sure that all three of us could make each other laugh with witty retorts.

I just don’t hold out hope for that dream anymore. I told her that if she started acting like she actually forgave me, then she’d be allowed back into my circle. If not, I will know I just chose the pattern I love the most. That it was always about trying to find someone to please. I know that is true on my end, and she has a choice to make as to whether she tells me how she feels or not. So far, the answer is “not,” but I do not think this is a permanent state. Mostly because life is long and it isn’t over. I know that if I’ve been able to keep up these wild and crazy feelings for 10 years, it has never been a game to me. I do not believe it has always been a game for her. I believe as she does that no matter what, we have a past, present, and future. We just have different ways of getting there and cannot seem to jump into the chasm where objective truth is found.

But there’s another part of our relationship that has nothing to do with her at all. Over the last 10 years, she has not only become my real friend, but the one that puts me in the mood to write. When I say she’s my muse, it’s that she’s the one that when she says it’s a good line, I can take it to the bank and cash it. She’s gotten me published professionally by being my editor for the last five years. She’s told me that she’ll edit my book if I wanted, and I know it was a bad career move to walk away from that, but there was so much more to it than that.

It’s because editing my book is her love language, and that part of our relationship is as strong as epoxy. That glue holds us tight. Where we fail is speaking in my love language, because communication is a two-way street. She thinks that I’m the only arbiter of what friendship is and isn’t. I don’t think of it as that at all. I think that I lay out my thoughts and feelings and she thinks she can’t argue with me, get me to see things differently, change me as easily with her words as I change her with mine. I just didn’t think it was fair that we always spoke the way it meant the most to her, and not the most to me.

I think she thought that I needed her to do something so far out of her comfort level that she just didn’t have time and didn’t want to try. The opposite was true. Could you just change how you talk to me when we do interact? I am tired of you thinking that I am goading and provoking you when I am asking for your input? You think I’m asking for too much when you don’t understand the question.

Because she lives in my ink and talks inside my head, echoing in my chest, she’s part of my lifeblood now. I can feel her words coursing through me when I receive them, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re sweet or angry. They are all small pieces of artwork in a tapestry…. or one of those landscape photos made up of individual faces.

She has a beautiful face. It’s the one I look to for love, and have for years. I cannot do that if she doesn’t want it, so my work now is to take everything I’ve written about her and look at what I do want from it and what I want to leave.

What I know is that you can’t change anyone else with your own words, and you need to be prepared for relationships not fulfilling you and not worrying so much about getting out of them. Yes, everything feels new, but in a good way. A life where I am free of past mistakes in their entirety, and not because I wanted it that way.

As Kristina Mahr has said, “I took the tags off this love before I knew I was sure I wanted it. No, that’s not right. I took the tags off this love before I was sure you knew you wanted it.” I know for sure that even if my beautiful girl was interested in women, we would make horrible partners to each other. We cannot even make our love languages work with deep female friendship. I do think we could make friendship work, but because we have distance from each other. I can’t tell a partner to go home, but I can tell her. 😉

That’s because she would understand implicitly that we are both interested in socializing until the battery is dead. Please leave by nine. A group of people is a “no thanks.” We joke that I am the president of Overthinkers Anonymous, and she is the VP because president is a public-facing office. I still can’t get over that one, it’s so funny.

My last witty retort to this was “what a day. Need to find a meeting except there’s only one chapter and it’s really only us. We’re not friendly, Bob.” I said her real name, but “we’re not friendly, Bob” is a quote from my favorite Robin Williams movie, “RV.” You just have to see it to believe it.

Anyway, if you are also a member I will be holding a drive in late September. We’ll pass the hat for dues and coffee. No Folgers, and I get to make it before every meeting. “Leslie, you have one job.”

The point in all of this is that I learned a lot, and God I love her more than anyone or anything on earth, mostly because I’ve had 10 years to get used to the idea. She knows she’s it for me, in some sense, because even when she’s not in my life, she still lives in my ink.

I will look forward to the day when I can take all these life lessons and pour them into someone who wants them…. including her, but she has to show up. I’ve learned to celebrate the people who do. It’s why I think of Bryn and Zac as my partners in crime, both of them, because they serve different roles and I’m happy this way. Maybe it will change, maybe it won’t, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

I feel that it’s important to take guilt off of everyone when they don’t show up, and just do my own thing. I cannot make other people’s calls for them, especially on the telephone.

I’m not friendly, Bob.