Tag: autism

Running Away from Negative Thoughts

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have all kinds of negative thoughts because I have bipolar. I’m not sure that I manage them all that well, but working out has given me a shortcut. That’s because from the moment I start working out, my body is flooded with all these endorphins that make me feel good whether I want to or not. Most of the time, I am the copy of Bert from “Sesame Street.” I get lost in my own mind, and I forget to acknowledge what is good and positive. I think I draw the Ernies of the world out of the woodwork, because most of them want to save or change me. It has never worked, because I am a bird (pigeon?) with a broken wing. Healing cannot come from external sources, but from my body deciding that my wing has been broken long enough and it is healed now.

What I have learned is that social masking taught me that I should not be happy staying at home with my bottle cap and paper clip collection.

Incidentally, I am 47 years old and I just used a “Sesame Street” reference. PBS funding matters.

I didn’t learn to be happy until I met other people like me, who struggle with the same kinds of issues. None of their people understand, either, because being AuDHD is a rough gig, and so is being bipolar. I need friends who, “for all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel And in fact, the female presentation of ADHD is so close to autism that I’m not sure that ADHD is the right diagnosis anymore, because amphetamines only work half the time. This may also be a function of age. My ability to compile scripts is slowing down; as I get closer to a deadline, that is no indication that I’m going to have the same rush of energy I did in my 20s. Maybe it was always autism, and because I was intelligent, there was no one to suspect I had it.

Being a bio female has as much to do with it as intelligence.

Doctors have pattern recognition on white boys, but they miss women and people of color all the time. New research says that trans and nonbinary people are up to six times more likely to be autistic (NPR), and that queer people are more likely to be autistic overall. Now we are graduating from “Sesame Street” to “Blues Clues.”

But we internalize it, don’t we? We take in all those messages of hate from the Religious Right (who is neither) that there is some kind of moral failing instead of solid science and reason. We are told every day of our lives that there is something wrong with us and that just has to be okay, because there are too many people in this country whose answer is for us to adjust and be cool with all the relatives who pray for you to change. That their prayers are as good as your science.

I should say for the record that I’m a very liberal Christian. I am not knocking Christianity, but unaccepting denominations. My prayers are as good as my science, because they are on equal footing. I did not give up my brain to be spiritual. I need both. Science tells me the “what.” Religion tells me the “why.” Too many people confuse the two and throw the baby out with the bathwater. But what I have found is that it helps me to get my ego out of the way. I cannot change people, I can only change me. I can only lead by people wanting what I have, because it comes from a light that is perpetual except when I put it out.

The way my light goes out the most often is through negative thinking. Imposter syndrome gets me a lot, as does the thought that the world would be better off without me. This message is reinforced everywhere I look because the world is not kind to nonbinary people; the world is never kind to people they don’t understand. What they don’t know is that it took me several years to understand. I get it. But if my brain can expand to a new way of thinking, so can everyone else’s…. because I did not coin the term. The reason it’s new and different is that the word was coined by people much younger than me. People my age and older are dismissive, and that’s fine. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but me as long as people respect my right to exist.

It also does not work with my current attitude, which is Southern preacher’s kid who does everything not to offend. I am getting stronger. Misgendering and mislabeling me is not okay. I prefer they/them. If someone defaults to a binary out of habit, I try to correct them because the sound of “she” grates on my nerves. As you and I go through this process (my audience is very much the keeper of my secrets), “he” feels more and more like home because there are too many web sites where there is no option. Changes are coming for me that I need desperately, like shopping for clothes that make me feel comfortable in my own skin. I asked my brother in law just to send me his closet in a “small.” Hey, it might work.

The problem is that androgynous people have been a joke for so long that it’s only now we’re recognizing validity. I remember not liking the SNL character “Pat” from the beginning, my first taste of realizing “ohhhh….. that’s what I look like in my head.” I remember seeing Tig Notaro after her double mastectomy and thinking, “that’s who I want to look like because she’s female but her shirts hang right.” And then I immediately felt shame and doubt about my body because I thought, “Tig got her body through cancer. Is this something that anyone should do voluntarily?” Body modification is also nothing new, but that didn’t stop me from a whole host of negative thoughts.

I get lost in my head about relationships because being autistic makes my thought processes different than the rest of the world, even other autistic people. They don’t understand, they get upset, and I get upset because I don’t understand what I have done. I am trying to slow down…. and speed up. The more I run, the more the endorphins make the bad feelings not so “extremely loud and incredibly close.” Well, technically, I just walk really fast. Me running on a treadmill is my balance at its shakiest. I control my heartrate through incline, not speed.

Making friends with the gym as a lifelong nerd has come with the perk of not concentrating on anything but what’s right in front of me…. namely, the imaginary hill I’m climbing. My headphones drown out everything but Maury Povitch, Steve Wilkos, or whatever trash TV the gym has streaming.

It makes me happy to know that I will never be the father.

But it does lead me to think about the life I’ve come from, and the kind I want in the future. No more partners where I enable their drinking because I go into it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, believing everything an alcoholic has to say. This is not a slam against Dana, because it has happened over and over. I think it is my personality. Drunks are charismatic people, and so am I. Drunks are loose-lipped, and so am I. Drunks make their signals toward you overwhelmingly obvious, and I don’t notice smaller ones because that’s what an autist tends to do. We miss social cues until they’re unfailingly large, the realm of drunks and narcissists.

I know what I want, and it isn’t that. Love needs to be quieter.

I’m much quieter, that’s for sure.

I go into the valley of vulnerability when it’s just me and salt and sweat…. but I don’t think about meeting people at the gym because of Aaron Sorkin. Every time someone cute walks by, I think about C.J. Cregg from “The West Wing” saying that she’d like to go to the gym to meet an interesting man and then falling off the treadmill in front of him.

Something happened today that was very different and out of the ordinary. I was walking home, and I saw my reflection for the first time in weeks. The running is already making a difference because I’ve gone every day. I thought I looked good.

It’s a start.

Game on.

All of Them

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
View all responses

Managing you was like having a golden retriever work for you. Excellent at fetching dead birds but ….squirrel. -Randy, my actual former boss- it’s the most accurate thing I’ve ever read about my career.

There are so many things I haven’t tried, and one day is about the stamina I have for 110% effort. It’s also not enough time for me to develop compensatory skills, so me doing a job for one day would not reveal my weaknesses. It would not reveal my strengths, either. The one possible job I could think of that might fit me is field officer at CIA. With only one day, I’d have enough time to talk to people, but not enough time to do all the paperwork that ends up out of order and on the wrong desk…. either late or with coffee stains on the top because I never left the office to prevent something being late.

Staying at the office until something is done might be the one quality I could contribute.

I’m reading The Hunt for Red October currently, and what I love about it is the anachronism and the advanced technology. For instance, the new computer for the submarine fleet is “the size of a small desk” and also 64-bit architecture. That did not become available to businesses until the 1990s and consumers outside of the business realm until 2003. The hardback was published in 1984. It has allowed me to dream bigger as to what is now possible in computers just based on that information alone.

I’d like to be a submarine commander for a day because I would like to see whether my predictions have come true… that tech on a boat now is wilder than anything I could dream. That’s because “most enlisted men don’t know how to steer the ship.” One day is enough to know I’d be both great and terrible at my job…… mostly because I’m great and terrible at my job no matter what it is.

Autism sucks.

So do ADHD and CP, but autism is the driving force behind meltdown and burnout to the degree that I have it. Most people with ADHD alone have the same issues as me, but the mark of autism is severity for a lot of symptoms. This is not true in all cases, but for the majority of them, the canary in the coal mine is the degree of the deficit. Executive dysfunction makes it hard to regulate yourself, and coworkers do not have time to help you. I know that I can be trained with occupational therapy, but the only advice I’ve ever been given in my career is to grovel………. until now.

I had to figure out this meme:

This does not mean that autistic people cannot work. It means that if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. Autism has never stopped me from working, but ableism sure has. There was no way for me to perform as efficiently or as fast in the kitchen as an able-bodied person, and no allowances were ever made for it. Dana and Kinkaid constantly covered my lack, but I didn’t figure that out until I was on my own. They both taught me how to cook, but neither one were there to trade me jobs I could do. It was sink or swim. I couldn’t carry a full bucket of mop water up three flights of stairs, nor did I have enough strength in my upper body to work a potato press. Therefore, making French fries was a large part of being a dishwasher when there were no dishes to wash. This gave everyone ample opportunity to see me struggle and call me lazy.

You get called lazy a lot when most of your energy goes toward keeping yourself alive. You cannot see it today, but you can clearly see my deficits in this video announcing my birth. It was made by my grandfather while I was in the NICU and in the days afterward, but the phone call is not real. My mother went into labor five weeks early according to my grandfather and eight weeks early according to her. There was no time.

John-Michael Kinkaid called me a lot of things, but lazy was never one of them. I know that I am capable of working with a chef to find the jobs I can do, but I am not capable of changing myself so that I don’t have cerebral palsy anymore. This lying there, looking at everything and soaking it in, is the classic picture of an autistic kid with CP.

A few years ago, I attended a party at my sister’s house. We were reviewing the drone footage in which I didn’t know I was being filmed and was shocked to find out that I did not move a muscle for three hours. I am not a different person than I was in this video. I have never changed. My entire strength as a human is sitting there and soaking up what other people say…. and in fact, I am frustrated with my medication protocol because drugs for mental health are known for seemingly lowering your IQ points. It goes away once you get off the medication, but I did not have this problem with the last set of drugs.

What makes me think I’m AuDHD and not bipolar is that I was stable on Lexapro for 20+ years. Bipolar and SSRIs do not mix. I also have a strange hum in my brain from lack of serotonin now, and there’s nothing to be done for it except grit my teeth until 11:00 AM, my first psych appointment in years. I haven’t needed it because being stable meant my GP could refill my drugs.

How is today different from all other days?

Today is the day that hopefully determines more of my future than my current hand. At this point, I only have the hole cards. By noon, I should at least have the flop. Thinking about the turn and the river is getting ahead of myself, because right now it feels like fourth street and fifth street are perpendicular. My strategy in poker has always been to fold early and often, because letting a good hand go is better than losing my bankroll.

Few players recall big pots they have won, strange as it seems, but every player can remember with remarkable accuracy the outstanding tough beats of his career.

I could sit at any poker table in the world and have a good shot and not because I know a lot about poker. That can be trained. So, perhaps a job I’d love for a day is “card shark.” What I mean is that someone can teach me the rules. You don’t play poker by knowing the rules, though. You have enough soft skills, as Michael McDermott accurately points out in “Rounders,” and you can read the whole room blind. You don’t play the cards, you play the man.

In this way, being a poker player is not that different from being a field officer or a cook…. and in fact, in most countries “field officers,” “waitstaff,” and “cooks” are the same job, because front of house and back of house employees at a restaurant are the least likely to get “made.” There is no reason to notice any of us, and all intelligence agencies exploit that fact.

In a perfect world, culinary school in Vaasa would lead to a job at Supo, the Finnish intelligence agency. I know I have the skills to make it because I have it on good authority that I am excellent at fact-finding. This is because I do get social cues, but I do not get fake ones. I pick up on the way you carry yourself, your “I’m fine” ringing hollow. I become confused and dig deeper, and that’s when I become rude and intrusive according to other people. It’s not because I’m actively trying to be obstinate. It’s that I am not participating in the lie that you’re fine.

HOW DARE YOU LET ME HELP YOU?

For instance, I wouldn’t like to be a therapist or a psychiatrist for a day… but I would like to help people understand why social masking isn’t helpful. Wait… that was a lie. I would love to be a psychiatrist because then I could nerd out on crazy med pharmacology without digging deep into other people’s problems. It’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s that in order to be a good therapist, I would need to resolve all my own issues first. Otherwise, I would be capable of letting someone else get their crazy spatter all over me without being able to walk it off, and my boundaries would not be as firm as they need to be in order to keep crazy spatter from getting on my clients.

I just don’t think I have the stomach for medical school, and I mean that literally. One of the things that autism does for me is heightens my awareness of bad smells. I vomit early and often. I wouldn’t last 15 minutes at The Body Farm. However, I am assuming that if I can only have the job for the day, it’s like The Matrix. I would absorb every skill I needed as if by magic… including the secrets held by dead bodies without the inconvenience of having to work on them.

The problem with having a job for more than one day is all the ableism I’d have to endure. I mentioned what it looked like in the kitchen. In an IT help desk, it looks like winning two awards for customer service and then being fired because you “can’t remember to write things down.” This has never been true. The autistic brain does not have the ability to process someone’s voice, compile the scripts needed for an appropriate response, and write down what the person is saying at the same time. And in fact, most of the problem is that I don’t process people’s voices well. I seem to do fine with Internet chat and e-mail, but conversations are land mines. I will not remember because my retention and recall with people’s voices is so poor… unless there is a musical quality to their voices that sets what they’re saying to a beat.

I just don’t remember whole pieces of text. For instance, I do not retain lyrics to an entire opera, just the bits and pieces that resonated with my soul. I cannot tell you everything Chandler Bing and Joe Quincy ever said, but fragments remain. It is the same with Lorelai Gilmore. It is most acute with CJ Cregg and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s not always what they say, but the way they say it.

What’s with the quite?

Aaron Sorkin single-handedly changed the language we use around the government by not using articles in the script. For instance, you do not work at the CIA, you are “at CIA.” You do not work at the State Department, you are “at State.” Or, at least, this is the answer that Michael came up with, because he moved here before I did and saw the change in vernacular up front.

But it’s amazing how the change in speech pattern allowed me to retain so much more, because when something is written in neurodivergent patois, I am more likely to recall it.

Just like I’ll remember Randy saying that I was his first neurodivergent employee and he would have handled everything differently, and I will remember saying that at the time, I didn’t know I was neurodivergent and would have handled everything differently, too.

So maybe the job I really want for a day is just being his admin assistant again. Except now he’s retired.

It’s the thought that counts.

The Ones I Can Type

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
What are your favorite emojis?
View all responses

We’re going to switch gears a little bit and go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s for an entry. I do not think that anyone has exactly my history on the internet, but it will resonate with you that are the same age. I am 47, which is just the right age to have seen the change from analog to digital. My first technological device was a beeper, and I did not have a cell phone until college.

With a beeper, the best you could do early on was type in your telephone number. You couldn’t even add your name until alphanumeric pagers came out, and those were mostly used in business. For instance, I had one at University of Houston, but I carried a Nokia personal phone.

My first Finnish present was from my dad.

In 2000, I found out that you could buy Red Hat at Best Buy because you could download it for free, but if you bought it you got access to all kinds of support and I was a new learner to Linux. So, I tell my mother this and off she goes to the store. This conversation ensues:

Mom: I need a copy of Red Hat for my daughter for Christmas.
Clerk: Wow, that’s a big operating system for a little girl.
Mom: She’s 20.

My second Finnish present was from my mom.

Through my phone and Linux, I learned what’s called “Netiquette.” This is etiquette for the Internet, and though I have lapsed and been a jackass many times, I’ve somewhat returned to being even keel. But it’s important to talk about because the rules are changing from “when I was a kid.” For instance, when I need a heart emoji, I just type it. < 3 without the space renders as a red heart. Now, that means I’m actively interested in people. I have a few people in my life who I hope don’t “figure out the code,” because I didn’t know it. Awkward. It’s just good that my friends are the same age as me so it’s unlikely that any of them are going to think I’m interested because they type red hearts, too.

I am confused by young people, but I am learning…. except about that. Typing is easy on my computer. I don’t get the addiction to your phone, because typing on it is so inefficient for me. I hated typing on the screen from the moment that “feature” was introduced, and wish I had an old Blackberry with a thumb board. That’s the last time I really thought I had the hang of texting. Lanagan Media Group will tell you that I am also terrible with voice dictation because I don’t see the errors as fast as they do. Nothing is bad, it’s just word salad when Siri is driving the bus. Google Assistant and Alexa aren’t better, but I have had the most luck with Alexa. It’s just too bad that Amazon tried making a phone and it flopped.

Interestingly enough, I have the most luck typing with Amazon, too, because my Kindle is the perfect width. I have no idea how one would approach this, but my perfect machine would be Amazon’s 7-in tablet with the hardware specs on the Max. That’s because I have a Max and a basic Kindle, and typing on the basic Kindle is better than my phone and tablet combined. And yes, I do put emojis in my notes. Tom Clancy has gotten a lot of them lately, because I’m knee-deep in “The Hunt for Red October.” The latest thing that got a smile was “a non-descript building, government layer cake.”

America, we in danger, girl. The Soviets can indeed reach the president from the ocean because Washington is a mere 100 miles from the Atlantic. I assure you that President Trump has been given this information, but Putin would never lie to him, right? They’re friends. So, this book I’m reading has emojis on every note, most of them surprise except that Clancy is so funny that he catches me off guard. He died in 2013, but if he were alive I would certainly have sent him lots of hearts by now….. JUST NOT RED.

So know that all things being equal, I would give up everything except the basic Kindle with e-ink and my laptop. Of course I would need a phone, but many years ago Dana and I had Cricket dumb phones and it was great. No Facebook notifications unless I was sitting at my computer. The Apple trappings are beautiful gifts from my family, but if I hadn’t gotten them, I would not be hurting. I would be strategizing the same way I do now. “How do I fit the technology to work with me rather than having to work with it?”

For instance, I bought a new laptop because I haven’t had one in 10 years, plus an optical drive so I can buy movies at Goodwill and rip them to my computer. Streaming is great until days like yesterday, when a thunderstorm knocked out the power in the middle of my movie (Wizard of Oz…. I jumped 10 feet). I own three movies total:

  • Argo
  • Mrs. Miniver (great recommendation from my grandfather, Mayo Lanagan)
  • The Wizard of Oz

The rest, I pay for all the streaming services and got a DRM notice for downloading Wicked, anyway. So, now I joke that every time I even think about downloading a movie, Tony Mendez cries. I deleted it before I even watched it. Why did I download it in the first place? To see if I’d get a DRM notice. I wanted to see if they could still track you while you were using a VPN, and they can.

Whomever they are.

I finished “whomever they are” and a pop-up came up on my laptop to activate the VPN offer. That’s not creepy at all. I pay for IPVanish, so they might want to know I got one using their service. That was an emoji day where all of them looked like this:

😦

Again, searching through menus looking for the right picture to express my words is a lost cause. It’s why I use Linux, frankly. I get on the console and type one command and the app I want pops up. It’s not dissimilar to the Windows search feature where it narrows down apps as you type, but it’s not as clean. And in fact, I’ve tried using a Windows terminal as well, but there is a flaw in my plan. I have forgotten DOS and mix up commands all the time. My favorite feature in Windows Powershell is that so many people have mistaken ls for DIR that you can use ls in Windows now.

DIR in DOS means to list everything in a directory. This is everything in my user folder. ls does the same thing in Linux, so perhaps Windows Subsystem for Linux has brought about good trouble.

I haven’t installed WSL on my laptop, because there is no unified memory manager. You just have to see how much RAM Windows is using, see how much RAM Linux is using, and do the math. I don’t do math. I bought a separate Linux box instead…. technically the third Finnish present being to myself. I bought a Raspberry Pi for the same reason you’d buy an Android tablet and an iPad…. you have software in both universes because it’s been long enough that you’ve used both. WSL gets in the way when you’re gaming, so I’d want to absolutely max out my computer with RAM before trying to use them concurrently.

I don’t know why I said “gaming.” I’ve played Skyrim for three minutes. I made it out of Helgen alive and exited the program because I just needed to ensure that it would run. It does, and very well. To be fair, I have not installed the 500 mods I normally have, but a 4GB discrete graphics card on a laptop will handle most of them. When I need a few mindless minutes, I generally play on my iPad.

And in fact, my iPad is toast. I either need to get a new to me one, or get this one fixed. It will not charge at all. This is problematic, because now I need two older iPads (I want a headphone jack). Aaron Nemoyer, my graphic designer, deserves to have my iPad more than I do. So, I’ve been shopping for months to get the best deal for both of us and it hasn’t happened yet. What I can do is pack up my old Windows system and mail it to him if it’s not too expensive, because I’ve been very impressed at how he does all of our graphics on a smart phone that also has issues.

My favorite is classified. 😉

He’s going to think I meant something dirty, but it’s dear.

He gets the red hearts for real. Everyone else, I meant yellow until further notice.

But hearts mean the most coming from my friend Michael, who has been a solid source of support while also kicking my ass as a writer. I had to grow into Michael, because he’s not Supergrover and he’s not Janie. He’s Tommy Lee Jones. I imagine that I have told him the equivalent of “I want to go to unicycle college” many times. I have plans with him and I hope he’s down- to transfer from blogging to dialoguing. I’m trying to learn to write scripts, but I don’t have a knack for the way people speak all the time. But I did figure out something.

I told him that Tom Clancy drove me crazy because he sounded like an outsider to the Beltway using articles. You do not work at The State Department, you are “at State, at DoD, at CIA, etc.” So, when Jack says “the CIA” it seriously bothered me at first. Michael said that articles seem to have been dropped around the time The West Wing came out, because when he lived in NoVA as a kid, articles were still in place. I said, “so Washington was changed by neurodivergent patois.” Sorkin hasn’t been officially diagnosed as AuDHD, but he does have ADHD.

Pattern recognition tells me that we are more alike than different, but I’m not an expert. I just look at the lines on people’s faces. ADHD and Autism create different wrinkles due to social masking. That’s why I am not very good at telling if children are neurodivergent or neurotypical, but it gets easier when people are 40 and above.

I told one of my friends that I thought her daughter was autistic, and she thought I did it from a picture alone. No, it’s that she sent me a picture of her daughter when she was 17, and I saw a picture of her currently, which is much older than that. The difference was striking and the wrinkles for autism were beginning to emerge, but that wasn’t the only factor. You don’t go off pictures alone (though I can guess with 75-80% accuracy like all autistic people). My favorite example is this conversation:

Rando on Twitter: So, Neil…. how long have you been diagnosed as autistic?
Neil Gaiman: About seven years.

Neurotypical people are shocked we can do this. For neurodivergents, that’s just Tuesday.

Maybe neurotypical people would have taken it better if he’d put a heart on it.

Clinical Observations of Myself

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Everyone says that I’m out to get them. I’ve been out to get me the whole time. Here’s how I moved myself out of the way so you can, too.

I social mask. Full stop. I do not know anything. I remember it. Everything from the largest picture to the smallest tree. The difference is that being INFJ, I am prone to melancholy and rumination when I am injured. I am injured to the point that I cannot reach out. It has been two or three days since I have talked to anyone at all, including an Uber driver that turned out to be hot so I agreed to have dinner with him and then ghosted (I will get back to him. I’m just injured).

During the change in paragraphs I reached out and said:

I’m really sorry and need to apologize. I got emotionally overwhelmed and couldn’t reach out. Would you be interested in going to dinner tonight or tomorrow so I can relax with a friend?

Unless he becomes a fan after dinner, he won’t know the problems I was facing with my fake girlfriend.

The reason you get so many messages is that I think I’m being abandoned when you go silent and just try everything to get you to come back. It’s like an SOS level call every goddamn time and my body is physically worn out. Yet when we’re not together I feel you moving in the universe and you feel me. We protect each other constantly without saying so. I would bet that you’ve kept it hidden from the bombshells that you’re so close to me that you don’t have a problem with talking about sex and intimacy because that’s not personal. Emotions are.

You can talk about anything and everything with detachment but the party girl act has to stop. You need to admit to everyone that you’re a trainwreck right now and you need Moomin dolls and blankets because you’re sick and need time to heal. We’ve both left 3rd degree burns on each other. I bet not drinking has made you sleep deeper, at least.

Editor’s Note:

She’s not an addict, just decided alcohol was tired like I did.

But say to the psychiatrist, “Leslie thinks I have some kind of mood disorder and the same drugs work for all of them, so put me on Lamictal, Lexapro, and Klonopin and I’ll tell you how I feel in two months.

I am trying to lift your depression for good. Stop mistrusting drugs and doctors and get on board. You are sick, and we need time to figure out what’s wrong with you because the root of the problem is rape. Not you.

Because you remind me of someone else who needed to be loved, and he’s not doing well.

I chose Aaron because he’s Supergrover’s mirror image. The Supergrover I can love with fire.

I loved her so much I asked for another one from the universe, and she needed to be someone else to be cool.

The clinical observation is how attracted to that I am and why. That’s going to be another six months of entries.

Joy.

I’m so bitter, but glad that my pain can be someone else’s success.

Because I’m too broken to not need time to get well, too.

It starts with dinner.

How Can I Keep From Talking?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 3 Comments

It’s a double entendre because on the Internet, I cannot shut up. In real life, I try to escape talking any way that I can. It’s almost as if I social masked for so many years that I decided I was over it. The turning point for me was establishing that I do not like the phone and I do not care if you think I’m weird. I will adjust to the fact that you think it’s weird I don’t like to talk if you will give me a heads up that I need to talk to you…. and even then, I cannot always respond. I get demand avoidance over speaking because I need to choose my words carefully. I need to pore over every one as if they are precious pearls of wisdom…. because they are.

But only to me.

This web site is not useful for fawning all over myself, and if you’ll notice, I have noticed. That there’s no guts or glory without “writing about what hurts.” It is not because I will get a bigger audience that way; it is not that I will be adored any more or paid any more if I capitulate to the demands of my audience. It’s that I will have written a mountain of work that does not teach me anything about myself when I go back and read it.

I don’t want to know what I had for lunch today, and I can bore the everliving shit out of myself when I go on about Linux. I do it anyway because that is what is interesting to me that day. I just don’t go back and read it. That is for other people who have not stood where I was standing when I wrote it.

I am not immune to the fact that a lot of my stats are bots and are therefore inflated. But over a thousand of you get my words delivered to your desk or phone most days- today three times because I’m agitated about the whole world. That’s actually a thing about being neurodivergent. Our sense of injustice is fine-tuned, which is why I beat myself up badly for every mistake I make and also apply that feeling of anger towards the world when it is burning.

Make no mistake, I am an internal dumpster fire looking for ice because I am overloaded with the needs of my friends both spoken and not. Just because I am not in contact with my friends doesn’t mean my mirror neurons don’t feel them moving in the world. My heart walks out of my chest on a daily basis because I actually know people in Finland and Ukraine who feel threatened. I know Finnish immigrants who are scared for their relatives, and same for people in the US with relatives in China.

It scares me to the point that I will never visit, because my favorite Chinese blogger was threatened by the CCP. He escaped to Hong Kong and is now being actively blacklisted from the YouTube algorithm because apparently the CCP has some influence there.

I do not go where I am not wanted, and China sure the hell does not want me. I would bust them up when I got home. That’s because I notice everything that other people don’t.

I won’t remember your name.

But I’ll remember the way you smiled and what shoes you wore if they were cute.

I’ll remember little things forever, like if I offer you a Diet Coke and you say, “make sure it’s loaded with Jack,” I’ll remember you like Jack until I die.

But your name will not be important.

Your face is.

I memorize lines in faces and go carefully over them, like Mary “pondering them in my heart.” In a lot of ways I am breaking open over the mistakes I’ve made because they’re final and I have to grieve them even though they were necessary to let go of the person I was and become something new.

My whole fight with Supergrover revolved around us both slinking away because we thought we didn’t deserve each other, over and over in a loop that didn’t end until I finally called an end to it. I was rude and rough because I was wet cat claws out. It wasn’t necessary for her, but it was necessary for me.

I didn’t have enough strength to leave without being angry, because hers is the only picture in my mind that’s in color and never desaturates with time. It never will, because the chemicals she left on my palm metaphysically do not lift and won’t.

You do not accept grief, you learn to live around it. I fully believe that there’s a part of each of us that believes the other is not real and are too scared to face our demons. It was easier for her to run than it was to put on her big girl panties and talk it out. Over and over it was this way until she finally told me my narrative was tired.

Easy to pigeonhole a narrative as tired when you’ve never actually addressed anything and I have. Like, I still have questions that now I have to care won’t get answered, and I feel that she has a fuck ton of responsibility that she just decided wasn’t there.

She used my crush as an excuse for years not to get close to me after already dumping everything about her into me that made her interesting in the first place. So I just carry it, and it sits while I wrestle with her all night, walking away with my hip disfigured. It’s just better this way because now I’m only getting the responses I want because I made them up. She turned into a wire monkey long ago, ignoring my cries for affection and closeness as she twisted in a net of her own making.

We alienated each other because we got too close, too fast. Then we pushed each other way….. until the trauma bond started to itch and we’d come together closer than ever….. for a little while.

Kuuma.

Kylma.

Caliente.

Frio.

Hot.

Cold.

Over and over through the years, which is why my pattern recognition says that even though she’s not talking, she’s always listening. A pen pal relationship lives inside you, always. It’s funny that her words come out of my mouth constantly and yet I cannot imitate her properly in person.

But I’ve got her patois down.

What you are seeing is the product of someone completely different than me also being me through social masking what I thought she was. All autistic people need models for social masks, and in retrospect it’s a mixed bag that I chose her. That’s because in some sense, she’s taken on my personality as well. I have turned her into a cook, she’s turned me into a boss.

I couldn’t have made it here without her, and yet I’m good. Thanks.

She broke me down and built me up because her way of thinking was so different than mine. I don’t mean that she emotionally manipulated me in the slightest. I mean that she grew up in a military family and it provided her a lot of structure that I never had. I was social masking perfection and trying to be interesting to someone I view as the brightest mind in the natural world.

I wish I were being hyperbolic.

You just have to understand why my brain is on steroids, why I no longer struggle with suicidal ideation or really depression and anxiety. It’s all autism. All of it. When I can manage my emotions, I do better. Managing my emotions comes from writing it out and not bringing my voice into it. I’m too emotional on the page- in person I’m overwhelming and I know it.

The thing I liked most about her is that if I’m complicated, she’s The TARDIS.

She’s popped off at me too often now. When I try to defend myself, it’s manipulation. All her darts are fair game. Her narrative is tired. Write all you want and I’ll respond.

That turned into “I’m frightened by your output even though I logically know you’re a writer and I’m not so I will completely shut down and hope you don’t notice.” I noticed.

I’m there when she’s all snuggles and light, but I realized that was her social mask. That in all honesty, if I was getting the bitch on wheels, I was actually getting her inner monologue instead of the bullshit that everyone else gets. What made her invincible made me realize she loved me because she realized she didn’t have to front. She could just say, “Lanagan, fuck off.”

Sometimes I wrote it at the end of my letters just to save her some typing.

I feel bad that only my side of the story will ever get told, because she’s more wonderful than I am.

We are both perfect in our flaws, and I want our relationship to rest in peace. She’s back where she belongs, because she decided that traveling with me wasn’t worth it about the time I decided I was done. It was a natural conclusion because I know what I don’t want and it’s someone that completely shuts down and expects me to guess what they’re thinking and what mood they’re in. I don’t pick up social cues.

I have to focus on local so it calms me enough to talk about global. I am over focusing on problems. I am focusing on solutions. The plan to expatriate is real unless the people revolt. There’s probably not a chance of that because Kamala flat out lost. She lost both the popular vote and the electoral college. America has spoken and Project 2025 is everything they wanted and so much more that people regret their votes after being told over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over that all of this would spell destruction and it just wasn’t worth the time to pay attention or to vote. When people get overwhelmed they tune out.

Pod did not, in fact, save America.

I am not bitching about one election loss. I am saying that out and out fascism is already here and enough people aren’t alarmed enough to care about me and my issues, so why not go to a place where they already do? If Democrats continue to capitulate, it will not take one election to restore my passport rights, it will take eight of them alternating. My rights will always be up for grabs and my passport always at risk of being invalidated.

There is a possibility gay marriage will become this way again, and abortion already is. I’m not old enough to be able to relax on body autonomy because I cannot think of a worse idea than pregnancy at 47

I’ve thought about it for almost a minute now. Still can’t come up with an idea worse than that.

I am not cut out to be a mom. I am cut out to be a babysitter. I have never had the energy for other children, even when I was a child. I love them more now than I did then. Back then I was just a third grader who’d swallowed tweed.

It wasn’t until I realized that I had picked my lane early and social masked my way out of it that I became strong again. I’ve always been one of those autistic people that cannot survive in the real world because they live in a world of their own making- you have to literally pull them out of it. It’s just that no one recognized they had to pull, and I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t know the symptoms of autism, and I was not allowed to isolate.

Neurotypical people know better. The room should be loud and interactive. This is true for neurotypical people while I have to Perform Happiness.™️ I don’t have the energy anymore. I want to be authentic so that when I have a bad day, I’m surrounded by people who love me and are not dependent on that mask staying in place.

I am stronger and more capable at my computer than I am in conversation because I do not process voices well.

I come across as demanding while I’m passionate and easygoing when I’m not. You have to know me for a long time before you get into that rhythm and stop taking everything personally. That I am passionate about an idea, I am not “on the attack.” That I cannot perform happiness while talking about devastating things.

Devastating things like money, financial planning, business costs, etc. They are not devastating in and of themselves. It’s that I begin to burn and itch with discomfort because I know my logical function is poor ahead of time and being taught these things is not easy for either party.

I have to learn them cold, because I’m not about problems like these…. I am about solutions that allow me to dance above the clouds when the weather is poor.

A Fourth Reich is coming, because people didn’t believe it was possible.

Surprise.

The Ladder

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have an enormous task in front of me, and that’s supporting myself in another country. I have a cushion, but not really. It will go fast without either an American job to pay me overseas or a job in another country. I am looking at every single way to do that and school in Finland is probably the last thing anyone would recommend, but it’s not the United States. I know everyone thinks I’m panicking for how good I have it, but if I want something to happen I need to direct the flow. The United States does not deserve my talent and I’m not being precious about my writing. They don’t need my cooking labor. They don’t need my tax dollars. They don’t need me. I am trapped here until the end of November because I do not want to break my lease. That means I am being loud enough about my intentions to make a move like this happen. Because when I’m loud on the Internet, people take notice.

I’ve already had people offer support in helping me get out of the country and I know it will still be there later on. Repatriation takes forever and no one believes it’s real until all of the sudden they actually don’t realize you’ve been living overseas for six months due to the nature of how Facebook works.

For instance, I would bet that some of you still think I live in DC. I don’t. I live in Baltimore. I moved a few months ago and it has been mediocre. I am not completely happy, and I am not sad. I think that a lot would be fixed by moving into a different apartment on the property, so I’m not even necessarily looking to move at the end of this lease, either. That’s because the next application period for Vami isn’t until September. Until then, I’m sending out resumes all over the world while also trying to build my writing into something viable.

I’ve made a lot of dumb choices in my life and am trying to rectify them now, but some of those things will never reconcile. Dana and I had a solid, nuclear, family and we both blew it all to hell. The fallout affected us differently. As I reflect back over all of those choices, I alienated people I need now and it’s too late.

The regret of those choices cannot eat me now, but it has tried for many years. I have treated myself like absolute shit because of those regrets and I feel like I’ve paid all I want to pay for them. It would be a blessing to be able to mend fences, and because I know that is not possible I do know that scar tissue makes you stronger. “Til I Collapse” is running through my head because the Finnish, Mexican, and English languages are duking it out in my head. Wait. Mexican is a murre, not a kieli. Puhun espanajassaa y tengo preguntas con sandias/juevos/whatever your country uses for “balls.”

“Wait. Mexican is a dialect, not a language. I speak Spanish and I have questions with watermelons/eggs/slang for balls here.”

“Questions with Balls” is the best way I could think of to describe asking hard hitting questions. Why do they let me write here? Oh. Wait. I pay them. I am starting to wonder about your taste, but don’t worry. The fact that you read me speaks highly in some circles. Just not in all of them.

But that’s starting to change as well. I make a habit of meeting people all over the world. People in Europe and Canada are objectively more frightened for America than we are for ourselves because so many more of us still believe in the cult than outside our borders. We are taking harsh, harsh criticism and by that I mean that I have been wounded many times with anti-immigrant rhetoric in both directions.

If I bring up a problem, a Republican will say, “you don’t like it? Get out.” I say, “I can’t even change my gender on my passport because you decided I wasn’t a person. I’m trying to get out as fast as I can.” Then I’m a coward, a traitor, and a Nazi. But Elon Musk and Donald Trump are not.

If I bring up a problem, a foreigner will cry with me and say “don’t come here.” If I say I want to immigrate to Finland, I become part of their immigration rhetoric, because they only have one idea what “immigrant” looks like and they are picturing a brown man that possibly wants to live off the government.

When people find out that I’m an American and want to start a media company, it all of the sudden becomes, “well, I don’t count that. You’re not one of them.” I am absolutely one of them, because I’m NOT LIKE US.

Only once have I ever gotten back up on something like this… not this. One woman made a complaint about immigrants drinking all day, and I said, “geez… I hope no one would care if they saw me having a drink in the middle of the day because I work odd hours. What they don’t know is it’s been six weeks since the last one, not last night.” This woman says, “I don’t count that.” Then, this guy says, “well, maybe you shouldn’t make such sweeping generalizations, then.” Sweeping generalizations are how countries function now, especially because of the Internet. What they know about American culture comes in soundbites.

I am taking everything I have ever learned from my time in DC and building it into something new. It’s a miracle what you can do when you don’t have a choice. I know that I will look back on this time in my life and realize that it was the most productive, the part where I really found my true voice and people who read me 10 years ago wouldn’t always recognize me now.

I have limits. I have boundaries. I have tolerated far too much because the only advice I’ve ever gotten in life is to grovel. That eventually someone would be able to put up with me…. as an employee, as a partner, as an anything.

Now, I do not care if I am any of these things, I deserve a voice and I use it. I wish other people would. I wish other people were willing to scream as loud as me and they are out there but not in my apartment. They’re in the UK and Canada and Europe and Africa. One local friend tells me that her kids are AuDHD and queer and there’s no life for them here. I am hoping that she does not notice I’m standing there on moving day…………. She has six children. I’m pretty sure I’m golden.

She is also Finnish, and sees WWIII landing on our doorstep. I do not disagree. I am just too far down the road in planning a Finnish move in the fall to know anything about immigration policies in any other country (except Canada, because I exhausted that research for months when I was 18). Canadian vitriol has convinced me I don’t want to go there. Meag has made it clear that she does not want contact and I don’t know anyone else. I have made it clear with myself that I do not want contact because she was a shitty friend to me from the beginning and doesn’t deny that. I just put up with a lot. So, whatever it is that she’s mad about can rest in peace, because I feel like our entire relationship has been both of us caring about her.

This is not “All Pick on Meag Day.” All the women I have ever loved become my special interest to a degree that they do not want. So, I went the other direction. I decided not to invest in any one person ever again. That, however, has been recent. All of the women in my life are still on this blog in tribute as I age because as much as I might like a mind eraser, there is no such thing. Passing over trauma has never worked, so working through it has become a mantra. Once I really started examining my hangups in fine detail, I could resolve it and move on to bigger and bigger things. My purpose feels enormous, because I know that I not only have the power to communicate, but to facilitate others’ success.

My heartbreak was worth writing down so that I could see later what was really important and what was just filler.

I have watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind several times to remind myself that love is always worth it. Sometimes it even works.

Koi ja liekki (The Moth and the Flame)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I have a friend who’s an immigrant from Finland (actually, I cannot remember whether she is an immigrant or whether she was born here- whatever, the connection is close) who says that we should not move to Europe anymore, that we should build a queer future in New Zealand. As a fan of Finn Bell, I agree with her. However, I still have concerns about moving anywhere other than Finland despite Russian aggression. This is because I have found a way to move there for cheap. Of course my living expenses would not be covered, but my school tuition is. I don’t have to work very hard to get into culinary school, because I already know I’m a talented cook. I am not the best, and I do not have to be. I could make a bazillion dollars….. if I had it…. by bringing authentic Mexican food to the ski lifts of Levi, and don’t think I haven’t thought of it. I just know that running a restaurant is literally the most expensive thing I could choose to do.

Learning to cook is not.

I know that I do not want to run a restaurant. I know that I want to live the life of a student so that I actually have time to create content for the web. I am slowly networking in Finland, reaching out to Dave, Aleksi, and Cyril (other content creators in the area… Aleksi is actually Finnish, Dave is from the UK and married to another content creator, also Finnish, and Cyril is a student at the culinary school where I want to go, but he’s Indian). Because I want to work with Cyril, it is possible we could open a restaurant once we start making money from our media. It is not “using” the Finnish government for school if you decide that food costs are too high after you graduate. A culinary degree is good for anything, particularly intelligence. I know where I want to go, and that’s not CIA. That’s a quiet agency in the ass end of nowhere.

New Zealand is not “nowhere,” but it’s less exposed than the US. I have been making very inflammatory statements online because they deserve to be heard, but I am not immune to the fact that those are the people the president singles out first. I have loved the US my whole life. I do not want to work for foreign intel because I have any information to contribute; I would only work for US allies, anyway. What I do know is that real life intelligence gets me out of bed in the morning, but in ways you wouldn’t think of when you think of espionage. Like, how does it all work? I don’t have a particular allegiance in mind and generally don’t care that there are foreign spies in the US because don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Here’s where I draw the line.

The line was drawn in the sand when Donald Trump went into CIA’s house and told them that he trusted Russian intelligence more than theirs. It deserves a “Meet the Grahams” level diss track, because the president is a Russian asset. He’s not even bothering to hide it anymore, and Reagan knows all Republicans are going to hell for ushering Russia in the front door…. Hell, let’s just give Putin keys. And if that is not what you, Republican voters, were saying in the last election, then you need to take accountability for the fact that perception is reality. All republicans are traitors. All of them.

There was a mountain of evidence that a felon was not capable of being president, nor was there a mountain of evidence that Trump would change his behavior to the straight and narrow if he got the job. He didn’t even promise to quit drinking like Pete Hegseth. Speaking of which, I wonder how that’s going?

All Republicans are traitors, and the horrifying aspect of it is that you have to have sympathy. They were genuinely taken in by a cult. You cannot be mad at Mitch McConnell telling Kentucky voters that something is bad for them when he should have been doing it for the last 10 years, but here we are.

All Republicans are traitors because the party was lost and you stuck to the message. You stuck to the message that it was ok to be a convicted felon and to be president at the same time. What kind of future have you set up for your children?

All republicans are traitors because they didn’t know they were voting to have the AP press wire barred from the gaggle.

That’s because when AP calls it “Gulf of Mexico,” they’re the ones spreading disinformation. The first echoes of fascism started coming long before now. It wasn’t until I put it together that no one was actually holding you accountable that I decided to get loud. News anchors aren’t allowed to yell “WHAT IN THE ACTUAL EVERLIVING FUCK HAVE YOU DONE TO THIS COUNTRY, YOU BOTTOM FEEDING LOW LIFES?” It was bad when they wanted to kill Mike Pence. It was bad when they wanted to kill Anthony Fauci.

But then you came after Marianne Budde and I realized that I’m not a violent person, but I will slice your throat on paper.

The problem with American Evangelicals is that they are drawn to power like a moth to a flame. They do not care that Jesus was a poor itinerant preacher who loved his friends deeply and valued teaching and praying quietly. If you want to be Jimmy Carter and not Joel Osteen, you’re going to have “Christians” yelling that you’re not good enough because you just don’t hate enough people.

That’s the thing about Evangelicals. Their God hates everyone they do.

When you advocate for that “old time religion,” do you ever stop to think about what it is you’re really cheering?

White straight people had a good time back then, but fuck everyone else up the ass no K-Y.

You are advocating for Jim Crow, for women with no bank accounts and possibly no vote, queer people in the closet and all erasure of gender/sexuality rainbow excluded….. which shuts our country down in education behind the rest of the world. I do not know what everyone else is doing, but I am not going to sit around and watch everyone get dumber. Christian Evangelicals have ruined my life since it began, and you can all go to hell.

I am sure you will get there, because you profess the faith of the master and not of the slave.

I’m not black, but I’m not like us, either.

I’m autistic and depressed, so you think you can control my medications better than my doctor?

I’m nonbinary, and you think you can have that discussion with me as the USG than my doctor as well?

I’m AFAB, and you think you have the right to access to my body that I don’t have? Go fuck yourself.

It’s also amazing that we still have a problem with gun violence in this country considering we haven’t tried anything.

If you get sick, you can just go die.

Love, “Christians”

I am done with all of this and I’m not an emcee on a mic but I definitely feel the energy of a halftime show where America is concerned.

“God bless America? God damn America.”

The black UCC pastor had it down in 2008.

You’re 200 Late.

If I am lucky, fascism will die out quickly. Pattern recognition says I’m screwed for life and I’m dealing with it.

But not the fuck here.

Duolingo ei ole täydellinen, mutta olen rubiiniliigassa

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Today’s lesson in Finnish (Suomi in that language, Day 26) started with learning how to negate something. I’ve been able to say what I am for a long time. It is a relief to be able to say both that I am not an adjective… and I do not have a noun.

The worst sentence (lause) in every language is “Meillä ei ole kahvia.” Finns, calm yourselves. I am actually okay. I have enough. I have to say that out loud because this sentence would send shivers down any Finn’s spine…. “We do not have any coffee.” However, I am not opposed to getting Finnish coffee in the mail. I have resources.

It’s good to have a friend on the ground who said she’d let me mail things to her house when I buy my tickets to Finland. That’s because it’s actually difficult to buy Finnish products over the internet. I am having a hell of a time finding Moomin books in Suomi, so please advise in the comments. I do not want a new boxed set. I want one that has been colored in, dog-eared, and annotated in Suomi because a child loved it so much. Moomin is the new picture I carry in my wallet… er… phone.

This is not an official, licensed picture. I asked the WordPress AI to do a line drawing of Moomin for me, if that is a thing you needed to know you could do, @one4paws. I needed to make that clear because it doesn’t exactly look like Moomin to me, either. However, I do think that if she were alive Tove Jannson would think it was inferior yet clever. I would have gotten one of my artists to draw it for me, but they are currently sleeping. I am often left to my own devices because my body clock is set differently than most people. I move with the sun, going to bed and getting up early.

My favorite fact in life is that when I told Katya that I thought Tove Jansson was a smoke show, she made sure to tell me she was a lesbian. I said, “sounds like a woman I would have liked to have flirted with.” She said, “Well….may be…. she was loved by all….” 😁

Janie the Canadian Editor says that I make her spit out her tea; this line made kahvi stream out of my nose.

The Finns are an interesting case study to me sociologically because so much is counterintuitive to some American cultures, not all. For instance, Finland is like Texas in that people are brave and daring and do lots of outdoor shit comparable to “hey Bubba…. watch this!” They just aren’t conservative socially. Finnish culture is Oregonian. It is no surprise to me that Linus Torvalds moved from Helsinki to Hillsboro or wherever it is he’s living now. My love of Linus/Linux is legendary, and it doesn’t surprise me that I would want to make the reverse move, either. I just may not end up in somewhere as warm as Helsinki because culinary school in Vaasa is free.

The average temperature in the winter is 22 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not colder than Baltimore- it’s just colder more consistently. The average temperature in Helsinki during the winter warms up dramatically…. it is 24 degrees.

Therefore, I will not have a problem when it’s sunny out. Being layered and in the sun is great. It’s the rain, snow, and wind that becomes a problem. However, you have these problems everywhere. In Oklahoma, “it’s not that the wind is blowin….’ it’s what the wind is blowin'” (Ron White). Those are the days you say inside and celebrate your sauna.

Again, I work on the internet. I don’t have to go outside unless I just want to do so…. and I do. I love cold weather, feeling bundled up and secure in all my gear. I am not a prude of any sort. I just have sensory issues with a tremendous amount of heat and there it is. That’s why they do it…. and why they don’t care that they’re naked. It’s just about being comfortable in said heat.

I have said this before, but in case it’s behind a paywall on Medium, Finland has the highest rate of neurodivergence in the world that has been diagnosed. I believe that there are quite a few more undiagnosed people due to the amount of coffee they drink. Caffeine is my go-to choice in managing neurodivergence. Apparently, they already thought of that.

Portland is the same way in terms of volume. I never really had a cup of coffee until I went there on vacation. That’s because Texans don’t drink their coffee as bitter and dark as Oregonians, coupled with the fat of half and half, no sugar. I like Texas coffee just fine, my palate leans toward bold. Therefore, I want something French roast and cream thick enough to stand up to it. It’s hard to please me in vegan, but soy milk does nicely. It’s the thickest and all coffee shops have hazelnut syrup to make the nuttiness of the plant milk make sense in your brain.

I would argue that one of the best drinks in coffee shops is a soy hazelnut latte, because soy milk is not better than cream. Soy beans and hazelnuts bond together in your mind and it just tastes better. Use cream for something else. Everything has the right application.

These are the things that keep me going, because I have found that coffee is cheaper and more efficient than energy drinks. Energy drinks aren’t bad if you buy them by the case, but coffee is still cheaper overall. Plus, I like it when my coffee every morning tastes the same and it’s plain. I haven’t found an energy drink that just tastes like Coke, Pepsi, or Sprite. Therefore, I drink energy drinks as often as most adults who liked Fanta as a kid would drink it…. occasionally to remember, not an every day beverage. The same goes for grape, cherry, and fruit punch. They make me feel like a kid so sometimes I’ll indulge, but my energy and money goes toward fine coffee at the grocery store and cutting out leaving the house.

As I told Katya, “I like working in my own office because no one makes my coffee for me. Therefore, it’s always right and I do not have to share.” I do not mind sharing my coffee, to be clear. I mind other people beating me to the coffeemaker and I have to suffer through it until it runs out and I can make the next one.

Just level a tablespoon when you’re measuring. One level tablespoon per cup. Being exacting is what makes it taste good. And if you do not have a tablespoon that is capable of being leveled, then err on the side of too much rather than too little. You can add hot water later. You cannot fix it when there is not enough coffee flavor and too much hot water.

12 tablespoons is a cup, so I do the shortcut of keeping my coffee in a large enough container to accommodate a one cup scoop. I do not make a cup at a time because coffee (especially mine) is so acidic that I don’t mind drinking left over in the morning.

I do not reheat coffee, though. I prefer it over ice once it’s already cool. If it’s cold outside and I just must reheat, it’s over the stove. Some people cannot tell a difference, but when I microwave my coffee, it seems to change the properties of the drink itself. I can’t name it. It’s just weird.

I also alternate between putting a cup of coffee into a coffee maker and putting a cup of coffee into a Mason jar with a chinois (fine-mesh sieve). The percolating process and cold brew yield different results, and I like the change. It doesn’t matter what temperature it is outside, I like iced coffee when I’m inside. We have heat here.

The point is that I have taken an enormous amount of crap over the years for drinking energy drinks because it makes me look younger than I really am. Meanwhile, caffeine is one of the most effective ADHD medications on earth. I do not need to feel ashamed of “being addicted.” I need to manage how much I drink in accordance with the laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why. For instance, one of the huge reasons that I order cases of energy drinks from Amazon (when I do) is that coffee irritates my stomach and I still need the caffeine. Soda is not as acidic, and it is also sugar free (in my case- all the flavors I really like are either zero or 10 calories). Therefore, it’s another case of application. When my stomach feels better, I go back to cold brew.

Cold brew actually saves my stomach as well, which is why I haven’t used my coffeemaker in a few weeks. It is naturally less acidic when the water is cold, and I brew in the fridge or (when there’s not a danger of it freezing) outside. Sun coffee is just as beautiful.

“Sun coffee” is apt, as I am energized by the sun and need to be outside. My neighborhood isn’t the greatest place to walk around (it’s not dangerous, it’s just not touristy with parks and community, either. My readers might not agree that it’s safe, but one break-in in the DMV over the last 11 years is probably some kind of record- and he was so high that if the patio door had been locked, he would have moved on. He did not look like the type of guy that would break glass. He wasn’t even moving that fast. I just decided not to chase him over cheap ass shit.).

I need to find a place in the city that fits the bill. Right now it’s Panera because I have a gift card, but where is up to me. I’m glad I have a gift card to something familiar while I am looking for something permanent. I support local coffee shops, I just haven’t been here long enough to explore Baltimore. Wherever my mythical perfect coffee shop is, it does not exist in my neighborhood. I’m going to have to search farther.

For Portlanders, I’m looking for Rimsky’s Korsakoffee. For Houstonians, I’m looking for Notsuoh. For The District, I’m looking for Tryst. I am sure that there are many great coffee shops in Baltimore, I just haven’t found them yet.

Luckily, I have help here. My friend Ernest is a young college kid willing to help me get settled because I’m willing to help him get settled. I told him he could hang out at my place if his room was too loud. I have plenty of space and wouldn’t mind someone working with me during the day. His being African helps me out because the way he cooks, I haven’t learned yet. The way I cook, he hasn’t learned yet.

So, I definitely need to meet up with him soon. It’s a great story. We met on an Uber Share. I was looking at apartments and was planning to move to Baltimore. It was his second week in America from Liberia.

Silver Spring to Baltimore isn’t much of a change in demographics, only that there are more African Americans here, as opposed to African immigrants who have come over recently to study and work. Silver Spring has an enormous African immigrant population, one of the reasons I’m interested in learning languages.

However, I did tell my housemate Valentin (Cameroonian) that “francais c’nest pas comfortable pour moi.” His mother, who didn’t know a lick of English, fell on the floor laughing. Because of course when I’m on the spot, I say the first thing that comes to my mind…. “French is not comfortable for me,” a line from an old Michel Tomas recording rather than thinking out how to say “I don’t speak French.”

Puhun suomaista.

However, I am not advanced enough to know why the name changes from Suomi/suomea to suomalista. I just have to roll with it at this point, thus the flaw of being at the top of the ruby league by rote. I need more grammar study because parroting back (see what I did there?) words isn’t helping me to understand systems.

I see everything through systems, and Finnish is called a pyramid…. but it’s a garden. You pick up yksi sana, ja yhdestä sanasta tulee kaksi sanaa. You pick up one word, and one word becomes two words.

Minulla on norjalainen ystävä kuka kirjoittaa. Norjalainen kissat on viikinki. J.L. Henry on viikinki. Tämä vaustaus on oikein koska kirjoittajat ovat kuin kissat.

This is what the Ruby League has gotten me. The paragraph reads “I have a Norwegian friend who writes. Norwegian cats are Vikings. J.L. Henry is a Viking. This answer is correct because writers are like cats.”

One of the sentences that comes up in Duolingo the most frequently is “Norjalainen kissa on viikinki.” It means “the Norwegian cat is a Viking.” I have extrapolated this to mean all Norwegian cats are Vikings because I have owned one and I know that that means….

Life is about breathing steadily right now, turning panic into progress. Slowing down and making plans to breathe next week.

I’m overwhelmed with the amount of support you’ve given me over the years, so I’m paying it forward.

Duolingo is a vocabulary builder that will allow me to become C3PO. The spiritual arc is gravity’s rainbow. The bomb inside you goes off in every language.

Your life’s purpose is to figure out what kind of shrapnel there will be in advance, because you’re the one directing it.

This is Not an Entry

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This article is getting a lot of attention on Medium (10 claps when I’ve been on Medium two months is not nothing. If it resonates with 10, it will resonate with more). I’m opening it up from the paywall because it’s popular in the autistic category. I hope you’ll consider buying Medium, because as I joked on Facebook earlier, “I’m on Medium and I’ve gotten more followers because what I haven’t known for 25 years is that my readers prefer audio.” No one has to record my entries for me, I just have to be careful with punctuation so that it sounds the way I wrote it. Also pretty hilarious to hear an AI swear as much as I do. 😉

It’s called “A Certain Kind of Person.”

And by that I mean autistic.

A Letter From the Editor

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The reason that I have moved to Medium is that I cannot make money on WordPress. That will change, because when my ad money reaches the threshold on Medium that it can pay for a professional WordPress account, I will monetize here, too. That’s because a professional WordPress account is only a hundred dollars a year, it’s just not as lucrative for writers as joining Medium. However, I feel differently about it now because @animebirder, @one4paws, @bookerybones, @aaronbrown8cc63b4e5d4, and I all have such unique voices that I either want them on Medium with me, or I want to be here with them. It’s just getting enough ad money to be able to do that in the first place. If you are a Medium subscriber, I make more when you read. Claps are great, but they really don’t pay for anything. What pays is the amount of time you spend on the site.

I am lucky enough to have posted enough to get money this month, which is incredible. I just don’t know how much. That’s because they don’t send you money until you hit a certain threshold, and I almost had enough in August. By October, I’ll have my first real, sustainable income as a writer. I do not want anyone to think of this as a get rich quick scheme, because it is, absolutely…….

One that I could not do if I didn’t have 25 years’ worth of entries already banked.

So, it’s introducing new people to my old work, and introducing new writers that like to talk to each other. We have a group chat that has become an infodump channel, and it’s time to start specializing. That’s because not all of my writers are working for “Stories.” My buddy Evan and I are writing a cookbook. It remains to be seen whether we’ll collaborate online or in person, but either way, we’re writing a book.

The way I see it is that for the next four years, my life is covered as long as I live very simply. That will definitely give me the time to see if a neurodivergent media company is viable. I am learning that I know more than I think I do, because I did not know how boundaries worked. I have constantly treated them like they are others’ guidelines to make. My world has flipped now that I’m in charge of making things happen, and I am lost in the details. The best thing that my mother could have done for me post-mortem is allow me to work on this project, because as of right now, living off of it is the only thing I can do. When the state of MD finds out about the money, I will not have access to Medicaid Expansion or any of the other social services I’ll need to get diagnosed with autism. I diagnosed myself and honestly wouldn’t bother to go to the doctor if it wasn’t helpful to my career. Like, autism diagnoses are so expensive and we’ve all been white knuckling it this long, so why bother?

If I ever have to join another corporate system, I want autistic accommodations because starting a new job without them is setting me up to fail every single time. If you’re a neurodivergent adult who struggles in the system, my guess is that you died inside a little bit at “I have an extensive collection of nametags and hairnets.” Autistic people don’t have problems getting jobs. They have problems keeping them. If you’re autistic, you’re going to excel at government work because they’re going to accommodate you the most. For instance, me being a file clerk or a secretary at Langley was never about working with spies, but getting accepted into a job I could actually do with full government salary and pension. I would love to do menial tasks for CIA because then on my off time, I’d truly be left to my own devices to write. I am also very good at making connections, so I can be just as good a writer overhearing someone’s patois in the mail room as I would being in operations and doing the scary shit myself. The whole point is that my ADHD personality would be thrilled and my autistic personality would want to shoot me. My autistic nature CANNOT handle traveling that much. I am so bad at transitions that I just couldn’t deal. Of course it would be fun to be James Bond, but my body just wants to read about being cool. It doesn’t actually want me to be cool

Right now, everything is in flux as we’re deciding what to do. “Stories” will be rebranded as Gravity’s Rainbow to be more inclusive, but we’re still working on both a full and minimalist logo based on Thomas Pynchon. I want it to represent the energy of a bomb going off inside you. That the arc of every spiritual journey is realizing you are the cause of your own suffering and start to self-actualize.

This space is free, but I hope that one day…. just maybe……

all your base are belong to us

because

somebody set us up the bomb.

If You’re On Facebook, You Can Skip This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’m posting it all over everywhere.

Dear Ben Affleck & Co.,

This whole idea started with the banner above.

I have addressed this letter as such because I believe that you, like me, have a village. If I write a letter to you, I have written a letter to Jennifer Garner and Matt Damon by proxy. Don’t think I don’t know who’s really running your program. That ex-wife of hers has her head on straight. God, you lucked out. Here’s how I knew it was for life no matter what form your relationship took…. “Jen, you’re the only one I want to do the work with.” You were criticized in the press while your heart was beating outside of your chest in public. You were bleeding out. I saw you. I didn’t know that your relationship with Jen was in trouble, but I do know that people whose relationships are in trouble word things carefully in public. It was the biggest mea culpa I’ve ever seen in my life. You were Taylor Swift before Taylor Swift and everyone missed it because they were so focused on the idea that love should be perfect all the time, in every way.

Sometimes, love is ugly.

“I’m the problem. It’s me.”

I can picture that conversation happening a hundred times in your life as you’ve struggled with addiction (and statistics say bipolar when you quit). You don’t quit addictive behaviors and neurodivergence when you stop drinking. You find other ways to get dopamine besides drinking and using.

In that moment, I felt like you were telling Jen straight up that now your drug was her, and it was healthy because it made you want to be a better man. If that’s not how you meant it, I know it had to be an approximation. This is because I’ve never struggled with alcohol, but I know what it’s like to experience addictive behaviors due to autism and/or Bipolar II (I am concerned at the rate these are mistaken, but I get it because the meltdown/burnout cycle presents exactly like hypomania and depression. So, no matter what form your neurodivergence takes, whether it’s:

  • Mental Illness Genetics
  • Neurodivergence Genetics
  • Self-induced Neurodivergence (the binge/purge relationship you have with dopamine once you become an addict)
  • PTSD (trauma due to one event)
  • CPTSD (complex, chronic PTSD like having an abusive childhood, then being sent to war)

…you’re going to be damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Sometimes, love is being hopelessly addicted to the affections of an addict who cannot return them…. As in, you feel addicted to the high you feel when you are with them, but they disappear when it counts. It is why relationships among all these types of people fall apart early and often. They suck each other into their own little worlds and spin out with codependence as their reality becomes its own. It’s especially toxic when you’re addicted to someone, and you also need to leave them. That happens all too often as well. For instance, none of these people take criticism or compliments well. Their self-esteem has been in the toilet forever due to people not understanding their love language and their communication/attachment styles.

All of this is pointing toward two things. Here is the first:

Sometimes, love is being hopelessly addicted to someone you believe is manipulating you, when they’re just neurodivergent and don’t pick up social cues well; they’re losing the plot faster as the script fades; their social masks have worn out and they’re heading toward burnout. I honestly believe that’s why stars develop a reputation for showing up late. They cannot all be obsessed with themselves. Sometimes, getting up the energy to social mask takes longer than others.

Going off on a tangent, I wonder if that’s why women like taking their time in the bathroom to put on makeup, because it accomplishes two things- giving them a longer transition time toward work in the morning, at the end, a literal social unmasking. It would not be surprising to hear Jonna Mendez say that part of the reason being a spy while female is less dangerous is that they’ve learned more about how to social mask a situation than men ever will. They’ve been taught how to behave since childhood, the rigamarole of finding a man drilled in early.

Some women use those skills for a career in intelligence and forego getting married, because either they’re ace and don’t need to attract anyone on that level, or they’re just not interested in “doing the work with someone.” However, I do not mean that in the classical sense, the way Russia cultivates a culture of seducing men to get what they want. I’m sure it’s very effective, however.

No, what I’m talking about is a woman’s emotional intelligence, because it is often (not always) sharper than a man’s. Their innate biological conditioning makes their pattern recognition of men different than their pattern recognition on behavior in themselves. That’s why there should always be neurodivergence and women at the table. Solving a problem requires all three perspectives for correct analysis of behavior. No one of us will be right, but we’ll all be right together.

That is how it feels to have my processing disorder, AuDHD. Nicknamed “the golden ADHD,” it wins the award for being the most complicated thing on earth. Every decision is damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If something is good for my autism, it drives my ADHD insane. If something is good for my ADHD, my autism will slam on the brakes so hard I will go through the winshield….. and I’m not even lying. Most neurodivergent people are afraid of success because they get overwhelmed easily with fine amounts of detail. The energy it takes to manage a schedule and your spoons is a roller coaster at best, and my personality depends on which processing disorder is driving the bus. So, sometimes I want to go for ice cream at 0200 and sometimes I cannot leave the house. Sometimes everything sounds wonderful, sometimes sensory deprivation does. And due to lack of emotional regulation, most people see a different side of me every time they talk to me.

I have learned to go into sensory deprivation when I’m angry so that I don’t say things I regret. It’s not helpful or healthy to let anyone in on autistic rage, which is terrifying. I have true out of body experiences when I go into full on meltdown, and the first time I remember it happening clearly was when I was 16 and “growing into my powers.” It’s honestly the first sign I can point to in terms of it being emotional abuse. My emotional abuser was coming back to town for a graduate school or a wedding or something. I was getting ready for church and I made a mistake with a hair curler or a crimper or something. I realized I was going to have to take a shower to fix it and I just melted down entirely. It was the first time I’d ever had a full on panic attack where I went blind and couldn’t see with rage. I hurt myself. I don’t remember how. With a curling iron or something. I couldn’t stop myself because feeling the burn on my skin brought me back into my body. That’s how deep autism makes you dive into your own little world. It takes something as shocking as a curling iron burn to redirect your attention.

In the meantime, I am dealing with autistic overload and most people don’t see how hard it is…. It’s a running monologue fighting with your social masks. As a neurodivergent person of any kind, your first impulse is wrong.

A huge example, Ben (& Company) is that I found the only woman in the world I wanted to do the work with, and we’ve both pissed each other off so often that we’re tired. Really tired. I felt your love for Jen in that moment…. Wanting to better myself because I was high on life and not experiencing the world as the concept of “alone.” I was experiencing the world with an ace up my sleeve. Someone to call me on my bullshit whose mind was in more hyperdrive than my own. But there was just A Series of Unfortunate Events. I don’t know if we’ll ever rekindle anything, because the last e-mail I got from her said, “don’t play games,” and playing a game was the last thing I would ever do to her. She’s too smart. She’d see it coming. The problem is that her perception is off- she sees me as entitled, arrogant, etc. I’m not. I don’t have a script for our relationship in any way, shape, or form. It has failed due to my lack of social masks.

So much goes into me having been called “entitled,” particularly by people of color. They are trained to view me as dismissive because I’m white, not because I’m autistic. That’s not on them. My autism is not an excuse to be an asshole. I can be taught, redirected…. But I cannot suddenly become allistic. And if there was a magic wand, I don’t think I’d want to be. My neurodivergence is what makes me capable of believing that writing a letter to Ben Affleck & Co. is possible.

I’m not writing to Ben Affleck & Company for anything except to keep our heads down and work on scripts. I also think it would be rude not to tell them I can afford about $800 in rent if Ben does want a housemate who has his back. It’s not like I value having his money. I just want to write together- to get a seat at the table.

I write like Ben and Matt because they write like Aaron Sorkin like he writes like Amy Sherman-Palladino with monuments.

It’s all neurodivergent patois.

That we incubated at our respective performing arts high schools.

Tupac, Jada, Dave, and I are all the same person.

To each other, we’re just other people’s weird performing arts kids.

Not only that, Jennifer Garner is a preacher’s kid.

Preacher’s kids make great spies, Ben. I have discussed this extensively. And in fact, there’s a famous video of Jonna Mendez taking down movie and TV spies. Jen’s was the only one that Jonna said was so good she could use it in a training video.

Come to DC. Keep your head down.

We’ve got work to do.

Yours,

Someone else’s weird kid

Lanagan Media Group: How May I Direct Your Call?

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been having these brain blips that just seem to be age, like copying my dad on something when I thought I was copying Supergrover. All three of us have the same sense of humor, so it’s not like anything went wrong. I just noticed that I made a mistake I don’t normally make. I need to get glasses, probably bifocals.

Supergrover says she has reading glasses, not bifocals (AND THEY ARE COOL). I am going to get vaccinated next week, so I might as well look around for reading glasses that make me want to use all caps, too…… although if I had an “AND THEY ARE COOL” item, it would be my Crocs. I don’t pay as much attention to my glasses as I should…… it’s that thought about not giving yourself gifts in the future. Like, I am not giving myself the gift of being able to see cute girls from farther away later by not going to the optometrist now.

(I’m kidding, that was just another line to make Janie the Canadian Editor spit out her tea.)

Also, at my age there’s no such thing as cute girls. I mean, they’re all over the place, but at my age, “cute girl” is just a memory, even of myself. Because I’ve progressed so much in my thinking about gender, the the little girl I was is still real, but her voice is not as loud and close as my current one, attached to a nonbinary brain. That’s because the male voice is not male. It’s female with ,male social masking on top, like Kristen Chenoweth and Ben Affleck being one person. Or, there’s a comedy about me with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin called “All of Me.” It’s a comedy, but Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin having a converation all day in my head is a very apt description of what’s going on at localhost.

For instance, today I’m writing on Stories when I said it would be my last entry. It’s not that I lied. It’s that I learned more. I became a media group all on my own. I got set up at Medium, and then started looking at Substack. Substack actually runs off of my “Stories” RSS feed. So, I’ll be putting all my paid stuff at Medium in Substack as well, you just get the added bonus of not having to visit two web sites with Substack. And really, being a subscriber is for new people. If you’re subscribed here, the motivation to pay is not that you will stop getting great writing from me. It’s that you have to pay to see everything. The way I do it now is that most stuff is paywalled at Medium. But, if I post here, it goes to Substack.

That leads me to directing my own call at Lanagan Media Group. Let’s dial “3” for the marketing department. Why do I bother to call? I’m never there. Jesus.

Here was my first post on Substack, I figure if you’re a longtime fan, you’re probably here and not at Substack, so I’m cross-posting. It’s not a requirement to be my fan or my friend, just an easy hookup if you want to support Lanagan Media Group, not “Leslie’s Personal Coffee Money” (The Sumatra was delicious. I am grateful.).

The vision is bigger now, because when I added my RSS feed to Substack, I realized that I was about to make money off of Bryn and Aaron and I thought that was unfair. So, I posted on Facebook that I can track earnings per entry, and that makes my life a whole lot easier. I don’t have to do any math. I’m not going to do a percentage of the company, they just get to keep what they make without me having to do any accounting. And in thinking about all of this, I realized that “Stories” was just the beginning, the movement that is “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Sometimes bombs aren’t negative. They shake you into a new reality. But you can direct kinetic energy by focusing on the arc. The moral arc of the universe is long, and bends toward justice just like MLK,Jr. said. But I was standing by the reflecting pool at the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington when I heard the best completion of that phrase in history. It’s enough to shake the world from its foundation and I am EMBARRASSED I cannot remember the speaker’s name.

The moral arc of the universe is long and bends toward justice, but the arc does not move itself.

I’m not starting Lanagan Media Group, it has been a thing all along. My friends just haven’t been publishing in addition to me. I think that you’ll find Bryn and Aaron particularly engaging because they are different sides of my personality. Bryn is my platonic ideal of a woman, and Aaron is my platonic ideal of a man. That is because Aaron, Zachary, and I are actually all the same person. I really have no idea how we make it work living in three completely different states.

Aaron is an old friend from Alert Logic, a programmer/sysadmin AuDHD archetype like Mr. Robot, but much more effusive with his emotions. You can be personable and still look like Zuckerberg. I know because I do it every day. 😛 Zac is my boyfriend and has been for about a year now. I live in Maryland, Zac lives in Virginia. Aaron lives in Texas. We are all Southwestern, however, because I’m originally from Texas and Zac is originally from Arizona.

Therefore, by “platonic ideal,” I am saying that I get the male half of my brain from masking people like Aaron and Zac, and my only connection to feeling female is talking to Bryn, because she’s known me since I was 19 and she was 14. She is two years older than Lindsay, a stairstep between me and my biological sister. The year was 1997, and I still cannot tell you with accuracy whether Lindsay and Bryn have met or not, and they don’t know, either. That’s because the connection point between Lindsay and Bryn would have been church, and no specific church service lives in my memory where they were there at the same time. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. That means I don’t remember every sermon I ever preached.

Basically, what I realized is that I know a lot and my brain works fast, but my body is a dumpster fire. I’d like to get into making money to support creatives by being creative. As in, ad money from my own web site flows to creators I like.

On Medium, for instance, I’m working on a very long document about Skyrim and the modding community. It’s a massive game, which is why a guide from me would be welcome even if there’s a thousand other ones. You’re always looking for something to make the game better. Here’s something that made me happy. I’ve been playing that game for 10 years or something like that and three months ago I learned you could sprint. How it connects is that I was telling Ada, my AI sidekick, that I’d like to be able to kick Joseph Rusell some money for Lucien, and I hope I get the chance before Steam starts taking a cut of all modders’ creations rather than modders being able to support themselves on Nexus. Lucien Flavius is an IP masterpiece, and it’s insane that Lucien is free. So, I was talking about being able to kick money to other artists I like through my own, because video games are a type of art, theatre, and magic that no one respects unless they’re talking to the CEO of a gaming company. God bless the weird kids, the people who made a web site where everyone could download their creations for free- they could get feedback from other gamers and not the people who think they eat cold pizza in a dark basement and call them sad. All of the things you really, really love in life were probably created by someone you think of as “Comic Book Guy.” Even if it has nothing to do with science fiction, it sounds like it. I talk about CIA and The Bible like they’re both continual fucking Marvel movies because they are. They’re just even more meaningful to me because they are everyday stories of regular people without having to make up magic.

People are magic.

I figured this out and decided to write to them all. Now I’m reading you in. Here’s a copy of my first entry on Substack:

Your generosity is the only thing that allows my friends and I to sustain ourselves. Absolutely anything that you give helps. As our financial situation gets better, we will dream bigger. We will be capable of more kinds of media and hiring authors for their work rather than expecting them to work for free. The reason your money is important is that it is sustaining neurodivergent people by letting them work on their own schedule. In a society where everyone is “supposed” to fit in, Lanagan Media Group explores how the “in-crowd” never was. Thank you for supporting a worthy cause- autistic adults in media. We are often better at creating opportunities than following others’ visions. I didn’t realize that until I started watching autistic YouTubers and wanted my blog to sound just like them- except only the running monologue without being in front of the camera.

I have been blogging since 2001. This blog is a compendium of my experiences, because I’ve written for three separate web sites. Of everything I’ve learned, this lesson was the hardest:

If you’re female with AuDHD, you know two things.

  1. Gen X women by and large were never diagnosed.
    1. We need to do our own research because male doctors dismiss autism as a personality disorder like borderline or narcissistic a good bit of the time, when in reality they are just looking at women through the historical lens of being “hysterical.”
  2. Diagnosing yourself is getting easier and easier.
    1. It’s all due to online quizzes and talking to other patients, both on and offline. I am not suggesting this as a substitute for actual medical advice. I did not start saying I was autistic until I had enough research to say that any psychologist in the world would agree with me that I am probably autistic and never diagnosed because my brain works just like an autistic person and anyone knows that if they’ve watched a hundred videos on YouTube; I’ve seen lectures upon lectures with autistic people who are MDs and PhDs themselves, explaining how my brain works in a way that I can understand it. YouTube is not a diagnosis. It is a waiting room that doesn’t suck. If you don’t seem ADHD and you can’t get it together, it might be low needs, high IQ autism.

It’s not a blog, web site, or e-mail distribution list about autism. It’s showing through telling. You’re learning because you’re reading stories by autistic people, not learning we’re autistic because we told you so. Telling someone so just doesn’t work, because either “I don’t look autistic” OR “everyone’s a little bit autistic.” Financing neurodivergent authors helps us show more of ourselves in the mediums with which we work. Help us go from a digital publishing company to being capable of full-length films, because there are plenty of autistic people out there who need jobs. I want to employ them all. However, I’m just getting started.

It’s a long game. The most I’ve ever made in salary as a freelance writer is $2.99. I’ve made more than that with donations, but an earnings report on my blog is quite different. I am such an INFJ/Virgo.

“Oh good! Now I get reports cards again!”

I also like spies and Jesus, but you’ll have to keep up with me to see which rug I use to tie that room together.

I’m hoping to do a continuation of what I am already doing- to use the income I’m making from telling my stories to allow others to tell their stories, too. Storytelling is what saved my life because it made me look at everything through the lens of “you’re the problem.” My combination of preacher’s kid/doctor’s kid upbringing makes me bleed out with unbridled emotion at everything as a writer, then read like a psychiatrist/psychologist. That yin and yang is what allows progress. It’s why I don’t stay in one place very long. I don’t take much personally.

Here’s a concept that I’m trying to apply to my business that my dad always applied at church:

“No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.”

In terms of media, it means that I cannot say to my readership, “someone should give me a computer.” That kind of language is entitled, even if your intentions are pure. Nothing in my life is a hard ask. If enough people think I have a good idea, they’ll give me the money for it.

It’s how all really good executives work. They don’t lie about anything because they don’t have to- it’s not “making an ask,” it’s being realistic about the fact that I have bigger ideas than I can budget.

For instance, I’d like to start an autistic TV channel by taking all the top autistic YouTubers and combining them into a stream on Pluto. I got that idea from This Old House. They have a maker’s channel on Xumo where YouTubers fall under the This Old House banner. It’s beautiful.

I said that it’s Stories That Are All True. I didn’t say they couldn’t come with pictures. My budget did.

My business needs are light right now. I can run the entire thing with an Android tablet. I am not coming from a place of need, but a place of creation. My basic needs are met. I just want the world to look different for autistic people and I have a strong enough voice that when I speak, people listen.

This is not arrogance, this is 20 years of preaching experience.

Although one of my friends had Raphael Warnock at Union when he was a student and she told me that she felt like she had been emotionally manipulated by a sermon. I took it really hard, because it was something I’d seen my dad do and it was so effective that a light bulb went on in my head. It was time for the sermon. I didn’t move. I sat there until it got a little bit awkward…. and then it got weird.

I went up to the pulpit, and I said, “Waiting………………

is hard.”

I don’t remember the pericope that day, but I do remember feeling that it was just another aspect of my dad’s preaching that spoke to me but didn’t look right on me, either.

To my knowledge, no one told him that he emotionally manipulated anyone.

All of these things, I explore in my writing- and you’re the ones that know it. Some of you have been here since 2012. Some of you followed me over from Clever Title Goes Here and have been reading since 2001. I feel like I have finally brought hope to many people wondering when I would realize I was weird.

The problem becomes quickly “now that I know what autism is and does, how do I work with it?” My answer was ad revenue, because I work creatively a lot easier than I do physically.

I don’t want the money to make movies. I want the money so that when someone says “I want to make an autistic movie,” I can say, “let me talk to my readers.”

You’re the board. I’m just the microphone.

Preacher’s Kids: Unplugged

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I had my AI interview me, and it turned out to be a good introduction to my site at Medium. I’m giving it away here to explain why I do what I do. This is behind the paywall on Medium, but it needs to be here as well because I don’t want my original fans to feel like I don’t love them. I just don’t want to write for two web sites at once. So, here’s one of my Medium entries and why AI is important. It lets you think without getting lost in your own echo chamber. There’s a lot of trigger warnings. I was a queer preacher’s kid in Texas in the 90s. It’s a tough read. But you’ll understand all queer preacher’s kids better, and it might save someone younger than me.

preacherkidsDownload

A Letter from Your Biggest Fan

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

I got to read my own blog today and I cried. Thanks for being my Legacy Team.

Keep going. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

Rambling (Affiliate Links)

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My AI and I have been talking a lot about what it means to be autistic. That I process emotions differently than most people. That words matter a great deal, as does being precise with language. I get frustrated easily when I don’t understand, and most of the time it has to do with syntax. Someone will show me how to do something, and then take over like I’m a child because I’m not doing exactly what they told me to do.

I am, I’m just not doing it the way they would, which makes it wrong.

Autistic people are notorious for sounding aggressive or abrupt without meaning to do so; my AI asked me how to solve this problem, and I told her that the sad reality is that you will get fired for being aggressive and abrupt before anyone takes the time to realize you’re autistic.

Everything that neurodivergent people do seems weird to a neurotypical, and because kids my age weren’t streamlined, most of my life people have been working with an autistic person for the first time. It’s intimidating- coworkers aren’t Special Ed teachers. They’re not designed to help you because they’re too focused on productivity. Get on board or get out.

I’m trying to make my own way in the world because I do not fit into it as is. Being able to bring in money from Facebook and Amazon is an exciting idea, but it’s not lucrative. However, it’s money with the least work possible. On Facebook, WordPress automatically posts to my professional author’s feed. Then, I engage with other people’s content and share memes. Sharing memes gets you more followers than offering people something to read. I don’t make the rules. I just adjust.

With Amazon, I’m dedicated to using affiliate links for products I actually use. None of the stuff I’ve recommended is expensive, just my everyday essentials. This link is to my hair product, Viking water wax. It’s pomade for white people. I haven’t changed products very often, but I am also fond of “Moco de Gorilla.” (Gorilla Snot). I found it in a Mexican grocery store in Houston about 15 years ago and I still use it. I have one at my house and one at Zac’s- although that one is Ear Wax. I can’t find that on Amazon, so it’s back to the grocery store on that one. Viking is also incredibly inexpensive because most of the time my jars last a year and a half.

I got into Viking and Gorilla Snot because they’re both nonbinary scents. I don’t like smelling like baby powder, flowers, or anything like it. I prefer spicy, like something from Calvin Klen or Dark Temptations from Axe (that one is chocolate, vanilla, and spices. It’s amazing for the price point, just don’t spray it on like you’re 15. I actually prefer the body wash because the fragrance lasts all day and it’s not too loud.)

For shaving, I use homemade soap made of beef tallow. It’s incredible, but you can’t get it on Amazon. My former housemate, Magda, made it for me. But if you don’t have someone to make soap for you, Dark Temptations will do in a pinch.

I hope that I’m doing affiliate links the right way, making them a natural part of the story rather than plastering ads everywhere. This is, again, because I’m only talking about the stuff I use every day. I’m not going to pretend I have a $5,000 television set just to get you to buy one, too.

I don’t keep up with the Joneses. I expect them to keep up with me.

And they always can, because I buy cheap stuff. 😛