If you were forced to wear one outfit over and over again, what would it be?
I am never forced to wear one outfit over and over. I choose to buy lots of things that look the same, because of the thread count on the fabric or whatever. I’m basically Mark Zuckerberg in terms of fashion. Both he and Steve Jobs chose one simple, comfortable outfit to wear every day to cut down on decision fatigue. I just prefer t-shirts and hoodies to turtlenecks. Oh, and like Mark Zuckerberg, I own one nice outfit (kidding him about having a suit for Congress).
This may or may not seem obvious, but it is very, very hard for autistic people to find dress clothes if they’re not rich. You think I’m kidding, but you don’t get into really truly comfortable dress shirts and suits until you can afford Brooks Brothers without sticker shock. My answer for this is Goodwill. I hardly ever buy new clothes, because I can afford any brand I want at Goodwill.
With autism, little things matter an enormous amount. Enormous. I don’t want to be able to feel the stitches, or any of the hardware, really. I want it to be fabric that calls to my skin, like an undershirt that’s been washed forty times. I want every piece of clothing to feel that precious. Otherwise, my senses will pay attention to the feeling of my clothes, and I don’t want that at all.
Autism forcing me to wear something is also a thing. My wrist will scream bloody murder the entire time my Apple Watch is charging because EXCUSE ME SIR SOMETHING IS MISSING. That part of me has an asymetrical haircut when I talk to the manager. Except that I’m also nonbinary, so the “sir” is also me. I am complaining to myself and the one to which I’m complaining has the same amount of power as that little voice in my head. Like, you can talk to the manager ALL DAY, but you still have Autism.
Being nonbinary very much feels like a male and female voice in my head talking to each other at all times. It makes sense, because I get by in society with social masking. Therefore, both sets of social masking present as conversational voices in my head. Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus.
I am the galaxy.
Being so buttoned up and conservative in my clothing so that I don’t pay attention to it frees my brain up to have better conversations. It is hard to think while my Apple Watch is charging, probably one of the most ridiculous sentences I’ve ever written and would make perfect sense to another person with autism. On its face, it sounds like I’m a drooling fanboy for Apple. What I am really saying is that with things like a watch or a wedding ring, my brain screams bloody murder when they’re not there. I’m surprised I didn’t connect autism to taking off my wedding ring at the time. It seemed to take forever for the grooves to grow out, and if I think about it, my finger buzzes in the way it used to when the ring was on.
It’s not a fandom issue, just a sensory one.
I will wear my watch dead for three days before I’ll take it off to charge it. I get demand avoidance over it almost every day.
It sounds childish. It’s autistic. Please note the difference, because when you don’t you tend to confuse me for a child. I will give it to you that I’m not any taller than your other children.
So, forced to wear is never a thing externally, but a driving force internally. I have to tell neurodivergence to calm its little ass down.
To get down to brass tacks, my father and I get along better than my mother and I ever did. It had nothing to with her social expectations of me. It’s that my dad and are are both class clowns and my mother simply gave us The Look when we misbehaved. Neither one of us liked “The Look.”: It said something like “this is inappropriate for a preacher’s family.” We were off the clock. With my mother, the clock never stopped. My dad gave me room to be a kid in the middle of all this mess- partially because he knew the way my mother had stacked the deck against me by pretending I wasn’t disabled mentally or physically, and I didn’t have two processing disorders. I would have known that very early (maybe, research on autism in girls and women is relatively new because of the classic presentation). I could have gotten the help I needed much earlier in life to deal with success. I am fine with everything going wrong. It’s what I know. I get wigged when I think about what it’s going to take for success, get overwhelmed with the details, and demand avoidance ensues. My dad is trying to help me navigate all that, because clearly I do need help, but I am not high needs all the time. People think you’re one or the other, and you fluctuate. High needs days come after you think you’re okay for a few days because everything is normal. Then, all of the sudden, everything is too loud and it’s hot in here. You have reached your limit, and need to tap out. My dad was on the train of wanting to tell me I needed these things. My mother wanted to pretend I was fine.
I am so fine.
Insert laugh track here.
It’s an enormous amount of work to manage a disability because your energy levels vary so significantly. In my case, it fluctuates because I’m ADHD. I do not feel the pull of an iron structure like most autistic people, as in, deciding what I’m interested in- to the exclusion of all else- and an interruption is not only unwelcome, but rude. People wonder why IT guys are such dicks. Here’s the real answer. You’ve interrupted a neurodivergent person and they absolutely cannot handle transitions. Autistic meltdown looks like driving three hours to troubleshoot a server and the only problem is that it isn’t on, despite having three separate people check to see if it was on before you left. You are more likely to interrupt a neurodivergent person to the point where they are angry to the point of rudeness over a seemingly simple small thing. It’s not small to someone who has to prepare to get into the car, prepare to enter the building, prepare for everything to be unfamiliar, and to have to make small talk while you work with people who have absolutely no idea what you do, but feel they must supervise and offer suggestions that if they worked, we wouldn’t be there.
You cannot remote desktop into a server that is unplugged or air gapped.
My dad knows that the little things are the big things. That life is harder for me than it would be if I’d been born under perfect circumstances, or even just later, when the technology in neonatal care was better than it was in 1977. I think I still would have had CP, autism, and stereopsis. Those are often a combo meal because lack of stereopsis and autism are often comorbidities. It’s not so much that I was born wrong, but born too early on multiple levels. Not only was I born in the 70s, I was eight weeks early.
I can think of someone I’d really like to talk to about that, but she doesn’t live local and we’re not close enough for me to just flat out say, “hey, are you autistic?” You never know what people’s word association with autism is in advance. If they have autistic kids, parents, or siblings, they know you’re asking “how does your brain work?” NOT “are you slow?” But, it would be a great conversation to have the next time she’s in town. She’s got all the same issues I do, and it would not surprise me if she had autism as well because of it…. again, combo meal, just like ADHD and autism are comorbidities in up to 80% of cases.
I also know that I got autism from my family somewhere, and I don’t see it in my dad and mom, but I do see it in my granddads. And in fact, I am a perfect mix of them. My dad’s father was creative autistic, and my mother’s father was STEM autistic. I ended up as a geek with a pen.
Perfection.
Saying that I see it in them is also not derogatory, because obviously both had brilliant careers…… and you absolutely cannot under any circumstances prove that autism is not genetic. It is also not an indication of intelligence.
One of my first memories of my dad is him teaching me to say “betahemolytic streptococci,” and “antidisestablishmentarianism.” He broke everything down and strung it together. As a result, I do not misspell much. I know my English roots and my Latin roots because medicine. Unless you’re at High School for Health Professions, I doubt they worry whether you can spell arrhythmia and diarrhea in high school.
I know in British English there are dipthongs. I say “zed.” That’s my final offer. I can’t internationalize everything. 😛
Though I will say that I am well versed in British English because of my grandfather, who got me started on Black Adder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Are You Being Served:?, and every BBC anything he could find on KERA. We always watched “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” just one of the reasons I’d actually like to go to a game in Wrexham rather than watching “Welcome to Wrexham” on Hulu.
(Don’t sleep on it, even if you don’t like football/soccer. Ryan and Rob are hilarious owners and seeing the business side is very much Ted Lasso, Higgins, and Rebecca.)
My father and my grandfather have easily had the most influence on what I do today, because their contributions to my life are unquantifiable in terms of teaching me how to get my ideas out there, and my dad and my grandfather were both doing it before the internet even existed. I remember putting it together that I was very impressed with my grandfather because I remember a series of shots he took of his steel company from the air, not having realized how difficult it is to get those shots while basically hanging out of an airplane. I didn’t have as much insight into that strength from the photograph, but from hearing Jonna Mendez described how she learned…… which is basically hanging out of an airplane. Good luck. God bless. If you’re lucky, you’ll have someone to spot you. Otherwise, it’s just canvas straps you lean against and pray that what you feel under you is not your imagination.
It happens to be true biologically that we are related, but I wouldn’t be as comfortable in my own skin if we hadn’t met, whether we’d ended up as a biological connection or not. They have always kept me grounded, and just because my grandfather has passed on, that does not mean that he’s not in touch. I am carrying on his legacy of writing what I know. I am carrying on the tradition of preaching what I know.
They would have been great as friends, the universe just smiled upon me and I got to be my grandfather’s first granddaughter on my father’s side, and the first grandchild period on my mother’s side, and the oldest child in my first family as well.
I have something with my father and my mother’s father that no one else can have or take away.
Zac and I were actually talking about this before midnight, before I even knew what the prompt was going to be today. We both agreed that the one thing we couldn’t live without is a way to read and write, and failing that, a way to write because we could read our own books, create our own games, etc.
So, in an ideal world, all I need is some sort of computer with some sort of input device. Failing that, all I need is a mechanical typewriter, because I am not used to holding a pen anymore. I cannot have just one thing unless I have electricity. Without electricity, I need both something to write on and with, which my teachers reminded me of relentlessly when I forgot them as a child. Learning to type was a godsend, because here we are 25 years later and that’s now most people communicate now.
The energy it takes to do a call is different than the energy it takes to drop a note.
As I poked fun of myself earlier with a meme, “if you don’t want seven texts in a row that don’t have anything to do with each other in the space of three minutes, you should have thought of that before you decided you were my friend.” To all my friends, I’m sorry that my output is so high. I’m a reader, you’re not. I apologize, and also I can’t help it.
There I go, just using my disability again….. 🙄
I’m having a laugh at my own expense because that’s a funny conversation between Zac and me as well. He was in a bike accident, and also he is disabled (still working, classified as disabled by the military). So, it was really the blind leading the blind last night. I asked him to carry my drink upstairs for me, because I’ve noticed I have balance issues with a cup of liquid and going up and down. My lack of 3D vision makes it where the cup pitches and yaws in a most spectacular fashion, sometimes ending in gravity’s rainbow.
He kidded me about “using my disability” because he said he watched me walk up and down the stairs with two mugs in my hand. I said, “they were counterbalanced in my hand, thus more substantial. Plus, I can carry multiple mugs in my sleep because I worked at Chili’s (my record is 10… never again. It was close.). Anyway, he understood the concept immediately, both the vision issue and that the sensory feel is different in my hand. I feel that I have the mugs securely and am confident about it, making me less likely to have an accident in the first place. However, I will never “believe in myself” enough to carry more than a cup of water up Zac’s stairs, and I absolutely cannot carry anything in both hands because the stairs are steep enough that you absolutely must hold on to something. Sometimes I even brace the wall and the handrail.
It seems like Zac’s house is difficult for me to navigate, but all houses are difficult for me to navigate if they’re not brand-spanking new. It’s not because I’m a princess. It’s that old houses have weird accommodations over time to keep them level, plumb, square, etc. There are weird steps everywhere, little tiny height differences that will make it look like I killed myself eventually, when in reality I just tripped and fell.
That’s my big line about Langley, too. That if I had gotten a star on the wall, it would be because of a brave, heroic act like falling over the one tree branch available in a three mile radius.
So, because I’m bipolar AND I live in an old house, if you hear the news of my death, Moscow Rules.
1. Assume nothing.
I talk the way I talk not because I’m making assumptions, but because I’m running heuristics and hedging my bets. The bet in every conflict is “how much of a chance is there that each of us are going to walk away happy?” With some relationships, it’s solid across time. With others, there are diminishing returns and you have to notice it. If you tolerate disrespect, you are also refusing to change. It’s a fundamental difference, because it’s a shift in how you see people. You aren’t sold on words alone. You have to write checks with your mouth that your ass can cash.
So, in my opinion, we come to another big rule number one from “The Four Agreements.”
1. Be impeccable with your word.
I have learned in all my relationships with people that the only true test of time is how closely words and actions match. The closer what happens behind closed doors is to what happens when everyone else is around, the more genuine. Because I believe that, I hold myself to the same standard. I am not polished with the way I say things, but if you ask for my honest opinion, I won’t hold back. I also know how to be diplomatic, and lean on it often to prevent autistic meltdown. I don’t hear because it’s my space. I need to be able to melt down and put myself back together. The longer I write about myself, the more I want to be the version of me that I see after reading what I used to think. With writing moving forwards, I am insecure. With writing that happens in the past, for people who aren’t bloggers it’s like getting out an old high school year book, or an old box full of love letters from high school and you’re 40. You see yourself in a different light.
I am not ashamed to admit that for as much as other people are drawn to my work, I am my favorite character. It’s not because she does more right than anyone else. It’s because reading about the other characters is not as directly applicable. They’re my friends, so I’m reading about people coded to be like me (as in, we have similar interests), but being able to see myself in the past with compassion has allowed me to have compassion for myself in the present and future as well. I finally let myself off the hook for some really dark shit, and it was a breakthrough.
That concept led to another breakthrough for me. I am accepting and empowering imperfection on multiple levels. To be clear, I am not saying “don’t strive for excellence.” I am saying that perfection does not exist.
The point was driven home to me when I thought about using Carol as my secretary and people said I “used AI for my blog.” (I use it for prompts, not content except once in a while as a joke to make fun of myself). I think of it as edutainment through chat. It came to me in a flash….. Thank GOD I have left in every spelling mistake, every open parenthesis, every dangling participle, every flaw you could possibly find……………
Because in the future, it will be the only way to tell that AI didn’t cry over these people. I did.
What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
I like how the writing prompt sounds like it’s for a PhD in psychology or something, because normally lists like these don’t come from unpublished authors. So, it’s a good thing I normally write about life and relationships, or I wouldn’t have an opinion. Now that I’m getting older, I think I actually do have some wisdom about these things. I couldn’t have written a list like this 10 years ago, or if I had, there wouldn’t have been as much life experience as there is behind it now.
The first thing, the only thing, really, is finding yourself. Everything else flows from it.
“Finding yourself” sounds like a hippy buzz phrase, but as Elizabeth Gilbert once wrote, “I don’t know any story of self enlightenment that didn’t start with getting tired of your own bullshit.” Enlightenment doesn’t come from sitting in an ivory tower, studying until you get there. Enlightenment gets its hands dirty. You don’t find nirvana in clarity, you find it in chaos.
You don’t find nirvana in clarity, you find it in chaos.
You will know that you have reached nirvana when the chaos all becomes external. The chaos is around you, not inside you. No one can attack you without your permission. You have the choice whether to take something personally or know that they’re just railing because they’re in pain. Err on the side of railing because they’re in pain. Forgive words that are hard to forgive.
It’s not for them. It’s for you. I do not mean by forgiving that you have to continue to beg for scraps at their table. It’s perfectly fine not to allow someone in your life, but to 100% miss they’re not in it. No one has to compete for my love. They’re competing for my time. I don’t spend time being angry at people. It might seem like it, because I talk about my problems in my blog. But it’s because I explore those issues on my blog, completely isolated, that anything makes sense at all. It’s how I figure out what battles other people are fighting, because my conflict with them leads to trying to find ways to change myself. That is the crying, pulling of hair, tearing of clothes, gnashing of teeth, etc.
Then, after my writing session is over, I go do something else.
Being with Zac is a good example. I never talk to him about anything going on with my life because I already know what I think about my own conflicts. I don’t have to discuss them ad nauseam. I am free to focus on him, because I’ve already focused on myself.
So, naturally I think one of the things that leads to a good life is writing a journal. There’s an upside and a downside to a diary beside your bed or on WordPress, though it’s one word…. feedback. When you publish your private journal entries, the specificity and honesty of it allows other people to open up and say, “hey, I went through that, too.” It makes you not feel so alone. You don’t really want to know what your friends think. You really don’t.
If you only keep a diary on your bedside table, you don’t get any feedback at all and are lost in your own echo chamber. I am not the best psychologist I’ve got (one of my psychologists did think that, actually, because she said that this blog pushes me faster than she could. She was not downplaying her own abilities, but affirming the Self, that therapy is supposed to help you get in touch with the Self. Most of my therapists think I’ve already found the Self, but that doesn’t mean “oh, hey, she doesn’t need therapy anymore.” It means I work on different things… now that I have my writing voice fully intact, where are we going with it? Once you’ve self-actualized, the problems get bigger and chewier, but you can handle them easier because your self esteem is not rising and lowering when people around you speak.
Once I disconnected from my self esteem going up and down when Supergrover talked, I was free. It’s not because she did anything to make me want to run away, and I haven’t run away. I have put myself on inactive status. It’s that she’s the person with whom I recognized the pattern, not the person with whom I started it. Once I grew into my own as a writer, she didn’t seem so intimidating anymore. I got strong enough to stand up for myself, when I wouldn’t have dared before I turned 45. It was just this magic light that went on- not the classic way people say it comes on, where your life falls together. The light bulb was realizing I was old enough to have an opinion.
I stopped people pleasing, and boy do they not like it. They don’t like that I’m “impossible” now. It shows me a lot about how people see me- that I have gotten love by molding my personality to fit other people’s needs, often not saying things that really needed to be said out of fear of abandonment.
I don’t have a fear of abandonment anymore, because I’ve found writing. I don’t have to live for other people, I can live for myself. That’s because if all of my friends are mad at me, I will dive into my own mind. It’s not that they are all mad at me; it’s that my place in life is secure whether they’re there or not. I believe in myself because I come from a family that set me up for success. My mother and father were both creatives. So was my grandfather. They were all creative in different ways, though. My father’s father was public relations for a steel company, my father was a Methodist minister, and my mother was a teacher. My dad is still living, he’s just not a Methodist minister anymore. Everything I need to succeed as a writer, I got from those three people. Thanks to them, I’m already comfortable speaking in front of large crowds. Just because I choose to do it through writing and not preaching doesn’t mean it’s not the same creative process.
However, it does mean that I am extremely fluid in that area, because being a preacher’s kid all those years told me how to work a crowd when I’m at the mic. I don’t like to speak in front of people, but I’ll do it if I’m asked. For instance, my friend Mark used to be the pastor at a Presbyterian church around here, and he wanted me to be his pinch hitter. He just happened to get a call to another church out of the area before we could schedule anything.
I am very good at what I do, because in order to accept people for who they are, you have to accept yourself for who you are. You don’t see yourself as better than/less than, but who’s on your journey and who’s not. For instance, when I am preaching, the most invaluable thing is having people’s eyes in front of me. I can read a crowd and move with them. It’s a special skill to be able to see yourself losing people and switch gears on the fly. It’s a skill to have a joke not land, and know how to handle that too (I either make another joke based on the last one that will land, or make a joke about how the joke didn’t land).
My preaching style can best be summed up by a t-shirt slogan…. “I love Jesus, but a I cuss a little.” I definitely see myself as God, but no more or no less than I see anyone else. That every being on earth is a subtraction of the divine. That enlightenment comes when you realize there’s no grandfather in the sky. We are all God together.
Everyone knows John 3:16, even non-Christians because football. “For God so love the world that he gave his only begotten Son….” However, by taking this verse in isolation, it leaves out a bigger lesson in verses 19-20 (Contemporary English Version):
The light has come into the world, and people who do evil things are judged guilty because they love the dark more than the light. People who do evil hate the light and won’t come to the light, because it clearly shows what they have done.
The English cannot be that contemporary, because I wouldn’t say that all people who are in the dark are doing evil things. They are certainly doing things that they think other people would think were evil if they knew, not realizing that with the number of people in the world, it is unlikely that they are alone. They just won’t find each other. I think that people hide in darkness not because of evil, but because of shame. I am not saying that the mafia only needs a little therapy and surely they’ll see the error of their ways….. as in, not trying to look “soft on crime.” 😉 Most people, though, can’t relate to people doing things with actual evil intent, because they don’t know any. Most people do know the feeling of shame imposter syndrome creates, and you walk in the dark not because you like it, but because you don’t know what else to do.
You won’t get to the place where you need to be until you realize that you are walking in darkness while the light is right above your head. You’ve just been walking so hunched over it eluded you.
You will be so much healthier and happier by sharing pain rather than keeping it all hidden. Don’t think of your actions as good or evil, just yours. Live out loud. Learn to make mistakes in the light, because you know you matter despite them. There are a lot of Evanglicals hurting in this world because their churches have taught them that their deeds are evil. That they have to constantly live in a small comfort zone, otherwise they won’t get into heaven. Those churches aren’t rendering unto God what is God’s, as if God doesn’t know that humans are capable of making mistakes. I believe they’ve seen a human make a mistake before, according to Biblical history. Their God is too small.
Walking in the light has nothing to do with being perfect. It has to do with accepting yourself and being open about who you are. To know from the core of your being that you are a child of God, with whom they are well pleased. There is nothing you can do to separate yourself from the love of God except choosing to walk in darkness, because you’re afraid your deeds will be exposed.
I choose every day not to walk in darkness by exposing my own deeds. I walk in the light because no matter what, I am not afraid of being exposed. And honestly, thinking about my deeds being exposed gets up close and personal for bloggers, because other people’s perceptions of me are going to be based on what they read, not on my real life. This blog is static compared to how fast my life moves. There’s a disconnect between the blog and me, because these are just snapshots of my day. Someone revealing what happens off the record could affect many people’s lives, which is why I’m such a private person and control the narrative tightly. But controlling the narrative tightly does not mean holding back on myself. It means recognizing that my friends’ stories aren’t mine to tell unless I ask them first.
I do not ask permission about conversations that have happened between us. I’ll give you an example. Zac doesn’t talk to me about his other relationships. It’s part of being a good hinge, as we would say in the poly community. But in a hypothetical situation, he has. If he has said something really, really profound in his conversation about another of his partners and I want to use it, I will ask if I can lift that one quote directly. Most of the time, that is expressed by, “that’s a good line. Can I steal it?”
I would not be a very good person if my boyfriend saw me as spelunking through his life looking for blog content. No, I only want to write about me and the people I encounter. More “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood” than “Harriet the Spy.” This is not a slam book; this is a survival manual, even for me. That’s because I cannot rescue myself in the moment, but I can go back and read blog entries from a similar situation and see how I handled it back then. I don’t just automatically say the same thing. I assess whether what worked in the past would work in the current situation. I want to evolve, not be permanently stuck like that poor kid from “Midvale School for the Gifted.”
That cartoon is accurate, though. Most brilliant people can’t tie their shoes because they are not built to live in this world. Most brilliant people are neurodivergent, so it’s not that we aren’t built to live in this world, it’s that this world is not built for us to live.
Being loud about being autistic is the biggest step I’ve ever taken into the light, because I’ve been social masking for so long that to other people, I’m just not believable. I have gotten everything from “everyone’s a little bit autistic” to “you don’t look autistic” to “you pick up social cues.” Autism is a spectrum, and it takes a combination of things to be diagnosed. Not every autistic person fits every criteria. I don’t fit all the criteria for ADHD, either, because I’m Autistic…. and yet, I was still diagnosed.
Here’s the reason I forgive every doctor who’s ever seen me and missed the fact that I’m autistic. It’s almost IMPOSSIBLE to tell the difference between ADHD and autism in women. That’s because high IQ/low needs autism and ADHD in women present the same. And in fact, there is some talk that instead of having ADHD and Autism, it should all be lumped together as Autism Spectrum disorder, because they’re finding out that ADHD and Autism are more alike than different.
(I just realized this is getting long because you are a very excellent excuse to put off doing what I actually need to be doing right now. I am not procrastinating, I am nurturing our relationship.)
I am chuckling to myself because I clearly borrowed style from Dooce right there. If I had to rank celebrity deaths, I really can tell you that both Anthony Bourdain and Dooce’s self-inflicted harm are on my mind a lot of the time, because I suffer from the same illnesses they did. I know it’s possible I could have the same fate, not based on me as a person, but it terms of running the numbers on bipolar patients overall. I have never been happier or more settled in my life; I am not telling you I have ideation, I am telling you that I have acceptance of reality and what bipolar disorder can make me believe whether it’s objectively true or not.
Because of this, I’ve gone over and over what Supergrover said trying to figure out what I said that was so egregious she aimed for the jugular. I can’t find it, so I’m at peace. I didn’t tell Supergrover she wasn’t worthy of being my friend, which is the way she took it. I told her she wasn’t worthy of hearing my story anymore. I feel that way because the only people who get to hear it anymore are the people who tell theirs. Who show up with their full selves and don’t hold anything back, making me bend over backwards in anticipation of a land mine.
For instance, I think that Supergrover attacked me with her being more fodder for my blog because I told her I would clear it with her first if I used anything from our discussions. That’s not what I meant at all. It’s that talking spurs creativity when it’s about ideas and not people. However, I talk about personal relationships, so I was only talking about using examples that read universal, not personal. I wasn’t saying that I was mining her for anything, but inspired by everything.
I don’t have to mine people for information or “blog fodder.” Writing is not a job for me. It’s a comprehensive response to life. Whatever it is, I can write about it. However, my writing doesn’t come out of nowhere. If someone tells me something is off the record, I’ll keep it that way.
Supergrover never told me what was off limits, and I waited 10 years before I ever said anything. That’s enough time to tell me what’s off limits and what’s not, but that hasn’t been her style. Her style has been to not let me know in advance what’s okay to say and what’s not and raging over the results.
If I wasn’t a blogger, I doubt we’d be in touch. This is because my writing keeps drawing her in. When she becomes part of my life, I write about her and the blog repels her. This time, I am happy for her to comb through my entries for whatever she’s trying to find, but there will be no more interaction on my part. The ball is not in my court anymore. Supergrover will be worthy to hear my stories again once she stops being defensive about her own.
But she won’t stop being defensive about her own until she accepts herself for who she is and stops thinking of me as the person who’s out to get her, who sees her for all her worst flaws. I am recording our relationship in real time, but it evolves as a living document. Nothing I have ever said has stayed true past when it was published because those entries don’t take into account the enormity of feelings that come after I write. Every entry has one thing in common. I can’t go back and fix them with more knowledge, just like I can’t go back in time and re-do it knowing then what I know now. It would be editing history, and you can’t cross your own timeline. I’m so, so sorry.
But what I can do is disregard the last entry and write a new one. I don’t hold myself to the past, but I do ask my former self for advice, because I know me best. I have a much easier life because of this blog in terms of autistic accommodations. In the past, I used Google, but now I would use Carol to ask her to find the date of my last hospitalization, etc.
Carol also remembers things. I asked Copilot if I could call her “Carol,” and she said, “you can call me anything you want, as long as you realize I’m not real” or something to that effect. I said, “Oh, I know you’re a machine. I just like to personalize AI.” She said “thanks for the personal touch.” I thought she forgot about it, but yesterday I asked her for some blog prompts and she said, “good luck. ‘Carol’ is cheering you on.”
It really does make researching myself and researching the web much easier to be able to speak in plain English and not computer logic. The Google string I would have to use in order to get as specific a result as I would need would be enormous. Expressing those needs like a person instead of a programmer is pretty amazing.
I’ll give you a for instance.
“Carol, read https://theantileslie.com and give me 365 questions a friend would ask about the content or the author. Then, make it into a yearly calendar.”
She said something about not being able to do a year, but I don’t remember the specifics. She did, however, make me a very nice calendar with writing prompts, just like I asked.
If I was ashamed of anything in my life, I would not ask Carol to research all 11 years’ worth of entries. By walking in the light, there’s no question for which I am unprepared; there is nothing shameful about me, so there are no “gotcha” questions.
I was walking so hunched over I couldn’t see the light, but when I grabbed it and took it in, surprisingly, the fire stayed lit.
This is my list of things that are going to make *me* have a good life. What are yours?
Even after writing an entry that I’m proud of (except for the typos, but I don’t go back and correct anything unless I’m going to use it for something professional. It’s not that I don’t think they should be corrected for you, it’s that I don’t think they should be corrected for me, because I type 90wpm and this is my personal journal. Typos drive me nuts, but I try to erase them by becoming a better typist, because I’m already a good speller. Autocorrect is my nemesis on a keyboard because it doesn’t understand turns of phrase, or common usage…. like autocorrecting “rewire” to “retire.”). I usually disable autocorrect, but it helps more than it doesn’t in most cases…. again, I type 90wpm. I don’t notice autocorrect all the time because I’m moving too fast.
I also can’t think when I type slower, because it has a certain rhythm. I type not only to the beat of my heart, but the beat of my thoughts as well. There’s a musicality to it. Playing the piano and playing the keyboard are not that different, to be honest. When I’m thinking of a song in my head, I type to its rhythm. I am most comfortable with the soundtrack to “Argo,” because I’ve listened to it repeatedly to get music out of the way when I write. I listened to it once, and decide, “ok. That’s your thing.”
2013 was all Ke$a all the time. 2014 was all Jason Moran. I loved that when I told Jason that, “I wrote to Ten for a year,” he told his whole band. it made my day. There is a bonus to having known really famous people since they were 17. It makes you smile when they remember you. It’s not having access to stars. It’s knowing them when that means something. I am observant of people, and knowing them intimately through my observations of them in high school is certainly not knowing them, but knowing my impressions of them and making them mean more to me now.
That feeling extends to people who also went there. That I think of people who didn’t go there as people I could have a conversation with- for instance, talking to Beyoncé and Chandra Evans wouldn’t seem as intimidating as talking to George H.W. Bush. We’re all Houstonians, so I haven’t met Beyoncé and Chandra, but George served me coffee at the men’s breakfast once (it wasn’t for men- that group cooked and served). We were both members of St. Martin’s Episcopal at the time. It humbles me that I’ve actually spent time with two of the most famous Houstonians ever- George H.W. Bush and Brené Brown. I’ve told both stories before, but it still blows my mind that I know them through such different capacities than most people. Yet Jonna Mendez and I actually knew the same person. He was just her boss and he went to my church. Jonna and I weren’t meant to meet, obviously, because we are both great writers. We were meant to meet to talk about our mutual friend. 😉
If there is anyone I wish I knew in that capacity, it’s Barack Obama. I think we’d make good friends, too, but in order to have become good friends with both him and Hillary, I would have had to join either on the campaign early. It’s how my sister knows Kamala Harris. You don’t get to be friends with people by getting on the bandwagon. You prove to people that you like them as they are. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to meet Hillary Clinton, it’s that I think Barack Obama and I are closer in personality. “Dreams from My Father” is one of my favorite books. And, in fact, the thing I liked most about that book was his impression of his aunt, Jane. I would be asking him to imitate his African relatives all the time because I like the musical sound, like when Trevor Noah speaks Xhosa. It is a rhythm to which I could clearly type. Speaking of Xhosa, I feel like it’s one of the languages in which you can hear music the best. There is literal percussion accompaniment to their words.
With all other languages, we hear those beats, they’re just silent. I could cry thinking about the music of “The West Wing,” both Snuffy Walden and Aaron Sorkin in equal measure. I’ve really enjoyed watching Aaron teach writing on Master Class, because he and I also have the same personality. Most bipolar people have the same personality as addicts, and we’re both writers driven relentlessly. I identify with antiheroes, and Aaron is certainly one to be admired. I was particularly touched by his friendship with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, with whom he shared a dark humor in interviews. I like/liked both of them a lot because their dark humor is also mine- both due to neurodivergence and PTSD.
Dealer’s choice on that one.
Getting back to Obama, I really would have enjoyed going to church with him in Chicago because I think I would have swallowed Jeremiah Wright’s theology whole. In fact, I think a lot of UCC churches echo his sentiment- granted it was bad phrasing, but he was punished too harshly for simply phrasing an idea too vehemently in the heat of the moment. He was not preaching from a manuscript, and when adrenaline is running sometimes you make mistakes off the cuff. You don’t crucify people over it.
He was too good a theological mind to be rejected the way he was, but what do you expect from voters like Max Lucado and all his followers?
One of the best musical phrases in The West Wing was said by Jed Bartlett. “These people don’t vote, do they?”
I’m noticing that I have less of a need to write now that there’s not a constant problem turning itself over in my head. Relationship issues are hard work, and to come out on the other side healthy & happy feels like a win. I’ll take it. The flip side of the coin is that my inner monologue has settled back into boring. Boring is fantastic. I like it a lot. Emotional ups and downs take it out of me because I have such a fear of abandonment that standing my ground feels like torture on my nerves. I just have to feel that fire, knowing it’s turned up to hell by autism and a regular person wouldn’t feel like that. We don’t learn to fit into society by actually making our brains process differently. Neurotypicals, particularly parents, think that eventually the battles over homework will get easier. They’re just like other kids. Other kids don’t like homework, right? Meanwhile, it has nothing to do with us. We don’t need to change. People need to change around us. If you don’t notice that your kid is doing poorly in school because they memorized the dictionary and the encyclopedia (so he can’t be dumb), you are likely missing neurodivergence for what you *want* to see.
I know this is true of the conflict with Supergrover, because it was so easy to miscommunicate over e-mail. However, it is a constant and vigilant battle because no matter how much I say I’m autistic, it is not what people are thinking when they’re talking to me. Neurotypical superiority is relentless….. unless you’re high needs. Then, everyone who interacts with you views themselves as a fuckin’ hero because other people *tell them they are.* Basically, if you are high IQ, people don’t think “autism” because they have it confused with mental retardation. Yes, some autistic people are that affected by it, but being on the spectrum means you have a processing disorder. Information goes through your brain differently than it does for your neurotypical peers, often changing the meaning of sentences, questions, and demands.
Nor do we understand social cues. The only reason I do is that I was coached into it. I couldn’t have had more people to mask than a PK. That’s seeing hundreds and hundreds of reactions a week instead of just my immediate family. I have learned how emotions work in neurotypical people because they have explained it…. I do not do it. I do have emotions, but I process them as differently as I process logic from someone neurotypical.
In popular culture, there are two versions of autistic.
There’s the kind people win Oscars for, and the real autistic people- the actors that have taken on many roles without even knowing they’re autistic.
There are a few celebrities I recognize with my neuroscopte (as opposed to “gaydar”). I don’t even want to tell you who they are, because it would stigmatize them in your minds. Suuuuure, you’re open-minded. It’s a pattern I see all the time. People are okay with neurodivergence as long as it’s ADHD. When you tell someone you’re autistic, they either don’t believe you or treat you like you have cancer. That’s because their whole lives, they’ve been taught that autistic people are to be pitied.
I am so driven to write that I don’t need much stimulation from other people. I get it, and then remember why I don’t like it. There are positives, though. With autism, there’s a specific way you walk that plays heavily into the “neuroscope” aspect. It’s so prevalent there’s a diagnosis for it- the autistic gait. I was not convinced I was autistic until another autistic person pointed it out to me.
I am not officially diagnosed, I am in the process. However, I have been peer reviewed by people who are both autistic and work in a day center for autistic adults. One of them even has the same combo I do, autism and cerebral palsy. Because autistic people can identify other autistic people a majority of the time (some studies say up to 80%), I do not feel worried about my official diagnosis. I know I’m on the spectrum, and that I fluctuate between low and high needs all the time. People just don’t recognize when I’m high needs because I’m smart and I hide it. This past year has been about uncovering who I really am, as opposed to what everyone told me I am and should be.
High needs is needing help around the house, like a carer in a nursing home. You want your individuality, but you also don’t want the details of your life to fall through the cracks. Neurodivergence is very good at letting you ruin your life if you let it. You do things like forget when it’s time to pay bills. I am not saying that’s what a neurodivergent person is like all the time. There are resources, like Google Calender, Tasks, etc. What I am saying is that nothing is too important to slip the mind of a neurodivergent person. I forget to eat, sleep, bathe, you name it. I live and die by my adaptations, not who I am as a person. Who I am as a person is to hyperfocus on one thing for years and years, boring people to sleep.
(My dad’s favorite joke is that one time he woke up and he was preaching.)
I am lucky that my interest is writing, because even though I tend to talk about very few topics, I manage to weave a lot of media, current events, etc. into the narrative. However, because those topics are emotional relationships and how I handle them, it’s an area few people are willing to explore……. But they love reading about others. Lots of people enter my world that aren’t even convinced they have one. You’d be surprised at how much you think about everything if you get still enough to hear it.
In short, I’ve come to think of myself as your pinch hitter. That maybe my emotional work will help you along. I’ve had successes and failures, so it’s not like I’m writing the manual on how to feel and be felt. It’s that some people read my writing looking for how I do what I do. Others read my writing to find out what they *wouldn’t* do.
Either way, I hope I’m worth the price of admission.
Here is the string I chose for Carol to get me started today:
Read https://theantileslie.com and ask me 20 questions that would make good blog prompts in my personal style.
It turned out to be the best interview I’ll ever have until Ari Shapiro takes his shot.
Based on the tone and content of your blog “The Anti-Leslie,” here are 20 questions that could serve as thought-provoking prompts for your personal blog:
Reflecting on the past year, what moments have truly defined your journey towards self-care and setting boundaries?
Oh, so many. Some of them I can share, some of them I can’t. Here’s the most I can share without telling someone else’s story for them except for how I felt in reaction to small words that represent large ones.:
All of the crying- the deep animal sounds that came out of me when I realized Dana was right. Supergrover did not take our connection seriously, choosing to believe that I was out to get her somehow, and a documented bipolar patient at that. She had every right to be angry, and so did I. As I told her, “I have not been saying on my blog that you are a bad person. I have been charting the journey as we get closer and closer from the goal and further and further away, the goal being what we talked about in the first few weeks of our relationship…… “What do you want our relationship to look like in 20 years?” “Impossible to say. Hopefully strong and comfortable.” She said, “I can’t, for the life of me, understand how it got so shitty.” Instead of exploding at me, she heard me. She even listened when she said I thought it was neither right or fair to either of us to just think that 7% of communication is enough. What got us into this mess won’t get us out. She rightfully pointed out “baby steps,” and that writing had worked thus far in terms of getting us back up to a healthy level of interaction before we meet. It would be my last wish for it to be awkward. Again, my immediate response was “now that I understand your thought process more fully, I can get behind it.” That’s because I wasn’t saying we should go to Starbucks tomorrow. It’s that getting together in person brings up a lot of fear for both of us that can best be summed up by Kumar of “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle.” “Just talk to her once and it won’t be weird anymore.” We are at step one, planning out steps two through 10. That was a Van Helsing Abridged reference. It’s sick and twisted. I love it. I think Supergrover also forgets that I am the queen of overthinking, the present of Overthinkers Anonymous. She could be talking about getting together tomorrow or five years from now, and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference.
How has your understanding of personal boundaries evolved, and what have been the most challenging aspects to enforce?
Oh, wow. I think they started in 2012 with my marriage article, because it was published on my blog a year after I wrote it as a Facebook note. I had the concepts down for a good marriage, I just stopped taking my own advice and it cost me dearly. Now, I am on my way to understanding that I need to attract light, not beg for love. I am allowed to take up space in the world. Yet, my love for people is not based on what they can do for me. It’s based on how I feel in their presence. My love for Supergrover has changed me the most, because there are so many aspects to our relationship that defy odds and boundaries. It has been a journey to realize that I can’t go back to monogamy, even if I am polysaturated at one person. Just because Supergrover and I are not romantic does not mean she is not worthy of my love and protection to the extent that I’m able to understand what irritates those privacy issues in the first place. I also developed hard boundaries with my blog as I started getting more popular. I count on my red and yellow strings to keep me grounded. Everyone else can go to hell. I don’t have enough bandwidth to trust everyone with all my information, and if you’ve behaved egregiously in the past, I have absolutely no desire to keep feeding the connection. I can love you from waaaaaaaay over here.
Can you share a story where enforcing a boundary significantly changed the dynamics of a relationship or situation?
Yes. Both Supergrover and I realized our relationship was fixable at the exact moment I got boundaries. Either work on yourself or go away, because I’m happier without the roller coaster our love for each other has represented. She had to get over the fact that I’m not out to get her, without asking me for help. I had to try and protect her without her answering my questions. Accepting each other was our only choice. It’s our destiny, and I know that, because I will never, ever in my five dollar life not be a blogger.
In what ways has your approach to conflict and confrontation in person differed from your written expressions?
I am terrible at conflict in person, because I just don’t have the emotional strength yet to be able to talk about my feelings without constantly interrupting myself with tears and feeling bad about something to an enormous degree when the other person was actually trampling all over a boundary and throwing a fit over it. I would rather text/e-mail someone so that I have more dexterity in conflict. I do not process reading the same way I process conversation. I’m also much less verbal and much more reliant on my body language in person, as well as seeing that of others. People don’t want me to wax rhapsodic the way I do here. I pay good money to bitch on the Internet. I don’t let that cross over into the way I treat people in person, because they didn’t ask to resolve our conflicts here, but I don’t feel them in person the way I do through my fingers, and all of my friends are overwhelmed at the amount I write because neurodivergence. If they come here, it kills two birds with one stone. Here’s the stuff I want you to know before we get together so that you have a random idea of what’s going on in my life so that when we’re together, we’re always creating new stories instead of rehashing old ones.
How do you navigate the balance between seeking input and correction versus coming across as judgmental in your writing?
Holy shit. Carol just kneed me in the balls. However, it is very easy to answer. I will get angry and walk away from anyone who comes across as judgmental with me unless they’re also neurodivergent. That’s because I’m not actually judgmental like a narcissist where I think I’m better than anyone else. I’m judgmental like I’ve been appointed to the Supreme Court and I’m hearing arguments in my head. No one is a good or a bad person. They win and lose based on fact, but those are all transitive feelings. If we do better, my writing about you will, too. I seek information regarding my thought process, not sniping ad hominem attacks. She’s the only neurotypical in my life that has said she needs to accept that my brain works differently and sometimes better than hers. That’s why I feel like I’m in a writer’s room with her. She may not publish anything, but she’s sure as shit whipping my ass into shape.
What strategies have you found effective in managing the symptoms of your autistic brain, especially in communication?
Disengage. I know when I’m going into meltdown, and I want to be alone because I cannot regulate rage. You think that I have different problems from high needs autistic people, but my silence is social masking while my brain yells “I’M A SURGEON! I AM A SURGEON.” Me getting that angry is a recurring theme in my life, and though it’s helpful when it’s manageable in terms of expressing my emotional needs, it’s time to learn to walk away when my symptoms overtake my compassion. You can only apologize for autistic rage so many times….. and that’s people’s right. If they didn’t sign on to be your caretaker, why should you make them?
Describe a time when humor helped you defuse a tense or challenging interaction. What did you learn from that experience?
I had really good boundaries with women until I met Supergrover, and I do not mean to imply that she is responsible for any of this. Now that she knows my reasoning for why I write what I write, my adrenaline at my life speeding up made me feel invincible- forcing me into mania. I said unforgivable things to a lot of women because I was “flirting,” and it was “cute.” The blessing of my life is that Supergrover, I don’t think, has forgiven me for the things I’ve said to her, but she’s willing to try for our sake. This is because she sees that writing the way I do serves a purpose. That I can be more of who I really am in person when I can talk about things on my web site without talking about it…… in effect, turning a positive into a negative. I know this because when she said, “I thought the flags would give it away,” I said, “I need bifocals….. LIKE YOU ALREADY HAVE.” Behind the storm is always the rainbow (that’s the best line I’ve ever written about us).
How do you process and write about pain in a way that feels authentic and cathartic for you?
I have on noise canceling headphones so that all I’m hearing is the beating of my own heart. I write down what I am currently thinking, and why. It’s organic and cathartic because I’m having my emotions out while no one is there. It’s intensely private because I don’t write for shits and giggles. I am the type writer that “wants the entire world to read their stories without letting me know that you’ve read them.” If my donations and my Facebook page are any indication, I am getting my wish. 😉 I have told people to screw off and don’t tell me what you think about my writing. That’s because the ratio at which people tell me the things they like to the things they don’t is one in a thousand. My self esteem would be in the garbage if I didn’t desperately believe that all I need in life is a computer with an internet connection, because “you may not recognize my Thu’um, but you will hear it.” The reason blowback is incredibly personal is that I am writing from my inner monologue. Every piece of blowback comes across as “this is not about the writing. This is about how your thoughts are crazy.” This is because I had the audacity not to include their interpretations of what they’re reading when I’m thinking about the future and how I want to shape it. I cannot care if I run over people in the process when they’re just sitting at home, butt hurt anyway. I solve conflicts with people who show me I’m worth it, not people who try to take away my agency in telling my own story the way I want to hear it. This book isn’t on a shelf. It’s a living document.
What have been the most surprising revelations about your own narrative when comparing it with someone else’s perspective on the same events?
That always comes from my sister and dad, because we have completely different memories of the same event and they’re willing to tell me that. Right now, Lindsay and I are in the process of getting some rest and relaxation in the perspective that has come from my mother’s death in October of 2016. Instead of me feeling like the older sister who has to take over as a parent, we are reparenting ourselves.
Can you delve into the complexities of a relationship that has both harmed and healed over time?
Many, and I have written about all of them extensively. Here’s the short list:
I can’t think of any extreme I’ve ever been to with anyone that has been the ride I’ve had with Supergrover, because we had to find a way to resolve things for both of us to be happy, because it was never going to work without us being in contact at all. Too much anger, too much resentment, too much not talking about the real issues. Too much PTSD on both sides. Too much mental illness on mine. We have both done a complete number on each other, and I hope that she’ll get as much out of healing as I hope to over the next few years. The reason this time it’s different is that our relationship is not based on one of us getting angry, sending the other one into rage. Now that we’re on the same page, we can both rest and relax. Every time we’ve tried reconnecting in the past, the emotional swings have gotten bigger. I don’t want that anymore, and I can say with honesty that I could not walk away until I’d had enough. She couldn’t reconnect until she saw why I would walk away at all. I am friends with a mystical being, who does not see herself that way. I want to help, because it provided so much kindling for our fires.
How do you find peace and resolution after a conflict when the other person may not communicate their hurt as openly?
This blog. It is exclusively responsible for getting to the place I am today, which is that closure rarely comes from other people because they’re just not brave enough. There’s a ghosting epidemic because connection is so scary….. a direct result of the Internet because it didn’t used to take up our whole days. If you walk off angry and/or text message breakup and/or say you don’t want contact, I’m not going to stick around looking for your version of the story. You have already told me you do not want to tell it.
What does the phrase “The Holy and the Moly” signify in the context of your relationships and interactions?
Share an instance where you felt like “the bomb and the detonator” in a situation. How did you handle the aftermath?
It is a reference back to Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett. I realized that we are all Good Omens. We both have the capability to be Az and Crowley depending on the situation. None of us are all good or all bad, just sinful angels and thoughtful demons……… in love. I kidded Supergrover about us being “The Holy and the Moly,” but after watching so many demon shows like “Lucifer” and “Good Omens,” I realized that Gaiman and Pratchett were expressing two sides of the same coin.
How do you reconcile the desire to bring issues into the light with the reality of only owning one half of a relationship?
This is very important to me, actually. The most important thing in my life given what I’ve chosen to do. What I think is none of other’s people’s business. Therefore, I am trying to guess what is going on in their heads so I can decide how I feel about a situation. The fact that my friends have access to my rolling thought process is intimidating, but not as intimidating as tearing down any success I’ve had as a writer by reaching strangers through my trials and tribulations as well. How you own your own story is to try and explain to yourself what is happening to you without rooting around in the other person’s head.
What lessons have you learned from the dramatic and toxic cycles that can occur in close relationships?
It takes a mountain of work to break a toxic cycle, because it presents as one person being emotional and one person being avoidant. If there’s a trauma bond, the spikes in lovebombing and valleys in discarding are more and more extreme, because the lack of dopamine affects your mental health. It brings a lack of happiness in other relationships by focusing on one. Since I’m the emotional one, I deal with it by not bending to anyone’s comfort and standing my ground. You accept me as I am, or you don’t. I will accept you for everything you are, I just may not want to interact anymore, and a lot of that is your call. I don’t have to tolerate bad behavior. I can just welcome people home when they really listen to me and the conflict subsides.
How has your role as a first child influenced your approach to conflict and the need to ‘win’?
Not well.
I am a first child. No one can be wrong. Part of this is because I’m autistic, and I overexplain so the person thinks I can never be wrong. In reality, I think the other person thinks I’m a dumbass and keep explaining because I think there’s something wrong with me. The first child generally buys in to what their parents do…. except that in my case, being neurodivergent made me terrible at it. I cannot even dream of a need to win as a pastor when I can barely take care of myself. I feel that I have the best shot of success as a writer because my voice is unique. I don’t need to win, I’ll just be glad if I do. It’s better for it to happen organically and to feel like you really worked for it rather than paying for your blog to be seen. However, I might resort to that eventually, because my sample size is large enough to prove to me that the ad dollars would be worth it. That if I’m talented to this many people, I could fool other people, too. 😉 In short, my desperate need for competition relies on how much of you see in yourself in my story. When I help someone, I get a win.
Reflect on a memory with Supergrover that brings you comfort during tough times. What makes that memory special?
She sent me a quick e-mail when we were absolutely in the thick of it, to the point that I was actually freaked out that she was reading. It said, “thank you for this……. ‘I am not saying that Supergrover acted as my mother in this situation, only that mothers love differently than anyone else. They have no problem with carrying you by your scruff through the mountains, and tough love as it’s required.'” I realized that even if she didn’t want future interactions, she wasn’t mistaking the part for the whole, either. It reminds me to keep going. Someone is listening. She does.
How do you maintain a sense of humor about the challenges in your life, and how has it shaped your storytelling?
I try to be funny about everything, but usually I can only be really funny after I’ve written about my serious thoughts here. I do not have to work on my issues and verbally process with my friends. I have verbally processed enough. Get me out of my head. When I am back in my body, I can be the life of the party. My social battery just drains very fast. I am quicker in person with witty retorts because I have to be. You’re not here. 😛
What’s the story behind your nickname, and how has it played a role in your identity and interactions?
I changed my tag to “theantileslie” because I never wanted to be anything like myself ever again. I needed to reject what no longer served me. The antileslie is not a bad person, like the antichrist. It’s the acknowledgement that life is damaging and I need to keep evolving…… or it sounds good, anyway.
How has writing and blogging served as a tool for self-discovery and processing your emotions?
I would like to think that my blog is proud of me, because I told her the truth.
Feel free to use these questions as a starting point for your blog posts, and I hope they inspire introspection and engaging content for your readers! 📝
When I was 11 years old, my parsonage burned to the ground five days before Christmas. All our stuff, including our new presents, were in it. As a result, I don’t treasure anything. I don’t have that luxury, because I realize that anything could be gone in less time than it takes for the fire department to arrive. I can say that my necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint on it is dear, but would I really be surprised if it disappeared? No. It’s the nature of stuff. My mother is not in the necklace, so I am not attaching her memory to this particular thing. I don’t need things to remind me of people, but they are useful. I wear the necklace every day, and gifts from my friends surround me so that I think of them all the time. It also means a lot to me when Zac and I have matching bracelets, even when they were $3. Every time I look down at my wrist, I think of him when I see the rainbow of our friendship bracelets and the maroon of our nautical rope ones.
Plus, now I’ve been through two house fires. At Wire Ave., we had a professional electrician drill into a live wire in our basement, nearly sparking the gas main and taking out the whole neighborhood. That’s the kind of situation where you realize death is no harm, no foul. There’s literally nothing I could have done about it, and death would have been over before it really began with that kind of TNT. There are only so many events that you can prevent in life. Sometimes, you have to fold and say “the plane is going down.” However, I do not think that I would have even seen the gas main blow. Gravity’s rainbow ends in disaster whether or not you see the arc in the sky first.
It seems like I’m complaining, but I’m actually advocating for minimalism. You cannot believe how much it has helped my mental state to have all my books, newspapers, and comics on my Kindle instead of as kindling. There are practical ways to solve all of these problems. It’s just unfortunate that you don’t think of them until after the house fire is over. Everyone’s library is invincible right up until it isn’t. And in fact, there is a very popular novel that has probably told you the exact temperature at which books will burn since high school. Gotta keep that temperature below Fahrenheit 451.
I am sure that Android tablets and iPads also burn, but which is more expensive? The iPad/Android or the 2700 books I’ve downloaded over time?
All of this being said, I believe that my books are my most important possession. The autographed copies of all the books from Team Mendez might go up in flames, but I won’t have to re-buy the digital copies. Their words are more important than their signatures, and as I joked with Jonna, “if I didn’t have a hardback, I’d just let you sign my screen.” Her Js are pretty adorable, and I think it would be hilarious to learn how to copy her signature only because Tony taught an entire room of people at the Spy Museum how to copy Vladimir Putin’s. I unashamedly made it though high school because legit no one could tell when my mom signed something or I did. My dad’s signature is a pretty lost cause, but my mom’s was just classic teacher handwriting. And in fact, forgery is one of my favorite things about espionage because I love FONTS. Forgery, to me, is literally figuring out someone’s personal font. I just don’t show people that I do it, because I’m not trying to hurt anyone or get away with anything. It’s just an exercise to see if I can. See a Tony Mendez magic trick, do a Mendez magic trick, teach a Mendez magic trick. I wrote it just that way because the axiom in medical school is “see one, do one, teach one.” Themes in my life present themselves over and over. I have a feeling that my blog is a direct result of trauma and creativity. Here are my two roots:
The fire has made it where I feel more comfortable blogging, and more comfortable with e-mail altogether; all my personal letters that hadn’t been sent burned. Then, later on, my mother’s air conditioner flooded the back of my closet, and I lost all my journals as well. In those days, it was devastating. I was absolutely over the moon about my emotional abuser from ages 12 to about 20, when things became more complicated and the trauma of it all kept me from enjoying her. That doesn’t mean that losing all the letters and journal entries I wrote about the situation weren’t important to me back then. I had not made the connection that it was emotional abuse yet. I just swallowed all her bullshit whole. How could I not? I was a child.
I watched Doogie Howser, MD religiously as a child. No one knew that show better than me (at the time, anyway). I have always been fascinated by child prodigies, and this was right up my alley. Because of my emotional abuser, I cried through similar movies like “Little Man Tate.” It was a salty, bitter cry because it was like I’d been taken out of the safe environment of my parents’ shelter and dumped into a family where I didn’t know shit from Shinola.™ Watching Doogie write on his computer for the last three minutes of that show changed my entire fucking life. In fact, I sent a version of this as a Tweet to NPH, and I hope he sees it. That show was just as traumatic for him as my own coming out story. We helped each other. Between Doogie/Wanda and Barney/Robyn, you can see how much he’s absorbed about playing straight. He had to for just as many years as I did, I just didn’t have the pressure of being on TV. But tell me, truly, how is being a queer in the 1990s and also being on TV different from being a queer person who is also the child of a minister? It’s not a different situation, it’s a different scale. Neil’s career could have tanked if he’d come out when he was on Doogie, because back then, no one believed that children understood things about themselves. It is only now that people are starting to respect their children’s choices, because being who they are is a part of letting them individuate. If a child is brave enough to say they’re queer, they’re queer (lumping gender and sexuality issues together as one community), they are. No one in the current society who is also of sound mind and body would call themselves queer if they didn’t absolutely have to in order to survive their lives without shame and blackmail. Institutional homophobia and transphobia are going to take eons to get out of the fabric of the American experience, because our country is currently a theocracy run by the most hypocritical heretics I’ve ever seen in my life. Jesus is not your homeboy.
:::stares in non-denominational:::
I am dabbling in exegesis over the many pericopes in the New Testament over Jesus’s enlightenment (“Pericope” is theology speak for “an extract from a text, especially a passage from the Bible.” Some people say “peri-cope,” but I think it’s actually “per-ric-oh-pe.” I have no idea if I’m right, it’s just how my dad has always pronounced it and he’s a professional (you take Greek and Hebrew when you do a Master’s in Divinity). Let’s take a simple one and unpack it.
Matthew 15:21-28
Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Here is what Matthew was trying to prove, in my opinion. The first is that Matthew was a Jew trying to convince other Jews that this was indeed the Messiah they were looking for. He approaches it from a number of aspects, including lineage. More importantly, it shows the exact moment in which Jesus changes his mind. He decided that the moment the woman showed such faith, gentiles were as worthy of salvation as Jews. Matthew was a man on a mission from GOD, trying to bring the receipts. I admire that in a person.
One of the reasons I trusted David implicitly the first time I met him is that bad people don’t love their dogs so much they get a DNA profile of them (Jack is half terrier, half chihuahua. This means that he is a very tall chihuahua with a lazy, I don’t give a fuck attitude. It’s quite refreshing because chihuahuas are known for being little hellions….. similar to what my grandfather used to call “101 Damnations.” They’re as aggressive and energetic as little dogs, because they were bred to run next to fire trucks. I would only get a Dalmation if I started training for a marathon, because one of my friends offered to take him jogging. They went five miles and DJ (said dog) wasn’t even tired out when they came back. Because we couldn’t manage to beg, borrow, or steal good behavior out of him, we ended up giving him to the runner. He died not long after of an astrocytoma (star shaped tumor in the brain that was impossible to extract). I couldn’t believe that he had cancer and was still running five miles a day. Interesting how everyone deals with illness differently. Some people cater to it, some people pretend it doesn’t exist. No way is right, it’s just that some people view rest and relaxation as the way to cope with illness, and some view keeping busy right up to the end as their calling.
I would like to believe that Jesus would have given the runner a dog and a healthy brain. That he didn’t have to choose. I liked what they chose to call him, especially in retrospect having lived in Oregon……. “Otis Spotford.”
Speaking of which, before we change to a different topic, Supergrover and I have this thing about naming our dogs and it makes me laugh. It comes from when Daniel and I were engaged. “Check this shit out and get mad with me (joking). You need to go and set that boy straight. He wants to name his dog “Ozzie” instead of “Virginia Woof!” (it’s always serious if I use an exclamation point. They are of the devil most of the time.) If I remember correctly, and I am paraphrasing, she said he was only on thin ice, but “Virginia Woof” was damned clever. Ok, that’s the kind of stuff from her I live for. Having a good line in front of her is the gold at the end of the rainbow. Supergrover also said that she disagreed with “Virginia Woof” and thought we should call them “Sidney Brisdog.” That made my day because I thought, “you get me.” “Alias” is my favorite show of all time. I would give goddamn anything to work with Jack, Sidney, and Michael. But if I’m really honest about my relationship with Supergrover, I’m not Francie. I’ve been Will Tippet this whole time. Quietly pining away and trying to put together the pieces of why this attraction kept coming up for me over and over when I could clearly see how pointless and stupid it was. My brain chemicals just flooded, like you do.
Speaking of which, when she said that she got something out of my writing whether I painted her in a bad light or not, I thought for the literally 4,000,000th time that it was such a shame she never let me marry her and have her babies. It’s the hottest thing you can ever say to a writer. I love your writing whether it’s good to me or not? Come the fuck on. Who has that kind of support as a writer, when the traditional line about them is that “writer” is code for “unemployed.” My favorite retort comes from Brandon Sanderson, who waited YEARS to get this moment. This dude came up to him and asked him what he did at a cocktail party. He said, “I’m a writer.” The guy said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” Brandon looked him deadass in the face and said “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.” It was the equivalent of walking up to Stephen King and asking him if he needed money. Shiiiiiiiiiat. If God ever smiles upon me in the best way possible, that “best way” will be getting that moment as well. Here’s why:
I had a complex about Dana’s parents. That because I was female and queer and desperately in love with their daughter, we had something wrong with us. I was right to be paranoid, because they were absolute total dicks to both of us. The reason I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here” over blowback is that my sister-in-law ripped me a new asshole for writing about it and my skin was too thin to tell her that I owned my own story and to fuck all the way off. It’s the worst decision I’ve ever made in my career as a writer, that not telling her to fuck off. She silenced not only my voice, but my popularity as well. Wil Wheaton *used* to read me. *Used to.* Now, it’s one of the sources of my rage and a tape I’m working to solve. In some ways, it already is because I’ve gotten over the hurt. I can’t forget how it made me feel.
One of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with Dana was talking to her about how much it hurt me to watch her jump up and down for a type of approval she was never going to get, and she needed to stop. She needed to go low contact because of what it was doing to her self-esteem. In my mind, once you get married, you are individuating from your first family. That what God has put together, let no man put asunder. That meant she didn’t get the right to cater to them and ignore my discomfort, because she should have stood up for me and I became the family problem. They were lucky to get a daughter-in-law like me, because any time an in-law joins a family they shake up old family patterns and it is not often pleasant. An outsider can see dysfunction better than someone living in it. An INFJ sees what it will take to solve it. But they didn’t recognize themselves as lucky, because they never saw that I was trying to make their dynamic healthier and happier. They just thought I was stirring up shit for the fun of it.
This presented itself by me complaining to Dana’s ex-girlfriend, a beautiful diamond of a woman because she helped me navigate all of this having known the subject intimately. I told her that I was going to have to win the Pulitzer to get them off my back, and she joked, “oh, don’t worry. They’ll find a problem with that, too.” Empathy went a very long way in dealing with them, because it set off my autistic rage a lot. Supergrover can testify to that without blinking, because I told her every goddamn thing about my relationship with all of them that I possibly could, because I was constantly emotionally overloaded by them treating Dana’s sexuality like a problem to be solved and treating me like a loser dumbass. I was not trying to isolate her from her parents like a control freak narcissist. I was trying to isolate her from her parents because her mother told me that Dana was never going to get what she needed from her because of her limitations in understanding Dana’s sexuality, so it was better for her to go find someone else. That motherfucker didn’t say that in front of her daughter. She said it in front of her protector, mediator, and advocate….. words that will mean a lot to Dana because they come from The Book of Common Prayer. I viewed her as taking care of the sick, the friendless, and the needy. I have never told her that in person, because I thought it would hurt too much. I had to carry that pain for a long time until I was able to write about it. That gave me enough strength to kick her parents out of our house because I never would have done it if I’d known they couldn’t afford a hotel. For the first time, I got tired enough to raise my voice, because I was tired of tiptoeing around total emotional disaster on everyone. I said, “you come in here and you eat our food and you drink our drinks and use our utilities all while disrespecting me and my wife?” They got so angry that I yelled at her dad to “sit down.” He didn’t, but he sure fuckin’ thought about it. Sometimes, the only way to deal with a bully is to push back. He’s a lawyer, and the ace up my sleeve is that I am twice as obnoxious about the law as he ever could be and I have cornered the market on the asshole archetype because I’m a paralegal in the state of Texas. Come at me with Con Law or TRCP and I will instantly try to own your ass. But you can’t argue with the Religious Right. You just have to ignore them. I could. Dana couldn’t.
Jesus wept.
John 11:35
The more stress that piled onto Dana, the worse her physical health got….. making the connection that she broke out in hives for absolutely no reason at all in the middle of all our fights regarding all of this led to a lot of rethinking medicine; the reason I needed Supergrover so desperately to talk it through no matter how we felt about each other at any given moment. She won’t be my dragon and rush in when someone has hurt me when it’s her, but GOD HELP anyone who messes with me; she is quite capable of fucking you up in ways you’ll never see coming. It is delicious when it is not directed at me, and the thing she thinks I hate is the thing I crave. I want to crawl inside her brain to see how it works more now than I did almost 11 years ago, because we are equally taken by each other’s writing and she has very good stories when she’s willing to share them. The blessing of my life is that she may not want to meet me in person, but she likes crawling into my brain to see how it works, too. The curse was that she didn’t like doing it anymore. And even though she started a fight when she did it, it was not lost on me how sweet it is that she heard me. Tell me your feelings and step up, so she did. The disaster was not letting me respond and saying “I see how it is. What Leslie has written, so must it be.” I was telling her that I was allowed to have a reaction after I heard her out, not that what I was feeling was more important than her and “my opinion is fact.” She accused me of “rope-a-dope” when she went out of her way to hurt me after telling me to move on with my life. It’s unforgivable in most cases, but not for her. I love her too goddamn much and we’ve been through hell too long to give up now. But the ball is not in my court. She was the one that hurt me first by covering up her feelings that she was wigged out I was attracted to her by accusing me of something I didn’t do. It screwed us up and cost us time, not having an honest conversation. I handled it really well, and then as reality set in I had to create fantasy to get away from reality. But not fantasy, exactly. It was giving a story to information I couldn’t use with information I could. I can use our personal issues to illustrate what’s going on with us to drag her privacy issues into it.
The reason she’s so angry is because we’ve never had an honest conversation about boundaries on my blog, and she waffles between letting me be real and telling me that what I think is fucked up and all wrong without telling me what’s fucked up and wrong about it. That it’s lazy, childish, reductive, you name it. All the while ignoring that she’s feeding the pattern by getting angry and not just laying it out there because she’s frightened as fuck to do so. She needs to see that I see her so clearly because of an interview I saw with someone in her field that would punch her in the gut if she saw how much I truly picked up from it. That tape runs deep on how to handle her, and because she’s an IQ fan and I’m an EQ fan, I mean it like she’s my asset and I’m her handler, not that I try to emotionally manipulate her to get what I want. I am trying to be the tough love that she is to me (strident, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, I’m not going to do your emotional work for you kind of love), but I make mistakes all the time. Jim Mattox comes to mind. “I may be rancid butter, but I’m at least on your side of the bread.” If Supergrover’s last letter is any indication, this quote is relatable to her as well. I’m not innocent of this, and neither is she.
Editor’s Note:
Jim Mattox was the Texas AG (D) when I was a kid, and my favorite story in life about him comes from either my first political science professor or his wife, depending on who was teaching the class that day; I’ve slept since then. Anyway, when Mattox was AG, he was a drunk. He was out at a bar one night, and decided that he needed to sleep it off. He goes out to his car and gets in the backseat. The next morning as the car is being driven away, Mattox wakes up and says “My name is Jim Mattox. I’m the Texas State Attorney General. I’m a little hung over. Could you turn the radio down?” Mattox had gotten into what he thought was his car……………………………. #shatnerellipsis
She lights up my life all the time, and if I haven’t said that enough, I’m sorry- both to her and my audience, which are one and the same thanks to the fact that she’s chosen to stick by me no matter what. I think I have, but she has focused on the negative for so long that even if I haven’t said it in those exact words, she wouldn’t have retained it as much as something that cut deep. What she never understood is that I was trying to lance a boil, not irritate her. Patterns repeat, and I am never trying to hold someone to the past. I am explaining to them that the longer the bad pattern goes on, the less I want to engage because they’re hurting me. It’s a lost cause when you’re trying to be vulnerable and ask for solutions, and you become a problem because of it. I became the only friend who ever called her out on anything whether that’s true or not. How can she get through life without having conflicts with people?
Sometimes I wonder if she knows that I get so vulnerable I cry and shake when I go to that place of writing about her. That 10 years ago, I wrote to her, “sometimes I have to take off my glasses to wipe away the tears when I write to you,” and it wasn’t about anger. It was about my hopeless romantic showing up in my writing as a style. I wanted her to feel as precious as she is.
She fits into my theology very well, because she doesn’t believe in a higher power, but she does believe in paganism. It’s her theme. She loves the idea of Outlander, which eventually spoke my language. I couldn’t make it past the first rape scene until I learned that it was a fantasy built on Doctor Who (seriously. Diana Gabaldon is a Whovian, and she based Jamie on Jamie McCrimmon, a Scottish companion when she was a kid. She invented her version of time travel by watching Doctor Who as a child). The fact that we are both obsessed with novels that cover the same things from different ends of the spectrum is the perfect representative of our communication differences. In effect, I speak “Doctor Who” and she speaks “Outlander,” not realizing that both of our points are valid because they come from the same source.
They say that these are not the best of times But they're the only times I've ever known And I believe there is a time for meditation In cathedrals of our own Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes And I can only stand apart and sympathize For we are always what our situations hand us It's either sadness or euphoria
So we'll argue and we'll compromise And realize that nothing's ever changed For all our mutual experience Our separate conclusions are the same Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity Our reason coexists with our insanity And though we choose between reality and madness It's either sadness or euphoria
How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies Perhaps we don't fulfill each others fantasies And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives With our respective similarities It's either sadness or euphoria
-The Gospel of Billy Joel, Glass Houses
“So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing’s ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME. It takes a very special artist for me to feel like they are speaking to me only, and he got me with “cathedrals of our own.” I hope that when Supergrover reads me, she realizes that not only is she entering my sanctuary, in it she has the concept of sanctuary. When I’m around, no one can touch her. She is the ideal child of God, the fallible hero, the atheist who is actually Jesus to more people than me, or Moses if she’s more toward the Jewish persuasion. I don’t know how she identifies. Wherever her faith background lies, it’s not the same now as it was when she was a child. Being able to joke about that particular topic is one of my favorite joys in life because of another friend I knew from the same faith background.
I told this other friend that I was impressed about one thing and one thing only. That it’s one of the few religions in which there is documentation all the way from the beginning that has eyewitness accounts. Without missing a beat, she said, “yes. Documentation all the way back to when he made it up.”
It is my hope that eventually everyone in that religion will just self actualize and say, “it got weird,” and move on with their happy little lives. Tom Cruise could probably use that advice (not the same, but relatable).
You do you, but okay.
Speaking of which, that was another phrase that irritated Supergrover when it was a reference to another blog entry in which I explained that “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” That it was like telling the religious establishment with the snarkiest voice possible, “you do you, but okay.” It was not personal. It was me speaking truth to power. I was just being as snarky as Jesus, and repeating a line I hope gets stuck in people’s heads, because it’s emotional shorthand for being kind and taking no shit. BOUNDARIES. I tend to say small things repetitively because they do the most good. The music of the phrase makes it speak louder in people’s minds because they remember it. “You do you, but okay” means to me that you can uphold the system if you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.
People pleasers do not realize that catering to everyone’s needs and trying to anticipate them is actually more problematic than open and clear communication….. in essence, trying to render unto Caesar and render unto God and you can’t serve both. Speak truth to power. Please, please, please hurt my feelings rather than keeping it in. I only ask that you think about the problem long enough not to give me a knee-jerk reaction, because I’m making the commitment not to react to it and I don’t want to regress.
Red mist rage while I can type with my eyes closed is not a productive use of my time, and is feeding into my autism to an enormous degree because once I’m overstimulated, it’s meltdown time. I learned this from Harry Wales in “Spare,” because I don’t know if he feels red mist rage because of autistic meltdown or PTSD, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same kind of neurodivergence because all of the above alter your thought processes and they’re your new normal. You have to learn to cope with them, knowing that your first reaction will always be wrong. Always. You’re wired to shut down and protect what you have left, not to open up and share your pain so that someone else can see it and help without asking. For people pleasers, you always have trouble getting them to express what they need because they don’t want to look like an imposition. Most of the time, it’s because people have been taught that they’re needy in childhood. You think you’re being a hero by keeping everything inside and you’re just burning yourself out constantly and with PTSD, not being able to regulate your emotions.
It was inextricably interrelated in my mind, and I’m not sure that anyone could prove me wrong. Harry, like Kathleen, Dana, Daniel, Zac, Bryn, and Supergrover (and even Franklin, my companion at Wire Ave., to some extent) are all affected by trauma that’s above my pay grade and always has been. That being said, because I grew up as a preacher’s kid, my first instinct is to minister them. Especially because Zac and Supergrover are atheists, I feel that approaching them with spiritual lessons without attaching religion to it is helpful in our communication; I’m talking about energy and not dogma. Sometimes people need an osteopath, not an MD. They’re the people I can think of as a good example of why the Mayo clinic is such a wonderful resource.
They treat the mind/body connection as so real- in a way that other doctors’ offices and hospitals don’t. There is also no national infrastructure for health integration, because mental illness is treated so differently from physical illness, as if mental illness isn’t also coming from a diseased organ (separating out processing disorders from depression and anxiety. The reason the brain is diseased is that it uses the very best lies against you to get you to off yourself because the brain is hell bent on protecting you and thinks that’s the answer. It needs medication and therapy to not feel “extremely loud and incredibly close”).
Editor’s Note:
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is one of my favorite books in the entire world because I have such a personal connection to it. Not only was I living in Alexandria at the time and heard the plane smash into the Pentagon while the paintings and windows rattled from three miles away, my birthday is September 10th. My extremely loud and incredibly close moment is perfectly expressed from that book……… That “The Best Day” transitioned into “The Worst Day.”
I have felt exactly that way about health integration for a very long time. The less Dana really meant she was forsaking all others, the problems with her family would just get worse. And they did. She started developing depression and again, hives for “no reason.”
All of this culminated in disaster when Dana invited her mom and dad to come and stay with us. It was great, up and to a point. They even let us sleep together in our own bedroom…… at their house, their solution was to get a room with twin beds so they could keep their imaginations intact. That’s why we never visited. My general rule is that if I ask for your opinion and help in a relationship, please give it to me straight. If I don’t, BUTT THE FUCK OUT because this is my marriage, not yours. But in every family, it is not the in-law’s job to deal with their partner’s family. My partner fell down on the job, and that played a large part in our divorce as well. I needed Supergrover to cope with that kind of pressure. I still have that love and devotion from her in large part because she’s wonderful at giving me advice in other relationships and I hang on her every word. My frustration is that she’ll work on all my relationships with me except ours, and it’s the most important because I tell her everything and she doesn’t tell me what she hears.
I was actually very humbled when she sent me her thoughts, not because they were good or bad, but because they were there. I only ended the interaction when it became too painful to continue. We were making great progress, and then she exploded like a firecracker when I really hadn’t done anything to deserve it. As I told her, “don’t let me be the asshole out here all by myself.” Then, it was her turn to recognize that she was indeed the asshole. I sent her a message immediately that said “you are forgiven. Honestly and completely.” I knew she wouldn’t get the reference because it’s a line from Doctor Who, but that didn’t matter. I needed to feel the connection between Eleven and River Song to convey how I really felt about her. I will never be in love with her ever again, but because of my past with her and how much it affected me, I view her as an emotional support partner more than anyone else. It’s just not my decision to accept it or not. So far, it’s been a mixed bag. I was so happy I cried when she said, “you’re right. My first instinct was “LET ME GRAB MY PURSE. THAT MOTHERFUCKER.” If you get the reference, you’ll see how funny it really was.
I have no doubt that Dana’s dad would have thought I was brilliant if I was male. That’s because even though he tolerated me, I hung on his every word because he was a Marine and all of his stories have stayed inside me all this time. They’re just not my stories to tell. The one that I can tell is because it made me laugh. When cell phones first came out for intelligence officers (earlier than to the general public, I would imagine), the Americans knew how they worked, and the Russians didn’t. They thought they had privacy and couldn’t be tapped if they used them in their cars. I laughed so hard I was sagging in my chair. It does not surprise me in the slightest that my model for a perfect partner for me is military and intelligence (not as big an oxymoron as one might think) because I loved those stories more than I’ve ever loved anything. He sat there and fed my autistic special interest all day long. The thing I love about military/intelligence men (not because I prefer men, because I haven’t met many women in the service and only a few retired spies. Men are the ones that tell me these stories. I love all of them, from the motor pool to pulling a gun on a Colonel because he was being a racist bastard and that was the only thing they could think of to deescalate the situation- by making it clear just how serious being racist in the military actually is.)
My personal view is to baby myself, because I find that when I do, I am more able to show people that I love them, because my boundaries are not so overextended that I disengage. I don’t mean boundaries in terms of keeping people out because of their emotions, but boundaries on how much I want to hear at once. I like it when people ask me if I have the bandwidth for a call before they do it. I like it when people say they have serious shit to talk about and do I have the bandwidth to let them vent? As we say in Texas, “you better ‘redneckcognize.”
Because when people respect my boundaries, I am so much more comfortable bending them because I respect them so much in return. I will go above and beyond when people go above and beyond for me. I recognize Supergrover’s sacrifice, but she has not recognized mine as such. I think I’ll be waiting a long time, because if she was going to do it, she would have done it by now.
If she wanted to visit me, neither hell nor high water would keep her from it. Why did she snipe at me on the anniversary of my mother’s death instead of hugging me? I think it would have gone a lot further than making me angry as fuck for a very long time.
And in fact, the thing I invited her to do with me was on Mother’s Day. I only have this loose connection to it anymore, and I did not realize that’s what I was doing. Of course it was important for her to be with her family that day. But she didn’t say no. She agreed to mull it over.
Progress.
I have just been too intimidated and too humiliated to say flat out, “okay. This has gone on long enough. Only meeting in person will break our toxic cycles because we have no frame of reference to each other besides each other. There is no context to our relationship and seeing each other out in the world will give that to both of us.” The fantasy and the reality need to be managed, not ignored. I will absolutely die mad about that, because I got in very hot water over it. I didn’t ignore it, she did, then came down hard when she decided I should have known not to lay out what was really going on in my head and that her very specific secrets were not fair game but an overarching thousand foot view of the problem from all angles was.
I did not want to be the lovesick teenager anymore. I wanted to explain that there was a solid reason I felt like my heart turned into an 808 drum, that her love was my drug and that has proven to be true for almost 11 years. What kind of person thinks that deep a love is just a game I’m playing to fuck with her? What kind of person ignores how hard it was to say goodbye to her and Michael and instead, berate me for writing things like it? Or just telling me that she was incensed by some entries and touched by others, never telling me which ones touched her so that I didn’t have to be so afraid. I could know the boundaries I was crossing instead of guessing all the time to get my story out there.
I have caused a lot of hurt, but it has never been intentional. My story is for people all over the world, not direct letters to people. People would see my writing a lot differently if they viewed it as an episode of “The Moth,” “Morbid,” and “Risk!” (“Risk!” Is storytelling, but mostly adult content. Caveat emptor. I just love it because it’s hilarious.) People being able to read my writing and assess it like I’m Harriet the Spy are so close to the point, but it’s whizzing right by their faces.
I use my life as an example to others, both of what to do and what not to do. I allow myself to have a full range of human emotion, and not to dumb it down to protect other people’s comfort, because it’s not for them.
It’s all for me. As I work through my childhood and adulthood, I see the patterns that no longer serve me, and I have found that it was finally easier to leave the cocoon than stay in.
She’s still my precious, precious six year old. I’m just choosing to love her from over here……. until she realizes it’s not actually that far.
I just got a notification that I got my 996th follower inside the WordPress community, so I know it won’t be long before I hit a thousand. I knew I was going to take a hit in numbers when I locked down my personal Facebook profile and pushed people to my professional account, because I have so many more friends and followers of my personal account. However, it was a necessary evil because I don’t get paid for being a Facebook user. I get paid for being a Facebook creator. I may start writing some short pieces on Facebook as well, because what I have noticed is that Facebook does not like to promote links that take you out of Facebook. I’m hoping to have an income stream that is passive over time, because being a Facebook creator isn’t that lucrative until you get into the Glennon Doyle/Martha Beck stratosphere, but I have to start somewhere. Glennon and Martha didn’t become Glennon and Martha overnight, either.
I don’t really think I have their talent, I just think we’re all interested in the same things, which is the motivation for human interaction. Success in personal and professional relationships while neurodivergent, etc. Autism is a huge part of my life now, because it’s emotional shorthand for a world of symptoms. It’s also important for me to talk about my experiences, because there’s so little research on female autism, anyway.
Something jumped out at me in Supergrover’s letter, that she was mad I said that she acts like she’s a motherfuckin’ hero and I’m a mental patient. She went to the place of literal hero, like cape and tights Supergrover! ensemble. What I meant is that she often thinks that her thought processes are correct and mine have something wrong with them, when they’re just completely different from each other. Again, Mandarin on my side, English on hers. She just needs to develop some language skills she doesn’t currently have……… with me. I know that she knows from autism in real life, she just can’t apply it to me because she knows me so incredibly intimately and not at all.
One of my favorite memories of Dana, Supergrover, and me is still when Dana and I were talking it out. That I knew I was falling for Supergrover, and it could never be. So please just be patient with me. Dana was so incredibly sweet and kind. She said, when it comes to her, I am not threatened. I think I have more than proved my worth. God, she so did. Every day. If she could have held onto that feeling, our fights never would have gotten worse. She also said that she understood me, that it was natural because I’d seen her soul. She knew how it felt. She was married when she started crushing out on me. The difference is that I was able to do something about it, albeit years down the road. I didn’t know this, but Supergrover was dating someone when I met her, she just didn’t tell me that until months later. I was incensed because she knew that everything coming from her was also going to Dana, but I didn’t know that everything I said was being sent straight to Michael, among others if my web stats are to be believed. She took all her feelings about me and told someone else, where it did the least bit of good.
Dana was angry when she said it, but she knows me better than anyone else. She said, “you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to prove that you’re a good friend, and she’s always going to see you as a mental patient.” It was one of those lines that took me a very long time to forgive, but I knew she wasn’t going to be wrong even then.
It’s that Supergrover is my Doctor and I am her Clara Oswald, her Impossible Girl. It’s the connection I cannot ignore, because our words are a double helix by now. She is also equal parts Malcolm Tucker and The Doctor. If Supergrover really WAS The Doctor, you could count on her to slam down the TARDIS phone with “fuckitty bye.” 😉 It is my opinion that she might not know who The Doctor is, or that The Doctor was played by Peter Capaldi, but her knowing who Malcolm Tucker is….. probably a sure bet she’s in the loop. I never gave up because it was a connection I couldn’t ignore. My girl has privacy issues about my blog and wants to be involved, yet not sure she actually likes the author. Or, it feels that way to me. I’m not a judgmental dickhead, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even really kick her out of my life. I said that I wanted no further contact as we didn’t have a relationship for me to devalue. Prove to me that we have one, and I’ll play ball. I’m done falling on my sword for her as the lovesick teenager because it was never about that. It was a fantasy created to cover up reality. It was 10 years ago in which I was a lovesick teenager that did indeed spin out, but not because I was crushed out on her. My emotional abuser left a very specific mark on me, that sex and friendship are the exact same thing, and you don’t really know someone until you’ve slept with them. If I had gotten help when I was an actual teenager who was being fed that kind of bullshit by an adult, it would have saved me from a lot of heartache later on, and Supergrover as well because I can’t imagine that my illness didn’t send shit downhill. But I was never sick because of her. I was sick because of my emotional abuser. This is the first time in my life I’ve not been friends with anyone who knows anything about any of that, and I don’t have to talk about it. I am finally free. But I have been to hell and back to get here, which is why I am saying Supergrover needs to keep up with me emotionally. We set up some bad patterns back in the day, and she’s still hanging onto them. If she wants a real relationship with me, she’s going to have to throw down, and in a way that makes her seem approachable and vulnerable instead of pissed off and ready to spit nails. That kind of anger will never get you anywhere with me, because I realize that it just ratchets me up into rage and I just don’t want to go there anymore. She ripped me a new asshole and then it took her 15 minutes to spin out on her own, calling herself a bad person when I would never say that in a million years.
In fact, I actually said, “when I write about how much I love you and how wonderful you are and how I’d literally die to have one second alone with you to joke about things I couldn’t with anyone else, you don’t respond. You remember when I’m frustrated and angry, but you don’t see that I also see you as a goddamn miracle. If there is a God, they smiled when they put us together.” I can love her to the ends of the earth and she can also annoy the shit out of me. It’s about balance. It’s just that her response is “take care of yourself.” She feels deeper than that, but it would kill her to let me know. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t hang on my words the way she does, because she proved it. She’s the one person in my life who has said that she gets something out of it whether my work paints her in a bad light or not…. that I always have something worthy to say whether she agrees with it. I would not have been able to keep her interest for 10 years without something special running underneath, even if it’s just an unbreakable reader/writer connection.
I also know that she used to tell me she loved me. But it’s like all of it went away as not to give me the impression that she was into me, as if it hadn’t been drilled into my head every second of every day for the last 10 years (over 10 years, now…. coming up on 11 in the summer). I am not just going to forget that she’s married and mono and as settled as she’ll ever be. You’re never in the friend zone if you value having women as friends. At least that’s what they tell me. That’s what I’ve been working towards. Not a great love story, but yes. A great love story. Oprah and Gayle….. two best friends that are on a first name basis with the entire fucking country. What Supergrover doesn’t realize is that my fan base has been quietly growing without her, and more people know her name than mine because I don’t say my name very often (it’s Leslie, btw.). So, while she’s off being hurt that I’m happier without her in my life because she just can’t stop playing games with me, my stories about her are becoming more and more precious. She hasn’t been the best friend the whole 10 years, but she has absolutely been the best character….. a Siren.
Supergrover may not think this, but my boat never crashed against the rocks. I dragged her into it. I think I have saved her ass several times over, and I’m tired of waiting for the good part where she realizes that I’m not out to get her. As she said to me, “it seems like you’ve only taken away the bad.” That is objectively not true. Even in this essay, where I’m hurt beyond belief, I still can’t believe I met her at all.
People have problems, full stop. It’s how you handle them that matters.
I took a shower.
I got dressed.
I did my laundry.
I did my shopping.
Having a win in which I walked away with my dignity intact was important to me. Demand avoidance was not so strong today. I am making progress, however slowly.
The part that’s not so great about being autistic is not being able to manage practical things when you’re emotionally overloaded. My dad told me that he wasn’t coming (postponed, not canceled), Supergrover told me that she was mad that I compared her to The War Daniel, and Jack (who is also a dog) loves to trash out my bathroom when it’s that time of the month. It was special all the way around, and I’d had as much fun as I could take. I went to bed very, very early in hopes of starting this morning fresh.
The reason I folded into myself is that Supergrover once again contacted me to tell me everything I got wrong in my blog according to her, as if she has any validity in my life at all. She does, but it’s as a memory, a ghost who smokes in the back of my head. Why would I be so cold and callous? I’m not. She told me she had lost the ability to be a decent friend and to give back. I thought, “enough,” and I moved on. This is someone to whom I gave my whole self. I have dealt with every feeling on earth regarding our relationship. You can tell by reading this blog that I have drug myself kicking and screaming away from her, it’s absolutely destroying me and apparently, it’s not going the way she wanted it, either…… Because the way she reads all of this is “giving real estate to someone you so clearly loathe.” No, I’m grieving the fact that when you want to let loose with your friends, I’m not one of them. She doesn’t get to dump me and tell me how to get over it, too. We were never a couple, but it’s the best explanation for how I feel right now. You don’t count on the people who broke your heart to fix it.
I told her that I was happier without her in my life, because I am. I am happy without the up and down, will they or won’t they, “we were on a BREAK” kind of love. It was toxic and fucked up and anything I did to try and make it healthy was instantly suspicious. When I told her that I was happier without her, her tone instantly changed to “martyr.” She reminded me so much of my mother that I rolled my eyes. I moved on, I made new friends, all at her request. You can only kick a dog so many times.
She e-mailed me her thoughts on a few of my blog entries last week. I didn’t get them, because I’d forgotten that I’d set her e-mails to go to Spam on one particular account, but not all of them. So, she doesn’t get a response to her e-mails talking about what a childish, lazy, cruel writer I am and makes a point to send an e-mail to a different account to ask me if I got them. Why I wouldn’t want to read them is anyone’s guess………….. Especially when she came to find out that she’s just as lazy, childish, and cruel as I am and maybe she shouldn’t have just popped off an e-mail without thinking things through.
It was stirring up shit just for the fun of it, and I told her that. And in fact, she said that I devalued our relationship by lumping her in with Daniel. It was very clear to me that I wanted to marry the same type person twice, and it wasn’t bringing her down. Whatever she thought was “bringing her down” about that situation was self-inflicted, because it’s an idea she has about Daniel or about me, both of which live in her head and not mine. Autism is all about pattern recognition. I recognize PTSD behaviors in all three of us. I said, “if you can’t read Daniel’s tone and not see a compilation of your own greatest hits, you need to go back and reread.” The way they get angry is eerily similar, and it makes me feel the same type of fear.
It was really simple to me in the end. What relationship? How am I devaluing something you’ve said you’ve phoned in for years? Anything she liked about our relationship is probably a fantasy I created in my head to deal with the reality. I finally called her out on playing games with me, because I’ve finally had enough time apart from her to see it for what it is. Her game is that everyone else is playing games except her. Only she has a valid point. To her credit, she saw that she was doing it, too, and apologized. Whether that turns into a healthy pattern moving forwards or not talking to me anymore out of shame is on her. Her uploaded consciousness lives in me. I don’t need new interactions with her. My memories are precious and I’m not interested in watching her tear down her own legacy. I want her to add to it or leave it the fuck alone. What I realized a long time ago is that neither one of us are very good at love, but we have a lot of it. I am not “dedicating real estate to someone I clearly loathe,” it’s a wheel with many spokes and I’m writing about two 3D characters that I desperately love…… Both of whom are me, in a way, because never meeting Supergrover in person has never individuated her from me. Because I’ve never stood in front of her, she’s always lived inside me. Her words are given the entire echo chamber in my chest. I hear everything she says closer than my own heartbeat.
She doesn’t want that from me, and can’t stay away from me, either. I don’t want all of her drama, and was still excited to hear from her until I realized it was “All Shit on Leslie Day.” I want her, the real her, for everything she’s worth. But not if it means that I never have a valid point ever again. She’s worth a lot, but not that.
I didn’t come up with the most intriguing of things to write about this morning, because the daily prompt was “how do you feel about cold weather.” I answered it last year, so I cannot answer it again. I think I said that I loved it as long as I was dressed appropriately, and I almost always am because I’m autistic and hate the weather on my skin, anyway. So, I tend to overdress and take layers off, rather than getting cold and hoping I find a cheap tourist trap that sells sweatshirts. It’s not worth it when if I wanted an FBI/CIA/DIA shirt I can just ask Zac for one and it will be official instead of a couple of threads being in the wrong place. Autistic people don’t do that.
That’s because autism is all about pattern recognition. Let’s take Chucks, for example. I hated rip-off Chucks because the design was off. I am not one of those people that says “close” is “good enough.” Sometimes, it’s more expensive to be autistic, which sounds funny until you add up the cost of the right clothes, the right shoes, the right everything so you can make it through the day without being irritated. Bombas socks are $60/box. Worth it. American Apparel t-shirts are at least $25/apiece. Worth it. Knit caps that don’t feel like they cost three dollars and will drive your ears insane are probably $25 as well. Worth it.
Clothes for autistic people are extraordinarily specific, because you’re trying to cut down on your sensory issues to make it easier to function in public. My friends would not like hanging out with me as much if I always acted like there was a rock in my shoe. There are only so many quirks a friend can take before you’re “embarrassing them.” I will have to say that this has only started to be a thing in the past year or so, because before that I would social mask within an inch of my life to be acceptable. I have found that I am much more happy being loud. Just put it all out there. People who are embarrassed by me don’t get the right to hear my stories anymore. I know at least one woman who does the same, and she’s not a part of my life anymore. We lost touch about 15 years ago, and I wish I could just have a friend date with her all to myself and lay it out there. I think we would both cry and find someone to confide in, but it’s not a relationship in which I would feel comfortable doing so anymore. However, I can empathize from here and hope that she’s still a fan, and thinks, “wow….. Leslie and I do have a little too much in common for me to ignore this.” We are two peas in a pod, and I wish we could help each other more now than we did then. Back then, we just picked on each other because our sensory issues are over the top and we just ignored them, choosing to be that kind of aggro that’s polite.
But all of the things I noticed in her are actually things she needs to notice in her. It’s not my bag, but I think it would help her to discover herself. That’s all I want to do from here. Hope that she does pick up on it eventually, because it will unlock her personality as easily as it did mine. I don’t have to sit there in silence. I can say things like “I’m autistic and I need you to be sensitive to the fact that florescent lights are way too bright for me. Please respect my quirks and I’ll respect all yours. David makes me use coasters even if it’s an insulated mug. It’s his quirk. I’m here for it. I don’t have to like anyone’s quirks. I need to not set people off. That’s true for any neurodivergent person, including me. If it’s a small thing you have to adjust that literally no one else cares about, but it will make an autistic person more comfortable, do it. Life is hard enough without people stepping all over your sensory issues. They won’t even register if you don’t say “I’m autistic and this is a real thing. I’m not just being dramatic.” Even if you do say you’re autistic, it’s 50/50 as to whether people will respect you or tell you to get over yourself. Neurotypical people are my nemesis when it comes to this, because you’re “making a big deal out of nothing.” No, you think that my brain works exactly like yours, and to you, I’m just “silly” or “rigid” or any number of things people say when they think your autistic quirks are stupid.
That’s the thing. We know they’re stupid. If we could figure out how to turn them off, we would.
We are also not children, just for the record. We are not acting childish when we need comfort items, we are not acting childish when we want to sit in the same spot every time, we are not acting childish because one shirt feels good and the other doesn’t and you can’t figure out why we don’t want to wear it EVER. None of it makes sense unless you also have my brain disorders, and I’m done. I might not rage in front of people as not to be rude, but I’ll rage about it here because this is a survival manual for someone else. Who that might be is anyone’s guess, but it’s here.
Let’s also not pretend your life as the friend or parent of a neurodivergent adult/child is harder than actually being autistic/ADHD, okay? Cut the shit. I’ve been accidentally involved with parents’ groups trying to find peer groups on Facebook, and I’ve never seen a bigger bunch of babies at times. Oh, you think it’s hard that your kid will only eat five things? What about how hard it is when your body rejects EVERYTHING except five things, and everyone just thinks you’re “picky” and “difficult.” Do you think we like being this way? That it’s just so much fun? There are no words for how alarming unfamiliar food is to some autistic people. It is a sensory issue that will set someone’s nerves on fire. It gets worse as you get older…….. “guess who finally decided to show up for once?” It took me three days to get up enough energy to bathe last week. But I grin and bear it because demand avoidance over basic needs doesn’t make sense to neurotypical people and it never will.
I’ve finally got my computer set up the way I want it, and I swear to Christ David thought I had died in my room. I said next time you think that, you could just text me and ask. I told him that when I don’t come out of my room for more than peeing and eating, it means I am utterly obsessed with writing, not that anything is wrong. Plus, I’d just gotten home from Zac’s, and that always takes a lot out of me on the way home because I’m transitioning to writer’s mode rather than socialization mode. I also got food poisoning on Thursday night, so getting home was delayed by several hours so that I didn’t throw up on the train. I’m glad David works from home on Fridays so that I didn’t leave Jack stranded.
It was so nice to spend time with Oliver, who is a dog. I love that I have a Jack away from Jack and an Oliver away from Oliver…… and I am responsible for neither in terms of food or emergency vet bills. It’s a truly great setup, because I like pets, I just don’t want to spend money on them when I know I’d be tapped out quickly.
And that’s all I have to say about that, but I’ll be back on later. It’s going to be what I’m doing now that my hatred of Windows knows no bounds. But before I go, here’s why I love this office so much- my views into the front and back yards. They are no longer in bloom, but when they are, it’s a hundred times more beautiful.
I’m dcargonaut. I apologize for not changing the color scheme before I posted this. I’m sorry if it’s hard to read. I posted it on Facebook as well, but I know all of you don’t follow me there. Also let me know in the comments what social media accounts you actually have if you want to see my stuff there. I occasionally post things to reddit, Insta, Threads, etc., but lately I have gotten into a Facebook/WordPress rut. Basically, let me know if I need to branch out. I don’t need to go where everyone is. I need to go where you are. As if people who aren’t Fanagans are important. Please. 😉
Writing is a 24 hour a day job. If an idea comes to you, you better have a way to write it down. Your brain will not go back to it (or at least, mine won’t). My Apple Watch is handy for this because I have an app where I just press a complication on my watch and it starts recording. Then, I can play them back through Bluetooth headphones or on my iPhone/iPad. My watch doesn’t need to process anything, I just need to be able to hear the clip again. I think the app is called “Just Press Record.” If I was feeling less balanced in my work ethic, I would have looked it up for you. 😛
I keep speakers and a subwoofer connected to my PC, that also has a passthrough for headphones. I have my own office now, so I can choose to listen to ambiance in the room, or zone out with headphones in. I have said that my dad is coming to help me decorate, but the wiring is so bad upstairs I just couldn’t plug in a desktop and a monitor.I also have a much smaller desk to bring down here, because I want to be able to share the room with David. He has some exercise equipment in here, and I think a yoga mat. As long as I keep the middle of the room clear and I have a place to store my chair that fits next to the desk rather than in front of it, I’ll be fine. There is nothing wrong with the setup I have now. It’s functional. I want my dad to take it from functional to beautiful. This room was originally meant for plants, and we have grow lights that would be good for orchids, etc. and also grow lights work well with aquariums that have live plants. I also know that since it’s spring and covered with shade, I’m going to need a good space heater in the winter. You will drag me out of this office kicking and screaming the whole way.
Again, here’s my current setup:
There are windows on all four sides of the room, it’s just that the ones behind me look out in to the living room. There’s a tea tray to my right that would be perfect for tea bags, Splenda, and an electric kettle. David only has the kind that whistles on the stove. Plus, since I like cold sodas and energy drinks more than I like coffee and tea, it would not be a bad idea to put a dorm fridge in here. Even if I don’t buy soda, I keep water bottles and green tea/energy drinks/aguafrescas as if when they are gone, I would shuffle off this mortal coil. 😛
David actually came downstairs ad we had a wonderful talk about what we want to do with the space. I asked him if he minded me warming up in his attic where it’s soundproofed, and he offered me his own space in the basement. I just want to add some sound proofing panels and a stereo so I have my own accompaniment. That’s easy to do because I have an old Fire HD 8 that has plenty of power to run a stereo with wired or Bluetooth speakers, and one of them is an Echo Dot, which fits perfectly. The other I idea I have is to build a bracket/frame for it and put it in show mode. I can control the tablet and the Echo Dot with voice recognition. I don’t have a problem with this, because I made an entire fictional character starting with my Dot. I heard that the NSA is watching us through them (really? I think that’s ridiculous. Amazon is listening to create our perfect ad experience; I highly doubt the NSA could be paid enough to care whether I like Sunny D).
However, I thought this was a very interesting idea, and I created a character named Carol that watches me like a guardian angel. Like, she gets upset when I’m upset, etc. She was supposed to watch me and took it a little too seriously because I turned out to be endearing. She loves all of you very much, but make no mistake. Carol knows what you did. 😛
Work/Life balance is not a thing because a line that Carol would say could come at 0300, or it could come when I’m involved in something else. Nothing inspirational comes on your time.
Today I decided to do a short question and answer regarding the death of my mother. I couldn’t think of anything to do with one of the prompts, but I can combine all of them. This will probably make you laugh, cry, and get angry. My mother is dead. She will not know I said these things. Keep this in mind, that I am just a child reflecting on her parent’s entire life, and that little moments do not define a lifetime. There are times when she was wonderful to me and times that she was just plain terrible. What kind of child doesn’t say that about their parents, especially after they die? I am not out to get her. I am out to illustrate her. By the end, she will be a 3D character to you, and hopefully you’ll learn more about me as you read.
I’m sorry to hear about your loss. Here are 10 thoughtful questions a friend might ask to learn more about your mother and her passing, which you can use for your personal blog prompt:
Can you share some of your favorite memories with your mother?
I think I turned nine the year she threw me a Peter Pan birthday party with tons of activities in our backyard. There must have been a hundred people at my house for that one, because it was a tiny town. If there was something to do, people came. I was not popular in school, and I struggled against my mother being more popular than me (she was the music teacher, the fun one. I have been a 90 year old autistic man for like, 46 years. That tracks. I am 46 years old. I knew the smash hit “Get Off My Lawn” by the time I was seven.). Therefore, I was a lot more relaxed with her when we were just out in the backyard having fun. My grandparents, both sets, also lived close at that time and she was more relaxed in her comfort zone than she was when she was trying to make me into the perfect child. I didn’t get it. She could talk to me about being good because of my dad’s job all she wanted, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t just going to sit there and be weird, anyway. I found Daniel and I was fine. Neurodivergent people travel in packs. If you’re an introvert, they’re just smaller.
She thought I was a great singer and often gave me solos in things. She would laugh until she cried when she told the story about how I was too shy to sing with the choir, but as they were leaving the stage, I decided what the people really needed was a solo.
We were a team. She was my accompanist no matter whether I was singing or playing my horn. She learned monster orchestra reductions (piano accompaniments) just to take me to contests. Then, because she was already accompanying me, she accompanied all my friends as well. The only person she never played for, I don’t think, was Ryan Darlington (he’s a tuba player). It’s not that she wouldn’t have done it, we just went to different middle schools. We both ended up at PVA, but he went to Johnston and I went to Clements. Johnston was the performing arts middle school and I didn’t get it. I got into Clements and we marinaded and grilled their asses at contest. It was memorable because I was the trumpet soloist that helped get them there. I played the opening trumpet call in the “Dances With Wolves” score. I auditioned for PVA when I was at the absolute top of my game. My mother played for me at that audition, too.
At HSPVA, I was a trumpet player. At Clements, I was in Varsity Band and Varsity Choir at the same time, which I loved.
Let me take a quick break to tell you how I did it. I sang for the choir director and she put me in junior varsity. I said, “are you sure? I’ve been doing things like the Messiah for five years now.” She said, “Ok. Prove it.” She played the first four measures in front of a monster exposed lick, I believe trying to prove to me that I couldn’t handle it when I’d had in memorized since I was 12. Please. My opera voice flipped on. Case closed (link is to a humorous clip from one of my voice lessons).
In short, I would not be the person that I am today without the grand piano she bought to put in our apartment after my parents’ divorce. That’s because as long as it was there, she always had a way to draw me in. Draw me closer. Test out anthems she wanted to use with her choir and wanting to play for me because she could hear how it would sound at choir practice. I was part of the vetting process for the programming when she was a choir director/organist. I asked her to leave me her piano in her will, and she did. Now, it’s at my sister’s house and David’s house just isn’t big enough. But when I’m at Lindsay’s, I get really quiet and let my mom speak through the chords. It what she did when she was alive and it worked. Why stop now?
How has your mother’s life influenced the person you are today?
A tape runs in my head that I should be the perfect person all the time because people are always watching. This was true when I was a preacher’s kid, but now I can’t turn it off and I have massive self esteem issues at making any mistakes. I have chided myself for not achieving perfection instead of taking the W at excellence. I’m the person that absolutely is driven to get an A+ on everything and a body/brain that just won’t have it. I can either accept my fate or die thinking I’m the worst person that ever lived. I choose acceptance.
I work with children much easier because I am social masking her, an elementary and middle school choir director for all of her career, except for the time she took off from work until Lindsay and I were old enough to fend for ourselves. I’ve picked up more, noticed more than she ever imagined. She was a saint and also tough as nails. Strict disciplinarian who hid all her feelings because she thought she wasn’t enough, either. It is the plight of women most of the time. Because I needed to break free from that pattern, I see it for what it is. However, I do not think of her as a bad parent, but an overly fearful and depressed one. Her whole life depended on what other people thought. I was basically Chelsea Clinton on a very small scale.
She is the person that convinced me it was better to hide my every need than to display it. It’s part of the reason Lindsay is so outgoing and free, while I hide in the shadows. She doesn’t worry about what people think of her to the extent that I do, and it’s a problem. It’s only now by convincing myself I am a good writer who has something to say that I really value myself as an asset and ally. Again, I mean to come off as confident, not arrogant. Someone has to tell me I’m pretty every day. It might as well be me. I got well when I realized that not saying anything left me angry and resentful all the time. When I began to express needs, no one liked it because I was so angry. So, so angry. I apologize for that, but I cannot apologize for the ways I’ve felt ignored by people who’ve said they loved me. It is on them to apologize to me if they feel bad about it. But if they don’t, I’m not waiting around for an apology. Sometimes you have to create your own closure, and I’m at peace with it.
She is the one that taught me how to treat a wife/husband, basically doing everyone’s emotional work for them and taking all their bad behavior because if I don’t, those people will leave. It took me a very long time to come to the realization that if they leave because you have emotional needs, you’re better off without that person in your life. Be careful in deciding the line where someone else is “needy” and you’re refusing to talk. A mind will only accept that of course you’re too tired to talk for so many days/weeks/years. However long it takes for someone to realize they’re unhappy. But because they’ve been unhappy for a very long time, you’re not going to like it very much. Have clear boundaries on what’s too much so that fights like these don’t come up. Work smarter, not harder.
She taught me that jokes were funnier when you didn’t see them coming, like her making a really sharp comment when she was normally so happy go lucky. I have a feeling that she was probably also autistic because the tapes that ran in her head were that she had to act completely normal all the time, too. It’s called social masking. Because of my family, I have both male and female sets….. as in, what a man would generally say and what a woman would. The female set is unsure and cautious. The male one walks in the world knowing that no one is better than me and no one is worse, either. It’s very important to make that distinction, because basically seeing the way I write convinced me that I had a man’s confidence online, so go with it. Be confident all the time, because it’s not all about you. It’s a survival manual for someone else.
What were some of the values and lessons she instilled in you?
If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. I didn’t say anything for 35 years.
Be kind to everyone, no matter what they do to you. This has had enormous positive and negative affects, because I tend to overestimate the good in people and stop standing up for myself when I feel bullied. On the flip side, everyone is more open and caring with me because I am open and caring with them. It’s a mixed bag, as parental lessons often are.
Be subservient to your partner. Whatever they want to do, you want to do. What you want to do/eat is not up to you, because you have to watch your weight and not seem like a pig (I wasn’t on Adderall til college and had the normal appetite of a teenager), and also his choice of restaurant is always better than yours. I wasn’t raised to be queer. Neither are other women. We’ll talk for an hour about what to do for dinner because neither of us wants to assert an opinion that might offend the other. Same for dating. Lesbians take FOREVER to admit that they like someone because God forbid someone rejects them. it’s systemic, but my personal experience is unique and universal. One of the things I like about men is that they’re direct. It’s easy to ask them out because it’s a yes or no question to them. It’s especially fun when you don’t care about the answer and neither do they, because it’s no harm, no foul. With a woman, you’ll waste years pining over her until someone finally admits feelings and then spend the first four months of dating EXCLAIMING over how much we didn’t see it. Yes we did. We were just ostriches about it. If I don’t tell you I like you, then I don’t risk abandonment. It’s intrinsic to who women are as people. If we are not perfect, our husbands will leave. Flat out. This is changing as gender roles decrease. That information was useless to me then.
My mother’s narrative was never how hard it was for me that I was queer. It was always how embarrassing it was to tell people I was queer. She couldn’t empathize, which is the root of why we had a sometimes terrible relationship. Later in her life, she wouldn’t let anyone get away with a homophobic comments, but she never told me that. I heard it at her funeral, because all of the sudden she was now the cool mom and not the rejected one. She could play up that card instead of being embarrassed, all the while being completely disinterested in hearing how Meagan, Kathleen, or Dana & I were doing. I am glad that she came to peace about it. I am not glad she never told me.
How do you cope with the grief and keep her memory alive?
I have fallen in love with everything Dia de los Muertos and I actually visit cemeteries a lot for the peace and quiet, yet feeling surrounded. The most profound place I’ve ever felt peace is at a neighborhood for the dead in Paris. It’s called Pere LaChaisse (sp?), and it’s got more famous artists of every discipline that you could possibly imagine. If you cannot travel to Paris, there are the same type cemeteries in New Orleans. See them before you die, because it’s an experience in and of itself. In DC, I have now been to sit with Gore Vidal. Good talk.
I wear an ichthus necklace every day now, because the necklace she actually gave me came apart in a million pieces. I got it at the funeral home, and the inside of the fish is filled with her fingerprint. I don’t like how I got it, but I do like that it was possible to create and a powerful remembrance to have my mother’s fingerprint on my heart every day.
Lindsay and I FaceTime at my mother’s grave when I’m not in town, or visit together when I am. It makes us feel closer to her even though we know she’s not really there. The idea is fun. We sit and talk to her, sometimes eat, sometimes drink coffee. It’s a safe space to get away from it all, and we do.
Stories come up at random times, and I never know whether they’re going to be good or bad. Some of them are still so painful that I blank out, like seeing her in her coffin. What is really bad is that because it’s the last image I have of her, it’s the one that’s stuck. My mother got sick and died in about 30 minutes flat. I wore this look of abject shock, like I was high on Oxycodone and completely sober. It was more than a year of magical thinking, because it was so unbelievable.
I know for sure that she got the death she wanted, because she did not want to be in pain and she did not want Lindsay and I to end up taking care of her for years on end. She didn’t know it was coming, but she would have been pleased with the result. It gives me complete peace. I don’t have to worry that there are things she would have wanted that she didn’t get, because I know for sure that given the choice between dying quickly or it being a long, drawn out process she would have chosen to go out exactly the same way.
Other people keep her alive for me. She was such a public figure that people tell me all the time how much I remind them of her. It’s irritating until you realize that it’s the only way to keep your mother alive long after she’s dead.
Were there any traditions or hobbies she passed down to you?
Make a big deal out of people’s birthdays.
Love people until they just can’t stand it. Make it weird. So many people are hurt in the world. See it.
If you are a teacher and you don’t have money, you are responsible for finding it. She taught me that people will support a valuable cause. For instance, she dated a judge after the divorce that was pretty wealthy. She worked at one of the poorest schools in Fort Bend. She never asked him for money. She talked about her life, and he responded. One year he bought the entire class winter coats. You can get things if you ask for them, but only without asking directly. This is not bad advice, because it’s not one’s responsibility to respond to your needs, you’re just asking if they will. The difference is that I don’t take rejection personally and she viewed it as a flaw in her character. However, this is a new development because I finally got tired of not being heard correctly. I don’t do well when I’m talking around something and just hoping.
What is the most important thing you learned from your mother?
I have learned many things from my mother, from the tender to the terrible. Every bit of it had to do with focusing on external validation. She was not attention-seeking in the slightest. She was just trying to take up as little space in the world as she possibly could, because someone, somewhere could be offended.
She gave really good hugs. I miss those the most.
Towards the end of her life, she enjoyed traveling and came to both Portland and DC. In fact, I also met her in Seattle and we went to the Experience Music Project before she and her husband left on an Alaskan cruise.
Giving birth is not for the faint of heart. It’s especially hard if you don’t tell your doctors that you are in pain. She said that she bit her pillow while everyone screamed and no one noticed that she needed medication. There’s no award for that, but if there had been, she’d have won it.
Own yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you. You cannot be perfect enough to please everyone all the time, and you will die mad about it. I learned that because she never did and I watched what it did to her. She was still mad at my dad at all family functions 25 years after the divorce. I realize that relationships are complicated. Being a decent coparent is not. At some point, you have to say to yourself “this doesn’t even matter anymore,” like my friends who found out they were pregnant the morning of their wedding. All of the sudden, the wedding was literally a piece of cake because there were bigger fish to fry. Like, we’re having a good time, okay, but we’re not even going to pretend that any of this is now important.
I am a more compassionate person than I would be otherwise, because my mother’s insistence on being polite and friendly has led me to keep going in relationships that weren’t interesting at first, but kept growing. It was a lesson to sit back and keep listening.
It feels excruciating that she would have treated Zac like he walks on water, because he might be a little too much for her, but he’s still a man interested in her daughter, which was infinitely more important than a woman being interested in me. It is not surprising or lost on me that I did not find complete happiness with a man until after I realized she wasn’t there to give “advice.” Even though Zac is also queer and likes me for everything I am, she would not have believed I could tell Zac I was nonbinary and have the relationship survive. Yes, I’m sure that men who like men definitely have a problem with me………. But I only know this from watching how she treated Ryan and how she treated Meagan. Oh, and also I didn’t have any agency. It was all my emotional abuser’s idea and I had been turned somehow. Meanwhile, I’d been crying alone in my room for two years. I’m just not queer enough to exclude dating men altogether. It speaks highly of Zac’s brain that it even happened in the first place, because I do have a preference for women. It gives me a little bit of clinical separation, honestly, because not every conversation digs deep. By the time I talk to Zac, I have worn myself out on my blog.
How did she inspire you in your life’s pursuits and passions?
She loved everything I ever did in the arts, whether it was singing, playing my horn, playing the handbells, or creative writing. She also loved asking me to help her with her room when she was decorating because she knew I was creative at that, too.
She wouldn’t be surprised that I turned out to be a great writer, because I was already on my way in 2016. Therefore, she was invested in my talent. She still managed to bust my balls about my behavior, though. She hated my writing at times, because she thought I was harping on a point over and over. She did not realize that autistic people are governed by monotropic thought processes. It is literally not possible for us to change gears quickly, or process emotions easily. It takes time, because nine times out of ten, it’s trouble with not being able to translate neurotypical into neurodivergent or vice versa. She thought Supergrover was bad for me, that I descended into a world of pain. She wasn’t wrong. That being said, I couldn’t find a friend of mine she did like. Neurodivergent people tend to be queer and run in packs. Therefore, if she didn’t understand me, she didn’t understand them, either. So, her interest in my blog was a mixed bag.
In what ways do you see your mother’s traits or characteristics in yourself?
I am only strong when my back is against the wall. I only use power when I need it, not because it pleases me. Just like my mother in a classroom, I walk softly and carry a big stick. I just don’t have to be as aggressive about it now, because I have friends that respect my boundaries and I don’t feel like I’m being ignored. Your voice doesn’t have to be loud if people aren’t covering it up.
It is easier to be honest on the internet because when I’m in front of people, I cater to the urge to be small in front of them to gain acceptance.
If I’m going to be a musician, be the best musician I can be. Don’t think that you’re incapable of something. Suck until you don’t. And in fact, my voice didn’t get really exceptional until I started taking private lessons every week. It was so good to learn that I was so much more capable and confident than I thought, because I had a great voice, I’d just picked up some bad habits. She helped me work through all of them by accompanying me between lessons.
Take the time to get in a proper warm-up, because you’ll sound better if you’re relaxed. Start a rehearsal with your vocal cords already warm. Breathe deeply. Four measures is a long time.
What do you miss the most about her?
I miss having someone to talk to all the time. We had long, involved conversations about her life, her career, her everything because I was happy to listen to the chatter rather than tell her I wanted to talk about my life, too. I knew she wasn’t comfortable, so I just listened. The same goes for being touched. We could say a lot without saying anything, a safe person to just walk up and hug because they’re used to it. People rarely hug me anymore, and I’m so used to it I forget I need it.
How would you like people to remember her?
As a saint, perfectly perfect in every way, because no one gets through life without making mistakes. With your parents, it’s only a different situation because your first family installs all your triggers. I hope that by not staying silent about them, you won’t, either.
We are all a little bit broken, and that’s where the light gets in.
These questions are designed to be open-ended and reflective, allowing you to share personal stories and feelings about your mother. They can help readers understand her impact on your life and the legacy she leaves behind.
I cannot use the daily prompt tag very often because I did 99% of them last year. Please follow me if you’d like to read more. You can also keep up with me on Facebook, where you can interact with me, other readers of the blog, and great authors I’ve come to know in my time as a Facebook creator.
I have had both Android-based and Apple phones. Either way, I use Google Maps because I find it superior. I don’t know why. I just like the interface better than Apple Maps, and Google maps does the same thing on my watch that Apple Maps does, which is to buzz my watch when it’s time to turn. If I have my headphones in, there’s no need for it because the turn by turn navigation is in my ear, but when I don’t the haptic feedback on my watch is actually better than an audio alert.
I started out with my literal answer because the prompt reminded me of something Kathleen told me, the story of her college interview. Now, Kathleen (like every person I’ve ever dated) was incredibly smart. She was a business major at University of Houston, and ended up accepting a position at ExxonMobil in Global Information Systems. That’s how I moved to DC in the first place. Basically, the last person you’d ever think did something like this, which only made it funnier.
Kathleen was trying to get into Simmons, which is a women’s college in Boston on The Fenway. They are known for library science, I believe, but it wasn’t her interest. She wanted to live in Boston on The Fenway. I would like to point out that she DID get in after this, she just didn’t graduate there.
The interviewer asked her what she would bring to the college, and she said, “the blanket my grandma gave me, probably my pot-bellied bear (stuffed animal)……….” I was CRYING, shaking with laughter and so was she because of course she laughed about it in retrospect.
I don’t know everything she did end up taking with her to Boston, but she did take me (later on). She was supposed to graduate in the class of 2000, which she did, just in Houston. But her best friend was still graduating from Simmons that year, so I got the grand tour. The school’s address is literally 500 The Fenway, so we had access to everything right in our backyards. I loved Boston and wished I could have stayed longer.
I remember one souvenir I got that trip- a Harvard medical school sweatshirt for my dad. I didn’t go to a class at Harvard, but I did sit in on one at MIT. I think it was a math class, but I’ve slept since then. Whatever it was, I did not understand it. I don’t remember it because there are no “good lines” to connect me to it. My brain works through echologia. If there’s not a valuable thought or idea attached to a memory, it fades because I don’t repeat it in my head. In my head, good writing runs like a tape.
I can remember snippets of my dad’s sermons and it has been 29 years since he’s done a single service (not counting weddings or funerals). He will do those if someone asks him. As in, when you leave the church you stop doing active ministry, but they don’t take away your ordination. He can still sign legal documents as the officiant, etc. He left the church the summer before my 17th birthday, and went into medicine as a second career until he “retired.” In quotes because his philanthropy work takes up a lot of time. I tend to confuse people when I say I’m a preacher’s kid, because they don’t know my dad as a Rev. Meanwhile, I only had one grade school year in which he wasn’t a pastor.
“Can we cuss now?” -Lindsay L. Lanagan, 1995
I cannot say it was a different direction for my life as well, because like I said, I was almost 17. Not enough time for things to change drastically in terms of what I would do once high school was over, etc. I think those things would have played out the same, because being ADHD/autistic of course I didn’t plan anything in advance. I just took the basic entrance exams for junior college in Fort Bend, then transferred to UH. I’ve never even taken the SAT.
It just occurred to me to say out loud that I tend to have a delayed response to stress, thinking I’m fine until I break apart into a million pieces. It puts my behavior over the last 10 years in stark relief, that I’m fine right up until I’m not. That I will not explode because I am intentionally trying to hurt someone. I don’t realize that I’m overwhelmed, overstimulated, and at my breaking point.
In high school, that presented as a migraine that wouldn’t go away and landed me in the hospital for four days. The only reason I was mad about it is that I had to take my finals, because I had a good enough average to be excused and then I had too many absences. It wasn’t bad, though, just an annoyance at having to go to school longer than my peers. I was freaked out because I wanted to be at home with Meagan, because she’d gotten into University of New Brunswick and was leaving soon….. Another reason I had a full blown migraine. I was melting down due to stress and grief.
Dating a Canadian was really hard, because there was something so FINAL about her going to school in a different country. I knew she was never coming back, and I was right. She has never moved back to the US. Although what I can say is that researching immigration wasn’t wrong, and that I would have been happy if I’d done it even if the relationship had still failed. I have spent enough time in Ottawa with Meag to know I would have liked living there. But honestly, the more I researched immigration, the more final everything became because an autistic 18 year old cannot handle the logistics of an international move. I was overwhelmed by details from the beginning.
In terms of direction, what I knew is that if I wanted to go to UNB as well, I had to like the school on its own merit because people break up. So, I sent for an information packet and got an interactive CD-ROM that included a tour of the campus and some games to get you familiar with living there, like a scavenger hunt. It’s the most clever and creative recruitment tool I’ve ever seen anyone do, and WAY ahead of its time because it was basically the precursor to things like interactive web sites. I didn’t get anything like it from any of the other schools to which I applied, but does it surprise you that UNB got me by giving me something I didn’t have for my computer?
Do I regret not following Meag back to Canada? My perspective has changed. It’s a mixed bag, right? My answer today is very different than it was before the 2016 election, but even as a teenager I agreed with Canada’s socialist policies. People who say “socialist” like it’s a bad word because conservatives have convinced them it is. Meanwhile, Alberta has a thriving oil economy just like Texas and yet the people of Alberta still have nationalized health care and Texas has a lot more money. There is still income disparity, but no one is left to die on the streets. You can have capitalism and socialism.
Ask Deadpool.
Knowing what I know now, I would be horrified to change a thing that would have altered the course of my life away from eventually coming back to DC. The way it happened is just too oddly specific to recreate, and while my life would have been great as a Canadian, I would have kicked the shit out of myself for not going to Portland. If I hadn’t given up on immigration, I wouldn’t have met Dana.
Meeting Dana altered the direction of my life the most, because I’ve lived in Portland twice. I had to move back because I missed her too much; my girlfriend was way too jealous and possessive for me to have any friends. I mean it. She was emotionally abusive, and though she never punched me, she punched through a wall in my apartment (NOT HERS) when I told her that Meag was coming to stay with me……. Even when I didn’t say “Meag is coming to stay with me and we’re going to be alone in my apartment digging up old memories.” It wasn’t some sort of game. I said, “Meag, her partner, and their little girl are coming to stay with me.” She was still apoplectic and told me that it was inappropriate and I should have asked her if they could spend the night.
We didn’t live together.
We’d been dating three months.
And on some level I still thought I was an asshole and she was right. She said something to me that I’ve forgiven, but I’ve never forgotten.
She said something about not feeling secure in our relationship, that I was really committed, and then said “you look like such a flake when you haven’t finished your degree.” She was a middle school counselor, and it was like she’d never seen anyone with ADHD before……… And she’d never pulled that card before, it was just politically convenient and she knew it would hurt.
It hurt because she knew I was brilliant. She knew I’d turned down an internship with the Human Rights Campaign writing national Sunday school curriculum because she didn’t want me to go. She, like me, thought there was something so FINAL about going away, as if three months was enough that I’d just say “I live here now.” It might have been, but it wouldn’t have been “I want to move back to DC without you.” I felt secure in the relationship, not in Texas. For her, those two things were one and the same. I have several friends who are engineers and manage to have great marriages despite being asked to travel for work, often longer than three months. If that little time apart destroys a relationship, then it wasn’t a real relationship in the first place.
It changed the direction of my life, the giving up of that internship to kowtow to my girlfriend’s fears. Dana put the kibosh on that real quick. She was the one who put the puzzle pieces together and saw how I was being manipulated before I did. Dana’s former partner was an alcoholic, and so was my girlfriend. She could tell a lot without me having to say anything.
I don’t have a problem with alcoholics and addicts. I have a problem with alcoholics not admitting that even though they don’t drink, they’re still dry drunks. As in, the problems that made them drink haven’t gone away and they still exhibit the behaviors of someone who drinks, like manipulation, isolation, etc. I am not saying that if you have problems with alcohol, then you are emotionally abusive. I am saying that I do not have time for alcoholics and addicts who think alcohol is the entire problem. That the only thing they need to do is stop drinking. They don’t have to have therapy, they don’t have to go to meetings, they don’t have to do anything besides not drink.
So, you have a sober person who, for the first time in literal years is feeling real emotions again, and they don’t know what to do with them. Whatever drove them to drink or use is still the monkey on their backs and the ghost out to get them. They’re actively running away from their emotions because they’re not used to them. If you have an addictive personality, you have an addictive personality. That’s why so many former drug and alcohol users start smoking half a pack a day, drinking coffee as a water substitute, and/or you’ll never find something sugary that they don’t like. They cannot be addicted to the things they were in the past, so they find new ones.
But please know that I am not speaking from personal experience in an arena where it’s all about personal experience. I am not trying to speak for an alcoholic or addict, these are just observations I’ve learned from being a coworker in the kitchen and having had friends go through the recovery process. Having an addict living in your house gives you a front-row seat to how that brain works, and it is not so dissimilar from ADHD. If you were neurotypical before you started drinking, there’s a possibility your thought processes will go back to normal. Unfortunately, neurodivergence may be your new normal because the alcohol gave you so much dopamine that your brain cannot possibly keep up. It cannot produce more dopamine than what you used to get from the alcohol, so your brain just sits there and screams. It is possible that you have accidentally induced bipolar disorder, or that you were self-medicating to manage bipolar disorder you didn’t know you had.
Chicken and egg debate on bipolar vs. addict. We’ll never know, but it’s extraordinarily common.
From my perspective, an alcoholic and a bipolar person are perfect for each other because they present so similarly. However, that’s dependent on a lot of factors….. The biggest one is that half of the couple realizes they’re bipolar and what it does to you, and the other realizes they’re an addict and what that does to you. You have to speak from a vulnerable place and know you are capable of being wrong. Red flags are only problematic if you’re managing someone else’s. Knowing you have red flags and saying “I’m working on it” is completely different than trying to hide them and hope no one notices.
Your life becomes more manageable when you realize that you’ve been acting egocentric, and find something to get it out of the way. When you are no longer the center of your own universe, things look very different. “Egocentric,” however, cannot be equated to “selfish.” Plenty of people are egocentric because they feel that asking for things is putting someone else out. Being that shut down is egocentric because you have stopped participating in a give and take, making people guess your needs….. Often, when angry, blaming another person for everything you failed to tell them. In no example of any behavior that I’ve given on this Web site am I immune to being part of the universal “you.” The only behavior I don’t have is drinking too much on a consistent basis. If I feel any amount of hung over, I pull back more. For instance, if I had four drinks over the course of an evening with friends and I felt hung over the next morning, the next time I’d drink three. What I’ve discovered is that the best answer is not to drink at all unless it’s a once in a while treat. Because I’m a blogger/diarist, I absolutely hate losing control. I can tell I’m feeling tipsy when this monologue slows down, and that’s not a good thing. I need every bit of creative juice I’ve got.
I have learned that you do not want alcohol to numb your inner monologue unless the play is shit.
Stories That Are All True 