The sight of a blank page is intimidating, even in dark mode. There’s endless possibilities, and the longer you pause to construct your first sentence, the longer you’ll procrastinate writing anything at all. You cannot say you’ll start writing once the first sentence is perfect because guess how many years you can procrastinate off that one?
Sometimes I’ll go back and add a better sentence at the top if I think of one, because the slug on Facebook is important. Sometimes I don’t. It all depends on how much of a diarist and how much of a traditional writer I want to be that day. I do not compare myself to people like Ernest Hemingway (because he’s a novelist, not because I’m that talented); rather, I see myself more as a Dominick Dunne character from Vanity Fair. His only title was “Diarist.” His job was to go and sit in the back of famous court trials and write about them. I don’t write about trials, but some of my pieces (like the ones after the spy book talks) are reminiscent because I’m just taking in the whole room at once and writing it down. I would rather sit in the back and notice things.
Not that I can’t be a ham and make people laugh. I do that all the time because it’s how I know to relate to people. I often cover up how I’m feeling by trying to make the other person spit out their water. If they’re focusing on the fact that I’m funny, they won’t notice that…….. The list where that ellipsis lives is long. However, I think of that as The Leslie Lanagan Show, and being quiet in the back is my natural personality. For instance, when I was watching Jonna I was blogging the whole time. I just didn’t have my computer in front of me. When she’d say something I wanted to use, I’d make a note of it, etc.
I didn’t want it to be perfect, because I wouldn’t be brave enough to publish if I thought I had to aim that high. I just wanted to represent her accurately, always a challenge with people who are still alive, because you are not in their heads. You can only write your impressions of what they said, not what they were thinking at the time. I did not want to write something that made her wonder if I was even in the same room.
Twice, I have written things to be proud of, and I am. I think the biggest thing is that I wrote them like I write every other blog entry, as if Jonna and Tony aren’t my favorite writers in the universe and untouchable heroes, simply other characters in my weird little life. Because of The International Spy Museum, it’s kind of true. I met Jonna after Tony died, and we struck up a bit of a friendship.
The concept that she’s another character in my weird little life and not a deity is sort of alarming, frankly. I mean, who even am I?
Why do I keep saying things like this if someone like her knows my name?
It’s an issue.
I honestly think that the more known people are, the more they appreciate being treated like characters in my weird little life. That they want to be known as themselves, so they don’t have to be “on.” For instance, I would think it was way more interesting to meet Kamala Harris when it was just me, my sister, and some good music. That’s because I don’t care about the vice president as much as I care about her, if that makes sense.
Most Democrats have the capability to become characters in my weird little life because of my sister. She’s a lobbyist, so she lives in Houston (I’ve said this before, but new readers, etc.) and works in both Austin and DC on state and federal legislation. In her previous job, she had several states in her “territory,” and Maryland was one of them. We got to go to Annapolis and ended up in a regatta. We also found a great restaurant called “tsunami.” You really want the pork belly ramen.
I tend to eschew the spotlight, thus wanting to get to know the people Lindsay knows, just not in a place where everything is top volume and overwhelming. Cocktail parties are exhausting for me if it’s a lot of people I don’t know. I go into shutdown fast, selectively mute so that I couldn’t say anything even if I wanted to, because it would come out as stuttering while my brain lags like an Apple ][ e.
My thoughts come just as fast in person as they do when I’m writing. However, when I am writing, I can handle that volume of information coming at me because I can process it through my fingers at 90wpm. My brain cannot translate information into speech at half that rate. I get intimidated quickly and just stop trying. If it’s important, they’ll e-mail me….. Or, one can hope. Sometimes it backfires because it seems like I’m not interested in talking to people, and that’s not the case. I just like to take in my surroundings and read the room before I jump into it.
I’m not shy in the slightest. I have just made mistakes by not reading a room before, especially with my line cook loud mouth, that have made me reticent to talk first. In short, I’m trying to prevent problems before they come up rather than popping off and then having regrets. And by “popping off,” I don’t just mean anger. Sometimes it’s humor that makes people think “what the fuck is wrong with you?” The neurodivergent sense of humor is kind of dark, anyway. Then add line cook, where we’re all some kind of fucked up (I promise), and the differences between us and our neurotypical peers becomes even more stark, because we’re gathering in groups. You just don’t see it, because you don’t see that the kitchen is for misfits…
As Anthony Bourdain points out, it is a tribe that will have us…… And we know it. We are not built for office work or polite company. We are built to be aliens- because we are that different and also few people are educated enough about ADHD/Autism to really be able to understand it. One of the reasons that we seem like aliens is that none of our behavior makes sense to anyone neurotypical, and it’s always on us to adapt. There is a power imbalance that is unbreakable because neurotypical people have an air of superiority over “special kids.” We know it, so rates of anxiety and depression skyrocket when you also have ADHD/Autism. Not being able to navigate the world like a normal person takes its toll whether we’re talking about our personal or professional lives.
Autistic people have trouble in interpersonal relationships, even among each other because if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person. It does not present in everyone the same way, and I often think after many hours of study that the kind of ADHD that presents in women and the kind of ADHD that presents in men is so different that women are probably at the autistic end of the spectrum and men aren’t so much. Their ADHD presents as aggressively hyperactive. It’s not that women don’t display these tendencies as well, because I was married to a woman like that. I just think that the “male” presentation of ADHD is more accurate, and that the kind of ADHD that only makes you stare out the window and get lost in your own little world is more likely to be autism. Therefore, the criteria is the same for all genders. It’s not that there’s more autistic women, it’s that more autism is being caught. There hasn’t been much research on autism in women, because there are so many women that are struggling and only hear “you don’t look autistic.” I get it.
But please know that because I am autistic, I can predict with 90% accuracy whether someone else is, according to science (really). Neurotypicals can’t, because they don’t have the pattern recognition. They aren’t looking for the same things, because people tend to equate autism with severe retardation. If you are high IQ, you fall through the cracks. People understand autistic people who rock, scream, etc. They do not know what autism looks like after years and years of social masking.
Here’s my pattern recognition and how it might differ from yours:
Your gait
The number of different foods that you eat
How many times you have to go to a private place during a party for some sensory deprivation
The way you talk, because there’s a specific patois to neurodivergence- conversations are spaghetti code
The speed at which you talk- if Aaron Sorkin and Amy Sherman-Palladino have nothing on you, you may be autistic/ADHD 😛
The look in your eyes when you’re overwhelmed
Seeing stimming that other people wouldn’t notice- for instance, adults condemn a fidget spinner, but not knitting your eyebrows……. and it’s the same exact idea for calming yourself
How often it seems like “you’re just not there”
When you are dialed into a special interest, and what happens when you’re facing drudgery
How clean people’s houses are, because all neurodivergent people suck at sticking to systems and live in piles- no judgment because if you came to my house you’d see the same exact shit you do
Living in piles and yet knowing where everything is- because we don’t fit into your systems, we make our own
The way you write an e-mail, because again, a specific patois- which may or may not match your voice in person
The way you talk about your task list when it’s clearly overwhelming, especially when it’s already overwhelming and it’s three things.
How well you can multitask
How well you remember what you’ve heard vs. what you’ve read- most autistic people take in things through sight
Whether you make eye contact, and whether it looks like you’ve been trained into making eye contact as opposed to it being completely natural
Perceiving social masking instead of genuine comfort…. If you have to appear at a party, you’re ready to go long before anyone else (it’s a universal “you,” but it’s me)
These are not all the criteria, but it’s a good start. This last one is just “et al.”
I am not the expert, I just have lots of education because I made time for it. I also have the lived experience so that when the MDs and PhDs were talking, I could understand my past behavior in a completely different way. It’s interesting that there are so many tie-ins.
A lot of people who are neurodivergent are INFJ as well. In order to be “The Counselor,” there’s so much that goes into it…. Mostly introversion unless you’re in front of a crowd. My examples for this are writers and ministers. With ministers, it’s easier to connect to a thousand people than it is to go to a cocktail party. With writers, they’d rather sit in their offices til Jesus comes than do a book talk. All of the publicity is a necessary evil, not what an author really, really wants to do.
Authors who seem arrogant are generally one of two things….. Trying to fake it until they make it, or they’re not really artists. They’re trying to sell books, and they know it’s not very good….. But it doesn’t matter because people will buy it anyway. For instance, all those non-fiction books on how to get rich without really trying. It’s not pulling pain out of you as a writer, which is what makes it art.
When you write crap, you’re never going to see the real point of being an author, which is to wrestle your demons- even in fiction. For instance, Mary Shelley poured her heart and soul into “Frankenstein” to talk about her relationship with Lord Byron. The book was never intended to start the sci-fi genre, and yet it did. Sometimes I wondered whether she identified more with Frankenstein or Jenny. Either is a hot take.
Jenny has never appeared on screen, but she’s someone who was raised with Victor as a brother and then somehow weirdly engaged to him. She was accused of something she didn’t do, and went to the gallows. The reason she didn’t do it is that the monster did.
It looks different when Lord Byron is the monster.
And now all the fright is over, because the page is no longer blank. On the other hand, to quote another marvelous author…… “Tomorrow, AND tomorrow, AND tomorrow AND tomorrow…..”
The sight is relentless, and turns pain into beauty…. But that’s only by going by and seeing the other days where the pages have not ended up empty. In order to understand my future, I have to understand the past.
It gives me the insight to make “The Sight” not so intimidating.
Yesterday, I started an entry about the whole move. I didn’t finish it before midnight, so I was going to finish today. Then, I decided I just wanted to start fresh this morning. I got an amazing night’s sleep, something I desperately needed. I will also be taking a bath in eucalyptus at some point. I’m not miserable, I’m just not young enough not to hurt after a move.
Although technically, I did all the packing. Zac moved. By the time he got to my house, I was completely toast because I’d stayed up all night trying to get everything ready. By the time Zac arrived, all we had to do was throw the totes in the back of the car. However, they were a bit too heavy for me while I was exhausted. So, Zac wins the award for being such a thoughtful person and taking over so I didn’t have to bust ass again.
What happened is that I was trying to fold my futon into a couch, and the mattress was upside down and backwards to be able to do that. There’s a special hinging system in the mattress so that one part of it has to be on the seat panel. When I flipped it over to the mattress side, I wrestled it all by myself and didn’t see the “this side down” tag to avoid this problem. So, on Friday night I turned my legs and arms black and blue trying to make more space in the room for sweeping, etc.
The futon and I fought. It’s not easy to admit when you lose to an inanimate object. However, in the end, I did get it done. It was a victory after all the sweat and bruises. So, again, I was glad that Zac could see I was wrecked from lack of sleep and exertion. I honestly believe that the pain is not all due to age. I really fucked myself up, but what other choice to you have in those moments? Where the only answer is “figure it out,” and the problem brings you to tears. So you cry and do it, anyway.
When we were finished with moving, we decided to watch Slow Horses and order pizza. Then, after we’d eaten, Zac pulled out a small box of cannoli, a delightful surprise. He’s been my rock through all of this, and I know for certain that if he’d had the bandwidth, I wouldn’t have been packing alone, either. That’s because it’s a huge give and take. We both get demand avoidance, meltdown, and need to call each other because neurodivergence, what the fuck?
It is a misnomer that autistic people know exponentially more about our disorders than neurotypical people, because we have the lived experience. This ain’t necessarily so, because data is not lived experience. We are as confused and mystified by our behavior as anyone else around us. That’s because I’m self aware enough to know when I’ve hit a wall, leaving my my mind divided in half, doing odd things and trying to figure out why.
Is it that I’m an INFJ and naturally introverted? Is it meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, anxiety, depression, hypomania, CPTSD, etc.? Those are a lot of heuristics to consider, so managing myself in terms of patient care doesn’t always go so well.
As I was telling Bryn the other day, “when you treat yourself as if you’re the best doctor you’ve got, you probably need a second opinion.”
I need more psychological support than I’m getting, because I need an autism specialist- both for working out problems and the process of creating values and visions.
I am always about “values and visioning,” because that’s language from the church in terms of creating a mission statement. It works personally as well as it does in groups. Therapists aren’t just there to help you overcome your problems. They also help you when you’re stuck career-wise and don’t know where to go from here. Mostly, that involves talking to yourself until you figure out that you have always had your own answers, you just need to be guided to them.
If it helps, I think of my monologue here as therapy, so maybe you can think of your therapist as your raw blog entries. You’re just saying them out loud to the one person who actually knows what to do to help you emotionally suit up for a healthier future.
“Half this game is 90% mental.” -Yogi Berra
In terms of finding that for myself, what I have learned is that being on my own for so long has made it where the bare minimum effort on Zac’s part looks enormous to me. Just the fact that he does things like pick up income due to our income disparity is huge. This is because it says “I want to do this thing with you and I enjoy your company so much that I would rather pay for you to be there with me than worry you’re not going to be able to swing it on your own.” It doesn’t feel like chivalry, but…. not going to lie…… yes, it does. He just only sometimes feels that way. Most of the time, it’s just that he recognizes his own white male privilege. It’s one of the best conversations I’ve ever had in my life, because it was so comforting to see that he wants his only goal in life to make his world better. This doesn’t just extend to me. It extends globally.
Zac’s small kindnesses are so endearing, because it’s not about all the chivalry. It’s remembering things I say and respecting my words as equal to his own. I have not known many men like this, because most of the men I’ve known who date women think their opinion is superior because they’re the provider (generally). When women become the provider, men often get jealous enough to derail their careers. I remember one instance on reddit in which a woman was making bank in her field because it was so incredibly niche and had a lot of sensitive information. He interviewed for a job at one of her competitors and she had to divorce him immediately because he forced her hand. It looked too bad in her niche field to even date a competitor, and this woman had been married a long time. She told him all of this before the interview, and he did it anyway.
I know intimately that I will never have any of those issues.
I have also learned, and I think I’ve written about this before at some point, that it surprised me how little difference there is between dating a man and a woman when both parties are queer. Dating a straight person generally leads to keeping them insecure and anxious that you’re going to leave them for the same sex. There’s still such a cultural stigma on homosexuality that two things are running concurrently. Jealousy and homophobia are best friends when you want the worst possible outcome. On the flip side, gay people think of you dating the opposite sex as betrayal. Frankly, I understand and respect this outlook, because it seems like we’re watching you embrace the thing that oppresses us. There is also no world in which gay people don’t treat bi people like they’re “not queer enough.”
I will give you an example. I surf dating apps just to see who’s out there, and I am astounded by the number of lesbians who have on their profiles “no men, no bisexuals.” This basically comes across to me as “Irish need not apply.” No one ever thinks of bisexual couples who are in the system have the best ability to change it. Since we’re more accepted, we have a bigger platform. I think it’s shitty to use heterosexuality as a shield, but I don’t think it’s wrong for me to date men, or treat other women like trash because they have. It’s really hard for me, because that attitude is friendly fire. I need gay people to hear that in 7.1 Surround Sound, and the bisexual community is over it a “fuck you” amount. Straight people who have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for gay people, gay people have this constant insecurity that we’re going to leave them for the enemy.
🎶🎶 One of these things is not like the other.……… 🎶🎶
I get it. I really do. I don’t have to agree with you, because that’s not my problem to solve for you. Bisexuality has nothing to do with cheating. Cheating is cheating. Bisexuality has nothing to do with polyamory. You’re either wired for multiple partners or you aren’t. They are two separate mindsets/skills. Therefore, that does not have anything to do with sexual orientation, like we’ll die if we don’t have both.
All bisexual people are saying is that their partner’s equipment is a non-issue, it’s not a barrier to a romantic relationship. They are NOT saying “I’m incapable of marriage.” Whether they are or they aren’t is a separate conclusion from attraction.
However, with Zac I don’t feel invisible, and that’s what happens to bisexual people in heterosexual relationships. We both look queer as a three dollar bill, so we don’t exactly exude heterosexual privilege when we’re out and about. I realized that dating a bisexual man was not losing my connection to the queer community with my partner. That it’s important to share whether you’re in a heterosexual relationship or not, because we’re on equal footing when it comes to being oppressed by the system. It’s amazing how often queer cancels out white in a racist theocracy, theocracy being the key word here.
I am tired of the Bible being confused with the Constitution. It’s gone on long enough. I’m tired of atheist hate of Christians because we deserve their hate so much….. In America, Christ’s actual messages have been mangled into a religion he could not support.
If you dare to judge me, you are a Roman, not a Jew. Period.
That’s because Jesus was on the side of the oppressed. American Christianity would make him vomit. It’s tinged with racism because slave masters would use Bible verses to keep their slaves in line and justify their monstrous behavior………..
Not counting on the fact that the slaves would empathize more with the minority who was beaten and killed just like them. That it was religion that gave them enough courage to stand up and fight for freedom. If you are straight, white, male, and cisgender, you don’t see with striking clarity the horror of the situation……….
That Jesus was under the exact same constraints that Americans are now. It’s just that the conservatives weren’t Republicans and Democrats, but Pharisees and Sadducees. Same software, different case. Therefore, white supremacists do not see the irony in being the people who oppress others in his name, repeating the cycle for 2,000 years. Conservative evangelical faith does not see the liberation in the story….. sometimes through thoughtlessness, sometimes through malice. The thoughtlessness is because people who aren’t oppressed don’t need liberation theology. They don’t need to feel inspiration from the fact that a minority was murdered by the state.
Not only that, he wasn’t murdered for actions, he was murdered for ideas. He was murdered by a government who didn’t want the people to think.
“It’s people like you what cause unrest.”
So, when you think about it that way, if you are a Christian policeman with racist beliefs, you’re not actually being a Christian. You’re being a Roman.
You’re not the people for whom your sins were forgiven lightly. That’s because I’m betting it’s easier to forgive the whole world as an abstract concept than it is to forgive the people who are actively in the process of murdering you when you did it.
You are as worthy of redemption as everyone else, because grace and mercy are free of charge. But the more you exclude people, the more you separate yourself from the Jew you claim to adore while mangling his words into everything he didn’t say.
Where in the Bible do you find that Jesus would have accepted the behavior of people like Donald Trump? That is the real mystery of your faith, because your blinders keep you from seeing it. Your words and Jesus’s actions don’t line up, so how dare you think writing your own headcanon and retconning everything to support the crazy idea that Jesus would support war and greed, things like that is everything wrong with white church.
You don’t see the hypocrisy. You don’t see the discomfort you create, even in your regular followers because your services are so fear-based. Why do people have to say they’re a “recovering Christian” at all? Do you think that Jesus would ever want people to go through recovering from trauma given to them in his name?
It is the weirdest transformation in history.
However, a lie can get around the world six times before truth can put on pants.
I am trying to find the truth in it all….. wading through the bullshit of exclusionary Christianity that harms people all over the world and trying to decide what’s worth keeping. My biggest gripe is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so when most Americans think of Christians, they think of Evangelicals. My reputation proceeds me in the absolute worst of ways.
This is problematic because atheists think that all Christians go to some sort of fucked up Bible college and are fed all these bullshit ideas. They don’t think of Harvard, Yale, or Oxford Divinity School first. To them, The Archbishop of Canterbury and Joel Osteen have the same amount of education.
I know most of you know this, but for the record, I’m going to bet the Archbishop has more.
Most people don’t know this, but the former Archbishop, Rowan Williams, was really good friends with Christopher Hitchens. They have some marvelous debates on YouTube if you’re interested.
I think this is a good point because people like Williams are being left out of the conversation. That Christians are intelligent, but there is a war between people who interpret the Bible and people who take it literally. Unfortunately, the people who take it literally, as if the pen was actually in God’s hand, have entwined themselves with the Republican Party and are the loudest idiots in the room.
When people think of Christians, their brains don’t jump to Martin Luther King Jr. and Raphael Warnock. They don’t think of William Barber and Bernice King.
They don’t see liberation theology because they don’t need it.
Zac is an atheist, and he’s the kindest Christian I ever met in terms of showing actual Christlike behavior.
If an Atheist is a better Christian than you, that’s the point at which you need to decide which God you actually serve. Are you tapping into the universe, or trying to control it?
Are you a believer, or are you Pilate, washing your hands of the whole thing because hey.
He’s just a Jew.
And that is the importance of being earnest with ourselves about the Republican Party. We need to decide when we’re going to stop following the Sanhedrin and state that murdered him, or admit it’s been a good run..
It’s quite daunting having to reparent yourself with the skills needed to deal with an autistic kid, only you’re 46. It takes so much energy to be you and parent you at the same time, and I’m sure this resonates with a lot of people. The best part of being an adult is that there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep. The worst part of being an adult is there’s no one to tell you to go to sleep.
There’s no one to tell you to pack your lunch. And there sure isn’t someone to tell you to take a shower. Because parenting yourself is something that “you should already know how to do by now,” and is squarely in the wheelhouse of demand avoidance and a desperate need to fake themselves out of it with social masking. It seems unhealthy and codependent, but having someone to social mask is literally combatting meltdown and burnout. It keeps our routines stable so that we don’t spin out mentally/behaviorally. I believe that exactly all of my problems with Supergrover stemmed from meltdown and burnout, it’s just at the time, I didn’t know how to voice that. I could not tell her “this is too much, I’m overwhelmed.” I would not back down. Meanwhile, my disability is working overtime to prove that I can help her, support her, all that. She has different friendship needs than most people, and I was trying hard to show that I knew why and respected it. In fact, most things she thought of as “crazy” were about respect, but you can’t help a little old lady across the street if she doesn’t want to go. She’ll bang her purse on your head.
There’s already a perfect end to her story in my head, and it’s more than I would ever hope for in this lifetime, but not impossible. It’s a phone call. She and Michael are telling me that we have an important event to attend. Or maybe it’s just the two of us- who knows whether said event would be as important to him as it is to us. That’s because the event in question would be honoring someone who thinks the world of both of us.
But right now, I need to disconnect. I remembered that I had some tags on Supergrover’s public page, and I untagged myself so that they weren’t public anymore- not even I can see them. I’m not worried though, because our relationship has never lived on Facebook. It’s been in the quiet moments of the night, where a blank page starts off as intimidating, and then feels like a blanket.
As I’ve said, I write about Supergrover to calm myself. Echologia to bring me down when I feel shortness of breath, heart, and brain race. That’s why everything swirling around me is creating shutdown in terms of not knowing where to start. I defeated it last night, but I’m not sure I have the energy to do as much today as I did yesterday. I’m what you would call “indoorsy,” so when I suddenly have to exert as much will and energy as possible when I don’t have it, the wind gets knocked out of me pretty fast. Going to the gym would make my body stronger, but it would not stop me from getting lost in my own little world and falling off the elliptical. I have done it thrice.
With my kind of autism, I take most information in through sight. I can observe and note human behavior, but my processing differences make it feel like a double standard. How do I know how other people act when I am nothing like them? Learning to social mask. “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.” I do not pick up the morals in a situation if they are opposite to my finely tuned sense of justice. I pick up how someone else has dealt with a situation. And because I’m imitating someone else, it feels like the only time I use my real voice is here.
But the reason you can’t claim you know me based on my writing is that you cannot see my third dimension, all the thoughts that don’t end up here. There’s a lot more I can’t say than I can, and the things I can’t say are harder than the things I can, and with the little knowledge I do have, that makes me cry and shake enough.
It’s not because I’m a naturally depressed person. It’s that digging down into yourself and looking at your worst flaws is the worst job on earth. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t constantly rewarding. More people identify with my writing than don’t, and for the people who don’t identify with it, or have a problem with something I’ve said, they’re free to bring it up with me…….. or not. But I already know that if you’re covering up a feeling, you’re going to treat me differently and have the audacity to say my perception isn’t real.
For instance, I could never tell where I stood with Supergrover because sometimes she was like a loving aunt/big sister character in my life, and at others, she said really hurtful things like “you only know random factoids about my life.” I knew this was bullshit, just a dart.
I know this because all of the sudden, when it was my story to tell, did she start having a problem with the things she has told me. So, which is it? Am I the person that only knows random factoids about your life and you aren’t worried about anything I’ve told you, or is that the brave face you put on when you know I’m entitled to my own stories? I know this because she told me I was entitled to all of my feelings, while also raging that I’d let go of information she would have liked to keep quiet and it was incredibly hurtful.
I don’t just know random factoids about her life, because if that were true, she wouldn’t spend time analyzing my work to make sure she’s still unidentified. She’s said many times that her story ceased to be mine and long time ago, so I thought nothing of writing about our mutual trauma because it is indeed what handfasted us. I couldn’t explain anything without explaining it first. Otherwise, I just look like a lovesick teenager chasing after someone who doesn’t want me. This is not correct, and it never will be. We’ve both loved each other to the best of our ability, and love isn’t enough when you both need to stop treating each other as if they’re trying to trying to fight you all the time.
It was gaslighting, and a lot of it, but not because she was a narcissist. She was afraid, and there’s a big difference. The gaslighting was pretending for years that we were fine.
Morgan Freeman: They were not, in fact, fine.
If I take everything literally, that you have no worries about what you’ve told me and you haven’t, that your stories aren’t mine anymore, etc., do I actually deserve her ire in this case?
It would be helpful to know so many things. How many people know she’s Supergrover, for one. How much detail do I need to hide because more people than just me know that identity? Who is my audience that directly affects you? Why are you waffling on whether I am a straight up problem or not? If I’ve caused someone pain, I want to know the specifics. Otherwise, I will spiral out for days and days trying to figure out what it is that I’ve said that they’re mad about.
She comes by it honestly, because for us to really engage, we’d need some time to ourselves, even if it was asynchronous. She doesn’t often have time to write letters that are anywhere near the length of mine, so I think that she thinks I always expect that of her, too. I don’t. But if I’ve had a specific need go unaddressed for years, I only want the problem to be resolved, not assurance that you have read every single thing I’ve ever written. Ignore the rest, it’s all chatter. But it really got to me when she said that I was so demanding of her time and ability to give of herself, when I have been saying for 10 years that I do not deserve her and I will take what I can get.
Anything above that is off limits, but when you don’t give me any limits, I’m going to dream that way. I wasn’t “being demanding,” I was dreaming of a time where she naturally had more bandwidth- retirement. But, you’re going to think that I’m demanding of your time if you never tell me what your boundaries are. She said that three words were all she could manage until I called her on her bullshit for months. That she had to stop not giving me information and blaming me for what writing came out of it.
A lot of this is wrong and misguided because we didn’t have any boundaries. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I was using one concept for another. A lot of this is wrong and misguided because I said I could read facial expressions and body language. But not when I constantly get “all is well, you’re worried about nothing……..” right up until she’s so angry that being apart is better than being together.
I don’t think I was wrong for bringing up a problem so we could solve it. I did think it was a problem that I couldn’t make heads or tails of her feelings until she said enough words that I knew my anxiety was for naught. But how could I know that without any information at all? It was so confusing, and why I resigned the game. I was tired of constantly being confused. For instance, “you have absolutely NO idea what I’m dealing with,” scaring me away from writing at all…… and “I have had the choice, countless times, to stop what I was doing and didn’t.” Telling me you’re that busy while also running from me is unacceptable. It’s a coverup, and very conditional love. If I don’t walk on eggshells because you’re mad and won’t tell me that, then I can just fuck right off. Is that in any way a fair and balanced relationship?
How do I make you happy if you don’t seem happy with anything?
And by making her happy, I don’t mean that I have the capability to change people from within (although I have been told I do help). She has to find those changes within herself, because I’m not here to suss them out for her. Why she can’t be open and honest and has to stick to the people-pleasing schtick is on her, and I finally saw her get out of that rut……..
She stroked my ego mightily, and my chest puffed up. When she told me that she couldn’t control anyone’s reactions, she quoted me directly without realizing it. Or she did and she was trying to hurt me by throwing my own words in my face……….. and I turned out to be teary-eyed and impressed. I’ve always had the motto “help her, anyway.”
So, when I saw the same behavior in Daniel- get angry at someone for bringing up a problem instead of acknowledging there is one- I was out and quickly. The relationship with Supergrover destroyed me, and I didn’t want another 10 years of fighting a battle that someone needs to fight on their own. It’s not my job to tiptoe around anyone. When I told Supergrover that I had issues I wanted to talk about, she said that I should find friends who didn’t bring issues into my life. There is no such thing. It was Daniel’s first answer as well. If we can’t solve this in five minutes, our relationship isn’t worth jack or shit. It’s too much. If there is a battle inside someone, even two minutes of vulnerability is too hard and it hurts too much. They won’t let go because they’re afraid of losing control, but life doesn’t make sense until you realize you never had any control in the first place.
If I could tell Daniel what I know about my story, the most private parts, he would shit himself for saying I that “just because I wrote in bulk doesn’t mean I write anything of substance.” This is because I’ve never met anyone who could play “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” quite like SG. And she thought I wrote something of substance. I will take that ego boost over anything else that happens in my career. My ability to write could be taken away tomorrow and I’ll know that I accomplished every single one of my goals.
The first was to be seen and heard.
The second was to have people who identified with me that would tell me when they liked something and when I was an asshole with a God complex. That’s because I don’t have to take a single piece of your advice, but that doesn’t mean I won’t hear it. I will be angry and defensive at first, so I usually pop off and regret, another thing I’m learning to manage, because my response is always different than a knee-jerk reaction. But sometimes I write down my knee-jerk reactions because they’re important to prove to me later where I need to grow.
I also think that Supergrover and I should have a conversation about “painting my feelings as fact,” because I could write the way she wanted me to if I understood what she meant. And the reason I’d defer to her is that she was a writing major…….. and yet somehow still thinks of me as “the talent.” I do not know how to write in a way that doesn’t make anything look like a fact, because I am narrating a plot as well. She’s whipped my ass into shape as a writer before, so I have no doubt she could help me with this, too. However, I will do some research on autobiographical writing and see if anything resonates with what she said that gives me a little more context than wondering how and when I’ve been an asshole.
I play AITA all day long with myself, because it’s the fight within me of “say nice things” and “no one forced you to come here.” As I’ve said, the people in my real life knowing what I think of them is their choice.. If they want to be here, welcome. If you always have a problem with what I say, I encourage you to change the channel….. because seriously. Who even am I? Who cares about my opinion?
The only person that really should is me, because it informs how I feel about myself.
How I feel about myself this minute is that I’m proud I handled my move all by myself so that it is free to me- as in, I’m just going to hand my deposit and leftover rent directly to Colin on day one, and my rent hasn’t gone up, so I don’t have to make up the difference.
With Silver Spring, I have gotten two miracles in a row. Hayat and Colin were both the first people I called, and they both turned out to be right for me. Towards the end of April, I’ll have been here a full nine years, and I’m only missing it by a week.
I know from experience that we still might get one more light snowstorm, because when I arrived here in late April of 2015, there was snow on the ground. It was melting, but still. It had snowed on like, April 20th or something. I think I arrived on the 23rd.
Hayat texted me that it feels like it was just yesterday she picked me up at the Metro. I understand the sentiment, because in some ways, it really feels like I just got here. In others, this has been the longest 10 years of my life…… but so necessary in terms of growth and development that I cannot trade them. If I hadn’t become a blogger, I would not have seen autism coming. I would not have seen being nonbinary coming. I would not have seen how any of my friends affect my life, from besties to the smallest interaction.
It’s small interactions that get me the most, because I’m the worst at casual conversation. If I did something weird in front of you in 1993, don’t worry. I’m still thinking about it.
While I pack my “going to Zac’s” bag and try not to flip out that we’re seeing Jason Moran tonight. If I’d had time, I would have ordered a Senators baseball cap for the event, because Duke Ellington’s first job was selling peanuts at games, where he got to know Teddy Roosevelt peripherally because every once in a while Roosevelt would ride his horse down to the field.
So, if you ever doubt the power of living in Washington, remember that a middle class black kid from DC became friends with the President of the United States…………………. long before integration was even a thing.
In fact, that’s the perfect analogy for my life. I have the brain that’s capable of seeing patterns in world conflict like a president, but I have only managed to convince the people around me that I’m selling peanuts.
What I have learned through living in Washington is that people prefer to be treated like they’re all alike on a human level, and revel in friends who aren’t obsessed with who they are and what they can do for me, a classic Washington stereotype. Republicans sniff each other’s butts by asking how much they make.
People do that to me sometimes. Someone asked me how much my sister made, and it was so fucking rude. But, we were at one of Lindsay’s work events, so I didn’t want to go apeshit. I just said, “she’s a Democrat. Aim low.” The truth is that I only know she makes more than me. That’s it, because I don’t ask those questions, and she usually doesn’t volunteer that information except when she’s telling me what a job potentially will pay her if she gets it. I always tell her to aim for the stars, because not only does she travel, she eventually wants to live in a different state where the cost of living is a lot higher than Texas. She doesn’t know how she’d do it, it’s a pipe dream because she doesn’t often think about moving. But, every little bit helps when you are trying to save up for a dream.
I will use DC as an example because she doesn’t want to come here, so it’s not giving away where she’d look if she was actually interested in leaving Texas.
In DC, MD, and VA, buying a house here is ridiculously expensive, and the closer you want to “inside the Beltway” or “downtown living,” the price skyrockets exponentially. An apartment in the city is going to run you about $2500/month. Even in Silver Spring, you won’t find an apartment for less than $1,000…… maybe, maybe if it’s an efficiency. However, management companies are ridiculously relentless in raising rent, so you’ll be paying over 1k/mo in no time if they advertised cheap rent to get you in the door.
And, for $2500/mo in DC, you still only get a white box, especially in neighborhoods that aren’t riddled with crime. If you are in an area with violent crime, depending on where it is, you’ll still pay $2500 because it’s walking distance to the Metro or something like that. Housing does not go down when DC is only 60 sq miles.
Buying a house might be a little cheaper if you have the funds to renovate. You can get a good deal if it’s just a lot with a barely standing building. The land is the expensive part, not the construction.
But then you have to live in DC, and some of their laws are just plain strange. It’s weird that things come through the Senate, because DC’s needs are thrown under the bus by pork barreling.
Like, the bill will be something like “$15/minimum wage” or whatever it is that will do the city good, and someone will put a total ban on abortion in the bill. So, the bill gets struck down and the Republicans say “they wanted this minimum wage so bad, and then they didn’t even want to compromise.”
Make someone else look like that bad guy, because nothing you’ve done has ever elicited a reaction.
Global and national are the same as local.
Generally, if a person will react in a certain way, a country will also act like that. It’s a chessboard, and I see patterns all the time.
The important part is to just keep stitching. The quilt will come together eventually.
Or, with autism, maybe it never will. But I am not interested in turning myself into a person I was never meant to be.
My little AuDHD brain is overwhelmed and I need to shut down, refocus. So, I’m sitting on my bed and writing an entry… soothing myself back from burnout/demand avoidance because I have so much to do. Or, I think I have so much to do because my brain is consistently arranged like “The Persistence of Memory.” Everything is clear and logical, with solid lines….. except for the dripping clock. I have no ability to estimate how long a job will take, and my room isn’t honestly that big. I do not have the ability, however, to say “I have X number of days…. how much do I need to devote to packing so that I’m absolutely ready by the time Zac gets here? I have already packed a few boxes, and I have plenty left because they’re so large. It’s helpful that they’re canvas, because they’re just as heavy as cardboard, but they have nicer handles. So far, I like the orange ones best.
It’s kind of interesting that my moving boxes are a stunning array of colors.
I’ve been moving hard, but I cannot sustain concentration and effort on packing right now. My muscles need a break and I’m desperate for some water. But even when I sit down, I’m still searching for something. My mind gets busy when my body is weak.
On the autism subreddit there are tests to get you started in terms of gauging whether you have autism or not. It’s confusing, especially when you have ADHD….. although the most insightful test for me was called “the Aspie test,” and I’m sure they mean “Asperger’s,” but apparently that is a dirty word because Asperger was a Nazi. Anyway, there are different ways of asking the questions, and it clarified something that I could not explain, but I know is true.
It asked me when I read books if I could imagine/picture the characters. The Aspie test was the only one that allowed me to choose “imagination and visualization are two different things.” I am moved by prose, I am not seeing a movie in my head. I know a picture is worth a thousand words, but I generally write quite a bit more than that. What a focus on in a novel is empathy with the characters; I like reading how they think and feel. However, when I read descriptions of people’s physical attributes, it means nothing.
I will tell you that when I got to see an actual picture of the real Supergrover recently, I thought, “I will never in my lifetime do her justice, and there’s absolutely no one they could cast that would look anything like her.” It made me sad, because I realized if I didn’t read that way, I wouldn’t write that way, either…. it’s not my wheelhouse.
I swear to God, if I publish a book and you have no idea what any of the characters look like, it’s only because I have no idea, either.
So far, I’ve taken all of the quizzes. I 100% have traits of autism according to one because they took more information from me than anyone else. It was rad. They asked my gender at birth and gender now, my age, and whether I was self-diagnosed or professionally diagnosed. Then, they asked if I was professionally or self diagnosed with ADHD. The answer is that I am self diagnosed/suspected ASD and professionally diagnosed ADHD. THEN I started the questionnaire. That means it’s a weighted score, because the test already knows that if you’re diagnosed with one, there’s an 80% chance you have the other.
The thing that really freaked me out was that they asked if I had a specific gait, if I’d been accused of staring at anyone, if I had depth perception issues…… I mean WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK?
No one had to call me out like this.
At the same time, now that I’ve taken all of these quizzes that back up my gut feeling (I’ve taken the monotropism questionnaire and got a very high score, but nothing like the ones above), I don’t have imposter syndrome anymore. I finally have answers to miscommunications lasting back decades.
The worst was “I often say things that other people think come across as mean, and I don’t understand why.”
However, it is to Supergrover’s credit that I started down this road, because of course ADHD Facebook groups often have Autistic memes as well because we’re both neurodivergent. I saw a few too many autism posts that skewered me, and I started doing the research. The reason the credit goes to her is that she may never have thought of me as a narcissist, but her words made me feel like one when I was trying to reach out to her. I had to find what was missing in me. How could I improve my communication skills so I didn’t come off that way anymore? When I figure it all out, I’ll let you know. But at the same time, I have made progress. It’s just hard to make progress when there are several differences in the way I communicate with most of the world:
I am a big picture person. Always. My mind is not built to handle detail. This leads to professional and personal problems, because detail at work is required and detail at home depends on your partner. Are you always forgetting details that are important to them, having the most insensitive reaction possible, having them tell you that “you knew what you were doing?” There are a million cues built into the system that lead people to the most obvious answer. So, if I was neurotypical, I have no doubt that those people would be right. I’m not. I’m autistic. Therefore, my brain processes information differently and because it’s so out of sync with the rest of the world, it is aggressively annoying. I will do everything I can to help you navigate being in a relationship with me except read your mind. I will not pick up on the fact that you’re mad about something just because we haven’t spoken.
I see patterns in everything, all the time, when it comes to human behavior. I am not a STEM genius that can do magic with data strings. When I was a kid, I was the one that knew everyone’s phone number off the top of my head. Now, without my iPhone, I could 100% call my dad. Everyone else I might get wrong. One out of hundreds of contacts is not that great.
I know this because I do know my sister’s phone number, but when I had to dial it recently I put in the wrong area code and had to start over. So, I suppose I know two numbers.
I remember e-mail addresses easier than I remember phone numbers because I’m driven by letters. I still have a friend on AOL. It’s adorable. I have thought many times “what if I had the money to send her a GIANT BOX of AOL disks and a copy of Windows 95?”
I get lost in tasks to the exclusion of all else, and this shows most adamantly in working on computers. If something is wrong with my computer, I will take it down to the studs, because I prefer doing everything the same way every time. I am also not a detail person. I am a “keep everything on a cloud drive so that I don’t have to deal with details” kind of person.
It doesn’t take me very long to get frustrated with a task, and my fuse is more short with Windows, because I can use Google or ChatGPT to find the snippets of code I need to fix my Linux system. I should look on a DOS subreddit, but I won’t. The only DOS command I need is wsl –install (Install Windows Subsystem for Linux and the default distribution, Ubuntu). I will not put up with any system foolishness. If a hard drive disagrees with me, they seem to STFU when I drop the partition table. Troubleshooting a problem in either operating system can take hours. When things start getting difficult, I would rather start over. Metaphor for neurodivergent life, probably because we’re all relentless perfectionists so that we don’t get labeled lazy.
I do not like being interrupted, and while I am not grumpy about it, I am frustrated that nothing ever goes back to the way it was. It takes me a long time to transition in and out of “the zone,” no matter the task. But I’m not the type to say “you interrupted me,” because it’s not my job to enforce strict rules on who can talk to me when. I do, however, miss the many ideas that have floated off into thin air, and thankful I’m fast enough to have another idea to replace it.
I don’t process things verbally very well, because I think a lot faster than I speak. I’m literally having buffer overflow issues, and trying not to stutter when I’m in conversation. That’s because I generally have one thought building on another and I have to take all those strands and braid them before I speak. And even then, I often realize that I might have said something truthful, but I had no idea of the impact, because I have no idea how my words are going to be received.
Not knowing how my words were being received was instrumental in making me wonder why Supergrover called me a judgmental dickhead all the time, when I was sending her so much love and attention…… but I didn’t change for her. I noticed that I was struggling with relationships in every area of my life and couldn’t explain why in those cases, either. It was a long journey, because I didn’t want to be flippant. I wanted to be Maude Lebowski “thorough” before I said anything, because there’s a lot of hate in the autism community for people who don’t do the homework and just decide on two Tik-Toks that this is totally them.
Therefore, not only did I seek out autistic YouTubers, I also sought out lectures by M.D.s and Ph.Ds describing the symptoms of the disorders on the spectrum overall. That lots of people are creative and not visual. Because the autism test asked if I had depth perception issues, I assume that there are lots of people who can’t see movies in their heads because they don’t have the ability to put things correctly into their environment. Someone with 2D vision cannot have immersive experiences, for the most part. For instance, trees aren’t blobs because I don’t have glasses. They’re blobs because they’re all 2D. I can’t place individual branches on their x, y, and z axes…… particularly zed. I call it the zed axis because even though I’m an American, “Zed” sounds like more of a villain name……..
Zed Axis…….. so we meet again……..
So, because I cannot place things in their environment, can’t process thoughts and emotions the same way as a neurotypical person, and look like I’m from the Ministry of Silly Walks, I am a long way from normal before I ever really start talking about “my issues.” But they all combine to give me a hilarious sense of humor if you are also neurodivergent, because one of the things that the tests point out is that neurodivergent and neurotypical humor is different, too. We generally have no sense of propriety, and are always on the “think it, say it” plan regardless of the consequences, because it’s a disability, not a personal failing (I do not mean that one can or should blame their behavior on a disability. It’s the disabled person’s job to fix it because someone’s poor impulse control, demand avoidance, etc. isn’t a partner/coworker/boss’s responsibility except to give us everything we are entitled to through our places of work….. or, in the case of a partner, taking our needs seriously. A good example is that I basically like three brands of clothes because of the way they feel on my skin. Say my partner finds socks two dollars cheaper at Costco?
They might say “what’s the difference?” And I will be absolutely devastated, both because I don’t want to disappoint the person that brought the wrong thing, so I’ll use them until they wear out, annoyed they aren’t what I want. Socks last a long time and there’s no real need to replace them except for my autism making it where I can’t concentrate on anything else because the tag is three centimeters off from where it normally is. I feel all of these things. I hear sounds other people don’t notice. I pick up on behaviors other people don’t notice.
One of the questions and answers was interesting, because it told me a lot without saying a word:
The question was “can you easily pick up social cues?” One of the choices is “I think I can remember how to act like someone else I know.”
Christ on a cracker.
There’s also the matter of your abilities as a conversationalist………… Because you take everything literally, there’s probably no White Elephant in the room. If there’s something that needs to be said, if you’re autistic you probably just blurted it out like it was nothing, because to you it wasn’t, and you don’t understand the emotion coming at you. It gets overwhelming fast if you’re with more than one person, which is why I try to be with only one person at a time. I cannot process two people talking while also thinking of something to say. I end up missing the jumping in point, because they’re supercomputers and I’m a raspberry pi. I am much quicker than other people in text, but it’s a different kind of comprehension. I’m the supercomputer when they’re at a disadvantage.
Because I don’t process voices well, I do like talking on the phone, but only to the people who are very, very close to me. That’s because I don’t want it to be too long in between hearing each other’s voices. With literally anyone else, I tend to talk with my hands. I talk with my hands in person, too, but that’s just because I’m a Texan.
A Texan who has just realized that procrastination time is up. Have fun with the quizzes if you decide to take them. And by “fun,” I mean “I didn’t actually know you could feel this devastated and elated simultaneously.”
Today’s prompt, which I answered last year, was about what kind of exercise I liked….. or something like that. Well, I can assure you that it is not carting laundry up and down from the basement and packing boxes. It’s all a necessary evil, though, because for as much as I love my house, I’m getting really excited about moving into a new space. I can’t say that it’s bigger, because I haven’t really spent a whole lot of time there. But it’s at least as big, and it’s still a whole house over a tiny white box apartment. In my area, I would pay twice or three times as much for the privilege of living alone in a tiny white box. I realize you have to take a chance on housemates, but I truly prefer it to living alone.
I am a solitary person. If I didn’t have housemates, I wouldn’t talk to people at all. I go days without conversation now. Therefore, having someone around is not the worst thing in the world, and having it be someone I genuinely get along with is exciting. I’m bummed that Magda pulled out, but I see why. She just has too much stuff to fit in the space. I don’t know if she’s found another place or not. I’m just glad that my moving in was not dependent on me bringing someone else with me. He absolutely had the right to say no, that he only wanted one roommate and he was going to look for someone who could pay him more. And yet, he didn’t. It was very gracious of him, and I’m glad neither of us has to interview more people. We’re both neurodivergent and the thought of living with someone else is frightening. You find someone you get on with, you don’t lose them.
I mean, at the end of the day Colin only needs someone who cleans up after themselves, and is a normal human being. One out of two ain’t bad. And as I’ve kidded him, I have no problem moving in with a stranger because I’ve never met anyone stranger than me. This is undeniably true on many levels, and people tend to find this out over time, not immediately. But at least we’re the same sort of weird. Neurodivergent people feel like aliens, so it’s like two aliens decided to share a house instead of interacting with so many humans.
Yes, it really does feel that isolating sometimes, but it’s hard to notice when I’m actually lonely, if that makes sense. For instance, sometimes I mistake boredom for loneliness, or a hundred other emotions that are actually feeling lonely but written off as other things so they just fly right past me. I am not consciously saying to myself “stay lonely,” but “the world out there is scary.” “Out there,” I have to manage my AuDHD, and it’s sometimes an impossible task. Often a disability does not mean you cannot do something- it means that you have difficulty. Autism criteria tells me that I will suffer with problems in my interpersonal relationships my whole life. Apparently, my reaction to that is not to have that many of them.
But this isn’t unusual, either. Most people hang out with their partners and kids, and they don’t have a ton of friends, either. I believe that why this bothers me is that for them, cocooning with their people is perfectly normal. Not being a social butterfly because I’m not very good at it is problematic. Thankfully, I’m starting to feel this type of judgment less and less as family configurations come forward in all types of ways, and by my age those family configurations are completely convoluted, because by now we’ve all had multiple relationships….. and sometimes the people in your family are the ones that decided to stand by you when those relationships ended, so the family you thought you had is not where you ended up.
It’s the beauty of life, that we don’t know where we’re going to end up. But what I do know is that at this point in my life there’s no replacements. There’s no getting rid of Zac or Bryn to make room for someone else, because there is plenty of room already…… and yet, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like my life is bursting with good things. I am not waiting for something to happen; it is happening while we speak.
I have changed so much. I just wanted to go out and have a good time with Zac, kidding him that I liked to be “wined and dined.” It’s funny because we love Trader Joe’s and so far we have shared one bottle of wine in the year that we’ve been dating- or at least, I know it’s over a year, but I don’t know how much. I haven’t counted it up, and I need to. Zac says I need to pick an anniversary and that was immediately overwhelming. I wouldn’t know where to start, and that line of thinking immediately made me fall over with laughter….. the part where I think about what might constitute an anniversary. In any case, I wouldn’t have said that I’d rather find someone else who can fit into that rather than someone who would make me give that up, which is how most of society works. I have found that neurodivergence is basically a Chinese Wall. When Zac isn’t with me, my time is completely dedicated to something else. Therefore, I know I have the capacity to manage multiple partners because I’m not spending time with one thinking about the other, ever.
You live and learn. I had a hierarchy with Supergrover and Dana, but I never want that again, and I don’t have to unless I seek it out. The important part of learning is knowing where and when to stop looking. The hierarchy was in Supergrover’s favor, and she can feel guilty and hurt about that all she wants, but it doesn’t make my story any less valid, because there were things in her life I couldn’t see that I needed to see; and things in my life she needed to see and ran away from for years. I know she’s hurt, angry, tired, etc. Still can’t undo it or help it. She could have helped me with clarity, but she attacked me when I asked for it. There are so many really good conversations we needed to have that would have been hard, but enriching. It wasn’t easy to be dressed down by someone I love that much, but I survived.
Now that she’s out of my life, the power structure is still there, but it’s not so extremely loud and incredibly close. Having a power structure like ours made me feel comfort, because her love is a weighted blanket. But sometimes in the middle of the night, I got too hot and couldn’t take the blankets off. I saw visions and took off in that direction, and it was the right one. I just also made a shit ton of mistakes in the process. There’s nothing to regret or blame, just put to sleep.
What I have realized is that when it comes to Supergrover, echolagia is how I stim. Having her around me feels comforting, therefore I write about her when I’m trying to calm myself. It has worked for 10 years now. After all, her name is a waltz that plays for me and me alone.
I hope she knows that; I want her to know that thinking about her is the easiest way for me to calm myself, because I think she thinks I want to come after her with heat….. and in reality, I’ve just read her for so many years that it feels like I somehow have this other personality inside me. I don’t mean I impersonate her in any way, I mean that when I’m about to do something, a relevant line from one of her e-mails will come back to me and then I decide if I’m still going to do the thing.
When I’m talking to other people, relevant lines come up from her e-mails, too, and I don’t bother to quote her. I just make myself sound smarter by ripping her off blind. I’m not sure that she’s offended by this, as I am sure a lot of her friends know “her” opinions as well. 😉 Not that I’m as clever or funny, it’s just that I know if I have a good line and it stuck with her, it probably came up somewhere. I have fun thinking about where those things might have come up.
But once trust was broken, we stopped acting like we like each other and turned on each other instead. It melted into an easy peace, and I’m good with it and not. I have the character I’ve created in my mind, but I wish I had the real thing.
She is not a Hydrox. She is an Oreo.
However, over time I have learned to like Hydrox better and better. It’s a sweet treat, after all this mental exercise.
I should have known that this is exactly how things were going to turn out with Daniel, but I felt like it was important to keep the promise to myself- to see whether rehab had indeed cleared his mind and whether we could make the plans we made fit a future now. I did not want to be the person that abandoned their partner while they were in the worst part of their lives. I couldn’t be that person to my partner, and I wasn’t. I can be proud of that.
But in retrospect, there was a red flag on day one that I couldn’t ignore, and I ran from it, because I knew that I had made a horrible, horrible mistake unless Daniel was telling the absolute truth, and there was no way of knowing whether he was telling the absolute truth from this many miles away. He said that he was still drinking, but it was night and day now. It’s not the thing you want to hear from someone that’s been to inpatient if you know even a couple of things about alcohol and the brain. It’s not that they’re not telling the truth. It’s “are you willing to gamble?” Because maybe they are. Maybe one or two beers every once in a while is their new normal. But I’m not willing to gamble.
I was for a few days. Seriously. I wanted to know how Daniel thought, whether any of his thought processes had changed over the year we were apart, how he treated me now vs. how he treated me then, etc. Absolutely nothing has changed. At no time did he consider my feelings before he went right back to saying that we were starting over while also treating me like a fiancée, so which is it? Do you want to pretend that we don’t know each other or do you want the intimacy that comes with being a partner? I don’t share all my thoughts and feelings with just anyone, and I found out that he cannot handle them.
Even after having a talk about the way I process emotions and the difference in the autistic brain, it was still all about how I’m just so mean to him and “putting all this stuff on him.” Meanwhile, he does not have any answers for my questions and no indication as to what “putting all this stuff on him” even means.
I told him that no person worthy of me would ever spend a minute trying to make me think that my feelings don’t matter, and then I blocked him and walked away, while also telling him that I wouldn’t be back. I already have two people in my life that are willing to open up to me and share with me. I don’t need to fight through to be heard, and I have discovered I won’t.
I wanted a partner to build a life with, because Bryn and Zac already have life partners, and that’s unlikely to change. And by that, I do mean that Bryn is also my life partner, but with best friends, it’s a little different. I mean that she’s my off site document repository, because she knows my files better than I do.
Also, I know this sounds crazy, but the idea of marrying your best friend is starting to seem so much more sane than marrying your romantic partner. Like, why would you place something as important as marriage on a relationship that’s dependent on sexual attraction? It doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s how it’s done….. for most people.
Daniel told me that he wanted to be my favorite person, and I told him that he was…. because I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the position had been filled in 1997 and 2013, when my heart expanded to give huge palaces in my head to three women, not shoving Bryn and Dana away in favor of anyone else. When my definition of love got bigger, I did.
There are so many follow up questions that Daniel never asked, just treated me like the classic sitcom nagging wife. I have never been in a relationship with gender roles before, so I made no attempt to understand any of that. If he wants to marry a nonbinary mind, he’s got to understand that I am his equal. He can’t just dismiss my concerns; I will walk and I did, because I will not learn gender roles for anyone.
It was easy for the world to revolve around him, because only I had to respect his time. We had one conversation where we were actually focused on each other, and that was on the phone. The rest of the time, I sat and waited because he said he had time to talk and then everything that could possibly get in the way made it where our responses were 10 minutes apart. I couldn’t focus on anything because I was caught between thinking that we were having a conversation and not knowing whether I should wait for a reply or not. When I said this was irritating, he jumped all over me about that, too, when what I wanted was “sure- I’ll tell you when I’m doing something else because I also value your time.” If I have someone’s divided attention, I’d rather you finish what you were doing and come focus on me. Because it means that you won’t really focus on me. My words won’t resonate because you’re too lost in something else, like having a conversation with someone who is listening to a podcast with the TV on in the background.
I told him that I was excited about the future, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t things to talk about. That throwing problems out on the table and seeing what they look like in the light wasn’t a bad thing. He said, “you’re right, of course.” Then he proceeded to berate me for acknowledging our problems.
In the past, this would have made me start trying to learn all the ways I can move in a relationship that won’t piss someone off, giving up the parts of myself that make me unique to please someone else. I’ve been there so many times, and it doesn’t help anyone. I’d rather keep finding other people who have also gone through that transformation. It says “I am not threatened by another person having feelings.”
One of the things that really got me was the incredible double standard. Daniel told me that he gets so busy with his writing that he disappears for days, so I thought nothing of it when I was in shutdown/burnout mode; I didn’t contact anyone. I can’t think of a single person who has ever chastised me for that except Daniel, as if I should have somehow divined that he was not okay with going a day without contact from me. Although I probably would have said something to the effect of “what I hear you saying is that it’s ok for you to dissociate, but when I do it I’m a bad partner.” What’s good for the gander has to be good for the goose, because again, I am not into being the classic definition of a wife.
He said something about “trying our best,” and I thought, “that’s not what I’m going to remember about you. So far, you’ve taken every problem we need to work out in order to be together and shut down like a steel trap when I wanted to talk about it. You see me as blaming you…. so until you see me as a partner that wants to work with you instead of someone who’s ‘laying all of this on you,’ I can’t help you.” I cannot live with someone who’s in Fantasyland right now, and it seems like he’s changed his mind about moving to Maryland, because originally, we were all going to find a place somewhere between DC and Baltimore, because Daniel is overqualified to work at Johns Hopkins. It’s fine that he doesn’t want to move anymore, but he could have said that instead of just invalidating my feelings. I was talking about Avery moving in with us or something like that…. I can’t remember what. But I said something about DC and Baltimore and he said, “or Dallas or Austin.” I never want to have that conversation again, because it was like he was doorknobbing me. I would never seriously think about moving back to Texas unless the circumstances were dire.
Plus, I don’t like Austin. I just don’t. It looks like Portland, because they wanted to be all weird and stole all their slogans, then just like Portland, big industry moved in and it wasn’t the same place to live anymore. But in the end, to me it just feels like a city full of bumper stickers that say Keep Portland Austin Weird, and The People’s Republic of Portland Austin.
They were also the first Texas city to get a Voodoo Donut, but you will never in your life know how weird it really was. The FDA shut them down for making doughnuts with NyQuil and Pepto Bismol in them, as well as caffeine. You aren’t OG Voodoo Donut unless you’ve been drunk at 3AM on Burnside….. before the second location, before the hype, before the notoriety.
That’s how I feel about Portland and Austin. The donuts will never taste the same, but Austin can imitate the feeling of those donuts………. poorly.
There are better donuts out there that have taken the place of Voodoo in PDX, but for a while Voodoo was this enigma.
I also don’t like moving at all. It was great when Daniel was headed up here already, that we’d talked about him moving here about this time last year. I realized that his PhD put us in the way of that, but I wasn’t daunted. However, I did think that it was very unfair of him to change plans without me and not let me know up front that in order for us to be together, he’d also like me to “come home.” I could have saved him a lot of trouble. That’s not a doorknob conversation. That’s a conversation you have to be up front about, and that’s my whole problem with Daniel and the many other emotionally unavailable people in my life. They call me demanding when I lay my feelings on the table and expect them to do the same so that I know what problems I need to work on in our relationship, too. But, if you think that the problem is always me, it’s not a relationship anymore.
I have always been the unseen child. I do not have to be the unseen adult, unless I just want that. I thought I did. Turns out, I had to let go of a lot of things to make me realize who I was. My destiny is not to belong to one person, but to belong to many so that I never have to put all my eggs in one basket ever again. I don’t want my husband or any of my partners to feel less important than the others, because they’re all a part of my family.
It is cooking, where we all make each other’s lives more interesting. For instance, I love hearing about Bryn’s journey through all her relationships. I love opening up to Zac and knowing that he’s capable of going toe to toe with me. I didn’t reach out to Daniel in a time of need, but abundance.
Daniel had been in a poly relationship before, so it wasn’t like I was springing anything new on him. But he didn’t want to talk about his own boundaries, only that he never wanted me to pit him against anyone else. There’s no way I would or could do that. It would be comparing bananas and oranges and giving up one rather than realizing that they’re both great in different recipes.
I didn’t want a relationship where Daniel lived in Fantasyland, thinking I’d wait around for him all the time while he did whatever he wanted while also wanting to be married while also not wanting to compromise on anything while also saving things up and exploding.
You have been reading about that relationship with someone else on this web site, which made me especially gunshy when I saw that shit coming towards me again. Blame the person for bringing up a problem, find a way to turn it back around on them, and be extremely stubborn about being vulnerable so now I always feel bad about bringing up this problem because I know this is how you’ll react every single time.
So many women learn the land mines because they feel they need a partner worse than they need to stand on their own two feet. I’m not that person, and I never will be.
I know you have your shit. I know I have mine. The difference between us is that I’m willing to tell people the truth as I see it. As in, “this is how your words are making me feel.” Then, they choose how they respond. When it is immediately defensive, I know they’re not ready to compromise on shit. They can’t even be open and honest with themselves, so why would they be with you?
When you know yourself really well, you don’t feel the need to get defensive all the time, because you know that you’re just as fallible as the other person. It’s always a matter of working out compromises with other people if you want a relationship with them. But if your reaction to another person telling you what they need from you is “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me; how dare you,” then you’re in for a world of hurt. That kind of defensiveness takes years to work through in therapy, and you’re not a hospital for broken people. It’s too much to take on, because you’re either walking on eggshells or “starting fights,” with absolutely no in between.
Again, it took two hours for Daniel to go from “I’m having a bad day” to “you know what? This isn’t worth it.” It took him two hours to blame everything on me in my sleep because I just wasn’t attentive enough. I wasn’t attentive because neither was he. He showed me how to act. I wasn’t going to give him anything he wasn’t willing to give me.
Also, Zac and Bryn and I don’t talk every day, so it wouldn’t occur to me to treat Daniel differently unless he asked me to, and even then, I’d feel like a fuckup when I didn’t want to engage because my autism was struggling that day.
For all Daniel’s talk about understanding autism, it didn’t translate to actually improving communication, because I told him how I don’t social mask and he continued to treat me exactly the same…….. while also saying he got it.
In short, it was too much of a roller coaster, and it was easier to cut him loose and move on, knowing that I am the person I said I would be, and I will never have to play these childish games again.
I have a lot of people tell me this when they’re in relationships with me, and I have found that it is a fighting tactic of which I’m not very fond. They say “you’re demanding,” but what they mean is “I’m overwhelmed.” That’s because it is not on one person to divine the other’s needs, and there is no way that the problem is always me. However, it is a very effective cheap political shot, as if nothing in their behavior ever elicits my response. I’m just “mean.” When that happens, I disengage. I don’t want to play games. And, I’m hearing Supergrover’s voice in my head as I type this, “I do not have room for that temperature in my life.”
Last night Daniel invalidated my feelings, so I disengaged and went to bed. I didn’t want either of us to say anything they regretted, because he sighed in exasperation, which came across as passive-aggressive in the first place, and I knew it was time to go. It was enough for one day, because I was tired enough that I knew I’d go nuclear on him and I was heading a fight off at the pass. I said, “I don’t want to play your games,” took my sleeping pills, and went to bed.
I wake up, and he’s mad about all these slights, real and perceived, that he has not expressed before, so one of two things is happening. Either he’s actually concerned/angry about these things and has been covering them up, or he’s just making up things to throw in my face so that I’m “forced” to feel bad about the fact that I withdrew.
What I have learned over time is to go to bed angry. Let that shit work itself out in my dreams, rather than taking it out on the person I love because we’re fighting while we’re exhausted. So, I got some sleep, and while I was asleep, he went from “I’m having a bad day” to “you know what, this isn’t worth it” in two hours.
He absolutely spun out on his own because he was anxious, so it wasn’t a real breakup. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is right now, because he thinks I’m demanding due to old tapes. If everyone tells you that your feelings don’t matter, then you’re going to believe they don’t. If you don’t believe your words have power, then you’ll say anything because no one is listening, anyway. I understand this innately- it’s a trait of all neurodivergent people. But it is not my responsibility to fill that hole inside him and make him secure enough within himself that he doesn’t think I’m abandoning him every time I go to bed.
He asked me to stop bombarding him with messages because it was too much- he, like Supergrover, assumed that I needed answers to everything rightthefucknow, when I was making a list and checking it twice over things that were important to talk about as we plan the next few years. However, because it had been a problem with Supergrover, I was prepared for it. I could never convince her that I wanted an answer eventually, that I wasn’t on a time constraint because I was looking so far into the future that the moment didn’t matter. She could be as busy as she needed to be, as long as she was willing to lay her guts on the table and tell me what was wrong. I cannot divine it over text.
But I would if I could, and often tried.
So, I stopped writing so much to Daniel at a time and started recording my thoughts either here or in a notebook (because I doubt you care about the dull details that create dreams, you care about the dreams themselves). I want to get married to Daniel because the piece of paper has a function beyond just saying to the world that we’re in love and want to be together. We could do that in front of our friends and family without ever filing government paperwork and it would be every bit as meaningful.
But there’s a huge difference in marrying a civilian vs. marrying a veteran. Dependents are entitled to so much more if they’re married to or a child of a service member, even in Daniel’s retirement. There are perks that are thank you for your service all over the place, like not having to pay tax on things when you buy at the PX, getting to fly standby on military planes when Daniel, Cora, and I are all traveling together, and a health care system in which I’d never fall through the cracks. It’s a lot, and it’s a big decision, but Daniel has already offered. I don’t think we’re there yet, obviously, if our communication needs this much work.
But here’s why it does………. God help me. I am marrying myself, and it’s not so easy to be married to you. I do not mean that I’m a selfish bastard, I’m saying that we are so much alike that it’s akin to having a child and thinking, “I wanted you to look like me, not act like me.”
This time, it’s on Daniel to figure out why he spiraled out so fast, and learn how not to do that. Not my circus, not my monkeys. If he’s as serious about this relationship as he says he is, he’ll have to learn to own his half, because I am not here to suss it out for him.
I am in no way a psychologist. I just “speak” psychologist and this is the best way I know how to explain what’s going on without putting blame on either one of us. Medicine and how the brain works over huge population samples gives me perspective that I am not trying to analyze them, but to explain to an audience what I think is going on and how I feel, because that kind of empathy helps me move forward in a positive way. The empathy part is going out of my way to try and prove that I’m wrong. To give people the benefit of the doubt because I can analyze behavior with an omnipotent third eye, calling myself out on my own bullshit in the process.
There is just no room in my life for people who don’t want to know what part they played, because relationships don’t last that way. If one person expresses needs and one person hides, it’s a hard pattern to break……… but I have to, or Daniel, et al, will make me afraid to emote at all.
That is not what I want in a partner. We’re going to be giants together, with room for all our feelings…… no one ever has to hide in fear and spiral out alone.
Daniel seems to waffle on conversations about the future, but it’s for good reason. I’m not saying that he’s avoidant because he wants to be, only that he has to be right now…. but not forever. He’s in the middle of his disability case that could make his pension even more attractive, so he can’t predict things like cash flow and his ability to “move about the country.” At the same time, without any kind of vision, I flounder. And if me wanting some sort of working boundaries is taken as a problem because I am telling you what I want/need and feel like you need to keep everything close to the vest.
I have a huge capacity to love, but also a huge capacity to feel needed. The lovebomb/discard cycle will not happen with me, because I won’t allow it. It’s harder with an addict or a patient with mental health issues like PTSD, but not impossible. It’s not because the person is a narcissist, it’s that their first reaction is trained to be fear and protection of themselves. If you bring up a problem, their first reaction is to try and make their environment safe, and that includes the steel shutdown with the automatic locks, sometimes with the cocking of weapons to show you shouldn’t get any closer. That’s the point at which I know our conversation has come to an end, because I am not going to fight through all that. You’re going to explore why you felt you had to “suit up” and come tell me what you were really feeling that made you react that way. You are not responsible for my reactions, but I am allowed to have them.
I’m allowed to feel pissed off that Daniel once again broke up with me, but he fired himself out of anxiety and abandonment, just like I did with Supergrover. I felt abandoned even though she didn’t feel that way. I didn’t need any more safety and security than that. That way, I’m not counting on a response, but it’s welcome if I get one. I would have treated her like I treat Bryn for her whole life if she had been as honest with me in all of her e-mails as she was in her last one.
Here’s the line that got me. “I could write all night, but I won’t.” In that moment, I knew I hadn’t been lovebombed just to be discarded. That’s because the letter was already pages long, and then after she said she didn’t want to type anymore, she typed for several more paragraphs. It made it feel so much more personal and intimate, because it was like she was saying, “I could write to you all night.” The only thing I worry about with both Daniel and Supergrover is that I have done this thing:
It’s starting to stress me out that you can’t answer a blog prompt against, because I don’t really have a topic to start from each morning. Today wouldn’t have been a good one, anyway, because I don’t have any more morning/night rituals now than I did the first time around. The point still stands, though, that it was night to have a jumping off point and a tag everyone starts with every day, #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x, the number advancing every day. Well, since I have both tags for all of the prompts from last year, that’s why they already look like they’ve been answered this year. I’m sorry I’m on about this, it was just the main thing that kept me from being lazy and not posting something that day.
But yesterday wasn’t about laziness. I skipped yesterday because I was in burnout mode. I was more overstimulated than I’d been in a long time, because my schedule was all messed up. I needed time to recover and I took it. I slept, mostly. I am not as young as I continue to think I am.
If I have learned nothing from going to psychiatrists and psychologists over the years, it’s that medicine and therapy absolutely work and are valuable……… but so are sleep and sobriety. I don’t practice total abstinence from alcohol, because it’s okay to enjoy it once in a while. It’s just that if I am taking an antidepressant and drinking a depressant, I have not made any forward motion.
When I was in the restaurant business, I drank a lot more because that’s what we did after work. But, then after Dana got her DUI, we went to all these classes on medicine and alcohol (legally required for her, I just drove). It sent MY brain on fire. When I realized what was actually going on in my brain when I drank, I had a light bulb moment. It just didn’t feel like an every day sort of thing anymore.
Therefore, when I worked in a pub here in Silver Spring, I rarely drank. Occasionally I took them up on a beer, but they also had Maine Root Mexican Cola. That won nearly every night. It was a pub. None of the drinks we served had ice except for soda. With the choice of a room temperature beer or a cold soda with ice after a 12 hour shift on grill, it was a quick and easy decision. Give me the cold one.
I have shifted my focus into accommodating who I actually am instead of who everyone told me I was. Whoever I thought Leslie Lanagan was, I cannot say from before. I can only say that I saw the expectations in front of me and found all of them easy for a short period of time, and all of them untenable long term. I learned who my real friends were when I stopped social masking, and Doc was the first person who recognized it before I said it. “Do you think the authoritative part of yourself comes from you feeling more confident in confiding in me?” Yes, 100%. The more you allow me to be me without social masking, the more I want to talk to you. The more I want to open up to you.
I can only speak to the fact that the more I get to know myself, the more I learn how wrong I’ve been. Treating myself as perfectly mentally stable and perfectly physically able, just lazy and a drain on society has nearly killed me several times. I know that because I can only treat myself that way so long without realizing it’s not producing results.
Once I started being kind to myself, I could be softer, as well. That’s because I was living under everyone else’s expectations of what I should be able to do. I was not raised to be neurodivergent, and in some respects, not raised to even be fallible, either, because that is opening the kimono. The parish doesn’t get to live in the pastor’s house.
I didn’t “choose to air all of this out on my web site” re: Supergrover. I decided she wasn’t worthy of listening to my story anymore, because she’d told me she was tired of it. That did not mean there was no more story to tell. She just asked to stop listening to it. There’s so much context she’s missing, and what bothers me is that she told me that I’d aired some things she wanted to keep private, and in no way did I know any of that. When I started explaining, I went by the timeline of her e-mails, especially the ones where they said that her stories weren’t mine to carry anymore, that everyone already knew. She didn’t tell me any of it- no anger, no disappointment, no hurt, no anything. She just let it fester and wandered further from me. The thing I needed most was intimacy, but she didn’t want to give it to me. Not my call. It’s perfectly valid. But so is my hurt if that is her response. I am not saying that she did anything wrong. I am only saying that it is not her responsibility to have my reactions for me. If she wants distance, it’s just a different way of ending the game than I would have done it, but I get the same result and cannot be angry about that.
She says it’s a lot, that every letter is so dense. And at the same time, I don’t think she’d be as obsessed with reading my letters if they weren’t so deep and chewy. What brought us together has driven us apart.
Therefore, I went to my only other safe space in writing….. the part where it’s just me in my room, thinking to myself. I am writing these as letters to me in the future, which is why I cultivate this web site as what my friend Kristie called “my pensieve.” I am a really rare breed, I think….. someone who’s willing to let another person read their autistic mind in real time. I think it’s important, because generally, autistic people aren’t raised to be autistic. They know how their neurotypical adults handle the world, but they have no clue how an autistic person does it. And then add to that the large number of older women who are getting diagnosed now because it was entirely missed in their childhood due to having social masking beaten into them early. That social masking, those expectations, are what make an autistic person feel like an alien.
That’s because I am an aggressive taskmaster with myself, authoritative and stern without love because in addition to not giving myself empathy, I am a relentless perfectionist who doesn’t give a fuck about my feelings. I haven’t cared how bad I’ve made myself feel for not being perfect since I was born, because that’s how the outside world has treated me for years as well.
What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
I love Skyrim. When you pickpocket someone, you get to see the inventory of their pants.
For me, pickpocketing would be about magic, not stealing. It would have been a hit at parties if I set it up in advance…. that someone will lose their wallet, and can claim it later.
I will have all the wallets in five to seven minutes, because that’s how long I’ve got. Take longer than that, the easier it is to catch you in action.
In real life, I’m not comfortable racing against the clock, even in a video game. The exception is the kitchen, because I’m not solo. This is unacceptable to my ADHD. I thrive on ironclad structure and the other half of my brain hates my fuckin’ guts. This is because when I create iron structure, I cannot maintain it. I am happy for a little while with rigidity, but the longer it goes on the more my ADHD can’t handle it. That’s why my energy levels for tasks are different all the time. My ADHD makes it its mission in life to ensure my autism is miserable.
I have demand avoidance down to taking care of myself. Yet, at other times I can be the life of a party. I’m sure depression and hypomania play a role in my energy levels, but now that I know so much about ADHD and Autism (through endless panels and lectures on YouTube), I am finding that maybe I’m not depressed. Maybe I have been mistaking depression for autism. Every one of my symptoms of depression and hypomania feel like what the psychiatrists and psychologists are trying to explain about how AuDHD works. To me, it’s a reframing, because it doesn’t feel like depression and hypomania all the time. Sometimes, I am very stable and still have demand avoidance down to taking a shower.
I am fairly certain that I have pathological demand avoidance syndrome, because it takes a Mt. Everest amount of energy for me to do anything. I’ll know once I go through the autism diagnosis process. Basically, they treat you and if it doesn’t work, then it’s pathological. “Pathological” is a scary word, but yet it’s not. It just means it can’t be treated. It’s more scary to tell someone you have something pathological because they don’t think “pathologist,” they think “serial killer.” Not a good look.
Yet, that’s still the name of the condition, and it’s already on the spectrum, just a major part of some people’s cases of autism. If you’ve met an autistic person, you have met one autistic person. For instance, I’ll talk your ear off about The Cold War, but I don’t have food issues and I don’t have too many sensory issues. I don’t have emotions like neurotypical people, but I do have them. I just process them quite a bit differently, and writing gives me an outlet to do it.
So, honestly, I don’t need some mythical power to be a “Super.” I’ve got my superpower right here.
I found a meme that explains all of this better than I could, so let’s start out with it:
I am not saying that mansplaining does not exist. Far from it. But what I am saying is that as you get to know a man, it’s easier to tell whether they’re egotistical or neurodivergent. For instance, I would never accuse any of my male friends of mansplaining, because I’m just as likely to mansplain to them, because we are all working from a neurodivergent brain. I have had many men who worked from the first paragraph in my life, and they aren’t my friends.
In fact, a very effective way to get a man to stop “mansplaining” to you is just to ask them what’s up. Say, “are you telling me this because you think you’re the expert, or are you ADHD/autistic?” That’ll shut ’em up…… or you’ll get a real moment of authenticity and a breath of relief that will almost make them cry…… because they feel seen. That’s because I asked him a question that, dollars to donuts, no other woman has. They automatically assume that man is trying to one-up them, and don’t even think about that man’s self-esteem. That maybe he’s not trying to be an egotistical bastard. He has a processing disorder, and he thinks you think he’s dumb, not the other way around.
I feel like I know this better than most because I am nonbinary. I have told Supergrover over and over that I don’t write to her, and I don’t write for her. That my writing would exist whether she was here or not. This is the one exception. This meme is definitely for her, because I have a feeling that she’s been reading my e-mails like “I’m the expert,” and because of it I think I’m doing a terrible job of explaining myself, so I overclarify until “the cows can tape something by now.”
I feel this way because Supergrover has called me a “judgmental dickhead” for 10 years, and in her last e-mail said that I should stop thinking of myself as the expert on everyone and everything. “Not a good look.” So, my reaction is just to leave her behind. Fuck that noise. I will never in my life put up with that shit again. I talk how I talk.
I was absolutely moved by her e-mail, but after some time, I realized that she’s just as shitty a friend as she said she was, because the e-mail opened, “Ugh. I vowed never to respond to another of your e-mails.” Opening with disgust didn’t win her any brownie points, especially when I came to hear heart in hand and asked her for help with something she knew intimately.
Granted, she answered all my questions and even clarified within herself what she’s meant all these years, and it was basically “I hide all my feelings about you so that you can just twist in the wind.” It’s easy to keep someone feeling desperately insecure in a relationship that way, because they don’t know how to act. What is real? What is not?
I have been saying over and over that I’m not the expert on anything but the way I feel. If someone feels differently than I do, there is room for both our opinions in the world. Me telling my story and you hiding yours is just a shortcut to calling me a dictator and blaming me for everything when you’re the one that’s emotionally unavailable at every turn. It’s a stalling tactic, and a good one, because it makes me feel like shit.
The reason I had to get her out of my life is that I’ve been in relationships with too many women like this. I am attracted to emotionally unavailable people and they’re attracted to me. It’s because we each have something the other lacks. I lack pragmatism and logic, They lack the ability to feel as deeply as I do. So, in the beginning, it feels like you are each meeting each other’s greatest need.
Without fail, in every single relationship I’ve been in that works this way, over time it devolves into division of labor. They do all the thinking, I do all the feeling. It leaves me anxious and insecure, because in the beginning, they weren’t like this. They were high on new relationship energy and not so opposed to letting themselves feel. After that, they go back to what they know, which is not letting anyone know how they feel so that you have to walk on eggshells…… because they won’t tell you that they’re angry. They’ll say nothing is wrong when it clearly is by the way they treat you.
That has been my life for 10 years, and I’m done unless I actually feel some empathy for the way my brain processes information, because I am not an expert.
So, I read my last entry and it was so full of typos that I thought I’d gone stupid for a second…. and then I realized, no…. I am, in fact, blind as a bat. I had the font size on my tablet turned down too low in my editor, and I didn’t switch spell-checking on. So, obviously I am a genius and you need my mind.
I just got finished making supper. I didn’t know what I wanted, so I went for my go-to. Pancakes. This time, I didn’t stuff them with anything except milled flax, cinnamon, and Mexican vanilla. Normally, I add fruit and nuts, things like that. The fruit and nut ones make great peanut butter sandwiches. If you make them too thick, you can always cut them lengthwise. In fact, a couple of my pancakes look like they have bites taken out of them. This is untrue. I tore pieces off and ate them. I was already full, but I didn’t have any Tupperware, so I was trying to fit them into sandwich bags.
Which reminds me of the time I went to an Indian restaurant and ordered peshwari naan (I think that’s the one with raisins and other fruit.). It was to-go, and I was talking to the hostess. I said that peshwari naan was really good with peanut butter, and she looked at me like I was everything wrong with white people.
Fair.
However, now the house is steeped in a brown butter aroma that I haven’t smelled in a very long time. We used to make a brown butter vinaigrette at Tapalaya, and it’s a scent that takes me right back to that particular kitchen. Kinkaid says his recipe for bourbon maple syrup, which went on our fried chicken, dies with him. No the hell it won’t. I will stand over the stove for a week until I get it. I know what it tastes like ’cause I’ve made it. It’s just a matter of asking Zac for some bourbon to make it. 🙂 (I should ask him for some scotch, too, because I’ve never made butterscotch from scratch…… These are two things that would probably appeal to his appetite, so a shot or two is probably not out of line. 🙂
Kinkaid was an awesome chef, and any memory that takes me back to him is a good one.
But I make big pancakes. The best. No one can make better pancakes than me. I’m here to make America plate again.
Yes, I am making fun of the former president, but for real tho. You don’t run a brunch program for years on end and get out of there unable to make anything breakfast-wise….. except an omelette. It’s not because I don’t want to learn, it’s because I’ve never worked at a breakfast place that had them on the menu. A correct French omelette takes being in a restaurant because you don’t learn how to make them in a weekend. It’s different when you make a hundred a day. The closest I’ve ever gotten to an omelette was three eggs that looked like a broken waffle cone. But even that is progress.
It’s why if I could meet Anthony Bourdain, if it was a thing that were possible, the only thing I would ask him is “could you teach me how to make an omelette?” You don’t learn things about cooks by talking to them. You learn things by cooking with them. Everything about them comes out when they teach technique. Plus, it’s just the thing about doing an activity together makes you connect more.
When I miss him, I turn on the audiobook of “Kitchen Confidential.” I start to cry and turn it back off. It takes about 30 seconds.
To switch to another favorite chef, Gordon Ramsey, he had an interesting idea on his episode of Last Meal (YouTube, Mythical Kitchen). He said that the future of cooking is buying and trading chefs all over the world like professional footballers. The host asked him if there was anyone he’d want to slide tackle, and he said, “I did. David.” I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my bed, because the “Becks” is implied.
Gordon is who he is. He’s a rough, tough footballer who had his career taken from him at a young age due to an injury. But now those injuries are worth 17 Michelin stars. Not bad for a rookie………. who could have played Roy Kent no notes.
Here’s the thing about being a cook. You have no friends and no family beyond the kitchen, because it takes over your whole life. This is because we work while other people play. We don’t fit in with the rest of the world who thinks there’s something really wrong with you if you don’t wake up before noon. You get lots of “it’s nice to see you finally showed up to something.” Bitch, I haven’t seen my mother for Christmas in eight years.
The thing about Bourdain, though, is that there’s so much hate for him in the cooking community because mental health isn’t valid. Someone in my line cook group actually said “shame on him.”
My reply was, “you know, Anthony Bourdain is never going to hear what you said, but your friends in this group will. And now they know exactly how you feel about depression and mental health, so they know not to come to you.”
This is why people die.
You’re fine with bipolar as long as we never seem depressed or manic.
You’re fine with ADHD until you can’t track with us, and then we’re stupid, because neurotypicals think, “that’s just the way it is.” ADHD has no reference and does not give a flying fuck about the way things are. You’ll struggle in school as much as you do at work, except no one at work likes you enough to learn your communication style and how to get what they want out of you. It is all on me, all the time, to know what is expected of me because “these are things all people know.”
You’re fine with autistic people until meltdown and burnout, because you don’t understand the inconsistency in our energy levels, or demand avoidance, or literally being confused about anything because the instructions are so clear……. to a neurotypical brain.
I am not saying that I am not responsible for anything. Just because my brain works differently than yours, that does not mean I get a free pass on doing stupid shit. However, it does mean that people will get frustrated with you very, very fast.
No one wants to work with Sheldon from “Big Bang Theory” or Sam from “Atypical.” We ask too many questions. We want logic to be able to buy in. It’s logic that not many coworkers have. So, you become flaky, stupid, and whatever else choice words the boss has for you when they’ve reached the end of their ability to communicate with you.
It’s schoolyard tactics. The best way to deal with the neurodivergent kids is to leave them alone, like Special Ed is catching. Neurotypicals think that neurodivergents are annoying af, but they also hate HR, so they might be nicer to you at work than they would be at home.
An autistic person is always going to have a fairly equal spread among good evaluations and bad ones, because our energy fluctuates so much. Everyone says, “why can’t you perform like this every single day?” There are a thousand reasons why, and none of them are valid to a neurotypical who sees you using your disability as an excuse.
Therefore, I like solitary work. Being with coworkers is often downright embarrassing because when they learn I’m neurodivergent, their voices take on a different tone. I’ve never told anyone at work that I was autistic, because I didn’t know I should. It’s only been within the last year or so that I’ve learned so much….. mostly because my Adderrall only works half the time at keeping my ADHD symptoms managed, so it cannot be the whole answer.
In some ways, I think it is harder to be low needs autistic than high. People recognize autism when the person has no ability to social mask. They put up with meltdown and burnout because that’s what an autistic person does.
It is very hard to tell that autism does the same thing to people who are low needs. It’s not that we don’t have as big a problem, it’s that we’ve learned to cover it up because most people think we’re weird. You do what you have to get by.
I feel particularly discombobulated most of the time because it depends on which processing disorder is driving the bus and how much energy I have. I absolutely can be an ADHD hyperactive mess (talking, stimming), and at other times I struggle to get out of bed.
All autistic people are white knuckling it at work, which is why my favorite YouTube psychologist has three or four degrees and loses jobs all the time. Money and autism are not related. You can have the highest paying job in the world, but so much depends on your reputation.
My big thing is calling an impromptu meeting. I am the type person that cannot return to a thought. So, if I am interrupted, I basically have to start from scratch because I cannot go in the same direction anymore- it’s lost.
I don’t want to socialize at work, either, because I’ve learned over time that it gives your coworkers more ammunition against you if you tell them anything with which you struggle. Office politics determine job security, not necessarily performance…… and with an autistic person, performance is relative. With an allistic person, “it’s just how things are. You can’t hack it, and we know it.”
The bitch of it is that I have really high self-esteem, and a lot of confidence. I am not raking myself over the coals, this has been my job history and that of many, many others.
Before we get started on influential teachers, Here’s a basicl life update. Colin has said that he really enjoyed meeting both Magda and I, and he promised to get back to us by next week. We’ve continued to taxt- he sent me a message saying that he enjoyed meeting Magda and her daughter, And I said, “I was on pins and needles waiting to see how it went, and I’m so glad you like her.” He apologized to me, as if how he got along with her was his responsibility to tell me. I thought it was sweet, and said, “no need to apologize, you said it would be a while before you made your decision, and I watned to give you your space.
He told me that he was disappointed I couldn’t come up in price, because that would solve all his problems, but that he’d run the numbers and see if he could take my offer. Because it really was me reaching out and asking about the house. He told me he wanted $1230, and I said straight out I can’t afford it and tried to walk away. He still wanted to meet me, anyway. So, when he said that, I went over and met him and his dog, and really liked the place. He also mentioned that there might be enough room to rent to two people, but he wasn’t sure because he thought three people in the house would be cramped.
So, the next day I asked Magda if she needed housing, and she said yes. So, I went back to Colin and said, “I have an idea. Do you have time for me to run it past you? He said, “I’m going into a meeting, so just leave a message and I’ll get back to you when I can.” I told him that one of my housemates herre also needed housing and we love each other and want to stay together (she’s like my mother, she’s 73). Three minutes later (probably in the meeting 😉 ) he said to give her his phone number, just to make it clear he hadn’t decided anything yet.
We made an impression, and I can tell. I joked with him that he wouldn’t have to work so hard at keeping up the house. He said, “I thought everyone would just clean up after themselves.” I said, “that’s not what I meant. We’re both handy. If you want to turn the basement into usable space, we would help you. We also know how to do basic maintenance (Magda’s father was a carpenter and I’m a great assistant), as well as knowing what materials are good/worth the expense and where you can buy any brand. He said, “I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of it.”
By the time Magda left, she couldn’t say enough nice things about Colin and neither could I. If we don’t get this house, it will be sad, but not the end of the world. I have until May 1st to move out, so whether I have a place by April 1st doesn’t matter. I am best off prorating rent at both places if I do get the place on April 1st, because I want Zac to be able to help me move and he’s not free until the 13th or something like that. Plus, I told Zac that I never wanted to move into another place where he wasn’t welcome. He’s never spent any time over here becuase I wouldn’t let him. I didn’t want us to be on camera for shit, and there’s cameras all over the house. I don’t even know where all of them are. But this is a new development, and I’m certain it’s because they don’t want another fire. However, the fire was caused by an electrician drilling into a live wire in the basement. None of the housemates had anything to do with it, but for all of us it’s starting to feel like a jail.
So, it was a good time to move, because even though all three of us are freaked out beyond believe and feel locked in our rooms all the time, It wasn’t always like this. For me, the last straw was not getting any support in my quest not to clean up someone else’s pubic hair.
Then, I was cooking, and I heard them talking to a real estate agent in another room. I asked Samantha if they were selling the house, and she said, “I don’t know,” but it was very, very obvious that she did.
Not five minutes later, Hayat calls me down to talk to her and says that they’re getting the house appraised. She turned out not liking that guy, so called in another one. She told me that she wasn’t even sure she wanted to sell, she just thought that the house might be an easy way to fund her retirement….. she just didn’t know for sure because the first guy undervalued them so much. This was Saturday or Sunday, and the photographers came yesterday. So, apparently it was an easier decision than I thought.
I think it was Monday or Tuesday when she officially told me I had 60 days to move out, and we both cried together. It’s been nine years. It’s a huge transition no matter how I feel about the situation now.
So, anyway, I sspent a little of Tuesday and all of Wednesday preparing for photos, I was so glad I was done by Wednesday night, because I could go to bed without setting an alarm. I don’t, usually, because when I go to bed between nine and 10, I automatically wake up at five or six.
The photographers left, and I shut down. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t do anything but lie there. I am processing a thunderstorm of emotion, and it’s too much in its immediacy. I know I will feel more and more calm over time, even if we don’t get the house with Colin, because the shock will have worn off. I am so glad that they were talking loud enough that I could hear without eavesdropping, because I wasn’t trying to be intrusive. I was making dinner, and their kitchen is only separated by a wooden door from mine….. the real estate agent was especially loud.
But the reason I’m glad is that if I hadn’t confronted them, who knows how long of a notice we’d be given. I don’t think that Hayat would have left all this to the last minute, but at the same time, you’re never sure about things like that.
So, as I told Colin, Magda and I have decided that we want to live with Jack, who is a dog, and he’s just an accessory. He got a big laugh out of that one. I do think that Colin will come through for us because he’s alrewady invested in us….. and that’s a great feeling. It’s also amazing that my rent won’t change in the slightest. Since I told Colin I could pay $795/month, Magda said that she could pay $700 and I could have the bigger room. Colin said, “I think the rooms are the same size. I should get out a tape measure.” It’s the only appropriate neurodivergent response. I said, “it doesn’t matter. She thinks mine is bigger. Don’t take all of that upon yourself. We’re very happy with everything we saw and we like boht you and Jack.”
That’s because he said it wouldn’t be worth it to him to only get $1230 for two roommates, but he would consider it if it were $1500-1600. So, I found him another person who could get him up to $1500, because I’m so sold on the house. Then, so was Magda. Now the ball is in Colin’s court, but as I said, he’s really already made us feel welcome.
When Colin moved in, and I know this because of pictures on Redfin, the front of the house looked German, because all the wood that would traditionally be on a Tudor house was painted green. Now, it’s back to black and it looks AMAZING. It’s also a quiet street and only a 10 minute walk to the bus, with maybe another 10 or 20 to the Metro. I basically found a house two major stoplights from this one. It’s a miracle.
Plus, I hate moving. I really hate it. So does Colin. Both of us are interested in long-term, not six months. And because it’s possible that my futon won’t fit in my room, I said, “if we make a man cave downstairs, I will be happy to donate the couch.” I could sell it, as it’s worth a lot, but it was a gift from Hayat. I might tell Colin to take the bed out of my room so I can keep this one, but I’m not sure. There are too many possibilities to just concentrate on one.
My shutdown hasn’t been better today. I haven’t been able to do anything except lie here and think about all the moving parts in an actual relocation. It’s overwhelming to an enormous degree, and my reaction is to shut out the rest of the world. I’m not even listening to music or have the TV on. All I want is quiet.
My most influential teacher was Robin Stauffer (grade 11), because she taught me that my life was going to be hard. She invited me to do things with her, like put up bulletin boards or something, and then I came out to her. My grades dropped immediately and I was transferred into another class. There’s more to the story that includes sweet revenge, but it wasn’t until years later and I can’t really talk about it for privacy reasons. Let’s just say it was epic, but it’s not my story to tell because the comeuppance wasn’t from me.
In terms of love, I thought my grade four teacher, Jan Forrest, hung the moon. I was one of her stars because she was an English teacher. I won a couple of competitions for poetry reading that year…. not analyzing it. Getting up in front of the class and reciting them.
My father being a minister probably had nothing to do with this……. #eyeroll
Last night I went over to Colin’s house to meet him in person for the first time, as well as his dog. I got along with both swimmingly, but it’s a huge house and a lot more than I want to pay. I don’t want to use half the house. I want to rent a bedroom. He’s fairly certain he only wants to share the house with one person, so if he gets what he’s asking from someone else, I’m cool with it. I made a friend regardless.
However, we like each other so much that he’s taking some time to see if he can make it work, like being open to renting to two people, or axing his dog walker because I’ll be able to do it. Again, this has been a godsend of a connection, because even if I don’t end up moving in with Colin, he’s a solid dude. I told him that he still has my number regardless of the move for things like taking care of his dog while he’s out of town. Boarding dogs around here is expensive, and being good with a potential roommate’s dog has never lost me any brownie points.
Colin’s dog is half Jack Russell terrier and half Chihuahua. Therefore, he’s very tall (for a terrier/chihuahua) with blonde, curly hair all over. Colin says that the Jack Russell terrier must have been wire-haired (he’s had his DNA tested, so he’s sure about the mix). I feel like you can trust a man so dedicated to his dog that be brought genealogical research into it.
I just feel better about the state of moving at all, because Hayat gave me a stunning recommendation letter, and she’s actually the one that introduced me to Colin, indirectly. She’s on NextDoor and I’m not, so she sent me a listing. The reason it was so much more than I wanted to pay is that the listing didn’t have a price. When I told him it was out of my price range, he wanted to talk to me, anyway, because I was the first person that had even responded.
Then, of course, we started texting each other because that’s how our people communicate (neurodivergent). So, we have become a little bit closer via iMessage, because I feel it’s important for us to feel comfortable if we’re going to be sharing a house.
When he told me that he needed to think about all the financial implications, because he really only wanted one housemate, I told him to take the time he needed, because I don’t have to be out of my current place until May 1st, I’m just looking to move earlier than that because I don’t want to live here while people are coming in and out for showings. I also told him that I didn’t want to move again in another few months, so let’s make sure it’s the right fit.
He agreed, so we’re just chatting about normal friend stuff because like I said, I want to get to know him regardless. He does have a girlfriend, but they’re about as involved as Zac and me. As in, they don’t live together, they don’t spend all their time together, etc. We’re both stunningly introverted, which I think will also work well.
If Colin agrees to take me on as a lodger, it will be very nice only living with one, possibly two people. I don’t think that neurotypical people get the need for sensory deprivation. I think that people who need to be alone a lot make extroverts uncomfortable.
So, now I have two solid leads, and I feel better about myself than I have in ages because I didn’t know how this would go. Now that I have a letter of recommendation from Hayat and not someone they can’t verify I lived with, it’s a different ball game. My landlord said that I was a warm and caring person, and that my rent had never been late in nine years.
That goes a long way with people, so hopefully if it doesn’t work out with Colin, it will work out somewhere in DC. I’m surprised at the amount of looking I’ve sone in Silver Spring, because I thought I’d want to take off for DC/Alexandria immediately.
I’ve found much better deals on this side of the river, and in DC, even if you get a refinished house, it will still have weird steps all over the place because there’s no way it’s level after 300 years. I have nearly killed myself in several DC row houses. I know it would be so much easier for Lindsay if I lived in the middle of the city, but I haven’t found any place that truly looks comfortable. Most of the DC houses I’ve seen are very, very cramped.
Colin works for the local government in DC, and has a band. But it’s interesting. They only rent a recording studio and play together like, once a year. The rest of the time, they record their parts separately and just e-mail them, then the mixer puts everything together.
If it seems like I’m putting all my eggs in one basket, I don’t feel that I am because I am continuing to interview with other people, I’m just the most excited about this probability because I won’t be going that far and it’s someone I already like.
Plus, it would be nice to be settled by the time Bryn and her boyfriend, Dave, get here in May. However, I did warn them that it may be they arrive and start picking up my boxes. 😉 I know them well enough to know they’d just do it, though. The way I move, it will take less than half a day.
Today it’s all about culling, because tomorrow they’re coming to take pictures for Zillow, Redfin, etc. This is not my forté. I am going to suffer through. I had a Five Hour Energy, and I might have a cup of coffee as well (out of Adderrall and don’t have time to go to the doctor before the photographers get here). I have nine years of crap to go through, because I don’t want to move it all.
Yesterday, I gave my housemate Magda two GIANT bags of bath salts, because I bought them without knowing that Hayat was planning on ripping up the bathtub and putting in a shower. So, I have had industrial size bags of bath salts sitting on top of my dresser for the last year and a half.
Not all of my clothes fit, or they’re not my style anymore, etc.
It’s Mari Kondo time, and I may put her on for inspiration.
But if I’m going to bring up Mari Kondo’s name, I should also tell you I have “The Life Changing Magic of Leaving Your Shit All Over the Place” on my Kindle.
Today or tomorrow I am meeting another potential roommate that lives in my neighborhood. My landlord referred me to him via NextDoor, so hopefully I’ll be able to secure something fairly quickly. As we told each other, it’s at least worth a meeting to see if we get along, and he has a dog.
The funniest thing he said was that he was saying he lived alone, and I said, “I’m autistic and ADHD. It would probably work out better for me because of less sensory input.” He said, and it was so cute…… “I am somewhat neurodivergent.” I told him I laughed out loud at that one. We’re both introverts. He works for a government agency and his house is cute as a button, plus updated on the inside. I looked at some pictures online, but it was from the sale of the house. I have no idea what it looks like furnished yet, but I’m eager to see.
He’s a little older than me, the same age as Supergrover. It’s how I know he’s young enough to vibe with me and not too old to think of me as a constant annoyance because our age difference is too great. My worst nightmare was getting stuck in a group house with five 20 year old interns on Capitol Hill. It wouldn’t have been bad. I would have connected with a lot of Washington elite that way, but it wouldn’t have been the right vibe. If it works out that I move in with (let’s call him) Colin, I feel that I could go the distance with him, because I moved my entire childhood. The only place I have lived longer than DC is Portland, and even that was broken up into two chunks. The first was going to see my family, and at that time, I really meant it.
The second time, I had to go see about a girl. I had it bad, but I didn’t realize it until we drove from Portland to Houston together. That woman helped me move into my apartment in fucking August (I repeat….. in HOUSTON, TEXAS) and I let her get on the plane back to Oregon. What in the actual fuck was wrong with me?
If I have any regrets in life, it’s not taking Dana seriously at six weeks when she told me she had a crush on me. It took me three or three and a half years to accept that I had a crush on her, too. That’s because I don’t know what possessed her to tell me she had a crush on me, except yes, I do.
Carol, Dana’s then-wife, was not threatened by Dana having a crush……… and oh my fucking God.
Oh my God.
I did to Dana what Dana did to Carol. It just so happened that my new relationship energy was never going to go anywhere, therefore my pie in the sky ideas for a romance with a straight woman were grounded until my mental health went off the rails. That’s what I mean about the hurt being unintentional. I take responsibility for my behavior, because it happened no matter what my mental health might have been at the time. It is more about forgiving myself for not having the right tools to deal with my feelings, my medication, or my mental state while my medication was, in a few words, completely fucked up.
Again, I learned I was poly because I never lost any love for Dana, I only gained it for SG! Dana and I went down the tubes of our own accord, but not exactly. There was no preconceived plan on Supergrover’s part to institute a divide and conquer move. As she says, our relationship happened organically despite a whole bunch of things (which meant more to me than platinum, beautiful girl).
I can’t tell you how Supergrover is feeling except hurt and tired, because that is what I know for sure, and it’s probably going to make me cry.
Whenever I feel anxious that she’s distancing herself from me, she surprises me with all the love that comes through in black & white. Every. Single. Time. As I have said, she doesn’t say “I love you” in words. She does it by showing up. Consistently. No matter how mad we are at each other. No matter how bad the fight is, there has been nothing in 10 years that has ever torn us apart. Somehow, we keep the yellow string going even when we’re out of pocket. When I get the most anxious is generally about the time that she swoops in and reminds me what’s up. The Mama Wolverine claws are coming out, she will go Alduin on their asses, etc. We have that part down.
Keeping out of each other’s lives has been a mixed bag, because having context and not creates two different sets of problems. There’s the problems we have with telling our story together, and the problems we have with telling our stories apart. Lancing the boil was getting back on the same page. Again, I don’t know what will happen, but she said that she didn’t want to get into a cat and mouse game. It’s not if she shows up. Not being honest about your true intentions is a cat and mouse game. I love her enough to struggle all the way until we’re ridiculously happy again, whether there’s a context to our relationship or not. I’m ready for a different kind of honeymoon phase because I’m tired of putting each other through the wringer for no good reason.
I have loved her so much for a decade, and I feel like she has returned those feelings to the best of her ability. That she couldn’t be a better friend than she is right now in terms of being the kind of person that sends birthday and Christmas presents because we have such a long history together, and it’s so intense.
I don’t want to put anyone above her ever again, which is why I say that I’m as settled as I want to be. I am never going to get in another fight over emotional affairs because never once when I got married did I think I was going to go blind. I thought Dana and I had enough strength in our relationship to get through it, but I underestimated the pull I felt toward SG! The wave went over my head, and I’ve never been the same. But it’s all for good- I love my life, and I wish I could convince my beautiful girl of that instead of always thinking I’m saying “this is all your fault.”
I’m not sure why she thinkgs this is all her fault, because she laid out all the times she’s been a dick and the times I have as well. That means “Things Fell Apart” at both our hands. It is both our faults and neither.
Despite not having enough context, I think this is the relationship that reflects me the most deeply because since I’m reading her, I pick up her words and phrases all the time.
Painting my feelings as fact
Pricks on my skin I just couldn’t close anymore
It’s not “very” anymore, it’s “to an enormous degree.”
“I love his takedowns of the orange gelatinous shitbag.”
Me: How’s your day going? Her: picture of dumpster fire…. this has been especially useful lately
“Pick up my toys and go home,” which she got from me and now says all the time- at least to me. I don’t know how much I affect her speech at work/home/etc. If so, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. 😉
When she edits me, she’s very rough. I like it. I’ll get notes like “WHO TF IS PANCHO?”
Her husband had a thing and I asked her if she needed help (med assistant- she travels). She said no, but how kind of me to ask. I said, “it seemed nicer than asking how you broke him.” Later that day, I got an e-mail that said, “I keep laughing at this.” I smiled at that for three weeks straight. I got her. ❤ Maybe grasshopper is not as far away from satori as I think. So, because it tickled me to get a note later in the day that I was still laughing at something she said, I send them to others.
It was a door I never should have opened, but I used to love flirting with her because she was so fucking quick. I got in over my head fast, and I couldn’t take it back. Again, I knew I was fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked. I won’t tell you what she said, but I told her that all she needed to do was realize that my feelings were valid and real, and to be sensitive to them. That there was no reason to act, just to know they’re there. It was not to encourage, but for her to have empathy because I knew it couldn’t go anywhere and I was flipping out anyway. I can’t believe how much it meant to me when I said, “surely you spent longer than you wanted getting over someone who turned your head when it was a bad idea?” She said, “yes, surely I have.” She really saw me, and I will remember it forever. She has also never once invalidated my feelings, and been moved at the things I’ve written about her. She makes me happy without even trying, makes me proud just by breathing. The fact that she’s not my romantic partner means both jack and shit. She’s just always the one at the back of my mind, the one I quote all the time while she doesn’t know it…….. and I am sure that is a two way street even if she doesn’t say it out loud, because over ten years of writing, we have a million word associations between us……. most notably, “influencer.”
It was her brain that made me absolutely crazy about her (this is the part where you don’t get her reply that was so perfect it made my desk chair sag, I was laughing so hard). I joked, “besides, can I really make a decision on whether I’m in love with you or not if I haven’t seen your rack? What kind of idiot do you take me for, woman?” That was the moment *she* came in Kings full over Aces and I thought, “Christ. This needs to last my whole life, no matter what it looks like. I will never find her anywhere else in a million zillion years.” In fact, I actually told her this. That I wanted to fix us because I couldn’t go to the Supergrover store and pick out a new one. She’s the Vera Wang you can’t afford.
I realize by writing all of this down, it just seems like I’m begging her to come back. It’s just not true. That’s because if she does come back, it will be a great day in my life….. because she knows that I don’t want the surface level of her. I want the brain that made me crazy about her in the first place. I feel that if she lets me into that space, the way I let her into mine, what used to be a “cat and mouse game” will once again be stable, because in a lot of ways, we’ll be discovering each other again for the first time. Just because we’ve had a weird and hard road in the past 10 years doesn’t mean it always has to be as difficult as it has been. I’m just tired of covering up feelings with gifts, because I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel when I get them. What emotions are behind them when her e-mails say so little? No, these entries are not begging. They are the precious things I will want to read 10 and 20 and 30 years from now…… because she’s the best thing that ever happened to me and thinks she isn’t. I can’t fix that for her, but it’s not for lack of trying.
I will always love her with this much depth, because she gave me too much over the last 10 years to hold any bitterness or anger anymore. She has said that some of the things I’ve said are incredibly hurtful, and I’d like to talk about them. But again, I do not know whether she needs to separate from me, or whether she’ll be back after some time, space, peace, and grace. She has it coming from me in spades, because “surely grace and mercy will carry me all the days of my life” (Don’t call me Shirley!). As I have said before, it is not my job to talk now. I have talked enough. She knows how I feel, and she does not need to hear me again.
No, all of these memories are for me…. the ones that Oliver, who is a dog, has already heard.
I have never been good with money, which is why so many of my partners have had so much say in how I spend it. I let them, because generally I could trust their impulses better than my own. If you have ADHD, you just have to realize it and move on. There are going to be some times that you want to swing at every pitch, and if you have someone to bounce ideas off of, it’s much easier. I do not mean foisting my responsibility on someone else. I would ask for help in lots of practical tasks, because my EQ is so much higher than my IQ.
When I first came up with the idea for my alternate history, I had it vetted by the best of the best and it made me ride taller in the saddle. But even when Lindsay and I were kidding each other about me being on Oprah’s Book Club and making millions was STILL surrounded around “let’s make the biggest non-profit we possibly can and give it all away.” I don’t generally need money or things for myself. I generally want to help the world in a concrete way.
I have so many ideas for helping the world; very few surround taking care of myself. It’s difficult when you’re AuDHD and also live alone (for all practical intents and purposes). There’s no one to social mask, there’s no one to pick up my slack and let me pick up theirs when I’m the strong one. To a certain extent, I have this with Zac, but it would be a different ball game altogether if I was in a more serious relationship. I am trying to work out what I can handle and what I can’t.
I cannot handle the thought that autistic people naturally have trouble taking care of themselves in every aspect of their lives because sometimes demand avoidance is avoiding other people’s demands when they are put on you suddenly. Most of the time it’s that you cannot make demands of yourself. Take a shower. Comb your hair. Change your clothes.
People do not think about how much energy those things take because they don’t have to do so; autism is relentless and will always make you feel like lesser than, because what you know to be demand avoidance, meltdown, and burnout is seen as lazy, overemotional, and depressed.
Because I need to keep stimulation down to a minimum in order for my brain to function, that means I don’t spend much. Because I’m a writer, I don’t make much. My budget is tiny, and it makes me feel guilty that I cannot spoil my friends the way I want to…. however, I have never had job security in any job, either, so it’s good to know how to live on a little.
Autism and job security is a straight up problem, because something like 80% of autistic people are unemployed at any given time. There are a multitude of reason for this, but mostly it’s that you’re strange in a way no one else understands and therefore seems suspicious at best, or at worst, that you’re a child in an adult’s job.
Many, many adults are treated like a child in an adult’s job, because the things that traditional work rewards are the things that are the hardest for autistic people to manage. It’s the same with ADHD. Bosses and coworkers do not understand stimming. Fidget Spinners and the like were written off as toys, so autistic people that needed them were just “playing.” No one in the neurodivergent community has an easy time in office work because the system is not built for us.
The kitchen was a mess of neurodivergent and addict behavior, so of course I did better there in terms of happiness because everyone had something. I am happy in an office for a few months, because I can social mask my way through that. Over time, my disabilities begin to show and my performance swings wildly because first of all, I’m not the healthiest individual on the planet. Second of all, even a small mistake in an office can get you blackballed in terms of people being nice to you….. and even if you were the most perfect employee on earth, there would still be just something about you that seems “off.” A lot of your reputation at the office is built on perception.
Whether I am actually the best employee or the worst isn’t even at issue here; it’s that if you’re neurodivergent, there’s not a whole lot of acceptance of those quirks once you leave your house.
I am sure that I have mystified Zac at times. I still mystify my sister and I changed her diapers. I cannot say that my mother ever really understood me, and my dad is so interested in medicine that he’s really been my primary parent since I was born in terms of emotional connection. I think that’s because he didn’t agree that my mother should keep me in the dark, and was genuinely interested in my growth and development to the extent that I’d be able to grow and develop. It was very scary for a while, not knowing what I’d be capable of and what I wouldn’t. My mother refused to address it, and I cannot tell you how many factors went into believing she was right…. the biggest reason being that I didn’t need intellectual help, so I must be okay. And this is where I’m sitting now- if my mother was the one that was gaslighting me and my dad was telling me the truth, then where do I actually belong on the spectrum? What can be expected of someone like me?
My dad liked taking me to the neurologist, opthomologist, etc. Therefore, he understood a side of me that scared my mother and I knew it. Instinctively. It’s what happens when you’re the baby that laid around for an entire year….. when I wasn’t in physical therapy. I wasn’t any less interested in the world then. I took in so much more than I ever let on, because neurodivergent people take in more information through sight.
I know that I took in so much of the adult world There is no way that I talked when I knew words and sentences. I talked when I was good and ready. For instance, most kids say “mama” and “dada” first. My first word was “peaches.” My dad said that the next time I talked, I said “car keys.” I could read small books at 3-4, but was the weird kid later who’d check out a biography about Audie Murphy instead of the next VC Andrews. If you are that different from your peers, it doesn’t end at grade school. Autism is expensive when missteps get you fired. I have never found that if you point out the communication issue was actually from someone above you, it doesn’t help your case any. This is because if you don’t fit into the culture of the office, it will do more to shorten your time there than fraud (in most cases). If there isn’t a concrete reason to fire you, there will be a million petty grievances to get you off the island.
My dad taught me medical words at a very young age and I’m glad he did. I turned out to be an amazing speller whether it’s medical terminology or not, because so much of both scientific and general language in English is spelled close to its Latin roots….. that I learned when I was two. (Although I could not win a spelling bee, I don’t think, because every time I’ve gotten close and lost, it’s because I could visualize the word perfectly and mess up on the translation between thought and spoken word.
Because my brain takes in information through reading. Now, I’m an even faster typist without errors because remembering how to spell is reinforced with muscle memory. For instance, did you know that you can actually make a mistake more frequently in entering passwords, etc. just by standing up? You think it’s easier because you can actually see the letters……… but doesn’t feel the same.
I laughed when I saw Olivia Colman on The Graham Norton Show say that one of her most fabulous talents was being such a good typist she could stare off into space. I think the same of myself, and also that when you find the right keyboard, the one that fits your hands like gloves, you could wipe off all the letters. (I’d still need the numbers because I only remember a few of the special characters).
In fact, typing on someone else’s keyboard is a big sensory issue for me, and it does cause meltdown for a few seconds as I readjust my expectations as to how fast I can type at first.
It was my mother that taught me this. Not only was she a great typist, she’d be honored to know that I like typing because of something she said to me. That when you bought a piano, you were looking for only “the right touch.” Pianos come in as many different flavors as keyboards, which is why I take my keyboards seriously. Because I know what it looks like to play classical piano, I know that I run my fingers over the keys as easily as she does.
My mother seemed to want me to be a younger version of her, because being outside the norm didn’t sit well with her. However, I do think that just because there are more concertos written for piano than for the typewriter it only means I play the more unusual instrument.
Editor’s Note:
Link is to “The Typewriter,” by Leroy Anderson. I’ll try to remember to put it at the bottom for ease of use, but I didn’t want to forget and I didn’t want a big YouTube video in the middle of my blog entry. Whether you finish the entry or not is not my call. I’m a web designer. It just looks ugly, which is what I noticed when I tried it once.
My mother appealed to a much broader audience than I ever could, especially when someone at a party wanted her to put on an impromptu singalong (as a preacher’s wife, you just do it). We had a complicated relationship, but one of the things I loved about her was that she was warm and open to everyone except misbehaving kids. 😉 As a result, I am very much that spectrum in real life because I learned it over and over. What changed was when I realized that there were a lot of people in my life that could not change dynamics with me because I’d given each relationship a fair shot at getting better for quite a while.
I wanted people to grow with, not against. One of the things that happened in my marriage to Dana was that when I became a big shot at work, of course I became a different person. I was juggling more responsibility than I’d ever had in my life. Because I found someone I could write to that would understand every single pressure I was dealing with except mental health, she could identify with the person I was becoming while Dana was angry that things had to change. Living in Portland is a lot like living in Neverland. I mean, it’s not now, but it was back then. Even my friends with Masters’ degrees worked at grocery stores and coffee shops because if they could feed themselves, then they had time to spend on their art. They didn’t have to join a rat race they didn’t like to build a life they felt they had to escape.
Therefore, the cultural clash between my childhood and adulthood is complete. I knew that I wanted to write more and more because I knew I had something to say. Dana was an extrovert. She didn’t have any friends in Houston because she felt like they were all mutual (they were, but not to the extent that they’d choose one of us over the other. Chinese Wall.
What I want, though, isn’t the broad spectrum. It’s great if they come along, but I am of the opinion that I am physically disabled and emotionally fucked up. There is nothing I can do about the physically disabled part, but I am trying very, very hard with healthy boundaries in my new relationships because I found that it was easier to set that up from the beginning, because if you start trying to change a dynamic with someone and they don’t like it, trying to maintain positive change is an uphill battle.
He was also of the opinion that I should know I was disabled, and he tried to tell me….. but I never really got the message because my mother told me that he was overreacting, that things weren’t as bad as he thought, etc.
It wasn’t until she died that I saw my actual neurological workup from 18 mos, because Lindsay found it in her personal effects.
It’s exactly as bad as my dad said it was, but not more. I have absolutely no doubt that my mother gaslit me into believing I was fine because people didn’t do any better with disabled kids in the 70s than they do (for the most part) now….. and also she was very determined to have the perfect family.
Very. Determined.
I can take a very educated guess that part of the reason I wasn’t in special ed is that she didn’t want to have to tell people that. It’s a process of acceptance for parents, rearranging their expectations. What my mother never did was that whole “process of acceptance” bit. She wanted to sweep everything under the rug and she could because I have been told many times that I am brilliant (sometimes, I even let myself believe it because those fans aren’t liars).
People who meet me think that I am brilliant. They think that they’ve never met anyone like me. Sometimes, it’s admiration of me as a writer, sometimes a musician, always the ability to say what I think and be confident about it (in most cases).
The longer they think I’m brilliant and wonderful, the more I open up to them. Then, it becomes a weird game when they realize that I am 100% telling the truth, that I have disabilities, that I’m emotionally intense, that I can’t regulate well, etc. What I have said becomes concrete in their minds, and affects them in a totally different way.
Truth be told, I am way above most people’s pay grade. I just have to be aware of it, because there are things that I do have to take responsibility for, just like everyone else. What I cannot keep doing is constantly beating myself up; my life is supposed to look different than a neurotypical person’s.
I think I’m finally coming to a place of acceptance in terms of adjusting my own expectations of myself. I’m not trying to aim low, just in a direction the people like me are already going.
By “people like me,” I mean those with autism who are low needs/high intelligence. (In case you’re confused, low needs is what doctors used to call “high functioning.”)
High functioning for me comes in being able to craft sentences and synthesize ideas. It does not mean that I am also capable of understanding logical processes, because I struggle with details to an enormous degree.
My view on budgeting is just “try not to spend anything,” Even when I was making software company money in DC, I still lived on $150/week. That cushion bailed me out when my mother died, because like I said. I couldn’t get out of bed. That’s because I’d been let go from the software company on September 30, and my mother died October 2nd.
I was going to go on a road trip across the country with my friend Pri, but I backed out when I realized I would rather stay home. That it was too much change, too fast. It was also way above my pay grade to figure out budgeting for the trip.
I don’t really know what to do with more money, because keeping track of a budget with many categories sounds as difficult as learning Mandarin. That’s because it’s not just the money you’ve allocated. It’s the difference between what shows up on your account today, and what hasn’t cleared yet.
This is because I do most everything through PayPal because my Uber/Uber Eats account is connected to it (I would rather pay for grocery delivery than take an Uber to the store). Sometimes there’s a difference in the processing time on their end. It only happens once in a blue moon, but it happened twice last year….. as in, it’s happened twice close together, but I’ve had the account for almost 20 years.
I’m at the point in my life where I would like to learn, and demand avoidance kicks in when I feel abject fear, the kind that literally lights your nerves on fire. That’s one of the things that allistic people do not understand or tolerate- it’s not that big a deal, you’re just overreacting.
Well, for some people “sensory issues” means that they don’t eat or wear a lot of different things. Sensory issues in meltdown physically hurt because you can avoid the foods you don’t like. You cannot avoid your reactions. To neurotypicals, it’s talking about finance and that’s easy because it’s a logical process and I am trying not to dissociate from the conversation because as my discomfort goes up, so does my need for fight, freeze, or flight.
When I am faced with decisions I cannot understand, I freeze. Both my body and brain shut down when the information becomes overwhelming and the neurological reaction starts. For me, meltdown starts the most easily in conversations where I’m expected to know a 101 level and I’m not out of kindergarten on the subject. Generally, that means rage, but none of it is directed externally. I start to think about why I’m this old and still don’t understand X. My nerves begin to catch fire, upping my adrenaline. It’s truly an “Incredible Hulk” feeling, except you’ve painted yourself as the villain who needs to be smashed. Red mist rage is the least helpful when you direct it at yourself…. though in my eyes, preferable to blaming anything on anyone else.
Meltdown is not always loud. For people that social mask well, they can shield what’s going on in their bodies when they have to interact socially……. origin of the phrase, “you don’t look autistic.” But there are signs. If we’re at a house party or a restaurant, chances are that
I have said it before, and I will say it again…. people do not have empathy for demand avoidance, meltdown (and the sensory issues within), and burnout unless they can clearly see the person needs it. You think you know autistic when you see it, because you don’t see it until it’s painfully obvious, like Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory”
I love watching economists talk about world issues, because I have a much easier time with ideas and concepts rather than nuts and bolts.
I can explain anti disestablishmentariansm easier than I can explain things closer to home, like my weird autistic quirks. When I think about world issues, it’s honestly like my mind is taking me on a trip without drugs. I see patterns with enough information and I’ve been reading the news for at least 35 years.
I also see patterns in my own behavior while writing about my younger self, and I’ve realized that my head being in the clouds is the natural state for someone who’s creative autistic. That I am selectively mute in lots of situations because my brain isn’t keeping up with the conversation in front of me- I am sitting near people and entertaining myself. Bringing myself to enter a conversation is very difficult, both because I’m anxious when I meet new people and I don’t like talking, anyway.
I am sure part of it is that I don’t consciously social mask to the degree that I used to, so I don’t feel the need to add anything. If someone talks directly to me, I’ll be friendly. I’m not antisocial. What I mean is that because I think about big ideas, my worth is not dependent on being popular and engaging to a whole crowd, the way I was raised. I don’t mean that it was my job to become the life of the party, just extraordinarily funny so that everyone liked me, and also the one to leave last because I didn’t want the host to do the dishes.
Those were the values instilled in me, to be the kind of person that everyone liked at all costs, because I couldn’t do anything to alienate anyone from my church. When there were a couple of times my behavior had been used in meetings to score a political point, I shut down; my being queer and having someone to confide in was not going to become ammunition….. until I realized that there was no way I could hide a secret that big. It was a choir. A lot of people in a small room, an even smaller dressing room where everyone was all up in each other’s business.
She was not well-liked by a part of our congregation because they thought she was grooming me. She was, but not for sex. It was the ability to confide in someone that didn’t have anything to do with her adult life out there in the real world………. but she forgot something important because I let her. Who wouldn’t want someone like her to be your friend? We each thought each other was hilarious, and it cost me actually being able to do the “bit” where I showed up at school and actually cared about my friends’ problems, because I did not give a shit what happened in Algebra. I was already overwhelmed with a 25-year-old’s view of the world. One of the reasons I didn’t learn much in school is that I was there, but I wasn’t present.
Just because I’m the personality that’s a thousand years old doesn’t mean you should treat me like I’m that old in middle school. It was wrong of her to put secrets in me that were just too big to handle at that age, and now I know that it’s just what she does. She draws you into a special little bubble where you think you’re the most important person in the world. I do not think that she intentionally went after a 14 year-old girlfriend, I just showed up and became so through listening to her problems.
However, I also do not mean that she thought of me as her girlfriend in that strict a sense. You’d just have to know her as well as I do to know that the way she gets that supportive, platonic relationship with women crosses the line all the time. She has broken more hearts than anyone I’ve ever known. I don’t think she thinks that way of herself, but there are stories out there. BELIEVE THEM. Her way of going for that deep, yellow-string connection like I have to Bryn is being seductive enough to make you think it’s a red string in touches and hugs, but absolutely empty words…. she just wanted you to feel like it was important for you to be in her inner circle until she didn’t need anything from you anymore.
It worked on me, and I know for sure it has worked on others. However, it’s been 10 years since we’ve even been in the same room, probably longer. I’m guessing her body count is higher now. As I have said before, I’m not the only one. I’m just the youngest.
Editor’s Note:
I wonder how much of my view on money was also tied to the fact that I wasn’t raised to be queer. I was raised to be the perfect wife. My mother was born in 1951 to parents that had extraordinarily stringent gender roles. Fairly certain that my dad did all the budgeting at home because he had to do it at the church, anyway. I don’t think that for my dad it was a “traditional male” thing so much as “I’m genuinely better suited for this task because I do it a lot more often.” If my mother had showed up to the table with any financial skills from her first family, my dad would have let her do it…… but why would her mother or father teach her those things? So, I believe that because my grandfather and my father did all the “money stuff,” she almost assuredly thought I wouldn’t need to know.
Even though I couldn’t have known at the time that the relationship with this older woman would have disastrous effects, I did know the dopamine made me feel good. It was the last thing I wanted up for discussion. trying to keep it on the downlow because we both needed privacy (for good reason had I not been a teen). I used to put notes in her choir folder before she got to church so that no one saw me do it. I was rebelling against the status quo by being authentically myself. I liked the dopamine of being an older woman’s friend because everyone around me just seemed like, well, children. That should have been a clue, but I didn’t know anything to look for- that isolation was a thing.
That last sentence is carrying a lot of weight for me right now, because it’s a double entendre. Isolation is a thing that abusers do (no matter the delivery), and isolation in which my sensory issues are at a minimum is more comfortable for me, anyway. In short, easy target. It was also quite easy for another lesbian to tell I was one, so I’m sure that part of me being so young was getting to rescue this lost little sheep. In some ways, she did. But what stays with me today is just how much she didn’t want me until someone else did.
This was a running theme over my entire time in Portland, because we had lots of friends through church where all of a sudden it seemed like a competition. From her friends, it was the pissing contest of “we know her better than you.” From her, it was jealousy because she thought they did like me better than her. Neither of those things were ever true. So, eventually I made friends with people she had no connection to, and I was lucky if I got an “all call” party invite. When I wasn’t in her inner circle, I wasn’t part of the drama, and I liked it that way. It made life easier to regulate emotionally when I wasn’t letting her pull my strings.
There were so many good reasons for our privacy in the beginning that it overshadowed all the bad ones. I don’t know how many queer friends she had, but she’s the only one I’d met up unto that point.
So, my first model of an adult lesbian relationship was someone who wanted to have her cake and eat it, too. Someone to love and adore her at home, and a person that partner at home absolutely should be worried about, because if there’s a problem in your relationship, she won’t tell you. She’ll find a woman like me, one that absolutely loves to show their friends they love them by listening to them…… and start overwhelming them with dopamine immediately so that she has a shoulder to cry on when she needs you, but you don’t. What you will get is a lot of empty words and promises until she’s in the shit again and doesn’t currently have that person. You are not her first choice and you know it, but you have to pretend it doesn’t matter.
I’ve known her twice as long as her wife, and I could have taught her a lot if my emotional abuser hadn’t programmed her to think of me as causing trouble in her life. That’s because when she left Houston, she didn’t need me anymore and the story she told me never matched up. That of course I should move to Portland. Get out of Texas. It would be good for you. Just a million and one reasons telling me I should go out there, including visiting several times before I actually moved so that I knew more people than just her by the time I got there.
If we had only written letters about this, I would say simply that “love letters are the campaign promises of the soul.” But this was over the phone and in person. I have a feeling that she actually wasn’t really uncomfortable until I did move, because she couldn’t keep telling her partner and I a different story every day…… but she could if I was only an occasional letter or a call. For instance, her partner actually said to me, “you need to get over your issues with her because it’s like you’re just carrying all that shit in a bag.” She said this a propos of nothing, so I don’t even know what she was saying I needed to get over. All I know is that it wasn’t accurate, whatever it was.
Her partner is older than my dad, therefore I was never right in the history of our relationship. That’s because when I was 14 and she was 25, she was still basically a kid as well. It was easier to see herself as equal to me. In the years we didn’t live in the same city, the power dynamic changed twice over, because part of realizing that she was so much older was realizing she was almost equidistant in age between us. So, I said something she disagreed with, she would turn to the “adultier adult” and they’d both take me down. Meanwhile, she was playing both sides. Her partner was responding out of the information she knew about me secondhand, not anything said between her wife and me when she wasn’t in the room. If I got close, the conversation was engineered away.
I seriously don’t know anything about budgeting. Not my forte. For me, that entire relationship was about learning to conserve my energy. That every time she said “jump,” I didn’t have to. I should have been allowed to take up room. I was abandoned in the same city the way I felt abandoned when she left Houston. At least when she left Houston there was a reason for it.
It all seemed nonsensical as to why this was happening when we both lived in the same town until I realized that if I had a conference with 10 other doctors regarding her medical history and my experiences, not one of them would walk out thinking I hadn’t been taken in by a narcissist.
Now, I am exploring all of the things that make me attracted to emotional unavailability because I’ve realized how detrimental it can be. I want emotional honesty or I want to move on. I have had too much of being used and abused by people who can’t talk about their feelings. That’s not what made me say “narcissistic personally disorder,” though. It’s the round-the-clock schedule she’s got going of lovebomb/discard.
It’s scary how quickly you can go from “you’re my best friend” to “do I know you?” That’s because you won’t be in a relationship with her for very long. You just think you will. That’s why we don’t have any mutual friends left. Her castoffs generally gave me their story, but not because they wanted me to know it. They wanted me to be an intercessory of sorts, as if I had the power to help anything. I just listened and sympathized, but the “maybe you could talk to her” was implied. I get it. If you’re a nobody, having a powerful person who also has a solo-quality voice that wows you is a lot to lose.
It just took them all a long time to learn that they didn’t lose anything. They regained their sanity. Their “friendships” weren’t this murky blur of of moments were you thought it was kind of seductive, but you could have been wrong…. maybe it’s just your mind playing tricks on you.
That was my school experience from 7th grade on- trying to learn and in a monotropic thought process, stuck a moment and couldn’t get out of it.
So, as a result, now I’m learning a lot of the finer points of money when I’ve never thought about it at all. I didn’t have room.
Stories That Are All True 