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.
I had a breakthrough in accepting myself on Sunday. Forgiving myself for everything I didn’t know before my mother died (my mother didn’t want me to know I was disabled because she thought that I was too smart for what was then called “the special classes.” I don’t know. Maybe I would have been happier. My teachers would have seen how smart I was and I probably could have taught myself better than they could. Special Education is actually more about room to stretch out than it is the curriculum being different. Special Ed understands meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, lack of executive function, going selectively mute when you’re overwhelmed, and everything my other teachers wouldn’t have understood because they didn’t study being neurodivergent for a living.
I have trouble with transitions. I absolutely hated school after first grade, and it’s not that there weren’t genuinely good moments. It’s that in every school I attended, there were only five minutes between each bell. That’s not enough time for an AuDHD person to adjust to the next thing. It is EXACTLY like being at a party and needing to go to the bathroom just to recharge.
Also, five minutes is not enough time for a person with floppy muscles and depth perception issues to be able to run fast enough to be on time. I have been punished for my disability many times, which is how I found myself in the nurse’s office because a teacher was pissed at me for being a couple of minutes late every day and I knew it……. so I was hauling ass and I fell down two flights of steps.
Because I am low needs, I am trying to speak for the ones who can’t. You can’t imagine how brilliant most autistic people are if you take the time to get to know their brains rather than focusing on what they cannot do. It bothers me that people treat those with autism in which they can’t social mask like children. It’s one thing to have a childlike brain. It is starting how many people think all high needs people have problems with intelligence and not communication. It’s what bothered me so much about the “Autism Speaks” ad where a mother talks about one night in which she thought about putting her daughter in the back seat and killing them both. If her problem is limited to communication and not intelligence, what do you think it does to a person to sit with that knowledge for years on end? People think they’re talking behind our backs because in their minds “autistic” is shorthand for “stupid” and not different.
I would bet there are many more AuDHD people than me out there, but would never want to get tested because of how autistic people are treated.
Because Autism Spectrum Disorder means that your brain processes information differently, people at the lower needs end are told things like “you don’t look autistic.” “Everyone’s a little bit autistic.”
I am going to bet that those people have never experienced demand avoidance down to not being able to make demands of *themselves,* much less being able to communicate when other people make demands of them. If someone makes a demand of me, I have to white knuckle my way through it if I’m on a deadline, because I have problems with, again, transitions. I like to know what people need from me plenty in advance, because I know at first my body will say, “no. Not doing it.” Autism makes it where when someone makes a demand of you, you go into fight or flight (meltdown). It’s not because we don’t want to do things for other people AT ALL. It’s transitioning from one thing to another. We all wish that part of it would go away, because it’s the biggest reason even low needs people have trouble taking care of themselves. It’s not laziness, it’s not an unwillingness to do anything. It’s that our brains are shutting down because we cannot handle overload.
I realize that I have anxiety and I go through cycles. Sometimes, I want to stay home and chill because I’d rather spend time with myself, either writing or reading/watching something to spark my own creativity. This is problematic in two ways, and neither one of them have anything to do with me.
Sometimes, I’m on a down and I’d rather isolate than interact because I’m more likely to go into a meltdown from feeling overwhelmed. Recharging also means getting away from my own writing, navel gazing. I have learned that many, many autistic people are like this (the isolating part, not the blogging part) because too much activity in a room is overwhelming to an enormous degree. If you are low needs, that seems incredibly odd and they’re weirded out by it. People can clearly see that in high needs autism, but they cannot see that low needs does not mean less distress. We are just capable of social masking because we can recognize when we’re making you uncomfortable and adjust constantly, knowing you won’t adjust toward us. I am sure that you cannot say this about an autistic kid’s parents or siblings most of the time, but I’ll say it again….. NO ONE KNOWS what to do with autistic kids after they graduate from high school.
There has never been an apology to me by a boss when they have miscommunicated with me. It’s “how can you be so stupid/airheaded/flaky?” Why are you “not living up to your full potential?” Because you don’t have the skills to communicate with a neurodivergent person nor any empathy for those disabilities. It is always on the neurodivergent person to pick up what a neurotypical person is putting down when they literally can’t. Especially in an office, where everyone and their dog has a PhD in bullshit. If you don’t, you’re a problem child quickly….. mostly because since most bosses don’t know how to work with neurodivergent people, they don’t know how to get their message across in the way that they meant it because the chasm is *wide.* Bosses do not like to hear the truth most of the time. Very few will let you speak truth to power. Therefore, if I acknowledge a problem in their logic during a meeting, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t pick up on the social cue. I wasn’t focusing on them at all, but the matter at hand. I also want to contribute to the discussion in a major way because I’ve had bosses talk to me privately and steal my ideas.
It really, really matters whether your boss can hear criticism or not when you’re autistic, because you are literally trying to help with your different pattern recognition and it is seen as threatening, particularly to men. The first boss I ever thought really had my back was at Marylhurst, when in a meeting with Google I laid a truthbomb on the table and he saw what dog I was walking immediately. I was so touched when he said, “I think we should get back to what Leslie was saying, because I’m going to need an answer on that.”
I’d spent so many years thinking my words and opinions didn’t matter, so it made my year.
He actually did that twice. Dana thanked him for hiring me and he said, “Leslie is worth every penny.”
These are the things I remember when it all goes to shit later because literally no one understands me after a while.
I am one of those people who needs iron structure every single day like clockwork, and also angry when I feel micromanaged. There has to be a middle ground, and there is. But it’s more work than it would be for a neurotypical employee because what you say is not what we hear and vice versa. It’s why when I need to relax, I watch cartoons.
If you react to us realizing the pendulum has swung too far with negative attention….. “oh, look who FINALLY decided to show up FOR ONCE,” we’ll never show up to anything ever again. It’s easier to watch family friendly and kids’ shows so that you can study shows that present big ideas to little kids. Avatar: The Last Airbender comes to mind………… It’s almost as if it’s a hidden layer that’s gold when you find it.
Here’s what I mean about good writing where you least expect to find it…… Rigby says “tonight, let’s do something REALLY scary.” Pops says, “we could go to bed early and be alone with our thoughts.” It was at that moment I realized Pops had given me nightmares. 😉 It was a truth I, and most people with mental heath issues/processing disorders need to be able to voice. That’s part of the problem. Not being able to completely take care of ourselves makes us bad at communicating our needs as well. That makes society doubly difficult.
There is nothing scarier than being alone with your thoughts when you’re disabled. The system is not built for you, especially when you’re low needs and “seem normal,” You walk around all day, every day, feeling worthless and useless because we cannot accept that we have disabilities. It’s easier to believe everyone else….. you’re either slow on the uptake or a judgmental dickhead.
When you think of us as “stupid,” it comes across in a sugary sweet voice that no one needs. That voice is the shortest and quickest path to driving me up the wall. If I have to ask for information again because I didn’t catch it the first time, it’s downhill from there. That’s why I prefer working through e-mail. I do not like conversations at all regarding work because I do not want there to be anything missing in the conversation that I can’t go back and read. It’s what keeps me from having to ask “stupid questions.”
We don’t need your pity, but we do need your advocacy. Thank God the neurodivergent community found programming, because starting when I was a senior in high school, being a programmer meant getting rich. Not necessarily working at a company, but joining a small company that has venture capitalist money on a project in which you really know to the core of your being that it will succeed.
But that has backfired in a lot of ways because when programmers are sitting around together, they’re all tracking the same way and they get shit done faster than you can imagine. Therefore, the perception is that you’re either a savant at something, or you belong in special ed. There is no middle ground, because we’ve made it that way. Social masking has made it where we’re choosing not to take up room not to rock the boat.
Has it worked yet?
And now I realize I haven’t explained the title. In accepting my disability, I could laugh about it. In accepting his disability, Zac could laugh about it. He said “if you think I’m adorable, it probably has something to do with your depth perception issues.” I said, “I’m wondering if I should give you the finger you don’t have.” He said that was VERY well played. Because I realized something. That I can joke about it with Zac in a way I won’t let anyone else in the world get away with. EVER.
That’s because he’s not punching down, and neither am I.
I like feeling other people’s feelings if I’m close to them. When I’m in the grocery store or a crowd, it’s too much. I tend to put on my “doctor hat” in public because it allows me to act as if I have clinical separation because no one actually wants to know when you’re upset. If you have my URL, you know when I’ve been upset. But again, I don’t talk about this stuff anywhere else, because the things I talk about would just be bombs in the middle of a conversation, and I have found that people don’t like it when I’m speaking to them directly.
Sometimes I’m in so much pain that I don’t phrase things correctly and it comes off as if I feel worse than I actually do (by being snappish, etc.); I don’t have the time to craft a sentence in person that would convey it. I don’t do as well with conversation and get flustered. I’m overwhelmed, up to my eyeballs, and I’m always sorry when I cannot remain calm and sugar coat my way through everything.
But that’s with my friends. That’s where I need to dig deep and try to remain calm because those relationships are very important to me (whether they believe it for not). I am trying to develop coping mechanisms for having hard conversations so that I don’t get rattled. Most of the time, I feel meek and mild-mannered. Then, I’ll get angry about something and not know how to handle it. That’s when my fuse gets lit like a firecracker- this confusion- and I cannot even think straight. I am lost to the rest of the world until I can regulate my emotions again. I have talked while I was in that state. It doesn’t end well.
Which is typical of an autistic meltdown and I’ve had too many in front of other people that ended in disaster; they didn’t know I was autistic and neither did I. However, if they did know I was autistic, that’s still not an excuse for my words being uncontrolled. It’s just context.
It’s a way to bridge the communication gap so that I might be able to give someone empathy, not to try and excuse away my behavior. No one should stay with anyone no matter how bad it gets. I explain what was going on and that might give the other person empathy. It will help us both move on from this problem and solve the next of the same kind from ever beginning. But that is dependent on whether the other person sees me as making excuses. I know a lot of other people do, but it’s the kind of information I’d want from them in order to move forward. I’d want to know why they did what they did. Without that context, I will not be able to see why you’re struggling in the future. I will not know what to notice.
But because people don’t think like me, they think of me as justifying something when it can’t be justified. Not everything I do makes sense, both from a processing disorder and a mental illness standpoint. Therefore, they’re missing what I’m saying and I’m not getting what I need. When I don’t know what you’re thinking and what you expect from me, I will spin out trying to find it. I also spin out trying to find out how people’s brains work in general, because if I know how they take in information, I will give it to them that way. However, people rarely give me the information I give them because they think of it as making excuses…….. when the context heals the situation. God is in the details for me, that my light bulb moment is realizing why you did what you did and having empathy for it. Most people cannot open themselves up to me the way I can with them. They do not want to dwell on their own details, food for thought as we sit together and try to work out a conflict.
But until I learned I was autistic, I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so angry that this miscommunication happened all the time. Why did people think I bugged them for details because I was trying to hurt them? I found out later that this is pretty typical of autistic kids, and in retrospect, I definitely was one.
I couldn’t explain why I felt the way I felt. I didn’t have words for things like “demand avoidance.” I didn’t have words for things like “meltdown” and “burnout.” I didn’t have coping mechanisms to remain calm and be nice through all of that happening in my body when someone was frustrated with me because I was either asking them a ton of questions they didn’t want to answer or giving them so many details it was overwhelming.
In a lot of cases, they were just campaigns to convince someone of my worth, and it took learning that to go on this journey of self-acceptance. Once I started talking to autistic people and reading their stories, I realized that I wasn’t actually an alien. My sensory issue is other people’s emotions. It overloads my brain and I am constantly trying to give the people I love the room I want to give them because I feel the same amount of emotion bleed out in the mall as I do being alone with Zac.
I don’t need a break from feeling open and vulnerable to him, and people who are just as close to me. It’s the having to defend myself from being everyone’s fixer/pleaser because the ills of the world bother me just as much as the problems I have at home.
If you’ve ever had a fight with your partner in public and I saw it, I took it in. Probably tried to fix it until I checked out. If the store isn’t busy, I’ll ask the worker how their day is going and really listen to their answer. I can tell when they’re bullshitting me. It all matters.
It all contributes to the amount of spoons I have for going out. I really do have to make sure I sleep deeply, because my body cannot repair itself from that kind of psychological toll without it.
It is also my job to learn to handle my relationships with care, but because I didn’t know I was autistic before, I know that I have to do it differently than most people. I have to learn to regulate my emotions better than I have in the past, and that has to come through my own therapy/writing. However, I also have to learn how to translate better to people who aren’t like me. That I am not asking invasive questions because I mean them to be invasive. I am analyzing what you said because I was really listening to you and took it in.
I’m sure that eventually, I’ll learn to handle it all.
How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?
As a blogger, I have a perspective on life that is more accurate than most, because I cannot tell myself in the moment how something happened 10 years ago unchecked. I will go back and look. I do not have any moral superiority, because I can only go back to what I was thinking at the time, not another person’s thoughts. Therefore, it’s not “I’m right on the principle.” It’s “I’m right in that this is what I told you, and this is what you said at the time.” People confuse the two, because it’s “throwing things back in their faces.” To me, it is Brené Brown 101. I am checking the story you are telling yourself, because my blog made me check the one I was telling me.”
People think that I am pointing out that they’re lying. No, it’s “now you’ve told me two different stories and I need you to explain why your thinking has evolved.” I don’t care why there are two stories. I’m autistic and I want to know how everything works in your mind. I do not need judgment and I haven’t given any. I am asking for information, and people do not like that (as a general rule).
I complain about bosses who say “explain to me how this happened,” and then when I proceed to explain an autistic amount (which is, granted, neurotypically exhausting), they’ll reply, “I don’t need your fucking excuses.” I complain because I do not understand asking for information and refusing it. In short, I do need your fucking excuses. I just don’t call it that because I’m not going to judge you on your answers. I just want the whole story when you think I should pick it up on my own. That’s because there are social expectations everywhere that I cannot pick up, and you are setting me up for failure by “knowing” what I’m going to do next because of them.
My perspective also changes because I take in information through reading and writing, so I retain a lot of what I write, and what I go back and read here later…. which I often do because nothing spurs something I’m going to say like taking an old thing I said and turning it upside down and backwards because new shit has come to light.
If I didn’t, I would sit in anger and bitterness all the time. In short, this blog is my “Let It Go.” I’m not going to do it in a moment, but you’ll see the process as I make my peace. There’s very little that’s truly important in life, and you’ll begin to see what I think is and isn’t. And mostly that I am vulnerable enough to admit when I’m wrong, both when I see it in myself and when I yield to another person.
But I will never appreciate the phrase “throwing it back in my face,” because that’s an autistic trait, to see pattern recognition in everything, including behavior. When I am pointing out pattern recognition in relationships, I am actually trying to make us stronger by saying, “this problem has come up six times now- why does it always come up in the same way? It always hurts me. How can we make it stop?” The other person always makes it about them, because me noticing pattern recognition is more offensive to them than fixing the problem. The “how dare you” aspect is strong in a lot of my friends.
I notice my own patterns of behavior accurately and I love it when other people can do it for me. You also have to be strong enough to deal with criticism because I know what I will tolerate and what I won’t; it’s not because I’m trying to hurt you. I know me. What will make me feel better and what won’t. If you cannot hear me on those things, I do not want a relationship with you.
This is the standard by which we should all run our relationships. “How do I feel when I am with you?” If I constantly feel invalidated, I am not going to stay. You cannot hear me, and when my problems fall on deaf ears and yours never do, then I’m out. For instance, if you are vulnerable with me and tell me about a problem going on in your life, I will listen until you are ready to stop talking. Just vent for hours if you need it. I expect the same of my friends, because I do not want to be someone’s emotional dumping ground when they’re upset and too busy to take my calls.
I get that I’m a lot. What I don’t get is how many people refuse to acknowledge that they’re the same. All people are a lot. To love someone is huge, because you have to accept a whole lot of good and bad behavior without blinking. That’s why I do not believe in love at first sight. Infatuation and sexual attraction? Surely.
I don’t think you can say you love someone until you’ve wanted to smother them in their sleep with a pillow AND ALSO would give them an organ AND ALSO take care of them if they were sick, travel with them, and smile through family functions even if you didn’t want to go because even if they don’t, you feel like half of them hate your guts. You don’t love someone until you’re willing to clean up their vomit….. because you partied too hard OR you’re going through chemo.
If you don’t know how I learned that, you don’t know my writing. I cannot be in love with Supergrover because she is not capable of loving me that way. I cannot love Supergrover because she won’t let me. And by that I mean that she will listen to my problems about other people all day long, she’ll read my adoration and love with that intensity, but she will not address problems in our relationship.
It makes me feel like she’s here for the dopamine and not for the long haul. That can’t be me anymore. I want reciprocity, and I was tired of not getting it in the slightest. It doesn’t matter how I feel about her, that I would do all of these things as a yellow string and not a red, that who she is as a person was never dependent on her ability to switch hit. That I could have been a support person for both her and her husband, because I’m interested in keeping them together, not being a wedge.
I am not a jealous ex. If you’ve read “Outlander,” I’m Lord John Grey. John could learn not to want Jamie sexually, but he could not learn how to let go and not love him anymore.
We have a lot in common, me and Grey.
It took me six or seven tries to get into “Outlander,” because I wanted to read it. I always read my favorite people’s books, the ones that shaped them. However, I couldn’t get past the rape scene in the first few chapters. I had to read it, get distance, and try again. Once I made it over that hump, I inhaled the whole series up to that point in like, 11 or 12 days. I held all my calls and “Buy Next” is dangerous if you’ve ever been to the Kindle Store.
That’s because representation matters. If you want to read my two recommendations in stories for understanding who I am, they are, it’s “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, first of all. Great series, but you only need to read the first one for representation of me. There is no more important character to me in the world than that because I think both The Giver and The Receiver are INFJ. The way that The Giver explains information is very much the way an INFJ would, and the way The Receiver takes in information is very much an INFJ on the flip side. I use their titles and not their names because I think that tradition has continued in the world of Same for a hundred or two hundred years. They are The Keepers of the Memories.
The only ones in their community who are allowed to feel.
The only ones in their community whose brains work differently than everyone else’s because of it.
Not understanding anyone else when they can’t feel, can’t explain how they feel.
When they do feel, their emotions run as deep as the scene where The Giver gives The Receiver the concept of war.
You cannot imagine what happened in my heart and brain when The War Daniel had his hands on my back. Honesty about war is too much for everyone who hasn’t been there and is hearing what it is like for the first time. Daniel had a particularly rough emotional time of it because he had an experience where he won a piece of fruit salad that most people win posthumously, coming through unscathed, but a near miss by a fraction of a second. Daniel was in the Navy, a medic embedded in a team of Marines. The Marines’ mission, and therefore Daniel’s as well, was to make sure there was no violence at an event where they were giving out vaccinations. About a hundred people were gathered that day (in my memory- it might have been a little more or less).
A terrorist had rigged up a five year old child with explosives and had a remote detonator so he could throw the child in the middle of the crowd and blow it up. Daniel caught it out of the corner of his eye and shot the terrorist before the child exploded, saving the entire crowd. If the child was already wired and no one had caught it already, it was a near miss by seconds. Daniel also, presumably, was not the one in charge of watching for terrorists, just had his eye out because he did have responsibility. Yet he was a medic, one of the people who was giving vaccinations at the time. I think that makes his actions even more amazing, because there’s two things at work. Being able to notice both the people he was vaccinating and his complete environment, and being able to react before anyone else in both directions.
It was a memory that cost me a lot of spoons, but with perspective it helped me grow more than anything in the last, I don’t know, decade? It deepened my love for all people who have been to war, down to a Starbucks clerk I noticed was a Navy Corpsman. It’s the reason Daniel was embedded with the Marines in the first place. They don’t do medicine or travel. It’s amazing how much crossover there is, and rivalry because of it. People think the Marines are the toughest, and they do absolutely nothing to dispel this.
I had to bring in a little humor to the situation, because I realized that as I was getting deep into the combat aspect of my story (not being in it but feeling my partner’s emotions about it so viscerally), that when I tell The War Daniel’s story it doesn’t lose power. It feels like he’s touching my back every time I hear it in my head. The War Daniel was (is?) one of the loves of my life. The timing was just off. That being said, I have no idea how he feels about me now having broken off our engagement, but he hasn’t cut off contact. We’ve e-mailed each other once, but unfortunately I didn’t get it until a month after he’d sent it. I think it led him to believe I was uninterested in him. But, if he hasn’t been reading, he wouldn’t know that. I prefer it that way, to be honest. That if he doesn’t want to know how I feel, then I have my answer because in order to know me, you have to know my writing as well. I am a range of people depending on our experience.
Being online friends and in real life friends is totally different, because I understand things differently in person than I do in writing , and therefore present myself differently because of it. I am just not going to waste time on a man who doesn’t care how I feel……… because I’m not shut down. And neither was he, in the beginning, when it was all the rush of having known each other as children and him saying “I’ve been in love with you for 36 years.” I do believe that he meant it. I really do.
That’s because in the beginning, he could lay it out for me. That’s because he was on medication to control his alcoholism and drinking one beer to avoid the shakes so he could come down naturally and at home before he admitted himself to rehab. Therefore, his emotions were stable. When he started rehab, he was a different person and we started nitpicking each other. Because he was in rehab, there was no way to have an in person relationship for a while, and our engagement fell apart.
But here’s what I know. If he was serious that he’s been in love with me for 36 years, then it’s always been me and he’ll get off his ass or he won’t. But it’s not a matter of love, it’s a matter of pride.
Does he think he deserves the love of his life or not?
What he could lay out for me is that he knew he was fucked up, and therefore encouraged me to keep seeing where my relationship with Zac went, because he couldn’t be there for me in person and he needed someone “on the ground.” It helped that he found Zac charming and wouldn’t have been threatened if we wanted to stay together when he got home. That he did want the life we envisioned, which was living overseas if we were able and having our daughter, Cora, join us if she wanted. We even wanted to live in a country with protections for trans women, like Thailand, because she currently lives in northeast Texas and doesn’t know what a life without that persecution is like.
Our job was to be there for Cora, and when our relationship fell apart, we lost that ability to tag team as co-parents, which we absolutely were. Cora and I still have a relationship on our own, but I don’t tell her how I feel about Daniel because she’s not the monkey in the middle. I am happy to talk to her about cats, her fictional worlds that would be famous if she puts them out there, us both being queer and having that experience, etc. It is enough, that she can always reach out to me because I’m her “queer mom.” We are emotionally available to each other even when The War Daniel and I are not. Again, our relationship reminds me so much of The Giver, because The War Daniel was the first person to touch me with the memory of war the way Lois Lowry set up imparting all memories by The Giver putting their hands on the backs of The Receiver. However, I know that I was the right Receiver for him because I’d had the experience of listening to so many other people with complex problems that I was ready for it. And before he touched my back with war, he touched it with love.
It’s the perspective that made me believe I’d done a lot of things right in my life. The War Daniel was the first person that made me turn my attention from Supergrover, because he showed me everything I wasn’t getting from her that I needed to function in our relationship. She went too long between touching my back with good memories instead of bad. I deserved a lot of criticism and anger in the moment, but being forgiven made me think there was a future that wasn’t really there.
In my world, forgiveness meant something opposite from what it meant in hers. That loving someone meant forgiving them honestly and completely so that we can talk about our issues again, because we can both be vulnerable without fear of the other’s emotions. I feel that Supergrover was scared of my emotions because she wasn’t used to dealing with them on her own. Therefore, she could not give me what she didn’t have, and could not admit it. It was an unbreakable power imbalance, because we could not move past anything by actually resolving it. We just kicked the can down the road. There were two reasons I had to love her as a whole person, and love her husband that way as well. We all needed each other, and we all turned on each other as well (I mean, I assume that they’re a team on this one- that he probably wouldn’t want to go for beers).
It would have been a better situation all the way around if we’d sat around a table in a relaxed manner and actually talked about what was happening. That I couldn’t undo what had happened, she was it for me on multiple levels, and her husband would know why better than anyone else. That I didn’t liken it to polyamory because I thought I could weasel my way into some sort of weird unicorn hunting them. I likened it to polyamory because in the poly community, close emotional relationships matter just as much as romantic ones because we’re all talking about priority and time, not whether we’re banging during said established date. It’s not the kind of love, but the kind of attention.
I have not given her that place in my life, my first priority, because I am who I am. I have given it to her because I’m a writer and she’s a muse- in her world, problematic. I am not calling her out on being a bad person, just bad at not having realized this before. She’s not a bad person, it’s a bad situation. Therefore, what I have always been trying to get across is not “I am scolding you.” It is “this is a real problem for me and we need to talk about it. Here’s what I think.” If you don’t reply with what you think, not my problem. I’m not going to encourage relationships with people that go on the defensive every time I try to express an emotion. But because Supergrover is my muse, the one who puts me in the mood to write, not encouraging a relationship with her was never going to happen. If we didn’t submit to each other, we were fucked. I began to pontificate on how she felt, but she wouldn’t pontificate on how she felt in response. She’d blame me for telling my story when it was off from hers, but didn’t correct any of my assumptions. Our relationship became perfunctory, the way I learned in “The Giver.” My feelings were evident and hers were not. She said “you’re not the only arbiter of our relationship” and once called me a dictator. She didn’t realize that I’d be telling a different story if I knew what hers was. I wasn’t the arbiter of our relationship, I was waiting on her input………… that never came.
In Lois Lowry’s world of Same, their communities not being able to feel, down to being given shots to repress their sexualities, is mandated by the government and everyone is used to it.
In the real world, people have a choice to be locked down or not, and most people do because it’s so much goddamn easier.
And less worth it, which I think the book makes an excellent example in showing it.
I don’t think you notice those messages until you go back and read YA in adulthood. I think that’s why books like The Giver and all other science fiction stories that have Christ figures are such hits. Everyone wants to know how being able to feel changes the world, and they see that bravery in media, but not in them. They’re drawn to the media that does it because they cannot find it in themselves, yet are inspired by it. It is admirable, just not for them.
For instance, if Supergrover already had all the people in her life that she wanted to do those things for her, that was fine. I would be in her life to whatever level she would accept. Even if she never wanted to meet me in person, that was also acceptable because I can say just as much in writing as I can through other senses, if not more. But, as I told her 10 years ago, “a hug would be a nice goddamn thing.” It was great when she agreed with me, and I promise you there was a time, even if there’s not now.
It is the most important I’ve ever felt in my life.
The fact that she gave me that gift, even once, is more than I can take in. I just had to give myself The Tiffany Talk before I could be vulnerable with her again, because I needed space to get over my crush and get on board. Because I was so in love with her, I got resentful and bitter that I needed to separate myself from her for two reasons. The first is that I was married and feeling like total ass about myself because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. The second is that there’s a reason I was so in love with her. No one had ever put my mind in hyperdrive like that- made me care about the world and not just my little piece of it.
I just realized something, and now I’m making me cry. When we began, she was my Jamie Frasier, and Dana was my Frank. Thankfully, it was a totally different situation, but those are the only literary characters I can think of that accurately represent what it was like to be married to two people at the same time. The difference is that Dana and I loved each other deeply and fiercely. I didn’t find out that I needed Supergrover because Dana was capable of being toxic until much, much later. I learned that I was poly by going back and reading what I’d written about both women 10 years ago, how it was possible to love two people with such rabid attention and not have boundaries on either. We did have boundaries that helped me be safe, I just ignored them all because I was under every kind of stress you can possibly imagine and I became more mentally ill than I’ve ever been in my life.
Now, I realize that I have been The Receiver the whole time……….. with perspective.
All of it spiraled into me checking myself into Methodist Hospital, because I believed that neither my psychological nor psychiatric reactions were correct, and that my behavior was driven by both not having the emotional tools to deal with that amount of enormous emotion at once as well as not the right protocol.
Dana, Supergrover, and I all have massive life stories. It wasn’t the romance of it all that put me in the hospital. By then, I was already in it for the long haul with both of them. Hearing both of their stories bonded me to them in a way I’ve never felt about anyone else, and why I’ve made the decision not to enter a monogamous relationship ever again. It’s not that I cannot be monogamous, it’s that if it happened once, it could happen again. I am not going to bet against the house and end up wrecking my life at 46 the way I did at 36.
I lost a stable life with both of them because I spiraled out, but because of the already established long haul relationship, I never stopped hoping that Supergrover and I could, in a sense, start over once I got better. She’s not vulnerable enough for that, because it would require talking about a lot of uncomfortable things. If we’d ended up as partners, those uncomfortable conversations would have been different, but no less important. In a lot of ways, I am glad that I did not end up married to her, because what I learned from spiraling out is that if it hadn’t been my crush on her, it would have been something else.
Those intimate conversations wouldn’t have happened no matter how our situation turned out. I learned this by going back and reading my own work, because her emotional reaction to everything is to lightly move past it if it’s not all that serious and full on attack when she feels threatened.
It’s why “She’s So Mean,” “Your Love is My Drug,” and “I Believe in Love” (Matchbox Twenty, Ke-Dollar Sign-Ha, and Indigo Girls, respectively) have been my favorite songs since their release. “Your Love is My Drug” is particularly sentimental for me in two ways. The first is my connection to Supergrover, because our adrenaline was that hyped on many levels, and the second is that Dana and I danced to it at Lindsay’s wedding.
Accidental polyamory, but ok……………
Incidentally, my favorite meme from that Facebook group is when a guy texts another guy who is dating his girlfriend and he gets pissed about it. He says, “relax, bro. She is dating both of us. You are my boyfriend-in-law.”
Relatable. It’s how I think of Zac’s partners. That I’d hope they’d never react poorly if I reached out to them, because I don’t think of them as threats in the slightest. I get irritated with Zac about our relationship, which is different. The conversation we had about his newest partner was about me being jealous because he treated her completely differently than he did me, and it was particularly egregious for a number of factors.
My jealousy had absolutely nothing to do with his partner. It had everything to do with how Zac behaved, which, in the poly community, is called “being a bad hinge.” I was calling him out in love, because I want the best for him. I was also standing up for myself, because I am an older partner who can absolutely lay in his lap….. I also refuse to be a doormat on the other end of the equation. Zac prevented me from doing that from the beginning, because this is the first time he’s ever been a bad hinge and I had to call him on it. He established that the partner who never called him on anything was the worst because he couldn’t respond to their needs if he didn’t know them, he was bad at communication/getting back to people, etc. Therefore, the person who never called him on anything never got their needs met because they weren’t taking up room.
His honesty floored me because he’s the first partner who’s ever laid that out for me before we ever got intimate. Generally, that’s something I figure out after being with them long enough to pick up those things on my own. How much I care is dependent on how much I love you. If I don’t love you, I won’t call you on anything. That’s because I don’t want to do anything to make the relationship worse.
I have abandonment issues, and it’s something I’ve known since I was 14, because I knew even then that it was a core memory.
My emotional abuser was always as honest with me as I am with everyone else (about most things). I appreciated it at the time because as I found out through a Facebook meme, “you don’t like powerful women because they’re powerful. You like powerful women because you’re autistic and they’re direct about what they want.” It’s a terrible match, because they’re direct about everything except their emotions.
I have a feeling there are a lot of ASD/ADHD people trapped in that cycle, because we’re programmed to throw truth bombs whether you like it or not, and emotionally avoidant people HATE THAT. They would rather follow social convention and get mad when you ignore it. Social convention is nice, but it’s not kind.
What is kinder? Zac laying out everything for me beforehand, or surprising me later? What if he’d led me on for months before telling me that he had other partners? He could have, because telling someone that you’re dating other people is not required when you haven’t had the talk about whether you’re exclusive in the first place. I don’t feel like it’s a conversation you have on the first date, necessarily, because you haven’t even found out if you like the person well enough that you want to sleep with them.
Although if you do know on the first date, then that definitely is a first date conversation. You will wreck both parties, otherwise. One is disappointed because they found a great connection, the other is furious that they thought they might get a love story and they were actually one of many…… because most women are programmed to believe that when someone shows interest in you, that means that means We Are Really Starting Something™ from the moment we start texting.
The reason I say women are programmed to think that is that I was programmed to think that from a very young age, so I can relate. I also have found that if you express that you’re not interested in being exclusive from the first day forward, they’ll stop talking to you because they want that fairy tale so bad.
I was single for seven years, happily so, because I was more interested in Supergrover’s emotional support than I was interested in finding a red string. That’s because Dana’s trump card was punching me in the face, and I needed those seven years to recover. There was no way in hell that I would trust anyone that much, because I didn’t trust myself. I participated in us spiraling out to that degree, and by writing it all down I got perspective on the way I behaved and why.
That’s because I could go back and read it later without having the emotional attachment to my words because I was still struggling with the same problem. Looking at your own behavior with an omnipotent third eye is invaluable, whether you’re writing it for publication or secretly at night.
I choose to publish how I feel because I find that as I’m learning myself, other people learn themselves in turn. It’s what my personality is designed to do.
I’m an INFJ.
Like The Giver.
I love whole people, not just superficial attraction.
Like Lord John Grey.
Perspective on my life comes from other writers. Maybe yours will come from what you read here.
Here are my two favorite quotes about writing.
The first is a teacher asking a little girl who her favorite writer is, and she says, “me.” After writing since grade school and being 46 now, I cannot say that I am a great writer. I can say I’m my favorite author. It is one thing to love your characters when you see them in fiction. It is quite another to love your friends in real life so much more when you can see how you’ve both changed each other over the years. The second is “one day you’ll be someone’s favorite author.”
I hope that my friends realize that as I pass down memories like The Giver, they’re the reason I can do it, my reason for living because my experiences make my writing so much richer and deeper. I have been compared to Dooce, The Bloggess, David Sedaris, and a lot of other comedic writers. I can express things comically because perspective means I can laugh later, while having felt like Sylvia Plath in the heat of the moment.
I just realized that I told you that I had to give myself “The Tiffany Talk,” and I didn’t explain what that was. I then realized I couldn’t describe it better than I did the first time, so here’s a link to a sermon I preached at Bridgeport that I believe is the best I’ve ever done- and not because I’m that great.
I spent a lot of time walking around the grocery store this afternoon. I ended up walking out with a lemon parfait and a Diet Pepsi after almost 45 minutes of trying to decide what I would actually *eat.* That’s what happens when you’re on Adderrall and you go to a grocery store. You intend to buy groceries, and nothing looks good. Plus, I was absolutely lost in thought. I couldn’t have shopped at gunpoint because I was so knocked for a loop emotionally. The reason I walked out with so little is that the longer I spent lost in thought, the more demand avoidant I got. It happens to me frequently, a sign of the neurodivergent brain. If I can’t think about anything else, I can’t do anything else. That’s because autism is famous for monotropic thought processes.
I could not pick out food I would like to eat in the future when my appetite is so suppressed that I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate. This is also because I get demand avoidance around cooking, because I don’t like going downstairs. One of my roommates and I are tight. One of my roommates and I are now in a war because she expects me to clean up after her in the bathroom, to the point where she won’t even change the toilet roll.
I can’t remember the date, but the time I got together with Zac before Burns Nicht, I was at his house for two nights. Since I knew I was going to be gone, I didn’t change it just to see if she would.
She didn’t.
We have cameras in all the public areas, so people would notice if this was happening in the kitchen (it does). I have been her maid for nine years, except for the day the maid comes. It won’t take three hours before there’s hair all over the vanity because she has washed her hair in the sink.
The shower is a mess of her hair, because I don’t shower that often in the winter. It’s too big a swing in terms of sensory environment and if I was going somewhere, of course I’d pull out all the stops. Mostly, I just want to avoid cleaning up after someone else.
She will not talk to me about this issue at all, because she thinks I’m unclean (she’s a Trumper, a Modi fan, and has so far made me aware of all the cultural stigmas that come with being queer in India. It has never happened to me before. One of my previous housemates was a Nigerian. No issue whatsoever, and their taboos are probably worse than India.
Said Nigerian was a doctor who went to medical school in Crimea, so he’s the only black person I know who is also fluent in Russian. Oh, and Arabic because he worked in Saudi for years. I don’t remember whether he was a GP for the populace or whether he was working in a palace taking care of the royals.
My hatred of the Saudi monarchy knows no bounds, but I am not insulting the people of Saudi Arabia. The people have nothing to do with how they’re governed. What I know for sure (because my landlady is Lebanese) is that families in the Middle East are all about hospitality and being welcoming. For instance, if I could get into Iran, there are a lot of people who’d want to welcome me because they have no beef with the American government. A minority would be trying to peg me as intelligence, shouting “death to America. Death to CIA.”
Actually, I can’t remember if they said that last part in “Parts Unknown” or whether I’m mixing up the Iran episode and the first few minutes of “Argo.”
Incidentally, there is an “Argo” quote for every occasion… but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be when Jack and Tony go to present their idea for the film crew. Right before Jack opens the door to what is presumably a 7th floor kind of office, he says, “careful. It’s like talking to those two old fucks from The Muppets.”
Iran’s continuing ire at us is a real thing if they’re still protesting us exfiltrating the Shah. He lived out his days in Great Falls, VA, working for us (presumably) because one of the reasons we exfiltrated him was that he had cancer that he knew would kill him with the medical treatment in Iran. So, we got him to the US and that was the end of that.
I understand that the Iranis have the right to hate our guts for it, too. I don’t have to have a dog in this fight, because it’s been going on since I was two. No one, especially me, is going to figure it out. The best outcome would be coming to an agreement at least good enough to reopen the embassy. But that’s a pipe dream, like asking Israel to stop bombing the hell out of Jerusalem, because Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care who dies. If he has to kill his own people to make the Palestinians pay, he doesn’t lose sleep over it.
They came to a sort-of deal in the 70s, in which the Palestinians were given land. Good to go. But then Israelis were encouraged to move into those neighborhoods so that they could push the Palestinians out.
“You can’t do that. We live here.”
“Do you have a flag?”
-Eddie Izzard
We could solve a lot of this by cooking together, as Anthony Bourdain showed us for many years. We are more alike than we are different. Even the Israelis and Palestinians have learned this. There are many, many integrated neighborhoods where Israelis and Palestinians live side by side and never spout that Zionist shit, because they live in the real world… the one where Muslims lives are not worth less to Jews because they know them… not like the Israeli government.
Israel is a recognized state. Palestine isn’t. Therefore, Israel has all the military power they could ever want. Both Palestinians and the Israelis who support them are the Resistence. Zionism has been used to great effect, both in Israel and in the United States, to not only try and push out the Palestinians, but have the world’s full support to do it.
In America, this leads to Evangelical Christian money being pumped into Israel because they think that since Christianity came from Judaism, that means we are like, the same.
I don’t have time for that bullshit. This is not our fight, and we are clearly picking sides. There has to be a reason, I’ll tell you that. I just don’t know what it is. Because that’s what generally happens to me. I criticize based on what’s public, and find out later what really happened, through either the news or an op being declassified so you can look it up online.
So, maybe I’m telling you all the wrong things because there’s more to the chessboard than I can see at present. But this is what I think based on what I know *right now.*
And as I’ve said before, I dive up and down in my writing because I’m using a technique that Louis L’Amour taught me. He said to just start writing and let the faucet drip. Say whatever comes to your mind, because eventually you’ll hit on something worth exploring. For me, that shows itself in having random connections with stories in my brain, and some of them are not pleasant.
Therefore, I start feeling anxious about what I’m writing, and I come back up. Then, as I’m sitting with my negative feelings enough to breathe, I can dive back down again.
Because if I take the blog prompt from this morning literally, my favorite foods to cook are the ones I learned from Dana. She was my first chef, and I wouldn’t know anything about cooking on a professional level without her. So, I take time with breakfast.
My housemates called me “Pancake Girl” for a year.
This is an entry that delves into both making a brand, wandering off into video games, and then explaining why. It’s all of me. Skyrim in particular. Wanting to spend time alone, and wanting to be a writer. Writing and video games are more soothing to me than going out because of sensory overload…….. I feel like this might resonate with other ADHD/ASD/AuDHD people.
We need to talk about it. You and me. That’s because WordPress is also a community of authors who like to share in hopes of going viral. If you go viral on the Internet, there is a better chance you’ll get name recognition before you:
Ask for a book deal that includes an advance; the publisher can see with numbers how popular you are and that gives them a huge indication as to how well the book will sell beforehand. Dooce and The Bloggess both hit the New York Times because so many people were invested, less so after she became an influencer, but in her books, she was still just as raw and real as she ever was at the beginning of her blog.
Getting a book deal over someone else because you’re good at social media is very much like getting a role over someone else in a TV show or film because more people follow them, the younger the better.
In terms of age, I seem to have two markets locked up. These are the same people who like Martha Beck, Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Brené Brown. I cannot break down my analytics as far as I need because those are paid plugins if you don’t run your own server, my next move if I were to make one.
I don’t have to use WordPress, and I can add analytics and search optimization into my HTML documents for free instead of paying $99/year for the professional version of WordPress (that doesn’t include the plugins for analytics, those are paid separately), or a business account, which is $300/mo…. and the plugins you need for analytics are also paid separately even though you’re forking over way more money than these things actually cost.
There aren’t many more features that you get in the business account itself except the ability to basically do what you want with the code (leading to more monetization and they’ll let you keep the money… ads in the free tier make the money go to Automattic (in honor of Matt Mullenweg, also HSPVA. I don’t know him, and my relationship with him is still complicated. He made my job a lot harder once WordPress hit it big and started running almost 30% of the web at one point.).
I also know that with WordPress Business I would get enough subdomains and e-mail addresses; it’s more functionality like Google Education, making blogs with a lot of authors easier to manage.
That being said, I can find something open source and code it on my own. What I lose in that transaction is that I don’t know two things.
The first is whether WordPress is still available in its original form, where you install it on your own server without installing their ridiculous “app store.”
My perfect version got wiped out about 8-10 years ago and was replaced by a block system that lets you know nothing about HTML, and more specifically, layers and Cascading Style Sheets.
This is because WordPress used to have a feature where you could put a layer on top of the text and have it “float” so the text wrapped around it closely, except for the amount of padding you code into it.
I could also sort of “edit” the picture on the fly by making borders to separate the text from the image even more without having to add it in an image editor. CSS will do that on its own.
What I did do in an image editor was cut down the file size, because if you upload a 4 MB image and tell the web browser to scale it down, you could make a sandwich in the time it will take that image to load.
On a related topic, this is why I’m saying once and for all that camera phones are getting too intense for the average user. Apple and Android both require so much space for pictures and now there’s not really a way to turn down the quality so you have to edit it later, even if the shot was perfect in the beginning.
I wonder if absolutely any of this is tied to wanting to upload your pictures and then when it runs out, sell you server space……. because neither Apple nor Samsung nor Microsoft nor Amazon is uninterested in moving everything to the cloud because you’ll never lose it, and you’ll pay what the market will bear.
Those are your grandkids and the house might burn down (this is not fictional…. Lindsay and I lost most of our first family pictures to a house fire in 1990, because we gave some of them to our grandparents. The rest were smoke damaged and stuck together because they were wet.). It’s the reason I would buy server space if I didn’t have my own storage…. and even then, I have a 6TB backup drive I can use through USB.
I don’t have to keep anything on my boot drive except Skyrim, because an M.2 drive has the best loading time, but since I’ve added an SSD, the loading time is fast enough that I can store the large textures on my “scratch drive.”
As I was saying the other day, I have a new mod for Skyrim that will make your computer take it easy on your VRAM by unpacking all the textures beforehand to decrease loading time because of the extraction running on the CPU. If I had a media workstation, it would have enough dedicated RAM that I wouldn’t need it, but shared RAM is so much different that this is a game changer. I am now wondering if I buy a bigger SSD, it would work for other Bethesda games as well. Fallout 4 is just as huge an undertaking for my computer….. and yet, I still haven’t gone back to it because I don’t like the interface. The one time I went into town and got a decent weapon, and even remembered to pick up the ammo for it, it wouldn’t fire.
So, I did what any of us would. I toggled God Mode so I could take down a Deathclaw with a 10 MM pistol, and live to tell about it. I know people don’t appreciate it that I’ll actually admit I toggle God mode in tough situations, but I don’t care about winning and losing. I care about the writing. Besides, the story of a Deathclaw being taken down by a woman without any real armor and a pistol is much funnier than “I was so overpowered I killed it in one shot.” I did that in Fallout 3 already. Not as funny.
I just hated the interface, because it was made for console and adapted to PC. I couldn’t get the hang of it. If I’m ever interested in seeing what happens, I’ll catch it on YouTube. At least I can find out if a mod is interfering with that weapon firing or whether it’s not supposed to work and you’re supposed to find something else.
I’m still autistic when I’m playing a video game. I don’t do well with surprises at not being prepared. So, I don’t watch videos with any spoilers until I get what the best start is and a few of the high level weapons you can find easily before you find yourself shooting and pistol-whipping a Deathclaw.
In Skyrim, the best moment I’ve ever had was when I realized my magic had come up enough that I defeated one with conjuration spells and a bow that appeared when I cast it, I wasn’t carrying one on me.
This is because in the past, I’ve kind of played a weenie, what most people think of when they think of the stealth archer build. That’s because you’re so overpowered, even in the early game, because a sneak attack counts for more damage than shooting an arrow when the victim can see you.
However, since I’m so late in the game, I’m adept at any build. There are just the weapons I like carrying, and the ones I don’t. When I leave my player home (the one place you can store your stuff and know it will always be there when you get back), I am only carrying about 76 pounds of supplies. I carry a truly overpowered bow and sword, but no shield because I have a spell in my other hand, generally conjuration because that adds extra followers.
Speaking of followers, right now I have Lydia (with her dialogue extension) and Lucien (with a patch for Lucien to interact with Lydia). Lucien also interacts with other followers, but only the previous version of Kaiden supports those patches and Anniversary Edition won’t work with it. If I find out that Creation Club sucks, I’m downgrading.
Serana also has interactions with Lucien, Lydia, and Remiel, who is a Dwemer specialist and a ton of fun. We’re going to go and get her right after Serana becomes my follower.
I haven’t gone to get them yet, but I also have “Khajit Will Follow,” which comes with three in one, Inigo (who has interactions with all followers), Auri, and Hoth.
The reason for this is simple. My favorite mod in the whole game is “Legacy of the Dragonborn.” It comes with a Safehouse that can be modified so that your followers’ rooms are personalized to them with “Safehouse Plus” and its follower room patch. I can’t wait to see all of it, and I just got the key to the safehouse.
Plus, Remiel has a plugin for Legacy of the Dragonborn, so I can invite her to be a part of “The Explorer’s Guild.” She’ll freak because she’ll find more Dwemer shit than I will.
I’m also thinking about downgrading because some of the mods have not been updated and some have. This mostly affects dependencies, because one mod is looking for the old file name when it’s been renamed in the Anniversary Edition. So, you can’t really decide which mods you want to install. It matters so much what version you’re actually on.
I do not think that I am capable of live-streaming Skyrim unless it was a comedy show. I am so bad at this game, and yet I still play it because of the writing…. particularly Lucien’s, because I’ve just downloaded him and he’s hilarious. We’re supposed to warn the Jarl that a dragon is attacking, and Lucien’s voice is very posh. So, it makes you fall over with laughter when you walk into Dragonsreach and he says, “let’s chat to the man in the big fancy chair.”
Kaiden is the one I’ve spent the least time with, but I’m liking him more and more. His dialogue is sometimes clever, and I think it will get better once the main storyline with him starts. I know this because I sort of got a spoiler, an overhaul for his house…. so I know he eventually finds something.
When I get to Skyrim, the first thing I buy is a player home. I don’t do any quests, I start crafting potions and weapons. That’s because there are potions for smithing that give the weapon more damage, and then you can enchant them with very strong magic effects to decrease the time it takes to get through anything.
I’ve added a mod called “Summermyst,” which comes with all new enchantments without changing the current spell or enchantment perk trees (my problem with Ordinator, etc.). I’m excited because I just got my second favorite. It’s called “Death Shroud,” and when people get within 25 feet of you, their lifeblood starts draining. It is, unsurprisingly, found on vampire armor.
There is already a “fire damage” enchantment, but the one from Summermyst is much better. It’s called “Fire Damage Lingering.” When you hit them with that, they start burning at the rate of X per second (depending on strength of enchantment). If they aren’t dead when you shot them, they will be shortly.
I have something similar on my bow right now, shock damage and shock damage lingering. It will hit everyone in the vicinity with shock damage at X per second.
I also have armor enchantments that my followers cannot go without. I will not let Lydia within 25 feet of me if she doesn’t have a “muffle” enchantment on her boots. I make sure they all have it, because it keeps them from setting off traps…… on Lydia’s, I also fortify “sneak” instead of one-handed attacks.
Lydia is the only one I make all the weapons for because I’ve seen her use everything she picks up on her own except magic. So, depending on what armor I make for her, I make her every weapon that line offers. If they don’t do enough damage, they will when I’m done with them.
The other thing I do is that in addition to armor enchantments, I make them all jewelry… necklace, right and left hand rings, earrings, capes, and hoods. This is because you can wear all of that if you’re not wearing a helmet and each item can be enchanted. A ranger hood makes a very good head armor when the circlet is just worn for the enchantment.
I do all of this beforehand so that they’re armored for the late game as well. I do not know if they’re marked essential or not, because they’re all incompatible with a follower manager because they run their own scripts.
Speaking of which, I found the coolest one (to me) because my second favorite Marvel hero after Black Panther is Dr. Strange. I think it’s funny that my first and second favorites are my personality. The first is fighting for social justice, the second is the humor of watching Dr. Strange in the hospital and having known a thousand doctors just like him.
Anyway, I found this mod called “Strange Runes.” When you cast a spell, it takes a second. The original animation is still there, but when the spell is ready to cast, it throws out a bright rune in the color of your spell.
Also, I have to admit that it’s a lot of fun going to Apocrypha and collecting all the black soul gems because who hasn’t thought of putting Nazeem in one and using him to enchant something as cheap and worthless as his personality.
For instance, after I am the Thane of Whiterun because I killed a dragon and absorbed its soul, and the whole city supposedly knows who I am, and I am in and out of the palace almost every day for a while, that dick still says, “do you get to the Cloud District often? What am I saying? Of course you don’t.”
When I’ve defeated the boss dragon and saved the world, then beat the Dragonborn before me, even then everyone treats you like crap unless you overhaul all the dialogue.
I have single-handedly built two towns, and have hired guards. However, because the guards don’t have any different dialogue after all that happens, even in my own house, where I am basically the laird, I still hear “speak, Elf.”
But this time I’ve added a whole bunch of mods that overhaul dialogue, from Interesting NPCs to AI overhaul as well. Plus, I’ve added “Settlements Expanded” and a whole bunch of things that make the cities bigger, thus more people to talk to as I’m walking along.
I’ve also added a new quest mod I didn’t have before called “Project AHO.” I haven’t started it, again, not much time. But I found out that one of my favorite characters is in it (Neloth) and I couldn’t resist, even though people were talking so much shit about it on reddit. I don’t use reddit for opinions, ever.
However, Neloth is coded as a bitchy queen, and treats his assistants like he’s Murphy Brown and Christina Yang all rolled into one. I need more dialogue from him, and it will be worth it in the end, I think.
There are also so many dwemer mods in which Remiel has dialogue that I’ve gotten those, too. The few hours I’ve played with her are priceless because she’s a bookworm like me.
And that brings us completely back around. My “brand” is bookworm. I am really lost as to how to take myself to the next level, but also know I’m ready for it…. both the collaboration and the dedication to my writing time.
The reason I write about Skyrim is that it makes me stand out to Skyrim fans. The reason I write about any media and include lots of media references is that my fans aren’t just American. That’s why I say things like, “if you aren’t familiar.” It’s not because I’m trying to speak down to any of you. It’s because there are going to be many, many readers who don’t give a shit about installing Skyrim but like hearing the way I talk about it.
The gamers will get all the inside jokes, and we all win.
But in order to be able to do all that, I need help. Share me on Facebook when you find something you’re comfortable sharing. I know not everything is comfortable or easy. But to the extent that you’re able, it would really help me for you to subscribe to “Stories That Are All True” on Facebook, because that’s where I put my author page content, and the way I’ll eventually get paid- through blog posts and memes and being a Facebook “rising creator.”
I get more shares and followers on WordPress than I do anywhere else, because that’s an audience that already likes to read. It helps me when you’ve read something you liked because people are more likely to take the time to read something if you’ve vetted it first.
I’m also not the friend you don’t want to warn someone about, because you might bring them in on an entry about history, but who knows what you’ll find the longer you dig into mine.
