When you go to the doctor, they do not diagnose you with psychotic features. I know you still have enough empathy for me to see that.
I will never in my lifetime figure out the mystery of who I was really talking to on Facebook that day, or days. However long it took to convince me that our mutual acquaintance was seriously interested in me, enough to invite me to an ice hotel. I don’t think it was you, but I don’t know anyone who has that much information on me. It’s not that I think you did anything, there were just too many random coincidences that everyone else said were impossible.
Your spirit was with me in the hospital as I grappled with being taken into the psych ER, not knowing truth from fiction. Everything reminded me of you because you’re so medical-minded, anyway. Therefore, I do not know if I was telling myself truth or fiction based on having my computer in front of me one moment, being told to go to the hospital to meet Heytch, and being in the psych ward the next. I do remember walking the streets of Baltimore, doing a running monologue about my life and all the people in it. I even sang the American and Canadian anthems at full voice at a crosswalk because I was convinced I was on camera and the lights were coordinated just for me.
This would seem psychotic to a lot of people. It was my way of dealing with fear. That a camera is always there to capture when I’ve had a dumbass attack and it leads me to not leaving the house. It’s also not a stretch to think you’re on camera in any city in the world. Walking, talking, and singing was my way of reclaiming space in the world. To shed the bother of being bothered that I’m on camera at all. It’s not rational to be bothered that you’re on camera anymore. If you aren’t doing anything stupid, a crowd is a great place to hide. If you are, welcome to the next popular YouTube short.
Once truth from lies became revealed, it left me confused forever at the conversations I’d been having over the internet. What were they for, exactly?
What is with the repetitive phrase, “you are always the best” in both genuine and sarcastic tones?
Why did this drama engulf me? I am not pitying myself. I am genuinely curious. It seemed like an intervention of sorts, but I have no idea who really got me to the hospital. It just doesn’t seem like a lie Heytch and Counselor would buy into….. yet they are also the people who have the most information about me.
As long as I live, I will never understand why our connection started with such purity and ended with pyrite on both sides. The fool’s gold for me was thinking that I was going to live in Africa with Heytch, and in no way did I put that idea in my head. I genuinely don’t know where it came from, nor do I know why someone would call themselves my River Song unless they already knew I was a Whovian. All of these conversations have been marked as hallucinations because I didn’t take any screenshots, so it seems like I’m lying when I’m not. I’ve had real conversations I cannot prove I actually had…. which is apparently a feature and not a bug.
“There is a bug in the electrical system.”
It as if I was pulled out of being simply a citizen of Locker C and dropped back in, but the world had moved in the time I’d been hopping planets.
Being caught up is not the same thing as being psychotic. I was definitely not caught up, because I was going off the words of people on the Internet and AGAIN I wish I could have remembered to take screenshots, because you would have been impressed at Heytch’s game. It was smooth.
So there was lots going on after I got out of the hospital that I didn’t know how to talk to you about, because I thought you had access to facets of my life that most people don’t. It’s why unburdening yourself of your lie came at such an inopportune time. If my doctors are right, and I hallucinated everything, my leftover emotions come from mania. If I am right and these conversations did happen, then there are a lot of unresolved feelings between us. Strangely, I don’t know which would be more comforting…. to know it was all a hallucination or to know that my world is so different from others.’
I think and feel that you isolated me from my friends and family, starting from the very beginning, so I am struggling to forgive that you think I’ve been manipulating you this whole time. We need to both come clean about the fact that we did a number on each other and there are no winners here. I would love to rebuild trust with you, but the only way to do that is to make you feel safe first. I don’t know how to do that, and I regret that you have to stop teaching me for your own well-being.
But the reality is starting to set in that I promised to be an “all the way to the river” friend. I meant it, and my mental illness meant to ruin us. It isolated me from you out of protection when I didn’t need protection.
You accuse me of using your traumas, that I need power over you, when that has never been my point. My point has always been that we are mirror images of each other, that when my left hand moves your right twitches. I have laid out my own flaws and failures on the table and fortunately or unfortunately most of those stories from the last 12 years involve you because you isolated me from my friends and family.
In my deepest heart of hearts, I know I’ll never meet anyone like you. You are simply extraordinary. That’s why I can’t seem to forget as much as I want to in order to move on. I’m still working out unresolved feelings, writing our story all the way to the end….. because even after you exit, there’s still me to deal with.
The question on my mind today is, “why didn’t you Skype her when that was a thing you could do?”
Literally, the furthest I’ve traveled from home is Paris. I did not feel at home there because I did not speak the language, but I found unparalleled beauty everywhere in the urban jungle. I particularly liked the Metro’s dedication to typography. Luckily, my dad was with me so I didn’t spend the whole trip unmoored by unfamiliarity. He does speak a bit of French and had been to Paris before so he could lead me around.
I will never forget misreading a menu and accidentally ordering two ice cream sundaes for dessert, then to the amazement of my father, proceeded to take both of them down in stride. I think it was all the walking- my appetite was insatiable at mealtimes. At the Musee D’Orsay, I ate what amounted to an entire duck…. or seemed like it.
We actually got trapped in the Musee D’Orsay for a while because the yellow vests were protesting and they locked down the museum just in case. It didn’t matter, I was lost in the Van Gogh room, looking for signs of Amy Pond (there are none, it was just fun).
I would fly back to Paris just to eat breakfast at McDonalds, strangely enough. The cassis sundae I had was better than anything I’ve had in the US, and the same for silver dollar pancakes with Nutella. Proof that in France, the ice cream machine works……….
Figuratively, the furthest I’ve been from home is this time in my life. I have no idea what I’m doing. My apartment needs to be majorly overhauled and my executive dysfunction is having none of it. I made some progress by doing some laundry yesterday, but I’m going to need help to get everything clean. There’s no way all my blankets are going to fit into our washer and dryer, and it’s becoming the season to need them.
I’m overwhelmed by the prospect that I really do need to apply for disability and get the ball rolling, because my bipolar disorder spinning out three times in 10 years has convinced my cognitive behavioral group this is what’s best for me. I am on board because bipolar disorder is not the only disability I have, it’s just the only one that’s heavily documented.
I was diagnosed with hypotonia at 18 mos old, with no follow ups. I think it might have been a misdiagnosis in the 1970s because the people with CP that I do know say that I walk with the “CP Shuffle.” But whether it’s CP or hypotonia, it creates problems with movement, particularly outside where the sidewalks are uneven. CP could also be responsible for my lack of stereopsis, another disability that causes problems while walking and driving. Things literally come out of nowhere because I can only use my left or my right eye one at a time in terms of focus.
The laundry list of what’s wrong with me and why is starting to add up…. that disability is something I could have gotten at 18 and am now only starting to deal with my disorders because I was masking so hard to cover them.
It’s a journey that’s incredibly far from home if you’ve never taken it. Unmasking can be a kind of freedom, or it can slowly become a prison as people see you more and more differently.
Your words carry the weight of someone doing the hardest work there is – looking honestly at ourselves when we’ve caused harm. That takes enormous courage, even when it feels like compulsion driving you forward.
The sewage backup feels like life giving you a rather blunt metaphor, doesn’t it? Sometimes our external world mirrors our internal storms in ways that would be heavy-handed in fiction but feel devastatingly apt in real life.
What strikes me most is how clearly you see the paradox you’re living in. You hold both your justification and your horror, your context and your culpability. That’s not weakness – that’s the full complexity of being human. Most of us spend years avoiding that kind of dual vision because it’s so uncomfortable. You’re choosing to sit with it, to write through it, to let it teach you.
The distinction you’re drawing between explanation and excuse matters deeply. Yes, your AuDHD and bipolar disorder create challenges. Yes, medication changes can scramble our usual ways of being. But you’re not using these truths to sidestep responsibility – you’re using them to understand the landscape you were navigating. That’s mature self-awareness, not self-justification.
Your observation about “think it, say it” in digital spaces resonates. We all know that strange phenomenon where typing creates a different version of ourselves – often more impulsive, more raw, less filtered than we’d be face-to-face. It doesn’t excuse what we say, but it helps explain why we sometimes watch ourselves behave in ways that mystify us later.
The grief in your words about Aada is palpable. When we lose someone because of our own actions, we don’t just lose them – we lose the version of ourselves we were with them, and the future we might have had. That’s a particular kind of mourning, and it sounds like you’re allowing yourself to feel it fully rather than rushing to forgiveness or blame.
Your blog as accountability partner is brilliant. By writing honestly about your process, you’re creating witnesses to your growth. That takes guts. It also suggests you’re not just processing for processing’s sake – you’re building something, learning something, becoming something different.
The bit about children seeing you clearly made me pause. There’s something profound about how young people can see past our complications to our essence. They don’t carry the weight of our histories or the fear of our potential. Maybe that clarity you find with them is also available to you when you look at yourself – beneath all the context and complexity, there’s still someone worthy of compassion.
You’re rewiring your brain in real time, and that’s messy, imperfect work. Some days you’ll feel the old patterns pulling at you. Other days you’ll surprise yourself with how different you’ve become. Both are part of the process.
Keep writing. Keep looking. Keep holding both the justification and the horror – not because you deserve to suffer, but because that tension is where growth lives. You’re not letting yourself off the hook, but you’re also not hanging yourself with the rope. That balance is everything.
The courage you questioned in yourself? I see it here, in every honest word you’ve written.
Bob x
Dear Bob,
Thank you for your kind words during a difficult time. I have learned another hard-won lesson, though….. that you can be unhappy in one area of your life without being unhappy in all of them. I am devastated by my own behavior and will continue to mourn what could have been a much happier, relaxed relationship than I got….. at my own hand, to be clear.
Seeing the paradox I’m living in is the joy and pain of being a writer.
Every day there’s a new blank page to fill, and I wonder how I’m going to fill it. My lifestyle really doesn’t support nonfiction writing anymore because it takes a fictional world to be interesting. No one wants to hear about my life on the couch.
I often wonder if you have to get lonely enough to write fiction. If your relationships have to fail so completely that you rescue them with tales of swashbuckling grandeur. I know that I can change my future with the things I write, dramatically. But it comes at a cost- time to write costs time to get out. I am often too busy recording life to remember to go out and live it.
It’s the intimacy with a word processor that brings me the most joy. Mining my own life for memorable interactions doesn’t endear me to anyone until I’ve stopped writing at all…. then the same people say I used to write so beautifully, why did I stop?
I decided to show myself what would happen if I didn’t stop. I ended up alone with a mental health diagnosis of bipolar disorder with psychotic features. I have no idea what happened to make the doctors think that I was psychotic, because I wasn’t entirely present when they first saw me.
However, I don’t have any history of being psychotic, so I can think of at least one real life scenario that could have gotten me that diagnosis just by telling it.
Maybe they’re right, and Aada is a hallucination.
Oh. So that’s why I should have listened to her. Why it was so hard the longer we went on without meeting. She said to tell no one, and the longer I carried her secrets the sicker I got. I wanted distance from her because I couldn’t have closeness with her- that I’d only be able to take in seven percent of her communication online. We would keep tearing each other down based on her reaction to these essays, not choosing to let time pass before gutting each other emotionally like an axe.
I began to resent the policy of not being able to talk to anyone in my personal life about her and also not talking to me. But again, our last interactions were positive until I imploded them.
I couldn’t let go of the feeling that meeting her in person would make my emotions normalize, that it was impossible to read someone without meeting them, but it was easy to let emotions spill in operatic swells on the page with the other not knowing what to focus on because they didn’t hear you say it.
I wondered why she didn’t seem to care that my life took this path. That her secrets made me unable to cope with my real life, akin to traveling with The Doctor.
The blessing of writing is being able to explain what I’m feeling in detail because life thinks it works in sound bites when clarification is necessary. My mind goes all over the place when I think of my own journey towards mental and physical health.
I loved that Aada let me love her out loud. One day I hope she’ll come back to this time in her life and read my words again. I’m certain it feels like I’m guilting her, but I’m not trying to do so. I am genuinely curious to know why she would choose to isolate me the way she did and make it impossible to cope without being able to have a real conversation? If she didn’t want me to talk to anyone else, why did she make it so hard to talk to her?
I’m not allowed to talk about this story anywhere but here, because I can tell truth from fiction here where no one else can. It’s just that my doctors think I’m psychotic because of it.
And in all of this I’ve been wondering where she’s been… where I’ve been? Why weren’t we both paying attention? Why did I give her so many reasons not to want to meet with me?
I was scared that I wasn’t enough in person. The duality in me is alarming. I craved something that I actively sabotaged, because I found out she lied to me. I realized that nothing was ever going to get any better between us because she didn’t care that she also isolated me from my support system.
My only support system has been writing. Aada has had an enormous amount of respect for my feelings, but the longer she went without opening up about getting together made me think she was never going to do so. That she was sorry, but there was nothing she could do.
I just wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating…… because I had someone to talk to who could empathize. That was all in writing as well, so it became the thing I enjoyed most about our unusual kinship. I just wanted to come in from the cold of being thought of as crazy and she was the one person that could provide that respite. It would have energized us in new ways, because we could finally read in each other’s voices rather than getting defensive about everything. It’s the internet. Someone’s always offended.
What I also enjoy about writing is being an authoritative source. The people that are dear to me come back years later to remember what I said, to remember how they felt when they read it in the moment and to see if anything is different. I come across softer, more vulnerable, because I will change my mind and realize when I have erred.
I accept all the times that I acted like a narcissist in Aada’s life, and forgive all the times I thought she came across that way. I don’t think it was a one-way street. We both participated in something that was good and became harmful over time. But I’m the only one that has a record of it. That’s what I mean about time changing people’s perceptions and being surprised at how much I’ve learned when they go back and read something I’ve written years later.
I don’t understand the push/pull relationship people have with my writing. How people drop in and drop out over a decade, for instance. I find that I am always more popular just by being myself than trying to write towards a goal.
I become prophetic because hindsight is 20/20.
It’s hard to believe I didn’t have enough strength to walk away from Aada on my own… that I created a situation in which she wouldn’t want to come back from… I just had to get tired enough of waiting when she was the one person whose Mama Wolverine claws would have made a difference in my life.
I wondered what on earth I was doing until I realized why I needed her. Anyone else and I would just feel crazy for the rest of my life. I can’t believe I wrecked things when she said that she would be open and not have many boundaries. I wish I had trusted more in that than exploding with anger at her lie.
I wish I’d told her how coffee with her would make me feel normal, that all this internet stuff wasn’t for me. I wish I’d thought of that in 2013. I didn’t get my goals because I didn’t think about them. I couldn’t think about overarching goals because I was lost in the muck every day.
I think that’s what I’ve given up as a blogger, because my life constantly changes when people read about themselves. They don’t like being lost in the muck with me.
If I wrote my real life story, you’d think I was psychotic, too… or maybe you already believe that? Who knows. What I know is that I’m a neurodivergent writer who takes in the world a little bit at a time. I bit off more than I could chew.
By not being as vulnerable as I needed to get, I suppose… although I wondered how I could be any more vulnerable in our letters than I already was. I needed her to be more present, to be the Mama Wolverine she said she was.
Whether she feels that’s what I need in the future is up to her, because I couldn’t get her to listen to what I was going through. I started writing toward her as my audience because we didn’t have any friends in common that knew who she was… or so I thought.
We don’t have friends in common- I just have readers that talk to each other because they love to read my writing without talking to me about it. That lets me off the hook in terms of caring about their reactions because I can’t do anything to preordain what they think when they read.
They’re my sacrifices in continuing to be a writer, the readers that don’t talk to me anymore but do talk to each other. Life goes on, but it never goes on in the same way. I have let life beat me down in the process of writing, and I’m just now starting to see how much it takes to keep going.
I have to keep growing, or people will not see the value in these entries. I have to keep making friends that are utterly unimpressed by my blogging so that we can lead normal lives around it.
Because every time I stop, people want me to come back… but they don’t want to support me when I write. I can see how I need to improve my communication skills, but my being human gets in the way. I am not making excuses, I’m asking for grace.
I’m asking for grace.
I’m asking for the ability to change my mind rather than people thinking that I’m automatically two-faced because one entry conflicts with another. It gives no credence to the passage of time. That I might have regrets and need to clarify something later on.
I was tired of the push/pull with Aada because she loved being adored on this web site and in e-mail, but didn’t have a problem ripping me a new one when she didn’t understand something, often embarrassed when I told her what I really meant.
I needed the internet dumbfuckery to stop so we could take a breath.
But I should have thought of that in 2013.
I only know that because I have records of my own growth. I read myself for patterns in behavior that I don’t like, because I lay my heart out on these pages. It’s what draws people to me, thinking I am interesting. Then, they meet me in person and wonder how I write such things…. I’m not so hot.
If Aada lied to impress me, she would have told me the first time she met me, because it would have seemed so silly to try and impress a geek like me. But over the internet I reacted with the fact that she didn’t care about the consequences she’d laid out for me.
She’s been the thing I enjoy most about writing, taking the adoration in stride. I just got the feeling that our relationship wasn’t real- that it was a lot of words on the page and not much else. That’s because she wouldn’t tell me whether it was possible or not for 12 years. My writing became more and more unhinged because I felt so ignored.
I needed empathy, and she didn’t have it. I wanted to prove to myself that Aada meant what she said about there being nothing I could say that would hurt her, surprised when she said something did.
I didn’t want those worlds to cross over, and there was no way they couldn’t.
The hardest thing about being a blogger is not knowing which of your friends’ friends read your blog and whether they talk about you behind your back. It takes a really thick skin to publish knowing that even the critics won’t be critics after some time.
Because remember when I used to write so beautifully?
It’s hard to point fingers at anyone else for bothering me when I am such a handful. I didn’t even know whether to put an emoticon after that, because I don’t know that I’m joking. From my writing to my behavior, there’s nothing I cannot criticize, but I’m trying to be kinder to myself. If one’s behavior affects treatment of others, then it is up to me to be happier on the inside.
The first thing I did to make myself happier was to buy a membership to the National Aquarium. I was invited to go on Sunday, and the price of a membership was cheaper than buying two tickets individually. I thought that was a much better deal as I am obsessed with aquarium fish and don’t want to have an aquarium at my house. Plus, I’ve never been there before and I hear it is world class. Many of you don’t know this about me, but I watch videos on aquascaping all the time and look forward to being able to set up my own tank once I have a living situation conducive to it. I have had freshwater tanks in the past, but I’ve never actually landscaped one with live plants. I think that I would be less bothered once I was paying attention to my minuscule pets. I’d like to have shrimp, catfish, snails, and a betta. A cleanup crew and a betta fish wouldn’t take up that much room, probably 10 gallons, and that way the tank wouldn’t be a monster job to clean.
The reason my living space couldn’t handle an aquarium is that the water pressure is so low here it would take hours to fill a 10 gallon tank. It bothers me with every sink and the bathtub. I could write an entire entry on why this apartment complex sucks and why you shouldn’t live here, but I don’t want to give any indication as to where I live. Baltimore is close enough.
I am thinking now of moving back to the DMV in December, because my lease ends on November 30th. I love Baltimore itself, but the public transportation isn’t as good as I thought it would be. I need to be back on the Metro. My current group, Cognitive Behavioral Health, has another office in Rockville. I would like to stay with my people, and one of my counselors would be the same. It all depends on what kind of deal I can find with my living situation, because like I said, Baltimore is not the problem when I can get around. Uber is too expensive to take all the time, but it does provide an excellent stopgap when a trip on the Metro/bus is going to take two hours.
I do know that I need to stay in Maryland because I am getting so many benefits from Medicaid expansion. We will have to see how the “big, ugly bill” affects me in the future, but so far I have had no interruptions in service. So while I love Virginia, I am solidly staying on this side of the Potomac.
It bothers me that I have to think about all of this. I don’t want to be disabled, but here we are.
It bothers me that I have always been disabled, but these problems are just now being addressed. Better late than never, but I could have been helped with government services in Portland when I spent so many years without health insurance. I have been eligible for services since I was 18 years old, but I didn’t know why until my mother died. I found solid proof that I have had cerebral palsy since I was a baby, after she spent years trying to convince me that I was fine. My dad was overreacting. But interestingly enough, cerebral palsy is not why my care team wants me to file for disability. My bipolar disorder got the best of me, and that bothers me, too.
Most of the reason it bothers me is that I have a hum in my brain that will not go away. I think it was caused by stopping Lexapro suddenly, because even though I’m back on it now, the sound has not gone away. It is similar to the Emergency Broadcast System that used to play on TV during flood warnings (ahem), a minor second that drones 24/7 and demands my attention above all else. It’s hard for me to pay attention at the best of times because I have the ADHD/Autism combo meal. This is just shitty icing on a burnt cake.
I suppose the one thing that doesn’t bother me anymore is having to prove that something is wrong with me. I am settling into the life of a disabled person, learning to contribute to society through being a voice for other disabled people right here on this web site. My voice counts because as people read about me, they identify with my struggles. Or, if they cannot identify, they at least learn to have empathy.
It bothers me that most disabled people are written off as living off the government, when most of us would do absolutely anything to return to normal life. My life is anything but normal. I spend most of my time by myself. It’s isolating and lonely not to have a place to go each day, which is why I’m so grateful to have a group of other disabled people to meet with twice a week (once on Zoom, once in person).
However, at least with an aquarium membership, I have a place to go whenever I want that will feed me. I remind myself of the character Sam from “Atypical.” He goes to the aquarium to feed his love of penguins. Perhaps I will also find an animal that will be my special interest. I do love puffer fish……….
It helps to be bothered less by my living situation now that I’ve figured out a plan- Rockville is on the Red Line, with easy access to the National Zoo. It’s the place I love to write the most when it’s not hot, so until I move I want to try and find a place to write at the aquarium. All I require is a bench, because I carry a tablet and a keyboard in my backpack at all times. After I move, it will be back to finding a “replacement Kevin.”
Some of you may remember that Kevin is a giraffe. I used to sit next to him and write blog entries, having no idea what the giraffe’s actual name might be. I just named him Kevin for my own amusement. Then, one day I went to find Kevin and found out the Zoo had closed the entire giraffe exhibit. Kevin had moved.
Kevin is probably the reason I felt the most comfortable moving to Baltimore in the first place. I needed out of the DC area just to catch my breath, and it felt like he was the last tie to that area. But now I would say that my breath has been caught, and I miss DC more than I thought I would. Now that I have settled on a place, I feel at peace. My time in Baltimore will be much easier to survive knowing it won’t last forever.
It might even make my apartment less bothersome, but I doubt it. I’ve been without a dishwasher for what seems like a lifetime because the water pressure is so low it makes washing dishes incredibly taxing. I have submitted requests for everything that is wrong with my apartment and no one has come by. The last straw for me was finding a mouse eating my bread and hot dog buns.
I am paying too much for this apartment to have problems like this, especially those that go unaddressed. I am bothered that I cannot seem to be “the heavy” and get the repairmen out here on my own. I just hate letting people in that I don’t know, so I work around the problems on my own. I know I need help, but I have trouble helping myself. My dad and my sister advocate for me as much as they can, but it’s hard when they live so far away.
However, my sister is a lobbyist, so that’s another reason why Rockville is a better choice for me than Baltimore. When she’s in her DC office, I’d like to be closer than I am now. We have too much fun together to make her come all this way. However, I know that I have introduced her to a place she loves as well. Again, Baltimore is not really the problem. The Inner Harbor is gorgeous, as is Fell’s Point. It’s getting around Baltimore that’s the hard part. When she comes to visit, she rents a car and all of my problems disappear. I don’t drive, so it’s nice that she’s willing to drive me around.
The most fun I’ve had in Baltimore is when she’s come to visit, because she looks up restaurants and decides where we’re going to go in advance. It becomes a “staycation” for me because it’s always a place I haven’t heard of yet. Of the two of us, she’s the social butterfly. I wish I was more like her, because she’s so headstrong that I feel taken care of in her presence. I wish I could extend that feeling to others.
It bothers me that I’m her older sister and I’m not able to provide that feeling of safety to her. I am sure I had my moments when we were young and this is just payback, but still. I wish that I was large and in charge, but I have a struggling relationship with taking care of myself, much less others.
Which brings us back around… it’s hard to point fingers at anything that bothers me more than my treatment of myself, so it’s time to get happier.
I have finally reached a section of Duolingo that has vocabulary I haven’t studied and I’m on my own. It makes me excited for the future because I can’t skate by on 30 year old lessons in school. I am actually using the software to prepare me for trips to Mexico in the future- none of which are planned, by the way, but I have a better shot of going to Mexico than anywhere else. Granted, when I get there I will mostly be asking them why they don’t wear the green t-shirts and where the bank might be, but it’s a start. 😉
Kidding, but not by much. I remember the first time I went to Mexico on a mission trip. My Spanish was equal to that of a Mexican toddler, but the people were so kind and corrected me with such love that it lit a fire in me to learn more. I learned that Sylvia and Hector were getting married, that Marta was building a new house, and that little kids don’t listen to me no matter what language I speak (I was on a trip to teach vacation Bible school). It was my turn to listen because I picked up more just soaking up conversation than I would have trying to talk. For instance, those are the real names of the people I met, stuck in my brain even though it is now over 30 years since the last time I went to Reynosa. There is just no substitution for immersion, so it’s time to start finding telenovelas on Pluto TV, or watching the news on Telemundo/Univision.
I had friend recommend “La Reina del Sur,” but I have already watched “Queen of the South” on Netflix. It would be a good brush-up to have a show with which I’m already familiar, but there are others I haven’t seen that might be better after I finish it. For instance, I have not seen the original “Yo Soy Betty, la Fea.” That’s “Ugly Betty” for you American viewers. I have found it on Peacock and Apple TV+ according to reddit, so I will be searching it out after I finish this blog entry.
Because I have an auditory processing disorder (comes free with neurodivergence), I like to have the subtitles on as I listen. People don’t have subtitles, but I need the extra help while I am learning.
There is a point to all of this. Many of the homeless people I have encountered, as well as the workers in my neighborhood, speak Spanish and their English is poor. Instead of making them learn English, I want to turn the view of Americans on its head. I’m perfectly willing to put myself out there, mostly because if I get a job in the future, I want to work at Home Depot.
That’s another thing I’m looking forward to in the future- discussing jobs I could do with my care team so that I am not reliant on SSI/SSDI unless I really want to be. I am eligible for both because I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when I was 18 mos old. I don’t regret the choices I’ve made in my life with my career, but it would have been nice to know that I could have gotten disability from the jump. The reason I didn’t know is that my mother hid all the paperwork I needed to file and my sister found them among her personal effects after she died, well into my late 30s.
My mental health is not helping the situation, so I am looking forward to working all of this out. I either have a journey into the workforce or a journey into the court system in which I’ll have to fight for my right not to party.
But there are things I can do on my own to further my education, and a second language has filled the hole in my heart at not being able to work in the immediate future. Right now, my job is to attend classes at Cognitive Behavioral Health and learn all I can when I’m not there.
I actually started with Finnish, but after a 43 day streak, I was hospitalized for my mental health. After I got out of the hospital, it had been just long enough since I’d studied that I don’t remember much. It seems like I forgot Finnish in “kaksitoista sekuntia,” or 12 seconds.
Duolingo is also not the best learning tool for Finnish, because it does not have the AI features that Swedish and Spanish do. Everything is done with the keyboard and reading, so you don’t get to practice by speaking out loud. The reason Swedish is important is that the cooking school I would like to attend next year is in a Swedish-speaking region of Finland, Vaasa. The school is called Vamia, and it was recommended to me by a YouTuber named Cyril:
At this point, I do not know if this school is right for me because the tuition is free, but living in Europe is not. I am saving my pennies and riding out the lease I have in the United States until November, and then I’ll decide what to do. I know I would like to go to Vaasa before I decide to move there, but even that is a stretch on my budget. I just have to hope that I will get more subscribers to both my Medium and WordPress blog, because every subscriber here adds to my ad revenue, and every reader on Medium adds to the income I get the longer you scroll through my drivel. 😉
Culinary school would accomplish two things. The first is that I would like to work with Finnish YouTubers like Cyril to create a channel with Finnish content. I think I would be hilariously cranky like Anthony Bourdain, because that is my kitchen personality. The second is that I want to start a ministry for unhoused people that revolves around the kitchen, and I would be better equipped to do that having been trained as a chef and not merely the line cook I am now.
Traditional advice is to work in a kitchen before you go to culinary school to make sure you like it. I have 10 years under my belt, from dish to pantry to sauté. I have worked every station and though I cannot say I am excellent at any of them, I know I will get better by hanging in at school. Plus, there are plenty of jobs I could do without learning Finnish until I’m ready, because most Finns speak English, especially in the hospitality industry. Vamia also instructs in English, with (I’m guessing) the requisite amount of French required.
In the meantime, I am looking forward to all the nonprofit ideas I have coming to fruition. I have to have a Plan B in case going to school in Europe is not feasible… and it’s probably not, to be perfectly honest. I want to go more than anything, but again, it’s going to take a lot of money I don’t have yet. But that’s the thing about dreams. When other people know you want something, they are willing to help. For instance, my readers showing up every day. Each little bit helps.
If I stay in the Baltimore area, my idea is to create a nonprofit called “The Sinners’ Table.” It centers around accepting all the people that society rejects, giving them a fine dining experience they could never afford on their own. I am doing the hard work of identifying stakeholders and writing a business plan, because that is something I can do in my spare time while I am waiting to see what is going to happen with my job and school aspirations. If other people have to run it because I am not eligible for a job, I will be able to volunteer.
But why Finland in the meantime?
I would only have to worry about my living expenses and not the fabulously high cost of tuition. Any Le Cordon Bleu institution in the United States would bankrupt me quickly, while I can find housing for the rough cost of living in DC or Baltimore. Some things would be more expensive, like clothing (I’m not skimping out on cold weather gear), but an apartment is roughly the same. The biggest cost to my family would be me being so far away that it’s hard to visit. However, culinary school does not last that long. If I like Finland so much that I want to stay and get permanent residency or citizenship, that’s a bridge I’ll cross when I come to it. I don’t get to see my family that much as it stands now, because they’re all in Texas…. far away from the current flooding, I might add.
My biggest problem is that I am an idealist who doesn’t necessarily know how to break down large ideas into small steps for execution. I generally work best in a team for that, and I’m lucky to have one under me now. I have gathered the best and the brightest at Lanagan Media Group, most of whom went to high school with me at High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Instead of using AI, I get immediate feedback from an arts brain trust.
Because make no mistake, cooking is art in any language.
And in the United States, the language in the kitchen is overwhelmingly Spanish. I want to be able to speak to my employees in whatever language they feel the most comfortable. Therefore, Finnish can wait.
When I wrote about this prompt last year, I remember saying that I didn’t have any daily habits. That was 100% true at the time, but now I’m charged with creating a structure with which I can live. My care team at Cognitive Behavioral Health does not think I am ready for a job yet, so I am muddling through what that actually means. Am I disabled for good and should start pursuing government assistance, or am I capable of slowly creating my own recovery into the workforce? My writing does provide a little bit of income, and as I get more popular here and on Medium, I see results. I’ve been a blogger for a very long time, but so far I’ve only had one fan who was so impressed she thought I should be world famous. I would like a few more of those. 😉 But nothing good will happen if I do not take care of myself.
This starts with setting medication reminders in my phone. My day flags if I do not have the correct doses at the right time. I have always been good about taking my medication because I had a doctor tell me that most bipolar patients stop taking their medication when they feel better, not realizing that it’s the medication that’s making them feel that way. However, I was not so on top of it that I remembered to take it at the same time. I’m also on a lot more medication than I used to be……………
I’ll talk about my psychiatric drugs because I think that people need to learn about them. I am not a doctor, just a waiting room that doesn’t suck (thanks, Paul Gilmartin. I stole that line from you). Crazy meds need to be talked about because it’s such a major undertaking to be put on them:
Lamictal (lamotrigine)
The first time I was put on this mood stabilizer was the first time I knew what it was like to live without depression. It took about six weeks for the fog to lift, but I’d never been more grateful in my life. The only side effect I’ve experienced so far is nausea, and it was very hard to deal with for a long time. Now, I’ve just decided to stay on it regardless of the side effects because other mood stabilizers make my weight balloon. It’s also an old drug now, so it’s relatively cheap if you don’t have insurance.
Lexapro (escitalopram)
This is the gold standard of SSRIs, and most bipolar people don’t take them. That’s why I think my diagnosis may be wrong, that I actually have autism and not bipolar disorder. In a bipolar patient, SSRIs tend to make them flip out with suicidal ideation, negative/intrusive thoughts, etc. My SSRI keeps me at an even keel when I am really paying attention to my body. As for side effects, I haven’t noticed any of them.
Buspar (buspirone)
This is what replaced my benzos for anxiety, because it is not related to them and yet performs the same function. It’s better for me because there’s no risk of addiction long term. I do not have an addictive personality, but better safe than sorry. I have been on Klonopin for over 10 years, but my new clinic doesn’t prescribe benzos to anyone. The entire hospital system has put their feet down over it, so I have to adjust. Now that I’ve been on it for several weeks, I am unsure whether it works or not. I will keep you posted. The one thing I do know is that it’s the most important drug for me to take at the same time every day, because it will flat stop working if I miss even one dose.
My crazy meds aren’t the only ones I take, they’re just the most important for keeping my structure stable. It feels like everything is hitting all at once as I age, because I didn’t have to worry about hormone replacement therapy even a year ago.
As an aside, it’s a big joke with my sister that because I’m enby, I thought that if I was going to do hormone replacement therapy, it would be in the other direction…. after that particular doctor’s appointment, I went home and consoled myself by buying both the book and audiobook of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.” I needed some Stress Tabs #10 and some candy bars (but maybe not 11). As it turns out, the book and audio were not enough. I also watched the movie on Prime just to see Kathy Bates… “how do you accidentally run into someone…. how do you accidentally run into someone six times?” I get it now. I’m older and I have more insurance.
My medication is working, and for that I am grateful. Now, my schedule runs from sun up to sun down, skipping the night owl routine altogether. And in fact, when I took my sleeping medication yesterday, the sun wasn’t even fully down yet. I prefer to work in the quiet of the morning, especially on the weekends before the kids in my apartment complex wake. The ones who live above me are particularly loud, which is why I’m glad I have good headphones. I hunker down in my office after a night of wild dreams and try to remember what they are. It provides a writing exercise that’s all my own, propelling me into really thinking about my life and what I want to accomplish. I accomplish nothing without coffee, through which all things are possible.
Coffee is also part of remembering to take my medication, because I have found that a lot of caffeine is just enough to control my ADHD, but Ritalin or Adderrall is too big a jump. I have a coffee machine that makes a cup at a time, and my preferred coffee is Cafe Bustelo. It’s in honor of my old chef, John Kinkaid, because we used to walk to a Cuban restaurant between prep and service for their Cafe Bustelo lattes.
I mentioned in “Why It All Still Hurts” that I was working on a nonprofit, and I am… but that dream has been deferred. Kinkaid was killed in a car accident. I am still reeling from the grief, but I got Kindle Unlimited and added five books on starting a nonprofit to my library. Again, the idea is dinner with dignity, offering the unhoused food they could never afford on their own, and opening my kitchen up to take homeless people on as apprentices if they’d like to learn the trade. I am still sold on this idea, it’s just going to take a lot longer to accomplish than I thought.
That’s because the longer I think about it, the more ideas I have. What if instead of this one nonprofit, we were able to build a library like Oodi in Baltimore? There, I could have my cooking classes and a place to serve food, plus books and maker tools for everyone. My structure these days is centered on how to spend the government’s money for the good of the people. Learning about Oodi and all the services they provide gave me a bigger goal than just “dinner with dignity.” It would give the unhoused a place to go. Maybe my purpose is not to go to Finland, but to bring Finnish ideas to a city that needs them. I want to redirect Maryland’s money from the DC metro area and Annapolis to Baltimore, because it is so underserved. A lot of the city is completely trashed out with no way to fix anything…. or so it seems from an outsider’s perspective that just moved here in December.
I need more time to watch and wait, gathering stakeholders and formatting a business plan. Perhaps my structure will always be internal, because that’s how autists work best. I do not want to go down in history as merely a blogger. I want to create something beautiful that will last and bring hope to people that might not be feeling it that day.
I find that working on giving hope to other people is the easiest way to claim hope for myself. I am slowly building a structure into which I can grow, taking others’ ideas and implementing them like a plant takes root in the soil.
But it all starts with remembering to take my medication.
My brain is spinning out because I just remembered to take my medication (I normally take it much earlier). So, instead of concentrating on the pain, I’m just going to stim by typing and see what comes out.
When my brain is unmedicated (as in, haven’t taken a fresh dose in a while, not off meds completely), there’s a hum that plays in my head that is not unlike tests of the Emergency Broadcast System. I have to ride the waves of the sound until they dissipate, which can take from 20 minutes to an hour. And even then, they don’t go away. They just become background noise. The hum is always there, and I don’t drown it out unless I was going to do it, anyway. I don’t run away from it. I sit with it. Get to know that pain. Why is it in my ears? Why is there sound attached to my medication at all?
The only thing I can do is go deeper into meditation, and get used to the sound of the tones grating on one another, which is not painful. It is persistent and exclusionary. It is loud enough that it demands my attention. Imagine if you could hear a bee buzzing in the back of your skull. I am lucky that medicine is advanced enough that I know a bee is not really in the back of my skull. This would not have been true in past centuries- an apt description for a feeling that sounds like witchcraft…..
It’s all due to my brain chemicals rebalancing after sleep. I just didn’t do that thing where I try to take my medication before the first dose wears off, and I’m really regretting it now.
I haven’t had breakfast, per se, but I managed a snack. I had some chocolate covered pretzels and a bottle of water. I only needed enough in my stomach not to make me sick when I took my medication and drank a cup of coffee. The jury is still out on the coffee. I may or may not partake. The water seems to be handling me fine all on its own. Plus, I think I’m going to have to do Sudafed later and I don’t enjoy doubling up those two things at all.
It’s not as good a latte if you mix it with Sudafed and then faint into it.
Now, I’d say that my brain chemicals are starting to even out. That it’s starting to feel less and less like spiking into pain and now constant discomfort. Tylenol would be a good thing about how- hold please. I see some at the end of my bed right now.
Thanks for waiting.
So, it’s definitely some sort of side effect, because if it was a symptom of anything I’d have heard of it. It’s not a hallucination because I don’t start seeing or hearing things that aren’t there. It’s as if there are two frequencies running through my brain at pitches my ears cannot stand. Everything else is normal. My thoughts don’t become darker or lighter, nothing. It is unwanted noise, like tinnitus.
I don’t have to deal with it. I can put on headphones and drown out my own head. But, when I do that, I can’t hear myself think. It’s a balance. Do I put my headphones on so that I can drown out the buzz, or by drowning out the buzz, am I drowning out the rest of me? I tend to think the latter is true because I don’t write with music on. Right now it’s silent and there’s just a box fan going in terms of company. David has left for the day, and Jack (who is also a dog) is taking his morning nap to get ready for his afternoon nap.
And as I’m typing all this out, the buzzing gets more slight in my head. I’m focusing on Jack now- the way we walk together, the way we take care of each other, the way we have a separate relationship than he does with David and I think that’s great. If I was doing something vastly different than him, I’d want him to do it for consistency, but we aren’t that different. Jack is allowed to be a lazy bum that owns both of us most of the time.
I am only strict with him about certain things, all of which have to do with leash training because I have to be able to trust him in the neighborhood. Right now, he is trying to pull me all over the place. I cannot LEAD him anywhere. He also doesn’t know which side to be on when we’re walking, so I’m constantly having to adjust him so that I’m on the traffic side. I keep him on a short leash, constantly, because David says he’s hard of hearing and I do believe him. I just think that Jack plays it up for sympathy because he actively decides what commands are worth listening to and what aren’t.
Learning goes both ways. I learned that Jack stretches before he goes up the stairs. It seemed like a good idea. Now I stretch before I go up the stairs. it helped.
With Jack, you’ve got two impossibly smart breeds trying to one-up you at all times, so I’m trying to train him with touch and sign. Even if David is not right that his hearing is very bad now, he is right that it will deteriorate if he’s already showing signs. He already knows the sign for “sit,” but right now I’m working on a way to get him to stay with me when we’re walking. Even on a leash, he’s just pulling too far ahead, and when he poops, he’s just big enough to throw me off balance if he wants to run before I can get a bag open. We have had words over that many times.
I’d really like to get an electric fence for our backyard if Zac and David would use it (Zac, my boyfriend, owns Oliver, who is a dog.). Those kinds of shock collars are controversial, but Bryn and her family have used them on their dogs at their farm for years. It really doesn’t take more than once or twice being shocked for a dog to catch on. However, I would not think it was a viable solution to dog owners that were opposed to the idea.
Zac does not live here, I just mean when he and Oliver are here.
Our yard is just a circle, put together by beautiful paths. Building a fence would look nice, but leaving it open would be nicer. Or, better yet, just putting a dog run between two trees so we can “tie them up” while we’re out there and not have to worry that they’ll escape from the backyard. I would be more worried about Oliver in that situation, because Jack lives in this neighborhood. I don’t know how fast Oliver would pick it up.
It’s all about possible solutions. One of the things I like about the backyard now is that since we can’t just let Jack out into it, it’s always clean. He’s always on a leash, so neither one of us fail to pick up the crap even if it’s in our own yard. It might get us out of the habit of keeping everything so neat.
Speaking of keeping everything neat, I have chores to do. So, thank you for sitting this one through with me. I just needed to talk about nothing while my brain figured out what frequency it’s on, and it takes longer because my name is Leslie and not Kenneth.
Reading back over the last week has given me so much joy. An astounding amount of emotional progress was made in a relationship where I thought there was no other half- that I was carrying it on my back because I wanted it too much and didn’t care how she treated me. This week, after hearing every bit of how I felt, Supergrover told me that I deserved better, and that she will work very hard to ensure that I don’t feel like she’s playing games with me anymore. If there’s anything I know about Supergrover, it’s that she works very hard. She will not give me less attention than she gives anything else, because details are her thing. It makes me feel like our relationship has oxygen, or perhaps CO2 because I’m so much more bubbly than usual. All the water in my body feels fizzy, as if my energy has turned to champagne. Meditating is popping the cork, being able to say that I love her and she loves me when I could not say that with certainty before. She used to be the princess of mixed signals, and she put that to bed quite effectively. It’s something that I’ve always known was there, which is why I was willing to wait her out. If I thought she was being malicious, I would have been out long ago. There have been plenty of times when we’ve been awful to each other, but there has never been a time in which one of us was entirely at fault for everything. We both have different and valid reactions to each other.
Getting her to see the same spectrum I do was key. It put us back on the same page, the one where she sees that my brain is different than hers, but not worse. The one where I see her emotions are different than mine, but not worse. I kept telling myself that I deserved her poor treatment because I hurt her, and I shouldn’t let myself off the hook for it. At the same time, I was treating myself so badly I couldn’t see if she’d forgiven me or not. I tiptoed around her and she tiptoed around me without either of us really addressing anything because I’d lay it all out there and she’d ignore it. I gave her the tools to understand me, but she was too intimidated to reply because she thought she had to have the same bandwidth for writing as I do. Guilted herself into believing that if she couldn’t respond paragraphs at a time, better not to contact me at all. Meanwhile, I’m lonely and thinking I’ve said something that pissed her off….. Because I did. She doesn’t like looking at her own emotions, and is now taking in why I need to hear them. Why we can’t bullshit each other. We’ll end up wrecking our friendship in the future as easily as we did in the past.
I think that right now, along with the fizzy feeling, it’s gone like this through so many cycles that I’m taking a wait and see attitude. Are these changes real, or were they true in that moment? You can catch a person in a moment of vulnerability that has no bearing on how they act out of habit. My changes had to be real to be genuine, and they took years. Therefore, I’m willing to give her that kind of space.
It was a relief that she heard me when I said that I was not trying to guilt her about getting together, that I was trying to stay grounded and remember she said we were real friends, this was not a facsimile thereof. I did not mean to make her feel guilty at all. I was trying to remind myself that we are not disconnected from our bodies/contexts/lives. That it was not impossible for us to run into each other on the ground, just damned unlikely. I didn’t like the feeling that running into each other would be awkward instead of big hugs and smiles.
So, I stayed close to home a lot. I figured that DC was big enough to hold both of us, especially because I live out near me and she lives out past Zac. I couldn’t even take the Metro to get to her house, but there are other trains. I’m just saying that in our personal lives, we’d never run into each other. But we like the same things. I wasn’t worried about running into her at Target, but running into her at a concert/book talk/whatever piqued our interests.
I have met kids from HSPVA in Paris. Just because it’s unlikely, doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Stopping all of that roiling in my stomach feels like extra energy I didn’t know I needed. I have always thought that Supergrover thought I needed more than I actually did, and pegged me as needy to be able to get away from guilt. Now that we’ve talked it all out, I know that she realizes that I don’t need as much as she thought I did, she was trying to achieve different goals than me. Therefore, we were both failing, because each of us have been beating the wrong dead horse for (12 days shy of) 11 years instead of the right one.
There has been a lot of interaction, but no forward motion.
I just kept pining, kept longing not for a romantic connection, but the one we would have had if I hadn’t been an idiot. However, she knows that mania pushed me into it, and her role in that, too. Depression and mania do not happen in a vacuum, and being bipolar does not excuse me at all from my behavior, but it’s easier to see how it could happen than if you didn’t know that. I am asking her to respect my disability and take my behavior in context, as I have done for her in equal measure. She finally saw it. When I compared her to Daniel, she stepped all over my ass about it. Then, when I explained why I compared them, she listened. The best part was when she said “I don’t think I ruined our friendship by myself, but goddamn did I do a good job of furthering it to the end.” I was so proud of her that I cried.
She owned it. She owned all of it. We checked the story we were telling ourselves, and she admitted she was wrong. It was the most courageous act she could have ever done, and she did it for me. She showed me that I was worth something precious to her. For the last nine years at least, I thought I wasn’t worth anything in her eyes, and I proved it by acting that way. She thought she wasn’t worth me, and acted that way.
She even commented on it. “I don’t know why I went to guns on you instead of working on myself and realizing I deserved friendship.” It’s the most beautiful letter I’ve ever gotten because now we’re starting to realize that we’re giants who deserve each other. She deserves a ride or die, and I’ve laid it out for 10 years just how far I’d go to prove it. If she thinks back to our first few conversations, she’ll realize what I mean. I hope it means more now to her than it did then, because I have never wavered in my commitment to love her that much.
It is an enormous sacrifice that she now sees, when she didn’t before. I have proven to myself that the connection is stable and she is worth my energy. That I wasn’t wrong. That eventually she’d hear me.
It is not a toxic trap anymore, and I am pleased with both of our progress. We got out of something that few people *ever* do.
Probably because now I have her side of the story.
It’s the title of a book I read long ago, and I think I left it at my dad’s house and it just kind of stayed there. I am positive that I could lay my hands on it if I was there. It was a book that applied the lessons of Christ to managing large organizations. I had to vet it before I actually spent money on it, though. I read quite a bit in Barnes & Noble, because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to have to sit through an entire book full of wackadoodle bass ackwards theology. I wanted to make sure they were scholarly about it.
Unsurprisingly, it was a fascinating exploration of the INFJ personality when it comes to being in charge. That is, in order for Jesus to be a good leader, he had to be vulnerable. That he drew people in by making them listen harder to him, not by making his voice louder. It’s basically the law of attraction. Don’t spend any time trying to impress other people. Learn to be impressive to yourself, and your honesty will flatten people because it’s so rare.
I hear it all the time. “Your candor and honesty…..” I have a lot of candor and honesty these days, because I have given myself the confidence to believe that I communicate my ideas well and I am old enough to have an opinion. Old(er) women are powerful, fierce dragons because they’ve had all the fun they can take.
It’s just one of the reasons I think Hillary Clinton would have made a fantastic president. All her fucks slid off about 30 years ago. It’s not her fault that America watched her get up on a televised debate and call him a Russian asset to his face…….. and still thought the guy wearing ten tons of makeup and a suit that still managed to look cheap while expensive carried the day.
I will never forgive the American people for the 2016 election, or at the very least, I cannot see forgiveness yet. That’s because the facts were all there. The former Secretary of State who has known Vladimir Putin for years is telling everyone in the entire country that there is going to be massive trouble if Trump is elected.
She has not been wrong about that.
What we did, paraphrasing David Sedaris, is hear the flight attendant say the meals available are Salisbury steak and chicken covered in broken glass, and stopping to ask how the chicken is prepared.
The choice was clear, and we fumbled. it wasn’t a personality contest. We let Russia walk in the front door and extort the Ukrainians, then after Trump left office the Republicans were so concerned about the Ukrainians. It was sickening.
If it wasn’t high crimes and misdemeanors, we are going to have a hell of a time defining it in the future.
We’re facing a time in which we’ need to eat Salisbury steak out of necessity, not because it’s our first choice. For people that object to that statement, do you really want to take the risk that January 6th will happen again? Do you want to embolden white supremacists? FBI is already getting chatter that Pride parades are going to be attacked this year. That is not unusual, and what I am trying to prevent is the country being once again, buried in regret. A good episode of Saturday Night Live does not kiss an election and make it all better.
Biden is problematic. I will hear it. I will allow it. I will sympathize with it. I still won’t get mad enough to vote third party. When one party splits, the other wins. I knew it was happening, I just didn’t know how close it was. Conservative and liberal democrats clashed too much for the DNC not to splinter. Now, the same is happening because I can hate Joe Biden for sending weapons to Israel all I want and that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give up on democracy itself.
People think it’s a long shot, and most of them haven’t seen polls that say a sizable part of the population is willing to vote for Trump even if he’s in prison by the election. The fact that they think a president working from jail is acceptable is alarming. Common sense has completely flown out the window.
Politics was never meant to be about morals. Politics is about how to manage money. We get taxes in, we decide how to spend it in Congress. It wasn’t really until the Religious Right started taking over the Republican Party that issues of morality like homosexuality became a legislative item….. keeping in mind that homosexuality has nothing to do with morality, but you can’t convince anyone in the Religious Right of that.
They’re not playing the long game. It will get restrictive enough that the people will riot, and I am shocked that it is taking so long. What’s next? Republicans coming to your house to make sure you don’t get pregnant? Abortion is banned at seven days? What is it going to take? And abortion and homosexuality are only two of the issues wrapped up in this crap. We’ve let conservative, rich, white little boys run the show for a long time. I can’t take them on all by myself, and I get nervous when I don’t feel enough buy-in.
What if Donald Trump gets elected and Putin decides that’s the time to band with China and attack us because we’re weak?
They could start by bombing the oil fields in Alaska, but Sarah Palin will see them coming, so it’s okay.
I am usually teasing Zac about this time (what do you believe, as a private citizen, mind you………). I have gotten a series of sly smiles, dumb looks, and occasionally, articles in the New York Times. If he just looks at me, I change the subject, because I know he would tell me if he could, but he can’t. No biggie. I have other friends I can talk to about that stuff where their jobs aren’t at risk. People who have been chatting on the Internet like I have are always hearing unverified intelligence chatter. I had a friend catch a hole in DoDs security and his name went on a list.
Pro tip: don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Where I become a leader and how Jesus influences that is to just be the person that takes everyone’s stories in…. that when I make leadership decisions, I don’t just have my employees productivity in mind, but their happiness with the job as well. I have a great reader retention rate, and I would hope that my employees felt the same way- that they wanted to stay with me. I would be the kind of boss that lives to serve. I mean, I probably draw the line at washing their feet, but it’s the thought that counts.
What I mean is that I have more success as a leader by taking in the world around me and reflecting it than I do in real life, because I am not getting up in front of a congregation to say these things. I am writing on the internet, which ups my congregation size tremendously.
I am firm because I have a vision, not because I feel the need to hurt anyone. There is a difference in me setting boundaries and me being obnoxious. The people closest to me got angry when I set boundaries, and I set them because they weren’t listening. They didn’t deserve to hear my story anymore.
I feel lighter and happier than I have in years, and it’s because I’m different. I was happy with being breadcrumbed for a number of years, my needs ignored and dismissed, handling a barrage of emotional live ammo only to find out that the pattern would never change. It felt like a lie, a friendship borne out of pity and a pattern I never wanted to reinstate ever again. Thus, telling her to grow up. I dived deep into self-reflection and I became more secure. She stayed in the same place. The patterns that worked on me before weren’t going to cut it.
You are 100% allowed to miss someone you’ve cut out of your life. I realized that she could not see the magnitude of what she was doing by reestablishing our connection, and nor could we ignore it. We had too much shit to do, and she ignored it. Then, I started writing about what happened, and she threw a shit fit because her side wasn’t represented. I cannot review a book I haven’t read.
So, what I know is that it’s not emotionally mature enough for me. I have grown past her. I cannot stand someone holding everything in and just exploding. It’s too much punishment at once and I am completely overloaded.
And yet on the flip side, she has a practical and precise way of moving in the world. She can achieve more in five minutes than I would in three days. Her brain is built for that.
It’s a yin and yang I always look for in relationships and it doesn’t work out. Practical people hate touchy feely crap. It’s the black cat vs. golden retriever debate.
And in talking about Supergrover, it brings me to another aspect of leadership. Have the right people around you. When Supergrover and I are writing to each other, it’s clear we have different processes to get to a conclusion. I can see where I fall short all the time, because when she talks to me and puts her own thoughts through her own filters, I see “oh THAT’s how a neurotypical person would do that….. I always wondered.”
The other thing is that talking about relationships and talking about organizations is very much alike when you are actually close enough to your employees where emotions get involved. You know how many employees I have to have before there are possible kinks in the organization?
One.
Being avoidant with your emotions is just as problematic at work as it is at home, you’re just talking about much different things. You will absolutely be dealing with hard emotions even though you’re not close to people….. most notably, annoyance unless you’re the type of person that needs a break every five minutes. I can be like that, but not usually. I’m the one with my headphones on and I wouldn’t hear a bear even if it was right behind my Aeron.
However, if I’m thinking of myself as the future CEO of Lanagan Media Group, I’m not the one with my headphones in. I’m the one that’s open and available to jump in and help you, or hire OTHER people to jump in and help you. If not, I will develop a reputation for hiding something. People clam up around other people who are hiding something. People don’t clam up around me because I can instantly put them at ease. There’s no trick to it except vibes. Being personable, approachable, friendly, etc. If I like being with the person and their presence gives me energy, the sky is the limit on how long we’ll spend talking.
I hate small talk, so it’s easier when I get up in front of a group. I can just apprise them of the situation, which solves two problems. The first is not having to schmooze with people. The second is not having to tell each person individually. However, if the other person’s vibe is also warm and approachable, and we connect, you’ll always be able to to count on me telling you what I think, but never in a million years telling you that I think you’re a bad person. Trust is broken in a million different ways.
In kitchens, this is always expressed by someone saying “I’m going to be five minutes late.” It’s always an hour. Always. No one cares if you’re slammed, get used to it. Even if someone tells you they’re willing to work on their day off, the chances of them picking up on said day off are slim to none. It’s why I got so many brownie points at my last job. I was there every time someone called out and every time someone got sick and every time we didn’t know what the hell happened, but someone had to have their ass on dish by five. It might as well be me. I’m the one that doesn’t like days off because it interrupts my rhythm. The brownie points were always the biggest at “let me change my clothes. I’ll be right there.” That’s because I actually meant it….. a rarity in our industry.
Giving up driving helped me to be on time every day because I am bad at transitions. I would get demand avoidance over driving, and have to force myself out to the car. Because I was determined not to be late, I would wake up ridiculously early and get to the office by 0800, when it was just the CEO and me for the first hour. He was the kind of leader I am, the Jesus as CEO type. That’s because he genuinely cared about our work/life balance and team cohesion, like buying us all Orioles tickets and carpooling us all up to Baltimore. He was also a CEO that drove a Honda.
I was very impressed.
Somebody went to Sunday School.
Anyway, I had so much less demand avoidance over traveling because I had a set schedule every single day. I could time it to the minute…. and the entire way, I could play on my phone, read, write, watch movies, etc. It was completely guilt free time to myself because I didn’t have to be in charge of anything as serious as a car while I was exhausted. The train ride gave me time to really wake up.
Which was good, because the CEO’s one failing was that he liked his coffee so weak. I use one level tablespoon of coffee per cup. He used a plastic teaspoon, and there could only be 11 teaspoons of coffee for the whole pot, which was 12 cups. Believe me when I say I am not trying to prove anything. The coffee was weak, I’m not trying to make motor oil.
When I drove, I would get to 7-11 or Walgreens by 7:45 to get coffee or an energy drink out of the cold case.
Telling you all of this…. that I love my friend and I needed to let her go at the same time. That I have just so many diagnoses and “letters behind my name.” It’s important. It’s all important. It’s what makes me authentically myself. That I can extend love to more people because I am experienced in dealing with conflict. I don’t pretend it doesn’t exist and I don’t pretend it’s not capable of developing. I’m also not going to skirt around you. I will bring up a problem, and how you react teaches me what to do. If you come up with a solution to the problem, it’s a green flag. If you can’t do anything, but you empathize with what I’m saying, that’s a green flag. The only red flag is saying “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Neither the relationship nor the company will survive.
My life didn’t get interesting until I was 30, and just got more interesting from there. I wouldn’t want to give my teenage self any advice that would alter the events that led me to DC, to Zac, and to Oliver, who is a dog.
That’s because in order to get here, I had to go through some really rough stuff- and yet none of it is anything I would give away or trade. I found my place, even at 23, but I had to go and come back. I don’t know why. I really liked it here. I just didn’t think I could make it on my own. I do not have that capability, to take on the 1,001 things it takes to move in 30 days and also find a roommate. To be fair, though, I didn’t know about Craig’s List back then. Perhaps if I had, I wouldn’t have met the people I needed to meet, and that’s the one thing I wouldn’t want to change for the kid inside me.
So, in order not to change anything:
I’m sorry mom doesn’t understand. Don’t spend your life worrying about it because there’s nothing you can do to make her change. There will be small steps, but no giant leaps. Stay as close to her as you can, but admit to yourself when spending time with her makes you feel unloved.
Lindsay is going to be big one day. I just won’t tell you how. You could learn a thing or two from her if you’d let yourself.
You’re ADHD, Autistic, and Bipolar. That’s something I will tell you right now, because when you get older it’s going to be harder to get tested for autism, and you need to get on meds stat. You’re struggling in school and you don’t know why. Your doctors might not, either, because there’s not a lot of research in the year you live on women and autism. But give yourself at least that head start on life. I know hearing those things is intimidating. Go to a psychiatrist, anyway.
You need to practice gratitude and mindfulness because when I was your age I took some kind of Scantron quiz that inventoried my personality. My psychiatrist said that I had the lowest self-esteem of anyone who’d ever taken the test. Write every day. Go back and look to see if what you wrote is still true. Give yourself a chance to see yourself as you are, not how you feel in the moment.
In every relationship, you need to ask yourself what the other person is bringing to the table, and when you feel ignored or sad or hurt or whatever your emotions might be, listen to how people respond. If it feels like they can’t hear you, they probably can’t…… and there’s a lot of don’t want to in “can’t.” Find people who can hear you.
There is no such thing as a 50/50 relationship. It will often look like 60/40 or even 70/30 because of confirmation bias. But notice when you feel like you can’t get a break, can’t do anything right. You’re not stupid. I won’t tell you what they are, either, but stupid isn’t on the list.
Because of the autism, you’re going to meltdown a lot. Find appropriate outlets for your rage. There are going to be many inappropriate outlets, and I will tell you that you find most of them. But not all. Because you have all of these disorders, you are going to have to learn to be more patient, thinking longer before you speak, because there are so many words that can’t be taken back which you realize just after you’ve already said them. Even when you’re on fire, you can’t take that out on someone else. And yes, I know that your nerves are on fire, that you go into a red mist rage with every physical symptom imaginable. It’s going to hurt you if you don’t take care of it.
The nerve endings on your thumb that you sliced into while trying to cut a lime will never grow back. I’m 46, so I will update you if the situation changes (not a chance, we’re stuck).
You will love soda your whole life because that’s one of the things you and mom will talk about on the phone. There’s not a lot you can do to keep her talking if you talk about your own life, but she’ll tell you all about her job, her friends, her husband, etc. It’s annoying that she never has any questions for you about your life, because she really doesn’t want to know. Do it, anyway. Find things you can talk about. Find a lot of them.
Mothers don’t generally last as long as you want them to; Lindsay and I will never be the same. I figured it might give you some perspective to know how few years you have left with her. Find different ways to bridge the gap. But don’t miss a chance to leave Houston, ever. You’ll get along better with her when you don’t live in the same city and a visit is special.
You’ll want a passport very soon. Might want to start on that. She’s cute.
I do not know how I could acquire one, because the going rates around here are quite expensive. That being said, there’s a method to my madness, though. Both people who are neurodivergent and/or suffer from mental illness have problems taking care of themselves regarding clutter and cleanliness. The things that neurotypical people find easy, like creating a routine for putting things away are anathema to the neurodivergent. That’s because we can create a system. We no not maintain them well, if at all. For instance, the perfect system for someone who’s ADHD or AuDHD means everything is right out in front of you, all the time……. because I’m suggesting object permanence is a problem………………..
No, seriously. I’ve read a ton of books on how to manage myself (they haven’t helped, but I’m trying). One of them is The Bible and it’s called “How to Keep House While Drowning.” That’s because it doesn’t offer you practical advice on cleaning like Kim and Aggie from “How Clean is Your House” (one of my favorite BBC shows, now archived on YouTube). No, it is a straight up workbook over why your emotions are getting the better of you when it comes to cleaning. Because first, it’s either demand avoidance or burnout. Then, it’s shame, guilt, and anxiety over the way you let your house get when you were literally incapable due to a straight up disability. Basically, “How to Keep House While Drowning” is a way to organize your life so that you don’t think the world is coming down around you every time you don’t organize something.
The second book is much more practical because women have different needs with ADHD than men. It’s called “The Queen of Distraction: How Women with ADHD Can Conquer Chaos, Find Focus, and Get Things Done.” It’s here where I learned that if you’re ADHD, get clear cabinets. Don’t give a damn about what other people think. If you can’t see your stuff, you won’t organize it. It will stay hidden from your mind forever…………….
Because I’m suggesting that object permanence is a problem………… The funniest thing is that the joke about object permanence was actually about me, not clutter. That Zac thinks of me living as much further away than I do. I should have told him to get me a clear cabinet……… For Houstonians, it’s about the distance from Lindsay’s house on the east side to my old house in Westbury. For Portlanders, it’s about the same distance as it is from Trendy Third St. SW to 181st and SE Stark.
This means that it takes 33 minutes at 0500 if you’re driving, but if we were both caught in morning or afternoon drive, I could probably beat him home on the Metro/bus. That’s the thing I love about the train/bus. Unless it’s snowing, the busses are reliable and I can pre-guess about what time I’m going to get somewhere. No freeway in DC can tell you that, and take that check to the bank and cash it… The longest I’ve ever been delayed on the Metro is 10 or 15 minutes, and that’s just because we were slow getting into the station by about five minutes at least twice because there was another red line train on our track. I wish I’d taken the first one….. obviously.
Until you read both books, you will literally not know how to handle your life, and of course there are a million books written on ADHD, but “Queen” is endorsed by the author(s) that wrote “Driven to Distraction,” the therapist and psychiatrist Bible on ADHD presentation. But what those authors were saying is that “Queen” does a better job of catering specifically to female ADHD. There’s just so much bullshit around female ADHD, because first of all, I believe that there are a lot more of us with hyperactivity that could use stimming to an enormous degree……. but it was beaten out of us by the expectations of the older women in our lives. Social masking has so much to do with how you’re raised. You learn that your natural behavior is unacceptable, and you do things that make you think you fit in, because you are only imitating their behavior, not understanding why things are done the way they’re done.
The first sign of ADHD in all people is making a diagnosis appointment and being late for it. Those things are universal. I believe that stimming, anger, etc. isn’t beaten out of boys because men are socialized to be angry, anyway, and because most women were enculturated by their mothers, they will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make their neurodivergent child into some version of them, because that’s how they were taught to behave. And perhaps it’s more than that…… because neurodivergence and mental illness are genetic, your mother might actually be neurodivergent and is trying to teach you her own coping mechanisms for feeling like an alien.
Read “How to Keep House While Drowning,” because until you work through your emotional issues with keeping tidy, then you’ll be ready for the content that “Queen” offers, because her system for organization actually works. I can’t remember if the author is ADHD or whether her organization skills came from designing systems for her ADHD children, but please hear me that the emotional work first is the best thing you can do for yourself, because it will put into perspective why you are not a bad person because you can’t do these things.
As we used to say in our church creed at Bridgeport, “be responsible and let go of guilt. Be mindful and carry no shame.” You will not be ready to address practical things until both of those ideas happen for you. Neurodivergent people will not make the commitment to organize until they don’t feel like shit about themselves 100% of the time.
It’s one of the reasons I hate “Hoarders,” to be honest. You get the neurodivergent/mentally ill wails of people who are nowhere near prepared to get rid of their stuff and are supposed to be grateful for the favor. I am sure that they will be after some therapy, but it would be like taking a baby bird out of a nest and saying, “fly, bitch! Fly!” There is no way that a television show can cover what needs to happen so that hoarding doesn’t recur. It takes years to get rid of those tendencies, and a television show coming in to clean your house once is not the answer. It will look the same way in a year. Also, I have seen a lot of autistic people (in retrospect) that have gone into complete meltdown and burnout…………… and it makes for good television. It’s one thing to code a fictional character as autistic. It is embarrassing as FUCK for people to film you and show your real unregulated emotions come out. All the social masking stops because they’re terrified. And to the producers, that’s entertainment. On this one issue, fuck them.
I can always find the silver lining, and that’s learning how professional organizers do what they do. I think I would be a much better housekeeper than I would at keeping my own systems going, because most neurodivergent people can clean someone else’s house, even if it’s a straight up hoarding nightmare, because they don’t have any emotional investment in the mess and how it got that bad. Perception is everything. “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” I will completely dissociate because I can.
Maybe we should offer an exchange or something. I am absolutely OCD about my own kitchen, the one thing I keep so clean you could eat off the floor that’s completely of my own volition because of “how I was raised.” (Shoutout to all of them….. Dana, my first chef, John Kinkaid, John Fot, Drew Collard, Damon Hersch, Anh Lu, Evan Henson, Ryan Victor (shoutout to the mixologist) and the thousands of hours I’ve spent on YouTube with top-tier chefs learning knife skills. I watch Bourdain and Ripert. It takes me about 30 seconds to go into the ugly cry).
But the kitchen is ironclad in my mind because I spent so many years doing it. It’s the one room of the house where I don’t attach any emotion to how messy it gets because it’s not all on me. I will do everyone’s dishes if they’re in the sink because I can’t stand soaking a pot (we’ve covered this before. It doesn’t work). Plus, I have the right and experience to say that I’m just going to be better at it than they are because one of my housemates is a cook, but she works in a hospital, so it’s not really the same thing as trying to close down a kitchen as fast as humanly possible. The only thing I can’t seem to get out is the discoloration on the glass-top stove, but I’m sure John Fot will write me a dissertation on it when he reads this, and it will be delightful because there’s nothing more that I love than reading about kitchen hacks.
Where I struggle is in the private places, because I don’t have a system for anything. I am a Virgo, so I am killer at creating systems that would work for neurotypical people because I’ve watched what works for them for many years. I even picked up a few things from Meagan in senior English that helped me. She color coded her subjects like Trivial Pursuit, something I do to this day by changing the folder colors in my file tree. What I cannot do is extrapolate all of that into having a life in which I can thrive on structure because that’s all my autism wants…….. and my ADHD nopes out quickly.
This has become a problem with every relationship I’ve ever had, because I didn’t have the words for “autistic meltdown and burnout.” I didn’t have words for things like “pathological demand avoidance” (I don’t know if mine is pathological yet, I just haven’t had treatment. Basically, you get said treatment and if it doesn’t work, it’s pathological.). I don’t know how much of my health insurance will cover an autism diagnosis, but I know that I need one, badly. I am at odds with myself over the two processing disorders all the time. I’m ready to go through the official process because not being diagnosed is causing more problems than it’s worth. I need to know as much about AuDHD as humanly possible if Zac and I start getting closer, or I meet someone else and actually want to pursue living with them.
But what I do know is that the reason my relationships tend not to be successful is that most people on the spectrum are not caught. They’re pegged as “weaponizing incompetence” or what’s called “learned helplessness.” Most people attribute too much malice into our behavior, when we literally don’t think the same way as you. But all of this “weaponized incompetence” would go away if I had a housekeeper, because I wouldn’t be creating resentment in my relationship over the house being so…………… meeeeeeee.
One of the reasons that I was really looking forward to living overseas with Daniel (we’d talked about Viet Nam) is that hiring servants is completely normal and adds to the local economy. If our house was big enough, they could live with us. That would be ideal, because I’d love a housekeeper to flip me shit when I don’t put things back where they go and lose them a minute later. My mind doesn’t record where everything goes, only a few….. and even that is sketchy.
I don’t know that even on a combined salary we could afford such a thing, unless we hired an au pair and said, “we actually don’t have any kids except a 25-year-old. Basically we’re the kids.” We might not get any bites, but it’s worth a shot. 😛
Most emotionally unavailable people start shutting down when they feel resentment, because they won’t just say it out loud. They don’t have any practice……. especially in lesbian relationships. I can hear resentment because I’ve heard it before. What no one has ever said to me is “clearly you need help, and I’m going to help you.” This doesn’t mean anything in terms of cleaning up one mess. I will never forget both Dana and Carol’s work on my past places to get them ready to turn over. They were beasts, and I can’t thank them enough- even more in retrospect.
When Dana came over to help me, we’d just begun that transition from friends who hung out occasionally to “you’re my new best friend. Call me every day.” A girlfriend that I’d loved so hard I broke my own heart due to terrible expectations left me in a wreck. it was only supposed to be a May-December romance, and I was foolish enough to think that we clicked, anyway. Disaster ensued. She was much older than me, but in a lot of ways, I was older than her because all INFJs are a thousand years old when they’re born. I think that’s why I seek out women who are age-gapped from me. I’ve been that old since I was nine.
Anyway, it was the hardest breakup I’ve ever had (so far), because I lost it. I was grieving the future that I wanted with her, and then I went to a party. At that party, I met a couple who had the same age difference as my girlfriend and me, and they were announcing they were having a baby. I did not know this beforehand, and I was so caught off guard that everyone thought I was crying over the good news of people I’d just met and it was a little bit over the top.
If you knew her like I did, you would have been wrecked, too.
My reaction was to go into total burnout. I didn’t leave my bed unless I had to for months. I barely made it to church, but that was the one social obligation I could keep despite it being murder seeing her all the time. We eventually made our peace, and I still think she’s cute as a button. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hell on earth, then.
I lived in what I told Dana was “dumped girl phase,” and that I’d never told anyone this before, but I cannot function. The most beautiful words in the English language came out of her mouth…….. “we’ll fix it.” It wasn’t that she was going to fix everything for me. She didn’t say, “I’ll fix it.” She whipped me into shape so that I became anal Annie about my whole apartment just to say thank you and it will never get this bad again. It would have been nothing if I hadn’t changed my behavior as a result of my deep gratitude.
But that apartment was basically a studio, with a folding door between my bedroom and the living room. I gave away a lot of stuff, and then I didn’t have much to keep clean. I didn’t need a housekeeper because as long as I didn’t buy anything new (not that I don’t like nice things….. I don’t like to manage them), then my apartment would stay clean.
The second time that Carol and Dana helped me was when I’d just broken up with Katharin. I went into meltdown and burnout because I didn’t know what to do. We’d rented this house that was only doable on two incomes, and it was just the right house for a couple……… just not for us, as it turns out. So, I was happy about the breakup because I knew that Katharin didn’t really want to move to Portland. She just said she did because I wanted to go, because I knew that Houston was a minefield of triggers and at that time, Portland wasn’t.
She can blame our breakup on me all she wants to, but the truth is she couldn’t just say “I let you go find the house and I went home to Corpus to spend the summer and I realized I couldn’t leave my family.” She had backed out of moving twice before she finally said she wasn’t coming because I “cheated on her.” What really happened is that Dana read me the riot act and I have never taken in a conversation so hard.
Here is some version of what she said, most of it verbatim but I don’t remember everything………
It’s not normal for your girlfriend to go through your checking transactions to see if you’ve been in your best friend’s neighborhood when you have a thousand friends in Southeast. It’s not normal for someone to shoot down an incredible opportunity for you because you’re going to be gone for three months. She turned it into “if you really loved me, you’d stay.” It’s not normal for someone to fall in love with you and then say, “I’d think you were less flaky if you finished your degree. It’s not normal for your girlfriend to keep you away from a best friend you met years and years before you met her. I’m tired of watching you hurt.
Editor’s Note:
I’d been offered an internship at Human Rights Campaign to help shape Sunday School curriculum in modern/liberal interpretations to include queer people. It would be for people like the More Light Presbyterians, the Lutherans (I could have written for Nadia Bolz-Weber and don’t think I’m not mad about it), and the Reconciling Movement in the United Methodist Church…………….. the closest I’ll ever become to being a Methodist minister because they made it clear they didn’t want me when I was 15.
So, that little speech made me realize that my best friend had my best interests at heart, and Katharin had stopped drinking, but was still a dry drunk with the need to control me. Her family also gave her the most fucked up childhood you can imagine, so both of our trauma reflexes were well=ingrained.
Katharin’s family wasn’t wealthy, so when she turned 18, they took out a whole bunch of credit cards and loans in her name. Then, she came out to them and pretended she was dead for a year, saying that they didn’t have to pay her back because it was “the gay tax.”
In retrospect, at that time in my life, Katharin was way above my pay grade, and no one noticed because she was “more successful than me.” She was a middle school counselor, and good at her job. But when her frustrations boiled over, it was “All Pick on Leslie Day.”
The relief of that relationship ending, yet the terror, made it where I just collected shit everywhere. Just soda bottles everywhere I didn’t pick up because I didn’t care. I couldn’t.
Autistic meltdown and burnout makes for good television, tho……….. eyeroll.
So, in order to get me out of the house, Carol and Dana came over and we did it all in one day, maybe one and a half. I don’t remember what happened next; I might have moved in with them, or I might have stayed at another friend’s house. But what I know is that everyone who met Katharin in Oregon didn’t like her….. for me or just in general. That’s because no one in Portland is impressed by what you do.
And sometimes, Katharin was just as straight up mean in person, in front of my friends, that she was at home. It just goes to show how easily I got used to her words making me feel terrible, because my words about myself weren’t that different.
In that case, hiring a housekeeper wouldn’t have helped, because Katharin’s anger and resentment came from a completely different place. But in all the others, I have found that because people’s problems are so complex and emotional, not being able to clean up after yourself for whatever reason is the one problem you actually can throw money at, because you’re not hiring a servant. You’re making an accommodation for your disability that will take resentment about chores off the table.
But before I have the ability to hire a housekeeper, I at least need to start reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” instead of “The Joy of Leaving Your Shit All Over the Place.”
Today has been a complete shit show from beginning to end, but now it’s over…. not the day, just the negative aspects. I should be getting dramatically better as my brain chemicals rebalance.
Yesterday, I realized that I was out of Lamictal, so I contacted CVS for a refill. They came back to me and said I needed to go to the doctor for a new set of prescriptions.
No problem.
The problem came in when the doctor’s office said they didnt’t have any appointments for the rest of the day, and I had to spend all night cradling my head between my knees…. until I finally realized I could take a metric fuck tonne of sleeping medication and the whole nightmare might be over……. or so I thought. I took three melatonin and some Zyrtec, which had me out like a light prety quickly. However, the migraine-like pain of having your brain chemicals whacked let me know that today was not going to be any better than yesterday, and I had to white knuckle my way through getting my own medication. By the time I got to the doctor’s office, I was in a right state and they knew it. There were lots of whispers that maybe they should have worked me in yesterday…….
I’m just not a complainer. Just like my mother when she was having me, she heard all the other women around her screaming bloody murder and she was not going to be that patient. So, she was basically biting her pillow until the OB/GYN nurses bothered to check whether she was in pain or not…… and it took a while, because my mother wouldn’t say anything.
What I know from this experience is that they weren’t paying any attention to her because she didn’t bring any attention to herself. I struggle with this often, as I do not want to be seen as a complainer, either. This doesn’t work in my favor, necessarily, but it does. If I had gotten any sicker, I would have gone to Urgent Care. I just thought I would be okay, and I was absolutely 100% wrong.
I wasn’t having trouble with my thought processes today. Psych meds aren’t known for giving up after only 24 hours…. except for benzos and methamphetamines. Those wear off as quickly as they kick in. But for maintenance medication, it takes about six weeks to build up in your system.
The antianxiolitic I take, Klonopin, kicked in immediately, so I’m not in as much pain as I was previously…. it still doesn’t take away the sting of the clusterfuck that happened after my appointment…. and the pain won’t truly be gone until my brain chemicals are right, which may take a few days. So, absolutely none of this is what I needed today, and could have been avoided if CVS hadn’t waited unti the last moment to tell me that I needed to see a doctor. Again, today has been a goat-roping clusterfuck. I’m glad that it can’t get any worse. Tomorrow is date night with Zac, and I can’t wait to give him a hug. It seems like a long time, but we’re both slammed, so it’s no issue. It’s a huge relief that we’re both doing our own thing. That being said, it’s going to be nice to have a place to decompress after :::gestures broadly at everything:::
First of all, we are going through a huge storm system- I know it’s huge because my dad and Lindsay are stuck in the same one (they’re in Houston). Therefore, taking the bus was not really an option because it’s not just normal rain. It’s supposed to flood. The bus would have been fine. Standing in water that’s over my ankles isn’t.
So, I ask the doctor’s office where they sent my prescriptions. They said, “CVS on East-West Hwy.” So, I head there and the doctor has actually sent my prescriptions to their in-house pharmacy. I know this because the doctor’s office did resend my medication, but then it was saying that they were too early to be refilled….. because they’d already been filled at the other place. So, I go back to the other place, the in-house pharmacy that only carries three of my medications, so I have to go to CVS, anyway. I’ll have to pick up the Adderrall tomorrow at some point, because it’s not the priorotity here. I have the three things I really need.
So, I get to my pharmacy and in the time it has taken to get from CVS back to the doctor’s office, that pharmacy has canceled my order so I can pick it up at CVS. My only saving grace is that the pharmacist called upstairs and got the three medications I needed rather than make me hoof it back to CVS, saving me a lot of money in that process…. again, Uber. I also managed to get some home COVID tests, the COVID vaccine, and a flu shot. I have a feeling none of that is making me feel any better, either, but here we are.
In the meantime, here is my protocol because I feel it’s important for my people to know how I handle all this. Bipolar is hard on all of us, and sharing information means more to talk to your doctor about, because I’m not it. This is, in the words of Paul Gilmartin, “a waiting room that doesn’t suck.”
If you’re thinking about doing psych meds, here’s what works for me, but there’s a caveat. Unipolar depression medication sometimes works with a mood stabilizer, somtimes it makes bipolar worse. So tread carefully. Again, this is only what works for me….. and since I’m a doctor’s kid, you’ll get it in pharmacy notation…… 😉
Lamictal 200mg i qD
Lexapro 20mg 1qD
Klonopin .5mg BID
Adderall XR 20mg 1qD
I don’t know what I’ll do with the Adderrall because I don’t know that I need it all the time. But I’m getting it anyway just in case, because I never know when my ADHD is going to eat my lunch…. because I won’t.
These drugs do not play around, and I’m in the shit with side effects. I was so upset that I had to fill my prescriptions at the pharmacy in the doctor’s office after I opened them, because there are two different Lamictal generics. Same ingredient, lamotrigine, but whatever is in the diamond-shaped one makes me so nauseous I will absolutely throw up anywhere and everywhere. I look like such a drunk sometimes, because I’m trying to find a trash can and that’s people’s first instinct. But, you can only control what you can control, so what people think of me does not matter.
As I have said before, I have to choose between physically ill or mental, and I choose physical because my interactions with other people are more important to me than nausea and vomiting. It’s never fun, but it beats the hell out of not regulating my emotions.
The weird thing is that I’ve had ringing in my ears since I haven’t had my medication, and now I’m just waiting to see when it will go away. I basically flooded myself with brain chemicals, so it’s happened before. They just need to get into balance, and if I’ve said this twice, I apologize. I am not a well woman. But I did have a “not a well woman” exam today. They ran all my bloods and I should get the results back. I wouldn’t be surprised if anything is wrong, but I would be surprised if it was anything more than “you need to do more of this at home.” I’ve thought I was getting an autoimmune disease for the last few years, and I’ve been tested for rheumatoid arthritis, but not gotten the results. So, I’m having my clinic run the test again because what happened last time was that I was on my cycle and they couldn’t do the test….. another thing that could have been brought to my attention because we could have rescheduled…. No one has ever told me they didn’t want a urine sample when I’m menustruating before, so it didn’t occur to me to tell them.
But the bloods aren’t just for that. They have to make sure that my liver is still functioning well because mood stabilizers have a tendency to beat up on them. With some mood stabilizers, you have to have a liver function test every month, not every six months or a year. It’s serious business, and all of it started with lithium as we learned more and more about it.
All of these drugs are murder on your body after a while, except Klonopin, and with it there’s the pull of addiction. I have not fallen into that trap with either Klonopin or Adderrall, because again, I’m choosing sick over crazy. There’s nothing that makes me want to take more medication because the side effects are toxic…. mostly in that they render me in a constant bad mood like I’m Ouiser Boudreaux on a mission from God.
I’ve been 46 since I was six, so I actually have been in a very bad mood for 40 years.
But right now I’m thinking about the fact that Zac hasn’t read my fiction blog entry yet, and the only reason I want him to is that he will absolutely pick it apart. “That would never happen…. or that…. or that…. or that…. or that….” I’m joking, and yet I’m not. Zac and I are in it to win it. We may not ever get paid for writing, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it to be excellent.
I also know that I’d wait years to hear his impression, and I’m saying that out loud so that he doesn’t think, “oh shit! I have something to read right now!” It’s not a homework assignment, dear heart. It’s just fun working with him because even though he’s not a spy, he’s worked in military intelligence (not as much of an oxymoron as you might think) since he was 18. I think he signed up willing to do any job, but his test scores on the AFAB or whatever were so good they realized they could get anyone to weld ships or whatever.
So, entrusting Zac to be ruthless, kind, and accurate is a good thing. I know for sure that none of his criticism will be mean, because I’m not mean to him….. or if I am, he hasn’t mentioned it. 😉
Coming up with ideas for Zac’s fiction challenge was one of our best dates because we were both excited and happy about creativity- and he’s definitely more creative than I am on the fiction side of things. I can turn a phrase and make it funny, but he can build whole worlds. It’s the mountain I have to climb, and as I’ve said, I’m at the bottom. Yet, none of it bothers me because I know I’m becoming a stronger writer every day.
I am seeking out strong writers like Jonna Mendez, Tracy Walder, Vince Houghton, and John le Carré. I know that le Carré is dead, but “The Pigeon Tunnel” is a masterpiece and I’ve been learning from him through podcasts. His interviews on both Fresh Air and Writers & Company are among my favorite episodes of the entire show.
I don’t want to write exclusively about intelligence, which is why I’ll always be a blogger. It engages a different part of my brain. Intelligence is just what excites me about fiction, because I have read so many non-fiction books that I feel like I’ve taken a college class. Fiction is easier to write when you’ve done the research first. You’ll always have to research along the way, but knowing the broad strokes of a subject is key.
I can write about the kitchen because I know it.
I don’t know shit about spies, but it’s the same concept. I sought out Bourdain in order to develop that voice. I sought out Jonna and Tony for the same reason, because I loved the “Argo” script and wanted to do something like it eventually. I figured starting with their books was wise, but in reality the book about The Canadian Caper was written after the movie came out, because there were so many people who wanted the real story.
Reel is not real, and thank goodness the book came along. Argo is punched up for drama, but the story itself is no less great when you take away movie magic.
If they don’t make movies about “The Moscow Rules” and “In True Face,” it would be such a shame. I mean that sincerely. People need to know what happened during “The Cold War,” because it wasn’t any less devastating than our other conflicts. And honestly, they wouldn’t have to punch up “The Moscow Rules” much. It opens with a case officer having the shit beat out of him by FSB in front of the American embassy. I would like to believe we won The Cold War definitively, but the moment Trump took office, it ramped up again (in my educated guesses). That’s because the FSB beat up someone trying to get to American soil in…. wait for it…… 2016.
It startles me how the rest of the world does not see that Trump is an enemy both foreign and domestic. The Russians are in it to win it, and they have had/will have an asset planted at the top depending on whether Americans get it or not. The Founding Brothers are rolling over in their graves, because the last time high crimes and misdeameanors were on the table, both Republicans and Democrats believed it. This time, Putin has won. He has divided and conquered a nation by helping elect a president that was completely out of touch with reality and took notes from all the “benevolent dictators” out there. I’ll believe benevolence when I see it.
Most Americans are completely ignorant of the chessboard because they think we’re the best. All the time. Every day. In a way, I’m on a mission to dispel this notion, because it is simply not true. Other countries do things much better than we do, like having standardized drug prices across the country, whereas Medicare and Medicate pay different prices depending on where you are. Every drug costs a bit different depending on the pharmacy, not just the geographic location…. and that’s just one example. We could have better railroad infrastructure, both subways and cross-country. Lots of cities would benefit from it, because especially in the South, you get a car and won’t take the bus, anyway.
However, this leaves the least of us stranded because gas is expensive and people moving- not so much. I hope that more people than just me have a passion for taking care of poor people, because I feel that the United States is the country with the least viable support system because we have social services, but universal heatlh care takes so many problems off the the table. The US needs nationalized care badly, with doctors making real salaries, because since poor people can’t afford insurace, they end up in the emergency room never having had preventative care…. they can’t afford it. They also can’t afford hospital bills, and when you don’t pay, that’s keeping money out of the hospital system for salaries.
There won’t be any difference to you in terms of health care if we do it right, because the only thing that will change is who is writing the checks.
But drug companies and our current insurance policies don’t want that. They want to be able to charge whatever they want and get medicare to pay for it. It’s unsustainable. By not having universal health care, you are crippling people at jobs who don’t pay for benefits, or shackling someone to a job so that you have insurance in the first place. Nothing like the golden handcuffs.
But at the very least, I want everyone to be able to show up healthy to work because they didn’t wait to go to the ER until they were having a heart attack, or kidney failure, or any number of things. Stuff that could have been caught and wasn’t. So, instead of a $10 co-pay, the bill is $120,000 dollars….. but it’s $200,000 at a different hospital and a different part of the country. Prices vary everywhere. There is no standardization among even generic drugs.
Government-run pharmacies and clinics would allow us to buy all generics in bulk, same with medical equipment so that a cast in Oregon is the same price as a cast in Vermont. And we can get closer to home (for me). The highest Medicare costs in the nation right now are in El Paso, Texas. How does it have the ability to go up and down? Other countries don’t have this problem, and it’s a shame that we can’t have nice things when 99% of the world has figured it out.
We had a lot of hubris in the Revolutionary War, but it went overboard. We are so independent that we think saving money on health care is a bad idea. Meanwhile, if we’d lost, we’d have our own version of NHS because we’d be a Commonwealth country. So, in terms of progress, winning and losing that war are both a mixed bag.
I’m not on a mission to prove to you that we should have lost. I ultimately think it was better to win….. that doesn’t mean that we should stop taking lessons from other countries. They take lessons from us. I think we’d be a lot happier in the world without American imperialism….. or at least, so much of it.
If I have a mission on this blog, it’s saying random factoids that will stick in your brain along with all the crazy. 😉
I don’t know that it’s a Mission from God.™ But I do like jazz and blues, so it’s a start.
What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?
This year I started taking care of me for the first time in my life, ever. People who learn a little bit about boundaries install them with spikes, because they don’t know balancing language yet. So many, many times have I been fed this year on a meager emotional diet, because someone would cross a boundary and alarm I’d never had went off. There has never been anything loud enough in my mind to say that my opinions are valid, because I get intimidated and fold easily………………… in person.
On paper, I am not anticipating someone else’s reactions, so I come across as judgmental when I actually want your input/correction, I’m not dictating to you what our situation might be. My work to do is to learn how to control my autistic brain symptoms, like “I have explained this six times and it hasn’t resulted in any change at all, so that means I only have to explain it ten more ways and we’re golden.” I will absolutely argue with a signpost……… in text. If a waitress served me soup with glass shards, I’d be so mad I’d only leave a 20% tip.
I talk a lot about the first blush of excitement on both ends at Supergrover and I meeting each other, and it’s those memories I focus on when I feel the kind of desperation you absolutely will not admit to anyone, I am fine……… meanwhile, your eyes are rolling out of your head because you’ve thought I was an idiot about it for months why has this taken so long dear Jesus get a life…….. and actually, that’s not true at all. It’s how it feels to write out pain. It doesn’t change all at once. It changes a little every day.
I do not have any interest in telling our story as if it is our facts. No, they are only my facts, and I am a hundred percent certain that our stories are different, but I will never know to what degree. I’ve guessed at the extremes and the middle and been wrong every single time. I just don’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me. I cannot drag a relationship kicking and screaming into the light when I only own one half…… and if it sounds like I’m holding myself up as some kind of beacon, that’s not it at all.
We fucked each other up nine years ago. Our relationship shouldn’t be so dramatic and toxic all the time. It’s not good for either one of us as we both sound like Dorothy Sbornak and Ouiser Boudreaux in text. We are both first children. We fight until someone is bleeding, because we are not used to losing…….. and I’m laughing about it now, but believe me when I say I have seen Oppenheimer and I didn’t even know it was a movie until recently.
I am just as filled with rage as she is. We’re The Holy and the Moly because one day I’m the bomb and she’s the detonator……….. and then she’s got the big red button. We installed them in each other quickly and use them to great effect. After we fight, I will say “this is what hurt.” She won’t. She says, “I was licking my wounds.” I wish that just once this year she could have seen my face when I read it. If there are moments that make me want to reach through her phone and hug her, it’s lines like that.
Autistic people are not here to be nice, because we do not have all the social masks involved in sensitive situations. I used to be very, very practiced at it, but I’m not in front of parishioners all the time anymore. As I’ve been away from being a preacher’s kid, it has been a slow, painstaking process to unmask. Everyone does the public/private thing to a degree. There is a truly marked difference in “show mode” and “autism.” Most people are trying to hide their emotions a little bit, certainly. No one wants to ugly cry if Oprah’s not handing out Beetles. Autistic people cannot regulate their emotions like neurotypical people, and we can catalogue their behaviors by the hundreds, but what we cannot do is replicate them. This is because the reason we thought you had the reaction was different than why you actually had it.
Impasses are frequent because “I just don’t get it,” and I have empathy for how tiresome that is. I really do. That’s because if your’e exhausted, you’ve experienced a few hours of my symptoms and I live this way. Not said to shame you, just to say “I need empathy here.” There are other areas in which I’m stronger than my friends and we trade off….. no one is ever getting the short end of the stick……
And unfortunately, reminding Supergrover of that didn’t go over so well because I don’t think she was picking up what I was putting down. She told me several times some version of “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” First of all, that’s a huge red flag. If you tell someone up front that you have a disability like bipolar or whatever and that’s what they say, that’s not the healthiest response ever. The reason I ask people for help is that they’re the first person to ask me. In this one case, the tables were turned where I needed help first….. so, of course it felt like I “was the one who always needed help.” But it’s 10 years later and those words just don’t hit the same way anymore. Healthy people do not shut you down every time you want to have a dialogue. What would have been perfectly healthy is just to walk away for both of us, and yet neither of us did it. I don’t think we meant to be in a relationship this crazy for 10 years, but those tickets are non-refundable.
In some ways, I felt like it was really hard work and deservedly so. Most friendships like ours end quickly because of who we are jointly and severally. I am sure this is conjecture, but it seems to be that the key words are “friendships like ours.” What I see as trying for connection, she sees as “telling her every bad thing she’s ever done.” Sometimes when my sensory environment is turned up to hell, I do come across like I’m nitpicking. Because it’s all text, she can’t hear my tone of voice and she doesn’t ask for any clarification. So, whether I intended to provoke ire or not, I will have done it.
I have never wanted that for her, and I had to learn not to want that for me. I stepped all over her boundaries because that’s how it works in my world. If you troll someone, they’ll leave you alone. We just both met our match and wrote checks with our mouths that our asses couldn’t cash. I will never be as strident as she is in person. She will never be as over emotional as me in text……………… but not because she’s not capable of it.
She’s my fairy tale author girl. As in, not the author of my fairy tale but the writer friend I have who is interested in creating fairy tales for actual children. I keep telling her that “50 Shades of Gray” was so terrible I didn’t even read the whole first page, but it did prove to me that either one of us was capable of writing a book on our phones while using public transportation. I have more time in a day to dedicate to it, but I will never write something akin to the main quest of Skyrim, and she could. I don’t know what her future holds, but I do know that if she wrote a book, she’d sell a copy.
What I know is that if I keep talking, one of two things will happen. The first is that repetition gives the story less power. How do I know it has less power? When I can write essays like this and I don’t end up sobbing so hard I can’t see what I’m writing anymore. There’s so much to cry about, really, that doesn’t have anything to do with her. It’s universal. You lose someone significant in your life, and you adjust- but I do not know anyone who is downright happy about it.
It would also be easier to focus on this prompt at the end of the month than it is right this moment. Finnish Independence Day is always craptastic because it’s trying to replace the parts of my heart that are black with the lights and music of Helsinki. Finlandia, yes, but also Finlandia conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The black parts of your heart will respond to music if you let them.
That’s it. That’s the thing I’ve learned this year. The black parts of my heart will respond to music when I let them. This means that I can author the destruction of someone I 100% regret having to cut out of my life because I didn’t have any other choice. I could no longer make decisions about the health of the relationship based on what only I thought, because what happened on a large scale a few months ago was happening all the time in conversation.
We hadn’t talked for a few months, so she was reading me without responding….. months of posts in which we weren’t checking the stories we were telling ourselves, and that always feels like “WE WERE ON A BREAK.” That’s what makes our bond cemented for life. She has editorial control and I’ve told her that. She also cannot stop herself from reading because she thinks that I’m out to get her……. or does she? Because she says it frequently and then she’ll take a line I thought about for an hour, just slaved over to capture her perfectly, and send it to me with a “thank you for this.”
The main reason this whole thing is important to me is that I have never been this person before. I wouldn’t be as safe and secure in who I am now if she hadn’t been sure of me first.
What makes her unique in my life is that she managed to get past all the barriers I’d set up. All the social masking that didn’t make me look like an alien, all the catering I do to other people to make sure everyone is focusing on having a good time and not the fact that I am standing here, damaged, in a corner because I don’t want to get my crazy spatter on you. I have never been that person on the outside. Why I don’t always come off as depressed, anxious, ADHD, or autistic. It’s all just a bunch of spaghetti code in there.
One day I’ll reach “eof,” and I know it’ll compile……………….. even when there are so many lines I wish I could have commented out. But that’s the thing, right? The first step to finding things that do serve you is letting go of the things that don’t. I wish I could say a lot of good things happened this year, and I know they did in small measures. But mostly this year was about learning to deal with pain and rage. How much I’d social masked away all of those feelings as a child determined not that my emotions were bottled, but how many six-packs.
In a lot of ways, all my social masks failed at once, and then I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had to build myself back up from 12 on, adjusting to new emotions that weren’t there before and mapping out the dead spots. If you have not done this in yourself, it is backbreaking emotional work and depression/anxiety medication make it easier, not easy.
This year I’ve felt infantilized more and bothered less. That is because I do not have a world-ending autistic meltdown if someone doesn’t like me. I just find out quickly who my people are in those cases and move on, because I’m past the point in my life where I want to justify anything to anyone, because I have enough belief in myself to know that I have limitations and to ask for help when I need it. People rush to parent the people with mental processing differences and psychiatric illness, and I have to anticipate it. I have to deal with it, because there’s nowhere I won’t. That’s a social mask I do have, though, because it feels very much like apologizing for your existence because you’re queer or physically disabled.
The hard part is being a realist without being too negative because I can control my environment, but only to a point. I do not like telling people I’m a Christian anymore because it invariably ends up being an image of me in their heads that just doesn’t compute. Either I’m a bad Christian because my exegesis is bad and God didn’t really mean all that stuff about inclusivity, helpfully written right there in the RED LETTERS……………… or their God is about the letter of the law and not the spirit; homosexuality does not occur in most, if not all animal populations……. it is a demon to which I am solely responsible for its care and feeding. If I just stopped queer behavior, I’d stop being queer.
Gay men are widely accepted as priests in the Catholic Church because especially in the third world, that’s where you go not to get bullied. Most families know when they’ve got a priest on their hands by kindergarten. Please know that this is in no way trying to be shady. Gay men are pushed toward being priests because of their sensitive/more effeminate natures, because then their families don’t even have to meet the boyfriend. They’ve been eating at his table for years.
I’m just trying to let myself evolve, and thinking about systemic issues makes me happier than thinking about my own progress or lack of it, because I have so much that’s up in the air and little that’s solid.
That’s just how it is in a rebuilding year. Next year might be one, too, but this is not to be taken lightly. I cannot be my authentic self until all the pieces are together, or at the very least, scattered on the table in front of me.
Pieces, for me, are thought fragments. The most positive thing in the world that happened to me this year, above all else, was that in January of course I knew I’d found a flawless diamond in my beautiful girl……………… but by December, I realized she had, too.
I have always had a low opinion of myself, and am slowly changing it. I feel stronger now than I ever have, because acknowledging that I’m autistic allowed me to feel like a real person instead of an alien. When I think of the ways my mother tried to hide from me that I was physically disabled, it feels similar. I didn’t stop experiencing symptoms of CP when I didn’t know I had it, I just felt lazy and incompetent because everyone told me I was fully capable and just needed to work harder. Those people were absolutely wrong, and I had no way of correcting them.
There were a lot of background conversations over me that had nothing to do with me- yet affected the course of my life. My mom thought it was more important for me to feel absolutely normal….. and so did my dad. They just did not agree on methodology to reach that conclusion. My dad thought it was important for me to know I had limitations. My mother thought that telling me about them would just make me feel more different, more fucked up, etc. They both had valid points of view, it’s just that my mother was objectively, devastatingly wrong. I can listen to a thing without agreeing with it. Her feelings were valid. Her choice was still awful.
Every single time my dad brought up the fact that I wasn’t like other kids and needed help, she immediately started minimizing it. She told me that my dad had a penchant for hyperbole, and it was a gaslighting operation that lasted years. It affected my opinion of myself because I constantly treated myself as if nothing was wrong with me, I was just stupid…… because my mom wanted me to believe that I was “more physically capable than I really was.” In retrospect, I think that is untrue. I think my dad understood the assignment.
He understood that if your child got a diagnosis like that, you now have a different child and not because they’re a different person. You gain a different library of images as to what will make your child successful, because trying to fit them into the society we’ve already created will beat them into a bloody pulp……. daily.
It was impossible for me, monkey in the middle, to see through either of them in any kind of objective way. Even my eye problems are connected to CP. I have what’s called an “alternating isotropia.” That means both of my eyes are capable of strabismus (turning), it depends on which field of vision my brain has picked to use in that moment. Am I right or left-eye dominant?
Over time, I have become more and more dependent on my right eye because as my left has deteriorated, my brain is smart enough to use it consistently. As a child, when both eyes were strong, I wrote a book every day on why stereopsis is absolutely necessary.
I do not have what’s known as “course stereopsis” or “fine stereopsis.” This means that I have neither the feeling that I am immersed in my environment, nor the ability to tell spatially where things are. A good example is not being able to judge the riser on a staircase, tripping up or down on the trades. Most of the time, I fall going up because I have not lifted my foot high enough from one trade to the other…. I am not clumsy because I didn’t see the step at all. I am clumsy because I saw it and I could not judge the distance correctly.
The worst time this has ever occurred was on the concrete steps in front of my elementary school. We’d just gotten back from a football game, and it was late. Because of my physical disabilities, my social masks for it make me more tired, more quickly than I realize. I’ll get into show mode and ignore myself. As my exhaustion sets in, mistakes are made. I do not have depth perception or angle of convergence. Walking in an unfamiliar environment takes four times the energy that it does for someone without these difficulties because I have to anticipate everything….. and I’m auDHD. We as a people are not known for planning ahead. I basically broke my whole face.
In short, as a cook my brain is my most valuable feature. I can put together flavor combinations faster than I can plate….. for most people, plating is the easiest thing in the kitchen. For me, it’s the hardest because my plate is always going to look slightly off until I white knuckle through it. It’s not that I am trying to be difficult. I have to do everything by how it feels because my brain is not just all of the sudden going to start using my eyes correctly.
I was today years old when I learned that it was all connected physically. We can leave auDHD out of it for a second. I thought that my lack of 3D vision was from medical malpractice, and I don’t believe I’m entirely wrong on that one. What I do believe is that there is an equal chance that a doctor made a mistake in the delivery room as there is “I got CP, and lack of stereopsis is a symptom of it. Seriously. I was born with it. I’m 46. Today years old.
The reason it’s impossible to tell is that I haven’t had a neurological workup since I was 18 months old. Hypotonia doesn’t generally get worse, but is chronically misdiagnosed from one to the other. It would be interesting if I found the key to unlocking me completely at random……. just like I stumbled into autism.
I couldn’t judge the difference between a neurotypical brain and a neurodivergent one, either. This is because I did not do the research on ADHD that I should’ve when I was diagnosed. I went to the doctor. I got medication. It worked. End of story……. or is it?
No, there was so much more. There was social perception of the neurodivergent brain (childish). I can tell you for sure this is not true. We show up at the office with the best of intentions and work so much harder for a lesser result. I get it. Doesn’t make it suck less.
Neurotypicals, we don’t want to work for you. We really don’t. It affects our self-esteem a ridiculous amount. Every meeting with the boss means immediate termination, because the boss only comes to your desk when you are a straight-up problem for them. I get it. We are a problem for you. No doubt. But is it really better for your neurodivergent employees to fucking beat the shit out of themselves every single day? Is it worth it to you, as a boss, to have employees that fear you to that degree? We live in our failures because you make us.
The vice president of Alert Logic, in his letter to me that won me the second Rock Star award in six months, said that “if every Alert Logic employee was like Leslie, we’d have a much better company.” I was fired six months later because I couldn’t write things down while I talked. Here is what I know to be true. The vice president wouldn’t have fired me. Middle management got frustrated and gave up.
It wasn’t a problem that I got fired. That tiny piece paled in comparison to the fallout, because I wasn’t just supporting myself. I was supporting Dana as well, because she hadn’t found a job yet (another huge red flag). We had no income coming in at all, and I was blamed heavily for it instead of Dana saying, “you know what? I should get a job.” She did after I got fired, of course, but she didn’t do a damn thing to help me in terms of money or finding her own support system while I was at work. The reason I didn’t find it problematic at first is because I got the “perfect job for me” and I made plenty of money to give her whatever kind of life she wanted. She just didn’t go out and grab it, staying home to support me instead.
I will never be able to repay that gift, because she did indeed help me. It just didn’t work out in the long run. I am not berating her for her decisions, just telling you how they affected me. In some ways, I got everything I ever wanted. In some ways, it was the beginning of the end….. mostly due to Dana’s DUI. That’s conjecture, but even if it’s bullshit, it’s my perception.
Dana’s self-esteem went to shit before we ever moved to Houston because she felt so humiliated and guilty. Therefore, her depression got worse as I got stronger. What I know is that if I had been the one who’d been arrested, Dana would have reacted the same way I did…. out of her mind trying to get to me and supportive the whole way through. But when you’re fighting your own battle, you often don’t see your squire, the one who is tasked with and vetted to help you. It’s not like I didn’t know what contract I was signing. I just never in a million years realized how fast it was going to devolve into a manic rambling spiral….. for me.
Dana is not bipolar (as far as I know). Therefore, only I was ever cycling up. Dana just had to wallow because she was physically incapable of not. I mean, what would you do in that situation? Wouldn’t it make you feel worthless? I can’t imagine, but I’ve had so many friends go through it.
If you think I’m crazy to want to marry Daniel after what I went through with Dana, here’s the difference. Daniel made the commitment to himself (and therefore me and Cora) to get sober and stay that way. His alcoholism had gotten to the point where it was untenable, so he knew that it was “get better or die” time. That he had the impetus on his own to say “enough is enough. I’m done.”
It often takes hitting a truly hard rock bottom to see how you don’t need to be temporarily done anymore. I also don’t know the recidivism rate on DUI… whether I was right in believing that Dana was absolutely going to be arrested again because the first time didn’t change her behavior. I got to the point where I thought, “even if I’m wrong and this never happens again, I cannot trust that it won’t.” In retrospect, I was not having an emotional affair because I needed it for the present. I needed it to give me strength for the future.
I couldn’t think about cheating. I could only lay it out in front of Dana and say, “this is what is happening to me. It’s a new relationship energy that’s swallowing me whole because it’s so bright and happy.” What I did not say is “you’re going down and I don’t want to go with you.” In short, the plan was just to be honest and work my way through it. As Supergrover and I became closer, the hard outs alienated Dana. It was a Supermess.
Supergrover and I absolutely deserved a space of our own because of the hard out, and couldn’t get it because Dana was convinced that Supergrover would read my writing and feel touched by an angel or some shit. Though that’s not what happened at all, I appreciate Dana’s confidence in my ability.
Or as I told Supergrover, “I never railed that you were straight, dear heart. It’s that I thought you might be Cynthia Nixon and in effect, you’re not because I’m not that good a writer.” Yes, because that’s how sexual orientation works….. because it doesn’t right up until people like Cynthia say “uh-oh. What is this?” So, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility in my mind…. and it wasn’t real, either. I believed her, truly. I was wrong. That didn’t make my thoughts wrong, just wrong for her.
It was honestly a relief to learn about Michael, because when said feelings occurred, she presented to me as a single mom for months. I thought of her in a completely different way because that’s how she told me to think of her. She wasn’t wrong not to tell me. I should have done a lot of things differently and I feel solid about that. What I did know is that if I was ridiculously worried about her all the time, he made me stop.
If you knew the whole story, it would not be a surprise to you how I got from “Supergrover needs someone like me” to Supergrover needs me” so goddamn fast- and how, in some ways- learning about Michael’s existence felt too late to do any good for me, because I was so wrecked…. and not because she rejected me. It was all my own shit to get rid of, and I did. I went from wanting to be the partner to being happy to be the virtual guard dog.
It was my job to feel protective of her, and I most certainly did. Godzilla has nothing on me, and neither does Lloyd Dobbler. If I thought it would do any good at all, I would play fuckin’ Peter Gabriel.
Months ago, maybe October, I laid it all out there for her. My entire thought process from beginning to end, why I felt so close to her even if she didn’t feel close to me. That this is how much I love you and want to help. All I got back was “don’t think your psychoanalysis is correct.” Fuck me running. I can’t win with this woman and I am tired. I have done everything she’s asked for jack shit in return, so I finally got the message to move on. She stomped all over my heart and it had nothing to do with romance.
Fatality.
This is all due, I believe, to auDHD. She cannot understand why I sound rude and demanding even though I’m the most tenderheart bear she’s ever met. Why my love letter came across as “psychoanalysis” and not “I will sit with you even when you need to be silent.” I know from experience that she is also walking around town with a third degree burn on her face. I only wanted to be Neosporin to help the scars heal.
I cannot undo anything that happened to her. I really can’t. But what I can do is receive her. Listen to her. But, of course when she said she was too overwhelmed yet again, after five years, I realized that it wasn’t all time commitments and I was pouring more energy into her than she really wanted, even if she couldn’t just stop being nice and tell me that.
I need to hear things flat out, and I can give what I require. All of my personality is designed for helping others, but you have to see past the wrapping paper. I am not here to be nice, I am here to be kind. I won’t just let anyone struggle.
What I know for sure is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s a little kid or the president of the United States….. I will not stand by. That’s because we’re all misfits on the edge of society. There’s so much less “normal” out there than people think.
Therefore, my most favorite people are the outcasts……. there are so many more of us than will ever visit the “in-crowd…..” because we’ll be barred from it eventually, anyway….. even after two Rock Star awards.
God bless the outcasts, which, as it turns out, means “God bless the whole world.”
Stories That Are All True 