Dear Aada,

My writing is not to provoke or upset you. It never has been, and it never will be. My audience reaches into the thousands on a daily basis and millions over 25 years. There are people who read that don’t know who you are, just like you didn’t know the cast of characters when you started reading, either. What drew you in then draws them in now. It’s a peek into my life, just as it is. To think that I single you out and write only to provoke you is to ignore that I show my readers what it’s like to live in my head. You aren’t thinking about my audience when I never stop. Do you really think that you are my only reader? My blog is a treasure trove of memories… not always good ones.

It’s not always the portrayal of a healthy mind, because so much of my writing has to do with being mentally ill, and definitely showing the symptoms of it. I know I’m sick, and I know it will take a hell of a lot for me to be well. At no point do I think of it as manipulating you or our friendship, because I’m not even aware when you read unless you tell me so.

You said that people in your personal and professional life are reaching out to you to see if you’re okay. I wonder if they know how many people reach out to me to see if I’m okay after I’ve written?

The answer is “zero.”

Being a writer is a lonely life, and I chose it.

It was less lonely when I could write to you, and now I’m stumbling around in the dark all by myself. Mistakes are being made because our easy give and take is no more. I do not know what I am going to write that hurts you, because until today, I did not know that I could do so…. you told me that there was nothing I could say that would hurt you long ago.

I wish I could put a moratorium on writing about you, but you’ve been the absolute center of my world for the last 12 years. I’m not going to forget about it in a few months. That’s not true to who I am, because I don’t move on quickly or easily.

I did not have joy in busting you in a lie. I was angry. Truth pain burned inside me. I did not laugh the way you said I did, I was in full-on autistic meltdown…. and then I burned out. I haven’t left my house in months except on the days when someone comes to pick me up.

I’m in a group called Cognitive Behavioral Health, where we talk about healthy coping mechanisms. I have found that I am not the only manipulative person in our relationship because as I’ve learned more about the way I work, I’ve learned more about how you do, too. Neither one of us are spectacular friends to the other, quite frankly. But if your therapist really believes that I’m the only manipulative one, then so be it. Nothing I can do about that. I do know that if I was with you and said therapist, they would tell us we’re both wrong.

There are three sides to every story- yours, mine, and the truth.

Just like there’s nothing you can do to take back your lie, there’s nothing I can do to take back my betrayal. What I can do is move forward, knowing that I was wrong and having to carry it with me. The burden is extremely heavy and my chest is tight. At first, I could not breathe. Today was the first day in months where I reached out to people I hadn’t talked to in a long time and asked for a phone call. I took a break from thinking about you only to find out that the one time I’d been away from my computer, I actually did get an e-mail from you.

It ripped me a new asshole, and still I was happy to hear from you at all. There’s a lot I want to address, but I won’t. Now that I know you weren’t exactly telling the truth, that I could indeed hurt you professionally, I think it’s best if I don’t say anything. I’m just writing this here because you said you read my blog, but blocked my e-mail (explain that one like I’m five…. wait, you don’t have to. You either love my blog, or you love me. That seems to be the general consensus in my life. Did I mention writing is a lonely life?).

It is late and I am ending my day humbled, because even though the e-mail didn’t say what I’d hoped, I did get an e-mail from my favorite person. And that’s the bitch of it, really. You ranted at me with questions I couldn’t answer because the last line was that you were going to block me, not willing to even wait for a reply no matter what it was.

There’s only six words I really need to say:

I am sorry.

I love you.

That’s it. That’s all I really can say after what I’ve put you through. I do not like my life without you in it, but I am learning to manage.

Leslie

The question on my mind is “how do I become new again after reliving my sins every day for 12 years?” Again, I hid out because I thought I deserved it. Aada didn’t punish me. I punished myself. Yet, you’re always meaner to yourself than a judge would be, so I thought that not leaving my house was the best answer ever. What did I do that was so bad?

I took my line cook mouth out of its context and put it in front of a white collar government employee who didn’t need my bullshit. I came off as an asshole at first and couldn’t forgive myself. I kept trying to change, but my ADHD and autism prevented me from picking up social cues that I should have. I couldn’t actually see because I was working blind. I hadn’t met this person on the ground, so I thought my lines were just lines… easily forgettable and throwaway. I learned that they were not years later, when I made a joke that was along the same lines but not nearly as raunchy, and she said that I triggered her.

Note taken, and I have never said anything like that again. Because what I know for sure are two things. The first is that I don’t get to decide how long she’s hurt. The second is that I had to do a monster amount of work so that joke didn’t trigger me. That’s because to me, comedy equals tragedy plus time. The joke allowed me to save face, because what I’d done made me feel like an asshole every day and that I would never deserve anything better than being by myself.

I won’t repeat it here, because I don’t know that she’s not reading and I actually am sensitive to her feelings, despite what she may think. The point is not that she should have taken it in stride because I’ve worked on myself. The point is that I felt awful because she didn’t say “I cannot joke about this, ever.” I would have respected that boundary if I’d known it was there…. I assumed that after a number of years, she’d be okay. She assumed that I already knew I’d start a fight if I made those jokes. Neither one of us communicated.

That’s how I want to be a better person in the future- really listening to people when they talk. I would argue that the drift between Aada and me started when I stopped giving a fuck about other people’s feelings; they didn’t communicate them. I am not a mind reader, nor do I want to be. I am not insensitive nor am I trying to hurt anyone in conversations. I have a problem when I am expected to pick up a social cue that isn’t there, then berated later because I tripped over it. This problem is not limited to the Internet, it just happens more there because I have more cues to go on in person, like the way a person looks at me. People think that I am insensitive and lack empathy when it takes an enormous amount of guessing on my part to figure out how people think and feel. I am often wrong.

Neurotypical life is full of cues that neurodivergent people just do not pick up, so my tagline might as well be “mean” when in reality, I am trying to let all people speak for themselves. I don’t want to be in the same place in a year that I am now, and I won’t be. I have beat myself up every day for 12 years over a relationship that was never real in the first place because I marked myself as “bad.”

I didn’t say to myself, “this is a bad thing you have done and you must recover from it.” I said, “you are a bad person and you don’t deserve anything good.” I am convinced that I was never a value-add to Aada’s life because that’s how she treated me most days. She said that my words were pricks on her skin because no one else in her life called her out on anything (to my understanding, anyway). When she didn’t want to talk about something, I only heard it when she said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” That’s because I do not pick up the social cue of changing the subject. I change the subject and circle back around.

For instance, today my dad called me about money and I asked him about macaroni.

We talked about money, but we also talked about macaroni. I was in the grocery store. The circumstances of the talk were pursuant to the circumstances of where we both stood. He needed to talk to me about money. I needed help because I get decision fatigue in the grocery store. He needed to know how I report income. I needed to know which pasta shape he usually uses for a classic mac and cheese recipe. I hope that when I write down my hopes and dreams he knows how small they truly are, because I know how much I have in my account right this minute and I cannot count on anything more or less. My mother is helping me live right now, because my care team does not think I am capable of a job yet. I make money from Medium, but so far I’ve earned $12 this month… which is not nothing (thank you, fans). Mostly, it’s my mom.

That makes me think of Sam, who I told that “one day I’d be an author, living off an inheritance” and wanted her to come along. That’s because my mother had died, but I hadn’t gotten the money yet. We could have done a lot of things for us and the kids with it, and I’m bummed the relationship didn’t work out. What I know for sure is that it was idealistic thinking in those days because her biggest problem was that I didn’t drive and she couldn’t handle it.

She thought of herself as the mom taxi and I thought of myself as having the Uber app on my phone and access to multiple trains to get to her. The dreams I had for us were not pie in the sky, they’re true now. And yet, because I was “such a dreamer,” she’s moved on and I’ve lost something I can’t get back.

But the car thing was so ridiculous that I can’t get past it. I don’t drive because my reflexes are different than other people’s. Not only do I have cerebral palsy, I don’t have 3D vision and stuff comes out of nowhere. I might be able to make it safely to my destination, I might not. But instead of thinking about me and my issues, it was all about her and how she’d have to come get me.

I am not a child, but I do live my life differently on purpose. I’ve been a spoonie my whole life, and it’s only now that I’m dealing with it because I was streamlined as a child and didn’t know I needed help. I can think of so many instances that mark me as strange, but I’m saving all of those for my autism evaluation. What I can tell you is that I have always gravitated toward autistic people in terms of friendship, not knowing why.

The why is that we’ve only recently discovered how different autism looks in women. I’m nonbinary or NB or “enby.” That does not erase being born female at birth. The reason I present as enby now is twofold. The first is that I didn’t have a word for it. Gen Z coined the term. The second is that I am female though social masking, and it is alarming how many of them I lost when my mother died.

There was no one to reinforce them. I’m much more like my dad and brother-in-law and always have been, it was just hard to tell under years and years of being told what was appropriate for a woman and what wasn’t…. and her punishments for not living up to them were severe.

I am trying to get my life together in a way that is tightly controlled so that when other people hear me say that I live off a trust or have SSI/SSDI, they don’t infantilize me. This is unavoidable, but I can limit the damage by being an adult on the internet and making room for nuance. There are plenty of spoonies out there who don’t have a voice. I can be one of them even though I am flawed. I don’t know anyone who isn’t, even when I think my own sins are worse than everyone else’s.

There are multiple parts to infantilization, and here’s the biggest one:

I don’t control access to my money because I wanted it that way. I’m protected legally from being sued, because I took Aada’s threat seriously as a new path forward. You can have what I have on me, but you cannot sue my mother. Please enjoy your hundred bucks and maybe a free frozen yogurt coupon (if I have one). I may have to call a family member or my accountant to cover something, but that’s my own issue. No one needs to cover for me.

They just don’t talk about it. They assume everything, that they’re on the hook. It particularly affects my dating life when people see that I do not work in the traditional sense, that it’s great I have this little blog and everything. I was touched when Aada told me that she thought I was “this world famous blogger.” I hope that other people eventually see me in that light because nothing would make me happier than to make a real living off the writing I’ve done every day for 25 years (I do not publish every day, but I sit down at the keyboard without fail almost as soon as my eyes open). No blogger is actually world famous unless they’re gossip columnists. I write about my own life, and the people around me invariably get dragged into the fray because I cannot make up the situations in which I find myself. So, the people around me have to be a different breed of strong as well. If you are in my orbit, chances are you are utterly unimpressed with my writing because the kind of adoration I got from Aada messed me up. Someone who lovebombs an unknown writer by calling them “world famous” when they’ve never heard it before is going to feel some type of way.

I use the term lovebomb to indicate that it was over the top, but she never discarded me. Her lovebombing was real and genuine. I just cannot think of a real-life term that would cover the amount of adoration I received. I liked it a little too much, and now cannot stand anyone being in my inner circle that thinks I’m the bees knees. I need them to know that I’m just a regular person with both special abilities and disabilities alike. Aada put it best: “Give me a brain that outraces my body by a billion exponential degrees. The irony. The gods do find a way to humble us don’t they?” I’d been spending my life trying to keep up with everyone else, not knowing that in a lot of ways, I was so much further ahead.

But this is new and different for me. I needed people to help me and didn’t understand why they wouldn’t- they saw me as a normal person who was mooching off them. That social masking made me appear normal because I was using all of my energy to go outside, and there wasn’t anything left after that.

I know more about myself, and I’m willing to talk about it. I’m willing to admit that I’m the flawed one, but I’m getting better quickly with the right meds and daily exercise. I cannot even get to the gym without exercising a little, so I am starting autistic inertia early by leaving the house around 0700 on weekends and earlier on weekdays because my hours fluctuate during the week. I wake up anywhere between 0400 and 0600. Instead of starting to write right away, I’m going to change it up to working out first so that my endorphins are fully charged. Not feeling good about myself affects my writing to an enormous degree, as does focusing on me rather than the outside world.

For instance, I think that people think nothing is happening with Lanagan Media Group, when we’ve just gone quiet. If I bring something to everyone, it’s got to be more fully formed than it is right now. It does not mean that we’ve stopped working. It means that not everyone is entitled to know what we’re working on until it’s ready to have feedback and criticism. For instance, Evan and I really need to get started on the neurodivergent cookbook, and not because something like it doesn’t already exist. It’s that we both have brains that outrace our bodies by a million miles and it would be a fun project to work on with someone I adore. But the only thing we have so far is an outline and a promise to get together in either Baltimore or Oakland.

Evan keeps saying that he wants to come here so that we can go all over the place on the trains.

Because we’re AuDHD, we love the trains.

That being said, Evan has more health issues than I do and it’s hard for him to travel. There are lots of days where he’s just off the grid and so am I… neither of us has the energy to talk to anyone. I’m thinking that we need to start doing more Zoom calls and collaborative documents to get this book done, because our original thinking is that collaboration is best done in person. But perhaps spoonies must adjust because the energy it takes to fly across the country means several days of rest in either direction. The good part of this is that both of us have guest rooms. If Evan needs to sleep for a couple of days before he’s ready to work, he has the time and space to spread out. If I’m wiped at his house, so do I.

The blessing and the curse of being an AuDHD writer is that it takes so many words to get people to understand your disability and you have them if people will take the time to read. Our society is changing from long form articles to soundbites overall, and most people on the spectrum cannot function that way. There’s no emotional shorthand to communication with us, even amongst ourselves.

If you have met one autistic person, you have met one autistic person.

There are no shortcuts for people who are both on the spectrum, because autism is marked by an iron structure that we choose. One person’s does not match another’s, and it is foolish to go into any relationship thinking that just because both people are neurodivergent, that means we’re naturally going to communicate easier with each other.

It’s a learning process I’ve had to undergo, because my iron structure was given to me by my mother. Michael says I sound like an abused wife excusing all of Aada’s behavior towards me, but I don’t think I do. I think I messed up big time, and her iron structure does not allow her to forgive me because she’s frightened of what will happen in the future. That just has to be okay. She is of no consequence to me now, but I do have great memories that I would like to keep alive. You always remember your first fan, and I’m sorry I didn’t handle it well.

Our history with each other predated me because she was real-life friends with my ex. I slowly isolated her into being my Internet friend, but it wasn’t on purpose. She slowly isolated me into being her Internet friend, too, it just wasn’t based on romance. We were tied through a deep bond no one else shared, and she did not recognize that the burden was more difficult on me than I could say…. or can even imagine how to write about now.

Because as it turns out, her iron structure was full of lies as well. She needed me to believe that she was special, and I did. I loved her as a mother, a sister, a daughter… I did not need to believe that she was also a full-time superhero complete with cape and tights. But she thought I did, because I was a “world-famous blogger.” In the beginning is the end is the beginning. She’s too embarrassed to put on her big girl pants and face me now, or at least, that’s what Michael said. Whether that is true or not, I will never know. Because Michael and Aada do not know each other, they just have very educated guesses on who the other is based on my blog alone. It means something to me that what I say matters, but not like this.

Michael also works for the government, and reminds me so much of Aada’s patois that it’s hard to believe government wonks are actually different people. 😉 He has taken a rain check on his next trip to Washington for coffee or a drink when he has time, because his last trip was too busy for me to take the train.

It was funny… “I am not coming to Baltimore.” “Trains exist, Michael…. I told my sister the same thing.”

I have to remind people in Washington that trains exist a lot, because I don’t need them to come and rescue me. But in this case, Michael kind of did. He saw what was going on with Aada and me and put a stop to it, because we were both hurting each other. Now, no one cares if our relationship is dead or enmeshed…. it’s only Aada’s pride that’s hurt. But she has proven to me over and over that her pride means more to her than I do. The whole fight was because she wouldn’t show up for me the way I showed up for her every day.

She will say that I betrayed her, that I didn’t want a relationship with her. That if I did, I would have kept my mouth shut on a whole bunch of topics. I would say that I specifically had to find someone I could talk to inside the system and it just so happened that our relationship was toxic. Not “she was toxic and I was perfect.” The relationship was toxic because neither of us had great childhoods and were constantly manipulating each other when we got angry.

I would have liked to fix all of that moving forward, sitting down with a third party. Being alone in a chat room for so many years allowed us both a skewed view into each other’s lives. It was a relationship full of fun house mirrors, the distortion making beautiful reflections at times and horrifying at others. The one thing we couldn’t do was stay away from each other. I believe I have accidentally fixed that, but to say it’s what I wanted is a huge stretch. I wanted to be in a relationship where we could both rely on each other to have healthy responses to conflict, and our last conflict was a huge one in which she admitted to me that she lied.

Truth pain burned inside me.

That’s because she didn’t lie to me once. She started lying to me in 2013 and just a few months ago came clean. I was so angry that I said I didn’t care what she did now because her lies made me feel unsafe with her, something I regret. I wish I’d made her feel loved and wanted because her instant reply was “I will step away.” But I couldn’t control my reactions in the immediate aftermath of being told that she lied. Or maybe on some level I knew it was time to move on. I cannot say what I was thinking in that moment, only that I also told her that next steps were very much on her to figure out and not one part of her said, “I will find a way to make it up to you if you will find a way to forgive me.”

I wanted her to be new, too, but as it turns out only I was ready.