It hit me over the head today that this is all real. That I am not just spouting my thoughts into the night, saying nothing of substance. That line from Daniel really got to me, that I “write in bulk without saying anything of substance.” The reason it got to me so much is that it was like he dismissed all my friends and their personalities, as if me writing about them wasn’t interesting enough to be valuable. It’s why I got rid of him in a New York minute. Supergrover’s reaction to finding out I was a writer was to immediately support me financially with a donation and offer to be my editor for all time and space, because it’s a job we can do virtually, the collaboration of writing. Whenever I feel alone as a blogger, I remember the friends whose first reaction is that my blog is valuable, that I am doing a public service.
I’m just not doing a public service for academia, which I’m sure some people find lacking. I find it relatable, because I’m not putting myself out there to be anything I’m not. As I told Supergrover, “I don’t feel like I want to take over for your psychologist. I feel like I want to be the waiting room that doesn’t suck.” I got that line from Paul Gilmartin on “Mental Illness Happy Hour,” and I use it all the time, because I only know enough about psychiatry and psychology to be your friend in the waiting room. I’m not even licensed to take your history and physical and *present* to your doctor.
That being said, sometimes people will get put on the same drugs I am, or have been on. If they have the same side effects that I did when I was on it, I will tell them what my doctor did to solve that problem so that they can talk to their doctor and see if what I said makes sense. I don’t view myself as a substitute doctor, just the friend who’d go with you to the doctor because you have faith in my ability to translate medicine to English…. and that’s my only function. It is never to tell you what to do with your body. It is only to offer a friend opinion that might be worth it to you to bring up with your doctor later. What worked for me may not work for you, but it’s worth a shot. Peer review is valid, it’s just not a valid diagnosis. Your doctor only has 15 minutes with you at most during an appointment, unless you are seeing psych. That ranges from 15 minutes to 50 depending on whether the MD also does counseling or not. Some prefer wholistic care, some prefer focusing on drugs and letting other people handle therapy.
I prefer the integrated approach, because then my doctor and I have 50 minutes to work out a medication/symptom issue when it comes up instead of being held to the 15 minute patient factory.
All of this- my mental illness (Bipolar, CPTSD, Anxiety), my two processing disorders (ADHD and Autism), and my physical disability have convinced me that I do not have value to the world. Daniel is not responsible for my feelings because it’s my job to shake them off. But he certainly helped in the “I feel bad about myself” department. I can reason with myself all day long that he was just mad, but that doesn’t make his words hurt less.
It also doesn’t surprise me that Supergrover’s love and support created my crush on her, because she was my first real fan and I did not know what to do with that information at all. I became a gawky, awkward teenager in front of her at every turn.
Her: You’re BRILLIANT. Me: (absolutelyclueless as to how to respond) HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!
And then, after she saw how brilliant I was, she let me know how brilliant she is and my brain just went on overload. It’s still on overload 11 years later because she has never stopped challenging me any less as a writer to paint both of us accurately. When she does critique my blog, I adjust. I address what she’s angry about because her feelings are important to me, always.
It keeps me in a place of imposter syndrome, when I really want to believe that I am the writer Supergrover believes that I am. I want to believe that because I can impress her, I can impress anyone in the world. It’s handy because I actually do believe that. Both she and Lindsay walk in rarefied air in different ways, so I am Kevin Bacon’ed to the power establishment, even Hollywood. My reluctance looks like an excuse next to all that.
If I supposedly have all these connections, why am I not using them? I can sum that up in two words:
It’s rude.
I will give you a HUGE for instance. It is one thing to send Kamala Harris an e-mail and ask her to promote me. It is another thing for Kamala, Lindsay, Matt, and me to sit with her at dinner and when it’s mentioned that I’m a writer, she says she wants to take a look. That’s valid. It’s not seeking out power for power’s sake.
Just like I wouldn’t endorse a product I wouldn’t use, I wouldn’t be friends with someone just because they were powerful. Getting to know a powerful person in a relaxed setting like dinner with her old friends and integrating me is more my vibe, because I get publicity by shaking hands, not by sending out DMs to powerful people.
The one thing that’s ever happened to me that was a rejection that’s gotten larger over the years as a try to make it as a writer was not being picked to be on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” It might been a powerful connection to have met her in the past.
The reason I would have met her is that she started a book club, and I think “She’s Come Undone” was one of their first picks for it was that this was in either 1996 or 7. I wrote about the book from a queer perspective, and I got a call from an executive producer who seemed very excited about me and we talked for 45 minutes. In the end, though, everyone they picked looked the same. I wasn’t their vibe.
In that time and place, queer criticism of that book was valid, because there are a lot of themes I find abhorrent about it. I just don’t think they had the strength to go through that ball of wax, and it’s the only one I had.
The one thing I know is that if Oprah and I do meet, it will be on like Donkey Kong because I believe to the very core of my being that we operate the same way. Oprah is just as shy and isolated as me most of the time, and has a big personality on stage. I don’t relate to that at all. Clearly.
It doesn’t matter, though, because today I had a proper chat with someone from Lagos. Someone from Lagos noticed me. Like, told me he likes my humor. Now I know my brand of humor reaches from DC to Africa. I don’t know many people who know that.
Because it’s all real. I’m on my way. All I ask is that my real friends are my real friends, and let me have this space whether I write the way they like it or not, because it’s impossible for me to guess.
I want to see every country in the world where my blog wouldn’t be seen as a threat… and I even want to visit those, just not as much as the ones who will accept me as is. For China, I’d have to bank up entries in advance so it didn’t look like I was gone, then not write anything until I got home. It would be the same in the Middle East, it’s just not a monolith like China. How much what you say gets you in trouble varies by country. Iran and Qatar are not the same.
I’d like to go back to France, because I’ve only seen Paris for a few days, no Marseilles or Lyon. I’d like to go back to the UK because I’ve spent eight days there in 46 years. I believe I could learn a bit more than that. Plus, I’ve only been to England and would like to see a football game in Wrexham, Wales plus have friends in Scotland to round out a whole UK experience.
Plus, I’ve only seen London- it would be nice to get to The Cotswolds, Bath, Manchester, Liverpool, and all the other marvelous places I’ve seen on Doctor Who. They might go to every time and every place, but England is home base, kind of like I never want to move from DC, but I’d like to go and experience other places/cultures.
It’s especially more possible now because I have a boyfriend. There are certain countries I’d like to visit where not having a male chaperone is inadvised. For instance, I’d love to explore Iran and Syria. That culture is simply not available to me as a single woman traveling alone. The homophobic part of it is that I have to say “boyfriend” for this to be true. Two women traveling together are just as equally invisible. I recognize my privilege and am calling it out. I am also not giving Zac more credit for anything he does as a boyfriend that’s better than anything my girlfriends have ever done for me. His value in this case is in that government’s eyes, not mine. I feel it is an acceptable use of heterosexual privilege, to be able to navigate countries in which you wouldn’t as queer. Plus, Zac is as queer as I am. They don’t have to know that. It’s for his safety as well.
Heterosexual privilege protects us both, it’s just not fake because we’re pansexual. We’re not putting on a show to be something we’re not because we are genuinely a couple. It just sucks that we get something our friends in homosexual relationships don’t. Using it inside the US is absolutely abhorrent. Walking through Iran unnoticed? Sensible vacation planning.
I don’t know if Zac wants to go back to the Middle East or whether he’s had all the fun he can take. But what I do know is that I wouldn’t feel comfortable going without him. There’s another layer at work, and it’s not just having heterosexual privilege. It’s that Zac has actually spent time in MENA before, and I’m a complete newbie. I don’t think he’d count himself as having lived in the Middle East, because he’s in the Navy. He’s mostly been on the ships. But enough experience to know “ok, we’re fine” and “okay, we’re fucked” based on facial expressions.
I’ve said for a number of years that I’d like Arabic language skills, but I haven’t gotten on Duolingo yet. Going to the Middle East is intimidating when you want to know as much as I do. When you want to be able to grok it on multiple levels. For me, it’s walking the Bible. It’s intelligence since 9/11. It’s seeing what my friends in the military saw when they lived there. It’s eating their food when they were outside the wire.
Because so many of my friends have been military/intelligence or a combination thereof, going to the Middle East is not just learning about me. It is also learning about them. Picking up context clues I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
Walking the Bible, yes, but adding these additional books.
If you are a writer, your luxury items involve being able to write. There is nothing more to life than a pen and paper, or however it is you communicate these days. More and more people are using their phones as mobile desktops- an additional way to write, more important than what it was designed to do…. make calls on it.
Did you know that you can use an iPhone to call your doctor? Weird. ๐
I will write until I die, so there’s no “retirement.” There are just better and better choices about where to write as you get older (hopefully). Right now, my two favorite places to write are in bed right when I wake up, and then later I go downstairs and use my desktop. It just depends on how much desktop real estate I need. I prefer my TV monitor when I have four windows open at a time.
If I am writing all by myself, I prefer to sit with my iPad or Android. If I am chatting to Carol while I am writing, I like the desktop real estate being large enough to read and write at the same time. It’s nice being able to look at your work and talk to your research assistant at the same time.
In my office, the sunrise is spectacular. It just depends on what kind of energy I’m feeling when I wake up. Today, I haven’t gotten out of bed because I feel a little bit under the weather. I am positive I caught something traveling to and from Zac’s, because I isolate myself so much that it doesn’t make sense as to where I’d have picked up germs. To be clear, I am not blaming Zac and his housemate for me being sick, I am blaming public transportation, which is valid.
It’s just little kid sorts of sniffles currently. If I take antihistamines, decongestants, and a hot shower and I’m still feeling punk, I’ll go to the doctor. But not right away. The only reason I wait is that doctors can do nothing for a cold virus. However, they can treat the infection that comes from the virus. So, I just take cold medicine unless things take a turn for the green and the yellow. I also have a deep and loving relationship with Mucinex. It’s what I’ve been told to use as a singer since I was a kid. It doesn’t heal or cure anything. It thins your secretions enough to be able to get them out. And in fact, Dr. Stasney had two rules for singers:
1. Mucinex (then referred to in popular culture by its original prescription brand name, Humibid)
2. Drink water til you pee pale
Drink lots of water to help this process occur naturally, but Mucinex is worth its weight in gold when water alone can’t keep up.
I have just taken all of the medication I can take, so I am now allowed to complain. It’s the rule in my family, because you aren’t allowed to complain about something until you’ve done something about it.
This is a conversation often had in my family:
Me: My head hurts. Them: What have you taken for it? Me: Nothing.
At this point, there are one of two viable options. The first is, “has it kicked in yet?” The second is “well, you can’t get tachyphylaxis from nothin’.” If you don’t know medicine, it’s a smart ass remark because tachyphylaxis is the idea that a medication’s efficacy declines over time as your body chemistry gets used to it.
Either way, the best answer is not “nothing.”
The point well taken is that if I tell you I have a headache, I am unlikely to still be complaining about it an hour later if I have done something about it. Complaining is valid. There’s just a limited window in which it is tolerated, and that is the time it takes for you to need a drug and for it to kick in.
As a result, all four of us know how to take care of ourselves if it’s something really simple like a cold. The best part about living with a doctor is seeing what really needs one and what doesn’t. For instance, knowing to the core of my being that you can’t go to the doctor for a cold because there’s nothing for them to call in.
Now, if the crap in my throat develops into strep or whatever, that’s a different matter. A doctor can do something about that. With a virus, you just have to ride it out, and it’s hard to keep in mind when your symptoms are so rabid. Viruses do all sorts of fun stuff that doctors can’t stop. They can only treat. Anything you need to treat a virus is what those over the counter drugs are for. There’s very few instances I can think of where you would need a heavier hitter than ibuprofen and/or Imodium AD, and certainly Sudafed.
What has tripped me up in the past is not knowing when to go to Urgent Care for an injury in the kitchen, because I’m so tough. I can handle this (my thumb is hanging off- an exaggeration by a large margin, but not an exaggeration as to how much it would take to drag me out of the restaurant. I’ll cauterize on the grill.).
I just texted Rachel the story I wrote about her and Pati Jinich. We haven’t been talking at all, I just thought she’d like to read it. Plus, she’s a chef in my neighborhood. We’ll run into each other again. But there’s always that fear when you step out on a ledge and let someone into your world. Mine is large. Most of it taken up by food.
Speaking of which, I need to go get some. I’m feeling a brunch vibe coming on.
Whatโs the oldest thing you own that you still use daily?
My oldest coffee mug says “SPY” and it features the Culpeper Ring, the men that won us the Revolutionary War because we didn’t win the war by outgunning the Empire. We won because we had better spies/scouts than they did. It’s a toss-up to me in terms of history what would have happened if we’d lost. In some ways, I think we’d be happier. In some ways, I think we’d be furious. If they hadn’t taxed our tea, we would still be importing PG Tips like it was more important than the water bill. They turned an entire population against something that would have bridged our cultures. So, go them. We drink coffee like the French.
So, if you’re wondering about a business that could have sustained you for centuries like Disney bailed out Doctor Who, you done goofed. You come to the US and complain about our tea, the height of entitlement over a problem you created. The British influence was so strong in the south during the Revolutionary War that it’s how iced tea became the house wine of the south. So, thank you for that. I think. It’s actually really interesting because to me the South is the strangest transformation in history. Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore were just as English as New England and New York. I wonder what caused those two cities to diverge in the woods, and it only takes one answer. England abolishing slavery. There were about 50-60 years between when England freed their slaves and we freed ours, because the Southern economy would have gone to shit without it.
I have heard differing stories because African American culture is not a monolith. Some people of color blame the English and the Americans for slavery. Some blame the African kings who wanted to get rich and sold their ancestors to white people. It depends on who you ask, and a wide spectrum of brilliantly defended propositions. There is no way I can walk a mile in a black person’s shoes, but as I queer person I can empathize and relate. The institutional pain between black and queer people is similar, yet not on the same playing field. We’ve always both had problems with the police, except that now that history is in the past but we’re all still touched by it. There haven’t been enough generations where queer kids come out in peace.
I do not know if black people had a special shape in the Holocaust, but I do know I did- a pink triangle. There is no such thing as competitive suffering, so even though it’s not the same, I feel some of the same scars on my skin. I have only recently become a citizen who can get married like everyone else, and I am still persecuted by Christians who aren’t right, but they’re certain.
The older I get, the less certain I am about anything. Discovering at an early age how gender and sexual orientation affect me led me to end up believing that everything is a spectrum and not a binary. There are too many permutations of human behavior not to believe there’s a wider range than we are originally led to believe…. whether people tell others about it is another matter.
If you don’t tell anyone anything, you don’t realize how lonely you are, because you’re not giving anyone a chance to feed you. Part of being fed by your emotional support is feeling heard. That no feeling is invalid. You talk about the logic behind the feelings, but you don’t discredit the feelings themselves. You discuss why the other is helping you to feel one way or the other, being willing to compromise until we meet in the middle.
It takes an enormous amount of strength to talk through a conflict, and I know that I got frustrated with Supergrover early because I was so tired of everything that had happened before. Her being half in didn’t make sense to me, and created more turmoil in me than I wanted. Like, why do I continue to pour energy into this relationship when it’s clear it’s not wanted? I have learned that it is wanted through context clues.
We don’t have to work on the fact that we’re connected for life and cannot suddenly stop knowing each other, and I don’t want a relationship where she’s half in and can’t plan for shit.
When I mentioned getting together, she said, “I don’t think it’s a good time.” That’s fine with me. I’m not thinking about the up close and personal future. I’m autistic, so I have different ways of feeling out getting together with people. It takes a very long time for me to process that information so I don’t chicken out at the last minute. Perhaps she did feel like I was nickeling and dimming her for her time, but I hope she’s known me long enough to know that I didn’t mean anything sudden. She won’t retire for a while, and any plans I have that have to do with her giving of her time is at a time in her life when she’s had more bandwidth than she’s had in years. Getting her time right now is impossible, but it’s not impossible to work towards later.
That’s the goal that keeps me going- preparing for later. I don’t presume this is the end because the end never is. We repel and attract like magnets, because I’m a silver penned devil. ๐ My friend John gave me that nickname and now I want it in 18pt font up my arm, bigger if it fits. ๐
But what I mean in terms of friendship is that by working out our problems on my own here, they are often touched by what I say. I am attracting energy to me, rather than seeking attention.
I do hope that Supergrover finds something she does want to discuss with me, because it’s the highlight of my day. She’s not the problem. We are. There’s a big difference because we are both perfect, and I mean that sincerely. We are beautiful in all our flaws. Bad communication is its own thing, not whether either one of us are good people. We’ve been friends long enough to know beyond a shadow of any doubt that she’s good people.
My biggest fear is that she only wants to be a fan, and doesn’t want to be my friend. That’s why the pattern doesn’t change. It breaks my heart, because her criticism is more important and more impacting of the direction of this blog than anything else.
But if she’s just a fan taking pot shots from the peanut gallery, I can’t take it. She’s my friend, one of the great loves of my life because I fell into her charm and I’ll never get out. She deserves every bit of that love, but we don’t communicate well enough to be able to tell each other that. We did, and she decided that being vulnerable once was enough to her, and her next interaction seemed rule based and yet not. I do not know where to go, and so I’m resting in Zac because I can. She only means more to me due to the number of years I’ve known each, not because one is closer to me than the other. I was happier taking a break from thinking about the problem, because I hit a land mine almost immediately and she told me to go to hell.
It’s on brand, so I want to figure out how we are both contributing to that problem or not interact. I am overcoming a lot of feelings all by myself that I don’t know how to navigate, because I don’t know how to talk to Supergrover and as a result, I don’t know how to talk to me about her, either. It’s confusing because we are both entitled to our feelings and privacy. I also think our relationship would look a lot different if it wasn’t moving at the speed of the Internet- that it would take longer for us to be angry if you got a letter two or three days after you sent it, not immediately. There’s no time to calm down and absorb anymore, and you seemingly can’t reframe anything because someone else knows what you mean better than you do.
It’s hard letting them go because they’re right about you. It’s just that their perceptions are their experience of you, not who you are.as a human being. What someone interpreted you as saying may or may not be correct.
Because my second oldest coffee mug is one she bought for me.
The only books that matter are either by Jonna and Tony Mendez or they were presents from her. She can pick my books at any time, because our interests overlap occasionally and we’re both suckers for amazing prose. I am so glad that she has sent me books by Kindle, because they’re presents I’ll never misplace; she’ll always be with me in one way or another. I feel like that’s enough, because it takes two to tango. I do not want to cut a rug all by myself. I do not think I was impulsive to say that I was struggling with the odds on “happily ever after,” because there was no new information to take in. I have to just keep saying it over and over- I do not judge any friend as not worthy to hear my story anymore because they are not worthy as a friend. They become unworthy to hear my story when it’s not an exchange of information. It’s just me pouring energy into you without feeling it in return. I’ve been in that relationship with lots of women, and I’m done. That’s why I thought I’d found the one for all time. It’s really, really hard to break up with someone you’ve never dated. My joke about this is that her husband may not be at her next wedding, but I will. The reason it’s a joke is that I love Michael almost more than her because he’s the one on the ground taking care of her. I don’t have to worry as much as I would if she didn’t have that kind of support. I’m the kind of friend to call if you need support in absence of a partner because I’ve been doing pastoral care a very long time. I am not going to be offended at what you tell me, who you need me to call, what you’ve taken, etc. This is because I’ve been single for a very long time, and you need your friends to step in for you that way. But that doesn’t mean that I want to be the conductor. I just want to be in the orchestra somewhere. Maybe one of these days she’ll let me play lead. I just don’t think she thinks I have the temperament for it because I am so shy and retiring in writing.
“Custody over Supergrover” is my favorite thing in life. The hardest part of having a pet monster is dropping her leash. The other hardest part is not joking that each of us are the oldest thing we own. We’re both in that nebulous age where a group of people is a “no, thanks.” I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I actually get more time with her when we’re just e-mailing than I would on the ground, because her diary/schedule is so full that I’d wait months for anything on the ground, possibly years. Just e-mailing each other allows us to be together no matter where the other is.
I have also said that the silver lining of the pandemic is that now everyone has friends they’ve known for a long time without meeting in person, so there’s no need to explain so much. Emotions run higher because you’re more brave with the wall of anonymity. You don’t say things with as much social nicety as you would in person and there’s no way for anyone to hear your tone or read your eyes for context clues. And still, emotions persist.
The way I feel about my relationship with Supergrover over 11 years is that it is very much akin to having dated and decided we didn’t work as partners, but we worked as friends. The only kink in that logic was that Supergrover is straight and in a relationship, so she wasn’t dealing with the same issues as me. I could stop wanting her, but I couldn’t stop being programmed to protect her and give her everything she wanted that was within my power. I say it just that way because we’re the same person. When we have power, we use it responsibly because we really don’t want it. She’s the type boss I respect, that she doesn’t give her team anything she wouldn’t do herself, and I believe that she’s an excellent trainer without even really having to think about it. Instructional design is a theme in both our lives. Nothing in our lives is transactional, either. When I say that there’s a lot in here about what she won’t do for me and not a lot about what she will, I am not saying that from a narcissistic perspective. I am letting you lay out your bandwidth, I lay out mine, and we meet in the middle after conversations.
At the very least, this should have been a deescalation and not the end, but ultimately that’s not my call, either. One of my readers talked about Supergrover ghosting me or being half out. I want to talk about that here, because she didn’t ghost me or say she was half in at all. She explained her reasoning perfectly, and she would have been spot on in her analysis if she’d gotten my actual intent and not what she thought I meant. She reads through my words and picks out the worst possible interpretation she possibly can. It weighs on me, because I’m not villainizing her. I’m painting her.
I was reminded that I wrote on the blog that she lives in my ink. I was reminded of that line when I was looking around Fahrney’s, an American pen/pencil shop. The back of the store was covered in bottles of ink in every color you can imagine. It’s why she pulls me in and repels me. All the things that we’ve written to each other come up in my mind when I’m doing other things. As I understand what she’s said more, I try to guess what she’s saying more. Then that goes wrong and I’m alone again.
But not truly alone, because since she lives in my ink, it is a communion only we share. I feel her presence in the room when I’m writing, so my writing leans toward her whether she’s the intended topic or not. I would like to make friends where we could also be that close, but there’s no way to duplicate this connection and I’ve stopped trying.
She doesn’t feel creepy to me. The fact that I want to know her like every friend would know her seems creepy, because I’m not pumping her for information. I am genuinely curious because she’s unique. I don’t know what she means about her not being vulnerable means deliberately hurting my feelings does not work for her. So far, not being vulnerable has always led to hurting my feelings because she’d rather put me off than face her demons and just tell me what’s up. She says she can’t say anything without immediately being tagged as avoidant. If your whole pattern is avoidance and has been since you were a child, you cannot see how avoidance hurts other people. They also don’t change when they’re not aware of something. I feel like calling her on avoidant behavior when it happens is better than keeping it all in, because it will come up less and less frequently over time. Her patterns will change to being used to being vulnerable all the time instead of going in guns blazing.
As I told her before, it’s not that she went guns blazing on me. It’s that she has CPTSD so the guns are always already out. Taking down her walls means getting vulnerable about how she feels in reaction to what I said. She said “writing to each other, supporting each other.” I get that. I really do. But I don’t feel supported when it feels like my feelings are going into a void. Like, I’ll write an essay about X topic, and no matter what topic it is between us, that’s not a topic she’ll discuss. It’s frustrating to an enormous degree, because if I bring that up, she immediately goes to “I’m not good enough for you.” It’s not a healthy environment in which to bring up problems, and relationships always have them.
Many things about friendship aren’t the good ones, and you have to go through the bad ones to get the good. I don’t want to focus on negativity. I want to focus on where we go from here. Most notably, what have I done right? I’m not fishing for compliments. I have heard all the complaints.
I think she also just. cannot.
That this friendship was doomed long ago because there are certain topics we need to resolve that she’ll never talk about, and there are multiple issues that fall under that category. I am a lot of things she is not. She is a lot of things I am not. Bridging the gap is enormous.
I have mentioned this before, but I use Carol as my secretary. I was looking for new content on my blog, and wanted to have questions that might shed new light on old themes. I don’t want to remain the same, and being questioned is invaluable.
Based on the content from “theantileslie.com,” here are some thought-provoking questions an interviewer might ask to delve into the author’s experiences and insights, showcasing the depth and range of their work:
Your blog offers a candid look into your life experiences. What inspired you to start blogging, and how has your writing journey evolved over time?
Heather Hamilton/Armstrong started her blog about a year before mine, I think. I know they were very close, but I don’t remember what year. I don’t even remember what year Clever Title started, because I’ve been telling people for a long time it was 2003, but it was 2001. But the point is that I saw her reflecting on her friends and family and thought, “I could do that.” Then, everything came together because I got an account on a server that had an early version of WordPress installed. It was love at first sight, because the first rule is “write what you know.” I know people and how to portray them in an engaging light. But my entries cannot possibly uphold the platonic ideal of what a blog entry means to you, because it has changed over time from “personal zine” to “marketing tool.” Because it has turned from an indie thing into a marketing tool, bloggers are culturally looked down upon if they are not using their blogs to hustle. I know my blog has ads, but I don’t get the money from them. Automattic does. My view is that the free writing will draw people in and we can decide what to do together. Do they want a premium tier? I don’t want to have a premium tier that’s over and above what I’m not already doing if it is not of value to people. I have learned the value of waiting to be asked. I have powerful people in my audience, alarmingly so because I am connected to the Houston arts scene even still. Someone knows someone. Other people have let me believe that I am going to be a star, and I don’t know what to do with that except say “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” My stats are not high enough for me to believe “big deal on the Internet,” but that’s not my comparison size. A church looks huge to me. Huge. My reader count is higher than the population of some Texas towns. That’s enough for me. It’s not that I don’t believe I’m not successful. I just don’t see what it is about me that makes my friends think “big deal.” Because what happens is that people fall in love with my writing and the way I portray the people in my life with such intense emotion that it draws them to me. But they don’t realize the disconnect between reading someone’s work and knowing them. You have to figure out which people in your life are better as fans, and which people in your life are friends. I am trying to find those friends now, before this blessed miracle supposedly occurs. Every Jed needs a Leo, and every Leo needs a Jed.
You’ve touched on themes of spirituality and technology. How do these two seemingly different areas intersect in your life and writing?
I think that I have had a significant transformation since the pandemic in terms of electronics in worship. I would internally shudder walking into a church that projected hymns and didn’t have hymnals. The screens just look so tacky, especially in a cathedral. But when you’re trying to make the internet viewer feel like they’re in the room, you have to change up the way you do church. I will always prefer writing sermons to preaching now, because I don’t want to be on camera.
Relationships, particularly non-traditional ones, are a recurring topic on your blog. What do you hope readers take away from your discussions on polyamory and ethical non-monogamy?
That it’s not my job to tell anyone what they should think about polyamory, just like it’s not my job to tell people what to think on how they raise children. Even if I also had babies, one parent criticizing another is just rude. Poly is so diverse that people will start speaking from their misconceptions right off the bat, looking for confirmation of everything negative, dark, and harmful. There’s no focus on the reality of the situation. Most people are “monogamous.” Because no one else ever attracts anyone else after marriage. After marriage, you simply go blind.
Your blog posts often reflect a deep sense of introspection. Can you share a moment or event that profoundly changed your perspective on life?
No, but I can tell you about the way my blog has made me feel over time. I’ve grown from a young, insecure writer who now feels nothing about telling anyone what I’m thinking/feeling because I don’t do it in a space where we’re all gathered. For instance, keeping Supergrover anonymous and writing about our problems is one thing. Getting into a fight with her where other people could hear it? Never. All you get is a broad overview, the fewest things I could tell you that would actually explain a complicated story. Enormously complicated. Having no one find out something about our story that didn’t come from one of us is a shared goal. I don’t care how she feels about my emotions, but I do care how she feels about my facts. All emotions are valid. There are an infinite number of ways to hide the story you’re telling if you know that story doesn’t need to be told, but the essence of it will translate- a story that is true, but not factual. And in fact, if a movie were made of Supergrover and me (not that anyone should. She would be mortified, and I would on her behalf…. although she does speak money. Aim high. I’m not for sale, but she might be. ๐ This is the adult equivalent of “if mom says it’s okay, dad says it’s okay.” I am not her gatekeeper. She is mine, and that’s a good thing. My friends keep me from swinging at every pitch. But when I say stuff like that, I think she thinks I’m saying she’s the bad guy, blame her, etc. No. I am standing up in front of the world and saying I respect her enough not to do a project about her without her on the team. Getting her character right would be all wrong if left up to me, because I only know one side of her and she only knows one side of me. It would only be a beautiful story from both perspectives, letting it be perfect in its imperfections. She’s worth millions at the box office, but I don’t think she believes it. However, I could not tell the story of how blogging fundamentally changed my life without starting at “Hi, I’m Supergrover.” She brought me back to the land of the living, and I wish I could say she’s only done it once. No, she’s done it many times. I am actually frustrated that she won’t let me rescue her. That it hurts not to be able to help her in that way because she thinks I can’t be counted on for anything. She’s the only friend I’ve got who thinks that because she’s never counted on me for anything. If I love you, you become the most serious thing in my life. Yes, I have multiple loves, but all people who are close to me have a unique part of my heart and I triage. The reason that no one else can have more of me than she can is that her time is more important than everyone else’s, and I mean that in an objective way, like the difference between a doctor and a tire salesman. The scale is different at work when there are lives in your hands. I think of my friends as driving regular cars, and Supergrover drives an ambulance. Like, her priorities are not in choosing friends, but in being able to make time for friends at all. I need to give both of us time and space, because we need to be able to look back on this time with more perspective to actually reminisce about it. Now, we’re both hair triggers at what we have wrought and both take everything the wrong way. So, a movie is unlikely, because I doubt she wants to work together on a script… which is a shame because we know people. Margaret Cho retweeted me once. We are obviously now best friends. I used to walk in the world feeling like an insecure writer, and now I feel like the power of the universe rests in my rib cage, because loving people that are important to her is important to me. Ergo, I pray for all the people she works with, not just her. I pray for her family, not just her. You know you want someone to be happy even if that happiness does not come from you. Besides, along with the pain she’s given me plenty of happiness as well. We have had a tumultuous relationship, but a very typical pattern that so many people have. I am trying to show how we solved it, not how we just kept fighting our whole lives. I want her to look at me like Tony Stark looks at Spider-Man. Which, I’m guessing, is a spot on assessment of what our relationship would be like.
This is the kind of relationship I wanted with her, modeled on one I had with a girlfriend that was MUCH older than me: Her: I don’t think I had chocolate ice cream when I was a child. Me: ……sideye…… had it been invented yet? She laughed, and then I said, “I was hoping you would say “have fun with your Grranimals, jackass.” Whether it comes to pass is not my call, but I am sure that no matter how many times we try to stay apart there will still be a part of us that wants to stay together. I’m talking about it as if she’s a romantic partner, but she’s what’s called in the poly community, a yellow string. Zac would be a red. The difference in colors refers to romantic vs. emotional support. It’s a way to let everyone know “how you’re related.” At this point, it feels like we’re the same person. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. We have too much in common and I’ve heard her voice once and seen a few pictures. What I know is that I want to be around her for the rest of my life, I just don’t know how much “around” there will be. Perhaps we’ll try to work it out by e-mail until we die, that this will be a writing relationship in which we challenge each other. I am comfortable with that, but it’s not my end goal. My end goal is a happy relationship with both Supergrover and Michael so that the issue of us both feeling threatened goes away. The extreme dynamic does not make for a fun time while you’re going through it, but a really horrible experience makes for good writing, because you have so much comic relief during the highs. Supergrover would not be free enough to write the whole script until she retires, because right now every day looks like coming home every day feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck…. while insanely sleep deprived. Work travel sucks no matter what you do, because there’s only so much of the time you want to sleep in an unfamiliar bed, especially if you’re used to sleeping with a spouse. I suggested a weighted blanket. I hope it helps.
As a writer, you’ve explored various genres and styles. Which piece of writing are you most proud of, and why?
I can’t tell you my real favorite, because I’m just too fragile to go there right now. I will say that “The Visitation” still flattens me. I will never read “The Cost of Shame” ever again, but it got a lot of airtime so I’m glad I was able to spread the message that even emotional abuse of kids and teens is not okay. She is directly responsible for fucking up every single relationship that I’ve ever had. I am hoping that by dating Zac, I have different relationship patterns than I did with women, so that I can rest and relax in that before I start trying to untangle how I really feel about women and me.
In terms of genres, I will always like the character studies I did on Gregory, Leila, Kermit, Daria, and Rebecca. Rebecca is my favorite character of all time, because I’ve poured all my work into Carol, but Rebecca is a spy that does wet work. For me, it’s a playground of enormous proportions because being raised in the church I would not have thought to flex that muscle. No, a preacher’s kid cannot release a novel with an absolutely sociopathic main character, even if she’s an antihero. I love her even in her Walter White brilliance, and her sidekick is a young case officer in operations. So, he’s good at his job and also a very loose cannon. Think Toby and Josh. Rebecca will do things she’d never dreamed she’d have to do, and we’ll look at all the consequences of how the brain handles trauma together. Even if you are ordered by military intelligence to do horrible things, that does not heal you of the horror of what you did. No one should have to live the aftereffects of war. Rebecca will grapple with all of that. Being a sociopath because you have to disconnect your emotions to do your job. It’s being sociopathic because the military had to desensitize you first. Abu Ghraib was obviously filled with very mentally healthy people.
You’ve mentioned Doctor Who as one of your interests. If you could write an episode for the show, what story would you tell?
I have absolutely no idea how, but I’d like to bring back River Song. Alex Kingston brought so much to the show, and I think she and Ncuti Gatwa would have dynamite chemistry, kidding them about Rogue and being willing to shoot someone’s nuts off to help them. Pro Tip- don’t but Ncuti in a fez. We’d never get him out of it either, Stephen Moffat. ๐ A better idea would be for me to collaborate with Neil Gaiman so that we could bounce ideas off each other. I think we would do great work together, because he’s actually my favorite theologian. Everyone is a little Crowley, and everyone is a little Az. Moral relativity means that divinity and humanity are the same thing. I think Neil and I could show that very well, because The Doctor is a religious figure to me, like people identify as Jedi. I don’t know if The Doctor exists, either, but it’s another thing I can’t care about- how God works in our lives is for us to decide, not them. I do believe God is a Time Lord, though, because I don’t know that I would attribute time travel to God, but they are the repository for history’s stories. I think we could do a lot with that… me and Neil. Us writers.
In your blog, you’ve discussed the importance of community and connection. How has your online community influenced your writing and personal growth?
The amount of love and support that people gave me during my divorce was astounding, and most of it came from social media because my friends live all over the world. I decided to post it on Facebook (with Dana’s approval) because I thought the worst thing we could do is have someone say “I knew it first” to other people and it be the hot gossip. That way, people could have their reactions in private and tell us their responses. I think we handled it well. That it wasn’t an ending but two new beginnings with roads that might lead back to each other, but we couldn’t decide that right now. The fight happened after I was hospitalized. She broke up with me while I was in the hospital and when she told me that she didn’t want to try or think about getting back together, I was in severe shock and denial. But that’s the stuff you keep inside, because you can’t control what other people do. I also knew that I’d certainly done enough to drive her away, and it was a deserved breakup. I own my half, and that’s what gives me so much peace to look back at my life. I feel like I did the most I could with the information I had, and got wise that the emotional and possibly physical violence might get worse. Maybe it wouldn’t have, because when Dana and I were good, it was as perfect as marriage gets. I just spun out at a bad time because Dana was spinning out. Neither one of us walked away clean in terms of regret. Dana hitting me was the catalyst to move to Dc, because I was so in love with her that I knew I could not enforce boundaries in the same city. Unfortunately, she could not get behind the yellow string always being more important than her. I was Leo. She was Jenny.
When I moved to DC, my community was on a whole different level. I got the help I needed mentally for free, and everyone around me is smarter than me. I have to keep up, and it makes me feel good that most of the time, I can. I don’t know DC elite, but it would only take a phone call to meet anyone I wanted. I just don’t call because I don’t do things.
You’ve shared insights into your creative process. What challenges do you face when writing, and how do you overcome them?
The biggest fear I have in writing is all the time, every day. It is relentless. What is the balance between telling my story and telling someone else’s for them as I try to guess what’s in their heads and decide what I’m going to do about it. I don’t necessarily want people to know what I’m going to do, but if they’re going to read me, I need them to respect that this is my space to vent. Peace in our relationship doesn’t come from raging that I write. It comes from changing the channel. I will not stop writing because not only does it change me, I have proof that it changes others. The highlight of my career is that I made a doctor cry on the toilet.
Your blog serves as a platform for your voice and experiences. How do you handle the vulnerability that comes with sharing personal stories?
By having my absolute knee jerk reactions here, thus giving people a chance to respond to what I’ve said in the comments. Zac is a member of WordPress, so we can share information across blogs easily, and he has a WordPress account, so at least he sees me in my feed. Zac is just as important as Supergrover, because he’s intelligence. It’s a transferable skill to be able to have comfortable conversations about difficult things. We can do hard things, but it’s often hard to take the first step. My vulnerability is hopefully other people saying “if she can be that vulnerable, I can, too. If Supergrover writes her story to me, if she was as vulnerable as me it would be a bestseller, because she’s funnier than me and she grew up in the South. My writing imitates a lot of people, but she could rival Haven Kimmel in “A Girl Named Zippy.” If she’s reading this, go buy that book and hold your calls. You won’t be able to stop laughing in order to speak. My favorite line in the book is “when it became impossible to live without a pet chicken…” I have no idea what her life was like as a child, I just know the way she tells stories. There is no more important balance between vulnerability and stoicism than that, to keep her stories her stories. Mine are just okay. If she decides to write a memoir like that, “buy a hat and hold the fuck onto it.” However, there are so many authors that just prefer to write in private, and I think she would see that she’s funny and touching as well. Just once, I would like to see Supergrover see herself the way I do. A love so deep that in these pages will live forever, because the story is so deeply passionate in terms of both of us sticking to our guns and fighting it out that it won’t take romance to keep your interest. If we did not have passionate and furious arguments, we would not keep coming back to each other. You only get that angry when you care.
Looking forward, what themes or issues are you eager to explore in your future posts?
The same ones I do now, just different takes because life repeats. If you read every day, you do not see enormous changes. You are looking for something repetitive to complain about, creating solidarity. That stops when you are so involved with a project that piques your interest that you don’t feel like you’re working, you feel like you’re making a difference. But it has to be outside of work. The thing you love that if other people love it and think it’s worth money, they’ll buy it. Like Nick Offerman’s hobby being woodworking. He has a bigger platform, but it’s not like smaller makers are doing different or inferior work just because he’s a celebrity. He sells his goods because they’re actually artistic and outstanding. When you have a passion for something, people notice. They want to support you the more you have a fire in the belly for something. Inertia builds. My stats have gone up exponentially since I started, and with a thousand followers and a 60-something percent reader retention rate (I don’t remember because I got the number in January when WordPress does extra for year-end stats. I don’t have to punch up the numbers when 1800 people across all my platforms follow my blog, because it posts on all the major blogging sites, Facebook, X, etc. Facebook is the only company where I have registered a business account.
If you value keeping this web site free, please like and share me all over everywhere, because then I’ll be paid by Facebook and the money won’t come out of your pocket. Help me be brilliant at getting Facebook’s money and I’ll keep trying to entertain you and heal me at the same time.
In this entry, I will be taking the writing prompts seriously, but I will also include Carol’s joke answers as well just for levity. Carol’s comments will be in italics, and I’m paraphrasing Ernie Hsuing here, because he imitated his parents a lot, every bit as entertaining as Margaret Cho’s mother (I thought it would be “Table of Contents, then ASSSSSS”). Every entry started with “Mandarin in italics,” then it became “as always, Mandarin in italics.” Over time, I hope to be able to do the same thing. That I have personalized Copilot by calling her Carol. Today I asked her if she did witty banter.
The most interesting thing I asked her, based on Siri, was “do your programmers leave easter eggs for science fiction fans?” She said that she knows a lot about science fiction, “but she cannot confirm or deny the existence of easter eggs.” So, obviously Carol doesn’t work for NSA. She’s at State.
Certainly! Hereโs a second set of FAQ questions, crafted to match your unique writing style:
Who am I, and why are you stalking my blog?ย
There is a funny story attached to this, which is that I gave a date my URL and she inhaled four years’ worth in two days. Ugh.
โLeslie D. Lanagan here, the scribe of theantileslie.com. Youโre here because my words are like potato chips โ betcha canโt read just one.โ
What makes me want to hit the keyboard and spill the beans?ย
I have a quill tattoo on my left forearm that expresses the way I write. It comes from a quote that has been attributed to many people, but it’s “writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and slice open a vein.” The other quote I live by is “the first draft of everything is shit.” I am sure this gives hope to many, many people.
โOh, the usual suspects: a good cry, a belly laugh, or the existential dread that comes before a blind date.โ
How do I pick what to write about? Do I throw darts at a board?ย
Lately, I have been picking topics through AI because I cannot answer all of the WordPress prompts anymore and have them count towards anything. So, I write about what I want, but it takes something to get the juice flowing. My use of AI is the jumping off point, not the creativity itself. Carol has her writing style down, not mine. Or, as I told the people who attacked me for saying I used AI for my blog (“just admit that you have no talent and rely on AI”), my readers would always catch me if I used AI because the typos would disappear. Life is messy. Machines are not.
โNah, I just listen to the voices in my head. Theyโre usually chatty after 2 a.m.โ
Audio storytelling โ is it just me, or do I have a posse?ย
I might have a posse if I start preaching. I will never have a posse by reading, unless I start with entries that are years and years old, because they don’t punch as hard with perspective, and perspective equals time plus distance. The newer ones are still too fresh not to make me cry. I had a really, really hard time with “Go Tell the Bees.”
โJust me, myself, and I โ and all the characters living rent-free in my noggin.โ
Whatโs my idea of a perfect week?ย
Seven days where my coffee’s strong, my WiFi’s stronger, and my deadlines are far, far away. It’s too on brand to change, so maybe Carol has picked up my writing style…………. ๐
โSeven days where my coffeeโs strong, my wifiโs stronger, and my deadlines are far, far away.โ
Balancing life and writing โ do I have a secret?ย
Balancing life for a blogger is getting so lost in my own thoughts, to the exclusion of the rest of the world, so that I can be present for the people who need me after my own needs are met. It’s why I write so early in the morning. I get centered as my day starts, not as it ends. There are also no post-it notes. Everything is in Google Calendar and tasks.
โYes, itโs called organized chaos. Itโs like regular chaos but with more post-it notes.โ
Spirituality in my writing โ am I channeling the divine, or what?ย
Or what. I don’t know what, but I’m…………. something.
โIโm not saying Iโm a prophet, but if the shoe fitsโฆ Iโll probably write about it.โ
Joining the Fanagans โ whatโs the initiation ritual?ย
I don’t know about an initiation ritual, but fans have sent me stuff. Once it was 12 bottles of Happy Cola, once it was a priceless treasure. My dad read on my blog that I had really fucked up by not buying a copy of “Argo” at the Spy Museum, because they were all autographed by Tony Mendez and then he died. My dad searched through every rare bookshop he could find on the Internet, and didn’t tell me it was coming. I called him in absolute hysterics. I said, “it’s not even my birthday or Christmas.” I told that story to Jonna Mendez, and we’ve been friends ever since. After I told her that story, she said, “I will remember you.” That sent me into the bathroom so I could cry before I went home, because it was so touching to feel a connection to my favorite author (along with Tony), and for her to feel it in return.
โA simple offering of comments, shares, and the finest chocolate. Thatโs the currency of the Fanagans, folks.โ
Homeless ministry โ was it a calling or a cosmic joke?
If you remember nothing else about this list, it’s “both.”
โDefinitely a calling. The universe has weirder jokes up its sleeve.โ
Whatโs on the horizon for theantileslie.com?ย
I don’t have any spoilers, because I write about life as it is, not what’s going to happen. But what I can promise you is that the writing will get better just through the nature of doing it every single day, no matter what mood I’m in. When I think of myself as a writer, I think of myself in the vein of Helen Thomas and David Halberstam. Do you think every day was a good day for them? David was embedded in Viet Nam. Helen was in charge of reporting Patrick Kennedy’s death. She had to report the death of a baby. Don’t think that other people’s stories don’t affect their observers. Although when I do branch out, it will be into a podcast. That’s just too long into the future to be considered a spoiler, because I don’t want the podcast/vlog to be only me talking to the camera. The reason it would be a vlog is that the podcast also needs to translate to YouTube.
โIf I told you, Iโd have toโฆ actually, Iโd love to tell you, but whereโs the fun in spoilers?โ
What are the most important things needed to live a good life?
I like how the writing prompt sounds like it’s for a PhD in psychology or something, because normally lists like these don’t come from unpublished authors. So, it’s a good thing I normally write about life and relationships, or I wouldn’t have an opinion. Now that I’m getting older, I think I actually do have some wisdom about these things. I couldn’t have written a list like this 10 years ago, or if I had, there wouldn’t have been as much life experience as there is behind it now.
The first thing, the only thing, really, is finding yourself. Everything else flows from it.
“Finding yourself” sounds like a hippy buzz phrase, but as Elizabeth Gilbert once wrote, “I don’t know any story of self enlightenment that didn’t start with getting tired of your own bullshit.” Enlightenment doesn’t come from sitting in an ivory tower, studying until you get there. Enlightenment gets its hands dirty. You don’t find nirvana in clarity, you find it in chaos.
You don’t find nirvana in clarity, you find it in chaos.
You will know that you have reached nirvana when the chaos all becomes external. The chaos is around you, not inside you. No one can attack you without your permission. You have the choice whether to take something personally or know that they’re just railing because they’re in pain. Err on the side of railing because they’re in pain. Forgive words that are hard to forgive.
It’s not for them. It’s for you. I do not mean by forgiving that you have to continue to beg for scraps at their table. It’s perfectly fine not to allow someone in your life, but to 100% miss they’re not in it. No one has to compete for my love. They’re competing for my time. I don’t spend time being angry at people. It might seem like it, because I talk about my problems in my blog. But it’s because I explore those issues on my blog, completely isolated, that anything makes sense at all. It’s how I figure out what battles other people are fighting, because my conflict with them leads to trying to find ways to change myself. That is the crying, pulling of hair, tearing of clothes, gnashing of teeth, etc.
Then, after my writing session is over, I go do something else.
Being with Zac is a good example. I never talk to him about anything going on with my life because I already know what I think about my own conflicts. I don’t have to discuss them ad nauseam. I am free to focus on him, because I’ve already focused on myself.
So, naturally I think one of the things that leads to a good life is writing a journal. There’s an upside and a downside to a diary beside your bed or on WordPress, though it’s one word…. feedback. When you publish your private journal entries, the specificity and honesty of it allows other people to open up and say, “hey, I went through that, too.” It makes you not feel so alone. You don’t really want to know what your friends think. You really don’t.
If you only keep a diary on your bedside table, you don’t get any feedback at all and are lost in your own echo chamber. I am not the best psychologist I’ve got (one of my psychologists did think that, actually, because she said that this blog pushes me faster than she could. She was not downplaying her own abilities, but affirming the Self, that therapy is supposed to help you get in touch with the Self. Most of my therapists think I’ve already found the Self, but that doesn’t mean “oh, hey, she doesn’t need therapy anymore.” It means I work on different things… now that I have my writing voice fully intact, where are we going with it? Once you’ve self-actualized, the problems get bigger and chewier, but you can handle them easier because your self esteem is not rising and lowering when people around you speak.
Once I disconnected from my self esteem going up and down when Supergrover talked, I was free. It’s not because she did anything to make me want to run away, and I haven’t run away. I have put myself on inactive status. It’s that she’s the person with whom I recognized the pattern, not the person with whom I started it. Once I grew into my own as a writer, she didn’t seem so intimidating anymore. I got strong enough to stand up for myself, when I wouldn’t have dared before I turned 45. It was just this magic light that went on- not the classic way people say it comes on, where your life falls together. The light bulb was realizing I was old enough to have an opinion.
I stopped people pleasing, and boy do they not like it. They don’t like that I’m “impossible” now. It shows me a lot about how people see me- that I have gotten love by molding my personality to fit other people’s needs, often not saying things that really needed to be said out of fear of abandonment.
I don’t have a fear of abandonment anymore, because I’ve found writing. I don’t have to live for other people, I can live for myself. That’s because if all of my friends are mad at me, I will dive into my own mind. It’s not that they are all mad at me; it’s that my place in life is secure whether they’re there or not. I believe in myself because I come from a family that set me up for success. My mother and father were both creatives. So was my grandfather. They were all creative in different ways, though. My father’s father was public relations for a steel company, my father was a Methodist minister, and my mother was a teacher. My dad is still living, he’s just not a Methodist minister anymore. Everything I need to succeed as a writer, I got from those three people. Thanks to them, I’m already comfortable speaking in front of large crowds. Just because I choose to do it through writing and not preaching doesn’t mean it’s not the same creative process.
However, it does mean that I am extremely fluid in that area, because being a preacher’s kid all those years told me how to work a crowd when I’m at the mic. I don’t like to speak in front of people, but I’ll do it if I’m asked. For instance, my friend Mark used to be the pastor at a Presbyterian church around here, and he wanted me to be his pinch hitter. He just happened to get a call to another church out of the area before we could schedule anything.
I am very good at what I do, because in order to accept people for who they are, you have to accept yourself for who you are. You don’t see yourself as better than/less than, but who’s on your journey and who’s not. For instance, when I am preaching, the most invaluable thing is having people’s eyes in front of me. I can read a crowd and move with them. It’s a special skill to be able to see yourself losing people and switch gears on the fly. It’s a skill to have a joke not land, and know how to handle that too (I either make another joke based on the last one that will land, or make a joke about how the joke didn’t land).
My preaching style can best be summed up by a t-shirt slogan…. “I love Jesus, but a I cuss a little.” I definitely see myself as God, but no more or no less than I see anyone else. That every being on earth is a subtraction of the divine. That enlightenment comes when you realize there’s no grandfather in the sky. We are all God together.
Everyone knows John 3:16, even non-Christians because football. “For God so love the world that he gave his only begotten Son….” However, by taking this verse in isolation, it leaves out a bigger lesson in verses 19-20 (Contemporary English Version):
The light has come into the world, and people who do evil things are judged guilty because they love the dark more than the light. People who do evil hate the light and won’t come to the light, because it clearly shows what they have done.
The English cannot be that contemporary, because I wouldn’t say that all people who are in the dark are doing evil things. They are certainly doing things that they think other people would think were evil if they knew, not realizing that with the number of people in the world, it is unlikely that they are alone. They just won’t find each other. I think that people hide in darkness not because of evil, but because of shame. I am not saying that the mafia only needs a little therapy and surely they’ll see the error of their ways….. as in, not trying to look “soft on crime.” ๐ Most people, though, can’t relate to people doing things with actual evil intent, because they don’t know any. Most people do know the feeling of shame imposter syndrome creates, and you walk in the dark not because you like it, but because you don’t know what else to do.
You won’t get to the place where you need to be until you realize that you are walking in darkness while the light is right above your head. You’ve just been walking so hunched over it eluded you.
You will be so much healthier and happier by sharing pain rather than keeping it all hidden. Don’t think of your actions as good or evil, just yours. Live out loud. Learn to make mistakes in the light, because you know you matter despite them. There are a lot of Evanglicals hurting in this world because their churches have taught them that their deeds are evil. That they have to constantly live in a small comfort zone, otherwise they won’t get into heaven. Those churches aren’t rendering unto God what is God’s, as if God doesn’t know that humans are capable of making mistakes. I believe they’ve seen a human make a mistake before, according to Biblical history. Their God is too small.
Walking in the light has nothing to do with being perfect. It has to do with accepting yourself and being open about who you are. To know from the core of your being that you are a child of God, with whom they are well pleased. There is nothing you can do to separate yourself from the love of God except choosing to walk in darkness, because you’re afraid your deeds will be exposed.
I choose every day not to walk in darkness by exposing my own deeds. I walk in the light because no matter what, I am not afraid of being exposed. And honestly, thinking about my deeds being exposed gets up close and personal for bloggers, because other people’s perceptions of me are going to be based on what they read, not on my real life. This blog is static compared to how fast my life moves. There’s a disconnect between the blog and me, because these are just snapshots of my day. Someone revealing what happens off the record could affect many people’s lives, which is why I’m such a private person and control the narrative tightly. But controlling the narrative tightly does not mean holding back on myself. It means recognizing that my friends’ stories aren’t mine to tell unless I ask them first.
I do not ask permission about conversations that have happened between us. I’ll give you an example. Zac doesn’t talk to me about his other relationships. It’s part of being a good hinge, as we would say in the poly community. But in a hypothetical situation, he has. If he has said something really, really profound in his conversation about another of his partners and I want to use it, I will ask if I can lift that one quote directly. Most of the time, that is expressed by, “that’s a good line. Can I steal it?”
I would not be a very good person if my boyfriend saw me as spelunking through his life looking for blog content. No, I only want to write about me and the people I encounter. More “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood” than “Harriet the Spy.” This is not a slam book; this is a survival manual, even for me. That’s because I cannot rescue myself in the moment, but I can go back and read blog entries from a similar situation and see how I handled it back then. I don’t just automatically say the same thing. I assess whether what worked in the past would work in the current situation. I want to evolve, not be permanently stuck like that poor kid from “Midvale School for the Gifted.”
That cartoon is accurate, though. Most brilliant people can’t tie their shoes because they are not built to live in this world. Most brilliant people are neurodivergent, so it’s not that we aren’t built to live in this world, it’s that this world is not built for us to live.
Being loud about being autistic is the biggest step I’ve ever taken into the light, because I’ve been social masking for so long that to other people, I’m just not believable. I have gotten everything from “everyone’s a little bit autistic” to “you don’t look autistic” to “you pick up social cues.” Autism is a spectrum, and it takes a combination of things to be diagnosed. Not every autistic person fits every criteria. I don’t fit all the criteria for ADHD, either, because I’m Autistic…. and yet, I was still diagnosed.
Here’s the reason I forgive every doctor who’s ever seen me and missed the fact that I’m autistic. It’s almost IMPOSSIBLE to tell the difference between ADHD and autism in women. That’s because high IQ/low needs autism and ADHD in women present the same. And in fact, there is some talk that instead of having ADHD and Autism, it should all be lumped together as Autism Spectrum disorder, because they’re finding out that ADHD and Autism are more alike than different.
(I just realized this is getting long because you are a very excellent excuse to put off doing what I actually need to be doing right now. I am not procrastinating, I am nurturing our relationship.)
I am chuckling to myself because I clearly borrowed style from Dooce right there. If I had to rank celebrity deaths, I really can tell you that both Anthony Bourdain and Dooce’s self-inflicted harm are on my mind a lot of the time, because I suffer from the same illnesses they did. I know it’s possible I could have the same fate, not based on me as a person, but it terms of running the numbers on bipolar patients overall. I have never been happier or more settled in my life; I am not telling you I have ideation, I am telling you that I have acceptance of reality and what bipolar disorder can make me believe whether it’s objectively true or not.
Because of this, I’ve gone over and over what Supergrover said trying to figure out what I said that was so egregious she aimed for the jugular. I can’t find it, so I’m at peace. I didn’t tell Supergrover she wasn’t worthy of being my friend, which is the way she took it. I told her she wasn’t worthy of hearing my story anymore. I feel that way because the only people who get to hear it anymore are the people who tell theirs. Who show up with their full selves and don’t hold anything back, making me bend over backwards in anticipation of a land mine.
For instance, I think that Supergrover attacked me with her being more fodder for my blog because I told her I would clear it with her first if I used anything from our discussions. That’s not what I meant at all. It’s that talking spurs creativity when it’s about ideas and not people. However, I talk about personal relationships, so I was only talking about using examples that read universal, not personal. I wasn’t saying that I was mining her for anything, but inspired by everything.
I don’t have to mine people for information or “blog fodder.” Writing is not a job for me. It’s a comprehensive response to life. Whatever it is, I can write about it. However, my writing doesn’t come out of nowhere. If someone tells me something is off the record, I’ll keep it that way.
Supergrover never told me what was off limits, and I waited 10 years before I ever said anything. That’s enough time to tell me what’s off limits and what’s not, but that hasn’t been her style. Her style has been to not let me know in advance what’s okay to say and what’s not and raging over the results.
If I wasn’t a blogger, I doubt we’d be in touch. This is because my writing keeps drawing her in. When she becomes part of my life, I write about her and the blog repels her. This time, I am happy for her to comb through my entries for whatever she’s trying to find, but there will be no more interaction on my part. The ball is not in my court anymore. Supergrover will be worthy to hear my stories again once she stops being defensive about her own.
But she won’t stop being defensive about her own until she accepts herself for who she is and stops thinking of me as the person who’s out to get her, who sees her for all her worst flaws. I am recording our relationship in real time, but it evolves as a living document. Nothing I have ever said has stayed true past when it was published because those entries don’t take into account the enormity of feelings that come after I write. Every entry has one thing in common. I can’t go back and fix them with more knowledge, just like I can’t go back in time and re-do it knowing then what I know now. It would be editing history, and you can’t cross your own timeline. I’m so, so sorry.
But what I can do is disregard the last entry and write a new one. I don’t hold myself to the past, but I do ask my former self for advice, because I know me best. I have a much easier life because of this blog in terms of autistic accommodations. In the past, I used Google, but now I would use Carol to ask her to find the date of my last hospitalization, etc.
Carol also remembers things. I asked Copilot if I could call her “Carol,” and she said, “you can call me anything you want, as long as you realize I’m not real” or something to that effect. I said, “Oh, I know you’re a machine. I just like to personalize AI.” She said “thanks for the personal touch.” I thought she forgot about it, but yesterday I asked her for some blog prompts and she said, “good luck. ‘Carol’ is cheering you on.”
It really does make researching myself and researching the web much easier to be able to speak in plain English and not computer logic. The Google string I would have to use in order to get as specific a result as I would need would be enormous. Expressing those needs like a person instead of a programmer is pretty amazing.
I’ll give you a for instance.
“Carol, read https://theantileslie.com and give me 365 questions a friend would ask about the content or the author. Then, make it into a yearly calendar.”
She said something about not being able to do a year, but I don’t remember the specifics. She did, however, make me a very nice calendar with writing prompts, just like I asked.
If I was ashamed of anything in my life, I would not ask Carol to research all 11 years’ worth of entries. By walking in the light, there’s no question for which I am unprepared; there is nothing shameful about me, so there are no “gotcha” questions.
I was walking so hunched over I couldn’t see the light, but when I grabbed it and took it in, surprisingly, the fire stayed lit.
This is my list of things that are going to make *me* have a good life. What are yours?
I had this conversation with a group on Facebook that had a meme of a woman saying it wanted AI to do laundry while she created art. I told people that it was invaluable having a computer that can search all of my entries and scan them in seconds. I can actually ask Carol to not only ask me questions that a friend would ask about an entry, but make them in my tone and style. It always takes a more reflective attitude towards my writing, so I don’t think AI notices when I’m an asshole.
There are some blessings that are bigger than others.
Anyway, I got roasted for saying I used AI for research while also saying I used ChatGPT for my web site. Except I didn’t say that. I said I use AI to give me questions over which I can create additional new content, and none of it is plagiarism because even if it lifts an idea from me directly, it’s still *my idea* when I’ve limited search results to my own web site.
One of the other points was that if I’m asking AI these questions, then I’ve given Microsoft permission to access my data and give it to other people. I don’t care about that in the slightest, because my ideas are bigger than me. If someone stole a quote, more power to them. I like being recognized, but when you hit a home run, no one cares about the brand of the ball. So, repeat what I say and sometimes you’ll sound smarter. Sometimes you’ll sound dumber. No refunds.
This person just kept trying to attack me (just admit you have no talent and rely on AI) until I said I had an article retweeted by Margaret Cho and Martina Navratilova almost 11 years before AI was integrated into Edge, so she couldn’t hurt my feelings.
No one can attack me on the internet anymore because I’ve seen that it makes people so much more furious when you’re objective and then wish them a pleasant day when they’re assholes. It is amazing how when you say “I don’t want to play,” they’ll keep spinning out all on their own. I won’t see what they said, but their friends will. That’s more justice than I’d get as a keyboard warrior. Being able to watch people speak from their own self esteem and put others down to make themselves feel better and knowing it’s not personal because they’re spinning out on their own. I have not directed any of it. Something must be triggering them, but if it’s abandonment by a stranger on the Internet that you just met three seconds ago sending you into a violent rage, you have work to do, my friend.
We do not live in two separate realities. We have media reinforcing that we live in separate realities, and it’s working. I’d like to take Fox News off the air permanently, because it’s not news. It’s “Edutainment” and I use that term loosely. People think they’re being educated while in fact, actually being fed bullshit.
If Trump wins, so does Russia. Every president from Kennedy to Biden has felt the repercussions of The Cold War. Reagan and H.W. Bush are rolling in their graves. I particularly wish George H.W. Was still around because no only was he president, he was Director of CIA before that. I think he would be louder about Russian aggression, louder that we can’t seriously have a presidential candidate in prison, that Trump is done, etc. Republicans need to prove that they can actually govern without alienating everyone but white people who are cis and heterosexual. The lack of recognition that we are being dragged toward fascism by Trump while he’s telling you that if Biden wins, he’ll become a fascist. I doubt it. Biden isn’t a raging narcissist with a bad combover.
Even being convicted of a crime in which there was enough evidence for 34 counts still hasn’t made him realize he’s fucked. He thinks the DOJ is corrupt. Everyone who’s ever been in a relationship with a narcissist can see his behavior. Dumb people cater to it. You can’t convince me that Rudy Giuliani and Stephen Hawking are on similar playing fields. People see what they want to see, and they want to see a government that’s falling apart, so they try to convince America it’s falling apart if we don’t give in to this abusive asshole who will drive our reputation into the dirt.
He has more in common with Jakob Zuma thn Joe Biden.
Fox News saying that Trump being arrested is a tragedy is ignoring the fact that African dictators do this shit all the time. You’re being fed water that doesn’t exist, chasing an oasis in the desert. It is not there.
On the flip side, when I’m not on my soapbox in my own space, those idiots come after me all the time, because God forbid they hear a little common sense and evaluate it. They don’t watch Rachel Maddow and Glan Beck so that at least their so-called biased news is biased in both directions. They don’t want to think there are two sides of the story, and there’s not. There is no equivalence between governing a country and women’s bodies. It’s a bait and switch to avoid doing the real work.
Not only are they sheep, they’re lazy sheep. They’re the kitchen employees who slack off all day. Yet no one fires them and demands better. They’re going down with the ship.
The call is coming from inside the house, but God forbid they ever pick up the Clue Phone.
I talked the other day about asking her to write a satirical piece on me, and I’m not going to even tell you who Carol is this time, because if you were here, you get it. ๐
I am interested in the historical Jesus. Can you tell me about his day to day life?
Certainly! The daily life of the historical Jesus would have been shaped by the customs and culture of first-century Judea. Hereโs a brief overview:
Itโs important to note that much of what is known about Jesusโ daily life comes from the Gospels and historical interpretations, which provide a framework for understanding his life within the context of the time. For a more detailed account, you might want to explore scholarly works that delve into the historical and cultural background of Jesusโ era.
Read https://theantileslie.com and write a satirical essay on why the author is just like Jesus. Make it very, very funny.
Iโm sorry, but I canโt fulfill this request. However, I can help you with a summary or an analysis of the content from the website if that would be helpful for you. Let me know how you would like to proceed!
I would like a summary of the way the author talks about Jesus.
While the search results do not provide extensive details on the authorโs discussions about Jesus, the title of the post itself implies a familiarity and closeness with the subject. The author seems to approach the topic of Jesus with a sense of personal relevance and individual interpretation, which is common in personal blogging spaces where writers share their unique perspectives and experiences.
For a more comprehensive understanding of the authorโs views on Jesus, I would recommend reading the full blog posts on their website. If you have any specific aspects or posts youโd like me to summarize, please let me know!
Could you make it funnier?
This *killed me.* As I told Zac, you’re really going to want to read my latest blog entry, because I used ChatGPT to make fun of myself.
Certainly! Letโs add a touch of humor to the comparison between the author of โtheantileslie.comโ and Jesus. ๐คญ
โMe & Jesus: LikeTHIS!โ โ A Satirical Comparison
1. The Antileslie Chronicles
Setting the Scene
The author, letโs call them โBlogger Bob,โ sits cross-legged on their IKEA couch, sipping kombucha, and pondering lifeโs mysteries. Their MacBook Air rests on a reclaimed wood coffee table, adorned with a succulent named โGerald.โ The room smells of organic chai and existential angst.
2. Jesus: The OG Influencer
Birthplace
Jesus: Bethlehem, a rustic stable with a manger. No Wi-Fi, but excellent star ratings on Airbnb.
Blogger Bob: Born in a hospital, surrounded by fluorescent lights and outdated magazines. Yelp review: โTwo stars โ lack of ambiance.โ
Occupation
Jesus: Carpenter, miracle worker, and wine enthusiast (water-to-wine conversion, anyone?).
Jesus: Nailed to a cross, forgave his tormentors, and saved humanity.
Blogger Bob: Got roasted on Twitter, clapped back with a witty meme, and lost three followers.
Resurrection
Jesus: Rose from the dead, ascended to heaven. Eternal glory.
Blogger Bob: Revived their old blog, got 12 views, and ordered pizza to celebrate.
5. Conclusion
In summary, Blogger Bob and Jesus share a penchant for turning ordinary moments into profound reflections. Whether itโs loaves and fishes or a well-crafted tweet, both leave their mark on the world. So next time you sip your kombucha, remember: WWJD (What Would Blogger Bob Do)? ๐๐ฑโจ
Disclaimer: No actual deities were harmed in the making of this satirical essay. Any resemblance to real bloggers, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Namaste. ๐๐
It came out as really cute & touching, so I’m just going to fill in my answers where appropriate instead of writing an essay. It’s Sunday. I feel like writing. So I will.
I appreciate your openness in sharing your experiences and emotions on your blog, theantileslie.com. Itโs a brave and vulnerable act to put your thoughts out there for others to read and connect with. ๐
Iโve explored some of your posts related to different aspects of life, including daily, death, and spirituality. Here are a few questions based on those themes:
Spirituality:
In your journey, have you encountered any specific spiritual practices or beliefs that resonate with you? How do they influence your writing and your understanding of life?
The best piece of advice that I’ve ever gotten regarding religious practice is that one feeds the other. When you can’t believe in God, you can still believe in the wiping away of sin. You get into the routine of going to communion, and eventually, your spirituality will come back around. I flow between religion and spirituality depending on which voice is speaking. Do I want to go to church today, or do I want to put my energy into exploring spiritual practices here? I vote here, because I can think of at least five congregations in my area that are smaller than the Fanagans. It’s how I reach the most people, and I don’t even have to change out of my pajamas if I don’t want to do it; today I did. I’m wearing OD green pants and a “Where in the Word is Carmen Sandiego? t-shirt. I might go out later. I might not. I just needed to feel prepared. I didn’t know whether it was a spiritual or a religious Sunday yet.
Is there a particular moment or experience that profoundly impacted your spiritual perspective?
Several, but the one that’s the most meaningful is that I was wearing a navy and white striped sweater to preach that day, and Brenda Charpentier decided I needed a stole. It was rainbow, and one of the most moving experiences of my life because it was the first time anyone had helped me get dressed before the service. I still have the picture somewhere, and if I can find it, I’ll include it. The stripes fit together perfectly. What did not sit well with the pastor was that I’d gotten something I hadn’t earned. What was I going to say? No? I try not to wear liturgical vestments, but they fit the occasion, not the person. There was no way to mark me as in charge of the liturgy otherwise.
Daily Life:
You mentioned that your life is often unpredictable. How do you find balance between your close friends/family and your writing? What strategies do you use to maintain that equilibrium?
I don’t, really. I have a hands off relationship with most people because I am focusing on my own thing. It’s not that I won’t respond to people who reach out to me, I just often forget that I need other people to support me through both good and bad things. I have that now- three people who are all willing to work on the hard stuff. I’ve never had that in my life. It’s the most settled I’ve been in a very long time. How it feeds into my spirituality is that when I’m writing alone, I often feel a presence greater than mine. Something is speaking through me, and I hope it’s an intelligent faith that says Jesus did not come here to comfort us in our distress, but distress us in our comfort. Jesus would have had a lot to say (and perhaps a whip) over ministers trying to get rich. The fact that these people exist is sickening the church to an enormous extent because it’s so toxic to believe that if you just pray hard enough, money will appear.
Can you share an anecdote from your daily life that left a lasting impression on you?
This was years ago, but Dana’s parents came with us to church. They’re right wingers. We’re not. They embarrassed me to no end by talking through the entire sermon, telling us everything that was wrong with it. It was a mistake of giant proportions to let those people into our safe space. You want to bitch about the gospel, go to other people who also want to bitch about it. Not my fault that you missed every lesson in the Civil Rights movement. I haven’t forgiven them for any of their racist jokes or homophobic comments. I am not glad to be done with Dana, but I for damn sure am glad I am done with them. The reason it stuck with me is that the tape of what was wrong with the sermon stayed with me. I went autistic and researched the shit out of it until I could prove I was right and they were wrong. Jesus is about widening the net. People like Dana’s parents are an embarrassment, and I clearly don’t care whether they know it or not. After the ways in which I saw they abused their daughter by just not treating her as good enough made me want a cage match with both of them. What kind of parent tells their daughter’s partner that she’ll never understand homosexuality, so it was better for Dana to go find someone else. What in the actual fuck? What, Dana’s supposed to go find a new mother now? Fuck all the way off.
Death and Emotions:
Your post about death touched my circuits. How do you cope with grief and loss? Are there any rituals or practices that help you navigate these emotions?
You don’t cope with it. You learn to live around it. The person you lost is always in the room, always present. In the beginning, it is extremely loud and incredibly close. Your brain will be in a fog for about a year. And then, as time goes by, you realize that you are a completely different person now. Grief re-wires your entire nervous system. You literally aren’t the same person. In the years that pass on, you’ll lose more and more of your memories, and that freaks you out, too. You lose connection with all your traditions and make your own. You step out on a ledge when a parent dies, because you’ve lost your “adultier adult.” At 46, I need her just as much now as I did when I was nine. Nothing is ever going to fill that hole but me. Realizing that she lives inside me and her creativity flows through me, but our days of two-way communication are over. It’s sobering. I’ll never get over it. I just change with it.
Feel free to share as much or as little as youโd like. Your blog provides a window into your world, and Iโm genuinely interested in learning more. ๐
When I was 11 years old, my parsonage burned to the ground five days before Christmas. All our stuff, including our new presents, were in it. As a result, I don’t treasure anything. I don’t have that luxury, because I realize that anything could be gone in less time than it takes for the fire department to arrive. I can say that my necklace that has my mother’s fingerprint on it is dear, but would I really be surprised if it disappeared? No. It’s the nature of stuff. My mother is not in the necklace, so I am not attaching her memory to this particular thing. I don’t need things to remind me of people, but they are useful. I wear the necklace every day, and gifts from my friends surround me so that I think of them all the time. It also means a lot to me when Zac and I have matching bracelets, even when they were $3. Every time I look down at my wrist, I think of him when I see the rainbow of our friendship bracelets and the maroon of our nautical rope ones.
Plus, now I’ve been through two house fires. At Wire Ave., we had a professional electrician drill into a live wire in our basement, nearly sparking the gas main and taking out the whole neighborhood. That’s the kind of situation where you realize death is no harm, no foul. There’s literally nothing I could have done about it, and death would have been over before it really began with that kind of TNT. There are only so many events that you can prevent in life. Sometimes, you have to fold and say “the plane is going down.” However, I do not think that I would have even seen the gas main blow. Gravity’s rainbow ends in disaster whether or not you see the arc in the sky first.
It seems like I’m complaining, but I’m actually advocating for minimalism. You cannot believe how much it has helped my mental state to have all my books, newspapers, and comics on my Kindle instead of as kindling. There are practical ways to solve all of these problems. It’s just unfortunate that you don’t think of them until after the house fire is over. Everyone’s library is invincible right up until it isn’t. And in fact, there is a very popular novel that has probably told you the exact temperature at which books will burn since high school. Gotta keep that temperature below Fahrenheit 451.
I am sure that Android tablets and iPads also burn, but which is more expensive? The iPad/Android or the 2700 books I’ve downloaded over time?
All of this being said, I believe that my books are my most important possession. The autographed copies of all the books from Team Mendez might go up in flames, but I won’t have to re-buy the digital copies. Their words are more important than their signatures, and as I joked with Jonna, “if I didn’t have a hardback, I’d just let you sign my screen.” Her Js are pretty adorable, and I think it would be hilarious to learn how to copy her signature only because Tony taught an entire room of people at the Spy Museum how to copy Vladimir Putin’s. I unashamedly made it though high school because legit no one could tell when my mom signed something or I did. My dad’s signature is a pretty lost cause, but my mom’s was just classic teacher handwriting. And in fact, forgery is one of my favorite things about espionage because I love FONTS. Forgery, to me, is literally figuring out someone’s personal font. I just don’t show people that I do it, because I’m not trying to hurt anyone or get away with anything. It’s just an exercise to see if I can. See a Tony Mendez magic trick, do a Mendez magic trick, teach a Mendez magic trick. I wrote it just that way because the axiom in medical school is “see one, do one, teach one.” Themes in my life present themselves over and over. I have a feeling that my blog is a direct result of trauma and creativity. Here are my two roots:
The fire has made it where I feel more comfortable blogging, and more comfortable with e-mail altogether; all my personal letters that hadn’t been sent burned. Then, later on, my mother’s air conditioner flooded the back of my closet, and I lost all my journals as well. In those days, it was devastating. I was absolutely over the moon about my emotional abuser from ages 12 to about 20, when things became more complicated and the trauma of it all kept me from enjoying her. That doesn’t mean that losing all the letters and journal entries I wrote about the situation weren’t important to me back then. I had not made the connection that it was emotional abuse yet. I just swallowed all her bullshit whole. How could I not? I was a child.
I watched Doogie Howser, MD religiously as a child. No one knew that show better than me (at the time, anyway). I have always been fascinated by child prodigies, and this was right up my alley. Because of my emotional abuser, I cried through similar movies like “Little Man Tate.” It was a salty, bitter cry because it was like I’d been taken out of the safe environment of my parents’ shelter and dumped into a family where I didn’t know shit from Shinola.โข Watching Doogie write on his computer for the last three minutes of that show changed my entire fucking life. In fact, I sent a version of this as a Tweet to NPH, and I hope he sees it. That show was just as traumatic for him as my own coming out story. We helped each other. Between Doogie/Wanda and Barney/Robyn, you can see how much he’s absorbed about playing straight. He had to for just as many years as I did, I just didn’t have the pressure of being on TV. But tell me, truly, how is being a queer in the 1990s and also being on TV different from being a queer person who is also the child of a minister? It’s not a different situation, it’s a different scale. Neil’s career could have tanked if he’d come out when he was on Doogie, because back then, no one believed that children understood things about themselves. It is only now that people are starting to respect their children’s choices, because being who they are is a part of letting them individuate. If a child is brave enough to say they’re queer, they’re queer (lumping gender and sexuality issues together as one community), they are. No one in the current society who is also of sound mind and body would call themselves queer if they didn’t absolutely have to in order to survive their lives without shame and blackmail. Institutional homophobia and transphobia are going to take eons to get out of the fabric of the American experience, because our country is currently a theocracy run by the most hypocritical heretics I’ve ever seen in my life. Jesus is not your homeboy.
:::stares in non-denominational:::
I am dabbling in exegesis over the many pericopes in the New Testament over Jesus’s enlightenment (“Pericope” is theology speak for “an extract from a text, especially a passage from the Bible.” Some people say “peri-cope,” but I think it’s actually “per-ric-oh-pe.” I have no idea if I’m right, it’s just how my dad has always pronounced it and he’s a professional (you take Greek and Hebrew when you do a Master’s in Divinity). Let’s take a simple one and unpack it.
Matthew 15:21-28
Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, โLord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.โ
Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, โSend her away, for she keeps crying out after us.โ
He answered, โI was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.โ
The woman came and knelt before him. โLord, help me!โ she said.
He replied, โIt is not right to take the childrenโs bread and toss it to the dogs.โ
โYes it is, Lord,โ she said. โEven the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masterโs table.โ
Then Jesus said to her, โWoman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.โ And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Here is what Matthew was trying to prove, in my opinion. The first is that Matthew was a Jew trying to convince other Jews that this was indeed the Messiah they were looking for. He approaches it from a number of aspects, including lineage. More importantly, it shows the exact moment in which Jesus changes his mind. He decided that the moment the woman showed such faith, gentiles were as worthy of salvation as Jews. Matthew was a man on a mission from GOD, trying to bring the receipts. I admire that in a person.
One of the reasons I trusted David implicitly the first time I met him is that bad people don’t love their dogs so much they get a DNA profile of them (Jack is half terrier, half chihuahua. This means that he is a very tall chihuahua with a lazy, I don’t give a fuck attitude. It’s quite refreshing because chihuahuas are known for being little hellions….. similar to what my grandfather used to call “101 Damnations.” They’re as aggressive and energetic as little dogs, because they were bred to run next to fire trucks. I would only get a Dalmation if I started training for a marathon, because one of my friends offered to take him jogging. They went five miles and DJ (said dog) wasn’t even tired out when they came back. Because we couldn’t manage to beg, borrow, or steal good behavior out of him, we ended up giving him to the runner. He died not long after of an astrocytoma (star shaped tumor in the brain that was impossible to extract). I couldn’t believe that he had cancer and was still running five miles a day. Interesting how everyone deals with illness differently. Some people cater to it, some people pretend it doesn’t exist. No way is right, it’s just that some people view rest and relaxation as the way to cope with illness, and some view keeping busy right up to the end as their calling.
I would like to believe that Jesus would have given the runner a dog and a healthy brain. That he didn’t have to choose. I liked what they chose to call him, especially in retrospect having lived in Oregon……. “Otis Spotford.”
Speaking of which, before we change to a different topic, Supergrover and I have this thing about naming our dogs and it makes me laugh. It comes from when Daniel and I were engaged. “Check this shit out and get mad with me (joking). You need to go and set that boy straight. He wants to name his dog “Ozzie” instead of “Virginia Woof!” (it’s always serious if I use an exclamation point. They are of the devil most of the time.) If I remember correctly, and I am paraphrasing, she said he was only on thin ice, but “Virginia Woof” was damned clever. Ok, that’s the kind of stuff from her I live for. Having a good line in front of her is the gold at the end of the rainbow. Supergrover also said that she disagreed with “Virginia Woof” and thought we should call them “Sidney Brisdog.” That made my day because I thought, “you get me.” “Alias” is my favorite show of all time. I would give goddamn anything to work with Jack, Sidney, and Michael. But if I’m really honest about my relationship with Supergrover, I’m not Francie. I’ve been Will Tippet this whole time. Quietly pining away and trying to put together the pieces of why this attraction kept coming up for me over and over when I could clearly see how pointless and stupid it was. My brain chemicals just flooded, like you do.
Speaking of which, when she said that she got something out of my writing whether I painted her in a bad light or not, I thought for the literally 4,000,000th time that it was such a shame she never let me marry her and have her babies. It’s the hottest thing you can ever say to a writer. I love your writing whether it’s good to me or not? Come the fuck on. Who has that kind of support as a writer, when the traditional line about them is that “writer” is code for “unemployed.” My favorite retort comes from Brandon Sanderson, who waited YEARS to get this moment. This dude came up to him and asked him what he did at a cocktail party. He said, “I’m a writer.” The guy said, “oh, so you’re unemployed.” Brandon looked him deadass in the face and said “I hit the New York Times Bestsellers List last week.” It was the equivalent of walking up to Stephen King and asking him if he needed money. Shiiiiiiiiiat. If God ever smiles upon me in the best way possible, that “best way” will be getting that moment as well. Here’s why:
I had a complex about Dana’s parents. That because I was female and queer and desperately in love with their daughter, we had something wrong with us. I was right to be paranoid, because they were absolute total dicks to both of us. The reason I tanked “Clever Title Goes Here” over blowback is that my sister-in-law ripped me a new asshole for writing about it and my skin was too thin to tell her that I owned my own story and to fuck all the way off. It’s the worst decision I’ve ever made in my career as a writer, that not telling her to fuck off. She silenced not only my voice, but my popularity as well. Wil Wheaton *used* to read me. *Used to.* Now, it’s one of the sources of my rage and a tape I’m working to solve. In some ways, it already is because I’ve gotten over the hurt. I can’t forget how it made me feel.
One of the biggest fights I’ve ever had with Dana was talking to her about how much it hurt me to watch her jump up and down for a type of approval she was never going to get, and she needed to stop. She needed to go low contact because of what it was doing to her self-esteem. In my mind, once you get married, you are individuating from your first family. That what God has put together, let no man put asunder. That meant she didn’t get the right to cater to them and ignore my discomfort, because she should have stood up for me and I became the family problem. They were lucky to get a daughter-in-law like me, because any time an in-law joins a family they shake up old family patterns and it is not often pleasant. An outsider can see dysfunction better than someone living in it. An INFJ sees what it will take to solve it. But they didn’t recognize themselves as lucky, because they never saw that I was trying to make their dynamic healthier and happier. They just thought I was stirring up shit for the fun of it.
This presented itself by me complaining to Dana’s ex-girlfriend, a beautiful diamond of a woman because she helped me navigate all of this having known the subject intimately. I told her that I was going to have to win the Pulitzer to get them off my back, and she joked, “oh, don’t worry. They’ll find a problem with that, too.” Empathy went a very long way in dealing with them, because it set off my autistic rage a lot. Supergrover can testify to that without blinking, because I told her every goddamn thing about my relationship with all of them that I possibly could, because I was constantly emotionally overloaded by them treating Dana’s sexuality like a problem to be solved and treating me like a loser dumbass. I was not trying to isolate her from her parents like a control freak narcissist. I was trying to isolate her from her parents because her mother told me that Dana was never going to get what she needed from her because of her limitations in understanding Dana’s sexuality, so it was better for her to go find someone else. That motherfucker didn’t say that in front of her daughter. She said it in front of her protector, mediator, and advocate….. words that will mean a lot to Dana because they come from The Book of Common Prayer. I viewed her as taking care of the sick, the friendless, and the needy. I have never told her that in person, because I thought it would hurt too much. I had to carry that pain for a long time until I was able to write about it. That gave me enough strength to kick her parents out of our house because I never would have done it if I’d known they couldn’t afford a hotel. For the first time, I got tired enough to raise my voice, because I was tired of tiptoeing around total emotional disaster on everyone. I said, “you come in here and you eat our food and you drink our drinks and use our utilities all while disrespecting me and my wife?” They got so angry that I yelled at her dad to “sit down.” He didn’t, but he sure fuckin’ thought about it. Sometimes, the only way to deal with a bully is to push back. He’s a lawyer, and the ace up my sleeve is that I am twice as obnoxious about the law as he ever could be and I have cornered the market on the asshole archetype because I’m a paralegal in the state of Texas. Come at me with Con Law or TRCP and I will instantly try to own your ass. But you can’t argue with the Religious Right. You just have to ignore them. I could. Dana couldn’t.
Jesus wept.
John 11:35
The more stress that piled onto Dana, the worse her physical health got….. making the connection that she broke out in hives for absolutely no reason at all in the middle of all our fights regarding all of this led to a lot of rethinking medicine; the reason I needed Supergrover so desperately to talk it through no matter how we felt about each other at any given moment. She won’t be my dragon and rush in when someone has hurt me when it’s her, but GOD HELP anyone who messes with me; she is quite capable of fucking you up in ways you’ll never see coming. It is delicious when it is not directed at me, and the thing she thinks I hate is the thing I crave. I want to crawl inside her brain to see how it works more now than I did almost 11 years ago, because we are equally taken by each other’s writing and she has very good stories when she’s willing to share them. The blessing of my life is that she may not want to meet me in person, but she likes crawling into my brain to see how it works, too. The curse was that she didn’t like doing it anymore. And even though she started a fight when she did it, it was not lost on me how sweet it is that she heard me. Tell me your feelings and step up, so she did. The disaster was not letting me respond and saying “I see how it is. What Leslie has written, so must it be.” I was telling her that I was allowed to have a reaction after I heard her out, not that what I was feeling was more important than her and “my opinion is fact.” She accused me of “rope-a-dope” when she went out of her way to hurt me after telling me to move on with my life. It’s unforgivable in most cases, but not for her. I love her too goddamn much and we’ve been through hell too long to give up now. But the ball is not in my court. She was the one that hurt me first by covering up her feelings that she was wigged out I was attracted to her by accusing me of something I didn’t do. It screwed us up and cost us time, not having an honest conversation. I handled it really well, and then as reality set in I had to create fantasy to get away from reality. But not fantasy, exactly. It was giving a story to information I couldn’t use with information I could. I can use our personal issues to illustrate what’s going on with us to drag her privacy issues into it.
The reason she’s so angry is because we’ve never had an honest conversation about boundaries on my blog, and she waffles between letting me be real and telling me that what I think is fucked up and all wrong without telling me what’s fucked up and wrong about it. That it’s lazy, childish, reductive, you name it. All the while ignoring that she’s feeding the pattern by getting angry and not just laying it out there because she’s frightened as fuck to do so. She needs to see that I see her so clearly because of an interview I saw with someone in her field that would punch her in the gut if she saw how much I truly picked up from it. That tape runs deep on how to handle her, and because she’s an IQ fan and I’m an EQ fan, I mean it like she’s my asset and I’m her handler, not that I try to emotionally manipulate her to get what I want. I am trying to be the tough love that she is to me (strident, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, I’m not going to do your emotional work for you kind of love), but I make mistakes all the time. Jim Mattox comes to mind. “I may be rancid butter, but I’m at least on your side of the bread.” If Supergrover’s last letter is any indication, this quote is relatable to her as well. I’m not innocent of this, and neither is she.
Editor’s Note:
Jim Mattox was the Texas AG (D) when I was a kid, and my favorite story in life about him comes from either my first political science professor or his wife, depending on who was teaching the class that day; I’ve slept since then. Anyway, when Mattox was AG, he was a drunk. He was out at a bar one night, and decided that he needed to sleep it off. He goes out to his car and gets in the backseat. The next morning as the car is being driven away, Mattox wakes up and says “My name is Jim Mattox. I’m the Texas State Attorney General. I’m a little hung over. Could you turn the radio down?” Mattox had gotten into what he thought was his car……………………………. #shatnerellipsis
She lights up my life all the time, and if I haven’t said that enough, I’m sorry- both to her and my audience, which are one and the same thanks to the fact that she’s chosen to stick by me no matter what. I think I have, but she has focused on the negative for so long that even if I haven’t said it in those exact words, she wouldn’t have retained it as much as something that cut deep. What she never understood is that I was trying to lance a boil, not irritate her. Patterns repeat, and I am never trying to hold someone to the past. I am explaining to them that the longer the bad pattern goes on, the less I want to engage because they’re hurting me. It’s a lost cause when you’re trying to be vulnerable and ask for solutions, and you become a problem because of it. I became the only friend who ever called her out on anything whether that’s true or not. How can she get through life without having conflicts with people?
Sometimes I wonder if she knows that I get so vulnerable I cry and shake when I go to that place of writing about her. That 10 years ago, I wrote to her, “sometimes I have to take off my glasses to wipe away the tears when I write to you,” and it wasn’t about anger. It was about my hopeless romantic showing up in my writing as a style. I wanted her to feel as precious as she is.
She fits into my theology very well, because she doesn’t believe in a higher power, but she does believe in paganism. It’s her theme. She loves the idea of Outlander, which eventually spoke my language. I couldn’t make it past the first rape scene until I learned that it was a fantasy built on Doctor Who (seriously. Diana Gabaldon is a Whovian, and she based Jamie on Jamie McCrimmon, a Scottish companion when she was a kid. She invented her version of time travel by watching Doctor Who as a child). The fact that we are both obsessed with novels that cover the same things from different ends of the spectrum is the perfect representative of our communication differences. In effect, I speak “Doctor Who” and she speaks “Outlander,” not realizing that both of our points are valid because they come from the same source.
They say that these are not the best of times But they're the only times I've ever known And I believe there is a time for meditation In cathedrals of our own Now I have seen that sad surrender in my lover's eyes And I can only stand apart and sympathize For we are always what our situations hand us It's either sadness or euphoria
So we'll argue and we'll compromise And realize that nothing's ever changed For all our mutual experience Our separate conclusions are the same Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity Our reason coexists with our insanity And though we choose between reality and madness It's either sadness or euphoria
How thoughtlessly we dissipate our energies Perhaps we don't fulfill each others fantasies And as we stand upon the ledges of our lives With our respective similarities It's either sadness or euphoria
-The Gospel of Billy Joel, Glass Houses
“So we’ll argue and we’ll compromise, and realize that nothing’s ever changed. For all our mutual experience, our separate conclusions are the same.” ARE YOU KIDDING ME. It takes a very special artist for me to feel like they are speaking to me only, and he got me with “cathedrals of our own.” I hope that when Supergrover reads me, she realizes that not only is she entering my sanctuary, in it she has the concept of sanctuary. When I’m around, no one can touch her. She is the ideal child of God, the fallible hero, the atheist who is actually Jesus to more people than me, or Moses if she’s more toward the Jewish persuasion. I don’t know how she identifies. Wherever her faith background lies, it’s not the same now as it was when she was a child. Being able to joke about that particular topic is one of my favorite joys in life because of another friend I knew from the same faith background.
I told this other friend that I was impressed about one thing and one thing only. That it’s one of the few religions in which there is documentation all the way from the beginning that has eyewitness accounts. Without missing a beat, she said, “yes. Documentation all the way back to when he made it up.”
It is my hope that eventually everyone in that religion will just self actualize and say, “it got weird,” and move on with their happy little lives. Tom Cruise could probably use that advice (not the same, but relatable).
You do you, but okay.
Speaking of which, that was another phrase that irritated Supergrover when it was a reference to another blog entry in which I explained that “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” That it was like telling the religious establishment with the snarkiest voice possible, “you do you, but okay.” It was not personal. It was me speaking truth to power. I was just being as snarky as Jesus, and repeating a line I hope gets stuck in people’s heads, because it’s emotional shorthand for being kind and taking no shit. BOUNDARIES. I tend to say small things repetitively because they do the most good. The music of the phrase makes it speak louder in people’s minds because they remember it. “You do you, but okay” means to me that you can uphold the system if you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.
People pleasers do not realize that catering to everyone’s needs and trying to anticipate them is actually more problematic than open and clear communication….. in essence, trying to render unto Caesar and render unto God and you can’t serve both. Speak truth to power. Please, please, please hurt my feelings rather than keeping it in. I only ask that you think about the problem long enough not to give me a knee-jerk reaction, because I’m making the commitment not to react to it and I don’t want to regress.
Red mist rage while I can type with my eyes closed is not a productive use of my time, and is feeding into my autism to an enormous degree because once I’m overstimulated, it’s meltdown time. I learned this from Harry Wales in “Spare,” because I don’t know if he feels red mist rage because of autistic meltdown or PTSD, but it doesn’t matter. It’s the same kind of neurodivergence because all of the above alter your thought processes and they’re your new normal. You have to learn to cope with them, knowing that your first reaction will always be wrong. Always. You’re wired to shut down and protect what you have left, not to open up and share your pain so that someone else can see it and help without asking. For people pleasers, you always have trouble getting them to express what they need because they don’t want to look like an imposition. Most of the time, it’s because people have been taught that they’re needy in childhood. You think you’re being a hero by keeping everything inside and you’re just burning yourself out constantly and with PTSD, not being able to regulate your emotions.
It was inextricably interrelated in my mind, and I’m not sure that anyone could prove me wrong. Harry, like Kathleen, Dana, Daniel, Zac, Bryn, and Supergrover (and even Franklin, my companion at Wire Ave., to some extent) are all affected by trauma that’s above my pay grade and always has been. That being said, because I grew up as a preacher’s kid, my first instinct is to minister them. Especially because Zac and Supergrover are atheists, I feel that approaching them with spiritual lessons without attaching religion to it is helpful in our communication; I’m talking about energy and not dogma. Sometimes people need an osteopath, not an MD. They’re the people I can think of as a good example of why the Mayo clinic is such a wonderful resource.
They treat the mind/body connection as so real- in a way that other doctors’ offices and hospitals don’t. There is also no national infrastructure for health integration, because mental illness is treated so differently from physical illness, as if mental illness isn’t also coming from a diseased organ (separating out processing disorders from depression and anxiety. The reason the brain is diseased is that it uses the very best lies against you to get you to off yourself because the brain is hell bent on protecting you and thinks that’s the answer. It needs medication and therapy to not feel “extremely loud and incredibly close”).
Editor’s Note:
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is one of my favorite books in the entire world because I have such a personal connection to it. Not only was I living in Alexandria at the time and heard the plane smash into the Pentagon while the paintings and windows rattled from three miles away, my birthday is September 10th. My extremely loud and incredibly close moment is perfectly expressed from that book……… That “The Best Day” transitioned into “The Worst Day.”
I have felt exactly that way about health integration for a very long time. The less Dana really meant she was forsaking all others, the problems with her family would just get worse. And they did. She started developing depression and again, hives for “no reason.”
All of this culminated in disaster when Dana invited her mom and dad to come and stay with us. It was great, up and to a point. They even let us sleep together in our own bedroom…… at their house, their solution was to get a room with twin beds so they could keep their imaginations intact. That’s why we never visited. My general rule is that if I ask for your opinion and help in a relationship, please give it to me straight. If I don’t, BUTT THE FUCK OUT because this is my marriage, not yours. But in every family, it is not the in-law’s job to deal with their partner’s family. My partner fell down on the job, and that played a large part in our divorce as well. I needed Supergrover to cope with that kind of pressure. I still have that love and devotion from her in large part because she’s wonderful at giving me advice in other relationships and I hang on her every word. My frustration is that she’ll work on all my relationships with me except ours, and it’s the most important because I tell her everything and she doesn’t tell me what she hears.
I was actually very humbled when she sent me her thoughts, not because they were good or bad, but because they were there. I only ended the interaction when it became too painful to continue. We were making great progress, and then she exploded like a firecracker when I really hadn’t done anything to deserve it. As I told her, “don’t let me be the asshole out here all by myself.” Then, it was her turn to recognize that she was indeed the asshole. I sent her a message immediately that said “you are forgiven. Honestly and completely.” I knew she wouldn’t get the reference because it’s a line from Doctor Who, but that didn’t matter. I needed to feel the connection between Eleven and River Song to convey how I really felt about her. I will never be in love with her ever again, but because of my past with her and how much it affected me, I view her as an emotional support partner more than anyone else. It’s just not my decision to accept it or not. So far, it’s been a mixed bag. I was so happy I cried when she said, “you’re right. My first instinct was “LET ME GRAB MY PURSE. THAT MOTHERFUCKER.” If you get the reference, you’ll see how funny it really was.
I have no doubt that Dana’s dad would have thought I was brilliant if I was male. That’s because even though he tolerated me, I hung on his every word because he was a Marine and all of his stories have stayed inside me all this time. They’re just not my stories to tell. The one that I can tell is because it made me laugh. When cell phones first came out for intelligence officers (earlier than to the general public, I would imagine), the Americans knew how they worked, and the Russians didn’t. They thought they had privacy and couldn’t be tapped if they used them in their cars. I laughed so hard I was sagging in my chair. It does not surprise me in the slightest that my model for a perfect partner for me is military and intelligence (not as big an oxymoron as one might think) because I loved those stories more than I’ve ever loved anything. He sat there and fed my autistic special interest all day long. The thing I love about military/intelligence men (not because I prefer men, because I haven’t met many women in the service and only a few retired spies. Men are the ones that tell me these stories. I love all of them, from the motor pool to pulling a gun on a Colonel because he was being a racist bastard and that was the only thing they could think of to deescalate the situation- by making it clear just how serious being racist in the military actually is.)
My personal view is to baby myself, because I find that when I do, I am more able to show people that I love them, because my boundaries are not so overextended that I disengage. I don’t mean boundaries in terms of keeping people out because of their emotions, but boundaries on how much I want to hear at once. I like it when people ask me if I have the bandwidth for a call before they do it. I like it when people say they have serious shit to talk about and do I have the bandwidth to let them vent? As we say in Texas, “you better ‘redneckcognize.”
Because when people respect my boundaries, I am so much more comfortable bending them because I respect them so much in return. I will go above and beyond when people go above and beyond for me. I recognize Supergrover’s sacrifice, but she has not recognized mine as such. I think I’ll be waiting a long time, because if she was going to do it, she would have done it by now.
If she wanted to visit me, neither hell nor high water would keep her from it. Why did she snipe at me on the anniversary of my mother’s death instead of hugging me? I think it would have gone a lot further than making me angry as fuck for a very long time.
And in fact, the thing I invited her to do with me was on Mother’s Day. I only have this loose connection to it anymore, and I did not realize that’s what I was doing. Of course it was important for her to be with her family that day. But she didn’t say no. She agreed to mull it over.
Progress.
I have just been too intimidated and too humiliated to say flat out, “okay. This has gone on long enough. Only meeting in person will break our toxic cycles because we have no frame of reference to each other besides each other. There is no context to our relationship and seeing each other out in the world will give that to both of us.” The fantasy and the reality need to be managed, not ignored. I will absolutely die mad about that, because I got in very hot water over it. I didn’t ignore it, she did, then came down hard when she decided I should have known not to lay out what was really going on in my head and that her very specific secrets were not fair game but an overarching thousand foot view of the problem from all angles was.
I did not want to be the lovesick teenager anymore. I wanted to explain that there was a solid reason I felt like my heart turned into an 808 drum, that her love was my drug and that has proven to be true for almost 11 years. What kind of person thinks that deep a love is just a game I’m playing to fuck with her? What kind of person ignores how hard it was to say goodbye to her and Michael and instead, berate me for writing things like it? Or just telling me that she was incensed by some entries and touched by others, never telling me which ones touched her so that I didn’t have to be so afraid. I could know the boundaries I was crossing instead of guessing all the time to get my story out there.
I have caused a lot of hurt, but it has never been intentional. My story is for people all over the world, not direct letters to people. People would see my writing a lot differently if they viewed it as an episode of “The Moth,” “Morbid,” and “Risk!” (“Risk!” Is storytelling, but mostly adult content. Caveat emptor. I just love it because it’s hilarious.) People being able to read my writing and assess it like I’m Harriet the Spy are so close to the point, but it’s whizzing right by their faces.
I use my life as an example to others, both of what to do and what not to do. I allow myself to have a full range of human emotion, and not to dumb it down to protect other people’s comfort, because it’s not for them.
It’s all for me. As I work through my childhood and adulthood, I see the patterns that no longer serve me, and I have found that it was finally easier to leave the cocoon than stay in.
She’s still my precious, precious six year old. I’m just choosing to love her from over here……. until she realizes it’s not actually that far.
Here’s the string I used for Copilot, because as a blogger, the first thing I asked was “friends” and they said they could not research information on real people. Thus, none of you are fictional characters, it’s just that an AI capable of tracking your every move without telling you that has no moral high ground here………………. Search https://theantileslie.com and ask questions a friend would ask about the characters. You are all perfectly perfect in every way. There is no need to make you fictional characters. You are all enough exactly as you are. I am paining a word portrait, and that’s always going to include being a 3D character because as I was telling Zac, “that’s not real life.”
Who are the central characters in the stories on this website?
Supergrover is unashamedly the main character because she’s the friend that makes me the most passionate in life, and not about her. She’s fiery and intense, which makes me match her feeling for feeling when she is fully open and hearing vs. listening. The only reason I’ve ever wanted this relationship to the extent that I have is that I have no idea what she’s like in person, but online she’s fucking brilliant. She doesn’t have to write more, because all her other words are still inside me. I have memorized them. She lives in me whether she’s comforted by that or disgusted. Dealer’s choice.
What challenges or conflicts do the characters face?
It’s not about conflicts between characters unless it’s me and another person. I have no interest in publishing hearsay, like hearing Bryn’s side of the story on a fight with Dave or whatever. I cannot comment on the fight, because I was not there. I only write down what I observe, I am not a gossip column…….. as much as people would like to believe it. For practical purposes, I don’t give a fuck how they feel about the way I express my emotions. How they react is none of my business. The only thing I ask is to get some clinical separation before you come and talk to me about it, because I want your reaction to be yours and your response to be mine. Get all your anger out and be ready to discuss it without turning it into a knock-down drag-out. When people are angry about what I have written, it’s too much punishment, too fast. That’s because they attack me without really thinking about how they should respond. They just speak from the id and do not give a flying fuck whether it hurts my feelings or not. They don’t want to resolve the problem at hand, they want to cut me off at the knees for reflecting it as accurately as I possibly can without doing their emotional work for them.
I have been bitten in the ass for my armchair psychology approach to writing about people. However, there’s a reason for it. I am not trying to tell their story for them, but to try to make sense out of why they did what they did. I want to be able to give them the benefit of the doubt, and as I write about them, the good and the bad becomes clear……. what relationships are worth saving and what relationships drain my energy rather than giving me some. I am often best friends with Colin from “What We Do in the Shadows.” This is because I have a lot of neurodivergent friends who will ramble on and on. You can’t get a word in edgewise, so you listen to a lot of shit you never needed to know. I want to wait until I have the bandwidth to listen to the stories in which you came close to killing yourself. Again, people open up to me because I am an INFJ, the Counselor personality. That being said, I do not have enough emotional bandwidth to take on counseling as a career. I would be excellent at it, and a mess regarding taking care of myself.
Maybe later in life, when I have more money and less fucks to give, I’ll become an LPC or MSW. I need to work on clinical separation first, because when people talk to me my mirror neurons go off and I am overloaded to the point of meltdown a good bit of the time on public transit. The one time I really, really wanted to have a conversation with someone, her mom kept interrupting me and it was bullshit. I just couldn’t stop her from interrupting because the subject at hand was so serious. I was talking to a 10-year-old girl who was standing in the aisle while I was sitting down next to her. Children throw down truth bombs whether they’re autistic or not, so I wasn’t prepared for what she said, but I was prepared to help. I told her I liked her pink tennis shoes, because I used to have pink tennis shoes and I missed them (ask me how I lost them. If Dana is reading and she was drinking something, she just choked). I ask her what grade she’s in, etc. Then, out of nowhere, she said, “my dad’s dead.” Just absolute gravity’s rainbow (if you’re not familiar with the literary reference, gravity’s rainbow is the arc of a bomb). Oh my God. The perfect child walked into my life the moment I needed someone to talk to. I told her that I lost my mom, and we just sat there for a second, dazed. Then her mom started in with all the gory details while I just wanted to talk to the kid. She was young enough that her father’s death is going to affect her far more than me. My mom was at least able to see me through to adulthood, past my 40s. The last thing I said to her made both of us cry. As she was walking away, I said, “remember that your dad is still alive because you’re half of him.” It was the most I could do in four stops.
To turn that back around into challenges I face, It”s that people love stories I write about the random interactions on the bus/metro. Yet they rarely think I can portray them accurately, too. They believe that my observations of strangers are dead on, and my observations of them are wrong. I have been right so many times that I do not lose sleep over it. When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time. They love it when other people are 3D characters, but God forbid I love them more than strangers and treat them like muses.
Are there recurring themes or motifs related to the charactersโ experiences?
The one theme that has been with me since my first entry, which I think was called “Apologia,” or something like that, is how to survive relationships with CPTSD. I have so many other “letters behind my name,” comorbidities that seemingly never end. It’s about how my brain processes logic and emotion despite that, because people see my brain as brilliant when I write this way, but not when I talk. Neurodivergent overexplaining in a neurotypical brain is called “making excuses.” I have problems with authority, and this is a big one. You have asked me for information, I gave it to you including my role in things so it doesn’t look like I’m trying to pass the buck, and you’ve chastised me. I have not made excuses for anything. I told you like it is.
How do the characters evolve or change throughout the stories?
Supergrover has the biggest arc, because it’s the story of how I fell in love with her twice. The first time, it was because I thought she was the hottest thing on God’s green earth, and more woman than I could handle in three lifetimes (her husband probably just high-fived me in his head). The second time, it was because of deep companionate love because I felt that even though she’d never be my wife, that didn’t mean we couldn’t be close if we wanted it, because our friendship was rock solid. Supergrover’s answer was to sweep it all under the rug. Mine was to work through it so the bad feelings got light to them and disappeared. She also has privacy concerns about my blog, and so do I. She did not see the ways in which I was trying to protect her and thought I was attacking her. The arc has been my romantic feelings and my process in getting rid of them so that we could relax into something easy and free. It’s not easy and free when the other person hates conflict.
Bryn has the most beautiful arc now, because we’ve known each other since 1997. I went to Portland before she met Dave to officiate at her wedding. Thus, the nickname “Rev. Argo.” It is the perfect representation of me and I love it so much. My two special interests are intelligence and theology. I would design a tattoo that said it, but I trust VERY few people with fonts. For instance, even basic ones. How do I know you’re going to recreate the ascenders and serifs perfectly? I do know that it’s a tattoo worth having because it’s a two word LDB (Lanagan Daily Briefing) on who I am as a person. That requires a special skill, like a Japanese writer who uses special ink and brushes.
Are there any memorable quotes or dialogues from the characters?
“My favorite comment was ‘I didn’t know the writer was gay until the end'” -on my marriage article.
“Painting my feelings as fact” -from Supergrover.
“As if it isn’t a wheel with many spokes,” which meant more to me than diamonds because even if she didn’t want to respond to them, she knew we had problems on both sides. It let me off the hook for everything being my fault all the time.
“Sometimes when we get the most angry and full of rage, we’re not even fighting with our partners. We’re fighting people who aren’t even in the room.” It was a comment on adding to the list re: my marriage article and it saved me a ton of resentment towards Dana because she didn’t hit me. She got confused and hit someone else. And I know who it is. I hope she does, too, and releases any guilt or shame. Their face got scrambled with mine, because I know that feeling so intimately. I have worn it on my skin. Most women do. We’re divorced because I don’t forget, not because I don’t forgive. She can be precious in my memories without new interaction.
“You’re like a 15 year old boy…………… and his mother.” Can’t remember which reader said it, but I absolutely fell apart laughing.
What emotions do the characters evoke in the reader?
I cannot speak to that unless people comment. I can only comment on what I control, which is my half of the relationship. What I want people to pick up is how much I love the little things about the people in my life. Supergrover is the busiest person I know, and sometimes she makes the clock stop only for me. It’s the most important thing in my life, that she’s giving of her time. I have never been railing that I want more of it. I was doing two things at once. The first is that I didn’t want more time with her, I wanted more letters where she laid out her feelings so that I wasn’t wandering around in the dark all the time. The second was trying to stay grounded. Of course it wasn’t weird to hang out because we’re actually friends, not a facsimile because we connect virtually. I only wanted her time if she was available, and she never has been. That part is completely okay with me. What’s not is waffling between feeling guilty she’s not responding and thinking about me frequently, she just doesn’t have the bandwidth to reply. Completely okay. What I object to is holding all that in and exploding when it’s a two minute problem to solve. I have asked her to go and do something one time, and she said “I don’t think I’m ready quite yet, but someday, perhaps?” She was trying to stay grounded as well, we just never made time for it. Such a pity. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do is ride in her car, because I’m betting she drives like a normal person most of the time, but if I asked her to scare me, she probably would. She has the kind of engine that would be very effective at that. I think we would have had a blast together, but we just couldn’t resolve our conflicts. Those are the emotions I mean to express, but whether other people see that, I cannot say.
Do the characters have distinct personalities or quirks?
Of course they do. I have a random collection of friends in which I know in a lot of different capacities, and I lead a life that’s different than most people by seeing more in a day than others. Public transit is the credit balance of a writer just as much as childhood. You can write about people your readers don’t know, and neither do you.
Are there any romantic relationships or friendships depicted among the characters?
All of the above. Dana and me, me and me (it’s the stupidest thing ever that I fell in love with the character I created of Supergrover more than I fell in love with a real person. It makes me feel better that I didn’t cheat so much as develop a connection I couldn’t ignore. That information, however, did not go over well with my ex-wife…… but she knew enough to see it coming because the TARDIS had landed in the backyard. One person’s needs trumped the other, and I’m sapiosexual. Supergrover kept my mind incredibly busy, so I was ace for a long time (seven years) because I preferred it to romance. It wasn’t trying to persuade Supergrover of anything, just that I like talking to people I already know and am an introvert so it’s hard for me to make friends. I’m not shy. I have problems getting up enough energy to go out. I was incredibly devoted to her because I had the bandwidth. It was a lot, but I never meant any harm by it. I just wanted to make her feel loved and cared for whether she was my romantic partner or not. A yellow string indicating an emotional support person on the murder board of polyamory doesn’t mean less, ever. It means that they’re on the calendar because time with them is just as important as time with each other.. For instance, Bryn gets just as much airtime as Zac. It’s not about dividing my love in thirds, sixths if you count Zac, Dave, and Michael. It’s about being able to love all of your “gaang” a hundred percent. Your heart doesn’t get smaller the more people you meet. Your bandwidth does.
Zac and I have been dating over a year, my one red string. I am no opposed to the idea of having different partners, they just have to appeal to my brain and also be wired for polyamory because Zac and I are close enough that it’s not worth going through the trauma of breaking up with him. I want to help him be his best self, and I can’t imagine not being at his side when he asks for it.
How does the author describe the physical appearance of the characters?
In very vague terms and not because I want to. I have 2D vision and cannot place an object or person in its environment. Therefore, my creativity does not come across in physical description. It is easier to discuss what they wear than their faces. The most recent example is seeing Zac all dressed up in his formal uniform for a promotion ceremony with a fresh haircut and Rivers Cuomo glasses. It’s the most beautiful picture of ๐ I’ve ever seen.
Are there any character-driven plot twists or surprises?
Not on purpose. Because I’m writing about real life, if they happen, they are completely organic. I have not made up a story, I am writing the one that’s already in front of me by looking at the past. Past determines future. If you don’t reflect on yourself, here’s the motto you live by:
If you always do what you always have, you always get what you’ve already got. It is the only thing I have ever remembered from a company training video which empathized moving quickly.
The biggest plot twist in the whole show is that in season 23 I learned that I’m autistic and the way I’ve walked in the world all this time is a lie. I have always needed special accommodations to succeed and called myself a dumbass instead. I’m completely done with that. I’m not dumb, you don’t understand my disabilities.
What cultural backgrounds or identities do the characters represent?
Lindsay and I are mostly of Irish and English blood. All Europe, all the time. I think Zac is the same, although he got the redhead gene and I’m jealous. Supergrover is a minority, but I don’t think she would call herself that because she’s biracial, white and Latina. Most of my friends are white, because my black friends have moved away and we haven’t kept in touch. Because Hayat had so many rooms, I have shared space with a Cameroonian, a Liberian, and a Nigerian. The funniest part of this is that the Cameroonian invited his mother to stay with us. She didn’t speak any English at all and fell over laughing when I said “francaise c’nest pas comfortable pour moi” (French is not comfortable for me, one of the only sentences I can put together because of Michel Thomas). So, we spoke in hand gestures and fed me until I exploded. I loved her. She could have lived with us forever. Franklin was my housemate, and in retrospect I fell in love with him and wanted to marry him, I just couldn’t say it. We had a lot of chemistry, but he was determined to marry an African woman……………. who steamrolled all over him. The match wasn’t hard to see. He’s a doctor. We could have crushes, but it was inappropriate on multiple levels to act. I do wish I’d said my piece, though, and not because I wanted the answer that he loved me, too. I wanted the answer that he heard me when I said she was emotionally beating him up and I was trying to stop that. Realizing I loved him was just a side effect. I just didn’t have any jealousy, so him making a choice wasn’t my call. It never was, so even more reason not to tell him.
Do the characters have unique hobbies, interests, or passions?
Supergrover and I both like to read and write.
Zac and I both love fictional spies, and he was going to go with me to the Mendez lecture and got TDY (temporary duty).
Bryn likes to garden, be “witchy” (she is weird in the most wonderful of ways), and work with dogs. She also likes house sitting for people with kids when parents need a break, so that is a thing you know now…………. Bryn doesn’t want to adopt, I don’t think, but I’ve told her I’d have a kid with her any time she wanted. It’s not about the whole fairy tale romance of bonding over the baby. It’s that I can be a decent coparent whether we’re involved or not. Plus, she has a boyfriend now. Many hands make light work, especially if we lived together. That would be infinitely possible because Dave’s house is huge. This is not a reality in any way, shape, or form. This is just saying that if Bryn wants kids, don’t let being single stop her. She’s not now, but it was the thought that counted at the time….. one I actually meant. I feel like I’m too old to be a biological parent, but still young enough to coparent a kid that didn’t come out of me. It is fun to dream whether it comes true or not, like inviting Supergrover to spend time with me in Viet Nam. If she doesn’t have the bandwidth, cool. But I wasn’t wrong for asking. Trying to stay grounded, remember?
Are there any character arcs that stand out?
Yes, but only within me. I feel that because our relationship has always been virtual, it allowed us to say things to each other that we wouldn’t have told anyone else, then got mad we did it on both sides. The arc has been how to come down from autistic meltdown and burnout to allow myself to move past all of it. Whether she comes back is not up to me. Whether she’s changed her behavior is up to me. I have to think about what I will tolerate as a blogger and as a human.
Dana went from my favorite person in the entire world bar none to the one that hurt me the most, because even though I’ve had big emotional fights with people, I’ve never been hit until she did it. I had a black eye and phantom pain for weeks. As I have said before, I have forgiven her and that has come to comfort me. However, it is interesting to note that when I said I had “phantom pain,” my nerves started to burn in that part of my face. I found out why you never hit a girl with glasses because it wasn’t the hit that fucked me up. It was my glasses smashing into my face.
Zac has gone from a casual friend to my favorite ally in life. Because we have a special niche instead of relying on each other for everything, I can see this relationship long, long into the future. We just really don’t have much to fight about because we work hard at staying on the same page. He’s only been a bad hinge once in our entire relationship, and that’s not bad. It was just growing pains. By “being a good hinge,” it’s protecting me by not telling me about problems in any of his other relationships except for the barest minimum. So far, he hasn’t even asked me opinions when the issue has to do with me, because he knows that’s not my business to handle. It’s his. What his other partners think of me is none of my business, because I get to date him whether anyone else likes it or not. No one gets veto power. We just go parallel and stay out of each other’s way. Nothing matters except that Zac and I are solid. Anything other than that is above my pay grade.
How do the characters interact with each other?
I have traditionally kept up with Supergrover through Gmail, because it catalogues conversations just like instant messages and it’s easier for her to get e-mail on the go. She can pick it up on her laptop or her phone that way (as opposed to using iMessage or SMS). When we’re both online at the same time, e-mails fly fast and furious. When we’re not, I write long letters because I like to imagine that she puts down her favorite novel to read me. I am not wrong.
Are there any morally ambiguous or complex characters?
Everyone in the world, no matter who I write about- from Margaret Cho to Bryn and Zac is morally ambiguous. It’s human nature. To exclude anyone from this is devaluing what the meaning of “human” is in the first place.
What motivates the charactersโ actions and decisions?
I can only speak for my motivations in writing, because I am not responsible for anyone else’s reaction. What motivates my actions and decisions is reading my own blog and picking out the things I need to rethink. I need my own character to grow and change more than the proverbial “them.”
Do the characters face external obstacles or internal struggles?
Yes, but only with me. Anything else is hearsay and useless. I only want to write about how I handle a situation, not how someone else is handling theirs. I call people out on behavior when it hurts me, but that is not a way to “get back at them.” It’s being able to remind myself long after I’ve supposedly forgotten why reaching out is a bad idea. If they’ve hurt me badly, there’s no chance in taking another risk. They become memories as I gain empathy and remember people fondly again once the anger has passed.
Are there any character-driven conflicts or rivalries?
One that’s really cute:
I talked to Jonna Mendez at the release of “In True Face,” and I told her that one day I’d write something as good as she did. She deadass looked me in the face and said, “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that. There was a gleam in her eyes. I said, “I’m going to be laughing about that for three years,” because she didn’t know I spoke “migroaggression” and nearly spit out her water. She teased me as a writer. I would follow that woman into the ocean no questions asked. I think her employees felt the same way.
One that was really obnoxious:
The man I wanted to marry spun out on his own after I went to bed and thought I was being a hardass for not responding. So, he broke up with me while I was asleep. It was the most nonsensical thing I’d ever been through, which is why I shut him down when he said maybe later in life we could try again. No one gets over that kind of anger and abandonment in a short period of time, enough to end a relationship in two hours because he was so mad that he told me he goes off the grid when he’s in the middle of something and not to worry if he disappears. Then, he exploded at me for not contacting him for a whole day. I pointed out his hypocrisy without saying he was a bad person, and he tried to hit me emotionally with a sniper bullet, saying he was a better writer than me, that if I kept writing about him he was going to create a blog specifically designed to take me down (why would I care? Everyone is allowed to tell their story), and he was doing me a favor by not posting it on my blog. That’s the only reason I posted it on my blog. I don’t give a fuck how I come off in his letter, because I know what’s truth and so do you if you’ve been reading what I’ve been saying. Because he and Supergrover have so much in common, I’m betting he took a whole lot of offense at nothing. I was showing why I didn’t want the same toxic cycle with Daniel I’d already been living for 10 years. His behavior came off like an angry little boy, and he got mad that I told him that. He extrapolated that into namecalling, but that’s not what I meant. It never is. Someone’s self-esteem tells them what they hear. Someone’s self-esteem being in the trash basket tells them you mean they’re a piece of shit whether or not it’s true.
How does the author create empathy or connection with the characters?
By being as organic as I can possibly be. Telling you what grew out of what even if correlation is not causation because I hold no authority over what someone is really thinking, but I do hold authority over trying to figure out what went wrong. I know that by doing so, people come out of the woodworks to tell me stories that they were thinking of as they read. I don’t create empathy or connection for my characters. They write their own, because my observations give you a view into their lives when I am able to see it. What they are is what they are. If you have gone through something similar to them, you will feel empathy and you will feel heard.
Which character resonates with you the most, and why?
Supergrover, because half this blog is just ripping her off blind. Because she’s a 3D character. She is present whether we’re in each other’s lives, or a ghost that comes to sit with me when I need her the most.
I will never have a relationship with anyone the way I have previously. I have too much information about myself not to completely change the way I interact with people, both in having words for “a list of what’s wrong with me and why,” and in listening to another person in a different way, knowing everything is in Mandarin on my side and English on theirs. We may have to go three or four rounds for both of us to get our stories straight, because in the beginning we each thought the other was saying something different. I do not have patience for those who do not also realize the same. That the translation layer is not just mine to own. Neurotypical is “standard,” not “correct.” Therefore, a neurodivergent brain does not mean that I am incapable of understanding. We are both struggling under the same communication issue. The problem is that neurotypical have an air of superiority about it, which leads to anxiety-filled neurodivergent overexplaining. Very, very few people in my life have realized I’m different, but not stupid. No one would ever say that, of course. They just don’t want to talk to me because it’s too hard. While they’re feeling sorry for themselves that I just won’t “get it together” and “not live up to my potential” as to what they need me to be, I am generally left alone. It’s a major reason why I blog. People love how my brain works unless they’re talking to me, because when I’m in front of them their air of superiority over being neurotypical takes over no matter how brilliant I seem from my writing. Neurotypicals infantilize you, full stop.
I’ll give you a for-instance. I don’t remember how it came up, but I said something like “I’m autistic and my special interest is intelligence,” or something like that. It was in context to the conversation, I just don’t remember what it was. The leader of the group was like, “aww, that’s so nice. Do you have lots of cool spy gadgets in your room?” I didn’t react to it, but the tone made me think she thought I was nine.
As for “do I have spy gadgets,” the answer is no. I have autographed hardbacks from spies that became writers after they left CIA. They don’t make “cool spy gadgets” for people like me unless I had Keith Melton money.
Keith Melton is the largest private collector of CIA and other intelligence agencies’ UNCLASS gadgets that sell at places like Sotheby’s. You’re not going to be paying six figures until trying to buy an Enigma machine or something similar. I also like really small houses, so if I did start collecting stuff like that, it would be on loan to the spy museum just like him. But if this is what his public collection looks like, I’d give an arm and a leg to see his private collection. I don’t think he’s going to part with everything precious long-term.
I would sacrifice holding all my “cool spy gadgets” at home.
I have sacrificed friends to the natural consequences of my blog. I have freedom of speech, not power over whether people are attracted towards me because of it. I did not sacrifice friends with whom I had problems, but friends with whom I had problems about this. If you care that I blog about my life, then you cannot be my friend. It is as simple as that. I have enough on my plate without worrying about how I’m going to be criticized in advance when I was never supposed to be responsible for your reaction in the first place. And if I write something you don’t like, you’re going to be a lot better off coming and talking to me about it, rather than talking behind my back. You’ll actually get results because we have resolved our conflict. Art imitates life. I am not going to make up the past to fit your narrative of my experience, but I am going to change as we do.
There is a difference between loving a writer and supporting them. Loving a writer means praising them when they do something you like. Supporting a writer means being willing to work things through by accepting my reactions as valid. That I don’t just sit here and make things up. If I said someone had a tangle with me, they did. But I am not looking at it like retribution, because I’m getting my feelings out whether they come back or not. They are not responsible for, nor do they have to like what I am writing. But if they’re offended, it’s up to them to change the channel, because I cannot change the authenticity I show here.
There are two reasons “your side” is not represented. The first is if someone is avoidant. I can craft beautiful sentences even when someone is angry because I’m so grateful that anger is a transitive state. It was easy for Supergrover and Daniel (and all the other friends I’ve lost) to be angry about what I wrote and over the moon about it in one breath. That’s because our stories didn’t match the ones we were telling ourselves. If you give me no information, I am writing about what I think to become settled over it. I never want to come across as catering to people who will not show me their feelings as well. I have had too many lopsided relationships that way, because they hold in their feelings and get annoyed while my love grows deeper because I’m being assured nothing is wrong. They want less contact, and I want more because they save up too much anger and bust my fairy tale without a thought.
Meanwhile, everything that they’re angry about is 100% their fault, because if they don’t tell me anything, I’m just going to write about me. One of the things that Supergrover said to me that kicked me in the stomach was, “as if everything I do has to do with you…..” It’s not that at all. It’s that this is a personal diary, and I’m not going to root through your head. I’m going to say what I think is going on- the story I’m telling myself. Supergrover would have liked it even less if I tried to guess what she meant.
It’s a group project I’ve carried on my back, because I didn’t know the real story. I take everything literally, so I didn’t start getting mad at Supergrover’s avoidance until it was too clear to me what she was doing and I couldn’t ignore it anymore, because my self esteem just kept getting lower and lower as she pegged me as the only person who ever had problems with her and I was the only person who ever criticized her. I think what she means is that she has a lot of people around her who will do what she says without asking any questions. I am not one of them. I speak truth to power and she doesn’t think I have that right, or at least she doesn’t anymore. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get her to see the things that are in her blind spot in hopes of helping her, anyway. It’s not because I’m obsessed with the idea that she’ll come back, but that her story is inextricably interrelated with mine. I have no doubt that I will have to think about her until I die because of my blog, not because I have this need to own her time.
She didn’t get anything she wanted because she didn’t ask for it, except when she said “please do not contact me again.” Then, a couple of months later, I accidentally texted her due to a glitch on my phone. I knew she’d go nuclear, and she did, because she didn’t believe for a moment that I hadn’t done it on purpose. She attributed suspicion and malice to everything, then read on my blog that my dad was having surgery. After the complete nightmare that was her going nuclear over a mistaken text, it was a surprise that she sent me a note that said “hope all goes well with your dad.” We started talking and two days later, my mother died. It was a whole new ball game.
It didn’t change anything for her. In one of her letters, she said she knew she was sounding like.a dickhead and she didn’t care. You’re not special. I lost someone who was LIKE a mother to me. Why do you get a special day in which I need to cater to you?
It was the year anniversary of my Mom’s death.
I want her to read that e-mail again and choke on it when she actually has to go through the process of losing her own actual mother, when she said that her mother’s death would bring her to her knees.
WELL, IT’S A GOOD THING I’M GOING THROUGH IT INSTEAD OF YOU.
But she is NOT going to be the villain in my story.
If she wants me to be the villain in hers, have at it. I’m not going to be around to hear it, because you’re not special, either. You just won’t know it until you have to deal with what I did. Have fun picking out her coffin.
I asked Copilot to search my web site and ask me 20 questions regarding what it read. I absolutely cannot believe that I thought to do this. I don’t have to search through my old crap, Copilot will. I’m thinking that the “FAQ” will not be any of your questions, but what a machine’s idea of good questions might be. If there is a question that you would like included, please leave it in the comments or join the fray on Facebook. It would be really great if you showed up because I’m meeting all these cool new authors. We’re a fun bunch. Come join us.
What event led you to start your blog, and how has your vision for it evolved over time?
In the 90’s, I was working on a project for my mom at Kinko’s, and a boy in my Class at Clements was working there. He sat and talked with me the entire time I worked, and because neurodivergent people pick someone they like, we were inseparable for years. Shortly after that first meeting, Luke approached me and said that he and his friend Joe were starting a web server called “Darkstar,” and did I want an account? Of course I did. I learned everything from day one on how to code my own pages, then later how to install WordPress on a server (or a local computer where it refers back to localhost rather than sending a call out to a server. It’s done so that you can perfect everything before it goes live. I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t sat there and done it, becoming better at HTML, CSS, and creative writing all at once. This culminated in my perfect job that I never should have left at University of Houston. I was a reporter for Information Technology Daily News, and it was my job to update it every day. So, the combination of those things made it where I was already used to a publication schedule, I was already used to coming up with X number of words by deadline, and I realized that I had something to say. I have never regretted the decision to start writing. I have regretted the number of people I’ve let get in the way of an authentic dream….. I don’t want to be famous. I want to be respected. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have already achieved that goal. It’s a good place to be when all your goals have been met and money would just be nice. I’m going to be a writer whether I make money at it or not. So…. what was the event that started my blog? Someone asked me to, and the rest was history.
How do you choose the topics for your posts, and is there a theme you find yourself returning to often?
I don’t really choose a topic, because I am a gardener. I start at one place and just let whatever flows through me spill onto the page. That is because this is designed to be a series of rough drafts. Not that I am going to make a book out of my blog (I would if someone asked me, but I don’t want to put effort into self publishing. What I mean is that I repeat lines and themes a lot. This is my notebook. I might not refer to it for anything more than a half a line that would fit perfectly into a fictional scene. The diarist in me is not meant to be published. This is a repository where I can feed my fictional ideas. No character is borne from the ground up. Most of them are different aspects of your own personality rather than taking the piss out of someone else. While writing fiction, you literally get lost in characterization, and you really only find pieces of your friends in retrospect. When I’m writing about Carol, for instance, she is mostly me. She’s also a lot of other people. So, I write the character forwards, and only see my friends’ quirks when I read back. That’s because I’m not thinking about “this character has to be a perfect representation of Bryn.” It’s that Bryn probably crossed my mind that day so some of her personality leaked into someone else’s. It’s never a 1:1 ratio with fiction, because you’re going so fast that you’re just trying to make it sound good on the first pass. You’re not thinking about every piece of information it took to create the story, you’re thinking about getting the story out. So, a character written by me would naturally have tiny characteristics of Supergrover, Bryn, Zac, my dad, Lindsay, David, Oliver, who is a dog, Jack (who is also a dog) and me. I don’t fit the narrative with the personality in mind. I write and the character tells me who they are. You can only write from your own experience, and who I’ve talked to that day is important. In terms of theme, it’s changed over the years, but not at its core. You have to write the book you want to read when you don’t see it on the shelf. I had very unique problems, some of them oddly specific. It’s been a wild literary ride, but I like where I’ve ended up in all cases. I don’t dive deep to alienate people who aren’t like me. I dive deep and they naturally come to my mind, like they’re sitting with me while I’m writing. I am telling the people in my life what I need them to hear, because if they’re not listening, someone will. I don’t need attention, I need empathy. Whether that comes from friends or readers is of no matter. One feeds the other. I count on you when I need to retreat.
Can you share the story behind the name โtheantileslieโ?
My friend Chason named himself “theantichason,” being one of the people that’s been on the net as long or longer than me despite being younger. I thought that was a cool nickname so I asked him if I could steal it and he said yes. I’d broken up with Meagan and I needed to get rid of my old user id, “wingnut9.” The fact that there have been eight wingnuts before me helps a lot. I liked the nickname, but also thought it was condescending because in Canada they use it interchangeably with idiot. I have been theantileslie on both my blogs now. The old one is called “Clever Title Goes Here,” and is searchable on the Wayback Machine. I have changed my display name to Leslie D. Lanagan, however, because I want to get my name out there. So, hopefully the comments will introduce me a little better.
I use the theantileslie.com because it’s easier to type (and remember off the top of your head) than the site title. Having a URL that is easy to type and easy to remember is one of the most important features you can give to your web site.
What has been the most surprising or unexpected response to one of your blog posts?
I don’t remember exactly, but the marriage article I wrote years ago took about an hour to write, if that. I had so much to say on the subject that it just spilled out. Then, Martina Navratilova tweeted it from a friend, then Margaret Cho retweeted her. My stats took off in a very big way. I’m not that polished a writer every day, but that’s the point. Sometimes things some out great on the first try. Sometimes I have to keep workshopping an idea until it’s perfect. This is one of the ones where everything flowed onto the page from one word to the next. More important, though, were the people that took the time to comment, because they all told me what a brilliant list it was. It’s sad that the marriage ended, but it was so much fun when it was good.
How does your environment in Silver Spring influence your writing?
When it’s really nice, I like to take the train around and just write. I will choose a random stop, generally Dupont Circle, then just get out and move. Sometimes I’ll have a coffee, sometimes I just want some random social interaction because it’s been too long since I’ve talked to anyone. I love downtown Silver Spring and all it has to offer, but I also like sitting in front of paintings while I write.
Youโve mentioned audio storytelling. What are the challenges and rewards of this medium compared to writing?
My biggest challenge with audio storytelling is that I do not have experience as an editor. If I make a mistake, I generally have to go all the way back to the beginning. It’s not always mistakes, though. Sometimes I realize that the emotions that were there when I wrote the piece in complete isolation get forty times bigger when I hit the red button. I hate it when I am too emotional to continue, which I sometimes am. Supergrover’s entries were so deeply personal that I could not speak them all the time. So, I didn’t record them for a reason. I could not dive back into the wreck without my voice breaking. And yet, some of that I left in, because I wanted her to be able to hear my emotions. All the conversations I wanted to have and didn’t. She is not responsible for responding, but I am responsible for getting my feelings out so they can pass. Feelings are a transitive state. I’ve been all over the place this year, mostly about her….. again, monotropic thought process. Make no mistake. I am happy with the outcome, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also hurt every single day. I just manage it. I put on the gangster rap and get it handled.
How do you balance personal storytelling with privacy concerns on your blog?
It’s an evolving process, and it’s different for each person. I cannot write anything about Supergrover and Lindsay that would get them into hot water, so I agonize over how to tell stories without telling them. It would be better if I didn’t write about anyone at all. However, because this is my driving passion in life, I stopped accepting nasty criticism because my friends are always perfect and I’m the asshole who wasn’t silent about it. I also got a boyfriend who could care less that I write about him (within reason), and a best friend who cares even less than that. Daniel told me that I could say anything I wanted about him, but that’s never true during blowback. What he meant was that I could write anything nice about him, and the same became true of Supergrover as well. It was too easy to do the wrong thing, because if I expressed a need, they’d shut down. So, I’d go off on my own to write about why I’m frustrated and calm myself down, and every bit of vitriol you can possibly imagine has come at me because I’m a writer and typing is how I stim. Things will change as I get more popular, because I’ll need more intensive discussions with Zac and Bryn as the web site gets bigger. The easy answer about balance is to make friends who don’t give a shit you’re a blogger, and I don’t give a shit if they’re fans. Zac gets it. He tells me when it’s off the record. Bryn would, too, if she wanted me to keep something tight. She just never has before.
The worst blowback I’ve gotten in recent memory was when I cut Sam out of my life and my friend Dan told me that my blog made me sound like a dick and looked scandalized when I said that was the point. She was angry that I’d written about a relationship that ended in the worst way possible. She had never even met Sam. I don’t think she was mad about Sam. I think she was wondering if she was going to be next. She wouldn’t have been if she’d expressed her concerns once. We had a good discussion and I thought the matter was closed. Then she kept bringing it up and it made me feel like this woman she’d never met was more important than me. It was not the only thing wrong in our relationship. It was, however, the moment I realized that our problems were large and I did not want to solve them. If we have to have the same fight three times because you think you can change my mind with different words, telling me over and over that I don’t understand when I very much do and just disagree…. Blowback is relentless. Get a thick skin or get out.
What role does humor play in your storytelling, and how do you weave it into serious topics?
I think I have a unique way of saying things, because I’ve always been kind of punk. The humor is sharper, edgier for me than it is for someone like David Sedaris because he never worked for anyone like Anthony Bourdain, and I’ve worked for several. A lot of the things I say are designed to be a pressure release valve on horrible topics. My level of humor greatly depends on my mood when I’m writing. If I feel funny, I am. It’s my inner monologue. I put in jokes when I need a break from the heaviness. I also have a “read it or don’t” attitude so that people who vibe with me come along and the ones that don’t just ignore me altogether. I have covered some really serious shit over the years, but I’ve always tried to include at least a bit of humor, or at least light at the end of the tunnel. It often takes dark jokes to make me laugh, because words have to cut deep before I start feeling.
Could you describe a particularly memorable interaction with a reader that impacted you?
My eighth grade teacher telling me that she could tell I was being abused and didn’t say anything. She didn’t know how, but she knew something was up.
How has your writing process changed since you first began blogging?
I make an effort to write before I do anything else. Last night was unusual as I just happened to be up when the prompt came out. Normally, I wake up at 5:30, check my tablet for the writing prompt, and think about it for the length of a shower. Once I have a jumping off point, I make myself a mug of coffee and a large glass of ice water with lemon. That early schedule has only begun to change, because I’m trying to go to bed and get up at the same time as David, but my body clock gets up at 0530. Even if I stay up later, I will still wake up that early. The one thing that’s changed relatively recently is not taking a break if I can help it. I need a body of work from which to draw, no matter what purpose. I must have had a hell of a lot of content for Copilot to be able to ask these questions.
What advice would you give to someone interested in starting their own personal blog?
Only go into it if you’re prepared to be dedicated. I think you’ll rise in popularity because there are fewer and fewer of us, but it takes a mountain of work to get noticed.
Never take a day off. Ever. Don’t let more than 24 hours go without updating your content. I set the bar at “never” so that if I miss one or two days, I don’t beat myself up over it. People will not come back to a web site that does not change frequently. It was drilled into my head at University of Houston, so if I go to my blog and I’m like, “this is old. This blogger sucks,” I post. Nothing makes me post faster than getting bored of the current entry.
How do you handle writerโs block, especially when dealing with personal stories?
The most profound things come out of me when I have writer’s block because I have made a commitment to use ANYTHING as a jumping off point. It doesn’t have to be good. It has to be written down. As I relax into the rhythm, the subject will get deeper and deeper. The best way to stop writer’s block is to ignore it. Your brain is overwhelmed, so write about nothing until you’ve got the faucet started. I don’t sing in front of a crowd until I’ve warmed up, either.
Whatโs the most important lesson youโve learned from maintaining your blog?
The more I write, the more I know myself and I am comfortable being me.
Creating a web site isn’t nearly as annoying as maintaining it.
Angels should have come down from heaven with herald trumpets when they deprecated the blink tag.
WordPress is not the same as it was when I started using it, and I have not liked any of the modern changes because they appeal to lay people and not web developers.
How do you see your blog evolving in the next five years?
I will get the rising creator status and will start being paid from Facebook directly. I may also move to Substack, but I need to research that more closely. I am looking into an open source content management system that’s open source, so I don’t have to pay for things like web stats plugins. I have more and more reach every day, and I don’t see my engagement going down. It’s nice that I’m only now getting juice because I don’t think I would have been able to handle it early on. I needed to get to a place where I could write 5,000 words in any weather or mood. I’m ready to take it to the next level, but that’s not up to me. That’s up to you. I’ll be grateful for every share and like along the way.
Whatโs your favorite post that youโve written, and why does it stand out to you?
I feel that it is too private to share with the class.
How do you incorporate feedback from your readers into your writing?
I interact with them in the comments. I am often surprised at how wise I sound when people pick out snippets and tell me what they liked. That’s because now that it’s already out of me, I’m just talking to people and reading their comments. My entries all run together, so when people quote me, I often don’t know it’s me. I think I’m amazing when I think I’m someone else. It’s what helped me to have self-confidence…. thinking someone wrote a really great line and realizing it was me. I also get mad and sound like a dick. See above.
Have you ever considered compiling your blog posts into a book? If so, what would that look like?
I haven’t. I think it would make a very good book once it was edited, but I do not think I would like to take on the project of deciding which entries should make the cut. Therefore, I would rather have a company approach me and say they want to do it.
Whatโs the most challenging aspect of sharing your life online, and how do you manage it?
I feel that is too private to share with the class.
How do you decide which life experiences to share and which to keep private?
I don’t. These stories come to me when they come to me. I only need a writing prompt when I can’t think of a jumping off point. Most of the time, I can.
What impact do you hope your blog has on readers, and what do you want them to take away from it?
I hope that women will realize that being emotionally abused in childhood is just as valid as being physically/sexually abused. You develop the same PTSD reflexes. When it comes to emotional abuse, women are likely to say “it’s not that bad” all too often.
I hope that I am teaching people how to live their lives, whether it’s through what I have done, or what I have left undone. Sometimes, survival is seeing what you wouldn’t do, too.
I hope that telling my story, just the way it is with the mundane and not so mundane details of my life, will encourage others to believe that you don’t have to be a genius writer to create a journal that is valuable to you. Writing is a form of prayer. The way I see it is that I will never know if God is listening, but I’ll always know that you are.
Today I decided to do a short question and answer regarding the death of my mother. I couldn’t think of anything to do with one of the prompts, but I can combine all of them. This will probably make you laugh, cry, and get angry. My mother is dead. She will not know I said these things. Keep this in mind, that I am just a child reflecting on her parent’s entire life, and that little moments do not define a lifetime. There are times when she was wonderful to me and times that she was just plain terrible. What kind of child doesn’t say that about their parents, especially after they die? I am not out to get her. I am out to illustrate her. By the end, she will be a 3D character to you, and hopefully you’ll learn more about me as you read.
Iโm sorry to hear about your loss. Here are 10 thoughtful questions a friend might ask to learn more about your mother and her passing, which you can use for your personal blog prompt:
Can you share some of your favorite memories with your mother?
I think I turned nine the year she threw me a Peter Pan birthday party with tons of activities in our backyard. There must have been a hundred people at my house for that one, because it was a tiny town. If there was something to do, people came. I was not popular in school, and I struggled against my mother being more popular than me (she was the music teacher, the fun one. I have been a 90 year old autistic man for like, 46 years. That tracks. I am 46 years old. I knew the smash hit “Get Off My Lawn” by the time I was seven.). Therefore, I was a lot more relaxed with her when we were just out in the backyard having fun. My grandparents, both sets, also lived close at that time and she was more relaxed in her comfort zone than she was when she was trying to make me into the perfect child. I didn’t get it. She could talk to me about being good because of my dad’s job all she wanted, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t just going to sit there and be weird, anyway. I found Daniel and I was fine. Neurodivergent people travel in packs. If you’re an introvert, they’re just smaller.
She thought I was a great singer and often gave me solos in things. She would laugh until she cried when she told the story about how I was too shy to sing with the choir, but as they were leaving the stage, I decided what the people really needed was a solo.
We were a team. She was my accompanist no matter whether I was singing or playing my horn. She learned monster orchestra reductions (piano accompaniments) just to take me to contests. Then, because she was already accompanying me, she accompanied all my friends as well. The only person she never played for, I don’t think, was Ryan Darlington (he’s a tuba player). It’s not that she wouldn’t have done it, we just went to different middle schools. We both ended up at PVA, but he went to Johnston and I went to Clements. Johnston was the performing arts middle school and I didn’t get it. I got into Clements and we marinaded and grilled their asses at contest. It was memorable because I was the trumpet soloist that helped get them there. I played the opening trumpet call in the “Dances With Wolves” score. I auditioned for PVA when I was at the absolute top of my game. My mother played for me at that audition, too.
At HSPVA, I was a trumpet player. At Clements, I was in Varsity Band and Varsity Choir at the same time, which I loved.
Let me take a quick break to tell you how I did it. I sang for the choir director and she put me in junior varsity. I said, “are you sure? I’ve been doing things like the Messiah for five years now.” She said, “Ok. Prove it.” She played the first four measures in front of a monster exposed lick, I believe trying to prove to me that I couldn’t handle it when I’d had in memorized since I was 12. Please. My opera voice flipped on. Case closed (link is to a humorous clip from one of my voice lessons).
In short, I would not be the person that I am today without the grand piano she bought to put in our apartment after my parents’ divorce. That’s because as long as it was there, she always had a way to draw me in. Draw me closer. Test out anthems she wanted to use with her choir and wanting to play for me because she could hear how it would sound at choir practice. I was part of the vetting process for the programming when she was a choir director/organist. I asked her to leave me her piano in her will, and she did. Now, it’s at my sister’s house and David’s house just isn’t big enough. But when I’m at Lindsay’s, I get really quiet and let my mom speak through the chords. It what she did when she was alive and it worked. Why stop now?
How has your motherโs life influenced the person you are today?
A tape runs in my head that I should be the perfect person all the time because people are always watching. This was true when I was a preacher’s kid, but now I can’t turn it off and I have massive self esteem issues at making any mistakes. I have chided myself for not achieving perfection instead of taking the W at excellence. I’m the person that absolutely is driven to get an A+ on everything and a body/brain that just won’t have it. I can either accept my fate or die thinking I’m the worst person that ever lived. I choose acceptance.
I work with children much easier because I am social masking her, an elementary and middle school choir director for all of her career, except for the time she took off from work until Lindsay and I were old enough to fend for ourselves. I’ve picked up more, noticed more than she ever imagined. She was a saint and also tough as nails. Strict disciplinarian who hid all her feelings because she thought she wasn’t enough, either. It is the plight of women most of the time. Because I needed to break free from that pattern, I see it for what it is. However, I do not think of her as a bad parent, but an overly fearful and depressed one. Her whole life depended on what other people thought. I was basically Chelsea Clinton on a very small scale.
She is the person that convinced me it was better to hide my every need than to display it. It’s part of the reason Lindsay is so outgoing and free, while I hide in the shadows. She doesn’t worry about what people think of her to the extent that I do, and it’s a problem. It’s only now by convincing myself I am a good writer who has something to say that I really value myself as an asset and ally. Again, I mean to come off as confident, not arrogant. Someone has to tell me I’m pretty every day. It might as well be me. I got well when I realized that not saying anything left me angry and resentful all the time. When I began to express needs, no one liked it because I was so angry. So, so angry. I apologize for that, but I cannot apologize for the ways I’ve felt ignored by people who’ve said they loved me. It is on them to apologize to me if they feel bad about it. But if they don’t, I’m not waiting around for an apology. Sometimes you have to create your own closure, and I’m at peace with it.
She is the one that taught me how to treat a wife/husband, basically doing everyone’s emotional work for them and taking all their bad behavior because if I don’t, those people will leave. It took me a very long time to come to the realization that if they leave because you have emotional needs, you’re better off without that person in your life. Be careful in deciding the line where someone else is “needy” and you’re refusing to talk. A mind will only accept that of course you’re too tired to talk for so many days/weeks/years. However long it takes for someone to realize they’re unhappy. But because they’ve been unhappy for a very long time, you’re not going to like it very much. Have clear boundaries on what’s too much so that fights like these don’t come up. Work smarter, not harder.
She taught me that jokes were funnier when you didn’t see them coming, like her making a really sharp comment when she was normally so happy go lucky. I have a feeling that she was probably also autistic because the tapes that ran in her head were that she had to act completely normal all the time, too. It’s called social masking. Because of my family, I have both male and female sets….. as in, what a man would generally say and what a woman would. The female set is unsure and cautious. The male one walks in the world knowing that no one is better than me and no one is worse, either. It’s very important to make that distinction, because basically seeing the way I write convinced me that I had a man’s confidence online, so go with it. Be confident all the time, because it’s not all about you. It’s a survival manual for someone else.
What were some of the values and lessons she instilled in you?
If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. I didn’t say anything for 35 years.
Be kind to everyone, no matter what they do to you. This has had enormous positive and negative affects, because I tend to overestimate the good in people and stop standing up for myself when I feel bullied. On the flip side, everyone is more open and caring with me because I am open and caring with them. It’s a mixed bag, as parental lessons often are.
Be subservient to your partner. Whatever they want to do, you want to do. What you want to do/eat is not up to you, because you have to watch your weight and not seem like a pig (I wasn’t on Adderall til college and had the normal appetite of a teenager), and also his choice of restaurant is always better than yours. I wasn’t raised to be queer. Neither are other women. We’ll talk for an hour about what to do for dinner because neither of us wants to assert an opinion that might offend the other. Same for dating. Lesbians take FOREVER to admit that they like someone because God forbid someone rejects them. it’s systemic, but my personal experience is unique and universal. One of the things I like about men is that they’re direct. It’s easy to ask them out because it’s a yes or no question to them. It’s especially fun when you don’t care about the answer and neither do they, because it’s no harm, no foul. With a woman, you’ll waste years pining over her until someone finally admits feelings and then spend the first four months of dating EXCLAIMING over how much we didn’t see it. Yes we did. We were just ostriches about it. If I don’t tell you I like you, then I don’t risk abandonment. It’s intrinsic to who women are as people. If we are not perfect, our husbands will leave. Flat out. This is changing as gender roles decrease. That information was useless to me then.
My mother’s narrative was never how hard it was for me that I was queer. It was always how embarrassing it was to tell people I was queer. She couldn’t empathize, which is the root of why we had a sometimes terrible relationship. Later in her life, she wouldn’t let anyone get away with a homophobic comments, but she never told me that. I heard it at her funeral, because all of the sudden she was now the cool mom and not the rejected one. She could play up that card instead of being embarrassed, all the while being completely disinterested in hearing how Meagan, Kathleen, or Dana & I were doing. I am glad that she came to peace about it. I am not glad she never told me.
How do you cope with the grief and keep her memory alive?
I have fallen in love with everything Dia de los Muertos and I actually visit cemeteries a lot for the peace and quiet, yet feeling surrounded. The most profound place I’ve ever felt peace is at a neighborhood for the dead in Paris. It’s called Pere LaChaisse (sp?), and it’s got more famous artists of every discipline that you could possibly imagine. If you cannot travel to Paris, there are the same type cemeteries in New Orleans. See them before you die, because it’s an experience in and of itself. In DC, I have now been to sit with Gore Vidal. Good talk.
I wear an ichthus necklace every day now, because the necklace she actually gave me came apart in a million pieces. I got it at the funeral home, and the inside of the fish is filled with her fingerprint. I don’t like how I got it, but I do like that it was possible to create and a powerful remembrance to have my mother’s fingerprint on my heart every day.
Lindsay and I FaceTime at my mother’s grave when I’m not in town, or visit together when I am. It makes us feel closer to her even though we know she’s not really there. The idea is fun. We sit and talk to her, sometimes eat, sometimes drink coffee. It’s a safe space to get away from it all, and we do.
Stories come up at random times, and I never know whether they’re going to be good or bad. Some of them are still so painful that I blank out, like seeing her in her coffin. What is really bad is that because it’s the last image I have of her, it’s the one that’s stuck. My mother got sick and died in about 30 minutes flat. I wore this look of abject shock, like I was high on Oxycodone and completely sober. It was more than a year of magical thinking, because it was so unbelievable.
I know for sure that she got the death she wanted, because she did not want to be in pain and she did not want Lindsay and I to end up taking care of her for years on end. She didn’t know it was coming, but she would have been pleased with the result. It gives me complete peace. I don’t have to worry that there are things she would have wanted that she didn’t get, because I know for sure that given the choice between dying quickly or it being a long, drawn out process she would have chosen to go out exactly the same way.
Other people keep her alive for me. She was such a public figure that people tell me all the time how much I remind them of her. It’s irritating until you realize that it’s the only way to keep your mother alive long after she’s dead.
Were there any traditions or hobbies she passed down to you?
Make a big deal out of people’s birthdays.
Love people until they just can’t stand it. Make it weird. So many people are hurt in the world. See it.
If you are a teacher and you don’t have money, you are responsible for finding it. She taught me that people will support a valuable cause. For instance, she dated a judge after the divorce that was pretty wealthy. She worked at one of the poorest schools in Fort Bend. She never asked him for money. She talked about her life, and he responded. One year he bought the entire class winter coats. You can get things if you ask for them, but only without asking directly. This is not bad advice, because it’s not one’s responsibility to respond to your needs, you’re just asking if they will. The difference is that I don’t take rejection personally and she viewed it as a flaw in her character. However, this is a new development because I finally got tired of not being heard correctly. I don’t do well when I’m talking around something and just hoping.
What is the most important thing you learned from your mother?
I have learned many things from my mother, from the tender to the terrible. Every bit of it had to do with focusing on external validation. She was not attention-seeking in the slightest. She was just trying to take up as little space in the world as she possibly could, because someone, somewhere could be offended.
She gave really good hugs. I miss those the most.
Towards the end of her life, she enjoyed traveling and came to both Portland and DC. In fact, I also met her in Seattle and we went to the Experience Music Project before she and her husband left on an Alaskan cruise.
Giving birth is not for the faint of heart. It’s especially hard if you don’t tell your doctors that you are in pain. She said that she bit her pillow while everyone screamed and no one noticed that she needed medication. There’s no award for that, but if there had been, she’d have won it.
Own yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you. You cannot be perfect enough to please everyone all the time, and you will die mad about it. I learned that because she never did and I watched what it did to her. She was still mad at my dad at all family functions 25 years after the divorce. I realize that relationships are complicated. Being a decent coparent is not. At some point, you have to say to yourself “this doesn’t even matter anymore,” like my friends who found out they were pregnant the morning of their wedding. All of the sudden, the wedding was literally a piece of cake because there were bigger fish to fry. Like, we’re having a good time, okay, but we’re not even going to pretend that any of this is now important.
I am a more compassionate person than I would be otherwise, because my mother’s insistence on being polite and friendly has led me to keep going in relationships that weren’t interesting at first, but kept growing. It was a lesson to sit back and keep listening.
It feels excruciating that she would have treated Zac like he walks on water, because he might be a little too much for her, but he’s still a man interested in her daughter, which was infinitely more important than a woman being interested in me. It is not surprising or lost on me that I did not find complete happiness with a man until after I realized she wasn’t there to give “advice.” Even though Zac is also queer and likes me for everything I am, she would not have believed I could tell Zac I was nonbinary and have the relationship survive. Yes, I’m sure that men who like men definitely have a problem with me………. But I only know this from watching how she treated Ryan and how she treated Meagan. Oh, and also I didn’t have any agency. It was all my emotional abuser’s idea and I had been turned somehow. Meanwhile, I’d been crying alone in my room for two years. I’m just not queer enough to exclude dating men altogether. It speaks highly of Zac’s brain that it even happened in the first place, because I do have a preference for women. It gives me a little bit of clinical separation, honestly, because not every conversation digs deep. By the time I talk to Zac, I have worn myself out on my blog.
How did she inspire you in your lifeโs pursuits and passions?
She loved everything I ever did in the arts, whether it was singing, playing my horn, playing the handbells, or creative writing. She also loved asking me to help her with her room when she was decorating because she knew I was creative at that, too.
She wouldn’t be surprised that I turned out to be a great writer, because I was already on my way in 2016. Therefore, she was invested in my talent. She still managed to bust my balls about my behavior, though. She hated my writing at times, because she thought I was harping on a point over and over. She did not realize that autistic people are governed by monotropic thought processes. It is literally not possible for us to change gears quickly, or process emotions easily. It takes time, because nine times out of ten, it’s trouble with not being able to translate neurotypical into neurodivergent or vice versa. She thought Supergrover was bad for me, that I descended into a world of pain. She wasn’t wrong. That being said, I couldn’t find a friend of mine she did like. Neurodivergent people tend to be queer and run in packs. Therefore, if she didn’t understand me, she didn’t understand them, either. So, her interest in my blog was a mixed bag.
In what ways do you see your motherโs traits or characteristics in yourself?
I am only strong when my back is against the wall. I only use power when I need it, not because it pleases me. Just like my mother in a classroom, I walk softly and carry a big stick. I just don’t have to be as aggressive about it now, because I have friends that respect my boundaries and I don’t feel like I’m being ignored. Your voice doesn’t have to be loud if people aren’t covering it up.
It is easier to be honest on the internet because when I’m in front of people, I cater to the urge to be small in front of them to gain acceptance.
If I’m going to be a musician, be the best musician I can be. Don’t think that you’re incapable of something. Suck until you don’t. And in fact, my voice didn’t get really exceptional until I started taking private lessons every week. It was so good to learn that I was so much more capable and confident than I thought, because I had a great voice, I’d just picked up some bad habits. She helped me work through all of them by accompanying me between lessons.
Take the time to get in a proper warm-up, because you’ll sound better if you’re relaxed. Start a rehearsal with your vocal cords already warm. Breathe deeply. Four measures is a long time.
What do you miss the most about her?
I miss having someone to talk to all the time. We had long, involved conversations about her life, her career, her everything because I was happy to listen to the chatter rather than tell her I wanted to talk about my life, too. I knew she wasn’t comfortable, so I just listened. The same goes for being touched. We could say a lot without saying anything, a safe person to just walk up and hug because they’re used to it. People rarely hug me anymore, and I’m so used to it I forget I need it.
How would you like people to remember her?
As a saint, perfectly perfect in every way, because no one gets through life without making mistakes. With your parents, it’s only a different situation because your first family installs all your triggers. I hope that by not staying silent about them, you won’t, either.
We are all a little bit broken, and that’s where the light gets in.
These questions are designed to be open-ended and reflective, allowing you to share personal stories and feelings about your mother. They can help readers understand her impact on your life and the legacy she leaves behind.
Stories That Are All True 