I have a lot of people tell me this when they’re in relationships with me, and I have found that it is a fighting tactic of which I’m not very fond. They say “you’re demanding,” but what they mean is “I’m overwhelmed.” That’s because it is not on one person to divine the other’s needs, and there is no way that the problem is always me. However, it is a very effective cheap political shot, as if nothing in their behavior ever elicits my response. I’m just “mean.” When that happens, I disengage. I don’t want to play games. And, I’m hearing Supergrover’s voice in my head as I type this, “I do not have room for that temperature in my life.”
Last night Daniel invalidated my feelings, so I disengaged and went to bed. I didn’t want either of us to say anything they regretted, because he sighed in exasperation, which came across as passive-aggressive in the first place, and I knew it was time to go. It was enough for one day, because I was tired enough that I knew I’d go nuclear on him and I was heading a fight off at the pass. I said, “I don’t want to play your games,” took my sleeping pills, and went to bed.
I wake up, and he’s mad about all these slights, real and perceived, that he has not expressed before, so one of two things is happening. Either he’s actually concerned/angry about these things and has been covering them up, or he’s just making up things to throw in my face so that I’m “forced” to feel bad about the fact that I withdrew.
What I have learned over time is to go to bed angry. Let that shit work itself out in my dreams, rather than taking it out on the person I love because we’re fighting while we’re exhausted. So, I got some sleep, and while I was asleep, he went from “I’m having a bad day” to “you know what, this isn’t worth it” in two hours.
He absolutely spun out on his own because he was anxious, so it wasn’t a real breakup. He doesn’t know what the right thing to do is right now, because he thinks I’m demanding due to old tapes. If everyone tells you that your feelings don’t matter, then you’re going to believe they don’t. If you don’t believe your words have power, then you’ll say anything because no one is listening, anyway. I understand this innately- it’s a trait of all neurodivergent people. But it is not my responsibility to fill that hole inside him and make him secure enough within himself that he doesn’t think I’m abandoning him every time I go to bed.
He asked me to stop bombarding him with messages because it was too much- he, like Supergrover, assumed that I needed answers to everything rightthefucknow, when I was making a list and checking it twice over things that were important to talk about as we plan the next few years. However, because it had been a problem with Supergrover, I was prepared for it. I could never convince her that I wanted an answer eventually, that I wasn’t on a time constraint because I was looking so far into the future that the moment didn’t matter. She could be as busy as she needed to be, as long as she was willing to lay her guts on the table and tell me what was wrong. I cannot divine it over text.
But I would if I could, and often tried.
So, I stopped writing so much to Daniel at a time and started recording my thoughts either here or in a notebook (because I doubt you care about the dull details that create dreams, you care about the dreams themselves). I want to get married to Daniel because the piece of paper has a function beyond just saying to the world that we’re in love and want to be together. We could do that in front of our friends and family without ever filing government paperwork and it would be every bit as meaningful.
But there’s a huge difference in marrying a civilian vs. marrying a veteran. Dependents are entitled to so much more if they’re married to or a child of a service member, even in Daniel’s retirement. There are perks that are thank you for your service all over the place, like not having to pay tax on things when you buy at the PX, getting to fly standby on military planes when Daniel, Cora, and I are all traveling together, and a health care system in which I’d never fall through the cracks. It’s a lot, and it’s a big decision, but Daniel has already offered. I don’t think we’re there yet, obviously, if our communication needs this much work.
But here’s why it does………. God help me. I am marrying myself, and it’s not so easy to be married to you. I do not mean that I’m a selfish bastard, I’m saying that we are so much alike that it’s akin to having a child and thinking, “I wanted you to look like me, not act like me.”
This time, it’s on Daniel to figure out why he spiraled out so fast, and learn how not to do that. Not my circus, not my monkeys. If he’s as serious about this relationship as he says he is, he’ll have to learn to own his half, because I am not here to suss it out for him.
I am in no way a psychologist. I just “speak” psychologist and this is the best way I know how to explain what’s going on without putting blame on either one of us. Medicine and how the brain works over huge population samples gives me perspective that I am not trying to analyze them, but to explain to an audience what I think is going on and how I feel, because that kind of empathy helps me move forward in a positive way. The empathy part is going out of my way to try and prove that I’m wrong. To give people the benefit of the doubt because I can analyze behavior with an omnipotent third eye, calling myself out on my own bullshit in the process.
There is just no room in my life for people who don’t want to know what part they played, because relationships don’t last that way. If one person expresses needs and one person hides, it’s a hard pattern to break……… but I have to, or Daniel, et al, will make me afraid to emote at all.
That is not what I want in a partner. We’re going to be giants together, with room for all our feelings…… no one ever has to hide in fear and spiral out alone.
Daniel seems to waffle on conversations about the future, but it’s for good reason. I’m not saying that he’s avoidant because he wants to be, only that he has to be right now…. but not forever. He’s in the middle of his disability case that could make his pension even more attractive, so he can’t predict things like cash flow and his ability to “move about the country.” At the same time, without any kind of vision, I flounder. And if me wanting some sort of working boundaries is taken as a problem because I am telling you what I want/need and feel like you need to keep everything close to the vest.
I have a huge capacity to love, but also a huge capacity to feel needed. The lovebomb/discard cycle will not happen with me, because I won’t allow it. It’s harder with an addict or a patient with mental health issues like PTSD, but not impossible. It’s not because the person is a narcissist, it’s that their first reaction is trained to be fear and protection of themselves. If you bring up a problem, their first reaction is to try and make their environment safe, and that includes the steel shutdown with the automatic locks, sometimes with the cocking of weapons to show you shouldn’t get any closer. That’s the point at which I know our conversation has come to an end, because I am not going to fight through all that. You’re going to explore why you felt you had to “suit up” and come tell me what you were really feeling that made you react that way. You are not responsible for my reactions, but I am allowed to have them.
I’m allowed to feel pissed off that Daniel once again broke up with me, but he fired himself out of anxiety and abandonment, just like I did with Supergrover. I felt abandoned even though she didn’t feel that way. I didn’t need any more safety and security than that. That way, I’m not counting on a response, but it’s welcome if I get one. I would have treated her like I treat Bryn for her whole life if she had been as honest with me in all of her e-mails as she was in her last one.
Here’s the line that got me. “I could write all night, but I won’t.” In that moment, I knew I hadn’t been lovebombed just to be discarded. That’s because the letter was already pages long, and then after she said she didn’t want to type anymore, she typed for several more paragraphs. It made it feel so much more personal and intimate, because it was like she was saying, “I could write to you all night.” The only thing I worry about with both Daniel and Supergrover is that I have done this thing:
Daniel said, “because you said you were still in love with me, I want to make it my life goal that you don’t regret being that raw.” I told him I was only able to be that way with him because he’d been that raw with me. That he’d told me he’d been in love with me for 36 years, and I didn’t think one would undo it. I was absolutely right.
And then I got to go back to Cora and say that “I told your dad that if he wasn’t strong enough to admit that he’d been an idiot, then it was on me.” I love that I got to make my girl laugh. I get why stepfamilies have family rings. I love that kid like I birthed her, and I didn’t meet her until she was 24.
It’s been awesome getting to talk to her dad, because I am not her primary parent. But I do fulfill a very specific role in her life, and that’s that her parents will never understand her like a bisexual woman with a nonbinary brain. Again, it’s not that they lack empathy, they are just standing outside the queer community when my sister and I have been in it since we were kids. I think that Cora and Lindsay will like each other a lot, because even though Lindsay is a cishet woman, she works in trans medicine. The best part is that I have relatives that live in the same area as Daniel and Cora, so it would be fun to go and visit Daniel, but also be able to check on the progress at my grandfather’s house, visit with my aunts, uncles, and cousins. It is really hard for us all to get together because we don’t have our grandparents to bind us together anymore, nor my mother or her brother, Bill.
But we manage. I learned at my grandfather’s funeral that my late uncle’s wife is getting married again, and I’m so happy for her. I was also very glad to see my mother’s sister, because she said she knew my mom would want her to be there, if not for her, for us. She was right. It was like hearing my mother’s voice the whole time. My aunt speaks in a little higher register than my mother, but the inflections are exactly the same.
I’d get to see people that want to be close to me and aren’t, just by the nature of where we live. It would be so nice to be able to move back to Northeast Texas without incident- lower cost of living and all that. But at the same time, it might be safe for me to be bisexual, especially in big cities like Dallas, Austin, Houston, etc. But nowhere is it safe to be trans. That changes my equation quite a bit.
Plus, I also consider Bryn one of my partners as well. She’s a yellow string, but if you walk with me in such a close way for that many years, you’re someone I consider a partner, because that helps me keep it in perspective that Daniel does not deserve every single bit of me outside of my professional endeavors. It’s a mistake that too many couples make- cocooning to the rest of the world and only speaking to each other, then when the relationship ends, your entire world walks out the door. I can’t do that again.
Bryn and I want it to be so that when everyone else walks out on us, we have each other. That’s what best friends do. To make her less important than someone I want to marry is ridiculous, because I’ve been through so much more with her than with him. It is not that we are unhappy in our other relationships, it’s that you always need someone to have your back. You’ve got your romantic partners, and you’ve got the ones that heal your broken hearts.
The thing that keeps relationships in perspective for me is that even if Bryn goes away, I still have writing. I still have a friend that hasn’t left me, because in a lot of ways, this is still a conversation. I just don’t know the audience. It’s still epistolary, yet I’m going to bet most of us will never shake hands.
I have finally found something that gives me complete and total internal validation, so I am not looking for it in anyone else………… anymore. I am not saying that I like any relationship ending. I like the feeling that even when someone else isn’t with me, I am, and I’m finding out that I’m pretty good company.
I’m guessing I am at least interesting enough that you read to the end.
It’s starting to stress me out that you can’t answer a blog prompt against, because I don’t really have a topic to start from each morning. Today wouldn’t have been a good one, anyway, because I don’t have any more morning/night rituals now than I did the first time around. The point still stands, though, that it was night to have a jumping off point and a tag everyone starts with every day, #dailyprompt and #dailyprompt-x, the number advancing every day. Well, since I have both tags for all of the prompts from last year, that’s why they already look like they’ve been answered this year. I’m sorry I’m on about this, it was just the main thing that kept me from being lazy and not posting something that day.
But yesterday wasn’t about laziness. I skipped yesterday because I was in burnout mode. I was more overstimulated than I’d been in a long time, because my schedule was all messed up. I needed time to recover and I took it. I slept, mostly. I am not as young as I continue to think I am.
If I have learned nothing from going to psychiatrists and psychologists over the years, it’s that medicine and therapy absolutely work and are valuable……… but so are sleep and sobriety. I don’t practice total abstinence from alcohol, because it’s okay to enjoy it once in a while. It’s just that if I am taking an antidepressant and drinking a depressant, I have not made any forward motion.
When I was in the restaurant business, I drank a lot more because that’s what we did after work. But, then after Dana got her DUI, we went to all these classes on medicine and alcohol (legally required for her, I just drove). It sent MY brain on fire. When I realized what was actually going on in my brain when I drank, I had a light bulb moment. It just didn’t feel like an every day sort of thing anymore.
Therefore, when I worked in a pub here in Silver Spring, I rarely drank. Occasionally I took them up on a beer, but they also had Maine Root Mexican Cola. That won nearly every night. It was a pub. None of the drinks we served had ice except for soda. With the choice of a room temperature beer or a cold soda with ice after a 12 hour shift on grill, it was a quick and easy decision. Give me the cold one.
I have shifted my focus into accommodating who I actually am instead of who everyone told me I was. Whoever I thought Leslie Lanagan was, I cannot say from before. I can only say that I saw the expectations in front of me and found all of them easy for a short period of time, and all of them untenable long term. I learned who my real friends were when I stopped social masking, and Doc was the first person who recognized it before I said it. “Do you think the authoritative part of yourself comes from you feeling more confident in confiding in me?” Yes, 100%. The more you allow me to be me without social masking, the more I want to talk to you. The more I want to open up to you.
I can only speak to the fact that the more I get to know myself, the more I learn how wrong I’ve been. Treating myself as perfectly mentally stable and perfectly physically able, just lazy and a drain on society has nearly killed me several times. I know that because I can only treat myself that way so long without realizing it’s not producing results.
Once I started being kind to myself, I could be softer, as well. That’s because I was living under everyone else’s expectations of what I should be able to do. I was not raised to be neurodivergent, and in some respects, not raised to even be fallible, either, because that is opening the kimono. The parish doesn’t get to live in the pastor’s house.
I didn’t “choose to air all of this out on my web site” re: Supergrover. I decided she wasn’t worthy of listening to my story anymore, because she’d told me she was tired of it. That did not mean there was no more story to tell. She just asked to stop listening to it. There’s so much context she’s missing, and what bothers me is that she told me that I’d aired some things she wanted to keep private, and in no way did I know any of that. When I started explaining, I went by the timeline of her e-mails, especially the ones where they said that her stories weren’t mine to carry anymore, that everyone already knew. She didn’t tell me any of it- no anger, no disappointment, no hurt, no anything. She just let it fester and wandered further from me. The thing I needed most was intimacy, but she didn’t want to give it to me. Not my call. It’s perfectly valid. But so is my hurt if that is her response. I am not saying that she did anything wrong. I am only saying that it is not her responsibility to have my reactions for me. If she wants distance, it’s just a different way of ending the game than I would have done it, but I get the same result and cannot be angry about that.
She says it’s a lot, that every letter is so dense. And at the same time, I don’t think she’d be as obsessed with reading my letters if they weren’t so deep and chewy. What brought us together has driven us apart.
Therefore, I went to my only other safe space in writing….. the part where it’s just me in my room, thinking to myself. I am writing these as letters to me in the future, which is why I cultivate this web site as what my friend Kristie called “my pensieve.” I am a really rare breed, I think….. someone who’s willing to let another person read their autistic mind in real time. I think it’s important, because generally, autistic people aren’t raised to be autistic. They know how their neurotypical adults handle the world, but they have no clue how an autistic person does it. And then add to that the large number of older women who are getting diagnosed now because it was entirely missed in their childhood due to having social masking beaten into them early. That social masking, those expectations, are what make an autistic person feel like an alien.
That’s because I am an aggressive taskmaster with myself, authoritative and stern without love because in addition to not giving myself empathy, I am a relentless perfectionist who doesn’t give a fuck about my feelings. I haven’t cared how bad I’ve made myself feel for not being perfect since I was born, because that’s how the outside world has treated me for years as well.
If you could have something named after you, what would it be?
Generally, things are named after you posthumously, and I don’t want to be given an award for the most original way to die, like accidentally rocking a Coke machine onto myself….. that’s a classic. In DC, I basically have the option of a museum, a statue, or a gravestone. However, the plots around Gore Vidal are already taken at Congressional cemetery, and I don’t live in The District proper. I’m not sure there are any other requirements to live there. But it wouldn’t matter. I’d rather be cremated because I don’t see anyone needing my body after the doctors with it (I am an organ, skin, and donor). I also don’t have a special attachment to one place, but a lot of them.
I’d like to become one with the Columbia River Gorge, because no one is going to rename that after me, but it’s where I’d like to spend eternity. And if you put me on the Washington side, I WILL KNOW. I don’t know how I will know that, but I do know that I’d take a lot of chances with ghosts, but I’m not one of them. I could outsmart me easily, because I create the logic. I don’t have to follow it. I am sure it is something that seems like a joke to me and yet is the source of all my real problems. I don’t have to follow what I say because I know what I think. I forget about the translation layer between neurodivergent and neurotypical people that makes me automatically sound immature and a little bit crazy because I haven’t thought it out. I’m like “The Doctor” in that way. People spend time with me and wonder how I get so far on half plans. It’s because I’m not threatened when they don’t work out or change. I just assimilate the new information into whatever the plan was before.
I realized I was struggling without Daniel because there wasn’t someone to social mask in the mornings. There was nothing to build anything with if we didn’t take the raw materials with which we started and put in the work. I don’t want to throw raw ingredients into a stock pot and hope for the best.
He told me that some of the things I said made him not want to engage. I said, “that’s fine and we can table it, but these are the important conversations to have and we can’t ignore them. Problems keep revisiting you.” He agreed with me and we moved on. I am not trying to make anyone feel bad, I’m saying, “this is the problem. What do you want to do about it?” Most people do not think of it as a problem unless it affects them. They rarely care when their actions affect you. What’s good enough for them is good enough for you in all cases, regardless of how their first family communicated.
I’m guilty of the same thing, but I’m trying to learn from my mistakes. I do not need everything to be doom and gloom all the time, but I do need for people to be emotionally mature and tell me how they feel instead of attacking me for bringing something up. It’s an easy and cheap shot that I will never let anyone get away with ever again. It’s the equivalent of “it’s not that bad. You’re imagining it. You’re dwelling on the past.” No, I’m telling you the feelings that are coming up for me now because of what happened in the past, and we can either deal with it now, or we can deal with it forever, because if this is always a one-sided conversation and it is important to me, it becomes a dealbreaker.
Yesterday, Daniel asked me how he could show me the most amount of love. My answer to that was twofold. The first is that if he really loves me, he’ll want a housekeeper before I move in…. one of those jokes that’s not meant to come off as a joke because I’m autistic/ADHD and I don’t remember anything going anywhere and I don’t create messes, I maintain them. They are piles, but it is my emotional support detritus.
Here’s why “emotional support detritus” is a thing. The first is that few houses come with built-ins where you can see anything inside. Every cabinet has a door. The neurodivergent brain has to have everything out in front of them all the time, because they do not create memories of where they place things. It’s a need for iron structure and an inability to create it with ADHD. I am a Virgo. Back to school has excited me since the 80s. I have bought every planning system known to God and man. The thing that has worked best is my original Palm Pilot with Graffiti 1. I never got the hang of Graffiti 2, and I am still butt hurt about it.
I might look on E-bay to see if I can find a Palm Pilot and a dock, because the form factor is so much smaller than my iPad and “Scribble” is harder to get used to than I thought it would be.
Interestingly enough, Graffiti 1 works really well on the Apple Watch, but it would be better if the Apple Watch supported the Apple Pencil because it’s so much easier to hand write with a stylus than it is with your finger, especially one as touch sensitive as the Apple Pencil.
I write like it’s Graffiti 1 anyway, because it’s easier than having to get all my letters perfect. It knows what I mean…… except for voice dictation. I have better luck when I’m on Bluetooth headphones, and I cannot be very far from my phone, because I think the voice files are actually processed on your phone rather than your watch.
I want an Apple Watch version named after me, because I have some good ideas. What if CIA gave us those batteries that lasted months without a recharge, and a chip that would fit inside a watch and be so powerful that you don’t need your phone for anything. I have a feeling that would involve creating a larger memory ROM, but surely if they have enough room for as much as they do now, they can put more RAM on the board. The biggest problem would be overheating, but if they can make tiles for a space shuttle to guard against heat, they can probably design something like that to absorb heat in an Apple Watch.
The battery is the main thing, because Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and a 5g connection all take a lot of battery at once, and that’s before it starts processing apps. The one I use the most is “Find My iPhone,” because I can make it make noise from my watch….. unless my phone is dead…. then I’m on my own and that’s not a pretty sight. Although because of the Apple ecosystem, as long as I have a wi-fi connection, I’ll still get iMessage on my iPad. I will still get iMessage on my phone, as well as SMS.
Although I think if I ever get a new Android tablet, I’ll want it to have a slot for a SIM card because I won’t use anything for texting on an Android but Signal, Wix Secure Messenger, and WhatsApp. I use Facebook Messenger because it’s easy, but it’s not encrypted, either. If you want to chat with me on either of those platforms and already have my phone number, please do.
On my author page at Facebook, you can leave all kinds of comments, and the more engagement I have, the closer I am to being paid. It also makes it where anyone can message me, you don’t have to be a follower (although it would be cool, no lie). Sometimes I wonder if I should do an FAQ on Facebook as an introduction, but I don’t know what people would ask. I’ll answer anything, you just have to respect that “no” and “that’s too private” are valid answers.
Anyone is welcome to contribute, from my biggest fans to my biggest detractors. I do not think I am the expert on anything but myself, and your stories are your stories. I often get so many likes on a post that I don’t know what triggered the reception. Is it the time of day, is it my content, is it my characters, etc.?
The biggest surprise is being more popular in other countries than I am here. I have a huge following in India and the UK. Plus, I have flags all over the world where I know who they are. If you don’t want me to know who you are based on geography, I would suggest a VPN. 🙂 I have so many people addicted to this web site that know me in real life, because they’re in the position where they don’t want to be written about, but they inhale everything I’ve written as truth because it is interesting and presented in a way that hopefully everyone can understand it. That I try as often as I can to use universal examples so that I’m not attacking anyone. I am laying down the facts as I see them.
Very few people are willing to stand by and let themselves be written as a villain, because that’s how they see themselves in my writing- not that I intentionally portray them that way. I have made it a point to record every up and down in every relationship, so that you don’t see me as paining anyone as perfect, not even Jesus.
Speaking of which, I am watching a docudrama on Netflix called “Testament,” and it’s all about Moses, starting with the story from when he was a child. The documentary part is interviewing all kinds of scholars from the Abrahmic tradition because he’s the only “character” that appears in all three holy books. There is a lot more information about him that way, and the Jews in the conversation have been very enlightening, because Jesus was a Jew. It’s fun learning about the traditions he would have been taught as a child, before he started branching out……. because in order to understand the future, you have to understand the past.
I can absolutely believe that as a historically known INFJ that his divinity started the moment he started arguing with the rabbis in the temple when he was 12 years old. That his divinity does not come from resurrection, but about being able to go toe to toe with the best theological minds in the world when he wasn’t even a man yet. His bar mitzvah was still a year away.
To me, I believe as Pete Rollins has said, that “a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” To me, theology is not the end goal, whether there is a heaven and a hell, whether there is an afterlife at all. It is the ritual and the argument.
I got sidetracked when I was talking about Gordon Atkinson, who used to blog as “The Real Live Preacher,” as if he was a carnival act. I have never related more to anything in my life. He really opened up to me in those essays, and I understood myself so much better after reading him. I didn’t grow up to be a pastor, but I grew up with a pastor dad. It was hard not to feel like “The Real Life Preacher’s Kid,” because when you are a public figure’s family, you’re all in the fish bowl together……. and sometimes, two things happen…… severally or jointly. The first is that people think preacher’s kids are somehow better than everyone else. I mean, I am, but let’s not talk about Lindsay. (KIDDING)
I only say that because I really bought in. Lindsay was a walking wild hair, and I envied her for half my life because of it. Still do on days when she has to be “on” and I’m in burnout mode. I do my best work by standing behind her and just listening.
I did not have the strength (and sometimes still don’t) to have equal relationships with people by calling them on their bullshit. She learned it at three. I learned it at 45. There is a slight difference between those two ages, and I have to say that it probably comes from birth order. I was almost six when she was born, because her birthday is in June and mine is in September.
Therefore, I don’t have a lot of memories of what it was like to be an only child, but I do have quite a bit more than someone whose younger sibling was born when they were a toddler. I was blessed to have a sibling, because I was that kid. I talked about different stuff than most kids. I had the vocabulary of some adults by the time I was two or three because no one ever talked down to me. I was expected to keep up, and I did. Before Lindsay was born, I didn’t have that mostly neurotypical kid to intervene on my behalf. My main interest and what served me all through school was finding an outcast and sitting next to them, because I only wanted to talk to one person at a time.
Everyone thought it was because I was a preacher’s kid, and I’m sure that’s definitely part of it, but it’s not the whole story. I hate small talk, and if I was only sitting with one person, it wasn’t a good bet that we’d be doing small talk for very long.
That’s how Daniel became my boyfriend in 2nd/3rd grade. We were both “that kid.” We had more to talk about than basic 2nd grade shit, because we were both way beyond our peers with reading and music.
I will say something again that is meaningful to me about choosing Daniel. Not only did he know my mother, she taught him music for at least a year. So, that meant that Daniel was in some of my school plays with me, and my mother trained his voice. I can’t wait until we have our own house that will fit a piano, because I want to hear Daniel play my mother’s piano, as well. I am sure that it will become four-handed duets in no time, because I can’t keep the left and right rhythms going at the same time. If he doesn’t already play piano, I can at least teach him “All Blues” by Miles Davis.
Yes, Jason Moran. I know you’re terribly impressed right now. It is almost like I’m the savant you missed in taking on students. A pity, really (it’s got an easy bass line and like two or three chords). Although I’m pretty sure I’ve heard him play keyboards in his music, so I might get an accompanist out of this deal. 😉
I might get an accompanist, anyway, if Colin wants me to lay down some tracks for his band. I think we’d have a great time together since he plays guitar and I sing, plus he has professional recording equipment in his attic. I can’t wait to show Lindsay that room, because I think it would be her heaven. Maybe for once we could be in the same band. 🙂
Lindsay was in a band in college that I really liked called “The Cosmonauts,” and my favorite t-shirt at that time was “I’m with the band.” It went over really well with my in-laws…….. because I was wearing a nice sweater and when I took it off, it sort of amused and horrified them. I explained that it was my sister in the rock band, and I can’t tell whether that impressed or horrified them, either.
I have never been in a family that was really accepting of me, because I always felt like I had no right to take up room. When I felt like I had enough clout with Dana’s family to have my say, Dana was horrified because I was changing her family dynamics. Well, of course I was. You are introducing a whole new person.
With Kathleen, I think she really bought into the fact that she only wanted to have babies with men. And, to be honest, I think she was afraid of me becoming even more psychiatrically unstable because the research on taking antidepressants while pregnant suggested it would be dicey. But I didn’t care if Kathleen was the biological mom. I would have been happy either way. We just didn’t have enough money to swing it, or blamed it on that, anyway.
I think eventually I realized that I didn’t want to have kids with her, because even if I wasn’t the extra kid, she’d always treat me like that because that’s how she treated me currently.
My biological clock went CRAZY when I got together with Dana, because she was the right person to have kids with, even in retrospect. I would have preferred her to carry the baby, but she wasn’t buying it. She said she’d do it as a last resort. But by the time wee got to the OB/GYN, the phrase “geriatric pregnancy” did not sound appealing and we just kind of put the idea away.
I don’t think either one of us were actually capable of integrating an infant into our schedules without major changes, most notably getting out of cooking because Dana would never make enough money to support housing for both of us if we were depending on me to make all the money. My job history isn’t that stable with all the medical conditions I have, and it’s hard to integrate just how many doctors’ appointments I have without a cooking job, because my days off weren’t generally Saturday and Sunday. I could schedule my appointments in the morning and still be on time for work.
However, I have IT to fall back on, and as far as I know, Dana doesn’t. I didn’t pressure her to go into it at all, Aaron just noticed she was a great coder. She wanted to be a teacher, but didn’t make that a reality, either. We moved to Houston so that she could teach, because you didn’t need a Master’s there. She was rejected by one program and didn’t try to get into any others. It’s a shame. She would have been a marvelous teacher. I just don’t think she was in any shape to be a teacher by the time we arrived in Houston.
I don’t blame her in any way, shape, or form. The only appropriate reaction to an abnormal situation is an abnormal reaction. She was very depressed and I understood intimately. The problem was that I was also very depressed, and I couldn’t handle Dana’s depression at the same time.
Then, I got an influx of “new relationship energy” that was supposed to be clean, light, and fun. Well, since I was a jackass and told her my feelings were starting to change, she started not telling me things, as if that would make the situation better. I was guessing too much of the time as to what would make her happy, all the while making her ridiculously angry and not knowing why.
Enter Daniel.
“Oh, wait. You’re autistic. That changes EVERYTHING. If you’ve told me this before, I don’t mean to make you rehash, but tell me again how your autism affects you.”
It was the end of all the feeling like he was being bombarded by questions, because he’s a Doc. He saw which way that train was going and hopped on.
As we were talking, he said, “do you think the authoritative part of your personality is that way because you feel safer to express what you feel to me?” That was a lightbulb moment for me, because it’s exactly the thing I’ve been trying to explain to everyone for all time. If I don’t think you can handle my feelings, I won’t tell you what they are. If you don’t like my tone, you can tell me to rephrase something. But the more I don’t feel like I have to social mask around you, the more I let my guard down and I start writing like I’m blogging- to an international audience and not an audience of one. So, even if it’s not a personal attack, it comes across like one because I am not running what I say through every filter ever. I want those closest to me, especially someone I want to build a life with, to be able to take me at full strength. Daniel has agreed that he’s just as intense as I am, but the thing that was the most valuable about this conversation was feeling seen. And not just seen by Daniel as my partner, but seen by Daniel the doctor as well.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have said, “oh, shit. This changes everything.”
It does, and I’m looking forward to every fucking minute.
I feel a sense of peace this morning that I haven’t felt in a long time. I found a great house, and I’m moving in roughly two weeks. I think Colin is okay with our first plan of me moving in on the 13th, but he needs some time on his end to get my room ready, too. The only thing I was trying to avoid was being home while my landlords show their house, but it won’t be the end of the world if I have to wait.
In the meantime, I’m on pins and needles waiting to see Zac, because it’s been a while. Nothing is wrong between us, just jacked up schedules right now for both of us. But again, we’re going to see Jason Moran on the 10th, and then that weekend is drill for him, so he’s going to help me after work both days (if needed). I told him if he wanted he could stay at my house on the Saturday, because drill weekend is at Ft. Meade, which is 20 minutes from my house and quite a bit further to his (Zac lives out in Virginia at the end of the blue line). I’m hoping we can get it all done in a few hours, and I don’t think that’s impossible as long as I have everything boxed. I only have four pieces of furniture.
Other than that, I think I have everything I need. My dad sent me some canvas moving boxes, and I think I’m just going to fold everything as opposed to trying to find a hanging box for all my button-downs. I hate packing. Anything to make it easier. Thank God I don’t have many dishes.
Speaking of dishes, I’m out of coffee and I’m a bit peeved about that. The only reason I’m not a full-on maniac is that I have Stash English Breakfast tea if I get desperate. I wonder if I could go door to door begging for someone to take pity on me. It’s 0551. Surely someone is up.
They are.
I could get coffee from Hayat, but I’m lazy and upstairs. Hayat (and the coffee) are downstairs. Don’t you see it would take ALL THAT WORK? 😉 Hayat has gotten up at 0400 since the day I arrived, and I started waking up early because of her. Originally, I was such a light sleeper that her coffee grinder would wake me up, so I just started going to bed earlier and earlier.
Now, I’m on my own schedule, which seems to be “be lazy. Sleep in until 0500.” So, if you get a message from me in what seems like “the middle of the night,” I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I just write things when I think of them and forget about things like notifications. I’ve gotten good about asking people if they leave their notifications on at night or if my texting them is going to bother them- leaving notes rather than expecting a reply.
This gets problematic because people are programmed to respond right away. So, they’ll say that the notifications don’t bother them, but they weren’t serious. And now they don’t want to hurt my feelings. PLEASE hurt my feelings, because if you tell me that I can text you at any time, because you have your phone on “Do Not Disturb” or whatever, I’m going to believe you. If you change your mind and it is indeed annoying, then don’t let me think it’s fine when it’s not, because I will not pick up on your subtle cues to stop.
I mean, sometimes I will. But not if you only text me back and I can’t read your voice and it’s too polite to really tell anything. I have problems with polite, because I take things literally.
Well, when I’m not being sarcastic. Sarcasm I can do. One of the many services I offer (that tends to get me in trouble). I’ve thought I’ve been weird a lot of my life, but as it turns out the autistic sense of humor is often dark to deal with the pressure. I’m not weird in a crowd of autistic people, because someone is likely to make a darker joke than me, and that’s hard to do. It’s always a slow clap moment for me when someone manages to out-dark me.
I will be taking no further questions. 😉
Making things right with The War Daniel needed to happen, even if we never get further than we are right now. Our future plans don’t matter so much as being friends again, and being able to be there in lockstep for Daniel’s daughter, Cora. I think that’s been the hardest part of this whole separation from Daniel, because Cora is 25 years old. Trying to judge the parent dynamic from the friend dynamic is tough, because I didn’t want her to know how I feel about Daniel at all (she does now, I’m talking about when we weren’t speaking). It wouldn’t have been fair or sane to make her “monkey in the middle,” and I am definitely sane/brave enough not to do that. It’s basically the only piece of our relationship that does fall under parent/child dynamic, because no matter what happens between Daniel and me, Cora is already an ironclad member of my family. I’m never going to walk out on that kid, so all I ask from Daniel is that he just let me.
No matter what his relationship with me is, just let us be, because my relationship with Cora cannot be dependent on him. I know she’s my kid, not just my rainbow kid, because I don’t believe I’m going to get out of this without becoming her stepmother, even though we’re all adults, because she already sees me that way. That’s how she was introduced, and was overwhelmed that I am bisexual, because all of the sudden she had an ally in the house. Trust me that her parents are doing the best they can, but it’s one thing to be in the queer cultural zeitgeist and to be standing outside of it.
Daniel and I are already talking about getting married again, but on the delayed timeline of his doctorate. This is because we both want to travel, possibly live overseas, and the easiest way to do that is to fly standby on military bases, which Cora and I can do as long as we’re military dependents. The only time we would have to fly commercial is if Daniel wasn’t with us. You cannot fly unaccompanied using the service member’s benefits.
Last night, we were talking about places to move where we’d be able to get back easily, like Manila. We were trying to think of places it’s less expensive to live, but still has protections for Cora.
Daniel and I had the sweetest conversation last night. He was telling me how much cheaper UAE is than the US, and I said that I was great with going to UAE and seeing if we liked it enough to stay, but that I didn’t think it was safe for Cora or me. That I could pass as straight, but that’s not me and I’m not down for it.
He said, “sweetheart, why would you ever want to pass as straight?”
I was very touched, but I said, “to get by in a Middle Eastern country, no other reason.” Instantly, his tone changed into the English professor he is and he said, “I’m not moving ANYWHERE my women aren’t welcome.” He’s on board.
I love him. I really do. If the stars line up, we’re going to go back to Caldwell Zoo in Tyler to take pictures, hopefully recreating a few. I remember one that we need to do, and it just flashed into my memory (Achievement Unlocked, MASSIVE XP). I don’t know if it’s still there, but they used to have a playground. My mother took a shot that day of Daniel and me sitting under the play structure. I have no idea what we were talking about.
Probably Sartre or Proust, who knows. But we were definitely THAT KID.
I’ll get to show him where I was born- in Tyler, at Mother Frances Hospital, with “the statue of Jesus directing traffic.” I could see how things are going at my grandfather’s house.
It’s interesting, my grandfather gave his house to my cousin Jason, because his whole job is refurbishing homes. The plan is that once Jason is done overhauling the place, it will serve as a lake house for all of us. It’s out on Starlight Lake in Lone Star, where interestingly enough, my mother’s sister also has a house. So, we can go back and forth between relatives like we used to do when we were kids in NE Texas as well. My grandparents lived at most five miles from each other, if that.
I honestly stayed at one house til I got bored, then called my other grandmother to come and get me. I can say that because they’re no longer with us……. but they saw what I did. 😉
The vibes of the houses were so different, because my dad’s parents were Anglophiles and have a million video tapes I’d love to get my hands on with a video production server. They have stuff that Mike’s Movie Magic doesn’t have, and I swear it. Old PBS showings of BBC plays and TV shows that no one would ever find again. If those tapes still exist and I have room for them, I’l put them on a server and give access to my family.
At Christmas we usually watched “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” or Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka, who was terrifying…. yet not as terrifying to me as “The Wizard of Oz.” Never again if I can help it (I do like “Wicked,” though, minus all the stage theatrics that really made me jump. However, I think the age at which I saw it is directly responsible. Three or four is too young for flying monkeys.
In this case, anyway.
I am terrified of Oz on some days, and some days it’s all Glinda, all the time.
I’m getting tired of the daily blog prompts saying I’ve already answered them, because I often have new ideas the second time the prompt comes around. Today, though, I’m glad I got nothin,’ because there’s been a change, and I really can’t tell you why. Magda decided that she didn’t want to move with me, and told Colin she wasn’t coming. I don’t know why. So, I was very scared that all of the sudden, I didn’t have a place to go, either, because I couldn’t afford to pay for both rooms all by myself. Colin said not to worry, that I could still move in, and my body relaxed. I think he hopes Magda will change her mind, but I have never seen it happen. I feel bad, that maybe we’ve done something to alienate her? But that’s impossible because neither one of us have had conversations since the last one we had together.
So, I have to stop worrying about all of that and just be glad that when my boyfriend arrives to be the muscle in the operation, I still have an address to point him.
That struck me as funny all of the sudden…… that if you never really thought you’d ever have a boyfriend, God laughs and you wind up with two. 😉 Two that know about each other, and aren’t threatened by each other………. very much like I wasn’t threatened by the idea of Michael for Supergrover even at the height of feeling absolutely waylaid by an arrow to my Achilles’ heel. We had two completely separate roles in her life, and I was incredibly far away. He was on the ground. It’s the same now. Daniel is incredibly far away. Zac is on the ground. Neither of us should expect the other to be monks for years on end, and that’s not what poly is, anyway. It’s not being able to divide love up between more people, but to love multiple people 100%. That gets tricky in terms of time, but not feelings.
I have never told Bryn that I loved her INSTEAD OF Supergrover (nor told Dana I loved her INSTEAD of Supergrover, or vice versa), so I wouldn’t do it to anyone else. Bryn doesn’t tell me she loves me INSTEAD OF Dave, and I’m glad because again, two completely separate roles in Bryn’s life. W
e’ve been through so much together, more than I’ve been through with either guy, she’s been through more than she’s been through with Dave. I just don’t care whether it’s a yellow string or a red one, if you’re connected to me, you’re important. My time is just as sacred for my close friends, and always will be.
It helps that The War Daniel is in the Navy, because since his classes are online that does open us up to him being able to visit on standby. As long as I have a way for him to watch wrestling on Wednesday nights (God help us all).
Colin has cable, but he’s interested in cutting the cord. I wish I still had my old computer. I’d have a media center set up for him within the week, because I already know how to cut the cord effectively. You can have everything, including a DVR, for the cost of a cheap computer. Well, I suppose the DVR also depends on how good the signal is from your antenna, but the point stands. I can also install Kodi (media center software) on my FireStick with a little bit of hackage.
And yet, all of that is a story for another day because for right now, it’s about how to fit all of my stuff into my new moving boxes. I want to pack everything except for the sheets/blankets and some clothes. Boxes stacked in here will be easier to keep clean and neat should we have visitors. The visitors are by appointment only, but I’d like to mitigate my ability to be me as much as possible.
No one was here to rescue me on this one. I had to do it all by myself. I had to reach out to people and tell them I was interested in looking. I had to be brave and make phone calls, which seems ridiculous and yet Gen Z just went, “oh my GOD, are you okay?” I ended up in a wonderful situation with more space than I thought I would get (at first, I’m sure someone will move in). The other thing is that I get to stay in my neighborhood, and it turns out that’s pretty important to me, too. I’m a Marylander now.
That may not always be the case, as I love Virginia, too. I just feel that it’s easier for me to own my space up here. I will never run into anyone I don’t want to see, and that covers a hell of a lot of ground. You cannot imagine how relieved I was to learn that there’s a Waffle House on my side of the river, as poorly as that trip turned out.
It is definitely time for a change, but not one so big that I meltdown and burnout in a cycle until I relearn my surroundings. I wanted to avoid all of it, and I think I’ve managed successfully…….. because did I mention that Colin lives two major stoplights from my current house?
Apparently, when you answer one of WordPress’s prompts, it remembers. So, even though I answered the prompt when it first came around, I’m not eligible to answer it again. The prompt was “what’s something that most people don’t understand?” If I remember correctly, I wrote an entire essay on how most people don’t understand themselves. How blogging is kind of a superpower that way, especially when you write every day. I understand myself because I go back and look at the entries from the last few days before I write the current one. That way, I can see if what I said then is still true. My mind works very fast, and is a busy place. I’m also not afraid to admit I’m wrong, so a good bit of knowing myself is saying, “Ok. I felt this…. but I don’t feel that anymore…. this is still good…. that can go in the back of the closet, etc.” It is a quilting of my life, because not everything is bad and not everything is good. But in order for me to see perspective with clarity, I have to be brave enough to read my own writing.
That’s the hardest part of blogging, the reading your own writing. Even when what you’ve said is embarrassing, you have to stand next to it because it was all how you felt in that moment, even if you don’t feel that way anymore. Also, processing my feelings about other people makes me feel closer and further away from them, too. When I think about what has happened to me over my life, none of it compares to my reaction at what I’ve allowed. No one affects me more than me, and I have not done things I needed to do to protect myself, and have also done too much. Apparently, I don’t know a whole lot about balance, but I don’t know many neurodivergent people who do.
For instance, yesterday I told The War Daniel that enough time had passed between us and we should start talking again. We agreed that we were assholes to each other. That I hoped he realized that I was never going to abandon him in rehab, and he told me he didn’t feel that way. We’re healing, a day at a time, and I get pictures of “my kids and grandkids,” who are apparently cats, a service dog, and a snake (between The War Daniel and his daughter, Cora). The War Daniel is getting his PhD in English literature, and it’s fun to hear about that project, too.
I realized that if The War Daniel wasn’t brave enough to come to me and say he was an idiot, then it was on me. Because it wasn’t a matter of losing or winning a fight. It was a matter of losing or winning Daniel.
I told him that I’d lived on something Cora said for a year….. “I don’t think your faith in my father is misplaced.” He said it was such a relief. I am not rushing for any specific outcome, I’m just glad to have the big rift healed. We’ll either end up moving in together or we won’t, but that’s not my main goal. My main goal is getting us stable enough to be able to communicate every day without leaving pricks on the other’s skin that won’t heal anymore. I don’t have time for things to fester, because I don’t want to live with that level of insecurity in my life.
So, at the very least, I have solved the most important rift in my life, and that is enough. Two important rifts, if you count the peace I feel after getting Supergrover’s letter and letting her go back to what she’s used to with her own family. I feel like that rift is fixed, because she’s welcome to show up with real feelings just like she did previously, she’s just not welcome to kick the can down the road and make me think we’re fine when we’re not.
I am stronger than that. I can take it. Whatever our real problems are, that’s what I’m built to solve, not to figure out the neurotypical games that come with talking around being anxious/upset/angry.
I’d rather just get back on the same page with someone, even if the writing we’ve previously done is good and we have to scrap some. Daniel and I have a new timeline and a new vision, but I decided that if I was quiet, I was part of the problem.
Now, there is hope where there wasn’t before.
Hope that I didn’t know was there, but had to ask and see.
I promised both you and The War Daniel that I would not give up until he’d been out of rehab a year and his brain wasn’t fuzzy anymore. I kept my word, and I was right. That was the surprise, that I was right. That we’d both been assholes under extreme pressure but it didn’t mean we didn’t love each other.
Other than that, though, nothing changes. He’s in grad school in NE Texas and will be for the foreseeable future, though his classes are online because his tuition assistance also comes through Texas, but once he’s done with school, he’d definitely think about moving here, because he wanted to last year as well. Cora has also said that if Daniel moves here, she wants to come with him because trans laws in Texas are terrible. So, all of these are things that need to be discussed a little bit at a time, while our timeline is long enough not to miss anything.
I have found that Daniel and I are both driven to write, and we need to cut that shit out. For instance, I think we should start video calling at least once a week to FORCE ourselves to stop being writers. This seems like it should be a joke. It’s not. Writer personalities are real and deep.
Supergrover and I have rarely ever gotten out of it, and if the same were to happen with Daniel, I think our relationship would go the same way- not feeling it as secure and real because it’s just text.
I learned the difference with Zac, who sends me pictures of him and Oliver, who leaves voice notes, etc. It helped me get out of my writer personality with him because there were more than just paragraphs to our relationship.
Supergrover doesn’t have time to send me pictures of herself and her dogs on a schedule, nor does she have a committed time for voice notes. The ones I’ve got, though, are priceless. They indeed made me feel close to her in a different way, an added layer. Getting to know the way she talks felt intimate- the mask in front of all her words after I’d internalized them.
Therefore, in online relationships I’m different now. This is not an online relationship because I’ve known The War Daniel since we were seven…. but it’s online now because that’s how we can communicate across states easily. I want voice notes. I want video calls. I want everything to feel as grounded as humanly possible.
How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?
The thing about being a writer is that nothing interferes with your goals if you don’t allow it. In my particular case, dropping everything to do something for/with a friend adds to the richness of my writing, not a distraction to it. I think of my blog as one of those video games that you can get lost in, because even after you’ve finished the main quest, you have so many side quests that you keep returning to that world. In this case, the main quest will be over when I die. My “stories that are all true” won’t end unless I do. Therefore, my blog is entirely driven by the way the B plots of my life work out. Everything is a B plot when the A plot is just my time on earth.
The main reason I started writing every single day was just to see if I could. If I could be dedicated to such a thing. That I wouldn’t even take off weekends, that blogging was serious business not to draw people in, but to heal me. I have said this before, but this blog is almost entirely my therapy, because a therapist only spends an hour a week with you. You don’t get well on an hour a week. I began to view writing as important as my medication. I have to take my medication every day to make me feel better, so I process my feelings as well.
Sometimes I wait until the afternoon, but most of the time I wake up, fill my water bottle, take my medication, and start writing. It is now 0524. I have been up and down since 0300, and I don’t know why. Oh, yes I do. When I knock myself out with sleeping pills, I go so deep that I don’t need as much. So, if I go to bed at 2100, I’m guaranteed to be up at o’dark hundred.
Generally, when you get entries later in the day, it’s because Zac goes to bed a lot later than I do, so our day starts later when we’re together. It’s an interruption I’m gladly willing to make, because as a boyfriend, he is killing it. Our next date is going to the Kennedy Center to see Jason Moran, and I’m so excited. I’ve known Jason since he was a senior in high school, when I was a mere freshman. He taught me to listen to jazz and analyze it so that I could repeat it, but he didn’t say that. He said, “never take your headphones off. Listen at home, between classes, have a radio under your pillow.” Guess what. I can analyze jazz now. If I see which way the band is going, I can go with them…… and I got that phrase from Konrad Johnson.
Konrad Johnson was a high school jazz band director in Houston, Texas who made fame. Kashmere’s Jazz band is known all over the world now, because one of their charts is on the soundtrack to “Baby Driver.” The way I know Konrad is that he was my director at Summer Jazz Workshop. I cannot believe that I got to work with the two greatest jazz educators in the history of the world, because my jazz director at HSPVA was Robert Morgan.
“Doc” is directly responsible for Jason Moran, Everette Harp, Eric Harland, Robert Glasper, Jon Durbin (The Suffers)…….. the list is endless, because if you studied jazz in Houston, it was probably with him. Everette was before my time, but Robert, Jon, and I were all in the same band. I didn’t choose to continue with trumpet, but I sometimes wish I had. I enjoyed it, I just didn’t enjoy it as much as my dad did, because he didn’t have the same problems with pain in his embouchure that I did.
I could play for about half an hour at a time, and was pushing myself through every concert ever. I could have corrected it, but there was no time. I was either right before a concert, a jury, a something important I couldn’t miss.
My voice is trained much more than I ever trained as brass, and in retrospect, I should have gone the choir route. I think I would have gotten along with Mrs. Bonner, because I definitely did with Mr. Seible (who was my conductor at Bering UMC). That’s because Mrs. Bonner was also a Methodist. 😛
However, I still wouldn’t have been in class with Beyoncé, because my dad was transferred from The Heights to Sugar Land, and I chose to go to school out there. I was grandfathered in terms of the new rule that you had to live within HISD to go to HSPVA, but I didn’t want to commute. It would have been hell every single morning for two years. For reference, it’s about 27 miles, so half an hour at three in the morning and two hours at 8:00 AM.
It worked out. I had a best friend that picked me up for school every morning, in which we listened to the same tape every day. It was “Three,” by Blood, Sweat, and Tears. As a result, I still listen to that album all the time. “The Battle” and “Lucretia McEvil” are my favorite tracks, particularly Lew Soloff blasting the top off that trumpet solo in “Lucretia.”
I met Lew at a Jon Faddis concert in Virginia in 2002. It was great, because he assumed that if I knew who he and Jon were, I was probably a trumpet player. Good guess, but not currently looking for work. He told me I should audition at Manhattan School of Music, because that’s where he was teaching. It was sweet, but I told him that I just liked watching him and Faddis now. The great thing is that Lew was just a fan. He wasn’t in the band that day, we were just making small talk before we could get on the bus to see Faddis.
So, I was charming to Faddis, and the other guys on the bus started busting his balls because he had a fan. It was great.
So is “Into the Faddisphere.”
It’s all B plot. It’s all richness. It’s all side quests.
Nothing distracts from my goals. Everything is a new layer of complexity. I am aging like fine wine, which often takes on new character as the years roll past.
What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
I love Skyrim. When you pickpocket someone, you get to see the inventory of their pants.
For me, pickpocketing would be about magic, not stealing. It would have been a hit at parties if I set it up in advance…. that someone will lose their wallet, and can claim it later.
I will have all the wallets in five to seven minutes, because that’s how long I’ve got. Take longer than that, the easier it is to catch you in action.
In real life, I’m not comfortable racing against the clock, even in a video game. The exception is the kitchen, because I’m not solo. This is unacceptable to my ADHD. I thrive on ironclad structure and the other half of my brain hates my fuckin’ guts. This is because when I create iron structure, I cannot maintain it. I am happy for a little while with rigidity, but the longer it goes on the more my ADHD can’t handle it. That’s why my energy levels for tasks are different all the time. My ADHD makes it its mission in life to ensure my autism is miserable.
I have demand avoidance down to taking care of myself. Yet, at other times I can be the life of a party. I’m sure depression and hypomania play a role in my energy levels, but now that I know so much about ADHD and Autism (through endless panels and lectures on YouTube), I am finding that maybe I’m not depressed. Maybe I have been mistaking depression for autism. Every one of my symptoms of depression and hypomania feel like what the psychiatrists and psychologists are trying to explain about how AuDHD works. To me, it’s a reframing, because it doesn’t feel like depression and hypomania all the time. Sometimes, I am very stable and still have demand avoidance down to taking a shower.
I am fairly certain that I have pathological demand avoidance syndrome, because it takes a Mt. Everest amount of energy for me to do anything. I’ll know once I go through the autism diagnosis process. Basically, they treat you and if it doesn’t work, then it’s pathological. “Pathological” is a scary word, but yet it’s not. It just means it can’t be treated. It’s more scary to tell someone you have something pathological because they don’t think “pathologist,” they think “serial killer.” Not a good look.
Yet, that’s still the name of the condition, and it’s already on the spectrum, just a major part of some people’s cases of autism. If you’ve met an autistic person, you have met one autistic person. For instance, I’ll talk your ear off about The Cold War, but I don’t have food issues and I don’t have too many sensory issues. I don’t have emotions like neurotypical people, but I do have them. I just process them quite a bit differently, and writing gives me an outlet to do it.
So, honestly, I don’t need some mythical power to be a “Super.” I’ve got my superpower right here.
I found a meme that explains all of this better than I could, so let’s start out with it:
I am not saying that mansplaining does not exist. Far from it. But what I am saying is that as you get to know a man, it’s easier to tell whether they’re egotistical or neurodivergent. For instance, I would never accuse any of my male friends of mansplaining, because I’m just as likely to mansplain to them, because we are all working from a neurodivergent brain. I have had many men who worked from the first paragraph in my life, and they aren’t my friends.
In fact, a very effective way to get a man to stop “mansplaining” to you is just to ask them what’s up. Say, “are you telling me this because you think you’re the expert, or are you ADHD/autistic?” That’ll shut ’em up…… or you’ll get a real moment of authenticity and a breath of relief that will almost make them cry…… because they feel seen. That’s because I asked him a question that, dollars to donuts, no other woman has. They automatically assume that man is trying to one-up them, and don’t even think about that man’s self-esteem. That maybe he’s not trying to be an egotistical bastard. He has a processing disorder, and he thinks you think he’s dumb, not the other way around.
I feel like I know this better than most because I am nonbinary. I have told Supergrover over and over that I don’t write to her, and I don’t write for her. That my writing would exist whether she was here or not. This is the one exception. This meme is definitely for her, because I have a feeling that she’s been reading my e-mails like “I’m the expert,” and because of it I think I’m doing a terrible job of explaining myself, so I overclarify until “the cows can tape something by now.”
I feel this way because Supergrover has called me a “judgmental dickhead” for 10 years, and in her last e-mail said that I should stop thinking of myself as the expert on everyone and everything. “Not a good look.” So, my reaction is just to leave her behind. Fuck that noise. I will never in my life put up with that shit again. I talk how I talk.
I was absolutely moved by her e-mail, but after some time, I realized that she’s just as shitty a friend as she said she was, because the e-mail opened, “Ugh. I vowed never to respond to another of your e-mails.” Opening with disgust didn’t win her any brownie points, especially when I came to hear heart in hand and asked her for help with something she knew intimately.
Granted, she answered all my questions and even clarified within herself what she’s meant all these years, and it was basically “I hide all my feelings about you so that you can just twist in the wind.” It’s easy to keep someone feeling desperately insecure in a relationship that way, because they don’t know how to act. What is real? What is not?
I have been saying over and over that I’m not the expert on anything but the way I feel. If someone feels differently than I do, there is room for both our opinions in the world. Me telling my story and you hiding yours is just a shortcut to calling me a dictator and blaming me for everything when you’re the one that’s emotionally unavailable at every turn. It’s a stalling tactic, and a good one, because it makes me feel like shit.
The reason I had to get her out of my life is that I’ve been in relationships with too many women like this. I am attracted to emotionally unavailable people and they’re attracted to me. It’s because we each have something the other lacks. I lack pragmatism and logic, They lack the ability to feel as deeply as I do. So, in the beginning, it feels like you are each meeting each other’s greatest need.
Without fail, in every single relationship I’ve been in that works this way, over time it devolves into division of labor. They do all the thinking, I do all the feeling. It leaves me anxious and insecure, because in the beginning, they weren’t like this. They were high on new relationship energy and not so opposed to letting themselves feel. After that, they go back to what they know, which is not letting anyone know how they feel so that you have to walk on eggshells…… because they won’t tell you that they’re angry. They’ll say nothing is wrong when it clearly is by the way they treat you.
That has been my life for 10 years, and I’m done unless I actually feel some empathy for the way my brain processes information, because I am not an expert.
So, I read my last entry and it was so full of typos that I thought I’d gone stupid for a second…. and then I realized, no…. I am, in fact, blind as a bat. I had the font size on my tablet turned down too low in my editor, and I didn’t switch spell-checking on. So, obviously I am a genius and you need my mind.
I just got finished making supper. I didn’t know what I wanted, so I went for my go-to. Pancakes. This time, I didn’t stuff them with anything except milled flax, cinnamon, and Mexican vanilla. Normally, I add fruit and nuts, things like that. The fruit and nut ones make great peanut butter sandwiches. If you make them too thick, you can always cut them lengthwise. In fact, a couple of my pancakes look like they have bites taken out of them. This is untrue. I tore pieces off and ate them. I was already full, but I didn’t have any Tupperware, so I was trying to fit them into sandwich bags.
Which reminds me of the time I went to an Indian restaurant and ordered peshwari naan (I think that’s the one with raisins and other fruit.). It was to-go, and I was talking to the hostess. I said that peshwari naan was really good with peanut butter, and she looked at me like I was everything wrong with white people.
Fair.
However, now the house is steeped in a brown butter aroma that I haven’t smelled in a very long time. We used to make a brown butter vinaigrette at Tapalaya, and it’s a scent that takes me right back to that particular kitchen. Kinkaid says his recipe for bourbon maple syrup, which went on our fried chicken, dies with him. No the hell it won’t. I will stand over the stove for a week until I get it. I know what it tastes like ’cause I’ve made it. It’s just a matter of asking Zac for some bourbon to make it. 🙂 (I should ask him for some scotch, too, because I’ve never made butterscotch from scratch…… These are two things that would probably appeal to his appetite, so a shot or two is probably not out of line. 🙂
Kinkaid was an awesome chef, and any memory that takes me back to him is a good one.
But I make big pancakes. The best. No one can make better pancakes than me. I’m here to make America plate again.
Yes, I am making fun of the former president, but for real tho. You don’t run a brunch program for years on end and get out of there unable to make anything breakfast-wise….. except an omelette. It’s not because I don’t want to learn, it’s because I’ve never worked at a breakfast place that had them on the menu. A correct French omelette takes being in a restaurant because you don’t learn how to make them in a weekend. It’s different when you make a hundred a day. The closest I’ve ever gotten to an omelette was three eggs that looked like a broken waffle cone. But even that is progress.
It’s why if I could meet Anthony Bourdain, if it was a thing that were possible, the only thing I would ask him is “could you teach me how to make an omelette?” You don’t learn things about cooks by talking to them. You learn things by cooking with them. Everything about them comes out when they teach technique. Plus, it’s just the thing about doing an activity together makes you connect more.
When I miss him, I turn on the audiobook of “Kitchen Confidential.” I start to cry and turn it back off. It takes about 30 seconds.
To switch to another favorite chef, Gordon Ramsey, he had an interesting idea on his episode of Last Meal (YouTube, Mythical Kitchen). He said that the future of cooking is buying and trading chefs all over the world like professional footballers. The host asked him if there was anyone he’d want to slide tackle, and he said, “I did. David.” I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my bed, because the “Becks” is implied.
Gordon is who he is. He’s a rough, tough footballer who had his career taken from him at a young age due to an injury. But now those injuries are worth 17 Michelin stars. Not bad for a rookie………. who could have played Roy Kent no notes.
Here’s the thing about being a cook. You have no friends and no family beyond the kitchen, because it takes over your whole life. This is because we work while other people play. We don’t fit in with the rest of the world who thinks there’s something really wrong with you if you don’t wake up before noon. You get lots of “it’s nice to see you finally showed up to something.” Bitch, I haven’t seen my mother for Christmas in eight years.
The thing about Bourdain, though, is that there’s so much hate for him in the cooking community because mental health isn’t valid. Someone in my line cook group actually said “shame on him.”
My reply was, “you know, Anthony Bourdain is never going to hear what you said, but your friends in this group will. And now they know exactly how you feel about depression and mental health, so they know not to come to you.”
This is why people die.
You’re fine with bipolar as long as we never seem depressed or manic.
You’re fine with ADHD until you can’t track with us, and then we’re stupid, because neurotypicals think, “that’s just the way it is.” ADHD has no reference and does not give a flying fuck about the way things are. You’ll struggle in school as much as you do at work, except no one at work likes you enough to learn your communication style and how to get what they want out of you. It is all on me, all the time, to know what is expected of me because “these are things all people know.”
You’re fine with autistic people until meltdown and burnout, because you don’t understand the inconsistency in our energy levels, or demand avoidance, or literally being confused about anything because the instructions are so clear……. to a neurotypical brain.
I am not saying that I am not responsible for anything. Just because my brain works differently than yours, that does not mean I get a free pass on doing stupid shit. However, it does mean that people will get frustrated with you very, very fast.
No one wants to work with Sheldon from “Big Bang Theory” or Sam from “Atypical.” We ask too many questions. We want logic to be able to buy in. It’s logic that not many coworkers have. So, you become flaky, stupid, and whatever else choice words the boss has for you when they’ve reached the end of their ability to communicate with you.
It’s schoolyard tactics. The best way to deal with the neurodivergent kids is to leave them alone, like Special Ed is catching. Neurotypicals think that neurodivergents are annoying af, but they also hate HR, so they might be nicer to you at work than they would be at home.
An autistic person is always going to have a fairly equal spread among good evaluations and bad ones, because our energy fluctuates so much. Everyone says, “why can’t you perform like this every single day?” There are a thousand reasons why, and none of them are valid to a neurotypical who sees you using your disability as an excuse.
Therefore, I like solitary work. Being with coworkers is often downright embarrassing because when they learn I’m neurodivergent, their voices take on a different tone. I’ve never told anyone at work that I was autistic, because I didn’t know I should. It’s only been within the last year or so that I’ve learned so much….. mostly because my Adderrall only works half the time at keeping my ADHD symptoms managed, so it cannot be the whole answer.
In some ways, I think it is harder to be low needs autistic than high. People recognize autism when the person has no ability to social mask. They put up with meltdown and burnout because that’s what an autistic person does.
It is very hard to tell that autism does the same thing to people who are low needs. It’s not that we don’t have as big a problem, it’s that we’ve learned to cover it up because most people think we’re weird. You do what you have to get by.
I feel particularly discombobulated most of the time because it depends on which processing disorder is driving the bus and how much energy I have. I absolutely can be an ADHD hyperactive mess (talking, stimming), and at other times I struggle to get out of bed.
All autistic people are white knuckling it at work, which is why my favorite YouTube psychologist has three or four degrees and loses jobs all the time. Money and autism are not related. You can have the highest paying job in the world, but so much depends on your reputation.
My big thing is calling an impromptu meeting. I am the type person that cannot return to a thought. So, if I am interrupted, I basically have to start from scratch because I cannot go in the same direction anymore- it’s lost.
I don’t want to socialize at work, either, because I’ve learned over time that it gives your coworkers more ammunition against you if you tell them anything with which you struggle. Office politics determine job security, not necessarily performance…… and with an autistic person, performance is relative. With an allistic person, “it’s just how things are. You can’t hack it, and we know it.”
The bitch of it is that I have really high self-esteem, and a lot of confidence. I am not raking myself over the coals, this has been my job history and that of many, many others.
Before we get started on influential teachers, Here’s a basicl life update. Colin has said that he really enjoyed meeting both Magda and I, and he promised to get back to us by next week. We’ve continued to taxt- he sent me a message saying that he enjoyed meeting Magda and her daughter, And I said, “I was on pins and needles waiting to see how it went, and I’m so glad you like her.” He apologized to me, as if how he got along with her was his responsibility to tell me. I thought it was sweet, and said, “no need to apologize, you said it would be a while before you made your decision, and I watned to give you your space.
He told me that he was disappointed I couldn’t come up in price, because that would solve all his problems, but that he’d run the numbers and see if he could take my offer. Because it really was me reaching out and asking about the house. He told me he wanted $1230, and I said straight out I can’t afford it and tried to walk away. He still wanted to meet me, anyway. So, when he said that, I went over and met him and his dog, and really liked the place. He also mentioned that there might be enough room to rent to two people, but he wasn’t sure because he thought three people in the house would be cramped.
So, the next day I asked Magda if she needed housing, and she said yes. So, I went back to Colin and said, “I have an idea. Do you have time for me to run it past you? He said, “I’m going into a meeting, so just leave a message and I’ll get back to you when I can.” I told him that one of my housemates herre also needed housing and we love each other and want to stay together (she’s like my mother, she’s 73). Three minutes later (probably in the meeting 😉 ) he said to give her his phone number, just to make it clear he hadn’t decided anything yet.
We made an impression, and I can tell. I joked with him that he wouldn’t have to work so hard at keeping up the house. He said, “I thought everyone would just clean up after themselves.” I said, “that’s not what I meant. We’re both handy. If you want to turn the basement into usable space, we would help you. We also know how to do basic maintenance (Magda’s father was a carpenter and I’m a great assistant), as well as knowing what materials are good/worth the expense and where you can buy any brand. He said, “I hadn’t even thought about that aspect of it.”
By the time Magda left, she couldn’t say enough nice things about Colin and neither could I. If we don’t get this house, it will be sad, but not the end of the world. I have until May 1st to move out, so whether I have a place by April 1st doesn’t matter. I am best off prorating rent at both places if I do get the place on April 1st, because I want Zac to be able to help me move and he’s not free until the 13th or something like that. Plus, I told Zac that I never wanted to move into another place where he wasn’t welcome. He’s never spent any time over here becuase I wouldn’t let him. I didn’t want us to be on camera for shit, and there’s cameras all over the house. I don’t even know where all of them are. But this is a new development, and I’m certain it’s because they don’t want another fire. However, the fire was caused by an electrician drilling into a live wire in the basement. None of the housemates had anything to do with it, but for all of us it’s starting to feel like a jail.
So, it was a good time to move, because even though all three of us are freaked out beyond believe and feel locked in our rooms all the time, It wasn’t always like this. For me, the last straw was not getting any support in my quest not to clean up someone else’s pubic hair.
Then, I was cooking, and I heard them talking to a real estate agent in another room. I asked Samantha if they were selling the house, and she said, “I don’t know,” but it was very, very obvious that she did.
Not five minutes later, Hayat calls me down to talk to her and says that they’re getting the house appraised. She turned out not liking that guy, so called in another one. She told me that she wasn’t even sure she wanted to sell, she just thought that the house might be an easy way to fund her retirement….. she just didn’t know for sure because the first guy undervalued them so much. This was Saturday or Sunday, and the photographers came yesterday. So, apparently it was an easier decision than I thought.
I think it was Monday or Tuesday when she officially told me I had 60 days to move out, and we both cried together. It’s been nine years. It’s a huge transition no matter how I feel about the situation now.
So, anyway, I sspent a little of Tuesday and all of Wednesday preparing for photos, I was so glad I was done by Wednesday night, because I could go to bed without setting an alarm. I don’t, usually, because when I go to bed between nine and 10, I automatically wake up at five or six.
The photographers left, and I shut down. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t do anything but lie there. I am processing a thunderstorm of emotion, and it’s too much in its immediacy. I know I will feel more and more calm over time, even if we don’t get the house with Colin, because the shock will have worn off. I am so glad that they were talking loud enough that I could hear without eavesdropping, because I wasn’t trying to be intrusive. I was making dinner, and their kitchen is only separated by a wooden door from mine….. the real estate agent was especially loud.
But the reason I’m glad is that if I hadn’t confronted them, who knows how long of a notice we’d be given. I don’t think that Hayat would have left all this to the last minute, but at the same time, you’re never sure about things like that.
So, as I told Colin, Magda and I have decided that we want to live with Jack, who is a dog, and he’s just an accessory. He got a big laugh out of that one. I do think that Colin will come through for us because he’s alrewady invested in us….. and that’s a great feeling. It’s also amazing that my rent won’t change in the slightest. Since I told Colin I could pay $795/month, Magda said that she could pay $700 and I could have the bigger room. Colin said, “I think the rooms are the same size. I should get out a tape measure.” It’s the only appropriate neurodivergent response. I said, “it doesn’t matter. She thinks mine is bigger. Don’t take all of that upon yourself. We’re very happy with everything we saw and we like boht you and Jack.”
That’s because he said it wouldn’t be worth it to him to only get $1230 for two roommates, but he would consider it if it were $1500-1600. So, I found him another person who could get him up to $1500, because I’m so sold on the house. Then, so was Magda. Now the ball is in Colin’s court, but as I said, he’s really already made us feel welcome.
When Colin moved in, and I know this because of pictures on Redfin, the front of the house looked German, because all the wood that would traditionally be on a Tudor house was painted green. Now, it’s back to black and it looks AMAZING. It’s also a quiet street and only a 10 minute walk to the bus, with maybe another 10 or 20 to the Metro. I basically found a house two major stoplights from this one. It’s a miracle.
Plus, I hate moving. I really hate it. So does Colin. Both of us are interested in long-term, not six months. And because it’s possible that my futon won’t fit in my room, I said, “if we make a man cave downstairs, I will be happy to donate the couch.” I could sell it, as it’s worth a lot, but it was a gift from Hayat. I might tell Colin to take the bed out of my room so I can keep this one, but I’m not sure. There are too many possibilities to just concentrate on one.
My shutdown hasn’t been better today. I haven’t been able to do anything except lie here and think about all the moving parts in an actual relocation. It’s overwhelming to an enormous degree, and my reaction is to shut out the rest of the world. I’m not even listening to music or have the TV on. All I want is quiet.
My most influential teacher was Robin Stauffer (grade 11), because she taught me that my life was going to be hard. She invited me to do things with her, like put up bulletin boards or something, and then I came out to her. My grades dropped immediately and I was transferred into another class. There’s more to the story that includes sweet revenge, but it wasn’t until years later and I can’t really talk about it for privacy reasons. Let’s just say it was epic, but it’s not my story to tell because the comeuppance wasn’t from me.
In terms of love, I thought my grade four teacher, Jan Forrest, hung the moon. I was one of her stars because she was an English teacher. I won a couple of competitions for poetry reading that year…. not analyzing it. Getting up in front of the class and reciting them.
My father being a minister probably had nothing to do with this……. #eyeroll
I have to, but let’s be clear. I don’t want to move. Mike and Hayat are just getting older and can’t manage the stairs anymore. They want a smaller, one-level house. I get it. However, it doesn’t make me any less sad. I have so many memories here, but none so great as “The Homo and the Hijab.” It tells the story of Nasim, one of my first housemates, and her journey from not knowing what a homosexual was to being friends with me. I nearly knocked over two people trying to get to her when I heard she was from Iran. The one thing I didn’t do is tell her that “Argo” is my favorite movie, because Iranians are touchy about that. I know, because I’ve talked to many. They all think it’s a commercial for CIA, and it is. Full stop. That’s because CIA’s reputation was in the shitter and they needed a win. George Tenet asked Tony Mendez to do “Argo,” and he said, “I can’t. That’s all classified.” Then, Tenet waved his magic wand and all of the sudden they had a story.
However, I do think that the movie starts out with incredible empathy toward the Iranians. Maybe it was the right choice to ex-fil the Shah, maybe it wasn’t. I can’t pass judgment on that. But I do hear the outrage of the Iranian people, and judge it “NAH.” That’s from the r/AITA subreddit, where people post questions and you tell them whether they’re the asshole or not. YTA and NTA are easy. The others are “NAH,” or “no asshole here,” and ESH, “everyone sucks here.” CIA needed the Shah for whatever reason. I don’t know it, but I’m sure they had more intel than I did in the 70s. I wasn’t even born until ’77. So, when the houseguests were rescued, I wasn’t even out of diapers. I don’t have a horse in the race, so I feel that both countries have a legitimate point and I’m not sure CIA would have gone that direction, in retrospect, given that we haven’t had diplomatic relations with Iran since then.
And that’s all cover-up for the fact that I’m dying inside. Hayat was there for me when my mother died. Mike took me to church and loved it when I sang next to him. Samantha gave me a Dr Pepper the moment I moved in and said, “since you’re a Texan, I thought it was probably your blood type.” Every housemate has been unique, none more than Magda, who took me under her wing from day one. I’ve checked with Colin to see if we can both move in, because that way he would get all the money he wanted and we could stay together. Magda is going to meet Colin tonight, so I hope they hit it off. If not, it doesn’t matter. I can find another place for one or both of us. I just hope it has a backyard as big as Colin’s, because our garden here is so beautiful- and Magda did all of it.
So, the idea of finding a place with one of my current housemates seems like a good deal because it’s someone I wouldn’t mind sharing a bathroom with. That’s so important, after having to clean up after two people for nine years….. myself and my Indian housemate who will not touch anything I have touched, including bottles of all-purpose cleaner. So, she won’t clean the bathroom. Ever.
I will miss her, because we used to get along. Then, she wouldn’t talk to me about the bathroom issue and I said, “WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT THE BATHROOM.” I raised my voice because I left her several notes saying, “please clean up after yourself,” and absolutely nothing changed. Well, she was freaked out that I raised my voice and has never spoken to me again…… after leaving my notes on the sink and walking by them for several days until all the ink was faded…… and her hair and water were plugging up the sink. That’s been my life. Nine years. I’m done.
I am over half done in getting my room ready for pictures tomorrow, but I had to take a break because I thought I needed more caffeine than I actually do, and now I feel, um…. not good. I’m hoping that by sitting down for the length of time it takes to create this entry that the feeling in my stomach will go away. We can mark this under “not as good an idea as thought previously.” I’ve got a few more hours to go with finishing touches, but mostly what I had to do was get rid of stuff I don’t want to move.
Zac is coming over the week of the 13th to help me move, which is the earliest I can get out of here because no one else has offered. I’m sure I could put out an APB, but I’m not bothered. If I had a ton of stuff, I’d be panicking. But most of my stuff can fit in Zac’s car in one trip….. minus the furniture, and I don’t know if I can take all of it or not. I mean, I can, but my new space is also likely to be furnished. We’ll just have to see. I’ve already looked at the space at Colin’s, and I don’t know if even my futon will fit because there’s already a bed in the room. However, I might be able to back it up to the bed so I have somewhere to sit while I’m putting on my shoes, etc. Again, I have no idea, and I have other spaces to look at before I sign anything, as well as Colin wanting some time to make a decision. He’s not sure that he wants to rent out his space at all. I think he put out an ad and didn’t expect to get a response so fast.
I don’t know why. He and Jack, who is also a dog, are delightful.
I’m really glad that we cleared up the moving in and being friends being two different propositions, because I would think it was terrible if it didn’t work out and he thought that meant I didn’t want him in my life. The truth is that I don’t have that many neurodivergent friends in the area. It was nice to meet one. So, the bottom line is that I’m hoping, but not a lot. Colin has lived alone for a long time, and so have Magda and I in terms of how much time we each spend in our individual rooms.
I just hope I didn’t come across as too talkative because of course when I got to his house my social battery was full. I think it was fine. I was just impressed by a lot of stuff, especially the music studio in the attic, because I’m a music person, too.
And exactly none of that means “an easy transition.”
It’s been nine years. I would say that it’s time for a change, and also one I desperately don’t want to make. This time, though, I don’t have a choice. It’s heartbreaking, but necessary because I understand all the moving pieces.
Last night I went over to Colin’s house to meet him in person for the first time, as well as his dog. I got along with both swimmingly, but it’s a huge house and a lot more than I want to pay. I don’t want to use half the house. I want to rent a bedroom. He’s fairly certain he only wants to share the house with one person, so if he gets what he’s asking from someone else, I’m cool with it. I made a friend regardless.
However, we like each other so much that he’s taking some time to see if he can make it work, like being open to renting to two people, or axing his dog walker because I’ll be able to do it. Again, this has been a godsend of a connection, because even if I don’t end up moving in with Colin, he’s a solid dude. I told him that he still has my number regardless of the move for things like taking care of his dog while he’s out of town. Boarding dogs around here is expensive, and being good with a potential roommate’s dog has never lost me any brownie points.
Colin’s dog is half Jack Russell terrier and half Chihuahua. Therefore, he’s very tall (for a terrier/chihuahua) with blonde, curly hair all over. Colin says that the Jack Russell terrier must have been wire-haired (he’s had his DNA tested, so he’s sure about the mix). I feel like you can trust a man so dedicated to his dog that be brought genealogical research into it.
I just feel better about the state of moving at all, because Hayat gave me a stunning recommendation letter, and she’s actually the one that introduced me to Colin, indirectly. She’s on NextDoor and I’m not, so she sent me a listing. The reason it was so much more than I wanted to pay is that the listing didn’t have a price. When I told him it was out of my price range, he wanted to talk to me, anyway, because I was the first person that had even responded.
Then, of course, we started texting each other because that’s how our people communicate (neurodivergent). So, we have become a little bit closer via iMessage, because I feel it’s important for us to feel comfortable if we’re going to be sharing a house.
When he told me that he needed to think about all the financial implications, because he really only wanted one housemate, I told him to take the time he needed, because I don’t have to be out of my current place until May 1st, I’m just looking to move earlier than that because I don’t want to live here while people are coming in and out for showings. I also told him that I didn’t want to move again in another few months, so let’s make sure it’s the right fit.
He agreed, so we’re just chatting about normal friend stuff because like I said, I want to get to know him regardless. He does have a girlfriend, but they’re about as involved as Zac and me. As in, they don’t live together, they don’t spend all their time together, etc. We’re both stunningly introverted, which I think will also work well.
If Colin agrees to take me on as a lodger, it will be very nice only living with one, possibly two people. I don’t think that neurotypical people get the need for sensory deprivation. I think that people who need to be alone a lot make extroverts uncomfortable.
So, now I have two solid leads, and I feel better about myself than I have in ages because I didn’t know how this would go. Now that I have a letter of recommendation from Hayat and not someone they can’t verify I lived with, it’s a different ball game. My landlord said that I was a warm and caring person, and that my rent had never been late in nine years.
That goes a long way with people, so hopefully if it doesn’t work out with Colin, it will work out somewhere in DC. I’m surprised at the amount of looking I’ve sone in Silver Spring, because I thought I’d want to take off for DC/Alexandria immediately.
I’ve found much better deals on this side of the river, and in DC, even if you get a refinished house, it will still have weird steps all over the place because there’s no way it’s level after 300 years. I have nearly killed myself in several DC row houses. I know it would be so much easier for Lindsay if I lived in the middle of the city, but I haven’t found any place that truly looks comfortable. Most of the DC houses I’ve seen are very, very cramped.
Colin works for the local government in DC, and has a band. But it’s interesting. They only rent a recording studio and play together like, once a year. The rest of the time, they record their parts separately and just e-mail them, then the mixer puts everything together.
If it seems like I’m putting all my eggs in one basket, I don’t feel that I am because I am continuing to interview with other people, I’m just the most excited about this probability because I won’t be going that far and it’s someone I already like.
Plus, it would be nice to be settled by the time Bryn and her boyfriend, Dave, get here in May. However, I did warn them that it may be they arrive and start picking up my boxes. 😉 I know them well enough to know they’d just do it, though. The way I move, it will take less than half a day.
Today it’s all about culling, because tomorrow they’re coming to take pictures for Zillow, Redfin, etc. This is not my forté. I am going to suffer through. I had a Five Hour Energy, and I might have a cup of coffee as well (out of Adderrall and don’t have time to go to the doctor before the photographers get here). I have nine years of crap to go through, because I don’t want to move it all.
Yesterday, I gave my housemate Magda two GIANT bags of bath salts, because I bought them without knowing that Hayat was planning on ripping up the bathtub and putting in a shower. So, I have had industrial size bags of bath salts sitting on top of my dresser for the last year and a half.
Not all of my clothes fit, or they’re not my style anymore, etc.
It’s Mari Kondo time, and I may put her on for inspiration.
But if I’m going to bring up Mari Kondo’s name, I should also tell you I have “The Life Changing Magic of Leaving Your Shit All Over the Place” on my Kindle.
Today or tomorrow I am meeting another potential roommate that lives in my neighborhood. My landlord referred me to him via NextDoor, so hopefully I’ll be able to secure something fairly quickly. As we told each other, it’s at least worth a meeting to see if we get along, and he has a dog.
The funniest thing he said was that he was saying he lived alone, and I said, “I’m autistic and ADHD. It would probably work out better for me because of less sensory input.” He said, and it was so cute…… “I am somewhat neurodivergent.” I told him I laughed out loud at that one. We’re both introverts. He works for a government agency and his house is cute as a button, plus updated on the inside. I looked at some pictures online, but it was from the sale of the house. I have no idea what it looks like furnished yet, but I’m eager to see.
He’s a little older than me, the same age as Supergrover. It’s how I know he’s young enough to vibe with me and not too old to think of me as a constant annoyance because our age difference is too great. My worst nightmare was getting stuck in a group house with five 20 year old interns on Capitol Hill. It wouldn’t have been bad. I would have connected with a lot of Washington elite that way, but it wouldn’t have been the right vibe. If it works out that I move in with (let’s call him) Colin, I feel that I could go the distance with him, because I moved my entire childhood. The only place I have lived longer than DC is Portland, and even that was broken up into two chunks. The first was going to see my family, and at that time, I really meant it.
The second time, I had to go see about a girl. I had it bad, but I didn’t realize it until we drove from Portland to Houston together. That woman helped me move into my apartment in fucking August (I repeat….. in HOUSTON, TEXAS) and I let her get on the plane back to Oregon. What in the actual fuck was wrong with me?
If I have any regrets in life, it’s not taking Dana seriously at six weeks when she told me she had a crush on me. It took me three or three and a half years to accept that I had a crush on her, too. That’s because I don’t know what possessed her to tell me she had a crush on me, except yes, I do.
Carol, Dana’s then-wife, was not threatened by Dana having a crush……… and oh my fucking God.
Oh my God.
I did to Dana what Dana did to Carol. It just so happened that my new relationship energy was never going to go anywhere, therefore my pie in the sky ideas for a romance with a straight woman were grounded until my mental health went off the rails. That’s what I mean about the hurt being unintentional. I take responsibility for my behavior, because it happened no matter what my mental health might have been at the time. It is more about forgiving myself for not having the right tools to deal with my feelings, my medication, or my mental state while my medication was, in a few words, completely fucked up.
Again, I learned I was poly because I never lost any love for Dana, I only gained it for SG! Dana and I went down the tubes of our own accord, but not exactly. There was no preconceived plan on Supergrover’s part to institute a divide and conquer move. As she says, our relationship happened organically despite a whole bunch of things (which meant more to me than platinum, beautiful girl).
I can’t tell you how Supergrover is feeling except hurt and tired, because that is what I know for sure, and it’s probably going to make me cry.
Whenever I feel anxious that she’s distancing herself from me, she surprises me with all the love that comes through in black & white. Every. Single. Time. As I have said, she doesn’t say “I love you” in words. She does it by showing up. Consistently. No matter how mad we are at each other. No matter how bad the fight is, there has been nothing in 10 years that has ever torn us apart. Somehow, we keep the yellow string going even when we’re out of pocket. When I get the most anxious is generally about the time that she swoops in and reminds me what’s up. The Mama Wolverine claws are coming out, she will go Alduin on their asses, etc. We have that part down.
Keeping out of each other’s lives has been a mixed bag, because having context and not creates two different sets of problems. There’s the problems we have with telling our story together, and the problems we have with telling our stories apart. Lancing the boil was getting back on the same page. Again, I don’t know what will happen, but she said that she didn’t want to get into a cat and mouse game. It’s not if she shows up. Not being honest about your true intentions is a cat and mouse game. I love her enough to struggle all the way until we’re ridiculously happy again, whether there’s a context to our relationship or not. I’m ready for a different kind of honeymoon phase because I’m tired of putting each other through the wringer for no good reason.
I have loved her so much for a decade, and I feel like she has returned those feelings to the best of her ability. That she couldn’t be a better friend than she is right now in terms of being the kind of person that sends birthday and Christmas presents because we have such a long history together, and it’s so intense.
I don’t want to put anyone above her ever again, which is why I say that I’m as settled as I want to be. I am never going to get in another fight over emotional affairs because never once when I got married did I think I was going to go blind. I thought Dana and I had enough strength in our relationship to get through it, but I underestimated the pull I felt toward SG! The wave went over my head, and I’ve never been the same. But it’s all for good- I love my life, and I wish I could convince my beautiful girl of that instead of always thinking I’m saying “this is all your fault.”
I’m not sure why she thinkgs this is all her fault, because she laid out all the times she’s been a dick and the times I have as well. That means “Things Fell Apart” at both our hands. It is both our faults and neither.
Despite not having enough context, I think this is the relationship that reflects me the most deeply because since I’m reading her, I pick up her words and phrases all the time.
Painting my feelings as fact
Pricks on my skin I just couldn’t close anymore
It’s not “very” anymore, it’s “to an enormous degree.”
“I love his takedowns of the orange gelatinous shitbag.”
Me: How’s your day going? Her: picture of dumpster fire…. this has been especially useful lately
“Pick up my toys and go home,” which she got from me and now says all the time- at least to me. I don’t know how much I affect her speech at work/home/etc. If so, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. 😉
When she edits me, she’s very rough. I like it. I’ll get notes like “WHO TF IS PANCHO?”
Her husband had a thing and I asked her if she needed help (med assistant- she travels). She said no, but how kind of me to ask. I said, “it seemed nicer than asking how you broke him.” Later that day, I got an e-mail that said, “I keep laughing at this.” I smiled at that for three weeks straight. I got her. ❤ Maybe grasshopper is not as far away from satori as I think. So, because it tickled me to get a note later in the day that I was still laughing at something she said, I send them to others.
It was a door I never should have opened, but I used to love flirting with her because she was so fucking quick. I got in over my head fast, and I couldn’t take it back. Again, I knew I was fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked. I won’t tell you what she said, but I told her that all she needed to do was realize that my feelings were valid and real, and to be sensitive to them. That there was no reason to act, just to know they’re there. It was not to encourage, but for her to have empathy because I knew it couldn’t go anywhere and I was flipping out anyway. I can’t believe how much it meant to me when I said, “surely you spent longer than you wanted getting over someone who turned your head when it was a bad idea?” She said, “yes, surely I have.” She really saw me, and I will remember it forever. She has also never once invalidated my feelings, and been moved at the things I’ve written about her. She makes me happy without even trying, makes me proud just by breathing. The fact that she’s not my romantic partner means both jack and shit. She’s just always the one at the back of my mind, the one I quote all the time while she doesn’t know it…….. and I am sure that is a two way street even if she doesn’t say it out loud, because over ten years of writing, we have a million word associations between us……. most notably, “influencer.”
It was her brain that made me absolutely crazy about her (this is the part where you don’t get her reply that was so perfect it made my desk chair sag, I was laughing so hard). I joked, “besides, can I really make a decision on whether I’m in love with you or not if I haven’t seen your rack? What kind of idiot do you take me for, woman?” That was the moment *she* came in Kings full over Aces and I thought, “Christ. This needs to last my whole life, no matter what it looks like. I will never find her anywhere else in a million zillion years.” In fact, I actually told her this. That I wanted to fix us because I couldn’t go to the Supergrover store and pick out a new one. She’s the Vera Wang you can’t afford.
I realize by writing all of this down, it just seems like I’m begging her to come back. It’s just not true. That’s because if she does come back, it will be a great day in my life….. because she knows that I don’t want the surface level of her. I want the brain that made me crazy about her in the first place. I feel that if she lets me into that space, the way I let her into mine, what used to be a “cat and mouse game” will once again be stable, because in a lot of ways, we’ll be discovering each other again for the first time. Just because we’ve had a weird and hard road in the past 10 years doesn’t mean it always has to be as difficult as it has been. I’m just tired of covering up feelings with gifts, because I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel when I get them. What emotions are behind them when her e-mails say so little? No, these entries are not begging. They are the precious things I will want to read 10 and 20 and 30 years from now…… because she’s the best thing that ever happened to me and thinks she isn’t. I can’t fix that for her, but it’s not for lack of trying.
I will always love her with this much depth, because she gave me too much over the last 10 years to hold any bitterness or anger anymore. She has said that some of the things I’ve said are incredibly hurtful, and I’d like to talk about them. But again, I do not know whether she needs to separate from me, or whether she’ll be back after some time, space, peace, and grace. She has it coming from me in spades, because “surely grace and mercy will carry me all the days of my life” (Don’t call me Shirley!). As I have said before, it is not my job to talk now. I have talked enough. She knows how I feel, and she does not need to hear me again.
No, all of these memories are for me…. the ones that Oliver, who is a dog, has already heard.
Stories That Are All True 