Write about a random act of kindness you’ve done for someone.
As I’ve said before, I live in Maryland and Zac lives in Virginia. Therefore, going between our houses takes a little minute- on both sides. Zac would get stuck in traffic longer than it takes me to ride the Metro. Using public transportation, it takes me about an hour and 20 minutes. In Washington, that is definitely shorter than fighting through rush hour, even shorter if you also have to find a parking space. Finding parking will make you 20 minutes late even when you thought you were half an hour early.
Therefore, it makes more sense for me to go to him all the way around. He doesn’t want to be away from Oliver any more than I do, plus I like to hike and there’s a trail starting practically in his backyard. It also gives me a chance to talk to lots and lots of random strangers, but it never turns out the way either one of us thought. I am so emotionally open that people tend to spill everything to me whether they want to or not. They can look up at the end of that hour and 20 saying, “I can’t believe I told you all that,” and I am very confident in my ability. In fact, I believe that’s the one consistently true thing about me over my 45 years. There’s never been a time where I seemed “unapproachable.” I do not deal in small talk, and neither do others when they talk to me.
I think it was two months ago that this story takes place.
To get to Zac’s, I take the red line to Metro Center, then switch to blue to get out to Franconia-Springfield (interestingly enough, one stop past my old house in Alexandria, Van Dorn). It generally means I have two random encounters instead of just one. If I’m lucky, they’ll ask for my number or vice versa. This is because I’m always looking for new connections, no matter what kind they might be. It doesn’t matter what they look like or what they do for a living. Everyone is going through something in their own way. I just have to pay attention and notice when I really, really feel something. It has never been romance. It has been good stories.
I saw her before I talked to her. Biracial, hair in braids, white t-shirt, nice kicks. She looked to be about nine years old. Her younger sister and her mother were with her, but they were outside my purview at the moment because I noticed that something was up. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. So, I say what I always say when I feel eyes on me. “I like your shoes.” It’s the best conversation starter ever.
Her face lights up and we talk for a few minutes about nothing. Then, out of nowhere, “my dad is dead.” It was a non-sequitur of enormous proportions, but when you’re a preacher’s kid and empath, these non-sequiturs are par for the course. You just have to line up the shot. Your response cannot seem startled, especially when talking to children. I don’t want them to think they’ve said anything wrong. So, even though my internal monologue is “SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT,” outwardly I say, “I am so, so sorry. My mother died in 2016 and it is so difficult.” She nodded at me quietly.
Her mother looks at me and says “we lost him during the pandemic.”
The last three years dropped in my stomach like a rock because I hadn’t lost anyone close to me. It became real very, very fast. We move on to lighten the mood a little bit and her mother says, “hi. I’m Angel.” We go through the pleasantries of what we do for a living and she is infinitely interested that I’m a writer and wants to collaborate on a few things. But the whole time, I’m watching her daughter as she battles with what she just said. The truth bomb left a visible crater.
The subject turns back to her dad, where Angel and both daughters told me about him in reverential tones. When I saw that her oldest was nearing her breaking point, I said, “look at me. Your father is not dead. You are half of him. He lives in you.” I could tell my words ran deep, because she struggled not to cry. We pull into the next station and Angel asks if she can call. I tell her that she surely can and her daughter mouths, “thank you.” They exit and I cannot hold it together anymore. The pain inside all of them was enormous and I took it all on. I had to go through the process of blessing and releasing it, because that pain was not meant for me to carry. We are not close enough yet.
I can say “yet,” because Angel is the first person who has asked for my number that actually meant it. I think it must be a sign.
How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you?
If there is anything I have learned over the last eight years, it’s “stop trying to describe yourself to someone who can’t see you.” It is wasted energy because they’re running on deduction and inference, and skipping over what you’re telling them. It is also true that people see what they want to see. Know when you’re not it, and celebrate the people who show up.
I was reminded of that by my favorite author, Jonna Mendez. However, if I hadn’t started with her late husband’s books, we never would have met at all. It is so beautiful to me that my first favorite spy/writer introduced me to the second…. and he thought she was just as beautiful inside as I do now.
She made my heart overflow with gratitude when I sent her “The Spy in the Room,” a blog entry where I talked about seeing her live at the International Spy Museum:
It was so validating to have someone who writes professionally really take in who I am and what I do. It changed my perspective and my self confidence, because she saw me in a way that no one ever has.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy compliments from readers. I really do. They’re so valuable. At the same time, there’s something about meeting your heroes and them saying they think you’re on the right track.
The reason I’m posting about this is it’s actually a screenshot from four years ago today.
It humbles me to stand next to greatness, and for a few minutes, I really, really did. She thought I was perceptive because the entry talks about the armor you put on when you’re in grief.
Sometimes you see a writing prompt and you know it’s going to hurt. I’m going to be blessing and releasing a lot of pain. It’s not going to be easy, but I hope it’s going to be worth it.
Dear Leslie,
You are my precious, precious child and I wish I could protect you. You’ll learn to protect yourself, but it will take so long you’ll lose hope. Just when you think it’s never coming back, you’ll find the woman of your dreams. It’s not what you think. She’s safe. Do not fear her. You’ll know her by her suits and crap for work. She will hug you so tight all your pieces will glue back together. Please don’t be too jaded to let her. There’s going to be a lot more pain before It Gets Better. Love her to the best of your ability- it’s for life if you can learn to be kind even under stress because sometimes………..
Things Fall Apart
You need to learn about the Civil Rights Movement. I know you know what it is, but dig deep. You’re already thinking big thoughts. You want to be the Martin Luther King, Jr. of pink people. In some ways, you already are- but in order to be great, you’re going to have to find a way to be strong. You already know this, but I’m not sure you know how much. Those big thoughts will never go away, and you have a stunning ability to write and speak in a way that people will listen. The hard part will never be getting others to believe in you. The hard part is getting you to believe in both of us.
I know you’re fragile and broken. I know you don’t recognize love unless it destroys you. Just keep writing to deal with pain, and start taking Tylenol before school. The one thing I can tell you about the future is that we find out Tylenol also dulls emotional pain. The next three years will be the hardest of your life so far, and I’ll be 46 soon if that’s any indication. You’re going to grow in so many ways, but everything you know right now is not everything I know, and I cannot change anything because you are a child. It’s not our call yet. I know you don’t feel like a child, haven’t for a long time. But Leslie, you are…. even if this letter doesn’t convince you.
I know it will be hard for you to accept it as reality, but it is true. It will be true for a long time, longer than you thought possible. Just hang in. I cannot give you anything more specific, because if you don’t go through the hard parts, you won’t get where I am now. It’s all going to be okay if you can learn to walk through fire.
You are capable of leading your people, but you need to protect your energy until it’s time to step off a ledge. You will feel in your bones when it is time to jump. You’re a superhero, but no capes. it is very good advice. Live in the now, darling. It will be Incredible, and you think that being Incredible will come later, and it will in some ways. In others, you’re already the bravest person I know.
Being “out” at school is one of the most courageous things you’ll ever do. You will not be at your schools long enough to see what you’ve done, but it matters. People still talk about it as if you’re some sort of hero…… and yet, you’re just trying to survive. Stop listening to her music so you can hear your own. If you work hard, you’ll be as good as she is. There is no doubt.
If you work harder, you’ll be even better. Maybe don’t go to PVA for trumpet next year. I think you’ll have more fun in choir. Just don’t be a soprano. Be an alto if you want to survive. I know you already know this, but it bears repeating. You will turn out to be a lyric soprano, but it’s not your personality. Just “cigar and vodka it down” (that was a joke). Your inner diva will come out regardless when the right teacher comes along. You’ll be able to sing to the heavens while you’re in hell.
I can picture you walking the halls of High School for Performing and Visual Arts with your Walkman, because Jason Moran said that you needed to listen to everything and he had a Walkman, too. But only you and I know that it’s not jazz on the tape. It’s her.
I know this is the biggest heartbreak you’ve ever had, and there will be so many more. Some will be older, some will be younger… but if you’re not careful with picking a partner (this is a future word you will like), you’ll be exactly where you are now. Jumping up and down for an approval that will never come because of what has happened over the last two years. This will happen over and over until your person arrives, and even then it won’t go all that great. Just keep hope alive. With enough courage, you’ll gain a lot of respect. It’s just that no one will tell you that until years later. You’re going to think people don’t care about you, when in reality you’re their hero.
I need you to do something for me. I need you to take better care of Lindsay.
This is critically important. Tell her you love her in both words and actions. Protect her while you still can, because later on it’s her turn and you won’t want to feel like you haven’t done enough. You just don’t know how she’ll save you, and if I could tell you I don’t think you’d recover from the happiness. Through her, you’ll get to tell Jimmy Carper about the clock radio under your pillow, the story every teen in Houston has for him.
I know you’ve harbored a lot of pain. This is one of the things that will go right. She’s the best thing about your life. I know you already love her. Make sure she knows it goes to 11. If all goes according to the same plan, you’ll look up to her. Literally. I’m sorry, but you’ve grown as much as you’re going to grow. You’re going to be in her shadow, but I also know that you already know that’s where you want to be. Her shadow is The Grand Prize Game.
You’re going to get the new bike, Archway cookies, the Bun bars, AND the photogirrafic pimento.
Spoilers. However, I cannot tell you how much joy will come out of your pain. It’s coming out right now in this letter. That’s because you’ll learn how to look over your life as I have, like you’re doing right now. It’s going to change your life. Lean in, and enjoy the ride.
You’re just not there yet, but already know you’re a disaster in the PVA hallway- a ticking time bomb that’s about to go off….. but I checked with me and it’s still okay for you to tell your nemesis to go to hell. Remember that nemesis rhymes with emesis. Do with that what you will.
You’re going to vomit up emotions until you’re dry heaving, and then you’ll keep on doing it because you don’t know how to stop. You already have a good friend, though. Dianne is safe. You’ll love her more as the years go by, and realize you were on the wrong track. The extra N means that she is a better person, even if you can’t imagine that’s true.
She’ll pick you up in her little green Volvo and it will change your life, in what you think are small ways, but here is the secret to life. The small things are the big things……. because she knows what you refuse to acknowledge at home- and think you’re hiding at church. She will hear the distress in your voice when no one else does. Love her to the moon and back. Love her until you think you just can’t and then love her a little more. She sees you, Leslie.
Look for the people who see you. Always. I give you permission to walk away from anyone. Protect yourself, but not so much you can’t receive love.
If you keep that in your mind and keep writing, you will go places and see things you never thought you could. You’ll meet people that define you, because you’ll love yourself when you’re with them. Cut yourself some slack. You’re a pretty great kid. It’s okay to love yourself, too….. even when it seems selfish.
The only thing I would suggest is that when Dana invites you for Easter dinner, go.
I’ve been up for the last hour or so, but there’s surround sound system on the TV where I’m housesitting for the week, so of course I’m watching “Jack Ryan” loud enough to rattle the windows. You really need surround sound for the full experience. Otherwise, you don’t know Jack.
I’ve loved Jack Ryan since I was a kid, and John Krasinski is amazing. It’s kind of funny watching Jim from “The Office” as an action hero. I will fall over laughing if he ever breaks the fourth wall and looks into the camera. He didn’t last season, but I’m only halfway through the first episode now. I have ADHD. When my brain says “start writing now,” I do it. That’s because if I tell myself something is a priority, I have to do it right then. Otherwise, the flow disappears.
Flow is a good thing, but so is being distracted. I’ve been talking about Sinead O’Connor’s death from a medical standpoint, and proceeded to chat about medicine. The only time I got even a little bit angry was when this woman said that her husband had a widowmaker heart attack and died instantly, then his daughter found him. I told her I knew exactly what that meant, and that I was so, so sorry, and that my mother had died at 65 from an embolism, which isn’t that unusual, but it felt like she was young. Someone replied that her husband had a heart attack, but that the fancy insurance package at his job saved him…. and oh, I lost it. What if the husband had died because he didn’t have health insurance? As calmly as I could, I said, “interestingly enough, my dad had a widowmaker a few days before my mother died. I just didn’t say that because I thought it would come across as “my dad survived and your husband didn’t. I should have said so to avoid confusion, but I was only trying to avoid pain.” I figured that was the nicest way I could tell this woman that I thought she was an insensitive jackass.
Groupthink leads to violence so in a later part of the thread I got, “you’re not an MD. You’re just the help. You are a vicious little nobody.” Ohhhhhhhh, is there a lot to unpack there……. But I told her that I’d already said I wasn’t an MD many times and that it was only my opinion and that I was out. She then called me some other choice name, but that’s when I blocked her and went about my day. I’m still thinking about the hypocrisy. Sinead O’Connor wasn’t a vicious little nobody. She had a celebrity career and a disorder…… but when you only have a disorder and you’re not famous across the world, the compassion for them does not extend to me, a nobody. The “therapist” said that I must have been triggered because she thought I was “clinging to the lurid details of someone’s death,” because she wanted to remember Sinead another way. I had told her our perspectives were different, that I was talking about medicine, and that if she wanted to grieve a different way, then my thread wasn’t the place for her. That’s because there were no lurid details. Everyone in my thread was talking about young people dying all over the world from a lot of different stuff.
It went from passive-aggressive to violent speech very quickly, but I’m not one to engage a troll anymore.
That’s because I know I can verbally bitch slap just about anyone, but people I don’t care about don’t deserve it. They’re not going to change or grow from anything I say, much less in anger. It’s just hard to tell tone of voice from my words, so people assume I mean harm when I’m just neurodivergent. Overexplaining is both a trauma response and a symptom of ADHD. Being objective and dispassionate leads to people thinking I’m condescending, which means I look down on people. 😉
I am not responsible for what other people understand. It’s just that most people don’t register ADHD/Autism in Facebook comments. I also can’t reassure everyone when the hate starts piling on. I don’t let it get to me most of the time, because I know that they’re not angry at me. I’m just an outlet. I know I can be angry and loud on the Internet, but this wasn’t it. I don’t think I’ve ever been angry when using a word like “comorbidity.”
I need to try and forget that she said it, because she got into my head and it won’t let go. She had no idea what trigger she was pulling, and being a nobody is it. I’m not a person, I’m just wallpaper. So I replied that it seemed that she had anger issues that she needed to resolve with the real people in her life because I didn’t deserve it. I went about my day and this woman had left a series of comments that were equally rage-fueled, so I said, “I was asleep. I wasn’t ignoring you, but now I am. This is going nowhere productive.” And then I blocked her.
Keep in mind that this is a thread where I’ve already said I had the same brain disorder that Sinead had, that the thread was all about mental health from a patient’s perspective, etc. where everyone was pouring out their grief for O’Connor and acknowledging we should help people… check in with them….. because no one loves a bipolar person more than they do at their funeral. What I mean is that I was relating to her hardcore and telling people what it was like, but only Sinead deserves compassion, apparently. That’s ok. They can use me as their punching bag, because I’ll remember that hurtful shit, but I don’t have to react. It was just ironic how bad the hypocrisy actually got.
So, to people who think I was exaggerating about being attacked, no one tells you that you’re a vicious little nobody when they don’t want to bait you, especially when at every turn you’ve tried to de-escalate a situation, because that only makes trolls madder. If their opinion of you is nasty, it doesn’t matter what you say after that. I don’t know the leap between medicine and her rage, but I didn’t want to find out. I’m going to take an educated guess and say that someone peed in their Wheaties, but it wasn’t me.
If someone thinks I sound vicious when I talk medicine, they probably don’t know many doctors. It’s not meanness. It’s blunt. Medicine doesn’t run on touchy feely crap. I don’t sound emotional because I’m not. Medicine does not require me to be that.
You also have to go to medical school to be a psychiatrist, which means I am flat affect about that, too. Something will eventually kill me, and this might be it. There are a TON of things that go wrong with your body when your brain is diseased. Again, your brain will do everything it can to protect you. It uses the very best lies against you. It will shut down rather than allowing you to feel unsafe.
Telling people about your mental health doesn’t generally get results.
I can hear Dana in my head. She has a marvelous Stitch impression.
I’m supposed to be describing me, and this is the best I’ve got.
I’m trying to stop being nice, without losing being kind. I find that if I try and people please everyone, it’s not the flex I thought it was. People treat you to the level they see themselves, and are self-serving a lot of the time. They’ll help you if there’s something in it for them. Very few people will help someone a propos of nothing.
Those few are worth more than you have in your bank account, and I don’t care how high your balance may be. It is even truer for billionaires that they need good friends, because they have to worry about things most people don’t. What if their kid gets kidnapped? It’s very real when the kidnapper can set the release at anything he or she wants.
Most people think it’s justified, like eating the rich. That doesn’t make it right.
It’s just one example to make my point, but there are millions of others.
It is interesting that now people see that my boundaries are ironclad, they don’t test them. It doesn’t matter whether they’re scared of upsetting me, whether they think I’m being an asshole, or respecting my privacy. I am not responsible for what they understand, and they don’t live in my head. No one can predict me, because I want them to stop.
The heuristic in their heads is mild-mannered preacher’s kid who will do anything and everything not to offend anyone. I was constantly trying to figure out how people emoted and thought so that I could keep them from getting upset. I wasn’t standing for anything, I was falling for everything, and I could hear Ben Franklin telling me to stop.
It’s probably because of the summer heat in Philadelphia. I hear it is not pleasant. If you do not know how bad, you should let Jill, Lindsay and me school you. We all had to read a book about early America that focused so much on the heat during the many Congresses it took to get to ::gestures broadly at everything:: that everyone sweated and grumbled and got drunk at lunch. Now that’s how you whip a vote.
I’m betting at least some of those guys had good boundaries, but not Franklin. He became the toast of Paris trying to win the Revolutionary War with their money and resources.
At the end of the day, there’s this gem from the International Spy Museam. “Washington didn’t beat us, he simply outspied us.” It’s a paraphrase, but you get the gist. Intelligence over military might, my goal in every conflict vs. putting boots on the ground. I have too many friends in the military to think of any of them in danger. Spies save lives by having good boundaries.
The first Moscow Rule, not Tony Mendez’ explanation but he wrote them down is, “don’t fall in love with your asset.” It doesn’t mean sleeping with them (a Moscow Rule…… for RUSSIA), it means that if you don’t have boundaries, you won’t be able to protect them. it means that you’ll start wearing rose-colored glasses instead of running the numbers. it means being emotionally incapacitated to some degree, because sometimes they get caught. It’s one thing for you to go to prison or be tortured. It’s another thing to watch someone else, and it’s something you asked them to do that got them caught in the first place.
It’s a metaphor for life, or it has become that for me. I have fallen in love with the whole world, but the whole world doesn’t deserve me. It takes my focus and directs it externally, leaving me with no energy. Pushing people away is not trying to hurt them. It’s trying to say that I only have enough energy for *some* people because I have many, many, many acquaintances and readers that are not my close friends, and yet I would bleed out if they needed anything while my needs, and my family’s needs from me go by the wayside.
I think when you’re an INFJ, if you are interested in International Relations at all, you love CIA because they keep people safe. It’s one thing to have a few people steal some documents. It’s quite a different experience walking into a base in Afghanistan or Iraq and seeing how massive it is because they have to accommodate thousands (or at least hundreds…).
CIA has done some shady shit, too, but what you see is what you get. If you want to see that they’re evil, you’ve got material. If you want to see that they’re amazing, you will. It just depends on your filter. Now, extrapolate that to everyone you know. Are you capable of accommodating six friends or at least, hundreds…….. What people see in you is what people see in “the Manson family,” which is what the FBI calls them in “The Looming Tower.” It’s not a real thing. It was just funny in the show (it’s on Hulu, I think).
But of course the FBIs filters are different. They’re a law enforcement agency built on slave catchers. Who’s really the good guy in either scenario when you look at them through those filters?
Giving the important people in your life the attention they deserve means shutting others out and not feeling bad about it. No one has the energy to have 50 friends, and if they do, they don’t know all of them that well. But if you’re a people pleaser, you might cater to people you don’t know well for a while, but then you’ll get overwhelmed and give up.
It reminds me of one of my favorite hymns:
Draw us in the Spirit’s tether for when humbly in your name two or three are met together, you are in the midst of them.
Now, God does not work for CIA that I’m aware of, nor do they belong to The Manson family. That’s all on us.
It’s a reminder that to have a truly spiritual experience, it can be quiet. You cannot go deep with 50 people, especially if you can’t go deep with one.
Talking to 50 people is easier than talking to one when you don’t hate small talk. Being on stage or in the pulpit/lectern is even easier. That’s because even when I’m preaching a confessional sermon with 200 people hanging on every word, I still don’t feel responsible for their actions. I don’t feel responsible for the way they feel when I’m done. I know from experience how I did. If I did well, they’ll tell me so. If I blew it, they’ll say, “I like your dress.”
“I like your dress is polite, but it doesn’t indicate someone who will show up for you.
And that leads me to a story about Mikal, my 11th grade best friend. We were on a mission trip to Reynosa, and it turns out that I, in fact, cannot preach in Spanish. But I tried.
I think it was something like “los ninos es la corazon o la iglesia” (the children are the heart of the church). That’s because I preached Sunday worship after vacation Bible school (I was the only one who could even attempt such a thing. Had nothing to do with my qualifications except two years in school that barely covered first grade. Anyway, I say a couple of things after that and then I run out of words and couldn’t really “think of a closer.” So I just repeated the above line twice and said, “Amen.” My mother cried (partially because she had no idea what I was saying) because that’s what mothers do when you preach.
I finish not really knowing how I did, because everyone was polite.
I get back to my seat and Mikal says, “that was the worst piece of crap I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Yesterday in my thread about Sinead O’Connor, I was called “one of those people.” The assumption she made was so far off that I could easily see she was butt hurt in her own life and lashing out at me. Those of you that do know me will laugh. She thought I was a health nut when I said that high cholesterol was an indication of how bad you need to break up with Pizza Hut…. that certainly people do drop dead, but it’s difficult to separate out random cards when the deck is stacked against you. That’s because people who die of natural causes so young are in the minority. There is ALWAYS an explanation if you look hard enough, because it’s science. We are not talking about woo woo shit here. I am also betting that the person who called me “one of those people” didn’t have JAMA articles for company. I could have been wrong, but she didn’t say she was a medical professional or that she had family who are.
However, I’m definitely “one of those people.”
It’s just not who she thinks. I’m bipolar. What I have noticed is that no one loves a bipolar person more than they do at their funeral. They weep and gnash teeth and say “they’re so sorry,” but people aren’t generally interested in learning how to support people with mental issues because it’s genuinely difficult, especially if the patient isn’t medication compliant and has symptoms that show consistently.
It is a truism that Sinead O’Connor had mental health issues that weighed on her. She also had lots of critics that treated her like crap, as well as people who aren’t fans just talking trash and none of them had any idea what was really going on. She took people’s shit her whole life, and it wore her down. It might have been cancer. It might have been a heart attack. What I know for sure is that bipolar didn’t help. It made her feel worse, carrying burdens that are too large for anyone because the medical example would be an autoimmune disease. Your brain is constantly trying to protect you. It thinks the answer is to shut down. It will, if you let it.
I am doing what I can to become emotionally bulletproof so that people can’t rattle me. But it doesn’t take away from the fact that I still deal with people who are insensitive all the time and very, very sure that they’re right. What they don’t say is that they’re bipolar.
Not the woman that called me “one of those people.” Not the person who said she was a fucking therapist and proceeded to try and diagnose me from a couple of Facebook comments. You aren’t even supposed to diagnose someone in the first session, as impossible as health insurance makes it to leave it off the table. After I said that I was just talking medicine, that I was expressing an opinion, that I had the patient perspective and the background to be able to express my opinion as educated but not fact, she said, “I don’t need your resume. I don’t think you’re being attacked as much as you think you are.” There were 75 comments worth of bullshit. My phone has been blowing up all night. The audience will kill you if you let them.
I told her that her comment about “I don’t need your resume” came across as passive-aggressive and that I hoped she was more objective with her actual patients… and that if I needed to look at my words, she needed to look at hers. She assumed that I had some sort of wish to say that Sinead’s whole life could be summed up with bipolar. I was talking about her health history.
My phone is still blowing up, but I’ve tapped out. I’ve said everything in the most objective, dispassionate tone I can muster. To other people, it comes across as aggressive, apparently, but I think that’s because on the Internet, people aren’t used to there being boundaries. That you cannot make up a whole bunch of shit and decide that’s the sum total of me, either.
When people don’t have context for something, they make it up. I cannot tell you how true this is with my beautiful girl. I made a ton of assumptions because she was so busy that she couldn’t pay attention to me, but she could skim my e-mails and tell me if I was on the right track. Sometimes I was. Sometimes I wasn’t. It just was difficult because when she’d get angry about an assumption, we wouldn’t talk it out.
That’s because I was sending her heartfelt letters, and she was reducing me to a Facebook comment section. I can’t show her my weird little world, and I can’t show that to all of Facebook, either. But what I can do is clear up misconception as long as other comments don’t anger me. When I get angry, I withdraw. I deal with my anger on my own instead of taking it out on other people.
But people have a stunning ability to gut you when they think you’re wrong and they’re right, because fuck your feelings. It’s not just Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s all of us. We’re too quick to anger, trigger happy idiots because when someone questions you on something online, you must go nuclear immediately. And then when you don’t get the answer you thought you were going to get, you must double down and keep stabbing.
Leading with your heart on the internet is risky business, and in no way am I talking about the risk I took in getting really close to someone I adore. I’m talking about Facebook comments, because groupthink almost always leads to violence. Facebook is just a mask for everything people think when they don’t know each other and also pick sides without ever truly understanding anything.
For instance, I started a thread on saying I thought I knew what happened to Sinead O’Connor, that I was bipolar so it weighed on me, and a thank you to Father Nathan Monk for “standing up for the rest of us..” I also said that I had never heard of someone dropping dead at 56 of natural causes.
Then, someone said that people die at random all the time.
I said, “that’s certainly true, but it’s also an indication of how bad you need to break up with Pizza Hut and it’s hard to tell what’s random and what’s not.”
I had said that I’d only posited what happened, that I didn’t know, but that bipolar was at least a comorbidity because it has mental and physical side effects. The side effects are mostly from the treatment, so thanks for that.
I didn’t say that last thing, but it’s true.
Someone said that I didn’t need to be condescending and diet shaming earlier in the thread, and I explained the logic medically instead of getting defensive and jumping on her ass. Progress. Then, someone else jumped on the bandwagon and said, “oh. You’re one of those. I’m sure the millions of people not addicted to crap food who got CVD will be thankful for your “educated guesses.” I said, “my stepmother is a rheumatologist. I was her medical assistant for four years combined. You can stop now. I’m out… but might I also suggest that you stop making assumptions about people before you shoot off your mouth. I can see that you’re hurt about something, but you’re popping off at legit nothing.” And that was the end of that.
Bryn was telling me about a woman who put on a show where she would stand still for six hours, and the audience could do anything to her that they wanted. She put out fun sex toys, like feathers, etc. and then it got dark. Scissors, knives, etc. By the end of it, she had been stabbed.
Her point at the end was “the audience will kill you if you let them.”
For the love of God, if you do nothing else in your life, get the people away from you who are not your audience. Do not give purchase to strangers, because they don’t have your best interests at heart. As we move toward a more and more virtual society, it’s going to take ironclad boundaries so that when we come together internationally it doesn’t devolve into World War Wii.
I stood up for myself by saying in words and actions that I am not responsible for what you understand. It was a woman (of course) because if someone is direct, it comes across as an attack. It doesn’t help much that I’m genderqueer and people automatically assume I’m mansplaining. I’m not. I’m neurodivergent. I can be an asshole to everyone without even blinking, because my operating system is different and I’ve stopped apologizing for it. I think that’s why I gravitated toward linux and web design. Not many people were doing it back then, and the industry was flooded with people like me. I just wasn’t standing up for myself because I didn’t think I deserved that right.
Now that I’ve done eight years of work on myself, I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Self actualization. If you want to understand me, you’ll work toward it. If you’re hell bent on thinking that I’m a judgmental dickhead, that’s your problem.
I am NOT RESPONSIBLE for what you understand.
Keep repeating that phrase to yourself over and over until it’s a part of you. Thinking that other people are thinking about you is often very, very wrong because your echo chamber is telling you that they are. Most of the time, your inner monologue will tell you that I mean harm because your self esteem is in the toilet. People are in the shit. Groupthink leads to violence because it’s the mirror with which most people see themselves.
Life is pain, princess.
You’ll move on quicker and let people off the hook quicker because you can write people off when you couldn’t before because you felt so obligated. No one owes you anything, so celebrate the people that show up.
It was the message I missed in the middle of the mess.
It is also the point that resurrection happens.
Baseball is life. Play small ball. Focus on getting to first.
First.
We may not end up as best friends, but I might be able to buy you a beer.
I remember my mother telling me that my first word was “peaches.” Because I was physically developmentally delayed, I absorbed everything mentally and emotionally. When I started talking, I went from “peaches” to “car keys” to my dad teaching me how to say antidisestablismentarianism and beta hemolytic streptococci. I know I’ve said this before, but even as a child I was a grumpy old man. I was the OK, Boomer of Parker Elementary School.
But by far, the greatest moment of my education was in the parking lot at Wal-Mart. I had *just* learned to read, so I was maybe three and a half or four. We got out of the car, and my face lit up.
WE SELL FOR LESS
I am such a grammar nazi that I didn’t even notice they had the audacity to spell my name wrong (My legal name is Leslie in case you didn’t know that). I don’t know if it happened afterward or if it had happened before and I am just blending memories, but I went from Les to Lesser to Looselie. That last one is probably my favorite.
I didn’t have another nickname until I got to HSPVA, when my friend Scott called me his “personal Leslian.” At first, I wasn’t into it. But when it stuck, it stuck. It didn’t matter whether I liked it or not. It was better than when I was in the closet and people teased me about my name like my parents picked my orientation before I was born and named me as such. I have never wanted to stab anyone more than when they called me Lesie on purpose just to see if I’d react.
Hold down the madness, Caroline. Hold down the madness.
I swallowed a lot of homophobic behavior because my school didn’t do shit to keep me from being bullied. In fact, when I told my high school counselor that I was being bullied, she asked what I did to provoke them. I did what I always do. When I left PVA, I took Creative Writing and roasted them over the coals. My teacher read it, and I got an A, but she said it was too personal to share with the class. That didn’t make me feel so hot. I spent five pages telling her how I felt about being closeted, being outed, being bullied, etc. and it was a TEACHABLE MOMENT. It was also 1995. It ain’t happening. Not in Fort Bend County. Probably not anywhere. But I had the courage to lay it out there. I was trying to change hearts and minds, which was probably limited to the English department so I’d be the most humiliated.
That’s because I got really close to one of my teachers, came out to her, and she had me transferred out. I think she thought I had some weird thing for her, but she was kind of a bitch which why I liked her. As in, I liked being AROUND her. Really not my type. I just needed a safe adult and she fucked me.
That’s because the class she transferred me into was doing the things we’d already done that semester. Because of transferring from PVA to Clements, I was on a third reread of “Of Mice and Men.” Not going to lie. Still hate it.
I was the only out kid in the entire school, and there were almost 3,000 of us. That led to a lot of choice nicknames, which is why I am so internally shut down when I hear a straight person say the word “queer.” I am having to do an enormous amount of work to turn off that reflex because the younger kids coming up have embraced it. To them, it’s a real word. To me, it’s the same thing as calling me a faggot to my face. Which even though I’m female, I got called a lot. I even got called that in elementary school. I “started showing” when I was in fifth grade. That’s when the real fear starts.
The moment you realize that homosexuality is wrong and yet “you have it” is the gravity’s rainbow of sexual orientation. You can hear the whistle as the bomb aims for your brain. You’ll spend the rest of your life with some form of internalized homophobia, and in the beginning, you’ll wrestle with God and all their angels. Some people try and pray the gay away. I didn’t. I knew enough to know that people around me needed to change, so I prayed for that.
That’s because I learned very quickly that this was an airplane crash sort of feeling. Once the plane starts going down, you know nothing will stop it. I could feel attraction to women everywhere, and not in terms of sex. In terms of wanting their energy. I liked having older women around me because the girls in my class treated me like a freak show. Not going to front. I was. I was in a different kind of hell than everyone else. Older women don’t have mean girl streaks.
No one questioned it because they thought I had the vocabulary and the emotional range of an adult……. when the reality was, “sort of.” I was a teenager in a weird relationship with a 25 year old. So, my brain grew rapidly with lots of blind spots. I think I’ve figured out the wrong way to address every one of them so far. I’m starting to fix it, though. I’m a work in progmess.
I don’t remember her giving me a nickname, because she’d always say “this is your middle name callin’ you.” I do remember my boyfriend’s dad (not yours) called me “Lester.” I did not like it because I thought he was making fun of me for being genderqueer. He probably was, a little bit, he just didn’t know. It was the 1990s. I didn’t even know. I just felt weird about it because I knew I’d be a husband in one way or another and he could see it. I was in that stage where all the adults gossipped about me when they thought I was out of earshot. Churches do a great job of making you feel spectacularly inferior because you’re a sinner and you’re going to hell, but of course we knew you were gay when you were five. That Happy Meal is missing some French fries.
Nicknames turned to Very Knowing Looks that they thought I couldn’t interpret. They made snide comments about how much I look like kd lang, and I do actually look like her. I get it. But it was their tones of voice. They were not trying to tell me that kd was pretty and I looked like her. People don’t realize that I sense energy and read microaggressions. I can read both sides of your face.
It makes me feel better about the state of the world than if I couldn’t, though, because I can always find truly authentic friends. I can also protect my energy, because I can tell when conflict is coming. What I am not so good at is remaining calm when I feel it. I have trauma reflexes, and I’m trying to turn them off. I do believe that if you’re a reader, you can see that my life has not always been easy. I have come by all of those reflexes honestly.
It has made me a completely different person than I would have been, and I can’t say I’m grateful for that right now. My trauma reflexes pushed away the person I love most in this world. Not woman. Person. Supergrover is one in a billion. Yes, I’m certain. Yes, I know how large a billion is. Still holds up.
I loved her hard, like a Boston marriage in the 1800s, teachers who just loved books and wanted to forego all the romance- but keep all the intimacy. I could tell her anything. She gave me a name. Goddess Jana, of the moon. It made me cry because it was so perfect. Of course she was writing to the moon. I was writing to the sun.
When she said it, my sister’s voice was in my head.
When I was nine and Lindsay was three, we went on a cruise to Mexico. There was a talent show one night, and tiny baby Lindsay started singing.
Somewhere out there…. beneath the pale moon light, someone is thinking offffff me, and loving me tonight……
If the sound of a three year old baby singing that song doesn’t make you cry, nothing will. If you’re not familiar, it’s on the soundtrack to “An American Tail.” The singer is a little boy. In the animated movie, he’s a tiny mouse with a hat that’s too big….. I think a metaphor for my childhood, really.
One of the reasons I loved having a virtual relationship is another line from the song. “And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby, it helps to think we’re sleeping underneath the same big sky.” It didn’t matter where in the world either one of us were. The sun and the moon would always dance.
I still think that way, because I’ve given up hope that anything will get better, but I also don’t want to put her back on the shelf, because the character is what I have left. I am afraid that my memories of her will fade, so I have to put them down somewhere. It’s not an experience I want to forget. I do not want to lose my Raggedy Doctor.
She didn’t seem to realize that she was losing her Amy Pond.
I really couldn’t think of a better way to categorize our relationship than Doctor/Companion…. except we’re American. It’s apt not just because our feelings were platonic. It’s apt because even though the story of the Raggedy Doctor is in the Matt Smith era, her personality is The Fugitive Doctor. Namaste AND don’t try me. 😛
I should put in here that The Fugitive Doctor is a wonderful, lovable character lest she runs across this. She doesn’t watch the show, so “fugitive” might raise an eyebrow. It’s so much fun to use these analogies, like a mom and dad who speak Spanish in front of their kids so they can have private conversations….. except now you guys are collectively one parent. You choose. I’ll take the one you don’t want.
I think it was about a year ago when I mentioned a Doctor Who gift I got for my nephew, she told me that she “didn’t watch The Doctor.” I laughed and then said, “it would be confusing to me if you did, because you’ve told me you don’t watch Doctor Who for :::checks watch::: nine years.”
She has read what is basically the spin-off in terms of ideas, Outlander, so she does like time travel stuff. It’s workable. If I think Doctor/Companion, I also think Claire/Roger. In fact, I don’t think even she’s thought of that. I’m a preacher’s kid and I have monocular vision. I was so happy that I got to tell Diana Gabaldon how much Roger meant to me and have her respond on Twitter (shut it)….. and I just realized that Amy Pond is The Doctor’s mother-in-law, so neither one of us can escape that description.
I would give an arm and a leg to see her face when she realizes I just called her my mother-in-law. We’re first children. I’m betting “old person” has been apt since she was born, in some sense, anyway. When you’re the oldest, you’re sort of a child. You’re also sort of a junior partner at the firm because you manage the associates.
Also being first children, we are both used to being right and not having to argue about anything because our opinions are law. I wish she could have seen my face at “be careful painting your feelings as fact,” because I got all that shit from her. If she ever goes back and looks, she’ll see a solid progression. It’s not that I intentionally did it, it’s that when I was writing, I was thinking about her. My words in her writing voice. Kettle. Black. You get it.
Nearly every time, if I sounded too much like her, she’d call me a judgmental dickhead. At first, it was funny af. After a few years, it felt relentless. It was all in tone. But every once in a while, if I listened close, I heard a full orchestra playing our song. What is it? All of them. They’re the chords that run between us.
Maybe I should buy something that reminds me of her. I could go to Wal-Mart.
I have never needed Jeremy Bearimy more than I do right now. However, I wouldn’t know how to change things if I went back in time. I’d only be able to go with the flow, knowing what I know now. I don’t know if I would or wouldn’t survive Life on Mars. Either I’ll save humanity over and over, or I’ll take in the whole vortex. There is no in between.
I’ll decide in the car. Guess it depends on who’s driving.
If I had to go back in time, I would be Meagan’s friend and let go of the idea that we’d be good together. I was too wrapped up in my damage to pay attention, and it wasn’t fair to her. She just thought I was intense and weird, so she either went on a date with someone else or had a one night stand. She was also supposed to be a mutual friend, so seeing her after Meagan noped out wasn’t the best experience. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. It was written all over my body. It was more grief than I could carry. The relationship wasn’t fair to either of us, because I’m not the alpha dog…. or I wasn’t at 18. She found an alpha dog and married her. I was livid, and not for the reasons you think. I loved her more than me, and to see her commit for a lifetime to someone that would steamroll her every single day made my heart break into a million little pieces. My friend was fucked, and it only took about a decade for her to see it.
This is not blaming her. I just see how it is.
That’s because I love those type women as well. She had it together better than I did, but cut off from her emotions a good bit of the time. I only say that because my dad said I was after I started dating her. That I receded into my shell.
Hm. That has no bearing on “this thing we’ve created and managed.” My eyes are rolling out of my head. That phrase hurt worse than a one night stand. I never got laid, but I am well and truly fucked. It’s too much. And yet, 10 years is not nothing. I have the right to be upset for the time it takes for waves of tears to wash over shallower wells of injury. It doesn’t feel like the end of a romance with my beautiful girl. It feels like wondering where it all went. I know we both participated. I have owned my part. At the same time, the story will not go away.
It’s just that now, I like her character more than I like her. It’s painful, but it’s true. I love her like I love all my friends and family, but I don’t have to like her. She was not being very likable at last interaction, and neither was I because of it. If I start a letter with “I don’t want to fight about this,” the answer is generally not “you’re not getting what you need and I am not going to give you any more than three words. Die mad about it.” I am doing the work so that I don’t. She doesn’t get to steal happiness anymore.
She replaced it with fear that had nothing to do with either one of us. It was our filters for it. We fought because it was easy to read each other wrong and I felt constantly impaled. She would say that she wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been such an asshole to her, and she’s right. She has also been great about saying I’m forgiven and treated me like dog shit. So, which story do I believe? Do I believe that I am worthy of this treatment, or do I believe that what I did was eight years ago and she’s still a brick wall. It made me so angry that I realized I could not live that way anymore. I had just met Zac and reconnected with Bryn, and I felt settled in a way that I haven’t in a long time. I realized that because her dark begets dark, I couldn’t shine a light bright enough to get through to her. It was her choice to say “you are clearly not getting what you need, and I am hell bent on never giving it to you.” She created a fucking mess, and then blamed me for everything. But because I hurt her, what she did became totally invalid. I couldn’t have pain anymore. I couldn’t have issues anymore. Her right. Her barometer. She would not submit on it and admit that things had not gone as planned on either side.
She thought she was trash, and treated me as an extension.
I do not have to entertain her opinion anymore, but not wanting it is a whole other thing. If she wanted to break me, she did. I think she did want to break me, because when she’s angry she’s quiet as well. Her words reverberate, and she has never grasped how much. So, of course she doesn’t have to apologize. It wasn’t lashing out. If I hadn’t done what I did, she wouldn’t have been forced to treat me like shit until I gave up.
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
I needed her to pick up the clue phone, but I was always too much for her. If I am too much for you, now I don’t care how important you are in my life. This aggression will not stand, man. That’s because I’m an easy target to blame for other people’s refusal to look inside themselves. There’s never an actual conflict where we both present stories and try to figure out objective truth. Very few people do what I do, because they hate it. It’s too hard and it hurts too much. And yet, I do it anyway because it helped me to see what I was doing to participate in everything without doing the same thing to her. I didn’t make it all her fault. She saw it as that, but that’s because she was looking for it.
If your self esteem is so low that you cannot open up about anything due to fear of other people, you will hurt them. That’s because you’ll make everything about me. You didn’t do anything, I made you. If I hadn’t x, you wouldn’t have had to do y.
First of all, that’s bullshit. She acted too much like a victim for someone who supposedly forgave me. It was her damage, not mine. If she only needs to be hurt once to lock down forever, I’m out.
Our relationship devolved into as long as I agreed to do everything she said and keep quiet about anything that was bothering me, she was ready for anything. She actually said that I was the only one who ever trashed anything. It was a dick move on her part.
I didn’t respect her boundaries because she didn’t tell me what they were. I would just hit a land mine and she’d explode. I have the ability to make her feel things that other people don’t, because I can say it in a way that actually makes her emote. She just doesn’t do that for me. She gets angry at me and tells someone else.
Meanwhile, I am of the opinion that if the information goes out, it has to go to the right person.
She was my perfect picture of the companion that my INFJ personality profile said I’d get. She traded friendship for shallow communication because apparently it takes a very long time to write e-mails unless she’s telling me to fuck off. Those she takes time with.
Meanwhile, I know why she’s hurt. I know why she’s angry. I know why she cuts off her emotions. I can have sympathy for all that and still think she’s on a path of destruction. She can’t cancel everyone when they make a mistake.
If she goes through life treating everyone like me, that when they hurt her she recedes into her fortress and nopes out, that’s going to lead to a lot of short friendships. But that’s the view from where I sit. Maybe she has managed to meet people that never do anything that ruffles her feathers. For their sake, I hope so.
She’s a lot to lose, and if you piss her off, she’ll hold it over your head for the next 30 years. But she’ll also be nice and not tell you that.
It comes out when her actions and words don’t line up.
She treated me like I was sick when I wasn’t. My perception when she check in on my dad was that my mother died two or three days later, so she felt like she couldn’t tell me that she didn’t really want to be my friend, she just wanted to send me a compliment. At first, it felt like she pitied me, coddled me, anything to make me not get upset at anything. She walked on eggshells no matter what I did, because don’t upset the crazy person. She took away my agency.
She’d beat me emotionally like a southern mama with a hair brush,
I didn’t walk away because she deserved to take a shot at me. But she didn’t deserve eight years of it.
Meanwhile, I also walked on eggshells and tried to please her because I felt like she thought I was a threat. The truth is that I have never even been within 15 minutes of her, and when I truly tried to walk away, she wouldn’t let me go. She could say the same thing about me.
Writing is a comprehensive response to life. That is true no matter what kind, but particularly blogging because the story moves forward every single day, because it’s a choice to post, not a responsibility. I do not feel like I have an audience to whom I owe anything. If I needed to, I’d push the red button and everything would be gone. Nothing threatens you if you don’t need something out of it. I would be giving up a lot, but I wouldn’t stop writing. It’s a huge deal to be a blogger, because people cannot predict what you’ll remember and think they can.
Someone might be totally freaked out and barking up my tree not to write about them, but what they don’t know is that if I can’t make an illustration out of them that works, I won’t. Not everyone makes a good character. Telling them that is worse than blowback, because their ego gets involved. What do you mean, I don’t make a good character?
I feel like I handle this better than most after coming out to straight people without a clue. You’ll never see a more butt hurt child than when they’ve told a gay person they don’t like them “that way” and the person says “you’re not my type.” They are horribly offended in the most hilarious of ways. It is more than physical attraction, and they’ve taken your rejection as if you think it isn’t.
My straight girl crush was because I was struggling in my marriage and it was easier to feel high as hell on new relationship energy than it was to deal at home. She is drop dead gorgeous and it didn’t mean anything to me because I wasn’t looking at her picture while I wrote. She was the equivalent of my “corporeally challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.” (I went on a date with a woman from OPB/NPR… maybe two… but this is what Dana and I called her for 15 years.) I could have a crush on a straight girl because it couldn’t go anywhere. I’d get all the good stuff without all the bad except I didn’t. My trauma bond screamed with empathy because she didn’t give me a slap bracelet after the fire.
When I say that someone makes a bad character, I mean that when I write about you, the emotions fall flat on the page. If I can’t make myself feel anything, no one else will feel it, either. If you go back to my older entries, you’ll be able to tell when I’m distressed. I can, but I also have the memory of writing the piece if it’s so overwhelming it made me sob. People think I get really angry when I’m actually crying my eyes out. I am literally pouring myself out onto the page so that I have an accurate idea of how my mental and physical health are treating me. I realize when I’ve been too harsh. I realize when I’ve been too nice.
What makes Supergrover such a great character is because when I write about her I can cry. Not many people evoke emotion in me like that because I just won’t get vulnerable enough. When I write about my beautiful girl, I step into a museum with ten years’ worth of collected art. Some of it was bought and paid for. Some of it we stole in a heist. We’d push and pull and tumble and roll, but for whatever reason, we didn’t cut each other off. That’s because the museum had no easily accessible exits.
I became exhausted because bringing up conflict and it never getting resolved was eating my self-esteem for every meal.
It was very, very confusing because we’d have a fight and she’d say we were done. When I assumed she meant it, I’d try to move on and then she’d drop in. When I assumed that she was just angry af and apologized, it was perceived as me trying to get attention. She would tell me that she told me it was over and I just pushed, but I have two solid memories that stick with me.
The first was a huge fight that really was the end of it for me. Like, I am just not capable. She reads on my blog that my dad is having surgery and checks in. I was pleased, but I felt weird about it because I thought, “surely she sees why this would be problematic.” It felt like “leave me the fuck alone, but I’m going to make sure you know I’m watching.” It has never gotten any more resolved than this, because when she dropped in on me, it was fine. When I dropped in on her, she felt creeped out because she thought it was me saying “I’m always watching.” It happened again when we had another blowout and I thought maybe then I’d get a break long enough to figure out what really happened. Someone said something to her that reminded her of me, and she was back in my DMs.
Neither one of us could break the connection, just “tumbling through a freefall, no one’s going to go unscathed….. but it’s not because you held back, and it’s not how I behaved.” Now I’m humming…. “and I believe that underneath it all, you are my friend. And the way that I fell for you, I’ll never fall that way again. I still believe despite our differences that what we have’s enough” because I believe in her (and I believe in love). You know I have the ability to cry about this if I’m writing and suddenly quote Indigo Girls.
I told my friend Missy that I didn’t even listen to them for the longest because it created a “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” amount of “AS IF I’M NOT WEIRD ENOUGH.” I had a stereo in my room. Their albums didn’t leave when I did for years.
Now, one of my favorite songs is “When We Were Writers.”
Writing is not what Supergrover does for a living, but she does write in her spare time to get away from work. She’s right. It’s a bubble, When I say that I can’t do something or I have to go because I’m writing, it is taken every bit as seriously as when Lindsay says, “I’m going on a run.” Nothing else is more sacred than spending time alone so you can actually hear your thoughts.
With a virtual relationship, you never have to feel alone. That’s because their physical presence has never been needed. The relationship wasn’t created that way. We’d become each other in our work, borrowing style, structure, and tone. It was quite sophisticated in retrospect. It’s amazing how much we were able to do for each other virtually, and now everyone knows it because of the pandemic. We were virtual BEFORE IT WAS COOL.
We’d trade off being The Holy and The Moly.
We both went scorched earth too much when it was infinitely possible to just be out with it and either be done or decide we have something and work toward it. My emotions were larger than hers and always have been. She absolutely knew this. But I do not think that she ever thought that she’d be reopening a wound if she reached out. My part in all this is that because my feelings were large, I ignored everything bad and just kept on believing that one day, I’d find the combination of words that would unlock her. In my mind’s eye, I’m 14. She’s six. I’m older, and I should have known better.
When you know better, you do better. Maya Angelou’s words, but true for me as well. I don’t even know if she likes Coke, but she has a unique name and I knew for damn sure she wasn’t going to find a “Share a Coke with…..” bottle anywhere. So I ordered her one from Atlanta. There were actually six. One with her actual name, one with her character’s name, her husband, her kids, and her dogs. Except the Coke bottle said “Boytoy” on her husband’s because that’s how we referred to him. She never saw them, because I mixed up the address and put my name on the wrong part of the form. So they got a box addressed to me for a reason completely unknown to them and returned it. I was furious because it cost so much to do, but I was only angry at myself for mixing up the web form. It was so unique, and ADHD fucked me. I was absolutely miserable because it was the nicest thing I could think of to do virtually because I’d been a jackass. It was the friend equivalent of having to sleep on the couch and buying chocolates and flowers to beg.
Since she wears suits and crap for work, she also travels sometimes. I sent her a bracelet with a charm for her favorite cause. She told me it was perfect and sent me a picture of her wrist. I feasted on that for weeks because now I could go wherever she was, metaphysically. She just isn’t the sort of person that would tell me where she went, because it’s not important in her daily life and that’s really what I wanted to hear. I don’t care how she’s doing professionally. I care how she’s doing emotionally. I am the red telephone where she is concerned. Even now that we’re done I won’t hear a bad word about her because my friends don’t care about her. They care about me. They don’t recognize how much she gave me because even I’ve never heard her side of the story. I couldn’t make anything better. She was looking for hurt, so she found it.
The bracelet said to me that as long as I kept my behavior consistent, she’d know that my drug protocol was working , and not to worry if I spiraled out, that it had nothing to do with her. It had to do with my mental health, and no one else is in charge of managing it. I know when to go to the ER/psych ward. If that doesn’t end up being the whole story, still not her damage. Blame poor health and bad medicine, not the patient.
It all seems scary to people the way I lay it out because I’m dispassionate. I have a disease. It has to be managed. People need to know they’re off the hook for checking in on me, because when mental health issues pop up, if I don’t do anything that’s my fault.
“Oops. My bad. Should I leave a note?”
Wow. That was dark, even for me. I’m mostly fine, so that’s not an indication that things are about to get worse. It’s just a reality check. Run the numbers, don’t diagnose me.
I am awaiting the cause of Sinead O’Connor’s death. I think I already know what it is…. and no matter what it is, you don’t die at 56 of natural causes.
I don’t want to know, but I ran the numbers.
Here’s the other thing you need to know. You cannot guess what mood I’m in, or whether I’m experiencing depression or hypomania in my work because I write about things that have already happened and I’m searching for the road ahead. I map out what I feel now to plan for what I’ll feel later. It’s not because I know you better than you, it’s that I have to decide how I’m going to react to our next interaction based on past history. I will know whether it’s time to stand up for myself or apologize with fancy Coke.
However, I did not just send a gift and assume that she’d take it as “I’m sorry.” It’s just that her love language is action and mine is words of affirmation. I compromised, she didn’t. She could respond in her own love language, but she couldn’t meet me halfway and talk about her feelings. I never knew which way was up. It’s just not fair to leave someone in that much confusion because my need was being rejected. I needed her to show up, be present in the moment. Instead, her responses were dismissive or angry. Meanwhile, I’m trying to do things that make her less angry and annoyed, but I couldn’t because I was guessing all the time. I got done with guessing way too far past my breaking point. She had enough information to blow up my life, not the other way around. And yet she saw me as a threat without realizing she felt like one to me, too. We were in the same boat, just back to back.
She is the Aunt Voula. I am the Toula. She will be everyone’s favorite and I’m okay with that because she’s my favorite, too. We’re in that weird age gap where I’m not young enough to be her kid, but not an average age between siblings, either.
In the beginning, she treated me like an equal. After fights, she treated me like a pest. It is my fault I treated her badly, and her fault that she never got over it.
The problem isn’t even that she “never got over it.” It’s that she is free to be someone who decides how they feel about you on a daily basis for someone else. It was chaotic and I was tired of the swings.
I have found that being direct has cost me a lot, because especially with women, they think I’m attacking them because I’m not sugar coating anything to protect their feelings. They’re responsible for their feelings. I should not have to do the emotional work of walking around in someone’s mind to determine the reaction I’m going to get before I say something. It makes me people please and my need gets ignored.
That’s because I used to stuff everything down. Anything anyone has ever said to me that mattered is still there. So is everything that has been done to me because I am a victim of childhood emotional abuse and queer, so I’m a big hate double ticket being female as well. Women being chattel is not something we created for ourselves. Queers being construed as mentally ill pedophiles is not something we created for ourselves. Hell, even being female wasn’t part of the plan. It’s just the hand I was dealt.
My mind isn’t all cis, which gives me some confidence now that I’m not four damn years old. I will not take anyone’s shit anymore.
First of all, if we are in a relationship, we have to forgive each other over and over and over and over. I will not accept anything less, because I cannot abide passive-aggressive abandonment. “There’s a problem, so instead of being a grown up, I’m going to avoid you for all eternity.” If you don’t love me enough to struggle, GTFO.
State boundaries clearly and be consistent on letting me know when they change. Again, I will not predict you.
If you’re a homophobe or a misogynist, you cannot come see me until after you’ve already done the work. My friend Erin said that straight people should check with queer people before they decide to say they’re an ally. I told her it meant a lot to me that I could have an opinion on that. That an ally shirt is not something you buy for yourself.
It’s also problematic to buy things that say “ally” on it for some people, because it becomes clear that you’re not willing to take on our burdens. God forbid someone think you were gay. The point of being an ally is realizing it’s relentless. You have a habit of putting on all your rainbow shit until something happens that you don’t like. Maybe it’s that someone hit on you. Maybe it’s that you experienced discrimination. Either way, when you take it off because it’s too hard, fuck you sideways.
Resurrection happens in the middle of the mess, but it will never happen if you believe you’re the main character in every goddamn story. If you’re going to ask me to recommend what you should do as an ally, and then say I’m attacking you because you ended the paragraph by explaining why it’s too hard to look queer, you are not welcome at my table.
Alternatively, I could never get my beautiful girl to open up enough to figure out how we could solve all our shit, and it was a similar issue. By holding everything in, she became the main character in every story because I was constantly begging her to open up because we went through some shit and had way different reactions to it. I NEEDED her, and she half-assed it. The only reason I say this is because she never explained to me that she was any busier, but I knew how I was being treated.
She was an open book once I learned to read, it’s just that now my opinions are not valid. I cannot always be wrong. I am too smart for that. If you insist that your words are never the problem, GTFO.
It’s not that you’ve pissed me off so bad we can’t work it out. It’s that we have a bad pattern and me doing all the work isn’t going to solve jack shit. Go with God. Don’t accept any wooden nickels. May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. Just don’t come back to me until you know what you want and you can say it out loud. Have the integrity to own that you are responsible for a percentage of what is happening in every situation. Even my emotional abuse isn’t that woman’s problem anymore, because I’m a grown ass woman.
There are absolutes in life you can’t change, though, and with my beautiful girl I found a big one. She did not. We need to be together and yet we are apart. This is not personal. This is that not being able to have a relationship with her causes consequences bigger than me and she’s fucking blind to it. But that’s all her shit. If she doesn’t figure it out, then she can watch as I trip over a land mine.
I will struggle to forgive noping out when I needed her most. I realize that she needed time to recover, but I gave her eight years. It seemed like she didn’t have any other dogs to kick because I was getting massive anger in response to legit nothing.
My beautiful girl, I will always annoy the everliving shit out of you and make you angry because it doesn’t take much. Every accusation was a confession, and we can both be dead honest about that. We were seeing each other through our own filters. I would never escape judgmental dickhead. I would never be her goddess of the moon ever again.
But she saw me being a writer as a threat, so instead of just asking me what I was going to write or helping me craft the narrative or helping me gain understanding about ANYTHING so that I had parameters? She told me that she could no longer allow my words to cause fear in her and to go find new friends. I was livid. I hadn’t written anything about her in a long time because she hated it so much. I could write beautifully about everyone but her, unless I fed her ego and then she’d realize being a character wasn’t so bad. She just couldn’t see herself as true in my eyes. That both sides of the spectrum exist in her just as much as it is in me.
She couldn’t see red to indigo, and beat my ass with blue.
So, now when anyone crosses me, I ask myself what she would do. It works. I’m not a totally different person. I have confidence in what I believe for the first time in forever. I do not think she has the same confidence in her own beliefs when it comes to emotions and relationships. This is because my experience of her is that dealing with conflict is bad and we don’t need to do it at all. Not talking about it is the same.
I’m a verbal processor and I was trying to work through some shit. She could read it. Instead of realizing that I didn’t have to make sense of the way she felt, I only had to make sense of my own emotions, she felt like I was on her ass. Got annoyed when I asked for fucking anything, called me a judgmental dickhead 80% of the time, but if I told her that, she’d say that she thinks I have an extraordinary mind and she’s wildly impressed with me as a person.
Well, start fucking acting like it.
I don’t need friends who don’t respect my opinion on things because they think they’re the whole story. If we can’t collaborate, I am out.
This one relationship is reflective of how I feel about homophobia. It is not my job to struggle with it. It’s yours.
I had one of the most toxic conversations I’ve ever had with an ally because this time I could feel the anger instead of letting medication stuff it down. I also had enough strength to direct my emotions appropriately. I told her to fuck off and namaste.
I’m the proud mother of a gay daughter. But I’m also straight, single and well over a certain age. We live in a gay friendly town and never had any issues. The ONLY a reason I do not wear rainbows, is because it’s hard enough trying to meet a life partner without them assuming I’m gay. And I am not very good at telling when someone of either sex is attracted to me in that way. I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t know I was on a date with someone. Perhaps there should be a special symbol that means “I support and protect you even though I’m not one of you” . Give me some ideas and I’ll design it and make it.
I told Zac he could have anything he wanted if he went to this thread and started it with “as the man Leslie met (while she was wearing rainbow shit, I’ll grant you- it was terrifying)……………
This is after an entire thread on why straight, cis people are problematic because you can’t be an ally AND scream “no homo.” That comes out in a range of ways. This is exhibit A, because it’s an example of someone who:
Told me she had a gay child, so she can’t possibly be homophobic.
Wanted me to do work for her instead of looking it up.
Missed all the messages where I was trying to tell her that she doesn’t deserve safe space from me or anyone else because she doesn’t need it.
Didn’t listen when I said she’s probably saying all that shit around her child and actions speak louder than words. You know what will kill us? Literally? Telling us to our faces that it’s just too hard to be us, so let’s just not do it.
Didn’t listen when I said that people were being let into a sacred space. That for a lot of history, queer people have needed those symbols to find each other because we were trying to avoid having our skulls bashed in.
Reacted with straight fragility and said something about mental health issues and not needing this to push her over the edge.
It was a rehash of everything I was trying to tell The War Daniel, hopefully in a less angry tone, but this woman hit a trigger without even recognizing she was doing it. Straight people do this to queers all day, every day, because it’s enculturated behavior. I do not get to say I’m not a racist when I do racist shit accidentally all the time. Here’s where we’re different. I TAKE THE FUCKING NOTE.
She reminded me of my grandmother, Rena, who would have put this woman away. “You can’t help it that you’re ugly, but you could stay home.” I am finding the fuck out that I am more Rena than anyone in my biological family. She would fuck you up and bake you a pie. That’s a Texas yellow dog Democrat in a sentence. Tell horrible people to go to hell, but make sure they enjoy it.
She missed the part where I said that I realized I would have to leave Texas because my life was too hard there. I needed to live with real grown-ups. This kind of shit makes me want to settle in Canada or overseas, because it’s not that those countries are SO much more liberal, it’s that queer issues aren’t a thing EVERY election. They don’t have to worry about federal legislation EVERY two years…… and during that time, there will almost certainly be a naturally occurring event that will somehow become my fault. The queers absolutely ruined New Orleans. Remember? You forgive uneducated assholes because too few people care and we’ve made too many allowances for racist, homophobic, and transphobic behavior. I will never again kowtow to people who say they just can’t change. If being with me is important to them, they’ll change. Otherwise, I don’t have time for people who can’t get it in their heads that their homophobia actually hurts. It’s not innocuous and stop asking us to pretend it is. If I ever have to hear “he’s just so set in his ways,” that person is going to be driven out of the temple with a whip.
This person didn’t mention anything about the church, but it’s responsible for everything homophobia is today. The difference between being a sexual minority vs. a racial minority is that if I got black and white Evangelicals together, they’d all tell me to go to hell because I’m a sinner and I deserve it.
Straight, white, cis people are not the only issue here, Dude.
I don’t call out the black church as often as I probably should, because I’m not black. Those churches do not see me speaking with any authority because I’m not black, even though the minority I represent is present in every congregation everywhere. China. Russia. Iran. Uganda. It’s all the same. Skin color makes no difference to me because on this one issue you’re all equally terrible people.
I hate it when I say things like “I could have been killed in the Holocaust” and it STILL becomes all about them.
You can’t be an ally and scream “no homo.”
I don’t owe you safe space. You’re not in front of the firing squad.
I said something about a Supergrover playlist the other day, that she reminds me of the color green, new life, new earth, etc. But what I needed in the moment was to release pain before I could enjoy everything again without anger or resentment. Here is the list.
She’s So Mean, Matchbox Twenty
Her clothes are on the floor and my records are scratched, but she’s the best thing that ever happened to me.
I Believe in Love, Indigo Girls
When we tried to rework all of this, each to our rendition, painted blindly in a corner, lost for ideas blinding fishing for a compliment or kindness just to bring us into view. You could not interpret me, and I could not interpret you.
Unwell, Matchbox Twenty
I wasn’t crazy, I was unwell. She’s hell on wheels in a black dress, but not by choice.
Hold On, Wilson Phillips
This is a direct result of the movie “Bridesmaids,” and it is completely responsible for making me cry and blow my nose at red lights.
Nobody Knows, The Tony Rich Project
It’s everything you can’t say, because no one wants to hear it.
Pink Triangle, Weezer
It’s the quickest way to make me sob with empathy at Rivers’ plight, because I would know nothing about the reverse….. #eyeroll
Not Your Fault, AWOLNATION
I yelled at her for so much that didn’t have anything to do with her, and that’s where I’d start if I got to meet her on the ground. Just “I’m sorry” all over the place. Alternatively, there were other times when I felt she was doing the same thing to me with no hesitation or apology. It cuts both ways.
Despacito, Louis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee
This is probably the most controversial song on the list because I loved it based on the idea that I was blogging the most innocuous things about her because no one else would think they were important and the narrator talks about writing on her body. This is what happens when you decide a song is about someone and ABSOLUTELYFUCKINGNOT fluent in Spanish. Dude is a creep, and my thought was beautiful because she was writing our story on my shoulderblades as well. I still like it, it’s just not a mutual story anymore. The ink on my skin I got from the amusement park is fading and when it goes, there’s no re-entry. I will not let people tell me one thing and do another. I want to hold your hand while the ride lasts, and if you decide to jump, my emotional support can’t depend on whether I’m happy about it or not. It can’t depend on getting things I want that you don’t, and vice versa, trying to convince the other we’re right. Relationships aren’t supposed to be THAT much work. You aren’t supposed to find dealbreakers once a week.
Superman, Eminem
This is only when I’m really angry, or I skip it. She was the equivalent of “I’m not fazed, I hang around big stars all day, It’s not a big deal to me anyway… you’re just plain old Marshall to me.” I was all “girl, you run that game. First off you don’t know Marshall. At all so don’t grow partial… that’s ammo for my arsenal.” Great at first, a shit show later. I could never recapture her attention even though I wanted to rescue her.
Love Game, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar
The chorus makes me laugh my ass off in this context. “Have a blessed day.” I am the little fuckin’ Ferris wheel and I have no shame.
Business, Eminem
I desperately want to know what it would be like if Dre and Em were us. She would drop me like a sack of potatoes in a rap battle. You can do that when you have ten years of blackmail. Alternatively, I’m cleaning out my closet.
Closer, Nine Inch Nails
It’s not about her. It’s the cry of The Timeless Child. It’s perfect when you see it in the context of abuse.
Dope Nose, Weezer
This has no particular meaning, just a good beat to make me feel good….. even if it is a little “Peter Gunn.”
This Could Be the Start of Something Big, Count Basie
I can’t not hear brass like that without thinking of her. She’s too quick. I should have put this as the intro track.
Church, Lyle Lovett
She should have joined me at National Cathedral if she wanted to see me fly like a lead trumpet. Not getting to see her face while I was riding on a high C makes me sad. She has heard me on a recording and all I have to say is that you didn’t even see the best part yet.
Til the Sun Comes Up, David and Devine
The video says more than the song.
Paper Bag, Fiona Apple
What it feels like to struggle with ***gestures toward everything***
Hit Me Baby One More Time, Bowling for Soup
Chad Michael Murray played me in a movie. It is every bit as embarrassing as it sounds, thank you for noticing.
I am already holding a mirror in front of society, because my microcosm represents everyone else. People read me because if it’s true for a hundred people (my on the ground reach), it will be true for a thousand. If it’s true for a thousand, it is a good indication that everyone will find something they can relate to written by me. That’s because I’m a bisexual man wrapped in a lesbian’s body, a minority who is trapped in the majority (I’m white), with spirituality and religion weaving themselves into the themes of my life.
I am always spiritual and seeking an audience with God. I am sometimes religious. I enjoy church and miss it, then go back and see why I don’t go anymore. It’s not that I don’t believe in organized religion. I believe in it so much because it has the power to change you if you let it. It’s just different for me because I don’t find God there anymore. I find God in other ways because I know how the sausage is made. It’s like being a musician and a line cook. Everything changes once you’ve been on stage, sat in the orchestra pit, and worked in the kitchen. I enjoyed being a lay preacher of all the jobs I’ve had in church, so I lay out my thoughts here as if I was preaching.
Every entry has a thread of that preacher persona running through it because I’m making connections through a library of images collected from every piece of media I’ve ever consumed. Very few entries are so stream of consciousness that I forget to tie it up at the end. It is short sighted AND impressive that every entry I write is one shot, hit post, go back and fix typos. When I go back and read something from five years ago, I am astounded at how quick I am at writing sentences that will flatten me emotionally and other people say that as well. My marriage entry, the one that was shared all over the world, some of them celebrities? It took about half an hour.
My blog is the very best example I can give you in terms of why I was terrible at school until I got to college. It all looks like the ADHD kid who stayed up all night trying to finish a paper. In college, you can do that because there is no daily homework to be checked. English and Language Arts didn’t eat my lunch, but remembering to turn things in sure did.
Blogging is how I know to use my ADHD superpower. I have been capable of thinking very deep thoughts and writing them down since I was a child. I have not been so capable at remembering the minutiae of life. I can best be summed up by Rhythm of Love by The White Ts, because this is a conversation that makes me laugh in terms of several relationships where I’m this man……..
My head is stuck in the clouds, She begs me to come down, Says "boy, quit fooling around."
No one likes a dreamer. Even fewer like what happens when our creativity is cut off or managed. Russian and Chinese TV is an extreme example of it, but it’s the best illustration I can think of at the moment. They are held back by strict standards. I would be lucky to find some.
I tell people I like the view from up here, and their constant quest becomes telling me why I’m wrong. I don’t write because I’m talented. I write because no one will ever understand themselves without being able to read themselves later with a dispassionate eye. Journaling is so important whether you let others read it or not. I am glad that’s the message the church instilled in me that stuck. Praying gets your ego out of the way, but it will creep back in when you think about a situation in retrospect and you can’t fact check anything. If someone tells you you’re being unfair, you have no way to check and see if they’re right. You won’t know when you need to yield, and dollars to donuts you won’t figure it out immediately because it takes so long to convince you that you might, indeed, be fallible.
You develop a more acute sense as to whether people are listening to you, because you have concrete examples of where you did and did not take in love or justified anger. If you grew up in a family that doesn’t fight and you’re terrified of it, that’ll be something I need to know up front, because I know it will make you run from every conflict for all time and to be gentle. Also, to learn when you’re running too much of the time and decide whether I want the relationship to continue. I can stop doing your emotional work for you at any time when you refuse to show up.
I see so much on the Internet about how women are not hospitals for broken men, and yet we are. We so are. Men can’t emote for the most part and you become their entire emotional support system within three months flat. It’s not because they’re not capable of having multiple relationships so they’re not putting everything on you. It’s that they won’t emote in front of anyone but you. The best thing you can do is encourage your partner to go to therapy and get their shit handled. You cannot do anything more. You can only notice when you’re not seeing results and move on. You get to decide how tired you’re going to be from getting your needs constantly ignored while they think nothing of trauma dumping while not being able to take it when they dish.
Men, 99% of the time it’s your fault. Period. End of story. You were not socialized to do anything but be angry all the time and it’s a lifelong battle to be whole again. It is not that you are generally wrong in your beliefs. It means that you are really bad at communication because you fear other people so much. If you open up to a woman and she breaks your heart, then what are you going to do? Who do you tell about those feelings? Why do you need another emotional support person/rebound right away? You can’t handle your emotions on your own. Everything stems from that one issue.
You can’t handle a household, either, because you weren’t taught those skills because why would you ever need them? Your mother’s frustration doesn’t mean shit to you, Holmes. She’s not going to be there forever to wipe your ass, but she loves you enough to do it even though you’re ungrateful because you’re not taught to look around and notice women’s contributions to your life, either.
You need to be able to communicate your needs and wants so that we don’t have to take care of you physically or emotionally. If you want a woman to cook and clean and raise the children and stay home all the time so you can be with others, you are free to be that for someone else. I’m not playing. There are going to be certain times when you’ll submit or I’ll walk away, and you’ll have those dealbreakers as well. It takes a tremendous amount of work to be in any serious relationship, and men are treating all their relationships with women as if they matter so much less. That’s because their way of doing everything is better according to them. I don’t have rights because I shouldn’t need them, etc.
If I wanted to get my tubes tied, in a lot of states I’d have to marry Zac to get my tubes tied, because I need my husband’s permission…. and then we’d have a marriage that didn’t mean anything to either one of us, I just needed health care.
This has no place in society at any time.
My happiness and survival shouldn’t be dependent on whether I’m working, and I don’t mean whether I can be lazy or not. It’s whether I can afford health insurance on my own or walk away from a job with really good benefits because my boss is a walking nightmare.
Proving that you have a disability severe enough not to work is a nightmare for many people. That’s why you have to get a lawyer and it costs money to be different. It is severely ableist and makes people live check to check because it’s not enough to generate savings. The one thing that’s sacred about disability is that they can’t take it away from you and make you dependent on your own money again. In order to live paycheck to paycheck, there cannot be an end in sight. A gap will drown you immediately.
If you have to go to the ER without health insurance, you will almost certainly be fucked for a number of years. You have to pay a lot of money to get Band-Aids and ibuprofen, because women’s pain doesn’t mean as much as men’s to doctors. They’ll think nothing of prescribing another white man enough oxy to down an elephant, but you’re suspicious or needy for being hysterical when you’re in pain.
They need to cut that shit out if they’re going to say Tylenol and Advil are strong enough to compete with narcotics after surgery and/or childbirth. It will work in the days and months after, but never immediately. That’s not your first call when you’ve sliced someone open, ever, unless the patient is an addict and are self-aware enough to know they need nerve blockers instead.
If you can’t get narcotics after a serious injury that all people with eyes can see, your arm’s off, you’ve cut your bleeding leg off, etc., it is not merely a flesh wound. Your doctor’s just an asshole.
Ibuprofen is right out.
I am not pushing for giving out oxy like Tic-Tacs. I am saying that narcotics have a time and place, and that place is in the delivery room, the ER, and the recovery room. It takes more than your hospital stay to heal, and most doctors are very concerned that Karen is going to become a frequent flyer while ignoring Chad’s warning signs. Chad gets what Chad wants. If not, it’s time to call Daddy.
Daddy will think his daughters’ lives are worth less and not with words. It will play out in actions. Boys get condoms and a later curfew because their dad is just as excited about the loss of his son’s virginity as he is, while shaming the women that provide the outlet.
The whore/madonna complex is real and it’s deep.
Either we’re the ones that wipe your asses or the dirty sluts who will actually sleep with you.
It’s why I’ve dated women so long. I don’t have to deal with your bullshit. I can live around it.
Here’s the take home message that really ties the room together:
Modern society is only going to change when men realize that they’re just as emotionally needy as everyone else, while blaming women for being hysterical. This will not change in my lifetime. I can only get more men to see what it’s like for women from an outside perspective.
It’s the difference between getting the ticket to La Boheme and playing in the pit. We’re just “the help.” It’s the same issue with media. You love Succession and Archer while shitting on arts grants. All of it stems from having your creativity and humility quashed.
In order to change society right now, start getting there faster and keep up.
“When my coach said ‘you run like a girl,’ I told him that if he picked up the pace, he could run like a girl, too.”
I realized that I’d told you I have sensory issues, and that I do my best to mute them while they’re not my focus. Here are the things that make me feel the most comfortable:
Professional-grade Crocs, the kind you wear in a kitchen or hospital. They keep my feet on the ground, whereaas Danskos have a heel and it makes my foot rock side to side. That is a disaster for someone with floppy muscles. I don’t care what people think of me when I wear Crocs, but I for damn sure notice what they think of me when I fall. There are very few Good Samaritans in this world and I’ve found that to be true everywhere. I can be walking around with blood on my face and pants and no one says jack shit.
American Giant’s “The Original Hoodie” is the only jacket you’ll ever need in your entire life. The only reason you’ll ever need another one is to change colors, because it gets better the more you wear it. Yes, they’re over a hundred bucks, but they get cheaper than nearly anything else when I look at price per wear. Same with the Crocs. It turns into less than pennies.
Unchallenging food, like white bread, pasta, yogurt, etc. I will get wild with yogurt because I don’t like sweets. I leave it as is and just add fresh fruit. Not many people like it that tart, and my favorite flavor at all yogurt shops is plain. If you mix it with dark chocolate yogurt, it will taste like the best sour cream donut you’ve ever had in your life.
Bombas socks are the tightest elastic that holds over time. My whole thing is about making my body feel secure, so anything I can do to stabilize is critically important. I need to feel balanced, and I am irritated when one foot feels more bound than the other, etc.
Button downs, but only the ones that have buttons on the collar as well. I also like it better when they’re 20 years old and white or blue having been laundered a thousand times and still look classic. I joke that it’s the “Visiting Professor” collection at Macy’s, and I also love sports coats and Nehru jackets that fit like a glove because of it. I also want everything to have a place and look put together. It’s almost impossible to get a collar correct when you iron and have it stay that way. What looks good on the board has fallen flat by the time you put it on.
I like Dockers because they’re just as comfortable as American Giant and Crocs. They just don’t last very long and they’re confusing to buy because every fit is a little bit different. You have to get the name of the make and model, and sure as shit by the time you look it up to order more it’s not there.
Big boys’ dress shirts are always welcome because I prefer men’s clothing because of the way they feel and have a teenage frame…. with the exception that I’m just between a size 16 in boys’ pants and a size 30 in men’s length. It’s mix and match, but nothing too crazy. I’m a visiting professor.
I will do anything to get my hair out of my way, and wear my CIA baseball cap almost everywhere. I cover my head a Muslim amount because it makes me feel safe. I can hide behind it, both because people aren’t staring into my eyes and for some reason CIA is more intimidating than other agencies. I can’t figure that out. The FBI was built on slave catchers, but CIA is the problem. Ok. Whatever blows your dress up. I am genuinely using it like I would use a yarmulke or a hijab. I am hiding in plain sight, because I have trouble believing that people want to notice me. I make people jump too high sometimes, and it’s all my own shit. These sensory inputs being dulled helps me to keep from swinging at every pitch. If I don’t work on my reactions, I’m not keeping up my end of the bargain in relationships and cleaning my own house before I clean someone else’s.
I pay close attention to bar soap because I like to use it to shave. You actually use up body wash and shaving cream much more quickly. The bare minimum is Dove, but I have a housemate who cold presses her own soap and lotion bars that don’t have any scent to them (or are lightly scented). My favorite is charcoal, but I have to have a serious cleanup afterward. All the shower walls are dark gray when I want to turn off the water. It’s nice having the cleanest products available in a quantity that makes me think my housemate likes making soap faster than she can give it away. I’ll have to gift some to Zac if and when I remember it. If I write it here, there’s a solid chance.
I enjoy soap designed for men from high end shops because they always have both cologne and shaving in mind. Basic men’s soap is wax stripper with no conditioners. High end men’s soap is designed to make it harder to cut yourself. Soap and a brush is so much better than anything else I’ve tried, and I’ve had to remember all the best stuff because my skin will freak out at anything less. The best part is that Dove really works on my face and in shaving my legs. It doesn’t have to be expensive. It’s just something I value- continued safety is not nothing, and that’s what grocery store soap offers. It will never change.
Things never changing is why I love futbol jerseys so much. I can ask Lindsay to bring me one from any country in the world and it will feel the same. If I ask her to bring me a scarf, it will feel the same. Right now she’s in Barcelona and I’m wearing a Messi jersey.
I will start a new game of Skyrim like people rewatch The Office. There is comfort in hearing dialogue you’ve already heard, like a famous comedy routine. There is also camaraderie. We used to be adventurers like you, but we took an arrow to the knee (got married).
I go through phases with media. It’s “binge/purge.” I have to see it, then I need to retreat and write my own content. Lather, rinse, repeat. The hardest part is coming back and looking at my own writing, because it’s twofold. Both the WTF? of what I’m saying and the “WTF?” of how I wrote it. How did I miss that twice?
If I was wealthy, I would put a lot of money into peripherals that I don’t now. My Fire tablet is not great on its own. It’s great with a keyboard that makes me feel comfortable. It’s long lasting because Office and Chrome don’t require many system resources and the Fire can handle a browser and a text editor in split screen. Therefore, even with my sub-$200 throwdown laptop, I am just as productive as I would be on a $4,000 laptop. It’s not because I wouldn’t use that expensive a computer if I had it, it’s just that I don’t have a need for it. I will save up for an M1 or a Ryzen when I start seriously thinking about video rendering. If everything can be done using Audacity, Google Photos, and JetPack, I have no need to put together a monster gaming rig.
Because of what my current tablet will do, I think if I bought a new computer it would be a top of the line Samsung or M1 iPad, because there is no need to carry something heavy when you just don’t have to. I don’t even need an M1 iPad to do what I currently do. I have an old iPad Pro first gen that will edit the videos on my phone quite handily. I would get a gaming-rig level processor if I bought a camera that required it or it would take an hour and a half to render everything. I can’t have my computer incapacitated that much of the time. If I was shooting/working in RAW with a Nikon or a professional studio camera, that’s a whole other thing. If I needed that kind of editor, it would be easier to let a professional do it than it would to save up enough money to buy that kind of workstation.
Touch and feel above everything else. So much of the world is uncertain that it helps to have things you can count on. Clothes are one of the easiest ways to make yourself feel safe, because when you feel good, you act completely differently than when you’re threatened. It also helps to look at why you feel threatened so that clothes don’t become a permanent trap to hold in all your feelings.
It works as a relationship analogy as well. If you’re going to wear a suit, remember to occasionally change to sneakers and a zipper cardigan. If you learn nothing else from Mr. Rogers, learn that. No relationship will ever progress until you learn to be as vulnerable as you were the first time you saw his face, and you will not feel any differently after learning that he was also a very flawed human and treat your relationships like that as well. You cannot cancel everyone, and you will not know what’s up until you can look at the situation from a third person perspective. That’s much easier for me than it is for most because I can go back and read myself with a dispassionate eye. I am clothed in the softest material to allow myself to feel words more deeply.
If I can’t distract myself, I won’t. So if I dress weird to you, I don’t care. If I eat weird to you, I don’t care. If people believe I’m in the wrong relationships or saying weird things about people, I don’t care. That’s because all the people I do care about have laid out their boundaries and so have I. Other people are free to look at me from the very, very outside and make their own judgments, because their opinions can’t matter. I have to write what I saw because I have to remember things accurately according to what I was thinking in the moment. Otherwise, this is not even self help to me, much less others going through something similar.
So. Crocs? You have to give me this one. Especially if you later admit you also own them. I will notice. 😉
Stories That Are All True 