What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
The reason I’m most scared to edit an entry is that it takes a lot of bravery to be vulnerable with people on this scale. If I sit with a piece, over time I start judging it. I lose courage and back out on publishing. I write very fast and hit “Post.” Then, I don’t own it anymore. I’m not the judge of whether it’s good or not.
Plus, getting into the routine of writing every day means that I don’t dwell over past entries unless I have said something that crosses over from personal to professional (for someone else). My perceptions of their feelings are fair game; their jobs are not. So, I’ll go back and change something if they’ll tell me what I need to alter.
For instance, I had to keep that story tight about Kamala Harris for a month so that by the time I told you my sister had a meeting with her, it had been old news for quite a while.
I think the other reason it’s hard to edit entries is that it would be easier after the fact, but I’ve moved on to a new thing…. because it’s easier than sitting in some of those feelings again.
I don’t ever want to go back and edit anything, because I’m a good editor….. for someone else. I need the same thrashing with a red pen I’d give someone else, but I write too fast and furious to put someone else on a deadline like that.
There is one funny thing from yesterday that I didn’t notice until I reread… “I seem to have two audiences locked up…” and proceeded to only describe one of them.
The other is the people interested in cooking and what goes on in a professional kitchen. It gives me a different writing voice, one I like. It’s more confident than I am, because I’m hearing Anthony Bourdain in my head and not me. I’m definitely borrowing style without trying to imitate him, because all line cooks and chefs sound the same.
I think that I have so many long time readers because people do become invested in my weird little life, one that I adore because I chose it.
I don’t think that I chose wisely a lot of the time over the last 10 years, but I’m hoping the next will be easier having literally edited my life. I’ve been broken in ways I never thought I would be, and I’ve survived. Not always happily, but what didn’t make for a great time did make a good story- good or bad, it’s what happened according to me.
I underestimated how much crying there is in writing, and perhaps this is unique to me in some ways because fiction writers are always crying over someone else’s feelings. When I’m writing, I’m pulling things out of me that I haven’t thought about in years. Not everything is happy.
Not everything is sad, either.
What I can say is that it would be miserable going back and editing everything I’ve said about Supergrover, because editing came at a cost….. but no, it didn’t. That’s because I should have realized a long time ago that she was never going to open up to me and I was wasting a lot of time and energy with hope.
However, there are several good options as to why she’s not talking right now, so I don’t want to be a dick and say we’ll never speak again because I’m sure we won’t. I’ve been sure several times before, and it hasn’t lasted that long. But what I don’t want her, or anyone else, to be able to say is that I was the only one who exhibited toxic behavior. That withholding information was just as bad as giving too much. That we were both hotheaded and angry. That we’re both first children, and not used to being wrong. We’ve got each other’s numbers. For every action, there’s been a reaction. Sometimes it’s mine that’s blown out of proportion. Sometimes it’s hers.
No one won anything here. We both participated, and it became toxic because of a cycle perpetuated by both of us. I want to show that more than anything because I don’t have the want or need to blame her for anything.
Writing is about what I’m going to do. Editing it is dragging up the past. It makes the ghosts rise from their graves, and I’m eager to avoid that part of it. With an editor, they’d be reading my words without having memories attached to them.
So, in order to get me to edit my own work, I’m not exactly sure what it would take. It would be cutting my brain off from my heart…. something that writing stream-of-consciousness never does.
In 2012, when the movie “Argo” came out, Tony Mendez was asked to write a companion book to the movie. So many people wanted to know the real story, me being one of them. So, I read that book and then proceeded to inhale all Tony’s other’s….. which were co-written by his wife, Jonna. Tony passed away in 2019, so “In True Face” is Jonna’s first solo work.
My dad sent her a message asking her if she’d sign a book for me and give it to me at the talk, so now I know I will have something to read as I’m leaving. I am picturing a scene in which I cannot put it down and the museum guards are saying, “ma’am…. MA’AM! WE ARE CLOSED.” I hope I’ve managed to get some other people excited about it, too, because I’ve mentioned the book on reddit (over 500 upvotes) and at Zac’s parties (because that’s already an audience who’d be interested in going since they work in intelligence).
I could write about a hundred books I want to read in the future, but this one means more because I have such a personal connection to it. If you’ve read every single thing an author has ever written, it’s an unbreakable bond. Then, you meet the author and it’s a good experience and it adds to the excitement of reading what they do next.
I do for her what people do for me, essentially. I know I have some people that click on my links immediately, and it makes me feel incredible. So, I hope that promoting her makes her feel good, too. If you can’t be in the audience on Mar. 5th, again, at The International Spy Museum, it’s already on order at Amazon, but I don’t think it’s out already. I think you have to preorder. I’m not going to check because if I did, I’d have two copies.
I generally end up buying two copies, anyway, because my keepsakes are pristine (except for “The Moscow Rules.” I was on a plane, so there are pencil marks in the margins on that one. But for the rest, all my notes are digital and kept in my Kindle app and synced to Goodreads….. despite perfectly good hardbacks in my top dresser drawer (in which I don’t want pencil marks). “The Moscow Rules” autograph is too personalized to ever give away. Earlier in the evening, she said something about “maybe we should hire you” when I joked at her about having a sneaking suspicion she worked on “Atomic Blonde.” I said, “that part about ‘maybe we should hire you will live in my memory for the rest of my life.”
So, the book says, “Leslie….. Maybe we should hire you.”
When Jonna talks about an autobiography called “In True Face,” one of the special memories I have of her is that she showed it to me a long time ago.
She’s the real deal. You should go. We can sit together….. because I’m getting a book. 😉
I do not know how I could acquire one, because the going rates around here are quite expensive. That being said, there’s a method to my madness, though. Both people who are neurodivergent and/or suffer from mental illness have problems taking care of themselves regarding clutter and cleanliness. The things that neurotypical people find easy, like creating a routine for putting things away are anathema to the neurodivergent. That’s because we can create a system. We no not maintain them well, if at all. For instance, the perfect system for someone who’s ADHD or AuDHD means everything is right out in front of you, all the time……. because I’m suggesting object permanence is a problem………………..
No, seriously. I’ve read a ton of books on how to manage myself (they haven’t helped, but I’m trying). One of them is The Bible and it’s called “How to Keep House While Drowning.” That’s because it doesn’t offer you practical advice on cleaning like Kim and Aggie from “How Clean is Your House” (one of my favorite BBC shows, now archived on YouTube). No, it is a straight up workbook over why your emotions are getting the better of you when it comes to cleaning. Because first, it’s either demand avoidance or burnout. Then, it’s shame, guilt, and anxiety over the way you let your house get when you were literally incapable due to a straight up disability. Basically, “How to Keep House While Drowning” is a way to organize your life so that you don’t think the world is coming down around you every time you don’t organize something.
The second book is much more practical because women have different needs with ADHD than men. It’s called “The Queen of Distraction: How Women with ADHD Can Conquer Chaos, Find Focus, and Get Things Done.” It’s here where I learned that if you’re ADHD, get clear cabinets. Don’t give a damn about what other people think. If you can’t see your stuff, you won’t organize it. It will stay hidden from your mind forever…………….
Because I’m suggesting that object permanence is a problem………… The funniest thing is that the joke about object permanence was actually about me, not clutter. That Zac thinks of me living as much further away than I do. I should have told him to get me a clear cabinet……… For Houstonians, it’s about the distance from Lindsay’s house on the east side to my old house in Westbury. For Portlanders, it’s about the same distance as it is from Trendy Third St. SW to 181st and SE Stark.
This means that it takes 33 minutes at 0500 if you’re driving, but if we were both caught in morning or afternoon drive, I could probably beat him home on the Metro/bus. That’s the thing I love about the train/bus. Unless it’s snowing, the busses are reliable and I can pre-guess about what time I’m going to get somewhere. No freeway in DC can tell you that, and take that check to the bank and cash it… The longest I’ve ever been delayed on the Metro is 10 or 15 minutes, and that’s just because we were slow getting into the station by about five minutes at least twice because there was another red line train on our track. I wish I’d taken the first one….. obviously.
Until you read both books, you will literally not know how to handle your life, and of course there are a million books written on ADHD, but “Queen” is endorsed by the author(s) that wrote “Driven to Distraction,” the therapist and psychiatrist Bible on ADHD presentation. But what those authors were saying is that “Queen” does a better job of catering specifically to female ADHD. There’s just so much bullshit around female ADHD, because first of all, I believe that there are a lot more of us with hyperactivity that could use stimming to an enormous degree……. but it was beaten out of us by the expectations of the older women in our lives. Social masking has so much to do with how you’re raised. You learn that your natural behavior is unacceptable, and you do things that make you think you fit in, because you are only imitating their behavior, not understanding why things are done the way they’re done.
The first sign of ADHD in all people is making a diagnosis appointment and being late for it. Those things are universal. I believe that stimming, anger, etc. isn’t beaten out of boys because men are socialized to be angry, anyway, and because most women were enculturated by their mothers, they will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make their neurodivergent child into some version of them, because that’s how they were taught to behave. And perhaps it’s more than that…… because neurodivergence and mental illness are genetic, your mother might actually be neurodivergent and is trying to teach you her own coping mechanisms for feeling like an alien.
Read “How to Keep House While Drowning,” because until you work through your emotional issues with keeping tidy, then you’ll be ready for the content that “Queen” offers, because her system for organization actually works. I can’t remember if the author is ADHD or whether her organization skills came from designing systems for her ADHD children, but please hear me that the emotional work first is the best thing you can do for yourself, because it will put into perspective why you are not a bad person because you can’t do these things.
As we used to say in our church creed at Bridgeport, “be responsible and let go of guilt. Be mindful and carry no shame.” You will not be ready to address practical things until both of those ideas happen for you. Neurodivergent people will not make the commitment to organize until they don’t feel like shit about themselves 100% of the time.
It’s one of the reasons I hate “Hoarders,” to be honest. You get the neurodivergent/mentally ill wails of people who are nowhere near prepared to get rid of their stuff and are supposed to be grateful for the favor. I am sure that they will be after some therapy, but it would be like taking a baby bird out of a nest and saying, “fly, bitch! Fly!” There is no way that a television show can cover what needs to happen so that hoarding doesn’t recur. It takes years to get rid of those tendencies, and a television show coming in to clean your house once is not the answer. It will look the same way in a year. Also, I have seen a lot of autistic people (in retrospect) that have gone into complete meltdown and burnout…………… and it makes for good television. It’s one thing to code a fictional character as autistic. It is embarrassing as FUCK for people to film you and show your real unregulated emotions come out. All the social masking stops because they’re terrified. And to the producers, that’s entertainment. On this one issue, fuck them.
I can always find the silver lining, and that’s learning how professional organizers do what they do. I think I would be a much better housekeeper than I would at keeping my own systems going, because most neurodivergent people can clean someone else’s house, even if it’s a straight up hoarding nightmare, because they don’t have any emotional investment in the mess and how it got that bad. Perception is everything. “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” I will completely dissociate because I can.
Maybe we should offer an exchange or something. I am absolutely OCD about my own kitchen, the one thing I keep so clean you could eat off the floor that’s completely of my own volition because of “how I was raised.” (Shoutout to all of them….. Dana, my first chef, John Kinkaid, John Fot, Drew Collard, Damon Hersch, Anh Lu, Evan Henson, Ryan Victor (shoutout to the mixologist) and the thousands of hours I’ve spent on YouTube with top-tier chefs learning knife skills. I watch Bourdain and Ripert. It takes me about 30 seconds to go into the ugly cry).
But the kitchen is ironclad in my mind because I spent so many years doing it. It’s the one room of the house where I don’t attach any emotion to how messy it gets because it’s not all on me. I will do everyone’s dishes if they’re in the sink because I can’t stand soaking a pot (we’ve covered this before. It doesn’t work). Plus, I have the right and experience to say that I’m just going to be better at it than they are because one of my housemates is a cook, but she works in a hospital, so it’s not really the same thing as trying to close down a kitchen as fast as humanly possible. The only thing I can’t seem to get out is the discoloration on the glass-top stove, but I’m sure John Fot will write me a dissertation on it when he reads this, and it will be delightful because there’s nothing more that I love than reading about kitchen hacks.
Where I struggle is in the private places, because I don’t have a system for anything. I am a Virgo, so I am killer at creating systems that would work for neurotypical people because I’ve watched what works for them for many years. I even picked up a few things from Meagan in senior English that helped me. She color coded her subjects like Trivial Pursuit, something I do to this day by changing the folder colors in my file tree. What I cannot do is extrapolate all of that into having a life in which I can thrive on structure because that’s all my autism wants…….. and my ADHD nopes out quickly.
This has become a problem with every relationship I’ve ever had, because I didn’t have the words for “autistic meltdown and burnout.” I didn’t have words for things like “pathological demand avoidance” (I don’t know if mine is pathological yet, I just haven’t had treatment. Basically, you get said treatment and if it doesn’t work, it’s pathological.). I don’t know how much of my health insurance will cover an autism diagnosis, but I know that I need one, badly. I am at odds with myself over the two processing disorders all the time. I’m ready to go through the official process because not being diagnosed is causing more problems than it’s worth. I need to know as much about AuDHD as humanly possible if Zac and I start getting closer, or I meet someone else and actually want to pursue living with them.
But what I do know is that the reason my relationships tend not to be successful is that most people on the spectrum are not caught. They’re pegged as “weaponizing incompetence” or what’s called “learned helplessness.” Most people attribute too much malice into our behavior, when we literally don’t think the same way as you. But all of this “weaponized incompetence” would go away if I had a housekeeper, because I wouldn’t be creating resentment in my relationship over the house being so…………… meeeeeeee.
One of the reasons that I was really looking forward to living overseas with Daniel (we’d talked about Viet Nam) is that hiring servants is completely normal and adds to the local economy. If our house was big enough, they could live with us. That would be ideal, because I’d love a housekeeper to flip me shit when I don’t put things back where they go and lose them a minute later. My mind doesn’t record where everything goes, only a few….. and even that is sketchy.
I don’t know that even on a combined salary we could afford such a thing, unless we hired an au pair and said, “we actually don’t have any kids except a 25-year-old. Basically we’re the kids.” We might not get any bites, but it’s worth a shot. 😛
Most emotionally unavailable people start shutting down when they feel resentment, because they won’t just say it out loud. They don’t have any practice……. especially in lesbian relationships. I can hear resentment because I’ve heard it before. What no one has ever said to me is “clearly you need help, and I’m going to help you.” This doesn’t mean anything in terms of cleaning up one mess. I will never forget both Dana and Carol’s work on my past places to get them ready to turn over. They were beasts, and I can’t thank them enough- even more in retrospect.
When Dana came over to help me, we’d just begun that transition from friends who hung out occasionally to “you’re my new best friend. Call me every day.” A girlfriend that I’d loved so hard I broke my own heart due to terrible expectations left me in a wreck. it was only supposed to be a May-December romance, and I was foolish enough to think that we clicked, anyway. Disaster ensued. She was much older than me, but in a lot of ways, I was older than her because all INFJs are a thousand years old when they’re born. I think that’s why I seek out women who are age-gapped from me. I’ve been that old since I was nine.
Anyway, it was the hardest breakup I’ve ever had (so far), because I lost it. I was grieving the future that I wanted with her, and then I went to a party. At that party, I met a couple who had the same age difference as my girlfriend and me, and they were announcing they were having a baby. I did not know this beforehand, and I was so caught off guard that everyone thought I was crying over the good news of people I’d just met and it was a little bit over the top.
If you knew her like I did, you would have been wrecked, too.
My reaction was to go into total burnout. I didn’t leave my bed unless I had to for months. I barely made it to church, but that was the one social obligation I could keep despite it being murder seeing her all the time. We eventually made our peace, and I still think she’s cute as a button. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t hell on earth, then.
I lived in what I told Dana was “dumped girl phase,” and that I’d never told anyone this before, but I cannot function. The most beautiful words in the English language came out of her mouth…….. “we’ll fix it.” It wasn’t that she was going to fix everything for me. She didn’t say, “I’ll fix it.” She whipped me into shape so that I became anal Annie about my whole apartment just to say thank you and it will never get this bad again. It would have been nothing if I hadn’t changed my behavior as a result of my deep gratitude.
But that apartment was basically a studio, with a folding door between my bedroom and the living room. I gave away a lot of stuff, and then I didn’t have much to keep clean. I didn’t need a housekeeper because as long as I didn’t buy anything new (not that I don’t like nice things….. I don’t like to manage them), then my apartment would stay clean.
The second time that Carol and Dana helped me was when I’d just broken up with Katharin. I went into meltdown and burnout because I didn’t know what to do. We’d rented this house that was only doable on two incomes, and it was just the right house for a couple……… just not for us, as it turns out. So, I was happy about the breakup because I knew that Katharin didn’t really want to move to Portland. She just said she did because I wanted to go, because I knew that Houston was a minefield of triggers and at that time, Portland wasn’t.
She can blame our breakup on me all she wants to, but the truth is she couldn’t just say “I let you go find the house and I went home to Corpus to spend the summer and I realized I couldn’t leave my family.” She had backed out of moving twice before she finally said she wasn’t coming because I “cheated on her.” What really happened is that Dana read me the riot act and I have never taken in a conversation so hard.
Here is some version of what she said, most of it verbatim but I don’t remember everything………
It’s not normal for your girlfriend to go through your checking transactions to see if you’ve been in your best friend’s neighborhood when you have a thousand friends in Southeast. It’s not normal for someone to shoot down an incredible opportunity for you because you’re going to be gone for three months. She turned it into “if you really loved me, you’d stay.” It’s not normal for someone to fall in love with you and then say, “I’d think you were less flaky if you finished your degree. It’s not normal for your girlfriend to keep you away from a best friend you met years and years before you met her. I’m tired of watching you hurt.
Editor’s Note:
I’d been offered an internship at Human Rights Campaign to help shape Sunday School curriculum in modern/liberal interpretations to include queer people. It would be for people like the More Light Presbyterians, the Lutherans (I could have written for Nadia Bolz-Weber and don’t think I’m not mad about it), and the Reconciling Movement in the United Methodist Church…………….. the closest I’ll ever become to being a Methodist minister because they made it clear they didn’t want me when I was 15.
So, that little speech made me realize that my best friend had my best interests at heart, and Katharin had stopped drinking, but was still a dry drunk with the need to control me. Her family also gave her the most fucked up childhood you can imagine, so both of our trauma reflexes were well=ingrained.
Katharin’s family wasn’t wealthy, so when she turned 18, they took out a whole bunch of credit cards and loans in her name. Then, she came out to them and pretended she was dead for a year, saying that they didn’t have to pay her back because it was “the gay tax.”
In retrospect, at that time in my life, Katharin was way above my pay grade, and no one noticed because she was “more successful than me.” She was a middle school counselor, and good at her job. But when her frustrations boiled over, it was “All Pick on Leslie Day.”
The relief of that relationship ending, yet the terror, made it where I just collected shit everywhere. Just soda bottles everywhere I didn’t pick up because I didn’t care. I couldn’t.
Autistic meltdown and burnout makes for good television, tho……….. eyeroll.
So, in order to get me out of the house, Carol and Dana came over and we did it all in one day, maybe one and a half. I don’t remember what happened next; I might have moved in with them, or I might have stayed at another friend’s house. But what I know is that everyone who met Katharin in Oregon didn’t like her….. for me or just in general. That’s because no one in Portland is impressed by what you do.
And sometimes, Katharin was just as straight up mean in person, in front of my friends, that she was at home. It just goes to show how easily I got used to her words making me feel terrible, because my words about myself weren’t that different.
In that case, hiring a housekeeper wouldn’t have helped, because Katharin’s anger and resentment came from a completely different place. But in all the others, I have found that because people’s problems are so complex and emotional, not being able to clean up after yourself for whatever reason is the one problem you actually can throw money at, because you’re not hiring a servant. You’re making an accommodation for your disability that will take resentment about chores off the table.
But before I have the ability to hire a housekeeper, I at least need to start reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” instead of “The Joy of Leaving Your Shit All Over the Place.”
If you’ve read me even twice, you probably know I love intelligence. I believe wholeheartedly that I could have been a spy based on my preacher’s kid upbringing (really, really not much different growing/maintaining a congregation and recruiting/handling assets), genetics (great uncle was C/DIA), and the fact that I’ve “done” news like cocaine since I was eight.
There is a direct correlation.
When I was eight years old, I came to Washington for the first time. It was love at first sight. A miracle dropped in my lap that the first offer Kathleen got out of school was from ExxonMobil, because we got to choose whether we lived in Houston or DC. Moving became a monotropic thought process in which I envisioned my life playing out much differently….. and it did. Absolutely none of the plans I made for myself materialized, but that didn’t mean I didn’t have a hell of a good time making them.
If you’re that kid, the one that grows up in a small town and travels so that they see how much bigger the world really is than 40 square miles, you become a “type.” By 10 I had been to Mexico, the UK, and The Bahamas. I noticed the highs and the lows, the looming cathedrals and the neighborhoods made with tin. Global issues become important early. News becomes important early. Politics become important early. You begin to see that working for the government might be a positive thing because instead of reading the news, you are helping create it.
Kids like me end up at State or at the Washington Post. Rarely do we want to be the story. We want to shape it, especially for writers who process “verbally” in stream-of-consciousness spaghetti code. Writing about my life in DC is learning how to say “Hello, World” in every language.
(Sometimes when I write, I imagine people’s faces as they’re reading and now I’m smiling to myself knowing my programmer friends. Just for them, that line should be “every language……….. except JavaScript. Fuck JavaScript.)
My autism and ADHD are why my plans haven’t come to fruition, and my bipolar disorder threw my first choice out the window. So, right now, I am trying to concentrate my energy where I feel it can manifest. I am a better writer than I am anything else, and I know that I’m not the best. What I do know is that by writing every single day, there’s no way to get worse. I am sure that this brings hope to many, many people. Living in DC is where I feel the most alive, because I’m tapped into The Source. The United States is a living, breathing entity, and I am deep within the carotid artery (or the vena cava, depending on administration).
When I go to The Spy Museum, it’s not about seeing the exhibits. I’ve done it 10 times, they don’t change it that much. I hardly ever go during the day anymore, because it’s more fun at night. After the museum closes, all the Bond mannequins…. kidding…. after the museum closes, that’s when they do book talks and record SpyCast, how I met Jonna Mendez and Tracy Walder.
Jonna is one of my writing heroes, because she writes about the stuff I like in the way I like to hear it. She’s got a very concise, no bullshit tone and the wit of someone like David Halberstam or Rachel Maddow, who have also written a wealth of political non-fiction thrillers. I should tell Jonna that if she sees an uptick in sales the next few days, merry Christmas. The post I talked about yesterday for reddit re: Spy Dust and Moscow Rules has had 471 upvotes in 23 hours. I hope I sold her a thousand copies, and I’m not even going to tell her about it because “Secret Santa” is a thing. Book sales are the best gift I could have picked.
A woman said her dad wouldn’t read a book about intelligence if it was written by a woman, and I think that if Jonna can’t convince him, he’s a misogynistic lost cause……. being Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive or anything (my eyes are rolling out of my head). I like Spy Dust better in terms of being able to pick out Tony’s voice from hers, but The Moscow Rules is my favorite of them all….. and I thought Argo was hard to beat. The book was made in reaction to the film, and it was still better.
I have a different relationship with/to Tracy than I do with/to Jonna because Tracy is so much younger, and in fact, is a bit younger than me (I think). Do you ever have a moment where someone says something and your heart just walks out of your body in empathy? I know it happens to people with their families, but Tracy was a complete stranger to me when she told the audience that she was born with hypotonia. I had never met another person who’d been born with it, she’d never met anyone outside her family. It was not just that kind of moment for me. The emotions we felt at seeing each other mattered. It is one of, if not the most intimate moment of my life. I wasn’t proposing or having a baby, and yet it was still that big because the chance of us connecting was so small, our affliction so rare. It’s one of the few times in a relatively unfamiliar situation in which I’ve been able to breathe that deeply.
However, there is a reason I chose Jonna over Tracy with the reddit comment. That dude is already predisposed to disliking female intelligence writers, so handing him a book with a sorority sister protagonist didn’t seem like the wisest choice. You get Jonna until you can handle pink coffee mugs without being an asshole about it. But make no mistake, he definitely needs to read it. There’s more dirt on scumbags like him inside FBI who don’t trust women in intelligence. To be clear, Tracy did not have problems at CIA. She had problems with FBI. Tracy has a problem with FBI, so they have a problem with me. It’s just that simple.
I am sure that Tracy appreciates the support in which I do legit nothing but talk shit about the FBI on my web site……… but hey, she has a great autobiography called The Unexpected Spy. It’s a thrill ride through her life having worked at both agencies, and thrilling to find out that CIA is actually as forward-thinking as I thought it was. Tracy also made an interesting style choice. When you write a book involving CIA (and I’m not sure if it applies to me, but it definitely applies to employees), it has to go through a publications review board. When Tracy got her manuscript back from the PRB, there were parts that were blacked out….. and she just left them in and published as is. Tracy’s is the one book I don’t have on my Kindle, and the one hardback I’m grateful to own, because the words come across the same on e-paper with Jonna and Tony, but the feel of the paper with its saturating amount of black ink looks official.
And in fact, I liked it so much that she signed my book after the lecture and as she was writing the inscription, I asked her if she would black out a word. Tracy understood the assignment. 😉 She blacks out one word, and you can still see what it is, so she asks around and finds a black Sharpie. She hands it back and it says:
To Leslie-
Go [redacted] the world.
Then she says, “there. Now no one knows what I told you to do to the world.”
We’ve (sort of) kept in touch- I should reach out and see what she’s up to these days. Last I heard she was in Dallas (went to SMU just like my dad, went back to teach at Hockaday). If she ever comes to DC, first coffee’s on me.
Here’s to hoping we can [redacted] the world together……..
because the Spy Museum is my favorite place in my city.
I am including the link to both book talks, and I’m in them at the Q&A. In the Walder video, I’m wearing my CIA baseball cap. In the Mendez video, I am “Sir Not Appearing in This Film,” because the video cuts off right when Jonna stops speaking.
Sometimes, you can do for other writers what you don’t do for yourself- promote them. I am currently over the moon because one of my comments on reddit is getting more and more upvotes by the minute. In r/suggestmeabook, a woman was telling the sub that her dad wouldn’t read intelligence writers if they were female. At last count, it was at 100, so safe to say my work is done. Here is what I said, and huge props to both women:
Alma Katsu is a former CIA case officer and she’s brilliant. She’s so quick she could run circles around him, so she’s probably your best bet. I’m a member of the International Spy Museum and a huge fan of fiction and non-fiction. For non-fiction, your go-to is going to be Spy Dust or The Moscow Rules by Jonna and Tony Mendez. They’re a husband and wife team who each served as Chief of Disguise for CIA 10 years apart. She will also wipe the floor with him because their stories are true. Women don’t just write these stories. They make them.
Women are better at being little gray men than little gray men. Anonymity has its privileges, and so does reading these marvelous books. For Katsu, start with Red Widow. One of the things that it touches on that made me cry was the reality of losing an asset/colleague while female. Some of them become emotional. It works out as well for female spies to be emotional as it does for the rest of us……………..
The reason I write stream of consciousness all the time is that I need a sounding board, and it can’t be me until I have had some distance from a problem. I can pick out my own problematic behaviors if I’m not in the heat of the moment. It’s the main reason I know I’m autistic and not a narcissist. I have pure motives, my social masks did not until my emotional abuse stopped. I only knew how to react from a PTSD perspective because since I didn’t think I was abused, I never bothered to look up trauma responses.
Therefore, the trauma bond transferred from the emotional abuser to Supergrover. It’s not because she’s a narcissist and I needed that pattern to repeat. It’s that we both laid our guts on the table emotionally and that had consequences beyond our control. In terms of my writing, nothing is under Supergrover’s control, either. That’s because in her absence, I spend time with her character because the lovable things about her are my new social masks, matching my values to my vision.
When I first lost my rose-colored glasses, my behavior regressed to that of the age I was emotionally abused, 14. Now, 10 years later, I am finally 11, the person I was when I met her. I am not yet 46 because I do not know enough about myself to be comfortable in my own skin right now. I am 21 at best, because emotionally I can be a fully-functioning adult. Logically, not so much. I have to tailor-make every job to me, so far unsuccessful, not due to effort. Due to every pattern I’ve had while working. It’s trite, but “I wasn’t born to fit in, I was born to stand out.” It’s what people always say when they’re fucked six ways to Sunday.
Burnout wears on you.
What restarts the fire is adding new kindling. The example I just thought of as a “spark” is finding out there are hackers who originally thought about sending me a SQL injection and changed their minds because “she knows the command line. She’s good.” This has never happened. I just think it’s funny considering how many hits I get from Eastern Europe (speaking of Eastern Europe, the new season of “For All Mankind” has dropped……….. #intelligence #iykyk). It’s an image of GRU, Mossad, NSA, etc. that doesn’t scare me. Considering how much hacking I’ve studied, I love espionage enough to know that I’ll never be off the grid. Cameras all over London are nothing compared to developing for the web……. and yes, I have seen people dumb enough to put a web cam on an HTML/DB server. It’s a special kind of stupid.
I don’t cover my web cam with a Post-It because I’m not interesting. I don’t even care if pastors use my sermon illustrations in their own without credit, because when you hit a home run, nobody cares about the brand of the ball. That is only my personal opinion; with other writers YMMV.
In some ways, being trained as a web designer taught me that it was like being trained as a sharpshooter. That respecting Internet privacy was every bit as crucial as respecting the business end of a scoped shotgun. There are consequences for content far beyond your reach, as Karens have found out recently and minorities have known for centuries.
Burnout wears on you.
It’s easy to rail on neurotypical, straight, white, cis people because they need it, frankly. Having the majority claim oppression is too fucking rich. Because whites own so much wealth, they are literally rich from ruining legit everything. Reaganomics wasn’t the best idea they ever had. When things were supposed to trickle down, the rich asked for and were granted bigger cups. It didn’t work, and we’re stuck. It was the equivalent of “let’s tell the poor to fuck all the way off.” Meanwhile, the rest of the world is looking at us like we’re crazy because we absolutely are.
It’s easy to say things like this when I’m not in front of a crowd- that my words have more impact because they flow easier and aren’t compromising with others’ stories because it renders me a weak narrator. People get onto me for creating my own narrative. Of course I do. What else am I supposed to do? Should I be beholden to anticipating your every need?
That has been paralyzing, because it’s always meant “I love your writing and you are entitled to your stories as long as you never mention we know each other.” Everyone likes reading my observations about everyone else. They are not going back and looking at their actions in third person omniscient like I am…. and not positing why I would do what I do in reaction to them, either. It is never their behavior, only the paragraph that triggered it.
When I acknowledge my inner angel and asshole, it doesn’t seem that others are brave enough to do the same. No one in the history of my blog has ever apologized for their behavior when they stepped all over my ass and got pissed when I stopped apologizing for my words as well. I also would never say anything behind my friends’ backs that I wouldn’t say to their faces, and sincerely dislike friends who do otherwise. If you have a problem with me and talk to everyone else about it, that’s on you. Nothing will get better by telling other people the problem, and clearly you are more in tune with those friends than you are with me, so please go ahead.
Your services are no longer needed because I cannot solve a problem if you do not tell me what it is. I will disconnect immediately from people like that because it doesn’t result in being able to shrug things off easily. The quicker the dump, the better. I waffle between holy terror meltdown and incapacitation; I’m done with those kinds of swings. I’m not going to pass out over anger anymore, because I don’t do much but self-soothe and my echo chamber is a hot mess.
I don’t disconnect quickly from people because I don’t like them. I disconnect because when people are angry, my echo chamber turns everything into “you’re the worst person who ever lived.” I can work on turning down the volume, but I can’t pretend a little bit of it won’t always be there because internalized homophobia and hatred of my processing disorders/mental illness is ever-present. Society reinforces it by people confusing autism with Down’s Syndrome… which I believe is the root cause of the phrase “you don’t look autistic.” Autism doesn’t refer to genetics. It refers to the way your brain processes your environment, logic, and emotions.
Logic is more disparate over the spectrum because of differences in executive function. I could be a therapist better than a programmer because my EQ is so much higher than my IQ. If there’s a MENSA of EQs, I’m certainly in it. I’m the Stephen Hawking of human behavior. I’m not the only one. Most autistic people are like this because they have to study neurotypical people so hard to social mask them……. because acting like themselves leads to “problematic behavior.” It’s not the behavior, it’s the context I got from what you said, which, if you’re neurotypical, will hardly ever match what you meant.
What I mean about logic being a spectrum is the difference between STEM autistic and creative autistic. Creatives don’t process things like scientists. Creative autistics have problems processing a process, essentially. STEM autistics have problems processing their feelings about a process. That’s a spectrum, too, and varies because so many of us also have ADHD. Autism in women is not generally caught when the person has both processing disorders. Their ADHD makes their interest vary so much that doctors tend to downplay their experiences.
If someone does not believe that I am autistic and low functioning in terms of logical processes, I don’t have anything to prove. You can see it in my life everywhere you look if you want to find it. If you don’t, you won’t. Neither of those things are my issue, I just respond to you the way you respond to me. Saying “you don’t look autistic” or “everyone’s a little bit autistic” is just dismissive of a devastating process. Your entire life changes from the moment that light bulb goes off. It’s better knowing than not. It’s debilitating knowing that in a lot of cases, it does not get better because it’s not all up to you.
People often like reading/writing about things they love and cannot do themselves. I was attracted initially to being a spy or a diplomat (or “both”) because I studied international relations and political science at University of Houston. I left UH (early, but not by much- if I went back, I could graduate pretty quickly); I wanted to travel the world, and working for the government was the easiest path since I couldn’t get into the military. I didn’t follow up on civil service because by the time I was rejected, I’d moved on from traveling because my autistic side showed up more and more as I aged. When I first moved to DC in 2001, I don’t think I left my house for six weeks due to meltdown and burnout from changing so much, so fast. I was not dissatisfied, I was exhausted.
I actually tried to join the military before I graduated from high school because I wanted to be in a jazz band that came to HSPVA called “The Airmen of Note.” Speaking of them, I once heard the joke that the Air Force is a group of people who stand next to the military, which is basically recycled from the “fact” that drummers are a group of people who stand next to musicians.
I am not an arrogant asshole out of the bandstand and kitchen, but I can damn well “play it on TV.” Being a dick on the line is child’s play next to being the only woman in the absolute cesspool of humanity that is top brass, and we’re not talking about the Air Force anymore.
It remains to be seen whether I’ll ever take the Civil Service exam, because I’m having trouble conceiving of being anything other than a writer, because I can shed light on things without having to work inside them as long as I do the research. I very much learned this from Rachel Maddow. She’s not a spy, a diplomat, a soldier, etc. She’s just an observer to all of it, painting her feelings as fact because she’s taken the time to read them all and digest, imparting what she understands based on what she’s read, not because of a pathological need to be right.
The moment I moved here, I started searching for a job as a cub reporter and found out quickly I was too old for the job because no one would look at me. It’s not the job I wanted, it’s the job I thought I could do. I already just pull the string and 3,000 words will come out. Deadlines are every bit as solid as ticket times, and you’re reacting to what’s happening rightthefucknow rather than having to sit on a story for weeks until you get it perfect.
I am glad I continue to train myself like a journalist, because my other works are going faster now that I “work out” before I get to them. Writing is a muscle, and my emotions feed it. I decide whether I like the feel of my craft or not, and what styles advance me, what doesn’t.
Being a wishy-washy storyteller is boring to other people, I am not a dictator over my friends. That’s because I don’t have a lock on our future. I have a lock on my reactions to our past. I’m never going to be nosier than you’ll let me.
It’s just hard to be curious and have people think it’s nosy. In my relationships, I want to know what makes those people tick. Them not telling me those things makes me feel rejected, because I don’t mean any harm and yet have caused anger. I genuinely care or I would never ask you anything.
I’m not going to stick around if my curiosity is intrusive because I’m autistic and I’m not going to walk on eggshells or change. It’s impossible. It’s not my personality, it’s my disability. You can deal with it or you can’t, and that’s not my bag. I have become better about seeing the people that show up instead of wanting people who don’t.
It’s only when I’m truly alone that I want Supergrover whether she wants me or not. It’s too powerful to grow through the thermonuclear war to not pay attention. I learned who I was, who I didn’t want to be anymore. I learned who I love and how. I made a list of what’s wrong with me and why. I don’t apologize for the things over which I have no control anymore, because I absolutely don’t believe I “should have known better” in front of people who don’t talk. They will never know how my responses would have changed if they knew how I felt and weren’t brave enough to ask.
In some ways, I write everything here to push through rejection sensitivity disorder, meltdown, burnout, demand avoidance, impulse control, etc. I could keep naming symptoms that suck for quite a while, but writing gives me structure I don’t get elsewhere. I don’t have demand avoidance over things I understand intimately. I also use my writing as a jumping off point for conversation, so people already know how I feel before I see them if they’re fans, and don’t if they don’t want to know. Their choice. Being a fan is not a requirement, but you’ll get more of me if you are. Full stop. This is because the autism doesn’t mix well with conversation. It is even easier to have a conversation through chat than verbally. A lot of autistic people process through writing to cut down on social masking, so I am very much not alone in this trait.
I’m admitting that I am not the person I thought I was because it makes me feel better about myself. That I am finding solid answers about working around limitations rather than being ignorant of them. I am also not using autism for anything but a Google or YouTube search term. It’s not an excuse, but it is very much my responsibility to let you know so that you do not hold me to neurotypical standards, which harp on a neurodivergent person’s greatest weaknesses. It’s a trap (Zoidberg gif)!
It feels like my only choice is to do this by myself, because even if people are dismissive, that doesn’t make it untrue or less difficult. You only have to study how much AuDHD and ASD is missed in women for five minutes to understand that what I’m telling you is not bullshit. You only have to spend another five minutes to know why so many people avoid an official diagnosis. It’s expensive and intimidating, leads to more discrimination at work. An official diagnosis can help you stay employed at some companies, get your resume left in the dust at others. It depends on how the culture of the office views neurotypical people as a whole. If you are any combination of the neurodivergent disorders, you have problems keeping track of important things because sensory issues impede your comprehension. Having an open office plan for every employee is like picking on kids for being fussy eaters. They’re both neurodivergent traits that result in neurotypical people saying “get over it.”
Autistic people can be astronomically talented and unemployed because they cannot “get with the program.” If you have a policy that I must be able to write, talk on the phone, and listen to everyone else’s conversations just because other people can do it is insane. People want to have hired neurodivergent people. They do not want to work with them. We are HR window dressings like all the other minorities.
There are two sides to every story. I also understand why having neurodivergent employees with needs so highly specialized is problematic. You cannot provide enough space to block out noise for me, and even if I wear headphones my eyes are tracking an enormous amount of activity. All of that matters in terms of performance. How many things am I expected to keep track of at once, knowing that the very same things that limit me at work make me the most frustrated at home. Guaranteed. I don’t dislike those things about myself any less than they do. I’m just tired of feeling like a failure, and see promise in my writing because it’s helping me. I have the attitude that it doesn’t matter if readers show up for not, because I do my bit in asking people to read without being obnoxious. There’s a difference between building my audience slowly and actively trying to be the center of attention. I don’t want to “go viral.” I want people to know my name when shit hits Amazon.
I ask for donations, you don’t get a paywall. To me, that’s enough. A few ads aren’t that obtrusive, and I know that because of my stats. People wouldn’t stay if the design wasn’t easy to read, and ads in paragraph breaks are mostly fine. I honest to God do not want to be famous. I want to be respected. I am, among a very small audience (small being relative for the web), and am growing every day. Life is small ball. You don’t hit a home run every time you’re at bat, or at least, I don’t.
It’s just so much different understanding the rules, and how they’re different in the National and American Leagues.
It’s really difficult for me to find a time when I’ve felt out of place, and not because I’m so confident I never do. It’s the opposite. It’s combing through every day of my life to figure out if I can remember a specific story about this, because feeling out of place is almost a continual state of being. I write with confidence and self-assuredness because I am not dealing with social anxiety while I type. You are getting how I sound when I’m alone… not when I’m trying to balance all the energetic forces in a room.
In public, I tend to go out with one person or perhaps meet up with two or three friends at a time. I do not like to go to parties very much, because I find that I only have one mood that likes to party and I don’t know how to get there. I have just been at a party and sometimes enjoyed myself without knowing what I did to deserve the favor. I like overhearing conversations more than I like participating in them. People are interesting to me, and if I don’t know them at all and just overhear them, it’s impossible to identify them on this web site. You won’t meet them, because I don’t even know who they are.
So, to the people at Starbucks and the zoo, I’m listening (trying to bring you Niles and Frasier Crane realness here). I honestly believe that I’ve become a blogger to learn to handle my shit because walking around and hearing everyone else and having my mirror neurons go off makes me feel tired and low-energy. I hurt for what I see around me, particularly homelessness. If I ever have cash, I won’t by the time I get home. That’s because I carry cash a quarter to never and when I do it’s only two or three dollars at a time. I will give it to anyone who asks, because since I don’t carry cash, I don’t often have the chance to give poor people money at all.
If I saw someone buying beer or cigarettes with it, more power to them. I don’t care. The gift was not in seeing what they did with it. The gift was seeing that I may have issues, but being kind is not one of them. But I also notice how long it’s been since they’ve had a shower and I take all that on, too. I empathize with Jacob who wrestled with God. Being empathetic doesn’t incapacitate me, but the struggle constantly disfigures my hip. My blog is a record of the scars.
One of the reasons I wish I’d gone to medical school is that balancing the energetic forces in a room and having your mirror neurons go off at everyone’s pain is the plight of the INFJ. I wouldn’t have gotten in to medical school because sciences and maths aren’t my gift, but I wish I had gone to gain clinical separation. It doesn’t stop an INFJ from doing these things, it just turns the volume down to a point we can take care of ourselves. Our nature says “give it all away.” I am learning to do it on my own just through the nature of becoming stronger in myself. I’ve felt so out of place not being the person to take everything on, and emotional strength is helping me create and maintain boundaries.
Those boundaries are more important to me now than they used to be, because what I’ve realized is that especially growing up queer in Texas I developed a habit of trying to be perfect in all things, do all things for others and not myself, so that people would overlook my deficiency……. because society and culture tells me that there is one. I have tried to be the queer version of the acceptable minority, and now my current favorite documentary is “I Am Not Your Negro.”
I am alive today because of James Baldwin. “Go Tell it on the Mountain” was assigned by my ninth grade English teacher and she had a pretty good idea what was up. I cannot imagine that a black woman teaching in Texas wouldn’t know what she was doing placing James Baldwin in the hands of high school students studying the performing arts. Like no one would pick up on the fact that she was surreptitiously trying to give us a hero without saying anything………….
In education, my experience is that it takes a black soul to reach out to a gay one. Not one of my white teachers ever gave me a gay author except one, and she wasn’t intelligent enough to realize Celie was queer as a three dollar bill (and couldn’t have said it that way even if she did). Because friends totally do that stuff with each other, right? It’s all normal. Totally and completely normal platonic behavior. The difference in tone at the two schools was stunning and had everyhing to do with context. It was like being taught about antiracism from Kendi and Coates, then having to live with Karen’s commentary on what she thinks they meant. Karen hasn’t had to deal with any of the shit on the list.
Black people dealing with internalized racism have a better sense of what internalized homophobia does to a person, and it shows. Sure, lots of black people spew hate at me, too, but it’s not personal. It’s been programmed into them by their churches and most don’t think they’re doing great harm because they think they’re helping me by telling me I’m going to hell.
But I could find that in the white church as well.
Evangelicals all suck, because the opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty (picked that up from Anne Lamott). For the people who aren’t evangelicals, we find common ground easily and often. It helps me find my place in the world to an enormous degree.
I am never trying to be egotistical, just trying to stop apologizing for my existence. I have the rights to thoughts and emotions. Freedom of speech, but not freedom from consequences.
When I sound egotistical on my web site, it does not mean that I am egotistical. The difference is that in person, I am only one piece of the conversation. I do not have a lock on anything except my memory of a situation. Ego doesn’t come into it except when I’m writing about the past. First, I am cognizant that this is only my perception of a situation, and others’ perceptions are just as valid. Second, it’s not your name in the author slot. It’s not my story because I’m all that, it’s my story because you didn’t write it.
I am also projecting confidence because I am aware that I am in front of an international audience, and people who are creating blowback are taking it personally a hundred percent of the time, often castigating me over a sentence that could be construed to have been about them because it reads universal, but it isn’t. Their egos are so involved it doesn’t matter what I say. I do not tolerate their foolishness because my opinion is just as valid as theirs, and I know my own intent. I also know when I’m wrong and I just sit there and take my lumps.
Those conversations generally center on “I AM SO FUCKING ANGRY AT YOU FOR SAYING SOMETHING TRUE IN A WAY I DIDN’T LIKE.” Not once has anyone come up to me and said, “now that I know the whole story, I really acted like an asshole and I’m sorry.” No, they show up on my doorstep full of spit and vinegar and I talk them down off the ceiling if I actually care about them. My tolerance is less these days because it doesn’t help me to have friends that care what I say here.
If I am talking about a univeral concept between abused kids, for instance, someone who is not abused will see it and turn the meaning inside out and backwards and now I’m a fucking terrible person for something I never said. That’s happened quite a lot, and made me feel out of place.
I’m going to close with a Kristina Mahr poem, because it encapsulates everything I’m trying to say to everyone who pops up here….. because generally when people are angry, it’s because I’ve said something that called them out for hurting me.
The reason “honestly” is my favorite word is that it rhymes just for me. If you ask me what I mean, I will tell you that I can’t do that. It only rhymes for me. It’s not even an inside joke. It’s music only I can hear…. a waltz, and Strauss is about to bring in the horns.
I love music honestly and completely, the most pure thing in my life because there’s nothing a choir and orchestra can’t fix. In my head, anyway. When I’m sad or angry, two things happen. The first is that I sing it out. The second is that I conduct it out.
The last time I had to conduct about a problem, it was Desplait. Alexandre Desplait wrote the score to “Argo,” and conducting anything on that album is a full body workout. I am a terrible conductor. Just terrible. I don’t do it to get better. I do it to get exhausted.
It’s the only way I really fall asleep. I have never slept much, and people kid me all the time. “Do you ever sleep?” is popular in my crowd, but it’s true I don’t need much. Most of the time I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 0500 unprompted. This week it’s a little different because I can tell that my mood is swinging upward, and I don’t know that because of mood and behavior. The only real side effect that I have consistently with hypomania is insomnia. I feel lucky that it’s not worse, but it’s like getting my period. I am tired and in pain all the time because of brain race. Why can’t I sleep if I’m so tired? My body is not running the show. If my brain says it’s an all nighter, my body will fight it tooth and nail. When that happens, I can take 75 or 100mg of Benedryl and it won’t do a damn thing.
I’ll have to see a doc about it eventually, but I’m a writer so I hardly notice. Have I been writing for three hours or three days? It is always a mystery when I’m finished writing as to the date, day, and time. Luckily, I can look it up quickly. I just notice that finishing writing is a lot like waking up in the morning- discombobulating because you don’t know where you are after writing, either. But that’s what makes writing worth it. If you are a writer, fiction or non, you get to live in three worlds instead of just waking and dreaming. The characters and research turn into plot and setting. You cannot see anything outside of it while thoughts are pouring forth. A bear could rip out the back wall on my house and if I was writing, I wouldn’t even notice. I don’t even need headphones most of the time.
I’m not saying that my process is any different because I have it wired and other authors don’t. I am explaining a universal concept. All writers are more than one person. Even with non-fiction, there’s your writing personality and your physical space personality. Sometimes those are the same. Sometimes they’re not. I hope Karen Slaughter is a “not.” 😉
I take responsibility for everything I write, because I know that I’m influencing culture. My platform has gotten bigger over the years, but so many people have repeated the things I’ve written/said as their own that I hear my own words out of someone else’s mouth a lot…… particularly when they’re forgetful because I have the memory of an elephant for what I read. I can remember conversations with Supergrover nearly verbatim because being friends virtually meant I had to read everything to respond. That’s the way I take in information the best. So, part of the reason that she thinks I’m judging her is that I’m actually using her words and she doesn’t remember that she said them. I don’t mean that in a “gotcha” kind of way. I remember everything she’s said, not just the words that hurt. That’s because she’s a great writer and I try to quote her as much as I can because the way she said something fits an occasion perfectly and I got nothin.’
I can’t talk about my writing without talking about my inspiration.
I am not a person that holds onto things. There’s a part of me that would love a day with any one person from my past whether they’ve wronged me or not, with one glaring exception that I wouldn’t have thought would come in my lifetime……….. but I’m not even holding onto anger regarding that situation. I’m just angry about it in my writing because I do not want her as the kind of fan who thinks she can reach out any time she wants, because that would destroy me…… for a bit. There’s no one alive who ever really gets over anything. It just moves from a place of pain to “this is something that has happened,” but if the situation comes back up, the feelings you had then are still stored in your body. Even if the same thing isn’t happening, it will feel the same way.
I would like to see the look on Supergrover’s face if and when we had to have we had that conversation, because my beautiful girl is a monster on a leash…… that she carries in her mouth and will let you hold if she thinks you are worthy of lifting Mjolnir. My mind bent like a pretzel when she decided I was. If you try to hurt me, you try to hurt us. It won’t go well for you whether it’s her or me that made your hackles go up. That one fan coming up into my yard would set us both off, I don’t care how pissed we are at each other, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that crap. It’s the same way on both sides. When someone comes after her, I want to jump between them. It’s just not possible, so I hope it’s the thought that counts.
There is such a thing as loving someone until you die while also knowing you aren’t good for each other, and either you need to correct the problem or move on. It might be hell in the moment, but love doesn’t go away. If I found out that something was going on with her I could actually fix, it would be done already. It doesn’t mean I should sit and wait around until she needs me. It means that no matter what happens between us, I’ve made promises that I intend to keep.
I think it’s cute that she’s a boss ass bitch and I’m basically “Player” from Carmen Sandiego. It makes our perspectives wildly different and thus easier for us to call out each other’s bullshit because we’re objective and uninvolved with any of the people the other might talk about.
That part I really did like about our relationship, and I’ve made other friends that way. I am not as close to them because it hasn’t been as long, but still the same feeling of two people in wildly different situations that can listen to the other because they don’t care about anyone but the person they’re talking to in the moment.
I don’t have to care what their husbands do, what their kids do, what their friends do because I am not trying to maintain a relationship with any of them, therefore I don’t have to balance my emotions because if I say something about one, it affects my relationship with the other. Conversations are sacred, and so is trust. I’ve learned everything about how to do virtual relationships the wrong way, so I’m adapting to make it better. I found someone that made me think so hard about myself that it was sink or swim. I could deal with the fact that me being in love with her was a pipe dream and move on, but nothing can be unsaid and I’m a writer. I don’t have the safety and security of knowing when I’m close to the hard out because I want to be seen as the loving friend I said I’d be….. after I was a total dick, of course. Rejection sucks, but it doesn’t last forever and I am not the kind of person that believes in the friend zone. There was never going to be a time where my ruminations meant that if she said no to me, her friendship didn’t mean anything to me. It would be the opposite. I know how we work. She’d fire me in a hot second, probably due to annoyance alone. But I’ve always wanted to know the things that don’t mean anything, like I said about Zac’s work colleagues the other day. She’s unique in a different way, but the concept is the same. I liken it to Cyrus and Olivia from Scandal, after hours, when it’s just them and wine and popcorn.
One of these days, she most certainly will wonder whatever happened to me and look it up. If the stars align, I hope it’s at a book table…….. where I’d gaze lovingly into her eyes, and ask her to sign my book.
I believe in fairy tales. I would never hold a grudge that meant we couldn’t fix it in the end. There’s a solid reason we should be friends, but she thinks I need too much when she hasn’t said what she needs from me and how we could establish boundaries that made us both happy. Believe it or not, I do not enjoy being ripped a new one for my crafted pages and having them called lectures by a judgmental dickhead. She never knew how my responses would have changed had she told me honestly how she was feeling and focused on the good things I was telling her, or asking me about things she thought were negative so that I could tell her if they weren’t.
Because our ways of showing love are so wildly different, neither one of us were getting what we needed from the other. I tried to correct that problem, and she bailed. But she didn’t take back her friendship. She said that nothing was ever going to change and the way she treated me blew sometimes and was incredible at others. I tried to love her in a way she could hear it, and sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn’t. It was very confusing for both of us and she didn’t have time to mull it over. I got tired of so often being responded to when she thought I was trying to fight her and not when I was telling her that I thought she was the greatest human being I’d ever met. Poll ten people that know her. We all agree, even if nine of them work for her.
I don’t dwell on my negative feelings because to me, the things that I’ve written about her combine to make a truly intimate portrait of our relationship all the way through, and it means something. Even now, I know it means something. Even if Michael and me are the only people who ever read it, it doesn’t matter. We’re the ones that will need it the most if she goes before we do, which I only say because now that my mother died so young, I can’t be sure of anything. The dice of the universe will roll one way or the other. I don’t have to focus on what might happen, I feel happy that I have prepared something that will last longer than all three of us. One of these days, WordPress will be an artifact. People will want to know how we lived, and a blog is a good example of writing about daily life. Sometimes I feel like I’m a column in a small town newspaper.
Not feeling guilt or remorse over any relationship once I feel enough time has moved forward to have closure is essential. I don’t want to be the type person that spends her life wishing things were different and not actively trying to fill my time with new opportunities.
But you guys have read every day what I’ve dealt with in all of this. How it’s painful and glorious, but there’s no problem that is not solvable if we both want to work on it. I’m just okay if she doesn’t, because my memories are enough. It’s pointless to hold a grudge, because it will do more to hurt you than they will ever care.
I didn’t start my day writing because last night was date night with Zac and I’m staying at his house until Tuesday morning; he’s going camping and Oliver isn’t. Oliver would love to go camping, but he’s just not wired that way. He would deal perfectly with the nature aspect, he’s just not friendly, Bob.
Oliver, for those just joining us, is a dog. He loves being outside. What he does not love is strangers. I cannot trust him on a walk, and I appreciate the HELL out of people who ask me if they can pet my dog, because I can tell them ahead of time that it’s not a good idea. Oliver is a pit bull mix, so other people seem to innately understand without pushing. It’s not just people. Oliver is not friendly with other dogs, either, but not in an aggressive way. He’s basically me with two extra feet. I, like him, choose a few people to love incredibly intensely and ignore the outside world. I absolutely adore days where it’s just the two of us. We should call Bryn later. I love talking to her while I’m curled up with him…. almost as she loves talking to me while curled up with her dog, Pippi.
Zac is currently getting ready to leave, not imminently, just puttering about the house trying to make sure he’s got what he needs. I find it best to stay out of the way, because I can’t help him unless he tells me what he needs, and his brain is too scrambled to do that. My way of helping is limited to pithy comments.
I love this relationship so much, because I can be all of me. I was just thinking this morning that I am way less Zac’s girlfriend than his twinkie bitch boyfriend…………….. I love that I don’t want to be anything but his twinkie bitch boyfriend. Neither titles really apply, I just don’t have a better word for it. Neither one of us want anything more than we have, and yet our relationship is not insignificant to me, either. It is very much how I saw much, much older people dating when I was a kid. If a woman becomes a widow, in my experience they look at how hard being married is and think, “nope.” I feel that way and nobody died.
I joke about being Zac’s boyfriend, but there’s an element of truth to it. I’m genderqueer and nonbinary, but it’s not a 50/50 split. I don’t have a male side and a female side, just like being bisexual doesn’t render me half gay, half straight. I still use she/her because it’s the most apt description, but it’s not the only one, either. Genderqueer and nonbinary are similar terms, but the way I’m using them here is that my appearance on the outside and the inner workings of my mind aren’t all cis. I know I would never change a thing about myself, that I am not giving you new information. I have words for the confusion now and can move on to bigger things.
The most interesting discussion that Zac and I had yesterday was about my writing. That it could be seen as problematic because places like CIA would want to know why I was a drooling fangirl (Zac’s words, but he’s not wrong), and might want a background check to know that I’m not just with him to pump him for information because I’m not who I say I am. I’m not worried if such a thing did come to pass. You’d only have to talk to me for five minutes to ensure I’m actually an idiot about all this stuff on purpose. I don’t want to know what’s going on in Russia and China because that’s not what I’m looking for. I am looking for things that are far more granular.
I want to know about the people, and not even certain ones. My alternate history covers military and intel, so it isn’t about learning facts. It’s about learning what it takes to do the job, what kinds of personalities are in the room, what they eat, drink, wear. I want to know everything CIA wouldn’t care that I know. Lots of things are classified, but I’m betting that what kind of cookies Carol made Tuesday isn’t. Now I’m picturing a meeting minutes document with “chocolate chip” blacked out.
CIA gets really fucking funny when you look at it like an episode of “The Office,” even funnier now that Jim Halpert is Jack Ryan. I love things that are humorous more than serious- for instance, one of my favorite intelligence movies is “Burn After Reading,” because you don’t even know how bad you need to see CIA written by The Coen Brothers until you do. Every bit as funny as Intolerable Cruelty, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Raising Arizona. It’s just not my favorite movie because Argo is just as funny and packs a more serious punch now that I’ve actually spent time talking to Tony Mendez’ widow, Jonna.
It will always be a regret of mine that Argo lit my fire to learn how to write stuff like that and not making it to DC before Tony stopped doing public appearances due to his Parkinson’s Disease. It was a glorious moment when Jonna told me it was a shame I never got to meet him, because he would have really liked me. She also told me that she loved what I wrote about us meeting, but there’s no accounting for taste. 😉
Part of what drives writing about intelligence is where I live. I have loved spy movies since childhood, but in the way that a casual observer would. Like, they’re cool, but whatever.
This is how it works in my family. You’re just going about your day and then you see a movie that speaks to you and then it becomes part of your personality. For me, it was Argo. For Lindsay, it was Jurassic Park…. and My Girl…. Pretty sure Lindsay will never leave her Ellie and Vada phases behind, just like I’ll never leave Tony. It is just a bonus that he is not fictional. I even have a picture of him wearing “my shirt,” the one that says Argo @#$% Yourself and has the museum logo on the sleeve.
I picture working with CIA to create things, not working against them. Homeland was brilliant, and they had a hand in it through their Hollywood relations board, or whatever it is they really call it. Yes, I’m a drooling fangirl, but it’s also part of my job as a writer. I cannot write things I don’t know, so I study a lot. That’s because all I can do is study. I would have had a great career at CIA had the random dice of the universe not rolled “mental illness.” I write about spies because I am not capable of being one.
Accepting that I cannot do everything, but I can write about it has made all the difference in the world. I see my position as truth teller about lots of things as valid….. keeping in mind that it’s only my truth.
It’s not just acceptance. It’s feeling settled and happy living with purpose. It’s creating character, both for me and the fictional ones who live in me. I am liking spending time with my characters more and more, because I don’t feel responsible for them. They do and say what they want and I just write it down. It doesn’t even matter if I like it. It’s their conversation.
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.
Like Edna Ferber, I also think that life itself is my partner and everyone else is a mistress, because we’re both writers. Here is what every writer in the world has in common, whether it’s keeping a journal and writing for yourself, or inviting the world into your crazy. It isn’t something we do. It is a comprehensive response to life. Therefore, I live just as much on the Internet as I do in front of actual people, just in different ways.
I am not just a great writer when I’m thinking in longhand to all of you. I make people laugh with my letters as well, and it brings us closer. Even well-timed jokes on someone’s Facebook post count if you get the desired reaction.
“Great writer” is relative. When people don’t understand you, it’s devastating. When you hurt someone meaning to help them, you bleed. I have a tattoo of a quill on my forearm dripping blood. It’s the idea that when I write, I cut myself open and look at it. We all do, even in fiction.
I do not feel like a great writer today, and that is not an uncommon occurrence. Dorothy Parker rescues me when I need her, as does Ernest Hemingway. I look back over my entries and say “that wasn’t terrible. That was fancy terrible. With raisins in it.” I also have a button that says “the first draft of everything is shit.”
I’m sorry you get all my rough drafts. I look forward to releasing something that will show you why I got As on every paper I ever wrote except my own senior thesis, but I got an A on my girlfriend’s that year… from the same teacher. How in the hell she couldn’t tell that someone went from constant misspellings to referencing books that her student couldn’t possibly have read and didn’t notice that the style didn’t change from one kid to the one she was, um.
The tragedy is how much I didn’t care that I got a C on mine.
I went to college, but I didn’t graduate. It was a mistake, and maybe one day I’ll rectify that if I actually need letters for something. I’m not one of those people that relies on a degree when by now I have 20 years of experience, including IT if I wanted to go back. I just don’t. I can’t handle the pressure of a full-time job and tuition because my ADHD is so bad that I know it from experience. It makes me terrible at both, except Constitutional Law because it blew my mind and my friends were also into it, trying to exceed all expectations of us as we navigated it together.
I won by only half paying attention and half recording every word the professor said and giving my group members a transcript of every lecture. I wish I still had them, because it was full of great lines like “the Supreme Court is nothing but nine guys in robes.” He was talking about how there are no standards, not even a high school diploma about being a judge who sits on it. I would have chosen a few doctors by now, but that’s just me. You can’t tell me that Michael Chrichton wouldn’t have been the greatest Supreme Court judge who ever lived, that we wouldn’t all hang on his decisions like they were coke. So many more people would have gotten into it, especially if he’d been able to publish his opinions on the Internet. You could say the same about John Grisham. No one can tell me that we as a country wouldn’t be collectively obsessed with opinion crack because of the way they were written.
It was a mistake because I was a second semester junior and would have started my senior year when Kathleen and I moved to Alexandria. I have so many good memories of being in Virginia, but Kat wasn’t one of them. Because I had a full time job, I paid her rent the entire time we lived in Houston. She promised me that when we got to Virginia, I could start at George Mason, basically across the street from her office. You can’t believe how fast that didn’t pan out.
I then proceeded to upend my entire life in a bad way, because I hadn’t really been in the DC area long enough to put down deep roots, and I definitely couldn’t afford to live in DC on my own and couldn’t find a roommate that fast, so I just went back to Houston.
I was writing on Clever Title the whole time, and I never bothered to tell her how big it was. I don’t mean that she didn’t understand why it was important to me, although she didn’t understand that, either. She didn’t realize that real writers knew who I was. She would absolutely freak the fuck out to know that Margaret Cho retweeted my marriage article and sent me hearts when I told her thank you, that her reading me was Goliath reading David.
It’s only her favorite comedian in the world.
If you’ll allow me a second of schadenfreude, her favorite comedian also knows that my reaction to Dana was joy, and my reaction to her was not. 😛 She was the relationship you get when you want your feelings about yourself reflected back to you. When you feel the most worthless, they’re standing by to reinforce it………………
It’s just a blessing that this is all that’s left of her in my memory. DC mattered. She didn’t. End of story.
I’m just in a better place all around. I’ve lived in the same house since I got here because I figured I could live anywhere for a month if it didn’t work out, and joke that I’m glad that Hayat picked me up at the Metro because if she hadn’t, I’d still be there. It has allowed me to breathe, this staying in one place until my emotional support was strong.
Sometimes I have problems being emotionally strong, but I am the type of person that if you agree to safety net me, you can ask me for anything, even in the middle of the night. It is a two-way street, always, and in no way have I ever expected that of anyone. If someone says they don’t have the bandwidth, I turn my energy to someone else who does. What I do expect is that I will take on all your emotions when you’re the one who’s having a moment. I will just want to relieve you of everything so that you have the courage to say what you need to say.
One of the biggest compliments I’ve ever gotten from anyone came from my beautiful girl, “looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies.” No, it is not. I cry and shake and feel tormented just like painters and actors. I am not certain that it comes across as art, blogging, but that’s what it is. It’s my way of reflecting the world, and letting the world shine through me.
Writers also tell secrets without telling them because they aren’t aware of it at the time. You can make up a million different characters, but your life story will be told with them. John Le Carre revealed so much more than technical data writing George Smiley. Jonna Mendez leaves breadcrumbs for those who are ready to hear it.
The difference between them and me is that I write about my real life, and they do, too, with caveats. One does it through the emotions of a fictional operative, and the other does it by talking about the real world and if you’ve read media accounts, you can also pick up what she’s not saying. For instance, in the latest Spy Support video, she talks about how you have a choice to make whether you tell people you work for CIA or not, so generally you tell your family because it’s hard managing your cover(s) at home.
Then, she looks at the camera and says, “it’s your friends who are the problem.”
The way she looked at the camera made her pain so evident and real, and I thought, “there’s a story there.”
It made me want to double down on not talking about Zac at all, and then I realized that there were going to be things I’d mention that had nothing to do with that life, that I was never going to say which agency he worked for except that he knows things about every agency because he sees that data and makes sure it gets to the right people. I also misspoke the other day when I said that his job had been intelligence “since the Navy.” He’s a reservist. What I meant was since he enlisted at 18, he’s been in that world. We talk around many things because I am naturally curious about the current chessboard. It makes me excited to hear even the thing around the thing so I can research it on my own.
“The thing around the thing” is large, no matter what area of the world we’re talking about. Conversations that are truly exciting because we’re not talking about something micro. It’s macro, both in economic terms and world view. It gets me out of my head.
It also makes me a better writer, getting out of my head. I tend to navel-gaze because that’s what my personality does. We are hard-wired to look at the world because we are driven to improve it… but we know we can’t, so we lead by example.
It’s how I know I have the ability to be a great writer someday, as long as I keep practicing my art.
Let me start by saying that my first thoughts were fairly unprintable on this topic, but I decided to take it seriously, anyway.
I don’t exercise at all. Not purposefully, anyway. I walk a lot because I don’t have a car and I like it that way. A lot of my writing gets done on Hwy 29 between East-West Hwy and Franklin Ave. I wear Bluetooth headphones and listen to music, left foot on the downbeat. When I think of something good, I stop and record what I’m thinking.
A typical walk for me is at least a half hour. That’s because I keep changing my mind. I walk to the bus stop, and get bored of waiting, so I’ll start walking and tell myself there’s a bus stop every major street, so why worry? But then I get to the next bus stop and I still don’t want to wait. I’ll go three miles that way, anything to avoid slowing movement. Movement is creativity.
I’m not talking about dance. Movement creates inertia. If I start out with an idea at the house, I’ll have a book series at the entrance to the Metro, and a short audio clip of what my topic is to get started. When I’m on the train, I get out my tablet and keyboard.
I would like to be serious about exercising, in a perfect world. I’d like a trainer and I would work hard with them. For me, it’s not about losing weight. It’s that I have balance issues and a brain palsy that makes my muscles rebel, against what I have no idea. Strengthening my core is essential to staying upright. I am also of the age that I have been laid out flat on my back from a bad sneeze. Training would stop most of that, too.
Something to think of for the future, that walking won’t solve everything. My body is complicated, and yet, it’s not. I don’t care about what and when I eat, ever, because my blog won’t write itself. I know I will walk until I have something. It’s funny how my weight goes up and down dependent on how much I’m thinking about that day. If my mind is full, I can predict six miles. Not in a row, but throughout the day.
There’s a ton of shops within walking distance of my house, whether it’s going toward downtown Silver Spring and into DC, or toward my neighborhood shopping center, which has the basics. 7-Eleven gets most of my money, because when I forget my water bottle, I stop in for a soda. I like Big Gulps best, because I generally want the ice as bad as I need a shot of caffeine. Or, at least, up until I found Liquid Death sparkling water. If I’m going the fizzy water route, I’ll also “do a shot.” “Doing shots” is how I refer to getting pep in the middle of the day in hopes of not seeming so incredibly old. 5 Hour Energy is the top brand, but there are a hundred of them. My favorite is sour apple with a lime seltzer “back.”
Today is a bit different because I’m packing my “going to Zac’s” bag. Zac has an appointment on this side of town, so he offered to swing by and pick me up rather than me taking the train. My “going to Zac’s bag” is basically full of electronics. Getting on the train home would be impossible without my phone/smart watch, and of course they don’t have the same charger…. That would be insane.
I’m writing about going to Zac’s so that when I read this later, I will remember that Bryn asked for a picture of me with Oliver, Zac’s puppy dog. I am already blessed with “The Daily Zac” and “The Daily Oliver” photos, so it wouldn’t naturally occur to me to take one myself. 😛
Getting those two pictures are the highlights of my day… fuel for the road ahead, which is often lonely due to necessity. I can’t just hand off my story ideas to anyone else and say “I’m tired. You do it.” It’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s that I would feel terrible about asking people to work for free on the off chance a book does well. I am not so precious about my idea that I wouldn’t like a research assistant, for example, but I am also not willing to pay them in dreams.
I just have to keep walking so that my ideas flow organically through me and onto the page. Getting a proposal together is difficult, but definitely easier than trying to finish this book on my own (meaning the alternate history). It’s such a large scope and I’m such a small person. I continually hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew, especially in terms of showing talent.
All I can do is believe in myself, and keep walking, one foot in front of the other.
Just one book? Forever? If I only get to have one, it’s a Bible. Not because I’m a religious zealot. I enjoy theology and reading criticism… but in the absence of other books, I’d have to make my own. Very, very hard without the source material. Over time, I would absolutely entertain myself by writing both First and Second SpongeBob to see if anyone noticed.
The Bible isn’t an answer. It’s a lens through which I see everything else. By taking these stories seriously and not literally, I can tap into something useful… the power of me. When I look at the historical Jesus, I’m looking in a mirror. I feel like every Christian says this, but I’m never sure if they mean it. They leave out the “historical” part and that’s what creates problems. They’re not connecting to him, but the marketing campaign that tried to rebrand him as white. They’re connecting themselves to something that has never even existed.
The “prosperity gospel” people drive me up the wall, and it is extremely important to understand why. Jesus is all about setting priorities, and money wasn’t on the list. I am angry that so many people think Christianity is *only* mega churches so that small communities engaging in social justice are also thought of as suspect.
Meanwhile, the income disparity just gets more intense as people want church that looks like a rock concert, when to me it’s the very worst of both. It’s pedantic to preach to people on an eighth grade level. Assume your audience is smarter than you are, because it is true.
Moving what is basically my textbook out of the way, you guys already know I love Argo, but it’s not my favorite book by Team Mendez. That’s Spy Dust, the love story between Jonna and Tony. I read it shortly after I met Jonna in person, and it was exactly the book I needed at exactly the right time. They’d both been married before. It was their second act after facing lots of hardship, and it was beautiful (both their relationship and the prose that came out of it).
Fiction changes by the hour. It would be impossible to list all the novels I love. When push comes to shove, I still can’t pick one.
Catcher in the Rye comes up quite frequently. People love it because of the foul language (for the time) and the “Holden Caulfied is just cool” factor. I also love those things, but it’s more than that. It’s written from my favorite perspective, probably because I’m a blogger. It’s first person with an unreliable narrator. Holden’s were stories that were all true and God knows if any of them happened.
I am also very impressed with my own writing, but not in the moment. It takes about five years for me to be proud of an entry because I have to be a different person than I was when I wrote said piece. I’m proud when I look at it with a more objective eye… I feel like I’m connecting to another writer and critiquing their work because at that point, I’m not emotionally attached to it. I also have to be my own biggest fan, because to make my blog dependent on external validation is crazy. It’s a journal and you’re invited, both to read and talk back. To need your love and adoration is to handicap myself, because it’s letting the audience become my boss, writing what they want to read rather than this space actually being useful for my own growth and development.
I absolutely do go back and read what I’ve written, because again, that’s what’s useful to me. I read my entries and look at what I was trying to accomplish and ask myself if I’ve done it. Most of the time, I am not sure. What I do know is that people don’t think I know how I come across, and they are very worried. To me, that’s caring about what other people think more than I care about myself.
I’m not being cruel and callous about hurting people with fallout. I am saying that I can’t think about the outside world. I have to let the audience find me because I need this web site more than everyone else.
My personality type says there are callbacks and patterns, so I go back and find them. I throw things back in my face. I get angry at myself. And somehow, good writing comes out of it sometimes. Not all the time. Sometimes I’m an angry, judgmental dickhead. I like the bumper sticker wisdom of “when you ask yourself ‘what would Jesus do,’ remember that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is a viable option.”
This is why I’d take a Bible over anything else. People worried over him the exact same way that people worry over me. They even say some of the same things. It is enough to make me shut down this whole site at times, and I have to force myself not to do it; I’ve done it once before and it really screwed up my future.
It screwed me up inside when the same people that tried to force my hand were so outraged in the moment, then months later said, “you were always such a great writer. Why don’t you do it anymore?” Notice I said that they tried to force my hand. It didn’t work. What did work was feeling so terrible about anything and everything I’d done that my poor self esteem cased and trashed everything I’d built in less than 20 seconds. At the height of my popularity, I was up there with Wil Wheaton and Heather Armstrong. Dooce had only started a couple of years before me, when she actually talked about things that got her in trouble. She built her entire audience off of brutal truth…… and then….. didn’t.
I can’t be bitter, because it was my decision. I am just telling you the cost of shamethat comes with having readers. As a writer, you only fear two things. The first is that no one will read your work. The second is that everyone will.
Over the years, people start to appreciate my writing more and more, and I’m not talking about strangers. I’m talking about my friends who don’t remember what happened when and I’m the only one that remembered to write it down. That’s why I’m so careful to talk about people in a three dimensional way. Once the subject removes themselves from the equation and starts reading about themselves as if they were a different person, “all of a sudden” I’m the greatest writer who ever lived because mine was the story that stuck.
I am not sure that this entry will be written without tears, because I’m thinking about so many things that my emotions might leak. I might let the audio sit for a day or two, just to get some emotional distance. It helps the narration if I don’t have to blow my nose. Also, I’m sorry if the audio is poor. I have five housemates and I don’t have an “on air” light, nor would they pay attention to it. I am, however, surprised at just how much my Bluetooth mic picks up. The mic is literally in my ear, and it still picks up noise from all over the second floor. It helps me, though, because it keeps me from flooding out…. So that I can record an entry without tears…. 98% of the time.
I am positive that some people were confused at me crying over the death of Tony Mendez, but let me tell you why. I wrote about it, but it’s been long enough and I haven’t mentioned the connection more than once so it’s time for a rehash.
I wasn’t finished with grieving my mother when Tony died. Grief compounds. Therefore, I knew innately what his widow, Jonna, was going through in terms of having to tough out a public event all armored up while dying inside. My mirror neurons went off like crazy. My grief mixed with hers even though we didn’t talk about it. I took all of that grief home with me and mourned Tony and my mother simultaneously. Therefore, years later, when I think about grief, Tony and my mother both come to mind.
Mourning my mother was so great a loss that I put it deep down inside, hardly ever talked about it unless the other person in the conversation had already lost a parent. This is because the chance was too great that I would open myself up to further injury, because people have no idea what to say and often make it worse.
I will tell you right now that the only thing I actually wanted said was “I’m sorry.” I loved people that showed up and were willing to sit in the silence until I could emote.
Digging that deep was so incredibly hard that I still hadn’t cried as much as I needed to. Crying about Tony was only partially about Tony. The loss of a new book from him ever again really was devastating. But mostly it’s that the grief I felt regarding him was so much bigger than that. Grieving over him allowed me to process my mother’s death, because it was the entrance to a deep, dark cave, ripe for excavation. I just didn’t have any spelunking equipment.
Meeting Jonna was at least the hat with the light.
She broke me open in just the right way, at just the right time. Her armor was my armor laid out in front of me where I could take it in… where I could see my own actions in the third person omniscient.
So, when I talk about Tony Mendez, I can’t do it without tears.
Going through a breakup with a friend has been devastating, and yet not at all. It just depends on the day. Some days I think “no one is her,” and some days I just can’t. What has helped is a book called “My Other Ex,” stories of women who’ve lost their best friends and why “no one is her.” One thing they expressed universally is that with other women, you get so close you can speak without words, but there is no recognition of that type of grief.
I am an INFJ. I feel emotions so deeply that they’re capable of overtaking common sense, and I could write a seven volume book series on my dumbass attacks. Not only do I understand, I grok.
I understand so completely that their grief is my grief. Grief compounds. I cannot talk about that relationship ending without tears. So I compartmentalize, and armor up. No one is trying to see me cry in line at Whole Foods.
Armoring up is necessary only because if I don’t, I will just bleed out emotionally. In the moments where I am not capable of armoring up, it means the grief is too deep. So even though no one was trying to see me cry at a Whole Foods, they must have thought that them being out of the veggie dogs I like was being taken way too seriously.
Although I will say that it was legit a problem. If veggie dogs, vegan cream cheese, and hot sauce didn’t exist, I’d probably be dead by now. I eat them all the time. It’s my favorite lunch, because it takes about a minute to make. Yes, I am a very good cook, but I eat prepared foods most of the time. This is because I don’t want to devote the time and energy to prep. If you come over to eat, I will pull out my good knife. Left to my own devices, I run on sandwiches and Crystal Light.
I believe in Crystal Light, because Crystal Light has always believed in me. Also, not going to lie- finding out there are flavors with caffeine in them has made my whole life easier. I cannot talk about Crystal Light Energy without tears. 😛
“Spare” is a rough read, and I cannot do it without tears, either. Prince Harry and I have so much in common. My platform as preacher’s kid was so much smaller, but I can empathize with his pain. I’ve cried over the loss of Princess Diana, being different than everyone else because he wants to speak his truth, and the list goes on.
And then he went to Afghanistan, and I went from tears to the full-on sob.
I have said over and over that The War Daniel is my primary partner, and that if he changes his mind about marrying me, it’s over for anyone else. The reason that they don’t stand a chance is that we have a trauma bond, which is like a regular bond on steroids.
He’s the only person ever to make me feel better about the emotional abuse handed down to me over the years. I couldn’t listen to him without tears of relief. He said, “your trauma is so much worse than mine, because my enemies in Afghanistan were clearly defined. Yours were the ones closest to you, turncoats all.” If he is willing to walk in my inner landscape, I am willing to walk in his.
In fact, I am hoping to God I didn’t just reject a call from him.
The area code on my phone was his, but the name was “Telemarketer.” They didn’t leave a message, so I hope that means it really was an auto dial. Someone in rehab feeling rejected is not my MO, especially because I need him to know that I love him, honestly and completely.
The only reason I’m even saying that it’s up in the air is because I’m willing to date people casually until January. At that point, it’s a different ball game. I need to know if he still feels the same way after the fog has cleared from his brain. Again, I am trying to think logically through rehab and its aftermath, experience I’ve gotten from being a friend and a coworker.
But even though I’ve dealt with addicts my entire cooking life, that doesn’t mean I can do it without tears. What if he doesn’t come back? What if I’m waiting for nothing? I only think that in my smallest moments, though, because I’m not ready for a serious relationship, anyway. Even the relationship that Daniel and I created previously wasn’t serious. He didn’t tell me to break up with Zac, and thinks he’s adorable (because he is). I didn’t tell him I needed him to be faithful, either. He was going to be off doing his own thing. The best I hoped for this year was letters, calls, perhaps a short visit since he can fly here so easily and without money. The only constraint that the military would put on him is time…. Being flexible about his departure and arrival depending on how many standby seats were available.
The only part that was serious is dreaming of the life I wanted to create with him once he was capable of doing so. It fits my purposes nicely that he doesn’t drink, because I so rarely indulge. Zac likes cocktails, and so do I, especially if it’s something I’ve never tasted before. Therefore, I will always take a drink if Zac is bartending, but I don’t even keep alcohol at my house. I would rather drink Crystal Light. I think we have covered this. 😛
Right now, I am not communicating with Doc. It’s not because I don’t love him more than life itself. I need him to get well, and I don’t want to be a distraction in any way. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if he thought I needed help more than him and decided to come to my rescue at the expense of his own. The best thing I could possibly do is let rehab have him, and he’ll be done in May.
On the surface, it looks like I am batshit crazy and I realize this. Combat vet and alcoholic. Leslie, are you insane?
Yes, and that’s the point.
Daniel was HM2 in the Navy. That is the equivalent of a civilian nurse practitioner. Therefore, I feel safe with him because me being bipolar would never be an issue. I trust his judgment. If Doc says he can tell whether I’m up or down, I will take that check to the bank and cash it.
On the flip side, is it any wonder that I know how to support a Doc? My family is all medicine, all the time.
A really funny conversation between Doc and me ran thusly:
“I think I’m getting hypomania.” “And what are your qualifications to make this diagnosis?” “I went to medical school in the backseat of a Lexus.”
I am good at standing (sitting) behind people and listening closely.
I have been listening to Doc closely, and trying to understand his pain. Most of the time, I cannot do it without tears. If I start down the road of Doc doing this brave thing and how it was his worst day, I will collapse in a heap. It’s why I’m wiling to forgive him, and struggling through it. I have to forgive him whether he reappears or not. The forgiveness isn’t for him. It’s for me. I won’t be myself until all of this is resolved, even if it’s just getting my own closure.
The only reason I haven’t closed the door is that I can’t think of him going through rehab without tears, either. I know what that’s like, not from a first-person perspective, but from having a best friend back in the day who went through what Doc is going through now. I remember that I gave her a ring that looked like leaves encircling her finger, in honor of turning over her new leaf.
I wear my skeleton claddagh with pride on my right hand, or I did until the silver wore off and it turned my finger green. That’s not Doc’s fault. It wasn’t a gift. I bought it as a placeholder and told Doc where to find my favorite jewelry.
I should call around and see if I can find a maker who does plating. Even nickel would protect the metal. The only reason it’s worth plating a ring that cost $3.00 is that it’s so unique. Doc is a death metal fan. Skeleton claddagh is not my style, it’s his. Even after he broke up with me, I still wore it like a #livestrong bracelet. It didn’t mean we were still together, just that I hope to God that sending support would help, even if he never knew about it. I mean, he knows I have it and I have sent him a picture, but it might surprise him to know that the ring turned my finger green a few days ago. I didn’t give up on the ring, it gave up on me.
Perhaps it’s for the best that I’m not constantly looking down at my right hand, longing for a dream that might never come. I just don’t want to be certain about anything regarding him, because rehab is hard work and your emotions are all over the place. Again, Cora has said that she doesn’t think my faith in her father is misplaced, so I’m choosing to believe her. Keeping my own strength up is what’s important, because my faith in her father is important to me being who I am through all of this, too.
What kind of partner would I be if I gave up on him while he needed so much compassion? I know what it’s like to push someone away because you’re traumatized, and his trauma goes to eleven. Our pain isn’t even on the same playing field.
Stories That Are All True 