Today’s daily prompt is about times in my life that I’ve felt productive, and this is a great time to ask me about it because I don’t think I’ve ever been more productive writing-wise, and I don’t want to be known for anything else.

It’s been a transformation of enormous proportions. I have been pulling myself inwards, thinking about my directions and distractions. What and where are they? Why do I fail when I am so motivated by hearing other people talk about success? It’s all about dealing with the gap between knowledge, emotion, and communication. I do hear people, and I do take in emotions. However, I don’t do it at the same rate or speed because my pattern recognition is different. There are literally different pathways to your conclusions than to mine. I am not a sociopath, cut off from all my emotions. I show all of them very well in writing. I show them very well in person, although I am much less likely to tell people what I think in person because it’s hard for me to verbalize it. If something feels like a threat, I go mute. I do not stop taking everything in. My mind decides “we’re not going to do speech today.” And we don’t.

Part of being so much into chatting online vs. getting together is because I don’t experience those gaps in between trying to say what I think and trying to verbalize it. It is why I now think that Supergrover is my puzzle piece by now, because she’s had unfiltered access to my brain for 10 years without once hearing a stutter as I figured out how to put words in my mouth. I solve the problem of stuttering by taking time to think before I speak, because most of my stutter is just lag. Damn lag.

Therefore, people who know me would probably say “you don’t stutter.” I don’t when I’m not choking on buffer overload (and as you get older, the amount of RAM decreases). When people are talking to me, the thing that you are reading right now has not stopped. It is running underneath my speech. Therefore, I have multiple trains of thought running at all times, and picking one of them in order to speak slows me down by quite a large margin.

It also depends on how many other sounds are competing with your voice in the room. I like very intimate conversations because I can really only process one voice at once. I am never trying to “get people alone,” because I don’t have to. I go off to be by myself and the other introverts adopt me because they see it’s okay to be overstimulated… Or someone is concerned and now the person that’s concerned about me is in my bubble. Either way, it’s not about my personality. My personality is “when you’re overwhelmed, find somewhere quieter.” That’s how I got Bryn. She has always been in my corner because we were the introverts trying to get away from the noise. We talked to each other in quiet spaces because we could hear ourselves think.

I remember myself at that age (19) and just realized that my haircut now is the closest it’s ever been to when I was that young. And yet, I really don’t look much different except a few gray strands and a few more wrinkles. Some people say that they don’t feel any older. I do. I feel ancient- partly because I see how I’ve grown, but partly because I’ve been middle aged since I was nine. I have never talked like a child, ever, which is why in our family no one imitates things I said when I was little. No one. I have been very precise with language since I learned to use it; it just so happens that most people excel at conversation and I excel at taking a second to think of a reply and chatting back.

Supergrover once told me that it was clear I often said things before I thought about them, and I believe that is true. It has to be, because I’m ADHD. But at the same time, I think she was also talking about consequences that a naurotypical person would see coming, but not a neurodivergent one. I don’t mean issues of clear right and wrong. I have that. I mean being able to divine consequences and/or their feelings out of thin air, and our relationship was only using 7% of what went into communication in the first place. A good example of this is thinking I’m being the bigger person by laying out my vulnerabilities first. She took it not as “this is what Leslie is worried about,” but as “Leslie needs to guilt me about something.” Meanwhile, I think I have said something perfectly logical and she thinks I’m trying to hurt her. It’s unsustainable, because I do not want her to feel guilty.

I want her to see that these are the problems we need to resolve so that we can move on, because I can imagine that some of the things I think and feel do indeed make her feel guilty, but making her feel guilty was not my intent. I think she thinks I want to punish her for what she’s done, when she’s the most precious thing in my life. The fact that she thinks that I feel such negativity is overwhelming, and I feel like I’ve proven that within myself I was not asking for anything huge. She reassured me that I do come up in her mind all the time, and that was that. That she didn’t have to drop out of her life and appear in mine. That I was worried our relationship was truly lopsided and I was on the wrong track. It was a half a line in an e-mail, not a day at the beach.

Wanting to do things together is dreaming because she doesn’t have the bandwidth, but I didn’t make it clear that I was just dreaming, so she thought I was being demanding. If I was demanding, e-mails wouldn’t have been enough to sustain a relationship for 10 years. When I throw ideas out there and they’re not for her, she becomes part of the problem by not saying “eh. I don’t think meeting in person is for me.” Or whatever. She’s never said anything like that, so I’ve always treated her like a normal person. And in fact, I believe she sees me the same way. That’s because I was preaching at Bridgeport during the pandemic and she told me to send her a link. She didn’t get to come because something came up, but the fact that she told me to send her the link made my heart beat eighty times faster and I did very well that day.

However, I didn’t know she wasn’t able to come until after the service (Zoom), so I still put a reference to her in it because it tends to make people laugh to themselves. I also thought it would make her laugh to be an atheist and think “a preacher mentioned me in a sermon today.”

And the thing is, I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest because she was genuinely sorry that she couldn’t make it because what came up was really important- not that I’m not, but I’m not her only friend and I’m not a member of her family, unless you count the space in her head I’ve been renting all these years.

It feels very much like a constant running version of “All of Me.”

I do not know whether she would be Lily Tomlin or Steve Martin, but as I’ve seen Steve Martin age I actually think we’re more alike, despite Lily and me both being queer. I love comedy, but I also love zoning out and doing my own thing, like buying art and writing novels/screenplays. I have a feeling that Steve Martin is a neurodivergent introvert as well….. That stage presence is an affectation for EVERYONE who is in any way creative. You get to see us live, you don’t get to see us in the practice room.

You don’t get to see the thousand pictures I took before I got to the good one……………. Except you do.

I write in bulk, so how many of these entries do you think I think are amazing? Not all of them, I assure you. I feel like I spend my days work shopping ideas, throwing them around in my brain and trying to word it so that I understand them. If I can understand them, then mostly so can other people. I get lost in my own head and forget transitions a lot of the time, but that’s what it’s like to get a blog and not a book.

You are not getting the finished product, you are reading my notes. I am a different writer outside this blog because when I am writing for publication, I tend to clean it up more. Not only that, if it’s important I get someone to edit me (A friend or a Fiverr). By “important,” I mean anything I’m turning in to a contest or I’m being paid, like a book review. Even if I don’t get a salary, the book is the payment.

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I took a break to make breakfast, and now I don’t remember where I was going.

The stove is gas.

The stove is gas.

The stove is gas.

I have to keep pinching myself when I say it. It has made me cry several times, both because having a gas stove is such a a good thing and because there are All-Clad pans to go with it. I remember every moment of learning to cook just by the way the pan feels in my hand. It’s too professional not to trigger me in a good way. David hasn’t seen me flip mushrooms or anything, but he has come home and say it smells good. What he’s smelling is butter. A lot of it.

Now that I have All-Clad, I’m back to cooking like I’m in a restaurant. It’s good, because I don’t eat very often, but everything I do eat is loaded with calories. Most days, it’s eggs and toast. Today, I made oatmeal.

I started with a couple tablespoons of butter, oatmeal, and chia, flax, and hemp seeds. I sauteed all of it until it was brown, then added water, Mexican vanilla, and sugar. It sat on the stove for about five minutes (steel cut, but microwavable so it doesn’t take long on the stove) and then I added some peanut butter and dried cranberries to finish.

Then, I let it sit while I was cleaning the kitchen, because I like oatmeal to cool so that it breaks apart in chunks. It took me about 15 minutes to clean up, at which time I took the liberty of pouring some almond milk on it.

Now, the whole house smells like brown butter, and I am very, very pleased. I wish I had made a larger pan, because I like steel cut oatmeal warmed up in the microwave rather than buying quick oats. These were some I’d ordered off of Amazon years ago and I’m still using them up because I didn’t know I was ordering six boxes of six. Normally, I buy Irish steel cut oats and it takes about half an hour. For my money, now that I’ve cooked with microwavable steel cut, it’s fine. It tastes the same when you put the amount of ingredients in yours as I do in mine. I didn’t do it this time, but last time I sauteed pumpkin seeds for oatmeal as well.

Generally people who say they don’t like oatmeal haven’t had what I consider oatmeal. It’s watery, or soupy, or whatever. Mine actually looks like cereal. Plus, the grains all taste better after they’ve been sauteed in butter first. Pretty much anything tastes good sauteed in butter, but get exponentially better with sugar, vanilla, and dried fruit.

I need to go to the grocery store at some point today, but breakfast was just “throw it together.” I like to go to the grocery store when I’m full, because it helps my impulse control…… But not too full or nothing else will look appealing. I will go to the grocery store, walk around, and leave. I get overwhelmed at too many decisions. It is literally why I have a standard order on Uber Eats and I just hit reorder. If they don’t have something, I discuss substitutions. I do not want to go through decision fatigue with every single item.

The only thing I know I want today that I haven’t gotten in a while is toilet paper. Hayat always bought all of ours, I didn’t have to get it myself. So, I get to pick out my own. This is exciting for me. You have no idea.

Before David left for church, he told me I could put my office in the sun room. He said that no one uses it, and that it’s kind of cold. I told him that was fine. I could get a little electric heater if I had to. It’s nice to have a place to write that’s not shut up in my bedroom. I’m having trouble transitioning into having a whole house again. My housemates and I stuck to our rooms and rarely came out. Therefore, I’m usually in my room. I think David thought I was unhappy and that’s why I’m shut up in here. Nope, it’s that I only think of myself as renting one room.

I have seen David visibly relax over time, because since he’s also neurodivergent, having someone move in with him was VERY intimidating. It was intimidating for me, too, but not in the same way. He’d never rented out his space before, so he didn’t know what to expect from anyone at all. I’ve had housemates in every living situation since college except a spot here and there. Once I lived in a junior efficiency by myself. All of the others, I was either in a relationship or I had housemates. Once, I had a one bedroom in a retirement community. I was in my 20s and I was delighted. They didn’t legally discriminate, they picked up the trash door to door, there were two pools on the grounds and I was the hottest person at both of them….. I mean, what was not to like in that situation? 😉

They stopped doing things for the residents after a while. At first, we all had breakfast together every Sunday morning on the landlord’s dime. That stopped, and then picking up trash door-to-door stopped. The only thing left that marked it as a retirement community at all was a bus that went to several shops around the area. In Houston, I drove, so I didn’t use it. Basically, though, what made it unique was gone.

I am trying not to do that to myself. To give pieces of myself away so that I am no longer unique. I am also not trying to be invulnerable, to actively disconnect myself from my emotions so that things hurt less. If I felt less, I wouldn’t have so much inspiration to write, because I wouldn’t think my life was worth remembering.