No One Matters But You

May 4, 2025 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Daily writing prompt

List the people you admire and look to for advice…

I don’t look to anyone for advice because I can’t… and that’s true for every single person reading. You are only getting someone else’s read on a situation in which they have no experience. That’s because even if the particulars of a situation seem familiar to them, the combination of factors that make you, well, you are absolutely unique. My divorce wasn’t the same as Dana’s, for instance, and we were married to each other. I am blessed not to know much about what happened to her after I left Houston, because once I was done, I was really done. I wrote about her fondly and I meant every word. She’s still dear to me when I think back. But I’m not planning a future with anyone from my past. That’s because I asked them for their advice, and it did not work for me.

What works for me is being alone with the spirit, and that comes to me through classical music. Today, the thing that brought me to absolute tears was the a capella singers in the back of the church at Washington National Cathedral, because today it’s Nerd Church. Nerd church is where I have stuff to do at my desk, but church is going on in the background… or, it is until I think of something and have to write it down.

Some would argue that I have church on the wrong screen, but there’s nothing wrong with my tablet. It’s my desktop that needs work. I bought a gaming laptop with an NVIDIA video card so that I could use GPT4ALL in private conversations (basically Microsoft Copilot built for your PC and not cloud computing). It came with Windows 11, and this desktop is not that advanced- it came with Windows 10. A computer capable of Windows 10 with 16 GB of RAM will scream with any version of Linux you throw at it, so my nerd church has been finding out that I love my desktop more than anything AND ALSO I cannot stop crying.

There doesn’t have to be a sermon to remind me that I am a sinner.

There does not have to be a sermon to remind me that there are things I have done, and things I have left undone.

They are grievous unto me, to the point where right this moment it feels like I’ll never recover because there is no one to ask. It was my choice to be alone, because there is no way that the buck doesn’t stop with me. What I will say is that I needed to move on with my life instead of thinking that it was over. You think that when your only choice is lying or being hospitalized. That when you tell the truth, someone calls your care team and says you’re having an episode.

I often wonder if that’s how my life was always supposed to turn out. That there’s no combination of manipulations both by me and against me that wouldn’t have landed me here. I’m never going to see friends I dearly love ever again, because ““life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” -Soren Kierkegaard

I don’t push blame on others, because I know that I am not innocent. But I think that maybe a friend was too hasty in saying that she’d never betray me…. because the betrayal wouldn’t have been leaking my e-mails all over everywhere. I do not care. At least people would understand why things flying back and forth were so emotionally volatile. No, the relationship floundered because our ways of communicating and giving each other advice were, at the same time, perfectly perfect in every way and also diametrically opposed. She was raised by the almighty hand of the military. I was raised by the Almighty. Kidding, my dad was a Methodist minister when I was a kid and joke that “Jesus is the son of God and I was born to middle management.” These two things are very, very different.

And yet, not different enough because we clicked on a level that was unusual. I often think that our love for each other must have been something fierce if we could also fight that hard. But what I learned is that just because I was younger didn’t always mean I was dumber. I just felt like that on a number of occasions. I feel it now, as I’m trying to close out this chapter in my life and feel no energy for writing because it’s not like I have anything to say that will help anyone.

You can read me all day long (and you do), but comprehension is a whole other level. I was telling my therapist that because of my stats, I can safely and confidently say that many people have broken up with me, but no one has ever broken up with my blog. That people either fall in love with my writing, or they fall in love with me. Rarely do people love both. I am constantly comforted by the fact that my therapist is reading, because she does not know anyone in this blog and was saddened to hear that I wanted to delete everything. Just push the red button and kiss it goodbye. Losing the character of Supergrover made me lose the will to write.

Yes, it was all my fault.

Yes, I mean it.

That’s because our little echo chamber provided me with the love I was missing on the ground, in real life. She decided not to meet me long ago, she just wasn’t going to tell me. That looks like betrayal to me. This is not a story of every wrong I’ve committed, but also her plan to extract herself without ever having to do any real emotional work.

“Do you ever think this is all for the cameras?”
“Well, they’re getting the ratings, I’ll give ’em that.”

We are both back to our public transportation, nondescript government layer cake lives. Except that in my case, it’s figuring out whether I should file for SSI or not, because I do not know what my financial future needs to hold. I was diagnosed with hypotonic cerebral palsy when I was 18 and one-half months old. I was diagnosed as bipolar in college, along with ADHD. I have not been diagnosed with autism, but my therapist is helping me in terms of getting me the referrals I need. The question is not whether I can work anymore, but whether I ever should have entered the workforce as a “normal person” at all. AuDHD is so hard to catch that I could have used services in elementary school, and the problems with my muscles were evident…. when anyone bothered to pay attention to the fact that I was struggling.

The way I moved to Baltimore was a mistake, because I tried to go it alone and failed spectacularly. Now I know that what covered my autism was being married. I’m a wreck without Dana, but I do not mean that I am not over her. That ship sailed a long time ago. What I mean is that I am a wreck without the safety and stability of being in a relationship where someone else takes care of me. I leaned on her too much without knowing that’s what I was doing. It’s a gift I’ll never be able to repay, and it weighs on me not to be able to apologize.

But I just did, because people break up with me, but they don’t break up with my blog.

Speaking of which, I was telling my friend Ken that Dana had paid $20,000 for her culinary school education and had given it to me for free- another gift I’d never be able to repay. He said, “ah, but gifts by their very nature aren’t meant to be repaid.” So many people have walked around giving me gifts that I haven’t noticed because autism pulls me into my own little world. I have to be dragged into understanding how my actions affect others, because I will not even leave my house if I don’t have to do so. I would rather be alone with my thoughts, because it is so much easier than feeling like a drain on everyone else. I have found that a lot of autistic people feel this way… particularly if you are undiagnosed and have no idea why people seem reticent to tell you things.

I was left to figure out everyone else’s quirks on my own without them communicating, and I chose………………….. poorly.

My hospitalization was directly tied to my autistic quirks and how I was so misunderstood. That’s because I am of the opinion that in any conflict, I can only own my half. When I see more than that coming at me, I retreat. I haven’t written for several days and that in and of itself is emotionally constipating. But there’s nothing like a fresh computer install to invite me into writing because it all looks so new and shiny. It also helps that it takes less than 15 minutes to get up and running because so many things are in the cloud.

I found old e-mail from Supergrover that made me realize we were better off without each other. That she’d stabbed me with words when I showed up unarmed as many times as I had. That even her “dramatic e-mail” was all about my manipulations and how I’d hurt her. Absolutely no accountability for anything she’d done. I let it stand because I got what I wanted. I’d already explained her manipulations in detail; turnabout is fair play.

Then she set me up to fail, and I did.

My own words echo in my chest daily… “so which is it, after you block me?”

I’m sure the answer is over the rainbow, but at least by my count there’s six.

That’s the first time I’ve even been able to say I wanted to look for them. I know I deserve the storm.

I know that without any advice.

I Made the List for the First Time

May 4, 2024May 4, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

List the people you admire and look to for advice…

This is the first time anyone has ever asked me this question and I thought to put myself on the list. I have never been comfortable enough before in my own skin to think my opinion was worth anything. However, once I sat with my thoughts day in and day out, my discomfort at sharing those opinions went away. Mostly because I realized that no one is wrong or right. We are all making it up as we go along. I didn’t have to put people I admired on a pedestal because my opinions were just as good as theirs. It wasn’t hero worship. It was thinking something was wrong with me and that made them automatically better at opinions.

It is also true that when you’re physically disabled and mentally ill, other people assume they’re better with the thinking because they don’t have those issues. It is amazing to me that people think treated bipolar disorder and untreated are the same. So, you have a lot of people who tell you that your opinions aren’t worth anything because to them they aren’t. They have invalidated you by your diagnosis. People tend to be dismissive because they don’t think I’m in my right mind anyway. I don’t know what I’m saying.

In a very real sense, this is true. Accurate and dead on. I do not know what I am saying.

This is because I know exactly what I am saying, but through my autism and ADHD, I do not know what you hear when I talk. I know this because of the difference in what I mean vs. what people have angrily insisted I mean. This is because their brains process the order of my words differently than I do, which changes the meaning of a sentence.

What could possibly go wrong?

It leads people to put emotion where it doesn’t belong, because they’re, in effect, accenting the wrong syllable. Thinking I’m being aggressive, sarcastic, cold, whatever the emotion and telling me that- which is great. I need to know your experience of me. The problem comes in when there is no way to prove to you that I mean what I say and I say what I mean, so I am struggling against the way you perceived my words and not what they actually were. For instance, trying to prove I wasn’t trying to be aggressive when you are absolutely convinced I purposefully tried to anger you.

There is really no way to un-fuck that particular situation. I walk away from those relationships because the thing that’s harder than anything else in a relationship is proving you’re NOT angry. With autism, disproving any negative, really. It’s hard to prove you’re NOT anything if someone’s perception in their minds of you is certain.

Through being autistic, I have learned that I am a master manipulator while I sit there and wonder why people say that….. Or I did, until I learned I was autistic. That everything I say is probably going to come out wrong. So, I’m in a situation where people think I’m manipulating them and it’s supported by the fact that I’m bipolar.

I am not malicious and I am not mentally ill. I take medication every day for it. You don’t call someone blind when you can see the glasses on their face- their vision is corrected. You don’t treat a mentally ill person like they’re on thin ice for being put away.

You don’t focus on the fact that someone is an alcoholic. You focus on the fact that they’re in recovery.

So, if I know I’m not malicious and that I’m not trying to manipulate people, then obviously I am failing in my communication and need to learn new strategies for saying the same things. This is because I do not have a problem voicing needs anymore, but I don’t know how to talk at all without people telling me that I’m acting like I know everything.

However, it’s only a certain group of my friends that jump on me this way, so how they communicate plays into it as well. It is not a one sided communication issue. Because they have things in common, my pattern recognition on what they’re doing reads universal rather than personal to each individual relationship.

So, not only do I need better communication overall, I specifically need guidance on how to phrase things so that I don’t sound like I’m master of the universe. My self-esteem is so incredibly low (and I’m vulnerable about it) that I’m surprised people think I sit around and think about how great I am.

Coming into my own was hearing the child inside me say, “hey. You’re not THAT bad.” My trouble with communication made me reticent to give an opinion at all, because it always came out wrong. I have been told that the most fucking irritating thing about me in the whole entire goddamn world is that I’m always right, so take that for what you will.

One of the reasons I shut down and became a writer, basically talking to myself for incredibly long periods of time is that it came across like people tolerated me rather than genuinely wanting to be in my company. I jumped into writing because I wasn’t wanted elsewhere, and not in a “poor me” kind of way. It was “I don’t have to have friends, because I can entertain myself.”I do indeed have friends, I’m just saying that my happiness is dependent on them. I have the capability to bring myself joy; no one is responsible for making me happy.

I also think that writing reinforces what I think- I am not arguing with myself over how I feel in person because I’ve already written about it here. Therefore, people are deathly intimidated by me because I am deft in an arena where few people excel. My Achilles Heel is that I often have communication issues and end up beating the wrong dead horse instead of the right one…….. Because I interpreted someone else’s words putting the accent on the wrong syllable.

There are plenty of people that I look to for advice, generally my sister and Bryn are at the top of the list.

I ask Supergrover for advice all the time. It’s just that her responses are calculated on everything she’s already said. It’s the same way with Dana. I can’t go back in time, but their uploaded consciousnesses live in me. I talk to their characters. Their characters don’t grow and change, but it’s comforting nonetheless.

I am coming to rely more and more on myself because I realize that being disabled and autistic has led me to discount my opinions, buying into the view everyone else has about both groups. I realized when I was talking about people I go to for advice, it felt like I wasn’t even allowing myself to sit in the conference room with them.

I started taking up more space when I realized I wanted to define myself. That it was okay to take up room. It was okay if I didn’t swallow other people’s opinions whole in order to please them.

I’m not the expert. I constantly play tapes in my head of the things people have said about/to me and it sits in my brain like a rock. I defined myself by all the negative things that people placed on me, and thought I was a bad person because of it. I don’t mean recently. I mean I can tell you about feeling the exact same way at six years old. School is brutal for kids who can’t communicate. Having a neurotypical kindergarten teacher was the first time I realized that people couldn’t hear what I was saying and were putting meanings into my mouth.

I started releasing my demons as a writer…… Or at least, as I said the other day, exercising them. I hardly ever say “exercise” because I know they ain’t leavin.’ It makes me laugh to think of my demons in workout clothes. We are very serious. We are eating Starburst for breakfast.

Breakfast of champions.

I do not know what it is about the autistic brain that makes me insufferable. It’s funny because it’s true. But know that it’s not all me. Part of it is that I have a disability you know nothing about, and are choosing to believe I am not that different from you. The fault in this is not being able to predict my behavior and thinking you can because your heuristics are for neurotypical people.

I am taking responsibility for learning my half, but I can only meet you. I cannot go all the way to the other side and drag you to the middle. It is a disability. Worrying that I’m failing is a non-issue because it doesn’t matter. There’s no chance of winning. It’s miserable when that reality sets in.

I have found that I need respect for myself because I am so misunderstood. I am also not saying I’m not part of the problem. I haven’t known I was autistic since I was a kid, so I have to learn new coping mechanisms.

I think the thing that hurt me the most this week was a scene from “The Big Bang Theory” in panels as a meme on Facebook. It’s Amy telling Sheldon that his friends all hate his bad behavior and that the fact that he can’t do anything about it is the only reason they tolerate him.

I cannot be dependent on external validation. I write or pray. It’s a new development, but trusting in myself hasn’t backfired.