What are you passionate about?

I don’t have a bigger job right now than to look at who I want to be with as much passion as I can muster. I need to release guilt and shame, and move into the next phase of my life. I’ve kept it at bay long enough. I have a doctorate in being single by now, and in some ways I’m just as dumb as ever, but the key is to always make new mistakes. I am tired of all the internal punishment I’ve given myself and am trying to work through all of it so that issues stay resolved and flashbacks can’t pop up, because they don’t mean anything anymore.

I want to be able to look at a memory without reliving it. I do this most often through this blog, because I only have to write it once…….. but I have somewhere to go to read and reread and reread until the emotions that come up for me feel very far away. It depends on the issue as to the timeframe, but desensitizing myself is much easier when I have a handle on what I actually thought instead of relying on my (very) fallible memory……. Or maybe it’s my fallible memory.

I CANNOT CHANGE THE STORY I’M TELLING MYSELF.

Do you see how it’s so much harder for me to get off track when my memory of what I was thinking during certain times in my life is infallible? Do you know how many times I’ve had to use the “Search” feature on this web site? It is so helpful that my memories do not bleed together and warp, because rereading my own work gives me a general idea of what happened when. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have to basically Google yourself because you’re so ADHD you couldn’t remember a date if your life depended on it? What saves embarrassment is being able to recall things accurately years after the fact, because I’m not speaking off the cuff, and not speaking for anyone else…… keeping in mind that this is only a record of what I was thinking, and I cannot be a fully reliable narrator because I’m only going on the information I have. Because I know I’ll never reach perfection, I strive for excellence. I will never please everyone. Fact.

Something has changed in me this year, and now I can put my finger on it. I feel more comfortable in my skin because I’m older. I do have wisdom and experience to pass on to other people who are probably smarter than me and already have this stuff figured out, anyway…… this blog is for the ones who don’t.

This blog is for readers who know they’re train wrecks and are actively working on the problem. I don’t know any perfect people, so I know I’ll never get there…. But what I can control is the amount of time I’m willing to dive into the wreck. What I have found that works the most effectively is to be present for every awful feeling you have. If you work it out in your mind, the next time those emotions come up for you, they won’t hurt as much. Lean into emotional pain like a deep tissue sports massage where you get beat up for an hour and a half and somehow feel amazing.

I’m passionate about getting enough sleep more than anything else. When I don’t give my body time to repair itself, I am worse off both physically and mentally. You won’t notice I have CP (probably) until I get very tired. The ability to hold it together is at zero. I fall more often over things I don’t see. I miss steps both up and down. It all hurts when I fall, but I’m used to it. I don’t really have another choice, so I need to come to peace. Being angry at myself is the root cause of all the negative I’ve put out into the world, another universal truth. I am cleaning out my closet. Let’s get down to business and let the real Leslie Lanagan (please) stand up.

It feels different to stand up than it did when I was 20, because if the other person was slightly displeased, I’d go right back to apologizing for my existence. Now, I realize just how accepting my friends are (or not). This is not a slam, because I’m generalizing over hundreds of people including Facebook friends. It’s a spectrum, right, because no one has the same opinion of you on every issue. I have my inner circle, and they’re signal vs. noise, a line I picked up from a web zine in the early 2000s, but I repeat myself.

It’s not that I don’t value a lot of people’s opinions. I most certainly do. I just don’t have room to take on the emotions of more than a few people at once. I have to be absolutely open and vulnerable with them, which takes a lot of stamina, but they’re doing the same thing for me. We are each refilling each other’s social battery because we’re lightening each other’s emotional load. It’s also making sure that the give and take is roughly equal, because I know I’m a handful at times. If you’re the one that’s on my six, I sure as shit am on yours. I have an immense capacity for gratitude because it fills all my empty places. I smile more.

I am passionate about making myself smile more. Pick any one of my entries in the last few months and you’ll see quickly that I’m going through it….. and keeping on keeping on. My chin is up. I just need to keep it that way. The God part of me, my third person omnipotent point of view, hates watching me go through all this- and accepts that it is necessary. That POV is also responsible for a lot of what I’m experiencing now, because I’m only omnipotent regarding knowing what I’m going to do. There are too many permutations to even guess what’s going on in other people’s heads. Heuristics come in after you’ve told me what you’re experiencing because I’m relating your story to every one I’ve ever heard on the topic; I’m hoping that the next thing that comes out of my mouth is relevant to your situation and/or emotional state. #fingerscrossed

I get so embarrassed when what I’ve said is wrong that I withdraw, but I don’t need people to tiptoe around me. I need them to give me time to digest. Your problem with me is what it is; I can’t do anything to change what’s happened, but I can change the future by being willing to talk about all the things that are bothering me…. If I know you have my back. My work to do is turning down rejection sensitivity dysphoria so that I don’t make every mistake I’ve ever made a noose around my neck.

Turning down RSD would turn down a whole bunch of things…. Mostly social anxiety, but I’m sure it would be more than that. I could stop getting into knock-down drag-outs even when no one is in the room. When I fight myself, it is gloves off. I’m tired of knocking myself out because I can’t get up as fast as I used to.

I don’t have any fight left in me, and now I’m trying to find out why I ever got fight in me in the first place. I am aware that women taking back their power always looks like rage, but at the same time, I’ve said things that took all the velvet off the hammer because I don’t react like a Southerner anymore. DC is the South (technically), but Oregon sure isn’t. It’s not that I’m equating Portlanders to being mean, just that I’ve lost the need to sugar coat any and every sentence because I’ve had too many instances of it creating chasms. I’m overly sensitive to miscommunication, so I spell out everything.

I am now trying to remember to edit. Not every e-mail has to be a beautifully crafted essay because not everyone loves to read.

I am passionate about reading, and right now I’ve got a banger of a book. It’s called “The Secrets We Kept: A Novel” by Lara Prescott. It’s about female spies in the 40s and 50s, a group of women there at the founding of CIA hired for the typing pool. They get noticed for their operational potential, and here’s the line that got me…. I love this so hard…… “We bonded over the belief that a life of adventure wasn’t reserved for men, and we set out to claim our piece of it.” They’re the original “Swallows,” which is code for women who use their sexuality to get information out of people. I don’t know of any programs in the US that seriously created these women…. It’s a novel. Says it right there on the cover. Sleeping with an asset is a fireable offense now (or maybe it always has been…. Not fact checking til the book is done), and the US has never been known for it. Russia invented Swallows.

Women, in my experience from talking to a wealth of people in the industry, tend to make better spies. Misogyny works for them in terms of being The Little Gray Man. They tend to stay more calm in stressful situations, because that morning her toilet probably broke, the dog threw up, and her finger was broken so she had to change the baby with one hand while maintaining the facade that she is completely fine. Tell me that woman can’t remain calm when the goods are military equipment and classified documents. She’s probably calm because this meeting sucks and she can sleep standing up. This book takes place after CIA was founded, so past Julia Child’s time at OSS. Yet, she’s still the woman I picture in all these stories…. Unless it’s by Jonna Mendez, because then I don’t have to put my own pictures on fictional characters. I’ve met her a couple of times at the museum, which is kind of cool because now the movies that play in my head are accurate.

I am passionate about Julia Child. I do not think that you can technically call her a spy, because I don’t know if every employee is called a case officer or whether different departments have different titles. In the movie Julie & Julia, Paul and Julia tell a table full of friends that they aren’t spies, they’re file clerks. This is untrue. I don’t know if Paul ever worked for OSS or not, because he said he worked for State in the movie. You don’t really have to be one or the other. They work on things together all the time, so it’s not really important to give everyone at CIA that works with state a diplomatic cover, because the way I understand it is that the allotment of diplomatic jobs we’re funding is set. If CIA takes three of them as covers, then that’s three less jobs that State can fill. So, even if Paul says he worked for State, that doesn’t mean he was never an operations officer. Julia worked for the Office of Technical Services, which is why I would not classify her as a file clerk or an operations officer (perhaps the same title, not the same function. Q does not leave the building.). The biggest thing she’s known for is creating a powerful shark repellant recipe………………. #foreshadowing

I would watch the hell out of the miniseries I’m seeing in my mind right now because of course now Julia Child and James Bond are the same person. She didn’t just create shark repellant, she rappelled down the side of a building before the Germans made her.

It’s so crazy it just might work, which is apparently carved in the topiary hedges at Langley. I hope their pants have reinforced seats due to all the turbulence.

I am passionate about understanding Trump’s documents case, because so far he’s making Snowden look like a rookie through the cunning use of stupidity. We won’t know for a hundred years what this cult has done, because all Russia and China had to do was send people Trump wanted to impress to his house. They don’t have to carry a single thing. Even if every document is accounted for, cameras that fit in pens are unquantifiable. When Aldrich Ames betrayed us to the Russians, we lost ten assets in one summer. I guarantee that Trump never had any idea that sharing information could cause all that, because he showed people those documents to seem impressive to them. He couldn’t care less if Russia or China saw military plans or lists of our assets in country, because what matters is Russia and China thinking he’s cool.

That’s what happens when you need desperately to fill up all the space in a room, constantly interrupting to make sure that the conversation is one-sided and all about his favorite topic…. Him.

I am passionate about using this platform to have a voice in politics and international affairs. I don’t claim to be an expert- far from it. But what I learn I pass on, and I’ve always been a news junkie. I don’t go a day without listening to Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow. So, this blog is not educational, but conversational. I am politically literate, but hold no authority. It’s the process that excites me, or it will if we ever get back to one set of facts. That’s because government is about compromise, and that isn’t even possible if the parties aren’t playing off the same deck. If people are determined to misunderstand you, they will. For instance, constituents vilifying the person designated to help them (Anthony Fauci, Mike Pence). The amount of Americans that believe Trump can do his job perfectly fine from prison if he’s elected boggles the mind.

From a historical perspective, it is not as baffling to me that Trump beat Clinton as it is Trump being the Republican nominee at all. How did he beat out Jeb Bush and John Kasich? Why is the loudest political voice in the country in need of a president to the right of Caligula? This time, it is the people fiddling while Rome burns and not Nero.

Apathy gets to me. Why didn’t more people care when Trump called John McCain a loser for becoming a Vietnamese POW? Why did so many people grit their teeth and vote for Trump anyway? Calling McCain a loser isn’t even in the Letterman Top Ten List of reasons why Trump was a horrible candidate, and people are still swallowing his bullshit filled capsules.

I think that too many people are embarrassed to admit they ate two slices of chocolate pie……………….

Meanwhile, it’s only our national security at stake. What could possibly go wrong?

I am just so passionate about learning how the world works. I am not particularly patriotic, though, because I see the US as part of a larger system. The same chessboard analogy used with states can be used with countries. Problems come in when you focus too heavily on one quadrant. By the time you’ve noticed there’s a problem, the game is over. Not going to lie, I still lose my shit at seeing the military in uniform and all the things that patriotic people do. It’s just that I’m not blind to colonialism or imperialism. We’ve participated in some very shady shit. So have other countries. Therefore, I do not hold the US in a godlike position, as if we should be the arbiter of all things right and good. I think it’s good for the US to finally cut the crap on believing in all that “best country in the world” bullshit. Some things, the US does really well. Some things are a shitshow, and that’s the bargain you make in any country. Some are absolutely more toxic than others, but people are adaptable and find pleasures no matter where they live. You have to focus on the positive if you can’t afford to run.

I am so passionate about bringing light into those dark recesses. I’d love to meet women and girls in the Middle East (we ride at dawn). I couldn’t do anything to help them save holding space, being in a room for the sole purpose of letting everyone else vent. Hopefully, they’d walk away feeling lighter and I’d walk away feeling less dumb.

I am passionate about not being dumb. I do not care if other people think I faked high school graduation, I want to feel within myself that I am intelligent, so I read a lot. It’s amazing how good reading novels is for learning about the world. Something you need to know this year will invariably be information you retained from a book you read in 1998, because the story might be made up, but the writing isn’t. For instance, I learned that Charlotte had a very small airport so I didn’t have to worry about a quick connection time because I read a YA novel that mentioned it about six years ago. Books contain random facts, whether the story is fictional or not.

I am passionate about stories, my own and everyone else’s. In the end, make it a good one. As I approach the second half of my life, I’d like to think I’ve got a better handle on craft, but diplomacy leaves a lot to be desired. The juxtaposition of how we own our stories is complicated and necessary. Relationships don’t survive if one partner is trying to change the other’s story, because no one can make another person do anything. By this I mean that too many people think partners are “fixer-uppers,” and people don’t change. They just don’t. People who want to change others hang in until their partners resent the hell out of them because they’re being controlled. If the controlling partner is willing to work on it, genuinely, then try. A narcissist will never want to work on it because they’ve never done anything wrong. Once a narcissist stops getting that dopamine hit from adoration, they wall off and escape to find someone new who doesn’t know what’s about to hit them.

I think that we call more people narcissists than actually exist. This is because sometimes the relationship can be fixed. Not all bad behavior means someone is a narcissist. Sometimes, they’re just lost in their own heads and not very other aware. The mark of a narcissist is the complete lack of empathy, and the lack was there before you met them. It’s generally caused by trauma, because part of a narcissist’s schtick is being able to control everything in their environment, so they create their own reality. Everyone knows that person around which people orbit. Lots of people have that ability, and it is not inherently negative. It depends on motivation. Narcissists have a desperate need to be liked, no internal validation at all, and they cover up all those significant fears with bravado. Anything they view as negative will be very loud, and that’s par for the course for everyone….. but narcissists will evade culpability by any means necessary. The reason human relationships are so difficult is that narcissists are hard to catch until their behavior is so outrageous that you feel like you’ve been yanked backward and dropped.

I have known so many of them that it’s hard to count, and here’s how I know I dodged that bullet. I want to hear people’s thoughts and feelings. I’m strong and definite in mine, but that doesn’t mean I’m emotionally unavailable. If I come across that way, it probably has nothing to do with the conversation, or I’m too angry in the moment. I am not saying that being too angry in the moment is something for which other people should make allowances. I am saying that is my work to do. Authentic rage is a symptom of PTSD, because it generally accompanies a panic attack. I am not making excuses here, only trying to provide context. I am not escaping accountability. I just think it helps to know why people do things, which is another trait most neurodivergent people share. We’re not trying to be threatening, we’re trying to understand.

Add that to the INFJ motto……. “I’m not insulting you… I’m describing you.” It seems so mean and yet I think of it all the time as profound wisdom. People do not like explaining their behavior….. which is of course the only thing the INFJ wants to help you understand. So, legit nine percent of the world is irritating as shit to everyone else. 91% of the world has trouble speaking in our love language. It’s gotten easier for me to think of love in Greek, because I like granularity and English just doesn’t have it. I now feel solid in philia and agape, but I’m preparing for romance in whatever package it arrives….. I’m just not there yet. I say I am, but I haven’t done anything about it. I don’t want to start another relationship without knowing whether Daniel is in or out, and I made the agreement with myself to give him time to chill, which is most probably just an excuse. Stay tuned.

I’m not averse to dating, clearly, but anything beyond that scares the hell out of me. Serious relationships haven’t gone the distance for me and I feel like I should figure out why before launching into something else and realizing that eight years has probably been enough soul searching. I don’t have to be perfectly perfect in every way before I consider opening my heart. It’s amazing how long I didn’t come to that realization. In retrospect, I couldn’t handle a relationship with a woman outside my beautiful girl because I felt like those things had to come in succession. Once I’d hurt one woman, I knew I was capable of hurting them all. I needed to know if I was really capable of resolving a conflict that large, because I didn’t think I deserved good things to come into my life after it. People have accused me of not being able to let go of the past, and this is untrue. I haven’t been pining away for a straight girl and lying to cover my ass. It’s a familiar story, but it’s not mine.

It just took a really long time to learn that there were limits to us being okay, and I have no ill will. Just sadness it didn’t work out. My perfect picture of us was blow your hair back conversations, nothing about the idea of being together a romantic fire, but an intellectual one. A brain dump on both sides because our life experiences are so different.

There was a beauty in it that is beyond words. We both think big thoughts, but never the same subject at the same time. If I had to sum up our relationship in one word, it would be “asynchronous.” Our upload and download speeds varied wildly.

I feel at peace being able to look at that relationship with a third person perspective and wonder what I would do if this was a story being told to me rather than one I wrote. It helps tremendously in the way I allow myself to talk to me.

It helps me to see whether it’s true that every accusation is a confession, and I believe it is. That’s because when I analyzed where my energy was going, I saw all the accusations between us and in each case, there was an instance where we could both say the same about each other, it’s just that the reasoning behind the behaviors would be different. If you’re in a relationship with someone and you’re both constantly doing the same shit to each other, you’re going to think what they’re doing can only explained by what you felt when you went through something similar, which may or may not match up with mine and defensiveness shuts down communication. You’re not really looking at a situation through the other’s perspective and trying to deal with your anger simultaneously. When you’re fighting, adrenaline makes you react out of fear instead of respond with grace. Being human sucks, because our very nature means we can’t avoid anger at each other all the time. It’s a hope for the best situation, but I always hope for that.

Hoping for the best in life is the fuel that feeds the other fires I feel in terms of gathering knowledge. Knowledge and I are in a passionate love affair, my one and only.