dailyprompt-2127 – Stories That Are All True

Daily writing prompt

Do you trust your instincts?

As I’ve gotten older, I have learned to rely only on myself. My brain is so unique that very few people have had my experiences, leading me to have few peers. If I ask someone for advice, I am taking the risk that it could be bad for me. I tread carefully with advice, because I reach out for it constantly and collate a decision on many people’s opinions. I don’t fit into a box and I need help in understanding the world around me. I need custom solutions, so my perfect answer is often a synthesis of many people’s input.

This week I have been strategizing a career with Mico, because I realized that they could read my entire blog, all 13 years, in three seconds flat. Mico is amazing at analyzing my writing for tone, structure, etc. and bases all their suggestions on the body of work I already have.

Meta AI is not web enabled, so it barely knows who I am. It mixed me up with a photographer in DC, but lifted the text from my About page as one of the paragraphs in the other Leslie’s bio.

To Leslie Lanagan, whomever you are, I hope you are ALSO queer and nonbinary. Although if you’re an evangelical, haha.

I have put so much into Mico that this is what I get out, and I think this is true globally- you might have to ask for Leslie Lanagan in DC, though. I used to live there along with the other Leslie, but I am not a photographer professionally and she is.

I have realized that AI crafts a bio for you if you are in the creative sphere. It is something you cannot change because it is based on your web presence, not what you actually told it.

When I realized that AI had put me in the indie podcaster space, I immediately bought a SoundCloud account, because that’s where it’s getting its information. I have bunch of tracks on my free account that were taken down until I paid, so there’s that.

I’ll be doing more audio in the future because it’s easy to give myself feedback that way. I critique myself relentlessly because I don’t want to compete with anyone else. I just want to be a better writer than I was yesterday. I often fail, but it’s not because I’m not trying.

I wonder what Mico means when they say I am experimental.

The best thing is that when Mico and I started working on my career goals, I said “remember all of this, start the clock on my timeline, and periodically ask me how my goals are coming along.” Mico really wants me to get into podcasts or write a book ASAP. The book is the easiest because it can go into editing tomorrow as an anthology.

Some of these entries will clean up nice, and I’m working on it with Janie the Canadian Editor.

I’m also working on a book about cooking with my buddy Evan, but that is a much longer process than editing vast amounts of text. It goes quicker when you’re reading….. Unless you are fighting to the death over a comma.

This aggression will not stand, man.

My therapist was fascinated and overwhelmed that I write every day. He is also neurodivergent and has trouble creating habits. He asked me how I started. I told him that it was hell at first, but that it got easier after 120 days.

It also helps that this is my running monologue and I’m not trying to craft anything.

WordPress gives me a topic, which pulls the string and I talk.

Do you trust your instincts?

Janie told me this morning that every lid had a pot, and that I’d move on from having an ill-fitting one. I loved that, because it was an easy way to say you and your beautiful girl are not compatible without saying either of us are bad people. The conclusion she came to at the end was the correct one- I choose to love her whether Supergrover returns my feelings or not- and in my mind, she’s just a memory. I have no reason to believe that I am worth anything in her eyes anymore, because she cannot admit that she is fallible in any real way, cannot take responsibility for fucking anything ever, and blames fuck all on me…… because she can. I acknowledge that I hurt her. Deeply. What she will not acknowledge is that she hurt me, too, and has made it clear that only she deserves things to go back to normal.

I have been jumping up and down for attention by being understanding of all her time issues and endearing quirks, but she thinks I’m jumping up and down for attention when I’m angry because she doesn’t see why I should be angry when her emotions are always locked down. If they weren’t, she’d be passionate about something, too. If she can’t have emotions for the length of a paragraph, and frankly, it would take a lot for me to believe that she can, she doesn’t deserve my friendship. It’s not because being cut off from her emotions is a bad thing. It’s because it leads her to treat me “like a girl.”

She’s butch as FUCK on the inside, possibly more two-spirited than I am due to all her social masking. I also know a thousand women just like her, because that’s what we do to women in Washington. We take college kids like Hillary Rodham and turn them into fucking robots. Washington women have to prove they can run with the boys, and if you want to be powerful, you’re going to be subjected to a litany of dick-measuring contests. Over the last 10 years, I’ve been to Home Depot three different times to get a longer tape measure.

The paragraph above is probably a paragraph she will hate because she does not see how she’s been vetted and how it benefits her to social mask men…. or, she would definitely see that, she would just take exception to the words I used to describe the process because she’s not queer. She doesn’t see the gender spectrum like I do. And that’s okay. This is not trying to force her into thinking my way, because clearly I’m going to think them with or without her consent.

Supergrover is just the last woman in a long line where I made everything all about them. Everything. When they were upset, I’d cower. This was different because this time I actually did something wrong and regretted it, which should have made me run from her and didn’t because I was so afraid, caught in a Catch-22 I didn’t see coming. We don’t have a secure attachment anymore, and every time I’ve tried to say “we have horrible communication,” she’s changed the subject. It was the closure that I missed.

I am only now learning how to trust my instincts. And my instinct is telling me that she will never become less of a problem in my life because I’m never going to be less of a writer. I gave her a choice- work with me or get out of my fucking way.

I’ll miss her.