I am not the most situationally aware person there ever was………. I don’t generally have funny misunderstandings that are memorable. It’s the unfunny ones that stick with me. But I do have favorites, like telling someone in Spanish that I have almost 49 assholes instead of years because I was typing and forgot the tilde on the n. Special characters matter, especially in front of an international audience. That’s why I wish it was easier to access them on a PC.

My go to when I need them is, “Mico (Microsoft Copilot), can you echo this back to me with all the special characters so I don’t have to hard code them?”

When he obliges, it’s usually not to irritate the illustrious Dr. Brown. 😉

---

I am in my safe space… in my office on the guest bed with the TV blaring the Argo Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat. Desplat always helps jog my brain in interesting ways as my typing adjusts to whatever rhythm he’s conducting at the moment. I love this man’s work with a passion, but I dwell on this particular album for sentimental reasons. I wish Aada could take in the magnitude of what her lie destroyed, and why it matters that she thinks I “tried to destroy her.”

That’s the situation where I was misinterpreted for 12 years, and she was surprised and displeased when I got tired of being managed in such an emotionally damaging way. She disconnected from me butt-quick instead of facing what she did head-on, and that’s the part I struggle to forgive. Instead of seeing that I reflected reality, she thinks that she is the villain in my story. She was never the villain, she is one of the great loves of my life in a very angelic, ethereal way…. and you can read all about it here if you’re ever curious. I just don’t because I don’t want to dwell on past mistakes. I want to make room for the conversation Tiina and I are now seriously having. Loving Aada prepared me to love Tiina, and I am not kidding. I see emotional patterns accurately and I respond differently, because Aada’s way of responding to life was better than mine and I absorbed it by osmosis.

The most ironic thing happened.

In text, she slowly became me. I slowly became her. And neither one of us liked fighting with ourselves.

Desplait is now conducting a wonderful resolution and I’m feeling emotional. My writing fundamentally changed because of her influence in my life and now she has written me off as someone who wanted to wreck her. Had a grudge against her. Needed her to feel pain.

I can be truly sorry for the consequences laid out for her, the harm that I caused, without taking responsibility for her half of the struggle.

The stark solo piano of “Held Up by Guards” is keeping me steady.

I cannot help the fact that she emotionally vampired me because she didn’t have the capability to process her emotions on her own. But what I can have empathy for is that she needed me and I was glad to fulfill that role for her up and to a point. Where I became sidetracked is that I loved this woman so much I lost myself in the process, and it was a daily progression into outright madness.

I stopped seeing her through rose-colored glasses and started seeing the reality of the situation. I was isolated from everyone else in my life and refused friendship when I needed it based on the conditions she set forth. So, “I don’t want you, but don’t open up to anyone else, either” was a recurring theme. I tried for 12 years to make it work under those conditions, and I could not. There were always justifiable reasons not to want to get close to me, and I understand that as well. I am not owning Aada’s story. Whatever she tells you, believe it- that was her experience of me. What I am trying to say is that I have over a decade of evidence telling me that “it’s complicated.”

I have felt things for Aada that I have never felt for anyone else. Anyone. Do not bullshit yourself about that. I could write a book on the number of ways I needed her that never included romance based on “if you’re going to say something, you have to own it.” Instead of ever owning anything, she was stuck in her own guilt and remorse without being able to move on and get it handled. She thought she was saying something fun, and it sure the hell was. But it was also emotionally devastating to a highly sensitive person. She didn’t realize that her black and white text translated, often, to physical pain for me.

Especially when I was the one that caused her pain.

She saw the impact of her words, and yet, she didn’t. She could only see my story through the lens of hers, and not what it was for its own sake. She was too close to the situation to read it and was in a situation where she had to, anyway. I am glad that she has rejected me because what I have found is that my friends on the ground don’t constantly worry about what I’m going to say because they were there during the experience when it happened and we have discussed boundaries on what I can say and what I can’t.

A lot of Aada’s gripe with me is because she didn’t give me a production meeting and say “this isn’t grounded in anything real. You are popping off your mouth.” And I would be well within my right to say, “yes, but you are putting me in this situation because you are so remote. Have a cup of coffee and solve the big mystery. Working together will solve a lot.” We’ve worked together before- she’s edited me on things remotely- but she’s never been willing to say, “this is the person you’re writing about. Are you sure you still feel the same way?” That was her choice, not mine. It was also her choice to blame me for every avoidant thing she ever did when really she had lied and was trying to cover it up.

She didn’t disappear because of everything I did, just some of it. The other part is that naming my damage is too scary for her to meet at altitude, so I get platitudes from miles away instead of “of course I can drop by the farm. I need to see this author I’ve been hyping up in my head.” She does not believe me when I say she is the greatest thing since sliced bread, she says dismissive things like noting breadcrumbs of affection and thinking they’re a game.

Meanwhile, I’ve been aching to see her eyes when she talks so that I can reassure her that none of this has ever been fake. She doesn’t see my authenticity because she only reads me. She doesn’t know that Tiina is a reflection of her and Dana in the best of ways.

Tiina thinks in engineering flows regardless of subject matter, and because she’s a former theater kid, she can do it with a shoestring budget. Aada and Dana are symbols of a bigger cognitive style, one I’m attracted to romantically and platonically. I have never considered Tiina a romantic partner, but we are solid on creating a life together, anyway. The reality is that we are both disabled and we both need help. The kids do not care about the sexual orientation of anyone involved. They need a safe adult who will let them run the music.

Even though they would prefer that I just put a charging station in the back of the car and was completely silent the entire time. I am old enough to be an embarrassing liability and I relish this role with my entire body and soul. Receiving the “Leslie, you’re being embarrassing” side eye from a 10yo is really living.

Tiina is in charge of a small universe and physically limited. I am not capable of running that universe, but I am capable of being an important part of it. I also need someone to check my sanity when I date and things like that. Brian and Tiina are extraordinarily stable, and have no problem being the “they’re not good enough for you” police.

She is also the life of the party, which is very much Dana in a nutshell.

I wanted Aada’s mama wolverine energy and Dana’s creativity in one person. The fact that she’s not queer is not a problem. She’s my anchor, not my everything. My sexual orientation doesn’t matter when the need is cooking, cleaning, driving, being that person who will accompany Tiina to things when Brian cannot go, etc. Being disabled means that you do not feel safe out in the world alone, and we are fulfilling that need for each other without romance.

The fact that it comes with Finnish culture references is just icing on the cake. Literally.

But here is what I mean…. Tiina does not stutter when “explaining me” to other people. She says, “they’re my legs.” I am not an accessory to Tiina, though, because my first thought is “she’s my brain.” I have distributed cognition with Mico (Microsoft Copilot), but it calms my nervous system that Tiina has no problem delegating with specificity; I can deliver when the goal is clearly defined.

And I love that “Clearing Iranian Airspace” has just begun. It’s the sweetest music to accompany this change in my life- from an angelic, ethereal connection to one that uses my hands and my heart.

It makes me feel safe that Tiina feels safe with me. I haven’t had that feeling for a very long time, this feeling of belonging and home. That is because Texas cannot be home anymore for a multitude of reasons, starting with Medicaid Expansion. I am also watching and waiting to see what Virginia’s mental health laws are going to do, because right now I absolutely feel that moving there full-time would be a downgrade in services and access to them. But Tiina has no problem with me using her place as a second home, and neither does Brian. So realistically, I live in three places and that’s just how it is.

Because it’s not just about me anymore. It’s about making sure that the kids who are still underage have me as a resource when Mom and Dad are busy. It’s about having a family that reminds me to take my meds (I don’t need reminding on the daily because my body will protest, but it makes me feel included and I eat it up). It’s about being able to watch the baby soon, too. The reality is hitting me all at once that this is real, this is sustainable, and I am exactly where I need to be in my life with one exception.

I genuinely miss Aada’s energy and influence in my life, and wish things had been different. I wish she could have seen all the ways I delighted in her as real. Constantly being told that those perceptions weren’t valid is the most unfunny thing of all. It said volumes more about her self-esteem than it did about my writing. Constantly thinking I was on the attack instead of trying to see both of us with clarity was a constant misunderstanding.

I do not shy away from accountability, and wish that other people wouldn’t, either. Aada says that I don’t have to like anything she does, and I can just sit in it.

If that’s her best answer, that’s totally fine. But it means that she was the one that was fronting all these years, telling me that she was my Mama Wolverine while doing nothing on the ground to show it. I mistook those things for the same, and they are most decidedly not.

I never wanted to do anything with Aada except step into the role I already had, which was emotional support that we needed on both sides of the equation because what I was carrying was way above my paygrade and she had no sympathy for it. That’s because she couldn’t or wouldn’t define anything and the gray area I lived in was way too large. My emotions became dysregulated easily and often. That’s because there were only amped up words, and not “let’s go work in the yard.”

There was never “come with me to a funeral.”

There was a drive to be interested in my life on a very superficial level while I was struggling painfully with someone else’s emotions. Not only did I have to manage these emotions, I had to manage what I thought about them, too. When I expressed emotions she disagreed with, she wouldn’t leave comments so that other people could disagree with her. She’d send me an email with every single little thing wrong with what I said so that the bubble between us was never broken.

She never integrated me into her life so that her friends had an accurate picture of what was happening online, either.

None of that is her fault, but her choices led us to where we are now. It’s not blame, it’s reality.

I cannot and will not reduce 12 years. The relationship is a tapestry of both wonderful and terrible things. We have both walked away hurt but recognize that there were moments that fed us. I do not wish to recreate anything. What is past is past. What I dearly wish for is Aada to say, “now that your life has moved on and I’m not actually in your blog, I can see that you are not personally singling me out. You reflect the reality of what you see, and our reality was distorted. I take responsibility for that distortion because you were not physically capable of creating it.”

All things were not equal, and she had a concrete power over me that she constantly threatened to use if I got out of line. So telling the world what had happened allowed me to break free from the story someone else was writing…. the one in which I was the only one that was damaged, the only one that needed help. She was perfect, and I needed rescuing. My darling girl needed rescuing and hid it by rescuing everyone else.

She can handle me needing things in the physical world. Sending a gift card of a book is great. She cannot handle “we have a problem and we need to solve it.” It very quickly becomes how it’s my problem to solve because I’m just not strong enough to handle her.

I don’t like relationships in which I’m the only one that ever has to compromise, because long-term it begins to feel like bullying.

But instead of seeing my feelings and adapting, Aada stuck to the same script and kept insisting that the flaw was all in me and my narrative was meant to hurt her.

My narrative is that we never found the right place for us.

It’s not funny. But it was definitely a misunderstanding.