What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

View all responses

Make the effort to know your own body so that you have an acute sense of what is wrong. Emotions do not start as thoughts, they start as sensory perception. Discomfort starts with you. There’s a reason I often say that Aada “got under my skin.” Because she was remote, I felt her energy in the room, or thought I did. A lot of the time, the energy I made up for her was wrong, and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. I should have communicated more. I should have studied boundaries more in-depth, because Aada and I each failed each other.

Learn that lesson early. Everything is all your fault, so nothing is. Do you see what I mean? There is no relationship in your life in which you are going to win one hundred percent of the time, and thinking that you should is just a recipe for sparkling narcissism.

Instead of trying to find blame in someone else, learn what you did that didn’t feel right in your own body. That will help you try to find the truth between “what’s mine to own” and “what’s not.” I am sure that a lot of you sit around and try to find ways to blame yourselves if Aada’s letters are any indication. I have never been saying to myself that Aada was at fault for anything, and the joy of my life is being able to go back to myself 12 years ago and re-live everything at any time. Aada may not ever want to reconnect, but she cannot take away that she and I are an internet institution. Even she agrees that it wasn’t all bad, and I truly wish good things for her in the future. 

I broke my vow of silence on September 11th because I had a panic attack, and I hope she will forgive an unwanted email if she even got one. I am sure that by now she’s blocked my email address, and that is okay by me. I apologized when I realized what I had done and thanked her for putting me on the path towards school. It will come across as manipulative, I am sure.

That’s because it was. Intention does not equal impact, and I was thinking of my feelings and not hers. It’s not like my birthday and the surrounding days afterward aren’t a dumpster fire for her, too, just not in the way I might have imagined. Whenever I feel like I really screwed the pooch with Aada, it’s always realizing that she didn’t give me any scaffolding to succeed. That I failed, but there is a damn good reason why.

She thought that I was just like her, that I manage my feelings like a boss. I don’t. I manage my feelings like a therapist, processing with the appropriate person. Aada slowly isolated me from everyone on earth except her and then got irritated at the result. I cannot help that, nor am I asking for an apology- though it has been given (received, heard, felt, understood, loved, kissed goodbye, etc.).

“What was Missing” is hearing from her that she understands me. Forgiveness is instant. Processing my emotions takes a long time, because I am a naturally curious person and want to understand. My curiosity with Aada was always taken as offensive and pathologized when I was just trying to get to know her. All connections are valid, so I wasn’t “only after one thing.” If that were true, our relationship would have lasted 12 minutes and not 12 years.

Repair would be hearing the result after processing her own emotions, in as secluded an environment as she needs it to be. I’m just intimidated at being alone with each other, but if she’s not, then I’ll manage. I would have compromised on so many things, and she says that there are things that could be clarified…. I just don’t deserve that.

She’s just in a pissy mood and needs to take it out on me because of the “479 blog entries that left nails in my palms.” OMG. You know your life has hit rock bottom when they use a crucifixion reference to describe your writing…… But it’s ok. My government teacher told me how to handle people like that. He said to tell her (meaning my mother) that she’d be fine ’cause I’d stop by to wipe the blood off her cross every day.

John Ben died recently, I heard through the grapevine. Farewell to a most excellent atheistic foil…..

A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash -Pete Rollins

There are so many people in your life who will make your personal choices about them. Some of it is valid. Some of it is not. You have to know when to be firm and when to…….. not. I have said so many things to Aada that I regret simply because if there are lines from her that live rent-free in my head there are certainly things I’ve said that have wrecked her.

For that I owe several thousand apologies, flowers (hopefully seeds we could plant together), and a six pack of the best local brew because a drink is best shared among friends. I waffle between thinking that my work to do is to forget that Aada existed and thinking that the best thing is to feel integrated about it. The relationship went wrong, but I am a better person for having known her.

I do not know whether she can say the same about me.

But what I do know is that I haven’t said that every day, or implied it, because it took being able to see our relationship from Such Great Heights to be able to let go of the emotions surrounding it. Not everything is heightened anymore. She feels soft in my memory, the face I look to for love even now, not knowing if that’s okay.

It has to be, she gave me a picture in which she knew she was “looking at me.”

Make your friends take those pictures. They are absolutely the ones worth treasuring. It is how I know she loves me, not in an “I’m hot for you” sort of way. In an “I enjoy you so much that I’m not quite sure what to do with it” kind of way. Admiration for a writer is a serious thing. I get it, because I’ve had those crushes before…. but I didn’t get one on me until I read me through my beautiful girl’s eyes and ignored my own.

She’s such a firecracker, and one day I hope that these pages will remind her of that. She says that she doesn’t like the portrayal she got, but the picture is skewed because she threw red paint in the center and asked me to pretend it wasn’t there on multiple levels.

She often accused me of painting my feelings as fact. I hear that criticism, but I cannot absorb it wholly because I do not know any storytellers who ask the opinion of everyone in the room and take a consensus on what the story is before they write. A better approach would have been a production meeting offline, and what can I say but that we are both chickenshit losers for not making it happen?

We both intimidated the everliving shit out of each other, and what I wish that she could have seen is a more polished version of what I wrote. She was getting the shitty first draft (SFD) phase every morning and not looking back over a year. It will look different when it is edited, bound, and if she wants it, signed.

But she’s already pre-empted herself by saying, “guess you won’t dedicate that first novel to me. I’ll never know.” Then 15 seconds later…. “for now, all I want is peace.” I believe that creatively we are both fed by the tension, but it gets to be too much emotional dysregulation and we shut each other down…. then time goes by and we miss each other because we don’t remember the dyregulation part of it.

Advice to younger people- this is called “creating your own drama.” Losing Aada was the worst thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life, and I will never truly get over it. I want her back in a way that is primal but directed into self-improvement and self-empowerment. I cannot control what Aada ever does in her life, but what I can do is take her criticisms to heart and decide which ones are truly valid.

Not to do so would be saying to myself (and the world) that she didn’t really matter to me…. that she doesn’t matter to me. In effect, Aada is giving me back my capacity to love the world, because she tilted my heart in that direction. I can love the shape of her for all time in memories and in the work I’ll do with other people. Some of our problems give me highly specialized empathy.

But what I won’t do is let her off the hook for isolating me and then lying to me in such a way that made her want to keep lying instead of coming clean on the first pass. The house in my head that I built for her was too large, because she had puffed herself up. What she does not see is that I roll with reality, and that is the disconnect. She does not want to tell me what reality is in the aftermath of her “one lie.”

We ended up abandoned each other to the wolves, and we should both be ashamed of our actions in those months. We were too harsh- expressing hugs and cheek kisses would have gone a long way. We both feared expressing affection. I felt like I couldn’t do it right and didn’t want to try. How do you put toothpaste back in a tube? I wish I had listened so much more than I talked, because she was telling me what I was trying to learn in ways that were upside down and backwards to the way I understood how the play was supposed to go.

I don’t pick up social cues well, especially over the internet. If you’re young, figure that out quick. It’s good knowing that I have a different cognitive style than most people, and that I probably read Aada wrong for a lot of our relationship as well. I could have had so much more empathy with more communication, like facial expressions, handshakes, hugs, etc.

When my temper got out of control, I was a little bastard internet troll and she didn’t deserve that shit, either. She was just very good at returning fire; it didn’t take much and we were both trying to cut each other off at the knees. We were both in trauma hell, but on way different playing fields.

Advice to my younger self is to cultivate long relationships, but I still cannot tell you how to do that because ADHD and autism do not bode well for them. I’m learning, though. I made a friend yesterday that actually invited me to go do something, and another today. I feel like I am re-grounding myself after a walk in the clouds.

It’s ancient wisdom to touch grass, and it’s coming in handy now.

My advice to anyone younger…. make sure that early on in a relationship, grass is included. There’s no substitute for sitting outside in the sunshine on a quilt with a basket, drinking in Vitamin D and pinot grigio.