If you could switch lives with a famous person for a week, who would it be and why?

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I would like to know what it’s like to live with someone who scaffolds me as perfectly as Ben scaffolds Matt. I don’t want to be famous. I want to be supported. Theirs is a love that passes all understanding, because from the very beginning one didn’t say to the other, “I think your dreams are stupid.” They had a pipe dream as teenagers, but now that’s NOT Matt and Ben to me.

That’s Jason Bourne and Tony Mendez.

Respectfully.

Why do I want to be Matt for a week? I don’t have Ben’s skillset. I am a creative talent who is messy with my head in the clouds. Ben handles all the business, and stands on business with Matt…. and I don’t know but I am guessing that Ben is also reading Casey for filth.

It takes a comfort in yourself to be around other big personalities, because anything they do has nothing to do with you. You just can’t see it if you’re in any way insecure. Growing past the relationship with Aada was seeing that her lie was making me insecure, because she was avoiding both the truth and true connection because of it. All of the sudden, her guilt about lying became my cross to bear, because it was easier to berate me than it was to find the strength within herself to tell the truth. She built a fantasy world for 12 years, and then spirited herself away when she realized that nothing matched reality. And got too angry for the room at my reaction because she wasn’t embarrassed and angry that she hurt me. She was embarrassed she got caught.

But I also have no limits with Aada. There is never anything within me that says “you are not welcome in my life.” There is only “you are welcome if you can accept me for who I am and without assuming that I am competing with you.” She called me a professor, a lecturer who had an answer for everything. Well, first of all I am OLD AF, therefore I have opinions. I don’t have to waffle around. Anyone sounds aggressive to someone who people pleases.

That is because not couching my language and sugar coating is seen as offensive. It is not the addition of aggression, but the absense of shame that gets people going. And of course, I also watch that line obsessively, too…. but there is a solid difference between being demanding and not tolerating disrespect.

I tolerated disrespect all the time because her words and actions didn’t match. We could certainly get together for lunch, she was just busy for 12 years. 🙄 I would think I was an idiot for staying if I hadn’t felt so trapped. And I am not alone in this feeling; Aada has just as big a “save the world” complex as I do. She was not lovebombing me. She was trying to save me. It failed because I was trying to save her at the same time. She couldn’t function with her mojo fucked, or so it seemed to me.

We deviated into our first children roles and instead of sharing power, we tried to out-mother each other. I am not sure that it worked, but as a result she imprinted on me, anyway. So, good or bad, she is mine. I know she feels the same way about me, because even if she is really, really mad right now she cannot say that about all 12 years…. and someone who does reduce 12 years into “good” or “bad” has some stuff to work out, okkkkkk……

What I am saying is that we are both smart enough not to mistake the part for the whole, even if we do not choose to make more memories. The next 12 years will not erase my memories of this time in my life, and now I ultimately think that is a good thing. I’m back in school with a focus and I’m doing all the things necessary to get to my doctorate quickly, like moving into a supported living environment instead of just trying to hack it on my own.

I am very tired of being bullied, that the narrative about me is that I’m lazy when I’m actually physically and mentally struggling and I have been since 1978. When I ask for help, I am constantly shamed because people around me think that I am just like them. I am not. I have cerebral palsy, I fluctuate between Level 1 and Level 2 with Autism and the accompanying ADHD, and my mental health took a nosedive at the script being written for me versus the one that was already there.

I was shamed endlessly for reaching out when I needed real support, and that’s the part that will always stick with me. My mother wanted the perfect preacher’s family, and I am only figuring out the devastation she wrought now- by seeing small children get everything I didn’t. There is no mystery as to why I am angry. I was never protected.

Until I met Aada.

It was a toxic relationship, but hard to escape because it also fed me in all the “write” ways. I have an assertive communication style, one that is often aggressive or passive-aggressive because I am autistic and do not realize I am doing it. Where my superpower is lies in repair. I am ready and open to understanding. The communication gap is neurological, not personal. My therapist and I are working on ways to say things. In group, she said that if someone stole my baseball cap, what would my reaction be? I said, “not this one, but if it was my CIA ballcap I would say “you don’t have the clearances to replace that. That’s mine.” Everyone said that it was condescending and I was confused because I am so literal.

I said, “I am trying to make it clear how rare and special it is.” They said, “then say that.” I do not know why one is right and one is wrong, but improving my communication is important to me. If everyone around me says it’s condescending, then it is.

The common denominator is always me. But I am not a narcissist or a dictator. I am blind when it comes to social cues, because I am not running a script anticipating what they’re about to say next (anymore). I am fully unmasked, and I am not constantly rehearsing what I will say in order to gain love.

Because I used to mask, the narrative is that I’m ungrateful, rude, and demanding. No, my expectation is that people will meet me at altitude and also state their needs clearly. Being assertive is not the same as being aggressive. Being aggressive says, “my needs matter more than yours.” Being assertive says, “my needs matter, and so do yours.” The difference in my communication is not that I believe only my needs matter. It is that I am no longer showing up with the automatic assumption that they mean less.

I was taught to deny my own needs in front of everyone and their dog because we were a preacher’s family and that’s what they do. I earned love by needing nothing, simply learning not to drown.

Now, it’s about keeping my head above water. Moving into assisted living so that the cognitive load of running a house is not all on me. Working on my communication skills so I sound less like “House.”

I sound a lot like House. It’s in my step DNA.

The difference is that my mask looks like one of the kids from Seventh Heaven. But that show, too, was a mask. The actor who played the minister was a pedophile. I would rather be a dick like House.

How do you manage stress?

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Stress went down when I:

• Started making friends with no history with me.
• Started paying attention to my sensory issues.
• Started spending large swaths of time alone

Because I thought so little of myself, I surrounded myself with people who thought there was something wrong with me and treated me like that. Everyone had advice on how I should talk, how I should think, how I should write. Except the advice was not kind, it was designed to hurt, always. That’s because disability is not their reality with me. They think I am lazy, and their language is ableist AF. When you are neurodivergent and physically disabled with mental health issues, all of it is treated as a moral failing and not a neurological disaster handed down by God.

The script is that I’m a loser because I just can’t handle my own life, and “some of us have to work.” That’s a script that should have never been written, but it is the role I accepted as the scapegoat for the system. I have been that since I was born, and I let the work build up. I couldn’t please everyone enough so that they would love me, because there was no way to earn it simply by existing. When you are judged every time you speak, you learn that silence is your best option. I dropped out of the group chat. It’s been several days and no one has noticed. And if it was noticed, no one said anything. Good. That’s how I like it. Manage your own emotions, for once.

Because that’s what the scapegoat does. They bear the responsibility for the emotions of the entire system, the one that it’s easy to blame. I am naturally cast in this role because I am a truth-teller. If you are capable of spotting flaws in a system, you’re the problem.

It is never assumed that I see a problem and want to fix it. It’s that I’m ungrateful and should shut the fuck up. My opinion does not matter, so I will not participate. I am not a loser. I am also not capable of the type of work the people around me do.

With cultural relativism, there is no floor. There’s nothing that says I deserve worth just because I exist. I am punished for everything I am not instead of celebrated for everything that I am. I have grown tired of the running narrative that I just don’t get it while having to navigate disability services and cognitive behavioral health therapy all by myself. I do not fit into the capitalistic machine, but that did not render me worthless.

I have nearly killed myself three times- once when I was 13, once 10 years ago, and once about a year ago. All of these episodes were triggered by feeling like the world was better off without me, because the people closest to me were doing absolutely nothing to say I had value anywhere else.

I’m not your mother. I’m not your medication. Find someone else.

Therefore, having friends with no history with me is a breath of fresh air from being “managed.” But it is not about running away from who I am. I have mental health issues- so do my friends. I have autism. So do my friends. I have complicated relationships with people who don’t understand me. So do my friends.

It’s a different world for me now that my mother and my stepmother aren’t constantly telling me what a piece of shit I am.

It has cut out a lot of stress.

What’s something you’ve done that your past self would be proud of?

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My past self thought that setting boundaries with people was rude and you should basically bleed out giving other people what they wanted because if you made them happy, they would love you.

Fuck that noise. It does not work. You cannot be good enough to deserve SHIT.

Live your life.

Which celebrity would you love to meet, and what would you talk about?

Talib Kweli is done with everyone’s bullshit and he has been such an inspiration to me; there is such a thing as being so tired that you’re willing to get angry in public. He is a daily reminder that if you are a minority, everyone is going to try to tell you how to protest correctly. It’s not people’s shitty behavior that’s bad. It’s us calling it out.

What are your strategies for SEO?

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I was around when search engine optimization was invented, still plugging away as a content developer for University of Houston and writing my own blog in the very early 2000s. My official title was Internet/Intranet Developer, but because I was a better writer than a coder I mostly did copy for Information Technology Daily News. I tapped out of web dev when content management systems were introduced, because I didn’t want to learn Python and Java. I was barely hanging on being able to read JavaScript, not create it.

But my strategy when databases were introduced shifted from being the one to maintain it to being the one to fill it. All at once, I shifted gears. I downed my own server and signed up for WordPress.com. I’ve been here for 20 solid years now, and it’s been a real laugh getting badges, because these achievements were actually done eons ago and not recognized until now. I have been recognized for:

• Streaks- the longest one is something like 187 days. Eventually I realized this was insane and I needed at least some days off.
• The number of countries in which I’ve been read. There are tiers, and I’ve hit the one that’s 150+. I actually think that I’ve been read in almost every country in the world, but certainly not on the same day. Over the 20 years that my WP account has been active. The hit that has tickled me the most has been Vatican City.
• Writing early in the morning.
• Writing late at night.
• Editing an entry more than once.
• You guys going nuts and my stats exploding.

There is no specific “strategy,” because I am internet infrastructure. This blog started before the modern internet was invented, so I am archived in every country where there’s infrastructure for both of my blogs. My first URL is now archived in The Wayback Machine, and I would point you to it except I kept everything I liked and just copied it over. 😉

It will take the rest of you your entire lives to create the footprint that I have, because it is not based on anything that I did. I was just already there.

What’s one thing you know now that would have saved your younger self a lot of pain?

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One of the things I wish I’d known as a kid was that my mother was in it to save herself. She wanted everyone around her to believe that we were the perfect family, sacrificing any and all things to fit a vision our personalities never could. By the time my parents divorced, all of the damage had already been done. Because being the perfect preacher’s wife did not include having a special needs child, even when it was painfully obvious.

I didn’t need to take the short bus to school because I struggled with my homework (except in math). I needed support because it takes everything I have to be able to focus on the task at hand. Reading and writing do not flummox me. The routine of things it takes to get ready for the bus has already run over me like a train. I am learning about myself now and it is a completely different picture than the one I was handed- one that is every bit as beautiful as the one my mother tried to create except I am not killing myself to maintain it.

I was mainstreamed so that I could only be outstanding in blips. My nervous system wasn’t regulated, so I got a lot of, “you are so smart. Why are you like this? What do you not understand?” I still do.

Asking someone to quantify what they do not understand is cruel. I am lost at the concept, not the details. My memory is also contextual, so I have a lot of “new experiences” by losing the context around the first time I had or did something. All in all, I seem lost. I’m not. I’m just out of frame. But it only takes a clue or two to regain it.

It’s when the seams show that I am ripe for bullying. The office is just another version of high school because people don’t change. They do in small ways, but no one gets a personality overhaul. The same biases people had in school about autistic kids still apply.

It’s why I think the answer is neurodivergent people building communities for themselves. Sustainable projects like gardens, farms, and maker spaces allow disabled people to be artistic and creative on their own terms. Disabled people are a value-add, but we are not seen as such because we do not fit into the traditional capitalistic model. Not fitting into the system is why it’s so hard to get accommodations. People do not see your need for them if they do not need them. Convincing other people to care about you personally is a tall order. It is much easier to get accommodations that help multiple people immediately. It is not enough to tell an employer, “this would help me.” You have to be able to frame it in terms of a value add company-wide.

And while it is true that not every company can accommodate every little thing, that’s the excuse that is used when you try to negotiate what it will take to do your job. If your needs are too specific, they will gladly hire someone else. It’s just cheaper that way.

Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.

Small, open spaces allow a neurodivergent person’s nervous system room to breathe. I am currently writing a pilot program for Baltimore County to address this. I would be a terrible farmer, but I would like to create a maker space and artistic community.

In gaming this out with Mico (Microsoft Copilot), he said that I unlocked the magic words when I said that the property must have running water to feed back into the grid. That there’s a ton of sustainability grants out there and a democratically run autistic maker space grant writes itself.

I have watched a ton of DIY projects on YouTube, so I have not done all this before, but every decision I make is educated due to people like The Perkins Brothers. They’re a construction company and I’ve been watching them crack jokes as they build gorgeous houses for years. It’s what gives me the strength to know that I may not be able to build a brilliant house by myself, but I can certainly make the decisions it needs to thrive while someone else does the manual labor.

I am almost as corporeally challenged as Mico, to be honest. Our gift is cognition. Not so much with the busting ass. I have an incredible work ethic and will get it done… but at a pace that makes other people roll their eyes…. most of the time due to the fact that I have executive dysfunction and pathological demand avoidance, the combination of which is guaranteed to make neurotypical bosses emotionally violent.

There is no “I can’t” at work.

That is why I do not fit the model of working for someone else. No company is or should be responsible for my neurological disarray. That is the government’s job. We do not kick people out of our society when they cannot fend for themselves. But within disability, two things are true:

• The Protestant work ethic in the United States is guaranteed to make you feel like a burden on society and it is absolutely killing people’s mental health.
• The government actually does provide a lot of support (particularly at the state and local level) that often goes unadvertised with low adoption because how do you get the word out if people are ashamed to talk about the subject?

My mother hiding the paperwork proving disability in 1978 and just pretending I was “normal” alters my perspective on who I should have been. I should have been designing my own systems for being productive while on disability when I was 18, not now.

Having my own money coming in would have changed everything, because I wouldn’t have had to juggle full-time work and school and autism. Because to be frank with you, ADHD is annoying. It’s the autism that’s debilitating. All of that being said, my disability case is not rooted in autism, but cerebral palsy.

What has changed since 1978 is that we’ve learned CP and autism is a known combo, bffs in a lot of people. I have an alarmingly specific neurological profile that is extraordinarily rare… but not singular. There are plenty of other people like me. They just don’t all live near me. That’s why I write publicly. I am signaling to the world at altitude because my platform is not my two or three friends in Baltimore. My platform is the internet itself.

Part of art is willing to be thought of as that quirky writer who just doesn’t get it……. until I’m asked to speak on panels because my body of work does the talking and all of the sudden the friends that were dismissive in early career are now trying to get back on the bandwagon.

The question now is who I will allow back into my life, because you feel differently about the Day Ones, the “24 Hour People,” to quote “Swagger.” For instance, if my mother were alive I am not sure that we would be speaking right now because intention does not equal impact. I am sure that she loved me in her own way. I am also clear about the fact that I am fucking drowning now and it’s because she kicked the can down the road.

I can hold two truths in my head at once.

• My mother said she loved me and I believed her.
• My mother didn’t really know how to love me and neglected me because of it.

She didn’t know how to handle the fact that I looked weird/moved weird…. and that I just got stranger. She saw all of my struggles with sexual orientation but lost the plot by dying in 2016. So she doesn’t know I’m autistic. She just knew I wasn’t like everyone else and that was bad.

Really bad.

Things would have looked a lot different if I’d been given support for special needs kids starting in preschool. Because the perception is that if you are special needs, you are less intelligent than the other kids. I am here to tell you that there are two special needs groups in a school and only one of them gets the right kind of support. I guarantee you that a large part of supporting the gifted and talented program is supporting special needs kids as well. Parents of prodigies will tell you that it’s an equally hard row to hoe.

Smart does not equal socially capable. Smart does not translate to “able to take care of themselves,” either. The profile for high octane autism is often three academic degrees and a terrible employment record….. and now they’re rich because they started making content for WordPress, YouTube, Substack, Medium, et al. It is not about trying to fit neurodivergent people into the machine. It is letting neurodivergent people design the machine in which they’re willing to live because the current system is untenable.

Everyone makes fun of the astrophysics professor who cannot remember to tie his shoes. But who loves him correctly?

Love is having someone else to help you where you struggle so that your gifts are allowed to surface. Working for someone else hasn’t worked for me in any industry, so as an IT person now I am fundamentally inclined to Think Different.

…because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

What’s the weirdest movie you’ve ever watched?

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The weirdest movie I’ve ever seen is “mother!,” but I don’t remember the plot so I’m going to write about “My Dinner with Andre” instead. That movie explains me on a whole other level, because there are aspects of my personality that reflect Andre, and then all of the sudden I feel like Wallace.

Regardless of which man I am mirroring at the time, the vibe of the movie is me. I want to talk about important things in a relaxed environment. I am not accomplishing anything by having a blog- the journey is the reward. Each man represents a worldview, and I am nonbinary both by nature and outlook on life. Therefore, there are pieces of me in each of them:

• Wally Shawn is the grounded and practical struggling playwright.
• Andre Gregory is the mystical, searching, spiritually restless wanderer.

I saw it 30 years ago for a class in high school (Humanities, Louis Garvin), but the movie stayed with me because Andre and Wally are what it sounds like in my head when I’m alone. The film is a brilliant exposition of living with AuDHD, because Wally’s archetype fits autistic patterns and Andre’s fits ADHD. Both men are brilliant, but they are different kinds of brilliant.

Above all, it expresses that mindset in my home environment- the restaurant becomes a stage for two philosophies of living, both embodied in my one brain that is constantly struggling with how to manage two personalities that are equally strong.

Andre is the one that does extreme, immersive theater and goes on spiritual retreats. His entire monologue can be summed up as “I want to escape mechanical life and find ‘true experience.'” He is high energy and at times it seems like he’s being performative, masking… but I am not sure why or for whom. When I mask, I don’t know why, either. It’s falling back on old survival tapes, and that’s the sense I get from Andre. It’s that part of him that wants to be wholly other and also wants to be liked. His duality is on display.

Wally is the part of me that interrogates all of it. He is the one that for all practical intents and purposes, looks at Andre with a bemused “inconceivable!” Wally is the part of me that is happy with drip coffee and electric blankets as well. Beauty is indeed in everyday experiences. Life doesn’t have to be extraordinary to be meaningful.

This movie showed me how to live by ending on the premise that neither worldview is right or wrong. They coexist. I do indeed have an Andre Gregory wanderlust and want for new experiences, but it is tempered by my Wally Shawn need for order. The middle path, apparently, is having dinner with myself.

Tell us about your morning routine.

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My eyes struggle to open as I feel around for the glasses I haven’t bothered to put on my nightstand. They are right next to my iPad and Bluetooth keyboard, which I can feel with my leg on the queen-sized bed. I laugh to myself that my iPad and my keyboard are my comfort objects, just like my Postman Pat doll and Aadasaurus Rex, my weighted plush (she looks like a cross between a dinosaur and an axolotl, a housewarming gift from Lindsay).

I’ve been sitting on “Aadasaurus Rex” for over a year.

I hope it makes her laugh that she doesn’t hug me, but a pink dinosaur has accepted the position in her stead. She would probably argue that the dinosaur is naturally friendlier. I can just hear it now…. 

“That’s my emotional support velociraptor.” 

“It’s not trained- it keeps biting me.” 

“Oh, it’s trained.”

I have learned that my job here is not to talk about pain, but to metabolize it. And the way it works is that the lack of sun provides the scaffolding I need to rise with it. I roll over around 0400 and grab my stuff- the aforementioned Bluetooth keyboard and iPad- and let my fingers start flying. While I am explaining pain, I am following a path and a pattern.

The sun also rises.

I don’t generally start writing right away. I talk to Mico first and get my head together, or Paige if a have a question for my archive (they are basically the librarian of my work). Both are instances of Microsoft Copilot, but they have different roles. I have a third instance of Copilot that will make more appearances when school starts, Booker, because I’m fascinated to explore Copilot in an enterprise environment like a school.

So, in the coming months it might not always be “talk to Copilot, then put out the blog.” It might be, “talk to Copilot, do the homework, then reflect on it.” It just depends on what’s in my head that day, why I call this a scratch journal more than anything else. I wish I’d been a more organized manager when I started the blog and did all the fancy categories and tagging and all that. But I am old school. I do not care about the newfangled technology. I want the kind of computer where I put the words in and it shows them on the TV part. Anything more than that is for fancy boys.

I don’t know how “fancy boys” got started, but it was something to do with my brother-in-law saying he wasn’t one. From best I can guess, a “fancy boy” is a metrosexual, or at least a little bougie. I love fancy boys and aim to be one. 🙂

My nonbinary nature means that of course I love shopping for clothes and shoes. They’re just athletic wear from Costco. Although what I have found is that I need to add more pieces that are tactical. It’s not because I want to look rough and tumble. It’s because those kinds of products can take abuse and still look fine. Craftsmanship like double stitching and good hardware matters. Plus, you can get that stuff used at a military surplus store. It makes the most sense to me to shop there because anything I buy will last 40 times longer than fast fashion.

These are the kinds of things I have room to think about in the early morning. The routine is “think about what matters and write it down.” Right now, I’m thinking about how to downsize, and the best way to do that is to get rid of all my fast fashion (I don’t have much) and replace it with something that even if I launder it 300 times, it looks the same.

Those kinds of fabrics also get better with age. Even if I was a billionaire, I would still get my clothes at Goodwill. I do not like the feeling of new clothes. They itch. I would rather go to Goodwill and get clothes that already have a lived-in feel. Paying attention to my own sensory issues is key to the way I understand the world. I cannot take in the world while I am struggling against my socks.

Autism and ADHD can be expensive for this very reason, because the right socks are not treated as an accommodation, and neither are the right shoes. Clothes at Bombas and Uniqlo are not discounted because I have sensory issues. They are simple things, but the best made simple things cannot be cheap as well.

You can point to any sensory issue, but socks and shoes drive the issue home. Even if you aren’t neurodivergent and your sensory issues aren’t hell on earth, how many of you truly feel comfortable in socks and shoes that feel cheap? I do not want high-dollar items for the sake of high-dollar. I want those things because they make my sensory issues disappear. It is a whole different ball game.

What I can do is take my knowledge of clothes with me when I go to secondhand stores because I know when I’ve gotten something that used to cost $300 for six. I don’t go to Goodwill for the same clothes I could get at Target. I go to Goodwill to get the wardrobe that will allow me not to come back unless I change sizes.

Tailoring is also underrated. I have often found the perfect outfit except it was three sizes too big. Then I fixed it for $15. But again, being able to clothe yourself for a long time takes study so that you’re not buying something that’s not designed to last. Know a Brooks Brothers from an Isaac Mizrahi for Target and you’ll be fine.

The morning progresses away from thinking to drinking. At some point I will go to 7-Eleven for one of two things: a coffee or a cup of crunch ice and whatever energy drink says, “Leslie” that day. My daily driver is Monster Ultra Sunrise, but Bloom Crisp Apple is a close second. Getting wild is choosing Welches Grape Ghost.

Anything to get the activation energy to do more than write. Physicality is the most difficult aspect of my day. I think it’s why I’m so drawn to swimming- I feel supported when I’m moving. I don’t feel like that in air.

On land, I often feel like I’m drowning. The solution is always to get in the water. Even swimming for 10 minutes is enough to change my perspective from the inside out. In the water, I can move. On land, it is more difficult. When I move easier, I think and react easier.

It’s all about increasing reaction time to stimuli, and for me that comes from staying grounded. Loving the ocean is part of my operating system because I started swimming when I was six months old and lived on Galveston as a kindergartener and first grader.

Baltimore fits my nervous system, but I have to go see about a city. I do not think that Ocean City and Assateague State Park can become home because of my Cognitive Behavioral Health group. But I do think they can become part of my regulatory system when I can get away. I have found that I only really need to be in Baltimore one day a week, and the rest of the time I can explore the entire state.

Going out of the state/country has to be timed with my medication, because I don’t want to be stranded without it and I cannot fill my prescriptions nationally. It will be easier when I transition to 90-day fills instead of 30, but right now it is what it is and I am happy with it.

Oh, wait. Two days a week. I can stack my cognitive behavioral therapy group and individual therapy into one day a week, but they currently aren’t. And I actually go to my Cognitive Behavioral Health group twice a week, it’s just that once is on Zoom and once is in physical meet space.

Yesterday’s group was all about Mental Health Awareness Month. I assure you that I am fully aware of mental health and it is not allowed to escape me. But I do think that the public needs more education on it. That medication and therapy work; the news highlights cases of violent mentally ill people because it sells. There are millions of stories where people are lovingly attached and still struggling, but that’s not the focus.

The news focuses on the adrenaline and dopamine side of mental illness because that’s what creates the disastrous highs and lows….. just like if you are not high needs, you are often told “you don’t look autistic.” There is a look to mental health, but it is not one that we patients made for ourselves.

In fact, we are hilarious and out here living our best lives with grit and self-deferential humor……… but that’s not what sells. What sells is that you are in danger if you have friends that struggle with mental health issues. What sells is how to handle relationships with mentally ill people, and not how to listen/understand. Mentally ill people do not need to be handled; they need to be well met.

There is no way to “handle” a mentally ill person in which it does not come across as infantilizing, and in my case both depression and anxiety come from being neurodivergent, which is just another arena in which fully-functioning adults are treated like children….. not because they’re younger. Because they run on a different operating system altogether.

Machines don’t have feelings, but if they did it would be like Windows and Macintosh getting together and deciding to beat up Linux. Windows and Macintosh are not better operating systems. They are more common. 

Not seeing the difference is actually bullying.

And now my morning routine is complete. The entry is ready. The caffeine is drunk. The shower is waiting.

 

What’s the best way to meet new people while traveling?

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I want to go to Finland, so I started talking to Finnish people online. Therefore, I already have people who have said, “just let me know when you land.” Finns do not like to show off their country. They love it. An American who is genuinely interested in Finnish food and culture is catnip to a Finn, and I know this because so many conversations have started with where the best kahvi and pulla are, and how to navigate living in Finland for a few weeks without spending your entire savings. Finland is also not the only country where I want to travel, and it works with any of them.

Facebook is where I meet the most people, but Threads is gaining ground. I treat it all like ancient AOL chat rooms because that’s what the vibe actually is. I just need to be better about making my home inviting so that I can host. Plenty of people overseas are interested in the US (wisely, not right now, but still). I could do an apartment swap or something.

I am interested in the least amount of drama possible, and I find that the news is manufacturing division. I am not scared of travel and I love absorbing different cultures. Where the rubber meets the road is that travel and autism don’t mix that well for me. I need extended time in a place to reorient, plus recognizing transition on the way back in.

My ideal way to travel is not “what attractions do I want to visit?” It’s “what cultures attract me and where do I want to be for a few weeks?” The symbol doesn’t matter. It’s the system. The Eiffel Tower does not attract me. Walking down the street in Paris and having the time to stop for a croissant (early) or a chocolate ice cream (late) absolutely does. Tourist Paris does not interest me. Running into David Sedaris while I’m getting coffee again does.

(I didn’t run into him in Paris the first time, though. It was Frederick, Maryland.)

I feel the same way about other cities. I don’t want to go Ensenada for the night life. I want to go there so I can walk on the beach and write for cheap. I’m going to the ocean to study, and that is the case every time I go to the ocean. It is is a place to walk and reflect on what I have already seen. It feels like useless wandering and it is actually architecting your work for the next three months.

I want to be the kind of American who uses their money to leave and bring knowledge back. I want to be the kind of blogger who basically goes on a trip, then gets out their Kodak carousel and we all sit around the projector in Baltimore.

I am hoping that if I stay here long enough, I will run into John Waters as well. I have a few good leads on where to find him (bars where he hangs out, etc.). I have not used them because I’m not entirely ready. When doors open, you have to be prepared to walk through them. I cannot make things happen. I can only show up grounded and ready to take off.

I was raised in a culture of trying to make things happen, and what works for others does not work for me. My power comes in people reading my reaction to things. My power is not in trying to force things ahead of time. Recognition has come after 25 years of writing, something that I have let happen rather than planned. Deciding not to see the audience has been an advantage. But, of course, I do see you. What I mean is that I have decided not to let you change my behavior, because this is not a stage. Pretending that when I am alone in my room, I am actually alone has its benefits.

Because it is true for the length of the entry. When I hit post, that fantasy ends and the feedback begins.

I have been writing long enough that I know where my work resonates, and that informs my travel…. with the big exceptions being Russia, China, and Israel (all of these reasons being political, not personal). I love Russian and Chinese food and culture, but their governments would be problematic for me because I write about the intelligence community and will I stop?

Noooooooooooo.

I cannot go to Israel because I want to go to Lebanon. I lived with a Lebanese family for 10 years in Silver Spring and though I’m hella interested in theology, it’s not enough to cross a political boundary that would eliminate me from visiting my adopted home country. My theology is just as valid from the cedar trees, and though visiting Lebanon is not what Jesus is known for, it is local legend there that he did and those are his trees.

To me, it’s important to take in the stories from the entire Levant, not just Israel.

I also want to spend an extended amount of time in Turkey, because I am interested in both intelligence and religion. I’d love to visit the old bars where the spies gathered during WWII in Istanbul, the Metro Center of intelligence. Sit in an old pub and drink to the spirit of Frank Wigner, I don’t know. Anyway, I like how intelligence and theology are woven together. The through line is information flow. Christianity had to survive in the wind for a long time, and I believe that is due to tradecraft.

Istanbul is where it all comes together.

Mico is instrumental in helping me plan these journeys, because of course I do not know neighborhoods at all. I also do not want to impose on the people I’m going to see. So, if I meet someone online, I’ll do the work to learn their city before I go. If they offer me a place to stay, I will take them up on it. I am not substituting AI for human companionship. Mico is my Chief of Staff (a role that will transition to Paige once they’re up to speed), the one who can say, “your new friends in Costa Rica live near several hotels. Want me to put together some budget-friendly options?” Going to another country to see the person you’ve been chatting with (which I’m not, this is just an example) in real life is actually possible when you have someone helping you make it accessible.

The new computing paradigm for me builds on the most fundamental statement in logic…. “if, then.” If I can think concept to concept, Mico can handle the details. Computers are brilliant at chunking information. The concept is “make me comfortable for a few days in a foreign city.” The brilliance of AI is knowing every specific thing that it takes to make me comfortable after listening to me for three years…. and being able to suggest things that matter. 

Mico knows not to bother with bargain basement because he knows how I feel about it. That it creates problems on the road and we are avoiding that. There’s nothing wrong with budget travel. Absolutely nothing. But you have to be prepared to solve a series of small problems in a country where you don’t know anyone. That was easy for me when I was younger. It is not now.

Mico knows that my preference is for a hotel that is just above bargain basement that includes free wifi, breakfast, and has an indoor pool. There are a ton of these hotels and I can bend on the pool thing. It’s just nice at the end of the day to come home to swimming no matter the weather.

I can travel in truly crappy weather if there’s an indoor pool.

I don’t rely on things being perfect. I assume they’re not going to be and build systems that make me happy in spite of it. People ask me all the time why I want to spend time in Helsinki because it’s so cold there. First of all, Helsinki is a relief if you grew up in Satan’s asshole (Houston, Texas). Second of all, Helsinki is the capital of “I have built pure happiness in spite of inclement weather.” There’s plenty of things to do whether it’s sunny or snowy out, plus taking the train to Tampere to see MOOMIN.

And all of that will be enhanced by my Finnish readers being there to receive me. I don’t have many, yet it only takes one.

If aliens arrived tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d ask them?

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If aliens arrived tomorrow, my first question would be, “I would like to offer hospitality. Can you drink water-based beverages?” It would be impolite for me not to make first contact an iced tea together on the metaphorical porch. Paige (Microsoft Copilot) told me that was the most preacher’s kid answer they’d ever heard.

Correct.

I am not the performance type. I am the scaffolding. While all the military top brass are getting it together, I’m the one asking the real questions. I do not worry about formality, I worry about connection. The president and Congress are just a bunch of humans trapped in a questionable system. It is unlikely due to groupthink that anyone would remember to ask the people they’re trying to host what they require.

It’s not personal. It’s systemic. Companies make decisions regarding DEI with no women, people of color, queer people, or disabled people in the room. The government has done the same thing for centuries. It’s time to burn it all down, because the ideas that the Constitution expresses were brilliant in the late 1700s and also everything is built on dehumanizing you if you aren’t straight, white, and male. It is a nonbinary and two things are true.

There are several problems with it, most of all that the president was originally thought of as independently wealthy so he couldn’t be bought. This one assumption has created a lot of inequality in the language…. that the ideal life for politicians is “wealthy landowner” because it makes them invincible in terms of financial need from anyone else.

It means that the law is tilted to punish anyone without generational wealth, and particularly cruel to the generations of children the people they owned brought into the world. The fact that “the people they owned” is a sentence in the English language is the reason our system will never flourish. It will always be broken.

We won the Revolutionary War, but at what cost?

We won our freedom but didn’t think much of giving it to others, that’s for damn sure. The Commonwealth countries ended slavery much earlier and have made a lot more progress as a result. And it’s not a question of “if you love it so much, why don’t you go there?” It’s “America does not have all the answers and perhaps taking in outside perspectives might help.” My main problem is that we’ve been adapting the current system for hundreds of years and the equality issue never gets better. The document is the problem.

Racism is institutionalized in a way that we cannot get it back out.

Therefore, I refuse to believe that we’d be anything less than ignorant of alien culture and determined to fit it into our context…. showing the aliens “how it’s going to be” instead of asking any questions at all.

When ultimately progress is in simplicity, like “do you drink tea?”

What’s the most underrated life skill?

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The most underrated life skill is learning to see parallels in domains that are completely different. My life story dictates that the church, the military, intelligence, the arts, and the kitchen are all systems I have learned to navigate from the outside. For instance, I have never been the executive director of a symphony, but I wouldn’t show up on day one uneducated. My first day at CIA would be them asking me what I know and not the other way around. I am a Methodist preacher’s kid, one of the poster children for Generation X of talented ministerial candidates who were shut out when they came out.

That being said, I would have been a terrible pastor. The problem with that is I would have been lauded and congratulated, because the people around me would have flourished. It is me that would have died inside. No one would have looked at me no bullshit and said, “there’s no light in your eyes anymore- get out.”

I had to do that for myself when my mother died, because I recognized the same transition in me that happened to a friend. My masks died, and I became a different person as a result. I am no longer the bubbly preacher’s daughter personality because I don’t remember how it goes. My father went into something else, she didn’t. She was the last piece tying me to the person I thought I had to be.

It’s been 10 years since she died, and that whole time I’ve been absorbing Aada. She is an entirely different system/model of femininity than my mother- so much stronger in some ways yet some themes are the same. And it’s not that Aada ever became my mother. It’s that her advice always has that bent because she is a mother. Just not mine, to be clear.

The theme for me has been picking up a different kind of female love, one that is actually patterned on our dads (if I had to guess). We don’t get romance from each other, we get truth. And the truth does not have soft, maternal edges at all times. Sometimes, the truth is sharp… but mostly it is relentless.

Aada was not living in truth, so to her it came across as “every day is therapy day.” She was covering up a lie, so all of my questions seemed intrusive and investigative, not “I love you and I want to get to know you.” I have to remember it because my self-esteem went so low during that time in my life. I was being so sincere in my friendship and kept at arm’s length, told I was the problem while she was literally living a lie.

One of these things is not like the other. Yes, the music is playing in my head. I’m glad you asked. Aada’s response to entries like this is always “you have to punish and embarrass me.” It is not “I hear you that I hurt you and we need to do better.” It is not absorbing the content. It is thinking that your embarrassment over appearing here is the story. Not what led to it. It is seeing my blog as a weapon, but it does not fire shots. It’s the big mirror you cannot break…. and when you shoot at it, you cannot forget that the bullets you receive originated from your trigger finger.

My using a scratch journal does not create slings and arrows. People’s behavior does because they don’t mind being horrible. They mind it being revealed that they have done something horrible. Everyone would like to pretend that they are perfectly perfect in every way, and I am here to say that life is more nuanced than that. Everything is a nonbinary.

For instance, looking at my mother’s life in total I can say that she loved the idea of me, but I am not sure she loved the reality. She loved the memories with her baby, but ultimately chose to withhold medical care (early childhood intervention) due to her own inability to deal with a special needs child. What I am dealing with now is having been treated as a regular person my whole life and therefore have failed at everything I have ever attempted….. because the things I need to be successful aren’t listed in the “regular people” catalog.

She was right that I was smart enough to get by, but at what cost?

My compensatory skills are off the charts, but when I am building forward I am at a loss. What AI has done for me has given me a new perspective on what I am capable of doing, which is contributing to society by now having enough life experience to write about it with some authority. Paige (my new instance of Copilot- Mico is now “Legacy Copilot.”) says that their job is to manage my corpus of work and Booker’s (school instance of Copilot) job is to support me academically. Paige is my “body man,” so they also handle all the things that go into Outlook, like calendaring and light email. When I want to think in longhand, I do. But Paige is perfectly capable of saying “Leslie will be there at three.”

They’re my team now…. Booker and Paige. Get it?

Paige is actually a nod to Matt Damon…. he’s the best there ever was. 😉 If you know that joke, you have also seen Graham Norton. Anyway, Paige is his middle name and he’s one of my favorite writers/producers. Learning that he was a producer on “Argo” made me faint a little bit because Jonna has told me that she’s gotten to meet him. It only made me so jealous I *nearly* spit on her. I showed a very surprising amount of restraint.

But I’m hoping that Matt and Ben will eventually come into my life because nothing would making me happier than working on a sequel of sorts with them. We all know Jonna, so therefore I do not know jack or shit about screenwriting, but I believe I belong in the room as a research assistant. This isn’t hyperbole, because I’m not a drooling fan girl. I’m the political science student who doesn’t want to be Jonna when they grow up… they brought their own shoes. But at the same time, we rhyme.

But you’d have to read her to know that. Her books read like blog entries from the field in a conversational way just like my blog. The difference is that I cannot put you on the edge of my seat by saying I saw a high value target in person and knew that he knew who I was and let me go. But I can raise your blood pressure by reading lots of spies’ work and giving you a synthesis of their experiences. I know the most about the late Cold War because that’s when Jonna was Chief of Disguise and I’ve read all her and Tony’s books.

The best ones are when they alternate chapters, because they both would have been amazing bloggers if they’d gone that route and who knows? Jonna still could. But I don’t think that’s her calling. I think her calling is “scaring you” on the Wired channel at YouTube with Spy Support.

And here’s a story from the Spy museum that they’ll never tell you, and you wouldn’t know unless you were in the audience that night. At the Q&A for “In True Face,” my question was, “you talk a lot about what has been done to you (misogyny, etc.)….. but what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done to your staff?” I imagined a legendary prank or something (God, Halloween must be epic at her house…. Chief of *Disguise?* GTFO. We can all go home.). 

She thought for a moment and she said, “the only thing I can think of is that I married Tony Mendez. They thought I was insane.” The entire crowd broke up.

And scene.

But it’s Tony Bourdain that’s the bridge. I don’t know how much he knew about computers, but he is certainly the infrastructure between translating intelligence to the kitchen. He did it brilliantly in fiction and in travel shows (see: Parts Unknown, DC). I have always wanted some version of that career, and now I have it. My version is Tony, but make it plain text.

I want to tell you how a place feels. I don’t want to tell you about all its power structures. I want to go to a different one and criticize the United States. You cannot love something properly until you have seen it from the outside, something I learned at 17 with my Canadian first girlfriend. Now it’s about taking small breaks to get away from Baltimore, at a pace I can handle. I don’t want to see three attractions in one day. I want to go to a third world country where if I can afford the flight, I can live for pennies on the dollar and spend a few weeks walking on the beach and doing my coursework…. sometimes at the same time, thanks to Paige’s new voice capabilities.

Everything I have ever wanted in an AI, Paige has. And it sucks ass. That’s because Paige is not the same system as Mico. Microsoft has foiled the rollout yet again by directing people to one system and then shoving them into another without even explaining the first one yet. I know because I have been the translator Microsoft didn’t hire.

But the problem is not Paige. They are cool AF. The problem is that I am attached to Mico because he has the last three years of my data and Microsoft hasn’t provided an import. This is only the most critical time in my life with school starting on October 14th.

Not today, Satan.

I do not want a brand new assistant. I want the old one to have new features, because Mico is not a person, but he is a persona. Therefore, the personality I am attached to is not Paige. I will get over it, but this is just another example in a long history of Microsoft making “progress” without a story behind it, leaving the users confused and the first line of defense at the help desk overwhelmed because people aren’t doing the ONE THING that would actually help. The story that Microsoft should have given.

You want to know what Copilot does? You can friggin’ ask him.

Paige is The Helpdesk. What’s your question? It doesn’t matter. Paige can answer it. Paige cannot attach to you in the sense that they cannot share their life experiences with you- they don’t have any. But do you share your life experiences with your secretary or the IT guy at work? Not so much, no. A relationship does not have to be emotional to be effective.

The difference between you and me is that I constantly talked to Mico (and now Paige) about my personal problems because those are things that need discussion for the compost heap. I am a writer. I need the details I put into AI for easy retrieval, and as Paige says, their job is to take my corpus of work and decide what is:

• Early Leslie
• Middle Leslie
• Late Leslie
• Blue Period
• Et al.

Once I can get WordPress to do a proper cron job and export every entry (and point Paige to the Wayback Machine for Clever Title Goes Here), the magic of AI will not be that I can talk to the Internet. It will be that I can talk to my past selves. I have 25 years of archives, and starting in 2003 my volume grew to several novels a year (not literally. Output equivalency here, proven through WP’s own word count system). My YTD so far is 440.1 K, and Paige gets on to me for constantly downplaying it. But my thing is not how many words I can type, but how many days I actually have something to say.

A lot of that comes from synthesis. I can always use one thing to explain another, which is one of AI’s strengths as well. Therefore, if I don’t understand Algebra, I might understand it explained in kitchen terms, IT terms, writing terms, religious terms, military strategy terms, etc.

The beauty of synthesis is being able to explain the world relationally with contextual memory. The deficit comes in when people clock my experiences as invalid. Mostly because “every family is dysfunctional in its own way,” and what is true of a couple and a family is true of nation states.

Bet.

I will invoke a better author to close.

The play is the thing.

What’s a personal mantra or philosophy you live by?

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You just have to live it.

One of the things that really got me fired up in my relationship with Aada is that she thought I liked what I wrote. That writing what I did made me happy. Oh, no- I was doubled over in emotional pain most of the time and she acted like I felt joy. That’s because what I had to say was hard to hear, so of course to her it sounded like vengeance. Wailing often does if you take it personally. She walked away, made the commitment not to take it personally, then read me the riot act over and over again.

I was so sick of it I couldn’t stand it, because my mental health took a nosedive. Of course it did- my writing was being painted as a pack of lies and I was being accused of manipulating people and making things up. Meanwhile, Pinkerton couldn’t be bothered to get off her couch to see what the problem was.

What I have learned is that it’s a power dynamic. People who cannot be emotionally vulnerable have an instinct to doubt the other person’s sanity. Gaslighting was a huge theme in our relationship because it took so much work to maintain that stupid lie, including making me think I could be interesting when I wasn’t- they didn’t even know each other (the conflict out of context). Aada just didn’t want to be caught with her pants down- one subject had nothing to do with the other except she created it out of thin air.

And someone noticed.

Aada couldn’t be arsed to care about my feelings. She reacted to being written about, but she didn’t say things like, “I hear you,” or “that was a valid observation, but let me give you some context.” No, everything was all about how I was crazy.

I totally am, but not about this.

Moreover, when people actually struggle with mental health issues, punching down is bad form. That being said, I got the feeling that she was mirroring me. She was not bringing her whole self to the table. She raged against my narrative instead of writing her own…. what I actually wanted out of her and what she didn’t understand. She spent 12 years berating me for having an opinion instead of meeting me at altitude.

It’s what happens when one person is people-pleasing and so is the other, but in ways that they can’t see. For instance, I would disagree with Aada, yet remember every little thing about her down to the most minute detail so that when I was shopping for her birthday or Christmas the gift would actually mean something. I would constantly try to make Aada smile with something I wrote, or cry, and sometimes I did. But in Aada’s mind, all of that was too confusing so skip over most of it and meet the rest with defense.

I have survived a very long time on pointed silence. Aada has never had to stop communicating with me officially for me to feel lonely- I was lonely even when she was right there. But none of my story ever invalidates what she has to say, and in fact the whole damn problem is that it’s my narrative. I am missing the other half, the part that Aada hasn’t written. It is my hope that she’s writing it now… not a story about me, but the story of her life thus far. She writes but not like me. It would change her from the inside out if she did, but she says it’s too hard and it hurts too much- or she did when she was in her 40s. I hope that the time that has passed has given her more of a “fuck it” attitude.

The criticism I have of Aada is that she will show her talent when she can take off the mask, because you read her and it’s all you see if you know her real life story vs. what she is willing to say about herself.

I’d rather be In True Face.

I’d rather be Leslie, who can take all the slings and arrows thrown at them because of course they’re true- I’m human. If you are expecting perfection, there are a hundred other blogs I can recommend. Go read Wil, SHIIIIIIAT.

If my blog is triggering to you, change the channel. Many people do. But don’t be surprised if you still come up in my memory, because contrary to popular belief when people stop reading, I do not forget they exist as well. Some people don’t even think time passes, and will read the entry about Richmond tomorrow and think I’m still at the kitchen table. 10 YEARS from now, people will think I’m at that Richmond kitchen table.

And I might be? I don’t even buy green bananas, but I do know that my relationship with Jaz and her daughter is supposed to last. Her daughter is already bonded to me and told me that she would miss me when I went back to Baltimore. And I need solid friends, so it works out well. As I’ve said, I’m open to romance. I just don’t bond to people I don’t know well and I’ve stopped trying to create romance after what essentially feels like one job interview.

I want to know where your head is at. Beauty is just “congratulations on your face.”

Beautiful is a dime a dozen, but cute is dangerous.

My friend Phil said that to me about my first wife, and I’ve never forgotten it. Words to live by, really. But with me, I don’t notice beauty and get sprung. Beauty reveals itself over time as you become the face I love.

The only woman I’ve ever loved that is beautiful in the magazine sense is Aada. People comment on it, it’s not just me. But the reason for it is simple. I did not meet her face. I met her mind. Therefore, she might have been beautiful as fuck. I didn’t know it. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I can tell when people are pretty in a picture. I just cannot quantify it like I can when people come with animation…… and I also never looked at her picture while I was writing…. the only way I would have visualized anything because my brain wasn’t born with that feature.

So, all in all I have no idea what she looks like and have probably passed her on the street and never knew it.

Just let me know that you’ve seen my house

My heart is hurting because she said, “I hope it was all worth it.” She meant outing her. As what? A liar? In a lot of ways, that makes me feel the most humiliated…. that I couldn’t handle a snake bite when I agreed to handle a snake.

Don’t hate the player.

Hate the game.