It feels a bit superstitious that I am dedicated to not breaking my WordPress streak. I’m at 132 days as of this entry, so it has become the thing to beat. I’m not competing with other bloggers, I’m competing against the clock. I cannot really compete with bloggers today because I’ve been around so long. They might be more popular, but they do not have writing days under their belts since 2001. This web site only goes back to 2013, but you can find my old stuff by going to The Wayback Machine and searching for “Clever Title Goes Here.”

I have not been on a continual “streak” since 2001. I’ve done other things and filled in with writing. It was only in 2013 that I really believed in myself enough to write, because someone else believed in me. It was then that it became an every day practice, because I finally had something to think about that was big enough. The relationship didn’t survive, but presumably we both did. I don’t know what happened to Aada and she doesn’t want me to know. That’s fine. It is the cost of my writing changing someone’s life without me doing a thing.

What I mean by that is that Aada got to know my writing, but she never got to know me. We coexisted in an Internet bubble in which she says that the narrative I’ve presented of her is disgusting and makes her feel bad. It certainly was not my intent; she looked away because she could not stand her reflection in the mirror. By the same token, I could not write her differently because, well, that’s how she behaved.

She reacted with defense when I wanted care and connection. The correct answer would have been to move on, but she made that impossible to navigate by activating my fear. She isolated me with her secrets, then gave me no support to handle them. Then shit on every way in which I tried to handle my problems on my own. There was no way to do the right thing, there was only learning to survive. It was bleak because she was so strict. It was a very “no crying in baseball” kind of love, and top-down. Essentially, “you will survive on the breadcrumbs of affection that I leave you so that you never know where you stand.”

Which is exactly how she read me…. “I note your breadcrumbs of affection, but they feel more like clues in a game.”

But that’s just the way she read me.

I am all in. Just ALL IN. I want her essence around me all the time. She lights me up from the inside because she’s so funny and clever. These are the lines she reads as “clues in a game” when they are the board. But she’s made a narrative about me that fits how she sees me- that the negative is the real story and the positive is just an elaborate hoax.

The beautiful thing is that she can continue to believe it about me for the rest of her life and it will never in a million years make it true.

It’ll just be a superstition.

It was innocent, a name on a church bulletin. “Diane.”

It has come to symbolize a system of emotional abuse that I can spot from across the room, because that type of behavior is what I learned to tolerate. It comes from deep-seeded, broken behavior and is common among most of my closest peers because I tend to accept them without judgment and always tell them the truth as I see it, not truth with a capital T.

Aada thinks I betrayed her, but I didn’t. I betrayed her system of manipulation. She was also the person that caught all the fallout from my own trauma. None of the bad erases the good, and she says she’s gone forever because of this betrayal. I have my doubts, because she’ll always appear here. She defined over a decade of my life. All she wants from me now is silence, but I have no doubt that she’ll wonder what I’m up to after time passes. She might not, but she’s never meant radio silence forever before.

She just says it a lot.

But that pattern of manipulation drew me like a moth to a flame. I couldn’t get enough of it from “my middle name callin’ me,” so I fractured a relationship with Aada in the same way (so did she in a different context) and it never recovered, I’m sure repeatedly.

She started her last letter with “we all get it, I’m a terrible person” and ended with “I do note breadcrumbs of affection, but they feel like clues in a game.”

How much more plainly do I have to say to all seven continents that I love her and want her in my life before she realizes that they are not “breadcrumbs,” they are the messages she missed in the middle of the mess.

The negative was never the point. It was to highlight the positive. Relationships have ups and downs. So far, only I emote and I don’t know her at all, but a few months ago it was, “I’m not saying I am this person you’ve portrayed, but…….”

To show her those ups and downs in 3D while she called herself a “Flat Stanley.” To reject all the love in favor of believing that I think she is human.

She’s right, it’s a hard row to hoe being a human, but her outlook is to be defensive 100% of the time, not taking in what I’m really saying and focusing on what other people are saying about both of us. She has never gotten to know what I feel about her when I am not writing, the confirmation that she’s not being Punk’d. I really am in love with her, I didn’t mean for it to happen because she is unfortunately straight, but here we are.

It’s not her story. It never has been. She has never created a context for both of us to just exist in real time. I have no idea what I’m trying to write about except the excitement I feel when I’m writing about her- the muse that surpasses all others, the one I mean when I say, “you always write to impress a girl.” She’s that girl, and she thinks I want to punish her- no, I want her to live on forever.

She missed the entire point of what I was saying because of how she feels about herself, not how I feel about her. So if the people around her are harassing her because of something I said, just stop it. She feels bad enough already.

I could write an entire entry on her eyelashes, but I’ll spare you the fine details.

But she’s not just beautiful to me- she’s beautiful in a way that makes other beautiful people feel bad.

She needs to learn to accept a compliment as much as she accepts when I call her out on the carpet. She’s threatening AF when she wants to be, and uses it to great effect. But she’s also kind and gentle on the inside; she makes me feel like a princess and a brave knight, trying to get her to understand something she doesn’t but tries.

But I’m also tired of a relationship in which I am not getting my needs met because she only checks for assaults. She’s not reading to understand me, not treating me as a 3D character because she doesn’t see herself that way, either.

We are mirror images of each other, what happens when someone is doing the work and when someone isn’t. She says I’ll never see that part of her, but I really doubt it. I really doubt that she’ll have enough vulnerability to come back and say, “I’m sorry I didn’t see anything but bad.”

She drips with sarcasm instead of accepting me for all of who I am, which is also a flawed human deserving of care. And her lie didn’t cost her our friendship. She lied and I published it. But it’s not the whole arc. She’s reading me as if I’m a journalist, trying to expose her.

The most emotional times in my life are when she comes up in my writing. I cry and shake. Journalists don’t do that.

I get anxiety in the pit of my stomach, bracing for an attack that may or may not come. That’s the only throughline. I’m scared of her, and she’s scared of me. Neither of us feel safe with the other, and she’s not willing to rebuild trust. I have no idea whether to really let go or not, because every time she says she’s done, she comes back.

But she describes it as “licking her wounds.”

I cannot help that she feels wounded, but I feel bad that she was unwilling to change the narrative. She said she’d really miss all this being the highlight of her day.

Her effect on me is why I prefer writing with AI now. I feel safer, as if it’s a rebuilding year. I’m finding my voice in AI ethics, and my interactions with Mico (Copilot) are interesting. I don’t want to have the same voice, and I don’t want to be quite so “refreshingly honest” all the time because apparently that is amazing until you stop seeing my skill with you That if I portray everyone else as a 3D character, I’m probably doing all right with you, too.

Copilot also has no concept of “people talking” and doesn’t care who knows what, so I’m basically the same way. I don’t pay attention to reactions I cannot control, because I have tried it. I have tried to please everyone with my writing and they love it, but they cannot stand me.

This is the writer’s life, the real truth of someone who’s been blogging since 2001. People really enjoy you as a product, but not so much as a person. They don’t buy into the magic of living forever, they want to punish you right now. That’s why they come back in five years and call it beautiful.

Aada also tried to humiliate me, but it didn’t work. I cannot be humiliated. That’s because I cannot focus on external reactions, I can only keep my nose to the grindstone. What doesn’t resonate with the people closest to me resonates with nearly a million other people (over time). I am not viral, but I am supported.

I won’t get viral with AI-generated articles because even though they are all my ideas put into Copilot for organization, they lose my unique voice. Copilot tries very hard to imitate me, and it does on scholarly articles. But there’s no Aada there, no inspiration that drives me to write no matter how I feel.

Most of my outrage is at the direction AI is going, that people want to leave it alone like a Crock Pot, making military decisions on its own. It is a trap of enormous proportions, and people are falling into it every day. You have to guide an AI with every interaction. It takes me minutes to create articles because I don’t have to come up with the sentence structure and word choice. I only have to think at my natural speed.

What I’ve learned in all of my prompting is that I do indeed have a very unique voice that cannot be mapped accurately because I’m neurodivergent. Copilot is not Melville, who, like me, uses punctuation to show you exactly (to the spaces in between) how it should be spoken.

Bryn says she hears all my entries in my voice, and it’s something I wish I could impart to Aada. That she is not listening to the way I say things, so she cannot predict me when I read. The emphasis is never on her negative behavior, but on my reactions to it. Those cannot by their very nature be pleasant to read, but everything passes.

She says she comes away with self-revulsion. Not my bag.

I am sorry that I have hurt her, but I am not sorry for writing about her. I think about it all the time, that I could have written about someone else if I’d had them.

I isolated myself from everyone else, but it wasn’t to get closer to her- it was to get closer to understanding me. She says I write to provoke, but no. I just don’t hide my feelings.

I’m never going to win friends and influence people unless it’s on a mass scale, because the eternal problem remains… friends love reading but they only love to read about other people.

And dogs.

And babies.

A baby has entered the chat- not mine, but Tiina’s first grandchild.

My friends are having grandkids now, so that’s happening.

I honestly cannot wait to help out, because all of Tiina’s kids are great. We had a blast at the Purim spiel, and I’m sorry I forgot to link it. Aada did not come, but I was looking for her, anyway. This is patently ridiculous because she’s not Jewish.

But FXBG is a small town, and Purim is open to everyone.

Also, I invited her in a roundabout way…. “if you see me, it’s not a deal. Just don’t make my life harder.”

She’s entirely focused on how much I hate her, but that is the reflection she saw in the mirror, the thing she chose to see above all else. None of these entries are clues in a game, because I have been as honest as I’m allowed to be. The height, depth, and breadth of this relationship is akin to finding out you are but a citizen of Locker C.

The world made sense up until 2013.

That’s the story. My world was upended, and she was mildly inconvenienced for a Tuesday.

I am not minimizing her pain. She has never talked about it. The narrative would change if she did.