Have you ever performed on stage or given a speech?
I have alternated between the quietest and the loudest person in the room for many years. This is because as a preacher’s kid, you have the personality you use with parishioners and the one you use at home, when you’re with your normal family…. the one that already knows you’re weird. I started doing things with music/music theater when I was three. And in fact, if I remember correctly, the first time I was in a choir performance I waited until it was over and then decided what the people really needed was a solo.
A few things that I’ve said have stuck with me, though.
At Bridgeport, I told the congregation that they were my Thanksgiving, and I meant it. Preaching in person is a whole different vibe, and I’m glad I know how to do it, and sometimes be incredible, even if I didn’t choose to go after it as a profession. It is enough to know that I could have, I just didn’t want to in the end. All I wanted to do was speak, and that’s not what pastors do. I’d be horrible at pastoral care and I know this about myself. It’s not that I wouldn’t listen. I would, intently, and then I would spend more time trying to figure out their problems than my own….. just like I do now, but I am only taking care of my family. They’re all over the world and right at home.
I wish I’d gotten to preach with Zac in the congregation at least once. I would have played so far against type that I doubt he would recognize me….. until I started preaching. Because yes, Zac, I have quoted Snoop Dogg in a sermon. It’s also just fun because he’s an atheist and also very, very smart. Therefore, we can have great discussions without ripping each other’s heads off. Religion is desperately, intimately ontological. God only exists as much as you believe God does.
I preach from the standpoint of resolution and resurrection, my faith absolutely secure in the mysteries of our faith, because the things that have been attributed to God are not God. I’m not even talking about The Crusades. I mean that people like Abraham didn’t write down God’s experiences, they wrote a record of their own.
It’s why I’m so glad this blog exists, because it is very much the Bible I am writing. Both in looking out over my experiences and processing them for better understanding (to me it’s a form of prayer), and because no one in the Bible is more important than me. The only reason my book of the Bible doesn’t count is that I was born a little later than the council of Nicea. I honestly treat my relationship with Jesus the way I treat my relationship with Zac when he’s not here. Jesus and I are kind of the same person, so I tease him all the time… and that’s a plural. I tease Jesus and he’s got some sick burns on me, too….. but those are just what I think he would say, and I like the comedic version of Jesus best.
If I had to pick a favorite Jesus representation, it’s the one from South Park. He manages to be relevant and yet the same calming presence he was back then. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, and I’m paraphrasing, “if you can’t laugh at your own religion, you haven’t picked a very good one.” I tease Jesus in his WTF? moments because I know I couldn’t have done any better. For me now, it’s thinking about me being so much older than he was. Having to go through that much, that young.
My whole take is that the best part of the resurrection was not having to do pastoral care. “Screw you guys, I’m goin’ home.” The truth is that Jesus was one of many people who thought he was the Messiah at the time, because the Jews were genuinely looking. If there is a Messiah, I choose to believe he’s it. That’s because none of the self-help he taught has changed for thousands of years. Brené Brown is an Episcopalian. Steven Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jim Gaffigan are Catholic. Trevor Noah isn’t a Christian, but he was raised in the church. Sarah Silverman is Jewish. Even under the Abramic tradition, we find our way in the world doing great things. For Sarah and me, it’s comedy (Sarah believes she’s one of God’s chosen people, and I believe Jesus is magic.) I don’t believe that it is the one true way.
I believe everything comes from us. We are not connecting to an Abramic or Hindu or Egyptian god, we are connected to The Source, the idea in which religion was created. We did not create The Source, we are all subtractions from it. You are a tiny piece of something great, but you block yourself from receiving it with ego.
But I didn’t come up with that idea. Jesus did. The check is in the mail.
What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?
I have floppy muscles, it’s an inborn trait. Therefore, I have success with physical activity to a varying degree. I think if I had to pick a favorite thing to do outside it’s very simple. It’s walking Oliver, who is a dog. It’s better when Zac is with us because I don’t trust Oliver to behave with me the same way he would if Zac was there, plus hiking in the woods behind his house is intimidating if you don’t know the area well. I could get lost easily and because I’d be in the middle of the woods, my GPS would only say “continue to highlighted route” and I’d be shit out of luck.
Ask me how I know this.
I’m not sure what to call it, but Zac’s townhome development backs up to some sort of nature preserve, so I have hiking accessible to me that’s just as challenging as anything I used to do in the Columbia River Gorge . Zac likes to hike as much as I do, and because he does it more often, he’s more in shape than I am, too. Yes, I weigh less, but I do not work out my muscles in the same way he does. I don’t have to have a physical fitness test to stay employed by the Navy. However, I do stay slim and trim by not owning a car, and I have decided that because ride share exists, that should always be true of me. I don’t actually want to pay money for a car when I could pay money for a car and a driver, taking the risk of driving off me entirely. If we crash, it will never in a million years be my fault. It’s not the hassle, it’s that I know I don’t have 3D vision and driving is working without a net, knowingly putting other people in danger.
Nope.
I didn’t have a choice in Houston, which is why I moved back to DC. If you’re going to take public transportation, it’s a very good place to do so because we’re not huge like New York, yet we have all the same amenities. Maybe it’s because I lived here in my 20s, but New York frightens me in a way that DC doesn’t. I don’t know whether my sensory issues were out of control in Manhattan because it was that big a city or because I’d never been there before. I now know why writers live the way they live in movies when they’re set in New York. As soon as I got there, my nerves felt like they were on fire. As a writer, I was energized by it and also needed to find a way to mute it. Thus, writers in movies being hermits in New York. They’re trying to find a manageable amount of sensory input.
Writing is a sensitive area in terms of perception because you need enough stimulation to have something to say, energy that lets the words flow naturally….. but not so much that it makes your mind lose the train of thought that’s going to hit the New York Times. Fine-tuning that instinct takes time. When I am overwhelmed, I go back to zero. This means wired or Bluetooth headphones blaring white noise like TV snow or a jet engine (because people reading this are so young they might not know what TV snow is…..). Over time, you begin adding things.
I find that I function the best under a sensory deprivation diet, because it helps me to work faster when there’s less going on in the room. I cannot write if people are talking around me, and most of the time I cannot even write with music on. Today, my soundtrack is Zac typing in his office. I’m sitting in his room with my iPad and keyboard, he’s at his government computer because he’s neurodivergent as well. I wanted to cut down sensory issues for both of us.
The funniest thing that happened this morning is that I grabbed a pink coffee mug and Zac said something about it being his partner’s mug and her being picky about it. I said, “oh, no problem. If I’d known it was hers I would have respected the rule. You don’t have to apologize for having other partners or them having preferences.” He said, “I’m just sorry I couldn’t let you have a CIA mug.” I said, “that was a CIA mug? I didn’t know CIA came in girl shit.” I loved his laughter at that one.
Editor’s Note:
Every time I’ve read that line while writing/editing I’ve fallen over with laughter.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like pink CIA stuff, it’s that I’m a purist. I like the seal they already have on a navy background and think it looks classic…… There’s no need to change something that isn’t broken. I don’t need CIA feminized for me, because to me it’s already feminine. Look up all the department heads and count the number of women. It’s staggering.
The truth is that women my age are invisible, and that’s why we run the world. If you believe nothing else I say, believe that. There’s a reason female intelligence officers at CIA and in the military embed themselves in women’s groups all the time. Getting women together is a HUMINT ATM machine. Now I’m wondering what the equivalent of a “stitch and bitch” is in Arabic…………… You can tell a lot about a man’s mood, behavior, and actions by asking the women around him, because dollars to donuts he hasn’t heard what she has to say.
I love that my love of women in intelligence is making others excited as well. It caught on for Lindsay when we went to Zaytinya the other night, because I told her about a fabulous novel I’d read called “The Secrets We Kept,” by Lara Prescott. The premise is brilliant. In Russia, female spies were trained to use their sexuality to get what they wanted, so they were nicknamed “Swallows.” The United States does not do this, so the novel explores what would have happened if there had been an American “Swallows” program. It’s danger and intrigue, but also camaraderie. Spying is the world’s second oldest profession, and it bears a striking resemblance to the first.
My favorite female intelligence stories are “constant fish out of water.” At first, it’s being approached by CIA and getting trained…. hero origin story…. then it’s being fish out of water because CIA doesn’t work inside the US. My favorite part of the journey is from the approach to graduating from The Farm. The Spider-Man where you find out how he became that way is the best. I don’t make the rules.
I feel that though typing is not something one would classically think of as a physical activity, it is my origin story.
Especially since I can write it down.
Now it is time to transition into my day, because it always starts here at the keyboard and branches out. I have coffee to drink, news to read, and a trip across a city in which it snowed this morning. I am eager to get out and take pictures.
Taking pictures for me is a physical activity because I am one of those people. One of those who thinks nothing of holding other people up for a few seconds to be able to lay down in the middle of the sidewalk or whatever to get a shot. This is because I am willing to wait eons to make sure I’m bothering the least people. It’s really the only way I’ve shot the top of the steeple at Notre Dame.
It just occurred to me that creativity often feels like exercise. Creativity often feels like exhaustion once you’ve pulled ideas out of yourself. Both writing and taking pictures show your way of seeing the world, and especially because I don’t have 3D vision, the pictures I take look different than ones taken by people with stereopsis. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what makes me driven to take pictures. I want to see how I see the world by looking back at the way I shot it.
All writers search for themselves. In this blog, you can see it transparently. With novelists, you see it through archetype and allegory. A childhood is a writer’s credit balance, in the words of John le Carré. We start there and we excavate to a degree in which most people are uncomfortable.
And yet the physical activity of writing sustains us whether you’re comfortable or not.
What is something others do that sparks your admiration?
When I really reminisce about my childhood, I get very angry. Not at my parents. At the way I walk in the world. I am not built for it, and a lot of it is the way I think. I am not neurotypical, and I am also bipolar. Then, there’s the added layer of complication with being an INFJ, the personality known for being a hundred thousand years old. Interestingly enough, there’s a connection between autism and INFJ. You can be one without the other, but there are so, so many of us who are both. My biggest for-instance is being emotionally abused.
Many people wondered how I could fall apart that badly….. my emotional abuser told me and everyone else that she was my best friend………. sometimes. At others, she pretended not to know me. I fell apart because my psychologist in middle school told me that I was obsessed with her and I needed to work on my own issues. No one thought “emotional abuse, autistic, introverted anyway, driven to help others more than themselves.” My emotional abuser got away with everything because the fault was always in me. My therapist blamed me, and I cannot think of a reason why, except that autism wasn’t on her radar, thus she did not see my emotional abuser as my monotropic thought process, she did not see that this woman genuinely traumatized me because a 14-year-old cannot be friends with a 25-year-old when there are not serious boundaries set. Everything was dependent on my behavior, not how she acted.
I felt married to this woman from the time I was 13 until I was 36, because I did not realize how incredibly unsafe I was. How could I, when my doctors as a kid had convinced me that this obsession was all in my head and if I just turned my attention, it would all go away. But “married” is relative. I knew that we weren’t going to be a couple, but I did know that it was for life…….. back then. This is because she clearly needed help. Clearly. Of the two of us, I’ve always been the more emotionally mature one, and I knew this from the first conversation that actually went deep. I was not like other children. My bullshit detector is finely tuned because of my preacher’s kid upbringing. So, I could tell that I was older, and that wasn’t a bad thing to me.
In fact, once she actually said that she was “older and often not wiser,” so at least I know my intuition is correct on that one. The solid truth is that I am more emotionally intelligent than most people you know, and this is not because I’m so great. It’s that INFJs are only 9-15% of the world’s population….. probably another reason my psychologist thought I had OCD.
The problem is that most neurodivergent behaviors are the same. Am I PTSD, bipolar, borderline, narcissistic, OCD, ADHD, Autistic…….. the list goes on. Parsing everything out is a matter of degrees.
The part where I can take responsibility but no I can’t (I was 14) is that I wasn’t completely honest with everyone because I knew she would get in trouble. My mother had already told her to stop talking to me once, and it didn’t work. I am still not sure how I feel about that, and it’s almost over 30 years later. Part of it is that I felt like I had to protect the path, but part of me needed a queer friend and I didn’t have any others. For every moment I’ve felt used and abused, I’ve known it wasn’t all disingenuous. It wasn’t all healthy, either.
She became in charge of regulating my emotions, because what happens in abuse is that when you’re not around that person, your dopamine nosedives. You’re only really happy in their presence because your dopamine ramps up. And, of course, you don’t know it’s the trauma bond talking, so you think they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s not true, of course. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. You just feel so much better when you’re with them than you do without them that they seem more powerful than they are……………………….. and they know it.
Everyone looked at me like I was just this crazy fan. No, surely it couldn’t be because Leslie is being emotionally abused. Some people did see it, and instead of doing anything, just talked shit behind my back.
In effect, what happened when I was a teen is what happened 10 years ago. I switched from one friend being my monotropic thought process to another. That wasn’t the bad part. Supergrover is the most amazing woman we have on earth, and we’re not going to get another one. She is everything, everywhere, all at once…… or as I say to her, “that’s my badass out there…. not yours.” Supergrover didn’t see “monotropic thought process and INFJ,” either, so she tended to attribute things to me that just weren’t true. I can believe that most of it is not being able to take the time to get to know me in person, but that would have had to happen when we first met, not after all our virtual patterns were entrenched. It became too scary to face each other, in some ways.
Both of us are the type of people who are intimidated that would never admit that something is intimidating. Her way of dealing with it was to avoid talking about it. My way of dealing with it was to pretend it didn’t exist. That meeting for lunch wasn’t weird because it couldn’t be. What I know from experience is that it is indeed intimidating to go from online to IRL after many years, but you both have to be willing to sit there and let it suck for a second as all your senses are overloaded and the person you’ve known for X number of years is right in front of you. It’s surreal and disorienting, not that you don’t really love the person. You just take the time to get over the weird.
If there is one thing I’m grateful for in terms of a silver lining on the pandemic, it’s that people understand me in a whole new way. During the pandemic, everyone had to learn how I do what I do all day long. I was a hero, when I was previously “Miss Get Off the Computer” in 1993. All of the sudden, people could see something they couldn’t before. Real emotion exists in virtual relationships, full stop. We conducted business and personal relationships with people often being coworkers for years without seeing each other in person. It was a paradigm shift that benefitted me, because I had to explain a lot less.
What I have to explain a lot less to me is how ill I am. Turns out, a lot of the symptoms I was attributing to bipolar are actually just autistic quirks. There’s so much less depression and hypomania, so much more meltdown and burnout because my sensory perception is so incredibly high.
So, I admire how people think, because it’s worlds different from my own in nearly every case. Other people are just as complicated, but not in the same way.
Which is good, because it means we are all admirable in our own way, too.
Ten years ago, I was working at Alert Logic in Houston, Texas. Because I’d moved back to Houston, I was hanging out with people I’d known most of my life. One of my childhood best friends has the same sense of humor that I do, so I would pick his brain for suggestions on kids’ shows because I am interested in the writing and he has two rugrats. I liked Adventure Time and continue to be a fan of Lumpy Space Princess, but I loved Regular Show.
Regular Show actually taught me how to handle my divorce in a way no other show ever has. I was in the middle of losing my Margaret, but watching Mordecai grieve her and then meet Cloudy Jane was all I needed to know. Margaret and Cloudy Jane would both mean everything to me, and loving a Cloudy Jane later didn’t mean that Margaret wasn’t in my box of memories anymore.
And in fact, Dana and I are an accurate representation of Mordecai and Rigby (or more accurately, Bert and Ernie- we were them for Halloween one year). I am sure that she is now someone else’s Rigby, but when we divorced, I promise it didn’t make me any less Mordecai. It also doesn’t matter that she’s someone else’s Rigby, because I don’t think of her in that way anymore. I think of her as pristine and perfect in my memory, which is different. All of you know that pristine and perfect does not mean that she is not flawed, and neither am I. You don’t love people based on their perfection. You love people because they aren’t perfect.
The smallest example I can think of currently is Supergrover forgetting my birthday year after year. I could choose to be mad about that, or I could choose to accept reality. Birthdays are important to me, they are not important to her. I always made a huge deal out of her birthday because that’s what my family does. She doesn’t make a big deal about mine because that’s what her family does. Because of it, there’s no foul. We were raised differently.
Over time, she picked up that birthdays were important to me, and I picked up that birthdays weren’t important to her. So, even when she can’t make the clock stop, she will say things like “I’m so sorry I missed you yesterday, but I did send a gift.” That’s because I communicated and she changed. She communicated and I changed. It wasn’t a matter of how much we loved each other, because neither of our reactions had to do with our relationship. I got vulnerable once and told her that it hurt when she didn’t remember, and she got vulnerable and said she was sorry, that’s just how she was raised- and yet, it impacted both of us because we both grew toward each other.
It was never about the gifts. It was about being remembered. This is why we were able to grow. I am able to recognize that there are times when the clock just doesn’t stop, and also my way is not more important than hers. It was a tiny conflict that in the end, turned out to be not a conflict at all.
Editor’s Note:
I realized that talking about cartoons was a good reason to make fruit punch. So, now I have an appropriate beverage. It’s Sunkist, but not soda. We are allowed to have bubbles when we finish our blog entries. 😉 I am also an expert. Make a 20oz fruit punch in a bottle, then fill my travel mug with so much ice that only 8oz fits, then keep refilling. I have the kind of travel mug where I can make at least two drink mixes before I need more ice. In fact, this morning I needed a drink of water as soon as I woke up and there was still ice water left over from yesterday afternoon.
But with a friendship like mine and Supergrover’s, we can be ourselves and communicate across all of that. Nothing has to be engineered to my specifications or hers, because we’re a spectrum of belief and action.
All of our experiences combine to make us Muscle Man and Hi-Five Ghost. Because she’s virtual, it would make sense for her to be Fives, but I need her to drive the golf cart.
She is also as sweet as Pops, and has taken me to Really Real Wrestling many times. 🙂
I could do less writing. It would be worse for my portfolio and better not to spend so much time lost in my head. I am not sure I get a choice on that considering how much quiet I require, but I do recognize that my mind is a busy place and I get lost there. I have said this before, but there are times when autism makes me feel lost to the rest of the world, and I wouldn’t have said that before because I have had that constant feeling since I can remember, I just didn’t have a word for it.
Because, I mean, of course I’m not autistic. I did not equate myself with other autistic kids because my school wasn’t mainstreamed, therefore I rarely saw any. There is also more and more evidence that ADHD and Autism are missed in many, many women because of the way we were raised. I didn’t look like a “special” kid, so I wasn’t. You get on YouTube and you find out that there is no “look” to autism. I do not have mental retardation because of autism, and those two things are conflated often. Autistic people are either savants at coding or developmentally delayed in popular culture. What is missing in the zeitgeist are regular people who also have that processing disorder. The kind where some doctors say, “I’m hesitant to give you a diagnosis because I don’t want you to be unable to see outside it.” Trust me, this is not just for patients. New parents of autistic children are equally shellshocked as me.
What is intimidating is receiving the same amount of information as autistic parents because it’s a lot easier to make decisions for someone else than it is to make decisions for yourself. You don’t have demand avoidance in mentally healthy parents because it is an inborn trait, the reflex to nurture. A baby’s cry affects men and women differently, but they both respond at the drop of a hat if they see a child in trouble and they are in any way parental.
It is so much harder when you realize the child you’re trying to keep alive is you. Like, in middle school there were not consequences this dire for my Tomagotchi. I’m older and less flexible, more demand avoidant because I’ve either been guided away from handling because I didn’t know I was autistic and didn’t realize that ADHD gives it to you as well (not mentioned in any of the layperson’s ADHD books I’ve read). I also didn’t know that if you have it pathologically, that is also part of the autism spectrum, and because I haven’t been diagnosed, I don’t know which is which. Pathologically Demand Avoidance is somehow part of autism and its own thing. Basically, you get treatment. If it doesn’t work, it’s PDA.
Social stigma around figuring out your processing disorders and mental illness is big and difficult because you get it on both sides. From neurotypical people, there is a constant need to reassure you that things aren’t that bad, you’re not autistic (because in their minds what I am saying to them is worlds apart from what they hear), you’re just too hard on yourself and if you X, then……… Their answers are not my answers because I am incapable of their thought process.
It is not a matter of pity on my end, it is a matter of acknowledging disability and illness. There’s a huge difference between acknowledging something and “making it your whole personality.” No one has said this to me, I just know I talk about it a lot because that’s what I’m reading/watching right now- educational videos. It’s not that “it’s my whole personality,” it’s that you didn’t come here on leg day, capiche? I am obsessed with getting the diagnosis of my neurodivergence right, not fitting the facts to a certain outcome. There is such a thing as ADHD with autistic traits, and there is a lot of overlap between the two diagnoses, so it’s not always clear which is which. I already have an ADHD diagnosis. The “huge leap” is in your perception, not my reality.
Here is the other very serious thing. I am the same amount of different now that I will be after I’m officially diagnosed, or after I’m told I have ADHD with autistic traits. ADHD is not valid in the way that autism is, because in other people’s minds, an autism diagnosis is devastating and if your child is ADHD, it’s bad, but at least it’s not fucking autism…………. when the reality is that the introverted form of ADHD can be just as debilitating. It’s invisible because it doesn’t come with physical symptoms and again, a processing disorder that doesn’t affect the development of the brain so that you can’t figure out how a person can be so smart and so stupid at the same time. But that’s neurotypical perception/stigma, not what’s really happening.
For instance, women’s voices were largely absent from ADHD research because to the researchers, ADHD became invisible in people without hyperactivity. People often don’t see autism because I do not have extraordinarily regimented sensory issues. I do not have a meltdown when I touch or taste something unfamiliar, so therefore I cannot have sensory issues. Some people have autism but do handle sensory perception well. Some autistic people are mentally delayed and some aren’t.
High IQ autistic people have two archetypes in society…… the manic pixie dream girl and “Comic Book Guy.”
I know what you’re thinking. Shut it.
No, I don’t identify with Comic Book Guy at all……….. eyeroll.
Now that everything is so expensive, I feel like coders who live in their mother’s basement are the luckiest bastards on earth. They live with people who love them on a salary that really helps everyone while acknowledging that they- are in some ways- able to take care of themselves and also not. I feel a jealousy toward programmers that I don’t feel in other areas of my life because they created the standard that all their sensory issues being tamped down was critical to the way they work and no other department in an office functions that way…… so if you’re autistic and not a programmer you’re just shit out of luck.
For instance, lights are usually very low in a server room, as are sounds. A server room has the same decibel level as a library. I live like Mr. Robot, because CPTSD and AuDHD being comorbidities means that I am constantly more comfortable with less stimulation through sound and more information through sight. Loud noises and bright lights are anathema to all of those things. I do not have a problem with flashing lights, but office fluorescents. I have a problem with prolonged eye contact, because sensory information becomes too much; I also become self-conscious about my eye drifting. It’s why I’m much better about maintaining eye contact when I’m wearing my baseball cap. I don’t think it’s much of a distraction, but my brain believes it is.
I could do less caring about my appearance, and so much more. By caring about my appearance, I could do more in terms of skin routines and putting on makeup once in a while when I actually feel like it. By not caring about my appearance, I mean constantly worried about how I look in front of other people because it’s not whether I’m attractive or not, it’s whether my social masks are working.
If I don’t call attention to my disability, you won’t notice it and I’m grateful until we get close enough that we can’t social mask around it anymore. It gets more intense with more connection, because social masks fail on a whole other level when you live with someone. I have never had a partner that truly understood me, partly because I’m a complicated case psychologically and partially because I didn’t have the tools to express myself.
You know what I also couldn’t do? I also couldn’t say, “I know you’re feeling personally attacked, but here’s several videos of other people explaining how their symptoms affect them so that you know I’m not just ‘using my disability as an excuse.;” The “motherfucker” is implied. I do not have a problem taking responsibility for my behavior as it is sometimes problematic, but I draw the line at seeing only my behavior as problematic and not acknowledging that things don’t happen in a vacuum. I can say that moving to DC was the last thing that happened, but Dana put us on the road toward divorce originally because of my reaction to her DUI, not blaming her because she got one. There is a cause and effect to everything.
In short, I can take responsibility for developing a wandering eye in a relationship not built for it, but I will not take responsibility for Dana’s drunken mistake that changed my whole sensory perception of life.
You are not the same person at work after a full night’s sleep, and one of the things that would have saved our marriage in retrospect was me putting my foot down and saying, “you’re on your own, kid.” This does not mean me stopping helping her. I mean forcing her to quit her job and get a different one if her boss didn’t move her schedule. That taking her to work in the middle of the night while holding down an office job would bring about destruction for me because I am not capable of it. I got fired from Marylhurst for the same reasons I got fired at Alert Logic. Especially when I don’t sleep at night, I cannot listen and talk at the same time, nor listen and write things down. The reason that transcribing the constitutional law class was easy is because I was transcribing, not taking notes. I was not having to constantly make a decision on what was important to write down and what wasn’t. I got that on my own, by going back and reading what I’d written down, faster to process because I’d heard it once.
I cannot blame Dana for her mistakes, but I can blame my reactions to them. Dana getting a DUI doesn’t make my words and actions okay, or let me off of any kind of hook. I am acknowledging that in a relationship, I only own half.
The problem came in thinking that my issues were so much worse than Dana’s. That Dana needed help and I was just a bad person. There was no medical explanation for why I did what I did, so it was worse….. and yet, there was a medical explanation. I was overloaded and overwhelmed, depressed and anxious except for when I was hypomanic and at no time able to regulate those things. So much was said without thinking, which is why there’s such a disconnect between my thoughts and the words I used in the heat of a moment.
With autism, the heat of the moment is everything. If your words are charged, we will pick up all 7,000 subtexts and our brains are immediately overloaded because we don’t know how to respond. This is why it’s easier to communicate with a neurodivergent person in text. It’s a balance, though, because we have to get to know your voices well enough to have context for when we leave it out. For instance, I think our conversations would have gone a lot differently had I known in the early years that hearing Supergrover’s voice feels like watching molasses drip……. she is a velvet hammer. I might not have been so quick to attribute rage if I’d known she was so laid back in person. She does not portray that through text. In text, she’s strident and it’s “pull yourself up from your bootstraps.” I only get frustrated when she can’t see I’m barefoot.
I choose to be butt hurt over this right now, while it’s happening, because what I know to be true is that my history is to save it all up until I explode, and as Supergrover herself has said, my anger isn’t helpful. She’s right, and in a lot of cases it’s due to lack of coping mechanism. In others, it’s autism and I can’t work around it. That’s because coping mechanisms fail when sensory overload is happening.
This relationship was a new level of sensory overload because we are both so different from each other. I cannot blame anyone else for anything, but I can get it all out so that I can look at it and see what I can do about my own situation.
I think more about it now, so that I know I can and will do less later.
I could do a lot less thinking about all of this. But it wouldn’t turn out the way I think it would. I would be even less able to regulate my emotions.
What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?
This year I started taking care of me for the first time in my life, ever. People who learn a little bit about boundaries install them with spikes, because they don’t know balancing language yet. So many, many times have I been fed this year on a meager emotional diet, because someone would cross a boundary and alarm I’d never had went off. There has never been anything loud enough in my mind to say that my opinions are valid, because I get intimidated and fold easily………………… in person.
On paper, I am not anticipating someone else’s reactions, so I come across as judgmental when I actually want your input/correction, I’m not dictating to you what our situation might be. My work to do is to learn how to control my autistic brain symptoms, like “I have explained this six times and it hasn’t resulted in any change at all, so that means I only have to explain it ten more ways and we’re golden.” I will absolutely argue with a signpost……… in text. If a waitress served me soup with glass shards, I’d be so mad I’d only leave a 20% tip.
I talk a lot about the first blush of excitement on both ends at Supergrover and I meeting each other, and it’s those memories I focus on when I feel the kind of desperation you absolutely will not admit to anyone, I am fine……… meanwhile, your eyes are rolling out of your head because you’ve thought I was an idiot about it for months why has this taken so long dear Jesus get a life…….. and actually, that’s not true at all. It’s how it feels to write out pain. It doesn’t change all at once. It changes a little every day.
I do not have any interest in telling our story as if it is our facts. No, they are only my facts, and I am a hundred percent certain that our stories are different, but I will never know to what degree. I’ve guessed at the extremes and the middle and been wrong every single time. I just don’t do that anymore. I don’t have it in me. I cannot drag a relationship kicking and screaming into the light when I only own one half…… and if it sounds like I’m holding myself up as some kind of beacon, that’s not it at all.
We fucked each other up nine years ago. Our relationship shouldn’t be so dramatic and toxic all the time. It’s not good for either one of us as we both sound like Dorothy Sbornak and Ouiser Boudreaux in text. We are both first children. We fight until someone is bleeding, because we are not used to losing…….. and I’m laughing about it now, but believe me when I say I have seen Oppenheimer and I didn’t even know it was a movie until recently.
I am just as filled with rage as she is. We’re The Holy and the Moly because one day I’m the bomb and she’s the detonator……….. and then she’s got the big red button. We installed them in each other quickly and use them to great effect. After we fight, I will say “this is what hurt.” She won’t. She says, “I was licking my wounds.” I wish that just once this year she could have seen my face when I read it. If there are moments that make me want to reach through her phone and hug her, it’s lines like that.
Autistic people are not here to be nice, because we do not have all the social masks involved in sensitive situations. I used to be very, very practiced at it, but I’m not in front of parishioners all the time anymore. As I’ve been away from being a preacher’s kid, it has been a slow, painstaking process to unmask. Everyone does the public/private thing to a degree. There is a truly marked difference in “show mode” and “autism.” Most people are trying to hide their emotions a little bit, certainly. No one wants to ugly cry if Oprah’s not handing out Beetles. Autistic people cannot regulate their emotions like neurotypical people, and we can catalogue their behaviors by the hundreds, but what we cannot do is replicate them. This is because the reason we thought you had the reaction was different than why you actually had it.
Impasses are frequent because “I just don’t get it,” and I have empathy for how tiresome that is. I really do. That’s because if your’e exhausted, you’ve experienced a few hours of my symptoms and I live this way. Not said to shame you, just to say “I need empathy here.” There are other areas in which I’m stronger than my friends and we trade off….. no one is ever getting the short end of the stick……
And unfortunately, reminding Supergrover of that didn’t go over so well because I don’t think she was picking up what I was putting down. She told me several times some version of “why do you think it’s everyone else’s job to fix you?” First of all, that’s a huge red flag. If you tell someone up front that you have a disability like bipolar or whatever and that’s what they say, that’s not the healthiest response ever. The reason I ask people for help is that they’re the first person to ask me. In this one case, the tables were turned where I needed help first….. so, of course it felt like I “was the one who always needed help.” But it’s 10 years later and those words just don’t hit the same way anymore. Healthy people do not shut you down every time you want to have a dialogue. What would have been perfectly healthy is just to walk away for both of us, and yet neither of us did it. I don’t think we meant to be in a relationship this crazy for 10 years, but those tickets are non-refundable.
In some ways, I felt like it was really hard work and deservedly so. Most friendships like ours end quickly because of who we are jointly and severally. I am sure this is conjecture, but it seems to be that the key words are “friendships like ours.” What I see as trying for connection, she sees as “telling her every bad thing she’s ever done.” Sometimes when my sensory environment is turned up to hell, I do come across like I’m nitpicking. Because it’s all text, she can’t hear my tone of voice and she doesn’t ask for any clarification. So, whether I intended to provoke ire or not, I will have done it.
I have never wanted that for her, and I had to learn not to want that for me. I stepped all over her boundaries because that’s how it works in my world. If you troll someone, they’ll leave you alone. We just both met our match and wrote checks with our mouths that our asses couldn’t cash. I will never be as strident as she is in person. She will never be as over emotional as me in text……………… but not because she’s not capable of it.
She’s my fairy tale author girl. As in, not the author of my fairy tale but the writer friend I have who is interested in creating fairy tales for actual children. I keep telling her that “50 Shades of Gray” was so terrible I didn’t even read the whole first page, but it did prove to me that either one of us was capable of writing a book on our phones while using public transportation. I have more time in a day to dedicate to it, but I will never write something akin to the main quest of Skyrim, and she could. I don’t know what her future holds, but I do know that if she wrote a book, she’d sell a copy.
What I know is that if I keep talking, one of two things will happen. The first is that repetition gives the story less power. How do I know it has less power? When I can write essays like this and I don’t end up sobbing so hard I can’t see what I’m writing anymore. There’s so much to cry about, really, that doesn’t have anything to do with her. It’s universal. You lose someone significant in your life, and you adjust- but I do not know anyone who is downright happy about it.
It would also be easier to focus on this prompt at the end of the month than it is right this moment. Finnish Independence Day is always craptastic because it’s trying to replace the parts of my heart that are black with the lights and music of Helsinki. Finlandia, yes, but also Finlandia conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. The black parts of your heart will respond to music if you let them.
That’s it. That’s the thing I’ve learned this year. The black parts of my heart will respond to music when I let them. This means that I can author the destruction of someone I 100% regret having to cut out of my life because I didn’t have any other choice. I could no longer make decisions about the health of the relationship based on what only I thought, because what happened on a large scale a few months ago was happening all the time in conversation.
We hadn’t talked for a few months, so she was reading me without responding….. months of posts in which we weren’t checking the stories we were telling ourselves, and that always feels like “WE WERE ON A BREAK.” That’s what makes our bond cemented for life. She has editorial control and I’ve told her that. She also cannot stop herself from reading because she thinks that I’m out to get her……. or does she? Because she says it frequently and then she’ll take a line I thought about for an hour, just slaved over to capture her perfectly, and send it to me with a “thank you for this.”
The main reason this whole thing is important to me is that I have never been this person before. I wouldn’t be as safe and secure in who I am now if she hadn’t been sure of me first.
What makes her unique in my life is that she managed to get past all the barriers I’d set up. All the social masking that didn’t make me look like an alien, all the catering I do to other people to make sure everyone is focusing on having a good time and not the fact that I am standing here, damaged, in a corner because I don’t want to get my crazy spatter on you. I have never been that person on the outside. Why I don’t always come off as depressed, anxious, ADHD, or autistic. It’s all just a bunch of spaghetti code in there.
One day I’ll reach “eof,” and I know it’ll compile……………….. even when there are so many lines I wish I could have commented out. But that’s the thing, right? The first step to finding things that do serve you is letting go of the things that don’t. I wish I could say a lot of good things happened this year, and I know they did in small measures. But mostly this year was about learning to deal with pain and rage. How much I’d social masked away all of those feelings as a child determined not that my emotions were bottled, but how many six-packs.
In a lot of ways, all my social masks failed at once, and then I didn’t know who I was anymore. I had to build myself back up from 12 on, adjusting to new emotions that weren’t there before and mapping out the dead spots. If you have not done this in yourself, it is backbreaking emotional work and depression/anxiety medication make it easier, not easy.
This year I’ve felt infantilized more and bothered less. That is because I do not have a world-ending autistic meltdown if someone doesn’t like me. I just find out quickly who my people are in those cases and move on, because I’m past the point in my life where I want to justify anything to anyone, because I have enough belief in myself to know that I have limitations and to ask for help when I need it. People rush to parent the people with mental processing differences and psychiatric illness, and I have to anticipate it. I have to deal with it, because there’s nowhere I won’t. That’s a social mask I do have, though, because it feels very much like apologizing for your existence because you’re queer or physically disabled.
The hard part is being a realist without being too negative because I can control my environment, but only to a point. I do not like telling people I’m a Christian anymore because it invariably ends up being an image of me in their heads that just doesn’t compute. Either I’m a bad Christian because my exegesis is bad and God didn’t really mean all that stuff about inclusivity, helpfully written right there in the RED LETTERS……………… or their God is about the letter of the law and not the spirit; homosexuality does not occur in most, if not all animal populations……. it is a demon to which I am solely responsible for its care and feeding. If I just stopped queer behavior, I’d stop being queer.
Gay men are widely accepted as priests in the Catholic Church because especially in the third world, that’s where you go not to get bullied. Most families know when they’ve got a priest on their hands by kindergarten. Please know that this is in no way trying to be shady. Gay men are pushed toward being priests because of their sensitive/more effeminate natures, because then their families don’t even have to meet the boyfriend. They’ve been eating at his table for years.
I’m just trying to let myself evolve, and thinking about systemic issues makes me happier than thinking about my own progress or lack of it, because I have so much that’s up in the air and little that’s solid.
That’s just how it is in a rebuilding year. Next year might be one, too, but this is not to be taken lightly. I cannot be my authentic self until all the pieces are together, or at the very least, scattered on the table in front of me.
Pieces, for me, are thought fragments. The most positive thing in the world that happened to me this year, above all else, was that in January of course I knew I’d found a flawless diamond in my beautiful girl……………… but by December, I realized she had, too.
So, in WordPress, the daily prompt is right next to the blank entry button. I am guessing that you wondered why I posed about Kevin, who is a giraffe, in an entry where I was actually at Zaytinya with my sister. I said something about how Kevin used to live in DC, talked about our evening, and did not realize that the prompt was not at the top.
So, in case you were wondering why there’s a giraffe in my last entry, here’s why. Everyone else can just be confused.
Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?
My relationship to my environment changed when I realized everything begins and ends with me. That I couldn’t blame anything on anyone at anytime. That when I’m phrasing a sentence, I make sure it’s “if, then” and not “this is why the people I know are bad.” Even now I have a sentence I call myself out on, so I know I have to correct it….. not in how I meant something. How I said it.
I said something about not wanting Supergrover to be mad at poly because “she helped make me this way to begin with.” I was mad and not thinking clearly, because if I hadn’t been going 90wpm, I would not have said it that way. I would have said that my reaction to the hard out was to make her a part of my heart in a way that can’t be duplicated. Therefore, it would be hard sharing myself to the same degree with another person. But it comes across differently in “she made me” language, and I am persnickety about that. No one made anyone do anything, I was just bad at grammar that day…… because I really do see the world like this.
Everyone is the cause of their own suffering in interpersonal relationships, but I draw the line at “everyone is the cause of their own suffering” because conventional wisdom says “don’t bet against the house.” I am the cause of my own suffering if I do not take care of the flaws within myself. But nowhere within myself can I fix institutional-scale ills. I am never going to fix racism. I am never going to fix ableism. I am never going to fix homophobia or transphobia. This is why self-help on the laws of attraction is bullshit to a minority on some level, because for a minority to attract anything to them they require others to want to work with them despite their differences.
They are all differences society is trained not to see and you’re trained to social mask around. If someone makes a comment about your lifestyle, sexual orientation, or gender, it is not on them to have been nice. It is on you to have held your tongue. This is the plight of all minorities. Be different, just don’t mention it.
For instance, having the reaction I did with Supergrover was helpful in my relationship with Zac, because I asked him out not knowing that he was actually the partner of a mutual friend. At first, I didn’t know he was intelligence, either. All of that came together later, when I realized that I’d managed to pick someone who was both safe and exciting, strong and comfortable. I felt like I already knew how to do this because I was so practiced at not feeling jealous of Supergrover’s husband…. that my behavior wasn’t fake with Zac because it wasn’t fake with her, either. I can love her all I want, but at no time does that make her stop being straight. I can send her love that is useful to her or love that isn’t. I can have other romantic partners because she will not give me that, but I cannot put her outside that level trust, either. And this is true whether we’re talking or not, because when she walks away she doesn’t depreciate in value.
In a lot of ways, it feels like she’s a museum exhibit and I’m the custodian who works nights.
But I walk around in my head often. It’s my favorite place.
I used to be vegan, and probably would be full time if I was interested in spending all my money at Whole Foods (but God, is it fun….. I’ve found so much that I love). Now, I’m mostly vegetarian because I don’t like cooking meat, but I’ll have it if it is prepared for me. For instance, once in a blue moon I’ll get a whole roasted chicken from Safeway. I can’t eat a whole chicken, but many times I have tried. 😉 In true autistic fashion, I have my favorites and I order them every single week. This is because I truly love adventurous food, when that is my focus. I have to cut out all my sensory issues to be able to focus, so food is one of them. White bread. Pizza with extra cheese and mild sauce. Eggs. Butter. Cheddar. The most challenging thing I bought was a jar of pesto for a frozen pizza and later spaghetti this week. Sometimes I make pesto Alfredo with pumpkin seeds as protein. If I am writing while I work, it’s ham, turkey, or egg on toast with cheese, or plain pancakes with one note syrup. However, I don’t like the same sandwich forever. I don’t choose one food and eat it every day. I choose a diet for the week and buy the same thing every time. It is so comforting when every bite is the same, and also something rich in its simplicity. I can do a lot with an egg and some cheddar. I prefer the texture of cheese when it’s cold, so I learned early on how to make the perfect scrambled egg and just lay it on top of the cheese and toast.
I am also very, very fond of the classic French-style sandwich. It’s really good white bread toast (I use Wonder, there is no substitute in this country), lots of butter, Swiss, mustard, and black pepper. I’ve been eating that almost every day for lunch this year. Very occasionally, I buy spring mix to wilt into eggs, rice, and lentils…. sometimes Brussels sprouts either fresh or roasted. But again, not often, because I tend to repeat things. I don’t have to eat fancy food all the time- that’s what makes it a treat.
I had a craving for fried chicken the other day, and that’s because Uber Eats was having a sale. I got 10 pieces of chicken (first of all, I really had no idea how much food that actually was), two sides of collard greens, and a Mac and cheese. When I got the chicken, I immediately deboned it and put it away for sandwiches, because by the time I’d put everything away, I’d snacked on enough. Really good local place, cheaper and better than KFC and of course now I don’t remember the name of it. I hope I recognize it again, but there’s nothing like trying a local restaurant that hast stuff on sale. It’s how I found out you can order prepared crawfish, which is also on the list of acceptable foods. AuDHD requires stability and flexibility, which in me is an iron structure for when I experience new things and when I don’t. Sometimes I have the bandwidth, sometimes I’m a picky eater. It depends.
Today it was chicken, cheddar, and honey mustard- total Boston Market throwback. Probably Sunkist limon later, a drink that tastes like the best Mexican street lemonade in the world and is sugar free. I could mix it with tea if I could be arsed to cold brew. I know I’ve already forgotten milk this week (or haven’t checked to see if I need more, but it’s almost time). The only problem is that you can’t get the bags back out of soda bottles easily, so it becomes a two use sort of deal. But I get plenty of soda when I’m out, and 20oz Coke Zero bottles work well for cold brew. I would use one tea bag if I was going to drink it straight, two or three if I was going to add milk (shaking it with Splenda and almond milk is delicious).
I’ve also started buying a package of cookies every week because they’re good as an accessory to ice cream if someone comes over and I need something nice, or just on their own. I like the white bread biscuits with the chocolate square on top. Yes, it’s a cookie, but it tastes British so I’ll give it to them.
I also generally get bananas, because I get some sandwich meat and eggs, but that’s not enough protein for every meal. It might not seem related, but vegans live on peanut butter and, often, banana sandwiches. It’s as packed with nutrition as rice and beans. (Rice, beans, and eggs are everything you need to start your day.) I know I have these things in the pantry somewhere, but I need to look for them. Frozen pizza is life because I can’t make cheese toast that good.
In short, I believe that eating meat is fine as long as you do it in moderation. Eat food. Not a lot. Mostly plants. Michael Pollan set me on the right track, because I eat whatever I want. Most of the time, it’s something ambitious with vegetables because there are just so many recipes I haven’t tried……. or made my own.
I have “fixed” many major sauces and soups. Campbell’s is the gold standard, don’t touch it. If I had to pick a favorite, cream of lettuce or mushroom made with whole milk and extra fresh lettuce or grilled/sautéed mushrooms. When you eat Campbell’s, you’re generally invoking someone’s childhood and it’s hard to mess with that. With all soup bases it’s easier not to reinvent the wheel unless you just like boiling chicken carcasses. Yes, I agree with David Chang that all pre-made stock is garbage, but I’m not standing over the stove to make fresh, either. He can. I’ll just add some of his momofuku pepper sauce to my boxed setup and he can tell me if it’s not okay. I don’t need it to be perfect, I just need it to be the base when building a chord.
It’s beautiful whether I’m eating meat or not, because I actually like mushroom stocks and gravies better than chicken. To me, it actually tastes better….. particularly on poutine.
Let’s end on poutine. I’d like to think about mushroom gravy and cheese a while longer. Maybe get some collard greens with bacon to go on top.
It’s a good image, because yesterday was a day and I’m still recovering. Sometimes I think so hard I have to stop. I have reached the end of my battery, but it will recharge eventually. I always set out with the best of intentions to post, and for the last several months I’ve missed one day. Some of it is the feeling of wanting to get plunked out of obscurity knowing that blogging is not X Factor material, Most of it is that in order to be ready for what’s coming, I need to be in shape.
I get that through how I feel about eating meat- nonplussed, except on the days when I’m obsessed with it because I’ve made the commitment to truly cut down. It’s been a dramatic change, but worth it. Superfood is really a thing. You’ll like greens better with vinegar. On the poutine. That’s you’re going to eat because I suggested it.
What is one thing you would change about yourself?
I wish I had known about the connection between teeth and meth when I started medication for ADHD, but even then, I was maybe 19. If there were side effects to a drug that made me lose weight, I didn’t want to know them. Adderrall did indeed help me lose weight, but it did it too quickly and violently for my tastes (here’s a free warning in case “you think you have ADHD now”). I had an upset stomach from the medication and when I looked at food, I felt sicker. Craving a donut is hard. Not craving a donut is harder. What do you do when even the most appealing foods on earth are in the “I don’t think so” category? Eating and not eating cause two different sets of problems for your teeth as well. So, if I could change anything, it would be only that. I feel like the mental “list of what’s wrong with me and why” is finally showing me how I can do things right, because I sat in all of it long enough to know what serves me and what doesn’t. I cannot change the way my mind works biologically, but I can learn the ways in which I am unique to you so that I can communicate.
This one’s going to be short, as it’s an important date on my calendar to eat pizza (bacon, sausage, light mushrooms) and ice cream (strawberry banana shortcake). Writing can come tomorrow, when it’s just not so today.
I can get used to any schedule except being awake all night long. Either I go to bed early and rise with the sun, or I go to bed around 0300-0400 and sleep until noon. That was the schedule that worked best when I was in the kitchen, because I’d get home around 11:00 PM, and could spend my “evening” writing. I think it made me a better cook than in the days when Dana and I would go out after work, because 1) when I wasn’t in the kitchen, I was somewhere far, far away 2) I was never hung over, so I picked up all the shifts due to brown bottle flu and was probably the highest paid employee and not because of salary.
Yes, I had limitations. That doesn’t matter when you just need a body, and the one scheduled is less functional than me. I worked six and seven days a week to keep busy; my disability kept me from perfection and struggled with excellence. At no time did it mean I got less hours, because in a kitchen everyone works long hours and compete with it. If I worked 50 hours, I was lazy ’cause you worked 60. It wasn’t just keeping busy, though. The neurodivergent brain does not know what to do in the absence of structure, and I had no idea what to do with time off. If I got out of the rhythm, it was harder to do it again….. disorienting and exhausting, again trading mental health for physical.
I was a permanently exhausted pigeon, but also very happy. Supergrover was a million miles away (which is what we in MD call “Virginia”), which meant that when I wasn’t at work, I wasn’t the same person. I very much had the feeling of the protagonist in Avatar, because of my physical disability and how all of those barriers were taken away on the world of Pandora. It was amazing learning to speak Na’avi, and if there’s anything I will miss about our communications the most, it would be the ones in which I had to say, “I know you’re busy, so is it “‘wink and nod,’ ’emphatic fist shake,’ or “slow finger wag?'” With Bryn, I could shorten this to “Borum it,” because we all picked it up imitating Matt, Bryn’s older brother. That day, it was “SFW.” Duly noted, beautiful girl. 😉
I also feel that Supergrover and I came to the same impasse I’ve come to with every friend I’ve had, which started with the woman who emotionally abused me- it was her deflection tactic….. “why do you think I don’t tell you anything? You remember it.” I’m a monotropic thinker, human relationships are my special interest, and I basically memorize most of what I’ve read because if it’s not a special interest, you love it a weird amount. I was also completely honest with Supergrover. If you do this, you won’t become “my friend.” I’m an INFJ. That means if we’re going to be close, you’ll be a companion, not just a friend. My personality profile says I only have one or two friends at a time, and I love them deeply. Just unreasonably, and that will always be true of people like Zac and Bryn. If Supergrover wants her spot, it’ll always be open because of the hard out, and as you could see yesterday, I’m not happy about the fact that she is diametrically opposed to this now. That’s because for everything in which I can’t walk away, I understand the assignment and she doesn’t. That when she told me what she did, it would cement our bond for life and we couldn’t be careless with it. So, in short, she’s terrified that I remember everything and call her on it so we can stay healthy.
I know this pattern so well. Your idea of love is so fucked up that you don’t recognize it when people are willing to change their behavior to something healthy, because you don’t recognize it as love. I have so much empathy for her, but it’s time to stop caring if she is no longer willing to engage, because I cannot go without an emotional depth she doesn’t have and not because it’s not inside her. It’s the things she won’t acknowledge to herself, and therefore can’t help me. I know I’ve said this before, probably many times, but watching all these videos about CPTSD and how it rewires you got me to see that Supergrover and I were both extremely damaged people who rushed into a deep relationship before we really got to know each other……….. except did we? I saw the incompatibility within weeks. She is not built to hang with an INFJ, and most people just frankly aren’t. We demand going to a rich emotional place because we’ve discovered it in ourselves and want to drag our friends toward “enlightenment.”
What is stopping me from becoming someone like Martha Beck (interestingly enough, also neurodivergent, queer, and poly) is realizing that’s not really how INFJ works for someone who’s already introverted. I can write about this stuff, but with my processing disorders I am just not as fluid as a public speaker. I can and have to turn on the afterburners when I preach, but I still do not feel that I can process information and speak at the same time.
I thought yesterday about why I was able to transcribe Dr. Wall’s Con Law class when I hadn’t been able to do that before. It was the laptop, entirely. This absolutely is an accommodating for neurodivergetnt kids, and I will take any teacher to the mat over it that I possibly can. Because I’m not Gen Z, I would encourage them to let neurodivergent kids keep their phones. If you don’t have an app to let them respond, then have the kids put their phones in airplane mode so they can use their notepads. Otherwise, if you don’t give the kids laptops, they are in the position of having to buy a second device…… when they are probably already used to the tactile experience of typing on their phones, just like I am the most comfortable at the keyboard.
When I said I was “going to class on my own,” I did not mean that I was going to class while I was in it. I used hyperfocus to drown out everything in the room so that I could hear a voice without listening to it, getting things down without comprehending it….. just like I do with my blog. Stream-of-consciousness is basically “first draft, get it all out.” Therefore, sometimes I’m quicker at crafting beautiful sentences than others. Sometimes, it’s crap you have to wade through to get to the good stuff, because that’s how I work. I start at one point and dive, ending up at another. Overthinking makes me a good writer, because while I’m getting the words out, I am not even looking at the screen. I am staring off into space, touch typing as I think about the next sentence rather than the one I’m currently typing. My brain moves just the right amount faster than my fingers, therefore my typing is not lagging behind because I’m three sentences ahead in my mind rather than just one.
An editor at a Canadian newspaper, Janie, told me that once all this was edited, I’d be surprised what I’d written. That made my confidence shoot up, because I think I’m only writing about what I know- me and how I interact with others, and my reactions to their reactions….. and no hearsay. I don’t say “one of my friends told me that Bryn…..” because I can’t verify that it’s true. Just a for-instance, Supergrover or Bryn could tell me that Dave or Michael did something. I would not write about it unless I could verify that what Michael or Dave said was accurate, because then it’s not something that happened to me. It’s someone else’s story.
For instance, I know it like the back of my hand that even if Supergrover walks away thinking I’m the meanest person on earth, it doesn’t mean I didn’t get the story I wanted and we’re not all good. It means that I will take our memories away and be okay with not creating new ones.
Because I think of Supergrover this way, it is very, very hard to switch to past tense, but I know for sure that will come with time if she doesn’t show back up eventually. It will hurt, it already hurts, but yet it is also not my problem anymore. I have explained it to the best of my ability without so much input from anyone else because I don’t talk about our relationship in person and I don’t talk to her about it, either. It’s not for lack of trying. It’s all due to avoidance on her part; it doesn’t matter why. She’s doing what’s best for her, and I’m doing what’s best for me. I hope that she’s angry AF, because it’s the one thing that will lead her to realize that there is a life beyond walking in anger all the time.
I give her so much latitude because of her job. I know that there are times when she’s not able to respond for very good reason and not because I’ve said something wrong. But when she does reply, it’s to point out everything I’ve said that’s wrong, when it’s not my focus at all. My focus is on a healthy relationship, cleaning up a toxic mess that just doesn’t need to be there. I also have the right to step away when I cannot get any compromise on anything ever. At that point, I just need to stop caring, and I can’t……. also for good reason.
So, I’m in a bad way over it, but writing it out helps. It also helps that this is the only relationship that I have that’s in turmoil, so I don’t have to think about it all the time and I have plenty of love in my life that’s healthy in the extreme. It’s all about using my ADHD to change my focus, but it doesn’t mean that a monotropic thought process drops off the radar…… again, do you have a special interest if you don’t just love it a weird amount?
I would think it was manipulation if it wasn’t a learned behavior from childhood. When I said that I wanted that bubble with an older woman and I got it when I was 12 by trying for it since I was born, it’s not because I was sexualized early or anything like that. It’s because adults treated me like a real person.
As a 16-year-old preacher’s kid who’d had many years of running behavioral heuristics on 200-1500 people at a time, the problems of my friends felt juvenile and pedestrian. I didn’t connect with anything they said, because it wasn’t monster dramatic and that’s what I was used to; people call pastors during the worst moments of their lives, and I actively tried to listen in to everything……….. and those times I even understood the language.
Again, I don’t process voices well, so those conversations would repeat in my head ad nauseam, special interest engaged, because there were two operations at play. The first is hearing something without context so that you can regurgitate it later by rote, even if you don’t understand it. The second operation is picking up what’s neurotypical and what’s not, so a lot of my social masking comes from the PTSD that belonged to other people, because those were the conversations I heard. Therefore, in my mind, it was completely normal to have wild emotional swings all the time and to live in that kind of pressure cooker. It’s what makes me able to work with cooks.
You can do everything by hearing and not taking it in, because you hear something, and then you own it. You don’t need to ask for clarification because there isn’t any, just get it done as quickly as possible. You are also, unless you’re on plating, only responsible for one part of a dish. A good example is a steak salad. Grill does the steak, pantry does the salad. I hand you the finished steak to slice over the salad, I am not in charge of presentation. Even if you have six burgers at once, it’s plenty of time to get all six setups and servings of fries done.
Quick, gotta move fast, gotta perform miracles. Gee willikers, Dre, holy bat syllables! Look at all the bullshit that goes on in Gotham! When I’m gone, time to get rid of these rap criminals……
If SCOTUS can quote Eminem, so can I. Line cooks are absolutely rap criminals. 😉
When you work in a kitchen, it’s the same feel as working in a church. Some of the best conversations I’ve had in a church came from cooking together for a pot luck after the service, or the traditional Easter brunch (which Dana and I did with another line cook one year and the three of us absolutely destroyed it…. that’s good, by the way. Just like comics, we bomb and we kill…… nightly.).
On Easter, you’re feeding three separate crowds. The first is the people who want breakfast after the sunrise service (that’s popular on Easter only). The second wave is the musicians who have come before the 9:00 or the 11:00 service (usually 10:00-10:30 in the Episcopal church). This is going to be a larger crowd of musicians than normal, because you probably already have a choir. You probably do not have a brass quintet, a harpist, an orchestra, or whatever else it is that you do to “boost the ratings.”
Church takes many forms, but for me it is ancient…. the interminable march of Sundays back into the dark ages. The Episcopal church is my favorite because I know that other people I love are saying the same words at the same time I am…..
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies…..
I didn’t even have to look it up, and the tears have already started. It’s called the “prayer of humble access,” and it is the shortest and fastest path to getting my heart to bleed all over the communion rail. That’s because it’s The Moment. The communion rail is where I wrestle with the bomb that could destroy millions, my own internalized rage. When I knew that everything was over with Kathleen, I went to church and laid my head on the communion rail, I was so wrecked. As the choir sang “lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” I folded because I had a lot of them.
I didn’t blame Kathleen entirely for her behavior, either, because she didn’t have the skills to deal with me. Just as traumatized as Supergrover, perhaps more so because the effects of her abuse lasted for years in what any adult except another traumatized one would see as wildly inappropriate and must be stopped. No one noticed.
One of the things that I wish Supergrover would take in is that she’s not scarred, not broken, literally perfect. This is because I have enough experience to say that there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just stubborn. 😉 In these moments, John the Gnostic speaks to me:
This is the verdict: light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
We do not run from the light because it’s not there. We run from the light out of fear. Fear of not being loved. Fear that the light is too bright. Fear that our sins are too great and everyone else’s are acceptable. Fear of separation from others, thus the feeling of being separated from God while it’s just not true.
Whether I’m in the kitchen, whether I’m writing, whether I’m queer, whether I’m poly, whether I am anything I have more power when I name it and claim it than I do by keeping it all in and having preconceived notions about what others are going to think. You stop attracting light to you because of shame and not being vulnerable about it…. therefore, you’ll never get to a place of acceptance through the torture of cognitive dissonance.
My life got so much better when my priest said “we are all very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, who are also heirs, through faith…” because it was the first time in my life I’d ever believed someone meant it……. after meeting the wrong priest, first, but still.
For Houstonians, Larry Gipson at St. Martins told me I’d never be a priest because I was gay. My revenge is that he’s Catholic now. Karma took care of him, because the Episcopal church as a whole disagreed with him and left him in the Middle Ages. I will not say any more about that except I can think of several people I’d like to go with him. Like, if you’re going to be a homophobic asshole, put a warning sign out, amiright?
There are many Catholic parishes who have quietly ignored The Pope for many, many years. They also have an organized queer group within the Catholic church. Just like protestants, there is a range. I would feel comfortable walking into any American Episcopal church, but I could not just walk into any Anglican or Catholic church (Anglican being the name of ECUSA churches who left over female ordination and homosexual marriage/ordination.
So, if I go to church at all, it’s St. Alban’s (better known as National Cathedral). I will never be discriminated against ever again, and I need that for me. Other people don’t. The “frozen chosen” have in the past had problems with “the most segregated hour in America,” but that has changed so much across the world, especially with the election of Michael Curry. Plus, there’s a lot of immigration from Africa going on in Houston and DC, so Episcopal churches have naturally gained more black members over the years. And that doesn’t all come from, say, Nigerians being active in the Anglican church overseas. Some of it is that you go to church once because it’s in your neighborhood, decide you’re cool with it, and stay.
My grandparents were Presbyterian, but the church in Lone Star they liked the best was Methodist. Ergo, we were Methodists now. I have to say that Paw Paw made an excellent choice. I got to meet Matt McConaughey before you even knew who he was.
My mother’s favorite joke in life was “I’ve seen Matt in a bathing suit….. of course, he was 12 at the time.” I’ve mentioned this before, but for new readers my dad confirmed Matt into the church when he was a tween, and my mother was his middle school choir director. I was three, so yes, I have met and spent time with him, but I’m going to bet we don’t remember each other and the only reason I keep up with him is because I see him everywhere I look.
Plus, his mom is in Bernie and it was great to see her, too, despite all Matthew’s justified and reported anger at her. I’m not telling tales out of school when I say that Kay wrecked him by giving press interviews about private matters, and it is not lost on me that I do the same thing, essentially, but the difference is that my friends don’t care that I do it. Even Supergrover, who is the maddest of them all, says I’m entitled to my stories and to keep at it, essentially. She doesn’t have to like it, she just has to live it.
That’s because she’s a fucking fan.
The rest of my friends are busy on self-discovery, particularly Bryn and we compare notes. We’re all driven by self-improvement and reparenting ourselves…. not to point out what our parents lacked, but to point out all the times we didn’t say anything and became part of the problem.
I was social masking because maybe if I did, I’d deserve to be loved. That’s the deepest tape I’m trying to get rid of, because that comes with altering and accepting my entire reality as an autistic and physically disabled person. If you compare yourself to someone neurotypical, you will always fall short and berate yourself. Acknowledging I’m simply not capable of some things is necessary because I cannot be held to the same expectations by other people.
I would have no relationships as a result, because they’d all walk off in frustration and still do despite my best efforts. I cannot always be in my body and respond from a place that’s not ensconced in pain. I am human. What becomes a problem is being willing to forgive anyone for anything and not receiving the same courtesy.
This is because I believe neurotypical people are holding me to the standard expectations of a neurotypical person and also get frustrated I can’t “get it together.” When I said that high needs and low trade off, this is what I mean. Sometimes, I am a functional person with a routine. Sometimes, my autism makes me get lost in my own brain and lack of function comes from the inability to change channels.
When I was a child, this presented as being emotional leaps and bounds ahead of my peers and listening to everyone’s problems, then meltdown and burnout after school making me unable to do homework. I couldn’t do eighth grade math when my then lady-love was married to a drug dealer who got drunk at a church party and threw up at one of our best friend’s houses. That stayed with me as a monotropic thought process for years on end, a 14-year-old on a mission to love a 25-year-old through it… another avoidant personality who didn’t know what the hell to do with either my emotions or the situation she was actually in.
As an adult, this presents the same exact way. People are my monotropic thought process and their emotional weight stops me from carrying anything else. So, is the question isolating myself entirely so that I don’t have a jackass magnet on my forehead (the term I use for being on the Metro and someone saying “my dad hit me as a child” or something equally heavy within minutes… the jackass magnet is a reference to the fact that I cannot keep myself from letting it in, not that those people have done anything wrong.
There are two words I could use right now to explain what I mean, and nearly everyone knows them but I’m so mad at JK Rowling right now that every time I say something mean about her, I wish it had been worse.
If you just can’t stand not knowing because you’re not a fan, someone put it in the comments or something. I’m done.
In short, I cannot read minds, and I cannot protect my mind………
People expect me to read minds because the societal response is clear and I am just not on that wavelength. I think big thoughts, and I’m not going to apologize for that. While you’re thinking about how I didn’t do X when you wanted Y, I’m thinking about how the whole company should run and how to change it for the better because my scope is different than yours.
In college, I began to learn how international systems work, the chessboard, and because of my history in the “underworld” of abuse, I was drawn to government espionage (corporate doesn’t do it for me). You’re thinking about the village, I’m thinking about the world. I am not dissimilar from any spy, really, because most of them are truly damaged people who needed refuge in the system…. and that was appealing to me, not a drawback.
The reason spies are generally damaged people is that those are the people who are willing to cut ties. It’s a lot to manage, your real life and your cover identity, so it’s better to be like me and not have many significant relationships so you can keep your necessary lies straight. If you’re an abused kid in any form, whether it’s being young and raped or being 18 and getting shot, you don’t trust anyone.
I listen to everything. I talk a quarter to never. I have selective mutism often. Part of it is that I’d much rather write than talk, part of it is being emotionally abused over many years and having those threads so woven into me that I never know when that woman’s expressions are going to come out of me rather than my own. I sound just like her because that’s who I was social masking as a teen.
Again, from 12-36 years old I was social masking someone who’d been raped as a child, was currently dating a drug dealer, and had a very unstable career because opera is just like that and she was a queer teacher in a conservative school district. My memories of her are crystal clear down to the smell of the air.
As a result, I do not trust anyone or anything at anytime, but I listen to things intensely without processing their voices until after said conversation is over, because I am not both talking and listening anymore. In those cases, talking is limited to sympathetic nods and breaking eye contact when it gets to be too much sensory information…. which it always is. You don’t walk off the Metro with conversations like “my husband beats me” unscathed.
In effect, what’s happening is that I take in information like a doctor, then have my emotional response later. In a neurotypical person’s brain, they’ve “dealt with it and moved on.” I am “lost in the past,” when you’re walking around like a ticking time bomb and I’m trying to stay calm about it.
I am an INFJ, and I’m here to drag you kicking and screaming toward believing in yourselves. I am here to love the shit out of you.
What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make? Why?
The hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make are the ones I didn’t get. Because do you really get a choice not to feel confused down to your very soul when your wife cannot function? You’d think I was talking about Dana, but no. I could not function and she could not handle it. Then, she started to self-destruct and I was too sick to stop anything. I have been writing a book on my illness, to a large degree, because when you have access to my thought process, you see all my processing disorders and mental illness through stream-of-consciousness memories.
It’s not just a deconstruction of my marriage, though, because I talk about all my relationships here to one degree or another.
This morning, the thing that made me smile was my first boyfriend, Ryan, finding out that I’m still attracted to men and asking me what I’m doing this weekend. It was hilarious, and I teased him about being slow on the uptake because I’d been posting about Zac for a year (this was just a funny meme). What I didn’t say and should have was, “actually I’m free.” There’s a reason it’s really important that Ryan laughed and joked with me about it, because breaking up with Ryan isn’t a decision I got, either.
Lesbians older than me convinced me that bisexuality was a lie. Kids are stupid, ergo I thought women were magic. There was no such thing as people who loved both, because if you fell in love with a woman, you couldn’t go back (like they had some sort of secret poison? Idfk. I can’t do the math.). I do not believe that anyone meant me harm. I think their attitudes toward Ryan were based in their own prejudice and internalized homophobia. It’s not like I’ve never been burned by a bi girl, but what I knew even then is that the men weren’t the problem.
Marrying Kathleen was a mistake because it was an anxious/avoidant attachment and when she was avoidant, she acted out. No normal person in a relationship that gets frustrated is going to cheat for months and destroy you while you’re out of town. She can justify it all she wants, but it’s not going to reconcile. In turn, I do not blame Dana for all my feelings for Supergrover. Just because I felt things for someone else while married to her doesn’t mean that I was horrible about it.
It was contentious because those feelings existed at all, not because I was trying to push Dana away. It just did. It was a ball I didn’t realize I was setting in motion until many, many years after the fact. This is because I went back and started exploring the root cause of the pain. Dana and I only looked stable from the outside when we got to Houston. We were actually broken beyond repair and needed a therapist. We didn’t go. Therefore, things fell apart quickly.
Feelings for Supergrover didn’t come out of a vacuum, they were the siren call of something darker- a life without having to fight through a marriage at all. Yes, Supergrover gave me a task that would limit other people from getting into our bubble, and then thought I thought there was something unappealing about that. I did not trade one situation for a worse one, and I got tired of Supergrover insisting that I had. As I’ve said before, I didn’t do anything because she told me to do anything. I did it because it needed doing.
I didn’t leave Dana for good because she was a bad wife, or that our problems weren’t reconcilable (until she hit me). It was because there are three forms of communication in Texas….. telephone, television, tell Dana. If Supergrover has any reticence about this, she shouldn’t, because basically I felt like I had a deep, irreconcilable issue that resolved the moment my glasses smashed into my face.
Dana’s voice echoes in my head constantly regarding a particular event, the one where I knew it was over in retrospect. I won’t say more, but it was huge and ended in a voice mail to Supergrover telling her that I knew she’d had something big come up at work and I was crying that I’d been a distraction to it.
But, the phrase that runs through my head is haunting and it replays every single night, and the one thing that would unlock all the context and hits the hard out. I’m betting that Supergrover does not want to know what this phrase is, because then she’ll have to face the reality of knowing what I do. It was never going to work, the three of us. Ever.
That’s because it was a moment in which her boss was wrecked, too, and we were having a day of it. I was a panicked mess over our shit, and it was just not a good day for me to go into meltdown (as if it ever is) because she was in meltdown as well over her shit. We seem to have a lot of those days, but for all that, she’s still my beautiful girl. Doesn’t mean she didn’t alienate Dana from me, yet nothing is her fault, either. I hope I have made it abundantly clear that neither of these things is the answer- that it was a spectrum of answers and I had to choose between staying married or “the very best bad idea we’ve got, sir.”
Editor’s Note:
There is an “Argo” quote for every occasion.
In the end, I had to ask myself what I was going to give up for this relationship, and as it turns out, a whole lot. But I didn’t do it because she needed me, or I had this wild fantasy that everything was going to work out in the end. By the time I moved to Washington, we were officially done and I was freaked out at the possibility of moving with that insecure connection because I realized it was going to be hell on earth to convince someone I didn’t do something because of her. She took it so personally that she couldn’t see my point anymore, except it was the same point I’d been making for several years before I got sick. The timing of everything was just off, and I can’t help that- even more now that nine years have passed.
When I got sick, Dana’s parents didn’t move from the area, so I thought that our paths would stop being parallel, but wouldn’t go off in completely different directions. Dana could visit, not live with me, etc. But again, I quickly learned that’s not how being hit works. The longer the shock wore off, the more depressed and anxious I got.
I know for certain that to the outside world it looked like I was waiting for a woman in a situation that would never happen. This is not true. I was terrified. I could make her priority one in my head because nothing would happen. I was safe. She was the only woman in my life that I could love with wild abandon that I knew for sure wouldn’t hurt me. I just had to hang in until her anger was resolved.
In some ways, winter melted into spring, and the thaw warmed both of us. But we’ve never gone back to The Moment, either. She was never the definite article, because she has two in my mind. For every time she was The Moment, there were three times where she was The Doctor.
If you don’t know what The Moment is, I won’t make you either go back and look it up or research Doctor Who online. The Moment is a weapon that is capable of destroying entire universes, entire species, and that’s the point. He’s trying to save the universe from collapse, but in order to do it, he has to kill his own people in addition to the Dalek invasion.
Editor’s Note:
I had to look up the exact number, and Doctor Who is so popular that all I did was type “how many Gallifreyans died in The Time War?” It popped up immediately.
Eight to 10 billion Time Lords died that day, leaving The Doctor completely alone except his mirror image, The Master. There are two interesting concepts here. The first is that Supergrover is my mirror image, because we are both Timeless Children, steeped in that DNA. The second is that I have decided the “The Timeless Child” is all abused children because of what Tecteun did to The Doctor. She adopted him and ran experiments on The Doctor, which The Doctor couldn’t have recognized to due regeneration. She was a mad scientist with a willing participant because The Doctor didn’t know any better. The Doctor was regenerated all the time like a rat in a lab, ending with William Hartnell….. who unsurprisingly stole a TARDIS. I think it’s institutional memory, to be honest. Even if The Doctor didn’t recognize what was done, The Doctor still felt all the pain of an insecure environment, just like all Timeless Children do. I hope we find out as we go along why she stopped with William Hartnell. Why The Doctor ended up as his particular persona….. which as I remember, is not altogether pleasant and for good reason, as it turns out. However, with Supergrover, we are The Holy and the Moly, and we change it around often. Neither of us is coded as The Master, neither of us are pure enough to be The Doctor. But, The Doctor is not pure enough to be The Doctor, and he knows it…… felt it deeply as he wrestled with The Moment that day. Let’s not forget that thought the genocide was later rectified, he still made the choice to blow up his people. As a result, The Doctor, like all Timeless Children, is also The Master when The Doctor feels weak….. “a good man goes to war.” Luckily, “prisoner zero has escaped.”
Editor’s Note:
I switch between him, she, they, and The Doctor because it isn’t clear in canon whether The Doctor goes by “they” now or is always the definite article. The Meep cleared that up when The Meep said that The Meep always identifies as the definite article, and The Doctor says, “ya, I do that.” The reason it’s confusing is the actor who played the role when the story took place. The Doctor might be the definite article, but Matt Smith and Jodie Whitaker aren’t. Therefore, I try to remember to use the definite article or “they,” but I get lost quickly.)
To that end, I had to wrestle with The Moment. She had to walk with me through all of my decisions whether they were the worst or the best.
It’s what makes my worst decision also the best, depending on where you stand.
Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays?
I don’t cook anything for holidays anymore, because when I got divorced and moved to DC, I moved in with a family who already had Thanksgiving wired, and I wasn’t the only cook in the house. One of my housemates when I first arrived had gone to Johnson & Wales, and was the chef at Jaleo Crystal City (Jose Andres is the executive chef, I mean the guy who actually ran the restaurant on a day-to-day basis). Therefore, I know Jose Andres intimately, even if he doesn’t know me…. and all of his secrets are safe. 😉
We used to laugh together about the things that happened around us that we were helpless to stop. Neither one of us in all of our cosmic culinary power could get people to stop putting knives in the dishwasher or in the bottom of the sink. More than once did we look at each other and say, “I can’t.” We honestly didn’t spend that much time together, it’s that our relationship was like all brothers in arms. We had an emotional shorthand not there for others in the house. If you are not a person with ADHD/Autism when you start a kitchen job, you will gain the ability to see the kitchen that way. Everything in cooking is a sensory issue, and you’re learning to fine-tune it. The tiniest changes will cause absolute anarchy.
For me, a big one is soap. They’re all concentrated differently, and it seems there is a large leap from generic to brand. It also affects the kitchen to change the smell of the dish soap, because you get used to how those fragrances mix with spice. For instance, going from a floral scent to a lemon scent gave me gastrointestinal issues because the lemon mixed with the scent of eggs and ruined Hollandaise sauce for me because every time I think of it one of the flavor notes is surfactant.
Soap is a trigger for a much bigger sensory issue overall. Most autistic people who have sensory issues with smell are because it’s turned up to “pregnant woman.” I throw up more due to bad smells than anything else, and why when I live alone and have a cat, I have disposable litter boxes and change them out often rather than ever force myself to change it. I was lucky in that Dana didn’t mind and had permanent boxes at her house, but I wasn’t counting on her to care for Asher. I had my own system, I just didn’t have to use it. I wasn’t allergic to chores. I traded that one out.
Being married is really the last time I had any holiday traditions, because when I moved to DC, I was folded into an established family here, Lebanese heritage and not Irish. For Thanksgiving and Christmas we have turkey and dolmades. Stuffing and kibbi (Kibbi is actually one of our dog’s names, too- “meatball,” basically, in Arabic). It’s a wonderful life. Hayat and I have talked often about the fact that “I’ve picked up Arabic,” because when I first moved in, Hayat spoke Arabic and Nasim spoke Farsi. I asked both of them if it would bother them for me to listen in on their phone calls, because I didn’t want it to feel creepy and I knew they wouldn’t really, either since I don’t understand either language. I just wanted to take away the feeling that I was trying not to watch them by making it obvious that I was.
Listening to Nasim was hearing the end of “Argo” all day long. Learning the Levantine dialect of Arabic was learning the rolling lilt of the ocean and not the Middle East RP equivalent, Cairo (I checked). Some words in Egypt and Lebanon are different, some words are the same because Lebanon has had a bigger influx of Mediterranean immigrants. In fact, my cover photo on Facebook is a picture Hayat took of the marina in Beirut, now a city on my bucket list if it ever calms down enough for me to go. I would feel comfortable with Daniel or Zac in that situation, but I would not feel comfortable traveling without someone who could defend both of us. That whole idea started the romance with Daniel, because I initially wanted a travel companion and then I realized I wanted him. I don’t know whether Zac and I will ever travel together or not, but what I do know is that he may have not been in the same situations as Daniel, but not because he didn’t train for them.
But Zac and I haven’t started our own traditions yet because we haven’t spent a Christmas together. Since he celebrates Yuletide and not Christmas proper, it doesn’t matter whether I see him on the 25th or not. What I do know is that we as people are a spectrum. Maybe we’ll go for Chinese, maybe we’ll finally watch “The Pigeon Tunnel,” the Apple TV+ documentary based on interviews and John le Carré’s last book. I would have jumped on it the moment I saw it if I wasn’t so insistent about not cheating on him. Infidelity is one thing. This is couple TV. THERE ARE RULES. There are shows I still haven’t finished because I promised Dana I’d wait. It’s getting a bit ridiculous. Still can’t do it.
I have been asked to make a Christmas list and so far the only thing on it is a long-sleeved SAS t-shirt. I’d also like a Senators baseball cap because of the Duke Ellington concert in the spring, because even if I didn’t wear it, oh my God would it ever look good with Jason’s signature on the side. For my international readers, the Senators are the current hockey team in Ottawa, but the baseball team in DC was called the Senators when we first joined the league. Duke Ellington started selling peanuts when he was like, 11?
When Jason told me that he was going to do a Duke Ellington concert in The District, I told him that he was a brave, brave man. He laughed because he knew exactly what I meant. If you come for Ellington in his hometown crowd, you best not miss. Here’s what I know that you don’t. Jason is objectively better at piano than Ellington ever was. He can take Elllington’s ideas to a place that the composer himself couldn’t- another brain seeing different patterns. Ask me how I know that? He’s been doing it since he was 17 (probably younger, but I’ve known him since then), the Mozart of jazz, too many notes that boggle the mind.
I do not say this lightly. It probably sounds like I’m just part of the Houston jazz scene and trying to promote my boy. No. Jason is different. Jason goes to places I don’t like and I don’t know why and then I fall on my ass when I figure out the chord structure. It’s not that I didn’t like Jason, it’s that my mind wasn’t big enough to hold Jason yet. I had to grow into him. He’s an artist that is perfectly capable of giving you a beautiful haircut that you don’t like until you realize you were wrong. You thought it was a mess, and it makes your whole face.
The last time I saw Jason, I left the Kennedy Center and walked around for two hours trying to deconstruct that concert in my mind. Every time I came to a new metro stop, I decided I wasn’t done thinking about jazz yet. If you’ve never been to see Jason, I do not believe you have a grasp of modern jazz and where it’s going. I hope the concert is not too esoteric for Zac, but I don’t think it will be. I just think the difference is that when he looks at Jason, he sees the finished product. I see every iteration. Tall, skinny, quiet, softspoken when he does, can’t get used to the fact that he doesn’t wear a stocking cap every day. Can’t believe he and John Schutza aren’t a thing at lunch anymore.
Zac is going to become a bridge from my old life to my new one, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. I know Jason wouldn’t necessarily look for me at the concert, but what I do know is that he would be disappointed if I came to the concert and didn’t say anything. If I had my life to do over, I would have loved to be as serious a jazz musician as Jason. But, on the other hand, I did not have the ability of Konrad Johnson to “see where they were going and go with them.” I did not have Jason’s ability to see the rules of composition in such a way that he plays as if they aren’t there. No open fourths? Here’s seven in a row. Deal. Not a real example, but on brand.
Jason, like I am, is an unapologetic artist trying to get the audience to come to him, and he’s so good at his craft that he deserves to be a leader.
If there’s anything in my family that starts with me, it’s a love of music- the only special interest I had before intelligence because the first time I ever sang in front of an audience (congregation), I was three. Never in my lifetime did I think I’d get involved with it enough to understand what an open fourth might be, but here we are.
I know that when we talk about dishes, we’re often talking about the things put on the table. To me, sharing music with someone is every bit as important as a Christmas or Thanksgiving table. It’s where my mind goes now that I don’t have to cook for either holiday.
I also talk about music not to talk about what is going to be missing.
Also, here is a meme to express my feelings, one of my love languages:
If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?
I would play it by ear. I don’t have the kind of mind that would plan it out in advance. I function way better as the red team than the planner/finisher.
Some people are unfamiliar with the term “red team,” but it’s journalism slang for people who point out the flaws in your plan. There’s a whole episode on the red team in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom.” Very, very much like prepping a presidential candidate for a debate; the red team researches the blowback you’re going to get before you publish something.
It is so much easier to red team than it is to create it because an autistic mind sees patterns and can tell you what doesn’t fit. Other people can do it, too, but allistic and autistic people have different criteria for pattern recognition. This pattern recognition is created by our autism, but also our extensive social masking. We research neurotypical people, but we do not take it in. We do not become neurotypical by socializing with you. We make ourselves seem more acceptable to you and you interpret it as “getting better.”
But, if you try to tell a neurotypical person that they’re wrong about something, you’re fucked. Because mental health issues mean they treat you with kid gloves. Your opinion comes across as “why does this child think she knows anything?” There’s a huge superiority complex that comes from not having mental health issues or processing disorders. It’s such a catch-22 because you can’t hide it and living with the consequences of telling people is a concentrated tisane of depression and anxiety, served to you every morning even when you don’t sleep.
It makes people feel better about themselves when they’re in conflict with you and you have mental health issues. People are so much more likely to write off my feelings as symptoms of my mental health than actually consider the fact that they might have hurt me. I am responsible for hearing when I have hurt someone and responding; I am also responsible for knowing when people are seeing symptoms when I express needs. Normal things that people should care about, should worry about, all of the sudden become “you should take something for that.” Bitch, please. My psychologist thinks you’re a freak show and my psychiatrist says “not enough medication in the world.” Truly, there is no medication in the world that will fix someone’s perception that it’s always your brain (therefore, you’re always wrong) because you have a diagnosed problem with yours and they don’t. It would be gaslighting if it was malicious, but it’s not. It’s every bit as systemic as racism.
It’s the sign, being treated like a pest. That’s the sign that someone thinks of you as mentally ill and not a person anymore… but not consciously. It’s not personal, it’s global. I am a diagnosis to a lot of people, and I finally stopped catering to them because I started treating me like a diagnosis as well. It didn’t do anything to make me feel better and often made me feel worse…. and in fact, a lot of the “symptoms” people see are indeed symptoms- of autism, not depression and anxiety or hypomania. In some ways, it was such a blessing because the symptoms I thought I had from depression were actually processing disorders. I felt lighter than I had in years, because that means my depression isn’t as bad as I think it is.
There’s never going to be a time I can wean off of my depression medication, but there is a lot of comfort in things being unique to me as a person rather than brought on by depression. They just tend to work in tandem. If my autism gives me demand avoidance, my depression will tell me I’m useless and worthless. Anxiety will tell me that if I do not get with the program, I will keep on being worthless. The boss music moves faster, and the threat never appears.
Therefore, I’ve never fallen into a pit of fire, but I haven’t saved the princess, either.
I take that back. I have saved the princess once. I bought an NES controller for my PC, and downloaded an emulator capable of cheats like a Game Genie. The only time I’ve ever beaten Super Mario Brothers was turning up the cheats to full-on invincible. I didn’t have to do that for Alduin (main storyline villain in Skyrim, a dragon).
If I didn’t sleep at all, I’d probably play video games more. I don’t have time for them, which is why I stick to Skyrim and don’t pick up new titles. If you get into Skyrim, it’s different than getting into any other game. There are so many makers of free content addons called “mods” that add quests and characters that you’ll never finish it all. I haven’t even finished all of the quests in the main game, much less expansion packs. While Bethesda is amazing, the creators didn’t make Skyrim immortal. The modders did. It’s basically a video gamer’s blog, because they keep updating the story and the software as newer hardware comes out (getting Skyrim Legendary Edition to run on Windows 10 should be in your quest journal).
Besides, I’m a monotropic thinker. I am happy disappearing into Skyrim more than once rather than getting used to new game mechanics every time. I can change them slowly over time if I want. Part of the joy of the creators’ community is that they’re able to create new animations as well.
And, of course, I love the Thieves Guild, and not because they’re bad. It’s because it’s the closest you get in Skyrim to being a spy. You’re tasked with burning someone’s beehives and stealing something out of someone’s house without anyone knowing you were there. I may not be Jack Reacher, but I get to feel like it for a little bit.
It is so easy to me looking back to see how intelligence became my special interest. Hearing about my great uncle when I was a kid made intelligence feel secretive in a good way. I know for sure that my great uncle was a watchdog on CIA and the military, part of the solution and not the problem.
I have a couple of stories that prove to me that the American government is not lily white from that era, so I also do not think of spies as superheroes. Because James Bond is, well, James Bond, no one thinks of spies as the babies they really are. Most are recruited at the same age as people in the military. CIA recruits at universities as well because they always need people fluent in more than one language. As John le Carré points out, when you’re old enough to do those jobs well, people stop asking you to do them.
What I do think is that I identify with living a double life. My personality on the street is not shown online, and my online personality isn’t me in real life. I am not hiding one from the other, you just can’t only know me in one way and see everything. It’s not the way I’m trying to present online and in person. “The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan.
If I never slept at all, I think I would spend more time researching. It’s my favorite thing whether it’s intelligence operations or biographies of real people. This is because the more non-fiction I read, the more I have a library of images in my head to make correlations. Reading about intelligence is like reading any novel. You find random facts about everything while on one topic. That’s because nothing happens with one decision. With worldwide intelligence, you may have to visit Mexico and Iran in a day. So, in the course of one operation I can learn the habits and mannerisms of a policeman in Oaxaca and a tea shop owner in downtown Tehran.
I am deadly serious in that I believe the Netflix version of “Carmen Sandiego” is the most realistic show we have about intelligence available currently. Carmen is a young woman, but I’m not sure how young. Her friends seem to be teenagers, so maybe college? Anyway, she has a ground support team (ginger twins named Zack nd Ivy) and a handler, Player.
Player is not on the scene, he’s kind of like Justin Long in “Galaxy Quest.” He’s at the computer with the floorplans in front of him, but he’s never in Carmen’s physical location. And because they’re an intelligence agency unto their own, they’re not trying to mimic another one poorly. I really like the relationship between case officer and handler when it’s written as a funny and touching buddy comedy, which this is (my other favorite is “Spy” with Melissa McCarthy and Miranda Hart). In this version of Carmen Sandiego, Player is written very much like her little brother, and it makes child labor so endearing. 😉
Speaking of “child labor,” I love The Disney Channel. They’re the ones that have 14-year-old children saving the world at every turn. I believe that’s a lot more realistic than expecting me to figure it out. Plus, I love writing for adolescents, because it doesn’t take fancy language to make a good story.
It is not lost on me that I bond with these weird little families because Player is coded as autistic. Carmen is coded as CPTSD. Zack and Ivy are clearly ADHD. Ivy is also coded as queer. When you’re the ones picked to live in the shadows, you don’t get to pick and choose who comes with you. The relationships just keep getting bigger to accept who everyone is. Player is never going to be on the ground support. Zack and Ivy are never going to sit still. Carmen is never going to let other people control anything, because she deals in burning beehives.
If you love “Doctor Who,” you’ll probably love “Carmen Sandiego” as well, because it’s very much the same idea. Zack, Ivy, and Player are very much Carmen’s “fam.” And she has more important companions in her life, but that would involve spoilers I’d be devastated to give you before the story unfolded on Netflix.
Often the best representations of intelligence agencies across the world are fictional, because then people have so much more license with it. Less chance CIA would get upset with me if I changed their name and gave them global power to track down alien activity. Maybe throw in Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as the main characters. I don’t know. Seems risky. Think anyone would watch it?
I am watching very closely at how fictional characters are written across the board. My alternate history combines my two greatest passions in life, so I don’t know whether passion for cooking fed intelligence or the other way around, but now they are inextricably interrelated into the plot of my novel. The one thing that will happen for this alternate history with certainty is that OSS will not transition to CIA. It will transition to something else (or stay OSS, because its future would also be fictional). To me, it is better to create my own intelligence agency with its own fictional structure/rules than it is to guess what CIAs structures are and be wrong. I am a Virgo. I can’t be wrong. It creates a blip in the Matrix.
I have archetypes for my characters thanks to YouTube. There are lots of interviews with people from DIA, CIA, NSA, etc. Here is the one truism I can tell you from hours of all that. In every single one, someone says, “when you were a kid, did you think about working in intelligence?” In every single one, they say “nope. It just fell into my lap.” I think this is due to age. Most of the interviews I’ve watched are with people that are at least my age. When we were kids, spies were approached. There was no “go to CIA’s web site and apply.” Future female spies will be able to say that they applied when they were 18, all they did was send in a resume.
In fact, the way Tony was recruited was through an ad in the newspaper for a government artist. He was intrigued because he thought, “what would the government want with an artist?” Turns out, when an intelligence agency wants people to forge passports and documents, they call it “government artist” in the newspaper. 😉
I am certain that people still get approached because there are people out there doing all sorts of things that would be useful to CIA. For instance, you might love languages or cartography and think you’ll end up as a professor somewhere. But when you get up to six languages or images no one else has, someone will be impressed.
And honestly, we’re starting to be impressed as a country. People loved Madam Secretary, which is a great example of a show that shows how government works (heightened, but realistic). Not everything is accomplished in the shadows, but……….. “for everything else, there’s Visa?” When I think of CIA and State, I don’t want to picture Elizabeth. I want to read the real stories of the people in those jobs. I have read every word Hillary Clinton has ever written, both fiction and non.
I suppose I am trying to find what any writer is- the ability to find themselves while constantly researching other people.
Before we get started today, I finally found the perfect keyboard for me. When I use it, I feel like Jason Moran (jazz pianist). The touch feels like it’s made to help me go faster. It’s kind of like having a new car, honestly. Like, there is a big difference in the feel of an accelerator on an old Toyota and a new BMW. With the brand new Bimmer, you’re going to touch the accelerator and be a quarter mile down the road. It’s nice to have a keyboard that is not in the way of being able to jump in that fast. The amount of force on the key to make a letter is almost negligible, but it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s that middle of the road touch between mechanical and laptop. If I had to name the biggest sensory issue I have in life, it’s the touch of a keyboard. I think this is because I know how important it is. I would not know that touch was important if I hadn’t lived with a pianist.
Because of my mother, I have words to express what I need out of a keyboard in the first place.
The prompt today is about pet peeves.
My biggest one is that my housemate has a maid and I don’t. I am terrible at keeping things organized, so my room is a mess and I white knuckle through the common areas because since we have a housekeeper, it is manageable. The problem is the six days a week when our housekeeper isn’t here. There are three of us, and only two of us help. Only the entitled one shares a bathroom with me, so I am constantly cleaning up after her. The way she does this is to say that because I have touched something, she cannot touch it. She comes from a culture that does not accept homosexuality and pretends that it is contagious and I am unclean. I have been laughing at her for nine years now, and it’s not funny anymore. I cannot beg her to do it, I cannot get my landlord to make her do it, because my landlord has talked to her about it also for nine years. So, if she washes her hair in the sink, it’s my problem. Has been for nine years….. because I’m gay and that makes sense to her.
Because it’s been so long, I feel trapped between “this is unacceptable” and “this is my weird little family.” There is no way I do not have empathy for someone so twisted in their world outlook that they make me treat me this way. It’s not anger. It’s pity. I look down on her because she does clean up after our guests whether she brought them or not. I say that her culture dictates homosexuality as unclean because it sounds like very Karen behavior, and she’s the furthest thing from it. I cannot see it all the way around as entitled behavior because she’s been taught since she was a little girl that I should be in jail or dead. Therefore, I can understand and be angry all at once.
Another big one is not responding to emotion with emotion. I do not ever want to hear the phrase “you should have known” ever again. I am out of the anticipation business. I cannot be the expert on how I felt and how you felt, too. Because then you’ll berate me when I haven’t anticipated correctly. You have to be strong enough to communicate your needs with me. It is only my job to become emotionally flexible enough to hear them without reacting in autistic meltdown. It is not pretty and I always regret it. Always. However, now I have new ways to learn coping mechanisms. I don’t want people to feel like they have to walk around on eggshells, the way I feel when I’m trying to guess how to make our relationship better.
My answer for this pet peeve is time. I need to hear/read what you think and walk away. Let me have time to process, because I will look at it differently if I change my environment and come back. I do not trust my first reaction. Please always remember that about me and when I say I need time, let me go. I was emotionally abused as a child. I have trauma reflexes. That means my first reaction to everything comes from that place, and I don’t want to operate that way anymore. I react with autistic meltdown because you’ve interrupted my reality so violently that my environment feels different in panic. I often react with panic because I have been corrected so much about every little thing that I feel like a dog surrounded by an electric fence in most relationships. In anxious/avoidant, the avoidant person will move the target to avoid confrontation, so you cannot please them. Meanwhile, the anxious person feels like they can’t do anything right. Every relationship I’ve ever had has been like this to some degree, because I am the common denominator.
If you have trauma reflexes, after the trauma is over you’ll gravitate toward one of those extremes, and they marry each other constantly. That’s because one of you is social masking an abuser and one of you is social masking an enabler. The younger you are when abuse occurs, the more that pattern is ingrained. The person you really are is hidden underneath those trauma reflexes, because you built them to protect the bubble an abuser creates with you. Everything about how I react as an adult is based on how I reacted as a child to hearing secrets that were too big for me. I have learned that my first instinct is to protect myself from violence. If when I express needs, I am met with violence, I will do anything to avoid saying something and I become part of the problem. So much of writing to Supergrover all those years was learning how to walk in the world in a different way.
Because she’s a boss, her thought processes got under my skin quickly. Every time she got angry at me, I made a note of how and why. It wasn’t to throw things back in her face. It was, “I’m a nobody and she’s not. What can I pick up here?” She’s also not a politician, so she could give a fuck if she wins and influences me. 😉 If she goes back and reads my blog, she will see that it’s just a collection of things she’s said in new contexts, and so many of those lines I got when she was adding new definition to furious. The reason I love her so much is that I find lines that flatten me in letters that are meant to convey annoyance, rage, whatever. I thought, “it must be love if you delight in even this.” For instance, when she said “be careful painting your feelings as fact.” I have quoted that in this blog at least 10 times because it was an image I could use and beautifully.
I wish I could get her to see that I stare at her Renoir like she stares at my Jackson Pollack. They are both beautiful in their own way. We are so magnetic when we are both painting our feelings as fact, because what is happening is that she has so much more to work with than I do. Whether she really doesn’t have time, or whether she’s avoiding writing back to feel guilty, the effect is the same. She knows more about me and can think about it than I know about her and can do the same. She has more context about my life, my mental health, my family dynamics, my entire heart and soul on the page, basically….. because when she said I could, I started using a finer brush- that I’d give her details and she’d write back.
Writing back became a pet peeve because she’d find the things she didn’t like and leave out the things she did. I didn’t like living in negative feedback, because then she started to feel like every boss I’d ever had. Assuming malice where none was meant, turning everything back around as if I’d meant to hurt her by being honest about something, and just generally dealing with the fact that she doesn’t deal in emotions and I do. I write so much about this relationship because it became a list of what’s wrong with me and why. But instead of just saying she was wrong, I dug deep into myself and figured out what was going on.
She did not. Therefore, every time we came back together after blowing each other to bits, nothing changed because she’d react in the old way and I’d regress. I got tired of feeling like she was provoking me and telling me I was the one always provoking her. I was not, I was asking her what was going on in her mind regarding where we are and where we’re going because we have shit to deal with if we’re going to create a secure attachment.
The exhaustion came from feeling as loved as I’ve ever felt and a complete dumbass depending on the day; I never knew which woman was going to show up. As a result, neither did she. It was tumultuous and extreme because we were fighting our own battles in ourselves. My way to cope is to use my blog to be Jackson Pollack. Just like an artist, I am throwing my feelings onto canvas so I can look at them from an objective third eye. Her way is to throw herself into work and pretend that our problems will go away. So, I think it’s better to be apart, because I can’t go on having issues with her that are infinitely solvable with any kind of real conversation at all…. and by that, I mean she doesn’t have to come and pick me up or anything. Just send me an e-mail with your Renoir so that I have two pieces of art in my museum. I have only been saying “I feel neglected and this isn’t okay” because I am asking for so very little. I don’t care that she can’t be available all the time, I care that when she’s here she’s present.
I need to be less reactionary, and so does she. I don’t want to end the relationship, but I also don’t want to live in highs and lows, either. It’s too disruptive to an autistic mind, craving stability and having a volatile monotropic thought process. I am not saying I never had security. I’m saying that her coping mechanism was to end the relationship every single time she was mad about something, and then we couldn’t stay away from each other. Just binge/purge for 10 years straight. If my writing had any effect at all on her, it’s that it didn’t make her fall in love with me, but it did make a future in which we were alternately mad as hell AND also craving each other’s words. What do you think it means to her to be a voracious reader and have crafted pages like mine for long haul flights? What do you think it means to me that I’m the author she reads? That bond is unbreakable, which is how I know with a 60-70% chance that she is absolutely hanging on every word here while also not saying a damn thing. Good for her, because if I can’t entertain her one way, I can entertain her another. The delivery method does not matter, and if she isn’t reading, I also don’t care. I just think her morbid curiosity is stronger than her will. 😉
I do not pretend she is dedicated because I’m writing to her. I am explaining my experiences with her, and it would devastate me to publish something just because I thought she wouldn’t hear about it. I have to consider the possibility because it would wreck me if I didn’t, because there could be repercussions for her, not me. I am trying to anticipate what will and will not be offensive to publish, working within limits. So many things here are analogies for something else that will come across to her differently than the point I’m trying to make…. and also having to be aware of that, too. How much am I entitled to my stories and how much am I just actively hurting her? She doesn’t see that it hurts me not to know, and keeps everything close to the vest.
That’s not her fault, either. That’s just the difference between us. I have something she lacks- the ability to spill my guts emotionally. She has something I don’t- the ability to protect myself emotionally by not constantly focusing on others’ needs. We are both lying to the other- she’s as much a people pleaser as I am, she just makes it look good……. and I only know because of how much she tried to please me. I regret every single time that I “made her feel like she wasn’t good enough for me,” because her feelings are valid and yet not a message I ever intended to send. How she got from “you’re the absolute love of my life and I’ll never put anyone above you again” is just beyond my comprehension, but it’s also my reality. I don’t get the right to make that reality untrue…. and she fucking knows it. That’s my anger issue.
That she cuts and runs when it’s hard, and it’s deservedly hard because it’s so fucking worth it. She does not see that’s what I’m saying. She sees it as “you’re a bad person.” I am not asking to change the nature of our relationship and make her act differently, I am saying that “this is a thing we should manage, not avoid.” Absolutely all of this is because of who she is as a person, but it’s not a dealbreaker at all. It’s that I need someone who can deal with the fallout, and she’s insistent on it not being her while also saying I shouldn’t talk to anyone else. It’s devastating to an enormous degree for both of us, because whatever she’s avoiding in me has nothing to do with me at all. I am asking for something she does not have to give. She’s 10 feet tall and bulletproof IRL while also putty in front of me, because she thinks she’s not good enough for me…. and has thought that about many other people. It didn’t start with me, and I know that.
For most people, she’d be a walking red flag. She doesn’t see that she gets to be that with me. That I’m the person who willingly said “the flag is a lie.” My feelings were deep and immediate because of it, and she’s run from it ever since.
The first fissure was treating me like I was suspect and avoiding me because I’d done something wrong….. except the story she was telling herself was fiction. It was a diversion tactic to avoid talking about the fact that she was wigged I’d told her I’d had feelings for her. I tried to be cool. I really did. But I was wigged that both she and Dana were angry at me about it, because I didn’t have a secure environment anywhere. Not at work, not at home, not in the cloud anymore.
It was a time of trial, and instead of blaming everything on others, I got the help I needed. But the problem with Supergrover never went away. Just avoid, avoid, avoid. Checking in once in a while and gifts were enough. It confused me, and she got angry if I said so. I began to walk on eggshells in a way that I don’t for anyone else anymore. I have explained both sides of the story; Dana was going down, but that didn’t not mean that Supergrover led to my decision to break up with her. I couldn’t deal with both their anger at once, and Supergrover was the more stable choice at that point. It wasn’t the whole story….. but it made cutting ties to Dana so much easier when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would benefit me.
She just got freaked that I chose to come back to Washington to do it, because she thought it meant that I was leaving Dana for her. What she did not realize was that a tiny part of it was for her, but not all of it. I could have broken ties with Dana from Houston just as easily. What I could not do is live in a city without a car. What I could not do is find impartial friends who didn’t know me from Adam…. I know my friends. I know that they love Dana every bit as much as they love me. I also knew that Dana needed them more than I did and it was easier not to give them a choice. You can keep up with me online, she needs you to jump in. Go to her.
Just because Dana was a walking red flag didn’t mean I didn’t love both of them equally. Dana just didn’t like sharing me and didn’t have a choice. Every “come to Jesus” meeting was a rehash because she treated me so differently and I never knew which Dana was going to show up, either. We all have trauma reflexes, full stop.
The entire problem was that when Supergrover pulled back, she didn’t have that choice, either. She thoughtlessly put something into my head that will affect me forever and decided she had the right to just let me cope. I don’t have the right to make her do anything, but I do have the right to be angry that she did indeed fail me in some respects, and absolutely delighted me in others. She is a spectrum, a 3D character, you might say. 😉
I loved checking in once in a while. I loved getting gifts in my e-mail. All that stuff was so rock solid. What wasn’t was all my anxiety roiling underneath, the feelings she refused to acknowledge that she had created. The feeling of “not good enough” doesn’t come from the fact that she is failing me. She is failing us. I could love her more deeply and be less reactionary with more information. I do not feel anger at her, I feel angry about my insecure attachment and environment because of it. Her conflict avoidance told me more than anything I could ask her outright, because she thought I was hysterical and overemotional…. because she doesn’t see that my approach to life is so different. She sees it as needing me to get with the program while also not explaining what the program entails. Hard to be successful when you don’t know the rules, but she doesn’t do rules, either.
Therefore, I feel like she steps all over my boundaries by withholding information, and I step all over hers for asking for it. We are at an impasse and always will be, because now it’s up to her to accept my reality. If she doesn’t, a part of me will always be angry with her, but it doesn’t mean that my love gets smaller. It only means that it will remain unresolved, and that causes feelings of injustice. An INFJ does not do well with injustice, local or global.
So, now I’m just working on the anger, and she’s not working on the anger she “doesn’t have.” She says in words that I’m just projecting. In her actions, I feel on target. That’s because she’s never vulnerable about anything. When she’s mad at me, I don’t know it. As you can see, that doesn’t cause problems at all. I didn’t walk away because I was angry. I got tired of feeling like my emotions don’t matter to her while she’s saying that’s untrue in words and deeds.
She did something enormous for me when we met, and I think in some sense I’ve come across as ungrateful because she sees me pointing out problems as throwing emotional bombs. That’s not true at all. I can handle bigger emotions than she can, so I write from that place. She reads it while being buttoned up, so it feels like an attack because she can’t receive what I actually mean. She is moving too fast and accusing me of moving too slowly. Again, the leap between a neurotypical and neurodivergent brain with the exception of both having CPTSD. It’s amazing to me how our traumas are on completely different playing fields, yet our reactions are the same, yet mirror images of each other. I forced us into a bad pattern, and it is better to walk away and lick my wounds than it is to convince her I’m right.
My emotional strength makes me care about myself in a different way than I did before……. but not entirely.
“For all our mutual experiences, our separate conclusions are the same.” -Billy Joel, Summer, Highland Falls
Hers is a gift I’ll never be able to repay, because now I have the confidence to believe that if I speak, powerful people will listen because that’s what I’ve been taught. At the same time, I can’t go on with such an inflexible power structure, because the avoidant one always has it. They don’t do things wrong, you’re a problem.
All I want is reconciliation on my terms, because we’ve been on hers for so long and it’s not helping either of us. If it’s not helping either of us, I have other friends. She thinks of me as someone who points out everything wrong with her…. and in my mind, she is everything amazing about being on this planet.
Stories That Are All True 