Really the only thing I believe all people should know is that race is a construct and we’ve lied to ourselves about that since the first enslaved people arrived on US shores in the 1600s. It’s not an American problem by any means, but the police do not convince me that we have gained much ground. Yes, there are great big sweeping changes in that people aren’t enslaved anymore…. but in America, you can’ shoot Jim Crow all you want and he will not die. Ruby Bridges, the first black girl at William Frantz Elementary during the school segregation crisis, is the *three years younger* than my mother.

Homophobia is just as manufactured. The Bible gave people a book chunky enough to beat people and that’s just what the church does unless you take time and energy you don’t have to search for a congregation. The barrier to entry with Christianity is high, because you have to swallow a lot of bullshit church teachings that you don’t like if you go to the wrong one first, and most people don’t come back. I promise there is a difference between the Church of Christ and the United Church of Christ (“Splitter.”), but if you are in one and belong in the other, my guess is that you don’t know it because I would bet that a lot of people could tell you the difference between Catholic and Protestant….. but probably not one protestant denomination from another. To the unchurched it’s all the same. Jesus would most certainly be baffled by *all of this.*

Transphobia is where the rubber meets the road in the queer community. First of all, white gay men rarely compromise with anyone because they make more money than everyone else. Watching gay people on TV, you’d think we were all one big happy family, but depending on where you live, there’s a deep divide between men and women. Not hatred. Just have their own spaces and don’t reach out. When I was coming up in the 90s, some bars you couldn’t even get into unless you were male or accompanied by one who’d vouch for you. These are the bars where straight white women think they want to hang out and get completely wide-eyed at dick o’clock. Moreover, there are lesbians that make Rowling’s Twitter/X feed look like child’s play. It took years for HRC to support trans issues (their point and I do see it, though wrong, was that gender and sexual orientation were two different issues…. that trans people weren’t queer people). I have never had the entitlement of a rich white gay man, but my own feelings toward trans people have changed through education as well. Younger people are losing touch with their history and it’s because no one wants to hear me (or anyone else) tell it. “Don’t Say Gay” is just the latest iteration in “lock up your kids because homosexuality and pedophilia are the same.” Republicans are making it harder and harder for queer children to feel normal in today’s world because they don’t realize what everyday life was like for us in the 90s, much less remembering that we were targeted in the Holocaust. Our pink triangles are slowly being forgotten because our infrastructure to be able to pass down information is being bottlenecked in so many directions.

And now we’ve arrived at the most important thing I believe everyone should know. If we do not stop picking people to hate, erasing these three things will do no good. We’ll just take the way we’ve treated minorities and apply it to something else.

“Three magic genie wishes” sounds like “New York Football Giants.”

I honestly think I would have different wishes depending on which processing disorder was at the forefront, and I’m not being snarky. I genuinely do see things differently when my ADHD is winning. My ADHD side is a thrill-seeker. My autistic side wants NONE OF THAT. I want to conquer the world, but not when I’m wearing uncomfortable shoes. I want to lead a nation, without leaving my house (some of you live in countries small enough where this might be possible. Call me.). I could rule the world if I could understand it. 😉

Truly, it is an interesting place to be- so understanding of how neurotypical people work in conflict, and unable to fit into it. I am not, in fact, doing something a neurotypical I’ve observed does, because mimicry is not authentic. What I’ve laid down comes off wrong and I don’t know why. I then take up less room and let more start happening around me without participating. Things happen to me, I don’t direct, because when I have had a voice, no one has listened. I am learning to find people who listen so that my voice does matter…… and because I haven’t had a voice, I haven’t used it for anything except in my writing. It took me until I was 45 to realize that I was hurting myself by only letting other people set boundaries with me. That if I never said there was a problem, it would never go away.

I found out who my friends were. It’s the ones that even when they disagree with me, acknowledge what I’ve said. I feel heard, not gladhanded. I feel they’ve listened, not managed me. I don’t want anyone to be a “yes man” to my crazy ideas and I don’t want to be infantilized. By the way, “crazy” is relative. Like, “what if I downloaded the beta version of Ubuntu? What if I went to Walgreens past nine. Finding out that someone wasn’t my friend was finding out that they didn’t care they were hurting me when I asked them to change. After all I’ve written, it sounds pointed at Supergrover and it is definitely not. Lots of people liked having no boundaries with me. If dopamine was money, why would they want a different deal when they used to have free withdrawals all day, every day, without ever making deposits? People who love you genuinely don’t want to feel like they’re draining your emotional ATM all the time and care when they’re doing so. It’s easy to find your real friends when you say it out loud. I have to have boundaries set so I don’t worry myself to death in your absense….. and most of the time, it’s because I’ve taken off a social mask and don’t know how you’re going to react to it.

The anxiety at not having canned responses in unfamiliar situations is frightening, and something with which all neurodivergent people deal. I’m not saying I don’t try every day, only that it’s easier to pick out patterns when you are outside a system rather than in it.

With wishes, I couldn’t fix all that. But I could help.

I would make other people do well so that it was like they got a magic wish, too. The first wish in either case (whether autism or ADHD is winning) would be “socialized medicine in the US.” People know not what they do when they vote against socialized medicine- that insurance premiums from private companies are more expensive than you’d pay in tax and millionaires who don’t want to pay tax have convinced people that socialism is evil. Why wouldn’t they? They don’t need it. The gate should have closed after they got in.

The second would be erasing Reaganomics off the board. It didn’t work and no one will admit it. Go back to the 50s tax structures so that our millionaires and billionaires are actually subsidizing us as they should through tax, thus having money for a safety net. We could do it right now, but we would have better facilities and a wider network of services if we had more influx…. money that isn’t already allocated, in other words. Being able to do it through magic wishes is the only way it would happen- that tax structures would be restored and all the influx would go to social services, the people who need it the most.

If Congress can’t agree that we should do our best to stop school shootings, what makes anyone think they’ll do anything in the way of social services? These are the same people that try to call government services “entitlements” like you’re being an entitled Karen when you use them. They forget that they’re called “entitlements” because you’ve already paid into them. It’s just more rich people shaming poor people as the barrier to entry gets higher and the stigma gets worse.

The third wish would be overhauling education. It is a disaster in this country that most people don’t recognize the names of the Vice and the Speaker, and barely recognize “Biden.” It’s a misnomer to think that the US is a country of extremes. No, it is a country of apathy represented by extremes, because voting participation is so low. Voting needs to be more important, certainly, but we’ve always been failing history and now have a shoddy relationship with science at best.

We stopped focusing on leaps in education and it cost us, clearly. We’re in deep and most people don’t even know how bad. This is not limited to a candidate because fascism is a movement. If it’s not Trump, it’s DeSantis. If it’s not the Proud Boys, it’s QAnon. Education is the only way out, and I don’t think any of those people are going to change whether we educate them or not, but we can prevent it from happening again.

Notice all three wishes are for me. They are just not only for me. I have the idealism to believe that we can make a better world, so I’d use the genie to facilitate it. I would rather grow where I am planted rather than trying to find another country that has these things. I just know they won’t happen in my lifetime and want to help.

But even after I’d done all that, I’d still wonder if people liked me because I messed up their sysem.

I didn’t do the Daily Prompt yesterday because I’ve aready said all I want about exercise in “Don’t.” But today’s is nice because I don’t describe my family that much. First, let me give you some context.

My mother had two brothers and one sister. My mother, Carolyn, and her brother, Bill are both gone. Nancy and John are living in northeast Texas, where all of my family is from. My dad has two sisters and a brother, all living. My dad divorced my mom in 1995, and remarried to someone who also grew up in the same area as my mom and dad. Therefore, I have a sister biologically and two stepsisters through her. My stepmother also has two brothers, both living. All of my grandparents including from my stepmother are now dead, but that is very recent. My father’s father was the last to pass a few months ago at 92.

My cousins on both sides were close to me when I was young, but now I’ve lived outside of Texas for longer than I’ve lived in it. I am not close to them because I don’t run into them, not because I have any particular need to avoid them. Yes, we are politically very different and it causes waves. But our family can handle waves. I’m not even the only queer one, and I will leave it to everyone’s imagination who that might be. 😉 So, Southern Baptists mix with flaming liberals and we’re all happy. Truly, not just saying so.

But this says to describe “a family member.” The above is background information. I still won’t talk about only one person, though, because you really can’t talk about one without the other. It’s my cousins Jason and Jonathan. They belong to my aunt Shawn, my father’s youngest sister, and they are relatively famous compared to the rest of us. Jason appeared on “American Idol,” video at the end if I can find it…..

So, Simon Fuller (producer) finds out that Jason is a funeral director, so his first appearance on the show was him singing a beautiful a capellla rendition of Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up.” I was dying. DYING. I think Simon must have picked Jason because they could build such a funny narrative around him.

Enter Jonathan.

Jonathan has been the class clown of our family since he was born. For instance, one year at Christmas he showed up and announced that he was “Rabbi Claus.” He is not Jewish, but we call Santa “Rabbi Claus” to this day. Welcome to the Lanagan family, where if it’s funny, run it into the ground.

So, of course the show has segments of Jason and Jonathan. Jonathan said he should do well because he has such a tiny head that getting a big one could only be an improvement.

Now, they work together at the funeral home, and are both doing well. Jason didn’t make it very far in “Idol” because he left of his own accord (don’t remember why). But he did get paid, so he sunk his money into house building and body transport and a few other things, diversifying to an enormous degree. If you don’t think Jason and Jonathan are a big deal outside of the funeral industry, you don’t know them very well. I do. I felt my heart break when they were both on call for the aftermath at Uvalde. I do not know if they did any of the kids’ funerals, but I do know that Jason’s body transport service was instrumental. They do all the things we don’t think about in everyday life.

Jason recently bought the funeral home in his old hometown, serving families he’s known his whole life. He has, in effect, taken over my role as a preacher’s kid having never been a preacher’s kid himself. It’s not the same, but it’s the same loving patois. Jonathan is in the same boat. They are so admirable, living in the pockets of northeast Texas where it’s easy to establish yourself because industry isn’t already there.

Jonathan is still just as laid back as the moment I met him.

Jason and Jonathan are both successful outside of work, raising their kids to be amazing people. Jonathan (and his wife, Molly) adopted their little girl from China. She makes me laugh at her antics, but no less than all the others. She’s just the one I’ve met the most recently. 🙂 It is really fun to watch first cousins give me more of them…. well, cousins anyway. I can’t do the math.

The bottom line is that my grandfather has a legacy of which to be proud. It took me a while to see how that extended to me, too. He wrote a book about our family. It’s got at least five volumes, maybe seven.

It has been taken over by a different author.

For me to to go to the moon, we would have to pretend my assets are limitless first. I would not want to go to the moon on the cheap. I would feel weird about only paying $49.99, because if it seems too good to be true……. So, short answer, at least a million. It doesn’t cost as much to go to the moon as it does to stay at present because we have no standing facilities. I am also not ignorant about the cost of fuel. Everybody hates hauling people places who don’t kick them some money for gas. I just don’t know what’s in the scope of the question, so the price of the ticket would be dependent on the length of the trip. In short, how much of their resources am I using?

We don’t have a hotel on the moon already, so I’m thinking maybe just a moon landing? If we are assuming my assets are limitless, I could have a hotel built….. provided I got the approval of several different earth governments. But I don’t think I’d want to go that route, either, because then I’d be constantly stuck in the battle between the US and everyone else, particularly Russia. I would never be able to get away with a hotel in space and not have to constantly check it for bugs. The panic of the space race in the 50’s was real, and there are carryovers- like knowing if I built a hotel on the moon, GRU would be on my ass for all eternity. First, they’d try to recruit me as an asset, then, when they realized I wouldn’t do it, become passive aggressive and put me under surveillance, anyway.

Our relationship with the Russian people is inversely proportionate to our distrust/hatred of their government, particularly among astronauts who have lived in Star City for weeks at a time. We love Russian food and culture, we do not love the competition. Thank you for Tetris.

Our fear was that if Russia won the space race, they would arm the moon with nuclear weapons. It seems crazy now, but we were genuinely frightened. This was not Trump hysteria. This was based on actual facts. The dissolution of the USSR abated that fear because all of the sudden, Russia didn’t have enough money to run with the big boys. I don’t know how much that has changed, really, I just know Russian attitude hasn’t. If Putin doesn’t have the money to destroy us, he certainly has the will.

It’s an interesting point of history at NASA and CIA…. how science had to move with intelligence and vice versa. It’s a beautiful dance if you get time for the deep dive. The best part is that neither space program nor intelligence agency got everything right, and most of the space race ends up being a comedy of errors that’s not actually funny because we could have all ended up dead. 😛

Now, we have a branch of the military called “Space Force,” and I think it’s ridiculous and not because we don’t need the intelligence (we are nowhere near ready to talk about putting a standing military in space). It’s because all of the things that we could do are within the scope of another branch…. but it’s too late, now. I have a Space Force patch from Zac that I need to sew on my bag. I do wish it had a batter name than that, though, because it sounds like a cliche. Like naming a dog Spot and thinking that’s original.

I mean, I get it. Air Force, etc. But it still sounds like a Seth MacFarlane show…….. except MacFarlane’s two space shows, “Cosmos” and “The Orville,” have been outstanding.

Maybe the name isn’t all bad.

I am at a crossroads right now, and I don’t know what to do. Historically, because of my mental and physical limitations, I am great at getting jobs because I mask and seem neurotypical to get by…… get severely overwhelmed and stop performing………. and the death spiral begins. I get social anxiety at work, which has only been exacerbated over the last eight years by many different things. But social anxiety and masking are only part of it. Right now I am unsure of how capable I am and need both counseling and a neurology consult.

My brain just does not fire and I do not understand logical processes. I also have to understand what I’m doing to buy in. When I seem to fail at enough things that neurodivergents struggle with and neurotypical people don’t, I tend to beat the hell out of myself because I didn’t know it was ADHD struggling against autism so that even I couldn’t tell what was what and didn’t think of myself as autistic until i watched a shit ton of YouTube videos, got peer reviewed, and now need a confirmation. But don’t underestimate the value of people relating to other people’s stories. I have found myself in multiple videos on autism, stories from multiple people and lectures by doctors and psychologists. It’s overwhelming because now I know why I’ve always felt like an alien.

I am so interested in other people that I’ve stood back and studied group dynamics for years…. since I was a child. What I cannot do is then turn around and see why my reactions are so different. To not really know why people’s interactions with me are confusing because everything makes sense in my brain- except for office politics. I have never been able to figure out those because so much goes on that is hierarchical and you don’t know who is really doing what. Your name comes up in meetings you don’t attend, and people are so full of HR-speak that you cannot find a clear path with a map and a flashlight because no one will tell you the truth…… that they have reached their ability to explain something and now I’m just being obstinate.

No, I am trying desperately to please you and I do not know how because something that makes sense in the moment fails when you walk away. Over time, this becomes truly problematic because it comes across as not being able to work independently….. and I’m not entirely sure this is untrue. I seem to have the most success with writing, but I cannot count on it because the validation from writing comes in believing in myself. The compliments I’ve gotten are astounding, but since I haven’t gotten them on a large enough scale, I cannot bet my future on going viral. What I do know is that by helping myself, I help others. I would be a good Glennon Doyle-type character, if only to end up married to a soccer player. 😉

That depends on other people seeing it first.

I don’t have the ability to do everything, but it’s different when you can hire it out rather than having to be the one where everyone’s expectations are heaped upon you and as a neurodivergent, you have no coping skills on how to mask in unfamiliar situations. It’s not a canned response. You have to be okay with going to your boss and asking for help more than everyone else, and they only have so much time and patience. Their executive function isn’t fucked up, but mine sure is.

Because of the cerebral palsy affecting my movement and my neurodivergence affecting my brain, I feel incapable a hundred percent of the time- until I sit down to write.

So, when you ask me about other career paths I’ve considered, literally all of them. I do not have the echo chamber that says “keep plugging away. Eventually you won’t be in trouble all the time.” I always am. The last time I had job security, I was in a government job where it was almost impossible to get fired and on a college campus where everyone attributed my gaps in functioning to being young. I am a child in an adult’s body because that’s how people treat me. It is hard to break those patterns because you don’t know what’s going on and why you can’t get with the program. It is not built for you. No one in an office has taken me under their wing without getting so frustrated they wanted to fire me that I wasn’t let go within six months. It was always attributed to other things, but in the kitchen my ADHD and lack of masking worked in my favor while also not having the dexterity to move fast and carry heavy shit. Because of my floppy muscles, I couldn’t predict when I could or I couldn’t hang. People saw it as my performance going up and down, and they always do. But it’s never a case of my limitations. It’s that I’m lazy.

In any job, you are defined by who you are…. the popular kids, the geeks, and the mean girls all have to work together. The degrees are not as pronounced but the microaggressions are real. You are marked quickly as a “type,” and if that type is incompetent because they don’t understand what I’m putting down, it’s never a matter that they didn’t explain it where I could pick it up. The hierarchy doesn’t have time to adjust.. they have time to hire someone they feel can actually do the job.

People expect me to be so capable because they’ve seen me “act normal” my whole life. I am fucked and having to catch up. Occupational therapy and seeing if it helps, because I drop so many details that I don’t feel capable and constantly have that message reinforced. I wish I had stayed in academia constantly. The river is slower, and makes the learning curve less steep because I have time to get comfortable in my environment, but even that is tough if I don’t have an office. Cubical farms are death to the ADHD and the autistic.

I cannot solve someone’s problem on the phone while hearing everyone else’s conversations and write down the problem and contact other people on line two. It’s too much stimulation and it’s what was expected of me every single day. I liked night shifts because of it. My body screamed in pain and I didn’t care because I could focus better. I dropped less. If you wonder why mainstreaming is hard on both parties, stuff like this is it. We get overstimulated and can’t function, you get frustrated and angry. Perhaps guilty that we don’t get it, because you know we’re neurodivergent and you’re still at wit’s end. You’re running a business here, man. You’re not a special needs teacher and we get it. We just don’t know how to deal with it and feel constantly horrible about ourselves for things we can’t control. It’s relentless.

When you get into simple jobs that I can do, they generally involve physical activity. I could be in a bakery, more laid back than a restaurant, but I can’ lift 60 pounds of flour. I can’t stock in a grocery store because everything is as heavy there as it would be in a kitchen. Perhaps a courtesy clerk. I don’t have a problem with an entry-level job because I don’t have to be brilliant at my job. I have to be brilliant at writing.

I am one of those people for whom disability would be perfect, but I don’t know whether I want to go that route. It involves giving up a lot, and I don’t know whether it would be worth it in the end. I need to wait until I get finished with the diagnostician and the neurologist. With disability, I have the ability to focus on what I do the most well, the job I actually can handle, with no ability to keep money I make from it. So, I’d rather learn what I need to know and so far behind the eight ball.

That’s because I refused to admit I have limitations before. Not only to everyone, but lying to myself as well. I have the energy to sit at my computer all day and type like a coder, but not the talent for STEM. I have tried to learn programming many times, and I do not have the executive function to understand logic to that degree. It’s like playing the pipe organ. I cannot keep track of what all my limbs are doing, and I cannot keep track of the music while I’m doing it.

I went downstairs to get some tea (maple espresso), and my housemate Magda told me that I was like a mushroom. That I grew where I was planted. She meant that I needed to get out more. I took it as a compliment. I also take trash and turn it into beauty. So rare a pig searched for me, something plentiful yet hard to find.

You can’t use truffles in everything. They have a very specific set of applications, and the rest seem off…… it’s just…… unclear.

Today is not the greatest day to have this prompt, because I’m dealing with a lot. Part of it is just now having any freedom at all to tell any stories about the whole ordeal with Supergrover, because now I just want it to be over and the story won’t quit. I need to put it down with force, and my dreams are eating my lunch. There’s a reason for this. You don’t meet extraordinary people without loving them through extraordinary problems. She didn’t do anything wrong, ever. My reactions are my own and have nothing to do with her. That doesn’t mean it’s not hard and I’m not entitled to my feelings after a decade, and it’s the entire reason why I need it all to end. I went into this relationship not knowing she didn’t think of me and what I do at all. I will never stop saying this, because even though she didn’t think it through, I’m not blaming her.

Where I feel blame comes in is pretending we’re okay when we are clearly, clearly not. I am not proud of any of this, yet that doesn’t mean it’s not still my story. It doesn’t mean that other people won’t connect to deep trauma and the bonds we create to deal with them. My problem here is that we managed to turn on each other and when we did, she discarded and I kept lovebombing because that’s what I do. She discarded me, later came back and forgave me, and then my mother died.

I was a completely different person who needed her in a completely different way. I stood up, and she didn’t rise to meet me. I do not know whether that is because she couldn’t, or whether she wouldn’t, and that’s not my call. My call is what to do with all her feelings because I cannot get a read on her and I’ve been walking on eggshells ever since. I would say she was a narcissist except she’s clearly not. It’s not like she discarded me for no reason. I earned it free and clear. I came onto my best friend while under duress, not because of anything she did, but because I was in a situation where I couldn’t deal and thought getting her to run away from me was easier than just telling her flat out, “you cannot be my friend. I do not have a clear path to you yet, because I cannot decide how I feel and it’s not a good thing.” If I had, we might have been able to save the relationship, essentially just putting it off until I was really myself again.

We didn’t have that kind of time. I needed to get there faster, and I didn’t. It is such a time of trial and pain that I am stil recovering a decade later. It doesn’t all have to do with her, she was just the lucky recipient of all the shit happening in my life that rolled downhill. I remember sitting on the floor of my apartment before Dana and I moved from Portland, telling her all my most intimate secrets while she told me hers.

It was never her looks that bound us. It never is when you fall in love from the inside out. Remember, our relationship is 99% text. Her words stuck with me because they were in my head, tone of voice fabricated when a phone call would have solved so much. Everything she said echoed in my chest, which made her voice louder in my echo chamber as well. When we were lovebombing each other, it was a high I’ll never experience again, because this was too unique a situation.

Dating Zac is my refuge in all of this, because I need time to rest and relax in a way I’ve never needed before. I cannot be fully present in a relationship right now, and he’s not waiting on me to decide anything because he doesn’t need me to do it. I can handle going out on dates, even platonic ones (going to Charlotte Cardin with Lindsay tomorrow night). I cannot handle the relationship escalator, because I cannot care for someone else in the way that I want while all this is going on. Believe me, it’s not that I can’t or stubbornly won’t move on. It’s all the things I can’t say, summed up by other factors at play. The triggers she left are still there and it’s going to take a while to get them out.

The triggers are large, but I agreed to take them on without knowing ahead of time what it really meant. That she’d always be the baby I’d respond to in the middle of the night with something to drink, Tylenol, and if she ever got old enough, I’ll throw in diaper changes for free. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. If that’s ont love, it’s saying I’d be tested when she said she had wonky organs. If that’s not love, I wouldn’t reach out for her in the middle of the night, without knowing what dream it will be that will make me do it, and being embarrassed that it even happens because like I said, I didn’t know. If my girlfriend heard me calling for her, I couldn’t tell her why and it would be a bad situation fast to wake up in the middle of the night with the wrong name on my lips, even for the purest of purposes and not anything to do with cheating. It’s because she’s done things like that for me in real life that make me want her protection, and then it flips, and the things I’d like to do for her as a repayment flip and it’s a different scenario altogether.

But when I express this to Supergrover, she says that she already has a very full life and can’t do anything for me. This is truly problematic because when we told each other all that stuff, we were drunk as fuck on each other’s brain chemicals and it looked a whole lot different once the effects started wearing off, because she’s not trusting enough to open up again and I have so far been inconsistent enough that when her eyebrows go over her forehead in exasperation because she didn’t ask for this shit, I pick up all my toys and go home because I didn’t sign up for that.

When I forgive someone, I mean it. I don’t let them do me dirty and then set boundaries where they can never work it out with me; I’m just too unwilling to trust an apology with changed behavior. I’ve never become jaded, and I’m proud of that. Jaded comes in when I don’t see changed behavior and I’m trying my absolute best. Where we were before determines how willing I am to set those boundaries, where no amount of feeling wronged erases love or care or connection for me. To love someone so unconditionally that I’d push the big red button on this web site if it came to that, because having the freedom to say what I want with no restrictions on it became a bad thing over time when she wouldn’t commit.

Because then I started having real problems with no peers except her, and she was shit at dealing with mental health. She didn’t know me well enough to know what would happen when we exchanged secrets with me, and neither one of us were prepared for the fallout because we knew each other’s deepest secrets without the context for it…….. except being in the honeymoon phase of a relationship where you can’t see anything going wrong. This person is never going to do anything wrong. There is nothing this person could do that would make me feel differently about them, etc.

I got that deep, but she did and she didn’t. This is because she pushed me away and brought me closer so that I never knew which end was really up. When we get too far apart, we start attracting each other like magnets, but to different degrees. Since I treated her with the same intense lovebombing after we made up, I don’t think I made sense to her. That’s not how it works in her world. If you fuck up, she’ll never open up again and I blew it. I didn’t protect the one baby I made promises to and it broke my heart in half. I jumped up and down trying to get her to see that my behavior was driven by something outside me that I couldn’t control, and it wasn’t my feelings for her. It was that ADHD kicked my ass in the moment and caused waves. Then, when I did the work and became healthy, she couldn’t trust that it was true.

I do not blame her for this. I blame both of us for keeping a toxic pattern and Supergrover being unwilling to work on solutions so that both of us felt well and healthy again. I feel like since she was coming from a very suspect place, she thought I was coming at her from that direction, too. That I was holding something over her head that I didn’t. I was facing the reality of the situation and asking to move on, and the reality is not pleasant. If she felt guilt, it was of her own doing because I didn’t bring up the past in order for that to happen. I will take responsibility for my tone sounding judgmental, but it’s not because I was trying to be judgmental. I’m ADHD and Autistic, raised by a pastor and later a doctor.

I don’t see judgment. I run numbers, emotionally speaking. Where’s the percentage in our behaviors in this situation and what needs to happen in light of it….. not “you’re bad and I hate you.” And of course, because that’s what she thought I was saying to her, that’s how she treated me. That I was always wrong, terrible, and judgmental because I was so mean to her all the time.

No, cielo. That is not true nor has it ever been. I do not see you as wrong and bad, but a mirror reflection of me. When I move my right hand, you move your left. When I learned to love me, the love for you grew deeper because you’ve always lived inside me, my Impossible Girl as I became yours over 10 years. The two Timeless Children that fall into each other the most often. The ones who love so intensely that it flames out, because avoidant/anxious patterns fill a need. We have, as my friend Donna Schuurman said, “compatible wounds.” I am not calling you out, that’s a psychological term she uses that has stuck with me for over 20 years. That’s why I bellieve managed correctly, our relationship makes us perfect for each other. Left untouched, we’ll emotionally destroy each other……… and that’s exactly what has happened. We have left so much “done and left undone” that those sins are grevious unto me.

This relationship will sustain us or it will kill us, and in order for it to stop hurting us that way, we will have to have it out. There’s no way around it, and she doesn’t have time, which ramps up my feeling that she doesn’t think I’m worth it. That she won’t submit to any boundaries I set forth because I don’t deserve them with her. And then, just when I think all hope is lost, there she is. My dragon. The one I love more than all the others. It’s just that safety and security for me is so lacking and so secure without knowing what day it is. I cannot cope and shouldn’t have to, and not because I am feeling entitled and want to intrude upon her life. It’s that she forgave me and I jumped through hoops to prove myself because of it. What I didn’t know is that it wouldn’t work and nothing would ever be the same. That I’d carry a constant feeling of “I can’t do anything right” and constantly have it validated. I am not that person. I am not wrong and bad all the time, and I refuse to be treated that way when I’m just expressing needs.

I tend to get angrier than I should because the longer she goes without addressing anything the less I want to walk on eggshells around her, but I run up into the limits of her forgiveness that way and it just hurts. There was no choice for me except to walk away until Supergrover can love herself the way I love both of us. That her reactions need to come from a place of joy again, because I know they do for other people. I’m just standing outside a big circle, sort of forgiven and yet not. She is folded into my family and content to be so without really recognizing that I need her, too. That if our relationship continues, I can be tight or not at all. I cannot walk in insecure attachments trying to heal them alone.

It’s running over the problem with Supergrover again in my mind because my autism naturally makes me ruminate over it constantly…. and yet, there’s a reason for that. I hit 45 and all of the sudden boundaries meant something to me when I’d never been able to do it before. I established boundaries with everyone in my life and she was so proud of the process until the last one was her. She was the last one for many reasons, the biggest being that I was depressed and isolating because I couldn’t focus on both of us, and it was time to let go if we weren’t moving forward, anyway, because I could not maintain the cognitive dissonance of loving someone so much and having a ceiling on how much it meant to her, and to have the level go up and down every day was frightening. I hung in as long as I could, but I’m not waiting on the world to change. I just hope it does, because I’ve done more work on myself for the past 10 years that would not have been possible if I hadn’t started from a place of pain and reclaimed my life in such a way that I was more stable and capable of dealing with emotions.

If nothing else, I hope she’s proud I’ve gotten there, and I know she is. She’s told me so. What she will not do is get there herself, because it’s too hard and it hurts too much. She’s told me there’s just so much she’ll never let go of. I also know I’m one of them. Even if we never speak again, we’ve changed each other to such a degree that we don’t fit in the old containers we made for each other. They used to stack, and now they’re warped.

I am most proud of getting rid of the floppy plastic boundaries and starting to build with steel……. and it’s okay if that’s with someone else. But we could be The Proud Family if we gave it both our pennies.

I love the idea that the writing prompt is about something people don’t know about us and all we do all day is tell people stuff other people don’t know about us. So, I’ll go through a quick list for new people just in case I publish in a different time zone (I start at 0500, but between writing and doing the things I need to do to get ready to write, I’m ADHD. I write a paragraph and get up and down I just don’t scroll up until I read it back. I will publish anything I think because boundaries have already been established in my mind. Nothing I publish is something I can’t stand by later. Other people can be mad, but I can walk away clean. You make the choice not to be in this blog by whether you interact with me, and it’ll be hard and I’ll miss you, but I won’t tolerate criticism as ad hominem attacks. I will drop you with force and I won’t ghost you. You’ll know exactly why you pissed me off so that I won’t stab you in the back on my web site. I don’t say anything about people I wouldn’t say to them.

It’s not because I love you any less. It’s that my life isn’t easy dealing with blowback when my echo chamber already thinks I’m a bad person. I do a better job of kicking my ass than you do, so leave me be. You can watch how I do it or don’t, because while I’m explaining your behavior, you’ll get closer to me if you let it happen. You’ll understand a pattern and why it went wrong rather than making you read my mind all the time. But my writing won’t do that if you think you’re always right. It doesn’t bother me if my friends don’t read me, in fact I prefer it because it also keeps people from getting impressed with me. The highs and lows are too big a swing. So that means:

Supergrover told me something that’s too hard to forget because of my chosen art form, because it would make waves bigger than either of us want to handle to have her identified. Therefore, I view her as my primary partner because she’s the one in which the breadcrumbs on my web site are worth something, no matter how small. And it isn’t that I’d even be writing about us. Breadcrumbs are unintentional because she’s the river that runs beneath my emotions. She comes through me by now because I’ve adopted the style in which she writes and it affects my speech every day. I am more strident at times than I used to be because I have better boundaries. At others, I’m just as romantic with language as I used to be because that’s how I wrote before I met her. Complete change in tone because I was obsessed with the way she wrote…. and proud that my words have certainly been used in powerful rooms without her even thinking she was doing it, because she doesn’t remember everything I’ve written, but it creeps in. It’s fun thinking about exactly about she could have told “this is a goat roping clusterfuck.” Or, “now that you’re mad you’re just packing up your toys and going home.” That one makes me laugh even harder.

Lindsay is my younger sister who doesn’t live with me anymore, but stays close most of the time. She lives in Houston and works in DC, so she’s far away and part of my life depending on the day of the year. We are close because of proximity. Her career is in government relations, so whether she’s been a private or public lobbyist, I’ll never stop running into her. I am so goddamn blessed because I got to move away from Houston without moving away from her. That’s actually the biggest reason I chose DC again vs. going back to Portland to be with Bryn and her whole family like I had been before. There were other factors at play on my end besides my love for Supergrover. I knew that if Mayor Pete won the election, she would end up working in the White House. And I knew that before you did. Also, there are many other candidates that woud appoint her here, I just don’t think she wants to live here. I think that she would do it if she had to, and at that point would be glad to have a local to keep her grounded and she has a thousand of them by now. She would fit in here like she lived here before she even packed.

Bryn is my partner in the sense that you should go to her if something happens to me and you want to know about me. My last wishes, all that shit. She’s basically a human document repository, not someone I could marry because I think you should live in the same city for that. Doesn’t make us in less of a long distance relationship and her family has plenty of friends in that model, so no one would make it weird. There are female names that are synonymous in our lives that aren’t together, so we’re the ones synonymous in their minds. You have a partner and a housecarl. Don’t make it weird. Play Skyrim instead and my whole life will come together in front of you. I’d like to be a good companion, but most of the time I’m a dumbass. I can’t tell you how many times Lydia has gotten me killed and I hate that I could be someone else’s when it’s their turn to crawl through a Falmer dungeon.

Zac is my romantic partner, and I think we’ve been together a year or so. It’s hard to tell because we’ve just been dating off and on. It’s not like we see each other every day. We’re not building a future together unless it’s good for the order- that I’d like to stay single and not have it bother anyone that I’m already dating someone when we go out on our first date. Doesn’t mean they can’t still be my last. I am free to marry someone else. Not Zac. But Zac plays such a large role in my life that I’m not really all that tempted to date anyone else. It’s not that I wouldn’t, it’s that I’m happy as I am. Content. I’m not so much avoiding dating as I am not threatened by the fact that no one else is asking me out and I’ll end up alone. I won’t. Zac would be my boyfriend until he died if I let him and it was a mutually agreeable situation. We don’t have plans to get closer and we don’t have plans to break up unless it’s necessary. I don’t see that as a bad relationship. I see that as connection and leaving each other better than when we found us. We don’t have to get married for the relationship to matter.

He’s an intelligence officer that doesn’t get bored when I want to talk about it and it’s my autistic obsession in life. It’s Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s partner asking her to make an appointment with him to talk about whales because she was overwhelming him all the time with random facts.

Like, he might read the thing I wrote about Israel, and say “you’re technically right, but here’s where you went wrong.” He could tell me in detail if I had his security clearance, but I don’t and I don’t care for it. I’d just like to be able to talk about intelligence like I was in school for it, not that I’m pumping people who have classified information to spill it. Zac is always in control of the narrative, so he always knows the boundaries on what he can say and is excellent about not revealing anything that isn’t already public because he checks. I’m saying that clearly because if I was on his contact sheet, CIA and FBI might not see my interst as only that. That it’s the equivalent of dating someone retired, and lots of people do that. They’re the ones that have the responsibility of carrying that shit, and they know they’re bound not to make you. So, Zac gives me the kind of information you’d get from a college professor in undergrad and I go look up what’s public. Here’s how that conversation goes:

Leslie: What’s going on in Russia right now?
Zac: Crops, grain, “medical medical medical.”

Except that the “medical, medical, medical” part is a quote from a book. From Zac, it’s slow finger wag, emphatic fist shake, or dumb look. That’s the part I know where he’s hog tied and I need to quit. The earlier he starts hemming and hawing, the more badass I know he is. That his Aaron Sorkin walk and talks are better than everyone else’s…. including Aaron Sorkin’s.

That’s because even Aaron Sorkin will never know what could replace “medical, medical, medical.”

Hayat and Mike are my landlords, Edu and Magda rent with me. We all live in one house including Hayat and Mike’s daughter, Samantha. This is possible because there’s an addition that makes it really one and a half houses. It’s impressively large, and I’m glad I chose a group house over an apartment because my autistic side needs absolute quiet and when I need community I don’t have to leave the house for it.

I have been in the same house since 2015, a blessing and a curse because I didn’t get to spend the last year of my mother’s life with her before a took off running again. But I couldn’t have known it was the last year of her life because I took it for granted that she would live past 65. She didn’t even think I was mature enough to drive from DC to Houston because it’s not something she would be brave enough to do and I drove to Portland by myself no problem. It would have been nothing getting through the mountains because I’d already done Shasta in November. This was the Blue Ridge in August. If I had known how the weather was going to be that day, that it was a miracle I didn’t have to stop and chain up with the chains I’d have to go buy, I would have stayed in a hotel another night- to see if the weather cleared up but also to be able to go buy chains and learn how to chain up if it didn’t.

Turns out, chaining up is not that hard. I’ve done it on a Jeep and a Saturn. It was easier on the Saturn and the little car was a lot more fun in the snow. In the Jeep, there was four wheel drive AND chains. Nothing exciting happened. There was no adrenaline in it. I’m just glad I get on the bus and train now instead.

My dad is still living- retired and a trumpet player and on the board of everything everywhere all at once. He’s been a world-class musician since he was in high school, making All-State Band three years running and his senior year, he got first chair. Which means that by the time he auditioned for chairs in that band, when he got first it meant he was literally the best trumpet player in the nation, I believe, because Texas Music Educator’s Association is tough shit. Even band and choir directors know when they take a job in Texas, all the other teachers and choirs/bands have it out for you and standards are high. In the band I joined, there were maybe two in the state that were better than us, and it wasn’t HSPVA. I actually got into a much better situation when we moved to Clements musically. That’s because Clements had a lot more money and a lot more clout. So, both my dad and I have been through “the system,” but I was never that great a player. I just had fun (most of the time). I feel more at home as a singer, so I focus on that.

I write because I feel more at home as a writer than I do as a conversationalist, and people get the same amount of information without me being uncomfortable. Where this becomes problematic is that other people aren’t writers and won’t reply to me because they’re intimidated. They do not accept that they’re not as good a writer as me without recognizing there’s a reason for that and don’t make it a thing. It will ruin our relationship if you think I’m better than you. It’s not that. It’s that I write these long ass essays that are somehow enjoyed all over the world every single day and you don’t. You don’t have to sit there and think about why you’re not a good writer because I don’t expect you to be me. I expect you to know what communication mode works best for you and I will also accomodate you if you’re willing to speak to me that way because you don’t like writing….. but expect that I will expect you too read those letters, not write back if you like talking better. The way this works for me is Facebook Messenger. Bryn, Beck, and Andy have no problem sending me a voice message while I’m still typing. At that point, I start sending them voice messages as well because I know they’re not in a writing mood. It reminds me to branch out.

Beck is the woman I referred to when I wrote about “my wife.” She’s not, I was kidding, and there’s no chance of that happening, either. She’s the one who sets my brain on fire right now because we’re talking about law and conflict resolution likein my old paralegal days. It brings back a side of me I didn’t know I needed, because I feel at home in the law, just like I feel at home with international affairs. I write about intelligence because CIA doesn’t hire people with neurodivergence that have to take medication for it. It’s just too dangerous. But I would have been great if I’d been medically healthy because I would have been as happy in the JAG as I would have been at State, which is really the only government job I’m interested in and also feel like I should have tried to get into State when I was 23.

And all of that is forgiven and forgotten because I didn’t have the capability to think all that through because State is an adult job and I don’t know how to do that. Neurodivergent people do not have job security, ever, because neurotypical people do not like working with us. They can complain to HR all they want and it does no good, so they have to make you look incompetent when they get tired of explaining things in the way you can hear it. Bosses who say that’s not true are the ones that make life easier. But all people aren’t them, either.

It’s a dirty little open secret. Whether you are physically or mentally disabled, getting an interview is harder. They require you to report your conditions if you have them to get ergonomics and/or special considerations, but it makes employers take one look at your resume and think “retard” in a very nasty way. Doesn’t matter whether they’re put off by bipolar or cerebral palsy, I’m not getting in there if I tell people I’m disabled on a web form because I have to in order to get the interview and the considerations afterward because they have to decide if I’m worth it first. Or, I can not tell them….. and that’s worse. I will launch into the song and dance of masking behavior until I can’t keep it up anymore and need those considerations and get fired for it.

I am fucked in getting disability unless I hire a fuck ton of lawyers, and then I’m not sure I can have any assets and now I do because my mom and stepfather are both dead. I don’t want to touch them because I’d be heavily taxed, but I don’t know whether being on disability would allow me to keep them or not when I turned 65. Then, I would also face the social stigma of being disabled, making it harder to date. No one wants to take on a financial project because they don’t want to be the one that pays for everything when they don’t like my cheaper suggestions because that’s the way I can treat them. Zac doesn’t care because we don’t do anything truly expensive except stop at the liquor store on the way home because Zac likes whiskey and I like N/A spirits and a hotel bottle of whatever it is that someone has created this week that’s new. I think the last time it was rum punched up with sour apple liqeur. It was okay. But again, it was like $4. I wish I could be the girlfriend and the friend and the daughter that paid for everything, and I might be later in life if my ideas or blog take off. Who knows? Dooce got to be Dooce, Wil and Jenny got to be Wil and Jenny. Who knows what will happen to me? At this point, it’s exciting to see what’s to come because I’m getting answers to questions I’ve had my whole life.

Mel is a chef I write to in England that has some of the same issues in the kitchen that I do. We work through the emotional side of it and talk about cooking. It feeds me in a way no one else does. Tyler and J.L. are my newest connections, writers who are on a whole other level than me and have taken control of my education. It’s the right move for me, because being around Supergrover all those years was like training for a writer’s room, and it would blow her hair back to be in this group as well. Writing isn’t what she does for a living, but she’s good at it.

She has a blog that she thinks I haven’t read and when she said it I was hurt because you could wake me up in the middle of the night and I could recite lines form it verbatim. There weren’t that many entries and I can quote all of them. I just won’t.

The community that supports me are the only ones who really deserve to know the things that no one else knows about me. But maybe I should give you one. Something good, yet not so deep I end on a downer.

Something no one knows about me is that I don’t have peers. Not really. I’m too complicated and so are my friends. There is no one on earth that can identify with me in every way possible, why I doubt I’ll be happier than I am right now with Zac and Bryn filling two completly different roles as my inner circle. The jury is still out on whether Supergrover comes back to me, but not on the fact that my mama wolverine goes off like hers does, both trauma bonded and angry with each other and refusing to connect.

But if I have more than three people who know everything, it’s not because I don’t want more friends. It’s that I become saturated and overwhelmed easily. I am not trying to be avoidant, just protective, which is where I see Supergrover headed for me and I’m sorry I didn’t see the signs earlier. But it wouldn’t have saved me any pain at all. I just would have started the process earlier. But it would have made feeling put upon last even longer, because there’s a little bit of me that will always feel that way, and not because she put me out with telling me. She put me out with not communicating afterward. We have a situation that changes day by day because I’m a writer. She hates press. Even worse when I’m not a journalist and I’m not fact checking. It’s just like, my opinion, man.

She wants me to write from her perspective. Consider her feelings. I would if I knew what they are. I do not know any of her feelings to be able to consider them.

But I know this.

I love her, something everyone knows. She loves me, something that everyone knows.

And still the truth runs deeper than just that fact. Everything does. We do as people, we do as situations we deal with. And now we’ve stopped leaning on each other and I’m on my own, trying to figure out how to move on when she’s not listening and it’s a disaster. She thinks I’m a dick for pushing her away. I think she’s a dick because she isn’t bringing me closer and it really fucking hurts in a concrete way, not an objective one. And if she saw what I saw, she would see objective danger and come back and say she’s sorry so we could work together instead of against each other. If she doesn’t, whatever she says is on her, and I don’t care how much she says she can deal with it, no she can’t. If I stop protecting her, other people might, too, and that’s bad. I love her so much and she treats me like a mean girl.

I was mad because she was ignoring me, not because I didn’t understand everything on her plate. I wasn’t saying I wasn’t patient. I was saying I think eight years is enough to get over something and you don’t have to get over it but you have to stop shitting on me. Your issues are your issues now.

It’s time for her to tell me everything I don’t know about her, and she’s hog tied like he is in another galaxy far, far away.

I don’t rebel against her story. I regret that she doesn’t tell me the parts that Zac does… the things he needs from me before he has to start saying “medical, medical, medical” like Lauren Graham.).