Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
I have no idea what this means outside of Oregon. In Oregon, there’s infrastructure for sustainability. In Maryland, it is “good luck, God bless.” I want to talk about things I do to sustain my own life.
Being a writer has changed my perspective on everyone and everything who isn’t me. I will make them me by inhaling, life as ink on the exhale.
“Life as ink on the exhale” is the perfect phrase for all of this.
“Writing is ink on the exhale” is a better sentence than I’ve written in a while. I should quit for today. 😉 I realize this is extrapolating data from an incomplete set, though, because I can never explain in a catchphrase how experiences go in and ink comes out. I can’t tell you who and what and why is most important that day. The only reason my beautiful girl pops up so often is that as I’ve said before, she’s my muse. She’s the ink. What is sad about that is the absolute confusion as to why it’s the last bottle. How do you cope with not knowing whether someone even wants to meet you or not, yet tells you nothing’s wrong and you’re the only one who ever trashes anything. I have lived long enough to know that I am only trashing the relationship she wants with me. I can have the relationship I want with her on my own, and in a lot of ways, it feels the same. To me, that is also trashing a relationship……. letting starvation rule over your compassion.
I did not want to be in a relationship that was starving, particularly one that had flourished. The problem came in when I’d wronged her and wanted to be forgiven, because she never got over how it felt to be hurt by me. She could forgive me, but she couldn’t open up again…… at least, not for years. Then, she started to loosen up and I hadn’t been so profoundly happy in years. I invited her to come with me wherever I went in the world, dreaming pie in the sky- and told her to bring her husband, kids, dogs, books, wtfever. I felt safe enough to say something like that because she was opening up emotionally.
I don’t know what would have happened with that train of thought, because she never told me what she thought and I got tired of living in grey area. I would have given her an organ. I never got a fraction of that level of emotion from her, and I’m supposed to believe I’m the one that trashes everything?
What I have to remember is that we don’t know each other. We have created characters for each other that live in our heads, which may or may not be 100% accurate. Absolutely none of that stopped me from giving her access to everything. Just everything. She’s the only one to whom I’ve ever given editorial control of this blog, and the only one that knows the code that unlocks my phone. I have never done this for anyone else, ever, and I will never do it again.
I didn’t give her either of those things to impress her. I did it to make her feel comfortable. I did it so she would know I was listening.
As I listened, ink on the exhale traveled the spectrum, inventing colors as it soaked into the page. I am now strong enough to look at her e-mails now, and I saw something that jumped out at me. She said something about how I thought she’d wronged me, and she’d read it wrong. I said that I had wronged her. Another time, she got mad at me for “the lies you (plural) tell, and that’s not like you (personal) at all.” She thought I was calling her an actual liar, and I wasn’t. I thought she had told white lies about a few things to protect my feelings, and “the lies you tell” is a classic South Texas way to say it, but you’re not talking about a specific person. You are talking about a nebulous “you.” She lit into me, and I told her I was sorry I had attacked her with grammar. In my head, I was screaming. Why would a writer decide to emotionally roast me over the coals like this? What the fuck was wrong with her freshman comp? I thought I had made my point overly clear by being sure to note grammar on both kinds of “you.” I was wrong.
I never understood why she thought she wasn’t good enough for me. Not ever. I hated the way she treated herself in front of me, as if I was a dictator and she was hell bent on pleasing me and angry that she just couldn’t do it. I am certain that my actions facilitated this, but it doesn’t mean I didn’t want a different outcome. I tried to tell her that she was beautiful, perfect over and over, an ostinato to drown out her disbelief.
If she thought she disappointed me by not also being sexually fluid, it would have been helpful for her to say that. If she thought she disappointed me because my standards were so high, it would have helped to ask me what they were. I have never known feelings this intense, but in the way I’d feel if my sister was my first priority, not my wife. She has never disappointed me a day in our lives, and she never did until she felt like she was being picked on and didn’t have enough stamina to hear me out. She thinks I don’t have enough stamina to hear her out. I do. It’s just that what’s coming out of her mouth is total bullshit, and not because she’s a liar. It’s that she hasn’t dived into the wreck. She’s going to own herself the way I have here, and it’s going to be magnificent. You know you love someone when you can see them coming into themselves before they do, and fighting you so hardcore that you know you won’t be there at the finish line. For me, that moment became clear when I realized that I should be more concerned that she has lost me. I am not nothing.
I cannot know her feelings on the matter, yet I also cannot treat myself as if I’m so disposable no one will notice.
I’ve had enough of that, and it’s not sustainable.
What’s the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?
I am a cook. I don’t have a way to rank anything because in my world, when I say “apples to oranges,” I mean actual fruit. What I will say is that I have a very advanced palate, so it takes a lot to impress me. It doesn’t need to be fancy. I can tell a good cook from a bad one in one egg.
I was taught by the best, so I’m the best through transitive properties. But I’m the best at home. “No Fish on Mondays” is written from the first person perspective because I was living in a memory, not recalling it. However, I decided that the kitchen was too much for me physically- that I could have cerebral palsy or get my stripes in the kitchen, but I couldn’t do both and I figured that not being a chef was easier than curing CP.
That reminds me of a beautiful memory with my Supergrover, which I only bring up because I need it so bad. I figured out some more stuff that went into our demise that I could have told her, but I didn’t because I was trying to spare her feelings. As a result, I’m working through all of it on my own so that I don’t turn into a bitter queen. I don’t read “angry dyke.” I read “bitchy queen” all day. Anyway, the story is that another line cook sexually harassed me and she offered to kill him. I know enough to know it would have been with her bare hands. Honey badger don’t care. God, I feel the same way. I go apeshit inside when anyone crosses her. Believe me when I say she is a monster in the best sense of the word. It’s a good feeling when you’re the one holding the leash, and the ones closest to her often do. She’s not mean to us. She’s mean for us.
If you don’t have that friend, you don’t have a friend. Choose wisely.
And now back to our regularly scheduled program. It just feels better to write about all the things I love about her rather than sending negativity out into the world. I don’t even know if she’s reading and I don’t care. It’s not about her. It’s about healing me.
So, no way to rank but lots of standouts. I love everything, from cheap to expensive.
My favorite cheap thing is grocery store pizza, particularly the fancy kind with rising crust that actually smells like yeast. If you get your pizza delivered, you can’t enjoy the smell of it baking and it takes the same amount of time now that Domino’s drivers aren’t constantly tasked with delivery or death.
My favorite middle tier thing is pesto sauce. This is because you can buy pasta for a dollar a box and $15 pesto and all of the sudden you have a dish you could sell at a restaurant for more than that.
My favorite expensive thing is sushi, because even at the grocery store, sushi grade ahi is pricey. So is good wasabi. However, being able to “roll my own” has meant a lot to me in terms of education. I can make pretty good sushi-su (sp?), the rice with Kewpie and rice vinegar. I never roll it tight enough, but I don’t care. I could eat ahi and rice out of literally anything. I should learn the difference between Japanese and Hawaiian cooking because I could probably do a poke bowl with one hand tied behind my back…. but again, sushi grade ahi is just ridiculous in price most of the time, and even more expensive at a restaurant, where I’m always tempted to upgrade to yellowtail, soft shell crab, or salmon (seriously, there is no logic to the Philadelphia roll. WHY IS IT ADDICTIVE.)
The funniest conversation I’ve had in a sushi restaurant is that I told Dana that I wanted a Mexican roll (I don’t remember what was in it, probably fried jalapenos). She asked me if I could eat a whole Mexican, didn’t realize what she’d said, and then we both ended up nearly on the floor…… just shaking with laughter. The whites are so pretty next to the coloreds (that was the lights on the Christmas tree). Lord Jesus, help me I’m falling down the stairs I’m laughing so hard…. as if I was listening to the Eddie Murphy routine from whence the line appears.
When I talk about food, I talk about my ex-wife. It’s inevitable, because most of my adventure with food started at “Hi, I’m Dana.” We worked together for three years (I think?) and two restaurants. In the first, we basically ran our own kitchen because we were the only ones on shift. The second was at the Portland airport, and those restaurants don’t come to play. It wasn’t irritating locking up the knives at night, but it was hell trying to find parking at the airport and it took a long time to get from the parking into the building.
The coolest part of my cooking career was having the badge that let you walk directly up to the planes if you wanted. I could literally stand out on the tarmac and no one gave a shit. You cannot imagine how many times I imagined stowing away, but the issue with being on the tarmac is that you have NO idea where the planes are going. To some, that might be exciting. X means airports with international flights, so at PDX I could have ended up in Houston or Helsinki. Those are two very inconvenient cities to arrive with no luggage…. not that any city is, but not to know whether you need ski pants or sundresses isn’t that great.
Speaking of ski pants, I watch this YouTuber named Dave Cad that has ads for the most amazing Finnish clothing company. It’s kind of like REI and Uniqlo, and I’ll look it up if you’re interested in the comments. Anyway, Dave lives in Helsinki, but he was road tripping up to Kilpisjaarvi (sp?), which is so far up it was only three degrees Celsius in late June. It makes sense. Lapland is supposedly where Santa Claus lives, as well as the thrill of seeing Dave’s glass igloo. The glass igloo is so that you can ile in bed and watch the aurora borealis. OMG Bryn. That’s on our bucket list now, too. Note to self…. rent a car. Kilpisjaarvi is the most beautiful tiny little town I’ve ever seen. If I lived in Finland, that’s where I’d settle. I want hygge for the rest of my life (from Norwegian… the cosy feeling you get in the winter…. SO similar to Portland except not constantly raining. Snow is easier to me to deal with than rain, because it doesn’t hurt as much when it’s being pelted at you.
Plus, I’d like to start a garden. I’ve watched a couple videos on Finnish chefs because the palate is so much different than ours. I mean, just straight up BIZARRE. In every piece of footage, I am reminded of Anthony Bourdain in Iceland. It’s my favorite episode of No Reservations because he is the crankiest little bitch I’ve ever seen all the way through it. Comparable to Namibia, where he griped he hadn’t had anything without sand, fur, or shit in it for three days.
That part of the world has completely different plants. Vegan food would be off the chain when fruits and veg are in season. If I did have the strength to open a restaurant, Kilpisjaarvi would be excellent because it’s a tiny, tiny town and I could start out small. (I’m just gaming this out. I’m not crazy enough to do this by tomorrow). I think I’d close in the winter, at least part of the time, because I don’t think there would be enough business to survive on bread, cheese and meat until Spring. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s what they eat. Just don’t drink with a Finn. Ever. You just don’t have it in you, and I don’t even know you.
I would be an excellent Finn, for the same reason that I’d rather spend time alone as much as they would. I may not have Finnish blood, but my personality is limited to one country. 😛 No DNA test needed.
Actually, I think Lindsay said we do have some Finnish blood, but it’s only like 3%, which is obviously enough to practically knight me there. Obviously.
Stating the obvious to an obscene amount, what would it be like to live in a country where they don’t hate women and lesbians?
That means I’d go check it out even if the food was terrible.
I put a moratorium on writing about my beautiful girl yesterday, and then I get a prompt like this. Whelp. Here we go. Hold on to your butts.
When I said before that there is a place in everyone that feels infantile and defenseless and I’d given mine to my friend, it was that in 20 minutes worth of talking together, I’d made her God in my mind. Do you remember the movie “Contact?” That when the aliens reach out, it’s to a little girl, so they project an image of her father to explain everything so she is not afraid. What I love about this scene is that it’s not frightening to her because she’s been told that it’s just an image to make her listen harder.
That’s who she was to me. The image of God that made me listen harder, not that I was putting her on a pedestal and thought she was more important than me. It’s true that if we hadn’t been so incredibly different, we wouldn’t have lasted so long. We’d have developed a Venn diagram on friends that would have made us lose the stranger on a train feeling that made me crave her. I can’t even explain that part of it, only that our conversations were so full of emotion that at the time, my favorite song was “Your Love is My Drug.” I was the most complicated 808 percussion rhythm in existence. It was exactly like doing a concerto at Carnegie Hall, where people only expect the highest level of musicianship, or perhaps a music jury to keep your chair in a major orchestra. In the orchestral example, I was a soprano hanging off a ledge with a cadenza to rival Kathleen Battle. The music jury is realizing you’re last chair and learning to roll with it. You’re just happy you got in.
Plus, I’m an INFJ. I am built for people to trauma dump all over me. It makes me want to fix all the things and I will put lots o energy into it because they’re helping me find myself a day at a time. What she never knew that I did was how many hours I gave her while she wasn’t in the room. Therefore, I think she thought I was always winging it, when I was running things past her to correct the story I was telling myself.
She didn’t, and it made her say things to the effect that I never missed a chance to tell her how much her problems were a burden for me. If I’d thought about it, I would have replied that I think of her with every term of endearment that has ever existed, particularly “mulkvisti,” which comes from Suomi and means “one I hate less than the others.” What she couldn’t see is that I was pouring my heart out to her and telling her how much her words affected me. She thought I was rejecting her, when I was telling her that my empathy was so large I was hurting for her, and please recognize that I made sacrifices, too. If she only knew how much love I send through the chord that runs between us (in the geometric sense of the word, not a typo)………. sometimes I put Red Bull in it just in case she’s running a quart low. Those metaphysical images give me life, and I’m rebelling against the way I have seen her treat everyone else and how I am not in that group anymore.
She can tell other women that they’re beautiful, that she loves them, sign off with kisses and hugs. To me, that is what is keeping my mistakes over my head and making it drip on my face every day. That would mean we were getting back to normal, because it made me feel that she couldn’t tell me those things because she thought I’d overreact and think she’d been touched by an angel or some shit. She doesn’t know how much it means to me when she sends me heart emojis, even. To me, showing up is often hearing that I am beautiful and loved despite all my flaws and failures, too. Showing up big would be acknowledging all my love and care as much as she’s recognized my ire.
She doesn’t recognize that at times my love for her is fucking feral, and I know she feels the same way about me because she went apeshit when Sam dumped me. She doesn’t know that I allowed myself the absolute luxury of falling in love with Daniel and my queer as folk “boyfriend,” in quotes because I don’t know what the fuck to call him at this point, only to say that he’s my first thought in the morning and will be on a friendship level for life. This is because she gave me everything I needed in terms of girl power energy everywhere I looked. There is nothing hotter to me in this world than a woman with big dick energy.
Wow, it’s a good thing my feelings aren’t that intense.
So, it was no surprise to me that within days I was completely gone. I love her for everything she used to be, is, and will be. She has said it as no matter what, we have a past, present, and future. I really believed that until she didn’t tell me that the position of partner had been filled long ago, so I hoped too much that she was one of those women whose sexuality changed based on how much they felt demisexual/sapiosexual, not where they were on the Kinsey scale previously. It was a bad pattern to set up, because I’ve kicked myself over what I didn’t know for ten years, especially the part where my brain chemicals made backing down off that nerve scream in pain. I made myself a mixtape like a fucking child, and I will not apologize for going to that place, because acknowledging those feelings helped them go away faster, and I know it. It was easier to ask and move on than it was to pine for her, because I would have done it forever and I know this about myself. I’d be eighty years old without ever being vulnerable with anyone else. It’s not her, it’s the way my personality works.
I didn’t date for a long time, and the most vulnerable reason is that I didn’t want to make anyone else a priority over her. Sam would have been fucked, and now I know that. I couldn’t acknowledge it before, but my attention didn’t turn. I chose emotional intimacy over romance for years, which is why I felt starved of it after I fucked up everything. It came across as pouting that I’d been kicked out of the popular kids’ lunch table, because she was filtering it through her experience of dealing with younger people. Our age difference doesn’t show much, but that is where it pops up most in my humble experience. That feeling provoked comes from the heuristic that I’m so much younger, I’m using girlfriend tactics to goad and provoke her like she’s a senior jock and I’m a freshman.
I had that relationship when I was actually in high school.
I had enough emotional bandwidth to sit down at a table she prepared for me, at first filled with promise…. taking off the last silver cover to reveal absolute confusion……… when all I’ve ever wanted is to be her personal chef- for real, not a euphemism. I want to be a chef, and I wanted her to be my sous. I was working toward that goal by being emotionally vulnerable so that we both could heal and move on. But recognizing that we had issues didn’t come across as goading and provoking until she laid into me and I didn’t take the time not to respond with an absolutely proportional response because I was triggered too badly at being thought of as a nuisance…. and at the same time, it being held over my head that I wrote from a different perspective than what she was actually going through because I didn’t know what it was.
By the time she actually did it, she ended with being exhausted by everything. I thought, “no girl is worth this.” No girl is worth wrecking my life over, even if I do think she’s the face of God. If I left, I could use that without her. Through looking at her picture and telling it how beautiful she is, I could imagine her thinking the same thing even if she couldn’t say it out loud out of fear.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from the Bible, it’s “love people out loud.”
My favorite form of self-care used to be taking a bath, but our bathroom got remodeled and now I don’t have a bathtub. It’s not an easy feat to have smooth legs, a standup shower, and cerebral palsy. Most days, pick two. In fact, I have two bags of Epsom salt (one in lavender, one in eucalyptus) that have never been used because I didn’t know we were getting a shower when I bought them.
Self care changed a bit when Zac and I started dating, because then self care started leaning toward getting out and walking with Oliver, and taking the train to his house, etc. I’m not a social butterfly unless I have to be. Most people take care of themselves by staying in. I’ve got that covered. I need to go out.
I find comfort in my bedroom/office more than anywhere else. This is because my house is very, very large and I am a small person. I tend to hole up in favor of feeling safe. I avoid most people in real life because I don’t live with my family.
I am fairly certain that my housemate thinks that because I’m queer, if she touches anything after me, that thing will turn her queer as well. I’ve gone out of my way to assure her that it TOTALLY WORKS. Don’t you dare pick up this peanut butter lest you suddenly find yourself noticing my sweatpants do fit extra tight today, you’re welcome.
Self care is learning to see others’ idiocy, otherwise it would bother me more often than it does that my housemate thinks I can King Midas her into submission (OMG. EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES TURNS RAINBOW). First of all, ew.
I can also say with a healthy amount of confidence that she’s not smart enough for me.
Self care has been about creating boundaries, which I can’t say has gone all the right way, but has produced all the right results. Having a relationship that was all in my head changed my neural pathways, but there was almost always an air of flying too close to the sun.
The relationship ended my marriage, which I’ve said before; what I haven’t said outside it was all my fault is that we trauma dumped too much too fast and each made the other take on things that they wouldn’t have otherwise chosen. This in and of itself was a crack in my relationship with Dana, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t undo it for anything in the world.
How it worked out was how it was supposed to work out, because I can truly say that I did not choose one or the other. The situation unfolded over years and I retconned it so I could explain it to myself. It was too much to act and process at the same time, and I think that’s what’s happening now. I couldn’t act and process at the same time, so I ended the relationship when I realized what it would take to be on the same page and not having someone to work with on a shared goal, because no goal was set.
It was a roller coaster, when my idea of fun is more “sitting outside by the pool and/or fire.” But that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the ride while I was on it, or would turn down another trip if the situation were actually right to do so. I just don’t feel like she’s willing to hammer it out, because instead of seeing questions, she saw entitlement. It wasn’t my intention, but what my words said to her. As if I had an agenda she was constantly failing when I actually saw her as the good kind of trouble. I would do anything for her, and if the situation actually required it, I might even call her on the telephone (no, I wouldn’t. I’m not even that dedicated to me).
If it seems like I’m ragging on her a lot, I would tell you everything I ever loved about her if it wouldn’t result in identifying her. She is just too fun and funny to miss. I would be her second in command at anything just to watch her go off script.
I realized that if I meant as much to her as she meant to me, there wouldn’t be any doubt in my mind as to where we were and where we are and where we’re going because she’d actually want me to know all those things. Now I think she’s just afraid that I value me more than I value her….. that anything truly personal we shared will end up splashed all over everywhere. I doubt it, as we have no mutual friends, but it’s possible if I’ve managed to leave enough breadcrumbs without realizing it because that’s not something I’d do intentionally. I value her privacy, but it’s more than that. Talking about what we’ve shared means sharing things about me that only belong to her. It’s taking that tiny virtual meeting space and opening it up to others, when the purpose of our friendship in the first place was to be the other’s safe space. I would never intentionally violate that. I don’t want to invite anyone else into our space any more than she would want me to do it.
Self care is knowing that I need to turn my attention inward, that I need to protect my energy. So much of it went to her at times that I lost track of me. Not always, but enough. There’s one thing I won’t do, though, and that’s stop praying for her. It’s the least intrusive thing I can do, and probably all I ever will. I am certain that I have said enough, that she is done…. mostly because I told her if she was going, she couldn’t come back unless it was big. That us being so nebulous was kicking my ass. I wasn’t entitled. I was clueless.
That’s because I’d already done the clawing back up part, and it wasn’t happening again without major buy-in. What I didn’t do that I should have was cure her of all her shitty assumptions, like assuming I wasn’t getting what I thought I should out of our relationship. The truth is that she prides herself on not needing anything, so why wouldn’t she think that me being emotional was a weakness? That I’m needy?
I wasn’t needy. I was uneducated. If you don’t tell me what you need and resent the hell out of me for feeling, I’m going to rely on self care.
Truly, I think a lot of our differences can be summed up in our four ages….. ours and our inner children and how those developmental milestones rubbed up against each other. She’s chronologically older, and yet I see her as so much younger than I am. I wanted to protect her because of it, and I failed.
Caring for myself is now harder, because since I failed to protect her, I don’t care as much about myself because I don’t think I’m worth it. I’ve already proven I don’t take care of other people well, why do I think I can help me? I know they’re just intrusive thoughts; most of them don’t even have basis in fact.
I thought of something from yesterday that made me feel amazing. Years ago, I sent her a pen for Christmas. So. Who knows? Maybe I live in her ink, too. 🙂 Moments like that remind me that thoughts of her are not the intrusive ones. My giggle box turns over every time I think of that thank you letter…. that the pen (a novelty) was the first thing that had made her laugh in a while. It helps to think of these things, because I know that I am not chaotic evil 24/7.
Self care is being a little chaotic evil, though. No true regimen would leave out mass quantities of carbs and chocolate at any time, much less right the fuck now (the cramps are starting and I feel my uterus getting ready to scream).
Ohhhhhh……. the cramps are starting…… that’s why I was such a hot mess yesterday. Sounds like I could use some self care.
I waste a lot of time giving energy to problems I don’t have. For instance, I can’t just wall off my feelings about said Internet friend, so I’ve spent way too much time asking the universe to make her go away so that I don’t constantly give her rent in my head. She has a palace, and I want only a desk with a drawer that locks.
How do you get rid of a muse that has lived inside you for ten years, knowing that you’ll own a piece of them forever? How do I sort out how I feel about that? She’s not “just under my skin” anymore. She lives in my ink, bottles with many colors. Most of the time, she’s a spectrum. I see her as purple and orange, a taster in grape or citrus in which sweet and sour are inextricably interrelated. I cannot enjoy her without acknowledging it wasn’t all healthy. I’m also not saying that was ever her fault. It just is.
I feel like friends who hold you accountable love you more than the ones who just stuff things down, because they don’t care when they see you stagnating. There is worth in someone seeing you exactly for who and what you are. There is value in someone seeing all the good and bad inside you and deciding that you’re infinitely worth it no matter what lies ahead. There is a danger in love being so infinite and wild.
I think I can say it was the same way for both of us, because platonic love can go equally haywire. Every person alive knows how hard it is to make good friends, and I have read too many stories of women who are miserable because their husbands are so emotionally unavailable that their friends provide what their husbands lack. This is unsurprising to me when I look at my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. But thinking I can say it is different than knowing whether it’s actually true.
She said that I was part of her wild and crazy brain. My feelings ran just as wild, which felt like she was part of my wild and crazy soul. She’s a thinker, I’m a feeler. We are yin and yang, feeding each other when it was right. It just wasn’t the majority of the time because neither one of us ever really knew where the other was coming from. She never asked any questions, and never gave me any answers to mine.
Today, I have allowed myself the luxury of getting so angry my hair nearly caught fire. What is WRONG with me? How did I put up with that shit for so incredibly long? Why was she even interested in me in the first place? There are two answers to that question, only one of them good….. a question as important as “when silence falls, the question will be asked.”
Doctor WHO?
Everything I knew her to be blossomed and flowered and I fell headlong into the perfect trap, one I set up and decorated.
She won’t get this, but you will. I was willing to be Rory the Roman. Being him is what destroyed me, even though our relationship was The Doctor/Companion rather than The Doctor/River Song. Tell me that if Amy could have, she wouldn’t have stayed with The Doctor forever. I mean, you could, I just wouldn’t believe it. Even when they stopped traveling together, The Doctor still turned up at their house once in a while. I just don’t see that kind of break happening. And of course, now her husband (to me) is Rory and I’m little Amelia Pond……. still sitting on that fucking suitcase a decade later because she thought she’d done something that hurt me, and she did. It’s just not what she thinks it is, and she never will. That’s because she thinks my problem is with who she is, and it’s not. It’s over an action, one that is long forgiven and forgotten except when she accidentally triggered me and brought it all back, then accused me of being a little shit trying to provoke her.
I called her out on all of it, and she told me to go find new friends if I was so unhappy. I want her to choke on those words, realize she threw me away as if I was dog shit, but she won’t. She won’t even apologize for small things, why the hell should I expect better when the problem is large? That’s not her deal. That’s mine. I put up with it because I thought I deserved it. In part, I did, which is what made things so problematic. My rejection sensitivity dysphoria allowed me to accept that even after some years, I was still a piece of shit. Nothing was ever going to change and I ignored it because I wanted her in my life so bad I couldn’t see anything else. My rose colored glasses shattered, and the fragments are floating through time and space as I put together all the ways in which those lenses stopped me from seeing I was setting myself up for a lifetime of pain.
Young Amy is why I call her my Raggedy Doctor, when I should have called her Guffman and moved on. That didn’t stop me from wasting time on choreography.
I feel so stupid, and that anger that’s been buried inside me and struggling to get out is finally releasing from its mold…. a two inch pour that went REALLY badly. There’s epoxy dripping all over the floor, and I forgot to spray with mold release, so I also have a ruined mold……… and then that illustration becomes even more apt. She changed me in ways that are too unique to even write about, they’re so personal. The mold broke on her, and I could have had her for a lifetime in my gaggle of friends if I’d only been more patient and not said anything about the things she did that hurt me. Being more patient is valid. Wanting to keep a relationship even though it’s hurting you is not.
Until now, I have thought that the hurt was all my doing, and then I realized that eight years was probably enough to get over something. If she wants to hold a grudge and not let me in anymore because I’m such a terrible person, she has every right. I just thought she had more integrity than to hold something over someone’s head for their entire lives when she fucking told me she would do it. She told me she’d never let me in ever again and as time went on and she loosened up a little bit, I thought she’d said that in anger.
Nope.
She’s not responsible. I am deaf.
I’ve wasted a lot of time because there’s nothing wrong with my ears.
Things have changed so much for me this year, and I’m reeling from it. I’m not sure that I meant to change this much this fast, but in retrospect things worked out. I’m not constantly worried that I’m a judgmental dickhead. I’m not constantly thinking of myself as less important than everyone else, and I’m finding out that not having interests as a child- in terms of fitting into society- I adopted a whole bunch of behavior patterns that I don’t like. I fell for everything because I didn’t stand up for anything.
I’m just a writer. I don’t know shit about shit.
The older I get, the more that lesson internalizes. What is different is that I am not constantly making up scenarios and conversations in my head to produce the least offensive outcome because I am a shell of a person. I was abused emotionally from the time I was 13. I absolutely lost everything I was interested in, favoring her interests. I think I carried around an opera dictionary for six weeks or something.
I feel like I learned how to be myself in a sandbox, that I was beta testing all kinds of things… and let’s be clear. Some of that software isn’t even out of alpha release. Keep checking GitHub. Good luck.
So, that’s what the Internet relationship was good for, if nothing else. I’m not a lead the charge into hell sort of person. But I knew someone who was. It felt like an ace up my sleeve, and it was.
And that’s why it hurts so much. I’m not disappointed that I never got to call her boo, I’m disappointed that our friendship had such promise.
You cannot imagine how long I just sat in silence, figuring this thing out. Or trying to, anyway. There was just no way to separate what I’d done from my level of trustworthiness, so I’ve known I’m a piece of shit for years. Intimately.
So, it lit me up inside that things started looking up. And then realized the swings were only going to get worse. If she’s not forthcoming, I’m not pushing. If e-mails are too big a deal, let me go.
Let me give all that love to someone else… not in a mean way, just that I hurt that I’ll never be able to make something right. I spent too long dwelling on how to fix a problem without realizing how much it was robbing me of any self respect. As I got older, I didn’t want to sit in it anymore. I didn’t want to cry any more than I already had. I didn’t want to wake up at 55 and see that I’d just kept at it.
So, I asked her what she wanted and where she was going.
Last time there was a huge break, I’d send her e-mails and get a few in return. It took a mountain of work to get where we are today, and I thought that we were in it for the long haul in a “sure, I can water the plants” kind of way. I don’t think I would have been wrong if I’d just kept my mouth shut, a running theme in this relationship for evil and for awesome.
My attention is starting to turn and it is a welcome relief after ten years of not being able to shake Gmail’s hand.
But it’s not all that. As I told her, “you’re in my head, Malkovich.” I do not know how to get rid of things I’ve thought about ad nauseam for ten years. I am making progress, but I’m not there yet. I feel like part of this is just delayed. That this is the conversation I should have been having with myself eight years ago instead of now. Except that some really good things have come in the last few years. I don’t even fucking know anymore, and that’s the saddest part.
Pretty much everything can be summed up by “I don’t even know anymore.” The difference is that I care a lot less in terms of what it’s going to take to keep me going and how other people are going to feel. I have to go hardline Lamott here. My story is mine. I’m not seeing what I want to read, so I’m creating it.
I loved loving a writer, because she could think as fast as me.
I’m remembering what she used to say about my writing, and letting myself fall apart for a minute. Just sit in it and let it hurt. It’ll go away.
My mother dying taught me this. That if I could just sit in the discomforts and not shut it away, I’d be better off because with tension comes release.
I keep seeing her in my mind and thinking, “do it, anyway.”
If I thought I could really help her, do it anyway. But make her come to you. Maybe reading my words will help, and that is the only thing I can hope for. I doubt anything will ever happen between us again and feel that our story is over. But I know I can help her just by being me. That if she wants, she has a wealth of information on what I was really saying- the answers to questions she might have, without any real desire to know whether she reads. I told her I didn’t want to know, and for now, I mean it.
She is a memory. I want to look at our entire relationship and decide what it should have taught me the first time around that it just didn’t. Mostly I learned that I talk too much, that I’m too much. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just that most people aren’t ready for what I can do, and that part can fry people’s hair.
It’s not because I’m so much smarter than everyone else. It’s that most people don’t think like I do, and it’s difficult for them to relate. No one knows anyone like me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come off as absolutely brilliant for a little while.
My beautiful girl knows she’s brilliant for a lifetime, and she’s told me I am, too. That’s enough. I am sitting in the concept of enough. What I thought it was. What it should be. How my idealist bullshit caught up to me by creating wishes with no foundation. It’s all a lot, and not a damn thing has to do with parsing out anything she did except to point out what I didn’t know for a decade.
It’s paying to look at all the things I could have given attention, I just didn’t. It’s filling me up where I’m empty, letting me have back the parts of me that were hers…. Because after ten years, I know for damn sure that there’s a lot of her that’s in me. The best part about having an Internet relationship is that the joke you made this morning will be huge this afternoon and no one’s heard it.
Today my big laugh was Bryn being stuck behind a horse trailer and several cars going 25 miles per hour going down the back side of Mt. Chehalem and I started laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. “Bryn…… Bryn…. I can’t believe you’re stuck in a hay pride parade.“
I couldn’t believe I’d made a joke that I didn’t have to rip off.
I lost a lot of myself, but I’ve regained it.
The blessing is that it is a lot of gray area. Nebulous whitespace that’s primed and ready for paint. Feeling like I’m making room for new things feels exciting, because if I’m going to end a relationship because I think it’s not working, then what will? I have ideas, but it’s about connecting with people who share them. I want to meet someone who’s excited to meet me.
Again, I do not tend to write short essays, so you’ll get more than you bargained for. NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?
This writing prompt is coming at a very good time. Today is Lindsay’s birthday. Lindsay is my younger sister. She works as a lobbyist for a federally funded clinic that does trans medicine. She lives with her husband, Matt, and her dogs, Charlie and Teddy. I would post a picture of her, but I don’t want to bother her. If I posted a picture she had not pre-approved to make sure she was looking the most fly, she would lose her shit. Pretty sure that’s a direct quote.
My favorite moment of all time that nothing can ever beat is going to see Lindsay in the hospital when she was born. It’s the most important day of my life so far. My favorite words are “it’s a girl.” We’re everything the other is and isn’t. I can say things to her that I can’t say to anyone else, and not for lack of trying. It’s just that those who weren’t there don’t have the comprehension. I’m not talking about a particular situation, just the natural ebb and flow of growing up together. Like all siblings and couples, we have our own emotional shorthand.
Lindsay is emotional about music in the way I am excited by the math. I can’t do it, but I like to listen to the outcome. Lindsay is looking for catharsis. I’m looking to set my brain on fire and blow my hair back. There’s a reason my favorite choral composer is Bach. The man was brilliant. I believe he was the first person to do mashups, because in some of the pieces, they’re in eight part harmony, then divided into two groups of SATB. They basically have individual oratorios that fit together like a long zipper..
I listen to music while memorizing rhythms and drumming my fingers on the desk trying to figure out the key and how to play the parts on the trumpet, which I don’t play now, but I reflex is a reflex for all the practicing I did in junior and senior high. I pulse my toes so that people don’t think I’m a freak show for tapping my foot. I learned that trick from my dad, another trumpet player, because conductors don’t generally want to see your foot going up and down during a performance.
Contrast that to my sister.
When Lindsay listens to music, she is deaf to the rest of the world. You’ll startle her the same way a bookworm will jump out of their skin if you touch them while they can’t see you. She wants to find comfort, and finds comfort in tracks while I prefer entries. I’ve tried to write songs before , and I’m crap at it because I’m aggressively verbal. Trying to find words that fit in a particular rhythm and also makes sense would take me hours and hours, while an entry generally only lasts one at most. The majority of the time, I type so fast it’s 20 minutes, because I’m not preplanning anything except looking at the writing prompt and seeing if it’s any good. I can do all that silently, while Lindsay does not want to be interrupted and neither do I. It’s her introvert space, because she’s more extroverted than I am, and also has to be “on” a hell of a lot more than I do. Being “on” is a reflex for us, one that was hard to beat out of me, but I would say that I have done it. It’s not that I don’t want to be polite. It’s that I don’t want to have to think of the appropriate response. I want to respond. I know I’m often wrong, but at the same time, you’re seeing the real me and not one I designed to make you happy.
I think that Lindsay is also experiencing extraordinary change in her life and trying to decide what she wants it to look like. She wants to do great things, not just talk about them. The only pie in the sky idea we’ve ever had is that we want to be filthy stinking rich. Just multimillionaires. Then, we’re gonna fix all the things Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs can’t- one because he’s dead, but never gave money to charity while he was alive…. Maybe a few times. I can’t remember. But Walter Isaacson made sure to indicate sharing was rare. The other is just egocentric. Homelessness? Not on my watch. Hunger? Here’s groceries for a week. Just everything we can possibly do to die broke.
It’s not money for us to spend, it’s money for us to give. She makes good money, I have a killer idea. It’s not outside the realm of possibilities, and not likely, either. But it was a fun conversation. It’s like that scene in The Three Amigos where they’re all lying in bed thinking about how to spend their profits from the movie and we’re both Ned Nederlander.
I don’t NOT want a big shiny car, either. 😛
I say I want a car, but I don’t. My favorite moment recently has been road tripping with Lindsay. She drove all eight hours, and I realized that though I love cars, I’d rather ride than drive. During our trip, I wrote and she listened to music, which is what I do when I travel in any way. I don’t need a desk. I’ve got a keyboard that’s pretty heavy that has a slot to hold my tablet. My lap is perfect.
I feel like it’s fancy enough that I can completely dissociate and not notice anything, because knowing my stop is rote. My attention is laser focused, and because of it, writing while riding fits my personality perfectly. It doesn’t invite people to talk to me, because I look like I’m doing VERY IMPORTANT WORK because I’m typin.’ I remind myself of Richard DeLongpre at work on the TV show “Allen Gregory.” “This is Richard DeLongpre. I’m on the phone.” This is said with no small amount of pride.
It is important work. My emotional vomit has impressed tens of you across the world.
My favorite activity is writing this blog. That’s because it’s just stream of consciousness, a literal translation of what’s in my head. The path winds everywhere because I’m interested in everything.
Today I’m sad that my favorite woodworker on YouTube lives in Portland and I didn’t know of him then. It “wood” have been cool to meet. That’s where my mind goes when I think “I’m interested in everything,” because of all the things I thought I’d be addicted to, watching people refinish or make new furniture isn’t even in the top 50. And yet, woodworking videos are my Great British Bake-off. “Did you really just do a box joint when miters are at least three times stronger?” “She’s gonna paint it…. gonna paint it….. Jesus God. I bet her next project’s a river table.” ” “You’re putting wood…. near water….. not even a coat of Total Boat. Playing fast and loose, bud.” I have nearly given up on TV. I haven’t seen anything recent. I’m just going to YouTube Youniversity. I’m telling you, though, it’s a rabbet hole. I find it so similar to cooking, because in woodworking, you also start with “the mis.” (mis en place)
Although if I have to hear another advertisement for Rubio Monaco I’m the one that’s going to lose my shit.
I’d like to make a friend who’s a woodworker, because I don’t think I’d be a very good carpenter with my vision issues I’m not the person that has the funds or the desire to get a CNC, where I could do all of it on a computer and then fit it together. However, I can stand there and hold stuff. I can do little things rather than big things to see if I’m even capable of graduating to big things. There’s lots of carpentry that can be done without measuring or math. Sanding, painting, routing finished pieces, etc. Plus, I’m knowledgeable about wood, epoxy, and metal.
Jesus, is there anything the two of us *don’t* have in common? Unclear.
The Bible is one of my favorite things, because it’s the lens through which I see everything else. Don’t freak- I’m not an Evangelical. All I mean is that I see Biblical people as human and not exalted (The Bible is an ancient blog at best. The authors of the Bible were the me of their generation. I just have less “begats.”). I see the God in all of us. Heaven and hell are created by the environments to which we belong, because God lives in the thread of energy that runs through the human race. If we count on our rewards being in heaven, we have no motivation to make heaven right now. Evangelicals are just a bunch of welfare moms in their own shitty vernacular. What makes their behavior extra hard to take is their sanctimonious bigotry masked as thoughts and prayers.
They’re the modern Pharisees and Sadduceees. You know, the religious zealots Jesus hated? The ones we’re encouraged to call out because Jesus’ law is not letters. It’s love.
My favorite thing this morning was waking up and going to drink some water and coffee. I was halfway through both before I thought about Supergrover. Progress. Generally she’s my first thought, and it’s nice to know that I’m not always going to be this sad. I’m not done with her. I’m done quietly begging for just a little bit more. If I had my way, we’d do lots of cool stuff together, but I am all about compromise. I don’t have things I need. I have things I wish for. The difference between “this is what I need” and “this is what I want, but don’t want to be selfish.” I only needed her to open up a little more, because she said she trusted me and clearly didn’t. Feeling like she was giving lip service to it destroyed me. If I’m honest, that’s the moment I was out. This is because I have an example that’s really cut and dry. I needed to go, and I didn’t want to leave.
I wrecked both of us in the process, but I do not take credit for a hundred percent of it. At ten years (really ten years now), that would be impossible. I did a lot wrong. So did she. I hurt her more, and that’s clear. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be so gunshy about talking to me about anything important to me about us. Yes, she’s married and has kids and friends and siblings and the whole nine. I do not expect her to change anything for me in terms of spending time together except for maybe a few longer e-mails, because I know she doesn’t have time for anything else. In retrospect, I should have come to the conclusion that nothing would ever change years ago. For all the joy I’ve had over the last few years, it didn’t last because I would write about anything and everything and for months I’d get three word responses. When I finally asked her to think about some things- take it away so she wasn’t responding off the cuff, she replied in about 20 minutes and said she really didn’t have time for anything but three word e-mails. She’s diplomatic, and I’m not stupid. It’s not rejection dysphoria. It’s life.
When I’d ask for the smallest things, if she couldn’t do them, she’d say something like “of course, not good enough for you.” It made me feel like a dictator I am most certainly not. I’m Type B, and and unimpressed with passive-aggressive martyrdom.
Not good enough? I think it’s crazy she believes anything isn’t good enough for me because I have told her how amazing she is, how much she’s loved, and how much her intellect feeds mine. What about my opinion says she’s not good enough for me? Or that any task she couldn’t fulfill was a disappointment? It’s not. It’s just life. She’s not responsible for me. I don’t need her to save me. She’s not the only friend I could ask for something in a pinch. She’s the one I want, not the one I need in a way that feels codependent or romantic. Just that while I’m single, she’s been my first thought. First priority. I didn’t want romance. I needed friendship on a fundamental level, and I thought we had enough history to really forgive each other and move on. I have been disabused of this notion, and it feels internally histrionic (not that intense, but I am struggling to word and the best I could do outside of that diagnosis is “extra intense.”
That’s because I didn’t give up until a few months ago, and I feel stupid. Instead of calling her out, I should have just ghosted her because calling her out has gone so spectacularly badly in the past. The imbalance was frightening because there was no direction, like being in space. I got tired of being the half of the relationship that was talking to a brick wall. You can’t wall off an INFJ. I mean, you can, but that’s not the friendship they want. I had the friendship I wanted, and I ruined it out of desperation. When she stopped confiding in me, I felt like her personal content creator….. a sideshow…. and most of all, unwanted. She reinforced that idea too much of the time, probably the same way she thought she wasn’t good enough for me and I still haven’t wrapped my brain around that thought process. We so obviously need to talk, I just don’t want to anymore. I was on hold for eight years…. and I think that’s because she thought I’d act like a man. That her worth was tied up in whether she’d sleep with me or not, because I didn’t ever think that and yet I can see how she’d get there. If she saw herself through my eyes, she’d faint. When I think of her, I blank out into complete bliss, and so does everyone who knows her. This is a stone cold fact.
I’m also not stamping my feet and asking why I’m not her favorite. What’s done is done. I am certain she thinks I’m being childish because I didn’t get what I wanted and threw a tantrum, because that’s what having feelings means to her, apparently. Feeling rejected is okay. It wasn’t her responsibility to feel guilty, just to hear me say I felt rejected and decide if she wanted to do anything about it or not. She didn’t. It’s okay, but I’m not wired for shallow. It hurt too much. Because there were no clear boundaries, all of the things we could have worked out are nebulous. It is not on her to decide when I get up from the table if love is no longer being served.
This is not to say she doesn’t love me. I don’t think that. I never could. But I think we both like our memories more, because I love the sweet things she did for me, but those also felt surface-level because I don’t trade gifts for emotions. So, I felt lonely even when we were talking. That I was sharing too much with someone who didn’t really want to open up to me, and how the amount of information I have on her pales in comparison to what she knows about me.
But now I want to talk about another favorite moment so we end on an “up.”
My beautiful girl dropped me a note out of the blue… “Argo is on HBO. Made me think of you.”
Bryn sometimes calls me on her way to work, which gives us about 15 minutes to talk (note to Bryn- let’s do this more). Today the notable news is that we’re both obsessed with Starbucks food. The coffee I can take or leave, but no one else has egg bites and Impossible sandwiches. Eggs and cheese are cheating on my vegan diet, but I only eat mostly plants, anyway. I’m living Michael Pollan’s advice…. “Eat food. Not a lot. Mostly plants.” I was also telling her that I liked Starbucks getting Trente cups because I’m a sucker for their iced tea. Just shut up and take my money. My favorite flavor is green because it’s a bit minty, but their black tea makes me smell numbers at that quantity. I get a breve, which is black iced tea, no extra water, Splenda, and soy or oat milk. It sounds weird, but you wouldn’t think so if it was a Thai restaurant, now would you? I think the’ve caught on to my idea, because now they’re selling iced London Fog lattes (Earl Grey and vanilla syrup).
We’re also working on bringing joy into our lives. That we are responsible for our own suffering because of our rejection sensitivity, but it’s something we can improve about ourselves by relating to each other. When I look at Bryn, my heart floods with gratitude. She’s the face I look to for love, because I can. She is also safe in loving me, because she’s getting me the me that has already made so many mistakes that I’m not so closed off to her because I see how that isolation affects her. I don’t want to make her think I’m doing anything that’s pushing her away, because when I feel sad, it’s not about her. I can’t ignore her needs, and sometimes they’re more important than mine….. like not encouraging her to believe that I’m being distant because of something she did. That’s more important to me than taking care of myself, because if I don’t make it more important than I will isolate based on what I’m going through when the situation isn’t even that bad….. I just think it is.
The story we’re telling ourselves is often skewed, because we’re so unkind to ourselves. We disconnect quickly out of embarrassment or self preservation, because it hurts to think about the ways we’re responsible for contributing to another’s behavior, or giving someone else negative consequences….. true whether you meant to or not.
We disconnect quickly because we’re so digitally oriented. Think back over the last 10 years. Are you quicker to anger because of the wall of separation between you and another person? That even though this person is close to you in real life, you have a desperate need to fight with people on the Internet, leading the charge into hell and forgetting that you are creating some awkward cocktail parties…….. because being right over whatever it is has become more important than empathy.
I don’t think this happened in any organized way. It is the nature of becoming digital. Too many relationships go up and down because of Facebook and Twitter, because everyone can see how you interact with everyone else. You’re not only taking into account how people treat you, but how you observe them treating everyone else. I don’t care if you have me a kidney 20 years ago. I will not let you get away with saying watching two men kiss gives you nausea….. and that’s why you’ll never go to a gay wedding.
Someone from my high school actually said that to me. He apologized and I’ve moved on permanently. I got an apology, but I want no future contact.
It’s the same kind of bullying I endured in high school, and it’s just noise. It’s chatter designed to make me feel awful about myself. Imagine being so certain that God is telling you that you need to tell queer people they’re going to hell. Imagine that message being preached to a church that has 40,000 members. Imagine that message going to all churches that have 40,000 members. Then imagine going to high school 15 minutes away from that church so its bitchy little mean girls all go there. I can’t think of anything more psychotic than getting into a performing arts high school and being homophobic….. especially if you were in theater. Even the straight kids are queer.
Probably because actors have to be two-spirited anyway. It’s the full range of human emotion.
I think it’s notable how fast I’m putting together what has happened to me over my life and how it is affecting me now. Being gay in Texas is a rough gig, and it always has been. I am not oppressed. WE are oppressed. We did not create the system that hates us, and we can’t really do anything about it due to the 80/20 rule…. That 20 percent of the population has to convince the 80% they’re right.
………over things that shouldn’t be legislated.
Thomas Jefferson is rolling over in his grave, because his ideas of conservativism was that the highest government in the land would be the equivalent of a school board. Just as little legislation as possible. He would be incensed that conservatives were trying to parent the whole nation. You don’t get individual freedoms if it’s perfectly acceptable to treat you as if your entire personality is a sin.
Sometimes I wish that the US had lost the Revolutionary war because the Commonwealth countries are so much more progressive than we are. I would deal with Boris Johnson a lot better than I’d deal with Ron DeSantis (I’m assuming he’ll be the nominee because more people are being convinced he’s an actual criminal every day. Hiding classified documents near water? Obviously he’s a genius….. we knew that when he looked directly at the sun during an eclipse. Don’t get me wrong. Hiding documents in your house is always wrong. But putting them near toilets and sinks is a special kind of stupid.
I also think it’s great he lost the E. Jean Carroll case, because that judicial standard says that it is more likely he’s guilty than not. This is different than a criminal trial, because “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a higher standard than a “preponderance of evidence.” The best example I can give of this is FBI and CIA. FBI collects data that has to stand up to scrutiny in a courtroom. CIA has no law enforcement capability. They collect data and return it to Congress and the president. Therefore, their information only has to be analyzed in percentage of sureties on outcomes. To me, that is the difference between judicial standards in American courts as well, because nothing in intelligence is beyond a reasonable doubt. Those issues change like a CNN stock ticker.
It’s too quiet in here. I put on the soundtrack to Argo The theme in the bass is about to drop, and that’s the best feeling I get with my headphones. The bass of the strings….. omg…. Fabulous. Although my favorite track is “Hotel Messages.” Hard to describe, just listen to it. I’ve been trying to learn the whispered rhythm for years.
Second favorite is The Mission, but Hotel Messages is all you get because I want you to actually watch the movie. 😛
I know the score intimately because I had to memorize it to get it out of the way while I’m writing. I don’t want to think about walking bass, suspended chords, etc. I had to do all that stuff independently, otherwise you’d just get an entry full of bad music theory with my third grade education on the subject. No open fourths. Rules are made to be broken. That’s kind of my limit.
I love movies about intelligence set in the Middle East, because that kind of music fills me up. The melodies are haunting because they’re not using a Western sense of chord structure. It’s also different hearing Middle Eastern music with a full orchestral arrangement vs. a couple of people.
Argo was all written by a composer named Alexandre Desplait, and he’s done a lot of movie scores…. But all middle eastern spy movies have that vibe. The music in Syriana, Beirut, Three Kings, etc. is just so complex. Speaking of which, there’s a great documentary on Amazon Prime called “The Sounds of Bond” or something like that, and it’s incredible. I like Bond music, too, but it is secondary to my love of strings moving to the notes you don’t expect.
The one thing you get with American music that’s not so prevalent in the East is a good Picardy Third. It’s the term for when a piece is written entirely in a minor key, but switches to major for the final chord of a line or piece. “Coventry Carol” is a great example of this.
Comparing Hotel Messages to Coventry Carol and the difference between how scales are used is apparent.
So, just another reason to love intelligence. The soundtrack to their lives is better than everyone else’s.
I don’t have a bigger job right now than to look at who I want to be with as much passion as I can muster. I need to release guilt and shame, and move into the next phase of my life. I’ve kept it at bay long enough. I have a doctorate in being single by now, and in some ways I’m just as dumb as ever, but the key is to always make new mistakes. I am tired of all the internal punishment I’ve given myself and am trying to work through all of it so that issues stay resolved and flashbacks can’t pop up, because they don’t mean anything anymore.
I want to be able to look at a memory without reliving it. I do this most often through this blog, because I only have to write it once…….. but I have somewhere to go to read and reread and reread until the emotions that come up for me feel very far away. It depends on the issue as to the timeframe, but desensitizing myself is much easier when I have a handle on what I actually thought instead of relying on my (very) fallible memory……. Or maybe it’s my fallible memory.
I CANNOT CHANGE THE STORY I’M TELLING MYSELF.
Do you see how it’s so much harder for me to get off track when my memory of what I was thinking during certain times in my life is infallible? Do you know how many times I’ve had to use the “Search” feature on this web site? It is so helpful that my memories do not bleed together and warp, because rereading my own work gives me a general idea of what happened when. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have to basically Google yourself because you’re so ADHD you couldn’t remember a date if your life depended on it? What saves embarrassment is being able to recall things accurately years after the fact, because I’m not speaking off the cuff, and not speaking for anyone else…… keeping in mind that this is only a record of what I was thinking, and I cannot be a fully reliable narrator because I’m only going on the information I have. Because I know I’ll never reach perfection, I strive for excellence. I will never please everyone. Fact.
Something has changed in me this year, and now I can put my finger on it. I feel more comfortable in my skin because I’m older. I do have wisdom and experience to pass on to other people who are probably smarter than me and already have this stuff figured out, anyway…… this blog is for the ones who don’t.
This blog is for readers who know they’re train wrecks and are actively working on the problem. I don’t know any perfect people, so I know I’ll never get there…. But what I can control is the amount of time I’m willing to dive into the wreck. What I have found that works the most effectively is to be present for every awful feeling you have. If you work it out in your mind, the next time those emotions come up for you, they won’t hurt as much. Lean into emotional pain like a deep tissue sports massage where you get beat up for an hour and a half and somehow feel amazing.
I’m passionate about getting enough sleep more than anything else. When I don’t give my body time to repair itself, I am worse off both physically and mentally. You won’t notice I have CP (probably) until I get very tired. The ability to hold it together is at zero. I fall more often over things I don’t see. I miss steps both up and down. It all hurts when I fall, but I’m used to it. I don’t really have another choice, so I need to come to peace. Being angry at myself is the root cause of all the negative I’ve put out into the world, another universal truth. I am cleaning out my closet. Let’s get down to business and let the real Leslie Lanagan (please) stand up.
It feels different to stand up than it did when I was 20, because if the other person was slightly displeased, I’d go right back to apologizing for my existence. Now, I realize just how accepting my friends are (or not). This is not a slam, because I’m generalizing over hundreds of people including Facebook friends. It’s a spectrum, right, because no one has the same opinion of you on every issue. I have my inner circle, and they’re signal vs. noise, a line I picked up from a web zine in the early 2000s, but I repeat myself.
It’s not that I don’t value a lot of people’s opinions. I most certainly do. I just don’t have room to take on the emotions of more than a few people at once. I have to be absolutely open and vulnerable with them, which takes a lot of stamina, but they’re doing the same thing for me. We are each refilling each other’s social battery because we’re lightening each other’s emotional load. It’s also making sure that the give and take is roughly equal, because I know I’m a handful at times. If you’re the one that’s on my six, I sure as shit am on yours. I have an immense capacity for gratitude because it fills all my empty places. I smile more.
I am passionate about making myself smile more. Pick any one of my entries in the last few months and you’ll see quickly that I’m going through it….. and keeping on keeping on. My chin is up. I just need to keep it that way. The God part of me, my third person omnipotent point of view, hates watching me go through all this- and accepts that it is necessary. That POV is also responsible for a lot of what I’m experiencing now, because I’m only omnipotent regarding knowing what I’m going to do. There are too many permutations to even guess what’s going on in other people’s heads. Heuristics come in after you’ve told me what you’re experiencing because I’m relating your story to every one I’ve ever heard on the topic; I’m hoping that the next thing that comes out of my mouth is relevant to your situation and/or emotional state. #fingerscrossed
I get so embarrassed when what I’ve said is wrong that I withdraw, but I don’t need people to tiptoe around me. I need them to give me time to digest. Your problem with me is what it is; I can’t do anything to change what’s happened, but I can change the future by being willing to talk about all the things that are bothering me…. If I know you have my back. My work to do is turning down rejection sensitivity dysphoria so that I don’t make every mistake I’ve ever made a noose around my neck.
Turning down RSD would turn down a whole bunch of things…. Mostly social anxiety, but I’m sure it would be more than that. I could stop getting into knock-down drag-outs even when no one is in the room. When I fight myself, it is gloves off. I’m tired of knocking myself out because I can’t get up as fast as I used to.
I don’t have any fight left in me, and now I’m trying to find out why I ever got fight in me in the first place. I am aware that women taking back their power always looks like rage, but at the same time, I’ve said things that took all the velvet off the hammer because I don’t react like a Southerner anymore. DC is the South (technically), but Oregon sure isn’t. It’s not that I’m equating Portlanders to being mean, just that I’ve lost the need to sugar coat any and every sentence because I’ve had too many instances of it creating chasms. I’m overly sensitive to miscommunication, so I spell out everything.
I am now trying to remember to edit. Not every e-mail has to be a beautifully crafted essay because not everyone loves to read.
I am passionate about reading, and right now I’ve got a banger of a book. It’s called “The Secrets We Kept: A Novel” by Lara Prescott. It’s about female spies in the 40s and 50s, a group of women there at the founding of CIA hired for the typing pool. They get noticed for their operational potential, and here’s the line that got me…. I love this so hard…… “We bonded over the belief that a life of adventure wasn’t reserved for men, and we set out to claim our piece of it.” They’re the original “Swallows,” which is code for women who use their sexuality to get information out of people. I don’t know of any programs in the US that seriously created these women…. It’s a novel. Says it right there on the cover. Sleeping with an asset is a fireable offense now (or maybe it always has been…. Not fact checking til the book is done), and the US has never been known for it. Russia invented Swallows.
Women, in my experience from talking to a wealth of people in the industry, tend to make better spies. Misogyny works for them in terms of being The Little Gray Man. They tend to stay more calm in stressful situations, because that morning her toilet probably broke, the dog threw up, and her finger was broken so she had to change the baby with one hand while maintaining the facade that she is completely fine. Tell me that woman can’t remain calm when the goods are military equipment and classified documents. She’s probably calm because this meeting sucks and she can sleep standing up. This book takes place after CIA was founded, so past Julia Child’s time at OSS. Yet, she’s still the woman I picture in all these stories…. Unless it’s by Jonna Mendez, because then I don’t have to put my own pictures on fictional characters. I’ve met her a couple of times at the museum, which is kind of cool because now the movies that play in my head are accurate.
I am passionate about Julia Child. I do not think that you can technically call her a spy, because I don’t know if every employee is called a case officer or whether different departments have different titles. In the movie Julie & Julia, Paul and Julia tell a table full of friends that they aren’t spies, they’re file clerks. This is untrue. I don’t know if Paul ever worked for OSS or not, because he said he worked for State in the movie. You don’t really have to be one or the other. They work on things together all the time, so it’s not really important to give everyone at CIA that works with state a diplomatic cover, because the way I understand it is that the allotment of diplomatic jobs we’re funding is set. If CIA takes three of them as covers, then that’s three less jobs that State can fill. So, even if Paul says he worked for State, that doesn’t mean he was never an operations officer. Julia worked for the Office of Technical Services, which is why I would not classify her as a file clerk or an operations officer (perhaps the same title, not the same function. Q does not leave the building.). The biggest thing she’s known for is creating a powerful shark repellant recipe………………. #foreshadowing
I would watch the hell out of the miniseries I’m seeing in my mind right now because of course now Julia Child and James Bond are the same person. She didn’t just create shark repellant, she rappelled down the side of a building before the Germans made her.
It’s so crazy it just might work, which is apparently carved in the topiary hedges at Langley. I hope their pants have reinforced seats due to all the turbulence.
I am passionate about understanding Trump’s documents case, because so far he’s making Snowden look like a rookie through the cunning use of stupidity. We won’t know for a hundred years what this cult has done, because all Russia and China had to do was send people Trump wanted to impress to his house. They don’t have to carry a single thing. Even if every document is accounted for, cameras that fit in pens are unquantifiable. When Aldrich Ames betrayed us to the Russians, we lost ten assets in one summer. I guarantee that Trump never had any idea that sharing information could cause all that, because he showed people those documents to seem impressive to them. He couldn’t care less if Russia or China saw military plans or lists of our assets in country, because what matters is Russia and China thinking he’s cool.
That’s what happens when you need desperately to fill up all the space in a room, constantly interrupting to make sure that the conversation is one-sided and all about his favorite topic…. Him.
I am passionate about using this platform to have a voice in politics and international affairs. I don’t claim to be an expert- far from it. But what I learn I pass on, and I’ve always been a news junkie. I don’t go a day without listening to Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow. So, this blog is not educational, but conversational. I am politically literate, but hold no authority. It’s the process that excites me, or it will if we ever get back to one set of facts. That’s because government is about compromise, and that isn’t even possible if the parties aren’t playing off the same deck. If people are determined to misunderstand you, they will. For instance, constituents vilifying the person designated to help them (Anthony Fauci, Mike Pence). The amount of Americans that believe Trump can do his job perfectly fine from prison if he’s elected boggles the mind.
From a historical perspective, it is not as baffling to me that Trump beat Clinton as it is Trump being the Republican nominee at all. How did he beat out Jeb Bush and John Kasich? Why is the loudest political voice in the country in need of a president to the right of Caligula? This time, it is the people fiddling while Rome burns and not Nero.
Apathy gets to me. Why didn’t more people care when Trump called John McCain a loser for becoming a Vietnamese POW? Why did so many people grit their teeth and vote for Trump anyway? Calling McCain a loser isn’t even in the Letterman Top Ten List of reasons why Trump was a horrible candidate, and people are still swallowing his bullshit filled capsules.
I think that too many people are embarrassed to admit they ate two slices of chocolate pie……………….
Meanwhile, it’s only our national security at stake. What could possibly go wrong?
I am just so passionate about learning how the world works. I am not particularly patriotic, though, because I see the US as part of a larger system. The same chessboard analogy used with states can be used with countries. Problems come in when you focus too heavily on one quadrant. By the time you’ve noticed there’s a problem, the game is over. Not going to lie, I still lose my shit at seeing the military in uniform and all the things that patriotic people do. It’s just that I’m not blind to colonialism or imperialism. We’ve participated in some very shady shit. So have other countries. Therefore, I do not hold the US in a godlike position, as if we should be the arbiter of all things right and good. I think it’s good for the US to finally cut the crap on believing in all that “best country in the world” bullshit. Some things, the US does really well. Some things are a shitshow, and that’s the bargain you make in any country. Some are absolutely more toxic than others, but people are adaptable and find pleasures no matter where they live. You have to focus on the positive if you can’t afford to run.
I am so passionate about bringing light into those dark recesses. I’d love to meet women and girls in the Middle East (we ride at dawn). I couldn’t do anything to help them save holding space, being in a room for the sole purpose of letting everyone else vent. Hopefully, they’d walk away feeling lighter and I’d walk away feeling less dumb.
I am passionate about not being dumb. I do not care if other people think I faked high school graduation, I want to feel within myself that I am intelligent, so I read a lot. It’s amazing how good reading novels is for learning about the world. Something you need to know this year will invariably be information you retained from a book you read in 1998, because the story might be made up, but the writing isn’t. For instance, I learned that Charlotte had a very small airport so I didn’t have to worry about a quick connection time because I read a YA novel that mentioned it about six years ago. Books contain random facts, whether the story is fictional or not.
I am passionate about stories, my own and everyone else’s. In the end, make it a good one. As I approach the second half of my life, I’d like to think I’ve got a better handle on craft, but diplomacy leaves a lot to be desired. The juxtaposition of how we own our stories is complicated and necessary. Relationships don’t survive if one partner is trying to change the other’s story, because no one can make another person do anything. By this I mean that too many people think partners are “fixer-uppers,” and people don’t change. They just don’t. People who want to change others hang in until their partners resent the hell out of them because they’re being controlled. If the controlling partner is willing to work on it, genuinely, then try. A narcissist will never want to work on it because they’ve never done anything wrong. Once a narcissist stops getting that dopamine hit from adoration, they wall off and escape to find someone new who doesn’t know what’s about to hit them.
I think that we call more people narcissists than actually exist. This is because sometimes the relationship can be fixed. Not all bad behavior means someone is a narcissist. Sometimes, they’re just lost in their own heads and not very other aware. The mark of a narcissist is the complete lack of empathy, and the lack was there before you met them. It’s generally caused by trauma, because part of a narcissist’s schtick is being able to control everything in their environment, so they create their own reality. Everyone knows that person around which people orbit. Lots of people have that ability, and it is not inherently negative. It depends on motivation. Narcissists have a desperate need to be liked, no internal validation at all, and they cover up all those significant fears with bravado. Anything they view as negative will be very loud, and that’s par for the course for everyone….. but narcissists will evade culpability by any means necessary. The reason human relationships are so difficult is that narcissists are hard to catch until their behavior is so outrageous that you feel like you’ve been yanked backward and dropped.
I have known so many of them that it’s hard to count, and here’s how I know I dodged that bullet. I want to hear people’s thoughts and feelings. I’m strong and definite in mine, but that doesn’t mean I’m emotionally unavailable. If I come across that way, it probably has nothing to do with the conversation, or I’m too angry in the moment. I am not saying that being too angry in the moment is something for which other people should make allowances. I am saying that is my work to do. Authentic rage is a symptom of PTSD, because it generally accompanies a panic attack. I am not making excuses here, only trying to provide context. I am not escaping accountability. I just think it helps to know why people do things, which is another trait most neurodivergent people share. We’re not trying to be threatening, we’re trying to understand.
Add that to the INFJ motto……. “I’m not insulting you… I’m describing you.” It seems so mean and yet I think of it all the time as profound wisdom. People do not like explaining their behavior….. which is of course the only thing the INFJ wants to help you understand. So, legit nine percent of the world is irritating as shit to everyone else. 91% of the world has trouble speaking in our love language. It’s gotten easier for me to think of love in Greek, because I like granularity and English just doesn’t have it. I now feel solid in philia and agape, but I’m preparing for romance in whatever package it arrives….. I’m just not there yet. I say I am, but I haven’t done anything about it. I don’t want to start another relationship without knowing whether Daniel is in or out, and I made the agreement with myself to give him time to chill, which is most probably just an excuse. Stay tuned.
I’m not averse to dating, clearly, but anything beyond that scares the hell out of me. Serious relationships haven’t gone the distance for me and I feel like I should figure out why before launching into something else and realizing that eight years has probably been enough soul searching. I don’t have to be perfectly perfect in every way before I consider opening my heart. It’s amazing how long I didn’t come to that realization. In retrospect, I couldn’t handle a relationship with a woman outside my beautiful girl because I felt like those things had to come in succession. Once I’d hurt one woman, I knew I was capable of hurting them all. I needed to know if I was really capable of resolving a conflict that large, because I didn’t think I deserved good things to come into my life after it. People have accused me of not being able to let go of the past, and this is untrue. I haven’t been pining away for a straight girl and lying to cover my ass. It’s a familiar story, but it’s not mine.
It just took a really long time to learn that there were limits to us being okay, and I have no ill will. Just sadness it didn’t work out. My perfect picture of us was blow your hair back conversations, nothing about the idea of being together a romantic fire, but an intellectual one. A brain dump on both sides because our life experiences are so different.
There was a beauty in it that is beyond words. We both think big thoughts, but never the same subject at the same time. If I had to sum up our relationship in one word, it would be “asynchronous.” Our upload and download speeds varied wildly.
I feel at peace being able to look at that relationship with a third person perspective and wonder what I would do if this was a story being told to me rather than one I wrote. It helps tremendously in the way I allow myself to talk to me.
It helps me to see whether it’s true that every accusation is a confession, and I believe it is. That’s because when I analyzed where my energy was going, I saw all the accusations between us and in each case, there was an instance where we could both say the same about each other, it’s just that the reasoning behind the behaviors would be different. If you’re in a relationship with someone and you’re both constantly doing the same shit to each other, you’re going to think what they’re doing can only explained by what you felt when you went through something similar, which may or may not match up with mine and defensiveness shuts down communication. You’re not really looking at a situation through the other’s perspective and trying to deal with your anger simultaneously. When you’re fighting, adrenaline makes you react out of fear instead of respond with grace. Being human sucks, because our very nature means we can’t avoid anger at each other all the time. It’s a hope for the best situation, but I always hope for that.
Hoping for the best in life is the fuel that feeds the other fires I feel in terms of gathering knowledge. Knowledge and I are in a passionate love affair, my one and only.
I am not sure there is a thing as overcoming a fear. It doesn’t get better, you just learn. For instance, asking someone out feels like having your guts rearranged, but if you’re lucky, you’ll be laughing and smiling a minute later. If not, oh well. In the past, I would have taken that rejection and sat on it forever. Now, I don’t care if people like me or not, so it doesn’t wig me out to say to someone that I’m interested. If they’re not, I’m strong enough to handle rejection. I have been alive long enough to know that not everyone vibes with me….. although people seem to be drawn to me initially. They don’t find out what a train wreck I can be until later. It’s all good, because I won’t find out they’re a train wreck immediately, either.
We all have too much fear of rejection most of the time, because what goes on in our heads is much worse than what happens in the real world…. with one exception, the only thing that scares me.
I need my e-mail and documents to be secure, because ideas are my currency. That means one of the reasons I don’t date much is that partners like going through your phone, as if it’s some medal to be earned. Slow it down, Buster Brown.
The thing around privacy is mystifying. When you are a couple, are you supposed to let people think that you’re talking to both of us all the time? That nothing you say to me stays with me? What if my friends stop confiding in me because they don’t like you? They don’t have to. I have to like you.
I also don’t want you to read anything they asked me to keep tight and you thought it was your right to snoop. I promise you that if I’m attracted to someone, you’ll know it. Probably because I’ll tell you that so you won’t miss who I’m seeing. Jealousy is not my bag, and pushes me away faster than anything else. I’m not going to bat an eye if you see heaven on earth, either.
I have a fear of dating anyone jealous, because that’s the shortest path to getting my phone held up in front of my face while I’m asleep. I should wipe it, but it’s so much hassle. That being said, only my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch have biometrics. I should just move all my sensitive stuff to my Android products and eschew obfuscation.
See? I’ve overcome a fear right here. It makes me feel safe that I really can lock everything down. Anyone I date from here on out is not part of The Five (the people that know what my alternate history is about…. possibly six if Dana has been paying attention, but I don’t know and can’t.). I don’t want anyone to read e-mail in my history, because it reflects a lot that’s just not me anymore….. and it does no good to dwell on who I wanted to be, because there’s just so many variables. I am doing my best to show up without fail so that I see these changes happening. That I am creating the life I want, rather than being satisfied with the life I have. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want people to come to me. This is perfect in that my sister does not live in DC, but works here. Lots of people work in DC, so I have more than just her that drop in on a whim.
It was a huge fear to move back to DC, because I thought, “what if I don’t fit in anymore?” It couldn’t have been further from the truth. I integrated into my house and community easily. I remember that on the first day I was here, I was sitting out on the front porch and Samantha handed me a Dr Pepper. She said, “I thought I’d bring you one since it’s probably your blood type.” I told her that it wasn’t sugar free, but that she was correct. I still drank it. Let’s not get stupid. I was running a quart low.
DC started feeding me immediately, because I didn’t have to save up money to go and do things. I’ve loaded up my tablet and keyboard, writing anywhere and everywhere. If it’s not too hot, I write outside at the zoo. If it is, I write at any of the museums, I just have to keep a hoodie in my bag. Don’t wear shorts, because you’ll get really hot outside and then walk into Siberia, where you’ll be stuck in shorts for most of what you’re going to do that day.
My favorite Smithsonian museum is the National Portrait Gallery, but I like all of them. My favorite museum overall is International Spy, and when I go, I usually get a membership because it’s the cost of four tickets and traditionally I spend hours at a time, going eight or 10 times for shorter periods, and it’s $25 a visit. Belonging to Spy is a trip, because you get access to all the stuff that goes on after hours. It’s also a tremendous resource if you’re like me, and have no problem browsing at the bookstore for an hour and a half. As I’ve said before, I’m not writing a book about spies, but people who have to become them under duress. I can’t think of a better place to go than a museum who’s already bought all those books.
It was a fear to become a museum member, because I’m quite shy and introverted. I didn’t know if I would spend enough time there to warrant getting a membership. It was a combination of forcing myself to get out of the house and wanting to meet people on a different level, brain-wise. I never felt like anyone was talking down to me, and I had a lot of stupid questions so that I could learn how to ask what I really wanted to know. I actually asked the museum if they’d start a class like that for writers, but I haven’t heard from them. I don’t know enough to teach it (Spy Jargon 101), or I’d offer to spearhead the program so that it’s done by a volunteer and not their meager resources. Yes, they do fantastic things. They’re also privately funded and don’t get government assistance TO MAKE EXHIBITS ABOUT PEOPLE THAT WORK FOR THE GOVERNMENT. Ironic.
If I had time, I’d stop by and see some of Jonna and Tony’s masks before I head to DCA. They give me strength when I don’t have it. I just stare at them and think, “if they got up and did what they did, where’s my excuse?” It has to stop being that I’m afraid, because I am afraid of nearly everything.
It’s why I’m the president of overthinker’s anonymous, why I spill out possibilities regarding problems and solutions…. anything to make it where I have a roadmap because I’m so likely to be distracted. I have a concrete need to know what’s going to happen, because I feel so adrift at times. It’s never a good time for a grandparent to die, but I do feel lucky in that I’ll get to see my family in person for a few days (tomorrow through Friday unless plans change).
What I know for sure is that my grandfather’s house is not near Houston. We’ll have a road trip ahead of us- at least five hours each way. That is premium time just to talk and laugh, road tripping because of sadness, but also the fact that we’ll get to see family we haven’t seen in a long time. I tend to focus on laughs and togetherness when it comes to funerals, because what else are you supposed to do? Even when my mother died at 65 and was robbed of getting to live out a long life, I still focused on the fact that I hadn’t seen my cousins in years. It kept me upright.
The fact that my mother died so young created another fear in me…. that someone would die before I got to tell them something. It made me ramble on in e-mail without taking into account how long they were. I’m sorry to people who don’t communicate like that, but I figure if I put everything in a letter, everything you need from me is probably in there somewhere. I tend to use conversations to clarify. It’s irritating as shit to some people, so I generally ask if people like e-mail before I send them. I warn them that I’ll talk about anything and everything, and so can they.
But it’s a fear that people are just being nice, and therefore I try to get together with people as often as I can. I have a better gauge of the situation, I’m not unloading information that no one needs, even if I think they do.
It’s a fear to write to other people now that this Internet relationship has just gone so wrong. Am I setting myself up for the same rabbit hole? Have I learned enough to be able to handle e-mail responsibly and not get upset and reply without thinking?
Had I thought about it, I would have said something like, “I can see that you’re going through a lot, and have for months. I don’t want to do anything that takes away from your life, only things that add to it. I really do understand your point of view, and have so much empathy for it that I’m hurting for you.” I was too angry to respond and I did it, anyway. I think the outcome would have been the same, though, because it was so clear to me that I didn’t have a place in her life that I didn’t feel like spending more energy and attention. That I could be happy with bread crumbs, or I could take that energy and use it on someone else….. because her breadcrumbs were my morning coffee. I was seeing her emotions through my filter, because she didn’t give me any.
I don’t know why. I didn’t ask why. She said something about not fitting into the mold of friend I’d made for her, and I could only agree. It was based on times past, not times present. That made the present too hard and hurt too much. I’m not even sure she remembers who she was to me anymore, or if it even matters. What attracted her to me was great writing, and, in the end, repelled her. I hope she’ll go back and read in five years….. that maybe something will jump out at her that didn’t before. I need her to see what a mutual admiration society we had, and how I never lost my awe of her, but hers of me was gone and I had a complex about it because I knew exactly when it had gone and why it would never reappear. I wasn’t dumb about this, just too full of hope. She must have been, too, because she tried so hard. We just couldn’t make it gel, and I have to believe that I was right to step back, because I needed to take care of me. I needed to lick my wounds. Every elephant in DC knows how wrecked I am, and they are sympathetic. My bees are flat getting tired of me, but they’re the ones that need to hear all this. They live on gossip, and right now I’m pathetic. I have given them more tea than they can possibly carry…… but they can hear all the things that no one else can. I imagine that they’re flying between our houses, so I tell them to tell her she is loved. That way, I don’t walk around feeling anything except relief that the situation is bad, but it won’t get worse.
I feel extraordinarily selfish and wonder what I should have done instead, because I know it’s not what actually happened. I couldn’t live with three words a month (in its extreme), and she couldn’t live with pages and pages that she thought were telling her how bad I thought she was, when nothing has ever been less true. I thought the sun came out because she was smiling, not the other way around.
I didn’t like being blown off by someone I valued so much, and not knowing whether that’s the message she intended to send…. that blowing each other off was who were now. You would just have to see what happened on Day One to see why Years Three Through 10 were so problematic. It couldn’t have been fun dealing with me, because I hated it, too. We saw each other at our worst, and clawed back up…. just not to where it was solid enough that I could say things like “I have one of those. Lemme drop it in the mail for you.” “I’m headed to Chuy’s. You guys need emergency burritos or anything?”
No one should ever turn down an emergency burrito.
I never actually said those things, just once offered to take her to a thing and realized two others. The first is that I’d accidentally offered to take her to a Mother’s Day event and she has actual children. I don’t, and my mom is dead, so I spaced it. The second is that I realized I shouldn’t be THAT nervous, and I was. By then we’d known each other for years and years. We’d supposedly worked through all our shit. I told her the ball was in her court, and it was 2017 or 18. It’s not something I put a whole lot of stock in, because our relationship has always been virtual on purpose. How do you talk to anyone about anything? Make it where there’s no time constraints. Facebook Messenger was just as real as Skype, and back then I couldn’t just hit a button in Messenger to bring up calling. We were our real selves, and ghosts of ourselves all at once. I think that because reading her e-mails and looking at her picture brings her presence close, but of course it is not the same as being outside on a restaurant patio with frozen margaritas on the way.
Therefore, it’s a fear to write blog entries as well as letters, because I come off great at first. People keep up with me no matter what………… Keeping someone close to me is hard. I seem to have a learning curve of which I am completely unaware. Getting to know an author is tricky, even if you like them. We don’t like us very much, so good luck. 😉
So, there was the pull of having that experience with her, but no passion or drive toward it. Just a “wouldn’t it be nice?” picture floating by. In fact, it didn’t even become important until recently, because I realized that the patterns we used to talk to each other wouldn’t change unless we changed mediums. We need to prove to the other one that we aren’t scary, because that’s what happens when you’ve known someone for ten years and not at all. It’s hard to know how to grieve someone you’ve loved a hundred and crazy percent for a decade, and yet can’t tell you where she keeps her cutting boards. I opened up, and didn’t. She doesn’t know where my cutting boards are, either, but I do know enough to know that her best outcome would be never knowing that. I am not being mean, it’s just that she doesn’t like to cook enough to make that fact worth remembering. She would rather read about the things I cook, if that were a thing I wrote about. People keep telling me to put up recipes. I don’t do that. I look at your pantry and decide what the recipe is on the fly.
I have been told I could get a lot of readers by putting up recipes, and to me, that is the “live, laugh, love” of blogging.
Speaking of writing and drawing people in, that’s a fear as well. I am terrified of success, because every time I’ve managed it, I’ve torn it down out of sheer unpreparedness for life. I barely manage without a partner, and yet I’m still alive….. mostly because I’ve spent so long telling myself that I can be independent, and finding out that ain’t necessarily so.
I am coming to terms with significant fears about my mental and physical health, that I’m not doing so hot on either plane and don’t yet know what it will take to fix it. Nothing is so horrible that it needs attention tonight, I’m just saying. I have a lot of appointments to sit through in which I try not to get worried as we run the numbers on treatment. Some of it isn’t even treatment. I just need to join a gym. No one would say that I needed to lose weight, even me, but I have specific needs in a trainer. I need to strengthen all the muscles that control balance.
My fear touches a little bit of everything, and I am trying to get stronger day by day. It sometimes feels as if I have a mountain to climb and no boots, but I’ll get there one way or another. I do have a spirit that leans into the divine, so right this moment it’s all about letting mystery guide me rather than fear. I want to see where I’m going, without being so impatient to get there that I repeat the same mistakes.
And now we’ve arrived at my biggest fear…. that I will stay the same.
Describe one simple thing you do that brings joy to your life.
I don’t tend to write short essays, so I’ll tell you about all the things that bring me joy. I need to write this out because I am not experiencing joy in my life at all right now. I’m in DC while I have an emergency in the family going on, so I’ll probably leave next week for Texas. Right now, though, I feel the weight of being far away, and I won’t know anything until I see it. For those who are worried, my dad and sister are fine. I’ll give you more details, I just don’t know whether the word is public or not. Let me clear that up first, and then I’ll let you know why I’m going. It won’t be information that needs to be kept tight for long. Just know that I’m going through a thing, and remembering joy helps.
The first thing that’s giving me joy is comments on my web site. Some of them come from readers that post here and are public. Most likely, I’ll get an e-mail. I got one this week re: my beautiful girl that will live in my memory forever…. “how could she deny you the one thing you love, which is her?” It didn’t make me feel joy because of the situation, only that I was able to connect…. to write it in a way that would make someone say that. The reality is that she didn’t deny me anything. I chose to walk off because of the things she was doing that hurt me, because it didn’t make the fantastic less so. I have lots of stuff from her that reminds me every day of how much I just love her to pieces. That’s enough.
I want more e-mails that kid me about our favorite genderqueer Instagram influencer, my Bozo the Clown red hair, and my Dalek winter hat. I want less e-mails that say I’m goading and provoking. People have issues with each other. Full stop. I can’t go on pretending that our problems are small enough not to talk about them. On the flip side, I indeed got impatient over time because of exhaustion. But though I was exhausted, I wasn’t actively trying to provoke her. I just wanted her to pay attention, when there’s no reason she really should have. It’s what I wanted, not what I deserved.
But to have someone who doesn’t know me say that they see me? Priceless. That’s the message I need- that I am not perfect, but redeemable. This internal freakout was eight years ago, and I’ve been fighting against the tide ever since, because I didn’t know where we were and I didn’t have a map.
So being reminded to take in joy is very important. It’s taking away the sting of this family emergency, losing my Richard from Texas, and that I’m in DC typing all this. The cure for every one of these things is time.
I focus on the joy that it will never be over with someone I have loved this much, because she’s here whether she meant to be or not. I tease her that I even have a t-shirt with her picture on it, not her but a symbol that represents her. I can’t tell you what it is in case it’s identifying, but I will tell you that the pic is similar to a T-rex cuddling a stuffed bunny. That level of incongruous, anyway. My Kindle library is littered with books she likes, both recommendations and presents. What I have to say to that is she needs to pick out all my books from now on, because she reads me so often that she picks up on these things easily.
Karin Slaughter and I are a little bit alike in that we walk into the darkness with our Southern style. I have never been more surprised than I was at hearing her voice. Those books come out of that mouth? Seriously, it’s a trip.
I am fully able to accept that the dark and the light feed each other and make the other feel more extreme. I wouldn’t be hurt if I had not felt that level of joy and could remember what that was like. But I never knew if the things I did elicited the same reaction…. the same reaction that it was from me. I tried to be as creative as possible, and I hope that’s one of the things I got wrong, that I thought because we had conflict it wasn’t fun to her to reflect on the parts that felt right.
There was no persuasion, no changing her mind. There was only letting her be her. If I really loved her, it had to be dependent on her….. not the idea that if I just kept at it, things would fall into place the way I would have wanted. It’s the craziest thought ever, because I can flat hear a “no.” I didn’t do much to prove that almost a decade ago, but I prove it every day now.
I truly believe that I’m forgiven in the macro, but not the micro. It’s scary to say the thing you’re most afraid to say. I feel bad that I stepped all over her ass for explaining what was going on with her in the moment, because I was angry that she’d read a volume on what I was going though without acknowledgement of what I’d said. It’s not that I didn’t feel empathy, it’s that I could have written the essay on what she was going through. I wasn’t angry that I wasn’t a priority. I was angry that I was never a priority. No one is that busy when you’re that excited to meet someone at first.
I certainly don’t think I gave her the same amount of joy, but I can’t do that, so it’s time to take those lessons and build a solid friendship with someone else. I couldn’t live the way I felt anymore, because no one does well with that much uncertainty. Are you the person that’s been my friend for 10 years and wants to move forward without carrying all this shit around?
She said no, and that’s fine. But she couldn’t expect me to stick around forever. Toothpaste does not go back into the tube. I got rid of all the feelings that needed to go, but all the other ones stayed. I will never be the person she needs me to be, because my emotions regarding her will always be larger than hers for me. I have always hoped that I was wrong about that, but I’m not.
I handled it like building a relationship with an ex rather than a former friend because I had land mines that were painful when stepped on that she mirrored…. a problem with me on the opposite end of the spectrum from seeing that I was treating her like an ex because I had to. I needed her to see that I understood where she was coming from and where I went wrong. I needed her to see that resolving the issue made it where I could talk about a flashback without attaching emotion to it. It didn’t make the issue unresolved. Triggers made it feel unresolved in the moment, because I was seeing something from the past and snapping out of it.
It ended like she was an ex, too, because there are some things that are very, very difficult to come back from and trying to be friends where there was attraction before is one of them. Neither party really believes that the other has changed, can’t believe that the other person genuinely loves them for them with no belief about the situation is held except that being together is better than being apart.
I didn’t treat her like an ex because I suspected that she wasn’t telling me the truth, that she was hiding her real feelings, or anything that sounds as schizo as it would be had I done it. I did it because that’s how I knew how to relate. That’s how I could rebuild and eventually not have to treat her like that anymore because I didn’t need it. The emotions I had to get rid of were gone.
But that doesn’t mean that going forward, I’ll love people the same way. This was completely unique and a little bit crazy, but completely worth it. 10/10 would recommend, no regrets. But that doesn’t mean I want to make more memories, either. I’m done if she doesn’t want to show up, because I’m tired of getting blamed for having feelings. There were many things I saw that made me know it could go this direction, but those are just for me.
She has always been just for me, my Raggedy Doctor. You never forget your first Doctor, and you never forget your first Pond.
How do you know when it’s time to unplug? What do you do to make it happen?
When I know I need to go off the grid, it’s for one of two things. The first is that I’m trying hard not to get my crazy spatter on anyone else. The second is that I have something important to write and I don’t want that flow to be interrupted. Therefore, I am connected by an umbilical cord to my desktop/Fire HD, but not the Internet. Local files are a thing, people. Look into it. 😉
To me, unplugging means refocusing my attention on myself. It’s not that I’m actively trying to be selfish. It’s just that who should have the time to give me what I need when I am already actively spending time with me? I mean, there’s no commute.
When I shut down, I shut down completely. I’m sure it irritates the living hell out of people, but when I get like that, I don’t have the bandwidth to take on what other people are thinking and feeling. I recede into myself as my brain tells me that no one needs me, anyway. It’s not the truth. It’s the lie depression uses to get me where it wants me. My work to do is to raise my self esteem so that I’m not so needy, because no one likes to think of themselves that way, even if they have cerebral palsy, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and anxiety. I’m not needy in that I’m an emotional vampire. I’m needy because I genuinely have a harder time navigating the world. Because I don’t look like I have CP or bipolar, people treat me as if I have none of those things because perception is reality. In order to receive the kind of patience I need, it’s imperative for people to understand why I need them. Alternatively, I will be just as attentive to people who confide those things in me. It is not about me always needing things. It’s about both people finding someone who has their back. I am more dedicated to my friends than most people because I realize that if I need them, I need to appreciate them more as well.
I just navigate those relationships slowly, because I’m a lot and I know it. Even Sam was never truly on the inside, and not because I couldn’t see a future with her. It was that even though we were connected, it hadn’t been very long. I always trusted my friends more than I trusted her, because it would take time for all that to come out and we only lasted three weeks. What Sam did was devastating to me, because I had to come up with all the answers as to why on my own. All the answers I would have given her had she asked questions before busting my fairy tale. The resolution I received is that she was too pragmatic to take dreaming in stride. She seemed threatened by thinking bigger rather than excited. I believe the relationship lasted as long as it should’ve, and I’m glad it was easy to move on. It would have just been another relationship in which I’d say too much to fill the silence.
I always think there’s a combination of words that will unlock people. They won’t open up if they’re threatened by dreaming into the future or dealing with conflict. One always leads to the other if they’re threatened by both. I want to live bigger than this, despite my actions to the contrary. I had good reasons for disappearing from everything, because I needed so much and wouldn’t tell anyone about it. I wrote everything down, self-soothing to the extent that I’m able. One of the tapes I have that needs destroying is “why do you think everyone else needs to save you?” One answer is that I don’t have shame about asking for help, because I know how far I’d go for the people I love when I’m at full strength. I have an extraordinarily long track record in terms of absolutely going out of my mind when my friends are in trouble. They have to talk me down from the ceiling and they do, unless I can tell that they’re in such bad shape that they’re unable to run on their own power. In that case, I just do things without asking. I will clean someone’s house even when they’re yelling at me to stop because I can see that depression has gotten the better of them and I can’t let them die from bacteria, despite the fact that depressed people often kill themselves slowly, because they have no ownership of their future. All they can see is a lifetime of too much emotional pain. Death is not a gunshot to the head, but seriously not caring about your health because of death’s relief.
It’s the monster on your back and the ghost in your head, your diseased brain trying to protect you by emotional torture so you’ll isolate in protection of yourself and others. They think you’re too needy, anyway. I don’t feel needy, I feel fair. You give me a hand up, and both of mine are yours.
I also internalize that when I ask for help, people think that it’s not mutual because obviously their issues are too much for me. If I am projecting that, it’s not you. It’s the weight of the world. It’s not your problem that’s weighing me down, but the mass I take on just walking through a mall. Therefore, it makes me write differently, because I write to illustrate an idea, and it makes it seem more dramatic than it really is because I’m trying to craft a page. Trying to make up for the lack of being able to see your eyes, so that you see how deeply I’m feeling whether you’re in front of me or not. I am not actively trying to be more dramatic, I’m trying to make sure you get it. The more granular with detail I can be, because you’re not seeing body language or tone of voice. Even the way I talked about a problem would be different in person than in writing, because I have trouble processing emotion in front of people and need the safety of a delete key, even though I’m a dumbass and don’t use it as frequently as I have needed.
I retreated into myself, having fewer and fewer conversations in person, because it was far too easy to reveal myself in my letters than a cup of coffee relaxing on the couch. That way, I could have more emotional bravery than I’d ever have sitting down together, because I am not processing your emotions at the same time I’m processing mine. I don’t have to handle watching you cry or yell, because it will rip me to pieces and I avoid that at all costs. When I am reading your words, I am imagining your world. Imagining you telling your story as I tell you mine. I think it makes meeting in person easier, because if you’ve already written out what’s driving you up the wall about the other, time together can be all laughs. Writing is how I get to the bottom of some deep, dark shit. That way, you already know how I feel when we meet, and if the issue is not resolved, it’s easier to respond with empathy because you’ve already digested how I feel, sort of like being prepared for a test. If we have a conflict, I’m not blindsiding you and expecting you to have all the answers, because you already know what I think the problem is and talking is for answers.
I have a habit of popping off without making it clear how angry I am about an action and how much I love the person with whom I’m fighting. Harry Windsor talks extensively about this in “Spare,” how he often went into a blind rage everyone called “Red Mist.” It’s something that many people with PTSD feel, and you can’t tell me he doesn’t have it. We both have been through the shit, except his trauma isn’t even on the same playing field. To be perfectly blunt, we both have PTSD, but I don’t have a kill count. This is not to say that I think Harry did anything wrong. He is a precious gift from God and I hope he recognizes that though he’s been treated like crap by his family, other people are ready and willing to take their place. I think that’s part of the queer in me. We know intimately what it’s like to live with chosen family and not because we want to…… although it’s funny, I have never seen funnier conversations between old queers and young, that we are irritated by straight people accepting us because now it means we do get invited to things. We do get pressured to have kids. We now have to put up with all kinds of bullshit that’s new to us- how to act like we belong when we haven’t the first clue as to how. That’s because deep down, we don’t know whether your homophobia is overt or uneducated. It’s not that there’s never homophobia, it’s that deep down, white people have been told that being white is better with a horrifying history of trying to prove it, and straight people have been told that homosexuality is a sin that deserves jail and death. Those messages don’t fade overnight. We know that because we feel the same way as everyone else. It’s one thing to work through believing that homosexuality is a sin. It’s another to work through people treating you as if you are one.
So, even allies with the best of intentions make mistakes on two levels. The first is due to the deeply ingrained message that homosexuality is wrong, and the second is not knowing how to communicate with a gay person, because they’re enmeshed in a system they don’t see and don’t wonder what it is we’re rebelling against. We’re not different, we’re threatening. Straight people who are fully accepting of their gay friends/relatives still work through their own biases, and gay people with straight friends/relatives work through those prejudices from the opposite vantage point. We aren’t responsible for your education, and yet we are because we don’t want to live in this society where our lives are threatened because of our sins in the Bible; they have no bearing on the law and people shouldn’t make them exclusive……. but somehow have.
Dealing with everyone’s homophobia, including the fear we have of ourselves, is everyone’s problem. It’s not dissimilar from eradicating racism, including the kind that’s internalized because of the messages we receive every day. Our lives depend on whether straight, white, and cis people are threatened by us to varying degrees. We are making progress in the US, sliding backward…. while people in other countries have no such luxury. Being gay in the US is a much smaller deal than being gay in Uganda.
We find more ways to separate than connect. Women are still dependent on the level of men’s misogyny. Children are still dependent on their parents and rightfully so, but experience a large range of situations from their parents’ ideas on whether they are a being or a possession.
Unplugging and protecting myself from feeling all of that is sometimes necessary, because I stop talking when I feel like if I ask for help it will count as a black mark against me. If I don’t have help, I need more space. I need to write longer. It’s what helps me rely on myself, but often leads to the pendulum swinging too far and not wanting to say anything about anything, ever.
If I have a problem with you and I take the time to lay it out, you’re important to me. That’s because it takes an enormous amount of emotional fortitude to say what I really feel and not fear a response. To not torture myself once a letter leaves my hands. To know that I will deal with what comes, instead of focusing on all the bad things that could happen if you know how I feel and don’t agree with it. If you don’t tell me how you feel, I will free up that time and energy to be able to give it to someone else.
When my mother died, I lost someone who would help me if she was able, so she’s the part of my life where I feel the most vulnerable. It freed up a lot of my time and bandwidth, just love with nowhere to go because I wasn’t trying to replace her. I was only trying to fill up the hole in the most practical ways I could, like turning my attention in the hours I used to spend with her on the phone. I can’t replace her personality, but I can reorient how I spend my time. I can purposefully make friends with moms both older and younger so I feel that energy without having it myself. It’s a huge mountain to climb when you realize you don’t have a mother anymore. I do not mean in a practical sense. I mean that you are not in the active process of being the child born to her, and grief kills those parts of you so that your personality doesn’t resemble who you were before. There are just dead spots, searching for something to fill them.
The one thing I didn’t do was zone out, seeking pleasures like being drunk or high to avoid processing. I can be very proud of the fact that those things didn’t lure me away from myself. Most people can’t imagine doing that whole thing straight edge, because I never put anything in my body that would make me feel disconnected from reality. Now that I’m several years out, I’ll have a beer once in a while. It’s a treat like a Snickers, not something I do all the time. What I found is that alcohol makes my depression worse, so I can’t treat it the same as soda. I didn’t quit drinking because I needed to stop, I only quit drinking most of the time because it made me feel better. It gave me more bandwidth to deal because I wasn’t putting off until tomorrow what could be grieved today. Nothing compounded because I wasn’t kicking the can down the road. I sat in agony daily, just waiting it out because there’s nothing you can do but let time work. You never get over it, but you do see that you’re allowed to have happiness again eventually.
This is because when my mother died, I was single. It caused so much pain that she’d never know how my life turned out. I could say I’m grateful for that because I’ve made so many mistakes, but I’m not. The idea that Sam was my girl made me so happy, and crushed that my mother would never meet her or her stepkids had we moved in that direction. My favorite and most heartbreaking moments were dreaming about my mother and Sam having so much in common, and being so different. I got the best of what I loved about my mother professionally without the things about her personality that I didn’t like. Therefore, Sam actually reminded me a lot of Texas musicians, and my mom was one. An amalgam of everything I loved about Texas without the baggage of being from there. It was difficult dealing with being in the best music program in the country (TMEA, not local schools), and the homophobia within. I went to a performing arts high school in the middle of gay Disneyland and I still got bullied by kids in church choir.
Thinking about my mother not meeting anyone else I might date is devastating, because I don’t have that “bringing someone home to meet my parents” feeling yet…. and when it happens, there will be a deep place of sorrow inside me. I think about my future wife being pregnant and I just crumble at the thought. I think of my sister getting pregnant as well in the same way, even though we’re both childless and like it. It’s not the thought of Lindsay being a mom that drives me, but the part of my mom that would live in the kid. Neither of us want to have kids, and yet it would have been interesting to have seen what those kids would have been like. When I was thinking about getting pregnant, I was excited about all the ways I’d see my family in them. Getting pregnant was only about genetics, because I didn’t think of that until after my mother died. Lindsay and I both thought the same thing, we just didn’t have passion or drive about the idea. It jut exists.
You can acknowledge that a story would have been great without writing it. However, in my case, I have no idea who I want to commit to, so my dreams are based on what my partner will bring to the table and not what I want. I am not looking for a person in a certain set of circumstances, just being open to the fact that I won’t know anything up front and just be open. Women are naturally driven to have kids, and sexual orientation doesn’t play into it. Some just have more maternal drives than others and I need to be ready for it. If the person I want feeds me intellectually, they could probably ask me to dive off the Empire State building while singing “The Star Spangled Banner” and I’d at least think about it.
Having a sous with excellent cooking skills and a criminal mind is one of God’s great gifts. -Anthony Bourdain
Everything I know about love, I’ve learned through cooking. That’s because my relationship with Dana was very much chef and sous, without the hierarchy. We cooked at home the same way we cooked at work. “You put ’em down, I’ll pick ’em up.” I relied on her technical expertise and soaked it up like a sponge. She learned that when I said I could fix something, she could take that check to the bank and cash it. Instead of just serving me things, she asked for my input. It meant the world to me, because who even am I in the kitchen? I’ve never been to culinary school. My absolute and total belief that she was the chef made communication in the kitchen so easy, because Dana didn’t have an ego and yet there was a line, like Leo being Jed’s best friend and his Chief of Staff. He wasn’t the president, and he knew it.
Our home life fed our work life and vice versa. I couldn’t wait to be in the kitchen with her every day, and that communication made us closer in that if we could communicate under that much pressure, we could talk through anything. It gave us emotional bravery because we were pushing ourselves so hard physically…. especially me, and I’m not in it for the pity vote. It’s just that *everything* in a restaurant is heavy and she could do most things faster and easier than I could. She had more muscle mass. I lifted a lot of things that were too heavy for me, and I will be in awe forever of the memory in which Dana carries a 50 pound bag of flour down a rickety set of steps. The hardest part was not hurting myself in the kitchen. It was watching her in pain. Therefore, my heart stopped for a second at the danger of what she was doing. Then I realized how strong she was.
And if she fell, she’d have a much better survival rate than I ever would have, because I’d have tripped over nothing in the first place. It’s a miracle I didn’t die, especially during a shift, I just couldn’t lift 50 pounds while I was afraid of the stairs that rode the line between step and ladder. Because I have no peripheral vision, the only thing that happened to me that made me afraid was backing down the stairs into a stock pot of cold oil- I couldn’t see it, so I stepped into it up to my shin.
I couldn’t believe what a patient teacher she was, and I’d like to believe I was a good student. I may have gotten a job on Dana’s word, but I kept it. I just couldn’t always be on my A game because my physical limitations show there more than everywhere else. Why wouldn’t they? Cooking combines balance, timing, depth perception (particularly in plating). I had to keep track of all that and sometimes my body rebelled.
I’m proud of what we accomplished together, because combined we had a well-rounded chef. One with both a great palate and technique.
Now that I’m not married to a chef anymore, I’m not saying I want to be with another one. I don’t know what my future partner will do for money. But what I know is that they’ll have the heart of a chef. They’ll either be great cooks or willing to learn how from me. That’s because closeness comes through activity, and life happens when you’re doing something else.
I need someone not afraid to try new things, who doesn’t have hangups about a particular ingredient before they try it. I need someone who is bold and brave in their choices as to how they do life. By this, I mean that they need to have enough confidence to admit when things are wrong and how they contributed to a problem. To be vulnerable with someone is the hardest thing on earth.
When you find that person, it makes you explode on the inside. Everything looks new, even if you’ve been in love a thousand times. When your brain comes down, you think about consequences and how much you’re willing to open up based on what’s happened before the relationship started. You use heuristics to say that what one person is going to do, they all are. That comes out both in very positive and negative ways.
As an INFJ, my inner landscape is huge. I let people in, and walk away from people that are frightened by it. My mind is a very busy place, and to be let in is a privilege. I don’t trust easily, and because I’ve been hurt before, I’m not as approachable as I’d like to be. I walk as if I’m in pain and don’t want to be bothered, and I can’t find a lie.
In terms of learning about love in other ways, my beautiful girl invested so much in me that I couldn’t help it. My brain flooded at all the dopamine, because I heard a message that I hadn’t heard in a long time. That what I bring to the world is valuable, and keep going. Looking inside yourself isn’t for sissies.
When my mind stopped turning a deep, platonic love into something the relationship would never sustain, I realized that even though I had been in love with her and it sucked ass carrying around all that emotion, there was no part of me that wanted to reject her. I often did when I was angry, but I was never alone in doing so. That’s because we’re a little too much alike. First children can be assholes to each other because they’re used to being the authority on everything.
She has the heart of a chef, but her passion is for different things that line up with the thousands I share. We do such different things that even if we lived a mile from each other, our lives would never cross over unless it was on purpose. We’re both introverted. Good luck. I think she’s less shy than I am, but we both have social batteries that drain vs. shyness in meeting anyone. We both think a group of people is called a “no, thanks.”
So, sufficed to say, I thought I’d found a lifemate, but not in terms of romance. My personality profile says that I only have one or two really close friends at a time because I’d rather be deeply intimate with them rather than having surface level friendships with a lot of people. It has been true my whole life. God forbid I be at a party, just having fun and not talking about anything of importance and enjoying the moment.
No, I am knee deep into all sorts of things, very few that were outside my beautiful girl’s wheelhouse. I wanted to soak up her knowledge for all time, because she cares about the same issues I do.
And yet, we fought like cats and dogs because she was everything my personality profile said I’d get, that I’d find someone willing to walk in my inner landscape with me. Why that side of me, the one that felt hurt and rejected won, I’ll never know. Why didn’t I just let it lie and stop responding? She gave me things to think about that will turn over forever in my brain. Why give that up?
It was easy when I realized that we’d never get back what we had, and I was too crushed by it. She didn’t deserve to know how I felt about her anymore, because clearly it didn’t mean as much to her as it meant to me. The reason it took eight years is that she did things that touched me deeply…. that even though there was no going back, we could move forward.
As long as we didn’t have to talk about what did happen, and it was making her reactions all the more muddled…. loving and also reinforcing the idea that I was intruding on her life rather than adding to it. Those words aren’t easily forgotten, and she said them. I just don’t know if she meant them. Was her response actually protective when it came across as angry? Why did I feel so defensive and afraid? Because I’d wronged her. She didn’t hang it over my head, but she didn’t solidify anything, either. That choice didn’t bother her, but it made me ruminate on what she actually wanted from me for far longer and with more intensity than I should have ever given it. I should have walked away sooner to protect both of us, but I didn’t because I wanted the question of how to move forward out of the way. How to navigate spiraling out because as much as we reject each other, it’s not really possible to disconnect now. We are both in each other’s minds and hearts but in different ways and for different reasons.
So, whether she shows up or not, I have to be there for myself. I have to offer myself the relief I was seeking, because relief is the only thing I wanted from her that I didn’t get. That’s why it was too painful to continue the relationship on a surface level. Not talking about the real thing led to superficial snarks, real and perceived.
So, there’s a lot in me that’s fighting right now with what is real and what isn’t. How much I should believe based on what I saw and not what I heard, because maybe I missed what she was trying to say in favor of thinking I was right. I also have defensive mechanisms and a stunning need to be correct. Thinking about it now makes me laugh, because none of our younger siblings would believe the lengths we’d go to in order to prove each other wrong because it’s good to be the king.
I feel deeply about every win and loss, because no matter the outcome, I screamed with empathy. It hurt more to watch her in pain than it did to be in pain myself, and 90% of the time I caused pain because I’d stepped on a land mine thought to be dormant. The other 10% was in reaction to feeling completely dressed down and unable to express my point in a way that had merit. I’m not the person that always has to be right in most cases. It depends on what I know about the subject, and I will defer to the smartest person in the room, always. But what do you do if your subject matter expert doesn’t think the same thing about you, or expresses that? What I mean by that is the people in your life not yielding to you at least part of the time. No one is ever wrong to the point there is no redeeming quality about them a hundred percent of the time. There is no relationship where one person knows everything and the other person is absolutely brainless and never has better sources and methods than you.
I will never in my lifetime have a conflict with someone in which I don’t have to own consequences, so I expect other people to feel the same way. I write to people privately the same way I write here- which is to say that I look at every possible combination of factors that could be going into someone’s behavior. I clearly express my 3D opinion, which is that I love you, but that doesn’t mean we don’t got shit to do.
When the response is rejection, trauma kicks in. It’s my job to stop. I can’t throw around words the way I have. I don’t judge people, I judge whether situations are fair. Just how long I’ve been feeling defensive because I spoke in a quiet voice and was ignored. How that builds up and my voice gets louder. I need to know why I’m doing it in order to change, and I can point fingers, but only for comprehension to understand the pain’s source. I cannot blame other people for my reactions, and I will not allow people to think that theirs are more important than mine. Different and equally valid.
Most of the time, I don’t understand the charge I’m leading because I don’t think the way a neurotypical person thinks. My filters are different, and the symptoms are akin to Asperger’s. I don’t process emotion like most people, so I don’t always know what to say in a way that doesn’t make them upset because I simply wasn’t thinking about it. My brain doesn’t say “you can’t say that.” Where my empath kicks in is seeing when I’ve caused a negative reaction, mostly because my calculations are foreign. I’m not running on the same operating system. There are no “things we don’t talk about.” That’s because every instinct in my body says that being vulnerable is the key to being strong. That it takes more courage to tell people how you feel when you are terrified of rejection. It takes courage to have an opinion, a right I’ve denied myself for far too long. That’s because when I began to have opinions, I rocked the boat to the point I thought I wouldn’t survive all the upheaval. That I had to fight this mental battle with my health so that I’d have enough energy to also self-soothe.
I didn’t want to continue a relationship where I thought I’d found Richard from Texas and she’d found Groceries. That’s because I made it where it didn’t feel that way and couldn’t get enough confidence in myself to give me any slack at all. I knew that my brain chemicals were beyond FUBAR and didn’t retreat the way I should have.
And exactly none of that turned down all the warmth I felt when I thought of her, not a fire in the belly but a day at the beach. I will feel that every time I think of her, which is how I know there’s no set of circumstances in which I’d refuse anything she wanted. It wasn’t a little deal to me that nothing felt solid, and the inconsistency drew me into myself. I was trapped in this cycle of believing that everything was fine and she hated me and yet still somehow tolerated my presence. Say that sentence all in one breath and you’ll get close to how I felt when you’re winded.
At the same time, I wasn’t always good about letting her know that I was thinking of her feelings because I talked about them, but she never talked about mine. Over time, I realized that my emotions didn’t cause much in her when I felt like Elvis had left the building, awakened out of a stupor caused by awe. When you love someone, aren’t both of those things true? That you can grieve what is lost and enjoy what you had simultaneously, because love and conflict live in the same house?
But if the only thing I can be counted on is saying we’re done and not done, I won’t waffle. That’s because I showed up for every holiday for nine years and wrote to her every day. For nine years. Pretty sure I can be counted on for more than a political point. When I said that it was over, we both had steam in our ears by then. I had no guidance in how much I should feel, so my attention never wavered from the first time we had a conversation. It should have been different. I should have known she was sharing my words with other people because she should have told me she was going to do it rather than telling me after it had been done. I don’t care about her sharing my blog entries, but my letters are another matter. Who knows what went on between her and the people who read them? I ruminated on that for years, because she’d said to keep things tight from everyone, and never said she wouldn’t.
I can’t do that. I can’t face a firing squad over what I’ve written, and neither can she. Neither one of us would want to walk into a room knowing that everyone there knew what we’d said, which meant that integrating our lives would have been difficult. I just would have had to sit through a lot more uncomfortable conversations because I haven’t said shit to anyone. She has a clean slate all day, every day. I do not.
He’s never known it, but I think about her husband all the time. Why wouldn’t I both love and fear him? How would I know how he felt in all of this? When can I stop shaming myself for it?
I am not pushing my memories with her away. I am letting them come and visit me in my dreams, her words pouring thoughts into my head that made me feel stronger and smaller than I ever had. But her words didn’t do it all. My reactions were often poor because my self image was so destroyed.
I do think that I’ve gotten a peace of mind that hasn’t been with me in a long time. I didn’t want to be selfish, and I waited until I was so defeated that I just slunk off into the night. That’s because she laid out everything on her plate and I couldn’t take it. I’d already spent years thinking of everything on her plate and knew there was no universe in which any one of my problems could compare. I didn’t get impatient until we’d been tearing at each other for almost a decade. I don’t know what created that push/pull…. that we could say it was over like that and sign up for more.
I think it can be chalked up to our different approaches to everything, but I never knew when she was going to see a change as positive or suspicious. When she felt attacked, she attacked me. Sometimes, I was stable enough to say “no, that’s not what I meant,” and sometimes her reaction was so fiery that it engaged my escalation mode. In fact, the last exchange we had started with “I don’t want to fight about this.” It ended with her feeling like she had to delay reading my e-mails because they brought on guilt and shame when none was meant. I am not responsible for that guilt and shame. I am only responsible for communicating my needs and hoping that they create a desired reaction because my happiness is just as important as theirs. When her response was to go find other friends, I did. I would like to believe that she popped off as much as I did, because she knows I know everything in that letter intimately. That no obligation of hers went unnoticed to me. I couldn’t believe she thought she needed to spell all that out as if I hadn’t noticed. I’d been drowning in it. I knew I was last priority, I knew why, and I couldn’t make anything better.
If I’d been the sort of person that compartmentalizes emotion, we would be in any of the situations we are now, because I could have just laid back and enjoyed having a friend that was smarter than me.
But I didn’t. I walked around hurt too much of the time, not because of how she felt about me; it was all about my emotions. The guilt and shame that was above me dripping down. I can’t speak for my beautiful girl, but it seemed like something was brewing on her end that read similar. My emotions were too big, and I knew it. I didn’t know how to tamp them down properly, and I never will. Someday a neurotypical can tell me what that’s like.
Right now, I’m just trying to turn my attention, living around this loss instead of kicking it out. Dealing with it while it’s happening so it doesn’t come up later. It’s important to me to have a verbal tapestry of our history, because even if I never get what I want again I still want to remember when I had it.
I want to cry out all the pain, and relive all those laughs. The fact that I look at this whole experience together makes me invincible, that I am not swayed into “it was always bad” or “it was always good.”
I didn’t handle it with power, grace, or style. But I felt it all, all the time. What kept me going was the heart of a chef, that the same give and take I had with food was there with all relationships…. that all of them were a balance of clutch and gas.
I am the first in, so I start the ovens, the fryers, and the flat top. I need them to be up to temperature by the time we open, because sure as shit the first person to order will want pancakes. I make them my own by adding hazelnut fluff and making them thin, like a crepe. People who don’ like pancakes like mine. They’ve told me on multiple occasions. Later on, I will make Lanagan’s Pub Chili, a recipe that started as a soup of the day and got my name on the menu. I experiment with different beers and different levels of spice for the Oregon palate. Sometimes I challenge it, making heat radiate through people’s bodies, but not in a way that hurts.
I am very good at fixing things. Soup is my forte, because if someone else made it, they’d ask me to approve it. I was not the chef, because we don’t have one. We all experiment with everything and keep what sticks. We are allowed to constantly improve the food, rather than letting the menu get stale. We are an Irish pub that riffs, like corned beef and cabbage eggrolls.
I am a student. I read and absorb knowledge, like respecting first contact and only flipping once. I am also willing to make something awful without guilt because I know that it takes failure to get an idea that will appeal on a large scale. I love making things new and more exciting than something I’ve had before. Last weekend it was pineapple thyme stuffed French toast.
I have learned to fry things to perfection and the one reason I justify eating out occasionally. I am not getting a deep fryer for my house, and yet there is nothing quite like French fries out of a deep fryer vs. the oven. However, since I can do it, my standards are extraordinarily high. The danger of French fries is making them too brown while the inside is still raw. I do not approve of sending out fries that are a little bit undercooked. Restaurants who do send fries out like that are generally worried about ticket times.
I can make a mean Hollandaise, but I don’t like it. That’s because I have to clean the egg pans with lemon dish soap and the smell drives me up the wall. So we have bearnaise, and Shaun (bartender) and I laugh every single shift about how the first thing I need from him when I walk in is a shot glass full of white wine. It’s a running joke that never gets old. I taste it and the tarragon dances on my tongue.
Over the course of the next eight to 12 hours, I will burn myself three times. I rarely cut myself anymore, but burns are relentless. I will touch an oven, accidentally press the fry basket toward me protectively burning my stomach, and touch the flat top with my bare hands. I just have to hope chicks dig scars, because I have a lot of them.
Once I grabbed a spoon that was too hot and the plastic fused to my hand. Once I sliced my thumb in addition to the ham. Working here is no picnic when it happens, because there’s nothing to do but keep it moving.
Having a checklist was more important than having a chef, because repetition is key, but I can’t do that without a list. Something will be forgotten that could make people sick. I thrive on this work because I am actively making people’s lives more comfortable and showing off my own skill without bragging. We don’t have to talk about it. Just eat it.
Eat it without adding salt and pepper first. Don’t change my vision before you taste it. Something that you normally don’t like might complete the whole dish and you’ve cut out an element you might have liked. I was unprepared to like licorice and peach as much as I do.
Make a frozen bellini and add some anise, like Sambuca or ouzo. You’re welcome.
Licorice flavored alcohol is one of my favorites because of its throat soothing properties. I’m a singer, and that informs everything else. It makes me a creative. I look for unusual textures and flavors everywhere. My current favorite ice cream is strawberries, balsamic vinegar, and black pepper. That’s only the stand out from Salt & Straw, though. All the other ones I can make myself, like buttermilk, bacon, or cafe au lait. It’s not that I couldn’t make it, I just haven’t.
I would rather have sweet cream or vanilla ice cream with stuff in it. For instance, I don’t want chocolate ice cream. I want a swirl of fudge or some chocolate chips. Sweet cream will let anything play, particularly olive oil (trust me). The trick with putting olive oil or balsamic into ice cream is choosing a flavor bold enough to stand up to it. That means expensive, most of the time.
Aging brings on depth of flavor. Good ingredients can hold their own, provided you know what to do with them. Some cooks can take everything and make it look brown, no matter what’s in it.
My knees are aging much faster than I am. The ballet on the brigade is amazingly hard work, yet when I don’t have my ass in the kitchen by 1500, I feel lost. Days off are the worst, because it interrupts my flow. Taking my knife for a workout is my favorite thing, and my most precious inanimate object. It is an extension of my hand, the only part of me that’s French as I prep 20 pounds of mushrooms.
The smell is incredible. Hospital cleanliness mixed with unique spice combinations meant to impress. To raise the expectation of what you were going to get at an Irish pub, because there’s no way to make one truly authentic in the US so why try? Chili isn’t Irish, but my name is. I don’t think I would have gotten the honor if my last name was Smith.
I cook food for me, and I can experiment even more. What makes a burger crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside? What happens when you finish a burger with butter? (OMG, ya’ll.) That idea came from making fajitas. I can dance because I see patterns in how things are made, that i I master the basics I can do everything else. My technique isn’t great, but my palate is. If it excites me, it will excite others.
For instance, I made pancakes out of Bisquick that were really thick so I could stuff them up with chocolate and pumpkin seeds for protein. It must have been a little too thick, because it turned out like a cross between a pancake and a biscuit. It was the perfect response to a cronut, especially since I’d loaded it up with so much butter that it was perfectly crisp, and white bread with chocolate is one of my favorite things.
I make pancakes because I can try anything with them, when that’s not true of most desserts. You can’t alter the recipe of a cake unless you have a Master’s. I don’t normally eat them with syrup. I build layer cakes with a variety of fillings, or eat them the moment they come out of the pan soaked in butter.
I make steel cut oatmeal that’s so good it’s like people have never had it before. It’s an accomplishment to get someone to try it, because they’re used to oatmeal being soup. I add all kinds of flavors and textures, but my favorite will always be maple and brown sugar. Most people just like vanilla and sugar, but flavors come from seeds, nuts, dried fruit and milk. I do the same with grits- make them part of a meal instead of serving cereal that looks like paste. I add eggs, sausage, cheese, hot sauce, chives, anything to break it up…. even sugar on occasion. I like grits that are firm, yet dripping with butter.
….And that’s what I’m thinking about as I load and unload the dishwasher countless times, making sure to pay attention to the silverware.
The urge to zone out and let my characters play is intense, but I have to wait for more of a break than taking people’s lives into my own hands.
I never forget the underside of cooking, that you can accidentally really hurt someone. I also never forget the joy of truly hitting a home run.
What does “having it all” mean to you? Is it attainable?
One of the things I’m pondering this week came from a Twitter thread on habits…. that neurodivergents don’t have them, and that’s what neurotypical people can’t understand. Neurotypical people can make things happen automatically by repetition, and for neurodivergents, every task takes the same amount of energy as it did the first time, because every routine you have is a conscious decision. I have no executive function, nothing that makes me form a habit in the same way someone who doesn’t have ADHD would.
If you have no ability to create habits, life is exhausting. You are spending so much energy remembering what it takes to get out the door and you’ve been doing it since childhood. When your brain is unmanaged attention-wise, other thoughts invade while you’re trying to make a memory. That’s why I, a Virgo, am classically great at creating systems of organization that don’t last very long. Every “Back to School” was so much hope.
I am deeply in discernment about what my definition of having it all means, because it has shifted in quite a few ways. It’s great because my sister and I are having some of the same epiphanies, and it’s great being able to share. I saw her for lunch the other day, and she looks great. I was going to go with her to a thing where she was speaking, and I backed out because I couldn’t find an outfit. It was impossible. I’d lost so much in the fire by having to evacuate my room and I haven’t had time or need to replace anything until now.
Part of having it all for me is nice clothes, which is why I have a black belt in Goodwill. I can take a thousand dollar outfit and have it for $40, because it probably cost $20 and needs hemming.
In terms of clothes, I dress like every tech nerd in America, I just have sensory perception issues and would rather have an old shirt that was made to last two generations than fast fashion because it feels better. It’s the difference between a Target button down and Brooks Brothers.
I already have it all in one area of my life- this web site. I’ve made friends from it all over the globe, and it’s tremendously validating that I got here just by being myself. I didn’t set out to teach anyone but me, and ended up connecting with everyone else. To be honest, I post an entry frequently because I’ve come to visit this web site and it is now boring. That blogger sucks. Then I remember it’s me and get back to work.
I’m sorry that in some ways, entries seem repetitive if you show up every day, but to me it feels like I’m workshopping an idea. Clarifying. That’s what I mean by teaching myself. Reading myself closely and seeing how I come across to the outside world informs what I do next, and that feels right, because none of my ideas are coming from external validation and I am not trying to please an audience. I can see structure over time where I am woodshedding, purposefully running selected measures over and over until the tempo is right…. when I feel my inner Aaron Sorkin kick in. A phrase rises from being able to hear it in your own cadence to being able to hear it in mine.
Having it all is knowing I create reactions in you when you read, and you’re not shy about letting me know how you feel. Even when you disagree, I know I’ve made you feel something, which is so much better than nothing. It’s been such a rewarding relationship over the years, the one between you and me. I strongly believe it’s the only one that will last the rest of my life because I’ll still be able to write even if everything else goes away. In fact, I need it more when things go sideways. That’s how I teach those things not to hurt. I don’t approach every relationship thinking it’s going to end, I just know that I’ll be all right if it does.
Having it all is being open to the possibility of having kids in my life, which is to say that Cora already is, but it would be different living with her or any of the kids I would come to love. I’m also at an age where many of the people I meet have grandkids, because either they had kids early or they’re a few years older than me. That’s exciting to think about as well. I wonder all the time how it would change me, because I’ve had to think about it before and it all made me smile. I’d even be up for pregnancy and childbirth as long as it wasn’t mine.
I would be the greatest dad ever. I am already an old grandpa on the Internet. I already make terrible jokes, and I’m not offended by dating someone younger if they’re aiming for kids or already have them, because in that case they’re already better at adulting than I am, so why worry? I am not aiming for a young trophy wife, I’m just saying that I can’t know what circumstances people are in until I talk to them. Who knows what my next love will bring to the table? Whether they’re older or younger, childless or have many, none of that matters. I want someone who has an exciting mind and doesn’t care that I’m a bit of a homebody who needs to sit alone for long periods of time if they can’t sit quietly. That’s how to be a writer. To have everyone understand that they know where to find you in an emergency, but please don’t interrupt. In exchange, when I am not writing, I am completely and totally available. This gets easier when the other person is really busy.
It would help if my next partner had as big a worldview as Zac, because it gets me out of my own head to talk about things that affect countries and not me personally. I often need to be dragged out of thinking about myself, because it informs where I’m going on this blog. It’s developing ideas on what to say so that I’m not threatened by a blank page. It’s having more to talk about than just me.
I also feel like I’m the authority on me, but I don’t want to presume I’m an expert on anything else. Some of my assumptions are flat out wrong, because I don’t have all the information. When I do, my opinion changes and I write about that, too. I process emotionally pretty fast, which leads people to believe I am up and down mentally. In reality, I just let go of what I think quickly because new shit has come to light.
My mind moves fast, and it’s hard to keep up. Sometimes I’m proud of that, because it gives me self confidence to an enormous degree. I am literally not carrying around anything, because I talk about it here and then I’m done. Everything else I do to prepare just feels like writing a letter into the void, hoping that someone a hundred years from now will find it interesting. Knowing for sure that people who have crossed my path will live forever because I think that highly of them. That our story goes up and down because life can’t do anything else. I embrace change now in a way that I haven’t before, because I have a repository that tells me how strong and resilient I’ve become. That I have a place to fall that makes good stories out of bad situations. Future generations will read it like a novel, or a collection of letters in great grandma’s trunk.
Lately, happiness has written white for me, the ink not dark enough to be memorable. Having it all has been adjusting my expectations so that they’re much smaller. Noticing how good a cup of coffee tastes, even the day after with ice. Having the world’s most comfortable bed, surrounded by friends I never would have made had I not moved here. When Mother’s Day manipulation is not raining down on me, more of my funny moments with my mom shine through, because there were so many. It’s just that when shit goes down, you’re not always thinking of the sunniest thoughts, and that’s okay. My dad said something in a sermon once that’s stuck with me to this day, which has to be almost 30 years by now. He said, “death is 50% anesthesia to the living.” That when people die, we tend to saint them and not talk about what they were really like.
My mother and I are both full characters. We laughed, loved, lost and found each other. None of that can be contained with mere words. I accept all her love and genuine homophobia (she was never a bigot, just uneducated and afraid). Those things are not mutually exclusive. They are both true, and always will be.
I hope that with all of my entries, you can see that I hold the same opinion of all people. I accept that people do things that make them come across like an asshole, and so do I. They also do things that make them come across like an angel, and so do I. Sometimes I’m so focused on trying to resolve my issues that I forget to acknowledge how blessed I truly am, the only words I also love and hate. I want to talk about Christianity, but with the same foul-mouthed academia you’ve come to know and love, not Christianese.
I like that when I’m angry, I can still count on Jesus to have had a similar experience in which things also sounded better in his head.
This is another way of having it all, and it comes from the blessing of one person in particular. Love me or hate me, I was this way before Nadia Bolz-Weber, and then I got worse. 😛 Finally, someone who preached in my style because she used to do stand-up. Her sermons could make you roll in the aisle with laughter, which came as a relief because you were sobbing a second ago. It opened me up to hear that being human was a viable option. She didn’t inspire me to follow in her footsteps, only that being a regular person with a full range of emotions didn’t make me a less serious academic when it came to research and the humor I attached to it. Seriously, it was like Moses whispered in my ear that he killed a guy. A blog didn’t render me less worthy to talk about God. But it was a much bigger sin, just to be clear.
